Interview with Andrew Sposeto
Thinking our readers might enjoy hearing about the editing experience here at Runestone, CWP Communications Assistant, Jenniey Tallman, recently took a moment to interview Andrew Sposeto.
Andrew (aka Spo) was the Creative Nonfiction Associate Editor for volume one—responsible for guiding the CNF editorial board as they read through submissions and learned about publishing. Curious about our editorial process? Read here for more.
J: Hello Andrew and thank you for taking the time to talk with us. To start off, could you tell us a little about yourself? Where are you now—what are you working on?
A: I’ve just finished my Master’s Thesis, a collection of essays loosely focused on the theme of modern masculinity, a memoir-laden attempt at understanding myself through stories about men who have affected my life. I haven’t been writing much—I’m at one of those decompression points in my writing life, where I find my time is better spent reading, reflecting and seeking out new experiences. I’ve always admired writers who seem to have that bottomless well of ideas, but I am not that writer. Much more mechanical. I run out of gas and I put the onus on the world to fill me up again.
I’m currently teaching undergraduate creative writing, where my joy lies in reading student work. I’m always amazed to meet a new class and see talent manifest itself through creative work. For some of the students, this is their first time engaging with writing creatively, and to watch personality and genuine, youthful energy shape writing, void of many of the constraints they are used to, can be a huge inspiration for my own writing. The choices these kids make!
It sounds like you are really enjoying yourself. So, tell us: what was the most enjoyable part of working on Runestone?
Being challenged by my students. My goal going into my work with my editorial board was to empower them as much as possible—to have them do the work as editors and to cede final decisions to them. I didn’t anticipate how eagerly they would be to take the reins. From day one, my editorial board took ownership of both the experience and the product and shaped the discourse we had around creating this journal in some weird, conglomerate mold reflective of a group of very unique voices. Because they bought in so soon and so thoroughly and were so willing to challenge the opinions I brought to the table in the same way they challenged each other, the dynamic for how we operated was really special. Almost as if we had this dramatic arc throughout our process—some nights we’d leave exasperated with each other, but by the end it was as if we had won some small battle together.
Is there anything else that surprised you about teaching the class and editing the journal?
I was genuinely surprised by both the capacity of my editorial board to engage with the work we read and their ability to arrive at a consensus. And, that we were able to arrive at a point towards the end where, despite a markedly diverse editorial board, we had a clear vision of what we wanted the nonfiction section to represent—from content to aesthetics, and from what voices we valued to an emphasis on rewarding innovative writing. An editorial board is this weird place where creativity meets politics—that we, as a group, could navigate the two disparate poles as well as we did, I found surprising.
Given your experience reading CNF for Runestone, what is the best advice you can give undergraduates who are considering submitting their work for publication?
Particularly for creative nonfiction writers, my one bit of advice would be to consider audience. In determining what pieces would move from our general submissions list and onto the consideration of the larger editorial board, I had one simple sniff test: did the piece read like a diary or journal entry? Consider the audience.
Make sure everything in your writing—each sentence, each image—is working for the reader. The process of creative writing is not complete until someone has read your work. You, as a writer, are working for them, the reader. It is your job to provide everything to make the experience of reading your piece pleasurable for the reader. Journaling is a great exercise, but writing, in its completed form is so much more. A piece of CNF should never read as if it means more to the person who wrote it than the reader themselves.
A more general piece of advice, for those working in all genres, would be to take risks. Everyone submitting to Runestone is a young writer. Likely, if you place a piece here it won’t be your last. So have fun with your piece. Take risks. Experiment with form. Push the boundaries of your creativity to new places. As an undergraduate journal, we reward striving to create something new.
Lastly, would you let us know some other online publications you admire?
I read a ton online: n+1, the Believer, Brevity. Too many places to name here. What excites me most about online publication, as a CNF writer and a lover of the personal essay and long-form journalism, is that online publication is not bound, quite literally, by page count. The space this provides us as writers (long-winded writers, like me) is important.
I’m too young to complain about this age of social media, but one thing I do decry is the impulse to posit the first idea or commentary rather than to chew on something and provide a considered and lived-in response. I look at some of the long-form CNF out there as a perfect antidote to this insta-culture.
Longform.org is a great resource for people looking to explore some of the best in that genre. I’m a huge nerd. There is nothing I look forward to more than a Sunday morning, a cup of coffee, and a spare half an hour or so engaging with a writer who has devoted the whole thing to their piece.
Thank you for those insights, Spo. Best wishes with your writing and teaching endeavors!
Readers: If you are trying to reconcile the featured image on this blog with this interview, look no further. Spo mentioned “decompression” and that is an image of a fish in a state of decompression.
Stay tuned for more posts from this semester’s student-editors, coming soon.
