New England Review

Behind the Byline

Megan Fernandes

NER staff reader Alicia Romero talks to Megan Fernandes, whose poem “Letter to a Young Poet” appears in NER 43.1, about the rhythms of quiet survival, the permission to stumble, and staying raw—unruly. 

Alicia Romero: When I first read your poem, it made me think of music. It’s like listening to Miles Davis in “Kind of Blue” or Chopin’s lamenting Preludes. Then I read your poem “In the Beginning” from Good Boys in which you write, “Muddy waters in the floods with Bach.” You seem to riff in that same way in this poem, “Letter to a Young Poet.” Could you talk about how music influences your writing?

Megan Fernandes: My relationship with music is part blood, part brain. I was not the kid growing up who was listening to all kinds of experimental music and knew obscure songs from limited release albums by heart, but I was surrounded by people who had a crazed and instinctual relationship to music. My sister was an excellent pianist. She could really get into some dreamlike zone and I was more of a plonker on the keys, not terribly nuanced. My closest childhood friend growing up, Judith, had musical tastes that were wildly diverse (she listened to everything from Rachmaninoff to Brazilian dance music) and her presence in my life shaped my sonic appreciation, not necessarily in any technical way, but she really got mood. She used music as a way to curate a car ride, a heartbreak, an awkward gathering of people, a necessary silence. Poets need to know how to do that, you know?

My parents listened to a lot of jazz and blues and would attend festivals and take us to clubs to listen to them in Philly. My mom was into opera and introduced me to Kathleen Battle and Maria Callas. And of course, I grew up in the 90’s and so lived through a great era of hip hop which taught me a lot about flow, wordplay, slant rhyme, and what can be great about rhythmic irregularity, the cognitive surprise and pleasure you get when the rhyme isn’t fully true. Recently, I’ve been reading about triplet flow in contemporary hip hop (Lamar, Migos) and femme folkloric performance in Portuguese fado music.  

AR: You emphasize via clipped sentences: “Bridges. Ideas. Destabilization. Yellow tansy. Cities. The wild sea.” The reader experiences surprise with the idea of “destabilization.” Why is a sense of destabilization important to a poet’s sense of language?   

MF: It’s hard to stay awake. The lull of the homeostatic is so comforting. It’s easy to make decisions that are based in comfort and stability and social expectation. It’s easy to believe in the scarcity politics of capitalism and literally “settle” into a set of static relations with the world. I mean that broadly. But why? To be a poet is, I think, to understand flux and dynamism. I’m not saying one should court destabilization (the glamour or romance of the tortured artist gets boring the older you get), but I do think poetry requires us to be a little raw. And stay raw. And with rawness, you’re a bit more porous and tender to the world. A bit more unruly. I think in a moment where poetry is becoming hyper-professionalized, it’s good to remember that to be destabilized is also to be moved. To allow yourself to reorient. To be the kind of person who can change their mind, to change their life.

AR: You talk about ritual in absence of love and in recovery. When and how does ritual come into play when you’re writing?

MF: The only ritual I have with my writing is to read constantly, widely, and voraciously. My writing happens in spurts and when I force it, it’s not very good. My mind has to arrive at the right time, in the right space, with the right set of constellations aligned. Then it happens. It’s tectonic.

But in this poem, I was kind of thinking that ritual is a way we cope with grief and loss. When you lose someone and you become unintelligible to yourself, sometimes all you can do is the basics. Eat. Sleep. Work out. Take a walk outside. Make coffee. Feed the cats. When any kind of stimulation or emotional engagement feels violent or violating or you’re just too tender, ritual is a kind of armor. It builds daily expectations that give structure and order to interior chaos. Ritual is a way into thinking about the durational, how to survive when time feels long and the absence of a beloved feels unbearable. You still need to eat. Sleep. You still need to step outside into the sunshine. When your heart goes on strike, ritual enters. That rhythm of quiet survival.

AR: This poem makes me laugh out loud and it also brings up deep, serious emotions. Sometimes, in one line, the reader experiences both laughter and quiet turmoil. For example, in the line “Pay attention to what disgusts you.” What do you think our dislikes reveal about us as people and as artists?

MF: I’ve read a lot about disgust. From Ahmed and Ngai. It’s an emotion of the gut. Disgust is that weird dual motion of revulsion and attraction. We are disgusted by something but we can’t look away. And it happens mostly when we come into relation with some other subject, where we are no longer sovereign over our own bodies. Haraway says something like, “sex, infection, and eating are old relatives,” which are three examples of what it means to be in relation to some other person, species, virus. To succumb or consume or fuck. That’s when we’re most vulnerable. When I said, “Pay attention to what disgusts you,” I think at the root of it is some fear of being contaminated by an other. And we should pay attention because often some dehumanizing feeling (racism or homophobia or some other prejudice, conscious or not), is lurking there. One only needs to close read the way the media talks about immigrants and the language of disgust and animalization to understand this.

