What was the inspiration for the piece published in the issue?
I’ve wanted for years to write about three strange, precious childhood trips to southwest Iowa’s Viking lake, but couldn’t quite find my way in until I started with my little boy hands, their capacity for tenderness and violence. I’m fascinated by the way long-held experiences are proximal yet remote, mundane yet profound, and by the way so many experiences braid kindness and cruelty. I guess I dig irony and paradox, so I tried to lace it into every stanza.
Who or what inspires your work generally?
Memory, loss, the simultaneous delight and horror of living. Landscapes and lovescapes, the giving up of hopeful futures. Moths and tinnitus.
What is your creative process? Do you plan pieces out or let them happen as they come?
My pre-writing process is planned insofar as I always read a poem or ten before I write, sifting through a journal or a book of poems until I find one I love. Then I use it as a launching pad or model, a frame on which to drape my own work, which I never plan, but which generally coheres around place, love, sickness, recovery, the usual obsessions and approaches.
What is your "white whale"?
I love this question so much. Thank you for drumming it up! Um, probably my weight. I’ve been bobbing between 210 and 220 for like twenty years, and whenever I get in striking distance of 209, I go on a bender up to 221. Nobody else seems to notice or care, but I obsess, weighing myself every morning, castigating myself for my frequent lapses. Dude. Maybe talking about it so publicly will help me release the whale, so it doesn’t kill me?
Why did you feel like After Happy Hour would be a good home for this piece?
I met Jess and Liz at AWP Kansas City and they were so cool, so supportive, so interesting, that I had to follow up and send them some strophes. The universe can be incredibly kind when it isn’t kicking our asses.
What is your favorite vice? What are you drinking at happy hour, in a literal or a metaphorical sense?
I love vice of most stripes, but in mid-life I find myself bereft of the old crutches, which nearly killed me a decade ago. So my current fave vice is probably ice cream or board games, both of which I consume in very large quantities. Back in the day, my happy hour drink was a three-ingredient margarita: 2 oz. Don Julio blanco, 1 oz. freshly squeezed lime juice, ½ oz. Cointreau. Vigorously shaken and poured over ice. Salted rim. It’s the only booze I miss, and I miss it mucho.