Ashley Holloway (AH): Hi, Ren Daniel (RD), thanks for spending some time with Unleash! Among many things, you are an Alberta-based illustrator and writer/editor who creates some really cool art. You are also a graphic novelist who also creates comics. I am really interested in how you got your start; can you tell me a little bit about your journey?

RD: Sure! I was a hobbyist animator as a child, utilizing an app called Flipnote Hatena for the Nintendo DSi. Thanks to it, I fell in love with drawing and animating, and my life goal was to animate my own series!… Until I realized that one person animating so much would probably be impossible, especially as I had health issues that stopped me from working as much as I’d like. So, I settled on illustrating and worked as a freelance illustrator for some time before realizing that comics and graphic novels heavily borrow skills from animating—it was a perfect fit!

*****

AH: When you start a project, do you begin with the illustrations or the text?

RD: I always used to begin with the illustration: the illustration is the most important! Who cares if the dialogue is stiff because a well-designed character can remedy that, and so can good backgrounds! But when I realized my body will not always allow me to illustrate, I was forced to prioritize writing, and suddenly that stiff dialogue needed to be remedied.

Now, I take the “pineapple-pen” approach to projects: I’ll take some stuff I’ve drawn, I’ll take some stuff I’ve written, and I’ll combine them into a horrible amalgamation that, somehow, surpasses everything I did prior.

*****

AH: As someone who also battles with an invisible disability, you and I have had many conversations about how this impacts our creative process. Can you tell me a little about being a creative individual with a disability in an ableist context? How do you manage? Do you have any tools or resources you use? (OK, that was three questions…)

RD: Those who work in the entertainment industry know that we must be willing to sacrifice the best years of our life for a project—generally a commercial project—to prove we are worthy of staying in the field. And if you win the lottery and are employed, there are dozens of people, if not hundreds, ready and willing to replace you as they also want a chance to live their dream. Many of those individuals are more skilled, faster, and younger than you, and have better genetics that will protect them from long-term health effects. Put simply: like a workhorse, if you develop (or are born with) health problems, you are told the dream is dead and you need to face reality of a life out back.

Since I’ve had these health issues since childhood, I experienced the grief of a dead dream at a young age. And, having accepted that grief, I can now say that: yes, my work is hard on my body; I’ve had times where I was not able to work for months—and even years—at a time. But when I could not animate, I turned illustration. When illustration became difficult, I turned to 3D modeling to limit my hands’ exertion. When that became difficult, I turned to typing my stories to better plan and prepare. And when typing became impossible because I was in braces, I turned to voice-to-text programs like Dragon dictation which took nearly all the pressure from my body.

Writing with my voice stands as my last bastion, granting me the time to heal while also pursuing fulfilling work—preparing the story for production. And, so far, I’ve been lucky that my body has always blessed me by healing, at least to some degree, and I’ve been able to return to illustrating.

And now, when I do go back to my graphic novel work, I’m faster, cleaner, and more prioritized; each limitation has forced me to learn a new skill. My stints in writing have improved my storytelling and drafting to an immeasurable degree. The development of 3D skills has taken me from a beginner to someone who understands industry standards. My use of voice-to-text ensures that I never put unnecessary strain on my body by typing. And I no longer suffer from perfectionism, as I feel nothing but gratitude that I’m even able to hold my pen.

I am now more adaptable and resilient than I could have been had I won the genetic lottery. The most important, however, is that I have now proved to myself that if an obstacle gets in my way, be it health or life, I’m able to work a way around it—to continue doing what I know I need to do.

*****

AH: You have all these cool little comics and snapshots, if you will, about life in addition to more story-based work. It seems almost philosophical. What do you base your work on? Where does your inspiration come from? (OK, a double-whammy there…)

RD: If we’re referring to my “Daniel & Luka” series, those are based on those closest to me; sometimes it could be based on a conversation I had with my mother—for example, her telling me that one day I, too, will “stress rub” my eyebrows off— and I love seeing her smile when she reads it. It may be an experience I had with my partner, like when she, huddled in blankets, screamed at me to put on pants when I was shoveling snow—I live to see her burst out laughing at the memory.

The D&L comics were also my way of “easing back” into comics because I was, honestly, terrified to try again. I wasn’t sure if I could ever return to comic work, and if I couldn’t handle something so simple, I was inviting my own funeral. But Thank God, I could work on the short comics. And now, they make me happy by making my family happy and by storing memories I would have otherwise taken for granted.

Ren Daniel is a Canadian illustrator and writer-editor who's driven by an obsession with the art of storytelling and a love for psychology. If you enjoy exploring the world through creation and art, you can read his graphic novels for free on his website.

Join us October 24 & 25, 2025 for two days of connection and creativity while learning from some kickass writers!

Unleash Lit editor Ashley Holloway sat down with Canadian artist Vanja Kragulj to chat about all things colorful (and some not-so).

Ashley Holloway (AH): Hi, Vanja Kragulj (VK), thanks for spending some time with Unleash! Among many other really cool things, you are a Canadian artist, surface designer, illustrator, art educator, entrepreneur, and overall, super fab human who has a pretty big following. I am really interested in how you got your start; can you tell me a little bit about your journey?

VK: Hi Ashley! Thank you for the opportunity to be interviewed about my work. I initially studied graphic design at AUArts, and shortly after graduating I moved to Montreal and started working in children’s publishing and fashion as an illustrator, graphic designer and art director. I never planned to work in the children’s industry, it kind of found me early on in my career and I realized I really loved it. However, I was too scared to try freelance illustration, so for many years I worked in graphic design. But after a while, design didn’t stimulate me creatively and I decided to take the big leap into fulltime illustration about 8 years ago when I moved back to Calgary. It was also around that time that I started dabbling in teaching, at first from my home and then later I opened my studio. I now split my time between freelance illustration as well as teaching illustration workshops to children and adults in my studio and in collaboration with local organizations and schools.

AH: When approaching a project, how do you start? Like, how do you get your inspiration for such cool, bright colors, designs, and shapes?

VK: That’s a great question! I initially approach my illustration projects with a mindset of a designer. That means that I start by creating a mood-board of images that will inspire the final illustration. This can include a colour palette, patterns, graphics, etc. I keep these images all around my art board as I start sketching or illustrating so that I always reference back to them.

AH: Do you ever feel as though there aren't enough colors or shapes in the world?

VK: I DEFINITELY feel that there is not enough colour in the world, in particular in our part of the world. I wish we would approach colour similarly to countries such as Mexico. Personally, I think colour makes everything better and we should embrace it more, in our architecture, design, fashion, everything!

AH: A big focus of your workshops is collage-based art, and you teach kids art classes to adults. What is it about the act of creating and of making collages that draws in both kids and adults alike?

VK: I definitely didn’t plan on becoming a collage artist. I just found that it was very closely linked to my graphic design background because it allows me to play with colour and shape similarly as I would on the computer. With collage, I get to choose from a much larger variety of colours that can’t be produced in print and I’m able to create everything with my hands, which I prefer over the computer. With children, I use collage a lot because it’s much easier for a young child to cut let’s say a circular shape, paint it, then glue it, rather than paint a circular shape and a background around it. As for adults, I feel that the act of cutting and glueing paper brings them back to a child-like state. It’s very therapeutic because it allows us to let go of perfectionism and enjoy the process. I often have to set a timer in my adult classes for the cutting portion because people really get lost in the process.

AH: You and I have discussed how I, as someone who writes and edits on the side, have a lot more creative freedom to take on projects, and do so without worrying about financial gain (well… to a point!). As someone who has a salary, I have the luxury of doing so; I know I will still have a paycheque at the end of the day. You, on the other hand, have taken that giant leap and have made this your work. Now, to me, this is incredibly courageous, and I admire you so much for this (but, I mean, come on, your art is fabulous! Of course this is your career). But, in doing so, this also means that your work is a bit feast-or-famine; you take work when you can get it because it may not be there next week. I'm curious how you deal with this uncertainty and relative lack of predictability? Basically, how do you be you?

VK: Well, this is the million-dollar question. I would say that I’m still learning to deal with the uncertainty. It’s an ongoing process. However, I also know that I don’t do well with too much predictability, and I get bored easily. The key is to shift the fear of the uncertainty into excitement of what might come next. The potential of a new project or a new aspiration is what gets me up in the morning. The uncertainty and excitement go hand in hand.

You can find Vanja Kragulj through Instagram (@vanjakraguljillustration) or through her website: https://www.vanjakragulj.com/

BG: Oh, thank you! I had a personal Instagram account and began to follow and become more aware of pages that were dedicated to posting book recommendations, reviews, anything bookish, and I knew I wanted to be a part of that community. One Christmas break a few years ago, I decided to create a book specific account, a Bookstagram, and I’ve learned, and added so much to my TBR pile ever since.

AH: How do you choose which books to review?

BG: I review all the advance reader copies (ARCs) I receive, but not all on my Bookstagram. The majority of my ARCs are through NetGalley, a website where anyone can create an account and request digital ARCs, and I always submit my feedback on their website. I also try to post my thoughts on other platforms that allow book reviews, like Goodreads, The StoryGraph or Amazon. As Bookstagram is my hobby, what I post there can ebb and flow with life. This year I am trying to post some brief thoughts to my story on every book I read and save them as a highlight to be referenced by anyone at any time. I mostly post favourites, recommendations, wrap ups, cover reveals I am a part of, or any time creativity strikes on my Instagram grid.

AH: A big part of being a Bookstagrammer is creating engaging content with great visuals. How do you decide how best to feature the books you are reviewing?

BG: This is a great question! I think this is constantly evolving. I try to post as relevantly as possible, like with reels or trending music, but mostly I just try to post. My goal is to chat all things book related, so I try to create posts that engage people and open a conversation. For reviews specifically, I try to be as spoiler free as possible so I like to include a brief synopsis and a ‘read if you enjoy’ list, so other readers can decide if they think this book is worth picking up.

AH: Do you have any pearls of wisdom to share for those who may be interested in starting a Bookstagram?

BG: I would say just start! Find accounts that speak to you and follow them. Engage in other people’s content. If you’re trying to grow, pay attention to trends and what’s popular.

AH: I know it’s a bit like asking someone to pick their favourite child, but do you have a favourite book?

BG: This is tough! Fredrik Backman’s Beartown is high on my list. The hockey aspect of this would normally not interest me, but the way he wrote about people? This is why I love reading!

