Interview with Grace Bauer, Guest Editor of Prairie Schooner's new Baby Boomer Issue

Literary journals often dedicate single issues to major themes – grief, transformation, technology's effect on humanity, birth, hunger, so many others. Prairie Schooner is a terrific read no matter what, but their Fall 2009 Baby Boomer issue especially captured my attention. I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek and to ask guest editor Grace Bauer some questions. [Note: a Prairie Schooner subscription give-away is underway – see note at end of post.]

Lisa Romeo. How did you prepare for the role of guest editor?

Grace Bauer. I was very excited and also somewhat nervous about taking on the task of editing this special issue of Prairie Schooner. I had served as Acting Editor seven years ago when Hilda Raz (the Editor-in-Chief) had a semester’s leave, but then I just put finishing touches on an issue that was pretty much together. This time I was, by choice, taking on much more control – and responsibility. Many years ago, I worked on a short-lived little magazine called Pontchartrain Review in New Orleans, and have also co-edited an anthology, so I wasn’t completely lacking in experience. I’ve been reading literary journals for a long time -- but still, being at the helm of The Schooner was a little daunting.

The first (and probably smartest) thing I did was to sit in with Hilda as she put together an earlier issue. Hilda and I have worked together on our own books -- she was instrumental in helping edit my last collection, Retreats & Recognitions -- so I had some idea of how her editorial mind worked, but the journal seemed like a different kind of creature, and I wanted to see how she tamed it.

Over the course of an entire afternoon, I observed how she made (and often re-adjusted) her choices for ordering the poems, stories, essays, and reviews with an eye toward achieving some balance while making connections and creating interesting segues from one piece to the next. I asked a lot of questions. I had confidence in my ability to recognize good work when I saw it, but I am notoriously “technically challenged” and had a lot to learn about some of the “nuts and bolts” aspects regarding the journal’s formatting template, etc. I knew I had a capable managing editor, James Engelhardt, to rely on for much of that (and I did so). I asked more questions.

And then, not having much choice, I just got into it!

LR. Writers who submit to journals would love to know more about how the editorial mix comes together, particularly for a themed issue. Can you talk about the kinds of decisions you made, where you agonized, etc.? Did you get any inappropriate material?? Did you solicit specific writers, and if so, did you then have to turn down any piece that came about from those requests?

GB. As I discuss a bit in my Introductory essay, the work in The Boomer issue came to me in three basic ways: 1) solicitation 2) the back files of already accepted work at the journal, which I combed through, looking for anything that might fit the boomer theme, and 3) announcements we handed out at the AWP Conference.

Part of my challenge was time. I was technically only serving as guest editor for one semester – and doing it while teaching and keeping up with other obligations. I got a bit of a head start towards the end of the Fall 2008 semester (soliciting the essay from Dorothy Barresi early on, because I knew it would take her some time to write it) but for the most part, I started working on the issue in January, and had to have it to the printers by April. This did not allow for a “general call” or to advertise a special issue.

I solicited from people I knew, and from total strangers whose work I knew – mostly by email. Many responded enthusiastically and promptly sent work my way; some said they’d send me work, but never did. Some responded that they had no available work that seemed relevant; some never responded at all – whether because they were too busy or uninterested or never got the email, I don’t know. Some people told their friends, who also sent work, or recommended people for me to contact, which I usually did. The Schooner staff at the AWP Bookfair handed out flyers, and I found myself walking up to people and saying “hi, were you by any chance born between 1946 and 1964? And have you written about it?” -- which resulted in a flurry of post-conference submissions.

I was, from the get-go, more anxious about the prose than the poetry. I knew that, because of length, I would have to choose fewer pieces, so I was prepared to agonize over that, but both Marianne Boruch’s hitch-hiking piece (an excerpt from a longer memoir) and Marly Swick’s story seemed so perfect for the issue, it was easy to say yes to those – (I did work with both authors on cutting for length) though I then had to say no to other long stories and essays. I was happy to be able to include a few “short short/sudden” fiction pieces – because I’ve always been intrigued by that genre, and it seems to have flourished among boomer aged writers.

