The Third Coast Poetry and Fiction contests exist to elevate the creative endeavors each of us as writers make. Often, the work in itself is the only reward we can expect. Through the contest, readers and judges give careful attention to the work of each author. We are grateful to shine a light on the work we found most compelling.

Poetry Winner: “A Lesser Evil” by Saba Keramati

Here’s what judge Jamaal May had to say about Keramati’s poem:

“A Lesser Evil” is as complete a poem as I’ve ever seen. The music sounded so natural it felt like it was written for me after a few days. It was in my body—in my field of resonance. The repetition of “lie” works like a moving anchor as the syntax, which is wonderfully varied, pushes the word around. It has been said that poetry isn’t just about pattern. It is about pattern and variation. The poet knows just when to shift the pattern on us at every line. The nimbleness of the poem belies some of its complexity as well. There is a well-done turn near the midway point that increases the stakes before making them personal. It’s a move from the public to the private that Carolyn Forché could be proud of. Approaching the end, the poem works toward the interior before closing on a moment that brings the public, private, interior, and exterior into weave with the closing music. That weave tightens into a raised fist as the threads ripple back through the poem while resonating outwards.

Poetry Runner-Up: “I Drag My Shame Into the Bathroom and Kill It” by Alejandro Lucero

Here’s what judge Jamaal May had to say about Lucero’s poem:

“I Drag My Shame Into the Bathroom and Kill It” arrests attention at the title, then goes on to reward that attention. The skill shown with imagery means this poet could have gotten plenty far with just that in their toolkit. Yet, they go on to demonstrate others, such as the ability to enliven an abstraction, use line-length to ebb and flow the music, and introduce subtle links and psychological interactions through diction.

Poetry Finalists

Aaliyah Anderson, “Decimation” · Moriah Cohen, “In the Emergency Room after my Son Shattered his Elbow I Catalogue Units Below Which Measurement Becomes Meaningless” and “Proof of Life Holding the Associated Press March 2024” · Clayre Benzadón, “Qué Guay” · Saba Keramati, “Notes On the Archive” · Carolene Kurien, “Mirrors” · Daphne Maysonet, “After Julie London’s ‘November Twilight,’ 1956”· Danielle Garcia Tubo- “Aking Panahon: This, too, is Legacy” 

Fiction Winner: “Crisis Actors” by Melissa Yancy

Here’s what judge Misha Rai had to say about Yancy’s story:

There are stories that storytellers tell over and over again. The reasons for this are varied, but in, “Crisis Actors,” the winning story of the contest, I saw how skillfully the writer complicated the reader’s understanding of the aftermath of a traumatic event—an event that has been mined in fiction quite often—and the grief that goes with it. Each time I thought I had a handle on the kind of story I was being told, there was a shift in the narrative and suddenly I was in a different story, but also in the one I first began to read. This is not an easy feat to pull off though “Crisis Actors” pulls it off and with such great aplomb that I found myself at the edge of my seat every time I read it.

Fiction Runner-Up: “Where There Can Be No Breath At All” by Aida Zilelian

Here’s what judge Misha Rai had to say Zilelian’s story:

I was instantly taken in by the command of the first-person voice in “Where There Can Be No Breath At All.” The child narrator is watchful, innocent, and in the end, full of gumption exhibited in a manner that raises the stakes of the story exponentially. The ending is beautiful and as the writer puts it, with a kind of “truth (that) can hollow your heart…sometimes it’s best not to know the answers.”

Fiction Finalists

Jasmine Jones, “Zombie Boy” · Dalton Sikes “Head Hunting” · Bill Smoot “The Scream”

The Books Arts Center of Kalamazoo preserves book-making traditions. While the shift in printing processes post-Industrial Revolution made books widely accessible, Jeff Abshear founded The Book Arts Center of Kalamazoo to keep the art of traditional book-making alive. Visit kalbookarts.org to learn about upcoming workshops, events, and more.

Amanda Gatewood: How did you get your start in book arts? 

Jeff Abshear: My background as a student is in art and literature. I studied both when I was an undergraduate. After I finished my undergraduate degree, John Ridland introduced me to the work of Harry Duncan. Many people have referred to Duncan as the father of fine press printing back in the 1920s. When the industrial revolution had pretty much abolished hand printing and replaced it with mechanical printing, he had gotten an old-fashioned press, like some of the presses that we have here. Duncan started publishing books of poetry, including a book by William Carlos Williams. He did the whole thing with hand set type, on an old-fashioned press, and in small editions that were hand bound. I was inspired by Harry Duncan’s work, and that was what got me interested. 

