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Mary Mackey

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Interview with Artist Cristina Biaggi on “Habitations of the Great Goddess”

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Cristina Biaggi, Ph.D., is a renowned Artist, Writer and Prehistorian. Her work has been widely exhibited in the U.S., Europe and Australia. She has published five books: Habitations of the Great Goddess, In the Footsteps of the Goddess, The Rule of Mars, Activism into Art into Activism into Art and Four Legs = Two, as well as a number of articles, which have appeared in various anthologies and other publications. The archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, who was her mentor and friend, wrote an introduction to her first book. Biaggi’s artistic practice consists of figurative sculptures, including a recent portrait of Jane Fonda, as well as political and abstract collages. She has also been commissioned to create numerous large outdoor sculptures. Her artwork is presently included in many collections including Jane Fonda’s in L.A. and Sean Scully’s in N.Y.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cristina: You’re welcome.

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

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

 

“A Country of Strangers” Interview with Poet D. Nurkse

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D. Nurkse is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently A Country of Strangers  (Knopf, April 2022), a “new and selected.” He has received the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Whiting foundations. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review and many other venues, and has been widely translated. He has taught poetry at Rikers Island and served a term on the board of Amnesty International-USA. He currently teaches in the MFA Program at Sarah Lawrence College and collaborates with Zephyr, his visionary dog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

D. Nurkse: “Caligula.”

Mary: Here is “Caligula.”

 

                         Caligula
                                                             After Suetonius

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary: Why is it your favorite?

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

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

 

Interview with Poet Andrea Carter Brown

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Andrea Carter Brown’s new collection of award-winning poetry September 12 was published by The Word Works for the 20th anniversary of 9/11. She is previously the author of Domestic Karma, The Disheveled Bed, and Brook & Rainbow. “American Fraktur,” her current manuscript, won the 2018 Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award from Marsh Hawk Press. Her poems have won awards from Five Points, River Styx, The MacGuffin, and the Poetry Society of America, among others; and are cited in the Library of Congress Online Guide to the Poetry of 9/11. They have also been featured on NPR. Andrea was a Founding Editor of Barrow Street and Managing Editor of The Emily Dickinson Journal. For six years, she served on the Virginia Center for the Arts (VCCA) Fellows Council, the last three as Chair. Since 2017, she has been Series Editor of the Word Works Washington Prize.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact Information for Andrea Carter Brown:

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

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

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

Interview with novelist and short story writer Valerie Miner

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

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

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

Mary: Which writers have influenced you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links
www.valerieminer.com

Instagram valerieminer1

 

Interview With Poet Indigo Moor

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

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

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

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

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

Mary: What poets and writers have influenced you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary: How has your poetry changed over the years?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview with Marge Piercy

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

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

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

INTERVIEW WITH MARGE PIERCY

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

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

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

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

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

How do you view this novel now in 2020? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

 

Writing Fiction and Nonfiction: Interview With Author Janice Eidus

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Janice Eidus   (Photo credit: Steve Schulman)

Mary Mackey:  Janice Eidus is a novelist, essayist, short story writer, and writing coach who, after a celebrated career writing fiction, has turned to writing nonfiction as well as fiction. Today we are going to talk to her about the experience of doing both.

Welcome to my People Who Make Books Happen interview series, Janice. As I noted, before you also started writing nonfiction, you had a very successful career writing fiction. Let’s talk about that first. Could you please start by telling us when you started writing fiction?

Janice Eidus: I began writing and illustrating stories and plays that were percolating in my head when I was a little girl. Usually they were about girls my age having grand adventures, sometimes in the Bronx, where I lived, and sometimes in the wider world as I imagined it. I also wrote short poems, celebrations of New York City and the occasional “ode” to favorite teachers.

Mary: What inspired you to write?

Janice: I wrote for reasons I couldn’t articulate back then. I wrote to invent whole worlds of people and places that were unlike my unhappy family and the housing project in which we lived; to be heard by someone, somewhere, since I never felt truly listened to or understood at home; to transform words into art; to bear witness.

I believed that when I grew up I’d write a novel on Monday, a poem on Tuesday, and a play on Wednesday. Fresh out of college, I did publish some poems in literary magazines but I quickly came to see that at that time my passion was fiction. I loved “spinning yarns” the old-fashioned way while simultaneously “re-inventing” the world. Even in my most fantastical or magical realist stories (as opposed to my more realistic work) I never eschewed traditional storytelling elements of plot, character, conflict, and theme.