About Brianna:

Brianna Gitzel is an Alberta-based Bookstagrammer sharing her bookish adventures as @tbr.ianna. She loves getting lost in a great story, discovering new authors, and connecting with fellow readers to chat all things books.

Ashley Holloway (AH): Hi, Robin van Eck (RvE)! Thanks for taking some time with Unleash. We were thrilled to share your work with the Alexandra Writers’ Centre Society (AWCS), in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. As the Executive Director of AWCS, can you tell us a little about your organization?

RvE: Hi Ashley, Thanks for thinking of me and the AWCS. The AWCS is a non-profit (registered charity) organization in Calgary. We have been serving Calgary and area writers since 1981 by offering a wide variety of courses and workshops for every writer, at any stage of their literary journey. Whether an individual wants to explore writing for therapeutic means, try out a new hobby, write a memoir or legacy gift to leave for their family, play with poetry, or have big dreams of being published and read widely, we have something.

AH: AWCS has been very successful at creating a beautiful writer’s community. What’s your secret?

RvE: I don’t think it’s really a secret. As humans we crave connection, knowledge and imagination. There is nothing greater than finding something you love and are passionate about and being able to share that with others who also love and are passionate about the same thing. I think that’s what AWCS really is—a community of creatives who love the written word and want to enjoy it with others. We all have a story, we all want to be heard, we all want an outlet to convey our inner most desires without it getting too weird. I think AWCS is that and more.

We all have a story, we all want to be heard, we all want an outlet to convey our inner most desires without it getting too weird.

AH: AWCS hosted the When Words Collide writer’s festival this past summer. Tell us a bit about this event.

RvE: When Words Collide (WWC) is a 3-day literary festival that brings together readers and writers from across the country to share, connect and learn. The festival has been a significant part of the literary culture in our city since 2011 and this is the first year that AWCS took the helm. We saw around 800 attendees flock to Calgary this past summer and be energized and engage with one another. The air was truly electric. If you’re looking for a place to connect with writers from across the country and beyond, meet industry professionals and learn tips and tricks on craft and publishing, this is the place to be. Next year our event will be held August 15-17, 2025 at the Sheraton Cavalier Calgary and we are excited to announce three international featured authors – Stephen Graham Jones, Emily St. John Mandel and Terry Brooks.

AH: You are an author yourself. Can you tell us about your writing

RvE: I guess I should be leading by example. My first novel, Rough, was published in 2020 by Alberta-based publisher, Stonehouse Publishing. It’s the story of a homeless man living on the banks of the Bow River during the Calgary-flood in 2013 and his connection, or reconnection, to his lost family. It’s part mystery, part family drama and was a joy to write. Lately my imaginings lean more into the speculative fiction realm and I am almost done my second novel that is hopefully going to be a literary horror when it fully comes out of its shell. When I’m not working on longer works, I also play around with short stories and the occasional personal essay.

AH: How do you deal with writer’s block?

RvE: If the words are coming or I’m simply not in a creative headspace, I’ll read a book. I have more books on my TBR pile than I know what to do with, so there are no excuses.

AH: How would you define success as an author?

RvE: Success is different for everyone. For me, when I signed that first contract to publish that was enough. I didn’t even care if the book came out after that. Someone else read my book and found it worthy enough to spend money and time on. That’s huge. Of course, seeing my book on the shelf is pretty great – even if, most recently, it was the shelf of a used bookstore. (There are copies available at Fair’s Fair by Chinook, if anyone is interested.) But at the end of the day, no one can define your success but you.

Notes 1. “Crazy over Husband's Suicide.” Morning Oregonian (1861-1937) [Portland], 12 May 1900, p. 4. Historic Oregon Newspapers, University of Oregon Libraries, oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn83025138/1900-05-12/ed-1/seq-4. Accessed 16 Apr. 2023.

2. “Missing: August Fischer, Farmer, Last Heard of Friday.” The Eugene City Guard (1870-1899), 30 Dec. 1899, p. 1. Historic Oregon Newspapers, University of Oregon Libraries, oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn84022653/1899-12-30/ed-1/seq-1/. Accessed 16 April 2023.

Acknowledgements The poems included in this excerpt previously appeared in Trace Fossils Review and are forthcoming in Footnote: A Literary Journal of History.

Jen Knox (JK): Hi, Elizabeth! Congratulations on winning our inaugural WIP Prize for your work-in-progress, Unfit to be at Large: Fragments from the life of Helen Fischer. Can you speak to the excerpt we included and explain a little about how you envision the project as a whole?

EH: Hi, Jen! Thank you so much. This is really an honor. The excerpt is the first four pages of the project. In those first pages, you can see two of the threads that run through the larger project: historical poems and historical source material. You’re introduced to Helen Fischer, kind of plunged into her grief through the poems, given information about the story the work dramatizes through a newspaper article and quote. The wider project follows Helen in multiple stages of her life, before and after the portion from the excerpt, continuing to incorporate archival materials. There’s a contemporary element as well that comes in a little bit later and is woven in throughout the project to contextualize and complicate it. It was important to me to show a diachronic perspective on conceptions of mental illness, to use the past to clarify the present and future. I wanted to show how unstable those conceptions have been across time, how unstable they continue to be. There are threads of my own family history in there, and the knowledge that I’m looking back at a time when settler-colonialism was very fresh in Oregon, and I only have to go back three generations to do that. So much is troubling, haunting about this story that it really pulled me in and demanded a lot more of me than I anticipated. There’s a lot to try to get right. I’ve spent a lot of time with newspaper archives, census records, probate records, commitment records, legislative reports. There’s still a lot of work to do. Mostly though, what I didn’t initially anticipate was how this project was going to demand that I write about myself, address my own neurodivergence, and sort of explain my motivations for co-opting Helen Fisher’s life in the way that I have. That became woven into the contemporary narrative. By the time I got there, I found that I’d created a foundation, an understanding within the story of the porousness of classification that allowed me to make myself legible in ways I couldn’t before.

JK: What motivates you to write?

EH: It’s just the medium that works for my brain. In real time, I can’t usually represent my ideas or myself in ways I find satisfying. There are too many factors to consider and too little time. When I write, I have all the time in the world to get the words right and I’m able to center myself in a way I otherwise can’t—I’m not immediately concerned with the demands of a particular situation, with other people’s expectations or comfort or reactions. When I interact with other people in real time, those concerns consume a lot of bandwidth. Interacting with people in real time is vital, but writing is restorative for me. In writing, also, my brain’s inclination to retread previous conclusions and conversations and go over the same thoughts a hundred times is an advantage, and because that’s a liability in other aspects of my life, writing is fulfilling and affirming in ways that I can’t replicate elsewhere.

JK: Please share with us one (or a few) of your favorite lines from a work that has inspired you and explain what strikes you about the passage.

EH: This is probably longer than what you had in mind, but it really stunned me in terms of how much I felt it resonated with this project, to the point that I now think of it as an epigraph. It’s from Lulu Miller’s book Why Fish Don’t Exist, and it’s referring to human attempts to classify the natural world taxonomically, and also, of course, to our attempts to classify difference within each other:

Consider the word “order” itself. It comes from the Latin ordinem, to describe a row of threads sitting neatly in a loom. In time, it was extended as a metaphor to describe the way that people sit neatly under the rule of a king, general, or president. It was only applied to nature in the 1700s under the assumption—a human fabrication, a superimposition, a guess—that there is an orderly set of ranks to find there. I have come to believe that it is our life’s work to tear down this order, to keep tugging at it, trying to unravel it, to set free the organisms trapped underneath. That it is our life’s work to mistrust our measures.

It’s basically everything I’m trying to say with a whole manuscript in one paragraph.

JK: Why is creative work important in 2024, 2025, and beyond?

EH: I’m not sure that the importance of creative work changes across time. What changes is how much we value it, and the scale of the consequences of not valuing it. Having time, energy, resources for creative work—that’s a privilege in our culture, and even people who have access to that privilege are usually trained to see exercising it as vain and embarrassing. It’s not considered productive because it’s not financially valuable. A handful of people get famous and make lots of money off their art, but the reality is that this is the work, by and large, of people with day jobs. We might be told that creativity is important, but the realities of pursuing creative work show us the real story, which is that we’re not meant to prioritize it because capitalism has little use for it.

But it makes our lives more livable, more meaningful. It allows us to see each other more clearly, with more empathy. Creative work is a place where experiences can be reprocessed, where new meaning can surface, where it’s possible to escape the noise of daily life long enough to see what’s the matter with it, long enough to see other options. Certainly, right now, we need to see other options.

JK: What is literary or artistic success to you?

EH: I have mixed feelings about the word success. I’ve vacillated between viewing success as something that isn’t my goal, and trying to redefine success to mean something else, something more centered in showing up for myself. If I define success that way, at its most basic and most important, it's just having written, having found momentary meaning within my thoughts, a way to explain something that felt unexplainable before. Success is just doing this thing that makes me happier, this thing that can be hard to do because other people will not necessarily see value in it.

I’m not immune, though, to being excited by facets of the more traditional conceptions of success. Holding a book with my words in it and my name on it, putting it on my bookshelf next to books I’ve read and loved—that’s very appealing. But my goal is just doing my best at the work that compels me, because if I concern myself too much with what other people are going to think about it, it won’t be mine anymore. I don’t think it would be very interesting to other people anyway—a writer trying to get readers to like them. As a reader, I want to read work that cuts through posturing and really opens a window for me into something I haven’t seen before. I want something to be revealed to me. Success to me as a writer would be making work like that, whatever the outcome.

JK: How did you get started as a writer, and what advice do you have for new writers?

EH: I’m not sure there’s one single starting point, and it hasn't been a linear process. I’d probably point to a community college poetry class I took when I was sixteen as some kind of start. At that point I had been mostly out of school for two years; I didn’t have a GED yet; I was on probation for underage drinking—the world and my ability to navigate it felt bleak. That class was a little piece of evidence that there were places out there where I could do something I really enjoyed and be taken seriously. I took all the writing classes I could after that. Still, there were years after my undergrad where I didn’t do much writing, and I waited a long time to pursue the MFA. It wasn’t practical or financially sound—it’s not an easy thing to pursue in our culture, even if, like me, you’re privileged enough to make it work. It took me a long time to find the nerve.

