Writing with Celia

2020-10-25T22:32:00.008-04:00

#YOUBEYOU

So there’s been this meme going around social media in which women proudly post pictures of their “real” selves: no makeup, no filters, and then you must say how old you really are. It’s supposed to be empowering, and in many ways it is, but something about it has been stuck in my craw for weeks now and I haven’t been able to shake it. What’s wrong with this meme?

For one thing, it strikes me as funny that the women who participate are usually pretty good looking without makeup and for their age. I’ve yet to see a truly hideous picture. And you know they exist. Admit it. Hideousness exists, though it’s impolite to point it out. But I can point it out in 10 seconds by taking a picture of myself, no makeup, just after waking up.

The thing is, that is my private self. That’s what had been stuck in my craw as I observed the meme developing. What do I need to prove by displaying my private self to my 5000 friends? That I am comfortable with the way I look? Of course I am. The way I look when I tidy myself up and put on really good makeup and if somebody takes a picture of me that doesn’t live up to my expectations, use as many filters as I like until I am satisfied.

This meme comes as a reaction to the oppression women face about their looks. If you aren’t young and pretty (read: attractive to men), then you are useless. No more roles for you in movies, Debra Winger. Usually 40 is The End. That’s why this meme is meant to be empowering: Look at me, world, I’m 40 (or 50, or 90) and I love myself for who I am without makeup. Well, I say, good for you.

What the meme is also is an implicit criticism of women who wear makeup and otherwise alter their appearance. So if I color my gray now, I’ve caved to the patriarchy, I’m not being myself. I must let my hair be natural and have my face be clean in order to qualify as real . . . .

Hell no. That’s just another set of rules. Freedom isn’t the exchanging of one set of rules for another (see The Who), it is the absence of rules. I’m publishing a book next year. It requires an author pic. When I suggested to some of my friends that I might use a picture of myself created with FaceApp, they were horrified. Admittedly, with something like FaceApp you can alter yourself to such a degree that you suddenly become Kim Kardashian, but even Kim Kardashian isn’t Kim Kardashian. Go chase her down somewhere and see what she looks like up close. You’re likely to be disappointed. That’s what my friends said about my controversial author pic (one not as altered as the one I posted on Facebook). What if you give a reading? Won’t people be disappointed by what you look like for real?

There are so many things wrong with this line of reasoning that it’s a challenge to address them all, but here’s a few. Why is my unaltered self more real than my made-up self? What is reality? If I wear sunscreen to prevent wrinkles, am I destroying my real self? If I comb my hair? How far do we have to go before we can be real? Another problem is the issue of disappointment. So you’re disappointed by the way I look after having seen an idealized version of myself in a picture? Maybe you shouldn’t put so much stock in the way I look. How about letting me open my mouth and speak my mind before you decide I’m disappointing? At the end of the day, this “real me” meme is still about judging women for their looks. You don’t see men participating, do you?

So I propose a new meme. A #YOUBEYOU meme, where we all post pictures of ourselves that we like, whether you have ten pounds of makeup on or not, whether you’re flopping around all over the place or wrapped up like a taquito in Spanx, or whether you’re just as the camera captured you or you’ve used twenty filters to get there. You be you, and I promise I won’t be disappointed.

I've Got a New Blog!

2015-07-30T13:08:00.002-04:00

Perhaps the last thing poor, neglected Writing with Celia needs is competition, but I decided to start a new blog about eating vegan in Miami, and really there was no way to justify it on this blog. Please check it out at miamiveganreports.blogspot.com!

Easter in Sarasota

2015-04-05T13:52:00.000-04:00

Such a treat to celebrate Easter in Sarasota, at St. Michael the Archangel on Midnight Pass. This was my parish all during those amazing summers of my childhood, when we would spend as much as a month on Siesta Key. Now I only make it up here for a week during Spring Break, but it’s always nice to return. I had never been here for Easter, and it was a great celebration—people were packed in so tight they kept the doors open, and they stood outside. Another mass was going on simultaneously in the parish hall, and the parking lot—a good-sized lot—overflowed onto the grass and the street and down the street as well, to meet the other overflowing parking lot of the Episcopal Church a few blocks away. It took almost half an hour for Holy Communion. I’m no good with numbers, but I’d say there were about 3,000 people packed into that rather small, T-shaped church. After mass they crowded around the altar, taking pictures. My mom and I got tired of waiting for a front shot and took one off to the side.

It’s nice to see so many people at church, although “Big Mass” days—Easter, Palm Sunday, Christmas—are always bittersweet, simultaneously a reminder of how many Catholics there are but also of how many of them are missing the rest of the year. Some of them hang in there for a couple of weeks, but eventually once we’re deep into ordinary time it’s just the usual old crew once more, scrambling to get enough readers, ushers, and Eucharistic ministers for a simple ceremony in front of half-empty pews.

So it’s always a thoughtful moment for that old crew to see the oceans, the vast oceans of people who are at least nominally Catholic. What brings them in on the Big Mass days? Some sort of secular enthusiasm for Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny? What makes them leave? Lack of time, I’m sure many would say. Who has time to go to mass once a week. That’s just a cop out, of course. There’s plenty things most people have time for once a week, like hitting the mall or catching a movie, that take more time. It’s not that. What is it, then?

I think I’ve already given my best theory: people are much more willing to identify as Catholic (or Episcopalian, or Baptist, or whatever—this is not solely a Catholic issue) when they have the secular enthusiasm of a holiday to validate that identification. Of course, that secular validation has an expiration date, and so once the shelves clear of tinsel and non-flammable multicolored Easter grass, they stop coming. It’s one thing to come to mass when Payless has a sale on Easter shoes to let you know everyone’s going to be doing it, and a whole ‘nother to do so some nameless Sunday in August when everybody else is back-to-school shopping.

I realize this is no revelation, but I felt compelled to comment on it sitting there in church (my mother and I were the last two to get seats, a row of folding chairs set up in front of the first pew) surrounded by what seemed like all of Siesta Key. It felt so good to see so many people participating in what is usually such an exclusive affair that I sometimes wonder whether me and the other fifty or so stray cats that show up to regular mass back home at St. Dominic’s are the last Catholics on earth. Now that I work at an actual Catholic school (St. Thomas is technically Catholic, but in such an optional way that you could spend your four years there and never really notice it), I get more of a feeling of community, but by and large to be Catholic, to be religious at all, usually feels like being a minority. In the movies we are always child molesters, on TV we are nonexistent, and pretty much everywhere else we are freaks and extremists, people who hate gays and fear sex. Yet there we were on a fine Sunday morning in paradise, by the thousands, as normal as they come: babies, elders in wheelchairs, families of two or of ten, some dressed up, some not so much, but all of us present and accounted for.

How would the popular conception of Catholics change if more of us who identify as Catholic did so full-time? Would we be able to correct the media image that so readily associates religion with extremism? If the whole world could see what I saw today, would we be so afraid to embrace our religion more than simply on holidays? Because it is fear that keeps us away, fear that ties us to the pack mentality of going to church only when everybody else is doing it. I see that fear today on Facebook, so many posts saying “Happy Easter, to those of you who celebrate” or words to that effect. We are afraid to offend. As if accidentally wishing a Happy Easter to someone who might be Jewish or atheist is grounds for war. We are suspicious of one another—we assume an agenda behind a holiday greeting, feelings of superiority or privilege. We assume hostility.

Here’s something this cubanita has learned about freedom of religion: it doesn’t mean freedom from religion. Doesn’t mean we all keep our religion to ourselves, as if we were doing something wrong. It should mean everybody gets to do whatever they want, religious or otherwise, without judgment or interference. That’s what it felt like today, amid that sea of people. It felt like freedom, and it felt good. Happy Easter!

Publication News

2014-05-19T16:38:00.000-04:00

It's summer! That means time to catch up, and I have to begin with a string of publications that I'm totally stoked about. Here they are, in the order in which they got to my house:

Zymbol published one of my "wacky poems"! Take that, Rafael (my husband, who first referred to my poems as such)! In all seriousness, it's pretty hard to publish experimental poetry, in my experience, at least, but Zymbol--just a few issues old--is especially interested in symbolism and surrealism. Thus, "Magic Trick," my highly experimental nonce sonnet crown, finally found a home. A great publication story: originally I sent them a bunch of shorter poems, having totally given up on the idea of anybody even considering a sonnet crown. On a whim, I decided to mention that I had a sonnet crown to send if they were interested. Magically, they didn't want any of the poems I had selected, but they asked to see the sonnet crown, and they liked it! It's a gorgeous issue, with haunting artwork from Carrie Anne Baade and an amazing piece called "Ways to Become a Druid" by Larry Lefkowitz. You can get a copy of this issue here.

I'm also in Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century, a new collection of poems in my favorite form. Edited by Carolyn Beard Whitlow and Marilyn Krysl, the anthology also features an afterword by Lewis Putnam Turco! The 152-page book features sestinas on Americana; Art; Love and Sex; Memory, Contemplation, Retrospection, and Death; The Natural World; Sestinas about Sestinas; Sestinas with Irregular Teleutons; and Unconventional Sestinas. Mine, "Lizards," which originally appeared in Poets and Artists, opens the "Natural World" section (note to aspiring poets: change your last name to something beginning with "A"--you have no idea how important that tiny detail is!). I could spend days dropping names here on all the amazing people in this anthology (you can read the ToC here), but the only one I will mention is Maxine Kumin--got into an anthology with you one more time, Maxine.

I've got two poems in Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books, edited by Bryan D. Dietrich and Marta Ferguson. Another great publication story: "Wonder Woman Goes through Menopause" actually won a prize back in 2008, but the awarding magazine, HereThere, collapsed before publishing it. The other poem, "Superman Confronts Me about Dinner," is one of my Lois Lane poems. (Someday I hope these will all be together somewhere, even if it's just a chapbook.) Both are in a section of the anthology called "The Bronze Age," about aging superheroes. Lots of familiar names in this anthology, too, so I won't play favorites by naming just a few. Suffice it to say this is now the definitive anthology on superhero poems. Check out the ToC here.

Lastly, my old favorite, two new poems in the latest issue of Iodine, which also happens to be the 15th anniversary issue. Iodine published my first poem ever, and I hope it will publish my last. I've come to trust editor Jonathan K. Rice's judgment, who convinced me that "Never" is actually a very good poem, even though I wasn't sure when I sent it to him. I also have another sonnet, "Maria's Sonnet," in this issue.

I've also gotten a poem accepted for How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens, although that won't be out until next year, The ToC is already up at Upper Rubber Boot Books, however, so you can get a preview here. It will reprint "Malibu Barbie Moves to Mars," which originally appeared in Eye to the Telescope. I'm excited--this officially makes me a sci-fi poet!

Hoping that the summer will bring more opportunities for writing and sending out stuff. I have been neglecting my writing, a lapse for which there is no excuse. I did have a great creative writing class last semester, so I am raring to go, and hoping to get this blog back at the center of things again, so check in every once in a while and feel free to nag me if you think I'm letting the summer go by without posting. I would love to hear what you think of any of these pubs if you check them out. My thanks to all the editors who have given me some much-needed encouragement. To all my anthology and issue buddies, I lift a virtual glass of sugar-free lemonade: cheers!

Lisset's Mother's Legendary Croquetas

2013-08-22T16:21:00.000-04:00

Many moons ago, I was known by my middle name, and my mother packed my school lunches with homemade goodies I would share with those lucky enough to be called my friends. In time, one lunchbox staple became the stuff of legend: Las croquetas de Sonia. A quarter century later, people (okay, maybe just my old pals Rita and Shirlene) still clamor for the secret recipe. Behold:

4 tbsp. butter

1 small onion, chopped

4 tbsp. flour (any kind)

1 cup milk

1 tsp. salt

¼ tsp. each pepper and nutmeg

1 tbsp. lemon juice

2 cups ground beef, cooked (just browned or lightly seasoned leftovers is fine)

eggs and bread crumbs for breading

oil for frying (Mazola, one assumes)

1. Melt butter with onions. Add flour and milk and stir until thickened.

2. Add salt, pepper, nutmeg, and lemon juice.

3. Add ground beef.

4. Mold mixture into croquetas.

5. Bread by dipping first in egg, then flour.

6. Fry until golden brown.

Now that we are vegan, she continues to make them, and they are even better. An easy series of subs: vegan butter for butter (we use Earth Balance), unflavored soy milk for milk, soy ground beef for the dead stuff (Boca crumbles are the best), and water mixed with a little of the flour for the eggs. You can also bread with plain flour if you don't find vegan bread crumbs.

Please, do not share this recipe with just anyone. They must be deserving.

From the Swamps to the Skies: Preston L. Allen Talks about Every Boy Should Have a Man

2013-05-27T14:24:00.000-04:00

My homie Preston Allen’s new novel, Every Boy Should Have a Man (Akashic, 2013) is the most interesting book I’ve read this year. Since it’s still only May, let me rephrase that: it’s the most interesting book I’ve read in a long, long time. It’s not the sort of novel I often read; it’s neither realism, nor sci-fi, nor fantasy, nor speculative fiction, but its own thing, what could perhaps be called an epic fable or fairy tale. Regardless, what has most impressed me is not its style, although it is unique, but its heart—this is a serious book, a throwback to the polemical novels of Isaac Asimov or Philip K. Dick, with a little Jonathan Swift thrown in for good measure.

The confusing title refers to the book’s premise: a world controlled by a race of giants called Oafs, where humans are considered lesser animals. Some roam in the wild, feral but smart, sort of like industrious chimps. Some are kept as pets by the oafs, and these come in dumb or fancy varieties that can talk, sing, or even play instruments. Some are eaten as meat. These categories are not well-defined; an expensive “talking” or “musical” man can be a wealthy oaf’s pet one day and dinner the next if circumstances change. The novel’s main character is a “female man” called Red (her name changes as her owners change, but it is always some variation of Red because of her hair and “frecks,” or freckles), a talking, musical man who is born to a female man owned by a poor boy oaf.

Preston tells the story in an almost fairytale voice, interspersing the main narrative with tales told by bards as songs and passages from “Great Scripture.” The oaf world seems pre-industrial, since they live in villages, and so one has the impression of reading something medieval. A philologist would have a field day with this novel—in the oaf world, bears have become beos, horses hoss, cows bovin. Humans are simply referred to as “man,” whether male or female. In their degraded state, humanity’s gender has become irrelevant except for breeding. The oafs go to war and hunt species to decimation. All of these factors contribute to a morally and ethically complex text that questions the boundaries of humanity, gender, and sexuality. What makes one species superior to another? What responsibilities—to each other and to the planet—come with such hierarchies? Is there some greater force that can survive the mistakes of those in power?

