Mary: Welcome to People Who Make Books Happen, Cristina. How did you first become interested in the Great Goddess and Her habitations?

Cristina: My discovery of and interest in the Great Goddess first occurred when I was in my early twenties. I was raised Catholic, and I felt something was lacking in the traditional concept of divinity. I knew instinctively that there had to be something more than “God.” Even though as Catholics we had the Virgin Mary, she seemed too tied by the shackles of patriarchy to be a meaningful representative of female spirituality. When I read Joseph Campbell my interest in female divinity moved to a new level. Then later on I read about Marija Gimbutas’ discoveries and felt transported and on a quest to learn all I could about this numinous being whom I related to.

Mary: What was the most important thing you discovered in your research on habitations of the Goddess?

Cristina: The importance of negative space as a defining component of spiritual meaning.

Mary: How has this influenced your own work as an artist?

Cristina: I created a sculpture as a temple to be entered.

Mary: An edition of Habitations of The Great Goddess has recently been published in Italian. What special attraction do you think this edition will have for Italian readers?

Cristina: I believe Italian readers will appreciate the idea of architecture as sacred sculpture flowing with and into the landscape.
Mary: I’m sure they will. Your work has a beautiful, rhythmic flow that is very evocative of the body of the Great Goddess. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you today.

Cristina: You’re welcome.

Cristina Biaggi’s Habitations of the Great Goddess is a comprehensive examination of the tombs, temples and artifacts dedicated to the female deity of prehistory – the Great Goddess, copiously illustrated with plates, drawings and photographs mostly taken by the author herself. Biaggi has concentrated on Malta and the Orkney and Shetland Islands which, even if far apart, seem to have an ideological connection. As Marija Gimbutas states, “No work before Biaggi’s has analyzed the findings within the context of a theacratic society worshiping a female Goddess as a main deity and provides solid evidence for the existence of the Goddess religion in Europe.” Riane Eisler has noted that, “her book verifies important links in the chain of evidence of Goddess worship from the Paleolithic over 20,000 years ago to early historic times.”

To purchase Le abitazioni della dea, Luciana Percovitch’s splendid Italian translation of Cristina Biaggi’s Habitations of the Great Goddess, click here.

The post Interview with Artist Cristina Biaggi on “Habitations of the Great Goddess” appeared first on Mary Mackey.

Mary: Welcome to People Who Make Books Happen, Dennis. A Country of Strangers is wonderful and very moving. I loved these poems in so many ways: in breadth, depth, and height; in subject; in beauty; in richness. This collection, which is a “New and Selected,” brings readers thirty new poems and over 150 poems drawn from eleven of your previous books. How did you choose the poems for such a rich collection, one that spans well over three decades of your work? Did you pick your favorites? Select according to a theme?

D. Nurkse: I’ve worked hard all my life in this poetry labyrinth, and all the prior collections left out a lot. I’ve learned to have a Zen attitude. If a poem has intensity, it’s because a lot of companion poems were left out—it’s representing more than itself. So the selection process was pleasurable for me. My editor Deb Garrison had her own thoughts but was very flexible: it was a good situation, I had a check on my impulses but didn’t feel constrained. My books tend to be thematic, and my first impulse was to preserve each theme and keep each collection distinct. Deb was more granular, thinking about individual poems.

Mary: What changes did you discover in your writing? How have you changed as a poet in the past thirty-five years?

D. Nurkse: Maybe I’ve gotten worse? I was a hardworking kid, for sure. But I have done books recently that are speculative, approached the poem in a way that’s more open to other voices, sui generis structures, themes like marine biology that weren’t always part of the poet’s palette. We’re all struggling with a permanent crisis—the world is imploding, the universe squeezing itself back into a dot of sound byte. How do we deal with that? How do we live with disaster without investing in it or denying it? That’s the background. In the foreground, poems take so much time to write that you’re not always conscious of style, just of endless trial and error. Judgments are for the critics who have detachment.

But there’s another side to your question: what did writing help me discover? Often, I found the poem taking the other person’s point of view in an argument, being tolerant of an adversary, being curious for no motive. Poetry is more generous than I am.

Mary: In the poems in this collection, you seamlessly combine the personal and the political, demonstrating compassion and understanding for those who protest injustice, and the poor and oppressed who cannot speak for themselves. For example the first poem in A Country of Strangers, “Order to Disperse,” is dedicated to your students and takes as its subject protestors facing armed troops. What makes it remarkable is that you simultaneously reflect on the beauty and fragility of life in lines that are lyrical and deeply poetic. In other words, your poetry is often political, but never didactic. How do you accomplish this?

D. Nurkse: Mary, you’re too kind. I really believe all our lives are political. But I deeply believe in the autonomy of the poem. We as a species don’t know ourselves. We’ve been organizing ourselves with the same brain capacity for 30,000 years, and all we’ve come up with is a handful of male narcissists with the ability to destroy every sparrow and butterfly in the world. I really believe in poetry as a thought experiment: a decoy self that channels its own emotions and creates a mirror in which we can see ourselves, maybe, at least for a blink. It’s important that that decoy self doesn’t have to be righteous, anti-bourgeois, and infallible. Otherwise we just intoxicate ourselves with our own convictions and we end up being Communist oligarchs or the kind of Christians who couldn’t forgive a mouse.

Mary: How has your family history influenced the poems in this collection? For example, I understand that your parents immigrated to the United States from Estonia in the 1940s.

D. Nurkse: My family history has been a huge influence. My parents both came through trauma and never visited that on me for a moment: that’s an immense accomplishment, and I will honor them for it as long as I breathe. They met on a boat out of Portugal in 1940, escaping Nazi Europe, and their lives have a sheen of precarity, contingency, that becomes more meaningful to me as I watch America now. There was a lot they wished they hadn’t seen that they didn’t want to talk about. That double negative made me a poet—the sense that there was another story behind people’s everyday words and actions, and it was full of danger.

Mary: How has your more recent, personal history influenced your new poems?

D. Nurkse: I’ve had several moments of deep sickness, those times when life is like a low door you have to duck way down to pass through, and you don’t know what’s on the other side.

Mary: There are mystical elements in your poetry that don’t lend themselves easily to words, yet somehow you find words to express them. Have you been influenced by poets from other eras and other countries? By poetry in other languages? By walks in the forest?

D. Nurkse: Walks in the forest, yes. Poets in other languages—Michaux, Apollinaire, Lorca, Alberti, Jimenez, Cendrars, Gabriela Mistral, Anna Swir. I taught in prison and inner-city schools, and there was a lot I could learn from the kids there. A little African American girl in Topeka, Kansas wrote “I’m just about average/but no two mirrors/show the same me.” That’s mysticism.

Mary: One of my favorites is the title poem “A Country of Strangers.” In it, you write of refugees from the “nation” of “Sheol” with its “limousines and shanties, padlocked granaries and empty fields, live wires strung in the rain,” and “our country” which is “poor too” and where “every inch of the border is sealed.” Could you tell us something about the circumstances that inspired you to write this poem?

D. Nurkse: I think you have ideas and graphic images: two very different sources, for poetry. I had the images in El Salvador—people uprooted, with their possessions sewn in canvas sacks, kids trying to save a pet. And the meditational idea is just the bemusement that we all die, and yet death doesn’t unite us as a species—we each feel it happens to everyone else. It’s a poem about “othering.”

Mary: Do you have a favorite poem in this collection?

D. Nurkse: “Caligula.”

Mary: Here is “Caligula.”

                         Caligula
                                                             After Suetonius

Caligula ordered the night city illuminated.
Every stoop, porch, or balcony was a stage.

He made the senators dress as prostitutes–
tight silk skirts, paste-on eyelashes.
Up to a matron to wriggle into a boy’s shorts.

Marcus Severus, one-armed veteran
of our labyrinthine border wars,
had to hobble into the amphitheater
armed with a plume, and attack a lion.

A plume _ We were fascinated.
We were all players, who was the audience?

The Emperor chose me, me, me, and me,
and slept with us. He was passive
as a bedpost, but listed his demands
in documents we had to sign in advance.

Slaves–who had been stockbrokers
or insurance agents a moment ago–-
carried triremes on their backs to Rome.
Sails billowed above our seven sacred hills.

Would it ever end? We were enthralled.
Every breath was a saga
when you long to skip to the finale.

We no longer washed, brushed our teeth,
or picked a scab–just him, him, him.

It was Cassius Chaerea who killed him–
that silent tribune he called ‘pansy.’

The Emperor lay on his golden bed.
We were mesmerized. All we could do
was compete to reconstruct the portents:
headless chicken racing all morning,
kitten born without eyes, huge cloud,
tiny cloud, cloud like a fist...
For a few hours the Chronicler
listened and scribbled, but soon
he grew bored, we bored ourselves,
so began Caligula’s slow death–

Caligula who so often said of a captive,
‘make him feel he’s really dying.’

Now we’re helpless as always,
faced with twilight, a child crying,
birdsong, the breeze, our seven steep hills.

Mary: Why is it your favorite?

D. Nurkse: I think it speaks to authoritarianism, the temptation of our age, without letting the public off the hook. Why do we allow ourselves to become spectators?

Mary: Thank you, Dennis. It”s been a pleasure to talk to you.  Anyone who would like to buy a copy of A Country of Strangers is invited to click here for a direct link to hard cover, Audible, and Kindle editions of this remarkable collection of poetry by D. Nurkse.

