lookingglass
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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 26 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! |
Kathleen Mcgookey
"Small words"
Around Halloween, I volunteered at my daughter’s elementary school and saw a bulletin board that displayed the gravestones of small words. The gravestones also listed the longer, more complicated words that would take their places. Clearly, the teacher wanted her students to vary their diction and learn some new words. But I felt so sad. I love clear, simple, and direct small words. I felt sorry for little, pretty, small, cold, dark, house, and sky, soon to be discarded. And what were their longer, better, more complicated replacements? I can’t remember a single one.
annette sisson
"Flight season"
The epigraph to my poem “Flight Season” references “Gulf Coast Highway” (1988), a song composed by Nanci Griffith, James Hooker, and Danny Flowers. My husband and I love that song, often singing the parts along with Griffith and Mac McAnally, savoring this bittersweet anthem to love and life, loss and death. In response to the song, this poem depicts the generations that continue life even amidst separation, loss, health challenges, and the certain approach of death. Helping the toddler trace her own cheekbone and then her grandmother’s, narrating how rain becomes river becomes lake becomes bathwater, the aging speaker attempts to show the granddaughter that the seasons of life are beautiful, necessary, inevitable—and to help her see continuity and connection amidst change.
Carella keil
"cosmic bloom" | "The birth of the phoenix"
"Cosmic Bloom" and "The Birth of Phoenix" are two photographs from my Ethereal Forest series. These are photographs of flower petals; layered, textured and colorized in Photoshop to transform them into otherworldly flora. The ambiguous, abstract images reveal the beauty and delicacy of a magical nature all around us, a world capable of unfurling from our imaginations.
At the center of "The Birth of Phoenix" is a foetal figure, the colors vibrant and pulsing with a hungry scarlet light, the petals reminiscent of phoenix feathers or a jewel-toned flame.
"Cosmic Bloom" shimmers in a velvety blackness, as though emerging from the sky of an unnamed world, a world of sapphire lakes and shadows and lush purple-veined trees with amethyst leaves.
Ethereal Forest seeks to lure you into the blooming world of lucid dreams and stained-glass fantasies.
At the center of "The Birth of Phoenix" is a foetal figure, the colors vibrant and pulsing with a hungry scarlet light, the petals reminiscent of phoenix feathers or a jewel-toned flame.
"Cosmic Bloom" shimmers in a velvety blackness, as though emerging from the sky of an unnamed world, a world of sapphire lakes and shadows and lush purple-veined trees with amethyst leaves.
Ethereal Forest seeks to lure you into the blooming world of lucid dreams and stained-glass fantasies.
gerburg garmann
"Hibiscus and Happy Hoops"
"Hibiscus and Happy Hoops" is an acrylic piece that started out as a ‘group-brush’ project during a self-care event for women which I co-led in September of 2022. I finished the project, and it ended up becoming "Hibiscus and Happy Hoops." Upbeat, bold, and multi-layered in its rendition it reflects both the many voices of the women present as well as the abundant and joyful nature of the event. It also strikingly aligns with my mission to inspire joyful resilience in women (in contrast to developing a rigid and unhealthy spine in the professional world).
claire Hamner matturro
"trespassing"
The poem “Trespassing” reflects upon my experiences and emotions while living in a home-made house deep in the lush woods of Georgia. My husband—a lawyer by profession at the time—built the house with his own hands and the help of a few good friends. After we gave each other permission to leave our careers as lawyers in a city, we moved into the house, which was part of an intentional community of environmentally minded people. He and I lived there together for twenty years. During that time, I learned the names and ways of many of the flora and fauna and became a competent organic gardener. My husband and I also had a small commercial organic blueberry farm we named after our cat. We have since left the house due to family obligations elsewhere, though a dear friend lives in it now and maintains the gardens and the blueberries. We visit often. Each visit I see the woods creeping back toward the cleared space. At a blink of an eye, the wildness could reclaim that space.
I will always love that house and that place and that time in my life, but with each year living there I became more aware of the unintentional damage we did to the natural order of things in those deep woods just by living there. One day my husband said that no matter how carefully he walked through the woods, he crushed small lives. And that, finally, is where the poem came from—those crushed small lives we’d meant to honor and cherish.
I will always love that house and that place and that time in my life, but with each year living there I became more aware of the unintentional damage we did to the natural order of things in those deep woods just by living there. One day my husband said that no matter how carefully he walked through the woods, he crushed small lives. And that, finally, is where the poem came from—those crushed small lives we’d meant to honor and cherish.
Mary makofske
"what would grow in hitler's garden?"
