Monthly Archives: August 2023

Author Update 2023: Patricia Walkow

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Patricia Walkow is an award-winning editor and author of fiction and nonfiction including magazine articles and newspaper columns, essays and short stories, and memoir and novels. Her newest release is Life Lessons from the Color Yellow (February 2023), a story collection of people and events who have influenced her life. You’ll find Pat on her website at PatriciaWalkow.com, on Facebook, and her Amazon author page. Read more about her writing and editing projects in her 2016 and 2020 interviews for SouthWest Writers.

What is at the core of this memoir collection?
This collection of stories represents significant people, events, and places that have shaped me. It is not an autobiography, but a collection of separate stories from my childhood through the present day. I have learned something about life from each of these stories, not only as I lived them, but also, years later, as I wrote them.

Which story in the book means the most to you? Which one revealed something unexpected as you wrote it? Give us a one-sentence description of each story.
“Golden Meadow” holds a special place in my heart, as it tells the tale of sharing my youthful dreams and aspirations with two friends, all in the encompassing embrace of a beautiful meadow. What surprised me was how difficult, emotionally, it was for me to write “My Mother’s Kitchen.”

“Mr. Howard’s Roses” — a school-age child learns how to care for roses. Lesson learned: Friendships happen between people even when they are quite different from each other, and there are things in life worth fussing over.

“The Dog Against the Yellow Wall” — a dog photographed by the author turns out to be almost identical to the dog she adopted many years later. Lesson learned: Serendipities exist in this world. Enjoy them without analyzing them.

“Sunny” — the author encounters a woman who always wears yellow. Later on, she finds out why. Lesson Learned: Despite terrible things that can happen to a person, it is ultimately a choice to be happy.

“Lemon Love” — some relationships are intense and beautiful, but cannot last. Lesson Learned: Always be true to yourself.

“My Mother’s Kitchen” — a dysfunctional family forever affects your life. Lesson learned: You can get beyond the issues of your childhood.

“The Promise of the Yellow Box” — when life gives you a gift, make the most of it. Lesson learned: Make your choices reflect your hopes and dreams rather than your fears.

“The Estate Sale” — a young woman comes across an estate sale and realizes she would have enjoyed knowing the person who once owned the house. Lesson Learned: Seize the moment to make a new friend.

“Golden Meadow” — three teenage girls bond during weekly hikes through a meadow as they share their hopes and dreams for the future. Lesson Learned: Friendships on the cusp of adulthood are among the most precious.

Why did you decide to write short pieces as opposed to a longer-length memoir?
From my past, I wanted to distill specific people and events that helped form the person I am today. As a result, I wrote the book as a set of discrete short stories, unrelated to each other, rather than creating a flowing set of chapters in sequential order over a long arc of time. I know this approach is not the typical way of writing a memoir, but it is the method I found satisfying.

What was the most challenging aspect of putting this project together?
The most challenging part of writing this piece was deciding which events and people helped form me into the person I am today.

Tell us about the book’s connection to the color yellow.
As I wrote, the color yellow surfaced over and over in my stories. It is not as though I was seeking out the color…or any color at all. Yellow simply turned out to be an integral part of each story and revealed itself as my teacher over the years. It was a surprise to me.

What do you love about your writing in this book?
Writing each story reconnected me to parts of myself, to people, to places I had not thought about in years.

What writing projects are you working on now?
I coauthored Alchemy’s Reach with SouthWest Writers’ member Chris Allen. It is a murder/mystery with a romantic undertone set in southern New Mexico’s Sacramento Mountains. It was published by Austin Macauley on August 18, 2023 and is available in paperback, e-book, and audiobook.

Another project I’m working on is The Far Moist End of the Earth. It’s a literary novel about a young widow who volunteers to work at a Methodist mission in Siam in the early 1900s. Prejudice, limitations on women’s lives, and multicultural appreciation are the key themes in the book. It is scheduled to be distributed to beta readers by the end of 2023.

KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kat has a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.