The post “A Country of Strangers” Interview with Poet D. Nurkse appeared first on Mary Mackey.

Mary; Welcome to People Who Make Books Happen, Andrea. September 12 is a powerful series of poems. Before we discuss the poems themselves, could you please set the scene by telling us what happened to you on September 11, 2001?

Andrea: That morning, I was sitting in our apartment a block from the World Trade Center drinking coffee and reading the paper. Later I planned to spend time writing and then get dressed and go to a client (I did freelance accounting work back then). At 9:03 am, the phone rang. My sister, in North Carolina, had just seen the 1st plane flying into the North Tower on “Good Morning, America.” I ran to the far end of the room, looked out the window, and saw flames curling through blown-out windows, rivers of black smoke, chunks of debris falling, people jumping. I knew immediately the towers would come down, and I fled.

Rather than head north, as did almost everyone else, I went south and ended up on the Staten Island Ferry. From there, traveling on foot, by ferry, car service, pick-up truck, another stranger’s car, and cab from Staten Island, through New Jersey, and Rockland County, I finally met up with my husband in his boss’s house in Larchmont, which is in Westchester County—about 110 miles altogether. It took twelve hours. The first four, when we couldn’t reach each other, my husband was sure I was dead.

Mary: September 12 is divided into five sections: I. Cloud Studies: The Hudson River School; II. September 12; III. The Rock in The Glen; IV. To The Dust; V. The Present. I’d like to start with Section I, which is lyrical and almost dream-like. There’s an innate silence and innocence to these pre-attack poems, one of which looks back to 1609. Why did you decide to start September 12 with these poems and how do they reverberate through the rest of the collection?

Andrea: After I had written most of the eyewitness account and some of the aftermath poems, it occurred to me that you cannot have a book of elegies without showing what was lost. For me, that was the life before, a life lived on landfill facing the Hudson River, fourteen years, longer than I had ever lived anywhere else, including my childhood homes. The river is actually a bay of the Atlantic Ocean at the base of Manhattan, so that my life was punctuated by skyscrapers on one side, and on the other by tides, boats, weather, and changing light, a life filled with history and beauty. For ten years I had been writing about that world, and I decided to use these poems to set the stage for 9/11.

As you noted, these poems reverberate through the rest of the collection. Each one plants the seed for something to come, sometimes several: a love of birds and birding; rivers, the ocean, and the estuaries where they meet; the essentially domestic nature of my odyssey on 9/11; the many writers, especially poets (for me), associated with NYC (Whitman, O’Hara, Amy Clampitt); the distrust between Henry Hudson’s crew and the local Native Americans who lived in the area, the Lenni-Lenape, which lead to violence and death during their initial encounters in early September, 1609; the fascinating geology and glaciated terrain of the area, gneiss and schist, the metamorphic bedrock near the surface of Lower Manhattan, making possible the extreme height of the WTC Towers; and my love of baseball, especially at that time, the Yankees.

Mary: Section II, September 12, is a nine-page series of prose poems, each a paragraph long, which describes your flight from your apartment on 9/11 and what you experience as you and those around you run for their lives. Polished and beautifully crafted, these poems retain a raw, immediate, emotional power that is stunning. I’m particularly impressed by the way you avoid hindsight and deal with events as you lived them moment-by-moment. Could you please talk about why you chose prose poems for this section? For example, were they originally diary entries?

Andrea: Oh, how I wish I had diary entries! But, no, the truth is: I didn’t write at all for 6 months. Instead, I re-lived the events in minute detail again and again in my mind, day and night, telling my story to others, especially my husband, beginning the night of September 12, as recounted at the end of this section. Each retelling, for the first few years at least, new details came back. I added these to the story, until this past became more real, more present than the present. Just as I didn’t want to wash my dirty clothes the night of 9/11, although I had nothing else to wear, I didn’t want to let anything go. Even the dirt and dust. I didn’t take a shower for days. Eventually my husband would complain, “cut to the chase” when I was telling the story, but I couldn’t. All the little details together made the whole.

Since then, I have often thought of writers in gulags who made themselves memorize vast bodies of work because there was no way to write. I’ve never been good at memorizing and still am not. Nonetheless, six years later, when I tracked down what I had said to a reporter on Staten Island that afternoon, I learned that my memory had stayed true. And if my memory was accurate about those details, I could trust it about others, which was an enormous relief. Very liberating. Nothing, in all the research and interviews I did for this book, contradicted the story I kept telling myself. How could this be? And yet it was. It is.

It was a challenge not to stray from the moment-to-moment story. Since I was a poet, “poetic” gestures unconsciously crept in: the impulse to offer metaphors, similes; the way meter and musicality elevate the material, heightening the emotional power but draining away immediacy. These I tried to resist by stripping description down to the essential minimum, making every word count, limiting rhetorical devices like repetition. I tried to stay in the present tense. Not to use words that were hyperbolic or inflammatory, words that had been over-used in describing the event and to which we had become numb. One example of this: the word “terror” only occurs once in the entire book, and not about the event, a terrorist attack, but to describe the look on a first-time father’s face when he contemplates the newborn baby in his arms (the poem “Joe” in the Section III).

Avoiding hindsight was difficult because experience being sequential, knowledge builds. Since the book took so long to write, I began asking myself constantly, “What did you know at the time?,” and then stripping away anything that had crept in later. Sometimes that felt like pulling teeth, especially for the sections that were hardest to write and therefore took the longest. I’m thinking of the people at the windows who jumped, the ferry engulfed in smoke (when the first tower fell), and the swimmers seen from the ferry. Shortly before we went to press, I read the narrative closely, looking for all these things. To my dismay, despite repeated checking, I still found instances that had to be fixed. I couldn’t be more happy that you noticed this aspect of the book.

Mary: Do you have a favorite poem in Section II that you’d like to share with us? Why is it a favorite?

Andrea: Many of the individual prose poems in the long sequence September 12 consist of crucial moments in that story. It’s very hard to pick my favorite, but recently I’ve come to a new appreciation of the poem about the Staten Island policemen in Section II. Readers seem to love him, as I do too, and that makes me happy. Sadly, I’ve forgotten the name on his shield. Here’s the poem, with the lead-in, on pages 36 to 37 in the book:

 . . . When the uniform cop hears She lived there, he opens his arms and gathers me to his chest.

Held against his massive bulk, the embossed brass buttons on his jacket, the decorations pinned to his chest pressing into my cheek, I cry my heart out. Only when I’m ready does this burly red-necked stranger release me, murmuring Stay close to me. You’ll be safe here. I stand beside him, reluctant to move, our arms touching. A wool blanket miraculously appears around my shoulders. For years, he volunteers, we’ve known something like this would happen, but didn’t do anything to prevent it.

Mary: The poems in the final three sections deal with the aftermath of 9/11 from September 12, 2001 to September 8, 2020. Why three sections instead of one entitled “Aftermath?” What prompted you choose to organize the poems in this fashion?

Andrea: Given the difficulty of this material for readers, from the beginning I knew that I had to break it down into manageable chunks. Even my own attention would flag after 15 pages. It was too much to take in. I spent a lot of time experimenting, trying to find the poetry equivalent of prose chapters.

The solution became clear to me only after I visited my old home town, Glen Rock, New Jersey, which had lost 11 residents on 9/11. This was one of the higher victim counts from among the surrounding suburban towns. Although I learned about these victims in late 2001, I didn’t yet see them as part of my story. It had been 25 years since my parents retired and moved away, and I had not been back. But these names haunted me. On a research trip in 2007, I realized the town had essentially not changed at all since I grew up there. It was still a peaceful commuter town of modest homes for starter families which shuffled its fathers (mostly men back then) off to work weekday mornings on Wall Street in Downtown Manhattan. They would emerge from the ferries or the train into the area around the WTC and fan out to their offices, repeating the same journey every night in reverse.

Those ten men and one woman who died on 9/11 could have been the parents of my friends; I knew intimately what a town like this was. Suddenly, those 11 victims became people I might have known, and I wanted to memorialize them. That town came to represent all the small communities, inside NYC and in surrounding areas, which lost residents that morning. These poems became the central section of the collection, The Rock in the Glen, serving as a bridge between my first person eyewitness account and the aftermath poems, allowing me to separate the immediate aftermath poems in Section IV from the longer-term aftermath poems about life after moving to California in Section V. As a former accountant descended from a math teacher and a long line of bookkeepers, I love numbers. You can probably tell by the sheer number of numbers in this interview. The idea of a collection with five sections, two sections on either side of a central sequence about the town that lost 11 people that day, like a palindrome, made me happy. It felt perfect.

Mary: You’ve said that it took you twenty years to write September 12 and that the original manuscript was 200 pages long. How did you go about paring down the manuscript to 80 pages?

Andrea: The first 10 years I was writing this book, I kept adding more and more material. The last leg of my journey and our return to the apartment 4 days later, which completed the circle of my odyssey begun 9/11. The history of New York City and the Hudson River, human and natural. And about Ground Zero, which had become our neighborhood, and how we navigated the challenges of living so close to the site of a mass, world-changing tragedy, now a toxic waste site.

As it approached 200 pages, I saw September 12 more as a collection of short stories or a short novel in verse. But this length is a tough lift for poetry publishers, who are used to less than half that. Friends told me I had to be realistic and pare it down to find a publisher. I fantasized about publishing it in 2 volumes, but knew better than to try that. Over time, the manuscript shrank to 143 pages, then 110, before settling on the version with 80 pages of poetry accepted by the Word Works.

