The South Carolina Review

Each year, SCR presents the Ronald Moran Prize for the best fiction and poetry submissions of the year. This year’s poetry winner is María Esquinca for her poem “Dream In Which I Return Home,” published in SCR’s Spring 2024 56.2 Issue.

One of our assistant editors, Sage Short, interviewed María Esquinca about dreams – worldly, metaphorical, and lyrical. The two also spoke (via email) about María’s new book of poems Where Heaven Sinks, which, in the words of University of Nevada Press, is “an experimental collection set against the backdrop of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, weaving fragmented verses, striking imagery and bold typography to confront the brutal realities of immigration and identity.”

The interview had been lightly edited for clarity and consistency.

SS – In “Dream In Which I Return Home” [the SCR prize-winning poem], we get so many literally dream-like images and language (the moon screeches / vomits indigo / you cup palmfuls of dirt / swallow grime and good earth / pink paisley curtains spill / out of your parents’ / bedroom window / like a butchered tongue). The poem spans only one sentence accompanied by fantastic punchy line breaks, often enjambed in a way that makes me believe in the double entendre (out of your parents’). How do you make decisions regarding form and language? Do ideas of borderlands surround language in your poems?

ME – First of all, thank you for such a thoughtful question and for such an intentional reading of that poem. I think about form a lot, I often want the poem to augment the meaning of the poem. I’m a reader that gets excited by collections with poems that span various forms both traditional and experimental, and so I think that is reflected in my own choices. I came from a journalism background before studying poetry. Journalism is a form of writing bound by very specific stylistic rules. So, when I arrived at poetry I felt freed by the open page, the lack of rules was exciting to me. So I find freedom and play in form. It’s often the thing I struggle with the most as well, because sometimes I’m trying to fit the poem into different containers before I find the right one. In this poem in particular, I wanted the form to augment the surreal/dream aspect of this poem, I used it to help me enjamb the lines in surprising ways. In terms of the language, because this poem is set in a dream landscape, I wanted to use images and words that were both grounded in the real world, like a house, curtains, rooms, but then juxtaposed with the sorts of unexpected images that come out of a dream, so then for example the moon “vomits indigo.” I was thinking how can I use imagery/language to take this poem into a dream landscape? Lastly, because I am a person that grew up in a border town, bridges, walls, borders often are part of the poetry because they are a reflection of my experience. Both my literal experience, the place I am writing about, but also beyond that, in a more philosophical or fundamental way, as a fronteriza, it’s a part of experiencing the word that is inherently a part of me. And I’m often thinking of the ways in which I can also create those borders in my poems. The border is always informing my poetry.

SS – As a Xicana fronteriza and abolitionist, what are your biggest concerns when you’re writing poems? Do you find these identity categories influencing your work always or often? Are dreamscapes or the denial of them (but this is not a dream) a way for you to discover or shape your poems?

ME – As a Xicana, fronteriza, and abolitionist, my biggest concern is the liberation and freedom of Black, Brown and Indigenous people. I wrote this collection during Donald Trump’s first term, and it will come out during his second term, where we already have, within a few months of this administration, witnessed the further obliteration of human rights, the U.S. continuing to participate and facilitate the genocide of Palestinian people, the repression of student activists—just today, I read reports of ICE attempting to enter schools and arrest children as young as three. So yes, the categories I used to identify myself absolutely influence my work. People are dying every day in this country, and beyond, because of U.S. policy. I have a responsibility to use my art for the liberation of my people. Although not all my poems are explicitly political, my larger purpose will always be to be of service to my people. My biggest dream is that poetry can alchemize a reader for change. It is not enough, because the only thing that will save us is to organize, but poems are sparks. I believe in the transformative power of poetry.

SS – Dreams are often depicted in a shining light, including the idea of the Americandream. What do you have to say about the concept of dreams in either of these ideas in poetry?

ME – Dreams have always been something present in my life, and I’ve always been fascinated by the surreal aspect of dream, as well as being influenced by a long legacy of surrealism/magical realism in Latin America. I think dreams are like portals. They allow us to access the psyche and other wordly, I found myself visiting dreamscapes to explain the unexplainable. As I was writing this collection, dreams allowed me to put into language and image the horror of what I was seeing during Donald Trump’s first term. By entering the dream, we can also enter nightmares. They contain multitudes. The “American Dream” is like this too. As immigrant children, we’re told this is the country that our parents chose for us to have a better life, the land of opportunity, the melting pot, we get sold and told all these ideas about how welcoming this country is. But as we grow older, the American Dream distorts and becomes a nightmare. The same country that benefits from our labor, skills, life, is the same country that is perfectly okay with killing us.

