Start with 10,200 books,one big pink truck, five days in April, and six locations spread out across the “book desert” of the Navajo Nation. Add a covey of young Native creatives and mix in the special magic of giving back, and the result is an epic journey—Book Drop 2024—that delivered free books (and shoes, socks, stickers, zines, and bracelets) to Hopi and Navajo youth and their families.
“Physical books are not the most accessible things on the reservation,” says Amber McCrary, one of the project’s volunteers. McCrary, who heads the Indigenous publisher Abalone Mountain Press, knows this from experience, having grown up in Tuba City on the reservation. “When you are living on the rez and income is limited, your family is going to choose money for food over money for books.”
Book Drop 2024 was led by NDN Girls Book Club, a nonprofit founded in 2023 by Kinsale Drake, a member of the Navajo Nation, with a mission “to make accessibility to quality Indigenous literature a reality for all ages by sending out free books and literary care packages.” The organization also hosts free youth workshops and author talks while uplifting Indigenous literature and supporting Indigenous booksellers.
Underscoring the emphasis on young people, Drake says, “If our youth do choose to pursue writing and higher education, they deserve mentors, adequate and culturally competent resources, and the tools that will help them undertake that journey and achieve their dreams.” To that end, the organization has been offering at least one free workshop each month via Zoom and as many in-person events as the small team can manage.
Drake, who graduated from Yale University in 2022 with a degree in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration as well as in English, and her close friend Lily Painter, who is pursuing a degree in American Indian/Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, have poured their energy into hosting events since NDN Girls Book Club was launched. Looking back over the short life of the organization, Drake says, “We’ve done in-person events on reservations, in urban areas, with student groups, universities, libraries, book festivals, and pop-ups in various cities with partner organizations like Indigenous Women Rising and Abalone Mountain Press.”
As a result of this visible work in the community, Drake was enlisted for the book drop by Cellular One’s SBi Giving Foundation, which does various kinds of charitable work with the Navajo Nation. Fellow Diné Amy Denet Deal, who heads 4KINSHIP and its philanthropic arm, 4KINSHIP Indigenous Futures Fund, was another lead partner. Once NDN Girls Book Club jumped in, Drake says she recruited McCrary, who, along with Painter, Deal, and others, helped with months of logistics.
“January through March was just a flurry of making estimates,” says Drake. “Guessing how much we’d need, learning what a pallet of books was, figuring out who was reading or participating at which stop…. It was an insane learning curve for all of us. Together we dreamed up stops at accessible sites that would highlight the resources that already existed in those parts of the reservation.”
Ultimately the book drop completed a circle tour of the reservation, stopping at six sites: Window Rock at the Navajo Nation Library and Museum; the Chapter House in Leupp; the library in Kykotsmovi on the Hopi Reservation (which is located inside the borders of the Navajo Nation); Change Labs in Tuba City; Monument Valley (close to Kinsale’s family’s place of origin); and Shiprock, at the Diné College Library.
Help came from many community organizations. Morningstar Minerals provided a warehouse. Chizh for Cheii (Firewood for Grandpa) provided a truck and showed up at several of the stops to provide music and hand out toys, shoes, socks, and other needed items. And multiple national presses donated books—Copper Canyon Press, Milkweed Editions, Torrey House Press, Macmillan, Greystone Books, and others. The independent children’s press Levine Querido alone provided half of the goal of ten thousand books, including titles by popular Indigenous authors such as Darcie Little Badger, Eric Gansworth, and Andrea L. Rogers. Salina Bookshelf provided books specifically for Navajo readers, including Running With Changing Woman by Lorinda Martinez and the bilingual The Three Little Sheep/Dibé Yázhí Táa’go Baa Hane’ by Seraphine G. Yazzie, translated by Peter A. Thomas.
Throughout the planning, NDN Girls Book Club thought carefully about centering Indigenous youth. Perhaps the most visible symbol of that care and the most emblematic image on social media during the historic event was the Big Pink Truck, also lovingly referred to as “Pinky the Rezmobile.” The product of Painter’s imagination, the truck boasts all the sponsor’s names and logos as well as the book drop logo. The colorful image used on all Book Drop 2024 PR and associated goodies was created for the tour by Diné designer Lynne Hardy. In it a Diné girl sits under a rainbow, corn plants behind her, while she reads. More books, Diné cultural items, and the words Yiłta! Book Drop surround her. Yiłta! means “I read it!” in Diné Bizaad, the Navajo language. Using the Diné language and highlighting community members was high on the priority list of the project planners for the book drop.
Events during the five-day tour included readings by young Indigenous writers such as Erik Bitsui, Tyler Mitchell, Pte San Win Little Whiteman, and Amanda Tachine. Local markets featured art and craft vendors, coffee, and wares from Abalone Mountain Press. At the Leupp event, Kinsale’s mother and aunties came and helped make fry bread for those in attendance; at Change Labs in Tuba City, a friend and local teacher, Jonessa Reid, brought her students to perform traditional dances.
For Drake the entire undertaking was linked to traditional Navajo teachings in other ways. “At the beginning of the journey, on the very first morning, before we did any of our events, we were blessed in a hooghan for our journey by Shawn Attakai, a medicine man. He made sure we were protected…. He was very proud of us and very diligent in blessing us with specific songs and prayers.”
Drake, who is embarking on a new chapter of her life as a graduate student in the MFA program at Vanderbilt University, hopes that with the help of Painter, McCrary, and others, NDN Girls Book Club will be able to continue its important work. “We’re really hopeful that we can continue book drops in the future and mobilize our communities to make it happen; there has been quite some buzz since the first one.”
Drake also believes that NDN Girls Book Club is carrying a family legacy into a new era. “People [in attendance at Book Drop 2024] who knew my grandparents and my maternal family would tell me I was making my cheii [grandpa] proud, that I was continuing the work that he was doing for our people before he passed. That meant everything to me. My grandfather is my biggest inspiration; I’m always trying to make Navajo Mountain proud and represent us well.”
Those five days in April when ten thousand books were put into the hands of almost two thousand Native youth may indeed be an important step in transforming a book desert into a nourishing literary space.
Kimberly Blaeser is the founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets and the author of six poetry collections, most recently Ancient Light. An enrolled member of White Earth Nation, Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, and an MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts.
When you come to Fairbanks, Alaska, visit the waste transfer sites. Fairbanks has several, each with a similar layout: large open lots located near main roads. This time of year, you won’t see them from the roadway. They’re surrounded first by chain-link fences and then obscured by the extravagant foliage of the birch, willow, aspen, and spruce trees. Almost every household outside of the city limits hauls its own waste. My husband usually drops off the trash on his way into town before work. There’s no leaving it in his truck bed and waiting until evening; the ravens would root through the bags and leave a terrible mess behind.
But this August morning I’ll take the trash instead. I need to drive to town anyway, to use the internet. Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, is opening its submission portal to unagented poetry manuscripts and will cap entries at three hundred submissions. There’s no way my home internet can upload my manuscript in a timely manner. On a good day, our DSL connection achieves a 2.5 Mbps download and 0.7 Mbps upload speed. Today is not a good internet day. Using my cell phone as a hot spot isn’t an option either.
I live a few miles outside of Fairbanks proper, on top of a hill. Our home is surrounded by boreal forest, squirrels, chickadees, and sometimes moose. It’s also at the heart of a cell service dead zone. At home I text and call over Wi-Fi. When that’s not possible, I can send a text from the bottom of my driveway. If I walk a little farther, onto the dirt road that leads to our home, I can receive the GIFs my friend sends in reply. The location is idyllic if not always practical. The state of Alaska recently released a digital equity plan to rectify disparities in internet access across the state with a project time frame of 2023 to 2030. Until completed, the larger world remains less accessible.
I know, mostly via tweets, that more than three hundred other poets will try to submit to Scribner today. My friend Asa, who is wiser about these things than I am, suggested I have a cover letter and bio prepared in Word to copy and paste into the submission fields. Before I leave home, I open and resize my documents and web browser so both documents and browser are visible onscreen at the same time. There will be no fumbling while trying to copy and paste my bio and cover letter into the web form. Closing my laptop, I reassure myself that the only thing I have left to do is find somewhere I can connect to the internet, as everything is organized and ready to upload. Doing so, I feel foolish, the same way I feel when buying technical sportswear despite knowing that I’ll wear it only while walking and napping. But I’ll accept feeling foolish in exchange for feeling overprepared.
At the entrance of the transfer site is a reuse area: a series of folding tables and abandoned furniture that’s sometimes screened by a tarp. People leave behind items here that still have life left in them. Single-use grocery bags stuffed with clothes rest on top of overturned boxes. A lamp sits next to a folding chair and reflects the sunlight. The Shrimp Truck Man will sometimes park next to the reuse area and set up shop. He’ll place hinged signs that face the road and advertise Kodiak Scallops and Alaska Shrimp. He appears on his own timetable. I like the mystery of it, but I’m disappointed he isn’t here today.
I leave my kids’ outgrown clothes, folded and stacked like an offering, on an elementary-school desk, then creep my vehicle a few feet forward toward an empty dumpster, where I wrestle an overstuffed Glad bag into the bin. Once I’ve sanitized my hands, I’ve decided it’s too late to chance driving to a coffee shop for Wi-Fi. I have enough bars here to use my phone as a hot spot. I move to the far side of the lot and balance my laptop on my knees. A raven lands on the gravel in front of my car and watches me from the corner of their eye. They fluff their throat feathers, or hackles, in a rolling and puffing movement. Afterward they hop away to chase an errant wrapper.
What worries me is this: The trash bags, ravens, and fences aren’t enough to keep every wrapper contained. Nor is the reuse station enough to ensure all the still-useful items remain purposeful. In late summer, when fireweed blooms along the highways and the tall stalks and long leaves conceal debris that has escaped, it’s easy to forget this. And in winter, when snow crusts the litter in a white sheet, it’s unseeable. The images of brilliant summer wildflowers and severe winter landscapes are the images of Fairbanks that are accessible to most people. For most non-Alaskans, the images of Fairbanks and other parts of Alaska on the road system are familiar from encounters shaped by the window of a vehicle during the tourist seasons. What worries me is that those images, and the ones related to them, are also what populate much of Alaska-themed literature.
My worry is a selfish thing. As a writer living in Fairbanks who often writes about her homeplace, I’m aware of the incongruity between the landscapes I dwell within and the Alaskan landscapes I read about. Worst of all, I feel the tension within myself to perform a narrow, affirmative version of Alaska for an audience that I imagine desires an endless stream of poems and stories filled with people finding catharsis in the pristine wilderness.
But my most immediate worry on August 1, 2023, is that the time for the portal to open has come, but the page refuses to load. I press Command + R over and over, finally the page appears, and I upload my information. After I hit Submit I want a parade or a medal, but I settle for texting my poet friends to see who else caught the portal in time. Then I try to forget that I sent off my manuscript, so it’ll be easier to wait for a reply. The raven succeeds in wrestling the wrapper away from the wind. They hop a few steps sideways and fly away to perch in a spruce tree on the opposite side of the fence.
Alaska’s shoulder seasons are less photogenic. First, there’s breakup, which is like the end of cuffing season but with the addition of intermittent snow, slush, and a decadent amount of mud. It begins in mid-April and ends with greenup, the dramatic moment in early May when the trees unfurl their leaves in a delicious green haze. Then, in September and October, the fallen leaves decay into a brown mat that waits for snowfall’s cover. It’s easier during the shoulder seasons to see how permeable the boundaries are between the transfer sites and the rest of the borough. Silver-foiled juice pouches and aluminum cans flash against the brown ground. It isn’t for a lack of trying to enforce the border between litter and landscape; in May, Fairbanksians participate in the Golden Heart Clean Up Day, when the city folks don neon-yellow safety vests and comb the highways while carrying large green and yellow bags to corral the litter that escaped the first time we attempted to contain it. We leave the carefully knotted bags on the meridians at intersections, and Heavy Hauler volunteers transport the bags to the landfill.
More than winter even, I think of shoulder seasons as waiting seasons. Not stasis, but close to it. As periods marked not by time but by the aching anticipation of change, of the transformation from mud to the first wild strawberry leaves, or from bare-limbed trees to hoarfrost-encased branches backdropped by twilight blue sky. Perhaps that’s why the Alaska on screen and in literature glosses over shoulder seasons and reifies other images instead. Purple mountains looming over impossibly clear waters, a whale’s arced body hovering over a bay, the aurora borealis and the moon. These images are nicer scenes to project ourselves into. They fit neatly into a mental index of both beautiful and comfortably recognized other. Besides, it’s easier to imagine an inner revelation is at hand when there are birds nesting nearby.
I liked three things about Scribner’s submission process. First, it was free. Second, despite the different ways that a capped and online submission process impedes accessibility, I respect that Scribner sought to lower publishing hurdles for—three hundred, internet-accessing, flexible-scheduled—unagented poets. Finally, I appreciated that the publisher gave a firm end-of-year deadline for acceptances and rejections. At my core, I am not patient. I try to disguise this with mindfulness exercises and good manners, but not-so-deep-down inside, waiting leaves me in distress. Summer slows and fall begins. At least twice a day I drive past the transfer site while taking my children to and from school. I can’t always see it from the main road, but I can see its traces and hear the ravens gurgling.
The thing that shoulder seasons make uncomfortably clear is that away doesn’t exist. You may throw away your trash, but the barriers between trash, home, and the more-than-human world are porous. Or you might go away on vacation, but you will bring yourself back with you. At some point a raven will puncture the bag and render it into something less than a filter. What was cast away will, like salmon, migrate home.
Even though away is imaginary, it poses a real problem for Alaskan writers and for Alaskan readers hoping to find their home depicted upon the page. When an Alaskan landscape is imagined only as something isolated—as a place apart from—that imagining leaves little room for the reality of the relationships between place and the people who belong to it. Or, to be blunt, many stories and poems that are set in Alaska look like this: A person spends time in the Alaskan wilderness and the encounter with pristine nature changes them and/or reveals an essential truth about them. In these texts, Alaska exists only inasmuch as it furthers the protagonist’s movement toward personal triumph. Land and animal and plant kin are demoted to dramatic background to heighten the audience’s perception of the protagonist’s emotional arc.
The problem is there’s no room for a transfer site to exist in this image. And if there isn’t space for a transfer site and its attendant baggage, there’s no room for depictions of the messy community members who rely on transfer sites to hold their take-out containers and junk mail. The Alaska without a transfer site seems related to the colonial construct of Alaska as frontier, with images that rely on a settler moving from geographical areas marked by population and culture into areas of uninhabited wilderness. The problem, of course, is that the land has always been inhabited. Since time immemorial the Indigenous peoples of Alaska and the more-than-human world have been present and continue to share presence with each other here. More recently, Alaska’s animated and vibrant landscape contains an increasingly diverse population marked by complex relationships between place and its environments, ecologies, and beings.
It’s late December when I receive my rejection letter from Scribner. Sometimes being a writer in Fairbanks is exactly like being a writer elsewhere. I was visiting my in-laws when it arrived at top-internet speed, delivered directly to my phone. And since I was in Ohio, not only did it arrive at the same moment as the messages my friends and fellow submitting poets received, but we were all in the same time zone, and our daily rhythms were attuned to one another. It sounds so small on the page to tell you that I sat down with a cup of coffee mid-morning and texted a friend who texted back while drinking her mid-morning tea. But in my mind, the image of those texts between us is larger, the frame expanding to contain the two of us sitting on a couch, both of our heads bent over our e-mails, laughing and disappointed at the same time.
Annie Wenstrup is a Dena’ina writer. She was an inaugural and returning Indigenous Nations Poet (In-Na-Po) fellow and now serves as In-Na-Po’s Alumni and Donor Relations Coordinator. Her first poetry collection, The Museum of Unnatural Histories, is forthcoming in spring 2025 from Wesleyan University Press.
A view of the Tanana Valley and the last remnants of shoulder-season breakup from the West Ridge parking lot at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.
My friend and I veered east on Highway 48 in northwestern Wisconsin as we headed for a July writers festival in my secondhand 1995 Geo Prizm, its metallic pale blue hood mottled with dark splotches as if decomposing. The previous owners, the nuns of Saint Benedict’s Monastery in St. Joseph, Minnesota, near where I live, had patched a hole in the front bumper with turquoise duct tape. I’d pulled it off, preferring the frank appearance of the puncture. A fringe of tape threads hung on and fluttered in the wind. The nuns had left a rosary in the glove box.
I’d named that car Subtle Power.
The day before the festival, my friend, a poet, had two teeth pulled and didn’t want to drive her somewhat better car because of the painkillers. She was working a factory temp job over the summer assembling insulin injector pens in rural Polk County. She had put the dentist’s bill on her credit card.
“I’ll have to work another couple weeks to pay it off,” she said. “School starts in a month, and then I’ll be tutoring again, up to $100 a day, as long as the students show up.” She’d left her adjunct teaching job and the long commute to the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire two years earlier and was now helping at-risk students with their coursework at the local high school.
The financial tightrope I walked was equally tenuous. I’d opened a simple artists retreat for the joy of it and to help manage taxes and upkeep on my property, a decrepit farmstead I’d purchased for a pittance and was fixing up little by little. I was lucky to own it outright. But so far, with the expense of building improvements and regulations coming at me from all directions, the retreat had cost more than it earned. I didn’t know how I was going to pay my annual insurance bill.
My friend and I both have MFAs in creative writing.
Before earning that terminal degree nearly twenty years earlier from the University of Minnesota, I worked as a newspaper reporter and editor, magazine editor, grant writer, and copywriter, as well as in public relations. The jobs were instructive, but more importantly they were a means to support my writing life. With the degree, I landed a teaching job at the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire at Barron County during a time when I really needed it. But I didn’t get my MFA to teach. I got it to learn the craft of writing. After five years I resigned, choosing to live frugally and accept certain risks to make my writing a priority.
I had authored one book, a memoir about home-based learning, published by a small press in 2008, and I had a substantial list of magazine publications, so I began offering occasional writing seminars through local schools, libraries, and community centers. I enjoyed them and the people who showed up, but the little money they brought in didn’t go far in paying the bills. I didn’t mind. Despite my experience and degrees, I’ve always considered myself in training for a life in creative writing.
I looked forward to the writers festival, where I had been invited to offer a craft talk and give a reading from my recent work. After a day of preparing I packed up copies of my book to sell, fliers of my upcoming seminars, my business cards, a card table, and two green-and-white webbed lawn chairs.
The air conditioning in my car was broken. We drove with all the windows down.
“The visibility is poor,” I said.
“I thought it was my painkillers,” my poet friend said.
“Dirty windshield maybe,” I said.
Though the humidity was high, I felt more desiccated by the minute. My friend needed water, so we stopped at an air-conditioned gas station. The thermometer on the wall outside read 97 degrees.
I cleaned the windshield inside and out, then realized it wasn’t the windshield but rather the saturated air that occluded the landscape. I waded through it after we pulled into the parking lot at the festival. The event organizer stood in the shade of a skimpy tree, his face glistening and a cape of perspiration darkening his pale blue button-down shirt.
The doors of the building where the opening ceremony would take place stood ajar. Heat and humidity rushed in. The lights were off. About thirty people had showed up, including a half dozen presenters. We sat and sweltered on metal folding chairs in the strange interior darkness. Thank God I’d worn jeans instead of a skirt. I hate when my butt sticks to a metal folding chair.
The organizer made a few remarks. Two poets read. No one turned on the lights or air-conditioning. I later learned the power was out.
My craft talk, scheduled to follow the opening ceremony, was one of several taking place at the same time. I hoped like heck I’d get a few participants. I did—three people. I led the way down the even dimmer corridor to my assigned room. It was locked. We stood beside it until the organizer jingled down the hallway with a ring of keys and let us in.
Afterward, my poet friend and I moved to the lawn in front of the main stage. Off to the side, pop-up awnings sagged where a dozen of us would be featured for stories and poems under the stars once the main-stage events were done. We would read our work, no mic, in what was intended to be a cozy setting.
We waited.
From the stage the director of the foundation that organized the festival made a fund-raising appeal to a scattered group of about fifty.
We waited again.
A local theater group performed a few scenes from their upcoming plays. In between, the sound guy wearing cutoff blue jeans, hiking boots, a tattered T-shirt, and a ponytail clomped across the stage, head down, moving microphones and then disappearing to the soundboard in the back. The recent winner of the Wisconsin Book Award read a compelling excerpt from his book. At dusk, right on schedule, the mosquitoes came out, and so did the writer of an up-north-at-the-cabin memoir whose reading ran over her allotted time by a full hour.
The minute she was finished, the sound guy turned up the volume on the loudspeakers and played “Diamond Girl” by Seals and Crofts. I stepped to the designated awning where I was billed with my poet friend. It was dark by then. I squinted at the page and considered the competing noise of “Diamond Girl.” I thought of asking the sound guy to turn it down, but no one else seemed bothered. I began reading. At that moment he turned off the music and vaulted onto the stage.
“Nothing!” he yelled, amplified by the mic.
I kept reading but more loudly.
“Nothing! Nothing!” he said again, his voice blasting through the four-foot speakers.
I paused.
He continued with the—what was it, a sound check?—his voice loud and clear, as if offering a postmodern performance.
I looked up, ready to quit.
“Keep going,” my friend said from the front row.
“Nothing. Nothing. Nothing,” the sound guy yelled all through my seven-minute reading.
My poet friend read next. By then the mosquitoes were so bad that most of the audience had left.
Off to one side the winner of the Wisconsin Book Award persevered under his awning, brushing mosquitoes from his bare arms and face, and from the looks of it, he sold five or ten books. The up-north-at-the-cabin memoirist had already scrambled away.
My friend and I folded our chairs and card table, packed up our books and materials, and headed toward my car. A man who’d attended my reading grabbed our webbed lawn chairs to help and followed along.
“This looks like a writer’s car,” he said as we loaded everything into the back seat.
The foundation director, who had been weaving through the crowd all evening, approached us. “Come back tomorrow. We’ll have beer and wine.”
“I had two teeth pulled yesterday and I’m on painkillers,” my friend said in response.
“Then whiskey for you,” the director said.
Once in the car, I turned to my friend and asked, “Do you need anything before we head back?”
“To never, ever hear any nostalgic writing about life before 1967,” she said, referring to the lake-cabin memoirist. “I can’t stand that syrupy crap.”
I drove north on Main Street, lit by vapor lights and steam from late afternoon rain, then west on a forty-mile stretch of rural road. Iridescent ground fog enwrapped us. It refracted headlights of the few oncoming cars—red, blue, orange—like radiant auras. The cars flowed toward us through the river of fog, the fog itself dreamy and soft. We slowed through Cumberland, the air even more saturated from the lakes surrounding it, and then McKinley, unincorporated. We could have been anywhere on any rural road in America. It was all the same within the immediate perpetual present—the flickering lines of yellow to the left and steady ribbon of white to the right. We drove with the windows half open and the defrost fan blowing through mile after mile of open space in our little island of Subtle Power.
We laughed lightly about the festival. We compared our work to that of affluent friends who’d taken their advanced or not-so-advanced degrees to the private sector. They had lake homes and shiny new cars and took extravagant vacations.
We didn’t think we were crazy, but we weren’t sure.
Making a sustainable living from creative writing is a long shot. Don’t quit your day job. I’ve heard that advice a hundred ways over the years, but I’ve never settled into it. When I had a day job, I ached to write.
On those fresh mornings leaving home for the newspaper office and a sixty-hour-a-week job, I walked to the car with a pang in my heart. I knew I wouldn’t get to my own writing until much later in the day, if at all, or on the weekends between covering the tractor pull at the county fair or photographing snowmobiles revving across the open water of a small lake at a local town celebration. As a magazine editor I’d squeezed the work into three long days so I could spend the rest of the week on my own writing. The university teaching job had offered a stable income, health insurance, and a retirement package, but I scraped to bring some energy to my family during those busy years and had nothing left for my own writing.
After I resigned, the exhaustion lifted. I had some savings to carry me for a while, and I settled into a frugal lifestyle. I was in my early fifties and single, and my youngest child would soon leave home. I maintained some intellectual engagement through writers conferences, critique groups, manuscript exchanges, and occasional online seminars. I purchased major medical insurance and hoped I wouldn’t need it. I wrote first thing in the morning, six hours a day, and felt deeply contented.
When other writers asked how I could afford to write, I replied, “Grow a big garden. Cut a big woodpile. Drive an old car.” All of which I did. It’s a little embarrassing on one level, because we do live in a society in which so much of one’s identity is tied to money and the shiny veneer it can buy. It helps that my expectations for material wealth are low since I’d grown up in a rural blue-collar family. Most days I like the active, practical labor of growing my own food and heating my own house while pursuing the creative, intellectual work of writing. The two modes complement each other. And I don’t conflate success and satisfaction in life with wealth and income. Still, the practicalities of life do require some cash.
“Being in the MFA program was the happiest time in my life,” my poet friend said, in the strobing light of cars whizzing past Subtle Power. She’d been a star in the program at the University of Minnesota and had since published a book and placed poems in dozens of journals.
“It was important to me,” I said.
But I wonder if it was important to me in the way it is to others. It didn’t pave the way for a lifelong career, though it could have. It did prepare me for several ways to make a living—teaching, editing, and writing of various kinds, none of them particularly creative. I do travel those roads at times, but for me creative writing is a calling that extends beyond a job or career, one that lasts throughout a lifetime. I don’t make much money from my creative writing. Not many writers do. But I’ve found something in writing that is even more valuable to me, and that’s a purpose.
The writers festival that foggy night was a chance, once again, to experience what it feels like to show up in public and be a writer. I have had truly rewarding experiences at public events, but I needed the writers festival that sweltering evening to remind me why I do what I do. It reminded me, strangely enough, of my purpose as a writer. Maybe it’s not to make a lot of money. Or to appear on a best-seller list. Or to attend swanky parties with celebrity authors.
Some of us are here to write, whether it’s honored or supported by society, and whether it’s paid or not. For me, and others like me, writing is the shimmering aura through which we see the world. It is the quiet and courageous act of creative expression that nourishes our souls. It is the subtle power that aligns us with ourselves. It is what we offer to others.
I’m not quite ready to go all Zen on this—or maybe I am. I’m in a peaceful striving mode. I write for understanding and connection. I write to make a life, if not a living.
I may not be flush with cash, and I may not have a capacity crowd waiting to hear me read my work, but that sound guy shouting “nothing” over my reading that night at the writers festival was wrong. I have everything I need and much more. Making tough choices to prioritize creative writing is not for everyone, but for me it’s a rich life.
I’ll figure out how to pay that insurance bill.
Kathleen Melin is the author of By Heart: A Mother’s Story of Children and Learning at Home (Clover Valley Press, 2008). Her writing has appeared in Split Rock Review, the Baltimore Review, Essay Daily, Barstow & Grand, and elsewhere. She lives on a farm in northwestern Wisconsin.
In September 1889, when the Martin House hotel opened for business at the intersection of Railroad Avenue and Canal Street in downtown Westerly, Rhode Island, its owner, Captain Michael F. Martin, handed out cigars. In April 2023, when patrons of the Savoy Bookshop and Café bought a copy of my new book, Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir, in what had been the hotel’s lobby, they received one of the Cow Tales caramel candy sticks my sister Patty had bought in bulk. Then they wandered around the store’s wood-paneled interior and stepped outside to try their hand at milking a life-size plastic cow named Daphne, which also mooed.
Although I live on Boston’s north shore, I travel to Westerly often because much of my extended family still lives there. A few weeks before my reading at the Savoy Bookshop, I headed home in part to visit my cousin Frank’s farm. I wanted to see if he might have a calf we could bring to downtown Westerly as part of my book launch celebration. As a kid, my 4-H club had brought a cow and some calves to a mall outside of Providence to celebrate National Dairy Month in June. I figured parking a pickup truck with a calf on its bed outside a bookstore couldn’t be any more challenging than escorting animals along the slippery floors between Kay Jewelers and RadioShack and cleaning up after them as shoppers gawked, as I had done all those many years ago.
Located one mile from the Atlantic Ocean and positioned between two salt ponds, Frank’s Ocean Breeze Farm is aptly named. Frank stopped milking cows several years ago when a land trust, dedicated to preserving open space in this watershed, purchased the development rights to his farm. As part of the agreement Frank and subsequent generations of his family can live out their days there, but whether they do or not, this property will always be the same sixty-five rocky acres on one end of Misquamicut Beach. (Taylor Swift owns a mansion on the other.)
As I slowly drove along the dirt driveway, a few head of beef cattle milled about the barnyard, Frank’s grandsons puttered with tractors in the garage, and two goats with shaggy coats grazed in the front yard. Frank is seventy-five but keeps himself and his family busy making hay every summer to sell to horse farms. He greeted me with news of my cousins, complained about the goats (his granddaughter’s idea), and shouted some instructions to the boys. Then his daughter Sylvia pulled into the driveway and swung her pickup into a space in front of a neatly stacked woodpile. She hopped out of the truck, laughing—part nervous reaction, part pure joy. She’s a genuinely happy person.
When I asked about possibly borrowing a calf, she said she didn’t have an animal due in time. “Wait! I think I have something better,” she said, referring, it turned out, to the plastic cow named Daphne. “But first I have to check something.”
She opened the rear door of the truck, stuck her head in, and emerged, laughing. “Wanted to make sure the semen tank hadn’t fallen over.”
“You ride around with that?” I asked.
My family’s semen tank had pride of place in its own office on our farm. A portable tank resembling an oversize metal water bottle, it is filled with liquid nitrogen and ampules of bull semen. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, nearly 90 percent of dairy farmers breed their cows artificially. It’s safer than keeping a two-thousand-pound behemoth around to do the job, and it allows breeders to select genetics that might benefit individual cows in their herds. Sylvia doesn’t inseminate animals for a living, but as a former dairy farmer she has uniquely marketable skills.
“Sometimes after my real job,” she replied, “someone needs a cow bred and I stop by on the way home. You know, just as a side gig.”
Right, I thought.
Seventy-six houses and a home-improvement warehouse now stand on the farm where I grew up, but my father had been a celebrity in the cattle-breeding world because he’d developed a bull named Osborndale Ivanhoe in the 1950s who produced championship heifers. Artificial insemination was new then, so our bull was one of the first who went on to achieve fame not only in Rhode Island, but all over the world. I had spent my youth at 4-H meetings and county fairs showing some of our famous cattle. In Barnflower I tell the story of our family’s farm, from the time my grandparents purchased it in 1911 until the day, almost eight decades later, when we sold our animals and our land. I hoped that the book’s themes—coming of age, searching for one’s place in the world, navigating the specific contours of family dynamics, one man’s version of achieving the American Dream—would appeal to any readers of memoir, but Sylvia reminded me that some people still worked their farms, attended county fairs, earned college degrees in agriculture. They, too, might be interested in a book like mine.
Several decades earlier my mother spent a summer trying to convince five-year-old me that climbing onto a bus and heading to school in the fall would be exciting. I preferred spending days with my father, holding on piggyback as he climbed the silo to fix an auger, or sitting on the steps that led into the milking parlor with the dog as my dad finished up milking for the night. One day, on our way home from plowing a field we rented, we stopped at a farm to pick up a lamb I later named Betty Baa Baa, who rode home with us in the truck cab.
Life off the farm held no interest for me. But it turned out I loved school, and I was enamored with my teachers. One evening that fall, when my mother headed out for parents’ night at the school, I reminded her that Mrs. Phillips said there would be a book sale and asked my mother to buy textbooks for me. It seemed to me that those glossy volumes contained all the knowledge of the world and had empowered the godlike women who stood before us in class, doling out worksheets still warm and full of the scent of the mimeograph machine. Instead, my mother returned with Charlotte’s Web. I pouted for days. How could this flimsy paperback compete with a book that would crack a toenail if it fell on your foot?
Months later my mother had to pry the tattered copy of E. B. White’s classic out of my hands. “There are so many other books to read,” she said. “You can’t keep reading the same one.” It wasn’t just that it was a great book; it was also—it was mostly—that this was a book about a farm, the first time I’d seen aspects of my own life in print.
So that evening at the Savoy Bookstore, with Daphne mooing outside, much as it had happened with Charlotte’s Web, my two loves merged: farm animals and books. Imagine a life that could contain both. Imagine a book tour that could do the same.
Ever since I could articulate the answer to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I answered, “A writer.” I felt compelled to write stories on every scrap of paper in the house, from the official copy of my parents’ will to napkins and grain bill receipts. So, yes, I wrote, and eventually I published books. Three books. Three different small presses. Three attempts, largely on my part, to promote them, an awkward business that involved reaching out to, say, small-town libraries several times before they squeezed me into their events calendar and then arriving with my sisters toting homemade goodies, my nephews setting out chairs, and my mother perched in the front row reminding me of the names of cousins several generations removed who composed a good portion of the audience.
In all my fantasizing about life as a writer, I had never daydreamed about what it might take to promote a book. That seemed the realm of people who earned business degrees, not people like me who sat alone in a room in sweatpants and a sweatshirt with the collar cut out of it à la Flashdance, believing the less restrictive my clothing, the more fluid my thoughts. Even my mother was a more skilled salesperson than I. In her kitchen she kept a large stack of my first book, a collection of poems based on my family and stories of Westerly, and she sold them to everyone she could corner, from relatives to patients in the waiting room at her optometry office.
Now, thinking beyond the usual bookstores and literary festivals, I had some very different ideas for a self-designed publicity campaign for Barnflower that would include what the book was partly about: cows. I bought a pair of waterproof muckers and decided to head to where real cows and their very real owners gathered.
One of the first people I contacted to plan a book event was Julie Brodeur, whose family had run a dairy farm in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, for 118 years before they were forced to sell off their milk cows in the 1990s. Our 4-H group had once staged a haunted house in the basement of their eighteenth-century homestead, which was purported to host a ghost named Dorcas. I lay in an old vegetable bin in an ancient bride costume (think Miss Havisham) and sat up when kids peered inside. These days Julie runs the livestock program for the largest fair in Rhode Island, one my family had brought our cows to every August. When I told her about my book, Julie invited me to set up a table ringside at the dairy show. In between bathing animals, combing out tails, polishing leather halters, and spraying animals to keep the flies off, people stopped to chat and inquire about the book.
Some stopped by to tell me how they, too, had finally sold their cows. Same old story: too much work, not enough money. “The day the cows left,” one woman said, shaking her head. “Can’t think too much about that.”
I imagined myself back beside my father as the trucks pulled away, our life’s work inside. I remembered how impossibly quiet it got once the animals had gone.
Later, on a rainy day in September, I waited until the flower arrangement competition was over before setting up my book display at the Deerfield Fair inside the new Future Farmers of America booth, a 160-square-foot space built by volunteers. I sold one copy—to the young man who had brought in antique milk cans and farm tools to use as decorations.
“I do the American Pickers thing,” he told me. “Lots of empty old barns around here to go through.” His family still had their land, but instead of farming it, he worked with New Hampshire’s Forest Management Bureau on conservation issues. “Keep an eye out for New England cottontails,” he said. “New Hampshire’s only native rabbit.”
The next weekend, a cold wind blew on a bright day as people headed into a corn maze in Thompson, Connecticut, a town on the Massachusetts border where “Swamp Yankee,” a colloquial term for rural New Englanders, is thought to have originated during the American Revolution in 1776.
The farm’s owner told me the maze helped keep their dairy farm going. “But, damn,” she said. “It’s rained every Saturday this month.” As we spoke she paused to give instructions, handing families a map with a crayon to check off landmarks they’d pass. “No pens, because the cows can’t eat those, but if you drop this,” she said, holding up the crayon, “it won’t hurt them.”
On the first day of November, she, along with her daughter and her son-in-law, would cut the corn for their three hundred milking cows. On my way out I drove by the heifer pasture and admired the cattle, head after wooly head lowered happily over a long feeder of grain mixture. I slid the window down and inhaled: Smelled like home.
At EMMA Acres Family Farm Fest in Exeter, Rhode Island, most famous for the Mercy Brown vampire incident of 1892 (part of the wider New England vampire panic of the time), I set up my table on the porch of the farm store where they stocked local cheese, beef, honey, and vegetables. The farm’s name derives from the first initials of Cynthia and Scooter LaPrise’s four children, all grown now. Cynthia grew up on Bailey Brook Farm, a few miles away from where she and her husband raised their own kids. The Baileys milked cows for five generations, but like the LaPrise family they, too, stopped milking. Instead they raise heifers: 4-H projects for their nine grandchildren. Sales at the store and the festival, which includes tables of goods from local vendors, helps them keep their own twelve acres as well as the 225 acres of Bailey Brook. At Christmas, EMMA Acres offers photos of pets with Santa (if you don’t have a pet, you can borrow a calf). To preserve their way of life, Cynthia’s sister’s family also sells flowers, pumpkins, and Christmas trees.
When Theresa, one of our former hired hands, showed up at EMMA Acres, we hugged. “My son surprised me with a copy of your book,” she said. “And what do you know? I’m in there!” She had been one of my dad’s most loyal workers. Once she left our farm she spent twenty more years milking for another Rhode Island family before they also sold out.
“God,” she said. “I sure do miss it.”
Later that fall my husband and I drove the four and a half hours to Burlington, Vermont. In response to an e-mail I’d sent out to several universities along the East Coast that offer a program called CREAM (Cooperative for Real Education in Agricultural Management), Steven Wadsworth, a lecturer and adviser to the group, invited me to speak to his class at the University of Vermont. Along with copies of my book, I presented a PowerPoint presentation about my father’s quest to breed award-winning dairy cattle and met the eighteen young women who manage the university’s herd of fifty Holsteins. The students showed me the complex record-keeping system they use to track data on their herd. They led me through the milk house and to the barns where the cows munched grass silage. They introduced me to each animal (“This is Pigeon,” “This is Lourdes,” “This is Gouda”) as they walked along scratching the chins of cows who are a whole lot bigger than the (big) cows I grew up around. Every woman in the program bought a copy of Barnflower.
Wadsworth told me that on top of their academic course load (and, in some cases, their varsity athletic requirements), the students commit several hours a week and vacation time to the herd. When a cow is about to calve, they form two teams: Team Baby and Team Mama.
“Doesn’t matter if the cow gives birth at two in the afternoon or two in the morning,” he said. “They show up.” Then collectively they decide on the baby’s name.
Between stops at family farms, I joined Facebook groups like Keep the Lights On: Save the Family Dairy Farmer, a page dedicated to families who are still farming, and Legendairy Holsteins and Brown Swiss Milk Cows. This led to messages from several farmers across the country who shared with me how my book had affected them. One man read chapters aloud to his girlfriend each night in Missouri as she completed a jigsaw puzzle. He wrote: “It was as if you had written that book about my family.” It is not unusual for a magazine to arrive in my mailbox from Wisconsin or New York where someone who used to farm has come across an article about my dad or a picture of one of our cows in an old copy of a breed magazine. One note said: “Happy for you to have this as part of your legacy.”
One of my final events of the year was at a gathering planned by members of a family who had shown our calves during their years in 4-H. This family lived on Aquidneck Island, in Narragansett Bay. When their family first met ours, the only way for them to transport heifers to their backyard farm was via a ferry that crossed the water. Farmers often lend out calves to kids who otherwise would have no animals to raise. Once those animals have calves of their own, the mothers return to their original herds to be milked. The idea for my book began with a story of a cow named Darcy who, for weeks after her devoted 4-H’er returned her to our farm, broke down every fence in the place trying to get back to her calf.
A man waited after the event to speak with me. “You know,” he said, “I once gave Misty a bath.” Our cow Misty was Ivanhoe’s first famous heifer. She received accolades all over New England and won awards in New York and Iowa, my father trucking her to competitions in the back of a yellow pickup with plywood sides he constructed himself to keep her safe.
This man had helped my dad out at the Eastern States Exposition (the Big E) in West Springfield, Massachusetts, the region’s largest cattle show. My dad had handed him Misty’s halter and sent him off to get her ready for the show ring.
“I knew exactly who she was. Everyone did. I’ll never forget that,” he said, sixty years later.
This fall I head back to the Big E, where my father, partly because of Misty, is in the Exhibitors Hall of Fame. I have been invited to attend the dairy cattle exhibitors’ social hour the evening before the show and will set up my sales table in the barn where our own cows once waited for show day, my father sleeping beside them on a cot each night as we stayed nearby in a hotel. Part of my marketing materials includes the kind of tri-board kids use for middle school science projects. On it I’ve pasted photos of Misty, Ivanhoe, and our farm.
My invitation to attend is all thanks to my former 4-H square dance partner, Greg, who serves on the fair’s board of directors. I don’t think Greg was terribly excited about square dancing back when we would do-si-do, and I don’t think he walked into his sophomore English class the Monday after our competition flashing the medals we’d won, but he was a great partner who wasn’t afraid to spin. In the more than forty years since we’d perfected the Trail of the Lonesome Pine dance, he has served on the fair’s board and also taught at an agricultural high school.
When I contacted him to plan this stop, he said, “You want to come to Eastern States with the book? I can do that.”
I do, I thought. I desperately want to be back.
I love an independently owned bookstore. Libraries have always been places of worship for me. I appreciate any chance to read with other writers, to attend book groups or visit schools. But I am from a place where the scent of freshly baled alfalfa drifted through my bedroom window, and I could hear the creak of stanchions from the barn. The sun would rise over a silo and set behind a pasture of tasseled corn. To return to that world, this time as a writer, if only for a handful of days and nights, was more than I could have imagined.
Yes, I sold books on my tour. Sometimes one or two copies at an event, sometimes fifteen or twenty. But, more important, I returned to a world I had left after our own farm had been sold to a developer who burned every building to the ground. It took me thirty years to tell our story because, in part, it had been so painful to remember our life as it had been, to remember myself as I had been. When people who have known me only in this new version of my life read the book and say, “I had no idea you did all this stuff,” I want to tell them: “There is only one thing I have been longer than I’ve been a writer. And that’s a farm kid.”
Carla Panciera is the author of Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir (Loom Press, 2023); the story collection Bewildered (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), winner of AWP’s Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction; and two collections of poetry, No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera Press, 2010) and One of the Cimalores (Cider Press, 2005). A recently retired high school English teacher, she lives in Rowley, Massachusetts.
The author with a Holstein cow from a herd managed by the CREAM program at the University of Vermont in Burlington in September 2023. (Credit: Apphia Donoghue)
Can we please dispense with the tedious archetype of the lonely writer? In addition to garrets, this trope usually includes isolation,with its connotations that one is cut off from society and suffering from a lack of companions. Nonsense! As Flannery O’Connor writes in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969):
There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful—the myth of the “lonely writer,” the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering because, supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him.
She goes on to call this myth a cliché. I agree.
I live in rural Maine on nearly twelve acres of land. The property includes a fire pond; a big field of wild grasses, flowers, and mowed paths; and an undeveloped forest that stretches on for hundreds of acres behind my writing shed, a converted tool shack and chicken coop. A small deck with a pergola covered in grape vines leads to a sliding glass door that reveals a pine-paneled space with four windows, a long desk made from a yellow Formica countertop that I ate on as a toddler, and a reading chair tucked into the crook of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.
Joan Dempsey in her writing shed in rural Maine. Photo credit: Greta Rybus.
Often, when I’m at a literary event in the city of Portland, a writer new to me will inevitably ask where I live, and when I tell them New Gloucesterwhat usually comes next is some variation of, “Oh, wow, way out there?” My home is a mere twenty-two miles north of Portland, not exactly a godforsaken hinterland. The person’s tone is typically either envious or pitying, but both seem to have the same roots: I live way out there, which might mean enviable isolation, or it might mean I’m bereft of community.
The romantic desire for the equivalent of an isolated writer’s garret is less about a physical place, I believe, and more about a yearning for the privacy which can be found there. Writers don’t need isolation, but we do need freedom from interference so we can “[w]rite with the door closed,” as Stephen King says in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Scribner, 2000). That door can be physical or metaphorical. Some of my best writing is done at a big table in my public library, where people respect each other’s privacy, especially if they think one is hard at work.
The beauty of the shed, though, is that its use is restricted to me; it’s my private space, but I don’t ever feel isolated, and I’m certainly not lonely. For one thing, I have books, and therefore a rich community of authors at my fingertips. One shelf is particularly influential: books by and about James Baldwin. When I was getting my low-residency MFA at Antioch University Los Angeles, I wrote my thesis on an autobiographical aspect of Baldwin’s famous story “Sonny’s Blues.” While writing this paper, I was fully immersed in all things Baldwin and I often had the distinct and sometimes unsettling impression that he was in the room with me, directing and encouraging me in equal turns. I had dreams of him that felt more like visitations than something conjured from my unconscious mind. Eerie, but also rather wonderful.
During this time I traveled to New York City to see a one-man play about Baldwin, with Calvin Levels playing the author, and I had the good fortune of going out afterwards with members of the Baldwin family and Levels himself. I asked the actor if he ever felt Baldwin’s presence and he threw back his head, laughed, and said something like, “Oh lord yes, he would not shut up! I finally had to tell him to leave me alone.”
I recently read an essay by Mary Oliver from Upstream: Selected Essays (Penguin Press, 2016) in which she talks about this precise feeling of inheriting an “immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground….” She writes about being “inseparable from…my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones” and adds, “I go nowhere, I arrive nowhere, without them. With them I live my life…this innumerable, fortifying company….”
At my Antioch graduation Steve Heller, the creative writing MFA chair at the time, invoked the names of a long list of our literary ancestors and welcomed us into their esteemed community. I felt a prickle of excitement and sensed their presence as keenly as I’d felt Jimmy Baldwin hanging out on my screened porch, smoking his ever-present cigarette while I tussled with “Sonny’s Blues.”
On other shelves in the shed are books written by those ancestors, but plenty others are by living authors, many from right here in Maine. In fact, my shelves teem with contemporary Maine authors, fifty-six of them (I counted), too many names to list here, although I’d like to, because what a gift it would be for you to know each and every one of them as I do. These folks exist in the pages of their books, of course, but I’ve also met them in person. I’ve been in their kitchens and living rooms and on their decks, sat next to them at events, raised toasts at their parties, celebrated their new books, retreated and workshopped with them, bumped into them in New York and Los Angeles and Florida, and hung out with them online.
How can one possibly feel alone with such company?
I got my start in fiction at the terrific GrubStreet center for creative writing in Boston, back when GrubStreet was just getting started. When I left the area I was worried I wouldn’t find the same kind of vibrant, nourishing literary community—was I ever wrong!
After moving to Maine, I was invited to sit in on a Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance (MWPA) board meeting to try it on for size, see if I’d be a good fit for the board and vice versa. At the University of Southern Maine in Portland I sat around a nondescript conference table with a small group of writers, and the first thing we did was listen to a board member—a poet—read a poem. Glasses wedged on the tip of his nose, grey hair swept back, grey beard unruly, he read, and we listened, each one of us rapt. We would later turn to the budget and strategy and programming, but first on the agenda—always, I discovered after officially joining the board—was a poem. No matter who read what poem, the subtext was evident: This is what we love, this is why we’re here, this is what matters most. That was my first experience of the Maine literary community.
Years later, when Longfellow Books in Portland suffered significant water damage from a burst pipe, damage that meant the store’s owners would have to close Longfellow for good, those folks I’d served with on the MWPA board—friends now—and scores of other Maine writers quickly banded together. Within two days we raised enough money to save the bookstore. I wasn’t surprised. From day one, everyone in the Maine literary community was welcoming, generous, and deeply caring. In 2017 a packed house inside the born-again Longfellow Books celebrated with me as I launched my debut novel, This Is How It Begins.
Way out here, then, I have my great ones on the shelves, and I have my writing friends and colleagues all over the state. I also have an extended community of Antioch writers, including three women from my graduating class—Dawna Kemper, Christa Mastrangelo Joyce, and Mary Rechner—who joined me right after graduation to form an inviolable quartet; every single month, for almost twenty years now, we have checked in with each other via e-mail to share every aspect of our writing lives and support each other on our respective journeys.
As if these riches weren’t enough, I’ve also created a free, private, online community specifically for novelists: the Gutsy Great Novelist Writers Studio, which currently has 2,464 members. This includes a highly engaged, core group who are incredibly community-minded. Members live in the Outback of Australia and suburban Texas and the shores of the Canary Islands and the city of Vancouver and everywhere in between, and all of them bring wisdom, experience, good humor, and generosity to this virtual writers studio. From those new to writing novels to those who are well-published, these folks all have one desire in common: to connect with other writers who love what they love.
The vast majority of these writers I’ve never met in person, but a few have made their way to Maine to attend a writing retreat I host every year in early June. We gather in Bar Harbor at the home of Arthur Train, an attorney and author who wrote legal thrillers in the early 1900s, copies of which grace the shelves of his old house. He’s less well-known than Maine writers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E. B. White, but he’s nevertheless become a part of my literary community, and every year I read a snippet of his work to the retreat-goers so he can become a part of theirs as well, so they may be as wildly companioned by writers both living and dead, local and distant, as I am, way out here.
Joan Dempsey is the author of This Is How It Begins (She Writes Press, 2017), which won a bronze Independent Publisher Book Award for literary fiction and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, and a Sarton Women’s Book Award. Her honors include a Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award, a Maine Literary Award, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, a Key West Literary Seminar scholarship, and a Jentel Artist residency. Dempsey holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles and lives in Maine with her partner and their family of animals. Her website is joandempsey.com.
Can we please dispense with the tedious archetype of the lonely writer? In addition to garrets, this trope usually includes isolation,with its connotations that one is cut off from society and suffering from a lack of companions. Nonsense! As Flannery O’Connor writes in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969):
There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful—the myth of the “lonely writer,” the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering because, supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him.
She goes on to call this myth a cliché. I agree.
I live in rural Maine on nearly twelve acres of land. The property includes a fire pond; a big field of wild grasses, flowers, and mowed paths; and an undeveloped forest that stretches on for hundreds of acres behind my writing shed, a converted tool shack and chicken coop. A small deck with a pergola covered in grape vines leads to a sliding glass door that reveals a pine-paneled space with four windows, a long desk made from a yellow Formica countertop that I ate on as a toddler, and a reading chair tucked into the crook of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.
Joan Dempsey in her writing shed in rural Maine. Photo credit: Greta Rybus.
Often, when I’m at a literary event in the city of Portland, a writer new to me will inevitably ask where I live, and when I tell them New Gloucesterwhat usually comes next is some variation of, “Oh, wow, way out there?” My home is a mere twenty-two miles north of Portland, not exactly a godforsaken hinterland. The person’s tone is typically either envious or pitying, but both seem to have the same roots: I live way out there, which might mean enviable isolation, or it might mean I’m bereft of community.
The romantic desire for the equivalent of an isolated writer’s garret is less about a physical place, I believe, and more about a yearning for the privacy which can be found there. Writers don’t need isolation, but we do need freedom from interference so we can “[w]rite with the door closed,” as Stephen King says in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Scribner, 2000). That door can be physical or metaphorical. Some of my best writing is done at a big table in my public library, where people respect each other’s privacy, especially if they think one is hard at work.
The beauty of the shed, though, is that its use is restricted to me; it’s my private space, but I don’t ever feel isolated, and I’m certainly not lonely. For one thing, I have books, and therefore a rich community of authors at my fingertips. One shelf is particularly influential: books by and about James Baldwin. When I was getting my low-residency MFA at Antioch University Los Angeles, I wrote my thesis on an autobiographical aspect of Baldwin’s famous story “Sonny’s Blues.” While writing this paper, I was fully immersed in all things Baldwin and I often had the distinct and sometimes unsettling impression that he was in the room with me, directing and encouraging me in equal turns. I had dreams of him that felt more like visitations than something conjured from my unconscious mind. Eerie, but also rather wonderful.
During this time I traveled to New York City to see a one-man play about Baldwin, with Calvin Levels playing the author, and I had the good fortune of going out afterwards with members of the Baldwin family and Levels himself. I asked the actor if he ever felt Baldwin’s presence and he threw back his head, laughed, and said something like, “Oh lord yes, he would not shut up! I finally had to tell him to leave me alone.”
I recently read an essay by Mary Oliver from Upstream: Selected Essays (Penguin Press, 2016) in which she talks about this precise feeling of inheriting an “immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground….” She writes about being “inseparable from…my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones” and adds, “I go nowhere, I arrive nowhere, without them. With them I live my life…this innumerable, fortifying company….”
At my Antioch graduation Steve Heller, the creative writing MFA chair at the time, invoked the names of a long list of our literary ancestors and welcomed us into their esteemed community. I felt a prickle of excitement and sensed their presence as keenly as I’d felt Jimmy Baldwin hanging out on my screened porch, smoking his ever-present cigarette while I tussled with “Sonny’s Blues.”
On other shelves in the shed are books written by those ancestors, but plenty others are by living authors, many from right here in Maine. In fact, my shelves teem with contemporary Maine authors, fifty-six of them (I counted), too many names to list here, although I’d like to, because what a gift it would be for you to know each and every one of them as I do. These folks exist in the pages of their books, of course, but I’ve also met them in person. I’ve been in their kitchens and living rooms and on their decks, sat next to them at events, raised toasts at their parties, celebrated their new books, retreated and workshopped with them, bumped into them in New York and Los Angeles and Florida, and hung out with them online.
How can one possibly feel alone with such company?
I got my start in fiction at the terrific GrubStreet center for creative writing in Boston, back when GrubStreet was just getting started. When I left the area I was worried I wouldn’t find the same kind of vibrant, nourishing literary community—was I ever wrong!
After moving to Maine, I was invited to sit in on a Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance (MWPA) board meeting to try it on for size, see if I’d be a good fit for the board and vice versa. At the University of Southern Maine in Portland I sat around a nondescript conference table with a small group of writers, and the first thing we did was listen to a board member—a poet—read a poem. Glasses wedged on the tip of his nose, grey hair swept back, grey beard unruly, he read, and we listened, each one of us rapt. We would later turn to the budget and strategy and programming, but first on the agenda—always, I discovered after officially joining the board—was a poem. No matter who read what poem, the subtext was evident: This is what we love, this is why we’re here, this is what matters most. That was my first experience of the Maine literary community.
Years later, when Longfellow Books in Portland suffered significant water damage from a burst pipe, damage that meant the store’s owners would have to close Longfellow for good, those folks I’d served with on the MWPA board—friends now—and scores of other Maine writers quickly banded together. Within two days we raised enough money to save the bookstore. I wasn’t surprised. From day one, everyone in the Maine literary community was welcoming, generous, and deeply caring. In 2017 a packed house inside the born-again Longfellow Books celebrated with me as I launched my debut novel, This Is How It Begins.
Way out here, then, I have my great ones on the shelves, and I have my writing friends and colleagues all over the state. I also have an extended community of Antioch writers, including three women from my graduating class—Dawna Kemper, Christa Mastrangelo Joyce, and Mary Rechner—who joined me right after graduation to form an inviolable quartet; every single month, for almost twenty years now, we have checked in with each other via e-mail to share every aspect of our writing lives and support each other on our respective journeys.
As if these riches weren’t enough, I’ve also created a free, private, online community specifically for novelists: the Gutsy Great Novelist Writers Studio, which currently has 2,464 members. This includes a highly engaged, core group who are incredibly community-minded. Members live in the Outback of Australia and suburban Texas and the shores of the Canary Islands and the city of Vancouver and everywhere in between, and all of them bring wisdom, experience, good humor, and generosity to this virtual writers studio. From those new to writing novels to those who are well-published, these folks all have one desire in common: to connect with other writers who love what they love.
The vast majority of these writers I’ve never met in person, but a few have made their way to Maine to attend a writing retreat I host every year in early June. We gather in Bar Harbor at the home of Arthur Train, an attorney and author who wrote legal thrillers in the early 1900s, copies of which grace the shelves of his old house. He’s less well-known than Maine writers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E. B. White, but he’s nevertheless become a part of my literary community, and every year I read a snippet of his work to the retreat-goers so he can become a part of theirs as well, so they may be as wildly companioned by writers both living and dead, local and distant, as I am, way out here.
Joan Dempsey is the author of This Is How It Begins (She Writes Press, 2017), which won a bronze Independent Publisher Book Award for literary fiction and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, and a Sarton Women’s Book Award. Her honors include a Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award, a Maine Literary Award, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, a Key West Literary Seminar scholarship, and a Jentel Artist residency. Dempsey holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles and lives in Maine with her partner and their family of animals. Her website is joandempsey.com.
In September 1889, when the Martin House hotel opened for business at the intersection of Railroad Avenue and Canal Street in downtown Westerly, Rhode Island, its owner, Captain Michael F. Martin, handed out cigars. In April 2023, when patrons of the Savoy Bookshop and Café bought a copy of my new book, Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir, in what had been the hotel’s lobby, they received one of the Cow Tales caramel candy sticks my sister Patty had bought in bulk. Then they wandered around the store’s wood-paneled interior and stepped outside to try their hand at milking a life-size plastic cow named Daphne, which also mooed.
Although I live on Boston’s north shore, I travel to Westerly often because much of my extended family still lives there. A few weeks before my reading at the Savoy Bookshop, I headed home in part to visit my cousin Frank’s farm. I wanted to see if he might have a calf we could bring to downtown Westerly as part of my book launch celebration. As a kid, my 4-H club had brought a cow and some calves to a mall outside of Providence to celebrate National Dairy Month in June. I figured parking a pickup truck with a calf on its bed outside a bookstore couldn’t be any more challenging than escorting animals along the slippery floors between Kay Jewelers and RadioShack and cleaning up after them as shoppers gawked, as I had done all those many years ago.
Located one mile from the Atlantic Ocean and positioned between two salt ponds, Frank’s Ocean Breeze Farm is aptly named. Frank stopped milking cows several years ago when a land trust, dedicated to preserving open space in this watershed, purchased the development rights to his farm. As part of the agreement Frank and subsequent generations of his family can live out their days there, but whether they do or not, this property will always be the same sixty-five rocky acres on one end of Misquamicut Beach. (Taylor Swift owns a mansion on the other.)
As I slowly drove along the dirt driveway, a few head of beef cattle milled about the barnyard, Frank’s grandsons puttered with tractors in the garage, and two goats with shaggy coats grazed in the front yard. Frank is seventy-five but keeps himself and his family busy making hay every summer to sell to horse farms. He greeted me with news of my cousins, complained about the goats (his granddaughter’s idea), and shouted some instructions to the boys. Then his daughter Sylvia pulled into the driveway and swung her pickup into a space in front of a neatly stacked woodpile. She hopped out of the truck, laughing—part nervous reaction, part pure joy. She’s a genuinely happy person.
When I asked about possibly borrowing a calf, she said she didn’t have an animal due in time. “Wait! I think I have something better,” she said, referring, it turned out, to the plastic cow named Daphne. “But first I have to check something.”
She opened the rear door of the truck, stuck her head in, and emerged, laughing. “Wanted to make sure the semen tank hadn’t fallen over.”
“You ride around with that?” I asked.
My family’s semen tank had pride of place in its own office on our farm. A portable tank resembling an oversize metal water bottle, it is filled with liquid nitrogen and ampules of bull semen. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, nearly 90 percent of dairy farmers breed their cows artificially. It’s safer than keeping a two-thousand-pound behemoth around to do the job, and it allows breeders to select genetics that might benefit individual cows in their herds. Sylvia doesn’t inseminate animals for a living, but as a former dairy farmer she has uniquely marketable skills.
“Sometimes after my real job,” she replied, “someone needs a cow bred and I stop by on the way home. You know, just as a side gig.”
Right, I thought.
