Elena, Mel, and Cerid review and discuss three of their nominees for the 2024 Pushcart Prize. Part 1 of this podcast includes readings of “Parteada por el Fuego/Twice Born” by E.N. Diaz, “December Rain” by Subarna Mohanty, and “Heavy” by Shaun Anthony McMichael. You’ll also hear reflections from each author on their piece, their craft, and what drives their creative process. Congrats to each of these three nominees!
Featured Authors:
E. N. Díaz (México, 1995) es poeta y cuentista. Sus escritos han aparecido en las revistas BULL Magazine, Letralia Tierra de Letras, Babab, The Café Irreal, Clarkesworld Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, y en el blog Jóvenes en la Revista de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
E. N. Díaz (México, 1995) is a bilingual poet and short story writer. Their writings have appeared in BULL Magazine, Letralia Tierra de Letras, The Café Irreal, Clarkesworld Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Revista Casapais, Revista Larus, Strange Horizons and others. You can find more of their work at Bluesky: @endiaaz.bsky.social WordPress: https://endiaazblog.wordpress.com
Nominated Poetry: Parteada por el Fuego / Twice Born by E. N. Díaz on The Metaworker website
Subarna Mohanty writes poetry and short stories that explore the intricacies of human relationships. An avid reader and movie enthusiast, she prefers fiction to reality and draws inspiration from the stories that surround her. Her work has been featured in Sparks Magazine and Alipore Poetry Post, among others. Through her writing, she aims to inspire readers to see the world from fresh perspectives, fostering empathy and a deeper connection to the human experience.
Nominated Short Story: December Rain on The Metaworker website
Since 2007, Shaun Anthony McMichael has taught writing to students from around the world, in classrooms, juvenile detention halls, mental health treatment centers, and homeless youth drop-ins throughout the Seattle area. He is the editor of The Shadow Beside Me (2020) and The Story of My Heart (2021), anthologies of poetry by youth affected by trauma, mental illness, and instability. Over 85 of his works have been published, including the forthcoming short story collection The Wild Familiar (Fall, 2024; CJ Press). Keep up with him at shaunanthonymcmichael.com.
Nominated Poetry: Heavy on The Metaworker website
Episode Transcript:
Elena L. Perez: 1:06
Hi, everyone. We’re here today with part one of our two-part podcast series featuring our 2024 Pushcart Prize nominees. This is our second year nominating for this prize, and we’re glad to be able to provide this formal recognition of the hard work they put into their writing. First off, we’ll introduce ourselves. I’m Elena Perez, the editor-in-chief of The Metaworker.
Melissa Reynolds: 1:30
I’m Melissa Reynolds, also an editor at Metaworker.
Cerid Jones: 1:34
And I’m Cerid Jones, the international editor here at The Metaworker.
Elena L. Perez: 1:40
And today we have a special guest joining us, our new podcast intern, Nevaeh. Say hello, Nevaeh, and give us a quick intro.
Nevaeh Dudley: 1:48
Hello, everyone. I’m Nevaeh Dudley. I’m a first year sophomore at Howard University, and I’m super excited.
Elena L. Perez: 1:55
So, she’ll be with us for at least the next couple months, editing these Pushcart episodes and a couple others, and learning how we put our podcasts together. You won’t hear too much from her today, but she has a couple ideas for future episodes, so we’re all really excited to work with her to produce those. Sign up for our newsletter to get notifications about when those episodes will drop.
Melissa Reynolds: 2:18
In today’s episode, we’re celebrating our 2024 Pushcart Prize nominees. We published so many incredible pieces of writing in 2024, and it wasn’t easy to choose just six. But after much deliberation, we’re happy to feature these authors who surprised us, made us think, and whose writing left us with a deep emotional impact.
Cerid Jones: 2:41
In this series, we asked each of our six nominees to read an excerpt and share with us some insights about their piece and themselves as writers. Each episode will feature three of our nominees, as well as a short discussion from the Metaworker editors about what made us decide to nominate each piece for a Pushcart. We hope you enjoy this feature series as much as we enjoy presenting it.
