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 10 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!

Toni Bennett
"Naked Tree" & "Meditating Horse"

Picture
The picture “Naked Tree” in Issue 10 of Glassworks was taken on the Big Island of Hawaii near the lava fields. Its bravery and nakedness struck me, its vulnerability in the path of indiscriminate destructive forces, the same forces that created the island itself.

The picture “Meditating Horse” in the same issue was taken at a county fair. For several years, I haunted rodeos and county fairs, taking pictures of animals, a specialty of mine. This picture is a favorite. I spent some time with this horse so it would feel comfortable enough to let down its guard and close its eyes. After the picture was taken, it became for me an image of a being imprisoned in a stall with people continually filing in and out to look at it, and its only escape is to close its eyes where it finds a better place to be. Of course, I’m anthropomorphizing. That’s what I do.

Jameka Williams
"Billions of Cicadas"
& "No Longer Afraid"

I'm a morbid person ruled by fear. In my writing, I've always been interested in what make me nervous. That's why I'm drawn to poetry; it's a space where I an fearlessly tell you that I'm a coward, attempting to face my haunting obsessions with clear, new eyes. "Billions of Cicadas" and "No Longer Afraid" are strange siblings; one poem born out of my need to say that I'm not scared to live my life and the other born out of the truth that I'm not ready to be an active participant in this cruel world. Both born out of fear. I don't know why this is comforting: to have someone tell you that they're afraid of the same thing (no matter how irrational). To share that shame is wonderful; I hope I can share my fears, my shame with someone through my poetry.

Brianna Pike
"Forsythia"

Horses were a constant in my life, starting when I was a child and continuing into my early adult years. I sold my last horse and quit riding around the same time that I decided to move to Texas to pursue a Master’s degree in poetry. It was while I was in Texas that both my “bay pony” and “her love” died, leaving our barn empty for the first time since it was built. It stands empty to this day. All of these events combined to rather emphatically end a very large phase of my life. “Forsythia” came as a result of trying to capture this transition on the page, and it’s the only successful poem I’ve managed to write about my horses. This poem is also part of a chapbook of poems that I’m currently working on that feature the themes of loss, love, family and memory.

Daniel Leach
"Visiting Hours"

Picture
I write best in the summer. School’s out, life slows down, and I have the luxury of waking up early and working for several hours before my wife gets up and the demands of our day ensue. It was on one such quiet summer morning that I wrote a story called “The Sinner’s Prayer,” a unique story in the sense that its opening line came to me before anything else. I opened up a notebook and wrote: “From my house to hers was pretty long for a short walk.”

I wrote those twelve words down and studied them, amazed and slightly intimidated at how everything—the narrator, the conflict, the setting, the theme—was still wholly indefinite. I had unpacked a story from a single image or concept, but never from a single line. It seemed a flimsy way to begin and I would have scrapped the entire thing if not for a nagging curiosity to see how much, if anything, I could pull from that line. Two hours later, the story was finished. I sent it off to The Wayfarer without so much as a second reading (a decision I do not recommend and have never again attempted) and it was accepted for publication several months later.

From one line came an entire story about two people with a complicated past trying to reconcile their respective sufferings with the idea of a loving God. Embedded in the tension between the two characters are so many of the religious tensions I saw (and still see) in the South. But as much as I liked “The Sinner’s Prayer,” once it was finished, I felt that its characters had more to say, that its themes had just barely been tapped. So, next came “Frog Heaven,” which was published in Night Train. Then, “Daddy Issues,” which is still unfinished. Finally, “Visiting Hours” was picked up by Glassworks. 

Although I believe “Visiting Hours” can stand alone, I want to encourage readers to check out “The Sinner’s Prayer” and “Frog Heaven.” Twenty years elapses between the childhood events in “Frog Heaven” and the deathbed scene in “Visiting Hours.” Each story fills in different parts of their shared history and each story contains a different tragedy that illuminates both characters’ ever-changing faith. When read together, the stories show the ways in which a person’s life shapes their faith and vice-versus. I’m pleased with how the existing four stories interact with each other and entirely open to the idea of writing more, possibly with an eye to gathering them together in a collection.