I proposed to do what was my very first book with John, which was was called Palms: Six Ballads. I did a very limited work, only 75 copies. I did a series of aquatint etchings that went in the book, printed all the pages, and bound all the books by hand. After that Western Michigan University gave me a fellowship to come here and set up the letterpress studio. Then I worked as a graphic designer for many years. In 2005 a lot of things came together to start the Book Arts Center. I gathered together a bunch of people in Kalamazoo that were artists, writers, paper makers, book binders, and printers. We didn’t have much of anything except for Paul Roberts’ paper studio and very basic equipment for doing book binding. That was 20 years ago and gradually it grew from there. 

AG: Do you believe that it’s very important to handcraft a book? So often publishing houses just put them into a machine and you can almost feel that there is not a human touch to it.

JA: That is correct. I think when a book is made by hand, when somebody reads that book, it’s a different kind of experience. They tend to read more carefully. I think it’s a more intimate experience. 

AG: Especially since so much of the publishing industry is just pushing out copies.

JA: Of all sorts of stuff. Maybe you read it and then you throw it away or, you know it gets lost or whatever. Or even if it doesn’t, they use very cheap materials. The books fall apart or the paper has a lot of acid in it and so eventually the pages turn yellow. A book like the kinds of books we make, with archival materials, will last a long time. Books the were printed with movable type on handmade paper in the Renaissance are still perfectly good today. 

AG: How does your process differ from historical bookmaking processes?

JA: If you go all the way back to the very beginning of bookmaking, people were making books with animal skins. In the 19th century, with the industrial revolution and the mechanization of book production, books were made by machines, sewn by machines, covered by machines. Often made with cheap materials in order to make a lot of copies quickly and cheaply. The quality of book production kind of fell down. Contemporary mechanically-made books I’d say are better made now, because people have realized that the old books from the 19th century and early 20th century are falling apart, so they take more care. But we [at the Book Arts Center] are sort of anachronistic. We go back to another age, printing and sewing books by hand. We use materials and techniques that would have been used in earlier times.

AG: What are the steps that go into building a book by hand?

JA: It’s kind of difficult for me to just describe it. There are different ways of making books. There are different kinds of book forms depending on what kind of book you’re going to make. If you’re making what we call a casebound book, which is a hardcover book, going from the very beginning, you start by folding the pages in half. You have to lay out the book so that you can put the pages into groupings of pages together, which are called signatures. 

Then you poke holes in the fold and sew it together. Take glue, put the book in a clamp, put glue on the spine, and put fabric on that. Then you make a cover out of book board, which is a kind of really compressed cardboard that you cover with cloth that’s specially made to be resistant to the glue, so the glue doesn’t come through the cloth backing. You then glue the book into the board. Once everything’s glued together, you have to put it into a press so that it dries and comes out flat.

AG: You’ve mentioned in class and on the website for the Book Arts Center that you are a researcher in Venice and that was part of your education. Do you believe that’s helped you in this field?

JA: Definitely. I was a Fulbright scholar in 2007, after the Book Art Center had been established for only two years. I had been making books already, going all the way back ten to fifteen years. When I went to Italy that first year, I ended up making contacts with some of the studios. I still bring students to work in some of the studios that I made contact with all the way back then. 

AG: Is there any other information you believe people should know about the industry of handmade books?

JA: Here’s one thing that there’s a fairly recent kind of development in book arts. In the last 50 years or so there’s been a kind of explosion in the development of what are called artist books. Where an artist will create a usually very small edition of books, sometimes just one single copy of a book. Often the emphasis is on the book form as a medium for the artist’s expression, so the artist will often write whatever text is in it to create images. Sometimes the books are handmade paper, or they use hand printed imagery. Sometimes they’re even sculptural in different ways. So, the way the book is presented and packaged can be an experience in itself, like experiencing a piece of sculpture. 

AMANDA GATEWOOD is a student at Western Michigan University, majoring in art history and creative writing. She is pursuing a publishing career through her Third Coast internship and has a poem in Moonstone Arts Center’s New Voices 2025.

