An Interview with Sean Thomas Dougherty & J.D. Schraffenberger

The 25th Anniversary Season of the Final Thursday Reading Series concludes with a special book release reading. Sean Thomas Dougherty and J.D. Schraffenberger will be launching their new co-written chapbook from Final Thursday Press, Dueling Shovels. This collection of golden shovel poems was inspired by the work of James Hearst. Sean Thomas Dougherty is UNI’s inaugural David C. & Patricia A. Meyer Visiting Writer and the author of many collections of poetry, including Death Prefers the Minor Keys (BOA Editions, 2023) and The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions, 2018). J.D. Schraffenberger is a UNI Professor of English and Editor of the North American Review. His work includes American Sad (Main Street Rag, 2024) and The Waxen Poor (Twelve Winters Press, 2014). 

As always, open mic at 7:00 and featured reading at 7:30 at the Hearst Center for the Arts. The featured reading also will be live Zoomcast. Click to sign up for a link. You can pre-order a signed copy of Dueling Shovels now.

Interview by Jim O’Loughlin. 

JIM O’LOUGHLIN: You two go way back. Talk about how you got to know each other and what were your connections over the years. 
J.D. SCHRAFFENBERGER: We do go way back, don’t we! Has it been twenty years? I remember first meeting Sean when he came to Binghamton, New York, where I was doing a PhD, and we were hosting a writing conference. Man, he was such a terrific reader, so affecting. I remember that we also published a lot of his prose poems in the journal I was helping to edit, Harpur Palate. It’s funny that a former student of mine here at UNI, Hannah Carr-Murphy, ended up doing her PhD there, too, and she was responsible for digitizing all of Harpur Palate’s back issues. So you can read all of those old pieces by Sean if you want to. 
SEAN THOMAS DOUGHERTY: Yes, we met at Writing by Degrees, a graduate student creative writing conference in the 2000s. Jeremy was a student there, and I was teaching as a lecturer in Erie and working on my PhD dissertation for Syracuse University (sadly, I never finished it). I had a friend there, too: Cody Todd, who ended up dying a few years ago, and Joe Weil and Maria Mazziotti Gillan taught in the Binghamton program and advocated a poetry of life and dignity. I went back a number of years, and Jeremy and I ate, drank, and conversated. It was a nice time to be growing professionals. Jeremy was erudite and passionate about poetry and wrote in a day that I recognized the people in his poems from life. He was straight up and kind, as he still is. You could tell immediately from him a love of language and art and a belief in the idea that art can help us, teach us. That art could believe in us as much as we believe in it. 

Sean Thomas Dougherty

JO: Sean, I think it was your idea to write a collection of golden shovel poems. Can you explain the form and why you are drawn to it? 
STD: I was fascinated by the form ever since Terrance Hayes first published his invented form as an ode to the great Gwendolyn Brooks. Jeremy and I had been going through a list of possible ways to collaborate. We discussed a theme, the use of sonnets, etc. I can’t remember exactly how we decided on the golden shovels and Hearst. I think it just came out of brainstorming. I am also attracted to rigorous forms that require right line repetitions, such as sestina or canzone, forms I’d written in extensively. But the golden shovel is different, as it is also dialogic. It asks to use the source material of the end lines but not to erase them, but to speak to them. I approached the lines I used for each shovel as a kind of epigram. The end words become a kind of ghost epigram in dialogue with the poem we write, as well as part of the poem itself. I also love how it asks at the end to read that line vertically, which isn’t a usual way to read in English. 

JO: Jeremy, you were probably as surprised as I was when Sean sent us a fully conceptualized draft of this half of the collection. What was your initial response, and how did his writing inspire your own work on Dueling Shovels? 
JDS: Yeah, I have always been blown away by Sean’s writing, not just how quickly he seems to tap into his own kind of poetic genius, but how everything in his imagination accrues meaning and culminates into a revelation or deep insight about the world. When he shared his poems, I admit I was intimidated, but I was also inspired. I saw how his poems were so daring and humane. I didn’t want to try to mimic his style because, well, I think it would only turn out as a paltry imitation. But at the core, I felt like I needed to embrace poetry as sympathy, poetry as compassion and care. I was also really impressed with how he navigated the formal challenges of the golden shovel. It felt like he was almost confronting the form, daring it to keep his words from moving freely and fluently into the next line. It gave me courage to face the form myself. 

