DD: How did Winter Goose come into being? Can you give us a brief history of the press?
JK: In 2011 I started WGP from a desire to stay close to the written word as a writer and lover of art. The success of our press came quickly with an overwhelming amount of submissions and support from the writing community. We’ve now published over a hundred books and carry several award-winning authors and titles in our catalog.
DD: Tell us a little bit about your poetry catalog. What do Winter Goose books share in common?
JK: Our poetry catalog ranges in variety from traditional form poetry to a more extensive catalog of contemporary poetry and poets. Our poetry books are all laced with a genuine heart-felt journey through the eyes of many different perspectives. In that genuineness, we find a common thread for all our poetry catalog.
DD: What are you looking for in prospective authors?
JK: We are looking for unique and well-designed writing with a strong voice. We publish based on quality more than what the industry may consider marketable material. We appreciate the process of writing, whether fiction or poetry, and are always excited to find the next fresh and talented new voice.
DD: You’ve published two of Bill Stratton’s poetry collections. Can you tell us about what you most admire in his poetry?
JK: Bill brings a strong sense of self with his writing. He writes from a place that brings you in and keeps you there. It’s genuine, raw, and heartfelt. The power shines brightly through his words and gives him a solid foundation that we honor and appreciate.
DD: You grew up in a rural area of upstate New York. Can you talk about how this upbringing influences your writing and how the natural world figures in your work?
WS: I don't know if I can say anything I haven't already tried to say in my poems, though what I've tried to say has filled a decent part of two books now, so perhaps I ought to try. Where I am from is central New York, more hills than mountains, more dead farms and dollar stores than mines or mills. It's beautiful and haunting, and within my life I saw the end of a certain way of life and the movement into another; from working on farms and local factories to an economy that never really sees the upswing when the country does well and feels every bit of pain when it does not. Drug addiction and violence have increased, as they have in a lot of places where poverty is a problem. Still, there are amazing people there whose friendship I value greatly and who often appear in my poems. I obviously have a lot of conflicting feelings about where I am from, but I'm also fiercely loyal—my friends from home know that, and to me, that is very important. Of course it's a rural place, and in particular I grew up on an old farm with several hundred acres to roam, and several thousand acres of state land on two sides. I spent a lot of time alone in the woods when I was a kid. My father subscribed in part to the idea that I should leave the house whenever I wanted or could (and sometimes when I did not) without a curfew or expectation on return. "He'll come back when he's hungry," I remember him telling my stepmother. As a result, there is little I do not know about those woods and fields. It is a tiny corner of the earth, and I am very aware of how sheltered I was in some ways, despite my fierce independence and oppositional defiance. Those years are formative, and for me, they helped to form a sense of self which maybe relies too much on itself to construct meaning; that is, I often had a hard time relying on others when I reached adolescence, because in my isolation I taught myself that I was all that I needed. Turns out, or so I think now, that's not always the best way to go about life. It taught me patience and that examining simple things at length and in detail can yield surprising results. It taught me that I am something small and fragile and mortal but also big and powerful and destructive. It taught me about consequence. I digress. The natural world is, in short, important to me not only as a writer, but as a person. I hope I do it some justice in my work. Since I believe, in some part, that writing is a process of pulling the internal (reflection, insight, observation, interpretation) and externalizing it as language, I recognize and do my best to work with the kind of internal abilities the natural world endowed me with. I have learned to listen for the voice I recognize as my own, and it is often easiest to see in the natural world. I hope that answers the question.
DD: In These Things Too Have Shape you have poems about being stabbed and being punched in the face. Different forms of violence punctuate the otherwise gentle forward movement of this collection. Could you discuss the role of violence in your work?
WS: This is an important topic for me, and one I think writers ought to speak to more often. I would like to think myself a non-violent person. I would like to think that I no longer need violence in my life, either as way for conflict resolution or as a means of self-discovery, both of which have been a part of my past. I do my best to work through anger and violence internally now, recognizing them for what they are: destructive and unnecessary, and usually ineffective. That said, if I ignore the role that violence has played in forming the person that I am, or if I dismiss the part is has played in the world I grew up in, I am lying to my readers and worse, to myself. The world is sometimes a violent place, and it does no good to pretend otherwise. I say this not to advocate for violence, but to advocate confronting it, to advocate for resolving root problems that lead to violence, to advocate for self-reflection. Often people pretend they are not capable of violence—that’s the worst kind of fallacy. I believe we ought to admit to ourselves, each of us, that we are capable of being violent creatures, hurting and even killing, because I believe it is only with this admission that we can even attempt to solve violence as an epidemic worldwide, and within our own homes. In addition to this, I think poetry and writing in general has its roots in violence. Some of our oldest recorded writings for instance, are incredibly violent. We don't teach Beowulf or Gilgamesh to glorify violence. But to pretend that those works are not riddled with violence is silly. For me, a careful examination of what that violence is, how it operates for the characters and for the narratives, why it exists and what it measures...those are important questions, which I think we might overlook at times. So yes, my poems on occasion record violence, but they are non-fictional instances of violence (as far as my memory operates) and they serve an important function not only for the book, but for me. I would very much like to think that what readers I have are able to engage that violence on several levels, and that their reactions are both visceral and honest.
