Silverman’s second memoir, Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction (W.W. Norton & Company, 2008) was made into a Lifetime TV Original Movie, starring  dancer and actress, Sally Pressman, who currently appears on the Lifetime Television series, Army Wives.

Sue William Silverman

As a professional speaker and writer, Silverman has appeared on many nationally syndicated radio and TV programs, including The View and Anderson Cooper on CNN.  She will be moderating a panel at the 2012 annual AWP Conference in Chicago about Shifting Voices in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction, with panelists Connie May Fowler, Xu Xi, Robert Vivian, and Philip Graham.

Silverman teaches in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in Michigan with her partner, poet Marc Sheehan,
and their two cats.

Derek Alger:  How’s the world look from western Michigan these days?

Sue William Silverman: These long, winter days are bleak and gray. All winter I wait for summer. I grew up in the West Indies, and I still feel like an islander! But I live only five blocks from Lake Michigan, and it’s gorgeous here in the warm months. So, really, I shouldn’t complain.

I live in a small town, without much to do.  Which is fine with me. I have lots of time to write and work with my students. I teach in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.  It’s a low-residency program, which means we go to campus twice a year, ten days each, at the beginning and end of the semester, for intensive workshops, lectures, and readings. Then, the rest of the semester, I work from home, long-distance, with five students who live all over the country. Once a month they send me their writing to be critiqued. I love to teach in this way. Working with only five students, I’m able to give them an enormous amount of personal attention. It’s gratifying to watch their writing grow and evolve over the semester.

DA:   You were a writer before you ever started writing.

SWS: Yes! I hoarded words in my mind. I envisioned scenes in my head.  But for years I lacked the self-confidence to actually place these words on pieces of paper. I think it comes from growing up in my incestuous family, where language was all upside down.  I could never speak my truth, the truth of this dark, destructive relationship I had with my father.  For example, since my father showed his love sexually, I didn’t know the difference between “love” and “sex” – the words or the feelings associated with them. After all, my father told me he loved me when he sexually molested me.

Language, as well as definitions for words, was confusing, so, for years, I was very tentative about actually committing a word to paper.

DA:  Tell us about the changing geographical spheres of your childhood.

SWS: I was born in Washington, D. C., where my father was chief counsel of Trust Territories in the Department of the Interior. Then, when I was in second grade, my family moved to St. Thomas, where my father opened a bank.  We left the island when I was in seventh grade, moving to suburban New Jersey. And, after that, I’ve moved around quite a bit: Boston, back to Washington, D. C., Texas, Missouri, Georgia. Now Michigan.

So I don’t really have a sense of home.  Or one home.

Every place I’ve lived has influenced my writing. When I write about St. Thomas, for example, I tend to have a very specific Caribbean vocabulary – which is different, say, from writing about New Jersey, with my New Jersey vocabulary – if that makes sense! As I set any given piece of writing in a particular place I’ve lived, each has its own scents and sounds, so this affects the imagery I use, the vocabulary I “taste.”

DA:  Your family moved to New Jersey where you graduated from high school.

SWS:  Moving away from the West Indies was culture shock, for sure. I was a teenager then and I just wanted to fit in. But I arrived at Glen Rock High School in my madras clothes and tanned skin.  I looked so different from the other students. I sounded different, too, as I’d picked up a bit of a West Indian accent.

But I set out to fit in as quickly as possible.  I made friends.  I acted like everyone else. Now, looking back on it, I was, ironically, probably more interesting as a Caribbean girl! But what do teenagers know?

DA:  I know as a teen I thought I knew much more than I really did.

SWS: I never felt as if Glen Rock was home – any more than any other place I’ve lived. To me, in many ways, the only sense of home I have are the words and memories in my head. Home is the color of frangipani flowers in the Caribbean; the scent of crimson leaves in autumn New Jersey; the red brick of Back Bay Boston, where I went to college, and so on.

DA:  Did you feel pressured or was attending college a given.

SWS: My family thought education was very important. It was assumed I’d go to college. At the same time, my mother told me that I had to go to college to meet a husband. How antiquated does that sound?  And I didn’t meet my husband in college!

But I had no mentors growing up, or anyone guiding me about what to major in – nothing like that.  On a positive note, summers, in college, I worked on Capitol Hill as an intern. I loved that. After graduation, I returned to Capitol Hill to work for a few years as a legislative and administrative aide.

DA:  You gained valuable experience writing.

SWS: Yes. It’s kind of ironic. While working on Capitol Hill I did a lot of writing: I wrote speeches and inserts for the Congressional Record for various politicians. I wrote in their voices. I guess I had to do that before I finally learned to write in my own voice.

DA:  A turning point was moving to Galveston.

SWS: Yes. After marrying a man I met in D. C., we moved when he got a job as director of the Galveston Historical Foundation.

This is where I started to write. It may be that Galveston reminded me of St. Thomas – a tropical island – which set off a sensory chain reaction.  One day, seemingly out of nowhere, I set up a card table in the guest room in our apartment, put a Smith-Corona portable typewriter on it, bought a sheaf of canary- yellow typing paper, sat down, and began. At that point, I would call it more typing than writing. But I produced about one thousand pages before I realized I didn’t know how to write! So I took an adult education class at the University of Houston.

No one was talking about memoir or creative nonfiction back then, so I set out to write a novel. Thank goodness it was never published. I actually ended up with about four or five bad novels.  They were mainly about incestuous relationships and alienated teenage girls.  Yet even though these novels lacked an emotionally authentic voice, still, over time, I did learn how to write. I was just in the wrong genre. I didn’t find my authentic voice as a writer until I switched to creative nonfiction, years later.

DA:  You paid your dues going your own apprenticeship as a writer learning the craft.

SWS: I did. With every word I wrote I was getting closer to my true writing self, which finally emerged in my two memoirs.

DA: You were forced to live a traumatic double life as a child, one veiled in deep secrecy.

SWS: Yes. Even though, growing up, I lived in this incestuous family, no one ever talked about it. I don’t even ever remember hearing the word “incest” until college.

Throughout my childhood, I lived a double life: on the surface, we seemed like a perfect family. But that was a mask that hid the secret of what my father did to me in private. That was my reality.  So, in one sense, it even seemed normal. That’s how strong denial is. I just remember feeling numb most of the time. I watched how other girls acted, and mimicked them.

Later, there was much shame and confusion and anger. How could a father who said he loved me have hurt me?  And there was anger toward my mother for not protecting me. It took many years of therapy to process all of this!

DA:  You captured this horrific experience in your memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You.

SWS: I began that memoir two weeks after my parents died, within six days of each other, and at the urging of my therapist, who suggested I stop writing fiction and tell my true story. He was the first person to hear the real “me.” To be honest, at that point, I’d never even read a memoir…except for The Diary of Anne Frank. Anyway, I sat down at my computer, and, in three months, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You just “fell” out of me.

While writing that book, I never thought about how it might be perceived, what family or friends might think, or even about possible publication. I totally shut out the world. At that point in the process, all that mattered was getting the words down on the page.

To write memoir is to understand and make sense of experience, to give a life an organization, to discover the metaphors of one’s narrative. It’s not simply to say, “this happened to me, then this happened to me, then this next thing happened to me.”  “What happened” is part of it. But it’s much more interesting to discover the story behind the story – what you could never have known at the time of the events – but what you (the author) discover about those events now by reflecting upon them.  So, for example, in “Because I Remember Terror…,” I learned how growing up without a true language, or voice, affected me.

Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You

SWS: I was shocked. The odd thing about winning a literary award and getting published is that you are still the same writer, the same person as before this public recognition.  But the world perceives you differently.

All of a sudden people saw me as a writer! Which is lovely, don’t get me wrong. And publishing the book opened up many opportunities.  But, inside, I’m still the same person I was before I got published.  Well, okay, maybe I have a bit more self–confidence!

DA:  You tackled a difficult subject in your second memoir, Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, an issue that is minimized by many.

SWS: That was a tough book to write.

First, on a personal level, I had much more shame about struggling with sex addiction than being an incest survivor.  Yes, the addiction was a result of the childhood incest – since my father saw me as a sex object, that’s how I saw myself – and, I thought that’s the only way any man would see me.  Still, it’s difficult to convey sympathy for an adult woman having affairs with married, emotionally dangerous men.

In the writing of the book, this was my challenge and my struggle: Initially, I found it difficult to discover an emotionally authentic voice to convey the whole of the experience.  In early drafts, I only heard the voice of the addict – that tough, edgy persona.  But with just that addict voice, it was one-dimensional – how boring to read only about the unenlightened life of a sex addict.  It was like I lopped off half of my experience.  It took about five years to hear the voice of the woman struggling to get sober.  While the book itself is a weaving together of these two voices, still, the sober voice is at the heart of Love Sick.  And finally it all coalesced.

DA:  You also are the author of Fearless Confession: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir.

SWS: I think of Fearless Confessions as a guidebook for people who want to take possession of their lives by putting their experiences down on paper.

I wanted the book to sound friendly, inviting, intimate: we’re all writers, we’re all in this together. It became, in part, a memoir about my writing journey.  However, there is plenty of craft information in it, too, chapters about metaphor, voice, structure, the use of sensory detail.  It contains many writing exercises that help writers navigate a range of issues from craft to ethics to marketing. I also have a chapter about the importance of memoir, and how memoir is as legitimate a genre as poetry and fiction – just taking on all the naysayers out there who call us navel gazers!

DA:  You’ve also published a poetry collection, Hieroglyphics in Neon.

SWS: After I finished the two memoirs, I needed to write something very different. And, since my partner, Marc Sheehan, is a poet, he suggested I try poetry. Well, at first this was scary. Line breaks terrified me. I’d never even written bad high-school poetry. But Marc was a great teacher.  And he helped me overcome my fear of line breaks.

Writing this collection turned out to be a truly joyful – freeing – experience. I mean, you can’t really say that writing about incest and sex addiction is going to be joyful!  One thing I love about poetry is the ability to “time travel” without having to get people in and out of doors as you do in prose. Plus, I could pretend, say, to be Queen Hatasu, an Egyptian pharaoh. I loved writing persona poems.

DA:  What’s on the horizon?

SWS: I just finished writing what I call a cultural memoir, The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew.  Through a series of linked essays, the manuscript chronicles my search for authentic self-identity – a search complicated by my conflicted feelings toward Judaism and my various efforts to “pass” as Christian. (I wanted to be Christian since my Jewish father sexually molested me.) At the heart of this journey are three separate encounters with 1960s pop-music icon, turned Christian provocateur, Pat Boone, who plays a pivotal role in my desire to belong to the dominant culture.

This book has a much more ironic voice than the voice(s) of my previous books. My first memoir is written in the voice of a young, scared child trying to survive her childhood. Then, in Love Sick, there’s the voice of the addict as well as the more sober voice.  In this new book, as I say, I implement an ironic tone as I try to come to terms with my religion.

That’s one thing I love about creative nonfiction: there are endless ways to discover new voices and additional stories.  We already have these different identities, so as writers we need only discover the various voices in order to explore them on the page.

Until I discover the voice to examine events, they remain murky – blending and bleeding together.  It is only by writing that I am fully able to understand these identities and make sense of my whole life.

Sue William Silverman is a post from: Pif Magazine

A native New Yorker, Allen, also known for her art and photography, left home at 20 to live in Europe and has traveled extensively over the years. Her art is in a collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and over the years, she has had exhibits in both the United States and Europe.

Roberta Allen

Allen’s travels have inspired her writing, and she is the author of the nonfiction book, Amazon Dream (City Lights Publishers, 1992). She has also written The Playful Way to Serious Writing (Mariner Books, 1997), Fast Fiction in Five Minutes (Story Press, 1997) and The Playful Way to Knowing Yourself: A Creative Workbook to Inspire Self-Discovery (Mariner, 2003).

Allen taught creative writing at The New School from 1992 to 2010, has taught in the Writing Program at Columbia University, and currently teaches private writings workshops in New York City.

Derek Alger: Congratulations, your novel, The Dreaming Girl, has come out in a new edition with a glowing introduction by Luisa Valenzuela.

Roberta Allen: It must have been 1986 when a mutual friend, an Argentine artist, introduced me to Luisa Valenzuela. We loved each other’s stories and have been friends ever since, though Luisa moved back to Buenas Aires quite a few years ago. The stories in her book Other Weapons, made a deep impression on me and that collection remains one of my favorites. I admire all her writing. Recently, her book Dark Desires And The Others was published by Dalkey Archive. She calls it an “apocryphal autobiography” about her years in New York. It’s full of wonderful lines like “Fear doesn’t have a name; it’s just the steady beat underneath a smile.”

DA: How did The Dreaming Girl come about?

RA: I was commissioned by Wildlife International Magazine to write a piece about visiting the howler monkey sanctuary in Belize. I was the first tourist. It was an amazing experience. The only visitors before me had been scientists who were accustomed to roughing it. When I saw that the villagers were building huts for tourists without windows, I stopped them. This was the first conservation project where the local Creole people, instead of being displaced, became caretakers of the monkeys whose eerie roars–if indeed one can call the cacophony of sounds they make “roars”–can be heard for a couple of miles.

I wrote a number of stories that take place in Belize before I began writing The Dreaming Girl. I had a lot of material but I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it after I wrote the magazine article. So I just let it gestate for a while. When I started writing it, I knew that when I had the right rhythm I would be able to write the book, even though I wasn’t sure what the book would be. I sort of let the book write itself. I finished it in a year. My agent sent it out to one large publishing house at a time because it was “special”. Finally a small press, Painted Leaf, published it in 2000, but the press and the distributor went out of business after good reviews so I was happy when Ellipsis Press recently decided to republish it.

DA: What were your impressions of Belize?

RA: In Belize City, soon after I arrived, I watched an American woman get mugged across the street. A guy grabbed her handbag and ran off. Her blood curdling screams brought a couple of local men to her rescue. They chased after the thief and retrieved her bag. From the sound of her screams, I thought at first that he had slit her throat. I was warned in Belize City that there were a lot of junkies but hey, I was from New York I told the worriers.

I loved Belize, especially the rain forests which were far more lush than the Amazon had been in the dry season. In Belize, there were only three main roads at the time. To get to Francis Ford Coppola in the interior, for example, you had to hire an expat to fly you in. I wasn’t visiting Francis Ford Coppola or taking any planes however. Rains had washed out the road to the Jaguar Sanctuary in the south where I wanted to go so I had to take the bus west which is what I say in the novel. I figured I would see as much of the country as I could. Everywhere were mounds of Mayan ruins which the country couldn’t afford to excavate, though I did see one extraordinary city before it was opened to the public that had just been unearthed by scientists from Stanford University.

DA: You were an accomplished artist before you were a writer.

RA: I am still an artist. I was drawing from the age of two, my mother said. Drawing was my survival. There was never any question about my being an artist when I grew up, though my mother wanted me to be a secretary like her or a dental hygienist like a former classmate of mine from grade school. I needed to get far away from her to become a painter, which is why I went to Europe alone at 20. I was also encouraged to travel by a famous scientist. I loved Amsterdam and had my first painting exhibition there at Galerie 845. My first paintings were surreal abstractions. Organic forms. But I quickly moved on to college, assemblage, sculpture, and finally conceptual art.

DA: Painting and writing went together for you.

RA: I learned how to write by describing my art which combined images and text and explored the meaning of signs. By then, I was back living in New York, though I had traveled extensively in Europe, lived also in Athens and Berlin, and then Mexico for a while. I wonder now how I was able to do all that since I never had any money. But I guess when you’re young you find a way. During the 70s and early 80s I was very active in the art world here and in Europe. I had two solo shows at P.S. 1, which is now part of MoMA, many gallery exhibitions, including four at John Weber Gallery, New York, a museum show in Munich and one later in Australia where I had a fellowship from the State Museum in Perth. I lived there for more than six months.

DA: Your traveling days, resulted, appropriately enough, in your book, Traveling Woman.

RA: Since I used text in my art, it was not such a big leap to start writing stories and it seems inevitable to me now that I would write about my travels which I did in my first collection of short shorts or flash fiction as it’s called now, The Traveling Woman.

DA: Your book, Amazon Dream, about traveling in the Peruvian Amazon is an intriguing work.

RA: I had always wanted to go to the Amazon. It was a childhood dream. I thought I would feel “free” there. My mother and grandmother kept me helpless and dependent. I didn’t know how to tie my shoes when I was 8 1/2.

DA: I think I was in second grade before I could tie mine.

