Articles

MA in literature Western graduate, LOUIS MCLAUGHIN (Managing Editor in the 2015-2016 calendar year) now lives and teaches in the Twin Cities.

by Julia Hands   The daughter finds a jar in the laundry closet as she puts away her soccer cleats. The glass is stained yellow with dust, the inside of the rim browned with rust-colored grime. She hides it under her coat when she goes outside, her parents not meeting eyes as they sit on opposite …

I realized just now how I’ve been rehashing the same concerns, making different attempts to answer the same questions, like I haven’t really evolved an expansive thematic range over the years.

Most of my essays, broadly speaking, deal with dancing between a need to know and the realization that I cannot truly know something beyond myself.

I think most of my work is inspired by random threads of words that I hear and images that stick in my mind and won’t let go, and I follow those threads to find out why they’ve stuck.

Spending so much time immersed in the push and pull of the ocean currents and tides has made its mark on my inner rhythms and outward perspective.

As a stay-at-home mother of three boys, poetry became for me a way to carve out a “room of my own” to record and bear witness to life—past, present, and imagined.

I wanted to see if it was even possible to write a story in my second language. I thought that would be the most challenging thing in my life so I wanted to try!

If I had to choose one word to capture a recurring obsession, it would be lucidity. I think that if my writings are to have any relevance, they would be because they resulted from seeing as clearly as I could…

I found this rehab notebook from 2006 buried in a box, skimmed through it, and found a dozen questions, some of which turned into poems, but all of which left me thinking about my life in ways they didn’t at the time (for obvious reasons).