The Latest from 

CSUP Creative Writing

A. Rafael Johnson delivered a dynamic reading to a packed house at CSUP on October 14, sharing electrifying excerpts from his novel The Through and his forthcoming collection For You, Why Should I Cry: Stories, which will be published by Texas Review Press in 2027. You can order The Through, a finalist for the 2018 Minnesota Book Award, here: The Through.  

Johnson is a writer, educator, consultant, public speaker, and the author of Absinthe Party at the Fly Honey Warehouse, UNOFFICIAL, and the Whorizontal column at Whoopsy! Magazine. He co-authored Creative Evaluation & Engagement: Essentials and was a staff writer for the Austin Live Show. He teaches creative writing at The University of Denver and The University of Nebraska at Omaha.

One of our creative writing teaching assistants, Sam Atencio, had the opportunity to talk to Johnson about his work. 

SA: Are there any themes that you feel span across your body of work, or that you feel the most excited or interested in examining through your writing?

ARJ: Depends! Theme-for-the-reader or theme-for-the-writer?

Theme-for-the-reader is an underlying message in literature about the human condition. The fascination of literature is that different readers can read the same text and discover different themes. Theme-for-the-reader arises equally from the text and from the reader’s interpretation of the text. The writer shares control of theme-for-the-reader with casual readers, critics, historians, editors, librarians, and everyone who engages with the text. But that definition assumes the text has already been written. It’s not very helpful to a writer trying to get the words on the page in the first place.

Theme-for-the-writer is a consequential truth the reader can’t find anywhere else. Some true thing the writer saw - perhaps never witnessed by anyone else. Or theme is a particular reading of the world, a lens the writer develops through narrative choices that shows the reader lives and experiences they never knew about. Theme-for-the-writer arises between the author and the text. Theme becomes a dream, a feeling, a thread to pull. That’s something we can write down.

So what themes-for-the-writer excite me right now? I’m currently working on a short speculative memoir and a novel that involve alternate versions of the self. If we got a chance to revise our own lives, how would that turn out? What ‘mistakes’ create who we are now, and what ‘successes’ hold us back?

SA: How does the world around you influence your work, and if so, in what ways?

ARJ: Writing is inspiration, creativity, empathy, and trust. Writing means peering into dark places, listening to silenced voices, finding the vulnerable, and telling the truth. Writing means holding a sacred trust, because the act of reading is a profound act of intimacy. The reader trusts us to devise a text where they can see a part of themselves. The reader trusts us to supply the words they don’t know how to say, to name their fears and taboos, to make sense of the horrors of war, depredation, abuse, even death. Writing can bear witness, reveal hidden truths, commemorate successes, mourn what’s lost, and explore identity, language, and narrative.

If writers have any task in society it is this: to imagine what does not exist and bring it into being. If we can no longer imagine a world without pain, a writer will imagine healing. If we can no longer imagine a world without cruelty, a writer will imagine caring.

SA: When you're working on a piece, how do you balance your personal experience with making sure the work is also relatable for readers?

ARJ: After The Through came out, I did a reading and interview with Lissa Jones on a Black radio station in Minneapolis. The building itself was mostly empty, except for me, Lissa,, the audio engineer, and two custodians. After the interview, I was outside waiting for my Lyft when Lissa ran out to me. She’d just heard the most extraordinary conversation. The three Black men in the building - all about my age - had listened to our interview and all opened up about suffering childhood sexual abuse. Hearing me talk about it gave them the words to say things they’d never said to anyone.

Here’s the thing - I had no clue that was going to happen. I’d like to say that I wrote for a specific audience with a purpose in mind but I didn’t. I tried to understand the truth of the characters and write that down. But I had no idea whether I’d succeeded until I heard about that conversation.

SA: How do you work best? What aspects of your writing process do you feel are most important?

ARJ: Writing has to be a sustainable part of my life. I have four kids, an aging parent, friends and family, plus a new job and a new city to learn. I’ve never been in a position where I could only concentrate on my work until it was done. So I write when I can - sometimes just a sentence or two on my phone, sometimes voice notes, sometimes little scribbles during a meeting. But I save every bit. When I have time, I add it all up and often find that what seemed scattered and disconnected was my subconscious working out parts of the same story.

