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Writers' Groups by Susan Girolami Kramer
I’ve traveled through numerous “writers’ groups” at various stages of my writing life. Early on, when I was low on the "confidence-in-my-writing" ability and was boxing myself into saying I only had enough skill to write short pieces (poetry and short-short stories), I found myself in a very relaxed group, one that was not so tuned in to strict writing goals and offering specific critique. One of our members actually did self-publish in the non-fiction realm, but most sessions were social gatherings, garnished with lots of good food, laughter, and general comments. I was OK with the dynamic at the time because I met some good people and did glean some advice that I would use later. Also, the writing I was doing at that point was mostly in journals, and it was more warm-up writing instead of serious writing.
Looking back from where I’m at today, my writing needs now would not have been met satisfactorily with a critique group like my first one. And the groups that I’ve been to within the past 5 years reflect how I’ve grown both in my writing skill and the ability to listen to my inner writer’s wisdom. I don’t limit myself anymore and have discovered that it is important to know the right time to allow your "group" to read your work and offer their comments.
Sometimes you can do more harm than good to your story (and psyche) even if the criticism you receive is constructive. Understanding this has helped me trust myself when doing final edits. I have a short story I’ve re-written 16 times, adapting each version to the critiques given to me by members in my group. Finally, I became so frustrated and confused about the central ideas and characters of my story that I threw out all the critiques and decided I would only listen to my own opinions for the time being.
Currently, I am in the process of polishing revision number 17 and have gone back to my original story-line and main character (Well, hello!). Now, I will only show a select few of my writer friends this re-discovered story, and only when I am certain the writing is done well and I am satisfied. I am still part of a writers' group, but I use more discretion now when I present my stories for critique.
Susan Girolami Kramer is Newsletter Producer for Rose & Thorn Journal. She wears many hats at her job as a Communications Specialist and at home on her off-hours. She’s a photographer, fiction and poetry writer, editor, and publication designer. She has won several awards during the last two decades for her photography and recently held a display at a local gallery. By day, she writes articles for an Association’s newsletter; by night, she taps into her more creative writing skills. Susan lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with her husband, son, and pug, Truman.
Book Review: Night Songs by Kristina Marie Darling
Night Songs
by Kristina Marie Darling
Published by Gold Wake Press 2010
Reviewed by C.L. Toups
Kristina Marie Darling’s latest poetry collection, Night Songs, reminds readers of what they have always known inherently—that music is the universal language. The poems here pulsate, and the harmony of their phrasing underscores the ways in which music moves us, lives inside us, radiates from us, and connects us. Everything is sound, even the silences. With sublime technical mastery and lyrical astuteness, Darling devises the basic notes of her linguistic scale of images: night, cello, teeth, moon, bird (canaries, in particular) harp, dust, clock, blue, window, hall, curtains—all arranged and rearranged in prose poem compositions that strike just the right chord.
Some of the most striking images are those in which light personifies music’s radiant quality: the luminous cuff links and uncanny whiteness of a cellist’s shirt, a throat likened to a lantern, and the light of a woman’s hair turning to constellation as she croons Tosca. This is music personified—a living, breathing entity. Darling is also able to capture the nuanced rhythms that reside in everyday movement: the tap of a painter’s brush, the hushed fall of velvet stage curtains, the shudder of beveled mirrors in their frames, the tick of a death watch beetle. Music is a collage of sound found almost anywhere.
With the advent of records, radio, the amplifier, over-dubbing, auto-tone pitch adjusters, and the marvel of the IPod, the creation and experience of music has become synthesized, removing listeners farther and farther from its original source. Darling ponders this disconnection and its affects in very unique ways.
In the poem, “The Musician Considers Modernity and He Sighs”, the reader glimpses the musician’s lament of mechanization:
The city has turned into a mechanical city, he observers one morning, a tiny ballerina
spinning inside a glistening box. Beyond the window, his wife seems adrift under the
trellis’s dank foliage, her steps measured with a strange precision. And even the chain
on his wristwatch rattles with diminutive elegy. But when the moon rises that
evening, every radio fades, and the streetcars vanish like wooden birds retreating into
a great unique clock. The discotheque holds its breath in deference.
In the poem “The New Conductor”, an old opera house has been turned into a discotheque:
. . . but no one bothered to
remove the velvet curtains, the gilt cornices, or the great plaster cherubs above each
doorway. When the musicians arrived, dressed in sleek tuxedoes and blue silk ties, only
the building’s smallest embellishments seemed familiar.
Music is organic—Darling reminds us—always reinventing itself while still retaining its fundamentals. And like its kindred spirit, poetry, we hear the echoes and influences of the past with each new transformation and interpretation. Darling’s poems celebrate this process but at the same time also give way to elegy for what is altered in the execution.
The second half of Night Songs focuses on word collages, found texts, and erasures, the arrangement of which mirrors the process of composition itself. Darling’s verse in this section makes creative re-use of not only her poems from the first half of the collection, but the text of a Victorian music appreciation guide. What is most intriguing about these poems is the way Darling is able to illustrate the diversity of meaning and feeling that is elicited from the changing, but repetitive patterns of her own words as a way to resemble the same patterns which define music. Notice the differences in the treatments below of the poem “Ennui” and its erased version:
You walk past a crystal decanter glistening near the harpsichord. Since our guests left
for the ocean, with its dark enclaves and its low mumbling, the lakes have done
nothing but rain. And our dim halls become more cavernous with every evening.
