Persephone Speaks

Writing and Editing Fiction: An Interview with the Author and Editor of FOR SALE BY OWNER

2011-06-01T15:01:00.000-07:00

An Interview with Kelcey Parker and Shannon Cain about For Sale By Owner

By Erinn Kelley

Erinn Kelley received her BA from the University of Iowa where she majored in English and minored in Women's Studies. She is currently a part-time Environmental Consultant, a full-time mom, an aspiring writer, and a graduate student working toward an MA in English at Indiana University South Bend.

1. Kelcey, did the collection evolve as a series of separate pieces that just happened to speak to similar issues? Or, did you always envision your stories as a collected body of work?

KP: Each of my stories begins on its own terms as an individual exploration, and each story reveals a new aspect of my writing. But as these stories accumulated, I began to see connections - in theme, style, and subject - and I began to see the possibility of bringing them together as a collection. That said, not all of the stories I initially sent to Kore are in the final collection, and certainly not all of the stories I've ever written were among the ones considered.

2. Can you tell us if you have a favorite among your stories or if there is a piece in which you feel particularly invested?

KP: In "Some Aspects of the Short Story," Julio Cortázar asks, "What is the essential quality of certain unforgettable short stories?" He distinguishes between stories that are 'the best' or most frequently discussed and those that are, simply, unforgettable. His own list includes lesser-known stories by well-known writers. I love this way of thinking about short stories, and it may say something about my answer here.

The story that lingers with me is "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why," which was inspired by the Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet of the same name. When I read that poem, I immediately knew it would find its way into one of my stories, and something about the voice of this story's narrator-a high school teacher accused of inappropriate relations with a talented student-seems to fit the lonely tone of the sonnet. The narrator admits to minor offenses such as stealing flowers and library books, but she is unable or unwilling to admit to any wrongdoing with the student. In fact, she wants only to know what others believe: "Do you think I did it?"

Cortázar concludes that the "essential quality" of unforgettable stories is that they contain "that fabulous opening from the small to the large." Millay's uncertain poem ("I have forgotten," "I cannot say," "I only know") acts as the portal that allows my story, I hope, to open up to something larger.

3. Your work includes a lot of play with form - space, sentence structure, and the overall appearance of the text on the page. What draws you to play with form in this way, Kelcey?

KP: This is just how I think. Visually, architecturally. It's no accident that the collection's title and subject matter are related to houses. For me, paragraphs and section breaks lead a reader through the story as hallways and staircases lead one through a house. (My next project takes this to an extreme: it's set at Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.)

4. Can you tell us about the writing process? How long does it typically take you to write a single piece and how often do you revise a piece before you consider it finished?

KP: Often enough my stories begin - to use a simile - like a metaphor: there's one subject (or image or form), and then there's another. I know I'll make use of each of them individually, but the story begins when I realize they are going to be together, and I begin to seek the connections between them. For example, a friend of mine experienced a late-term miscarriage, and it made me so sad. Another friend participated in a home marketing research survey. I knew I'd try to write about each of them, but I didn't know that one would provide the content and the other the form that would become "Domestic Air Quality," and it was both a delight and fresh challenge to discover it.

In terms of time, I do write 'faster' than I used to. But there's two qualifiers to this. One is that even if I write a draft in a week (as I do every spring break), I don't have time to return to it until the summer or fall, so I get the benefit of returning to the story with fresh eyes. The other qualifier is that, after a decade of serious writing, I feel I've achieved what Flannery O'Connor, quoting Jacques Maritain, calls "the habit of the artist." O'Connor says that she wrote "Good Country People" almost without revising, but insists that the story was "under control" throughout the process because she has developed this habit, this "way of looking at the created world and of using the senses so as to make them find as much meaning as possible in things."

5. Your stories are not only beautiful, but also unpredictable and often startling. Can you discuss the inspiration for some of the unexpected ideas that populate the pages of your book - the bride who swallows the fly or the mother who imagines a freeway in her head?

KP: Thank you. Maybe it's best if I address the two stories you mentioned directly. "I Heard a Fly Buzz" is a flash fiction that transforms the Emily Dickinson poem, "I heard a fly buzz - when I died," to "I heard a fly buzz - when I got married." It was also inspired by Kate Chopin's "Story of an Hour" (and far too many other stories about women), where marriage and death are uncomfortably interconnected. My story tries to have some fun with the idea that, because of the fly's buzz, the bride says, "I does" instead of "I do." But it ends in the dark and unsettling territory of Chopin's story.

The other story, "Maugham's Head," is sort of a surrealist manifestation of suburban sprawl. All the land is taken up, and Mom/Maugham, who feels guilty as well as lost because her own house takes up so much space, accepts an offer to have a road built in her head. This story and a few others borrow from the Magical Realism of Clarice Lispector and Maria Luisa Bombal, but I'm not sure that my stories are Magical Realist so much as, perhaps, Metaphorical Realist (a term used by the artist Vladimir Kush to describe his paintings: a ship with sails made of butterfly wings, an ocean that is a rippling sheet, a suitcase that is a house.)

In "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed," set in a land of lake-effect snow, the narrator's garden blooms all winter. As I mentioned, the narrator is a high school teacher accused of inappropriate relations with a student, and the reader learns that the student's first poem is about a garden that blooms all winter. Toward the end of the story the narrator jokes that the scientists conducting tests on her garden might find an unfamiliar substance in the soil: "Metaphoracline." Is the winter garden magical? Metaphorical? Or merely imagined? Neither I nor the story will tell.

1. Shannon, what drew you to Kelcey Parker's collection and led you to choose it as one of the first pieces of fiction published by Kore Press? How does it fit with the vision of Kore Press as a press devoted to promoting the voices of women?

SC: There were so many factors. But mostly what happened is that I opened the document and I felt immediately in good hands. The authority of the prose was evident; this narrator was in complete control. Yet at the same time the language broke rules, was wild and lyrical and half-sensical. Here are the first sentences I read: My garden blooms all winter. Rose petals bleed on Northern Indiana snow. I mean, really: how could you not keep reading?

By the time I got deeper into the manuscript-I think it happened with Kelcey's story Lent, in which a woman gives up her family for Lent, moving into a motel for 40 days and not seeing them at all, even when a crisis occurs-I was in love. I thought, here's an original, unafraid writer. So this is first & foremost what made the stories work for Kore Press: just damn good writing. Yes, we're devoted to promoting the voices of women, but we don't have any particular focus on what those voices are saying. By which I mean we aren't tied to any certain material or subject matter or even literary aesthetic. Just good writing by women and transfolk.

2. How does your own career as a writer of short stories and fiction shape your editorial decisions? Did the fact that you are a writer contribute to your interest in this collection?

SC: Oh yes, the writer in me was completely turned on by Kelcey's manuscript. The inventiveness at the sentence level, the attention to language, to the sounds of the words, even to punctuation-this hardly went unnoticed by my writer's eye. In many ways Kelcey is a writer's writer. This isn't to say that she ever allows the language to dominate the story; she doesn't let the form, the voice or the conceit get in the way of narrative, or character. She's a craftswoman for sure, but she doesn't let the scaffolding show-she makes it look easy, which it most assuredly is not.

3. What is it that you most love about Kelcey Parker's work, Shannon?

SC: Her misbehaving characters. I just love stories in which the protagonist acts out in unhealthy ways or makes lousy choices for the right reasons. I love stories in which we cannot help but feel intense empathy for a character even as she's doing something ridiculous, or dangerous. The first time I read these stories, the phrase "twisted domesticity" popped into my head, because Kelcey takes the familiar realm of family life and contorts it. She allows an irritant into the mix, and then lets that irritant fester, and of course the character does nothing to calm or solve the irritant (because that would be reasonable, and reasonable characters are usually boring characters). Tossed into this delicious mess is Kelcey's feminist ethic, which is never, ever imposed, never didactic-it's organic, infused.

1. Can you describe the process of selecting stories for inclusion in this collection? How were the decisions to include or omit certain pieces reached? What about the organization of the stories within the collection? How did you determine the way the stories would be presented and the order in which they would appear?

KP: This may have been my favorite part of all: having Shannon's input on what should stay and what should go, and on where a story should go once we decided it stayed.

Between the time I first sent the manuscript to the time it was going to production, I wrote new stories and revisited older stories that I thought might fit. I sent all of them to Shannon, and she told me in no uncertain terms that we needed to go 'lean and mean' and gave me a list of six stories to cut. That felt great - like an overdue hair cut. I fought back for just one story, and Shannon graciously and immediately agreed.

Then followed my favorite part: an intense Skype session with Shannon in Arizona and me in Indiana. Shannon picked up her laptop and showed me all of my stories spread across her dining room table. She had them mapped out, quantified, and categorized. She told me how many happy vs. unhappy endings I had (unhappy won in a landslide). She divided them according to their various lengths (short/medium/long), conceits (formalist, fabulist, realist), and points of view. She performed, in short, a complete diagnostic study of the collection.

Thus, when she recommended the placement of the first and last stories, which were very different from what I was thinking, I trusted her completely. She really set everything in place, and helped me think through my stories' arrangement in a new way.

SC: I'm so proud of this book, and the work Kelcey and I did on it together. This is the first first full-length book of fiction I've edited, and I couldn't be happier with it. Because I hadn't done this before, I needed to figure out the thinking behind how story collections were ordered. So yes, I did all that analysis that Kelcey describes, and am grateful for what it taught me about editing. Ultimately I hope what I was doing more than anything was listening to how the stories wanted themselves to be told, and of all the wonderful stories in the initial manuscript, which of them were doing that job in greatest harmony with their neighbors.

2. I know that the book's title was inspired by one of the stories within, but how did you decide on that specific title for the collection?

KP: I sent the collection to several publishers with several different titles, but I'd never tried 'For Sale By Owner,' and I have to confess that I didn't really like it when the publisher suggested it. I replied by suggesting a half-dozen overly arty titles and was basically told that the title was going to be 'For Sale By Owner,' that it was the best for marketing and book design. Marketing and design are about the farthest things from my mind when I'm writing, but now that the book is out, I think of these things a LOT. And I know that the title is exactly right, not only for those things, but for the writerly things: motifs, multiple levels of meanings, and even the tone - the sense wanting to give up what one has, and of being on one's own.

3. What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

KP: A year ago I started a blog, phdincreativewriting.wordpress.com, where I address this question fairly frequently. As a professor, I work with aspiring writers every single day, and some of those students are doing exactly what it takes to become writers, while other students seem to want to be professional . . . aspirers. The students who are well on their way to becoming writers are those that take as many writing classes as they can, write even if they're not in class, volunteer for the student literary journal, attend local readings, read like words are food and they're starving, participate in open-mics, follow literary debates online, write reviews, and connect with other writers in the community. Becoming a writer is not rocket science, but it's not magic either.

SC: First and most important: there are no shortcuts. Kelcey is a perfect example: she's been writing seriously for ten years, and here finally is her first book. My path as a writer is similar: my first book comes out this fall, nearly twelve years since I started writing seriously, doing all the things Kelcey recommends. Typically when editors are asked what we're looking for in a manuscript, we respond with some version of "it's got to grab me from the first sentence." Which is true, absolutely. And also a terribly unhelpful answer for a new writer, who already believes (one would hope) that their work accomplishes that initial grabbing. The part you hear less often is that it takes a whole lot of work and dedication to get the point at which you can write those grabbing sentences, and just as importantly that you understand why they're grabbing; how to know when they aren't, and how to fulfill the promise of that grab in every sentence that follows. As a teacher told me once, getting published isn't hard. Getting published is easy; its the writing that's hard.

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To read more about (and purchase your own copy of) For Sale By Owner, click here.
For more information on Kelcey Parker and Shannon Cain, visit kelceyparker.com and shannoncain.com.

An Open Letter to Poets,from Claudia Rankine

2011-02-14T09:18:00.000-08:00

Claudia Rankine is the author of three previous collections of poetry, Nothing in Nature Is Private, The End of the Alphabet, and Plot. She is co-editor, with Juliana Spahr, of American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. She teaches in the writing program at the University of Houston.

Author photo © John Lucas

Dear friends,

As many of you know I responded to Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change” at AWP. I also solicited from Tony a response to my response. Many informal conversations have been taking place online and elsewhere since my presentation of this dialogue. This request is an attempt to move the conversation away from the he said-she said vibe toward a discussion about the creative imagination, creative writing and race.

If you have time in the next month please consider sharing some thoughts on writing about
race (1-5 pages).

Here are a few possible jumping off points:

•If you write about race frequently what issues, difficulties, advantages, and disadvantages do you negotiate?

•How do we invent the language of racial identity--that is, not necessarily constructing the "scene of instruction" about race, but create the linguistic material of racial speech/thought?

•If you have never written consciously about race why have you never felt compelled to do so?

•If you don’t consider yourself in any majority how does this contribute to how race enters your work?

•If fear is a component of your reluctance to approach this subject could you examine that in a short essay that would be made public?

•If you don’t intend to write about race but consider yourself a reader of work dealing with race what are your expectations for a poem where race matters?

•Do you believe race can be decontextualized, or in other words, can ideas of race be constructed separate from their history?

•Is there a poem you think is particularly successful at inventing the language of racial identity or at dramatizing the site of race as such? Tell us why.

In short, write what you want. But in the interest of constructing a discussion pertinent to the more important issue of the creative imagination and race, please do not reference Tony or me in your writings. We both served as the catalyst for this discussion but the real work as a community interested in this issue begins with our individual assessments.

If you write back to me by March 11, 2011, one month from today, with “OPEN LETTER” in the subject heading I will post everything on the morning of the 15th of March. Feel free to pass this on to your friends. Please direct your thoughts to openletter@claudiarankine.com.

In peace,

Claudia
openletter@claudiarankine.com

A Tucson Perspective: Through the Eyes of Shannon Cain

2011-01-16T10:48:00.000-08:00

The following posts come the blog of Shannon Cain: Tucson, the Novel. Shannon is a fiction writer and a writing coach. Her collection of short stories, The Necessity of Certain Behaviors, was awarded the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for 2011 and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press this fall. Her work has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the O. Henry Prize and the Pushcart Prize. She has taught creative writing at the University of Arizona, Gotham Writers Workshop, UCLA Extension and Arizona State University. She is the fiction editor for Kore Press. Visit her website here.

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

Tucson: Learning to live with the discomfort of unknowing

This week, the sort of familiar violence we watch on the news has come home to Tucson, and our hometown seems suddenly unfamiliar.

So I did what used to be done in this country, not really so long ago, when the senseless struck: I consulted a novelist. The writer of stories, the reasoning goes, has spent a good amount of time thinking about the human condition and might have something interesting to say about it.

The loss of innocence, says the American novelist Charles Baxter, is partly a recognition that there are depths to things, that what you see isn’t always what you get. The loss of innocence leads us to explore, to try to figure out what it all means. To gain insight.

But the mass production of insight in America is a dubious phenomenon, says Baxter, and some of these insights can seem disturbingly untrustworthy. There is a smell about them, he says, of recently molded plastic.

My call today is for reflection, and calm, and a strong yet passive resistance to the demands all around us that we participate, at top volume, in efforts to neatly wrap up this experience. Perhaps, for a while, we should let it dwell in the realm of inexplicability. We should live with the discomfort of unknowing. Soon enough we’ll be compelled to make sense of it all, but maybe for now the most appropriate and most dignified response is to sit quietly and reflect.

Let's not allow this tragedy to be commodified for the national and international media. To join in the noise of a debased and thoughtless rhetoric, the kind that people use gleefully without really knowing what it means or understanding its consequences, is fundamentally disrespectful. We ought to give these deaths and grave injuries and indeed our own grief the dignity of their own complexities.

We are free to reject toxic public discourse.

We can be grateful that Tucson has a history of investing in the arts. In the months and years to come, we're going to need our artists. The role of the Tucson artist in the wake of these events is the same as it always is, in good times and bad: to consider that which she sees and to reflect it back to us in all its beauty and pain. To show us who we are, and in so doing to help us see ourselves differently. Said James Baldwin on his eloquent public resistance against the pain and struggle of black Americans: "I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness." In moments like this, when our hearts are broken open, when the familiar seems strange, when a parking lot becomes a killing field, the artist shows us how to expand our vision.

The story of what happened on January 8, 2011 in Tucson, Arizona is a moral mystery. Good storytellers understand that tales overcontrolled by their meaning, as Baxter says, start to go a little bit dead. When a story hits us over the head with what it’s trying to tell us, it can become false to its own shadings and nuances. Perhaps we should take a cue from the artists and try not to explain this right away, but just to see it. Perhaps we ought for now to reject the self-satisfied declarations and false authority of others who are trying to tell our story. Perhaps for now we ought to allow the mystery to unfold without judgment, without attaching a meaning to it, because when we are too busy interpreting, and then yelling out our interpretations, we can't listen.

Gratitude to Charles Baxter in "Against Epiphany," Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction (Graywolf Press, 1997)

Saturday, January 15th, 2011

Tucson as birthplace of the civil discourse movement

Tucson's heart has broken wide open. And to our pride we discover that out pours love.

This loss of innocence has not closed us down and filled us with fear, as it might have done. We are wide-eyed, America, at what has happened on our doorstep. We're grateful for one another. There's a lot of hugging going on. We're not afraid to show this country a thing or two about kindness, not to mention heroism.

What good might come? What if these events began a new way toward democracy? Here on the eve of Martin Luther King Day, what if Tucson were to become the Selma of the civil discourse movement? We already have the attention--and respect!--of the country. What if Tucson were to lead by example, what if we pledged henceforth to engage in the democratic process with civility and compassion and respect?

Tucson, America loves us. They love us out of empathy for our loss and also because we have been so openhearted in the media about our pain and grief and our resolve to move forward as better versions of ourselves. If any city can bring America back to civility, it's Tucson. And what better way to return the love of our country.

A speech from a vigil for recent LGBTQ youth suicides, by TC Tolbert

2010-10-25T02:18:00.000-07:00

TC Tolbert is a genderqueer, feminist poet and educator. TC earned his MFA in Poetry from UA in 2005 and currently teaches Composition at Pima Community College. S/he is the Assistant Director of Casa Libre en la Solana and is a member of Movement Salon, a compositional improvisation group in Tucson. S/he is a collective member of Read Between the Bars, a books-to-prisoners program, and s/he spends his summers leading wilderness trips for Outward Bound. TC’s poems can be found in Volt, The Pinch, Drunken Boat, Shampoo, A Trunk of Delirium, and jubilat. He won the Arizona Statewide Poetry competition in 2010 and his chapbook is forthcoming from Kore Press.

According to the American Association of Suicidology, 12 youth per day die by suicide. Suicide is the 3rd highest cause of death for youth between the ages of 15-24 – right behind accidents and homicides. Now even if we apply the most conservative estimate that 1 in 10 of those youth is LGBTQ, this still means that 1 queer kid a day is dying by suicide. That is over 365 queer youth per year. And yet, all we know of – what has pulled us here together – are 8. What about the other 350-something lgbtq youth who have died by suicide in the last year? What do we know of their stories? Why don’t we know their stories? When we look at these 8, who do we see reflected back at us? Who do we not see?

You may have also recently heard about the horrible attack of a transwoman in the Bronx (she has been mis-identified as a gay man in the media but she used female pronouns and went by the name La Reina – the Queen). 9 attackers, ranging in age from 16-23, brutally tortured her and two acquaintances for being queer. Some NY detectives are calling it “the worst hate crime they’ve seen in years.”

The grief we feel as a community and as individuals when faced with such violence is swift, tremendous, and just. When youth, the very embodiment of hope, growth, and change are snuffing themselves and each other out b/c they cannot find evidence of that hope, b/c they cannot see themselves reflected, or, perhaps, b/c they cannot stand the reflection that they do see – our response should be grief. We are losing something and we have lost people. I am proud of us tonight for being honest, for being vulnerable. For coming together in our grief.

And yet, I ask each of you not to let this grief become a weapon. I ask us, as a community, not to let our losses be compounded by separation, by a perpetuation of hate, violence, retribution, or otherness. If convicted of a hate crime, their perpetrators could get 3 years, 5 years more. Given 3 more years will La Reina feel safe walking in her neighborhood? Given 5 years will we hear Tyler’s violin again? No. Hate crimes legislation will not and does not make queer people safe. Prisons perpetuate violence, they do not end it. I’m sorry but hate crimes legislation won’t bring back Tyler Clementi, Asher Brown, Seth Walsh, Billy Lucas, Raymond Chase, Justin Aaberg, Zach Harrington, and Aiyisha Hassan. Hate crimes legislation won’t bring back the over 30 transwomen who have been murdered in the last year. We can punish the most obvious perpetrators but it won’t correct a system – a world - in which racism, homophobia, and transphobia are status quo.

Instead, I’m asking you to do two things. First, I ask that you take care of yourself. Nourish yourself with good food, time alone, time with loved ones, time with your body, fun. Take the kind of care of yourself that you would wish for your very best friend. That’s it. It’s simple but not easy. That is thing one. Take care of you.

Thing 2 is neither more important nor less. And I believe with every fiber of my being that if each of us do both of these things, we will see the radical shift we are asking for. I am asking you (and myself) to take responsibility for the privileges we do have in this world (and we’ve all got some – I’ve got an enormous of amount of it) – be it white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, socio-economic privilege, the privilege of education, of leisure, of time – whatever privilege we have, use it to advocate for someone who is unlike you yet who is also oppressed. Let’s stop acting as if there is such a thing as a migrant issue or a women’s issue or a people with disabilities issue. These are all queer issues. Put yourself in dialogue, in proximity, in solidarity work with people who do not look like you, think like you, believe like you. So we’ve come out on campus this week – that is the first step, not the last. Let us now be big brothers or big sisters and come out there. Let us now volunteer to teach in prisons and come out there. Let us volunteer at shelters, in schools, at migrants’ rights organization, at Palestinian liberation actions, at Jewish film festivals, and come out there. Give time, give money, give. The sooner we stop segregating ourselves from the issues that keep all of us down – the closer we come to eradicating oppression. If we want real change, if we want to end violence and bullying, we’ve got to know each other – we’ve got to work in solidarity, we’ve got to connect.

Please consider not just those stories you heard today but also the stories you didn’t hear. Search them out. Make room for them in our movement. And please, make movement any time you have room. Thank you.

Tucson is Buzzing About Coming in Hot

2010-09-27T05:06:00.000-07:00

Since Coming in Hot wrapped up its Tucson, AZ performances and has hit the road for LA. We're sharing a collection of reflections from post-show audience free-writes, open forums, and facilitated discussions. During the month of September, Coming in Hot took the stage at six area high schools, Pima Community College, the Univeristy of Arizona Poetry Center, a Veterans in Higher Education conference, and a few local living roomgs. The diverse locales and audience sparked powerful, collaborative dialogues across generations:

Tucson High School

"I feel the weight of many years of history--the stories of men and women whose lives are forgotten but whose struggles mirror my own. . . [this is] a war memorial more meaningful than a statue or a wreath. War/anti-war; knowledge/awareness; compassion/grief."

