Writers Writing in Rooms in Winter. Sign me up.

A few months ago, while completing details related to teaching a three-day memoir workshop at the Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway (where I'm at this weekend), I hesitated at the question, Would you like to attend a complimentary master class for faculty, with featured special guest poets Denise Duhamel and Yusef Komunyakaa? 

This would require arriving about five hours earlier than strictly necessary, and on the last full day I'd have to prep for the start of the spring MFA teaching semester, which would begin the morning after my return. Could I really spare three hours? Still, I knew my schedule that day would likely be flexible. Also, the thought of getting out of hectic northern NJ and settling in to a sprawling old world/completely remodeled hotel by the ocean seemed appealing. 

What clinched it was that it occurred to me that I had not sat in the student/writer participant chair for quite a long time. Had not written anything resembling a poem in even longer, but have always loved being in the room with poets, which pushes me to think differently; I usually emerge with something that I later revise into a prose poem, or a piece of flash creative nonfiction (which is how this one got started a few years ago). Or even if not, I leave that kind of room lighter.

Sign me up.

A few things conspired to make me late. (You know those dumb scenes in movies where someone's suitcase explodes, spewing contents all over? Picture this, between my back door and garage, at 7:30 a.m., then me going back in the house, into the attic, to fish out the only remaining suitcase, so old there's no rolling wheels or pull handle.) So when I slid into a chair, the several dozen other writer-teachers were discussing intricacies of one of Komunyakaa's poems and it took a bit to settle in and catch up. But then, for the next two-plus hours, my pen moved, my brain slowed down. I was able to look off into space, and think, muse, wonder. Write. Consider.

Then Komunyakaa -- a Pulitzer Prize recipient and eminent voice -- said a few things that stopped me in place, lit me up with that familiar sense, a combination of intuitive understanding and driving curiosity. 

Here's some of what he shared; I'm paraphrasing here, and of course can't even begin to convey the richness of his speaking voice, his quiet wit alternating with gravitas:

- A poem is a dialogue, a beckoning. It's all about the tone, the music of a phrase.

- Titles should never be a resolution stuck on top of a poem. Titles are an invitation. The poem is not equal to the title.

- I always and only revise a draft of a poem from the bottom up, because that's usually where it's needed. I often write right on past the natural ending because I'm trying to explain everything, and I had not left that door ajar, as you must. I may start out with 150 lines, but the final poem is 40 lines. But that original ending is not usually the real ending. It all comes down to the right confluence of images and connections.

- A prompt can take you anywhere.

The prompt he gave next was to write an ode in praise of oneself, and I wrote about my love/hate relationship with my legs. Like most workshop-generated rough writing, I loved and hated it! What it may one day be, who knows.

After a brown bag lunch, Denise Duhamel asked us to engage with an excerpt from I Remember, a book-length poem by Joe Brainard in which every line or small paragraph begins with "I remember..." and then to write for 15 minutes in the same way. Since an "I remember" list is one of my go-to writing prompts in memoir classes, I sat up straighter in my chair, and wrote, mostly about what I remember of the two years I spent living in Orange County, California in my 20's, riding horses and competing in shows.

Next up was to consider three poems which all end on the word "life", to take one of those ending lines and make it the start of something. I went with (from "A Moment" by Ruth Stone), "you do not want to repeat my life," and wrote of how, at various times in my life, I did or did not want to repeat parts of my own life, my sister's life, my mother's life. 

Too soon, it was time to pick up my folder with my roster of writer participants who would be sitting around my workshop table the next morning. But when I got to my hotel room, before I pulled out all my materials and shifted back into teaching mode to prepare, I pulled on layers of clothing, hat, scarf, and gloves, and struck out to walk the paved cart paths of the golf courses behind the hotel for a chilly but restorative hour (in 34 but "feels like 23" degrees). Walking, and thinking about images, endings, about not explaining so much, about remembering and what we don't remember, and how to write about it all. 

At the opening reception, Peter Murphy, who began the Poetry & Prose Getaway more than two decades ago, reminded the 200-plus in attendance, we are all -- teachers, mentors, workshop leaders, special guest -- just writers together after all, writers writing in rooms, stoking energy and words and more.

Guest Blogger Nicole Rollender on Necro-poetry and Memory

Since joining a Facebook page where local writers gather, I’ve discovered many more Garden State writers, including Nicole Rollender. A 2017 NJ Council on the Arts poetry fellow, she is the author of the poetry collection, Louder Than Everything You Love (Five Oaks Press), and four poetry chapbooks. She has won poetry prizes from Gigantic Sequins, CALYX Journal, Princemere Journal and Ruminate Magazine, and her work appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, The Journal, and West Branch. Nicole is associate editor of THRUSH Poetry Journal, and holds an MFA from the Pennsylvania State University.

Please welcome Nicole Rollender.

Have you heard of micro-chimerism, where a mother holds her children’s cells in her body – in her brain, hand, foot, even floating around, for her whole life? It’s an amazing concept, that our bodies are part of other bodies. That’s how I look at poetry – my words becoming part of other people’s memories, part of their bodies. In this way, I know why poetry is important and essential.