When I ask why the rooms buzz with damseflies, you merely nod your head. The
shutters blow open and closed. Our parlor hums like trees shifting before a storm.
You left for the ocean
mumbling
When I ask why,
the shutter blow open. Our parlor before a storm.
In this way, Darling creates a kind of phonautograph of her own by transcribing the qualities of sound to a visual medium.
Reading Night Songs is a study in musical and linguistic acoustics and the natural harmonics of life. It is an active and interactive experience, and in an age when music seems to be more about a packaged product than the art of creation itself, Darling provides a venue for readers to reconnect with the true source of sound.
Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate of Washington University, where she received both an undergraduate degree in English and a master's degree in American Culture Studies. Several chapbooks of her work have been published, among them Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006) and The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006). A two-time Pushcart nominee, her poems appear in such journals as Gargoyle, Cider Press Review, Illya's Honey, and Janus Head: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. Her literary essays and book reviews have also been published in The Gettysburg Review, The Boston Review, Shenandoah, The Colorado Review, New Letters, Pleiades, and other periodicals. Awards include residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Centrum Foundation, the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts, and the Prairie Center of the Arts, as well as scholarships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and Colgate Writers Conference. She currently studies philosophy at the University of Missouri and hopes to pursue a doctorate in English Literature.
Why Write by Janna Qualman
A deadline hangs, waiting. I am poised and ready, good intention is with me, but the words don’t care. They’ve hidden. They are mean and elusive.
Writer’s block has settled in, and I’m frozen at the computer. There is no flow, no zone, only quick-passing time and doubt, exacerbated by the weight of life’s other responsibilities. My creativity is entirely stunted, and now I’ve no chance.
That’s when I ask myself, why am I a writer? Why do I torture myself with this strenuous, miserable process, again and again? I can see no dream, no goal, no purpose.
But just when I’ve got the towel arched above my head, wondering if I could really throw it in, a saving grace. A moment of my own, a hint of inspiration. I find my way to the computer, where my fingers tiptoe along the keys, soon enough dancing, fluid with their composition. Time, for now, is my friend; words become friendly, too.
My creativity is born again, and I understand its need. My need for it. I see that maybe it’s not miserable, but instead it is beautiful.
I write. I write some more, and more. Soon, because I have trusted the process, I have something worth sharing; something that maybe someone will want to read.
I find that’s why I put myself through every bit of it. Because in the end, it’s worth it.
Janna Qualman is a freelance and women’s fiction writer. Visit her blog Something She Wrote.
Ms. Picky Persnickity...That's Me by Kathryn Magendie
I seem to be getting pickier and pickier—but believe me, I’m just as hard on myself as I am on the manuscripts and stories I edit. When did I become Ms. Picky Persnickity? But our writing becomes lyrical and strong when we pay attention to the little things. There is breaking the rules, which I love to see writers do and I do myself, and then there is what bugs me—um, well, just because. Here are a few:
Trying to pull a “surprise” ending that only makes your reader feel cheated, as if they were along for the ride only to be left by the side of the road before they reach their destination. Surprise endings are great, if the writer is good at them—if you are not good at surprise endings, or endings meant to “shock” the reader, then don’t write those kinds of endings. How do you know if you are good at those endings? I wish I could tell you. I can say, however, that a good ending will just feel right—there is that satisfied ‘ahhhh’ at the end, that feeling of completion, that smile that spreads, that “Yes!” An “eye-rolling-heavenward” ending is one you stick on the end because you are in a hurry to finish the story, or you just can’t figure out how to get out of the mess your character(s) made, or you are bored, or you are ready to move on to another story, or—you get the idea.
Watch those descriptions of characters where they look into mirrors and then describe themselves. For example: “Betty looked into the bathroom mirror and studied her strong chin, her curly red hair that framed a pale face, the freckles across her nose.” Who does that? Who thinks about themselves in that way when they look into a mirror? Perhaps more realistic is how we notice something like messed-up hair or smudged lipstick or a cut on the cheek, etc. Just be careful that your character looking into the mirror isn't an easy way out to physically describe your character—there are many ways to give a physical description, if that’s what you want to do—but looking into the mirror is turning into a big over-used cliché.
This is my own personal pet peeve, but watch phrases where something floods a character’s mind or body or whatever, as in “Relief flooded Betty’s body,” or “Anger flooded her veins.” “Lust flooded her loins.” . . . eek!
Snuck is sneaked. No, really, it is!
Lately something that never bothered me is “starting to bother me.” When we write, for example, “She started driving down the road.” Well, is she driving or is she not? If she is in the car and the car is rolling, she is driving. Picky, huh? So, why not simply write “She drove down the road.” Or, “Bob started running across the parking lot.” Isn’t he running when he’s running? Why not: “Bob ran across the parking lot.” Oh, I know! I am being completely picky, but sometimes a character is simply doing what she is doing instead of starting to do it.
Now. I wonder after I post this, how many picky things I will find within my own text to angst over. Woe. Oh, woe.