"I feel a deep power from within, hearing a tale of . . . women in the army. It takes away the simplistic views I had about the army and threw them in the trash. I see that the army is fear, it is sadness, it is loneliness. The army, especially for a women, is a complex world."

"I feel sad not only because my mother is in the army and I wish she could be here with me, but because its not easy to be a woman soldier. It motivates me to want to be in the military even more. I feel grateful for our women who serve in the military."

"I feel really frightened by this play. When I first walked through these doors I was interested, maybe inspired, to join the military, now I'm afraid."

"I can feel each pain and struggle these women have been through! I felt as if i was there when I heard each story. I have a brand new respect for military women and it has opened my eyes about wanting to go to Westpoint after high school."

"I wouldn't join the military, but if a woman feels that God wants her to join, she should be able to without fearing the male soldiers and what they might do."

"This has got to be one of the hardest things I have ever listened to. Women don't deserve to be treated this way, especially by men they are working with."

"The Israeli army will be a different experience by far, as a family and community. I think because it is more expected that women will join. I will not get raped or harassed, like these women did."

"I plan on joining the military or Coast Guard after high school. To hear how many women in the military go through so much makes me want to be part of something bigger than myself."

University of Arizona Veterans in Higher Education Conference

"I believe this [play] would be a great program to not only spread to civilian women, but to try to assemble active duty women from all ranks and all forces. As an active duty female, I believe young sailors/soldiers/marines would benefit from exploring this side of combat, both male and female."

"Profound feelings. It took me back like I was there again. Not in a good way. I hated it. I loved it. Well done."

"This was some pretty powerful stuff. We have had a deaf ear to women's issues for way too long and still do not want to face the realities. This play is a wonderful means of awareness that just opens the doors slightly . . . and we need to bust it completely open."

"Too dark. Too sad. No one spoke about patriotism? Courage? Satisfaction?"

Hamilton High School

"These women go through hell and back more times than the male soldiers do."

"I feel shocked and ashamed of myself. I have never really thought twice about women in the military, let alone what they might be going through. . . this performance has reminded me of the things that go on outside of my little bubble of a world."

"I saw and felt all the women's stories. . . as a result I want to talk to anyone in my family who was in the military to see and understand any of their stories."

"I have never felt this way. I feel captivated and touched. . . taken all throughout the horrid experiences a woman has to endure so she can help serve her country. As a man, I feel guilty to have to share the title of "man," for what man has done."

"I feel like I want to do something more. I know I am a very strong girl and now I feel like I am wasting it. . . I am so impressed by how strong women can be. I am glad this is being performed for people."

House party/fundraising salon hosted by Shannon Cain, Kore Press Fiction Editor

"I feel grateful to the artists for giving me a meaningful way to engage with the overwhelming reality of what is occurring in the world--the cost of what my country is doing. I have not found other meaningful ways of engaging. I find most of the ways these issues are presented and discussed to be inhumane, alienating and even more painful."

"It was easy to visualize women in war---the conflicts, the intensity, the never-ending injustices--danger from within our military. I feel loss of life, permanent scaring--damaged souls. . . perhaps the lucky ones are the dead."

"I feel like I've overlooked and not honored my own military upbringing. Yes, Air Force brat was such a badge of pride, but the late 60s and 70s buried that and I buried that and all the families that I knew who lost---literally "lost": MIA. Dads, husbands. Thank you for bringing those memories to the surface."

House party/fundraising salon hosted by Linda Green, anthropology professor at the University of Arizona

"Glad you brought these voices forward. Really found the piece about the pow wow---the inability to speak---very significant! It really brought us back to the silenced voices of women!

"Coming in Hot" clearly opens the space rather than claiming triumph. Thank you for that honesty."

One audience member stated how conflicted she felt about her response to the play: being proud of the strength and courage depicted by the women warriors and at the same time being aware of how deeply anti-war she is.

Someone else raised a question about the status of women in the Israeli army, guessing that they do not experience the same levels of harassment and abuse that women soldiers in the US military do. He also wondered what women vets face when they return, what kind of community do they form or can they look to be received back into? As a Native American, he noted that the Pow wow is a place for warriors to return to and find a home in.

Catalina Foothills High School

"I don't support war, I don't know who would, but I really respect those strangers who live to die. Isn't that a cornerstone of the military, of war, in general? Death?"

"I feel confused as if I am not able to be the person needed for my country, where there is life free and bold. I cannot rise to the occasion of becoming one who protects others. Where do we find this strength, this liberty? How do we understand the unknown? Where do I fit in?. . ."

"I feel like I would like to serve my country but I couldn't do it. I feel like the government covers up the truth. I feel like most war isn't necessary."

"I feel incredibly lucky in the most absurd way. . .it seems completely wrong that I should be so lucky when so many more, the majority of the world is less lucky than me. Why do I get to be comfortable? Why do I have family and friends that love me? Why don't I ever have to pay some kind of steep price for all my good fortune? maybe it will come eventually. I am so selfish for wishing I won't have to."

"The most shocking message I got from the play was that of sexual harassment in the military. Here, servicemen are portrayed as being honorable and something to aspire to, but when they are pulled away from society they are reduced to basic instincts. i also think that the military doesn't share this information with the public."

City High School

"You should have more pro military stories. I know multiple soldiers who are women and they're experiences were much different. I heard some stories from the Gulf War and a lot has changed since then."

"I feel so heart broken that even living in the 21st century that women do not get the respect they deserve even with bravery, desperately fighting for their country. I actually cried. I never cry. Incredible. Truly incredible."

"I feel amazed at how much sexism there is among people who are supposed to be the heroes of our country."

"I can't get how people go about their business during the day let alone sleep at night knowing that people are being tortured, dying, starving and yet. . . we don't even bother to lift a finger."

"I feel sad and confused about the truth of what happens to women in the army. No one should be treated like that."

Gobsmacked

2010-07-26T18:43:00.000-07:00

By Deborah Fries

A few years back, a reviewer introduced my first book of poetry with a caveat that landed like a sucker punch. She’s not in the under forty crowd, but he began. I imagined a haunting chorus of alternative dependent clauses. Some days, I heard but she’s amazingly hip and relevant. On cloudier days, I heard yet she’s still tuned in to some of what matters. And on my feeling marginalized days, I heard if you are curious about the alien world of the older woman, dig in.

It’s an alien world for me, as well. I am without role models for aging. Both of my grandmothers were smacked down before they were fifty and before I was born. Both were farm wives who raised their children during the Depression. While they may have sensed that something meaningful was eluding them, I’ll never know if that thing had a name. I very much doubt that it occurred to either of them that what was missing was their Voice. They were spared the urgent messages of the self-actualization movement that sang to my generation. They were spared aging.

My paternal grandmother, Jessie, died unexpectedly at forty-five during surgery. She had no opportunity to fear being invisible or irrelevant or to wonder whether she had fully explored her potential. My maternal grandmother, Inez, died at forty-nine after a long illness. Bedridden and emaciated, unlike Jessie, she knew that she had been short-changed. Melpomene was the only muse whispering in her ear.

I never had a sweet, silver-haired grandmother who taught me to knit or a wild, biker Gram who broke all the rules: I had no one to set that generational example. My mother’s last four decades gave me my first and most intimate exposure to how a woman ages. She lived for eighty-six years and for almost half of that long existence, she was bitter, envious, sad and disappointed.

She had opted for a small life, while longing for a large and vivid one. She became a wife once and a mother twice, and treated those relationships as occupational compromises in a weak job market --options that left her chronically underemployed and frustrated. None of her dreams could be realized by her alone: all were dependent on the effort and accomplishments of her husband and daughters. And to the extent that each of us failed to make them come true, her bitterness increased. It became huge.

In March, Robin Black wrote about the life-affirming phenomenon of the late bloomer who finds her voice, a possible antidote for the aging woman’s fear of invisibility. Even more than invisibility, I am afraid of the kind of unrelenting regret and bitterness my mother cultivated.

And so at some point in my thirties, I promised myself that I would live differently, that I would find ways to adapt to aging, with its many narcissistic wounds and personal losses, and remain open to possibilities. I would search for developmental muses, role models who lived their lives fully, who managed to do meaningful work for as long as possible, whose focus on mastery of their craft rather than on recognition provided balance, whose ties to family and friends sustained and tethered them to this world. I would battle regret and nurture a built-in immunity to the bitterness and despair that had gripped my mother in her fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties.

That was the plan. But as time passed, my sense of possibility eroded a bit, tempered by circumstance. The world is not indifferent to age, and some paths seem to be more age-friendly than others. I wanted to believe that no matter how my path meandered, no matter how much time passed, there would always be room for another writer. After all, there was Amy Clampitt.

Amy Clampitt, who published her first book of poetry at sixty-three, who I’d seen at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee the month I filed for divorce, who was there, reading from The Kingfisher, and holding out the possibility of never-too-late artistic accomplishment, just as I was taking a sudden detour from its pursuit.

Amy, whose focus on the external world transcended the ephemeral goals of the flesh, whose musical, Marianne Moore-ish diction was valued above her attractiveness, whose safe, sexless poems about reed beds, beach glass, meadowlarks and thrushes could hold their own against the flash of young sensualists and surrealists. She was proof that a woman’s voice could be embraced even in her sixties; that the literary world, unlike so many others, might choose to ignore age.

She was my age-blind muse of late debuts. For decades, I kept her narrative in a mental pocket, like a rabbit’s foot, to remind me of how I wanted to age: go about doing what you love, indifferent to the fickle prejudices and politics that can factor into how one is perceived; keep evolving, with or without applause. Applause, if it comes, is the frosting, not the cake.

And now? Above all, I want to be comfortable in the present. But I also want to live with a sense of personal and professional possibility, to believe that there is still more becoming to come. Last month, when I learned that eighty-two year-old Myrrha Stanford-Smith had received a three-book deal from Honno, a Welsh women’s press quite taken with her approach to children’s fiction, I heard a new muse whispering in my ear.

That Ms. Stanford-Smith’s literary accomplishment comes at a time when she is also teaching and directing repertory theater is more frosting on an already very tall cake. Yet she described her reaction to Honno’s offer as feeling “gobsmacked” -- the kind of speechlessness that an eighty-two year-old woman might experience when she is seen by the world as whole, vital, worthy of investment -- unsullied by time and its powers of reduction.

It’s the kind of smack that sends assumptions about age and invisibility flying. Its external source makes it newsworthy: most of us suspect that the larger world can no longer see a woman in her eighties, let alone see her potential.

But the editors at Honno could see -- see that Stanford-Smith was not in the under eighty crowd, yet capable of transporting children into an engaging imagined world, places she created when she wasn’t busy teaching or directing a play. When women publish women, it seems, the scope of our valued experiences broadens and our potential for remaining visible is extended through that sweet lens of appreciation.

2010-06-23T15:38:00.000-07:00

My Kind to Your Kind
by Niki Herd

To live in this country with the skin on my back is to always be suspect. I walk into a store—I become a potential thief—and am followed. I pick up the telephone to address an issue at the workplace and colleagues and clients marvel at how articulate I am. Just the other day, a server at one of my favorite, now-defunct, eating spots confided that the owners thought I was anti-white.

To live in this country with the skin on your back means you are the default button. In a game of spades you are the trump card. All that is not you is measured against you, and most often by you. To live in this country with the skin on your back may also mean listening to the rape and pillage song day in and day out. It may be living in a marriage in which past mistakes, indiscretions, moments of bad judgment and disloyalties are never laid to rest.

The important word here is past. Past mistakes. Past indiscretions. Past moments of bad judgment. Past disloyalties. The word assumes that which is not current, or ongoing, or systematic. When flocks of revolutionaries came to this land to flee political oppression, there was nothing wrong with them wanting to flourish in a new home, but the blood of blacks should not have been systematically imported to do so. Nor should tongues have been excised and rosaries placed around the necks of the people that enjoyed this land before you.

Since you may think this the rhetoric of the past, let me address the current issue to which I write which seems all too much like the past—that group of teenagers protesting outside of an Arizona high school today. How by law, one of them could be stopped by police, asked to prove his or her citizenship while inside the school, and schools throughout the state, courses like Mexican or African-American studies are being banned to prevent what you call ethnic chauvinism. What is clear to me as I drive by is that the focus should be on equipping these children with the tools they need to succeed. The problem rests with a state that de-values education and continuously refuses to educate its children properly. Mexican-American studies is not the problem. What is also clear to me as I drive by cardboard signs and honking horns, is that these children, who they are and their history, will never be accepted—and they share a lineage with the people south of us who are systematically pennied and pimped, who fold our bed sheets, wash our fine dining dishes, tile our floors and pick our poisonous crops. They have become the unacknowledged American workforce functioning to make our lives easier, comfortable and profitable in a country that befriends its Latin brothers and sisters only when convenient.

Let me begin again.

Let me introduce the players. Let me clarify what is at stake.

Good people, good friends are in my life, many of whom retain beliefs significantly different from my own about those topics that change the tenor of dinner such as the choice between war or non-violence, abortion or god. They are friends because their actions do not at all minimize my humanity. Despite their beliefs, there is some kind common ground we share and cherish. But you and I are not really friends, and we are on two separate sides of the bible or the flag if you will. And I am not sure where to go from here.

Several years ago an ex-NFL player drove his Bronco onto the Los Angeles freeway after killing his white ex-wife, and I watched the racial river widen. In my own back yard, it widened again when folks were protesting the re-naming of a non-descript university building in honor of Cesar Chavez. The latter happened here in Arizona, the same state getting the attention recently for legalizing racial profiling and removing ethnic studies from the elementary and secondary school curriculum. It is the same state that did not want to honor a Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. But I think it unfair that Arizona is making all the headlines for the state is only enacting what you have taught her. More than seven letters and four syllables connect you. Arizona is your daughter child, and with your history of Eurocentricsm, you have educated her well.

Perhaps I am wrong. Tell me I am wrong. I think we need to talk.

We need to talk. We need to talk to each other—to do what my people call speak truth. We need to talk. We need to listen. We need to listen to some things neither of us wants to hear. We need this before another apology is given from a police officer who physically attacks a Mexican suspect while hurling racial curse words, as was the case in Seattle. No more do we want apologies. In these days of propaganda, political correctness, and reactionary communication, we need honest dialogue, and we need it soon.

It was James Baldwin who alluded that the relationship of my kind to your kind was like a marriage, and I have never been into until death do us part, but since the children are here having shed baby teeth, ready to assert themselves in this world, and we find ourselves joined at a time when folks are being arrested for mopping floors, or having a rake in their so brown hands, don’t you think we need to be honest about where we are and how we got here? See—the honeymoon is over. Actually, there never was a honeymoon. And the children say all hell is about to break loose.

---Niki Herd, May 12, 2010

We Are All Arizonans: SB1070 Reflections by Adela Licona

2010-05-11T10:13:00.000-07:00

Reflections on Why I am opposed to SB 1070…

I am opposed to SB1070.

I am opposed to SB1070 because this bill is unconstitutional. Its content and what it calls for cannot be reconciled with the concept of equal protection. It ignores constitutional rights and it ignores human rights. This bill will make some of us more equal than others before the law – and that should trouble all of us.

I am opposed to SB 1070 because this bill is dangerous. This bill conflates and consolidates federal and state power – and that should trouble all of us.

I am opposed to SB 1070 because it’s regressive. It moves us backwards in time and practice towards division, separation, and segregation. It promotes anti-immigrant sentiment and hostility and fuels a new cultural racism. It can and it will lead to racial profiling – and that should trouble all of us.

I am opposed to SB 1070 because this bill is impractical. The bill calls on local police officers to do more with less. The bill calls on officers to determine the status of an “alien” based upon “reasonable suspicion.” It will distract police officers in their efforts to keep us safe – and this should trouble all of us.

I am opposed to SB1070 because it dishonors hard-working laborers and in so doing, it promotes discrimination. The language in the bill serves to dehumanize immigrants. It is no way to go about immigration reform.

SB 1070 is immoral. It will produce an environment of threat that allows for even grosser and more exploitative laboring and living conditions. It validates uncivil discourse and unleashes hateful rhetoric that has material consequences particularly for the least among us.

I am opposed to SB1070 because it is a bill constructed on questionable premises.

We must not be deluded by the language of this bill, as there is a difference between immigration, safety, and security.

We must question the assertions that Arizona is less safe because of the presence of migrants. Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico is a most dangerous city that is forcing migrants to flee into El Paso and yet El Paso continues to be considered among the safer cities in the US and was even a named 2010 finalist for the “All American City Award.”

I’m opposed to SB 1070 because it is a smokescreen that keeps us from seeking answers to questions such was what motivates migration? And not only who benefits from exploitative labor and its productions - but who is accountable for it? Why, if migrants are actively recruited to labor in our agricultural and service industries - and more - must they alone bear the burden of laws such as SB1070?

In my research, I have visited meatpacking plants and the “new destinations” or local communities in which they are situated and continue to wonder how a bill such as SB 1070 can become law while migrants are actively recruited to labor in and for our country.

Beyond the meatpacking industry, migrants are the reasons Arizonans and others across the US enjoy cheap produce, and clothes, and subsidized child care. Migrant labor is present in hotels, motels, private homes, restaurants and construction projects across the US.

As not only a participant but as a beneficiary of such a subsidized economy – the state of Arizona is complicit in the presence of migrant labor.

We must promote public dialogue, awareness, and understanding about the motivations for migration. The issue of migrant labor is a global issue made ever more urgent in the context of neoliberalism because of the unevenness globalization in such a context imposes, aggravates, and entrenches.

Make no mistake about it though – SB 1070 is not just about migrants - documented or undocumented. It is about all of us. Those of us who are brown. And those of us who aren’t. This bill clearly makes some of us more equal than others before the law – and that’s unconstitutional. And immoral. Simply stated, it’s wrong.

SB1070 is insidious.

It breeds a politics of fear that promotes suspicion that is not reasonable. Instead, it is UNreasonable and unjust.

I’m opposed SB1070 in the name of my father. During WWII my father worked in the navy shipyards where service men and civilians alike called him “Chile” as a nickname. Bills like SB1070 promote such degradation and that should be unacceptable to all of us.

I’m opposed to SB 1070 in the name of my daughters. I don’t want my daughters to believe that life in the US must be lived in fear of difference. Or that reasonable suspicion can be determined by the status of one’s immigration, or one’s class, or the color of one’s skin. I want them to know that the discourses we engage in – civil and uncivil - have import and consequence.

I was raised on the US/Mexico border and all my life I have witnessed the exploitation and the unjust treatment of working people of color. SB1070 is a wake up call to me. Living in Arizona is a wake up call to me. We are not only in a recession, we are in a regression. We are headed in a backward direction and we must act.

Please read the bill. Re-read the 14^th Amendment. Use your heart together with your mind. Use the privilege and power of your education. Use your voice. Speak up for others who are too afraid or otherwise can’t speak for themselves, speak up for yourself and for our community.

S1070 must be repealed. Adela C. Licona

aclicona@email.arizona.edu

***

Feminist Action Research in Rhetoric (FARR) Opposed to SB1070

As a collective of scholars and activists who live in the borderlands of Southern Arizona, we stand in united, steadfast opposition of the signing and enforcement of SB1070, as well as HB2162. As feminists, we believe in actively addressing issues of inequality, exclusion, and oppression. While this new law affects each of us individually in a variety of ways, it affects all of us because it threatens to intimidate and incarcerate us, our families, our neighbors, and our colleagues.

While we acknowledge that the law does not explicitly state that racial profiling and harassment will be part of the enforcement of this law, we have experienced first- hand the role racializing practices already play in law and border enforcement, political action, and public discourse in Southern Arizona. This law gives additional legitimacy to a regressive politics of fear and suspicion that will further divide our beleaguered community. Moreover, the unsettling speed and viciousness with which some of our fellow Arizona citizens have dismissed the clearly racist heart of SB1070's assumptions are only further evidence of our current need for coalition as we openly challenge institutionalized and legislated racism wherever it exists.

We call on the members of our community, law enforcement, state government, and the rest of the country to speak out against this bill. We must educate those who may not understand the specific problems and long-lasting consequences with the wording and intent of this measure. SB1070 will not make our borders more secure or our neighborhoods safer; it threatens the humanity of all people living and working in this border state. We are Arizonans--migrant, native, transitional, and transnational--who stand against the intimidation and/or harassment of people in the borderlands and elsewhere.

*Feminist Action Research in Rhetoric, FARR

Marissa Juárez, Regina Kelly, Adela C. Licona, Londie Martin, Rebecca Richards, Shannon Ritchie, Jenna Vinson, Amanda Wray

*FARR is a collective of public scholars and activists who are committed to public scholarship, public rhetoric, civic, and civil discourse. For more information contact aclicona@email.arizona.edu

TC Tolbert Interviews Sonya Renee

2010-05-10T16:56:00.000-07:00

Sonya Renee is an internationally acclaimed Performance Poet, Actress, Educator, and Activist. She has been seen on HBO, CNN, BET, MTV, Oxygen Network; performing on stages from New Zealand to Scotland to New York. Sonya Renee is heralded as a "force of nature on stage" and "humanity in action.” Her work is published in numerous anthologies and has been translated into multiple languages. Her work is transformative, raw, honest and powerful. Her first full length collection of poetry, A Little Truth on Your Shirt, was just released from GirlChild Press.

TC Tolbert is a genderqueer, feminist poet and educator. TC earned his MFA in Poetry from UA in 2005 and currently teaches Composition at Pima Community College. S/he is the Assistant Director of Casa Libre en la Solana and is a member of Movement Salon, a compositional improvisation group in Tucson. S/he is a collective member of Read Between the Bars, a books-to-prisoners program, and s/he spends his summers leading wilderness trips for Outward Bound. TC’s poems can be found in Volt, The Pinch, Drunken Boat, Shampoo, A Trunk of Delirium, and jubilat. He won the Arizona Statewide Poetry competition in 2010 and his chapbook is forthcoming from Kore Press.

Container Malfunction: Grace

by TC Tolbert

Ever since starting testosterone, back in 2006, it’s been hard for me to cry. If you had tried to convince me that this was a possible side effect before I actually started hormones, I would have thought you were a misogynist. Even now, when I feel tears climbing up some unnamed part of my throat and lodging themselves as pillows behind my eyes, I’m shocked when they can’t quite get through.

I didn’t know this when she walked on stage at Hotel Congress on Saturday, April 3 but Sonya Renee has no respect for side effects. She is not interested in who you thought you were when you walked in the door. She is more interested in the alchemy of collision. The things that happen when she tells you a story. And instead of a story it feels like she’s just handing you a mirror. No big deal. She found it in her purse, thought you would need it – you’ve got that spinach in your teeth. But you can’t decide if the mirror is a paintbrush. Because in this light you think that the mirror might be a gun. But she’s telling you now not to worry, get comfortable. Maybe sleep on it. This could be a thing with which you decorate – no, protect – your terrible ears.

You should not read Sonya Renee’s new book, A Little Truth on Your Shirt, if you don’t like poems that want to fondle you. If you are used to poems that don’t ask you any hard questions, this probably isn’t your kind of scene. If you are looking for a poet who stands at a safe and comfortable distance, don’t bother with the interview below. It’s probably just time to walk away.

