Issue 65 is off to the printer, and we will reveal our cover soon! As part of our countdown to the new issue, art editor Leslie Vega has interviewed our cover artist, Andy Kehoe. Kehoe creates evocative work in both the traditional and digital realms. With nods to mythopoetic fantasy and folklore, his paintings feature figures so small that you may not notice them ensconced in trees and moonlight. These animal-human hybrids beckon us into Dante’s dark forest or a Grimm’s fairytale, and we really wouldn’t mind joining them.
Leslie Vega: Tell me a bit about your process. Does it differ between your paintings and your digital works? They look remarkably similar.
Andy Kehoe: The process with my traditional and digital paintings is actually pretty similar in a lot of ways, especially in the beginning stages. With both mediums, I have pieces that are very planned out, which will involve detailed sketches and some black-and-white studies. Then I have paintings that are more loose and improvisational. I’ll just start throwing paint and textures down —whether they be oil paints or pixels— and see where it takes me. I also tend to work in layers from back to front, which I do with both mediums.
The major difference is the crazy flexibility of digital work. I can move and rescale different components or change the entire color palette on the fly. There is so much freedom to experiment, readjust, and improvise. [I] love that aspect of working in digital.
Oh, and I can also finish a digital painting in days to weeks, instead of months with my traditional work. With digital, I can get my ideas down and out there into the world rather quickly, which is awesome. With traditional painting, the process is much more prolonged so my initial concept often evolves and shifts with what has inspired me and affected my life along the way. That brings a different quality to the work, which I very much love and appreciate.
LV: Your work is influenced by fantasy and sci-fi art, which has been heavily shaped by epic poetry, myth, folk tales, 19th– and 20th-century fantasy, and current speculative fiction. What are your go-to works of poetry or literature to draw upon for inspiration?
AK: Folklore and fairy tales really shaped my young, imaginative mind when I was growing up. There’s a certain indescribable feeling that those stories gave me, which was amplified by the fact that I was young, and all of life was a mystery. Much of my work is trying to tap back into that specific feeling and to bring some mystery back into people’s lives. It’s a tough thing to do these days, with all the answers to the universe at our finger tips—living a constant existence peeking behind the curtain. I feel like this breeds a real desire for worlds that encompass mystery and diverge from the mundane, such as the realms of fantasy and sci-fi.
Currently, I listen to a lot of audio books as I work, with the vast majority being in the fantasy genre. The biggest draw to fantasy writing for me is the world building. Creating a believable world where unbelievable things happen is some tricky business and also a such a tantalizing prospect. Authors like Brandon Sanderson, Scott Lynch, and Joe Abercrombie excel at creating very rich, unique, detailed worlds that you can lose yourself in. This kind of imaginative thinking really fuels my creative mind while working.
LV: And who are your favorite illustrators?
AK: Some contemporary artists I love are Aron Wiesenfeld, Kilian Eng, Boris Pelcer, and James Jean. I’m also inspired by legendary fantasy artists like Michael Whelan and Paul Lehr, and painters like 19th Century Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich.
LV: Working both in traditional painting as well as digital, what do you think about AI generated art applications such as DALL.E 2?
AK: The debate on AI art is a tricky, layered one. Kind of a mess right now. A real mixed bag scenario. On one hand, it’s very cool technology that makes some truly amazing imagery. It’s also really fun to see what crazy things you can come up with and get immediate results.
On the other hand, it’s creating this imagery by training its AI through the use of copyrighted imagery without artists’ consent. That’s a big negative and a big problem. I’ve rarely seen any technology go so quickly from “Wow this is cool” to “This is a travesty. Burn it all down!” The vitriol for AI art in the community is intense because of this non-consensual image usage. An uproar I totally agree with.
We are definitely wading into unknown legal territory in which distinctive boundaries will (hopefully) have to be drawn. It feels like this technology is here to stay, so where those lines end up is anyone’s guess, but [it] will have ever-lasting ramifications for visual artists. I know music IP is protected very staunchly by the law, and the industry would not put up with this kind of unfettered usage one bit. I’m hoping visual art can be treated equally.
Personally, I have played around with Midjourney and I’ve used it as a tool to work through concepts and to get some fresh perspectives. But I’ve never used it to make completed art work and never would. Interestingly, I can just use my own name in the prompts to get a new concept inspired by my paintings… but that also means my copyrighted work is in the database without my consent. Since I’m the original artist, is it then OK to used unlicensed images of my own work to create something new? Like I said, it’s a mixed, convoluted bag.
LV: Do you have any projects in the works that you’d like to share?
AK: I have a Patreon page where I’ve been making a digital painting every month and posting it. That’s where I post most of my new work these days.
This year I have a couple [of] group shows, then next year I have a solo show at Outré Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. The best way to keep updated is to sign up for my newsletter, which can be found in the contact page on my website.
For the 63/64 issue, we spoke to members of Crab Devil, an art collective based in Tampa, FL. Art Editor Leslie Vega’s interview is reproduced here:
The Peninsularium is an immersive interactive art attraction that will undoubtedly draw the crowds. Crab Devil is adamant about bringing a sense of wonder and excitement to both locals and visitors when the Peninsularium finally opens its doors. In my discussion with two principal members of the Crab Devil collective, Janine Awai and Devon Brady, we talk about the importance of conveying a sense of place and the necessity of supporting and promoting area artists in the service of local enrichment. Our extensive focus on Tampa as a distinctive city is not surprising. Tampa Bay is experiencing massive economic and population growth, and keeping Tampa weird is a priority.