In terms of advice, I would say find people who can give you advice that’s specific to you, your writing, your context, your goals. Find people who will be kind and constructive, who understand what you’re trying to do. Take classes, find peers, study the work of the writers you enjoy. Go to school for it or don’t—there are as many routes to writing as there are people. Find what works for you. Take risks. Learn to love revision. Learn to believe that your work has value. Learn that well enough that rejections won’t stop you.

JK: Is there anything I didn’t ask that you’d like to answer?

EH: No, but thank you so much for having me. I’m really grateful to you and the team at Unleash for the support. It means a lot.

Thanks, Elizabeth! We are a champion of your work and look forward to seeing more of Unfit to be at Large: Fragments from the life of Helen Fischer.

Elizabeth Higgins writes across genres and disciplines to consolidate information and experience, and through archival research as a way to confront the past and reframe the present. Elizabeth is an academic coach and former library cataloger with an MFA in creative writing from Oregon State University Cascades, whose work can be found or is forthcoming in Third Coast, Redivider, Trace Fossils Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Footnote: A Literary Journal of History. Elizabeth is a co-founding editor of the online journal Tethered Literary, which is set to release its first issue in winter 2025.

Ashley Holloway (AH): Hi, Slow Burn Books (SBB) from Calgary, Alberta Canada! Thanks for taking some time with Unleash. We were thrilled to share your work with our writers. Your bookstore is unique in that it is an all-romance bookstore. Can you tell us a little about it?

SBB: Thanks for inviting us to chat with you today. Slow Burn Books is a family-run business started by my sister and myself, and we are the first brick-and-mortar romance bookstore in Canada! And probably the smallest too. We have a 209 square foot space featuring all things romance, from contemporary to sports to dark romance, as well as fantasy, monster, and young adult. We have enjoyed the process of becoming business partners while navigating the family dynamic and it truly has brought us closer together.

AH: Romance novels are a firmly established genre within the book world. What is it about romance novels that draws readers in?

SBB: Romance is definitely an established genre, and has been for decades, as evidenced by best-seller lists and sales numbers. Yet, it still has to fight to be taken seriously within the literary community. We have found that romance novels tick multiple boxes for readers: a guaranteed happy ending, allowing the reader to relax and enjoy the ride, an escape from real life, and then some extra spice, which really is the cherry on top. 

With the boom in “BookTok” and “Bookstagram,” readers of this genre have found a place to openly talk about their love of these novels and to meet one another. The romance reader community is amazing and constantly surprises us with how thoughtful, supportive, and lovely they are. There is an extra level of connectivity through Instagram in particular, as readers can interact directly with their favourite author and get first access to an author’s news or book release information.

AH: While I appreciate this is a bit like naming your favourite child, do you have a favourite book (or author)?

SBB: You’re right, picking favourites like this is next to impossible. That being said, each of our staff has chosen their favourite author from the store. They are (in no particular order): Danielle L. Jensen, Elsie Silver,  Sarah J. Maas, and Lyla Sage.

AH: Tell me about the importance of independent booksellers, like yourselves, to the publishing industry?

SBB: Indies like ourselves are hugely important. Perhaps we are biased, but being so close to the consumer and seeing the trends, talking about what they like and dislike, seeing what they pick up in the store, and what they gravitate towards really makes us feel like we have our finger on the pulse. Indies, of course, cannot generate the same sales volume that box stores/larger online retailers can, but they are a good mark of what the consumer wants and publishers do pay attention to that. We are also in the fortunate position of working closely with distributors like Raincoast here in Canada, who actually listen to their indie stores and value our input. It’s such a symbiotic relationship and we are lucky to have amazing reps in the industry who want us to succeed. 

Indies, of course, cannot generate the same sales volume that box stores / larger online retailers can, but they are a good mark of what the consumer wants and publishers do pay attention to that.

We also try to bring in many independent authors’ titles to the store, which also highlights the importance of independent bookstores. Regardless of title discount, we aim to please the consumer. If they want a book and we can bring it in, we will. 

AH: What do you recommend for a first-time romance reader?

SBB: We usually like to ease first-time readers into the genre by recommending two avenues of entry. Either fantasy with Sarah J. Maas, Carissa Broadbent or Danielle L. Jensen or the contemporary romance route with authors such as Emily Henry, Christina Lauren, Talia Hibbert, or Ali Hazelwood.

AH: What can authors do to support you?

SBB: Authors, both traditionally published and independent, can support us by:

Partnering with us for exclusive deals:

• Arrange exclusive signed copies, special editions, or pre-order campaigns through independent bookstores to drive traffic our way.

Promote us:

• Mention and tag us on social media when discussing your book. Encourage followers to purchase from independents instead of large online retailers.

Provide marketing support:

• Share promotional materials, such as posters, bookmarks, or digital content with independent bookstores to help them market your book effectively.

Participate in "Shop Local" initiatives:

• Engage in local or national campaigns that promote shopping at independent bookstores, such as Independent Bookstore Day (in April each year).

Slow Burn Books is located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. For ordering online, see the following link. For more information about Slow Burn Books, or their tropes search tool, click the following link.

EQ: I have been a writer for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I saved up my allowance and money made from sweeping the local roller rink floor to spend at B. Dalton Bookstore on The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker Magazine, and every Sidney Sheldon, Jackie Collins and Sweet Valley High book I could get my hands on. I carefully cut out pictures from the magazines (Oh! I also bought International Male - look it up -  OMG where were my parents?) and wrote stories about them in my Future Book, a scrap book filled with male swimsuit models in the Hamptons and classy shoulder-padded ladies in their upper east side penthouses. I grew up on the prairie of North Dakota, so let me say how absolutely obsessed I was with New York City. I also loved watching people around me, listening to their conversations and then imagining a new world for them, my new characters. I took many years off writing to raise a family, but was able to find my way back into creating by attending wonderful workshops and retreats filled with supportive people who have become dear friends. And now the biggest supporters of my writing are my grown-up kids, my best friends Kim and Camie, my sister, and my husband.

AH: What is the best piece of advice you've received as a creative person?

EQ: My dad, a geologist who grew up in the deep south, used to tell me “wait and see.” I was a tad dramatic growing up (still am) and whenever I was freaking out about grades or relationships or health stuff, he would quietly listen, not interrupting. Then, after I was all done barfing out my feelings, he would say, “just wait and see. Things will work out one way or another.” I believe this advice applies to my writing also, especially when I’m stuck on a plot issue, or waiting for a response to a submission. I don’t need to fret about whatever I’m obsessing about, because one way or another, it will work out. My father passed away a few years ago, but my kids have “wait and see” tattooed on their arms to remind me of his words every day.

AH: Please share with us one (or a few) of your favorite lines, either from your own work or someone else's work, and explain what strikes you about the passage.

EQ: “I’ve told this story so many ways, so many times. I’ve written it; I’ve told it to my dogs while we sat on my father’s lake dock where we released his ashes. I’m not surprised by my need to tell and re-tell the story of my father’s death, but I have been surprised that every time I tell it there is one thing that stays the same: All my other stories make their way up to the surface too, begging for inclusion, connection, a piece of the action, like koi swimming to the pond’s surface for a nibble of bread crumbs.” – excerpt from an essay by Signe Land, in Pif Magazine, called “On Writing, Dogs, Autism, What Is Lost, What Is Found, And The Practice of Alchemy.”

My earliest writing teacher was my sister Signe, who wrote the above passage. “All my other stories make their way up to the surface too, begging for inclusion.” These words inspire me daily to listen and make room for all the other stories inside me that bubble up when I’m writing.

AH: How did you find your first publication? Was it everything you dreamed it’d be?

EQ: My first published essay was in Disability Acts in 2019, called “Taking Back Our Bodies’ Stories.” I was so excited to show my mom, because she was the one who drove me back and forth to creative writing camp each summer, showed me how to use a typewriter, and let me read any books that I wanted. She was always so encouraging of my writing, so having a very personal essay published was a huge deal for both of us.

AH: What are you working on next, and where can our readers connect with you?

EQ: I felt like I came full circle with my first piece in the New York Times this summer, after spending my youth carefully pasting NYT’s articles in my “Future Book,” hoping that someday I would have my words in there.

My sister and I are about to query a fun mystery novel with a queer, autistic protagonist who runs a B&B, but her guests keep dying. F*CK THIS MURDER includes a cute touristy mountain village, exes who flirt, Bees! A murder forest, adorable pets, a wedding, and love!

I’m on Instagram, Threads, (@elizabethlquant) and Facebook, and hopefully soon will have a proper website.

Jen Knox (JK): Hi, Tom! Thank you for taking some time to answer a few of our questions. We are honored to feature your poetry in our forthcoming nthology. Can you tell us a little about the poems that will appear in On Rules?

Tom Wayman (TW): The recent pandemic (2020-2022, or so) affected the rural as much as the urban. With the news media and most cultural institutions largely being located in cities, however, the ways the pandemic impacted the countryside similarly to and differently from urban areas wasn’t much discussed. I wrote a series of poems about experiencing the pandemic where I live, in a remote mountain valley in southeastern British Columbia’s Selkirk Mountains. 

Rules designed to preserve the health of the community were a big part of the pandemic, with the matters of who made the rules, and how they were enforced, being contentious where I live. Since the rules changed as the authorities learned more about the virus, and developed techniques and then vaccines to combat the pandemic, people grumbled about the learning curve that our whole society had, willy-nilly, embarked on. Some of my neighbors turned to Dr. Google to find justification for their belief that they knew better than the doctors, scientists and public health experts. Or that the pandemic was a plot (“the PLANNEDemic:”). By flouting the rules, these neighbors felt they were doing the majority of us a favor.

My poems in On Rules deal with two particular issues—the fear that the pandemic could be spread by hands touching infected surfaces, and the way that health rules morphed as more became known about the virus and how it spread. The latter poem is based on the kids’ game Simon Says.

In case a reader isn’t familiar with Simon Says, the game requires that one person utter a series of commands: “Simon says put your hands on your hips. Simon says lift your right knee.” At some point in the series, a command is given (“Touch your nose with your left hand.”) and, according to the rules, you should not obey that command because the order wasn’t prefixed with “Simon says”. Players can be “out” according to the rules for obeying when the prefix isn’t given, or the game can be played just to exercise players’ ability to quickly assess what they’re told to do. I felt the game had resonance with how most people followed the decreed pandemic rules while a minority decided not to, and also how fast sometimes societal rules designed to fight the pandemic (disinfecting every public surface, schools shifting from in-person learning to online and back again to in-person) could change.

