Lia Purpura’s essay, “My Dog Doesn’t Know It’s Her Birthday,” appears in the Winter 2025 issue of The Southern Review. Here, she discusses ways of knowing, the roughness of cared-for language, and the imperative of forming relationships in an imperiled world.

Halley McArn: As the narrator of this essay stands on the edge of Lake Bemidji, she tries to name the beings in her midst. Yet naming these beings—beetles, loons, aspen trees—doesn’t bring her closer to experiencing their sensations. How do you define the difference between naming and knowing?

Lia Purpura: Wow, this is really central for me—getting close to the experience of others, and to ways of knowing and being that bypass conventional forms of understanding, recognizing the integument that exists between humans and the other-than-human world. As partial as it is, language can make some forays here, do some carrying work. I’m not inclined to lament the “uselessness” of language—that’s not an especially interesting or spiritually rich response for me, to work from lack, or failure, or self-consciousness. Language moves me to a certain point, glances, touches on, then bounces off … it functions more like light than scalpel or hammer. More like wind’s movement than an interstate’s. If human habits of mind like taxonomizing and “assessing” are anxious and potentially dangerous, then prepping to be known-to or known-by might show us more reciprocal ways of moving around in the world. We moderns are beyond late in recognizing or admitting to kinship. I want to be part of the efforts of so many (in all fields) to revoke the supremacy of our ways of knowing and admit experiences that are, more and more, becoming recognizable to us—like all the “languages” spoken by the mycelial world, the patterns and intelligences of oceans and plants, the quietest and least seen …

HM: The narrator is aware that forces can overtake shapes “for purposes entirely their own.” Some of these purposes seem tied to present needs—filled-in lakes, docks launching tricycles for a fee—while others seem an inevitable part of life—the pain in her dog’s paw, the need of the gingko to pass on its genes. What is your purpose when you start an essay?

LP: I’ve always felt aligned with E.M. Forster’s famous line: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” It describes so well the weird combination of presence and distance involved in writing. It’s almost primordial—that initial unselfconscious sketching, followed by the surprise—sometime shock—of reflection. My purpose at the outset of writing is to remain patient—to linger with the inklings, and to fully give over to curiosity. Maybe that’s more a practice than a purpose by now. Questions at the outset of a walk, or when sitting to write, are often as simple as, “what’s that one insect doing to that other insect?” And, “what’s this response in me—that joy, that flinch—all about?” Of course, I have Big Concerns and issues and rages and urgencies—but those are all written into, sort of snuck up on. I can’t start off armed with a subject—I need to find my way into conversation anew, every time.

HM: The narrator tries to console her dog “in the language of peanut butter treats.” Despite this shared language, the narrator cannot take her dog’s cut away, nor can she feel the cut for herself. How do you consider the wounds which we share but do not comprehend?

LP: The absolute aliveness of others (humans, sure, but even more so, the other-than-humans) that I am present to but cannot “understand” is a profound reality to me. And because I’m a writer, I nudge up to it in language. Which is humbling and natural and my fate and partial and stunning and redemptive and not nearly capacious enough for the depths of possible relationships—but it’s what I have to work with.

HM: You achieve so much momentum and clarity in these two lines: “I walk along the shore. / My chest fills up with loon.” How do you find the paragraph breaks in your essays?

LP: Oh, I think of paragraph breaks more like line breaks. My writing life began in poetry and I work on essays and poems at the same time, publish on both tracks, ride both rails simultaneously. In poems, I’m always working with the presence of the sentence, its meanderings and interruptions, and in prose, I’m always working with the shadows of poetry’s open space and breaks and sound patterns. That sense of breath, of allowing for silence and breath and pause in an essay feels like a natural way to give shape to, or to direct the pace of, thought and image.

HM: I take a lot of comfort in the quotations the narrator shares:

Where was I going I can’t

go to now, unless hurting?

 

Where am I standing, if I’m

to stand still now?

What thinkers and writers most influence your work?