Sonya Renee made me cry and I want to thank her for it. But I’m a sicko, I’ve already proven that, I’m a trannyfag. I can tell you that I love her and her work, but that’s beside the point. She doesn’t answer, she just nods when I ask her, “Is there grace enough for a poor wretch like me?”

TC: Maybe the 1^st question relates to the title, A Little Truth On Your Shirt, what is the truth that you want to spill?

SR: The place that I write from personally is very much about “what is the relationship between knowing and how does the knowing impact the individual and how does knowing impact other people – your own knowing?” So truth, for me, is the knowing. What things do I know, what things do I know in my body, what things do I know intellectually, what things do I know socially, politically…and how does that get interpreted? And what is the thread that connects my knowing with the rest of the world? We often exist in our own cylinders where our knowing is exclusive to us and our experience we believe to be exclusive to us and I don’t believe that. I believe that our knowing is often many other people’s knowings. We all have fear that it is not – but if we start sharing our knowings with each other, we’ll realize that there is far more that connects us than divides us. It’s cliché but true. And, I’m messy, by nature. I spill shit all the time. You can know what I ate for lunch because it will be on my boobs. There is a way in which my work is that way too. It is a spilling. Sometimes that spill is not a mistake, it is an intentional spill and sometimes it’s just that the container can’t hold it and then sometimes it’s just that I was trying to hold it all and I tripped and it all fell out. But it doesn’t just fall on me. My existence is not isolated in the world and so other people experience that spill as well which is why that truth isn’t just on my shirt it’s on your shirt, too.

TC: I’m interested in the difference between the spill that is a mistake and when it is a container malfunction. In your book (which I love) are there moments when you found, in the writing of the poems, where you thought, “Whoa, I didn’t mean to say that,” or “I had no idea that was in me”? Where you were surprised by what emerged?

SR: Yeah, yeah definitely. Those moments are there, a lot. Which relates to an email question you asked me about my biggest fears in my writing. There are things in this book that were not written with the intention of publishing or with the intention of sharing them with the world. They feel phenomenally vulnerable and frightening and they conflict with the way I present in the world and that is scary for me. I’m thinking of “Penance” about my mother who for years had a crack addiction and she got clean in 2000 and in the last 3 years or so started drinking and is veering into alcoholism. I originally started to write the poem and I couldn’t. It became a blog where I could just say how I angry I was with my mother for returning to addiction and there was just nothing. I didn’t have anything poetic to say about this shit I was just fucking angry. Later on, I went back and added things to it. It started off solely as a space for me to be angry with my mom. So, that was a sort of accidental spill. And the choice to include it in the book was about knowing that that was not some singular, secretive, shameful place for me to exist. There are plenty of other people out there – I find hope in at least believing that.

Which is the difference between the work on the page and the work on the stage; on the stage I get the opportunity, in that moment, to get folks to rally behind the knowing with me and in their own knowing. And in the book, it’s all about the hope that there are other people who can find truth in that truth.

TC: There are so many things there that I’d like to know about. In reading this morning, I was thinking about the trajectory or arc of the book – the organization. I noticed what you are talking about around that poem, “Penance,” – about half way through the book, there is a sort of epicenter of anger. Then the book shifts again and moves into a place of redemption/hope. And I was curious about that, which led me to the email question of how it relates to Sonya Renee the poet, Sonya Renee the performer, and Sonya Renee the person. Which you mentioned a little bit, how those poems seem to conflict a bit with how you present.

SR: This question is an interesting one because it gets posed to me only by those people who know me very intimately and so the fact that you would ask it as a result of reading the book is so scary to me because it means that I’ve let people in intimately. And yes. There is a difference. If you were to read the book backwards, if you were to start with the “Bonus” section and then read to “What a Body Knows,” I think you would have the answer to that question. SR the performer is always self assured. She knows what she knows what she knows and she never questions it. Even if what she knows is vulnerability and fear. She is solid in that. And owns it without question, without wavering. The reason is that I’ve only got that moment on stage engaged with those individuals in front of me to share with those individuals what I’m going to share. And if I question it, in that moment, then they leave questioning it. And they don’t get the opportunity to go back and revisit it because it is gone. So, in that moment as an artist, I have to own that moment. SR the poet on the page doesn’t know in the same way, at all. She is full of questions and very few answers. It’s all about the discovery. On the page it is very much about the process and inviting the reader into that process because as long as that work exists on page I can keep going back to it, I can keep discovering it. I can keep discovering what the nuance is and I can keep having that experience every time I pick it up – and the reader does too. They don’t have to know in that moment b/c it is on that shelf and they can go back and pick it up and say, “oh, I’ve thought about that now, let me go and see what is different about it today.” So, there is a way in which when I am writing that work, I don’t feel like I need to know. I get to not know. And there is safety in that. Until I publish it! It feels safe in the creation. And it feels terrifying in the sharing. And so the choice to share it is one that is against my instinct. SR the person exists in between those two spaces, really. There are moments when I feel assured and completely in my power and strong and there are moments when I am totally in my process and afraid. I am in between those two things.

TC: At what point when you are writing a poem does it become clear that it is for the page or for the stage? Or is it ever that clear?

SR: They are really different spaces. I feel it when I am writing for the stage and mostly that is because the writing is different. The construction happens in a very different way and there is a level of intentionality that I have to have around that to make them translate. One of the constant debates in the slam world is, “Is slam about writing a poem and reading it on stage or is performance poetry something different?” There are lots of different opinions. Personally, I believe that when I am writing for the page, I am always writing with the understanding that the reader has the opportunity to dig endlessly and constantly uncover and excavate. And when I’m writing for the stage I am always certain that the listener only has that moment to get that – so what do I construct to let them get that in that moment. Also, when I write for the page I don’t have an intention. I have an experience, I have a desire to explore language visually. It is often about the word looks and appears and feels in my mouth alone. When I write for the stage, I am generally telling a story. About 90% of the time I am telling a story. And I want people to leave understanding that story. They can make their own inferences about intention or meaning or what they got from that later but I want them to understand the story so they can ask themselves those questions later.

TC: How do we, as artists, – or, do we - consider the reader or audience? At what point do their needs influence what we create?

SR: It’s difficult. Nothing starts, for me, with the reader. It starts with me and my place in the experience, in the observation, in the thought process. That’s where it starts, for me. My decision to share that is about where I believe the reader exists in the work. There are things that I have written that I feel very clear that the reader does not exist at all in that work. And I feel very clear about that. Usually the poem will tell me if it is for more than just me. And if the poem tells me that, then I share it.

TC: A personal question I found myself wondering – has her mom read this? Has her dad read this? How do the folks who are very much present in this work, how do they respond? How do you navigate that?

SR: They know that they are in the book. There are a lot of pieces that they have heard already. I read “Penance” to my mother long before I considered publishing. We were having a conversation about how I could establish boundaries around her drinking and what I could do that does not re-traumatize me and I didn’t know what to say so I said let me read you this poem. Just yesterday I read the piece, “Dreams for My Father,” on the radio in Portland, Oregon and my father called me b/c he had heard me read it and he said, “When I hear the poem it reminds me that I need to call and tell you I love you unconditionally. So I’m calling to tell you I love you unconditionally.” And this is its own art in that experience b/c that is not where we started when I wrote that piece. The piece, “Fragility of Eggs,” I read to my mother when I first wrote it and she cried and asked me to never do it publicly. I obviously didn’t honor that. And here is my perspective. Whenever the experience impacts me, it becomes my experience. And as an artist, I want to honor the space where that came from. And I’m not going to not tell my truth b/c that makes you uncomfortable. Because it is mine. But what I feel committed to doing is writing from a space that honors, that doesn’t exploit, that shows the humanity in the experience. I can do that. I feel committed to doing that. But I don’t feel committed to keeping other’s secrets, for their sake. Not when it makes them my secrets too.

TC: That is interesting as it relates to other kinds of writing, like memoir, and the expectation that everything that is written is factual. I wonder what is the line in your work between what is factual and what is true?

SR: There is a difference. Truth is often conceptual. Knowing isn’t about detail. It is about core and spirit and synthesis. That is not about detail. That is not about making a left turn instead of a right turn at two in the afternoon. In my work, knowing and truth are about destination. And facts are about roads. How did you get there? Sometimes I absolutely believe in factuality. I am interested often in how do you make fact poetic. Fact is newspaper and newspaper isn’t often poetic and I’m interested in that line between fact and poetry and where do you create that. But I think poetry is about creation and creativity and nuance and language and I feel free to utilize that when I need to. And I feel like the truth in my work is always present. The other thing is that truth, in my work, is never about exploitation. I have read work that is more about exploiting the subject, reader, or audience to get the reaction you want but I never want to exist in that space. My story is about truth and people’s ability to find their own truth in my truth.

Here is a concrete example. In the Bonus section “Liking Me” it is about me and an interaction with a guy who does not want to use a condom. Did that scenario happen in that exact way? No. Have lots of scenarios similar to that happened? Yes. Have those always ended with me being super strong and saying “Get the fuck out of here – I’d rather masturbate.” No. Sometimes I’ve bent. But the truth of my spirit is that I know that I am more important than someone who is getting me to compromise my safety. That is my knowing. And that work is a vehicle to get me to live in my knowing and to get other people to live in their knowing.

TC: As a woman, as an African American woman, as a woman who writes about sex with men and women, is there ever a moment when you feel a pressure to stand for a community?

SR: There is always that pressure. I identify as queer. That is a new identity for me. One I’ve picked up in the last year and a half. I’ve called myself bisexual for the last 8 years but I am just now learning to exist in the queer community and to consider myself part of the queer community and that is a new space and yes, there is a lot of pressure to belong to a community. Other people want you to belong to their community and, for me, it is about safety. Does the community take as much ownership in me as they want me to take in it? As I get to that space, I get to figure out if that can happen or if it doesn’t feel right.

I tour with a group of women called Salt Lines. We began the tour last year and we are all women who exist in varying degrees on the spectrum of sexuality but I had not, at that point, decided to identify with the queer community. I always felt like an ally but there was something about that term that did not feel like it included me. I felt like some of the LGBTQQA terms included some of those letters just by happenstance. And the discussions that I had been having with lesbians and gay men, I oftentimes just felt like they did not really like bisexuals – like they were annoyed by them, feeling like they were riding the fence. I felt like my identity was not respected in a lot of ways. Coming to feel myself included in the queer community was very much a process. Feeling safe, like there was space for me without being annoyed that I was at the table – or people not believing my experience to be true. And there are lots of communities where I am still figuring out my role or relationship in that. It is a constant re-engaging. I am always investigating that.

I am in the black community by virtue of the fact that when you look at me I am very clearly black. But there are ways in which I have been challenged in that despite the fact that I am very clearly black. There are ways in which I am challenged around feminism. It is a constant dance.

TC: I wonder also about your femme identity – how does being a feminine queer woman impacted your ability to connect with community, if it has at all?

SR: It absolutely has! If you are asking my gender identity, I am a drag queen! That’s my gender identity and there is a way in which that feels very very true for me. As soon as I wrap up the prep for the book, I start on my one woman show which are talks with a biological drag queen. My femme identity is constant. There is a way in which being as femme as I am challenges my relationship with women. And often in communities with butch-femme dichotomies, which is not my orientation, I am attracted to other femmes – which creates its own special dynamic of difficulty to access – because I am so femme it makes it difficult to read me as queer – people make assumptions about my sexuality based on the fact that I have on heels, a dress, and a wig.

Because my femme identity is not subtle, I don’t think a lot of the assumptions about femininity get played out with me. Because my femme is so in your face, I don’t get “oh she must be soft or dainty,” people treat me totally different. I think that is also a relationship between my identity as a black woman, as well. All of these things interact.

Patricia Hill Collins, the feminist sociologist, talks about the “matrix of oppression” where all of these different marginalized identities and their relationship to each other – there are a thousand Venn diagrams and with fifteen million circles in them all and there’s overlap everywhere and ways of being excluded at every corner depending on what other circle you exist in at the time. I feel like I am simply going back and forth within all of that. And there are ways in which my femininity frightens the world sometimes – it scares folks. There is a piece that I wrote in the workshop the other day called “Oh I’m Overdoing It” which is about my lover’s reaction to me meeting her family and how much I am. In one of the quotes in Alice In Wonderland the mad hatter tells Alice she has “lost her muchness.” It’s awesome, I love it. And it’s all about how muchness I have in the world and how many assumptions can exist around that and how much my identity plays a role in me being allowed at the table in a very universal sense. And in a very social and political sense. Being seen, you are already a person whose identity is on the margin. To be seen in a way that allows you to construct the seeing, based on what you know of yourself rather than based on what people want to tag to you, you have to carve that out for yourself. And if you are quiet or subdued or understated it makes it so much easier for people to make you invisible. Or, to make you present but to stick their own labels on you. But, my muchness allows for me to force my way to the table and then to guide the conversation around me that happens there.

TC: That sparks some questions for me about horizontal hostility, where this marginalized group is pitted against another marginalized group. For instance, queers are somehow separated from people of color. I was reading another interview with a writer who is gay, Mexican, and male and he was talking about the queer community’s cold reception to stories by people of color. And I wondered what your experience has been. How have your different communities, which I think there has been an imposed separation on, how have they responded to your work?

SR: It varies. There is definitely a lot of work in both communities that needs to happen to bridge the divide. My professional background, before poetry, I spent a lot of time doing work around HIV/AIDS specifically in the African American community so I constantly was in the battle between homophobia and homophobic ideas and its relationship to the black community and the black community’s health with serious life and death shit around homophobia. You know, we’re the most disproportionately impacted community with HIV/AIDS nationally and then, black people are the most disproportionately impacted group of people around HIV/AIDS in the world. So, how does our unwillingness to deal with homophobia in our community impact community health. So, having those conversations is constantly a challenge. My own dance around my sexual identity and its relationship to my community has been a very tricky and nuanced and difficult one. And a space where I had to deal with my own fear around it. I didn’t come out to my family until last year. I was out in all of my other social circles, my work circles. some of that is my relationship with my family. some of that is not feeling comfortable enough to let them into certain parts of my life. Is it worth the disruption? Is there going to be a disruption? All of the fears that come up around coming out. So that was a dance I had to navigate.

Because I get to exist in this empowered space as a stage artist, I love to use that space to challenge black people around their notions of homophobia. I try to access it from places where I feel like they can get it. How is homophobia personally impacting you? Where is the intersection between homophobia and black people’s existence? which I think doesn’t happen. we don’t create, as our society, a space to recognize another group’s oppression in our own experience. in that reach. and that is exactly how it is supposed to be because if someone always gets to be the bottom rung, then you don’t have to feel like shit about yourself. Right? Because at least you’re not the bottom rung. There are a lot of challenging conversations that I’ve had in the last month around race and the queer community. In the queer community, again, it is an interesting dynamic. Again, doing this tour with Salt Lines with three other queer women, in most of the shows – most of the schools that bring us have queer groups but I’m not in the audience. I’m often THE black person in the audience or one of two or three. Bridging the gap starts in the conversation but the conversation is so challenging without having all of every group’s years of oppression show up to speak first. And all of the defensiveness and hurt and trauma around the issue show up to speak first. So people just pass on having the conversation. I think there is no way to begin to bridge the gap unless we push ourselves to have the conversation - totally uncomfortable and difficult and all of that. It is in the process. My writing about it seems to be in the process phase.

TC: I am so thankful for your work because it does openly raise those questions without saying this is the answer. But you are so vulnerable and you say, these are the questions that we need to be asking.

SR: Because that is what I want. I don’t have any answers but I am so down to have the hard, ugly, difficult conversations. I’ve been having race conversations in the poetry slam community for the last two months. Someone posted a blog that I found really insensitive and culturally elitist and bigoted and I posted a response that kind of created this huge storm of conversation. Lots of stuff came up. And I don’t have any answers.

Particularly around race and sexuality, those are identities that we feel in our bodies first. I feel it cellularly before I am ever able to intellectualize it. Before I am ever able to say “Oh, this clerk is following me around the store b/c I’m a black woman,” my body knows it first. Before I ever can say, “Oh, I’m in danger for holding my girlfriend’s hand in the space,” my body knows it first. So, our bodies show up to the conversation before our minds do. Which makes the conversations really hard to have but I’m willing. I’m willing to work through the process while my mind catches up with my body. And I’m willing to exist in grace and create grace and compassion for other people who are willing to show up for that conversation.

TC: Hmmm. That is so beautiful it kind of catches me off guard. And it makes me think of something Cherrie Moraga said in This Bridge Called My Back. She said, “Sometimes in the face of my own/our own limitations, in the face of such world-wide suffering, I doubt even the significance of books.” But then she goes on to say, “The political writer, then, is the ultimate optimist, believing people are capable of change and using words as one way to try and penetrate the privatism of our lives. A privatism which keeps us back and away from each other, which renders us politically useless.” And it seems like your work uses your personal experience and story to connect to that larger truth, and so it seems like you are, at your core, an optimist. Would you agree with that?

SR: Absolutely, I am at my core an optimist. I absolutely believe in the possibility of human change. For where my mother is at this moment, watching my mother go from horrific crack addiction – selling my Easter dress when I was 10 years old, selling our TV, taking the money my father sent when he was overseas and buying drugs with it when there was just water and baking soda in the refrigerator. And being gone for four days and leaving me home alone. And then seeing who my mother became when she got off drugs. And having my mother restored to me. I can’t help but believe in the possibility of change. I’ve seen it.

I wrote a poem that reminds my father to call me and tell me he loves me unconditionally. I’ve had that conversation with my father for fifteen years and then I write this poem and he remembers to call me. That poem has made people leave my show and call their parents and reconcile the relationship.

Absolutely. I’m totally an optimist. From the top of my head to the painted toenails on my feet. I totally believe in the capacity for humans to change. And we see it all the time. And when we are connected through our stories, the more possible it is to extrapolate it to the larger world. We don’t look for it in our small, microcosms so we can’t see it in our macrocosms. But it exists. But it exists with the correction of those smaller experiences. Each time one person is individually changed, they add to the number of people who create change in the world. So, the more we add to that number and have our own human individual experiences, the more powerful we become to switch that possibility on a world level – on a universal level.

AWP Weekend Round-Up

2010-04-13T15:40:00.000-07:00

A recap of AWP experiences by Kore author Heather Cousins,
author of Something in the Potato Room.

While I was volunteering at the AWP table, Patricia Smith came by. Patricia selected my book for the 2009 Kore Press First Book Award. This was the first time that I have spoken to her in person; it was wonderful to be able to grab her and hug her to thank her for selecting my manuscript. She was sweet and encouraging. I gave her three big hugs. And she smelled like poetry. Just kidding. About smelling like poetry. I'm not sure what poetry smells like. She just smelled nice and warm. I also got to meet Carolyn Forche while volunteering at the table. She came by to autograph copies of broadsheets of one of her poems that Kore produced. She and Patricia and Barbara Cully were all at the table at once, and I was scrambling around looking for a pen for Carolyn to sign broadsheets and hugging Patricia and trying not to knock over the Kore table and feeling like my head was going to explode at the thought of all the amazing women and poetry powers gathered in one small space!

I gave Carolyn a signed copy of my book, telling her, as I handed it over, apologetically, "You don't have to read it." Patricia laughed kindly at me and told me to never say such a thing about my work. She said, "Whoa! Have we got a lot to teach you!" Then she laughed and put a wise hand on my back. Patricia gave me a much-needed jolt of power, strength, and confidence.

I was impressed by the number of people, while working the Kore table, who came by and expressed a love and interest in Kore Press. There were also many women who stopped who were not familiar with Kore and who, when I explained the Press's project of publishing women writers, stood up a little straighter and got a little glimmer in their eye and said something to the effect of: This is so important. Or, there need to be more publisher's--like this--for women's voices. I got into conversations with several women about the failure this year of Publishers Weekly to recognize any works written by women in their list of the "Best Books of 2009." There were also several brief, but important conversations about the marginalization of women's perspectives and women's voices. I found this marginalization of women's spaces, lives, and writing brought up in panels that I hadn't thought would necessarily address , including Thursday's panel with Cate Marvin, Malachi Black, Dean Young, Jerry Harp, and Roger Reeves, "Toward a New Criticism," and in Saturday's panel "Hot/Not: A Panel on Sentiment," with Joy Katz, Sally Ball, Mark Bibbins, Jenny Browne, and Sarah Vap. Vap presented a paper that I thought was particularly eloquent and beautiful. Several writers in this last panel addressed the idea that the sentimental is often, problematically, connected with the lives and emotions of women and children.

I also attended the WILLA Benefit at the Denver Press Club on Friday night, which was a wonderful event in support of women writers. It featured burlesque dancers and roller derby girls, as well as some great poets: Patricia Smith, Kim Addonizio, Dorianne Laux, Cathy Park Hong, Ana Bozicevic, and two of my own friends, who earned PhDs in creative writing from the University of Georgia: Lara Glenum and Danielle Pafunda.

2010-04-09T10:01:00.000-07:00

The Play “Coming in Hot”
by Joanna Frueh

Tenderness is not what I expected from a play based on a book by women soldiers. Yet tenderness is the quality that has most stayed with me from Coming in Hot. The actor Jeanmarie Simpson delivered the work as a monologue that propelled into the audience the individual emotional atmosphere of 14 “characters,” the authors who had served in the United States military .

On a bare, shallow stage the script from which Simpson read sat on a black music stand while next to her the sound artist Vicki Brown, on viola, played her own music, whose ethereal eeriness functioned to paradoxically lift many of the stories from grimness, such as corpses described in detail and a fellow soldier/rapist eluded, and to ground those stories in tonal roots. I heard angelic music. I heard the music of soil, of death, of passions confined, plundered, gushing.

Huge images, including those of women troops, Baghdad street scenes, the solider authors themselves in military gear, and Simpson performing the play in a different space and costumed as a soldier–white T-shirt, dog tag–and tending a coffin, projected to the left of her and Brown. The images held my attention far less than did the performers. I like LIVE. I like its directness and expressiveness. I like being in the presence of human beings breathing, sweating, and creating. With them, I feel my own presence. I liked the simplicity of dress–black, which I read as neutral more than funereal. In black’s neutrality and with my eyes mostly on the performers, their art as well as the crispness of the writing grew far larger than the visually large impact of the projections. With Simpson and Brown, I felt my humanness.

“Coming in hot” is military jargon for arriving with guns blazing. That’s often what heroes do, both real and mythic ones. The weapons of heroes may be lethal to human flesh (Genghis Khan) or loving to the human heart (Buddha). Either way, heroes produce social or cultural change. (I include spiritual change within those 2 categories.) Heroes are unique and special. Everyone is probably not a hero, although people have the capacity to be one. I’m defining “hero” differently from the way that I often hear it used today, as an adjective applied to virtually all soldiers returning from Iraq. In general, people use “hero” loosely.

The artist Barbara Kruger lampoons that looseness as she critiques the convention of the hero, the always-a-guy with public or personal, romantic or professional muscle. In a text-only work from 1983, in which What big muscles you have! in red overlays black text on a white ground, the “feminine” compliment, “Ooh, what big muscles you have!” turns into absurdity and ingratiation as we read line after line composed of “compliments” such as “My lordship,” “My Rambo,” “My baby mogul,” “My sugar daddy,” “My banker,” “My pimp.” Looking over the list, I end up thinking that any male in any role could be on it. The hero reduced to pablum.