(PS - yes, I recognize I should maybe have written: Ms. Picky Persnickity -that's is I!)
Kathryn Magendie is Co-Editor/Publisher of Rose & Thorn Journal. Her novels include: "The Graces Series:" Tender Graces and Secret Graces (the third Graces to be released 2011); and Sweetie to be released fall 2010. Visit her website or her blog and follow her on Twitter or Facebook .
Interview with Ronlyn Domingue by Angie Ledbetter
Ronlyn Domingue is the author of The Mercy of Thin Air (Atria Books). The debut novel was a 2005 Borders Original Voices Award Finalist and was acquired in 11 other countries. Her writing has appeared in New England Review, Clackamas Literary Review, New Delta Review, and The Independent (UK). She earned an MFA degree in creative writing from Louisiana State University. In the past, Ronlyn worked as a grassroots organizer, project manager, teacher, and grant writer. Novel #2 is in progress, completion date heretofore unknown. Visit her at ronlyndomingue.com or Facebook .
R&T: What do you like about contributing to The Nervous Breakdown?
Domingue: I enjoy the magazine’s positive community spirit. When I started to write for TNB last summer, I noticed that comments on the pieces tended to be thoughtful and encouraging. Snarkiness rarely rears up. (And several writers have become friends, both online and in person.) There’s so much content diversity, too, from funny to serious, politics to personal stories, nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. I always find something wonderful to read. I think I’ve grown as a writer by having this outlet, a chance to share stories and ideas through nonfiction.
R&T: If you had to name one thing that makes good fiction, what is it?
Domingue: The ring of truth. To read a book for entertainment is pleasurable, serves the moment. To read a book that makes you feel—which connects you to the human experience in a way that speaks to you—feeds the soul.
R&T: At a recent writers conference, you spoke on the difficulty of POV. Any advice on getting it right?
Domingue: Trust the story to tell you what it wants. I once wrote a short story in third person limited because I thought it was a more literary approach. That’s what I was supposed to do. But after I finished the draft, I realized the protagonist had to tell the story in his own voice. It was a leap because the main character was a nine-year-old African-American boy. I often recommend the novel Seven Types of Ambiguity by Elliot Perlman because the story is told from several points of view. The perspective from which the writer writes shapes how the reader will perceive the work as a whole, as well as specific characters and situations. My opinion is that Perlman’s novel would not have been so profound if he’d chosen a more simplistic way of telling the story.
R&T: I'm reading (and am captivated/inspired by) your The Mercy of Thin Air. The non-linear plot is fascinating but unusual. Did you have problems convincing your agent or publisher to let you do it that way?
Domingue: First, thank you for the compliment. Second, to answer your question, no, not at all. No one ever suggested I change that aspect of it. I believe each book has its own inherent structure. A wise writer will pay attention to what the book reveals. The Mercy of Thin Air wanted to be told with the interweaving plot lines with time fractured as it was. Sure, I could have crafted the novel with a straightforward chronology, but that would have undermined its suspense and power.
R&T: Do you have a handy-dandy list of three things emerging writers can do to improve their chances of publication?
Domingue: First, as often as possible, avoid words that end with –ing and avoid passive voice. You’ll be surprised how much your prose improves. Second, write what you want to write. Audiences don’t know what they want to read until they read it. Publishers can’t predict trends or what will break out as “the” hot books of a season. If you make it as a writer, that has as much to do with your own talent as it does with luck and timing. The former is under your control. The latter two are not. And third, be perserverant. You will have to work, not piddle, at your writing. You will face rejection—which feels terrible but it is part of the experience. You will have to work for what you want. For example, The Mercy of Thin Air took four years to complete. Then within 15 months, I researched and queried 60 agents—and was rejected by 59 of them. If I gave up at any part of this process, you wouldn’t be reading this now.
R&T: When you read the Kirkus Review's thoughts on your book -- "Debut novelist Domingue weaves a tapestry of lost spirits and misplaced lovers...” -- did you get goose bumps? How much stock do you place in reviews?
Domingue: Goosebumps, no. The experience was so surreal that it almost felt as if that and other reviews were about someone else’s book. As for what stock I put in them, enough to know they matter but don’t have the power to make or break a novel. Reviews serve a publicity function to get the title and author’s name out there. Good or bad, they also serve as a way to track a writer’s work in a cultural context. Ultimately, it’s the unpredictable force of word-of-mouth that changes a book’s life.
R&T: Book two -- what is it, where are you in the process, and how is it different from your first?
Domingue: Novel #2 will not let me speak about it specifically. At this point, the entire story is plotted, and I have sense of most of the significant connections among characters and events. It’s different from my first in its scope and depth. This is an epic story, although that doesn’t mean it will have an epic length. There’s a dark, brutal, archetypal quality to this novel that was not present in the first. However, like The Mercy of Thin Air, it ends in light.
R&T: What draws you to the supernatural and psychological elements while crafting a story?