Readers also told me the fundamental structure—the main narrative told in 12 double sonnet crowns (each 14-15 sonnets, the last line of each poem repeated as the first line of the next) separated by the hay-sonnet Glen Rock victim portraits and punctuated by step-out poems in other forms which highlighted dramatic moments along the way—was cumbersome and sapped the drama of its power. All those repeated lines, even varied, seemed like wasted space. This was very hard to hear. The sonnet crown structure had made writing the material manageable by dividing it into smaller units; the step-outs provided formal relief and variation from the constraints of the 14 line poem.

Taking it out of the form to which I had devoted years was the most difficult thing I have ever done creatively. But the minute I removed the lineation of the narrative, the story came alive to me again. I immediately saw what was essential and what could be cut. Plus, reading it as prose felt revolutionary, similar to the way the idea of the book had always felt radical. Yes, an odyssey, but a domestic one, the narrator being female. A book of poetry that would be relentlessly factual. A hybrid collection which restlessly strayed from or played with the “Poetic.” A sustained eyewitness account in verse that contributes to the historical record. I never looked back from that decision.

Mary: The aftermath of an event like 9/11 goes on forever for all of us, and particularly, I would imagine, for someone who was so intimately involved. Are you still writing poems about 9/11? If not, what kind of poems are you writing?

Andrea: I think I will always be writing about 9/11 as long as I write. My life has not been the same since; I am not the same person. But as time goes by, that writing is less about that day, and more about how it reverberates in the present. Every anniversary, for example, I write a new poem documenting that day in some way, just as I always write a poem on my birthday, an idea I borrowed from Joseph Brodsky. Every 9/11 (except in 2020 during the pandemic), to celebrate our survival, my husband and I go out to eat. One anniversary, the 15th I think, as we raised our glasses to toast each other, we noticed the much younger couple at the next table was doing the exact same thing. Turns out they too were commemorating their survival on 9/11. Here were two couples, complete strangers, having moved clear across the continent to build new lives in the same city, now seated next to each other at the same restaurant. You can’t make this stuff up! Of course I wrote about that. We shared stories, compared dishes, went back to our desserts, waved goodbye and left. Somewhere I have their first names, and I can picture them, their joy, like ours, tempered by memories of that day. I could give you countless other examples of ongoing work related to 9/11.

That being said, I also wrote and published two other poetry collections while I was working on September 12 —Domestic Karma and The Disheveled Bed, neither of which had anything to do with 9/11. I’ve recently finished a new collection, American Fraktur, exploring my father’s experiences as a WWII soldier ashamed of his German immigrant roots who pretended his origins were Scottish, despite documentary evidence to the contrary. The poems about his wartime experiences dovetail with mine as a survivor of a terrorist attack living in a time of constant war, rising intolerance, hatred, and human and natural disasters. During the pandemic, a time which vividly brought back memories of 9/11 and for which 9/11 strangely prepared me, I finished another collection, Enduring, and I have an idea for an abecedarian collection kicking around inside me. After that, who knows? When you come to writing late, in my case middle age, there is a lot of material inside you.

Mary: If you could ensure that one of the poems from September 12 would survive to be read 500 years from now, which poem would it be, and why have you chosen it?

Andrea: It’s hard to choose, but I think it would be “The Old Neighborhood.” This poem preserves the world I knew, in all its particularity, as it was the morning of 9/11 before the towers came down. This was the world I loved and was happy to be part of: lively, colorful, friendly, diverse, full of people offering and savoring what makes life worth living. Every time I read this poem, out loud or to myself, that world comes alive for me again, even 20 years later, and I am grateful and a little mystified, humbled, to have written it.

Mary: Thank you, Andrea. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you about September 12. Do you have any upcoming readings, workshops, or other events? How can people get in touch with you?

Andrea: The best way to get in touch with me is through the Contact button on my website: www.andreacarterbrown.com, where you can email me or ask to be put on my mailing listing for upcoming events. With everything still in flux about “in person” or “remote,” my website is also the best way to find out about readings and events or audio/video interviews and readings as they become live.

Mary: Thank you, Andrea. It’s been a pleasure to talk with you.

Andrea: Thank you, Mary, for your thought-provoking questions, not one of which has been asked by anyone else. It’s also always a pleasure to talk with you.

Contact Information for Andrea Carter Brown:

September 12 is available from:
Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/September-12-Andrea-Carter-Brown/dp/1944585451/
SPD (Small Press Distribution): https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781944585457/september-12.aspx
The Word Works: https://www.wordworksbooks.org/product/september-12/

Website — For Upcoming Events and Zoom Links: https://www.andreacarterbrown.com/

Email: andreacarterbrown@gmail.com
Facebook: Andrea Carter Brown
Twitter: @AndreaBrownPoet
Instagram: #andreacarterbrown

The post Interview with Poet Andrea Carter Brown appeared first on Mary Mackey.

Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of fifteen books. Her stories and essays have been  published in more than sixty anthologies. A number of her pieces have been dramatized on BBC Radio 4, and her work has been translated into German, Turkish, Danish, Italian, Spanish, French, Swedish and Dutch. Miner has won fellowships and awards from The Rockefeller Foundation, Fondazione Bogliasco, The Brown Foundation, Fundación Valparaiso, The McKnight Foundation, The NEA, The Jerome Foundation, The Heinz Foundation, The Australia Council Literary Arts Board and numerous other sources, and has received Fulbright Fellowships to Tunisia, India and Indonesia. Since 2005 she has been Artist-in-Residence at the Clayman Institute. Bread and Salt is her fourth collection of stories.

Mary: Welcome to People Who Make Books Happen, Valerie. Let’s start at the very beginning:  How did you become a writer?

Valerie: I started out as a journalist and reported from Africa, Europe, Canada and the US. Although I studied literature at university, we were rarely assigned books by women. When I later discovered books by Doris Lessing, Toni Cade Bambara, Bessie Head and Margaret Atwood, I began to dare to write fiction. My first co-authored book (1975) emerged from my writing group. I’ve been in writing groups ever since; they sustain and provoke my work.

Mary: Which writers have influenced you?

Valerie: I continue to be moved by the language of Shakespeare, Milton and Whitman, favorites since my U.C. Berkeley days. The feminist writers above inspire me as do Rohinton Mistry, Toni Morrison, Grace Paley and others who attend to the music of language and the challenges of fostering social justice and compassion. I’m grateful to my current writing group for close readings of Bread and Salt and to many other writers who “swap” drafts of new books with me. This kind of contemporary critique is crucial.

Mary: How do you get the initial idea for a story or novel?

Valerie: My novels are usually ignited by a question–a philosophical, spiritual, moral, political quandary. My stories are usually imagined from a particular scene. Place is very important in all my fiction.

Mary: Tell us more Bread and Salt. What is the most important thing readers should know about it?

Mary: The stories deal with women’s friendships, gun violence in families, falling in love, state terrorism, guardian angels, suicide as well as provocative encounters in India, Indonesia, Italy, Turkey and other places. The title novella follows two lovers from Tunisia to Boston to France and back to Tunisia. Three quarters of the stories feature queer characters. (Two of my previous collections were finalists for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Fiction.) In a variety of forms ranging from mirco-fiction to novella, the characters in Bread and Salt navigate romance, terror, grief, passion, and whimsy.

Mary: If you could ensure that one of your stories would survive to be read 500 years from now, which story would it be, and why have you chosen it?

Valerie: If I’m brief, may I pick two? “Incident on the Tracks,” depicts a short train journey during which three strangers of various races, classes, ages and genders discover an unlikely friendship. “Hollow” explores the often ignored tectonic shifts within a family that can lead to catastrophe in our gun-obsessed culture.

Mary: Thank you for joining us here today, Valerie. Before you go, where can readers buy copies of Bread and Salt?

Valerie: Bread and Salt is available (in paperback and ebook) from independent bookstores as well as Amazon, B and N, etc. For book clubs who buy Bread and Salt, I’m happy to offer a gratis Zoom visit. I enjoy meeting readers and hearing their insights.

Links
www.valerieminer.com

Instagram valerieminer1

The post Interview with novelist and short story writer Valerie Miner appeared first on Mary Mackey.

Poet Laureate Emeritus of Sacramento, Indigo Moor’s fourth book of poetry Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something, took second place in the University of Nebraska Press’ Backwater Prize. Jonesin’ is a multi-genre work consisting of poetry, flash fiction, memoir, and stage plays. His second book, Through the Stonecutter’s Window, won Northwestern University Press’s Cave Canem prize. His first and third books, Tap-Root and In the Room of Thirsts & Hungers, were both parts of Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Select Poetry Series. Indigo is an adjunct professor at Dominican University and visiting faculty for Dominican’s MFA program, teaching poetry and short fiction. He is also co-coordinator for Open Page Writers.

Mary: Welcome to People Who Make Books Happen, Indigo. Let’s cut to the chase: How did you become a poet?

Indigo: I don’t know. By birth? Circumstance? My entire life, I sought explanations, keys to what I saw around me. That’s all any artist is: someone who can’t be satisfied with leaving the rock unturned. In that sense, I have always been an artist of some kind. If you are asking when I became a practicing poet, it was 1999. What should I call that, my Prince year? I was in Cambridge, MA, trying to figure out who I was. I discovered Paul Robeson. I discovered Othello. I discovered that poetry was not only something I did; it was who I am. I made a conscious decision to dedicate a significant amount of my life to bending toward the written word. Or bending it to me.

