Your three flash stories, "Pickle," "Harvest," and "The Landlord," all have that exquisite melding of poetry and magical realism. Tell us more about your process and what brings it all together for you in a story or poem. I'm adding a quote from each of the three stories.

"She's healthy and young, as full as the canopy of spring trees above her – green and wide and so thick only the smallest slivers of light squeak through. Or maybe that's not a canopy at all, but a tunnel, a long one and it's cold, not spring at all, and the sun sets so quickly some days everything disappears before you can make it to the table lamp."

"At times when Esther worked in the yard she would stand under the blossoming trees and pray to something above them, something she imagined had ears as big as the yard."

"A few bites had been taken from a green apple on the kitchen counter, and as we touched, the white parts where the bites had been taken turned the color of rust."

My process isn't unique or profound – I write in a journal and I write when I can (mostly when my daughter is napping). I love images, of course, and I write both poetry and flash fiction, so I hope, always, that good images will come to me. Today we had an ice storm – there's ice hanging from everything: the lawn furniture, branches, the bird feeder. I already recorded this in my journal. It'll come up in something, a poem, a story. How I know when a piece of writing is going to be fiction is when a character comes to me. Sometimes I dream (day-dream?) of him/her and sometimes the character is a part of me I can see out there. Lately I've had this image of a teenage boy with long, stretched earlobes. I can't get him out of my mind – his sadness, mostly, sort of haunts me. He seems like he's waiting on me to write about him. Then, the other day, I was taking a walk in my neighborhood and this old man who keeps chickens (who happened to be rolling his trashcan to the road where I passed) told me how his chickens often hit the electric fence and fly over the road. As he was telling me this, the boy with the earlobes showed up in my mind and the chickens sort of landed in his earlobes. I knew he belonged in a story, but I tried to put him in a poem. My husband, who is also a poet, read the poem and said, the boy with the chickens in his earlobes needs to be in a story. He was right, of course. The boy is in a winter story now, and his earlobes are still stretched, but without the chickens. Maybe now just isn't the time. I'm lucky to have an editor as a husband, and luckier that he's a poet: just a few minutes ago he slid a poem under the door, one he just wrote. The first line: "We woke today and the world was glass." I don't have to look far for the magic.

That's beautiful. I love ice storms. I used to live in Montreal and the world does become glass.

In these stories each person is transformed by nature. Something in the wind or the soil changes the movement in the story. How is nature a part of your life and your work?

Peter Lucas sent me the cover to my new book of poetry (It Would Be Quiet) this morning. The cover is a picture of a woman who is half tree. The woman's rear end, which is a trunk, stretches to the edges and there are birds on the branches. I feel that way, mostly (or sometimes) – there's no real boundary between my skin and wind, the dirt, the trees. Oh, and, once I ordered a scarf from ModCloth and it came smelling like earth. All the reviews online complained of this as a "terrible odor," this earth smell. I never wanted to take it off. Also, most of my dreams are of me flying, over the oceans and through the trees, so I think, maybe, in another life I was a bird. When I forget to water my plants for a while, the dirt cracks and as I look down into them I think only of my face.

How has life changed for you moving from the East Coast where you grew up to the South? Has that made an impact on your writing?

Yes, I don't have to wear 600 layers when I'm sitting at my desk. I'm from northern NH, but I haven't lived there since I left when I was 18. My sister-in-law, Mindy, told me yesterday that it hasn't gotten above 0 degrees for two weeks. It's been 18 years since I've lived there, half my life I've lived away from home, and I'm still trying to warm up from those childhood winters. Tennessee winters are so very mild and easy, but when I write about winter it's filled with fear and pain. I miss my family terribly, but I wouldn't live there for anything. Clay, my husband, always calls my writing "Southern," and I ask him all the time why. Maybe it's the chickens in the earlobes – who knows!

Who are the writers that most inspire you?

I'm always so quick to say Anne Carson – Autobiography of Red is one of my favorite books. Marquez is amazing. Isabel Allende's House of Spirits blows my mind – I can't even imagine writing something that big and beautiful and wild. It takes me weeks to write a one-page story. How do they do it?

Who are you reading now?

When I'm teaching, usually textbooks and papers. I teach on the block system, so in two weeks I'm off for about six weeks. I just ordered HOPSCOTCH by Julio Cortazar on Inter-Library loan because it was on Aimee Bender's Goodreads list.

What projects are you working on at this time?

I usually don't talk about that because it takes away the magic or ruins it in some way. But, I can't get the word "Laden" out of my head. Clay and I have been talking about a book of collaborative poems, or a collaborative book where the poems sort of talk to each other. The thing is, he writes so quickly, a poem in a sitting. It may take me weeks to write a poem. I guess he'll just have to wait.

I look forward to reading that collaborative collection. Nice. Give me five words that you love and why?

I use "little" too much, but I love it. My dad likes little things, too: rolling pins and muffin tins and so forth.

"Laden" lately – the burden of winter is upon me!

"Whisper" and "Listen" – not a whisper, that seems cheesy, but as a demand. "Whisper this: does the land cry beneath the streets?" I like demands in writing, in poetry, at least. Make your reader do something already.

I have an e-chapbook from Sundress Publications titled "Hush." I'm self-promoting, of course, but I love the title.

I appreciate the quiet immensely. My mother is hard of hearing and I've always been jealous that she can take her hearing aids out. What a lovely feeling that must be.

Give me one image from your past that made a huge impact on your choice to become a writer.

Early in my writing I was obsessed with everything Sylvia Plath, especially her journals. The moments of her living from her journals, all of them so beautiful and terrifying – baking, swimming, riding her bicycle, working as a student, becoming a wife, and then a mother – transformed into these dark and haunting poems. When I was reading her heavily I lived in this really dark apartment. The kitchen was the size of this desk. The walls were wood paneled. There was only one window and it looked out into the woods. It was so dark in there. All my plants died. I read Plath pretty much all day long and her life was like a light to me – it seemed so beautiful. Dark, too, of course. Her ability to observe just sort of woke something up in me. She sort of bicycled into my life with all her flowers and hair while I was in my dark kitchen eating chicken.

What is your first image that you remember as a child?

My father owned a tire shop and he always had these harried workers around. Once, we were on the lawn and one of these workers (I think his name was Smokin' Joe) said to my father, she's a homely one, isn't she (meaning me). Every time I closed my eyes after that moment, I always pictured standing on a cliff and looking over the edge and seeing a river filled with macaroni.

This interview is making me very happy. The boy with chickens in his earlobes, a scarf that smelled of earth, she bicycled into my life, a river filled with macaroni.

Leave us with a quote that you LOVE that says something of who you are.

Some character said this on Mad Men:

"Life is like a horseshoe. It's fat in the middle, open on both ends, and hard all the way through."

 

That's great. WOW! Thank you so much, Jan, for sharing your pure brilliance with us.

Thanks for listening.