With poetry, I had lots to choose from, and once certain choices were made, they influenced other choices. While I expected – and wanted – some recurring themes and motifs, I also wanted variety -- in subject matter, style, tone, perspective, diversity of writers, etc. I wanted some “big name” writers, but was open to including anyone whose work spoke to me. I went out of my way to solicit from formalists as well as experimental writers, and everything in between. I didn’t get much that I would call “inappropriate,” since I was thinking “boomer” in the largest possible sense.

I didn’t want an entire issue full of work that looked back on “the good (or bad) old days” -- though I counted on getting some of that (and did). As things were coming together, I tried to follow Hilda’s lead in terms of making connections and interesting segues, which meant I sometimes turned down work I thought was very good – and relevant to the issue – but maybe too much like something I’d already accepted. Or, conversely, I might accept something because I thought it would work well with/speak to -- or against -- another piece I’d already taken.

It’s little comfort, I know, but I think that’s something all of us need to keep in mind as writers – getting rejected doesn’t necessarily mean the rejected work isn’t good or that the editor didn’t like it. So many other factors might influence a decision – especially, I think, when it comes to theme issues. In the end, I had to reject work I liked quite a bit – including work I had solicited from people (I tried to be clear when I did so that I wasn’t making any promises). A journal is finite, and I simply ran out of pages.

LR. The issue wrestles with the notion of nostalgia. Some pieces look backward, but they resist sentimentality. Even your intro celebrates the boomer generation's achievements but also points out its excesses. When writing a piece that looks back over a life or an event, what strategies can help avoid over the top sentimentality?

GB. Wallace Stevens famously said that a poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully. Note the modifier. Also the one in your question: over the top sentimentality.

Because there is a good bit of work in this issue that “looks back,” there is a certain amount of nostalgia, and some of that may risk sentimentality, but hopefully resists it almost successfully. I think any adult who can look back at the life they’ve lived and not feel the occasional pang of nostalgia for things that are gone – youth, love, time, people, places, brain cells or whatever – has not faced up to their own mortality.

Over the top sentimentality can certainly make for bad writing because it’s too easy. It may mean the writer hasn’t looked closely enough, felt or thought deeply enough, or – even more likely – struggled enough with the language to really get it right. On the other hand, I sometimes read work that seems so determined to not be sentimental that it’s devoid of any human emotion, or even consciousness. While over the top sentimentality may make me cringe, its polar (as in frigid) opposite doesn’t speak to me either.

As for strategies for staying on the right side of that fine line – attention, vigilance, a bullshit detector in good working order?

Note from Lisa: Prairie Schooner editors would like to give away a one-year (four issue) subscription to their excellent journal. Simply leave a comment on this post before midnight on October 17. If you like, share a boomer memory, an experience submitting to or editing a literary journal, or a response to something discussed here. Please include a way for us to contact you.

Three Takes on a Poem from Prairie Schooner: Editor, Poet...and Me

To mark the first day of National Poetry Month, here's a treat.

The venerable literary journal Prairie Schooner, published by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, celebrates its 83rd anniversary this year, and I'd love to bring your attention to their wonderful contribution to the literary community. In their current issue (volume 83, number 1), published last week, the editors put a focus on Portuguese poets. James Engelhardt, Prairie Schooner's managing editor, was kind enough to share the poems with me before publication, so that I could choose one which spoke to me and feature it here. Here are the first lines from the poem below.

Why I Sang at Dinner
Roberto Christiano

I was not permitted a word at dinner
because you were too hot from laying
brick in the sun to bear the voices
of children, and mother too tired
to oppose you. My sister and brother,
five and six years older, had graduated
in allowance to one sentence
and on your good days two.

Click here to read the rest of the poem at the PS site. Then, pop back here for an inside view of editor Engelhardt's reaction, my own thoughts on the poem, and some insights from the poet too (all below).

Lisa: As a nonfiction writer with particular interest in family narratives, I had little trouble selecting Why I Sang at Dinner from the packet of poems Engelhardt sent me. Not only does Christiano's poignant piece tell a compact, unique, but also universal story about a father and his adolescent child, it does so in a way which allowed me to enter the world on the page without losing the battle of slippery imagery which poetry often presents for this prose writer.

