Daniel Cowper’s debut poetry collection, Grotesque Tenderness, was recently published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. The book is divided into five parts, three of which are discrete poem sequences and two of which are collections of poems on regret and relationships. Beyond that, he’s the Poetry Editor of PULP Literature and he’s married to poet Emily Osborne.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Cowper about Grotesque Tenderness, the pros and cons of workshopping creative writing, combining personal, historical, geographical, and mythical inspirations, and more!
I’ve been noticing a trend in
movies: the inciting incident of the story is usually the murder of a female
character. The more I thought about how many stories depend on a dead woman,
the more disturbed I became. This story-starting device shows up over and over
in pop culture, in films as diverse as Bambi,The Fugitive, Jaws,The Shawshank Redemption, Gladiator, The Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo, and in every detective, police procedural, and true crime series,
from Sherlock to Criminal Minds to 48 Hours.
Cathy Ulrich has also noticed this trend, and she wrote a book about it. Ghosts of You is a collection of thirty-one flash pieces from her Murdered Ladies Series.…
The ink came in an opaque plastic bottle, the size of an adult fist, and difficult to pop open which made one think the lid would hold similarly tight when screwed back on. One was wrong about that. Ink was a possession that marked a very clear line between little kids and school. For the basic kindergarten penmanship exercises — the squiggles and circles that were not really expected to coalesce into letters — ink was provided; it was there, in the pen, when it was time to practice. In first grade, ink and the filling of one’s fountain pen became one’s own responsibility. Only fountain pens were approved for use in elementary school, ostensibly because writing with a fountain pen established proper penmanship and the ink was deemed to be a proper color to minimize eye strain.…
The judge was a tall big man with blue eyes and a brown billy-goat beard and he seemed to me to be old, though he was only around forty years of age at that time. His manner was grave. On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife’s religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make. It is something to think about (True Grit 42).
I was raised
Methodist and have thought a lot about it. Most of my thinking occurred after I
left the church, for while I was a member, what I mainly thought about was the
drudgery of attending Sunday school and church each week; the horror of the
torturous deaths in both testaments; and the reality that my only interests in
attending church at all were (1) singing hymns both in the choir on Sunday
evenings and in the congregation on Sunday morning, and (2) sitting next to my
adolescent peers on those same mornings, playing games of hangman or, if I were
really lucky, rubbing legs with some equally squirmy girl.…
Stevie Z Fischer writes about “the dynamics of people, nature, and power in small-town New England.” Her first novel, River Rules, looks at “how everyday heroes can be forged as lives are changed by forces seemingly beyond our control.” Outside of that, she teaches at several universities. You can find her here.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Fischer about River Rules, her interests in environmentalism and social connections, the pros and cons of modern political correctness, and more!
“Give this a chance,” I urged myself as my
gorge began to rise. I was watching a young woman pretend she hadn’t heard a
classroom full of fifth graders return her greeting. She stopped dramatically
in mid-stride, raised a hand to her ear and asked them, “What did you say?”
From one perspective, I should’ve long ago
developed a tolerance for this kind of thing. I’d heard it inflicted on my son,
Riley, and his fellow students before by a wide range of adults, including the
principal at their public school, a camp counselor at a “working farm” and a
docent at a “hands-on” science museum.
But the truth was that each repetition of
this bit of showmanship built on the intolerability of the ones preceding it,
making me wonder: “Do these adults really still believe that what they’re doing
is in the least bit original, spontaneous, genuine, entertaining or even
useful?” …
Jessy Randall’s 2018 poetry release How to Tell If You Are Human contains 29
black-and-white, grayscale, or full-color diagram poems, encompassing a
dizzying range of personal experiences. By calmly exploring and analyzing mental
illness, isolation, and multiple facets of human relationships, Randall’s
speaker helps to raise our understanding of the bewildering set of interactions
a person must navigate on a daily basis to function in American society.
Commendably, she accomplishes these observations, all the while touching upon
the spirit of the iconic 1990s Nirvana album Nevermind. In a brief 78 pages of verse, observations, and
illustrations, the reader is left with a humming sense of his own disconnected
state, coupled with the realization that this unique predicament is universal
and, in fact, entirely disconcerting.…