Author Update 2023: Cornelia Gamlem

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Speaker, consultant, and award-winning author Cornelia Gamlem is an expert in employee relations and human resources. Along with her co-author Barbara Mitchell, Cornelia has published six business resource books. Their latest collaboration is The Decisive Manager: Get Results, Build Morale, and Be the Boss Your People Deserve, released by Career Press (March 2023). Visit Cornelia at BigBookofHR.com and MakingPeopleMatter.blogspot.com, as well as on Facebook and LinkedIn. You’ll find all of her books on her Amazon author page. Read more about her writing in her 2019 and 2021 interviews for SouthWest Writers.

What would you like readers to know about The Decisive Manager?
Most of the issues an organization has are people issues—issues and situations that must be properly and promptly addressed and managed. Doing so is not an easy endeavor. People issues can be complicated because every person is a unique individual, and there is not necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach that a manager can take. Even the most experienced managers can be surprised by a new situation leaving them feeling vulnerable.

Why did you choose this particular topic to write about and why was this the best time to publish the book?
Managing people is not the responsibility of the HR department, and people management issues constantly challenge front-line managers. We wrote a similar book for managers, The Manager’s Answer Book, in 2018 that included topics across the whole spectrum of management. After publishing the 10-year anniversary edition of The Big Book of HR in 2022, we realized that a book for managers dedicated to people issues would complement both of these books. We wanted a resource for managers to turn to, especially those without an HR department like small business owners, to help with those vexing issues.

During and after the pandemic in 2020, so much about the workplace changed. That was one of our challenges writing The Big Book of HR during 2020 and early 2021. We watched so many new issues arise. The timing was right for addressing these issues. Each section of The Decisive Manager has a subsection for “Navigating the Changing Workplace.”

In a previous interview for SWW you mentioned that you and your co-author (Barbara Mitchell) “divided the work according to our respective areas of expertise then stayed out of each other’s way.” What particular expertise did each of you contribute to The Decisive Manager?
We organized The Decisive Manager around the same sections in The Big Book of HR. We’ve both had years of experience in all functions of human resources, but our individual focuses have been different. Barbara’s expertise and strength is clearly in the area of talent management, “Finding and Hiring the Best Talent.” My expertise and strengths are in the areas of employee relations and compliance, “Understanding Policy and Practices” and “Avoiding Legal Pitfalls,” another subsection. “Creating a Positive Employee Experience” speaks to both of our areas of expertise as well as our passions about creating positive workplace environments for employees and managers alike.

As for the other areas that we address, “Paying and Rewarding Employees,” “Helping Employees Grow and Develop,” and “Ensuring Graceful Endings,” we both brought a great deal of our respective experiences and knowledge.

The sub-title of the book is Get Results, Build Morale, and Be the Boss Your People Deserve. How did you narrow down these managerial goals from what must have been dozens of possibilities?
Our experience continues to show us that organizations—across all sectors of the economy, industries and size—don’t prepare individuals to manage people—the most critical parts of their management responsibilities. This is especially true when they promote people. They take the best technician or widget maker, promote them to be in charge of others and expect them to succeed. Too often these individuals have the best intentions but lack the skills, experience and knowledge to manage people. Their missteps can tear down morale and interfere with productivity. These were the observations that resulted in our focusing on those three management goals.

Did what-if questions help shape this work?
In a sense, yes. Perhaps not so much “what if” but “what do you do when?” or “how do you?” We relied on situations from our collective experiences as a starting place—those evergreen issues that managers struggle with. We also read a great deal about the emerging challenges, many associated with remote and distributed workforces. For example, with so many employees working from make-shift offices during the pandemic, how can employers make sure those arrangements are ergonomically safe.

The biggest challenges we read about and researched were how to keep remote and hybrid workforces motivated and essentially ‘be the boss [all] your people deserve.’ It can be like walking a tightrope for a manager to make sure they are addressing and meeting the needs of all their team members whether they work from home or in the same physical office as the manager.

Any “Oh, wow!” moments while doing research for the book?
Absolutely, especially in the areas of navigating the changing workplace. We had done some work with a company that specializes in using mobile communication methods, such as text messaging, that captures the preferences of younger workers. It was really interesting to learn some of the things that can be done with communication using mobile technology—everything from onboarding employees to learning and development. It really streamlines processes. Another area was microlearning that ties directly with mobile technology. It’s small learning units and short learning activities that can be done from anywhere using mobile devices. It’s very revolutionary.