Mary: How old were you when you wrote your first poem, and what was it about?

Indigo: As a kid, in school. Even then I knew it meant more to me than it did to many of my friends or classmates. I hungered for it. It was an awakening. But there was no avenue to get me closer. No shortcuts. No mentors. I had other paths to follow. I wrote a lot of bad poems as a child. I remember snippets of some, but nothing that could give me a glimpse of any of them.

Mary: What poets and writers have influenced you?

Indigo: Yusef Komunyakaa was the first to speak to me. He is Southern, a veteran, someone who worked through himself to rewrite the world he knew. “Blackberries” and “Believing in Iron” come to mind. Dien Cai Dau, his book about Vietnam was my introduction to arc. Jean Toomer was next. He went back to the South to write Cane, again the theme of discovering yourself. I like many poets and I read widely. But I gravitate to poets who write themselves into being.

Mary: What events in your life or in society as a whole have influenced you? For example: You are a twice-decorated Gulf War Veteran, a playwright, a Professor at Dominican University, and an Integrated Circuit Layout Designer. Do you incorporate all these experiences into your poetry?

Indigo: I have been working on a memoir, so the different parts of my life are coming together. I would say nicely, but anyone who has written a memoir knows better. Layout designer has never been something that has reached my creative side. I am often asked if there is an overlap. Not that I have noticed. There is no poetry in engineering. But the person who writes poetry can be the same person who is an engineer. And a veteran. A professor. And a person who wears bunny slippers. It all influences me. But I choose what I write about. I am relearning who I was and what I went through during Desert Storm. And as a child. It is all coming together, but not as several rivers converging. More like a dozen different flowers growing in the same planter. Some thrive and have purpose. Some are support, even dying to enrich the soil. Some having no effect, other than preventing a nothingness. That is not entirely fair. There are some things that I thought were dead, that have resurfaced as meaningful events. And others I may never uncover.

Mary: How do you get the initial idea for a poem?

Indigo: It’s usually an image. My work is very imagistic. A new phrase can do so much. Today I heard: “Avoiding the Wagon.” When I found out the wagon in question was something that takes away a dead horse it began a train that will end in a poem. I spent time on a horse farm. It is one of the most life-affirming events of my life. And the idea of this wagon coming still chills me.

Mary: You are a poet who “weaves together historic truths” How do the poems in your new book Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something demonstrate this?

Indigo: History does not represent the past. Not to me. Taken as an “event,” anything can be glossed over, any moment. What I strive to find is the emotional event, the moment on one person’s life that history changes. A person decides to shoot up a church. As they sit in the car, what is going through their mind? A farmer hears of Travon Martin, how does it affect them? A woman receives a saxophone from her estranged mother. A painter tries to undo the Twin Towers falling on his canvas. History is only history when we forget it is more than a factoid. When we refuse to hold it in us, keeping it at arm’s length.

Mary: How has your poetry changed over the years?

Indigo: I believe my poetry changes as I do. As my lens focuses on different aspects of the world, so does my poetry. How I write changes because I learn different techniques. Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something contains poetry, prose poems, flash fiction, flash memoir (did I make that up?), and stage plays. The entire book is one interlocking poem about the danger and draw of the American dream. Ten years ago, none of these poems, nor the concept of the book would have made sense to me.

Mary: Tell us more about Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something.

Indigo: I wrote Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something to explore my own understanding of the American Dream, which cannot be defined. We are all the heroes of our own stories. The American dream distorts depending on where the desire is spawned. The book is multi-genre because not all desires are best represented in poems.

Bethany Humphries, Editor-in-Chief of the American River Review said, “[Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something is] no white-washed children’s textbook treatment of U.S. history. . . . It requires the reader to witness the offender’s hand reaching up Lady Liberty’s coppery skirt, to both confront abusers, and to empathize with a litany of memorable victims and survivors. . . . Utilizing a stunning variety of forms to explore a myriad of facets of human desire, from floating tercets to prose to dialogue-heavy scripts to a poetic table of historical footnotes, Indigo Moor delivers unforgettable images like chains ‘hanging like man-o-war tendrils, / like a trembling curtain of almost lynchings.’ There may be times you want to look away, but there are many moments you will want to return to, again and again.”

Mary:  What are the three most important poems in Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something? Why?

Indigo: There is never an answer to that question. Different poems have different meanings at different times, even to me. “Love Letter to Dr. Ford, from the Patriarchy” gave me a chance to step into the shoes of an institution I detest. To look atrocities as necessary to the survival of an America I am forced to walk through. The play “Catching a Cotton Ball” follows a couple at odds with each other as well as the country that doesn’t accept them. Veterans of Foreign War’s is more personal, pertaining to my own brother and how losing him is an everyday emotionally charged event. I like the range of these three pieces. Such different forms. Different agendas.

Mary: You were the Poet Laureate of Sacramento from 2017 to 2019. How has your involvement in the Sacramento literary community influenced your work?

Indigo: I don’t know if working with any organization influences my work. There are some fractured, but necessary groups in this region. Sacramento Poetry Center has been a stalwart in this community. I think what I am reminded of is that the community and serving the people is what matters.

Mary: If you could ensure that one of your poems would survive to be read 500 years from now, which poem would it be, and why have you chosen it?

Indigo: Yes, I can choose a poem, but only because it means something to me. “Metal: The Tow Truck Driver’s Lament,” from Tap-Root. It was the first poem where I tackled who I believed I was at the time. I think poems are asymptotic to the truth, at best. It speaks to stress and pressure, the belief of being alone in handling far too much. Of the hard road of the past and steam building. It worked for me. Perhaps a little too long to read. But certainly, a cathartic piece.

Mary: Thank you, Indigo. This has been fascinating. Do you have any upcoming readings or classes? How can people get in touch with you?

Indigo: Thank you, Mary. I’ll give you some contact information and you can post it at the end of this interview.

Contact Information for Indigo Moor and links to his writing:
Website: https://www.indigomoor.org
Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something: To Order
For appearances: Workshops and Readings: https://www.indigomoor.org/appearances
Read Indigo Moor’s essay on how he became a poet: “A Long Overdue Apology” (part of the Marsh Hawk Press Chapter One Series)
And read “A Riotous Anodyne,” his brilliant open letter to the City of Sacramento on the occasion of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

The post Interview With Poet Indigo Moor appeared first on Mary Mackey.

Today we welcome Marge Piercy to People Who Make Books Happen. Her most recent collection of poetry is On The Way Out, Turn Off the Light, published September 2020 by Knopf. In addition to 19 previous poetry collections, she is the author of 17 novels including the classics Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It. Born in center city Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan and Northwestern, and recipient of four honorary doctorates, she is active in antiwar, feminist and environmental causes.

A popular speaker on college campuses, she’s been a featured writer on Bill Moyers’ PBS Specials, Prairie Home Companion, Fresh Air, the Today Show, and many radio and TV programs nationwide including Air America and Oprah & Friends. From 1993 to 2017, her poems were frequently read on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.

Praised as one of the few American writers who are accomplished poets as well as novelists, she is the master of many genres. In 1993, her cyberpunk novel He, She, and It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction in the United Kingdom.

INTERVIEW WITH MARGE PIERCY

Question: Which of your 17 novels do you consider your greatest success, not necessarily commercially, but for you personally as a writer”

Marge Piercy: I don’t have a favorite novel.  What I can say is that I vastly prefer and am much prouder of the less conventional novels – WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME, HE SHE AND IT, CITY OF DARKNESS, CITY OF LIGHT, BRAIDED LIVES and SEX WARS.  I am less proud of the more conventional novels that focus primarily on relationships, although I am invested in them also.

Some of those are historical novels concerned with how we got where we are; some are speculative fiction concerned with ‘if only’ and ‘if this goes on’ (to use Isaac Asimov’s categories of science fiction). 

I discovered, among many other revelations, that I’m not as good a person as I had imagined.  Examining one’s own life is a critical nightmare if you’re not trying to make it pretty.

 Question: Adrienne Rich once said of your novel He, She and It: “Piercy’s vision of a post-greenhouse-effect, nuclear-blasted world interlaced with the Prague ghetto of 1600, and the efforts of certain people to stay human in both, is threaded with the questions: What is it to be human? … What does `life’ mean? What are the limits of creativity? As always, Piercy writes with high intelligence, love for the world, ethical passion and innate feminism.”

How do you view this novel now in 2020? 

Marge Piercy: I had read the scientific papers about climate change when I was writing the novel; however, global warming has moved so much faster that my projections were a little optimistic.  We have orca off Cape Cod this summer besides increasing numbers of great white sharks.  A manatee was swimming in one of the south facing harbors.  We have had the worst drought I’ve ever experienced in my 45 years of living here.  Trees and shrubs are dying.  The grass is all straw.  Mice keep coming into the house where there are four cats because they need water.  We have moved from zone 6 to zone 7 agriculturally.  Massachusetts is experiencing an increasing number of tornadoes.  We worry about hurricanes.  There are far fewer butterflies and warblers and far more flies. 

The ethical issues about artificial intelligence have only grown, as has our intimacy with and reliance upon the internet, social media and our other interactive devices.  Corporations have greatly increased their control with Citizens United and super pacs.  Elections have become sound bites and info-mation.  The huge multicorps are obviously non-national.  The gap between the few with huge wealth and those barely getting by has increased exponentially. The middle class is shrinking; people have not only less money but less power.  Fewer and fewer workers are unionized.  Aging nuclear power plants are endangering a high percentage of the population of this and European countries like France, and of course Japan. All in all, the world of He, She, It  is becoming reality much faster than I imagined.  But I was prescient enough to be glad I’m 84.  Dystopia is coming fast, perhaps on the wings of a political leader.

