ISSUE 16: What Matters

Voice Lessons

Some people hear many voices in their heads. I hear only one; it has been speaking to me (for better or worse) since I was seven years old. Fifty-four years later, I give it public acknowledgment. I may not be crazy, but I’m certainly not normal.

Allison Chestnut received her BS, MA, and MFA from Mississippi University for Women and her Ph.D. from Louisiana State University. She teaches at William Carey University in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

A Perfectly Inelastic Collision

Janet Dale lives in southeast Georgia where she teaches first-year writing at Georgia Southern University and is always reading something (including submissions for Nightjar Review). Her work has appeared in Hobart, Zone 3, Pine Hills Review, Really System, and others.

American Summer

Shinelle L. Espaillat teaches writing in Poughkeepsie, New York, and her fiction can be read in Midway Journal, Ghost Parachute, and The Westchester Review. She believes that the narratives of our realities grow out of small choices and small moments that intersect with forces outside of our control. Those choices still matter, even when societal elements try to tell us otherwise or throw us off course.

The Fall of Maureen Rafferty Inside a Big Box Store

Nancy Green lives and works in New York City. She is a clinical social worker practicing at an outpatient mental health clinic in Queens. She is a founder of the multicultural, political Castillo Theatre, and currently co-leads a book club at UX, a free school of continuing education open to people of all ages and educational backgrounds in New York City.

A student at the Writers Studio, her work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Fiction Now, Epiphany Editions, and Practice, a Journal of Politics, Psychology, and Culture. “The Fall of Maureen Rafferty Inside a Big Box Store” was inspired by the poem “The Shooting of John Dillinger Outside the Biograph Theater, July 22, 1934” by David Wagoner. She is pleased and honored to be included in this issue of Minerva Rising.

Skimming the Surface

What matters to Jan Haag is writing. She teaches journalism and creative writing at Sacramento City College in California’s capital city, where she advises campus publications. Jan is the author of a book of poems, Companion Spirit, published by Amherst Writers & Artists Press. She leads weekly creative writing workshops in Sacramento, has written two novels, and had work published in many journals and anthologies. She is also the co-publisher of River Rock Books in Sacramento.

Dressing Up

Heather Hewett is an essayist and literary critic in the Hudson Valley whose work has appeared in publications such as Boston Review, the New York Times Motherlode blog, Women’s Review of Books, and The Good Mother Myth (Seal Press). She is an associate professor of gender studies and English at the State University of New York at New Paltz. “Dressing Up” explores how our roots are woven into the experience of raising children. Read more at heatherhewett.com.

To My Daugther

Lindsay is a psychology undergraduate student at The University of Colorado at Boulder. In addition to her studies, she works as a swim instructor and lifeguard. She has had several poetry publications in Harper College’s Point of View literary-arts magazine. Her poem “blurred lines” won the Point of View award. Lindsay’s poetry focuses on the moments in life that send earthquakes through her veins.

Infrequent but Violent Extremes

Anna Leahy is the author of the poetry collections Aperture and Constituents of Matter and the nonfiction book Tumor and the co-author of Conversing with Cancer and What We Talk about When We Talk about Creative Writing. Her poems and essays have appeared at The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Crab Orchard Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, The Southern Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere, and her essays won the top awards from Ninth Letter and Dogwood in 2016. She directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at Chapman University, where she edits the international poetry journal TAB and curates the Tabula Poetica reading series. See more at www.amleahy.com.

Here, Between, Stars to Fire, Striations

Diane LeBlanc is a writer, teacher, and book artist. Her poetry chapbooks are This Space for Message (2017), Sudden Geography (2014), Dancer with Good Sow (2008), and Hope in Zone Four (1998). Diane directs the writing program and teaches at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Website: www.dianeleblancwriter.com

Dolls, Death, and Pleasing Decay

Vicky Lettmann’s writing has appeared in Twenty-six Minnesota Writers, Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude, Forge, and other publications. She was co-editor with Carol Roan of When Last on the Mountain: The View from Writers over 50. Her chapbook, What Can Be Saved, was recently published by Red Bird Chapbooks. She received an MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College and is a recipient of a Loft-McKnight Fellowship. Her blog and website, “The Joy of Writing,” can be found at www.turtlehouseink.com.

Six Birthdays

Jackie Davis Martin’s work has been published in print and online journals and collections, including Modern Shorts, Love on the Road, and Road Stories. Prizes were awarded by New Millennium, On the Premises, Dogwood Journal, and Soul-making Keats. A memoir, Surviving Susan was published in 2012. She teaches writing and literature at City College of San Francisco, a city where she and her husband enjoy attending plays, operas, and ballets.

Abrasions, In Search of a Lexicon

Jude Marr teaches, and writes poetry, as protest. They are currently an aging PhD candidate at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and their chapbook, Breakfast for the Birds (Finishing Line), was published in 2017. Recent credits include Anti-Heroin Chic, Harbor Review, and Juke Joint Magazine.