Domingue: The stories pick me. I don’t choose them. Whatever interest I have in the paranormal and psychology gives me the ability to understand the evolving work intellectually. I’m able to separate the experience—then merge it back together. How do I explain this….I receive rather than imagine. Stories come in fragments of image, dialogue, “knowings.” I’m tasked with making sense of all of this, piecing it together in a meaningful and understandable way. For example, there are images within Novel #2 that I appreciate more fully because I’ve read a good bit of C.G. Jung. Those images would work just fine on their own, but with my knowledge, I’ll be able to add a layer of depth that may not have been present before.
R&T: Best advice you give your students? Your "For Writers" section of your website is really nice.
Domingue: I can’t generalize here. If a student or friend asks for my guidance, I pay attention to where that person is in his/her growth as a writer and what s/he wants to achieve. There’s no one-size-fits-all. My “For Writers” page keeps that in mind. Some people simply want to start writing. Others are ready to look for agents. A few others might be in the process of getting published and want to know what to expect. Every writer’s journey is different, and I strive to respect that. And I know I don’t have all the answers.
R&T: Give us a look at a typical day in your life.
Domingue: The other day, I made a comment to my sister that I live as a secular contemplative. I spend most of my daylight hours alone with my cat. The amount of time I spend reflecting on what I’ll write far exceeds the actual moments spent writing. I tend our vegetable and flower gardens either morning or evening. At night, my partner Todd and I usually watch a movie. This might sound horribly boring to many people, but for me, I need this silent, solitary space to produce the next novel. And I’m very grateful to be able to bring it into the world in this way.
Thank you for taking time away from your busy schedule to do the interview, Ronlyn.
Angie Ledbetter is Co-Editor/Publisher of Rose & Thorn Journal. You can visit her in the blogosphere at GumboWriter or in Twitterville at Angie Ledbetter .
Interview with Darrell Bourque Part II by Angie Ledbetter
This is the second installment of Roses & Thorns interview with Louisiana State Poet, Darrell Bourque.
Darrell Bourque is Professor Emeritus in English at University of Louisiana Lafayette. He is the author of five books of poems: Plainsongs, The Doors Between Us, Burnt Water Suite, The Blue Boat, and Call and Reponse: Conversations in Verse (with Jack B. Bedell). He has two books forthcoming: In Ordinary Light: New and Selected Poems (2010) and Holding the Notes, a chapbook commissioned by Chicory Bloom Press (2011). He served as Poet Laureate for a brief time in 2007-08 and then again in 2009-2011.
R&T: What date on your calendar are you most looking forward to? And what are you working on now?
Bourque: One of the dates that I am looking forward to is the date when the LEH will name the new Louisiana Poet Laureate. The nominating process will begin late this year and we have many incredibly talented poets in the state and many poets who deserve the title. I look forward to seeing what they bring to the position.
Right now I am working on a "new and selected" volume which will be published by University of Louisiana Press as well as a chapbook commissioned by Chicory Bloom Press out of Thibodaux.
R&T: What's your favorite poem of someone else's and of your own?
Bourque: I have so many poems that would fall in the favorite category and depending on what day you ask me, you might get one of the following: Robert Frost's "Mending Wall," his "After Apple Picking," and his "Birches." I read and reread Gerard Manly Hopkins. I love Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality." I love Stanley Kunitz's poems. Donne's "Valediction Forbidding Mourning." Nearly everything Sheryl St. Germain has written. I read Mary Oliver and Mark Doty and Li Young Lee regularly.
Of my own poems, I am pleased to have been able to write "The Grammar of Verbenas" and "Inhabiting Separate Bodies" but I don’t know that they are favorites. I am pleased with the two sestinas in The Blue Boat and the movement toward variations on the sonnet in recent works also. Maybe the sonnets please me most right now.
R&T: Could you give us a look at a typical day in your life including writing rituals and preferences?
Bourque: There are no "typical" days in my writing life. Many of my poems first come to me on my morning run but there are many mornings when the poems stay far away. I write lots in workshops and retreats that I direct. I nearly always write the poems in longhand first and then go to the computer for lineation and revision. I don’t think I ever know what the poem will look like until I get it into the computer. "Printed" lineation and form is so much clearer on the computer than they are on the handwritten page.
R&T: Does your wife mind that you have groupies?
Bourque: I don’t think she does but we never talk about that. Our conversations are always about other things. She loves my work and supports every aspect of it, just as I love her work as a glass artist and support her immense creativity and artistry.
R&T: Is there a secret you can share with other poets?
Bourque: I don’t know that this response has anything to do with secrets, but I do know that I cannot write convincingly about anything that I am not passionate about. I have to have a vested interest in the work or it ends up in the trash bin.
R&T: Do you believe there is a connection between dreams and writing poetry?
Bourque: I think the process that governs the two is very similar. I think the imaginative operations are the same. This is not original with me or restricted to poetry; John Dufresne says much the same thing about dreams and fiction; we see the "dream" operation as a method of narrative in much drama and film (Pedro Almodovar, Frederico Fellini, Samuel Beckett, etc). In the new work I have a series of dream poems that attests to the "connection": "The Gypsy's Dream," "The Arum Lilies in My Mother's Dream," "Turtle Dreams," and others.
R&T: What did I forget to ask that you'd like to address, if anything?