Reviewed by: Taylor Mroz

In his radiant collection of prose-poems, Degrees of Romance, Peter Krumbach creates a playground for imagination in a neighborhood near reality. In his own words, Krumbach writes with the intention to “follow the logic of the unconscious,” and perfectly captures the absurdity and playful profundity of a dream. With sharp wit and dry humor, he invents surreal situations—a man finding Tchaikovsky under the bed, a divorcing couple slowly turning to wood, a newborn baby running away from the hospital—and uses them to deliver touching meditations on themes such as secrecy, stagnation, and parenthood. The poems wind through wandering paths of the mind, creating a distance from reality which is introduced early on in “Nightshift in Produce”: 

Big Sal tells me again how he loathes not only the way I stack, but the way I shelve. His words have a rhythm. They become a 5-mile-long train. I nod in triple time, then cut myself adrift, entering a space with no verbs, a field where the past, present and future exist at once. … I need to tell Big Sal that my soul is out back, playing chess against the loading dock crew, that his soul is marked down, bottom shelf, aisle 8. 
(5)

The disconnect between the speaker’s thoughts and physical existence is typical of the entire collection and how it moves away from corporeality in order to reach a plane of poetic enlightenment. The body is anchored to one place—in this case, the grocery store—but the mind slips away from the linear logic of reality, looping around to a state of wonder. The reader is urged to consider the absurdities of desire, connection, and loss, and invited to find meaning within them.

Krumbach employs accessible language that is craftily tilted on its head to form compressed bursts of imagination, which are easy to digest and latch onto because of their brevity. Through use of justified text, the poems are mostly square, framed by the page like vivid scenes painted on a museum wall. These scenes, full of bizarre premises, mainly occur in mundane, everyday locations —in a kitchen, on a park bench, on a highway—but their unique scenarios set a playful tone that can be peeled back to reveal layers of deep sincerity. In “Fugitive,” Krumbach weaves a tale of a runaway baby who flees the hospital to go “running with the bulls” in Pamplona, take a “selfie with pope Francis in the Vatican Gardens,” and launch a memoir from Simon & Schuster (8). The poem’s opening lines set a grim tone, initially implying a neonatal death by describing the infant as “lost” and “gone.” This seriousness is then subverted as the poem’s true meaning is revealed, and humor takes over with the imagery of a baby driving a getaway car or running laps in the womb. Ultimately, though subtly, the poem circles back to the themes of loss—not from death, but from being left behind. The parents are forced to wrestle with both the joy of their baby’s adventures and the sting of the baby’s absence, and the reader is confronted with the bittersweet realities of watching a child grow up.

Although Degrees of Romance refuses to give easy answers about these big ideas, it embraces absurdity as one way to cope with them. In “Explaining Marriage to an Alien,” which aptly describes its own premise, the paradoxical nature of human relationships is explored through dialogue:

Does it cause happiness? Yes, a great joy. A heat that grows homicidal. Don’t most of you divorce? We do. And those who don’t? They’ve thought of it. So, you marry why? Love. The hand of a hundred fingers. (7)

Zooming out to an alien’s perspective allows for an objective consideration of how many human behaviors don’t seem to make sense. Every relationship ends, whether through separation or death, yet we love anyway. We act on emotion, defy logic for spontaneity, hold superstitions, procrastinate to our detriment, and dream for mysterious reasons. The best way to address these contradictions is through art, and the human element of the surreal situations Krumbach conjures is the thread that ties the collection together. Whether a poem is from the mind of a bird, or God, or a well-mannered bear, it spins the yarn of fundamental human experience out of seemingly unrelatable fibers.

Among its other delicate takeaways, Degrees of Romance teaches us to pay attention to the world around and inside of us and see it in new ways. It is part instruction manual, part insightful acid trip, part confusing dream, and part shout into the void. It first makes us comfortable, offers a cup of humor and suggests we put our feet up, then pulls out the rug from under us to reveal the aching vulnerability of the human condition. As its layers unfold, the book itself becomes “a span which renders truths we’ve sensed but deemed invisible visible,” and, much like with dreams, its lessons are whatever we make of them.

Cited: Peter Krumbach, “10 Questions for Peter Krumbach,” interview by Edward Clifford, The Massachusetts Review, vol. 61 (Spring 2020), www.massreview.org/node/8935. 

