Raw Earth Ink
Spit mixed with dirt – Muddy words flow
Author Spotlight: Dominik Slusarczyk
Dominik Slusarczyk won 3rd prize in Fiction in the Northwind Writing Award 2024 for his story “Erase Every Plate”. It is an honor to feature his Q&A here on Raw Earth Ink as part of our promotion of truly exceptional authors.
Q & A
Candice: Who are your influences in fiction? If they are not fictional, such as the natural world, or a painter, muse, or other, please explain.
Dominik: I started out as a painter so my biggest influence in getting into art was Vincent Van Gogh. As far as writing goes, I am a big fan of poetry so my biggest influences in getting into writing were Carol Ann Duffy and T.S. Eliot.
CD: This is not a children’s story but it also could be a children’s story because of the moral, fable-like quality it possesses. That’s a compliment. Was there an element of awareness that it could have that children’s story power to “Erase Every Plate”?
Dominik: I think all writing should be appropriate to people of all ages. I take great care to not include adult themes in my work because that would exclude younger people.
CD: Aside from other writers, what else gets your blood pumping when you feel engaged to write on subjects? What are those subjects and why do they appeal to you?
Dominik: I am always trying to experiment and try new things. The greatest subjects only appear after extensive work on a particular style.
CD: Tell us a little about what brought you to becoming a writer, what your story is there, and how it evolved from the time you began writing, until now?
Dominik: I became a writer because I wanted to make longer films. Paintings are small so you can’t say much with a painting. I started by writing poetry and then started writing fiction about a year later. I have recently started writing strange films with odd structures.
CD: You took some risks with this piece, as it’s untraditional. Did you think your writing would be received with as much love as it has been, when you submitted? Or did you fear the readers wouldn’t get what you were trying to say?
Dominik: I think this style is interesting. I was expecting people to want to publish some of it but I probably wasn’t expecting to place in competitions.
CD: Can you talk to us about writing this short story and how you began writing in this style and what your objective was in writing this and submitting it to an award?
Dominik: The idea came to me one day while I was writing other things. I wanted to write about objects because they are regularly ignored in favour of people.
CD: Did you find your writing changed over time and if so, how do you see that happening and what were the influencing factors to cause that shift/change?
Dominik: This style definitely changed over time. It is important to let what you are doing naturally change as new ideas come to you as you write.
CD: Your style is incredibly distinct. Did you deliberately create a niche in your writing that enabled your work to stand out and be noticed?
Dominik: I was trying to do something different because I think it is important to be constantly experimenting.
CD: As a reader of fiction, what do you like and dislike about the fiction you read, and why?
Dominik: My favourite part of writing is endings so I enjoy fiction that has a good ending.
CD: Was this a piece of fiction that flowed out of you or more one you planned out consciously? In other words, what was the inspiration there?
Dominik: I do not plan fiction at all. I was writing in this particular style but none of the elements of the story were planned beforehand.
Author bio: Dominik Slusarczyk is an artist who makes everything from music to painting. He was educated at The University of Nottingham where he got a degree in biochemistry. His fiction has been published in various literary magazines including moonShine Review and SHiFT – A Journal of Literary Oddities. His fiction came 1st in The Cranked Anvil Short Story Competition, 2nd in The Streetlight Magazine Flash Fiction Contest, and was a finalist in a number of other competitions. He is on Instagram and Twitter as @dom_slusarczyk.
To read The 2024 Northwind Treasury, including Dominik’s winning piece, you can purchase it in paperback on Lulu, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon, or as an eBook on Kindle. To see the list of contents and winners, visit our winner’s page.
Author Spotlight: Braeden Michaels
Braeden Michaels won 3rd prize in Prose Poetry in the Northwind Writing Award 2024 for his poem “Once Upon A Rain, She Bloomed.” It is an honor to feature his Q&A here on Raw Earth Ink as part of our promotion of truly exceptional authors.
Q & A
Candice: Braeden, firstly thank you so much for your beautiful submission. What stood out to all six judges of the prose-poetry award was the enduring strength of your storytelling and the vividness of Once Upon a Rain, She Bloomed. What inspired this story to be written?
Braeden: The poem is the epilogue of my most recent book Once Upon a Rain, She Bloomed. The idea of the book and the ending the book with this epilogue was understanding that you need to love yourself first. Often, we try to find people to make ourselves feel complete. Sometimes we try so hard to please others and not make ourselves happy in the process, but not realizing it. At some point we discover that we needed to meet this person to learn and grow as an individual. Often difficult times make us grow the most. The rain is symbolic of her tears.
CD: The gorgeous title alone hooked me. I have read a lot of your work and you consistently knock it out of the park. Raw Earth Ink and The Northwind Writing Award are very lucky to attract writers of your caliber and we deeply appreciate the effort you put into every single piece. How do you keep your work so sharp and finely written? What’s your secret?
Braeden: A lot of is just read, read, read! I am a fan of old poetry. I use a lot of symbolism and don’t want too much to be forward and direct. I want each line to have depth to pull the reader in. I take a lot of pride in language, word choice and titles. I will massage a piece until I am satisfied.
CD: With lines like: “I lie in my bed of careless decisions.” It’s impossible not to see you as a natural wordsmith. Have you always been able to crank out killer lines like that?
Braeden: I do feel it is natural, but I read and write daily. I have more patience in my craft and may spend a few days on a poem realizing this is going into a book. I want to make sure the entire book is cohesive.
CD: Does it annoy you when you read sub-par work that everyone seems to think is excellent? What do you think that’s about?
Braeden: I find it fascinating what pieces readers do comment on. In my head, I think I do have poems that I think are good, great or just nailed it. Sometimes the ones that are just good may get a reaction that I did not expect. I don’t have control of how people respond but always it’s encouraging.
CD: Was it challenging to write such a short prose-poetry piece, given it’s both poetic but also very much prose, and you tackle many things within less than a page worth of text?
Braeden: I am an introverted individual and need to be mentally challenged. Writing serves me so many different purposes but yes, I love the challenge.
CD: The story has several themes, it also feels like a song at times, or an ode to something, and there’s basically a lot happening with a killer opening line and equally powerful and impactful closing line. The language is gorgeous. How important is language in exploring the themes you write about?
Braeden: The language to me is critical. It is how I separate myself as an author. The language for me is the key ingredient.
CD: We all thought it was remarkable you could write so much in less than one page. When did you begin to write in the prose-poetry genre? How does it distinguish itself for you as a genre? Why are you comfortable with it?
Braeden: Honestly, I have a fear of writing prose pierces that are too long. I don’t want to bore the reader. I have always written more verse poetry but have dabbled in prose a little bit. When I won 1st place last year, it was an eye-opener. I am becoming more comfortable with it because I love the challenge of telling a story. Winning the award taught me so much about myself. This makes me more passionate about what I am doing.
CD: There’s a ton of beauty to Once Upon a Rain, She Bloomed. If you had to say, what is the key message for you in this?
Braeden: Pain and heartache will make you stronger. We all are flowers, and our tears make us look inward.
CD: Are there some quieter sub-texts here? Share any you want to.
Braeden: This is my trademark. Just the title alone is a subtext. I think you or anyone could read this poem multiple times and find them. It would be no fun if I gave you examples.
CD: Who are your influences in the genre of prose-poetry if any? If they are not in that genre are there some elsewhere, such as the natural world, or a painter, muse, or other, please explain.
Braeden: I have influences of poetry but not specifically for prose poetry. The last few poetry books I bought were of Charles Bukowski What matters most is how well you walk through fire and collected poems of Frank O’Hara. I love the Beat Generation poets, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. I have a good collection of poetry that I read. There are thousands of poets out there, well-known and hidden gems. One of the books I really enjoyed was by REI author G.M. Manzi, The Fog of the Midnight Hours. I cannot stress enough about reading and writing, they go hand in hand to be a successful writer.
CD: Did you find your writing changed over time and if so, how do you see that happening and what were the influencing factors to cause that shift/change?
Braeden: I think in our last interview I mentioned I used to write from a personal place but felt I was done doing that. It felt repetitive. To separate myself from others, to be a pioneer, is trying to crawl inside of others and write from their point of view. Once Upon A Rain, She Bloomed is from a woman’s point of view. Poetry is generally written from a personal place, and I bring something unique to the poetry community.
CD: As a writer, was there a time when you were unable to write and how did that affect you?
Braeden: I always find it interesting for those who writer’s block and or just unable to write. I have not really experienced this. There is inspiration every year. I tend to think we over think things and are aiming for perfection. Aim for growth not perfection.
CD: Please share any other aspects to your piece Once Upon a Rain, She Bloomed and what brought you to submit it to the Northwind Writing Award, that you believe readers would benefit from knowing about?
Braeden: I submitted four pieces, two free verse and two of prose. I intentionally selected pieces that felt distinctive from each other. In my book Once Upon A Rain, She Bloomed, each poem starts out with “Once Upon A…” as if each poem is a scene, memory, an event in this person’s life. I thought the entire book would be very relatable to any woman.
Author bio: Braeden Michaels is a two-time poetry award-winning winning author living in beautiful Georgia with his family and his own unique creativity. Within his analytical mind dwell the many passages and corners of a world built by observation, investigative perception, and penetrating rationale. He’s been published in several anthologies as well as his own books of poetry, written in the method of Deconstructive Literature, in which he pulls apart nuances within human nature then organizes and restores it in poetic style. You can read more from him on his website.