SA: What advice would you have for burgeoning writers?

ARJ: There are almost no rules that can’t be broken in fiction. Just about every piece of advice ever given to writers has huge, glaring exceptions. But here are three rules that can’t be broken as far as I know:

1. Read. Read everything you can get your hands on. Read fiction, poetry, art books, cookbooks, anything and everything you can find. One of my favorite characters came from a chapter on composting in a gardening book.

2. The manuscript always wins. Some writers decide what the book will be before they write it. If that works, great! But if it doesn’t, don’t try to force the narrative to be something it’s not. You will either develop writer’s block or write the worst book of your life.

3. Place one word next to the last word you wrote down. Then stop.

CSUP Graduate Cathrina Jakeman (English '26) recently published a new micro-chapbook entitled Aftercare, which was released by Shadow and Sax Press. Jakeman is a staff writer for The Lycian Magazine, with work published in The Afterpast Review. Her debut chapbook, Why I Bite, was published by Bottlecap Press in 2025 and is available here: Why I Bite. 

Below is an excerpt from the book's beautiful opening poem entitled "How to Sever Your Spine." Order it here: Aftercare.

i. Wisdom Teeth

If it wouldn’t open my stitches,

I'd spend my whole life running

my tongue over the same

empty socket.

I’d make the mistake

of considering my scaffolding
in line with my spine,

or by mistaking it as mine.

Our jaws prove we were once alive—

full of prehistoric teeth made to

tear through thew too tough to swallow.

Sometimes, I have phantom pains in my soft palate.

It shoots through my veins deep into my brain

and when I'm finally amaurotic,

eyes bubbling with static,

I see you—

pulling my teeth out.

I am awake as you slice my gums open

with our kitchen scissors

and I am awake

when you drop the blade

and walk away from the open wound—

heirloom bad blood gone septic from tetanus.

Nothing sits right anymore.

I flinch at how I learned

to hold my mouth open

just the way you liked.

I tremble at the thought of you

trying to extract the

true shape of my harm.

I resent you

for correcting
my overbite.

It settles

into my gums

and becomes

wisdom.

One of our creative writing teaching assistants, Emily Olonia, had the opportunity to talk to Jakeman about her work. 

EO: What is the inspiration behind Aftercare?

CJ: Aftercare actually came together in a way that was very different from my first chapbook. I was contacted by Ryan Di Fresco, the EIC of Shadow and Sax Press after publishing work in a few small online magazines. He asked me to send work for consideration, so I sent around ten poems, and they selected three for what became this micro-chapbook.

Once I knew which poems they had chosen, I started thinking about how they existed in conversation with Why I Bite. That book is all about hunger and longing from that hunger, so I wanted to move away from those themes (although admittedly, my work always tends to end up there). Interestingly enough, the poems in Aftercare (“How to Sever Your Spine,” “I’m Afraid I'll Be Sad Forever, So I Wrote This,” and “How an Easy Girl Wins Lotería”) began to feel like an addendum to that book, they spoke about what happens after the bite, when the hunger is sated, and your stomach starts sitting heavy.

And, admittedly, I also thought Why I Bite followed by Aftercare was a funny title progression.

EO: How does it vary from your other works?

CJ: The biggest difference is probably that I didn’t construct Aftercare from the beginning as a manuscript. The poems existed independently first, and the publisher selected three pieces that they felt matched. Because of that, I had to look at the poems they chose and discover the relationship between them afterward.

That process made the book feel almost accidental in a way I really liked working through. Why I Bite was much more consciously built around recurring ideas and images. Aftercare is smaller and more concentrated, and I think there is something interesting about allowing three poems to speak to one another without over-explaining the connection.

EO: What part of the writing process was the hardest to work through?

CJ: Once you call something a collection, even a micro-chapbook, readers begin looking for relationships between the pieces. I had to stop thinking only about what each poem meant individually and start noticing what repeated across all three. These poems, in reality, are about what happens after a rupture, but also about being forever changed by that rupture.