Seventy-six houses and a home-improvement warehouse now stand on the farm where I grew up, but my father had been a celebrity in the cattle-breeding world because he’d developed a bull named Osborndale Ivanhoe in the 1950s who produced championship heifers. Artificial insemination was new then, so our bull was one of the first who went on to achieve fame not only in Rhode Island, but all over the world. I had spent my youth at 4-H meetings and county fairs showing some of our famous cattle. In Barnflower I tell the story of our family’s farm, from the time my grandparents purchased it in 1911 until the day, almost eight decades later, when we sold our animals and our land. I hoped that the book’s themes—coming of age, searching for one’s place in the world, navigating the specific contours of family dynamics, one man’s version of achieving the American Dream—would appeal to any readers of memoir, but Sylvia reminded me that some people still worked their farms, attended county fairs, earned college degrees in agriculture. They, too, might be interested in a book like mine.
Several decades earlier my mother spent a summer trying to convince five-year-old me that climbing onto a bus and heading to school in the fall would be exciting. I preferred spending days with my father, holding on piggyback as he climbed the silo to fix an auger, or sitting on the steps that led into the milking parlor with the dog as my dad finished up milking for the night. One day, on our way home from plowing a field we rented, we stopped at a farm to pick up a lamb I later named Betty Baa Baa, who rode home with us in the truck cab.
Life off the farm held no interest for me. But it turned out I loved school, and I was enamored with my teachers. One evening that fall, when my mother headed out for parents’ night at the school, I reminded her that Mrs. Phillips said there would be a book sale and asked my mother to buy textbooks for me. It seemed to me that those glossy volumes contained all the knowledge of the world and had empowered the godlike women who stood before us in class, doling out worksheets still warm and full of the scent of the mimeograph machine. Instead, my mother returned with Charlotte’s Web. I pouted for days. How could this flimsy paperback compete with a book that would crack a toenail if it fell on your foot?
Months later my mother had to pry the tattered copy of E. B. White’s classic out of my hands. “There are so many other books to read,” she said. “You can’t keep reading the same one.” It wasn’t just that it was a great book; it was also—it was mostly—that this was a book about a farm, the first time I’d seen aspects of my own life in print.
So that evening at the Savoy Bookstore, with Daphne mooing outside, much as it had happened with Charlotte’s Web, my two loves merged: farm animals and books. Imagine a life that could contain both. Imagine a book tour that could do the same.
Ever since I could articulate the answer to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I answered, “A writer.” I felt compelled to write stories on every scrap of paper in the house, from the official copy of my parents’ will to napkins and grain bill receipts. So, yes, I wrote, and eventually I published books. Three books. Three different small presses. Three attempts, largely on my part, to promote them, an awkward business that involved reaching out to, say, small-town libraries several times before they squeezed me into their events calendar and then arriving with my sisters toting homemade goodies, my nephews setting out chairs, and my mother perched in the front row reminding me of the names of cousins several generations removed who composed a good portion of the audience.
In all my fantasizing about life as a writer, I had never daydreamed about what it might take to promote a book. That seemed the realm of people who earned business degrees, not people like me who sat alone in a room in sweatpants and a sweatshirt with the collar cut out of it à la Flashdance, believing the less restrictive my clothing, the more fluid my thoughts. Even my mother was a more skilled salesperson than I. In her kitchen she kept a large stack of my first book, a collection of poems based on my family and stories of Westerly, and she sold them to everyone she could corner, from relatives to patients in the waiting room at her optometry office.
Now, thinking beyond the usual bookstores and literary festivals, I had some very different ideas for a self-designed publicity campaign for Barnflower that would include what the book was partly about: cows. I bought a pair of waterproof muckers and decided to head to where real cows and their very real owners gathered.
One of the first people I contacted to plan a book event was Julie Brodeur, whose family had run a dairy farm in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, for 118 years before they were forced to sell off their milk cows in the 1990s. Our 4-H group had once staged a haunted house in the basement of their eighteenth-century homestead, which was purported to host a ghost named Dorcas. I lay in an old vegetable bin in an ancient bride costume (think Miss Havisham) and sat up when kids peered inside. These days Julie runs the livestock program for the largest fair in Rhode Island, one my family had brought our cows to every August. When I told her about my book, Julie invited me to set up a table ringside at the dairy show. In between bathing animals, combing out tails, polishing leather halters, and spraying animals to keep the flies off, people stopped to chat and inquire about the book.
Some stopped by to tell me how they, too, had finally sold their cows. Same old story: too much work, not enough money. “The day the cows left,” one woman said, shaking her head. “Can’t think too much about that.”
I imagined myself back beside my father as the trucks pulled away, our life’s work inside. I remembered how impossibly quiet it got once the animals had gone.
Later, on a rainy day in September, I waited until the flower arrangement competition was over before setting up my book display at the Deerfield Fair inside the new Future Farmers of America booth, a 160-square-foot space built by volunteers. I sold one copy—to the young man who had brought in antique milk cans and farm tools to use as decorations.
“I do the American Pickers thing,” he told me. “Lots of empty old barns around here to go through.” His family still had their land, but instead of farming it, he worked with New Hampshire’s Forest Management Bureau on conservation issues. “Keep an eye out for New England cottontails,” he said. “New Hampshire’s only native rabbit.”
The next weekend, a cold wind blew on a bright day as people headed into a corn maze in Thompson, Connecticut, a town on the Massachusetts border where “Swamp Yankee,” a colloquial term for rural New Englanders, is thought to have originated during the American Revolution in 1776.
The farm’s owner told me the maze helped keep their dairy farm going. “But, damn,” she said. “It’s rained every Saturday this month.” As we spoke she paused to give instructions, handing families a map with a crayon to check off landmarks they’d pass. “No pens, because the cows can’t eat those, but if you drop this,” she said, holding up the crayon, “it won’t hurt them.”
On the first day of November, she, along with her daughter and her son-in-law, would cut the corn for their three hundred milking cows. On my way out I drove by the heifer pasture and admired the cattle, head after wooly head lowered happily over a long feeder of grain mixture. I slid the window down and inhaled: Smelled like home.
At EMMA Acres Family Farm Fest in Exeter, Rhode Island, most famous for the Mercy Brown vampire incident of 1892 (part of the wider New England vampire panic of the time), I set up my table on the porch of the farm store where they stocked local cheese, beef, honey, and vegetables. The farm’s name derives from the first initials of Cynthia and Scooter LaPrise’s four children, all grown now. Cynthia grew up on Bailey Brook Farm, a few miles away from where she and her husband raised their own kids. The Baileys milked cows for five generations, but like the LaPrise family they, too, stopped milking. Instead they raise heifers: 4-H projects for their nine grandchildren. Sales at the store and the festival, which includes tables of goods from local vendors, helps them keep their own twelve acres as well as the 225 acres of Bailey Brook. At Christmas, EMMA Acres offers photos of pets with Santa (if you don’t have a pet, you can borrow a calf). To preserve their way of life, Cynthia’s sister’s family also sells flowers, pumpkins, and Christmas trees.
When Theresa, one of our former hired hands, showed up at EMMA Acres, we hugged. “My son surprised me with a copy of your book,” she said. “And what do you know? I’m in there!” She had been one of my dad’s most loyal workers. Once she left our farm she spent twenty more years milking for another Rhode Island family before they also sold out.
“God,” she said. “I sure do miss it.”
Later that fall my husband and I drove the four and a half hours to Burlington, Vermont. In response to an e-mail I’d sent out to several universities along the East Coast that offer a program called CREAM (Cooperative for Real Education in Agricultural Management), Steven Wadsworth, a lecturer and adviser to the group, invited me to speak to his class at the University of Vermont. Along with copies of my book, I presented a PowerPoint presentation about my father’s quest to breed award-winning dairy cattle and met the eighteen young women who manage the university’s herd of fifty Holsteins. The students showed me the complex record-keeping system they use to track data on their herd. They led me through the milk house and to the barns where the cows munched grass silage. They introduced me to each animal (“This is Pigeon,” “This is Lourdes,” “This is Gouda”) as they walked along scratching the chins of cows who are a whole lot bigger than the (big) cows I grew up around. Every woman in the program bought a copy of Barnflower.
Wadsworth told me that on top of their academic course load (and, in some cases, their varsity athletic requirements), the students commit several hours a week and vacation time to the herd. When a cow is about to calve, they form two teams: Team Baby and Team Mama.
“Doesn’t matter if the cow gives birth at two in the afternoon or two in the morning,” he said. “They show up.” Then collectively they decide on the baby’s name.
Between stops at family farms, I joined Facebook groups like Keep the Lights On: Save the Family Dairy Farmer, a page dedicated to families who are still farming, and Legendairy Holsteins and Brown Swiss Milk Cows. This led to messages from several farmers across the country who shared with me how my book had affected them. One man read chapters aloud to his girlfriend each night in Missouri as she completed a jigsaw puzzle. He wrote: “It was as if you had written that book about my family.” It is not unusual for a magazine to arrive in my mailbox from Wisconsin or New York where someone who used to farm has come across an article about my dad or a picture of one of our cows in an old copy of a breed magazine. One note said: “Happy for you to have this as part of your legacy.”
One of my final events of the year was at a gathering planned by members of a family who had shown our calves during their years in 4-H. This family lived on Aquidneck Island, in Narragansett Bay. When their family first met ours, the only way for them to transport heifers to their backyard farm was via a ferry that crossed the water. Farmers often lend out calves to kids who otherwise would have no animals to raise. Once those animals have calves of their own, the mothers return to their original herds to be milked. The idea for my book began with a story of a cow named Darcy who, for weeks after her devoted 4-H’er returned her to our farm, broke down every fence in the place trying to get back to her calf.
A man waited after the event to speak with me. “You know,” he said, “I once gave Misty a bath.” Our cow Misty was Ivanhoe’s first famous heifer. She received accolades all over New England and won awards in New York and Iowa, my father trucking her to competitions in the back of a yellow pickup with plywood sides he constructed himself to keep her safe.
This man had helped my dad out at the Eastern States Exposition (the Big E) in West Springfield, Massachusetts, the region’s largest cattle show. My dad had handed him Misty’s halter and sent him off to get her ready for the show ring.
“I knew exactly who she was. Everyone did. I’ll never forget that,” he said, sixty years later.
This fall I head back to the Big E, where my father, partly because of Misty, is in the Exhibitors Hall of Fame. I have been invited to attend the dairy cattle exhibitors’ social hour the evening before the show and will set up my sales table in the barn where our own cows once waited for show day, my father sleeping beside them on a cot each night as we stayed nearby in a hotel. Part of my marketing materials includes the kind of tri-board kids use for middle school science projects. On it I’ve pasted photos of Misty, Ivanhoe, and our farm.
My invitation to attend is all thanks to my former 4-H square dance partner, Greg, who serves on the fair’s board of directors. I don’t think Greg was terribly excited about square dancing back when we would do-si-do, and I don’t think he walked into his sophomore English class the Monday after our competition flashing the medals we’d won, but he was a great partner who wasn’t afraid to spin. In the more than forty years since we’d perfected the Trail of the Lonesome Pine dance, he has served on the fair’s board and also taught at an agricultural high school.
When I contacted him to plan this stop, he said, “You want to come to Eastern States with the book? I can do that.”
I do, I thought. I desperately want to be back.
I love an independently owned bookstore. Libraries have always been places of worship for me. I appreciate any chance to read with other writers, to attend book groups or visit schools. But I am from a place where the scent of freshly baled alfalfa drifted through my bedroom window, and I could hear the creak of stanchions from the barn. The sun would rise over a silo and set behind a pasture of tasseled corn. To return to that world, this time as a writer, if only for a handful of days and nights, was more than I could have imagined.
Yes, I sold books on my tour. Sometimes one or two copies at an event, sometimes fifteen or twenty. But, more important, I returned to a world I had left after our own farm had been sold to a developer who burned every building to the ground. It took me thirty years to tell our story because, in part, it had been so painful to remember our life as it had been, to remember myself as I had been. When people who have known me only in this new version of my life read the book and say, “I had no idea you did all this stuff,” I want to tell them: “There is only one thing I have been longer than I’ve been a writer. And that’s a farm kid.”
Carla Panciera is the author of Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir (Loom Press, 2023); the story collection Bewildered (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), winner of AWP’s Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction; and two collections of poetry, No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera Press, 2010) and One of the Cimalores (Cider Press, 2005). A recently retired high school English teacher, she lives in Rowley, Massachusetts.
The author with a Holstein cow from a herd managed by the CREAM program at the University of Vermont in Burlington in September 2023. (Credit: Apphia Donoghue)
Can we please dispense with the tedious archetype of the lonely writer? In addition to garrets, this trope usually includes isolation,with its connotations that one is cut off from society and suffering from a lack of companions. Nonsense! As Flannery O’Connor writes in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969):
There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful—the myth of the “lonely writer,” the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering because, supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him.
She goes on to call this myth a cliché. I agree.
I live in rural Maine on nearly twelve acres of land. The property includes a fire pond; a big field of wild grasses, flowers, and mowed paths; and an undeveloped forest that stretches on for hundreds of acres behind my writing shed, a converted tool shack and chicken coop. A small deck with a pergola covered in grape vines leads to a sliding glass door that reveals a pine-paneled space with four windows, a long desk made from a yellow Formica countertop that I ate on as a toddler, and a reading chair tucked into the crook of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.
Joan Dempsey in her writing shed in rural Maine. Photo credit: Greta Rybus.
Often, when I’m at a literary event in the city of Portland, a writer new to me will inevitably ask where I live, and when I tell them New Gloucesterwhat usually comes next is some variation of, “Oh, wow, way out there?” My home is a mere twenty-two miles north of Portland, not exactly a godforsaken hinterland. The person’s tone is typically either envious or pitying, but both seem to have the same roots: I live way out there, which might mean enviable isolation, or it might mean I’m bereft of community.
The romantic desire for the equivalent of an isolated writer’s garret is less about a physical place, I believe, and more about a yearning for the privacy which can be found there. Writers don’t need isolation, but we do need freedom from interference so we can “[w]rite with the door closed,” as Stephen King says in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Scribner, 2000). That door can be physical or metaphorical. Some of my best writing is done at a big table in my public library, where people respect each other’s privacy, especially if they think one is hard at work.
The beauty of the shed, though, is that its use is restricted to me; it’s my private space, but I don’t ever feel isolated, and I’m certainly not lonely. For one thing, I have books, and therefore a rich community of authors at my fingertips. One shelf is particularly influential: books by and about James Baldwin. When I was getting my low-residency MFA at Antioch University Los Angeles, I wrote my thesis on an autobiographical aspect of Baldwin’s famous story “Sonny’s Blues.” While writing this paper, I was fully immersed in all things Baldwin and I often had the distinct and sometimes unsettling impression that he was in the room with me, directing and encouraging me in equal turns. I had dreams of him that felt more like visitations than something conjured from my unconscious mind. Eerie, but also rather wonderful.
During this time I traveled to New York City to see a one-man play about Baldwin, with Calvin Levels playing the author, and I had the good fortune of going out afterwards with members of the Baldwin family and Levels himself. I asked the actor if he ever felt Baldwin’s presence and he threw back his head, laughed, and said something like, “Oh lord yes, he would not shut up! I finally had to tell him to leave me alone.”
I recently read an essay by Mary Oliver from Upstream: Selected Essays (Penguin Press, 2016) in which she talks about this precise feeling of inheriting an “immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground….” She writes about being “inseparable from…my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones” and adds, “I go nowhere, I arrive nowhere, without them. With them I live my life…this innumerable, fortifying company….”
At my Antioch graduation Steve Heller, the creative writing MFA chair at the time, invoked the names of a long list of our literary ancestors and welcomed us into their esteemed community. I felt a prickle of excitement and sensed their presence as keenly as I’d felt Jimmy Baldwin hanging out on my screened porch, smoking his ever-present cigarette while I tussled with “Sonny’s Blues.”
On other shelves in the shed are books written by those ancestors, but plenty others are by living authors, many from right here in Maine. In fact, my shelves teem with contemporary Maine authors, fifty-six of them (I counted), too many names to list here, although I’d like to, because what a gift it would be for you to know each and every one of them as I do. These folks exist in the pages of their books, of course, but I’ve also met them in person. I’ve been in their kitchens and living rooms and on their decks, sat next to them at events, raised toasts at their parties, celebrated their new books, retreated and workshopped with them, bumped into them in New York and Los Angeles and Florida, and hung out with them online.
How can one possibly feel alone with such company?
I got my start in fiction at the terrific GrubStreet center for creative writing in Boston, back when GrubStreet was just getting started. When I left the area I was worried I wouldn’t find the same kind of vibrant, nourishing literary community—was I ever wrong!
After moving to Maine, I was invited to sit in on a Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance (MWPA) board meeting to try it on for size, see if I’d be a good fit for the board and vice versa. At the University of Southern Maine in Portland I sat around a nondescript conference table with a small group of writers, and the first thing we did was listen to a board member—a poet—read a poem. Glasses wedged on the tip of his nose, grey hair swept back, grey beard unruly, he read, and we listened, each one of us rapt. We would later turn to the budget and strategy and programming, but first on the agenda—always, I discovered after officially joining the board—was a poem. No matter who read what poem, the subtext was evident: This is what we love, this is why we’re here, this is what matters most. That was my first experience of the Maine literary community.
Years later, when Longfellow Books in Portland suffered significant water damage from a burst pipe, damage that meant the store’s owners would have to close Longfellow for good, those folks I’d served with on the MWPA board—friends now—and scores of other Maine writers quickly banded together. Within two days we raised enough money to save the bookstore. I wasn’t surprised. From day one, everyone in the Maine literary community was welcoming, generous, and deeply caring. In 2017 a packed house inside the born-again Longfellow Books celebrated with me as I launched my debut novel, This Is How It Begins.
Way out here, then, I have my great ones on the shelves, and I have my writing friends and colleagues all over the state. I also have an extended community of Antioch writers, including three women from my graduating class—Dawna Kemper, Christa Mastrangelo Joyce, and Mary Rechner—who joined me right after graduation to form an inviolable quartet; every single month, for almost twenty years now, we have checked in with each other via e-mail to share every aspect of our writing lives and support each other on our respective journeys.
As if these riches weren’t enough, I’ve also created a free, private, online community specifically for novelists: the Gutsy Great Novelist Writers Studio, which currently has 2,464 members. This includes a highly engaged, core group who are incredibly community-minded. Members live in the Outback of Australia and suburban Texas and the shores of the Canary Islands and the city of Vancouver and everywhere in between, and all of them bring wisdom, experience, good humor, and generosity to this virtual writers studio. From those new to writing novels to those who are well-published, these folks all have one desire in common: to connect with other writers who love what they love.
The vast majority of these writers I’ve never met in person, but a few have made their way to Maine to attend a writing retreat I host every year in early June. We gather in Bar Harbor at the home of Arthur Train, an attorney and author who wrote legal thrillers in the early 1900s, copies of which grace the shelves of his old house. He’s less well-known than Maine writers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E. B. White, but he’s nevertheless become a part of my literary community, and every year I read a snippet of his work to the retreat-goers so he can become a part of theirs as well, so they may be as wildly companioned by writers both living and dead, local and distant, as I am, way out here.
Joan Dempsey is the author of This Is How It Begins (She Writes Press, 2017), which won a bronze Independent Publisher Book Award for literary fiction and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, and a Sarton Women’s Book Award. Her honors include a Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award, a Maine Literary Award, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, a Key West Literary Seminar scholarship, and a Jentel Artist residency. Dempsey holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles and lives in Maine with her partner and their family of animals. Her website is joandempsey.com.
Nestled into a block with a dance studio and a tax-services business in El Monte, California, Matilija Lending Library greets visitors with a sign in the window announcing its name in English, Spanish, and Chinese. There’s also a poster with the dictum “Protect Our Elders” and another that reads “This Is Tongva Land,” referring to the Indigenous people who have long inhabited the region. Inside, bright yellow and exposed-brick walls frame shelves of books. Colorful papel picado flutters overhead, and a vintage typewriter sits on a side table.
The decor’s nod to a wealth of cultures reflects the mission of Amy J. Wong and Andrew Fung Yip, the couple who opened the lending library to the public in March. Named after the Matilija poppy—a California-native plant that flowers in fire-ravaged landscapes—the library aims to “reflect our people of color communities in the San Gabriel Valley, and build multiracial solidarity.” Boasting a collection of more than 1,500 books by mainly BIPOC authors, Matilija allows patrons to check out three volumes for four weeks at a time. Recently displayed titles have included Chiang Yee’s The Silent Travellerin Boston, Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s The Mountains Sing, and Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. Guests can also congregate in the space during the library’s hours of operation on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. At a time when people of color are struggling under the weight of increasing racist and anti-immigrant violence nationwide, Matilija functions as a sanctuary as well as a lending library.
“We envisioned a place where people can just sit—like a reading room,” Yip says. “We even have board games now and magazines. People can just relax, do homework, or just hang out—because there’s not a lot of places where you can go, other than libraries, where you can just hang out and not have to buy anything.”
The Matilija Lending Library is the culmination of a dream Wong and Yip shared. Initially they hoped to open a shop focused on books by BIPOC writers. But some of the hurdles to owning a bookstore, such as purchasing inventory—plus the duo’s desire to create a free space—shifted their focus.
To prepare for launching Matilija, Wong and Yip visited other California grassroots libraries—including Libros Schmibros in L.A.’s Boyle Heights and Café con Libros in Pomona—taking notes on how they functioned. They found space in a former shoe-repair shop on Lexington Avenue, owned by a friend. The two received the keys in December 2021 and started prepping to open. Since then, monetary donations have paid for utilities and books, both used and new. Wong and Yip purchased furniture from thrift shops—including long church pews repurposed as benches—which they hoped would invite folks to sit a while.
The couple manage the library themselves, a labor of love they do in addition to their full-time jobs at Active San Gabriel Valley (ActiveSGV), whose mission is “to support a more sustainable, equitable, and livable San Gabriel Valley.” The lending library has become an extension of Wong and Yip’s identities as lifelong residents of the region, a second home where they welcome chatter and even music from a record player in the space.
“This library is a small step toward…the future that we want to see in the San Gabriel Valley, where the voices and the stories of people of color are centered,” says Wong.
Christine Tran, multimedia storyteller and executive director of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council, sees Matilija as an important gathering place in El Monte, one that reflects the “really deep history” between the area’s large Latinx and Asian communities. It is also uniquely inclusive. Public libraries require borrowers to be at least eighteen years old and Los Angeles County residents before they can apply for an official library card on their own. Matilija, on the other hand, offers easier access as well as a direct line to the community. For example, the library has posted polls on social media asking patrons to suggest programming, leading to planned movie screenings, a mah-jongg workshop, and karaoke. Matilija also collaborates with community groups, including South El Monte Arts Posse (SEMAP) and ActiveSGV, which recently held a poetry reading in the library that Tran participated in.
“We are a community of storytellers and story listeners,” says Tran, who grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. “And it’s really hard to find space for that level of intergenerational and historical connection.”
Certain moments stand out in Wong’s memory as illustrative of the library’s success in supporting BIPOC readers. A visitor once told Wong that she hoped Matilija would encourage her daughter’s appreciation of her Chinese and Mexican roots. On another day, Wong looked on fondly as a father and his two daughters plucked books from the shelves and sat down to read as jazz played in the background.
“It’s those moments of peace and quiet affirmations that bring me joy and allow me to see that these spaces are important,” Wong says. “We wanted a space to center joy and to center storytelling and positive aspects of our lives here.”
Eva Recinos is a journalist and creative nonfiction writer based in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in Air/Light, Electric Literature, and Pank, among other publications.
Andrew Fung Yip and Amy J. Wong, the couple who founded Matilija Lending Library. (Credit: Jasmyn Bagonghasa)
While South Central Los Angeles has long had a vibrant poetry community, local writers lacked a dedicated venue to write, read, and listen to the work of poets—until this past summer, when poet and educator Hiram Sims opened the Sims Library of Poetry in the Crenshaw District. The new space represents the latest of Sims’s efforts to connect local poets to the broader publishing and writing communities. Though the library just opened its first permanent location, its origin story can be traced back several years.
In 2013, Sims noticed a disconnect between the community of active poets he knew from open mics and the staff of small presses who told him they didn’t know of and weren’t receiving submissions from these poets. “I met all these fantastic poets, none of whom had books,” says Sims. That’s when he started the Community Literature Initiative (CLI), a nonprofit organization through which he offered classes supported by his alma mater, the University of Southern California, on the process of book production, completing a manuscript, and finding a publisher. In the fourth year of running the program, Sims asked students to read one book of poetry a week, but a roadblock emerged: They couldn’t find poetry books at the library. “I didn’t believe them, and then I went to the local library and there was no poetry section,” says Sims. To help his students, Sims gathered eighty poetry books of his own and put them into a rolling suitcase to take to class. Students borrowed books and returned them the next week. Sims recalls one of his students saying, “This is like a little Sims library of poetry,” and the name and concept stuck with him.
A year later, in 2018, Sims built a bookshelf from scrap wood and cleared out his garage to make room for the beginnings of a library. Soon his CLI students weren’t the only frequent borrowers, as local poets began visiting his garage seeking books by Amiri Baraka, E. E. Cummings, and Nikki Giovanni, to name a few. With demand growing, Sims enlisted his brother to help him build a wraparound bookshelf to line his entire garage. He then ran into a new problem: “I had about three hundred books of poetry, and when I put my books on that huge shelf, it looked like I had six books.” There was room to grow. In 2019, Sims hosted his birthday party at the garage and turned to his poetry community for help, asking for book donations to the library. At the end of the day there were two thousand books filling the shelves.
Still, Sims wanted to do more. “I always had a larger vision, even before I built those bookshelves in my garage,” he says. The pandemic offered a blessing in disguise. In June 2020 his wife, educator Charisse Sims, decided to close the preschool she operated and suggested the space for the library. Soon volunteers gathered and the team was off and running. “Over the span of six months, we converted a preschool into a library,” says Sims. The pandemic delayed the opening but offered time to create a circulation desk and digital catalog and to hire staff. On July 10, 2021, the Sims Library of Poetry, located on Florence Avenue, just a few blocks from Sims’s garage, officially opened to the public.
“We have over six thousand books of poetry now, and 90 percent of those books were donated by poets,” says Sims. There are sections for full-length collections, chapbooks, anthologies, biographies, literary journals, and magazines, as well as shelves dedicated to books by Latinx and African American writers. Painted on the concrete fence in front of the library are the words “Poetry Lives Here,” and inside on the walls are posters of book releases from local poets and a collage of flyers from poetry events in the area—a reminder, Sims says, that poetry “needs to be heard, not just read” and for poets to “stay active.” There is also a private writing room, a computer lab, and an outdoor reading area with space for events. Out front is a reserved parking spot marked “Poet Parking Only.”
“We want to make sure that all local poets, especially poets of color, know we are here and that this is a home for them,” says library manager and member of the CLI community Karo Ska. The library is currently open Monday through Friday, 9:30 AM to 2:30 PM, and Saturday from 1:00 PM to 6:00 PM. Several events a month have been hosted at the space already, including workshops, book releases, open mics, and readings, with more to come. “We are growing, blooming, and expanding every day,” says Ska.
From the poets who donated books to the garage and the volunteers who helped build and help run the library to the donors whose funds help sustain and support the growth of the space, the Sims Library of Poetry is a testament to the power of poetic community. “Poets mop the floor, poets sweep, poets dust, poets pay the light bills and gas bills,” says Sims. “It’s a place that’s built by poets for the reading, writing, and performance of poetry.” It is a home poets can rely on.
Jessica Kashiwabara is the digital director of Poets & Writers, Inc.
Hiram Sims holds a 1929 copy of The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes, part of the library’s collection. (Credit: Jamie Asaye Fitzgerald)
On the ninth anniversary of poet Lucille Clifton’s death, her eldest daughter, Sidney Clifton, felt a strong desire to be back in her family’s former home in Baltimore. She decided to call the owner, who told her the house had been put up for sale that very day, February 13, 2019. A reunion with the house seemed fated, and Sidney Clifton jumped at the chance to buy her childhood home. Soon the space will once again be filled with the energy and cheerful noise of artists at work and in conversation as the poet’s family develops the Clifton House as a place where new generations of artists can flourish.
In 1968, Lucille Clifton and her husband, Fred, a professor and activist, bought the house at 2605 Talbot Road and moved in with their six children. It was there that Lucille Clifton launched her prolific poetry career. Her first collection, Good Times (Random House, 1969), was published a year after the family moved in; Good News About the Earth (Random House, 1972) and An Ordinary Woman (Random House, 1974) followed soon thereafter. While living at the house, she wrote countless poems, a memoir, and children’s books, earned fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1970 and 1973, and began her term as poet laureate of Maryland in 1979.
The Clifton family lived in the house in the Windsor Hills neighborhood for almost eleven years before they lost the home to foreclosure. Buying the house last year was profoundly meaningful for Sidney, because with both parents and two of her siblings gone, the years they shared there represent a moment when her entire family was alive and together, happy and whole.
At first her only plan for the home, she says, was “the reclamation of my family’s history. It felt like a triumph for my family to reclaim a house and a history that was lost.” But as she reminisced about watching her mother write award-winning poetry at their dining table and her father create sculptures and paintings, she knew she wanted to do something to honor their legacy. In the seventies her parents threw bustling social gatherings, at which writers, artists, and activists were welcomed and supported in their creativity. Sidney and her siblings mingled with the children of her parents’ friends to the sounds of percussionists drumming while the adults ate and talked about how they were making a difference through their work.
Today Sidney envisions a second life for the home as a creative safe space for emerging and established writers and artists to participate in residencies, in-person and virtual workshops, and cultural events, as well as to display art in gallery space. “This house will be for a wider community what it was for my family and me when we were growing up: a place for artists,” she says.
Sidney, an Emmy-nominated producer of animated and live-action content, also plans to draw on her more than twenty years of experience to develop a series of cultural conversations between emerging and established artists. She’s not the only Clifton involved in the work of bringing this project to fruition; it is a multigenerational family affair, with her siblings involved in the project and plans for their children, artists in their own right, to possibly teach workshops and show their art.
With the house scheduled to open in 2021, the Clifton family aims to support and launch the careers of artists as they experience and learn what it is to live a creative life. Future residents and participants are likely to be inspired by Lucille Clifton’s illustrious career, built throughout the years she lived at the residence, during which she published numerous collections and won prestigious awards and accolades, including the National Book Award for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988–2000 (BOA Editions, 2000), the 2007 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and, posthumously, the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America for a “distinguished lifetime service to American poetry.” (In September, How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton, edited by poet Aracelis Girmay, was published by BOA Editions.)
Initial funding for the Clifton House was provided in August 2019 by the V-Day campaign, which supports programs to end violence against women and girls, including arts programs and organizations. In July 2020 the Clifton House received a grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, which strives to preserve African American history in order to tell a more rich and complete story of the American experience. The grant will support staffing and in-person and virtual program planning.
During a tour of the home with the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund team, Sidney opened a closet door and discovered her name written on the wall from when she had been practicing cursive as a child. It seemed another portent that she was meant to share and preserve the family’s legacy.
Writers and artists interested in participating and developing Clifton House programs may contact Sidney Clifton at cliftonhousebaltimore@gmail.com.
LaToya Jordan is a writer from Brooklyn, New York. Follow her on Twitter @latoyadjordan.
The Clifton House, now and then. Sidney Clifton (above, center) and siblings (from left) Gillian Clifton Monell, Alexia Clifton, and Graham Clifton, gather on the steps in 2019, much as the family did with their mother, Lucille Clifton (right, top center), around 1969. (Credit: Sidney Clifton and Rollie McKenna)
On February 13, 2010, American poet Lucille Clifton passed away. This interview with her was published in an April 1999 special issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, on which she graced the cover.
Born in Depew, New York, in 1936 and reared in Buffalo, Lucille Clifton published her first book of verse, Good Times, in 1969. She went on to publish Good News About the Earth (1972), An Ordinary Woman (1974), Generations (1976), Two-Headed Woman (1980), Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980 (1987), Next (1987), Ten Oxherding Pictures (1989), Quilting: Poems 1987-1990 (1991), The Book of Light (1993), which contains “brothers,” a transcendent sequence written from Lucifer’s perspective, and The Terrible Stories (1996), which reflects on Clifton’s survival of breast cancer. She has also published numerous books for children. Her most popular poems include the gracefully meditative “the thirty eighth year,” the amusingly affirmative “homage to my hips,” and the scathingly witty “wishes for sons.” The special brand of instruction in her magical lyrics depends on keen social awareness and a disciplined intuition–both hers and ours. Her poems about race relations, womanhood, and self-affirmation often seem like parables that only our hearts fully grasp. She has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is the recipient of many other honors, including a 1999 Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award. Currently at work on a collection of new and selected poems, she is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. This spring she has a visiting position at Duke University as the Blackburn Professor of Creative Writing. Her home is in Columbia, Maryland, where this interview took place on a brilliant Saturday afternoon.
Your name, Lucille, and the names of your family members often show up in your poetry as well as in your memoir, Generations. And in the poem, “I am accused of tending to the past,” in Quilting, you describe the past as “a monstrous unnamed baby” that the narrator has taken to her breast and named “History” with a capital H. So I was wondering, why are names and the process of naming so important to you? Well, I was alive during the sixties when African Americans changing their names caued a great stir. And naming is as close as we can outwardly come to identifying ourselves, my menesss. Now, for me, because Lucille means light, I can get a lot of metaphor and baggage and all that sort of thing from that. And so I suppose I think that being able to name is somehow being able to place, to identify.
When did you start working with your own name, Lucille, as a poetic device? When I understood, when I thought about what it meant.
And when was that? I was very young. I started writing when I was about ten. [I was] perhaps a little older than that when [my name] began to take on metaphoric meaning for me.
What happened to you at ten that caused you to sit down and start writing? Well, I loved words always, and my mother used to write poetry, so I saw it as something to do. I think everyone has in his or her self the urge to express, and people do it with what they love, I suppose. Cooks do it with food; there are people who do it with hair, with clothing, fabric. I loved words, always-the sound of words, the feeling of words in my mouth—and so I did it that way.
I was recently approached about writing an entry on you for a reference book on contemporary Southern writers. Isn’t that interesting? I’m in an anthology also of Catholic writers. [Laughter.] I said to the [editor], “But I’m not Catholic.” And she said, “Doesn’t matter.” I don’t think of myself as Southern, though people think of my home as Maryland although my home is Buffalo, New York.
That’s what I wanted to ask you about. You write about racial identity, gender identity, and family identity, but I’m wondering about geographical identity. How does that fit into who you see yourself as being? I don’t think that I particularly feel a geographical identity. It may well be somewhat related to something I read about Robert Penn Warren sometime back. The article said that when he graduated from college, he bought an old car and he traveled across the country. And he wanted to see the landscape; he wanted to look at this country. And I was understanding then that that’s why, maybe, I know something about the people in this country, but I’m not a landscape person. I don’t identify that much with landscape.
Why do you think that is? Because it was not available to me. There’s no way a person of my age, who looks like me, could have gotten a car and gone across this country safely. It’s not possible. We’re talking about the fifties and sixties.
Critics often talk about your affirming spirit and the celebratory qualities in your verse, and I certainly see those, too. But there’s also a lot of anger and sorrow and uncertainty in your writing, and it seems like the hopeful essence really has to struggle against those forces. It does! [Laughter.] That’s because I’m human. I’m doing a “new and selected” now, and a couple of friends have seen some of the poems, and they say this is going to be a dark book.
Is it? Well, I don’t think it’s dark. I think it’s just…you know, I have a poem about dialysis, for instance. I was on dialysis. And it ends…something about “i am alive and furious,” and then it ends with a question, “blessed be even this?” [Some critics] would expect of me, “blessed be even this.” Well, I’m not sure about that. You know, dialysis is not fun. Kidney failure is not fun.
It seems like, maybe more than in most poetry, people can see what they want to see in your verse. If they want affirmation, it’s there. There is affirmation there. And that makes people uncomfortable. And I understand that. I say sometimes at readings something I heard an old preacher say a long time ago. “I come to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.” Of course, I would be nuts if I didn’t see the negativity and despair in the world, if I didn’t sometimes feel it myself. I am always hopeful, because that’s the kind of personality I have. But it does not mean that I do not see what there is to be seen and do not feel what any other human being would feel.
You’re very accessible in your readings, and you kind of give yourself over to the audience. But it also strikes me that each of your readings is a very artfully arranged process, that it’s even an artful exercise in consciousness-raising that you’re leading your audience through. I like to connect with people. I like people. Now, I am, on the other hand-nobody ever believes that-I’m shy. I am shy. But I think that one can teach without preaching, you know what I mean? And I know that there are some things that it would be helpful if people understood, and I want to say the truth. I want to tell the truth, you know? I believe that if we face up to our responsibility and the possibility of evil in us, we then will understand that we have to be vigilant about the good. But if we all think that it all happens to somebody else, somewhere else, over there, then we don’t have to take responsibility for what we do.
Is this interest in the possibility of evil what leads you, in part, to write about Lucifer so much? I’ve said that I know there’s Lucifer in Lucille, because I know me: I can be so petty, it’s amazing! And there is therefore a possibility of Lucille in Lucifer. Lucifer was doing what he was supposed to do, too, you know? It’s too easy to see Lucifer as all bad. Suppose he were merely being human. That’s why the Bible people—it’s too easy to think of them all as mythological, saintly folk. It is much more interesting to me that these were humans—caught up in a divine plan, but human. That seems to me the miracle.
If Lucifer were sitting here, what would you want to ask him? “Do you regret? What are your regrets?”
What do you think he’d want to ask you? [Laughter.] “Why are you doing this?” But as I said to somebody whose class I talked to, “If Milton can do it, so can I!” Why not?
I’m reminded of an earlier interview where the interviewer asked you, “What do you try to avoid as a poet?” and you said you try to avoid being clever. Can you elaborate on that? Why would that be a problem? Cleverness gets in the way of creativity. Cleverness is often the easy way, the expected, in your work, and I try very hard not to take the easy way out. I think about Rilke’s [advice], “Hold to the difficult.” And I try very hard not to do the easy, expected, smart thing. Poetry for me is not an intellectual exercise. To understand my poetry, I don’t think approaching it simply intellectually will help. It has to be a balance, I think, between intellect and intuition. For me, there is a kind of intuitive feeling for the language, for what wishes to be said-you know what I mean? I never had classes in this, I never took courses in this business, so I had to learn, I had to feel my way into the language. And you can have a visceral response to these things coming together, if you have enough authenticity behind them, enough power.
You use a lot of questions in your poetry, especially at the ends of your poems. How conscious are you of that? I was not particularly conscious of using a lot of them. But I do think that poetry is about questions.
What do you say that? Well, because I don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.
Do you consider Yeats— I like Yeats.
Do you like him or do you love him? I probably just like him a whole lot. [Laughter.]
Whom do you love? I love—well, do we have to have writers?
Yes. Then we can move on to others. Who do I love? I don’t know. Adrienne [Rich]! We lived in the same town for a while. She’s a fabulous person. We each had a child who had cancer at the same time at one point in our lives. We used to talk about that and commiserate quite a lot. I think we exchanged a poem at the time, something about “our children are bald,” because they were both having chemotherapy.
Are there other poets who come to mind as a passion for you? I admire Derek Walcott. I admire cummings—though that’s not why I don’t capitalize, okay? I admire Whitman. I admire Yeats. I admire Gwen Brooks.
What about Plath and Sexton? I begin to respect Plath more now. When I was younger, I wasn’t as into her. Sexton I do [admire], and I knew her a little bit. She was a friend of Maxine Kumin’s, whom I’ve known for a long time. As I get older, for some reason, I admire Plath more. Sharon [Olds] I like very much. I think Sonia Sanchez is an underrated poet. Oh, there’re so many! Joy Harjo. [And] there’s a poet in Arizona, Richard Shelton, a remarkable poet. He has a wonderful line: “We will be known as the ones who murdered the earth.”
Do you read a lot of newspapers? I do. On Sunday, we get the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.
Did you grow up reading newspapers? Yes. My parents were great newspaper readers, my father particularly. And my father couldn’t write. My mother could write. Couldn’t spell! As her daughter can’t exactly, either. But they both had great interest in what was going on in the world. There were people who were curious about things, learners as well, I think.
Which magazines do you read? Well, I try to read as many as I can. Let’s see, what do I read? I don’t subscribe to them, but I read the New Yorker; I try to read Lingua Franca, I read all kinds of things like that. I also read People, I read Jet, I read Essence, I read Ebony. Mode is for big women. [Laughter.] I like to tell my students, “I’m very eclectic—deal with it!” I am eclectic. I love Bach. I also love the Four Tops. And now I’m into jazz. I like opera very much. I don’t know if I love it or not; I like it very much.
What else do you love? I like to laugh. I can tell you better what I can’t stand. I can’t stand injustice. I can’t stand seeing people being unfair to each other. I can’t stand cruelty, indifference. I don’t like that a lot. Oysters! [Laughter.]
Are you allergic? No, I just don’t like them. I don’t like condiments. I never eat condiments. I’ve never had mustard, but I know I hate it. I’ve never had ketchup; I know I hate that, too. One of the things about living alone, without my kids around, I don’t have to buy ketchup.
If you were going to have a dinner party for three people from history, famous people, who would you want to have? David of Israel [and] Crazy Horse of the Lakota Nation.
You can have one more person. It has to be a woman. Hmmm. Mary, the mother of Christ.
And what would you want to ask them? Well, they all are people with contradictions in their lives. They all were people who were faced with something larger than themselves and tried to meet it with grace, I think. And I would ask them how that felt, what were they feelingmaybe a little bit about what they were thinking, but what were they feeling? With Mary, is that really what happened? With David, who did you really love? Because he didn’t know how to love women, I don’t think. He wanted them, he lusted after them, but I don’t think he loved them. Crazy Horse—his life was a series of strangenesses, even for him, and he was a mystical guy. I’m always interested in people who are a bit mystical, and those three I think all were. I’d like to know: How was it for you? How was it for you?
In Langston Hughes’s essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” he writes, in response to a young poet who said he wanted to be a poet, not a “Negro poet,” “[T]his is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.” It seems to me that you acknowledged and climbed that mountain a long time ago, that your blackness is very much part of who you are in your poetry. Exactly, exactly. And what the young man was probably talking about was not what he was, but what people saw him as. And I’m seen as that quite often. There’s the poets and there’s the subgenre [of black poets] and Lucille is in there. Because people see it that way, that does not make it so. I’m not either American or black. I am an American poet, and that’s what American poetry is: me, Li-Young Lee, Joy Harjo, David Mura—you know what I mean? That is American poetry. I aspire to be the poet that Marianne Moore was, that Langston was, that Richard Wilbur is. I aspire to be as much a poet as Auden—whom I like, by the way, and Lowell, whom I like. I aspire to be all of that. I am not an American poet who happens to be black. I did not happen to be black. My mother was black, and my father was black. And so there I was: I was gonna be black! It didn’t just zap me. And that’s okay, that is all right, that is not a subgenre of anything. I am an American poet; this what American poetry is.
Hilary Holladay is director of the Fellowship Program at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities in Charlottesville. She is the author of Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton and co-editor of What’s Your Road, Man? Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Her current project is a biography of Beat Movement icon Herbert Huncke.
Despite the cancellation of its 2010 poetry festival, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation recently launched a channel on YouTube featuring twenty-nine videos of poets reading at past festivals. The biennial event, which is held in Waterloo Village, New Jersey, has hosted blockbuster poets such as Billy Collins, Robert Hass, Maxine Kumin, and Paul Muldoon. In an article in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, contributing editor Kevin Nance reports that, although nineteen thousand people attended the most recent event, in 2008, the foundation was forced to cancel next year’s festival due to economic setbacks.
In an open letter that explains the situation to festival supporters, Dodge Foundation president David Grant in January described an archive of over 2,500 hours of high-quality audio and video recordings that the foundation would try to make available to a wide audience. The foundation’s new YouTube channel is the first step toward realizing that goal. “The Festival experience itself cannot be duplicated, but we take heart
that it can and will be shared by students, teachers, poets, and poetry
lovers the world over,” Grant wrote.
The channel currently features videos of poets such as Chris Abani, Lucille Clifton, Mark Doty, Joy Harjo, and Anne Waldman. Below is a 2006 reading by Linda Gregg, who recently won the Jackson Poetry Prize, sponsored by Poets & Writers, Inc.
Although
the current recession is hammering all sectors of the literary economy,
including publishers of books and magazines, booksellers, and service
organizations—not to mention writers themselves—one of the community’s
smallest but most important components is proving particularly vulnerable. Many
writers conferences, workshops, and festivals are under severe stress this
year, with several having postponed or canceled their 2009 events due to
lower-than-expected registration, shrinking stock portfolios, dwindling support
from private donors and foundations, and other financial problems.
The list of affected events is lengthy and includes both
established and relatively new names, as well as those sponsored by nonprofit
and privately operated organizations. The thirty-six-year-old Santa Barbara
Writers Conference has announced a “hiatus” in 2009, for example, as has the
Lambda Literary Foundation’s two-year-old writers retreat in Los Angeles.
“When you’re talking about
businesses that depend on discretionary income, those are the first to be hit
hard in a bad economy,” says Marcia Meier, executive director of the conference
in Santa Barbara, which usually takes place over a week in June. “Writers are
notoriously broke—we don’t make a lot of money—and we just aren’t sure it’s
wise to spend whatever we do have at the moment. People are hunkered down.
We’re hopeful, with the new president, but in the meantime people are thinking,
‘Wow, I’m holding on to my pennies right now.'”
Charles Flowers, Lambda’s executive director, has decided to
wait until his organization’s fledgling retreat can offer writers as much as it
possibly can before it resumes. “At least half of the students at the first two
retreats received some form of scholarship money, and we just weren’t sure we
could raise those funds this year. We decided to defer the retreat for a year
and come back in 2010, when hopefully there’s a better economy.”
In the meantime, even some
of the best-known literary events are on the brink or beyond. In February the
International Poetry Forum, which sponsored poetry readings and performances in
Pittsburgh as well as in northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., announced that
it would shut down after its stock portfolio dropped by 25 percent. And a month
earlier, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, which has seen its own net assets
drop by one-third, announced the cancellation of its biennial poetry festival
in Waterloo Village, New Jersey. Over the years, the festival has hosted some
of the biggest names in poetry; nineteen thousand people attended its most
recent edition, in 2008. (In early March, the New Jersey township of Montclair
offered to host the festival; to the Newark Star-Ledger, Dodge Foundation president David Grant expressed “cautious optimism”
that the festival will be back “in some form in 2010.”)
Other events that have
been recently canceled or postponed include the Lake Tahoe Writers Conference
at Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village, Nevada; the Heartland Writers
Guild’s annual conference in Kennett, Missouri; a novels-in-progress workshop
sponsored by Green River Writers in Louisville, Kentucky; the Marjorie Kinnan
Rawlings Writers Workshop in Gainesville, Florida; WordHarvest’s Tony Hillerman
Writers Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Catskill Poetry Workshop in
Oneonta, New York; and Canada’s Halifax International Writers Festival.
While many of these
struggling conferences and festivals were supposed to have been held later this
spring and summer, signs of the economic slowdown in large-scale literary
events were evident as early as last year. The Kenyon Review canceled its biennial literary-studies trip to
Italy because of a decrease in sign-ups; the Gwendolyn Brooks Writers’
Conference at Chicago State University was postponed due to “funding concerns”
(the conference was rescheduled for last month); and the Florida First Coast
Writers’ Festival was canceled because of “funding issues.”
But not everyone is having
problems. Some of the nation’s most prestigious writers conferences are doing
just fine, thanks in part to their reputations, star-studded faculty, guest
literary agents, and substantial support from their hosting academic
institutions. “So far, so good,” says Michael Collier, director of the
venerable Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont.
Applications for the next event, which is being held in August, are holding
steady. And although the college has experienced some budget trimming in recent
months, partly because of an endowment buffeted by the market, Collier says the
downturn hasn’t affected the core of the program. “Middlebury is committed to
keeping its level of funding for the conference at what it has been,” he says.
At the Sewanee Writers
Conference at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, student
applications for fiction-writing spots at this summer’s event (July 14
to July 26) are running even with 2008 levels, while applications in poetry
have doubled and playwriting applications have tripled. “I’m sure the economy
has had some effect, but we haven’t seen it yet,” conference director Wyatt
Prunty says. “The key to our success has been the quality of our faculty, which
continues to be very strong.”
Sewanee also benefits from
its status as a beneficiary of the Walter E. Dakin Memorial Fund, which was
established by the estate of Tennessee Williams. Proceeds from the fund, which
is regularly replenished by income from productions of Williams’s plays, defray
about 30 percent of the cost of the event. It helps, too, that the conference
uses university facilities, which include relatively inexpensive housing for
students and faculty. Prunty also cites an increased interest from visitors to
Sewaneewriters.org, which has become a key marketing tool. “That’s opened up
things for us,” he says. “We used to get letters through the mail; now our Web
site gets a hundred thousand hits and fifty thousand visitors a year, so we get
a lot of e-mails.”
Increasingly, smaller conferences
and festivals are using the Internet to stay alive. “I want to really look at
how we can serve writers in the twenty-first century by continuing some of our
workshops online,” says Meier of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. “Writing,
self-marketing, self-publishing workshops—all these things could continue on
the Web, for a fee, and students could stay in contact with their faculty
leaders after the conference is over. That’s also a great way to keep them
connected to us.”
And if writers
conferences and their organizers are feeling a bit daunted at the moment, many
are also defiant. “I’m not giving up,” says Karen Newcomb, executive director
of the Lake Tahoe event. “We know people want these things. They want to be
exposed to writers who know what they’re talking about, instructors who know
how to teach, agents who can help them get their manuscripts published. So we
will definitely try it again. Not sure when, but we will try it again.”
Kevin Nance is a
contributing editor of Poets
& Writers Magazine.
As the crisis on Wall
Street trickles down to Main Street, businesses of all kinds are responding to
the gloomy economic climate with a variety of belt-tightening measures.
Independent literary publishers are among the smaller, more vulnerable
operations that are reacting to real and projected downturns in orders, sales,
and, in the case of nonprofit houses, philanthropic giving.
Some publishers are in flat-out retrenchment mode. Atlas
& Co., the nonfiction publisher founded by James Atlas six years ago,
recently postponed its spring 2009 list (which included a biography of George
Eliot by Brenda Maddox) due to money problems, while a cash crunch at the San
Francisco-based MacAdam/Cage led to staff layoffs; casualties included
editors Khristina Wenzinger and Dave Adams, and marketing director Melanie
Mitchell. Several other publishers have reported less drastic measures, but
almost all express rising anxiety about the economic outlook and its potential
effect on their ability to acquire, print, and market new books.
“Like everybody else, we’re
struggling because of the bad economy,” says Johnny Temple, publisher of
Akashic Books in Brooklyn, New York, whose fall list included The Sacrificial
Circumcision of the Bronx, the
second novel inArthur Nersesian’s Five
Books of Moses series. “We’re very worried about the future. Book sales are
down, not just for us but across the board. And we’re bracing ourselves for the
economy to get worse. Anybody who tells you they’re not worried is lying.”
Temple goes on to say that
he doesn’t know exactly how badly sales are lagging compared with last year,
but his “educated guess” is that this year will see a 20 percent drop. So far,
he notes, no titles have been canceled and no staff members have been laid off,
but two editors who recently left the company voluntarily will probably not be
replaced, and the remaining staff’s hours are being cut. Temple also
anticipates that less money will be available for promotion of new titles.
At Graywolf Press, in
Minneapolis, marketing director Rolph Blythe takes a more measured but still
sober tone. “We did experience, as did a lot of publishers, some last-minute
changes in the fall orders,” he admits, “but I’d say we’re in a good position
in that we’ve had a couple of recent successes that make us feel confident
going into 2009.” Blythe, no doubt, is referring to the October announcements
that Refresh,
Refresh author Benjamin Percy had
won a fifty-thousand-dollar Whiting Award and Salvatore Scibona was a finalist
for a National Book Award for his debut novel The End. “But in terms of our budgeting,” he goes on,
“we’re definitely playing it safe. We’re watching every dollar in terms of
marketing and advances.”
In addition to the slowdown
in sales, nonprofit publishers are facing potential decreases in the donations
that often make up the majority of their revenue. “It’s a double whammy,” says
Nora A. Jones, executive director and publisher of BOA Editions, in Rochester, New York, who depends on gifts from individuals
and foundations, government grants, and fund-raising activities for about 60
percent of the press’s budget. “That 60 percent is in grave jeopardy as we move
forward, because individual donors are much less generous in an economy where
they’re uncertain of their own finances. Government grants are being cut back
because the government is up to its eyeballs in debt. And it’s that much more
challenging to get people to a fund-raising event, because they’re cutting corners.
Where you once could ask $125 a plate for a dinner, now people will hesitate
and not come at all. So you do it for $90 a plate and end up not making very
much, after expenses. It’s a huge challenge,” Jones concludes.
Most unnerving of all,
perhaps, is that the full effect of last autumn’s economic downturn may not be
felt until early this year, when unsold books from the fall lists are returned.
Although books are traditionally a popular gift item during the holiday season,
many presses anticipated that families would be spending less as household
budgets tightened. (“Never in all of the years I’ve been in business have I
seen a worse outlook for the economy,” Barnes & Noble chairman Leonard
Riggio wrote in an e-mail to employees in late October. “And never in all my
years as a bookseller have I seen a retail climate as poor as the one we are
in. Nothing even close.”)
Despite the doom and gloom, small independent publishers do
enjoy certain advantages in an economic downturn compared with their larger
commercial and corporate counterparts. For one thing, independent publishers
tend to be thriftier than the big New York houses, which are known for their
relatively high overhead and their penchant for awarding huge advances for
manuscripts that fail to become best-sellers. “Smaller publishers are in a
better position, period, in good or bad times,” says Joseph Bednarik, marketing
and sales director of Copper Canyon Press, a poetry publisher based in Port
Townsend, Washington, whose spring list includes titles by James Galvin, Jim
Harrison, Gregory Orr, and Alberto Ríos. “We live on such small margins already—we
know how to use the second side of a piece of paper. We’re not Wall Street;
we’re not leveraged in those ways, and we don’t play those games.”
On the other hand,
Bednarik concedes, operating on relatively small margins leaves little room for
error; a shoestring budget can quickly turn into a noose: “We can get hammered
pretty hard by returns, for example. I’ve seen a number of small presses go under,
and it’s usually because of some cash-flow issue. Our world is kind of littered
with those bodies.”
Still, publishers like Copper Canyon may benefit from another
intangible: quality. “We need that, especially now, in hard times,” Bednarik
says. “People who look to poetry for strength and solace will continue to do so
in these times.”
Kevin Nance is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In addition to the slowdown in sales, nonprofit publishers are facing potential decreases in the donations that often make up the majority of their revenue.
The House of Representatives approved on Wednesday fifty million dollars in supplemental grants funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as part of the $819 billion economic stimulus bill put forward by president Barack Obama. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Bill, which would allow the funds to be distributed by the NEA as grants to artists and arts organizations, has yet to gain Senate approval.
The legislation has been criticized by Republican lawmakers, none of whom voted to approve the bill, as lacking detail, which some fear might lead to extraneous expenditures. “We don’t know what they’re going to spend it on,” said Neil Bradley, a spokesperson for House Republican Whip Eric Cantor, the St. Petersburg Times reported on the PolitiFact Web site. “There is no direction to the NEA on how to spend it.”
The NEA issued a press release on Thursday stating that the organization has in place procedures to distribute funds efficiently and quickly to artists, which make up 1.4 percent of the work force, and nonprofit arts organizations, which support 5.7 million jobs.
“Arts organizations have been hit enormously hard by the current recession,” said former NEA chairman Dana Gioia in a press release. “They’ve seen their support drop from corporations, foundations, and municipalities. This infusion of funds will help sustain them, their staffs, and the artists they employ.”
“Artists need jobs just like everyone else,” said Kristin Brost, spokesperson for the chairman of the house appropriations committee, Wisconsin Democrat David Obey, the St. Petersburg Times reported. “Fifty million out of $825 billion doesn’t seem like an extreme amount to support our artists.”
The Senate will begin debate on the bill on Monday.
In other NEA news, President Obama has appointed Patrice Powell acting chairwoman of the organization. She will succeed Dana Gioia, who announced his intention to step down last September. Powell, who has served the NEA since 1991, most recently as deputy chairwoman for states, regions and, local arts agencies, will remain in the post until the president appoints a permanent chairperson.
Jon Peede, the former counselor to the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), was recently appointed director of grants programs, a newly created position in the organization’s literature department. While continuing to direct the NEA’s Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, a national initiative to encourage U.S. military personnel and their families to share their experiences through writing, Peede will also oversee the grants process for individual fellowships as well as awards to literary presses, publications, and organizations.
“One cannot overestimate the importance of discerning and supporting artistic excellence, especially during the formative years for writers and organizations,” Peede says. “I am honored to work with Chairman [Dana] Gioia and our talented literature staff to build upon this rich legacy.” Prior to his tenure at the NEA, Peede served as publisher of Parrish House Books, an editor at Mercer University Press, founding editor of Millsaps Magazine, and director of the Georgia Poetry Circuit.
The new position is part of an overall expansion of the NEA’s literature department. David Kipen, the director of literature since 2005, also recently assumed a new role: director of national reading initiatives. While Peede will guide funding to artists, Kipen will manage nationwide programs, including the Big Read, which has become the NEA’s largest literary initiative. Four new staff members have been added to the Big Read, and two to the Poetry Out Loud program, a national poetry recitation contest for high school students.
Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for the past six years, has announced that he will step down from his post in January to return to writing, the New York Times reported. The poet and politician was appointed chairman in 2003 by president George W. Bush. The next U.S. president will determine Gioia’s successor.
Gioia joined the NEA at a time when the organization was, in his words, “a wounded institution,” suffering budget cuts and the elimination of staff in the wake of disagreements over the funding of fringe artists. While Gioia has been criticized for not advocating enough for artists whose nontraditional work stoked controversy, he has helped cultivate programs such as Shakespeare in American Communities and Operation
Homecoming, which sends writers to work with veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan on telling their stories. He also oversaw the development of The Big Read and Reading at Risk, the NEA’s study on literacy.
“I think the difficulty any chairman has in the NEA is to listen to
and assimilate the needs of vastly different
constituencies—politicians, artists, organizers, teachers, students,
average citizens,
urban communities, and rural communities,” Gioia told the Times an interview at his office, adding that he hopes his successor will find the entryway to the post a little less rocky than he did. “We now have bipartisan consensus in the U.S. Congress, so I think that
the real challenge will be to see how quickly and how capably we can
grow the services of the NEA.”
Gioia plans to live in Washington, D.C., where he will spend part of his time directing an arts program for the Aspen Institute, a leadership development organization, and travel to California regularly to focus on writing.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced in September the creation of International Literary Exchanges, a program intended to “expand cultural exchanges between the United States and other countries.” The initiative includes funding for the publication of dual-language anthologies and their distribution in the United States and countries such as Greece, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia, and Spain. Funding is also available for poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers whose work has been translated to participate in readings and lecture tours.
The new program is part of the U.S. Department of State’s Global Cultural Initiative, which hopes to “emphasize the importance of the arts as a platform for international engagement and dialogue” through partnerships with public and private institutions. The NEA currently provides individual fellowships for translation as well as grants to nonprofit presses to publish works translated into English. Since 1981, it has awarded fellowships resulting in the translation of more than two hundred foreign works from forty-six languages and sixty countries.
