James Norman assumes the open road would recall his name.  Musician, part-time lover—a heterodoxical historian of the forgotten, a half-assed Buddhist in his concrete monastery, a traveling freak show feeding LSD to a higher consciousness—Contradictions are the meat on the bones that construct him.  James Norman was born to a Navy Man, and the sea never quite left him.  His mother was the son of a preacher, though no God has ever claimed him.  His mountain is too tall for flags anyway.  He has lived in cabins surrounded by forests of marijuana, in that steel onion called ship bobbing across the Atlantic, in squalid houses owned by unscrupulous men chasing the Almighty American Dollar far past the point of no return.  He owes everything to the women in his life, starting with Jean.  He is a lover of animals (even the human kind.)  He hopes you enjoy his musings about Armageddon, though he believes that inevitably we make it out alive to tell the story ourselves.  I suppose he believes in the story more than anything else.  Most of his poems are instructions for how to survive the desert of self for long enough to understand the thirst that drives us, and he wrote them solely to make it through till morning.

Oscar Oswald: I am a poet and editor teaching English at the University of Idaho.

I grew up in the southwest, and hopped around the northwest and the Mojave before landing in the Palouse. My interests in poetry include modernist and postmodernist writers such as Barbara Guest, Lorine Niedecker, and Erin Moure, as well as global literatures and especially Eastern European and Latin American traditions.

My book of poems Irredenta applies a pastoral framework to the American wilderness, in particular what is ‘untouched’ and ‘untamable’ within the United States. It is an experimental thing, written in a sequential mode, drawing upon the work of Henry Thoreau, Gertrude Stein, and Rene Char. I love the desert, and this is why I wrote the book.

I spend my free time hiking and walking – always on my feet.

Cameron McGill is a poet, educator, and musician from Champaign, Illinois. He is the author of Meridians (Willow Springs Books, 2020) and In the Night Field (Augury Books, 2021). His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Grist, Raleigh Review, and RHINO. He has released six studio albums, most recently Gallows Etiquette. A new album, The Widow Cameron, is forthcoming in fall 2022. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Idaho and teaches at Washington State University, where he serves as co-director of the Visiting Writers Series. He lives in Moscow, Idaho.

Daryl Gussin is a writer and musician who has been awkwardly standing around at punk shows for the last twenty-something years. Thankfully at some point in his late teens he decided to become a little more productive, and has been working on zines, setting up shows, and playing in bands consecutively since then. In 2006, he became integrally involved in Razorcake fanzine where he is currently the managing editor. His writing revolves around the honest, bittersweet, and ultimately triumphant aspects of counterculture and its flavorful inhabitants. The heartbreaks, the implosions, and the defiant victories. Community over commercialism, create and destroy.