The Peninsularium is not just a tourist lure, a quirky roadside stop, or even a gallery of art; it’s a marker that Tampa is growing into its potential as a cultural destination. https://www.crabdevil.com
Skunk ape housed at The Peninsularium. Photo by Leslie Vega.
Leslie Vega: Let’s begin with the origins of Crab Devil and the collective. Are all the members from Tampa, and did the art collective sort of evolve in parallel with The Peninsularium project?
Devon Brady: Yes, all of the members are at least long-term Tampa residents. Twenty years or more. There are three Tampa natives. Myself, Tracy, and Gianna. Jan’s been here since college.
Janine Awai: And everybody else has been here since their college days. There’s nine of us total. We are all entrenched.
LV: I asked that because, at least among the people I know, so many of us are transplants, and it’s hard to get a sense of place. I feel like the theme of The Peninsularium is, of course, Tampa.
JA: It’s a little broader… it’s Florida—
DB: —But very Tampa centric, right. And, you know, when we talk to people about it, and talk to investors about it, we’re always pitching that idea in different ways. You know, there’s people that want to see Tampa recognized as a cultural destination, and there are people that want to see Tampa recognized for its food, its music. There’re other ways to approach it; some people have an inferiority complex that comes along with being from Tampa. It’s interesting to kind of play into that in a way to get people on board and to say, even if you’re not 100% interested in what it is specifically that we’re doing, what we’re trying to do here is raise the tide for all the boats so that if you have other projects that are poised to benefit off of an increased interest in Tampa as a cultural destination, that’s a reason for you to get involved with us too. To just kind of jumpstart everything that’s going on here.
LV: Yeah, the more the merrier, right.
JA: And I think that one of our objectives is to elevate all the things that people take for granted here in Tampa—they’re pretty awesome, pretty unique things. Really unique history. And also, there are a lot of reasons that people move here. There are things that are attractive about this area. Even if you just look at the flora, fauna, you know, those are things that we gloss over all the time, but it’s still Florida, it’s still a part of our everyday psyche.
LV: Yeah, so I kind of want to lean into the weird Florida aspects [of the Peninsularium], and in particular, Tampa, as opposed to St. Pete, because I think of them more as boroughs. But other people are like, “Oh, that’s a different city.” And of course, St. Pete has historically always had more of the art scene. I’m really interested and excited to see Tampa tap into all the beautiful weird stuff that’s here, and I just wanted to get your take and understand more about the uniqueness of what’s here.
DB: Well, first, I would say that the idea that St. Pete is more of an arts destination is to me, after forty-seven years here, that’s kind of a relatively new idea. When I was in high school, and even going through art school at USF (The University of South Florida), that wasn’t really a thing. St. Pete, in the last twenty years or so, has done a good job of branding itself that way and encouraging very visible things like murals, you know. St. Pete had a lot more murals than Tampa ever had or still does have, and to a lot of people’s minds that makes it a destination for the arts. I’m kind of like, famously cantankerous about murals, but that’s just my thing.
LV: [laughs] How come?
DB: Well, first of all, I love shitty old industrial buildings. And I like it when they’re shitty, old, and industrial. I don’t like it when somebody paints a big mural on the side of one of them…. It’s always kind of saying, like, don’t look at this thing. Imagine that it’s something else, you know. I’m always interested in architecture and spaces, and so the murals that I really dislike are murals that employ things like force perspective where they’re trying to create an illusion of depth on a flat surface. That was a beautiful, flat surface before somebody came and painted a horrible mural, you know. There’s a lot of bad murals out there.
[laughter]
JA: I’m not opposed to them. But there are so many badly rendered murals. When I think of murals, I think of WPA, right. Like Diego Rivera. Beautiful—
DB: —But also, when you look at the Diego Rivera murals in Rockefeller Center—those were prepared spaces to take murals, you know. They built these walls with these proscenium arches and prepared these flat spaces to accept a mural. They didn’t come and paint over a building with this image that’s drawing your attention away from the building.
JA: But for me, you can do that sort of thing on a building and have it work well.
LV: Have you guys been to Philadelphia? They have a whole funded Mural Arts Project and people take tours of the murals around the city: they have these in a lot of other cities too. And, I’m laughing because, yeah, there’s a lot of bad ones. But it’s also a big tourist draw.
DB and JA: Right. Right.
DB: But I think that it’s a good distinction between Tampa and St. Pete, because Tampa has always had an art scene, as has St. Pete. And St. Pete’s has always been a little different than Tampa’s. And they nurtured and grew what they had there. And that’s all great. But I’m more partial to what Tampa has and has always had because it’s a different scene. It’s more conceptually based. It’s grittier. It’s a little harder to digest. Yeah, a lot of that is because of the academic influence of USF, because USF is a very conceptually based art program. St. Pete has always had a strong emphasis on craft, which is great.
[This is to] draw a distinction between what you will see from us and what you see from Fairgrounds (an immersive art space in St. Pete) over there. Their work is more poppy with brighter colors, with cleaner lines that is in keeping with a more St. Pete aesthetic, you know, and if you look around here, it’s like, there’s no straight lines. It’s all organic. Things have moss growing on them, so it’s a different approach. Fairgrounds has been great with us—we talked openly from the beginning about making some differentiation between us and them. The ultimate goal is that you can buy a two-day ticket to visit both places. Having more of this sort of thing is just better.
