Persephone Speaks

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.

Sand, Sweat and Gunpowder

2008-04-25T12:55:00.000-07:00

This month's blog features an essay from the forthcoming Kore Press anthology of essays and poetry by military women.

Heather Paxton (center) was an Army Reserve Specialist in the 418th Civil Affairs Battalion stationed in Tikrit, Iraq from 2003-2004. Upon her return she graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia with a B.A. in English Literature. She and her husband live in Columbia, Missouri.

Hussein stood by himself that morning, lurking in the corner of the guard shack. I pulled the HUMVEE up to the designated parking spot, grabbed my M-16, and walked to the front gate. Before he said hello, he handed me a box wrapped in a cheap blue plastic bag. I stared at the bag, not quite sure what to do with it.

I shielded my eyes from the never-ending sun in the clear Iraqi sky. “What’s this?”

“A present. Perfume. Women should smell like women, not men.” On his face was a mischievous grin.

“You need to think of me as a soldier, not a woman.” I said. This wasn’t the first time he had given me a gift, and I was torn between feeling flattered and horrified. His crush on me only seemed to get worse as time went by. His two wives didn’t approve, and neither did my commander.

Hussein was the local Sheik’s first-born son, and a critical asset in catching insurgents and gunrunners in Diyala province. One day it would fall to him to run his tribe and keep his people safe. My job required that I transport him every day from the front gate to the operations center to meet with my superiors. This made my attempts to ignore him difficult.

“I can’t accept this, and you know it.” I thrust the bag back into his hands.

The smirk on his face vanished, and he stared at me with his dark eyes. “Why? You not accept my gift because you a soldier, not a woman? Take it. You a woman too. You make me happy if take gift.”

I snatched the bag from his outstretched hands. “Get in the vehicle.” I barked, “We’re running late.”

After I dropped him off with my superiors, I stole away for a moment to my room. I untied the knot in the plastic bag and took out the box containing the perfume. Inside was a beautiful oblong glass bottle, a mixture of clear and smooth, milky and rough, like fine sandpaper. It was topped with a white cap shaped like a fresh budding blossom. A gold pendant hung from the neck of the bottle: Parfum D’Or.

The only scents I’d smelled for the past four months were sand, sweat, gunpowder and the overpowering cologne that our Iraq interpreters poured on everyday. I pressed the pump and a spray of perfume shot out, saturating the air around me. I savored its spicy bouquet. My heart ached for the world I left behind. I was tired of the stench of fear that clung to every pore of my body. I dreamed, just for a moment, that the fragrance of the perfume could bring me back home, back where I was safe. But no amount of perfume could cover my fear. So I put the bottle into my trunk, washed my face, and went back to work.

Two months later, Hussein was dead. Shot in the chest five times while driving home from work. The day I learned of his death, I took the perfume bottle out of my trunk. I pictured his mangled body on the side of the highway. I pulled the cap off and inhaled, trying to recapture the joy his present gave me, but it only deepened my grief. When he gave it to me, I felt normal, like a woman and not only a soldier. Its scent brought me to my own home, away from bombs and guns and death. Inhaling now, I was sorry I’d never thanked him. He’d given me a sense of home, where I felt safe and where I was loved.

Trying on My Dude Suit

2008-03-25T11:49:00.000-07:00

Janice Erlbaum is the author of GIRLBOMB: A Halfway Homeless Memoir (Villard, March '06), and HAVE YOU FOUND HER: A Memoir (Villard, Feb. '08). She was a contributor to BUST magazine from 1994 through 2007. She lives in her native New York City with her domestic partner, Bill Scurry, and their three cats.

I once did drag as a guy. It was for a gag beauty pageant called the Mr. Lower East Side Contest, put on by some friends of mine in a grotty, underheated theater in that once-bohemian neighborhood in New York City. I bound my chest with an Ace bandage, stuffed my pants with a pair of socks, and spirit-gummed on a beard, moustache, and sideburns. I called myself “Ray Pissed,” a terrible pun, but one that summed up how I felt about a lot of men at the time.

Ray Pissed was an asshole. He shoved the other contestants, snorted and spat on the floor, tried to shove his tongue down the female host’s throat. He kept flexing his biceps and roaring unintelligibly, chest bumping people, heckling, and belching. He was everything I find

abhorrent in stereotypical male behavior. I had an amazing time as Ray.

Then I went back to being a woman. Which is great, you know; I love being female. I’m secretly a huge sexist who suspects that women may in fact be emotionally (and

therefore spiritually and morally) superior to men; I wouldn’t trade my gender for all the male privilege in the world. I had a friend in grad school who confessed that she was transgendered, and hoping to transition to a male identity, and while I tried to be sensitive to her inner truth, in

my head, I was like, “Ugh! What the fuck do you want to become a guy for?”

(This is the part of the essay where I feel obligated to point

out that I love men, I love all

humanity, I’m domestically partnered to a wonderful guy, blah blah blah, I’m not one of those “man-hating lesbians” you’ve heard about [which…do those really exist? Or are they a figment of the popular imagination? I mean, what do lesbians know about hating men, anyway? You want to know about hating some men, ask a straight girl. I kind of think you have to

date ‘em to hate ‘em. But I digress.])

So, yeah. I went back to being a hairy-legged mostly heterosexual feminist woman. I wro

te a memoir about my female experiences as a young female person, with the sex and the drugs and the domestic violence and the self-esteem issues, and my publisher called it Girlbomb and slapped a pink cover on it. I continued writing my column about politics for BUST magazine, covering the rape/abortion/birth control/constant political disenfranchisement beat. That’s me – all woman, and loving it!

Then, last summer, I had an idea. I was sitting around playing sudoku and brooding ab

out this fight I had with a female friend of mine, and I realized that her boyfriend and my domestic partner had really liked each other’s company. Now that she and I were estranged, the guys’ friendship had been interrupted, which seemed kind of sad and unfair. But what if they were to go behind our backs and have some sort of non-sexual friend-affair?

I felt the thrill of a really rich premise rippling through me. A first line popped into my head – “What can I say? He did a great Schwarzenegger.” I put down the sudoku and went

for my laptop. By that night, I’d written five pages.