To read The 2024 Northwind Treasury, including Braeden’s winning piece, you can purchase it in paperback on Lulu, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon, or as an eBook on Kindle. To see the list of contents and winners, visit our winner’s page.
Author Spotlight: Joe Labriola
Joe Labriola won 3rd prize in Non-Fiction in the Northwind Writing Award 2024 for his piece “Beach Cleaned Eyes”. It is an honor to feature his Q&A here on Raw Earth Ink as part of our promotion of truly exceptional authors.
Q & A
Candice: Joe, firstly thank you so much for your beautiful submission. What stood out to all six judges of the non-fiction award was the emotive strength of your storytelling and the uniqueness of Beach Cleaned Eyes. What inspired this story to be written?
Joe: First of all, a huge thank you to the judges and everyone involved with this amazing award. The purpose of writing—in my opinion—is to share important messages with the world, and so being given the platform to do this is the greatest honor one can hope for.
I would describe the inspiration for this piece as a culmination of my beach cleaning experiences, which stems from my love of the ocean, having grown up always close to the water. What started as innocently noticing and then picking up some trash evolved over the years into ongoing advocacy—from working with students at my university’s Environmental Club, to hosting local events, to journeying cross country and sharing the stories of what I clean up along the way on social media. I think this piece is my way of contextualizing many of these experiences in how they illuminate humanity’s relationship with itself—and, of course, nature.
CD: The story has several themes, obviously a main one being COMPASSION, the other being what we do to the natural world, and then the alienation with that world and the connection with nature. Ultimately is it ever enough? There are questions of existence in this short piece. Did it start out that way – did you always see the parallels between the situations?
Joe: A piece like this is so strange to describe from a “craft” standpoint. The initial version looked very different from the final product, as there’s certainly a lot of “weaving” here of different situations that parallel each other in terms of relating to and building upon themes like you point out. And so I think that there was a lot of “trial and error” in the sense of writing out beach cleaning scenes that have stuck out in my mind over the years. There are many more experiences than those that made it into the final version, but I think starting with a pretty strong sense of some of the core themes (garnered from these very experiences)—even if I didn’t quite know their full commentary yet—was a huge point of guidance. It’s kind of like having a wobbly compass: maybe it’s not pointing directly north, but it’s close enough to get you to a broad ocean shore that you can then specifically find what you’re looking for.
CD: What I gained from this piece most of all was a renewed faith that we should do better (as humans) both to each other and respecting others, and then to nature. You manage to provoke this thought in a relatively short non-fiction piece, that at times reads like fiction but has the intensity of a first-person account. What was your goal in writing it?
Joe: That’s amazing to hear, as that was very much my intention! I think there’s lots of instances in this piece of exactly what you say. It’s almost like we sometimes overwhelm ourselves by thinking that since so many issues are so big, that small actions don’t mean anything. But it’s quite the opposite—just ask a lone horseshoe crab stuck on its back!
It’s interesting that you mention how it “at times reads like fiction,” as I consider myself a fiction writer by trade, so maybe it’s as simple as that, in how I work elements together with sentimentality toward that form. But I’m also a huge believer that forms like fiction and nonfiction exist for a reason: some content just works better in a given space. I think that was my feeling in how I decided to take these experiences from over several years and express them as a composite day, reflecting these themes of humanity’s relationship with itself and nature.
CD: How important is being completely original to you as a writer? How do you achieve this? Given that this piece had many moving-parts it felt very original from the start.
Joe: I think that originality is vital. One way I tell my creative writing students how to improve is to follow these three simple rules: read more, write more, and live more. The latter is essentially why this piece was possible. The experiences here probably ranged over the course of at least four or five years. I certainly think in a writerly way while I’m out beach cleaning, but at no point was I doing this work to gain content. Rather, I was doing the work to do the work, while simultaneously reflecting in my mind, building the connections that manifested the themes that ultimately appear here. You have to take note of that progress as you progress through life, even if the bigger puzzle picture isn’t initially clear. Every connection you make in your mind (no matter how small) that you add to your repository of context, is now there as source material in tandem with other deposited experience. You just have to trust the process. The puzzle picture will come if you’re patient and persistent.
CD: We all thought it was remarkable you could write so much in less than four pages. When did you begin to write in the non-fiction genre? How does it distinguish itself for you as a genre? Why are you comfortable with it?
Joe: I love the “honesty” of nonfiction, if that makes sense. And I think it’s why I take so long to publish nonfiction work too. Again, I love writing short fiction, but that has the advantage of going off in any number of imagined directions. But nonfiction is often all about the contextualization of the direct resource content (my experiences in this piece’s case). And so I think that’s why it sometimes takes me longer to publish in this form, but also why it’s so impactful when I do. It’s like how a great biographer spends years researching their subject, but only maybe 10 percent of their gathered content makes it into the published book. You need to do all that work to find that 10 percent, which doesn’t negate the other 90. On the contrary, the latter is necessary to yield the former.
CD: Do you think people go ‘unnoticed’ and if so, why does that matter to you? (It matters to me too, I just want to hear your perspective on this).
Joe: Oh yes, definitely. It’s an immensely complicated answer, but in general, I think what really goes unnoticed is who, what, and why people are the way they are, if that makes sense. Like, there’s a subtext in this piece about that, and one that I believe is so important to highlight. I see this particularly in the “lack of trust” of other groups, or what I sometimes call “strangerization.” Perhaps the most salient example of this comes with the fishing families’ dynamics with local homeowners. It’s easy for the latter to strangerize the former as infringing upon their property rights (as also seen via the no trespassing signs for anyone else).
But I don’t think either group fully understands the stories of the other (returning to the point of how certain groups can go so “unnoticed” in terms of their true motivations). Nor have I ever actually seen them interact—which is not to say that such exchanges don’t happen. But in a best case scenario, I imagine it ends up being parallel to me being confronted for seeming to collect shells, or just outsourcing any confrontation by calling the cops. People are busy and think they deserve what is rightfully “theirs.” But nature knows none of this. It just reacts and continues.
CD: How is Beach Cleaned Eyes different from a fictional piece? I mean, it could be considered fictional as much as non-fictional in some ways. How do you distinguish it?
Joe: It’s a really interesting question. I’ve definitely written fictional works that build upon some of these core experiences (or at least their corresponding themes). I think, in this case, the distinction can pretty much be boiled down to the fact that my fiction takes an idea and imagines new characters, scenarios, and circumstances (often more extreme versions) to manifest themes; while nonfiction is all about contextualizing whatever experiences I have to work with through choosing the most appropriate material.
But this returns to my previous point of why it takes me longer to publish a nonfiction work. There’s no opportunity to invent new or extreme characters, scenarios, and circumstances; I have to wait for them to actually show up. But the raw reality of these experiences ends up equally (if not more, in some cases) impactful if you’re just patient.
CD: You talk of beach trash and the notions of respecting the land versus people thinking someone volunteering to clear up, has no worth. If this is a personal account, what did that make you feel at the time?
Joe: That’s interesting because I think you might be touching upon a subtle theme but a powerful one that I’ve noticed in my years of beach cleaning. There’s this weird sense of “merit” or “creditization” of work in contemporary society—even (and perhaps sometimes especially) advocacy work. Who’s mandating it? Who’s signing off on volunteer hours? Who’s paying you to exchange your time for a public good?
Reducing ocean waste seems like such a daunting global challenge, that I often have (even well-meaning people) ask me, “Yeah, but does it really make a difference if the beach is just more trashed again tomorrow?” And this is such a bizarrely pseudo-nihilistic perspective to me. It’s tantamount in my opinion to arguing, “Why do you waste your time Saturday mornings volunteering at the local soup kitchen? Aren’t the homeless just going to be hungry again tomorrow? It’s not going to solve food insecurity.” I think this fatalism comes from how huge and abstract the issue of environmental degradation sometimes feels. A person can thank you for feeding them breakfast—a horseshoe crab can’t thank you for flipping them back over, or removing man made waste from cluttering their home and choking their water.
CD: Do you see non-fiction as being an opportunity to write about our experiences and relate them to bigger experiences and then reflect that back to the reader, or is non-fiction something else in your opinion?
Joe: I think this is definitely a big part of it. Obviously, nonfiction can be used in all sorts of ways with different effects in mind. But for me, there’s something really powerful about sharing experiences as truths that work to highlight certain themes that palpably connect to larger experiences and emotions that readers may themselves relate with.
CD: The judges were attracted to the way you were able to talk about a universal subject of alienation without being obvious about it. It fits really well into the person’s subjective experience. We weren’t sure if it was your direct experience or an amalgamation of a story of someone else’s experience. Put us out of our misery!
Joe: Thank you! I think, as I mentioned earlier, I extend this idea of “alienation” to “strangerization,” which I suppose is relatively synonymous. But there’s definitely a lot going on here about where this phenomenon is happening at all levels. The local homeowners alienate/strangerize the fisher families; they alienate/strangerize anyone who is on or near their “property.” But nature doesn’t abide by such constructs. It just is, and it just reacts to what we’ve decided seems to be. I’ve seen this all firsthand, and the conversations in this piece are pretty close to verbatim exchanges. It’s all not something that’s immediately obvious, but as you speak more and more with these types of people over the years, and you notice these trends, you start to be able to sense that there’s something specific going on under the surface here that’s reflective of our collective societal values, actions, and of course inactions.