DD: You begin the collection with my favorite poem, “Milkweed,” which seems really to be an Ars Poetica. In this poem, you write that the burst remains of a milkweed pod are your Paris. What is your personal definition of poetry?
WS: Oh dear. I guess I might say: Poetry is that which, if I attempt to define it, I will sound pompous and moronic at the same time. Milkweed is as close as I can get to a definition, and hopefully I sound neither, but odds are good that someone out there think I sound one or the other or both fairly consistently. I think, ultimately, whatever my definition is, it's not completely static, and hopefully you can get a feel for it by reading my poems, which I would vastly prefer to attempting to distill it in a definition here.
DD: What is the most encouraging development you’ve witnessed in contemporary poetry?
WS: I don't think I read nearly enough contemporary poetry to be any sort of judge. I don't really read enough contemporary poetry, period. I do my best, but there’s so much of it out there, I rarely feel like I'm doing even a passable job. At the risk of sounding completely self-centered, I do read every journal that publishes my work cover-to-cover, and I've found some amazing poems, poets, and friends that way. I suppose I see a trend towards narrative poetry slowly gaining ground on lyric poetry. I recently had a discussion with an editor and poet friend of mine about the types of poetry he sees for submissions. He explained to me about Hoagland's essay and the skittery poet (which I then had to find and read), and I have to say I agree, though again my experience is limited. Personally, my aesthetics run less associative and “experimental” (though that term irks me), but I recognize that those poems have value outside of my taste preferences. I've always thought poetry might want to consider allowing accessibility to be a word which, instead of gathering scorn, might have value. I have had a poet nearly take a swing at me for the very idea that poetry should be able to be 'accessible' if it so chooses. So, I would like to think that poetry today is, increasingly, large enough to accommodate all types of poems and all types of audiences. I certainly think it can be, and while I don't buy a lot of books that don't fit my aesthetic, I am honored to be published in the same journals as those that differ, and I would very much like to live in a world where both can exist peacefully, as it were.
DD: If you could only read and say and remember one poem (written by someone else) for the rest of your life, what poem would it be?
WS: Ha! Prufrock maybe? I'm terrible at memorizing poems, it’s embarrassing. Prufrock was the first poem though, that made me think: "Shit. I wish I had written that." and really feel it.
DD: We both attended Binghamton University as undergraduates at the same time, in the late 90s and early 00s. I was lucky enough to be in Liz Rosenberg’s poetry workshop and Michael Klein’s creative nonfiction workshop with you. How did Binghamton University influence your development as a writer?
WS: Looking back on my life as a writer, I have been so fortunate. Not only to be in those classes with you (and several other talented, amazing people), but also to have the teachers I have had. From a very young age I was lucky enough to have one or two who would challenge me, push me, allow me to invest myself in learning and education and writing. Liz, Michael, Ruth Stone, David Chirico and others at Binghamton, a couple of very good high school English teachers, even a teacher who had me in a gifted and talented program in elementary school. As I write this, I am recovering from the loss of one of my great mentors in writing, Tom Lux. Along with Stuart Dischell and a few others at the Sarah Lawrence summer program for adult writers, he helped me to discover that writing was, actually, a thing I could not live without. I have met and worked with some amazing writers over the years, many of whom are also amazing people. David Rivard and Mekeel Mcbride helped guide me through my graduate program, and I was lucky enough to Charlie Simic as my thesis advisor. I was able to spend a day with Phil Levine less than a year before he passed, and we spent a few hours talking about poetry and writing and poverty and how we both felt a sense of responsibility to the people and places that raised us. I have so many wonderful moments with so many wonderful writers, and they just keep coming. Lately I have been lucky enough to be accepted into a group of talented writers in Burlington and I am lucky enough to say that Major Jackson now reads my poems every week, for example. Not all of my encounters with poets and writers have been positive ones, and certainly I have met some writers which, for one reason or another don't seem interested in engaging with me. But overall, I have been blindingly fortunate. It is my great desire to be able to give back to poetry and writing and young poets and writers what has been given to me.
