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.