Where the Lion is also the Lion Tamer: An Interview with Salgado Maranhão and Alexis Levitin

 by Leah Brennan

Brazilian poet Salgado Maranhão often writes about the dry, harsh landscape of Brazil’s northeast region where he was born. He credits his love for language to his mother and her support of the poets who traveled and performed around Brazil. Striking images of fire, dust, and the sea keep his work grounded in place, but his work also transcends the physical world. He pays homage to the people of his community, and to communities everywhere, formed by place, language, or love.

Maranhão has won numerous awards for his work, including the prestigious Brazilian Academy of Letters Prize for his collected poems, A Cora da Palavra (The Color of the Word) in 2011. Sol Sangüíne (Blood of the Sun) is his first bilingual collection. An accomplished musician and songwriter for many of Brazil’s most beloved jazz and pop artists, Maranhão infuses his lines with a sense of musicality.

While Maranhão considers his lyrics separate from his poetry, he has had considerable success in both. In addition to his awards, a number of Brazilian artists collaborated to produce a tribute album in 2006, titled Amorogio.

For Blood of the Sun, Maranhão worked with renowned translator Alexis Levitin,

author of thirty-one books, as well as publications in 25 anthologies in more than 200 literary journals. One of the most well respected English translators of Portuguese and Brazilian literature, Levitin translates not only sense, but sound as well. In Blood of the Sun, he incorporates assonance and slant rhyme to convey the rhythm of Maranhão ‘s Portuguese.

Maranhão and Levitin recently met with me at Chatham University’s Jennie King Mellon Library to discuss poetry, translation, music, and love. Please note that when Maranhão is speaking, it is Levitin’s translation that I’ve transcribed.

Brennan: How did you begin working together?

Maranhão: We met each other in 2007 at Brown University. The chairman of the department of Portuguese and Brazilian studies at Brown, Luiz Fernando Valente, brought us together.

Levitin: Valente was already a great fan of Salgado’s poetry and was eager to see it translated into English. He invited Salgado from Rio de Janeiro and me, from Plattsburg, New York, much less romantic, to attend a conference at Brown, intending us to meet and hoping that we would hit it off and work on a book together, which is indeed what happened.

Brennan: So, would you consider this work a collaboration?

Levitin: You could say the translation is a collaboration, because, in the process, I went over everything with him. We read it aloud together, and so on.

Brennan: Would you say that’s one of the greatest advantages of working with a living writer?

Levitin: I always prefer working with a living writer. You can ask them questions, both about meaning and about sound. In other words, about form and content. Everyone understands that you need to ask questions about content, but really you need some help with form as well.

Brennan: In terms of form, are you referring to the way the poems look on the page, the structure of the poems?

Levitin: More than that. Listen to this:

Maranhão: Há que se viver o árido / como se cálido.

Levitin: “One must live the arid / impassioned and torrid.” Arido and cálido: it’s not a full rhyme, but a slant rhyme. Arid and torrid: it’s not exactly a full rhyme, but it’s close. Now, listen to the next stanza:

Maranhão: Há que se viver o breu / como se brio.

Levitin: Again, it’s a slant rhyme. Breu and brio isn’t a full rhyme. I made it a full rhyme, and it’s made richer by saying, “one must live the vile / with valor, with style.” So, we have vile and valor as a slant rhyme, and vile and style as a full rhyme. And Salgado can help point out to me the different things he’s doing in the original, so that I can notice them, especially the different things he’s doing with sound. And here, palavra, larva, alarde. He’s playing with the Ls and the As and the Rs, and I have to be aware of it. I try to reproduce it, or to produce some repetition of sounds in English which will not be identical but will create the same web of sounds.

Brennan: I remember reading that, for both of you, it’s the sound that’s most important. You mentioned these moments of good fortune in translation, of finding the word that fits the meaning and also the sound.

Levitin: Sometimes, it takes the passage of time before you find the right solution. We’ve sat around together in Rio working on a poem and not finding a solution, and then suddenly it appears. Or it may only appear the next day, so it’s as if the solution has to mature.

Brennan: Like writing poetry.

Maranhão: Sometimes, the right word comes a week later. You send an e-mail to your subconscious. The subconscious searches its archives, and a week later it comes.

Brennan: So, it’s more like snail mail than e-mail.

Maranhão: Not always at the time you want it. Poetry is mysterious. Like women.

Brennan: Yes, I would agree with that. Can you tell me how working with a translator affected your writing or your writing process?

Maranhão: Well, it’s had a great effect on me. It opened for me an understanding of the field of translation. I’m basically monolingual, so it’s a field that I didn’t have much to do with before. Although, of course I’d read English and American and French poets in Portuguese. I certainly knew that a poem could be translated into another language. What I didn’t know was the modus operandi. How do you actually accomplish it?

Brennan: That’s the mystery.

Maranhão: I was able to experience the craft of harmonizing the rhythms of one language into another, or harmonically presenting the rhythms of one language in another. I discovered what hard work is involved in finding the right word or the right phrase in translation, but also that it’s a bit chaotic or random. Sometimes it just comes from the air. Now, I realize the importance of the translator. And I’m convinced that they are profoundly underestimated.

Brennan: Alexis, I’ve heard you speak about translation as a moral act, as a way to increase understanding between cultures.

Levitin: Of course. I do think it’s moral, but here’s the deal. Anything you do in life presents a moral dilemma, because you can do it sloppily or you can try to do it well. And to do anything well is in a sense a moral triumph. Obviously, you can trap me with paradoxes; for example, the Nazis did their extermination of the Jews very well, and that of course is not moral, so there are paradoxes in what I’m saying, but in general, to do your work well is already a moral triumph. And then there’s the communication. My sense is  that we’re all islands. The reason John Donne said, “no man is an island” is exactly because we are. And we have to overcome that, and surely translating is one hopeful way to make a connection from one island to another. In this case, not just from one individual to another but from an individual from one archipelago–let’s say the Portuguese archipelago–to those of us who live in the archipelago of Anglo-Saxonic English. And making connections is surely, I think, a moral act.

Maranhão: Translation is a vital act for culture and for civilization itself. The labor of these upstanding people, the translators, has been an enormous contribution to all cultures. Imagine what our life would be like had no one translated the Bible, the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and many other books that have made our life so very rich. Even today, in our technologically advanced era, when you can make a translation from Google. You can’t use Google for essential and symbolic language, though. Despite Google and technology, the translator is essential for helping us bring an awareness and understanding from one culture to another through language.

Brennan: It seems especially true for poetry. There’s just no way to use Google Translate.

Levitin: If Google translated a poem, it would be a totally different poem.

Brennan: When I was reading these poems, I noticed that, while a few of them are in first person, many of them are removed from the personal perspective and focused more on observations, especially of the physical landscape. I’m wondering if that is a reflection of, not only a connection to landscape, but maybe also a lack of ego?

Maranhão: Since my story comes from a community, I was never really alone with my ego, so that even when I do speak in the first person, I am carrying along with me a communal sense of things. I bring a community along with me. Even when I speak in the third person, I am still present as a kind of hidden observer. If you read my poetry carefully, here or there you’ll catch glimpses of me, just as you do of Alfred Hitchcock in his films.

Brennan: Alexis, can you also speak about the question of ego from a translator’s perspective?

Levitin: Even if translators begin life as egocentric as anyone else, they cannot very well remain so. The first factor is that they are completely dependent on somebody else. A poet sits down in front of a blank piece of paper, and something grows on that paper because of the poet. I never sit down in front of a blank piece of paper, because I already have a book in my hand that is written by someone else. Second of all, although poets generally do not become very famous in our culture, translators hardly become known at all. Even if you do a good job, you tend to remain relatively anonymous. Third of all, in our culture, most rewards take a financial shape, and obviously poetry by its very nature, in American society, garners almost no financial rewards, and the translation of poetry even less so. If you’re not humble to begin with, then as you live your life as a translator, you better become humble, because that’s what life is telling you. You’re important, but not that important.

Brennan: Speaking about the support for artists in the United States, I’m wondering what it’s like to be a poet in Brazil?

Maranhão: Recently, enormous state enterprises, such as state-run oil companies or electric companies, have begun to support major artistic events such as film festivals and jazz festivals, which are of cultural interest. In fact, they are also beginning to support things that have some pedagogical value. However, poetry doesn’t really interest government agencies because, alas, it doesn’t appeal to great numbers of people. And more and more, these big companies that have money are often being co-opted by political figures, whose real interest is to win votes, and you don’t win many votes with poetry. Politicians don’t have the slightest interest in poetry. Nonetheless, poetry, which is an amphibian creature, survives both in the wet season and the dry.

Brennan: Can you talk about your experience working with jazz musicians and your experience as a songwriter?

Maranhão: My education as a poet occurred simultaneously with the growth of a movement that was both musical and poetic in Brazil called Tropicália. The leaders of this movement were Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Torquato Neto, among others. I was ten or twelve years younger than they were. I had the chance to be friends with one of the leaders, Torquato Neto, and he stirred in me an interest in the vanguardism of poetry, and encouraged me to take part in that world of music and writing song lyrics. Neto was one of the most distinguished writers of song lyrics in Brazil, and he was a close friend of the founders of the concrete poetry movement in Brazil, Haroldo de Campos and Augusto de Campos.

Brennan: So, is working with musicians at all like working with a translator?

Maranhão: It’s a work in metrics, because music is mathematical and the writer has to adjust. If you don’t find the right word with the right rhythm and the right sound, [the song] just won’t work. So, strangely enough, even some very good poets are unable to do [the work] successfully, to write lyrics that work with music. If you’re writing the lyrics first, you have to somehow be foreseeing or imaging the music. A poem has to have a certain rhythmic availability, and even an availability in choice of words, because if it is sung, it is sung for all the people, not only for erudite academics. Erudite poems will not work as song lyrics for the people. And in fact, I do not include my song lyrics in any of my books of poetry, because it’s a different mechanism and a different density.

Levitin: I completely agree with him, but there are people who don’t agree. Back in the 70s, the Norton Anthology included Bob Dylan in the Norton Anthology of American Poetry. I thought it was ridiculous, but they did it. I know Leonard Cohen refuses to discuss the difference between poetry and the poetry of song lyrics, and I must say that Leonard Cohen comes as close as one possibly can in pop music to being a real poet.

Maranhão: Sometimes, a rather fragile, or a slender, slim poem gains great success as a song lyric, because it is anchored on a beautiful melody. There on the white page, that poem is all alone. There, the cruelty of the reader can devour it, because it lies there exposed, and it doesn’t have the music to support it.

Levitin: I think Salgado and I completely agree on this distinction between song lyrics and poetry; coming from him, it’s more significant because he’s succeeded in writing song lyrics, and I’m only an observer.

Maranhão: I am also a cruel reader.

Brennan: I think poets always are. And I have one last question. I’m wondering what the word amoragio means.

Maranhão: I made up the word from two words. Love and another word, something like a surcharge, or the price you pay. If there’s a car that everyone wants, and there are very few of them, the car dealer will raise the price, and that raised price is the agio. After all, the  most expensive thing, in a sense, is love because you pay a very high surcharge in suffering, in despair, in loneliness and loss.

Levitin: He says that [love] is a flame that unties, or unravels the knots in the skein. And easily ignores…I’d want to think about this. I really hate it when he makes me translate poetry in one second flat. The word is good, but it’s also the goods. It ignores the good, and has disdain for truth.

Maranhão: It is a bridge of air.

Levitin: A bridge of air from Eden to insanity. Now, he’s saying that love is a dance before a circle of angels. A dance before a circle of drunken angels.

Maranhão: Where the lion is also the lion tamer.

Levitin: Where the lion is also the lion tamer and who, after rising to the throne of splendor, gives up his own flesh to the hunter. Or, surrenders his very flesh to the hunter. I like that! That’s good. That’s poetry.

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Leah Brennan studies fiction and poetry at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she also teaches ESL and yoga. Her translations of French op-eds can be found at WatchingAmerica.com.

Note: The lines that are referenced in this interview are from parts 1 and 4 of Salgado Mranhão’s poem “Blood of the Sun.”  The cover and interview photos are by Kinsley Stocum.

The Surprise of a Mirror Where a Mirror is Least Expected: A Conversation with Tobias Wray

The Surprise of a Mirror Where a Mirror is Least Expected: A Conversation with Tobias Wray

By admin on January 27, 2016

Interview by Alyse Richmond, for The Fourth River

Tobias Wray is a poetry editor for the cream city review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Third Coast, Bellingham Review, North American Review, Blackbird and elsewhere. He’s been a finalist for the Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellowship. He holds an M.F.A. in Poetry and Translation from the University of Arkansas and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he co-curates Eat Local :: Read Local, a program that partners local restaurants with poets from Milwaukee and Madison.

Tobias’ poems, “Portrait of a Spider”, “Terra Incognita”, and “Top/Bottom: Ekphrasis” appear in The Fourth River’s Fall 2015 online issue under the theme, “Queering Nature.”

The Fourth River: One of the things I enjoy about your nature writing is that it carries a strong sense of nostalgia that permeates images of plants and animals. As a poet, I find it fascinating when someone is able to successfully associate memories with unexpected creatures, in this case spiders and crawfish. Why did you choose to draw memories from them, or would you say that they chose you? Do you usually turn to living things as subjects or characters when writing about the past, or was this a stylistic decision made solely for your “Queering Nature” submission to The Fourth River?

Tobias Wray: My perception of nature might also be characterized as American: I see it as a place of earthly normalcy, as a place untouched, as reflecting the possibility of culturally-instilled ideals, something like Edenic perfection. Nature is somewhere outside. But, as someone with deep ties to the South, the Ozarks are also the very real landscape of my childhood memories, a place for wandering, a place of discovery. In one sense, people are actually the unexpected creatures in the woods; the crawfish and centipedes and ground squirrels are the locals. These kinds of poetic choices—which are attempts to look at myself as a strange creature—thrill me most; the surprise of a mirror where a mirror is least expected. I think identity is very much fascinated with its own margins. Yet, every attempt to demonstrate this feels very much like picking up a handful of water.

You’re right that nature writing is, like all imagining, associative. But, I think folks who live in more population dense areas tend to see themselves in contrast to the natural world, which makes it all the more inviting to write about. When I wrote all three of these poems, I was in the middle of pursuing a PhD in Milwaukee. I wrote at a desk on the third floor of the Golda Meir Library looking down at a street full of students and buses and general bustle. Of course, the place we are in somewhat determines the place we imagine into. For me, the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas is familiar terrain, a place I cast into to explore my own emotional landscape, trading the familiar chaos of the street for the jagged leaves and rocks of creeks.

And, I agree with you about nature writing being imbued with nostalgia, particularly in what it latches onto. Nostalgia is all about contrast—the difference between where we are and where we were. Being queer, as an artist, as a person, I have some insight into the conscious reconciling of otherness. On the other hand, I’m also white, able-bodied, and highly privileged. So, when I think of queering nature my first impulse is to think about inherent contradictions: the weirdness of nostalgic nature writing in this place and time, when we are only now coming to terms with our global impact as a species.

TFR: I also noticed that music – specifically the piano – enters some of your poems. Do you play in real life? If so, how much does being a musician influence your writing? Have you ever written lyrics? Do you feel a musical background changes the way you view or read poetry?

TW: I was never able to sustain any consistent musical practice before I became a poet. My father, however, was a clarinetist and a music professor. He had a certain expression on his face whenever he played. His eyebrows arched high on certain notes and his forehead would round and dip in anticipation of a run. The correct embouchure for a clarinetist tightens the lips and flattens the chin into the appearance of a chimpanzee communicating a dramatic feeling. Yet, he seemed the most himself then—much more accessible somehow than the stormy man who complained about the state of the kitchen or the rudeness of store clerks. Here was a man who existed only once his instrument case opened and the first note filled the room. This distant relationship to my father (who also took me hiking in the woods each summer) was complicated when I reached adolescence and realized that I was very much attracted to men like him. I do in fact write about this quite often. I think I tend to write about music in a very similar way to how I write about nature: as something both familiar and strange.

I think of the lyric as the same kind of reflection, or expectation for reflection. If I see a tree covered in cobwebs and think it looks like a balloon and then think about the actual laws that govern a balloon and realize what a strange balloon this would be, and then feel unsettled, because perhaps strange balloons have always hung at the corners of my memory, then I have a lyric image. This becomes a clear psychological narrative, or a way of mapping a pattern of thinking. There may be no real difference between poetic lyric and song lyrics in that sense of analysis.

TFR: In “Terra Incognita”, you write, “I’ve lost another. I ushered it in, / the losing.” Then, “What’s left: / this old name for home, where the mountains are slow / to reveal themselves. You, my Arkansas.” My obvious first question is: Are you from Arkansas, or have you lived there? If so, what did you find most inspirational about its landscape? If not, why Arkansas? Why create a poem of loss that focuses on a place you don’t have a strong connection with? Have you written other poems about places you’ve called “home?”

TW: Because I write about queer identity, about being white and lower middle-class and from the South and from the Midwest, I end up claiming a lot of homes in my work. In more ways than one, that work ends up reflecting the messiness of all the categories I claim.

I was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and mostly grew up in a small town in North Dakota, but because both my parents grew up in Arkansas and because most of our extended family lives there still, I spent all of my childhood summers and holidays there. I moved to a small town in the Ozarks of Northwest Arkansas in 2008 to work on my MFA at the University of Arkansas’s Programs in Creative Writing and Translation. That was, as it often is for folks, a rich and productive time in my life, but it was also a lonely one.