CD: Are there some quieter sub-texts here? I don’t want to assume, but I think I can see some. Share any you want to.
Joe: Yes! I think we can simply go back to the opening’s gym bros who lament how “it’s nevah enough.” They’re talking about money, of course, but really their conversation is representative of late stage capitalism and what society deems as “life values/goals.” They’ve been told what matters in terms of wealth, success, family, etc.—and part of that is ever-striving for “more. ” But in many cases, they’re like rats in a wheel, pumping weights, never feeling like they’re “getting anywhere,” and not really even knowing where or why they’re headed anyways.
I try to drive this point home with the trope of “traffic, heat, and water,” which is a metaphor for modern American life. It’s a sense of frustration, but also a sense of feeling “trapped” as the world literally warms around us via just continuing to go about our business as if everything is normal. We like to think that we’ve “figured this planet out,” but I think it’s the opposite. Instead we’ve largely sort of “dug into” this sense of how to exploit our world to prop up what matters to us via status, wealth, and even family, as mentioned—without pausing to reassess the bigger picture: what we’ve lost and what we’re losing on our presently unadapting and unsustainable path.
CD: Who are your influences in the genre of non-fiction? If they are not non-fictional, such as the natural world, or a painter, muse, or other, please explain.
Joe: I think poetry in general is definitely a genre that I appreciate in terms of expressing the nuance of how nature impacts us. I also love fiction authors who’ve been able to manifest these themes in unique ways. Ursula K. Le Guin always comes to mind in how she was using environment to explore themes like race and gender all the way back in the 1960s as a female science fiction author. Really anyone who can do this through any creative medium is a rockstar worthy of musing in my opinion.
CD: Do you think non-fiction writers are very different to fiction writers in terms of what matters to them? Is their objective different?
Joe: That’s a really interesting question. I think from a craft standpoint, it comes down to one’s level of “comfort” writing within any form. I think many of the goals are the same in terms of highlighting what matters to us, but the pathways to get there are just different avenues for exploring and relating content.
CD: You talk a lot about longing. You want to go, the day is still young, you are still young. Are they part of who you are right now, the world ahead of you, wanting to get out there and make a difference? Do something that has worth rather than purely status?
Joe: That’s exactly right! There’s a subtler message here about challenging what we value as a society: wealth, success, family, etc. Throughout much of history, and even still to this day in many cultures, it’s a bit of an outcast thing to not be married with children by a certain age. Not that this is inherently always a bad thing or wrong, but as a monolith value it’s absurd to judge everyone’s “success” solely by these metrics. I say all this because I think this ties into this idea of “longing,” that is, longing to find a path that’s original, genuine, and truly meaningful to each of us in terms of what we ourselves value as success. It should be okay to take time to figure things out; you’re probably not as old as you might think—or at least as what society pressures you into thinking. I think we’re collectively getting better at this self-reflection, but it’s also an ongoing process.
CD: Aside from other writers, what else gets your blood pumping when you feel engaged to write on subjects? What are those subjects and why do they appeal to you?
Joe: I think this is the exact reason why I love beach cleaning. It’s kind of like writing in the sense of exploring new content; you never know what you’re going to find, or where it might lead (if you can think of an object, I’ve probably cleaned it up from the beach). Whether informing my nonfiction or giving me broader or key considerations for ideas to explore via fiction, actually going out and doing the work of doing something meaningful is inherently a great way to develop my writerly ideas.
CD: Can you talk to us about writing this short non-fiction piece and how you began writing in this style and what your objective was in writing this and submitting it to an award?
Joe: It’s interesting that you ask about submitting this piece to an award. I honestly don’t do this often, but I just thought that the universality and importance of these themes would shine through with the idea of potentially several judges as the initial audience. Audience consideration is always such an interesting concept in writing. I guess I just felt like these were messages that very different readers might be able to relate to—and I’m thrilled to see that they did!
CD: What power does writing in the non-fiction genre play in the translation of life?
Joe: That’s a great question too. I think that great first person nonfiction often has this underlying premise that the reader is not alone. My beach cleaning work is an outlet towards realization—and self-realization—of our relationships with ourselves, with each other, and with the world around us. I love the idea of this piece “raising questions” more so than “prescribing answers” for the reader. But I think one answer it does suggest is that even as one person, you’re not alone. At any point you can change your habits and make a difference; it can be beach cleaning, but it doesn’t need to be. It could be any other advocacy, just being kinder to those around you, or trying to be more honest with yourself.
CD: How important is age in writing? Do you find you have more to say at a younger age, than say, some who are older? What about gender? Do these things matter or is it just the story that matters?
Joe: I think there definitely is something to be said by being more “liberated” as a younger writer. That is, you’re not fenced in by an entrenched point of view, although you’re also limited in this sense. Contrastingly, as I’ve gotten older, I just feel like I have so much more perspective (both my own and that of others) to draw upon. I think the key here is to sort of remain open to the diversity of (and reasons for) different perspectives, even as yours develops with time.
Gender is an even more interesting consideration in some ways in how it can vastly influence a narrator or character’s perspective. And as perspective is how you can see and relate to the world, I think it has a huge impact in what details work to elicit certain themes in any given piece.
CD: When you write, do you sometimes try to write outside of yourself where there is no personal element and if so, is that why you are drawn to the non-fiction genre? Or do you find non-fiction enables you to write about personal things without needing to generate fiction around it? In other words, cut to the chase?
Joe: One of my favorite things about writing nonfiction where I’m the main character is the fact that I know (or so I hope) that character better than anyone. The same goes for settings, scenes, and even other characters. You can tangibly observe all of these, and think about how you could write about them. And that’s exactly what I do. Even when I’m out beach cleaning, I’ll think to myself, “Wow, that would be an interesting way to describe how [insert observation].” It could be about a piece of trash, the weather, or how someone is dressed. Sometimes you just have to enjoy the experience, but I’m also often processing how and why different ways of describing these elements and emphasizing certain details can work to be representative of different themes.
CD: As a reader of nonfiction, what do you like and dislike about the non-fiction you read, and why?
Joe: I think I particularly enjoy nonfiction writing that isn’t too “showy,” which of course is a very subjective distinction in many cases. What I mean more specifically is writing that is specific in both the themes and details, but not “showing off.” Subtle themes sometimes stand out more strongly to me for some reason. I even would go as far as to say that I like asking questions more than prescribing answers as mentioned earlier—which I like to think this piece does in its own way.
CD: As a writer, was there a time when you were unable to write and how did that affect you?
Joe: All the time! In fact, I think it’s a really important and underrated part of the process. Funny enough, a student just asked me yesterday, “What do you do when you get writer’s block?” I told him that it was a complicated answer, as there were actually several, depending upon the nature of the blockage. Sometimes it’s better to go around a wall rather than trying to bash through it. Or to work on another part of the puzzle rather than staying stuck looking for that one piece among a mammoth pile.
I always go back to my three pronged rule for writers: read more, write more, live more. If one isn’t working, just go to another. For me (and in regards to this piece) if I “got stuck” I could simply read similar works, or write other work, or go out and beach clean.
CD: Please share any other aspects to your piece Beach Cleaned Eyes and what brought you to submit it to the Northwind Writing Award, that you believe readers would benefit from knowing about?
Joe: It’s such a joy to see the Northwind Writing Award interested in this type of work—and so important too. Being able to translate any sort of advocacy into artistic form is truly a gift, and so having the platform to share that work is the greatest honor. I hope that readers feel even just a sprinkle of inspiration from this piece. That is the whole point after all: small changes, actions, and even just realizations can make huge differences—especially when added up. Progress starts with seeds—and seeds have the potential to bloom into forests if nurtured.
Author bio: Joe Labriola is a writing professor at Stony Brook University in New York, where he also serves as the Environmental Club’s Faculty Advisor. His fiction and nonfiction usually focuses on issues relating to nature and the environment as he is an avid beach cleaner and sustainability advocate, hosting cleanup events, lectures, and even a TEDx Talk. When he is not writing, you can most often find him scouring his local beach for litter—and then taking a swim once it is clean.
Previous publications:
- Dark Yonder, print (fiction): “Beach House”, 2023
- Twenty-two Twenty-eight, online (fiction): “Vegelante”, 2023
- Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, online (fiction): “Blowout Tide”, 2022
- After Dinner Conversation, print and online (fiction): “The Room Above”, 2021
- Amazon, print and eBook (non-fiction): “Beach Cleaner’s Guide”, 2019
- Garo Station, online (fiction): “Coloring In”, 2018
- Eastern Iowa Review, print (non-fiction): “And You Realize You Wander With Glasses”, 2017
- BlazeVOX, online (fiction): “Golden Delicious”, 2012
Socials:
https://www.instagram.com/professor_labs/
Linkedin.com/in/joelabriola
To read The 2024 Northwind Treasury, including Joe’s winning piece, you can purchase it in paperback on Lulu, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon, or as an eBook on Kindle. To see the list of contents and winners, visit our winner’s page.