Elena L. Perez: 3:05
In this episode, we’re featuring E.N. Diaz, Subarna Mohanty, and Shaun A. McMichael. So, I’ll start by introducing our first author.
E.N. Diaz, Mexico 1995, is a bilingual poet and short story writer. Their writings have appeared in Bull Magazine, Letralia Tierra de Letras, The Café Real, Clarkesworld Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Revista Casa Pais, Revista La Rus, Strange Horizons, and others. You can find more of their work at Bluesky @endiaaz.bsky.social and at WordPress at endiaazblog.wordpress.com. And now I’m going to read E.N.’s poem. This is “Parteada por el Fuego/Twice Born”, by E.N. Diaz. Content warning: graphic birth. Translated from the Spanish by the author.
Elena L. Perez (reading E.N.’s poem): 4:21
The smell of trash dripping days in the sun stains the walls with its yellow gunk. Hanging from a tangle of wires the only lightbulb buzzes like a fly trapped in a spiderweb. The Husband lying in the middle of the room in a nest of old covers and fetid shadows turns his face hidden under his mop of hair towards the door fixing his bloodshot eyes on the Wife. She kneels next to him, holding a set of pliers and a long kitchen knife. She caresses the Husband’s right leg– the filth of his exile an armor of asphalt. Throbbing between the cracks a long cut peeks, slashing up his knee all the way to his hip. Its lips are sealed shut with tin thread. The Wife smiles, digging her nails into his flesh, and the Husband moans. It is time to give birth. With one savage move she slashes the sutures and his leg pops, flooding the floor with golden ichor. The primal howling of her lover arouses her singing as she digs in his entrails the product of that illicit union. The Husband faints. The sweetest wailing hooks his soul back up to the surface. The Wife shows him a small bundle wrapped in tatters. Peeking through, a sweet strawberry dripping pus. He runs a finger over its forehead, through its hair, and finds two little bumps that worry him at first, but then he realizes they are just tiny horns. Exhausted, the Husband collapses in his waste and watches as the Wife takes his child away. The lock buries itself in the air like a nameless tombstone.
E.N. Diaz: 6:26
Hello, my name is E.N. Diaz and I’m from Sonora, Mexico. The inspiration for “Parteada por el Fuego/Twice Born”, comes from Greek mythology. My poem is a retelling of sorts of the birth of the Greek god Dionysus. It came about when I was rereading Las Bacantes (The Bacchae) by Euripides. And I remember reading the phrase ‘Parteada por el Fuego’, which kind of translates as ‘birth by the fire’ and that just struck something in me and this kind of cadence of language appeared in my head and I started writing, not really knowing where I was going or just being really interested in the sound of the language in my head. I wrote it first in Spanish and then I translated to English, which was really fun because some of the language I had to play with in order to make it fit the target language from the source language, which was really fun. And Spanish and English, although we have a lot of connection culturally, they are very, very different languages. So, finding the music in English was really, really fun.
For me being a writer, it basically is who I am. I don’t know. I don’t want to do anything else with my life. I don’t have any other kind of ambition. I just really love doing this. And I have played around in most genres. The first thing that I ever wrote was a novel when I was in my teens, a very bad one. And then I fell in love with short stories. So, I also write short stories. And then I fell in love with poetry. Although my love for poetry was there from the beginning, I felt like I couldn’t really write poetry. Not because I lacked talent, but because I was kind of forbidden to write poetry. Not by anybody in my family or teachers or anything like that, but by a sense of kind of guilt, like I felt guilty for writing poetry and reading poetry. I always, when I wanted to read poetry, I would talk myself out of it and the same happened when I wanted to write it. I don’t know where that came from but that’s how I felt for years and years and years until finally last year I was in a very dark place and only poetry took me out of it and helped me through it. But I also write short stories and I love short stories.