Question: At the age of 84, you have 17 novels, 20  poetry collections, a memoir, a book of short stories and four nonfiction to your credit as well as a host of other shorter pieces. Knopf has just published your latest book, On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light: Poems. What distinguishes this collection?

Marge Piercy: One whole section is about growing old – honest and difficult and sometimes funny poems. At 84, aging is a real part of my experience, and I’m sharing it.  Also of course there’s a lot of political poems as well as sections that contain love poetry, nature, Judaism, family in a broad sense and my own history from childhood on  It’s a book I’m very proud of.  I even recorded the audio book myself, all 183 pp. 

Question: I’m glad to hear you’ve made an audio book of On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing your read your poetry on a number of occasions, and it’s always a treat.

Over the years, you’ve made personal appearances in over 500 places here and abroad. Your many readers think of you as iconic, and you have been an inspiration to generations of younger poets. What advice would you give a young poet just starting out?

Marge Piercy: Don’t take writing teachers too seriously.  Learn what you can from each and don’t be surprised when they totally contradict what the last one told you. 

Find other beginning writers and share work.  That helps to keep you going.  You need feedback and that’s a helpful place to get it.  Read, read, read, read in the genres that excite you. But read like a writer, which means study what works and why and what doesn’t work and why. Look critically at all the craft elements in whatever you’re reading. See how the writers solved or didn’t the issues of craft in that novel, short story, memoir or poem.

Don’t take rejections to heart. Often you’re sending to someone who only publishes people they’ve heard of, or their friends. Just keep sending out.  When you’re published anyplace, it makes it easier to get published – somebody voted for you. Take every opportunity to read and improve your reading style.  By giving readings, you get feedback. Writing can be a lonely business so getting your work out to an audience can be a boost to your confidence. 

Hold on to your politics and your identity.  Don’t take critics seriously.  They are always building their aesthetic on what has been done, not what you want to do.

***

Marge Piercy is the author of twenty poetry collections, a memoir, seventeen novels, five nonfiction books, and a book of short stories. Her work has been translated into twenty-three languages, and she has received many honors, including the Golden Rose, the oldest poetry award in the country. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband, Ira Wood. Her most recent book, On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light: Poems was published on September 29, 2020 by Knopf.

The post Interview with Marge Piercy appeared first on Mary Mackey.

Originally published in Dichtung Yammer as “Exchange between  Mary Mackey & Susan Terris” (ed. Thomas Fink, Sept 1, 2020)

Susan Terris : I’m interested, Mary, in the fact that the new poems that open your most recent collection The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams are about Kentucky and seem to be more complex, more intimate, more raw than any poems you’ve written on this subject before. Another, less savvy poet, might have put the section Infinite Worlds before The Culling, then back-tracked to the past. Opening the book with a poem about Aunt Ebbie and her fortitude, immediately welcomes the reader into that Kentucky world and, therefore, into the book as a whole. Tell me more about the Kentucky poems. How did you come to write them now?

Mary Mackey: I wrote the Kentucky poems as a tribute to and meditation on the strength and resilience of women, poor people, and all human beings who have undergone deprivation, tragedy, illness, grief, and suffering and come out the other side still able to live happy, productive lives.                                  

When I was in my early thirties, I read a short essay by a holocaust survivor who described how he had healed himself from effects of the horrors he had experienced and gone on to have, in his words,  a “happy life.” He said that he had vowed not to let his captors take joy from him. For many years, his words both haunted and inspired me. How do we survive? I have asked myself. How do we get over things­­ and come out in one piece? How do we accept loss and go on? How do we accept the death of those we love and ultimately our own death? How do we keep evil from depriving us of joy?

After the election in 2016, I was feeling sorry for myself. One day when I was in a particularly sad and anxious mood, I took a long walk, and—as usual—carried my phone along with me. I often get ideas when I walk, as if the rhythm of my footsteps helps generate the rhythm and images of poems; but on that day, something strange and unprecedented happened: all twenty-one of the Kentucky poems came to me at once in a huge wave—came to me so fast that it was all I could do to get one recorded on my phone before the next came. It was as if they had been living in my mind for years waiting to be released.

Susan Terris:  In what way do these poem help shape and explain other aspects of your life or your poetry life?

Mary Mackey: What I realized at the moment the Kentucky poems came to me was, that from the time I was a small child, my Kentucky relatives in general, and my Great Aunt Ebbie in particular, had shown me how to be tough enough to survive loss, pain, and grief—not tough as in “hard-hearted,” but tough in the sense that they did what they had to do because they had no choice, and did it without complaining because complaining didn’t help them survive drought, fires, physical disability, grief, hunger, and oppression.

On my paternal grandfather’s side, my Kentucky relatives were Famine Irish. On my paternal grandmother’s side, they had come to this country in the 1600’s as indentured servants. My ancestors nearly starved to death, and yet they persisted. My Great Aunt Ebbie was literally eaten by hogs (she lost a leg and most of an arm ), and yet she persisted. The small family farming culture they created on the banks of the Ohio in Western Kentucky no longer exists. But there were important lessons in it, just as there were important lessons in other subcultures that, like so many of the Earth’s species, have also gone extinct. So, I wrote the Kentucky poems not so much as autobiography as an act of cultural preservation. I wrote those poems to give myself courage and to remind myself to never give up. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that the Kentucky poems wrote me.

Mary Mackey: Susan, could you please tell me why you so often do poems in series? When you complete an individual poem, what in it or in your creative process lets you know that you’re not finished with the subject and need to keep going?

Susan Terris: I think in order to tell you about why I write poems in series,  I need to try and explain a little about who I am first, because it’s related to my need to create day-to-day continuity for myself. The on-going metaphor for my life is that I start with a trowel but end up digging very deep holes. As a child growing up in St. Louis, I was curious about  the meanings of things. I used to call up the librarian (yes, all before Google!) at our main library at 10:05, right after it opened to find out things like: Is a teuthologist the name for someone who studies octopuses? or What year was Roy Cohen born? A first child, outwardly a “good child” who was fascinated by the out-of-doors, I picked up snakes and lizards,, fished crayfish out of streams. But I also prowled through half-built houses, had a secret fort in the woods, bicycled 20 miles out a major highway to my best friend’s chicken and pig farm. I was a serious ballet dancer until I wasn’t good enough. So then I immediately became a competitive swimmer, an actor in school plays, and a serious white water canoeist. 

In college, I took up modern dance, which I continued until I was in my mid-fifties. This, too, was a kind of series, since I danced, I wanted to see others dance, wanted to learn about choreography, about how music was paired with dance, how to keep a body from injuries, took up learning to tap dance, too, etc. etc.. With my husband, whom I married at age 21, I moved to San Francisco. No white water canoeing in western rivers, so he and I (and then later with our 3 children) hiked, wildcrafted for edible food, went down wild rivers on Huck Finn rafts and wooden dories. I took up kayaking, went to grad school, starting writing books for children and young adults. Then, after twenty-one of those books were published, my daughter became seriously ill, and I made an abrupt change back to poetry. As all this was going on with my family, I would spend a part of every summer in my family’s northern Minnesota lake home. More outdoors time. But whatever I did, one thing always led to another: my life has always been a series of series. This is today, I’d tell myself. What’s next?

As a poet, I never plan to work in a series. Usually it begins with just one poem. Ghost of Yesterday series started with “Sink or Swim,”a poem about a miscarriage my mother had at our cabin in Minnesota where the doctor put her on the kitchen table to remove the placenta of the non-living fetus.  The Take Two series began with my outrage over reading of Einstein’s treatment of his wife Mileva and the question of whether Mileva, also a physicist, was actually his partner in discovering relativity. In this instance, I suddenly realized I had more to say about couples, even those who where not romantic duos. So I plunged on ahead with Sancho Panza and his donkey, Jacqueline Kennedy and Maria Callas, Beowulf and Grendel’s mother and many others.

With the Memos poems, the series began after a day I was in DC at the Lincoln Memorial and saw a vivacious teenager with a port wine birthmark covering half her face posing full face for a photograph. After I wrote that poem, I suddenly knew, I had something to say to Heathcliff, to the cat who keeps bringing me dead birds, to the man who gave me his mother’s wedding ring by mistake, to the former child prodigy etc. etc..

Mary Mackey: How do you know when to stop; how do you tell when the series is complete?

Susan Terris: As you clearly saw, the crux is not where I start, but why I stop. The easy thing to admit is that sometime I stop because I lose interest. But the answer is more complicated than that. In any series of poems, there comes a moment when the new poems still being attempted are starting to repeat themes I’ve already dealt with. Often people ask why Memos wasn’t a full-length book or Take Two. My real answer is this: no more ways to differentiate. I stopped at 20 poems or 38 poems, because I was done. Most of these series have ended up as chapbooks—seventeen of them now. But selections of poems from each series have made it into my full-length poetry books.

 Susan Terris: So, I’m going to move from the technical subject of series to something spiritual. Your poetry often contains mystical elements. Where do these come from? How important are they to the understanding of your work?