What writing projects are you working on now?
We’re investigating other areas for getting our messages out. We’ve entered into strategic partnerships with some on-line business platforms and are investigating another with a global reach. I’ve also developed a relationship with Authority Magazine, an on-line business publication through Medium and have had several articles and interviews printed there.

We’re contemplating doing some short e-books that complement our current books. The objective is to both cross-market existing books and get messages out faster. I’m dusting off an old manuscript on the topic of workplace diversity. It’s become a timely topic again and there are now more opportunities and methods for getting that message out into the world.

KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kat has a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.



An Interview with Poet Gayle Lauradunn

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Gayle Lauradunn is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in numerous journals as well as national and international anthologies. Some of her poems have also been included in art gallery exhibits and adapted for the stage. Her third poetry collection, The Geography of Absence (Mercury HeartLink, August 2022), prompted one reviewer to write: “Open this collection to the first poem—or to any poem—and lose yourself in words that matter.” Look for Gayle’s book on Amazon.

Tell us how and why you chose the title of your poetry book The Geography of Absence.
When I was camping in the Sahara I was struck by the immensity of the space and the gigantic proportions of the sand dunes that seemed to creep across the landscape. The sheer vastness. I wondered what was absent in that huge emptiness. Then we spied a brown speck in the distance between dunes and went toward it, and it turned out to be a large Berber tent, probably large enough to hold 80-100 people. But there was only an old woman and her 3-year-old grandson napping beside her. She invited us in and talked with our guide, who translated for us, carding and spinning the camel wool contained in a large bag beside her the entire time we were there. There was nothing else in the tent, not even cooking utensils, and I still wonder who or what was absent. That experience led me to become aware of absence throughout our lives. The poet Morgan Parker has said, “Absence implies a memory of what once took place.”

Your book cover has interesting details with randomly placed blocks, giving a fractured appearance. Is it representative of what this poetry collection is about?
Yes. I originally thought I wanted a photo of large sand dunes with a broad sky but could not find anything. I asked my friend Scott Wiggerman, who is both poet and artist, if he could suggest something. He sent me what he had posted on his website. Of the many items there, I kept going back to this piece even though it is not the kind of art I generally like. I went to Scott’s house to view the original and asked him what he was thinking when he created the piece. He said he was thinking about what was absent between the blocks. When he said the piece was untitled, I suggested we call it “absences” to which he agreed.

You mentioned that you write poetry to learn about the world and to learn more about who you are. What things can you share with your readers about your discoveries?
The process of writing poetry is organic for me. I begin with a vague thought, an idea, a landscape, etc., and write the first line, whatever occurs to me. The poem writes itself; I never know where it is going or how it will end. I don’t think ahead. I let it be what it seems to want to be. It’s similar to traveling to a culture that is different from ours, a landscape that is different, a different language. The absence of my own culture surrounding me is provocative and causes me to view the world in a new way. I’ve taken ten trips with a company that focuses on going off the beaten path. It’s the reason I rarely travel to Europe which is our heritage. I prefer places like Mongolia and Bhutan. After hiking up 12,000 feet in the Annapurna Mountains in Nepal, we had lunch in a tiny village and visited one of the homes. The woman had a television set and later I asked our guide what the people thought about how different much of the world is from their lives. He responded that they think what is on television are fairy tales.

In your book description of The Geography of Absence you question the validity of memory. Can you elaborate? Do you find freedom with this prospect when it comes to writing, or is vague memory more of a hindrance?
Memory, vague or clear, allows me to write both the actual event and infuse it with imagination. Whatever the memory, imagination expands it, enhances it to get to the meaning of what really occurred.

What sort of decisions do you make when putting a poetry collection together?
Good question, one I’m dealing with right now as I work on the order of my next collection. The Geography of Absence and my first book, Reaching for Air, were both much easier as the poems lent themselves to sections. My second book, All the Wild and Holy: A Life of Eunice Williams 1696-1785, is a book-length persona poem which I wrote chronologically as I followed her life. This current manuscript has a central six-part poem which is the focus of the collection. My struggle is how to arrange the other poems around this one. All the other poems reflect the central idea in the long one and that is what I need to keep in mind as I organize them.