For me, being nominated with “Parteada por el Fuego/Twice Born”, for the Pushcart Award is… I was really speechless when I read the email telling me that I was being nominated. I did not expect it at all and I just feel very grateful and very humbled by the whole experience. And the lovely words that the wonderful people at the magazine have said about my piece —it’s just a dream come true, really. I was not expecting it. And also it’s very humbling to be writing in a language that is not your own and be recognized. It’s just really, really lovely and a lovely experience.
And I am currently working on a…I just finished revising a short story collection, actually two short story collections. One is more fantasy /myth inspired and the other one is more realist with a dash of fantasy. New, weird kind of stuff. And I also just finished revising my first collection of poetry. None of these have been accepted for publication at any publishing house, but I’m still working on them and I’m hopeful that maybe next year it’ll be the year of publishing a book, finally. It will be awesome. But I’m still working on them, and my poetry collection is a little bit more of what “Parteada por el Fuego/Twice Born”, is. It takes inspiration from mythology, from fairy tales, from popular myth, and it talks about the body, about sexuality, about gender identity, about… mental health a little bit, so it’s been that that one it’s one of the most difficult but most fun writing projects I’ve ever embarked upon. I loved writing it and I’m really loving revising it, even when it’s really hard.
And with the perfect writing environment—I can write pretty much anywhere. I just need, I sometimes don’t even have a notebook. I write on my notes app when I don’t have anything available. I actually had, for the longest time, a dream of living out in the woods in a hut and writing. But I don’t know, there are a lot of serial killers out there and I’m afraid all of the time. But kind of, yes, writing away in the forest will be like my dream for maybe a few months, but then I will have to come back to civilization.
Elena L. Perez: 12:42
Thank you, E.N., for sharing your thoughts with us and your answers. We’ll jump right into the discussion. I love that this piece is in both English and in Spanish. So, I didn’t read it out loud in Spanish because I don’t have much practice speaking, but I loved reading the words on the page. The sound of the words is so lovely in the Spanish version, and the English version also has that same quality. The words have a distinct sound to mirror the actions, like ‘slashes of the sutures, and trash dripping days in the sun, yellow gunk’—they’re very active descriptive words, so they just make the images in the poem come alive.
Melissa Reynolds: 13:25
Speaking of those images, they really got to me because there are some fairly gruesome images in this, especially when the wife is cutting her husband’s right leg. The images definitely got to me and that’s a compliment and not something that takes away from the poem. It’s actually one of its strengths because I was—ugh—I was pretty grossed out.
Elena L. Perez: 13:49
Yeah, same.
Cerid Jones: 13:51
Yeah, I wouldn’t say that I was necessarily grossed out, but then I do read a little bit of horror. I think for me, I really love how those moments…it’s vivid, right? But they create this kind of in-between sort of feeling. There’s just this real magic realism sort of encapsulated that this doesn’t feel like, even though it’s a brutal act, it feels symbolic for something so much bigger. And even though that that’s kind of shocking, it pulls you in, it makes you intrigued and feeling that sort of cyclic kind of response. And especially when we hear Diaz talk about, you know, the inspiration of the poem, that really sinks in and resonates just how masterful Diaz is in creating those parallels and those mythic dreamscape symbolic of levels of human consciousness or levels of understanding ourselves and the world around us and human nature. It really pulls all of that together for me, I think.
Elena L. Perez: 14:57
Yeah. And speaking of that, yeah, I thought it was really interesting that the male partner is birthing this child. It’s a reversal that kind of makes me think about current events, you know, with abortion being such a topic nowadays, or —not just in the US, but around the world. I don’t know, maybe I’m reading too much into it and it wasn’t the author’s intention. But it just makes me think of, you know, the contrast of what the world might be like if males had to undergo the birthing process and how things could be different or just what that world would look like.
Cerid Jones: 15:33
Well, I mean, I think that’s kind of fitting because this is based on a myth, right? And our interpretations of myths evolve and grow and change based on what our socio-political climate is. So, whether that’s the intention or not, I think that encapsulates really, really well the power of symbolic storytelling and how it can keep reinventing itself again and again. Much like, I mean, this poem is a reinvention of an old Greek story. And that’s remarkable. And I love that you’re able to pull current events into this as well. It shows the so many layers, this beautiful weaving of work really has.