From the outset, I'm pulled in by the narrative mood of the piece, a feeling of frustrated static within a family situation which is also changing as we progress through the poem. The voice is charged with the pain of naiveté and longing, as the narrator transitions to puberty, and the more nuanced understanding of a parent's existence as a person apart from his familial role. The poem pivots on that unavoidable but bittersweet time when a sensitive adolescent realizes things about a parent which cannot be unlearned. The emotional transition and sadness are palpable, as is the lingering childlike wish that things will change, that a father will look at his son, see what's behind the hope-filled eyes, and make a change. Instead, Christiano takes us, quite correctly and understandably, into the painful territory of the moment when a child gives up that hope, because a parent has already given up on it himself.

Roberto Christiano:

"It is my belief that writing should stand on its own without any qualifying explanations from the author. That said, I usually draw encouragement from Rilke's exhortation to mine one's childhood as a source of inspiration. The fabulous thing about this endeavor is that the writer can alter events that he was often powerless over when they originally happened. Sometimes poetic license doesn't just make for a better poem, it also makes for a better recollection. I have also taken inspiration from my friend and fellow poet, Norma Chapman, whose poems reflect on the major events of her life with as much clarity as she can muster. "

For those of us who submit any kind of work to journals, here's a small glimpse inside editor James Engelhardt's thoughts:

"There’s a bit of received wisdom in the writing community that editors stop reading after the first few lines (three or five, depending on who heard what from whom), so you’d better have a strong opening. The latter half of the advice is right: have a strong opening; but most of us do read the rest of the poem—you never know what delights await.

Looking at the Christiano poem, the opening is incredibly strong and assured. The opening line speaks back to the title and sets up a tension that follows throughout, a tension between what the reader might expect from family life and what happened in this particular family. The line ends on the syntactic unit – "a word at dinner"-- but that expectation of regularity is immediately shaken in the second line when the break occurs in the middle of the phrase – "from laying / brick." I’m delighted he didn’t describe the father as tired, so that we get “hot” and “tired” in two different places but still in one sentence, still calling to each other.

So that gives you an idea of how an editor might read openings. Throughout the poem, the tensions invoked in the opening play out clearly, but never explicitly. The father silences the boy with “You have no responsibility.” But the boy wants “to loosen the knot / between your brows”—a kind of responsibility he feels toward the father, born of love. The end of the first stanza strives, when describing the abuse the father had received, to explain the source of pain, even if the passage doesn’t excuse the father. The boy feels the weight of responsibility so heavily, he sings: “Slenderly, I quavered out tunes.” So the son breaks the imposed silence, but to what effect?

At the end, the father has not “softened,” and instead it is the boy who changes, at a point traditional for coming of age, thirteen, his “new male voice was starting to break in / and I couldn’t care anymore.” The responsibility has shifted, and the boy turns outward, but the tensions between father and son are never named exactly. The boy is looking for affection and connection, and he finds something like it in the music they don’t quite share, but have in common. What’s particularly nice is that song sets the boy free, and we can always read “song” as “poetry.”

I want to note how tightly the poem stays to this small narrative about family dinners. One night becomes many, but the focus remains on how this relationship intersects so profoundly at this one ritual so many of us recognize. It takes a long time to center a poem so neatly, pare a story down to be available to many people, and lose none of its impact."

For a chance to win a one-year subscription to Prairie Schooner (four issues, $28 value), compliments of the editors, please leave a comment below (and be sure there is a way for us to contact you). You have until midnight PST, April 15 to leave your comment. Good luck. And if you can't wait, check out the subscription options here.

NOTE: IMPORTANT -- please leave a way for us to contact you if you win the sub, either an email address or a link to your site/blog/Facebook profile/whatever, so we can contact you if you're the winner!

P.S. Also, check back here again in a few days, when Engelhardt and I will introduce and discuss a personal essay from the same issue.

Two Takes on an Essay from Prairie Schooner

It was no fun last week being a writer with a double eye infection, sinus infection, mega-headache, head cold and assorted other complaints. Can you imagine how much reading or writing got done? Enough said. Now that I'm clear-headed and, ahem, clear-eyed, let's move on. We're giving away a subscription to a fine literary journal this week.....