TAYLOR MROZ is pursuing creative writing at WMU and plans to work in the publishing industry. Her work has been selected for The Laureate and she currently lives in Kalamazoo.

The University of Georgia Press, 2024. 240 pages ($28.95).

ISBN: 978-0-8203-6736-1

“Recalling involves overwriting. A memory is a copy of a copy. The more often we recall a real time and place, the further we get from the real.” 

-Jay Baron Nicorvo, BEST COPY AVAILABLE

Reviewed by Latifa Ayad

The cover of Jay Baron Nicorvo’s BEST COPY AVAILABLE describes it as a True Crime Memoir. This categorization is only partially true. Yes, the crimes of the rape of Jay’s mother, Sharon, and the molestation of young Jay at the hands of a babysitter, are the black holes around which this story orbits. As Nicorvo writes, “Like the force of gravity, abuse bends space, torques time. The greater the abuse, the greater the gravity.” 

However, the primary investigation of this memoir is no police procedural. It is not centered on the profiling and tracking of a criminal. BEST COPY AVAILABLE is as much about “true crime” as it is about the essential but impossible nature of truth. When Sharon is raped, she tells her young children that she was mugged, but seven-year-old Jay senses that something has been omitted. He “can’t help but feel, at the deepest level of awareness, a compulsion to know, if not alter, the distortion.” When the truth of the rape finally comes out, Nicorvo writes, “What lodges in me is the lie. By a shameful leap of kid logic, a lie looms greater than rape.” Jay’s emotions and understanding develop with age, but he continues to hold the truth as sacred, and, in his own household as a parent, the adult Jay is carefully honest with his son about the molestation he was subjected to as a child. For Jay, “Home is the place without secrets.” 

Nicorvo meditates on how, even in the act of writing, he is recreating. “Writing focuses recall. Disciplines the mind. Trains it to see and hear things, things that aren’t actually there.” And, “Recalling involves overwriting. A memory is a copy of a copy. The more often we recall a real time and place, the further we get from the real.” 

Yet the act of memory, recording, storytelling, is as essential to puzzling out the crimes portrayed in this book as it is to the act of “pulling down that wall—brick by brick, word by word—and rebuilding something, rebuilding this book, from the salvage.” 

BEST COPY AVAILABLE is as formally flexible as the malleability of memory demands. The text makes use of interview transcripts, police reports, and photographs. Part II of the book switches, jarringly, to a second-person address, the object of address often morphing without warning from one male character to another. The unconventionality pays off as the reader begins to connect the “you” to a series of potential father figures for Jay, from his absent father Tony, his mother’s boyfriend Van, TV’s Roc Emerson, an oft-doubted God, and eventually Jay himself. 

In the examination of truth, Nicorvo must reckon with all the difficult facts, including that Sharon, Nicorvo’s mother and a white woman, was raped by a black man. Sharon develops a fear of black men which the young Jay subconsciously picks up on, judging his mother as a racist until the truth about the rape comes out. A conflict between two watershed movements of the recent decade, #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, meet in a muddle with Sharon’s truth. Nicorvo does not solve this muddle, but he carefully contextualizes it. “Abuse is the serpent that eats its tale,” and Nicorvo is hesitant to completely lay blame. If anything, Nicorvo blames American systems of race, wealth, and masculinity.  As we read, we come to the realization that this memoir is “true crime,” not as much in its examination of the rape of Sharon, nor of Jay’s molestation, but in its incisive investigation into the crime of being poor in America. Nicorvo highlights the bleak correlation between poverty and abuse. “The cause, poverty, and the effect, abuse, are so intimately united in this country that they’re nearly the same damn thing. Poverty is abuse.” BEST COPY AVAILABLE is an indictment of the structures that uphold the cycles of abuse as much as the men who perpetuate that cycle. 

Intense and propulsive, the pages of BEST COPY AVAILABLE are binge-worthy and saturated with horrific beauty and nostalgia. Nicorvo writes settings which are rich and revolting: an oil blackened beach in Jersey, a cockroach infested kitchen in Sarasota, each place an artifact of poverty which is colored halfway-charming by the childhood joys of a Christmas dirtying fingers in the cold sand, by a Nintendo room where the hours are whiled away. Vulgar but not irreverent, there is much this story holds sacred. The strength and love of two women raising three boys. The brave act of telling the truth. In a world where father figures, “Dodge taxes. Ditch sons. Assault Mothers. Molest kids. Knife grandfathers,” Nicorvo questions, “This what it means to be a man in America?” But ultimately the book is hopeful and courageous, offering up the possibility to rewrite the survivor’s script.