RA: Initially, I made a trip with a very small group through Peru not long after the tourist train to Machu Picchu had been bombed by terrorists. We ended up in the Amazon and I was amazed by everything. I did feel free and more alive than I’d ever felt. And the art by the Shipibo Indians just overwhelmed me. When I was back in New York, I got to know the man who was the expert on Shipibo art and made a trip alone six months later. I lived my dream. It was a wondrous experience, though there were some scary moments. I didn’t go there to write a book but when I returned, my agent at the time said that not many women have travelled alone in the Amazon and he thought I should write about it. So I did.

DA: I see we both were in writing workshops with Robert Phelps.

RA: I took a writing workshop with Robert Phelps at The New School when I was just starting The Traveling Woman. He really encouraged me. It was a very positive experience. I think he was the reason I wanted to teach there later, though I never imagined I’d be teaching at The New School for eighteen years.

Once I started writing and teaching, I really devoted myself to it for the next twenty years or more. In between projects, I still made art, mostly photo-based works and drawings but I was out of the art world.

DA: Your story collection, Certain People, is brilliantly comprised of what might be called ultra short fiction.

RA: Yes, I like that: the characters are exposed–not developed. I met some very interesting characters in Australia. The stories that take place in Australia came very fast once I was back in New York. I could hardly keep up with myself. When I knew I had the sweep of the story– as I like to call it–in a first draft, I knew I was halfway there.

DA: Your book, Fast Fiction: Creating Fiction in Five Minutes, offers some very useful tips and lessons.

Fast Fiction: Creating Fiction in Five Minutes

RA: Story Press which was part of Writer’s Digest called my agent at the time (a different agent) and asked if any of his clients wanted to do a writing book. I was going to Mali to write a feature on the Dogon people for The Sophisticated Traveler of The New York Times so I dashed off a proposal just before I left. I wanted to do a book about writing short short stories but in the end I had to include a section about using my technique to write longer stories and novels. It’s true that my energy method can be used for all kinds and lengths of creative writing — especially for revisions where it’s essential to keep that excitement going, even while using both intuition and thought. I still hear from people who love that book. Early on, when I started teaching privately, I saw how my students’ work transformed when they tapped into the material that really moved them. I was shocked, in fact, when I saw how the quality of the writing soared. In some cases it was as though a completely different person was writing. My later book The Playful Way To Serious Writing expands on this method and offers a lot more visual prompts. That book and The Playful Way To Knowing Yourself were fun to do since I used a lot of my photographs and even some drawings in exercises. In my classes I often projected photographs to use as writing prompts for students.

DA: Tell us how you started teaching your own workshop.

RA: While I was writing stories, I missed working with my hands so I started hand painting little boxes and jewelry with realistic fruits and vegetables. At that time, a woman who came to a reading said she wanted to study with me. I told her that if she found two more students I would start a class. She did. That was 1991. I’m still holding fiction and memoir workshops in Chelsea. The next one starts Wednesday January 18. I also work 1-to-1 in person or by email and phone.

DA: You’re also known for your photography.

RA: I’ve always loved photography but this is the first time I ever had an exhibition of photographs that were not photo-based conceptual art. Ingrid Dinter, a dealer who had a gallery in Chelsea, liked one of the photos I posted on facebook. That’s how it started. Now I’m beginning a project that actually combines my writing and photography in a new way.

http://www.dinterfineart.com/html/project.html

Roberta Allen is a post from: Pif Magazine

Bishop is also the author of the non-fiction books, My Mother Who Is Me: Life Stories From Jamaican Women in New York, and Writers Who Paint/Painters Who Write: Three Jamaican Artists.

A graduate of New York University with an MA in English & American Literature, and an MFA in Fiction Writing, Bishop was awarded a UNESCO/Fulbright Fellow, Paris, France in 2009/10 and a Fulbright Fellow in 2008/09, Rabat, Morocco. While still a graduate student at NYU, Bishop founded and is the current editor of the literary magazine, Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters.

For several years, Bishop taught literature at Medgar Evers College, taught creative writing at The Borough of Manhattan Community College, Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, and served as a facilitator for Women in Literature and Letters, a collective dedicated to social change and action by women through the written word.  She currently lives in New York City and teaches writing at New York University.
Derek Alger: So you’re back in New York after an extended stay abroad.

Jacqueline Bishop: Yes, I am back in New York after traveling about a bit.  I was on a Fulbright to Morocco (2008-2009) and then I was selected as the UNESCO/Fulbright Fellow (2009-2010) and placed in the Creative Cities Program at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The goal of the Creative Cities Network is to connect cities which want to share experiences, ideas and the best practices for cultural, social and economic development. However, I noticed while working at the Creative Cities Network that there was a need to help less developed cities become part of the network; and working with the U.S. Mission to UNESCO, I submitted a project proposal that was awarded $75,000 in funding to support the participation of less developed cities in the Network. I was really delighted about this and that became a highlight of my time away. Other highlights included traveling around Morocco and talking to groups of mainly students about what it means to be an immigrant to the United States. This really gave me the chance to get out and see the country. While I was in Paris, I had exhibitions in Belgium and Italy and those were certainly highlights as well.

DA: I see you were productive while away, completing Snapshots from Istanbul.

JB: Snapshots from Istanbul explores the lives of the exiled Roman poet Ovid and the journeying painter Gauguin. However, within the stories of these men I explore my own notions of what exile means to me. At the center of the collection is a doomed relationship that takes place in Istanbul between a Turkish man and a Jamaican/American woman. On one hand, I believe that the collection was inspired by trips to Istanbul. But, perhaps more than that, I guess the collection started coming together following a program I watched on television about the Roman Empire and particularly about Ovid, once a famed poet, but who eventually was exiled from his beloved homeland. I could identify with a poet in exile, because I often feel in exile myself, though I am not sure where I am in exile from. By this I mean that the Jamaica I left more than twenty years ago is not the Jamaica that is there today, and I often wonder if I return “home” to Jamaica, how well I would fit into and function in the society, even as Jamaica and Jamaican is the identity I am most sure of, the place I am most engaged with and the space from which I create within myself. So when I came upon this poet, Ovid, writing letter after letter, begging to be allowed back home, that really spoke to me. In some ways, though, I feel that Ovid’s fate was much more cruel than mine, because no one is banishing me from Jamaica, and I get there as often as I can.

DA: Discovering Ovid helped prompt your freedom of expression.

JB: What I learnt in putting together the book is that there is not much information as to why Ovid was banished. At first this was a huge disappointment to me, before I came to appreciate the artistic license this gave to me in trying to make sense of Ovid’s story and what might have caused him to be banished. This freedom also allowed me to flesh out the thoughts of the people around him, and this freedom also allowed me to insert my story of exile within Ovid’s. I like the description of the book that says “inevitably, [the poet] is forced to think about her Americaness and her Jamaicaness in different ways” and that “there is one constant: Bishop’s insistence that the drive to rearrange words is inextricably linked to the act of the rearranging of self” because, believe me, not only was I seeking to understand Ovid’s predicament in this book, but the predicament of many different people, including several artists, who feel the need to create and create things that might not be acceptable to their society. And, ultimately, I guess I was trying to understand my own predicament as a creator who is creating far from home.

DA: Your grandmother was a huge influence on you. Tell us about your grandmother.

JB: Thanks very much for this question. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about my grandmother. The first female figure I remember in my life is my grandmother. I lived with her from the time I was a baby until she decided to move from Kingston back to Portland and my mother refused to let me go with her because it was getting time for me to take what was then the Common Entrance Examination, so I could secure a place in one of the high schools on the island. I remember very clearly that my grandmother did not want to let me go, that she wanted me to come and live with her in the country, but eventually my mother won out. I would go every summer and spend my holidays with my grandmother, and those holidays were some of the best days of my life, and, indeed, some of those summer days found there way into my novel. Not as autobiography but as feelings. There are many things I remember about being with my grandmother, but one incident more than all others stands out in a shimmering bright light. I remember a day when I was busy drawing something. It was a beautiful Portland day, the sun kept streaming in through the window. Now, years later, colors stand out for me, red, yellow, green. I was sitting around the table at my grandmother’s house. My grandmother came up to me, wanting to know what I was drawing. Fruits in a basket. I think that was what I was drawing. Or maybe it could have been flowers, for even then the flower as image and icon was very important to me. My grandmother asked for the slim yellow pencil I had in my hand and she used that same pencil to draw a stunningly beautiful picture that I have always wished I had kept. “Listen,” my grandmother said to me that far ago day, “when I was a child at school, not much older than you, drawing was what I did best. I loved to draw.” She then lay the slim yellow pencil down next to the picture she had drawn, went off back to what she was doing, and ever since that day what my grandmother has done has both thrilled and haunted me. Thrilled me, because she seemed to validate what I was doing. Haunted me, because the drawing was full of so much potential. But more than anything else, what happened that day was that my grandmother gave me permission to be creative and she validated my creativity.

DA: Obviously, she gave you a great gift.

JB: Another iconic moment I had with my grandmother occurred my first day of high school. My mother was right in keeping me in Kingston because I was able to secure a place in the high school I hoped to attend. That day, as we were walking to school, we met my grandmother on the way. She had come all the way .from Portland, a drive hours and hours away, just to see me in my uniform that first morning. Later, she would sit by the light of a lamp and make me a white cotton apron for cooking classes at my new all-girl’s high school. So being with my grandmother was very important.

Other women of my family were similarly creative. My mother could crotchet everything in sight and my great grandmother would stitch together old discarded pieces of cloth to make quilts so beautiful that some have since gone on to be exhibited. I learnt from these women’s example that creativity and beauty was somehow important. Necessary.

DA: Any other special moments from your childhood?

JB:  I remember that when I was like ten years old, two poems I had written appeared on bright yellow inserts in a church publication. My mother was particularly pleased about this. One day I was flipping through a magazine and read of someone in the States wanting poems as lyrics and I sent my poems off and got a letter back that the people were interested in my poems as song lyrics. Naturally I never followed up with any of this but I got quite a thrill showing my friends the letter I got back!

DA: What was it like for you when your mother left Jamaica for the United States?

JB: To be truthful, I had no clear idea of what my mother leaving Jamaica actually meant. The breakup it would cause in our family, the years I would go without seeing my mother, the heartbreak and tears. For that day at the airport when my mother was leaving, I was actually quite excited. My mother was going off to a far off magical place, America, and she would send for us soon-soon to join her in that magical place, and we would fly in that equally magical apparatus, an airplane, to meet her in that place America. These days I think of Aladdin and the flying carpet. I had no clear sense of what life as an immigrant in the United States actually meant. I cover a lot of this information in my book, My Mother Who Is Me: Life Stories from Jamaican Women in New York. Consequently, the happiest day of my life was the day I was reunited with my mother at Kennedy Airport in New York. Goodness, I was never so happy to see anyone in my life, because all along I had been secretly afraid that I would never see my mother again. I kept touching my mother, my baby sister, and myself just to make sure it was all real. That my mother was right there in front of me and not just a voice I heard over the telephone. My mother and I talked into the wee hours of the night. Years later, I came to realize that immigration and separation are intrinsic to my family and my mother and I were following in so many footsteps before ours. The collection of poems that I am working on right now seeks to understand these geographic displacements and I will share with you one of the poems from the new collection to better explain what I mean.

HAGIOGRAPHY

Somebody was always going somewhere;
that’s the story of our family.

My mother left me a six-week old
to work as a domestic in Kingston, to work
for a family where the boys would always touch her,

You have such pretty legs Emma—

As for my father, he made the journey beyond
the shores of the island to England. When he was leaving
he took with him a woman, who used to be friends
with my mother, all of them living in the same yard.

Remember I tell you this as your grandmother:
Man cubbitch like star apple leaf.

Your great grandfather, he came all the way from
the other side of the island, from Hanover,
came following two sisters who were pretty enough,
and brown enough, to get work with foreigners.

He spent sometime in the sugarcane fields in Cuba,
your great grandfather.

In Portland of course, Ferdinand, your great grandfather,
met Celeste, your great grandmother, who was from same-place-there
in Portland, only higher up in the mountains.

I tell you all of this so that you know:

No, it wasn’t that hard for me to leave you children
behind and come by myself to America.

DA: One could say you’ve had multiple identities from early on.

JB: I guess one could say so. Though my primary identity is Jamaican. But I would be lying if I did not say that being American is not a part of my identity as well: Indeed I have lived in the United States longer than I have lived in Jamaica. I find though that my identities are more a problem for others than it is for myself. This is not to say it is easy to go around living in a superimposed world, for that is how I live, one identity, one country, superimposed over another, but I find that I, and people like myself, just get on with it. That is our lives and our reality and we live with it. It is the people that have various ideas about what an American or a Jamaican is or is not, that can make life difficult. When I was in Morocco, no one could believe that I was American because for them all Americans are white. And recently, at a reading at The New School, it was my Jamaican identity that was challenged. Indeed a woman was pretty upset with me at that reading, and she said to me in the question and answer session, “You are so educated, you are so polished, you sound like a broadcaster!” Somewhere in there she said that she had come for a “Jamaican” reading and clearly that was not what she was getting. Let me tell you that comment caused all sorts of ripple effects and discussions about who is a Jamaican and what they should sound like. Very interesting. It reminded me of a story a friend of mine, a Haitian writer, told me about feeling a little ill and being on a radio show, and the interviewer saying to her, “Haitians are supposed to be so happy! So full of life! And look at you!” Or some such thing. What I know is this: When I am in America, I am very sure of my Jamaican identity, but when I am in Jamaica, I am aware of the fact that I have lived away for a long time. That I have changed and that Jamaica has changed. Neither myself nor the country is static. To keep up with Jamaica, I have to go there, especially if I want to represent the “now” Jamaica in my writings and my visual arts. It is true that with the Internet and Facebook, it is much easier to keep up with what is going on, on the island, but for me, it is very important to actually go to Jamaica. In addition, I think that the people who live in America and say that they remain fully or only Jamaican are not quite honest. You change and become as the island changes and becomes. So I am clear when I am in Jamaica that I have become something else in addition to being Jamaican, and in America I am something else than American. As a visual artist I have been able to create an image that best gives a sense of the world as I live in it and that is a world of superimposed maps, the United States over Jamaica.

DA: When you came to the United States you went right to college?

JB: By the time I came to the U.S., I had finished high school in Jamaica and I went right to Lehman College in the Bronx. I LOVED Lehman College. I found it a pretty supportive environment and think that one of the best ways to integrate into a society is to attend school. At Lehman I started to have an understanding of myself as not only Jamaican but also Caribbean because they were people from so many of the various islands there. Lehman was also a good place to try and figure out myself and figure out the new society that I was in. I would end up majoring in Psychology, but tentatively I started taking creative writing and visual arts classes. By then I had moved far away from writing and painting, and instead, was focused on becoming the medical doctor that I knew my mother wanted me to become. This was a pretty confusing time, because I did not want to let my mother down and I did not want to let down all the people that I had told I was going to become a doctor. Teenage angst, believe me, is very real for the teenager involved. But I was not good in the sciences, and in pursuing the sciences, I was not pursuing the other things that I was most attracted to. As the universe would have it, I remember talking to someone about what I should do with myself, do with my life, and this person, a nun as it turned out, suggested that I try for one semester only doing classes that I love and that I really wanted to do. That was the end of medical school. I moved right back into painting and writing. And funny enough, my mother was not that upset by this, as I had feared that she would be.

DA: You also spent a year studying in France.

JB: My year in France was a pivotal year for me. It was my junior year in college when I headed off to a place I had never been before. I knew absolutely no one in the City. In addition, the few dollars my mother gave me was either stolen or lost the first few days I arrived in the City. But Paris would be the place where I came into myself. In no time whatsoever I found two jobs, one as an au pair and another in an office. And all the time my French was encore malade. Pretty soon after I arrived in Paris, I happened upon an English language bookstore and started reading many of the classics that I had heard of before, but never  had the chance to read. From the classics I ended up somehow at Toni Morrison and from Toni Morrison and Alice Walker I ended up at the Caribbean women Audre Lorde and Olive Senior. It seemed I just read and read and read in Paris, in addition to taking painting classes. Eventually I ended up becoming what is called a “demi au pair” to the Flammarion family, which is one of the biggest publishing houses in France. I sometimes fantasize that my books will be translated and published by Flammarion one day and that story will come full circle. The Flammarion’s encouraged my reading, my writing, my painting.  That year in France changed my life. I came back and finished up my degree in psychology at Lehman but I knew then that my life would be in arts and letters. That was the great gift that Paris gave to me.

DA: And then it was off to graduate school?

