Author: Deedra (Page 6 of 6)

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: Devin Balwit
Title of Piece published in Sweet: הוֹשִׁיעֵנִי אֱלֹהִים–    כִּי בָאוּ מַיִם עַד-נָפֶשׁ
Issue:  9.2

Find her:

These days you can find Devin behind the wheel, teaching her son to drive.  Oh, we feel you on that one, Devin!  You can find out more about her and her publications on her website.

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

Check out my website for book reviews, books, and a selection of online poems published over the last year.

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

I’m in the middle of a Proust-inspired chapbook.

Who is your favorite author?

I love Guadalupe Nettel in Spanish. Joseph Mitchell’s essays are a kick. Wonderful recent fiction reads were “All the Light We Cannot See,” “Lincoln in the Bardo,” and “The English Passengers.”

What is your favorite poem/essay/book?

A recent favorite has been Frans Bengtsson’s  “The Long Ships,” the inspiration for the Hulu series “Vikings.”

What inspires you to write?

Everything from boxing to Scarlatti, paintings to politics. All of life is fair game.

What is your favorite sweet?

My favorite sweet is alcohol. In the summer, Vinho Verde because I can drink more of it without feeling guilty. (It’s only 9%!)

Photo Credit: AneTours

Honestly, I had to look that one up and I’m happy to report you aren’t drinking green wine. Some of the best wine I have ever had was in Spain, so this one being from Portugual has me intrigued! 

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

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: Marin Sardy
Title of Piece published in Sweet:  There Is the Urge to Find Meaning
Issue:  8.3

Find her:

Instagram
Twitter

Marin currently lives in Tucson, Arizona and occasionally can be found teaching for Pace University in Manhattan. You can find out more about Marin on her website www.marinsardy.com.

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

I wrote a book! The Edge of Every Day: Sketches of Schizophrenia is forthcoming in May 2019 from Pantheon Books.

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

My first book is a wide ranging, fragmentary memoir about my relationship to the mental illness that runs in my family (schizophrenia) and with my loved ones who have struggled with it. One of the chapters in the book, “There Is the Urge to Find Meaning,” was originally a short essay that was first published in Sweet.

 Who is your favorite author?

I find that to be sort of an impossible question. To identify one that I like “best”—honestly, I don’t think I’m capable of it. I don’t understand how one would go about doing so. I think it makes more sense to ask, Who are the authors who made me? Here are some contemporary writers who have inspired me in recent years: Maggie Nelson, Lidia Yuknavich, Nick Flynn.

 What is your favorite poem/essay/book?

Let me try another version of that question: What book gave me a vision of what kind of writer I wanted to become? Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. But it feels weird even to highlight that one. I feel as if I’ve walked on a trail of books all my life, each like a stone in a creek, keeping me above the water. When you look at it that way, the idea of having one “favorite” seems meaningless. 

What inspires you to write?

I write into the gap between my experience and the stories I encounter as told by others. I write into the places where my reality is not reflected in culture. 

What is your favorite sweet?

Currently I am obsessed with Theo brand 70% dark chocolate bars with sea salt. Nectar of the gods.

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

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: Dayna Patterson
Title of Piece published in Sweet:  usque ad mala
Issue:  10.1

Find her:
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter

I live just about as far north and west as you can get in the continental U.S. I can zip across the border to Vancouver’s top-notch Shakespeare festival, Bard on the Beach, or mosey down to Seattle’s Pacific Science Center to see an exhibit of the terracotta warriors. My city hugs a bay where the occasional whale is spotted, and to the west is a glacier-topped volcano that grows mouth-watering wild huckleberries and blueberries. It’s a sweet spot.

You can find out more about Dayna on her website www.daynapatterson.com.

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

Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry was released in April 2018. I’m a co-editor, along with Martin Pulido and Tyler Chadwick.

I’ve also had several poems come out in Hotel Amerika, Western Humanities Review, Zone 3, and more.

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

I have two poetry manuscripts in circulation: O Lady, Speak Again was a semifinalist for the Brittingham & Pollak Prizes in Poetry and contains poems that combine my Mormon upbringing with women from Shakespeare. If Mother Braids a Waterfall examines my spiritual and ancestral heritage through Ellen Bailey and her polygamist son, Charles Ramsden Bailey.

I’m currently working on a third manuscript about breath, air, Keats, flight, and atmospheric change.

Who is your favorite author?

Ah, the impossible question. I’ve been heavily influenced by Carole Maso, Annie Dillard, Lucie Brock-Broido, Sharon Olds, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, William Shakespeare, James Joyce, Seamus Heaney, Bruce Beasley, Brenda Miller, Suzanne Paola, May Swenson, Terry Tempest Williams, Susan Elizabeth Howe, and Carol Lynn Pearson, among many, many others. Each of them has a body of work that casts a particular glow by which I write.

 What is your favorite poem/essay/book?

Another impossible question. If stranded on an island, I would take my copy of the complete works of Shakespeare and consider myself a rich woman.

 What inspires you to write?

Anguish, mostly. When I feel a peculiar tension arising, a pang, an uncomfortable awkwardness, then I know I need to write about it. Right now I’m experiencing the parenting anguish of daughters slowly transforming into teenagers. I know people have been, are, or will be in my shoes, and writing through the discomfort is like extending a hand to those who have gone before, or who are going, or who will go through something similar. In Sean Thomas Dougherty’s tiny poem, “Why Bother?” he writes: “Because right now, there is someone / out there with / a wound in the exact shape / of your words.” I can’t think of a better reason to keep writing. (Props to Todd Kaneko for bringing this poem to my attention.)

 What is your favorite sweet?

Every late summer, we hike up our mountain with buckets in hand to collect the tiny wildberries. They taste like the rich soil and alpine air and mountain sunshine. Baked into a pie, there is no better dessert on earth.

That looks amazingly delicious!

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

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: Kathleen McGookey
Title of Piece published in Sweet:  I’d Like to Think Someone is Listening
Issue:  7.3

Find her:

Now that my kids are back in school, you can find me in my office at home, looking out on a field where the long grass is slowly turning a silvery-tan color, finally writing a poem.

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

I’ve had two books of poems come out:  Stay (Press 53, 2015) and Heart in a Jar (White Pine Press, 2017).  Another book is forthcoming from Press 53 in 2019, though that book doesn’t have a title yet.

I’ve also had work selected for a couple great anthologies:  New Micro:  Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton, 2018), Elemental:  A Collection of Michigan Creative Nonfiction (Wayne State, 2018), and Nothing to Declare:  A Guide to the Flash Sequence (White Pine Press, 2016).

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

I am excited to be sitting at my desk again, writing poems.

Who is your favorite author?

It’s terrible to have to pick just one.  So I’ll tell you about the books I’ve read lately.  I just read George Saunders’ book of essays The Braindead Megaphone and really loved it.  I also loved The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs.  I am looking forward to reading I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O’Farrell, although I think that book is going to scare me.  But if you really want me to answer the question, some of my favorite contemporary prose poets are Nin Andrews and Gary Young.

What is your favorite poem/essay/book?

A poem I return to again and again is “Absence” by Susan Griffin.  Also, I loved the book The Museum of Happiness by Jesse Lee Kercheval, although I read it years ago.

What inspires you to write?

Reading poems.  After I read a poem, I sometimes want to continue the conversation.  So I write.

What is your favorite sweet?

Here is a link to my favorite chocolate cake recipe.  It’s a tiny bit different than how I make it, but it’s generally the same thing.  It is actually called Dr. Feelgood’s Chocolate Cake.

Photo Credit: Lara Fitzgerald www.larasfavoritethings.com

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