Last week I had the privilege of previewing and commenting on one of the poems in the current issue of the literary journal Prairie Schooner, now in its 83rd year. Today, it's a creative nonfiction essay which has our attention. The piece, A Grand Canyon, by Lee Zacharias, appears in the print version of the journal, and in part online at their website.

Of the four good essays in the Spring 2009 of PS which I was graciously permitted to preview, I knew immediately I was most connected to A Grand Canyon. She had me at hello, with an opening sentence that's tight, enticing and effective – and not only because it brought up something intensely personal for me, and I suspect, for many adult children juggling teenage children and the seemingly trivial wish of an aging parent.

In Zacharias's piece, it's a trip to the Grand Canyon her mother yearns for; for me, it's Williamsburg, Virginia my own mother longs to see, never mind that she's unable to handle the walking about required. Okay, I admit that's perhaps a bit like judging a book by its cover, but there you go. Yet, I can think of no better way of selecting how to spend my reading time than to find an opening line so arresting it makes a reader decide, immediately, yes, I'll spend time with that narrator, I'll follow where she leads – take me.

Zacharias opens her narrative this way:

"My mother said she always wanted to see the Grand Canyon. Actually what she said was "I always wanted to see the Grand Canyon, but I guess I'll never get there." Then the guess fell silent, the comma disappeared, she was sure she'd never get there, and the pause between the two clauses grew so short, the thought was one, desire and disappointment a single breath. She wasn't going to see the Grand Canyon before she died, and to her it surely seemed a melancholy measure of her life."

You can read a longer excerpt of the opening of the piece here.

Then, after a few paragraphs of backstory, we're off, physically and metaphorically; daughter and mother will travel to the Canyon, along with the narrator's 14-year-old son: "But the truth is I didn't really decide to take her to the Grand Canyon. One night when she began, "I always wanted...," I snapped, "I'll take you," because I never wanted to hear the rest of that sentence again."

Now here, Zacharias had entered my particular emotional territory, and the landscape in which I often travel as a writer – mothers and sons, daughter and aging parent, grandparent and grandson. Yet the truth is, Zacharias's prose is excellent all around, and her narrative style is compelling enough to pull a reader through the journey of the plot as well as the journey on the page, regardless of whether a reader shares any of her particular situational dynamics. Of course, isn't that the sweet spot of personal nonfiction, the embodiment of why people read nonfiction at all? Not because they necessarily want the narrator's story, but because they wish to find, somewhere within that story, some way to process and understand their own.

Zacharias delivers, weaving a piece rich in family dynamics and generational chasms. The questionable pairing of travel companions, grandmother and teenage grandson, begins sweetly, devolves into perhaps predictable bickering, and – once all have seen the physical Canyon – ends with the narrator's confiding a future separation between mother and son of a far greater emotional distance, with more at stake than a mother's unrequited wanderlust. There is as especially effective segment where, much later, the narrator is looking at photographs from the trip, and trying to make sense of the gaping distance to come: "Max and I should have lingered on the trail – why didn't we? My mother is fine and he is so soon to retreat from me – but the shadow is long, it's late, we're tired and hungry, it's time to move on."

In reading through Zacharias's essay and the Christiano poem, I was struck by the mirrored themes of sons growing away from their parents, as of course, all teenagers must As Zacharias puts it, "One day the love affair ends for the child, though it never does for the parent….As children always do, he grew up and became someone else, a young man I love more than anything on earth even though I will never know him in the way I once thought I knew the boy."

Prairie Schooner's managing editor James Engelhardt, had this to say about A Grand Canyon:

"Here again, families are at stake. What’s good to note, at least in passing, is how the two genres (poetry and creative nonfiction) differ in their compression. Zacharias has a lot more (dare I say it?) space in which to work. But also notice the strength of the opening and how the narrator moves so deftly through the paragraph, establishing the breadth and narrowness of the mother’s ambition (note, too, the sly alliteration of “Nashville, New Orleans, and Niagara Falls”). We get a very quick look at how the mother/daughter relationship around travel was built, but with very little commentary or judgment. And then the end of the second paragraph when we read that the Grand Canyon “was big enough to hold everything that had failed to come her way in life.”

