Poor Anima, Bad Blood, and Pork Rinds. Considering the poetry of Khaty Xiong

"Can poetry be a cleansing act? What can language offer in the face of personal and collective trauma?" That's the question Jane Wong is asking as she examines Hmong American poet Khaty Xiong's debut book of poems, Poor Anima. It's been called a work that "grapples with languages, forgotten histories, and narratives of haunting." She does a full reflection over at Warscapes this month.

Khaty Xiong was recently featured at the Poetry Society of America with her poem "Pork Rinds, Watered Rice." She has a sparse style that I find allows for particularly interesting comparison to the work of Souvankham Thammavongsa or the work of Soul Vang, Mai Der Vang, Andre Yang or Burlee Vang.

Presently, her standard bio is:

"Khaty Xiong is a second-generation Hmong American from Fresno, CA. Born to Hmong refugees from Laos, she is the seventh daughter among her 15 brothers and sisters. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from the University of Montana, and is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Deer Hour (New Michigan Press, 2014) and Elegies (University of Montana, 2013). Elegies was the winning manuscript for the university’s annual Merriam-Frontier Award. Xiong’s work has been featured on The New York Times and Verse Daily. Her debut Poor Anima (Apogee Press, 2015) is the first full-length collection of poetry published by a Hmong American woman in the United States. Currently, she resides in Gahanna, OH."

As someone who grew up briefly in Montana, went to college in Ohio, and is now spending a lot of time in the Central Valley of California, I approach her work with great personal interest, and appreciate the commitment she's made to the literary life.

Over the years, I've spent a great deal of time trying to encourage Hmong writers across the country to emerge. I will admit my continued concern that there are many regions where it still feels like we're not hearing from them. The Deep South and the East Coast, for example, don't come immediately to mind as a zone where many Hmong poets and writers are known yet. But that might be changing.

From what I've seen of Khaty's work, I find much in common with my own, working at once with many of the classic issues of the Southeast Asian experience in diaspora, but trying not to give in to the conventional language and tropes that the mainstream culture would otherwise impose upon us. I think that resistance is most easily executed in poetry.

In prose and film, economic considerations come into play. Marketability and clarity. Certainly, these things are worthy to a degree in the world of arts and letters. But I would critique there's very little room for experimentation and "flipping the script" because so many editors, financiers, and other stakeholders in the production have their idea about what sells for a community that's tagged with the terms "refugees" and "immigrants." In poetry, the stakes seem lower, and yet, that's where the most innovation that can change the rest of the field tends to emerge, in my experience. Khaty Xiong's work over the last 5 years is clearly demonstrating this principle in action.

I'm delighted to see that she's exploring much of the mythology, the traditions of the supernatural, the legends of the Hmong culture in the past and present in her work in poems such as "Pavor Nocturnus" and "Bad Blood."  I would hope that many of my colleagues in speculative poetry would also see that she is contributing some very interesting pieces for consideration.

With two chapbooks and a full-length manuscript completed, I look forward to seeing what's next for her, and I expect we will be hearing much more from her in the future. Be sure to get your copy of Poor Anima and see for yourself.

Cajun Sushi Hamsters, Murder, Aliens and Cats. An interview with Mary Turzillo

Mary Turzillo is a writer of many talents with a great sense of humor, imagination and poetry that I admire. I first ran into her work as a member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and quickly realized we had many things in common as writers with roots in the Midwest.

Based in Ohio, her work includes the award-winning Lovers & Killers, which won the the very first Elgin Award for Book of the Year from the Science Fiction Poetry Association. She also received a Nebula Award for her novelette Mars is No Place for Children. Her short fiction has been appearing since at least 1994, and she's produced three poetry collections so far beginning with her 2007 debut Your Cat & Other Space Aliens.

Mary has been a professor at Kent State University, and written books on Anne McCaffrey and Philip Jose Farmer. Her husband is the science fiction writer and scientist Geoffrey Landis, who I also feel does wonderful and thoughtful work well worth reading. In Cleveland, she founded the Cajun Sushi Hamsters writing workshop.

I was very curious to see her perspective as a writer and poet, and I appreciate her taking the time out to discuss this ideas with me. Be sure to visit her website and check out her writing.There's much to learn from her style and technique, and I'm looking forward to seeing her next collections.

How did you first develop an interest in poetry? How would you describe your access to poetry growing up?

I was read to from a very early age (two or three) by my grandmother, grandfather, and mother. According to my grandmother, I swatted my grandfather because he didn't use enough emotion in his reading. A lot of books for very young children are in verse, as you realize.