Melissa Reynolds: 16:15
Yeah, and I just want to bring up that this new being that is brought into the world is described as, you know, ‘sweet and strawberry’ and, you know, like, ‘aw, this little precious little baby’, but then it’s dripping pus and it’s got horns that are just starting to grow. So, you’re like, ‘okay, what, what is this exactly’? The sweet little baby that may not be what it appears at first. Well, obviously not because it’s being born from a leg instead of, you know, a stomach or something. But yeah, I really like that aspect because it really makes you stop and think about what’s really going on here.
Cerid Jones: 16:53
And that is my favorite line, by the way, Mel, that ‘sweet strawberry dripping pus’ because that just has those conflicts that you feel, you know, like it’s —you’re drawn. Every time I read that line, my visual imagery just keeps flipping back and forth. And again, that’s part of that duality, you know, that comes through this piece.
Melissa Reynolds: 17:13
Now we’ll move on to Subarna Mohanty. Subarna writes poetry and short stories that explore the intricacies of human relationships. An avid reader and movie enthusiast, she prefers fiction to reality and draws inspiration from stories that surround her. Through her writing, she aims to inspire readers to see the world from fresh perspectives, fostering empathy and a deeper connection to the human experience. Next is an excerpt from Sabarna’s piece, which will be read by myself, Mel. “December Rain”
Mel reading Subarna Mohanty’s words: 18:09
Two days before New Year’s, you went home again. You took the pickle jars we had emptied and the sweet boxes we had used to keep biscuits in the kitchen. “I’ll bring more this time,” you had said and kissed me at the doorway before leaving. When you came back, the double coloured, golden watch which was your father’s and his father’s and his father’s and so on, was back, fastened tightly on your wrist. I had dreamt about your wrist, and your arms, your lips, your thighs and your back, ten thousand times in the ten days you were gone. I might have talked in my sleep too, but no one was there to listen of course. I wanted to tell you that. But you seemed far away when you stood at the doorway, and I stood at the doorway inches from you and looked at you like you were December rain and all I needed in January was December rain. You said you were leaving. You said a girl was waiting downstairs, in a taxi whose engine was still on and which was to take you both to your new apartment. You said she was your wife, and that you had come to take the rest of your things.
Melissa Reynolds: 18:09
Subarna was kind enough to answer a few of our questions, so I would like to share her answers with you as well.
Mel reading Subarna Mohanty’s words: 19:20
I am Subarna Mohanty. I’m from a small town called Cuttack in the eastern Indian state of Odisha. I wrote “December Rain” at a point in life where I was struggling with very low self-confidence because of multiple failures in something I had been earnestly pursuing for a long time. At that low time, I found refuge in stories. I was watching “The Bear” TV series, and I heard the song, “Let Down” by Radiohead play in it at a very pivotal point in the story. The song had a very haunting kind of mood, which stayed with me. I was also reading the book, “The Rachel Incident” by Caroline O’Donoghue. There was a side character in it who couldn’t be brave enough to stand up for his love. It was heartbreaking, to say the least, and it got me thinking about how sometimes the pressures of life do burden us that way. I wanted to write a story with a similar ending. I kept listening to “Let Down” by Radiohead over and over again and kept thinking about the ending of the book. All of this happened at the same time. Then one day, I came back home from outside, sat on my bed, opened the Notes app in my phone, and the story, “December Rain”, basically wrote itself down. Then I sent it to my best friend, and he liked it.
Honestly, this short story was my first one to ever get published anywhere that mattered. I did write and scribble in my notebooks throughout school and college, but that time I wrote mostly for myself, and sometimes for my friends to read. I only started writing seriously now, and those friends do have a huge role in encouraging me to do this.
Being a writer means everything to me. I view this world we live in as a really big story being written with many plots and subplots, themes and characters. All of this chaos and mess around us makes sense to me only that way. We are all stories. I think that is why we were born, why life exists on Earth. What else could be the purpose of life?