For someone new to poetry, can you recommend where they might start reading?
It depends on what kind of poetry you want to write: open or formal. Today there seems to be more call from publishers for the latter. I find much of it fairly boring as the traditional forms do not fit our contemporary language, which causes the poet to focus on the form rather than what is being said. People are inventing new forms such as the golden shovel and calling a single line a haiku. I’m a storytelling poet, so content is more important to me than form. I do occasionally write a form poem, such as a pantoum, but I am rarely satisfied with them as the content often becomes distorted to fit the form. Some poets write a sonnet which you would not recognize as such because they are more interested in content than form. For form poetry, start with Shakespeare and improvise on his sonnets. For open, start with Denise Levertov and Gwendolyn Brooks. Galway Kinnell wrote both open and formal.

How important is accessibility of meaning? Should a reader have to work to understand a poem, or should readers find their own meaning?
I have been giving readings since 1970. In the early days, I experienced an awakening when after a reading, people would come up to me and say such things as “I love your poem about….” or “I understood your poem X as I had a similar experience.” In such cases I had no idea to which poems they were relating as I did not see what they said in any of the poems. That taught me that when we write, if we are open and not tightly controlling, people can get inside any poem that speaks to their own experiences. All we must do is write from within ourselves, organically. I remember one of my high school English teachers taking us through ten unbearable weeks of poetry. She invariably asked such nonsense questions as “What does the word the on the third line mean?” I doubt if even the poet knew. Readers should let the poem speak to them and not try to control it. Poems are a gift to allow people to find their own meanings.

Do you have a favorite poet? Someone who inspired you along the way?
Too many poets to choose just one. My early influences were William Blake, Walt Whitman, Denise Levertov, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Galway Kinnell, C.K. Williams, and the early poems of Louise Glück.

What do most well-written poems have in common?
A broad and deep knowledge of craft. Learn it and then you can toss it away. It will be part of you and you will use it without being conscious of doing so.

Su Lierz writes dark fiction, short story fiction, and personal essays. Her short story “Twelve Days in April,” written under the pen name Laney Payne, appeared in the 2018 SouthWest Writers Sage Anthology. Su was a finalist in the 2017 and 2018 Albuquerque Museum Authors Festival Writing Contest. She lives in Corrales, New Mexico, with her husband Dennis.



Author Update 2023: Joyce Hertzoff

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Author Joyce Hertzoff writes mystery and speculative fiction for middle grade, young adult, and adult audiences. She has written three fantasy series (completed or in the works)—the Crystal Odyssey set of four novels, the ongoing Portal Adventures, and the new More Than Just Survival books. Her newest release is Train to Nowhere Somewhere: Book 1 of the More Than Just Survival Series (July 2023). You’ll find Joyce on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, as well as on her blog HertzoffJo.blogspot.com and website at FantasyByJoyceHertzoff.com. For more about Joyce and her writing, visit her SWW author page and follow the links to previous interviews. Visit Amazon for all of her books.

Train to Nowhere Somewhere follows a group of passengers stranded in rural Missouri after their train derails. At its heart, what is the book about?
This is a book about survival, about taking what we know and recreating a new modern world after disaster, to rebuild with the hopes of an improved life. It is also about found families, the strangers we come to embrace because of shared experiences. Third, it’s about small-town life in farm country.

You had some trouble winnowing down your POV characters to a manageable number. What was that process like and who did you keep to tell the story?
Early critiquers found twelve POV characters a bit too much, even though each had something to contribute, a viewpoint that was unique and an interesting history. Spoiler alert: after the first novel, I envisioned the second would involve two groups splintered off to find answers while the main group continues to build a new community. Each group needed at least two people to tell what happened to them. Because of this, I needed to establish the goals and viewpoints of seven of the forty people stranded in book one. Those seven included one couple, two people who’d been at odds even before the story started, and a retired doctor, a lawyer turned cook, and one of the train attendants.

Tell us about the journey from inspiration to completed book for this first in a new series.
This book, like a few other stories I’ve written, began in a class I took as part of an online MFA program. The class was called Maps, and we were to take our characters on a journey, both physical and metaphorical. My characters’ journey hit a snag due to the collapse of a railroad trestle. From there, my imagination took off, as it often does, in the form of a more widespread disaster.

