Author: Deedra (Page 2 of 6)

Several times a month we connect with our contributors showing where they have been, where they are now, and what’s up for the future.

Name: David Ebenbach
Title of Pieces Published in Sweet: “We Were the People Who Moved” “To Whom It May Concern” “In the Chat Room of the Werewolf Pack ” & “Procedural Drama“
Issues: 5.2 & 6.3

Find Him:

FaceBook
Twitter
Instagram

David is a Philadelphia native, but these days you can find him in Washington, DC, where he lives with his family and works at Georgetown University. He teaches creative writing and literature at the Center for Jewish Civilization and promoting student-centered teaching at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship.

Find out more about David on his website.

What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?

I’m excited to say that I’ve had four books published since those publications, including two collections of poetry—We Were the People Who Moved (2015) and Some Unimaginable Animal (2019)—but I think the biggest accomplishment is just coming back to the page again and again. Books are great—it’s an unbelievable privilege to get to share my work with other folks—but the foundation is the writing. So I think that’s the most important accomplishment any writer can point to. #amwriting

Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?

I’m finishing edits on a novel due out in 2021 (Tachyon Publications). It’s called How to Mars and it’s a sci-fi novel about an ill-advised one-way mission to Mars; the small group of Marsonauts, who went in order to escape life, unexpectedly have to get ready for the first pregnancy on another planet.

Who is your favorite author?

Such a cruel question! Just one? Well, fine—I guess my favorite author is (and I’m sorry to say that this author has a really long name): Toni Morrison Jane Kenyon Yehuda Amichai Basho Salman Rushdie Rainer Maria Rilke George Saunders Stephen Dunn Virginia Woolf. Long name or not (Toni Morrison for short?), that’s a great author!

What is your favorite poem/essay/book?

Again, kind of cruel—but this time I’ll really honor the request. In the world of poetry I’ll go with Jane Kenyon’s Otherwise.

What inspires you to write?

One of the main things is my hunger to show the power and importance and even magic of ordinary moments and things.

What are you reading right now?

Five books (I always read a lot of things at once):
Hanif Abdurraqib, A Fortune for Your Disaster. (poetry)
Jim Gaffigan, Food: A Love Story. (non-fiction)
Layla Saad, Me and White Supremacy. (non-fiction)
Jeff Vandermeer, The Time Traveler’s Almanac. (fiction)
Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. (non-fiction)

What is your favorite sweet? We would love for you to share a recipe or link to place that serves it. Pictures are great, too!

Heritage India, a restaurant in DC, makes a bread pudding that is a religious experience.

Thank you, David, for taking the time to reconnect with us. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!

Are you a contributor who wants to be a part of Sweet Connections?  Come fill out our form!

Thursdays are dedicated to connecting with our contributors showing where they have been, where they are now, and what’s up for the future.

Name: Sara Henning
Title of Pieces Published in Sweet: “How to Pray Like a Girl“
Issues: 5.2

Find Her:

FaceBook
Twitter

These days, Sara lives in Texas, teach at Stephen F. Austin State University, and serve as poetry editor for Stephen F. Austin State University Press.

Find out more about Sara on her website.

What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?

So much has happened to me since “How to Pray Like a Girl” was published–personally, literarily, and existentially–but perhaps the coolest thing is that my collection of poetry, View From True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), won the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award. Adrian Matejka chose two winners that year–me and Monica Berlin. My book went on to win the 2019 High Plains Book Award Poetry and to be shortlisted for the 2018 Julie Suk Award. Diane Seuss blew my mind when wrote about my book, “Henning’s ravishing music is in revolt against the trauma of the book’s narrative, just as her sonnet sequences provide the ballast of history, of virtuosity. Sara Henning, a ‘trickster,’ ‘an heiress of disaster,’ has composed a radical masterpiece.”

Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?

Yes! I just finished up edits for my third book manuscript, Terra Incognita, a collection of poems focused around grief and the manner in which we pathologize the unknown. Latin for “unknown land,” Terra Incognita is a term used by cartographers to describe terrains that have been unmapped or otherwise undocumented. My objective for these poems is to explore and resolve the paradoxes of grief and its assimilation, weaving together my mother’s death from cancer, her mental illness, my husband’s hospitalizations, and re-occurrent miscarriage. Several poems from the collection won the 2019 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Who is your favorite author?