It was terrific fun, writing as a guy. I felt at liberty to pontificate about

everything, to stop the action and just blow hard about meaningless details, to unabashedly quote movies in the middle of scenes. My character never had to think about what he was doing; he just

acted, often in a manner that was inconsistent with his goals. Through his eyes, I was merciless with my female characters – “We hate the girlfriend,” said my (all-female) writers’ group, unanimously. “She’s so unlikeable.”

“I know,” I gloated. “She’s based on me.”

But as I was wrapping up the first draft, I started to wonder if I was really doing justice to the male voice. I asked Bill, my beloved domestic partner, for some advice.

Of course, he quoted a movie in his answer. “Remember As Good As It Gets, when someone asks Jack Nicholson how he writes such true-to-life female characters? And he goes, ‘I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability?’ Well, I think you should write as a woman, and take away all the emotional awareness.”

“Ah,” I nodded. Sage advice, that.

So I went back, and cut a 40 page story down to 20 pages. It was terse, it was funny, it was completely without emotional context. Which is not to say that my narrator didn’t feel, he just didn’t think about how he felt, or why. I was ready for Judd Apatow to make it into a movie.

And then I sat on it for a few weeks, as I am wont to do with second drafts. When I reread it, I was annoyed. I’d loved my narrator in the first draft; now I couldn’t stand him. And the poor girlfriend – so unfairly maligned! Who were these two-dimensional paper doll characters, and why did they act so stupidly? I sat at my laptop, cutting and pasting, trying to reinstate all the material I’d excised. But it was too late – the body rejected the transplants, and the story died.

Now I think it was probably vain of me to think that I could write from a guy’s point of view. Men have their unique ways of experiencing the world, same as women do; slapping on a fake beard, or a fake obtuse-ness, didn’t make me privy to the realities of living as a man. But I keep thinking I’ll go back to the story one of these days, and see if I can’t revive it. I still love the premise; I even love my narrator again. Hapless, clueless, struggling to be whole, unable to express his needs and wants in a mature or productive fashion – in short, a human being.

So You Have a Problem with Men?

2008-02-19T08:54:00.000-08:00

Tayari Jones is the author of two novels, The Untelling (2005), which won the Lillian C. Smith Award for New Voices, and Leaving Atlanta (2002), which received the Hurston/Wright Award for Debut Fiction. Essence magazine has called Jones "a writer to watch." Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, The University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is an Assistant Professor in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark University. Visit her site at www.tayarijones.com

A few months ago, before the media coverage of Clinton/Obama contest pressured black women to decide if we are "women" before we are "black," I sat beside a black man on an airplane. Since such close quarters lend themselves to small talk, he asked me what I do for a living.

“I’m a writer,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “What do you write? Romances?”

“Nope.”

He gave me a sideways glance. “So you have a problem with men?”

Though I was completely aware of the inanity of his question—of both his questions—I found myself working hard to allay his fears. “Oh no,” I said. “I have no problem with brothers!” Once I had disembarked from the plane, claimed my bags, and settled myself in a taxi cab, I recalled my own voice, treakly sweet with an edge of desperation.

What the hell was that all about?

The man on the plane was about the same age as I am—37 this year. We both came to understand the tradition of African American women’s writing in the context of the maelstrom surrounding Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and Gloria Naylor. And though these women writers came to public prominence because of their talents, they also achieved infamy in the African American community because they were charged with being anti-man.

Perhaps the most biting of the attacks was Ishmael Reed’s claim that “the same charges that Alice Walker makes against black men were made about the Jews in Germany.” Sadly, Reed was not alone; the vicious castigation of Alice Walker was performed on talk shows, in English Departments, in magazines, barbershops, and any other place black folks gathered.

As my own novels have been published, I have been fortunate enough to meet the writers whose work guided me, not only as a craftsperson, but as a thinker. In October of last year, Cheryl Clarke, whose work appears in the Black Feminist Anthology Homegirls, remarked that Ntozake Shange gave the women of her generation permission to “tell a black woman’s story.” Squirming in my seat, I envied her this moment of experiencing the debut of “For Colored Girls,” to be enthralled by the language, the performance, and the narrative, without being frightened by the controversy that would follow.

In her memoir, The Same River Twice: Honoring The Difficult, Alice Walker relates her experiences following backlash to the publication of The Color Purple and to the release of the movie adaptation:

It was said that I hated men, black men in particular; that my work was injurious to black male and female relationships; that my ideas of equality were harmful, even destructive to the black community. … It was a curious experience that always left me feeling as if I had injested poison. (22-23)

It was a curious experience for me as well. As a tender young writer-to-be, I was very much like a small girl who witnesses domestic violence and sexual terrorism between her parents. As I have set my own pen to the page, I recall the experience of Alice Walker. I understand what she meant when she said that the criticism “prevented my working at the depth of thought at which I feel most productive.” So fearful was I of being “unfair” to my male characters, that I relied on my older brother to vet my manuscripts. When he was unwilling to help me with my second novel, he unwittingly forced me to trust my own sense of just representation. For this, I will ways be grateful.

In her famous essay, “Looking For Zora,” Walker writes that she had limited exposure to Black women writers as she was coming of age as a writer herself. Gloria Naylor has remarked that before she went to Yale, she didn’t know that black women wrote books. I sometimes wonder if this was not a mixed blessing as they created their art without fear of being forced out of the circle.

So this brings me back to my experience on the airplane. My seatmate’s question-So you have a problem with (black) men- was really a demand that I establish my loyalty to the Race. Although we engage in philosophical discussion about what “blackness” is, there is no doubt that—whatever it is-- it involves an uncritical appreciation for its men. The consequences of being pronounced a race-traitor are cultural isolation, crippling for a person already marginalized. Of course, the flip side of this is that proving my allegiance requires a toxic silence.

I am a feminist, and I do not resist the label. I didn’t mention this to my seatmate although this is probably the real answer to the question, “What do you write about?” I would not be honest here if I didn’t confess to a secret desire to please this man, for him to tell me that I am still a member of the fold.