For more information about International Literary Exchanges, visit the NEA’s Web site.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) unveiled yesterday a pilot initiative to celebrate national historic sites related to poetry. As part of the NEA’s Big Read, the new program will give Extraordinary Action grants to encourage communities to commemorate American poets in the regions in which they lived. As its first gift, the NEA will present Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, with $15,000 to fund a multi-generational reading program focused on the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
In addition to the grant, the NEA will provide the Wayside Inn with reader’s and teacher’s guides and promotional materials, which will also be distributed to the Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Wadsworth-Longfellow House in Portland, Maine.
The Wayside Inn will commence its celebration of Longfellow on the poet’s 201st birthday, February 27, 2008. Events, including a lecture series, community reading groups, and the building of an online Longfellow library, will continue through Patriot’s Day on April 19, 2008. Patriot’s Day celebrates Paul Revere’s historic ride, of which Longfellow wrote in the poem “The Landlord’s Tale,” from his collection Tales of a Wayside Inn.
The NEA plans to announce further grants to poetry sites later this fall, and expects a competitive grant program to follow the pilot phase.
In response to its 2004 report “Reading at Risk,” which found that significantly fewer people read serious literature now than in years past, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) recently launched an ambitious program designed to reverse the trend. The Big Read, a joint project of the NEA and the Minneapolis-based nonprofit organization Arts Midwest, follows the template of the One Book program, developed in 1998 by the Washington Center for the Book in Seattle, in which teens and adults in one city are encouraged to read a specific book.
As part of the pilot phase of the Big Read, which began in February, arts organizations, literary centers, and libraries in ten U.S. cities have each chosen a single book from four selected by the NEA and Arts Midwest: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. The local organizations, working with the NEA and Arts Midwest, have received grants ranging from fifteen thousand dollars to forty thousand dollars to carry out project-related activities, which include promotional campaigns on television and radio, and public literary events featuring local celebrities.
The ten cities participating in the pilot phase of the program were selected from a total of forty-five that applied. They are Little Rock, Arkansas (represented by the Arkansas Center for the Book); Enterprise, Oregon (Fishtrap, Inc.); Miami, Florida (Florida Center for the Literary Arts/Florida Center for the Book); Fresno, California (Fresno County Library); Huntsville, Alabama (Huntsville-Madison County Public Library); Buffalo (Just Buffalo Literary Center); Minneapolis (The Loft Literary Center); Boise, Idaho (Log Cabin Literary Center, Inc.); Brookings and Sioux Falls, South Dakota (South Dakota Center for the Book); and Topeka, Kansas (Topeka-Shawnee County Public Library).
“These ten cities and towns have been really brave in signing on for our maiden voyage,” says David Kipen, the former San Francisco Chronicle book editor and critic who was named the NEA’s literature director last August. “Mistakes are going to be made; we’re going to learn things. So I think it’s really gutsy of them.” Kipen says the NEA plans to evaluate the program’s success after the pilot phase of the Big Read is complete, in May. The goal is to expand the program to a hundred cities by 2007. The list of books from which the cities can choose is also likely to grow.
The NEA’s “Reading at Risk” report, released in July 2004, revealed that the number of readers of literature—novels, short stories, poetry, and plays—was “in dramatic decline with fewer than half of American adults now reading literature.” From 1982 to 2002, the study found, the number of literary readers in the United States dropped by ten percentage points, and the decline in the percentage of Americans who read literature appears to be quickening. “This report documents a national crisis,” NEA Chairman Dana Gioia said at the time. “The decline in reading among every segment of the adult population reflects a general collapse in advanced literacy.”
Despite this decline, dozens of cities across the country, as well as others in the U.K., Australia, and Canada, have adopted One Book programs in the last six years. The initiatives have been successful in some places, but, for a variety of reasons, less so in others. Kipen says Chicago and Seattle are two cities that embraced their One Book programs, but that the idea did not catch on as well in Los Angeles. “What happens in too many cases,” he says, “is that you have cities concerned with picking up the trash on time undertaking an ambitious reading initiative, and unfortunately it doesn’t command the full attention of local officials. How could it? And, alas, it fails to live up to its organizers’ hopes.”
How, then, does the NEA plan to ensure that the Big Read reaches potential readers? The key component, according to Kipen, is the NEA’s partnerships with local arts organizations. “It’s all very well to ignore a [program] when it’s only coming at you from one direction. But when it’s got its tentacles around you—not just from the city fathers but from some combination of the local library, the local arts center, the schools, the chamber of commerce, the newspapers, the public radio station, the public TV station, the commercial TV stations, and heaven knows who else—it’s an octopus that becomes much harder to avoid,” he says. “Partnerships don’t take a huge outlay of money, either, just a bunch of citizens as scared as we are of turning into a nation without readers. When that’s the alternative, you’d be surprised how willing folks are to put in a little overtime, whether in my office or around the country.”
Though the NEA won’t know precisely what impact the Big Read might have until the next U.S. Census, in 2010, Kipen plans to travel to as many of the participating cities as possible to gather anecdotal results. “I want to see firsthand what works, what doesn’t,” he says. “I want to see the expression on somebody’s face as he’s realizing that good books aren’t medicine—they’re food.”
For the past few months, literary writers, editors, and critics have been using some strong adjectives while discussing To Read or Not to Read, a report released last November by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). “Scary,” “sad,” and “downright depressing” have been common responses—and for good reason. Reading in America is in serious decline, according to the NEA, especially among the young. Fewer than one-third of thirteen-year-olds read for pleasure every day—a 14 percent decline from two decades ago—while the percentage of seventeen-year-old non-readers doubled over the same period. Americans between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four watch television about two hours a day, the study reveals, but read for only seven minutes.
These and other findings in the report—which confirmed and expanded upon those previously published in Reading at Risk, the 2004 NEA survey indicating that Americans were reading fewer books of fiction, poetry, and plays—have obvious implications for writers, both in terms of the audience and market for their work and, more generally, for literature’s lasting impact on American culture.
Whereas Reading at Risk focused mainly on literary reading trends, culling information from a survey of more than seventeen thousand people aged eighteen and older about their consumption of novels, short stories, poetry, and plays, To Read or Not to Read gathers statistics from more than forty national studies on the overall reading habits of children, teenagers, and adults, and includes all varieties of reading, including books, magazines, newspapers, and online reading.
Both studies, however, come to the same grim diagnosis: There is a general decline in reading among teenage and adult Americans.
“The odd thing is that there’s no lack of writers,” says Donna Seaman, associate editor of Booklist, the review journal of the American Library Association. “I see hundreds of books every week—beautifully crafted, deeply felt works of fiction and poetry—and yet people are reading less. Everyone wants to write, no one wants to read; the disconnection is startling. That’s a real puzzle and a real challenge for creative writers in particular. I think we’re in danger of becoming a lost art, a lost world, if we’re not awakening the love of reading in young people.”
Novelist Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife
(MacAdam/Cage, 2003), agrees: “When you hear things like this, your
stomach kind of falls and you think, ‘We’re headed for perdition.’”
“It makes me very concerned that serious reading is becoming such a
specialized endeavor that it’s completely separate from the culture,”
says Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry magazine, whose book of
essays, Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, was published by
Copper Canyon Press last year. But Wiman realizes that no matter how
overwhelming the problem may seem, quiet resignation is not an
appropriate response. “I don’t think it’s always been that way,” he
continues, “and I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that it has to
be that way. I’ve heard people say, ‘You can’t resist the current, you
can’t resist the times.’ But you do have to resist the currents of the
times when they’re negative. These declines in reading are real, and
something has to be done.”
But what? Teachers shoulder much of the burden of improving reading
skills among students, but the new NEA report suggests that parents can
play an important role by reading to their children and modeling the
habit. Other strategies might arise as we begin to understand another
reason why young people are reading less—one that is more complicated
than the notion that they’re simply watching too much TV or spending
too much time surfing the Internet. According to Timothy Shanahan, a
professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and past president of
the International Reading Association, many young people don’t read
because, they say, it’s lonely.
“What kids like about [instant messaging] and text messaging is that
it’s playful and interactive and connects them to their friends,”
Shanahan says. “The Harry Potter books were popular not mainly because
of this wonderful story and the language, I don’t think, but because it
was this huge phenomenon that allowed young people to participate in
it. What was exciting was reading what your friends were reading and
talking to them about it. People of all ages are hungry for that kind
of community.”
The NEA seems to agree, pointing to the Big Read, its national program
in which communities around the country are reading American novels
such as Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck
Club. Similarly, a year after Reading at Risk was released the Poetry
Foundation partnered with the NEA to organize Poetry Out Loud, a
program in which students memorize and recite poems as a way to forge
connections to poetry. And book clubs, from the Oprah Winfrey
juggernaut to small neighborhood gatherings, continue to gain momentum.
But some say another fundamental factor in the decline of reading must
also be addressed: contemporary writers themselves, who have a
critical role to play if current trends are to be reversed. “I do think
for a long time writers turned completely away from the audience,”
Wiman says. “You can’t simply go back to the past, of course, but I do
think writers have to be aware of an audience.” Niffenegger points
specifically to modernism as a wedge between writers and readers.
“There was a shift away from narrative, where writers gave you less and
less and made you work harder and harder. People got the idea that
everything was going to be like Finnegans Wake, and everybody just
said, ‘Okay, we’re going to the movies.’”
Still, not everyone foretells the apocalypse. Tree Swenson, the
executive director of the Academy of American Poets, insists that all
signs point to an increased interest in poetry in America, particularly
online. “The Internet is a well-matched medium for poetry, in part
because the unit of consumption isn’t the book of poetry—it’s a single
poem, short and compact,” she says. “The Web and e-mail have also
facilitated people sending poems to one another. Yes, the larger trends
are disheartening, but if I can come back to poetry, I can find my
thread of optimism.”
To Read or Not to Read has the potential to inspire positive change.
“On the surface, the study would seem to be bad news for aspiring
writers, because you have the impression that the audience base is
depleting,” says Sunil Iyengar, the NEA’s director of research and
analysis. “On the other hand, there’s a tremendous opportunity for
meaningful interactions that can arise from the data. Booksellers,
publishers, teachers, librarians, businesses all have a common interest
in increasing reading because it exalts their mission. But it also
presents an opportunity for writers. By writing well, you’re filling
not only a market need; you’re raising the whole level of cultural
discourse in this country, because right now the bar is relatively low.
Writers could be taken more seriously than ever if people heed the
results of the report.”
To read the full report, visit the NEA’s Web site at www.nea.gov.
Kevin Nance is the critic-at-large at the Chicago Sun-Times.
In “The Grim Reader” (Poets & Writers Magazine, page 10), Kevin Nance discusses a recent report from the National Endowment for the Arts documenting the decline of reading in America. The article contains a quote from Donna Seaman, associate editor of Booklist, who shrewdly observes that while interest in reading is diminishing, interest in writing seems to be on the rise. According to Seaman, “Everyone wants to write, no one wants to read.” How can this apparent contradiction be explained? If the traditional view of the writer is one who loves literature, has been inspired by literature to take up the craft of writing, then why do we have a burgeoning population of writers that seems to have little interest in reading?
Later in “The Grim Reader,” Tree Swenson, executive director of the Academy of American Poets, argues that while reading, overall, may be declining in popularity, interest in reading poetry is surviving, even growing. In the words of Swenson, “Yes, the larger trends are disheartening, but [regarding] poetry, I can find my thread of optimism.” Do you agree that poetry may be one genre for which the audience is expanding? If so, how would you explain this surge?
Dan Barden, author of “Workshop: A Rant Against Creative Writing Classes” (page 83), takes up the much-argued question of whether or not creative writing can really be taught. His response? There is “no way to teach creative writing,” at least not through the current methodology of writing workshops. Do you agree with Barden that workshops “don’t work,” and that there is “something rotten at the core of most of them”? In your view, what are the potential benefits and pitfalls of writing workshops, and what examples can you offer in terms of good and bad experiences in the workshop environment?
If one considers both Barden’s essay and Nance’s piece together—the “Rant” against workshops and the report on declining reading—is there some connection to be made, some conclusion to be drawn, about how we educate young writers? How do the strategies and practices of the writing-workshop approach impact not only the students’ writing but also their reading? Should we, and could we, change the way we teach writing in order to foster more interest in reading?
In the “Q & A” with Quang Bao (page 19), Jean Hartig describes Bao’s contributions to the Asian American Writers’ Workshop as well as his commitment to Asian American literature. In the “Writers Retreat” section (page 64), Kathryn Trueblood reports on “western” festivals and retreats that are particularly supportive to western-based writers. Additionally, Kevin Larimer mentions in “Small Press Points” (page 16) that A Midsummer’s Night Press is devoting two books in coming months for anthologizing, specifically, gay and lesbian writing. What are the potential advantages for writers in belonging to, or connecting with, groups such as these?—groups dedicated to supporting writers of particular backgrounds or interests? Are there, conversely, any potential disadvantages? What has been your experience in connecting with like-writers in various writing communities?
In “The Rilke Trail” (page 21), Paul Graham writes of his admiration for Rainer Maria Rilke and chronicles his journey to a place where Rilke once lived and worked. Imagine planning a pilgrimage to see the birthplace or writing locale of one of your favorite authors. Which writer would you choose? Where would you go? And what would you hope to see and experience once there?
In “DailyLit Sends E-mail Worth Reading” (page 15), Kevin Canfield reports on the new Web site DailyLit, created by Susan Danziger and Albert Wenger, which offers readers “free delivery of over four hundred books” from the public domain as well as newer works for a small fee—all through serialized e-mail installments. The article also mentions other Web-based and digitally-based publication mechanisms. As the distribution and publication of contemporary writing changes, how do you think the writing itself may change? Will writers alter and adjust their work to fit a particular distribution? Will they write one way or one thing for traditional print publishing, but another way, another thing, for digital release?
Mark Doty writes in “Bride in Beige: A Poet’s Approach to Memoir” (page 33) that a poet’s memoir is essentially “after truth” but does not depend on an exact reporting of facts and details. Do you think that when writers are crafting a memoir, they are obligated to be as accurate as possible in their work? In your own nonfiction writing, have you ever chosen to alter or blur a few facts? If so, what was your reason for doing so?
In “Spring Essence” (page 47), new works from several established writers are featured. Some of these works are grounded in imagery from the natural world: “This” by Jorie Graham, “Small Bodies” by Mary Oliver, and “The Bather” by Charles Simic. What do these three poems share in terms of imagery and theme? And how do they differ in their use, their extrapolation, of the natural world?
Fiction writer Tobias Wolff is interviewed by Joe Woodward in “The Gun on the Table” (page 38). Woodward describes Wolff as writing with “the exacting precision of a bombmaker” and of “detonating his characters’ lives in the time it takes to read a paragraph.” Consider those comments while reading the excerpt from “That Room” (page 41), one of Wolff’s new stories. What aspects of “That Room” echo with the threat of “detonation” Woodward describes?
A little less than two weeks into this year’s National Poetry Month, the Poetry Foundation released Poetry in America, a report that analyzes American attitudes toward poetry. Conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and commissioned by the Poetry Foundation, the study is based on 1,023 interviews conducted over a four-month period beginning in June 2005—a random sample of American adults who read newspapers, magazines, and books for pleasure, and who read primarily in English. The most dramatic finding, according to a press release sent by the Poetry Foundation, was that “the vast majority (90 percent) of American readers highly value poetry.” As news of this finding spread among writers and on blogs, the phrasing was sometimes shortened to “90 percent of Americans” rather than “American readers”—and suddenly, poetry seemed as popular as baseball and apple pie.
“Taken as a whole, the results of the study confirm the need to reinvigorate poetry as an art form and to expand its presence in American culture,” says Poetry Foundation president John Barr. The Poetry Foundation, formerly the Modern Poetry Association, which received a $175 million bequest in 2002, appears to be in a position to do just that.
Poet Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), puts the foundation’s report in perspective: “[This] is not a study of the total U.S. population,” he says. “It’s easy to misrepresent the numbers.. Essentially, only 12 percent of the U.S. population reads poetry.” That number comes from the NEA’s 2004 report Reading at Risk, a study based on twenty years of data collection, which showed that only about 47 percent of Americans read any sort of literary work at all.
The two studies differ in several ways. For Reading at Risk, the NEA polled more than seventeen thousand people from the general adult population about their consumption of novels, short stories, plays, and poetry. The pool surveyed by the Poetry Foundation was made up solely of adults who read for pleasure. In addition, respondents in the foundation’s study were given a definition of poetry, whereas those polled by the NEA were not. The Poetry Foundation’s respondents were told a poem “uses rhythm and language in verses to create images in the mind of the reader”; that it might rhyme or it might not; and that greeting card poems, song lyrics, and Bible verses don’t count. Depending on their responses, those interviewed were then classified into two groups: “users” and “nonusers” of poetry. Users were then further classified as “current” or “former.”
According to the results of Poetry in America, more than half of current and former poetry users remember the title of a poem. Users are more active and social than nonusers, and they read more contemporary poetry than classics. Sixty-four percent of all respondents felt that, in general, people should read more poetry. The findings also indicate that positive experiences with poetry in school are integral to keeping people engaged with poetry in later life.
Along with launching a revamped Web site in January, the foundation has been working with the NEA to organize Poetry Out Loud, a program in which high school students take part in poetry recitation competitions. Tens of thousands of students have participated in the program to date—a sign of what Gioia calls “an enormous populist revival” of poetry through the spoken word.
Many poets aren’t all that surprised by the Poetry Foundation’s news that there is a relative enthusiasm for poetry on the page. “Maybe the more interesting question is, What are they reading, and what are they valuing it for?” says poet Daisy Fried, a 2006 Guggenheim fellow. In fact, the survey did ask respondents about specific works. Both current and former poetry users were asked to name their favorite poems, and while there are some classics at the top of the list—Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” is number one, and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” number four—number two is Mary Stevenson’s “Footprints,” an inspirational work, and number eleven, Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” Also in the mix are titles such as “Humpty Dumpty” and “The Grinch That Stole Christmas [sic].”
The wide range of works mentioned by respondents in Poetry in America has sparked some debate in the literary community about real or perceived divisions between serious poetry and casual or lightweight verse. “I suspect the casual reader isn’t necessarily interested in the things in poetry that poets are interested in,” says Fried. In fact, some poets even take comfort in that divide. “This is one of the things that make this little unspoken-word poetry world so compelling to those of us who are stuck inside it: It is truly arcane.. It’s a secret-magic-invisible world,” says Rebecca Wolff, a poet and the publisher of Fence magazine and Fence Books.
Others endorse the populist approach promoted by the Poetry Foundation, whose mission is to place the best poetry before the largest possible audience. “I think the depth of engagement with poetry is launched from a very broad swath of the [public’s] being interested in it, and that means having a huge layer of people interested in somewhat lightweight verse,” says Tree Swenson, executive director of the Academy of American Poets. In other words, the larger the number of poetry users—even if those users consider Dr. Seuss a poetic master—the greater the number of people who might one day wander into the poetry section at Barnes & Noble, pick up a book by Emily Dickinson or Frank O’Hara or Wallace Stevens, and be mesmerized by what they read.
And that, most everyone can agree, would be something to celebrate.
Sarah Davis is a poet and fiction writer who lives in Brooklyn.
The findings indicate that positive experiences with poetry in school are integral to keeping people engaged with poetry in later life.
As marketing director of Copper Canyon Press, the thirty-four-year-old independent publisher of poetry in Port Townsend, Washington, I am required to read a lot. While most of the titles on my reading list are poetry collections, I recently read two nonfiction texts that got me thinking about the “economics” of creative writing.
So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance (Paul Dry Books, 2003), by Mexican poet and business consultant Gabriel Zaid, and Reading at Risk, the sobering report published by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 2004, articulate the challenges faced by the swelling legions of creative writers longing to find a readership. Consider the following statements extrapolated from Zaid’s book and the NEA report:
1. Production of creative writing far exceeds consumer demand.
2. Accredited MFA programs in creative writing continue to proliferate, while the practice of literary reading is in steady decline.
3. Many publishers require underwriting to produce and distribute literary titles because sales do not support production costs.
4. Publishers can, with relative ease, attract a thousand manuscript submissions—plus reading fees—by sponsoring book contests.
What’s wrong with this picture? If you’re running an MFA program, a book contest, or a writer’s workshop, or selling other goods and services that support the writer’s life—absolutely nothing. If you want your book published and read by an audience other than friends and family—everything.
In a statistical mood, I once estimated how many “good poems” were being produced by recent graduates of MFA programs. Keeping all estimates conservative, I figured there had to be at least 450 poets graduating nationwide each year. If each MFA graduate wrote just one good poem a year for ten years, at the end of a decade we would have 24,750 good poems—not to mention 4,500 degree-bearing poets, each of whom was required to write a book-length manuscript in order to graduate. New poems, poets, and manuscripts are added to the inventory every year.
Admittedly, 24,750 and 4,500 are probably low numbers. After all, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs claims four hundred member colleges and universities, and most of them graduate at least one or two poets each year. The nonprofit poetry library Poets House, during its annual showcase last April, displayed over 2,100 poetry books that had been published in the previous year alone. But I use these estimates in an attempt to add perspective to the expectations not only of poets but also of writers of literary prose.
The creative writers in this country—those who have earned an MFA and those who haven’t—produce untold millions of poems, stories, novels, and essays. But for whom are they writing? Where is the readership to support this prodigious output? Certainly, bookstores and libraries prove that there are still readers out there. Yet Reading at Risk sounds the alarm that the practice of literary reading in America is in serious decline.
How can it be that MFA programs in creative writing flourish in a country where literary reading does not? I recall the writer who told me, without irony, that he doesn’t read because he doesn’t want to be influenced. And the eight-year-old who, after I suggested we read some poems together, replied, “I like writing poems better than reading them.”
MFA programs have clearly demonstrated that they can attract writers to teach and students to pay tuition. Many agree that the education is fabulous, with support and attention lavished on the individual’s creative process, and, with hard work, the completion of a degree-worthy manuscript come graduation. Life is good until the new graduate wants to see that manuscript become a published book, and the reality of a tiny readership becomes real-world frustration. And where does she turn? Often, she enters a book contest.
Along with MFA programs, book contests that charge entry fees are on the rise. And it makes sense: The publication of debut poetry books is viable if the risk is offset by monies provided by hundreds of writers willing to pay for someone to read and consider their book for publication. If a more active, supportive readership existed, however, there would be far fewer contests. Publishers would be more financially motivated to publish and promote the work without them. Administering contests is not what most publishers long to be doing.
In the fifteen years I’ve worked in literary publishing, over ten thousand manuscripts—checks attached—were submitted to contests sponsored by the publishers I worked for. From those manuscripts, fifteen emerged as published books—good books all, with each receiving review attention from local and national media, and several going on to earn accolades. In each instance, the net sales ranged from four hundred to twenty-five hundred copies. Calculating production costs, distribution fees, and so on, selling twenty-five hundred copies of a fifteen-dollar paperback might allow the publisher to break even; selling five thousand copies would yield a modest profit, but that sales mark is seldom reached.
One solution is simple enough: If you write, read. A lot. If you want a book published and sold in the marketplace, then buy and read and recommend enough books to nourish the system you want to enter. Advocate on behalf of literature. And, most quixotic of all, every MFA program should require all potential graduates to convert at least one eight-year-old into a passionate reader.
Otherwise, we’re faced with a bloated “writership” vying for the attention of an anemic readership. Of course, the readers left could start charging for their time. Envision the classified: “Reading group ready to devour your novel. $250. Rants and raves extra.”
Joseph Bednarik is the marketing director of Copper Canyon Press.
The creative writers in this country—those who have earned an MFA and those who haven’t—produce untold millions of poems, stories, novels, and essays. But for whom are they writing?
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced today the launch of the Big Read Egypt/U.S., the second international component of the organization’s community-based literary program. As part of the U.S. State Department’s Global Cultural Initiative for international diplomacy, the NEA will fund Big Read events in both Egypt and the United States that are designed to bring communities together to read and discuss a specific work of literature from a country other than their own. The Big Read Egypt/U.S. follows the NEA’s inaugural program with Russia, which began last October.
In the United States, four organizations will receive grants of ten to twenty thousand dollars to coordinate events focusing on the novel The Thief and the Dogs (Doubleday, 1989) by Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz. Between September 2008 and June 2009, Columbia University in New York City, Florida
Center for the Literary Arts at Miami Dade College in Miami,
Huntsville-Madison County Public Library in Alabama, and the
South Dakota Humanities Council/South Dakota Center for the Book in Brookings will each present their communities with a literary program involving book discussions, lectures, readings, and multimedia presentations.
Meanwhile, three institutions in Egypt—the American University in Cairo, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and the Egyptian Association for Educational Resources—will each organize programming centered around the novels Fahrenheit 451 (Ballantine, 1963) by Ray Bradbury, To Kill a Mockingbird (Lipincott, 1960) by Harper Lee, or The Grapes of Wrath (Viking, 1939) by John Steinbeck. The NEA is also planning cross-cultural activities, which may include virtual exchanges and the involvement of Egyptian authors and cultural figures in U.S. events.
“Cultural exchange needs to play a more important role in international
relations,” said Dana Gioia, chairman of the NEA, in a press release today. “And there is no better way
to understand another nation than to read one of its great books.”
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced yesterday that it plans to expand the Big Read to military bases abroad. Beginning next year, military installations in Germany, Guam, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom will receive readers guides, teachers guides, radio broadcasts, and other materials that can be used to organize community-wide reading programs focusing on a single book. Domestic bases, twenty-six of which have participated in the Big Read since its inception in 2006, will continue to take part in the program through partnerships with local grantees. The United States Department of Defense has previously collaborated with the NEA to offer literary programs, including Shakespeare in American Communities and Operation Homecoming, to members of the military.
The Big Read’s expansion to military bases abroad follows the recent creation of a joint program that encourages American and international readers to discuss books of cultural significance to countries other than their own. The Big Read Russia was initiated last month, with communities in the Ivanovo and Saratov regions of Russia reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird (Lipincott, 1960); from January to June 2008, communities in Illinois, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania will read Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886). The Big Read Egypt is slated to begin next year.
By 2009, nearly four hundred communities in the U.S. and abroad will have hosted a Big Read.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced yesterday that it plans to expand the Big Read to military bases abroad. Beginning next year, military installations in Germany, Guam, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom will receive readers guides, teachers guides, radio broadcasts, and other materials that can be used to organize community-wide reading programs focusing on a single book. Domestic bases, twenty-six of which have participated in the Big Read since its inception in 2006, will continue to take part in the program through partnerships with local grantees. The United States Department of Defense has previously collaborated with the NEA to offer literary programs, including Shakespeare in American Communities and Operation Homecoming, to members of the military.
The Big Read’s expansion to military bases abroad follows the recent creation of a joint program that encourages American and international readers to discuss books of cultural significance to countries other than their own. The Big Read Russia was initiated last month, with communities in the Ivanovo and Saratov regions of Russia reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird (Lipincott, 1960); from January to June 2008, communities in Illinois, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania will read Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886). The Big Read Egypt is slated to begin next year.
By 2009, nearly four hundred communities in the U.S. and abroad will have hosted a Big Read.
A little less than two weeks into this year’s National Poetry Month, the Poetry Foundation released Poetry in America, a report that analyzes American attitudes toward poetry. Conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and commissioned by the Poetry Foundation, the study is based on 1,023 interviews conducted over a four-month period beginning in June 2005—a random sample of American adults who read newspapers, magazines, and books for pleasure, and who read primarily in English. The most dramatic finding, according to a press release sent by the Poetry Foundation, was that “the vast majority (90 percent) of American readers highly value poetry.” As news of this finding spread among writers and on blogs, the phrasing was sometimes shortened to “90 percent of Americans” rather than “American readers”—and suddenly, poetry seemed as popular as baseball and apple pie.
“Taken as a whole, the results of the study confirm the need to reinvigorate poetry as an art form and to expand its presence in American culture,” says Poetry Foundation president John Barr. The Poetry Foundation, formerly the Modern Poetry Association, which received a $175 million bequest in 2002, appears to be in a position to do just that.
Poet Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), puts the foundation’s report in perspective: “[This] is not a study of the total U.S. population,” he says. “It’s easy to misrepresent the numbers.. Essentially, only 12 percent of the U.S. population reads poetry.” That number comes from the NEA’s 2004 report Reading at Risk, a study based on twenty years of data collection, which showed that only about 47 percent of Americans read any sort of literary work at all.
The two studies differ in several ways. For Reading at Risk, the NEA polled more than seventeen thousand people from the general adult population about their consumption of novels, short stories, plays, and poetry. The pool surveyed by the Poetry Foundation was made up solely of adults who read for pleasure. In addition, respondents in the foundation’s study were given a definition of poetry, whereas those polled by the NEA were not. The Poetry Foundation’s respondents were told a poem “uses rhythm and language in verses to create images in the mind of the reader”; that it might rhyme or it might not; and that greeting card poems, song lyrics, and Bible verses don’t count. Depending on their responses, those interviewed were then classified into two groups: “users” and “nonusers” of poetry. Users were then further classified as “current” or “former.”
According to the results of Poetry in America, more than half of current and former poetry users remember the title of a poem. Users are more active and social than nonusers, and they read more contemporary poetry than classics. Sixty-four percent of all respondents felt that, in general, people should read more poetry. The findings also indicate that positive experiences with poetry in school are integral to keeping people engaged with poetry in later life.
Along with launching a revamped Web site in January, the foundation has been working with the NEA to organize Poetry Out Loud, a program in which high school students take part in poetry recitation competitions. Tens of thousands of students have participated in the program to date—a sign of what Gioia calls “an enormous populist revival” of poetry through the spoken word.
Many poets aren’t all that surprised by the Poetry Foundation’s news that there is a relative enthusiasm for poetry on the page. “Maybe the more interesting question is, What are they reading, and what are they valuing it for?” says poet Daisy Fried, a 2006 Guggenheim fellow. In fact, the survey did ask respondents about specific works. Both current and former poetry users were asked to name their favorite poems, and while there are some classics at the top of the list—Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” is number one, and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” number four—number two is Mary Stevenson’s “Footprints,” an inspirational work, and number eleven, Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” Also in the mix are titles such as “Humpty Dumpty” and “The Grinch That Stole Christmas [sic].”
The wide range of works mentioned by respondents in Poetry in America has sparked some debate in the literary community about real or perceived divisions between serious poetry and casual or lightweight verse. “I suspect the casual reader isn’t necessarily interested in the things in poetry that poets are interested in,” says Fried. In fact, some poets even take comfort in that divide. “This is one of the things that make this little unspoken-word poetry world so compelling to those of us who are stuck inside it: It is truly arcane.. It’s a secret-magic-invisible world,” says Rebecca Wolff, a poet and the publisher of Fence magazine and Fence Books.
Others endorse the populist approach promoted by the Poetry Foundation, whose mission is to place the best poetry before the largest possible audience. “I think the depth of engagement with poetry is launched from a very broad swath of the [public’s] being interested in it, and that means having a huge layer of people interested in somewhat lightweight verse,” says Tree Swenson, executive director of the Academy of American Poets. In other words, the larger the number of poetry users—even if those users consider Dr. Seuss a poetic master—the greater the number of people who might one day wander into the poetry section at Barnes & Noble, pick up a book by Emily Dickinson or Frank O’Hara or Wallace Stevens, and be mesmerized by what they read.
And that, most everyone can agree, would be something to celebrate.
Sarah Davis is a poet and fiction writer who lives in Brooklyn.
The findings indicate that positive experiences with poetry in school are integral to keeping people engaged with poetry in later life.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released a new study yesterday that shows the unemployment rate among the nation’s working artists, including writers, hit 6 percent in the final quarter of 2008. Artists in a Year of Recession: Impact on Jobs, which examines employment patterns in the fourth quarters of 2007 and 2008, reveals that a total of 129,000 artists were unemployed at the end of last year, an increase of 50,000 (63 percent) from a year earlier. The unemployment rate for writers and authors alone is slightly higher than artists in general: 6.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008. The group with the highest unemployment rates are performing artists, at 8.4 percent.
The study compares unemployment rates among artists to U.S. workers as a whole and finds that artists have lost jobs at a faster rate: Between the fourth quarters of 2007 and 2008, the unemployment rate for artists rose 2.4 percentage points, while the rate for workers as a whole rose one point.
The study also predicts that the job market for artists is unlikely to improve until long after the U.S. economy starts to recover.
“We conducted the research to quantify what we hear in the field and read in the news every day, that art workers—alongside all workers—are suffering,” said the NEA’s director of research and analysis Sunil Iyengar in a press release. “Unfortunately, the data reveal that artist unemployment is increasing at more rapid rates than for the total workforce, and could have more of an affect over time.”
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced today that reading in the United States is making a resurgence. According to its report Reading on the Rise, adult reading of literature has gone up by 7 percent, the first increase since 1982, when the NEA began researching the subject using a series of surveys given every five years.
“There has been a measurable cultural change in society’s commitment to literary reading,” said NEA chairman Dana Gioia, the New York Times reported. “In a cultural moment
when we are hearing nothing but bad news, we have reassuring evidence
that the dumbing down of our culture is not inevitable.”
The rates of reading increased most sharply since the last survey in 2002 among Hispanic Americans and African Americans. The age group that saw the most significant positive change in the past five years was that of young adults ages eighteen to twenty-four, reversing the steep decline reported in 2002.
The 2008 survey, which asks about reading of poetry, fiction, and
plays, as well as book-length works, done during the past twelve months, featured new questions about online reading. Fifteen percent of
those surveyed said they have read literature online, but the majority
of that group also reported reading full books, both in print and
online.
As for what is being read, fiction (both short stories and novels) fed the increase in reading rates. The readership for poetry, on the other hand, continues a steady decline, especially among women.
For some, the results of the survey, which polled about eighteen thousand adults, are of questionable significance. “It’s just a blip,” Elizabeth Birr Moje, a specialist in literature, language, and culture at the University of Michigan, told the Times. “If you look at trend data, you will
always see increases and decreases in people’s literate practices.”
Highlights from Reading on the Rise are available on the NEA Web site and the full report is available for download from the NEA’s research archives.
After a week of uncertainty, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced today that members of the House and Senate conference committee have negotiated to keep the fifty million dollars that the House of Representatives had designated for the NEA in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The funding, which the House approved on January 28 as part of the stimulus package put forward by president Barack Obama, was cut from the Senate’s version of the bill last Friday.
Arts groups and individuals organized e-mail campaigns urging readers to contact their senators and ask them to reconsider senator Tom Coburn’s amendment to cut the arts funding. Now that the conference committee has finished its negotiations, the bill proceeds to both the House and the Senate for final votes before being sent to the president.
“On behalf of the National Endowment for the Arts, I am
pleased that the agency has garnered the confidence of members of
Congress to participate in addressing this national economic crisis,” said NEA acting chairman Patrice Walker Powell in a statement. “The arts and culture industry is a viable sector of the economy.
Its employees pay taxes and mortgages as members of the American
workforce and are being profoundly impacted by the economic downturn.”
The United States Senate voted on Friday to cut funding for the arts from the economic recovery bill. The amendment to the bill, offered by Republican senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, passed by a wide margin, seventy-three votes to twenty-four, and included support from senators Chuck Schumer of New York, Dianne Feinstein of California, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, among others. The House of Representatives had approved fifty million dollars
in supplemental grants funding for the National Endowment for the Arts
(NEA) as part of the $819 billion economic stimulus bill put forward by
president Barack Obama.
The new amendment, which was passed “to ensure that taxpayer money is not lost on wasteful and non-stimulative projects,” states that “none of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project.”
The nonprofit Americans for the Arts has organized an e-mail campaign urging readers to contact their senators and ask that the amendment be removed from the bill before the Senate votes on it early this week. For more information, visit the Web site.
The University of New Mexico Press, reportedly facing an operating deficit as a result of the current recession, recently announced layoffs and the possibility of outsourcing distribution, according to a strongly worded press release circulated yesterday.
The first cuts came when marketing and sales manager Glenda Madden, who has served at the press for seven years, and junior acquisitions editor Lisa Pacheco, were both advised that their jobs would be eliminated on Monday. The publicity department was also notified that it will have to slash one of its two positions, and press authorities have stated that outsourcing of warehouse and customer service jobs may be on the horizon.
According to the press release, publicist Amanda Sutton was advised by business manager Richard Schuetz and press director Luther Wilson that she would have to choose whether it would be herself or her assistant, Katherine MacGilvray, who would be let go from the publicity department. “I have a difficult time determining the fate of a fellow colleague, to whom I owe much loyalty and respect,” Sutton said in the press release. “Sacrificing up a colleague is not part of my job description.”
“Both members of the publicity team are extremely well connected in the media world and have been landing key coverage about UNM Press books in spite of budget cutbacks,” said advertising and exhibits manager Christina Frain. “The books, their authors, and our client publishers will only see negative results if these layoffs go through.”
The jobs of nine employees, as well as three student positions—in customer service, shipping and receiving, order fulfillment, and warehousing—are also in jeopardy as the press considers outsourcing distribution. The move would also affect over thirty client publishers who use the press to oversee order fulfillment.
“In addition to laying off at least nine dedicated employees, outsourcing is a slap in the face to the community, state, and region that UNM Press has served so well for eighty years,” said Madden, who saw the negative effects of distribution outsourcing at another university press.
In an e-mail to staff regarding the “new organizational arrangement,” Schuetz wrote, “I know this will not be easy for a lot of reasons and will involve a number of changes but I think we can make it work. We don’t have any other choice.”
According to Frain, staff members have expressed frustration with the lack of input they have been invited to provide regarding sustainable solutions for the press’s budgetary situation.
“The layoffs and the possibility of outsourcing came out of the blue,” said Frain, who also acts as fundraising coordinator. “Even though the UNM Press staff is one of the most experienced in the book publishing business, they were never consulted by the provost [Wynn Goering] or Mr. Wilson regarding the development of long term solutions for the viability and success of the press. We were only asked how to cut expenses.”
The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, the largest poetry event in North America, is changing venues. The event, previously held at Waterloo Village near Stanhope, New Jersey, is moving to Duke Farms in Hillsborough, New Jersey.
The tenth biennial festival will be cosponsored by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. As always, it will feature a plethora of readings and panel discussions on how poetry illuminates our culture and our daily lives.
Dodge Poetry Festival director Jim Haba says the Duke Farms estate will provide for a harmonious blend of serene atmosphere and poetic pleasure. Its size (120 acres) won’t hurt either: 25,000 people are expected to attend next year’s event, which will run for four days, beginning September 30, 2004.
Faced with budget cuts, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation announced on Thursday that it will suspend its biennial poetry festival. The festival, founded in 1986, last took place in September at Waterloo Village in New Jersey.
The foundation has been hit hard by the rising costs of putting on the four-day event, which takes place on a large, pastoral swath of land housing a number of tented sound stages. With production costs doubling over the last three festivals, and nearly 20 percent of the
festival funds going to hire poets to give readings and lectures at the
event, the foundation will look for ways to “reinvent” the festival, attended in 2008 by nineteen thousand people, on
“a more affordable scale or in a more affordable venue.”
According to an e-mail from Dodge Foundation president David Grant, although the New Jersey-based organization, which supports programs in the arts, education, and the environment, has been trimming its grant budget annually since 2002, the funds for poetry have never before been reduced. The current cuts will affect not only the festival, but also other poetry programming, which includes workshops for New Jersey teachers of poetry, poet visits to the state’s schools, mini-festivals, and a high school poetry contest.
Grant said in his message that the foundation would make audio and video from the past eleven festivals available on YouTube. Over twenty-five hundred hours of recordings are housed in the festival archives.
“The festival
experience itself cannot be duplicated, but we take heart that it can
and will be shared by students, teachers, poets, and poetry lovers the
world over,” Grant said. “It is a remarkable legacy—not yet ended.”
And maybe the unity of resistance to hatred that will stop that hatred seems improbable. Maybe an orthodox Jewish congregation will never stand in protective vigil outside a gay and lesbian community center, or the clinic of an abortion provider. Maybe a Black student organization will never rally for Asian American Rights….
Maybe. But, meanwhile, I am moving on an irrepressible wish that all of us will: All of us will build that circle of our common safety that all of us deserve.
—June Jordan
The writer and activist June Jordan wrote these words in 1999, in the weeks after a white supremacist opened fire in a Jewish community center in Los Angeles and then killed a Filipino American postal worker a few miles away. Even as the world presented evidence against hope, Jordan moved “on an irrepressible wish.” She insisted on her own freedom—“I am Black and I am female and I am a mother and I am bisexual and I am a nationalist and I am an antinationalist. And I mean to be fully and freely all that I am!” she wrote—and understood that personal freedom is inextricable from collective freedom. She wrote poems and prose and drafted plans for equitable—beautiful—public housing projects. Meanwhile, I am moving: a vector into a future free from white supremacy and all of its attendant structures. Jordan taught Black English in classrooms and marched in the streets to demand that that language, and the people who speak it, be celebrated, safe, loved. She knew her work as an artist, activist, and educator was part of a single project: to create a loving world.
From left: Ama Codjoe, Donika Kelly, Nicole Sealey, Evie Shockley, and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon (Kelly: Ladan Osman; Sealey: Rachel Eliza Griffiths).
Two decades later, five poets have come together to form a collective—named Poets at the End of the World—to partake in this project and continue the creative legacy of Jordan and others. The collective is comprised of Ama Codjoe, Donika Kelly, Nicole Sealey, Evie Shockley, and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon—five poets, five Black women, friends in letters and in living. In their poems, each poet in her own way holds language accountable to love and open toward possibilities for just futures. Collectively, they materially contribute to realizing those futures. Represented by Eloisa Amezcua of Costura Creative, Poets at the End of the World is available for readings, panels, workshops, and other events—at least three of the five members will be present at any booking—and donates all honoraria to causes agreed upon by the collective. Poets at the End of the World extends the paths laid by June Jordan, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, and Audre Lorde, who insisted that it was not enough to fight against violence—we must also cultivate the forms we desire. An honest appraisal of what is, a running leap toward what might be. I am moving.
As the poets are scattered across the globe from New Jersey to Rome, we had a conversation about the collective’s origins, work, and vision via Google Docs over three weeks in January.
Ama Codjoe is the author of the chapbook Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020). She is the recipient of a 2017 Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, the Georgia Review’s 2018 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, a 2019 Disquiet Literary Prize, a 2019 Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Award, and a 2019 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship.
Donika Kelly is the author of the chapbook Aviarium and the full-length collections The Renunciations, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2021, and Bestiary, the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, Donika is an assistant professor at Baruch College.
Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named. Formerly the executive director at Cave Canem Foundation, she is concurrently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and a Literature Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Evie Shockley has published four books of poetry and criticism, most recently semiautomatic, winner of the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Recipient of the 2019 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, she is professor of English at Rutgers University–New Brunswick.
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Open Interval, a 2009 National Book Award finalist; and Black Swan, winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is the coauthor of the chapbooks Poems in Conversationand a Conversation with Elizabeth Alexander and Leading With a Naked Body with Leela Chantrelle.
I’d love to start by borrowing an opening question from Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton, the hosts of the podcast Another Round: What do you do, and why? Codjoe: When I was a teenager, I read an essay by the feminist, lesbian priest Rev. Dr. Carter Heyward. She instructed the reader to “make justice.” I fell in love with the phrase. What does the collective do? We do poetry, we do community, we do justice. We do it because we need poetry, community, and justice ourselves—and because we want to support organizations that strive to build and sustain spaces of safety, creativity, and power in a world that does not guarantee everyone access to such spaces.
Kelly: This is a moment to think past the amplification of ourselves. We wanted to be of service, to reroute material resources to organizations that are doing meaningful work in local communities. One of the ways that has manifested is in our committment to donate our collective honoraria to organizations aligned with our mission to make the world more safe, just, and equitable for us all.
Sealey: Last fall, for example, the Fringe Foundation generously funded the collective’s debut reading at Cave Canem Foundation—donating $5,000 to the nonprofit that serves Black poets. This means that the organization will be able to do more good work. Helping to enable such work is our motivation. Poets at the End of the World has a running list of movements and institutions we’d like to support in this way. The next organization we hope to support is the Baltimore-based FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, which aims to “promote a culture of consent…where sex is empowering and pleasurable rather than coercive and violent.”
Shockley: When we make poetry, we transform our understanding of the world as it is into our vision for what it could be. Our poetry, in all its variety, becomes part of what identifies and sustains the things that are beautiful and good, and also dissects and challenges the things that suppress justice and joy. The collective enables our art to make that kind of contribution twice over: first, through the poems themselves and, second, by funding organizations whose work helps to enact similar visions of beauty and justice.
Van Clief-Stefanon: There’s another very important thing we do: We speak with one another regularly. We schedule time to do this. We established early that being in regular contact with one another would be foundational to our work of building and sustaining creative space. During our conversations, before moving on to whatever business is at hand, we check in with each other, discussing our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
Starting as far back as you’d like—in your personal and/or collective journeys—would you say a bit about how Poets at the End of the World came into being? Shockley: On the last day of AWP Tampa in 2018, Nicole and I finally found a few minutes to really talk, to indulge in some mutual dreaming about how we could best make our love and admiration for Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Gwendolyn Brooks manifest in the world. These poets modeled how caring deeply about craft could go hand in hand with caring deeply about the state and fate of one’s families and communities, particularly the people most vulnerable to abuses of power. We let ourselves imagine how wonderful it would be to work together on a project that would celebrate these amazing women and their work—as poets, as activists—by following their example.
Sealey: When Evie and I came to the idea of a service-oriented collective, we both began to laugh—this was it, this was the thing! My mind immediately went to Ama and Donika, who just so happened to be rounding the corner. Evie’s mind went to Lyrae, who she texted and who responded within minutes.
Codjoe: As soon as we walked up, Evie said, “Want to join our collective?” and Donika and I said, “Yes.”
Kelly: I wasn’t sure what it would mean to be in a collective—I’m a pretty solitary person in a lot of ways, but somehow, it was as if I’d been waiting for that question, for that moment for years. My “yes” was immediate.
Van Clief-Stefanon: I got a text from Evie saying that she had “a proposition for [me], involving Audre, June, and Lucille…and lifting and raising collectivity and light.” She couldn’t call to discuss it that afternoon, but she wrote, “Just say yes!!” And because it was Evie, and because I have known her now for more than two decades, and because, as I wrote back to her, “I have nothing but faith, love, and trust for any idea [she has] for us,” without even knowing to what I’d agreed, I said, “Yes!!!”
Sealey: Then, there, Poets at the End of the World was born.
I’m struck by the rush of the “yes” of this all. Would you say more about the commitments of that certainty? What exactly are you saying “yes” to when you come together as Poets at the End of the World? Sealey: I’ve loved these women for years. My husband [the poet John Murillo] and Lyrae taught together ten years ago; we’ve all remained tight since. Evie and I seemed to always miss each other, but have been drawn to each other for as long as I can remember. Donika and I became fast friends when we overlapped as fellows at the 2009 Cave Canem retreat. Ama and I met at a writing workshop some fifteen years prior, and ten years after that she was stuffing gift bags at my wedding. We know each other well. Well enough to say “yes” before a request, an invitation is fully formed because we’d been saying “yes” to sisterhood all these years.
Kelly: I was saying “yes” to possibility, to community. The external push, here in the form of Nicole and Evie’s question, so simply and warmly put: Will you join us? The question allowed me to open the door into a room of sisterhood and possibility.
Van Clief-Stefanon: Like Donika, I’m pretty introverted. I can be anxious, almost to the point of agoraphobia. I’ve thought a lot and written a lot based on thinking about how to say “No.” It’s been a long and ongoing journey, teaching myself to say “No.” For me, Poets at the End of the World follows the path of “see[ing] to be” that Miss Lucille’s work illuminated. When I say “yes” to Poets at the End of the World, I am saying “yes” to living that work, to seeing that work to be.
Codjoe: When thinking back to the yeses, I am reminded of the litany of synonyms that opens Clifton’s The Book of Light. The “yes” was built on years of friendship, to varying degrees, with Donika, Evie, Lyrae, and Nicole—whose commitment to service and justice I trust and in whose company I am continually flooded by light, even during challenge or struggle. I don’t have any full-blooded sisters, but in spite of that—or maybe, because of it—sisterhood has always been important to me.
The second “yes” to Clifton, Lorde, Jordan, and Brooks was built on my love for their work, thinking, and practices. As a reader, I have been in relation with some of these writers since I was a teenager. And isn’t that, too, a kind of friendship?
Shockley: When I think about how generously Gwendolyn Brooks gave—of her time, her funds, her expertise, and her spirit—I am overwhelmed. She sponsored writing contests for students that she funded out of pocket, and hosted awards ceremonies for the winners she had selected. She famously offered poetry workshops to members of the Blackstone Rangers, for which she was surely not being paid. I have friends whom she mentored when they were budding poets. I was not a direct recipient of her generosity except twice, when I was one of the devotees happily standing in a very long line after a reading to get my book signed. Her book-signing lines were always long and slow-moving because she was so beloved and because she had a real exchange with each person who stepped up. I was so in awe of her; I barely saw her as human.
But later, spending time with Lucille Clifton, I came to understand what a toll that must have taken on Brooks, even if she was energized by the people her work touched. Lucille would tell me, after a day or evening of reading, teaching, talking poetry: “Girl, I am tired.” I came to see some of the ways she would protect herself from giving beyond what was healthy.
For me, Poets at the End of the World represents a way we can share our poetry and transform the value of that work into monetary support for organizations that are making good things happen in the world. At the same time, through our shared mission and shared boundaries, our relationships with one another serve not only to sustain and nurture us, but also to keep us honest about what we have the capacity to do.
The name of your collective refers to a section of Clifton’s “shapeshifter poems”:
the poem at the end of the world
is the poem the little girl breathes
into her pillow the one
she cannot tell the one
there is no one to hear this poem
is a political poem is a war poem is a
universal poem but is not about
these things this poem
is about one human heart this poem
is the poem at the end of the world
What does calling yourselves “Poets at the End of the World” mean to you? Codjoe: Evie brought the name to our first meeting, and the air shifted in the room when we heard it. In the vastest view, the name “Poets at the End of the World” reminds me of how people of African descent on any side of the Atlantic have felt for the last four centuries: as if we were at the edge of the world—that the world might end, has ended over and again. I think of the Door of No Return as one symbol of that ending. And in a smaller “one human heart” sense, the collective’s name is about the girl in Clifton’s poem who has no one to protect or hear her. Whoever is doing work on behalf of that little girl—on behalf of and in collaboration with Indigenous communities, trans youth, survivors of rape—that is who we’d like to support.
Van Clief-Stefanon: June Jordan ends her essay “Where is the Love?” by quoting lines from Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poem “The Heart of a Woman” that I find particularly resonant:
The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.
Jordan describes her work as a feminist as “against such sorrow… against such suicide… against such deliberated strangulation of the possible lives of women,” and as learning “to love myself well enough to love you (whoever you are).” I see the collective participating in a tradition of poem-ing as holding the human heart, and of naming as breaking bars rather than breaking the heart against them.
Kelly: Poets at the End of the World resonates with me in a literal way as well: It is an acknowledgment of the state of the world and a practice of hope. I tend to have low reserves of hope, especially now, when so many vulnerable people are being openly targeted within and by the U.S. government. Our name reminds me that yes, we are at the end of an era in this world, but to work in and toward community is a practice of hope.
Sealey: For the most part, the world is a wreck—we’re building walls to keep certain people out and walls to keep certain others in; we’re waging wars; cops are killing Black people with impunity; a trans person is murdered every day; and on and on and on. I trust that there’s love on the other side of this madness. Beauty, too. There has to be. Which is why, for me, “Poets at the End of the World” means the end of what is as well as the beginning of what can be—a small gesture, yes, but a gesture nonetheless.
Shockley: Part of what it means to speak of “Poets at the End of the World” is to say that as long as there is a world, there will be poetry. And as long as there’s poetry, there is the possibility of a world in which we can survive—and thrive.
How has being part of a collective informed your own poetic practice? Sealey: I mean—Ama, Donika, Evie, and Lyrae wrote Blood of the Air, Bestiary, semiautomatic and ]Open Interval[, respectively—brilliant craftswomen and prizewinners all! So, in addition to my husband, mom, and dads, I now have four more people I want to impress with my poems. And, these women’s influence on me goes well beyond the page. They inform my personhood with their collective example—helping me to be a better global citizen.
Shockley: The experience of hearing our very distinct voices and aesthetics circulating in the same room over the course of an hour or so is moving, invigorating, and a little intoxicating—at least for me. Lyrae rings the power notes of a Southern spiritual and fills the room; Ama’s poetry slips in like a cat, hiding its teeth and its appetite; Nicole’s bursts through doors unapologetically, like a strong, cool, bracing wind; and Donika unravels the veils and shrouds with a tool that only looks like a paper clip. The beauties and truths of their art create a rich context for me to work and play in. To borrow a phrase from Zora Neale Hurston, these women encourage me to “jump at de sun”!
Kelly: Being a part of this collective reminds me—when I’m writing, when I’m giving a reading—of the many lineages of which I am a part. That we began with Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks, June Jordan, Audre Lorde is one frame. That we are ourselves and writing now is another. There are other frames, other lines, of course, but there’s an immediacy, a kind of materiality that the collective calls forth. To be connected to Ama, Evie, Lyrae, and Nicole, and to be committed to a mission that is larger than the smallness of my own singular life, imbues my approach to my work with joy.
Codjoe: It is heartening to know we will cheer for one another and feel what some call “sympathetic joy.” And there is so much to celebrate: Nicole is living and writing in Rome for the Rome Prize; Evie was recently awarded a Lannan fellowship; Donika’s newest collection, The Renunciations, will be published next year; and Lyrae’s recently published essay in Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African-American Poetry made me weep when I heard her read from it. The sheer strength of their writing propels me in ways not about competition. I carry these women, along with all the writers who inspire me, to the desk with me when I write.
Van Clief-Stefanon: I feel challenged and inspired, but also harbored. I am grateful for the grace of these women with whom it is my privilege to think and make.
Would you leave us with a few lines of poetry that fortify you to do the work of collaborating to make way toward wider futures? Shockley: From Audre Lorde’s “Coal”: Love is a word another kind of open. And the closing lines of Lucille Clifton’s anthem: come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.
Sealey: Lucille Clifton’s “why some people be mad at me sometimes”: they ask me to remember / but they want me to remember / their memories / and i keep on remembering / mine. And, from June Jordan’s “Poem about My Rights”: I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name / My name is my own my own my own.
Codjoe: The closing stanza of Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival”: So it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive.
Kelly: From the end of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Paul Robeson”: we are each other’s / harvest; / we are each other’s / business; / we are each other’s / magnitude and bond.
Claire Schwartz is the author of bound (Button Poetry, 2018). She is poetry editor of Jewish Currents.
For nearly ten years the brownstone at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem was silent. Once the home of celebrated Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes, who lived there for twenty years until his death in 1967, the three-story row house sat vacant, its dark stone walls overgrown with ivy, the paint of its once grand interior chipped throughout. The only evidence of the building’s literary history was a small plaque on the facade bearing Hughes’s name and designating it a landmark.
But today, thanks to the I, Too Arts Collective, the brownstone is once again bustling with creativity. On any given day one might hear the voice of a teen writer reciting Hughes’s poem “I look at the world,” or a community member reading at an open mic for the first time, or a distinguished author in conversation about the practice of writing. Established as a nonprofit organization by award-winning author Renée Watson, I, Too provides arts programming in Hughes’s house to underrepresented and marginalized voices. The collective takes its name from Hughes’s famous poem “I, Too,” which opens with the lines, “I, too, sing America. // I am the darker brother.”
“People need spaces where they can seek justice and stand up for what they believe in, spaces where they can be their full selves,” says Watson. “Often they are not able to do that in the world, so I wanted to have a space where they can come and create and engage with their community—that was really important to me.”
Watson, who lives in Harlem, walked past the vacant house for ten years, disappointed that nothing had been done with the space. She was inspired to take action in the summer of 2016, after hearing that Maya Angelou’s Harlem brownstone, located just a ten-minute walk from Hughes’s house, had been sold for $4 million. Determined that another piece of Harlem and African American culture wouldn’t be lost, Watson contacted the owner of Hughes’s brownstone and shared her vision of a space dedicated to preserving the writer’s legacy. The owner also didn’t want to see the building become gentrified, turned into condos or a coffee shop, but told Watson she’d need to come up with a year’s rent to turn her vision into a reality.
Watson, who in addition to publishing several well-received children’s books—including most recently Piecing Me Together (Bloomsbury, 2017)—has years of experience in business and nonprofit arts administration; she established the I, Too Arts Collective in July 2016 and launched #LangstonsLegacy, an online fund-raising campaign to lease the brownstone. In just a few months, with the help of the literary community and private donors, she raised $150,000 toward the lease, renovation, and programming costs. Watson signed a three-year lease in October 2016 and along with the I, Too team and a group of volunteers, cleaned, painted, and restored the building. On February 1, 2017—Hughes’s 115th birthday and the beginning of Black History Month—the Hughes House opened to the public.
I, Too now hosts weekly open hours at the Hughes House, during which the community and tourists can visit the space, walk the same parlor floor Hughes did, and snap photos of his piano and typewriter. Watson says the brownstone is less of a museum, however, and more of a space for people to create. I, Too runs a number of special programs and events at the Hughes House, including creative writing workshops for adults and young people, a recurring poetry salon with an open mic, a monthly social event for writers and artists, and discussions with writers about their process and work. I, Too also rents the space to other artists and nonprofits to hold workshops, readings, and performances. Writers who have visited the brownstone include Kwame Alexander, Tracey Baptiste, Andrea Davis Pinkney, Angela Flournoy, Nikki Grimes, Ellen Hagan, Jason Reynolds, Jacqueline Woodson, and Ibi Zoboi.
Watson and her I, Too colleagues— program director Kendolyn Walker, social media director Jennifer Baker, and graphic designer Ellice Lee, as well as working and honorary boards of directors made up of writers and artists—want to empower artists as well as honor Hughes’s legacy. “I wanted something that would add on to what he left behind,” says Watson. “I think that is a powerful thing, to not just celebrate his work in theory or by reading but also saying, ‘This is what he wrote, this is what he said—what do you want to say, and how are you continuing his legacy?’”
The program closest to Watson’s heart is the Langston Hughes Institute for Young Writers, which hosts writing workshops for young people during school breaks and throughout the summer. Funded by the Ford Foundation, the workshops allow teens to learn about Hughes’s work and share their own poetry. “I always say whenever young people are in the space, that’s when I get emotional and feel like this is why I am doing this work,” Watson says. “What moves me is when I see young people writing and finding their voices and expressing themselves.”
After a successful first year, the collective is working toward its long-term goals, including restoring the second floor of the house to create studio space and a library, as well as raising money to establish a fellowship program for writers. As part of the program, fellows would receive a residency in the Hughes House and hold workshops and readings in return.
The organization’s ultimate goal is to raise enough money to purchase the brownstone. “I want this to be a place that lives far beyond me or anybody involved with it now,” says Watson. “This is not just a trendy thing to do, but a sustainable space with roots in the ground for everyday artists to develop their craft and for established artists to share their stories and their voices.”
LaToya Jordan is a writer from Brooklyn, New York. Follow her on Twitter @latoyadjordan.
Renee Watson, founder of the I, Too Arts Collective, next to Hughes’s typewriter.