From a young age, poetry stirred something inside me – I felt excited, alive, tingling and connected while reading and writing poetry. I was obsessed with its technicalities: enjambment (line breaks), slant and internal rhyme, caesuras (internal line pauses). I devoured every poetry book I could find, looking at how poems were made, how I could poach that technique, that angle, and make it my own. How I could make my own poems sing and become a plank a reader can walk across (echoing James K. Baxter who says the poem is “a plank laid over the lion’s den”). I wanted to make poems to help other people feel less alone. I wanted to become part of other human beings.

Matthew Zapruder calls the poem a machine. The poem’s also a room, a house, a country, a world, a space of encounter as tiny or large as the poet or you, the reader, want it to be. Poems are meant to be read and passed on, and when you read a poem it’s easy to imagine the poet is speaking to you or for you, or writing you a letter from far away. Poems can also bring us news from a vantage point in the past or future, or from another continent. And, you don’t have to know exactly what the poet meant when writing the poem – the poem’s meaning is what you need in your life at that moment.

Aren’t we all afraid to die? Poems can help us come to terms with death. Heavy stuff, right? Many poets, including Robert Lowell, say  their initial encounters with poetry  occurred when facing a human or animal death for the first time. The poem was a way to make sense of the experience. “Necro-poetry” is also about elegy, memorializing others. We can go to a poem when we want to remember or celebrate someone who has passed.

Max Ritvo was a 25-year-old poet who died of cancer a year ago. Much of his work documented his battle with Ewing’s sarcoma, which he contracted at 16. He extended his cancer narrative into a larger compelling collection of work about the body.. He lived his life with such a visceral intimacy: a bowl of blueberries was holy; he’d breathe air in a church, feeling in instant communion with those who’d worshipped there before him.

In his staggering poem, “Afternoon,” he writes, “When I was about to die / my body lit up / like when I leave my house / without my wallet. What am I missing? I ask, patting my chest pocket.” He also writes: “I’m missing everything living that won’t come with me/ into this sunny afternoon.” This poem is filled with a sadness and longing for connection with what Ritvo won’t be able to connect with, what he’s going to leave behind.

In a New Republic interview, Ritvo said this about what good poetry does to you: “When your memories, things you’ve never disclosed to anyone, start appearing in your mind as you read the poem. When you discover that a poem links up to a chain of images from your own life like a song links up to its music video.”  In this way, Ritvo wrote his own elegies.

In Jim Harrison’s short poem, “Sister,” he writes an elegy for his deceased sibling: “You were buried at nineteen/ in wood with Daddy. I’ve spent a lifetime / trying to learn the language of the dead.” Those hard-hitting lines are followed and juxtaposed by this gorgeous line: “The musical chatter of the tiny yellow finches / in the front yard comes closest.” We can hear that gaggle of loud finches; we can hear his sister’s voice. We know we don’t mourn our dead alone.

I’m fascinated again and again by memory’s power to let us mingle again and again with the dead, but also how it teaches us how quickly our lives move away from the current moment.

I live with a strong sense of mortality that often informs my work, and  I often contend with heavier topics like death, the spirit realm, God, saints and the afterlife. Of course, I experience joy in my life, and that permeates my work. I also have a strong sense that what I have (and who and my own life) can just as easily be taken away, so when celebration does enter my work it’s with a sense of caution (it casts its own shadow). My poems live as artifact: They’re my attempt to create something beautiful from the imperfect and temporal world we inhabit. 

My poem, “The Return,” (it first appeared in Word Riot) was influenced in part by the concerns in Ritvo’s  work. My uncle does a lot of family genealogy and just a few years ago told me my great-grandmother’s name – I hadn’t known it -- was Florentine Bia, a woman who fled Russia in the early 1900s. I wanted to memorialize her, but also share the same air. I wanted us both to be alive in the same poem:

The Return
for Florentine Bia

I’ve imagined my great-grandmother in love,
her hands deep in a pig’s meat she rolled

into sausages. Blood’s aldehydic stench. Large clocks
laughing all over the house. Massive dark beds. Her long dress

licking the top of her foot. She remembered the geese
her mother strangled, the sound a whine just before

the final breath, the first time they made love. I didn’t exist.
I wonder if she felt her own death, her hands limp

on the bed after, the wind pulled out of her,
if when she finally spoke, look at the starlight,

look, her voice meeting that light would carry forward
to this day, when I say aloud, Florentine, Florentine,

we are both alive in this poem, my hands deep in tomato hearts,
the man I’ve chosen to love somewhere in the garden,

his words still vibrating: What you do is wake
the dead. You don’t let them sleep.

Sadness and joy  come and go, but weaving their imagery together  does create something indelible that doesn’t fade or  lose its sharp prick – that I will never know my great-grandmother, that my gardens will bloom, fade and die each year. In this poem, I’m celebrating small miracles of joy in the quotidian. This necklace of memories is what makes me nostalgic for a time and a self and others’ lives I can never return to – each day closer to the end of this life, and closer to the next. Frankly, I’m still afraid of death: The thought of leaving my children makes me shudder. I’d need to be dragged into the next world.