Being nominated with “December Rain” for a Pushcart Prize, for me, is the biggest and most pleasant surprise from the universe that I have ever gotten. As I told earlier, I had been going through a phase of multiple failures in something that I had been pursuing for a very long time. It was ugly. My mental health was down in the gutters. I had dwindling self-confidence. I was questioning everything. And in that state of utter despair, I had written the story for myself, just as a way of, ‘ah, what the hell, I might as well try and fail on this too’. So, one can imagine what being nominated for Pushcart did for me. It pulled me out of that phase, told me that I should write more, and I did after that. It’s the best thing that has happened to me in a long time.
Currently, I’m working on some science fiction short stories. It’s a new genre for me, but I really like reading science fiction stories and watching sci-fi movies and TV series. It just completely awes and marvels me how the human brain can imagine, perceive, and create a future that isn’t here yet. It’s one of the most beautiful things to come out of human creativity, really, so I always had the inkling to create in the genre. A short story I wrote has been shortlisted by two anthologies, which has boosted my confidence, and I’m eager to explore more in this genre.
My perfect writing environment is in my room, with the doors locked and no one disturbing me for hours and hours. Being away from people and being in my comfort zone is all that matters to me. The calm and the silence helps me think and create.
Melissa Reynolds: 23:19
Now we’ll move on to the discussion of this piece with the editors.
I particularly love this piece because I had a tiny bit of a link to my real life. This character brings pickle jars back from their home and this really grabbed my attention. It’s such a small detail in the story, but it’s something that I relate to so fully because my kids are pickle fanatics, and I often reuse the jars. We will clean out a huge pickle jar and use it as a giant water bottle instead of going and buying the big expensive ones. So, the way that the story uses those jars as a connection to home and how they’re used when they’re empty really struck me as the small thing that I connected with, that it’s strange sometimes how those connections can form. And this one for me feels a little bit strange because the story isn’t just about these pickle jars at all, but I still loved it.
Elena L. Perez: 24:28
That’s really what I liked about this piece too, was the details. They seem very small, but they have a lot of importance. Like you said, the pickle jars and the sweets and the brown and gold watch and the cloth that they hang between the room that they pull down later. It’s just those small things, but they have a lot of significance. But also because this relationship is sort of a secret —from themselves, too, like not just from the outside world, but from themselves. Almost it feels like those little details are kind of their way into the relationship you know without actually saying it’s a relationship so it’s kind of like markers for them to keep track of —not to keep track, but like—
Melissa Reynolds: 25:19
Connections.
Elena L. Perez: 25:20
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. To feel connected.
Melissa Reynolds: 25:23
Yeah, I love that. And I love how the blanket that separates the roommate is brought up again at the end as a, I don’t want to say touchstone, but kind of. Like, this is what the speaker or the narrator is holding on to, is like, ‘hey, I wonder if you treat your wife with that barrier, just like you did with me’. And it makes me wonder if this roommate ever fully connected, you know? Like, they’re closed off. It’s kind of sad, but it’s also one of those things that that’s kind of what this person connects with at the same time.
Cerid Jones: 26:00
Hm. Well, I mean, the whole story constantly evolves around this tug and pull of yearning and desire and self-denial and vulnerability and lack of actually being able to be vulnerable. Like, the whole tone of this piece is so poetically beautiful in this sort of sense of yearning but there is such an undertone throughout it of the lack of understanding of oneself and what (one’s) own level of vulnerability is. You know, like even though that sheet comes down, the armor doesn’t come off, and it’s really poignant in the moment where we get that description of, you know, standing at the doorway —which is the perfect excerpt to choose, by the way, from this piece if you ask me— because there’s that that longing there in January but all they want is a December rain, you know? You know, they’re both in this doorway. They are so close, yet they are so separate, because they are both really afraid of their own vulnerabilities that they can never fully remove that blanket in the real world or even within themselves.