But I am veering away from my experience on the plane. Perhaps I can’t stay on task because I am embarrassed by own response, that I didn’t take the high road, seeing this as a “teaching moment.” Or maybe I could have taken the low road and given him a piece of my mind. Perhaps I can’t stay on task because I am ashamed to remember so clearly the moment, to have been so rattled, to feel the need to confess here my reticence.

The antidote, of course, is to return to the substance of the texts that convinced me that a black woman’s story is a story that must be told, that must be passed down. Black women writers of my generation must have a bravery that exceeds that of the women who went before us. Although they are said to have paved the way, I think a better metaphor is that they cleared away the brush. The road down which the next generation will travel is still in need of pavement. There is molten tar to be mixed and spread. The work will be difficult, dangerous, and essential.

Take this Job and Love It

2008-01-23T07:55:00.000-08:00

Evelyn C. White took ten years to research and write her authorized biography of Alice Walker. She has published articles, essays and reviews on issues relating to women of African descent in The Vancouver Sun, Smithsonian, Essence, Ms., Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Enquirer, Seattle Times and The Washington Post. She graduated from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and earned a Master's degree in public administration from Harvard University. White edited The Black Women's Health Book: Speaking For Ourselves (Seal Press, 1994).

The blood snaked toward my left eyebrow. Not wanting to get sent home, I walked calmly to the employee lunchroom. There, I twisted an ice cube from a tray in the fridge, placed it over the gash on my forehead and pulled down my black, woolen ski cap. Reaching for a mailing label that had slipped to the floor, I’d smashed my head on the warehouse conveyor belt, but now the damage was concealed. Back at my work station, I blissfully continued to pack boxes.

Along with the praise of my subject, the shiny dent on my forehead remains the most rewarding gift of my journey with Alice Walker: A Life (2004). Injured after I’d missed the contracted deadline for my book (four years late!), the scar holds special meaning because the warehouse packing job that gave rise to the blemish proved to be my salvation. Although my advance had dwindled, money was not the reason I secured a packing job during a past holiday season. Trained as a reporter who was loathe to miss a deadline, I determined my writing block was best vanquished by adding manual labor to the daily walking regimen that has been the cornerstone of my creative life.

I also needed to counter the cocoon of solitude and silence that is vital for authors but that can also lead to isolation and yes, I’ll say it, insanity. On that note, I also utilized the services of a suicide crisis line, a 1-800 prayer line and, a peer counselor, as I struggled to complete my book. It was not lost on me why legions of writers succumb to alcohol and other mind-altering substances to soothe the stress, strain, self-doubt and paranoia of our profession.

Initially dubious of my 16-hour per week warehouse stint ("it will only take you away from the biography"), my partner soon came to appreciate the healing effects of the job. To be sure, I awoke exhilarated on work days, eager to pack my lunch (carrot sticks, sardine sandwich, apple) and don the mismatched fleece and corduroy ensemble that diminished the chill in the drafty warehouse. Pushing my metal cart through a maze of inventory, I gathered jogging bras, exercise tights, and other women's sporting apparel that I later packed and loaded on the conveyor belt for dispatch around the world.

Conversation during my half-hour lunch break centered on recipes for the delectable homemade tamales, lumpia and samosas that my co-workers, pitying of my damp sardine sandwich, generously shared with me. Deadlines? Those were the dates by which a rising mountain of packages had to be shipped to guarantee delivery by December 25.

After work, I'd prepare dinner, draw a hot bath and descend into near surgical sleep. Mentally refreshed, I was soon able to craft and polish the needed ending for my book. Having clocked six weeks on the job, I gave notice shortly after our warehouse holiday party. In loving affirmation of my labor (on both fronts), my partner gifted me with a Homer Simpson lunch box.

In relinquishing my packing job, I was also mindful of the multitudes who toil in low-wage positions as a means of survival. Their employment options limited by lack of education, language barriers and inadequate training, such workers deserve increased opportunities to improve their lives.

Later, during a chat with Alice Walker, I shared insights I'd gained about creativity and commitment while packing boxes. Author of The Color Purple and other works that have brought her wealth and fame, Walker took my hand and declared: “Honey, I know exactly what you mean. Let me know if there are any other openings at the warehouse.”

The Plum Woman

2007-11-20T14:12:00.000-08:00

Jane Miller is the author of eight collections of poetry, including A Palace of Pearls, from Copper Canyon Press. She is currently writing a book of prose poems, Midnights, in collaboration with the painter Beverly Pepper for publication by Saturnalia Press in 2008.

Persephone Speaks, the name of this site, calls to mind Louise Glück’s new collection, Averno, in which there are two acute poems with the title, “Persephone the Wanderer.” In the first incarnation, Ms. Glück iterates one of her familiar realizations:

… the goddess of the earth

punishes the earth – this is

consistent with what we know of human behavior,

that human beings take profound satisfaction

in doing harm, particularly

unconscious harm:…

In the second poem, Ms. Glück, a woman of fierce intelligence – fierce, from the Latin, ferus, wild, savage – writes:

Winter will end, spring will return.

The small pestering breezes

that I so loved, the idiot yellow flowers –

Spring will return, a dream

based on a falsehood:

that the dead return.

When two people run into each other after a long silence, and one says, “How are you?” the world, according to a dear friend of mine, is then divided into those who say, “I am shopping for ripe plums,” and those who will tell you, or begin to tell you, an entire life story from your last meeting until this chance moment. Who of the two is Louise Glück?

(Can one say? Why ask?) I believe the speaker of the poems in Averno is avid about her circumstance, her day (her moment, actually), but she is not the “plum woman”; rather, is impatient, anxious, maybe with some prior hurt on her mind, angry, in another realm of persistence. It is in this other realm where Ms. Glück is able to see context and legend, history and mythology, together, uncomfortably, but together.

The “plum” moment in a novel, for example, say, Mrs. Dalloway picking out her flowers, is Virginia Woolf’s having it both ways, the moment and the backdrop of the drama. The character is in the lilies, and the novel inhabits history. Glück, not a novelist, has elected her perspective. Our greatest poet of psychic, analytical work gives emotion intellectual context. She robs the moment of its romance. She does not have an erotic, but rather a tragic, relation to the moment.