A.P. Sposeto is a writer, teacher, and sore loser at board games. Born in Minneapolis and raised in a constant state of incomprehension, Spo travels the world searching for small grains of meaning to rejoice and write about. Although he was born with six fingers on his right hand, he possesses no sword fighting skills. Spo recently completed his MFA through Hamline’s CWP, where he now teaches.
BONE MAP by Sara Eliza Johnson, Reviewed by Dan Schauer
Reviewed by Dan Schauer
Sara Eliza Johnson’s collection of poems, Bone Map, manages to sift through the entrails of language, tossing about the viscera of words, and finds a primitive beauty in the brutality of the human experience. Johnson takes the reader from a concrete and primordial world into the heaven space of fables and dreams, mapping out the abstract and surreal places of humanity. Sometimes the author guides us tenderly, and sometimes she drags us like the corpse of a slain deer, through each vivid vision. Johnson accomplishes the surreal journey through these pages with language that tears through the skin and settles into the marrow. Her images and syntax crawl and inhabit the reader’s body.
The rain scratches at the deer’s coat as if trying to get inside
Plants are given the quality of blades so that they can “scythe / through the shadows,” and poems often contains literal holes in their subjects, which have been opened in order to search for what moves beneath. These poems aren’t afraid of the aftermath, either. They deal with the physical remnants of each encounter, sifting through organs and blood, reaching through the physical to the more abstract beneath. However, after surgically slicing through the human condition and its entrails, Johnson finds light. Light in the form of bee venom and rifle fire, light from water, falling light, moonlight and firelight and bioluminescence. The light takes many forms and qualities, acting physically in places.
Moonlight slivers, my eye, silvers my neck which you open gently to lick my oozing light
Johnson leaves the reader at a balance, in the poem “Equinox,” between primal, concrete brutality—
I know their teeth could sever my fingers
—and the surreal—
Soon the whitest sky will shatter, haphazardly / plant its crystal in our skin.
The poems are not in sequence and do not tell any sort of story, but connect to each other like bones—loose joints and tendons that allow the skeleton of the pieces to flex and bend. The pieces trace a map through these connections as the pieces shift from physical to surreal and dark to light as these themes battle with each other on the pages, cartographing a narrative through their symbolism.
If a reader is looking for physical poetry that reaches from the page with a scalpel ready for autopsy, Johnson’s Bone Map is the place to find it.
For more about Sara Eliza Johnson, visit her blog at saraelizajonhson.com and check out these interviews at The California Journal of Women Writers and Poets & Writers.
Meet the blogger:
Dan Schauer is a recent graduate of Hamline where he studied English and creative writing. An aspiring editor and poet, he’s really into the art of language. His favorite authors are Walt Whitman, Neil Gaiman, Matt Rasmussen, and Ray Bradbury. He also spends a lot of time with his pet fish and traveling the world.
SPLIT by Swati Avasthi, Reviewed by Charles DuBois
Today, from bitterly cold and frozen St. Paul, we have a warm book review from Charles DuBois, featuring Hamline MFAC’s own Swati Avasthi. Charles was one of the student editors of Runestone last year. Don’t miss his previous post, “Why Runestone?“
For a quick sneak peak into the way we run Runestone: student editors are all upper-level undergraduates interested in publishing. In the Spring, they take the course, “Introduction to Literary Publishing: Runestone.” These students are tasked with creating content for our blog, in the form of book reviews and blog posts.
As Runestone is a new venture, we are still getting our schedule worked out. The plus side to this is that we get to offer you new and unexpected content as we get the hang of it!
When gunshots ring out, no one wins.
Threatening death or threatened by it, none who find themselves thrown into the chaos escape unscathed. Shooters find themselves on the lam; the shot wind up in the hospital if they’re lucky. Some don’t make it that far. But what about the people left behind? For them, the struggle’s just begun.
Avasthi takes the reader to the heart of the question and explores what it’s like to lose someone close; not just the pain that comes from the void they left behind, but also the additional weight of attention, pity and advice that bombards the survivor.
Avasthi brings the reader inside the minds of Holly—the survivor of a vicious attack that left her brother Corey dead—and Savitri, a caring friend who’s worried about how Holly will recover from this horrific incident, or if she ever will. While her brother Corey’s body lies in a bullet-riddled vehicle, Holly chases his spirit into the shadow lands—a place ruled by Kortha the man-serpent—on a quest to bring him back to the land of the living. This sets the table for some great insight into how Holly tries to cope with the loss of her brother, or, more accurately, accept that he’s truly lost to the world.
Savitri—the siblings’ friend who was in the car ahead of them during the shooting—is plagued by bouts of guilt over her failure to act, all while trying to resume a semblance of normalcy during her time back at school. She wants to help Holly recover from the death of her brother, but finds Holly’s approach towards healing is sending them both down paths darker and more dangerous than she’d like. The two team up for a vigilante quest, devoting their time and energy into finding their shooter.
