KMWR: Have you ever won big from lottery tickets? Did they inspire this story?

JN: Oooh excellent question. I think the most I’ve ever won is like, 5 dollars. But I grew up on scratch-offs. We would get them all the time when I was a kid and I’ve always loved them. The real lottery, picking numbers or whatever, doesn’t feel as fun to me. I prefer the tactile experience I guess. 

That’s what drew me to the pull tabs they sell at bars, the experience of opening them up and seeing a cute little image that teases your imagination. The first time I tried those was when I worked in Kodiak, Alaska so even when I play them now it reminds me of being in an exciting place, pokes me towards remembering different moments of my life. I’m an incredibly nostalgic person so ruminating on things and people from the past that I loved is my favorite hobby! What really inspired the story was the little pictures inside the pull tabs. There’s always a fun theme and it sparks the imagination. 

When I was writing this story, I had just started frequenting a pub in Seattle that’s grown really dear to me. My boyfriend at the time and I would go all the time to play pool. I wanted to show him something special to me so I got some pull tabs for the first time in years. I didn’t even know how to order them properly, and the afternoon bartender (who sparked the character in the story) taught me the right way to ask him for them.

One of my buddies says he wants to win the lottery and he buys tickets from the 7-Eleven. I feel like he’s got this open desire for whatever might arrive for him that doesn’t have an expectation attached to it. My desire often has more of a point or explicit object. When those different types of desire meet interesting tension happens.

The lottery is all about desire and fantasy, so the way different people experience those emotions paired with the nostalgic imagining the pull tab imagery inspired different elements of “The Winner.”

KMWR: In your previous work, “Freemans,” dead things make another appearance just as the carcass captivates Derek in “The Winner.” (You write, “What past?” This really got me!) Why do you think humans are so enamored with/haunted by the dead animal?

JN: Wow, thank you for reading that poem! It’s really special to me, and based on another place that I spent a good amount of time: the restaurant Freemans in New York. All over the walls there are different taxidermied animals, so when I was sitting at the back bar trying to write that poem the dead things naturally made an appearance.

Death is so fascinating because it’s inevitably final. However, I think when animals die it’s impactful in a different way than the concept of death or the loss of a loved one. Animals symbolize different things for us or have layers of personification we consciously and subconsciously project onto them based on our cultural touchstones and myths as well as personal memories. So when a certain type of animal dies, it means something unique. But no matter how dear an animal is to us, it’s still less than human and you kind of move on from it in a different way.

I think of taxidermy as decoration, as an element of atmosphere, as a trophy. There’s a sort of elegant pride in that kind of token. You can take this dead thing and make it look alive, then preserve it forever. It becomes a powerful celebration, but it’s kind of gaudy and hideous if you move beyond that performance.

It’s a sort of reclamation of power, too. Someone who can preserve something lost, or who can hold onto a memory that should have gone away, has special ability. And who doesn’t want to be special, or spend time with someone who is? I knew a guy in Honolulu that tried teaching himself how to preserve dead birds. He had one in a pasta sauce jar on his bedroom bookshelf. He didn’t do a good job so it was decaying a bit – he was intrigued by the dead thing and wanted to learn how to make it stay. But once it was preserved on his shelf starting to fall apart it didn’t matter to him as much.

The carcass in “The Winner” was inspired by roadkill some of the guys at the camp I went to used to pick up and leave at our rival camp’s mailbox, which was gross and a disgusting gesture. Probably illegal, too. Once they took a truck out in the middle of the night to retrieve a deer we’d passed by earlier in the day, and they told us about the smell. That memory always stuck with me. In the story I have the boys hit the deer and create that death. A just-dead animal is so fleshy, revolting, and oozing. Especially when you accidentally harm an animal, there’s a guilty despair around that. But it’s still just a deer and eventually, again, you have to let it go.

KMWR: What would you say are your own personal ideal writing conditions? What about unideal conditions—and do you fight to write anyway?

JN: Oof writing is so hard. And I’m a procrastinator. I’m trying to be a more calm, mindful, enjoy-the-process writer in 2025 so definitely allowing myself to develop that practice. My ideal writing conditions have less to do with anything physical and more with space and time. I need the space and time to do nothing and to observe. And honestly, I ultimately need some sort of pressure or conflict or high stakes after having that to produce my best work.