2024 Fiction Contest Judge Misha Rai tells Third Coast editors about how the support of contests has influenced her career, what hooks her when reading submissions, and the blurred lines of literary and genre fiction.

How has support from writing contests helped to shape your career? What value do you see in submitting to writing contests? 

Misha Rai: For me, the support from writing contests has been career changing. Even being longlisted or shortlisted in a contest has resulted in editors from journals/anthologies emailing to ask for my work. There are agents who have reached out wanting to read a manuscript, and they’ve offered me representation. This is definitely one way to be legible as an artist in the writing/publishing community and the larger reading world. 

Then there is that absolutely necessary confidence boost that you get from placing in a contest. I think that last part is super important. 

The other thing is a writer must also make a habit of submitting work, collecting whatever response comes their way, and then doing it all over again. This too is a muscle the writer has to exercise. To say you’re a writer is to say I will put my work out there for someone to read, think about, hopefully be entertained and moved by, and only then make a choice to publish or not publish the work. I think contests are a wonderful way to put into practice what is an essential skill a writer has to become good at practicing. 

As a judge, what kind of work do you find most often piques your interest? Is there anything in particular you’d love to see from entrants? 

MR: I am a sucker for musicality of language, but that sort of beautiful sentence in and of itself is not enough. Within a really well told short story those sentences are magic. Honestly, what I want is to be able to lean in as I read, as if I was around a campfire and someone was sitting across from me telling me a story. 

I read rather widely, eclectically, and I am never sure of what will hook me where subject matter or even genre is concerned, so I’m excited to read the submissions with an open mind. 

Where do you stand on this commonly given piece of writing advice: “write what you know?”

MR: I both agree and disagree with it. Since I am a writer as well, the best version of this advice means mining an emotion you feel and putting the depth of that feeling in a character you’re working on, whether or not the circumstances of your life and the life of the character you’ve imagined run parallel. For example, everyone knows what disappointment feels like but what makes my sense of disappointment different will also make how the character expresses it particular to them. 

That being said, the whole point of writing fiction is to write FICTION! We have a license to imagine. What a poor writing life it would be if we were to allow ourselves to only “write what you know.”

What book is on your bedside table right now? 

There are a few. A little while ago I began to read several books at once, which is a new thing for me. Anyways, here is what I have been staying up at night with:

• The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024
• Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato
• Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy
• Orbital by Samantha Harvey
• Dengue Boy: A Novel by Michel Nieva
• Lonely Planet Guide to Washington, Oregon & the Pacific Northwest

Misha Rai is a Shirley Jackson Award nominated writer whose prose has been supported by the Kenyon Review Fellowship Program, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, MacDowell, Ucross, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Dana Award in the Novel Category. Her short story, “Twenty Years Ago” is a Distinguished story in the 2021 Best American Short Story anthology. In 2022 her fiction was longlisted for the Disquiet Prize. Her essay, “To Learn About Smoke One Must First Light a Fire,” winner of the Dogwood Literary Prize in Nonfiction, is listed as a Notable Essay in the 2019 Best American Essays anthology. Her prose appears in a number of journals and anthologies. Misha was born in Sonipat, Haryana and brought up in India where she first worked as a journalist, and then, later, in human rights for the National Human Rights Commission, The International Labour Organization, and on projects run by the Ministry of Women & Child, India, and the UNICEF. She currently edits for the Kenyon Review and teaches Creative Writing at Sewanee: The University of the South.

Hello Third Coast Readers!

This week’s blog post brings exciting news about the 2023-2024 Third Coast Fiction and Poetry Contests. We are so excited to announce Elina Kumra as the winner of the 2023-2024 Fiction Contest for her piece “The Grandmother,” and Sara Fetherolf as the winner of the 2023-2024 Poetry Contest for their piece “Poet as Meyer Lemon Tree they Keep Forgetting to Water”.