JB: After Lehman I took a year off working before I enrolled in a master’s degree program at City College. My time at City College was useful in that I took a feminism class with Jane Marcus and in trying to find out a subject for the paper I had to write, Professor Marcus turned my attention to the life of Jamaican women in New York and it was in that moment that the book “My Mother Who is Me: Life Stories From Jamaican Women in New York” was born. This is a collection of oral histories from different types of Jamaican women explaining how they ended up in New York. That book helped me to understand the immigration process and how that experience is gendered. This work was also facilitated by a scholarship to the Oral History Program at Columbia University where I worked with Mary Marshall Clark. Despite working with Jane Marcus at City College however, I knew I wanted to focus more on my own creative writing and there were people at New York University, such as Paule Marshall, who I wanted to work with, so I left City for NYU, and I have pretty much been at NYU ever since.

DA: You found a home at New York University?

JB: For several years now NYU has pretty much been home. I first earned an MA in English there, specializing in poetry writing. I later received an MFA in fiction writing from NYU as well. Following my first MA at NYU, I started teaching and I have been doing that ever since. Now I am a Master Teacher in the Liberal Studies Program at NYU.

DA: How autobiographical is your novel, The River’s Song which has been called “engaging coming of age novel” about a Jamaican girlhood.

JB: Whenever I have been asked how autobiographical The River’s Song is I say that the feelings in the book are more autobiographical than the book itself. Many of the feelings that particularly Gloria has in the novel are feelings that I have had. The sense of feeling confined on the island. Of wanting to go away, stretch one’s wings. Those are feelings that I can definitely identify with. One of the great joys in my life as a child, as I indicated before, was to go and spend time with my grandmother, great grandparents, and other relatives in Portland every summer. Who knew that those green days by the river would end up in a novel. One of my aunts has a daughter who is still a teenager who read the novel and she said to me, “all these places that you describe in the place you call Lluidas Vale are really Nonsuch!” Which is really where my family is from, Nonsuch, high in the purple-blue Portland mountains. This lovely girl started naming different places in the novel that are really in the district and that was when I realized how much of the district I had infused in the novel, even if I called it by another name. Certainly the love that Gloria has for her grandmother is the love I still have for my grandmother. But unlike Gloria, I did not have the good fortune of moving into a big house in the hills and I don’t remember a friend as rich as Annie at school. So, more than anything else, it is the feelings in the novel more than anything else that are autobiographical. I know that reviews have talked about the freshness of the voice in the novel, the liveliness of particularly the female characters, and for this I am thankful. For me, The River’s Song was a novel I had to write, before I could go on to write other novels. I still flip through the book and fall in love with the characters, and these days I still wonder to myself, how exactly all those people are doing and if the yard that Gloria and her mother fled from, is still standing. That novel also gave me the great joy of seeing that I could bring characters to life; that characters would trust me enough to let me into their life and to tell their stories.

DA: The River’s Song was also considered atypical of Caribbean literature because of your description of a young girl’s sexual awakening.

JB: I know that the sexual awakening of Gloria has been talked about, but what I did not know was that this was atypical. It seemed obvious to me that someone who is eighteen would have sexual feelings, but I guess this is a leftover from our days as being part of the great British Empire and a leftover of Victorian ideals and protocol of behavior, although that certainly is not the case in too much of our music where sexuality is, in too many cases, overemphasized.

DA: A recent book of yours deals with writers who also paint.

JB: For several years now I have been intrigued with the fact that so many writers from the Caribbean are also visual artists and vice versa. I started keeping a list of people from the region who were creative in both mediums. When I was invited to have an exhibition by the Brooklyn-based Caribbean Literary and Cultural Center I decided to invite along two writer/painters from Jamaica to be part of the exhibition and my wonderful publisher in the UK, Peepal Tree Press, decided to publish a book of the exhibition, since we were all Peepal Tree Press authors. It is a small darling book that I have come to love a lot. At the time I was putting the book and exhibition together, my dear friend, Wayne Brown, who has since died recommended Earl McKenzie and Ralph Thompson’s work to me. Earl I had known of before, because he is well known as a writer, but Ralph’s work I was being introduced to. Our styles are all different but we are unified in our exploration of the natural world around us and the colors of the Caribbean.

DA: How long have you been painting?

JB: I would say I started painting seriously about ten years ago. That was when I went back to school to study painting. But in terms of the visual arts I not only paint, but I also do some photography (or what I call photo-collage) as is indicated in the image of the two superimposed maps that I mentioned earlier in the interview. In terms of my paintings and photography, however, I find that I engage pretty much the same themes as I do mainly in my poetry. There is, for example, a lot of engagement with the environment and there is some storytelling and engagement with the folklore of the island. Some of my paintings are abstract, others are not. I tend to work in series when I am creating visual arts pieces, and this I see as a major carry-over from being a writer. It is as if one painting or one photograph cannot contain the entire story.

My most recent series of paintings is entitled “View from Afar.” In June 2010 the island of Jamaica erupted in unrest following attempts by the Jamaican authorities to arrest a reputed drug dealer, wanted in the United States. Members of Christopher Coke’s west Kingston neighborhood barricaded themselves and fought back against authorities. At the end of the unrest more than 70 people were dead. At the time this happened I was traveling around a bit and as I travelled I was desperately trying to make sense of what was going on, on the island. I had no choice but to rely on newspaper articles, emails, information on Facebook and the Internet. This all resulted in a series of paintings where I am trying to piece together a coherent narrative. Some of the images in the paintings are clearer than others; indeed some of the images are grainy, unfocused and unclear — this being what happens when someone is hearing about something from a distance. Yet the colorfulness and beauty of the Caribbean is suffused throughout. Maps have been used in some of the paintings indicating that the viewer of these events is not on the island, but rather is quite far away.  This is the most recent group of paintings that I have worked on.

DA: In closing, any major plans for the future?

JB: Well I only just finished a new book tentatively titled “Soliloquy” which is a strange hybrid of a book with stories, essays, and visual arts. This is a book in which I was trying to find my sea legs in writing essays and short-short stories, I feel as though I was working to establish my voice in genres that I had not really tried before. In addition, I have been painting a lot lately. Next year I am looking forward to an exhibition in New York.

Jacqueline Bishop is a post from: Pif Magazine

Excerpts of Falling in Love with Natassia first appeared in Prairie Schooner and were nominated for Pushcart Prizes and awarded a Nebraska Arts Council Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction. Monardo has also received residency fellowships from the Djerassi Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  Monardo’s stories, essays, and poems have been featured on National Public Radio’s “Selected Shorts” and published in The Sun, Poets & Writers, Indiana Review, Redbook, and other magazines and journals.

Anna Monardo

A professor of the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Monardo has also taught in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Eastern Washington University, the Writers’ Voice of the West Side Y in New York City, and the Bennington College July Program.

Originally from Pittsburgh, Monardo received her B.A. from St. Mary’s College at Notre Dame, IN, and then attended the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course.  Her first jobs in publishing were at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Random House and McCall’s.  She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University.

Derek Alger: You were the first of your family born in the United States.

Anna Monardo:Yes, and that happenstance has informed what I write about, as well as how I live. No matter where I am, I’m always conscious of some parallel “other place,” just like when I was a kid in Pittsburgh listening to my parents and grandparents talk about the Southern Italian village where they were all born. Sunday dinners, holiday dinners—they told great stories. Maybe because I was the first one born in America, maybe because I was already looking through a writer’s prism, maybe because my imagination wasn’t sparked very much by the suburbs where I was growing up—whatever the reason, I sort of took on this gatekeeper role, and as the adults told their Italian stories, I consciously gathered their details, holding on to and shaping the information. Even as a kid, I thought, There’s work I need to do here. I could never just listen and enjoy. In relation to my family’s history, I’ve never been able to be passive.

Through the years, I’ve explored our family story from so many different angles. My first novel, The Courtyard of Dreams, is a coming-of-age story of an American teenager and her Italian father. Their family life is in both America and Italy, just as my family’s was. The characters in my second novel, Falling In Love with Natassia, are very different from my family and me, but their parental issues and their cultural-identity issues are close to my heart. Now, I’m working on a nonfiction project in which I’m daring myself to tell the true story of my grandparents’ and parents’ immigration without the protective scrim of fiction. It feels great; it’s a relief. I’m loving nonfiction right now.

DA: How old were you when you began to write?

AM: I remember being bored during grade-school math class and slipping paper underneath my math book so I could write poems. I don’t remember getting caught, but I do remember thinking, If she catches me—she being the teacher—I’ll just tell her what I’m doing and she’ll understand. In sixth grade, the teacher was a he, and if he’d caught me, he would not have understood, being the stern taskmaster he was. Still, even during his math class, I wrote my poems. I knew in my gut that writing poems was as relevant as doing math problems.

DA: Did you know you’d become a writer when you went to college?

AM: No, by then I knew that it was impossible to make a living as a fiction writer or a poet, so I tried on a lot of different career ideas. I did take a few creative writing classes because we had a great writing teacher, Max Westler. This was at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. Max gave us exercises that shook me up. He had us gather words we didn’t know the meanings of, and then we wrote poems using those words. He was the first to make me conscious of what we all know instinctively—that words are as powerful in their sounds and associations as they are in their meanings. It’s a basic lesson, but an important one to get right, and Max had a series of smart exercises that eased us into that realization. I still remember the weekend I wrote a poem from one of his use-words-that-don’t-make-sense-to-you prompts. Suddenly, line by line, things were happening on the page in a way that I’d never experienced writing before. The action was happening between and among the words, it wasn’t coming from some received format or concocted structure in my brain. I use some of his writing exercises now with my own writing students.

But I couldn’t major in Creative Writing. Being the first born in America, I was the first in the family to go to college in America, and already I was causing discomfort at home because I wasn’t signing on for a profession-oriented discipline. In Europe, students go to university to become doctors or lawyers or engineers. When I told my family I was an English major, they kept hoping that meant journalism. I loved my major. It tickled me to think that I was getting college credit for reading a bunch of books and then sitting around talking and writing about them. Our department followed a traditional curriculum. I remember crying during my Chaucer semester, trying to uncrack the code of Middle English, and yet when I began to get it, and began to see how that amazing narrative marches along on a thousand different levels, all those voices, a microcosm of the macro that is everything—well, I thought that was the coolest trick I’d ever witnessed.

It was all very lovely, until my senior year. Then my father wanted to know what kind of job my English major would get me. I remember him saying, “You like to talk, you should be a lawyer.” I seriously considered law school, as many English majors do. But when I got to the part of the application that required an essay on why I wanted to go to law school, I couldn’t write it. For a few Saturday nights in February, I stayed in and tried to find my way into that essay. I finally realized that I had nothing to say. I didn’t want to go to law school. I could party again.

DA: What happened after college?

AM: I was hungry to get to a big city, but had no idea how to make that happen. And then, second semester senior year, I had a stroke of luck. The chair of the English Department stopped me in the hallway one day and said, “Oh, Anna, here. You might be interested in this.”  She knew I was curious about publishing, and what she handed me was a pamphlet for the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course. I applied and got in—probably they didn’t have many applicants from the Midwest—and from that simple hallway encounter, my life went off on a new trajectory.

DA: What was the publishing course like?

AM: Intense. You spent a summer at Radcliffe going to classes, seminars and lectures on every aspect of book and magazine publishing. Editors, agents, designers, marketing directors, advertising people—they all came up from New York or Boston to talk to us. It was a networking bonanza.  At the time, I’d been planning to move to Chicago, but the message that summer was, If you’re serious about working in mainstream publishing, you have to go to New York. This was 1977, before desktop publishing. Before computers! This was in the days of typewriters and Liquid Paper.

DA: You experienced strong feelings coming to New York.

AM: I wrote it in an essay: “I thanked God when I arrived in New York. I had flown just one hour from Pittsburgh, but I was as grateful as an immigrant, as relieved as a refugee who has finally escaped. I don’t mean to equate the enormity of exile with the comparative ease of my departure from suburbia, but I can’t lie about this: landing in New York felt as lucky to me and as monumental as it must have felt for anyone who ever sailed into Ellis Island. In leaving my family’s home, I was an anarchist. Our women had never lived in this place I was going to. For my Italian grandmothers, my mother, my aunts, a life between the home of the father and the home of the husband had never existed. Now it did exist.”

When I got to New York, I was, purely and simply, happy in my skin for the first time in my life. But I have to add that here I am, three decades later, and I still feel the repercussions of having broken from my family’s expectations. I don’t in any way regret it, but it’s interesting to me that even now, with both my parents deceased, I’m still untangling the complexity of what happened among us all when I left home—the anxiety and sadness, which was really also about their having left Italy and their culture. Immigration happens over the course of several generations. Assimilation is a jagged process.

DA: What are some of the repercussions you still feel?

AM: Amazement that I actually did it. Guilt for having left. In fiction, poems, essays—I’m always exploring some painful aspect of psychological and emotional separation. This is the way in which fiction is inescapably autobiographical—at least for me it is. I can create characters who, on the surface, are nothing like me, but it’s always their crises around separation and attachment that interest me. At twenty-one, I thought that in going to a new city, acquiring a new way of life, I would be changed—basta! I’d be a “new” person who could walk unencumbered and unambivalently into a really attractive urban future. And New York certainly grants you any freedom you may be looking for. You can be anything or anyone, because everyone else is too busy to notice. But what I’ve come to realize is that, even more than the influences and opportunities I found when I arrived in New York, it was the act of leaving for New York that shaped me.

DA: What did you do in your new-found home?

AM: Well, what got me on the plane from Pittsburgh was an interview at St. Martin’s Press for an editorial assistant position, which I didn’t get. I stayed at friends’ apartments, and after two weeks of interviews, I got a job as an assistant at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. My first few years in New York, I got to do exactly what I’d hoped to do. I worked in book publishing. During that relatively short time, I saw hundreds of manuscripts submitted to the various editors I worked for, and I realized that what I really wanted to do was to create my own manuscript. By then, I’d bought a little wooden desk at a secondhand shop on Broadway, and I was writing a lot, but very privately, showing the pages to no one. Well, maybe to an occasional boyfriend. You know, the courtship ritual of exchanging manuscripts. And then I just got my nerve up and put together a story for my application to the Columbia MFA program. I dropped off my packet in person—to save the postage—and I remember so clearly the sick feeling I had as I left the building and walked across the campus toward Broadway. I was sure I’d be rejected, and there was no other writing program I wanted to attend. I didn’t want to leave New York. So a rejection from Columbia would have been the signal to me that it was time to give up my hope of ever writing in a serious way. I couldn’t believe it when I got in. That’s still one of my happiest memories.

DA: How was your experience in the Columbia MFA program?

AM: We laughed, we cried! It was intense, as a good MFA program should be. Having worked for a few years, I don’t think there was one day of grad school when I didn’t think about how lucky I was not to be doing nine-to-five in an office. In two years, I had four fiction workshops—with Scott Spencer, Ted Solotaroff, Richard Price and Chip McGrath. (No women in that line-up, huh?) They were amazing writers and editors. You just sat there and absorbed it all. There are things Ted told us that I still quote to my students: “Passion is specific,” he’d say. Getting his little approving checkmarks over a couple descriptive passages in a story felt like winning some major award.

It was during my semester with Richard Price that I started my first novel. I was worried before I met him. His writing was all tough-guy and edgy, and I thought that my material was so different from his that I wouldn’t stand a chance in his workshop. At that time, I was reading a lot of Edna O’Brien and was really taken with the way she made stories of her character’s inner lives. She was my female mentor; I felt her stories gave me permission to write about what interested me, which is the subtle “plot” of the inner life. Anyway, I doubted Richard Price would be into that, but he shocked me by being very kind and encouraging. He was also extremely smart and funny, but I knew he would be because I’d read his work. As a teacher, he could tell if a narrative meant something to you, and then he would challenge you to go for it. He’d also let you know that he believed in your ability to get it right within your own sensibility. It was a respectful way to teach writing.

DA: What happened to the novel you began in that workshop?

AM: Ten years later, I finished it. My Columbia workshops helped me see that I had the material for a novel, but I didn’t have a clue how to go about writing a novel. Trial and error. I wrote a whole manuscript in one point of view before realizing it was wrong. Then I started the book again from a different character’s point of view. Years passed.

DA: Your novel certainly portrays a familiar, but intense, generational struggle.