JA: The moss growing on things reflects our approach to Florida because if you stand still too long, the moss is gonna grow on you. [laughs]
LV: Oh, yeah. It’s so much about decay, right?
JA: It’s about decay, it’s about swamps. It’s about this little atmosphere that we live in. And I think that instead of trying to ignore that and sweep it out of your house, you know, we’re letting it in, because that’s a part of what makes Florida Florida. It’s about the uncomfortable things.
LV: That’s what makes it way more interesting to me personally. I think you both articulated a lot of my thoughts that I’ve had about Tampa over the years. When we first moved here, we thought we should live in St. Pete; it’s so much nicer, you can walk down the main street. Tampa is more exciting because it’s growing. There’s an opportunity here to sculpt and shape your neighborhood. And it’s grittier, definitely.
DB: This is why I got into a project like this because I’ve always been a booster for this area. I have plenty of friends as artists who finished up at USF and moved to New York to pursue their career in New York, which anyone who was thinking logically about how to have a career as an artist would and should do, you know, go to the place where the thing is happening. If you’re an actor, you don’t stay in Branson, Missouri, you go to fucking LA and start trying to get jobs. And eventually you will, if you work hard enough, you will—that’s the way that it works. But what I always said to people was like, in Tampa, if you stay here, if something cool happens, either you did it yourself, or you know the person who did it—here’s only that many degrees of separation….Here we have to do it all ourselves and suffer all of the pains that go along with that, so it’s only for a certain type of person.
JA: For sure, it’s difficult, it has been difficult to convince the people that they want to see the show.
LV: It’s interesting to see the reality of how this stuff can come to be. Are you going to charge admission?
DB and JA: Yes. Yeah.
JA: We were going for the idea that The Peninsularium is a ticketed, admission-based attraction with art installations. People are going to go through, and at the end there will be some kind of identification so that they can know which artists were involved. Tempus Projects (a local non-profit art gallery) will be on site, and so hopefully they will also then be able to go to a more traditional art venue, and see some of those artists’ work in Tempus, and we can help push them towards maybe acquiring and collecting the art. Building a collector community, our community in Tampa, is important to elevate the whole art culture here. I mean, that’s what New York has.
LV: Sure. And there is money here, of course.
DB: Yeah, you have to be able to make a living as an artist in order for there to be a real art scene here. And that’s the nut that hasn’t yet been cracked. And you see all these efforts, which are great, you know—we need to have affordable housing for artists, and we need to have an arts district. All of that stuff is good. But nobody buys art from an artist—that’s the third leg of the stool that has to be there. And so, in order to make that happen, this is the project: you have to sell the validity of Tampa as a place to buy art from, and that its artists have their own perspective and viewpoint on their own terms.
JA: We’re viewing The Peninsularium as a bridge to that summit, a way to make art more accessible and more approachable to the general community.
DB: And that’s something that hasn’t really happened in these other places…. This is a pathway in for people to experience art in a way that they haven’t experienced it, and then walk out from this experience and go into a traditional gallery setting and see the name on the wall and go, oh, that person made the thing that I just saw in there…
JA: That’s really, really important.
DB: … and now I could take home a piece for not a whole lot of money, and then the wheels start turning about how this all works.
JA: We definitely want to promote the artists who are involved, all of them, so that they get something out of this and their names are definitely associated with their work. And that’s something that I think a lot of immersive art installation places have not done so well.
DB: Yeah, I don’t think it’s something that they do intentionally, but I think they struggle with how to highlight the individual artists and show whose work is whose without breaking the fourth wall of the experience.
LV: It becomes like an Epcot Center sort of thing, where people aren’t specifically thinking about who’s actually making the stuff. It’s just kind of turns into all one thing.
JA: Yeah. And that’s great, you know, for the whole experience. You don’t want to pull people out of it, but at some point in time you have to give the right attribution, make sure those people who are participating in this are getting something out of it. You can send visitors to these artists’ spaces and show them we have their work over here. Get to know these people. A lot of them are local artists. These are the artists in our community.
LV: People won’t have to pay to go to Tempus. That will still be a separate thing, right?
JA: Yes, Tempus is a non-profit. And so, they’re not a part of The Peninsularium.
LV: They will just be attached in the same space.
JA: Right, just like Deviant Libation brewery will be a separate entity: they are tenants.
DB: But the idea here was that we could create this kind of symbiosis. We [The Peninsularium] could hopefully attract a few 100,000 visitors a year, some percentage of which make their way through Tempus, which is a few 1,000 more people a year than they have typically seen, so we increase their exposure by a huge amount. And then in returning the favor, Tempus has already this established roster of artists and contacts and people that they work with and a respected name and a visiting artists residency program that’s been up and running for years.
JA: They are a traditional contemporary art gallery, yes.
DB: So that’ll help us to attract artists, larger names, and more mid-career artists. We’re still looking at a lot of local artists and non-established artists, but it also helps to have some of those bigger name people here, and Tempus has those contacts…. But now that we’re kind of working together, we can have somebody come down, do a project for Tempus, we can consult with them about building out a larger environment for Crab Devil, which might be, you know, a $15,000 or $20,000 or $25,000 commission for them. So now you’re talking about a real serious project that could be a person’s half of their year producing something like that. So, there’s a draw for them to come and work with Tempus and be able to work closely with us and see what we’re doing. And we can kind of tap into their network of contacts, bringing people here and then doing the same thing with the brewery (Deviant Libation). We bring people through there because they’re there already. They’ve got beer to be sold. People like to hang out and drink beer! It’s good for everybody.