J.D. Schraffenberger

JO: Most of the source poems in this collection come from the work of Iowa farmer-poet James Hearst. Though the content of your poems is very different from Hearst’s, how did his work play a role in the poems that you wrote? 
JDS: I’ve taught Hearst’s poems a number of times over the years. I’ve read all of his poems, some of them many times. So I had a deep familiarity with what his work is doing. I also know about Hearst’s life, the context of his poems, and the role writing poetry played in his life. So it took a lot, actually, to distance myself from some of that analysis for the sake of making art. Because I was writing mainly about the death of my mother in these poems, it allowed me to work thematically away from Hearst’s life and work while also, oddly, honoring and integrating it in ways that might be subconscious. There are some poems I chose to quote from that are directly related to what I wanted to write about myself. “Mother,” for instance, spoke to me immediately. “End of the Game” is another because Hearst wrote it for his brother, who had died quite young. It also happens to end with a reference to their mother, so that worked out nicely. I was tempted to use Hearst’s poem “Man with a Shovel” as a nod to the form, but I ended up thinking that that would be too cute and might undermine the poem. 
STD: So many of Hearst’s poems at the core are tensions between landscape and human. So even though they are agrarian and my work is urban, it is actually quite complementary. Also, the language Hearst uses is a language of small words, often Anglo-Saxon in lineage, and devoid of much abstraction. His spiritual poems are not didactic but rise from the occasion of the moment. All of these elements speak to me deeply. So I approached the project as a dialogue with those themes of land and labor, birds and people, and beneath it all, the human spirit. 

JO: I’m looking forward to your joint reading on April 30 at the Final Thursday Reading Series (in the former house of James Hearst), and I know you both to be great performers of spoken poetry (fun fact: many years ago, when I was living in Boston, Sean was a regular at an open mic and poetry slam I used to attend. We didn’t know each other at the time, but I have vivid memories of his slam poetry.). How do you both think differently about your work when you are selecting and preparing poems for the stage? 
SD: I did not know that about the Cantab. How small the world is. That was a good time to be a young writer. Cambridge, Massachusetts, was such a vibrant space in the late 80s and early 90s. There was such energy and dialogue there at the Cantab, TT the Bears, the Middle East club, and good pints of Guinness and music at the Plow and the Stars pub. I rarely think of reading when I write but only afterwards. When I am preparing for a reading, I think of how to get to a place where the word opens the air. I think I’m more concerned with getting to the place where the veil is thin, where the language can take us to a place between word and breath that opens a door in the room, and together we all walk right through it. 

The Cantab Lounge

JO: Though I regularly went to the Cantab to see the house band, Little Joe Cook and the Thrillers, I actually saw you perform at this bookstore in Somerville, where the poet Patricia Smith co-ran a series with a poetry slam. What was the name of that place? You just ran down some of my favorite watering holes back in the day. I can't believe we never got into a good bar brawl together. I'm also pretty sure at least one of us was also hanging out at these bars with David Foster Wallace and didn't know it. 
SD: Jim that was The Bookcellar Cafe. They had the best selection of small press journals around. I used to spend so much time there. More people we probably drank with during that time: Ben Affleck’s father, who bartended at the Cantab. 
JDS: Oh, man, that’s so cool. I had no idea you saw Sean in Boston back in the day! Sean, your reading here in Cedar Falls a decade ago or so was my all-time favorite. You are such a great reader and performer. I can’t claim to be a great reader myself. I’m much more a poet of the page, but I am attracted to the stage, I guess. I like arranging a reading as an event, including music. For my last reading, in fact, as you know, Jim, I played piano and had a couple of friends playing sax and singing. I was also struck, years ago, reading the essay “Can Poetry Matter?” by Dana Gioia. He recommended that if we wanted to make poetry more vital in American culture, we should include other art forms in our readings. He also said that more poets should read other poets’ poems as part of their program. I’ve tried to do that over the years. In fact, the golden shovel form offers a perfect opportunity to acknowledge the past and the tradition while reading new work. 

JO: Are there any questions you want to ask each other? 
JDS: Yeah, I’d like to ask Sean what he thought the most challenging thing about writing in the golden shovel form is. To my mind, the hardest thing was trying to make my line breaks feel natural, or at least…comfortable. I was recently talking with my friend Eric Paul Shafer, a really terrific poet whom I’ve published a number of times in the North American Review. We were discussing line breaks and how you control them, how you can use them to your advantage. The golden shovel completely upends what I normally think about with line breaks! It’s similar to my aversion, or my inability to write sestinas. In that case, however, you get to choose your end words more carefully. 
STD: Jeremy, for me, the hardest part was not erasing the form, you know, working within the rigid confines of those end words. We couldn’t even add much variance. I find Sestinas and Canzones easier because you can vary the end words with words that rhyme or have the same sound or variance that includes a word. For example, in a sestina, if an end word is “city,” the next stanza it repeats, and I might use “multiplicity” as a word. But the golden shovel asks you not to do that so you can honor the sentence you chose from the poet’s work. So, I agree completely, it asks us to see the line breaks and end lines in a completely new way. As such, I found it generative as I had to open a new place in my imagination to find new tensions I hadn’t worked before between line, line break, and narrative propulsion and pause. Jeremy, how did this collaboration or form open you up to write such intimate poems about one of life’s greatest losses? In some ways, the project has such artificial parameters. What was it about those—or being in Mexico? Or both, that pushed you to write so powerfully about your mother’s passing?
JDS: You’re right to put it that way, Sean. I mean, the form really did open me up. I think it was exactly the artificial parameters that allowed me to hold grief and still be able to write, still be able to work at the craft of it. And then being in Mexico City was, in some ways, just happenstance. I had planned long before to go but had no intention of writing about my mother’s death. There’s something about being in a different country where you don’t really know the language, even if you know enough to get by. You end up being in your head a lot, which I think definitely contributed to these poems.