“Offering” arises from personal behavioral patterns, essentially rules, we each adopt early in life to handle stressful emotional situations. Such default behaviors can serve to protect us from unpleasant feelings while simultaneously impairing how we function in the world, including achieving things we desire, such as better relations with other people (or a particular person). The situation described in my poem is an adaption from the Arthurian legend of the search for the Holy Grail (an important motif in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”). One of the knights involved in the quest is permitted to see the Grail, but is not allowed (those rules, again!) to touch it because, like the rest of us, he has sinned. I discovered late in life how a fear of closeness has harmed my relations with other people. I have other failings, too! If the sought-after grail of human existence is to be loved and to love with an open heart, I can at least understand why I haven’t grasped this wonderful cup. Though I have seen it.

JK: How long have you been writing, and when did you begin?

TW: My first book of poems was published in 1973, so I have half a century of poetry publication behind me. But I had a number of inspiring high school English teachers that directly or indirectly encouraged me to write. As a University of BC undergrad, I worked on the student newspaper, which served as the farm team for the main downtown Vancouver daily. So for three summers (12 months), I worked as a summer vacation replacement cityside and features reporter for that daily. We summer employees were expected to go to work as reporters for the daily once we graduated from (or dropped out of) university. While at UBC I took creative writing courses as a way of improving my journalism.

However, I won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to the two-year MFA program at the University of California, Irvine, where I began to seriously focus on my poetry. The 1960s were in full swing, so my shift from an expected journalism career to being a poet and teacher of writing was just one of many changes I went through.

JK: What is the best piece of advice you've received as a writer/person?

TW: The best advice I ever received as a writer is to read as a writer. If a piece I’m reading bores me, why? If a piece I’m reading dazzles me, why? I used to tell my writing students that if my course is successful, they will never again read simply for pleasure. I stressed that musicians constantly listen to other musicians, carpenters constantly evaluate the craftsmanship evident in buildings they are in, fine artists attend gallery shows, study art books, and even re-create famous paintings to comprehend from the inside how these were put together. Paying attention to how other practitioner of an art or trade create desired effects, or the reason other practitioners’ efforts fail, is the basis for always learning how to be better at what we do.

As a person, the best advice I received took the form of an observation by a counsellor whom I worked with who noted that I kept to the margins of whatever I did. I displayed a lot of emotional distance in any intimate relationship; I wrote poetry (a marginal art form) rather than, say, prose; I worked (in those days) at community colleges and alternative educational institutions rather than universities; and so on. The implicit advice was to try to understand why I feared to step forward, and to change my self-limiting behavior. 

This advice chimed with critiques of my poetry which said that for all its engagement with radical political themes, it took no emotional risks. Who we are is connected at many levels with what we write. The US poet Robert Bly, whom I had first met and admired at UC Irvine and with whom I had a desultory correspondence for many years, wrote me that: “the outer world is too much in the poems for the long run of life—more “water,” human intuitive possibilities lying at the back of your private brain need to come forward—be allowed to come forward, or up—to balance this marvelously developed sense of the solid world. You’ll never lose your solid world. It will just be added to, by trees and some witches and talking animals.” I’ve since written many poems about trees. But about witches and talking animals? Not so much.

JK: Please share with us one (or a few) of your favorite lines, either from your own work or someone else's work, and explain what strikes you about the passage.

TW: In the translation by Alastair Reid of the poem “Lazybones” (in Spanish, “El Perezoso”) 

by the Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, the speaker in the third stanza depicts spring in his country:

In Chile now, cherries are dancing,
the dark mysterious girls are singing,
and in guitars, water is shining.

I love the idea that guitar music is like sunlight reflected off water. Because of the previous two lines, filled with action (dancing and singing), the image in the third line (as well as its repetition of the “-ing” sound that ends each line) for me conjures up the melodious sounds of that glittering water as it moves.

My own poems, as you can see from the ones included in On Rules, often employ a kind of hybrid of surrealism, magic realism and reportage. Here is a similar technique utilized by a master. The first two lines in the stanza could have appeared in a travel brochure about visiting Chile in the spring. The third line, though, infuses tremendous energy into the stanza by evoking (for me, anyway) sounds and motion not described. The line offers an irrational image (nobody would pour water into a guitar) that conveys a multi-sensory truth (how lively guitar music can lift our spirits, inspire and delight us). 

JK: How did you find your first publication?

TW: When I enrolled in grad school at UC Irvine, I found some of my peers were already submitting to literary magazines. They taught me how to submit work, and, besides their help, the English department’s lounge for writers subscribed to various magazines in which I could discover whether any poems like mine were of interest to the editors. We especially wanted to be published in journals like George Hitchcock’s kayak, Henry Rago’s Poetry and David Wagoner’s Poetry Northwest. Mr. Hitchcock’s rejections were the most interesting.

My first book of poems resulted from having appeared in a new-Canadian-poets-under-30 anthology published the then-prestigious Toronto publisher McClelland & Stewart (now a branch of Penguin Random House). Like many contributors to that anthology, I subsequently submitted a manuscript to the publisher’s poetry editor, John Newlove, who (eventually) accepted it.

JK: What are you working on now? Please share any links our writers can follow to read more of your work. 

TW: Since March 2023, I’ve been involved in shrinking a gigantic novel that I had put away for a couple of years. A year before, I had submitted to my usual publisher, Harbour Publishing (BC’s largest secular publisher), a memoir about moving to the rural and my misadventures since. They asked me to chop 40,000 words from it, so I spent fall 2022 and spring 2023 cutting 26,000 words before resubmitting it. I hoped they would have forgotten the number of words originally specified, and, indeed, in June 2023, they accepted the book, now scheduled to appear this spring (2024).

When I resubmitted the memoir in March, I was excited about exercising the skills involved in reshaping a larger work into a briefer but punchier form. So I decided to tackle applying what I’d learned working on the memoir to reducing the shelved enormous novel to a size where it might be publishable. It had been rejected multiple times (including by Harbour) before I put it away, probably because of its excessive length. PM Press in Oakland, California, told me, “Cut it in half!” So far I’ve cut 34,000 words, but believe it needs about that amount cut again.

Interestingly, as I’ve toiled on shrinking the novel, its through-line has become more timely. My book is about a counterculture crew of young Americans and Canadians employed at “urban renewal” in a run-down area of Vancouver, BC in 1970. The crew decides to try unionizing similar crews of young people at work on other buildings in that district. Suddenly, now, young people working at Amazon, Starbucks, even A & W have discovered unionization, and they face many of the same issues my characters deal with.

To read samples of my work (no excerpts from, the novel, though!), you can go to tomwayman.com and click on the “Writing” tab or the “Did I Miss Anything?” tab.

(JK): Hi, Devin! Thank you for taking some time to answer a few of our questions. We are honored to feature your book review at Unleash Lit. Tell us a little about your life as a writer. How long have you been writing, and when did you begin?

Devin Meireles (DM): Writing has always been a hobby of mine. I’ve always carried a notebook to jot down ideas. My earliest memory was in grade school when I would write horror novellas and share my books with classmates during reading time. Then in high school I wrote scripts for video production. Most recently I have been inspired by my Portuguese heritage and have published many articles, including two books, about my personal journey of finding family roots and culture. I also write nonfiction stories from life experiences. 

Sometimes I write just to better understand things for myself. Writing helps to face my uncertainty, putting words that I cannot eloquently speak into something that I can share with others. Words matter so much. As a writer, I aim to evoke emotion in readers through the stories I convey. For those pieces that get published, when I’m ready to share them, not only is it rewarding for me but also cathartic. I enjoy connecting through well constructed paragraphs. 

JK: What is the best piece of advice you've received as a writer/person?

DM: Just write it down. When inspiration comes, just get that concept on paper before you lose it. I suppose you can say that I’m a plotter in that regard. Sometimes I find myself trying to perfect what I’m trying to convey but the words won’t fit together. I’ve learned that jotting down the sentiment in the moment is important to capture the idea that inspired me and then the editing is when you master the art. Editing and revising is where the magic happens and that is the most crucial part about the writing process, so take your time with it!

JK: Please share with us one (or a few) of your favorite lines, either from your own work or someone else's work, and explain what strikes you about the passage.

DM: “She soaked in the tub like a duck in water. Paddling under the bubbles, working hard to keep it together, but all I saw was her calm demeanor and lamenting eyes. She was beautiful amidst tragedy, exuding so much strength. Stronger than I had seen her before. More than she ever knew.”

This excerpt was from an article I wrote about a true miscarriage story. While it was hard to accept and recognize the impact of that evening, writing about it was cathartic to healing. Those words epitomize how strong women are. Those words describe how I saw my wife in such a difficult moment. Sometimes life can be cruel but keeping afloat is what matters, and that’s how people see each other from the outside. We are paddling underwater to keep our heads above water. Just keep calm and don’t lose focus. Things will work out as long as you stay strong. 

JK: How did you find your first publication?

DM: Since a lot of my content is related to Portuguese heritage, I started by submitting articles to local Portuguese cultural magazines and newspapers. It was thrilling to be published and receive positive feedback from my community. That was the catalyst to my pursuit of writing. As I wrote about culture and childhood, my work has evolved to include more personal stories. 

Through Submittable, an online submission platform, my story about a paranormal experience was published in my first literary journal, and I have been featured on many more publications since then. 

JK: What are you working on now? Please share any links our writers can follow to read more of your work. 

DM: I continue to write articles when elicited. My blog features all my recent work and my two books are available on Amazon Kindle. Readers can follow me on Instagram @LusoLoonie and visit my website lusoloonie.ca to receive new articles, visual content and special offers.

Nancy Townsley (NT): Thanks, Jen, to you and Unleash Creatives for the opportunity to share about Sunshine Girl! This book has existed, in one form or another, in my mind and heart for the better part of two decades. I retired from newspaper work in 2017—at the time, I was managing editor of two community newspapers in western Oregon—and started writing the novel in 2018, when I was part of an all-women writing group meeting in the basement of a friend’s house in Southwest Portland. After Covid descended and the group dissolved, I kept at it in the early mornings, toiling away inside my floating home on the Multnomah Channel. I finished a first draft in 2021. After three developmental edits and input from five beta readers, I began submitting the manuscript to small indie publishers in fall 2022. Naomi Rosenblatt understood what I was trying to do with the novel (yay!), and her company, Heliotrope Books of New York City, accepted it for publication last summer. The title is forthcoming in April 2025. I’m so excited!

