In case you missed the first part of our interview with Bianca Spriggs (in which she discussed being nomadic, Affrilachian, and pluck! The Journal of Afrilachian Arts & Culture), click here to check it out!

Your blog’s tagline is “author, artist, activist”. I’m going to ask about the activism in a second, but I’m curious what kind of art do you make besides poetry? 

A little bit of everything. Poetry is my first genre love, but I’ve actually always suspected I’m a speculative fiction writer at heart, and was adamantly told so by novelist Sarah Micklem when I read at The New School this past Spring. I keep a tight lid on my prose mostly because I feel like a foreign exchange student when I try and tackle it, but occasionally things will leak out. I’d written a poem about a dragon in a bathroom and Sarah was like, “We need you on our team.” I’m cracking up right now because we both got really excited during the conversation and it meant a lot to hear such an accomplished author call me out like that. So, I have to now confess, I write fiction and creative non-fiction too.

I am also an actor, a multimedia visual artist, and have directed a few short films. I say I’m a writer primarily because, as you can see, I’m a bit long-winded, but I love being able to tell stories in any medium. I don’t like the idea of restricting myself because stagnation terrifies me. I know I’m on the right track with something when I feel nervous and anxious and sort of like, “Can I really pull this off?” I feel very grateful to have been gifted the ability to adapt my stories to different outlets, whether it’s a painting, or a sculpture, or a short film, or collage. For me, the vehicle is less important than the content. The content dictates the form. I’d never made resin casts of skulls before The Thirteen but I figured it out because I knew it had to be thirteen skulls which were a little scary but also beautiful to behold. There was no other way for me to get my point across with that aspect of the narrative. Working in other media actually bolsters my writing because I can now think about a poem like a filmmaker, or like a painter, or a collage artist, or a performer, but I can think about all those things like a poet. It’s all one and the same for me because I believe hybridity and fluency in other media are crucial to the next evolutionary phase of artists and writers. Continue reading →

According to her blog, Bianca Spriggs is an author, an artist, and an activist. She has books published by Accents and Wind Publications and has poems in the anthologies New Growth and America! What’s My Name? as well as a litany of journals. She recently submitted one of the boldest and most unique writing prompts we’ve ever offered and is busy with what seems like a hundred simultaneous projects.

I had a chance to converse with her and discovered that she had so much to say that I had to split the interview into two parts. Below, Ms. Spriggs discusses her poetry background as well as her work on the newest issue of pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture.

Can you tell us about where you’re from and a little about your upbringing?

My upbringing has been fairly nomadic. Most people think of me as a born and bred Kentuckian, but I actually made my grand entrance into the world in Milwaukee, WI. Because of the nature of my parents’ jobs, I spent several years of my childhood sort of bouncing around between Florida, Indiana, Milwaukee, and Kentucky. We moved to Kentucky when I was eleven, and I’ve lived here the longest, but Kentucky has been an off-and-on affair for my family as well. There was always a heavy emphasis on education. I did fairly well in certain subjects like English and Social Studies, Geometry, and Biology, but I remember being frequently bored with traditional school-work, so I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy and fairy-tales on my own, and it helped that my parents kept me involved in a ton of extra-curricular activities like band and drama club and speech team. Continue reading →

Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.

“I did have a question related to the interview you gave Leigh Anne Hornfeldt [in New Southerner] where you said “Billy C Clark redefined how I saw my own writing forever.”

“Oh, okay. […] Billy’s from Catlettsburg, which is very, very close to Greenup. Actually, he was kin to Jesse Stuart.

“Billy C Clark is, I think, arguably one of the greatest writers I’ve ever read. I guess the Wikipedia on him will tell you (very accurately) that he lived the childhood of a Mark Twain character. He really did. He was an amazing writer. He left his parents’ home when, I think when he was 9, and lived in the county courthouse. They let him live upstairs. And he trapped furs to pay his rent. He spent the rest of his time down on the river fishing. He eventually went into the military. When he came to the University of Kentucky, he couldn’t really afford it so he worked out a deal with the president of the university that he would catch fish for him as part of his tuition.

