Blackbird ArchiveWriting Through the Body
Writing Through the Body
I grew up in northern Minnesota rollerblading with my brother every day. The best part of being a skater is that you’re out on the streets—you skate at Bell State Bank, you skate at Curt’s Lock & Key, you climb over the barbed-wire fence to grind rails at Dakota Electric. You meet a lot of bums and see a lot of crazy stuff go down. One time I saw a dude shit on the sidewalk and take off his shirt to wipe his ass with it. Another time a hobo bailed from a moving freight train and limped over to ask us for a cigarette, teeth bloody from the tumble. The wildness of the world flips on your senses. That’s why I don’t write at home. I edit at home. Home is good for that. But when I’m writing something fresh I head out on the town. I walk the streets and talk to people. I listen to what they say. I keep an eye out for free piles on the curbs. Then I sit down at a café with a journal and pen and let my body relax. This is the key moment. The body stills but the mind keeps racing forward, churning to help you survive the next peril. But with the external world becalmed, the electricity turns inward, the wheels start to spin, and slowly, you begin to hear the music.
Joshua Bennett’s poems have been published in Callaloo, The Collagist, Drunken Boat, Tupelo Quarterly, and Tidal Basin Review, among others. He was the winner of the 2014 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize (Backbone Press), and in 2010 he received a Predoctoral Fellowship from the Ford Foundation. He also received fellowships from the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Bennett, who is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Princeton University, is the founding editor of Kinfolks: a journal of black expression. Photo by Eve Ewing
Anders Carlson-Wee’s work has been published or is forthcoming in New England Review , The Missouri Review , The Southern Review , and Best New Poets , among others. He has received a 2015 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2014 Literary Award in poetry from Ninth Letter , and the 2014 Matt Clark Editors’ Choice Prize in poetry from New Delta Review . Carlson-Wee has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, as well as the Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Residency Fellowship. He is currently an MFA candidate at Vanderbilt University. Photo by Kai Carlson-Wee
Michelle E. Iwen earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University and earned a PhD in Critical and Cultural Theory from Cardiff University. Her academic work has appeared in gender forum and Assuming Gender . She is the assistant director of educational and research programs for the Origins Project at Arizona State University and also teaches creative writing at ASU. Photo by Anindya Raychaudhuri
Celeste Lipkes’ poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle , Smartish Pace , Bellevue Literary Review , and Unsplendid , among others. Her poem “Victor” received a second-place William Carlos Williams prize in 2014, and she has been an artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Lipkes earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and is pursuing an MD from Virginia Commonwealth University. Photo by Jeff Lipkes