SS – What are you currently dreaming about?

ME – I’m always dreaming of the worlds we will create when fascism is obliterated. I’m dreaming of a world with no borders, of no prisons, of free colleges and universities. I’m dreaming of my people dancing under the rain, drinking the sun, laughing like sparkles. I’m dreaming of Palestinian children going to a classroom that isn’t blown up.

SS – Your book Where Heaven Sinks is forthcoming from the University of Nevada Press after winning the 2024 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. How would you describe the collection?

ME – I would describe my forthcoming collection as a love letter to El Paso and my people. It took me about six years of applying to book contests to get this book out. I would have never imagined it would be chosen by Juan Felipe Herrera, for a prize to honor Andrés Montoya’s legacy. A poet who was my age when he passed away. A poet who also dearly loved his people, who is a poetic predecessor I am still learning from. I am so honored and full of gratitude. 

Where Heaven Sinks is now available on the University of Nevada Press website and Amazon and is described as a tribute to those who have endured and a call to challenge the systems that oppress, a love letter, a memorial for those lost and a testament to the transformative power of language.

LOCAL READING ALERT!

In conversation with her father, Ron Rash, South Carolina Review associate editor Caroline Rash will be reading from and presenting her new book of poetry, Because the Bullet Arrives at Hub City Bookshop in Spartanburg and The Pendleton Bookshop in Pendelton next week. Both events will have book signing.

Hub City Bookstore: Tuesday, July 15th at 6 pm at 186 W Main St, Spartanburg, SC 29306

The Pendelton Bookshop: Thursday, July 17th at 6 pm at 125 E Queen St, Pendleton, SC 29670 (signing begins at 5:30pm)

The South Carolina Review’s Spring 2025 57.2 Issue is completed and on its way to subscribers and ready for purchasing. Dive into bold poetry and cant-put-down fiction by writers like G.D. Holloway, Nate Marshall, Fara Abouzeid and Elizabeth Farren.

Emma Grace Connelly

Emma Grace Connelly is an architecture major that’s found herself immersed in English classes as well. When she’s not playing with 3D printers and Exacto knives, she’s typing away at a novel or posting about it on her writing page. She’ll start pursuing her Master’s in architecture at Clemson this fall.

Tori Jackson

Tori Jackson is a graduate English student and humanitarian activist. Her interests in editing and publishing come from a deeper love of writing and unveiling the power of words. In the future, she’d like to become an established author and expand her local nonprofit, the South Carolina Upstate Humanitarian Hub, that aims to create third spaces where art and writing act as common ground for connection and unity within the community. In addition, Tori is applying her skills from The South Carolina Review to the group newsletter which consists of student writing, think pieces, and current events. She looks forward to the chance to be a full time editor of her own literary magazine! 

Serena Johnson

This is Serena! She is an aspiring editor and major foodie, and is wholly incapable of liking anything in a casual capacity (her current obsessions are Arcane and Tracy Deonn’s The Legendborn Cycle). These days, she spends about sixteen hours a day curating Pinterest boards for various fictional works and the remaining eight hours eating, missing her dog (he’s at home with her lovely family), and hoping the cat distribution system will bless her. She is a junior English major at Clemson with a dual minor in creative writing and brand communications.

Kristen Huynh

Kristen Huynh is a senior English major who loves reading fantasy, writing literary fiction, watching period dramas, and baking when she has deadlines to meet. Some of her permanent obsessions are Bridgerton, Percy Jackson, and Pinterest. This fall, she’ll be starting law school at UofSC (don’t worry—once a tiger, always a tiger!), unless she decides to fulfill that café-bookstore-bakery dream instead.

Brett Porter

Brett is a sophomore English major at Clemson from Massachusetts. In his free time, he enjoys reading, playing sports, and fishing. His favorite author is Kurt Vonnegut who ignited his love for reading and writing. Besides that, he loves to play fantasy football and has won a total of four league championships with his friends. Brett believes that an otter best resembles his personality and aspires to be one when he grows up.

Caroline Anderson

Caroline Anderson is a senior English major from New York, though her accent and attitude only come out every once in a while. Caroline enjoys reading and correcting other people’s grammar. She is situationally a big enthusiast of the Oxford comma but limits herself to only correcting it every other day. Caroline’s favorite author is Mary Shelley, and she is currently planning her move to Galway to get her Master’s Degree.