The genesis of this poem was in the histories of the names we’ve given different spaces. Arkansas, which has a long denialist history of oppression (think, Japanese-American internment camps, the Little Rock nine, etc.), comes from another name for the Quapaw tribes that originally inhabited the region. Before the region had any shape on European maps, early French explorers called the land terra incognita or unknown land. I was interested in the human tendency toward demarcation, in particular. I wondered about the necessity and problematics of territorializing, but also, to be honest, its beauty, the comfort of knowing that someplace is part of who you are.

What it ultimately became was something of a break-up poem.

TFR: How would you describe your most recent body of work? Are you predominantly interested in writing nature and place-based poems? Which authors are you currently reading, researching and/or influenced by?

TW: As is probably clear by now, I’m interested in the intersections of identity. My current work tries to figure out how personal familial and sexual identities intersect with the fraught histories of homosexuality and queerness. More specifically, I write about the loss of my father alongside the persecution Alan Turing underwent at the end of his life and how both men serve as models for me, legacies for thinking about masculinity and endurance and failure. The sections of the book that reimagine Turing’s experience are written as fragments of a verse play, something akin to John Milton’s closet drama Samson Agoniste. I am very interested here in the unavoidable pursuit of heroic figures, and what happens when heroes also have to be people.

The chapbook project is mainly thinking about another kind of inheritance, the trials of odyssey and of experience. The chapbook’s title, forty dark ships, is drawn from Homer’s catalog of ships in The Iliad. There, I am interested in how we become our histories and the histories of those who carried us to where we are.

I am reading a lot of wonderful poets as I think through these projects. Currently, I am becoming more and more engrossed in Rickey Laurentiis’s premiere collection, Boy with Thorn. Dawn Lundy Martin’s Life in a Box is a Pretty Life has been haunting me, as well, this past year. Recently, I’ve been enjoying Carmen Giménez Smith’s book Milk & Filth and how it rethinks second-wave feminism.

TFR: Tell me about Eat Local :: Read Local. Where did this idea of partnering restaurants with poets come from? Is this program meant to expand your local literary community and, if so, how? What do you hope to achieve by building these relationships?

TW: As an academic and a teacher, I believe I have a responsibility to get out of the academy and bring poetry to people who don’t have access to it in the same way that I do. I try to acknowledge the privilege of education, but also resist its siloing, insulating tendencies. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Eat Local :: Read Local,which Ico-curate with the wonderful poet, Lindsay Daigle, has been going strong since 2008. EL : : RL celebrates partnerships between local restaurants and poets from Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin to showcase our region’s rich culinary and literary arts scenes. Both cities have strong institutional ties to Midwest poetry communities, so each April we distribute printed poems to local restaurants, who then pass them out to diners throughout National Poetry Month. We also hold readings for the program in both cities. In this way, we work with local businesses to connect with more of the community through poetry, hopefully reaching some readers we otherwise wouldn’t. The program is approaching its ten-year anniversary, so we are hoping to pull together an anthology to celebrate our current and past contributors.

***

Alyse Richmond resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and is completing an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Chatham University with concentrations in poetry, publishing and travel writing. Her work has been published in print and online by The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, Helix Magazine, Malpais Review, Coal Hill Review, Lines + Stars, and El Portal, among others.

Fracking the Marcellus Shale: An Afternoon with Jimmy Guignard

By Kenny Gould for The Fourth River

A native North Carolinian, Jimmy Guignard is the author of Pedaling the Sacrifice Zone: Teaching, Writing, and Living above the Marcellus Shale (Texas A&M University Press, 2015). He co-edited a collection of essays with Thomas P. Murphy called Literature, Writing, and the Natural World, which appeared in 2009, and blogs at https://pipelineroad7.wordpress.com. When he’s not researching or writing about the gas industry, he teaches rhetoric, composition, and nature writing at Mansfield University, and he chairs the English and Modern Languages Department. Every fall, he can be seen leading students on wheels, pied piper-style, over the hills and down the stairs of campus and town when he teaches mountain biking in the Outdoor Recreation Leadership program. Visit him on his website at http://jimmyguignard.com.

Tioga County, Pennsylvania, sits four hours northeast of Pittsburgh, an hour and a half southwest of Ithaca, and an hour west of Cherry Springs, one of the best places to stargaze in the country. The heavily wooded landscape plays host to Mansfield University (mascot: The Mountie), as well as a variety of forest creatures: ruffed grouse, pileated woodpeckers, bears. It’s a wild place, mostly state land and farms, reminiscent of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. For Jimmy Guignard, who grew up in North Carolina, Tioga County was the perfect place to raise a family.

But in 2009, something strange happened: trucks of all shapes and sizes began rolling through his town. One local described the situation as similar to the famous Ride of the Valkyries scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, in which a myriad noisy helicopters descend on a quiet Vietnamese village. Almost overnight, a one stoplight town just south of the New York-Pennsylvania border became the center of a nationwide discussion about fracking.

Fracking is a process used to extricate gas from the ground by which a high-pressured mixture of water, sand, and chemicals gets pumped into a vein of shale, cracking the rock and allowing trapped gas to flow out. On the one hand, researchers estimate that fracking could offer gas security to the United States and Canada for the next hundred years, not to mention thousands of new jobs; on the other, it raises environmental concerns, as it uses huge amounts of water and has the potential to release dangerous gasses and materials into the air and water table.

Guignard, now Associate Professor of English and the Chair of the English and Modern Languages Department at Mansfield University, recently sat down with The Fourth River to discuss his book, Pedaling the Sacrifice Zone: Teaching, Writing, and Living Above the Marcellus Shale, as well as the debate over fracking. He comes at the discussion from a unique angle: the son of a truck driver, Guignard worked for a general contractor out of Charlotte, North Carolina, for six years before returning to school for his Bachelor of Arts in English. Even as he pursued his degree, he continued working in construction, building houses and framing decks in Surfside Beach, South Carolina. He then moved near Cullowhee, North Carolina, for a Master’s degree at Western Carolina University, and two years after that traveled to Reno, Nevada, to get his Ph.D.

Which is to say that Guignard represents the everyman: born to a working class family, he has a penchant for raucous, long-winded stories, speaks with a soft Carolina drawl, calls people ‘dude,’ wears flannel and boots, and knows more facts about beer than the average American knows state capitals. And to the everyman, the oil industry portrays itself as the harbinger of renewal, prosperity, and jobs. For an economically depressed area, fracking often means salvation. Those with lots of land but very little means can lease the drilling rights of their property to Royal Dutch Shell or another gas company and collect a check each month for hundreds or even thousands of dollars an acre.

“How,” Guignard asks, “are you going to say to someone who may be land rich but barely has enough to keep up their property, ‘Hey, you shouldn’t lease?’”

Guignard knows of people who became millionaires overnight by leasing their land to oil companies—not many, he stresses, but a few. When the everyman in him looks at the oil industry, it sees the potential for financial security.

But the academic in Guignard sees things differently. He earned his doctorate in a field of academia called rhetoric, which looks at how different forms of communication cause people to think a certain way or adopt certain attitudes. And from this perspective, he doesn’t like the way in which the gas industry chooses to represent itself: for instance, in chapter five of his book, he talks about the American flag that flew outside the Tioga County offices of Shell, a company based in the Netherlands.

“There are many foreign companies at work in the Marcellus,” he writes, referring to the Marcellus Shale, the oil-rich vein of sedimentary rock found under Tioga County. “Schlumberger… is based in France. Talisman is based in Canada; Reliance, India; Statoil, Norway. I’m not naive about how the global economy works, but any foreign company flying the American flag creates a different impression of the company with the public.”

As a rhetorician, he was also disturbed by non-disclosure agreements, which the oil industry requires people to sign in settlements over environmental or health concerns. When Shell bought one neighbor’s property for $750,000, the neighbors weren’t allowed to tell their side of the story—not what happened, or how they felt, or even why Shell bought them out.

Equally disturbing is what Guignard sees as a repeat of history: “There was a boom in California in the 1920s—you can read Upton Sinclair’s 1927 book, Oil, and there are sections of that book that you could pull out and pop into 2012 and they would sound exactly the same,” he says. “In the 1970s, Texas also had a gas boom. In 2009 and 2010, a second boom used three times as many wells but only produced about eighty percent of the product. You hear the industry, and it’s all roses. We’re gonna be here forever! People are gonna make so much money! But what happens when the industry leaves?”

And the industry has left—not completely, but the boom that rocked Tioga County in 2009 and 2010 has taken a definitively downward trajectory. In 2015, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf imposed a moratorium on leasing any more state park and forest land to drillers. And fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on which side of the table you sit—the price for gas currently sits at two dollars and fifteen cents per thousand cubic feet, much less than the $4 to $7 per thousand cubic feet that experts say is required to make a drilling operation economically feasible.

Guignard’s book, Pedaling the Sacrifice Zone, gets at the central conflict felt by many of Tioga County’s forty-some-thousand residents, and many concerned citizens around the country, and the world: to frack or not to frack? The book is not a polemic, but rather a well-researched, first person account of what it was like to live in Tioga County during a period of intense tension. Instead of arguing for a side, Guignard presents his biases and observations, and encourages readers to form their own opinions about the issue.

“I have really deep problems with extractive industries,” Guignard says. “At the same time, I am absolutely one hundred percent fully implicated in them, and I cannot get out of that. The question is not so much whether or not we do it—the question is how we go about it. We can do it carefully, we can do it recklessly, we can do it in a way that only includes the perspective of the industry, or we can do it in a way that includes multiple perspectives.”

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Kenny Gould studied at Duke and Oxford Universities, and now Chatham University, where he’s pursuing his MFA. His non-fiction has appeared in Time Out New York, mental_floss, and Gear Patrol; his fiction with The Manifest-Station and The Head & the Hand Press. He currently lives in Pittsburgh, PA, where he teaches creative writing, practices yoga, and brews beer. Follow him on Twitter at @kb_gould or online at kennygould.com.

Nature Will Overcome: An Interview with Pittsburgh Artist Seth Clark

–by Faith Cotter, assistant editor, The Fourth River

In many ways, the neighborhood of Lawrenceville in Pittsburgh, PA is the perfect setting for award-winning artist Seth Clark’s studio.

Clark is drawn to architecture that has been broken down by time and circumstance. In Lawrenceville, houses are being restored as other structures begin to tumble. On one brick building are deep gashes down the side, an open wound; on another, a mural of a bride walks up a painted stairwell to her new home. Not far away is the children’s hospital that overlooks the historic St. Mary’s cemetery and Allegheny Cemetery.

Lawrenceville is an area caught between decay and restoration. Clark’s artwork encompasses these themes perfectly through collages and drawings, and even more so in the cover art for the spring 2015 edition of The Fourth River. A collection of splintered houses are gathered together in either what appears to be a bird’s nest, collapsing in, or that of the beginnings of a star, about to explode.

Clark said that it depends on who you ask.

FR: What artistic medium did you use to create the cover art for the latest edition of The Fourth River?

SC: I tend to start with a lot of imagery from the Internet—natural disasters, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes. And so I do source a lot of imagery there, but I also take a lot of my own photos to work off of. Then I make digital collages. I use Photoshop to basically take a window or a wall from one photograph or a collapsing roof from another and combine them. This piece in particular was probably forty layers of different chopped-up pieces. I like to build a composition digitally, usually, and I tend to get a good idea of where I am going and what composition I want, and how it will fit on the canvas or panel before I start working.

From there, I do a quick sketch and then the collage. The paintings definitely start with layers and layers of paper collaged together, and I go back and forth between collage and ink washes until a good enough foundation is built up for me, and then I draw on top of that.

FR: What drew you to the kind of art that is inspired by the roles of nature and place?

SC: This subject matter, for me, honestly came from the materials I was using. I wanted to use collage and I used a lot of found scraps of old posters and receipts and things that I found on the ground. And so these already worn pieces of paper—these ephemeral things, old pages of books and whatnot—really lent themselves well to the collapsing, decaying subject matter.

That’s really how I started: the material defining the subject or the portrait.

Coming from a design background, I think the aesthetic of collapse and decay is really dynamic and makes for interesting compositions.

Also, the response to it—we all have different understandings of what this means: what an old, torn-down building is and how we see it, and that can change over the course of our life, depending on what we’re dealing with. There’s an innate quality to these things that I think is constantly fluctuating. The common phrase is “beauty in decay,” which is certainly a thing. Respecting history and seeing value in that is huge. It’s preservation in a way, but it’s also the world we live in. Things are collapsing around us.

FR: What was your goal for this piece, and did it turn out the way you envisioned?

SC: Because there is this layering process, a lot of evolution goes on while I am making a piece of art. I think I’ve been able to work like this for so long and I’m constantly interested in it, because the first layer of collage I put down is so different and tends to be completely obscured by the time I’m finished. I always start with a specific imagery in mind, but eventually ditching that sketch and letting the piece evolve on its own is really important.

Probably the last twenty-five percent of the time I’m putting into a piece, that’s its own. It is always surprising and great to see what the paper is saying, or this little spot of color that is sticking out just by pure happenstance, or this one letter or old text in a book that’s halfway wiped out from an ink wash or scribbled over. It’s fun and surprising to me.

FR: How does architecture tie into the environment?

SC: It’s really important to consider these huge, man-made structures that are being built. So much time and thought and humanity and hands are being put into them, but no matter what we do they are always going to fall.

Nature will overcome. It usually does. Even on the smallest level of these pieces, they’re made from paper and they’re sensitive to sunlight. Every little piece of these paintings individually is weathered and in a state of decay. Architecture and buildings, as hard as we try to defend them against the elements—we won’t win.

*

For more information about Seth Clark and his work, you can visit his website at http://www.sethsclark.com.

It’s Just Kind of Doing the Work: An Interview with Wiley Cash

By Johnny Caputo, for The Fourth River

Wiley Cash, New York Times Bestselling Author and fiction faculty member at Chatham’s 2015 Summer Community of Writers, once wrote, “As a six-year-old you’re called a liar when you tell a story you know isn’t true. But if you can keep telling stories and wait just a few more years, people will eventually call you a writer. Even when they know your stories aren’t true.” For Mr. Cash storytelling may not be grounded in steadfast facts, but instead has everything to do with capturing and distilling truth.

I had a chance to have a conversation with Mr. Cash about the storytelling tradition he comes from and how he pulls from this tradition to create fiction filled with vivid characters and authentic voices.

The Fourth River: In an article I read about you, you mentioned that you come from a line of North Carolina storytellers. Can you talk about how you fit in that tradition and how that has influenced your writing?

Wiley Cash: When I say storyteller I mean people who told stories about their day or told stories about their parents or stories about growing up. And so when I was little I was around people who told anecdotes more than stories. I was also a part of a culture that told lies or tall tales to kids about how this particular thing came to be or how things were named. I think in the South there’s also more of an inclination to tell oral stories because you’re outside more, you’re sitting on the porch. People are together a lot, working outside. You’re not in a factory where it’s loud and you can’t hear each other. I think oral storytelling is something that is particular about the south. So much of our culture comes from the orality of African culture and the orality of Irish culture. You have Jack Tales and you have folk tales, and those things merge in the South. I feel like I’m part of that tradition.

FR: So how do you try and capture the essence of oral speech in your writing?

WC: If I’m writing first person, I try to think of how people I know, and who are from the place that I’m from, tell stories. And the stories are never linear. They never start at A and end at Z. They start in the middle, then they go back to A to set the context. Then they bounce around for a little bit and eventually they end at Z, but Z is never the most important thing. It’s always something beyond that that is the most important thing.

When I think about how people speak I think about how they use words. I try not to change the way words look, like dropping g’s and things like that. I never write phonetically but I do write in a vernacular way. For example, people from the South string together prepositions. Our daughter’s name is Early and so my mom will say, “Oh, Early’s gonna tear that toy up,” meaning she’s going to destroy that toy. My wife, who is from Long Island, always remarks “What does tear it up mean? Like tear paper and throw it in the air?” So it’s things like that that. I try to pay attention to specific hallmarks of a particular cultural language type.

FR: You can read the first page or two of either of your novels and see immediately that they are set in a very specific place within North Carolina. I think that comes a lot from the strength of the character’s voices. How do you accomplish this in your writing?

WC: Just by nature of where they come from and what they know, characters are going to dispense different information in different ways. I try to think about the character’s limitations and possibilities and draw from that. I want the reader to be able to open either of my books and know within a matter of two, three, four pages that they’re in North Carolina, it’s 1986, this is an eighty-one-year-old woman speaking, this is a specific day, a specific season. I try to ground them as soon as possible.

FR: What is the craft of grounding a reader immediately? How do you make that come across naturally and stay in the character’s voice?

WC: In my second novel, Easter, who’s a narrator says, “My mother died when I was twelve years old,” and we know the mother has just died, therefore Easter is twelve years old. You contextualize things using time as a marker. We know she’s light-skinned because her sister is dark-skinned and she says, “I’m just the opposite. I’m freckly.” It’s hot and sticky outside, so it’s summer. School just started so we know it’s August or September. Little things like that help the reader.

FR: Your first two books were written in three main strands. Can you pinpoint a reason why you’re drawn to the braided narrative?