An Interview with Art Cullen

The March 2026 Final Thursday Reading Series features Art Cullen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the Storm Lake Times. He is also the author of the new book, Dear Marty, We Crapped in Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World (Ice Cube Press). 

The Final Thursday Reading Series takes place at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls, Iowa. There will be an open mic at 7:00 p.m. (bring your best five minutes of original creative writing). The featured reading starts at 7:30, and it will also be simulcast on Zoom. Click to register for a link. 

Interview by Sara Shannon. 

SARA SHANNON: Let’s start with the title of your book, which is a bit blunt and quite humorous, to say the least, but is perfectly in tone with your journalistic style. How did you decide on that title? 
ART CULLEN: Well, I was talking with another writer named Phoebe Wall Howard. We were at the Okoboji Writers' Retreat in Iowa, and she was urging me, along with Steve Semken, the publisher of the Ice Cube Press in North Liberty, Iowa, to write a book. We were talking about what the subject would be, and I said, “Well, Phoebe, we s____ in our nest.” We turned that subject into the title, “We Crapped in our Nest.” It became Dear Marty, We Crapped in Our Nest because I framed it as a letter to my old high school buddy, Marty Case, about how the town we grew up in 50 years ago is a much different place. 

SS: As Iowans, we are all too familiar with corn as our main cash crop, but this economic dependence on corn has led to overfarming the soil without properly returning the nitrates. In your book, you talk about the history of the Corn Gospel. Can you talk a little bit about how Iowans became economically dependent on corn? Do you think it is possible for a change in the crop market? 
AC: It is possible. In fact, it's going to be necessary for us to lessen our reliance on corn production in the Corn Belt, because of climate change. We simply won't be able to grow as much corn because it will be too hot during the tasseling period, so we will have to be comfortable with lower yields. We are already struggling with a large amount of 90 degree days during the detasseling season. Maybe we’ll plant oats, or grass for grazing, but we're gonna have to reduce our corn acreage by quite a bit just to stop the pollution of the Gulf of Mexico alone. Furthermore, we became dependent on corn because it's the most amenable crop to this climate. The tallgrass prairie is the ideal habitat to grow corn, which is a descendant of a grass plant called teosinte that was bred in Mexico 10,000 years ago and has been domesticated ever since. We became dependent on it because our climate and soils are especially well-suited to corn. But, following World War II, we were growing so much of it in such abundance that we had to figure out a way to get rid of it. Now, we're selling it into ethanol and export markets even though the price of corn keeps declining. We just keep chasing our tail because growing corn is all we know how to do, or it's all we're encouraged to do, by the agrochemical complex. But soon, we’re going to have to do something differently. 

SS: In your book, you talk about how Big Ag and the government is contributing to the decline in farmland, but you also talk about individual efforts in sustainable farming. How does independent farming fit into Iowa within the agricultural system? How does the system impact the environment? 
AC: You can operate as an independent farmer at the margins of this system. You can scrape by, kind of like we just barely scrape by as independent newspaper owners here in Storm Lake. You can have your small cow-calf herd and get by. But to prosper, you've got to participate in the ag supply chain, and if you're in Iowa, you're wrapped up in the hog, corn ethanol, and now egg complex. Iowa is now the number one producer of eggs. To really cash in, you have to participate in the system, whether it's through federal farm programs or contract payments with meatpackers or corn delivery with ethanol plants. That's where the money is. Not in selling lettuce at a farmer's market, but in hogs and corn. The problem is, we're producing so many hogs in Iowa, we just can't get rid of all the hog manure. It is a valuable fertilizer source, but it’s ending up in the Mississippi River. That’s the real environmental problem with us, hog manure and our insistence on chasing the pot of corn gold at the end of the rainbow. We could grow oats, sweet sorghum along rivers that soaks up nitrogen, grass or hemp for ethanol production. But we don't, because there's no money in it for Bayer, Pioneer, or Corteva. The money is in corn and herbicides and fertilizer for that corn. There's an entire complex built around the corn seed and hogs, and it needs both to survive. 

SS: This book is, as Ice Cube Press puts it, “the right book at the right time,” as it deals with some fairly complex topics such as political polarization, racism, climate change, and monopolies. How do you approach pacing when dealing with such a large topic? 
AC: What I try to do is concentrate on a place. In this case, I focused on Storm Lake, Iowa. It helps me frame all the discussions. All these big macro forces are at play in Storm Lake: immigration (Storm Lake is majority Latino now because of immigration to meat-packing plants), the strength of the dollar against other foreign currencies, hog production, food production, the pandemic, etc. That’s how I pace or frame stories: through the lens of Storm Lake, because that's how I understand the world. 