Author Spotlight: Sherry Morris
Sherry Morris won 2nd prize in Fiction in the Northwind Writing Award 2024 for her story “Green Tights”. It is an honor to feature her Q&A here on Raw Earth Ink as part of our promotion of truly exceptional authors.
Q & A
Candice: Sherry, first thank you so much for your great submissions. What stood out to all the judges was the originality of your writing. You are a writer who stands out for this reason: in your selection of subject, title, and how you formulate your story. In a world of “sameness” how do you achieve the impossible, and stay original?
Sherry: Gosh, what an interesting and original question! I don’t plan to be original, I just try to write stories about characters I find interesting. Or I’ll write an ‘ordinary’ character who has something interesting happen to her and see how she responds. I’m always on the lookout for interesting facts or news stories to use in my fictional stories. When I hear or read something I think is interesting, I write it down—either in the notes section of my phone or in a little notebook I carry with me. Then, later, I go back and see if a story or character develops, or if the snippet can be used in a story or piece of flash I’m currently working on. I’m glad you think my ideas are interesting and original too!
CD: Is it abundantly clear you are able to mesh the power of humor, original perspective, and concepts that are out of the ordinary in your writing. Is there a story behind how you write as you do?
Sherry: I often write without much of a plan and just throw various interesting bits I’ve collected (see above) together and see what unfolds. The ‘voice’ of the story usually comes to me first and that determines the setting/location of the story and helps me figure out who the character is, what bits fit for this character and story, and what bits are for another story. Maybe some of the ‘out-of-the-ordinary-ness’ comes from the fact that I’ve been lucky enough to live in several different countries, each with its own unique and interesting ways that seem ordinary to the people there, but are fascinating to me.
CD: Beginning your piece I didn’t know what to expect, the obvious question being, how would green tights factor in and how important could green tights be? That’s half the surprise of the story, the way you work in things that don’t seem possible to relate, yet somehow you do. Is this true of most of your work or did you particularly employ this in “Green Tights”?
Sherry: I suppose it’s a feature of all my stories… linking together things that don’t seem to have any connection into something coherent. I see story writing as similar to putting together a jigsaw puzzle. My stories start out as many various pieces, the odd and interesting bits I’ve collected, a character’s voice and then a setting/location. My job (and challenge) as a writer is to take all these disparate bits and fit them together into an interesting, and hopefully meaningful, story that fits together well. Luckily for me, I love putting together puzzles!
CD: For short stories, the importance of the ‘opening line hook’ is more important than ever. Did it take you a long time to create your hook for this piece?
Sherry: I always knew the story would start with the protagonist finding Marianne in a ditch. I saw that image straightaway in my head and there was never any doubt that was how the story would open. I spent time finessing and polishing that first line—it was a startling image—and I wanted the opening line to match it.
CD: How important to you is the necessity of the unpredictable and the original in a short story specifically and if so, why?
Sherry: I suppose it’s quite important though I’ve not really thought about it in that way. I simply try to keep the story interesting to me. Because if I’m bored as the writer writing it, then the reader will be bored reading it—and that’s no good.
CD: When beginning your story, did you know exactly where it was going to go, or did it make itself known someway through?
Sherry: I wrote this story quite a while ago now, pretty much all in one go. Then I forgot about it and discovered it on my laptop I don’t know how much later. I had always wanted to write a story where a woman thinks the cracks in her bathroom mirror are the face of the Virgin Mary (a news story I’d heard on the radio) but I didn’t want to write a story ABOUT that woman. What I thought would be more interesting is to write about a woman (Lilith) who is the opposite of the cracked-mirror woman (Marianne) and have them interact. It was always the voice of Lilith I heard so I had to figure out what a tough character like Lilith could learn from someone as vulnerable and seemingly helpless as Marianne. I didn’t know how the story would end. I usually don’t know how my stories will end, but when I got to the end, I knew this was the right ending for it.
CD: Is the genre of short story telling one that is personally important to you and if so, what’s the story behind that?
Sherry: I always wanted to write short stories, I fell in love with them in middle school where I was introduced to stories like “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce and “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. They made a huge impression on me and that’s my preferred format to write. But short stories take me a long time to get right. I love novels too, but I’ve never had the slightest desire to write a book. Too much work! I discovered flash fiction (very short fiction) and write a lot of that. I have most of my success with flash fiction but my heart remains with short stories.
CD: Was there a particular person or persons who inspired or encouraged you to become a writer?
Sherry: As a kid I’d always been a big reader but I never thought much about writing stories until my high school English teacher inspired me. He taught Creative Writing and sparked something in me—he’s the reason I became a writer. He encouraged me throughout high school and college to write. He told me I was a writer. Even after I moved to the UK we stayed in touch—I’d visit him and spend time with him and his family when I was in the States—they were all very generous and kind to me. I always shared my writing success with him, and he even appears in a few of my stories. He passed recently and it’s a deep, deep loss. I know he was proud of me and he knows that every time I write a story, it’s because he believed in me.
CD: Did you think your writing would be received with as much love as it has been, when you submitted? Or did you fear it would be misunderstood/not related to?
Sherry: I’m always delighted when a story I’ve written is accepted and I was dumbstruck to learn all four pieces I submitted to The Northwind Writing Award had made the shortlist. When a writer finds her ‘tribe’—the editors and readers who ‘get’ her work—it’s magic!
CD: I felt such sadness in this story which, juxtaposed against the humor and insight, was at times very disquieting (in a very good way). Do you see this story as being ultimately sad? What’s the message there?
Sherry: I see “Green Tights” as a story where the main character grows. She learns to accept help, that she can’t always do everything on her own, and that help is sometimes on offer from the most unlikely sources. The lesson is to be open to change. Lilith also learns everything in life isn’t one thing or the other: crazy/sane, black/white… Sometimes things are…green. So I see it mostly as a positive story.
CD: I have always personally appreciated and loved the dark humor genre, where something is ultimately quite upsetting but the way it’s written makes you smile at the same time. Is that a genre you often write in? Do you find it is one you are very comfortable with?
Sherry: I belong to an in-person writing group that meets once a month to share and critique work. Often the comment is that my stories are a quirky mix of humour and sadness/pain. I don’t set out to do that when writing a story but I’m glad I can—in a way this replicates life.
CD: How much of your own direct lived experience relates to what you write and what you include in your writing?
Sherry: There’s almost always a kernel of direct experience somewhere in my stories. Not necessarily a character, but an observation, item, or detail. Sometimes it is a direct living experience but altered. I hardly ever completely make something up—I find I don’t need to; real life is interesting and strange enough.
CD: As a writer, was there a time when you were unable to write and how did that affect you?
Sherry: A few years ago, during the pandemic, I struggled to write anything. It was a stressful time, but also with all the free time I had (because we couldn’t go out and do things), I felt I *should* be writing. And that self-pressure made me unable to write anything. I’ve discovered the busier I am with non-writing projects, the more intentional I am when I do sit down to write—otherwise I procrastinate. So I try to keep busy with other tasks and projects (photography, local charities, presenting a spoken-word radio show) to give myself a smaller window of time to write. And then I write more productively.
CD: Please share any other aspects of your writing life.
Sherry: I’ve recently started presenting a monthly, online spoken-word show featuring short stories and flash fiction through Inverness Hospital Radio. The show focuses on stories with a Scottish Highland setting or stories by writers with a connection to the Highlands—though sometimes I include stories I’ve simply fallen in love with and want to share. The hour-long show includes music and chat and the plan is to also have interviews with local writers. The programme airs on Fridays at noon UK time and there is also a Listen Again feature. Check out ‘Sherry’s Shorts’ via the website or MixCloud. I source the stories for the show myself which means I’m reading more short stories and flash fiction which is fantastic. You learn so much about writing from reading other writers. I would definitely suggest volunteering to read for print and online journals or competitions. It’s an invaluable experience.
CD: I’d love to know personally how you came to the decision to call this “Green Tights”?
Sherry: I’ve learned titles are super-important in a story—especially in flash fiction when the word count is small. I usually spend time thinking about the title, considering what best encapsulates the story or, better yet, expands the meaning of the story. But sometimes, as with “Green Tights”, it’s simply a key item in the story. You could say, the title subtly suggests an idea I mentioned earlier—not everything is black or white, sometimes it’s green. And green is the colour of spring, new starts—which is how the story ends, with a new start.
Author bio: Originally from Missouri, Sherry Morris writes prize-winning fiction from a farm in the Scottish Highlands where she pets cows, watches clouds and dabbles in photography. She also presents a monthly online spoken-word radio show featuring short stories and flash fiction on Inverness Hospital Radio. Many of her stories stem from her Peace Corps experience in 1990s Ukraine and she received a 2025 Best of the Net nomination from Fictive Dream for her story ‘The Cabbage Tree’. Read more of her work at http://www.uksherka.com.
Twitter: @Uksherka
Bluesky: @uksherka.bsky.social
To read The 2024 Northwind Treasury, including Sherry’s winning piece, you can purchase it in paperback on Lulu, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon, or as an eBook on Kindle. To see the list of contents and winners, visit our winner’s page.
Author Spotlight: Amanda Trout
Amanda Trout won 2nd prize in Prose Poetry in the Northwind Writing Award 2024 for her poem “dear entomophobic america.” It is an honor to feature her Q&A here on Raw Earth Ink as part of our promotion of truly exceptional authors.