Mary: Tell us about some of your novels and short stories. Do they fall into any specific genre?

Janice: My short stories are all over the map, stylistically. However, as with my novels, they’re connected through theme, character, place, emotions, and worldview. Take, for example, two of my novels, The War Of The Rosens and The Last Jewish Virgin. One is firmly rooted in the realm of reality; the other is situated (at least partially) in the realm of literary myth.

The War Of The Rosens, the realistic novel, is also my most autobiographical novel. While much of it is totally invented, it’s deeply informed by my family and my childhood. The novel portrays a family that is passionate about leftwing politics as well as their Jewish identity while they confront illness, grief, and violence.

As for The Last Jewish Virgin, I call it my literary, Jewish, feminist, fashionista vampire novel. It pays homage to the myth of the vampire — a timeless, romantic myth I’ve adored since I was a little girl — while also subverting it with humor, through a contemporary lens. The main character is Lilith Zeremba, a young fashion design student who’s in the midst of a mighty rebellion against her intellectual, feminist Jewish mother.

The Last Jewish Virgin initially appears very different from The War Of The Rosens. For starters, you’ve got a vampire running around New York – which means realism is tossed out the window, right? Well, not really, because it takes place largely in two very real Manhattan neighborhoods: the West Village and the Upper West Side. In addition, the novel explores female sexuality and mother/daughter tension in authentic ways. And, much of it takes place in an art school modeled on The Parsons School of Design, where I used to teach.

The War Of The Rosens and The Last Jewish Virgin are linked not only to each other but also to my other novels and short fiction. All delve into issues dear to my heart: love and heartbreak; female passion; socioeconomic injustice; secularism versus faith; illness and grief; and, the creative process.

Mary: You’ve won major prizes for your fiction. What were these and for which stories did you receive them?

Janice: Among the prizes that mean the most to me are my two O.Henry Prizes because, as a kid, I adored O.Henry’s playfulness and wit, and, oh, those surprise endings! My first O.Henry was for my short story “Vito Loves Geraldine,” a contemporary fairy tale romance about two rock n’rollers from the Bronx – Vito the tough boy who becomes famous, and Geraldine, who sets her hair nightly with beer cans while waiting for Vito to return to her and the Bronx.

The second O. Henry Prize was for “Pandora’s Box,” a story about a survivor of incest who supports herself as a phone sex worker, all the time fearing her own Pandora’s Box of painful memories and truths.

The Pushcart Prize I received also meant a lot to me. It was for a funny and “naughty” story I wrote called “Not The Plaster Casters.” It’s literally about the genitalia of rock stars. An extra perk of winning that prize was that the talented, edgy actress Sean Young performed it at Word Theatre in L.A. It was thrilling beyond words to hear my words coming out of her fabulous mouth.

Mary: Given that you are successful as a fiction writer, what inspired you to start writing nonfiction?

Janice: I’ve always loved reading memoirs and personal essays. And, whenever I was asked to contribute a personal essay to anthologies on subjects ranging from Barbie Dolls to female desire to the meaning of “dirt” in my life and more, I happily did so. Nevertheless, for many years fiction was my main priority and passion. And then, one day . . . I had two “main” priorities.

I’m still writing fiction, but a new switch just seemed to get turned on in my brain, and ever since then, ideas for personal essays keep coming. I’m certain that this is connected to the fact that many things in my life were (and are) changing. By choice, I’d become a first-time mother in middle age. I adopted my daughter from Guatemala, which suddenly made me a member of a transracial family. Thus, issues of race, always important to me, now took on urgent new meaning. Every single day, my daughter and I were forced to confront the fact of our difference. This continues to be the case, even now that she is a teenager. In addition, becoming a parent made me realize how much my identity as a cultural Jew meant to me, and how strongly I wanted to raise my daughter as one.

Also years of therapy helped me to become calmer and more grounded, as well as more confident about my opinions and beliefs. Plus, I’d been diagnosed with celiac, an auto-immune illness one is born with, but which I didn’t know I had, despite being ill on and off for my entire life. For those of us with celiac, gluten is toxic. Living gluten-free has affected every aspect of my life, and once I was diagnosed, I felt physically better than I ever had.

In addition, I’d accomplished many of my goals as a fiction writer and a person. Many things came together for me, and this contributed to who I am as a human being, a woman, and a writer – and therefore to my new desire to write personal essays.

