We are super excited to announce that a winner has been selected for Sweet’s 3rd Annual Flash Non Fiction Essay contest. Jason Huff will receive $500 his essay, “Animagraphy”. Congratulations!
The runners-up were:
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: Paul Haney
Title of Piece(s) Published in Sweet: “Downriver”
Issue(s): 8.3
Find Him:
Paul lives in the Greater Boston area where he teaches writing, literature, and journalism at a few different colleges. His husband and I recently bought a fixer-upper in Salem—spooky! You can learn more about Paul by visiting his website.
What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?
Since “Downriver,” I’ve had work published in Slate, Boston Globe Magazine, Cincinnati Review, Hobart, and other such places, like the Potomac Review which nominated my essay, “Our Album Now” for a Pushcart Prize. I also earned my MFA in Nonfiction from Emerson College, along with the college’s Dean’s Award in part for editing Redivider. And I became both a research associate at the official Bob Dylan Archive and Co-Editor of the Dylan Review. So, a few things I guess.
Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?
Yeah! I’m writing a work of narrative nonfiction titled Bob Dylan Approximately: Tales of a Next-Generation Dylanologist, and just recently signed with Willenfield Literary Agency. The book comprises a narrative journey toward a next-generation Dylanology, one that leaves behind biographical fandom for close reading along with social and environmental consciousness.
Who is your favorite author?
Does Bob Dylan count? Seriously though, check out Chronicles, Volume One.
What is your favorite poem/essay/book?
At the moment, Bob Dylan’s “Pay in Blood.” Brian Doyle’s “Joyas Voladoras” is pretty b.a. James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son”.
What inspires you to write?
Several things: language, its subtleties, complexities, and simplicities; community and the desire to converse with—to become literate to—other thoughtful people; history and its mandate to record and make sense of what’s going on.
What is your favorite sweet?
My husband, Peter, makes some great cakes. But I gotta say, a yellow bag of peanut M&M’s after a long day of teaching, purchased from the newsstand in North Station and gobbled on the commuter rail just before a public-transit powernap, really hits the spot.
Thank you, Paul, for taking the time to reconnect with us. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!
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in our exciting new Fan Mail section.
Reading your book, Be With Me Always, I am reminded again of Sherlock Holmes in your approach to every haunting, and every visitation of your body by a ghost. Holmes makes an appearance in your list essay, “69 Inches of Thread, Scarlet and Otherwise”, but I noticed the similarities before this. When you ripped through Vivaldi arpeggios without realizing you had an audience, I pictured Holmes playing his Stradivarius. In “A Pill to Cure Love” you dissect the way a body metabolizes a love affair, and I pictured Holmes performing extractions in his home chemistry lab. Holmes’ devotion to justice, I liken to your hunger for understanding your ghosts. As Holmes hunts for criminals, driven by empathy and a lust for intellectual challenge, so too, do you hunt for your ghosts.
Click “FAN MAIL” in the main menu above for this and more,
in our exciting new Fan Mail section.
Nice Things by James Franco is filled with chaotic, yet surprising moments that take readers through a maze of lyrical and narrative twists and bends. Along the way, you transport us through time, alternate us between third and first person, and take us through the stream-of-consciousness, existential processes of an artist.
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: Anna Leahy
Title of Piece Published in Sweet: “My Grandmother’s Body”
Issue: 8.2
Find Her:
Anna lives in Southern California, where she directs the MFA in Creative Writing program at Chapman University. You can learn more about Anna by visiting her website.
What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?
When my poem appeared in Sweet, I was working on several book projects that panned out over the next few years—publications like Sweet contributed to my momentum. I’m especially happy to be publishing nonfiction regularly now in addition to poetry. My nonfiction book Tumor is part of the Object Lessons series from Bloomsbury, and my essays have won contests at the Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, and Dogwood—in the last few years. Plus, my second full-length poetry collection, Aperture, was published by Shearsman Books a couple of years ago. I’m now moving back and forth between poetry and nonfiction, and I feel as if each teaches me about the other mode of thinking and writing.
Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?
I continue to work on new essays, and I’m in the midst or revising—again—a poetry book manuscript. I’m also the editor of the international journal TAB, which focuses on poetry and poetics. The Creative Director is Claudine Jaenichen, an information designer who works on tsunami evacuation for coastal cities. We’re both interested in the ways medium and materiality shape the reading experience, so we make decisions about design and content in tandem, and we’re looking now especially at accessibility and design in poetry publications. I’m excited about the new website we’re developing, which uses an accessibility-ready design template and will have a set of more accessible, downloadable PDF files in the archives. For the 2020 print issue in January, we’ve given a lot of thought to readability and visual cues. It’s exciting to re-envision something I’ve built.
Who is your favorite author?
