A Conversation with kay drew by Brenna E. Raffe
“What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious.” – Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Loneliness If starting over late in life is something you’re afraid of, look no further than Kay Drew and her inspiring story to quell your fears. After retiring from her thirty-four-year medical career as a neonatal pediatrician, Kay decided to take up writing. Though, unlike Marina Keegan suggests in her quote above, this isn’t Kay’s first love affair with writing. Kay Drew has kept a journal her whole life, documenting all the things that help her make sense of life. As a kid, she moved all over; from Indiana to Rhode Island to Maryland and eventually to Massachusetts for college, where she got her BA in biology. After pursuing an MD from the UMD Medical School, and completing her residency there, she ended up here with us in DC, where she completed a neonatal/perinatal fellowship at Georgetown. Throughout this journey, Kay’s journal provided her with a space to figure things out, and to find and celebrate meaning. After her retirement in 2011, she decided to channel her love of reading and her knack for writing about her life into a hobby of writing creative non-fiction. Now, that hobby has paid off. The featured essay in Grace in Darkness, “Baptism by Fire,” is her first publication. I had the pleasure of getting to chat with Kay about her life and her story below:
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Contributor Spotlight - Miranda K. Pennington Miranda K. Pennington’s office at American University is located behind the Bender Sports Arena. I didn’t know this - and the several other people I spoke to didn’t know, either. The building, which appears as “SCAN” on the AU Map, is home to many of AU’s professors that teach in the College Writing program. I took a winding path around an eagle statue and a set of greening steps before I managed to find it, but find it I did. The building reminds me of the “portable” classrooms we used to have in elementary school, just, perhaps, bigger. White walls, tile floors. It seems a bleak, sterile place to put the offices of writers. Especially a writer as vibrant as Miranda.
This piece is the first Miranda has published since her book A Girl Walks Into A Book: What the Bronte’s Taught Me About Life, Love, and Women’s Work came out in May 2017. Miranda connected with Melissa Scholes Young on Twitter, and saw this as an opportunity to begin publishing essays again. One of the first stories she wrote while attending Columbia University’s MFA program, the essay, according to the author, is totally true. It was different than the work she had been producing up to that point. Miranda noted to me in an e-mail that “I went in writing a lot of lighter, comedic essays, and this was one of my first attempts to dig deeper and tell a story that only I could tell, rather than a relationship essay or pop culture commentary, which a lot of people do so well.” A Conversation with Kate lemery by Thaer Husien
A Washington D.C. transplant from Iowa, Kate Lemery worked for the Smithsonian Institution and National Gallery of Art for a combined fifteen years before moving on to raise her three children and focus on her literary pursuits. She has since written for the Washington Post, Fiction Writers Review, and Peacock Journal, to name a few. Lemery’s story, “Drawing Lessons” is a cousin of her novel-in-progress, An Artless Girl, in that she uses art in each to inform the narrative. In each chapter of An Artless Girl, the heroine recalls a different masterpiece of Western art, and the themes they invoke help the heroine better understand her experiences. Lemery’s goal is to finish a good draft of her first novel to send to literary agents later this year. JANE EYRE in korean queens by Revital Aranbaev
“Bridges and Tunnels” is the third chapter of Patricia Park’s novel, Re Jane published in 2015. There have been dozens of adaptations of Jane Eyre since its publication in 1847, but in Patricia Park’s novel--Re Jane—the author intentionally set out to change one pivotal line from the classic story: “Reader, I married him.” Park states that today we demand more from our heroines. Since women are no longer “confined to the same handful of choices that Victorian women had to face,” Park offers us a fresh and modern take on the classic narrative. In the novel, Park also stresses the significance of home—it is such an important theme that the book begins and ends on that word. For Jane, home is Queens, New York, where the author grew up. Park states that there aren’t many Queens narratives, which is what sparked her to feature sections of Re Jane in “Korean Queens.” In the interview, Park emphasizes that “Queens pride” doesn’t necessarily exist and that Queens, as well as the other outer boroughs, literally and figuratively lie in the shadows of “the city.” The chapter featured in the anthology specifically highlights that.  By Josh Harms