The heat with which heroes blaze into us gives them the power to serve as activists in our lives. Artists can be such heroes. No surprise that “My great artist” is in Kruger’s list. The artist as hero is a repeated, though often implicit, theme within art history. The controversial artist or art work–heroes do tend to be controversial–often deals with social problems, frequently reflecting rather than transforming them. In other words, we get reiterations of issues rather than offerings of solution. Some have responded to Coming in Hot as controversial, and on the blog for the play I read, “Controversy is a good thing.” Our culture loves controversy and believes in its capacity to bring fortune, fame, or at least talk to a person, event, or work of art. Activism interests me far more than does controversy, which I see as a distraction, from something that either may or not be significant, both affective and effective. Controversy can become people’s focus, whereas activism needs that focus.

In this activist play we listen to a group of people whose speech about their own experiences and perceptions tends to go without a public hearing. That, to me, is the activism in Coming in Hot–women first. And it’s women first throughout the entire creation and production, from the authors of the book Powder to its editors Lisa Bowden and Shannon Cain to its publication by Kore Press, devoted to works by women and published by Bowden, to the book’s adaptation for performance by Bowden, Cain, and Simpson to the very live art by Simpson and Brown.

Brown’s music was heated, it was freezing too, and its vibrations enwrapped Simpson’s corporeality–her body, her voice. That voice and her demeanor became increasingly tender as the performance progressed. Greater softness, which was a matter of vocal malleability, and greater nuance produced a compassionate humor as well as that tenderness, which I felt at its height near and into the end of the performance. During that time the character whose voice and gruesome yet poetic remembrances recur throughout Coming in Hot calls herself “mother of the dead.” The author of those remembrances prepared and processed the bodies of United States dead in a Mortuary Affairs Unit, which was work for which she volunteered while fulfilling formal duties as a Marine. Mother of the dead–she is the overarching activist in the play: mortuary goddess, a gentle Charon “ferrying” the spirit remains of her comrades wherever it is those remains go, speaking in the utmost gentle caress with the love whose realization, which is an activism unlike any other, can end all wars.

For more information about Coming in Hot go to:

http://www.korepress.org/

http://www.korepress.org/Powderstage.htm

http://cominginhotplay.blogspot.com/

Relics of the Past

2010-03-10T14:14:00.000-08:00

Written By Robin Black

So, it’s Sunday morning and CBS Sunday Morning just did a feature on Susan Boyle. And damned if that number isn’t featured prominently: 47.

Her age. My age.

Middle-age.

I was an unrepentant weeper when she made her debut. I watched the thing oh, I don’t know, maybe thirty times. (Maybe 47 times?) I read all the criticism, that of reality shows in general, of her voice, of the set-up, suspiciously perfect, Simon’s shocked expression a little rehearsed, perhaps? And I agreed with much of it. I pondered the feminist angles – I ponder them still. And then I clicked back over to You-Tube and I wept. Cried my blessed eyes out every damned time. Great big snuffly sobs.

It’s a late-bloomer thing. You wouldn’t understand.

Or maybe you would. It turns out a lot of people do. It turns out, as I’ve learned, that a lot of women do.

A couple of weeks before Susan Boyle took the world by storm I spent a week as the Fellow at the Sirenland Conference, in Positano, Italy. The Fellowship is awarded to an emerging writer who doesn’t yet have a published book. It’s an amazing conference – stunning location, brilliant teaching and serious attendees, many of whom were women more or less my age. By then, my book had been under contract for about six months and I had received both a lot of congratulations and a good many warnings about the impact a first book might (and might not) have on my life. I’d also answered numerous questions from other early-career writers about how it had all happened, how I’d gotten an agent, all that kind of stuff. And I expected more such conversations at Sirenland, which was fine with me. I was delighted to talk about my book.

But what I experienced there was unlike any of that. The women I met, not all but many, were less interested in the the fact that I had sold my first book at the age of 46 than they were overjoyed by it. They didn’t ask me the kinds of questions I had grown accustomed to, not at first. They just beamed at me. They stopped me in hallways to talk about how much my story – a mother home with kids for nearly two decades getting her first book contract at 46 – meant to them. They spoke about hope. They expressed great surprise. More than one woman said the story made her feel like crying. One woman did cry.

I was taken aback, at moments moved close to tears, myself. And I was glad to have made them so glad. Surprised that they seemed so surprised. But mostly, I have to admit, I was upset by what I saw. Their joy, their shock, bespoke such a deficit of hope for themselves. It was clear to me that though they were writing, and working hard at it, many, many of these women shared an underlying assumption that the world wasn’t really interested in what they had to say.

“The editors who liked the book all talked about appreciating what they called the ‘maturity’ of the stories,” I began to add, when I told the story. “It was actually viewed as a positive that the author had some years behind her. That it didn’t read like a book a twenty-something could write.”

More happiness. More shock. More hope.

Just as I had understood that their joy wasn’t exactly about me, Robin Black, getting a book contract, I realized that their hope wasn’t exactly for themselves getting one. It was something more basic, more elemental than that.

I write a lot about women in their sixties and seventies – in my fiction, I mean. I do so because I find older women fascinating – think of all the life they carry! What wealth, as characters, they bring. And think too of what a vastly complicated existence they live, how complex a discrepancy is so often forged between who they understand themselves to be, and how they are viewed by the world. If they are viewed at all, that is. If the combination of their gender and their age has not rendered them, as one friend put it, describing her progress down a street, “eerily transparent.”

“First people stop seeing you as sexual,” she said. “Then they stop seeing you at all.”

It’s a terrifying thought. Not being seen. Not being heard. Truly terrifying. Yet it’s also an everyday kind of fear. For many women, invisibility is an expected, largely unexamined consequence of age. There it was in Italy, that assumption, revealed by the celebratory response to the possibility that it might not be true.

When the whole Susan Boyle story broke, there was phrase often used in its recounting. Written off. Susan Boyle had been written off. By the judges. By the two men who asked her rude questions. By the young girls in the audience who so evidently considered her a joke. How laughable of a woman who offered so little of what we are used to applauding women for to walk on that stage! How presumptuous of her to stand at its center!

Written Off. Maybe it’s because I am a writer that I find the phrase to be such a chilling one. I think of writing as a means of creation, not of disposal. Or maybe it’s just because I’m a woman who is no longer young.

It took my meeting those writers in Positano to understand how deep the fear of being written off runs in so many women as they feel themselves age. It took my own inexplicably emotional response to Susan Boyle’s moment of being heard – of writing herself back on – to understand how deep that same fear had long run in me.

Now what we all need to understand is how to eradicate that fear, how to render it irrelevant, how to write it off as a relic of the past – instead of ourselves.

A Place in the Sun, in Turkey, Malgre Sangre

2010-02-09T18:36:00.000-08:00

Written By Arpine Konyalian Grenier
Reblogged from http://the-otolith.blogspot.com

Arpine Konyalian Grenier is a former scientist, musician and financial analyst, a graduate of the American University of Beirut and the Milton Avery Graduate Center for the Arts, Bard College, New York. Her work has been described as a mosaic of narrative that takes us out of our provincial concentration on American life to encompass broader social and geopolitical issues with a decidedly urban and postmodern sensibility. She has authored three collections of poetry, and has been featured in numerous publications including several anthologies.

I am watching hunger. May 20, 2009, Tucson International Airport. The lady bound for Chicago, for her granddaughter’s graduation, has just finished eating her yoghurt and granola mix. She is not too happy about her trip, not happy she’ll be away from Tucson, likes the slow of Tucson. She does, however, wish me a wonderful trip to Istanbul. “It’s good to close the book and go forward,” she says when I tell her I will also visit the Konya/Aksaray region where my father came from. I wait. There’s still an hour before takeoff. Hal would have been a great distraction now, his German/sailor/soldier mind and ways. We all distract ourselves somehow while we’re waiting, my meditation beads tell me. I’m wearing them. So then, next to this cute little girl of probably seven years old who’s coloring pictures as she waits, so intensely filling inside the lines with blue then orange and, and, I have an urge to suggest she color outside the lines (am glad she has not colored the wings of the angel). “What happens if you color outside the line here?” I ask. She smiles. “I don’t know,” she says, and returns to filling in the color.

Having already noticed how much we’re alike, I now want and need to learn to accept that, to also accept and love the unknown I come from. At Gate 15, Dallas/ Fort Worth Airport, they’re announcing KLM Royal Dutch Airlines’ flight information in French. I’m surrounded by languages I recognize or don’t. Have I been too long away from these sounds and minds? Always a misfit this I and yet this here feels fit/unfit and familiar in its strangeness. So, to be familiar with a strangeness or, to find the strangeness within the familiar, that’s all pulse, isn’t it? Otherwise, life is unbearable. Agency is fluid, remember? Moving (velocity?) allows sight when screens are in the way. “The dogged, organized and slightly boring make better corporate officers than the warm, flexible and empathic types,” says today’s International Herald Tribune on page seven. Oh well. Dallas to Amsterdam will be a nine hour flight.

There is no other city like Venice, and I bet there is no other city like Istanbul either. I was not brought up to consider (regard?) Turkey. I had never looked at her, let alone seen her. Placed as displaced, the only way to have was by not having and the only way to get out was by not getting out, like the main characters in the film, A Place in the Sun. What did they end up with? They had other options. I do too. Forty some years after I voluntarily left Lebanon where I was born, I will be visiting my father’s hometown wherefrom he barely made it alive way before he’d turned school age. In Turkey, I will be experiencing the culture of my ancestry as well as the culture I had run away from. Turkey and Lebanon, both Mediterranean, both left behind. I want to tend and befriend, accede to the full experience of the four noble feelings: glad, sad, bad, mad. So far, I’ve repressed some of them. No more fight, no more flight.

Amsterdam Airport. Several Turkish women with children are already waiting at the entrance to Gate 53. They look at me as if they know me, their eyes like Armenian eyes. I am leaning against baggage cart racks, planning the introduction to my presentation for the 2009 Dink Memorial Workshop sponsored by Sabanci University, Anadolu Kultur and the International Hrant Dink Foundation. Choke. It seems all I want to do is express gratitude for this opportunity, and love. That is and must be enough, I hope. Sabanci is a fairly new and progressive, private university, and I have heard a lot of good things about the workings of Anadolu Kultur. Luckily, boarding and takeoff have been efficient and uneventful. We’re on our way to Istanbul. The flight is serving me well as I’m practicing Turkish with the woman next to me. She and her children are returning to Turkey for the summer. Her husband is a visiting professor at some university in the United States.

We’re almost there. I see Istanbul, that ancient city, said to have been built on seven hills. At the baggage claim area I notice a Sabanci University greeter’s sign with my name on it. We embrace. The greeter is Ezgi (it is a modern Turkish name, she says), beautiful, smart and personable. One of the precious qualities of the Mediterranean region has always been simultaneity — an attitude of togetherness (asabia in Arabic) that harbors elements of pride and respect towards one’s community and society. Even Aristotle has not properly dealt with this matter in his ethics, I am thinking. Then I wonder, were the so called Dark Ages really dark, was the Mediterranean region included in this (Western) assessment? Maybe not. My ruminations are interrupted by the striking beauty around me. The limousine ride along the sky-blue waters is amazing, the terrain reminds me of the coastline of Beirut. “We’re crossing the Freedom Bridge,” says Ezgi, “it was constructed in memory of our 500 years of freedom.” I feel off kilter, wasn’t that 500 years of capture? I suspect she is being whimsical.

Uses of language: to cover/uncover a choice we forget to remember but also to access, a choice for celebration of capture of or freedom from blind spots, not just of the majority but of minorities as well. “Be brave,” they said. Were they? Women with bodies elsewhere denied them, and Kurds. Others too. So much of Constantinople is in Istanbul, I feel, like so much of the Turkish in me. Conjecture, possibility, likelihood. Relief?

Hotel Troya. It is 1:15 AM. I have checked in and settled down. The uniquely embroidered bedcovers flash unlived parts of my life into my head. My grandmother’s house, her kilims and shawl, I am revisiting to reinvent. Too many thoughts and feelings force me out of bed to pen and paper. Couldn’t sleep and wouldn’t. I also have some trust issues here. Will I really receive a wake up call from the front desk at 6:30 AM?

Flash forward. In the end, I will be speaking Turkish fluently, all the Turkish I have heard in my lifetime but, never spoken. The sound of it will feel good, gemütlich. So too will be the four days of the Dink Memorial Workshop at Tutun Deposu (an old tobacco warehouse, now a cultural venue), the space, the presentations, the hospitality, the attendees, all in harmony. The theme is Gender, Ethnicity and the Nation-State: Anatolia and its Neighboring Regions. Opening ceremonies include Kapilari Acmak/Opening the Doors by Kardes Turkuler and the Sayat Nova Choir, then memories and testimonies, presentations on contemporary constructions of Kurdishness and Armenianness, gender, ethnicity, history, ethnicity and violence, Circassian beauty, the Ahiska Turk, the Abkhaz surrender, Hamshen Armenians (who?), art and politics across borders, the xeni, the yabanci, the koylu, the kaba. Sophia, a Greek-American participant from Michigan State University comments about qualifier suffixes in Turkish; like for example with surnames, ‘li’ is for location as in Konyali (from Konya) and ‘ci’ is for occupation as in boyaci, painter (boya is paint). She is adorable. I am living hunger.

That first evening at Karakoy Restaurant, I sit with Rakel Dink (a stately, wise woman, widower of Hrant Dink) and Fethiye Cetin, an attractive and intelligent attorney and author. The mezza, wine, fish and hospitality are talking. Us too, lovely. Here are participants from 15 countries. Following dinner, Osman Kavala from Anadolu Kultur invites everyone for drinks at Cezayir Restaurant. We are discussing yapmak (to make) versus etmek (to do). Nefret etmek (to hate) has been interesting for me because in Turkish, nefret (hate) becomes a verb only with the auxiliary, etmek. For hate, I prefer to use the auxiliary yapmak (actually have a poem titled, nefret yapmak) because I feel hate does not come from natural action, that it takes effort to hate. So, for the verb to hate, ‘making’ hate makes more sense than ‘doing’ hate, I say. Others have different opinions, especially since the expression nefret yapmak does not make sense in Turkish.

Later, some of us are singing Bank Ottoman, the Armenian revolutionary song about bombing the Bank. This is an incredible experience; fifty years ago it would have been unthinkable. Some want to also sing it in front of Bank Ottoman itself but, that would have been stretching it. I must say that over the years, Armenian revolutionary songs have come to reflect much more than the long lost and sadly dated spirit of the Armenian revolutionary. Sung on the occasion of weddings, funerals and other ceremonial functions, they have become the vehicle for expressing passion at large, fanning encumbrance, urgency, rattling history?

It’s almost midnight, the conversation continues. Osman tells us that a few Armenians have been influential in Turkey’s transition from the Ottoman to the Republic. He mentions linguist, Agop Martayan who was given the name Dilacar (language opener) by Ataturk. He and a few others were noteworthy in westernizing the Turkish language. Martayan also codified the Turkish alphabet and edited the Encyclopedia of Greater Turkey. Then there was Edgar Manas, a prominent composer who orchestrated the Turkish national anthem. When Dilacar (Martayan) passed in 1979, the official Turkish news agency chose not to address his Armenian origins. Osman also states that before Ataturk the Ottoman resembled a ‘mother with no arms’ while after him it was hailed as Anavatan (Motherland), that Anadolu means full mother, and that it is Istanbul (‘I go to the city’ from the Greek), not Islambul, Ahtamar (from the Armenian), not Akdamar. All this time we’re getting closer to one another as we continue to float. At some point we are saved by our union, on a raft, over water. A place in the sun, indeed.

The following day of the Workshop I meet more attendees. Some are local, others first generation here. Ayse Gul’s mother is from Eastern Europe, Osman’s father too. My watch battery just stopped, Hermine takes care of it right away. She is local but feels diasporan. Helene, an artist, asks me to participate in her (diasporan) video project. But everyone is diasporan, I say, there but not there, clueless, ortancil (in the middle), and older is not necessarily elder. I want to loosen and undo matter, I also need glue. I am flushed, yet powerful. Everyone is nice here. There are no ‘where are you’ or ‘how am I doing’ types. The women are beautiful, soul is in their eyes. I can easily be seduced by the men anytime, anyhow. The five times a day call (ezan) of the mosque is beautiful. (Early Christians used to pray that often too, then they changed.)

The last evening, we use public transportation to go to the Giritli Café for dinner. It is fun being pressed against one another in the train during rush hour, experiencing the bumpy ride together, holding unto each other, refusing to let go. A gypsy family entertains us at the Giritli. The performance is stunning, the songs and dances full of love and hope and passion. We’re all alike as we’re different. I feel it.

The Workshop is over. The days seem to have swiftly glided by. In the end, we have developed kinship. The locals present us with gifts: Ebru, a magnificent book on the cultural heritage of Turkey, edited by Ayse Gul Altinay, and another splendid volume titled, Armenians in Turkey 100 Years Ago, compiled by Osman Koker. We are also given lokum. That’s Turkish Delight. Later I bought more lokum from Konya for the folks back home, no one liked it so I indulged. It was superbly fresh and delicious. In the end I have questions, concerns:

- Let’s talk a bit first please.

- Did you know some call me anzkam (Armenian for one who has no feelings)?

- Should I send my poem, He rules his own house, to Nichanian?

- Should I tell him about the titles of my manuscripts?

- Verbs in Turkish seem to have the unique quality of distinguishing between what’s observed and what’s rumored. How to make that work for, let’s say, improving the exploration of causalities?

- Can there really be such a thing as ‘usurping mourning’?

- Why didn’t Zabel Yessayan’s writing have her contemporary, Halide Edib’s complexity, why did she decide to be a writer anyway, why didn’t censorship and abandonment have better effects on her writing, how on earth could she write poetry instead of prose in order to conform?

In the end, several journalists interview me. They print what they wish.

Istiklal means independence in Turkish (I know that from the Arabic), and Hotel Troya is in the Beyoglu section of Istanbul, off Istiklal Avenue. The rates are decent and the staff, pleasant. It is owned and operated by an Arab from Antakya. Other Arabs work here as well, like Sami, Murat. They are from Antakya too. They know Kessab, my mother’s birthplace by Antakya, on the Syrian side. When Murat first introduced himself to me, he said, “My name is Murat, a perfectly Turkish name.” A few days later I find out he is an Arab, Sami’s neighbor in Antakya. Their families are still there. “There is no work in Antakya,” they say. Sad commentary. “We cannot get jobs like other Turkish citizens here either.” Another sad commentary. Ah, the archness and brickness of categories!

Next morning I get up late and enjoy a leisurely breakfast, compliments of Hotel Troya. This is no ‘continental breakfast’, it is more like a generous spread of many kinds of cheese, butter, fruit, choice appetizers and egg dishes, cereals, breads, cakes, and beverages. The figs and cumquats sparkle against each other, ready for consumption. The coffee is well roasted and fresh. I am full. My friend Burcu will be here in a few hours. I am waiting in the main lobby, reflecting on the who and what all of the past few days, all of it highly interactive between participants and attendees, truly. The only intolerance has been that of non-communication.

Having already noticed how much we’re alike and different, I now want and need to learn to love that, shifting and turning without undoing myself, without unseeing or dismissing others either. That will help me love myself someday, love and accept the oppression I come from, the oppressive that has released these new days for me (us). In Armenian, azcagan is relative, it comes from azc = nation. Can I make humanity my nation, or is the thought nationalistic still? How does one categorize nationalities? Shall I give up the concept altogether because it is neither integrative nor constitutive? Yet, an ethnic slant provides powerful multi-layers within the larger world.

Perhaps one must focus on connection. The human, impregnated (embarrazzado), embarrassed and humbled by connecting and sharing is addicted to the connect. Face it, I tell myself, the parameters of ‘then’ were different from those of ‘now’. Beware of easy gratification, of ascribing the ‘grotesque’ to an ‘other’. Civilization is no more that brazen foreign woman, that one-toothed monster coming at you. Do not fear cultivation. Go beyond (Armenian novelist) Raffi’s Zahroumar.

I also very strongly remind my self that when I am not mindful of an inner power, I am afraid. Catastrophe often arises from the fear of those in power who are not really in touch with their inner power. That’s failure between two magnets to connect. Where are the waiting points? The question burns and is burning since conclusions have measured in the missing, and explicity (or by omission one) is limiting. Ah, but the unsoundly extended in the interim. Whirling and swirling, we, sediment or vomit (banal, boyuk) from some concoction neither of us has wished to undo so far. We need a backdrop or setting similar to the Higgs’ field with or against which elementary particles acquire definition. That is the physical world’s metaphor for love — a necessity — humanity’s challenge for a future in which we really can have it both ways — union and progress, and then some. There’s movement and fluidity when we’re learning about each other, plowing, bouncing, lingering, stretching, moving on as we grow. No more (vampire) sucking blood or just yearning and longing, more like werewolves, shape shifting organically. Then there’s hope. It is the hope of the witness whose integrity is integral to generating hope, hope to make the river newly. No more plaster for the cracks, no fuss, no silence, no stutters either. No debunking but the exemplary, to rethink what is time what is space between two magnets. Coherent decoherence. Catastrophic laughter then? Parity is not conserved but passed on otherly then, ebru created colors and shapes allow the passage. Silk.

Ipek is silk. I remember actor/director Caspar Ipekian’s National Theater Group in Beirut. One season it produced Levon Shant’s Heen Asdvadzner (Ancient Gods). I was a young little girl then. Zinc and titanium enhance the toughness of silk now. The gods are at it again, oriental as ever. Untergehen. En face de _

Such was Saturday night’s candlelight poetry reading at Tutun Deposu with Karakasli who writes in Turkish, and me. Later she said, “I will always remember you touched me, you smiled and sang, ben Konyali sen Karakasli/nerden nere nerden nere. You did trust me, Arpine, you opened up your heart and all the love and spirit of Istanbul poured in, it was an unforgettable time, you were generous.” I reciprocate and “because we are strong inside,” I add. Bursar maybe. Some cannot win, having lost sensitivity towards the dipole, a dipole moment is missing.

The concierge informs me Burcu is here. Burcu is Turkish, educated in the United States. She has been kind enough to be showing me a bit of Istanbul during the next few days. Ah Istanbul, the yoghurt seller’s bells, the shoeshine boy, roasted chestnut vendors everywhere. The City is trying to remember itself in order to move forward. The sherbet vendors of the Ottoman are still around in tourist areas. There are dogs (and cats) everywhere, they are called street dogs, not stray dogs; they carry tags. Past Bogaz Turu, the Tunel, over the Bosphorus Canal, it is Dolmabahce, Besiktas, Ciragan, then the first bridge, Ortakoy, Rumeli Hisari, Yali, then the second bridge which is newer. The boat ride is breathtaking. Now the Asian side: Kanlica, Sahil Yolu (sahil = coast), Yenikoy (here’s the summer presidential palace), Sariyer (with characteristic onion shaped domes), Rumeli Kavagi, Anadolu Kavagi. We’re on land again, climbing up to the ruins. There are many who do the same. Then it’s lunch with cherries and kemalpasa (after Kemal Ataturk) at the Yoros Café. The view from this elevation is spectacular. Yesterday I tasted sekerpare. These are scrumptious desserts. What I taste, hear and see has been cementing what otherwise would not have surfaced, as most of experience does not tip or announce the death anthem, as we all want to be coming from somewhere. Be wary of narration, do not give into it, I tell myself. Rest assured. If read to one reads, if looked up to one looks up, from love or fear. The Turkish writer Namik Kemal said, “In the end, regret is useless”. Choose.