Bourque: Something I wish I had done as PL that I did not do: I would like to get more poems on Public Radio. I have a small segment on KRVS (88.7 FM--Lafayette, Lake Charles---KRVS.org) called "From the Poet's Laureate's Bookshelf.” It runs on Thursday afternoons at about 3:20 pm and it is a little five minute or so segment. I wish there was more of this kind of programming on National Public Radio. Little interjections between regular programming so that the community could hear the poets of their region, their state, their nation. Garrison Keillor does some of that kind of thing on his Writer's Almanac and he reads poems sometimes on Prairie Home Companion but it seems to me that Public Radio could be a conduit for getting poems on the airwaves and into the heads of the listeners, who seem to me to be the right audience for poetry.
Angie Ledbetter is Co-Editor/Publisher of Rose & Thorn Journal. You can visit her in the blogsphere at GumboWriter or in Twitterville at Angie Ledbetter .
Interview with Darrell Bourque Part I by Angie Ledbetter
Darrell Bourque is Professor Emeritus in English at University of Louisiana Lafayette. He is the author of five books of poems: Plainsongs, The Doors Between Us, Burnt Water Suite, The Blue Boat, and Call and Reponse: Conversations in Verse (with Jack B. Bedell). He has two books forthcoming: In Ordinary Light: New and Selected Poems (2010) and Holding the Notes, a chapbook commissioned by Chicory Bloom Press (2011). He served as Poet Laureate for a brief time in 2007-08 and then again in 2009-2011.
R&T: You seem to have favorite themes for your poetry -- human relationships, the natural world and culture. Are there others, and do you think all poets have pet themes that direct/inform their work?
Bourque: I think the themes pick the writer and that themes emerge within the writer's relationship to the world lived in as well as the aesthetic and sensibility the writer works in. For me, human relationships are the ones that intrigue me: how we evolve through our relationships with siblings, lovers, partners, parents, etc. The relationship of one human with another is often a sacred relationship and those are often the kinds of relationships I try to write about. Those special human relationships are the colors or the palette the writer works with; they are already there on the board and we chose them because they are right there in front of us, because they are part of what we have set out to do.
Another special relationship is the natural world we live in and of which we are an extension. We are never separate from the natural world and I try to convey that in much of my work, and have tried to convey that integral relationship from the very beginning of my writing. The world that "culture" creates is exciting to me because it takes those natural ingredients of human relationship and natural world and from culture emerges that identifiable thing that defines us: our music, our language, our food, our recreation, our rituals, etc. There are, of course, other themes that the writing renders and for me one of the most important is the opportunity writing offers to communicate or converse with other artists. We are all interdependent with all we live with and with all we know and with all we encounter. I love being able to somehow use what some painter has created as a jumping off place for my own explorations.
I love response. Thoughtful, respectful, inquisitive response. Often using a line from another poet to begin a poem becomes a way of connecting with the poet. The same is true of finding a starting point for a poem in a painting or a photograph. And often the collaboration yields one of the greatest rewards of writing: the discovery of something we didn’t know we knew. Writing is first and foremost an act of discovery and enlisting another artist in the effort is the highest form of praise one writer can give to another artist.
R&T: I heard you speak recently, and you said, "Go from the merely personal to the deeply personal" when writing poetry. Would you explain this a bit more?
Bourque: Going from the merely personal to the deeply personal is but one of the ways that Galway Kinnell has influenced me. The line or the directive is his, which for me means the personal is a great resource for poetry and stories and other kinds of writing. Writing that allows us to identify a writer with a region or a sensibility is often a result of the writer using the personal in the art. I think of writers like Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Robert Frost, Sharon Olds, Sheryl St. Germain and many others. But they know that the autobiographical merely reported is not art. The ways Sheryl St. Germain tells New Orleans stories about her brothers, her mother, her relationship to the lake, her relationship to swamps undeniably uses autobiographical detail. But, she (and other writers) go beyond personal detail. The conflicts, the epiphanies, the characters become archetypal in the works of art. The drug user brother in a St. Germain poem is the brother we all have who have insatiable thirsts for whatever relief is available to us as human beings for the pain of loneliness, separation, desire. Laura Wingfield begins in the person of Tennessee Williams sister Rose, but as a character she is so much larger, her suffering so much more universal---and that truth is evidence of Williams’ genius as a writer. Proctor, who will die rather than tell an untruth about what others suspect of him, is closely related to Arthur Miller and his refusal to name names for the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities in their witch hunt during the Red scare, but Proctor is an archetype, one who defines himself by integrity and strength of character. What emerges in the Miller writing may begin with the merely personal but ends with something that is so deeply personal that John Proctor is part of who we all are, or can be.
R&T: You've mentioned some things that inspire you -- ancestry, music and art. Do you think you draw from these sources because you are passionate about them or because you've studied them? (Nature vs. nurture?)
Bourque: I draw from them because they are part of who I am. I am interested in ancestry because when I explore ancestry, I explore who I am individually and who I am as an artist. When a piece of music inspires a poem or is somehow an adjunct to a poem, it is because that music is part of who I am and my response is an acknowledgment of that connection. The occasion of using a part of someone else's art as the basis for a poem reveals that the human story is not told by one person or in one genre. When I write about a Van Gogh painting or a Vermeer painting, I am revealing a solidarity with that particular artist. With those two in particular, I have much in common in that we all come from "wetland" cultures and those cultures have shaped what we see, what we understand, what we value. The same is true when I find a truth in a Japanese painting, a French genre painting, in Bonnard or Rembrandt, or Elemore Morgan or Gloria Fiero, or a Chagall or a Caravaggio, a Beckett or a Almodovar or a Fellini.
