lookingglass
Through the "Looking Glass," readers are invited to dig deeper into our issues as contributors share reflections on their work. Specifically, "Looking Glass" provides a sort of parlor where authors and artists reveal the genesis of their pieces, as well as provide meta-discursive insight into their textual and visual creative works. 
Issue 9 Reflections
Read on for reflections by select authors and artists
on the genesis and craft of their pieces in Glassworks
​and then read the full issue online!

Chrystal Berche
"A Study in Gestures"

I look at artwork as a series of possibilities that have come together; the what ifs, if you will. When I started this project, the idea was simple: to not let the three minute gesture drawings I had been required to complete for one of my art courses go to waste. It seemed a shame to just let them sit in a file cabinet and be forgotten. At first I considered just doing collaboration pieces, but the longer I looked at them, the more I started getting this vibe of freedom and whimsy, and I started thinking about how I could possibly portray that. I have to admit, I was stumped for quite a while, then one evening, I was helping my son take photos of bubbles when it dawned on me that they would make great background images. Just the patterns they made, and the colors that reflected off of them made me think about the gestures I’d drawn, but when I started to put the pieces together I realized that the bubbles just wouldn’t be enough, so again, I put the images aside and the files sat in a folder that I’d open every now and again and stare at, wondering what element would help pull it all together.  Then one night I was sitting at the computer writing by candlelight with some incense burning and I started watching the smoke, the way it drifted and flowed and it was that really clichéd moment when the light bulb flashed in in my head and the next thing I knew I was setting up black velvet as a background and lighting candles and taking pictures of incense and then layering them into the image with the bubbles and the dancers and that’s really the moment when everything came together. When I think back on that first dancer that I really felt proud of, I realize that was the moment when I just knew that I could make something special out of those images. 

Ruth Foley
"High Tide at Bee Beach"

My husband and I started keeping bees about a year and a half ago. Before the bees, I would have said—and did—that I was attuned to the natural world. I grew up at the shore, for one thing, picking up starfish and snails, and in general, I prefer to move little critters outside rather than smash them under a rolled newspaper. Getting the bees, however, changed everything—because we had the only local honeybees I know of, I started looking for them when I was out and about: walking the dogs, going for a run, getting the mail. I paid attention to the difference between honeybees and bumblebees, between bees and wasps and hornets and various flies that pretend to be these things as a protective strategy. This past summer, I saw at least twenty different kinds of bee-like pollinators in our small neighborhood alone.

Working with the bees creates its own form of attention. If we fear them, we’ll handle them roughly, and we’ll get stung. If we move with care for them, it’s much less likely. It seems to me that love is like that—especially long-term, lasting love. It requires a set of decisions, a series of deliberate movements, a good deal of care. Every once in a while, it’s probably a good idea to remind myself of that.

Ruth Foley
"Dear Firefly"

I am fascinated with decisions and potential—especially with unrealized potential. We turn down offers all the time, make decisions that invalidate other options, and sometimes we don’t even know we’ve done it. Sometimes the decisions are difficult ones, certainly, but sometimes a decision feels like the only option, sometimes it’s the only realistic option, sometimes the other options just don’t appeal. I can choose to fall for the midsummer firefly, the one that flashes at the end of our dead-end street and makes us stop a moment during the after-dinner dog walk. I can fall for them and I have.

Those fireflies remind me of my childhood, of being on a walk at our family’s beach house and stopping with my cousins to watch the light show of fireflies in the salt marsh. And they are lovely—I am never going to argue otherwise. But I also love the fact that they have to wait out the winter—much like I do, I’m afraid—tucked into shelter, warm enough if not exactly comfortable, with all of their potential still inside them. Again, much like me, or at least like the me of an earlier time, although I don’t know that I’ve ever exactly been flashy.