JK: So let’s dive deeper into the manuscript itself. You were a journalist, which is also the premise for your book. Can you speak a little about why you felt called to write this manuscript and also how you leveraged your life experiences in order to create this narrative?

NT: As a newspaper reporter, one of the things I always appreciated was how no two days were ever alike. I got to experience such a wide range of human striving, accomplishment, missteps, and failures; people at their highest and lowest ebbs. And I had the privilege of writing about it all! For some time, I’d wanted to try my hand at fiction after a life spent in a world of just-the-facts. I had this kernel of an idea to write about the evolution of community newspapers over the length of my career, which spanned about 35 years. That idea turned into a family saga complete with divorce, disease, secrets, subterfuge—and leprechauns! At its core, though, Sunshine Girl is about what happened to American media between Nixon and Biden. Spoiler alert: It hasn’t all been good.

JK: I’m always curious about writers’ inspiration. Can you tell me what/who inspires you as a writer?

NT: So many wonderful books and authors! Early on, Studs Terkel, George Orwell, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey. I guess I mostly read male authors in high school and college! Then: Nora Ephron and Erica Jong. Katharine Graham’s Personal History. And oh my, Grace Paley! A feminist and pacifist. Her memoir Just As I Thought knocked my socks off when I finally had time to read it after my children were grown. She raised her kids in Greenwich Village, where Heliotrope Books is located. Count this lifelong West Coaster astounded at the serendipity! More recently, Portland author Rene Denfeld’s The Enchanted blew my hair back. I adored Laura Stanfill’s Singing Lessons for the Stylish Canary for its whimsical, lyrical, fable-like qualities. And Liz Scott’s hilarious, unflinching memoir, This Never Happened, made me laugh and cry in equal measures, two qualities of a fine book.

JK: How did you find your first publication?

NT: The Riveter magazine was brand new when its editors published my longform piece, “Shades Of A Mother,” in 2013, the year my mom died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. It was a tribute to her life and times, but also an open-eyed look at the ravages of the disease and her descent into dementia, which robbed her of her ability to speak, an ironic twist for a woman whose hallmark was gregariousness and her ability to connect with people. To this day, I think of my mom as one of three people who spring-boarded my journalism career, the others being my high school English teacher, Letty Owings—who wrote “You have a flair for writing” in the margin of my junior year report card, six words that have informed and fueled my life—and later, J. Michael Fagan, my first news editor, after whom one of the main characters in Sunshine Girl is modeled.

JK: What are you working on next, and where can we look out for Sunshine Girl?

NT: I’m having fun playing with a new novel, working title Carson McClintock Is Not Dead Yet, which takes off on a minor character in Sunshine Girl and, like my debut, fictionalizes a contemporary societal issue. The concept: It’s 2035. Health care in America is broken. The youngest Baby Boomers have reached old age. Using inheritance money from his long-dead media mogul father, erstwhile circuit court judge Carson McClintock III starts ATM (All That Matters), a nonprofit commune for 25 of his indigent geriatric peers, in an abandoned trailer park along a northern Sauvie Island beach. At ATM, clothing is optional, ADA-approved walking trails are plentiful, and care is taken to bring meals, music, books, and bedside compassion to the frailest residents, easing their transitions to the next world. Carson is eclectic—some would say downright strange—and confides his insecurities to an owl that lives in a Norway spruce outside his window. He hears the owl hoot in late winter, plaintively calling to a mate, while Carson himself is alone. That is, until he reconnects with the beguiling Rose Pickering, 10 years his junior, a bespectacled AI legal transcriber and former court reporter who considered him perfect before he left the bench, and her, behind. But of course no one, and nothing, ever is.

A little more about Sunshine Girl, if I may: Lauded by Oregon author Suzy Vitello (Faultland, Ooligan Press, 2021) as “a narrative propelled by insider knowledge of journalism over the course of 50 years,” Sunshine Girl chronicles the evolution of the print newspaper industry through the lens of a multigenerational family story. It begins with HEYDAY (the pre-Internet era of booming dailies and robust weeklies), continues with PAYDAY (when newsrooms still paid a living wage and weren’t yet ghost towns), and ends with MAYDAY (a period that could eventually spell the end for print papers). A lived-experience work of fiction imbued with social commentary, Sunshine Girl sounds a clarion call for preserving democracy through a return to journalistic norms that promote understanding and suppress disinformation. By the mid-2000s, as print media companies struggled to stay afloat in an online-first age, small towns began losing a vital resource: their own community newspaper. The novel is, in many ways, a personal response to these “news deserts,” which result in an under-informed public, fraying the cultural fabric.

Sunshine Girl will be available in April 2025 direct from Heliotrope (heliotropebooks.com), via Bookshop.org, at various independent bookstores, and of course, via Amazon. (But please, please buy it from a bookstore! ).

Nancy Townsley lives in a floating home along the Multnomah Channel near Portland, Oregon. Her debut novel, Sunshine Girl, was inspired by her long career as a community newspaper journalist. She continues to have a keen interest in the cultural and political changes altering the media landscape, channeling that fascination into writing fiction and nonfiction. Her creative work has appeared in Hippocampus, The Big Smoke, Nailed magazine, the Timberline Review, Elephant Journal, Mountain Bluebird Magazine, and several anthologies. “Leaving Tulum,” an excerpt from her novel, can be found at unleashcreatives.com.

Jen Knox (JK): Hi, Nick! Thank you for taking some time to answer a few of our questions. We are honored to feature your brilliant work in our forthcoming anthology. Please tell us a little about the piece that will be forthcoming in On Rules. 

Nick Manning (NM):

Urban bike lanes signify so much.  Race, gentrification, virtue (both the signaled type and the real thing), optimism whether misplaced or otherwise, intergenerational fury, hope and despair are all coded into the painting of white lines on roads.  My husband and I are on opposite sides of the bike-lanes-everywhere debate and it has always seemed both important and appealingly trivial that we choose this to disagree about.  I wanted to write a piece that hinted at the humor and the passion in the bike lane debates.  The story emerged in the form of a fable – looking wryly at our strange passions and convictions, highlighting the follies and weaknesses that I suspect none of us can escape from.

JK: How long have you been writing, and when did you begin?

NM: I retired from the World Bank some ten years ago where I was the author of a large number of distinctly dry technical books and papers about governments and their dysfunctions. Since retiring, I have been experimenting with creative fiction – a very different type of writing but retaining my determination to be honest and unrelenting about ambivalent intentions, clashing incentives and hidden motives.  

JK: What is the best piece of advice you've received as a writer/person?

NM: Keep going.  Even when you are bored with your efforts and especially when you are bored with yourself.  

JK: Please share with us one (or a few) of your favorite lines, either from your own work or someone else's work, and explain what strikes you about the passage.

NM: “He met women…  their lives stretched so thin you could see right through to their end; saw the children, stunted and paled by their surroundings, bending to bad prospects.”

‘The New Life’, Tom Crewe.

This is a heart-rending observation from a protagonist who sees the cruelty and callousness of the world of his time, who feels that he must take action and who knows that his actions will amount to little but that that makes them all the more important. 

JK: What are your thoughts (if any) about AI and the writing world?

NM: I’m as scared as anyone else.  I fear the impact of a flood of bland, soulless prose – and I fear the insights that it might give us about ourselves when we realize that we do not care as much as we should.

JK: What keeps you going on the tough days?

NM: The advice above.  Keep going.  

JK: What are you working on now? Please share any links our writers can follow to read more of your work. 

NM: I am completing a novel about the hunt for family.  The protagonist is a fearful gay man who tries to assemble a family to replace the one that never worked for him.  My aim is to track the evolution of gay men’s personal politics as AIDS challenged the proposition that industrial scale casual sex is liberating at a time when the rise to power in the UK of the hard right and the loss of faith in a caring welfare state made families all the more crucial for emotional survival.  I hope that it poses some of the right questions about the nature of friendship, the challenges of interracial love, the difference between birth and chosen families and the dangers in assuming responsibility for other people’s kids.  

Thank you, Nick! 

I am a British gay man in my early 70s, living happily with my husband, dog and, sometimes, stepson in Washington DC and New York. There were many serendipitous steps between a remote rural childhood, an early career as a social worker in central London and my later work in international development.

Ashley Holloway (AH): Hi, Smita! Thanks for taking some time with Unleash. We were thrilled to share your narrative with our writers. Can you tell us a little about your journey as a writer?

SDJ: I was twelve when I wrote my first story. It was published in my school magazine, and I became an overnight sensation for three days. I followed it up with more writing. Then I entered college life, and since then, balance sheets and corporate strategies took centre stage; creativity is the last thing someone associates with an MBA professional!  I did write many thought leaderships, whitepapers, and business articles during my career in the corporate world; however, creative writing took a back seat.

Then, in 2018, pursuing my desire to learn something new, I enrolled in Stanford Continuing Studies for their Creative Writing and Novel Writing courses. Subsequently, I started to draft fictional pieces regularly and circulate these writeups among my close friends to get their views. The feedback I received for ‘The Lost Identity’ made me go for full-fledged publication, and later, in September 2021, ‘A Slice of Life: Every Person Has A Story’ was published. I followed it up with the novel ‘A Price to Love’ in 2022 and another short story collection ‘Twisted Tales and Turns: A Journey Through the Unexpected’ in 2023. In between, I also received awards and accolades for my flash fiction and short stories, published in anthologies and platforms across the globe.

AH: What is the best piece of advice you've received as a creative person?

SDJ: Write and read every day; the words will come automatically. That advice changed my perception of writing – I realised it’s a skill that can be improved with practice. I have been writing every day since April 2021, and this has changed my creative trajectory.

AH: Please share with us one (or a few) of your favorite lines, either from your own work or someone else's work, and explain what strikes you about the passage.

SDJ: I will take a passage from one of the short stories Top of the World from the short story collection Twisted Tales and Turns:

The gait had slowed. The fair skin had turned brown, and the face was worn and weathered. There was a hint of a bald patch where the forehead ended and hair began. Yet, the sturdy shoulders easily shouldered the burden of two bags.

The few lines encapsulate the long passage of time in simple words, saying a lot through their brevity. You can pack a punch with few words without resorting to flowering language – these lines underscore the fact.

AH: How did you find your first publication? Was it everything you dreamed it’d be?