I love being fresh out of a break up with lots of solo free time (so ideally securely funemployed after parting ways with a job that needed to end) to walk around the city thinking, exploring, mumbling to myself. I go into the world and soak up inspiration from places, people, and experiences that I engage with using curiosity and openness. I feel the emotions going through my body and allow them to create thematic, narrative, and metaphorical problems I have to move through, then I think about different ways I can frame and talk about those problems. I make lists. I do freewrites. I ignore the actual writing I need to do and process a lot of things internally, then look around me and trust that something I see or experience will serendipitously align with my story and I steal it from the real world for my own purposes.

Then I remember the deadline and force myself to sit down and expand from my notes. It’s often kind of painful and furious, but since I have a deadline I push through it and get the full draft out. When it’s done and I’ve finally pushed through the problems I’d been working through in my head and body, I feel such a rush of accomplishment! It’s seriously the best.

Unideal conditions would be working a lot and having a lot of social obligations. I find it hard to find the time to work through my plots and themes in my head when I’m having to focus on work or other people. That’s the difficult part, finding time! Writing takes so much time for me, and not even the pen-to-paper time. I’d say 80% of writing for me is just sitting and thinking. Taking that time for myself can feel really selfish, and I’m not a selfish person so I’ll go months without really writing sometimes. It’s also weird to be in public just thinking about something abstract or digesting a story idea. But it’s what I’ve decided to do as often as I can! I’m okay being a weirdo.

KMWR: Can you tell us about what you’ve been reading lately and what you would recommend?

JN: Yeah! I’ve been reading a lot. I usually go to the library and see what’s featured and go to the new poetry section and take out whatever looks interesting. I’ll walk the fiction shelves and see if something sticks out, and that’s how I found the two books I’m going to recommend: Yesterday by Juan Emar and Neotenica by Joon Oluchi Lee.

They’re both shorter novels with interesting premises. Yesterday is a series of surreal encounters a man and his wife experience over the course of one day. Neotenica is a series of vignettes over the course of a couple’s relationship. Both quick and intriguing reads that I really enjoyed.

KMWR: Can you describe how your writing life has evolved over your career? Also I’d love to know more about your upcoming debut book of short stories, Halve It—can you share what your editing process was like for choosing the stories for your book?

JN: Yes, I can! I always wanted to write fiction and have that be my primary focus. That’s what I read and wrote when I was younger.

But when I started actively trying to write and seeking out workshops it was easier to find generative poetry workshops at the time. This was in New York. I wanted to learn about poetry, too and of course having an ability with language is super important, so that took up most of my attention for a long time. I’ve written and self-published zines and books of poetry since 2017 and have a new collection called Friendship Poems I just finished that I’m low-key shopping around. But to me, poetry is more about expressing emotion and sharing it with people, so publishing books of it isn’t necessarily my main goal.

I also started working on creative nonfiction and lyrical essays, using that to dive deeper into the types of stories I had in my body and learn about hybrid forms, prose revision, and the skills to show up at a blank page and know how to get anything on the page. This was with Corporeal Writing in Portland. I had a lot of fun writing sort of memoir-ey lyrical essays in my early 20s and getting them published in different places. This year, I plan to return to essays and challenge myself to see what I’m able to write now. Will be exciting!

Then my friend referred me to a great nonprofit publisher in Washington called Blue Forge Press, and that’s when I started focusing more on fiction again. I ended up being a part of a recurring project they do every year that works with a cohort of writers to develop a book-length project. At the start of the month, the editor shares a prompt to use as a seed. The writers have the month to develop, write, and revise their story before turning the final product in at the end of the month. It was hard! But at the end of the year (plus an extra month) the writers have a full collection of stories that the press then publishes. So that’s how I wrote Halve It, and it should be coming out sometime in the next few months. 

I’m excited that people will be able to read it, and I’ve also been enjoying sharing stories from it in different publications online. It’s also helped me return my focus to fiction, has strengthened my ability to write prose, and gives me motivation to keep writing to see what my next project is.

♢

Joe Nasta is vibing in Seattle. He has whispered four collections of poetry into existence and his debut book of short stories Halve It is forthcoming from Blue Forge Press. Ze is an Associate Editor at Hobart.