MENTORSHIP RECIPIENT

Mentorship Recipient
"Speaking to Robin"

Recipient Reflection: 
Jackie Krogmeier

On "Speaking to Robin" by Jackie Krogmeier

by Matt Weinkam

I’ve always admired world builders—fantasy or sci-fi writers who in a single sentence can create not just a room or a person, but a planet, a civilization. We call it world building because the author must assemble the story’s place and its rules brick by brick in the drafting stages, making sure the structure is both beautiful and sturdy. But when reading such a story it rarely feels like construction. To me it’s always something of a conjurer’s trick. A dove retrieved from nothing. When a world is created well enough I find myself looking up the author’s sleeve to try to find out how they pulled it off.
 
What initially struck me about “Speaking to Robin” was how swiftly I became immersed in this post-apocalypse The Road-like landscape. I immediately accepted that our narrator can understand Little Dog. I was on the lookout for frights before I even knew what they were. It is a testament to Jackie Krogmeier’s imagination and voice that these elements of the world were in place and functioning perfectly in that initial draft I found in our submission queue. Lines like “The sound of a fright is the sound of your own heartbeat” made me want to applaud. Jackie, I could tell, is a natural magician.
 
Our work revising the story as part of the editorial mentorship focused mostly on the story’s ending, on how to take the elements of the world and transform them into something new. I knew we needed a fright to arrive and put pressure on our central characters, but I didn’t know what would happen next. Thankfully Jackie did. The resulting scene—white silence, the warm breath against the narrator’s neck, and (my favorite detail) the naked cottonwood with engraved initials—is the heart of the story. We don’t need to see the fright or hear what Robin says for us to understand what happens, for us to be changed as they are changed in that moment. In her smart revision work, Jackie reminded me that just as important as the world are the people in it and what happens to them. (RIP Little Dog). Human connection? Hope? Those are magic too.
 
In this world, it is also November. And cold. And you don’t have to search far for the frights. But what made me warmer in the near-apocalypse that is 2019 was working with a writer as talented as Jackie. I don’t know what she has up her sleeve next, but I can’t wait to find out. 

Matt Weinkam
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Matt Weinkam is a writer, editor, and college instructor with published work in Denver Quarterly, Sonora Review, New South, Quarter After Eight, Split Lip, DIAGRAM, and Electric Literature. He is founding editor of Threadcount Magazine and a former Managing Editor of Passages North literary journal. He holds an MA in creative writing from Miami University, an MFA in fiction from Northern Michigan University, and he has taught creative writing as far away as Sun Yat-sen University in Zhuhai, China. Originally from Cincinnati, Matt moved to Cleveland the same month LeBron broke the curse.  ​​