I know these people and their work because I have studied them or because I have spent a great deal of time with them. But I write about them and from them because putting myself in proximity to the work produces something inexplicable, creates some connection that I do not understand at all, but that I know is there and is palpable, and, it seems to me, must be recorded.
R&T: What are your most and least favorite things about being the Louisiana State Poet Laureate?
Bourque: I like everything about the position. The base that one works with is pretty much undefined so the PL can do with the position whatever is desired or is possible. The only requirement of the position is that the PL give one public reading a year during the two-year tenure and the position is considered an honorific by the people who administer the title, so if a PL does nothing but the two public readings then he/she has met the obligation of the award. The LEH, which oversees the selection, also makes available a number of grants that libraries and community organizations can use to bring the PL into their communities and in my case, those grants were well utilized. But, so much more is possible. The previous PL was the remarkable poet Brenda Marie Osbey and months after she was named, Hurricane Katrina devastated her home city and her home base. So, she was impeded in a way because of events beyond her control. But still she made appearances and made herself available whenever she could.
My work was modeled on an earlier PL, Pinkie Gordon Lane, who served in the 80s under Governor Buddy Roemer. While the job was as this one is, primarily an honorific one, she was active and creative in developing poetry audiences and serving as the poetry ambassador for the State of Louisiana. Pinkie Gordon Lane was a colleague and a friend who I valued highly and there was no doubt in my mind when I received the title that I would try to invest as much energy as she did in the work that the position made possible.
R&T: What date on your calendar are you most looking forward to? And what are you working on now?
Bourque: One of the dates that I am looking forward to is the date when the LEH will name the new Louisiana Poet Laureate. The nominating process will begin late this year and we have many incredibly talented poets in the state and many poets who deserve the title. I look forward to seeing what they bring to the position.
Right now I am working on a "new and selected" volume which will be published by University of Louisiana Press as well as a chapbook commissioned by Chicory Bloom Press out of Thibodaux.
Visit Roses & Thorns next Wednesday to read Part II of Darrell Bourque's interview.
Angie Ledbetter is Co-Editor/Publisher of Rose & Thorn Journal. You can visit her in the blogosphere at angie-ledbetter.blogspot.com or in Twitterville at Angie Ledbetter .
It's Like a Game by Janna Qualman
It’s no secret to writers that inspiration is everywhere. Setting is just out the window, down the road, over the hill. Dialogue, at the neighboring table or behind the kitchen door in your favorite restaurant. Characters are in the toilet-paper aisle at Wal-Mart, across the fence, or hanging out in the room down the hall.
I bought the game Guess Who? for my kids. Do you remember? It’s the one where you try to figure out which character, from a group of twenty-four, appears on your opponent’s card. It’s a process of elimination; a classic game of questions. And as my girls played, calling out descriptors while I listened in, it became, to my writer’s mind, an exercise in characterization.
Is it a man?
He’s not too old, I knew right off. But not too young, either. Middle-ground. Forties.
Is he bald?
Maybe he’s a cancer patient, one in treatment. Or maybe he’s a regular joe, just shaves it everyday because he likes the zip of a razor, the feel of a clean head. Or, no--he’s a skinhead, a supremacist; it’s mandatory, a habit, his way.
Does he wear glasses?
Dark sunglasses, all day, sunny or not, because it gives off edge, power, distance. And he lives all three.
Quickly he became a character with a story I could explore and set to paper. All from a game, who knew? It’s a process, like any other, I suppose.
Maybe you could try it, next time you're developing a character.
Guess who?
Janna Qualman, new to staff at Rose & Thorn, is a freelance and fiction writer. You can visit and learn more at her blog, Something She Wrote .
Book Review: Cherma by Jacqueline West
Cherma
by Jacqueline West
Published by Parallel Press 2010
Reviewed by C.L. Toups
Between 1880 and 1920 over twenty million immigrants entered the United States, all having fled their home lands to escape oppression, starvation, or the ravages of war. Jacqueline West’s chapbook, Cherma, draws its inspiration from “the names, lives, and family stories of a small group of Bohemian immigrants who settled in Wisconsin’s Pierce County in the late 1800s” and chronicles the transformation of this farming community as it sheds its native folkways and assimilates into the new American culture.
By weaving fragile imagery into the stark tones of these narrative poems, West reveals a multitude of vulnerabilities hidden below her characters’ steely resolves. Her careful attention to nuanced detail elevates specific events to universal experience and underscores the gains and losses of a people who have sacrificed much for their admission into American society.
In the opening poem, “Yanys,” a young woman debates how much she should reveal of America’s hardships in a letter home to her mother who waits expectantly for news. She envisions how her “mother’s hands would tremble /veins raised like small mountains over the bones /as she tore through the American seal.”