SDJ: I understood the publishing landscape before deciding to do it on my own with my first publication. A Slice of Life: Every Person Has a Story is a set of 18 contemporary stories that touch human hearts, and I am proud of it.

Readers have been all praises for the book, and one reader took my permission to make the book the subject of her college thesis in literature. So, yes, it was everything I’d dreamed it to be and more.

AH: What are you working on next, and where can our readers connect with you?

SDJ: My next is a novel on complicated human relationships set against a medical background. It is expected to come out in 2024. Readers can know more about my existing and upcoming works through my website and reach out to me on Instagram at @smitadjain and Facebook @smita.dasjain. They can also mail me at smita@smitaswritepen.com.

Smita Das Jain is a writer by passion and writes every day. Samples of her writing are visible in her home office, her sunny terrace garden, her husband’s car, and the kitchen napkins. An author of two short story collections and a novel, Smita’s short stories have found prominence in Auroras and Blossoms, Twist and Twain, WriteFluence and several other anthologies across the globe. She was the only Asian to be named in the Top 20 flash fiction winners list in the Spring 2022 contest of the prestigious Women On Writing (WOW!) magazine for women writers. A two-time TEDx speaker, Smita lives with her rockstar husband and adorable fourteen-year-old daughter in Gurugram, India.

Jen Knox (JK): Thanks for taking the time to speak with Unleash. Tell us a little about your journey as a creative person.

K.Lipschutz (K): The road I’ve traveled has been crooked, with potholes, washed-out sections, and all manner of detours. Smooth sailing has alternated with accidents galore, too many of them self-inflicted. Companions along the way have been key to both my self-destructive bent and my survival—and my few hard-won triumphs. Not to be unnecessarily vague! I’ve been writing since I was 17, and will be 68 in early 2024. I am an autodidact. Never was a big fan of the classroom. Self-education and lack of credentials have charted my pilgrim’s progress as a writer.

JK: What is the best piece of advice you've received (as a creative person or about life in general)?

K: “Take the long view.”

JK: Agreed. Can you share one (or a few) of your favorite lines, either from your work or someone else's work?

K: I will resist the temptation to quote myself. Instead, here’s a line (actually three lines but one thought) by Chilean poet Nicanor Parra that is also on my website: “The poet’s duty is this / To improve on the blank page / I doubt if it’s possible.” Parra’s words are bracing and humility-inspiring; they exist on the other end of the seesaw from the outsize confidence necessary to put your own words out there, where, in essence, they will be in competition (like it or not) with everything that has ever been written since the dawn of civilization.

JK: Do you have a writing persona? If so, share with us how it came about.

K: I’m pretty sure I have several. Not anything like the number racked up by Fernando Pessoa, the King of the Heteronym, but more than two. How they come about I don’t know and don’t want to. Sometimes the first poem of a line establishes a narrator’s voice that comes from I don’t know where. (For instance, I’ve never been a TV weatherman, but I have in a poem.) To excavate for reasons would inhibit me, and I need all the freedom I can muster when playing with a poem. And that’s what writing is for me when it flows and time goes AWOL: play.

JK: How did you find your first publication?

K: My publishing history has definitely been checkered. My first book came through an anarchist group in San Francisco that put out a national magazine. I was a regular contributor and went to meetings. But I didn’t say much. The consensus decision-making took forever on small points, the difference between which eluded me.. Anyway, they had formed a nonprofit and needed to show some “activity” to maintain their legal status. (These were very well-organized anarchists!) So they decided to form a press and publish three books. Mine was one of them.

JK: What are you working on next?

K: Writing songs with Chuck Prophet for his upcoming release. He goes into the studio in January.

And, I’m closing in on a first draft of a play co-authored with Jon Cone.

K.Lipschutz (formerly klipschutz) is the author of Mr. Congeniality (2021) and seven other collections of poetry, starting with The Erection of Scaffolding for the Re-Painting of Heaven by the Lowest Bidder (1985). He has also co-written over a hundred songs released by international recording artist Chuck Prophet. His Long Engagement: New & Selected Poems (1985–2023), assembled in conjunction with long-time supporter Brenda Hillman, is looking for a home. Current work in Cordite (Australia), the Taos Journal of Poetry (Nov. 2023), and Literary Cocktail (fall 2023. He lives in downtown San Francisco with Colette Jappy and three cats.

Nathan Bergstedt is a poet and playwright living in northern Minnesota. His stage work has been featured at the Minnesota Fringe Festival, The Great Northern Radio Show, and Twin Cities 24. Most recently, his poetry has been featured in publications by Pinky Thinker Press, Taint Taint Taint Magazine, and New Note Poetry. He received a Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of Minnesota, where he focused on poetry.

Read his poems in Unleash here.

Jen Knox (JK): Hi, Nathan! Thanks for taking the time to speak with Unleash. Tell us a little about your journey as a creative person.

Nathan Bergstedt (NB): So let’s see, I was born, I grew up, started drawing… that’s a decent summation. I originally went to school for graphic design, but I found that instead of doodling between classes, I was mostly writing poetry. It didn’t take too long before I ended up quitting design school and enrolled in the University of Minnesota for a degree in English Literature. That was more or less the beginning of my long slog to becoming a writer.

Since then, despite largely focusing on poetry, I’ve had the most success as a playwright. After writing and producing a couple of short one-acts, I wrote an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew” which was put on as a Shakespeare in the Park-style production (I played Petruchio in that show; I’m also an actor, which is what helped drive me to playwriting to begin with). That was my first full-length production. After that, I wrote and had produced three original full plays, plus another Shakespeare adaptation.

I’ve continued to write poetry, and have had several pieces picked up by publishers. It seems to be true what they say, how poetry is the easiest literary art to dabble in, but the hardest to master. I wrote poems for close to 20 years before getting my first acceptance letter. Not to say that this is a sign of mastery, but you get the point.

JK: You are a multifaceted artist, and we appreciate the poetic fortitude that led to work such as the poems we published here. Nathan, what is the best advice you've received (as a creative person or in life)?

NB: Probably variations of “just relax.” Oddly enough, it’s the pieces that I seem to toil over the least that end up being some of the best. I used to stress myself out trying to write what could be some kind of masterpiece, but once you figure out that a). that’s not how that works, and b). there’s no such thing as a “masterpiece” at the point that it’s written (that distinction just comes with time), then all you have left is just to do what you want to do. I dunno, just create the art that you want to see in the world. If it’s honest, it’ll speak to at least a few people.

There’s clearly more to it than that to create good art, but “chill out” is a good start.

JK: Can you share a few of your favorite lines, and explain what strikes you about the passage?

NB: One passage that stands out to me is from “Wild Geese by Mary Oliver” by New Zealand poet Hera Lindsay Bird.

“I love life

and I hate death

so when you try to describe to me

what it feels like to want to die

I can only look at you

Like you are a slow-burning planet

And I am pouring water through a telescope.”

There’s a plainness to the language that is just so attractive. So accessible. I’ve never heard such a profound communication between two people put so succinctly. I know what it’s like to be one of these people, and this interaction could, if you wanted, be an entire book. But all the pain, the desperation, it’s all summed up in 7 lines and ended with an almost humorous analogy. I wish I could’ve written this. 

JK: How did you find your first publication?

NB: Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (clmp.org). Always a great resource to find publishers looking for submissions.

JK: We agree - an excellent source. So tell us, what are you working on next? 

NB: I have a poetry book that seems in constant need of editing. One poem at a time is a hard enough task, but putting together a cohesive collection is something different entirely!

Aside from that, I’ve begun work on a new adaptation, this time for Macbeth. I don’t usually work on projects like this with directing on the mind, but I am for this one. It actually began with some ideas on how it would be produced, and I’ve been in communication with a local theater group about getting it on the stage. Very early stage so far, but I’m excited about seeing this process culminate before a live audience.

Thanks, Nathan!

Alan Elyshevitz is the author of a collection of stories, The Widows and Orphans Fund (SFA Press), a full-length poetry collection, Generous Peril (Cyberwit), and five poetry chapbooks, most recently Approximate Sonnets (Orchard Street). Winner of the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, he is a two-time recipient of a fellowship in fiction writing from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Jen Knox (JK): Hi, Alan! Thank you for taking some time to answer a few of our questions. We are honored to feature your poetry in our forthcoming anthology, On Rules. We’d love to know a little more about your journey as a poet. How did it begin?

Alan Elyshevitz (AE): Nearly as far back as I can remember, I’ve been writing something. The beginning for me was song lyrics and tunes on a secondhand guitar during rock-n-roll’s “British Invasion” of the 1960’s. Nowadays, after a couple of decades of primarily short story writing, I write poetry almost exclusively. Since I seldom create poems that exceed a single page, I get to view the entire work all at once as though it’s a painting or a sculpture. This helps keep me focused during the revision process and provides a higher level of gratification than writing prose, at least for me…It occurs to me that I’ve digressed, but I’ll let this answer stand.

JK: What is the best piece of advice you've received as a writer?

AE: So many to choose from, but I’ll select a couple of aphorisms imparted to me by two of my fiction instructors at the Bennington Writing Seminars. The novelist Lynn Freed used to say, “Train your ear.” This advice works well for any genre. Attend to the aural shapes of lines or sentences and the rhythms created by combinations of syllables. However, I doubt that I’ve mastered this skill. Another bit of wisdom came by way of Susan Dodd: “Subtle it up.” In other words, trust the reader to comprehend your work without explication or obvious literary devices. This notion is especially useful for poetry, in which the connective tissue of ordinary logic sometimes impedes creativity.

JK: Please share with us one (or a few) of your favorite lines, either from your own work or someone else's work, and explain what strikes you about the passage.

AE: Again, so many options. I’ll choose an example from fiction: the opening paragraph of Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger. “Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.” What I love about this passage is the chilling emotional distance between the narrator and immediate events. However, this opening is also a signal that, in this work, readers will be granted room to breathe. No specific emotional reaction will be imposed upon us by the author. There will be no manipulation, no conventional or possibly fraudulent feelings required of us. Most of the time, I do my best to write poetry in this same spirit.

JK: Why is creative work important in 2024 and beyond?

AE: Important to the world? I have no idea. I only know that it’s important to me. I write almost every day. On those rare days when I neglect my work, I don’t feel like myself. Creativity is one of my few healthy habits, I suppose. And I gain almost as much pleasure from reading a good poem written by someone else as I do from creating my own.