With that, more in this book than my other, I hit a very serious tipping point in writing personal work where I was able to create enough distance from the experience to treat it as material. Eventually the question was less “What happened?” and more “What is the poem wanting to happen?” That is always fun.

EO: Can you describe the work that went into titling your chapbook?

CJ: The title came fairly quickly once I started thinking of the three poems as being in conversation with Why I Bite.

I liked the idea of Aftercare functioning almost literally as an addendum to that book. If Why I Bite is concerned with the bite itself, then Aftercare asks what happens afterward. What do you do with the wound?

There are also so many associations in the word “aftercare”: medical care, emotional care, sexual aftercare, recovery. It implies both tenderness and the fact that something happened that required tenderness in the first place. This body of work is much more tender and less abrasive than my last, so it also felt fitting in that way.

EO: Are there any authors you're inspired by that impacted this work?

CJ: This work was unlike any other I've done because there was no planning or “syllabus” to follow when reading up before creating a product. The biggest inspiration I think I can attribute to it was just from the writing I was reading at the time, which was primarily Marianna Enriquez and Fernanda Melchor. Their imagery was something I definitely wanted to put my foot in the ring with. For, “I’m Afraid I'll Be Sad Forever, So I Wrote This,” I was trying to mimic Melchor’s run on sentences in a big block of text like she does in her book, Páradais. In my triptych, “How to Severe Your Spine,” the second poem, “Heartwood," was very much inspired by one of Marianna Enriquez's short stories, “Under the Black Water.”

More broadly, I’ve always been attracted to writers who let tenderness and grotesqueness be enmeshed with one another. I think that kind of tension is one of the most consistent things in my writing.

EO: How did you begin to think about writing a chapbook?

CJ: My first chapbook, Why I Bite, developed because I realized I had accumulated a group of pieces that were repeatedly returning to the same obsessions. With Aftercare, the book revealed itself after they had been selected, but still all grouped around a similar theme.

In that way, I’d say I'm a very thematically consistent writer and I also prefer to work at larger scales. There's something satisfying about working with multiple pieces at the same time. I think of it like a tapestry; connecting threads from work to work to create something bigger. The kicker I think is that the way I work, all the threads are being moved at the same time. I often write pieces as a companion to others while still making sure they relate to all the pieces as a whole. The gist of it is I have 2 or 3 poems that I think can be bigger, not by lengthening them to get my point across in a single piece, but by creating a whole body of work that is my point. It feels more significant to me and is always more fun to me than laboring over a single essay for 6 months until I deem it “perfect” (which I am known to do).

EO: Post-college, how has your writing style or process changed?

CJ: College gave me a very built-in writing life. There was always something to do, something that constantly gave me reasons to produce new work. I floundered for a bit without that (3 months, no new work for 3 months!).

I think I’m much more obsession-driven now. Instead of writing because I have to bring something to a workshop on Thursday, I tend to notice when a subject refuses to leave me alone and then follow it for as long as it remains interesting.

I’ve also become more comfortable trusting strangeness, and my revision process has become more destructive in a good way, too. I’m much more willing to cut something apart if I realize that the thing I thought the piece was about is not actually the most interesting thing happening inside it.

EO: Is there anything else you wanted to talk about that I didn't ask you?

CJ: A note: I think one of the most exciting things about Aftercare is that I didn’t really know I was making it until someone else saw the possibility of a collection in the work. Keep writing and someday someone somewhere will see it.

Poet Michele Battiste delivered a dynamic reading from her work, notably focusing on her latest book The Elsewhere Oracle, to a packed audience as part of the Southern Colorado Reading Series on Thursday, September 17. (You can order the book here: The Elsewhere Oracle.) Battiste is the 2026-28 Poet Laureate of Lafayette, Colorado. She is also the author of four poetry books (and an oracle deck!): The Elsewhere Oracle (Black Lawrence, 2026), Waiting for the Wreck to Burn (Trio House, 2019), Uprising (Black Lawrence, 2014), and Ink for an Odd Cartography (Black Lawrence, 2009). She has also published several chapbooks, including Left: Letters to Strangers (Grey Book, 2014). Her poems have appeared in dozens of literary journals, including American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Rumpus, Memorious, and Women's Studies Quarterly, among others. Michele has taught writing workshops across the US, and her career has been supported with grants, fellowships, and residencies from Blue Mountain Center, Good Hart Artists Residency, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Wichita State University, the Center for the American West, the Jerome Foundation, and the NY State Senate. She lives in Colorado where she works for The Nature Conservancy, raising money to tackle climate change and protect nature.