JA: It gets their attention!
DB: And it helps with our customer retention.
LV: Bolstering each other up. That’s super exciting! That leads me to my question of what’s with the Bait Shop.
DB: Well, it came from a bunch of different directions. I’ve always had kind of an obsession with what are the last few vestiges of mom-and-pop businesses that have not been franchised and corporatized and sanitized. And when you think about it, there’s only like a few. There are barber shops, tattoo parlors, nail salons, and bait shops would be another one. There was never a Blockbuster Video of bait shops. They’re all their own weird little thing. And in Florida especially, we’re surrounded by water. So that’s just one of those things that, growing up in Florida as a kid, it was one of those environments that you’re going to where there’s little objects of fascination all around, like the rubber worms that smelled like that weird oil they put on them and they had sparkly glitter in them, you know, and lead weights, and all kinds of weird little hardware and stuff that you don’t see elsewhere, you know, so it was always kind of like a place of intrigue as a kid.
Tracy and Sarah came to us with that idea. We were kind of casting about for, like, what is the first experience that introduces you to this whole thing?
JA: Something very Florida. Something also kind of in keeping with this roadside attraction concept.
DB: Yeah, DIY, and that’s kind of the whole narrative that we talked about, making it known that these things are made by human hands. We call it the artifacts of artifice; we never cover over the mechanism.
What I like to see the most is young children, especially young girls experiencing art because I think they aren’t encouraged to investigate mechanical things. They walk up from a distance with a big smile on their face, and they’re like, look at this big crazy trippy thing, and they walk up underneath it, and they’re looking up at it and just enjoying it for the illusion that it is. And then a minute goes by, and you see them looking closer at it, and then making their way around to where the motor and the gears and everything are. And then you can see the wheels in their heads turning— “Oh, that spins that way, and it turns this gear, which spins in the opposite direction, and now these two shafts are moving in opposite directions, and they’re two oppositely oriented spirals, and they’re spiraling into each other, and that’s what creates the illusion.” And you see the moment when they figure it out. And then they go back to it and they’re like, it’s still cool!
LV: It doesn’t take away from the magic.
DB: Magic, to me, is the understanding that it’s of human hands and minds. And we create it; we’re the ones that make the magic and that’s the whole message. We did this out of our own brains.
LV: With these big immersive installation experiences like The Peninsularium, how do you foresee people interacting with the space? Will people be able to touch things?
DB: They’ll be able to touch, and they’ll be able to move through and investigate the spaces. There are a lot of kinetic elements. And like I said, it’s all that kind of old school mechanical stuff—
LV: —Sort of circus-y.
DB: Yeah, there’s a lot of those kinds of elements. There are also narrative elements to be discovered through audio and through text and through ephemera. So, there’s that whole kind of aspect to things as well. And yeah, I think, people will experience it in different ways…. We’ve been calling it an all-ages show in a punk rock sense, you know. It’s an all-ages show, might not be for everybody and you’re all welcome to come, but there’s not going to be, like, overtly sexual content, at least not to be viewed by the eyes of the children.
We’re working on an audio element in the vein of a silent disco kind of thing where you have a headset that you can switch between channels…. So when you give a kid a headset, that headset only gets two of the three channels, so you can all be standing in the space, experiencing the same thing. But mom and dad might be listening to something different than what the kids are listening to.
JA: And then just physically navigating through this space, the mere fact that it’s in shipping containers, as opposed to, you know, a bowling alley, in comparison, it’s going to make the experience a lot different, because of the dimensions of the space. So our intention is to have people lose their way, and then find that there’s the potential for more discovery.
DB: Another difference here is that there’s going to be a lot of these transitions from interior to exterior spaces. The way these containers go together is this kind of grid to create all these little courtyard spaces between them. So a lot of times you don’t move straight from container to container, you step outside and then back in.
JA: And there’s going to be programming in all those spaces.
DB: We can landscape and do things in those spaces, which I think really differentiates us from any other immersive experience that I’ve seen, because I haven’t seen anything that has really involved the landscape.
JA: And that is another place where Florida steps in—the outdoors. That’s a huge part of being in Florida. I think that that is going to be an added experience for us.
LV: That’s wonderful…. You mentioned ephemera. So where do you think archives fit into all this? I’m sure you have pictures of Old Florida and memorabilia, and you’re collecting all this stuff.
JA: And we’ll be creating some things, some things that are printed, photographs. And then some of those things will possibly be available to investigate more closely or even purchase. There’s going to be a bus at the end, outside of [The Peninsularium] experience by the gift shop, which is going to be a place where there’ll be a lot of printed matter—
DB: —Pamphlets and literature and takeaways and things like that. But also, in the way that we’re approaching things, we’re kind of always trying to keep it up in the air as to where the reality stops and the fantasy starts. So we want to tell actual, historical stories about the area. And those things get weird enough that you’re not sure you know where the line is. It’s a trick because you also don’t want to have it filtered too much the other way in that people take fantasy as reality and go telling a story that’s not true. There are all these cool stories and history here that people don’t know about and that people will get excited for; it’s really about creating an identity. When you tell someone you are from Tampa, they will have a sense of exactly what that means.