I’m hesitant about picking favorite poets, but I return to Lucille Clifton, Sylvia Plath, and Anna Swir. Anya Silver is becoming one of my return-to poets. I find the work of a lot of poets whose first books I’ve read in the last couple of years energizing too.
What is your favorite poem/essay/book?
I don’t think favorite is the right word for my reading habits. I consider poems, essays, books as inhabitants in my reading-writing life, and each has its own role, complementing, instead of competing with, others. As a writer, I appreciate poems and essays from perspectives and voices different than my own. Probably the first essay that really wowed me and made me think about how essays work was Richard Selzer’s “How to Build a Balcony,” but I didn’t start writing essays until years and years after reading it. Some of my own early essays resulted from—were instigated by? inspired by? responses to?—reading specific pieces by Joan Didion (one about John Wayne, another about weddings in Las Vegas, a why-I-write essay). Her work made me want to write or pointed me toward something I had to say, but I don’t think my voice or experience is much like hers. Eula Biss, Anne Boyer, Beth Ann Fennelly, Sarah Manguso, and Paisley Rekdal are nonfiction writers—who are also poets—whose work I admire a lot, along with nonfiction writers like Jill Christman, Roxane Gay, Esmé Weijun Wang—I could go on.
What inspires you to write?
Reading. Writing. The words immersion and merge have the same ancestors, and I like the idea that immersing myself in reading and writing allows reading and writing to merge somehow. Really, I’m more about what invites writing than being inspired. Of course, all sorts of evidence points to habit and ritual—regular time at the writing desk—as good for the writing life. That’s not to say that I write every day but that writing fuels more writing and that regularity fosters connections. I’m off to a writing residency soon, and that kind of binge-writing feels amazing to me.
What is your favorite sweet?
Sugar can make me feel rundown, so I don’t indulge in sweets very often, but I admit that I like chocolate a lot. When I was a kid, my mom came across a recipe in a magazine for a ring puff pastry filled with thick chocolate mouse and topped with dark chocolate—she’d make it for holidays, and I’d have a piece for breakfast the next morning too. More recently, my sister introduced me to the chocolate cake at Smith & Wollensky—one piece is enough for the whole table, and it seems to be our new holiday tradition that’s reminiscent of my mom’s chocolate ring-thing.
Thank you, Anna, for taking the time to reconnect with us. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!
Click “FAN MAIL” in the main menu above for this and more,
in our exciting new Fan Mail section.
When reading, Still Come Home, I was in a mason jar of dust and oak and apricot. The novel was a self-contained entity of imagery and conflict that incited all the senses. Sweet to read yet there is a discomfort created within these pages, wounds that bleed out in lyrical prose and conflict. Discomfort in the good way. This is the kind of reading that can be absorbed in one sitting, because one can’t stop, but do, because the lines created need to be inhaled and exhaled.
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: Mary Julia Klimenko
Title of Piece Published in Sweet: “This Fear”
Issue: 8.2
Find her:
Mary Julia can be found writing poetry, painting, and working as a Telehealth psychotherapist in a private practice two twelve-hour days a week. You can learn more about Mary Julia by visiting her website.
What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?
FMSBW Press in San Francisco just released my newest book of poetry, Suspension of Mirrors.
Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?
I’m currently writing a memoir about forty plus years in the studio modeling for and collaborating with sculptor, Manuel Neri.
Who is your favorite author?
Dom Domanski.
What is your favorite poem/essay/book?
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rilke
What inspires you to write?
Reading other writers like Dom Domanski, Louise Gluck, Mark Strand, Rilke, Neruda, and others.
What is your favorite sweet?
Ice cream is my favorite sweet, anything with chocolate chunks and ribbons of caramel.
Thank you, Mary Julia, 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: Scott Loring Sanders
Title of Piece Published in Sweet: “Circus Prayer”
Issue: 7.1
Find him:
Scott lives in Cambridge, MA and teaches at Lesley University and Emerson College. You can learn more about Scott by visiting his website.
What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?
The essay first published in Sweet was included in a collection/memoir called Surviving Jersey: Danger & Insanity in the Garden State, which was a finalist for CLMP’s Firecracker Award 2018 for Best Book of Creative Nonfiction. In addition, I’ve had three essays chosen as Notable by Best American Essays, and a Special Mention from the Pushcart Prize. On the fiction side, where I generally write literary mystery/crime, I published a short story collection called Shooting Creek and Other Stories. I’ve had two stories included in Best American Mystery Stories (both in the above collection) and one selected as Distinguished, as well as a story selected as a finalist for Best Short Story of 2018 by the ITW Thriller Awards.
Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?
At the moment, I’m finishing up a crime novel set at Walden Pond. Then I plan to start work on a new novel set at an iconic New England ski resort. I’m taking a break from CNF right now. I tend to go back and forth.
Who is your favorite author?