I decided to ask Preston some questions of my own. Though his last novel, Jesus Boy (Akashic, 2010) was a huge success—one of Oprah Winfrey’s top ten of the year!—it turns out Preston still has the time to remember the little mans he once knew.

Q: In the acknowledgments, you credit the Earth Ethics Institute at Miami Dade College, “whose class in the swamps inspired this book.” Could you tell us more about that class and how it inspired you?

A: At the college where I teach, we instructors take classes from time to time for such things as maintenance of rank, promotion, and most importantly to stay current in our field. As you know, in our country things change rapidly. One wouldn’t want the teacher to know less than the student.

In my conservative field, English, the only rapid change we see is in the area of technology, and I had taken most of the techy courses that were out there at the time. So I got to thinking that I might do something different this go round. There was a course called something like “biodiversity and sustainability.”

Ah, I was a schoolboy in liberal, blue-state Massachusetts in the late sixties during the ecology phase, the country’s original “green” phase. Ah, my eyes were already misting over with nostalgia. Ah, the good old days in Boston. Ah, my longhaired, love bead, tie-dye, perhaps high, hippie teachers. Ah, their optimism. Studying nature in a classroom? That would be nice.

Nice? Nice? Are you kidding! How, oh how, did I miss the words “total immersion?” Just great. Nature would be my classroom.

So here I was in the Everglades up to my knees in mossy water, on my guard for alligators, snakes, and other creeping things. All these dangerous animals.

And then it hit me. Man is an animal too. And dangerous.

It wasn’t an original thought, and to be honest I had had it before. But never with such power and such light.

In this ecosystem, the alligator is the top predator, but man is the topmost predator of all. Man can take the alligator and turn it into a purse, an amusement in a zoo, an exotic meal. Now what if there were some intelligent species of creature above man on the food chain?

I remembered as a child in Boston coming home from the pond with a gift for my mother that I withdrew from my pocket dead. Tadpoles. And I wondered what species of boy could go down to the pond, pick up a handful of humans and at home withdraw them from his pocket dead.

What species of boy could bring one of us home on a makeshift leash only to hear his mother say, “Get that stinky creature out of this house! It’s mangy and full of disease.”

And what species of boy would pout and say in protest, “But mom, every boy should have a man?” And that was it.

As the wildly flying birds sang above my head, I envisioned the novel from beginning to end, the many issues I could explore, the biblical sound of it, the title, everything.

I had to get it down on paper before I ruined it by over thinking. When class was over, I sped home.

Q: The plight of mans—kept as pets but eaten as meat as well—echoes the ethical sophistry of our own society, in which we treat pets as family members and yet eat other animals without a second thought. One of the last facets of the Oafs before their destruction is that they become almost exclusively carnivores: “ . . . for oafs in those latter days had become monstrous indeed. They had resorted to a diet almost exclusively of meat (chicken, goat, hog, hoss, bovin, beo, dog, cat, rat, and man-meat whenever they could get it).” Do these allegories reflect your own personal philosophy? Is EBSHAM a vegan manifesto?

A: Vegan manifesto. Me? I’m not sure. Maybe my mind wandered in that direction.

Yes, lately I have been thinking about my diet. I tend to believe that it is more animalistic to eat meat that . . . “animalistic” is not the word I want . . . I think that if we devolve to a more primitive state we might tend to eat more meat.

Look carefully at the list as I wrote it, the order of the animals. The list begins with animals that usually are eaten for food, then it goes beyond the usual, taking in dangerous beasts as well as vermin and those we consider pets. Finally, it ends out of desperation with cannibalism.

Vegan manifesto. Me? I’m not sure. The mans in the novel are herbivores and they do inherit the earth, I guess. I still eat meat, though not as much as I used to, and when I do, I think about the animal that gave its life for my meal. Does that count? At some point I am certain that I will give up eating meat entirely, though mostly for my health and not so much for any other reason.

Q: EBSHAM strikes me as a profoundly religious book, rocketing from a kind of biblical pantheism to a condemnation of the role of religion in justifying war and violence. This is a book with a mission, and I don’t want to oversimplify by calling it environmentalist, globalist, or humanist. Could you comment on what you’re hoping readers will be moved to consider by this book?

A: First of all, I'm hoping that my readers will enjoy the ride. The sugar in the medicine. The dancing and the clapping at the prayer meeting. In fact, I hope the message doesn't overwhelm.

I want them to feel emotion as they're reading. A connection with the characters. I want them to read it the way children listen to a fairy tale. The awe, the magnificence, the magic--that's what I want them to be engaged by.

Maybe they'll stop and think about what it means later on, but when they're reading I want them to be scared of the wolf, amused by the foolish decisions of the two little pigs who did not build their houses out of bricks, and nod their heads knowingly when the house of straw is blown away by a huff and a puff.

We adults know what it means. Haste makes waste. Quick work is not the best work. Hard work pays off in the end. We've heard our parents tell us this before. Just not in a story.

And a story, first and foremost, must be a story. So here we have a boy who wants a pet. When he gets the pet, he wants to show him off. When he shows him off, the real owner shows up and just like that, the pet is gone.

Like those kids sitting on mats around their teacher, we nod our heads knowingly. That's what happens when you show off.

Of course, this pet is a man . . . That must mean something. Hmmmmm.

We are adults. We know what it means. Be kind to your planet, mans. Be kind to your animals, mans. Be kind to each other, mans. Learn from the oafs, mans, or you'll end up just as extinct as they are despite your sacred texts, ancient wisdom, good intentions, whatever.

The earth is forgiving and resilient, but it can only take so much. We've been told this before. Just not in a story.

Ah heck, we've been told this many, many times before in a story. It's my hope that this time we'll listen. Those Boston hippies back in the day made me quite the optimist.

Q: For lack of a better term, I’m calling EBSHAM an “epic fable,” which to me best describes your tone, the straightforward neo-biblical language and musical passages sung by “the bard” that mimic oral narratives. Did this approach come to you from the novel’s inception, or was it a conscious decision you made later? I’m curious about how difficult it was to sustain it without slipping into the everyday speech of, say, All or Nothing.

A: Yes, it's a fable, and hopefully people will take it as an important one.

From its very inception, as you put it, the novel was that way. I wanted it to sound the way it came to me in the swamp. It's a very simple message, really. A very simple story.

I think the problem these days is that many important messages and concepts are written in language that is so complex as to be misunderstood or deliberately misinterpreted.

In Richard Attenborough's epic film, Gandhi, there is a scene after the violence of Muslim/Hindu riot, when a guilt-ridden Hindu comes to the mahatma, falls to his knees, and fervently pleads something like, "O, Great soul, help me. I'm going to hell. I've killed a child!"

And Gandhi responds in a gentle voice something like, "There is a way out of hell. Go into the streets where there are many children whose parents have been killed in this violence. Find a boy who is the age of the one you killed. Take him into your home and raise him as your own."

When the kneeling Hindu murderer nods his agreement and begins to rise, Gandhi stops him with a stern admonishment. "But, it must be a Muslim child! And you must raise him as a Muslim!"

There is power in simplicity. If we lived by those simple words, there would be no more war. Go back and look at the "Ten Commandments." Simple words. People understood them. People knew what they had to do to be good; people knew what they had to do to be bad.

Compare the Commandments to the many chapters devoted to the hundreds of laws and corollaries and addenda to the laws of Moses in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Their number and complexity make our tax code look like a nursery rhyme.

Now compare them to the simple parables of Jesus. I'm not preaching. I'm just saying.

Like I said before, I knew immediately how the book would sound. Furthermore, I was prepared for this sound by my upbringing in the holiness church of my childhood. I often joke that I'm bilingual as are most of us who grew up in the black church. I speak English and King James Bible.

The real difficulty (wink, wink) was in keeping the everyday speech in All or Nothing and especially Jesus Boy from slipping into the King James.

Bible stories, fairy tales, parables, fables, and this novel all contain important lessons told in simple language. They follow the KISS principle.

Keep It Simple, Stupid!

Q: You write about sex, religion, gambling. You write short stories, poetry, novels. You write realism, erotica, and now—what to call EBSHAM? Speculative fiction? Do you ever worry that readers will be bewildered by your choices, or, perhaps, that editors and critics will not follow you on such a winding road?

A: Thus far, one may argue, that I have been writing so as not to be accused of self-caricature.

At the same time I've been kicking myself for my inability or my reluctance to write sequels.

During my erotica phase, after I had written my first short piece "Nadine's Husband" for Brown Sugar (Plume Penguin), I was called on to write a second and said I could not. I had exhausted all of the erotic content in my heart. I always write from the heart.

But my editor waved a good chunk of money at me, and suddenly I felt my erotic heart pumping in my chest.

When I finished the story, my editor read it and said, "Where is Nadine? Where is Pam? These are not the same characters."

Groan.

So I went back to the computer to accomplish a task that seemed to me boring and unpleasant, if not downright impossible. To revisit the scene of the crime after the crime has been solved. Where was the joy in that? Where was the inspiration? It seemed like too much work. It seemed too much like work. But money is money.

Beat on, my starving artist's heart. O, the things we do for money.

What I gave her next was met with the same complaint. "Where is Nadine? Where is Pam?"

This time I had an answer:

"This is Nadine's lover's wife. She suspects that he is cheating with Nadine, and so she sleeps with her best male friend who has been in love with her since childhood. The best friend she sleeps with is also the best friend of her husband, Nadine's lover. In other words, the lover is sleeping with his best friend's wife. In other, other words, the lover, the wife he is sleeping with, and the husband who is sleeping with Nadine were all best friends as children, get it?"

She got it even if you don't, and more importantly, my heart was pumping for these new characters and this fresh scenario.

Nadine be damned. "Nadine's Husband part 2" would proceed without you.

She did, however, show up in parts 3 and 4. With all that money being waved around, one can only delay the inevitable for so long.

But it taught me something about myself and about my writing process in general. For me, writing is effortless when I write from inspiration. When I write for work, I write well, but it is, in fact, work. And I don't necessarily find it pleasurable.

Work writing resides in the head, from which it I can be pulled when needed . . . Because of practice, because of my academic training perhaps, I am able to do this efficiently.

Inspired writing resides in the heart, out of which it copiously flows once the heart is tapped.

I think that with this story, I may have found a key that may tap my heart at will. I'm not promising sequels, or anything like that, but I'm not ruling them out either.

There are quite a few more issues that can be explored in that magical realm above the firmament.

Amen! I must admit, I’m jealous. If there’s anything one can learn from Preston’s experience (should anyone remember this blog’s original mission!), it’s the importance of keeping yourself open to new passions and writing with them whenever possible. Thanks, Preston, for these thoughtful answers. May the bard continue singing.

A recipient of a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in Fiction and winner of the Sonja H. Stone Prize in Literature, Preston L. Allen is the author of the short story collection Churchboys and Other Sinners (Carolina Wren Press 2003) and the novels All or Nothing (Akashic 2007) and Jesus Boy (Akashic 2010), which "O the Oprah Magazine" listed as one of "Ten More Titles to Read Now," Dennis Lehane called "a tender masterpiece," and about which the New York Times proclaimed, "no one does church sexy like Allen."

His short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals and have been anthologized in Miami Noir, Las Vegas Noir, Brown Sugar, Wanderlust, Making the Hook Up, and Here We Are: an Anthology of South Florida Writers.
His latest novel, Every Boy Should Have a Man (Akashic 2013), which has been called by Booklist "Imaginative, versatile, and daring," is a story about, well, er, um, boys who own mans as pets.
He holds a BA in English from the University of Florida and an MFA in creative writing from Florida International University. He teaches writing at Miami Dade College.

Cooking with Celia: Mango-Papaya-Tempeh Salad

2013-05-15T13:43:00.000-04:00

One can hardly call this a "recipe"--it's more like an idea, since it's just a bunch of things Rafael and I tossed together today for lunch. But it was soooooooo delicious! Behold:

We have an excess of mangoes--my godmother's neighbor just lets them rot on the ground, and we have been trying to rescue as many as possible. So we cubed some. We also had a giant papaya we've been trying to eat, so we cubed that, too.
Next, we sautéed some tempeh in olive oil, seasoning it with salt, pepper, and garlic powder.
To continue with the tropical theme, we added some delish toasted coconut flavored almonds.

Croutons have been a real challenge lately--it's insane how difficult it is to get ready-made vegan croutons. Even when they don't have cheese or butter as a flavoring, they sneak in dairy somewhere in the ingredient list. We found these organic ones at Whole Foods.

What we are mad crazy about this summer is the line of vegan salad dressings from Follow Your Heart. We've only been able to try those few Whole Foods deigns to carry, but the Honey Mustard is insane. It's still vegan--the honey is really a mixture of brown rice syrup, chicory syrup, maple syrup, and natural flavors.

All this over some nice romaine. Yay summer.

Cooking with Celia: Seitan Beer Stew

2013-05-11T23:07:00.000-04:00

Had some wonderful seitan stew from Whole Foods a couple of weeks ago, and when I went back to get more (okay, okay, when I sent Rafael to get more . . . ), they didn't have it. I decided to make my own, which, of course, involves beer. Rule #1 of cooking with Celia: if it can be cooked in beer, it's better. I used a Coors nonalcoholic, which is what we have around in these sad times, but you can use whatever you like to drink. You could also sub 10 oz. of low-sodium veggie broth (reduce salt by half if regular), but then it wouldn't be "beer" stew, would it?

Serves: 4-6

Prep time: less than 15 minutes

Cook time: 1 hour

¼ cup canola oil

6 cloves garlic, minced

½ cup chopped onion

1 tsp. dry rosemary

1 tsp. dry thyme

1 tsp. cumin powder

1 tsp. dry oregano

1 tsp. salt (1/2 tsp. if using regular soy sauce)

½ tsp. - 1 tsp. black pepper

6 oz. sliced portobello mushrooms

½ each red, green, yellow, & orange bell peppers, slivered (or two whole peppers of different colors)

16 oz. ready-to-eat seitan

2 tbsp. low-sodium soy sauce

1 tbsp. maple syrup

1 bottle beer

2 tbsp. flour

In a large pan, heat oil over medium heat. Sauté garlic until light brown. Add onions and spices. Sauté until translucent. Add mushrooms, cover, and simmer for about 5 minutes until mushrooms are slightly cooked. The mushrooms will release some moisture when they are ready.
Add peppers and simmer, covered, another 5 minutes or so until the peppers are wilted.
Add seitan and simmer, covered, another 5 minutes. Add soy sauce, syrup, and beer. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Cover and simmer on low for 30 minutes.
In a small bowl, mix flour with about ½ cup of stew liquid with a fork. Keep adding liquid from the stew and mixing until you have a thick, lump-free mixture. Add to the stew and stir. Simmer for about another 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. The stew is ready when the liquid is the consistency of gravy. To speed up the process, simmer uncovered.