WC: I think it’s because I’m trying to make these novels feel as real and as complete as possible. In A Land More Kind than Home, if I only had the perspective of one of those characters then you wouldn’t have known all these other important aspects of information. And if I had done it third person limited, then you wouldn’t have heard those characters tell their own stories, and so the heat of that would have been missing.

FR: Could you talk about the process of going from the first seed of an idea and getting to a completed first draft?

WC: Gosh, I don’t know. That’s kind of the mystery of writing. How do you reap this very abstract idea in your head into the concrete form of letters and words? With A Land More Kind than Home I heard a story in Milwaukee about a boy who was smothered during a healing service, and I thought, “That’s an interesting story. I’d like to write a story about that.” So I had to create characters and find a place to put it because I couldn’t put it in Milwaukee. Then that story ended up not being the story of the novel, but it ended up being the reason the novel was written. The smothering happens offstage and early on in the novel, and then the story is the fallout of that smothering. The thing that inspires you to write the book may not necessarily end up in the book, but it’s such a process of discovering what the story and its repercussions are.

The novel I’m writing right now is about a mill strike in my hometown 1929. There wasn’t really any one thing that spurred me to write about it because I’ve known about it for a long time. So I’m kind of playing with time and I’m jumping back and forth and trying to find a way in to this very big story.

FR: Going back to the idea of sense of place, Could you talk about the importance of writing about North Carolina. Is there any kind of pressure or joys or challenges that come with writing about the place you’re from?

WC: I don’t know if there’s necessarily any of that. I don’t know if there’s any of that in writing no matter where you write about. I think you write about the places you write about because you either know them or want to find out about them. I know North Carolina pretty well, so I’m writing toward distilling the truth of what I know to be there from what is there. So I’m pulling things out that I know to be true and arranging them in a way that seems plausible to the reader.

Now when I lived in Louisiana and I was writing A Land More Kind than Home there was joy in re-creating a place I could not be. I was living primarily in West Virginia when I wrote my second novel, so there was joy in re-creating North Carolina. But now that I’m living back in North Carolina, there’s not necessarily joy or pressure or even satisfaction. It’s just kind of doing the work. There is responsibility. I think there is responsibility in trying to get the place as close to your understanding of it as you can, because your truth is the only truth you can really write of. So I think there’s responsibility in trying to get your truth right.

From There He Began Making: A Profile of Pittsburgh Artist Ryder Henry

– by Taylor Smith, for The Fourth River

I am standing in the middle of an exhibit at the Mattress Factory in downtown Pittsburgh—the room is fully carpeted, and I am surrounded by nearly thirty brick-brown model towers. Foot-tall apartment buildings stand up on black lamp rods that suspend them in the air just at eye-level, lit from the inside like floating ghosts. The room is silent, empty, apart from the models and me. This is my second experience with the work of artist Ryder Henry, resident of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His piece, “Panopticon,” would be featured in a few weeks as the cover art for our first online issue of The Fourth River.

Two hours before, I spoke with Henry in person about his life as a painter and craftsman. There, in his home, where he offered me a cup of tea, we spoke for forty-five minutes or so, moving from room to room, looking through scrapbooks, looking at futuristic landscape paintings and portraits hanging on various walls, looking at his model spaceships—like something straight out of a Frank Herbert novel—cattycornered throughout the house, along with his son’s toys and stuffed animals, and pulling out finished and unfinished canvases hidden inside of closets. When I asked him how it all started, he pulled out an old book by Steven Eisler and Chriss Foss, Space Wars: Worlds & Weapons, a book full of airbrushed pictures of fantastical, Space Odyssey-like spaceships and Lost in Space-type characters. “I got a copy of this when I was seven years old,” he said as I thumbed through the pages, looking at amoeba-like pods rolling into gothic buttresses shooting out into deep space. “I loved all of these pictures. The aesthetics of it.”

Ryder Henry’s history as an artist brewed amidst these fantastical worlds, and began to develop more seriously back in high school, where he dabbled with science fiction pencil drawings, paintings, and models. “In sophomore and junior high school I started making acrylic paintings, and I did a lot of these morbid things. That was what I was really the most excited about, surrealist paintings,” he said as he pulled a painting out of his closet depicting a man being bitten by some demon looking cat, with a young woman playing a violin in the background.

“I did that kind of easy light painting for a long time. And I was frustrated by figurative painting, because the landscapes are just…I just couldn’t be happy doing landscapes. And portraits, I did some of my family, back in �?98 or so. And some other portraits, but I don’t like to ask people to sit because I can’t guarantee that the outcome will be successful.”

But despite that frustration, Henry has taken those very imaginative worlds and landscapes that he had dreamed about as a kid and has made something out of them that is his own. His work, which emulates various techniques found in those old science fiction books—Space Wars, and work by Alastair Reynolds—is developed nowadays predominantly on oil and canvas, or pieced together with discarded cardboard boxes and paint. They depict colorful, futuristic worlds that evoke both wonder and fear—they are surreal and psychedelic, and yet, exceptionally precise. I asked him if he had any experience working in architecture or doing architectural rendering, seeing as the majority of his paintings depict Jetsons-like cities, or even his own home, in a very technical manner:

“I just like it,” he said. “I did a summer program at Rhode Island School of Design back in high school, but it turned me off of architecture because it was too conceptual. I didn’t like all the chatter; same reason I left school too. But I love architectural rendering.”

It was at the Rhode Island School of Design that Henry first took painting to a more professional level.

“I thought, oh, I should make paintings. People will take you more seriously. And that’s what I was interested in, too. Got more into painting for years and years. I did more figurative painting, started using oils, and then I moved out to Portland Oregon, and I kind of got more into acrylics.”

But model-making, which he saw as childish for a period of time, soon resurfaced after he was offered to create a cityscape for a B science fiction movie out in Austin, Texas.

“And it kind of got me, and I read Cities in Flight [a series of science fiction stories by author James Blish] around the same time, and that inspired me a lot.”

From there he began making, what some might consider his signature pieces, the elaborate model spaceships, some three feet long, all out of cardboard, and the large model-city, which sits in its own corner in the Mattress Factory exhibit.

“It’s everywhere, it’s free, easy to work with, you just glue it together,” he said in reference to using cardboard as a medium.

In 2005 and 2006, he started making spaceships big enough to have lights placed inside of them, making them glow elegantly in the dark, which must have been part of the inspiration for the field of brown-brick towers that surrounded me.

He was hesitant to interpret his work throughout the interview. But he humored me for a moment when I asked him about his piece, “Panopticon,” which would be featured on the front cover of The Fourth River, and other paintings depicting the same city that is now a model at the Mattress Factory. He said there were elements in it of a science fiction movie called Divergent, similar to Brave New World, or something apocalyptic.

In almost all of these paintings, a technological hub sits in the center, an advanced, architectural structure. And in the distance, surrounding this hub–simple, stark, brick apartment buildings, the same brick buildings presented in the exhibit.

“It’s a movie about high school, pretty much,” he said in reference to the futuristic city and the film Divergent. “All the kids have to choose what they’re going to do, and they’re just stuck doing that for the rest of their lives. So, if you just don’t have any ambition, you would just be a farmer. And they just joke around and weed the fields and harvest, and they seem to be pretty happy about that. The science learned people do the research, and whatever they need to do. And there’s the police force. So this is kind of like that.

“In the center of town there’s this techno thing going on and they have the science and rocket ships, and there’s a particle accelerator that loops around, and you can see a little bit of that behind this, this whatever geothermal-vent-tower-something, but then, if you’re not engaged in sort of scientific or administrative activity, then maybe you’re just a farmer, and you live out in the fields in the brick towers and you tend to your plot.”

When I asked him if there were something he had hoped to convey to an audience, something he had hoped to accomplish with his art, or whether or not it were just personal exploration, he laughed and said, “Yeah, I don’t have a social agenda. I mean, you could say something about this kind of like neo-bolshevism or whatever technocracy, but that’s not—I’m not trying to forward that agenda. I don’t want to see our society necessarily move that direction…where would I be there? I mean this,” he picks up a model plane made out of cardboard, “this is for my little two year old, and he asked me, he wanted a plane that has wheels that turn, and he keeps asking me when he comes home…about the airplane. I get a lot of pleasure making that, and it’s going to be cool because I’m going to make it strong enough to withstand a toddler, with its rounded wingtips…” He picks up a flattened Yuengling box and proceeds to show me how he has managed to paint it white, which strengthens it, and then cut it into pieces in order to create the outer layer of the airplane, and shows me how the wheels spin. He is reserved, but enthusiastic. He is still living through those books that he had as a kid, airbrushed spaceships, Gothic buttresses shooting out into deep space. Now he is creating that very world for his son.

You can see Ryder Henry’s exhibit, titled Diaspora, 2014, at the Mattress Factory Art Museum, out past the Liberty Tunnels in Millvale, Pittsburgh, at 500 Sampsonia Way. The exhibit will be open from September 13, 2014 to May 31, 2015.

For more information about Ryder Henry, visit his website.

Book Review: Small Batch: Pickles, Cheese, Chocolate, Sprits, and the return of Artisanal Foods, by Suzanne Cope

Book Review: Small Batch: Pickles, Cheese, Chocolate, Sprits, and the return of Artisanal Foods, by Suzanne Cope

By admin on May 12, 2015

–by Sharla Yates, associate editor, The Fourth River

Something More: A Food Movement Story

When you take a bite out of a $7.00 artisanal chocolate bar, you expect something more than what a less expensive, mass-produced chocolate can provide—more refined ingredients, perhaps organic. A sophisticated flavor. A respect for trade and of the environment. Ethically sourced ingredients. Craftsmanship. And a good story.

Small Batch: Pickles, Cheese, Chocolate, Spirits, and the return of Artisanal Foods by Suzanne Cope, published in 2014 by Rowman and Littlefield, investigates, in 209 pages, the origins of artisanal foods in America. Cope asks the important questions: What is artisanal food, and its cultural phenomenon? When does size and success determine that a product is no longer “craft” or “artisanal”? What are the differences between East and West Coast approaches, pastoralism and environmentalism? Where did the concept of artisanal come from, and where is it likely going? Not a how-to book, but part history and part anthropology mining, the text follows the stories of artisanal pickles, cheese, chocolates, and spirits and the craftspeople making these products today. Cope’s entry into understanding the artisanal food movement was to research the people behind the craft and to include their stories so that the reader can better understand this movement too.

Most people whom she interviews are young entrepreneurs who, during the recession of the mid 2000’s, turned to making quality food products that also tasted good. Some returned to old family recipes and gave them a twist, creating something handmade with traditional value. Others looked for ways to make their farms self-sustaining, while still others wanted to give attention to ethical practices and environmental issues. What resulted was a creative, community-driven “food revolution” that has since become a force in today’s food industry.

Cope’s descriptions can whet an appetite. For example, after reading the second chapter “Pickles: Artisans, Craftsmen, and Hip entrepreneurs,” details of Travis Grillo’s pickling offerings, “from spicy cucumbers to small cinnamon-laced whole apples […] all pack a satisfying crunch,” had me searching out jars of handmade pickles at my local Whole Foods and farmers market. Much to the credit of her writing style and attention to what makes each product unique, my pickle intake at least tripled during my time between her book’s pages, savoring their brininess as I did her prose.

Food is more than what you eat. It has tradition, place and culture, and brings people together. Cope admits in the last chapter, “Defining The Movement, One Bite At A Time,” she was only able to interview a wedge of people, and there are many others whose stories are part of the movement, but didn’t make it into the book. Even so, the stories included provide a gratifying scope and explain the science behind many of these products.

Cope reflects, “What I found was that each business had a specific narrative or adaption of a specific narrative that helped to define its industry and how it presented its industry to the consumer. And each industry represents and element of the artisanal food revolution as a whole that is apparent in various industries.” She goes on to explain what each industry brings to the movement. The picklers are the movement’s “hip entrepreneurs [….] updating the role of counter-cuisine [and] broadening this new movement and making it all their own.” The cheese makers’ narratives remind us of the connection to the land, illustrating “how American originality is an important characteristic of this movement.” The chocolate makers are “helping to redefine the idea of terroir—by using the connection of flavor and ethical business and environmental practices and craftsmanship to define their industry.” The distillers are “working the land to (re)create the traditional connection between farming and spirit distillation.” (197-198).

After all the interviews and travels from picklers in Brooklyn, New York to distilleries in Portland, Oregon, from dairy farms in California and Vermont, to chocolate factories in Somerville, Massachusetts as well as many stops in-between—Cope comes to the conclusion that comprehending the artisanal food revolution requires a balanced perspective. Though we buy the more expensive artisanal food because we share a value with the people making the food, Cope warns that the standards we hold can be limiting, and are perhaps overly romanticized. As a consumer of artisanal foods, we need to keep in mind the costs to the craftsperson to make his or her product, that technology may play an important and necessary role in food production, how success may lead to higher demand, and how more hands on the product does not necessarily mean it is no longer artisanal. Indeed, Cope argues, the very term “artisanal” needs a widely accepted definition so it does not lose meaning like the word “natural” has. After all, beyond the story behind the product—the struggling artist and her or his hard earned inspiration—we also eat the $7.00 chocolate bar because, frankly, it tastes better.

To Run a River I’d Never Run: An Interview with Pam Houston

–by Chelsea Kindred, for The Fourth River

Pam Houston’s most recent book is Contents May Have Shifted, published in 2012. She is also the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, and the novel, Sight Hound, and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me, all published by W.W. Norton.

Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The 2013 Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA award for contemporary fiction, The Evil Companions Literary Award and multiple teaching awards.

She is Professor of English at UC Davis, directs the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers and teaches in The Pacific University low residency MFA program and at writer’s conferences around the country and the world.

She lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

Writer, teacher, and traveler Pam Houston joined Chatham University’s Summer Community of Writers in 2014 as the featured fiction writer. Here she explores the idea of community and how writers create, hold, and experience a safe place to enhance their writing

The Fourth River: How did you find community as an emerging writer?

Pam Houston: I found my first writing community as an undergrad at Denison University. Getting out of my angry, violent, tiny and isolated household to Denison was like literally coming out of the darkness into the light. My professors were aging hippies who wore ceramic peace signs around their neck and told us all of our dreams could come true as long as we worked hard and kept the greater good in mind. I majored in English and concentrated in Creative Writing. We had a group that went over to the professor’s house to meet and it was heaven. Literally heaven. I didn’t even [study] abroad, even though I’m a traveler, because I couldn’t bear to leave for one semester.

Then I was a ski bum for three years. I went to graduate school [at the University of Utah] and I went thinking it would be the same as Denison, but it wasn’t. It was much more competitive and more dysfunctional- yet we had a community. There were many good writers who were my colleagues in the program and we taught each other a lot. Deborah Monroe and I were there together; the wonderful poet Christopher Merrill was also a student at that time. We really helped and taught each other. Those were valuable years, even though I walked out on my Ph.D. a few hours short because I was tired of the faculty and administration treating creative writers like second-class citizens.

It was the best decision I ever made. I didn’t know it at the time. I literally walked out of the building and I didn’t go back to get my coat or my books. I learned a ton at Utah and I became a writer at Utah and I wrote my first book in that program, the book that gave me my whole career so I don’t regret anything. It was just that one day I had to go. And of course everyone said “You’ve thrown your whole life away” and that wasn’t true at all. I’m a full professor. I directed a program for twelve years in one of the most famous institutions of higher learning in the country (The University of California at Davis.) It didn’t turn out to be the big mistake that everyone thought it was. It showed me that I didn’t have to be pushed around.

Since [the success of Cowboys Are My Weakness], I have tried to pay it back. I was embraced by the literary community when my first book came out. It was sort of unexpectedly and stupidly successful. All the other good things of my career have come out of it and people were so kind to me that since then I really have committed to building a healthy community for young writers.

I also started a nonprofit because I believe in making community. Writing By Writers has three conferences a year that bring writers together. I am an only child from an isolating family so it matters to me to bring writers together and have them know they’re not alone. [I want them to] learn from each other and share ideas.

TFR: How would you define a healthy community?

PH:Where people feel supported, where people feel free to expand themselves creatively, aesthetically, emotionally. My job as a teacher and as a community maker is to create and hold a space where people feel like taking risks. Aesthetic risks, emotional risks, artistic risks, even personal risks.

A lot of people [at Summer Community of Writers] wrote things they said they’d never thought they could write. That’s the best news to me. That’s the best thing I could hear. As it happens that is often the best writing they’ve done, too, which is also very gratifying.

TFR:What is your approach to leading a workshop?

PH: Everyone introduces themselves and I ask some funky questions, like what song would you take with you to a desert island. I want people to be people in the workshop first. I usually confess a thing or two to say we’re all safe here; we can all talk about our mistakes or our flaws.

I have writing exercises that are really good for getting people out of their fear. I have certain passages from Wallace Stegner, Steve Almond, David Mamet, Margaret Atwood. I always think its good to say the big important things to students in a couple of different ways at once, so I bring their voices in.

What is most important is making and holding a space where people feel safe- the critiquers as well as the critiqued. It’s awesome if the level of the conversation is intelligent; it’s awesome if people bring their compassion. A lot of it is encouraging the good things that are happening naturally in the room and being a bit of a watchdog against things turning sour.

TFR:What makes a good workshop participant?

PH: I think everyone has to bring their attention and their good will. I ask that the students take each other seriously and take their work seriously.