Patricia Hooper is the author of five books of poetry, Other Lives, At the Corner of the Eye, Aristotle’s Garden, Separate Flights, and Wild Persistence, the last two published by the University of Tampa Press. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, The Yale Review and The Kenyon Review. A graduate of the University of Michigan, where she earned B.A. and M.A. degrees and was awarded five Hopwood Awards, she has been the recipient of the Norma Farber First Book Award, the Bluestem Award for Poetry, a Writer’s Community Residency Award from the Writer’s Voice, the Laurence Goldstein Award for Poetry from Michigan Quarterly Review, The Anita Claire Scharf Award from the University of Tampa Press, The Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, and, just announced this month (July 2020), the 2020 Brockman-Campbell Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society for the best book of poetry by a North Carolina writer. She lives in Gastonia, North Carolina, where Tampa Review Editor Richard Mathews asked her to reflect on the natural beauty around her and the idea of “persistence” in light of the global pandemic.
Richard Mathews: Congratulations on the recent news that the North Carolina Poetry Society has honored you for Wild Persistence by awarding your book the 2020 Brockman-Campbell Award as the best book of poetry by a North Carolina writer published in the previous year. This puts you in very good company. Previous winners include Shelby Stephenson, Fred Chappell, R. T. Smith, Betty Adcock, Dannye Romine Powell, and a host of other wonderful writers.
What are some of the ways you think of yourself as a “North Carolina writer”? Do you think this book in particular has ties to North Carolina as a place?
Patricia Hooper: Thank you, Richard. The truth is, I really don’t think of myself as a North Carolina writer, even though Wild Persistence is influenced by the landscape of this beautiful state. I lived in Michigan all my life, and when we moved here in 2006, I was so homesick that I searched the weather channel for reports of snow storms just to relive what they felt like. Some of the poems in Wild Persistence—“Moving South” and “End of Summer in the Piedmont,” for example—have to do with that displacement. Many take place in Gastonia, where I live, or nearby in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Before we came here, I already loved the literature of the South, but it has such a rich, regional heritage that an outsider can never appropriate it. Reading Thomas Wolfe or Reynolds Price or Lee Smith, you realize that you have to have deep roots in the South in order to be truly of it. Even so, North Carolina is now a significant part of my experience, and I’m grateful to have this book recognized in my new home state.
Mathews: I have always loved the title of this collection. It is a bit of an oxymoron—that is, “wild” suggests something almost frantic and untamed, while “persistence” suggests patience, planning, and civilized focus. One is a short, four-letter word; the other is a fancier, multi-syllable, thirteen-letter word. On the other hand, nature in the wild does itself have persistence—the kind of persistence that can allow plants and trees to sprout and grow out of cracks in the pavement. How did you come up with the title?
Hooper: When I was assembling this collection I noticed many poems that focused on the idea of nature’s persistence—the ones about the mockingbird, who learns so many songs and sings so earnestly, the final poem, “Ode,” which praises the perseverance of trees, and several others about nature’s relentless cycles, poems in which plants and birds die and go back to the earth, fueling its renewal. At the same time, I was thinking about the capacity in human beings to survive adversity, often through fierce determination and grit. And I was also thinking of what seems an almost pre-rational necessity in the poet to find language for experience, something that requires obsessive patience and perseverance if it’s going to transform itself into art.
Mathews: The cover of this book—like your previous book from the University of Tampa Press, Separate Flights—features a painting by the artist Suzanne Stryk, this one from a piece entitled “Homage to the Passenger Pigeon (extinct 1914).” Are there particular aspects of her work that resonate for you? Was there special appeal in this homage to an extinct bird?
Hooper: I find Suzanne Stryk’s work amazing! She’s a naturalist, and she pays close attention to the details of the natural world: the structure of a bird’s wing, the bodies of insects, the woven patterns of nests. And then she uses these meticulously rendered images to create paintings that have strong emotional content, reimagining and arranging them in such unusual ways that they move into the realm of the surreal. In the cover painting, “Homage to the Passenger Pigeon (extinct, 1914,)” the passenger pigeon sits in the foreground apart from a nest. The nest, which seems to be floating precariously on the branch above it, is alive with light and motion in contrast to the pigeon’s eerie stillness. There are no extinct birds in this book, but there are reminders that life is fragile and can disappear at any moment. Nature perpetuates itself, as we do, but for how long?
Mathews: Your book was not written or published in the context of a pandemic, but we are all now reading and thinking differently in the midst of fighting Covid-19, and I have found the title and many of the poems taking on new relevance in light of the persistence demanded of us in this fight. Are there any poems in the book that seem particularly relevant or meaningful to you in this new context?
Hooper: I certainly wasn’t thinking about the possibility of a pandemic when I wrote these poems. But it pleases me that they spoke to you in a new context. For me, those that relate most to what we are going through are those that have to do with how normal life can change in an instant, the ones about a debilitating accident, a missing child, an unexpected death, or a terrorist attack. And it may be those that have to do, simply, with resilience. People are thrown back, just now, on their own resources, and many are spending more time outdoors—walking, gardening, and even sitting in their front yards—not only to feel less isolated but to enjoy the relative normalcy of the natural world. Daily life is radically different, but even though nature doesn’t always act in our best interests, it still has the power to heal and console.