Q & A
Candice: Amanda, thank you so much for your submission a second year in a row. We are so honored to read your work and it always distinguishes itself. What stood out to the judges was the enduring strength of your storytelling and the necessary truth of “dear entomophobic america”. What inspired this story to be written? The timing is fantastic (with the election) but I’d love to hear your process leading up to.
Amanda: Hi Candice! And thanks to you, tara, and Raw Earth Ink for hosting this competition again! “dear entomophobic america” was initially written as a direct shadow/response to Danez Smith’s “dear white america”. Even though I, being a white female, can’t directly relate to the strong message of racial tensions in Smith’s poem, I wanted to come at the form from a space I could very much relate to: the feeling of being an outcast because of your beliefs, hobbies, obsessions, or anything else the world labels as weird (like, for instance, my adoration of cicadas and other insects).
CD: What stands out in your writing is how you are able to go from one genre to another, one writing style to another. It’s very rare to be able to do this so fluidly. What’s your secret!
Amanda: I’m very grateful to have been in two very good creative writing programs (Pittsburg State University during my undergraduate and the University of Missouri-Kansas City during my Master’s) that really push the idea of interdisciplinary and inter-genre writing. I’ve taken classes in fiction, nonfiction, and experimental forms that inform my poetry, and my poetry experience informs my prose as well. I also tend to think of my work in terms of finding a form that best fits the story, regardless if the form is conventional poetry, prose, or some hybrid of both.
CD: Another stand-out element of your writing is it’s consistently high-level, and “dear entomophobic america” is no exception. Such a tiny piece, and in a genre that’s incredibly hard to hone, I’d say this is as close to perfection in the genre as you can get. What speaks to you about this genre?
Amanda: Prose poetry sits at a very unique intersection where it can be both narrative and lyrical at the same time. I also appreciate just how fine the line is between prose poetry and flash fiction, to the point that, at time, a piece can be both and neither at the same time. “dear entomophobic america”also adds in another element—the epistolary, or letter poem—that makes it a little more interrogative and passionate than a traditional prose poem.
CD: I have to ask about the title, did that just come to you or? Brilliant. And also that last line that floats on its own; asking the big questions.
Amanda: The title is a direct reference to the Smith poem “dear entomophobic america”is based on, just with the word “entomophobic” replacing “white.” This is a direct relation to the change in problem the speaker is addressing while providing a connection back to Smith’s work. The word “entomophobic” comes from “entomophobia,” or the fear of insects, which connects to the similarity between the speaker and an insect throughout. The last line is right-aligned to indicate a change in tone and a departure from the insect-fueled metaphor the speaker has been speaking in; this line is meant to be a truth, a realization that “entomophobic,” at least in this poem, is a stand-in for something far more sinister.
CD: I like how you utilize lowercase in this, but what was your reason behind doing that? As I know you are intentional about everything you do.
Amanda: This is actually a technique I’ve been applying a lot to my thesis-in-progress, that this poem is a part of. The thesis also shows a lot of similarities between speaker and cicada. Especially early on in the manuscript, the speaker feels small and insignificant in the grand scheme of society, and this is reflected in the relative smallness and insecurity of the text. The speaker can’t speak in uppercase because they psychologically feel like they can’t do so.
CD: If you were describing your aim in writing this, what would it ultimately be?
Amanda: When I initially wrote this piece, the aim was to shadow and honor Danez Smith’s poem through the lens of my own experience. In revision, however, I think the aim shifted to being more about fully encapsulating the experience of the social outcast in society through the bug/cicada metaphor that permeates my thesis. I also very much wanted to write a poem more in the realm of outrage than I usually do, a poem where the speaker says what’s on their mind very freely.
CD: How important is being completely original to you as a writer? How do you achieve this? Given that this piece had many moving-parts it felt very original from the start.
Amanda: I would argue that no piece of writing is ever fully original: with so much writing and thinking in the world, inspirations come in a myriad of ways and poke their way through every piece of writing I’ve ever written. “dear entomophobic america”is very much inspired by Danez Smith, so I would say, if anything, they created the originality first, especially formally. I just brought my own insect-y spin to it!
CD: We all thought it was remarkable you could write so much in less than half a page! When did you begin to write in the non-fiction genre? How does it distinguish itself for you as a genre? Given you can write in multi-genres.
Amanda: I started writing creative non-fiction largely when I was in my undergraduate program at Pittsburg State, since the university literary magazine, Cow Creek Review, used to get barely any non-fiction submissions at all. I figured if anyone could contribute, it might as well be me, so I wrote a minimum of one non-fiction essay each year I was there. Creative non-fiction, out of all the prose genres, feels the most in-tune with poetry to me. It asks you to analyze and perform real facts in an entertaining, engaging way. That’s why, a lot of the time, my poetry will turn out more in the non-fiction space anyway, since the world is weird, and I love taking inspiration from that weirdness.
CD: As a writer, how important are competitions and why? Do they help you hone your art because you are challenging yourself by creating your best work in relation to a specific call? Is there a degree of discipline that comes from entering competitions for this reason?
Amanda: I absolutely love competitions, especially themed ones. They really motivate me to keep writing, even when I’m not in a class where my peers help motivate me. I would also agree that competitions do indeed help hone my art; every time I enter a poem in a contest, it gets edited (at least slightly), so contests help the poems and other works to keep evolving.
CD: Do you see prose-poetry as being an opportunity to write about our experiences and relate them to bigger experiences and then reflect that back to the reader using both prose and poetic means, or is prose-poetry something else in your opinion? For example, can it posit a political question more indirectly in this form?
Amanda: Prose poetry (and poetry in general honestly) lets you both skirt the edges of a question and directly answer it in the same breath, through image, metaphor, and description.
CD: Is it hard to write a prose poetry story with so many moving parts, how do you decide what to keep, and what to trim? Especially given the shortness of this piece.
Amanda: I honestly find prose poetry simultaneously easier and harder to write than more traditional, lineated poetry. On one hand, I usually conceptualize and write my prose poems in a loose, almost stream-or-consciousness style that tends to flow a little bit easier (since I don’t have to be as worried about line breaks). On the other, I find it harder to decide what to edit out and harder to keep the poem from becoming muddled or jumbled.
CD: Despite being short – what you write has mega power. It’s quite daring to submit such a short prose-poetry to a competition but your gambit paid off because the quality of your writing is such, that length is irrelevant. Do you tend to think length is irrelevant in all writing genres?
Amanda: I wouldn’t necessarily say that length is irrelevant (after all, every structure in a work brings some sort of meaning to that work, even if unintentional), but I do think it has heavier weight in some forms than others. For example, the stereotype is generally that poetry is short and prose is long, so a prose poem has to decide which of those two stereotypes to play more into. In the case of “dear entomophobic america,” I leaned more into poetic tradition, so it ended up a shorter work.
CD: The judges were attracted to the way you were able to create an emotional response almost instantaneously with just a few words. You are a wordsmith, how do you self-edit to ensure you keep yourself sharp?
Amanda: I very much edit as I write, paying extra close attention to sounds and which words fit the narrative I am trying to tell. “dear entomophobic america” is also benefitted by two different lexicons I was able to pull from: the words and images used by Danez Smith in “dear white america,” and the words I’ve used in the other poems that make up my thesis. So while I’m editing, I make sure to keep any words or themes I want to focus on always in the back of my mind.
CD: Are there some quieter sub-texts here? Share any you want to.
Amanda: One of the quieter subtexts in this poem (at least in my opinion) is the link to the idea of loudness. I’m the type of person that tends to get really excited about my favorite interests (think poetry, cicadas, anime, etc.), and once I start talking about a topic I love, I tend to slowly increase in speed and volume, to the point that the people around me shut me down. There are a couple fears connected to this: the fear of being too loud and pushing people away and a fear of being overtaken by obsession.
CD: I found myself reading into a lot here, do you think you anticipated people making their own judgement of what you’re saying or did you feel you made it abundantly clear? Or can you be clear and still leave room for individual interpretation?
Amanda: I tend to write with the idea that people will make their own judgements about what the work is about, and I am perfectly ok with that. I think, especially with the themes that occur in “dear entomophobic america” and my larger thesis project, that it benefits the poem/work for readers to be allowed to imagine, because everyone has different relationships with different people who might fit the “cicadagirl” model, who want to speak about issues in the world but don’t.
CD: Who are your influences in the genre of prose-poetry? If they are not prose-poetry, such as the natural world, or a painter, muse, or other, please explain.
Amanda: Danez Smith, of course. I’ve also read a lot of Claudia Rankine (Citizen especially does a great job merging prose poems and art) and Victoria Chang (both Obit and Dear Memory are wonderful). On a more general level, I am constantly being inspired by the natural world and the love of animals my younger sisters demonstrate, as well as by the other poets and writers in my MFA program.
CD: Do you think prose-poetry writers are very different to fiction writers in terms of what matters to them? Is their objective different?
Amanda: I think there are definitely some differences. I have some experience writing in both genres, and have found that, while writing fiction, I tend to pay a lot more attention to character development and dialogue because I am trying to establish a certain setting and plot. Whereas, when I conceptualize a piece as a prose poem, I usually don’t worry about supplementary characters as much and instead focus on building on a particular mood or theme.