One of our creative writing teaching assistants, senior Sam Atencio, recently had the opportunity to talk to Battiste about her work. 

SA: Are there any themes that you feel span across your body of work, or that you feel the most excited or interested in examining through your writing?

MB: I always find myself starting with—or coming back to—place. When I decided on the title for my first book, Ink for an Odd Cartography, it became pretty clear to me how much I ground (ha!) my work in place. The poems in that book map the communities I lived in, particularly San Francisco and Wichita. I’m a narrative poet, and setting is an important part of narrative, so maybe that’s why I care so much about place. But I think it’s more than that. Place is a part of us. We are changed by place. Experience is shaped by place.Documenting the material world and its influence has always been important to me. Lately I’ve been working with the immaterial world—the mystical and the divine. But place is important there, too, even if it’s an invented place.

SA: How does the world around you influence your work, and if so, in what ways?

MB: Ah, I already answered this a bit, but I can dive a bit deeper. The older I get, the more the natural world astounds and awes me. It is my church and my asylum. To be outdoors in nature is to be in a liminal space, a space between worlds, between earth and water and sky. A space between what has happened and what will happen. There are so many possibilities. Countless. I wouldn’t consider myself a writer of eco-poetry because I think that implies a certain kind of intent, but I do think that if there’s any magic in what I write, it comes from nature. 

SA: When you're working on a piece, how do you balance your personal experience with making sure the work is also relatable for readers?

MB: When I was in my 20s, I wrote to express internal and personal truths and experiences that I thought might offer a unique perspective. That started to feel like a broken bridge. Like a place where there could be a connection, where I could see the other side but couldn’t cross. So in my 30s, I thought the best thing I could do was witness and document the experience of others, and I wrote Uprising, which was a collection of linked poems about the post-WWII Soviet occupation of Hungary and the 1956 revolution. It didn’t do very well. I think because it was so focused on the other side of the bridge, but the bridge was still broken. It didn’t connect the two sides – the personal and the universal. In my 40s, I returned to my own experiences, but sought out the universal elements of them, and I ended up with a book about loss and separation and sorrow. And I think I finally got the bridge. But now, I don’t want a bridge. I don’t want to cross it. I want to stand in the middle of river, another liminal space, and I want to write books that bring the reader in the middle of the river, too.

SA: How do you work best? What aspects of your writing process do you feel are most important?

MB: Revision is the most important part of writing. For me, that’s where the art happens. The drafting, that’s the clay. Or maybe the marble? The revision – that’s the shaping, the carving, the slow and recursive process of creating something remarkable. Drafting—that’s the accumulation of language and ideas. Revision—that’s reaching for something alchemic, something magical.

SA: What advice would you have for burgeoning writers?

MB: Write what brings you joy. Even if it’s terrible. Because if it brings you joy, you’ll get better at it. You won’t stop. You won’t be able to avoid improving and eventually writing something amazing. And if it brings you joy, it will bring others joy (even if the way they experience joy is through a good horror or slasher story). And don’t let any criticism stop you. You can listen to it and use it to get better, but don’t stop. There is no deadline to becoming a good writer. No benchmarks or milestones. You’ll get there. Go your own way.

Poet & professor Dan DeVaughn joined the faculty at CSUP this fall. DeVaughn is the author of The Passion (Omnidawn, 2028), and he received an MFA from the University of Oregon and PhD from the University of North Texas. He will be reading as part of the Southern Colorado Reading Series on Thursday, October 12 at 1:00 pm in the LINCx on the library's second floor. 

