My newest author interview is up at As It Ought To Be. Check out an excerpt below:

If you pick up a copy of Letting the Meat Rest, hoping to find tips for juicy pork chops, luckily, John Dorsey’s got you covered:

a pork chop sizzles in a pan
for six minutes tops
any longer & you’ll let the imagination
bleed out all over your plate
& escape into the woods
like magic.

Yet, Dorsey’s subject matter extends beyond pork products. Reading Letting the Meat Rest is like rummaging through a friend’s box of old Polaroids. You want to learn more about these people and moments captured in time. Some snapshots are brief, impressionistic prints of a person frozen in a sliver of life, while others have their detailed history scrawled on the back. These vignettes present us with visions of addiction, poverty, and trauma, but also optimistic moments of youthful ambition, rebellion, and intimate friendship. No matter what Dorsey depicts, whether it’s a full portrait or a quick sketch, it’s always crafted with deep humanity

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Chase Dimock: I first became acquainted with your work when a mutual friend of ours told me he was driving up to Central Missouri to pick up the Poet Laureate of Belle, MO. At that moment I learned a few things: 1. That a town named Belle, MO exists 2. That a town of less than 2,000 people in rural Missouri has a Poet Laureate, and 3. That the Poet Laureate of Belle, MO is John Dorsey. Having lived for a few years in Cape Girardeau myself, I know there are quite a few cultural gems to be found in rural Missouri. How did you become the Poet Laureate of Belle, MO and what has that experience been like? I saw one poem in Letting the Meat Rest depicting the appropriately named Dinner Belle restaurant in town, so I am curious to know how this experience in Belle has impacted your writing.

John Dorsey: Well, to make a short story long, Chase,  I ended up in Belle at the end of 2015, from Wisconsin, after being awarded a residency at the Osage Arts Community and through that connection, in particular with the Executive Director Mark McClane, I started to meet more people in town,  including Mayor Steve Vogt, who seeing all of the work I had done and was continuing to do, offered me the appointment as Poet Laureate. I’m actually the first Poet Laureate the town of Belle has ever had. Since my appointment we’ve opened a Non-Profit used bookstore, Barb’s Books, and I founded, and Co-Edit, with Jason Ryberg, a literary journal, the Gasconade Review, which received grant funding through the Friends of the Belle Library, from Kingsford/Clorox. As far as the impact on my work, the first full book I finished here was Being the Fire, which was 80 new poems, written in my first two months here, and published by Tangerine Press in London in Fall of 2016. Since I’ve been here I’d say I’ve written between 300-400 poems, which have gone into 6 or 7 different books or chapbooks and have written a full length feature film, Missouri Loves Company, which was produced by Paladin Knight Pictures out of New Jersey, on a budget of around $60,000, which was shot on the East Coast and here in town, and is currently being edited. In terms of my poetry, I’d say that at least half of everything since I’ve been here has to do with Belle itself, so the impact has been significant.

(Full Interview Available at As It Ought To Be)