Participants must understand that [a ten day intensive workshop] is exhausting, but this is the time when you don’t feel isolated. Everyone around you understands what you go through with this thing that matters. You’ve got to store that in yourselves for when you part and you are alone or with your family or with people who don’t get it. You’ve got to store it up and use it later when you feel like you’re the only person in the world who ever wanted to write a sentence.

When I’m teaching I know I’m being useful. So many people read things [this week] that were meaningful to them and I just made the space for it to happen.

TFR: I heard there were a lot of tears in workshop today.

PH: I always say it’s not a workshop til somebody cries.

TFR: With this balance that you’re striving for- the give and take and giving back to writers- how do you nourish your creative self? Is it through travel?

PH: Yes, travel is a big one. There’s nothing like a new place- even if that place is Pittsburgh, it doesn’t have to be Mongolia. Nothing gets me wanting to write more than a new place.

I read my very favorite authors. I read a lot of poetry. I read Carl Phillips’ poems and that makes me want to write. His poems make me think that writing is the most important thing anyone could ever do. Nature and hiking- when I’m home and I have some extended time it’s about getting out with the dogs and moving my body and then coming home and writing.

TFR: How did you achieve the balance of intake vs. output, prioritizing thesis and publishing and life, as a new writer?

PH: In my late 20s and early 30s all I wanted was to be outside in nature and I think that helped me to not obsess. I wrote from a very early age just to be sane. So I never thought I wasn’t going to write.

I didn’t really know what happened to me until years after Cowboys happened. It was dizzying. I certainly never thought I’d get published while I was in graduate school and I certainly never thought my book would become a best seller. I had one goal and that was to get one story in Best American Short Stories, and then I did and I was out of goals. Not to say I was goalless, but I didn’t know what to make my goals. My real goals were to run a river I’d never run or to get a dog.

And maybe that’s good. I knew very early on that nothing that happens to you as a writer will feel better than when you nail a paragraph. There’s nothing that feels as good as having something to write and getting up from the computer thinking you nailed it. No matter what happens to you in the publishing world, there’s no feeling that you could ever have that equals that. That’s the reason to do it. And that’s really the only reason to do it.

Now if it works out that you can make your living this way, and you don’t have to have your crappy job, that’s fantastic, that’s a bonus. But there’s nothing that feels better than nailing that paragraph.

TFR:Who are your desert island authors?

PH: Toni Morrison

Alice Munro

Don DeLillo

Carl Phillips|

Ron Carlson

TFR:What is your desert island playlist?

The Beatles “Hey Jude”

Mavis Staples “I’ll Take You There”

Wilco “Via Chicago”

Pam Houston’s Workshop Reading List

Atwood Negotiating with the Dead

Wallace Stegner Angle of Repose

Steve Almond This Won’t Take But A Minute, Honey

David Mamet Writing In Restaurants

***

Chelsea Kindred is a fiction writer living in Austin, TX, evangelizing for international education by day and pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing by night. She keeps watch for life’s glimmers.

A Conversation with Dinty W. Moore

A Conversation with Dinty W. Moore

Dinty W. Moore was the keynote speaker during Chatham’s Summer Community of Writers, July 24-August 3, 2014.

by Lori Barrett, for The Fourth River

The Fourth River: The definition of Creative Nonfiction seems to be continually debated. Do you have a working definition? Or, more importantly, where would you draw the line between an embellished fact and an actual untruth?

Dinty W. Moore: My definition of creative nonfiction is that the writer captures the truth as best she can, within the limits of memory and subjectivity. If you aren’t sure of something, tell the reader. If you doubt your memory, yet that memory persists, discuss your doubt with the reader. I don’t think an honest nonfiction writer can ever knowingly embellish a fact or add an untruth to make the story better—that’s what fiction writers do, or at least those fiction writers who write from an autobiographical place. Sophisticated readers understand that the honest writer of memoir and nonfiction is merely saying: “I know memory is flawed, but I’ve done my very best here to capture the truth.”

FR: Your book The Accidental Buddhist came to be because you were curious about Buddhism in America, and then you went out to do research. Is this a typical writing process for you, that you are prompted by questions?

DM: Always. The essay is fueled by questions, and the writer is fueled by curiosity. A student can learn to write sentences and form scenes, but that curiosity, that wonderment at the world and all that is there to be discovered—that’s something an artist either has or does not. And it is crucial.

FR: I read a review recently of Philip Lopate’s new book in the New York Times. The writer [Morris Dickstein] says Lopate is “gifted at staging his inner conflicts, radiating intimacy without descending into the confessional.” What do you see as the difference between intimacy and narcissism? Would you consider the confessional as something to avoid?

DM: It all comes down to motive, I think. Writing as confession, trying to purge a demon, is about the self, not the reader, so this strategy will never succeed. Writing out of narcissism is about the writer/subject, not the reader, and that’s not going to work out well. The best motive for writing is exploration, to look at a life [your own, if it is memoir] and try to make sense of the world and the human experience, so that both the reader and writer make discoveries along the way. I suppose the intimacy is in sharing that journey of discovery.

FR: In an interview with Another Chicago Magazine, you talk about writing about your teenage daughter. I have teens, and I was surprised when I started looking for literary, personal writing about teens that there’s very little out there—until I thought about what would happen if one of my kids didn’t like what I’d written. I think that’s why there are a lot of publications devoted to writing about young children but not about teens. Do you think this is true? Was this a concern with your daughter?

DM: That’s a good question, but I don’t really have a good answer. I think the teenage years are a fragile time for many people, and these years can be very fragile for the parents of teenagers as well. If you are writing out of an honest place, you can’t be tiptoeing around eggshells. What I know is that my project stalled and died, and that—in the long run—was probably a good thing.

FR: As a teacher of creative nonfiction, what are some of the staples you assign your students to read? And, who are some new writers who have made it on to your syllabus recently?

DM: As for new writers, I am very excited about Roxane Gay, B.J. Hollars, and Aisha Sabatini Sloane, just to name three. The staples, those writers I return to again and again include Joan Didion, Scott Russell Sanders, Lia Purpura, Eula Biss, Lee Martin, and, well, the list is very long.

FR: For beginning writers, revision can be an intimidating thought: where to start, when to stop, how to know what to eliminate. What have you found that helps you or your students to approach revision? What hinders?

DM: Revision is so necessary, so crucial and for me [perhaps I am odd this way], the most fun in writing. It’s where you get to be articulate, where the artistry comes in. The blank page terrifies me, but sifting and trying to improve through pages and pages of half-formed thoughts is pure joy.

Here is what to eliminate: anything that doesn’t make your essay better, or anything that you’ve said elsewhere in the essay in a better way. You know you are done when you can read the entire essay aloud to yourself and not stumble over a single sentence or idea; when you read it all the way through and honestly feel a completeness.

FR: You edit the online journal Brevity, you’re the director of Ohio University’s Creative Writing program and you grow vegetables. When do you find time to write?

DM: It becomes more and more difficult, but I am stubborn.

FR: Does working in the garden help with your writing the way Buddhism helps?

DM: I think any physical activity or creative activity not directly linked to words is good for the writer. Gardening is both physical and creative, but it gives my “word brain” a much-needed rest.

***

Lori Barrett is an MFA candidate in Chatham University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. She lives in Chicago.

Dinty W. Moore is author of The Mindful Writer: Noble Truths of the Writing Life, as well as the memoir Between Panic & Desire, winner of the Grub Street Nonfiction Book Prize in 2009. He also edited The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction: Advice and Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, and Teachers. Moore has published essays and stories in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Harpers, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, Iron Horse Literary Review, and The Normal School among numerous other venues. A professor of nonfiction writing at Ohio University, Moore has won many awards for his writing, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. He edits Brevity, an online journal of flash nonfiction, and lives in Athens, Ohio, where he grows heirloom tomatoes and edible dandelions.

Book Review: One Summer: America, 1927, by Bill Bryson

By Sheila Squillante on March 31, 2014

Doubleday

528 pgs/ $16.86 hardcover

Review by Ryan Rydzewski

“A most extraordinary summer was about to begin.”

-Bill Bryson

Hundreds of thousands of people gather to watch a New York skyscraper burn. Thousands more crowd Charles Ponzi’s Boston office, desperate to hand their life savings over to an investor who can do no wrong. Yet another airplane falls from the sky. The President, working his usual four-and-a-half-hour day, sits in the Oval Office with his feet in an open desk drawer, watching the window and counting passing cars. One in six people head to the movies. In Mississippi, black workers man their posts at gunpoint as the worst flood in American history approaches. The government, in the throes of Prohibition, lethally poisons batches of booze to deter would-be drinkers. Minnesota considers changing its name to Lindberghia, and bombs explode in almost every major American city.

Welcome to the summer of 1927, beautifully reconstructed by bestselling travel writer and historian Bill Bryson. In his new book, One Summer: America, 1927 (Random House), Bryson tells the story of America at the height of the Roaring Twenties—or, as he calls it, the “Age of Loathing.” It’s a country wild for mass spectacle, where anarchists lurk in the shadows and almost everybody gets rich. Where misfits and criminals run the cities and towns. It’s a country teeming with paranoia and hatred and some of the most fascinating characters ever produced.

The names here are familiar—Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone, Babe Ruth, Calvin Coolidge—but Bryson weaves them together to show an America that was, in many ways, just beginning to come into its own. It’s easy to draw modern political parallels, and readers of One Summer will almost certainly do so. But Bryson himself stays close to the facts, focusing on narrative rather than reflection, emphasizing the surprising and sensational rather than the damning or prescient. It’s as if he wrote One Summer to mirror the fast-paced, gawking ethos of the age—a speeding newsreel that gives only the highlights.

In classic Bryson fashion, One Summer covers a lot of ground, from the history of aviation to the development of modern sound projection. When he introduces a new character or event, Bryson veers off course to dig deeper and give his readers a closer look. The section on Henry Ford, for example, begins with a description of Ford’s mind-blowing ignorance, which, as Bryson notes, “was a frequent source of wonder.” (Ford believed that the weight of so many buildings on the Earth’s surface would eventually cause the planet to implode.) He was ridiculed by his contemporaries for his infamous stupidity, yet his Model T changed the world more than anything that came before or after. The section goes on to explore Ford’s early life in Detroit, the founding of the Ford Motor Company, the mechanics of the Model T, the basics of the assembly line, Ford’s insufferable management techniques, his burning hatred of the Jews, the rise and fall of Ford’s newspaper, the history of mining in Brazil, rubber production, Ford’s failed colony in the Amazon (called Fordlandia), and finally back to Detroit.

There aren’t many writers who could pull this off without losing their audience, especially for 528 pages. But Bryson’s gift for careful narrative almost always shows us only what’s most interesting and relevant. Everything he writes about a man like Ford, no matter how tangential, eventually serves to illuminate both the inventiveness and recklessness of 1920’s America. The resulting story, so gripping and full of trivia-night facts, makes you want to shake the person next to you with every new page and say, “You’re not going to believe this.” One Summer is a large book, to be sure, but Bryson’s narrative is so rapid and to-the-point that it reads like a book a third of its size.

Is it pop history? Sure. But it’s also a hell of a lot of fun: Charles Lindbergh was so precise about the weight of his plane that he cut the margins off his maps. He subscribed to a newspaper-clipping service so that his mother could keep up with his adventures. After a few weeks, the clippings weighed over a ton and had to be delivered to his mother’s house by a series of trucks. A series of people climbed atop flagpoles, many of which capped very tall buildings, and sat there as long as they could, creating the art of flagpole sitting—one of the Jazz Age’s most popular fads. Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly didn’t come down from an Atlantic City flagpole for 49 days.

What isn’t here, though, and what might disappoint readers of Bryson’s other works, is a personal connection to the material or an attempt to find a larger story. Bryson’s most popular book, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, is just as stuffed with intriguing history and humor as One Summer, but it’s also about his best friend trying to walk his way out of alcoholism.

Bryson’s father’s death sparks his journey in The Lost Continent. Even Bryson’s other history, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, examined the evolution of human residence through the lens of his own home.

Unlike his other books, Bryson avoids the first person almost entirely here, coming through only in his clear enthusiasm for the material. Yet he writes with such eagerness and humor that you can almost sense him smiling at the story unfolds:

“Herbert Hoover lived to be ninety, and never in the whole of that time, so far as can be told, experienced anything approaching a moment’s real joy.”

“New York had more saloons in 1927 than it had before Prohibition, and drinking remained so transparently prevalent that the mayor of Berlin on a visit reportedly asked Mayor Jimmy Walker when Prohibition was to begin.”

“Moral decline was evident everywhere…Even the hesitation waltz was deemed to contain some element of sultriness that made it tantamount to musical foreplay. Worst of all by far was jazz, which was widely held to be a springboard for drug taking and promiscuity. ‘Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?’ asked an article in the Ladies Home Journal. You bet it did…”

Lack of analysis aside, a book this large—both in length and scope—is bound to have some flaws. One Summer showcases its share, the first and most obvious being the dead-end rabbit holes that Bryson seems to tumble through almost out of habit. While his asides are almost always worthwhile, occasionally we get a glaring dud. Take this one on Miller Higgins, manager of the 1927 Yankees:

“Forty-eight years old in 1927, he had grown up in Cincinnati. His parents were English immigrants; his father had been an excellent cricket player.”

You sometimes get the feeling that Bryson includes these because, well, he’s introduced a new character, and that’s what Bill Bryson does when he introduces a new character. But there are hundreds of characters in One Summer, many of them resurrected from limited source material. Bryson offers what he can, but a few stark moments make us wish we’d been spared Historical Aside #347. (To Bryson’s credit, though, it’s only because Historical Asides #346 and #348 were so fascinating.)

Another flaw—and this may seem small unless you’re an avid Bryson fan—is his overuse of the phrase, “The upshot is…” A problem in every book Bryson has ever written, One Summer is no exception (at least five upshots by my count).

The upshot is that despite its flaws and a tendency to stay at the surface, One Summer: America 1927 remains one of the most charming nonfiction books I’ve read all year. For anyone with even a passing interest in American history, it’s an essential read that’ll keep you smiling as you turn its pages, stopping strangers, telling anybody who’ll listen that really, they simply won’t believe this.

***

Ryan Rydzewski is a first-year graduate student at Chatham University, where he’s pursuing an MFA in nonfiction writing. His work has appeared in the Atticus Review and Three Rivers Review. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Book Review: Before and Afterlives, by Christopher Barzak

Book Review: Before and Afterlives, by Christopher Barzak

By Sheila Squillante on March 19, 2014

Lethe Press, March 2013, 225 pages, $15

Review by Kelly Lynn Thomas

After reading Christopher Barzak’s short story collection, Before and Afterlives, you might find yourself looking for mermaids among the bikini-clad women swimming at the beach, or for a ghost lingering around your kitchen at night. You might even start wondering if the suspiciously friendly newcomer to town isn’t an alien. Barzak’s tales of fantastic happenings set among the mundane trappings of everyday life are that believable.

Out in March 2013 from Lethe Press, the seventeen short stories in this collection range in length from a few pages to two that are just over twenty for a total of 225 pages. But even though this is a relatively short book, it’s not a quick read. These stories demand attention. They aren’t dense or impenetrable, but they are rich and complex, and you’ll want to spend some time with each one. I rarely read more than one story at a time, so that I had time to digest it, to fully appreciate the way Barzak weaves fantastic elements into post-industrial cities and rural towns whose school boards fire teachers for not teaching creationism alongside evolution and think it’s legal.

“Place” in fantasy is often something that can be manipulated, controlled, or escaped. In this collection, though, it is solid, unchanging, and for many characters, inescapable. It plays a starring role in almost every story in the collection, and that focus on setting helps ground the collection and make some of the more fantastic elements seem natural—or, when Barzak wants, unnatural and bizarre in contrast. This ability to both ground me in a place and then completely unnerve me kept me delighted and turning pages.

One of the best examples of how Barzak uses place comes in the Nebula Award finalist story, “Map of Seventeen,” wherein a teen girl discovers her older brother’s boyfriend is a merman. That’s not what the story is really about, though. It’s about family, and how place defines us, and how growing up is hard whether you’re human or something else. Toward the end of the story, the main character, Meg, muses,

If I had a map of seventeen, of the years I’ve lived so far, it would be small and plain, outlining the contours of my town with a few landmarks on it like Marrow’s Ravine and the town square, the schools, the pond, our fields and the barn and the home we live in. It would be on crisp, fresh paper, because I haven’t traveled very far, and stuck to the routes I know best. … What else is out there, beyond this edge of the world I live on? Who else is out there? Are there real reasons to be as afraid of the world as I’ve been? (115).

This passage not only tells us a lot about the town and Meg’s home, but a lot about Meg herself and how she relates to those things. She rails against the town for not liking gay people, but she herself sticks to the paths she knows. The map metaphor is not a new one, but using it to describe an age adds a fresh twist.

Meanwhile, the merman boyfriend serves as a stand-in for the parts of us other people can’t or won’t accept, and the parts of us we don’t want others to see. Barzak further links those hidden parts of us to place, as the merman can only show his true form in the same rural Ohio town that frustrates and angers Meg because of its narrow mindedness—although he can’t show it to any of the townspeople, only in private. Meg and the merman are both trapped, for different reasons.

“What We Know About the Lost Families of — House” treats place differently. The townspeople tell the story collectively in the first-person plural, the “we” voice. It brings to mind William Faulkner’s 1930 short story “A Rose for Emily” with its similar point of view and house-of-secrets as focal point. The main character’s name is even Rose, perhaps in homage.