LP: So this excerpt is from Denise Levertov’s stunning short poem “The Broken Sandal”—a poem that, as I say, passes along its question to the reader, to us, to what feels like, a next generation. It’s almost as if the questions she came to, about how to BE and ACT—are so clear and useful that the poet is handing it over to us for our own wounded moment. More and more I feel I’m very consciously writing in conversation with my elders; their words enter directly into my work these days. It’s a hunger for wisdom, a way to actively connect to a heritage. I call on them. Call them in. I recognize this, too, as a wildly different practice than the Anxiety of Influence script so many of us were given—that need to best others, the drive to solo, to “break” new ground, or mark territory that’s your own—rather than behave in a choral kind of way, acknowledging a community. A real lack of ecosystemic thinking there, and a privileging of individual achievement.

In that spirit, rather than cite individuals, I’d like to say a little about a way of being on the page that I love—I mean, one of the characteristics that moves me—it’s those so called “flaws” that accompany really adventurous, curious, deep-moving risk-taking work—poems and essays. It’s so entirely human to go a little off the rails, lose-and-regain, meander, over-write, scatter within a work or within a collection. I’m not talking about “dud” pieces, I’m talking about moments

where the writer is working-through and the oddness is necessary to the whole, actively moves the writer along into some kind of discovery. It’s a hard notion to describe but it’s when the cleaning up of something would wreck its strange heart, or create static points rather than live moments—all of which are necessary parts of the whole. Maybe it takes a little forbearance on the part of a reader (in the land of poetry, Walt Whitman requires it, and so does Emily Dickinson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins at times). I’d rather move through some roughness, or have my reading pace torqued a little, than have a thing tidied and message-y or fall into the hands of someone with a mind for topiary, kicking all the organic duff out of the way.

HM: I’ve been lucky enough to read, and thoroughly enjoy, your essay collection, On Looking (Sarabande Books). Every time I sense myself understanding what one of your essays is about, I’m plunged into an entirely new configuration of meaning—as if I’m learning how to be inside an idea as it unfurls. What is your process for finding the shape of an essay?

LP: Oh, I love that, “learning how to be inside an idea”—what a holistic way to think about reading. And writing. You know, often when I teach, I hear myself saying something like, “okay, stay with me here, I’m en route …” by which I mean to reassure folks that I’m rounding back, taking a turn, gathering up related stuff and yes, I promise, moving toward an idea … but real discovery can’t be compacted, can’t be taken from its necessary trails and meanders. So the “shape” of an essay is not a single “method” as much as patience with the actual movement and accretion of perception/thought/feeling. Every sensibility has its wobbles and needs to be tended and stewarded in particular ways—so I’m pretty alert to moments where density and weight might overcome or obscure shape.

HM: “Because I love that sensation,” the narrator writes of the sun on the ginkgo tree’s leaves, “I see the same in them.” I find this sentiment so sincere: that even as the experience of others expands beyond our perception, we can still reach into the unknown. Why is it important that we see ourselves in the world around us?

LP: Because the world sees us! We are being responded to all the time, even if we can’t touch into that, imagine it, and more and more it seems, against all wisdom, don’t value it (at our peril—and the peril of the other beings, including the elements, we’re taking down with us, who are talking talking talking endlessly to us). Whew. Now, though, the enormity of the situation—in the form of climate ruin—is daily upon us in incontrovertible ways. As I’m writing this, Los Angeles is burning. But there are relationships to be built, still and always. Ways of answering and interacting, loving and communicating that are not end-stopped by ruin. The micro relationships that art makes possible, those intimate moments—cultivating them, teaching their value, speaking about them—will help shift perception at large. Cared-for language is a way of valuing these relationships, imagining into possible ways of being for, and being with, others.

HM: How does being in nature inform your writing?

LP: I live in Baltimore, in an area where green space is at least accessible—green space is a complex subject in a city and it’s the marginal, overlooked, and degraded areas that draw me—compromised creeks that are still homes (to herons and foxes and crayfish); wooded sides of highways seeded with trash that work as archeological sites; scrappy, persistent urban forests; city streets that hold evidence of the lives conducted along them. These spaces feel sacred to me as my home ground, as my land, even as they’re challenged and suffering and making do. I’m part of a number of local greening and restoration efforts—forest stewardship, tree planting and maintenance, community farming and food justice work with others. I want to work exactly where I am with what I’ve got—it’s another way of asserting that we are not at all separate from our land, and not separate from the other beings that live here. And of course, what we do to the land we do to ourselves. Art doesn’t merely reflect the Zeitgeist but changes it, offers ways of imagining that create the conditions for change, and maybe even more, a sensitivity toward the need for change, a taste for it, which I’m inclined to call hope.