AM: It’s a coming-of-age novel about cultural identity, and, like all narratives that interest me, it’s about living in two worlds. In this case, it’s an Italian psychiatrist and his American daughter in Ohio in the late ‘60s. Their relationship is particularly intense because it’s just the two of them; the mother died when the girl was young. I wrote the story from the daughter’s point of view. Now, though, I occasionally have the opportunity to talk with classes that have read the book, and the students comment on how strict the father is—and, yes, both the father in the book and my own father were quite strict—but I’m a parent myself now and I have new ways of looking at that difficult relationship. As a daughter, I felt full of righteous anger. Now, as a mother, I feel sad because I understand the kind of fear that inspires a parent’s wish to control the child. It looks so ugly to the child—it is ugly. And yet, the parent is acting from a deep deep love that is simply terrified of all that could happen. Students say, Why don’t you write a novel about Giulia, the main character, as an adult. What’s more interesting to me now, though, is the father’s story. I think about writing that. What I do know now is that our children can bring us to our knees.

DA: You were fortunate to find yet another home teaching in Omaha.

AM: Actually, I’ve had a lot of homes. My first venture out of New York was to Washington State, where I taught in the MFA Program at Eastern Washington University. A one-year sabbatical replacement turned into a few years in that area, where I was truly lucky in the friendships I found. So now, I not only yearn toward the Upper West Side of New York but toward the upper west side of America, too. The landscape of the Pacific Northwest was a revelation to me. I did return to New York City for a while, and then I was lucky again to get a position in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. When I saw the ad for the job, I wasn’t exactly sure where Omaha was, but I kept reading the description: Teach in a BFA program located in a college of fine arts, coordinate a visiting writers’ series. This was my dream! Our Writer’s Workshop is across the hall from art studios and downstairs from the acting studio. Being with painters and dancers and actors makes me stretch; I’m always learning from them. I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in multidisciplinary and public-art projects. I began my teaching position at UNO in 1997, and I’m still here. And I’m still thrilled by the work we do in our department and our college. (And I’m not just saying that because I’m enjoying a Faculty Development Leave this year.) UNO is a metropolitan university, which means that our classes have a good number of returning or nontraditional students with jobs and families—in short, they have lives. And they bring all that to the classroom—the seriousness of their decision to be there, together with their wisdom, their savvy. I admire them greatly.

DA: Did you write Falling In Love with Natassia after you got to Omaha?

AM:Before I got to Omaha, I had my main characters and I knew their stories, so I was already living inside that novel, but there was a lot of research to be done. It’s the story of a woman, Mary, who is a world-class modern dancer and who, at 35, is reaching the end of her performance career. Simultaneously, her fifteen-year-old-daughter, Natassia, is caught up in a crisis. And Mary, who’s been largely absent from Natassia’s life, has to figure out how to save the kid. She adores her daughter, but she doesn’t have a clue how to be a mother to her. And that’s because Mary, as a Korean War orphan, was never mothered well herself. There was research to do on the Korean War. During summer breaks, I went back to New York to do dance research at Lincoln Center Library.

Falling In Love with Natassia

I wrote that novel while I was in my thirties and trying to figure out how I could keep my writing career going if I had a child, which was something I very much wanted to do. But each of those endeavors—parenting and writing—requires a 100% commitment. How do you do both? Basically, I used my characters to explore the worst-case scenario—the clueless mother who has to find a way to keep a career going while also figuring out how to truly be present for her out-of-control teenager.

The novel is also about the community that surrounds them. Natassia’s grandparents; her godparents; and her father, who is estranged from Mary but still in love with her. This is an intense group—book editors, a doctor, a painter and a psychotherapist—they all love Natassia and want to help her; and because of the work they do, they’re smart and informed and aware, and yet everyone has blind spots. Every one of them is significantly flawed and yet has the best intentions. Looking back, I see that I was nervous about the seriousness of raising a child, so I gave myself the space of a novel to look at it all, and talk myself down.

DA: I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about the pride of your life.

AM: Yes, my son, Leo.  When he was born, in 2000, I was still writing Falling In Love with Natassia, and I learned that I was correct: You do write much less after you have a child. And it’s frustrating because there’s so much you want to write. So much is happening, and you’re desperate to chart all the changes—in the child, within yourself, all of it—but there’s no time. And then you find your ways. You get efficient.

DA: And you guys have another member of the family.

AM: Ah, yes, our lapdog. I’d never had a dog before, so this was a kind of immigrant experience for me. I was entering a new land. Actually, I wrote an essay about how our dog came to us, and it was published in a wonderful online literary journal—Pifmagazine.com. You’ve heard of it?

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You can read Anna’s essay here: Writer with Lap Dog

Anna Monardo is a post from: Pif Magazine

Christopher Locke

Locke has received several awards for his poetry, including a 2006 and 2007 Dorothy Sargent Memorial Poetry Prize, as well as grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the New Hampshire Council on the Arts.

His poetry has appeared in such magazines and literary journals as Southwest Review, The Literary Review, Connecticut Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and The Sun, to name a few.

Locke currently resides in New Lebanon, NY with his wife and two daughters, and teaches literature and writing at The Darrow School.

Derek Alger:  Starting at the beginning, were you aware of being creative from an early age?

Christopher Locke: Yeah, but in small ways. For one, I had to find creative ways to fill my time, as my memory of childhood includes a lot of silence. My dad was a disc jockey at a local AM station, as well as an occasional cashier at a corner store. And my mom worked at a shoe store for a family friend. If she was home, she slept a lot. So my brother and I needed to come up with interesting ways to kill time. This included sitting in the basement and reading through the stacks of history books my father had stored there; hiding out at the local library; and even writing my own stories. My third grade teacher read these painfully moral stories to the class (it was a Christian school), and I knew I could come up with something better. My first piece was about a skunk, two boys camping, and a lot of bodily functions. My teacher was outraged. It was then I knew I was on to something.

DA:  You encountered a rather bizarre religious group as a kid.

CL: Pentecostal church. Totally fucked up. They didn’t talk about sneaking us into the Kool-Aid line with Jim Jones, but it was close enough. Weekly possessions, with bodies flailing about the church and so much horrible, horrible screaming. Or the preacher’s laying on of hands and filling true believers with ‘the spirit.’ They’d then collapse like a dish rag and be left to drool on the floor as the rest of the congregation sang songs of hope and enlightenment. So I believed, eight years old or whatever, that this is what everyone in America did on Sundays: go to church, watch your neighbors have demons cast out of their bodies, go home and have a nice family dinner. Totally normal. My poem “Possessed” (from the chapbook of the same name) highlights this time in my life.

DA:  What were your high school years like?

CL: Dicey at best. We left the church-town of Laconia, NH and moved to Exeter, NH. My parents got divorced and I was pretty directionless. Then, in 10^th grade, my friend Owen let me borrow a tape of this band called The Dead Kennedys and that was that; I absolutely fell in love with punk rock. 7Seconds, Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, Gang Green. Ahh, it was heaven. My friends thought I tried too hard to adopt the look, and they were probably right —- wearing shocking eyeliner to school, ripped jeans with the names of bands scrawled all over them, as if it proved I was part of something special and unique, something monumentally different from the dumb-ass jock culture that dominated our school. But it was this desire (desperation, really) to be different, to extricate myself from my own history, that I went to great lengths to rewrite myself: I lied all the time, even about stupid shit, (Do I play the drums? Sure I do! Live in a big house? Of course!!!) And this type of behavior, naturally, began to alienate me even further from my friends. I started doing drugs, whatever I could get my hands on. Even taking acid for the first time on a school night before dinner and then just hanging out with the family. Not one of my brightest decisions. Lessons came in bunches, but getting the answers took years. Thankfully, I had one teacher in high school, Ms. Smith, who saw something in me and encouraged me, particularly my writing. It was thrilling. I mean, here was an actual adult, and she spoke to me like…an equal! Or at the very least without contempt. I took her kindness and care with me into the world. It’s probably why I became a teacher myself. I’ve taught high school English for about 12 years. I really like teenagers, and relate to their sense of isolation and awkwardness. I think they get that I’m an authentic ally.

DA:  Tell us about your college experience.

CL: I didn’t know a lot about college until my senior year in high school (my parents and grandparents didn’t go to university), but after I did learn, I became excited by the possibilities it offered. Finally, I thought: a way out! But I didn’t have a dime. After floundering for a year and a half post high school graduation, my mom and step father rescued me and paid for a semester at Keene State College in New Hampshire. That got the ball rolling. College was a time that my writing really began to change and improve. I knew I wanted to become a full-time poet; I know, I know: go ahead and cringe. But I was a kid! Anyway, I discovered writers like Gary Soto, Robert Hayden, Larkin, Lowell, Sexton, Keats and Blake, all The Beats. I read ‘Howl’ again and again until the room spun. Keene State’s main poet, Bill Doreski, became my mentor, though our relationship was contentious at best. He was gruff and unsympathetic, and I was determined to be a better writer than him. Sparks, as they say, flew a few times in class. But it’s all good, we now get along quite well and still keep in touch to this day.

DA:  And after college.

CL: I moved to Portsmouth, NH and then Kittery, ME with my then girlfriend, now wife, Lisa Williams. I started the literary magazine Lungfish Review and even found a national distributor for it. Names in the poetry world started to send me their work. I couldn’t believe it. It was great fun. Myself, I wrote poetry every day like a fever. It was in Kittery I received my first acceptances into little magazines. Gary Metras, the wonderful publisher of Adastra Press in Easthampton, MA, offered to publish my first chapbook, “How to Burn.” I was 25 years old and absolutely living the dream. Menial jobs as a sandwich maker or photocopy jerk only added to the romantic charm: schlepp at bogus jobs during the day, write epic poetry and work on Lungfish Review at night. What could be greater?

DA: You then found a home teaching.

CL: Right. I was a waiter at a restaurant (Lisa and I had since moved to Northampton, MA so she could work on her Masters at UMass; I was finishing up my MFA at Goddard College), and a group of men came into the restaurant and were seated in my section. They were starting a school in Cummington, MA for troubled teens (as they called it) and were looking for an English teacher. Well, funny you should mention that, I said with a grin…

DA: You have clear ideas about writing poetry. 
 
CL: I guess so, in that I want my poetry to be clear. Because though poetry is an art, it’s communication first. And something we all do is fail, so I write about that. I try not to fail better, as Beckett would endorse, but try and simply find a way out of permanent failure, small breathers that allow us to keep going, even when it feels like less than an option.  This whole recent trend in modern poetry, kind of like a post-post take on L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poetry (the poetry of nothing, I call it), is pretty absurd: feeling and direct intention are out, clever pairings of disparate ideas is in, the more nonsensical the better. I mean, in some ways I get it: many writers are still pissed off at Robert Lowell for making everything so touchy-feely, but this type of backlash strikes me as arrogant and reactive; soulless really. I’ll pass. Yet for many young writers, accessibility has become a four letter word, and Billy Collins is the ringleader! It’s weird. Accessible and simple are not mutually exclusive. I don’t need to read bizarrely paired lines that I don’t understand in order to feel like I’m part of some new avant garde. I mean, didn’t Ashbery cover that already with his first collection?

DA:  Your recent collection, “End of American Magic,” received high praise from novelist James Frey, and your chapbook “Slipping Under Diamond Light” received accolades from Billy Collins, who said you write: “true-story poems about growing up in America” which are “delivered in plain, sure-footed language.”

End of American Magic

CL: Yeah, they were kind. I appreciate the support. But it’s true. Image is key in my writing, but so is storyline. I wouldn’t necessarily call it Confessional, but I’ll allow that it’s narrative and story-driven. Some stuff I write about is from my own life, some not. I just sometimes make shit up. And that really bugs some people. A teacher at Goddard was irate a poem I wrote about molestation didn’t really happen to me. As if I didn’t have the right to make him feel something without me trying it on for size first. Novelists don’t get this type of flack. It’s strange.

DA:  You’ve now found a home teaching at Darrow School.

CL: Yep, a tiny little boarding school in New Lebanon, NY. The campus is an old Shaker village, with the original buildings still intact. It’s quite beautiful, actually. I teach creative writing and literature, 10^th and 12^th graders mostly. Classes are small, so relationships can be authentic and valuable. That’s what I love most about teaching, the relationships I make with my students. That, and reading their work when they’re really excited about some topic or other. I relate to that.

DA:  You’re also a playwright.
 
CL: Yes, this is something new in my life. Over the years, when I wrote fiction, I always noticed that I thrived most at dialogue —- it was my favorite part! So playwriting feels like a natural extension of this. I wrote my first one act, “Labor Day,” over the course of a few weeks during Christmas break 2009 at the behest of our Drama teacher at Darrow. I submitted it to a few places and it won a contest at F.A.C.T. Theatre of NYC, where it was given a professionally staged reading. It was fully produced with a company in Portsmouth, NH and there’s even talk of doing it with a couple of other theatres in the Midwest. It was also produced at Darrow, with the students in the main roles. Some faculty were, how should I put this, a bit worried by the final production. The play is about kids in their late teens/early 20’s doing what they do best: struggle, suffer, illuminate, and seek instant gratification. You know, swearing, drinking, etc.

DA:  It’s amazing how true depictions of life in art tend to draw criticism from some in the so-called grown up world.

CL: Lenny Bruce said “Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government’.” But I get it. It was risky stuff, and there was concern that some depictions in the play messed with some of the kids’ issues. Fair enough. But still…(laughs). The kids were amazing in their roles, and proud of the work they accomplished. And I received so much support from the kids’ parents, as well as from many, many faculty too. It was really a great experience.

DA:  You’ve written a second play.

CL: It’s called “The Pool”, and it’s receiving a staged reading in Northhampton, MA in August. Also, a pretty serious film production company, (RHI Productions), has it and wants to find a way to make it into a movie. Talk about your roller coaster ride…

DA:  We should let everyone know you’re a happy family man.

CL: Indeed. Lisa and I have been married for over 15 years, and we have two daughters: Grace, 11, and Sophie, 7. They are the blood that beats my heart.

DA: Looking ahead, what’s on the agenda.

CL: World domination, obviously! (laughs) But seriously, I just completed a new collection of poems called “Waiting for Grace and Other Poems” and have it with a publisher, and a new play. A script, actually. It’s called “Can I Say” and is about a punk rock teenager growing up in a broken home in Exeter, NH. Autobiographical? Mmmmmaybe. (laughs)

Christopher Locke is a post from: Pif Magazine

Reviewers have often compared Aaron’s poetry to the style of the New York School, and John Ashbery likens reading him to: “dreaming of a summer vacation and then taking it.” His work is a curious blend of artistry, humor, and melancholy.

Aaron Belz

Aaron received his doctorate in English from St. Louis University in 2007 and has taught English most recently at Providence Christian College in Pasadena, CA. He currently lives in North Carolina.

Luke Irwin: Your second collection has had some pretty rave reviews? Is that a byproduct of time spent in California?

Aaron Belz: Most of those poems were written while I still lived in the Midwest; and now I live in North Carolina. California has affected the way I conceive of America, and of life, but I think it will take more time for that to show up in the poems.

Thank you for noticing the reviews. I’m always happy to read reviews of my own poetry because they’re generally very interactive, even when they’re negative. It’s gratifying because it feels like I’m getting past the position people are holding when they read and think about poetry. Obviously this is only one goal for new work; others might be that it’s wise, beautiful, inspiring, connected with its historical moment. I’m not sure my poetry is those things, but that’s no longer a source of insecurity for me. I don’t mind being a one-trick pony—or seeming like one. Actually, I think what I’m doing is at heart very traditional. Maybe it just plays out differently.

LI: You’ve recently submitted a third collection, and I’m curious if you’ve continued to write in the direction of Bird Hoverer and Lovely, Raspberry?

AB: The new book contains a bit more by way of short form, and I’m not comfortable with that. I think it’s a result of having spent some time, since 2008, giving readings in comedy venues. Some of the poems are short because they’re just jokes. Of course no joke is “just” a joke, and most of mine are flat and painful. Some are crass. But it’s good for the author to feel uncomfortable or as though he missed the mark somehow. One way I know a new poem is a keeper (at least till it works its way off the team) is if it makes me wonder if it’s any good. If it feels awkward, it might be good. If it feels easy and delights me, it’s most often not.

I’d love to get back to The Bird Hoverer’s way of looking at the world. To that end, I’ve been digging around in my archive of unpublished poems that are 7-10 years old. I found a few I really liked and submitted them to La Petite Zine, and they were accepted. They’ll be in an issue this fall.

LI: You’ve been on some comedy tours/venues. Do you have a method for integrating humor and melancholy?

AB: My primary method for integrating humor and melancholy is being really, really sleep-deprived and depressed. Then I drink at least one five-shot Americano, wait about 15 minutes, and voila! Poems. Supportive methods are to incorporate French phrases, reread old emails, and read Dylan Thomas or John Donne aloud. Sometimes looking at Facebook photos helps. Those are such melancholy tasks, and I have such an addictive/compulsive love/hate relationship with them that they often yield a new poem or two. Please know that I am not happy being funny. It sucks. It’s just a way of creating space between myself and real, legitimate, based-in-experience anxiety.