Once I got into first grade, I conceptualized that words on paper were connected to spoken words and stories, and I resolved to write my own Things (I didn't see any difference between poems and stories, and I still don't, really). My mother happens to have saved my first poem, which I wrote down in second grade.

She bought me complete works of Edgar Allan Poe, which of course set the course of my imagination for the ensuing years.


Which poem of yours do you usually recommend to someone who wants to read your work for the first time?

Oh, how to choose? Let me recommend three, since poems are short. "The Emperor's New Spacesuit," "If You Loved Me" (my elegy to borderline personality disorder), and "The Hunter's Mothers." These are in Your Cat & Other Space Aliens, (VanZeno).

The book I'm proudest of is Lovers & Killers, from Dark Regions Press which won the Elgin award in 2013.

I also have a recently published Best of chapbook called A Guide to Endangered Monsters, from Night Ballet Press. It has all my favorites and prizewinners.

Do you prefer coffee or tea?

I like both, but lean a bit more to tea. My preferences change all the time, but right now I like Tulsi Red Chai Masala. And of course, like all cultured people, I love Earl Grey.

If you could have any legendary being for a pet or a companion, what would you choose?

Ganesha, because he is the the remover of obstacles, patron of arts and sciences, god of intellect and learning, Lord of beginnings, and the writer's best friend. And who wouldn't love a deity in the shape of an elephant? But maybe that's a bit blasphemous, because Ganesha is, after all, a god. So my second choice would be Gummitch, from Fritz Leiber's "Space-Time for Springers."

What aspects of life in Ohio did you find most conducive to writing? Did you feel there any distinctive challenges?

Cleveland is a real hub for writing of all kinds. My husband runs a blog called clevelandpoetics (http://www.clevelandpoetics.blogspot.com). The clevelandpoets calendar shows at least one poetry event every night, sometimes several. We have at least ten local indy presses, and I'm not even counting college and university presses. Northeast Ohio is the happening place for poetry. I spent time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Pasadena, and it was hard to find much going on. Workshops, if there were any, were run by university prigs who wanted to charge huge fees, and who in my humble opinion needed a few lessons themselves, in humility if nothing else. As to readings in Pasadena and Boston? Oh, maybe a few here and there. A couple a month. Never open mic. But in contrast, Cleveland, Youngstown, and Akron have some wow stuff going on. Cleveland's slam team is prominent in the nation.

As far as fiction is concerned, in the internet age, geography is not a big issue. You read, you submit electronically, no problems.

Superman was born here. Roger Zelazny (who was a poet in addition to being a fiction writer). Vachel Lindsay. Hart Crane. Rita Dove. Paul Laurence Dunbar. Langston Hughes. James Wright. Ambrose Bierce. Gloria Steinem. Joe Eszterhas. Leigh Brackett. Harlan Ellison. Kenneth Patchen. John Scalzi lives here now. The list goes on.

Sometimes Geoff and I think the cornucopia of poetry opportunities is a lure that keeps us from writing fiction.

When did you feel Your Cat & Other Space Aliens was "finished" and ready to send to publishers for consideration?

Actually, it didn't happen that way. I do a lot of readings, mostly local in northeast Ohio, but also at cons, both in the US and the UK. A local poet and editor, Marcus Bales, had heard me read and had also read my stuff. He was inaugerating a press devoted to spoken word poetry, and he asked me to submit a group of poems. I gave him 96 poems, about half of which were already published, and he chose 69 of these to be in the book. In some ways, Marcus was a collaborator, in that he selected poems that he thought were the best and that worked together thematically. He didn't edit the poems themselves, but he definitely worked with me on concept. We came up with the title together and it really works for me.

I've never actually published a poetry collection that I submitted cold. I do have a couple of books I've lazily shopped around for various contests and publishers. I don't like fee contests; I am concerned that younger, less well-heeled authors are shut out of that process. Not everybody can shell out $50.00 every time they see a new call for a manuscript. I have five single-author collections in print, and all of them have been published because the editor came to me. I admit it, I'm lazy.

Anyway, Marcus published Your Cat & Other Space Aliens under his imprint of VanZeno, and I'm really happy with how it came out. He's a brilliant editor and incidentally a very fine satiric poet.

Marge Simon and I have four collaborative collections, and she placed them, being not only a genius poet but a woman who knows the indy poetry landscape better than anybody else in the known universe. She was a long-time president of the Small Press Writers and Artists Organization. We mull over where to submit (we have been rejected a few times, mostly because our concepts were pure hubris). And we mull over whether each book is finished. In fact, we're mulling that over right now with a book called Satan's Spawn.

I should mention that the brilliant and underappreciated poet Bruce Boston has edited two of my collections and also the collaborations Marge and I did. Bruce came up with the title of Lovers & KIllers, and he also did the cover. I couldn't be happier.