Mary: Do you find writing nonfiction difficult?

Janice: No. It’s actually exciting and thrilling: thinking in a brand new way, working with new editors, and speaking to new audiences, especially in the evolving landscape of digital magazines. I’ve even made new friends, people who are writing the same kind of deeply personal essays that I am. Friendship is, in fact, a very important subject for me–the ones that end, the ones that stay, the ones that transform. For example, recently I wrote an essay for NextTribe entitled “The Zen of Female Friendships: Why Some Last and Some Don’t.”

Mary: Tell us about some of your favorite nonfiction pieces

Janice: I love all of Vivian Gornick’s writing, but especially her two courageous memoirs, Fierce Attachments, about growing up as a Jewish girl in the Bronx with her widowed Communist mother, and The Odd Woman And The City, which explores her love affair with New York City alongside her intense friendship as a heterosexual woman with a gay man. I greatly admire and am moved by Gornick because of her unflinching honesty and specificity, as well as her intelligence and meticulous prose.

Mary: Are as happy writing nonfiction as you are writing fiction? If so, why?

Janice: I’m happier in my life now than I’ve ever been, and that happens to coincide with my writing so much nonfiction. I treasure the changes wrought by years of good therapy, parenting my amazing daughter, and being in a long marriage – and the things I’ve learned from all three.

I’ve also moved around a lot geographically and I wasn’t always happy where I landed, which was especially difficult for me because place is very important to me in both my life and my writing. I’m happy to say that I feel completely at home in the Manhattan neighborhood where I now live, the charming and untrendy Murray Hill, close to the river and the U.N. Of course the larger world is in great turmoil, and these are not happy times for those of us who care about social justice and the future of our planet. I’m heartbroken about so much that is going on, but I’m also galvanized and determined to effect as much change as I can. Writing essays is actually very good for my soul during such turbulent and tumultuous times.

Mary: What advice can you give writers who want to move between writing fiction and nonfiction?

Janice: Read, read, read – and not just the writing of people with whom you’re familiar. Read across the globe, and across genre, age, gender, sexuality, color, class, etc. Listen to your voice. Listen to the voices of others. Balance your intuitive self with your analytical self. Be specific yet universal. Understand that the creative journey is as important – if not more so – than the finished product. Revise like mad.

Mary: What is it like going back and forth between writing fiction and nonfiction?

Janice: I still read as much fiction as I do memoir and personal essays. I continue to work as a private Writing Coach to writers engaging in both. As time goes on, I’m sure I’ll continue to move fluidly back and forth between the two genres. Both live inside me.

Mary: What are you up to next?

Janice: I have a Word doc that’s a list of ideas for essays I want to write about things that are deeply personal and meaningful for me. It’s a very, very long list and it keeps growing. And I’m writing fiction inspired by visual art.

Mary: That sounds fascinating. I’m eager to read the essays that you will write based on that list. Readers are always invited to leave comments here. How can people connect with you in other ways, read your work, and find out what you’re doing?

Janice: If you want to know what I’m up to, you can sign up here for the newsletter I send out a few times a year with info including publications, interviews, and writing courses I’ll be teaching.
Here’s a link to some of my favorites among my essays in magazines: http://www.janiceeidus.com/essays.php . And a link to some of my favorites among my essays in anthologies: http://www.janiceeidus.com/anthologies.php.

Mary: Could you give us your website url and point us to some magazines that have published your nonfiction?

Janice: My website is at http://janiceeidus.com/  As for online magazines, I’ve written over 50 essays just for Purple Clover. I also write for a very cool magazine for women called Next Tribe. I’ve also written for She Knows, The New York Times, The Forward, Lilith, and so many more. I love hearing from other readers and writers, so feel free to be in touch!

Mary: Thank you, Janice. You’ve given us all a lot to think about.

Janice: And thank you, Mary, for your terrific questions and your ongoing support of the literary community.

Mary: If you would like to find out more about Janice Eidus you can follow her on Twitter @JaniceEidus and connect with her on Linkedin.

Subscribe to my quarterly Newsletter and check out the other People Who Make Books Happen Interviews on my website to discover what other great writers like Marge Piercy, Jane Hirshfield, D. Nurkse, and Ellen Sussman have to say about their work and literary passions

Beauty, poetry, Audible books, and turkeys on the run

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Dear Friends,
     Welcome to the Fall Issue of my Good News Newsletter, an alternative to all the bad news that’s being covered by the rest of the media. Believe it or not, this Fall there is a lot of good news, and a lot of it is coming from you.