Then the focus switches to the narrator's son and by the end of the third page (probably five or so manuscript pages) the characters are onstage and off on their adventure. As the essay moves along, I find myself nodding over the ways that Zacharias situates each tension explicitly. I mean that instead of saying that the grandmother and teenaged son bicker constantly over small things, she picks two small points: legroom and earphones. There are other conventions that Zacharias borrows from fiction besides a tight focus. She tells us that “the stark beauty of the land seemed to bode well” in a deft example of foreshadowing that seems lovely (and notice that the comment is within a visual detail) and yet ominous. Not too much later, she sketches out some of the trouble her son would have, but not on this trip.

She compresses time marvelously at different points to work us through the narrative more quickly. Every scene picks up some new aspect to the characters and their relationships. The narrator is slightly distracted, distressed, we wonder about some of her decisions, but we never lose identification with her.

At the end of the essay, Zacharias does a kind of summary that is pretty well strictly forbidden for poetry. She makes explicit that the Canyon is a metaphor for the divisions within family, and the erosion that left the Canyon AS a canyon reveals how a relationship can change and yet remain wonderful. And yet she leaves some things unsaid, and it’s the wonderful job of the reader to find the theme of Otherness that also runs through the piece, as we discover with her how each of them experiences their environment and each other as wholly different."

UPDATE: If you leave a comment here, or over on last week's post about the Roberto Christiano poem, you'll be entered in a giveaway of a year's subscription (four issues) to Prairie Schooner. (Be sure to leave an email or another way for us to contact you.) We're going to extend the contest until midnight PST on Friday, April 17. You can also order your own subscription or back issues here.

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

Literary Journal Subscription Winner

We have a winner.

Congratulations to Bonnie Naradzay, a poet and fellow Stonecoast MFA alum, who is now the recipient of the one-year subscription to the literary journal Prairie Schooner.

Bonnie's name was chosen at random by my very high tech in-house random selector, otherwise known as an 11-year-old who reached into a bowl filled with folded up pieces of paper on which I had written the name of each commenter from the two Prairie Schooner posts we ran.

Thanks to all who entered and have a great weekend.

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Linkety-Link for Writers

►Go to grad school, get stuck on bed rest, wind up on a bad weather vacation with people you don't like, or get a job as a book reviewer, and you too will learn to read a book a day, maybe even for a week straight. But a book a day for a year? That's what this blogger is doing, and she's nearing the end.

►Poets & Writers now has an MFA database, with a list of all U.S. program, as well as the top 50 (traditional) programs, and other MFA-related resources.

►Noah Lukeman, literary agent and author of The First Five Pages, has an interesting take on whether it makes sense to accept an offer from a small press to publish one's first book (via Backspace).

►Per writing nonfiction in which loved ones appear, I was glad to be reminded recently of this insight from Scott Rosenberg's book Say Everything: "Writers who tell stories about themselves, their families, and friends always walk a tightrope: you fall off one side if you stop telling the truth; you fall off the other if you hurt people you care about, or use them as fodder for your career. Dishonesty to the left, selfishness to the right." (via The Daily Rumpus)

►No, I won't be writing a novel, but I've signed on again for November's National Novel Writing Month. Last year, my goal was to write an average of 1800 new words each day, and by the end of the month, I did have 53,000 words of new memoir material. This year I have a slightly different project in mind, but the idea is the same – accountability and a shove. If you are having trouble sticking to a writing routine, need an outside deadline/accountability partner (or, say 15,000 of them – that's how many completed the program last year), or if you simply want to boost productivity, it may be worth considering.

►We writers are such strange creatures, no? For example, yesterday my day was made (really, I was dancing in my office) when I received what is probably the best personalized REJECTION email of my career, from an editor I admire, at a publication I love, for a column I'm dying to crack, only the day after I sent in an essay submission. Like I said, strange.

►How do you define a prose poem -- and know when it is a prose poem you are writing and not an essay? Know any good resources on the topic of prose poetry? Weigh in on this and other genre-splitting questions (and read the excellent comments/advice) over the Practicing Writing blog.

