New England Review

John Vaaler and Eleanor Pontikes

Meet the Interns

Our Spring 2022 interns, John Vaaler and Eleanor Pontikes, sat down to chat about their experience at NER.

Eleanor: Okay, I think we’re rolling!

John: Eleanor, tell me about what led you to the New England Review.

E:  I vividly remember walking into a professor’s office back during my second semester at Middlebury, and I came to show her something I was working on and ask for advice on how to become a writer. She had many great recommendations but one of them was to get an internship at the New England Review. I participated in the reading submissions group for a few years and here I am during my senior year! 

Tell me about your path here, John!

J: I love writing film and book reviews, and wanted to get the inside scoop on the publishing process. My advisor, Jay Parini—who cofounded NER—recommended the job, and I am so glad I got to intern this Spring. 

I didn’t realize going into the internship the amount of work it takes to keep a publishing house or literary journal on its feet. It’s not just editing: there’s fact-checking, contract work, design. 

E: I was also surprised that we pay our authors since not many literary journals compensate authors for their work. The administrative side of the journal was also fascinating to me, and I enjoyed working with Eli on the various platforms involved in the process of publishing.

J: I didn’t know how many drafts and rewrites go into a story before it’s ready for publication, or how collaborative the editing process is between NER and its authors. I assumed it was more like submitting a letter to the New York Times, where the editors might be the main tinkerers of the submission after you send it in. It’s a very collaborative process and I didn’t appreciate that until working here.

One favorite task in the office is reading the mail-in submissions, which are often especially lively.

Eleanor, tell me what stuff you are involved with on campus. 

E: I’ve definitely overextended myself this semester! But I run the Women’s Club Soccer team, am president of the fly fishing club, MiddFly, and am a senior editor of Clover Magazine, Middlebury’s first fashion publication. 

To create some balance between work and extracurriculars, I love going to the gym and walking around town. I usually treat myself with a latte every morning too. I think going to different coffee shops with friends has been one of my favorite self-care rituals this semester.

What about you, John?

J: I sometimes contribute to the Middlebury Campus. I’m a member of our Omega Alpha Social House, where I used to be the social chair. I am also a peer writing tutor at the CTLR (Center for Teaching Learning and Research), where I help freshmen students with their papers. A lot of the work I do with their papers is teaching them not so much to write well, but rather how to write well in an academic context. It’s a skill and not a talent, so it’s pretty great just helping all of these really brilliant first years make their first steps as academic writers. And I, too, love to go to coffee shops with friends. 

E: And what’s your favorite one?

J: Little Seed.

E:  I’ve found I enjoy different coffee shops for different needs. I go to Little Seed when I need to sit and work for hours, Haymaker when I want to talk to friends for hours, and Royal Oak when I need a break from everything!

Are you reading anything for fun right now? 

J: Finals are looming, so I really shouldn’t be reading anything . . . but yes, I am making my way through Temporary Kings, the penultimate book in Anthony Powell’s bittersweet, very funny A Dance to the Music of Time series. He’s a little like Dostoyevsky . . . Dostoyevsky by way of Wodehouse. The characters often think they’re living in a tragedy, but the series is obviously comic. 

What have you been reading?

E: I was traveling this weekend and started Mary Oliver’s Upstream. I’ve read various poems of hers through my time in the Environmental Studies department but it’s been lovely reading this collection in its entirety.

John: I love her poem “Wild Geese.”

E: “Attention is the beginning of devotion” has always stuck with me. Oliver’s keen observation of humanity and the natural world compel me as both a reader and writer. 

J: What is your ideal reading environment?

E: I think this office deserves some credit in this interview because it’s such a cozy, warm place! Overall, my ideal reading environment is just comfy enough so I don’t fall asleep because the Davis library chairs are way too comfortable, and I fall asleep every time I’m in there.

But ultimately, I need to have a cushioned seat and a drink in hand while reading—coffee or tea, of course.