Martha Silano
"Rondeau for the People of Nogents Sur Seine, France"

Last year I spent a month in residence at Camac Centre D’Art in Marnay-Sur-Seine, France. My stated project was to write poems about saints and cave art, but upon arrival I learned I’d be living a couple of kilometers from a nuclear power plant. Once settled into my studio, I could not shake my discomfort with living so close to something so potentially destructive. I began researching the history of the nuclear power industry, mostly to reassure myself I was safe. In my random surfing, I happened upon a film clip of a woman sharing her memories of working in a Russian factory where the first nuclear warhead was built. She spoke six words I could not shake: We called it our dear one. She was referring to the deadly missile in their midst. It struck me as a perfect refrain line for the rondeau I was trying to write—a lyric form popular in, appropriately enough, thirteenth-century France. The rest of the poem derived from living, for a short while, just up river from a ‘plant’ affording steady employment, affluence, and the potential to wreak radio nucleotide havoc at any moment. How is it possible to live happily in this town? That was my main question as I wrote and revised this poem.

Martha Silano
"Loveliest Fleeting"

“Loveliest Fleeting” is based on a writing exercise created by poet Erin Malone. First, Erin shared with us a poem by Sandra Lin titled “Loveliest Grotesque,” which appears in her book of the same title. The assignment was to title our poem “Loveliest ___________ [fill in the blank],” then begin with Lin’s first line: “I kept the little ruin near me,” substituting “little ruin” with our own word or words of choice. I decided to go with “I kept the finite with me,” probably because I had recently visited several artifact-packed museums—fossils, cuneiform tablets, and ancient Roman coins. All of these relics had been working on my psyche, making me feel a bit on edge, and suddenly, with the help of Malone and Lin, these images began to coalesce around the painful truth that human life is exceedingly short.

Kimberly McClintock
"The Garden State" and "In the Apple Tree"

I grew up with cosmopolitan aspirations in a rural, southern New Jersey town. Much of my family lives near that same town, and I visit regularly. One such visit occurred the weekend of my 40th birthday, which is in October. Out for a run in the foggy early morning, I was awestruck—I’m tempted to say  “anew,” but honestly it may have been for the first time—by the gorgeousness of the landscape. It was an honest discovery, as I say in the poem: nothing I’d encountered elsewhere in the world seemed that morning any lovelier than the landscape of my childhood.

This coincided more or less with the birth of my sister’s first child—the first baby in our family in nearly forty years. I began writing about the collision of my memories with reality, particularly of interest to me is the landscape which, on the surface, I would argue is concrete and objective. That was my concern in the “Garden State”—when I could see the place freshly, its loveliness was shocking.

Ex-patriots of New Jersey are subject to jokes that turn on the irony of the state nickname, “The Garden State,” and so I took that as the title of this poem. I don’t mean it as the comedians do, ironically in the sense of north Jersey compared to south, but more personally—a reverse Eden, the snake evident in my memories, perhaps only ever existing there.

The situation depicted in my poem "In the Apple Tree" is grounded in fact. As a child, I loved to climb trees and foolishly got stuck in the upper branches, over and over, spending terrified hours there. My mother gave the same advice each time, which, though it seemed useless to me, turned out to be perfectly reasonable: you get down the same way you got up. Which is to say, the trick to getting down is not looking down—which you don’t, of course, on the way up or you probably wouldn’t climb so high the first place. In that, it's a bit like writing.

A nod to the darker facts alluded to in the piece—a local child did die of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, though I didn’t know him and my parents don’t remember the family name.  They lived a few streets over from us in Victory Lakes.

“In the Apple Tree” was written at about the same time as “The Garden State,” along with a dozen or more others that also concern my family and the landscape, a series that will be included in my second book, Say Shadow.