One of our creative writing teaching assistants, senior Sam Atencio, recently had the chance to talk to Dr. DeVaughn about his work. 

SA: Are there any themes that you feel span across your body of work, or that you feel the most excited or interested in examining through your writing?

DD: I grew up in the church, so my perennial themes are the same as a lot of other poets working today, and I suppose American writers going back to Dickinson, Whitman, Thoreau—God, faith, the soul, and the ways that language and nature inform, even construct, these really big, seemingly all-pervading ideas. More specifically, it’s fascinating to me how non-human organisms—deer, for example, or trees—often overlap in our cultural consciousness with the supernatural and ideas of the holy. Non-human or “sub-human” creatures become equated with transcendent, “higher” ideas or realities. There’s something in that that has to do with emergence, I think, how form and deep, human meaning can emerge from simple matter—for example, a song from a piece of resonating wood, the call of a bird, a flower, even human speech. I’m not walking around constantly thinking about these ideas, but the more I write, the stranger, even miraculous, language and the sounds of speech seem sometimes. But certainly poetry for me is a way to satisfy a certain need I have for holistic, radical meaning. Oddly enough, that tends to come from what is stubbornly material—nature—probably because it is non-human and beneath, or outside of, culture.

SA: How does the world around you influence your work, and if so, in what ways?

DD: The people (and animals) around me, and who I grew up with, influence what I write more than anything else. I read the news, of course, and see the way the world is tending—what a mess it seems—and politics, the environment, history, and other ethical considerations are certainly forefront in my mind most days. Whenever I consciously try to write, let’s say, “topical” poems, though, I tend to get in trouble. What I mean is they’re usually not as successful as the poems that simply come from personal experience, a feeling I’m having, a forgotten memory that occurred to me while cooking, or whatever happened as I was walking my dog yesterday. So, I end up writing about the deer we see trying to cross the road, the wild turkey he likes to chase, the creek by our house, that kind of thing. Probably because these places are sources of solace and calm, I find it easier to write about them, to sort of free associate into them, through memory and imagination. Oftentimes in those associations, I end up thinking about childhood, family, loves ones, those human bonds that have actually sustained me throughout my life, even if I like to imagine, selfishly, that I need is trees and a good trail with a nice view at the end of it.

Also! The writers I read, and friends of mine who are writers affect my own work tremendously. Poetry is having kind of a moment right now, which is wonderful, so it’s in the air and in the media I consume. This influences my own perspectives and style in ways I probably don’t even consciously realize.

SA: When you're working on a piece, how do you balance your personal experience with making sure the work is also relatable for readers?

DD: In the beginning stages of a new piece, a first draft, I try to think as little as possible, or not at all, about the reader, my imagined audience. I believe that the best writing comes from feeling something, then attempting to communicate that feeling, ideally as it’s happening, but at least your clearest recollection of it. Even that attempt to remember the feeling, on the page, can be fascinating in itself, and a lot of great poems are just that, a la Wordsworth’s emotion recollected in tranquility, using the page as a place to reconstruct a felt experience, even to make it into an altogether new one. Once you’ve got that first draft down, though, and assuming that it didn’t come out fully formed and “perfect,” it’s all a matter of time. By that, I mean you have to allow yourself time and space to leave that page, to forget the written thing, then come back to it later and gauge the quality of what is there with all of the feeling, intuition, and critical faculties you can muster. You become your own best audience in this sense, but it’s not a quick process by any means. Writing something new should be as low-stakes as possible—a kind of play, a game, an experiment or exploration. Revision is high stakes, but it need not be rushed. The gift you should give yourself, and the writing, is time.

SA: How do you work best? What aspects of your writing process do you feel are most important?