Mathews: Well, in Wild Persistence I think you have connected with that power in ways that bring the forces of language and literature together with those in the natural world to magnify and reinforce the healing and the consolation. Both North Carolina and Michigan—as well as those of us based elsewhere—can rejoice and be heartened by that.
Eric Smith has published his work widely in journals such as 32 Poems, Southwest Review, The New Criterion, Pleiades and The Rumpus. He also has turned his hand to innovative literary publishing as a founding editor ofcellpoems, the award-winning poetry venue distributed via text message. His first book of poetry, Black Hole Factory, was published last year by the University of Tampa Press as winner of its Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, and released in time for the AWP Conference in Tampa, March 7-10, 2018. Over the months since then, Eric has launched the book with an unusually crowded schedule of readings and appearances, and the forthcoming double issue of Tampa Review includes a sampling of poems from the book.
Editor Richard Mathews asked Eric to reflect on his promotion of the book through his readings, and how they affect and inform his poems, both old and new.
Mathews: You are the most recently published winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, and your prize-winning book, Black Hole Factory, was released last fall. For the past few months you launched the book with quite a few readings and book-signings. Since this is your first published collection, it must have been an interesting experience. Can you mention some of the highlights? What were some of the readings that are the most memorable?
Smith: Reading at the Sykes Chapel at the University of Tampa was an incredible experience. It’s difficult to imagine a more perfect space. It feels at once intimate and vast, and the Chapel is perfect for both music and contemplation. It almost feels as if it were built for poetry.
The first reading I gave from the book, at the A. E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series in Huntington, West Virginia with the poet Mary Imo-Stike, was quite meaningful; as was the one a few months later in the MFA@FLA Reading Series in Gainesville, Florida, with my friend Jackson Armstrong. Both readings felt in a way like coming home given that both were central to the kind of writer (and colleague, and friend) that I am.
Eric Smith reading from Black Hole Factory for the MFA@FLA Reading Series in Gainesville
Mathews: Before this first book publication, you had participated in quite a few readings—both group and individual readings—and I wonder what you have found to be different about the readings you are giving now. What differences have you noticed in both your own reading performances, and in the way listeners respond now that you have a book?
Smith: I don’t know that the audiences I’ve been lucky enough to read to are responding to the work in a measurably different way. But for me, having the book in my hands does make a difference. I find myself remembering those earlier events, remembering how the poems have changed, how I’ve changed. It’s a good reminder that the writing, and even publishing a book, are part of a process, one I’m still in the middle of.
Mathews: Do you think of the book itself differently after having read so much from it to audiences of various kinds?
Smith: When Black Hole Factory was still only a manuscript, it was easy to think of it as “my book.” Now that it’s out in the world, I don’t feel as intensely that sense of ownership. I’m lucky in that I’ve received some kind comments and messages from readers who feel moved by certain poems, certain lines. I’m glad to know the book is finding people to talk to, mostly without me.
Mathews: Is all of this reading practice helping you? Are you becoming a better reader? Is it making you a better—or a different—poet?
Smith: I know the poems a bit better now. I find myself a little less dependent on the page, which helps me connect to the audience. But it also means that I’m trusting the poems–their music, their rhythms, their moments of quiet.
Mathews: How much new work—poems not in your first book—do you usually find yourself including in readings?
Smith: I’ve not yet had a reading that included poems not in the book. That will probably change soon. But for now, I’m trying to let the book have its moment. This one took almost ten years to finish. I’m not in a rush.
Mathews: Do you think having shaped your poetry into a book, and having come to know that book well over the past few years—from manuscript preparation and submission through publication and launch—do you find yourself thinking differently about new work? Are you writing poems now with a new book in mind? Are you thinking of developing thematic strands or stylistic elements of voice that link the poems? Do you find them linked to Black Hole Factory?
Smith: There are definitely aspects of Black Hole Factory that were preparing me for the poems I’m writing now. Often I wasn’t aware when this was happening. But I don’t know that there are any overt links or strands—stylistic or otherwise—that I’m consciously deploying. I’m sure that all of my little obsessions are still there.
Mathews: How has handling a heavy schedule of readings and appearances impacted your writing? Has it been hard for you to find the time and creative energy to work on new poems?
Smith: It’s been no harder than it always is for this easily distracted writer. If anything, the events I’ve been invited to have only fed the work. It’s impossible for me to overstate how grateful I am to talk to students about making poems, or to share a mic with other writers. I’m still turning over some of the questions that Don Morrill’s students asked when I visited Tampa back in November. [At another event?] I was lucky to also read again alongside friends I met as a North Carolina Arts Fellow–Patrice Gopo, Bryn Chancellor, and Kathryn Schwille. In January, I was a guest at the Writers Weekend at Summerville at Augusta University, where I was shattered by the work of Fiona Sze-Lorraine, Cinelle Barnes, Frank Iodice, Stephanie Kartalopoulos, and Laura Leigh Morris—tremendous writers, all.
That said, I’ve also had a few significant changes these past few months. I resigned my teaching position at Marshall University and joined the staff of the Sewanee Review as Managing Editor. I moved to Tennessee. But I still find myself more mornings than not with a little time to write, and that’s enough.
Alec Hill (left), outgoing Managing Editor of The Sewanee Review and Eric Smith (right).
Mathews: What are you working on now?
