Isabella DeSendi: “I wrote this poem after telling two of my poet friends the story of my tio’s death, including his vision of being abducted by aliens just days after we’d received the news about his deportation. My mom was still trying to figure out how to fight the government’s decision, how to break the news. My friends and I were huddled in a small circle during the intermission of a reading when I decided to share the story with them. One friend, Cat, turned to me and said, ‘Bella, this is a poem.’ She was right. This piece is an elegy for my tio, but it’s also a lamentation for immigrants in this country—and ultimately a song of praise for my mother, whose strength, generosity, and capacity for enduring I am constantly in awe of.” (web)
Roberta Beary: “Age 15, I stumble upon a tattered anthology called The Book of Living Verse. It becomes my talisman. Saving my life again and again. In my forties, as one version of my life ends, my mantra is—Write Every Day, No Matter What Catastrophe. Twenty years on, I don’t know if I write to save others or myself. But I know the why doesn’t matter.” (web)
River Adams: “I started thinking more deeply about the crafting of metaphors after Ocean Vuong shared a lesson on his Instagram story. In the time since, I’ve heard three songs use this particular euphemism. Do I like the songs? Yes, but maybe we can put this phrase into retirement, or at least come up with an equivalent metaphor for vaginas.” (web)
Devon Miller-Duggan: “After 25 years of teaching everything from a class on Fisher King mythology to comparative lit. surveys, I am finally (having at last gotten a book out) teaching creative writing, and for all the debates about whether it’s good for writers to teach writing and whether it can be taught at all, I just plain love it. That being said, my most recent ‘accomplishment’ is probably having gotten up in time to start the monastic day at 4:00 a.m. at Christ in the Desert, and having done the whole cycle, including singing antiphonally in Latin and weeding the hops field—all of which only added a layer of certainty to my conviction that I am about as unfit for a monastic life as it’s possible to be.”
Chris Anderson: “I am an English Professor at Oregon State University, but I am also a Catholic deacon, and my poetry is one result of the free association and spontaneity of lectio divina, the kind of prayer I practice every morning. In lectio you leap, and in leaping poetry, of course, you leap, and what I love about that is how there’s this mystery, this other story you don’t really understand, bigger than your own, that somehow gets implied in the gaps and jumps. Maybe a poem like ‘Living the Chemical Life’ would seem irreverent to a believer, but for me it’s not at all. It’s joyous. It’s one way of letting the Spirit move.” (web)
Taylor Mali: “In both of the books of poetry I published after Rebecca’s death I tried to include a few poems about her. But they were always so unlike the rest of the manuscript that they couldn’t stay in. I’ve known for a decade that all my poems about Rebecca would need to be published in a collection by themselves. The Whetting Stone is that collection.” (web)