My good news is that The Village of Bones, is finally available as an Audible Book from Amazon, iTunes, and Audible. So if you love historical fiction and want to visit a more peaceful time when the Earth was sacred, and organized warfare didn’t exist, you can listen to it being read to you by Merritt Hicks, one of the best professional narrators in the business.
     My other good news is that my comic short story “Fowl Play” has been reprinted in The Killer Wore Cranberry: A Fifth Course of Chaos, an anthology of humorous Thanksgiving mystery stories.  So if you want to witness an attempted coup d’etat by a flock of turkeys on the run from Thanksgiving read a FREE SAMPLE of “Fowl Play” and then check out the anthology.
     Some more good news from my side is that a German language edition of The Last Warrior Queen will be published by Fischer some time next year both as an eBook and a paperback, and I have two poems in a wonderful new anthology of women’s poetry entitled Know me Here. edited by Katherine Hastings. Also, as many of you already know, Amazon choose The Village of Bones to be one of their Kindle Monthly Deals for September.
     If you think that’s a lot of good news from me, read on. You have sent me so much good news that it fills up half this newsletter (and makes me very happy).
Less Stress More Joy
 
When the going gets tough, the tough do something silly to remain sane. This Fall, I’ve been spending some time relaxing at WeRateDogs, a hilarious Twitter site that rates dogs from 1 to 10 and never gives a dog anything under a 12. (“They’re all good dogs.”). Here’s the link to my all-time favorite WeRateDogs page:
https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-not-a-dog-tweets/
Send me your favorite ways to relax and I will post them in my next newsletter.
 
Want more beauty, passion, love, and lyrical poetry in your life? Read my recent People Who Make Books Happen Interview with poet D. Nurkse whose new collection Love in The Last Days (Knopf) re-images the Medieval love story of Tristan and Iseult. 
 
 
Good News From Friends
Congratulations to: Literary Agent Barbara Lowenstein for her work in Greece with refugees from Syria and Afghanistan; Rafael Jesus Gonzalez who has been appointed Berkeley’s 1st Poet Laureate; poet Katherine Hastings for editing Know Me Here, a new anthology of poetry by women; poet Dan Bellm for his translation of Speaking in Song by the Mexican poet Pura López Colomé ; Paul Pines for his new collection of poetry Gathering Sparks; poet Terry Lucas for Dharma Rain; Sri Lankan American author Nayomi Munaweera for her new novel What Lies Between Us; poet Bruce Bagnell for The Self-Evolution Spa; poet MK Chaves for Dear Animal; author-photographer Elaine Miller Bond for her children’s board book of wild animals and habitats Living Wild; Joan Gelfand who has signed a contract with Mango Press for Mastering the 4 C’s of Successful Authors: Craft, Commitment, Community, and Confidence and also had her essay “Dreaming in Thai” accepted for Chicken Soup for the Soul: Dreams and the Unexplainable; Alice Anderson for her memoir Some Bright Morning I’ll Fly Away; Michelle Zaffino on the publication of Parts 2 and 3 of her novel Skylar Saffron Librarian Detective; Iranian-American author Donia Bijan for her novel The Last Days of the Cafe Leila; Sylvia Brownrigg for her novel Pages for Her;  novelist Martha Conway for The Underground River; Achy Obejas for her short fiction collection The Tower of the Antilles; J. Alan Hartman of Untreed Reads for editing The Killer Wore Cranberry: A Fifth Course of Chaos and giving us all a lot of laughs (the man has a wicked sense of humor); writer-educator Louise Nayer for Poised for Retirement: Moving from Anxiety to Zen;  Mandy Aftel for her cookbook The Art of Flavor; psychologist-poet George J Kaliaden for Healing With Words: A Psychologist’s Experiments in Poetry Therapy; poet Basil King for having 12 of his BIRD paintings chosen for exhibition at the Appalachian State University Turchin Center for the Visual Arts; Thaddeus Rutkowski for his short story collection Guess and Check; author Kathleen Archambeau for Pride and Joy: LGBTQ Artists, Icons, and Everyday Heroes; poet and suicide prevention specialist Fredric Matteson for developing Contextural-Conceptual Therapy (CCT) for suicide prevention and for his on-going work to prevent youth suicide; and to artist-sculptor Cristina Biaggi for the installation of her nine-foot tall Triptych Portal, which you can see below.
Triptych Portal by Cristina Biaggi
Saunders Farm Sculpture Park, Garrison NJ
Please send me your good news so I can put it in my next newsletter. You don’t have to be a poet, novelist, film maker, artist, or musician. Good news is good news. And don’t miss the San Francisco Writers Conference 2018, February 15-18 in the Mark Hopkins Hotel.
 