Smith: Our editorial team is assembling the spring and summer issues of the Sewanee Review. I’m trying to get in shape for some of the hikes my wife has planned for us this spring here on the mountain. And poems, I suppose—ones that I hope will be a part of a new book that in my more optimistic moments I’m calling Cashtown.
Nancy Chen Long received the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for her first book, Light into Bodies. She is also recipient of a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the National Endowment of the Arts. She was born in Taipei, Taiwan, to a Taiwanese mother and an American father who was stationed in Taiwan as a linguist for the U. S. Air Force. Moving to the United States when she was young, she completed a degree in Electrical Engineering Technology, then pursued an MBA and developed a career in technology, working as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager. She received an MFA from Spalding University in 2013. Her poems have appeared widely in journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, Pleiades, RHINO, Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, and others, and she is author of the chapbook Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). She lives in south-central Indiana with her husband and works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division.
Following the official launch of her book on May 20, 2017, Nancy discussed its publication and her plans for the next few months with University of Tampa Press Director Richard Mathews.
MATHEWS: Your debut collection Light into Bodies, most recent winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, is a book about identity in many ways. It also marks an evolving identity for you as a poet. Can you comment on how the prize and the publication of your first book have contributed to your own sense of identity as a writer?
CHEN LONG: I once heard: A writer is someone who writes. And I believe that. I believe in the right to self-identify and the power/self-empowerment it can bring. Before the Tampa Review Prize, I happily stitched ‘writer’ onto that part of my mosaic, crazy-quilt identity reserved for what one “does,” but I didn’t say much about it outside of that. For instance, maybe two people at work knew that I wrote poetry up until the manuscript won the contest. That’s because I held for myself a personal scope of being a writer and a public scope, with somewhat different aspects. I considered myself a writer in the personal sense because I couldn’t not write. And also, I have some of the telltale signs: I carry little notebooks around, scribbling down things seen and heard; I find all types of writing implements irresistible, have an obsession with paper and how it feels, with books and reading, with dictionaries and word history, with story, sound, and lyric. So that attribution in the personal sense was clear and I owned it gladly. Outside of that personal scope, there’s a rich and layered conversation going on in the world of poetry. For poetry at least, one way to gain a seat at the table is to have a book published. I didn’t consider myself a writer in that public, part-of-the-conversation sense. But I wanted to—I want to be part of the cultural conversation. Winning the Tampa Review Prize, a prize offered by a journal and press with a long, rich history of contributing to American poetry, satisfied an internal requirement. It flipped some personal, internal switch needed to give myself permission to enter into that public scope and to identify publically as a writer.
Mathews: You also recently received some very public and prestigious national recognition for your work when you were named as recipient of a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. What does this award mean to you? Do you have any goals for your fellowship year?
CHEN LONG: Yes, a few months after Light into Bodies had won the prize and been accepted for publication by the University of Tampa Press, I received news about the NEA grant. Either one of those awards in itself is overwhelming. To have received both within a short period of time was a shock. It was the second time I had applied for the fellowship. I feel lucky to have been selected, especially in light of the future life of the NEA. I’m alarmed by the possible defunding of the NEA. The NEA not only enriches lives, it changes lives.
It funds not only individuals, but art organizations as well. I looked up some statistics I remember from a ThinkProgress article on the NEA: “About 40 percent of NEA projects are in high-poverty neighborhoods, while 14 percent of NEA grants are for projects that at least partially impact rural areas. Another quarter of state agency grants are awarded to rural places, many of which disperse NEA money.” I am grateful to the NEA for the necessary and good work that they do.
The combination of the Tampa Review Prize and NEA fellowship is a gift of public affirmation, and I am more confident as a writer with respect to my seat at the table in the literary conversation. The affirmation of both UT Press and the NEA challenges me to dig even deeper into the creative process, to give back to the literary arts and writing community as I am able, and to make a difference and help other writers where I can.
My goal is to complete a second manuscript, which is turning into an obsession with the intersections of art, science, and religion, the language we create to name and map those ideas and interactions, and how language mediates, bridges, and serves as connective tissue. This obsession requires much in the way of research, so I’ll likely ask for a one-year extension to complete it.
MATHEWS: You recently celebrated publication of Light into Bodies with a book launch at The Crazy Horse in Bloomington, Indiana. Could you describe that event and how it came about?
CHEN LONG: The Crazy Horse is one of the oldest restaurants in Bloomington. Rumor is that it used to be a brothel. It has a charming private room in the back with dark-red walls, one of them all brick, and a full bar—an appropriate place for the event because it looks a bit like a beatnik bar. The event took place on Saturday afternoon. It came about because a dear friend wanted to hold the launch event for this book. She organized it, evaluated venues, selected the food and wine. There were appetizers, brownies, beer, and wine, as well as non-alcoholic beverages. We spread the word through emails and social media. Since this event was not only a book launch but also a thanks-giving, a way of honoring some of those who helped me back to writing and poetry, there was a short program in which friends read poems and played music.
MATHEWS: It sounds great . . . and it seems from the photos that it was an ideal way to celebrate the publication. It seems to be a grounded and natural transition from the personal to the “public scope” you mention. Beyond the writing of the book, now that it has been published you are entering a more public mode and facing the task of helping to find ways to reach readers. For someone with a first book, you have been thinking especially clearly about good ways to help this happen. How have you come up with such good, practical approaches? Have the suggestions come from writer friends? Or is this mostly through reading you have done?