J:  I am a believer in what Virginia Woolf once said: You have to read alone in a room of your own. But there are exceptions to Woolf’s rule. The other day I was waiting for a friend in Two Brothers Tavern, and I read some of Temporary Kings for a few minutes. Reading Anthony Powell in a bar is an interesting experience. A lot of the characters in his novels do that sort of thing more frequently than they probably should. 

E: What is your favorite task here in the office?

J: My favorite task was copyediting the pieces we published on the website. After reading some of them in the reading group last summer, it was a real treat to see NER authors get the publicity their incredible work deserves. 

E: I think my favorite task was doing the author book posts every month. Every month we post new releases from authors who’ve been published in NER. This past weekend, I wandered through a bookstore in Colorado and saw Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother featured in their “New and Noteworthy” section. I wrote about his new poetry collection for the April new book post. NER authors are so talented and it’s a rewarding experience to have even a small role in their path to success, one that maybe began with the New England Review. Gosh, it also makes me want to read and read and read! (And then maybe one day write my own “New and Noteworthy” book!)

You’re graduating in a few weeks! Any plans for the summer and what’s to come?

J: I’m moving to New York and starting a job at an expert network company! Currently trying to find an affordable room in Manhattan. And what are your summer plans?

E: I’m going back home to Colorado, returning to work at a fly shop, and waiting to hear back from remote summer publishing internships, so I’m a little stressed (nervous laughter).

J: You mentioned your passion for fly fishing. What is your favorite fly fishing story?

E: Hmm. I’d have to say the story in Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It when Paul is swept through the Blackfoot River, holding his rod high above the water with a trout at the end of his line. 

For me, there are many moments I can think of, but my best fishing stories are less about the size of the fish and more about the places I’m in and the people I’m with. 

Do you have a favorite genre of submissions to read and go through?

J: I enjoy the nonfiction submissions, particularly the reviews of works I have never read before. It’s so exciting reading non-academic reviews, especially when the subject is a topic that the author is clearly passionate about.

How about you?

E: I also tend to gravitate towards nonfiction, especially essays centered on adventure and self-reflection. I am especially fond of Thomas Dai’s “Driving Days” from NER 42.2. 

J: I absolutely loved Mark Harman’s erudite, hilarious piece published in NER 43.1 “Borges Translates Joyce Who Translates Himself.”

It was so nice talking with you about your experience at NER, Eleanor!

E: You too, John! I wish you all the best, this summer and beyond!

NER Interns: Where are they now?

Elisse Ota

Elisse Ota ’11 talks to NER intern Bel Spelman ’23 about the influence learning Japanese has on her writing and storytelling.

Bel Spelman: Where are you now, geographically and professionally? 

Elisse Ota: My husband and I have been waiting for the past year and a half to move to Japan, but, unfortunately, due to the pandemic and the closure of Japan’s borders, we’ve been held in limbo. Currently, I am living in California and am at work on a collection of short stories that I hope to finish this year.  

BS: What was one skill you developed as an undergraduate—either in school or through internships—that most benefits you today in your professional work?

EO: One of the greatest gifts I received at Middlebury was learning a new language, specifically Japanese. When you’re learning a new language you wade clumsily towards meaning and you don’t always get there via words alone. You find that you need other things to help you—body language, facial expression, intonation—and, as you gather up every clue you can find to understand what is being said, you realize that communication is not merely a matter of grammar and words, and that what is said reveals as much as it conceals. Often, what’s unsaid is the most important thing, especially in a high-context culture like Japan’s in which politeness dictates certain verbal acknowledgements that conceal one’s true feelings to preserve group harmony. As a learner of Japanese, I both learned how to speak Japanese and how to pay close attention to things other than language to understand what a person truly thought and felt. This ability to both use language and to read the subtext of a conversation has helped me tremendously as a fiction writer. People are complex. They don’t often say what’s truly important to them, and this is the reason I love storytelling. It is a way to show the truth when it’s too difficult, or painful, or coarse, or simplistic to tell it directly.     