Serve over rice, with a nice green salad and, of course, more cold beer.

Further Thoughts on Women’s Empowerment

2013-03-19T23:08:00.000-04:00

In my last post, I uploaded the text of a speech I gave last Friday at a women’s empowerment luncheon at St. Thomas University. I was limited to ten to fifteen minutes for speaking, however, and so there was much that I wish I could have included that I didn’t have the chance to say on the topic of balancing work and family life. I thought I’d include some of those details now.

The subject has been much on my mind of late. Though I don’t have any (human) children, I have had an avalanche of bad luck in the last couple of years with my pets, health crises and losses that have more than tugged at what little professional attention I have. Moreover, my father’s recent full retirement last year, which I mentioned at the end of my speech, has really thrown the whole family into disorder. His inability to adjust to life at home—scratch that: the confrontation with the fact that he had no life at home to retire to after a life of unchecked workaholism, has really opened my eyes to the necessity of building a balanced life before it is too late.

And then there is the return of Educating Rita to the syllabus. It’s not the first time I’ve started my English composition and literature class with this film, but it had been a while. I thought I’d bring it back this year, which is also the thirtieth anniversary of the film’s release (the film is based on the 1981 play of the same name by Willy Russell, who also wrote the screenplay). The story, somewhat of a retelling of Pygmalion, involves the quest of the main character, Rita, to go to an Open University program to study literature. She is a working-class young woman, and sees this chance at an education as a way of “finding herself” and living a more fulfilled life. It’s a wonderful way to start an introductory literature class, since one can only hope that students might be infected by Rita’s enthusiasm for books, or at least be better able to understand what a literary education might offer apart from three required credits.

It’s also just a damn fine movie, one of those that always yields a little something more the more times you watch it. I saw it for the first time in the theaters when it came out. I was only ten years old, and who knows what effect it might have had on me. Since then I’ve seen it countless times. At first I identified with Rita as a student, and now I identify with Frank, her tutor. This last time I saw it, however, I was really struck by the pressure Rita gets to have a baby. She’s married, and twenty-six, and so it’s expected. I’ve always read it as a common expectation given her class. None of her family sees any value in the kind of education Rita wants; their definition of happiness is work that pays enough to sustain a family, and the joy of “eight different kinds of beer” at the local pub.

This last time, however, I saw the situation with more clarity. It’s not so much that her family believes that once Rita has a baby she’ll realize the happiness to be found in that, and abandon the fruitless search for a kind of happiness they can’t understand. Rather, it’s a form of control. The relentless pressure to have a baby her family exerts is a tacit acknowledgement of the fact that having one will tie her down and so take up her time and energies that she will have no choice but to give up her studies. It’s a threat Rita understands, which is why she secretly continues taking birth control pills months after she’s told her husband, Denny, that she’s stopped.

Maybe my new, darker reading of this situation was colored by having coincidentally seen Life Happens, which I mentioned in my speech, more or less around the same time. As I said in the talk, it’s the story of two young women, one of whom has a baby. The entire conflict of the film is the struggle of the new mother, Kim, to keep some semblance of her former, pre-baby life intact while still being able to be a mother, even though she seems to be blessed in a variety of ways many new mothers are not. For one thing, the baby is unusually quiet, well-behaved, and healthy. She carries him around on one of those papoose contraptions, and he doesn’t so much as squirm. I’ve seen chihuahuas who put up more of a transportation challenge than this kid does. Furthermore, she has a job, and doesn’t seem to be in any sort of dire economic struggle. Finally, she lives with two roommates, who could potentially help her with her son.

The problem is that no one wants to help her. Her roommates are resentful of any time she asks that they take care of her son, and the message of the film is that Kim must learn to “take responsibility” for her child herself. Her boss is such a total witch that she pitches a fit when Kim arrives at work with her baby strapped to her back. She threatens to fire her if she ever does it again, and refuses to support her in her idea for a new business.

Kim’s story might have been Rita’s story had Rita caved in to the pressure to have a child. The message young women are getting is not that they have choice, but that they must choose, which is not quite the same. An ultimatum is not a choice, and the message of a film such as Life Happens is that if you “choose” to be a mother, every other choice is off the table: dating, friends, work—whoosh! Gone.

It’s a severe punishment, to say the least. I had another relevant experience around the same time, during the first week of classes. I was already about fifteen minutes into class when a woman walked in with two children, a girl about seven and a boy about four. She did not ask if she could bring them with her—she just sat down in the back of the class with them. I was a little miffed at the lack of courtesy, but I regularly allow my students to bring their children to class as long as they ask first and the children behave, and so I let it go. These kids were louder than any I had allowed before, however. You could hear them all throughout my lecture, talking to each other as they colored some pictures they had brought.

One never realizes how much one talks about sex until one is in front of a couple of kids. I was introducing the concept of cultural studies to my students, and I found myself embroiled in a discussion of Twilight. I wanted to make the point that although it isn’t “great literature,” it is nevertheless a text that reveals a lot about us from a cultural studies perspective, especially about the sexuality of teenagers. Every time I would have said “Edward and Bella having sex,” I substituted “Edward and Bella making whoopee.” Other times I have had children in my class, I’ve warned the adult that I won’t censor myself on their account, and that has been part of the agreement. This time, however, there was no such previous agreement, and damned if the little girl wasn’t paying attention, which had also never happened before. I was trying to get my students to understand the concept of the canon, and when I asked whom they thought was the greatest writer who ever lived (hoping they’d say Shakespeare, which would lead to a discussion of Dead [white, male] Poets), the little girl shot her hand up and yelled “Me!”

I never saw that woman again, or her kids. By the next class meeting the class had been canceled due to low enrollment (alas, if only the kids had registered . . .). I admit I breathed a sigh of relief even while bemoaning the loss of $2K. She’d been late, she’d made a huge breach in classroom protocol without so much as an apology, and she’d spent the entire class with one ear on me and another on those kids. What kind of a student could she possibly be? Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t enjoy flunking students or being demanding. I had foreseen a semester-long struggle with a fraught woman and a pair of rowdy kids in the back of the class I wouldn’t have the heart to throw out.

I am deeply ashamed now of my selfish reaction.

Who was that poor woman? She seemed older—I wouldn’t be surprised if those had been her grandchildren instead of her children, which means there are two fraught and beleaguered women in this story. Or maybe she was just one of those women who bought into the idea of having children late in life, when she’s “established,” so that it will be “easier” to take care of them.

What a crock of shit.

The truth is she, or her daughter, had no place for those children. The public schools were out for a “teacher workday,” and so these kids had no place to be. Whose responsibility were they? Let’s first look at this question from our current point of view. They are the mother’s, no? She should have arranged for appropriate childcare. If she couldn’t, then she should have stayed home and taken care of them, instead of burdening us with them, impinging on our rights as child-free people to live freely and quietly. And, if she could neither arrange for adequate childcare nor staying home, then maybe she shouldn’t have had them in the first place.

One of the great ironies of the widespread use of effective birth control and the legalization of abortion is that it has made the “choice” to have a child seem downright ornery. Though these developments may have somewhat freed women from the unfair double standard and allowed them to have sexual lives outside of marriage without the threat of unwanted pregnancy, they have burdened those women who “choose” to have children with an unusual notion of responsibility. You’ve made your crib, now lie in it, we seem to think.

Well, if it takes a village to raise a child, then the whole village should be responsible for him or her as well. Why do schools let out hours before offices and factories and other workplaces do, while we bemoan the fact that children aren’t learning enough and need to spend more time in school? Why must workplaces have ramps and elevators and special parking spaces for the disabled, but not so much as a small room with a nanny for the mothers who work there? The other day on Facebook someone was circulating a story about companies who are now including “nap rooms” for their sleep-deprived employees. This is yet another effort to squeeze out the last drop of a worker’s lifeblood on the job, something that’s already anti-family, anti-woman, but also a slap in the face. Now you can nap at work, but your baby can’t.

Another stupid irony. If mothers could have their children cared for safely, preferably somewhere close enough to check in on them when they wanted, they’d be the most productive workers in the world. There should be babies in boardrooms, in offices, and, yes, in classrooms. Looking back on that first day of class, how bad was it having those kids there? My students actually strained to listen to me. Hell, that’s never happened before! I’ve lectured through furniture being moved on the floor above, through construction outside the window, through the sound of a movie being played next door. I’ve had my students distracted by their laptops, their phones, and each other. I’ve had grown students I’ve had to silence for happily chatting in the back of the classroom as if they were in third grade. Maybe if they’d been taught to behave in public with adults, instead of constantly being sequestered with other children, they’d have known better by the time they got to college.

We all need to take responsibility for the care and raising of children. We all need to adjust our behaviors to suit them, to include them, as much as possible, in our world. To allow anyone who wants to the freedom to have a child without getting the leper treatment. Yet another irony is how much lip service we pay to the wonders of children. Ask anyone about children and gold stars will shoot out of their mouths. They’re our future, our hope, blah, blah, blah. But when it comes to the crying, the squirming, the running around, the endless questions—you know, the hard part—well, then, that’s the mother’s job.

Maybe mom wants other jobs, too, and we have to free her up, not by making her “choose” one way or another, but by supporting her and sharing some of the burdens of childcare. If anyone should start the ball rolling, it should be women. To go back to Life Happens, it’s horrible that Kim’s boss, the one who threatens to fire her for bringing her baby to work, is a woman. We need to support one another, as women, for all that women can and choose to do, not divide into castes like some horrible nightmare out of a Margaret Atwood novel.

To return to myself, I should have been more supportive of that poor woman who had to drag those kids along to her first day of class, instead of rolling my eyes and thinking only about myself and my hardship, which amounted to projecting my voice a little more and making a few clever substitutions in my language. In fact, looking back, some of my best students have been mothers. Young women who for one reason or another had children while in college, and, far from having that cripple them, were thriving. They knew, better than the slew of Hello-Kitty-iPhone-cover toting princesses who spend more time on their hair than on their papers, what it takes to succeed. They organized their time and knew what was important. They got it done.

But at what cost?

After that first day of class, the woman with the kids told the little girl to show the teacher what she had done. She came up to me and handed me her coloring, a jumble of blue and red I couldn’t really make out. “It’s beautiful,” I said, “A+!” She left the classroom skipping.

On Women's Empowerment

2013-03-17T17:26:00.000-04:00

It's been a long time since I've posted on this blog, and I thought I'd take this opportunity to try to reinvigorate it. Below is the text of a speech I gave last Friday at a women's empowerment luncheon hosted by the Student Government Association at St. Thomas University. I was asked to speak on the subject of balancing work and family, and it brought on some serious soul-searching.

I would like to begin by thanking Ashley Perez & Laura Safstrom and all the members of the SGA for asking me to be here today. I must admit I’m surprised to have been asked—although anyone who has been my student knows that I am a self-described feminist and I care deeply about women’s issues, I don’t see myself as someone who has managed to balance work and family life in a successful way. How can I speak to you on this topic?

At 40, I suppose I now have the experience and credibility to be called a “successful woman.” I have been teaching for two decades, and in my classes I always try to confront women’s issues as much as possible, even if that means creating hostility in a generation that by and large sees itself as having gone beyond the gender struggles that defined the 1970’s and 80’s, when I grew up. I have a long list of publications—some of which could be described as feminist—that make me seem like a successful writer. As many of you know, I have a successful marriage to an equal partner who also would call himself a feminist if he were here, instead at home taking care of our sick dog. Moreover, I have achieved all of these achievements as a first-generation immigrant Latina, a feat in and of itself.

The truth, however, as the great philosopher Obi-Wan Kenobi put it, depends greatly on your point of view. From a less optimistic viewpoint, the successes I have just enumerated are a product of creative presentation, the kind one often does on résumés. If someone had told me, when I was a college student, that at 40 I’d be working part-time and relying on my husband’s salary for survival, I’d have died of mortification. The plan was different. My goal was to marry, yes, but always to be economically independent. That demanded a stable, economically viable career, but I also wanted one that would give me the time to pursue writing, and that is how I came up with teaching. In other words, I wanted it all: a successful career, personal fulfillment, and a rich family life.

That was the ideal, but the reality was that I made a series of choices that prioritized family and emotional life over career development. I use the word choice deliberately, because it is descriptive of the brand of feminism that became the legacy of my generation, women who reached adulthood in the late 80s and early 90s. Though the idea of choice feminism—basically, the notion that women should be free to choose whatever lifestyle they wish, whether that means staying at home and being a mother, pursuing a career, or some combination thereof, without being told which choice is “best” by a prescriptive social agenda—has been in circulation for some time. It is a carryover from the discourse of abortion, which began to use the term “pro-choice” to avoid the use of the more negative “pro-abortion.” Yet, it was not until 2005, in Linda Hirshman’s American Prospect article, “Homeward Bound,” that the term “choice feminism” became a commonplace of feminist lingo. Ironically, in that article, Hirshman bemoans the choices women were making at the time, women who had reached the pinnacles of education and privilege only to quit working as soon as they became mothers. According to Hirshman, women were making terrible mistakes, abandoning the hard-won rights of earlier feminists in their retreat to the home. These were the same women who, two years earlier, had been dubbed the vanguard of the “opt-out revolution,” the term used by Lisa Belkin in her New York Times article of the same name to describe this phenomenon. While Belkin ended her article on a positive note, suggesting that women would transform the workplace with their point of view into a less demanding structure that would eventually allow both men and women to lead more balanced lives between work and family, Hirshman sounded a note of alarm—women were going backwards, abandoning the public sphere and losing the political and economic clout that had enabled choice feminism in the first place.

Hirshman urged women to remember what Betty Friedan called the feminine mystique, the syndrome she explains in the seminal 1963 work that explored the limitations of an exclusively domestic life for women. While crediting the feminist movement for having opened the doors of the workplace to women, Hirshman condemned it for quitting before it successfully redesigned family life. Women weren’t quitting the workplace because they were freely “choosing” the domestic sphere, but rather because they were too exhausted by the now-proverbial second shift. The egalitarian home, where both men and women shared the responsibilities of keeping house and raising children equally, had failed to happen, and in validating the choice to stay at home, the philosophy of choice feminism had preempted the discussion over whether the unequal division of labor was fair or not.