And it’s this tragic, beautiful, masculine kind of tenderness, which we don’t see very often. I mean, that’s what really stuck out to me about this piece is I really enjoy reading stories that explore a masculine vulnerability. And this is on multiple levels. I mean, obviously there is sort of a taboo level involved in this since they are two boys sharing a room, or I think two men, but I think they say two boys somewhere in the piece here, so it really deals and wrestles with those issues in and around societal constraints that get placed on us as individuals no matter what framework they’re in. About when you can and cannot drop the cloth between things that veil between two worlds and how scary that is. Internal and external. But that’s also something really beautiful, much like December rain is beautiful —and longing for it in January —that line just haunts me. I just think this is such a gorgeously intimate piece even though it’s really describing distance and those polarities are just chef’s kiss. Beautiful piece.
Cerid Jones: 28:26
Our last Pushcart Nominee author in this episode is Shaun with his poem, “Heavy”. Since 2007, Shaun Anthony McMichael has taught writing to students from around the world in classrooms, juvenile detention halls, mental health treatment centers, and homeless youth drop-ins throughout the Seattle area. He is the editor of “The Shadow Beside Me” (2020), and “The Story of My Heart” (2021), anthologies of poetry by youth affected by trauma, mental health, and instability. Over 85 of his works have been published, including the forthcoming short story collection, “The Wild Familiar” (2024), CJ Press. You can keep up with him at his website shaunanthonymcmichael.com.
Shaun Anthony McMichael: 29:17
I’m Sean Anthony McMichael from Seattle, Washington. I’m dedicating this reading to Elena, Cerid, and Mel at Metaworker for their generosity, talent, and hard work providing this platform for writers. Here’s my poem. It’s featured in my debut collection, “Jack of All”, published by New Meridian Press in October 2024. The poem is called “Heavy”.
1. You carried it kinda heavy though, old Johnny confided on my last day of a 3 year gig slinging word-songs, poems, and prompts at youth without housing or certain tomorrows. Old John who on titanium hips, stayed light, all spirit, as he sailed alongside these kids, anchored in addiction while in my youth, I plodded on, bewildered by the teens, each morning bearing new banners of brilliance and blood. Heavy.
2. I lifted Grandma’s spare oxygen tank easily in my little hands, though she’d warned it’d be heavy. I was glad. Strong for the first time and good thing for she was gasping into the light of a spring morning. I’m out, she said. Hurry! And I lugged the evergreen cylinder to her to clip in the clear hose into valve, into nostrils. She cranked the nozzle. And we waited to the soundtrack of silence, time slipping away. Still no air. Call 911, she whispered. This tank’s empty. A full would have been too heavy for you to lift, the paramedic scolded, torpedoing a full tank into the castered carrier crouched by Grandma’s bedside along with the weight of work, the dire need to task death away and the probability of acting in error.
3. In seeped oxygen to keep Grandma alive for six more months of scrapbooking, showing me how disparate images could unite into a whole sobering you, clobbering you with wonder, the magazine clippings’ sheen lit by spring sun. So light. So separate from the heaviness of the tank, my future work, and my heart.
4. Old John’s tossed-off remark about my work left me the way Grandma did as she was carted out by paramedics, the way the youth did, light as sparrows, moving on to new, promise- vacant underpasses or gainful employment, me gasping for breath, anchored by their greatest lines and memories, a different kind of addiction.
I wrote Heavy around two years ago. As with many poems that start with a word or a phrase that tumble through our consciousnesses, “Heavy” comes from two sources in my biography. Between 2010 and 2013, I worked at a homeless youth center in Seattle’s U District as quote unquote, “zine instructor”. I got paid to pay homeless youth to make zines. I loved that job so much that I knew I wanted to be a teacher. And so after three and a half years, with a heavy heart, I left to start work in public schools. At my goodbye party, drug and alcohol dependency counsellor, Johnny Ohta, said that line to me about how I carried the job kind of heavy. And like most things that Johnny said, I knew in my heart that he was right. Why had I carried things so heavy? I wondered this through the years of Johnny’s coda rattled around my brain. And one day I asked this question and my mind went to the memory about my grandma.