I was grateful for the opportunity to read their impressive works and craft interview questions to hear more. Both writers have taken the time to respond thoughtfully to these questions and offer insightful information about their influences, technology, storytelling, and more. For more information about the writers, please refer to their bios located underneath the interviews.

You can read their pieces in an upcoming issue of Third Coast—stay tuned!

The judges for this year’s fiction and poetry contests were Fernando A. Flores and Destiny O. Birdsong, respectively. You can find more information about the judges and the contests here.

— Logen Crandall, Editorial Intern

An Interview with Elina KuMra

Crandall: Before we dive into the story itself, I would love to hear about your poetic and fictional roots. How did you get started in the writing realm? What led you to begin submitting your work? 

Kumra: From childhood, I’ve been deeply drawn to journaling and storytelling. The act of observing and capturing my world – both the day-to-day and the extraordinary – became a starting point for more serious writing. This process of unpacking thoughts and experiences through written words was, and continues to be, a foundational element in my writing journey.

Crandall: Where did you find inspiration for “The Grandmother”? Considering the Grandma’s origin in Chengdu, a city in China, was your writing influenced by Chinese folklore?

Kumra: Indian and Chinese folklore intrigue me. The complexity of their stories is fascinating- myths filled with enlightenment, holding up a lens to society’s values. Folklore’s mix of the real and unreal captivated my young mind and still inspires me today.  As a writer, I strive to explore the light and dark, taking cues from folklore’s fusions of human and supernatural. The tales taught me to blur lines, connecting worlds to create a more engaging narrative. This piece, like these myths, merges twists of reality and sparks of the supernatural. My aim is to invigorate readers, provoke thought, and reveal the allure of storytelling.

Crandall: The imagery in your piece is incredible. The reader shifts from chilling images of disfigured crows and toddlers with chicken heads to lovely glimpses of flowers growing from soda cans. Did you find yourself in a balancing act between the supernatural and the beautifully simple in this story?

Kumra: Thank you! I did strive for a balance between the supernatural and the starkly real in my tale. I’ve always admired Gabriel García Márquez’s ability to blend ordinary and extraordinary elements in his stories, making it seem like the extraordinary or the impossible could naturally exist in our world.

I also wanted to imbue everyday actions with deeper meanings. For example, the grandmother stowing away her money is reminiscent of the Dickensian era, but also delves into the concept of hoarding at a metaphysical level. And much like Alfred Lord Tennyson employed bird symbolism in his poetry to express profound human experiences, I tried to use avian imagery to enhance my narrative.

I also added an element of Chinese folklore with the reference to “The Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea”. While eight is generally associated with luck in Chinese mythology, the seven-headed crow in my story suffers and fights, challenging that familiar association.
In essence, my story aims to blend Western and Eastern literary traditions, metaphysical philosophy, and timeless folklore. Each element, from the seven-headed crow to the flowers growing out of soda cans, is meant to bring the magical and the mundane together in harmony, just like what Gabriel García Márquez achieved in “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.

Inspiration from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Eagle”, particularly its vivid depiction of a bird’s flight, helped shape my story’s strong avian imagery. The ancient Chinese tale of cooperative effort and unity, “Eight Immortals Crossing the Sea”, also lent its undertones to my narrative, similar to how the seven arguing heads of the crow are bound by a single stomach. So, yes, you could say I was walking a tightrope between fantasy and reality in a tousled snowglobe, in an attempt to create a story that speaks to the beauty and strangeness of our world from a unique perspective.

Crandall: “The Grandmother” sends a subliminal message about the power of storytelling and the effect it has on an audience. What do you want readers to take away from this story?

Kumra: I want my readers to understand that stories are not merely for entertainment or a way to spend time; their power extends much further. They have the potential to reshape our viewpoints, shift our ingrained paradigms, and question conventional norms. More importantly, stories have the remarkable ability to validate our experiences, making us feel seen, heard, and acknowledged.

An Interview with Sara Fetherolf

Crandall: The ‘about’ page on your website states that you live “next to a well-worn stretch of the Pacific Ocean”. Do you find this environment to be suitable for your writing? Describe your ideal conditions when creating a new piece.

Fetherolf: It’s funny you picked out that line in my bio. I’ve updated that sentence several times to try to get the description right. I live in a port city. I find living near the ocean is often associated with a certain glamor or privilege, but that doesn’t fit with my local ocean. For every pristine beach that is a picturesque home to the wealthy, there are so many stretches of ocean that are polluted and worn through. I think about this a lot. I love writing in the natural world, but I can’t ever get past that awareness that this beautiful place is also dying because of human causes.