JK: What are you working on now? Please share any links our writers can follow to read more of your work. 

AE: Right now I’m making my way through a poem about CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research, which houses the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. Such a topic is not unusual for me. I very much enjoy tackling subject matter that, on the surface, may not appear to lend itself to poetry (though, frankly, everything does). I also like to include “unpoetic” vocabulary in my work, words from various unrelated fields and professions. If you would like to learn more, please feel free to visit my website: https://aelyshevitz.ink.

Marina Kraiskaya is a Ukrainian-American writer and editor of Bicoastal Review. She recently won the Markham Prize for Poetry and has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best New Poets. Find her poetry and nonfiction in Poetry International, Southeast Review, Mississippi Review, L.A. Review, Zone 3, The Shore, EcoTheo, Deep Wild, Leavings, and other journals. She lives by the sea with her two cats. Visit mkraiskaya.com to get in touch.

Jen Knox (JK): Hi, Marina! We were thrilled to share your poetry with our writers (see our issue from March 16, 2024). Can you tell us a little about your journey as a writer?

Marina Kraiskaya (MK): Hi! Thank you so much for this opportunity! I’ve been enjoying the variety and ambition of Unleash Lit since discovering you last year.

Poetry came very strangely into my life when I was already an adult. I was studying international relations and Russian at UC Davis, absolutely determined to become an analyst or diplomat. I took some English classes for fun, and poetry workshops became a refuge for me from the cold brutality of war history and statistics, and from the many relationships in my life in which I felt I wasn’t “allowed” to be emotional, dramatic, metaphorical, illogical, devotional. I had never realized that I needed to be, and was, all of those things. I had been conditioned to privilege thought and bury emotion. 

“For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets.” – Audre Lorde

My MFA was also invaluable, widening my perspective on everything from subject to style, and literary history. I was impressed by the cleverness of poets, the double and triple meanings of their astonishing lines, and the magic of a clear image. My old instinct for slicing up and paring down sentences, and for mimicking Russian or French syntax in English, also just let me have my own kind of fun with language. Of course, I made all of the terrible first mistakes of sounding high-minded and syrupy, and I still struggle with my idiosyncrasies. But poetry, like music, opened up new dimensions of thought for me and will always be a major vocation and saving grace of my life, as well as a way to leave something behind. 

JK: What is the best piece of advice you've received as a creative person?

MK: Well, program director and professor Sandra Alcosser tells her students (especially the women) “no apologia” before their poems and in their essays, so I hear that in my head pretty often, whenever I feel too introverted or have some self-limiting thought. 

Poet and professor Katie Peterson, who I continue to be in awe of, would tell us to “end when the poem can go no further” and that much of negation means that you cannot tell the reader that something is not present in the poem without it being, in fact, present. Similarly, professor Blas Falconer’s refrain was to “use the availably stock of reality” to ground a poem and/or come back to something tangible for the reader to sink their teeth into. He would point out how often poets write and rewrite poems on the same topics, often to our own detriment. That we may need to cut, sometimes, 90% of a poem to get to that one line that is both authentic and original to the reader as well as writer, and begin again from there. (Pound did something like that for Eliot – it is a treasure to have good readers you can trust.) 

Writers like me – lovers of the aesthetic and the lush – learn from piling on too much, satisfying that need, and then chiseling down to “simplify, simplify” as Thoreau said. I think anyone’s ego can get stuck in that first “final” draft – especially if you publish it, so of course you are immediately validated for something that could have been better, and you start keeping score…. all a mistake, I think. 

I’m not sure who I am to give advice, but still, I would tell anyone, anywhere: Write alone for months, years. Let it be ecstatic and new, let it be terrible and cliche. Then, bring in a few trusted readers for your best work. Do not think of the public sphere or of your name. Trying to impress is, to me, failure. And, read every book (not Pinterest poetry) you can get your hands on. If you don’t, you’re guaranteed to be a bad writer.  

JK: I love how you pay homage to such wonderful mentors. Please share with us a few lines from a work you admire, and explain what strikes you about the passage.

MK: I’ll just take this opportunity to share how Allen Ginsberg punched me in the face with

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.   

I can’t stand my own mind.

America when will we end the human war?

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

I don’t feel good don’t bother me.

I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.

Ginsberg showed me that you could still be smart and tell it straight. He gave me the permission to go a little bit insane and to simultaneously hold both polarities of my immigrant love and thankfulness for America and my immense disappointment and hope for the improvement of our great failures. I wasn’t conscious, until later, of the body, the breath, of Whitman’s ghost, of the way that truths come once you have full control over the line. But the onslaught of politics and music I could easily drink. I don’t write very much like him, but that poem is number one for me. 

JK: How did you find your first publication? Was it everything you dreamed it’d be?

MK: My first minor little publications in journals and an anthology were some thrill, but at the time I wasn’t hanging my hat on anything to do with that world. I think that is a strength, as I’ve said – not getting the ego too mixed up in art, but rather letting it be an outlet and a personal practice akin to meditation. 

I do remember that around the last year of my MFA, I began to send poems out, and I felt like I could finally call myself a poet without imposter syndrome. Winning the Markham Prize was a happy moment; to have the effort I put into that poem be appreciated by the judge was lovely. To not be following many of the current trends but still be published makes me feel seen in a way that a workshop can’t. 

My recent efforts in the poetry community have taken me out of the classroom into the real world, so to speak – and all of THAT mutual, reverberating love for the poetic craft in subcultures across the U.S. and the world – is what I dreamed it would be.

JK: What are you working on next, and where can our readers connect with you?

MK: I am currently accepting poetry and nonfiction submissions for the upcoming issue of the journal Bicoastal Review. I will also have a book or two of poetry out at some point, but I am not in a rush. Please find my publication history and some of my poems at mkraiskaya.com. I am also a professional editor (since 2015) who works with books, manuscripts, marketing content, blogs, and everything else.

Thank you, Marina! Readers, if you missed it, please check out Marina’s poems here.

Jen Knox (JK): Hi, Nancy! Thanks for taking some time with Unleash. We were thrilled to share your poetry with our writers. Can you tell us a little about your journey as a writer?

Nancy Woo (NW): Hi Jen. Thanks for your interest in my work! I started writing poems when I was about 8 years old, then I wrote feverishly with much angst as a teenager, and I eventually found a thriving poetry community after college in my city of Long Beach, California. In 2015, I received the PEN America Emerging Voices fellowship, which was instrumental in preparing me for a literary career. I finished my MFA in 2021 and published my first full-length book this year.

JK: What is the best piece of advice you've received as a creative person?

NW: Write every day. When I was in the Emerging Voices fellowship, this is the #1 piece of advice that most of our visiting authors would share with us. I don’t always achieve actual writing every day, but I live my life as a writer every day, which means I am always doing something related to my writing or writing projects, such as reading, editing, marketing, or walking and thinking. Everything I encounter contributes to my understanding of the world, which informs my writing.

JK: Please share with us one (or a few) of your favorite lines, either from your own work or someone else's work, and explain what strikes you about the passage.

NW: I love Mary Oliver’s ending lines “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely / the world offers itself to your imagination, / calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - / over and over announcing your place / in the family of things” from her poem “Wild Geese.” I even borrowed the phrase “family of things” in one of my own poems. What strikes me about it is that it is so declaratively inclusive. Everyone is welcome in this world, she seems to be saying, even when we feel we do not belong to it. I have often felt I did not belong to this world, and these lines tell me differently. They tell me I have a place here, that I am warmly welcomed as a piece of a larger puzzle. I also find refuge in nature, so it really speaks to me.

JK: How did you find your first publication? Was it everything you dreamed it’d be?

NW: I don’t remember exactly how I found them, but my first publication was at the Camel Saloon, a now-defunct literary blog. It was very exciting to have a complete stranger decide they liked my work enough to publish it. I received that publication fairly quickly after sending out my very first batch of poems, so it was very encouraging.

JK: What are you working on next, and where can our readers connect with you?

NW: Right now, I am working on a second book. It’s still in development, but it’s heavily influenced by my daily nature walk to one of my favorite places, the Colorado Lagoon. It’s about a mile from my house, so I walk there almost every day with my dog. I live in a very urban setting so I consider myself lucky that I have a natural space so close. Being near the water, watching the birds, and connecting with nature is so very healing for me. I’ve been taking poetic “field notes” about my observations, both internally and externally, in response to the world around and inside me. Right now, I’m exploring the idea of what it means to be living in a time of rapid climate change, and so my field notes often approach my personal reactions to the changing world around me, such as extreme heat and flood alerts. Southern California was recently hit by a hurricane, which is wild. Luckily, it was mild, but still – Southern California is not really supposed to have hurricanes. So I write about my lived experiences in these turbulent times.

I would love to connect. Please find me on Instagram as @fancifulnance!

About the poet: Nancy Lynée Woo is a poet, imagination enthusiast, and eco-activist who harbors a wild love for the natural world. Her debut poetry collection is I’d Rather Be Lightning (GASHER Press, 2023). Nancy is a 2023 recipient of the California Creative Corps grant, and was a 2015 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow. She has received additional fellowships from Artists at Work, Arts Council for Long Beach, California Center for the Book, Idyllwild Writers Week and Literary Women. Her work has been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Stirring, Radar Poetry, and others. Nancy is the founder of the community-based poetry workshop Surprise the Line. She believes in the power of the arts to bring people together. Her degrees are in sociology and creative writing from UC Santa Cruz and Antioch University LA. Find her cavorting around Long Beach (Tongva land) in California, and on social media @fancifulnance.

Jen Knox (JK): Question #1: Hi, HR. Well, I can’t help but start here. How did you become a writer?

HR Harper (HH): I wrote my first poem in 1963, 12 years old, about the nuclear bomb. (“Oh pretty, pretty cloud, all billowed and curled; will your mushroom shape be the end of the world?”)  I think I’ve always found solace in poetry that deals with mortality, life/death – and would argue that in such poems the beauty of life, of Being, is intensified.  Writing poetry for me has always been a “laboratory” to explore and experience consciousness which absolutely includes the intense awareness of impermanence: life is so beautiful in part because we know it ends.  And the trick has been to use language to deliver an experience that is absolutely not linguistic.