I wrote the first three stanzas in less than an hour. I cried, which is usually a good sign. And then I read them to my wife who suggested I write a fourth stanza bringing things back to Johnny and the unhoused youth. And as I always am when I listen to my wife’s suggestions, I’m happy with the result.
Being a writer to me means to be alive. When asked why she wrote, Flannery O’Conner said, “because I’m good at it”. As I’m no Flannery O’Conner, I write because I like it. Ergo scribo sum is Latin for ‘I am, therefore I write’. And for me, that’s as good a life mantra as any. I’ve been making up stories since I was in fifth or sixth grade and writing since around eighth grade. My first works were Lord of the Rings, Narnia fan fiction. I pivoted to literary fiction and poetry in late high school and early college. And these are my current forms. So far, they’ve culminated into two books. In addition to my debut book of poetry, “Jack of All”, my debut short story collection, “The Wild Familiar”, came out in August of 2024. Writing is my wayfinder toward beings I never could have hoped to meet, which kindle of self-losing and languages see [inaudible].
For me, Metaworker’s nomination of my poem, “Heavy” for the Pushcart Award is like finally being put on the map. I’m so grateful. While I feel so lucky to have been published over 100 times online and in print, I’ve been rejected probably over a thousand times by now. I’ve long since stopped counting. And those rejections have mostly been form rejections or non-responses. So, being nominated is nothing short of wind in my sails. I’m going to be writing no matter what, but if I can be writing and have people like the folks at Metaworker appreciate my writing, all the better.
Currently, I’m working on finding a publisher for my first novel, “Whistlepunk Falls”. I’m also promoting my first two books, “Jack of All” and “The Wild Familiar”, published within three months of each other in fall of 2024. I’m trying to get through my sixth year of teaching English language learners at a public high school in my community. I’m parenting, husbanding, and adulting, etc. Faulkner said that ‘I only write when I’m inspired’, but I’m inspired every day. During the school year, my heart is just carved up into so many different pieces. It’s hard to have any heart left for poems or characters. And so I’m only inspired usually when I have time, which for me is usually in the summers.
My perfect writing environment is at the dinner table while my six-year-old son is in the living room watching Garfield for the fifth or sixth time. The favorite writing retreat I’ve ever harbored was in a garage converted into an office by my wife’s general contracting acumen. She did this while she was pregnant and with a newborn, no less. And so, with its own bathroom and kitchenette, this converted garage was the perfect remove to write in. Its windows overlooked the garden, overgrown in Spanish Bluebells and powered by a glossy Abelia, its leaves glowing golden in their jackets of dew. Robin’s song modulated above and below the luffing bus engines on a busy street nearby, and I relished the hours at the keys in the shade, not waiting for my son to be born, not waiting for school to start, not waiting to become a famous author, not waiting to be discovered, but watching the bees and the light sifting through the trees, being in the flow of language and ideas.
Elena L. Perez: 37:01
Can I start? I really love this one because of the play on words. So, you all know already that I love puns and wordplay. And this piece, I felt, did a wonderful job of utilizing the different kinds of heavy. There’s a physical heaviness of the oxygen tank that’s mentioned, but there’s also the mental heaviness of dealing with ailing grandparents and with the troubled youth that the narrator works with. So, it was interesting to me to see the the contrast of those different kinds of heaviness with the positivity that the narrator talks about in the character of Old John, who, if I’m reading it right, has one artificial leg or some sort of artificial thing. Old John is this positive guy who, because he has these artificial legs—like stereotypically, you know, one would think that that might be a source of sadness or struggle—but I liked that in this piece, he’s the one who’s being that positive source for the narrator. And so I liked that contrast between that positivity with the heaviness that the narrator is working through.