With that in mind, I don’t know if I have ideal conditions for writing, at least when it comes to place. I am simply influenced by whatever environment I find myself in. In a lot of my writing—and certainly in “Poet as Meyer Lemon Tree they Keep Forgetting to Water”—I try to represent a physical and emotional landscape at the same time. I live in a constant state of pathetic fallacy—the whole world is part of my own emotional life, and my emotion is part of the landscape of the world. Or, put another way, the landscapes of this earth are animate, and they interact with me mostly through the language of emotion. So I don’t have an ideal landscape for writing, because my writing is driven by engaging with my relationship with a place as it exists in its fullness, if that makes sense.

Crandall: Your award-winning piece, “Poet as Meyer Lemon Tree they Keep Forgetting to Water,” has an exquisite title. What inspired it?

Fetherolf: It is honestly pretty literal, at least to my mind! I wrote the poem at a time when I was trying to write a new poem every day. Most of my poems focused on the world that was right in front of me. On that particular day, I was writing about the Meyer lemon tree that I keep out in my little outdoor alleyway space.

The tree made me feel guilty. I loved it so much. It was a small, eager tree that didn’t ask for much of anything. It would cover itself in these beautiful, scented blossoms, and with a very minimal amount of care, all those flowers would turn into enormous yellow-orange lemons. And still, I couldn’t manage to give it that minimal amount of care. I would think about it a lot, but I would never get around to actually filling up the watering can and bringing it a drink. All the blossoms withered and fell off. It felt like a deep failure in myself.

For me, that’s how I experience depression more generally—not as sadness, but as this sense of inertia, an inability to do the simple thing that would nurture the eager and generous parts of myself. When I started drafting this poem, I realized I identified more with the tree than with the poet who doesn’t water it. That person who does not water the tree felt like almost an outside force, some other self that prevents me from taking steps toward providing care for myself or the world around me. That’s why I tried to give the poem a title that immediately sets up a confusion between poet and tree, between the one who keeps forgetting to provide the basic, necessary care that sustains life and the one who needs that care to survive.

Crandall: I love how you mentioned the “bluelight” of screens throughout your poem. What effect do you think technology has on modern art? Are there other inhibitors to modern poets and poetry?

Fetherolf: This is such a good question! I’m honestly not anti-technology as a whole, and I think there are certainly a lot of advantages to being able to connect with many communities through technological means. I think it has been especially good for poetry in many ways, since it can allow more voices into the mix with fewer gatekeeping institutions standing in the way.

And yet, on a personal level, interacting with the technological world usually feels kind of awful. I start to feel so trapped in the blue light scroll, unable to take agency over my own brain or my own time. This is especially true when I am already in a state of depression or numbness. For me, the constant newsfeeds create an intense sense of helplessness, disguised as a sense of control. There’s this feeling that if I can just collect enough information, read enough perspectives, find the right words to describe the endless disasters—if I can do that, it will somehow fix everything. And instead, it just reinforces the numbness that encourages more scrolling.

Over time, the endless scroll can have effect on the psyche where everything starts to feel like part of the screen. That was something I was trying to get at in “Poet as Meyer Lemon Tree”—the way the blue light of the screen seems to pervade the rest of the world in such moments. And I do think that can inhibit creativity. It can flatten out the sense of what is possible.

Crandall: Your poem tells the story of decline and does a great job communicating the feeling of being trapped. With the speaker’s ownership in the lines “my artificial floor / my round solid mirror,” self-imposed suffering comes to mind. What role does self-limitation play in the creative process? Do you think it is solely negative and can it be overcome? How can the poet remember to water themselves?

Fetherolf: I like your framing of this question. I think there are different forms of self-limitation, and no, it’s not always negative. Setting limitations for myself can be an important form of self-care, which is a very different thing from self-imposed suffering. As I alluded to earlier, I don’t know if this poem is really about self-imposed suffering, or at least it is more complicated than that—it’s about a kind of suffering that might look self-imposed from the outside, but that still feels awfully hard to end when you’re in it.

