Behind the Masthead: Kevin Lichty
Our new special projects editor, Kevin Lichty, discusses top secret plans, old radios, and Toy Fox Terriers.
Shelby Heinrich: Special projects editor sounds like a very interesting and important title. What exactly does this title entail?
Kevin Lichty: The special projects editor is job made and remade every year. Essentially, any idea that an editor has (as an individual or as a collective "editors") that falls outside of the traditional pages of HFR and everyone loves, it is the special project editors job to make that idea happen.
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Hayden's Ferry Review: Issue 56, The Chaos Issue
The ancient Greeks saw Chaos as the dark abyss from which life sprang.
Mathematicians use Chaos theory to explain how small decisions can give rise to unexpectedly grave consequences.
Chaos is a cluttered bedroom, a busy street corner, a blinding snowstorm.
In Paradise Lost, John Milton described Chaos as “the vast immeasurable abyss, / Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild.”
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A Mini-Q&A with Molly Beckwith
HFR: I love how this poem explores magical realism in its address to “you.” It speaks to the imagination of the girl and calls attention to the more quiet, realistic line: “In you mother’s circle you are the one / with bad breath, dirty fingernails, red stripes on your shoulders.” Can you speak a little about the pairing of this imagery? I am also interested in the inciting incident of the photograph and how the events begin to overlap in each stanza. Did you begin writing this poem with this incident or did it develop through revision, and did that influence the form?
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Contributor Spotlight: Chris Tamigi
I’m excited about seeing “Impure Acts” (my translation of Mauro Covacich’s short story “Atti Impuri” ) in print in the HFR. The idea of an English translation of a contemporary Italian story set in postwar Poland intrigues me in that it interposes several layers of mediation between the reader and the narrator. You have Covacich who conjured up this scene in the mountains outside postwar Krakow and described it in Italian, and then you have the translator (me) importing the story from Italian into English.
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AWP Off-Site Readings You Won't Want to Miss
So I know you'll all be attending the #superblueferry event hosted by Superstition Review, Blue Mesa Review, and Hayden's Ferry Review on April 10th @ 10 AM at The Nicollet. But what other offsite events do you not want to miss? To make your AWP-evenings as fun, social, and productive as possible we've compiled a list of the offsite events we are most excited about.
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Contributor Spotlight: Sarah Pemberton Strong
My poem “Mobile” was inspired by a baby gift for my newborn daughter—a mechanical crib mobile sent by a well-meaning relative I’d never met. This mobile, with its toxic-smelling plastic ponies and its beepy, teeth-grinding rendition of a piece of music I was fond of, struck me at first as the very nadir of technological achievement. As the poem says, whenever I looked at it—and smelled the chemicals coming off the plastic—it made me think of “asthma attacks and Chinese factory workers.” In an earlier draft, the poem went on to ask, “Why would anyone give a naked infant / such a complicated dance of suffering?” Although those lines didn’t make it into the final version, once I had posed that question, I wanted to try to answer it, or at least investigate it. That investigation comprises a large part of the pleasure poetry gives me—the experience of embarking on a quest I hadn’t intended to sign up for.
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Contributor Spotlight: Clyde Moneyhun
I found my voice as a writer, ironically, by speaking in other people’s voices, which is to say when I started translating in earnest. Before about five years ago, I’d dabbled in translation. In college, I once got out of taking a final exam in an Italian class by turning in a translation of the brief memoir “Winter in Abruzzo” by Natalia Ginzburg, and later it was the first translation I ever published. Still in college, I started translating Camus’s The Stranger to teach myself French. Living in Japan years later, I collaborated with my friend Mark Caprio to translate the Japanese novel A Heart of Winter by Miura Ayako, which we did manage to finish and publish, and also some contemporary Japanese Buddhist poetry. I should have given in to my fate long ago, but I spent many years writing short stories, personal essays, even a travel column for a while, before I committed to translation wholeheartedly.
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Contributor Spotlight: Patrick Milian
The first poem I wrote was a libretto, a byzantine elaboration of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” My roommate asked me if I’d try writing the text for an opera he was hoping to write, so I tried. I tried writing the only way I knew how—which meant meter, rhyme, form, and capitalizing the first letter of every line. It took about a year to finish the libretto and, reading it now, it seems like a record of an idiosyncratic education in which arias turn into sonnets, duets are sung is terza rima, and Longfellow makes more than one appearance. These were the best methods I knew of making a poem sound like music.
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