HM: What upcoming projects are you most excited about?

LP: I feel a sense of profound urgency about the state of the world, and I’m having to figure out ways not to be clobbered by the enormity of the tasks and responses required—and the losses. I’m hardly alone here—it’s the condition of anyone working in any art form today. I’m about halfway through a collection of poems and a collection of short form essays. “My Dog Doesn’t Know It’s Her Birthday” is one angle on the interests of the essays at large, which include relationships with the other-than-human world, the holiness of decay (and our inevitable participation in the natural cycles), how we might imagine into future ways of caring. A few months ago, I started sewing (literally, I mean, with red thread) into the breaches and openings, the breaks and cracks of natural objects like milkweed and wasp nests and icicles (posted on Instagram—my first foray!). This work is informing my writing, in conversation with it in ways I only barely understand at the moment. I do know that simultaneous art practices feed all kinds of internal conversations and questions. I’m watching to see where all this new work is going together.

Lia Purpura has authored books of essays, poems, and translations. A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for On Looking, her awards include Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Fulbright Fellowships. Her newest collections are It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful and All the Fierce Tethers.

Halley McArn is the editorial assistant of The Southern Review and an MFA candidate at Louisiana State University with a focus on prose writing. She’s served as the Poetry and Nonfiction Editor for the New Delta Review and as an editorial assistant at Speculative Nonfiction. You can find her work in Bright Wall/Dark Room.

Joanna Pearson’s story, “Bold Moves”, appears in the winter 2025 issue of The Southern Review. Here she discusses transcendence, scathing narrators, and what writing helps us understand about ourselves.

Halley McArn: Sylvie’s anxiety about giving a reading as a feminist poet in the Deep South is palpable! Why did you choose to set this story at a Christian college in Houston?

Joanna Pearson: Most of my writerly choices start as instinct—and that’s certainly how I first landed on the setting in “Bold Moves.” But the more I worked with the story, the more it made sense to me that a Christian college in the South would absolutely be the right place for Sylvie to end up. Discomfort is productive in fiction, so I knew it would make for a richer situation if Sylvie felt ambivalent about her escape from the preexisting discomfort in her home life. (It would have been an entirely different story, I think, had she flown off to a glamorous awards gala in Manhattan, or gave a big reading at Harvard!)

I’m interested in the way that religion has landed in the crosshairs of our current political and cultural moment. An institution’s religious affiliation can signal a range of things—although I’ll admit that, like Sylvie, I can be prone to make some reflexive assumptions. In the purest sense, I think religion serves our desire for connectedness and our longing for something transcendent. That’s also what poetry offers Sylvie—though she still has angst about it. I believe it’s what literature, at its best, offers all of us. I like this clash, the dirt and grime of lived experience (much like the dirt and grime of the Houston setting, the slightly uncomfortable position of such a college) butting up against something so hopeful.

HM: One of my favorite aspects of this story is how well Sylvie understands people. Her descriptions seem to reduce the people in her midst to a funny, perhaps unfortunate, but compassionate core. By what process do you get to know your characters?

JP: Oh, I love your description of Sylvie’s descriptions, especially the “compassionate core.” You might have put your finger on it. The compassionate core! But I believe it might require a certain ruthlessness to get there? I’m honestly not totally sure how it works when I attempt it, but when I think of other short story writers I love—Flannery O’Connor, Lorrie Moore, Edward P. Jones, Yiyun Li, Eudora Welty, to name a handful—I see how they (and their characters) observe others with scathing accuracy, with such a gimlet-eyed honesty that it’s downright vicious. And yet, it’s also somehow loving, if that makes any sense? These authors are so, so, so interested in how people work. They’re just as hard on the parts of themselves they inject into their characters—by which I mean, they are equally hard on themselves. No one comes out unscathed, but that carefulness of attention is also a gift, you know? It’s sometimes brutal, but I love it.

HM: Sylvie is aware of the way she projects her feelings onto other people “out of her own insecurity.” Yet there are certain moments, like when she assumes two characters are having an affair, when she’s right on the money. Why did you choose to inject moments of doubt into her narration?