►Beginning poets might want to consider signing up for Sage Cohen's free monthly e-newsletter.

►The work of two of my writing buddies is featured over at the More magazine website –Dionne Ford's piece is about swimming with her Grandmother, in A Five Generation Vacation, and Sari Botton's essay covers Finding Forgiveness on Facebook.

►Blog reminder – tomorrow (Sat., 10/17) is the last day to leave a comment and become eligible to win a one-year (four-issue) subscription to Prairie Schooner, a wonderful literary journal.

►This terrific New Yorker piece, a parody/rant about the way publishers now expect their authors to do practically all of their own book promotion, would be truly hilarious if it were true. Oh, wait, what's that you say?

►From the Department of Shameless Self-Promotion: This blog was listed among the Top 100 Writing Blogs by the Daily Reviewer; the list is worth a look for the many other great blogs included.

And, finally, if you're not already reading literary agent Nathan Bransford's blog (and in that case, we really must talk), or The Rejectionist, then you missed this great post about the publishing industry. Whoa.

Have a great weekend.

Guest Blogger Donna Baier Stein on Rejection, Writers of a Certain Age, and the Persistence of Hope

One of the many perks of working with The Writers Circle (a wonderful regional organization in northern New Jersey) was finding new colleagues among my fellow teachers. That includes Donna Baier Stein, who guides writers in the art of the short story. Donna's work has appeared (among other places) in Prairie Schooner, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Puerto del Sol. She was a founding poetry editor at Bellevue Literary Review and now publishes Tiferet Journal. Donna has been honored with three Pushcart nominations and prizes from Kansas Quarterly and Florida Review.

Please welcome Donna Baier Stein 

There are scores of encouraging stories about writers who didn’t find success easily … or even early.

Frank McCourt published Angela’s Ashes at age 64, and Booker Prize winner Penelope Fitzgerald published her first novel at age 61. Belva Plain, a bestselling author from right here in New Jersey, didn’t publish her first novel until she was a 63-year-old widow. She went on to publish 21 novels that were on the New York Times bestseller list, and more than 30 million copies of those books were in print at her death at age 95.

I find these statistics encouraging. Do you? Have you ever looked at a published author’s age and thought, “Oh, I still have time?” I know I have. Though as the years, the publications and the rejections have added up, I find myself doing that less. I am far more interested in my own trajectory than seeing how it compares to someone else’s.  

My first story collection, Sympathetic People (Serving House Books),  was published in 2013, when I was 62, and received some blush-worthy blurbs ("Donna Baier Stein is a discovery," according to C. Michael Curtis, fiction editor of The Atlantic, and New York Times bestselling novelist Caroline Leavitt called the book, "…a brilliantly edgy collection of stories that gets under your skin as even as it illuminates love, lust - and everything in between."). Most of the stories in this book were written and published in literary magazines in the 1980s, and an early version of the manuscript was a finalist in the Iowa Fiction Awards.  Still, many, many years passed without my seeing it in book form.

Why? Because I didn’t make writing a priority. Over the previous three decades, I had a thriving career as a copywriter, two children, a busy husband. I undertook several major moves. At times, I let myself be both distracted and insecure. There were very few days devoted only to creative writing. More often, I squeezed extra hours in early in the morning while my children slept and before copywriting client demands filled the work day. When I turned 40, I put my copywriting work aside for a year to earn an MFA from Johns Hopkins University, where I studied with a long-time writing hero of mine, John Barth. My thesis was a very early version of Sympathetic People.

Instead of continuing to pursue publication of that collection, I wrote and published new stories and essays. I published a poetry chapbook. I wrote a novel that won the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction and had a top agent from William Morris try to sell that book. "Close but no cigar," we were told by 17 New York publishers.

I sometimes felt like giving up but somehow never did. I sent the collection out to about five more publishers and finally, to my great delight, Serving House Books offered publication. I was thrilled!

Having my story collection finally in book form gave me a nice injection of can-do confidence. So I resurrected the novel I’d been working on for years and rewrote it almost from scratch. And started a new collection of stories based on Thomas Hart Benton paintings. 