DD: My ideal writing environment is not quite cut off from the world, but it’s close. There’s a place I like to go in North Georgia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, and when I’m working there, the solitude is visceral. You’d have to walk for quite some time to encounter anybody. I know I’m really alone, and I find that when I know that, and when I also stow away the computer and phone, I can write in the way I want to, which is actually a lot of sitting in silence, “doing nothing.” I guess it’s pretty cliché, but when I’m there, I sit in front of a big window on the other side of which are a couple of rhododendron trees, and beyond those, pine trees, and I try to write, long-hand, as much as I possibly can, with little to no regard for my inner critic or second thoughts. When I’m not writing, I stare out the window. Someties it’s beautiful; sometimes it’s very boring, but the boredom is necessary to reach that open, receptive, truly relaxed psychological (and physical) state that leads to having good ideas and thinking clearly.

So, I suppose I’d say that real solitude, with no distraction—space in which to be “bored”—is the most important part of my writing process. Other than that, mindfulness meditation is incredibly important for me. It’s a kind of reset button for my brain and nervous system. Without it, I don’t know if I’d be a writer at all. Probably I would, but the process would be far more laborious and agonized.

SA: What advice would you have for burgeoning writers?

DD: Read, and read what you actually enjoy reading. Read the books that make you feel something and that speak to you on an existential level. It’s good to read as a writer, to learn technical proficiency, what good writing looks and sounds like, and what is en vogue currently. But it’s crucial to build one’s personal canon, and those are the books that speak to you on a human, personal level, like a letter you’ve received from a faraway country. These are the books that, when you read them, you feel as if you’re being let in on a secret, being instructred on how to live, what it feels like to be alive, and how to give back to others who are also alive. This connects to what I said earlier about my upbringing in the church. I think I first went to literature for the same reasons I would read the Bible, or go to church services, or pray. I wanted truth, guidance, to learn how to live, and to come into contact with something truly durable and most alive. That, or simply a voice, to feel connected to a presence. So, my advice is to find the books that feed those needs in you, and if there’s something you want from the world, or want to see in the world, but you can’t find it, then write that thing into the world, or at least your desire for it.

CSUP is proud to host The Howl, a monthly open mic night, led by senior Marika Guthrie.The next installment of The Howl will be on November 20 from 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm in the LINCx on the library's second floor. This event is free and open to the public, and refreshments will be served. 

Haley Newman, our creative writing teaching assistant, had the chance to talk to Marika about The Howl, and their conversation is below.

HN: How did you come up with the idea for The Howl?

MG: I’m a very grateful recipient of The Reisher Scholarship given through The Denver Foundation. As part of my scholarship, I am participating in the Community Impact Certificate Program. This program encourages scholars to give back to their communities through projects that have a lasting positive effect on their communities. While CSU-Pueblo has a robust writing program, there was no venue for writers to share their work with each other outside the classroom. Open Mics have always drawn me because they bring writers and artists and their work into the community. CSU-Pueblo did not currently have an active or ongoing open mic venue and after attending a SoCo author reading the idea struck me that this was the perfect way to give back to my program, my department, my school, and the greater Pueblo community.

HN: What would you say are some benefits of reading your work in public like this?

MG: There are so many incredible benefits to reading your work aloud, not just to an audience, but as a practice. I always encourage writers to read their work aloud as they write. It makes a big impact on the quality of their work. Poetry especially is meant to be read aloud, but all forms of writing take on a certain life, energy, and movement when shared out loud. Reading in a welcoming environment, such as The Howl or the Id (at the Ethos in downtown Pueblo), builds confidence in your work, your voice, and your person. It also builds connections with artists and those that enjoy the arts. I think this is particularly important during times of national unrest, such as we are experiencing now, to know that you are part of a community that values the humanities.

HN: What kind of people would you encourage to come read at The Howl?

MG: I encourage everyone to come read! If you are new to reading at venues the Howl offers a safe inclusive place to find your voice. If you are an old hat to sharing your work you can expand your audience base and meet other artists. We also encourage non-writers to share! We would love to host musicians, visual artists, and those that don’t consider themselves artists. If you have something that fills your cup that you just need to share, such as a piece of writing from another author, an art piece, etc, please come! Just remember that whatever you want to perform must fit into a 5 minute window.

HN: What tips or advice would you give to people nervous about sharing their work with others?