To address this situation, Hirshman offered 3 very concise recommendations: “Prepare yourself to qualify for good work, treat work seriously, and don't put yourself in a position of unequal resources when you marry.”

What this meant was, first of all, that women should stop fooling around with liberal arts curriculums that only led to low-paying, limited opportunities in academic and artistic fields. Instead, women should use their college experience to prepare for work. She wrote, “Feminist organizations should produce each year a survey of the most common job opportunities for people with college degrees, along with the average lifetime earnings from each job category and the characteristics such jobs require. . . . The survey would ask young women to select what they are best suited for and give guidance on the appropriate course of study.”

Second, once ready to pursue work, women should stop prioritizing fulfillment or meaningful social service in favor of jobs that make money. She wrote, “Money is the marker of success in a market economy; it usually accompanies power, and it enables the bearer to wield power, including within the family.”

This leads to her third point, family. Here, she was also very specific, recommending that a woman should marry not just someone who has an egalitarian view of gender, but ideally a much younger or older man. Why? A much younger man, or perhaps an artistic type, will not have a competing work agenda. If it comes to choosing one career to put on the chopping block for the sake of home and family, a woman in a superior economic position—that is, married to a younger man who has not yet established himself as much as she has or an artistic type who doesn’t have economic supremacy over her—will get to keep her career while the man gives up his. Conversely, a well-established, older man will have enough money to pay for help, maids and nannies who can free the woman to continue working. The worst bet is an equal partner: “If you both are going through the elite-job hazing rituals simultaneously while having children, someone is going to have to give,” she wrote. Once done finding the ideal partner, she finally recommended having only one child, to ease the burden of child-rearing without missing out entirely.

Practical advice, to be sure, but no way to live, if you ask me. Except for the single-child policy, I broke all her rules, relentlessly pursuing a career in the dire liberal arts, despite at one point having been a well-rounded student who I’m sure could have succeeded in a more lucrative field. The scant four years that separate my husband and I meant, nevertheless, that when I met him he was at the end of his studies while I was only at the beginning of mine, and so he got his degree and his job before I did, making the development of my own career at first economically secondary and then eventually simply economically irrelevant. Though we never got around to having that first child, much less a second, we did have one, then two, then three, and eventually four elderly parents whose care demands that we stay in Miami, where my choices, so to speak, have been limited to either part-time work or switching careers altogether.

What was I to have done instead? Joined the ranks of the millions, both men and women, who make good money but hate their jobs? Passed on the rare opportunity of sharing my life with someone who loves me, understands me, and shares my interests and values because he posed too much of a threat in the competitive job market?

Perhaps I didn’t have the necessary mettle to martyr myself to the feminist cause, to make inroads or at least toe the line for the women who followed. I prefer to think, however, that among the limited field of choices at my disposal, I made those choices that would make me happy not as a woman, but as a human being. I believe that if I had been faced with a wider field of choices, I would have chosen differently. Both Hirshman and Belkin were right on one note: the working world is not only at odds with family life, it is hostile to it. Where both of these writers were shortsighted is in assuming that only one of these spheres is in need of revision, when in reality it’s both.

Today I hear my women students say things like “I really want to be a doctor, but nursing is a better career for women,” or “I really wanted to be a plastic surgeon like my father, but he says nursing is a better career for a woman,” or “a woman should have the right to pursue her career in her twenties, but give it up in her thirties, because children need their mother.” They are already compromising, and who can blame them? The way we have come to think of work is exclusive of any other aspect of life. No sacrifice seems too great to offer at the altar of The Career. Relocate to Uzbekistan today and back to Wyoming tomorrow? Sure, no problem. Put in a 60-hour work week to impress your boss and get a promotion so you can work an extra 5 or 10 hours more? Sure, no problem. Drive for two hours every day or maybe even spend the work-week in a hotel in a different city and then drive home on the weekends? Sure, no problem.

This concept of success and dedication demands the turning over of your entire life, a proposition that should be unacceptable to both men and women. We bemoan the loss of community and family life, of spirituality, and even of our health in this society, and all these losses are directly attributable to a concept of work that demands a slavish dedication to ever-diminishing wages. It’s a trap. For every stay-at-home mom baking cupcakes and going mad trying to unleash her creativity by decoupaging the diaper pail, there is a leave-the-home dad putting in 60+ hours a week at work who barely knows his children and is beginning to wonder why he ever got married in the first place.

Conversely, we need to stop pretending that home and family are a separate planet where only women belong. The 2011 film Life Happens is a wonderful example of what we are doing to young women. The film opens on one fateful night where two women in their early twenties have a fight over the last condom in their apartment. Sure enough, in the next scene, one of them—the loser—has a baby. The rest of the film is about how the new mother, Kim, adjusts to life with a baby. Her relationship to her friend, the winner of the fateful condom who continues to live the life of a twentysomething party girl, is compromised, because no one wants to date a girl with a baby and so she can’t participate in the party scene anymore. She nearly gets fired one day when she can’t find anyone to take care of her son and takes him with her to work. Her boss, a middle-aged woman intent on appearing younger, hates children and threatens to fire her if she ever does it again. The father of the baby leaves her because, as a surfer, a baby doesn’t fit his lifestyle.

The film ends with the typical happy Hollywood resolutions, but in between it shows what happens to young women who dare to have children: they must give up their lives in exchange. No one wants to deal with babies, and so they become the sole responsibility of the mother. We don’t want babies in restaurants, even though between the big-screens and the drunken screaming, no one has been able to have a conversation in a restaurant since TGI Friday’s first opened in 1965. We don’t want babies at church or at the movies, because if they cry they might interrupt the ringing cell phones. And we certainly don’t want babies at work or in classrooms, because they might distract us from Facebook and Twitter. We just don’t seem to want babies anywhere, and no wonder: to have a baby is to exit the world, to become an outcast. You can hang out only with other mothers, and in designated spaces. This isn’t choice; it’s segregation.

The aphorism holds that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. One way to address this issue is with education. We need to reinvigorate women’s studies programs, to study women’s history, women’s literature, and even women’s biology. We need to teach a new generation of women why Woolf wanted a room of her own, why Nora leaves Torvald, and how it is that Minnie Wright wound up strangling her husband.

Had I not studied these women’s lives myself, I might not be able to understand what my parents are going through right now. My mother was a pioneer of the so-called mommy-track. She received an Ed. D. from the University of Havana and worked as an educator in Cuba until she left in 1969, at the age of 40. She had me late, at 43, and since my birth coincided with the move to the US, she gave up working to raise me. Try as I could to keep her employed, however, I was fully grown by the time she was just 63. She’s 83 now, and it’s been 20 years and counting since her most intellectually challenging task has been what to make my father for dinner. She still tears up when she talks about her work in Cuba. Meanwhile, my father has just retired, finally, at 80. He spends his days in bed. Just last week he cried in front of me for the first time. “I don’t know what to do with myself,” he said. He had been working since he was 14.

These are not women’s issues; these are human issues. What we need as women is no different from what we all need as human beings: balanced, integrated lives, where we have the opportunity to develop every aspect of ourselves and live complete lives. It is only then that we will feel truly empowered.

When a Student Gets Published

2012-10-19T13:18:00.000-04:00

. . . it’s oddly more satisfying than getting published yourself. It’s the literary equivalent of the parental experience, perhaps: you have not only used your gift, you have passed it on. You have exceeded the limitations of the self, started a ripple effect. Butterfly, you flapped your wings, and sometime later a hurricane swept the coast.

I’ve had this awesome pleasure more than once, and the latest two have come from separate hemispheres: poetry and science. Ruben Aguilar, who graced my creative writing class a couple of years ago, has not one but two poems in the latest issue of Axis. The first, “My Brother’s Gift,” is a moving narrative meditation on the troubled relationship between brothers:

On my eighth birthday,

mom bought me dressy shoes

heavy, brown, one size too large;

said I’ll grow into them.

I wished to wear them then,

my present, my shoes, my birthday.

I felt older with them on,

would impress my brother’s friends,

hang with them after school,

not be sent to my room

Axis 9 2012

while the older boys played.

The second—and if you know anything about me, you’ll know how insanely amazing this is—is a sestina, “Underwear for My Feet,” another wonderful childhood recollection of being too young to fully understand the complexities of adult life:

Were you worried about your reputation

when I woke up to find that boyish man

in your bed? Did you think of your mother?

I saw him struggling to find his underwear

under the sheets she had bought, his feet

hanging over the edge, like an overgrown child.

I taught Ruben what a sestina was. That was me! Laura Mullen, thank you for teaching me. The cycle continues.

And then there is the strange phenomenon of how I am also, apparently, teaching science. For years now, I’ve been teaching the required writing courses for the nursing majors at STU, and the last course in the sequence, Scientific Writing, requires students to engage in a semester-long project that includes original empirical research and culminates in the production of a professional research paper. Last year, boy did it ever. My student, Veronica Hernández Menadier, had her paper, “How Personality and Physical Attraction Lead to Possible Dating: A Reflection,” published in the latest issue of the Journal of Multidisciplinary Research. It is a wonderful study on dating psychology, the premise of which—and if you know anything about me, you’ll know how insanely amazing this is—is to challenge stereotypical beliefs about how each gender chooses a potential mate:


Veronica, with Dr. Chan and Dr. Cingel

According to an experiment by Harris (2004), personality is defined as personal qualities and characteristics associated with interpersonal behaviors. Personality is seen as a second choice after physical attractiveness when it comes to being involved in relationships. Although many experiments (Schmitt, 2002; Harris, 2004; Tsujimura et al., 2010) have been previously conducted in areas of personality and physical attraction, all have various results but just share one in common. None have had an actual reliable and assessable quantitative method to evaluate the correlation between personality and physical attraction and how they lead to dating (Tsujimura et al., 2010). The above observations led my colleagues and I to wonder to what extent personality actually plays a role in the people we choose to date or not.

The key hypothesis of this study is: There will be a relationship in gender in terms of the frequency of choosing to date a person who is PASU (Physical Attraction/Social Unattraction) vs. PASA (Physical Attraction/Social Attraction) vs. PUSA (Physical Unattraction/Social Attraction) vs. PUSU (Physical Unattraction/Social Unattraction). Which will be tested against the alternative: There will be no relationship in gender in terms of the frequency of choosing to date a person who is PASU vs. PASA vs. PUSA vs. PUSU.

One can take only so much responsibility for the success of one’s students. After all, they already come to us with talents , skills, and drives we had no role in forming, especially in the case of college students, who are already adults (well, sort of!) when they come to us. Both Ruben and Veronica are immensely talented and driven individuals, and I had nothing to do with that. But I remember sitting in the office and telling Ruben about sestinas, and I remember all those hours spent with Veronica helping her get her paper ready for publication long after she had passed the class for which she had first written it. I had something to do with that!

Teaching is hard. There are days (many, many days . . .) when one wants to just set oneself on fire rather than teach one more minute. When a student gets published, it’s more than just a balm against those days. It means the boundaries of the classroom have been transcended. That brutal exchange that seems so pointless sometimes—work for grades—has been transcended. The word teaching, with all its bureaucratic connotations, hardly seems to apply. What’s happened is more like alchemy, somewhere between science and magic. You can’t quite force it to happen, no matter how hard you try to reproduce the conditions of its making. You can only hope that one day, amid the papers and the pens, the beakers and the boiling, it suddenly, spontaneously, miraculously happens again.

On Eating Greasy Tacos & Washing Your Feet at Sears

2012-09-16T17:29:00.000-04:00

Or, what makes great art great?

I’ve been reading Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna for what seems like forever. It’s a long book, and I’m not really getting into it, so I haven’t done that thing one does when one is really into a book, that devouring that makes even a thousand-pager read like a tweet. However, there is one scene I’ve kept going back to in my mind. It’s one of those famous-people-stories-told-thru-a-not-famous-nobody-who-just-happened-to-be-there type book, and so there’s a scene between the main character, a young aspiring writer, and Frida Kahlo. She says to him:

I think an artist has to tell the truth . . . . You have to use the craft very well and have a lot of discipline for it, but mostly to be a good artist you have to know something that’s true. These kids who come to Diego wanting to learn, I’ll tell you. They can paint a perfect tree, a perfect face, whatever you ask. But they don’t know enough about life to fill a thimble. And that’s what has to go in the painting. Otherwise, why look at it?

There’s nothing here that’s particularly earth-shattering as far as artistic philosophy goes; Kahlo goes on to recommend to the narrator that he go do some hard labor, “eat some terrible greasy tacos,” and “have sex with some Mexican boys.” It’s the old the-artist-must-suffer-to-make-great-art belief, and that’s too pat an idea to give credence to. For one thing, some people can suffer their whole lives and never be the deeper for it. Also, the whole idea that there is something more real or worthy of philosophy in hard labor and anonymous sex is beneath considering, a fiction of the well-to-do who have never spent a day sewing buttons in a shirt factory by necessity rather than choice. Finally, Kahlo here seems to imply that the only art that qualifies as such is that which enlightens or educates, and that’s just not so. What about entertainment? Can pure entertainment without a didactic element never be art?

All these caveats aside, however, I kept thinking about this scene as I plodded onward. I had just had the pleasure of reading “My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears” by Mohja Kahf for the first time, which you can read here. My thanks to fellow Duhamelite and poet Dustin Brookshire for introducing me to this poem by posting it on Facebook. What floored me about Kahf’s poem is how familiar it was—it’s a poem from the point of view of the granddaughter, Kahf herself, one assumes, watching her grandmother, a Muslim, perform the title act. It’s prayer time and she just happens to be at Sears, and so she goes through with the ritual despite the outraged stares and finally interference of the “respectable Sears matrons.” Being the daughter of Cuban immigrants, I can so relate, as my students might say. I don’t remember any one particular culture clash as definitive as this, but I do remember having felt just this way many times.

Well, not just this way.

I kept waiting for the poem to favor either the grandmother or the matrons in some way, but it never does, and that surprised me. I was expecting either a condemnation of the matrons for their sheeplike adherence to expected social behaviors, for their inability to see the Muslim woman washing her feet as anything but some kind of barbarian, or, conversely, a condemnation of the grandmother for her refusal to adapt to American expectations of acceptable behavior, possibly fueled by the granddaughter’s embarrassment at being able to see the behavior from both points of view. I thought I knew “this kind” of poem—it would probably favor the matrons, and end with regret at not having appreciated the grandmother and her culture more.