“I have to admit that something isn’t right,” confesses professional organizer Sasha Goldstein at the start of Lynn Kanter’s novel excerpt “The Closet.” “It has all begun to feel a little, well, hollow.” A sixty-three-year-old insomniac, Sasha stays up night after night in front of the TV, spiraling and wondering whether her wealth and prestige and fine furnishings amount to anything. “What does it all mean? What is any of it worth?” She sarcastically consoles herself that at least she’s sure her anxiety isn’t just a midlife crisis: “For that, you need a life. And I can look back and pinpoint exactly where mine went wrong.” Kanter’s “Closet,” published in the upcoming Grace in Darkness anthology of D.C. women writers, is a story that hinges upon retrospection. From her sleepless and world-weary vantage point in the present, Sasha jumps back forty years to reveal how the meaninglessness of her life’s story can all be traced back to a botched kidnapping-and-ransom plot. This move — commenting on the past to explain the present — is a hallmark of memoir and confessional writing. Retrospection is the key. Such texts use the wisdom accumulated over time to make meaning out of the past. A Conversation with Sarah Trembath by Brooke Olson
If Grace in Darkness is an anthology about keeping your head up, even in the darkest of times, then Sarah Trembath’s “Swaying with Wicked Grace” articulates the difficulty of doing so poignantly and personally. Her short creative nonfiction piece explores the history and legacy of racial inequality and its pervasive influence in the present day, and while the experience she describes is deeply personal, it is also transcendent and universal. The narrative refuses to gloss over the difficult experiences and persecution that the main character experiences, and gives voice to the desperation she feels. The narrator moves from childhood to adulthood through the words of others, including literary and political voices of her heritage, but not without difficulty. At every turn, the reader sees the main character struggle with another moment of pain and sorrow from the world, leading to desperation and anger that we experience as if it were our own: “The disembodied grins you drew everywhere—in jealous reverence for Lewis’ Carroll’s Cheshire Cat—became actual wishes.” The words of past writers punctuate Trembath’s narrative, with references to James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Pablo Neruda, Audre Lorde, and more peppered throughout the story. In the following interview, we discussed the influence of these writers as well as her research and writing process. Contributor Spotlight: Chelsea Leigh Horne and the Art of the Lovable Jerk by Angela Pupino
From Severus Snape to Walter White to The Hunger Games’ Haymitch, literature and pop culture are full of jerks. Despite, and sometimes because of, their misdeeds these jerks often become memorable and beloved characters. In Chelsea Leigh Horne’s short story “The Heartbreaking Misfortunes of a Nearly Genuine Almost Casanova,” readers are introduced to a more common kind of jerk— the twentysomething man desperately in search of love. Daniel does some some pretty jerkish things throughout the story: inviting a girl over in hopes of seducing her, calling Chloe a slut, and modelling his “Casanova” behavior after men like Humphrey Bogart. But by the end of the story, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit bad for Daniel. There is something charming about his oblivious attempts at developing a formula to attract women and failure to understand when and where he went wrong. I recently sat down with Chelsea Leigh Horne in her office at American University to discuss getting inside the head a male character, balancing humor and realism, and the art of making a familiar jerk lovable.  by Angelica Escalante
“Corazón,” a dark and generational telling, appears in our new Spring issue of Grace in Darkness. Author Caron Garcia Martinez agreed to share more about the story and her writing with readers. Let’s charm the reader for a bit. When did you start writing and why? I wrote my first poem when I was eight. It was about my cat, Calico Jane. I've also always kept journals ever since I was young, I think in an effort to make sense of my experiences as I lived them. So I just found that writing was a very natural way to express myself. And I think I’ve spent a lifetime wondering if I deserved to call myself a writer. I think that’s a topic for a lot of writers. I’ve now gotten to the point where it’s just as natural to me as the way that I breathe or work. It’s just a part of my life.  by Melody Tootoonchi
If you want to catch Tyrese Coleman, you’d better already be running. In addition to being a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she keeps busy as a wife, a mother, an attorney, a writing instructor at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, and an associate editor at Smokelong Quarterly. But once you get a hold of her, as I was fortunate enough to do, she will captivate you in conversation just as she does in her writing. Tyrese is a mix of honesty and edge, conveying the hard truths of life in her writing while still maintaining a level of lightheartedness. Her work features topics such as motherhood, familial relationships and their strains, voices from the not-so-heard, and the navigation of different stages of life. Her fiction can be found in [PANK], Queen Mob’s Tea House, the Tahoma Literary Review, and Hobart, while her nonfiction can be found in Buzzfeed, mater mea, Literary Hub, Washingtonian Magazine, and The Rumpus. Her contribution to Grace in Darkness, a flash piece entitled “Uncle Pug,” first appeared in the journal 1:1000 and gives a glimpse into the life of Pug, an old man with one leg who makes his way to the family house with a resounding “huff-plat, huff-plat,” and it raises the question of how much we should believe tall tales we may hear from our elders. “Uncle Pug” shows Tyrese’s affinity for character voice, inspiration from real life moments or people, and the parallels that can be drawn between life and