I’ll leave you with Audre Lorde’s point that there are no new ideas. We’re all living the same shared experiences. However, she says, there are new ways of making these ideas felt “of examining what our ideas really mean (feel like) on Sunday morning at 7 a.m., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth; while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while tasting our new possibilities and strengths.”

There’s courage in writing and reading poetry – in building that plank  and also crossing it.

You can connect with Nicole via Twitter and Facebook.

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers -- October 27, 2017 Edition

> Invest three minutes with 19-year-old poet Amanda Gorman, reading "The Gathering Place" at the Social Good Summit recently. She's the first official U.S. Youth Poet Laureate. You'll see why.

> I'm looking forward to reading Amy Tan's new memoir Where the Past Begins: Where the Past Begins, especially after enjoying this interview at Shondaland. (So many of the pieces in The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life, her 2004 essay collection (memoir in essays?), are ones I re-read frequently. Especially "Mother Tongue," which I teach from.)

> At Book Riot, Christine Ro explores "100 Must Read Books for the Socially Awkward". 

> Since I am (and so many author friends are) brainstorming future book marketing and publicity ideas -- and not that I have anything near her pull -- it's been interesting to see the #misfitsmanifesto posts on Twitter in celebration of Lidia Yuknavitch's new book of the same name.

>  At LitHub, some of the best writing advice gleaned (and edited down) from 150 authors.

Have a great weekend!

Image: Flickr/CreativeCommons-1950sUnlimited

Author Interview with Carol Smallwood on her new poetry book, Prisms, Particles, and Refractions

As part of my MFA research thesis, I interviewed a dozen women memoir writers, and had enough overflow information to write several essays and articles, two of which appeared in Women Writing on Family: Tips on Writing, Teaching, and Publishing (Key Publishing House, 2012). Carol Smallwood co-edited that book, has edited or co-edited several dozen other anthologies and collections, and has written six books of her own poetry. The latest is Prisms, Particles, and Refractions (Finishing Line Press). I read the galley the day of the solar eclipse, awaiting the sky to darken during a bright New Jersey afternoon, which felt right: the timing, the way the light was shifting in my office, what the poems have to say about light. Carol agreed to answer my nosy questions.

LR: As is the case for many poetry books, many poems were first published in journals and websites, over several years. When / how in the course of writing single poems, and seeing some published, do you get a sense of what belongs together in a collection/book?

CS: It is very fitting you asked questions about light on the long anticipated solar eclipse day! After several have been published, one gets an overview on what works and I can see a theme. The new collection I’m compiling now came about from one its poems being in the Thirteenth Annual International Ultra-Short Competition (sponsored by The Binnacle at The University of Maine at Machias: Honorable Mention Ultra-Short Edition 2016). The poem, “We Select”  became the Prologue to A Matter of Selection dealing with making choices, selections.

LR: In the Foreword, Lisa Zaran praises your book for "its vision and identification of darkness". Your Introduction says that your poems are "aimed at capturing some of the aspects of light—light that our eyes detect and light also as metaphor." Can you talk about the inspiration, opposites, and influences of light and dark on your writing?

CS: Poetry with me begins with a clash,  or what is called in creative writing classes: juxtaposition. And of course metaphor is vital also so the theme of light is one full of application.  How we see has always fascinated me especially since taking a college class which examined rods and cones in vision.

LR: One of my favorites is "Cuttlefish" because it asks a reader to consider things that aren't typically thought of together – fish, underwater darkness, light, bioluminescence, being able to change one's body. Can you comment on where this poem came from, and what you like about it as its author?

Cuttlefish

survive by matching their

environment, changing the

color and texture of skin

in a blink of W-shaped

pupil eyes; they dazzle

with light patterns like

some marquee—if that

doesn’t work, they exit

in an inky cloud

CS: This poem was in my first chapbook to be published: On the Way to Wendy’s (Pudding House Publications,  2008). It came from watching a science program on PBS because how they managed to survive was so amazing.

LR: As I read, I was continually reminded of how much depends on light or its lack, how emotions are tied to visual light cues: everything from lacework and its openings that let in light; the light between snow as it falls; the technical upside-down qualities of human vision; the sun, stars, black holes. I'm curious if light is something you have always observed? After writing so much about it, are you still seeing the world as light? Or does that keen focus wane after the themed poetry collection is complete?

CS: You covered the light cues very well, Lisa. I’ve not even scratched the surface about understanding light and it continues to be something to wonder about; its implications with us are unending. My interest in light perhaps began with a professor having us write questions we wanted to know in a freshman psychology class. He really liked my light questions which reinforced my interest.

LR: I wondered if "Live With It"—a poem about experiencing a seemingly permanent jagged black lightning bolt across the vision in one eye—was perhaps autobiographical and maybe a trigger for the light theme? Or am I just asking that awful question readers ask novelists about what parts of their fiction are "true"?