For Chicago teenagers with a passion for writing, there is no shortage of resources. Young Chicago Authors; 826CHI, a branch of the youth writing organization started by writer Dave Eggers; StoryStudio Chicago; and Writopia Lab, among other programs, have been offering writing workshops, open mics, summer camps, and poetry slams for kids throughout the city for decades. But a new organization has a more specific goal in mind for Chicago teens: to offer them hands-on experience in editing and publishing their peers. Launched last year by poet and educator Jennifer Steele, [Y]volve Publishing (YP) is an extension of Revolving Door Arts Foundation, which Steele founded in 2014 to empower and publish young and emerging writers and to get them actively involved in the publishing industry. Steele runs the organization almost exclusively on her own, with some help from a volunteer board that includes writers Fred Sasaki and Kenyatta Rogers. While Steele has other projects in the works for the organization, including workshops for young and new mothers, an anthology about postpartum depression, and a reading series, her primary focus is currently YP and its inaugural project, the Teen Chapbook Series, which features poetry chapbooks written and edited by teens.
The chapbook series began last summer, when Steele asked four teenagers on the slam poetry team she coaches to each write five poems and then expand that work into a chapbook-length collection. The four young poets—Nyvia Taylor, Semira Truth Garrett, Kai Wright, and Jalen Kobayashi—worked with one another, along with Steele, to edit their poems. “Each book has been a personal journey for these writers, as they explore personal ideas and also think about how to expand the craft of their writing,” says Steele. “Semira, for instance, was really interested in learning how to write short poems. Jalen has learned about truth versus fact when writing a poem. And Nyvia has been writing brave poems that are confronting difficult, personal subjects.”
The chapbooks, each featuring artwork the poets chose themselves, were published in May. Steele also invited four established poets, including CM Burroughs and Jacob Saenz, to write introductions to the chapbooks. For the young poets, seeing their words in print has had a powerful impact. “When you have a hard copy of something, it’s forever,” says Kobayashi in a video on the press’s website. “As poets, we share our work on social media, but that can only get you so far. Once you actually have that physical copy of all your words on the page, nobody can take that from you.” Wright agrees: “I’m just a little Chicago kid from the West Side, but to be able to put my work out there in a permanent way—these are just my words that are here and nobody can take my story, or my truth, or my life away from me as a result of that.”
The Teen Chapbook Series will be published annually, and next year’s series will be expanded to include fiction and nonfiction. (Submissions will open this month, and the chapbooks will be released in Spring 2018.) Steele is also in the process of developing a teen editorial board, which will oversee the production of each book in the series from start to finish. “We’re hoping to have a full-fledged publishing program that includes graphic design, marketing, and promotion teams by 2018,” Steele says. Students will create a call for submissions, read and select manuscripts, and then be paired with a more established editor or writer to edit the selected manuscripts. They will also work on every stage of production, from layout and design to promotion. Steele plans for the press to release three to five chapbooks through the series each year and to put out other books as well. This summer she is working with a group of teens to curate, edit, design, and publish a book of poetry and fashion photography centering around the Gwendolyn Brooks centennial, which is being celebrated this year in Chicago. The anthology will be published in October.
By teaching teens how to publish books, Steele believes she will help equip them with both entrepreneurial and collaborative experience that will be applicable within and beyond the creative industry. By taking on the role of an editor, publisher, or marketing executive, Steele says, the young people involved with the YP will acquire marketable skills before they even graduate high school. She also hopes to reach more teens by bringing YP books into classrooms. Starting in the 2017–2018 school year, she plans to provide the chapbooks to teachers in Chicago schools and help them develop lesson plans based on each book’s content or theme. “We often hear from teachers that they wish they had more books written by teens to share with their students, so we’re hoping this could fill that need,” she says. “As far as I know, there aren’t many collections of poetry being taught in the classroom, let alone collections by teens.”
Steele’s commitment to empowering teens is partially motivated by her own experiences as a young person. “I didn’t know I could be an editor,” she says. “I thought if I got my English degree, I was just going to be a high school English teacher. But if someone had told me that I could be editing a magazine, I probably would have made different choices. We’re trying to create these experiences for kids at this age so they can make more informed choices about what they’re interested in doing. That’s the underlying point of all of this: creating, through the literary arts, skills that can be transferable to any career path they’re interested in.”
Tara Jayakar is the founder and editor of Raptor Editing. She lives in New York City.
[Y]volve Publishing’s poets (from left) Semira Truth Garrett, Jalen Kobayashi, Kai Wright, and Nyvia Taylor.
Last night in New York City, at a historic ceremony at Gracie Mansion, nineteen-year-old Amanda Gorman of Los Angeles was named the first national youth poet laureate. The unprecedented title, to be awarded annually, honors a teen poet who demonstrates not only extraordinary literary talent but also a proven record of community engagement and youth leadership.
For Gorman, poetry and civic outreach aren’t separate interests. The Harvard University freshman knows firsthand that creative writing can build confidence and a sense of community among young people whose voices are often underrepresented in mainstream dialogue. In 2016 she founded One Pen One Page, a nonprofit organization that provides an “online platform and creative writing programs for student storytellers to change the world.” She continues to serve as the organization’s executive director.
Gorman’s own writing often addresses the intersections of race, feminism, and adolescence, as well as the changing landscape of her native Los Angeles. For both her poetry and her advocacy, Gorman has been recognized by Forbes, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the YoungArts Foundation, and the OZY Genius Awards. She has also performed on The Today Show, ABC Family, and Nickelodeon News, and helped introduce Hillary Clinton at the 2017 Global Leadership Awards.
“For me, being able to stand on a stage as a spoken word poet, as someone who overcame a speech impediment, as the descendent of slaves who would have been prosecuted for reading and writing, I think it really symbolizes how, by pursuing a passion and never giving up, you can go as far as your wildest dreams,” said Gorman at the ceremony on Wednesday evening. “This represents such a significant moment because never in my opinion have the arts been more important than now.”
The event represented the culmination of years of work by arts organizations across the country. In 2009 literary arts nonprofit Urban Word NYC, in partnership with the New York City Campaign Finance Board and Mayor’s Office, began bestowing the annual title of New York City youth poet laureate on one visionary poet between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. Michael Cirelli, executive director of Urban Word NYC, says the program was founded on a belief that “young poets deserve to be in spaces of power, privilege, and governance, and to have their voices front and center of the sociopolitical dialogue happening in our city.”
Since the inception of New York’s youth poet laureate program, arts and literacy organizations in over thirty-five cities have followed suit, launching their own youth laureateship positions. As it spread nationally, the program garnered support from the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and PEN Center USA, among other major poetry organizations. Finally, in 2016, the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities partnered with Urban Word to bring the program to the national level.
Last July a jury of prominent poets, including U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, Brooklyn poet laureate Tina Chang, and Academy of American Poets executive director Jen Benka, narrowed the pool of local laureates down to five national finalists. Poets were evaluated on the caliber and subject matter of their poems, as well as their commitment to serving their communities through volunteer and advocacy work, and each finalist was selected to represent a geographic region of the country (Northeast, Southeast, South, Midwest, and West). Along with Gorman, Hajjar Baban of Detroit, Nkosi Nkululeko of New York City, Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay of Nashville, and Andrew White of Houston were named the first annual regional laureates and finalists for the inaugural national youth poet laureateship.
Each finalist received a book deal with independent press Penmanship Books, which published Gorman’s first poetry collection, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, in 2015. Over the past year, the finalists have also had the opportunity to perform for large audiences at renowned venues, including the Poetry Foundation, the Kennedy Center, and the White House. As the national youth poet laureate, Gorman will continue to give readings and participate in events across the country throughout her yearlong term.
“The role of poetry, especially in marginalized communities, is to provide a voice to those who are traditionally silenced,” says Cirelli, “and the best way to effect social change is to provide platforms for youth to tell their stories. We hope to leverage our work to allow these diverse stories to be told in spaces that have historically omitted youth voices, and to energize and engage the issues that they are most passionate about.”
The ceremony at Gracie Mansion featured performances by three of the finalists, as well as a roster of current and former New York City youth poets laureate. The performers were introduced by a group of acclaimed poets, including American Book Prize winner Kimiko Hahn and four-time National Poetry Slam champion Patricia Smith. Nkululeko recited a poem about his hair, a metaphor through which he discussed his relationship with his mother and collective African American history. Baban, who was named runner-up for the national title, recited a sestina on language, family, and her Muslim name. Finally, Gorman delivered a poem about how her speech impediment led her to discover writing.
“I am so grateful to be part of this cohort of young creatives who are taking up their pens to have a voice for what is right and what is just,” Gorman said in her acceptance speech. “I don’t just want to write—I want to do right as well.”
Maggie Millner is Poets & Writers Magazine’s Diana and Simon Raab Editorial Fellow.
In 2008 the Library of Congress, the Children’s Book Council, and the nonprofit organization Every Child a Reader established the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature position to celebrate and promote books for children and young adult readers. The current ambassador, graphic novelist and recent MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient Gene Luen Yang, started his term in January 2016. Yang has devoted much of his work to his Reading Without Walls Challenge, which encourages kids to read books with unfamiliar characters, topics, and formats. Yang is the perfect advocate for such an undertaking: His popular graphic novels American Born Chinese and Boxers & Saints have pushed against cultural stereotypes and blurred the lines between the comic-book and book-publishing industries. More than halfway through his two-year term, Yang spoke about his work as the ambassador.
What inspired you to come up with the Reading Without Walls Challenge? We want kids to read outside their comfort zones, and we want them to do it in three ways. One: We want them to read about characters who don’t look like them or live like them. Two: We want them to read about topics they don’t know anything about. And three: We want them to read books in different formats. So if they normally read only graphic novels for fun, we want them to try a chapter book, and if they read only chapter books for fun, we want them to try a graphic novel.
What are you planning next? Right now we’re trying to promote the Reading Without Walls program. We’ve put together a bunch of downloadable materials: recommended reading lists, posters, and certificates of completion. We’re hoping librarians, booksellers, and teachers will download, print, and use these materials to promote the initiative with their classes. And we’re trying to do a wider national push for the summer.
What else is involved in the national ambassador position? It’s pretty flexible. I have a few speaking engagements—I was at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., in the fall, which was a ton of fun. I’m going to go again this year, and I’ve done a few school visits, some of them in person, some of them over Skype. We’ve tried some online stuff. I have a video podcast called the Reading Without Walls podcast—it’s just me having conversations about children’s books with people I really like. I had one that came out with Lois Lowry, who wrote The Giver; another one with Patrick Ness, who wrote A Monster Calls. I also do a monthly column at Book Riot about making comics, and we’re probably going to start another podcast this year.
Why do you think it’s important for kids to read books with characters who don’t look or live like them? There are studies that show that fiction in particular builds empathy—that when you read about characters who don’t look or live like you, you begin to understand them a little bit better. You understand what makes you similar and how vast the differences are, and it helps you to be a little bit more compassionate toward people who are different from you. Right now it seems like—not just in America, but around the world—we need a little more empathy. And I include myself in that too. I worry about how technology affects us. Just recently with the presidential election, there was all of [this research] about how Facebook basically shows you stuff you like to read. And then even beyond that, you can literally read about yourself all day. You could just fill your whole day with pure narcissism because of digital media. And I think fiction is the exact opposite of that. Well-written fiction pulls you out of your own mind space and helps you see into the thoughts and lives of somebody else.
Can you think of a book where you were reading without walls as a kid? As an Asian American kid growing up in America in the eighties, almost every book that I read was outside of my own walls, because they were about kids that were part of the majority culture. I do think that maybe gender-wise there were books that pushed me outside of my walls. Like almost every kid in the eighties, I loved Beverly Cleary and I loved the Ramona books. I think as a character Ramona really broke stereotypes and cultural norms about the way little girls should act, because she was creative and rambunctious and kind of loud. And there was a lot of overlap in the way she saw the world and the way I saw the world as a little kid. So I think that that pushed me out. And there were also books that mirrored my life. I started collecting comics in the fifth grade and got really obsessed with superheroes. I wonder if part of that obsession comes from the fact that these superheroes negotiated two different identities—Superman wasn’t just Superman, he was also Clark Kent. In some ways that mirrored my own reality since I had a Chinese name at home and an American name at school; I lived under two different sets of expectations. And Superman is actually an immigrant too—he deals with the cultures of both Krypton and America.
Have your experiences as a graphic novelist informed the challenge, especially the part about reading in different formats? Yes, absolutely. I think in America, up until pretty recently, the comic-book market and the book market were really two separate entities. They had their own stores, distribution systems, norms, and readerships. It’s only in the last ten or fifteen years that they’ve started working together. I really think I’ve been a beneficiary of that merging, and it’s exciting to see. It’s exciting to see how publishers and authors who are prominent in one area are starting to embrace the work from the authors in the other area. More and more we’re seeing publishers who typically only publish prose books start to add graphic novels to their list. On the other side, we’re starting to see comic-book publishers recruit writers who are primarily known for their prose, like Ta-Nehisi Coates over at Marvel.
Do you think that’s because people’s opinions or the form itself is changing? Can you diagnose why that shift is happening? I think there are three prominent comic cultures in the world. There’s the American one; there’s an Asian one that’s centered primarily around Japan, and there’s a European one centered around France and French-speaking Belgium. And in those other two cultures, comics have been prominent for a long time. If you go to Japan, there will be people of every age and gender reading graphic novels and manga on the subways. In France, it’s the same way: They televise the comic awards shows. In both of those cultures, it’s always been a big deal. It’s only in America that comics have been in this backwater. And that really goes back to the 1950s when the child psychologist Fredric Wertham wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent, in which he argued that comic books cause juvenile delinquency. The United States Congress took it very seriously and had a series of congressional hearings where they called comic-book authors, publishers, and artists to Washington, D.C., to testify to see if comics actually caused juvenile delinquency. These hearings lasted for a few weeks, but didn’t end conclusively—there was no congressional decision that came out of it. But they damaged the reputation of comics in the eyes of the American public, and that lasted for decades. That didn’t happen in Japan or France. I feel what happened in Japan and France was a much more natural development of the medium, whereas in America it was stunted. It wasn’t until the last couple of decades that people have forgotten about what happened in the fifties. People have finally started to realize that comics don’t cause juvenile delinquency.
What draws you to working with and writing for young people? I think it’s kind of my natural storytelling voice. When I first started writing comics, I was a self-publisher. I was working at a tiny scale. I would Xerox comics and I’d try to sell them at shows. I’d sell probably a dozen or two—tiny scale. And when you’re working at that level, you don’t think about demographics. I wasn’t actually categorized as a young-adult author until I signed with First Second, my primary publisher. They come out of the book world, not the comic-book world. In the book world age demographics are huge; that’s how booksellers decide where to shelve their books and how to sell them. So I was categorized there. It’s not something I had in my head when I first started, but I think it sits well—probably because I was a high-school teacher for a long time. I taught high-school computer science for seventeen years, so I was just surrounded by teenage voices, and a lot of that just bleeds into you. When you spend so much time in the hallways of a school, the voices of those hallways just kind of get into you.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Yesterday, the Academy of American Poets launched a new online poetry resource targeted at teenage readers and writers of poetry. The initiative was conceived after the organization conducted a survey of visitors to its Web site and found that 75 percent of users developed an interest in poetry before the age of eighteen.
The new home page features writing resources and a collection of poems for teens, as well as links to the organization’s discussion forum and a comprehensive index of Web sites and reference materials for poets. A “Leave Your Mark” feature prompts teen users to share indispensable lines of poetry, upcoming events, and to create virtual poetry notebooks of their own design featuring poems, writer profiles, and interviews culled from the Academy’s site.
Young writers are also prompted to sign up for the “Street Team” newsletter, which will notify them of poetry projects and contests in which they could participate. Planned programs include the Free Verse Photo Project, in which a line of poetry is written using a temporary medium and photographed before it disappears, the National Poetry Writing Month challenge and pledge drive, and Poem In Your Pocket Day.
The home page initiative was funded by close to five hundred Academy members, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, which supports advancement of artistic inquiry and scholarship, and the graduating class of 2008 from Holmdel High School in New Jersey.
From late nineteenth-century poet Paul Laurence Dunbar to Harlem Renaissance icon Langston Hughes to contemporary poetry stars Rita Dove and Toi Derricotte, the influence of African American poets on America’s literary culture cannot be overstated. But until recently there was no center that had significant institutional support and was specifically dedicated to sharing and studying the legacy of African American poetry.* Earlier this year, poets Dawn Lundy Martin, Terrance Hayes, and Yona Harvey decided it was high time to start one. The trio launched the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) as a creative think tank to spark conversation and collaboration among poets and other artists, and to promote and archive the work of African American poets for future generations.
“We recognized that there was this huge impact that African American and African diasporic poets were making on American arts and letters,” says Martin, who codirects the center alongside Hayes. “We wanted there to be a place where we could really think and work through what that means.” Housed at the University of Pittsburgh, where both Martin and Hayes teach in the MFA writing program, the center held its first event in March—a set of conversations and readings about race, poetry, and the humanities—and will host similar events throughout the academic year. Its first course on African American poetry and poetics, led by Lauren Russell, the assistant director of CAAPP and an English professor, will be offered to undergraduate and graduate students during the 2017–2018 academic year and will feature visiting speakers each week. Hayes and Martin also plan to launch a residency and fellowship program, through which poets, artists, and scholars can work at the center for periods between a month and a year.
Part of CAAPP’s core mission is to archive and document the work of African American poets, which will be accomplished through both a physical collection of books and an online archive of lectures, readings, and discussions. While organizations like Cave Canem create space to nurture new work by African American poets, and other university centers such as Medgar Evers College’s Center for Black Literature and Chicago State University’s Gwendolyn Brooks Center work to promote black literature, CAAPP will focus specifically on the research and scholarship of black poetics, particularly as it relates to historical, artistic, and cultural repression, as well as corresponding social justice movements. “Cave Canem is twenty years old, and there still hasn’t been a large body of work about how it came into being or archival work around it,” says Hayes. “Our organizations historically haven’t had an opportunity to take care of our own information, to build our own insights around that work…. Now we are in a position to be our own historians and our own archivists, and write our own biographies about the importance of these roots.”
The University of Pittsburgh has long been a home for the work of African American poets. The university press, with editor Ed Ochester at the helm, has published notable titles by both emerging and established African American poets, recently Derricotte, Ross Gay, Rickey Laurentiis, Nate Marshall, and Afaa Michael Weaver. Hayes and Martin hope to work with the press on a book prize, and harness other university resources. “What a university can do is provide infrastructure, in a way that’s just not set up in most sectors of our society,” says Hayes. “Infrastructure and research capabilities.” The pair have enlisted faculty from other departments, including English and Africana Studies, to advise CAAPP and possibly teach future courses. “We think of ourselves as a start-up,” says Martin. “And like innovators in tech, we want to be open and inclusive as we generate new ideas about what it means to work in the fields of African American poetry and poetics. This seems especially important in these trying and divisive times.”
A significant part of CAAPP’s work will also intersect with the university’s MFA program. Graduate writing students will be able to take courses offered by the center and have the opportunity to help curate, design, and teach these courses. This goes hand in hand with how Hayes sees the MFA as an opportunity to teach students the tools and skills needed to hold positions of power in poetry and arts organizations. “A person who is interested in getting an MFA and being a poet can learn how to live in the world, whether they are directing centers or working as librarians, archivists, or critics,” says Hayes. “Just to alert and inspire a poet to do that is a possibility. Maybe you want to run a press or be an editor of a press. I don’t see why the MFA can’t be an opportunity to begin that conversation, as opposed to assuming that all you can do is write or teach.”
*Editor’s Note: After this article went to print, it was brought to our attention that a center dedicated to studying African American poetry was already established before the launch of CAAPP. The Furious Flower Poetry Center, housed at James Madison University and founded by Joanne Gabbin, has been cultivating and promoting African American poetry since 1994. We regret the error.
Hayes and Martin hope that the center will also help make the university’s MFA program a more welcoming space for writers of color, an important effort in light of increased discussion about race and diversity in MFA programs. For Martin, this means creating and maintaining a space of cultural inclusion. “Pittsburgh is a place where there are other students of color, and the graduate faculty is extremely diverse. There’s already some understanding between folks who are there, so you can start from a place of not having to work through your values and struggle to articulate your cultural perspective.”
The CAAPP directors plan to offer courses that intersect with visual art and music, in order to explore how thinking across disciplines can parallel thinking across cultures and perspectives. “Certainly, we feel like if anyone is prepared to build those new conversations, it would be African American poets and poets of color in general,” says Hayes, adding that CAAPP aims to include non-black people of color and other marginalized communities in the conversation. “We talk about collage and hybridity—that’s what people of color are. [We’re] not thinking about segregation, not thinking about fences around what we do, but looking across those bridges, saying, ‘Well, how are these people across the street interested in what I’m doing?’ even if they’re not poets. They might be architects, they might be scientists.”
Moving forward, the center will hold a community workshop, reading, and exhibition from November 9 to November 11 on poetry and politics titled “Black Poets Speak Out,” featuring Jericho Brown, Mahogany Browne, and Amanda Johnston. The directors also hope to host a reading by emerging women and trans poets. Martin and Hayes are optimistic about the social impact of the center’s work. “As far as I’m concerned,” says Martin, “especially given the state of violence in this country—violence against queer people, violence against black people, violence against women—it makes sense to take up things like African American literature, African American culture, African American history, African American poetry and art as a part of making the world better.”
Tara Jayakar is the founder and editor of Raptor Editing. She lives in New York City.
In the summer of 2014, eighteen-year-old Kaya Thomas launched We Read Too, an app that offers a comprehensive database of multicultural books for young readers. Thomas had been frustrated with the difficulty of finding books by and about people of color in libraries and bookstores, so she designed and wrote the code for the app (she recently graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in computer science), which now has information on hundreds of books and more than fifteen thousand users. “I knew that if my app had even helped one person feel represented and showed them that their stories are being told too,” wrote Thomas in a piece at Medium about starting the app, “I had done my job.” Word spread further about We Read Too in March after Thomas launched an Indiegogo campaign to expand the app and raised $15,000. In the next several months, Thomas plans to launch a website for We Read Too and expand its catalog to more than a thousand books. As work on the app progresses, Thomas spoke about her larger mission and hopes for We Read Too.
How has the We Read Too app evolved over the years? When I first released We Read Too, it had a directory that included 300 children’s and young adult titles. Each title had a detail page where you could view the book cover, title, author, and description. There was also a suggestion feature where users could send me titles they thought should be included. Since then the directory has expanded to more than 630 titles, and you can search by author or title. You can now share any of the books via text message, e-mail, or social media, and you can view the book on Safari to purchase it. There’s also a discovery feature now that allows you to see one random book at a time so you don’t have to search through the entire directory.
Was it a purposeful decision to include both self-published and traditionally published books in this list? I wanted to include self-published works because it can be hard for those authors to get readers to discover their work. A lot of authors who are self-published have reached out to me in hopes that We Read Too can be a place for them to get more reader discovery for their work. I know that for authors of color it can be hard to get into the publishing world, so I want to support those who haven’t gone through the traditional routes. I want all authors of color to have their work highlighted in We Read Too, regardless of how they got their work out there.
Do you have plans to include adult fiction in the app? I eventually do want to include adult fiction in the app, but it would be a larger undertaking because there are so many different genres within that category. I want to make sure I have a significant number of titles in each genre before I add them to the app.
We Read Too is free. Do you think you will ever charge for it so you can continue updates and expansion? We Read Too will always be free for individual users. I never want to charge users to access the directory of titles because that would be counterintuitive toward the mission. I want titles written by people of color to be easier to discover and all in one place, not blocked by a paywall. I want users to discover titles they can share with the young people in their lives and community. I want users to know that these titles exist and, more specifically, for users who are people of color, I want them to see that there are authors who share their background and are creating work that reflects their culture in some way.
Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, the creator and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, the panel organizer for the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books, and the social medial director and a writing instructor for Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018).
Cave Canem was established by Cornelius Eady and Toi Derricotte in 1996 to nurture black poets both on the page and in the publishing marketplace. The Brooklyn, New York–based organization’s many programs include writing workshops, master classes, a reading series, publication prizes, and an annual retreat, which brings together more than fifty poets, or “fellows,” each year. In January Nicole Sealey, previously Cave Canem’s programs director, became the organization’s new executive director. A veteran arts administrator (including a previous role as the assistant director of Poets & Writers’ Readings & Workshops program), Sealey is also a poet; her first full-length collection, Ordinary Beast, will be published by Ecco in September. A couple of months into her new position, Sealey spoke about the future of Cave Canem.
Can you tell me a little bit about your relationship to Cave Canem? Almost ten years ago I participated in Cave Canem’s eight-week fall workshop in New York City, facilitated by Marilyn Nelson. I was a very young writer and it ended up being a formative experience in my life. We got serious about craft and made lifelong connections in the process. I’ve met many of my closest friends through Cave Canem, the closest of all being my husband, John Murillo. The very least I can do for an organization that has served me well for the last decade is to return the gesture.
How does being a writer influence the way you will lead the organization? Cave Canem has always had a “poets first” philosophy, which has served the organization well for the last twenty-plus years. Remember, the organization was founded by rock-star poets and directed for the past decade by Alison Meyers, also a poet. In that tradition, I plan to lead with both head and heart, which are the qualities I value most in poetry.
What’s ahead for Cave Canem and for you as the new executive director? In May we’ll be capping off our twentieth-anniversary year with Cave Canem 20/20: A Panoramic Vision of Black Poetry, a two-and-a-half day poetry forum at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn. The forum will offer readings, skill-building panels, artist conversations, and more. I’m also looking forward to my first retreat as executive director. The retreat takes place in June at the University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. It’s our flagship program, and where, as Harryette Mullen says, “black poets, individually and collectively, can inspire and be inspired by others, relieved of any obligation to explain or defend their blackness.”
So much has changed since Cave Canem faculty member Elizabeth Alexander recited “Praise Song for the Day,” the inaugural poem for Barack Obama in 2009. What do you see as the role of Cave Canem, and poetry more broadly, in the new political climate? “So much has changed” is a very gracious way to describe the political climate in which we now find ourselves. In “Praise Song for the Day,” the speaker asks, “What if the mightiest word is love?” I have no doubt that it is love, but the new administration would have me believe that the mightiest word is fear or, worse yet, the president’s name. It is neither. It is love. And what is love if not a society based on justice and equality? With this in mind, the role of Cave Canem in particular, and poetry in general, is and will be to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. With love. Bigly.
Are there any outreach programs on tap to connect poetry with readers? Cave Canem’s Poets Tour, a nonprofit speakers bureau, connects national audiences with Cave Canem fellows through readings and workshops. This year we hope to increase the number of participating fellows and reach out to presenting institutions, including high schools, universities, museums, libraries, and prisons. We want to bring black poets to diverse communities.
Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Early in March a box was erected outside the Association for the Advancement of Mexican Americans (AAMA) in Houston. Orange and with a slightly pitched roof, the box stands on a short post and bears illustrations by John Parra from the children’s book Little Libraries, Big Heroes (Clarion Books, 2019). It is large enough to hold at least twenty books for neighborhood residents to borrow and read.
This box is a Little Free Library, the work of the eponymous Wisconsin-based nonprofit that seeks to increase both access to and love for reading within communities. When the organization’s founder, Todd Bol, first placed a schoolhouse-shaped box in his yard in 2009 as a memorial to his mother, he wanted to foster book exchanges among his neighbors. In 2012, Bol founded the related nonprofit, and when he died in 2018 there were more than seventy-five thousand Little Free Libraries in eighty-eight countries. In Bol’s New York Times obituary, his brother Tony spoke of the program’s success: “What was powerful about it was that all you needed was the idea…. You just build it, or order it, then put it up in your yard, like a public art monument.”
The box outside the AAMA isn’t just any Little Free Library—it’s the one hundred thousandth Little Free Library in the world, and it was made possible through the Impact Library Program, an initiative launched in 2016 that has so far provided more than one thousand no-cost boxes to applicants in communities where books are scarce. Recipients commit to setting up the library and maintaining it for at least a year, taking a picture and sharing its story, and holding a book-related neighborhood activity. Applications are also frequently part of larger initiatives to build connection around books; Denver’s Montbello neighborhood, for instance, hopes to eventually erect numerous libraries along “walkable loops throughout the community for families to enjoy [for] walking and bicycle riding.”
Along with fostering community and a love of reading, the Impact Library Program seeks to improve literacy nationwide. According to the U.S. Department of Education and the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, forty-two million adults in the United States cannot read in English at a third-grade level—and a lack of access to books contributes to this crisis. This lack is often particularly pronounced in Native communities, and a special branch of the Impact Library Program, the Native Library Initiative, has so far placed sixty-nine book-sharing boxes on tribal lands. The poet Heid E. Erdrich says in a short video about the initiative, “Little Free Libraries are not just going to be in suburban yards and on street corners anymore; there are Little Free Libraries popping up on reservations and in Native communities across the United States.” An Impact Library Program application from Jamie P. in South Dakota, who received a box in 2018, described the need for a local book exchange: Their reservation the size of Connecticut had only one library, few families owned vehicles, the schools were overburdened, and not many people had internet access.
The Impact Library Program’s mission to expand access to books near children’s homes has only grown more important since the donation of AAMA’s orange box in March. In May the Associated Press noted an increase in Little Free Libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic, both in their original capacity as book-sharing locations and as “little free pantries” offering canned food donations, jigsaw puzzles, handmade masks, and more. Between March and September 2020 the Impact Library Program saw 40 percent more applications than during the same period in 2019, and according to Shelby King, the director of programs at Little Free Library, these applications frequently cite pandemic-related school and library closures as reasons a book-sharing box would make a difference.
Candice Arancibia, a third-grade teacher and literacy coach who received a box for her home near the Mexico-California border through the Impact Library Program in September, applied after noticing that during distance learning her students have limited access to books—and those they do have “often aren’t those of the BIPOC experience.” She hopes her new box will make it easy for children from local schools to come by and find books that resonate with them.
King says the importance of sharing diverse books has been a common refrain in recent applications. In response, Little Free Library has launched the Read in Color initiative, through which library stewards and others can pledge to share books that incorporate experiences and perspectives from people of many different identities. Distributing both diverse and anti-racist books is particularly important, Arancibia says, because “it’s not until we begin to share our stories that we can actually begin to be seen, and we start to understand people and build empathy.”
Emma Hine is the author of Stay Safe, which received the 2019 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and will be published in January 2021 by Sarabande Books.
Young readers at Jenks East Elementary in Jenks, Oklahoma, have access to books through the seventy-five thousandth Little Free Library, built through the Impact Library Program. (Credit: Jenks East Elementary)
Two buzzwords that continue to be redefined in today’s connection-oriented culture are sharing and community, with social networking making the dissemination of literature, art, and ideas among friends and neighbors as simple as the click of an icon. But what happens when we want to share cultural objects outside the electronic box, in material form? Artist Colin McMullan, founder of the Kindness and Imagination Development Society (KIDS), has found one way to take this act of real-time exchange to the streets, literally, with his Corner Library project.
The original KIDS Corner Library, first installed in 2007 in downtown New Haven, Connecticut, is a miniature book depository about the size of a doghouse, complete with white clapboard siding and a bright orange door, and full of donated graphic novels, zines, pamphlets, and books published by small presses and artists, as well as CDs, DVDs, maps, and other curiosities—a small-scale collection of the literature and resources one might find at a local library. The structure, which served New Haven’s readers for six months, found a new home last April on the corner of Leonard and Withers streets in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. A message on its door reads, “Welcome! This library is meant to encourage us all to publish and share information about local resources, issues, events, the many personal matters we care about deeply.” Potential patrons are encouraged to contact the two librarians, McMullan and Gabriela Alva, for a library card and the code to the door’s lock.
The library operates on the honor system: Every object in the collection has a slip of paper attached, on which the borrower writes down her name and the date borrowed. The slip is then left in a box inside the library, and the item is due back two weeks later. To donate, anyone can bring an item to the library for processing, or prepare the book for borrowing herself and shelve it based on where she thinks it belongs. “These libraries are meant to encourage local exchange and to help neighbors meet, know, and help one another in physical space with issues and interests that matter to them daily, right here and now,” says McMullan. “The Internet is an incredible information tool, but it doesn’t satisfy a need we have for real-space interchange among people.”
As of this writing, the Williamsburg branch of the Corner Library has about fifty members and is attracting a growing interest from the community. “One day I walked to the library and found a box full of donations, very carefully chosen,” says Alva, who is working on a Tumblr blog featuring images of all the library’s holdings. “It had books, photocopied articles, CDs, and an amazing horror book. The reaction has been great so far.”
At a time when underfunded public libraries have been forced to cut staff and hours of operation, McMullan doesn’t see his project as having the potential to provide a replacement for such institutions, but as offering a meaningful alternative experience. “The idea of microlibraries challenging the public-library system is pretty far fetched,” says McMullan. “However, I can say that one mom I met at the Corner Library in Williamsburg was pleased that it was available to her and her kids 24/7, as opposed to the limited hours of the nearby Brooklyn Public Library location, because sometimes her family has a hard time getting there during open hours.”
McMullan has a few other New York City microlibraries in development, partnering with volunteer librarians such as Christine Licata in Manhattan. Located outside Taller Boricua/Puerto Rican Workshop at the Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Center, Licata’s EAsT Harlem branch specializes in recipes and seeds. He also envisions building a microlibrary in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, in cooperation with the Center for Book Arts, where he is a resident artist. And he has plans for a branch located between Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights and Crown Heights neighborhoods.
Norman Stevens, head librarian emeritus of the University of Connecticut, also recruited McMullan to help erect a Corner Library as part of a new downtown development in Storrs, Connecticut. “I was intrigued by Colin’s project as a means of extending some of the concepts of the original American public library into today’s too-electronic age, and returning to a smaller, more personal, comfortable, and user-driven—not just user-friendly—approach,” says Stevens.
The user-powered spirit of the Corner Library is the force behind a similar book-sharing initiative with roots in the Midwest. The Little Free Library project, founded in 2009 by social entrepreneurs Todd Bol and Rick Brooks, launched with a structure about half the size of McMullan’s, built to resemble a one-room schoolhouse and installed near Bol’s home in Hudson, Wisconsin. The project, which uses a “take a book, return a book” model, has since provided unique microlibraries to dozens of U.S. neighborhoods, and a handful of far-flung locales in Australia, Bulgaria, and India, among other countries. Anyone can participate in the project by ordering a prebuilt library or building a new one using blueprints provided on the website, www.littlefreelibrary.org.
McMullan is looking for community collaborators too. “If anyone is interested in being a librarian,” he says, “I would say, Get in touch.”
Poets & Writers Magazine takes a look inside the Corner Library, a tiny book depository serving the community in Brooklyn, New York’s Williamsburg neighborhood.
For the past two years the literary nonprofit House of SpeakEasy has been bringing books to neighborhoods in and around New York City in the back of its bookmobile, a festive maroon box truck outfitted with bookshelves and movable side panels that serves as a pop-up bookstore and donation center wherever it’s parked. This June, in collaboration with storytelling organization Narrative 4, the bookmobile will undertake its longest journey yet, traveling fifteen hundred miles from New York City to New Orleans and making stops in seven states along the way.
During this expedition, called the Poetry to the People Tour, representatives from House of SpeakEasy and Narrative 4 will host events and donate books to local libraries, schools, and prisons. The truck will then roll into New Orleans on the first day of Narrative 4’s annual Global Summit, a five-day event for teens and young adults to share stories and build leadership skills. “I knew that we were heading to New Orleans for the summit, so I had a wild idea to drive there and give out books in underserved spaces along the way,” says Rob Spillman, who works with Narrative 4 and is more widely known as the editor and cofounder of Tin House, which published its final issue in June. “The House of SpeakEasy team and the Narrative 4 team both loved the idea, so we joined forces.” Spillman also contacted DonorsChoose.org, a nonprofit that connects potential donors with teachers in public schools, to identify classrooms with specific book needs and help map the tour’s route.
Running from June 13 to June 21, the tour will make stops in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Spillman will share driving duties with Jeff Waxman, partnerships director of House of SpeakEasy, and a few guest poets will even take brief stints behind the wheel. Over the course of their winding southward journey, the motorists will distribute more than four thousand books to prisons, libraries such as the Floyd County Public Library in Kentucky, and schools such as Plum High School in Pittsburgh.
While the donated books encompass a range of genres from self-help to literary fiction, according to the needs of each institution, events on the tour will emphasize poetry, which Spillman and Waxman agree is a particularly galvanizing outlet for young people today. “Right now poetry feels incredibly urgent,” Spillman says. “It is able to address the current, horribly unsettled moment better than most prose. The poets on the rise today—Morgan Parker, Danez Smith, Tommy Pico, Solmaz Sharif, Natalie Diaz, Kaveh Akbar, Ross Gay, Rickey Laurentiis—are also reflective of the real diversity of our country. Their poetry connects with teens in an immediate, visceral manner.” The tour’s schedule of events reflects that belief: On June 14 the Free Library of Philadelphia will host a story exchange, a workshop, and a reading featuring local teens alongside Philadelphia poet laureate Raquel Salas Rivera and writer and educator Rayna Guy. And on June 15 poets Jenny Johnson and Rickey Laurentiis will perform at the Carnegie Mellon Library in Pittsburgh.
The tour has naturally grown out of both organizations’ work to produce creative events that bring people together through stories or books. In addition to selling and donating books from the windows of its bookmobile, House of SpeakEasy hosts a series of literary cabarets in New York City that feature prominent writers and thinkers reading and riffing on a given theme. The organization also subsidizes tickets for teachers and students to attend literary events for free and sends working writers into classrooms and community centers throughout the city. Narrative 4, which has chapters in twelve countries on four continents, conducts story exchanges—events in which participants pair off to swap their stories and then retell those stories to the larger group—among people with different perspectives who wouldn’t otherwise meet, such as teens from public and private high schools or refugees and public opponents of refugee resettlement.
The organizers want the tour to bring this work to communities they have not reached before. “The mission of Narrative 4 is to harness the power of the story exchange to equip and embolden young adults to improve their lives, their communities, and the world,” Spillman says. “We are all about making connections through story, and the Poetry to the People Tour allows us to share stories and poems in person and make in-person connections across age, race, class, and geographic differences.”
Maggie Millner is a poet and teacher from rural upstate New York. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, and ZYZZYVA. Previously she was the Diana & Simon Raab Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers Magazine.
The House of SpeakEasy’s bookmobile at the Brooklyn Book Festival in 2017.
If you want to get a sense of where contemporary poetry is headed, there’s no better place to start than with recently published debut collections. Each year sees a rich, diverse lineup of debut poets whose work offers fresh perspectives, exciting new ideas and experiences of language, and unexplored subject matter. Even tried-and-true poetic topics—history, the beloved, nature, family, identity—are explored, interrogated, and lit up in new ways. This past year is no exception: In 2015, debut poets took on everything from Chinese unicorns and Mesoamerican shape-shifters to jazz trumpeter Chet Baker and The Real Housewives television franchise. They wrote sonnet cycles, erasures, conceptual poems, and lyric poems that skip across the page and open their readers’ eyes, illuminating ideas at turns thrilling, devastating, and always alive.
For our eleventh annual look at debut poets, we selected ten of the most compelling debuts published in 2015. The work of these featured poets runs the gamut, though each book celebrates the ways in which language, as Hannah Sanghee Park says, “shifts, morphs, steals, and fractures through time.” We asked all our poets to share the stories behind both the genesis of their poems and the publication of their collections—how they navigate publication and how to, as Alicia Jo Rabins puts it, “forge ahead despite setbacks and rejections and silence while also holding the whole endeavor lightly.” Their answers prove that there is no single path from a manuscript to a published book, and that inspiration can be found in the most ordinary and unusual of places—from the former home of a much-admired poet or a yard full of weeds to a drive on the freeway along the U.S.–Mexico border. But there is one common thread woven throughout: the invocation to submit to one’s obsessions, to write past the machinations of the publishing industry and the expectations of others and into the refuge of language.
Robin Coste Lewis Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems Knopf
“Once, I thought I was a person with a body, the body of something peering out, enchanted and tossed.” –from “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari”
How it began: Actually, I began writing poetry because of a very serious accident that left me with permanent traumatic brain injury. At one point in my recovery (because reading, writing, and speaking made me very symptomatic), my doctors told me I could only read one sentence a day, only write one sentence a day. After that shock began to wear off, I decided to use their prognosis as a formal writing restraint. I spent many months not trying to write a poem, but trying to write only one very fine line. It sounds romantic, but it wasn’t. At first, I was profoundly depressed. After years of teaching literature and writing, what was a life without books? Writing a line a day was an experience in tremendous discipline. It was thrilling to work again, yes, but to work silently in bed for hours, without writing or typing, working just inside my head, was also very macabre. Slowly, my illness became a sort of game. I’d find the milk in the oven and crack up laughing. It was pure poetry, brain damage. It was profoundly humbling.
In short, all those skills artists must acquire—stillness, concentration, discipline, compression, wrestling with the ego, all of it—walked in the door, hand in hand, with brain damage. That’s the real story behind my book. Poetry was the means by which I learned to reenter the world after traumatic brain injury. What compelled me to write was the desire to continue living an engaged life. Poetry allowed me to reenter my work, but from a different door.
Inspiration: Epic literature, especially Sanskrit epics and comparative mythology. I’m also quite nuts about Sanskrit court poetry. Another court I love to visit is the royal kingdom of jazz. What both Sanskrit poetry and jazz have in common, I think, is their mysterious and masterful use of silence, their ability to achieve their goal by laying it on thick while pulling way back simultaneously. Any art form that can balance sublime expression with tacit restraint has me from hello. I’m also inspired deeply by individual, quiet responses to history. I love the historical nerd-freak no one wants to research because they are too strange or eccentric or unconventional to make anyone proud. I am compelled by people who simply do their work, whatever that might be, quietly. Quiet devotion is a primary source of inspiration for me, however that manifests. I usually find much of that in the colored ancient world. And then, of course, I swing the other way toward that entire, ongoing waterfall of post-modern, post-colonial, often queer, cultural production, which makes me just swoon.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Honestly, I have never reached an impasse with my writing. My impasse is that I can’t stop writing. It’s not cute. I’m completely hypergraphic. This is not to say, however, that any of the madness I write is any good. I merely mean to saythat not being able to write isn’t my issue. However, what occurs before writing—that’s where my demons skip and play rope. I used to think the longest road I’ve ever traveled was from my bed to my desk. All of those voices inside my head that tell me, “No, you can’t say…” or, “No, you better not…” or, “What would [fill in the blank] do or say or think?” I don’t know how to describe this, but I know it had something to do with being born in the sixties, being a child in the sixties and witnessing just heinous experiences without any true developmental ability to articulate it. We all had a profound sense of injustice growing up. It was impossible not to feel that, watching profound degradation so common it felt like air. Our education was a travesty. So just holding a pencil when I was younger was very difficult for me. No one took our minds seriously. As a child, all I had heard was that, historically, I, as an African American, was not believed to possess a real mind; or I, like my ancestors, only had three-fifths of a brain. I mean, lest we forget, our bodies were once dissected, literally. So my struggle has never been within language. Language has always, always, been a refuge.
What has never felt natural, however, is this sickening history wherein bodies like mine were positioned to play the role of buffoon. It’s a rare moment indeed that I pick up my pen and do not immediately remember that in America it was considered illegal for black bodies to read and write. Just holding a pencil for me is deliciously transgressive. So history is my impasse—nothing else. What keeps me going? The work of others. Others, definitely.
Writing Prompt: When I was at Harvard, Jamaica Kincaid once said in our workshop, “Write about that which most embarrasses you.” I think that’s profoundly good advice. It’s so easy, isn’t it, to climb atop a soapbox and recite a poem about the ways in which we believe the world is fucked up? When I write that way, I’m certain all I’m doing is insulting my reader. Who, for example, doesn’t know the whole world is in cinders? And so I believe my work can be more effective, can reach deeper inside the reader if I say, “It is I who feel profoundly fucked up,” and then explore why meticulously. I like to use tenderness as a weapon, a seduction, a door to leave ajar so that my reader will walk inside the poem and feel safe, even in the face of profound historical horror. Trust me, I’m not saying all poems should begin with shame or embarrassment as a motivation, not by any means. I like writing all kinds of poems in all kinds of forms. I’m simply saying that instead of using writing prompts, I sometimes ask myself, “Well, what are you most avoiding?” And for me that’s a good place to begin.
Advice: I’m not sure I’m the right person to give advice about first books. I am fifty-one after all. Don’t get me wrong, I love my age, and I love that I’m just now publishing my first book, but it seems as if the “debut” has become a sort of genre, a particular ideal regarding what constitutes a first collection. I’ve known for a long while that my work has never fit into that schematic. My book, primarily, is about the history of race and Western art. It’s an experiment in archive. It’s not really what first-book publishers are looking for. Also, many debut prizes and grants have age limits or requirements. So by the time I settled into raising my son and finding my place in my work, my writing was already disqualified from even applying because I was older. Ultimately, it’s worked out just fine. And anyways, I don’t think I really had much to offer any reader when I was thirty-five. I was a mess. What could I have done with a page at thirty-five besides romanticize being a thirty-five-year-old mess? I am more of a tortoise than a hare. I like what taking my time reveals.
Also, I adamantly don’t believe that because one writes it follows naturally that one must also publish. I’ve written books for one person, and shared it only with that sublime audience of one. I’ve burned others. Virginia Woolf said rather famously that writing is a far greater pleasure than being read. I’m from that camp, I think. I’m deeply suspicious of the market.
So, I guess this is a long way of saying that if I have any advice to poets trying to publish their first book it’s this: Try not to look up too often at what others are doing. Your work is interesting because it’s yours, not because of where it lands in the publishing world. Ignore literary fashions and stay close to your own hand. Try not to please anyone or any particular audience. Find out what the real work is inside of you, then find the courage to do it well. Resist the temptation to be clever. It’s sexy, but it’s a sure sign that your mask has control of you, and not the other way around. Just do your work.
What’s next: I’m revising the other two manuscripts I finished while at New York University. The first, “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness,” is about the Arctic and its history of both colonialism and exploration. I use this history as an allegory for post-colonial desires for subjectivity. Besides the circumpolar diaspora and the history of expansionism, the book pivots primarily around African American Arctic explorer Matthew Henson. Henson codiscovered the North Pole, but was reluctantly given historical credit, due to race relations not only in the United States, but in the sciences specifically. I’m also revising another collection that I also began at NYU, a project titled “The Pickaninny Wins!,” a double-erasure of a 1931 children’s book originally titled The Pickaninny Twins.
Age: 51.
Hometown: Compton, California.
Residence: Los Angeles.
Job: I’m a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Southern California. It’s a hybrid PhD, so I do both creative and critical work. That is, I write poetry, and research-wise, I work on the historical relationship between African American photography and African American poetry.
Does your job allow time to write? Is this a serious question?
Time spent writing the book: All in all, the whole book probably took five or six years—with brain damage and a new child thrown in for good measure.
Alicia Jo Rabins Divinity School American Poetry Review (Honickman First Book Prize)
“Let me teach you about beauty: a slanted shipwreck draped in its own torn sails.” –from “The Magic”
How it began: I am obsessed with a few consistent themes: how weird it is to live in time; the magic of teaching and learning; the closeness and distance between people; and the mysteries of living in a body, like sex, love, travel, food, beauty, death.
Inspiration: Ancient Jewish texts are a huge influence and inspiration for me: the practical, the mystical, and especially the intersection of the two. I also draw on yoga, ritual, and spiritual practice in general. Music is a big part of my life too—both the experience of making music in many different genres and touring itself have defined and marked my life. Kenneth Koch taught me, in college, not to take myself too seriously in my poems. New York City inspired me tremendously for years, and since moving to Portland I’ve been inspired by the forests and plants, the weeds in my garden. Having children is immense and mind-blowing and inspiring, and I draw a lot of inspiration from my dreams as well.
Influences: Anne Carson, James Joyce (Ulysses in particular), Sylvia Plath, Christopher Smart, John Donne, J. S. Bach, Pablo Neruda, Laurie Anderson, Harryette Mullen, Brenda Shaughnessy, Julio Cortázar, Lucille Clifton, Yoko Ono. And so many of my contemporaries and friends, whom I won’t name for fear of inevitably leaving some out.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Because I usually write in a stream-of-consciousness mode and edit later, I don’t really experience impasses. Something is always happening, even if it’s only the breath. I did stop writing for three years in my early twenties, though. I had studied poetry intensely in college and felt like I had strained my reading and writing muscle, and that my relationship to writing was too ego-based and needed a dramatic reset. I completely let writing go and promised myself I would only start again if it returned naturally, without any pressure or ambition or intention. I was glad when it came back a few years later, and my relationship to poetry was transformed. I guess it’s important to me to maintain some paradoxical mix of being stubbornly devoted to poetry, enough to forge ahead despite setbacks and rejections and silence, while also holding the whole endeavor lightly.
Advice: The best advice I ever got was at an artist training from Creative Capital: If you aren’t getting rejected from 90 percent of the things you apply to, you aren’t aiming high enough. It flipped the script for me so that rejections meant I was doing my job, rather than failing at it. Along the same lines, I try to separate the work of being an artist into two parts: my writing self, who is sensitive and passionate and all that stuff, and my personal assistant self, who just sits down with a cup of coffee and submits poems without any emotional investment. Or, to put it briefly, play the long game.
What’s next: I’m writing my second book of poetry, about motherhood and giving birth and gardening and midwifery goddesses and how psychedelic the whole experience of pregnancy, birth, and early parenthood is. I’m also touring with my songwriting project Girls in Trouble(we just released our third album), and with my solo chamber-rock opera A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. AndI’m slowly moving towards writing a nonfiction book I’ve been mulling over for a while now.
Age: 38.
Hometown: I was born in Portland, Oregon, and grew up in Towson, Maryland. I also lived in New York City and Northampton, Massachusetts, for years and they both feel like home.
Residence: Portland, Oregon.
Job: I patch together a living between my work as a writer, musician, composer, performer, and teacher of Torah. As Eileen Myles says, “There are so many different packages for the same energy to travel through.”
Does your job allow time to write? This isn’t an easy question for me to answer. On the one hand, I’d love more focused time to write, but on the other hand, the line between “writing” and “job” is blurry in my life—songwriting is part of how I make my living, for example—and I have always written in the nooks and crannies of my day. Also, for the record, I find that being a parent of two young children demands more consistent presence of mind than any job I’ve ever had, and (alongside all the great stuff) is therefore more of a challenge for me in terms of writing time.
Time spent writing the book: The oldest poem in the book is eighteen years old and, amazingly, in exactly the same form it was in when I wrote it in college. It wasn’t originally part of the book, but I added it back in somewhere during the editing process. The rest of them were written over the past twelve or so years, though almost all of them were continually revised while I submitted and resubmitted the manuscript. It almost feels like two different processes—eighteen years of writing the poems and seven of intentionally editing the manuscript. Wow, that’s a long time.
Time spent finding a home for it: Five years, though I edited it throughout, so it was a very different book by the end.
Three favorite words: Amethyst. Sage. Antediluvian.
Alicia Jo Rabins reads “How To Travel” featuring the face of Alicia McDaid. Video by Zak Margolis on Vimeo. Check out another recent reading Rabins gave in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as part of the Poetry in America series.
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Jay Deshpande Love the Stranger YesYes Books
“But we will never have enough of being wrong about the other, not once.” –from “Amor Fati”
How it began: The earliest pieces of the book came together during my MFA, but it had a very different form and was wrapped around a couple series of poems that ultimately didn’t belong. I’ve always been drawn towards the love poem and lyric descriptions of beauty, but in that period I began to experiment more with the unfamiliar and the disturbing. I found my poems coming alive at the moments when the erotic and the alien braided together. At some point I started to see how the loss of the beloved is not just an occasion for utterance, but also an opportunity for greater reckoning with what it means to be human, and alone, and therefore deeply connected. Following these themes, I wrote a chapbook called “Love the Stranger” shortly after grad school; it was another year before I realized that it held the keys to this book.
Inspiration: Visually, René Magritte’s work was an essential influence on the book. Also middle-period Federico Fellini. Denis Johnson’s poems have always been a major touchstone for me, and they helped to shape parts of Love the Stranger. Environmentally, I took great inspiration from a residency at the Saltonstall Arts Colony in upstate New York. A lot of unseen and necessary work happened there in the woods and on the trails.
Influences: Denis Johnson, Marie Howe, Timothy Donnelly, Ben Lerner, Lyn Hejinian, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Ashbery, Bianca Stone, Richard Siken, Lucie Brock-Broido, E. M. Forster, Marilynne Robinson. Among visual artists, Dorothea Tanning’s work in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and Diana Al-Hadid’s sculptures.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I have long conversations with my brother, who is a musician and writer, about why we do what we do. I reread Michael Ondaatje. I think about Frank Ocean’s songwriting. I play old standards on the piano and explore chords until I remember that some parts of experience stay blissfully outside of words. And then I go spend time with the people I love and try to learn from them. I’ve also found that I have trouble writing when my work has moved away from the physicality of pencil and paper for too long. Then I’ll print out a number of pages of poetry (mine and others’) and mark them up excessively.
Writing Prompt: Just to get the lede out and free things up, I like to take an old poem of mine and perform a phonetic English-to-English mistranslation on it. “I, too, dislike it” becomes “Why’d you ignite this?”; “A certain slant of light” becomes “The skirt and pants of night,” etc. The goal is to keep the music and change everything else.
Advice: Read widely and make it your job to really consider the character of different presses: what’s the range of authors they publish, what qualities and ideas do their books seem to value, how do their books feel in your hands.
What’s next: In addition to writing individual poems to push my voice in new directions, I’m at work on an essay collection and a book of translations of the Egyptian poet Georges Henein.
Age: 31.
Hometown: Boston.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I write for Slate and other magazines.
Does your job allow time to write? It’s a constant navigation, but at the moment it works pretty well.
Time spent writing the book: About five years.
Time spent finding a home for it: It took one year; I sent it to six places. It was a finalist for the 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize, and then was accepted by YesYes Books during its open reading period.
Three favorite words:These kinds of lists always make me squirmy! But if it’s absolutely necessary: sandwiches; flensing; and, if it can count as one word, chocolate milk.
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Hannah Sanghee Park The Same-Different Louisiana State University Press (Walt Whitman Award)
“Just what they said about the river: rift and ever.
And nothing was left for the ether there either.” –from “Bang”
How it began: I had a lengthy first manuscript I was editing and sending out, and wanted a change of pace and page. I was aiming for concision. At the book’s inception, I was researching myth and folklore in Korea, in the hopes that I would write a manuscript about stories. I found that a lot of Korean stories had counterparts elsewhere (with its own cultural DNA), and that mix of universality and specificity was compelling. But at its simplest, the book is a paean to what comprises storytelling—language, in its words, sounds, imagery, and meanings. It was at the end of my research that I found H. D.’s Trilogy. I kept these H. D. lines on a Post-It above me as I wrote: “her book is our book; written / or unwritten, its pages will reveal // a tale of a Fisherman, / a tale of a jar or jars, // the same—different—the same attributes, / different yet the same as before.”
Inspiration: International folklore, fairy tales, and mythology—shape-shifters, hybrids, dualities, and metamorphoses. The same could be said about language as well—how it shifts, morphs, steals, and fractures through time. I’ve always loved form, prosody, and wordplay. When I started writing: H. D., James Baldwin, and Marina Tsvetaeva. The letters of Philip Larkin, John Keats, and Sylvia Plath. The bulk of it: everyone mentioned, Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Merrill, Samuel Beckett, a physical dictionary and thesaurus. Poetry by my friends and mentors. The editing and the end—Don Mee Choi and Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman. And in full circle, I turned back to H. D., Baldwin, and Tsvetaeva in different forms—short stories, plays, and nonfiction. When I was finishing the book, I was also learning how to write screenplays, which was helpful in economy and setting. But the running fount has always been the communities I’ve been lucky to be a part of. Wherever I go, I have met brilliant people who make me a better writer: professors, colleagues, peers. The book was written in Korea, Washington, New Hampshire, and California, and the natural landscapes influenced the book’s backdrop.
Influences: This is an ongoing, disparate anthology, so to keep it short—other than the poets I’ve mentioned above, my immediate community is always influential. Since moving to Los Angeles, I’ve been stunned by these local powerhouses: Kima Jones, Blas Falconer, Ashaki Jackson, Marci Vogel, and others. And the many poets I’ve met and hope to meet who are keeping poetry alive. Recently, the students in the 2015 Poetry Out Loud Competition inspired me—I experienced familiar poems in new ways.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I read, or watch films or TV. I used to be a night writer, and my excuse was that there were no distractions—I’m off work, everyone around me has gone to sleep. But sometimes I need to clean, cook, decide now’s the time to take up a new activity, and then write. As if expending all this other energy, or resting my mind allows the mind to reset. Writing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and open dialogue is necessary. I call people—usually my writing partner, Jane Shim—to discuss ideas. What keeps me going is the belief that even if writing is frustrating or maddening, it’s ultimately worth it. Petrarch: “And so desire carries me along.” And caffeine, too. Getting the ball rolling in the right direction sometimes feels Sisyphean, but when it starts, the speed and the growth is euphoric. No distraction is great enough. Writing is like a labyrinth. Sometimes there’s a reward at the end of it; sometimes you’re pursued by Sallie Mae and her Echidna spawn Navient. But nothing feels better than actually moving through it.
Writing Prompt: How much a word can be dissected, rearranged, and reimagined—imagined etymologies, defamiliarization, constraint-based writing. In short, the intersection of structure and play.
Advice: Keep reading, writing, rewriting, and sending, even when it seems like there’s a void. Dream big (a bromide that’s useful), and go there. That’s what I needed to hear in the publication process. Every time my writing boomerangs back to me, there’s a chance to reassess my work and my thoughts. I know form rejection boilerplate, but I also know the generous people in my life who have cheered me on. Having both rejection and support provides a kind of ballast. Knowing why you write despite x is invaluable—the pure joy of creating is as powerful as the final creation.
What’s next: Writing scripts, rewriting scripts, treatments, short stories, and starting a new poetry book.
Age: 29.
Hometown: Federal Way, Washington.
Residence: Los Angeles.
Job: Freelance writer.
Does your job allow time to write? Yes, but personal writing requires juggling. It’s a constant turning of a lazy Susan—a little here, a pass there, but all that matters is movement.
Time spent writing the book: For this book specifically, about one and a half to two years. It was fast because I had the luxury of a fellowship and a residency. I did a two-month residency at the MacDowell Colony (paradise) where I kept to a tight schedule. I woke up early, ate breakfast, and went back to my Internet-less studio and wrote. As I ate lunch, I read. Then I wrote until dinner. When I came back from unwinding, I’d write until I needed to sleep. Rinse and repeat. I’m naturally lazy, so I need this kind of structure. The bulk of the book was written then, because most of the day could be devoted to writing. However, a poem I wrote about five years ago made it in as well—a long-lost relative finding her family.
Time spent finding a home for it: Before this book, I sent my first manuscript out for about four to five years. When I was satisfied with The Same-Different, the plan was to send to a few places each cycle, as I was on a tight budget. But I lucked out, and The Same-Different was accepted in its first submission round.
Three favorite words: Cleave, move, empathy.
Hannah Sanghee Park reads from The Same-Different at the Academy of American Poets’s 2014 Poets Forum Awards Ceremony.
Jonathan Fink The Crossing Dzanc Books
“The bodies hang like chimes within the boughs. Perhaps the height is welcome to the dead” –from “The Crossing”
How it began: What poetry offers, and what set me off writing this book, is the visceral engagement with language that welcomes attention to imagery, tone, rhythm, narrative, metaphor, politics, ethics, humor, myth, and justice, among many other things. Like a painter who simply likes the smell of paint or a potter who likes the feel of clay, the pleasure of embarking on a writing project, for me, always resides in the tactile pleasures of language.