I tell Burcu about Biz Miyassine (We Together), a Turkish and Armenian organization based in France. Who shouts loudest. Connection is a basic need, humbling and addictive yes, but there is beauty in the connect. We are after that beauty. It provides reflection, harmony, tells us how to travel in space, in life. Laws of the Universe help me understand that more than one object can occupy the same space and more than one space can be occupied by a single object. I am learning the lesson of refugees, remembering the ‘wild elephants’ below, remembering also the sadirvans (fountains) for ablution. Insight alone is not enough. I need to be where things are simultaneously horizontal and vertical as well.

We walk from Misir Carsisi (Spice Bazaar) to Galata Tower, to the Hyppodrome. Then we ride the local bus to Haghia Sophia where it is not about de formation or re formation but castration/cover up. Maiming? Granted that has come about much earlier than similar silencings, there are staggering reverberations everywhere. That’s ancient history, says Burcu. I revert to the now. How about health education, how well has it developed in Turkey, I ask, as I see too many overweight people. Food is of utmost importance here, of course. We’re in the Mediterranean where emotional connects are mostly set up through food and music. Those are addictive too. OK. What to do with Turkey, what will Turkey do, what Turkey does malgre sangre.

Question: is what one does with the past the future?

We’re at Yerebatan Sarnici, the underground cistern by Haghia Sophia. School children are crossing the street. They are on a field trip. I hear the teacher’s excited voice, “Isn’t this fun, we are going mahajir” (that’s exile, aksor in Armenian). I am bemused. Other, less fortunate children are selling pocket size Kleenex type tissues, one TL each. They are convincing. Later we visit the Blue Mosque, then the Islamic Art Museum. There, I see a most beautifully lettered Tugra (declaration of order). Call to order regarding an issue, any some issue. I need a tugra for love. I tell Burcu I would like it in Kufic (the alphabet used in this region many years ago, before Arabic). She appreciates my hopes and wishes. Next, the Grand Bazaar and Beyazit Square where pigeons, handicraft booths, and stately trees and libraries create a memorable atmosphere along the street. Here’s also Istanbul University, its palatial (Ottoman) Ministry of War chambers house the University’s rectorate now. The static pays the price, definitely, remains residue, its heap of hells alternately capsize and swell. What good is veracity then, its pace cumulates anguish and abandon.

Knock knock, who’s there, open the door, what door, ah yes, say it anyway, anyway lightly. Here are some Turk and Armenian issues: borders, ghosts, mute or loud and raspy. Whispers, no stutters. The following morning Burcu and I light candles and pray at the Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Church. Another Turk is praying there too, he says he prefers the church to mosques.

Topkapi Palace is next. Heavily armed soldiers mar the entrance to what may be considered one of the marvels of the world. The setting, the grounds, the intricate mosaics and jewelry are aesthetic masterpieces. It is interesting that the harem is by the old Council Chambers, also interesting that five starred designs (engravings) are after the sixth, eight starred after the ninth. I notice them again and again. It is all a matter of dignity even though dignity must step outside itself, reckon erg, love being, loved. This is my last day in Istanbul. In the afternoon we visit the Kariye Church, the Old City Walls and the Suleymaniye Complex. The latter is being renovated. Later for dinner, we have kazandibi, a creamy dessert made from chicken meat, and kunefe with warm cheese. I hug and thank Burcu. We will stay in touch. Tomorrow, Konya.

The Turkish Airlines flight to Konya has been a pleasure: the clean and friendly atmosphere on board, that delicious sandwich, the cabin music, a captivating rendition of Eastern and Western sound. Kadir, a Konya University volunteer student greets me at the airport. Kadir means capable, he tells me. It comes from Arabic, I tell him. He is charming. In Konya, the ezan is amazingly well articulated both in musicality and words. Ney is the Sufi flute and neyzen is its player, and ‘Oh Mevlevi Presence’ is inscribed in Ottoman Turkish (with Arabic letters) above the entrance to the Mevlana Museum, Mevlana Turbesi (Rumi’s tomb) prostrate while his father’s upright, in his honor. Turbe is tomb. Kadir tells me Rumi’s philosophy and followers are called Mevleni, and his teachings, Mesnevi. There is a beautiful seccade (carpet) I want to take home with me. It is really beautiful. Mevlana was also called Rumi and Celalettin. The region was first Seljuk then Ottoman. So are my roots, I tell myself. I am also Armenian from Beirut, Kessab and Pasadena. Puzzling, baffling, but maybe not. We lunch at a local restaurant that only serves tirit, a local dish - spicy bread assortment smothered in some yoghurt sauce, delicious strips of meat on top. Later, we taste etli ekmek (meaty bread) which is another local dish. The restaurant owner calls me hemseri (relative), is offended when I offer a tip. When the ezan starts, the owner and servers are less social, more reverent. We also indulge in pistachio ice cream and dondurmali baklava at Mado, which stands for Marash Dondurmasi (dondurma is ice cream). Soon Mado will be available in the United States and Russia.

We then visit the blue mosaic studded Karatay (young horse) Museum which used to be a Seljuk madrasa (school), then the remains of the Seljuk Palace. An aesthetically pleasing structure has been constructed around the columns in front; it looks more recent. I notice that hardly anyone visits Tebrizli Semsettin Turbesi (tomb of Semsettin of Tebriz). It stands by itself, a serene and sacred place emanating love and compassion. Semsettin was Rumi’s ‘Other’. Kadir tells me his views about the passion to reason dilemma of human kind. I am surprised as he is only twenty years old. Now we’re at the Alaeddin Keykubat Mosque and Alaeddin Tepesi (hill) where one finds the largest man-made junction of roads in the world, I am told. This is Selcuklu Beledyesi, the doubly fundamental thrives here, the Anatole and the Seljuk. For me there has been a third, the Protestant.

In Konya, I stay at Ogretmen Evi, the hostel for teachers. At the entrance, a quote from Ataturk reads, ‘Muallimler yeni nesil sizin eseriniz olacaktir’. These are wise words to teachers. After checking in, we take the dolmus which is a city minibus, the word means full. It is always full. We pass by Sarraflar Carsisi, the exchange market. They exchange money and gold and all things precious at this glittery complex. Over the bridge, yet another quote, ‘Ya oldugun gibi gorun, ya da gorundugun gibi ol’ (either look as you are or be as you look), then a billboard, ‘Hayatinizi Tatlandirin’, sweeten your lives, it says. My Turkish is smoother now. The sound makes me feel more like who I am. The ezan reminds me of Beirut. I love its daily and repetitive melodic gyrations.

We pass by Konya Lisesi, a 100 year old school. Then, along a crowded street I notice an old, run down building that looks like an Armenian Church, Armenian or Greek or other? It is closed, is always closed, says Kadir. There is a sign in Turkish in front of it, ‘for bicycles only’. Kadir is girisikli (resourceful, entrepreneurial). He reassures me he will find out about the Church. The following day, however, he disappointedly informs me he has located no information at all. The building is an architectural beauty, I am surprised he does not already know about it as he is a local.

For breakfast we have pohaca and simit at a food stand. The old man at the stand asks, “Are you speaking English with the lady?” Kadir says, yes. The man is happy a Turkish young man is speaking English. Dunya Kenti Konya, reads the sign over an underpass. Konya, World City. Fake tulips will do in Konya but, they must be red and in the center of town, just like statues of Ataturk, focal, with message, vocal and local, never the lesser. I hope to return to Konya during the Selcuk University Spring Festival (Bahar Senligi), next. People are reverent here.

On the dolmus again, we’re looking into City of Aksaray travel at two different transportation agencies: Tokat Yildizi and Kontur Ozkaymak. Kadir is originally from Tokat so we choose Tokat Yildizi. The line is Aksaray to Nevsehir to Kayseri to Sivas. Aksaray is two hours from here. On the bus, I am glancing at the landscape but also taking it in. First, we pass by suburban Kule Site (tower city), a cluster of towering commercial and residential buildings, then the region turns ova (plain and wide planes), genis duzluk. Lavender and yellow wildflowers and occasional herds of sheep line the asphalt. The bus attendant is serving complimentary juice and cake. He is gracious. Kadir reminds me of Rumi’s three words — hamdim, pistim, yandim — I’m created (graced?), weathered (seasoned?), consumed (finished off?). I want to remind myself of the cycle of these words everyday of my life. The driver is playing what is called Arabesk music. It is sad and mostly heard by the working class. Then there is Turku which is Turkish folk ballads. Sarki means song, politicians’ affairs often are karanlik isler (dark business, under the table affairs?), dogum guni is birthday, and yumusak is soft. Kadir is telling me all this. (By the way, he is the only person I met in Turkey who has asked me about the Armenian Genocide, and he did use the term, genocide. I told him about April 24th, the Armenian Genocide commemoration day, also that April is Abril in Armenian, and it means 'to live'.)

More exchange on the bus. Kadir tells me Yeva is Havva in Turkish when I tell him Hawa = wind = love in Arabic. My, my, how all inclusive that is. Alan is space, liman is port, hava limani is airport and deniz limani is harbor. Evle is married because ev is home, and being married, one has a home (as if). We chuckle. Akraba is relative, devlet is state as in Plato’s Devlet or Amerika Birlesik Devletleri (USA). “I know bilezik is bracelet, it must come from the idea of being united then, huh, interesting,” I say. We continue, animated as always. I tell him about my poetry manuscripts and about poetry and art in the United States. He tells me about the three main political parties in Turkey. The Secular Party (CHP) is an older and democratric party, they love Ataturk. The Religious Conservatives (AKP) support capitalism, they do not care for Ataturk. Then there is the Nationalists (MHP) who disapprove of capitalism. Himself voted for the Liberal Democrat Party, it is a small party, he says. He then tells me about Gazi (veteran) Antep, Kahraman (heroic) Maras and Sanli (glorious) Urfa. The adjectives were bestowed on these cities for their valor during the 20th Century.

We’re in Aksaray now. It is much smaller than Konya. I am being noticed as an Out of Towner right away because not very many people visit here. We shall spend one full day here. First, we stop by the 12th Century Egri (bent) Minaret, then the Ulucami. Ulu means exalted. I see the sign for a hasta hana and remember the words (hospital, house of patients). There are numerous pasta hanas here as well, pastry shops. For lunch we have karniyarik, incir tatlisi and sarma tatlisi. The eggplant dish and desserts are other worldly. Kadir teaches me to say ‘yarasin’. That is said in response to someone expressing gratification after a good meal, but more so after having had a good drink of alcohol, sort of like a post bon appetit, excusing/allowing for the intake of alcohol perhaps. It is colloquial. I am calling him Sanli Kadir now. We are unable to visit the churches and caves at nearby Ihlara Vadisi because of time constraints. Next time. For now, I’m happy simply walking the streets, having small talk with the locals, touching merchandise here and there.

On the way back to Konya, we see a leylek (stork) at the Aksaray Autobus Station. It is aracil in Armenian. I remember the song, Pari Aracil. The bird brings good news, they say. Softer, lighter against the snow covered peaks of Hasan Dagi, it looks like hope itself. Softer and lighter is safer. Method, tell me more. When I feel, hearing and seeing are superfluous.

We’re having complimentary juice and cake again as the bus crosses the genis duzluk one more time. Kadir is proud to be from Tokat, the region is famous for scarves (yazmalar). Besides Istanbul, Ankara and Konya, the major cities of Turkey are Izmir, Adana, Bursa, Antalya, Diarbekir, Erzurum and Samsun, he tells me. In Gazi Antep, they have 40 variations for making kebab, kelime is word (like in Arabic), seyyar satici is person selling on the streets, nefes is breath while nefis is self. 20th Century Turkish poets, Cahit Sitki Taranci, Necip Fazil Kisakurek and Atilla Ilhan are worth reading, he says. I will do so when I return home. I tell him a bit about my obsession with the neutral non-zero of Higgs’ field. He is fascinated. Now we are testing ourselves as to which Turk in the bus is really Armenian. He says he knows them by their broad shoulders and noses. I say, I know them from their eyes, they look needy as in muhtac insanlar. He we are needy too, hungry. My visit has been icli (hearty) and tatli (sweet). Kadir has been a reflection of what Turkey is slowly becoming these days, the best of the East and the West. Tomorrow I return to Istanbul, then Tucson.

On the way to Istanbul Ataturk Airport, I tell the taxi driver about my bagimlilik regarding Istanbul, my sohbet in Istanbul. He tells me I am hayat dolu (filled with life). I think I am umit dolu (filled with hope). Next time in Turkey, I will also go to Eastern Anatolia, Van and Kars, to Ahtamar and Ani Harabeleri (the ruins, remains of the ancient Armenian City of Ani, of 1000 churches). At the dry point one experiences stance, direction. The origin of excess may have come from the push to eliminate pulse, stance, direction. Kadir has been saying, “Sora, sora, Bagdat bulunur”. It is a proverb. Ask and ask, Bagdad will be found. Question: is what one does with the past, the future? How do I answer? What do I do with remains?

Many years ago I was given a bandaged doll for Christmas. What could I do with it, what can a five year old do with or for the bandaged, bandaged from long, long ago. And yet, all parts of a simulacrum breathe, in time, in space. Those farther away survive as much or as well as those, closer. I am Hye Gin (Armenian Woman). Gin, from gyne. I remember that agency is fluid, and that the functionality of identities is identity too, a gate that can slam shut or open. I’ll go through it not knowing what’s on the other side. Who is to say when which creates, what. The only what I know is the gill I breathe from.

No one is gone or left behind, nothing either. A so called level of mileage between us throttles. It is time to toot the horn. A hard and soft non-existence is running, parsing and bending away from categories. I am culturally un-locatable, and my task is to avoid excess, that’s all. I’ll use myself, manipulating the essentials and how they work at large. I’ll use, instead of express myself, unfolding within a creating, invisible and unaccountable, yet on the grid, abandoning self, not because I cannot be documented but because of gratitude, hope and love. There is no product where love is, but a fullness pushing forward, pushing beyond catastrophe or misuse or the good and the bad. I, visible practice, underpinned by an invisible, conflated and conflagrated for a behemoth size aspiration, an associative moral headed whereabouts, ailing, wailing, failing, longing for many worlds while nurturing the longing. The Turkish poet, Taranci, said, “I want a country … let there be an end to brothers’ quarrels … I want a country … let living be like loving from the heart.”

Question: when a concept or person is unpopular, what happens to the policies surrounding it? Toughen or relax or revise the genetically biased tune or tone, incentives all around, resurgent, hand to hand, interventionist mode driven. I am returning home. On the airplane, the couple next to me has a small child, Noah. They are flushing him with love. Grace is not required but necessary. Hal has been saying he has a lot of love to give, is looking for someone to give it to. That is normal and customary. I now remember I flew KLM Royal Dutch Airlines first time when I left home for the USA, to find myself, I had said, to claim my self. Now I say I have a place in the sun, glowing, without being on fire. Ben kendimi gelistim in Turkey. I developed, moving from unknowingly being Armenian Turkishly to knowingly becoming American, Armenianly.

Agony, Ecstasy, and Creation

2010-01-19T20:27:00.000-08:00

"Bailey Doogan's work has inspired me for many years. As I found myself turning 50, and coming to terms with the effects of aging on my mind and body, her work that illuminates the female experience, the experience of depression and loss, I wanted to have a sit-down dialogue with her." -- Jeanmarie Simpson

JS: The newest works that you’re showing are a series of self-portraits. Do you call them paintings?

BD: I call the paintings “paintings”; I call the drawings “drawings.” The black and white works are drawings. Many people call them paintings, I think, because they’re big, they’re substantial, they’re heavily worked — many think of drawing as work that is small, often done quickly, often more linear – a study for painting, sculpture, something more substantial. Drawing is all of the above, more or less.

JS: Who calls these paintings?

BD: I’ve had everyone call them paintings: artists, gallery people, regular people. The large drawings are done reductively. I guess my process is like a painting process because I take a large piece of 100% rag paper, a heavy paper. I cover the front with about four coats of gesso and apply one coat on the back for a counter-tension, which is what you would do if you were preparing a canvas. Then I cover the front surface with charcoal. Often I’ll step on it, spray water on it, sometimes even roll on it, activate the surface because I like to kind of create a world that the figure is going to live in. Then I draw reductively. First I draw the form in roughly. After that, the work is done with sandpaper pulling the white out of the dark.

JS: What I think is really interesting about this new series is I can look at the paintings and I can look at the drawings, and I can’t tell the difference. It doesn’t read immediately that they’re black and white and this is color. It’s only that you’re mentioning this now, that some are paintings and some are drawings. I think it’s the detail and the texture that strikes you. I can’t even imagine seeing all these works together in a gallery. Will they be?

BD: This series of paintings and drawings of my hand manipulating my face was at Etherton Gallery, my gallery and the only venue where the paintings and drawings were seen together — two drawings and five paintings. Before the Etherton show, there was a group exhibition in North Carolina that included the two large drawings, and an exhibit in Baltimore with the same two large drawings. The woman who organized and curated the Baltimore exhibit, Joan Weber, purchased both large drawings. Currently, both of the drawings are at the Tempe Arts Center on loan from Joan Weber. I’m now working on two new large drawings. I’m excited about them. There’s a point when I’m working on the drawing at the very beginning that is wonderful, ecstatic — everything is just flowing and it’s all coming together, and then it’s struggle, struggle, struggle, and then maybe another epiphany, but then struggle, struggle, struggle, and then some point where I know what I’m doing and it’s all just ecstatic. I’m obviously a two-dimensional gal, but it feels like I’m crawling over the surface of the form, and it feels like I’m modeling — there’s a kind of energy, the marks that define the face or the body.

JS: I can see how it would quickly feel like a sculpture because of the dimension of it. Your work is so dimensional. The painters you are compared with — the ones who are likened to you and you to them — Lucien Freud and Alice Neel and Francis Bacon…

BD: I admire all of them. I especially like Freud. He just piles it on. With him, there is something about depicting physicality that I relate to. I think he just keeps putting the paint on until it feels right.

JS: Do you do that?

BD: I do in painting, and drawing too. Some areas are heavily worked, especially with painting — thickness builds up. Many view this as a technique. I have trouble with the word technique. I guess it’s part of the process. I’m just putting it on until it feels right, but what happens is it becomes very physical.

JS: And the character. People call it character. It’s like an old person in the theater — they say they have character in their face, and all that means is lines. They have imperfections or whatever. How often do you really see a little perfect young face with character? The character has to be a lot more demonstrated on the part of a younger person where it’s apparent in elders.

BD: Well, that term laugh-lines literally does mean that you have lines from laughing or lines from frowning, and of course a lot of it is from gravity.

JS: I think this is so fascinating, the way you described your process, the feelings of your process, because I felt like you were describing my process, which is interesting because, with painters, it’s often so difficult for me to relate and I just can’t, whether it’s an original work of mine or a work that’s collaborative work, or I’m taking on Lady Macbeth. It starts out with this ecstasy of the material, which is so beautiful, and then you hit this wall and think, “What am I doing? I suck at this. I was wrong. I never should have taken on this project,” and then I go in and talk to the other people in the process and they say, “You’re out of your mind. Let’s just keep moving.”

BD: The agony or ecstasy!

JS: I don’t know how artists can not be like that. I don’t understand Bacon when he says he doesn’t feel anything when he paints. I don’t even believe him. When I look at your work — all of your work is beautiful — but I have to say the last 20 years of your work that’s really dealing with the aging body and the female form, and the agony and the beauty of character and the exposed beauty, the nude aging human, is to me like watching a magnificent opera or a symphony.

BD: Thank you. That makes me feel good to hear that.

JS: It’s dimensional, and not to, in any way, diminish Francis Bacon’s work or Alice Neel’s, but I don’t get that richness from them that I get from your work.

BD: Often we know artists’ work from reproductions, and some work reproduces better than others. Freud’s work is very physical. I have to tell you a Freud joke. I obviously love Freud’s work. I had some people at my studio…I don’t know when this was — maybe six or seven years ago. They were being effusive, very complementary — of course, that always feels good. They really liked that work, and at one point, one of the visitors made a comparison to Freud and said, “But your work is so much better because yours is so alive; I can feel the blood and the juices — it’s pulsing. In Freud’s work all the people look dead.” I said, “They’re not dead, they’re just British.” [Laughs]

JS: Exactly. That’s what it is.

BD: There’s a certain kind of light in London. It’s a beautiful light, almost watery — a limited, grayed-down value range.

JS: I really do think that your work does reflect that Catholic…

BD: Oh yeah, the Catholic stuff is there.

JS: I mean, our relationship — as women raised Catholic — to the Vatican, to the Sistine Chapel, to Da Vinci, to all of that magnificent idyllic…

BD: One thing about Catholicism, vis a vis body, is the corporeal, that Christ came down to Earth, and he suffered and died and all of that. Transubstantiation — that the word of God was made flesh, so it is all about flesh. The body is mortal but luminous, not just a receiver of light but a giver of light. I’m no longer a practicing Catholic, but I have all that culture. I’ve always liked the term “Practicing Catholic” — if you practice long enough, will you eventually get it right? I had a show at University of Texas at El Paso of many of the big paintings. Often when I have exhibitions, many people are outraged, shocked; some people love the work, but often not. The director at UTEP said they had more people come to that exhibition, and people kept coming back. Mexico is right there, and UTEP has the largest Mexican-American student population of any university in the country. They got it. It was what they saw growing up.

JS: And you really turn it on its head. That’s what is so beautiful about it — your Ex Cathedra piece, which they used on the front of your retrospective catalog…

BD: I selected it. I wanted to show the entire painting, but that was nixed. Ex Cathedra is a painting of a woman floating in a chair-like position. Ex Cathedra means “from the chair” in Latin. When the pope speaks infallibly on issues of dogma, he speaks Ex-Cathedra from his chair of authority. Cathedral comes from the same root.

JS: She looks as if she’s in agony.

BD: People have told that me she looked tortured. I thought she looked like she was in ecstasy.

JS: That’s a really good point. Ecstasy definitely looks painful sometimes.

BD: Things are ambiguous. The other thing I realized about my work is how often mouths are open. And again, that was nothing I ever consciously thought about. When models posed for me, I would say, now look this way and open your mouth. I’m getting to the point where I can’t give a reason for why I do something. What did I really intend? Who knows? I think it was something about trying to speak or speaking, but it just may be about being open. I don’t know. We have orifices. [Laugh]

JS: I think that a lot now too, and I wonder if that is an age thing, just to come to terms with that and become so comfortable with it — what goes in comes out. I don’t know what it is, but it’s wonderful to just be free about that stuff, having been raised Catholic — that the body is something icky and yucky. You got to this happier, more buoyant place with these newest portraits, these self-portraits.