CD: Aside from other writers, what else gets your blood pumping when you feel engaged to write on subjects? What are those subjects and why do they appeal to you?
Amanda: I’ve always been really drawn to nature and music, especially when those two ideas intersect (which I feel like they do, often). I also really like when I make some sort of discovery or epiphany about topics I am interested and engaged in, and will usually write into those. Poetry for me is very much a way of telling a story of discovery, sharing the experience and the joy of discovering between myself and my audience.
CD: Did you find your writing changed over time and if so, how do you see that happening and what were the influencing factors to cause that shift/change?
Amanda: My writing has definitely changed over time. I first started writing my own creative work in the fourth grade—little songs and some very, very short stories. I also remember, during grade school, countless hours writing in notebooks and envisioning myself as a fiction writer. It was not until after high school that I really took to writing poetry predominately, and even then my poetry writing has evolved immensely, mostly due to shifting interest and my continuing exposure to newer styles, forms, and writers.
CD: What power does writing in the poetry or prose-poetry genre play in the translation of life?
Amanda: Poetry presents a unique way to engage multiple senses within the same work by emphasizing sound while still providing space for other senses to work. When writing a poem, a poet shares both a artistic rendering of their thoughts and the abstract translation of their emotions through sound. It’s a lot like watching a movie or something else with background music—it adds an ambiance that is hard to recreate in other mediums.
CD: Where do you see the difference lying between straight poetry and prose-poetry and what do you prefer about the latter in this regard?
Amanda: Prose poetry, in the literal sense, is simply straight poetry that doesn’t concern itself with line breaks. This tends to lead to work that tells some sort of story and/or leans into stream-of-consciousness style, since both the reader and the writer are given no pause. This is perhaps my favorite aspect of the genre, since it helps create a heightened emotional response.
CD: When you write, do you sometimes try to write outside of yourself where there is no personal element and if so, is that why you are drawn to a specific genre? Or do you find you gravitate to genres that enable you to write about personal things? Or are you most comfortable never addressing things that close to home?
Amanda: Almost all of my work is extremely personal, even when I am pushing that personal component into my thoughts about a fictionalized character. Additionally, I do tend to lean into genres that let me write about personal subjects directly (like poetry and creative nonfiction). Part of this tendency stems from my most major character flaw, pride. I like writing about myself because I like learning new things about myself and the obsessions I care about, so I write hoping that other people in the world might care about some of those same ideas.
CD: As a reader of prose-poetry, what do you like and dislike about the prose-poetry you read, and why?
Amanda: Most of the prose poetry I read feels impactful and emotional, which is something that doesn’t come as naturally to me as some other aspects of poetry writing do. Danez Smith is a great example of this idea—the form of prose poetry gives you a near-perfect space in which to get angry and emboldened. By extension, I don’t like prose poetry as much (including my own) that doesn’t make use of the particular nuances of the form itself in a tangible way. To me, you have to justify (at least to some extent) why the line breaks aren’t there.
CD: As a writer, was there a time when you were unable to write and how did that affect you?
Amanda: This might be kind of a cop-out answer, but I really dislike the fact that I can’t physically write in my dreams. I want all those images down on paper, and sometimes the dream journal just doesn’t cut it!
CD: Please share any other aspects to your piece “dear entomophobic america” and what brought you to submit it to Northwind, that you believe readers would benefit from knowing about?
Amanda: I think I mentioned earlier that “dear entomophobic america” is a part of my thesis for my MFA? I also have some other poems that play on similar themes and forms to it as part of the thesis, and hopefully the day will come when I can share those with you all as well! I also highly encourage those reading to submit to Northwind next year! It is a great contest and one that can see you rewarded for the hard writing work that you do.
Author bio: Amanda Trout is a Kansas poet with a love for sound and form. Her work has been published by Yavanika Press, Raw Earth Ink, The Common Language Project, and more. Find Amanda on Instagram @atrout2972.
To read The 2024 Northwind Treasury, including Amanda’s winning piece, you can purchase it in paperback on Lulu, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon, or as an eBook on Kindle. To see the list of contents and winners, visit our winner’s page.
A Little Art-share
Watching my friend Michael over on sceadugenga share his artistic journey has been very inspiring (and humbling) for me. At a passing comment from him that I share something of my own… I agreed.
I decided not to share any photo manipulation art pieces in this post. I don’t want to bog it down. I’ve got all sorts of things brewing, unfinished, in process. Keep creating, friends. ~tara
Author Spotlight: Ann Kathryn Kelly
Ann Kathryn Kelly won 2nd prize in Non-Fiction in the Northwind Writing Award 2024 for her story “The Color of Heartache”. It is an honor to feature her Q&A here on Raw Earth Ink as part of our promotion of truly exceptional authors.
Q & A
Candice: Ann, first, thank you so much for your beautiful submission. What stood out to the judges was the enduring strength of your storytelling and the vividness of “The Color of Heartache.” What inspired this story to be written? I understand you experienced a brain tumor, can you share more of how this led to this story in its entirety?
Ann Kathryn: Thanks for this opportunity to chat, Candice! Winning a writing prize of course validates the work put in, but when the recognition is tied to a piece that is particularly meaningful to the writer, it makes it all the more special. I’m honored and grateful to you and Executive Editor tara caribou and all the judges for believing my essay worthy of your award. I’m looking forward to seeing it in print in The 2024 Northwind Treasury anthology!
This essay remains one of my favorites. I vividly remember the day I started it. I was sitting in my living room on a Sunday morning, having coffee. I had joined a creative nonfiction (CNF) writing class just a week earlier, and was thinking about which part of my memoir draft I wanted to workshop with classmates in the upcoming week. With this particular class, the focus was on writing about the body. My memoir is all about that—specifically, my brain—and that Sunday morning I decided I wanted to write a standalone essay to workshop instead of a memoir chapter.
The reason for this was tied to, at that time, a current news story that brought up painful memories of a person in my life, my sister-in-law Jane Ann, who had been pivotal with other family members in helping me through the ordeal I wrote about in my memoir.
CD: Let’s stay with this for a moment. How did you begin and why did you decide to submit it to an award?
Ann Kathryn: As I mentioned, I’d signed up for that CNF essay class through WOW! Women on Writing in June 2018. Quick detour, for a moment, while I shout-out the incredible WOW! community that has elevated my writing life. I’ve met talented and generous writers, taken some of the best craft classes, and along the way became a WOW! columnist for their popular “Markets” newsletter that is sent to 50,000 email subscribers every month.
I count WOW’s founder, Angela Mackintosh, as a true friend—though we’ve yet to meet in person in the seven years we’ve been critique partners. Ang is one of my top trusted readers, and her feedback on my various essays and memoirs through the years has been transformative. I can’t say enough about how Angela lights up aha! moments for me every time she reads one of my pieces. Her feedback, her spirit, and her knowledge of the writing industry, both creative and business-wise, is a gift.
So, Ang and I were in that WOW! class together—focused around “What Our Bodies Have to Say.” As the first week of class was ending, news of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain’s suicide was announced.
As outlets vied with each other over every awful detail—how Bourdain did it; who, if anyone, might have driven him to it; what it meant for his daughter, his girlfriend, his TV network—I sat down to write. I had my “in” into writing a new essay for the class rather than workshop another previously written piece from my memoir. Tying in our bodies was required for that class, so my brain surgery ticked that box. Then I braided in the Bourdain news, along with a third braid about Jane Ann. On that Sunday morning, in my favorite rocking chair that faces a sunny turret in my Victorian, I tapped out on my phone a first draft of what would become “The Color of Heartache.”
Forty-five minutes later, as I re-read a very rough draft, I knew it was something I could work with. For me, news of Bourdain opened a way to write, for the first time, about Jane Ann’s suicide years earlier. Several drafts and almost a year later, I submitted my essay to The Coachella Review and it appeared in their online summer issue in 2019.
So, this is where the latter part of your question comes into play: submitting for an award. I think all writers share disappointment when something inside their heads and hearts that they’ve worked so hard to bring into the world is published and then … nothing. It disappears. I experienced that with this essay. I also think it happens more with standalone prose pieces or poems published online; less so, with novels or memoirs because the physical manifestation remains. One can hold a book, but an online piece can feel impermanent. I wanted this essay to find a printed home and that’s hard to do when something has been published online. Side rant for a minute, but I wish more journals, magazines, and anthologies were open to reprints! When I saw that The Northwind Writing Award was open to reprints and offered a chance at print publication in The Northwind Treasury anthology, I sent it in. It’s so meaningful for me that this essay will now live on in print.
CD: “The Color of Heartache” is raw with a lot of emotion that is intense. Many people who endure half of what you did would not be able to put those experiences down on paper, which is one reason we were drawn to your remarkable ability to do just that. If you had to say, what is the key message for you in this?
Ann Kathryn: I’ve heard that actors receive this advice early in their careers: “Don’t cry for the audience; make them cry for you.” As writers, we’ve heard it phrased: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”
I shed some tears while writing this essay—while reliving the wonderful memories of how Jane Ann supported me and the hole that remained, and still does, for our family after she was gone.
