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 31 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! |
Alex Carrigan
"Yahweh in a Can"
|
In August 2024, I gave myself one of my craziest writing challenges to date. I went through thirty-one episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, one of my favorite shows of all time, chose a joke from each episode, and had to use that joke as the title and inspiration for a poem I had to write each day of that month. This poem’s title comes from a film named Laserblast, when the main character picks up an alien laser cannon and shoots a bush, setting it on fire and prompting one of the riffers to deliver that line.
|
I wanted to think about how I could turn a silly line from a comedy show into something more serious, so I tried to think about who would need God/Yahweh in a can. A lot of the imagery that came to mind was inspired from news and footage coming out of the genocide in Gaza, so I wanted to think about that desperation to survive even when everything seemed hopeless and distant, and how that could also play with one’s relationship with God.
Alison Hicks
"Swedish Horses" & "Air From the Third Floor"
|
“Swedish Horses” was written in response to a prompt to write a portrait poem that might also contain elements of self-portrait. In connection with this, we read Jaswinder Bolina’s poem “Portrait of the Horse,” and that brought to mind the Swedish horse that had sat on the shelf above my mother’s side of the bed that I had so coveted as a child. My mother and I shared aesthetic tastes in some things (less in others, as the poem suggests), and the Swedish horse in turn reminded me of other objects of our household that gave me joy when I was growing up. When, as a young adult, I saw the Swedish horse in blue, of course I had to get it for myself. The irony, then, that the original Swedish horse, deformed by dog tooth marks, came to me not long after, when my parents moved. What was I going to do with two Swedish horses, which weren’t good for much except sitting on a bookshelf or mantle anyway? One which was in my favorite color palette, unmarked and glossy, and the other which was damaged, yet held a great deal of sentimental value? How could I make the choice between them?
|
“Air from the Third Floor” was written from the experience of my son, at age 23, engaging in his first relationship, post-college and living at home. A first relationship inevitably brings up for an older person the possibility of break up, and how one’s loved one would handle that. (I’m happy to say that in the case of my son, they continue to be compatible and are still together.) When he was in middle school, we had fixed up the third floor of our twin (duplex) house for him and he moved up there. Once his girlfriend started staying over, I’d hear her beautiful laugh coming down the stairs. The title might seem obvious, but it took me a while to come to it. I originally titled the poem “From the Third Floor,” but that was more placeholder than real title. I put the poem away for a while and when I took it out again, the word “Aria” sprung to mind, drawing on the singing metaphor. That is turn brought me to the crisper and musically wider “Air.”
Victoria Large
"Not Anymore"
|
I circled around the idea of a character sorting through boxes of mementos from their misspent youth for some time before realizing that that character was Christa, a thirtysomething trying to reconcile her past and figure out her future, all while juggling work, family, and her college literature requirement. Christa is so introspective that she needed younger, brasher Lacey as a foil. Their dialogue in the Commuter Café helped me to find the story’s spine. I struggled with whether to leave Lacey’s fate so open-ended, but it ultimately felt right to end things where and how I did. This story is about those moments when, like Christa in the closing flashback scene, we do not know what will happen next, only that our lives will--and must--change
|
Kat EchevarríA Richter
"The Top Up"
|
When I began my MFA program, I had read maybe three short stories in my entire life. I did not like them. To me, it seemed that all short stories were about people having affairs, and I did not want to write about people having affairs, so I plodded along with my Very Serious Historical Novel. Upon reaching the inevitable plateau, I instigated a weekend away with several of my colleagues. Wine was drunk, departmental gossip was shared, and when we powered down our laptops at the end of the day, we swapped anecdotes from our pre-MFA lives. “That’s a short story,” one of my colleagues informed me after I shared a particularly idiotic episode from my time in London. “Write it.” And so I did. I wrote the first draft of "The Top Up" in a single sitting. When I submitted it for workshop a few weeks later, my colleagues loved it. Probably they were relieved to get a break from the Very Serious Historical Novel, but maybe, just maybe, there was something to this idea that you should write what you know.
|
Alison Stone
"Eternal Ghazal"
|
I had been working with ghazals for years when I wrote "Eternal Ghazal." There’s so much I love about the form—the sound pleasure of the rhyme and repetition, the fact that unrelated couplets encourage me to make larger leaps than I might in free verse or other forms. I don’t have to choose between personal experience or myth, or even stick to one myth. After over a hundred ghazals, I was experimenting with phrases, rather than a single word, as the radif. The loss of numerous loved ones to AIDS, and then my mother to cancer, made the finality of death a theme I’ve returned to again and again. I envy (though also judge) people who say things like “She’s celebrating her birthday in heaven,” because I lack such a comforting belief
|