Melissa Reynolds: 38:16
Yeah, speaking of that, part two of the poem really brought to me this feeling of an insurmountable mountain that this speaker had to climb in order to help his grandmother. He’s a young kid and the oxygen tank is heavy. And so he’s like, ‘I got to get her the oxygen’, of course. But he’s able to do it with no problem. And he’s like, ‘yes!’ And only to get to the top of that mountain and feel like he’s saving his grandma only to find out that he could only lift it because it was empty. That really got to me on that one because so much of life can feel like that. You’re doing well and you think you’re finally reaching the top of the mountain only to see, ‘oh, no, this is not what you expected’ and you have more work to do yet. So, different context, perhaps, but that’s what I took from it.
Cerid Jones: 39:11
For me, I really love that this is such a deeply personal poem, but it has this universal relatability for exactly the reasons you’re talking about, Mel. We’ve all experienced some level of heaviness or burden that has felt like a weight at some points in our lives and at other times felt like a success. Do you know what I mean? And there’s this constant kind of polarity in between those two things. Like you were talking about earlier, Elena. You know, old Johnny, you know, has titanium hips. His hips have developed now to be entirely —like titanium’s strong as steel, right? It bears all that weight of his experience in his life. For him now, having that weight in those hips is the success. You know, he can still walk and do that. Whereas, like you say, that makes a beautiful parallel against the boy who feels like a hero for lifting this only to realize, you know, it’s actually empty. And so we get these beautiful mirrors from different stages in our lives and how we reflect and think about the different things that we carry with us.
And I love, again, like there’s this vulnerability and again, a masculine vulnerability, that really comes through in this piece. But he makes it so universal that no matter who, we can relate to this, we can connect to these concepts and these ideas. We can look at it on a micro, we can look at it on a macro. We also get to see a different perspective, at least for me, you know, as a woman who carries different kinds of heavinesses and different lots of experiences. I really saw a whole different perspective to ways that we can kind of deal with those layers of weight that exist.
And I just also want to add in really quickly that I absolutely love the way Shaun puts the voices in when he reads the poem. Hearing him read it really adds a different layer of weight to the poem. I love how comfortable he is with his own vulnerability both in the poem and his ability to talk about the poem. For something that’s so deeply personal, I just think that’s phenomenal and something we need to see so much more of in our world now. And I just think it really hits so many important notes about our society and about ourselves and our progression of humanity and it’s got a real sort of fearlessness about it despite dealing with some really heavy, meaty topics.
Elena L. Perez: 41:50
Yeah. One thing I wanted to bring up real quick, the mention of sparrows at the end reminded me. So, I was brought up Catholic and there’s a Bible verse that says something about sparrows not needing to worry about where they’ll sleep or what they’ll eat because God takes care of them. So, that kind of reminded me of that. Like, what you were saying, Cerid, it’s that duality. Of trying to aspire to live like that, like to live, you know, trusting that things will work out, you know, you’ll be okay in the end, but then also having to grapple with these struggles that are in your life. The sparrow line also gave me that impression, Cerid, of, like, aspiration. Of trying your best to keep positive and keep moving forward and inspire others, like this narrator does. Especially at the end, you can see that he really does connect with these kids that he’s teaching in that way. So yeah, I really like that.
Cerid Jones: 42:50
Really interesting, I did not know that —I mean I don’t come from a religious background –but my connection to sparrows is they’re actually one of the closest living relatives to the dinosaurs in lots of ways. You know, like sparrows are so —like, you know, sparrows have survived even the weight of a comet landing on the planet, do you know what I mean? Like, they have survived, so it works on two layers, which I really dig. I just couldn’t help interjecting with that.
Elena L. Perez: 43:18
Oh, I love that. I’m glad you did. See, yeah, oh my gosh. I love, I just love all the layers in this piece.
So, that wraps up our discussion for this first installment of our episodes highlighting our 2024 Pushcart Prize nominees. Thank you so much to E.N., Subarna, and Shaun for recording your readings and answering our questions. I really enjoyed hearing more about your pieces and your writing life.
Thank you to our listeners for tuning in and check out the episode description to read the full nominated pieces on our website.
Cerid Jones: 43:51
We hope you will join us for part two featuring Rezyl Grace, Carol E. Anderson, and Allister Nelson. Until next time.