If, on the other hand, I am the plum person, I am alone; the event is a beautiful, defeated ripe plum, and then it is over. I am harmless, although nothing is harmless; at this moment, I perhaps should be speaking of raising funds to fight cancer – while seemingly harmless, I am at least not entirely without reason, and with good reason, there is some truth to be gotten from the moment. The open market. The heavy sun, already fading.

What one sacrifices, as the plum woman, is history. I mean to say (but I should be listening to a philosopher or therapist about the past, and not speaking as though I get it) I mean to say that the past has its boundaries, and it is good, it is noble to remember it. But if one relives it for the sake of the self alone, one loses the season of the sunlight, one loses the great winds burdening the awnings of the stalls. Perhaps only poets of the ecstatic or the diurnal have the novelist’s opportunity to have it both ways? I understand that Ms. Glück is listening to the lament of the soul, not of the self. Hers is terrifically clarifying language.

My other teacher in graduate school, who, bless his soul, died recently, Jon Anderson, always gave us what he termed (and wrote a poem titled) “Permission to Speak.” Meaning (I think now) to listen. But there is such chatter, such dread, such “pestering breezes.” Does participating in the immediacy of the world develop a soul? Ms. Gluck, typically, brutally clear:

My soul in love was sad

and the moon on my left side

trailed me without hope.

To such endless impressions

we poets give ourselves absolutely,

making, in silence, omen of mere event,

until the world reflects the deepest needs of the soul.

--from “Omens,” after Pushkin

Her noun “silence” signifies an exemplary space worth surrendering to, especially for those of us who love words.

Here’s Jon, speaking from his backyard, his familiar ampersand carrying his voice, his silliness, his self. Though his romance with “every living thing” may risk sounding sentimental, his philosophical intelligence achieves a consciousness beyond self-lacerating comedy or irony. Jon: now ashes landing on Flagstaff’s mountains.

Now that it's quiet in my house I can't really think

without thinking & I can't really talk without meaning

something else, so I shut up. Some days I wish I was

back at the factory, moving heavy objects & grunting.

They start out looking for a handout, then they get used to it,

the birds. What's weird is I think they don't know why

they come anymore, now that I've stopped feeding them.

Frankly, they tend to be undifferentiated & cutely stupid.

Once, when one fell off the wall, I thought I had something,

it was so embarrassed, lying there like a ruffled pompom

with a black tack for a head. Turned out it was dead.

I was so alienated I mailed it back without a stamp, but

I said this prayer for it: Bless every living thing...

…When you're alone every damn word you say has got

to be how you feel, & then you've got to live with it.

I think I'll entertain myself by not experiencing anything.

Word on the mountain is that the wabi of consciousness

is all your living minus all your accumulated experience…

-- from “Exiled on Mountain, Bewail Fate & Praise Autumn”

Jane Miller

Tucson, Arizona

November 2007

Losing the Mental Note

2007-10-16T11:26:00.000-07:00

Anne Landsman (www.annelandsman.com ) is the author of The Rowing Lesson, forthcoming next month from Soho Press.

The family dog's on prednisone because she has allergies that make her gnaw at her paws. I know how this drug has to be administered – a half a tablet twice a day for five days, then half a table once a day, then half a table every other day. It's not good to take a dog off steroids suddenly. My son (who is almost ten) has a loose tooth and the dentist mentioned that he should wiggle it, help it to fall out. If it doesn't fall out soon, it should be pulled. I make a mental note that reads, "See if Adam's wiggling his tooth. If not, make a dentist appointment." Then I lose the mental note. Tooth stays in, at least for the time being. My daughter, Tess, who is twelve, wears a night brace to bed. It makes her mouth hurt, so the orthodontist recommends Motrin which she has been taking for the last three nights. Tonight Tess says she thinks she doesn't need it because she might be getting used to the night brace. If it bothers her, she will call for me. Another mental note: Teach Tess to take the Motrin by herself. A mother in another part of the city has e-mailed about inviting Adam to a Halloween party at her loft. An entertainer is coming and it's going to be fabulous. Adam says yes, and then he says no. He wants to trick-or-treat in our neighborhood with his old friend, Simon. I call up to politely demur and she is reading Harry Potter to her son and they're two chapters away from the end of the seventh book. We haven't even begun. Harry Potter isn't really Adam's thing. Should it be?

In order to write, I have to fight my way out of a dense thicket woven out of my own anxieties. I have to stop worrying about whether my children get enough iron and calcium in their diet, what they're learning (or not learning), whether my older one is spending too much time on the internet, whether my younger one, who is dyslexic, will ever be able to IM his friends. I have to guard my "flexible" schedule because if I give my time to the bake sale, to the Book Fair, I won't write.

I think jealously of Proust, who sat in bed and took care of no one. I hiss at Eugene O'Neill whose wife had a room designed for him that gave him an inspiring view of the sea. I rail against all the male writers who didn't wait for loose teeth to fall out, or notice the dog chewing its paws, or hear the cry of a child with an aching mouth in the middle of the night. I curse them for their obliviousness and their focus. I envy their singlemindedness, their myopic immersion in the life on the page, and only the page.

Luckily Emily Dickinson shows up in these moments, flashing her poems on the back of recipes. I summon up Jane Austen too, sitting in a drawing room full of people. Nobody notices what's she doing, as she fills her mind with sentences, as she remembers everything.

A Word Problem

2007-09-16T17:32:00.001-07:00

Blogger: Wendy Burk

Poet Wendy Burk translated While Light is Built by Tedi Lopez-Mills (Kore Press, 2004) and contributed to the audio CD Autumnal (Kore Press, 2006).

The math seems excruciatingly easy. Take two women; add one Honda Insight; one winding country road; one dark night; one moose, towering symbol of the Maine countryside. Add them all together and what have you got? Can’t be pretty, the mind answers.