I'm not sure I can specifically say exactly what Binghamton did for me as a writer, the time now seems to all blend together. I'm not sure I can quantify my time there in a satisfactory way. I suppose it will have to suffice for me to say: It influenced me greatly, and I would not be the writer I am today without it.
DD: I’d like to end with your poem, “Harness,” which appeared in a recent issue of Field. Could you introduce us to this poem?
WS: “Harness,” like the vast majority of my poems, is in large part non fictional and narrative. My father really did drive a team of draft horses, they really did take off with me on their backs, and I really was found some time later in an old apple orchard/pasture. To me, that's important, though I've heard from others that the distinction holds less meaning for a reader, and I have only their feedback to go on. When I became a father, my perspective and thoughts on my childhood started to shift. In particular, one day, I remembered this story, told to me many times by many family members. I was too young to really recall the incident, though I remembered instantly the smell of the horses and how the world looked from their backs. When I started to process the memory through the experience of a father, I nearly had a panic attack. I have no idea what I would do if my daughter disappeared up and over a hill on the back of a massive spooked horse. Chase them, I suppose. As for the ending, I think what was most telling about my memory was that I did not remember specifically that event, though I remember many others and I remember generally things about the horses. To me, that indicates that the event, while terrible and traumatic for the adults in my family, wasn't for me. I thought about that a long time, and the story of what passed between Angel and I came to me slowly, in the way things sometimes do when they have truth without adhering strictly to fact. I often write instinctively, doing my best to lose myself in the process, listening more than speaking (the exact opposite of how I revise). In Harness, I think I was somewhat successful in tapping into my own voice, and finding a way to translate a real event of my life into the fantastic we sometimes need to connect experience to the universal. I'm not great at talking about my poems, or at least, I aspire to be much better than I am. I hope that suffices.
Harness
They tell me I was too young to remember
the day the horse team spooked and broke
the reins and left my father empty-handed,
running after them with me on their backs.
I rode every time he took them out, Marsha
one was called and Angel the other and I was
too young (maybe four) to be up on their
broad backs, without a saddle, but they were
so calm not even a shotgun made them bolt
and my father was so young and proud
not even his son could scare him. I was
never scared, their black manes smelled
so good and the rise and fall of their shoulders
as I lay on my stomach pulled the horizon
up and down and I kept the flies from their face
with a long branch. Now that I am a father
and my father is dead I think he must have
felt, in the moment the reins left his hands
and the trace snapped, that all of what his life
had led to up to at that point was now in full
flight from him, his hands never so empty
as right then and it was a beautiful day
to lose a son. I was lost for only an hour
they tell me, but I know the truth: the horses
and I ran to the thickest part of the old
orchard and there I passed into Angel
and Marsha watched as Angel passed
into me and that is why still today on spring
days in the sun when the people are all
very happy to have the warmth I am remembering
a collar and the feel of a boy on my back
and the taste of wild apples sour and sweet.
Jessica Kristie is an award winning author, social entrepreneur, and a lover of poetry. She is an advocate for art, an activist against human trafficking, and a soulful contributor to the strengthening of our creative communities. Her novel, Barbed-Wire Butterflies, donates 100% of all print royalties and a percentage of digital copies and merchandise to fight human trafficking. Look for her poetry collections, Dreaming in Darkness, Threads of Life, and Winter Dress, as well as her eBook offering to creators, Weekly Inspirations for Writers & Creators. You can find her fusion of poetry and music with the collaboration, Kristie & Cloverfield, released through Ultrasonic Music Germany, and available everywhere. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jessica Kristie discovered her passion for writing as a child. Along with her creative side, she works in the publishing industry, is an avid supporter of all creative souls, and hopes to draw readers into her world through shared emotion. She inspires to forgive, remember, and heal, while continuing to dedicate herself to fighting social injustices.
William Stratton currently lives in Colchester, Vermont. He teaches writing and poetry at SUNY Plasttsburgh, and is associate poetry editor at the Saranac Review. His first full length collection of poetry, Under The Water Was Stone (Winter Goose Publishing, 2014) has been nominated for the Kate Tufts Discovery award and the Eugene Paul Nassar Award. His second book These Things Too Have Shape was released in January of 2016. His poetry is published or forthcoming in: FIELD, Sugar House Review, Spillway, The Cortland Review, Best of Pif Magazine, The North American Review, Connotation Press, Canary, and others.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.
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