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Monday, December 11, 2017, Berkeley, CA:  Mary will be the featured reader at Poetry Express Berkeley.TIME: 7 pm. PLACE: Himalayan Flavors, 1585 University Ave., Berkeley CA. Come listen to her read new poems from her forthcoming collection The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams and signup  for the open mic to read some poems of your own. Free and open to the public.

On Friday, February 16, 2018, San Francisco, CA:  Mary will be at the San Francisco Writer’s Conference taking part in three panels. More details to come as the time approaches.

To see Mary Mackey’s complete schedule of readings and other events please CLICK HERE

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D. Nurkse on Love In The Last Days

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The Story of Tristan and Iseult Revisited

D. Nurske is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently Love in The Last Days from Knopf. He’s the recipient of the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He’s also taught at Rikers Island, served on the board of Amnesty International USA, and translated medieval poetry. He’s on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. Love in The Last Days is a series of poems based on the legend of Tristan and Iseult.

Mary: Welcome to People Who Make Books Happen, Dennis. The legend of Tristan and Iseult reverberated throughout the Middle Ages. It’s one of the most romantic stories ever told. I’ve loved it since I first read Chevrefoil by the medieval poet Marie de France, so I was delighted to discover that it was the subject of your new collection of poetry Love in The Last Days. Before we begin, could you please give us a brief summary of the story of Tristan and Iseult, so people who are not familiar with the legend can understand what we’re talking about .

Dennis: Thanks so much, Mary. There are a thousand versions. Some have a happy ending! Here are the barest bones: Tristan is entrusted to fetch Iseult from Ireland to marry his liege, King Mark of Cornwall. On the boat home they fall in love. They commit adultery at Mark’s court and escape to the wilderness; eventually they separate, Tristan to exile, Iseult to her destiny to be a queen. They are reunited at the point of death.

Mary: The poems in Love in The Last Days are filled with a richness, complexity, depth, and lyricism that is truly extraordinary. What inspired you to write them. Or put another way, what prompted you to do a new version of the legend of Tristan and Iseult?

Dennis: The story of Tristan and Iseult is wildly subversive. At one of the most hierarchical moments in history, the bond between lovers suddenly emerges as a force—stronger than church, state, piety, or public opinion. The plot pokes at the underpinnings of patriarchy—what if love and obedience are radically different? I’ve always been fascinated by the lovers’ escape to the wilderness; as if the impenetrable forest stood for the untamed part of the mind.

Mary: What research did you do for these poems? What sources did you consult?

Dennis: There are lovely books in English: The Romance of Tristan and Iseult as compiled by Joseph Bedier, and Tristan: with the surviving fragment of the “Tristan of Thomas” as compiled by Gottfried von Strassburg. The stories in the Arthurian cycle are bedrock, and there are troubadour versions; René Nelli writes about troubadour eroticism. Jacques le Goff has an essay called “Levi Strauss in Broceliande: Brief Analysis of a Courtly Romance.” Beautifully specific documentation can be found in John Cummin’s The Hawk and the Hound: The Art of Medieval Hunting. Jean Rimmer has researched the Irish harp. The French series Bibliotheque de la Pleiade has a terrific one-volume compilation of sources. My own book is inscribed to the memory of Marc Bloch, an expert on the feudal imagination, who died under torture at the hands of the Gestapo.

Mary: Could you put the legend of Tristan and Iseult in a historical context for us. What did it have to do with Courtly Love. How did the Medieval Church view it? Did it find a popular audience?

Dennis: The legend began before the era of Courtly Love, but it was adapted (or adapted itself? It has a mind of its own.) and became a vehicle for troubadour ideas. The Church hated it. Yes, it found a popular audience—but my own ancestors were peasants a generation or two ago; who knows how deeply into the commons it reached?

Mary: How did you change the legend?