Still, the figures don’t tell you that much. Let’s look closer. The women: New England born and bred, sweethearts since college, married just over eight years. Kate’s a theater buff, Erica’s a bookmaker; both writers, singers, horse lovers. The Insight: tiny little hybrid with two seats and a top-secret jet pack concealed in the back. Always gets smiles and waves from strangers on the road. At the moment of our equation, speeding happily along in Aroostook County for a visit to Kate’s parents—Aroostook County in the Maine North Woods, “where moose outnumber people.” The winding country road: trees glinting briefly in headlights from both sides, and the feel of eternal descent, even when the road begins to climb. The dark night: dark. So dark, in fact, that when the headlights shatter it’s impossible to see what’s been hit, by whom. The moose: how big is a moose? About seven feet tall, ten feet long, weighs half a ton or more. When car and moose collide, something’s bound to break; perhaps, we fear, to die.

But don’t be afraid. This story is a little sad, but not too sad. Kate was bruised and jostled; Erica had whiplash; both were shaken and sore. The Insight valiantly gave its life for its human cargo: just what you’d hope and expect a hybrid car to do, right? The moose (as you may have guessed, this is the sad part) was killed. There was fur all over the road, they said.

So take a deep breath; it didn’t add up like you feared. And this is just the start. Now add something new to the equation: books, lots of them, read during recovery at the parents’ house in New Sweden, Maine. Books like Louise Erdrich’s Books and Islands in Ojibwe County, chronicle of a journey through southern Ontario with a big blue van and a nursing baby daughter. Books like William Least Heat Moon’s PrairieErth and River Horse, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit. Add, also, once the insurance payments come in, a considerably larger, but not too gas-greedy, Subaru. And slowly, add a question and a decision in the eyes of our two heroes.

There: it’s decided, and as suddenly as we began to add, it’s time to subtract. Take away one house, one dog, two fluffy cats, a lively social circle; pack up the piano and the books themselves. Take away two jobs and health insurance; subtract COBRA for Erica (courtesy Defense of Marriage Act) and income of any sort. Take away all that’s familiar and safe, and what we have left is two women, a Subaru, and one great idea.

What are they doing? They’re pointing the Subaru west, of course. They’re taking off, heading out. They’re driving away the moose, as they put it, lest the ghost of the moose start driving them away. They’re going to drive, and see, and write about it. How far? Well, all the way here, and all the way back, at a bare minimum. How long? No idea—how many years have they got?

What I love about this is that they wrote their own ticket. They didn’t wait for their grant, their sabbatical, their reprieve, their at-last-the-time-is-right. They have health stuff to deal with, money worries; they miss their pets (responsibly domiciled in New Sweden with the folks, be it said). They’re not being particularly practical; they don’t have a book deal; they don’t know where this will end. They just added it all up for themselves and said, well, your car could be hit by a moose (or, depending on your perspective, your moose could be hit by a car) at any time; you might as well travel with the one you love and leave a written record.

So, as my mom would say, it’s not a word problem, it’s a word opportunity. And what does it add up to for you? Maybe you’re one of those who could leave it all behind tomorrow, like Erica and Kate. Maybe you’re not. But what’s been flickering in your mind while you read these words: any hopes, any regrets, any ideas?

Two women, one Honda Insight, one road, one dark night, one moose, my words, this story, and you—what answer did you get?

To follow Kate and Erica’s epic journey West (and back), visit http://twogirlsontheroad.wordpress.com/.

My Superhero Secret

2007-08-15T20:05:00.000-07:00

Blogger: Tiphanie Yanique

Tiphanie Yanique is an assistant professor of creative writing at Drew University. A former Fulbright Scholar, she has received the Mary Grant Charles Award for fiction, the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Tufts University Africana Prize for Creativity. She is the recipient of a 2008 Pushcart Prize, the 2006 Boston Review Fiction Prize, and was the Parks Fellow/Writer-in-Residence at Rice University. Her short story "The Saving Work" was chosen by Margot Livesey for the 2007 Kore Press Short Fiction Award.

The English Teacher: Sixth Grade
The teacher gave me a "C" on my book report, claiming I’d plagiarized. I hadn’t. I had read the unabridged version of Robin Hood, which had more details and better language than the knockoff we were reading in class. The teacher was American, new to our island. She didn’t want to show weakness, so even after my mother and grandmother protested, the C remained. What could my vexation do? I was eleven. The teacher was an adult. It was a Catholic school, where even parents had little say. So I settled on feeling something else: flattered. I was smarter than the teacher thought. I’d tricked her!

The President of the Honor Society: Eleventh Grade
In high school there were privileges handed out for achievement or commendable behavior. Senior girls didn’t have to wear socks, which were a part of the uniform for everyone else. A particularly coveted privilege was being allowed to go to the head of the lunch line. The food was gross, so this was a privilege only because you didn’t have to lean against the wall, stuck in the line that ribboned through the cafeteria, and because the others watched you with envy. We were practicing for VIP lines at exclusive nightclubs.

When the football team won the championship, Mr. Carillo summoned the whole team and the cheerleaders to the front of the auditorium. When the National Honor Society had induction, officers and new members were also called to the front. I walked up.

The president of the Society, an American kid whose mother taught in the school, wanted to know what I was doing up there.

“They called up the inductees,” I responded.

“You’re an inductee? I didn’t know you were smart.”

I was also a cheerleader and had been called up the day before.

My Freshman Year Roommate: College
She was from the northeast and accustomed to the cold. I was from an island in the Caribbean and had only seen snow twice. But we had other things in common. On the first day we presented pictures of our boyfriends to each other. She was white and had a black boyfriend. I was black and had a white boyfriend. She and I were both going to be psychology majors and we were in the same weed-out psych lecture class. All this assured me that we were going to be friends. After the first quarter we both received the same Dean’s List announcement.

She wasn’t even shy about her disbelief: “How did you get on the Dean’s list? How could you and I both be on the Dean’s list? This isn’t fair.”

I laughed.

“But I’m serious!” She was hysterical with tears.

I went to MIT for the parties and poetry readings. I slept late into the day.

The fact that I am you telling you about this means: a) I am bragging, which feels dangerous, thrilling and narcissistic—especially in print, and b) I am communicating to you what I could not to my teacher, to the president of the National Honor Society, to my freshman roommate and to others I haven’t mentioned.