SS: Finally, this book has a call-to-action element. Many people today feel overwhelmed or despairing in our current political state and could use a good call-to-action. Keeping that in mind, what is one message you hope everyone takes away from reading your book? 
AC: Iowa is at an inflection point in a political, economic, and environmental crisis that's been building for the last 50 years. We've been hollowing out rural communities, polluting the water and the air, and consolidating all our economic enterprises so there's no independent ownership left. And I think people are actually getting fed up with it. They're getting fed up with walking out the door in the morning and smelling hog manure in the air. They're getting fed up with making half of what somebody makes in Minnesota or Illinois. They're getting fed up with book bans, and people treating gay people like they're criminals. I think we are seeing this on the national level as well. The fact that people are fed up with not getting their fair share is why Donald Trump got elected, and it will ultimately be his demise. Now, we're talking about how we can turn back and restore Iowa to what it was. This should be the richest, most prosperous place on Earth just by natural resources alone. And we've managed to crap in our nest. How can we recover what we've lost in Iowa? How can we restore that so that all Iowans share in this prosperity, rather than just a few?

An Interview with Jim O'Loughlin

The February 26 Final Thursday Reading Series features Jim O’Loughlin, who will be reading “Extension Cords,” standalone short stories set in the world of O’Loughlin’s science fiction novel, The Cord, a Midwest Book Award finalist. In-person attendees will receive a free Extension Cord publication, as supplies last. O’Loughlin is the founder of the Final Thursday Reading Series, which is now celebrating its 25th season. He also is an Associate Dean in the UNI College of Humanities, Arts, and Sciences. 

The Final Thursday Reading Series takes place at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls, Iowa. There will be an open mic at 7:00 p.m. (bring your best five minutes of original creative writing). The featured reading starts at 7:30, and it will also be simulcast on Zoom. Click to register for a link. 

Interview by Faith Okon. 

FAITH OKON: Your novel, The Cord, starts closer to the chronological end and then moves backward to reveal the story’s details. What inspired you to use a non-linear narrative structure, and how do you think it affects the reader's experience of the characters and themes? 
JIM O’LOUGHLIN: I was drawn to the structure of a reverse narrative because I feel it mirrors how we learn about the past, and how that knowledge informs our understanding of the present. As much as The Cord is a science fiction novel (set on either end of a future space elevator), it is also an intergenerational novel where characters have a past and a family history that impacts their lives. In the abstract, it can sound confusing, but I was really glad that many readers of The Cord found the reverse narrative to be a distinctive part of the book. 

 

FO: The story moves through time in a way that keeps the reader piecing things together. Was there a challenge in writing the story like this, and what did you hope the non-linear timeline would bring to the plot? 
JO: There were many challenges! I had to have a general sense of the whole narrative before I started writing, and I kept careful notes about details I needed to include later in the book based on what happened at the beginning. I also scribbled down a sprawling “family tree” to make sure I didn’t lose track of anyone (a version of that appears as a preface to the published version of The Cord). When it works (and I hope it does!), it has the effect of deepening your understanding about what you’ve already read. 

 

FO: How do you think the idea of the space elevator impacts the characters’ sense of place and purpose? Is it just a means of transportation, or does it symbolize something larger for them? 
JO: That’s a great question, but it doesn’t have an easy answer. The space elevator, and the capacity it brings for a kind of permanent colony orbiting the Earth, means different things to different characters because it can be used for many purposes—space exploration, energy generation, tourism, astronomy, military advantage. The novel shows the project’s early stages, what happens after an authoritarian takeover, and how a collectivist alternative emerges. Now that you’ve pushed me on the issue, I realize that it was important that the cord and the space station did not have an inherent meaning but could be made to mean many different things depending on how people used them. I think that is generally how I feel about new technologies, which can have great potential and can also be enshitified (to use the word of the moment). 

FO: What are the “Extension Cords” that you will be reading at FTRS, and how do they relate to The Cord? 
JO: The nature of a book like The Cord, with many narrators whose stories interlink with one another, is that there are always other stories that could have been told. Some of those stories are hinted at in the book, and some have come into my head since the book has been published. For example, without giving too much away, I can say that The Cord was written and published before the public release of generative Artificial Intelligence tools like ChatGPT. Since that time, our sense of what kinds of AI and future robots are possible has really been transformed, and that’s one issue I’ve continued to explore as a writer of science fiction. 

Eventually, I hope to bring out an expanded edition of The Cord, but for now I’ve figured out a unique and thematically appropriate way to present the Extension Cords, and if you show up on February 26, you’ll get to take one home with you. How’s that for a teaser?