What's been one of the most unusual subjects you've tried to take on with a poem?

Jodi Arias. Marge and I are writing a collection of poems about murderesses. Jodi stands out as one of the strangest subjects for poetry that I can think of.

What's one of your enduring memories from the Cajun Sushi Hamsters?

Steve Swiniarski (A.K.A. S. Andrew Swann) brought the early manuscript of Forests of the Night to our workshop, and we gave him enthusiastic encouragement. We have a custom that a writer has to bring a bottle of champagne to the workshop when he or she sells a story. When Steve sold Forests, and was reminded of this, he confessed shamefacedly, "I'm not old enough to buy champagne."

How easy is it for you to determine if a piece should be prose or poetry? What was the most difficult example to choose from, so far?

Basically, the issue is whether I want to spend an afternoon first-drafting a poem, a couple of weeks making it into a story, or a year making it into a novel. If I can stab the subject quick and deadly, it's a poem. I have a poem I've never published about a certain genetic aberration, and I've written a novelette on the same theme. They go together. I've never sent the poem out, because it would be a spoiler for the novelette. I really should get that novelette in the mail --

Of course fiction needs more of everything. My poetry tends to be narrative, but a story or a novel needs a lot of threads and characters and incidents.

I say I can write a poem in an afternoon, but I've picked at poems, adding a word, removing a word, twisting a line, for years. You know how it is, right? You lie in bed trying to think of the exact right word.

Are there any frontiers in poetry that you feel today's poets could explore more?

Right now SFnal writers are dodging the whole form issue. We need to write form poetry, not just doggeral, but actual good villanelles, sonnets, tanka, sestinas, etc. I personally write a lot of non-form poetry, and I don't think it's in any way inferior to the hard stuff, but I think poets should experiment with form just to see how it feels. I think what a person learns from writing metered poetry or poetry that has some exterior shaping transfers to free verse.

I also think many speculative poets should browse in the vast ocean of poetry that's being published and performed today. There's so much. So much variety.

One good thing is that there seems to be no wall between speculative poetry and the poetry of the greater literary world. A lot of Billy Collins' work could appear in Asimov's. I sometimes meet poets who have no idea that their work is speculative and then a couple months later, at my suggestion, they submit to Star*Line and get an acceptance.

[Poem] Narrative of the Naga's Heirs at Uncanny Magazine

My new poem "Narrative of the Naga's Heirs" in Uncanny Magazine debuted in Uncanny Magazine this January, and it is now available online as free content. Be sure to check it out, and as always, thank you for supporting diverse voices in poetry and speculative literature! Quick Sip Reviews also did a nice review of my poem and the other works in this issue of Uncanny Magazine which really added to the larger discussions we've been having on speculative literature lately. Be sure to check it out.

Howls and Fairies. A Conversation with Mary McMyne

Mary McMyne is a poet whose work I first came across through my membership with the Science Fiction Poetry Association. I've found her to be a delightful and exacting talent with a vivid sense of imagination and verse. She recently won the Science Fiction Poetry Association's 2015 Elgin Award for her chapbook Wolf Skin, from Dancing Girl Press. Like any excellent collection, Wolf Skin begins with a seemingly familiar premise, and the adventure is where it goes from there. It's a brief work, but it leaves you hungry for more.

Her roots begin in south Louisiana, in what she describes as "a plain white house at the edge of a deep dark wood." Her writing includes both short stories and poetry, with a focus on fiction. She studied literature and creative writing at Louisiana State University, and received an MFA from New York University. She has received several distinctions for her work including the Faulkner Prize for a Novel-in-Progress and the Sustainable Arts Foundation Promise Award. 

She lives in Sault Sainte Marie, in northern Michigan, and is presently an assistant professor and co-editor of Border Crossing at Lake Superior State University, she teaches courses in English and creative writing. Having grown up in southern Michigan, I was interested to see how she found inspiration there, particularly in the Upper Peninsula. She is also the poetry editor for Faerie Magazine.

Mary McMyne has been very prolific over the years, with interviews, reviews, fiction and poetry appearing in the Los Angeles Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Word Riot, Pedestal Magazine, New Delta Review, New Myths, Apex Magazine, American Book Review and the anthologies The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works and The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss,  just to name a few. You can visit her online at marymcmyne.com.


Do you mind telling us when you first developed an interest in poetry? How would you describe your access to poetry growing up?