MG: It can be terrifying to get up in front of an audience to read, especially if the work is your own. The fear of rejection or humiliation is real, but the reality is that writers and artists are an empathic bunch who want to see you succeed. Sometimes it helps to put your name toward the end of the list of readers so you can watch and listen to others present their work. I find waiting always gets me excited to share my own writing. Once you are up there it can feel like you are alone but remember that you are in a room full of friends and contemporaries who are rooting for you. Take a big breath before you begin. Often writers will crack a joke to ease their own tension. There is no wrong way to go about this. Read SLOWLY if you can. Everyone wants to hear what you wrote. Remember that your voice is IMPORTANT and worthy of sharing. Then come back to the next open mic and read again. Practice doesn’t really make perfect, but it does help tame the nerves.

HN: Bonus question: What’s the proper etiquette when someone finishes a reading: finger snaps or traditional applause? Those of us less familiar with public readings would love to know the etiquette!

MG: Proper response etiquette depends on the event. For an open mic like The Howl, clap when a reader is called to the mic, finger snap during the reading if you hear something that resonates with you, then when the reader is finished and returning to their seat you can clap, whistle, holler, stomp your feet or whatever way you feel best shows your appreciation! For events where there is a featured reader, such as the wonderful SoCo readings sponsored by CSU-Pueblo, clap when the reader takes the podium, snap when you hear things that move you and between pieces, then clap when the reader ends their reading. The big thing to remember is that encouragement is balm to the writer's soul so give it freely.

Cathrina Jakeman, an English major at CSUP, has just published her first chapbook entitled Why I Bite with Bottlecap Press, which is "a visceral, fragmented exploration of girlhood, illness, and rage." The book can be ordered directly from Bottlecap Press here, and what follows is an excerpt from a piece entitled "Jaws Comes For Us All Eventually":

Nine — in the shower, water sliding down my skin, kissing my eyelashes — washing out

my mouth. My hand hesitantly travels to the center of my chest, towards my heart. Three      

fingers extended, clockwise motion, light pressure. Finding nothing, I sink to my knees and,  

leaning over, cup my small breasts in my palms. I hold them, feel the weight of them, and  

squeeze.

Creative Writing Teaching Assistant Haley Newman had the chance to interview Jakeman about her work, the publishing process, and how she submits pieces for publication. Their fascinating conversation is below. 

HN: What stages did your new chapbook, Why I Bite, go through before arriving at the finished product?

CJ: There’s a lot to think about and unpack with this question, but I think it all started last semester when I went to Mona Susan Power’s reading for her newest book, Council of Dolls. In her Q&A, she said she knows a line, a paragraph — a book — is done when it feels true. That really got me thinking about authorial intention and vulnerability, especially since I was writing mostly poetry and nonfiction at the time. Why I Bite went through a lot of transformation before it felt like the truth, and I think that search for truth was the biggest driver of the chapbook’s evolution from nothing into a published entity.

In the beginning, the pieces were mostly fragmented experiments with tone, form, and style. I originally imagined them going to separate journals and magazines, but over time, I realized I was circling the same themes — girlhood, illness, inherited trauma, the body as an archive of memory — and that together they could articulate my ideas better. That’s something I’m always asking myself as a writer: not just is this good? but is this effective?

One thing that helped me move from fragments to a manuscript was making a visual chapbook for myself. I designed mock-ups in Canva, printed out the pieces, cut them apart, and rearranged them until the order made sense. Sometimes I even added images from my childhood scrapbooks to test how the themes could be visually delineated. That process —  cutting my own work apart (we always hear the term, kill your babies, and in this stage I truly understood that. I mean, I was literally taking a blade to my own work to make it the best it could be), moving sections, and seeing it as its own object —  is what helped me see what belonged and what didn’t; two or three pieces didn’t make it into the book for this reason. Some pieces, like Jaws Comes For Us All Eventually and Blood Slug, went through twenty drafts before I felt they had that truthful bite I was looking for.

And, most importantly, I wasn’t doing this alone. My creative nonfiction professor, Dr. Tomie Bitton, helped me talk through these big ideas and guided me toward the strongest representation of them. By the time the manuscript reached Bottlecap, it had shed its moles and warts and become something alive.