My surgery, and the months leading up to and following it as I recovered, took its toll on my family. But to endure what followed a year after, with her death, was devastating. While part of the essay’s focus is on questions that will never be answered, I wanted to highlight Jane Ann’s innate goodness. My family and I now understand that she put everyone around her first—family, friends, her own pets and all animals, in fact—but to the exclusion of herself. My mother will sometimes say when any of us recall that time: “Jane Ann, it seems, loved everyone but Jane Ann.”
What a heartbreaking statement, but a true one. And it’s a tragedy that plays out too often, around the world, with people struggling—sometimes in plain sight, but often in silence. That’s why I wrote that, sometimes, families and friends may not be aware of the demons that drive someone we think we know so well. We don’t know all of their fragilities. Living in the wake of suicide is tragic, yes, but also maddening. Those left behind often feel blame. They feel helpless and hopeless, ironically the very feelings that compelled the person to do it.
CD: The story has several themes, obviously a main one being your experience with the brain tumor and then the idea we do not know someone even when we think we do, in relation to suicide. This is a very universal theme that few have the courage to address. And you address TWO huge themes in one paper. Did it start out that way? Did you always see the parallels between the two situations?
Ann Kathryn: I wasn’t thinking about tackling big topics or themes simultaneously when I started the essay. If I had, it might have intimidated me and caused writer’s block! With the parallel angle, though, what struck me and made me want to write this was when I read an online article while in that writing class about Anthony Bourdain’s ashes being held in France until clearance was obtained to fly him to the United States. It immediately took me back to when my mother and I were with my brother Pat, Jane Ann’s husband. The whole family had flown from New Hampshire to their winter home in Florida to be with him. Everyone had returned home when my mother, Pat, and I were the last to board a flight to bring Jane Ann’s ashes back to New Hampshire for burial. I remember how surreal it all felt, knowing we had her urn with us in a suitcase. Reading about Bourdain and his flight immediately put me back in Florida, eight years earlier.
CD: We thought it was remarkable you could write so much in three pages. When did you begin to write in the non-fiction genre? How does it distinguish itself for you as a genre? Why are you comfortable with it?
Ann Kathryn: CNF is my comfort zone, for sure. I started writing CNF essays in 2017, about two years after I began my memoir draft. I’ve tried writing fiction a few times, but I get stymied. I can’t decide where I want to open a story or where I want it to lead. I could write fiction using nonfiction as my base, of course, and change names and identifying markers but I’d rather just write it from the get-go as CNF.
A big part of this has to do with me being the narrator, rather than writing something from a fiction narrator’s point of view. Knowing I’m in the CNF head space and will express things from my POV allows me to feel things differently than what I might feel if I start something as fiction—even if I know that what I’m writing about is couched in nonfiction! And, changing my name to Amy wouldn’t work for me. I find it easier to sink into memories and try to make sense of what’s happened when I’m the narrator. And then when I think about trying to write fiction where I would imagine brand new experiences and characters, well, that sounds complicated. I admire writers who can so deftly world-build and deliver a convincing story.
CD: Do you see non-fiction as being an opportunity to write about our experiences and relate them to bigger experiences and then reflect that back to the reader, or is non-fiction something else in your opinion?
Ann Kathryn: Definitely the former. Writers know we need to identify and bring forward universal threads in any piece we create. That’s our entry point into holding reader attention. They must relate in some way to what we’re writing about.
With CNF, this doesn’t need to be a one-to-one match. In my essay “The Color of Heartache” not every reader will have had experience with one or either of my topics: open-head surgery for 12 hours, or suicide.
Yet, many readers will identify with having received a serious diagnosis at some point. If not them, maybe it was a loved one who got the diagnosis, and they grappled alongside a spouse, parent, child, or friend through the rollercoaster swings of medical appointments and the fear of the unknown; the helplessness they would feel as the bystander. It’s often harder to be relegated to the sidelines than it is to be the patient who is often too sick to be aware of everything. In my memoir, I portray how my family did what they could to help from the sidelines every day. In this essay, that comes through by turning a dining room into a bedroom. Through white vinyl sneakers from Walmart, and homemade soup, and fistfuls of flowers.
And while some readers will tragically have experience knowing someone who died by suicide, others will not—but as humans, we all share the ability to put ourselves in others’ shoes. This means we can extrapolate how that would feel: the devastation. As long as the reader identifies in some way with the narrator, they will turn to the next page and the next. We will have done our jobs, taking them along with us.
CD: The judges were attracted to the way you were able to achieve feeling so quickly and intensely in this medium. Death and disease/illness is a universal theme, but you manage to talk about greater subjects like attachment, and how much we really know other people. That’s philosophy at its best. Did you recognize that you were expanding into a philosophical consideration at times?
Ann Kathryn: It would sound impressive to say I consciously chose to explore lofty philosophical teachings, but I didn’t set out to do that. That said, though, attachment is a central theme in my memoir. I often say my family was as vital as medical specialists in saving me both before and after my brain surgery. Many of my CNF essays, some that are excerpted from my memoir but some that I write fresh, often tackle attachment in some way because I also think attachment is a rich topic for many CNF writers.
CD: Are there some quieter sub-texts here? Share any you want to.
Ann Kathryn: Survivor’s guilt.
In a nutshell, my memoir examines mysterious symptoms I lived with from birth to age 40 due to an undiagnosed brain tumor. The tumor was not cancerous but being neurovascular, was fed by blood. It resembled a raspberry with chambers that would fill, hemorrhage, then flatten before starting the next cycle. Each bleed may only have been a teaspoon’s worth, but was repeatedly absorbed by my brain, causing a range of symptoms. When I received a diagnosis at last—I had a cavernous angioma—pieces of my lifelong puzzle fell into place. It now made sense why I’d limped since childhood. Why my eye crossed at age four. Why I had cycles of crushing headaches from childhood into adulthood. Why I developed, later in life, nonstop hiccupping and dry-heaving.
The brain stem is the worst part of the brain to have something wrong; not that any part is ideal. It controls breathing, heart rate, consciousness. After diagnosis at 40, I had to choose between risky open-head surgery on this small but critical brain stem, or allow my angioma to continue bleeding, bringing more health deficits and the potential for a catastrophic hemorrhage. My surgical team talked with my family about the possibility of me needing full care in a nursing home, despite their best efforts. Miraculously, I came through my surgery: 12 hours, face down on an operating table as the team cut the back of my skull open. I was back at work part-time three months later. While elated that I survived, I also felt at times survivor’s guilt, especially when I spent a month in a brain injury rehab where most patients there would never go home again.
And then, Jane Ann was such a source of support to me before and after my surgery—my whole family was—yet, a year later, she was gone. Survivor’s guilt is complex, as we balance relief and gratitude for making it through something huge and continuing our lives, while others around us do not make it. We’re left to contend with unanswered questions of why.
CD: How did your medical issues related to the brain tumor affect you in terms of coming to writing, and staying in writing? I would imagine you still have some personal battles there, that can’t be easy to navigate at times. Does writing work as a catharsis to some of that?
Ann Kathryn: I’m still learning what a lifetime with a bleeding brain tumor taught me, and still has to teach me—because I believe we all continue to unearth meaning from our experiences throughout our lives, even when a particular threat is in the rearview mirror. Writing about that time, and what my life looks like now years after surgery, where I’ve picked back up with my career, home life, and international travel, is rewarding but also bittersweet sometimes.
About two years after my surgery, I also started volunteering with a nonprofit in my local area that offers therapeutic services (speech and occupational therapy) and arts programming to people living with brain injury from tumors, strokes, or severe accidents. I’ve been leading weekly writing workshops for their summer arts program; one hour every Friday, through the summer months. The experience has been a meaningful way for me to give back, specifically to people living with brain trauma. I love helping them discover and write their own stories of survival and resilience.
CD: In your lifetime thus far, have you observed a shift in how people read in terms of whether they do or not, and how this influences their ability to be, say, empathetic or aware of things that non-fiction was historically a good medium for?
Ann Kathryn: I think society’s collective attention span—both today, but also going back several decades—has been completely reshaped by surface-level consumption, which in turn has impacted our comprehension and consequently our ability to find common ground and meaning from shared experiences. With each year that passes, people spend less time sitting with “any” piece of content, be it mainstream news or literary. They give anything a few minutes, tops, before bouncing.
We’ve been conditioned—all of us—to skim, skim, skim. That’s why social platforms do so well. They’re built around this “get in and get out” mindset. The sub-100-character tweet. The 10-second TikTok reel. Quippy hashtags. The shorthand young people use when texting. “AFAIK” … “ICYMI” … “FWIW” … “JLMK” …
A generation of young people are literally losing language. I sound dramatic, but I think people’s dismissal of taking the time to read—and even write in full sentences!—is a loss. As a memoirist and essayist, of course this makes me sad. Writers are not built to scratch the surface. We’re built to spend days, weeks, months—years sometimes with bigger projects like a book—where we tighten and rephrase and polish. It sounds torturous to someone who is not a writer, but it’s where we get our energy.
It’s gratifying, therefore, when someone spends time reading something we wrote. But that’s happening less and less. Many people are choosing not to linger over written content. And, to appreciate, you often need to linger; to sit with a piece and feel what you feel after reading something that delighted or surprised or saddened you. But instead, people gulp down soundbites, tweets, reels, shorthand.