An Interview with Daniel Umemezie

The 2026 Final Thursday Reading Series starts on January 29 at the Hearst Center for the Arts with a special event featuring the Cedar Valley Youth Poet Laureates, Lamya Pratchett (2024) and Daniel Umemezie (2025). Umemezie was also recently named the Midwest regional winner and will compete for the national title this spring. The Final Thursday Reading Series takes place at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls, Iowa. 

There will be an open mic at 7:00 p.m. (bring your best five minutes of original creative writing). The featured reading starts at 7:30, and it will also be simulcast on Zoom. Click to register for a link. 

Interview by Jim O’Loughlin. 

JIM O’LOUGHLIN: How did you start writing poetry?
DANIEL UMEMEZIE: I started spontaneously, really. I wrote a poem for a children’s day celebration when I was about 10 years old, and ever since then, I have written. Between the years, however, I had a hiatus from writing. This coincided with moving from Nigeria to America. And then I had a class with Michelle Rathe, and she convinced me to start writing again, and I owe a lot to her. The amount of growth I have had in the past years due to writing poetry has been nothing short of staggering, and I am constantly amazed at the way poetry impacts others around me, as well as the way my poetry has impacted people around me. I think it would be an understatement to say, "I am in love." 

JO: What stood out about your experience with the Iowa Youth Poet Laureate program?
DU: The biggest thing for me was the plethora of opportunities it brought and the chance to connect with other youth about poetry as a tool for change. I often encountered poets working in different modes, which complicated my understanding of how poetry operates formally and its many forms of impact on the world and society. 

JO: What tips do you have for writers who are just starting out?

DU: First, learn to cut everything you love that doesn't serve formal necessity. The hardest discipline isn't generating material, it's recognizing when your most compelling lines are decorative and when that beautiful metaphor is functioning as evasion rather than precision. Secondly, study formal constraints not as an exercise but as growing commitments. Don't adopt voice as persona or code-switching as decorative alternation between registers (some examples). Commit completely to what a given constraint reveals about the territory you are trying to explore. Read widely, not just to imitate techniques but to understand how formal innovation functions, noticing things like how structure enacts rather than describes meaning. Try to develop your own formal ideas before worrying too much about publication or audiences, and accept that your weakest work will come from inconsistency of execution, not lack of capability. The work will then be maintaining commitment when it would be easier to accommodate. Lastly, recognize that poetry isn't just self-expression; it's a world, a reality. Write realities into existence, and don't forget to have fun and play. 

JO: What hopes or plans do you have for the future (as a writer or in general)?
DU: I’ll always write, in some shape or form. But I want to major in aerospace engineering and minor in creative writing, continuing to write poetry, and eventually writing a poetry book and a memoir, maybe.

New Semester, New Poster!

 The Spring 2026 poster is set. If you want to get Zoom links for all the live featured readings, CLICK HERE.

An Interview with Adrianne Finlay & Rachel Morgan

Adrianne Finlay & Rachel Morgan

The November Final Thursday Reading Series takes place one week early due to Thanksgiving. It is a special “Sudsquicentennial” event as part of UNI’s 150th anniversary celebration. Authors Adrianne Finlay and Rachel Morgan are also the proprietors of Semisweet Soaps, an organization that sells handmade soap to raise money for type 1 diabetes research. The evening will feature artisan soaps combined with short literary pieces. In-person attendees will receive a free sample of their work (as supplies last), and other Semisweet offerings will be available for purchase. 

The Final Thursday Reading Series takes place at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls, Iowa. There will be an open mic at 7:00 p.m. (bring your best five minutes of original creative writing). Finlay and Morgan takes the stage at 7:30. The featured reading will also be simulcast on Zoom. Click to register for a link.

Interview by Jim O’Loughlin.

JIM O’LOUGHLIN: Can you explain how you two decided to start Semisweet Soaps and what your work with it has entailed?
RACHEL MORGAN: After my son was diagnosed, I read a lot of medical literature about diabetes, and started a blog, called Semisweet. Adrianne had been making soap for a little while, and encouraged me to try it. We’re both creative people: writers, knitters, so soapmaking was another natural creative project for us. One Saturday morning, Adrianne said, “Hear me out…” She pitched using the Semisweet name, combining forces, and making soap to sell, so we could donate the proceeds to type 1 diabetes research. In 2015, we hosted our first open house, and now it’s 10 years later, and we’ve donated over $8,000 to type 1 diabetes research. Specifically, we’ve donated to Beta Bionics; Breakthrough T1D (Formerly JDRF); Spare a Rose, Save a Child; and Faustman Lab

ADRIANNE FINLAY: I started making soap in 2013 when my wonderful mother-in-law declared Handmade Christmas, which is a great idea. The only trouble was, it was declared in November, so I only had one month to figure out a handmade gift for everyone in the family. I made a few rules for myself regarding this task: the gift had to be consumable, it had to be useful, and it couldn’t look like it was made by a drunk monkey. In my search, I stumbled on handmade soap, something that felt both useful and luxurious. And yes, that Saturday morning I texted Rachel and said, “I have a really good idea…” Then I walked over to her house with my “hear me out” pitch. 

