New England Review

Behind the Byline

McKenna Marsden

A character “containing multitudes” and gender exploration brings their debut author a bit of writerly confidence.

McKenna Marsden talks to NER staff reader Laur Freymiller about “Suffering in Motion,” Marsden’s debut story, and the path and the process that brought her to the pages of NER.

Laur Freymiller: Thanks for sitting down to talk with me about your piece. As a non-binary person myself, I found your character, Hannah, very real. The idea of “containing multitudes” especially resonated with me. Did you feel that writing this piece was more an experience of exploration or an affirmation of something you already thought?

McKenna Marsden: It can be both things. At the time of writing this I was also going through my own gender exploration and I wanted to look at an ungendered relationship with the body. I started writing about someone else other than me and at the end of the process, I realized it wasn’t about someone else after all.

LF: I like what you said about the ungendered body. That was something else that “Suffering in Motion” really nailed—the sense of physicality. Are you a runner yourself?

MM: That was the area I had to do the most research for. I am not a serious runner in that way. A thing I do is long-distance hiking, and that experience was part of how I came to want to write this. You get used to this way of using your body as a tool, but for the purposes of the story, I wanted to introduce a more competitive edge.

LF: It’s impressive that this was your first publication. What was the process like in finding a home for your story?

MM: I spent a really, really long time trying to write a novel that just didn’t work. Just bashing my head against that, and a couple years ago I finally decided to start working on this piece as a way of getting away from the novel. I have been taking classes from GrubStreet in Boston and they are amazing and wonderful and helped me work on getting out of my head with my writing. I also started to think about an audience for my writing. This was the first piece that really felt finished since I started at GrubStreet.

From there, I submitted it broadly, but specifically I really liked NER. I kind of thought of it as a stretch place, but I really love reading their work and I thought I’d love to have my writing be a part of it.

LF: Going forward, has publication changed your viewpoint?

MM: It has. For one thing, it was a big confidence boost. It helped me to think of my writing as something that deserves professional attention. It also inspired me to apply for MFA programs. I’ll be attending the University of Maryland in the fall.

It also helped me re-affirm my commitment to longer forms. I started writing “Suffering in Motion” as a piece of flash fiction. Getting it published made me feel that it’s okay that I’m more interested in at least novella-length works. I have recently been working on either a short novel or a novella. But the experience of publishing something shorter has helped me develop a keen sense for sustaining tension and working with scenes.

LF: That was part of what initially drew me into the piece: the structure. The way that it is cut up into episodic parts lends itself to the feeling of being in a race. Was that intentional? How did you find the structure?

MM: Definitely, I wanted to have the feeling of the present moment throughout the piece. Splitting it up into the segments and scenes was a way for me to keep everything in the present. I also wanted to give it sort of a cinematic or photographic feel. When I was younger, I wanted to write graphic novels, and I still love graphic novels. So that has definitely influenced my style.

I originally loved novels because I was reading novels, and through the experience of writing this short story I also read more short stories and have become interested in them for their unique possibilities. I’m especially interested now in connected short story collections that hang together as a whole.

LF: I guess it was inevitable that I would bring up In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. I think she does a lot structurally that would be interesting to you. I also think it is another example of a nuanced queer relationship. What are your thoughts about the queer relationship in your story?

MM: I was interested in the relationship between Hannah and their partner being the crux of the dramatic structure. I liked that the issues were a combination of Hannah’s evolving gender as well as just personal incompatibilities. But these more abstract issues are less pressing than the fact that the lease is coming to an end or how they handle stress differently. A thing that is interesting to me in general is the way people can be loving and supportive and yet they don’t quite get it. I tried to show that more in Hannah’s relationship with their mom. Their mom isn’t evil or anything but she just doesn’t quite get it.

LF: I felt that very strongly from reading the piece. I also got a really good sense of the setting.

MM: I don’t exclusively write about my personal experience, but I don’t like to get things wrong. I mostly write about things that I have a general sense for. I have lived in Boston for all of my adult life, so I mostly set things here where I have a feel for the place beyond what you can get from research. I grew up in Oregon so I set some things there as well.