Inspiration: W. H. Auden has a great line, “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings,” and I often feel inspired to write about personal, imagined, or historical material about which I have mixed feelings. The poems in The Crossing vary from an eighteen-section poem about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire to individual poems about myth, art, and my personal experience growing up in West Texas. In all cases, I was inspired to write these poems not because I knew what I wanted to say about the subjects, but because I felt compelled to explore and investigate the complicated material through poetry.
Influences: Too many to name, of course, although I would say, of contemporary poets, Jane Kenyon for the singular, resonate image; Marie Howe for book structure and thematic commitment; and B. H. Fairchild for lyrical, narrative expansiveness. I’ve also been immensely fortunate to work with wonderful writing mentors and teachers, including Natasha Trethewey, Mary Karr, George Saunders, Junot Díaz, Brooks Haxton, Michael Burkard, and Robert Flynn—all stunning writers who are unfailingly generous, constructive, and kind.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Raymond Carver defined a writer as someone who is willing to stare at something longer than anyone else. For me, that experience has been true; there is no trick to overcoming a writing impasse other than continuing to return to what I’ve written, looking for unexplored possibilities and/or unfulfilled expectations.
Advice: Submit to your obsessions, whatever they are. Resistance is futile. An honestly obsessive collection always resonates much more fully with a reader or editor than a collection constructed with an eye toward the market or some imagined palatable consensus. Remember that a camel is a horse designed by a committee.
What’s next: Dzanc is bringing out a finished second collection of my poetry, a book-length sonnet sequence titled, “Barbarossa: The German Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Siege of Leningrad.” I’m also nearing completion of a nonfiction collection primarily consisting of place-based immersive and investigative essays. Some topics include the fracking boom in Midland, Texas; the D. B. Cooper plane hijacking and parachute jump; the changing scope of U.S.–Cuba relations; and the failings and successes of the criminal justice system as seen through the lens of an assault trial in Pensacola, Florida; among other essays. I’m also working on new individual poems.
Age: 40.
Hometown: Abilene, Texas.
Residence: Pensacola, Florida.
Job: Associate professor and director of creative writing at the University of West Florida.
Does your job allow time to write? Yes, in the sense that my job contributes to the conditions that help make writing possible, but no job has ever prevented me from writing if I felt compelled to write.
Time spent writing the book: Approximately six years.
Time spent finding a home for it: Another six years after finishing and publishing the individual poems.
Jonathan Fink reads from The Crossing, published by Dzanc Books.
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Rickey Laurentiis Boy With Thorn University of Pittsburgh Press (Cave Canem Poetry Prize)
“I want to be released from it. I want its impulses stunned to lead. This body. Its breath. Let it. Let the whole pageant end.” –from “One Country”
How it began: I think about a friend and fellow poet, Phillip B. Williams, with whom I shared a suite at my first Cave Canem retreat in the summer of 2008. He had a manuscript then (actually several), but wouldn’t share it with me to read until I had something manuscript-length to share with him. So, that’s what I think Cave Canem must mean by fellowship: that kind of camaraderie, support, and push, however hard. I eventually did produce a manuscript and shared it with Phillip, but it was one very different in many ways from the Boy With Thorn that would eventually find publication. We helped shaped each other’s books along through the many years, but more importantly we helped compel each other’s poems. Poems first.
Inspiration: I’m likely to be inspired by anything in the right context: an overheard conversation on the street, a song, literary criticism, philosophy, a personal experience or, as is most present in my book, visual art. I was profoundly influenced and inspired by a course I took while at Sarah Lawrence College—queer theory, with Julie Abraham. That course threw a hammer into my ways of thinking. And not because it attempted to rebuild the pieces (although, in some ways, it did), but because it made me more aware of the pieces themselves and the various social/political discourses that have shaped them.
Influences: Here are some artists: Glenn Ligon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Björk, Piero della Francesca, Wangechi Mutu, Georgia O’Keeffe, David Bailly, Kara Walker, Edgar Degas, Judy Chicago, Yoko Ono, Jay DeFeo, Caravaggio, Auguste Rodin, Romare Bearden, Frida Kahlo, Anonymous. And I remain deeply influenced, in particular, by Jessye Norman’s rendition of “Deep River,” which she sung at a special concert with Kathleen Battle at Carnegie Hall in 1990 and most of which you can find recorded on YouTube.
Writer’s Block Remedy: My obsessions keep me going. I think about visual art and how, in the example of an artist like Mark Rothko, who explores the same terrain canvas after canvas, or at least seems to, I learned to recognize and trust my obsessions: the images, concepts, figures, and motifs that repeat in my head. Obsessions are ideas that I can at least remember are there at those anxious moments I’m willing to believe in a thing like “writer’s block.” But writer’s block, simply speaking, doesn’t exist if one’s willing to look back at all one has done and, realizing knowledge is always limited, thinks, “Nope, I need to try this again.” I still believe that.
Writing Prompt: Outside of what I offer to my students, I’m not sure I think about writing in terms of prompts, at least not thematic ones. If I chose any, they’re usually prompts that put restraints on the form or structure of the poem. A part of me vaguely remembers diagramming sentences as a young Catholic school student and so, in some ways, that finds itself in the pleasure I get from trying to sustain a single sentence over the course of a poem, or at least over several lines. There’s something about that exercise that seems dancerly to me, rhythmic.
Advice: So, there are thirty-three poems in my book—but that doesn’t mean I only wrote thirty-three poems. Of course I wrote way more than that at various stages in my growth and education as a poet—some that made the cut; some that I realize were the equivalent of a pianist practicing her scales; some that only exist as a single ghost line in another poem; some that might eventually find a home in a future collection, who knows. My point is to say that the process takes time, so much time, and, while I’m a fan of putting artificial restraints on a poem so as to get to more creative uses of language, I’m not a fan of artificial time restraints on publication. Just as I think that there’s something potentially problematic in knowing too much about what a poem is about when starting, so too I think there’s a problem in trying to know or demand when you should publish a book. Let the book tell you. And when it does send only to places that carry books you can’t live without.
What’s next: What they don’t tell you is that the second your first book is accepted for publication at a press (or wins a contest), let alone when it is physically published and released, all the poems you begin to write suddenly sound in a slightly different key, so to speak. The poems are suddenly working under the slight burden of knowledge that they may one day become (or that you need them to become) a second (or third or fourth) book. I am working hard now to try to get back to the kind of specific ignorance one writes from before the first book gets published: when you’re simply writing poem by poem because of some insistence that you have to; this poem must be written, alone, individual, not as a sequence necessarily, not because of some “theme” or “project,” but simply because it demands itself to be written, and for you to write and learn by it.
Age: 26.
Hometown: New Orleans.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Currently, I teach a course at Columbia University and at the Saturday Program at the Cooper Union. I’m also the director of an after-school writing and literacy program at the Harlem Children’s Zone.
Does your job allow time to write? No—but that’s a good thing. When I’ve been fortunate enough to be invited to some residencies, for instance, I’ve found that the sudden surplus of free, unstructured time can do harm to my writing process, insofar as I begin to occupy my time in other ways besides writing new work. Residences are great for editing older drafts or for ordering a book. But it’s in the gaps, in the minutes I steal when I’m on a crowded subway, when I’m in a less-than-exciting meeting or when I should be asleep, for example, that I find myself writing the most new material.
Time spent writing the book: The earliest poem in the book I wrote as a first-year at Sarah Lawrence College for a class (my first poetry class ever!) with Suzanne Gardinier. That was in the fall of 2007. The last poem I wrote that was also included in the book was written somewhere in late January/early February of 2014, after having seen one of my favorite Basquiat paintings in the flesh in a exhibit in New Orleans earlier that Christmas. So it would seem, then, that it took seven years to write all thirty-three poems that comprise Boy With Thorn (it took two years, alone, to complete one in particular). I was born on February 7. Seven’s always been my favorite number.
Time spent finding a home for it: Maybe about a year after Phillip first brought the idea to my mind that I could write toward a manuscript, I sent it out to a handful of contests. To my surprise, the manuscript was honorably mentioned for Red Hen Press’s Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. But I’ll remind you that this manuscript I’m referring to was, in significant ways, still very different from the book I would come to publish. After that, somehow, and quite suddenly, I wasn’t interested so much in rushing towards book publication. I concerned myself with the quality of the poems themselves, and with seeing them enter the world individually. So there was a large gulf of time when I didn’t submit a single manuscript to any contest or publisher, which mostly paralleled my graduation from Sarah Lawrence and matriculation into the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis. A year after I had received my MFA and had moved back to New York City, I sent my new manuscript to at least two publishers and four contests—four specific contests that either had a history of awarding books I admire or were being judged by poets I greatly enjoy. I didn’t get as much as a nod from three of them but, again to my surprise, I won one! And that it was the Cave Canem Prize just seemed so coming-full-circle perfect! Anyway, depending on how you read this narrative, you can say it took several years to find a publisher, or only a few months.
Rickey Laurentiis reads two poems from Boy With Thorn, published by University of Pittsburgh Press.
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Natalie Scenters-Zapico The Verging Cities Center for Literary Publishing
“You forgot to weed your eyes,so brush has grown wild in your stare.” –from “When the Desert Made Us Visible”
How it began: Homesickness. I wrote most of these poems while I was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I felt deeply haunted by things in my past that I had spent a lot of time ignoring: femicide, narco-violence, and the effect our broken immigration system had on me and the people around me. Suddenly, I felt compelled to face these things in a way I had never had an interest in before. For some reason, being away from the site of my liminality gave me the bravery to voice what had been silenced in me for so long. I also became very interested in the ways that people who are not from El Paso–Juárez were representing my border cities in art and pop culture. I wanted to write down my love affair with a place so often depicted as violent and corrupt.
Inspiration: The drive from Albuquerque to El Paso, Texas, and from Ciudad Juárez to Chihuahua was a huge source of inspiration. I would also drive the border freeway and take in that space, that in-between space, that illusion that is so physically damaging. And, of course, late-night conversations with my husband who is a border-rhetorics scholar, and who for most of our relationship was undocumented. When we fell in love, we also fell in love with each other’s pain, and the two cities that held us suspended in that pain.
Influences: While working on the collection: David Dorado Romo’s Ringside Seat to a Revolution, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Norma Elia Cantú’s Canícula, Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 spent a lot of time on my desk. These books deeply influenced the way that I conceive of borders and of my sister cities, El Paso–Ciudad Juárez. I also spent time with Federico García Lorca, Miguel Hernández, Anna Kamieńska’s notebooks, Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, Rigoberto González, Alberto Ríos, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I cook something that takes a while to make, but that I know how to make well. The repetitive motions of cooking keep me grounded in the body, but allow me the freedom to let my mind wander. I also like knowing that many women before me spent so much time in that domestic space, and I remind myself how important it is that I choose to be there, but that I don’t have to be there.
Writing Prompt: I spend a lot of time looking at the art books for the Bienal Ciudad Juárez–El Paso art shows, and then writing ekphrastic poems or flash fictions. It keeps me connected to where I’m from while helping me to see the border in new ways.
Advice: It is as important to know what you’re trying to accomplish in your collection as it is to know what it actually accomplishes. Sometimes placing your own will on a collection is the worst thing you can do.
What’s next: I’m in the early stages of working on the next book, which deals with border-security technologies, surveillance, and weapons. I’m interested in depictions of violence, how we consume that violence, and render that violence in art.
Age: 27.
Hometown: El Paso, Texas.
Residence: Salt Lake City.
Job: I teach high school English and creative writing.
Does your job allow time to write? It is always a struggle for me to write as a high school teacher. I have to schedule time for me to physically sit at my desk and write.
Time spent writing the book: It took me four years of obsessively writing and revising in constant rotation.
Time spent finding a home for it: One year.
Three favorite words: Sobremesa, cariño, and teeth.
Natalie Scenters-Zapico reads from The Verging Cities, published by The Center for Literary Publishing.
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Corina Copp The Green Ray Ugly Duckling Presse
“Let rest here my lyre and Hear soon the moon’s fair Lecture in black” –from “Pro Magenta”
How it began: I was reading Mark Ford’s biography of Raymond Roussel when I first came across mention of the green ray. In the same month, I saw Éric Rohmer’s Le rayon vert, and I attended a François Laruelle lecture. The notes from all three came to be the poem “Pro Magenta,” which set me into thinking about synchronicity and how I compose. The wheels of the actual manuscript were put into motion a few years later, when Ugly Duckling Presse editor Abraham Adams proposed a book project.
Inspiration: These poems range in composition date from 2010 to 2015, so what resonates now as far as inspiration goes is a list that I’ll spare you—but they are distinct, and each poem holds one or another source (or many simultaneously) in (I hope) different ways. Jean Day’s Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium was formative for me when thinking about devotion and source materials and how to think and write alongside inspiration itself, to construe it as an interlocutor, or a threat, or a friend, or a fetish, etc.
Influences: When I first started seriously writing poetry, I was reading Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Laura Riding Jackson; and I was obsessed with Alice Notley and Carla Harryman. Then Miles Champion introduced me to Tom Raworth and Jean Day—they both had a big impact. I had another turn when I really read Lisa Robertson, who led me to read Hannah Arendt. Richard Maxwell, the playwright, was another turning point; and the work of Big Dance Theater, Thomas Bradshaw, Kristen Kosmas. For a few years now, Ingeborg Bachmann, Marguerite Duras. And my friends are influential. They’re all brilliant. Can I say brilliant?
Writer’s Block Remedy: I’m easily comforted and astonished. By that turn from feeling like New York City’s rag doll, in particular; from that real desire to leave my life and start a new one; from that exhaustion; from walking into a diner or taking a train. I have to be in that place to write; I have to have a connection to future good feeling in general if I expect myself to write. Also: film and bibliomancy, both. Or Robert Ashley, an example. Opening to pages/sounds/images of work that I love will always help. Going to the library, feeling overwhelmed. But I can go for months without writing; I am often waiting to feel angry, or any emotional event, or just a deadline to push me. But accepting the stretches of not writing is okay, too. I mean: If I feel alert and awake and thoughtful and without remorse, then I am listening, which for me is also writing. I compulsively transcribe overheard dialogue or I note exchanges between people or how they are physically positioned. If I’ve gone months without this sort of openness, then I’m probably depressed and not writing. To help me accept that, I remember something Doris Lessing said—to paraphrase, you must use these energies while you have them, you will lose them; you are more clever now than you will be later. Terrifying.
Writing Prompt: Feeling constrained.
Advice: I took a strange route, and had faith I’d eventually get to work with people who cared about the poems. Having faith in those relationships is important.
What’s next: I’m working on an essay/score that reads and writes through the reading of the painter Alan Reid. The piece will appear in a monograph of his work that should be out in the spring.
Age: 36.
Hometown: I was born in Lawrence, Kansas, and grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and New Orleans.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I usually have two to three part-time jobs. I am currently a staff writer for the Poetry Foundation, I freelance copyedit and proofread, and I coordinate a master’s program in international finance and economic policy at Columbia University.
Does your job allow time to write? I’ve made it this far. But the answer is no, not at all. I would always prefer to be writing, to put it gently.
Time spent writing the book: About four or five years.
Time spent finding a home for it: I was very, very lucky in that Ugly Duckling approached me for the book. This was initially around 2012 or 2013, but I still had to finish writing it. We changed the date of publication a few times. They were patient with me.
Three favorite words: “Mom” and “or” and “Dad.”
Corina Copp reads an early version of her poems from The Green Ray, published by Ugly Duckling Presse, for the sixth Antibody Series in 2014.
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Morgan Parker Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night Switchback Books (Gatewood Prize)
“If I hear you’re talking shit about me in your confessional interview, please know seven birds have fallen dead at my feet right out of the sky.” –from “If My Housemate Fucks With Me I Would Get So Real (Audition Tape Take 1)”
How it began: This book started as my MFA thesis at NYU. It was embarrassingly large—something like 120 pages—so I spent the summer after graduation editing it, reordering it, and trimming it down in preparation for sending it out to contests and presses. The first book is a weird thing—mine contains some of the first poems I ever wrote, back in college. Of course, when I was writing those, I had no idea I was writing a book. I was playing around with new forms and registers and confessions, and it was only in grad school that I started thinking about the poems as a collection. There isn’t a “project” in this book, there isn’t a linear narrative or one central event, so in conceptualizing the book, I spent a lot of time thinking about my obsessions, taking in a lot of art and TV and movies and music and poems, and meditating on the themes they have in common.
Inspiration: Television. The Real World and The Real Housewives franchises have been particularly inspirational for me—something about the strangeness and boldness of reality TV, its dark comedy, is a really important lens in my work. Jay Z and Beyoncé are also super important figures in my work—or rather, symbols of them, the idea of them. In general, media and pop culture always have a lot of space in my poetic brain. They’ve got everything I want to talk about: loneliness, performance, representations of femininity, insecurity, family, sociocultural inequity, glitter.
Influences: My collaborator Angel Nafis; my peers Danez Smith, Charif Shanahan, Nate Marshall, Natalie Eilbert, Rio Cortez, Monica McClure, Wendy Xu (I could go on forever here); my big brother Matthew Rohrer; my poetry auntie Eileen Myles; Terrance Hayes, Tracy K. Smith, Evie Shockley, Matthew Zapruder, Cate Marvin, Anne Sexton, Lucille Clifton, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes; visual artists Mickalene Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Keith Haring, Glenn Ligon, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, William Pope.L.
Writer’s Block Remedy: If I feel stuck, I stop writing for a while. Or I write in another genre for a bit. I read. I go look at art. I have good conversation with friends over wine. Lately I’ve been trying to honor silence rather than being anxious about it. The itchy, restless feeling always comes back; the poems always emerge. I’m realizing more and more that “writing” is only a tiny aspect of writing poetry.
Writing Prompt: Formal poetry. Specifically sonnets and pantoums. Usually, I edit the drafts until they’re unrecognizable as formal poems, but constraint really helps my writing process. Honestly, I see prompts as rules to break, something to rebel against.
Advice: Submit widely, but also be strategic and thoughtful: Don’t submit to a press you aren’t familiar with or whose work you don’t love; don’t submit to a press whose aesthetic isn’t up your alley. A press is really a home for a book—and for you, the poet, as well—so I think it’s important (and often neglected in conversation) to remember the relationship continues past manuscript acceptance. It’s an intimate thing. Also, know that as you’re submitting, you should keep editing. Don’t be so stubborn you can’t see room for improvement. Finally, make the waiting time productive. Write new poems, go to readings, meet new writers, build community.
What’s next: I’m editing my second collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and getting it ready for publication with Tin House Books in 2017. I’m also at work on a young adult novel loosely based on my teen years spent coming to terms with my identity and depression in a conservative, religious suburb—it’s my first foray into fiction, and an exciting challenge. There’s also a rumor floating around that there may be an essay collection in my future.
Age: 28.
Hometown: Highland, California.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Editor for Little A Books and Day One, adjunct assistant professor of undergraduate creative writing at Columbia University.
Does your job allow time to write? Sometimes. I write at night, on the weekends, and in transit (buses, trains, planes). I wish I were one of those people who could wake up and write before work, but I’m a snooze-button person. Ideally, I block out a day each weekend to write or edit. I’ve also been known to take vacation days to hole away uninterrupted.
Time spent writing the book: They were written and edited over the course of five years.
Morgan Parker reads two poems from Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, published by Switchback Books.
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Richie Hofmann Second Empire Alice James Books (Beatrice Hawley Award)
“I have nothing to confess. I don’t yet know that I possess a body built for love.” –from “Idyll”
How it began: I began writing the first poems in this book while I was working on the book collection at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut—a magical, haunted place full of Merrill’s things, his furniture, his books. It was inspiring to inhabit that physical space with the spirit of someone whose art had meant the world to me. His “The Book of Ephraim” was one of the first contemporary poems I loved. To be showering in his shower, sleeping in his bed, staring into that mirror. There, among his art and belongings, my desire to write poetry was given new dramatic force.
Inspiration: Love; sexuality; history; music, especially opera and art song.
Influences: My teachers, foremost. Jorie Graham’s Erosion. Benjamin Britten’s operas and song cycles. Daniel Mendelsohn’s essays. French and Italian poetry in translation. Stephen Sondheim lyrics. Installations by Félix González-Torres.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Sometimes it’s important for me to get outside of poetry, or outside of literature altogether. To listen to music, look at a painting or sculpture or installation, see a concert, attend a lecture on something strange but intriguing. These other arts not only provoke new subjects, but they might offer new ways of thinking formally as well.
Writing Prompt: Write a poem in which your own name is invoked and explored.
Advice: Cut almost everything. Make your book as lean and dynamic as possible. Give yourself time to grow toward and away from poems, and see what new object you can create by subtracting and pruning and chiseling away.
What’s next: My new manuscript of poems explores my family’s history in Germany: my ancestors who owned a small bakery on the Rhine and my own childhood years spent in Munich. It’s about inheritance, history, power, violence, privilege, gender and sexuality, childhood, bookmaking, typography, and Mozart.
Age: 28.
Hometown: Haddon Heights, New Jersey.
Residence: Chicago.
Job: PhD student in English at Emory University in Atlanta.
Does your job allow time to write? It often does—in that reading and researching and working through critical questions is an essential part of writing poetry for me. Though I’d have to say, I like teaching even better, because I find interacting with people (usually) more stimulating than solitary research and writing.
Time spent writing the book: Four to five years.
Time spent finding a home for it: A year and a half.
Three favorite words: Exquisite, please, future.
Dana Isokawa is the assistant editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
The debut has a certain allure: an air of freshness, the promise of an exciting, original voice. Here is the new. Here is something you haven’t yet heard. And while that certainly might be the case with a poetry debut, it can also be true of a poet’s second, fifth, or tenth book—artistic innovation can happen at any stage in a writer’s life. What does make a debut uniquely exciting, though, is its sense of beginning—that the arc of a poet’s career has just begun, that the ball has just been tossed into the air. For our twelfth annual look at debut poets, we asked ten poets to share the inspirations and processes behind their first collections, and what emerged were stories of beginnings: how a book begins and how a poem begins, certainly, but also how a writer’s attraction to poetry begins. “I wanted to know if my sadness could ever be useful,” explains Ocean Vuong. “[It’s the desire] to get closer to whatever it is that’s always just beyond reach or sight,” says Justin Boening. “It was fun,” says Phillip B. Williams.
The ten poets in this year’s feature wrote some of the most compelling debuts published in 2016 and represent a range of styles and backgrounds. From the sparse, demanding elegance of Eleanor Chai’s lyrics, to the irreverent, kaleidoscopic roaming of Tommy Pico’s book-length poem, to the linguistic opulence and sheer nerve of Safiya Sinclair’s work, these ten encompass many of the impulses and registers of contemporary poetry. We asked for their insight on inspiration, publishing, and writing through impasses, and two commonalities—among many—surfaced. One: that inspiration might lie in paying attention to what appears small or insignificant—how Carolina Ebeid will listen to every “little bell” of an Arvo Pärt piano piece for inspiration, how Ari Banias will pursue the feeling elicited by something as minor as the behind-the-knee wrinkles in someone’s pants. And two: the advice to not be in a rush to publish. To take one’s time and question, as Solmaz Sharif does, what it means to be an artist and not just a person who publishes a book. Or to wait, like Jana Prikryl, for the poem to emerge that helps the others fall into place. These poets’ words are a reminder that it’s not a race, but a process of fashioning poems that can connect with the world, that can confront the “roots and wide-ranging shadows of words,” as Safiya Sinclair puts it, and explore language as we know it.
Ari Banias Anybody W. W. Norton
“Mostly a name feels like the crappy overhang I huddle under while rain skims the front of me.
I admit it keeps me visible, the cool compromise of efficient lighting, the agreement to call this that.”
—from “Recognition Is the Misrecognition You Can Bear”
How it began: I wrote Anybody out of the conditions of my life, and out of a will to connect more than divide. I was writing into loneliness and the social, and as a way to be alone with myself while also being and thinking with others. It was a process of concretizing and externalizing those conversations I was having in my head and out loud, with people dead and living, in my life or not, with the culture at large, and with other selves—past, present, future, parallel. As a younger queer writer especially, there were books I needed but couldn’t find, either because no one had published them or because they hadn’t yet been written. So I was probably writing this book, however unconsciously, to address that self, those selves.
Inspiration: The need to counter alienation and death. Humor, my immediate surroundings, memory. Sometimes just wanting to figure out how I felt about something could be enough. Poems could come from a question, an irritation, or even from a desire to get at my response to an object—like, Why does this tree, that I’m fairly certain doesn’t know I exist, evoke deep feeling in me? It’s embarrassing! And, What am I bringing to it—I mean all the baggage (cultural, historical, and otherwise) I’m carting around when I look at a tree (or a broken chair, or the behind-the-knee wrinkles in someone’s pants in front of me in line, or, really, anything) and find myself thrown off by unexpected feeling. As long as I’m attentive and willing to follow through, past what’s easy or comfortable, a poem can start almost anywhere.
In her piece “The Untroubled Mind,” the painter Agnes Martin writes, “Nothing that happens in your life makes inspiration / When your eyes are open / You see beauty in anything.” I’d add that I think of “beauty” here not in the classical sense but more like meaning, importance. Martin [writes later in] this same piece: “The wiggle of a worm as important as the assassination of a president.” They happen in the same world, never entirely independent of one another. And maybe the one I think of as small is in fact enormous. Even if a poem doesn’t directly point at these connections, to keep them near, to refuse to forget or evade them—that did and does inspire me.
Influences: More than I could possibly name. Some voices: Nina Simone, Arthur Russell, Odetta, Elizabeth Cotten, and the rembetika singer Roza Eskenazi. Some books: Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses, James Baldwin’s essays, George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, Brenda Hillman’s Loose Sugar, Lorine Niedecker’s Paean to Place, June Jordan’s Collected Poems, Joy Ladin’s Transmigrations, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “terrible sonnets,” Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Hilton Als’s The Women, Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation, David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives, Guy Davenport’s translations of Archilochos and Sappho. And Roland Barthes, Elizabeth Bishop, Fred Moten, Frank O’Hara, Yannis Ritsos, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Conversations with others ignite and recalibrate me, without fail. A few winters ago I came to a sort of crisis point with poetry. I wasn’t sure how or why, but poems began to repel me—I couldn’t write them, and I could hardly read them. Lineation looked melodramatic and grotesque. I couldn’t stomach even a whiff of solemnity. Poems were like giant echo chambers. Not coincidentally, that was my third year in a row living in fairly isolated circumstances away from loved ones, and I was feeling disconnected. I didn’t know what else to do so I started writing letter-poems to close friends. Immediately detail, texture, and volition returned to the act of writing. It was like the electricity came on again. Somewhere I’d lost the sense of purpose and direction created by that fundamental exchange of one person speaking to another. A good lesson.
Advice: It seems obnoxious to tell people not to get discouraged by how long it takes to publish a book, because it can be a very long time, and who wouldn’t get discouraged? For me publication never seemed a given—only writing did. What I told myself, and still do, is this: Keep working. Follow the shape of your mind’s particulars (its rhythms, its oddities) like a bloodhound, and take the poems as far as you possibly can, so that they are utterly yours, so that you’re writing in that singular way that singular thing no one but you can write. Each time. As Hopkins (whom I’ll take way out of context here) said, “more wreck and less discourse.”
What’s next: Along with writing new poems, I am translating contemporary poets from the Modern Greek. It’s a relief to get outside my own head and work out problems of language and expression through someone else’s poems, while still being in music. And I welcome the different sense of responsibility. Finding my way back into Greek, which was my first language, is also its own private homecoming, with all the associated awkwardness and joy of that.
Age: 38.
Hometown: I was born in Los Angeles, and grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.
Residence: Berkeley, California.
Job: I work at Small Press Distribution.
Time spent writing the book: Nine years.
Time spent finding a home for it: I started sending out a mess of consecutively numbered pages I thought was a book nine years ago. The early drafts look very little like what came to be published. It took about four years of sending out versions of what’s now the book before it was accepted.
Ocean Vuong Night Sky With Exit Wounds Copper Canyon Press
“There is so much I need to tell you—but I only earned one life.”
—from “Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown): oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952”
How it began: I wanted to know if my sadness could ever be useful.
Inspiration: Fire escapes. I was walking in New York City one day years ago and saw this big, white fire escape. And I thought to myself, “That’s it. That’s what a poem should do. Be a place where we can move further toward ourselves, which really means moving further toward our fears.” And medical marijuana. And Gushers fruit snacks.
Influences: Li-Young Lee, Federico García Lorca, Frank O’Hara, Yusef Komunyakaa, Arthur Rimbaud, Anne Carson, Emily Dickinson, Matsuo Bashō, Gwendolyn Brooks, Garrett Hongo, Amiri Baraka, Troye Sivan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Thomston, Thao Nguyen, Kobayashi Issa, Etta James, Ben Lerner, Luther Vandross, Michel Foucault, Alexander Chee, Little Richard, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Maggie Nelson, Mark Rothko, Frank Ocean, Bad Future, Whitney Houston, Patsy Cline, Lyoto Machida, C. D. Wright, Amy Winehouse, Yoko Ono, Al Green, Sinn Sisamouth, Childish Gambino, Ralph Stanley, Max Richter, Nils Frahm, Joel P West, James Blake, and Vince Staples.
Writer’s Block Remedy: When I am stuck, I don’t like to force out work or words. I just walk away from the desk—sometimes not returning for weeks at a time. I find a quiet place in the day and stop. If I’m at home, I lie down on the carpet. Then I do this thing where I just say thank you to all the things and people who have helped me. Of course, simply saying thank you does not awaken any creative force; it just reminds me that the work I am doing is not validated by quantity, but rather by the connection it builds between the world and myself. When my own work is not coming along, I try to stop and recognize the people doing the same challenging, at times unforgiving, art—and I feel happy. I think it’s hard, in our day and age, not to think, It’s me against the world, or, I have to do this for my career because everyone else is hammering away and if I stop now, I will fall behind and be forgotten. But that’s a toxic and self-defeating gaze. I think we are more productive—even in stillness—when we can recognize one another, when we say to each other, Thank you for doing this with me. Thank you for carrying on when I cannot.
Advice: Hustling can be good—but make sure what you’re pushing is gold (to you).
What’s next: I’m working on being a better son.
Age: 28.
Hometown: Hartford, Connecticut.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Writer and teacher.
Time spent writing the book: Eight yearsafter believing that I could be a poet. But I think really it took me all of my life.
Time spent finding a home for it: Eight months. I was lucky.
“To all the girls Bernini loved before I’d say, caveat emptor.”
—from “Benvenuto Tisi’s Vestal Virgin Claudia Quinta Pulling a Boat with the Statue of Cybele”
How it began: The book started as individual poems written over about a decade. I was finally galvanized into bringing some of them together by the long sequence that forms the second half of the book, “Thirty Thousand Islands.” The sequence gave me a new way of thinking about loss and literary history and nature and men and Canada and Europe; as it grew I sensed it was a foil to the more ad hoc poems I had written up till then. So the book emerged from this encounter between different forms of poetry, which seems apt since many of my poems tend to spark from the friction between different voices or points of view.
Inspiration: There are some ekphrastic poems in The After Party—one about a great, overlooked Buster Keaton movie, another about a not very good Renaissance painting. I like taking in all kinds of art—especially paintings, photographs, movies—and thinking about its implications, formal and historical. But I’m also taken with something Frank O’Hara once said: “Sometimes I think that writing a poem is such a moral crisis I get completely sick of the whole situation.” What kind of experience or vision or formal experiment can really justify taking up the reader’s time? Parts of my book attempt to think about European history and the ways my own ancestors experienced it; what gives me the authority to speak for those individuals? In other words, what kind of poem could do so? I find these sorts of questions inspiring.
Influences: I don’t feel qualified to name my own influences—and the writing I revere most seems too distant a beacon to enter into my own stuff—but there are writers I’ve loved over so many years they feel like family. I’d include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, John Berryman, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and Don Marquis.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I tend to sit with the impasse, partly because I have a day job and write essays as well (and recently had a baby) so life can throw me off course very easily, and partly because I think impasses are trying to tell me something so it would be imprudent to ignore them.But when I really must go on I get energy from hazelnut gelato; whiskey; the Metropolitan Museum; swimming; dips into Flann O’Brien or Jane Austen or Laurence Sterne; dips into Twitter, which so far is the clearest source of dissent I’ve found against the fascism that the Republican Party is happily riding into power; dear friends whose work is new and great, and conversely random lines in magazines that irritate me. Getting pissed off is, in the absence of anything else, a reliable stimulant.
Advice: Every voice needs something different so it’s unlikely my experience will apply to anyone else. But what’s been most valuable to me is time—to let the words stew, and let myself stew, and in fact resist publication for as long as possible.Once you’re ready I recommend an Excel spreadsheet. Maybe this is common knowledge but it was a revelation to me: A spreadsheet helps to compartmentalize the painful chore of sending things out and really cleanses it of emotion. You just record rejections and can very clearly see where else something might be sent.
What’s next: Mostly diaper changes and tummy times. Occasionally noodling away at things that may or may not make it into a second book.
Age: 41.
Hometown: My teens were spent in Ancaster, Ontario, which feels hometown-iest to me. I was born in Ostrava (in what was then Czechoslovakia), and when I was five my family fled and lived in an Austrian village for a year. From the age of six I grew up in a few towns in southern Ontario—so it’s complicated.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Senior editor at the New York Review of Books.
Time spent writing the book: Too long. But the too-longness varies a lot: One of the poems is around fifteen years old, some started almost a decade ago and had to marinate for years before they were finished, and some were written in half an hour, with minor revision. In general I revise heavily and take long gaps between glances at poems, so I can hear them afresh when I return.
Time spent finding a home for it: I spent a decade avoiding gathering my poems into a manuscript—it felt somehow presumptuous. About a year after I started bringing the poems together, Tim Duggan read my work in the London Review of Books and the New Yorker and got in touch, asking if I had a manuscript. I took a few more months to revise it and once I sent it to him he got back to me quickly. So I’ve been very lazy and very lucky.
Carolina Ebeid You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior Noemi Press
“We live in a copy of Eden, a copy
that depends on violence.”
—from “Albeit”
How it began: The book isn’t defined by a unifying project. Many of its poems did not begin with a particular book in mind. However, when I was placing the poems side by side to see how many pages I had, I noted an orbital pull forming. They were already set in a certain orbit of tone, subject matter, and high-lyric style. Identifying this motion allowed me to see more clearly which subsequent poems would be accepted into this circle.
Inspiration: For a few years I listened to a musical piece by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt called Für Alina. It is a composition for the piano, spare and slow. It sounds like little bells being struck. Pärt has said that, when he was making this work, he “had a need to concentrate on each sound so that every blade of grass would be as important as a flower.” I have thought the same about poems. Also, the visual vocabulary of certain films has inspired many of these poems, deeply. Movies such as The Spirit of the Beehive, Ratcatcher, In the Mood for Love, and Days of Heaven hold something arcane, a strange quietness. Perhaps they withhold (it’s a better word). What has moved me to write after seeing these films is how much they withhold. I am drawn to poems that can dance like that, in a relationship of what is said and what is left unsaid.
Influences: The books of Lucie Brock-Broido, Anne Carson, and Briget Pegeen Kelly have been early and lasting influences. In my PhD work, I’ve delved into the fragments and letters of Emily Dickinson, the poetry of Raúl Zurita and Cecilia Vicuña, the multimedia art of Caroline Bergvall, as well as the various adaptations of Antigone—which I hope will all be future influences.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Always, the engrossing work of translating poetry from Spanish is a spark. I also turn to looking through old lexicons, field guides no longer in print, medieval bestiaries or glossaries of birds, and early photography.
Advice: Three things. One: Listen to your innermost self—a self that has been forming aesthetic principles by the books you’ve read, by your various experiences and identities—and try to lower the volume of well-intentioned critiques that stifle your work. Two: If you are fortunate, you will find a trusted reader-editor-confidant-friend, one who will open your work and imagination. Take care to develop that relationship. My primary reader also happens to be my partner, Jeffrey Pethybridge. Three: Try not to send out your manuscript blindly, which can deplete one’s inner and outer resources. Rather, choose presses whose author lists exhilarate you, and remember that small presses are in a golden age; they’re making vital and sparkling books.
What’s next: A long sequence of small poems called “The M Notebooks,” M being a character made up of various persons, such as the biblical Saint Miriam (a myrrh-bearer), the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta, and Russian writer Nadezhda Mandelstam. The sequence is a convergence, confluence, conflagration of speakers. Also, a couple of essays on the work of Ana Mendieta, as well as research on the literature of sleep, descent, and dream-space.
Age: 40.
Hometown: West New York, New Jersey.
Residence: Denver.
Job: I teach while I also pursue a PhD in the creative writing program at the University of Denver.
Time spent writing the book: The bulk of the poems were written in Austin during my three MFA years at the Michener Center.
Time spent finding a home for it: About three years.
How it began: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—namely, how quickly the nation mobilized to invade these countries when just months earlier we were living in the myth of indefinite and obvious peace. That peace, of course, did not exist then, either, but I remember, for example, an Army recruiter visiting my AP Government class in spring 2001 and saying, as part of his pitch to join the Army and see the world, that were we to join the Army, we would not be fighting in any wars, anyway.
Inspiration: Conversations with friends—especially Samira Yamin, Ari Banias, and Brandon Som. The various books and artists they have pressed upon me. The stellar work they put into the world.
Influences: June Jordan, Muriel Rukeyser, Mahmoud Darwish, C. D. Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Reznikoff, William Carlos Williams, Adrienne Rich, Leonel Rugama, Walt Whitman, and Claudia Rankine.
Writer’s Block Remedy: If the causes are perfectionistic, I pull out the collected poems of a poet I greatly admire and flip through to remind myself how many mediocre poems their oeuvre contains. It is my duty, I remind myself, to write even those mediocre, messy poems. These failures are the ones that create openings in the conversation for subsequent writers and poets to enter—I’m not trying to kill the conversation, after all. I pull out journals—André Gide’s, Franz Kafka’s, Susan Sontag’s—to remind myself how long the process is and how often the sense of failure or impasse hits. I watch a movie.
Advice: Write a book you want to fight for. Fight for it. I am, after all this, though, a little hesitant to keep the conversation on first books or debuts. I am a product of an industry that emphasizes first books—it’s where the prizes are, it’s what the MFA programs are gearing you up for with your thesis, it’s what our conversations with our peers are about, it’s what we buy because we want to support our friends. I’m not entirely sure who this “we” is, as someone both inside and outside of it, as someone not wanting to presume you are a similar product, fellow writer. But there is something, something shifting the collective attention (of presses, of journals) to younger poets—an attention that does not exist for a poet’s second or fourth book and that doesn’t again until I don’t know when. A blessing, maybe, that turning away of the gaze—it’s likely due to sales. We are not necessarily taught how to be artists, how to commit to artists and attend to their failures, their sustained conversation—a conversation that would undoubtedly challenge and even dismantle said industry. We are taught instead how to publish our first books. Product, not process. I don’t have answers about “how to be an artist”; I’m not trying to make it sound like I do. But I do want to have that conversation. What do you want to do as a writer in the world? What do you see the arc of your writing life to be? How is your first book a launch to that arc? To discuss the book itself, the writers themselves—myself included—is a misdirection. Or as Forough Farrokhzad said: “Remember the flight / the bird will die.”
What’s next: Translations of Forough Farrokhzad. And some secret stuff.
Age: 33.
Hometown: I haven’t worked out the answer to this question for myself. Los Angeles is probably the closest I will get to a hometown.
Residence: Oakland.
Job: I’m a lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University.
Time spent writing the book: I started working with the Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms in earnest at the end of 2007. The earliest poems in the book are from 2008. But some of the pieces and images are reworked from 2003, even. By 2012 or 2013 I had pretty much worked out all the conceptual elements and the general frame of the book, though I added and removed poems up until the last deadline. The most freeing realization was that I could ditch poems that had been previously published in journals and that I liked, generally speaking. I could create a book rather than a collection, I mean.
Time spent finding a home for it: I started sending the book out in 2009, which was massively premature, but I don’t regret it. I drew up a very short list of dream first-book prizes and vowed to continue sending out yearly until I was disqualified from doing so.
Phillip B. Williams Thief in the Interior Alice James Books
“I’m listening to Alice Coltrane to feel Blacker than God”
—from “Eleggua and Eshu Ain’t the Same”
How it began: It was fun. I used to write several manuscripts at a time. One year I was working on three books simultaneously. My first attempt at a book was in 2008 (“I Empire,” read as “first empire”), the second was in 2009 (“Thief in the Interior,” which was not the same book as the one that was eventually published), and the third was in 2010 (“In Vulnerabilities”). Eventually I released a chapbook called Bruised Gospels in 2010, and because I do not want poems in chapbooks to appear in my full-lengths, I was “forced” to restructure the main manuscript, “I Empire,” which remained the backbone of my debut.It had many, many names, to my friend Rickey Laurentiis’s entertainment. He and I exchanged different versions of our books for years. I distinctly remember two titles he had before Boy With Thorn that I do not think he would mind me sharing. The first was “Mirror God”and the second was “Down Atlantis.” If there were any others, I cannot remember. My failed titles were “Grace,” “Grace and Empire,” “Dancing on an Upturned Bed,” “Darling,” “Shame No Tongue,” “Lie Down,” and “Witness.”Going through this process with Rickey over the course of four to five years helped push me along. All I knew is that I wanted a book before I turned thirty. My book was published a month before my thirtieth birthday.
Inspiration: The book On Black Men by David Marriott was always on my mind while writing. The work of my peers. The work of those who have become ancestors.
Influences: Essex Hemphill, Jorie Graham, Terrance Hayes, Sonia Sanchez, the racism of Wallace Stevens seems its own kind of artist or shadow of the artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mary Jo Bang, Wangechi Mutu, Nina Simone, Leontyne Price, Björk, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Kerry James Marshall, Federico García Lorca, Lucille Clifton, Henry Dumas, Carl Phillips, Douglas Kearney, J. Michael Martinez, Dawn Lundy Martin, Octavio Paz, Camille T. Dungy, Evie Shockley, Frank Bidart, Alvin Ailey, Judith Jamison, Alonzo King, Clifford Williams, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Sylvia Plath and her fascination with the word nigger, Claudia Rankine, Carolyn Rogers, Thylias Moss, James Baldwin, afropessimism as a theoretical framework, Mahmoud Darwish, Toni Morrison, Meshell Ndegeocello, Suji Kwock Kim, Larry Levis, Sunni Patterson.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I go for months without writing and then write nonstop for about a month or so. An impasse for me is a sign that I simply have nothing to say, and that is fine. I had to learn that it was fine not to write. As far as what keeps me going, I’m still not sure. Something just clicks on and stays on until it runs its course. I frequently add to a Notes document any lines I come up with or words I need to look up. My memory is very poor, so I do not retain what I read. Sometimes, in order to assist with retention, I have to activate the knowledge, meaning implement it into something tangible like a poem. The joy in this is that most things I read are fresh when I return to them. The downside is that it takes me forever to do scholarly work and I’m not the best person to speak with about books or even single poems unless they are in front of me.
Advice: Just write. Study first, then write. We cannot control the reception of our work, but we can decimate our imaginations by trying to write “for the people.” Who are these monolithic people? Why think so little of them and call that kindness? Recently, there seems to be this idea that one has to write for someone else or a specific group. So many folks want to be mouthpieces for a community for which they’ve set low standards reminiscent of the oppressive forces they claim to want to counteract. In that writing, it is assumed what these potential readers will and will not understand. In the same instant that this idea wants to be communal and welcoming, it is also condescending and ostracizing. We have enough low expectations set on us by others, especially if we are persons of color, women, part of genderqueer and LGBT communities, and/or any other marginalized group. Almost every poem I’ve written my mother has seen. She may or may not understand each one but she has read those poems and encouraged me to keep going. She tells me what she loves and what touches her. So do my nonliterary friends and family members. It’s not up to me to assume there are restraints on their ability to understand me. My poems aren’t a standardized test that my friends need help cheating on, or that can even be “passed.” Though we have limitations, language barriers, literacy barriers, and other factors, we are also complex and capable if allowed to be.
What’s next: I’m working on trying to eat right and go to bed on time.
Age: 30.
Hometown: Chicago.
Residence: Bennington, Vermont.
Job: I am a visiting professor in English at Bennington College.I try to make some kind of living off my work but not to the point of distraction. Writing does keep me alive, even during those times it does not make money.
Time spent writing the book: The longest poem in the book I started in 2005 and it was a single-page poem. It continued to grow across different iterations of the book until it became a twenty-page poem while I attended Washington University in St. Louis for my MFA. I was convinced to shrink it down to fourteen pages and officially finished it in the spring of 2014, nine years later. Many of the poems I wrote that were originally in the book did not make the final edit. Most of the poems that made it I wrote during my MFA, so about two years.
Time spent finding a home for it: It depends on which version of the book we’re talking about. In my naiveté I submitted manuscripts to contests as early as 2009. They were unready projects that I would have regretted if they were published. It only took a few months for what was to become Thief in the Interior to find a publisher. When it started finalizing for prizes and open submissions I knew it would eventually get picked up.
Eleanor Chai Standing Water Farrar, Straus and Giroux
“This, I’ve seen. I see it always. I carry it in my torso as surely as a Buddhist lives in the skin of his own corpse.”
—from “Little Girl’s Auricle”
How it began: I can’t say I was compelled to write a book. I was compelled to write poems. I am not a native speaker of English, but I no longer speak my native language (Korean) for complicated and disorienting reasons. Finding shapes in language that hold for longer than the instant of speaking has always felt crucial to me.
Inspiration: I am happiest when I am completely and obsessively engaged. Nothing absorbs me as thoroughly as trying to get a poem on the page. So I suppose living the life I wish to live is what inspires me.
Influences: I spent years transcribing the complete correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. For a few hours each night for six years I was dropped into their intimate “Dear—.” Their devotion to their poems and to poetry continues to move me. Alongside one of her letters, as an afterthought, Bishop wrote: “And did you like the 4 Quartets?” exactly so, with the number 4 and the word Quartets. The “And,” the casual usage, the numeral 4—not the word Four written out—thrilled me. It felt spontaneous, in real time (which it was) and I felt a sliver of how it may have been to read the Four Quartets as a newly made thing, without the edifice of criticism bracing it. The Four Quartets constitutes at least one of my Ten Thousand Things. To see it considered before it aged into its full regalia made me feel closer to its nascence, its being made. I’ve also had the great gift of deep friendship with Frank Bidart. He is one of the finest, most exacting makers I know. His obsessive devotion to the needs of a poem stuns me. I love T. S. Eliot too much. I love Louise Glück. I love James Baldwin. I love Ezra Pound. I love Clarice Lispector. I love Mark Strand. I love Walt Whitman. I love Frank Bidart. I love Marguerite Duras. I love Winnicott and Freud. I love Bishop. I love Robert Frost. I love Louise Bourgeois. I love Toni Morrison. I love Van Gogh’s letters. I LOVE The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I love ethnographies.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I turn to silence, or rather, I surrender to it. Silence, and superior voices. And panic.
Advice: I wish I had some useful advice. Mine was a strange path.
What’s next: I am working on one new poem. Hopefully I will be able to write it and hopefully more will come. I am also trying to compose, or rather assemble, Mark Strand’s oral memoir from tapes we made in Nova Scotia and some of his unpublished writing. I am following the practice and principles he used in making his beautiful, singular collages from paper he himself made. I think of his sentences as his “paper” and I am trying to tear that material and place it on the page into a compelling narrative of his life. It’s such fine material; the task is daunting but animating.
Age: 49.
Hometown: My hometown is a complicated question. I was moved around quite a lot as a child. I suppose I would say Seoul, South Korea,though I’ve not been home in many years.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I started a school in Westport, Connecticut.My daughters are now both in college so I am trying to give myself the time and space to write poems, finish editing the Bishop-Moore letters with the meticulous Saskia Hamilton, and work on Mark Strand’s oral memoir. Working at the school demanded all of my energy when I was there.
Time spent writing the book: I have no idea how long it took me to write this book. Decades.I knew that my daughters’ time in my everyday care would not last forever. I’ve always been achingly clear that I had eighteen years to share our days, to participate, even shape what would be our holy, our minute particular (William Blake). I am devoted to the minute particular. Much that I value in life resides there. I did not have a childhood with my mother, so being a mother to my children every day and night seemed a privilege and a miracle.
Time spent finding a home for it: I was very fortunate that Jonathan Galassi, my editor [for the Bishop-Moore letters], liked my poems and took my book.
Justin Boening Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last Milkweed Editions (National Poetry Series)
“does sadness leave us? Is that the source of sadness?”
—from “Banquet”
How it began: The book’s title is taken from the thorny end of a Kafka parable called “The Coming of the Messiah.” It finishes: “The messiah will come on the day after he is no longer required, he will come on the day after his arrival, he will come not on the last day, but on the very last.” I’ve seen others attempt to negotiate these paradoxes by changing the definition of last day or very last. I guess that makes as much sense as anything else. But for me, this is a portrait of a savior who comes, not belatedly, but by not coming at all. I think it may have been this parable that put me on the road toward writing a book of failures, of mistakes, which is how I’ve come to understand the collection—a book where one learns to become a god by being unrecognizable, for example, or where one rules the world by being the only one in it. I don’t know. I’m probably the last one who should be talking about such things. More generally, though, I think what compelled me to write this book may have been distance from God. For me, poetry is an expression of this desire to reach out, not to communicate per se, but to get closer to whatever it is that’s always just beyond reach or sight. Maybe that sounds too lofty, but it’s a longing I’ve felt all my life, and a longing I’ve often associated with the essence of whatever it is I’ve called “human.” Stevens finishes his poem “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” by saying, “We make a dwelling in the evening air / In which being there together is enough.” I think that about sums it up for me—what compelled me to write these poems.
Inspiration: The unshakable belief that poetry is absolutely necessary, that it’s inextricably linked to language itself, and that, therefore, it’s one of the most human things we’re allowed to participate in.
Influences: As far as writers go, I return most often toFranz Kafka, Wallace Stevens, Clarice Lispector, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath,Mark Strand, and Lucie Brock-Broido.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I almost never push it. If a poem is frustrating me I walk away, watch some YouTube, read writers who know what they’re doing. Distraction is good for poetry, I think, maybe because it breeds uncertainty. In fact, I feel I do my best writing when I’m not writing at all.
Advice: Hold off as long as you can. And once you lose your patience, only send the work to people and presses you already respect and trust.
What’s next: Lately I’ve been putting a lot of my energy into a new magazine and press called Horsethief Books that Devon Walker-Figueroa and I have started together. As far as my own poems go, with the loss of so many friends and luminaries I’ve been writing elegies as of late.
Age: I’m 35and will be turning 36 on February 13 (yes, I was born on a Friday).
Hometown: I was born in Saratoga Hospital, on a holiday down to see the ponies. I call Glens Falls, New York, my hometown though, since I ate my first corn on the cob there, stole my first bike there, etc. I moved to New York City when I was six—pretty young—so that’s a home for me as well, though not my origins. Recently, I was eating a 1:00 AM chicken fried steak in Missoula, Montana, at a dive called the Ox. Two guys, who had just finished playing poker at the front card table, stood up suddenly from their counter stools. One guy walloped the other guy in the eye, snatched up his rucksack, and hustled out the front door. No one called the cops. Few were alarmed. That’s the place I’ve lived the longest, actually—Missoula is another home.
Residence: Iowa City.
Job: A living? Maybe you could call it that.I teach and edit, mostly.
Time spent writing the book: Well, there are some whispers from poems I wrote while I was a graduate student, but they’re really only whispers. The oldest poem in the book is one I wrote the moment after I handed in my graduate thesis—that was in 2011. The newest poem is one I wrote in 2015. So I guess that means four years?
Time spent finding a home for it: I sent out bashfully in 2013, and then in earnest until the book was taken in 2015.
Safiya Sinclair Cannibal University of Nebraska Press (Prairie SchoonerBook Prize)
“Tell the hounds who undress me with their eyes—I have nothing to hide. I will spread myself
wide.”
—from “Center of the World”
How it began: I began writing poetry as an act of survival. Faced with the silencing exile of womanhood in an oppressive household and a patriarchal society that discouraged me from speaking and thinking, the only way to make sense of my burgeoning selfhood was here on the page, by writing it down. Then, plagued still with the strange linguistic exile of writing in English, the language of the colonist, while dancing wildly in the brazen self of Jamaican patois, the only way to unfracture this amputated history was by making a home for myself on the page, and building new modes of language by writing poetry.
When I was younger I was very dismayed by how little of myself and my family I could trace into the past, and was very inspired by the oral folklore and storytelling tradition passed down by my mother and my aunts. It became very clear to me that this oral folklore and storytelling was a matriarchal tradition—a way of preserving our history, both family history and Jamaican history. This not only incited and inspired me to write Cannibal, but it was also a way of saving my own life, of making a record of our songs and mother tongue, and paying tribute to the women who have woven our words and days into existence.
Finally, it was imperative for me to confront the macabre history of the Caribbean itself—to expose the postcolonial roots of violence here; to explore how being “Caribbean” was so closely linked to being “savage,” being cannibal. By confronting the ugly language and prejudices that continue to plague all people of the African diaspora, I hoped to renarrativize the toxic gaze of white supremacy at home and abroad, to shatter its fictions through the shared ritual of poetry.
Inspiration: Always in my ear is the ghost meter of the Caribbean Sea, its old rhythm and singing. The possessed tempo of Pocomania, and the fire-root of duende. I am continually inspired by the fertile landscape of Jamaica, which fevers my dreams—our lush hills and blooms, our heavy fruit trees. The way nothing here grows politely. The wild animal of my childhood and its green river of memory.
I’m fascinated by Goethe’s lifelong search for the “Primal Plant,” from which grew my own notion of the black woman’s body as that elusive Primal Plant, the first site of exile. Early on in college I was very startled by Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, which showed me the wild possibilities of breaking form, how I could build my own labyrinth of mythification as a way to honor and transfigure family, a way to alchemize our folklore. I’ve also been writing from a desire to dismantle Western texts like Shakespeare’s The Tempest, to repossess Caliban as a throat through which the poems could sing, our one-drop rhythm transgressing violence and its lingering exile, a linguistic rebellion forged here through the music of linguistic mastery.
Influences: The poets, artists, and writers who feed the fire and bloodroot of my family tree are Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Frida Kahlo, James Baldwin, Federico García Lorca, Caliban, Aimé Césaire, Caravaggio, Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez, Paul Celan, Rita Dove, Wangechi Mutu, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I can’t say I’ve ever truly reached an impasse in my work. There’s still so much unwritten of Jamaican history, folklore, and culture, still so much of our rich lives that I need to give voice to, in my own small way. Because I read so feverishly, and am always engaging with topics outside of my field—mostly science, history, and philosophy—I’m always finding new ways to enter into a poem, then discovering how many ideas are already in dialogue with each other in that lyric space. I am often so possessed with language, with the roots and wide-ranging shadows of words, that I’m always chasing one word or another down a new corridor of inquiry. If I hit a wall, I’ll listen to music that opens a window unto memory and centers me in a specific time and place, or I’ll reread authors who’ve dazzled and nurtured me, who take the top of my head off. Both English and Jamaican patois are two deep oceans ready-made for diving. And I dive, unabashedly. There, I find the far-reaching tentacles of naming and wording in our society so expansive that I would have enough material to interpret for a lifetime.
Advice: Take your time. Read widely, expand your references and vocabulary; make the poems sing.Nowadays I think there is such a rush to publish a first book, and many poets might feel pressured to send something out that isn’t quite ready. My strongest advice is to be unafraid of waiting, to sit with your words and work until you’ve cultivated them into something flourishing. Live inside the book until you’re certain you’ve grown something lasting, a bloom of your absolute best self. You only have one first; make it count.
What’s next: I’m currently working on a memoir about growing up in a strict Rastafarian household in Jamaica, and feeling estranged in my own country (Jamaica is a heavily Christian country, and Rastafarians are an oft-ostracized minority.) At that same time, I began feeling exiled by my blooming womanhood, and eventually had no choice but to rebel against a religion and a home that made no room for me.
Age: 32.
Hometown: Montego Bay, Jamaica.
Residence: Los Angeles.
Job: I’m a third-year doctoral student at the University of Southern California, where I’m getting my PhD in literature and creative writing.
Time spent writing the book: The bulk of the poems were written in the three years I was in the MFA program at the University of Virginia. The book was my final thesis, and I spent a few months after that rearranging, focusing, and editing the manuscript. One poem snuck into Cannibal that was written in college six or seven years ago. After the book was accepted, I was still tinkering a bit with structuring, and I knew it needed three more poems (circling around a specific theme) to make it cohesive and complete in my mind, so I slipped three new poems into the manuscript, right down to the wire. Those last three poems were completed in September 2015.
Time spent finding a home for it: I waited to send out the manuscript (and most of its poems) until I felt certain that it was ready to breathe on its own full-bloodedly. The fall after I graduated from the University of Virginia I started submitting Cannibal to prizes, and was really fortunate to have the book accepted to a couple of places by the summer of 2015. Cannibal won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry that June. So it was a year or less of sending it out into the world until it was accepted—a fitting nine months.
“The stars are anxious. What version of yrself do you see when you close yr eyes?”
—from “IRL”
How it began: I was torn between a stable relationship and predictable future with a boring dude, and an exciting but uneven fling with a pretty young thing. It kind of broke open all the similar divisions inside me: how to transition into my thirties; hailing from the foothills of rural California but living in the busiest city in America; being a modern, queer, indigenous person with a lot of inherent self-love in a world that tries to deny me life, dignity, liberty, etc.
Inspiration: Survivors, femininity, experiences that happen within the span of ninety minutes (like movies [sometimes sex]).
Influences: A. R. Ammons, Beyoncé, Mariah Carey, Amy Winehouse, Janet Jackson, Nicki Minaj, June Jordan, Muriel Rukeyser, Jeffrey Yang, Sherman Alexie, James Welch, Joy Harjo, Louise Erdrich, Chun Li, Storm, etc.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I watch a movie—or a film, if that’s your vibe. Seeing something begin, build, and end in a certain amount of time gives me faith in a creative faculty.
Advice: Keep the faith, b, keep the faith.
What’s next: I’m working with Tin House to finish up the final edits on Nature Poem, the follow-up to IRL coming out May 2017. I’m about halfway through writing book number three, Junk, and have started Food—the final book in the four-part series I started with IRL. Also a roundtable-discussion-type podcast called “Food 4 Thot” about four multiracial, queer writers in New York City discussing literature, sexuality, and pop culture (hashtag elevator pitch) whom I met at the 2016 Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop. Teaching long-poem workshops. Also being a good friend, a good lay, and a good human.
Age: 33.
Hometown: The Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I have approximately sixty-nine side piece jobs, including teaching/touring/freelance stuff, and a main thing that involves writing—but I’m not at liberty to talk about it just yet. If I told you I’d prolly have to kill you.
Time spent writing the book: Officially, I wrote the book from May to August 2014 in an office in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, facing the entire trunk of Manhattan, but in a way I was writing the book for thirty years.
Time spent finding a home for it: I sent it to allllll the book contests and once or twice even got a personalized rejection, but mostly sturdy no’s from everybody. I don’t blame them, it’s a weird nonstandard poem and the initial manuscript was probs 70 percent realized. Sampson Starkweather at Birds, LLC saw me read one night in the city and asked me to send him something. Thankfully they had enough faith in my voice and work ethic to help me guide the book toward its final form.