“His first creative writing teacher told him that he didn’t even want Billy in the class because Billy was a natural writer and he didn’t want to pollute him. And Billy quickly retorted. ‘I need A’s. So is it okay if I sit in your class and ignore everything you say?’

“But, I mean, you read his work and it… University Press of Kentucky put out a book a couple of years ago: When Miss America Kissed Caleb. It’s just a group of short stories. And his short stories make me cry, they’re so beautiful.  Continue reading →

“James Baker Hall told me years and years ago that when he became poet laureate that whenever he’d go overseas or whenever he’d talk to other writers in other parts of the country, people would always comment, ‘Oh man, I wish I lived in KY! You have such good writers there.’ And I think storytelling is ingrained in this state in a way that you can go about the business of being a writer any way you damn choose, right? But you still have a certain respect for the principle of being a good storyteller because it’s just something that’s ingrained here. And that’s the reason why there’s no pattern for a quote unquote ‘Kentucky Writer’. They’re very, very different. And, I mean, Stuart (for example) is substantially different from James Still. Don West even more so. Moving up generations, James Baker Hall, for example, is very different from Wendell Berry. And Elizabeth Madox Roberts, you know? Whoever the case may be, these writers are very unique. But yeah, I think it does stem from this idea that we’re all storytellers. And I think the nature here supports that.”

“[…] It’s not about poetry. It’s not about prose. I think, you know, it’s just about the ability to try and commune with what’s going on around us.”

Matthew Haughton signing his book for Accents intern Robin!

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Matthew Haughton’s high school students affectionately call him “The Man in the Hat”. And honestly, the only thing I knew about Matthew (except that he was the author of Accents Publishing’s Bee-Coursing Box) was his unique collection of headdress. But I had a chance to sit down with him at Common Grounds Coffe House and discuss his work, his life, and his undying love for Kentucky.

In fact, the first thing I noticed when speaking to Matthew was his thick Eastern KY brogue. As it turns out, he grew up in Greenup County. “The first thing that usually comes to peoples’ minds,” he said about Greenup, “is Jesse Stuart, who was an internationally famous poet and novelist. So I became aware of Stuart at a very early age. We were kind of indoctrinated with it in school. And to be honest with you, I spend most of my teens avoiding it. It wasn’t until I got into my 20’s that I really could grasp how wonderful that man’s work really was.”

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Nettie Farris‘s writing is sparse but dense. Her poetry and micro-fiction attack short attention spans head on and pack a wallop with each word. In Communion, the newest chapbook from Accents Publishing, Ms. Farris creates a narrative of love, loss, and (most importantly) everything in between. The structure is unique: long lines of one or two words stretched out with numbered markers identifying… well, what the markers are used for maybe isn’t for me to say.

Nettie currently lives in Louisville where she’s busy teaching as an adjunct instructor and no doubt hiking the surrounding trails. When I asked if she had a few moments to shuffle off her minimalist style and get intimate with our readers, she agreed to let it all out.

Where are you from and what is your relationship to Kentucky in general?
I have a rather complex relationship to Kentucky. My mother grew up on the property of Henry Wallace on Rose Island Road. My grandparents were sharecroppers there until they could afford to buy their own farm in Marysville, Indiana. I remember my mother’s stories about interrupting Mrs. Wallace’s tea parties and being introduced to Mrs. Wallace’s friends and also her stories about driving into work at the Courier-Journal with Henry Wallace when she was older. I grew up in Southern Indiana and moved to Louisville when I began college at the University of Louisville. The first house I owned was in Simpsonville, where I lived during my years of early motherhood. I think the final push that led me to breastfeeding my babies was when I saw, while driving down US 60, a foal, on a hill, nursing—it looked so beautiful, and natural. Pure Kentucky. I didn’t realize how beautiful Kentucky was until I had left for a doctoral program in Tulsa. I came home after a semester—I was turning 30 and suddenly obsessed with babies, and I missed home. About five years ago I moved back to southern Indiana. I now live in Floyds Knobs. We wanted our children to all go to the same middle and high school and also be able to walk home from school. My major concern, at the time, was whether or not I could continue to think of myself as a Kentucky poet. Continue reading →