Mary Mackey: The mystical element in my poetry is one of the primary keys to understanding my work if, indeed, anything mystical can be said to be “understood” in the ordinary sense of the word.  I believe it may have its origin in the very high fevers I have run since I was a small child, some of them approaching 107 degrees. At the age of six months, I developed pneumonia, ran a high fever, and—according to my parents—nearly died. I don’t remember this, but I do remember the next time I had a dangerously high fever just before my third birthday. I’ve written about this experience in “Fever and Jungles: On Becoming A Poet,” and in the title poem of my collection Breaking The Fever. The short version is that I had a hallucination/vision/mystical experience–call it what you will—of children singing to me through a screen-like veil that separated my world from theirs.

Since then, I have run fevers close to 107 degrees eight or nine times, and each time when my temperature rises above 106, I have experienced a different reality from the one we experience at 98.6. I make no claim as to whether what I see is real or unreal. My best guess is that these high fevers may have modified my perceptions in a manner that has allowed me to understand—at least at some level—what mystics like Mirabai, St. John of the Cross, Santa Teresa, Blake, Basho, and Rumi may have experienced–moments which no one, even the greatest of poets, has ever been able to put into words because they occur in a place where words no longer exist.

Susan Terris: I find that fascinating. Especially since I’m a person who never runs a fever. Even very sick, my temp won’t reach 97°. What other gifts have the fevers given you?

Mary Mackey: I suspect that high fevers also may have slightly modified the speech and thought centers of my brain. As my body temperature approaches 107 degrees, I often begin to laugh, tell  jokes, and speak in rhymed couplets, sometimes for up to four hours at a stretch. I find it interesting that Santa Teresa had her first mystical visions when she was suffering from the high fevers of malaria.

In other words, although in 99.999% of my life I am a rational, sane, reliable retired professor of English who prefers David Copperfield to A Game of Thrones, I have little doubt that fevers and the inexplicable experiences they bring with them have made me into a poet. In my poems, I frequently struggle to describe the indescribable. I try to touch the edges of a different reality. I attempt to put a great, unbounded wordlessness into words that are too small to contain it.

As for the jungle: sometimes I wonder if Nature is God’s great metaphor. But since I don’t know what God is, or even if God is, that’s a question I can’t answer.

Mary Mackey: I’d like to move now from mystical to haunted. There’s often a haunted sense to your poems, Susan, as if something is stalking the poet, as if the poet can neither grasp nor completely understand either the past or the present, as if time itself slips through the poet’s fingers. The title of your 2012 Marsh Hawk collection of new and selected poems is Ghost of Yesterday. Could you tell us more about the ghost of yesterday and what role he plays in your poetry and in your creative process? Why is he masculine? Why does he so often seem to control the poems he appears in? What is his connection to memory, time, and childhood?

Susan Terris: The answer to that haunted sense you find in my work is simple yet somewhat hidden. When I was studying Latin in high school, my teacher gave me a Latin motto –“Carpe Diem”. I prefer the literal translation of that as “Pluck the Day”. Mostly, I live very much in the present, but, as I said, I spend my summers at our family lake home in northern Minnesota, and there I am all ages yet none. This place is a capsule of my entire life, the place where past and present meld together. That’s part of what you are seeing, sometimes with sotto voce comments purportedly from my father who died more than 60 years ago.

It’s sometimes said about the rabbi’s wife (or the minister’s) that her life is careful and grounded. Then it’s often also said, “Oh, but she has a rich inner life.” Do I also? Maybe so. I’m also left-handed and, as a famous coach once declared, “Left-handers see life off two frames to the left.” Guilty. I’m not claiming a dreamy inner life, but I am the kind of wild and fierce person who poses as a calm, competent one. What you are seeing, Mary, as haunted is more what’s hidden, revealed only obliquely in my poetry. It’s not my father but the impulses of being caught between woulda-shoulda-coulda and who I really am. Speak truth. Reveal. Yet not too much.

Actually my father aspired to be a writer but graduated from college in 1929 and writing then would have been a folly and not an option. As a young man, he’d been a speed skating champion, so he supported my riskiest behavior like running white water rivers in a canvas canoe or writing poems. By the time I came into the world, he was a careful, measured person. But – yes – he would not have approved of the man in love with me for many years when I was married, which I was at 21 and stayed married for 56 years until my husband, deep in Alzheimer’s, died. Yet in my layered way of experiencing life, my father might well have applauded my boldness. White water with a paddle or yellow pad with a pen, my inner life combines with my outer one to create a kind of fearlessness. But, still, I am haunted by what I try to do in a poem, by what I never manage to do. I don’t expect perfection, but long for a clue to find out how to grab hold of that mythical gold ring on an old merry-go-round. I’m always interested in trying something new. What if? Could I? Is enough ever enough? Carpe diem, I often remind myself; and being safe is not the way to succeed as a writer. But then, when I fail, all I ask of myself, is to fail well.

Susan Terris: Mary, you’re rather haunted also, aren’t you?  Infinite Worlds, the second section of The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams introduces a new poem featuring Solange, a character who has appeared repeatedly in your poetry, and who was first introduced in your collection Sugar Zone. In this new poem,  Solange is drifting from real to surreal. The recurring fever poems (here but also throughout the book) offer fever-dreams that make reality become the surreal. Tell me more about this phenomenon of real/surreal. It’s something I do in my own work. I’m curious to know if you do this with intention. Or are the fever-dreams inexplicable?

Mary Mackey: I wouldn’t call myself “haunted,” but when I write, my mind moves fluidly between the real and the surreal. I experience ordinary, plain, unadorned reality; and at the same time, I see the alternatives that reality offers, the dream-like possibilities that cluster around objects,, the barely-conscious connections between words, images, scents, sounds, and touch. I can look at a bowl sitting on a table and see it simply as a white china bowl; but at the same time I can see it—as I have written in in my poem “The Breakfast Nook”—as  “a white sound/ swirling into a depression/ of unspeakable depths.” I can pick up a fork and see it simply as a fork (which is what I do most of the time, because to do anything else would be impractical when I am eating). But if I concentrate on that fork, focus unwavering attention on it, I can see it as a “long shining road/that branches at the end/into four paths/that lead nowhere.”

So, in answer to your question, I would say that my use of the real/surreal is not entirely intentional nor is it entirely spontaneous. The surreal always clusters around the real the way the petals cluster around the central disk of a sunflower. I can choose to ignore the surreal, ignore the real, or use both in a poem. But I don’t create either the real or the surreal. They just are.

Susans Terris:  And then there’s Solange. And again Solange, often not stepping from real to surreal but directly into magical realism –- maybe influenced by Lorca, Breton, Marquez yet also by the consciousness and mythic imagination of the indigenous people of Brazil. Will you tell more about how you immersed yourself in magical realism while still holding on to that notion of “there are so many ways to die here/  I’ve lost track” (from Inquisition)

Mary Mackey: I’ve never immersed myself in magical realism. I’ve read Lorca, Breton, and Marquez, because I got a doctorate in Comparative Literature that involved both French and Spanish; but I read those authors long after I was writing in the way that has come to be called “magical realism.” Yet at the same time, both personally and in my work, I never lose track of reality. I am a practical person. I change the oil in my car at regular intervals, alphabetize my spices, meet deadlines, and appreciate antibiotics. I believe in the validity of logic, scientific research and expertise. I have had a life-long  interest in ecology, tropical biology, botany, epidemiology, and mathematics (although I often find understanding mathematics and contemporary physics difficult).

Yet this practical, logical side of me does not stop me from seeing that reality in itself, completely unmitigated by magic and dreams is more  mysterious, beautiful, and powerful than anything I could imagine or invent. I look at the trees along banks of a river and see them shining with light. I look into the water at sunset and see a great river of black birds flying toward the sea. I know for an absolute fact that there are no actual birds in the river, but the shadows of the ripples on the surface of the water look like a flock of crows, and the forms of nature repeat themselves endlessly in expanding symmetry as fractals repeat in the curve of snail shells, grains of dust, and the rings of Saturn.

As for Solange, she first came to me in the poem “Sugar Zone,” published by Marsh Hawk Press in 2011 in my collection of the same title. Since then she has reappeared in a number of my poems, many of which are now collected in The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams. Who is she? Perhaps she is a priestess, a muse, a lost love, a shaman, a shape-shifter, a goddess, a ghost. Perhaps she is me, or perhaps she is the spirit of the jungle incarnate. She might be a jaguar seen in a dream or a Mae-de-santo lost in a trance. Perhaps Solange is all of these things, or perhaps she is none of them.

One of the things I like most about poetry is its capacity to contain ambiguity.

Mary Mackey: Now could you please speak about the tension between the real/surreal elements in your poems? Do the surreal images come to you naturally, emerging spontaneously as you write, or do you intentionally put them into a poem as you revise and polish it? What role do dreams play in this process? Have you been influenced by the Surrealist Movement and surrealist writers and poets like André Breton?

Susan Terris: The tension between real/surreal? You who do the most musical and amazing poetry using surreal or magical realism, are challenging me for an explanation? It may partly be dream fragments or the left-handed thing. I had my first story—something real/surreal, though I wouldn’t had had words for this then—published in a teenage magazine when I was twelve. It was about a young girl who talked to a man on a bench in a foggy evening. She didn’t know he was deaf, kept talking until the fog obscured him and he vanished. Then, years later, when I was writing YA children’s novels, each one had a chapter where the real drifted off into the surreal. My influence here was not Lorca or Breton or Marquez, but the South African playwright Athol Fugard. Almost all of his plays have a moment where the real leaks for a moment or so into surreal.