Dennis: I want my version to be psychological—it’s not clear that spells and monsters aren’t just the shadows of desperate love. But I’d better steer clear of hubris. The originals, pre-Freudian though they are, are full of double entendre and the agency of the unconscious. Stories teach that illusion is part of love—you can’t wish it away. When you’re close enough, the other’s face is as invisible as your own. My version has no patience for the values of aristocracy and purity. Sometimes it’s funny.

Mary: How did you change the main characters?

Dennis: Well, Mary, the original characters morph according to who’s telling the tale and when. Tristan and Iseult are open to interpretation. I really just tried to hear in my mind the voices of two young lovers, destined to become old lovers, baffled at any given moment, but who complete each other strangely over the arc of a lifetime.

Mary: You depict Iseult as a woman of great strength. Did you find hints of this in the Medieval versions of the legend, or is her emergence as a powerful woman new to the story?

Dennis: It’s one of the exciting things about the original story. The troubadour versions are strikingly empowering to women characters—and there are women who themselves are poets or troubadours, including Marie de France and the evocatively named Dangereuse de Chastelreaux. There’s a transformation of gender relations. Of course, most it may take place mostly in literature, and be susceptible to the “pedestal” critique. But it’s radical for any time.

Mary: You say in the Preface that your version “takes places in an imaginary past known as The Last Days.” Why did you call this past “imaginary” and why did you name it “The Last Days?” Is this a reference to the Book of Revelation? A veiled warning of the approach of a contemporary apocalypse? Please tell us more about The Last Days. [Read more…]

Censored Shakespeare by Pamela Rafael Berkman

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Today novelist Pamela Rafael Berkman shares a post with us at People Who Make Books Happen. Her essay Censored Shakespeare first appeared on her website at pamelarafaelberkman.com on July 24, 2017.

Censored Shakespeare

By Pamela Rafael Berkmam

Public Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar has finished its run in New York’s Central Park, despite the withdrawal of support by some sponsors and the disruptions on June 16 and June 18.

Within seconds of the first stage rush, institutions and individuals worldwide raced to defend Shakespeare. My favorite hashtag, #ShakespeareSunday, was all a-Twitter. But during his lifetime Shakespeare would have had no one to so staunchly defend his right to free speech.

Censorship was a fact of life for him and all of his fellow Tudor writers. Not market-based shutting up, like getting a book contract cancelled, but real, true, hard government censorship, the defiance of which carried penalties like imprisonment in seriously horrible places, getting a hand cut off in the public marketplace, and grisly forms of execution.

Shakespeare’s colleague Ben Jonson spent several months in the Marshalsea political prison for co-writing a play called The Isle of Dogs (we’ll never know why – it’s lost). And the only example we have of Shakespeare’s handwriting (we think) are some notes on a play by someone else that he was script-doctoring, with several other playwrights, to make it more palatable to official censor Edmund Tilney, Master of Revels.

Tilney’s job included reviewing every play to be performed in the London-area playhouses. The play was The Book of Sir Thomas More, and the scene in question depicted a mob rioting (some would say protesting) in London.

In the end Shakespeare and his co-writers couldn’t revise the scene enough for Tilney’s approval. Tilney ordered that any representation of the riots be described in narration instead of shown on stage, adding ominously, “not otherwise at your own perils.”

The most well known example of Shakespeare and his friends being placed directly in danger by his writing involved the play Richard II, which contains the “deposition scene” in which Richard is stripped of his crown. Conspirators in the Earl of Essex’s doomed 1601 rebellion paid Shakespeare’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men, to perform it publicly the day before they tried to wrest the throne from Elizabeth I. Company member Augustine Phillips’ later testimony is priceless.

 

Richard II handing over the crown as seen in “The Hollow Crown” (Photo: provided by BBC)

The Chamberlain’s Men, Phillips said, told the Essex rebels that the play “was so old and so long out of use as that they should get no company at it.” They had, he said, heartily wished to put on “some other play.” They only did it because Essex’s men offered them 40 shillings over the going rate.

The company was cleared of any deliberate wrongdoing, but they must have been terrified.

In Elizabethan England the ideas in our First Amendment were unheard of, undreamed of: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Considering what Shakespeare managed to leave us even working under the government restrictions placed on him, imagine what he might have done had he enjoyed the protections of the First Amendment. And today, worldwide, what genius is silenced, never to be heard or remembered, because he or she does not?

Note: For more details on the events I’ve mentioned here, try Park Honan’s Shakespeare: A Life, Oxford University Press, 1998.