I was filling spiral-bound notebooks with handwritten novels and poems from the time I was about eight or nine. I still remember an epic poem I tried to write about St. George and the Dragon at that age on a road trip: sitting in the back seat of our small car with my little brother and sister, asking my mother for help with rhyming words as the trees whizzed by outside. I was a musical kid, who played and wrote songs on the piano, and I was fascinated by the sounds and rhythms of words. I kept writing all the way through middle school and high school, taking creative writing classes and entering contests (in eleventh grade, I won a prize for a poem I wrote about a comet). I was very lucky to have encouraging parents. Our house was full of books. They both read voraciously, and my mother took us to the library weekly. She was a kindergarten teacher who read to us every night and wanted to write children's books. My father was a once-aspiring writer who worked as a technical salesman. (I didn't know this about him until not long before he died, but apparently, he burned everything he'd ever written in his 20s and never wrote again.) He subscribed to Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science, Nature, and National Geographic. They introduced me to Robert Frost, Edgar Allen Poe, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury. By the time I was nine or so, my bedroom shelves were stacked with books: classic poetry collections, dictionaries and encyclopedias and novel series. Gold-edged, leatherbound editions of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales (which are very lyrically written), Greek myths, the Brothers Grimm, and Alice in Wonderland ("Jabberwocky" was my favorite poem for years as a kid). There wasn't a particular focus on poetry, but they made sure I had access to literature in general.

We often hear about how writers get started, but what keeps you going these days, as a poet?

I'll be honest. I write poetry when I'm inspired to do so. When I'm working on a longer project, I agree with so many other writers who advise that you've got to sit down and do the work even when you don't feel like it. I'm working on a novel, right now, and for that project, because I'm in it for the long haul, I schedule out my time. I block it off on my calendar and show up to do the work. I force myself to sit down and invite the muse, to cultivate inspiration through contemplation. But I never start a project unless I am on fire to write it, and each poem is a project of its own for me, even if it's part of a longer manuscript. Nabokov was talking about prose when he described inspiration, but I can think of no better explanation as to what keeps me going as a poet. I overhear a phrase spoken aloud, see or read something that disturbs or elates me, and I know immediately from my emotional reaction--a heightened sense of awareness, a psychological sort of tingling--that I am going to write a poem about it. "A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life," Nabokov wrote. "This feeling of tickly well-being branches through [the artist] like the red and the blue in the picture of a skinned man under Circulation... It expands, glows, and subsides without revealing its secret." When I feel that way, I stop whatever I am doing and write. If I'm in the car, I turn on the sound recorder on my phone and dictate orally. And so a poem is born. Development and revision follow over the next few weeks or months. The poem calls me back, over and over, until it has revealed its secret.


Which poem of yours do you usually recommend to someone who wants to read your work for the first time?

If they like fairy tales, "Wolf Skin" (the title poem of my chapbook, which first appeared in Los Angeles Review). If they like science poetry, "Irene Joliot Curie" (a poem of mine which first appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly).


When you're writing speculative poetry what's been your general line of thinking when determining the balance between the realistic and the fantastic?

I tend to be more absorbed by projects that explore some element of the unreal—whether that be myth, fantasy or science fiction, folklore, the supernatural, or simply intense subjectivity—but I'm dissatisfied with work that doesn't engage enough with reality. There are two types of poems in my chapbook, Wolf Skin: realistic poems about a modern woman whose mother told her dark fairy tales as a child, and fantastic poems about the versions of those tales she re-imagines as an adult. The realistic poems bookend the fantastic ones: the beginning of the collection explores the woman’s adult life after her mother dies; the middle poems follow her into the unreal to reexamine her childhood mythos; and the final poems follow her back into the real world with her worldview and sense of self transformed. I played with a draft of the chapbook that included only fantastic poems, but was ultimately dissatisfied with it because it retold the tales without fully examining the role they play in our lives. An important function of speculative poetry, I think, is to use the unreal as a sort of mirror in which we can better see ourselves. Many of the fantastic poems in Wolf Skin imagine realistic motivations for fantastic villains or flat female characters, in order to interrogate the explanations we’ve accepted for those characters’ actions—too easily—all our lives.


What served as the impetus for Wolf Skin as a manuscript?

I moved to Sault Ste. Marie, a remote town in Upper Peninsula Michigan, when my daughter was nine months old to take a professorship at Lake Superior State University. When we drove over the Mackinac Bridge into the Upper Peninsula with all of our things, it felt like I was entering another world. I was enchanted by the way the trees loomed over I-75, how wild and remote and empty everything seemed. At night, I read fairy tales to my daughter, the way my mother had read them to me, and I started to wonder how they changed over time as they were written down, what ancient oral versions of the tales might now be lost to history. After I put my daughter to bed, I would research the way the tale I’d read to her that night had changed over time, and how the various versions intersected with history. This research would often inspire a poem, though it was also feeding the historical fairy tale novel I was (and still am) working on. For instance, the last two lines in my poem, “Old Woman Gothel,” were originally the opening for a section of an early novel draft. It’s difficult for me to talk about one project without the other because they’re interconnected; the poems in Wolf Skin and my novel-in-progress were born out of the same impulse.