AR: Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels as though our lives have come to a screeching halt in so many essential ways and yet in your poem you advise young poets to “Go slow.” Could you say more about why that might be wise?

MF: We’re in a moment where people seem both reactive and certain about what they believe. What I’m saying is that it’s okay to go slow. Both in your arrival to the ideas you have about the world, but also, as in, go look at the ocean today. To build a belief system requires experience, requires you getting burned a few times. It means you will stumble. “Go slow” is the permission to stumble. To walk to your beliefs instead of rushing headfirst into them.

AR: A powerful line in this poem is “A good city will not parent you.” How does your upbringing influence the way you approach identity in your work?

MF: I think what I meant by that line is that New York’s indifference to you, your heroic subjectivity, your belief in what you can do, can be useful. You become resilient to the need for validation because in the end, you’re just another person walking across the Manhattan Bridge. You’re not special. A good city will not fool you into thinking you’re exceptional, that you’re an exception to anything. It’s healthy ego prevention.

AR: The title of your poem beckons Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.” Could you discuss the mentorships that have impacted your work?  

MF: Dead or alive? I’ve had literary mentorships with some dead folks for a while. Gwendolyn Brooks. W.B. Yeats. Etheridge Knight. Jorge Luis Borges. Meena Alexander. I go on these obsessive little deep dives into the work of some dead authors. They talk through time, from the grave.

In the land of the living, my PhD adviser, Bishnupriya Ghosh, is brilliant. I never know what she’s going to write about next, but she also believes in fun which I think in academia, is kind of radical. I came to her at the age of twenty-two and she modeled for me in this fundamental way, how to live a life full of joy, friends, dinners, critical thinking, a radical living politics, in a way that few have, I think. The poet and my former colleague, Lee Upton, is another person who I count as one of my most important mentors. Again, she just did this by modeling kindness and an unparalleled work ethic.

Lastly, my older sisters. Everyone should be so lucky to have older sisters.

Alicia Romero is a graduate of McGill University. She taught AP English in San Diego, CA and led the English Department for the Oakland Unified School District. She taught English teachers curriculum and instruction at McGill University, San Diego State University, and Saint Mary’s College.

NER Interns: Where are they now?

Camille Kellogg

Camille Kellogg ’17 talks to NER intern Bel Spelman ’23 about editing manuscripts, books as mirrors, and reading widely.

Bel Spelman: What do you remember from your NER internship?

Camille Kellogg: I remember my time at NER vividly. I was so excited to intern there. At the time, I was writing my thesis, so I would leave the library and tramp through the snow over to the NER office, which is this lovely, cozy building full of books. It was a very warm place, in every sense of the word. Everyone who worked there was so kind and friendly and put me at ease right away.

At NER, I got to sort query letters, format website posts, choose art for the website, proofread pieces, and read submissions then discuss them with the team. One of my favorite tasks was editing audio recordings of authors reading at Bread Loaf: I got to listen to incredible readings from Garth Greenwell, Natasha Tretheway, Peter Ho Davies, and more.

Interning at NER convinced me that I wanted to work in publishing. I looked at the NER team and saw a life I wanted to lead. It’s a lot of work and it’s not all reading and editing (there’s plenty of paperwork!) but the work was inspiring and exciting. When I got the issue of the magazine we’d worked on and held it in my hands it made me very sure that this was the kind of future I wanted.

BS: What were some of the steps that brought you to Bloomsbury Publishing?

CK: Once I graduated from Middlebury, I attended the Columbia Publishing Course to get an overview of the publishing industry. When the course ended, I crossed my fingers and moved to New York without a job. I actually had a broken arm at the time from a rugby injury, so I only brought one suitcase with me! I applied to as many editorial assistant jobs as I could find and got hired at HarperCollins Children’s Books. A few years later I moved over to Macmillan, but I was only there for about a year before my entire imprint was shut down during the pandemic. They say if you work in publishing long enough, you’ll eventually get laid off, so I’m hoping that was my one time! While I was unemployed, I spent my time working on a book of my own, which is being published by Penguin Random House next year. After four months, I was hired at Bloomsbury Children’s Books. I’m now an editor here, working with the wonderful Bloomsbury team and acquiring books from truly incredible authors.

BS: How does your work challenge you?

CK: Editing a manuscript is always challenging, no matter how many times you do it, because every book needs something slightly different. The first time you read a manuscript through, you know there are parts that you love and parts that feel off. Then you have to sit down and figure out why things feel off. Is it the pacing, the character development, the plot? Once you can identify the problem, then you can work with the author to come up with a solution.