The ghosts of all the people who’ve died within its walls and on its grounds haunt the house, whose original family name has been forgotten. Vivid, characterizing details bring the house to life and make the story stand out as an example of how a place can become a character. Rose hears the house speaking to her, and constantly has to clean up buttons that appear out of nowhere. After a visit to her daughter, her mother describes an encounter to the townspeople: “I said to Rose, ‘Rose! What’s the matter with you? Why are all these buttons lying about?’ and she says to me, ‘Mother, I try, but they just keep coming’” (12).

This specificity of place appears again and again throughout the book. Without the button quirk, the house threatens to become a simple evil villain, swallowing the maiden. But we know the house is trying, too.

Place and our connections to it aren’t the only things that keep the collection moving. Ambiguity and dark twists abound, as in “Dead Letters,” a story that can be read multiple ways. On the surface, it’s about the imaginary friend of a murdered artist sending letters to the artist’s home. But who is this person, really? Is she a crazy homeless woman who read the young artist’s obituary and made up a story in her head? Was she ever imaginary? Or was she somehow put into the body of a homeless woman, an imaginary friend made real by the friend’s murder?

The first letter Alice Likely writes to her friend Sarah says, “For a long time I thought I was dead too. Then one day someone called my name … and I opened my eyes in a dark place, like a fairy tale princess trapped in a coffin. Light appeared suddenly, a flash so sharp and blinding, it pricked my eyes and made them water” (119). This passage could be read as a birth, or a rebirth. In a collection like this, with so many fantastic tales, it would almost be impossible to believe anything but the most fantastic explanation. But Barzak doesn’t let us off that easy. The woman wakes up with Sarah’s obituary in the newspaper spread across her chest—it’s awfully convenient for her to just happen to wake up and be draped in her former best friend’s obituary. It’s up to the reader to decide what to believe—something I love in a story.

Overall, this is a strong collection. No stories stood out as weak or not up to snuff. But then, Before and Afterlives is Barzak’s fourth book and second collection of short fiction, so he’s had plenty of practice. He’s also won numerous awards, including a Crawford Award for his first novel and a James Triptee Jr. Award for his second. His second novel and several of his stories have also been finalists for Nebula Awards, a series of awards given annually by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for the previous year’s best science fiction and fantasy. What I find hard to believe is that he’s never won one.

Anyone who likes dark fantasy with a bit of a bite to it will enjoy this book. And although this isn’t marketed as a young adult title, I believe teens would enjoy it as well—many of the stories have teen main characters, and deal with struggles like dating (hard to do when you’ve got barbs sticking out of your skin, like the titular character from “The Boy Who Was Born Wrapped in Barbed Wire”) and figuring out what to do with your life after high school.

***

Kelly Lynn Thomas reads, writes, and sometimes sews. Her creative work has appeared in metazen, Punchnel’s, Psychopomp, and others, and she received her MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University. She is hopelessly obsessed with Star Wars and can always be found with a large mug of tea. She also runs the very small Wild Age Press. Read more at http://kellylynnthomas.com.

Christopher Barzak graduated from Chatham University with his MFA in Summer of 2010. He is an assistant professor of fiction writing at Youngstown State University, and teaches in the Northeast Ohio MFA program. He is the author of a novel, One for Sorrow (Bantam Books) and a novel-in-stories, The Love We Share Without Knowing (Bantam Books). Chris has also co-edited the second volume of an anthology of fiction called Interfictions (Interstitial Arts Foundation), and has served as translator on Kant: For Eternal Peace (Sogosha Books), a book about Immanuel Kant’s peace theories for Japanese teens. He is author of two collections of short stories—Birds and Birthdays, and Before and Afterlives—and his first novel has been made into a feature film under the title, Jamie Marks is Dead, starring the actress Liv Tyler. More can be found at: http://christopherbarzak.com/

Then Work, Work, Work: An Interview with Tim Parrish

By Lainy Carslaw, for The Fourth River

Tim Parrish is the author of three books: Fear and What Follows: The Violent Education of a Christian Racist, a memoir (University Press of Mississippi); The Jumper, a novel (winner of Texas Review Press’s 2012 George Garrett Prize; and Red Stick Men, a story collection (University Press of Mississippi). His work has appeared in dozens of periodicals and in a number of anthologies, including Louisiana in Words, Alive and Awake in the Pelican State, The Best of LSU Fiction, and Rules of Thumb. In a former life he was the front man for the bands The Human Rayz, The Lower Chakras, and The Irascibles. He grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and is now a professor in the full-residency MFA and undergraduate creative-writing programs at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven.

Parrish lead the workshop in multi-genre prose at last year’s Summer Community of Writers.

The Fourth River: How much of your fiction is drawn from personal experience? In The Jumper specifically, is the part about minority children being sold to farms for labor actually true? Was there ever a lawsuit involving that scandal or did you invent it?

Tim Parrish:  Five of the nine stories in my collection, Red Stick Men, are heavily based on my family, though of course so heavily recrafted as to be only shakily classified as “autobiographical.” Members of my family begged to differ. One of the other four stories, from which The Jumper partially grew, is based on a newspaper article, another about my time working offshore, though with a central character only tangentially related to me, another about a shooting that a friend saw at work, and another about the Mississippi River changing course, so it’s a mixed bag. The memoir is, of course, my experience, and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever written. The Jumper, which is my best book I think, isn’t autobiographical at all, except that I tutored a man on whom the main character is based and then combined that with a premise from one of my stories.

TFR: Your memoir, Fear and What Follows: The Violent Education of a Christian Racist, deals with your process of overcoming a racist past. Was that evolution gradual or did you have one “ah-ha” moment that woke you up from your prejudices?

TP: Well, obviously it’s tough to summarize such a thing when I felt the need to write an entire book about it, and you would have to read the book to see about my evolution, but overcoming racist indoctrination, not only in my upbringing, but from society as well, is a gradual and ongoing evolution. That said, there were key moments that led to things like epiphanies, all after violent circumstances. One was when, in the aftermath of a friend of ours being stabbed in a fight and almost dying, this powerful racist under whose sway I’d fallen wanted to burn down a house of innocent black people and I just wouldn’t go along with that (luckily, he didn’t either). Then after being in a gang fight at school and getting suspended my senior year, my father and the African American quarterback at our school stepped in told me things I need to hear.

TFR:  Most people seem to be praising your bravery for speaking up about your past. Are you getting any backlash as well?

TP: I’ve gotten a huge amount of support and feedback, but I truly don’t believe I’ve done anything that’s courageous in simply telling the truth. But, oh, yeah, I’m getting backlash from both whites and African Americans. Most of it is from white people in the South, especially my hometown, but just last night I was on a radio show where I was gone after pretty thoroughly by the two African American hosts for still being a racist and part of worldwide white supremacy. It’s not easy to manage all that because I’m a person who tends to engage people in what I hope is a rational way, and many of these people, obviously, aren’t looking to have rational discourse.

TFR: Is your lesson one of hope that people really can change?

TP: Without a doubt, and I’ve had to work hard to get there and stay there through lots of cynicism and anger in me.

TFR: You said you have been “somewhat famous” over the last few weeks. Are you enjoying the attention or are you more of a private person?

TP: For the most part, I’ve loved it, though “somewhat famous” is a little ironic. More like mildly high profile, especially after I was on CNN, though things started going fast when an Op Ed I wrote for the New York Daily News went viral. I’m a performer and I like to talk about things that matter to me, so I’ve enjoyed having a wider audience. I like the buzz of new things, and it was definitely a rush when my girlfriend and I were in NYC and I was about to leave to go back to CT when CNN called and asked if I could go on in four hours. I didn’t even have a clean sleeved shirt with me, so that was an intense and weird day, not mostly because of the shirt, but partly. I hadn’t had make-up put on me in a while either.

TFR: What’s your next project?  Are you in the middle of one?

 TP: I am working on a convoluted novel that is a fake memoir entitled MIMWAR! It’s told from a first-person narrator named, surprise, Tim Parrish, but also from a number of third person POVs by characters whom a younger Tim Parrish knew or the older one creates. Most of those third-person characters are involved in a kind of Western set in 1971 Baton Rouge. The book came about in part because of my frustration with and bitterness toward NYC agents and other houses rejecting the actual memoir after trying to push me to make it focus more on violence and sensationalism. So, this memoir starts with a version of a fight that a number of people suggested I start the actual memoir with. MIMWAR!’s version is narrated by previously-mentioned, crank, edgy writer who bears no resemblance to me. I’m trying to make sure that it’s so convoluted that no agent or big house will take it either.

TFR: How long have you been teaching?  What do you like most about it?  Least? Do you have a student who has really stuck with you? One that maybe taught you more than you taught them?

TP: If you count the four years during which I taught two classes a semester while getting my MFA, I suppose I’ve been teaching for a little over thirty years, including a three-year stint as a high-school teacher, and a three year gig as a teacher of developmental reading at LSU. I love the interaction with people, giving my students ownership of their learning, giving feedback and discussing what I love, but most of all I love being able to sometimes have a positive impact on people and just getting to know so many people. I’ve had tons of students who have stuck with me, and I’m still in touch with students all the way back to when I taught high school. And I’m constantly learning from and influenced by MFA students because they are reading works that I haven’t read and doing things that I haven’t done and so I have to expand my understanding and aesthetics in order to respond semi-intelligently.

TFR: Was your first book hard to get published?  How did you get your foot in the door? Many of us here are trying to manage our expectations. We have dreams of being published but don’t want to write solely for being published. Do you have any advice for us on managing those expectations?

TP: Every one of my books has been hard to get published, as I think I complain about up above. Rather than get a foot in doors, I tend to shove them open and then have them swing back and hit me in the face. As far as expectations, publishing literary fiction seems to get harder and harder. I think most people continue to write literary fiction because they can’t not write it. I compare it to a virus. So write what you’re compelled to write, send the work out, try to make connections with other writers whom you admire and who get your vision and keep trying. I don’t buy this thick-skin thing, but you do have to take rejection the least personally as you can and just have real resolve. But most importantly, make the work as good and original as you can, and then work, work, work with the aim of always learning from your own work, work you admire, and trusted readers.

Interview: Adam Tavel

By Sheila Squillante on March 3, 2014

Adam Tavel received the 2010 Robert Frost Award, and his forthcoming collections are The Fawn Abyss (Salmon, 2014) and Red Flag Up (Kattywompus, 2013), a chapbook. His recent poems appear or will soon appear in West Branch, Indiana Review, Zone 3, Diode, Bayou, Yemassee, The Cincinnati Review, and Cream City Review, among others. Tavel is an associate professor of English at Wor-Wic Community College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

~Interview by Christopher Ruff

The Fourth River: Can you talk about your path as a poet? Not that typical poet’s bio stuff, but the writers, the teachers, and the moments that led you to choose this life of words.

Adam Tavel: One of the biggest influences in my writing life was, and remains, David Hillenburg, my sixth grade English teacher. When I met him, he was only in his second or third year of teaching and seemed like a strikingly irreverent figure among the other hum-drum faculty of my junior high: tall, lanky, with long sideburns and a wacky tie collection. His classroom was idiosyncratic in ways that I’m sure is outlawed now, with pictures of Elvis, a cork board littered with a dozen of Bukowski’s PG-rated poems (though the occasional word was still blacked out with marker, CIA-style), and a large list of behavioral commandments, most of which sought to differentiate the nuances between ‘nose scratching’ and ‘nose picking.’ He wasn’t a rule-breaker and he didn’t incite rebellion, but he did challenge us to think for ourselves and be as creative as possible. Among other things, he had us read The Phantom Toll Booth and Sounder, and he certainly was the first person in my life who seemed genuinely invested in poetry. He was also the faculty advisor for the school’s literary magazine, so we bonded pretty quickly once I showed an interest in writing beyond my mere assignments. I’m glad to note that we’re still close friends all these years later.

Certainly there have been many other influences, too. My mother was an aspiring journalist in college, so I had an early appreciation for language. In college and graduate school, I was blessed to study with more brilliant professors and writers than I can count. Perhaps the most critical mentor, though, was my undergraduate mentor, labor historian John Hinshaw, who was unbelievably patient with me—I would ambush him during his office hours, an essay draft and new poems in tow, and he always took the time to read everything I wrote. Looking back, I’m embarrassed to realize that I consumed so much of his time, especially with material that had nothing to do with his courses. I try to remember these moments now, when my own students sheepishly ask for guidance with assignments for other classes or timidly slide me one of their  poems or stories.

It’s unwise to extrapolate any grand generalizations from the limited experiences that comprise my writing life, as the development of any poet is a long, quirky, serendipitous adventure that relies just as much on luck and pluck as it does on talent. That said, though, I think our earliest guides—parents and teachers—shape us in ways that last a lifetime. This is a fairly clichéd statement, but I fret about the detrimental impact of rigorous standardized testing and No Child Left Behind; not only do they both devalue the arts, but they send the message that creativity is a distraction with no currency in the intellectual marketplace. I’m sure the bureaucrats would say that those moments at the beginning or end of class spent on a poem outside the curriculum is a waste of time, but it is in such moments that poets far better than I are made.

FR: In some of your poetry—such as “Witness 483: Phoenix Lights Incident, 1997” and “Widow’s Lament” (both published in Connotation Press), and “Fever Dream in Which Anne Sexton Is My Mother Begging for Her Job at the Sunshine Supermarket After Her Third Reprimand for Tardiness” (published in diode)—your speakers seem to be actors on the stage, reciting their climactic monologues. Do you have a background in theater? Do you pull inspiration for these characters from movies, TV, plays? Or real life? Or just out of your imagination? Do you do research on these personae to make them as authentic as you do, or do they come more spontaneously from your well of inspiration?

AT: I dabbled in acting as a high school and college student, but it was never something to which I aspired, and I don’t think those experiences were formative in my writing life. That said, I have a deep affinity for the dramatic monologue, or persona poem, and I go through long periods where it is my dominant mode. As an undergraduate, I was a history major and worked briefly for the Smithsonian and Maryland State Archives, but even before that I was obsessed with history—the earliest interests I can recall having as a child were dinosaurs and ancient Egypt. So I suppose the monologue is my way to explore this obsession, but also to engage in acts of ventriloquism.

Most of the figures I attempt to embody are dead, so the pleasure and challenge in these poems is remaining true to the voice while simultaneously resurrecting the voice for the contemporary ear. Occasionally this sort of poem requires research—to avoid an anachronism or accurately date something, for example—but I try to avoid having my poems, however archaic, turn into little reports. My friend William Hathaway scoffed at a bad historical poem he read a few years ago, joking that it seemed like the poet had merely versified a Wikipedia article. I thought that was one of the sharpest insults I had ever heard. There are all manner of pitfalls to the monologue, but flat reportage and/or pedantry are chief among them.

FR: Seemingly opposite of these dramatic monologues, you write some poems—like “Target Practice” (published in diode) and “The Rocket” (published on The Fourth River Online)—that seem to come from your voice, with references to people the reader may assume to be drawn from your life. In these poems, there seems to be a direct opposition between “adulthood” and “childhood.” Does this run along the lines of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience in some way? Is there some other thread of experience you’re trying to unravel here? Or do you just have a latent adolescence inside of you dying to tear away your adult experience (as I often find true for myself)?

AT: It’s funny that you ask this question, as I asked something similar of my friend Eric Anderson a few months ago when I interviewed him for a separate project. For me, it’s important to differentiate “innocence” from “childhood,” and “childhood” from “adolescence” for that matter. I like to think of innocence as a state of being that is often anchored by childhood, but is not limited to childhood, which is merely an age. Adolescence largely repulses me, as I have a hard time seeing it as anything other than a post-war fiction created by advertisers to exacerbate and extend the inherent dilemmas of being a teenager as a means to sell garbage. Somewhere in America, a balding father blares a classic rock station in his convertible, shrieking the phrase “teenage wasteland.”

Getting back to your question, though, the two poems you reference are certainly in the confessional mode and present me, or versions of me, as their speakers. The notion that innocence always meets a violent end—and is often crushed and obliterated, as it was at Sandy Hook—is a prevalent theme in my poems, but it’s an ancient idea, as it’s front and center in the Greek tragedies, and the Bible, and the quirky verses of our prophet Blake.

I’m not sure I see innocence and experience as necessarily antithetical—injury, illness, senility, and dementia can all result in a kind of tragic innocence at any stage of life—but I do see childhood and adulthood as being fairly rigid constructs. One of the many gifts poetry gives us is the ability to see the world afresh through the eyes of another, so my poems addressing childhood seek, and occasionally find, a bewildered amazement in keeping with the romantic sublime. As a father, I can trespass into childhood through imaginative play, but I’m always aware that it’s foreign territory, and I’m always aware that I’m a tourist, even if my heart swells from the visit.

FR: In “The Undertaker’s Son Gets Cast as Ophelia’s Gravedigger” (published in Toad), were you really the son of an undertaker (hence falling under the more personal poem category) or would this poem fall under the dramatic monologue category? Either way, this idea of “typecasting” is very interesting, as we tend to fall into certain roles in our lives that seem to be cast even before we are born. Into what roles do you find yourself sometimes “typecast”? Do you try to capitalize on those “types” or try to break free from them?