JO: It wasn’t the plan when this event was scheduled, but, appropriately, November is Diabetes Awareness Month. What should people be more aware of when thinking about diabetes?
RM: My world was rocked when my son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at 3 years old. T1D is an autoimmune disease, and there is no cure for it. To stay alive, folks with type 1 diabetes have to do the job of a pancreas, which means regulating their blood sugar with either sugar or insulin. In someone without type 1 or 2, your body keeps your blood sugar between 70-140. Numbers below 40 could mean seizure or death, and numbers above 200 could mean damage to the eye, kidneys, and circulatory system over time, or acute coma and death if the numbers are high enough. Basically, if you have type 1 or know someone who has type 1, these realities are always in the back of their mind. This is to say nothing about the price of insulin, one of the ten most expensive liquids on earth. I have so much to share about T1D history and advocacy, so ask me out for coffee and we’ll talk.
AF: I’ve learned a lot about type 1 since Rachel’s son was diagnosed. Our kids have all grown up together, and we even live across the street from each other, and I’ve witnessed the challenges faced by the parents of a kid with type 1 and the challenges facing the kids themselves. If we were going to be making and selling soap anyway, it was important to me that it be for a good cause. 

JO: Can you describe the soap-making process for both of you?
RM: One of my favorite kinds of soap to make is castile soap, which is a very mild soap made from 100% olive oil, and it has to cure for an entire year before it’s used. At a minimum, cold processed soaps take about 4-6 weeks to cure, so before we have a soap sale, we have to plan ahead, and getting some of the ingredients, such as lye, can be difficult. Once we have everything, it’s a process of exact measurements, temperature monitoring, and basically mixing lye water into a combination of oils and butters, then pouring soap into molds. My favorite time to soap is in the fall, when the temperatures and humidity are lower.
AF: Rachel’s castile soap is great. It’s probably the most gentle soap out there. The process of soap making isn’t complicated, but it does require care: goggles, thick gloves, even closed-toed shoes. When my kids were smaller, I’d make sure they were out of the house before soaping, both because of the caustic smell of the lye and the danger of it. Now, I’m a little more comfortable with it all and enjoy the focus it requires and the satisfying results. A little lye water and some oils and, through the magic of chemistry and saponification, a whole new compound is formed: soap! It’s pretty pleasing. 

JO: Okay, you knew this question was coming. You are both creative writers. Is the soap-making process at all similar to the work you both do as writers, or is it wholly unrelated?
AF: As a writer, I think one of the reasons I like soapmaking is because it’s satisfying in a completely different way. I like baking too, and that’s similar. There’s no revision in either process: the final product is what it is, and it feels clear and straightforward. Not a lot of subjectivity, unless I guess we’re picking which scents we like best. It can be fulfilling, as a creative person, to do something that, while it does require attention and focus, does not need the analysis, judgment, and intuition that is essential to creative work. Kind of like giving my right-brained self a rest.
RM: Well, there’s math and chemistry in soapmaking. In writing, a great portion of the process is revision. If I’m working on a poem and an ending isn’t working out, I can put the poem away and come back to it later for revision. So much of soapmaking is very specific: measurements of lye, water, butters, and oils. Also, in cold process soapmaking, it’s done at a certain temperature, which you have to monitor. If the chemical process goes wrong, there aren’t revisions, like in writing. 

JO: What do you like best about soap making?
AF: I think I can answer this for both Rachel and me. Each of us loves engaging with the community and seeing the people we’ve known for years as well as anyone new who comes to buy our soap, and we love that it’s all going to fund type 1 diabetes research. We hold an annual Semisweet Holiday Open House in my home before the holiday season. We have snacks and socializing, and people come to buy our products. Not just soap, but lip balm, lotion, sugar scrub, and more. It all makes fantastic holiday gifts and stocking stuffers. No one is unhappy to receive a beautiful, locally made product that goes to a good cause. We welcome everyone, and if you’re interested, we’ll be at 519 Iowa Street in Cedar Falls on Sunday, December 14th from 1:00 - 6:00 p.m. Stop by, we’d love to see you!

An Interview with Ted Morrissey, Brady Harrison, and Grant Tracey

The October 30 Final Thursday Reading Series features a live recording of the podcast A Lesson before Writing with co-hosts Ted Morrissey, Brady Harrison, and Grant Tracey. Morrissey is the author of numerous books, including the award-winning novels Mrs. Saville and Crowsong for the Stricken, and the publisher of Twelve Winters Press. Harrison is a scholar of Western American literature whose creative work includes the books A Journey to Al Ramel and The Term Between: Stories. Tracey is the author of the just-released novel, A Shoeshine Kill, the fourth book in the Hayden Fuller Mystery Series, and Fiction Editor for the North American Review. 