Timothy B. Dodd
"The Physician's Advice"

My beautiful and much maligned home state of West Virginia is a place of stories and storytellers, and it occupies much of the landscape in my own stories too. Due to its geography and mountainous terrain, it has always maintained a certain level of uniqueness and isolation, both a boon and curse. For a young person growing up there, one curious about the whole universe, this isolation presents its own set of hurdles. “The Physician’s Advice” is probably the most biographical story I’ve written, originating from real events: winning a scholarship during high school to study for a month in Egypt, seeing a doctor who informed my shaken parents that he’d “never let his son go,” and of course the stubborn teenager hell-bent on “something different” at all cost. I hope this story is presented with both humor and warmth, the result of being able to look back at those events many years later, but it is also meant to draw attention to the misinformation and difficulties that people face, universally, when we want to go beyond the commonplace, when we live a life that others tell us is impossible. So many forces, some even monstrous, pull us in other directions.

Today I am happy to say that this trip to Egypt was the first of many. Amazing realities await us around the corners we sometimes fear. So it’s next stop Iceland! Or Iran! Or Tbilisi again! These days, even my parents are interested, although they still worry all the same. And West Virginia? More fascinating than ever.

Scott Beal
"Warning and Watch"


Often I pay scant attention to clouds beyond what they portend about the weather – bright or gray, it’ll storm or it won’t. But sometimes for days I become obsessed with them. They strike me as utterly bizarre. Aerosol continents roam overhead, loaded with ice crystals and electrostatic energy. I gaze overhead and reel. No matter how hard we try to explain the clouds with physics or meteorology, they remain untouchable and evocative; we live helplessly in their shadows. “Warning and Watch” was written in part as an attempt to capture that feeling of disorientation and wonder. The metaphors of the crumbling palace and the warships undercut the rational explanations – what we tell children or what scientists tell us. I suppose the poem was written as my own version of the children's game of identifying shapes in the clouds. But here I wanted the shapes to feel real, as they did to me in that moment standing outside, and to capture the sense of terror I recognized in my daughter when I told her about lightning strikes. 

Stan Lee Werlin
"Aspic Bayberry Cathedral"

During our college years, I joined a group of hometown classmates on day trips each summer to a friend's family home in the dunes of Truro on outer Cape Cod. The drive took three hours each way and we would occasionally play the two word games that appear in the story. The word sequence that begins with the words "aspic bayberry cathedral..." has been etched in my memory ever since one of those trips, probably because I managed to outlast everyone else in the car and won the game when we reached 23 words at "wombat". Although I can't remember more than a handful of facts I ever learned about American or world history, things that have to do with words seem burned into the neurons forever. In the story I added  "xenophobic youthful zookeeper" to complete the 26 word sequence needed in the story.

In its first incarnation, "Aspic Bayberry Cathedral" was one of my two unsuccessful attempts to write science fiction. I've always enjoyed reading sci fi in the short story form, and a few stories in that genre have stayed with me over the years, including the brilliant 1943 classic "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Lewis Padgett in which two young children experience "Jabberwocky" not as a nonsense poem but rather as a cipher that - once puzzled out - opens a portal to a world seemingly more to their liking than good old Earth. I tried to forge something similar with the notion that there might exist a series of 26 specific words, in alphabetical order from A to Z that would -  if somehow improbably discovered and said out loud - transport the story's four friends to an alternate universe.

Ultimately, the story had a fuzzy, frustrating quality and an utterly ambiguous ending that left readers and eventually me as well feeling dissatisfied and uninterested in the characters and outcome. And so it lay fallow for a while until I accepted its fundamental weakness and decided to forget the fantasy angle and try to write a serious literary piece instead. The central idea of escape stayed with me, as did the notion that a unique sequence of words could become a mantra that a character like Denise, the disaffected protagonist of the story who values mystical concepts and beliefs far more than her career-minded friends, might invest with unusual power and meaning. The wordstring became Denise's "cosmic code", helping her find the will to leave behind the world she knows in search of counterculture nirvana in the Haight.  

Vestiges of the original story remain in Denise's focus on concepts like the multiverse, decoherence, and quantum foam; in her vivid dream; and in the fascinating numerology of the number 26. I was especially taken with the existence of the 26 letter Italian word precipitevolissimevolmente and found myself compelled to find a place for it in the story. I like to think that the story's excursions into these areas adds an offbeat creative dimension that surprises readers and pulls them in a bit more.