Maybe I was projecting, but probably I was just expecting the usual moves in this scenario, and Kahf didn’t make them. Instead, she presents the event almost comically, a perfect balance of two opposing yet equally valid attitudes. She seems to relish the misunderstanding and revel in its inability to be resolved. The poem winds up being a wonderful—and refreshing—statement about our common humanity even despite our sometimes radical differences.

This, I believe, is Truth of the kind that makes great art. A lesser artist would have met my expectations—one culture would be oppressed yet superior, the other appear superior but turn out to be narrow-minded and inferior, and both the poet and the reader would be enlightened by the experience in most predictable ways. How wonderful that I didn’t read that poem, again!

I’m sure Kahf must have suffered in her life, all of us do. But what she did here in this poem is not just rehash some kind of suffering, but process it in a surprising and, yes, an enlightening way. I will never forget this poem, and I’m likely to remember it every time I get involved in a culture clash, which is pretty often.

What Kahlo is most right about in the advice she gives Kingsolver’s protagonist is that mechanical correctness is not enough to produce great art. I suppose this point is most evident in films, which sometimes feature amazing technical feats but yet are not great art. Sometimes a small, low-budget film will amaze you in a way that no blockbuster multi-million dollar special effects extravaganza can. Great art must have both great craft and, for lack of a better term, great truth.

These truths, however, can’t be easy truths. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus is a gimmick, not a revelation. Don’t confuse fairy-tale type morals or catchy bumper-sticker wisdom with real truth. Do you have to “suffer” to acquire insight such as Kahf’s? I don’t know. But I do know that you have to cultivate thoughtfulness. You have to read good books (of course), those that will challenge—not confirm, challenge—your concepts of right and wrong. Watch good films that do the same. Expose yourself to art, and it can help you grow without first-hand suffering. Kahf’s poem “taught” me in a way that decades of cultural snafus I’ve experienced first-hand failed to do. I was so stuck in my us-vs.-them mentality that I was rewriting Kahf’s poem into more familiar territory as I was reading it. She jogged me out of it, made me see an old situation in a new, in a better, way.

So, you want to create great art? It comes to this: cultivate your moral sense as much as your craft. Look for great art in ambiguity, in the messy terrain of real life. Sometimes you might find it in a greasy taco, sometimes it finds you in the bathroom at Sears. What matters most, however, is not how many Mexican boys you sleep with, but how you frame that experience in light of what you believe is true, right, good. The great artists are always questing, questioning, experimenting, revising. Maybe that’s where the cliché about hard living comes from, why so many of them drink and fuck and smoke and die. We tend to glamorize this particular view of the artist because it appeals to everyone’s desire to break the rules, but it’s not in their breaking that art is created. Emily Dickinson is widely revered as one of the greatest poets who ever lived, and apparently she barely left her house. But she thought about everything—the simplest act acquired enormous significance. She turned the buzzing of a fly into a meditation on life and death.

Maybe you’ve come here, like Kingsolver’s protagonist, to get some words of wisdom from a more experienced artist. Sadly, I can’t be your Frida. About as close to her genius as I may ever come is the ability to grow my eyebrows. But I do know good art when I find it, and all of it has that one thing, and one thing only, in common. Call it truth, call it moral complexity, call it philosophy, call it mojo if you like, but get your hands on it any way you can, or you’ll never be a real artist.

Thinking Inside the Box

2012-08-26T17:41:00.000-04:00

Began the semester by teaching my first-year composition students about the five-paragraph essay. Before you get all mad and stuff, stop to consider: why did the five-paragraph essay become the go-to paradigm for every standardized test prep and essay exam situation?

The naysayers will argue that it did so because it’s easy and automatic, two words no professional writer will want associated with the craft. That may be so, but there’s also a more benign reason, which is that it makes sense. In its pre-programmed way, the ubiquitous five-paragraph essay teaches the basic student or that student forced to respond to a topic quickly and under pressure that at the very least, a well-written, organized essay must have a clear purpose and a beginning, middle, and end.

I’m not about to argue, of course, that mastering the five-paragraph essay is “enough.” In fact, when I teach it to my students, I’m careful to clarify that it’s just a good pattern, and no guarantee against bad writing. It is a starting point, and no more.

But it’s a damn fine starting point, and not deserving of all the flak it’s gotten for its misuse. Anyone who thinks a four- or six-paragraph essay is somehow wrong is obviously an idiot, and no amount of maligning this classic paradigm is going to help them.

What’s up with all the animosity against patterns anyway? In most other arts and crafts, patterns are revered and understood to be one of the classic tools of the artist. Take fashion, for example. Before you decide to revolutionize women’s couture by making them wear their bras as hats, you usually go to fashion school, where they teach you to cut shirts, skirts, dresses, and suits from patterns. You may chafe against the standard knee-length pencil skirt pattern you must follow for your midterm, but proving you can make a good pencil skirt shows you know the basics of your craft. You still may have room for creativity in other areas—your choice of fabric, for example, can make your basic pencil skirt stand out. Who knew a skirt made out of plywood could be so comfortable? Later, when you are designing your own pattern, you may choose to deviate from it or not. You might keep the classic form and continue to exert your individuality by making skirts out of tortillas, or you might decide to add feathered ruffles or whatever to the outline.

It’s not ignorance of the pattern that will make you into an artist, but your awareness and mastery of the reasoning behind that pattern.

The prose version of the five-paragraph essay must be the classic conflict-crisis-climax-resolution pattern. Here, as well, we find a certain disdain for the classic setup. Most highbrow short stories and novels seem to self-consciously deviate from this plot. They key words here, of course, are self-consciously. The art of storytelling evolved in natural ways; one doesn’t often find oneself motivated to start a story about “nothing.” It’s only when “something” happens that one is moved to tell about it, and that “something” is a conflict. The natural movement between conflicts and their resolutions is a series of crises and some kind of tipping point or climax. When one encounters a narrative that doesn’t follow that pattern, it’s because the storyteller has found other ways to generate interest, a seemingly different agenda that upon closer inspection often turns out to be that same old pattern in disguise. We read about narratives, for example, that “resist resolution.” That’s a literal impossibility, however. A narrative that resists resolution is one that never ends, like a soap opera. If there’s an ending, there’s some kind of resolution. It may not be one you recognize: not the happy ending or the reward/punishment, but a resolution nonetheless, even if it’s just a giving up, an abandonment of whatever we have been reading for—a thematic resolution, for example.

The two stories I use to teach this point to my students are either James Joyce’s “Araby” or John Updike’s “A&P” and Harlan Ellison’s “’Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman.” Both “Araby” and “A&P” are classically plotted stories. “Araby” begins with the classic layout of the setting, whereas Updike gets straight to the conflict in “A&P.”

At first, Ellison’s story appears to be a nonsensical departure. “Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself,” he writes, as if in sheer defiance of our narrative expectations. In fact, that’s his point exactly. The story is, after all, a story about the value of rebellion, and he tells it rebelliously to prove his point. If we examine the story carefully, however, we see that the so-called “middle” he begins with may indeed be the chronological middle of the story, but thematically it is nevertheless the beginning, the laying out of the conflict: some crazy harlequin-type guy is upsetting the orderly society in which he lives. We don’t know why yet, but we figure it out soon enough. The crises and climax are as classically plotted as if the story were written in the usual straightforward way—the Harlequin is being chased by the Ticktockman, and when he’s caught we wait to see what happens next, which is both the resolution and the ending of the story.

Poets seem to have a much healthier relationship to patterns. Sure, there was a moment there when the rebels fought the formalists, but eventually everybody made up and we are now (for the most part) coexisting peacefully. Perhaps it’s because, unlike in prose, poetry has never truly preferred a single form to the exclusion of all others. One could say that in Western poetry the sonnet had its moment, for example, but at the same time poets everywhere were writing villanelles and odes and ballads and a bunch of other things with perfect joy. Today the same poet can write in free verse one day and form the next, and put all the poems in the same collection if she pleases. Like the fashion designer, the poet has the freedom to innovate a little or a lot. She can publish the perfect alexandrine or the completely wacky nonce version of a form all to the same acclaim.

One should never be afraid to follow a pattern, or to deviate from it. Forget about thinking inside versus outside the box--as long as you're thinking, you're okay. It's not the box that's evil, it's your relationship to it. If you're afraid to think inside the box, you're just as trapped outside.

Taking Off in Silence

2012-08-16T16:55:00.000-04:00

It's been a trying week, what with trying to come up with the syllabi for the new academic year and helping my mother out with her sprained ankle. Today I found myself staring longingly at this picture that's making the rounds on the Internet:

Supposedly, it's a view of the Mars skyline, showing Earth, Jupiter, and Venus. Of course, it's some kind of hoax, and if you care for the full explanation, Phil Plait provides it at Discover Magazine.

My interest in the picture is different. I wondered if Malibu Barbie liked the view, for one thing. In my poem, "Malibu Barbie Moves to Mars," I envisioned a tired Malibu Barbie escaping to the red planet where she can, at least, have some peace. It was kind of a reverse ekphrastic experience, staring at this photo and thinking about a poem I had already written.

The sense of peace I got from staring at Earth, so far away, was welcome. I had just spent an uncomfortable two hours at a simple routine visit to my mother's cardiologist, in which I had to listen to the same twenty-second piece of Muzak over and over. The ubiquitous large-screen was just finishing some abominable David Copperfield DVD when we got there, and when it finished it went to the menu screen and just stayed there. No one bothered to restart it or play something else, or just turn the damned thing off. Of course, there are no buttons to push on the waiting room side--some secret remote from within the inner office was asleep on the job.

I was quietly losing my mind. I had brought a book, but the waiting room is small and so even in the farthest corner from the screen, you can still hear it loudly. Every time the music started over, I lost my concentration. I tried switching to a magazine, but that didn't work. Finally, I went up to the window, rang the bell, and asked the woman in the inner sanctorum to please do something about the DVD. The other patients waiting and I had a good round of jokes about Gitmo during the few blessed minutes of silence after David Copperfield disappeared, and then the Keeper of the Remote started the Cirque du Soleil DVD I had already seen last year.

The whole thing was surreal. Not so much David Copperfield's gargantuan head or the contorting Canadians, but this mad insistence on the need to be staring at a screen at all times. I do understand that some people welcome it; at my mother's GP, he's constantly offering the local Spanish soap operas. Given that something like ninety-five percent of his patients would be watching these at home anyway, I can sort of understand how it helps to pass the time. Other places show the news, or play music. I can even understand that magic and circus acts fall under the "general interest" category. What I can't understand is how this has become so necessary that no one seems to be able to envision the possibility of existing for a few breaths without it.

I wouldn't dream of showing up to a doctor's office without a book. Unlike a television, only I can hear my book. I'm not subjecting anyone else to my efforts at entertainment. Not a big reader? A newspaper or magazine can offer some light, quiet entertainment for a little while. Illiterate? Wrong language? Look at the pictures. Out the window. Lie back and think of England, but don't force me to participate in your loud, obnoxious psychic void.

I don't care if the Mars skyline is fake. Whoever came up with it had the imagination to do so, and I thank her or him for it, for the few minutes of quiet fancy flight it offered me. There are many arguments for reading instead of watching television, and normally I couldn't care less. Whatever you believe the merits of each is, there is one extremely valuable way in which reading trumps watching: it's quiet. I can't reproduce the entirety of Ogden Nash's "Take Off with Books" here because it's apparently somehow still under copyright, but let me remind you of a few lines of advice to be found there: "Take off with books, not with the rocket's roar; take off in silence and in fancy soar . . . . Books reached the moon before real rockets did."

An Ekphrastic Gem

2012-08-07T16:52:00.000-04:00

Beautiful ekphrastic poem this week at Linebreak based on the Pieter Bruegel painting above, The Hunters in the Snow. Read "Bruegel" by Paul Carroll and listen to the reading by Ty Kessinger here.

The Poets & Writers Best Books for Writers List

2012-08-01T00:05:00.000-04:00

Before you buy all 79 books, maybe I can help!

Have been out of commission for a while, having some fun with my uncle and then nursing my mother through a sprained ankle. I’m thinking of a “what I did on my summer vacation” type post later, but I thought I’d get the blog rolling again by posting about Poets & Writers intriguing “BestBooks for Writers” list. I saw some old favorites on it, some I’ve not read but would like to, and a couple of glaring omissions. I thought I’d share my reactions with you, dear reader.

YE OLDE FAVORITES

Graywolf Press’s “The Art of” Series

There were many selections on this list from Graywolf Press’s excellent “The Art of” series, including my very favoritest, The Art of the Poetic Line by James Longenbach (2007). I’ve talked about this book many times before, because it changed the way I think about lineation forever. Unlike other treatments of what one might consider an “esoteric” subject, Longenbach’s writing is clear and his logic easy to grasp. The examples are perfect. This is my second-favorite writing book of all time, and my No. 1 favorite book on poetry. You don’t know a thing about lineation until you’ve read this book. Another selection from “The Art of” series is Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot (2007), but I found this one rather hard to get through. Unlike Longenbach, Baxter assumes a very well-read, semi-professional (at least) reader, so at some point one wonders whether such a reader wouldn’t be apt enough already to grasp the subtleties of subplots.

The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing by Richard Hugo (Norton, 2010)

This is indeed a classic, one I first read as an undergraduate. Every poet knows this book, owns a copy, loves it so much that she will go into a burning building to retrieve it. This book is psychology as much as mechanics. Hugo writes about words, but also about the writer’s mind, in beautiful prose of his own. A must-read indeed.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (Scribner, 2010)

This is another one of my go-to recommendations, and I’ve even used it a couple of times as a textbook. Do not assume that this is a guide for genre writers—King’s advice here is solid for all types of writers. I also love that it’s part writing memoir, part writing instruction. The memoir is of interest even to those who are not King fans (those three sad people), and it’s an eye-opener to the beginning writer who assumes the road to bestsellerdom is paved with sex, drugs, and fancy typewriters. King writes about his early struggles candidly and with humility and humor. I’m not his biggest fan, but I was charmed from page one. The “to-do” section stands alone and has great advice on all the basics: plotting, characterization, even sentence-level editing.