BD: Yeah, I went through a hard time for almost three years. Even when you first interviewed me, it was still too close, I couldn’t talk about it. I think I worked so hard for the retrospective. I probably completely wore myself out. A physical and mental collapse is what I think happened. I had never been sick before in my life — always just been chugging along, able to do everything, and all of a sudden, everything came to a halt. One of the things that happens for most people when they’re depressed, and it certainly happened for me, is withdrawal. Not a good thing. I remember one day, I was already beginning to feel better but didn’t realize it. I went into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, made a face, and laughed, which was something because I had lost my sense of humor — the worst thing that can happen to you. Depressed people are often a pretty humorless lot. I was steeling myself to go out and I thought, “Okay, so I’ll smile. I’ll look interested.” And then it became a game, and I started using my hands to push my face around. I loved the smiles and grins. Who doesn’t? I talked to friends about the difference between a smile and a grin. What does a smile mean? What does a grin mean? So I started pushing my face around, and of course, as you get older, your face is more elastic. There is more stuff to grab. I was actually able to reach one arm over my head, stretch it to the opposite side of my face. In that position, I was able to stick a finger in my mouth and stretch it into a grin. I especially liked the idea of combining my hand and my face.

JS: So then you started doing these new paintings and drawings…

BD: I get very obsessive; I would make the gestures and then write a description of what I had done: left arm goes over and grabs, neck is in this position, finger comes up from chest to chin… I wrote it all down. I knew I wanted to have a photographer take head shots of me in those positions.

JS: That process of just going through the motions — of making your face, putting on a face, going through the gestures — was part of bringing you out of your depression?

BD: I think so. They say if you just keep smiling, you’ll feel better.

JS: Yes, I’ve found that to be true.

BD: Like everything else, if you pull or push on one area, you affect another. Moving your nose around will change your eyes, etc. The painting where I’m pushing my chin up makes me look thoughtful.

JS: If you’re in an accident or get a scar or something, what that does and how people react to you because of it — it’s fascinating.

BD: People love the images where I’m smiling or look perky. Many people had difficulty with Five-Fingered Grin because it was too much of a grimace.

JS: There you go again!

BD: I never know, but I’m not exactly naïve.

JS: We share that. People always like the cute little fun characters I play. I just have to admit, for me, the characters who are on the brink of cutting their own throats are the most interesting, the ones I relate to for whatever reason. But I have a history of depression too, and I think for those of us who have been there, I think we’re as sick as our secrets. The more we turn it over and put it out there, the more we get people to look at it, the more comfortable we are with it, the less scary it is and the more we can examine what happened to us. I don’t like bouncing around with the happy-bubbles all the time. That feels like denial to me.

BD: Also, I think depression causes great discomfort in other people because, first of all, you’re not a barrel of laughs… I mean, I don’t think I was. And then people who love you don’t want to see you suffering. I have great sympathy for the people who had to put up with me during this time because, in a way, we were both mourning the loss of the person that we knew.

JS: And there’s really no going back, is there? Once you’ve been through it, you’ll never be who you were again. You may not be depressed anymore, but you’ve been deeply changed by it. One thing I have recently felt fascinated by, as an actor, and you can do this as a visual artist and I would love to be able to do it, but the expression in the eyes of someone deeply disturbed — an Alzheimer’s patient or someone with dementia — that innocent, whatever-that-is in the eyes; I desperately want to capture that, and so far I can’t. I haven’t been able to figure out how to do it. I’m looking and trying.

BD: I don’t know if I’ve ever been able to put that into my work.

JS: Have you tried?

BD: I don’t think I’ve tried because that was never in any…

JS: I’m sure you could. What would it be like for you to paint one of them?

BD: It would be pretty extraordinary.

JS: I’m interested — and this is just happening as we’re talking — do you think you’d feel like you’re betraying them?

BD: I wonder if I would feel that way. It’s interesting, I was listening to an interview with the director of that new film, Precious. The main character is a young, very overweight black woman who has been abused, is not very educated and ostensibly doesn’t have a lot going for her…except that she’s an exceptional person. The director said that before he found the woman who did play that part, he went around the country and auditioned a lot of young women. They were young, from poor backgrounds, abused, overweight. Finally it hit him, and he said, “I can’t do this to them. I feel like I’d be exploiting them.” I understood that.

JS: In Gilbert Grape, it’s so touching, and that incredibly beautiful and 500-pound woman… Johnny Depp, who played her son and had to say some really demeaning lines, turned to her and said, “I really hate saying these things to you,” and she just said, “It’s okay. It’s a good job.” She really wasn’t an actor before that, but the exposure gave her a whole new lease on life.

BD: You could take the position that you are exploiting a person, but you could also see it as honoring who that person is.

JS: I come back to your work again and again. I cannot look at one of your paintings without… I can’t glance at your work. I can’t. Your work is so rich and I say dimensional, but that’s not what I mean.

BD: I’ll take dimensional.

JS: It’s dimensional in the sense that you really feel like it’s three-dimensional, like you can touch it. It jumps out from the page. It doesn’t seem two-dimensional. It’s got so many layers of meaning, content. So much going on that it’s like revisiting a Shakespeare script as an artist. I’ve doneMidsummer Night’s Dream 17 times, and every time I’ve done it, I’ve learned something huge about it. I’ve approached each production uniquely because I’ve been in a different place each time.

BD: That’s a wonderful play. It’s funny and romantic and complex.

JS: And it always reveals itself in new ways, and your work does that too. I can’t glance at it because it grabs me and forces me to think about… Not think…I don’t want people to think, I just want them to experience. And that’s what happens to me with your work — the impact of the experience. Opening up your retrospective, I had a catharsis about my own work.

BD: That’s wonderful.

JS: If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, would you feel that you had to do something work-wise? Like, I have to do this. I have to stay up all night?

BD: I’d feel like I had to finish the two drawings I’m working on. It’s funny — this summer, I saw a friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in 20 years, Toni. She has two grandchildren, about 18 months old, who she adores. She said, “I’d love it if you would do portraits of them.” I thought, oh God, no. And then I went over to her daughter Koren’s house — her daughter lives next door. They all live on the Chesapeake Bay. It was a moonlit night and the light was beautiful. The two twin girls were luminous. One a little devilish and the other sweet and pleasing looking, so they’re very different and both so alive, constantly in motion. For the entire time, one of them, Josephine and Catherine — I think it was Josephine — was sticking her hand in her ear, in her mouth, pulling her hair out, gesturing. There was electricity between them — both 18 months old. I thought, you know, I could do this.

JS: I think if you wanted, you could dance your way to the moon. Thank you, Peggy Bailey Doogan.

2009-12-09T11:03:00.000-08:00

Masha Hamilton is the author of four critically acclaimed novels, most recently 31 Hours, released in September. She is the founder of the Camel Book Drive and the Afghan Women's Writing Project.

Shannon Cain: What inspired you to launch the AWWP?

Masha Hamilton: I returned to Afghanistan about a year ago, last November. On this trip, I found a greater pessimism among the women than during my previous visit in 2004. My own travel was severely limited due to security considerations, and the women I interviewed often spoke about how quickly the Taliban had taken over in the '90s, how quickly they were not allowed outside except in a burqa and accompanied by a male relative, how quickly they were denied access to schools. How quickly their worlds shrunk. There was fear that this could happen again. Although "moderate Taliban" may be a meaningful term in terms of negotiations with the Karzai government, it seems less meaningful in terms of women's rights. So there is definitely concern among Afghan women as the Karzai government moves toward incorporating the Taliban in some fashion.

SC: How did you organize the project and get it started?

MH: I had long considered teaching an online class to Afghan women writers; I decided to launch the class a few months after my November visit. But enthusiasm among the Afghan writers was palpable, and I rapidly understood the demand would outstrip my ability to meet it. That's when I began reaching out to American novelists, short-story writers, poets, memoirists, etc., who also teach, many of them my friends, and asking them to volunteer on a rotating basis.

SC: What are some of the barriers/risks these writers are overcoming in order to have their voices heard?

MH: Sometimes these women are overcoming major risks just to participate in the project. In several cases, their families do not know they are participating, and would not be happy. Virtually everything on the blog goes through some revision process, so exchanges back and forth between the student and her teacher are critical. Yet many have difficulties getting us the work: going into an Internet cafe is not possible for a woman alone, and a woman who goes in with a male relative makes herself the center of unwelcome, and sometimes threatening, attention.

SC: How has working with these writers changed your teachers’ perception of Afghan women? And your own?

MH: If you take a look at the newsletter, you will see the section called "A Word From Our Teachers." Often, they comment about how much more they understand about Afghan women at this point, and that they have been both educated and moved by working with the writers in ways they hadn't anticipated. This is definitely a two-way street and women at both ends of the project are benefiting. My own perceptions of Afghan women were formed by my previous trips, when I interviewed women in prison in Kabul and Kandahar, child brides, matriarchs of opium-growing families, war widows. I grew to appreciate the grace with which many handled enormous hardships.

SC: What are some of the stumbling blocks you’ve encountered along the way?

MH: The only stumbling block – which is also a strength – is that the teachers are here and the Afghan writers are there. We've largely overcome that with the help of a couple of awesome and amazing liaisons in Afghanistan. We also have a volunteer blogmaster in California and a volunteer technical director in Indiana who set up our secure online classrooms. This project has helped connect people in unusual ways -- I've heard from those who've read the blog and those who've heard about the project, and through this, I've been able to take part in some inspiring conversations. My hope for the coming year is that the blog readership will continue to grow because I think this is a unique and valuable project.

SC: Here at Kore Press we believe in the power of literature as a means toward social justice. Do you see the project contributing somehow to an improved standard of living for women in Afghanistan?

MH: That’s a large goal and my own goals are more modest. I hope we can connect Afghan women to American women as well as to readers from the U.S. and elsewhere. I hope the Afghan women can benefit as much as their teachers and readers do from this exchange. I hope we can let these women know we are here, we are listening, we care.

SC: What would you say resides at the heart of the Afghan Women’s Writing Project?

MH: AWWP is about sharing your story – and I think this is a human need that has been denied Afghan women for many years. Their stories were either seen as irrelevant and value-less, or expressed via male relatives, or sometimes expressed via the media. But not in their own words, in their own way.

Being a Woman: My Only Sin

2009-11-16T09:24:00.000-08:00

Photo by Heidi Levine

Reposted from the Afghan Women's Writing Project http://awwproject.wordpress.com/

(Eds Note: This essay was written by one of our writers, but contains no identifying information due to security considerations.)

I love my job. I know it can help bring changes in women’s living conditions in my province. But there are obstacles.

Recently I received a death threat from Taliban. I was on my way to work when a neighbor called out to me and said, “You must return home because we found a letter from the Taliban threatening you, and you must quit your job right now.”

“I want to see that letter,” I told him.

He said, “That is fine,” and gave me the letter, which said the Taliban in my province were planning to kidnap me, my sister and my father and then kill us.

As my family was at risk, they decided to move to another city. They were not happy about leaving me alone and asked me to come with them, but I thought about my responsibilities for the women in my province, so I remained behind for my job. I am not living with my family any longer. I only go out covered in a burqa. I am still working.

My early life began like this: when I was seven years old, my mother got sick, so I began to take care of our home, washing clothes and dishes, cooking. One night during the Taliban regime, our family left Afghanistan at midnight and headed to Iran. It was cold and dark. We were traveling in a car and the roads were unpaved and dusty. Finally we reached the Iranian border. We found a place to stay for the night, and in the morning we crossed a river and then took another car to Zabol in Iran.

In Iran, we started another life with many difficulties. My father was working and my mother and I began to work also. We deshelled nuts for a shopkeeper who paid us about 1000 toman so we had enough to buy bread. I have many bad memories from that time. I remember when I was eight years old; I went to bakery to buy bread. I was the first in line, but the baker did not give me bread because I was an Afghan. I waited until 10 p.m. that night. It got darker and darker and I was afraid, as our house was very far. Finally I got the bread and was running home and, on the way, crying. When I got home, my mother was waiting at the gate, also very worried.

At that time I wanted to study, so I tried to enroll in official Iranian schools, but as I was an Afghan, I was not allowed to attend the schools. I did find a literacy class and I started my primary education there until sixth grade. That meant when we returned to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, I could go directly to school to learn subjects, not simply to learn to read.

The first day of school in Afghanistan, I was so glad. I felt I was floating in the sky. It was a sunny day. I was with many Afghan girls standing in the yard of school and waiting for our teachers. It was 2001 and I was in the sixth grade. We did not have chairs, desks, books, or a blackboard and our floor was dirt, since everything was lost during the Taliban regime. I was an intelligent student and the teachers loved me. I never missed a day, even though my mother was sick. I got up early in the morning to clean the house, make breakfast and cook lunch.

In 2004, my life faced another tragedy. My family forced me to marry an uneducated, older man. I was sixteen years old. The man I was engaged to was my father’s relative. From the beginning, every day, I was beaten by him. He wanted to prevent me from going to school; he never allowed me to see my friends and relatives. I tolerated everything because I was an Afghan and it was shame for my family if I complained about my husband.

After three months, my husband sent me to my father’s home and left me. When I was 17 years old, he came and divorced me. I was pregnant. I was happy that this cruel man would leave me alone, but I was worried about my child. After he divorced me, people started to say bad things about me because they did not accept a divorced woman. My child was born in a hospital but since then, I have never seen him. It was a boy and my husband’s family came to take him forever.

There was no way forward for me except to continue my education. I finished my pre-university classes and wanted to go to a university. But my mother was again sick and required an operation that cost the equivalent of eight-thousand dollars. So I worked for three years to help raise this money. My mother had the operation and is now fine. I feel so happy to see her finally healthy after 17 years.

As for my own future, I don’t know what it will be. I know I want a university degree someday, and I know I will keep trying.

By Anonymous

Victoria Garza

2009-08-21T14:39:00.000-07:00

Victoria received her Master of Arts degree in Film and Media Theory, History, & Criticism and her M.F.A. in Film Production at NYU. She received the Tisch School of the Arts Fellowship and was nominated for both the Directors Guild of America Scholarship and the Women in Film Scholarship for her documentary Claribel. She has twice been awarded the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts Entertainment Industry Scholarship. Victoria just finished production of a documentary on immigrant street food vendors in New York City. She resides in Los Angeles, where she writes and develops projects for her production company, clearthoughtmedia.

Left behind

and drenched as the grass,

with drops of dew.

--Kobayashi Issa

For twenty-three days I am terrified of dying. I am terrified that I or my parents or my grandparents or the dog across the street will die. Having decided I was barely surviving, I decide I am a Jew and hiding in Ohio. When I suggest this to my mother, she gently asked me how I can manage to be a Catholic and a Jew at the same time. I remind her that the early Christians were Jews and so was Jesus Christ. “Yes, that’s true,” she says, while patting my hand to keep me from pulling a loose thread from her brown and orange flowered bedspread. I tell my mother all about Anne Frank and remind her that people can be hiding for years and everyone thinks they are dead—but they are not, they’re just hiding. My mother says that my sister is not hiding.

I know she’s dead Mom,” I say. But I also think my sister is bound to show up at any moment, and so I should therefore be prepared. Thus began my love of lists. As long as I could list my thoughts, I felt a degree of control over them, as if listing was slapping them into submission. My most important list was a series of questions I was going to ask my sister upon her return home. The relief I feel from performing the exercise is so profound that it consistently overshadows the knowledge that she is not coming back.

Rather than add to my list, I always change it. I choose eleven, one number shy of my favorite number. There was some logic to this, but I can’t remember what it is. Maybe it’s the same logic my cousin Rachel (whose pajama party my sister and cousin never arrived at) uses when she decides to skip her 7th birthday. We find out a year later when she announces to everyone’s surprise that she is a year younger than she actually is. She says, matter of factly, “I skipped a year.” I skipped weeks and months after Gina’s death. I just wiped them off the map of time. And then I skipped time altogether when I took to daydreaming without realizing it. Anything could set me off. I fell into a trance once while looking at a beetle behind the garage. When I finally hear my mother calling , I have no way of explaining to her what I was doing. I can’t say, “I was looking at a beetle,” because that would sound stupid. So I say, “Nothing,” which my mother, like all mothers, takes to mean that I was doing something I shouldn’t have been doing.

Death does that to time, compresses it, slows it down until it doesn’t exist. A year feels like a week, three years, like three weeks. Carlos Casteneda’s Don Juan says that death lives behind you on your left, an arm's stretch away—ready to tap you on the shoulder. Lorca calls it duende, death as friend, death as companion. But Grace resides to my right, and she is louder and far more beautiful and more powerful than death. She is capable of coaxing death to do whatever she wants. She can make death shut up. Death whispers, “Certainly, if it can happen to you, it can happen to anyone, or worse yet, it can happen to you again.” Then Grace would whisper, “Yes, my girl, it is not only true but it is The Truth, so why worry about it?” So after twenty-three days, I decide I want to die. I imagine my death in hundreds of ways. I die riding my bike, smashed to a pulp by a reckless teenager who only has his driver’s permit. I die by drowning in dirty Lake Erie after jumping off the jetty. I freeze to death outside my bedroom window eating too much snow. I get struck by lightning. I die when I fall out of a tree and crack my head open, and instead of blood pouring out there are just dead thoughts that trickle out and collect in a puddle, which I then stomp on and watch scatter in the wind. However, finally thinking I understand what an attack of the heart means, I decide to die of a heart attack. Except in the case of my heart, it will not give me any warning—it will just beat slower and slower until it stops, like melting an ice cube under my armpit in the middle of summer—slowly or quickly my heart would start shrinking until it is the size of a pin head beating tiny beats, like a lighthouse beam flowing through my bloodstream, working its way out through my eyeball and then flying away. My heart would wave to myself, dead down there in the yard.

The Radical Art of Sowing Seeds and the "Net Win"

2009-06-17T11:28:00.000-07:00

Deborah Fisher is a sculptor and critic whose work focuses on the structural meaning of climate change, or the relationship between the built world and the earth. She recently completed a large-scale public sculpture entitled Solid State Change for Middlebury College’s Environmental Studies building, for which she received a Puffin Foundation grant. She is an artist in residence at Sculpture Space in Utica, NY. Fisher contributes regularly to two online magazines: ArtCal Zine and A Gathering of the Tribes. She earned a BFA in studio art from the University of Arizona in 1997, and an MFA in visual art from UC San Diego in 2003, where she was a Regents scholar and recipient of the Center for Humanities Research Fellowship.

For more than a decade, I made sculpture. It feels good, viscerally, to take a concept in, chew on it, and either shit or regurgitate a third thing that is now neither you nor the original idea, but is a record of the journey from outside to inside and back again.

My motives have always been personal and deeply vulgar. That's art for you. Making meaning is a grabby activity. You see something and want to take it and make it yours. And while I deeply enjoy this arrogant, aggressive part, I also think that gratuitous creative license is boring. If there's going to be nastiness, I want some kind of redemption. I want a net win.

I'll make this real by telling a true story. I worked until recently for Socrates Sculpture Park, which Mark diSuvero founded and where he still keeps a studio for his work on giant I-beam sculptures.

The original goal was to create an art petting zoo: an alternate universe where you can stand right in front of someone making a sculpture, even if they're welding or using a crane, while your baby plays at your feet, with no thoughts about liability or mishap. That part of Socrates does kind of work. But the genius part of Socrates is the ecosystem of people who actually do this, and what they bring. Doug the Taoist has been doing tai chi in Socrates forever, and he introduces himself to every artist he meets and tells stories about past artists. In doing so, he creates a running narrative, handed from artist to artist. Frank is an eighty-year old man who comes to the park every day and talks about how he's waiting to die, how beautiful his wife was, and his WWII exploits. He sits in full lotus on the work tables, smoking Misty cigarettes, and fixes the tools. The unemployed Dominican men that fish in the nearby east river every day are the sharpest art critics I have ever met.

Socrates was a particularly aggressive grab. DiSuvero made plenty of enemies by insisting that this vacant lot, full of tires, junk cars and concrete block, was his to clean up and use to build his career. The relationship to the surrounding community wasn't always perfect, but the park still thrives because it is so much more than one artist’s playground.

Mark would never call Socrates art, and neither would I, but it is a successful act of meaning creation. And Mark would be disappointed to hear this, but I actually find it more meaningful than his sculpture. It's got the parts I like: the creative violence and its overcoming. It's got the Net Win.

So, I come to you in this essay from the middle of a substantial transition. My strong bias toward sculpture as the "right" way to make meaning is giving out. In fact, this bias has been so powerful that the first one hundred drafts descended quickly into tedious explanation about how I am not some loser who was forced to stop making art because I couldn't hack it, or because my art wasn't good. And right now I am going to catch myself at the edge of this particular cliff one last time and just say that I am not making art right now because when I look at the scale and scope of my sculpture and compare it to something that is truly giving, like Socrates, I think that it pales in comparison. Most art does. Even my all-time favorite pieces do less than the park .

Art’s primary job, in New York City, anyway, is to prove the wealth of very rich people to other very rich people. It can be wasteful. And it's all about one individual's devouring and excreting vision. We all love the image of the asshole artist chewing through the world in service of his vision. We cling to this idea of art even as it dawns on us that the rest of modernism has hateful side effects. We are rejecting the radical consumption-based individualism of buying a McMansion in a distant suburb, and rolling around in a really big vehicle willy nilly, and feeding at the more-cheaper-is-better trough of agribusiness. We are collectively deciding that the diseases of modernism, from diabetes and climate change to existential angst, are worth addressing. Why not subject the impulse to create and all its products to the same scrutiny? Is it so crazy to suggest that, just as there are transportation alternatives to the Hummer, there are ways to live and work creatively that reorganize redemption, consumption and destruction?

As you know, times are tough. We need to problem solve, to find new ways of doing just about everything. Last winter, as I stood alone in my studio, I realized that if I thought the most important thing I could be doing is make an abstract sculpture out of my junk mail while the financial system collapses and the climate becomes increasingly unlivable and this poor Obama fellow keeps his chin up as he recites his impressive litany of deeds left to do, then I am not firing on all cylinders.

I decided that what I care about is the environment, and the culture of environmentalism. I decided that I hate calling myself an environmentalist because the movement is decidedly puritanical, and that even as I reject the label, I struggle with my own infinite capacity to eco-ritualize on a daily basis. I started wondering why I feel like I have to fish other people's compostables out of the garbage and bring them home in a wet sack. I got really angry that Earth Hour, an hour of sitting in the dark, is the worldwide environmental action. I decided that it would be much more beautiful if everyone went and sowed wildflower seeds instead.

