Award-winning writer Shann Ray has two new titles published this summer, a poetry collection, Sweetclover (Lost Horse Press, March 2019) and a collection of short stories, Blood Fire Vapor Smoke (Unsolicited Press, June 2019). Shann, a leadership and forgiveness studies professor at Gonzaga University, is the author of numerous titles, including American Book Award-winner American Masculine.

I caught up with Shann over email, where he answered questions about his compassionate and transformative fiction and poetry.

Your work is often described as “brutal” and yet your stories always hold in them a true and powerful moral center. Your latest story collection, Blood Fire Vapor Smoke is described by your publisher as a response to the “present age of enragement, and the collapsing binary of two hungers: violence and forgiveness.” Can you talk about the relationship between brutality and morality (violence/forgiveness) in your work and in the world at large? Since my wife Jennifer first introduced me to the capacity art has for healing the heart of the world, I’ve been drawn to the nature of conflict, power, mercy, and love. Authentic love between people, in our families and friendships, and even with our enemies, humbles me. I see art as devoted to the transcendentals: beauty, goodness, justice, truth. When others draw me in and open my heart and soul, especially in my trauma, loss, or unavoidable suffering, I find myself awakened in a new place, hand in hand with others who live with abandon and love with uncommon strength. The musicians, painters, dancers, poets, short story writers and novelists I’ve been blessed to know, surprise me with their depth, with how fully they engage the human shadow, and with the sheer revolution in their art. Melanie Rae Thon, Melissa Kwasny, Toni Morrison, M.L. Smoker, Tolstoy, C.D. Wright—they embody the complexity of the human condition in our propensity for genocidal violence, and the Divine mystery that lives and speaks in our quietness, our humbled selves, and our most intimate care for one another.
I love the duality in your fiction and poems, how you explore notions of light and darkness, or—something we’ve discussed in person before—fusion and fission, the masculine and the feminine. As you write, where do you see these lines blurring and intertwining? I love vital questions: Who can know the essence of the heart? What does life ask of us on behalf of one another? How can I honor the feminine and the masculine in others and in myself? Is death both a closure and an opening? Who has the right to foreclose on either the sacred or the profane? How can I listen to you more fully, know my own faults, ask forgiveness, and make amends? In our DNA and in the DNA of the stars, exists the same light, the same darkness. How might fission or disruption, fracture or trauma, provide openings to greater light, harmony, and love, greater fusion. I write at night. I feel loved by my wife, my three daughters, deeply loved, and therefore I feel loved by the wilderness, the world around me, sisters and brothers everywhere, natives, immigrants, migrants, those of my German heritage who committed genocide against those of my Czech heritage, those who forgave this and in my grandparents’ case, even married one another, my immigrant families on my mother’s and father’s side who came to America for greater life, liberty, and happiness, the immigrant families who hold the same hope now.
In the gorgeous, fluid, vivid love poems of Sweetclover, you celebrate carnality and marriage with a refreshing passion. What do you see as the necessary components of a healthy marriage, and how is that similar to a healthy artistic practice? I wanted to honor my wife and the long-treasured marriage. Though my faults could have wrecked us many times, we’ve agreed to grow more humble and more willing to change when faced with our own chaos, and this has made all the difference. In an echo of this, pursuing life as an artist cycles through many lonely valleys and sometimes ascends to unforeseen heights. I find the most stabilizing force is love: sacrificial, given on behalf of the beloved other, attuned to the foresight necessary to help co-create something to be cherished. Listening and responding well is loving each other.

As a writer of many titles, do you have a favorite? Why or why not? Generally the books of poems, because poetry is first love. I feel so grateful for the community of poets who have loved me and led me to more loving conceptions of life, God, and others. 

What books would you recommend to Inland Northwest readers? Seattle writer Charles Johnson’s exquisite Middle Passage, and Debra Magpie Earling’s vivid, fiercely rendered American love song, Perma Red.