Rebecca Gayle Howell is an award-winning poet with close ties to Kentucky. Her newest book, Render/ An Apocalypse, came out in March. Accents had a chance to talk with her about that book, its response, and more information about the specific poems.
(The interview was conducted by Accents Junior Editor, Christopher McCurry.)

Christopher McCurry:
Do you care to start at the very beginning? When and how you decided to write poems? How did Render: An Apocalypse happen?

Rebecca Gayle Howell:
My grandparents were subsistence farmers in Eastern Kentucky. They raised enough food to feed their family and that was it—my grandfather didn’t pursue the money economy. He never so much as logged his mountain. I admire their life choices more than I know how to say; when I remember love, I remember their land, its humidity, chickens, and hillside. But maybe this is the perspective of my privilege. My mother, who was raised as the daughter of subsistence, knew true poverty. What I mean is—she knew absence. And longing.

So my family’s narrative is dynamic. It shape-shifts, depending on who is telling the story. Throughout my life I tried to pin it down, until I realized I was mistaken to do so. My friend at the Fine Arts Work Center, Salvatore Scibona, told me the key was to take all of it, every last bit of the past, and throw it in the compost. What grows from compost is its own life. I suppose a point came when I realized we all share a shape-shifting narrative told by well meaning and unreliable narrators. Continue reading →

Sarah Freligh at a book signing at AWP conference in Boston, 2013

In April, Accents Junior Editor Christopher McCurry interviewed author Sarah Freligh about her work and newest chapbook, A Brief Natural History of an American Girl, which won the Accents Publishing 2012 Poetry Chapbook Contest. In 2009, she earned a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Tell us about yourself and your award winning chapbook A Brief Natural History of an American Girl (Accents Publishing 2012).

I live in Rochester, New York, on the North Coast of the United States with two cats the size of small dogs. And I thank you for that “award-winning” as a prefix to “chapbook.” It was years in the making, although most of the poems in there are still young and currently undergoing further revisions.

The title invites us to read the book as a guide to being an American Girl. In many ways, it is easy to see the common experiences, and yet reading the poems, the title doesn’t seem to fit perfectly, as if to suggest a kind of irony. Could you discuss the title in relation to the poems and speaker?

Irony, definitely. “American girl” is such a catch-all phrase, suggesting some kind of homogenized ideal as standard. It’s a term that’s very much of a throwback to the ‘50s and while I didn’t come of age during that time, I’m very much of that time, of its leftover mores and customs, and boatloads of “shoulds” and even more “should nots.” In many of the poems, the speaker is temporally distanced from “event,” in essence presenting a dual perspective that I hope allows for irony to mortar itself between the bricks of “real” and “perceived.” Continue reading →

Christopher McCurry teaches English at Lafayette High during the school year and studies at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English during the summer. He has been an intern for almost four years, running tasks both grueling and rewarding. He reads anything he can, but gravitates towards “poetry with a singular voice and control of humor.”  And somehow he finds the time for his wife and daughter.

Christopher is a workhorse with the gait of a prize-winning thoroughbred. He is as relentless in his craft as he is towards bettering his community and never seems to sweat. His hobbies aren’t pastimes but a way to better himself: ultimate frisbee and disc golf keep him limber while board games and StarCraft keep him sharp.

I recently sat down with my fellow Accents intern after his promotion to Junior Editor to pry him open and find out what lubricates those clockwork gears, what keeps him ticking when anyone else’s batteries would’ve corroded long ago. Continue reading →