Joyce Carol Oates writes in her essay “They All Just Went Away,” that she has long wondered about the wellspring of female masochism. She wonders if it’s something learned or something biological that predates culture. But what, she asks, is the evolutionary or cultural advantage of self-hurt in women?

I would like to suggest that it’s a kind of back-up strength. It’s about being able to protect your own incredibleness when it seems others can’t accept it. It’s a private joke. It’s a quiet knowledge to hold above people when you feel they’ve kept you down.

I don’t recommend this kind of strength. It’s a kind of trick power. Isn’t this how women have failed themselves, each other and even men, again and again? We like to play dumb; even us black girls dye our hair blond. We fall in love with men who mistreat us…and we stay with them and say it’s for their own good. We wear shoes we’re more likely to fall down in—and somehow feel more powerful in them. Are women writers any different? I own those shoes. I’ve fallen in love with that man.

Perhaps being Vice President of the National Honor Society or being the snob who read the wrong version of the book wasn’t who I really was. My roommate didn’t know that I stayed up late, studying my brains out in the hallway after the whole dorm had gone to sleep. I wasn’t so sure I deserved the Dean’s List either after her face turned red over it. Hélène Cixous says our writing is like sex. I think it’s the body I was given. Perhaps it doesn’t match my brain. Perhaps all women feel this way.

Of course, it’s no different if you’re a writer.

It’s like this: more women read fiction in America. It’s believed that there are more women literary agents and editors. Yet men still dominate the bookshelves and the bestseller lists and cut the big deals.

It’s like this: the men speak more than the women in writing workshops. And if they’re white men and the women are of color it turns into preacher and congregation. The women might write better, but still they cry or throw up after class.

It’s like this: If you get the job or you get the book contract or you win the prize, it’s a shock. It’s unfair, they say. Perhaps you won because you’re a woman, they say…and if you’re a woman of color then it’s definitely true, and if you’re a woman of color who is from a small island that should only produce beaches and daiquiris (not writers, not intelligent things) then even the other women believe it’s unfair, and even the man you love doesn’t think it’s much to celebrate.

It’s like this: an editor says “we already have (insert the black Caribbean writer you know). We can’t have another.”

And it’s like this: I’m secretly a talented novelist. This cheerleading uniform is only a disguise. I’ve got superhero powers. I can even make myself disappear.

I Aspire To Be Song

2007-06-18T14:27:00.000-07:00

Blogger: Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo's books of poetry include How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems (2002); A Map to the Next World: Poems (2000); The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (1994), which received the Oklahoma Book Arts Award; In Mad Love and War (1990), which received an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award; Secrets from the Center of the World (1989); She Had Some Horses (1983); and What Moon Drove Me to This? (1979). She lives in Hawaii.

Rain. This morning I carried mangoes into the house blessed by a sprinkling of rain. These fruits are evidence that someone loves us…or maybe not. Maybe this ebb and flow is not personal at all, maybe everything just is... For now, I will live in mango heaven for a season. And these are Piri mangoes, considered the best in texture and taste. They are similar to ripe, perfect peaches with a little more body, not as stiff as nectarines. Last night when I headed out the door to the stationary bike under the house, I found another mango near the steps, glistening from late afternoon rains. I breathed mango. When I breathe mango I breathe rain, sun, earth, birds and sex.

I wonder if anyone else out there is ever overwhelmed by multiplicity and depth? Within each raindrop are millions of possibilities, equations, the story of water, of flight, of storms, of the emotional tenor of a city, of plants, of humans, of a thousand years ago, of infinity, of now, of increments of now. Each word bears similar flyways or labyrinths. Each culture defines a slant. Each individual within a culture is yet another angle of memory, of perception. Where does the song start?

Any traces of procrastination I carry comes from an overwhelm of the dissolve into multiplicity. Where do I start?

Yesterday I followed along watching myself for several hours. What is stranger is watching yourself, watching yourself.

My friends Pam Uschuk and Bill Root returned this last week from Nepal. One village they visited the people live as they have always lived, without interference of the money-culture. They sing the sun up, they sing to the clouds, they sing to their animals, they sing to the plants. They move about the day singing and when they go to sleep they are singing. I aspire to be song, as they are.

The spirit of my voice, of my poetry has boundaries and rules. (This is the voice of poetry, lyrics, singing, saxophone-ing.) This voice sets me free yet freedom has strictures. It demands care and honor, even as it takes care. I am warned when I cross over and offend the gift. Yesterday when the barbs of the edge cut into my back, I had to stop and pay attention. A detractor has been attacking me in the comments section of my blog. I have control, can either post or delete the comments. Twice he’s written and each time my li’li’i (small, in Hawaiian) self has responded. Then I delete his nasty note and my response. I delete because I have been using words: the breath behind them, the spirit, in a wasteful manner. My breath, which carries life, essentially, is then being given over to someone who wants to only to hurt me. (And his breath is being given over to something that will conversely hurt him.) Yes, it’s important to speak up for oneself, for justice. The feminist edict of the seventies from Audre Lorde remains planted in my gut: “Your silence will not protect you.” No, it will not. Yet there’s more to this: you must use your words wisely, as a warrior, so they contain power. I wasn’t using my words wisely here, my spirit warned me. I was giving over my power to someone who has made a choice to harass. So I used the delete button, on the screen and within.

I wrestle with this: if all is God/Omnipresence/Breath, then that includes any opposition in this realm. I prefer to turn in the direction of compassion, no matter the arrows and keep moving however imperfectly I move.

My question: why would someone focus energy on destruction? There's too much to do here.

Is it a symptom of the age that words are casual? Do blogs imply casual intimacy?

Early on I was asked to review another native woman’s chapbook of poetry. I honestly reviewed the book, emphasized strengths, and did not labor the weaknesses. After the review came out, in a small magazine, I was attending a large, first-of-its kind gathering of “Third World” writers in California. A voice found me from the crowd at the reception:

"_______ wants to meet you.” There's no mistaking the wisdom of the stomach. It rocked and rolled. Then there she was, the poet, all six feet of her, a big woman, arms folded across her chest. "I wanted to kill you." I made quick note that I wouldn’t stand a chance in a free-for-all, instead, I maneuvered coffee in a nearby restaurant. She began calling me for advice, often the calls turned to accusation of crimes by others. Ten years after our meeting we attended a dinner of native and black women writers in a restaurant in Montreal. Audre and I sat across from each other. See, this is what we dreamed: Native and black women eating and speaking together. The poet kept drinking, then stood up and made a speech denouncing me. She said I wrote the only bad review ever of her writing. Then she kept going, against others. Recently I reread the review. I was surprised to note it was actually generous; there were no barbs. I have not seen the poet in years. She has a huge gift, and she is haunted.