The ten poetry collections featured in our thirteenth annual roundup of debut poets offer a glimpse of the wide range of contemporary poetry. Each of the books, published in 2017, shows just how much poetry can do. Eve L. Ewing’s Electric Arches tells stories that reckon with history and imagine a better future, while Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS and sam sax’s Madness reclaim language that has been distorted by governments and institutions of power. Emily Skillings’s Fort Not reveals the tendencies of our culture and society through the trappings of modern life, as does Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Jenny Johnson’s In Full Velvet both give voice to the interior—Akbar to the ongoing work of faith, Johnson to the vagaries of the heart and desire. Joseph Rios’s Shadowboxing and Airea D. Matthews’s Simulacra create personas and alter egos that argue and spar with one another, while William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind clears a path for understanding others. And all ten collections do what poetry does best: inhabit the many possibilities of language and form as well as attend to, as Seamus Heaney put it, “the lift and frolic of the words in themselves.”
We asked the poets to share the stories and influences behind their books, and they responded with a list of inspirations as varied as their collections, from the food of April Bloomfield and music of Flying Lotus to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and words of Adrienne Rich. When we asked the poets to offer advice to writers who are stuck or looking to publish their first book, however, their answers coalesced around some common suggestions: Take a break when you’re struggling with a piece. Permit yourself to write one or two or thirty or a hundred lousy poems. Most of all, reach out to the people who can keep you afloat. Listen to your family’s stories, as Chen and sax do, or talk with your kids, as Matthews advises. Or, as Johnson and Rios suggest, call up your friends, encourage one another, and then hold one another accountable for getting the work done.
Writing poetry can often feel lonely or frustrating or even futile—especially during a year of political turmoil and soul-searching—and these poets remind us to turn to whatever will protect our capacity for wonder and allow each of us to be our “whole self on the page,” as Rios says. They remind us to be attentive to the world, and they urge us to be ready for whatever scrap of language or feeling might help us pass from silence into speaking and jolt a poem into being.
How it began: When I got sober, poetry became my life raft. Every poem in Calling a Wolf a Wolf was written from a few months to a few years after I got sober. I had no idea what to do with myself, what to do with my physical body or my time. I had no relationship to any kind of living that wasn’t predicated on the pursuit of narcotic experience. In a very real way, sobriety sublimated one set of addictions (narcotic) into another (poetic). The obsessiveness, the compulsivity, is exactly the same. All I ever want to do today is write poems, read poems, talk about poems. But this new obsession is much more fun (and much easier on my physiological/psychological/spiritual self ).
Inspiration: The searching earnestness of the people I’ve met in recovery. They’ve taught me how to talk about myself without mythologizing, without casting myself as some misunderstood hero maligned by the world. I think (hope!) that resistance to flattening my narrative into some easy self-serving hero’s journey is one of the central features of Calling a Wolf a Wolf.
Influences: Franz Wright, Abbas Kiarostami, Mary Ruefle, Kazim Ali, Daniel Johnston, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Carl Phillips, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Nicholson Baker, Dan Barden, Kathy Acker, all writers for The Simpsons from 1990–1999, Fanny Howe, Eduardo C. Corral, Jean Valentine, francine j. harris, the verve of Marc Bolan, the voice of Kate Bush, the sneer of Justin Pearson/The Locust, the frequency of Eric Bemberger’s guitar, Sohrab Sepehri, Russell Edson, Lydia Lunch, Zbigniew Herbert, Joanna Newsom, Heather Christle, Patricia Smith, Anne Carson, Robert Olen Butler, Bruce Nauman’s neon art, Vic Ketchman, my mother.
Writer’s block remedy: I don’t really believe in writer’s block. If I sit down to write in earnest and give myself enough time, eventually I’ll walk away with something. Even if it turns out to be nothing (which is usually the case), I’m still training and preparing my instincts for the next poem. Even bad poems that go nowhere provide compost for the good ones to come. That said, I do believe in refractory periods, periods spent rebuilding one’s relationship with silence. Ellen Bryant Voigt talks about how in order to strike, a cobra also needs to recoil. I have recoil periods in which I throw myself into my reading, a kind of active listening. So much of Calling a Wolf a Wolf works by hypersaturation, by these breathless rushes of language. It’s been immensely useful for me to go back into silence, to reclaim a bit of psychic quiet to take back into the poems.
Advice: Be kind to yourself and to other poets. There are so many people in the world who would conspire against our joy, who would mistake our reverent wonder for idleness. Against everything, we have to protect our permeability to wonder. That’s the nucleus around which all interesting art orbits.
Finding time to write: I’m one of those people who wakes up obnoxiously early to get in my hours before the world really starts up. I like to get into my poem-writing while my brain is still gummy with dream logic, before the mundane argle-bargle of the everyday comes in.
What’s next: Rebuilding a relationship with silence. Being the best professor and mentor I can be. Orienting myself toward gratitude despite a political moment working very hard to prevent that. Being in love and planning a wedding. Being an uncle. Touring with the book. Staying alive one day at a time.
Hometown: Not sure exactly—I was born in Tehran, Iran, then moved to Pennsylvania, to New Jersey, to Wisconsin, to Indiana, to Florida, and now back to Indiana.
Residence: Lafayette, Indiana.
Job: I teach in the MFA program at Purdue University.
Time spent writing the book: The honest answer is twenty-eight years, maybe even longer than that, but to answer the question I think you’re actually asking, the oldest recognizable poem in the book is about five years old. That’s fairly fast, actually. There are a number phrases and images I cannibalized from poems much, much older than that, though.
Time spent finding a home for it: Not very long. Carey Salerno, my editor at Alice James, saw a poem of mine published by the Poetry Society of America and wrote to me asking if I had a manuscript. I actually wasn’t really done with Calling a Wolf a Wolf yet, but I sent her what I had with the caveat that I still needed time to continue building and rearranging and reimagining. She liked what she saw and took the leap. I couldn’t imagine working with a smarter, more generous, more compassionate editor. So much of what is good about the book is the result of her patient guidance and mentorship.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast (Ecco) is a collection I think people will still be reading in fifty years. Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press). William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions). Airea D. Matthews’s Simulacra (Yale University Press). Cortney Lamar Charleston’s Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books). Safia Elhillo’s The January Children (University of Nebraska Press). Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS (Graywolf Press). Eve L. Ewing’s Electric Arches (Haymarket Books).
Airea D. Matthews Simulacra Yale University Press (Yale Series of Younger Poets)
but I knew it was a winged thing, a puncture, a black and wicked door.
—from “Rebel Prelude”
How it began: My life and the lives of the people who have affected me were the impetus for the book. I’d had undiagnosed mental illness for a very long time, and I wanted to get to the root of it. It started with a question, actually. I asked myself if I had inherited hunger and instability. As I wrote the book, the universe handed me small parts of a very complicated answer.
Inspiration: Books, people, and technology—Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s The Blue and Brown Books, Albert Camus’s The Stranger and The Rebel, Franz Kafka’s absurdity, Greek and Sumerian myths, the wit of Twitter and Facebook, the days of Motorola Q, Anne Sexton, Gertrude Stein, my family and friends. In short, everyday life—private and public.
Influences: Aside from the nods in Simulacra to my poetic lineage, Nora Chassler, Vievee Francis, Rachel McKibbens, and Ladan Osman are some of my greatest artistic inspirations. They’ve all taught me more about community, poetry, and history through their generosity and friendship than I could ever hope to learn in a book. As literary exemplars, I’d have to say Rita Dove, Simone De Beauvoir, Anne Carson, Alice Notley, Haruki Murakami, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Muriel Rukeyser, Marina Tsvetaeva, Carl Phillips, Louise Glück, Antonio Porchia, Cecília Meireles, Wisława Szymborska, Heraclitus, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Hayden, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Writer’s block remedy: When I lose language it’s almost entirely because I am too focused on myself at that moment. And so, I step back. I consciously get outside of myself by unplugging and planting myself in public spaces at odd hours of the day. My perspective shifts because, in public, my gaze moves toward other forms of subjectivity—nature, outside conversations, cityscapes, etc. I am also a big fan of stepping away from work to listen to my kids’ observations about life and/or ask them how they’d work through a problem. Young souls are closer to Edenic wisdom. They understand human nature and the journey in a way that seems to elude the more grizzled traveler.
Advice: Listen to yourself, your hand, your gut, your pen, your mind. Be authentically who you are as a writer. Your work has its own logic and its own tools; honor them. And, finally, wear comfortable shoes because the journey toward making the impossible possible is rugged, long, and lovely.
Finding time to write: I suppose I don’t find time as much as I make time. I have long practiced jotting down at least one observation every day—anything from watching a child play to documenting arguments. I find that those observations help me sustain focus when I sit to write in longer form.
What’s next: I am trying to gain fluency in my body’s primitive language, my instincts. The next collection, “under/class,” will be driven entirely by those instincts and will almost definitely be outside of definition and genre—social criticism, poetry, and short stories.
Hometown: I grew up in Trenton, but I spent twenty years in Detroit. Detroit is the place where I matured into a writer.
Residence: The City of Brotherly Love (and car horns), Philadelphia.
Job: Assistant professor of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College. The college was voted one of the most beautiful campuses in the country (and not just the grounds); the people are exceptional humans.
Time spent writing the book: The poems were in my body my whole life, perceiving and altering the way I interacted with the world. Somatically, I would say it took me forty-plus years. But, in a more linear view, it took a solid five years to commit them to paper and have them coalesce into a collection.
Time spent finding a home for it: I heard “no” and “not quite right” so often, I started to answer to them. Interestingly, I had a hard time getting individual poems published, which explains why my publishing acknowledgements are fairly lean in the book. I sent the manuscript out thirty times in some form or fashion, under two different titles. It was rejected twenty-eight times. It was accepted twice, and I went with Yale.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: ALL OF THEM! It’s hard to name only a few, but here’s my feeble attempt: Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa’s Rummage (Little A), Chelsea Dingman’s Thaw (University of Georgia Press), Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS, sam sax’s Madness, Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast, and Charif Shanahan’s Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press).
William Brewer I Know Your Kind Milkweed Editions (National Poetry Series)
All the things I meant to do are burnt spoons
hanging from the porch like chimes.
—from “Naloxone”
How it began: In the broadest sense, I saw the opiate epidemic start to swallow up my home state. Eventually it made its way into my life in specific ways, including a day when someone came to me and my partner and told us they had developed a heroin addiction. I was extremely angry with them and brushed them off, but quickly after that—by which I mean within a matter of minutes—I was overwhelmed with repulsion toward myself for how quickly I had slipped into such a damning, limited, and unsophisticated view of what this person had just confessed. Here they were at their most vulnerable, and I couldn’t be less humane. I was enacting the shame and stigmatization that is our culture’s default. I hated that and wanted to push against it.
Inspiration: There are maybe five hundred books and writers I’d like to name if I had the space and time, but I Know Your Kind is particularly indebted to Virginia Woolf, Carl Phillips, Denis Johnson, the Inferno, Paradise Lost, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Timothy Donnelly, John Berryman, and Walt Whitman.
Influences: I am constantly nourished, refreshed and challenged by Herman Melville, Don DeLillo, Caravaggio’s paintings, most of Stanley Kubrick, early Terrence Malick, LCD Soundsystem and Radiohead, the food of April Bloomfield, Gabrielle Hamilton, and the Joe Beef cookbook. More recently I have been nourished, refreshed, and challenged by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Louise Glück, Lydia Davis, Joy Williams, Karen Solie, Isaac Babel, Teju Cole, and Blade Runner (new and original).
Writer’s block remedy: If my writing is stuck, it’s because I haven’t read enough. Sometimes I pretend this isn’t the case, but I’m always wrong.
Advice: I’d suggest thinking about what your book is doing as a composition. How does it read? What are its sources of heat and thrust? Does it have an arc? An architecture? A book can be a kind of random collection of poems and still be organized in such a way that creates drama, tension, interaction, and a greater composition.
Finding time to write: The Stegner affords me a great deal of writing time, for which I’m extremely grateful.
Time spent writing the book: The oldest poems in the book are about four to five years old, though a large chunk was written in a fit of about eighteen months. It’s hard to say because some poems existed in a kind of shadow form for years before they were fully realized.
Time spent finding a home for it: Long answer, five years; short answer, approximately eighteen months.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast. Elizabeth Metzger’s The Spirit Papers (University of Massachusetts Press). And I’m excited to read Emily Skillings’s Fort Not (The Song Cave).
Chen Chen When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities BOA Editions (A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize)
My job is to trick
myself into believing there are new ways to find impossible honey.
—from “Spell to Find Family”
How it began: The book happened poem by poem. I didn’t have a very specific project in mind. I wanted to write poems that excited me sonically and formally, that surprised me in their turns, that grappled with a wide array of subjects, such as: family, immigration, queerness, race, misrecognition, labor, pop culture, mortality, love, and “growing up” in a really broad sense. “Growing up” as something ongoing, unfinishable—not a linear process but a messy, multidirectional one. This theme of “growing up” became clearer the more poems I wrote and the more I saw them as being in conversation with one another.
The process of putting together my MFA thesis and working with my advisor, Bruce Smith, helped me take the step from a pile of poems to a poetry collection. After the book won the Poulin Prize, the judge, Jericho Brown, was so generous with his time and insights and helped me reshape and reenvision the manuscript. “Write the book you want to read,” Jericho said. It was the deepest encouragement as well as the most daunting challenge. And I felt that Jericho had inhabited the book in its ideal form, its most compelling state. He saw the potential, and he got me excited to revise.
I cut out about fifteen pages—poems involving this complicated relationship between a queer son and his unaccepting mother that were getting in the way of the book’s main movement. The book went from four sections to three, with that one poem (“Self-Portrait as So Much Potential”) set off on its own at the very beginning (a suggestion from my poet friend Jess Smith). And many poems underwent significant revision, mostly cuts and tightening up of language. I tend to be expansive and want to throw everything in, including the kitchen sink and everything from every kitchen on the planet going back to when kitchen sinks first became a thing; I’m fortunate to have such smart readers and editors who will tell me when my maximalist tendencies are working and I need to pull back.
Inspiration: Robert Hayden. Jean Valentine. Walt Whitman. Joseph O. Legaspi. Nikky Finney. Paul Celan. Audre Lorde. Allen Ginsberg, especially Howl. Richard Siken’s Crush. Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. My former teachers Aracelis Girmay, Martín Espada, Deborah Gorlin, Bruce Smith, and Michael Burkard. Sarah Gambito, especially a poem called “Immigration,” which includes the line, “So what if I don’t love you.” Marilyn Chin’s Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. Pablo Neruda, especially his odes, his poems about the Spanish Civil War, and his book TheBook of Questions. I love the range of Neruda’s work. In the United States he’s known for his early love poems, but he wrote so many different kinds of poetry, including some of the most moving political poems. Other inspirations: Buffy the Vampire Slayer; my mother (who is a fabulous storyteller); Tegan and Sara; Paul Klee paintings and their delightful titles; cross-country running; the trees of New England; the Texas sun; the Japanese gay porn star Koh Masaki; guanacos (an animal related to the llama); reduced-sodium soy sauce; Frank Ocean; my high school French teachers; my partner, Jeff Gilbert; our dog, Mr. Rupert Giles (named after the British librarian character in Buffy).
Writer’s block remedy: I have to take breaks. Walk around. Talk to people I like. Watch some TV. Eat a snack. Do a different form of work. I really like doing my laundry; I don’t know why, but I find it meditative and satisfying. It’s weird how much I like doing laundry because I’m not super cleanly when it comes to other things, like my desk, where I do the actual writing. But, nine times out of ten, doing laundry and then putting away all my clothes in a very organized fashion helps me return to the writing with a fresh mind and a sense of calm. When that doesn’t work, I have to accept the draft isn’t going anywhere, at least not at the moment, and I have to will myself to stop staring at the computer screen. And then it’s wonderful to realize that I have a totally different draft or at least some bundle of notes I could attend to. The well doesn’t dry up. I just have to look somewhere else and stop fixating on what I thought was going to be the next poem.
Advice: Believe in your work. Don’t write what you think will get you published. My book got picked up quickly, but it took a longer time for many of the individual poems to get published in journals. Rejection will continue to happen after your book comes out, so really know, for yourself, what you like about your writing. You don’t want to feel like you’re experiencing success from something that doesn’t fully belong to you. It’s so satisfying when someone does (finally!) appreciate the weird thing you’re doing, your weird thing. I’m going to sound Hallmark-y, but I’m serious: Don’t compromise on your heart.
Finding time to write: I’ve found that I’m a much happier person when I make time to write, so I try to do that first. Before answering e-mails, before checking the news and social media, before getting up to take a shower sometimes. First thing. Then I feel like I’ve had at least this small moment to tend to my spirit, to honor what’s most alive or mysterious in how I’m seeing or engaging with the world. I like to try getting a whole draft out, but even a couple lines or one image can make the moment glow, and I can carry that with me into the rest of the day. But, to be honest, much of the time I just try to squeeze in some writing here and there.
What’s next: A second collection of poems, tentatively titled “Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency.” A lyric craft essay on Asian American poets and the politics of humor. Some personal essays, but who knows if they’re actually poems, not essays.
Hometown: Amherst, Massachusetts, by way of Fort Worth, Texas, and Xiamen, China.
Residence: Lubbock, Texas.
Job: Doctoral student at Texas Tech University.
Time spent writing the book: The oldest poem is about six years old, but that includes a year of not even looking at it. I started it in college, then sort of abandoned it. This is a poem called “Race to the Tree,” which is probably the most narrative piece in my book. It took a long time to figure out the structure, though it ended up being pretty simple. Simplicity can take years, I guess. I was making edits on this poem up to the last minute before I had to turn in the final manuscript to my publisher. The other poems didn’t take quite that long. Most of my book was written during my MFA, and then I didn’t look at it for a little while after submitting it to contests and reading periods. I revised and revised after the book was picked up in Spring 2016. I work well with deadlines, so I’m glad that I had about five months (and not more than that) until the final manuscript was due last fall. It was a good amount of time for revisions—not too short that I felt rushed and not too long that I felt like I was overthinking everything. Well, I still overthought and over-obsessed, but not for terribly long!
Time spent finding a home for it: I was extremely lucky. I sent my book out to only seven places. One round of submissions in Fall/Winter 2015. I was mentally preparing myself to keep sending it out for many rounds. When I’ve submitted chapbook manuscripts, it’s taken more time and perseverance. When I apply for fellowships and residencies, it often takes a couple attempts at least. So I was stunned to learn that my book was a finalist for Waywiser Press’s Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and then the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize at BOA Editions. I was stunned and continue to feel deeply grateful to the readers and editors who’ve responded with such enthusiasm for my work. And it’s been a dream working with BOA.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS. Keegan Lester’s this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it (Slope Editions). Nico Amador’s Flower Wars (Newfound), which is one of the best chapbooks I’ve ever read; I’m excited to see what’s next for this poet. I’m painfully behind on new poetry collections, but I’m especially looking forward to reading Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied and E. J. Koh’s A Lesser Love (Pleiades Press).
they mailed me from Mississippi in a metal ice chest
—from “how i arrived”
How it began: It started as a collection of mostly autobiographical poems that were varyingly interesting but not really cohesive. I talked with the publisher of Haymarket Books about the possibility of doing something with them, and it became one of those great iterative conversations where, through the process of talking something through with an active and curious listener, you have a chance to articulate for yourself what you’re really interested in doing. I realized that I wanted to write a book that would enter my own autobiographical coming-of-age story through a rewriting of my city’s past and future, through joy and magic, and that I wanted the book to speak to adolescent black girls and young adult black women. After that I was able to revise the manuscript into something with a lot more focus.
Inspiration: Reading Citizen by Claudia Rankine and seeing its use of visual art and prose. Walking around Chicago, driving around Chicago, biking around Chicago. Seeing visual art—for instance, the poem “The Device” was inspired by a series of masks I saw in the African art gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago. Going to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and seeing “the Mothership” that used to land onstage when Parliament-Funkadelic and George Clinton performed. Watching the film that Beyoncé made to accompany Lemonade and listening to A Seat at the Table by Solange; both pieces engage in elements of magic and world-building and, in the case of Solange’s album, a cohesion and clarity of aesthetic that I find inspiring. Listening to the album Heavn by Jamila Woods. Listening to Flying Lotus. A million other things.
Influences: Gwendolyn Brooks—I was writing the show No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks when I was editing Electric Arches. Ross Gay. Fatimah Asghar. Jamila Woods. Kevin Coval. Nate Marshall. Hanif Abdurraqib. Patricia Smith. Studs Terkel. Danez Smith.
Writer’s block remedy: I write in multiple genres, so often I just try to turn my attention to something else or step away from a project if it needs a little more time to incubate—although I often find it helpful to interrogate myself somewhat about the nature of the impasse. Am I tired? Hungry? Distracted? Is this idea bad? Is it something I’ve lost interest in? Am I trying to make an argument that I don’t actually have the evidence to make yet? Do I need another pair of eyes? Reflecting and being honest with myself about what’s going on usually helps me move forward. I’m also patient with myself. Everything doesn’t have to be written just this minute. Sometimes it’s okay to go read a book or ride a bike.
Advice: I think I was so eager to publish my book—and also perhaps somewhat lacking in confidence in myself—that I was at risk of going with any press that came along. I’m so grateful that I ended up with Haymarket, which I think was just perfect for me for so many reasons. If that hadn’t happened, I think there’s an alternate universe where the book is out on some other press in a much diminished form. I think it’s worth it to be patient and find the right press that believes not just in your book in the abstract, but in your entire vision for how you’d like it to live and operate in the world. I also think it’s worthwhile to ask yourself, “Which of these poems really are exciting to me?” and try to figure out which poems serve as the core thematic foundations of the book, and then edit and cut mercilessly around those foundations.
Finding time to write: It’s my job, which means it’s nonnegotiable, and we have to find the time for things that are nonnegotiable. I clear a path for it in whatever ways I can. Sometimes that means having a very disciplined morning writing session or a daylong retreat, and sometimes that means doing things the old-fashioned way—scribbling notes on a train or a bus.
What’s next: I recently finished my second book, When the Bell Stops Ringing, a work of nonfiction about the mass closure of public schools in Chicago and the history of racism in the city. I’m working on kicking off some new research projects that I hope will result in my second academic book, though that’s a very long process. And on Sunday mornings, little by little, I’ve been working on some fiction.
Job: Professor at the University of Chicago and writer.
Time spent writing the book: Three years.
Time spent finding a home for it: About a year.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Three collections I both enjoyed and learned from were Safia Elhillo’s The January Children, Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast, and sam sax’s Madness.
Let us speak without occasion of relations of our choosing!
—from “Gay Marriage Poem”
How it began: There’s a scene in a somewhat dated film from 1983, Lianna, directed by John Sayles, in which the protagonist goes to a lesbian bar for the first time with her lover. The next morning, as she’s walking down the street, she is newly able to integrate a private way of being, seeing, and desiring into her public sphere. Through an exchange of looks, you see her recognizing that all along there existed a community of other queer folks. Suddenly she’s moving through a space where future friends or lovers are newly possibly everywhere—choosing a plum at the fruit stand or on the far side of a street smiling at you as you smile back. Kind of like an audience for a poem that you weren’t sure existed but who you kept writing and revising for just in case.
Inspiration: Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality by Gayle Salamon.
Influences: Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde are poets I read when I know I could be living and writing more courageously. A few other writers whose poems have been especially strong mentors are Rita Dove, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marilyn Hacker, and Larry Levis.
Writer’s block remedy: I often turn to my dear friend and fellow poet Soham Patel, who always reminds me that it’s okay to play. And then we do—though we live in different cities, we get on the phone, laugh a lot, give each other exercises, and hold each other accountable.
Advice: Don’t listen to the voices of those who fear the power in what you have made and will make. Trust your closest readers and the reciprocal spaces that nourish you and give you strength.
Finding time to write: Like many poets I know, I am resourceful. I memorize poems that I love by others, which helps me think through my own while walking home along a busy road muffled by traffic. I carry a pocket-sized notebook when I go for a run. I have a little desk in an attic by a third-floor window where I slow down to revise. But many poems begin in the interstices of the day, when my mind is in motion.
What’s next: I recently cowrote a one-act play with playwright and friend Paul Kruse. It’s called Boundary Layer. The play takes place in a mysterious world covered in the most humble of life forms—moss. The last two people on a lonely planet, Sam and Dusty, are left to negotiate unexpected desires, relationships, and boundaries as they step outside of what is safe, familiar, and human.
Job: I teach at the University of Pittsburgh and at the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program. Before I taught college, I was a public school teacher.
Time spent writing the book: Eight years. In “Invisibility in Academe,” Adrienne Rich says that when someone “describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors.” I share this because I spent eight years writing, but also eight years working through some sort of “psychic disequilibrium.” Often I was writing, but at the same time I was teaching, loving, showing up for others, organizing, dancing: choosing to be in spaces where I could better see myself. To write my book, I had to widen my sense of my work in relation to others.
Time spent finding a home for it: I was quite lucky—I sent my book out for about a year. Then I won a Whiting Award. The weekend of the awards ceremony in New York City, I gave a reading from my unpublished manuscript. After the reading, I was approached by an editor at Sarabande.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press) by Lauren Russell, Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora, and The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books) by Molly McCully Brown.
sam sax Madness Penguin Books (National Poetry Series)
you either love the world or you live in it
—from “Warning: Red Liquid”
How it began: The seed for this book was actually just an exercise I gave myself. I’d come across a list of reasons for admission to a mental asylum in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in the 1800s that included examples such as “kicked in the head by a horse,” “tobacco and masturbation,” and “novel reading,” which I thought would all make lovely titles for poems. So I went to the woods (a residency at the Blue Mountain Center) but found I couldn’t write poems within that stricture. Instead I refocused my attention on the precise moment in history when homosexuality was taken out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and how that act of depathologizing has affected the way we think about and embody queerness and desire today. I began to work sequentially, incorporating my own relationship and my family’s relationship with mental health as both patients and practitioners. Through this process I discovered how clearly you can draw a line between so much of the inherited, lived, and systemic violence we experience and perpetuate today back to those early diagnoses.
Inspiration: Some of my research materials were The Birth of the Clinic and Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault. The DSM-I from 1952. The collected paintings of Francisco Goya and Hieronymus Bosch. Freud’s idea of the pleasure principle. Talking with my grandpa. The Sawbones podcast.
Influences: My friends. The folks I started writing with and have grown alongside over many years have unequivocally had the most impactful and life-altering affect on my writing and personhood. Some of those folks are Franny Choi, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Danez Smith, Fatimah Asghar, as well as countless other geniuses I’m lucky enough to be around. I’d also say there’s a litany of smart, politicized, literary, sad homosexuals from the present back to Hart Crane flinging himself off the deck of that ship who have made my work possible.
Writer’s block remedy: Give up and start something new. There are many poems to be written. If something isn’t working, I feel totally fine putting it aside and writing toward what has the most urgency and energy around it. Another thing that frees me up from the internal and newly external pressures of writing poems is being a-okay making terrible ones. I try to think of each new piece of writing as an experiment until it transcends that and becomes a poem. There’s something about the lack of preciousness around this process that helps me think of them as disposable until they become indispensable. Also each experiment and almost poem that doesn’t meet the world helps me accrue knowledge that will inform the next thing I write.
Advice: Everyone’s journey is different, and I can’t think of any catchall prescriptive advice outside of: Don’t be a jerk. It can be a really crummy process. For the longest time not having a book made me quite sad, and I always found it mad frustrating when someone who was already established told me to take my time and that it would work out how it’s supposed to. Although that turned out true in my case, I don’t necessarily think this is good advice. If you’ve finished one project, move on to another. You can always return to edit what you’ve already written. The doldrums that sometimes arise from not having a book can be dangerous. Madness is the sixth or seventh full manuscript I put together over eight or so years of writing, and to be honest, had any of those initial books been published, it would have been bad news. The time it took to get these books into the world has been invaluable for their life as books and for mine as a writer. So if you can stomach the patience, go for it. If not, publish chaps! Self-publish zines (I made like twenty as a younger punk writer.) There are lots of ways to get your work out into the world that isn’t as precious, lauded, and seemingly impossible as the first book object. Fuck it up. Make your poems indispensable to the world and let publishers fight over the privilege of supporting your work.
Finding time to write: I find time to write in the mornings before other obligations, during a spare hour at the coffee shop, on trains, buses. I’ve been trying to broaden my notion of what writing is to include the passive moments—a shift in perspective where looking at the world is just as important as writing it down.
What’s next: I’ve got two books in the works. There’s a collection of poems that’s currently circling around a sequence of Anthropocene / Apocalypse poems that attempt to celebrate queer joy in community and loneliness as the world burns. I’m also working on a novel, which is a queer Jewish coming-of-age story told in nonlinear fragments from the perspective of someone who’s just lit their self on fire outside of Trump Tower.
Hometown: Born in Manhattan, went to high school in Mamaroneck, New York.
Residence: Brooklyn, New York.
Job: I teach poetry and give readings.
Time spent writing the book: A little over a year. I wrote the drafts and skeletons for two-thirds of the book in the month I was up at a residency, and I spent the next year editing and refining. The rest of the book I wrote in and out of graduate school.
Time spent finding a home for it: Well, I’d just had my first book, which will be published second, picked up by Wesleyan University Press. The process of writing and sending it out took five to six years, although the book is wildly different from earlier versions I’d sent out. I had finished writing that first book and was tired of waiting for it to be accepted, so I decided to write a second book. I sent Madness out on a whim to the National Poetry Series and was expecting to have a multiyear journey of searching for a publisher, but amazingly Terrance Hayes selected the book. We had to push back my first book, Bury It, by a year so that the two books wouldn’t be in competition with each other.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Oy. This year has been ridiculously plump with incredible and dangerous first books. Here’s my list of poets whose first books this year took the top of my head off: Nicole Sealey, Kaveh Akbar, Erika L. Sánchez, Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa, Tyree Daye, Meg Freitag, Chen Chen, Eve L. Ewing, Layli Long Soldier, William Brewer, Chelsea Dingman, Javier Zamora, and I am SURE I’m leaving some wonderful books off this list.
I was never here. I’m not coming back. I’m at sea.
—from “Crystal Radio”
How it began: This book is a collection of mostly discrete poems that I wrote in graduate school (a handful were written in the time before and after). I never set off to write it; I looked back and gathered things I’d previously written and arranged them and drew out connections among them. It’s more of an act of returning. I think many first books begin this way, by remembering what’s been done already. Some of the shared attentions and themes of the book include depression, gender, color, painting and visual art, toxic white femininity, cloudiness, somatic experience, cantankerousness, jealousy, sex, light, America, collage, feelings without names, looming dread, boredom, water. I think in a larger sense I wanted to create a space where a state of not quite knowing felt expert, delightful, powerful.
Inspiration: I feel a little corny saying this, but my friends are my greatest inspiration. I am about to coteach a class on the poetics of refusal with a friend, the poet and artist Simone Kearney, at Parsons School of Design. Our conversations around this subject, around phenomenology and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill, and other texts that draw out these “slow states,” have really helped to create an environment for my work to emerge. The workshops and seminars I attended at Columbia were also instrumental. My students inspire me every week with their risk-taking and generosity. John Cleese’s character, Basil Fawlty, in the 1970s British sitcom Fawlty Towers shaped a lot of my early fascination with language, as did my father’s yellow legal pads, my mother’s excellent malapropisms and non sequiturs (“mind like a steel sieve”/ “letting the can of worms out of the bag”), and my brother’s baroque prose and steady diet of cyberpunk novels. I am a dedicated follower of a Twitter account of Yiddish proverbs.
Influences: John Ashbery, A. R. Ammons, Marcella Durand, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Eileen Myles, Francis Ponge, Sei Shōnagon, Mary Ruefle, Douglas Kearney, Susan Howe, Myung Mi Kim, Ariana Reines, Claudia Rankine, F. T. Prince, Emily Hunt, H. D., Harryette Mullen, Adam Fitzgerald, Alice Notley, Fernando Pessoa, my teachers Timothy Donnelly and Dorothea Lasky, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Édouard Levé, Kim Hyesoon, Jorie Graham, Lucy Ives, Lyn Hejinian, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorge Luis Borges, James Schuyler, Lisa Robertson, Ali Power, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, my dance teacher Alexandra Beller.
Writer’s block remedy: I usually reach an impasse because I need to take a minute to recharge, so I listen to that. I quiet down my writer mind and enter a reading-seeing phase that may last weeks or months. I use a lot of repetition and anaphora in my work (some of which gets cut later) because I find the experience of repeating oneself to be both necessary in our times and deeply clarifying and stimulating. To repeat a phrase is both to stabilize it in the memory of the writer and reader and to question its soundness, as in Gertrude Stein’s “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” The rose is both etched in our mind and transformed, transmogrified. When I still made dances, I was obsessed with repetition and resultant exhaustion, and I often repeat as a way of entering or reentering a poem. I think I learned how to do this by listening to Anne Waldman and Dorothea Lasky.
One question I am still grappling with is how to negotiate a balance between “innovation,” constraint, and intuition. The painter Jane Freilicher put it best, I think, when she said, “To strain after innovation, to worry about being on ‘the cutting edge’ (a phrase I hate), reflects a concern for a place in history or one’s career rather than the authenticity of one’s painting.” There’s also, I think, a quieter quote somewhere about her letting go of the pressure to be innovative, and that she felt she could really paint after that, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere.
This sounds a little strange, but I like to think of my life so far as a writer as a kind of oscillation between states of openness and movement and states of stillness and solitude. There are islands of production, productivity, and then pockets of…nothing. I think I am grateful to my depression in this way, in that it often forces me to be still.
Advice: Support other writers by editing their books, teaching their work, inviting them to read, publishing them, letting them sleep on your couch, etc. Put your work in the hands of only people you know to be caring and dedicated. I am grateful that being a poet is perhaps more of a career path than it once was, and I know that being heard and read is vital to the form. That being said, I do find the professionalization of poetry (in which we all engage) to be in some ways hurtful to the writing itself. It’s okay to turn it off sometimes, this drive toward productivity. When you are writing, you are not involved in career making; you are being a poet. You are also a poet when you are teaching or walking around or doing your day job or looking at art. Don’t partition off your daily life from your writing life.
Eileen Myles once visited an undergraduate poetry workshop taught by Jennifer Firestone that I was taking, and she said something like: “There is something to being a poet that has nothing to do with writing poetry. It’s an identity.” This was such a relief for me when I heard it almost ten years ago, and yet I’m still not sure what it means. Perhaps what it means to me keeps changing. I like that.
Finding time to write: I am a very slow writer. I only sit down to write a poem a handful of times per month, but I find I am constantly jotting down fragments, recording phrases, and “puttering” (to borrow one of my mother’s favorite terms) over lines. I usually use my phone to record these, either as a note or in a voice memo. These scraps gleaned from daily life become the scaffolding of many of my poems. I’ve been commuting to teach this semester and have also found that being on a train (with no Wi-Fi!) and gently zooming through a landscape is very conducive to writing. I just have to stay ahead of the motion sickness.
What’s next: I’m working on a book-length poem sequence called “Mother of Pearl” about the environment and whether or not I want to eventually have children. It uses fragments of language from the anonymous Middle English poem “Pearl,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, lyrics from Roxy Music’s song “Mother of Pearl,” and probably a few more sources. It is a very different experience than writing Fort Not, both because it is more of a project book than a collection, and because it relies on and is building itself around found language. I also want to start writing a novel but don’t quite know how.
Residence: Brooklyn, New York, and sometimes Hudson, New York.
Job: Assistant to poets and an adjunct professor.
Time spent writing the book: Five years. I wrote the poem “Canary” in thirty minutes before a poetry reading at the Center for Book Arts in 2013 and didn’t change a word. I began the poem “Parallelogram” in 2014 and didn’t finish it until 2016, revising it well into 2017.
Time spent finding a home for it: I think I had a pretty rare experience in that the Song Cave (run by the incredible Alan Felsenthal and Ben Estes) was the first and only press to which I sent the manuscript, so not long. The deadline for the Song Cave’s 2016 open reading period (and my partner Danniel Schoonebeek’s gentle nudging to put it in my calendar) was one of the primary motivators for getting the initial manuscript together.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: William Brewer’s incredible I Know Your Kind comes to mind, and Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast. Tongo Eisen-Martin’s second book, Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Books), is one of my favorite books of the year, along with Alan Felsenthal’s debut, Lowly (Ugly Duckling Presse). I am incredibly excited for Samantha Zighelboim’s The Fat Sonnets, which will be coming out in 2018 from Argos Books.
Joseph Rios Shadowboxing: Poems & Impersonations Omnidawn Publishing
I am the American, güey
—from “Southpaw Curse”
How it began: It was a long while before I started thinking about a book. Willie Perdomo helped me with that at a Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation workshop. That’s when I found my alter ego, Josefo. Willie got me to conceptualize a project that could be built around this character. That was in 2012. It took another three years to mold the work into something that felt whole. I read John Berryman’s Mr. Bones character [from The Dream Songs] and Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito and fell in love with the notion of characters living full lives inside poems. It’s a thin veil, of course, but it worked for me. I was able to hide behind this character that looked and sounded like me, had the same memories and experiences as me, but was allowed to live apart from me.
Inspiration: My grandmother’s stories, my grandfather’s stories, the dudes I dug trenches with, the packinghouse where I used to work, wrench turners at my uncle’s airplane shop, jornaleros I picked up at Home Depot in Cypress Park, in Oakland, Marina del Rey, Daly City. My cousin Gabe’s vinyl collection, Dro’s Navy stories, dysfunctional romantic relationships, regret, mistakes, degenerate behavior, survival, and healing. You know, all that stuff you talk about when you and your cousin Erica are drunk and crying at four in the morning. Also, watching people I love get sick and pass away. All that loss, too much loss. Mourning, of course.
Influences: Javier O. Huerta, Michele Serros, Richard Pryor, Douglas Kearney, Warren G, Andrés Montoya, Rafa Cardenas, John Berryman, Zbigniew Herbert, D’Angelo, Art Laboe, and the Rocky films.
Writer’s block remedy: My poetry community, without a doubt. As I write this, I’m sitting across from my poet-cousin Sara Borjas. We met up to get some work done. I really couldn’t do a damn thing without these people.
Advice: Keep writing. Keep grinding. Send to presses that are publishing work you give a shit about. Don’t water down your voice because you think that’s what it takes to get a book. My homie Chiwan Choi asks us, “Why sell out in a zero-dollar industry?” It might sound corny, but be your whole self on the page. There isn’t much out there more terrifying to the powers that be than a bunch of people being their whole damn selves on the page. They straight up ban those books in places like Arizona. We need more of those books.
Finding time to write: I have to make time or it doesn’t happen. I get lazy. I work nights and weekends. Weekdays are usually free for poet work. I have people around me who keep me accountable.
What’s next: Tough question. I feel so far away from anything that resembles a second collection. I’m trying very hard to resist the producer mentality and to just enjoy this book and reflect on the journey I took to get here.
Job: I work at a venue called Civic Center Studios in downtown Los Angeles.
Time spent writing the book: Seven years, give or take.
Time spent finding a home for it: I submitted a previous version of the book as early as 2011. It was premature, without a doubt, but sending to contests kept me engaged in the work. I’m deadline driven that way.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: For real, 2017 needs to calm down. Where do I begin? Mai Der Vang’s Afterland (Graywolf Press). Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied. Vickie Vértiz’s Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut (University of Arizona Press). Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast. Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s Scar On/Scar Off (Stalking Horse Press). Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s Beast Meridian (Noemi Press).
Now make room in the mouth for grassesgrassesgrasses
—from “Part 1: These Being the Concerns”
How it began: The first half of WHEREAS is a collection of poems that date back over the last decade. There was no particular setting off or intent for those poems except the desire to write. The second half of the book is a response to the 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans. For those pieces, it was a kind of frustration and outrage—lifelong and on slow boil—that propelled me.
Inspiration: My daughter, motherhood, and watching the younger generation. The land—the artfulness of the land, its endurance and change, its nonverbal lessons. And people—unexpected encounters as well as long-term relationships. I am always profoundly struck by the surprising things people say and do. People are poems, in themselves.
Influences: My daughter’s dad, the poet Orlando White, was as an important influence on my development as a writer, as were the poets he introduced me to—bpNichol and Aram Saroyan—whose works I return to over and over. Frida Kahlo and Zitkala-Sa speak to me as women artists of mixed heritage who elevated indigenous art, philosophies, and histories within contemporary considerations of art. And definitely the Native poets of my generation, previous generations, and the upcoming; their works are my touchstones. I turn to their pages both for inspiration and as conversation; I look and listen to how they handle language, form, line, and the big, sliding boulders of content.
Writer’s block remedy: Conversation—e-mails and phone calls—with other poets. Talking things out really helps the energy start moving again. There’s also conversation with the page: I will open a book of poems and keep the pages turned upward, next to my laptop. Sometimes just a glance toward the page helps invigorate my belief that whatever I’m working on, it can be written. I have others to hold my hand, figuratively speaking. And, when a piece has stopped and won’t move no matter how much I try, I need to take a break and do nothing for a while. Relaxing my brain is very important! I need to watch Netflix or hang out with my daughter; I need to laugh and not think about poetry at all.
Advice: Write as honestly as you can. Write what’s most important to you.
Finding time to write: I work at night from around 10 PM to 4 or 5 AM. I sleep in, in the morning. But it’s worth it. The night is an uninterrupted block of time that I really need.
What’s next: A new manuscript titled “2.” In this, I am working with ideas of duality, multiplicity, mixed heritage, failure versus success (the illusion of both), love and its failure, love and its necessity. Mostly, I am working with “2,” even at the most basic biological level, as the beginnings of pain and, likewise, belonging.
Hometown: I grew up in the Southwest; I don’t have a single hometown. But I have lived in Santa Fe the longest and feel most at home here.
Residence: Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Job: Write, make art, do readings.
Time spent writing the book: A few of the poems date back ten years or so, not long after my daughter was born in 2006. And I began my response to the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans—the poems in Part II—in 2010 or 2011. Altogether, the response pieces took me about six years.
Time spent finding a home for it: A number of years ago, Jeff Shotts from Graywolf Press read my poem “Ȟe Sápa” online at the Kenyon Review. He messaged me about the poem and asked if I had a manuscript to read. At the time, I didn’t, but I told him that I was working on one. It took several years after receiving his message for me to finish WHEREAS. But we kept in touch and, although I was prepared to send my manuscript to other presses if Graywolf did not accept it, Graywolf ended up being the only press I submitted to when the manuscript was ready.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Mai Der Vang’s Afterland and Bojan Louis’s Currents (BkMk Press).
Ten years ago, Poets & Writers Magazine launched its annual Debut Poets series—a feature that aimed, quite simply, to highlight some of the best first books of poetry published in the previous year. In the decade since then, the series has grown into something all its own, bringing to light some of the most inspired, and inspiring, emerging poets from across the country—along with the ambitious, vital, and lasting collections they create. A number of the poets we’ve featured have gone on to become familiar names in the national writing community—Dan Albergotti, Todd Boss, Jericho Brown, Victoria Chang, Michael Cirelli, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Aracelis Girmay, Dana Goodyear, Tyehimba Jess, Dorothea Lasky, Joseph O. Legaspi, Alex Lemon, Ada Limón, and Justin Marks, to name just a few from the early years. But what’s most remarkable, when looking back through this list of poets (which you can see in full starting on page 90), is that all of them, regardless of how prolific or well known, made a commitment to writing, dedicating themselves to bringing words to life despite the jobs, everyday obligations, and myriad challenges that inevitably arise as time ticks along.
In celebration of our tenth annual Debut Poets roundup, we reached out to those poets—all 111 of them (one, Landis Everson, sadly, passed away in 2007)—and asked them to recommend their favorite debut collections of 2014. A good number responded, building for us a longlist of some of the year’s most exciting books. From that we selected the ten poets featured in the following pages. The task was not easy: We looked at both the work within those collections and at the poets themselves, in an attempt to curate not only a broad range of voice, style, content, and form, but also a diverse list of poets representing a unique breadth of age, background, and experience. These ten poets find inspiration in everything from neuroscience, outer space, black holes, and race to Anglo-Saxon elegies, Vietnamese musicals, honey badgers, and Nina Simone. Despite their many differences, though, they all point to a sense of wonder, exploration, curiosity, and community as essential to their writing—and they are all creating urgent, powerful, and important work. And what connects them even more fundamentally is that regardless of where they come from, what they do for a living, or where they draw inspiration, they all do it for the same reasons: for love of the work, and, as Sally Wen Mao puts it, to break into the silence, disarm the solitude, and find a place where poetry lives.
Sally Wen Mao MAD HONEY SYMPOSIUM Alice James Books
Abandon hive. If the hornet breaks the heat net,
save yourself. Abandon yen. Abandon majesty. Spit the light out because it sears you so. —from “Apiology, With Stigma”
HOW IT BEGAN: In early 2012, I decided that the poems I had collected needed to transform into a manuscript. What compelled me? Probably the naked trees on Linn Street, my tiny yellow living room full of books and ghosts, or the radio silence of the days. Those winter days were short and frigid: Every day I walked past a frozen waterfall and slipped on cracked ice. I knew I had to write to break into that silence, disarm that solitude.
INSPIRATION: The earliest incarnation of this manuscript was a thesis project I titled “A Field Guide to Trapped Animals.” In this manuscript, I sought trapped animals: the honey badger, Laika the space dog, endangered flightless birds such as the kakapo, taxidermists’ specimens, disgruntled pandas in captivity, a flock of doomed pigeons. I admired the honey badger for its inane yet marvelous tenacity to sate its appetites for dangerous animals. From that obsession I found bees, and the magical honeys that they can make, including mad honey (meli chloron), a noxious honey made from rhododendrons or azaleas or oleanders that causes drunkenness, hallucinations, and heart palpitations in humans. There I was able to find the manuscript’s spine—humans who poison themselves for the sake of their desires.
INFLUENCES: Ai, for her poems are fire escapes into the terrifying psyches of others. Lorca, for his theory of the duende, and his poems that wander through the darkest and loneliest spaces in New York City. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, for Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, one of my earliest introductions to poetry. Most recently Cathy Park Hong and Bhanu Kapil, women writers whose hugely exciting works transgress boundaries and shift borders in terms of subject, syntax, and form.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m working on a new manuscript, Oculus, that maps out the border between exposure and invisibility: ghosts, cinema, digital life, and Internet voyeurism. In this manuscript, Anna May Wong, the Chinese American film actress who peaked in the 1920s and 1930s, acquires a time machine and travels through time searching for her perfect role. Along the way, she meets some of her contemporaries (Josephine Baker and Zora Neale Hurston), and some of her successors (Bruce Lee), and she is dismayed to see some of the future films that continue to cast Asian Americans in a stereotypical light. Other poems in this manuscript are about magnetic levitation trains, Chinese bodies exposed in the Bodies Exhibition, a model who wears a homeless man’s pants, and girls competing for a national singing competition.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: Sometimes the writing stops, but there is never enough material for a poet’s arsenal. I look for high places and vantage points, new spaces to invade and interrogate. I look for old books in science libraries. I research poetic obsessions or I try to look for new ones. I visit contemporary-art museums, natural-history museums, planetariums, space museums, botanical gardens, science libraries, bookstores, parties, concerts, or arboretums. I love the feeling of movement, of being on a train heading to someplace unknown. My entire self is built around this wonder, this movement, this search for adventure. I seek adventures, and they float back as poems eventually.
ADVICE: Be impermeable. Research your presses: Read their books, see if you like their covers, get to know their submission and evaluation process. It’s like finding an apartment, really: Send your manuscript to those presses that you could envision as a home for your poems to live. The key is to find a place where your poems live.
AGE: 27.
RESIDENCE: Brooklyn, New York.
JOB: I’m an instructor in the Asian American Studies program at Hunter College in New York, where I teach Asian American Poetics, and a teaching artist at several sites around Brooklyn.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Yes, thankfully, but who knows for how long. In the mornings I write, or late into the night with a cup of milk tea.
Sally Wen Mao reads five poems from Mad Honey Symposium, published by Alice James Books.
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Charlotte Boulay FOXES ON THE TRAMPOLINE Ecco
As much as I wanted that boy saved, I wanted him eaten. —from “Watson and the Shark”
HOW IT BEGAN: I’ve written poetry since high school, and graduate school helped me think about ways a disparate collection of poems might become a more or less cohesive whole. Foxes isn’t a book “project,” although it has some themes and interests that run throughout. These include exploring ideas associated with journeys, both concrete and abstract, as well as questions about desire and loss.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: I’ve joked that in almost any of my poems you can find references to animals and weather, but I think these are less inspirations than touch points that help me structure my concerns. I spent time in my early twenties living in India, and that was certainly an education, as well as an inspiration. I’m also continually inspired by visual art—paintings and photography and sculpture can do things that words can’t, but poetry can create a dialogue with them. This book owes a debt to Cy Twombly, whose work continues to fascinate me. In working on Foxes, I particularly relied on and admired the work of poets Saskia Hamilton, Nancy Willard, Robert Hass, and Susan Hutton.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m working on both poems and essays. I’d love to write a second book more quickly than this one, but we’ll see.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I try to get outside and take a walk, if I’m smart, and if not I try to turn as far away from my own obsessions as possible, to get out of my own head. That may be how I discovered the YouTube home video of foxes jumping on a trampoline in someone’s backyard—aimless Web surfing. What keeps me going is reaching for the moment when a poem comes together, when it becomes itself and something separate from me.
ADVICE: Keep going. Cycles of feeling good about your work that alternate with doubt that any of it is worthwhile are completely normal. Listen to the judgments and suggestions you get from readers you trust, test them out, and then throw them away if they don’t feel right. Submit to all the places where you’ve always dreamed of being published. Don’t hold anything back.
AGE: 36.
RESIDENCE: Philadelphia.
JOB: I’m a grant writer at the Franklin Institute science museum.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? This is something I continue to struggle with. I thought that leaving teaching and entering a 9-5 job would leave me freer to write without the burdens of grading and office hours, but in fact I’m pretty invested in my day job, and it often occupies my thoughts both inside and outside the office. I do make more money than I did as an adjunct, though, so that’s something, but I have much less time off. I’m still figuring out how to make more room in my daily routine for poetry. I’m not very good at writing in small snatches of time, but I’m working on it, and hoping it will help me in ways I haven’t discovered yet.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: I worked slowly on the book for about seven years.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I sent it out to contests two years in a row, but had to withdraw from a few the second year after Ecco took it. My editor contacted me to ask for the manuscript after seeing a poem of mine in print, so that can still happen.
Charlotte Boulay reads the poem “Fleet” from Foxes on the Trampoline, published by Ecco. For more of Boulay’s work, visit www.charlotteboulay.com.
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Hieu Minh Nguyen THIS WAY TO THE SUGAR Write Bloody Publishing
Sometimes you don’t die when you’re supposed to, and sometimes you do. —from “Flight”
HOW IT BEGAN: For a long time, I didn’t know how to write about my traumas. I found myself writing the same poems over and over again, even if they didn’t make any sense to the world, even if I was the only person who would understand the significance of something as basic as a peach. I guess the hope was that if I could write the poems, if I could speak about my trauma in a way that didn’t seem careless, I could stop trying to explain myself. It is stupid to feel the need to explain yourself at all, but I spent a lot of time being ashamed of my experiences as a son, a body, a survivor, and I believe in the importance of confession as a tool to combat shame.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: So many movies! Since a lot of my book talks about my childhood, I spent a lot of time archiving my past, which meant interviewing my mother, visiting old neighborhoods, and watching movies from when I was younger. I spent endless nights watching and rewatching cai luong, which are essentially Vietnamese musicals. I was obsessed. Because my start in poetry began in spoken-word and slam poetry, many of my earlier influences came from performance poets, often poets who could transcend the arbitrary boundaries between the performance world and the written one, such as Rachel McKibbens, Bao Phi, and Patricia Smith. Through my participation in the performance world, I was lucky enough to have been introduced to the work of poets outside of spoken word, including Li-Young Lee, Anne Sexton, and Philip Levine.
WHAT’S NEXT: Currently I am applying to college. I abstained from going to college directly after high school, but now it seems like the right time. So basically a lot of my time has been spent writing college admission essays and studying for the ACT. It’s pretty terrifying; I haven’t done math in six years. As for poetry, I am currently working on poems about time travel.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I spend a lot of my time alone in my apartment writing, so when I come to a block, I feel like I’ve taken all I can from that space and need time to let it recharge. Usually, it requires engaging in something visual and half-social, like writing alone in a public location.
ADVICE: Give yourself permission to not explain everything.
AGE: 23.
RESIDENCE: Minneapolis.
JOB: Right now I am on a book tour, but when I’m back home I work at a haberdashery, selling fancy hats to fancy people.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? My job has been incredibly supportive; I’m very lucky. I’ve been able to take large chunks of time off of work to focus on writing or traveling, and am always welcomed back.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: Most of the poems in the book were less than two years old, some even a few months old, by the time it was released.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I started submitting the early version of the manuscript about two years before it got accepted.
Hieu Minh Nguyen reads a poem from This Way to the Sugar, published by Write Bloody Publishing. For more videos of Nguyen’s work visit www.hieuminhnguyen.com.
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Saeed Jones PRELUDE TO BRUISE Coffee House Press
in this town everything born black also burns. —from “Anthracite”
HOW IT BEGAN: The poems exist in the space between the reality of my life as a gay black man from the American South and the mythology I often dreamed of in my isolation. With that said, I wrote about half of the poems in the book before Boy, the character we follow throughout the collection, appeared to me. I wrote a poem in which a boy wakes up from a beautiful dream to find his father standing silently in the doorway of his bedroom. The silence of that moment—the interior and exterior worlds colliding—stunned me. Prelude to Bruise exists in the form it does now because I wanted to know what happened next and why.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: Homer’s The Odyssey, the last few collections Alexander McQueen designed before he took his own life, the way Toni Morrison involves landscapes and weather in the plot of her novels, and Nina Simone’s music. The poems of Lucie Brock-Broido, Patricia Smith, Rigoberto González, Anna Journey, Eduardo Corral, Jericho Brown, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Audre Lorde. The essays of June Jordan, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Susan Sontag.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m writing a memoir that charts a course from 1998, when I was 12, the year Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. were killed in hate crimes, to 2008, the year a straight man invited me into his bedroom, stripped down to his boxer shorts, and tried to kill me.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: When I’m struggling to write, I tend to begin reading in even more earnest than usual—earnest in the sense of pushing myself to read work beyond what I regard as my intellectual home and artistic neighborhood. I read to find work that will jolt me out of my usual habits and ways of approaching whatever I’m working on. Usually this works, but now and then it doesn’t. I’ve yet to be blocked in the sense of not being able to write for an extended period of time. Much more likely, I get frustrated because I hate what I’m writing and can’t tell if I should keep going or go in a different direction entirely. Reading then is like consulting a map for the best path forward.
ADVICE: Read five poems for every one poem that you write. You have to understand the broader landscape and community in which your work exists.
AGE: 29.
RESIDENCE: New York City.
JOB: I’m the editor of BuzzFeed LGBT.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? I’ve essentially finished one book and started another in the two years I’ve been working at BuzzFeed.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: I worked on the book for five or six years.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I submitted my manuscript to two contests; it was a finalist for the 2012 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. A few months later, Erika Stevens from Coffee House Press e-mailed me and said she wanted to talk. I was thrilled because Coffee House has published work by writers I love and respect, Patricia Smith among them. In retrospect, it all happened pretty quickly. I know I’m very lucky. Friends had told me to brace myself for a long haul so I tried to resist expectations. I’m glad my book wasn’t picked up as soon as I started submitting it; the act of being rejected and having to wait forced me to keep working at it.
Saeed Jones reads five poems from Prelude to Bruise for BuzzFeed. For more of Jones’s work visit theferocity.tumblr.com.
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Bianca Stone SOMEONE ELSE’S WEDDING VOWS Tin House/Octopus Books
What man does is build whole universes out of miniscule disasters and educational degrees. —from “The Future is Here”
HOW IT BEGAN: After I graduated from NYU’s graduate writing program in 2009 these poems just flooded in. I thought I’d be publishing my thesis, but that was just a stepping-stone to this book. When I look at Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, I realize that so many of these poems speak to past poems I’ve written. That’s important to me, to have my work never be static, moving forward but with those older poems still vital. For this book I wanted to write out the complexities of human love; how rich, but also how destructive it can be—and always somehow deeply inspiring. Being loved by someone is a great responsibility. And loving someone can be very hard, if part of their love is problematic.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: I’ve always been drawn to science, especially neuroscience. I feel that poets look at the world so differently because of something to do with the way their brains are wired: It’s not the normal, happy, healthy brain. It’s something else entirely. I also find inspiration in art—from reading comic books to sitting for hours in the Byzantine section of the Metropolitan Museum—as well as space travel, religion, and mythology. In addition, Vermont, where I’m from, is very important to the landscape in my poems, and I’m endlessly inspired by my friends and colleagues, all the amazing poets I know: listening to them, reading their books, collaborating with them. That’s really what keeps me going sometimes. I grew up spending a huge amount of time with my grandmother, the late poet Ruth Stone, and her poetry is ingrained in me. As is the work of my mother, novelist Abigail Stone. But of course I paved my own way too. I fell in love with Sylvia Plath and William Butler Yeats early on. Contemporary poets like John Ashbery, Sharon Olds, Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, and Mark Strand have been hugely influential.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m writing a lot of poems, some of which feels like a kind of memoir-essay-elegy-poetry hybrid book. I’m exploring narrative storytelling within the surreal. I’m also working a lot on what I call my Poetry Comics: that’s visual art and the lyrical working together, without one explaining the other. I use pen and ink with watercolor to do this. I find combining the text and image one of the most challenging things, but one that can be very exciting. We’ve been seeing a lot more of visual art in the writing world. I think it’s generative for students, too, to think about other means to express themselves and break out of the institutional bubble. Lastly, I’m in the (massive) process of rescuing and fixing up Ruth Stone’s house in Goshen, Vermont, and turning it into a nonprofit writers retreat and artist space.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: Sometimes I’m not feeling anything and I take a break from myself, find a well-written, engaging book of poetry and immerse myself. Getting out of your own head is just the key. Drawing or painting, too, lets my mind rebuild.
ADVICE: Be patient. Rather than focus on book contests, focus on making a community of support. Do readings, start magazines, take classes; make connections with like-minded poets and use those connections. Once you have a good, solid, thriving community of contemporaries, everything follows.
AGE: 31.
RESIDENCE: New York City.
JOB: I think this is a great question for writers, because usually it’s not as simple as saying, “I’m a poet!” Although, I always say that first, bluntly, without apology or pretention. I love people’s reactions. Usually they say, “Not a lot of money in that, huh?” and I say, “We actually make it work!” Really, there’s always so much more to being a writer than people think. Being a writer means you usually do many things, all of which is informed by your creativity. My livelihood comes from being a personal assistant to a poet at NYU. I also teach online classes in poetry and the visual image, guest lecture and teach, and do poetry-related freelance illustration. I’m also the chair of the Ruth Stone Foundation and editor-cofounder of Monk Books.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? I work from home mostly, and my work involves lots of multi-tasking. It’s a blessing and a curse because everything I do is self-motivation based. It’s hard sometimes to pick which task to focus all my energy on. But yes, compared to everyone else I know, I have lots of glorious writing time. I just have to make myself do work-work and poetry-work equally.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: About four or five years. It went through so many revisions, editing, cutting, and adding. I was editing poems right up until the last second. It’s a lot of deciding what’s working, and what you’re clinging to that perhaps should be let go.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: Four years. I submitted to a lot of contests, which is really a crapshoot. I started to realize I needed to find other ways to get it in someone’s hands. A lot of times that happens at poetry readings, when you get along with someone who is a publisher, and they like your poems, you’re like, “Well, guess that I have this book you can look at!”