The Final Thursday Reading Series takes place at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls, Iowa. There will be an open mic at 7:00 p.m. (bring your best five minutes of original creative writing). The featured reading/podcast begins at 7:30 and will also be simulcast on Zoom. Click to register for a link.

Interview by Faith Okon. 

FAITH OKON: How did you three decide to start this podcast? What keeps you coming together for these conversations?

TED MORRISSEY: I know it was my idea or at my instigation, but I’m not exactly sure what got me thinking about it in particular. The three of us got together in the same physical space the first (and only, so far) time in Albuquerque, for the Southwest Writers Conference (in 2021, I think, or 2022) and had a blast talking about writing and books, etc. So doing a regular podcast would give us the opportunity to get together (remotely) and have those same kinds of conversations. I delayed starting it for a while because I thought I’d need special equipment, and software, and know-how. But then we started doing Zoom readings to launch books, and I realized we could use that technology to do a podcast. At first, I thought we’d just do a YouTube-based podcast, but some early watchers encouraged me to expand to other platforms, so I added Spotify and Apple Podcasts. I really enjoy our conversations and look forward to them every month.

BRADY HARRISON: The podcast! When Ted proposed it, I thought, sure, why not? What could be better: we get together once a month to talk about books, writing, publishing, journals, teaching, and more: what’s not to like? I look forward to catching up with Ted and Grant, and I especially like the old school, DIY feel of it: we have a topic in mind, but we also let the conversation go where it will, and we don't worry too much about tech or glam. (Grant and I were raised on punk, and back in the day, he used to invite me to sit in on his punk rock radio show, “The Spirit of ‘77,” and it feels like we just picked up where we left off: talking about the things that matter to us.) What I like most about the podcast: being in community with Ted and Grant and our listeners.

GRANT TRACEY: I just love hanging out with the guys and talking art. In the past few years, I’ve delved into writing a series of crafting crime articles for the North American Review’s Open Space platform, and when we get together, it expands my base of knowledge for future articles and helps me appreciate the work editors do. From both Ted and Brady, I’ve learned to have a greater appreciation for experimental literature and works that demand a lot from their readers. Brady’s new novel, A Journey to Al Ramel, is absolutely amazing, and it works on two levels: it’s accessible storytelling and has a sturdy adventure plot line, but it’s also rich in meta detailing, allusions, and connections to other works. And Sean Flynn shows up. How cool is that? 

FO: Throughout your discussions on the podcast, you’ve covered a wide range of topics related to writing and literature. How do you decide what themes to focus on for each episode?
TM: I select the featured story that we do in each podcast. Often times, though, I have in mind something Brady brought up or something Grant brought up in a previous episode, and that leads me to select this story versus that story. In the days leading up to a recording, one of us may jump on our text thread with an idea that we may want to talk about. Sometimes we actually get to that idea, but many times we don’t. The conversation just veers off in a certain direction, and we go with it. I teach creative writing for two different universities (undergrads for one, MFA students for another), so I’ll come up with ideas I want to talk about based on things that come up in my classes. Both Brady and Grant have a wealth of teaching experience, so I’m always curious how they might respond to a particular issue. In sum, the featured short story we’re going to talk about (recently published in a lit journal) provides some structure, and we have a vague idea of things we might want to address. But really, it’s free-flowing, and we never know for sure what we’re going to talk about. We never run out of things to say; we always have to cut off the episode.

BH: It’s just as Ted says: in the days leading up to the podcast, we’ll text back and forth: we should talk about X, or Y has really been on my mind of late (as I’m wrestling with a story or working on a novel or getting ready for classes), and we fire ideas back and forth and we sometimes get to them during the podcast and often we don’t. I like the energy of the conversation and the way things take on a life of their own. We have scores of topics we’d like to discuss about writing and writers and publishing and idea leads to idea—half the fun for me is how much I learn from our conversations. Most of all, I hope that our listeners get lots of ideas and practical advice about writing and publishing.

GT: I’m always blown away by what Ted and Brady have to say about the featured story for each podcast. They’re so smart and kind and empathetic to the work. And their genuine excitement creates an energy ball that we all toss around the room with vigor. It’s very cool. I always come away a richer man for having the conversation. I’d call our talks structured improv. We have a format, we have an opening topic, and then we riff. Sometimes, alas, I jump the gun and start talking about the featured story ahead of scheduled programming (because there’s something in the craft I want to get on Front Street and explore), much to the consternation of the fellas. LOL. 

FO: Have the discussions you’ve had on the podcast impacted your own writing or creative work? If so, how?

