Contributor Spotlight: Stella Reed

Stella Reed’s poem “After the Civil War, a Greenhouse Built from Images of the Dead” is featured in Issue 75 of the Bellingham Review.

What would you like to share with our readers about the work you contributed to the Bellingham Review?

Matthew Brady was a Civil War photographer. Glass plate negatives of some of his lost images were sold as scrap to gardeners who used them after the Civil War to build greenhouses. In the years that followed the end of the war, the sun slowly burned away the images. I found that to be a haunting story and great premise for a poem.

Tell us about your writing life.

I’m intrigued by mythology, ritual, dying and what comes after, all of which find a way into my poems.

Which non-writing aspect(s) of your life most influences your writing?

Once I decided to take myself seriously I made choices that enable me to write. I work a low stress job at an Audubon sanctuary so I get to spend my 9-5 with birds, bears, bobcats, mountain lions, creepy crawly beings and all the rooted things that sustain them. I pick through their scat and witness how they eat each other. I live near a river that’s sometimes an arroyo. Coyotes wake me up at night with freaky songs. All of that manages to create a head full of poetry.

What writing advice has stayed with you?

“Put away the knives.” – Carolyn Forché on critiquing yours and others’ work.

What is your favorite book (or essay, poem, short story)? Favorite writer(s)?

My favorite poem might be Larry Levis’s “Anastasia & Sandman.” I’ve been studying it for a while now. How did he do what he did? Brilliant!

What are you reading right now?

Many things: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me are on my bedside table. Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in the bathroom. On my breakfast table are Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead, and Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas. In my office desk drawer is Eliot’s Four Quartets.

What project(s) are you working on now, or next?

I’m thrilled that a collaborative poetry manuscript with two other women titled We Are Meant to Carry Water was just picked up by 3: A Taos Press for future publication. It’s a feminist response to the 2016 presidential election written mostly in epistle form through the personas of 3 mythological women. It’s fuckin’ hot.

Anything else our readers might want to know about you?

I’m distantly related to George Clooney, more closely related to his aunt—and mine, many times removed—the warbler, Rosemary Clooney. But here’s the better answer: I help to create a space for women and children to write in homeless and domestic violence shelters through WingSpan Poetry Project. Visit www.wingspanpoetryproject.wordpress.com to see what they’ve been up to.

STELLA REED is from Santa Fe, NM. She is a teacher with the WingSpan Poetry Project bringing poetry classes to residents in domestic violence and homeless shelters in Santa Fe. You can find her poems in the Taos International Journal of Poetry and Art, Slipstream, and the American Journal of Poetry among other literary journals. Stella is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a winner of the D.H. Lawrence prize for fiction as well as a grant from the New Mexico Literary Arts Society for the poetry and visual arts project Ordinary Cloth, the Secret Language of Women. She holds an MFA from New England College where she was awarded the Joel Oppenheimer scholarship.

Featured Image: “Film: Negatives” by Nicolas