An excerpt from “In the Field: Conversations with our Contributors” with Angela Narciso Torres (poetry, ’09), published at  Water-Stone Review:

In the Field: Conversations with our Contributors with Angela Narciso Torres

1. Tell us about your poem in Volume 20. How did it come to be?

I was in a workshop with Terrance Hayes and we were looking at definition poems. So when I got home I tried to write one. I thought I’d take it a step further and use the various definitions of the word “between” in a sentence, as you often see in a dictionary. Inadvertently, the sample sentences somehow started to form a kind of narrative. Being a writer with a strong narrative bent, I’m always interested in finding ways to subvert the traditional linear trajectory of storytelling. Using the nonliterary form of the dictionary entry was a fun and sneaky way to do this. The use of blanks came later—I thought it would be interesting to leave spaces in the poem, inviting the reader to participate in the poem’s meaning-making. This gave the poem an element of surprise and unintentional humor, as I’ve found when I’ve performed this poem in readings.

2. What was an early experience that led to you becoming a writer?

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always loved writing in little notebooks. I read the Diary of Anne Frank when I was about nine and have been a diarist ever since. My first diary was a small clothbound Hello Kitty notebook with a lock. I wrote down everything in my Catholic schoolgirl script, even the most mundane things, addressing them to an imaginary friend named Daisy, e.g. “Dear Daisy, Today I woke up, brushed my teeth, and played with my dog, Wiglet . . .” and so on. Being an avid reader, I also enjoyed copying down esoteric quotes from books I’d read, whether or not I grasped the full meaning or implication at that tender age. e.g. (from The Little Prince) “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” Back then it was more about the pleasure of getting things on paper than about the writing itself, then later looking back at how the pages filled up and made the shape and story of a life—my life! I was a serious, introverted child with a small circle of close friends and a huge inner life, prone to daydreaming. Most of the time, I felt “on the fringe of things,” an observer, looking on. I think this all made fertile ground for becoming a writer.

 

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An excerpt from “Iguana Iguana” by Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10) published at the Massachusetts Review:

Iguana Iguana

Iggy was sweet. Everyone in the family said so, even if they didn’t share the boy’s belief that the iguana also was beautiful, with skin the milky shade of a raw lima bean, and along his spine a line of mauve dots, each ringed with an apricot halo. Picked up, he’d stretch along your forearm placid as cat sleeping on a sill, breath concaving his throat and inflating it again in a great, pale bubble. Bubble, blink. Bubble, blink. The boy sometimes stood like that for an hour or more until his arm went numb.

His mother found reptiles repulsive, but she was grateful that this one at least was not a meat eater. She couldn’t have faced buying live moth larvae, or worse, frozen mice embryos horribly called “pinkies” that had to be thawed then prodded with a broom straw to fool lizards into thinking they were stalking live prey. And, unlike the three-foot monster her brother-in-law had once kept in a bathtub, Iggy didn’t seem to be growing very fast.

Leslie had to admit that the lizard was a good friend to her son, for whom friends were in short supply even with expectations that shrank with each passing year. Small for his age, he avoided the team sports that bonded his fifth-grade classmates and after school generally went to his room to play video games or sit at the kitchen table to draw or do homework.

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An excerpt from “All Fun, No Joy” by Eric Rampson (fiction, ’16) published at Leaf Land:

 

All Fun, No Joy

Dave looked forward to seeing Kendra in her bathing suit. She was the only WaterWigglers mom that wore a two-piece. Kendra was in shape but not a supermodel or anything. Her butt was substantial, the backs of her thighs a bit dimpled, her belly slightly rounded between the top and bottom of her suit. Dave thought she looked damn sexy, though, with her dark hair in a bun—probably, he figured, to keep it dry—and her glasses on even in the water. There was something of the naughty schoolmarm about her: the severity of those cat’s eyes frames and the tightness of the bun contrasted with her ample cleavage and the way the seat of her suit rode up just a little when she got out of the pool. Dave had become adept at exiting the pool just far enough behind her to watch unnoticed. She’d hook a thumb under one edge of her bottom and pull it lower, shift her daughter to her other arm and do the same on the other side. Sometimes, depending on the angle, Dave would get a quick glimpse further up her suit as she pulled on it.

Kendra’s daughter was Penelope. Dave knew this because the other mothers said, “Hello, Penelope,” while waving the chubby arms of their own children. He knew the names of all the babies in WaterWigglers—Penelope, Smythe, Jaiden, Janessa, Tom, Dinah, Mary, Paulo, Ricky. Dave said hello to each of them, too, waving his son Declan’s chubby arm. He made a point of learning the babies’ names day one of a new session since there was so much turn over, a mostly new crop every nine weeks. This session the only holdovers were himself, Kendra, and a strange Ukrainian woman who always wore curlers in her hair during class. He knew all the kids’ names but not a single one of the mothers’. Even Kendra’s. Kendra was just what he called her. He had settled on it because he had never heard the name in real life. It gave her the aspect of a dream, made her strange. Dave liked that.

Dave was the only father in the WaterWigglers class. The only man in a pool full of women. Well, aside from Jamieson, the instructor. Jamieson had obviously been a competitive swimmer, maybe still was. When he lifted his arms, his lats looked like tiny, washboard wings. Dave knew he, too, had lats. He must have. Even so, when he lifted his arms in front of the huge mirror in his master bathroom, all he saw was flesh puddling above his waist.

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An excerpt from “Durer’s ‘Saint Jerome in His Study'” by Chloe Martinez (poetry, ’09), published at The American Journal of Poetry:

Durer’s “Saint Jerome in His Study”

from the 1514 engraving, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Translator hunched, haloed, slant

of light, bottleglass windows lining

the casements with little sun-targets

and a skull beneath them, and Christ

tiny on his desktop cross, and along

the back wall, each thing in its place:

scissors, sunhat, time in the hourglass,

rosary on a hook, and one enormous

gourd suspended on a rope from the ceiling,

calligraphy of drying vines. The lion and dog

repose in the foreground. The trestles

of his worktable: etched in all their specific

solidity, their shadows at rest on the floor.

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An excerpt from “I Always Thought I was Fine with not Becoming a Father. But Then I Wasn’t,” by Geoff Kronik (fiction, ’12), published at The Boston Globe:

I Always Thought I was Fine with not Becoming a Father…

We pose in July sunshine, my wife and I and the two girls. The older one is 6, the younger 3, and with their bright eyes, dark hair, and shy smiles, they’re as drop-dead gorgeous as people always said our kids would be.

Except they’re not ours. The photo, from an outing with friends, depicts the family we only might have been. The friends lived nearby one summer, and we grew to love their little girls. I looked at the photo later that day, and for a long while after I wished I hadn’t.

We had spent the afternoon on the Common, and at one point the older girl asked me to take her on the merry-go-round. Afraid of falling off, she insisted that I hold her throughout the ride. “Don’t let go,” she said, and soon I realized I didn’t want to — ever. I’d never taken a child on an amusement ride, and now countless other things not done, and never to be, suddenly crashed down on me. If anything, I held on tighter. The ride ended, the girl ran back to her parents, and my sense of loss was palpable. […continue reading here]