LF: Thank you for taking the time to sit down with me. I look forward to reading whatever you come out with next!

McKenna Marsden studied English and Creative Writing at the University of Oregon and currently resides in Somerville, Massachusetts. This is her first publication. 

Laur A. Freymiller is a non-binary writer originally from Indiana. Their short stories have been published by Hobart Pulp and the Fabulist: Words & Art, and their short story “Accidents” won the 2019 COG: Page to Screen Award. They will be joining the University of Idaho’s MFA program in the fall. 

Mister Rogers Would Be Proud

Dr. François S. Clemmons publishes “Officer Clemmons: A Memoir”

NER author François Clemmons, the widely recognized Officer Clemmons of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, is an actor, opera singer, activist, and writer whose new book, Officer Clemmons: A Memoir, is available today (Catapult).

Listen to Clemmons read “From the Beginning” (NER 39.2), an excerpt from his new memoir,  as he takes us to the Alabama plantation of his earliest childhood. From there to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and far beyond, Officer Clemmons reads like make-believe. 

As Clemmons says at the start of this reading, “Nobody else can tell your story”—and very few can tell a story like François. 

Part I, François Clemmons, “From the Beginning”
Part II, François Clemmons, “From the Beginning”

Stay tuned for news about a chance to celebrate the publication of Officer Clemmons in person, at Middlebury College, with NER, François, and friends, hopefully next fall . . . 

Behind the Byline

Lindsay Starck

It takes a courageous runner to brave the race.

NER author Lindsay Starck (pictured left, walking the icy shore of Lake Superior) talks to NER editorial panel member Evgeniya Dame, sharing the story behind “Baikal” (NER 41.1) and its roots in the annual winter marathon across the largest and deepest lake in the world.

Evgeniya Dame: When I first read “Baikal” I couldn’t believe that its premise—a race across the frozen Lake Baikal in Siberia—was real. And yet it is! Could you talk more about the real-life marathon and how you went about the process of fictionalizing it?

Lindsay Starck: Yes! It feels so unbelievable. I remember reading the first few paragraphs of a news story about the marathon when I was standing in line at a coffee shop. I was so hypnotized by the video header, which showed a line of tiny runners trekking across an endless expanse of ice, that the barista had to call my name repeatedly. I’d never heard of this race, which has taken place annually since 2005 (when conditions permit) across the largest and deepest lake in the world. Baikal contains nearly a quarter of the earth’s fresh water, which is exceptionally clear; it’s ringed by mountains and is home to distinctive flora and fauna such as the famous Baikal seal; and it’s full of geothermic springs that bubble up, even in the winter, to melt holes in the ice. It takes a courageous runner to brave the race, and as I prepared to write this piece I sought out stories of those who had attempted it. I studied photos, videos, and written accounts, which is where I learned, for example, about the “hummocks” (ice rubble) that spackle the surface, the tents on the course, the hovercraft rescue-missions, and the perception of the lake as a living being.  

ED: Have you ever run a marathon? What helped you get in the mind of a runner?

LS: I am a runner, but not a marathoner. My father, however, has run thirty marathons; he tends to collect them as one would collect vintage coins or passport stamps. So I’ve been in the crowds, waving homemade signs and cheering the runners as they plod past mile fifteen, twenty-three, etc. I’ve attended the pasta dinners held in heated tents on the eve of the race, and I’ve been close enough at the finish line to see the faces of the runners as they take those final steps. I’m always astounded at their fortitude, but also worried about the toll that the race can take on their bodies!

ED: Visually, your story looks very distinct on the page: paragraphs interspersed with short questions. When I read the story, I immediately fell into the rhythm that those questions created. How did this structure arise?