AT: I know nothing of undertaking and don’t have any family or friends in the field, so thankfully I lack first-hand experience with it. The poem’s narrative situation is built on a fairly rudimentary irony, but as you insinuate, it’s also mining how we typecast each other, and at times allow ourselves to be typecast. The voice is that of a quirky kid who is as horny as he is creative, so his motives for auditioning for a stage role are less than genuine. The image of a guitar-slung teen butchering a Dylan cover for his Hamlet audition struck me as pretty witty until I later saw Steve Coogan’s Hamlet 2 and realized how much further the irony could go, and of course how unoriginal my idea was.

The discovery for me in writing the poem was that this speaker is fairly oblivious to the world, secures a bit part because he’s assumed to know something about death, and in the end realizes that he knows a great deal about death after all. It’s also about fathers and sons, and how sons are frequently inadvertent apprentices. This is a fatalistic view, of course, but sometimes I find it difficult to see the world through any other lens.

On a more global level, though, one of the great pleasures of the persona poem for me is being able to invent characters and inhabit them. When the voices are convincing, there are larger intimations of their worlds, their daily lives, their burdens and dreams. Poets sometimes think of ‘character’ as the proprietary hardware of fiction writers and playwrights, but I think that’s a reflection of our literary milieu’s resistance to narrative rather than a reflection of verse’s vast polyphonic tradition. And for me, it’s a means by which I can jettison the vessel of self, if only temporarily, and thus jettison whatever role I’m resisting at that particular moment—teacher, editor, washer of dishes, etc.

FR: In “Letter to Schnell Written on Glovebox Napkins” (published in Thrush) and in “The Rocket,” you have moments of subtle humor that punctuate the more serious aspects of your poetry. I want to laugh at the monikers “Goatee” and “Mascara Smear” even as I feel for the child of these dysfunctional adults. I know the silliness of “Captain Atom,” as I too find myself in a world of make-believe when I can momentarily escape my adult life. Do you try to offset (or maybe even highlight) the emotional impact of these poems with humor? Or does the humor come as a byproduct of the narrative being told? Maybe I’m asking “which comes first, the chicken or the egg?”

AT: The humor in these particular poems was present in their respective first drafts, since I realized—as I so often do—that they wouldn’t work without some modulation in pitch or feeling. And when I say ‘work,’ I don’t mean likable, or marketable, or ‘workshop clean’—I mean that I wouldn’t have been able to finish the act of composing them and contented myself unless some leavening occurred. In “The Rocket,” the speaker’s surrender to fantasy by transforming his snowy trek into a science fiction scene is fairly logical: it’s a doomed mission, so why not have some fun along the way? Of course, in “Letter to Schnell…,” it’s gallows humor, as that bickering couple’s venom for each other—and the inability to keep the speaker’s son from witnessing it, even peripherally—would just grind the poem down to nothing without some wit.

I like to think of myself as a funny guy, but the truth is that I have a pretty average sense of humor, so these moments, or turns, aren’t shrewdly mapped out. Rather, it’s a way to allow the poem to go beyond mere reportage, to acknowledge that the poem isn’t mere experience, but experience with editorial distance, rendered in such a way that the authenticity of feeling outweighs the obligation to verisimilitude. Events, particularly tragic ones, are rarely funny when they’re actually transpiring—a bad job interview, a flat tire, a romantic dinner gone awry. It’s only later that we see the humor in them and allow ourselves to laugh at the memory, and of course memories and dreams are the most elemental kinds of poems. Richard Pryor setting himself on fire wasn’t funny, but the story he told about burning was hysterical.

FR: Being that The Fourth River is a journal concerning itself with “place,” how much do you feel locality plays a role in your writing?

AT: The idea of place has always been integral to me as a reader and writer of poems. Much of my first book—which is coming out next year from Salmon Poetry—explores the landscape of my adopted home here on the Delmarva Peninsula. It is a gorgeous terrain, rife with natural wonder and the rich traditions of farming and fishing. Yet it is impossible for me to forget that it is the rightful home of the Nanticoke, a tribe long decimated, as well as the birthplace of American slavery. Like most places, it is a juxtaposition of beauty and blood.

This tension is especially palpable when I run, as I live out in the boonies, so I see plantation mansions, stubble fields, and century-old dilapidated barns all within a few miles. I’m a native Marylander, too, so even though I grew up in the more suburban parts of the state’s western shore, some of my earliest memories are of driving past the tobacco auction houses not far from my grandmother’s home. Even as a child daydreaming in the backseat of a car, they felt ancient, alien, haunted—totally out of keeping with the fast food restaurants and gas stations that surrounded them. Yet they endured, and still endure, as remnants from a not-so-distant past that still has some bearing on my present, a past that calls out for acknowledgment and reckoning.

***

Christopher Ruff is an alum of Chatham University’s MFA Program.  He lives in Juniata County, Pennsylvania.

Of Red-tailed Hawks and Earth Writing: A Review of Earth Works, by Scott Russell Sanders

Of Red-tailed Hawks and Earth Writing: A Review of Earth Works, by Scott Russell Sanders

By Sheila Squillante on August 5, 2013

Reviewed by: Brigette Bernagozzi

Earth Works

Scott Russell Sanders

ISBN 978-0253000958

Indiana University Press, 2012

“I am sometimes asked if I am a ‘nature’ writer,” Scott Russell Sanders writes in the preface to his newest book, “as if paying attention to our membership in the web of life were a specialized interest, like following sports or fashion or cuisine. What I am is an Earth writer: I’m interested in life on this planet—all life.” Labels notwithstanding, when an essayist as impassioned as Sanders publishes a new book, people usually take note. The aptly titled Earth Works is the latest from the award-winning writer and indeed features several classic and uncollected essays built around the concept of place—and in particular, the natural world.

Throughout his writing career, Sanders has published eleven books of non-fiction and eight books of fiction. He and his wife currently reside in Bloomington, Indiana. As place is one of the common themes in his non-fiction work, his essays often focus on the land itself, or on the various aspects of community and family that have permeated life in his various hometowns.

Clocking in at nearly four hundred pages, Earth Works is a pretty handy tome for a nature-lover’s home library, as it includes many of Sanders’ best-known essays, such as “Buckeye” and “Staying Put.” Yet even if you are not a member of Greenpeace with a few environmental protests on your résumé, perhaps you consider yourself to be a reflective thinker when it comes to the big questions in life: how to relate to the opposite sex (“Looking at Women” and “The Men We Carry In Our Minds”), for example, or how to talk to your angsty teenage son (“Mountain Music”) and foster male bonding through a game of catch (which is a “dialogue carried on with muscle and bone,” as Sanders writes in “Reasons of the Body”), how to observe one’s patriotic and moral duties as an alternate juror (“Doing Time in the Thirteenth Chair”), or even how to navigate your father’s alcoholism with the kind of grace and candor that comes only with hindsight (“Under the Influence”). Earth Works remains a thing of substance for readers who want to consider the intricacies of our social networks and family dynamics, in addition to the larger implications of our current environmental climate and responsibilities to the planet. Sanders has been considering such weighty family and community-oriented issues throughout his long writing career, and he is very good at it.

“Buckeye,” a piece that is perhaps most representative of the reflective tone and natural setting that appears in this collection, also happens to be one of my favorite essays in Earth Works. As a reflection on the legacy of his father, Sanders introduces the essay with a description of the pair of buckeyes that keep residence on his desk—brown seeds that his father was known for keeping in his pocket for years before his death. In a flashback scene, Sanders’ father instructs him as a child about the trees that would become such an important part of his life later on:

‘[T]he old-timers called it stinking buckeye,’ he told me. …You see where it got its name?’ he asked.

I saw: what gleamed in my hand was the eye of a deer, bright with life. ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said.

‘It’s beautiful,’ my father agreed, ‘but also poisonous. Nobody eats buckeye, except maybe a fool squirrel.’

The portrait of this father—revealed through his quirky habits and colloquial speech—and of his son’s love is so beautifully drawn that it even sustains the surprising conclusion, in which Sanders admits that he once saw a hawk in the sky that reminded him of his father. Not just reminded him, I should say, but seemed to be his father: “The voice of my education told me then and tells me now that I did not meet my father, that I merely projected my longing onto a bird…yet nothing I heard in school, nothing I’ve read, no lesson reached by logic has ever convinced me as utterly or stirred me as deeply as did that red-tailed hawk.” He does his level best to convince the reader of his own conviction in this spiritual experience, and though it is for each reader to judge, I found his conclusions to be powerful ones.

“Under the Influence,” one of Sanders’ best-known works, first appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1989 and offers a different portrait—that of a childhood profoundly disturbed by his father’s heavy drinking. “My father drank,” it begins. “He drank like a gut-punched boxer gasps for breath, as a starving dog gobbles food—compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling.” Here, Sanders explores the physical symptoms of his father’s addiction, the shame that kept him separated from his religious Ohio community, and his own road to forgiveness and acceptance. He confides in his Acknowledgments: “I wanted to record what it felt like to be the child of an alcoholic while placing that experience within larger cultural and social contexts.” Thus, while looking back to his childhood, Sanders employs a youthful perspective for much of the piece, explaining his grudge against the winemakers, “whose faces shone from the labels of their wine,” for their poisoning of his father’s body and mind: “I noted the Gallo brothers’ address, in California, and I studied the road atlas to see how far that was from Ohio, because I meant to go out there and tell Ernest and Julio what they were doing to my father, and then, if they showed no mercy, I would kill them.” “Under the Influence” reveals the author’s struggle with the overwhelming emotions caused by the shameful family secrecy that bound him as a child, making him an accomplice to his father’s addiction—and yet, Sanders is clearly writing from a place of acceptance instead of bitterness, a distinction that makes the piece all the more powerful. “I hope it is clear,” he writes in the Acknowledgments, “that I do not regard myself as a victim of my father’s illness. His illness affected me, along with my entire family, but the healthy rest of him shaped me more profoundly.”

In Sanders’ best essays, there is a mix of the meditative and the spiritually-minded. While those who are not inclined to love the earth as he does may at times find his reasoning to be dogmatic,the spirited nature of his explorations and his willingness to ask the hard, human questions about life and to share his struggle with their answers on the page more than compensate for any intermittent issues of tone.

Among the thirty essays it contains, Earth Works offers a thought-provoking mix of old and new. The nine new pieces included in the back of Earth Works—in this case, “new” means unpublished in any of Sanders’ other books, though all have appeared in print elsewhere—are themselves worth the sticker price. Its catalog of well-chosen selections spans the many decades of its author’s inspiring career and reveals what appear to be Sanders’ twin passions in life: ruminating on life’s meatiest conundrums and delighting in the bit of the earth that rises up to meet him, wherever he might stand.

Brigette Bernagozzi is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Nonfiction.  Whenever she puts her pen down for a spell, she teaches creative writing at the local jail, works as a freelance editor, and composes place-based blog posts centered on her own Pittsburgh backyard. Her writing has been featured in Coal Hill Review.

Review: Miraculum, by Ruth L. Schwartz

By Sheila Squillante on July 21, 2013

Reviewed by Marguerite Sargent

Miraculum

Ruth L. Schwartz

ISBN 978-1-932870-59-6

Autumn House Press

In Miraculum, her stunning and vital fifth collection, Ruth L. Schwartz writes with thoughtful precision and praise of the wounded. These poems have a way of reaching into a moment and pulling it inside out, of illuminating the body and its hungers. Schwartz obsesses over issues such as what is this body? Does it contain us? Is there a part of us living outside of ourselves? In poems both lyrical and miraculous, she grapples with her central question: “Can this grief love itself / into something else?”

Miraculum is pieced together by quotes from the great minds of poets and philosophers, including Pablo Neruda, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Robert Bly. The quotes are interlaced with the poems that come before and after them, manifesting a body of work that is constantly in conversation.

The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense,

a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.

The words above, written by Friedrich Nietzsche, fuse together the title poem “Miraculum” with the poem “In the Garden.” “Miraculum” portrays how “we shuffle along in our various bodies” completing ordinary tasks with an extraordinary vehicle. “In the Garden” awakens the pain we inflict on our bodies and how our bodies continue to thrive. Nietzsche’s words explain this love/hate, this war and peace, our bodies endure with the spirit that inhabits them. The quotes, both evocative and poignant, serve to bring the collection together rather than to separate it.

Schwartz, a therapist and shamanic practitioner, creates a shift in her poems from ordinary consciousness to a deeper level of knowing—the part of the self that some deem the soul. In the poems, this “soul retrieval” or shamanic healing process takes the form of waking dreams or inward journeys in which the speaker is guided by something not of the literal or ordinary consciousness, guided by something higher than the self, but part of the self.

His mother told him over and over that she expected great things

from him, and he got hooked on speed to try to do them.

The dragon scooped her up in its huge claws, and bathed her tenderly.

The tiger ate the bleeding boy so he could finally rest inside its belly.

These lines, alive in Section 11 of the poem “All the Bodies,” offer access into the realm of mystery and ambiguity, not evoking confusion, but rather a deeper level of the mind and the self. Schwartz is successful in rendering this kind of consciousness by first grounding the reader in the real and the tangible and then introducing him or her to the miraculous. The reader is never reintroduced to the real, but is left to linger in the mystical until the next section. This shift allows for a more profound view of the mind and the body and the place both can travel when moving together. Schwartz reflects on this writing process: “A mysterious alchemy occurs when we put our pain and confusion into words, then usher those words out of our bodies and onto the page. In this way, writing can facilitate the kind of healing shamans call ‘soul retrieval,’ restoring us to wholeness.”

Another moment this “soul retrieval” or shamanic journey occurs is in Section 18 of the poem “All the Bodies.” The speaker is urged to jump by some inward force or higher self.

On a cliff like this, but in another world,

my soul taught me to jump.

The point, I learned, was to be everywhere:

whole in my body on the cliff,

fully contained in that body, solid, alive

in that embodied knowing

These moments of “guidance” are subtle and brilliant beams of light throughout the collection that offer an introspective view of the world and the bodies that carry us through it.

Poet Audre Lorde confesses, “I write to find out what I didn’t know I knew.” Miraculum is endlessly questioning and building off itself to get at the core of what it means to be human and to live in a body. There is a movement in the poems from the very small to the very large and back again.

Not just physical wings, but feathers of soul.

Not just soul but star-charged fingers, splayed to stroke

the sky into our hands.

Not just sky, but earth and all its rivers.

Not just rivers, but their shine,

how it holds everything—

In the poem above, “Why I Love Your Body,” the lines build on each other like a waterfall, using the natural world as a catalyst to knowing what it means to have a body, to be separate from that body, and to listen to that body. This metaphysical movement from the minuscule to the grand forges gentle, rhythmic lines that propel the poem forward and into an overarching discovery of faith in the living world.

Poet Bruce Weigel finishes his poem, “The Impossible,” with the line, “Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.” As a collection that praises the wounded, Schwartz finds beauty in the horrific by facing it directly. In the poem “In the Garden,” the speaker fixates on the scars that run down her sister’s thighs until the poem calls for the speaker to turn away.

There are rows of ancient scars,

white and raised, lining your thighs,

striping the tender inside skin.

I look at them, then look away.

I don’t ask; you don’t say.

The speaker in the poem “All the Bodies” calls again to these scars, saying “No to the lines of red my sister cuts again and again / on her arms and legs.” Schwartz, a poet of witness, does not look away, crafting poems both haunting and beautiful. She manifests hopeful poems through recording the complications of life, without glossing over the brutality that is inevitable.

A subtle, ghostly music lingers throughout the collection, mimicking the natural sounds of the world and the body. In poems such as “Moveable Feast,” Schwartz merges prose and lyricism to create pacing and movement from the truth of reality to the natural space where reality lives.

It was Easter Sunday and I was telling my grandmother that her only

son, my father, was an addict. That was why he’d shown up at her

door so broke she had to pay the cabbie. That was why he’d gotten so

sick on her sofabed.

I felt that hardness in me as I told her. Like roots hitting granite they

can’t break.

The shift from the prosaic style to the lyrical style generates a movement from the real to the metaphorical. The splendor of the natural world becomes Schwartz’s vehicle to explore the pain of reality. The reader is given room to breathe in the space that waits between the brutal and the beautiful.

Miraculum is not a collection to simply read, but a work to live by. The poems have been molded into one body that questions its place in a world full of both the dark and the light. Schwartz declares, “Maybe we have to have bodies so damage / and beauty can meet,” and with that I believe she has found her answer.

Review: Solecism, by Rosebud Ben-Oni

By Sheila Squillante on July 5, 2013

Reviewed by Linda M. Robertson

Solecism

Rosebud Ben-Oni

ISBN 978-0-944048-50-4

Virtual Artist Collective

In a 2010 interview for Camera Obscura, Rosebud Ben-Oni says, “The identity of a Mexican bordertown is problematic; the transience, violence and instability of its character are sometimes romanticized and often demonized. But it is also a place to live in the lyrical, as well as find inspiration and affirmation of the human will.” Many poems in Solecism consider places and people scarred by formidable living conditions and violence. Ben-Oni consigns the reader an unflinching focus onto these people and places with deft language, line, and sonically sensitive writing. These poems are personal, at times painful, and often bear witness to scenes we would rather turn away from.

