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All three of us are poets and professors. We all also write prose. Our jobs rely on and live in words. And yet, there are no real words to describe our complicated emotions about this anthology. On the one hand, we are grateful that it exists. On the other, we are mortified that it exists. We are pleased these amazing poems and responses are out there in the world; we are horrified there are increased reasons for them to be in this book.

We feel similarly about the opportunity to write this essay. We are thankful Powell’s has given us this forum; we are saddened that just a few weeks ago there was another deadly shooting in a church, making this anthology tragically relevant...

Six months out of my MFA program and 60-odd pages from completing my first-ever draft of my first-ever novel, I read (while — confession time — procrastinating on said novel) a glossy lifestyle piece on buying your second home first. I don’t remember the particular magazine, but I do recall irritation hitting me with all the subtlety of the magazine's perfume samples. Part of it was the conveyor belt narrative at the article’s center: you start out, you scrimp for a down payment, you buy your first home, you’re lucky and rich, you get luckier and richer, you buy your second home and drink your gin and tonics on its twilit veranda...

After having walked alone to the South Pole for 50 days and nights under the midnight sun without uttering a word, raised my three daughters, worked as a publisher for 21 years, and spent the last 18 months writing the book Silence in the Age of Noise, I have come up with the following three observations: The basic state in our brain is one of chaos. An abundance of activities leaves us with a feeling of experiential poverty. And we are living in the age of noise.

The reason that it took me so long to understand this is that my days in Norway often pass on autopilot. I sleep, wake up, check my phone, shower, eat, check my phone, and head off to work while I am checking my phone...

What do Star Wars, Kill Bill, The Matrix, Pacific Rim, and Big Hero 6 — several of my all-time favorite films — have in common? 

They are examples of internationally successful American story franchises that owe their originality, sense of fun, and straight-up awesomeness to something very particular: a deliberate, imaginative, and ultimately loving blend of Western and Eastern story elements. 

Take Star Wars, for instance. In the 1960s, a young George Lucas was strongly influenced by the films of that titan of Japanese cinema, Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa himself was a fan of Western literature and movies, and directed remakes of Macbeth (Throne of Blood) and King Lear (Ran), but embedded them in Japanese history and culture...

As a novelist, I’m drawn to stories concerning the impact of sudden change. Under the pressure of large upheaval, reversals of fortune, losses, and societal disruption, people reveal their true natures, perhaps hidden even from themselves. Why are some able to keep their balance, while others fall under the steamroller, or discover new strengths and unconsidered new paths? People said of the Russian poet Mayakovsky: “He walked into the revolution as into his own home.” 

I first met Marina Makarova (Ma-KAR-ova) in the early 2000s. She was a minor character from a novel that failed, a Russian exile living in California in the 1920s. With that novel safely boxed away, I made Marina the protagonist of a short story, “Room 721,” which appeared in the journal Black Clock...

One of the reasons I’ve loved writing about jellyfish for so many years is that jellyfish evoke unending examples of metaphor. Jellyfish are angelic in their transparency and grace. Jellyfish are demonic in their sometimes fatal sting. They are ancient ghosts of the past. They are harbingers of ecosystem destruction. The way jellyfish swim is like our breath, creating a low-pressure region that pulls them through the sea. The timing of their pulsations is controlled by a neurological node called a pacemaker, just like the neurological node that controls the beating of our own hearts. In other languages, jellyfish are likened to living water, bad water, itchy water, curdled water, the ocean’s tears, the sea’s bride, and the mother to all of the sea...

I have been writing for 35 years, and have written 23 books. I often don’t even know what the book is about until it’s been published and the reviews come out. The creative process is a mystery to me. In the last few months, I have been editing and revising the English translation of my latest novel, In the Midst of Winter. This has given me the opportunity to think about creativity and try to unravel its mysteries. Good luck with that!

There are stories in the air: they exist all around us, and they need to be told. I apply some skill, hard work, and attention to the subtle connections between people and events to that raw material and, with some discipline, my books come to be...

I have been camping on the same small patch of scrubby beach every summer since I was in utero. Ever since the days when my parents didn’t need inflatable beds, sleeping instead on flat green mats, their backs feeling every bump in the earth. In those days, the campground was filled with young people who turned up in minibuses and danced naked around fires. I might be imagining the last part, but I like to think of them spinning on the freezing tip of the site, those dunes where the rough illusion of civilization gives way to stones and sea. I can see them very clearly, wearing stout boots but otherwise bare, their hair twisting in the coastal wind...

We love fairy tales, we always have. These are the stories that grabbed our attention when we were young readers, and then hooked us anew when we were older and discovered their darkness. We’ve always been fascinated not just by the stories themselves, but by the bones underneath — by how those bones stay the same when you clothe them in different costumes or shapes, and by how, in a retelling, the heart of the stories remains the same. Retellings allow us to explore new truths, to tell the stories we want or need in a particular moment, using structures that are intimately familiar. We have played with them, explored them, read them, and retold them over and over again. And we know we’re not the only ones who feel this way...

Two years ago, archaeologists made an astonishing find. Working in the backcountry of Great Basin National Park in Nevada, they came across a rifle leaning against a juniper tree. This was not just any rifle — it was a Winchester Model 1873, a repeating rifle known as “the gun that won the West.”...In 1882, that particular gun might have been deployed by the US army against Native Americans who were being purged from their homelands; by Native Americans who had acquired it in trades; by settlers; by trappers, miners, hunters, homesteaders, cowboys, travelers, and anyone else who had a need...