How many poems did it take before you felt that you were on to a whole text?

I had written about eight or nine poems before it occurred to me I might have a chapbook on my hands. My friend and colleague, the poet Julie Brooks Barbour – who was wonderful about encouraging me to write poetry when I first moved to Sault Ste. Marie – kept telling me I was writing a chapbook, but I didn’t believe her until I began to see connections between the realistic and fantastic poems. After that, I started trying to imagine how each poem would fit into the structure of the whole as I wrote it, and the story that connects all of the poems began to take shape.

There are numerous well-known fairy tale characters who make their appearance in Wolf Skin. Who was the most difficult for you to approach through a poetic lens?

The bulk of the poems in Wolf Skin are persona poems, written from the perspectives of fairy tale characters who were glossed over or marginalized in the popular tales, so the key to getting each of them to work was usually knowing what each speaker wanted to say and why. Once I understood the answers to those questions for a given poem, it would come out fairly easily in its speaker’s voice, and polishing it was simply a question of editing. The characters I struggled with most were those whose motivations for speaking weren’t as clear to me, like the prince from Rapunzel and the woodcutter from Red Riding Hood. It was difficult for me to figure out why these characters would be moved to speak at all, because they are already represented as heroes in the traditional tales. This meant that these characters didn’t quite end up getting a voice the way other characters do. In "Wolf Skin,” for example, the speaker isn’t the woodcutter from Red Riding Hood at all, but another speaker addressing him with irony.


One of your earliest published poems was "Ghost Story," in the New Delta Review in 2010. What inspired this poem?

“Ghost Story” is a long persona poem, written in prose, from the perspective of a fictional girl who grew up in the Ninth Ward before Hurricane Katrina hit. Her story is that she moved to Baton Rouge with her mother as a teenager and lost her grandmother and childhood home in the storm. I was living in New York City in 2005 when Katrina hit, but I was visiting a childhood friend in New Orleans on the one-year-anniversary of the hurricane. My friend, who had only recently moved back to the city after staying with friends in Texas, took me to the Ninth Ward. It was heartbreaking and surreal to see what had become of the neighborhood. There were sofas hanging upside down in the bars of porches, cracked foundations of churches without roofs, the rusting remnants of overturned cars. I took photographs, because the landscape was so surreal and horrifying. Over the years, I kept thinking about it. One weekend, after I moved back to south Louisiana to take a teaching job, I heard the girl’s voice in my head and wrote the poem very quickly. The piece is called “Ghost Story” because the speaker visits the Ninth Ward after the storm and sees the ghost of herself as a child, her grandmother, the neighborhood, everything that is now gone, superimposed over the landscape.


Do you feel there's anything about life in Michigan that's conducive to a literary mindset, particularly in the Upper Peninsula?

Long, cold winters. Deep, dark woods. My wonderful job, teaching in an English department with other creative writers. My basement writing studio.


What's been an unexpectedly useful skill for you as a poet?

My graduate studies focused on the craft of writing literature, not the business of marketing it, but I was a professional business and technical writer for a few years before I began teaching writing. It was useful, once I had a chapbook to promote, to be able to draw from that experience.


How did you get involved with Faerie Magazine? Do you have any tips for emerging poets to avoid faerie clichés these days?

About ten years ago, I was introduced to its current editor-in-chief, Carolyn Turgeon, by my dear writer friend, Ronlyn Domingue, because Carolyn and I share a deep love of myths and fairy tales. We’ve corresponded and read one another’s work ever since. Not long after Carolyn took over as editor-in-chief at Faerie, she asked if I would be able to contribute a poem from what was then my poetry chapbook-in-progress. I sent her “Rapunzel Tucks the Twins into Bed,” and she printed it. After Wolf Skin came out, she asked me if I had anything else, and I sent her a series about Snow White and Rose Red I’d been working on for my eventual full-length collection. She published five Snow White and Rose Red poems in a beautiful spread, and I fell in love with the possibilities of surreal photography and poetry presented together. When Carolyn asked if I would like to start editing poetry for Faerie, I immediately said yes. I’m excited about the role I get to play at Faerie in bringing poetry to a larger audience.

