Brett DeFries’s poems appear in the fall Web issue of Dark Sky Magazine. Here, Brett gives us a brief look at Ezekiel, talking seeds, and why heaven may or may not be polluted water.

Could you introduce me to Ezekiel?

As a collection, Ezekiel is a book length poem series. As the speaker in the collection, Ezekiel is someone nearly unable to cope with every day sense experience. Color is sometimes ecstasy and other times hell. Ezekiel is a victim of hauntings, and dogs are allergic to him. He is friend to Simon, son to his mother, client to Sasha, and burden and lover to Monica. He often confuses one relationship with the other, and sometimes he forgets his roles altogether.

Why is heaven “a dirty bowl of water?”

I’m not sure it is, and neither is Ezekiel, though if we were dogs, we might believe such a thing. From my own observations, though, I can say that as water is revealed to (some of) us, it is not the purity it stands for. If heaven is a revelation of world in time—and why not—then heaven is not remote from terror or soil or drought or spit. Instead heaven is worsened or improved by what populates it.

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Ben Gwin’s “Inpatient” was pulled from his work-in-progress novel, Clean Time, and published in Issue 12 of Dark Sky Magazine. Here, I talk with Ben about Ronald Reagan, American voyeurism, and finishing a project five years in the making.

So let’s talk about “Inpatient.” I’m especially fascinated with playing around with simulacra/simulation reality TV theme. What was the inspiration for the story?

It’s an excerpt actually from a novel I’m writing called Clean Time. It was also my masters thesis, which won the Best Thesis in Fiction Award at Chatham. I was really happy with that. I worked really hard on it. My main character, Ronald Reagan Middleton, has a drug problem and he winds up in rehab on this reality TV show for a portion of the novel. He meets this girl Althea who he’s laying with in the dirt there. This part was to develop her character specifically and hopefully Ronald Reagan’s as well and, you know, to move the plot ahead, to complicate their relationship because they are about to try to… um, escape from rehab. I wanted to try to have as much conflict in that scene as I could… as far as them trying to communicate. One of the themes of the work is, you know, how we present ourselves… Not just drug addicts, but I guess especially drug addicts… Presenting ourselves one way, you know, putting on a show for people and then you know, really being another way.

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[Ed Note: This interview was posted a couple of months back, but since Ryan is making some news, I figured it was timely to repost it today. Enjoy, and congratulations to Ryan!]

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Ryan Call’s debut collection, The Weather Stations, is forthcoming from Caketrain and if you haven’t pre-ordered it, you’re performing a disservice to yourself. Today, we talk with him about skyless worlds, what it’s like behind the scenes at HTMLGIANT, and what happens when our personal lies about the reality of our deaths begin to unravel.

Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from? What fires you up? What makes you sad?

I don’t really think of myself as being from anywhere. I was born on Hill Air Force Base in Utah, lived there for maybe a year or two while my father flew F-16s; my sister was also born there a year later, and then we moved to Maryland when my father left active duty to fly for the airlines. We lived in Chattanooga, Tennessee, beginning the summer before my 6th grade; my parents still live there. Since then, I’ve lived in Memphis, northern Virginia, and now Houston, which seems to be the place that my wife and I have settled. I’m not a typical Air Force brat who can claim to have moved every year as a child, but I think it was enough to keep me from feeling sure of where I’m from. As a result, I’m from, probably, not a place, but a family.

Usually I feel pretty calm, though it still happens that I get intensely emotional about things. More often, I get happy in a calm way. This usually happens when I think about being with my wife, about hopefully living with her for a long time, about reading my favorite books, working on my writing, being with friends, my family.

I also get sad a lot. I get sad when I think about my childhood, not because I had a bad childhood, but because I’ve since left that world and cannot get back there. I’m very susceptible to nostalgic sadness, I suppose. Recently, I’ve been taken with random moments of sadness, which usually come about because I’ve somehow remembered that I will die, and my wife will die, and my family will die, and other people I love will die. I get sad when I think about that, about not being able to be with them. Something I wonder about, though, is how this sadness is a kind of anticipatory sadness; I’m frightened to experience how the emotion will shift once there’s physical cause for its existence in my body.

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Today we talk with Adam Clay whose work was featured in Issue 12. Adam talks about his favorite poets, writing a poem a day, and balancing family and career.

When did you figure out that you liked writing? How young were you when you first started?

Like a lot of writers, I started in high school. The poems were, of course, terrible, but I still felt driven to write them. Once I ended up in college, I found out you could actually major in creative writing. At the time I had no idea this was even a possibility. I took a fiction course and a poetry course — it became clear (as mentioned below) that poetry just made more sense for me. I was fortunate enough to study with Angela Ball and D.C. Berry at the University of Southern Mississippi. They are both remarkable poets in their own right and very different from one another. I still think a lot about how their influences are in my work today.

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Today we have a conversation with a different sort of artist. Ramsay Midwood is a Texas-based musician whose style and lyric-making ability will excite and confuse you in the way that good poetry can. His music is bright with surprise, sultry beat, and innovative comparative operators. One can liken his sound and style to a potpourri of incense and smoky vapors complicated by the thick heat of a swamp and spiced with healthy dashes of salt, sandpaper, and beer foam. A strong sense of plain-stated, Southern Gothic surrealism helps buoy the themes of loss and redemption infused throughout his work. You’ve not heard another musician like him. Two albums are out now: Shootout at the OK Chinese Restaurant and Popular Delusions & the Madness of Cows. A third album is due soon. The best intro to Ramsay Midwood is one he wrote himself though: “I was always an admirer of Woody Guthrie’s seemingly heroic undertakings. I vowed to fight his same righteous fight. I immediately broke this vow by chasing an actress to Hollywood and many songs later I chased a stripper from Wisconsin to LA, realizing that I was a simply a make-believe cowboy unconsciously herding women of questionable virtue into a corral in my head, where I could engage in long periods of self-loathing. This was when I decided to start my own space program. The initial fund-raising has been difficult, but I’m certain once I get my driver’s license things will pick up.”

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