JP: Oh, but it’s so human, isn’t it?! The way we can sometimes assess a situation quickly and accurately based on little information other than an intuition, and then other times, the way we can utterly misread something because we’re seeing it through the lens of our own preoccupations. I think both phenomena happen—perhaps even more so in a sensitive person. The fact we can be so good at these assessments from time to time is a little dangerous; we can start to trust our initial impressions too much. To her credit, I think Sylvie knows this. Therein lies the doubt.

HM: Billy, Sylvie’s husband, describes Sylvie as “a beguiling mystery,” but both Sylvie and I have to disagree! As much as her moves are “bold,” they are understandable. How do you strike a balance between interiority and action in your fiction?

JP: Ha, I agree with you and Sylvie! Anyone can seem like a beguiling mystery when we are first falling in love … then the mystery diminishes … and then, if one is lucky, I think the mystery—and appreciation—deepens again.

I sure hope I strike that balance between interiority and action. My husband, writer and beguiling mystery himself, talks about this idea of balancing mass and propulsion in a narrative. I think about that a lot. I want to accumulate mass (description, interiority, backstory) so that things feel textured and real, but I also want propulsion. I find that if I can capture my own interest, it’s usually a good clue that things are moving but the story world is also fully realized.

HM: Though Sylvie struggles with Billy, she still seems amazed by the fact that they found each other in the first place. “What were the odds, really,” she considers, “that you would ever meet anyone with whom you might want to share a life, make a home?” How do you hope readers, by seeing the world through Sylvie’s eyes, reconsider their commitment to other people?

JP: I’ve been accused of overusing the word “simpatico,” but I think it’s a great word because it captures the magic of when you find someone, be it a dear friend or a romantic partner, with whom you truly relate. Though lots of people are pleasant, it’s just rare enough to find another truly simpatico person. What a lucky thing when it happens! I’ll grant that Sylvie has a lot of flaws, but I think she appreciates that fact—and would want others to appreciate it as well.

HM: As an MFA student myself, I appreciated the care with which this story explored the complexities (and hilarities) of the academia-adjacent literary world. What was it like to write a story from the perspective of a writer?

JP: Ha, it’s so fun. I realize there’s an ouroboros-type danger to poets writing ars poeticas, novelists writing novels about novelists, but I like to believe my cheat code is that I tend to write fiction about poets. I feel a great fondness toward characters who are writers—they care deeply about something I care deeply about, too! I also feel entitled to poke fun at them a little bit, in the same way I’d poke fun at myself. I can fill these characters with all my own ridiculousness and neuroses, perhaps even to an exaggerated degree. I recall MFA life fondly (so I hope you’re enjoying it!)—it’s such a brief, charged time. But I suspect I might still find it so interesting partly because I’m now no longer a part of academia, so it’s a world I’ve stepped away from.

HM: How does your experience as a psychiatrist inform your writing?

JP: If you talk to enough people—and if you talk to any specific person long enough—you can sort of start to understand how anyone might do anything. People who seem pretty unlikeable, even odious, at the outset can start to become much more sympathetic. This is a perennially useful concept for me as a writer. (It’s basically the opposite of my experience, say, looking at internet comments, or any other glancing interaction with the public at large, which often fills me with a bleak, irritable, impatient view of humankind.)

HM: Sylvie says that she used to be more concerned with style. How has your writing changed over your career?

JP: I guess the biggest change is that I used to write poetry, and now I exclusively write fiction! I frequently wish I’d studied the craft of fiction more formally (my MFA is in poetry), but there might be some advantages to wriggling one’s way over from another genre. I got a little jaded about poetry, whereas I maintain an amateur’s enthusiasm toward fiction. I just really enjoy it—in this pure, exuberant, totally uncool way! No one ever explained certain rules to me, which workshop stories were overdone, how we’re all supposed to be obsessed with Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son or whatever (good book, but I’m not obsessed), so I can do whatever I want and be gloriously unfashionable about it—and sometimes that works out!?

HM: What are you working on right now?

JP: I’ve got a manuscript for a third story collection that I’m trying to tie up (this story is a part of it!). I’m also trying to get traction on another longer project.