Ted Morrissey

TM: I find our conversations very stimulating. I get ideas for things to read and writing techniques to experiment with. Also, I’m forced to articulate things I have in mind but have never really fully grasped myself. Thinking through concepts and sharing them with these guys helps me to make those concepts more concrete and more useful. One specific example: I have a poetry collection coming out in 2026, and I thought about including a glossary with the collection. So I asked Grant and Brady what they thought: yes, glossary? No, no glossary? We had a really fascinating conversation about the pros and cons, and Brady and Grant came down on opposite sides of the question. Their feedback was really helpful (I’ve decided no glossary).

BH: Great questions. Just as Ted says, I learn from our conversations all the time. Every month, I get a chance to listen to really experienced writers talk about craft, and how to shape scenes, and how to handle dialogue and showing versus telling, and so much more. More, and as Ted also says, our conversations force me to think through and articulate (on the air!) my own practices and approaches and ideas. When I’m working on my own stuff, I often think: how would Ted handle this? How would Grant? I get to learn from deeply experienced and extraordinarily well-published writers, and it’s all for free! Best of all, it encourages me to keep evolving: we all have different approaches and philosophies, and I’m absorbing ideas and strategies all the time.

GT: Ditto to what Ted and Brady said. I’ve learned to have a greater appreciation for complex, experimental work. Moreover, Ted models, in my mind, what a good editor should be. If you like the work, publish it. Enter into the editorial process, but don’t hijack it. Respect the work and approach what you’re going to publish with humility, aligning yourself with the artist’s vision. In terms of my own writing, I learned that less can be more. By that, I don’t mean minimalism; I mean don’t try to create uncertainty for the sake of placing the readers in uncertainty. In my fourth Hayden Fuller novel, I got a little carried away with em-dashes at the end of every paragraph of dialogue, and I used free indirect discourse a bit too freely. I didn’t see my own flaws, but during one podcast, I went on and on about how I like the featured literary story for that week and how the writer mixed vivid prose with complex characterizations. The prose was clean, easy to follow, but dynamic. A few days later, Ted contacted me and said, kindly, “About that—your stories want to reach the truck drivers and the literary-minded, and I’m afraid they’re going to be confused by all the literary pyrotechnics on display and give up. I’ll publish the book as it is, but I want you to think about it.” I took the note, thought about it, and, in a final pass through of A Shoeshine Kill, made several changes for clarity. I think it makes the book much better. 

Brady Harrison

FO: What have been your favorite episodes or topics to discuss? Looking ahead, what are your plans for the future of the podcast?

TM: The only episodes that have been themed have been our October episodes, which have a Halloween-inspired theme. We talk about Gothic books, movies, and techniques of writing Gothic fiction. It’s a howling good time. Otherwise, we don’t have themes for our episodes. We talk about whatever comes up. In March, we’ll be at AWP in Baltimore. It will be the first time for Twelve Winters to have a booth at AWP. We probably won’t record an episode while we’re there, but we’ll interview various writers and use that material for bonus episodes (which we do from time to time).

BH: Agreed: I love the Halloween episodes. I often teach a course on the Brontës and the Gothic, and I can’t wait to talk about Gothic fiction and frights with Ted and Grant. More broadly, I also really enjoy discussing the stories that Ted selects. We cover a range, from very traditional to experimental, and some we love, and some we like less, but whatever the case, we dive as deeply as we can, in the time available, into the thematics and craft of each story. And, for the record: there’s a lot of truly astonishing work going on out there, and we’re glad to do what we can to spread the word.

GT: I love talking hockey, whenever we can talk hockey. 

Grant Tracey

FO: Is there any question I should have asked but didn’t? If so, can you ask and answer it?

TM: I talk to my students about the importance of writers having a community—other people who take writing and publishing as seriously as they do. Quite honestly, Grant and Brady are my community. They’re really the only people in my life who have such similar interests and experiences that I know they can relate to my goals and aspirations, my frustrations, my little victories. Their souls tick to the same rhythm, the same vibrations as mine, and that’s really important. I’m delighted to be their publisher but even more so to be their friend and colleague.

BH: Absolutely: why won’t Ted let Grant and me talk more about hockey during the podcasts?! (Just playin’, Ted! Grant and I grew up in Canada, so we come by our love for the game quite honestly.) I’ll close by agreeing with Ted: what’s best about the podcast, and working with Twelve Winters Press, is the community: we love books and stories and we love talking about writing and publishing, and we’re on each other’s side: I can’t wait to hear what the guys have been up to since we last met and to hear more about their ongoing work and publications and more. We may never be famous and rich, but we do get to do what we love, and I hope that that shows in the podcast. To quote Austin Powers, it’s all very groovy!

GT: I really love these guys. It’s a treat to get together and rap. I think we’re all simpatico, kindred spirits. We care about art, each other, our students, and all those aspiring writers who are tuning in. We respect and listen to each other (we don’t always agree), and I learn something from every episode. And I think we’re all humble. We talk about the need for writers to have rhino hide to keep going, and I think that’s our goal: inspire others to keep going, keep writing!!