CS: The jagged lightning did happen (fortunately only once) but it wasn’t the beginning of my collection on light.

LR: When reading about light, one might expect to encounter gardens, the sun, the outdoors, space, etc. But other physical locations also repeat in several poems – the eye doctor's office, the library, Wendy's,  the hospital, Nicolet City, the deep ocean.  Intentional, or coincidence? What might a reader take away from those less expected settings?

CS: Usually my inspiration comes not far from what I literally see which is a tiny amount of course—each of us has their own worlds, settings, from which we see. I didn’t start writing poetry until years after editing anthologies largely for librarians as I was afraid it was beyond me after literature classes in grad school on classics like John Milton. After retiring from public schools, I wrote a novel and feeling I had nothing to lose after that rough learning experience, tried poetry which was as if jumping off a cliff (had no idea if it was good or bad) and was amazed when I began getting journal acceptances. Writing poetry and editing at the same time provides a good balance for me.

LR: There's an interesting mix of both free verse and formal poems, and some prose poetry. Is that how you write, alternating between forms? Do certain topics demand one specific form over another? Or is it the other way around: you want to write free verse, or you want to write something formal, and so then cast about for a story to tell in that particular way?

CS:  A few days ago I tried writing about Sirius, and The Big Dipper, as triolets and villanelles but what I wanted to convey wouldn’t fit the rhyme schemes so will have to try free verse or maybe a  pantoum, sestina, cinquain, or others. What I saved  trying to write them hopefully will be of use yet.

Learn more about Carol by visiting her page at Poets & Writers, and browse her books here. Another interview with Carol is found over at Literary Mama.

Image: courtesy Carol Smallwood. "Cuddlefish" reprinted with permission.

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers -- June 30, 2017 Edition

> From Book Expo 2017, held in Manhattan last month, Shelf Awareness summed up key points of a panel for authors on Working with Indie Bookstores.

> Did you know that Tracy K. Smith is the new U.S. Poet Laureate?

> At her tumblr, Roxane Gay has some tips (25 in fact) on "How to be a Contemporary Writer."

> Meaty interview with Lidia Yuknavitch at The Millions (in conjunction with Bloom).

> What do MFA instructors read in downtime? My colleagues (and I) talked personal summer reading lists at the Bay Path MFA Director's Blog.

> Feeling proud of my former coaching client Emily Wanderer Cohen, whose new book From Generation to Generation: Healing Transgenerational Trauma Through Storytelling -- which focuses on the influence of her mother, a Holocaust survivor and educator -- has been doing exceedingly well in its first few days.

> Feel awkward doing self-promotion? It's not a rare disorder, as Sonya Huber explores at Proximity Magazine.

>I'm getting a bit more active over on Goodreads. If you'd like to connect, find me here. And on Instagram, I'm @LisaRomeoWriter

Have a great weekend!

Image: Flickr/CreativeCommons--1950sUnlimited

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers -- January 20, 2017 Edition

> Most writers like to know how other writers get it done. Emma Donoghue (author of Room and other works), offers excellent insight in a Guardian piece, including time management, allowing herself to write badly, and more. 

> Like podcasts? A batch of new episodes of Exactly are available, with host/originator Kelly Corrigan interviewing Mary Roach, Nicholas Kristof, Margaret Atwood, and others.

> Devotee of Edgar Allen Poe? For his 208th birthday, Electric Literature gathered up audio of five (living and dead)  celebrities reading The Raven.

> I mentioned last week a Resolve to Write event I led with local writers. One of them, a write-at-home, mom-of-a-toddler, summed up how it's going as she tries on some new writing-day organizing advice.

> If you haven't yet visited the blog of novelist Caroline Leavitt, do it! She features many many interviews with authors, and always asks unique questions.

> At the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, contemplating the purpose of a columnist today.

> Ever wonder, what writers think about questions students are asked to answer about their literary works? Poet Sara Holbrook wrote this funny/not funny account: "I Can’t Answer These Texas Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems."

Have a great weekend!

Image: Flickr/CreativeCommons - Felipe Sasso

The Way out of Prose Problems is Through: Through poetry, sometimes.

This week, I am asking my creative nonfiction MFA students, to consider poetry. To read about poetry. To read poems. To ask themselves what they can learn from the poet and from the poem. Then, I'm asking them also, to write something that feels like poetry to them. Prose poetry. A narrative poem. Free verse. Maybe something lyrical. A haiku.

I'm not suggesting they embark on a serious study of poetry forms (though if that's interesting to any of them, why not?). What I'm doing is pushing them outside of their writer comfort zones. Reading a form they don't write in, to discover how those writers operate, and why. Giving them a new lens through which to consider that cranky essay, that recalcitrant narrative, that stubborn slice of memoir. To look from a new angle, with a different and strict economy of words, at what a piece of prose is struggling to be about. And to listen to what might happen on the page when the prose becomes a poem.

Every time I do this, in any class or workshop, the response is mixed. What I tell them all is how much I've learned about writing from the other genres. How pleased I was, during my own MFA program, to discover everything that poetry, and poets, and poems, and the blurry line between prose poetry and creative nonfiction, had to teach me about getting at the heart of what I was trying to write.