LI: I’ve read some of your early, college-era poems and the humor part is missing. How did your style develop? Do you think the associations with the New York School are accurate?

AB: The humor part was missing because in college I was a tall drink of gaiety. I had a cute girlfriend, a dad who let me buy things but lived hundreds of miles away, good grades, a Walkman and a convertible 1963 Volkswagen. Nothing yet had gone wrong. I hadn’t been exposed to the deep well of horror that is human life, especially the horror that is myself. Over the past ten years especially I’ve seen it. I’m much more sympathetic to other people’s troubles now. As to the New York School poets, in grad school I started reading Ashbery and O’Hara. After that I found Schuyler and Koch and felt right at home. It’s educated dorkiness with a correct sense what walking down the street feels like. That’s about where I was in the 90s and still am.

LI: Do you have any predictions for where poetry may be heading based on what you’re reading lately?

AB: I’m not in tune with most newer poetry, though I know many of the poets, or at least their names. I like Rae Armantrout’s poetry very much. If she’s any indication, poetry’s going to get more aggressive and self-assured, but I don’t really know. I have no clue what will happen. It depends on who’s writing it, I think. Poetry is words, and words can be made to do just about anything. To me, the big question is, will poetry ever regain its 18th and 19th century readership?

LI: In Lovely, Raspberry a poem like “Privacy” takes the clutter and sensory overload of 21st century life and then walks away from it. Should poetry be walking us away from our constant information feeds even as it dunks us in their idiosyncrasies?

Lovely, Raspberry

AB: That’s a great question. To what extent should poetry embody the limitations of its own age, and to what extent should it provide relief from them? I guess I balance Romantic desires (from Wordsworth to Thoreau, and even the woodsy side of Twain) with popular experience (celebrity culture, Facebook, email, etc.) in my poems, but I don’t do it intentionally. The poem is my own escape path. I don’t ever feel as though I’m creating a path for others. I guess people can read over my shoulder as I let the tensions play out in language.

LI: You’ve encouraged younger poets to read old poets. Who have you been reading?

AB: Honestly I’m reading nothing at the moment. It’s all packed up, because I just moved to North Carolina. And when I read, it’s often assigned review books, essays, opinion pieces, and more out of the way stuff. I’m not trying to sound weird, but contemporary poetry doesn’t inspire me…at all. I love and respect what my peers are doing, but I don’t read it unless I have to. It feels incestuous to read it. Old stuff (like Herrick), on the other hand, sounds really fresh and innovative. I do read old stuff occasionally. I also teach other people how to read and understand old stuff, and that process is invigorating.

LI: Your take on spoken word and poetry slams?

AB: I’m all for it. But it has a pretentiousness of its own, which is too bad. Last week I was in the Hillsborough DMV waiting to get my North Carolina driver’s license. A guy walked in who was probably in his late 70s or early 80s and loudly announced, “I need a BED to lie these old creaky bones in. There isn’t even a SEAT.”  People chuckled but the mood became nervous. People prefer to be private in public. Then he said, “Wanna hear a poem?”  I thought…oh no. Though no one had said “yes,” he recited a poem about picking up a girl. It was very flirtatious and people started to get into it. He said, “I wrote that” and sat down next to another old dude. Soon he piped up, “Anyone wanna hear another one?” I was like, good grief, man. Then he rolled out an amazing poem about how brown sugar heals his bones; it included a discussion with a woman. It all rhymed. Very old school. I loved it. That’s spoken word, and it proves that poetry does have healing power and can bring a group of disparate souls into a single community.

LI: I’ve watched you perform via youtube, and your deadpan is an important part of the delivery. For most of us the enjambment in the text is all we get. Is the “full” experience of the poem compromised when it isn’t performed?

AB: There are multiple ways for an audience to receive a poem; you have mentioned two of them. What about whispering it across a table to a friend? What about saying it slowly to someone you’re terrorizing just before you slit their throat? Or forcing them to memorize it and recite it to a dozen eggs? There are all sorts of ways for a poem to take shape in the real world, and they all feel really different.

Aaron Belz is a post from: Pif Magazine

Alan Cheuse

Cheuse is well-known as a book commentator, and a regular contributor to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”  His short fiction has appeared in numerous publications and literary journals, including The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, The Idaho Review, and The Southern Review.

The son of a Russian immigrant father and mother of Romanian descent, Cheuse currently teaches in the Writing Program at George Mason University and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.  He previously taught literature at Bennington College for close to a decade, as well as teaching at Sewanee: The University of the South, the University of Virginia, and the University of Michigan.

Derek Alger: Your most recent novel, Song Of Salves In The Desert, is a complex one dealing with an especially turbulent time in history.

Alan Cheuse:  Slavery is America’s curse, as Faulkner called it. Biology is just a long line of people trudging through time. History is what they did as they trudged, both good and bad, and despite the “family values” document that those political ignoramuses Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum recently signed about the good in slavery that held black families together, there was nothing good in that so-called “peculiar institution”. Slavery wasn’t peculiar among the Greeks and the Romans, but when it became tied to racial theory, as it did in England in the 16th and 17th centuries, its radical cruelty became more apparent. But why should a writer from Jersey become interested in it in a deeply personal way?

I’d been a member, for about eight months, of a Jewish fraternity during my freshman college year at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.. The president of the chapter was a charming and smart black student named Leonard Jeffries. I left Lafayette after freshman year, transferring to Rutgers and never thought about Jeffries, until the early 1990s when he surfaced in a controversy at the City College of New York. He had become head of the newly instituted Black Studies department, and seemed to enjoy stirring shit by announcing, among other things, that black people were “sun” people, full of light, vitality, energy, etc. and white people were “ice” people, with all that such a word entails. And he added that the Jews had bankrolled the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Oh, Lenny, I thought, you’ve changed since you were president of the Jewish fraternity at Lafayette! I filed Jeffries’ assertion away, and some years later doodled my way through the web, found some rants by black nationalists saying the same thing, and made a list of about four books by serious historians on the subject of Jews and slavery. What I discovered was that Jeffries had not a kernel of truth but perhaps a fly’s whisker of truth in his statement. Of the hundreds of Jews who lived in Charleston, South Carolina in the early and mid-19th Century, there were about four families that owned plantations with African slaves. (Charleston was the center of the slave trade in the US, the port to which, before the international slave trade was banned by various governments in the early 19th century, slave ships from Africa carried most of their prisoners, and even after the ban went into effect Charleston remained a busy center for slave trading among the U.S. states.)

DA: You said, “Once I’ve done all the research, the question is what to do with it,”
in reference to your novels on historical figures.

AC:  All life, gossip, reading, eavesdropping, your troubles, family, your friends’
troubles and families, strangers with interesting stories, the news, travel, sights, insights, that’s the stuff of research for a novel or a short story. Graham Greene once put it this way. All a writer needs is a childhood. And I would add, an adulthood. But when you choose to work with historical material research becomes more codified. You can visit a location or a region where historical events that interest you took place. But how do you visit the time? You don’t. You have to face up to the fact that you have to invent the time based on all of your reading, insights, and what you might know about contemporary human character back from which you extrapolate in order to imagine characters from a certain time period in history. The one constant in writing anything is the interface between fact and imagination, and in a way historical fiction is as much an imaginative endeavor as so-called speculative fiction or what some of us still call science-fiction. One of its most skilled practitioners, William Gibson, said in a recent interview in The Paris Review, that all science-fiction is really about the present. You can’t say that about historical fiction. Otherwise you put your imprimatur on rank anachronism in both psychology and politics, among other elements in an historical novel. In any case, I want to emphasize the importance of the imagination in all of this, and by that I don’t mean that we invent what we don’t know any more than a scientist of any ethical standing would invent his or her findings. Forster says “only connect”. We try to connect, by means of our imagination, with times and events far-flung throughout the past. Writing fiction is difficult for me, no matter what the form or the material. Writing the Middle Passage sequence in Song of Slaves was the most difficult thing I ever had to do.  I’m sure William Styron must have felt the same way when he wrote the concentration camp chapters in Sophie’s Choice, not to mention his Nat Turner novel.

DA: Do you think your father’s background gave you an early sense of history and a wider world beyond your early environment?

AC:  Absolutely. It took me almost half a lifetime to realize—to admit to myself—how much I owed to him. But this is certainly one of things I learned from his life. About life’s uncertainty—one step one way, I wouldn’t be writing this—one step another way, and I’m here to say these things.

DA: You were born and raised in Perth Amboy, N.J. of a  Russian immigrant father who was in the Navy Air Corps, and served in the Red Air Force against rebellious Muslims, China mail service.

AC:  I had a lived or, what’s the cliché, a felt sense of history. I was part of it, as we all are, but as a child I didn’t know that. I thought it was only my childhood and my family and that was that. How they got to be who they were, how they all came to be living with each other in a small industrial town at the confluence of the Arthur Kill (the body of water that flows out of New York Bay to form the western boundary of Staten Island) and Raritan Bay, where the Raritan River flows out of the west Jersey hills to meet with the Atlantic Ocean). I did not understand, even though (fortunately) my father beat us over the head with his stories about his former life as an adventurous air cadet and pilot in the old Soviet Union and Japan and China before coming to the US, that I was the product of chance meetings within particular historical times and climes. You know, the American as apple pie scenario is a static myth, a myth that exists outside of time. Where do those apples come from? Who grew them? Who grew the wheat for the flour? Who sold it? Who baked the pies? That’s story, which happens in time. To live outside of time, in our contemporary days, is a kind of madness. Faulkner shows us that in the section on Quentin Compson’s suicide at Harvard in The Sound and the Fury. A sense of time=sanity. No sense of time=madness.

DA:  You went to high school in an industrial town which was not exactly an encouraging learning environment.

AC: No. Part of childhood includes whatever sort of education you might have acquired, and in post WW-2 Perth Amboy, New Jersey, it was wretched. The teachers were all normal school graduates, and for the most part bored with their subjects. It was a bit like dining in an old Soviet restaurant. The waiters had their sinecures. Why should they have to be bothered to serve you? You felt as though you were starving to death in one of those restaurants. I got a much better education playing hooky with my friends, on trips to New York City (which, thank the gods, was fairly close by) and on the beaches and the water that surrounded our town on three sides.

DA: But you were interested in the written word at an early age.

AC: I have this memory—and I’ve written about it in a memoir I published before memoir was cool!—called Fall Out of Heaven –of my father sitting in a little alcove in what passed for the dining room of the apartment we lived in on lower State Street (which meant near the Bay) in Perth Amboy, and of a Sunday morning he typed and typed, trying, as he explained to me later, to write satirical stories in English in the style of the great Russian satirists Ilf and Petrov. He did not read much—we did not have any serious literature in the house, as I recall, and contemporary fiction only in the form of Readers Digest Condensed Books—but he was trying to write. Kind of a classic situation, much like any number of people you meet as a writer today. Kind of like trying to become a professional baseball player without practicing…Reading is for a writer the equivalent of practice. I remember reading, or listening to people read to me, from an early age. In sixth grade I entered a reading contest at the local public library with  a little Greek kid named Spiro Giorgio—I’ll always remember him because he beat me by three books! To check books out for that contest I had to pass through the main entrance of the library, past a book rack where there was a copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The title and the cover caught my curiosity, and every time I saw it I picked it up and tried to understand what was going on in its pages. Needless to say, that finally happened some years after sixth grade. Years later, when I was serving as a waiter at the Breadloaf Writers Conference I met Ralph, and I told him that story, and we had a good laugh.(I saw him quite a bit after that, at his apartment in NYC, and at Rutgers, when he was writer in residence and I was a teaching assistant in comparative literature)…

DA: Going to Rutgers University was a positive, life changing experience.

AC: Yes, it was. It opened my eyes on the world we never saw in Jersey, except for flashes of it that came with trips on the water and forays into Manhattan. I had world-class instructors, Francis Fergusson, who founded the drama division at Bennington College, where I later went to teach for nearly a decade (author of The Idea of a Theater, still the best book, I think, on drama), critics Paul Fussell and Richard Poirier, the poet John Ciardi (who was writing at the time for The Saturday Review of Literature), William Sloane, novelist and editor. The straight forward academics who taught there were swell, but these men were giants to me.

DA: And after graduation.

AC: Odd jobs, four months as toll taker of New Jersey Turnpike, where on the night shift I read Thomas Wolfe and Proust. Then I went to Europe for eight or nine months. Paris was, as the man wrote, a moveable feast, with the spirit of Hemingway hovering over the city for me, traveled to Spain and lived there for a while,  in a cement house on the beach at Fuengirola, just south of Malaga. I had never seen tiled streets before, I had never seen a lot of things, I climbed with friends to the top of the low mountains at the coast, near Mijas, Picasso’s birthplace, and saw the coast of North African hovering on the horizon.. I took the ferry from Gibralter to Tangiers, and that was wonderful, as was the hashish in Tangiers.

DA: What came next?

AC: When I returned to the US, I took a job as a case worker at the old NYC Department of Welfare, and then at Fairchild Publications as an assistant editor. I covered the mink and seal skin auctions at the Hudson’s Bay Fur Trading Company at their offices in midtown Manhattan. And played a lot of chess at various coffee houses in Greenwich Village.

DA: Real world experience but a bit removed from the literary world.

AC: You can say that. After a year or so of this I got a call from John McCormick, one of my undergraduate professors at Rutgers, inviting me back to become one of the first members of the first class of a new graduate program in comparative literature, under Francis Fergusson. There were about half a dozen of us, including a young woman named Joan Acocella, who went on to become the New Yorker’s first rate dance critic and Jay Wright, the poet. I don’t know what was on their minds, but I know I was thinking, well, I like to read, and I’m now an adult—ha!ha!—so I figured I ought to get an adult profession. I stayed on at Rutgers a while, finished my course work, and then went on to teach while I was working on my dissertation (a critical biography of the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier).

Fergusson suggested I apply for a teaching post at Bennington College (in southwest Vermont). “You’ll like it there,” he said. “It’s not a real college…”  And he was right. It was an extraordinary place, the top five percent of the students as good as any students anywhere in the world, and the half of the faculty that wasn’t intellectually fascist as good, too. The great colleagues I had there—Bernard Malamud, Nicholas Delbanco, John Gardner, Stephen Sandy, a French teacher named Georges Guy, Ben Belitt the poet and translator, poet Michael Dennis Browne—more than made up for the nut-cases and poseurs who staffed the rest of the literature division.

The freedom to teach meant we taught freely. In my case I devised a cycle of narratives from Gilgamesh to Hemingway, and taught myself—as I taught the students—most of what I needed to know to begin my own work. When I left, after nearly a decade (under circumstances too comical and painful and awful to recount here) I was ready to begin to write fiction. My wife at the time and I moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where she took up a teaching post at the University of Tennessee. We made a pact. I would try for five years to write fiction and she would bring in most of the money. Within three years I had written a short story and sold it to the New Yorker, and I was off and running. I wrote and published a few more stories in little magazines. Then  came a novel. By then the marriage had come to a shuddering halt.

DA: That was your  novel about John Reed?

AC: Yes, that was when, like some kind of supernatural shape-shifter, I turned from nonfiction, vaguely scholarly writer—as in my dissertation on Carpentier, about whom I chose to write because I loved his work—into a fool of a fiction writer. It happened that I was trying to figure out what to do next, and I had the notion that I would write something like a biographical monograph, perhaps a hundred pages long, about John Reed, the American journalist and radical whose Ten Days That Shook the World was such an interesting piece of writing.

I began my research at the Rare Book collection at the Harvard Library, where the journalist Granville Hicks had convinced Reed’s widow Louise Bryant to send all of her late husband’s papers. I noticed that an historian named Robert Rosenstone (from Cal Tech)) had been going through the papers the year before. When I visited Hicks, then already quite elderly, in his upstate New York house, he told me that Rosenstone had recently been there to interview him about Reed. So since this talented young American historian was clearly at work on a biography of Reed I decided on the spot to write a novel about him instead.

Fools rush in…Maybe a good motto for all novelists? When I told my friend and then colleague novelist Nicholas Delbanco about my decision, he said, Oh, you’re lucky, you’ll have all of that material to work with whereas I have to make things up. So I thought I was lucky, until I had to wrestle with the task of what to leave out of the story!
DA: You also became friends with Bernard Malamud at Bennington?

AC: Actually, it was Malamud who introduced me to Granville Hicks. I had met Bern the summer before, at the Delbanco wedding reception. He was dressed in very (as I was to learn over the years) un-Malamud like fashion, with open shirt collar and love-beads around his neck. We talked. (We were going to be colleagues). He said, “I think we can be friends if you never show me anything you write…”

DA: You and Nicholas Delbanco co-edited Talking Horse, Bernard Malamud On Life And Work.