As a teenager I read and was drawn to the classic modernists (Eliot, Stevens, Bishop) but also the more morbid confessional poets (Plath, Sexton) and Beats (Ginsberg, Dylan, Snyder).  That’s what I took to UCLA where I was both a lit major and a creative writing major.  I studied with the poets Jascha Kessler, Calvin Bedient, and Stephen Yenser – all of whom influenced me, but I also felt I didn’t fit into the “workshop” world that seemed to create followers of contemporary poets of the time (e.g. Ashbery, Lowell, Merrill)… the poems I wrote then were more clunky, narcissistic, and grandiose.  I wanted to be a surrealist, and many of the poets I read to write were in translation (Rilke, Neruda, Szymborska, Breton) and so my poems were in a horrid English that also sounded like bad translations.  I didn’t “fit” in the academy either – although I continued in the doctoral program at UCLA, life and its oddities pulled me out.  I got a few other graduate degrees and worked as an adult educator in immigrant communities for over 40 years.

Through it all I continued to write – work, wild urban poor choices, relationships, politics, music, recovery – I wrote “what I knew” but in fragments, nothing ever finished enough to try to publish.  Then in the last few years I wrote differently - spiritual progress (not perfection), creaky maturity, COVID isolation, dogs and a good spouse, wandering in mountains and forests, Christian/Taoist/Buddhist study and meditation, and disciplined reading (all of Rilke, all of Whitman, all of Dove, all of Oliver, all of Gluck) motivated me to finish poems, not just toss them off as fragments.  The re-writing, leaving and returning to poems, was a different kind of satisfaction – it made me write differently, but also want to share them more widely.  And my editing became more kenotic than additive. I tend to mansplain and go on a bit too much.  I’ve had over 30 poems published in the last few years.

Question #2: What is the best piece of advice you've received as a creative person?

In my ears I hear “write what you know” as the kind of advice this question seems to be seeking.  Just as an exercise I want to say “you don’t know what you know; write to see if you can find something new”… so Pound’s “make it new” seems a key element in the alchemy. 

Question #3: Please share with us one (or a few) of your favorite lines of poetry or prose, and explain what strikes you about the passage.

I only found Louise Glück in the last decade.  Her poems, though changing over time, seemed both so clear and conversational and as terse and pithy as haiku.  These lines, from her last collection, represent the odd mix that I love and that inspires me: she’s using common words to get underneath our usual experience.  And she is finding and sharing a comfort with/because of, not in spite of, our fragile impermanence and mortality. 

Downward and downward and downward and downward
is where the wind is taking us;
I try to comfort you
But words are not the answer.
	
                                            Poem, from Louise Glück’s Winter Recipes from the Collective

Question #4: How did you find your first publication?

My first publication was some national college anthology an ice age ago.  I think a college teacher suggested I submit to it.  Now I look at pubs and/or all the digital directories of publications, submit, then wait for rejections from Submittable: I find them a litmus test of my spiritual condition.  A rejection will depress me and confirm my lack of worth, or create a space of gratitude for having lived long enough to submit work at all.  One rejection at a time.

Question #5: What are you working on next? 

In the last few years my meditation study and practice (Buddhism for the most part) has become central to my writing.  I use the aging gay white male Boomer voice, because it’s the one I have in my throat, but what I want to say isn’t what that voice knows. It wants to escape the cultural or political, it wants to be more about the common human consciousness that is threatened by digital numbing and monetization, instrumentalization of international capital, generational assumptions and goals, and the struggles of an earth we are destroying – I do think the world and our species is in existential crisis.  I want to write to resist the conceptual in favor of the experiential: and in this mode I see poems connecting to each other. I am working on collected poems that, together, are stronger than their individual expression.  So far I haven’t been able to get a publisher to want to publish a collection – I accept it may never happen.  But for now, it’s the work not the product.

About the Author: HR Harper, author of the three poems submitted here, a writer living in the redwoods above Santa Cruz CA, was a creative writing major at UCLA and studied in the English Ph.D. program there. He worked as an educator in central city schools for years. A student of meditation and apophatic traditions, he writes to understand human consciousness in a natural world humans seem to be destroying. Writing poetry and fiction over decades, he only began to publish in 2021. Some of his recently published work may be found at:

https://brusheswiththedarklaw.blogspot.com/

Jen Knox (JK): Hi, Patty! Thanks for taking some time with Unleash. We were thrilled to share your narrative with our writers. Can you tell us a little about your journey as a writer?

Patty Somlo (PS): I have been writing in some form since high school, but I didn’t take my writing seriously until much later. That began in my late twenties when I started working for a public relations agency. The work in PR eventually led to a 10-year journalism career. When I finally got burnt out from that, I entered a creative writing program and received an M.A. in English with a Concentration in Creative Writing several years later. I first focused on writing poetry, then moved to short fiction and creative nonfiction. I have published four books with small publishers, three short story collections and a memoir.

JK: What is the best piece of advice you've received as a creative person?

PS: I’m a person who needs to practice something, in order to learn. So, it wasn’t advice that helped my writing but having my work edited by skilled editors. The best thing I learned was how essential revision is to good writing. Early on, I could often sense that a piece wasn’t working but I didn’t know what was wrong. From my experiences being edited, I learned how revision is like unpeeling the onion to get to the heart of the story or piece. I learned to not leap from here to there, but to detail specific steps along the way. I learned not to generalize but provide concrete details that bring a reader into the work. In other words, I learned what was meant by the advice most writers hear at some point, to show not tell.

JK: Please share with us one (or a few) of your favorite lines of poetry or prose, and explain what strikes you about the passage.

PS: I could pick out a million lines written by Ann Patchett. She is one of my favorite writers of both fiction and nonfiction. One of the things I so admire about her writing is the way she nails character through specific descriptive details. In one of my favorite essays entitled, “The Wall,” about her experience preparing for and testing to get into the Los Angeles Police Department, which is included in her collection, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, she describes one of the police officers. “This session will be run by Officer Crane, a very slim man with a mustache. His uniform is so tight I can make out his abdominal muscles. The sleeves ride his biceps like tourniquets.”

JK: How did you find your first publication? Was it everything you dreamed it’d be?

PS: Not including articles when I was doing PR and working for newspapers, my first poem was published by the Santa Clara Review. It was thrilling to have a creative piece of mine in print. This was before the Internet, so I actually held the book in my hand and it’s still sitting on my shelf with my books, anthologies and literary journals in which I have work.

JK: What are you working on next, and where can our readers connect with you?

PS: I am at the very beginning stages of a memoir on nature and healing. I am at the point of trying to figure out how I might want to structure the book and what it will include. This, for me, is the hardest part of writing a book!

People can connect with me by going to my website: www.pattysomlo.com.

Jen Knox (JK): Hi, Polly! We’re so honored you’re spending a little time with us. Can you tell the Unleash community a little about your journey as a writer?

Polly Ingraham (PI): When I was around 10 years old, I used to head into the woods near our house, bringing a notebook and a pen with me. I’d find some cozy place, often in a tree, and then start writing—about the birds that were fluttering around me, and about my thoughts. This was how I began paying attention and reflecting, during moments of solitude. A bit later, I started studying classical piano and discovered the joy of bringing this kind of beauty to life, but I rarely improvised. Throughout high school, college, and graduate school, I was frequently moved by what I was reading and became proficient at writing academic essays. Still, I didn’t feel much like a creator myself. It was only after getting married and experiencing the hurly-burly of raising three children that I turned back to my original kind of writing: bringing forth the range of responses, and sometimes contradictory impulses, I had about what was going on around me, especially as the stubbornly non-religious wife of a clergyman.

JK: What is the best piece of advice you've received as a creative person?

PI: Probably to focus on bringing out my natural voice, while also being always open to learning from others. This is a balancing act. I’m surprised sometimes when people reading my work say, “That sounds just like you” because I don’t have any distance from myself and right away wonder, “Is that good, or not?” But I’ve learned that being true to ourselves and our quirky ways of looking at the world is one of the most important things we can do – as writers and as people, too. At the same time, though, we need to be attentive to ways in which we can learn from others how to make our work better – not more like theirs so much as more like our very own.

JK: Who inspires you, Polly? Please share with us one (or a few) of your favorite lines, either from your work or someone else's work, and explain what strikes you about the passage.

PI: I’ll choose the ending of E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake”: 

Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.

Here is a middle-aged man watching a boy, his son, do something that he clearly once did himself, at the same age. Deftly, White can compress the two individuals, reminding us of moments when we too had to grasp the hard truth of our own mortality. The chill of the swim trunks is parallel to the chill of the realization. The sensory detail of the passage makes it work so beautifully.

JK: How did you find your first publication?

PI: Since I was the Sports Editor of my high school newspaper (a whole class was devoted to it), my first publication was probably an article about a varsity team. Then there was the impassioned testimony I gave, which was published somehow, to a state agency in Connecticut about why trapping of wild animals should be banned. But my main breakthrough came with a column that landed in the Boston Globe magazine’s “Coupling” space back in 2006. It was about the constant collisions my clergy husband and I kept having over sports events/church services. I knew I had a distinct situation I could describe in a lively way, with expected gender roles reversed, and I sensed that outsiders would find it amusing. This publication gave me the courage to try to go for a whole book.

JK: What are you working on next? 

PI: Good question! I wish I could say that I have a crackerjack idea for a short story collection or even a novel, but when I get good and done with this memoir I’ve been trying to get out, I think I’ll be staying with non-fiction.  Having been active for years with a non-profit organization that pairs adults and young people, and hearing about “mentoring” as a kind of a buzzword these days, I’m interested in exploring what we know about most effective strategies in this area. Without being someone’s parent, how can you best guide and support a young person who needs to find his/her route to independence and fulfillment? Is there a “just right” measure of involvement? I’d like to tell some individual stories of people who can reflect on their experiences and identify both the frustrations and the factors that were most important in changing life trajectories for the better.

Polly Ingraham has worked primarily in high schools, both as an English teacher and a School-to-Career counselor. She and her husband live in Concord, NH; their three adult children are elsewhere. In 2018, she completed Grub Street’s Memoir Incubator program and continued working to finish her book manuscript. She has attended workshops at the Madeline Island School of the Arts, the New York State Writers Institute, the Wesleyan University Writers Conference, and the Iowa Writers Festival. Her work has been published in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Tikkun, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, and on National Public Radio. She is a contributor to FAST, FIERCE WOMEN, an anthology of flash non-fiction published in 2022. Her blog is:

https://www.pastorswifeblog.com/