Writing those YA novels, this technique was intentional, and my editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux defended it when anyone questioned. But in my poetry, it’s never intentional. Yes, my dreams are vivid and strange – especially here in Minnesota where night is loons crying, much lightning and thunder, or a night dark and clear enough to see a comet and its tail without binoculars. The leaps in my poems from the real world to surreal are never planned and must come partly from unremembered dreams. My subconscious seems to barge into the literal and overwhelm it, I think. Then  ask myself, Who wrote this? And then Who am I?

Fugard may have led me into admiration to this odd edge, but I think the real influence was my absorption, starting as a child, in classical mythology: Greek, Roman, Norse, German, Egyptian. Then books like the Odyssey, Metamorphoses, Gilgamesh, Nibelungenlied. Then later I studied and was absorbed by British classics such as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Faerie Queen and work by Coleridge, Browning, Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins, Christina Rossetti, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf. With all this packed somewhere in my head, I think of myself as a magpie, forever grabbing as bright bits of matter. And when I do write a poem where the real and surreal are fused, I feel as if I’ve been given a gift. At the same time, the rational part of my brain is asking: How did I do this? Does it work? And when can I count on this happening again?

Susan Terris: So, Mary, here comes what is probably my most complex question for you: Though your earlier poems, reprinted as part of the selected poems in The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, show turbulence and skill and a strong interest in portraying the lives of women,  I’m not going to ask you about them. (I, too, did a book with a whole section of persona poems on women in literature.) I have a major question here. Breaking the Fever is transitional. But Sugar Zone is amazing and different from anything you’ve done before. Your poetry changed between the publication of these two books. Poems in Sugar Zone are denser, more complex, deeper. Dark-light, dangerous, amazing. What happened between 2006 and 2011? Yes, that’s my question.

Mary Mackey: Something did indeed happen. From 1987 to  2007,  I was busy writing novels, a total of fourteen in all, and was known primarily as a novelist, although I had written poetry since I was eleven. During those twenty years, I only occasionally wrote poems. In 2008, I decided that I wanted to concentrate on poetry again. That fall, I applied for and received a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. During my time there, I wrote several poems a day. It felt awkward at first, but by the time I left VCCA a month later, I had had reconnected with the part of me that wrote poetry. In addition, as a Californian temporarily living among writers, many of whom had come from New York and Boston, I also realized—not for the first time—how much of an outsider I was on the East Coast and what a gift this was. Being excluded and often benevolently ignored, allowed me to find my own way.

Immediately after I finished revising Breaking The Fever, I began to write about the tropics for the first time. In particular I began to write about the rain forest, which I had fallen in love with as a young woman when I was living in jungle field stations. I also began to incorporate Portuguese into my poetry, searching for the lyrical space that lies at the conjunction between Portuguese and English. The resultant poems were fierce, ecstatic: grounded in the absolute reality of the jungle and at the same time mystical and visionary, for the more I wrote, the more I came to see that the rainforest, which was being threatened with extinction, was the great spiritual love of my life just as Krishna was the great spiritual love of Mirabai’s.

Breaking The Fever is composed of the poems I wrote at VCCA and the poems I wrote from 1987 to 2007. Sugar Zone, Travelers With No Ticket Home, and the section entitled Infinite Worlds in The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams are composed of the poems I wrote after I realized that being an outsider was the one of the best gifts the world could give to a poet.

Mary Mackey: Susan, a number of your poems are written in the voices of literary characters like Beowulf & Grendel’s Mother, Tristan & Yseult; historical figures like Evelyn Nesbit & Her Mother, Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald; or a combination of the two such as Mary Shelley & Frankenstein’s Monster. These remind me of Browning’s poetic monologues—“My Last Duchess,” “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church,” etc. What is it that attracts you to this genre? What do the pairings allow you to say about couples? How does the “I” of these poems differ from your own “I”?

Susan Terris: Yes, a lot of literary characters. Perhaps I’ve already answered this. As I just admitted to you, I had a classical education. But there’s another pervasive influence on my love of literary persona already written and on my own efforts. I am – admission here – a self-described “theater slut”.  I am madly, passionately interested and involved in live theater. In any year, except one with a global pandemic, I probably go to at least 2 performances a week. My tastes are eclectic ranging from Shakespeare or pre-Shakespearean drama to odd avant garde modern pieces under the Bay Bridge or in the Men’s restroom of a military compound. I’m not a playwright – except for one short piece called Virginia Woolf &Virginia Woolf, that has been published and performed. I also read plays to vet them for a small theater in San Francisco. This diverse interest in drama does echo in my poems along with admiration of poems such as Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and his “Porphyria.” All this inspires me to bring characters both real and literary back as persona pieces with a different twist or as poetic portraits. As I write, I’m looking for what may be hidden parts of other lives, as well as some of the hidden parts of my own.

You asked about the “I” and how much of myself ends up in a persona poem. Ah, yes, I need to mention here that I have always known I was an outsider. College in Boston, a life in San Francisco. I’ve treasured this, prized the fact that I don’t quite fit anywhere. That’s part of the reason I was bold enough, years ago, to take on  James Joyce’s Molly Bloom and the amazing soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, I did this to use Freud’s question (Joyce and Freud knew one another’s work): “What do women want to talk about? How women want the power of the word.” Yes, that was me. And yes, when I wrote in the voice of Mary Todd Lincoln, I was filled with rage of my own sitting through a 90 minute, boring intro to the Napa Valley Writer’s Conference – so Mary, after Lincoln’s death – was speaking both with my rage and her loss.

Still, many of the duos of you asked about ended up in an Omnidawn chapbook called Take Two: Film Studies. Then, later, they were republished in my Marsh Hawk book Familiar Tense. In these, all the characters are destined to meet with disaster, to die, or to suffer the humiliation of ignominy. Yes, “characters”, because there tends to be something very theatrical in all of my persona poems. Though many of them are also outsiders, they’re not me. Actually, I’m more prone to fight for change than many of these couples. As a member of what I call the I-Hate-Hamlets, I believe passivity and accepting one’s fate is the worst way to fail or die. With the Take Two duos, I’m mostly a person reinterpreting others’ lives without adding mine. I care about them, about the mistakes they are making. I am afraid for what I know is coming in their lives. As a wife, a mother, a lover, a poet, I am also afraid of everything yet, therefore, afraid, somehow, of nothing. So, hoping not to head toward their fates, I’m always ready to take a risk. In life and as a writer, risk is all.

Mary Mackey: I agree: “risk is all.” What strikes me about the conversation we’ve been having is how we write very different kinds of poetry yet have many aspects in common. So here’s to being outsiders and taking risks: two women exploring the real and surreal, plunging into poetry like white-water canoers who don’t know if there’s going to be another waterfall just around the next bend.

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Mirabai

The Mystical Indian Poet Who Defied Her Family And Married God

By Mary Mackey

Whenever I read the ecstatic love poems of Mirabai, I emerge elated, inspired, and awed. Discussing this great mystical poet is like trying to write a history of the universe on the head of a pin, but I think Mirabai herself would not only have approved of such an attempt; she would have found it quite rational, since she believed that everything in the universe was an emanation of a single, divine consciousness.

Born in the region of Rajasthan in 1498 into a wealthy, royal family, Mira (as she is affectionately known throughout India) was passionately devoted to the wordship of the Hindu  god Lord Krishna whom she sometimes refers to as the “The Dark One.” Every poem Mira wrote was a love poem to Krishna, the the god of compassion, tenderness, and love who, Mira insisted, was her true husband.

I have always admired Mira’s energy, stubbornness, courage, powerful devotion to her own vision of the world, and unrelenting determination to follow her own path to the truth as she saw it. Abandoning her upper class family and all the power, advantages, and social expectations of a woman of her era, she refused marriage and child-bearing, threw away her jewels and silk saris, dressed herself in rags, and wandered alone through Rajasthan dancing and singing the highly-erotic poems she had composed to her divine lover.  

The best English translations of her poems appear in Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (Boston MA: Beacon Press 2004) translated from the Hindi by two of America’s finest poets: Robert Bly and Jane Hirshfield. In Bly’s translation of  “It’s True I Went to the Market,” Mira tell us:

            I went to the market and bought the Dark One . . .

           What I paid was my my social body, my town body,

                     my family body, and all my inherited jewels.

            Mirabai says: The Dark One is my husband now . . .

Mira’s conservative Hindu family, was—to say the least—displeased to have one of their daughters leave home, throw aside all modesty, wander about unaccompanied, write erotic religious poetry, shamelessly dance in the marketplace before a statue of Krishna, and study with a teacher who belonged to the lowest social cast. So they did what any highly conservative family of the time was obliged to do with regard to an errant woman who ignored social conventions: they tried to kill her, not just once but several times sending her goblets of poison and baskets filled with venomous snakes.

Legend has it that when Mira drank the poison, Krishna turned it into nectar, and when she reached into the baskets, the snakes turned into flowers. In any event, she survived her family’s attempt to murder her, went on writing exquisite love poetry to Krishna, mourning him when he was absent, delighting in his return, and bringing joy to her many followers until the moment when, so the story goes, Krishna appeared to her, opened his heart chakra, and she merged with him and disappeared.