I’m not sure I have any magical tips for avoiding fairy tale clichés, but there seem to me to be at least two aspects to this. The first aspect is linguistic: emerging poets should obviously strive for inventive and beautiful turns of phrase, precise and surprising diction, startling line breaks, and an interesting voice. All of these elements work together to make the texture of a poem feel fresh and new. The second aspect is ideological: emerging poets should also strive to avoid a clichéd approach. It’s not enough to convert an existing fairy tale or trope into inventive poetic language. It’s also important to think about how a poem builds somehow on the traditional tale or trope and/or subverts it. It seems to me that the best fairy tale poetry strikes a balance between the strange and familiar. Two poems we recently accepted for the summer 2016 issue illustrate this concept: John W. Sexton’s “The Man with the Ladder of Loneliness” is an inventive, original fabulist poem that manages at the same time to seem familiar and resonant, and E. Kristin Anderson’s “Selkie” updates an old myth in an inventive way (in this poem, the titular creature carries lip gloss and a driver’s license). Readers can check both of those poems out in the summer issue by signing up for a subscription.


Do you prefer coffee or tea?

Coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon. I am incorrigibly addicted to caffeine.

Winter, Writing, and Shannon Connor Winward

This week I'm sharing an interview with Shannon Connor Winward, whose work I first encountered as part of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Based on the East Coast, Shannon's engaging work includes both prose and poetry.Her poetry has been nominated for a Rhysling award, with publication in Pedestal Magazine, Strange Horizons, Fairy Tale Magazine, Literary Mama, Hip Mama, Star*Line, Illumen, and many others. She's also the poetry editor for Devilfish Review, a quarterly online magazine specializing in speculative literature. Be sure to check them out!

Shannon's debut collection of poetry, Undoing Winter, (Finishing Line Press) was nominated for a 2015 Elgin award for best speculative poetry chapbook by the Science Fiction Poetry Association. It's not easy to describe Undoing Winter because it covers so much ground, but you'll find her contemplating love, motherhood, history and the fantastic, death and ressurection. It's a brief book, but it earns its praise.

Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in Psuedopod: Artemis Rising, Gargoyle, Spinetingler Magazine, Scigentasy, Flash Fiction Online, Plasma Frequency Magazine, PANK, and The Vestal Review, and numerous international anthologies.   She's received many distinctions for her writing already, including Semi-Finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest, and runner-up for an emerging artist fellowship in literature by the Delaware Division of the Arts in 2014 and 2015.

You can visit her website at: http://www.shannonconnorwinward.com/

Do you mind telling us when you first developed an interest in poetry? How would you describe your access to poetry growing up?

I was always writing poems. I was into anything creative that drew attention to me, me me. But I got serious about it in fourth or fifth grade, when they would take our English class down to the computer lab to mess around with clipart and typing; we were supposed to make greeting cards for our parents for the holidays and whatnot. I always turned mine into poetry, like, Shakespearean sonnets and epic tragic-comedies about doomed turkeys at Thanksgiving. I loved that I could create something lasting like that, to entertain people or surprise them. And of course, as I grew older and life got harder, I realized that writing was a way to express what I was going through. It just came naturally.

I can't say that I had prolific access to poetry as a kid; I read what I came across (how I loved Shel Silverstein) and what was part of the curriculum. I was fortunate to have some very supportive teachers who encouraged me to write; sometimes they introduced me to poets like Langston Hughes or Sylvia Plath. I wish now that I had a more extensive education in poetry, but I ended up studying the humanities, not the arts. I'm trying to make up for that now, but it's different when you are a grownup, with kids and a mortgage. If I could go back, I'd tell my younger self to slow down and soak up a lot more, but life doesn't flow backwards.

Which poem of yours do you usually recommend to someone who wants to read your work for the first time?

My poem, "Session" (The Pedestal Magazine, December 2010) is one of my favorites. It's about the anthropology of the individual psyche. It's very representative of how I write and what interests me. "Beansidhe" (Ideomancer, June 2011) is another one. It deals with myths and ghosts, lost love and subtle feminism, and features an unreliable narrator. You have to read between the lines in my writing, which sometimes means people don't get me, but that's okay. I get me. :)

Do you prefer coffee or tea?

Oh, godz, coffee. Coffee coffee coffee.
Mint tea is pretty good, though.

If you could have any imaginary being for a pet or companion, what would it be?

I would like a talking owl. A sarcastic, sage, self-sufficient and hypo-allergenic owl (because I'm allergic to feathers) who calls me on my bullshit, babysits my kids, and bites me when I'm not writing enough.

"Undoing Winter" has some really lovely lines, and blends some very modern and timeless issues with the fantastic. What were some of your thoughts on organizing the manuscript?