I did begin to question the intent of many reviews, and why many aggressive reviewers feel that it is their place to protect the field from mediocrity with their astute and often nasty observations. I say, acknowledge that which moves and accomplishes. Don’t speak of anything that doesn’t. I don’t review. I am better at the saxophone than reviewing. Yet, we need reviewers. How many books of poetry were published last year? How many of those worthy of review were reviewed?

Aggressive and punitive reviewers play to an audience more than to the text. Many audiences get a hit off of vicious and sensationalistic behavior, in print or performance. Cheap thrills are easy, but not so cheap. I walked out of a Hunter S. Thompson performance. He was late and terribly drunk when he finally made it to the stage. The packed house of Midwestern college students grew rowdier as we waited. When he finally staggered on stage, crowd members taunted him for a reaction; he bit. It was ugly. I left.

I’ve always admired the poetry of Charles Bukowski. No, this isn’t a PC revelation. Bukowski was/is irreverent and his observations were often misogynistic. His work is uneven, tends to maudlin indulgence, yet through his intimate supplications, he knew absolutely that he depended on the power of women. I responded to his form of questioning God. And I tend to give slack more easily if a voice is genuine. Much poetry published these days is shining tight with technique, but rings empty. I never saw Bukowski perform, but have seen footage. The audience howled back and encouraged his drunken act.

Both Bukowski and Thompson were taken over by the alcohol spirit. That spirit is attractive, will dance with you, give you confidence, will help you fly. It is similar to being taken over by vision, by words, by the muse of poetry. We do not create on our own. And then what happens when the mask is off, when the sun comes up and all your companions have left? Poetry must stand on its own two feet, between worlds. It wasn’t Bukowski or Thompson starring in their performances, it was the alcohol spirit.

I’m reading everything the Maori writer, Patricia Grace has written. Here’s a passage from Tu, her novel about war:

“Off I ran, out of the iron gates and away to war.”
“And it was the thousand eyes that made the color of his skin a shame, that made him catch his breath before going into the greengrocers or getting on a bus, that made him unable to go into a shop without buying something. It was the thousand eyes and the thoughts that went behind him that halted him."

And from a short story in the collection, The Sky People:

“It was instinct that caused Earth to tuck these bright things away. Neither she nor Sky realised at the time that their children could become their enemies, or they themselves could be enslaved…But later they began to ask themselves where they’d gone wrong. Was it because of their separation that these children had become so grasping, so out of control? Had Sky been too distant? Had Earth been too over-compensating? What could they have done about it anyway? Was it all a question of light?”

And there’s more... She is an exquisite storyteller. The stories always depart and return to the intimacy of home, of family, though the characters, and space might travel the multiplicity of time.

We always return home, even if we are in constant motion away from home. I am in the middle of studying Mvskoke tribal music forms, the blues and jazz and trying to figure out a crossroads. I am, just as my people are, a crossroads of these forms. America is a crossroads of these forms. What makes a challenge in creating new songs is that in the Mvskoke traditional (non-Christian) song forms women don’t sing. So I remake the form so it’s mine. Isn’t this what Adrienne Rich did when she left the harbor of the patriarchy of form and rhyme? And I am indebted Danny Lopez, the Tohono O’odham writer who made his own song forms. The traditional ones come with their rules, for their own protection as well as for the protection of the listener.

Here’s a song, from the poem, “Morning Song” translated into Mvksoke, with the help of Ted Isham and Rosemary McCombs Maxey:

Morning Song

Hvt-hv-yvt-kē
e-kv-nv em-mv-he-ri-ces

Hvt-hv-yvt-kē
e-kv-nv em-mv-he-ri-ces
v-ker-ric-kv e-to-kv-let.

Hvt-hv-yvt-kat te-lv-cet v-cum-kes.
He-ru-sat mvo e-to-ho-cet.

'Po-fvn-kv 'ra-fun' we-cah-lē sa-cum-kvt-os.
Ce-pen-kvh-le-kos
Ce-pen-kvh-le-kos

The red dawn is now is rearranging the earth
Thought by thought
Beauty by beauty

Each sunrise a link on the ladder

Thought by thought
Beauty by beauty

The ladder the backbone of shimmering deity
Thought by thought
Beauty by beauty

Child stirring in the web of your mother
Don’t be afraid
Old man turning to walk through the door

Don’t be afraid
Do not be afraid.

Hvt-hv-yvt-kē
e-kv-nv em-mv-he-ri-ces
v-ker-ric-kv e-to-kv-let.
E-to-go-let
He-ru-sat mvo e-to-ho-cet.

Hvt-hv-yvt-kat te-lv-cet
v-cum-ke

Joy Harjo June 6, 2007 Honolulu

Political Poetry: Who We Engage

2007-05-16T18:43:00.000-07:00

Blogger: Spring Ulmer, Kore Press First Book Award Winner for 2007 for her manuscript Benjamin's Spectacles, selected by Sonia Sanchez and due for publication this summer

I want to address the subject of political poetry today by responding to David Wojahn’s essay “Maggie’s Farm No More: The Fate of Political Poetry,” featured in this month’s The Writer’s Chronicle. I was struck, reading Wojahn’s essay, by his overwhelming focus on male poets. And no, I am not here to rewrite a Virginia Woolf essay and debate whether women or men are more peaceful, but I do think that to approach political poetry as Wojahn does in this essay is limiting -- not only to the art of poetry and the diversity of its practitioners, but to the possibilities of its ability to act as a social catalyst.