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics by Lewis Turco (UP of New England, 2000)

Put this next to The Triggering Town, so you won’t have to scramble during the fire. True, you can find a lot of this info on Wikipedia now, but no one is going to present it to you in a way that makes sense the way Turco does. This is the definitive book on form. You cannot call yourself a poet if you don’t have a well-worn copy of this book.

TO PUT ON MY TO-READ LIST

The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer by Sandra Scofield (Penguin, 2007)

I’ve been looking for a decent book I could use to teach scene creation for a while, and read some real duds along the away. According to P&W, this book is “straightforward,” which is exactly what I’d like to get.

ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound, introduction by Michael Dirda. (New Directions, 2010)

Despite having spent so much time in school and having read so much all my life, despite all the degrees I’ve accumulated, I still think I’m (gulp!) woefully ignorant. Here is an important writer on important books promising to enlighten me. From P&W: “Originally published in 1934, Pound's book serves as a guide for those interested in honing their critical thinking through reading the classics. The book is based on the premise that to be a good writer one must be a good reader, aware of the traditions out of which the best literature has emerged.” Who can disagree with that?

I’m intrigued by the title of David Orr’s book, Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry (HarperCollins, 2011). From P&W: “Award-winning poetry critic David Orr provides a tour and guide to contemporary poetry and the ways in which to appreciate it. Beautiful & Pointless examines what poets and poetry readers talk about when they discuss poetry, such as why poetry seems especially personal and what it means to write ‘in form.’”

The Art of Description: World into Word by Mark Doty (Graywolf, 2010)

Mark Doty wrote an “Art of” book and I didn’t know about it? About description, which is, like, his unbelievable forté? What is the matter with me? I must read this immediately.

The Poem’s Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody by Alfred Corn (Copper Canyon, 2008)

This sounds good to me. Pun fully intended. Perhaps a good textbook? I know a little bit about prosody, but this looks like it can fill out the empty spaces. From P&W: “In ten progressive chapters, Corn covers everything from metrical variation and phonic echo to the basics of line and stanza.”

GLARING OMISSIONS

You can’t blame anyone for overlooking one of my favorite little books, Panning for Gold in the Kitchen Sink: Everyday Creative Writing by Michael B. Smith and Suzanne Greenberg (McGraw-Hill, 2000). It’s not a well-known book, much less a classic, and it’s geared toward the beginner more than most of the books on P&W’s list. Nevertheless, I always recommend it, and have used it as a textbook a couple of times. It’s exercise driven, which is not unique, but what is unique is the way it forces writers to mine, if you will, the everyday experiences that make for good writing, i.e., the kitchen sink. One of the greatest obstacles a beginning writer must overcome is the tendency to overdramatize, to succumb to melodrama. Spies. Golden bathtubs. Evil characters with bombs. Nothing that speaks, as Faulkner would say, to the human heart in conflict with itself. The exercises in this book will help you find what all good writers know about already: the gold in the everyday life of everyone.

Another dark horse favorite of mine is Structure and Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns by Michael Theune (Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 2007). I don’t know of any other similar study in poetics. Theune looks at typical poem “patterns,” ways in which successful poems are structured as wholes—not in particular forms, but as objects. For example, many of you may be aware that sonnets have a volta, a turn or shift in the subject that usually occurs after the octave. That’s the sort of analysis Theune provides in this book, only on poems that may or may not have any set form. He discusses relationships of contrast, for example, between beginnings and endings. Full of examples, this book is not only a great read for the poet who is struggling to find ways to guide a poem to the final draft successfully, but also would make a great textbook. I wouldn’t recommend it for an introductory class, but any advanced class that is studying poetry, whether creatively or critically, would find this book eye-opening.

There is one book that didn’t make the list at all that left me clicking for more. How can anyone compile such a list and leave out William Zinsser’s On Writing Well (Harper Perennial, 2006)? Could it be that the rift between journalism and “creative” writing is so exaggerated that they failed to see the enduring wisdom of this book? Me no comprende. This is THE BEST BOOK ABOUT WRITING EVER WRITTEN. Period. It can take a talentless buffoon and polish him into a decent writer. I was about to say “polish him up” and caught myself. Why? Because of Zinsser. Because once he gets into your bones, you will never be able to write badly again without a twinge of guilt. The man is a verb in my classes—we speak of “zinssering” a sentence. I mention this book in almost every post. I have to read it once a year. If you only own one book about writing, it should be this. And . . .

Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (Longman, 1999). I can see why they omitted this book, however—it’s really a reference book, to sit along your dictionaries and your Rodale’s. (Did I mention Rodale’s?) So, I forgive P&W for not putting it on the list. Put it on yours and you’ll be okay—despite being now almost 100 years old, this classic (now updated several times, of course) continues to be the definitive style maker for good writing. This book is to writing what Chanel is to fashion.

Hope that helps you out. There’s a lot of terrible writing about writing out there. You could spend the rest of your life reading how-to manuals and peppy you-go-girl guides, so choose what you put on your reading list wisely. And, at the end of the day, remember: it’s better to write than to read about writing. While it’s important to widen your knowledge of the craft, the best way to do that is still to learn by doing. And doing. And doing . . . .

Cooking with Celia: Celia's Vegan Potato Salad

2012-07-04T12:19:00.007-04:00

Still looking for your Fourth of July side? May not be too late to add my freaking awesome salad to the menu. It's not traditional potato salad--traditional potato salad is loaded with carbs and cholesterol, and not many people like it. This one still has that potato charm, but lots of veggies to make it healthier. The light vegan mayo dressing is virtually guilt-free.

Ingredients for 12 servings

3 1/2 pounds of mixed small potatoes
5 carrots, cut into disks
5 celery sticks, cubed
small package of frozen peas, thawed

one apple, cubed

1/2 cup cilantro, chopped

1 cup vegan mayo

1/4 cup spicy brown mustard

1/2 cup apple cider, white wine, or rice vinegar

1 tsp. dill (2 tsp. if fresh)

1 tsp. thyme (2 tsp. if fresh)

salt & pepper to taste

Wash potatoes and cut to bite-size pieces. I prefer to leave the skins on, but you can peel them if you like. Boil until soft (about 15 minutes). Salt the water generously. Drain.
Boil carrots separately to avoid overcooking, about 10 minutes. Salt the water generously, and drain.
In a small bowl, whisk together mayo, mustard, and vinegar.
Combine potatoes and carrots with peas, celery, and apple while still warm in a large bowl. Add the dressing a little at a time to avoid breaking the potatoes too much. Add cilantro and spices at the end.
I like it warm, but you can cover and refrigerate for a couple of hours or overnight.

Feeling the Love at Fringe

2012-07-02T11:03:00.000-04:00

As part of the Vintage Fringe feature, the folks over at Fringe are re-featuring my poem, "Blackbirds," and posting an accompanying interview. I can't tell you what a thrill this is! It's one thing to have someone publish your poem--that's already a great seal of approval. But to come back to it? To do it again? Yay.

In the accompanying interview, they've also given me the chance to talk about the poem's composition, as well as how it interacts with one of my favorite forms, the sestina. Fringe's poetry editor, the wonderful Anna Lena Phillips, also asked me questions about this blog, which I (of course!) was very happy to answer.

Please read all about it at the links above, and note that you can leave comments on the interview. I'd love to hear what you think about the poem and about sestinas--how far can you push a form?

My thanks, my thanks and thanks, to Anna Lena Phillips, David Duhr, and all the wonderful people at Fringe.

Why You Should—and Shouldn’t—Go to College

2012-06-04T14:53:00.000-04:00

Summer’s here, and I’ve been spending time getting to some much-postponed home improvement projects, which is why this is my first post in over a month. It’s okay; I’ve decided to just let the summer happen, and blog or blog not as the mood strikes me. Tis the season to be lazy, one of the many perks of being a part-time frustrated academic.

Tis also graduation season, and as I see all those pics of proudly smiling grads making the rounds online, I can’t help but wonder, as Carrie Bradshaw might put it, how many of them will still be smiling come fall, when 68.3 of them arrive at college.

A low percentage, you might say, barely over half. Of these, only about half again will actually complete their degree:

Today, especially among low-income students who attend public community colleges as a gateway to a college or university, 27 percent actually graduate in four years, and 48 percent of those pursuing bachelor’s degrees at private schools do so, according to ACT Inc., an organization that provides college testing exams and other services. Most students take at least six years, and even then only 55 percent get their degrees.

Moreover, graduate or not, the mere pursuit of the college dream is going to cost all of us, cripple many. Most of the students going to college in the fall will be paying for tuition, books, and housing with loans, banking on a future filled with guarantees of higher incomes their degrees will supposedly facilitate. This dream debt is now at the $1 trillion mark.

What to do? Expert opinions vary. Lowering the cost of higher education is a popular solution. Working to improve the economy to create more jobs for grads is another. I prefer a simpler approach.

Less people need to go to college.

What? Blasphemy! Heartlessness! How dare I!

I dare. You bet I dare. Unlike politicians, economists, and career academics, I’m in the first-year college trenches, I’ve been there for 18 years, and I got nothing to lose by admitting the truth. About one in every three incoming students has no business being in college, much less signing a loan to be there. A whopping 30% of those students taking out loans will never graduate, yet they will give over not just the money they owe for the one, two, three or more years that they struggle to stay enrolled but also the time and self-esteem it costs them to admit they should have never gone to college in the first place.

The pitch high-school graduates are receiving—and have been receiving for years—is preposterous. No time to attend classes because you have two full-time jobs, seven children, and numerous diseases? No problem! Classes start anytime. You can go at night, on the weekends, or online, in your pajamas! No money? No problem! Just sign on the dotted line.

A must-see on this subject.

These predatory practices make it seem as if college is easy, as if the only thing you need to get that coveted degree is a convenient schedule and a loan. It’s the perfect pitch for a consumer-driven society: convenience + cost = instant gratification.

Sadly, you can’t order up a college degree at a drive-thru as if it were a Big Mac. Getting a college degree is not a matter of just getting through the door; it’s about being able to succeed once you’re in, and that’s something no one’s talking about anymore. It’s not the piece of paper that gets you the fancy job later—it’s the skills and knowledge that paper represents, and the truth is that’s pretty hard to get even the old-fashioned way, when you used to spend four years doing nothing but studying.

Too many people want to go to college for all the wrong reasons. They don’t really want to go to college, actually. What they want is to get through college, which is not the same thing. They want to get through this obstacle course as quickly and painlessly as possible, so they can cash in on the reward, a higher-paying job than the one they would get without the college ordeal.

College is not a test of endurance. It’s not something you’re meant to “survive,” like being trapped on an island with nothing to eat but tarantulas. You can’t just grin and bear it long enough to be released. It just doesn’t work that way. You don’t get rewarded with a better job at the end of your incarceration; you are rewarded with a better job—if you can find it—because you have learned the skills you need to succeed at it.

Which brings me to my main point. There’s only one reason why you should go to college: Because you are a good student and both desire to learn and are capable of learning more.

It breaks my heart to see people who can barely read try to make it through a college course. If you barely made it through high school, if you had trouble passing your classes and hated being in a classroom, you shouldn’t voluntarily sign up for four more years of torture, especially not if it’s going to cost thousands of dollars. The problem here is that most people don’t feel it’s a voluntary decision at all, and I’m not talking about parents who force their children to go (a most foolish thing). I’m talking about the economic and social imperative, about a society that has come to believe that only doctors and lawyers can be happy and respected citizens, and that everyone—no matter what life and educational messes he or she has lived through—has not just the right but the obligation to become one.

The cost of a college education is not just a matter of dollars. You must have other forms of currency, skills and values you should have picked up in high school. Apart from basic skills like reading, writing, and math, you need to know how to study, how to be responsible for your own education. Moreover, you need to want to be a doctor or a lawyer for some reason other than the paycheck attached to these careers. Otherwise you wind up being one of those proverbial med students who faints at the sight of blood.

The college experience is intimately tied to the careers it leads to. If you’re cringing in your history class, what makes you think you’re going to be a good lawyer, where every decision that you make must be based on historical precedent? If you’re flunking biology, what makes you think you’re going to be a good doctor? Careers that involve acquiring a college degree aren’t like jobs, where you can whine your way through the day for the sake of the paycheck. Careers that involve higher education employ those very skills you’re taught in class. A lawyer never leaves history class, a doctor never leaves biology class. In fact, most of these careers involve a lifetime of education, revalidating licenses, attending seminars, and publishing papers—yes, as in college papers—that keep professionals informed members of their field.

If we’re really going to make good on all those promises of a bright future for high-school graduates, we need to start, among other things, to validate the decision to pursue non-college-track choices, which is where the majority of college dropouts wind up anyway. They lose valuable time they could be gaining real work experience and accrue crippling start-up debt simply because no one is exploring options.

Let me make one point crystal before I give up this dark meditation: I am in no way suggesting that the only problem with higher education in the US is the pursuit of a degree by people who shouldn’t be in college. That’s just one of the problems, albeit a pretty big one. It would take me the rest of my life to go through the multiple and complex issues that have created the current mess. What I have tried to do in this post is to inject some sense into this College or Bust madness—to prepare myself, in a way, for the flipside of the happy June graduations, when I face a class full of students in the fall less than half of whom I’ll be seeing again come spring.

The Winners of the 2012 Big Poetry Giveaway

2012-05-01T09:49:00.000-04:00

Drumroll, please:

Stephen S. Mills has won a copy of my Finishing Line chapbook, The Stones. Congratulations, Stephen, hope you like it!

Tara Mae Mulroy has won a copy of Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros. Congratulations!

Many thanks to all who participated, and especially to Kelli Russell Agodon at The Book of Kells, for coordinating this fun event. Come back next April for the 2013 giveaway, and keep reading poetry!

Foxy Lady Jeannine Hall Gailey Talks about She Returns to the Floating World

2012-04-29T22:31:00.000-04:00

Jeannine Hall Gailey is the Seattle-area author of Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books, 2006) and She Returns to the Floating World (Kitsune Books, 2011) which is an Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist for 2012. Her upcoming collaborative book of poetry and art, Unexplained Fevers, is forthcoming from Kitsune Books in 2013. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in journals like The Iowa Review, The Seattle Review, and Prairie Schooner. She volunteers as an editorial consultant for Crab Creek Review and currently teaches part-time at the MFA program at National University. Her web site is www.webbish6.com.