How did you go about choosing the title and subtitle?
The title for this one refers to their train journey which ended in a kind of nowhere, but also to the fact that they turned it into a somewhere. The subtitle refers to the entire series, which is all about survival and how that can take unexpected turns.

What makes Train to Nowhere Somewhere unique in the dystopian market?
Is it dystopian? Maybe. I think of it as near future. When I describe it to people, often they say, “That could happen.” I hope not. We’re too dependent now on being able to communicate with people far away and to have reliable electricity in our homes. In this book, I never say what caused the disaster, although there is speculation.

What was your favorite part of putting this project together?
Doing research on wind generators and other aspects of the story. It was fun to learn new facts and find a way to incorporate them into the story. Also developing the characters was fun, the threads about knitting as a useful skill, working out some logistics.

Any new writing projects in the works?
As always, I have several. Besides the second and third books of the More Than Just Survival series, I’m working on: book three in my Portal Adventures series; a series of stories about a girl who’s exiled from her domed town; a murder mystery that takes place in 19th century England; a group of stories about a family that acts as couriers between planets of a system settled by people from Earth; two or three murder mysteries; the story I just workshopped about a boy who wants to work on a time travel machine while his parents want him to help at their dig in the desert near an extinct volcano; and my favorite, a story about two girls from Tucson who manage to time travel to 1873 Arizona and are accused of murdering a merchant. There are probably more projects but these are ones I’m actively working on.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
I’ll be selling my books at assorted venues throughout the fall. Watch for announcements of when those will take place.

KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kat has a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.



Author Update 2023: RJ the Story Guy

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RJ the Story Guy (aka RJ Mirabal) is a retired high school teacher turned author. He has written three series: the completed Rio Grande Parallax trilogy (adult fantasy) and the ongoing Dragon Train Quest for young adults and Trixie the Brown Dog for children. His newest release is Dragon Train Rebellion (December 2022), the second book in his Dragon Train Quest series. You’ll find RJ on his websites at RJMirabal.com and TrixieTheBrownDog.com, on Facebook at RJMirabalAuthor and TrixieTheBrownDog, and on Instagram and Twitter. To find out more about RJ and his writing, visit his SWW author page and follow the links to previous interviews.

Distill the story you tell in Dragon Train Rebellion into a few sentences and include the themes you explore.
Rebellion takes up the story of Skye, the big blue dragon, and her human friend, young Jaiden the farmer, as they prepare themselves and the rest of the small community of free dragons to fight to stay free. In addition, they want to free all their fellow dragons who are enslaved. The dragons want to live once again in the mountain caves as they always had before humans won the Dragon Wars a generation before. Jaiden is captured when he tries to rescue Skye’s children who were abducted during a human raid on the free dragons’ desert community. Things come to a head which will lead to all-out war. The main themes of the story involve the quest for freedom, the importance of friendship and family relationships, and dedication to a cause.

Jaiden returns as your main character in book two. What challenges does he face, and why will readers connect with him?
Jaiden, who is now 17 years old, struggles to take on the responsibilities of adulthood and strives to offer himself to a cause greater than himself and that is, in fact, seemingly against his own kind—humanity. He encounters an attractive and very capable young woman a few years older than himself and a teenage girl whom he barely knew back in his hometown. The difficulty of relating to members of the opposite sex are mostly a mystery and somewhat frustrating for him. He also wants to gain independence from his demanding and mercurial father but he fears he isn’t capable of standing on his own feet until he is challenged by his new dragon friends.

Who are a few of your other characters, new or returning?
Skye and her mate Caerulus turned out to be rather demanding of Jaiden, though Skye still handles him with the compassion of a substitute mother, but she isn’t quite as supportive as he expected her to be based on his earlier experience with her.

A new character is a silver dragon (about the size of a horse with the intelligence of a ten-year-old child) called Trigger. He and Jaiden train together because when Jaiden goes into battle he will ride Trigger. Trigger is annoying and mischievous but also proves to be brave and humorous. The two start to bond by the end of the novel. Another new character is Dog, a small gold dragon about the size of a dog and the intelligence of a four-year-old child. Because of his size, he can easily sneak around to explore and help Jaiden once they start to work together with Trigger, Skye, and Caerulus.