Memoirists and essayists will likely never get over wrestling with doubt and questions of: “Who cares about my experience? No one will want to read this.” So when a literary journal says they want to publish a piece, or a contest like yours specifically applauds a piece, and then readers read it and maybe someone responds to let the writer know how it affected them, that’s a shot of pure adrenaline. Of gratitude.
That’s why we, as writers, keep doing this. Because we’ve reached someone.
By the way, want to know what I think the worst text shorthand is? “TL; DR”—which means “too long; didn’t read.”
I hope some of your readers stayed with us to get this far. And I want to thank you again, Candice—and the whole Northwind team—for spending time with my essay, thinking about its message, and talking with me about it. It’s been a real pleasure.
Author bio: It’s a toss-up which Ann Kathryn Kelly loves more: writing or traveling. She has crossed the Sahara Desert’s dunes on a camel, trotted into the Arctic Circle with a reindeer sled, floated in the Dead Sea, traversed parts of India and Thailand on an elephant, and clung to rope bridges that swung over gorges in the Amazon Rainforest—for starters.
Writing brings the same thrills. Ann is a memoirist and essayist living in New Hampshire’s Seacoast region. Her essays, poems, and flash prose have been published in dozens of literary journals and anthologies—among them, the multi-award-winning anthology Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness and The Northwind Treasury anthology, with her essay winning second place in the Northwind Writing Award.
The opening chapter to Ann’s memoir was a top four finalist for the Sandra Carpenter Prize for Creative Nonfiction and longlisted for the First Pages Prize. She has been awarded writing residencies around the
world, and she’s an editor with Barren Magazine and a columnist with WOW! Women on Writing. Ann works in the technology sector and volunteers as a writing workshop leader for a nonprofit that serves
people living with brain injury. https://annkkelly.com
Socials:
Instagram: https://instagram.com/annkkelly
Twitter: https://twitter.com/annkkelly
To read The 2024 Northwind Treasury, including Ann Kathryn’s winning piece, you can purchase it in paperback on Lulu, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon, or as an eBook on Kindle. To see the list of contents and winners, visit our winner’s page.
Author Spotlight: Laurinda Lind
Laurinda Lind won 1st prize in Poetry in the Northwind Writing Award 2024 for her poem “Year One.” It is an honor to feature her Q&A here on Raw Earth Ink as part of our promotion of truly exceptional authors.
Q & A
Candice: Laurinda, firstly thank you for your beautiful submission. What stood out to the judges was the beauty of your writing and the terrible sorrow of your subject. Many times a subject can win because of its powerful theme, but the writing itself isn’t as strong. We all felt that regardless of subject, your writing stood on its own. However the subject of such profound loss is also a universal theme many of us can deeply relate to. What was your thought when you submitted this deeply personal poem to the competition?
Laurinda: Thanks for your kind words. Of hundreds of poems, I chose intuitively for submission to the contest (I may even have dowsed on a few). I haven’t sent much writing out this year, because I moved to a different town and am swimming in too much newness. But since Northwind is a newer contest, it inspired me to try for a reset.
CD: Was it challenging to share such a deeply personal poem publicly? Or was this in some way, cathartic? I would imagine it’s a vulnerable thing to share such an intimate moment of your life and how challenging that would be?
Laurinda: In some ways, even though it is an older poem, this one keeps echoing out of me as if I am still writing it. The devastation of that time comes back with its ironies — sacrifice under the trees, black-clad witnesses, a kinder season after it’s too late. Every time, I feel grateful there was a way to vent it.
CD: Can you talk to us about writing this poem and how you began writing out your grief in this way?
Laurinda: My son died on Martin Luther King Day, a school holiday (and his school nickname was Luther), shocking his family (father and four siblings) and circle of friends. All these years I thought his death accidental, but just this spring I learned it wasn’t. He was a terrific student and funny, but introverted. On the day of the cake and crows, I felt I was releasing him to the elements.
CD: Did you find your writing changed after such a profound loss? And how did writing play a part in working through this loss, especially when it’s such a life-changing event that can never really be “worked through” like other types of grief?
Laurinda: Well, I changed for sure, we all did. My poems afterward got grittier, I think; then other badness ensued. “Year One” came two-thirds of the way through an eighteen-year silent period where I wrote poems but rarely showed them to people. Then a breakthrough, and poetry submission became an anodyne to the difficult world.
CD: The imagery is gorgeous in your poetry, where do you get the influence for your images and metaphors?
Laurinda: Thanks again. If you look with your inner eye, your surroundings themselves supply the imagery, and the poem becomes like dream analysis — the subconscious mind puts symbols in front of us all day long, but most of the time we’re too lost in the weeds to see them.
CD: What power does poetry play in the translation and processing of grief in your opinion?
Laurinda: Thank God poetry is available as a valve to take some grief out of us through a hole it opens in us. Sometimes it feels as if we died, too, but after the poem comes through, we find out we are still alive.
CD: When you write, do you find a catharsis in writing out an experience, even such a painful one?
Laurinda: Writing about pain’s a way of being a survivor. Even, as I think I wrote in a poem (about Sylvia Plath), when you name what hurts, that enables joy, and asserts what’s hard hasn’t been meaningless. I do feel that.
CD: In your opinion, how do you think people can benefit from reading grief poetry or poems on the subject of loss and grief? I, for one, find them very important in the canon of writing, but I’d love to know your perspective on this.
Laurinda: I’ve known many people turned off by poetry in school because of the formulaic way it came at them. Despite this, people who expect poetry to be strictly metered and rhymed don’t know what to make of free verse. It’s when they notice that it’s saying what they’ve been holding inside that the gate opens and they walk into the words. The grief-affected are a very big club, and their commonality cuts through a lot of BS.
CD: Do you believe grief has powerful imagery that goes hand-in-hand with the experience, so when you think of grief, you also think of the images that accompany it, such as the snow, and the crocuses, and all the things you recall that seem to be forever connected to that time of grief?
Laurinda: I think the imagery carries us through it, even for non-artists. At the risk of sounding repetitive, it’s a place to keep yourself while you go on recovering for the rest of your life. I have already said I didn’t know for years that my son was a suicide; this spring, his younger brother followed suit. He too was smart/ deep/ conflicted. So I have to find more boats to put that ache into.
CD: As a reader of poetry, what do you like and dislike about poetry and why?
Laurinda: A good poem is like an available alternate existence, where a reader suddenly realizes, “Oh. This, too, is who I am.” Probably a reason for all the different poem varieties is that people have so many different needs. I don’t always “get” very academic poetry, but I’ll bet there are those who simply light up from it.
CD: Do you find “modern” online poetry varies from the more traditional published (print) poetry in terms of length and subject and how do you feel about this?
Laurinda: There’s a place for form and format, and writing in traditional form pulls things out of you that open-form poetry won’t. But rhyme needs to be unexpected, and to illuminate. I don’t think there are any wrong subjects.
CD: As a writer, was there a time when the grief was too powerful to find you could write “through” that grief, did you have to wait before you could write?
Laurinda: That’s where I am now, waiting.
CD: We all felt your last line “it just can’t be alive enough” slayed us, and the very potency of that in relation to the loss of life, was such a powerful image and ending. Many poems struggle to “end” themselves and you wrote this as if you knew exactly how to end it, before you’d got there. Was this a poem that flowed out of you or more one you planned out consciously?
Laurinda: This poem just climbed right up out of my throat and out through a dollar-store black pen, because it was a place I could stash that strange, lonely hour.
CD: As an award-winning poet and writer, do you feel connected to that identity or are you someone who writes without really believing you are a writer per se? In other words, do you have Imposter Syndrome as a writer, or are you quite comfortable with the idea of being a writer? And if so, what does “being a writer” mean to you?
Laurinda: While submitting feels like being part of the conversation, composition is meditative or is like psychoanalysis or something. What’s in all the dark cupboards? You’ll find out. I don’t think of myself as a writer until people start asking questions about how I spend my time. Also, it didn’t exactly discourage me that I got to fly from the U.S. to London to read a single poem. That day I felt like a writer.
CD: Please share any other aspects to your poem “Year One”, and what brought you to submit it to Northwind, that you believe readers would benefit from knowing about?
Laurinda: Advice to readers: don’t just read. Write. And don’t give up on a poem, ever. Every time you go back to a problem poem you’ll see something that needs to go out or come in (as long as you keep reading poems that found a place before yours did). “Year One” sat around for a long time before I first sent it to a magazine that wasted no time in rejecting it, and it racked up a little heap of subsequent rejections. But I kept casting it out until it caught somewhere. It’s also the last poem in my new chapbook.
Author bio: Laurinda Lind lives in New York State’s North Country, where she worked as an adjunct English teacher and caregiver. Her poetry and fiction appear in over 400 literary journals, including Atlanta Review, Blueline, Comstock Review, Constellations, The Cortland Review, Guesthouse, New American Writing, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Radius, SmokeLong Quarterly, Spillway, and Stand. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and placed first in poetry contests for the Keats-Shelley Prize, the Foley Poetry Award, and the Peggy Willis Lyles Haiku Contest.
To read The 2024 Northwind Treasury, including Laurinda’s winning piece, you can purchase it in paperback on Lulu, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon, or as an eBook on Kindle. To see the list of contents and winners, visit our winner’s page.
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