One such bordertown is Matamoros, Mexico, which lies on the southern border of the Rio Grande, directly across from Brownsville, Texas. Matamoros is a site of maquiladoras, where manufacturing occurs in a free-trade zone. The first poems in the collection expose the difficult conditions in a colonia or neighborhood called “Sal Si Puedes,” which translates into “Leave if you can.” The speaker in “At Ten I Held the Look of Locust” considers when “the Americans came and built a factory for the women/to work with solvents and a playground for their children,” and where “Twenty years later, the factory is condemned, but the playground stands/with a sign in English: WARNING: toxic waste, no playing.”

Matamoros is also a beach town where “even the gulls scuttle[d] from the surf,” and horrific scenes occur frequently:

Workers hanging from scaffolds of a patiobar

spotted the waves scattering the next body.

This one, a Brownsville journalist

tied up in a metal drum and doused

with slow-burning gasoline.

The edges of this world are serrated and sharp; Ben-Oni’s language is direct and cuts to the quick. The tone is beautifully ominous; the voices are haunting as they reveal a place where “Shells gather like cemetery flowers./A warning from where mermaids/siesta in the shark’s atrium.”

Ben-Oni’s poems also consider other countries that are rife with conflict: Jerusalem, Syria, Lebanon; sites where there’s “Nothing new to report: charred clothing/for the photographers,” and yet heroics are observed there too:

…It took a youth to go back into the burning house,

and fall out of smoke with the Arab…

…He, natural as a father,

ushered the Arab into an ambulance,

slamming its doors on her gown

and then stooped off into the street.

No one called after him…

The poet also writes about the place she returns to after her travels, New York City. In “Off the Q” she describes her building:

…where the trains no longer keep me awake

passing by below, open and exposed,

the sharp sound of metal and voltage

like a grace note off a drum roll,

the snare head loose and low.

This building houses people who seem more community than strangers, where:

There are the boys whose father sits outside

in a wheelchair late on school nights

and twice a year he’s risen

to give a shakedown to those

who’ve dared to follow me home.

Teenage girls hang near the tiny mailboxes

that hold nothing, until the grandmas

come over with their laundry carts

and tell them they’d better get to school,

or they’ll always be in this falling apart

and given to leak…

Ben-Oni was born to a Mexican mother and a Jewish father. Several poems disclose the poet’s sense of divided self. In “For the Mixed Child with Pale Skin,” the speaker says:

                                  ...That's how dangerous
                is loved, that's friendly ethnic.

But now you've offended by writing this. You have to be careful
                  in conferences by ethnicities you half

belong to. Nothing sings how there is never unity for you...

The imagery in Solecism is striking, often startlingly; the voices are unafraid to speak challenging truths. Rosebud Ben-Oni’s work bears poetic witness of places both dangerous and real. The poems tap at the reader’s social conscience and heart; a tapping that continues long after the book’s covers have been closed.

Review: Stay Awake, by Don Chaon

By Sheila Squillante on March 24, 2013

Reviewed by: Heather Price

Stay Awake

Dan Chaon

ISBN 978-0-345-53037-0

Ballantine, 2012

The approach a reader takes to a short story collection is very different than how he or she approaches a novel. I’ve heard it compared to the difference between a long-term relationship versus a one-night stand; you expect to spend days, even weeks, with a novel, but only one sitting with a short story. However, the stories in Dan Chaon’s latest collection, Stay Awake, are more akin to an obsessive relationship: you know you shouldn’t take them to bed with you, but you cannot help yourself. Even after you’re finished with them, they linger in your mind, haunting you, drawing you in for just one more read.

Part of this is due to a lack of closure. Chaon’s endings tend to leave the reader with an impending sense of doom, though he leaves out the specifics. [Please note that bolded sections contain mild spoilers.] In “Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted,” we see the protagonist’s sanity wane throughout the story. This thread is woven with a terrible storm threatening to knock out all the power in the city and leave him completely alone and isolated. The story ends with these lines: “Then, with a sigh, the power shut down again. All across the city the light folded into itself, and the darkness spread out its arms.” We don’t know exactly what happens to the young man in the story–whether he survives the storm or returns to a normal life, but we do get the sense that whatever it is, it won’t be good.

Many of the stories in Stay Awake navigate similar terrain. “St. Dismas” follows Pierce, a man who kidnaps his girlfriend’s son (she’s a meth addict) and takes the kid to his childhood home in Nebraska. At this point, Pierce doesn’t know what to do about the boy any longer, so he abandons him there. The story concludes with this image: “His car no bigger than a flea, and Jesse even smaller, running and shrinking, running and shrinking.” What happens respectively to Pierce and Jesse? We don’t know, but both characters are isolated by the end, swallowed into this barren landscape.

Aside from the lack of closure, there are several images and themes that appear and accumulate throughout the collection, adding to the lingering sensation the reader feels upon finishing the book, which is much like the feeling after one finishes a novel. Themes of isolation and loneliness appear in nearly every story.  Children are murdered or almost murdered, spouses die, suicides occur. In the hands of a lesser writer, these repetitions could be seen as merely a lack of creativity, but Chaon makes it work by demonstrating that these horrific cycles encompass us all.

The last story in this collection, “The Farm. The Gold. The Lily-White Hands.” gathers all the other voices that appear throughout the collection and shows the reader that these repetitions and cycles are purposeful. When the character Daddy looks through a window and sees images from his past that cause him to fall off the ladder and suffer horrific injuries, images from previous stories come back into play.

This works because the perspective in this story, the collective voice of Daddy’s daughters—perhaps dead, perhaps alive—is fresh and effective. This supernatural approach explores the subject of cycles in families, how things like drug abuse and suicide and violence feed off each other and continue into new generations.

This story, and thus the collection, ends with the lines: “Let us say that this, all of this, has a logic to it. We understand each other, don’t we? Are we not, you and I, both of us spirits? Reader, do not ask me who at this very moment is dreaming you. Do not ask me when you are going to die. Do not ask me where the gold is buried.” These stories are crying out, daring you to try not to think about them, try not to reread them. This is the perfect end to this collection, a perfect example of Chaon’s mastery over endings, his ability to keep the reader engrossed and horrified at the same time.

Review: Theft, by BK Loren

By Sheila Squillante on March 16, 2013

Reviewed by Luke See

Theft

B.K. Loren

ISBN 978-1-58243-819-1

Counterpoint Berkeley, 2012

In the opening pages of B.K. Loren’s debut novel Theft, three children gather around a dying bird. It is a quiet scene held together with nuance and pain. In between these three characters, this small bird reveals, in many ways, the courses of their lives. Zeb, the conflicted introvert who shot the bird, walks away, teary-eyed and ashamed. His younger sister Willa clings to the dying creature, revealing her compassion as well as her drive. A friend to both, Brenda walks a central line, torn between attraction to Zeb and loyalty to Brenda. It is as if in these opening pages, Loren hands her readers a road map so they can chart the course of these characters’ lives from this one moment in time.

What follows is a tale of loss and absence. The now-adult Willa is an animal tracker helping to reintroduce the Mexican wolf into the United States. However, this work is interrupted when she is called back home to track her long-displaced brother Zeb, who is now a confessed murderer. Her journey home takes her physically through the familiar landscapes of her youth and mentally transports her through the memories of her childhood. The novel is told from various perspectives, which gives the reader several viewpoints into the world Loren has built. Perspectives shift between Willa, Zeb, and Brenda as their three stories diverge and intertwine.

Perhaps Theft’s greatest success is it’s tightly-wound plot. With a story as multifaceted as this, that moves through time and place, it could be easy to lose a reader. However, no page–or sentence, for that matter–feels wasted. The story is rich with objects, characters, and ideas that always find a way back to the forefront of the plot in interesting and awe-inspiring ways. In fact, the Mexican wolf that graces the cover of the novel ultimately acts as the steady heartbeat of Loren’s world. The story’s exploration of nature’s undeniable importance echoes the overall themes of loss, as shown in Willa’s quest.

These ideas are made richer due to the novel’s many voices. Shifting points of view throughout a story can be risky for an author. Voices can blend together; storylines can get confused. However, Loren has a gift for description and each of these characters jump off the page, fully realized. The novel’s pace only slows in the second act when Zeb and Willa’s stories are barreling towards one another and Brenda’s tale reemerges. Although this reunion slows the action, it feels like a necessary reprieve for the reader to catch his or her breath and take a second look at nature’s role in the book.

Ultimately, Theft accomplishes a great amount during the readers’ brief stay in its world.  It evokes a deep sense of place and closeness to nature. It also begs to be reread and reexamined. The subplots and symbols are so masterfully stitched into the novel that its composition is a feat in itself. In the novel’s final moments, one cannot help but think of the injured bird and how its waning life revealed the hearts of the three major characters in just a few short pages. What follows is a quest for salvation in a mutable world, its death their first call for redemption.

Where the Music Happens: An Interview with Judith Vollmer

Where the Music Happens: An Interview with Judith Vollmer

By Sheila Squillante on January 16, 2012

By Marcella Prokop

Judith Vollmer’s collection of poems The Water Books was published this month by Autumn House Press. Her previous books include Reactor, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; The Door Open to the Fire (1997 Cleveland State Poetry Prize and 1999 Paterson Prize finalist); Black Butterfly (limited edition; 1997 Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize); and Level Green (The 1990 Brittingham Prize, Wisconsin). The recipient of literature fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Vollmer has been awarded residencies at the American Academy in Rome, Yaddo, Centrum, and Blue Mountain Center. She also was the recipient of the 1992 Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award.  Vollmer lives in Pittsburgh and co-edits the national poetry journal 5 AM.

The Fourth River: Your earlier work in Level Green and The Door Open to the Fire includes several Dionysian images. As you progress through these poems, you eventually leave behind the image of the bacchanals and the Dionysian revelry for the more serious voice of Persephone—what influenced the shift?

Judith Vollmer: Well, I haven’t left the Dionysian voices behind.  In Reactor, the revelry changed form or tone and turned toward violence.  Figures in, say, the Yucca Mountain sequence—the poems specifically about nuclear waste, catastrophe, and my father’s work in the industry—vocalize work or experiment that’s gotten out of control.  Some of the figures, like General Linda, are perpetrators.  Even the Persephone figure or voice is clearly a part of the Dionysian scene.  She lives in Hell and is both traumatized and energized by the power of the uranium and the dregs of “wealth”—after-product of the nuclear waste.  In another figure, she’s the spring goddess, yes, in “Persephone Returning,” but even that poem is written as an elegy: I’d just lost my dear friend, the journalist Betsy Heltzel.  Elsewhere, Dionysus shows up in coffee, wine, insomnia, excess of influences, consumerism.

FR: Do you look back on any of your past work and find things you’d like to revise? How do you ever know something is complete?

JV: I don’t think revising older work is a great idea, though I know many poets putting together selected poem-volumes who do it.  I do know I’ve traveled far from some of the poems I’ve written and a few poems that I’ve included in my books fell short of what I was trying to do.  I’m never satisfied, really, and when I find myself in the gluey place of not knowing when something’s finished, I show it to my close readers and they tell me what to try, and I listen, or I try to hybridize their reactions when they disagree with each other.  I also have the luxury of showing them extremely rough work that they respond to and help to push along.  I like to work a very rough or chaotic or incomplete draft and not revise quickly.

FR: So how do you decide on the form for your work?

JV: I never map a poem, but I do think about how I’m entering the line when I start composing a poem, and honor the line as I go.  And I do set projects for myself: while I was writing Reactor, I visited Yucca Mountain and got out all my old books and notes about nuclear operating systems and post-WWII nuclear energy culture.  While I was revising the book, I made a number of ink and graphite sketches so I could visualize what the poems were trying to sing.  Watching the terrifying images from Japan this spring, I was catapulted back to childhood when my father, who designed tools and built hydraulic systems for similar reactors in the States, Italy, and Japan, brought home sketches and blueprints I still have.  I consider those to be “maps” or tools I can study.  Writing about reactors and wastewater and danger is simply a subject I have inherited: my father’s work on nuclear safety issues inside the cowboy days of the 1950s and 1960s—and all the dangers he endured—paid for the university educations my brothers and I enjoyed.  The additional complication is I’m the only person in my biological family, so far, who isn’t a scientist or engineer or computer analyst.  So I’ve spent big chunks of my life trying to understand and/or be companion to how my brothers, for example, see and think. I think the scientists are asking interesting questions and they have ways of “seeing” spaces and systems that I find unusual.  Plus, by avocations, my brother Robert is a gifted nature photographer and Rege is a knowledgeable astronomer. I’m a person who can take four hours to change a fuse or assemble an IKEA lamp….

While I was writing my new collection, The Water Books, I remembered that in the late 90s I had said to a colleague, when she asked what my next book would be about, “I want to write about water.”  I didn’t fully enter the project, though, till I was nearly finished writing Reactor.  Then it took me another seven years to write The Water Books.

FR: Earlier we discussed brevity and the impact of words.  In your poem “Trees at Night,” there is a line that reads “whose sound if properly recorded would be soft as dust.” How do you know when you’ve got the right words, when the words have fallen into the order in which they’re going to have the most impact?

JV: I think that’s probably my favorite part of that poem, and I think that’s where the music is, in that kind of phrasing, and that cadence. It’s a process of perceiving or apprehending something and putting it not consciously beside something else. So dust and a tape recorder, or dust and technology, beauty and technology, side by side, somehow came through in my thinking/phrasing, but also listening. So it’s about hearing something that might coincide with seeing, say, an object, and letting the two elements fuse or engage. And I think where music happens in a good poem, it’s really coming from a subterranean or subconscious place, or fusion of instantaneous perceptions because it’s coming in like dictation, you hear it and you write it. It can’t be premeditated or invented. It’s the most natural thought-music that happens in a poem.

I’ve met composers who talked about phrasing in a very technical way, and I think that’s fascinating, and I think they know a lot about that. It’s all consumed with tempo and measure and also the same quality of listening. They have more language for talking about what they do technically than we do. I think poets in particular, and maybe all writers, don’t have the same vocabulary for describing sound and sense as composers do.

FR: Do you think that’s because, aside from when writers give readings, we work with the written word more than the sounds?

JV: It could be that they’re working more directly with intensely minute frequency. And we’ve got suitcases of words and fields of words and universes of words. [Writer and literary critic] Julia Kristeva suggests that with certain writers, it’s not that they don’t make good art, but they might not achieve fine art because they’re so busy tripping over words. But she says it much more eloquently than that. So words are our tools and our sustenance and our drinking water, but they’re also minefields in a way. In your own work, you can tell when you’re in the middle of composing an essay and it’s just coming forward and your voice feels most natural and real.

FR: How did you first find poetry, and who taught you how to “get into it”—and by that I mean authors, instructors, relatives, friends?

JV: When I was eleven, my mother decided to go to college when she was in her thirties, and she became a lit major.  She was a so-called nontraditional student in a time when there weren’t many, and she was also full-time raising me and my brothers.  She brought home an anthology of the British Romantics and used to recite the poems while she was cooking dinner.  I loved hearing her talk about Wordsworth and Coleridge.  Then, in high school I had a wonderful teacher who showed us poems by Li Po—probably the [Ezra] Pound translations—and I was mesmerized.  I didn’t formally study poetry, though, until I took a few undergraduate lit classes and began reading poetry: I was focused on finding a newspaper job and I worked as a journalist for eight years after undergrad.  While I was working general assignment, and trying to write poems between deadlines, I went to a reading and heard Octavio Paz and I decided that night I wanted to go to graduate school and work on poems.  Pitt was starting its MFA Program and I could go to school at night and keep my newspaper job.  I had amazing teachers: first among them, Ed Ochester and Gerald Stern, and seminars with Louis Simpson and the very gifted literature professor and obsessive reader, Harry Mooney.  The only woman teacher I had during grad school was the essayist Diane Ackerman.  Fellow students Patricia Dobler and Kevin Rippin were my closest readers and we made huge reading lists for each other, and dared each other to try things; we were reading Ritsos, Milosz, Tsvetayeva, many other poets I still rely on all the time.

Next stroke of luck: poet Lynn Emanuel invited me to work with her, Maggie Anderson, and Patricia Dobler in a workshop they’d started a few years earlier.  They became my next teachers, mentors, and dear friends.  Plus a host of other poets: Peter Oresick, Craig Paulenich, and the Selvaggio brothers (Marc and Lenny) taught me by suggesting poets I’d never have investigated otherwise: Louis Zukofsky and, most important, Gary Snyder.  I’d already read Adrienne Rich, Anne Waldman, Judy Grahn, Audre Lorde, and Denise Levertov, whose work gave me a way to think and write about not only gender but voice itself.  My struggle then—and I’d say it continues—was to write a lyrical narrative poem that didn’t/doesn’t rely primarily on the essential infrastructure of witness, recall, plotting, or linear apprehension.  And a few of the poets I’ve mentioned—Ochester, Oresick, and Emanuel—are still my closest readers.  I met Jan Beatty sometime later.

FR: References to Li Po and others appear in your work, and you’ve noted some of your poems are imitations. How hard is it to duplicate another poet’s style?

JV: When I used the term “imitation,” I meant something more like a trans method.  Not translation, maybe something more like transcreation.  I wanted to invite certain poets or certain sections of their poems—like Valery Larbaud and [Stéphane] Mallarmé in Reactor—into the book I was writing.  In The Water Books, I’ve included versions I’ve made of a few poems by the Italian poets Giovanni Pascoli and Giacomo Leopardi.  I felt I was doing something in my own poems that spoke to their work.  [By] writing my versions of their poems and placing them in my book, I wanted to honor that sense of mentorship I felt.