The biggest challenge in publishing, though, is always time management. There’s so much to do! There’s always paperwork to fill out, emails to send, and submissions to read. The job is never really “done.” I always wish I had more time, especially for reading.

BS: Bloomsbury has a focus on publishing children’s and young adult stories. What do you enjoy about working with these stories?

CK: I decided to go into children’s books because, as a queer person, I didn’t see myself in books growing up. It’s so important for kids to see themselves in the stories they read—it helps them develop confidence and feel like they can be the hero of their own story. I wanted to help make sure every kid gets that experience. Being a kid or teen can also be really scary and overwhelming, so I tend to be drawn towards books that don’t shy away from the darkness of childhood but instead show readers how to find light when things get dark.

Kids and young adult books are also fun. One of the goals of every book I publish is to teach young people to love reading, to publish stories that they don’t want to put down. It’s hard to take yourself too seriously when you’re editing chapter books about dragons or YA novels about K-pop stars. There’s always a note of fun in the work I do.

BS: Any advice for college students looking to enter the publishing industry?

Camille Kellog (right) and a fellow intern in the NER office.

CK: The best advice I can give to anyone who wants to work in publishing is READ. Read a ton of books in the genre you want to work in and read RECENT books. When you go to an interview, you want to be able to talk about books published in the last two to three years, not just the books that you read in your English classes. Read a really wide range of books, too: commercial books, literary books, bestsellers, flops, everything. When you finish a book, think about what worked in the book, what didn’t, and what you would suggest changing if you were the editor. Doing this helps you get to know the current publishing market and also develop your editorial skills.

BS: Do you have a long-term goal for your editorial career?

CK: My long-term career goal is to publish a lot of wonderful books, do my absolute best for my authors, and help to put more stories out into the world for people who might not have seen themselves in stories before. That’s also the same goal I have for my career as an author: my debut novel, which is a queer adult romcom, comes out in 2023 and is for queer people who feel lost or uncertain about how to navigate the world. It’s the book that I desperately needed when I was younger to tell me that things were going to be okay.

New Books from NER Authors

April 2022

Happy National Poetry Month! We’re celebrating with five new poetry collections by NER authors (and maybe some captivating prose, too!)

By tapping into the metaphysical, the ekphrastic, the sensual, and the ordinary moments of life, Erika Meitner’s newest collection Useful Junk (BOA Editions) provides a stunning exploration of memory, passion, desire, and intimacy. These poems assert that pleasure is a vital form of knowledge, reminding us that deeply-rooted desires are what keep us alive and moving forward in a damaged world. Meitner’s poem “In the Waiting Room of America” appeared in NER 38.4.

In his highly anticipated second poetry collection, Time is a Mother (Penguin Random House), Ocean Vuong reckons with grief, the meaning of family, and “the cost of being the product of an American war in America.” Deeply intimate and tender, Time is a Mother embraces the nuances of healing and illuminates a means of survival: “How else do we return to ourselves but to fold / The page so it points to the good part.” Vuong’s poem “To My Father / To My Unborn Son” appeared in NER 36.1.

Written between 2016 and 2020, Dana Levin’s fifth collection, Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon Press) carries a reader through the disorientations of personal and collective transformation. Formally varied with prosaic breadth, Now Do You Know Where You Are investigates how great change calls the soul out “to be a messenger—to record whatever wanted to stream through.” Levin’s poetry has appeared in multiple issues of NER, most recently in issue 42.2.

Largely composed in Japanese syllabic forms called “wakas,” Victoria Chang explores loss and redemption in her newest poetry collection, The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press). Chang contrasts these traditional forms with contemporary language, reconciling the loss of her mother, the ache of wanting, and “our human urge to hide the minute beneath the light.” Chang’s poetry has appeared in several issues of NER, most recently in issue 41.3.

Rachel Mannheimer explores the intersection of art and love in her book-length narrative poem, Earth Room (Changes). Selected by Nobel Laureate Louise Glück as the winner of the inaugural Bergman Prize, Earth Room transports the reader across decades and different landscapes, considering art through “observations shaped by gender and environment, history, and portents of apocalypse.” Mannheimer’s poems “Horses” and “Berlin” appeared in NER 42.4.

A young woman in Kamalpur high society must confront the alcoholism of her mother and change her own hard-partying ways in Naheed Phiroze Patel’s Mirror Made of Rain (Unnamed). Patel’s story explores class and traditions in contemporary India in this exhilarating commentary on family, gender, and addiction. Mirror Made of Rain challenges its reader to contend with how society alters the way we view ourselves. Patel’s short story “Call of the Greater Coucal” appeared in NER 39.3.