art—all of which (and more) I had the opportunity to discuss with her. First, I’m interested in where you draw the line between fiction and nonfiction. I’ve seen that a lot of your stories are inspired by real life people or events (like “Uncle Pug” being inspired by your real Uncle Pug, for instance). Since some of your fiction is so heavily influenced by real aspects of your life, how do you decide what should be presented to the public as a fictional story or as a nonfiction piece? Is it a matter of how you process the real-life aspects as you write? I don't really make conscious decisions about where to draw the line. Some stories may be entirely based on real life occurrences (like “How to Sit”) and others may only contain a few facts that I always thought were funny or interesting, such as how my Uncle Pug loved The Golden Girls. It depends on the piece and how it unfolds during the writing process. An Interview with the author of "On the line" by Danielle Dyal
It would be easier to list the things Leslie Hsu Oh does not do than the things she does. She doesn’t watch the world go by as a bystander without taking an active part in it. She doesn’t take nature’s beauty for granted, and instead documents and pays homage to it with her writing and photography. She doesn’t treat the Alps as a landscape with the purpose only to grace her computer monitor, and instead glacier hikes them when she isn’t teaching her four children to rock climb, snow board, ride snowmachines, and hike before the age most kids start kindergarten. Her dreams are not just dreams but future endeavors that Leslie does not hesitate to make happen. Last year, her family took a trip to Iceland to see three national parks outside the US, and this year her goal – that will no doubt reach fruition, unlike the intangible and persistently unfulfilled goals that most people make in their lifetimes – is to begin showing her children the seven wonders of the world. Leslie doesn’t hoard her and her family’s outdoor adventures to herself either but shares them in her writing and photography that has been featured in or is forthcoming in Alpinist, Alaska Magazine, Backpacker Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, First Alaskans Magazine, Fourth Genre, MIC, Outside Magazine, Parenting Magazine, Real Simple, Smithsonian Magazine, Sierra Magazine, Travel + Leisure, Washington Post and more. She is also the Outdoor Editorof Panorama Journal of Intelligent Travel. Leslie’s writing and photography is centered on her interactions with the outdoors through extreme sports and expeditions to the extraordinary corners of the world most of us will only see through the photographs taken by and stories told by others – others like Leslie, whose passion for nature is rooted in her childhood. She was raised by an outdoor photographer herself, adopted by the Navajo Táchii’nii (Red Running into Water Clan) and the Tlingit Yéil Naa (Raven Moeity), K’ineix Kwáan (Copper River Clan) from the Tsisk’w Hit (Owl House). Her life has been spent in intimate connection with her surroundings, fostered by a give and take exchange with nature. While she takes in her surroundings, she gives back tributes that include “On the Line,” her short story that is published in Grace in Darkness. “On the Line” takes place on the shoreline of the Russian River in Alaska, where Leslie herself has combat fished beside black bears like those that appear in her story. This story is a work of fiction, however, featuring not Leslie, but Sean, a father-to-be who readers find on a late June night combat fishing and thinking, among other things, about how “his wife and he would make terrible salmon.” While fish dodge his line, Sean doesn’t quite manage to likewise dodge thoughts of his Chinese relatives’ admonishments against his and his wife’s unconventional and capricious outdoor lifestyle, or memories of his older sister’s disapproving and berating email – the last instance of communication between the siblings. But the tensions from the periphery of Sean’s chosen lifestyle as a mountaineer guide have turned inward, as Sean has found himself now in discord with his wife, with whom he had, until recently, seen eye-to-eye with in terms of how they lived their lives with a deep-set relationship with nature above all else. In my following interview with Leslie, we discuss her own thoughts and decisions in regard to writing “On the Line.” With your background so centered on traveling, backcountry expeditions, and adventures in the outdoors, do you find that you begin writing fiction more often with an idea of place in mind even before you have envisioned your characters or their conflicts? I begin all my stories, whether nonfiction or fiction, with an idea of place. Something speaks to me about the landscape, whether it’s an incident that occurred such as two bears causing a hook to lodge itself in someone’s ear or a feeling. My Elders often lament that what’s missing today is an intuitive understanding of our relationship to all of creation. In Navajo, we call it K’é yił yał tx’I’, which means “it’s saying something with a kinship feeling.” Nick Carltikoff, Sr. explains in Dena’ina Ełnena: A Celebration, “Everything on earth has a spirit. They call it ‘K’etniyi,’ means ‘it’s saying something’ that’s how we believed long ago. We believed that everything had a spirit and should be treated with respect. From a rock, water, mountains, animals everything. This is what’s missing today.” That is what drives my narrative. |
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