Mira’s poems are still sung today all over India. She is a celebrated Bhakti saint, particularly in the north. I read her work often these days, not because I share her worship of Krishna, but because her ecstatic verse inspires me to write poetry that is free of constraints and expectations. I revel in the beauty and power of Mira’s language  and stand in awe of her ability to merge the erotic with the divine and the mystical with the worldly. Like Santa Teresa, Saint John of the Cross, and Rumi, Mira reminds me that there is more to the universe than what we can see or even express in words. As Mira says in her poem “All I Was Doing Was Breathing”: “Without the energy that lifts mountains, how am I to live?”

Mary Mackey’s essay on Mirabai first appeared in the anthology Readers Without Borders 2019/2020, edited by Sharon Bard, Karen Petersen, and J.J. Wilson and published by The Sitting Room, a privately funded Community Library in Penngrove, California. To obtain a copy and read essays by 36 American writers about writers from all over the world whom they admire, you can go to https://www.SittingRoom.org or write to The Sitting Room, P.O. Box 838, Penngrove, CA 94951.

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Rebecca Vincent

Myth and the Environmental Crisis

by Rebecca Vincent

    You’d have to have your head in the sand these days not to notice that we’re in the midst of an epochal environmental crisis. Wildfires lick at our heals while ancient icebergs frozen since the last ice age collapse into the sea (how much longer till we need boats in Manhattan?); glaciers supplying water to millions in Asia simply disappear, more floods, more droughts, more mudslides, and on and on. Twenty-five percent of species on earth are threatened with extinction.  Andy Purvis of the Natural History Museum of London, one of the authors of the UN Biodiversity Report released May 6, 2019, posed the question: “can you imagine how people would be reacting if 25% of all major companies were facing bankruptcy?  Ecologically, that’s where we’re at.”

How can turning to ancient myths help shift where we are in this pivotal moment of life on earth?  What do ancient stories have to tell us that will help light our way toward a more livable and sustainable future?  Most myths we think of in the traditional sense when we use the term “myth” emerged from cultures of the preindustrial world—cultures that were immersed in the natural world; cultures that had a vastly different relationship with nature than we modern humans have today.

Peoples of the past created stories about spirit beings inhabiting the stars because they saw the stars at night glistening in a black sky, unlike most of us today whose night skies are polluted by a dull glow of artificial city lights.  People told stories about spirits and deities of streams, rivers, hillocks, desert oases, ice hummocks, and even water bubbles because these natural entities were an inescapable part of their daily lives.  The natural landscape was a world of sacred beings and relatives. 

We have, in the contemporary urban world, simply gone indoors where we no longer notice the natural phenomena happening outside our dwellings, cars, and work places.  Because we’re hidden inside, we’re collectively blind to the impact we’re having on the natural systems that surround and sustain us—clear cut forests collapsing into mudslides, coastal cities whose beaches have been stripped of protective mangroves swamped by ocean and storms, the desertification of once green lands, the drenching of land and water with toxins, and the trash.  The amount of plastic trash on earth has now surpassed by weight the combined total of all seven billion human beings alive today.

The price of our lack of awareness of natural systems is becoming increasingly hard to avoid or deny.  Our collective attention is being constantly swept into a frenzy of alarm as floods, droughts, hurricanes, fires and other extreme weather events intensify and worsen.  More of us are forced to wonder if these cycles of climate chaos will descend upon our very own doorsteps.  Indeed, according to the United Nations, one in seven humans alive today are fleeing some kind of turmoil, much of that caused by environmental devastation.  In sheer numbers, more humans are presently fleeing climate and societal chaos than at any other time of human life on earth. 

In the  twenty-first century we speak collectively of water and nature as “resources.”  We think of them in terms of their utility in upholding contemporary  societies.  Nature and water have gone from being deities in the pre-industrial past to commodities today.  How can myth help us out of this crisis?  

Myths and stories from pre-industrial times and from living indigenous cultures call our attention back to natural phenomena we have forgotten.  They remind us of a time when nature was not a commodity but instead sacred and populated by holy beings.  Myths remind us of a different way of perceiving and interacting with the natural world than our predominant one of exploitation.  Instead of draining ancient aquifers to frack for oil or flushing the toxic remains of coal mining into slurry, water sources were deemed holy.  People presented gifts to the spirits they perceived as residing over particular water sources.

Salmon, seals, whales, sea otters, and a diverse array of other nonhuman creatures were taken as spouses and viewed as relatives.  Boundaries between species were fluid, and creation stories of myriads of diverse cultures tell of primordial descent from these unions with fish, snakes, and other animals.  Traditional Passamaquoddy myths from the Northeastern US describe the tribe as descending from unions between pollock and humans.  The Arapaco of the lower Uaupes in South America consider their tribe’s origin to be from a union between an anaconda and a human woman.

Myth shows us, by means of contrast, our perceived lack of interconnection with the natural world. Our collective consciousness is no longer oriented around the natural world, nonhuman animals, deities or mythic beings.  Instead, modern consciousness is dominated by technology, machines, buildings, and cars. Of course we cannot simply lift the mantle of ancient beliefs about the holiness of nature and water from earlier times and overlay it on our own.  We’ve grown into another era and cannot simply abandon technology and industry and revert to prior times. But noticing how nature and water have shifted from deity to commodity illuminates the distance that has arisen between people and nature in the modern era.

Tribal elders of the Achuar Tribe of South America say that radical changes in human actions toward nature are not all that is needed to alter humanity’s life-destroying course.  They believe a fundamental change in the collective dream must take place in modern consciousness for any sort of real transformation to occur.

We are at a pivotal moment of life on earth.  The science is clear.  We must change the way we are living together and on this earth, and we must restore a more harmonious, less exploitative relationship with the natural world.  Our understanding of “nature” must transform from one based on utility, one where we define nature as a “resource”, to one based on respect and gratitude. We need a radical change in our collective dream.  

Indigenous peoples around the earth can help lead us.  It is not too late to listen to the voices of those cultures but we must act quickly.   Indigenous earth-based cultures around the world have survived and continue to fight for their existence against the continual assault of mining and utility companies intent upon pillaging their lands and cultures.  As Tara Houska, an Ojibway writer and tribal attorney, points out:

My people are the keepers of the sacred—the last beautiful places, rich ecosystems, and healthy earth left. Eighty percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity didn’t happen by accident. When embedded traditional value systems are interwoven with the living world, stewardship, sustainability, the rights of nature and those yet to come are simply ways of life. Certainly, colonization did its best to wipe those values out of existence, but many of us hold on or revitalize and defend.

The struggles for environmental health and human justice are twin sides of the same coin.  They cannot be waged separately. Indigenous peoples around the earth offer models of harmonious connection with the natural world based on respect and stewardship that can help alter the modern path forward.

According to English folklore, nature spirits would live in a spring, lake, stream, or grove of trees only as long as they were remembered and addressed respectfully; if they were neglected, they would depart and the land and waters would feel soul-less and dead.  This same pattern of story is found in mythic traditions around the world where the spirits of land and water admonish humans to respect them, treat them well, and maintain harmony with the nonhuman world; otherwise drastic and terrible consequences ensue.

The ancient Greeks believed two springs of water were to be found in the netherworld: the waters of forgetting which come from the Lake of Negligence, and the waters of remembrance from the Lake of Memory.  We are standing right at the brink of irreversible change unless we alter our collision course with the natural world.  Let us seize this moment before it is truly too late.  Let us drink once more from the spring of memory and rekindle the ancient awareness of the critical importance of earth and water.  Let us stop destroying the earth and instead salvage the fine web of interconnected life forms.  Youth today demand this change. For any kind of livable future, we must recognize that we are inescapably intertwined with the natural world; that what we do to the earth, we do to ourselves.  Let us turn our attention to the indigenous peoples of this earth and listen to their stories and their struggles.  Let us stop  pillaging our planet and instead launch together into the long work ahead of restoring these relationships and the ecosystems that support all life.

Notes

Andy Purvis quote from PRI, The World, May 6, 2019.

The amount of plastic trash surpassing the total of all human beings alive today from Patagonia, Recycle issue, September 2019, p. 05.

Human migration statistics from Paul Salopek, Walking With Migrants, National Geographic, August, 2019, p. 45. 

Passamaquoddy myth of descent from pollock from a radio series on native music and culture, Oyate ta aloha (Songs of the people) broadcast on WOJB April 10, 2001. www.oyate.com.

The Arapaco origin myth from, Nijel J.H. Smith, The Enchanted Amazon Rainforest, Stories from a Vanishing World. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1996, p. 93.

Pachamama belief about a change in our collective dream from New Dimensions radio interview with Lynn Twist, broadcast on WOJB, April 15, 2001 and also from www.pachamama.org.

Tara Houska passage fromTara Houska on the Voices of Indigenous Elders, LitHub, Sept. 18, https://lithub.com/what-listening-means-in-a-time-of-climate-crisis/). 

English folklore about nature spirits departing if forgotten from Terri Windling, https://www.terriwindling.com.

Ancient Greek belief about two springs of water in the netherworld from Jean Rudhardt, “Water.” Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 15.  Ed. Mircea Eliade.  New York:     Macmillan and Free P, 1987, p. 357.

Rebecca Vincent is a freelance writer and editor  with a PhD in mythology who writes about myth nature, and environmental issues. Her writing has appeared in various publications, anthologies, literary reviews, and blogs.  She has recently launched an online educational program that offers courses in writing, myth, and environmental studies. You can learn more about her and her work and connect with her by visiting her website http://rebecca-vincent.com and  https://www.animarieducation.com/

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Poetic Influences: Mary Mackey on John Keats’s “Negative Capability”

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