CHEN LONG: All the while, while sending out the manuscript, I cataloged ideas I ran across regarding how to promote your book. Some of the ideas came from colleagues who attended Spalding University, where I received my MFA. Spalding has a strong alumni association and each year at the homecoming residency there’s a session on publication and promotion. I also picked up ideas and resources on social media. For instance, I participate in a number of Facebook groups related to writing and poetry. The topic of promoting one’s book is a common subject. There are many generous and creative people out there willing to share their good ideas. Also, it helps to be a good literary citizen. I’ve been interviewing poets and writing poetry book reviews for a number of years on a couple of blogs as a way the help promote other people’s work. When Light into Bodies was released, I already had some contacts for reviews and such.
MATHEWS: You also had a reading at Spalding University, a sort of second launch, in their Festival of Contemporary Writing. Tell us a bit about that event.
CHEN LONG: Yes, Spalding has a Festival of Contemporary Writing that includes invited speakers as well as a “Celebration of Recently Published Books,” in which faculty and alumni read from their recent works. This year the Celebration was held on June 2 at the Brown Hotel in Louisville. If you’ve never visited the Brown, you’re in for a treat. It’s a lovely building listed on the National Register of Historic Places and where Louisville’s most famous dish, the Hot Brown, was created. The architecture is beautiful—it was built in the Georgian Revival style. I read there along with other alumni: Linda Parker, who released her novel Oliver’s Song; Al DeGenova, who read from his poetry collection, Black Pearl; Mary Popham, who read from her novel Love Is a Fireplace; Kathleen Thompson, whose creative nonfiction book Time & Distance was just published; and David Dominé, who read from his work, Voodoo Days at La Casa Fabulosa. There was a reception and book-signing, afterwards—what Spalding calls SPLovefest—with hors d’oeuvres and an open bar. Other alumni sell their books as well at SPLovefest. It’s wonderfully celebratory.
(Recently published Spalding alumni: From left: Al DeGenova, David Dominé, Linda Parker, Mary Popham, Kathleen Thompson, Nancy Chen Long)
MATHEWS: What other appearances do you have planned over the next few months?
CHEN LONG: Here are the other readings planned through August so far:
Friday, June 23 • 7 pm Reading with Christine Rhein Nicola’s Books
2513 Jackson Ave, Ann Arbor, MI 48103
Patricia Hooper is the author of five books of poetry, Other Lives, At the Corner of the Eye, Aristotle’s Garden, 
Mathews: The cover of this book—like your previous book from the University of Tampa Press, Separate Flights—features a painting by the artist Suzanne Stryk, this one from a piece entitled “Homage to the Passenger Pigeon (extinct 1914).” Are there particular aspects of her work that resonate for you? Was there special appeal in this homage to an extinct bird?
Eric Smith has published his work widely in journals such as 32 Poems, Southwest Review, The New Criterion, Pleiades and The Rumpus. He also has turned his hand to innovative literary publishing as a founding editor of 
Mathews: You are the most recently published winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, and your prize-winning book, Black Hole Factory, was released last fall. For the past few months you launched the book with quite a few readings and book-signings. Since this is your first published collection, it must have been an interesting experience. Can you mention some of the highlights? What were some of the readings that are the most memorable?
Nancy Chen Long received the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for her first book, Light into Bodies. She is also recipient of a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the National Endowment of the Arts. She was born in Taipei, Taiwan, to a Taiwanese mother and an American father who was stationed in Taiwan as a linguist for the U. S. Air Force. Moving to the United States when she was young, she completed a degree in Electrical Engineering Technology, then pursued an MBA and developed a career in technology, working as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager. She received an MFA from Spalding University in 2013. Her poems have appeared widely in journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, Pleiades, RHINO, Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, and others, and she is author of the chapbook Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). She lives in south-central Indiana with her husband and works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division.
CHEN LONG: I once heard: A writer is someone who writes. And I believe that. I believe in the right to self-identify and the power/self-empowerment it can bring. Before the Tampa Review Prize, I happily stitched ‘writer’ onto that part of my mosaic, crazy-quilt identity reserved for what one “does,” but I didn’t say much about it outside of that. For instance, maybe two people at work knew that I wrote poetry up until the manuscript won the contest. That’s because I held for myself a personal scope of being a writer and a public scope, with somewhat different aspects. I considered myself a writer in the personal sense because I couldn’t not write. And also, I have some of the telltale signs: I carry little notebooks around, scribbling down things seen and heard; I find all types of writing implements irresistible, have an obsession with paper and how it feels, with books and reading, with dictionaries and word history, with story, sound, and lyric. So that attribution in the personal sense was clear and I owned it gladly. Outside of that personal scope, there’s a rich and layered conversation going on in the world of poetry. For poetry at least, one way to gain a seat at the table is to have a book published. I didn’t consider myself a writer in that public, part-of-the-conversation sense. But I wanted to—I want to be part of the cultural conversation. Winning the Tampa Review Prize, a prize offered by a journal and press with a long, rich history of contributing to American poetry, satisfied an internal requirement. It flipped some personal, internal switch needed to give myself permission to enter into that public scope and to identify publically as a writer.
It was the second time I had applied for the fellowship. I feel lucky to have been selected, especially in light of the future life of the NEA. I’m alarmed by the possible defunding of the NEA. The NEA not only enriches lives, it changes lives.