Rachel Bertram

Rachel Bertram is a DJ at Clemson’s alternative radio station, WSBF-FM. They spend their free time playing guitar, pickling veggies, and writing letters they will never send. They are inspired by the living room routine from The Perks of Being a Wallflower, one-liner Letterboxd reviews, and sitting beside large bodies of water.

Ashtyn Goff

Meet Ashtyn! She’s an English grad student who spends all of her time reading young adult literature. In other words, she never got over The Hunger Games and has found a way to make that her personality. She runs a book-related Instagram and YouTube channel where she makes her book obsession everyone else’s problem. She recently discovered a love for fan art and always has a Pinterest tab open. She also adores soul-crushing movies or anything with Christian Bale in it. Speaking of Christian Bale, she loves Little Women and currently has eight editions of the book on her shelves. Outside of fangirling, Ashtyn enjoys national parks, cute dogs, and crocheting—oh, and SCR, of course.

Ella Kindt

Ella Kindt is a poet and graduating English major with a crippling houseplant addiction. She’s pursuing an MFA in poetry at North Carolina State University in the fall of 2025. She spends her free time playing guitar, singing off-key and reading gothic horror novels. Her current favorite song is Katya’s verse in “Read You, Wrote You” from the finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars season 2. She’s obsessed with the color green.

Makenzie Anderson

Makenzie Anderson is a writer from South Carolina. In May 2025, she will graduate from Clemson University with a B.A. in English and a minor in poetry. She will attend Virginia Tech’s MFA Poetry program in the fall of 2025. Her poetry explores girlhood and womanhood, sapphic identity, and familial relations. She channels her southernness while simultaneously addressing coastal South Carolina’s haunting and alienating powers in her writing. She also adores hummingbirds and the color lavender.

Jennifer Terry

Jennifer Terry is a graduating MA in English student who enjoys reading, writing, and playing The Sims 4. She is currently obsessed with all of her friends’ dogs and loves the color pink. Jennifer lives for weird stories and poetry that deals with grief and loss. Sometimes she wishes she was a worm.

Each year, SCR presents the Ronald Moran Prize in Fiction and Poetry for the best fiction and poetry submission of the year. Our fiction winner for Spring 2024 was Matt Lumbard, with his story “Big River, little river,” from SCR 56.2.

One of our assistant editors, Ella Kindt, interviewed Matt Lumbard about all things river, big and little. Read Lumbard’s winning story, “Big River, little river” here.

Ella Kindt: How did you decide on the Giant River Otter in “Big River, little river?” Do you have a particular connection to otters?

Matt Lumbard: The Giant River Otter popped out of nowhere into the story, but I think I was reading about them not too long before writing it, so they were lolling around my subconscious. They’re totally fascinating, endangered, very intelligent, beautiful, but at the same time terrifying with their size. I think at some point I realized that we associate otters as cute and cuddly…we all have that image in our heads of them lounging on their backs, holding hands…but at the same time, if you look into them in more detail, you hear about some pretty vicious behavior. So if you then take the Giant River Otter…we’re talking about an animal that can be six feet long…you have this edge to the story, and it becomes kind of scary…which was a lot of fun to play with. But yes, in general I’ve always loved otters, they’re one of my favorite animals. They’re like these crazy water-dogs to me.

EK: You said this story is about leaving home. Can you tell us about some place you left? Do your own personal experiences with leaving play a role in how the story ends?

ML: I left home a year or so before writing that story, so it was on my mind a lot. Even after only a year, which is not very long, you visit back home, and notice things are different. You’re different for having been away, and home is different because it’s been sort of moving on without you. That should be the most obvious thing in the world, and something everyone anticipates, but I don’t think it really hits you in the gut until you see and feel it for yourself. My own experience with leaving home absolutely played a role in how the story ends. I think to me it’s like, you’re either gonna go home and entrench yourself back into that life, or you’re going to fully accept the changes that are happening—you’re going to dive in headfirst and see where the current takes you, you’re going to become a Giant River Otter.

EK: Along those same lines – although it’s never exactly specified, the story seems to be set in the bayou area of Louisiana. Is that the area that you call home? Are you from there originally? Have you ever piloted a river boat?

ML: I’d say that’s a pretty good guess. And no, I live in D.C. now, but the place I call home is Verona, New York, which is a very rural place in Upstate New York, and a place that I cannot for the life of me stop writing about. Like the narrator, I basically grew up in a creek and the deciduous forest around it. It’s all about fresh water for me—rivers, creeks, lakes—I don’t like salt water at all. Verona is on the Erie Canal, so that’s where the mentions of the canal, aka the “little river,” back home come in. No, I’ve never piloted a motorized boat of any kind, actually! But it’s hard to deny the romance of river boats. Actually, I’ve never even seen the Mississippi River! But that’s the fun of fiction, eh?