This germ of irritation evolved into Bed Stuy Meadow, which happened April 11, 2009. I got two hundred and fifty people to give me either money or a promise of time, and even though the 11th was pouring rain, almost one hundred people turned up to sow wildflower seeds on every single square inch of untended land in Bed Stuy in Brooklyn, where I live. The seed sowing day was a great success: more than 90% of the territory got covered, and the volunteers were on fire. But if I thought I was getting away from the arrogance and grabbiness of making meaning, I would have been very disappointed. A lot of people were angry because they thought it was a white idea in a historically black neighborhood. Or that it was about newcomers in a neighborhood with a fiercely protective old guard. The press coverage focused overwhelmingly on gentrification. And at this writing, in mid June, with zero flowers on the scene because they seem to have been choked out by weeds, I am finding myself getting intimate with a whole new class of people that I've pissed off: disappointed volunteers who feel like they got soaked in April for nothing.

I am sitting here at the most vulnerable point of a selfish, impulsive, problematic and totally redeemable project that could really explode into exactly the kind of thing I want... if it gets enormous enough. I am wrestling with the fact that I wanted a simple Wildflower Love Gesture and got Race War and Real Estate Anger and Disappointed Volunteers, but I know that this is a function of misunderstanding the scope of what I wanted to do. It's not a manifest destiny thing, it's a call and response. And I am just getting the first responses back.

A quick list of what I have, and what the Meadow yielded:

1. I have the original grabby gesture: seeing all this available untended land, lying fallow behind busted chain link fences, my neighborhood's greatest liability, begging to be turned into its greatest asset.

2. And I have a big handful of new neighbor friends who have even more ideas than I have, and more real-world knowledge, and backgrounds that are, I must admit, a little more practical than mine.

3. I also have, at this point, a responsibility not to run away. My role here is to make meaning, and I already said that much of that work is a matter of follow through. Pulling back now would make the meaning of Bed Stuy Meadow something that I can't bear, like the perverted inverse of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, or the same old things we already know about how frightening it is for white people like myself to be called racist.

In other words, I am in this up to my neck, and the stakes are much higher than they ever were when I was screwing tires together. Thankfully, I am working with a handful of folks to get to that net win that this project requires. We are talking about making an Urban Farm Syndicate that takes actual responsibility of as many vacant lots as possible instead of just casting seed, and uses them to feed and employ people and conduct large-scale urban farming research. Right now it's just talk. But it could evolve into a lot of dignified, living-wage jobs for local people; tasty local produce in a neighborhood formerly known as a food desert; beautiful trees and shrubs that sequester CO2 and provide shade in perpetuity; a venue for trying out new ways to remediate contaminated soil; a library of urban farming knowledge; a seed bank; a project that improves Bed Stuy by delivering value to all the people who live here: rich and poor, black and white, new and old.

The vision is grand, and even more grabby than the original idea, but much less dependent on one artist's work. I am in total freefall, with nothing to cling to but my belief that freefall is how the best creative work happens. I have never been happier or more frightened in my life.

More about Deb's project:
http://www.21stcenturyplowshare.com/

Press coverage:
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/brooklyn/2009/04/09/2009-04-09_bedstuy_wildflower_mission_draws_oppostion.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/nyregion/12flowers.html?_r=2
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robyn-hillmanharrigan/think-global-act-local--b_b_186317.html
http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/128527

How To Treat Your Minority Student

2009-05-15T12:39:00.000-07:00

Sophia Licona is a high school student in Tucson, AZ. She is a long-time participant in the Kore Press Grrls Literary Activism Project.

Do you have trouble interacting with minority students? Does it seem like they are overrunning the schools? They just keep coming, year after year, lowering test scores, and speaking their foreign jibber jabber. Fortunately, the Minority Student Instruction Manual (MSIM) has now been written. What follows are solutions to all of your minority student problems.

The safest way to learn your minority student’s ability is to assume they don’t speak English. If they have a last name that can’t be pronounced, like Garcia, they probably won’t understand your course content. If they come in and try to declare that English is their first language, don’t be fooled. Insist they at least take an English fluency test, but it is best if they go through several weeks of ESL. Start out the ESL class with a picture of a dog. Point at the picture and clearly state, “dog, D-O-G, dog.” Have the student repeat the word several times. If your student complains that they “already know how to speak English,” they may be moved to a regular English class, but not before you comment on “how fast” they learn and “how well” you taught them.

Now, if you aren’t quite sure what your minority student’s heritage is, there are two (two, T-W-O, two) options. Option numero uno is to ask, after having an unrelated conversation, if your student has “recently been on vacation,” or if they are “just not Caucasian.” It is best to do this when the student is about to leave and must answer quickly. Option two is best if you have a vague idea of where your student may come from. If you think the student is from India, ask “Are you from India?” When your student says, “No, my family is Mexican,” respond with, “Sweetheart, you must be mistaken. Are you sure your parents aren’t from India?” Thirty minutes of arguing is acceptable. After, remind the student that it is important to not be ashamed of where they come from. It may be in the student’s best interest if you recommend that they try to reconnect with their cultural heritage. Perhaps suggest watching the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

When grading a minority student’s work, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, make sure they aren’t writing in clichés that they learned in those first few weeks of ESL. Suggest alternatives they might relate to culturally. For example, if a student compares something to “a knife through butter,” say, “Why don’t YOU write, like a knife through guacamole?” Any ethnic food will do. Also ask if there are any common sayings where they come from.

If your student has trouble picking a topic for a project, suggest an issue meaningful to them. If they are from Japan, suggest they study communism in China. They will already have a wide knowledge base because China is a big country in their part of the world. Finally, when having a class discussion, don’t hesitate to ask your minority student for the Black community’s perspective, or the Hispanic perspective, or the Asian perspective, or the Indian perspective (it is important to separate India from Asia because Indians look more like Middle-Eastern terrorists than like Chinese). However, don’t let these guidelines limit you; get creative with your suggestions.

If a Black or Hispanic student ever approaches you about college, the advice you should offer is clear. If they have anything to say, listen patiently. Then, if they are smart, tell them how lucky they are to be Black or Hispanic. If they are remotely intelligent they need not worry about silly things like SAT scores; they will get into the school of their choice because of affirmative action. Well, maybe they won’t get into Harvard, or Stanford, or Yale, or [insert school here]. It is then acceptable to go off on a tangent about how soon all of our universities will be overrun by Black and Hispanic students with mediocre SAT scores and on financial aid scholarships.

This will segue nicely to your next point. There are many scholarships out there for kids of color. In fact, almost all scholarships are for kids of color. Remind the kids of color to be grateful to white kids who have it so hard. If you feel your minority student isn’t bright, tell them to join the military, as this will be their only opportunity to be a contributing and productive member of society.

Remember, when dealing with minority students, it can be hard to know what to say. However, parent-teacher conferences are easy to prep for. When your student’s parent arrives, speak loudly and slowly. If you can’t enunciate, just yell. Start by asking how to say hello where they come from, then use your newfound linguistic skills to say hello. Ask how they like AMERICA. If they look confused, it’s fine. They probably don’t know what you’re saying. It’s not like they have a PhD in Rhetoric through the English department in AMERICA. Next, say what you need to say, and, if the student is getting good grades, state how well they represent Mexicans, or Indians, or whatever.

If you can’t remember any of this, just tell your student how beautiful you think their culture is. Let the student know you understand them and their “minority-ness.” Remember: you are doing the best you can with these people.

When You Catch Writer's Block on the Side of the Road, Kill It

2009-04-21T17:06:00.000-07:00

Laraine Herring is an author, teacher, and counselor. Her first book, Monsoons, was published in 1999 by Duality Press. Her novel, Lay My Sorrows Down, won the Barbara Deming Award for Women in 2000. Lost Fathers: How Women Can Heal From Adolescent Father Loss, was released in May, 2005 from Hazelden Press. The audiobook is also available on itunes and audible.com. Her latest book, Writing Begins with the Breath: Embodying Your Authentic Voice was released in September, 2007, from Shambhala Publications. She is at work on a third novel and a memoir. Find out more at www.laraineherring.com.

This semester, my students have been resistant to practice. Perhaps because it's spring and they want to be dancing in fields of poppies. Perhaps because they are worried about their futures. Perhaps because they are simply not ready to commit to writing. Writing, after all, is serious business.

I've had students complain to me that they aren't writing enough, and when I ask them if they're writing, they say, "Well, no..." To this I respond: writing begets writing. There is no way to write but to write. There are no tricks, though there are plenty of diversions. One of the points I make in my book The Writing Warrior is that any structure someone provides for your writing, or any structure you create yourself, is only as useful as your ability to work freely within it and to stay centered and focused. The structure or the concept doesn't make the writing work. Your discipline, practice and flexibility make it work. When structure of any kind (relationship, job, religion, writing, city) becomes a prison, it's time to move on.

Now, what writing practice does is illuminate. It yanks out into the open everything that the writer has been trying not to look at. And so the writer goes away. This is normal, but a book about writing, or a class about writing, can't address the nuts and bolts without addressing the real reason writing is hard. It holds up a mirror to your own demons. It dares you to look, dares you further to write about it, then dares you even further to share it publicly. Yeah, is it too late to change majors to something safer like Pyrotechnics in the Middle East?

Writing practice brings up your limitations. This is a gift, not a problem. The more you know about what you do and why, the more room you have to make authentic decisions. Writing practice shows you your belief systems about yourself, your family, your world. It shows you where you need to be right and where you feel invisible.

One of my favorite books is If You Meet Buddha on the Road, Kill Him by Sheldon Kopp. What he means, of course, is on your quest to self-knowledge, anything that gets in the way of true self-intimacy needs to go—even if that thing is a revered deity. It’s a symbol, it's the finger pointing at the moon, it's representative of an endless search. You don't need it. Ben Yagoda’s recent title expresses a similarly radical sentiment: When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It.

(Lest you think I hate all adjectives and manifestations of God/dess, let me reassure you that I don't. I have been known to use an adjective or two, and right now my office displays a statue of Buddha, Ganesh, Kali, the Venus of Willendorf, a yin/yang symbol and a cross.)

As an exercise, I ask my first year creative writing students to describe a person they know without using any adjectives or adverbs. The intent is not to wipe adjectives and adverbs off the face of the earth, but rather to show the student that they often cloud what’s really there. As Ben Yagoda says, adjectives are often used by lazy writers "who don't stop to think that the concept is already in the noun."

Writers get in the way of their own writing because they don't yet know that the writing is where they are. There is nowhere to go. Writing will not unlock the secret code to fame and fortune. Writing will not bring about world peace. But what writing will do is bring forth her sorrows and her joys, her secrets and her lies. It will bring these out, and once in daylight, they will vanish and she will find she has space in her body, in her mind, and in her heart. And as one writer opens to herself, she brings that changed being into the world and into her contact with others. She has no attachment to whether others change or not, no attachment to whether they write or don't; she simply is, and in that 'is-ness' she is the noun, nothing in the way of all that beauty.

Assuming it Matters

2009-02-11T12:35:00.000-08:00

Susan Baller-Shepard is the co-founder and the Editor-in-Chief of Spirituality Book Club.

When I was very little, I loved to write in my room, on long skinny strips of paper given to me by my great aunt the librarian. In seventh grade, I won an essay contest and a big chicken dinner for my whole family. In eighth grade, my essay about a local candy company was published in a state history journal, and my mom and I got to have lunch with the governor. The message to me: words feed people.

But in college, writing become uncomfortable, so I abandoned it. I worked at a church, left the country, returned, got married, went to grad school in a dual competency program, and got two masters: divinity and social work. I took one writing class, along with my other graduate classes, and the instructor told me I had “verb tense problems.” I got ordained, worked at churches, eventually had two sons and adopted a daughter. I did the things women do that get repeatedly undone: laundry, dishes, meals, house cleaning.

I felt an urge to write again. I thought no one would take me; I hadn’t written or published in years. Still, I kept feeling this need to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard. I submitted a manuscript to Dr. Lucia Cordell Getsi, editor of Spoon River Poetry Review, asking to get into her graduate poetry writing class. I was convinced it wouldn’t happen. I got an email back from Lucia saying I was welcome to come and try out the course. She wrote, “I can tell from your manuscript that you are a serious writer.”

Lucia helped me think again. She was not as I had conjured her in my brain. She was short, attractive, worldly, wordy, scientific, mathematical, poetic. I tell her she is surgical in her editing. She cuts away what doesn’t belong, and sees what is healthy and connective. Mostly, though, she helped me to think through poems, learn the skeletal frames of the poems, consider their sinewy tissues. Now I have a book length poetry manuscript which Lucia edited, a children’s book manuscript, and I am presently writing a collection of essays.

I am forty-five and grateful to have age on my side, to be a woman writing the truth of my life, as a minister, web site editor, wife, mother, writer. They are mutually inclusive roles. My brother Jim says I should be glad my roles feed each other. That’s the beauty I see in the over-forty writing women and men I know well. They speak the truth about their lives: the good, the bad, the less-than-perfect. I value this. It’s less about publication now than it is about giving voice to what needs to be said, what can finally be said at this side of forty. If we don’t say it now, maybe it won’t get said.

On TV recently, I saw Jessica Lange give the commencement address at Sarah Lawrence College. She urged the young women,

“Remember who you are. Because, right now, you have it all: the power of your imagination, the velocity of your dreams, the language of innocence, and the passion of a beginner. Don't lose it. Don't let it evaporate or get stripped away or worn away. And, as time passes, if you find you've come far away from yourself, allow the breeze of humility to remind you of who you were—who you really are.”

Persephone lived in circles, cycling between worlds, going away, coming home. I am thankful to Lucia, and others, who reminded me of my writing self.I have circled back around to the child I was, the child who shut herself in her room because she loved to write.

Spoon River Poetry Review
http://www.litline.org/Spoon/index.html

Jessica Lange’s Commencement Address
http://www.slc.edu/news-events/Jessica_Lange_Commencement_Address.php

In Search of a) Literary Activism; and b) Happiness

2009-01-13T12:34:00.000-08:00

Shannon Cain was the Executive Director of Kore Press from April 2004 to July 2008, and has served since then as its Sales & Marketing Director. Shannon’s short fiction has received the Pushcart Prize, the O. Henry Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches creative writing at the Gotham Writer’s Workshop and as a private coach. She continues her work with Kore Press as its new Fiction Editor.

1986: As an undergraduate at the University of Arizona I took a fiction writing workshop with Mr. Monkeywrench himself, Edward Abbey. He was stoic and closemouthed. I wrote horrible stuff. I had no idea a) what a workshop was; and b) that I was sitting across the table from a famed literary activist.

1988: I moved to New York and began working in nonprofit administration and fundraising. Someone gave me a job directing a small women’s organization in East Harlem. I fell in with a group of fierce feminist activists and learned how to make social change by a) community organizing; and b) yelling at the top of my lungs.

1994: I gave birth to a baby girl and realized a) this was happiness; and b) I needed to start writing again.

2000: I started writing again. I dragged myself to a night class in fiction writing at Pima Community College. The ground started to feel slippery under my feet, yet a) everything started to make sense; and b) there was no going back.

2002: I had a bright and shiny career in nonprofit management, with a lucrative specialization in raising money for social service and social change organizations. But I had grown to despise the work. I distracted myself with writing fiction, which was going well. I was in my first year of a prestigious MFA program. This education was blowing my mind and releasing a passion I’d kept in hibernation since childhood. I wrote a long paper on political fiction. Suddenly the philanthropic foundation I was working for shut its doors, creating in me a) panic; and b) despair.

2003: I turned 39. Unemployed for the first time in my life and resisting the urge to accept any number of jobs I knew I’d hate, I spent a year a) writing; and b) crying.

2004: I came to work for Kore Press. I learned what is meant by literary activism. Here I could feel good again about fundraising. I combined the fancy- schmancy nonprofit management training I’d accumulated with the rich, round fullness of literature. I got elbow deep in the business of publishing. My paychecks were small and irregular but I felt neither panic nor despair. I converted a backyard storage shed into a writing studio. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and won a prize or two. From my colleague Lisa Bowden I learned volumes about fine publishing, about editing, about standards of quality, and about perseverance.

2009: This year I take a deeper plunge into the literary life, evolving from writer/arts administrator to writer/teacher/editor. Soon I will be part-time fiction editor for Kore Press, part-time teacher and full-time writer. For five years at Kore Press I have been surrounded by women who honor the act of writing. They have shown me by example that it is possible to accommodate one’s passions. My partner and I have rearranged our lives. We live in a little brick house and worry about the mortgage. I am writing a political novel, flying headlong into a career as a literary activist. Writing a novel is the hardest work I’ve done so far, because it causes me a) despair; and b) happiness.

The Largest Locomotive on Earth

2008-12-16T14:51:00.000-08:00

Holly Iglesias is the winner of the 2008 Kore Press First Book Award. She is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Prose Poem, Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Margie, Crab Orchard Review, Massachusetts Review and Spoon River Poetry Review. She has been awarded fellowships by the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Edward Albee Foundation. She is the author of two chapbooks, Hands-on Saint and Good Long Enough, winner of Thorngate Road’s Frank O’Hara Prize. A critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women's Prose Poetry, was published by Quale Press. She teaches at University of North Carolina-Asheville and at Warren Wilson College.

Souvenirs of a Shrunken World is being taught in poet Kim Garcia’s Core Lit class at Boston College this semester, and it appears that her students connected with the poems right from the start. As the instructor, Kim passed along their first set of questions, curiosities and comments to me and invited me to respond. I was shocked at the amount of questions they generated about the first poem alone, “Running for the Fair: a Stereoscope.” Now I eagerly await their response to the book as a whole, as well as their reaction to footnotes posted on the Kore Press website that enhance understanding of the Fair and its historical context.

It goes without saying that it’s an honor and a rare opportunity to have such a chance to engage with engaged readers, and I share my response to them below.

You've brought in a great deal of curiosity, energy and insight to the reading of the first poem of Souvenirs of a Shrunken World. It's an incredible thrill to think of you reading my work and an honor to consider your questions. I trust you know that you as readers take part in making meaning of any poem by bringing your own associations to the words and experiences. This way the poem has a life of its own and continues to grow even after the author has let it go.

A few responses to the issues and ideas you raised:

A stereoscope is an image that you see in a three-dimensional way by looking at it on a special holder, which presents two of the same photograph but from a left-eye and a right-eye point of view, which provides depth. Stereoscopes were very popular around the turn of the 20th century.

My book is very much concerned with point of view, framing and the power of images, both still and moving pictures (thus the strobe). Around this time (1904) Kodak cameras became affordable so regular people could take snapshots pretty easily; also motion pictures had begun to be viewed by a general audience. In a WiFi, You-Tube world, we take such things for granted, but at that time such innovations were mind-boggling and really effected people's attitudes.

Another thing: the Fair took four years to build and then it was demolished, razed to the ground in a few months. People knew this would happen from the start and so were nostalgic about it even before the buildings were gone. Thus, the importance of souvenirs, particularly photographs--the only mementos, or traces, of an awe-inspiring, life-changing experience.

So, back to the boy and girl, whose poem comes before all the rest. I wanted to set up the importance of young people--young country, young people, young century--and how impressionable they are and what kind of influence something as enormous and thrilling as the Fair would have on them. These young people would live out their lives in the 20th century and would take these influences and ideas forward, so we need to keep an eye on the impressions being made on them. They could easily have been my grandfather or grandmother, who were in their teens at the time and who, as recent immigrants, were new Americans and trying to learn how to be a Real American, which the Fair tried to demonstrate.

So: yes, young people in the country, lots of chores, remnants of old-fashioned life soon to be extinct (slop pot, cheese cloth, home-made sausage, etc.) due to rapid population shifts and technological advances. These are kids who have no experience with electricity, radios, automobiles, or telephones!

There were many hoboes wandering the country, riding the trains and living in shanty towns. While the notion of hoboes was also romanticized, the ugly truth of it was that they were part of the huge upheaval and displacement that came about as industry and commerce became centralized in large cities and people left small-town and rural life. A time of economic boom and bust, and thus insecurity and crime and labor unrest. So, that rumbling train doesn't merely symbolize an escape to the bright lights of the city (where the Fair is held), but also offers a foreboding of things being run down, of the danger inherent in too much "progress" too fast.

The past and future at this cusp-y time were neck and neck; we as a nation could've stayed as we'd been, or been more deliberative and patient, or barreled ahead and worried about the consequences later. You know which way it went. That's part of the over-arching metaphor of the Fair--it celebrates a century of progress since the Louisiana Purchase, but that progress and that hugeness and that speed came at a price. Hopefully by the end of the book, you'll be able to see some of the cost of that progress, not just to its "victims" but to the perpetrators as well. Treating humans inhumanely or with disdain injures both the giver and receiver of disrespect. Plus it's dangerous, planting seeds of future divisions.

Boy and girl: traditional roles: he's gets to indulge his adventures, she watches the train pass by. And the cars rolling by, strobing the cornfields, suggests not only the flickering images of movies, but also the fragmentation of families, communities, fields of vision, the human family that is coming down the tracks.

The largest locomotive on earth was on display at the Palace of Transportation at the Fair. It was on a turnstile; the wheels spun in place; and its enormous headlight slashed the walls of the enormous building. The name of the locomotive? It was called the Twentieth Century, I kid you not. So, there's nothing subtle in my mind about the image of a huge iron behemoth barreling down the tracks and the dangers of getting in its path.

Warning! Here comes the 20th Century! This caution lies beneath the entire collection of poems. Everything—and I mean every single thing—that came to characterize the 20th century, in all its glory and all its atrocity, is evident at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. And these two young people are racing to see it, yearning to take it all in, running to catch the train that will take them there. Young people, a relatively young nation—each full of energy and optimism, as well as ignorance and naiveté.

Why We Published Powder

2008-11-07T10:16:00.000-08:00

Lisa Bowden is the Publisher of Kore Press and the poetry editor of Powder.

Shannon Cain is the Fiction Editor of Kore Press and the prose editor of Powder.

PREFACE
Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks, from Vietnam to Iraq

At a writers’ conference in Georgia in the summer of 2005, an American veteran of the war in Iraq stood at the podium and read a personal essay about his time as a soldier. Overcome with emotion and using language both beautiful and stark, he told about the mutilations he’d seen, the bloody losses, his struggle with self-hatred upon returning home, and the profound mistrust he now harbored for his commander in chief. The room went silent with respect for his service and horror for his pain.

That day in Georgia, a thought arose: what about the women who have served? Where is their perspective? Who will publish their words? Thus the idea for this anthology was born.

We put out a call. We asked women in the ranks, especially those who had served after September 11, 2001, to send us their writing. We waited for the flood of responses. Only a few pieces arrived. They were excellent, but not enough to assemble a book-length collection. Then, an email from a soldier who told us of the repercussions, formal and informal, that the military imposes upon those who speak their minds while on active duty.

We reissued our call to military women, farther and wider, and expanded the scope. We asked women who had served anywhere, at any time, to tell their stories. And now the essays and poetry arrived. The writing blew our minds, broke our hearts and gave us hope. And suddenly we found ourselves putting forth a new rendering of American history.

Here was writing that gave us the full scope of the military experience, including a range of ideas about what it means to be a patriot. As advocates for peace and justice, we went into the project determined to publish a book that would somehow help end the war in Iraq. In the process we found ourselves expanded, and in awe. We saw immediately the necessity of setting aside any agenda. We offer this poetry and this memoir edited but not manipulated, selected but not filtered. In so doing we amplify these voices, and we insist upon their place in a long and nuanced literature of war and peace.