With the act of writing a poem, I think prose writers are well reminded of the value and possibility of each individual word. Of the need to think about each word on its own. Each word in connection to the words that come before and after. And in relation to the places where there are no words. These are nuances of writing that sometimes get lost in what can be an avalanche of words in prose drafts. Poetry demands the prose writer in me to stop and consider: this word? that one? or another one entirely? or no word? a space here? end here? or there? why? what's between the words, where there are no words?

I often try a problem child piece of prose as a poem, which shows me something about what I'm trying to say. Usually, I then go back to prose, wiser. But not always. About eight years ago, I did a crappy first draft of what I assumed would be a narrative essay, about a day I took a walk with one of my kids. When it wasn't working out, I tried capturing just one moment of the experience as a poem. That felt better. Then I put it away for a long time. I looked at it again last summer, as my younger son, who appears in this poem as a 10 year-old, was packing for college. I realized it was, and is, and is only, a poem. It appears in a new mixed-genre anthology, In Celebration of Mothers (edited by Trisha Faye), published this month.  

Image: Flickr/CreativeCommons-SteveJohnson

Friday Fridge Clean-out: Links for Writers -- July 22, 2016 Edition

> So many, me included, were particularly saddened to hear of the passing of Carolyn See, novelist, writing professor, book critic, and tireless literary citizen whose generous acts and motivating book, Making a Literary Life, inspired so many writers over decades. Here is the New York Times obituary, and at KCET's website, a stunning, meaty, loving tribute by Gayle Brandeis.

> I missed this back  in March, but it's just as relevant today: Rebecca Hussey's "100 Must-Read Essay Collections," at Book Riot.

> Some days we need, "17 Poems to Read When the World is Too Much." Especially haunting: "What They Did Yesterday Afternoon" by Warsan Shire.

>Writers continue to react to the idea of aiming for 100 rejections per year. On the Kenyon Review blog, Laura Maylene Walter shares how she racked up 215 rejections in 2015, how those numbers added up, and what it means to her.

> Occasionally, I like to point readers to other places on the web (like my Friday posts) to find weekly round-ups of writerly news and links. Try the Literary News column at Change Seven journal.

> Although Beyond Your Blog will stop posting new material soon, the archives are rich in podcast interviews, tips, advice, resources, lists, and links that will help writers who want to get published online and in print.

> Student Brag Box: Bay Path University MFA student Heidi Fettig Parton's work of creative nonfiction, "When You Wander West" appears in the current issue of Angels Flight Literary West. If, like me, your kids are near, entering, or working their way through young adulthood, you'll appreciate this one!

Have a great weekend!

Image: Flickr/CreativeCommons - Cas Bright Meadow

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers -- June 17, 2016 Edition

> Joshua Becker, at the Minimalist advises, "Accomplish More with a 3-item To Do List." My comment at that post: I have been doing this for years. Didn’t know it was a real thing. I just call it my 1-2-3 Rule. Long to do lists are overwhelming. But who can’t do 3 things?  (And there -- you've just gotten one of my *secret* coaching tips.)

> Read and weep (a little - in the spirit of what my father sometimes said: Beware what you wish for - you might just get it.) "Lisa33 and Me -- The Harrowing True Story of a Six-Figure Advance," at Rottingpost.

> One of my bigger editing pet peeves: dialogue tags other than said or asked.  (Okay, very occasionally I can see the need for something like whispered which usually can't be communicated via the dialogue itself. Then again, I'd probably opt for action, if appropriate, like...he leaned close to her ear and...). My writer pal Linda Sienkiewicz weighs in with "Nancy Pontificated."

> The Wall Street Journal reports that HarperCollins launched a Facebook Live initiative, featuring live video with authors interacting with readers on HC's FB page daily (and also on the individual authors' FB pages).

> At Book Riot, Kelly Jensen with "33 Ways to Have a More Bookish Summer." Why not? (hat tip Buddhapuss Ink)

> Writer Beware examines the BookLife Prize in Fiction.

>Love food and literature, and are local to New York's Hudson Valley? Check out Read and Feed on July 30. Details: "Basilica Hudson, in partnership with CLMP, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, announce READ & FEED, the launching of a projected annual event bringing together artisanal makers of food with artisanal makers of literature." Tickets here.

> At Writer Unboxed, Donald Maass asks (and does a pretty good job of answering) 

"What Makes Fiction Literary: Scenes Versus Postcards." Be sure to check out the many good comments too.

> Finally, if you have not done so yet, do read Maggie Smith's excellent poem "Good Bones" at Waxwing Magazine. It's rare for a contemporary poem to "go viral" but apparently that's what has happened this week. Read it and, if you're paying even sideways attention to U.S. and world news lately and are weary and disheartened, you'll know why it's struck such a universal chord.

Have a great weekend!

Image: Flickr/CreativeCommons -FaceMePls

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers -- July 24, 2015 Edition

> Weary of those "writers under 30/40" lists? So was Claire Fuller, debut novelist at 48, who helped form Prime Writers.