By using the term “American seal,” West emphasizes the significance of the letter’s contents and characterizes it as being analogous to an official document, one that acts as a vicarious passport for the mother. Ultimately, the young woman cannot bring herself to write about the death and loneliness that confront her and opts, instead, for a delicate treatment. She writes about the qualities of America that remind her of home, reassuring her mother
that at last they had plenty to eat,
that the land was cheap
and the china unbroken
and outside the tent where they slept on the dirt
clumps of violets grew wild in the ruts.
With unflinching focus, West probes the complexities of preserving the ideal of America as a land of opportunity and prompts the reader to question whether the cloaking of physical and emotional hardships serves to safeguard that dream for others as well as for ourselves.
The psychological conflicts associated with assimilation also play out in the poem, “Cobian,” where a contentious marriage acts as metaphor for an immigrant caught between the demise of one identity and the emergence of another:
From state to state she followed fast,
teeth clamped tight to the trail behind him.
He could have sworn she’d leashed him with a spell.
And so at last he changed his name.
V to b, k to c;
he sank through the silt of traveling strangers
West skillfully foreshadows this dark side of the American courtship with contradicting images that create friction and imbalance throughout the poem and show the uncertainty, confusion, and anxiety of assimilation:
She was lovely on their wedding day,
the lace cap like frost on her black hair,
black eyes bright as broken glass.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But after the dancing and shivaree,
when the Bohemian band had picked up their brass
and ambled home over the hills,
when the slender sliver of moon
had thickened to a coarse white eye,
his bride laid her docile guise aside.
Of course, he never admitted it,
big Bohunk plowman that he was—
Like the young woman in “Yanys,” denial becomes a coping mechanism for living in cultural limbo, and the assumption of new identities and altered expectations result in a bargaining of loss and gain.
The inevitable split that assimilation causes between first and second generation immigrants is also reflected in West’s collection. In the poem, “Merta,” a son’s aspirations to leave the farm and attend college are derailed when his father informs him he can’t be spared because there aren’t enough hands to do the work. West describes the smell that summer as
rotten and sweet.
Ripeness thickened in the air. The apples
fell faster than the pigs could eat, each heavy branch
trailing its tip on the ground
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The boys scooped apples by the barrowful,
brushing away the cider-drunk bees
and hauling the fruit off to three spreading cairns
that simmered and softened in the heat.
West turns the rotting apples into a poignant metaphor for the son’s deferred education, and the cairns he constructs out of hauling them off are an ironic memorial to his lost ambitions. When his father’s “slow step crushe[s] the cores,” readers sympathize with the son being relegated to wear the same uniform of “overalls covered in motes of hay / that clung to the denim like glinting pollen” instead of the "clean slacks and buttoned shirt” that “striding the brick halls” of college promised.
The characters in Cherma struggle. While many persevere, others give in to hopeless despair, but readers of West's collection will find familiarity in their journey. These poems are a powerful testament to the courage and determination of anyone who has ever sacrificed everything to follow a dream. Alexis de Tocqueville once commented that the American Dream was “the charm of anticipated success.” As the descendants of immigrants who settled here in pursuit of that dream, we often suffer from a Janus-type complex—while half of our spirit gazes back upon its origins, the other half is always lured by the promise of advancement. This constant give-and-take is the evolving inheritance of our melting pot identity and the central theme that carries through the poems in Cherma.
Jacqueline West’s poetry has appeared in journals including The Pedestal Magazine, Inkwell Journal, Barnwood, St. Ann’s Review, Pebble Lake Review, Rose & Thorn, and flashquake, has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was awarded a 2008 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. Her series for young readers, The Books of Elsewhere, debuts in June 2010 from Dial (Penguin). You can visit her at jacquelinewest.com.
C.L. Toups is Managing Editor and Senior Poetry Editor of Rose & Thorn Journal.
Interview with Glenn J. Bergeron II by Angie Ledbetter
Recently, I had the chance to chat with the founder of Chicory Bloom Press, and he shared some interesting insights into the world of chapbook publishing.
R&T: What inspired you to start Chicory Bloom Press?
Bergeron: As an undergraduate student of English at Nicholls State University, I had the privilege of studying poetry and poetics independently under the mentorship of poet-in-residence David Middleton. During the course of this study, he offered me the gift of my first chapbook: A Prayer to the Father: Poetry and Prose by John Finlay, edited by Middleton himself and published by Blue Heron Press. It was a small, attractive book—20 pages or so—of selected poems and diary entries by the late poet/essayist John Finlay. Just a few weeks later, I acquired another chapbook titled T. Sturge Moore: Twenty-Three Poems (also edited by Middleton) published by R. L. Barth and then another at a poetry reading I attended titled Poems on the Life of Hildegard of Bingen by Stella Ann Nesanovich also published by Blue Heron Press. By this time, my interest in chapbooks was firmly rooted, and I would continue to collect them over the years. To me, chapbooks are small treasures to be cherished—cozy, personable, handmade, and quite often signed by the author. They are modest objects of beauty—lovingly crafted by poet and independent publisher.