LS: As someone who does not possess the fortitude or willpower necessary to run across Lake Baikal, I had questions for my character: namely, “How?” and “Why?” From the beginning, I was interrogating her. As I wrote more, it became clear that the central relationship of the piece had been shaped by unspoken questions. When I read that the founder of the race had described Baikal as “alive” and “breathing,” I wondered if the narrator could be the lake itself. I’ve long admired the “Ithaca” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is written as a catechistic call-and-response, and also John Edgar Wideman’s “Stories,” which is a flash fiction piece composed of “question after question after question.” Finally, one of my favorite remarks about literature is Anton Chekhov’s observation that the artist’s task is not to answer questions but to pose the questions correctly. 

ED: I love the way “Baikal” engages the environmental themes while making them serve the story and the character. Are you often drawn to these themes in your writing? 

LS: Yes! Especially recently. It was late March when I came across the article about the marathon, which meant that soon the ice would be breaking up on the lakes near where I live . . .  And as I walked across the parking lot to my car, I imagined a woman running across the lake while the ice cracked open behind her, racing against time the way that we’re all racing against climate change. My stories are centered on relationships, but to me those relationships are most interesting—and truest—when set against the backdrop of a specific environmental, political, or cultural moment. I recently published a short story about the last remaining Pinta Island tortoise on the Galapagos Islands, and I’m in the process of sending out two pieces that are also climate-themed: one about a future water shortage in California, and one about a guy who leads tours for people who want to see species on the brink of extinction. 

ED: There is a beautiful passage in your story that describes the main character’s reaction as her husband reads poetry to her. “Sometimes, as she tilted over the towering precipice of sleep, her temple throbbing and her skin burning, she’d think she heard something between the lines: something the poet was reaching for but couldn’t find the words to say. The poem behind the poem.” This concept—the poem behind the poem— sounds fascinating. Is this a common notion?

LS: That’s a great question! I don’t believe the phrase itself is all that common, but to me the idea feels central to the work of countless writers. I’ve long been interested in the use of literary constraints—from sonnets or pantoums in poetry to specific word counts in flash fiction to the question-answer format you see here—in part because language itself is a constraint that writers strive to transcend. We always want to say more than what we can actually get onto the page; with every word we type, we lose the possibility of infinite alternatives. As Italo Calvino wrote, “The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.” That’s what I had in mind when writing this passage: the poem on the page is the ghost of the poem you were trying to write. And the idea seemed to work well with the image of the marathon’s finish line, which feels tantalizingly close but also unreachable even from the start.

ED: I guess literary constraints are restrictive and freeing at once. I remember reading a Rick Moody interview in which he spoke about his love for them. He said limitations make him feel “energized.” Is there a literary constraint you’re thinking of trying next?

LS: I agree with Rick Moody! The novel that I’m working on actually began with a constraint: there are a number of first-person narrators, and I wanted each narrator to be addressing someone else in the novel, rather than simply addressing the reader. Over the course of several revisions, I’ve had to let go of that original idea; but, like any good constraint, it propelled me through my draft and taught me a lot about the characters and their connections to one another, so it definitely served a purpose. 

ED: Could you share a book or two that you’ve been reading during these strenuous times?

LS: I’ve found solace in Richard Powers’s The Overstory, a gorgeous ode to the natural world which does a wonderful job reminding humans of how brief and inconsequential our lives are when compared to, say, the lifespan of a sequoia. I know that may not sound particularly comforting, but it helps me to remember that even though this pandemic feels like it’s lasting forever, it’s really only a blip. (The novel is also an important reminder that the pandemic is only one of many crises the world is currently facing.) 

I’m also trying to memorize more poems, as I find something meditative and peaceful and rhythmic in this act of complete attention. I’m grateful for the chance to inhabit someone else’s language and vision for a while. Some recent pieces I’ve memorized have been Jamaal May’s “There Are Birds Here,” W. S. Merwin’s “To the New Year,” and Naomi Shihab Nye’s “What Changes.” 

ED: Thank you!

Lindsay Starck was born in Wisconsin and raised in the Milwaukee Public Library. Her first novel, Noah’s Wife, was published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 2016. Her writing has recently appeared in Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Cincinnati Review. She teaches and writes in Minneapolis, where she swims in the lakes and skis in the streets. She lives with her husband and a geriatric golden retriever. 