Halley McArn is the editorial assistant of The Southern Review and an MFA candidate at Louisiana State University with a focus on prose writing. She’s served as the Poetry and Nonfiction Editor for the New Delta Review and as an editorial assistant at Speculative Nonfiction. You can find her work in Bright Wall/Dark Room.

The Southern Review is pleased to announce this year’s recipients of the Oran Robert Perry Burke Awards for Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Literary Translation, as well as the James Olney Award. These annual awards, established and funded by the generous support of donors, are presented to contributors in recognition of an exceptional work that appears in the previous volume year. Our congratulations to the winners!

The recipient of the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Fiction is

Victor Wei Ke Yang

for the story, “Chicken,” from our winter 2024 issue

The recipient of the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Nonfiction is

L. I. Henley

for the essay, “Dispatches from the Ridge,” from our spring 2024 issue

The recipient of the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Poetry is

Julie Hensley

for the poem, “Hard Mast,” from our autumn 2024 issue

The recipient of the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Literary Translation is

Ryan Choi

for the translation of Natsume Sōseki’s poems, “II” and “III” from our spring 2024 issue

The recipient of the James Olney Award is

Kevin Prufer

for the poem, “Memory,” from our winter 2024 issue

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Adam Stumacher’s story, “Supercharger,” appears in the Autumn 2024 issue of The Southern Review. Here he discusses the need for speed, the similarities between teaching and writing, and how the COVID-19 pandemic reveals our most profound vulnerabilities.

Halley McArn: Jordan seems most interested in getting a supercharger so that he can boost the speed of his car as quickly as possible. Why is this the car part he most wants?

Adam Stumacher: Research is central to my writing process. When I am writing outside my identity and experience, as I am in this piece, I want to do so with humility. I want to put in the work to get the details right. For this story, I took a deep dive on, among other things, the psychology of race car drivers, the physics of cornering, and the particulars of street racing modifications. In my research, I became fascinated by the supercharger, which I came to see as a concrete object that represents Jordan’s desire to escape or transcend everything that is holding him back.

I’m always interested in characters who are motivated by strong desire. I’m particularly drawn to characters whose desire includes complex and contradictory elements. Over the course of writing, I came to understand that while Jordan thinks what he wants is speed, what he really wants is the anticipation of speed: that perfect moment of stillness before you hit the accelerator.

HM: How does your experience as an educator shape your writing?

AS: I’ve been working in urban schools for more than two decades now—first as a teacher, then as a school leader, and now as a leader in an education nonprofit. For years, I experienced a tension between my identities as a writer and an educator: am I a teacher who writes in his spare time? Or am I an author who teaches as his day job? Both teaching and writing require everything you’ve got, if you’re doing it right. So how could I possibly do both?

In time, and in my better moments, I’ve come to understand these two facets of my identity feed each other in important ways. As an educator, I am a huge believer in the power of stories to build connection and community—whether it’s in a classroom, a faculty, or a school district—and as a writer, I find that most of my work draws inspiration from what I know best: the world of schools. Urban schools are often misrepresented in popular culture through myths such as the White savior, the hero teacher. What I try to do is depict the world of schools as I have experienced it, with all its messy nuance. So it turns out the work I do every day, which I used to think was holding me back as a writer, is my material—it’s central to what I have to say about the world.

HM: We see the virtual space of the pandemic through TikToks, Reddit threads, and complaints about Zoom class. What was it like to write about the onset of the pandemic from the perspective of a 17-year-old boy?

AS: I spent the pandemic at home with my family, supporting teachers and principals over Zoom, and it quickly became clear the kids were not alright. This was especially true for students in high-need districts like Boston. Remote school was hard for everyone, but my family had the privilege of parents who could work from home and support our kids through the process. This wasn’t the case for many, and as always, it was the most vulnerable among us who paid the steepest price. In this story, I wanted to imagine this reality, and at the same time, to explore a character who isn’t defined by the forces that seek to constrain him.

The seed of this piece was a news story I read about the uptick in street racing during lockdowns. I was struck by how these racers were defying so much about this time, taking wild risks when so many of us were staying inside paralyzed by fear, sanitizing our doorknobs. I’m fascinated by characters who go against the grain, and I was intrigued by what motivates people to get behind the wheel and risk their lives. This was the question that drove me into the writing, which for me always works best as a process of discovery.