Wyetta is a young woman, probably about three to four years older than Jaiden. She is very self-sufficient and athletic which makes her both attractive and threatening to Jaiden. Her beauty makes her irresistible to Jaiden, though there is a mysterious air about her.

You’re currently writing book three of Dragon Train Quest. At what point while working on the first book, Dragon Train, did you know the story was strong enough for a series? What has been the most challenging aspect of writing this series?
When I came to the end of the first book, I knew I had to tell the story of how Jaiden would get involved in the dragons’ quest for complete freedom. The freedom of Skye’s family that she and Jaiden accomplished at the end of the first book was fine, but it wouldn’t be enough for either of them to simply quit while they were ahead.

The most challenging aspect of writing this series is to limit the complexity because this is a story intended for teen and young adult readers. I could easily take this story into levels of complexity and a cast of characters as extensive as a major epic fantasy. But I wanted to keep the focus on Jaiden, Skye, and others closest to him as he goes through his whole coming of age quest. He is a part of a monumental struggle for freedom, but I didn’t want to bog the story down with a lot of politics and cultural theories. Though those elements are present, the story sticks to Jaiden and his quest since he is the narrator throughout, except for a few rare occasions.

What makes this series unique among all the other dragon books on the market?
Though there are a lot of dragon stories, most of them focus on people’s struggle with the dragons with usually the dragons as antagonists. Some stories allow dragons to be intelligent, but I decided to make them very intelligent, wise, and highly moral. They only want their own freedom, not to destroy humanity through death, destruction, and dominance. They do not have unusual magic abilities, but they communicate with Jaiden mentally. They have a highly developed culture but virtually no technology since they don’t possess hands and the more compact bodies of humans. I slowly reveal interesting elements of their highly developed culture as the story progresses. Also, the setting for the series is not medieval as is typical for many dragon stories. In this world (which I don’t name) people have developed a 19th-century kind of life and technology but they haven’t developed steam power, so they use dragons for heavy labor to do farm work and to tow trains, etc.

Did what-if questions help shape your Dragon Train books?
Yes, the unique aspects of the series mentioned above were the what-ifs I started with. In fact, the title came to me before any story ideas once I began thinking about developing a dragon story. Somehow, the words “dragon train” came to me one night when I was falling asleep. Later, intrigued by the idea, I imagined why dragons would pull trains and it all went from there, including the characters, storylines, etc.

What writing projects are you working on now?
Dragon Train War, which will conclude the Quest series, is this year’s project. It’s been the hardest to develop because I had to do a lot of research about war, battles, strategy, weapons, and battle techniques, as well as coming up with a satisfying conclusion that deals with the contradictions and horrors of war that will be comprehensible to young readers. And of course, I had a lot of storylines and character development that began in books one and two to contend with! Sometimes, a one-off book seems very appealing knowing that I don’t have to develop characters, storylines, and themes beyond the conclusion of one book.

Is there something else you’d like to tell readers?
Love and value freedom before you lose it. Value the people in your life and make the unique contribution to life as we know it that only you can do. Accept some failure and celebrate your successes. And remember, people (in broad enough terms to include the other intelligence forms of life we share this Earth with) and your relationships with them are the most important things.

KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kat has a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.



Author Update: Dan Wetmore

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Among retired Air Force officer Dan Wetmore’s creative outlets is his passion for writing poetry. In 2016, he released My Mother’s Gentle Unbecoming: The Absentings of Alzheimer’s, a poetry collection published by Saint Andrews University Press. His second collection, Phoboudenopanophobia: Words Now for a Possible Then (July 2022), explores “dementia’s emotional toll on the leaving and the left behind.” You’ll find Dan on LinkedIn and his SWW Author Page. Look for his book on Amazon, and learn more about his work in his 2017 SWW interview.

Why did you write Phoboudenopanophobia?
Penning My Mother’s Gentle Unbecoming, about her descent into dementia, got me contemplating a similar fate, so I wrote this volume as an extended last letter to my family, sort of an “epitaph in absentia”; hoped insurance against having last feelings go unexpressed, in the event the body outlives the being.

Tell us about the structure of the book and how you worked through “putting everything in order.”
As the number of poems multiplied, I saw six different tones emerge: overwhelmsion, dread, desperation, gratitude, resolve, and acceptance, similar to the five stages of grief, it being a book about loss, simply of self. So, to reassure the reader—at risk of spoon-feeding them—that the “voices” constituted an evolution rather than an equivocation, I grouped the birds of a feather, in hope the whole would ultimately take greater flight.