AC: Yes, after Bern’s death (in 1986) Nick Delbanco and I wanted to do something in tribute to him, and so we collected a bunch of his essays, interviews, lectures and notes, many of which had never been published before. Going through his papers at the Library of Congress was certainly an eye-opener for us, particularly about the meticulous way he went about revision. Every story, every novel manuscript—he wrote a draft in long hand, and then typed what he did, and made changes in the typescript, and then copied that over in long hand for a new draft, made changes, and then typed that…etc. For the stories, sometimes a dozen versions. And he’d correct and change galley proofs of the magazine versions, and then work on the galleys for a collection. He would work on  tear sheets of magazine versions which he corrected for the book.

DA: Delbanco and you have also collaborated on a series Literature: Craft And Voice.

AC: Yes, which is currently going into a second edition, published by McGraw-Hill. The behind our book—on fiction, poetry, and drama—which we gained through long experience as teachers: when you improve students’ ability and interest in reading, you help them improve their writing. Many students, because of the proliferation of email, text messages, and now twitter, come to college unprepared to read long works in a sustained manner. That’s, as we see it, the equivalent of living for the moment, the view from Jimminy Cricket’s head. We think you can live both in the moment, and in the long view of time. But then novelists have to think this way. How else could they read, let alone write, long work?

DA: You also have written a novel, To Catch The Lightning: A Novel Of American Dreaming, about Edward S. Curtis, a photographer of the American West and Native American people.

AC: A long novel. I’d been fascinated with Curtis, and American Indians in a serious way—like all American kids I first became steeped in their lives in childhood as myth— And when I was about eighteen, and wandered past his photographs in the lobby of an art movie house in Cambridge, Mass., I knew I was seeing something important. Those images stayed with me for many decades. Who knows how a novel percolates up through the hard surface of the mind? This one came unbidden, after many years.

DA: You have also served as the regular book reviewer for the NPR radio program “All Things Considered” for many years.

AC: As of today, twenty-nine.

DA: You’ve literally literally have read thousands of books over the years, a remarkable feat of dedication.

AC:  Once a week, on “All Things Considered,” I learned art of doing book review in two minutes, usually end up reading three books for everyone I decide to review.

DA: How do you find or decide which books to consider.

AC: My taste guides me, and that includes a sense of audience, and a certain duty to report on what seem to me to be the most interesting and entertaining books of the day. As it happens, my taste spans everything from experiment fiction to genre fiction, and good good books in the middle.

Song of Slaves in the Desert

DA: You’ve found a home at George Mason University.

AC: A very formal place, after Bennington (and a few places, such as Michigan, University of the South, and University of Virginia, in between. But they encourage writers to write, and that’s a boon. From C.K.Williams to Carolyn Forche and Richard Bausch, to name a few, some fine writers have taught at Mason. Right now I have some wonderful colleagues in Susan Shreve, Steve Goodwin, Helon Habila,  Courtney Brkic, Eric Pankey.

DA: What type of courses do you teach?

AC: Fiction workshops, and some literature. American modernism, always great to do because you get to reread Faulkner and Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. And I do a cycle of courses in the short story, from Europe to America to world story. A lot of great reading.

DA: What are you working on now?

AC: I don’t want to jinx it, but I can say that after years of wrestling with long books, the Curtis novel, and then Song of Slaves in the Desert, I am trying to work short. A short novel. I like the short form. Over the years I have published, I guess it is, about half a dozen novellas, the latest one being in the current—2011—issue of The Idaho Review. So I like short. But the novels tended to get long. You have to be more a long-distance runner rather than a sprinter for many reasons in this thing we do. When you’re running long distance, people sprint past you, but they fall by the wayside. You just keep running at your own pace.

Alan Cheuse is a post from: Pif Magazine

Lou Rowan

Rowan also edits the literary journal, Golden Handcuffs Review (www.goldenhandcuffsreview.com).  A native of Southern California, Rowan lives in Seattle after living for three decades in New York City.  He has worked as a teacher at Friends Seminary, and as an institutional investor at the Bankers Trust and Frank Russell companies.

Derek Alger: It appears you’ve found a creative home in Seattle.

Lou Rowan: In New York City,  you go to a party with “civilians,” and if you say “write” in response to the “what do you do” probe, you get grilled on publisher, agent, sales.  In Seattle, people ask what kind of writing you do and what you’re working on. In general, living in Seattle is easy; in New York I had to fight the environment, once or twice literally during attempted muggings, and especially as my kids were growing up. I don’t thrive on stress, distraction, competition, and so it’s no accident that I’ve finished many projects in Seattle that I began in New York.

I feel truly at home in a city when I can use the public transit;  there’s a sense of openness, of being “part of.” Unfortunately the only western city with real public transit is Portland; Seattle encourages bike-riding, but that scares me. And so we isolate ourselves as we move about the varied neighborhoods. But the ferry-system is great!

Music, especially jazz, dance, and the fine arts are lively here. The museums tend not to catch the local work, the donors going for big names from elsewhere (as they do also with architectural commissions), but the galleries capture the liveliness. And we have an excellent range of independent bookstores.

DA: Tell us a little bit about the novel you’re working on about the “losing of the West.”

LR: I have two projects going, Derek. I’m finishing a relatively short book, A Mystery’s not a Problem. It’s in sections called “Easterns” and “Westerns,” which use the mystery form to tell lighthearted tales of crime and corruption in New Jersey, New York, Tacoma, Seattle. There’s an earnest and charming narrator named Lou Rowan who lives through these episodes, helping us to understand their significance, often with reference to his autobiography. The poor guy has been let down by books, but he assures us we’ll find this the one book we can count on in all ticklish situations.

DA: And the second project?

LR: The longer project you refer to is Corpus, a novel that tells the stories of employees, bosses, and founders of the businesses that developed the West, told from within their experience of work. It runs from roughly “Reconstruction” to the 1990′s. There are also scenes from a US colony, based roughly on Guatemala, whose first peoples manage to find a way to secure justice from us. The discipline, if you will, of the book is that its episodes are retellings of Biblical episodes or passages: so much is made in this country of our roots in that wonderful collection of abused near eastern documents.

DA: Sounds like quite an  undertaking.

LR: Corpus is a lot of work, so you can’t blame me for diverting myself from it over my years out here with stories and shorter novels, not to mention an occasional essay. But as soon as the mystery-book’s done, I’ll go after the “big book” full-time.

DA: You originally hail from the west coast.

LR: Yes, I grew up thinking that the ways of Southern California, the enforced optimism, the car culture, the informality, the fine weather, the McCarthy-ism were “normal,” and that the East I began to live in as a teenager was “weird.” In fact when I first arrived in Massachusetts, I was baffled by all the trees. What good were woods?  Where were the used-car lots, the four-lane boulevards, the barefoot tow-heads? Then more confusion: my prep school was riddled with anti-semitism, and I, who’d been raised totally safe from all minorities in Pasadena and Newport Beach, was at a loss to know what Jews had done wrong. My abiding theory is that the parents of my classmates were being pushed from their economic sinecures by able graduates of the Bronx High School of Science and its ilk, and they were bitter at losing the competition.

At any rate, here was a stratified social order, with the “townies” of Southboro and the “biddies” of the kitchen providing menial services; I, who had experienced only the cream, had my first distorted glimpses of the whole social pudding.  It was not until my senior year that a Latin teacher, one of two or so Democrats in a faculty united in despising Eleanor Roosevelt’s earnestness, stunned me with the revelation: there is social injustice needing remedy. I suppose the upper-middle-class naïveté I brought East is some variant footnote to Henry James’ innocents in Europe. At least that’s how I play it in the mystery-book: the villain of one western section has his ill-nature confirmed at Harvard, and I enjoy treating the Ivy League as the source of pompous venality infecting our culture and politics.

DA: Was it after prep school you realized you were a writer without consciously knowing it?

LR: Yes, Derek, good point. A friend was kind enough to call some of my gossipy letters “publishable.” I was writing to him about a post-graduation party thrown by Philadelphia “Main-Liners” (interesting pun) in a vast house overlooking the lovely Wissahickon River.  A friend who would later become richer running a hedge fund was standing transfixed by a large cake. I bit, and entered the drama: he would never be able to enjoy cake again, he’d just been diagnosed with diabetes. Next thing I knew I was cornered by a woman who made a life of sleeping with boys from my prep school, and who was breaking up with my best friend, a stoic, handsome, uncommunicative Scandinavian. I had just seen the movie of Long Day’s Journey into Night, and attempted wittily to connect her lucubrations with those of “Katherine Heartburn.”

I also sought to entertain my younger brother and sisters with bedtime tales I wrote for them. I’m sure the stories were prolix;  I remember their restlessness.

DA: It couldn’t have been that bad.

LR: I was intimidated by what I took to be the intellectual snobbery of college: I bought into the notion that literature was a sacred text to be parsed, and I couldn’t see myself on that level, so I majored in history. At the same time, I felt that there was something stupid about what passed for modern poetry:  the poet would “cling to a spar” when he meant he was upset. Nothing like John Wiener’s sincerity, playing itself out a few MTA stops away.

But in New York after college Bob Lamberton, the wonderful writer, scholar, translator Robert Lamberton, introduced me to what I’ll call the Black Mountain/New York schools of poetry; Kelly’s side of A Controversy of Poets became my bible, the readings at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery my passion, and after meeting Louis Zukofsky I sure had something to crack my brains on!

DA: You were fortunate to become close with Zukofsky, one of the founders and primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets.

LR: Oh yes, it was fun, intimidating, moving, frustrating to spend time with Louis and Celia. He was renowned not only for his amazing work, but also for his hypochondria and complaining. He was constantly dodging “drafts” that would send him into some wilderness of symptoms;  one time I told him that he was too old to fear the military draft, and it seemed to become more fun after that. When you have a mentor, you maybe dote overmuch on his every word, but Louis always chose his words so carefully! He was the ultimate editor:  someone who aspired to “perfection” of language, and so when he destroyed quite a bit of my attempts at poetry, I got what I expected and I suppose what I felt I deserved. But then he found work to praise, unearthing a piece I didn’t think at the heart of my work,  and that was stunning.

It was all about diction, and the rest of my excitement he dismissed as “talking about creation”–that was like the “afflatus” he dismissed in Blake (he liked the rest).  I can hear how he drew out the word playfully, “ah flah tuss,” the third syllable reminding me of “tush.”

When he’d relax, he was charming, funny.  He’d bounce in his seat, hearing music from somewhere.  When he’d volunteer something about his work, he’d lower his voice, so that I’m still trying to reconstruct what he said about his “use” of Mallarmé.  His memory of the work of younger poets was striking: I remember his correcting my quotations from Denise Levertov. He mentioned Creeley and Duncan the most.

I knew George Oppen at the same time. It seemed a perversity in Louis to isolate himself from colleagues with his crochets and quarrels, and in fact he told of a time he’d been catty with Basil Bunting, and Bunting told him he was hopeless. It was hard to understand why this brilliant, kind, attentive, funny man could be so petty, and he seemed to be musing on that when he told the story about Bunting.

DA: At one point, you thought you might  become a minister.

LR: Bertrand Russell called St. Paul the “inventor of Christianity.” My experience falling into a confused state between two families (my parents divorced long before the technology of divorce became so extensive), between two coasts, of feeling at home nowhere, and my then-inability to thrive on rootlessness and alienation made me a perfect receptacle for Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, Rudolph Bultmann, C.S. Lewis and others. I was fallen, the world was fallen, and I needed a redemption that could be only partial in an existence I must endure, the whole Pauline version. Now I can question the logic of rejecting the existence I’m given, but then it all fit. I was probably the only member of my class at prep school to take “sacred studies” and the required religious observances with some seriousness. My reading and my earnestness failed to make me the liveliest guy at parties, but I’ve always, probably because of the confusions in my upbringing, felt the need for some kind of coherence.

My family was baffled by this pursuit. They had forgotten to baptize me, and so the beginning of my preparation for confirmation by Bishop Anson Phelps Stokes was being baptized by the little-used font at the St. Mark’s School chapel. I did go briefly to Union Seminary as a graduate school, but moved on to NYU to get my “teaching license” MA, though I returned to Union to take a course in Systematic Theology from John Macquarrie, Heidegger’s translator. Going to Union Seminary was alienating also:  whites from all over validating themselves by ministering to what we then called the “inner city.”  It seemed like missionary work, destructively naive, and I was worried about Vietnam while they were talking about LBJ healing the nation’s “identity crisis.”

DA: Sounds like a crisis over what is truly a crisis.

LR: Now I want to get back to what I might call loosely religious anthropology, of The Bible and other crucial texts, and as I study the history of the settlers out here, I can see them bringing no greater understanding of our environment or our own nature than the spiritual understanding of the Indians they displaced. Obviously their ignorance of water, plants, animals and sociability caused them (and us) abiding grief.

But during and after college I moved to secular texts, and I think I owe it to the early (and I emphasize the early, not the later silly) Henry Miller to say “so what?” to all the anxiety and questioning. I also love the passage in Studies in Classic American Literature in which D.H. Lawrence sends up American writers for being so earnest. I don’t have the book, but he says something like: “The meaning of life. The meaning of life. At the moment it’s a cup of tea.”

Gabriel Marcel was another hero of my theological period, and I was most disappointed when his intonation prevented my understanding most of what he said in his Gifford Lectures at Harvard.  But I’ve used a favorite phrase of his in the title of my mystery-book, and it tickled me to learn recently that he and Sartre hated each other so much they’d purchase tickets to the openings of each others plays, so that they could storm out.

DA: You eventually became an English teacher for a fair spell.

LR: I loved it. It was exciting to go back to work each fall. I still feel guilty for how long I held on to the students’ papers, or for times I’d get grumpy in class. One of the blessings of the to-me weird world of Facebook is getting back in touch with students after these decades apart. The Quaker school I taught in was probably the most eccentric of the competent New York private schools: a good scholarship program for kids of all backgrounds, and an openness to questioning so-called social norms. Sure, many families had succumbed to the economic definition of experience, but their boring anxieties didn’t dominate the curriculum, or the kids’ free time. One of my favorite books is Huizinga’s Home Ludens: a wonder of teaching is the spirit of fun that can animate work. Heck, kids could read Hamlet in the ninth grade, could plow through the whole of The Pickwick Papers, could suffer the intensities of “romantic” poets or Milton in those days. I hope they still can! Yes, the culture’s barbarous jargon infected some of them: I can remember arguing with a young man who couldn’t “relate to” Huckleberry Finn. I was probably pompous enough to point him at e-ducare, suggesting that a leading-out from himself would be quite beneficial!

There were upper and lower Quakers corresponding the high and low church, but there was enough radicalism in the Quaker tradition to keep things lively and open-ended.

I moved on to another kind of work partly for the usual reason, $$, but mostly because the arrival of my own children focused my excitement on them, and you can’t teach unless you’re excited by it.

DA: So you moved on to the world of finance. Was business strange for you?

LR: Mostly yes. But I will say that working with clients to protect their employees retirement security, or with foundations to protect their returns was engrossing, and it took me to unexpected places (like Kalamazoo and Beijing), and put me into situations I never could have imagined.

I went into business partly as a challenge: could I keep up the harsh intensity of the hard-driving, efficient beings whose social milieu I’d left when I stayed East to pursue some kind of life — I was never sure what — -that differed from the upper-middle-class world of my family? I started in the human resources department at Bankers Trust, in the building on Liberty Street that has caused so much heartache and controversy as it disappears, and the first thing I noticed is that the vaunted efficiency of the private sector is merely a religious belief. Murray Kempton wrote that MBA’s are the free-market equivalent of communist apparatchiks, and boy is that true!

Bankers Trust was highly successful but almost totally disorganized. Infighting, corporate envy of Wall Street investment houses (this was before Bill Clinton eliminated Glass-Steagal, creating the “level playing field” on which traders could toy with our economy), reorganization after reorganization based on some abstract “vision,” the constant anxiety that if you were profitable but not “growing exponentially” you were useless–this immature lack of planning or governance was the reality. While all this was going on inside, the financial press was loving us. I’m afraid that this is the reality of unregulated business, and bad actors like Enron or Murdoch are simply the ones who get caught, as Bankers did after I left to join a smaller company I could represent with a straight face.