I first encountered Jeannine Hall Gailey’s work while searching for poetry that would appeal to my students. They were at the height of the Twilight obsession, and I thought if I could find poems with younger themes, it might open a window for them into this world they were so wary of. I posted the question on the Wom-po listserv, and Jeannine herself said her first book, Becoming the Villainess, “does have poems about Buffy, evil Snow Queens, villainesses of all sorts...teenagers seem to dig it (though I wrote it with a slightly older audience in mind...).” Who was this Gailey person? I did a quick Google and found “The Night I Realize I Won’t Be Able to Have Children,” in Blood Lotus. So began my love affair with Jeannine Hall Gailey.

She was right about Villainess, by the way. Everyone I’ve ever told about this book (and they’ve been many) has loved it, and students who “don’t like poetry” like Jeannine’s poems. When she contacted me about reviewing her second book, She Returns to the Floating World, I immediately accepted, even though I had sworn off reviewing forever in a stupid attempt at “concentrating on my own work” that I’ve since quite obviously given up. I was floored by the book, which collects poems about Japanese traditional mythology and popular culture in an intensely personal context centered on the myth of the kitsune, the fox-become-woman of Japanese myth. In the traditional tale, the fox falls in love with a human male, and in She Returns, she is the central character in poems exploring themes of marriage, maternity, womanhood, and womanhood’s relationship to the environment. The review appears in the current issue of the Southern Humanities Review, and, as a companion piece, I asked Jeannine if she would answer some questions:

Q: She Returns begins with a rather lengthy set of acknowledgments in which you list seven “books and sources . . . invaluable to my research.” I’m sure there are plenty of people who don’t necessarily think of research and poetry as easy partners. Could you comment on the kind of research that you did, and why, and how it fed into the poetry?

A: Well, I’m the kind of person who likes to look stuff up for fun, which can really start an avalanche effect. For instance, Hayao Miyazaki mentioned in a couple of interviews that the story for one of his first movies, one of my favorites, called Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, was based on a Japanese traditional tale called “The Girl Who Loved Caterpillars.” The discovery of this charming tale, along with the discovery, quite by coincidence, of a fabulous resource, Hayao Kawai’s The Japanese Psyche: Major Motifs in the Fairy Tales of Japan – which I picked up just for fun at a used bookstore – they both kind of pushed me to start reading Japanese folk tale collections, criticism, and even start exploring Japanese short fiction, like Osamu Dazai, who is now among my favorite writers of all time. So it sort of built on itself. I really wrote the first poems in the book from watching Hayao Miyazaki’s movies, which are almost large visual poems in themselves, and then, as I read all these other books, the voices started up in my head – the fox-wife, the crane wife, all these transforming women – and the big sister/little brother trope in Japanese folk tales was equally fascinating to me. The idea of the female savior – which reappears quite often in anime and in Japanese folk tales – just seemed so liberating in the face of much pop culture “victim/sex object/villainess” stereotyping in Western culture. Of course, then, listening to Japanese pop bands, reading contemporary Japanese poetry, and learning more about the history and culture of Japan – these all seemed like natural ventures after I started up the project.

Let me point out I read probably twenty-five or thirty books of research for Becoming the Villainess, too – books of feminist fairy tale and comic book criticism, researching older and varying versions of fairy tales across different languages and cultures, so, um, it could be just a thing I do when I write.

Q: You learned Japanese. You researched. You wrote a 128-page book, lengthy for a poem collection these days. How long did this project take, and what was it like to get through such a complex endeavor?

A: I think the book from start to finish took about six years.

I wish I could say that I knew enough Japanese now to even have a regular conversation of the street – but no, I am still a stuttering idiot who can barely introduce herself in Japanese! I can recognize words in conversation, and I think Kanji is so beautiful I just want to learn more of it for aesthetic reasons – but I still can’t say I’m at all fluent in the language.

All of the books I read along the way so enriched my whole life, and the people I got to make friends with during the process of writing the book – my little brother’s Japanese professor, Dr. Ayako Ogawa, was quite helpful in reading early drafts of the book and helping me research Japanese terms and stories, even sending the book around to her family to get their input – and Roland Kelts, who I ended up meeting in person last year after corresponding for some time – and I ended up seeing Hayao Miyazaki in person in Berkeley CA, which was a dream for me. So really it was wonderful to get to meet and work with wonderful people who were so much more knowledgeable than I am! Even now, this last year, I’ve made new friends online in Japan who are working with translating some of my poems, and I never would have made those connections without the book. So the process was really something that changed me as I wrote.

Q: In the dedication, you credit your little brother with turning you on to Japanese language and culture, but poems like “Code III,” show a personal involvement with gaming culture in particular. Can you talk more about what it’s like, as a girl, as a woman now, to participate in worlds usually dominated by boys and men?

A: I grew up with three brothers, and I learned to program my first computer game when I was around seven (I made an alien stick out its tongue, and another where a maze exploded when you took a wrong turn – all in TRS-80-ready BASIC!) My father never acted like technology was something just for boys, my mother played early video games with me like “Zork!” and we were all encouraged to play with the computers and robots that went for tours in the house while my dad worked with them. So I’ve always felt pretty much at ease around techies, who, for the most part, have been men. At AT&T at one of my first jobs, I had this wonderful brilliant engineer friend from Ghana who was happy to show me all sorts of stuff – how to be a network administrator, a little bit about Unix and Java – and I never felt that I was treated differently at my jobs because I was female (except for being asked out on the occasional date!) That doesn’t mean I wasn’t appalled by occasional stuff – guys discussing the code for making breasts bounce in a certain volleyball video game comes to mind – and I’ve been a little disappointed sometimes in Geek culture for not embracing more females as something besides the sex objects – I remember feeling so sorry for the “booth babes” when I went to Comdex one year in Vegas because none of the men would make actual eye contact with them or acknowledge them as human beings. On the other hand, I’m totally happy to see more women at the bigger cons like WonderCon and ComicCon, and Seattle is hosting a new phenomenon called Geek Girl Con, which was fabulous last year. So I think Geek culture may not always be so male-dominated – at least I hope so!

I also think not being the sturdiest human physically has contributed – necessarily – to finding things to do when I was sick, stuck indoors, recovering from whatever…and video gaming, books, movies, these are all part of the process of staying sane when you’re not able to “go outside and play.”

My little brother definitely deserves the credit for helping educate me about a wide variety of anime series – he also is the one who showed me which comic books were cool in the eighties, and which ones had great writers – and when he started studying Japanese in college and visiting Japan it was a wonderful chance for me to tag along in learning. He’s three years younger than me, and seems to have a wonderful sixth sense about the “next big thing” in the culture – he told me Nirvana and Pearl Jam, for instance, would be huge, even when no one knew who they were. So, I’ve learned to pay attention to him whenever he recommends a band or a movie.

Q: Beyond the personal, can you say how you see the relationship between Japanese and American culture now, how it is evolving?

A: I really loved talking to Roland Kelts about this, author of Japanamerica, a book that was published a couple of years ago, that talks directly about the give-and-take of cultural flow between the two countries from WWII till today, especially as it pertains to pop culture. I certainly think that things like anime and manga have influenced the popular culture, especially of young people – I just think of the crowds of kids (and adults) at things like SakuraCon here in Seattle. For me, personally, I think it’s a shame the folk tales of Japan aren’t more widely read here – the fairy tales of Japan have unique qualities that I think would be a wonderful addition to the children’s cannon of tales. I hope my book sort of helps popularize some of the not-as-well-known tales like “Big Sister, Little Brother” or “The Girl Who Loved Caterpillars.” Some of the stories weren’t widely available in English when I was doing my research, but since the publication of the book, Osamu Dazai’s wonderful collection of folk tales has come out in English translation – it’s called “Otogizoshi: The Fairy Tale Book of Dazai Osamu.”

Q: The common thread between Villainess and She Returns is your wonderful ability to write persona poems. In Villainess, however, the territory is Western: fairy tales, myth, popular culture figures from comics and television. What did the switch to a Japanese cultural vantage point enable you to do?

A: I think the mood of the books is much different. I think I wrote Becoming the Villainess and She Returns to the Floating World in very different spaces, and I started them almost a decade apart; while Villainess is kind of brash and funny, She Returns is a more serious, meditative, melancholy book; definitely the notion of “aware” or “softly despairing sorrow” that characterizes so much Japanese literary art rang true with me when I started writing the book. The idea of separation – relationships that move apart for whatever reasons – and the idea of alienation from the body – were both things I was struggling with when I wrote many of the poems in the second book.

Interestingly, my third book, the upcoming Unexplained Fevers, returned to a lighter tone and to some of the Western fairy tale heroines I sort of passed over in the first book – the characters who were trapped in glass boxes, towers, coffins, etc. And then a fourth manuscript is all about my childhood in Oak Ridge and my father’s work with robots and kind of goes off in a sci-fi direction. So, you know, I get interested in different subject matter, then I write kind of single-mindedly about it for a few years, that’s how my books get written. I definitely write poems in “books” and then just weed out the weaker poems later.

Thanks so much for the opportunity to be on your blog, Celia!

And thank you, Jeannine, for taking the time to answer these questions, but most of all for sharing your passionate interests and interesting passions through your work.

Read some of Jeannine’s poems online:

“When Red Becomes the Wolf”
“Wonder Woman Dreams of the Amazon”
“The Husband Tries to Write to the Disappearing Wife”
“Sleeping Beauty Loves the Needle”

Couplets Blog Tour: Week Four Roundup

2012-04-28T22:58:00.000-04:00

126 posts! Start at the top, and work your way down:

22 April 2012: 3 Questions for Heather Kamins (at Miriam Sagan's Miriam's Well: Poetry, Land Art, and Beyond)

22 April 2012: Inquiring Minds and Other Clichés — David W. Landrum (at Christine Klocek-Lim's November Sky Poetry).

22 April 2012: Couplets: a multi-author poetry blog tour — Angie Werren (at T.A. Smith/Yousei Hime's Shiteki Na Usagi)

22 April 2012: Yousei Hime (at Angie Werren's feathers: micropoetry (and tinyprose))

23 April 2012: Guest Post by Carol Berg (at The Wordsmith's Forge: The Writing & Other Projects of Elizabeth Barrette)

23 April 2012: Couplets: Interview with Iris Jamahl Dunkle (at Francis Scudellari's Caught In The Stream)

23 April 2012: Guest Post by Stella Pierides (at Sabra Wineteer's The Bloomin' Blog)

23 April 2012: Featured "Couplets" Poet: Julene Tripp Weaver (at Christina Nguyen's A wish for the sky...)

23 April 2012: Margaret Dornaus (at Angie Werren's feathers: micropoetry (and tinyprose))

24 April 2012: Macbeth and Probabiliby (Michael Round at JoAnne Growney's Intersections — Poetry with Mathematics)

24 April 2012: Exploring the blueshift on the Couplets blog tour (review of Blueshifting at Sherry Chandler's blog)

24 April 2012: Inquiring Minds and Other Clichés — Catherine Rogers (at Christine Klocek-Lim's November Sky Poetry)

24 April 2012: Fiona Robyn (at Angie Werren's feathers: micropoetry (and tinyprose))

25 April 2012: Inquiring Minds and Other Clichés — Timothy Green (at Christine Klocek-Lim's November Sky Poetry)

25 April 2012: balance and flexibility: Molly Peacock part one (at Joanne Merriam)

25 April 2012: Couplets: Crossing Genres with Iris Dunkle (at Wendy Brown-Baez's Wendy's Muse)

25 April 2012: Fiona Robyn (at Angie Werren's feathers: micropoetry (and tinyprose))

26 April 2012: Kathy Uyen Nguyen (at Angie Werren's feathers: micropoetry (and tinyprose))

26 April 2012: Couplets: My life as a poet (Anne Higgins at Sue Burke's Mount Orégano)

26 April 2012: Inquiring Minds and Other Clichés — Lizzy Swane (at Christine Klocek-Lim's November Sky Poetry)

26 April 2012: NaPoMonth Guest: Mary Alexandra Agner (at Stella Pierides: Literature, Art, Culture, Society)

27 April 2012: elbow grease and enthusiasm: Molly Peacock part two (at Joanne Merriam)

27 April 2012: Couplets Blog Tour: Carol Berg Hosts Pat Valdata (at Carol Berg's Ophelia Unraveling)

27 April 2012: Poetry with Math -- BRIDGES 2012, Limericks (John Ciardi at JoAnne Growney's Intersections -- Poetry with Mathematics)

27 April 2012: Couplets Poetry Tour & Sharing Your Story (Lisa Cihlar at Michele Fischer's Finding Your Voice)

27 April 2012: Stella Pierides (at Angie Werren's feathers: micropoetry (and tinyprose))

28 April 2012: Inquiring Minds and Other Clichés — Stephen Bunch (at Christine Klocek-Lim's November Sky Poetry)

28 April 2012: Weaving Words, an interview with Ned Haggard (at Wendy Brown-Baez's (Wendy's Muse)

28 April 2012: Couplets Blog Tour: Celia Lisset Alvarez on Poetry & Politics (at Sunslick Starfish: chronicling the amazing ideas and adventures of Ching-In Chen: Writer & Community Organizer)

28 April 2012: From Nature's Patient Hands: For Couplets, Elizabeth Barrette (at Wendy Babiak's What I Meant to Say)

28 April 2012: Marty Smith (at Angie Werren's feathers: micropoetry (and tinyprose))

Couplets Blog Tour: On Poetry and Politics

2012-04-28T15:29:00.000-04:00

My last stop on the Couplets Blog Tour is Ching-In Chen's Sunslick Starfish, where I've written about one of my favorite subjects: poetry and politics. Check out this post and other posts from the Couplets Blog Tour at the Upper Rubber Boot Books website. My thanks one more time to Ching-In Chen, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Pat Valdata, Anne Higgins, and, of course, Joanne Merriam for this wonderful tour--what a great way to celebrate National Poetry Month!

Couplets Blog Tour: Opening the Dream Cabinet with Guest Ann Fisher-Wirth

2012-04-20T23:01:00.000-04:00

My guest today is Ann Fisher-Wirth, whose fourth book of poems, Dream Cabinet, has just been published by Wings Press. Her other books of poems are Carta Marina, Blue Window, and Five Terraces. Also she has published three chapbooks: The Trinket Poems, Walking Wu-Wei’s Scroll, and Slide Shows. She is coediting Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology, forthcoming from Trinity University Press in 2013. Her poems appear widely and have received numerous awards, including a Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Rita Dove Poetry Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award, two Mississippi Arts Commission fellowships, and twelve Pushcart nominations including a Special Mention. She has had senior Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden. She teaches at the University of Mississippi, where she also directs the minor in Environmental Studies. And she teaches yoga at Southern Star Yoga Studio and Blue Laurel Yoga in Oxford, MS.

