"Colorado Review" Magazine: A Discussion with Stephanie G’Schwind and Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

New Books Network

Stephanie G’Schwind is the editor-in-chief of Colorado Review and the director of the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University. She has edited two anthologies, Man in the Moon: Essays on Father and Fatherhood and Beautiful Flesh: A Body of Essays, which won the 2018 Colorado Book Award for Anthology.

Harrison Canelaria Fletcher is the author of Descanso for My Father, Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams, and Finding Querencia: Essays from in Between. Besides being G’Schwind’s fellow nonfiction editor at Colorado Review, he’s been an editor at Shadowbox, Upstreet and Speculative Nonfiction. He teaches at Colorado State University and Vermont College of Fine Arts.

All four of the essays from recent back issues discussed in this episode involve identity, place, and survival. The first is “Who Lives in That House” by Emily Winakur. For her the home operates on the level of being a dream about the self, what matters, what the risks are, why it is that a party of our brain is devoted to memories and specifically a sense of place. As a psychologist, Winakur uses her curiosity and concern for her patients to serve almost like a home inspector, making sure they’re safe. In turn, Shze-Hui Tjoa’s “The Story of Body” concerns a mind-body split that causes the author to mostly describe herself as a distanced, alienated “Body” and “Mind” that struggles under parental demands to become an exceptional musician. In Sarah Curtis’s “The Ghost of Lubbock,” she’s not a musician, but her dad is; in fact, he played with Buddy Holly and wrote “I Fought the Law” among other notable songs. But who is her dad, really: the stage performer, or the quiet guy who deflects questions? In Jarek Steel’s “Nesting,” confinement and becoming are the dominant motifs. As a pregnant 19-year-old, she occupies a “garbagehouse” of a place, but transforms herself into a man who can look back at a very primal, vulnerable part of life and put the pieces together.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc.

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