Evgeniya Dame studied English in Samara, Russia, before coming to the US on a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue fiction writing at the University of New Hampshire. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Joyland, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her nonfiction and interviews have appeared in Electric Literature and New England Review online. She is the recipient of a Monson Arts Residency Fellowship, Martin Dibner Memorial Fellowship for Maine Writers, and the Young P. Dawkins III prize for best MFA thesis at the University of New Hampshire. 

New Books from NER Authors

April 2020 #2

Independent bookstores need our help now more than ever.
Support them from home by purchasing these titles and others from bookshop.org.

“Exceptional . . . Chang’s poems expand and contract to create surprising geometries of language, vividly capturing the grief they explore.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

From the publisher: After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living.

Victoria Chang’s books include Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. Her children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, was illustrated by Marla Frazee and published by Beach Lane Books/Simon & Schuster. It was named a New York Times Notable Book. Her middle grade novel, Love Love, will be published by Sterling Publishing in 2020. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch’s Low-Residency MFA Program. You can listen to Chang’s most recent poems with NER, “Obit—Memory,” “Obit—Music,” and “Obit—Grief,” here: NER 38.3.

Obit can be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores!

“There is nothing like this book.” —Stephen Scully, author of Homer and the Sacred City

From the publisher: Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Romans and Greeks, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. In After Callimachus, esteemed poet and critic Stephanie Burt’s attentive translations and inspired adaptations introduce the work, spirit, and letter of Callimachus to today’s poetry readers.

Stephanie Burt is a poet and critic and professor of English at Harvard University. Her books include Don’t Read Poetry, Advice from the Lights: Poems, and the essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has appeared in such publications as the London Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review. She serves as poetry coeditor for the Nation. Her essay, “Skating with Delmore,” is forthcoming from NER this June.

After Callimachus can be purchased from from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores!

“Reading this book feels like some cosmic bang is conjuring up gravity inside your own brain, but whoa it was actually just John Gallaher who did that and he only used his words.”  —Kathryn Nuernberger, author of Rue

From the publisher: In Brand New Spacesuit, John Gallaher writes with honesty, humor, and tenderness about what fades and what remains. These poems offer snapshots of the poet’s memories of his adoption and childhood, his father’s heart attacks, his mother’s progressing Alzheimer’s disease and stroke, raising his own children, and his reflections on the complex mysteries of the universe within everyday moments. With exquisite attention to detail, Gallaher captures the losses, anxieties, and possibilities that come with caring for one another.

John Gallaher is the author of  In A Landscape (BOA, 2014), and The Little Book of Guesses (Four Way Books, 2007), which received the Levis Poetry Prize. He is also the co-author with G. C. Waldrep of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (BOA, 2011), which was written in collaboration almost entirely through email. He is currently the co-editor of The Laurel Review and The Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics. He lives in Marysville, Missouri, where he is an assistant professor of English at Northwest Missouri State University. You can read Gallaher’s most recent poem with NER, “Addenda to Your Emergency Plan,” in NER 36.3. 

Brand New Spacesuit can be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores!

“Every sense engaged, each filament of intellect glowing, memory fully aflame—it’s not easy to survive such aliveness.” —Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize

From the publisher: In his debut collection, William Fargason inspects the pain of memory alongside the pain of the physical body. Fargason takes language to its limits to demonstrate how grief is given a voice. His speaker confronts illness, grapples with grief, and heals after loss in its most crushing forms. These poems attempt to make sense of trauma in a time of belligerent fathers and unacceptable answers. Fargason necessarily confronts toxic masculinity while navigating spiritual and emotional vulnerability.

William Fargason is the winner of the 2019 Iowa Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Barrow Street, Indiana Review, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. He received two awards from the Academy of American Poets, a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a 2018–2019 Kingsbury Fellowship. He earned a PhD in poetry from Florida State University, where he taught creative writing. He is the poetry editor of Split Lip. He lives with himself in Tallahassee, Florida. Fargason’s poems “Aquarium” and “Birthmark” appear in NER 35.1.

Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara can be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores!

“Each stanza has a heuristic brilliance” —Forrest Gander, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 

From the publisher: Insofar is a collection of poems dedicated to analogical reasoning, seeking to remember basic terms of relation and proportion. Archival in mood, it works with and against the idea of an A–Z filing system. While the poems proceed alphabetically, there are gaps in representation, and redundancies. The poems get stuck in certain alphabetic registers and elide over others.  Its theology, insofar as it finds one, is earth-based, pluralistic, and cyclical. Its fondest prayer is that we come to our senses.

Sarah Gridley is an associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Her poetry collections include Weather Eye Open (University of California Press); Green is the Orator (University of California Press); and Loom (Omnidawn). She has a BA in English and American Literature from Harvard University, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana. The title poem of Insofar was first published in NER 38.3 and can be read here. 

Insofar can be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores!

“Chatti turns fear and shame into empowerment in her unflinching debut” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

From the publisher: In her early twenties, Leila Chatti started bleeding and did not stop. Physicians referred to this bleeding as flooding. In the Qur’an, as in the Bible, the Flood was sent as punishment. Chatti’s remarkably direct voice makes use of innovative poetic form to gaze unflinchingly at what she was taught to keep hidden. This powerful piece of life-writing depicts Chatti’s journey from diagnosis to surgery and remission in meticulous chronology that binds body to spirit and advocates for the salvation of both. Chatti blends personal narrative, religious imagery, and medical terminology in a chronicle of illness, womanhood, and faith.

Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She is the recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place, and the Key West Literary Seminar, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and Cleveland State University, where she is the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing & Publishing. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her poem “Portrait of the Illness as Nightmare” appears in NER 38.2.

Deluge can be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores!

“The poems in To the Bone are a gift, each one like a note in a musical score where superstition is prelude and memory is encore . . . Torres [pieces] together the narrative of a mother battling Alzheimer’s and a daughter writing and revising her many selves, drawing on the lyricisms of the natural world. Light passes through these poems as it does through the veins in a leaf.”
—Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Hour of the Ox

Angela Narciso Torres is the author of Blood Orange, winner of the Willow Books Literature Award for Poetry. Hersecond collection, What Happens Is Neither, is forthcoming from Four Way Books (March 2021). Recent work appears in POETRY, Missouri Review, Quarterly West, Cortland Review, and PANK. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Illinois Arts Council, and Ragdale Foundation. She received First Prize in the 2019 Yeats Poetry Prize (W.B. Yeats Society of New York). New City magazine named her one of Chicago’s Lit 50 in 2016. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she currently resides in South Florida. In 2020, she joins the conference faculty of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. She serves as a senior and reviews editor for RHINO ​Poetry, and sat until recently on the editorial panel at NER.

To The Bone is available for FREE download at Sundress Publications. Preorder a signed print copy here. 

All proceeds to benefit RAICES, a nonprofit organization providing free or low cost legal services to refugees, immigrants, and their families. 

“Fiona Sampson’s voice is something new and it’s a delight to hear it . . . A joy to read”— W. S. Merwin

From the publisher: Throughout, Sampson’s poems shimmer between the human perspective and what is beyond – some larger, longer-term consciousness. Language runs and dances over the stuff of the human body and the material of the landscape. And yet, despite these radical perspective shifts, the collection keeps in sight, always, the human experience: the act of creation; the way in which childhood memory and family lore impinge on the present.

Fiona Sampson has published twenty-nine books, most recently a critically acclaimed biography In Search of Mary Shelley (2018), and received a number of national and international awards for poetry. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she’s received an MBE for services to literature, and been published in thirty-seven languages. She now lives in an old farm in a valley on the Welsh borders. Her poetry will appear in NER 42.1 (June, 2020).

Come Down can be purchased from Waterstones. 

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