For today's post, I present a short review of Ann's latest book, Dream Cabinet, and ask her some questions about the role of the poet, of the reader, of form, and of her passion for the environment.

Opening the Dream Cabinet

In an interview for Very Like a Whale, when asked about the role of the poet in the world, British poet Tony Williams said, “It’s very difficult for a poet to write well in the light of a perceived responsibility to engage with matters outside the poem – whether these are political, historical, moral, theoretical, aesthetic, etc – because as soon as you have a conscious desire to do so, you’re serving two masters.” Ann Fisher-Wirth’s new collection from Wings Press, Dream Cabinet, is an extended meditation on this very dichotomy, this push-and-pull the poet feels between the world inside and that outside. The poems, ranging from formally experimental environmental meditations to intimate lyrical narratives, are fueled by the simultaneous desires to both make sense of the world and acknowledge its senselessness. In the title poem, the speaker is moved by the changing seasons of the Swedish landscape to wish “to know this place in the fullness of its seasons. / And watch the light on water, day after day, / empty out my everlasting self-regard.” It is a wish the collection fulfills, moving from poems that struggle to define experience to poems that, finally, acknowledge “nothing needs / to happen” in order for us to claim our places in this world.

The collection begins with poems capturing moments that resist definition while at the same time desiring it. The opening poem, “Slow Rain, October,” features a quotation from Williams Carlos Williams, “Minds like beds always made up.” Enjoying the possibilities of “div[ing] into an unmade bed and sleep[ing],” the speaker turns her vision towards the “sixty years of family” represented in the photographs nearby, and relishes the “Sweetness of not making the bed today, / not making the body today, not making / the life today.” It’s easy to see why Fisher-Wirth chose to begin the collection with this quiet poem. It holds all the collection’s themes inside: family, especially their comings and goings; nature present but inscrutable in its “cloak and foggy stars”; and the poet herself, attempting to make sense of it all yet deriving more pleasure in the telling than the told, in the unmade bed.

Subsequent poems pick up on this theme but take it into darker territories. A memory of a lazy afternoon in Athens is shadowed by the earlier memory of the shattered family that preceded it:

When I speak of that time my tongue

grows thick and I think of the family I broke

to be with you; years later my daughter told me

her father said to her, You will have to be

the mommy now.

Other poems, such as the powerful “Answers I Did Not Give to the Annulment Questionnaire,” explore the boundaries of remembrance, the difference between change and destruction, between the passage of time and death. Faced with annulment papers after twenty-two years of divorce, the speaker travels through the lifetime of memories encompassing fourteen years of marriage, and challenges the readers of the document to “Make to nothing now the path that led / to the house next to the chicken farm / in Upland, California” where the family once lived. This is a poem that explores the value of experience even in the face of failure, that simultaneously wishes the “Fathers” to whom it is addressed to “Make to nothing my self-hatred” and “explain that, Fathers, / to the children of this marriage.”

The environmental poems also speak to the theme of broken vs. annulled. “BP,” a formally complex poem arranged partly from quotations, presents a stark look at the disastrous oil spill, with animals large and small struggling through the oil muck. Even in its agony, however, the gulf is teeming in its “filthy iridescence,” and the “flames [that] roll over the waters” are alive with ominous intent as they “lick the legs of our chairs / where we sit sipping coffee.” Like the ever-changing landscape of Sweden, the natural world of Dream Cabinet has its peaks and valleys, transforming but never disappearing. Like families that dissolve and coalesce into new families, Fisher-Wirth’s natural world is a place that holds “no vow,” that is a soft rain one minute and a terrifying tornado the next. “There’s nothing to be done,” writes Fisher-Wirth, and she revels in it:

others have written of blackberries,

but these are my fingers gently twisting

the tender knobbly fruit from the hull,

this is my hour and cherishing, I breathe

blackberry into every cell of my body.

Bees love me. They come to buzz

and hover around my crimson fingers.

In this stained, thorn-pricked

meditation, nothing needs

to happen.

What is the role of the poet in such a world? This is one of the questions I asked Ann Fisher-Wirth:

Q: In “Credo,” you write, “And the artist, what is she? The one whose hands are empty.” Could you say more about how you perceive the role of the poet?

A: Recently a friend who read Dream Cabinet pointed out what she felt to be an interesting conflict. On the one hand many of its poems grow from personal experience, from engagement with four generations of my family and with history, politics, the environment. They strongly bear the marks of my personal identity; they are autobiographical free verse grounded in lyric and to some extent narrative. Yet on the other hand “Credo” expresses a conception of poetry as coming from a kind of relinquishment, an emptying of the known self, a listening and channeling, so that language comes through but not exactly from oneself. I think, though, that what appears to be a conflict is just two sides of the same thing. Existence expresses itself through us, shaped as we are shaped. Sometimes, the shaping will be of “things that happened to the writer,” and we call that autobiography. Sometimes, the shaping will hew more closely to dream, fantasy, meditative states, the free play of the imagination. Even so, the poet is (in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s beautiful phrase) “Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.” We speak the language, yet the language speaks us.

The role of the poet is to serve the poem. Sometimes this happens in one way, sometimes in another. Along the way, the poem cannot help but reflect the nature of the poet’s engagement with all aspects of his or her world—including the desire to empty the self out and, as much as possible while one is still alive, become one with the world. I have practiced and taught yoga for a long time, and I think of this desire as akin to what happens in meditation or Savasana.

Q: Many of the poems in Dream Cabinet seem to resist resolution, to travel through the murky waters of experience without a map. How do you perceive the role of the reader, then?

A: It’s funny, I always think of my poems as abundantly clear, even too clear—so your statement that many of the poems in Dream Cabinet seem to resist resolution delights me. Experience doesn’t have a map; instead, experience has its plenteous and as you say murky self. Poetry—like all literature—thrives on questions, complexities, conflicts, ambiguities. It is a journey, a means of exploration. And I suppose I’d want a reader to take the trip, to “learn to love the questions themselves,” as Rilke advises in Letters to a Young Poet. I think contemporary American culture is way too addicted to answers, solutions, game plans, for complicated reasons that probably have much to do with confusion and fear. Once, long ago, in a time of great trouble I asked someone, “What is the meaning of life?” I was looking for some clear-cut statement of purpose, a map that would chart my despair. He replied, “The meaning of life is life.” It was exactly the right answer. And while poetry cannot resolve life’s complexities, cannot do away with murkiness or suffering, it definitely offers us life more abundant.

Q: I was particularly impressed by “BP,” in which you not only incorporated quotations from a government document and a news article, but also did so in a very formally interesting way. I was equally taken by more traditional poems, like “Thirty Years.” How do you think about form so differently, especially in relation to content?

A: I am glad you liked “BP”! That poem was a challenge for me to write, because whereas I am intensely involved with environmental issues both in my teaching and as a citizen, and whereas I live in Mississippi, I don’t live close to the Gulf of Mexico and so did not see the destruction caused by the BP oil disaster with my own eyes. Yet Jonathan Skinner, who was co-editing a special issue of Interim magazine focusing on the disaster, invited me to contribute and I really wanted to. So I leaned on what I did have: a Nation article by Naomi Klein, the Congressional report a year after the disaster, various images in the press, and a digital photograph taken by Gara Gillentine, with whom I collaborated on the piece. I decided to run the found text in one jagged column across the page from my own jagged column of language, and to use the found text to address the large environmental implications of the event, and my own language to address the beauty and suffering of the nonhuman creatures—pelicans, dragonflies—caught in the web of our greed. So, the poem is in three sections: first, the Nation text and my poem about dragonflies; second, the Congressional report excerpts and my poem about pelicans; third, two contrasting voices—both mine—the first of which expresses our lack of interest in what does not impact us directly (“What does that have to do with me”) and the second of which expresses a warning: it does have to do with me, for literally and metaphorically, the waters are rising around us all.

Different poems present different challenges, and I like to experiment with a wide variety of ways of writing free verse. Many of the poems in my first, second, and fourth books are fairly traditional free verse lyrics or lyric/narratives. My chapbook Slide Shows is a sequence of nineteen short-line poems, each of which is only ten lines long. My third book, Carta Marina, is a book-length poem in three parts, each of which has multiple dated sections, and the sections are in all sorts of free-verse forms; formally, it’s the most experimental thing I’ve done. Some longer sequences in Dream Cabinet, like the poem “Answers I Did Not Give to the Annulment Questionnaire” or the title poem “Dream Cabinet,” are in short sections some of which utilize open field composition. I also love to write prose poems; in fact the manuscript I am working on now, “First, Earth,” is all prose poems.

Q: Dream Cabinet seems obsessed with the passage of time, both on a personal and a global scale. What can you tell us about your own relationship to environmentalism and how it has evolved over the years?

A: It’s true, I am obsessed with time—particularly with the passage of time. I guess that’s inevitable if one is as drawn to autobiography as I am, and also pretty common as people grow older. I was born right after World War II, only because my father lived through the war. I was a teenager living in Berkeley during the Civil Rights era and the first part of the Vietnam War. Growing up in Berkeley, I became aware of politics at a fairly young age—of civil rights and environmental justice issues, in particular, because of a guy I dated who was much involved with Cesar Chavez. Then as a graduate student, young mother, and eventually Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia, I became very interested in second wave feminism, women writers, and feminist theory.

My focus on environmental issues grew gradually, and I can think of four main sources for it. First, when I married my second husband, Peter Wirth, we moved to live in the guesthouse of a 600-acre farm south of Charlottesville, and I realized that what I’d always thought of as my passion for the natural world was actually a fact: I really, truly did love nature. Second, as I became aware of the dire state of the environment, I realized that, for me, that was the most important issue of all; if we destroy the planet for human life, nothing else is going to matter. Third, at around that time I became involved with the nascent Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, which has now become an international 1000-member group known as ASLE. This has been a major professional investment for me; it has had many results, among which is my directing the Environmental Studies Minor at the University of Mississippi. And fourth, as I have continued in my study of Eastern thought, combined with my study of environmental literature and my practice of yoga, my awareness of the other-than-human world and forms of life has grown. The bodhisattva consents to remain in the cycles of birth and death until all beings attain enlightenment—not just all human beings. That, to me, is a supremely beautiful concept. The idea of extending compassion to all living beings opens up one’s awareness immeasurably, and though I can’t say I fully live with that compassion, it inspires me.

Thanks for passing on that inspiration, Ann, and thanks to Joanne Merriam of Upper Rubber Boot Books, coordinator of the Couplets Blog Tour, for providing me with the opportunity to get to know Ann and her work. If you want to keep up with the Couplets tour, check the updated list of posts here.

Couplets Blog Tour: Week Two

2012-04-14T22:40:00.000-04:00

Wonderful new posts all around this week, if I do say so myself! Happy reading:

8 April 2012: Fiona Robyn (at Angie Werren's feathers: micropoetry (and tinyprose))
9 April 2012: Guest Post: Mary Alexandra Agner (at The Wordsmith's Forge: The Writing & Other Projects of Elizabeth Barrette)
9 April 2012: it requires practice, a lot of it (Christine Klocek-Lim at Joanne Merriam
9 April 2012: National Poetry Month: Guest Post #6, Alegria Imperial . . . (at Margaret Dornaus' Haiku-doodle)
9 April 2012: Inquiring Minds and Other Clichés — O.P.W. Fredericks (at Christine Klocek-Lim's November Sky Poetry)
9 April 2012: Andrea Grillo (at Angie Werren's feathers: micropoetry (and tinyprose))
10 April 2012: Measured Extravagance by Peg Duthie (a review) (at Renee Emerson's This Quiet Hour)
10 April 2012: guest post: poems by Christina Nguyen (at Peg Duthie's zirconium)
10 April 2012: National Poetry Month: Guest Post #7, Claire Everett (at Margaret Dornaus' Haiku-doodle)
10 April 2012: Kirsten Cliff (at Angie Werren's feathers: micropoetry (and tinyprose))
11 April 2012: GUEST BLOG & INTERVIEW — Heather Kamins — BLUESHIFTING (at Steve Vernon's Old Fart Rambles)
11 April 2012: Interview with Steve Vernon (at Heather Kamins)
11 April 2012: Couplets Blog Tour: Pat Valdata's Inherent Vice (at Celia Lisset Alvarez's Writing with Celia)
11 April 2012: Inquiring Minds and Other Clichés — Karen J. Weyant (at Christine Klocek-Lim's November Sky Poetry)
11 April 2012: Open My Mouth and Sky (Ching-In Chen at Mary Alexandra Agner)
11 April 2012: National Poetry Month: Guest Post #8, Pamela Cooper . . . (at Margaret Dornaus' Haiku-doodle)
11 April 2012: there must be a lot of power in that quiet space for there to be an all-out onslaught against it in our culture (Jeff Hardin at Joanne Merriam).
11 April 2012: Marie Marshall (at Angie Werren's feathers: micropoetry (and tinyprose))
12 April 2012: Math or poetry — must one choose? (Eveline Pye at JoAnne Growney's Intersections -- Poetry with Mathematics)
12 April 2012: Ojibway Poet Heid Erdrich and the Craft of Writing (at Wendy Brown-Baez's Wendy's Muse)
12 April 2012: 3 Questions for Mary Alexandra Agner (at Miriam Sagan's Miriam's Well: Poetry, Land Art, and Beyond)
12 April 2012: Couplets Blog Tour: "Why Getting Small Details Right Matters," by Pat Valdata (at Celia Lisset Alvarez's Writing with Celia)
12 April 2012: James Brush (at Angie Werren's feathers: micropoetry (and tinyprose))
12 April 2012: Featured "Couplets" Poet: Sue Burke (at Christina Nguyen's A wish for the sky...)
12 April 2012: National Poetry Month: Guest Post #9, Andrea Grillo . . . (at Margaret Dornaus' Haiku-doodle)
13 April 2012: Beginning with a Question (guest post by Lynn Domina) (at Kristine Ong Muslim)
13 April 2012: haiga: a powder brush (Peg Duthie at Joanne Merriam)
13 April 2012: Cara Holman (at Angie Werren's feathers: micropoetry (and tinyprose))
14 April 2012: Aubrie Cox (at Angie Werren's feathers: micropoetry (and tinyprose))
14 April 2012: Inquiring Minds and Other Clichés — John Amen (at Christine Klocek-Lim's November Sky Poetry)