Bianca Stone reads a poem from Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, along with original illustrations and animation by the poet, for Tin House. For more of Stone’s videos visit vimeo.com/tinhouse.
Sara Eliza Johnson BONE MAP Milkweed Editions (National Poetry Series)
all moments will shine if you cut them open, glisten like entrails in the sun. —from “As the Sickle Moon Guts a Cloud”
HOW IT BEGAN: The book began as a seafaring narrative—influenced in part by a stormy winter in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod—and expanded outward into the world of Bone Map. As the poems expanded outward, as they further considered the contemporary American moment, they also became more visceral and brutal, and eventually I realized I was writing an organic and ancient violence into the book, that the book was in some sense about violence as origin.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: I immersed myself in the materials of strange, old worlds (ones often as alluring as they are terrifying): Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the 1967 Czech film Marketa Lazarová, the Anglo-Saxon elegies and riddles, the sixth-century voyage of Saint Brendan the Navigator, Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise. The poets and artists who have particularly influenced me include Lorca, Plath, Celan, Ingmar Bergman, and the Polish artist Zdzisław Beksinski, who said, “I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams.”
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m still in the early stages of the next book, but it’s one preoccupied with the apocalyptic moment. I’m writing a lot about human annihilation and alien or inhuman spaces, such as primordial earth, future earth, outer space, and deep sea.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I’m always looking for new sources of fascination to spark my imagination: a book on black holes or human evolution, a visually exciting film, a visit to a museum or the aquarium. If I’m experiencing writer’s block or feel stuck in a comfort zone, I’ll more aggressively seek those sources out. It’s in part this curiosity—and the potential to transform my curiosities into art—that keeps me writing and creating.
ADVICE: Don’t be afraid to cut the dead weight. Beware of nostalgically clinging to poems that marked artistic milestones for you. And just because a piece is good—or has been published in a grand venue—doesn’t mean it belongs in the project you’ve undertaken. If you think of the book as a dynamic, breathing thing, or as a unique textual place, every page should seem indispensable when you read through it.
AGE: 30.
RESIDENCE: Salt Lake City.
JOB: I’m a PhD student in the creative writing program at the University of Utah, where I also teach.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Though often my academic and creative work intersect, it is not always easy to balance work obligations and writing, especially because it can be a challenge to switch on the creative regions of the brain at will. It is not only necessary to carve out the time to write, but the mental space as well. To get myself in the right headspace, I usually clear my desk of papers and books, put on some music (headphones are essential), and pour some coffee if it’s daytime or (just a little) bourbon if it’s night.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: About five years.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: Bone Map was selected for the National Poetry Series in its first round of submissions. The NPS was the fourth book contest to which I submitted the manuscript.
Sara Eliza Johnson reads the poem “Dear Rub” from Bone Map. For more of Johnson’s work visit saraelizajohnson.com.
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F. Douglas Brown ZERO TO THREE University of Georgia Press (Cave Canem Poetry Prize)
my body, rain drenched on the inside and you arriving faster than the next song —from “The Talk”
HOW IT BEGAN: What initiated this book was the birth of my son, then that of my daughter, five years later. It really came together thanks to the Cave Canem retreat and the influence the writers gave then and continue to give. I am both a Cave Canem and Kundiman fellow, and the folks who are connected to these two phenomenal organizations are generous, intelligent, and the best advocates for poetry that I know. They all helped me push and delve deep into the work. When my father died five years ago, so many poems erupted. When I stepped back and looked at the body of work, a book made sense.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: My kids and father were the immediate sources for this. As I mentioned, the poets of Cave Canem and Kundiman really push all of us involved to believe in the work we’re doing. However, back in ‘99 or so, I was in the MA Creative Writing Program at San Francisco State University, where I took a class called “What the Body Knows.” Toni Mirosevich and the rest of the class helped push me to see my father body as a vehicle for exploring my growing baby who was walking, talking, and figuring out the world. Music also factors into my work. I recently wrote a poem trying to imitate the cadence of Beyoncé’s song “Flawless.” Cornelius Eady’s You Don’t Miss Your Water and Yusef Komunyakaa’s serial poem “Songs for My Father” were also big inspirations. Both helped me take mere observation and make it stand up to the duty of fatherhood. Later, Natasha Trethewey’s books helped me reexamine pain, and [learn] how to open the voices of fatherhood that had been surrounding me as a parent.
WHAT’S NEXT: I am working on two projects: first, more fatherhood poems, and second, my namesake. The fatherhood poems are a collaborative work with poet Geffrey Davis, who I met at the Cave Canem retreat in 2012. At that time he was a new father, and what we shared regarding fatherhood—mostly our attempts to be better fathers—inspired us to continue via poetry. We are conducting workshops together, discussing poems on fatherhood from seminal poets, and doing our own work to complete what we hope to be a manuscript. Whatever it becomes, the work is good thus far, and liberating.
My complete name is Frederick Douglas Brown. How could one named after such a remarkable figure avoid it? In my work I am specifically responding to the paintings of Frederick Douglass’s life by the Harlem Renaissance painter Jacob Lawrence. My ekphrasis poems have been a pleasant journey for me. I have been able to do plenty of research, but I hope to view the Lawrence work face-to-face before releasing a final manuscript. As it is, I have completed fifteen poems.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: Reading is the best cure for me when the words are not coming together on the page or are nowhere near the page. Reading gives me permission to try new approaches. If I’m stuck or in a rut, an imitation poem helps. To see my friends publish work helps too. There is a bit of competition in every poet, and I don’t want to fall behind. I let that happen before, but Cave Canem teaches us how valuable our voice is.
ADVICE: Two things were told to me that really helped me finalize the work: 1) This is not your thesis. Approach it as a means to speak to a larger audience. 2) Friend and poet Jenny Factor told me, “Doug, this is not the only book of poems you’ll write about your kids or your dad.”
AGE: 42.
RESIDENCE: Los Angeles.
JOB: I’m an English teacher at Loyola High School of Los Angeles. I’m also a deejay on the side.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Most of the time is does not! I have been a teacher for twenty years. From my experience, teaching and writing dip from the same well. When I am “on” in the classroom, rarely does that translate to being “on” in my writing. I am accustomed to having my hands in as many projects as possible: parenting, writing, teaching, deejaying, etc. When I am at my best as a writer or teacher, my job is singularly that. This, of course, excludes fatherhood, which asks/needs me to be whatever my kids need.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: This work took sixteen years to complete. The poems about my kids took a while, mostly because I did not want the book or any individual poems to be a slideshow of my family. Also, many of the poems explore the mystery of fatherhood, so the logic of the poems, like parenting, had to be thoroughly sifted. I was learning how to be a father as I was writing the poems (and still am). The poems about my father came rather quickly: I waited a year after his death, and then started writing them. The drafts were strong and needed minor tweaking, but tweaking nonetheless.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I submitted the manuscript on three separate occasions. The first two submissions were a year before I won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2013.
F. Douglas Brown reads two poems from Zero to Three, published by University of Georgia Press. For more of Brown’s work visit fdouglasbrown.com.
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Cindy Williams Gutiérrez THE SMALL CLAIM OF BONES Bilingual Press
Garland my bones with those who have gone before, colli, And the ones who have gone before them, colli. Return, Return.” —from “If I Were a Nahua Poet”
HOW IT BEGAN: When I entered the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Program (graduation was a gift to myself for my fiftieth birthday), I knew I wanted to explore two things: Mesoamerican poetics, specifically Aztec “flower and song,” and the poetry of feminist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who secured a cell of her own 250 years before Virginia Woolf insisted on her own room. I realized later that this was my way of bridging borders as well as history. I was born and raised in a Texas town on the border of Mexico, and my father worked for the U.S. Immigration Service on the bridges in Brownsville for more than thirty years. Though he is the “Williams” in Williams Gutiérrez, he was raised in a Mexican mining camp in Santa Bárbara, Chihuahua. Primarily of Welsh and German ethnicity, he was also one-quarter Cherokee and had an abiding respect for native peoples and their way of life. My mother’s heritage (the “Gutiérrez” in Williams Gutiérrez) can be traced to a sixteenth-century land grant from the King of Spain. In exploring Mexico’s history as a backdrop for my own mixed heritage, I realized that I was not bicultural (Anglo and Hispanic), as I had thought growing up, but rather multicultural—braiding together my father’s indigenous and Anglo roots with my mother’s Hispanic heritage.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: My father has been my muse. He was a history buff and loved telling stories about Mexico. He was also always fascinated by women’s lot throughout history: He read voraciously and spoke often about the misogynistic treatment of Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc, Sor Juana, even Marilyn Monroe. Early on, he made me believe I could do anything, that the world was mine. In high school, he’d return from his shift on the bridge after midnight and read my English papers. I would awaken to a full, handwritten page of thoughtful remarks. I reference this in the poem “The Gift,” which is the seminal poem in the first section of my book. I would also have to say that Charles Martin, my first mentor at Stonecoast, inspired (and terrified!) me when he suggested I create poems in the voices of Nahua poet-princes. This book would not have been born without his provocation. Aside from Sor Juana and Nezahualcoyotl and other Mesoamerican poets, my literary guiding lights are Yeats and Lorca—both tapped into ancestral memory and revived the local imagination. I draw inspiration from the silent and silenced voices of history.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m searching for homes for my manuscripts that have remained tucked in my computer for the past two years. I also have an idea incubating for a play inspired by a Rumi poem. And today I awoke with an idea for a chapbook inspired by—no surprise—women’s lot. Though my father passed away a year and a half ago, he still speaks to me in my sleep.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I haunt cafés. All I need is the aroma of coffee and a strong dose of people-watching (and the accompanying eavesdropping) and something (some image, line, dialogue, idea) will emerge.
ADVICE: I have found that the more I write about my writing, the better I can shape my collections. An abstract is a beautiful thing: It encapsulates your intention for the book in less than a page. More than once, this has helped me perform the hardest task of all—prune poems from a budding manuscript.
AGE: 56.
RESIDENCE: Oregon City, Oregon.
JOB: I split my time between my careers as a business consultant and as a literary artist. My firm, Sage Marketing Associates, has provided strategic planning and marketing consulting services to West Coast–based global technology companies, regional healthcare organizations, and local nonprofits since 1997. I am also a poet-dramatist, producer, and educator. I have taught poetry (mostly in English, sometimes in Spanish) to every grade from kindergarten to twelfth through the Portland Art Museum, the Right Brain Initiative, Wordstock, and Writers in the Schools. I also teach poetry to adults at my home in the country and at Studio 410 in Portland, Oregon, where I offer an annual ekphrastic poetry class in response to Russell J. Young’s photographs.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? I have striven to piece together a writing life since 1997 when I left my job as a marketing executive in Silicon Valley (I have a Bachelor’s degree in Computing Science and a Wharton MBA). Consulting has afforded me the flexibility to become a serious writer as well as to return to graduate school to earn my MFA and, afterward, to teach. It continues to be a challenging balancing act, particularly because I am equally devoted to theatre, which is incredibly consuming, especially in the role of producer. My most recent production was Words That Burn—a dramatization of World War II experiences of William Stafford, Lawson Inada, and Guy Gabaldón (in their own words), which I created and coproduced in commemoration of the William Stafford Centennial. The show was featured in Milagro Theatre’s 2014 La Luna Nueva festival, which celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month in Portland, Oregon.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: Two years. I wrote the poems during my first two semesters at Stonecoast and then spent the last semester editing and shaping them into a collection. But the collection wasn’t in its finished form for another few months after graduation.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: During the 2009 AWP book fair, I shopped my manuscript around and received interest from Arizona State University’s Bilingual Press. I followed up three months later with a book proposal and my manuscript. About a year and a half after that, I received the press’s letter of acceptance. In the meantime, I received fifteen rejections.
Cindy Williams Gutiérrez reads the poem “Micacuicatl, Or Song For The Dead” from The Small Claim of Bones. Original pre-Hispanic music by Gerardo Calderón (www.grupo-condor.com). For more of Gutiérrez’s work visit grito-poetry.com.
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Danniel Schoonebeek AMERICAN BARRICADE YesYes Books
The question of whether the idea of America is dead is not a question. —from “Correction”
HOW IT BEGAN: There’s this feeling in the United States that the country is somehow finished. I wanted to peel off that scab, and peel off the scabs I found underneath, which for me were family power dynamics, the American workforce, taboos of love, the rifts surrounding gender and class, the problem of having a name and a history, the misnomer of the word America. I wanted to dig into that American disgust.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: In place of inspiration, which I don’t think I feel, what I feel instead is camaraderie. And to that end the names can be endless. But Rukeyser and Woolf, global protest, James Agee, the Clash, running in winter, August Wilson, gunpowder tea, Eileen Myles, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, postcards, the Anti-Rent War, anxiety, Poet in New York, C. D. Wright, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Occupy movement, Paul Thomas Anderson, living in a cabin, Claudia Rankine, rush hour, Allyson Paty, percussion, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Frank Bidart, night walks, Austria, Walker Evans, Sarah Kane, Camus, shaving, Simone Weil, Jules Renard, Marina Tsvetaeva.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m finishing a book of prose, a travelogue called C’est la guerre. It details a two-month reading tour I did in support of American Barricade last year. C’est la guerre will be published by Poor Claudia in 2015. (I sometimes hear grovelers say that certain poems feel like prose broken into lines, and I think C’est la guerre is maybe poetry broken into prose; I want to see who’ll grovel at that). And I’m also, every day, writing poems that will be my second book of poetry. Which so far appears to be about problems of capital.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: It helps me to think of a poem as a house you can demolish. When the lines aren’t budging but I know they can move, I like to start knocking down walls and prying up floorboards and putting the rooms back together the wrong way, with new lighting and banisters. Experimental editing is something I urge upon myself, and more times than I can count it’s resulted in a radically different poem that I had to essentially destroy in order to make.
ADVICE: Any advice people give only distracts other people from writing the book they need to write.In my life and in my writing I’ve been grateful when I can stop and remind myself to revolt against what revolts me. Always unsettle myself into myself, if you will. I’m always asking myself to write the poem and the book and the sentence that I don’t want to write.
AGE: 28.
RESIDENCE: Brooklyn, New York, and the Catskills.
JOB: I write books and read poems aloud for a living. I publish poems written by other people and I have conversations about art and politics for a living. At some point we all have to make our own distinctions between living and money. To make money I work as an editor, a booking agent, and an occasional book critic.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? It’s a little war every day, and you have to antagonize the conflict in a new way every day. The simple answer is never. I find that most jobs are the opposite of writing, or creating any art that will matter to people. I felt this for the first time when I was young, and ever since then I’ve written poetry from a place where the poems want to jam themselves into the gearworks of this problem.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: About four years. Some of the poems were drafted and edited for years. A few poems were written in a fever pitch and finished within a week or two.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: My publisher was actually the one who found me. I read a poem in a really crowded basement bar in Boston about two years ago and she was in the audience; she got in touch with me a few days later and asked if I’d written a book. I wish that scenario happened more in poetry. Before that I mailed the book around to publishers for about a year.
Danniel Schoonebeek reads five poems from American Barricade. For more of Schoonebeek’s work visit dannielschoonebeek.tumblr.com.
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Tarfia Faizullah SEAM Southern Illinois University Press (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award)
How thin the seam between the world and the world: a few layers of muscle and fat, a sheet wrapped around a corpse: glass so easily ground into sand. —from “Reading Tranströmer in Bangladesh”
HOW IT BEGAN: I learned about the widespread rape of Bangladeshi women by the Pakistani Army during the 1971 Liberation War. I wanted to know more, and I applied for a Fulbright fellowship to go to Bangladesh and interview the women. A number of them are still alive. Seam emerged from my time there.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: The courage of other artists who share beautiful and difficult stories about the conversations taking place between their interior and exterior lives. I’m in awe of Detroit poets: Vievee Francis, Nandi Comer, francine j. harris, Jamaal May, Matthew Olzmann, and Tommye Blount. I’m moved by Eugenia Leigh’s Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows and David Tomas Martinez’s Hustle. I always return to poets in translation such as Rumi, Hikmet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Anna Akhmatova, César Vallejo, and Tomas Tranströmer.
WHAT’S NEXT: A second book of poems, Register of Eliminated Villages, and a memoir, Kafir.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I try to get into the physicality of what the vastness inside and around me looks like. I listen to the train going past our house and wonder at the science and magic that collided to create its vibrations. I wonder who decided to write the informational signs at the top of a mountain during a hike, and what that person looks like. The world isn’t material for my poems; it’s its own fabric and when I’m not writing, I’m disconnected from it. For me, what keeps me going is mindfully rolling around in the world and feeling it in my whole body.
ADVICE: Let yourself be surprised. Relentlessly do the work of making every word of every line of every poem sing. Make mistakes and let them lead you into unexpected and wondrous places. A quote that has become my mantra is by the poet Russell Edson, who said, “Desire and patience takes us where we want to go.”
AGE: 34.
RESIDENCE: Detroit.
JOB: I teach at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program as the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor in Poetry, and codirect the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press and Video Series with Jamaal May.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Absolutely. Even when it doesn’t seem like there’s time, there’s always more.
Tarfia Faizullah reads the poem “Instructions for the Interviewer” from Seam, published by Southern Illinois University Press. For more of Faizullah’s work visit tfaizullah.com.
Melissa Faliveno is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
[Credits]
Ilustrations by Eugene Smith; books by David Hamsley
Since its inception in 2010, Instagram has spawned whole new genres of visual entertainment. From tattoo artists to cookie decorators, savvy users of the photo- and video-sharing platform have attracted viral followings that often galvanize lucrative commercial ventures offline. The same goes for poetry: Not only has the platform served as a launchpad for some of the most widely read poets in recent history, but it has also helped them sell thousands—sometimes millions—of books.
In fact, books by “Instapoets” constituted nearly half of all poetry book sales in 2017, which, according to NPD BookScan, nearly doubled since 2016. Leading the sales roster was Rupi Kaur, whose debut collection, Milk and Honey (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2015), sold more than a million copies in print last year and who boasts in excess of 2.6 million followers on Instagram, including pop star Ariana Grande. Kaur’s second book, The Sun and Her Flowers, also published by Andrews McMeel, debuted at the No. 1 spot on the New York Times paperback best-seller list when it was released in October 2017; it stayed there for twenty weeks and has sold more than 1.2 million copies. Kaur’s poetry epitomizes the prevailing Instapoetic style, with its epigrammatic brevity, plain language, and empowering messages, and she also supplements her verse with glamorous selfies and hand-drawn illustrations. But while Kaur may be the highest-grossing poet of the moment, she is hardly alone in making the successful transition from social media to print; twelve of the twenty best-selling poets of 2017 got their start on Instagram.
Other writers on that list include Amanda Lovelace, r.h. Sin, and the pseudonymous Atticus, whose debut collection, Love Her Wild, was published last year by Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books imprint. The book was a national best-seller and landed Atticus among the top ten best-selling poets of 2017. His Instagram following has also more than doubled since the book’s publication, currently comprising more than 700,000 fans. Like Love Her Wild, most commercially successful books by Instapoets contain a number of poems that don’t appear on the authors’ social media pages, incentivizing serious fans to buy a copy, and the books differ from most traditional poetry collections in their inclusion of photography and illustrations, maintaining the visual quality that has helped make Instagram so popular. Social media can also serve as a free marketing tool; Instapoets often advertise book deals, discounts, new editions, and tour dates online.
Still, as Sarah Cantin, senior editor at Atria Books, points out, “Viral online followings do not guarantee commercial book sales.” Instead Cantin attributes the success of Love Her Wild to Atticus’s talent for storytelling across a range of mediums, as well as the book’s pleasing design and the cultural hunger for pithy, motivational writing that “makes the reader feel seen.”
Sara Sargent, executive editor at HarperCollins Children’s Books, echoes this sentiment. “Instapoetry is the height of feeling that your lived experience is shared,” says Sargent, who recently edited Light Filters In, the debut collection of eighteen-year-old Instapoet Caroline Kaufman, published in May. Sargent sees books like Kaufman’s straddling several markets; they’re poetry but with a young adult spin, supplemental artwork, and even dimensions of the self-help genre. “Instapoetry is part of the growing cultural trend around self-care and self-discovery,” she says. “Journaling, coloring books, self-help: It all has to do with our commitment to figuring out who we are.”
No publisher has cornered that market more effectively than Andrews McMeel, which, in addition to being one of the first companies to produce adult coloring books, published eleven of the top twenty best-selling poets last year, including Kaur, Sin, and Lovelace. Kirsty Melville, McMeel’s president and publisher, ascribes the wild success of the Instapoets in her catalogue to “the emotional intensity, passion, and message of their work, which resonates with us at a time when many young people feel disaffected from the mainstream.” She adds: “I think the digital age has facilitated a connection between writers and readers. In addition, although these poets share their work online, publication in book form is also cherished. The book is one of the oldest, most successful, and most valued inventions for sharing ideas.”
But as Instapoetry has taken up more and more space on poetry shelves at bookstores around the world, the craze has also had its fair share of detractors, who consider the writing trite and unrefined, bearing a tenuous relationship to poetic traditions before and beyond the Internet. (A 2017 article from Deadspin calls Kaur’s poetry “pitiful, vapid, exploitative, and possibly plagiarized.”) When asked whether Instapoetry might function as a gateway to other kinds of poetry, editors and writers give mixed responses; many think the Internet subgenre is helping to reinvigorate a cultural interest in poetry in general, while others consider Instapoetry a pop phenomenon with little connection to the literary world. Still others refute the distinction altogether.
Related or not, book sales are up for both traditional print poetry and Instapoetry. “Poetry on the whole feels revitalized right now,” says Cantin. “If more bookstores create table displays featuring poets of all backgrounds, if more young people, in particular, feel that poetry is relevant to their daily lives, so much the better for the publishing industry and for readers alike.” When asked why he thinks people continue to buy poetry in an age when new technologies threaten to replace the old, Atticus replied with his signature Instapoetic brevity: “There’s a magic there you can’t find online.”
Maggie Millner holds an MFA from New York University and lives in Brooklyn. Previously she was the Diana & Simon Raab Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers Magazine.
In 1952 in New York City, Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Roney recorded Dylan Thomas reciting a few of his poems, including the famous villanelle “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Released on vinyl later that year, the recording offered a rare chance to hear Thomas, who worked for years as a radio broadcaster, read the poem and its memorable last refrain, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” It also marked the launch of Caedmon Records, a label dedicated to restoring the spoken tradition of poetry and stories and creating, as its slogan read, “a third dimension for the printed page.” Caedmon Records became Caedmon Audio when it was acquired by HarperCollins in 1987 and made the switch from vinyl to CDs. To this day, the label is still often credited as having laid the foundation for the audiobook industry.
Caedmon’s vinyl recordings seemed to be a thing of the past until January, when HarperAudio/Caedmon announced a new series of literary vinyl, to be released throughout 2018. The imprint’s first title, a recording of actor Nate Corddry reading Joe Hill’s story “Dark Carousel,” came out in April, and records by Nikki Giovanni, Neil Gaiman, and Daniel Handler (also known as Lemony Snicket) will be released later this year.
HarperCollins isn’t the only big publisher to venture into vinyl. In February Hachette Audio launched a new vinyl audiobook series with its first title, David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water. Later this year the imprint will release recordings by David Sedaris, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Amanda Palmer, among others. Both HarperCollins and Hachette are looking to capitalize on the unexpected revival of vinyl in recent years, despite the format’s near-demise in the 1980s with the introduction of CDs. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, revenues from vinyl were as high in 2015 as they were in 1988. Jeff Bowers of Wax, the independent record label partnering with both Hachette Audio and Harper Audio, said in a January press release, “This well-curated, thoughtful series of spoken-word releases is a response to the tremendous growth in audiobooks and vinyl, part of a new moment in what has become a listening revolution.”
In the foreground of this revolution are Third Man Books and Fonograf Editions, independent literary presses committed to recording language on vinyl. Even as music streaming dominates as a listening format, Third Man Books and Fonograf Editions aim for a literary listening experience that is both meaningful and tangible, that necessitates the physicality and fuller sound of a vinyl record. “People were saying fifteen, twenty years ago that records were going to go away,” says Chet Weise, cofounder of Third Man Books. “People said paper books were going to go away too. The craze is settling down, and paper books are still a majority of what people read. There is something to [their] tangibility. It isn’t just rationalizing that these things we love are worth something and should stay around.”
Third Man Books is the partner publisher of Third Man Records, launched in 2001 by multi-Grammy-winning musician Jack White in Detroit. In 2014 Third Man Records claimed the best-selling vinyl album since Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy in 1994 with White’s Lazaretto. The label also boasts “the world’s only live venue with direct-to-acetate recording capabilities” in Nashville, where writers as well as musicians can record their work straight to vinyl. “For me, poetry has to exist in the audio spectrum—got to hear those words with some breath behind them,” says Weise. “It’s music, and if we believe that music sounds best on vinyl and is best presented on vinyl, we’re going to put poetry on vinyl too.”
Third Man Books released its inaugural title, Language Lessons: Volume 1, in 2014, a box set that includes an anthology of contemporary poetry and prose by writers and musicians such as C. D. Wright, Adrian Matejka, Richard Hell, and Tav Falco, plus two vinyl LPs of jazz, psychedelic punk, poetry, blues, and pop, and five poetry broadsides. Since then Third Man Books has maintained a multimedia aesthetic; its April release, Destruction of Man, a book-length poem about farming by Abraham Smith, includes photography and an audio flexi disc of Smith reading his own poetry.
Jeff Alessandrelli, the director of Fonograf Editions, shares Weise’s reverence for literary vinyl. “It allows for a listening experience that is also an emotional experience,” he says. “When I listen to an MP3, I don’t get the same emotional sensation that I get when I listen to a record.”
Fonograf Editions, an imprint of Portland, Oregon–based independent publisher Octopus Books, was established in 2016. Since then the vinyl-only poetry press has quickly garnered national attention by releasing records featuring readings by Rae Armantrout, Eileen Myles, and Alice Notley, who performed her work live in Seattle. Fonograf’s latest record, Harmony Holiday’s The Black Saint and the Sinnerman, released in March, features poetry by Holiday along with music sampled from Charles Mingus’s 1963 album, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.
“We live in a digital age, and I think in a lot of ways that’s great; it streamlines a lot of experiences,” says Alessandrelli. “But I think increasingly there’s going to be both the desire and a need for things that are tactile and for things that you can hold on to, and that means something greater than an MP3.” For more and more readers, listeners, record labels, and publishers, that something can be found with a needle traversing the grooves on a vinyl record.
Thea Prieto writes and edits for Portland Review, Propeller Magazine, the Gravity of the Thing, and Oregon Music News. Her website is theaprieto.com.
In celebration of Short Story Month, we’ve assembled ten of our favorite audio recordings of authors reading from story collections featured in Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin over the past five years. All of them were recorded exclusively for Poets & Writers Magazine and illustrate the irresistible and inspiring power of the short form.
Roxane Gay reads “Florida” from Difficult Women (Grove Press, 2017).
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Mary Gaitskill’s Somebody With a Little Hammer and Lesley Nneka Arimah’s What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, for a glimpse into the worlds of these new and noteworthy titles.
“Manacled to a whelm.” Fast (Ecco, May 2017) by Jorie Graham. Fourteenth book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Daniel Halpern. Publicist: Martin Wilson.
“On occasion, the two women went to lunch and she came home offended by some pettiness.” The Dinner Party (Little, Brown, May 2017) by Joshua Ferris. Fourth book, first story collection. Agent: Julie Barer. Editor: Reagan Arthur. Publicist: Carrie Neill.
“I’ve been dreaming about my violin.” Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung (Crown Publishing Group, April 2017) by Min Kym. First book, memoir. Agent: Annabel Merullo. Editor: Rachel Klayman. Publicist: Rebecca Welbourn.
“That year, toward the end of my childhood, I was living in Jacmel, a coastal village in Haiti.” Hadriana in All My Dreams (Akashic Books, May 2017) by René Depestre, translated from the French by Kaiama L. Glover. Fifteenth of twenty-seven books, third of four novels. Agent: None. Editor: Johnny Temple. Publicist: Susannah Lawrence.
“Ezinma fumbles the keys against the lock and doesn’t see what came behind her: Her father as a boy when he was still tender, vying for his mother’s affection.” What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky (Riverhead, April 2017) by Lesley Nneka Arimah. First book, story collection. Agent: Samantha Shea. Editor: Rebecca Saletan. Publicist: Claire McGinnis.
“Descending the subway stairs / in a crowd of others, slow / steps, everyone a little / hunched in their coats, probably / as unhappy as I was / to have to go to work.” The Others (Wave Books, May 2017) by Matthew Rohrer. Eighth book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Matthew Zapruder. Publicist: Ryo Yamaguchi.
“I’ll begin our story with that afternoon, after we hadn’t spoken for a year—like so many years when we didn’t speak—when you pulled up next to me on my walk to work and offered me a ride.” Sunshine State (Harper Perennial, April 2017) by Sarah Gerard. Second book, first essay collection. Agent: Adriann Ranta. Editor: Erin Wicks. Publicist: Martin Wilson.
“It was summer.” Woman No. 17 (Hogarth, May 2017) by Edan Lepucki. Second book, novel. Agent: Erin Hosier. Editor: Lindsay Sagnette. Publicist: Rachel Rokicki.
“When Albert Murray said / the second law adds up to / the blues that in other words / ain’t nothing nothing he meant it” Field Theories (Nightboat Books, April 2017) by Samiya Bashir. Third book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Kazim Ali. Publicist: Lindsey Boldt.
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee.
“By some concoction of sugar, prescription painkillers, rancor, and cocaine, my father, Gregory Pardlo, Sr., began killing himself after my parents separated in 2007.” Air Traffic: A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America (Knopf, April 2018) by Gregory Pardlo. Third book, first memoir. Agent: Rob McQuilkin. Editor: Maria Goldverg. Publicist: Jessica Purcell.
“Strangers are building a new house next door.” Negative Space (New Directions, April 2018) by Luljeta Lleshanaku, translated from the Albanian by Ani Gjika. Eleventh book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Jeffrey Yang. Publicist: Mieke Chew.
“Tucker had been walking for six hours through early morning ground fog that rose in shimmering waves.” Country Dark (Grove Press, April 2018) by Chris Offutt. Seventh book, second novel. Agent: Nicole Aragi. Editor: Amy Hundley. Publicist: John Mark Boling.
“The book lied.” That Kind of Mother (Ecco, May 2018) by Rumaan Alam. Second book, novel. Agent: Julie Barer. Editor: Megan Lynch. Publicist: Sonya Cheuse.
“It’s a love story, the famous violinist had said, and even though Jana knew it was not, those were the words that knocked around her brain when she began to play on stage.” The Ensemble (Riverhead Books, May 2018) by Aja Gabel. First book, novel. Agent: Andrea Morrison. Editor: Laura Perciasepe. Publicist: Liz Hohenadel.
“Frenching with a mouthful of M&M’s dunno if I feel polluted / or into it—the lights go low across the multiplex Temple of // canoodling and Junk food” Junk (Tin House Books, May 2018) by Tommy Pico. Third book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Tony Perez. Publicist: Sabrina Wise.
“When I was five years old, back when my old man was still sort of around, I watched a promotional video for Disneyland that my mom got in the free box of VHS tapes at the library.” Lawn Boy (Algonquin Books, April 2018) by Jonathan Evison. Fifth book, novel. Agent: Mollie Glick. Editor: Chuck Adams. Publicist: Brooke Csuka.
Nearly half the world’s languages are endangered to some extent, with one language becoming extinct roughly every two weeks, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Barring swift revitalization efforts, more than 2,500 of the nearly 7,000 tongues spoken in the world today are predicted to disappear by the end of the century. More than two hundred, such as Peru’s Panobo and Angola’s Kwisi languages, have become extinct since 1950.
Losing a language is not like losing a precious ancient artifact, such as a piece of jewelry or a Grecian urn. A language is not a synchronic object, encapsulating a culture at a single moment in time, but rather a dynamic force that binds people together within a shared, ongoing history. When a language vanishes, it takes with it something intrinsic and irreplaceable about human experience in general and a marginalized culture in particular. Chris McCabe, the poetry librarian at Southbank Centre’s National Poetry Library in London, had this in mind when he launched the Endangered Poetry Project, which seeks to collect poetry written in endangered languages and archive it in the library’s permanent holdings.
McCabe first conceived of the project, which launched in the fall, after coming across a striking bit of literary trivia: Instead of the official Latin expected of him, Dante composed the Divine Comedy in a medieval Tuscan vernacular. “That got me thinking about how many great poems there might be out there in dialects and endangered languages,” says McCabe. “After looking into endangered languages more closely, I realized how many languages are under threat.”
At the time, Southbank Centre’s National Poetry Library already included poems in more than two hundred languages. Within its first three months, the Endangered Poetry Project had ushered in over a dozen more, including the Shetlandic dialect of Scots as well as Kristang, a severely endangered creole language spoken in Singapore and parts of Malaysia by a community of mixed Portuguese and Asian descent. McCabe and his team crowdsource poems from around the world, and encourage anyone familiar with a well-known poem in an endangered language to submit it through the project’s website (www.southbankcentre.co.uk/endangered-poetry). After collecting both written and audio versions of each poem, staff members at the National Poetry Library then print them on handmade paper and store them in a specially made conservation box. Although the foremost goal of the initiative is to gather poems in their original languages, McCabe also strives to procure English translations whenever possible. There are also plans to make some poems accessible online, and McCabe says that the initiative will “continue in perpetuity to gather poems from languages under risk.”
The fear of losing language—and specifically losing the poetry of a language, which can often help crystallize and communicate the experiential and linguistic information of a given culture—is part of what motivates McCabe, who is also a widely published poet and writer. “Poetry has a place in most cultures and languages where other art forms might not have gained traction,” he says. “This could easily have to do with economic factors—poetry costs nothing to create, especially in oral forms—and also with the fact that when a language comes into existence, it becomes the material for the human imagination to capture events, ideas, and emotions.”
The Endangered Poetry Project owes some of its early success to a rousing inaugural event in October during the fiftieth anniversary of Poetry International, a biennial poetry festival in London founded at the Southbank Centre by poet Ted Hughes in 1967. During the event, called “Seven Thousand Words for Human,” multinational poets Joy Harjo, Nineb Lamassu, Gearóid Mac Lochlainn, and Nick Makoha read pieces they had written for the occasion in languages such as the Ugandan Luganda and Muscogee Creek. Southbank Centre translator-in-residence and festival organizer Stephen Watts furnished English translations of each poem, and a member of the public even volunteered to recite a poem in the Logudorese dialect of Sardinian.
Another highlight for McCabe was the moment, a few weeks later, when he received a selection of poet Claude Vigée’s “Schwàrzi Sengessle Flàckere ém Wénd” (“Black Nettles Blaze in the Wind”), a long Alsatian requiem written in tribute to the language, which was banned in schools in the Alsace region after World War II. The poem is special to McCabe because it captures the anguish of losing one’s native tongue: “Our hoarse voices, broken long ago / Suddenly stopped: / Already, on our school bench, / In the thrall of the forceps of language / We felt like tongue-cripples / Tangled up in our songs.”
Maggie Millner teaches creative writing at New York University, where she is pursuing an MFA in poetry. Previously she was the Diana & Simon Raab Editorial Fellow at Poets & Writers Magazine.
The National Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre in London.
In the fall of 2009 writer Doran Larson put out a call for essays from incarcerated people and prison staff about what life was like inside, and five years later, in 2014, Michigan State University Press published a selection of them as Fourth City: Essays From the Prison in America. But the essays never stopped coming. “I’m holding a handwritten essay that just arrived today,” Larson said in August. “Once people knew there was a venue where someone would read their work, they kept writing.” Instead of letting this steady stream of essays go unread, Larson decided to create the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA), an open-source archive of essays by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, as well as correctional officers and staffers. Accessible to anyone online, the APWA (apw.dhinitiative.org) is a “virtual meeting place” to “spread the voices of unheard populations.”
With more than 2.2 million people in its prisons and jails, the United States incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other country in the world. But most Americans don’t know anything about life inside, which can leave them both indifferent to those who live and work there and divorced from the justice system their tax dollars reinforce. Larson hopes to rectify this disconnect with the APWA, and after receiving a $262,000 grant in March from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the archive is poised to do just that.
Larson, who teaches literature and creative writing at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, first became involved with the incarcerated population when a friend invited him to a discussion group at Attica Correctional Facility, a New York state prison. Larson listened to men speak about how they were coping with being in prison and was “floored by the honesty and earnestness of those conversations,” he says. A few months later he started a writing group at Attica and became interested in prison writing as a genre. “I spent two summers at the Library of Congress reading all the prison writing I could. I wanted to start an undergraduate course on it. There are a few anthologies of [work by] political prisoners like Martin Luther King Jr. and some small collections from prison writing workshops, but I couldn’t find a wide, national sampling from currently incarcerated people.”
With more than 1,200 essays from people all across the country, the APWA fills that need. The database currently holds three million words’ worth of writing, enough to fill more than eighteen volumes the size of Fourth City, which is a hefty 338 pages. “While reading individual essays can be moving and inspiring, it’s reading in the aggregate that’s valuable and instructive,” says Larson. “One of the extraordinary things has been to see the same themes emerging: staff violence, neglect and abuse at home, drug and alcohol addiction, police aggression.” These shared experiences are part of what inspired Larson to name the collection Fourth City—to represent the fact that the prison and jail population in the United States is larger than that of Houston, Texas, currently the fourth largest city in the country, and that stories told from inside any prison in the nation can seem as if they’re all coming from the same place.
The APWA is part of Hamilton College’s Digital Humanities Initiative. With additional funding for the archive from the NEH grant, Larson plans to continue to solicit, preserve, digitize, and disseminate the work of incarcerated people and prison workers and to hire a part-time assistant. The grant will also go toward finishing an online tool that will allow anyone to transcribe handwritten essays into fully searchable texts and to improve the site’s search functions so users can search by author attribute (race, religion, age, ethnicity), keyword, location, and more.
Larson hopes the archive will be a resource that people will use regularly for academic, policy, and social research. “In the age of big data, we’re trying to help create the era of big narrative, people writing very concretely about what works and doesn’t work,” he says. “Policy-makers might consult this to investigate: How much human pain might be caused because of this policy? When does the law become little more than legalized suffering?” Larson published a book last July, Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration (Rowman & Littlefield), that compared prison writing in Ireland, Africa, and the United States; he is currently working on another book about the archive tentatively titled “Ethics in the Era of Mass Incarceration.”
The APWA doesn’t espouse any political view. “The advocacy is done by the writers,” Larson says. “You read ten Holocaust or slave narratives and no one has to tell you what the message is. The difference is that there is a fixed number of slave and Holocaust narratives. But this collection will continue to grow.”
Gila Lyons has written about feminism, mental health, and social justice for Salon, Vox, Cosmopolitan, the Huffington Post, Good Magazine, and other publications. Find her on Twitter, @gilalyons, or on her website, gilalyons.com.
Doran Larson, founder of the American Prison Writing Archive.
Every Tuesday morning, twenty to thirty writers gather in a meeting room in the basement of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul on Tremont Street in Boston. Each member of the Black Seed Writers Group gets a pen and a yellow legal pad and, after catching up with one another, sits down and gets to work. The writing they produce will eventually fill the pages of the Pilgrim, a literary magazine celebrating its fifth anniversary this December. The Pilgrim looks like just about any of the small literary magazines lining the shelves of local bookstores and cafés, but it is different in one major respect: Its contributors are all part of Boston’s homeless community.
The Pilgrim is the brainchild of James Parker, a contributing editor and cultural columnist for the Atlantic. In 2011, while on a sixty-mile pilgrimage with the MANNA ministry of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Parker was inspired to launch the writers group and journal with the idea of pilgrimage as a guiding theme. “Homelessness is a state of acute pilgrimage,” writes Parker on the journal’s website, “a condition of material and occasionally moral emergency, and thus a place where the world reveals itself under the pressure, or the pouring-in, of a higher reality.” When he returned from his own pilgrimage, Parker established the Black Seed Writers Group to give homeless people in downtown Boston an opportunity to gather, write, and share their work. The group is named for the nearby café where it first met, but its ranks soon swelled beyond the café’s capacity and it moved to the cathedral next door. Each week, Parker provides a few open-ended prompts to get the writers going. There is no formal workshop, and anyone who is homeless, recently housed, or transitioning into a home is welcome to join. Members of the group come and go, though each week there are at least a few regulars.
“If we’re the Black Seed Writers Group,” says Margaret Miranda, a writer in the group, “the people helping us are mission figs: They surround the black seeds at the center, they’re nurturing, and they’re on a mission. Besides,” she adds, “think of the literary significance of figs.” (When Miranda presented her metaphor to Parker, he asked her if that makes him a mad vegetable. Miranda replied, “In forty years, you will be.”) In addition to Parker, the other volunteers who help facilitate the workshop include Kate Glavin, an MFA student at the University of Massachusetts in Boston; Libby Gatti, a diocese intern; and James Kraus, a graphic artist who refers to himself as “the other James.”
Miranda and several other regulars set the group’s tone: After a few minutes of greeting and banter, they settle into their various writing processes and work diligently through the hour. A man named Joe dictates into his phone and transcribes his recording; Steven thumbs through a dictionary; Cody paces back and forth before plunging into his work. Rob, a wiry writer in a Red Sox hoodie, brews the coffee.
“This is the most punk-rock thing I’ve ever been part of,” says Parker, who first connected with the homeless community through music. At age twenty-two, Parker was immersed in Washington, D.C.’s independent music scene, and discovered the city’s Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV), a thriving facility for the homeless, through the liner notes of a music album. Parker lived at CCNV as a volunteer for several months, but soon moved to Boston and lost touch with the homeless community over the next two decades, until founding the writers group.
After each session, Parker gathers all the work and splits it among himself and the other volunteers to transcribe. He then prints the writing in packets that he distributes the following Tuesday. Within a week of attending the Black Seed Writers Group, therefore, every participant is a published author; additionally, the packet entices writers to return the next week. Parker then chooses work from these packets to include in the Pilgrim, which he publishes eight to ten times per year. The Pilgrim is printed right where it’s produced; the administration at the church lets Parker use its printers, and subscription fees—the journal has a circulation of a few hundred—provide funding for the paper and ink.
As a writer himself, Parker believes fervently in the power of publication. While he was writing his first book, his wife had one of the chapters printed as a chapbook, and it transformed the way Parker approached his work: “It was so powerful to me to have something published,” he says. When he founded the Pilgrim, the heart of his mission was to publish as many voices as possible—particularly those that would normally go unheard. In 2015, according to government census figures, the homeless population of Boston was 7,663—a 5.6 percent increase from the previous year. Since it was established, in December 2011, the Pilgrim has published more than 150 different writers.
The Pilgrim does not have a specific style; instead, writers are encouraged to find their own style, and to push their voices deeper. Participants write poems, stories, memoirs, prayers, protests, and everything in between. One regular attendee, Rolando, is a journalist who catalogues various aspects of life at the shelter through a series of bullet points that create something between a list, a poem, and an essay. One week he wrote about lost property; the next week he categorized the various safety nets at the shelter. Cody writes prophetic images from his imagination. He describes a dream cover for his book, were he to write one: a rendering of the globe with a seven-headed serpentine monster crawling out of a deep chasm in the center.
In 2014 Parker expanded the Pilgrim to include a book imprint, No Fixed Address Press. Its first publication was Paul Estes’s science fiction novel, Razza Freakin’ Aliens, a madcap space opera featuring the intergalactic adventures of Dave the Spy, who encounters many multispecies creatures, such as rebel alien cats that yell, “Hairrbawlz, kill ’em all!” This year, the press published Miranda’s debut collection of poetry, Dressing Wounds on Tremont Street. The book is at once devotional and jocular, weaving together portentous subjects with light banter; think John Donne meets Kenneth Koch.
Now, Parker says, No Fixed Address Press is concentrating on what he calls broadsheets—chapbook-length collections that are easier, cheaper, and quicker to produce than full-length books. Any profits that the Pilgrim and No Fixed Address Press might bring in from sales go directly into producing the next publications. Parker is excited to watch the group’s reach naturally expand, but is careful to avoid a “dissipation of essence,” as he puts it. As the group grows, it’s important for Parker to maintain an environment of openness, encouragement, and safety—an intimate space where members can nurture each other as writers. “We want growth that’s real growth,” said Parker. “Growth as writers.”
Adrienne Raphel is the author of What Was It For (Rescue Press, 2017) and But What Will We Do (Seattle Review, 2016). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review Daily, Poetry, Lana Turner Journal, Prelude, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University.
In 1992 in Reno, Nevada, a group of scholars and writers founded the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) to promote interdisciplinary research and conversation about the connections between humans and the natural world. Comprising professionals in both the humanities and the sciences, ASLE encourages collaboration, supports environmental education, and convenes a community around the twin goals of literary excellence and ecological sustainability. Now, twenty-five years later, the organization is more robust—and necessary—than ever.
The intersections of poetry and conservation biology, or speculative fiction and environmental activism, may not seem intuitive. But in the early 1990s many scholars working at the crossroads of these increasingly siloed disciplines sought a way to share ideas and enlist creative, scientific, and ethical advice from specialists in other fields. With the advent of ASLE, members gained access to a directory of multidisciplinary scholars, as well as environmental studies curricula, a list of awards and grants, mentoring programs, and a bibliography of ecological writing, among other resources. In 1993, ASLE launched the semiannual (now quarterly) journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, which publishes academic articles in addition to poetry, nonfiction, and book reviews.
Since 1995, ASLE has also hosted a biennial conference, each event held in a different U.S. city, at which intellectual cross-pollination and collaboration can happen in person. The twelfth conference, titled “Rust/Resistance: Works of Recovery,” took place in June and doubled as a celebration of ASLE’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Hosted by Wayne State University in Detroit, the 2017 conference featured more than eight hundred presenters as well as keynote addresses by writers and environmentalists such as poet Ross Gay and historian and novelist Tiya Miles. According to ASLE copresident Christoph Irmscher, these conferences serve as “sustained intellectual experiences in which an array of amazing speakers complements the serious conversations that take place in individual panels.”
ASLE’s quarter-centennial comes at a critical moment. As an organization committed equally to literature and to environmentalism, ASLE and its membership are doubly threatened by the massive rollbacks in arts and climate spending proposed by the Trump administration. The White House’s 2018 budget plan, unveiled in May, would slash funding to the Environmental Protection Agency by nearly a third, eliminating 20 percent of its workforce and leaving the agency with its smallest budget in forty years, adjusting for inflation. Predicated on a staunch denial of the urgent reality of climate change, the plan proposes crippling reductions to programs that clean up toxic waste, determine the safety of drinking water, and research and predict natural disasters, among others.
In June, President Trump announced that the United States will also be withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, an agreement between nearly two hundred nations to reduce emissions and mitigate global warming that was adopted by consensus in 2015. “As we have known ever since Rachel Carson, the environmental crisis can only be addressed globally, not within traditional national boundaries,” says Irmscher. Branches of ASLE have been established in nearly a dozen countries or regions outside the United States, including Brazil, India, and Japan, and this year’s ASLE conference drew around a thousand members from twenty-five countries. Irmscher describes the organization’s international, interdisciplinary conferences as its “pièce de résistance against Trumpian unilateralism.”
The Trump administration’s proposed 2018 budget would also eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities. Though such cuts seem unlikely at this point—Congress thus far having upheld federal funding for both agencies—the proposal itself is indicative of an attitude that devalues the importance of art and literature to American life and culture. In light of such threats, Irmscher looks to literature for models of political environmentalism. “Panels and presentations on Thoreau’s Walden—to mention one of the intellectual progenitors of ASLE—can no longer ignore the fact that his philosophy of resistance has assumed new importance in an era when the government systematically suppresses scientific evidence,” he says.
In a sense, the joint disavowal of both environmental protection and the arts can be seen as a confirmation of what ASLE has always known: that these disciplines are deeply linked and even interdependent—that, as Rachel Carson once said, “No one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.” In the face of these most recent threats, ASLE will continue to serve as a meeting point. “In a climate that discourages innovation, scientists have adopted new roles as dissenters and protesters,” says Irmscher. “As they unite and march, they find new allies in the arts and humanities that have long spoken truth to power. ASLE, whose core mission is to promote collaboration and public dialogue, provides an organizational framework for such new alliances.”
Maggie Millner teaches creative writing at NYU, where she is pursuing her MFA in poetry. Previously, she served as Poets & Writers Magazine’s Diana and Simon Raab Editorial Fellow.
The Wednesday morning after Election Day delivered a political shock for just about everyone, including writers—but hot on the heels of the electoral surprise came an existential dilemma: How could writers attend to the quotidian concerns of sentence structure, agent-hunting, and sending out work when America was so divided on seemingly every major issue—from reproductive and LGBTQ rights to immigration laws and the environment? Like much of America that morning, many writers turned to their friends and colleagues for answers. “On Facebook, everyone was saying, ‘Now more than ever we need fiction, art, and books,’” says writer Anna March, who had spent time in Pennsylvania that week, knocking on doors for Hillary Clinton with her mother. “I got a little bit panicky. I thought, ‘Oh my God, are people really thinking that art is going to save us?’ Because it’s really about organizing and getting out the vote.” Similarly, fiction writer Paula Whyman, based in Bethesda, Maryland, described the morning after the election as a rare world-changing moment. “As a fiction writer I had a lot of questions in my mind about what would happen to fiction and how we would go on working,” she says. “Does it really matter now?”
Both Whyman and March reached for similar outlets to channel their doubts and reassert the power of writing. Whyman answered a call on Facebook by her friend, the writer Mikhail Iossel, for help launching a new publication and with a small group started Scoundrel Time, an international online journal intended to foster artistic expression in the face of political repression and fear. March, eager to harness the energy of the arts community for political activism, decided to start Roar Feminist Magazine, an online publication that would provide a platform for politically informed fiction, poetry, and essays—as well as a way to strike back against an election that frequently devolved into disrespectful language, most notably the leaked Access Hollywood tape showing Donald Trump making lewd comments about women. “We wanted to do something that was both literature and revolution,” says March.
These efforts are part of a growing number of projects and events started by writers, editors, and literary organizations in response to the election and the current political climate. Poet Erin Belieu and PEN America organized Writers Resist rallies, which brought out thousands of writers and citizens in cities all across the United States on January 15, five days before the presidential inauguration, to “defend free expression, reject hatred, and uphold truth in the face of lies and misinformation.” Poet Major Jackson started a collaborative poem, “Renga for Obama,” at the Harvard Review, while the Boston Review released the poetry chapbook Poems for Political Disaster, and Melville House published What We Do Now, an essay collection focused on “standing up for your values in Trump’s America.”
Roar and Scoundrel Time both launched in late January—Roar on Inauguration Day and Scoundrel Time ten days later—and have since produced an impressive body of work and attracted large followings in just a few short months. “The idea of starting a new journal would be laughed at otherwise,” says Whyman. “There are so many excellent journals doing beautiful work that I in no way want to compete. But I think of this as something entirely different.”
Indeed, the interest both magazines have received in terms of financial support and submissions suggest that the audience is engaged. With a very small inheritance from her grandmother, who died shortly before the election, March was able to launch the Roar website and with her collaborators held a successful crowdfunding campaign that raised $12,000 in just a few months. The Roar staff includes Sarah Sandman and Bethanne Patrick as executive editors, Jagjeet Khalsa as production editor, and several section editors, including novelist Porochista Khakpour and humor writer Cynthia Heimel. The title is a play on the “pussy” motif that appeared on posters and signs, and in knitted hats, after Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood remarks were made public. According to March, the journal’s mission involves “roaring, not meowing.”
The most prominent feature of Roar, which publishes three new pieces each day, is a section called “My Abortion,” in which women relate their experiences with abortion. The daily column serves to remind readers of what’s at stake under the strongly antiabortion Trump administration. Other columns include the Roar Meter, which uses numbers to tell a story: “Number of votes by which Hillary Clinton won the popular vote: 2,864,974 / Number of Americans who receive Planned Parenthood services: 2,840,000” reads the beginning of one entry. A column called Fight This Hate highlights “a small selection of hate crimes and/or harassment,” alongside fiction, poetry, and art sections. “Think about if Guernica met the Nation or VQR met Mother Jones,” says March. “We want to be at the intersection of the finest writing and political activism.” The editors plan to expand in the spring by publishing six pieces a day and bringing on more explicitly political writers.
Scoundrel Time (named for the 1976 book by Lillian Hellman about the McCarthy era) is, in Whyman’s words, “a place for artists to respond as artists” to the postelection reality. “There are wonderful and thoughtful journalists and commentators, people at think tanks, and activists in every realm doing important things,” says Whyman. “But this is a place for artists to speak to what’s going on from their particular perspective. We can keep telling one another stories, and those stories will draw people in and give them some relief.” The journal is a registered nonprofit organization, and the all-volunteer staff plans to look into nonprofit partnerships. Slightly less confrontational in tone than Roar (though no less political), Scoundrel Time publishes fiction, photography, poetry, essays, and dispatches from around the world, with a focus on content that’s current. “The strongest argument I can think of for satire and parody is that despots and authoritarian regimes of all stripes hate it so,” Tony Eprile writes in a February essay tying recent Saturday Night Live sketches to a long tradition of political subversion through mockery. Fiction writer Jodi Paloni also spearheads an Action section, encouraging readers to make calls and show up to protests.
Scoundrel Time and Roar also drummed up support at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Washington, D.C. in February. Whyman and her fellow Scoundrel Time founders gathered in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue and read aloud from James Baldwin, Emma Lazarus, and Claudia Rankine. Meanwhile, Roar supporters wearing pink “pussy hats” handed out pink Roar-branded condoms and stickers at the bookfair. They weren’t the only ones making a statement at AWP: Split This Rock, a D.C.–based organization focused on poetry and social change, collaborated with organizations such as VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and CantoMundo to hold a candlelight vigil for freedom of expression outside the White House, during which writers such as Kazim Ali, Ross Gay, and Carolyn Forché delivered speeches about the importance of writing and art.
Scoundrel Time plans to organize similar actions in the future, but for now it carries on that spirit of standing together and holding space, albeit online, for writers to freely speak their minds. With their new journals, both Whyman and March hope they can help writers to, as Whyman says, “hang on to our humanity and feel like [we] can gain understanding.”
Sarah M. Seltzer is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, and ill-advised tweets. A lifelong New Yorker, she is the deputy editor of the culture website Flavorwire.com.
Protesters march on Trump Tower in New York City as part of the Writers Resist rallies in January.
In a little over two months, we the people will choose the forty-fifth president of the United States. Between now and then, the nominees will present their policy proposals and debate the issues, shaping a national conversation about some awfully big and important topics. But before we get to those televised debates (the first of three is scheduled for September 26 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York) we wanted to give some of our most thoughtful and articulate citizens—poets and writers—a chance to offer their perspective. Because, as former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove remarked, “Our nation needs to learn to value its independent writers and artists as the heralds of a richly textured, inclusive national identity.”
The request was simple: Imagine you are face-to-face with the next president—whoever that may be—and, in a few sentences, write about what you hope to see addressed in the next four years. It turns out something pretty great happens when you ask writers to convey, without a lot of political grandstanding, what is most important to them. The contours of some of America’s biggest issues—education, health care, gun violence, racism, immigration, and the environment among them—start to come into sharper focus, the collective discourse rises above the rhetoric of political pundits, and the pomp and circumstance of the political process falls away, so that we are left with a discussion of real problems, real concerns, and, if not solutions, then at least some honest ideas that may inspire action of real, lasting value.