Former Navy Sonar Technician Khadijah Queen understands poetry as “a necessary reaction” to the death of her colleagues. Army Reserve officer Victoria Hudson, who has been mobilized five times in her thirty years of service, says she wrote about what she saw in Bosnia and Iraq in order to “integrate those experiences into memory.” Air Force jet engine mechanic K.G. Schneider says she writes to express her gratitude, “so that they who served with me can be remembered.”

The writers here are divided on the question of whether they would re-enlist. Marine Corps Officer Charlotte Brock has “never regretted joining,” but notes “if you asked me that question at various times over the last six years, I would have given a different answer.” Former Army Communications Officer Terry Hurley would not hesitate to join again, and is especially drawn to the idea of training new recruits. Arabic linguist Rachel Vigil has “no desire to serve the current administration’s objectives,” and says “nothing would talk me into joining again.”

Former Air Force medic Deborah Fries looks back at her service during the Vietnam era and realizes if she had it to do over, she “would have marched for peace rather than for a base commander.” Bobbie Dykema Katsanis, who served in the Army National Guard Band, finds the culture of the military “anti-intellectual, sexist, and subliminally violent,” and has had to work hard to leave it behind. Former Air Force traffic controller Christy Clothier discovered that the military demanded “silent passivity” and is still in the process of rediscovering her voice. Navy administrative officer Donna Dean reports she endured “denigration and open hostility throughout her active duty career” and more than 25 years after her discharge still struggles every day with the effects of post traumatic stress disorder.

But Ohio National Guardsman Sharon Allen, who served as a petroleum supply specialist in Iraq and Afghanistan, says that the military gave her a “confidence unrivaled by civilian training.” R.O.T.C. student Cameron Beattie reports that her experience in Airborne School has changed her forever: “If I can jump out of an airplane, I can do anything.” Navy Religious Programs Specialist Dhana Marie Branton believes she wouldn’t be the writer she is today without her military background. “I became myself,” she says, “rather than the person others expected me to be. I learned to own my mind.”

“The military is a group of diverse human beings like any other,” Dykema Katsanis wrote to us in an email. “Some of us are politically liberal or progressive; many of us are against the war and oppose the current administration’s foreign policy. Often these voices are squelched in American public discourse.”

Regardless of our contributors’ divergent views on the war and on the necessity of service, every one of them comes together on one point: it’s damn tough to be a woman in the military. Brock, whose essay “Hymn” appears in these pages, says “why is there no national debate on the fact that women are subject to institutional discrimination in the military? Nowhere else in this country are women so blatantly prohibited from certain jobs solely on the basis of gender. The American public should know what military women have achieved.”

*

In the science fiction movie Contact, an astronomer/astronaut played by Jodie Foster is launched into space at the invitation of a benign race of extraterrestrial beings. Wide-eyed at what she encounters, she says, “We should have sent a poet.”

Indeed we must send poets and writers to places both heavenly and hellish so they can return to describe what the rest of us are incapable of seeing. When we send women to war, they bear witness in ways that men cannot. The memoirists and poets in this volume have stood wide-eyed at the border between war and peace, and in these pages they gift us with a record of what really happened there.

Why I Write

2008-10-15T14:05:00.000-07:00

Kimi Eisele, co-director of The Invisible City project, is a writer, dancer/choreographer, and educator. She serves as the Special Projects Director for NEW ARTiculations Dance Theatre where she directed “RE:Configurations: an evening of dance and stories about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender relationships” in 2007 and “We Are What We Eat: Dance and Stories about the Food We Eat and the Systems that Feed Us” in collaboration with the Community Food Bank in 2008. She is currently trying to finish a novel about America in the post-apocalypse before the economy really does collapse.

1. Proclamation

I went once with a friend to a wildlife refuge on the Delaware Bay. It was one of those beautiful Mid-Atlantic winter days before the snow falls. The ground was brown and brittle, the trees nude, the sky interminably gray. We got out of the car and pointed the binoculars toward the edge of a tidal pool to look at snow geese. Thousands of them. Roused from their roost, they lifted into the air like a cloth billowed by a wind. On the ground again, they squawked incessantly, the sound hovering above them like a shadow of their flight. What were the geese saying? I wondered. “They’re just checking in with each other,” my friend said. Are you still there? Yes, I’m still here. And again: Are you still there? Yup, I’m here. And on and on.

I understand the snow geese. I understand the squawked question and its response. Both comprise the foundation of why I write. I write to announce my place in the world. One bird among millions. I am here. Are you there?

2. The Thrill of Words

When I was growing up, my parents were close friends with a couple from New York who invited us to visit them at their New Jersey beach house every summer. She was a teacher, he was a writer, and both of them loved words. Every night after dinner, we’d play a game called anagrams. Each player tried to spell six words using the small, wooden letters (much like Scrabble pieces) placed on the table. We could steal someone else’s words by adding letters and anagramming it (“bird” could become “bride,” or “over” could become “hover”). On those summer evenings, as the sea air sputtered against the screens and Billie Holiday’s blues spilled from the tape player, I would sit sandwiched between the adults, transfixed by the letters in front of me. Amidst the laughter and exclamation, I learned that words were fun. They created connection, experiences, and memories.

I still believe words are fun. Whether I’m writing email messages, letters, poems, essays, or stories, I like the sounds and the spellings. I like stringing words together to form sentences. I like using words as tools to say what I want to say. I like, too, that words have roots and histories and lives contained within them, and that they can be re-arranged and borrowed and re-invented. And that all of that magic can happen in silence, but for the sound of breathing, or somewhere perhaps, the distant churn of the surf.

3. Possibility

I wrote my first story when I was five. It was based on a prompt—“But oh, how she wished she had green curls…” In it a blond, straight-haired girl (not unlike myself at the time) wishes desperately for new hair. She finds a magic wand, gets her wish, and lives the rest of her life with green curls. I remember the story for its silliness and for what it reveals about my earliest desire as a writer—to make the impossible possible.

Common advice to new writers says, “Write what you know.” I say also, “Write what you don’t know.” Because that means summoning the imagination. With imagination, the unknown becomes knowable, the unattainable slides closer into reach. It’s not necessarily magic, just a practice. Pretty soon I’m granting wishes, conversing with quirky strangers, traveling across continents, and dreaming up new societies much kinder than my own.

But my imagination is not simply a way for me to escape reality. By strengthening my powers of observation, my imagination helps place me more firmly in reality. As Salman Rushdie recently said in a June 2006 interview with Bill Moyers, “What writers can offer better than journalists, better than philosophers, is that they can use their imaginations to look at the world and what's happening in it.” Imagination allows us “to get into the skin of the other,” Rushdie said, which can then lead to greater understanding and acceptance. I believe this is a critical message for our times. It is also what has long propelled me to the page.

In nonfiction, I have written about 19^th century pioneer women on the overland trails, fishing communities on the coast of Ecuador, Cubans at the end of the 20^th century, children and families on the U.S.-Mexico border, and asthmatic children living in U.S. cities. This writing has helped me understand and honor those whose lives are different from my own. More recently, I have been “getting into the skin” of the characters in my novel in order to move them through a future where the current economic and technological luxuries we know today no longer exist. The work has given me the opportunity to ask “What if?” The answers I have come up with have given me new ways to think about my everyday life, my family, my community, and the world.

When I write, I hold hands with possibility. I stumble upon magic wands. I hone in on my senses. I wake up to the world and observe things I hadn’t noticed before. Several weeks ago, I walked into a diner and ordered a slice of pie, for instance. There was something odd about my waitress. When she brought me my pie, I looked again. She had bright green curls.

4. Coherence

A few years ago, at age 33, I began asking the question, should I or shouldn’t I have a child? Behind my question lingered the belief that as a woman I am supposed to give birth, that my body was designed for it. But I didn’t want to simply fall into a prescribed biological role. I wanted make a conscious choice. First, however, I had make sense of my options. So I went to my desk. I wrote about my college years when I was belligerent about a woman’s right to choose. I wrote about the “mother club” some of my friends have been joining. I wrote about the ridiculous mountains of plastic baby gear piled up in their living rooms. I wrote about the “body snatcher” that had invaded my body, making me ogle at babies and want to have sex. I wrote about the ticking sound. I wrote and re-wrote. I turned the questions over and over. Eventually, an answer began to emerge.

Writing helps me collect and order my thoughts and clarify the workings of my mind. I write to make sense of complicated issues—motherhood, U.S.-Mexico border policy, being an American in a time of global conflict. My current project is helping me wrestle with a set of questions and confusions about what it might mean to live in a country that is no longer the richest, most powerful in the world. I write to know where I stand. I write for coherence. I do not always achieve it, but in my attempt, I understand more fully myself and how I live in the world.

5. Connection

Nearly 15 years ago, when my college roommate and I moved out of the shoebox-sized dorm room we called home, we conducted the self-important act of writing letters to its future residents. We pasted the letters inside the dressers, imagining that two women like us would someday find them, brittle and yellowed, and read our words with reverent interest. Of course, it’s possible that our letters didn’t survive at all, that they were tossed out following week when the custodial staff cleared out the rooms. Nonetheless, we wrote because we wanted to connect.

I am not the same person I was when I was 20 but I still write out of a longing to connect. There are things that I see or hear or feel that I must share—either because they explode with beauty or because the horror of them would be immoral to keep secret. When I write, I am calling out across the tidal pool, checking in with my flock. I am thinking about what connects me to humanity. I am thinking about my readers. Who are you? I ask, adding my own stories, ideas, and interpretations to the formation of the fleet.

By writing them, my exclamations and ideas do not dissipate on the wind; they become immutable. This might be the greatest quality of the written word—it endures. Because of that, I can have relationships with writers long gone—Zora Neale Hurston, Leo Tolstoy, Willa Cather, Italo Calvino. I can also know something of the lives and imaginations of Wislawa Szymborska, Eduardo Galeano, and Orhan Pamuk, writers whose thoughts can reach me across the oceans.

This passage of words forward or backward or laterally in time or place seems to me an extraordinary leap of faith, the most insistent form of silence. It is a correspondence that makes me feel connected to the past, hopeful for the future, and completely alive in the present.

6. Redemption

Some days the thought of going to my desk gives me a stomachache. I’ll wish instead that I worked for an insurance broker in some cramped, carpeted office. At least then I’d know what to do. Because sometimes I arrive at my desk and sit there in the doldrums, nowhere to go and no way to get there. If I scream for help, my voice comes out tiny and insignificant; no one at all hears it. When this happens, I can stay away for a few days, a few weeks, months even. Thinking of my work makes my stomach tighten, my heart rate accelerate. Nothing moves. I sigh a lot.

But then I’ll see something—the edge of light behind a cactus, a grapefruit on a park bench, a forgotten dog on a chain. Or I’ll hear something—the bees in the pepper tree, the slap of rain on the desert pavement, a news story about yet another Mexican migrant dead of overexposure. And a split-second of breeze will blow over me. It will nudge me closer to the horrific or the beautiful and remind me that there are things that must be said. I will recall the elegant swoop and curve of the letters, the gentle rock of sentences in a paragraph. The images and the sounds and their urgency will lift me up and carry me back to my desk.

Are you there? I’ll ask, settling in. The answer might flutter up right away. Or maybe it will drift in slowly: I. Am. Here. Either way, I’ll hang on the words as if my life depended on it.

Because it does.

Historical Moments

2008-09-18T12:56:00.000-07:00

Rena J. Mosteirin is the winner of the 2008 Kore Press Short Fiction Award for her novella, Nick Trail's Thumb, which will hit stores this fall. This month, read about her take on the thoughts and anxieties of a newly published writer.

I wake up one morning in my apartment on the South Side of Chicago and Shannon Cain calls me to tell me that Lydia Davis picked my novella “Nick Trail’s Thumb” as the winner of the Short Fiction Chapbook contest and Kore Press is going to publish it. I sit down on the floor. I jump up. Shannon says things. I say things. I hang up and jump around my apartment causing the squirrels on the fire escape to scramble and my neighbors to complain by turning up their music. I sing along to my neighbor’s music. I throw open the door and beam at the squirrels who take this as an act of hostility. I wave at Pops, the homeless man who is finding treasures in the trash bins. He smiles.

I call up my fiancé who is just leaving a seminar at the University of Chicago. I won. I won. I won. I call my brother who teaches elementary school music in Brooklyn. He picks up the phone even though he’s at an assembly. I won. My mom is headed out to class at Queens College, where she has bravely taken up undergraduate study after fifteen years as a homemaker. She is an English Major. I won. My father says he knew it all along. Knew I was a winner. I hang up the phone and dance around some more.

I get dressed for work and skip down the street. I skip past the bar on the corner named Jimmy’s. I won. Past the playground where recess is in session and all these kids are running around and screaming and I wave at them like a queen. I won!

Fast forward to this morning: I wake up knowing that the final draft, copyedits and all, were sent to Shannon yesterday. During the months of drafts going back and forth between us I doubted everything I had once admired in the story. I was terrified that it was really bad writing and that it was picked by mistake. I worked through it, struggled through the anxiety, and yes, had the occasional banana split when the endless outpouring of reassurance, support, and love from my significant other just weren’t enough.

This morning I feel good about the novella again. Nervous too. But good. I’ve been telling everyone I know about the novella getting published, but now I wonder how it will feel to see it on my mother’s coffee table. Are the people at work going to look at me differently?

This blog posting should be about the upcoming election. I should be expressing my firm belief that Sarah Palin’s vice presidential nomination is nothing more than a dirty trick. The Republican Party has totally missed the mark if they think they can swindle the votes of Hillary supporters with such deceit. Furthermore, I am outraged at the blatantly sexist terms used to berate Palin, terms I am hearing more frequently now. These words tend to catch the breath in my throat and have the power to make me feel alienated from the speaker. This political “historical moment” has been fraught with hate speech and frequent belittling of women.

Still, I love the idea that we all have our own historical moments. That morning in Chicago was one for me. Others include when I finally convinced my mother to give college a shot and when I proposed to Jed Dobson, nervously, and he said yes. I can’t wait to hold “Nick Trail’s Thumb” in my hands, to slide it onto the bookshelf, to read aloud from it. Because I love the interactive potential of blogs, I’d like to suggest that other readers share some of their own historical moments in the comments section here. From the political to the personal, for better or for worse, tell us what rocked your world!

Words of the World

2008-08-07T13:37:00.000-07:00

Fourteen-year-old Aida Villarreal-Licona blogged for the young feminist magazine New Moon about her experiences at the Women's World Congress in Madrid. This month, read her entries in full! (Click on a link and scroll down to see the complete entry.)

Tuesday, July 8: "My name is Aida, and for the next week or so I'm going to be reporting from the 2008 Women's World Congress (Mundo de Mujeres) in Madrid, Spain. You may be wondering what exactly that is. The Women's World Congress is a meeting that brings together women and girls from all over the world to discuss issues that involve them." Read more.

Wednesday, July 9: "Beside me sat seven year-old Mbabazi [pictured above.] Mbabazi was lying on the steps, drawing pictures. She told me that she lives in Uganda with her mom, dad, and brother. I met her mother who is the Head of the Gender Mainstreaming Division in Kampala, Uganda." Read more.

Thursday, July 10: "Madrid has a lot of character. [...] People pose as statues, which you may have seen in other cities. There are flamenco dancers, musicians of all kinds, magicians, shops, and so many people. You can buy something like a waffle cone dipped in chocolate with whipped cream while you wander the cobblestone streets." Read more.

Tuesday, July 15: "Somaly Mam is an activist from Cambodia. Her work is to speak out against modern day slavery and the trafficking of human beings. She has experienced being sold herself, but she got free and has devoted her life to speaking out against this injustice." Read more.

The dark labyrinth of conceptual poetries...

2008-06-23T11:25:00.000-07:00

Barbara Henning is the author of two novels (Black Lace and You, Me and the Insects) and a number of poetry collections, including Love Makes Thinking Dark, Detective Sentences and a series of sonnets titled My Autobiography. She currently teaches workshops at the University of Arizona's Poetry Center. The following is an excerpt from Barbara Henning's blog.

Learn the language of mathematics . . . or wander
in vain through a dark labyrinth. (Galileo, Opere V1232)

A week or so ago I attended about half of a poetry conference at the Poetry Center in Tucson curated by the critic Marjorie Perloff. Following various links from the Poetry Center's website for the conference, one is bound to locate an anthology of conceptual writing by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith (UBU). Throughout the conference participants seemed to be responding to the definition of conceptual poetry on this UBU site, and to differentiate it from other poetry movements or approaches in the past. The term conceptual has been used in the past for art and writing, but not as the name of a poetry movement. That and the addition of multi media possibilities seems the only major difference between the 70-80's work and now. Wikipedia, my somewhat democratic mostly reliable sometimes not website offers a simple description of conceptual art.

art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. . . . ' The idea becomes a machine that makes the art' (Sol LeWitt). . . . The inception of the term in the 1960s referred to a strict and focused practice of idea-based art that often defied traditional visual criteria associated with the visual arts in its presentation as text.

In the early nineties I edited a journal with a conceptual artist, Miranda Maher (and also with contributing editors Sally Young, Lewis Warsh, Chris Tysh, Don David, Michael Pelias and Tyrone Williams). In Long News: In the Short Century, we published conceptual-based art and writing mostly from the New York and Language schools. See:

http://myweb.brooklyn.liu.edu/bhenning/long%20news.html.

I was surprised when I read the introduction to the UBU anthology to find that their description was very close to what Miranda Maher and I had written as the philosophy for our journal seventeen years earlier—non-expressive, not led by emotion, a direct presentation of language, using procedures like appropriation, collage, erasure, oulipian constraints, making poetry new, etc. Writing that is off-center, non-mainstream mostly non-referential, idea-generated writing. (With time passing, I've revised my interests to include autobiographical and emotive language and description as it is or reconfigured and re-examined with various conceptual frames and experiments.)

I just emailed Miranda and asked her what she thought of the wiki definition. (To see Miranda's work, go to http://www.mirandamaher.com/)

Hi Barb,

I would say that is a very good working definition. Love Wikipedia. Sol LeWitt was the big daddy of conceptual art. . . . Also, it might be helpful to be aware of some subtle (and not-so-subtle) visual art world distinctions.. 'Conceptually-based' is separate from 'conceptual'. My work is usually described as conceptually-based, rather than conceptual. I think this is because I am interested in what is conveyed by aesthetics and materials and they also play a role in my work. A lot of conceptual visual art is anti-aesthetic... meaning they add nothing that is not about the concept -- some even strip down existing objects/systems to their non-material/aesthetic idea-core.

Another undertone is that "pure" conceptual work tends to valorize the (ego) intellect. Especially the early (60s) work sometimes implied that it is possible to set up a premise and follow it through unsullied by human emotion, subjective foibles etc. Also, the early artists were predominantly white and male. Probably because their working idea of "intellect" was the white/male in power version. For me, the "pure conceptual" still seems to have that going on (either actual white males or women who are exceedingly male-identified). This is rarely spoken of however. Seems to be non-PC. Another under-cover association is that conceptual is the highest art form and all other approaches would be conceptual if they could (but aren't good enough). Many practitioners are heavily invested in that hierarchy. I'd be interested to know if this sort of B.S. has translated into the poetry community...

It's not that I dislike conceptual art -- the rigor of well-executed conceptual art is gorgeous. And when done right it has an austere, intellectual beauty similar to the beauty of pure mathmatics (not that I can understand pure mathmatics). The B.S. comes into it in attitude and personal interaction. . . Perhaps there is a fundamental, internal contradiction . . . . -- Conceptual Art carries an implication of rigor not only in the structure of the work, but also in the makers' self-examination and self-awareness. But artificial, self-soothing hierarchies such as "my art-camp is better than your art-camp" would be the first to go if we were really being thorough in our thinking.

Ironically, it seems to me that truly strict rigor will always (eventually) dismantle hierarchies and lead to compassion.

I hope this helps.

xxxM

Read more here.

A Writer's Afterworld

2008-05-15T11:56:00.000-07:00

Gisela Telis is the Kore Press office manager, and an award-winning freelance writer and photographer whose work centers around science, the environment and sustainable living. She has reported for Audubon, Science, High Country News and National Public Radio, among others.

On an April afternoon I sat talking to a prominent scientist, a woman who’d overcome tremendous odds to become a tenured professor, a leader in her field and a mentor to many younger researchers. She confessed she’d noticed a pattern over the years: her female students were usually more capable than they thought, and her male students were almost never as capable as they believed. It wasn’t that one bested the other, she said—she’d worked with equal numbers of brilliant men and women—but that the women doubted themselves more.

This didn’t surprise her, as it likely won’t surprise any of you. A stranger on a plane asks Tayari Jones if she has a problem with men and she will walk away kicking herself for reassuring him. He will forget the exchange, and she will mull it, write an essay about it. Robin Black has won awards that other writers covet, but still questions whether she has something to say. My friend hears, “Why are you always like this?” from her lover and instead of saying there is no “always” in how I live my life, she wonders if it’s really true, because he was so convincing when he said it.

I think of Persephone and her annual reemergence from the afterworld. For the purposes of living, it doesn’t matter that society’s to blame, that prizing independence and decisive action in boys while teaching girls to be “good sports” conditions us to need permission and approval, to think too much and too long, to more often say, “I don’t care – whatever you want, dear.” We didn’t choose our world; therefore we often absolve ourselves of the requirement to be truthful, to act and speak honestly in spite of our “what if … ?” We live in another sort of afterworld, where we are stymied in the present by anticipating the after. What matters is that every time we give in anew, every time we silence and dismiss ourselves, we give others permission to silence and dismiss us.

Let’s just talk about writing. I was going to start this paragraph with “Although writers of both genders struggle with self-doubt, and despite the real need for precision—the appropriate tone, the exact word—in our craft …” But there I go, qualifying again, thinking I have to say perfectly what I mean and will always mean, even in a necessarily wild and undisciplined first draft, putting precision before impact when I needn’t, at least not yet, putting the audience before my own voice when the likes of Wallace Stegner have insisted no writer ever should.

Instead I’ll tell you this: I have the start of a story sitting on my computer somewhere. In it, a woman walks along a coast, between a string of dunes and the ocean, and though a storm is coming she doesn’t take shelter. I knew what I was seeing when the image first came to me: the Big Sur coast in California, footprints in sand, a woman willing to die. But when I put my voice to it, I put my doubts to it too—where is the storm coming from, who do I want her to be, can I write her and who am I to try? If I’d taken a page from the men’s rulebook and felt entitled to whatever comes out of my head, if I’d followed my voice with conviction, I might already have finished something beautiful, and not abandoned something promising.

Let’s take up arms against our conditioning, our self-defeat. Let’s promise that the next time we write about the wind that crests the coastal dune, we will not stop ourselves with what color the dune, and from where the wind, and am I really a writer in the first place, but will fly with it instead, because that’s what will let us write as we wish to—the trust and courage it takes to speak your mind even if you change it five minutes from now. Let’s consider that despite our every doubt, our voices deserve to be heard and that they will, like Persephone’s, emerge intact and essential from the afterworld.