Avasthi approaches Chasing Shadows from two different character perspectives—Holly and Savitri—and both are done in the first-person. This allows Avasthi to bring the readers deep into the loss, pain and confusion that both are experiencing, follow them as they each try to process Corey’s death and help find the culprit responsible.
Interwoven throughout the novel are illustrated sections that bring the characters into physical perspective, allowing the reader to experience through the art what Holly and Savitri are going through. We can see Holly’s image transform as she goes through the stages of grief, giving up the long hair and makeup for a more militant style, profiling her descent towards violence. 
Free running through the rooftops and parks of Chicago—leaping over benches and climbing building walls—Holly, Corey, and Savitri felt like they inhabited a realm separate from the masses, a world both within and outside of the norm that set them apart and brought them all closer together.
After Corey’s death, Holly and Savitri fall back on their skills of movement and stealth to begin their own manhunt for Corey’s killer, but Savitri begins to realize her best friend isn’t the same person she was before the incident, and finds herself stuck between supporting Holly as she plummets deeper and deeper towards the shadow lands and stepping in to stop Holly from going in too deep.
Editor’s note: Swati Avasthi is one of Hamline University’s treasured award-winning faculty in our MFAC program: MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. Check out the program and recent news for more information.
Meet the blogger:
Charles DuBois is a graduate of the Hamline University BFA program where his major was creative writing in fiction. He also likes to eat Popsicles while driving with the window down mid-winter, which he erroneously believes is an allusion to being cool.
Interview with Kevin Moffett
Last Spring, Kevin Moffett was one of the ACTC Visiting Writers here at Hamline University and Runestone was honored to have three members of our editorial board conduct his public interview in April.
We are all very proud of the great work Deziree Brown, Paul Patane, Sophia Myerly, and Mariela Lemus put in to bring this interview to life and grateful for Kevin Moffett’s time and thoughtful answers to our questions.
The interview is now available as a supplement to our first volume and you can read it here!
Kevin Moffett is the author of two story collections, Permanent Visitors, which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, and Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events. He has received the National Magazine Award, the Nelson Algren Award, the Pushcart Prize, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts.
The Silent History, a collaborative multi-part narrative he’s written with Matt Derby and Eli Horowitz, was released as an app for mobile devices in 2012, and in book form from FSG in 2014.
He is a frequent contributor to McSweeney’s and his stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, the Harvard Review, American Short Fiction, the Chicago Tribune, the Believer, A Public Space, and in three editions of The Best American Short Stories (2006, 2009, and 2010).
Learn more about Kevin at www.kevinmoffett.org.
Contributor Interview with Michael Ribbens
Today, we are talking with Michael Ribbens, author of the short story, “Save Dave,” which we had the honor of publishing in volume one.
First question: How do you make time to write as a college student?
It’s hard to make time to write, especially as an upperclassman: responsibilities tend to pile up as classes get harder and the working world looms. That’s why I enjoy writing classes so much. When what I want to do aligns with what I have to do, time is well-spent.
Tell us three books you love.
Science fiction makes my life seem so insignificant, which is nice because it takes the pressure off:
Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett has sneakily become my favorite Discworld novel, but whichever one I re-read next will probably take its place. The City and the Stars, by Arthur C. Clarke, enveloped me for a few days and his Rendezvous with Rama, dominated the next week.
What was the hardest part to get right in “Save Dave”?
“Save Dave” was a headache to write. I made the classic mistake of becoming infatuated with a premise without regard for a satisfying ending. I think you can see the search for an ending in the story itself. Do you think the ending is a cop-out? You could make that argument. Hopefully the ride is fun enough that you’re not too mad at me.
Suppose the piece you published in Runestone has a soundtrack, much like the Book Notes at Large-Hearted Boy. What song(s) would it be, and why?
The Dark Knight has a great soundtrack for anyone losing their mind.
What are you up to these days?
I’m somersaulting ass-first into adulthood like many liberal arts graduates: jobless and delusional. It seems just as likely I end up working at the Tonight Show as Jimmy Johns. Maybe both. At this exact moment [editor’s note: this exact moment being a few weeks ago] I’m procrastinating working on a script for a film about ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, tonight I’m doing an on-campus Improv show, and later I’m going to play Boggle with my housemates and try to find dirty words in the tiles.
Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions, Michael. We hope Boggle and the Improv both went well for you!
Meet the Contributor:
Michael Ribbens is a recent graduate of Calvin College, where he studied digital film-making and writing. He won Calvin’s talent show as freshman by doing standup comedy and has since performed comedy in a number of events as a comedian and a member of Calvin Improv. He served on the news satires, Calvin College News and the Calvin Chives.