DA: I suspect laughing at corporate meetings is somewhat frowned upon,

LR: I had been lucky enough to stumble into the highly-profitable world of institutional investing, so big and so profitable that the bank could “position” its boring steady income as a diversification from trading and deal-making in its PR. The traders that took over the bank as I arrived let my department alone for about a decade, after which they couldn’t resist shooting it up with steroids called derivatives — Bankers was one of the “pioneers” of this “rocket science.” Management became younger, and almost totally ignorant of the pension and

non-profit world in which we had thrived, and soon I was working on a trading desk with a “turret” instead of a phone, and people around me were yelling “fuck!” and “let’s tear their faces off!” while I was trying to talk with investment officers at foundations and in treasuries.

The new head of institutional investments, who’d made a bundle for the bank trading derivatives on gold, explained to me that sitting at a trading desk puts you “into a flow” you can’t get in an office. One day all of us in sales and client service were introduced to the number-one derivatives inventor in our business. (I wish I could remember her name, so I could see where she’s gone. The gold trader’s back in Australia, where a yacht race bears his name.) As she was explaining to us new directives to “leverage” fees on our clients, a traditional-biz type asked her, “What about client service and client relationships?” She paused, and with the righteous anger of zealotry asked, “Do you know what a client is? Do you?” We all shifted in our seats.  Had we been missing something all these years? “A client is no more and no less than an opportunity for making lots and lots of money.” I love the seeming precision of “no more and no less.” These are the people that brought down the world economy.

DA: Sounds like a good time to leave.

LR: I went to a much smaller, more reputable and traditional company in Tacoma, and it took another ten years or so before young visionaries succeeded in “leveraging” into hedge funds and other dubious investments, a move which caused it to break the buck in its money market funds and to lay off something like 20% of its workforce, few if any of whom had anything to do with the foolish risks. And so my personal survey of American business has been a bit scary. Of course there is opportunity for honest, interesting work — but it’s frightening how readily that opportunity can be snatched away by “synergistic” deals hatched by execs and investment bankers for whom the companies are tradable abstractions, or by foolish managers who feel that risk goes in only one direction. “Unlocking value” and “leveraging” are faith-based concepts.

DA: It’s all beyond me.

LR: The purpose of business schools and business courses is to train students into the proper attitude, to mold their thought-process into a doctrinal jargon that blinds them to social experience. Case studies are lives of the saints. Recently I went to the memorial service for a great artist at his daughter’s home in suburbia: in the immediate wake of the heartfelt tributes a Wall-Streeter asked me, “Does his work trade?” When I commuted to my teaching job from Westchester County in the 70′s, businessmen would lower the curtains as we traversed the Bronx and Harlem. A friend who succeeded mightily as an investment banker told me he learned nothing in business school — he went to Yale — except the time value of money, and he could have taught himself that.

It’s as if I stumbled into the middle of Zukofsky’s “Inextricably the direction of historic and/ contemporary particulars.”

DA: What does “Golden Handcuffs” mean, and why did you chose that title for the literary journal you edit?

LR: Hey, blame it on Toby Olson! I took a walk with him in Philadelphia in the ’80′s, during the heyday of the large corporate takeovers described in The Barbarians at the Gate. Bankers Trust funded many of them. Suddenly a sheetrock wall would be thrown up between you and a noisy crew of investment bankers –that was the “Chinese wall” that’s supposed to prevent one part of the business from trading on what another part is doing in putative confidence. Trouble was the young investment bankers would chatter loudly in the halls and on the elevators about their machinations. — That’s another thing that stuns me: the youth and ignorance of so many business folk affecting jobs and communities. I’ll never forget the young managers of our “emerging markets” fund bragging about how they’d bullied Mexico’s treasury, threatening to pull our money out unless they “reformed” (i.e., cut benefits to the needy).

Anyway, I’m regaling Toby with corporate buzzwords and out of the blue he says, “If you do another magazine, you should call it that.”–Meaning our illustrious title. That’s what I love about Toby’s work: imagination continuously surprising you. When we were colleagues at Friends Seminary he invented a lovely course called “Fairy Tales Coming True,” in which “folk” sources were lined up with “literary” work.

The title is satirical: “golden handcuffs” are the payments captive boards make to the exec who’ve appointed them, payments meant to keep important execs “on board.” They are never, to my knowledge, tied to results: it’s a privilege to pay these ransoms.

Anyway, the thought never crossed my mind that the title could suggest porn, until I started the website — the name was long gone. And the title reminds me of Blake’s songs.

DA: When did Golden Handcuffs come into being?

LR: I started Golden Handcuffs in the early ’00′s partly to ensure my return to literature, and partly to fill a gap: I’m unaware of any journal with good production values and circulation that focuses entirely on what I call (and no term satisfies) experimental writing and art. Many are open to it, but there’s nothing I happen to know of that’s “pure,” if you will — and especially nothing that publishes all the forms of writing, fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs, criticism. The Review of Contemporary Fiction focuses on the new in fiction only — it was my lifeline during my biz years, and continues to educate me.

And editing has been a fine hike: the writers I’ve followed since the ’60′s, some of them contributing editors, have been very good about introducing me to younger writers unknown to me.  All Golden Handcuffs needs is more subscribers and advertisers to ease the financial burden of independence.

DA: Since you left New York, the scribbling you’ve done over the decades has become two books.

LR: Yes, I’d begun some of the stories in Sweet Potatoes as early as the 80′s. Maybe sooner, because I had a small repertoire of stories about my school days I’d tell my students in the 70′s. Many I left out, it’s definitely a selected stories.

Sweet Potatoes

My Last Days began when I sketched a story about flying about lower Manhattan and Brooklyn in the 80′s, when staring across “concrete canyons” at people in offices like mine made me think of flying right over to see what they were up to. But it was not until I was living on a quiet island in Puget Sound that it occurred to me that I could rid myself of all my anger (naïve wish!) at New York’s business and political shenanigans by having a gullible Superman fight them, exploring his inner child as he fought. I began that in earnest about 10 years ago, and I like my Rupert Murd better than the guy so much in the news these days. Satire’s always a temptation in today’s world–but now I’m looking for something more sane.

DA: How did you choose the title “Sweet Potatoes?”

LR: I went to a London pub serving sweet potato fries during a tense time, and they were a blessed relief. Smitten with their blatant pleasures, trying to ignore the people I was with, it hit me walking around Earl’s Court that “Sweet Potatoes” could be just right.  I wanted the word or the notion “sweet” in the title, for I wanted an aspect of the book to be pure fun. We “play” music, and most of the stories I chose  were improvisations.

DA: In the preface to one section, you write, “. . . these stories play with autobiography, they entertain it. The game is a form, or better a quest for a formal flexibility, not a congeries of facts.” –Could you elaborate a bit?

LR: Sure. There’s something palpable about play, if only the tones and grimaces and timing we use in spoken verbal play, but more often a ball, a stick, cards, a defined space. Why not treat events from my life (or made-up events looking like them) as objects, as playthings? Are not Henry James’ sentences the most finely-spun webs of witticisms? Do they not position his characters on a cultural battlefield as minutely elaborate as My Uncle Toby’s toy soldiers?

When I wrote the “The Alphabet of Love Serial” and “The Accounting” (the sections of it in the book), I heard sentences and voices that allowed me to make mocked-up analyses of people while caressing, or at least touching them.  For example, I can take a lesbian couple utterly seriously at the same time that I educe their social foibles. So I can be dissing liberalism’s Uncle-Tomming of a “minority” while toying with pieces of the kaleidoscope we all are, singular and plural.

Consider all the senses of “entertaining.” Can we “entertain” our knowledge and experience in fiction, putting everything we know in play? These stories were in the first draft improvised: I was finding out what the game was as I was playing it.

DA: I think you played quite well.

LR: When I wrote them, I heard them as a laconic footnote to Henry James’ elaborations, but THEN when I began to read them in public, I found myself sounding like my fond memory of Spencer Holst, who seemed to me poring over and  bemusedly discovering his words when he read his tales.

If I have a theory, and for this California barbarian, literary theory can be to writing as the sports section is to sport, it is that when you really let it in, art is the unexpected.  Responding to the novelty, you re-shuffle your experience, in delight, in learning, even therapy

Lou Rowan is a post from: Pif Magazine

Mindock is also the author of two poetry chapbooks, Doppelganger (S. Press) and Oh Angel (U Soku Stampa), and her poems have been published in numerous journals, including River Styx, Phoebe, Poesia, and Poet Lore, to name a few, as well as appearing in several anthologies. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was awarded a fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council distributed by the Somerville Arts Council.

Gloria Mindock

From 1984-1994. Mindock edited the Boston Literary Review/Blur and was co-founder of Theatre S & S Press, Inc.  During its existence, Theatre S. received grants from the Polaroid Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Globe Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.  Her poetry collection, Doppelganger, served as the text for theatre piece of the same name performed by Theatre S.

Over the years, Mindock has performed, acted, composed music, and sang in the theatre.  Her most recent performance piece, Walking In El Salvador. is scheduled to debut this September.

Mindock lives in Somerville, MA, where she has worked as Social Worker, and also does freelance editing of manuscripts and conducts workshops for writers.

Derek Alger: Were you creative as a kid?

Gloria Mindock: I was always creative as a kid.  I wrote music all the time and words to go with it.  I remember one song about the Mississippi River when I was 10 years old.  I still remember it!  As I got older, I still loved music but I turned to acting and theatre.  I acted in plays in high school.  My senior year in high school, the drama department was started again by Mr. Gordon Rogers.  I thought he was remarkable.  He called me “Little Nutsy.”  I ended up acting in The Skin Of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder in college that he directed.  I had a blast.  He had a deep voice and could recite Shakespeare for hours.  It was amazing.  He was such an inspiration to me.  He died some years ago which was a real loss.

I also did a few plays at St. Bede High School in Peru. IL.  At that time it was an all guy Catholic school.  My best memory is being in a play that Father Placid Hatfield and Father Gabriel directed.  They both were so wonderful and I have never forgotten them.  Two very special priests.  I often wonder where they are now. I also sang in musicals so it was a great experience.

DA: You originally hailed from the midwest.

GM: Yes, a proud midwestener, born in LaSalle, Illinois, and raised in nearby Oglesby, population 4.300, today, 3,800.  I disliked high school except for a few teachers.  I had great friends throughout school.  My closest friends from home are Janie, Shirley, Carol, and Sandy.  There is a special bond of friendship there that will always be there.  I look forward to going home and spending time with them and my family.  My wonderful friends made school bearable and we had such great times!

DA: And after high school?

GM: I belonged to Stage 212 in LaSalle, IL and was cast as a Kit Kat Girl, Maria, in Cabaret. I loved that musical. I was one of the lead dancers and singers. The cast was great. I went to Illinois Valley Community College for two years just to get the general studies out of the way.  Mr. Jim Jewell, who was the lead in Cabaret, was a teacher there.  I did many Readers Theatre productions with him as the instructor and had him for a few classes.  He was a gem, also like Gordon Rogers.  During my community college years, I continued to do theatre.  I was very lucky to have such good influences.  Other than that, I didn’t care for my classes there.  I was bored by them.  I never believed in studying things that I would never ever use in my life.  I am a total radical against the educational system as it stands now and how it was then.

DA: No argument from me.

GM: I went to two other colleges in Illinois and majored in theatre.  First, Theatre Education, then Comprehensive Theatre.  The department was a nightmare for me and I did not belong there.  The teachers were on an ego trip.  One semester they knew you, the next, they did not.  Some of them seemed jealous of the students.  Of course there were some really wonderful teachers but the majority . . . I hated my classes.  I did a lot of acting in shows and loved it.  Many of them directed by students. This was a wonderful experience and I learned a lot.  In the department, at the time, were really great students who were so gifted.  You see them today on the big screen and on TV — Jeff Perry, John Malkovich, Terry Kinney, Laurie Metcalf, Rhondi Reed, Gary Cole, and many more.  I didn’t really know any of them very well.  Every student there was talented and so nice.

I have nothing but good things to say about the students.  Real gems!  Some of them went on to Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, started by Gary Sinise, and then some continued on their career path elsewhere.  I have no contact with anyone in the theatre department.  I left my mark though and co-directed Godspell and it was one of the best attended shows ever.  That was in the ’70s.  So in summary, pertaining to the classes, I was not a model student, but I do not feel bad about this.

DA: Probably prepared you well for other things.

GM: After I left there, I went to another college and majored in Social Work. It was a good fit for me. I wanted to work with addicts. I focused on addictions, criminology, and crisis intervention. I loved it! I had some great teachers. I did Grad work in theater and that was a great experience. I liked the teachers. They really cared about their students learning.

DA: You decided to go east after college and ended up confounding Theatre S. & S Press, publishing books and producing experimental plays.

GM: I moved east to Somerville, Massachusetts and found a home, and a vibrant artistic community. I love theatre, acting is in my blood. What can I say? I love it. At Theatre S, we did original plays and adaptions. We received grants in the 1980′s. It was a good time for that. I had some wonderful experiences here working with David Miller, a wonderful performance artist, director, and writer, and Paul Miller, who did film-making at that time, both just brilliant, and so many other wonderful people. It was tons of hard work but worth every minute of it. Even when some of the actors didn’t take some things seriously, I still loved it. Yes, I’m old school. I believe in warm-ups and knowing your lines.

DA: Your poetry collection, Doppelganger, was the text for a piece performed by Theatre S.

GM: For this collection, Edgar Allen Poe/William Wilson was an inspiration for writing such dark poetry. It was such a thrill seeing it being performed. The set was done to give the feel like you were looking in the windows of a house. The audience had to walk around looking in the windows to see the action and hear the text, which was my poetry.

DA: When did you start writing poetry.

GM: When I was studying theatre at the college talked about previously. I would go into the library and browse the poetry shelves. There I discovered Keats, Shelly, Byron, Matthew Arnold, and some others who I just loved. I was hooked. I also grew up with poetry books around by Frost, Burns, and some others that my Mother and Dad had. I wrote mostly plays but in 1982, while my ex-husband was part of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, I started to write poetry. I wrote some pretty bizarre poems. Later, I discovered Eastern European writers and that totally is my inspiration for writing now. One of my very first poems was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. I was floored.

DA: You still had a calling for acting.

GM: Always. I plan on performing a piece called, “Walking in El Salvador” which focuses on the atrocities committed there from 1980-1992. It goes along with my book Blood Soaked Dresses. Though I haven’t done anything in years, I will do this.

DA: Your poetry collection, Blood Soaked Dresses, has been praised as “a beautiful, harrowing” book.

Blood Soaked Dresses

GM: This book is very special to me. I worked with El Salvadoran refugees who fled the civil war which lasted from 1980-1992. This book is their account of the atrocities and what they told me written in the first person. A follow-up book, Whiteness Of Bone is currently being worked on. I had to write about this because the world seems to turn its back on such atrocities and genocide.
I wanted to focus on being a voice for the people of El Salvador in this book.

I have always been political following the news of the world. A priest brought El Salvador to my attention. I started hearing so much about it and how could I not get involved? I hope someday they make Arch Bishop Oscar Romero a saint. He was very special to the people of El Salvador. It seemed like at first, he followed what the church told him, and then later, he was there completely for the people.

DA: In 2005, you embarked on another major project.

GM: Yes, I founded Cervena Barva Press. It means “Red Color” in Czech. A few friends told me that I couldn’t do this and that it would be too much for me. I replied, “Watch me!” So the press we born. We publish chapbooks and books of poetry, fiction, and plays. We also publish some poetry postcards, broadsides, and some non-fiction from writers all over the world. William J. Kelle is the other half of the press. He designs the book covers, websites, lays out the chapbooks, and so much more. He is so good at what he does. I also have had many interns from surrounding colleges which has helped. Right now my interns are Kate Clavet and Allison Nonko.

DA: You also have a pretty demanding job.

GM: Being a social worker/counselor has been wonderful. I work with men age 21 and older in a halfway house in Somerville. I have been at CASPAR, Inc, a community-based non-profit organization founded in 1970 in response to the growing need for substance abuse treatment.. since 1994, I like helping those there to learn to live sober and get their lives together. They all have lost everything in their life due to heroin, alcohol, cocaine, oxy’s, and the list goes on, but these are the main drugs of choice. My experiences have all been good. A few times I had rough days on the job but when you look at the whole picture, it has been worth it. So many clients who have come through the program have died. We all try to give them hope. The program is based on AA principles.

DA: What drew you to a specialty in addiction?

GM: I just always believed in helping the less fortunate. My philosophy is that we are all on this planet together. How some people cannot be passionate is beyond me. I volunteered in grade school at a hospital with my friend Jane. We were called, Angelets. At feeding time, we used to hide on the roof because when I fed one patient, he later died. We were freaked out about that. Later in life, and much older, I volunteered for the Red Cross, Kidney Foundation, Easter Seals, and at Anna State Hospital.