HN: How did you find Bottlecap Press?

CJ: I actually found Bottlecap Press through the work I’ve been doing with Vinegar Press, which is the small literary press I founded earlier this year. In that vein, I wanted Vinegar to publish experimental, hybrid, and emotionally raw writing in the form of digital chapbooks and magazines.

Part of running Vinegar means being nosey and constantly looking at what other indie presses are doing — how they curate, how they design, and how they advertise their authors. That’s how I came across Bottlecap. Their catalog immediately made me want to submit. I could see my own work living in conversation with what they were publishing, and that gave me the confidence to send Why I Bite their way.

HN: What was the submission process for your chapbook like? How long did it take to hear back from Bottlecap Press at each step of the process? Did they request further editing?

CJ: The submission process with Bottlecap Press was really smooth, which I appreciated because submitting a chapbook can feel so intimidating. I sent Why I Bite in during one of their open reading periods, and I heard back with an acceptance about three weeks later. That initial “yes”... I can't even describe how that felt (I think I reread the email ten times).

From there, the process moved quickly. Bottlecap didn't request any edits; by the time I submitted, the chapbook had already been through so many drafts and rounds of revision that it was in pretty good shape. We did some small adjustments on formatting and layout for the physical print, but for the most part they trusted my vision and let the manuscript stand as it was.

The whole thing — from acceptance to production — took a little over a month, which in the publishing world feels lightning fast. They designed a cover, had me write a blurb, and now it’s out in the world.

HN: You’ve been published several times. How much of your work do you have submitted at any given time, and how do you keep all of that information organized?

CJ: My submission process tends to come in waves. I’ll go through an intense writing period where I generate and revise a lot of work, and then I’ll send a batch out “on submission.” Usually that means around ten places at once. After that, I’m in the habit of checking Submittable and my email constantly to track responses.

To stay organized, I keep a Notion page with publishers I like, notes on whether I’ve submitted to them, and deadlines. That system helps me see patterns (which presses feel like a good fit, what kind of work goes where) and keeps the process from feeling like I'm just throwing pages into space hoping for a response.

On top of that, I’m also a staff writer for The Lycian magazine, where I publish once a month. Having that responsibility means there’s always writing, editing, and organizing going on at some point, even when I’m not in the big submission push. It gives me some form of structure and accountability (which is huge since writing is something that is so reliant on self-motivation) while also reminding me that publishing doesn’t only come with external validation. Being published and continuing to publish my work has taught me the value in working with a community; that in practicing consistency and resilience, I can get as much fulfillment from the process that I do in solely chasing acceptances. 

HN: Do you have any advice for those who might feel intimidated about the submitting process?

CJ: I’ve been rejected more than I’ve been published and at first that “no” felt soul crushing. So much to the point where I was at a standstill — not writing, not submitting, just waiting for the perfect moment when everything would be exactly right for me to write the perfect piece. I had to change this. I had to reframe.

Now, every “no” tells me something; maybe the piece needs more work, maybe it’s not the right time, or maybe it just hasn’t found its home yet. That reframing was huge for me. For example, there’s this one magazine that has monthly prompts that I submit to each month. I’ve never been accepted and I’ve been submitting to this particular magazine since 2023. That’s two years, 24 pieces, and none of them have been picked up. One of the pieces I submitted was I Ate All My Friends, which found its home in the chapbook. Simply put, because I failed there, I was able to surpass my goal of publishing in that magazine and put a whole book into the world. It just takes time and stubbornness.

HN: Bonus question: What (art/music/books/movies/tv/theater) is inspiring you right now?

CJ: I’m usually inspired by themes more than single works. Lately it’s been big ideas like inheritance, violence, surrealness, and how I can try to distill them into something intimate. Recently, I’ve been reading experimental fiction like Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch and Sayaka Murata’s short stories, thinking about Murakami’s surrealness, and turning to Fernanda Melchor and Mariana Enriquez for the way they explore Hispanic heritage and violence. After my grandmother passed, I started looking more deeply into my Mexican heritage, which has shaped the direction of my current work, a short story collection, tentatively titled Mudwives.