> Poet Jessica Piazza vowed to only submit to paying markets in 2015. At the mid-point of the year, she tallied her dollars and reflected on the process.

> Is Joan Didion "the ultimate literary celebrity"? Laura Marsh, at The New Republic, thinks so, and makes the case for why and how.

> In two weeks, I'll give a presentation and be on a panel at HippoCamp2015, a Conference for Creative Nonfiction Writers (Lancaster, PA). There's still time to register, and using the code HippoFriend, you'll save $25. (Some less-than-full-conference registration options are also available upon request.) Not long ago, I interviewed conference organizer (founder/editor of Hippocampus Magazine) Donna Talarico.

> Cathy C. Hall shares some tips on getting the most from a short (in this case, three-day) writing retreat.

> At Creative Nonfiction, exploring the origins of the CNF term itself.

> The Millions takes a look at what's coming up in new nonfiction books for the balance of 2015.

> While I teach in an MFA program, I also think the degree is not for every writer; that not every good writer needs or wants one. In this account at The Millions, a non-MFA writer examines his reasons for skipping it (and the article is jammed with other interesting links, too.)

> Jessica Page Morrell discusses the need for messy emotions in writing.

Have a great weekend!

Image: Flickr/Creative Commons - GlobalX

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers -- April 17, 2015 Edition

> My Bay Path MFA teaching colleague Susan Ito describes an unforgettable experience (on the heels of AWP), that involves: one of her early books, a high school class in Minnesota, an invitation, saying yes, teenage exuberance, adoption stories, drama, connection, and the powerful ways that writing and story bring people together. Read it; I promise it will make you think differently about why we write.

> The Guardian's take on the AWP Conference, or as they call it, "the Comic Con of MFAs". I especially enjoyed seeing my MFA alma mater in the spotlight: "Some MFA graduates who have gone on to teach see a larger social value in their work. Justin Tussing, the director of the low-residency Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine, said the MFA’s popularity is a valuable counterweight to a pragmatic culture that values technology over art. “Like we need another app,” he joked."

> Just a few more AWP Conference related links: Carolyn Forche on why poetry still matters (as if we doubted it!);

> You'll find more links to AWP coverage around the web, in my post from earlier this week.

> Ah, the cranky tough love of an editor who cares enough to be disliked (which means loved), and who pushes her authors to write revise manuscripts that become bestsellers. I love her, and I love the final two paragraphs, too.

> A short and spot-on post by Lee Martin details "The Essay Within the Essay." Or: why we so often don't write what we thought we were going to write, and why that's often wonderful.

> For National Poetry Month, Drew Myron is giving away poetry books at her blog. While there, check out her Fast Five interviews with writers.
>
> Finally, here's a slide show that would, individually or as a whole, make a great writing prompt: "50 Surprising Photos From the Past that Show How Different Life Used to Be".

Have a great weekend!

Image: Flickr/Creative Commons - Jinxmcc

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers -- May 30, 2014 Edition

> Richard Gilbert, author of a new memoir, Shepherd, has some good advice on obtaining advance trade press reviews, over at his blog.

> This summer, three writers I'd had the pleasure of working with as students or coaching clients are beginning low residency MFA programs, and in the fall another is entering a full time program; so the advice for new graduate writing students in this John Vanderslice post is particularly timely.

> If you're not reading book coach and author Jennie Nash's How to Write a Book blog, you're missing out.

> Determined to crack that one important journal? Read how Laura Maylene Walter (finally) made it into The Sun. (hat tip Erika Dreifus)

> In the next month or so, I'll have an interview here with essayist/memoir writer Sue William Silverman, but I can't wait: her interview at The Artist's Road, about building a memoir from essays, is too good not to pass along.

> Wondering if Tumblr will help your freelance writing career? Some quick tips via the ASJA newsletter.

> Sure, I'm biased (since I'm the creative nonfiction editor) but I'll say it anyway -- there is some seriously good writing, across all genres, in the Spring issue of Compose Journal. Plus, a few excellent craft and business-of-writing articles, too.

> Perhaps by now everyone has seen the "Look Up" video exposing the anti-social effects of social media, texting, and cell phone addiction, but it's worth sharing. Extras: it's by a Brit, in rhyme, and hey, my teenager sat through the whole five minutes and pronounced it "cool". Pass it on.

> Essays that rise to the top of the submissions pile at Prairie Schooner have a few important things in common, according to assistant nonfiction editor Sarah Fawn Montgomery.

> In case you missed it, scroll down one post to the interview with Brain, Child magazine editor/publisher Marcelle Soviero...and leave a comment by Tuesday night to win a subscription and batch of recent issues.

> Finally, listen to Rosie Perez's passionate reading of the poem "Still I Rise" by the late, wonderful Maya Angelou. 

