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The Bitter Oleander‘s latest issue contains a special feature on Lara Gularte which includes a bio, interview, and selection of her poetry. Born in 1947 and raised in San Jose, California, Gularte has a unique family history as well as an accomplished self history. In the interview, she speaks much to how her experiences growing up influenced her life as a writer: “I remember having an active imagination that grew greater due to my isolation and no other children to socialize with. . . . I was so used to amusing myself and spending time with adults, grade school was a formidable experience. However, my love of reading stories never waned.” By high school, she was interested in “Beat Poets” and had the opportunity to buy a book of poetry from and meet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. She participated in demonstrations and was part of the counter culture movement. More influences include working in human services, participating in a group called “Waverly Writers,” attending Community of Writers Squaw Valley Workshop, and going to the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal.

In response to the question in which Gularte admits is “very thought provoking and not easy to answer”—”Your poems are enriched by an imagism . . . and a solitude that summons both the natural world and the consciousness that helps complete your oneness with it . . . How do you manage to keep it awake inside yourself?”—Gularte writes, “I look at writing poetry as mining, going into my unconscious to draw out what is there and make sense of it . . . I can enter the unconscious easily at any time. However, I must be quiet and not have busy activities to do. From my unconscious I retrieve images. I am a visual person and find putting images to words is satisfying for me. Before I write a poem I retrieve many images from my unconscious and describe these images on paper. I then put the images together to make some kind of sense. I never know what will come of it. I arrange words with a result that usually surprises me. I like to be surprised.”

Here’s a sample of some of her work. The poem is titled “Cassandra Visits the Azores”:

She roams the stone islands,
sees the future through basaltic rock-
flowings, wrinkled crevasses, hardened fluids.

Her milky eyes never shut.
She wears a necklace of black stones,
these stones she throws in the sea,
and fishing boats, surface.

The folding and unfolding
of what she sees turns her inward,
sand and tears stream down her face.

The sky of wayward gray slides like lava,
light changing,
changing moments.

Water spills over the caldera.

Because of her large success with her creative nonfiction title Wild, Cheryl Strayed is greatly known in the writing world, and in the latest print issue of Booth, Ashley Petry talks with her “about telling hard truths, making pacts with your readers, and of course writing like a motherfucker.”

In the interview, Strayed talks a lot about how it is to share truth in writing and the challenges that come along with it: “I always say, if you’re going to show anyone’s ass, it had better be your own. Memoir writing is about the journey of the self. It’s about saying, this is my subjective view of this experience, and that gives you an enormous amount of power. You get to say what’s true; you’re the god of that world. So I belive in searching my soul to tell the necessary truths, and sometimes that involves other people, but I always try to do it with a sense of compassion.”

In response to a question about what she gains from writing about difficult experiences, Strayed conveys that writing is her own kind of therapy: “I’ve been able to forgive and understand and accept many of the hardest things in my life via my writing. The fictional character in Torch who is the stepfather, Bruce, is based loosely on my own stepfather. There was no way I could get inside the consciousness of Bruce without loving Bruce, forgiving Bruce, and understanding why he did what he did. Once I did that, I understood why my stepfather did what he did, and it wasn’t about not loving me; it was about his own survival. Being able to step back from my own life by going deep into the life of literature has been healing over and over again. There’s this strange dichotomy where you have to go deeper into your life while also stepping back from it so that you can craft it into a book or an essay.”

The conversation wraps up with a thought from Strayed about the debate on if you need to live in NYC or have an MFA in order to be a writer: “I think that whole thing is so unbelievably ridiculous . . . What I say is, do the same thing as a writer that you do as a human, to seek out the people who inspire you, who comfort you, who challenge you, who enlighten you, who will offer you shelter when you need it and a push out the door when you need it. I root for real life.”

“The Newman Prize for Chinese Literature is awarded biennially in recognition of outstanding achievement in prose or poetry that best captures the human condition, and is conferred solely on the basis of literary merit.” The winner for 2013 is Yang Mu, and the recent issue of Chinese Literature Today includes a special feature on the writer, including poetry by Yang Mu and an interview.

Here is a short bio from Chinese Literature Today, and you can read a few of his poems on their website: Yang Mu was born in 1940 in the small coastal city of Huilan in east Taiwan as Ching-hsien Wang 珙씀獻. He received his BA in English from Tunghai University in Taiwan, his MFA from the University of Iowa, and his PhD in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley. He has taught at many universities in North America, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, but he spent most of his academic career at the University of Washington, Seattle. He has also served in important administrative positions, including the founding dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Dong Hwa University in his hometown of Hualian and the founding director of the Institute of Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica, the premiere national research institution in Taiwan. He currently holds an endowed chair at Dong Hwa.

Yang Mu has been writing poetry continuously for sixty years. The longevity of his career is matched by his extraordinary creativity, which has exerted a transformative influence on Taiwanese poetry in general from the 1950s to the present. His poetry assimilates the best that the Chinese and the Western traditions have to offer, deftly blending classicism and surrealism, romanticism and modernism. His poetry may be lyrical or dramatic, contemplative or defiant, elegiac or erotic. In an age when poetry is indisputably considered to be minority literature, Yang Mu enjoys enduring popularity among readers of several generations. His accomplishments beyond the realm of poetry are demonstrable in prose, literary criticism, scholarship on classical Chinese poetry, comparative literature, and editing, as well as the translation of poetry.

Yang Mu has been married to Ying-ying Hsia for thirty-five years; they have a son, Bruce. The couple now lives in Taiwan most of the year, dividing their time between Hualian and Taipei.