Dear President,
“The countless complex problems facing the world require complex critical thinking. Please reinvest in public higher education systems like UC, SUNY, CUNY, and the other once-strong and accessible state systems of higher education. Restore and privilege humanities and arts education at the K–12 and higher-ed levels. Reduce the military budget and make a real commitment to social and educational infrastructure.” —Kazim Ali
★
“Please listen to the stories being told right now by the scientists who study, and the citizens who live, amid the catastrophic changes taking place across the planet. They are not fiction; without courageous leadership they will become fate.” —Steve Almond
★
“Your critics, most of them, would have called me a superpredator back then, when the memory of the pistol was heavy in my palm—so that’s not my focus. But now, unlike then, you have power, and I’m left to wonder what you will call the young men and women lost in the system, those who walked down paths they regret. Do they earn your scorn, your mercy?” —Reginald Dwayne Betts
★
“I would like President Clinton to know that I support her and her agenda fully, especially as it relates to education, the arts, and the environment. The single greatest problem facing our species is the erosion of the environmental conditions that allowed us to evolve and thrive and tap out messages like this one on our phones and computers. We are doomed, yes, but later rather than sooner, I hope.” —T. C. Boyle
★
“Once the body arrives in the world it immediately becomes fragile—fragile in that it needs nourishment, protection, education, and endless chances; bodies of color, in particular, have had these basic human rights revoked, and it continues. I call for a protection of these bodies through a reassessment of the justice system and retraining of authorities who violate the civil liberties of citizens of color through racial profiling, stop-and-frisk, and abuse; human life is at stake, and my wish is that the next four years will reflect back the beauty and not the wreckage of our existence.” —Tina Chang
★
“America has often seen itself as a beacon of democracy, but the American project has always been about a settler project of inclusion and exclusion: democracy for those imagined as real Americans, and inequality for slaves, immigrants, black and brown bodies, and those who live in places the United States has colonized or destabilized, most recently Iraq and Libya. I hope that you can see yourself not just as a standard-bearer for a global economic elite, but as a force for equality and justice for all.” —Ken Chen
★
“There’s so much I could ask of you—a list of demands—but first to ensure our safety as citizens. Too many lives have been lost to gun violence—mass shootings, gang related, and otherwise—and now it is more than a false dilemma, it’s a reality that can no longer be ignored.” —Nicole Dennis-Benn
★
“There is no present or future without immigrants; white supremacy (and all of its sequelae) is one of the gravest threats to our democracy.” —Junot Díaz
★
“I want an America with tougher gun laws. I want an America that nurtures and embraces diversity.”—Chitra Divakaruni
★
“Eight million metric tons of plastic are dumped into the oceans every year. Our government has to get involved in legislation that reduces one-use plastics, invests in alternative-packaging ideas, and dramatically decreases pollution in the oceans, or by 2050 there will be more plastic in the sea than fish.” —Anthony Doerr
★
“If we are ever to attain our forefathers’ aspirations for ‘a more perfect union,’ educating our young—not only in the sciences, but also the arts—cannot, dare not, be neglected. If our children are unable to say what they mean, no one will know how they feel; if they cannot imagine different worlds, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points.” —Rita Dove
★
“I would say to the president that she should work to dismantle the global culture of corruption present at all levels of society, which prevents any meaningful change or accountability, and whose primary victims are the powerless and disenfranchised. This complicity is a symptom of larger systems of discourse and economy that exist to preserve the status quo, and I would say that in the absence of means to transform those systems outright, she should start, at the level of the law and of media, to model ways of addressing concrete problems with transparency and tenacity, showing that even at the most entrenched levels of corruption, change can be effected.” —Robert Fernandez
★
“The stakes are too high for you to ignore the grievances voiced by those of us who believed you when you spoke of progress and equality. We can’t afford for you to go slow.” —Angela Flournoy
★
“Climate change—stop dicking around. War—use only as the ultimate last resort.” —Ben Fountain
★
“I’d like our next president to know compassion and compromise. I’d also like her to know how thrilled I was when I received a thank-you note from her husband after I sent Chelsea a birthday card when I was fifteen.” —Carrie Fountain
★
“The occupation of Palestine by Israel—mass incarceration, presumption of guilt, withholding of resources, wanton destruction of human life, all underscored by the creation of physical barriers and the emotional propaganda of persecution, exclusion, mythmaking, and fear—are mirrored, one by one, in the policies of institutionalized racism in the United States. Unless we face this singular fact, and acknowledge our collective culpability as architects and sponsors of state terrorism here in our American cities, and in our foreign policy regarding Palestine (which is the bedrock of all other foreign policy), we will continue to be unable to fulfill the potential of our democracy for our people, and remain excoriated abroad for our impotence and hypocrisy.” —Ru Freeman
★
“Dear Madam President, our undocumented families are not silent or invisible in our hearts. May they be just as present in your actions as we continue to build this home, this country, together.” —Rigoberto González
★
“None of the problems of this country will be solved without things getting messy, and without your commitment to listen, truly listen, and to govern for the people who have the least in this country—black and brown women of color, undocumented women, trans and lesbian women, poor women, the people you usually wish to have behind you at a podium but rarely invite to the room where decisions are being made. Invite us in and listen and then act.” —Kaitlyn Greenidge
★
“President Clinton, after celebrating with a tall flute of Prosecco, please make gun reform your first order of business. In four years, I hope to live in a country where the pen is mightier than the gun (and the money that keeps it in power).” —Eleanor Henderson
★
“Ms. President, I want you to know that the power of having our first woman as president doesn’t escape me; I’ve been waiting for this my entire life. And I want you, as the first woman president of the United States, to place the liberation and justice of historically marginalized people at the center of your work— terrifying, hard, necessary work. We need this more than ever.” —Tanwi Nandini Islam
★
“I would like the next president to know that the 2016 presidential campaign has awoken a sizable portion of this country’s electorate to the limitations of a two-party system that is beholden more to its own status quo than the interests of its constituencies; that we are more awake than ever to the corruption of politicians who claim allegiance to ‘the people,’ but whose votes and policies are purchased outright by producers of weaponry and manufacturers of economic disparity. I would like the next president to know that we will be watching and taking note of their promises to Wall Street and the military-industrial complex, that we will call out their positions on trade deals that betray American workers, their complicity with a prison-industrial complex that seeks profit from incarceration, their commitment to a justice system that frees criminals in uniform while killing people of color with impunity, and that we will organize beyond their scarecrows of fear to create a movement capable of replacing this oligarchy with the highest of this nation’s ideals: democracy.” —Tyehimba Jess
★
“Madam President, thank you for sparing us your opponent’s dismal and clownish stupidity, his blind and blinding hate. I’m still scared, though. I’m scared that you think beating him will be the hardest part of your job, and I’m scared of what’s happening to the environment, to our schools and water supply and our tolerance, scared of people being out of work and people being hooked on painkillers and people not being allowed to use the restroom where they feel most comfortable. I don’t give a rip if you’re honest or transparent or running a thousand different e-mail servers, but I need you to be compassionate and smart and clear-eyed, to be decent and flexible and open-minded, to be afraid with me—with all of us—and despite our fears, not least yours, I need you to be brave and resilient and, well, hopeful.”—Bret Anthony Johnston
★
“I’d like to talk about government subsidies for mental-health care. We tend to speak about mental health after some extreme event, like a shooting spree, but mental health is an everyday thing. So many people—especially poor people and minorities—are suffering in silent pain.”—Tayari Jones
★
“Make fighting bigotry a priority—bigotry of all sorts, from race to sexuality to gender to class. I feel it’s especially the responsibility of our candidates this time around, as this very election unleashed a whole new wave of intense bigotry directed at all sorts of minorities—so I feel like it is the urgent responsibility of the elected official to face this and work to increase the dialogue, education, and awareness required to heal and advance.” —Porochista Khakpour
★
“I watch my students invest in cultural, economic, and financial change despite their pessimism and frequent belief that we live within a system that profits from their disenfranchisement. How do we convince the next generation of thinkers that their engagement and participation in the political system matters as they watch so much of the progress facilitated by activists of the past dismantled?” —Ruth Ellen Kocher
★
“Madam President, please pay more attention to, support, and build up public education. Our schools are the democratizing cornerstones of our communities—and this country’s future.” —Joseph O. Legaspi
★
“I’d like to trust that the voice of any suffering person, regardless of category, had as much currency with you as some power broker. I’d like not to doubt you knew that suffering was of a piece with the planet’s emergency, the ongoing story of oil, water, war, animals.” —Paul Lisicky
★
“Your country is complex; it is hard to imagine a foreigner being able to fix it for you. Keep this in mind when you consider invading another nation.” —Karan Mahajan
★
“What’s really important to me is the radical reconceptualization of our broken criminal-justice system that targets young black and brown people—increasingly girls and young women—for arrest, detention, and incarceration, thereby continuing the program of relegating generations of people of color to second-class citizenry. It is clear to so many of us that the increased presence of police in daily life, alongside the militarization of police forces, is the wrong path to go down, and that we have to think progressively in our imagining of the future we’d like to create.”—Dawn Lundy Martin
★
“Please put climate change at the front and center of our national conversation, and follow up by funding initiatives toward developing and using sustainable energy.” —Cate Marvin
★
“Peace is a good word for politicians to look up, understand the meaning of it, use it once in a while, learn to practice it. You are committing environmental child abuse by poisoning our food, polluting our air, and totally destroying the environment so that a few of your cronies can make a few extra billion or two while the rest of us will not survive even to serve you.” —Alejandro Murguía
★
“The blight on ‘American exceptionalism’ is the recurring cycle of black youth raised in communities where poverty, inadequate education, and insufficient recreational and job opportunities exclude too many of them from the promise of the American Dream. It is urgent that you fund programs now to address this shameful problem.” —Elizabeth Nunez
★
“Dear Madam President, help us lift up the least advantaged among us. Put your strength and determination behind education, jobs, and equality. We have benefited greatly from the moral guidance of the last administration. Please keep the spirit of ‘yes we can’ alive. God bless you.” —D. A. Powell
★
“What the world wants, demands, deserves, and needs from you is that you guide your leadership and base your decisions on just one principle: love. Because isn’t that the whole point to it all—love? Isn’t that why we all keep on going?” —Mira Ptacin
★
“Madam President, the influence of the Israel lobby is not as valuable as the lives of the many Palestinians who have been living in degradation and increasing terror under the Israeli occupation for the last half century, just as the influence of the NRA lobby is not as valuable as the lives of the many U.S. citizens who have been injured and killed due to gun violence.” —Emily Raboteau
★
“There should be a new cabinet post—Secretary of the Arts. For the inaugural six poets: European, Hispanic, Asian American, African American, Native American, Muslim.” —Ishmael Reed
★
“I want the president to know that we are tired of having our voices silenced and our needs unmet. I want the president to know that we want better gun control, higher minimum wages, recognition of women’s rights, better education, and most of all a greater sense of our shared humanity—unity, not division.” —Roxana Robinson
★
“President Hillary Clinton, I live in Portland, Oregon, where every day I watch our homeless camps grow in size. Homelessness is a national crisis that has barely been discussed this election season. You’ve pledged ‘to direct more federal resources to those who need them most.’ As you do so, please don’t forget about some of your most vulnerable constituents: homeless Americans. It’s an issue at the nexus of economic inequality, joblessness, rising housing costs, lack of affordable housing, health care accessibility, and systemic racism. Please make connecting all Americans to safe, stable homes and services a priority.”—Karen Russell
★
“Madam President, where has all the funding gone for arts in the schools? Could those kuts be the reesen we are all getin dummer?” —George Saunders
★
“The growing disparity in wealth in this country undermines any hope we have for achieving social justice. Changing this won’t be easy, and will require more courage, conviction, and political leadership than you have exhibited in the past.” —Dani Shapiro
★
“Since arts and humanities programs enrich our American lives beyond measure, connecting and inspiring people of different backgrounds and inclinations better than anything else does, it would be reasonable to support them threefold or more, without question. The fact that Bernie Sanders, a Jewish American, found it possible to be frank about the injustice and criminal oppression that Palestinian people have suffered for the past sixty-eight years suggests other politicians might be able to do this too—injustice for one side does not help the ‘other side’ and everyone knows this but does not act or speak as honestly or honorably as Sanders did.” —Naomi Shihab Nye
★
“I would like you to know that we do not have any more time—at all—to postpone addressing the issue of climate change. And while you’re working to ensure the survival of the planet, please remember that some of us are dying at an even faster rate from poverty, lack of health care, gun violence, police brutality, war, and twenty-seven kinds of intolerance—so please use your authority to help ensure that we live to see (and help implement) the climate-change solutions you set in motion.” —Evie Shockley
★
“I want the next president to shout from the housetops that violence is not a source or sign of strength but of weakness, whether inside a home or between nations. I want us to address violence at all scales, from domestic violence and gun violence to our endless, failed, one-sided, expensive foreign wars to the subtle violence against the poor and the unborn among our species, against more fragile species, and against the earth and the future that is unchecked climate change and the brutal fossil-fuel industry.” —Rebecca Solnit
★
“Did you know we need to find more jobs for the unemployed? Also, Palestine and Israel need to work it out.” —Tom Spanbauer
★
“If you can’t do everything, at least do what you say. I just wanna live in a country that knows the difference between love and hate.” —Ebony Stewart
★
“Our public-education system is in desperate need of resources, specifically in marginalized communities, as well as a more learner-centered, diverse curriculum emphasizing perspectives across race, gender, class, nationality, sexual orientation, ability, and the multiple intersections therein to challenge all of us to be better human beings on this planet. And, Madam President, if I can focus our last few minutes on my beautiful, complicated city: Your support of Rahm Emanuel terrifies me. Thank you for listening. Please, keep listening. To all of us. Not some. All.” —Megan Stielstra
★
“Free Leonard Peltier. Free Chelsea Manning.”—Justin Taylor
★
“No language is neutral. To speak is to claim a life—and often our own. If more Americans speak to one another, in writing, in media, at the supermarket, we might listen better. It is difficult, I think, to hate one another when we start to understand not only why and how we hurt, but also why and how we love.” —Ocean Vuong
★
“The greatest threats facing the United States are not terrorism and illegal immigration but rather injustice, bias, inequality, and fear. To be a great nation we must focus on criminal-justice reform; the eradication of the vestiges of slavery; education; and human and civil rights for all.” —Ayelet Waldman
★
“Please stop separating families through deportation; let it be understood that they did not want to be in this country to begin with (which reminds me, please stop bombing children, stop invading countries, stop sending the young and poor onto the battlefields). Please create a path toward citizenship for everyone, not just the ‘dreamers,’ because we all learn to dream from our parents.”—Javier Zamora
It has been just over five years since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, during which twenty first-graders and six educators were killed. Since then, more than 150,000 Americans have lost their lives as a result of gun violence, and the public debate about guns in America—recently magnified by a mass shooting in Las Vegas in October and at a church in rural Texas in November—rages on. But a new anthology of poetry and essays aims to offer a different perspective on an issue that is so often oversimplified by the media.
Published a week before the fifth anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting and coedited by poets Brian Clements, Alexandra Teague, and Dean Rader, Bullets Into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence (Beacon Press) is a powerful call to end gun violence in the United States. The anthology includes poems by dozens of celebrated poets—including Billy Collins, Ocean Vuong, Natasha Trethewey, and Juan Felipe Herrera—paired with nonfiction responses by activists, political figures, survivors, and others affected by gun violence. The anthology’s “call and response” structure showcases the direct relationship between specific acts of gun violence and the poems that were generated as a result. In the book’s foreword, former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords—who survived being shot in the head at a 2011 meeting with constituents in Arizona—and her husband, retired astronaut and Navy captain Mark Kelly, write, “Survivors, advocates, and allies can change hearts and minds—and move more people to join our fight for solutions—by telling stories about the irreparable damage that gun violence does to families and communities across the country.”
When they began compiling the book, the editors knew it would have a political purpose. “We agreed that the anthology would do more than simply collect literary responses to a political issue—it would need to be a political artifact in itself,” says Clements, for whom the anthology has a personal thrust. His wife, Abbey, worked as a second-grade teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 and has since become an outspoken activist for gun control. Clements and his fellow editors envisioned the anthology as both a tribute to those who die by guns every year and a way to find common ground in the discussion about gun violence.
Several poets the editors invited to contribute, including Robert Hass, Tess Taylor, and Yusef Komunyakaa, chose to write new poems for the anthology. “These poems tend not to respond to specific events but are, instead, often deeply personal meditations on the poet’s relationship to guns or their individual experiences with shootings,” says Rader. He points to two poems in particular: one by Brenda Hillman about her family’s gun, and one by Bob Hicok that revisits the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, where he was a professor at the time and even had the shooter, who killed thirty-two and wounded seventeen, in one of his classes. “Both of these poems move beyond mere ‘anger’ and toward some larger notion of individual and communal ethic,” says Rader.
With more than fifty poems and fifty responses, the anthology brings together many perspectives on a complicated issue. “A big part of the impetus for the anthology was that conversations in the media about gun violence often become a loop of the same few sentiments, without the range of voices that poets were offering,” says Teague. “Christopher Soto’s ‘All the Dead Boys Look Like Me,’ for instance, written in the wake of the 2016 shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, draws together personal experience with the often fatal dangers that queer brown bodies face in our country, as well as with family connections, activism, and a call for reimagining this legacy of endangerment and death.”
In another of the anthology’s pairings, Samaria Rice, mother of Tamir Rice, the twelve-year-old boy who was shot by police in Cleveland in 2012, responds to Reginald Dwayne Betts’s poem “When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving,” which opens:
in the backseat of my car are my own sons, still not yet Tamir’s age, already having heard me warn them against playing with toy pistols, though my rhetoric is always about what I don’t like, not what I fear, because sometimes I think of Tamir Rice & shed tears…
Rice responds, “When I think of Tamir as his mother, the woman who gave birth to him, I wonder why my son had to lose his life in such a horrific way in this great place we call America…Tamir was an all-American kid with a promising and bright future…. Who will govern the government when they continue to murder American citizens?”
In another pairing, Po Kim Murray of the Newtown Action Alliance responds to a poem about the Sandy Hook shootings. Antonius Wiriadjaja, who survived being shot on the sidewalk in New York City as he walked to the subway in 2013, responds to Jimmy Santiago Baca’s poem “A Morning Shooting,” about a young man who is shot in a driveway on his way to work. “The poems themselves are exceptionally powerful, but the combinations of poem and respondent results in another order of emotional impact,” says Clements.
“Throughout the collection, the poets and respondents imagine how the lives of those killed by gun violence, and their survivors, could have been different if not for racial discrimination, homophobia, and other forms of violence that have replaced listening and supporting the lives and potentials of all our citizens,” says Teague.
The Bullets Into Bells editors hope to expand the project’s reach beyond the book. In the coming months, a number of events will be held across the country, featuring readings and panel discussions with the poets and essayists from the anthology. A related website for the project (beacon.org/bullets-into-bells-p1298.aspx) includes additional poems, statements from activists, opportunities for action, data on gun violence, interviews, and more. “One of my hopes,” says Clements, “is that this project—the book, the web content, the events around the country—will be part of a perhaps slower but more direct and more personal approach, bypassing the national media, that will encourage poets, readers of poetry, and literary audiences who might not otherwise have become involved in this movement to get more involved.”
Colum McCann echoes this hope in his introduction to the book: “The conviction behind this anthology is that we should be in the habit of hoping and speaking out in favor of that hope. It is, in the end, an optimistic book. The poems assert the possibility of language rather than bullets to open up our veins.”
Maya Popa is a writer and teacher living in New York City. She is the author of the poetry chapbook The Bees Have Been Canceled (New Michigan Press, 2017). Her website is mayacpopa.com.
Abbey and Brian Clements (holding an orange sign) at the Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America march across the Brooklyn Bridge in May 2016.
When poet Glenn Shaheen first started writing, he had little sense of community as an Arab American writer. He felt constrained from writing about Arab American issues or identity, and his undergraduate writing professors scoffed at “identity writing,” telling him it would be “a cheat to write like that, because you’d immediately get published.” But when fellow poet Hayan Charara introduced Shaheen to the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), Shaheen found a community that supported and empowered his artistic freedom. “RAWI helped me be proud of my Arab heritage. Knowing there was a thriving community of Arab writers of all backgrounds and genres made me realize I was actually a part of that community,” says Shaheen. “I feel free to write about anything now after meeting so many other Arab writers—some working on science fiction novels or ecopoetry or experimental dramatic works. It helped me see that there isn’t a specific mold of an Arab American writer that I should aspire to or avoid.”
Shaheen is not the only writer who has found community through RAWI, a nonprofit organization that for the past twenty-five years has worked to support and disseminate creative and scholarly writing by Arab Americans. RAWI—a word that means storyteller in Arabic—was first established in 1992 by journalist and anthropologist Barbara Nimri Aziz as a seven-person group of writers that met in Washington, D.C. It has since grown into a thriving community of nearly 125 writers, artists, and journalists all over the world, from the United States to the United Arab Emirates. Members include literary heavyweights like Pulitzer Prize finalist Laila Lalami, National Book Award finalist Rabih Alameddine, poet and translator Fady Joudah, and poet Naomi Shihab Nye. The organization now hosts workshops and a biennial conference that features panels, readings, and workshops for Arab American writers. The last conference, which focused on a range of topics including craft, publishing, and the effects of Islamophobia, was held in Minneapolis in June 2016 and cosponsored by Mizna, a nonprofit that promotes Arab American culture. The next conference will take place in Houston, Texas, in June 2018. In the meantime, RAWI has also launched In Solidarity, a series of daylong workshops and craft talks for people of color, members of marginalized communities, and allies in various cities throughout the United States. The series was spearheaded by fiction writer Susan Muaddi Darraj, and the first workshop, which took place in March in Washington, D.C., gave writers space to talk about identity, publishing, and being a writer in the margins. The second was held in San Francisco in April, and more are in the works around the country. “We hope these workshops foster communication and a feeling of solidarity among various communities,” says Darraj. “At least one writers circle has been formed as an outcome of these daylong workshops.”
In the coming year RAWI will be doing even more. In March the organization began advocating for the first-ever Arab American caucus, to be held at the next Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Tampa, and is currently planning a twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration. In October the University of Arkansas Press will publish Jess Rizkallah’s poetry collection the magic my body becomes, winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, a new award given for a first or second book of poetry by a poet of Arab heritage and cosponsered by RAWI. “Leading RAWI has always been rewarding and challenging, but it is especially so this year,” says executive director Randa Jarrar. “I’m dazzled by our community’s literary output—we have so many excellent books out this year and next, and on and on.”
RAWI’s growth hasn’t been without some pains. “The challenge is often fund-raising, and belonging to a nation that often doesn’t celebrate our work alongside us, but picks and tokenizes, or silences,” Jarrar says. Both before and after 9/11, Arab American writers have had to balance the desire to be read and recognized for the quality of their work with being hyper-visible spokespeople for their homelands while struggling to live and work amid ongoing hostility toward Arab people. With the president’s recent ban on travelers from several Arab-majority countries, Arab Americans face increased challenges. “More than ever,” Jarrar says, “I hope that RAWI can be a solace and provide its members and the Arab American literary community support and a sense of belonging and connection and resistance.”
For many writers, RAWI has done just that. “It has shown me that we exist,” says Palestinian American poet Tariq Luthun. “I think, like any population, we are at least vaguely aware of the fact that we aren’t the only ones of our kind. But seeing and experiencing this community firsthand is so vital to one’s resolve in continuing to do this work.” Emerging poet Kamelya Omayma Youssef agrees. For her, RAWI provided the foundation she needed as a writer. “Imagining that I can eventually read to a room full of people and be heard without the threat of reductive thinking or fetishization or demonization should not be as radical as it is for me today,” she says. “But it is totally radical. RAWI is that room.”
Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist who lives and teaches in Brooklyn, New York. She is the winner of BOMB Magazine’s 2016 Poetry Contest and the author of the poetry collection Invasive species, forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2019. Her website is marshelal.com.
Hayan Charara addresses attendees at the 2016 RAWI conference in Minneapolis. (Credit: Makeen Osman)
On a recent trip to New Orleans, my friend and I went to a bar in the neighborhood known as Algiers. We met a local man there, who hung out with us for the rest of the evening. About three hours into our conversation, I casually mentioned that my last name means “crescent moon.” He backed away from the table with a fearful gesture and said, “Oh, so you’re definitely Muslim.” This is the M-word in action, and this is how it functions in everyday social situations. It can suddenly change the mood, discontinue or alter conversations. PEN America’s new initiative, “The M Word: Muslim Americans Take the Mic,” aims to address this social effect head-on through a series of events and stories that will give voice to some of the most powerful and innovative writers in the Muslim community. The two-year initiative, which launched last fall and is funded by a $225,000 grant from the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art’s Building Bridges Program, seeks to advance the conversation about the challenges of self-identification and self-expression that Muslim Americans face in today’s social and political climate.
An organization devoted to advancing literature and protecting free expression at home and abroad, PEN America has highlighted Muslim writers by publishing their work on its website, pen.org, and by inviting Muslim writers to speak at the annual PEN World Voices Festival in New York City, where the organization is based. The M Word series continues this work by giving a more dedicated platform to the Muslim community. “We are for the first time focusing on the richness and diversity of Muslim American writers but also their deep contributions to the American literary canon and landscape,” says Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, the deputy director of public programs at PEN America.
For centuries, Muslim Americans have played a vital role in building America’s varied and inspiring cultural landscape. But their voices have often been marginalized, a trend that has accelerated in today’s political climate, as misinformation and the normalization of hate speech have given rise to divisive rhetoric and rampant Islamophobia. “PEN America wanted to counter this trend by giving Muslim American creators the mic, so to speak, to tell their stories, their way, and to challenge prevailing narrow representations of Muslims in popular media,” Shariyf says.
The series kicked off in New York City this past September with an event called “The M Word: Muslim-American Comedians on the Right to Joke,” which featured comedy sets and a conversation with journalist and award-winning playwright Wajahat Ali, and comedians Negin Farsad, Mo Amer, Hasan Minhaj of The Daily Show, and Phoebe Robinson of 2 Dope Queens. PEN plans to host similar events in Boston; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; and other cities across the country. The next event, part of the Muslim Protagonist Symposium hosted by the Muslim Students Association at Columbia University, will be held in late February in New York City and will focus on Muslim American fiction writers.
To expand the program’s reach, PEN will also share original stories by Muslim American writers online. “We are inviting audience members, online followers, panelists, and others to share their personal experiences. The stories we collect will become part of the PEN American Center Digital Archive of Free Expression and may also appear on pen.org, Facebook, or other platforms,” Shariyf says. Videos of the M Word events are also posted online and sometimes live-streamed.
To help shape the series, PEN is collaborating with prominent organizations and individuals within the Muslim writing community. PEN cohosted an event in September at the Brooklyn Book Festival with Akashic Books and the Muslim Writers Collective, a volunteer-run group that organizes monthly open mics for Muslim writers and artists (the collective has active chapters in several cities, including Seattle; Boston; Houston, Texas; and Ann Arbor, Michigan). PEN has also solicited several advisers, including Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Ayad Akhtar; Sana Amanat, creator of the comic-book series Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan); novelist Zia Haider Rahman; religious scholar and media commentator Reza Aslan; and Ali, who moderated the September event. “Everyone talks about Muslims, but no one is really interested in talking to them or having them emerge as protagonists in their own narrative,” Ali says. “The M Word is not a politically correct, feel-good, liberal proselytizing series. It examines, dissects, uncovers and celebrates the diverse experiences that are too often silenced, stereotyped, or excised from the final draft.”
When asked what the M-word means to him, Ali explains, “Muslim is an identity, a signifier that means an individual in some way identifies with a religion that acknowledges the Allah as the Creator and the Prophet Muhammad as his messenger. It’s one of my chosen identity markers that denotes my spiritual path and religious communities. On 9/11, I was a twenty-year-old senior at UC Berkeley. Since that day, I have become an accidental representative of this word and the 1.7 billion people it allegedly represents. I became us and them. My career has been spent navigating the alleged divides, building this bridge and inviting others to cross it.”
Ali remains hopeful. “Change takes time and effort, it never comes without some friction. I hope the M Word helps cast a spotlight on these talented American Muslims who rarely get their voices heard in front of mainstream, privileged audiences. It’s education, entertainment, and an opportunity to bridge the divides.”
Marwa Helal is the winner of BOMB Magazine’s 2016 Poetry Prize. She lives in New York City and received her MFA from the New School. Follow her on Twitter, @marwahelal.
Every month in New York City, thirty to forty writers and literature enthusiasts gather at the home of a fellow writer for a potluck and reading of American, international, and Singaporean literature. Established in 2014 by Singaporean writer Jee Leong Koh, these salons, called the Second Saturday Reading Series, have featured dozens of emerging and established writers from around the world and allowed Singaporean and non-Singaporean writers alike to connect over literature. Koh now hopes to expand on that cultural exchange with his new project, Singapore Unbound, which will celebrate and raise awareness about Singaporean literary culture. “We want to expand the idea of who is Singaporean,” says Koh. “You’re not Singaporean just because you’re a citizen. You’re still Singaporean if you move away, or you could be a guest worker in the country. We want to encompass both groups.”
Launched in February, Singapore Unbound serves as the umbrella organization for the Second Saturday Reading Series and the biennial Singapore Literature Festival, which was created in 2014 by Koh and writer Paul Rozario-Falcone and was last held in New York City in Fall 2016. Under the same umbrella, indie poetry publisher Bench Press will join forces with the blog Singapore Poetry, which features cross-cultural book reviews (Americans review Singaporean books, and Singaporeans review American books). Koh hopes that by aligning these projects under one organization, he can provide Singaporean writers with a “prominent and independent platform for open and free expression of their views.”
That platform is important to protecting and advancing the literary culture of a country that has not always supported free speech. While Singapore boasts a rich stew of cultures with four official languages—Malay, Mandarin, Tamil, and English—and a burgeoning indie literature landscape that showcases a diversity of cultures and ideas, literature is still restricted by the government. Although the state grants large sums of money to publishers and writers, giving them greater freedom to take risks on young writers in particular, the money comes with stipulations: The work cannot undermine governmental authority and must not advocate for what the state deems “objectionable lifestyles”—namely, those of LGBTQIA writers. In response, Singapore-based publishers like Ethos, Epigram, Landmark, and Math Paper Press have been pushing censorship boundaries for the past few years, and Koh himself doesn’t accept government funds. Kenny Leck, owner of the popular Tiong Bahru–based bookstore BooksActually, says, “At the bookstore, and with our publishing arm, Math Paper Press, we sell the titles and publish the content that most compels us. In that way, our government, the state, has no say in what we choose to do.”
Singapore Unbound is committed not only to freedom of expression, but also to the idea that cross-cultural exchange leads to a healthier literary culture. Alfian Sa’at, who participated in the 2016 literature festival, where a portion of his five-hour epic play Hotel was performed in the United States for the first time, notes the positive impact of the kind of exchange Singapore Unbound fosters. “Having links with writers from other countries helps us learn from one another’s experiences,” he says. “For a long time I think we’ve looked toward a place like the United States for guidance on issues such as freedom of expression, how institutional solidarity in the form of something like the PEN American Center can aid writers who struggle with censorship and persecution.” Jeremy Tiang, a Singaporean writer living in New York City, agrees. At the 2014 festival Tiang worked with the political arts collective Kristiania to organize a panel of two Singaporean poets alongside writers in exile from Indonesia and Nigeria. “I think the best conversations happen when people from different contexts are able to exchange ideas in this way,” says Tiang.
With the introduction of Singapore Unbound, Koh plans to further those conversations. He hopes to start a scholarship program that will pay for Singaporean writers to spend two weeks in New York during the summer to experience the culture of the city and collaborate with local writers. This past fall Koh also created a fellowship program designed to bring more voices to the organization, help it reach a wider audience, and build its online presence. “With Singapore Unbound we want to bring outstanding literature to a wide audience,” says Koh, “and by doing so liberalize our politics and sentiments.”
Melynda Fuller is a New York City–based writer and editor. She received her MFA from the New School and is at work on a collection of essays. Her website is melyndafuller.com. Find her on Twitter, @MGrace_Fuller.
Correction A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the 2016 Singapore Literature Festival included both a performance of Alfian Sa’at’s play Hotel in English and a panel organized by Jeremy Tiang. Alfian Sa’at’s play is actually multilingual and Jeremy Tiang organized a panel at the 2014 festival, not the 2016 festival.
Jee Leong Koh speaks at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
On a recent trip to New Orleans, my friend and I went to a bar in the neighborhood known as Algiers. We met a local man there, who hung out with us for the rest of the evening. About three hours into our conversation, I casually mentioned that my last name means “crescent moon.” He backed away from the table with a fearful gesture and said, “Oh, so you’re definitely Muslim.” This is the M-word in action, and this is how it functions in everyday social situations. It can suddenly change the mood, discontinue or alter conversations. PEN America’s new initiative, “The M Word: Muslim Americans Take the Mic,” aims to address this social effect head-on through a series of events and stories that will give voice to some of the most powerful and innovative writers in the Muslim community. The two-year initiative, which launched last fall and is funded by a $225,000 grant from the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art’s Building Bridges Program, seeks to advance the conversation about the challenges of self-identification and self-expression that Muslim Americans face in today’s social and political climate.
An organization devoted to advancing literature and protecting free expression at home and abroad, PEN America has highlighted Muslim writers by publishing their work on its website, pen.org, and by inviting Muslim writers to speak at the annual PEN World Voices Festival in New York City, where the organization is based. The M Word series continues this work by giving a more dedicated platform to the Muslim community. “We are for the first time focusing on the richness and diversity of Muslim American writers but also their deep contributions to the American literary canon and landscape,” says Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, the deputy director of public programs at PEN America.
For centuries, Muslim Americans have played a vital role in building America’s varied and inspiring cultural landscape. But their voices have often been marginalized, a trend that has accelerated in today’s political climate, as misinformation and the normalization of hate speech have given rise to divisive rhetoric and rampant Islamophobia. “PEN America wanted to counter this trend by giving Muslim American creators the mic, so to speak, to tell their stories, their way, and to challenge prevailing narrow representations of Muslims in popular media,” Shariyf says.
The series kicked off in New York City this past September with an event called “The M Word: Muslim-American Comedians on the Right to Joke,” which featured comedy sets and a conversation with journalist and award-winning playwright Wajahat Ali, and comedians Negin Farsad, Mo Amer, Hasan Minhaj of The Daily Show, and Phoebe Robinson of 2 Dope Queens. PEN plans to host similar events in Boston; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; and other cities across the country. The next event, part of the Muslim Protagonist Symposium hosted by the Muslim Students Association at Columbia University, will be held in late February in New York City and will focus on Muslim American fiction writers.
To expand the program’s reach, PEN will also share original stories by Muslim American writers online. “We are inviting audience members, online followers, panelists, and others to share their personal experiences. The stories we collect will become part of the PEN American Center Digital Archive of Free Expression and may also appear on pen.org, Facebook, or other platforms,” Shariyf says. Videos of the M Word events are also posted online and sometimes live-streamed.
To help shape the series, PEN is collaborating with prominent organizations and individuals within the Muslim writing community. PEN cohosted an event in September at the Brooklyn Book Festival with Akashic Books and the Muslim Writers Collective, a volunteer-run group that organizes monthly open mics for Muslim writers and artists (the collective has active chapters in several cities, including Seattle; Boston; Houston, Texas; and Ann Arbor, Michigan). PEN has also solicited several advisers, including Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Ayad Akhtar; Sana Amanat, creator of the comic-book series Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan); novelist Zia Haider Rahman; religious scholar and media commentator Reza Aslan; and Ali, who moderated the September event. “Everyone talks about Muslims, but no one is really interested in talking to them or having them emerge as protagonists in their own narrative,” Ali says. “The M Word is not a politically correct, feel-good, liberal proselytizing series. It examines, dissects, uncovers and celebrates the diverse experiences that are too often silenced, stereotyped, or excised from the final draft.”
When asked what the M-word means to him, Ali explains, “Muslim is an identity, a signifier that means an individual in some way identifies with a religion that acknowledges the Allah as the Creator and the Prophet Muhammad as his messenger. It’s one of my chosen identity markers that denotes my spiritual path and religious communities. On 9/11, I was a twenty-year-old senior at UC Berkeley. Since that day, I have become an accidental representative of this word and the 1.7 billion people it allegedly represents. I became us and them. My career has been spent navigating the alleged divides, building this bridge and inviting others to cross it.”
Ali remains hopeful. “Change takes time and effort, it never comes without some friction. I hope the M Word helps cast a spotlight on these talented American Muslims who rarely get their voices heard in front of mainstream, privileged audiences. It’s education, entertainment, and an opportunity to bridge the divides.”
Marwa Helal is the winner of BOMB Magazine’s 2016 Poetry Prize. She lives in New York City and received her MFA from the New School. Follow her on Twitter, @marwahelal.
Goodreads, the social networking website and app for readers, celebrated its tenth anniversary in September. With sixty-five million users and sixty-nine million book reviews, it is among the hundred most visited websites in the United States. Owned by Amazon and headquartered in San Francisco, the company is not just a platform to catalogue, rate, and review books, it’s also a promotional force in the publishing industry—one utilized by the Big Five publishers, independent presses, and authors alike.
In 2007 journalist Elizabeth Khuri and software engineer Otis Chandler, who were married the following year, created Goodreads to answer two needs book lovers often face: how to decide what to read and how to keep track of what you’ve already read. Social networking was in its infancy—Facebook had just hit fifty million users—and the couple wanted to bring the social aspect of reading, recommending, and discussing books to the Internet. “Most readers find the amount of books being published overwhelming,” says Khuri. “And there is something deeply satisfying about being able to track the books you’ve read.”
A teeming community of book bloggers and critics quickly latched on to the platform. Chandler says that publishing “the best reviews on the Internet” helped secure its success. Khuri adds that the reviews published on Goodreads are more personal than those of traditional book-review outlets, which enhances the site’s appeal. “Goodreads users are writing for their friends and for the community, so the reviews feel more authentic.”
Goodreads offers numerous tools for cataloguing and discussing books. As with Facebook and other social-networking sites, readers can set up a profile and connect with other book enthusiasts. They can create and label “shelves” to keep track of what they’ve read, what they want to read, and their favorite books; they can rate books, write reviews, and comment on other readers’ reviews. They can also join any of the thousands of public and private discussion groups and book clubs—or create their own. Users can even ask authors questions and post their own writing. In 2011 the Goodreads team introduced a book-recommendation engine to the platform, which delivers informed suggestions to users for further reading based on the books they’ve read and rated. Chandler notes that three to five books in a given subject area enables the algorithm to make smart picks—often a mix of best-sellers and lesser-known surprises.
In 2013 Amazon purchased Goodreads for an undisclosed sum, allowing Goodreads to bolster its team (now at 130 employees) and implant Goodreads reviews and recommendations into the Kindle reading experience. Users can also share Kindle notes and highlights with friends on Goodreads, to facilitate deeper discussion. “We’re building magical experiences for the Kindle,” Chandler says, before adding, “We’re still full-guns-ahead on Goodreads the site.” Though Goodreads makes it easiest to buy books on Amazon, a drop-down menu lists other online options such as Barnes & Noble and Better World Books, as well as links to WorldCat, a centralized library catalogue.
While Goodreads started out as a useful tool for readers, it has also become an important promotional platform for authors and publishers. Considering that publicity departments have been scaled back in recent years, social networking has played a growing role in the success of many books and authors, whether traditionally or self-published. “Online discovery has become the biggest challenge for authors and publishers,” says Chandler. “How do you stand out online with all the self-publishing and digital publishing? Goodreads sits at the intersection of word of mouth and online publicity.”
Writers Paulo Coelho, Neil Gaiman, Kathryn Stockett, and Roxane Gay have long used the site. Chandler and Khuri were humbled when John Ashbery joined Goodreads a few months after the site launched. Novelist Celeste Ng joined Goodreads in its early stages to keep track of what she’d read. When she published her 2014 debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, she created an official author page, which contains a bio, a list of books she has written or contributed to, quotes from her writing, discussion topics, and her reviews of other books. Ng also answers reader questions and participates in interviews on the site. But she warns against responding to reader reviews, good or bad: “For the author to be listening in can dampen the conversation,” she says.
Everything I Never Told You resonated with readers on the site and was nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award, so Ng’s publisher, Penguin Press, embraced the site in its promotional campaign for her 2017 follow-up, Little Fires Everywhere. The publicity team raffled off galleys to Goodreads users, mailed them to influential reviewers on the site who had loved the first book, and shipped a box to the Goodreads office. When the book hit stores, Penguin paid for an e-mail with a note from the author to be sent to Ng’s fans and placed targeted ads on the Goodreads home page. Ng came in at number three on a BuzzFeed list entitled “21 Books Goodreads Users Are Damn Excited to Read This Fall,” and Goodreads featured an interview with Ng in its e-newsletter in the lead-up to her new novel’s publication. After each of these efforts, more users added the book to their “want to read” shelf—which often converts to sales.
Ng’s second novel debuted in September at number seven on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list. “It’s safe to say that this community helped make Little Fires Everywhere such a big success,” says Matt Boyd, the associate publisher and marketing director of Penguin Press. “I think the site has helped people discover the book,” Ng says. “My sense is that it’s an amplified version of friends recommending books to other friends.”
Jonathan Vatner is a fiction writer in Brooklyn, New York. His novel, The Chelmsford Arms, is forthcoming from Thomas Dunne Books in Fall 2018.
Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri, founders of Goodreads.
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road has inspired countless works of literature and art, but now, thanks to two literary-minded entrepreneurs, the iconic novel has also inspired an app. “I was reading On the Road, sitting there with my laptop next to me, book at my side, looking up all the places Kerouac mentioned,” says Jef Van der Avoort, cofounder of the new literary search-and-discovery app Squirl. “I told my business partner, Serie Wolfe, and she said she had the same experience.”
The pair’s literary curiosity sparked the idea for Squirl, which allows users to find nearby literary locations wherever they are. The app pins locations on a map that correspond to scenes in books. There’s a pin for the University of Texas in Austin campus, which is featured in Elizabeth Crook’s novel Monday, Monday. There’s a pin for South Park in Billings, Montana, which appears in Carrie La Seur’s novel, The Home Place. And there’s a pin for the Brooklyn Bridge, which plays a part in Catherine Lacey’s debut novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing. Each pin features a relevant passage from the book, as well as links to the author’s profile and a summary of the book that also includes links to booksellers.
Squirl works by first inviting authors to post locations from their books. “We developed the app because we think too many great books remain undiscovered,” Van der Avoort says, noting that the app is geared mostly toward independent and emerging authors who need help getting the word out about their books. “If you’re a smaller indie author, you can tell your friends, then friends of friends—but what’s the next step? It levels the playing field. Whether you have a marketing budget or not, it’s the same for everyone.” Writers then set up an author profile, on which readers can find out more about their work. Readers can search locations for a specific book, or they can search by locale to discover what literary places might exist in that area—and in doing so also find out about new books. Users can also search by author, from self-published writers to Arthur Conan Doyle, in order to find out where the characters in that author’s books have been and the places that have inspired their works.
Van der Avoort and his team began developing the app in late 2014. They launched the brand, complete with people dressed in squirrel costumes, at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, in March 2015. The app, which is free for readers and authors, went live later that year; by the end of January it included more than five hundred authors and a thousand locations worldwide. The project has so far been independently funded, but Van der Avoort is looking for external support to develop new features. In the future, he hopes readers will be able to create their own maps of favorite literary locations and that authors will be able to create virtual journeys for their characters that readers can follow.
For now, Van der Avoort sees Squirl as a tool to enhance the reading experience and connect readers with authors they might not otherwise discover. “My personal goal would be to one day see a book that was discovered through our app featured on the New York Times best-seller list,” Van der Avoort says. “That would be success.”
Rachael Hanel is the author of We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Considering the number of steps it takes for writers to turn their work into a published book, it’s no wonder that the literary world is partitioned into so many components: workshops for writers to hone their craft, literary magazines for emerging writers to share their first pieces, and both indie and mainstream presses for new and established authors to publish their books. Catapult, a new literary venture launched in September and led by a team of industry veterans—with significant financial backing—offers all of the above.
“Catapult conceptually mirrors the ecosystem in which writers and creatives exist right now,” says Andy Hunter, Catapult’s publisher and the cofounder of the popular website and digital publisher Electric Literature. The new operation, headquartered in New York City with a satellite office in Portland, Oregon, evolved out of the independent press Black Balloon Publishing, which was established in 2010 by Elizabeth Koch and Leigh Newman. Koch—Catapult CEO and daughter of billionaire conservative industrialist Charles Koch—provided the seed funding for the company, which is operating on a budget in the high six figures. “Since the inception of Black Balloon, part of the vision was always to create a mechanism for writers to find one another, support one another, and share their work,” says Koch. “Both Catapult and Black Balloon sprang from a deep-seated belief that a well-told story can be an accidental training ground for empathy, for expanding our minds and developing personally.”
Koch enlisted Hunter, who then recruited industry veteran Pat Strachan to take the role of editor in chief. Strachan has worked as an editor at the New Yorker; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and Little, Brown, and is known for acquiring Marilynne Robinson’s debut novel, Housekeeping, as well as books by Tom Wolfe, Lydia Davis, and Seamus Heaney. Meanwhile, Newman has been named the company’s editor-at-large.
Catapult’s editorial focus will be broader than that of Black Balloon (which will continue to publish more experimental books as an imprint of Catapult), with twelve titles published in both print and e-book format each year. Strachan says Catapult is seeking “American and international fiction and narrative nonfiction that is alive, insightful, illuminating, stirring, and surprising by way of unique voices—whether emerging or established—who honor the craft of writing.” The press will open its doors to unagented submissions every April and October, and released its first titles this fall: Padgett Powell’s short story collection Cries for Help, Various, in September; and Gavin McCrea’s debut novel, Mrs. Engels, in October.
The company’s website (catapult.co), meanwhile, publishes original short fiction and nonfiction that complements the press’s editorial focus. Web editor in chief Yuka Igarashi and associate web editor Mensah Demary say they are more concerned with a compelling story than genre distinctions. “We’re thinking about stories very widely,” says Igarashi, the former managing editor of Granta. “Hopefully that includes graphic pieces and stories told in multimedia.” Catapult also publishes pieces with original art by its in-house illustrator, Tallulah Pomeroy; recent works have included Nao-cola Yamazaki’s story in translation about amoebas, “False Geneology,” and Joy Williams’s story about a daughter visiting a nursing home, “Cats and Dogs.” Submissions for the website are open year-round, and contributors are paid for their work.
The Catapult website also hosts a Community section, which allows writers to self-publish stories and comment on one another’s work. Readers can promote pieces they like, and the web editors will choose their favorite pieces, which will then be published on the curated site; those writers selected will be compensated for their work. With this type of community engagement, Hunter hopes the site will eventually attract a million unique visitors a month (by comparison, Electric Literature attracts three million unique visitors a year)—an audience that will help build and sustain a readership for Catapult’s books.
In addition to its publishing platforms, Catapult offers a robust series of writing classes in New York City. The program offers six-week workshops (limited to six students each), as well as daylong publishing and writing boot camps, taught by both established and emerging writers such as Mary Gaitskill and Julia Pierpont. While the Catapult team doesn’t have plans to host courses outside of New York City, it will offer online courses starting in 2016.
With such a comprehensive array of publishing and educational efforts, Hunter believes the new endeavor could eventually become its own publishing ecosystem. In other words, beginning writers might take a Catapult class to learn craft and find readers, then publish a piece on the community site, and then be chosen for the curated site. And finally, Hunter hopes, some Catapult writers might even publish a book through the press. “Nothing that we do hasn’t been done before,” Hunter says, “but we’re the only ones who are doing all of it together in exactly this way.” Koch agrees. “This multiarmed structure—that’s our Catapult. It’s our flywheel, generating its own growth and momentum as it blurs traditional boundaries—between student and teacher, established author and up-and-comer, publisher and audience.”
Jonathan Vatner is a fiction writer in Brooklyn, New York. He is the staff writer for Hue, the magazine of the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Correction An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that many staff members of Black Balloon Publishing have joined the Catapult staff. No former Black Balloon staff members currently work at Catapult.
When looking to buy a particular book, one has a couple of options: Either go online, punch in a few keystrokes, click a couple of links, and a book will be immediately on its way; or call several bookstores, track down a copy (or wait for it to arrive in stock), and then walk, drive, or take a train to the shop. The first option is quick and easy; the second is time-consuming and inefficient, but supports more local booksellers—an increasingly important act in the age of Amazon, the company whose business model has made it difficult for many independent bookstores to compete.
Ben Purkert, a poet who lives in New York City, grappled with this dilemma. Like many readers, he wants to support his local independents and enjoys the experience of browsing through a physical store, but in the end he wants to know whether a specific book is on the shelves before he makes the trip. Purkert grew frustrated, however, with calling individual stores to confirm books were in stock. “I thought that maybe there were other people getting frustrated in the same way I was,” he says. In response, he founded CityShelf (www.cityshelf.com), a new digital tool that allows users to search the inventories of local bookstores on their mobile devices. A user can simply enter the title of a book, and CityShelf offers a list of local bookstores that carry the title, including the book’s price and in-store availability as well as each store’s location and phone number. Launched last December as a mobile site, CityShelf initially only covered seven bookstores in New York City. This summer, however, Purkert and the CityShelf team rolled out a new app and desktop site that covers stores in New York City as well as in five new locations: Boston; Chicago; Minneapolis; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle.
Purkert describes CityShelf as a “passion project.” He and his partners—technologist Eric Weinstein, designer Liz Oh, and product manager Javier Lopez—created the site in their spare time with no funding. Once they built the platform, they approached bookstores and included those with a searchable inventory on the site. In the few months since the mobile site’s launch, Purkert reports that more than a thousand people have used CityShelf, with about 50 percent of the site’s traffic representing returning users. Ultimately, Purkert would like to see the number of users grow exponentially, and he hopes to add more cities to the site and more developers to the team.
As CityShelf continues to expand, Purkert believes the platform will complement what he sees as a resurgence in indie bookstores and will encourage more readers to choose local brick-and-mortar shops over the convenience of Amazon. “A lot [of bookstores] are not just surviving, but thriving. What that suggests to me is that people are buying local. People love talking to booksellers, they love browsing, and they love getting suggested picks,” he says. “You can buy lightbulbs and diapers online, but a paperback is a bit more sacred.”
Rachael Hanel is the author of We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down: Memoir of a Gravedigger’s Daughter, published in 2013 by the University of Minnesota Press.
Filmmaker Jennifer Crandall first visited Alabama in 2013 on a short-term assignment for Alabama Media Group, a digital media company that produces television and video programming and publishes three of the most prominent newspapers in the state. Though she was living in Amsterdam at the time, Crandall was so inspired by Alabama that she moved to Birmingham, became the company’s first artist-in-residence, and began developing a documentary project that would showcase the state’s citizens. But rather than use a traditional interview format, Crandall decided to center her project around Walt Whitman’s iconic 1855 poem “Song of Myself” for its celebration of American identity. She has since spent the past two years traveling throughout Alabama, filming people reading from the poem. The resulting series, Whitman, Alabama, captures the spirit of the state and its people while illustrating the many themes of the poem—race, religion, politics, sexuality, and immigration—that the nation continues to wrestle with today.
The first installment in the series featured ninety-seven-year-old Virginia Mae Schmitt, who has since died, reciting the poem’s famous opening lines. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” reads Schmitt from an armchair in her living room in Birmingham. “And what I assume you shall assume.” Since that initial shoot, Crandall, with the support of Alabama Media Group and the help of fellow filmmakers Bob Miller and Pierre Kattar, has filmed around forty of the fifty-two planned films; she posts a new video to the project website (www.whitmanalabama.com) each week. The project features a diverse group of Alabamians, including Bob Tedrow, a concertina maker in Birmingham; Mariam Jalloh, a fourteen-year-old immigrant from Guinea living in Birmingham; and Demetrius, Frederick, Patricia, and Tammy—all inmates at prisons in Montgomery.
Acquaintances and friends introduced Crandall to several of the project’s readers, but she approached many people at random too. Crandall was surprised by how readily Alabamians agreed to being filmed. Each subject is asked to read from one of the poem’s fifty-two verses. “No matter what way we went about it, people just said yes,” says Crandall, who notes that the project is not about making the audience into Whitman experts. “Most people have heard of Whitman, from Alabama to anyplace else I’ve been, but they are not really conversant in his work. Fundamentally, it’s a project about getting Americans more conversant about who we are as Americans.”
Crandall strives to make the videos intimate reflections of the subjects and to film them in environments where they can be fully themselves: a living room, for instance, a front porch, or the woods. Each video juxtaposes candid moments alongside the recitation. A group of teenagers skateboard, dance, beatbox, and tease one another in a vacant lot while taking turns reading verse 21. One participant, Beth Spivey, recounts getting into her car in the middle of the night to chase a vandal down the road before reading the opening lines of verse 34.
Crandall embraces spontaneity in her process. She filmed verse 43 by driving along Route 43 and seeing whom she might encounter. While passing through the small city of Union Springs, she met Anthony Stewart, who was sitting under a tree. When she asked him to read a portion of the poem, he explained that he has a hard time reading. In the video, Crandall can be heard feeding Stewart the lines from behind a tree. The result is moving: Stewart repeats complex language with composure, lines Crandall herself stumbles over. “I’m not a good reader, but I’m a good singer,” Stewart says. The scene closes with Stewart singing as a thunderstorm breaks over Union Springs. “That is the stuff I live for,” says Crandall. “Each of these verses has its own fingerprint, which has to do with the people behind the camera, in front of the camera, and the Whitman verse chosen. This project is 51 percent serendipity, 49 percent planning. It’s a gamble, but part of what we do is in the spirit of the moment. We work with what people give us. Everyone is a coauthor in that they feel some sense of ownership.”
In the opening verse of “Song of Myself,” Whitman proclaims, “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” This sentiment lives at the heart of Crandall’s series, celebrating the disparate lives of individuals while emphasizing our unity as a nation. “Whitman wrote the poem at a pretty divided time,” Crandall says. “He did a lot of work to help us empathetically understand who we could be and didn’t restrain himself to the time and place he was from. He offered us guidelines for how to think of ourselves as Americans. We are inextricably linked to one another and no one particular thing. Today we’re struggling with that.”
The irony of using the words of Whitman, a Northerner, to showcase the South does not escape Crandall. “Bringing this poem to life by Southerners was an attempt to remind us that if you’re a Northerner, you’re also a Southerner. We are part of each other.”
Maya C. Popa is a writer and teacher based in New York City. She is the author of the poetry chapbook The Bees Have Been Canceled (New Michigan Press, 2017). Her website is www.mayacpopa.com.
Bob Tedrow, a concertina maker in Birmingham, Alabama, plays the banjo as part of his reading of verse 7 of “Song of Myself” for the Whitman, Alabama project.
In 2013 actor and director Ross Williams, founder of the nonprofit New York Shakespeare Exchange, set out to film all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, each performed by a different actor in a New York City location. After raising nearly $50,000 through a Kickstarter campaign, filming began. The original deadline was Shakespeare’s 450th birthday (April 23, 2014), but the project’s aim—to merge the literary and visual arts, and bring the poetry of William Shakespeare to the poetry of New York City—quickly proved more ambitious than expected.
As Williams and his team—made up of producers, a copy writer, and text coaches—began to film the sonnets, it became clear that the project transcended a mere collection of recitations. Each video became an artistic object in its own right. “This project is unlike any I have seen before,” says Mark Karafin, who directed Sonnet 108, which won runner-up in the annual Shakespeare Short Film Competition in 2015. “I read Sonnet 108 and it spoke to me immediately.” Filmed at the John T. Brush Stairway in Harlem, where the Polo Grounds, the original New York Giants baseball stadium, once stood, the sonnet explores “the first conceit of love, and its agelessness.” “I felt strongly about this location,” says Karafin. “It had substance and relevance to New York. There was history here.” Billy Magnussen, an actor who earned a Tony nomination for the Broadway production Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, stars in the film, and recites the sonnet in a voice-over. “My favorite part of this project was the opportunity to collaborate with such talented and inspiring artists in every department,” says Karafin.
Each of the project’s short films, released online and through a mobile app, offers a unique stylistic take on the sonnets: The adaptation of Sonnet 73, which opens with “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” depicts a gray, blurry image of a man sitting beneath a wintry arbor in Central Park while another man plays the saxophone. Sonnet 116—“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments”—features a couple walking along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade in the rain. Sonnet 44—“If the dull substance of my flesh were thought”—uses special effects to portray a man walking in an abstract, geometric landscape as his skin morphs into different metals.
The Sonnet Project app, which was launched in May 2013, has been an integral part of the project’s success, offering a catalogue of the filmed sonnets and a mapping feature that shows the setting used in each production. This allows the project to highlight locations in New York City that tourists and locals alike might otherwise overlook. “That’s been a part of the project that really makes people notice us,” says Williams, who adds that the interactivity of the project “could really make an impact” in terms of its reach. Additionally, each video provides a transcript of the sonnet, including a brief analysis and explanation of the wordplay. “It’s a unique platform to learn and expose all parts of Shakespeare,” says Karafin.
Ultimately, the project aims to nurture the next generation of readers and artists, helping them gain confidence with Shakespearean language and inspiring them to take on creative projects of their own. “We are currently deep in the creation of the Sonnet Project educational tools,” says Williams, who, by the end of the year, plans to unveil a two-week curriculum for high school students that teaches Shakespearean language and encourages students to create their own Sonnet Project films on their mobile devices. “We have had a number of educators tell us that they like to use the Sonnet Project in their classroom because it’s the one time of day they can stop telling their students to put their phones away,” says Williams.
So far, the Sonnet Project has engaged more than five hundred artists and produced videos for all but approximately thirty of the sonnets. Filmmakers and directors are invited to apply to create an original video adaptation of any of the remaining sonnets; if accepted, the Sonnet Project will work with that filmmaker to assign a New York City location, actor, and text coach for the film. In his plans for 2017, Williams hopes to launch a second series of videos of the 154 sonnets, this time filmed in locations all over the United States and abroad. The team also hopes to add several new mapping features to the app so that it can support walking tours and even scavenger hunts. “Our goal is to create a global conversation about Shakespeare,” says Williams. “By existing in a cinematic space, Shakespeare can feel alive and present.”
Maya C. Popa is a writer and teacher based in New York City. Her website is www.mayacpopa.com.
A phone rings, but it’s not the one in your pocket; you realize the sound is coming from an old-school rotary pay phone in a corner of your favorite bookstore. You look around. It’s just you and this softly ringing relic of a bygone era. You pick up the phone. “Hello?” you say. “Ishmael, what’s going on, man?” a smooth-talking stranger says on the other end. “I just wanted to tell you a little bit about my experience with The Catcher in the Rye.”
Welcome to Call Me Ishmael, perhaps the most celebrated opening sentence in literary history and now an innovative and irresistible new tool for discovering books and sharing stories about them. The project began in 2014, when founders Logan Smalley and Stephanie Kent were exchanging favorite opening lines of books in a bar in New York City’s West Village. One of them wondered aloud, “What if Ishmael had a phone number? What if you actually could call him?” In an instant, the idea for Call Me Ishmael was born: a phone number, an answering machine, a website, and an invitation to “readers around the world to tell us stories about the books they love.”
The process is simple: If a reader has a story to tell about a particular book—how it was a source of inspiration, maybe, or how it was life changing—that reader can call Ishmael at (774) 325-0503 and leave the story as an anonymous voice mail. Those who just want to listen can visit the website (callmeishmael.com) and hear more than a thousand stories about books of all types: literary fiction, fantasy, mystery, poetry, nonfiction, and everything in between. Smalley and Kent select their favorite stories and share a few each week on the website and via social media. When the pair discover a particularly wonderful story, they transcribe it on a typewriter (yes, a real manual typewriter) and share it as a video.
But they’re not stopping there. Now, in the form of a rotary-style pay phone produced this winter, Call Me Ishmael will soon be found in bookstores, libraries, schools, coffee shops, and even homes around the world. A small placard on the phone provides a directory of books. Dial the number for, say, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Mary Oliver’s Thirst, and moments later a caller is listening to a stranger’s journey with Kerouac or, in one of Smalley and Kent’s favorite calls, a woman’s recollection of serenading trees with Oliver’s verse in a Nashville park.
To fund the project, Smalley and Kent, who both have day jobs—Smalley is the director of TED Education and Kent works in community and marketing at Astrohaus—conducted a Kickstarter campaign in early November 2015. The campaign exceeded its ten-thousand-dollar goal in the first two days, and the project’s first phones will be produced early this year, including one that will be installed in Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia. The phone is portable, requires minimal space, and can be plugged in or powered by a rechargeable battery. It can be purchased outright (the cost is still being determined) or rented for events such as festivals or readings. Owners can also track the number of listens for each story on an app that manages the phone.
Owners of Call Me Ishmael phones can also use the app to assign any voice mail in Ishmael’s library (or stories that the phone owner uploads) to any button on the phone. “A bookstore might want to make all buttons correlate to stories about a visiting or local author, or a librarian might want to feature stories sourced from a fifth-grade class,” says Smalley. “It’s just a simple and, hopefully, delightful way to discover and celebrate books.” The phone’s app even has a “mysterious button”—when an owner presses the button on the app, the physical phone will start ringing. When someone answers, a message will play.
The response to Call Me Ishmael so far has been positive—not least, the founders believe, because it taps into why people so deeply love books. More than two thousand readers have called in and left messages, and the recordings have been played over a million times. “Ishmael is a really unique way to talk about books and to get people talking about books,” says Smalley. “It isn’t a review of books, it’s a way for people—writers, readers, teachers, anyone—to share stories about the stories that have touched them.” Kent agrees: “Books affect us in profound ways. Ishmael provides readers a way to share that experience, and it’s fascinating the range of people who call and the books they tell us about. Sometimes people call and instantly start crying. More often than not, they share intimate stories from their own lives.”
In one message, about Shirley Conran’s book Lace, a woman says, “I was adopted at birth. And at the time when I read this book, I wanted desperately to find my birth mother. And I found her.” In another, a man talks about his experience with Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches. “I was born about five months before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate by definition is not equal,” the caller says. “My Sunday school teacher told us that God wanted us to be separate.” Another: “I feel like I grew up with Harry Potter, as crazy as that sounds.”
Ishmael also gets his fair share of prank calls (one caller asked Ishmael to pick up toilet paper for him, another declared her love for him). “The calls are just absolutely hilarious,” Kent says. “We compiled them for April Fools’ Day this year. It’s quite a treasure to wake up every day and hear what people have to say.”
Call Me Ishmael has also bridged the gap between readers and authors. Last March Cheryl Strayed posted a response to a Call Me Ishmael voice mail about her book Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life From Dear Sugar, on her Facebook page, saying that the message made her day. John Green tweeted “I’m in tears” in response to a compilation video of readers who called Ishmael to share their experiences with Green’s young-adult novel The Fault in Our Stars. This is precisely why Call Me Ishmael was designed, Kent says: “to build community via narrative and to share books. Strayed and Green are just two examples of how it can do this. We’re super excited to see where all of this goes.”
Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is a poet, an editor, and a lecturer at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He is the author of a poetry collection, Ghost Gear (University of Arkansas Press, 2014). His website is andrewmk.com.