Britain’s leading military historian, Richard Overy, reassesses World War II in Blood and Ruins (Viking). Overy argues for a more global perspective on WWII that broadens its focus to consider a century-long lead-up of global imperial expansion, the bitter cost for soldiers, and the heightened level of crime and atrocity that marked the war and its aftermath. Overy’s investigation “The Summer Ends, The War Begins” appeared in NER 31.2.

Joseph Pearson’s My Grandfather’s Knife (HarperCollins Canada) catalogues forgotten stories from World War II through the lens of personal artifacts. These everyday objects—a knife, a diary, a recipe book, a stringed instrument, and a cotton pouch—reveal the histories of their young owners, and illuminate the often dark history of the 20th century. Pearson’s nonfiction piece “This is Also Tangier” appeared in NER 39.1.

Visit our page on Bookshop.org for cumulative seasonal lists of NER author releases.

NER Interns: Where are they now?

Brita Fisher

Brita Fisher ’15 talks with NER intern Hannah Frankel ’22 about social justice organizing, teaching, and following your interests.

Hannah Frankel: What did you study at Middlebury and where do you live now?

Brita Fisher: I majored in Literary Studies and minored in French. I’m currently living in Calais, Vermont.

HF: Tell us a bit about what you did after you graduated and how you decided what to do.

BF: Right after college I taught English in France for a year, and then taught high school French and a literature elective in English at a private school in southern Vermont for two years. Throughout my time teaching, the curricula I was writing focused on both literature and issues of social justice. For example, we studied immigration, racism in France and the US, decolonization movements and how they intersected with the Civil Rights movement in the US, as well as mass incarceration and the Movement for Black Lives.

During that time I got involved with community organizing through the Root Social Justice Center in Brattleboro, the Vermont Workers’ Center, and Resource Generation. The Root focuses on local racial justice organizing, the Vermont Workers’ Center is an economic justice organization with a campaign for health care as a human right, and Resource Generation organizes young people with access to wealth and/or class privilege for the equitable redistribution of resources to social movements.

After two years teaching in southern Vermont, I thought that I wanted to do something more aligned with organizing for work, so I got a job through AmeriCorps at Vermont Legal Aid in Burlington doing community legal education and community outreach. In the end, I found that working at a nonprofit felt very different than the organizing I felt more passionate about. When my contract ended after a year, I got a job baking to prioritize mental and emotional space for the unpaid community organizing work I had continued to do. I baked for a year and a half before getting a job delivering packages for FedEx. This fall I started a two-year program through Goddard College where I’ll get an MA in teaching and a license to teach English in high school. The program is self-designed so I’ve gotten to center an intersectional social justice lens.

Brita during her time as a literature student at Middlebury College.

HF: How has your professional life changed between then and now?

BF: My professional life has gone through a lot of changes since I graduated. I suppose where I am now—in school for teaching, working part time in food service, and deeply involved in the Vermont Workers’ Center and Resource Generation’s Vermont chapter—represents a blend of where I’ve been since graduating. The biggest changes have been orienting my life around community organizing and then making the decision to go back to teaching in a school. I really value what I’ve learned and accomplished in different organizing contexts, especially in developing and facilitating political education workshops as part of campaigns, and I am excited to add teaching back into my life.

HF: What’s one thing you remember about your time as an intern with NER?

BF: I remember the feeling of being in the cozy and welcoming office and the awe I felt at getting to be involved, in any small way, in the work NER was doing. For Literary Studies we were reading almost exclusively books published before the 1930s, so participating in the active publishing of new material, and seeing how that happens, felt exciting and inspiring to me. The generous way that Marcy and Carolyn brought me into the different processes feels central to my time at NER.

HF: What would you say you learned as an undergrad that really benefits you today, either personally or professionally?

BF: I would say what I learned about my own analysis and writing process—how I like to approach it and what works for me.

HF: What advice do you have for current students that have similar interests and goals as you had when you were a student?

BF: The most concrete advice that comes to mind is to not wait until senior spring to take an intro level class you’ve been wanting to take. I write poetry for myself and waited until senior spring to try to take an intro level creative writing class. I wasn’t able to get into it because I was a senior and wasn’t able to take any of the upper level classes because I had no prerequisites. I’d known for a while that it was something I wanted to do, so I wish I had prioritized taking that class earlier.

HF: What are your favorite ‘guilty pleasure’ reads and what have you read lately that you enjoyed?

BF: I came across the books Daughter of the Forest and Son of the Shadows by Juliet Marillier when I was in eighth or ninth grade. Something about the way she writes about trauma, healing, and the power of myth and storytelling in a fantasy context really moved me then, and I read them multiple times. I periodically return to them when in need of a comfort read. As for what I’ve enjoyed recently, last week I read Passing by Nella Larsen, which is a short and intensely powerful novel about race, racism, and power.

HF: Thanks so much for taking the time to answer all my questions! I hope school goes well and wish you happiness and fulfillment in the future.

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