I honestly do not remember the genesis of this poem, though it may have been from a prompt suggested by my poetry group. How “what’s buried in my garden?” shifted to focus on Hitler, I do not know. I am an avid gardener, and I have read much about Hitler. I’ve heard that Hitler loved animals, especially dogs, and that fact reminded me that certain dangerous people may have some aspect of humanity which surprises us. It was not difficult to imagine Hitler growing a garden filled not with poisonous plants, but with those most of us welcome. Once I had gardens in my mind, certain images arose: weeding out unwanted plants, applying wood ashes.
How mysterious the process of writing is, and how difficult it can be to remember later how a poem evolved. Once “garden” becomes the focus, images and metaphors spring up unbidden, and only later can be explained as if some logic existed. When those hands rose from the ground, how glad I was to see them, irrepressible as perennials that return after the long winter.
How mysterious the process of writing is, and how difficult it can be to remember later how a poem evolved. Once “garden” becomes the focus, images and metaphors spring up unbidden, and only later can be explained as if some logic existed. When those hands rose from the ground, how glad I was to see them, irrepressible as perennials that return after the long winter.
reese menefee
“Missing Us During a Downpour in Louisiana”
My poem “Missing Us During a Downpour in Louisiana” navigates loneliness, place, and love. In the speaker’s telling of collecting love and grappling with loneliness, this poem is meant to reconcile with endings. I wrote this piece a year and a half after Hurricane Laura made landfall in Louisiana. I had just moved there with my long-term partner and we broke up after the hurricane. The weather invites memories. It was storming on the day that I wrote this poem and I found myself missing my relationship. That relationship was my first big love. We lived together, and I thought we would always have each other. Knowing when to let go was a big lesson for me. Self love comes with loneliness and I wanted to write something that makes sense of that. There is something beautiful about being alone and building a home within the self. Letting go is a painful and necessary act of self love.
Catherine edgerton
"13th Amendment" | "predators"
Diving into the juxtaposition of incarceration with the underwater ecologies that surround us, these pieces live in a multi-media collage journal called Gifts of Winter. Reflections from my seasonal work on a sailing and SCUBA diving charter in the Bahamas illuminate my creative and cultural work back home in North Carolina.
The first piece, "13th Amendment," illustrates the active role of passivity or “turning a blind eye” to modern-day slavery. The hooked-fish mirrors all of the figures in the scene: the imprisoned men in orange as well as the white-skinned toddlers with blinders, all of whom seem to have their hands tied. The 13th amendment—quoted at the bottom—declares the constitutional legality of slavery as punishment for a crime.
The second piece, "Predators," palpates a different kind of trap—that of consumption and addiction. A diver attempts to reach the bottom of a well, or satisfy the “hungry ghost,” a term used by recovering addicts to describe the endless plight of addictive behavior. The opposite page frames a hand clawing from the jaws of a shark, scrambling for release from the death-grip of consumption. Hungry little birds reach blindly from the page.
The first piece, "13th Amendment," illustrates the active role of passivity or “turning a blind eye” to modern-day slavery. The hooked-fish mirrors all of the figures in the scene: the imprisoned men in orange as well as the white-skinned toddlers with blinders, all of whom seem to have their hands tied. The 13th amendment—quoted at the bottom—declares the constitutional legality of slavery as punishment for a crime.
The second piece, "Predators," palpates a different kind of trap—that of consumption and addiction. A diver attempts to reach the bottom of a well, or satisfy the “hungry ghost,” a term used by recovering addicts to describe the endless plight of addictive behavior. The opposite page frames a hand clawing from the jaws of a shark, scrambling for release from the death-grip of consumption. Hungry little birds reach blindly from the page.
Rachael Inciarte
"Desert dogs"
Our Bichon, Aslan, had difficulty adjusting when we moved from snowy Massachusetts to blistering Southern California. From losing his appetite to nerves around the neighbor’s unleashed and unfriendly chihuahuas, he was slow to warm to the new environment. Eventually I think he found consolation in daily sunlit naps, and seemed to enjoy being taken for dusty walks year-round. The poem reflects a desire that I imagined he (and we) yearn for—the delicate balance between comfort and novelty. He was still an animal, although a pampered one, retaining all his canine instincts just as we occupied a cozy house within a harsh natural landscape. Essentially, we want it all—to be undomesticated and still safe at the same time. In Aslan’s case the wildness won out. Shortly after writing “desert dogs” our family was devastated to lose him in a hit-and-run accident after he escaped through an open door. Seeing this poem in print is meaningful as an enduring testament to both his memory, and our love for him.