I realized pretty early on that the poems needed to follow a "down into darkness, back into light" pattern; that is the motif of the titular poem ("Undoing Winter" is about Demeter haranguing Persephone to get over Herself and come away from Hades), but it's also symbolic of my life as someone with a mood disorder. I go down and I come back, maybe scarred but usually stronger and wiser. I wanted the reader to take that journey, too. I arranged the poems within that framework like you might make a mix tape; one poem had to flow into the next in a way that sounded right, even if I couldn't articulate why.

Were there any parts that you really wanted to include in "Undoing Winter", but cut out for one reason or another?

Yeah, it started out as a longer manuscript, but I kept trimming it down. Some of it felt repetitive, or messed with the arc. The final product is petite (which is unusual for me) but I think what was left was much stronger.

How do you determine how much of the imaginative you include in your poems, and how much realism?

I wrote a lot of speculative work when I was younger, stoned and spiritual. Over the last few years my poems tend to be more about family relationships, especially dealing with aging parents and raising a special needs kid. That's the stuff that comes pouring out when I come crying to my laptop, not the magical or mythic. I do still love the speculative genre; I try to make a point of doing it when I've got time to free write. I like to write to prompts or challenges. I also get some imaginative stuff when I start with random words or structures, let my right-brain take the lead. I think once my kids are older I'll come back to genre writing but, right now, life is about the alarm clock, the school bus, the IEP meetings, the bad back. Realism is where my head is.

Are you contemplating another collection of poetry in the near future?

I am. All the family-centric stuff will probably find its way into a memoir of sorts. I have a lot of rage in me over the lack of support that is out there for families of kids with mental health issues; I always thought I'd like to use my words, and what we've been through, to advocate for those whose voices aren't being heard. But I've got to be doing more than treading water myself, so I don't know if that will be a "near future" project or just a someday one. But it's coming.

If you could write from any legendary or imaginary place, where would you like to write?

The Celtic version of heaven is the Summerland. I imagine it as a balmy place full of waterfalls and bonfires, tables always overflowing with your favorite foods, and all your departed loved ones strutting around in glittering clothes, drinking and laughing. I'd love to go there with a pad and a pen – and then come back to share the stories. I'd like to be able to tell people it only gets better from here.

And finally, what advice would you give to someone who wants to begin writing, whether as a poet or as a prose writer?

Write! If writing makes you feel good, do it. If it's all you want to do, write as much as you can, challenge yourself, read. seek out constructive criticism, keep trying to improve your craft -- but don't pressure yourself to be perfect, or take rejection personally. It's important to keep an element of joy in the process, else writing becomes just work, and that's no fun. Love yourself through your words; the rest will follow.

Four Poems

From my 2009 collection, BARROW

San Diego Lao Boat Racing Festival coming Oct. 31

On Saturday, October 31st in San Diego, I'll be joining Sahtu Press at the Lao Boat Racing Festival at Tecolote Shores North, Mission Bay Park from 9AM to 4PM.

This is the second year the community in San Diego has organized the event. In addition to Dragonboat racing, they'll have Lao food and craft vendors, cultural performances including traditional Lao dance and music, and a parade. There are approximately 7,000 Lao estimated to reside in San Diego. For more information you can visit the organizers' facebook page at: MekongBoatRacing Club.

The other Sahtu Press authors will be there, too, including Nor Sanavongsay, author of "A Sticky Mess" and Krysada Panusith Phounsiri, the author of "Dance Among Elephants". Nor Sanavongsay have had a busy month with recent appearances at ZAPPCON in Fresno and ConVolution in San Francisco. Krysada Panusith Phounsiri also had a successful gallery show for his Snap Pilots photography team in San Diego in addition to his extensive traveling across the country. His book just finished selling out its most recent printing, but a fresh printing is arriving just in time for the Lao Boat Racing Festival.

We'll have copies of Soul Vang's first book of poetry To Live Here, Sunny Chanthanouvong & David Zander's folktale collection The Wolf and the Moon, and Kev Minh Allen's debut poetry collection My Proud Sacrifice.

I'll have copies of Tanon Sai Jai and Demonstra on sale for $20 each at the festival, although we'll also have discounted bundles available throughout the day.

In the Sahtu Press reissue of my 2009 poetry collection, I address the complicated twists and turns of the Lao diaspora in one of my more intimate and personal collections to date. Composed of 56 poems and a photo essay, I contemplate what it means to be Lao and Lao American.

Is there a difference? How do we reconcile with memory, and how do we share a future? Tanon Sai Jai probes many of the familiar symbols and everyday objects of Lao life and pays tribute to many of the artists, writers and community builders I met along the way. Sometimes deep, soften humorous and humane, Tanon Sai Jai gives readers many things to think about on the Path of the Heart.