Ron Rash has always been a favorite of mine, who seamlessly blends beautiful prose with darkness and mystery. Recently, I discovered a guy named Lou Berney, who I met at the above-mentioned Thriller Awards in NYC. After talking with him, I went home and read a few of his books, which also combine crime/mystery with beautiful, literary writing. It’s what I’d like to think (perhaps wishful thinking on my part, admittedly) I do in my own fiction. I’ve never believed literary writing and crime writing have to be mutually exclusive. At any rate, his book, November Road, in particular, was excellent.
What is your favorite poem/essay/book?
I can’t possibly answer that!
What inspires you to write?
Many of my ideas come to me while exercising. Whether it’s cycling, running, or skiing, I often find myself working through ideas while being outdoors. The natural world also greatly influences my detail to setting. I like writing about places I’m familiar with and enjoy, then creating a dark spin.
What is your favorite sweet?
I’m a sucker for chocolate and nothing fancy. Chocolate chip cookies and brownies. I’m also hooked on Chocolove’s Orange Peel in Chocolate, which I guess is a little bit fancy. And ice cream, of course, chocolate peanut butter being my Achilles. For amazing homemade ice cream in Cambridge, you can’t beat Honeycomb Creamery (homemade waffle cones too!)
Thank you, Scott, 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: Amy Strauss Friedman
Title of Pieces Published in Sweet: “Biopsy”
Issue: 10.2
Find Her:
Twitter
Instagram
Amy lives in Denver, teaches college English courses here and there, and is working on her second full-length poetry collection. She also works for a state senator. In between those activities she writes book reviews, and she just edited her first book for another author. You can learn more about Amy by visiting her website.
What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?
My first full-length poetry collection was released in 2018, The Eggshell Skull Rule (Kelsay Books). I’m now working on a book about the 88 constellations, and women’s place within their myths. Close to 20 of those poems have been picked up by literary journals/magazines out of the 30 or so that I’ve completed thus far. And I’ve read some truly great new books of poetry by other authors, many of which I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing.
Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?
I’ve already mentioned it, but my book on the constellations is the project that I’m currently immersed in.
Who is your favorite author?
I have to choose? I’ve long loved Aphra Behn, not just because her writing is enchanting, but because she was one of the very first women to make a living through writing in the 1600s. Rebecca Makkai is one of my favorite modern novelists. There are too many poets I admire to mention, but I’ll name just a few: Gwendolyn Brooks, Sharon Olds, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Jennifer Givhan, Tracy K. Smith, Jennifer Franklin, and Megan Merchant, just to name a few.
What is your favorite poem/essay/book?
Again, too many to choose from, but I do come back again and again to Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things.”
What inspires you to write?
I like participating in the large and varied collective conversation that takes place within writing. Every new piece adds another layer to that conversation. Engaging with it inspires me.
What is your favorite sweet?
There’s a place in Denver called D Bar which makes, among many other yummy things, Nutella beignets. They are terrible for me, but they are also heaven!
Thank you, Amy, 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 Kirk
Title of Pieces Published in Sweet: “Winter Starlings,” “A Man’s World,” and “Harpoon”
Issue: 4.1, 6.2, and 8.3
Find Her:
Facebook
Kathleen can be found at the Normal Public Library in central Illinois most weekday mornings, behind the scenes, or in her home office, working on Escape Into Life, where she is the poetry editor. You can learn more about Kathleen by visiting her blog.
What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?
I have published several poetry chapbooks. The most recent is Spiritual Midwifery (Red Bird, 2019), and before that, The Towns (Unicorn Press, 2018). I did both release readings at Ryburn Place, a Route 66 shop in my hometown. Some of the towns in The Towns are on, or just off, old Route 66. The cover of Spiritual Midwifery is based on a painting by my husband, Tony Rio.
Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?
I’ve been writing a series of poems about Cassandra, the mythological figure, but re-situated in the Midwest in the 21st century. It’s fun and weird. Many have been published in literary magazines, but I would like to see them all together in a chapbook. I thought I had written them all but a new bunch burst from me recently. It’s been a little scary being taken over by Cassandra.
Who is your favorite author?
Oh, my, I love many authors and read constantly. Lately I’ve been reading short stories again. I love that form. I had just been re-reading Ann Packer’s Swim Back to Me and recommended it to a friend, who also loved it.
What is your favorite poem/essay/book?
I often return to The Wild Iris by Louise Glück.
What inspires you to write?
Looking at the world, paying attention. Trying to figure things out…and resting in paradox.
What is your favorite sweet?
I’m about to bake the annual pumpkin bread from a recipe from a childhood friend in Nebraska. Sometimes I add chocolate chips. Sometimes I make a gluten-free version for my mom.
Thank you, Kathleen, for taking the time to reconnect with us. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!
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