Sometimes, hopelessness about “being too old” or “not good enough” still takes hold. What we as writers try to do – to create something from nothing, to have our insides be heard – is hard. I’ve come to think that occasional hopelessness may just be part of the creative package.

So, how do you switch hopelessness to hope? Here's what I do.

Talk to other writers, and gain perspective.   I know a lot of “famous” writers. And every single one of them has a tale of woe to tell about some stage of their publication history. No one is immune from that.

Discover what you need when you want to stop. For me, physical exercise and meditation are both big helps. So is finally learning that first drafts can be, as Hemingway said, “*&($.” Getting anything on the page is a step in the right direction.

Accept that sometimes a step back takes you forward.  Every time I’ve gone through a cycle of hopelessness, I have come out the other side a better writer. This is a fact. Sometimes we have to trust that growth occurs even during fallow periods. And keep on writing.

At a commencement speech at Duke University in 2008, author Barbara Kingsolver said, “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides."

I love this image, this idea that hope itself is a space in which we can live, no matter what our age, no matter what our publication history. Writers need hope. Very few of us are overnight successes. And the only thing to do in the face of rejection letters and passing years is find that hallway of hope, set up your computer or yellow pad, and write.

Notes from Lisa: Donna would like to send one blog reader a complimentary copy of her short story collection. Simply leave a comment by end of day on Friday, Sept. 26, and we'll choose one winner at random (U.S. postal addresses only).

New Jersey residents can see Donna read from her collection at the Bernardsville Public Library on Tuesday, September 23, at 7 pm.

Donna's poetry chapbook is Sometimes You Sense the Difference (Finishing Line Press, 2012).

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

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers, January 11, 2013 Edition

> Want to access literary journals on your iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch? Check out the LitRagger app.  Among those available are: Bellevue Litearary Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, and more.

> At Magical Words, some tips for keeping your dialogue real (hint: by making sure it isn't).

> The poet who will write for Obama's inauguration worked as a civil engineer before his writing career gained traction. In the New York Times, Richard Blanco's work is described as "laden with longing for the sights and smells of the land his parents left behind (Cuba)."

> When submitting to literary journals, it never hurts to review the most common reasons for rejection, offered in this post at Inkspill.

> With her characteristic wit, grit, and candor, nonfiction author and college professor Sonya Huber answers writers' most frequent questions in one terrifically engaging post.

> At My Journal Coach, Jeanne Westervelt Rice offers tips for journal writing, including a worksheet for those affected by storms. 

> Finally, I do hope my corraded Friday links list today will not too badly jargogle your mind. Perhaps this last link will even make you kench. Writers, go forth and have a day in which you avoid perissology and aspire to scriptitation. If those lines have not put you into a widdendream, wander over to Matador Network for "20 Obsolete English Words That Should Make a Comeback." 

Have a great weekend!

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers -- March 16, 2018 Edition

> Assay Journal asked many writers attending the AWP conference last week to each report on one specific break-out session. I was happy to contribute this piece covering a panel presentation on chapbooks as a viable publishing option for (not poets, but) creative nonfiction writers. And if you want more on CNF chapbook publishers/ contests/opportunities, see Chelsea Biondolillo's post and generous list at Brevity's blog. 

>Many more AWP reports on a variety of sessions are at the Assay blog.

> What would it be like to get news only from print for two months? This guy found out.

> Poet Stephanie McCarley Dugger, on what it's like to win a book publication contest, ordering poems in her manuscript, and the ups and downs of submissions, at the Prairie Schooner blog.

> Gayle Greene, at Women Writers, Women's Books, on how she shaped her grief memoir, Missing Persons.

> Creative nonfiction writers have to make their characters come alive on the page, too. Shuly Cawood has some good advice for this. For novel writers, here's Jessica Morrell with tips on "Creating Vivid Minor Characters."

> Feeling lucky? You can win a bookstore. Yep, an entire store, to own and operate. Deadline to enter is this Sunday, 3/18.

> Finally, if you are one of my local northern NJ readers, come work with me on Sunday morning, 3/18. As part of the Montclair Literary Festival, I'm leading a 90-minute workshop, "Writing from Memory," geared to helping memoir, personal essay, and family history writers pry prose from partial memories.

Have a great weekend!