EK: There’s a narrative structure to “Big River, little river,” but the linear plot isn’t really at the forefront. The story reads as if the narrator just says whatever’s on his mind at the moment it occurs to him. Tell us more about the writing process for this story. Did you have the narrative in the back of your head while writing it, or did it just come to you as you moved along?

ML: Well, it reads that way because that’s exactly what I was doing myself! Just writing completely from the hip. I haven’t been able to quite do that since. It was really fun…I just woke up with those lines in my head: I am the dumbest man driving a boat on the Mississippi today. I weigh five hundred pounds. I want to talk to you. It wasn’t from a dream I’d just had or anything. I have no idea where those lines came from, but I texted it to a friend who is often subject to all sorts of weird messages…then I realized: wait, I really like that. That’s a story. So, I went over and wrote it in one go. When I made myself the 500-pound river boat captain sort of waxing nostalgic about home, that part fell into place with almost no effort. Then, by the time I wrote the line I see cats and dogs in the stars and I knew I wanted to give those two little leaving-related anecdotes about Catnip the cat and Brittany the dog. That was a lot of fun too, and both of those anecdotes are pretty close to being true stories. I knew I was going to bring the Giant River Otter back into the story after those anecdotes, having mentioned the otters in the beginning, but I didn’t know how or what I was going to do. There wasn’t really a plan in place to have a talking Giant River Otter in the story, much less one that I fall in love with. She kind of stomped into the story much like she stomps uninvited onto the boat. But when I thought back to the bit about the shack people telling legends about people turning into Giant River Otters, it made perfect sense to me. When I saw her in my head I thought, oh…this is perfect…I’m in love with her…I’m 500 pounds, she’s 400 pounds, I love the water, this is it, and it’s my turn to leave now.

EK: What are you up to now? Are you working on anything exciting? Have any upcoming publications?

ML: I’m trying to revise a story now that I thought I’d finished a while ago and was never quite happy with. Things started to kick back into gear for it though, so I’m wrestling with that, sort of hammering away on that bad boy. As always, I’m also shopping around a handful of finished stories that I’m happy with. But my biggest project, which is always always always on my mind, is a novel I’m working on. It’s been in the works for around two years now, and sits in a shoebox, unorganized beyond belief…written on cocktail napkins, Post-its, menus, pages torn out of books, loose leaf scraps, etc…it’s going to be a huge effort to organize it all, but it’ll be fun. The good news is that it’s 65% already written in the shoebox/my head. I haven’t typed even the first sentence at the computer yet, but the house is already built. Now I have to move in, furnish it, decorate, find out where the floors creak…make it into a home. And yes, I have a story coming out very soon in issue #49 of Meridian, University of Virginia’s literary magazine.

South Carolina Review Spring 2025 Issue 57.2 is almost ready to be released! Here is a look at this issue’s cover art, Alien Spaghetti by Margaret Smith.

Alien Spaghetti uses color theory to evoke different emotions from its audience. There are four panels, each taking a unique approach, illustrating the wire’s texture and color schemes. Each panel is meant to inspire a different emotion.

“The first panel uses warm colors such as orange, pink, maroon, and primary red to convey the energy of the composition,” says Smith. “The second panel uses analogous colors, meaning they appear beside each other on the color wheel. The two rolls of wire are depicted using green and purple respectively, and the blue background unifies them because it sits between green and purple on the color wheel. The third panel uses cool colors like blue teal, and green to create a calming atmosphere juxtaposed with the warm one above it. The final panel is where the title Alien Spaghetti comes from, as the analogous colors come together to create an otherworldly experience.”

These diverse color schemes create a unique experience for the viewer with each panel. Alien Spaghetti is an exploration of how color affects the emotional experience and alters the perception of a piece of art.

Margaret Smith is a senior in Clemson University’s Bachelor of Fine Arts program with a focus in ceramic arts. She is from Greenville, South Carolina, and graduated from the Fine Arts Center in 2022 after three years of intensive study of the different mediums of visual art. She is drawn to illustrating organic materials and foliage, as well as the emotional connotations that certain objects contain. Her depictions of plants and animals are physical representations of her connection to nature. Growing up in the lower Appalachians, she was surrounded by nature and those motifs are often present in her work.

Check back with us soon for the release of the issue with selected readings and the announcement of the Ronald Moran prize winners in fiction and poetry.