When did you decide to make this a project and step into the journey to put it together?
As the previous volume was dwindling down to completion, this one suggested itself. Though having said all about the subject (my mother), the subject matter wasn’t exhausted, since we speak our empathies and our personal experience with different voices. It was the passing of a baton from one runner to the next.

How did you choose the book title?
The title is a mash-up of three fears:

The norm and the hope is that animacy and identity will prove co-terminal, but death by dementia denies that. So, first fear is of its final phase—having lost all which effectively makes one human: fear of (having) Nothing: oudenophobia.

I suspect the penultimate state of consciousness—just shy of unawareness—is incomprehension. And as what’s feared most is the unknown (and, at that point, everything will be unknowable), the final fear will be that of panophobia: fear of Everything.

And the double-teaming by those possible tomorrows threatens to taint today, prompting a fear of succumbing to dread, sacrificing all remaining moments to a prolonged flinch: fear of Fear (phobophobia).

At what point did you know you had taken the manuscript as far as it could go, that it was finished and ready for publishing?
When the flow slowed to a trickle, and further attempts at purging felt affected; trying to fabricate emotion rather than free it. That said, every quake has aftershocks, and the ledger—echoing the life—is ever a work in progression (and hopefully of progress). A few guests always arrive late at table, but fashionably so—the most composed of the bunch, because not rushed by the deadline which some impatience or another dictated.

What were the expected, or unexpected, results of putting this project together?
Somewhat managing to untie the Gordian Knot of emotions the situation set to roiling; to at least depict the Moebius nature of the matter, given the impossibility of ironing it perfectly flat. Gaining an appreciation of how many others are walking this particular road, and having the opportunity to hopefully return the favor done for me by so many others, of finding something to point to and say, “Yes—THAT!”

Do you have a favorite quote from the book that you’d like to share?
“Though fast flat on a mountain of limestone-capped granite, this is akin to falling: moving without the ability to arrest, orient, or anticipate; the trifecta of entropies which constitutes chaos.”

What does your mature self now bring to the writing table that your younger self never could have?
Appreciation that (despite occasional appearances otherwise) less is more. An identifiable/consistent voice, reflecting settled priorities and a gelled perspective. Grudging admittance that Ben Franklin was right about that perspiration business. And realization that writing is primarily about having written (vice being read). If you can comprehend your own words, you’ve already achieved audience, and everything else is icing on the cake, which liberates you from chasing acceptance beyond (and potentially exclusive of) your own, insulating you from the temptation to pander.

Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently if you started your writing/publishing journey today?
Resist viewing quantity as the enemy of quality, rather as one means to it, having realized that the more frequently you go to the pump, the less you have to prime it.

What do most well-written poems have in common?
Concision, to include leashed ambiguity (selectively implying multiple things for the price of saying one). Perspicuity, to include exercising the rods of the mind’s eye rather than the cones—seeing peripherally, intimating rather than stating (to include liberal use of simile and metaphor—the more novel, the most mind-blowing).

Is there something that always triggers your creativity?
Always? A strong emotional spasm, usually of the yearning sort; a visceral (pre-lingual) feeling. Which throws down the gauntlet to become midwife to that muddled. And, as closest kin to the ineffable is the oblique, it usually comes into the air as poetry or poetic prose.

Often? Discerning a way in which seeming incommensurables are some way kindred.

What writing projects are you working on now?
A third volume of verse, On Our Knees in Ironies, about my dad’s dissolution at Alzheimer’s hands. Though the last generated, that’s an accident of time, it being thematically second. (Viewing the disease—more to the point, its host—as the subject, when the afflicted was my mother, Dad was serving as caregiver, and I merely spectator [third-person]. In a succession of roles, he became she, and I he, raising [razing?] my status to second-person. Trying to place myself in their shoes had me not only behind the lens, but in front of it; the wolf, at end, fully at the door.)

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
Building on the question (above), about what my mature self brings to the writing table, as far as dividends go, adulation and commiseration are nice, but catharsis suffices.

KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kat has a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.



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