MQR Online

On “Poetry Comics From the Book of Hours”: An Interview with Bianca Stone

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“The process of making a poetry comic is vital, since I don’t plan out in advance; don’t plot and storyboard. The process is where the piece determines itself. It’s a lot like composing a poem on a blank page: you have tools (language, memories, obsessions, sound) and you work with those in a sort of simultaneous process of improvisation and intent. So, even if the poem is already written, it’s going to become something totally different in the end.”

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Unsolved Histories: A Bird Lost, A Sketch Found, and a Dream to Bring It Back

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We saw her for the last time in 1944—frantic, wild-eyed, twitching about in her tree. Or rather, 23-year-old wildlife artist Don Eckelberry saw her, having traveled south to Louisiana’s Singer Tract to sketch America’s last Ivory-billed Woodpecker. It was a less than ideal situation. After all, National Audubon Society president John Baker would have much preferred to have found a way to save the bird rather than dispatch a man to sketch her. However, after negotiations with the Chicago Lumber Company broke down (“We are just money grubbers,” the company’s chairman allegedly said), Baker wasn’t left with much of a choice. Since the land couldn’t be spared (and by extension, the bird), Baker sent Eckelberry south in the hopes the artist might preserve her image.

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In the Body’s Own Words

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“In the body’s own words, it cannot live like a vegetable in the country.” I am twenty-one and sitting on a bunk in a shotgun house in Mid-City, New Orleans, reading C.D. Wright. After a few conversations on the phone with a professor at the University of New Orleans, I have come here, weeks after graduating college, to help with an oral history project about the experiences of people who lived through Katrina.

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The Costs of Being a Writer

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Here’s a possibility: as writers, we have more of the one truly non-renewable resource in the world—time. And I’m not just talking about quantitative, chronological time. When we sit down in solitude and think about life, we extend life. When we read about the different permutations in which lives have been led, or when we contemplate life in our own writing—time is stretched, warped, mutated, created anew.

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On “Poor Your Soul”: An Interview with Mira Ptacin

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“As a writer, there’s always the whole self-induced pressure of whether you wanna market yourself, and build your brand and your buzz. But on social media, I never find myself drifting toward the yes-and-no debate of abortion, nor fighting for it. I’m pro-choice, but I think I make more of an impact when I’m writing about one individual at a time. Because I think abortion is a personal decision for everyone, and I don’t like to generalize it. As a writer I’m more concerned with individual stories, no matter what they’re about. You can’t lump people into one category.”

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“Pub Club” to Celebrate the Joy of Reading

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The new initiative is the Michigan Library Publishing Club (“Pub Club”), a quarterly book club in Ann Arbor where attendees will informally discuss recently published, open access U-M Press books over coffee, tea, and treats. The inaugural event will take place at Hatcher Graduate Library Gallery on Thursday, February 4, 2016, 3:30-5:00 PM, and will feature introductory remarks from Charles Watkinson (Associate University Librarian for Publishing and Director of the U-M Press) and the Library Staff Forum Board, as well as free, collectible bookmarks handmade by Wolverine Press.

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Rock n’ Roll Time Travel: An Interview with Mo Daviau

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“I had the goal of writing a feminist novel with a first-person male narrator. Karl is not the most dudely of dudes, of course, but I liked the idea of a man casting a kind eye on someone like Lena, who stopped caring what everyone thought years ago and is just trying to make it through her day without crying. I liked the idea of having the male gaze on a woman most men would ignore or revile, with him actually admiring and loving her for her positive qualities, for who she is and her strength, which goes largely unnoticed in her life.”

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An Apology to My Friends Who Love YA

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Vulgar and prurient and dumb. They’re the sort of adjectives we not only often ascribe to young adult fiction, but to teenaged girls, who are overwhelmingly the protagonists of young adult fiction. It’s no surprise that culture dismisses the interests of this demographic before co-opting them. Just think about The Beatles, whose legacy now seems preserved by middle-aged men who dismiss the same population that catapulted the band to success, teenaged girls, as tasteless and frivolous. It could be my own internalized misogyny that prevents me from taking these stories seriously at first glance. When literary fiction still struggles to write women without the same invisible hand of misogyny, I’m excited to see the world of YA allows women to be heads of armies, political leaders and general badasses.

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Literary Promises: A Look at Last Year’s Books as a List of New Year’s Resolutions

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My year was rich, and I hope yours was, too. It was full of joys and frustrations, thrombosis and the evenest sleeps, massive blizzards with fragmenting winds, rains that blurred the boundaries between body and air, and the exasperations of humidity rising off the tennis courts in the park near my home. I listened to the otherworldly gargling calls of ‘ua’u in the young but stelliferous dark of Haleakala, let the shutter out on my Nikon to see those same stars in the sapphire depth of Wisconsin’s skies, and I spent an inordinate amount of time staring out at the Chicago river from the exhibit hall in the Sheraton Grand Chicago, where I also learned how to sell books on the run.

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