HM: This story is so rooted in Boston, naming the streets, interstates, and neighborhoods where Jordan drives. Yet he almost feels out of place when he drives, like he’s blurring the landscape. How is writing about driving different from writing about place?

AS: I love this question. This piece is very much about a specific place at a particular time. It is part of a larger project, a linked story collection centered around a single setting. I want, in this project, to complicate the received images of the city of Boston, to get beyond the Red Sox and the colleges and the cobblestone streets and engage the complex heart of the actual city as people experience it.

In some ways, writing about driving is not so different from writing about place—both involve the strategic selection of details to convey a sensory experience to the reader. At the same time, as you allude to, driving is a form of placelessness. Your question makes me think that this might be the story of a character who wants to escape that setting through movement. That the blurring of the landscape may, in fact, be what Jordan craves when he gets behind the wheel.

HM: The worst thing it seems one could be in this story is a “bitch,” or completely consumed by fear. Fear seems to drive these characters into dangerous situations—like street racing—yet it also protects them from real dangers—like falling victim to a racially discriminatory justice system. How does Jordan come to accept his fears in the course of the story?

AS: I was thinking a lot about fear as I wrote this story. In part because, as I mentioned earlier, the pandemic was a time of such acute anxiety, and the act of street racing is a direct contradiction with that emotion. This doesn’t mean that Jordan is fearless. He is too smart not to be scared. He is constantly navigating the tension between being taking risks and being reckless, especially if he wants to keep Thuy in his front seat, not to mention survive.

You’re right to point out that fear is useful in, for example, helping avoid being destroyed by our racist criminal justice system. There is no margin of error for Jordan, like so many kids I have worked with over the years. That is also something I wanted to explore with this piece, the fact that the same people who took such enormous risks, risks so out of step with the dominant ethos of the times, were often the most vulnerable.

HM: I was moved by the connection Jordan makes between the images of the women in his life and plants. This character seems to crave the potential nourishment and interconnectedness of relationships while being unable to seek them. Why do you end the story on a scene of him racing alone rather than with Thuy?

AS: In the images of plants—as well as the animals who were starting to take over the streets during COVID-19 lockdowns—I was thinking about the sense of disconnection with the natural world so many people in cities experience. During the pandemic, I spent as much time as possible outdoors—it was a major way I coped with the stress and uncertainty of the times. I was aware how fortunate I was to have the woods right behind my house, and I wondered how people surrounded by concrete survived.

But I love this idea of connection as nourishment, which feels exactly right to me. In the end of the story, Jordan is alone because his journey is about coming to terms with his isolation. This is, in many ways, a story about loneliness. While he craves connection, over the course of these pages, he comes to recognize he is on his own. Even though he is racing alone in the car, he is imagining a future at the finish line with Thuy, and then Candace Glover, so he hasn’t given up hope for connection.

HM: What are you working on these days?

AS: As I mentioned above, this story is part of a new project, a set of interconnected short stories that center on the same fictional high school, South Boston High School, which is referenced briefly in this piece. Many of the stories are set in the school and narrated from the perspective of teachers or administrators. Others, such as this one, stray from that setting to explore the lives of parents or students, such as Jordan, beyond the school walls. The stories are arranged chronologically, with recurring characters. Both Thuy and Dante have stories centered around them elsewhere in the collection.

The pandemic cuts right through the middle of the collection, just as it cut through so many of our lives. I find it interesting how few stories or books about this period have been published, almost as though we are engaged in a collective effort to forget it even happened. Maybe it’s a trauma response, or perhaps it’s because staying inside and wearing masks isn’t particularly dramatic. Part of what drew me to this particular story was that it felt like a fresh way to render what was, for so many people, a period of boredom and isolation. My hope with this piece, as with all my work, is to complicate what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “a single story.” This kind of tangled complexity is, I believe, what fiction can offer.

Halley McArn is the editorial assistant of The Southern Review and an MFA candidate at Louisiana State University with a focus on prose writing. She’s served as the Poetry and Nonfiction Editor for the New Delta Review and as an editorial assistant at Speculative Nonfiction. You can find her work in Bright Wall/Dark Room.

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