Image: Windell Oskay/Flickr, Creative Commons

Author Interview: Grace Bauer, on her new poetry collection, Nowhere All At Once

I have written here before that the way I came to truly appreciate poetry was one poet at a time. There was never a moment or period of time when I can say I began to love poetry, but there are many precise moments when I can say I fell in love with particular poets – and their poems. Grace Bauer's poetry found me about three years ago when I embarked on a joint blog project with the journal Prairie Schooner, where she's a senior reader.

While prose writers and poets often think of what separates us, in Grace's poems, I find so much kinship between memoir and imagery, story and metaphor, the lyrical and narrative. I'm so pleased to feature this interview with her today, in which I ask about her newest poetry collection, Nowhere All At Once (Stephen F. Austin State University Press), her writing and submitting process, how she groups poems, and more.

Lisa:  I believe this is your fourth full-length poetry book, right on the heels of your fourth chapbook (Café Culture). How and when do you realize that the poems you are working on at any given time are destined for one or the other?

Grace:  Putting together a collection is always a long process for me. First, of course, is the writing and revising of each individual poem. How they then come -- or are put -- together varies.

Two of my books (The Women At The Well and Beholding Eye) are what I call, for lack of a better term, “concept books,” composed of a series of interconnected poems. The Women At The Well is all monologues spoken in the voices of women from the Bible. (I’m happy to say it has just recently been presented as a play in New Hampshire). Beholding Eye is all ekphrastic poems (poems based on visual art, in various ways).

Retreats & Recognitions and now, Nowhere All At Once are more eclectic collections of poems written in a voice (or voices) that one might see as some version of my own, and based in personal experience or observation. The eclectic collections are always more of a challenge. I’ll generally have a pile of poems that I spread out all over the floor and, quite literally, walk around in, looking for connections and links and echoes – recurring themes, motifs and/or formal similarities.

My goal is to weave the poems together in a way that makes the whole add up to more than the sum of its parts. I obsess a lot about ordering the poems, even though I know full well that many readers will hunt and peck their way through the book instead of reading it from cover to cover. It’s something I feel compelled to do for myself. Since I tend to be working on many things at once, there are always poems that seem finished but don’t quite fit into the manuscript at hand for one reason or another. I consider those poems possible “seeds” for the next collection.

Q.  Along the way (to a chapbook or collection), how do you decide which poems to submit to individual journals? How much time and energy do you give to that submission/journal publication process?

A. I send stuff out to journals fairly consistently – or at least I try to.  Sometimes the demands of my day job get in the way of those good intentions. It’s always a struggle to find – or make – the time to do the creative work and/or the “practical” work (I’m not sure you can really call submitting to literary journals “practical”) you have to do to get your writing out in the world. 

For me, both writing and submitting often go in spurts, but I try to practice what I preach to my students and do at least a little something directly related to my writing most days of the week.

On the days I don’t teach, I “show up for work” in my study first thing in the morning and put in as many hours as I can – either writing or revising or submitting or corresponding. By the time I’m putting a book together, most of the individual poems have been submitted to journals and, with any luck, many of them have been published.

Q:  You teach in English, Creative Writing, and Women's Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and work with Prairie Schooner, and its annual PS Book Prize. How does all of that reading and thoughtful consideration of others' writing affect you – as a writer and a teacher?

A: My reading for the journal has been intermittent the past few years because I’ve been working with so many undergraduate and graduate students (that also means a lot of reading), but I have served as a Senior Reader for the Prairie Schooner book prize since its inception.

Each year I read a short list of manuscripts that have already successfully made it through a previous round of screeners. I made a vow to myself early on that I would read each manuscript in its entirety – cover to cover -- and I have stuck to that. I’m hoping that rustles up some good karma in the poetry universe for my own manuscripts. Most, if not all, of the manuscripts I read are of publishable quality – or getting close to that point, so the reading is both inspiring and humbling. I’m looking for the two or three that distinguish themselves in some way; these I send on to the next level of judges.

All this reading reminds me that I have to work very very hard – on individual poems and a manuscript as a whole – to try to make it stand out in the crowd. And I pass that idea on to my students.

Q.  One of the endorsements (dare I say "blurbs"?) for your new book is from Naomi Shihab Nye, and says in part that your poems display "…a compact flow of narrative…"  When you are writing and/or revising, how much are you aware of a need, or perhaps I should say, a desire for the force of narrative in a poem?

A. I don’t necessarily begin a poem with a desire or need for narrative – or anything else. A poem, for me, usually begins with a phrase or an image that just sort of arrives, or presents itself, to my consciousness and/or my ear. My job is to take that originating inkling and see where it takes me. I recognize, of course, that I have a tendency toward narrative. Why? I don’t know exactly. I know I’m drawn to the musical possibilities of common speech, the cadences of voices. I like thinking about how poems can work on the page and orally/aurally.  

Q. I'm a huge fan of writing prompts. In a blog post at Ploughshares, you noted that a classroom prompt provided by a student, led you to write "Crime Scene," which appears in your new book, and I was struck by this:  "I was writing fast, never knowing what I was going to scribble down next. Any of the first three lines could have been an opening."  Many writers fear that sense of not knowing where something is going, or are wary of trusting that a writing prompt exercise, with no expectations, can lead to good work. Can you comment?