DA: Should I ask if you ever sleep.

GM: No.

DA: An email exchange provided you with another creative opportunity.

GM: Yes, I started to correspond with Elkin Getir, the owner, founder, and editor of the Istanbul Literary Review. He had the same vision I have. This vision is to bridge the gaps in writing between countries. After corresponding for awhile, Etkin asked me to edit the Istanbul Literary Review. I said yes and was so excited. I started in September, 2007.

DA: How often does the Istanbul Literary Review come out?

GM: We publish three issues a year online. Elkin has given me full control of what I choose for the magazine. He trusts me completely with it. Guluzar is the Webmaster, Halime, always puts up the best Turkish recipes each issue, and there is a staff which is quite wonderful.

DA: What can we look for in the future?

GM: Personally, a new chapbook called, Pleasure Trout, my book, Whiteness Of Bone, and that performance piece I talked about in the
interview, Walking In El Salvador. Look for many new books by Cerena Barva Press. In the future, I will publish mostly from European countries.

Gloria Mindock is a post from: Pif Magazine

Trowbridge is the author of several poetry collections, including Flickers (2005), O Paradise (1995), and Enter Dark Stranger (1989), all from the University of Arkansas Press, as well as The Complete Book Of Kong (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2003).

He is also the author of three poetry chapbooks, The Packing House Cantata (Camber Press, 2006), The Four Seasons (Red Dragonfly Press, 2001), and The Book Of Kong (Iowa State University Press, 1986).  Trowbridge’s poems have appeared in over 30 anthologies and numerous literary journals, such as The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, and New Letters, to name a few.

William Trowbridge

Trowbridge earned a BA in Philosophy and an MA in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and went on to receive a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University.

Trowbridge’s awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, The Anderson Center, and Yaddo.

Trowbridge and his wife, Sue, live in Lee’s Summit, MO.

Derek Alger: Congratulations on publication of your poetry collection Ship of Fool.

William Trowbridge: Thanks, Derek. It came out in February from Red Hen Press, whom I’m very happy to have as a publisher. The book centers around a character named Fool. When I first started writing poems about him, I wasn’t quite sure who he was, other than an interesting character who seemed connected to the fool figure in silent films and stand-up comedy — for instance Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Richard Pryor, George Carlin. But when I got to know him better, I saw that he’s connected to the fool archetype, which appears not only in silents and stand-ups but also in tales running back to the beginning of storytelling. To borrow from Yiddish comedy, he is a combination of schlemiel and schlimazel. The difference, as you may know, is that the schlemiel is a bungler who’s always accidentally breaking things and spilling stuff on people and the schlimazel is a sad sack who’s always getting his things broken and getting stuff spilled on him. My Fool is both. He’s often treated harshly, which seems to come simply from his being a fool. Most fool figures, though “comic,” are subjected to a great deal of violence. The very term “slapstick” derives from this. In her book on the fool figure, Enid Welsford notes that the fool’s essence is expressed in St. Chrysostom’s phrase “he who gets slapped.”

The fool’s vulnerability and “foolishness” are seen by the non-fool population and perhaps by the fates as an invitation to take a shot — or at least be amused by watching someone or something else do so. The fool becomes a kind of scapegoat. Nathanael West, in Day of the Locust, discourses briefly but memorably on the fool or clown’s tendency to incur violence — usually mirthful but sometimes not. People laugh when he gets slapped or slips on metaphorical or literal banana peels. Keaton discovered this as a child, when he was in his parents’ vaudeville act. When their acrobatics began to feature little Buster taking what looked like, and often were, hard falls, the audience roared. The Keatons became a hit. I touch on the violence motivation fairly directly in several of the Fool poems. But, once in a while, the fool wins out, however temporarily and by default.

DA: Your fool is somewhat unique.

WT: My particular fool starts out as an angel who is accidentally cast into hell with Lucifer and company. He’s then reincarnated in various historical times, with occasional unplanned visits back to the heavenly realm, run by an Enron-style-CEO God who rules from a kind of cosmic Corporate Woods. The first two sections of the book consist entirely of poems about Fool. The middle section is made up of sociopolitical and autobiographical poems, all of which touch on the idea of fools and foolishness.

DA: What prompted you to concentrate on a fool as a representative character of human existence, or is that a foolish question?

WT: Not foolish at all. Yes, I do see him as a reflection of an essential human trait, which is why this figure appears in all periods of literary history and, I’d guess, all cultures. I suppose we can consider our Edenic parents the first fools, and we’ve carried on the tradition without interruption ever since. It’s in our blood. The fool represents human fallibility, and mine also represents the human capacity for hope in hopeless situations and a basic will towards goodness, however unreachable that may be in a world that is most often veering towards its opposite. Fool represents what the novelist Stanley Elkin called the main theme of modern comedy: powerlessness — specifically the powerlessness of the individual in the course of human history, especially modern history. So there’s a seriousness beneath the comic surface in nearly all my Fool poems. This seriocomic element is present in the works of all my favorite writers and comedians. I think the tension created between comedy and seriousness generates an extra element of power in the works of authors who can maintain the risky balancing act.

Ship of Fool

DA: What was your childhood like?

WT: I’d say I had a pretty ordinary childhood in the Midwest, the home of ordinary childhoods. I was born in Chicago at the onset of WWII, and my father was called up by the Army to fight in Europe. So we moved around quite a bit during that time, from military base to military base, finally settling in Columbia, MO, my parents’ hometown. When my father returned after VE Day, with a lingering case of PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder), we moved to Omaha, where he managed the Wilson & Co, packing house. Omaha had by then taken Chicago’s title as “hog butcher for the world.” Our house was devoid of art: no music, books, paintings. So my first exposure to art was when I watched the film classics run on early TV, when there wasn’t much else offered in the way of programming. I was especially taken with the early comedians — Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin, and later, Abbott and Costello– but the whole art form mesmerized me. The images still percolate through my subconscious and often turn up in my poems. From King Kong squashing pedestrians to Van Johnson cooking eggs in his helmet in Battleground to Jack Palance coldly gut-shooting Elisha Cook, Jr. in Shane, those images remain with me. When I was old enough to get to stay up late, my favorite time of the day became 10:30 p.m., when the late-night movie on TV started — a program known in Omaha as “Night Owl Theater.” I remain a night owl. But at that time and all though high school, I had absolutely no interest in poetry and relatively little in any kind of reading.

DA: Did you have a specific idea of what you wanted to eventually do when you first went to college?

WT: My father, uncle, and big sister all graduated from the University of Missouri, and my grandfather had been Dean of Agriculture there. So I wound up there, too. I entered as a pre-med major, picturing myself as a future surgeon — about as realistic a notion as the old Walter Mitty pocketa, pocketa fantasy. I think about half the entering freshmen that year declared for pre-med. I found the pre-med courses both difficult and boring, so after my freshman year, I tried pre-law, a decision based on yet another fantasy.   But even then, my main interest was in philosophy, which I finally switched to in hopes, I suppose, of becoming a professional wise person. I really did suspect that, with some help from the great thinkers, I could back Truth into a corner. Anyway, in college I became a reader. I was also taking a lot of lit. courses then, which I discovered I enjoyed. It turned out that literature was something more than “Thanatopsis” and The Good Earth, the likes of which made up most of my high school literary curriculum. I planned to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy, specializing in philosophical ideas in literature.

DA: So, Philosophy led you to English.

WT: Yes, that happened after I hit the Truth wall during my first semester of graduate studies in philosophy. Trying to slog my way though Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” was perhaps the tipping point. Or maybe it was the required course in symbolic logic. Anyway, I finally realized my preference was definitely for the concrete particularity of literature over the abstractness of philosophy, though my interest in poetry was still minimal. I switched my major to literature, specifically modern American literature, with a planned specialty in Faulkner studies, and finished my M.A. at M.U.

DA: You took a break from academia.

WT: That’s right. I went to Vanderbilt for my Ph.D, but after a semester there, I finally overdosed on school. I felt that, if I had to write one more essay test, I was going to have to do it under some kind of strong medication. I was granted a withdrawal in good standing from the program, which gave me the option of returning if my search for a life outside academia didn’t pan out. I then undertook a series of interviews with newspapers, advertising agencies, publishers — anyone who might have a job for someone with an M.A. in English (I played down the philosophy degree). I was finally hired as a cub reporter for the Des Moines Register and Tribune in Iowa. I had absolutely no journalism experience, but I was lucky enough to walk in the door soon after the managing editor decided he was never going to hire another journalism major. He told me he wanted people who knew something beyond the history and principles of journalism and had not been trained to use a style different from the Register and Tribune’s. Ironically, he had turned down my journalist brother-in-law, Hugh Sidey, several years before. Hugh went on to become White House correspondent for Time magazine. I wound up quitting the paper after a year.

DA: Sounds like it was time for a change.

WT: A job on the paper was the good news. The bad was that I learned I disliked journalism. I had visions of writing artsy features, not calling in police and fire stories from a closet-sized room in city hall. But I was being groomed for the latter. I had to compose the stories in my head, off my hastily scribbled notes, because the tight deadline left no time for me to sit down and write the stories. I dictated them to a “rewrite man,” who typed out what I said and relayed it to an editor. So I couldn’t see what I was writing till it came out in the paper — after it had been reshaped at the editorial desk. I also found that I had no interest in “getting the scoop” or getting in someone’s face to pry information out of them. I realized I was a writer, not a reporter. So after a year of chasing scoops and getting rewritten, I gladly hurried back to Vanderbilt.

DA: It was at Vanderbilt you began to discover the poet within.

WT: That happened while I was studying for my Ph.D comps. Modern poetry was one of the areas I would be tested over, so I was studying a lot of it. One day, after reading a poem by Howard Nemerov — “Mousemeal,” as I recall — I found myself bitten by the poetry bug. I decided to try writing a poem, and after I did that, writing another. It felt so good that I wrote twelve or so during the next few weeks — before deciding to take them shyly to one of the professors to find out if they had any merit. He liked them enough to recommend that I enter the Academy of American Poets annual contest at Vanderbilt, and, to my utter surprise, I won. So that moment after I’d finished reading the Nemerov poem probably marked the beginning of my shift from scholarship to poetry, a shift that would take another five years or so to complete.

I left Vanderbilt ABD (all but dissertation) and took an assistant professorship at Northwest Missouri State. It required four years worth of summers to complete my Faulkner dissertation before I could concentrate on my poetry. After that, I began seriously shifting from scholarship to creative writing, though I’d spent my time as a student preparing to be a scholar. The only creative writing course I ever took was a fiction-writing course my sophomore year at M.U. So I now tell people who ask that I attended the Monkey-See-Monkey-Do School of Writing. I learned by imitating my favorite poets and then developing my own voice. There are both advantages and disadvantages to that compared to attending an MFA program in creative writing. You avoid the pressure that can develop to write for the small audience in your workshop, but you don’t get regular feedback from your peers and instructors. I probably would have saved some development time by attending an MFA program, but by the time I realized that, it was too late to go back to school.

DA: We should probably mention your wife was a great support while you discovered and followed your true calling.

WT: Yes, she certainly was. We had dated some in Omaha in high school, but her family moved to Minnesota her senior year and we wound up going to different universities. But we got back together our senior year and were married right after college. She’d earned an education degree from the University of Minnesota, and she took a job in special education while I worked on my master’s degree at M.U. As you might guess, special ed. is a high-stress-low-reward field, requiring a lot of dedication and inner strength. From the beginning of our marriage, she was very supportive of my meandering toward becoming a poet. We had our first child when I was working on my M.A. and wound up with three after I’d been teaching full-time for a while. She bore the larger share of child rearing while I was in school and after that as well. Her last job before retirement was as a language arts teacher in Maryville, MO, middle school, where Northwest Missouri State is located. She now does volunteer work and enjoys, as I do, visiting our kids and grandkids.

DA: And then you pursued the balancing act of teaching and writing poetry.

WT: That’s right. I was hired as an American lit. scholar at Northwest and didn’t get to teach a creative writing course till I’d published enough poems to make my case for doing so. However, the school had only two creative writing courses, one in poetry and one in fiction. I mainly taught graduate courses in the novel, plus some survey courses and freshman English. There was a 14-hour per semester course load there, which didn’t leave a lot of time for writing. Teaching is a very demanding job if you take it seriously, and I did. So, yes, I had to do a balancing act between the writing and teaching, and teaching took up most of my time during the school year. I know that some say that teaching energizes their writing, but I think that doing it well can have the opposite effect. It did for me. I wound up getting most of my writing done during holidays and in the summer. I stopped teaching in the summer after one or two times to get more writing time.

DA: You also discovered the value of writing retreats and fellowships.

WT: Retreats were precious to me. Yaddo was my first and is still my favorite. I was accepted for a month there, but before arriving, I began to worry that I’d freeze up and sit around watching squirrels for a month. I didn’t realize the energizing effect of having your time protected for the sole purpose of writing. I went to Yaddo for a month and, right afterwards, to The MacDowell Colony for another month, and had almost a year’s worth of work finished when I came home. And, of course, I got to bask in the literary history of those two venerable retreats, not to mention hanging around with a lot of interesting people in the evening. I’ve also been to Ragdale and The Anderson Center, with much the same results. And, though Bread Loaf is not a retreat in the sense of getting writing done, it was my first exposure to the rubbing of shoulders with a lot of writers. I was pretty starry-eyed. That was where I got to meet Howard Nemerov for the first time. I went there as a working scholar in 1981, and I’m still in contact with several people I met there.

DA: How did your collection, The Complete Book Of Kong Poems come about?

WT: I wrote my first Kong poem, “Kong Looks Back on His Tryout with the Bears,” with no intention of writing any more. But that poem gave me an idea for another and the next yet another. Motivated partly by my attraction to the old 1933 version of the film and partly by a sense that Kong embodies something very human, I wound up with 25 or 30 pages of Kong poems. X.J. Kennedy, in an essay called “Who Killed King Kong,” persuasively argues that Kong is an example of the pitiable monster archetype, a figure who’s good or at least well meaning inside but is trapped in a monstrous body, which hides that goodness from the world. I found in Kong yet another figure in which to combine seriousness with comedy. Like Quasimodo, the Frankenstein monster, the beast in Beauty and the Beast, that monster must suffer and eventually die alienated from fellow creatures. Once again, this figure becomes an archetype because he reflects something in us, who sometimes feel the world doesn’t see the beautiful person deep inside our unbeautiful exterior. Kong may be a monster, but he is as vulnerable and lonely as any of his human counterparts. I didn’t make the Kong poems into a book till about 15 years after I’d written the original poems. It somehow took that long to make me realize that, if I wrote 15 or 20 more, I’d have a book.

DA: We should mention you gained valuable experience with a well-respected literary journal.

WT: Some NWMSU colleagues and I rescued The Laurel Review from West Virginia Wesleyan College in 1986. I had been reading fiction for them for a couple of years when the editor, Mark DeFoe, told me he was going to let it die. He’d been editing it by himself for years and was exhausted. It took us a couple of years to get subscriptions back up, but after NWMSU gave each of us a one-class teaching-load reduction, we managed to turn it into a very respectable literary magazine. We published well-known writers like William Stafford and Albert Goldbarth, but we also managed to get many new writers into print. It was very time-consuming work, but we were passionate about it. We prided ourselves on producing handsome, error-free issues containing some of the best writing in America. I got to know a lot more other writers during my editorship and am still in contact with many of them. I left the magazine when I took early retirement in 1998, but it’s still going.

DA: You still keep your hand in teaching.

WT: Yes, I teach part-time in the University of Nebraska Low-residency MFA in Writing Program. I got in on it at the beginning and continue to teach there. At first, I was a little worried about getting involved, because of the use of the internet. It sounded a little like those “distanced education” programs that many universities seem to be putting in to save on personnel and classroom expenses. But I was quickly won over. The program caught fire the first semester and has continued that way ever since. The students are bright, enthusiastic, and hard-working. The faculty, too, is first rate. The learning is intense, with an emphasis on one-to-one student-faculty relationships. The faculty are called “mentors” instead of professors, and we’re restricted to a maximum of five students a semester. That allows students much more personal attention and flexibility than conventional programs do. I mentor two students a semester. And the residency part is held in a resort hotel in Nebraska City rather than on the Lincoln campus. So students and faculty have their own hotel rooms instead of dorm rooms and eat in the restaurant instead of in a cafeteria. And the part-time load leaves me plenty of time for my own literary endeavors. I plan to keep teaching there till I can’t tell metaphors from Metamucil, though they may ask me to retire before that.

William Trowbridge is a post from: Pif Magazine