The first chapbook I printed was actually a gift for a poet friend of mine who was moving from the United States to Wales. I gathered several of her poems and printed a few copies from an office here in my home in late 2008. This would turn out to be God is Southern: Louisiana Poems by Camala Ryan. Everything was done quite simply using Microsoft Word, my laptop, and a $75.00 printer. I mailed a copy to David Middleton, who, to my delight and surprise, responded to it with a great deal of enthusiasm and encouragement. I am certain to always remember fondly his telephone call to me: “I received your chapbook, Glenn, and must say that it is stunningly beautiful.” This led to our meeting over lunch shortly thereafter to discuss the future of CBP and engaging David as Advisory Editor of the Chicory Bloom Press Poetry Chapbook Series. My wife, Samantha, signed onto our endeavor as well by assisting me in the work of typesetting, printing, and binding of the books.
R&T: Would you share the best and worst thing about running a small press?
Bergeron: The most rewarding thing for me is working with the poets throughout the creative process. It is an intimate process in which we strive to produce a finished chapbook that complements a collection of poems in a respectable manner while allowing the poetry itself to remain primary. I cannot express adequately how humbled I am that the poets with whom I collaborate trust me with their craft and are willing participants in our modest endeavors as I am quite the novice at printing poetry chapbooks. I owe a great deal to experienced poets such as Catharine Savage Brosman, whose chapbook Trees in a Park we recently released, for the patience and knowledge extended to me.
I suppose the most difficult thing personally about running CBP is that we are indeed such a small press with very limited resources, and I do not speak primarily of finances here. I have already mentioned that everything is produced from my laptop and personal printer here in my home with my wife’s assistance. Although I do have an editorial advisor with whom I consult, I do not have a staff or the equipment to produce large quantities of chapbooks (a fact that probably plays in favor of the collector). Time can also prove difficult. I am a licensed embalmer and funeral director by profession. My wife is an elementary school teacher. We are also parents. We have to remain realistic with regard to the amount of time we are able to devote to our chapbook endeavors.
R&T: Do you publish only poetry?
Bergeron: Although we have entertained the possibility of venturing into short stories and essays in the future, we continue to publish only poetry at present. Anything beyond poetry would definitely be in the distant future.
R&T: What current projects are in the works?
Bergeron: I’ve already mentioned Catharine Savage Brosman’s Trees in a Park, which appeared as our Spring 2010 chapbook. We will be releasing a Summer 2010 chapbook by poet Daryl Holmes titled The Gift of Laughter very shortly. In addition, we are hoping to release chapbooks by poet/playwright John Doucet and Louisiana poet laureate Darrell Bourque respectively in Fall 2010 and Spring 2011.
R&T: Is there something poetry lovers can do to support poets and small presses besides the obvious answer of purchasing books?
Bergeron: I would have to say to them to simply continue to do what so many have already done for us personally—that is, continue to remain aware of us and pass the word to others. I know of many people who have done this whether or not they themselves have purchased books from us. They are supportive of our endeavors for whatever personal reasons they may have and get the word out to others. In my own recent experience, this has led to my being contacted by the State Library here in Louisiana as well as Special Collections at Louisiana State University, both in Baton Rouge. I understand that Tulane University in New Orleans intends to add Catharine Savage Brosman’s Trees in a Park to their library stacks. I’m grateful that people and institutions such as these have taken something of an interest in us.
R&T: Has the advent of e-books and e-readers changed your business?
Bergeron: We haven’t been established long enough for me to offer an informed opinion of this. However, I venture to guess that the majority of people interested in poetry chapbooks to begin with would want to have the actual chapbook itself in their possession as opposed to having access to it electronically. Again, I view chapbooks as something personal and intimate. I’m just not convinced that such intimacy—if that is indeed what is desired—would translate well through electronic mediums.
R&T: Do you do any of the hand stitching/binding yourself?
Bergeron: Yes . . . emphatically, yes. My wife and I have personally folded, punched, cut, binded, numbered, etc. every single chapbook that we have released.
R&T: What haven’t I asked that you’d like others to know about CBP specifically?
Bergeron: How did I come to name our imprint Chicory Bloom Press? Simply stated, I drink a brand of coffee called CDM (Cafe du Monde), which has chicory in it and can be dark, dark, dark depending upon the strength of how one brews it. My very liberal measurements make for a rather strong, rich, black cup of coffee—so black, in fact, that when one peers down into the cup, one can discern something of an oily blue-black sheen on the surface of the coffee emitting a sharp, almost smoked aroma—beautifully pungent . . . rich.
Shortly after the inception of the press, I sat in my kitchen gazing into my cup of coffee and chicory and decided to incorporate this all into the name of the press. Well, I had initially considered using the name Blue Chicory Press, but after a brief Google search, I learned that this name is already being used by another press out of . . . the details slip my mind now. Needless to say, desirous of staying clear of any association with or infringement upon this particular press, I shortly thereafter modified the name to Chicory Bloom Press.
And that’s pretty much how it happened.
R&T: Kudos on publishing both emerging and established poets. How did you come to this decision?
Bergeron: I owe this to my friend, fellow poet and editorial advisor David Middleton. David initially recommended that we publish at least two chapbooks per year: “One by a well-known poet and one by a poet who’d love and who deserves a first book.” I concurred.
Glenn, thank you so much for the interview, and we wish you the best of luck with Chicory Bloom Press.
Angie Ledbetter is Co-Editor/Publisher of Rose & Thorn Journal. You can follow her musings at GumboWriter.