DEMONSTRA is my 2013 award-winning book. It received the Science Fiction Poetry Association Elgin Award for Book of the Year. As my publisher, Innsmouth Press described it: "In the depths, half-hidden under still waters, await strange and vicious creatures …. Cthulhu, Godzilla and nagas mingle in DEMONSTRA, a speculative poem collection which assembles 20 years of work. DEMONSTRA is a book of things glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. It is about a reality that can never fully be demonstrated, authenticated, dissected, for certain visions always remain in shadows."

As an interesting bit of history, dragonboat racing originated in China, but many other nations observe it to recognize aspects of our shared heritage.

One version of the tale maintains that there was a wise and loyal minister and poet named Qu Yuan who served the Zhou Emperor. His book, the Chu Ci is widely regarded as one of the two greatest books of ancient Chinese verse. He was much beloved by the common people for his constant fight against corruption in the emperor's court. However, Qu Yuan finally became so despondent at the corruption of his colleagues he threw himself into the Milou River.

The community rushed out in long boats hoping to rescue him, but they were too late. They beat drums to scare the fish away, and threw dumplings into the water to feed the fish so they would not eat Qu Yuan's body. It is said that late one night, Qu Yuan's ghost appeared before his friends and told them his fate, asking them to wrap their rice into three-cornered silk packages to ward off a dragon in the river.

Dragonboat races have since been held to commemorate Qu Yuan’s death, typically celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth month of the lunar calendar. Many communities now convene dragonboat races year-round.

My poem "Zongzi" was written in part because of this legend, although it never really found a home in other journals. So it goes.

Zongzi

How can a person be free
If they do not grow?
Will all of the poets die
If Tomorrow finally arrives?

How hard did the home winds blow
On the bleak isle of sharp-beaked Harpies?
Will Qu Yuan ever bob to the surface
And touch my humble dragon's bow?

Can burnt flags really feed trees
better than spilled blood?
If I don't pretend I'm here
Atop my staircase now,
Where do I go tomorrow?

After a good meal on University Avenue,
You might dream of unwrapping
A forlorn writer's last words
Secretly scratched onto a bamboo leaf,
Thrown to the wind for passing schoolchildren
From an attic of dried flowers and dust
And ask, "When do electric elephants dream,
If all of their time is spent remembering?"

[Poem] Hmong Market at Luang Prabang

If I am successful,
I will be immortal and misunderstood.

If these emaciated girls on the candlelit street
Of Luang Prabang are successful,

They understand they will live for another melting day
Dreaming idly of an ink-faced man like me
Who will whisk them away for good,

Only he’s perfect, always remembering his pinky promise
To come back the next night

To buy their dusty bed sheets
For a fistful of wrinkled kip.

[Poem] Tempus Fugit (Spanish translation)

Caroline Arroyo of Madrid did a fine translation of my poem Tempus Fugit, which originally appeared in my collection BARROW in 2008:

Tempus Fugit

El tiempo vuela, pero va en círculos también,
Un hula hoop celestial
Como los juguetes más pequeños de un Dios bailarín
Clavado en órbitas confusas.

               Todo cambia, todo es la misma opción

Corriendo a toda velocidad como un caballero español
En la ruta de los molinos, al otro lado de la línea inicial
¡Moliendo el dorado grano bajo sus enormes pies!

¿Quien lanzó este disco al aire en un principio?
El sol una pistola de fogueo, la luna un cronómetro
Nuestros ojos testigos imperfectos

               Consistentemente parpadeando antes de que la meta haya sido cruzada.

Tempus Fugit

Time flies, but it is going in circles too,
A celestial hula hoop
For a shimmying deity’s tiniest toys
Pinned to obscure orbits.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,

Racing at full tilt like an old Spanish cavalier
On a windmill course to the other end of the start line
Grinding golden grain beneath her giant feet!

Who threw this disc into the air in the first place?
The sun a starter pistol, the moon a stopwatch,
Our eyes an imperfect witness

       Consistently blinking before the finish line is crossed.

[Poem] Haikilling

Some people will have
Less than even a haiku
To mark their passing

Who will remember
This man, this woman, their lives
With at least one word?

Forgotten by all?
Nothing worth a lasting note?
This fate, quite common.

Elders and parents.
Refugees from old countries.
Veterans and priests.

Students stare at me.
“This does not apply to me.”
They take some selfies.

Victims on the news?
Abstractions, like their mentors.
What is there to say?

How futile it seems,
To battle for tomorrow,
Odd posterity.

Haiku or whisper,
This poem is a ghost. Haunts.
You will recall this.

But not who it was
Written for in the first place.
Even if it’s you.

[Poem] Charms

[Poem] A Thousand Smiles