BS: Do you have any book recommendations?  

EO: I recently finished Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry, which I thought was fantastic!  It’s a beautifully rendered portrait of a small farming community in Kentucky, and I appreciated Berry’s elegant and heart-wrenching exploration of what it means to hope while shedding expectations. I also love William Trevor’s work, especially his short story collection After Rain, and Mary Yukari Waters’s collection The Laws of Evening is one I go back to again and again. Tessa Hadley’s book, Bad Dreams and Other Stories, is also a gem!

BS: Is there a past project that you’re particularly fond of?

EO: Out of all the stories I’ve written, “Girl From the Moon,” which was published in Narrative, is one of my favorites.  I am also looking forward to the publication of another story called “The Paper Artist,” that will come out as a Ploughshares Solo this fall.  

Behind the Byline

Alyssa Pelish

NER fiction reader Mary Tharin speaks with Alyssa Pelish, whose story “Paleontology” appears in NER 43.1, about excavations, the unknowability of others, and embodied characters.

Mary Tharin: “Paleontology” begins with the painstaking excavation of the largest dinosaur ever uncovered. When I re-read those first paragraphs, it struck me that writers are constantly engaging in their own excavations, uncovering memories and distilling experiences to use in their fiction. Was that on your mind when you started this story?

Alyssa Pelish: I like that observation! That connection, though, wasn’t so much on my mind when I started the story. I had visited the dinosaur wing of the American Museum of Natural History, and I was taken by those signs that continually advise museum goers of the limits of paleontology: what we can’t in fact know about these creatures despite all the careful excavation. That continual admission seemed haunting to me—beautiful and haunting. And it made me think of the limits to what one can ever know about anyone else’s experience.

But then, of course, those museum signs no doubt also attracted my attention because I do spend so much time in that mode of excavation you describe.

MT: The story explores the limits of these excavations: the fact that we can never fully know others, or even ourselves. The narrator is vexed by these limits, and as a reader I sympathized with her. It made me wonder, though, what is behind our need to know so much about each other? What’s so frightening about the alternative?

AP: It’s a really good question. A misguided quest for intimacy? Fear of solipsism?

Miscommunication surfaces in various ways throughout the stories I write. For me, I think this recurring theme stems in part from an old, old fear of being misunderstood—and maybe working to understand others became a way of reassuring myself that I, too, could be understood, that some kind of connection could be forged.

There are, no doubt, other explanations.

I’ve been both fascinated and horrified by stories whose narrators show either an utter lack of regard for someone else’s interiority or a dangerous obsession with it. I’m thinking here of Humbert Humbert’s “safely solipsizing” Lolita, as well as Proust’s narrator’s obsession with what Albertine does when he’s not there, what he can never know about her. In either instance, the other person remains entirely unknowable. (That single, passing moment when it occurs to Humbert that he doesn’t know a thing about Lolita’s mind, that within this girl he calls Lolita there might be “a garden and a twilight”—but that he is incapable of knowing them.)

In a more heartening direction, the way the so-called problem of other minds gets handled in To the Lighthouse is soothing to me. Lily Briscoe first imagines that there exist, “in the chambers of the mind and heart” of Mrs. Ramsey, “tablets bearing sacred inscriptions,” which, if deciphered, could teach her everything she longs to know about this woman. But then Lily realizes that such information is not actually what she’s longing for: what she desires is “nothing that could be written in any language known to men”; what she desires, really, is “intimacy itself.” She recognizes that what she’s longing for is not is not an exhaustive inventory of the contents of another person’s mind. What she’s longing for is a sense of connection. It’s an idea that gets developed later in the novel, when we see how Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey understand each other not because of a strong intellectual connection but because of their shared intimacy. In that scene between them, hardly any verbal language is necessary. “She had not said it: yet he knew.”