A. As I suggest in the previous answer, I never know where a poem is going to end up when I begin. If I already know the ending, I don’t see the point of writing it. It’s the old “no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” thing. I’ll write with my students in class when possible – which it isn’t always, for a variety of pedagogical reasons. Prompts don’t often lead to full-blown poems, as this one did, but sometimes lead to at least a good line or two.

Café Culture, for instance, grew out of – not a prompt, per se, but an assignment of sorts, which was to go to a coffee shop or café or diner or whatever and eavesdrop and/or spy on people till something caught my attention and then I’d just start scribbling. Most of what I came up with was junk, but eventually I had this small group of poems that I thought might make a fun chapbook. I sent it to Dan Nowak at Imaginary Friend Press, and he agreed. So again, prompts, assignments, schedules. Anything that gets and keeps you writing is a good thing.

Q.  In a post over at Hayden's Ferry Review's blog, you wrote, "One thought leads to another; one word to the next. Wave-like and wandering. Wondering. Sometimes sound for the sheer pleasure of it. And so, sometimes, poems are made."  I wonder how many of your poems begin this way – wondering, wandering around on the page for pleasure, and how many others begin another way – maybe with a kind of insistence or need, perhaps even the opposite of pleasure, a way to work something out?

A. Well there’s pleasure. And there’s torture. And, maybe tortuous pleasure and vice versa. A need to “work something out” may be the impetus for a poem, but even then, there’s a kind of pleasure – or satisfaction – that comes from working with the language – sound, rhythm, the aha of finding a word or image that seems right, that captures an impression or perception or feeling or whatever and also works musically and/or suggests layers of meaning. I believe you can write a poem about pretty much anything, but the so-called “subject matter” of the poem is only part of it. As a reader, I go to poems not just for what they may be “about,” but for how they go about being a poem.

Q.  You mentioned to me that Nowhere All At Once is an "eclectic collection which revolves around recurring themes, motifs, obsessions and plays around a lot with perception -- how we look at the world around us, at ourselves and each other. How PREconceptions affect what and how we see". This truly describes what I found reading it!  I'm curious, was this apparent to you as you were writing the individual poems, or does this reveal itself as you assemble them into the collection?

A. Definitely the latter with this book. The poems in Nowhere All At Once were written over a span of time – some older poems that didn’t make it into Retreats & Recognitions and some much more recent work. It goes back to your first question about how I assemble a book – many of these connections and recurrences were discovered as I walked around those poems spread out on the floor. Once I had a rough version of the manuscript, several friends – Hilda Raz, Jane Varley, Liz Ahl – looked at it and gave me their invaluable suggestions on individual poems and on the overall arrangement.

That’s something I’d recommend to anyone at that point in the process – to get a set of fresh eyes looking at the work.

Q. I begin my nonfiction classes by reading a poem, to transition from everyone's busy day to the world of words, language, story. One miserable New Jersey winter day, we read "Slacker's Prayer," which to me celebrated the upside of bad weather and cancelled plans. Everyone in the room – all ages, backgrounds, lives –instantly nodded.  And, we especially loved the final lines:  "..Curse only/the fact that such days are too rare/and pass too quickly. Then praise the work/you will rise tomorrow to do. And know/that giving praise (for nothing) is work too."  Perhaps this is a naïve question, but can you remember how this poem came about, and whether or not its traces back to a particular day, storm, feeling?

A. As you know, there are several “prayer poems” in Nowhere All At Once. I couldn’t give you an exact date or anything, but I recall the general feeling of the day this poem began. I have fibromyalgia and am very seasonally affected. I hate winter and if I never saw snow again in my life I’d be perfectly happy, so usually a blizzard would fill me with fear and loathing. 

This, as you might imagine, is not exactly convenient for someone living in Nebraska! So I often try talking myself into appreciating the world as it is in winter. Usually I fail. But this one day I was at home and just found myself praising things as they were – mostly because I didn’t have to go out in it. Next day, out came the shovel and I was bitching about it all per usual.

Q.  You've said the book is made up of "several little' mini-series'  -- the prayer poems, the 'against' poems, poems about female characters" and while I understood that while working my way through the book the first time, it also seemed to me that there were so many connections between these – prayer poems that had an 'against' vibe, poems about women that felt like prayers, etc.  When assembling a series or sections, do some poems seems to straddle lines? How do you finally decide where to place them?

A. I’m happy to hear that all those connections came across for you as a reader. Many of those connections evolved on their own; a few were deliberate. For instance, I had the “against” poems and several of the prayer poems, so I very deliberately set out to bring those together in the poem “Against Prayer.” I could, of course, have clumped each “mini-series” together, but I thought it might make for a richer reading experience (at least for that ideal reader who reads cover to cover) if I intermingled the poems instead. I was going for a weaving more than a patchwork quilt kind of effect.  I like what Daisy Fried says in her blurb/comment about the poems looking inward and outward and being “praise and agitation.” The way I see it, the world warrants a bit of both.

Note:  You can follow Grace on Twitter