FR: You earned your BA in 1973 and your MFA in ’81.  What were writing programs like twenty years ago, and how have they changed?

JV: It seems to me that people read more widely and happily and didn’t worry about “fashion” and “experiment” and, lucky for us, a “web presence.”  In terms of the study itself, we were just coming into having poetry in translation available to us and it was exciting for me.  I was trying hard to break my hearing that had been clogged up with newspaperese and with what I incorrectly judged to be the heaviness of my own Western Pennsylvania voice, even though I knew better.  I knew James Wright was right but it took me a while to listen to him.  At any rate, reading work in translation—the poets of Russia, Poland, South America, Italy—more than any single thing other than my teachers—shaped my ability to move forward.  Reading work in translation forced my ear to slow down, listen more closely, consider how a real, human voice talks.

FR: Why was it translated poetry, as opposed to poetry in English, that caught your ear?

JV: Two things were going on in my thinking there. [The] translations we had of the Russian poets, the Chinese poets, were all British translations. So we were hearing those voices through a very formal, British tone and cadence. Reading the then-new translations by Robert Bly and James Wright, it seemed, and my teachers thought the same thing, that for the first time we were really hearing a poet like Li Po or [Pablo] Neruda or [Gabriela] Mistral in an American idiom. They were writing about place and character and work and love and all the things we were trying to write about, but they were doing it in a seemingly relaxed, plain voice. So when James Wright said, “I speak in a plain voice, I talk in a flat voice,” I think I recognized that a lot of the poetry even after Second-Wave feminism and New Criticism and even the New Left still was excluding the experiences of people from the working class. So when you’d read a poem by Wright, talking about destroyed landscape and it sounded like your uncle talking, without artifice or ornament, it just made sense. For me, it gave me a way of thinking about poetry in a very different manner. I grew up in a family where Polish was spoken on the weekends [by] my mother and her sister and my grandmother. I was hearing a second language and the rest of the time speaking and hearing Western Pennsylvanian and I was coming out of a late adolescence, and I didn’t think any of it was poetic language. I couldn’t get it. And I couldn’t even really read James Wright when I was entering graduate school. That Ohioan voice, I couldn’t even read it, it was like reading a foreign language. So when I read plainspoken, elegantly direct poetry in translation, it gave me a kind of mirror, a way of thinking, “Yeah, that’s what poetry can sound like.”

FR: Why couldn’t you read it?

JV: It sounded like me and I felt suffocated. Why do people leave home? They leave home to have a take on where they’ve been and to hear new voices and sounds.  There was something about that. My second book, The Door Open to the Fire, is about that. It’s my first long love poem to Pittsburgh. It’s filled with affection and admiration and joy, but also with anger and it’s a dismissal of the local. It’s been part of the culture here for a long time that if it’s here, it can’t be good. If it’s made here, it must be absent from the real culture, the real land of artistic experiment. So, that’s what I grew up with and I had to fight that.

FR: Do you think people everywhere go through that, except they just don’t recognize it at the time?

JV: I think they might. When I’ve gone to writers’ colonies, people have said things like, “Oh, Pittsburgh, do people still hunt there?” or “Pittsburgh, oh yeah, I’ve heard it’s beautiful now.” So they’re curious, but it’s also very much the land that time forgot, even though Obama has certainly elevated Pittsburgh’s national profile and it is one of the five greenest cities in the United States. The area where I live, the Nine Mile Run watershed, is the largest urban park-water reclamation project in the country. So yeah, you have this reality lens on something very particular, and very valuable, but you might ignore it if you live here.

FR: That reminds me of Ernest Hemingway, who said he couldn’t write about Michigan until he left it.  Do we have to go out into the world and compare it to what we’ve got, then come back home?  Your poetry in (and after) Level Green feels like you’re very much in love with Pittsburgh.

JV: Oh yeah, it’s definitely my love story, complete with the challenge of how does my voice—our voice—sound to me?  I walked the bridge to this is where I live, is who I am. When I first read [Hemingway’s] Nick Adams stories, I really looked at the way he put that book together. The Michigan landscape itself was amazing and experimental in the best sense and a wonderful illustration of what you’re talking about. Work two lenses. Go away, and look at where you were, and if you live where you are, then you have to do something like write slant, or by evasion, without abandoning your intimacy.  Your writing takes you on the road, and you travel and you read, and you have to get out of town as much as possible when you can.  But I’m thinking, as we’re talking, about [Cesare] Pavese. I’m reading his political prisoner book right now, but he longed for that home place. He was a publisher and translator, an urban poet, and a novelist. He was, if you think about it now, something like an Italian Maxwell Perkins but with a more unusual personality. A great editor, friend to writers while writing himself, and he had a very erudite and cosmopolitan life. But he longed for the village of his boyhood and it’s really the stage for his political novels.  I think a lot of writers have that physical bond to home, to first place.

FR: Someone once called your writing “an exploration of the changing and unsettled identity of the city.”  Is it fair to say that Pittsburgh is the container and structure for the multitude of lives and passions you write about, and not the main character in your poems, or is it explicitly the protagonist, with all other individuals and themes working to illuminate something about the city?

JV: Pittsburgh is the living geology, the formal architecture, the staging body, and the organic shape that informs many of my poems.  It has infused the way I’ve written about Rome, a city I love like a second home.  If you walk a lot in Pittsburgh, you see architecture from every major nineteenth and twentieth-century style, so compressed and so dramatic and so beautiful and hideous that you can’t take it all in: and we’ve lost a portion of it forever.  The first time I visited Milan and walked through the great arcade, I thought: Jenkins Arcade, Stanwix Street, where I’d shopped with my mother and aunts.  And Pittsburgh, like so many other cities, is built of layers—from indigenous cultures through the still-excavated layers of nineteenth-century industry.  It is also dramatically cantilevered, so we have the gift and talent for walking and living with dizziness; fractured, cubistic vision; and both short and long-distance vistas.  Too many firsts and mosts to list here: atom splitting, coffee consumption, bridges, tributaries, conspiracy theories, ghosts, ancient rock and island shelters.  It’s a hyperreal and surreal place and contains scores of versions about The Past, about Destruction, about U.S. Economic Policies, RENEWAL and SURVIVAL, all of it.  To not write about or from or because of it has struck me as crazy.  Writers who fear being pegged as local or small are missing the reality of Pittsburgh.  Need I mention August Wilson?

FR: There’s a line from your poem “Extended Family Genealogy” that speaks to the “uselessness of fixed identity.” Do writers create for themselves a fixed identity over time? How is that dangerous or beneficial?

JV: I think fixed identity changes and deconstructs over time, as the idea of ego or self changes because of community.  Something like: negative capability allows a writer to not merely assume another voice, but to step inside another’s situation or perceptions, and start to let go of one and only one version of herself.

FR: You’ve said you like to listen to loud music while doing line edits—what do you listen to?

JV: I don’t listen to much past 1998 or so.  Seattle grunge bands, old metal, Neil Young, Chrissie Hynde.  You know, old stuff. There’s the radio station here, WYEP—I listen to Mike Sauter’s show and I listen to Rosemary Welsch. They play new rock as well as music for people who just weren’t through with Pearl Jam. [Laughs] Rosemary plays music by new British bands; Mike, I understand, is an accomplished archivist, and you will always hear something you wouldn’t otherwise hear.

FR: You mentioned that after college you were trying to write poems between deadlines for your newspaper job. How did those two styles work for you?

JV: [Laughs] Ohh…total clash. Even now, if I’m writing a narrative poem, I still fight over-narration or visually over-paragraphing something and over-scrutinizing what I think must be said. But the newspaper business…it taught me so much about discipline and time and that it is possible to do a lot of work in a short period of time.

FR: Journalism taught me that sort of discipline, too, but also showed me just how long I could procrastinate and still get it done.

JV: Right. That’s the magic. That’s the adrenaline of the deadline. I totally believe that. I remember editors hounding me for burying the lede in the fourth paragraph. “What are you really trying to say here? What is the lede? Why doesn’t the lede have more information?” It was very good concentration. And that’s how I got interested in cities and architecture and urban history. In the newspaper business. I worked nights and I got to go out and cover tough stories and talk to people up against enormous personal tragedy who knew sections of the old city and stories those places held.

FR: So it was newspapers that got you into architecture? You’d also mentioned your father’s blueprints earlier?

JV: It was both.  When I was a kid, my dad always had designs and mechanical drawings in the house and he was always building something in the garage, so he was doing these two kinds of “art.” He was drawing very elaborate designs for safety tools and hydraulic systems—that was his area of specialization—and he would build go-carts for kids, or he would build fancy tea carts for my mother. He was a welder and made very practical things as well as things he made for work. What happened in the newspaper business is I think I learned a physical and academic context for looking at cities and I began figuring out why and how I loved cities so much, through reading Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford. Especially Jane Jacobs. When I read what she had to say about Pittsburgh, [it] was interesting and compelling, and Mumford too, and I followed my interest in architecture. My parents would take us to New York once a year, and we would enter into that big body of density and drama.  Then, coming back to tiny Pittsburgh taught me a lot about working with scale and wanting to read more about it.

FR: Is Pittsburgh is a very literary city? As someone who completed a writing program in Pittsburgh, I sometimes wonder if my view is skewed.

JV: Oh yeah. It’s crawling with writers going on a fully-fledged second generation and beyond. The university and community scenes both thrive, across the genres. Lots of writers have spoken or written about it, but we’re very lucky, productive, vital, inside contemporary American letters. It’s also true that we’re still learning from—and about—the generations that came before, writers who left Pittsburgh, so there was a big gap between, say, the 40s and 50s, maybe later, and what the scene is now.

So you have writers like Gerald Stern, earlier, Willa Cather, earlier still Gertrude Stein, and then you have some of the poets and writers of Pittsburgh’s first black arts movement: Albert French,  Rob Penny, Ed Roberson, Maisha Baton, and of course, August Wilson.

FR: So how does place influence who we are and what we know?

JV: One of my grad school friends said that if you had either place or voice in a poem, you could do anything.  I think that’s pretty close to a truth I can believe in.  Pittsburgh as a highly compressed, densely layered model of place—it represents essential truths and heartbreaks most people in the United States are becoming more familiar with every day.  Water supply and safety.  War wounded.  Job hunting. Up-cycling. You name it.

FR: As an editor of 5 AM, you’ve made a point to make sure women poets get recognition. What do you think of the 2010 VIDA poll of women writers/publications?

JV: I’m happy about the VIDA poll.  It’s about time.  I told someone involved in the project that at AWP Philadelphia about eighteen years ago, I was on a panel with Alicia Ostriker and Maggie Anderson and we discussed counting and how absent women were from the journals and we were heckled by somebody who said something like, “Hey, aren’t we all writers here?”  Like, what’s with gender, anyway?  I count with disappointment all the time and I count reviews and reviewers and essayists who never mention women writers.  I count female poets and writers who never name a female influence or peer.  I’m acutely aware of how many women writers I know who work three jobs, so counting, for them, or speaking to this issue, for them, takes even more time away from what they should be doing: writing.  With 5 AM, yes, we’re proud of the fact that gender equality is and always has been a priority.  We stay vigilant, even while submissions from men outnumber submissions from women nearly two to one.

FR: What can help writers get into some kind of publication?  What do they need to be thinking about before they get published?

JV: I do this talk called “After the MFA,” and in it, I give people three categories of journals: journals that are friendly to new writers, journals that are a little tougher to crack, and then journals that are extremely difficult to crack.  I’ve fine-tuned the list many times, but what’s common to each list is you want to send your best work out to journals that you most admire. I think it’s relatively easy to publish, poetry especially, in places that are so-so. Especially online. But why would you want to do that? Writers should aim high, send out clusters of their best poems, or essays, and see what happens. If you’re writing well and you’re keeping your work out there, you will have a return. The editors among us who do this for love are excited, as excited as the writer probably, when new, good work comes in the mail. It’s very hard to make a good piece of writing. My friend and colleague Michael Waters said, “You’re only going to have so many poems in your lifetime, or so many essays in your lifetime, so you should send to the best places possible.” I want to read and write poems I can return to with pleasure, knowing and feeling the mystery, the atmosphere, and the voice(s) that inspire me to see the world a little more clearly.

Marcella Prokop graduated from Chatham University’s MFA Program in 2011.  She lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Photo from the New England College MFA Program in Poetry.  Vollmer’s bio was adapted from the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg faculty page.

Ted Morrissey on Calypso, Accomplished Lying, and the Contemporary Novella

Ted Morrissey on Calypso, Accomplished Lying, and the Contemporary Novella

By Sheila Squillante on December 16, 2011

by Beth Gilstrap

On a gray March evening, I spoke with Ted Morrissey, author of the novel Men of Winter (Punkin House, 2010) and the forthcoming novella and story collection Weeping with an Ancient God. We talked about the publishing industry—and the joys and terrors of writing.

The Fourth River: How did you come to write Men of Winter, a novel inspired by The Odyssey?

Ted Morrissey: I’ve always found Calypso the most sympathetic character in the poem,  as her love for Odysseus is totally disregarded by the council of gods and goddesses who decide that the hero should be allowed to go home. I guess it was my thinking about brokenhearted Calypso that started me moving in [that] direction.

FR: What were some of the high points and low points of writing either Men of Winter or Weeping with an Ancient God?

TM: I actually write longhand. I enjoy the physicality and the puzzle of writing that you have to work your way through. The high points, besides the process, have of course been finding people who like them and who want to publish them (especially Amy Ferrell, the CEO of Punkin House, who has championed them).

My lowest points were of course the innumerable rejections I received from publishers. The biggest disappointment came when I’d been contacted by a literary agent because she’d read one of my stories in Glimmer Train Stories, and she wanted to know if I had a book-length manuscript. I said yes, I had the novella manuscript [of Weeping], and she didn’t even want to see it.

In anticipation of Weeping with an Ancient God being published by Punkin House, I sent the first chapter out as a stand-alone piece titled “Melvill in the Marquesas,” and it was picked up very quickly by The Final Draft. To be honest, I thought it was so quirky it might take me quite a while to find a journal to take it. But editors have responded very enthusiastically to it, which has been, frankly, both surprising and vindicating.

FR: What made you decide Weeping with an Ancient God would be a novella? How is writing/crafting a novella its own beast?

TM: I never set out to write a novella, per se, but writing a novella is about limiting the number of characters and plot conflict. Publishing has changed so much since I first started looking for a publisher for the novella; now, it seems to be something the industry’s willing to do. Maybe it’s the popularity of Nooks and Kindles and the demand for shorter stories.

FR: What inspired you to write about Herman Melville’s encounter with cannibals in the Marquesas Islands?

TM: I always admired that he abandoned the style of writing that would have made him a wealthy man (the sort of writing he did in Typee and Omoo) and experimented with other forms (especially Moby-Dick) that led the reading public to abandon him. His last several works were self-published, in fact. In particular, though, A&E had a Great Books Festival. One of the episodes was about Melville and his writing of Moby-Dick, and it painted him as a tragic figure, consumed by financial troubles and self-doubt and all kinds of personal and family problems. I started researching Melville’s biography, and I read Typee, his own fictionalized account of his cannibal adventure—and I soon realized it could make a great story in itself.

But I didn’t want it to be a biography of Melville, per se, so I did a few things to distance my story from being a biography: I’d discovered that his family name was originally spelled “Melvill” without the “e,” so I thought it’d be an interesting twist to use his original name that was not as well known, in fact barely known at all. Also, I decided to write about Melville in a very spare and modern style, in contrast to his own richly florid and poetic prose, thus firmly transplanting his nineteenth-century story into the twenty-first century.

FR: How did you get interested in “revisionist fiction”? What are the beauties

and complications of working in this genre?

TM: I read several examples of it that I enjoyed and admired. Coming to mind are: J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly, John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius.

I’m not a musician, but I suppose it’s a bit like doing a cover of a song that you love – changing it up and making it yours, but because you love and respect the original so much, not because you think the original failed in some way and you want to do a better version. I enjoy playing with the nuances of the original, isolating certain aspects of the tone or imagery, for example, and amplifying it or recoloring it or recasting it somehow; or emphasizing an aspect of characterization that is only hinted at in the original.

FR: What kind of research did you do in preparation for this type of writing?

TM: For Weeping with an Ancient God, I read a lot of Melville and about Melville. I read with special care his novel Typee, which was his own thinly veiled fictional account of his time in the Marquesas Islands. It’s important to say, though, that while I used his biography and Typee for inspiration, and for period details, I wasn’t interested in being faithful to what really happened.

Men of Winter was a bit different, in terms of research. Even though it’s strongly implied to be set in early-twentieth-century Russia (Siberia, in fact), I deliberately avoided pinning it down to a specific time and place. I wanted the narrative to have one foot in the “real” world, and one foot in some other sort of world.

I’ve had a few readers compliment me on my thorough research, which implies to me that they think all of the geographical and period details are genuine, when in fact there are very few details that I included straight from my research. So I do take such comments as a compliment, but not to my thorough research so much as to my ability to write made-up stuff that sounds real. In essence, they’re complimenting me for being an accomplished liar. To which I nod demurely and say “Thank you.”

Beth Gilstrap is an MFA candidate at Chatham University’s Creative Writing Program.  She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.  The photos of Ted Morrissey on the cover page and this page are by Kristen Shaffer.