That’s not where my narrator ends up. She’s not there yet. She’s made the mistake of thinking that knowing what her son is thinking (finding the inscribed tablets in the chambers of his mind) is the only way toward intimacy with him.

There’s a moment in that classic Thomas Nagel essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat,” that I find similarly soothing. Nagel concludes that, just because our means of apprehending the world won’t ever allow us to understand the subjective experience of being a bat doesn’t mean that bats (or any other creatures) don’t have experiences as rich as those of our own. This observation strikes me as a way of granting others a quiet dignity. There’s a garden within them, a twilight, that can just exist without our quantifying it. Maybe that’s closer to where my narrator ends up.

MT: The narrator of your story is a playwright and her husband is an actor. Is theater important to you? Has it influenced your writing?

AP: Hmmm. I’ve lived in New York for the past eleven years and have a good friend with a theater background, so I’ve certainly watched more theater and thought more about it than in any other period of my life. So, it’s there. But I don’t think of it as a big influence on my writing.

Theater emerged in this story because the narrator privileges talking as a means of knowing other people. It made sense for her to be a playwright who creates dialogues that, when performed, amount to a kind of wish fulfillment. The other elements of theater in this story then readily grew out of that: the self-excavation the Method allows, the skepticism about the correspondence between interiority and behavior that acting implies, and so on. I suppose that, in some ways, I’m interested in writing fiction as a kind of performance, as a means of inhabiting other roles while never being able to completely leave my own perspective behind.

There’s also the fact that, as a writer and reader, I love encountering a character’s interiority on the page. Where a character’s mind goes when they’re doing something in the physical world: the memories and free associations and reflections that arise, the way their particular perspective colors what they’re noticing in that physical world. Theater, of course, doesn’t allow such ready access to a character’s interiority. But that constraint has made me think more about how my characters are embodied, especially when and how to locate them in the physical space of a dialogue. So, for instance, instead of always using speech tags (she said, he asked), I like to experiment with attaching a line of dialogue to a relevant physical description (a facial expression, an action, a tone of voice) of the character or of the space. Thinking of my characters as embodied—as a particular body in a particular space—also becomes part of figuring out what they’ll do or think or feel next.

MT: The “Method” is presented in the story as a way for actors to tap into the essence of emotion. It struck me that this could be useful for writers of fiction as well. Did you have experience with the Method before writing this story? Is it a tool you yourself have used to deepen your storytelling?

AP: I actually knew very little about the Method before I began working on this story. But as I researched it, it did occur to me that it’s not unlike what I do when searching for a way to describe a given character’s perceptions and emotional reactions. Of course I want to be careful not to lend my own emotional and sensory memories to a character where it’s not relevant. But once I’ve figured out how a character should react, I definitely do some excavation of my own. So, no, I’ve never used the Method in any formal way, but writing this story made me more aware of the (lower case) methods I do use.

MT: The story contains snippets of plays that explore how words can be used to establish connection, but can also be meaningless or difficult to find. In the narrator’s play, Talking Board, two sisters use a Ouija board to confront difficult questions; while in The Bald Soprano, absurd dialogue is used to highlight the emptiness of small talk. The narrator seems to feel that words are tools essential to the project of uncovering truth and meaning, while her husband and son put less value and expectation on words. Did you aim to present both sides? Do you, ultimately, lean in one direction?

AP: I’m not sure that I present both sides equally: we see everything from the narrator’s perspective, and she’s so tethered to knowing the world through verbal language that, even when she’s made to reconsider that approach, she only comes to accept what she can’t know—not to consider what might be illuminating about other ways of knowing. It’s possible that comes next for her, but I was most interested in telling the story of her grappling with the limits of what she can know.

Mary Tharin is a fiction reader for NER. Her short stories have appeared in Sixfold, Five on the Fifth, and Collective Realms, among others. A native of California, she now lives in Italy where she teaches English.

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.

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