I believe I understand where Wojahn is coming from, as I grew up under the tutelage of parents who participated in the Civil Rights Movement, actively protested the Vietnam War, and then poured themselves into a carving out a largely self-sufficient, back-to-the-land lifestyle for themselves. It makes sense, to me, in other words, that Wojahn begins his essay with Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm,” a refashioned old folk tune. I, too, trace my radical roots back to the land and its songs and speeches inciting and commemorating struggles against the imperialist, capitalist system.

Yet, I am left undeniably cold when Wojahn then compares Dylan’s artistic melding of the personal with the political to W. S. Merwin, Robert Duncan, George Oppen, Robert Lowell, Hayden Carruth and other male poets of the 1960s, while simultaneously dismissing women writers Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, and Rita Dove. Wojahn accuses these women (and Robert Bly) of being unable to “blend a desire for personal mythmaking with social consciousness” and claims that their protest poetry is just “decidedly bad.” And I grow progressively colder as Wojahn professes the dated quality of Carolyn Forché’s writing (her poetry has, he argues, “passed into oblivion”) and then applauds the work of Milosz, Herbert, Hikmet, Ko Un, Vallejo -- some of whose voices Wojahn forgets to acknowledge Forché helped bring to North American and English-speaking readers. Can it really be that Adrienne Rich is the only woman (and Komunyaka the one North American male of color) Wojahn salvages from the wreck of what he calls “bad” political poetry? What, too, does it signify when Wojahn thereafter completely disregards all confessional poetry and language poetry? I smell something aslant.

Let me say now that I hope not to fall into the trap of an attack. I am not trying to destroy the Left or to debase what Wojahn sets out to say -- which is that good political poetry isn’t to be found in poems on the Poets Against the War website, marinated as these poems are, Wojahn insists, in North American culture that kills poetry’s complexity, stuffing it, instead, full of predetermined accepted definitions of the social and the personal. Rather, I am interested in pushing this dialogue to a more complex emotional and intellectual space.

What I would like to do is to illuminate the politics inherent to being a non-white-male poet in North America -- a politics which is synonymous with the struggle against the erasure, whitewashing or marking and romanticizing of writings by silenced populations, including migrant farm-workers: today’s sharecroppers. Perhaps, it occurs to me, our voices aren’t being heard because so many white men are still too busy arguing about what good and bad writing is and providing recipes for the crafting of such writing, rather than listening to and providing openings for the voices of those who cannot afford time enough to write.

This summer I went to Rwanda in an effort to throw aside my cynicism. There, I helped build a vocational school for children who are unable to attend an academic school because of the enormous educational fees. (Some of these students asked me, personally, to help find them sponsorships. Click here for more information.)

When I think of these children, I remember their dreams and how they sang and how one boy crafted paper decorations that transformed the ceiling of his windowless one room home into a fluttering sanctuary of poetry. When I listen to Wojahn’s need for “good” political poetry, I want to tell him that this poetry is around us and inside us. It doesn’t have to do with crafting the perfect poem; it has to do with getting our hands dirty. I didn’t have to go to Rwanda to find this out; these same lessons were also presented to me as I taught English composition at the University of Arizona -- the true teaching of which occurred one-on-one as I took the time to listen to my students’ stories. The lessons were also present when I taught writing and photography to migrant farmworkers’ children -- many of whom work all day in corn fields and go to school at night. As I drove around from camp to camp, teaching on picnic tables or in other teachers’ classrooms throughout Illinois, I never wondered whether my students’ poems were good or not. And when teenage Yvonne Flores wrote about her ten-hour work day, I did not question the quality or worth of the political poetry I heard in her voice, as she penned, “The last cuadro was hard cause the machine didn’t take out any of the espigas.”

Political poetry today is at the cusp of awakening. It can be found in Illinois’ fields, in Iraqi bloggers’ websites, in music that travels through illiterate communities, as well as in discussions between impassioned students at universities. To be aware of its omnipresent gift, maybe we need to change our definition of what changes us socially, consciously, and politically.

I was writing yesterday to Lisa Bowden at Kore Press about how I had feared listening to the CD she edited, Autumnal, as my father is sick with a rare blood cancer and I didn’t want words of grief to plunge me into depression. I shouldn’t have feared. The words led me away from my fear and let me go into the word… I heard women’s voices. Jane’s flute and piano, Niki’s washing, Frances’s goldfinch. If only all loss was so commemorated, I thought. If only each of us could be so recognized. And I thought of those suffering in Iraq, Afghanistan, and of those with AIDS, cancer, of survivors in Rwanda and all over the world, and of women who live through genocide, only to be rejected by their families and husbands because they have been raped.

I thanked Lisa for the CD, and confessed that before my manuscript, Benjamin’s Spectacles, was selected by Sonia Sanchez for Kore Press’s First Book Award, I had just about accepted that writing for me would be a solitary practice, as I had become convinced that the publishing world was too high-society and connection-oriented to break into. Now, with my first book inching up over the horizon, I keep thinking of all the other deserving people out there whose voices aren’t heard. Their voices keep me committed to doing the work that is grown through dialogue and action; work that publishers like Kore Press do and wholeheartedly embody.

So, to slowly weave my way back to Wojahn’s argument and his assertion of the “good” versus the “bad” political poem: I used to be aggressive and self-hating in my own need to proclaim others’ rights; I bullied and fought. Today, overlapping social locations between many genders and races, cultures, classes, abilities, and geographies, colors me. The last thing I desire now is the fascism that so often claims to be activism; real activism seems more and more contemplative and hands-on to me these days. I think of Sonia Sanchez and her challenging the Black Panthers to be more inclusive of women, and of the times in the past that I looked to separatist movements for inspiration. Now, I am seeing more of the worldly hate and invasions as separatist. The good/bad dichotomy, as I see it, doesn’t really cut it any more.

Today I see more vividly than ever the limits of academia and of my own privilege, but I feel less trapped by my ethics, which at one time offered me no way to accept myself and provided me little compassion for anyone but the absolute underdog. I am still struggling to get myself to a place of permission, so that I am better able to write, and hence, to better give. One thing that helps me is reading. Reading a multiplicity of voices, a multiplicity of poetry. Political poetry is more than what is on a page. It is real, lived. It is how we speak and how we listen and who we engage.