I mentioned earlier that I was writing a poem every day when I drafted “Poet as Meyer Lemon Tree.” This did not come naturally to me. The only way I could keep up with it was to accept that most days, I was going to write something very bad. And this act of writing bad poems in itself was healing. It became an exercise in releasing my perfectionism—a very insidious form of self-limitation that has always played a major role in how I limit my art. I guess this means that my answer to “how can the poet remember to water themselves?” is: it might not be so much about remembering, as it is accepting that it’s boring and daily, and that it’s going to be deeply imperfect. And it’s still important to do.

Author Bios

Elina Kumra is the author of the forthcoming Lodestar (2024) and Paradiso (2024). First Prizes with Marin County First Prize Poet, Third Coast, Reed Magazine and Beyond Words. Honored by Scholastic Writing with over 20 Gold and Silver Keys. She has been published in Peatsmoke, Reed Magazine, One Art, Up North Lit, Writer’s Digest, StreetLit, Coffin Bell, Polyphony Lit, Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, Variant Lit, Quibble, Death Rattle, Typishly, Cathexis NorthWest Press, Tint Journal, and the Peauxdunque Review. She is Reed Magazine‘s 2024 Emerging Writer Winner. Second Place California Youth Poet Laureate. Her essays have appeared in Quibble Lit. Her primary goal is to tackle illiteracy by promoting equity and accessibility within the educational system. Elina is the EIC and founder of VelvetPoets. She is currently focusing on A Brush on Recovery — a 501(c)(3) non-profit which seeks to promote mental health and opiate recovery through poetry. @velvetpoets twitter x: Elinakumra1

Sara O. Fetherolf (she/they) is the author of Via Combusta (New American Press 2022). They won the 2021 Iron Horse Long Story award and they have written text for song cycles and short operas that have been performed around the country. Their writing appears in publications like Best Microfiction 2023, Gulf Coast, New Ohio Review, Storm Cellar, and Gigantic Sequins. She lives in California.

Dear Third Coast Readers,

With Memorial Day approaching on Monday, May 27th, I’ve found myself caught up in thoughts about sacrifice and honor. Not all of society supports the various angles of the military, but I think we can all agree that there is honor in fighting for what one believes in, especially if the cause is noble. Even devout pacifists find alternative ways to stand up for their principles, such as peaceful protests or debates.

Whether the military is ethical or not isn’t the question of Memorial Day. Instead, it invites reflection on our choices and values while honoring those who were brave enough to sacrifice their lives for what they believed in. What would you give up for the chance to spend another day with someone you loved and lost? What comfort item would you forego in order to support an organization you resonate with? What about a healthier lifestyle? Are there any people or causes that you would give your life for?

Today’s poem by MRB Chelko from Issue 48 utilizes careful imagery as a reminder to consider the areas of life that inspire us, giving us joy and passion, from things or feelings that we may take for granted. While the means to obtain freedom, love, happiness, or a better life can be judged in positive or negative ways, there is more honor in passion than passivity.

— Logen Crandall, Editorial Intern

What About

summer? Flies alight in the fruit bowl? A good blue cheese?

What about the body? Tight with post-swim wind? In a towel?

A bath? With crystals?

What about New Mexico? (Its lizards like squirrels?) (Sparse trees like ghosts of buffalo?) Or this place? It’s amazing parallel park jobs? Swift maneuvers? Car-fulls of praise?

What about in-season anything? Taut, edge-ripe tomatoes?

Vines in the chain-link? Lush, probing braids?

What about fades? In haircuts? And songs?

And salt? (The way elephants pilgrim to lick it?)

What about calling it fucking and fucking loving it? (That ex who shows up sometimes?) (His bike in your driveway?) (The twine of his arms?)

And arms? Just having them? At least one? To not be a worm?

What about Rome? Piazza boys pressed to some blondies? The way clouds grope a dome?

And grapes? Sliced in quarters? On some toddler’s tray?

What about mothers?

And swallowing mint leaves with water?

And trees? (Aren’t they cities?)

((Just all of it?))

Meat?

The fat cooking down? Stumbling down the hall? That aroma?

MRB Chelko is the author of several chapbooks including Songs & Yes (2016) and Manhattations (2014), which was selected by Mary Ruefle for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Chelko’s publications include Bennington Review, Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, and Poetry International. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program of the New Hampshire Institute of Art and lives in New York City.