Jeffrey S. Markovitz
"Threads"

"Threads" was inspired by a graduate class in Holocaust Literature in which I was enrolled in the summer of 2014.  The course, a difficult (in subject matter) but remarkable study of what it means to be a witness of atrocity and what it subsequently means to be a witness to the witnessing (in essence, all who remain beyond those who experienced the Holocaust; in essence: us) featured a number of texts dedicated to the unknowability and indescribability of that part of our human history.  A paradox arises: the further removed we are from that time, the less capable we are of understanding and properly articulating what it was, not just historically, but metaphysically; but, we must continue to write about it nevertheless.  Poets, novelists, playwrights, all must continue the literature, despite our inevitable failings.  "Threads" is one of my many attempts to do so.

Beyond academia, my ancestral history is routed in European Judaism.  And so, I've traveled to Germany, to Poland, to Auschwitz, to study: both as a writer and as a man.  My experiences in those places are indescribable, and so I describe them, failing wildly, if for no other reason than to keep a once muffled voice humming.  Despite my studying, despite my writing, I have absolutely no sense of what the Holocaust means or why it has to be a part of us.  But, I suppose, the "no sense" is the most appropriate reaction to such a thing.  Holocaust writing is immediately and always problematic; it is a witnessing that flirts with spectacle and, therefore, misrepresentation.  For this, I must apologize for my part in it.  But, as I am a human, it is my duty to put myself there, as Charlotte Delbo suggests in the novel mentioned in "Threads": Essayez de regarder.  Essayez pour voir.  Try to look.  Try to see.

Kristin Faatz
"Dandelion Wish"

Picture
"Dandelion Wish" is a story that grew out of an incident from family history. In 1960, a young woman gave birth to her son five weeks early, which at that time presented potentially grave risks for the baby’s health. One day while her son was still in the hospital, the new mom went out to shop for baby clothes. When she told a neighbor what she was doing, the neighbor advised her to wait and “see if it lives.” The (hopefully) unintentional nastiness of that comment struck me as the perfect seed for a story. When we write stories based on real events and people, exploitation is always a concern, but in this case I knew the story had a happy ending and was too fascinated with the characters to resist.

The young mother in "Dandelion Wish," her own mother and the nosy neighbor are all fictional representations who took on personalities of their own. They have stayed in my head, building lives that extend well beyond the pages here, so that the story has also become a jumping-off point for a novel. I grew up in a time when the idea of women's equality, though not fully realized to the present day, was taken far more for granted than in the time period of “Dandelion Wish.” The young mother, raising her son without help from a husband, unintentionally becomes a member of the vanguard of emancipated women. She ends up on an entirely different adventure than the one she had planned for, and I hope to get that fuller story onto the page as well.

Ralph Sneeden
"Fiddler Crabs"

Picture
“Fiddler Crabs” is one panel from a triptych, “Crab Studies.” I was in the National Gallery in London a few years ago, a quick run-through just before closing. I owe the aesthetic connection that made me pause that day to Vincent Van Gogh’s “Two Crabs” and “Crab On Its Back”  (1888), and John Ruskin’s “Study of a Velvet Crab” (c. 1870). The South Fork of Long Island, where I spent a lot of time as a kid, had its share of species—some desirable and captivating, some terrifying—but this poem, “Crab Studies,” became a way to consider my relationship with crustaceans over the long haul. I decided to employ the images of various crabs over the years to box myself in, to provide a lens, an autobiographical compass bearing. The other panels in the long poem explore blueclaws and horseshoes (together), and spider crabs. “Fiddler Crabs” is the one that focuses on pre-adolescence, the mysterious and flirtatious relationship that species invites; the narrative of the poem is pretty straightforward about how that works. It’s literal. But, there are a lot of conversations we hear but don’t understand at that age, and I suppose, metaphorically, that the process and state of being described in the poem capture that. A friend of mine is convinced that the poem is about sexual awakening, or pre-sexual auguries, anyway. That was not my intention, but I can see why he would have said that. Anyone who has seen fiddler crabs, knows they are bizarre and captivating. Children always want to dig them out, to prove they exist, hold them, perhaps, to prove they aren’t apparitions. It’s the tactile memory I was after here, more than anything else, the suspense of blindly groping in the sand after these critters and the ambiguity of disgust and exhilaration that follows when you finally have one in your hand. I haven’t been back to Long Island for decades, and sometimes wonder if the fiddlers are still there, if at low tide near the marshbank you can still see them twitching as a colony just outside their holes. But even in memory they disappear.