I love too many to narrow it down, but Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, and Mary Oliver are three poets very close to my heart.

What is your favorite poem/essay/book?

I have too many favorites to name, so I will share two with you. I love Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” particularly the question at the end: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Asking myself that question has helped me to escape a difficult childhood and to work on living my best life in small, beautiful ways. My second choice is Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Song.” I don’t believe in perfect poems, but I truly feel that this one is perfect in every way.

What inspires you to write?

I write to understand the world around me and the world inside of me.

What are you reading right now?

I’ve been re-reading Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. I’ve also been spending quite a bit of time with Jane Kenyon’s poems.

What is your favorite sweet? We would love for you to share a recipe or link to place that serves it. Pictures are great, too!

I really love salt water taffy. I was born in Savannah, Georgia, and when I was a little girl, my mom would take us to River Street Sweets, the oldest candy store in the city, where I would watch the folks who worked there stretch it on a 100-year-old taffy machine! My childhood tastes like still-warm taffy, as if you took sugar and mixed it with the sea.

Oh, I have such fond memories of walking down Savannah’s Riverwalk just to go get taffy and pralines for my dad. Always worth the trip!

Thank you, Sara, for taking the time to reconnect with us. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!

Are you a contributor who wants to be a part of Sweet Connections?  Come fill out our form!

Each week we will be connecting with our contributors showing where they have been, where they are now, and what’s up for the future.

Name: Jenny Ferguson
Title of Pieces Published in Sweet: “After the Trial, October 4th 2013“
Issues: 6.2

Find Her:

Twitter

Jenny can be found in Gabrielino Tongva nation land. That’s L.A., folks. The Los Angeles Times has this super cool map that you can learn a little more or you can also check out this historical site.

Find out more about Jenny on her website.

What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?

Published my first novel with NeWest Press in 2016: Border Markers.

Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?

I’m revising a YA novel with my agent!

Who is your favorite author?

Haha. Impossible.

What is your favorite poem/essay/book?

Also impossible. But I’ll say that Alicia Elliott’s A Mind Spread Out On the Ground is still with me, daily, since I first read it a year ago.

What are you reading right now?

To survive the pandemic, lots and lots of feminist romance novels. And plenty of nonfiction about furthering my anti-racist work.

What is your favorite sweet? We would love for you to share a recipe or link to place that serves it. Pictures are great, too!

Butter tarts with raisins. Oh my. Recipes exist galore.

A Canadian classic!

Thank you, Jenny, for taking the time to reconnect with us. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!

Are you a contributor who wants to be a part of Sweet Connections?  Come fill out our form!

Each week we will be connecting with our contributors showing where they have been, where they are now, and what’s up for the future.

Name: Leah Browning
Title of Pieces Published in Sweet: “Halfway Through the Biography of Anne Sexton“
Issues: 4.1

Find Her:

Leah is a freelance writer and the editor of the Apple Valley Review. She currently lives in California.

You can find out more about her on her website.

What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?

My second chapbook of short fiction, Orchard City, was published by Hyacinth Girl Press in 2017. (The cover design is by Sarah Reck.) 

Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?

I’ve been working on a full-length collection of fiction.

Who is your favorite author?

There are so many! A few of my favorites are Ha Jin, Alice Munro, David Sedaris, Raymond Carver, Amy Bloom, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Per Petterson, Etgar Keret, Elena Ferrante, Haruki Murakami, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Domenico Starnone.

What is your favorite poem/essay/book?

This is even harder to narrow down. A few that really stand out for me are Waiting by Ha Jin; In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin; My Ántonia by Willa Cather; Come to Me: Stories by Amy Bloom; Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born); Baba Dunja’s Last Love by Alina Bronsky (translated from the German by Tim Mohr); and There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers). 

What inspires you to write?

Everything in life, I think.

What are you reading right now?

A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir about being a young writer in Paris in the 1920s, and The Red Convertible, a collection of short stories by Louise Erdrich.

What is your favorite sweet? We would love for you to share a recipe or link to place that serves it. Pictures are great, too!

Chocolate mousse! More traditional versions taste amazing, but the quick and easy recipes—especially when garnished with whipped cream and chocolate shavings—are no slouch, either.  

That looks so yummy!

Thank you, Leah, for taking the time to reconnect with us. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!

Are you a contributor who wants to be a part of Sweet Connections?  Come fill out our form!