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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:
Want more beauty, passion, love, and lyrical poetry in your life? Read my recent 
Monday, December 11, 2017, Berkeley, CA: Mary will be the featured reader at 
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.
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D. Nurkse on Love In The Last Days
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…]
Susan Kelly-DeWitt on Becoming A Poet
Susan Kelly-DeWitt Kelly-DeWitt 
was born in San Francisco but spent most of her childhood in Hawaii before it was a state, living for several years on the grounds of an historic artists’ colony called Wailele. She moved back to Northern California in 1960. Kelly-DeWitt is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and the author of Spider Season, The Fortunate Islands and nine previous print and online collections . Her work has been widely published in numerous journals and anthologies, both at home and abroad, and has been featured at Wordstock, and on Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. She is also an exhibiting visual artist.
Mary: Welcome to People Who Make Books Happen, Susan. Let’s start at the beginning: Why did you become a poet?
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: Hard to know! My mother had a beautiful clothbound volume of Leaves of Grass. My father could recite The Iliad though he had only an eighth grade education. My parents also knew Don Blanding in Honolulu in the early 50’s, so I probably heard the word “poet” at a very young age. I was always a voracious reader but I never thought I could actually be a “real” writer or poet myself until I was in my twenties, in college, and read Plath. Having had a lot of trouble and tragedy in my life by then, Plath’s poems showed me there was a way to write about that.
Mary: How old were you when you wrote your first poem?
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: I may have written some small silly ditties when I was a child but the first “real” poem I remember writing was when I was a freshman in high school.
Mary: What was it about?
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: I had read A Tale of Two Cities and subsequently wrote a long poem–two or three pages in rhyme and meter–called “The Guillotine”, about a prisoner marching to his execution. The last lines were: “So spoke my head from its place unseen/ Where I left it, near the guillotine.” I always get a big laugh when I tell this story to high school students!
Mary: That’s hilarious. My first poem was about garbage collectors. So, which poets have influenced you?
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: So many! In childhood/adolescence, Poe, Coleridge, Dickinson–though I never actually thought I could be a poet then. After that some of the biggest influences–where I read everything I could by and about–were Whitman and Dickinson; Blake and Yeats; Rilke; Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Ratushinskaya; Neruda; Bishop; Kenyon, Oliver and Dove; Hillman and Gluck; Kinnell; Merton; Heaney and Boland; Mistral; Milosz; Rumi; Transtromer; Levertov (who was also my mentor when I was a Stegner), and Plath, of course. The three Wrights have been very important to me also–C.D., Charles, and James Wright especially. Finally, and hugely, my early mentors and now dear old friends, Dennis Schmitz and Sandra McPherson.
Mary: What inspires you to write a poem? How do you get the initial idea?
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: Reading other poets always inspires me–I enter into a conversation with them and start replying, connecting associatively via lines that come into my head and make it to the page. Also, when I take my daily walk I frequently begin to get a line. When that happens, I keep it going for as long as I can, memorizing what comes, keeping each line as an evocative unit, in terms of both rhythm and meaning, and push it as far as I can. As I said in another recent interview, I also “see” the poem as a shape in space–a word sculpture. (Now that we have cell phones I sometimes pause to type out the lines on my Notes app.) When I come home I start to work on what I have. Sometimes the poem simply finds me–as one did a day or two ago, when I walked by jasmine vines in bloom and inhaled the perfume–I have been writing and revising it ever since.
Mary: What are your personal poetics? In other words, what are you trying to do with regard to both form and content when you write a poem?
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: I am a big believer in Denise Levertov’s “Theory of Organic Form”–that the poem must find it’s own shape/life, life-force as it evolves on the page. I believe this even when I am trying to write a villanelle or a sonnet. For me each line (as Levertov said) must exist as “an evocative unit of thought.” I also want to write something that will connect across time, space, class, culture–something that celebrates or articulates or witnesses for others in some small way–and/or something that helps someone through its beauty or use, or both.
Of course, as Frost said: “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” The poem has to teach me something, take me somewhere new–the poet as detective, solving the mystery. The poet as photographer, developing film in the darkroom.
Mary: You’re the author of nine Chapbooks and two full-length collections of poetry, beginning with A Camellia for Judy published by Frith Press in 1998. How has your poetry changed over the last twenty years?
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: You know, Mary–I’m not sure that I am the best judge of this. I did try, in Spider Season, to tackle some new subjects and to feel my way to a different kind of poem-shape. I think in the early years I was still discovering my own voice, and I hope–especially with Spider Season–that I have now found it. That said, I have always tried to include poems that address history–personal, political, social–in some way. I don’t think this has changed. The natural world and the visual image have always been important to my poetic vision and self (probably stemming in large part from growing up in Hawaii and living for several early years in a defunct artists’ colony surrounded by art and a tropical rainforest)–I’d like to think I have gotten better as an observer of those worlds, but I am not sure that I have. I’ll have to listen to the critics for that.
Mary: You just mentioned your most recent collection of poetry, Spider Season,” published in 2016 by Cold River Press. What does the title symbolize? How did you arrive at it?
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: Coming up with the title was largely intuitive. I woke one night with that title in my head. I had written quite a few new poems during the previous months (known as the “spider season”) and I had encountered numerous spider webs on my morning walks. Spider also means “mother” in dream symbolism. Since this is the first full-length collection I have published since my mother’s death, I’m sure that had something to do with the intuitive part. The book also casts a wide web of connections for me–parts of my life that I have not written about before.
Mary: What are the three most important poems in Spider Season? Why?
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: Well, first let me say: I think we know the writer/artist is often the least qualified to judge her/his own work! That said, the three I might choose from Spider Season now would be “The Subject of All Poems is the Clock” and “First Light.” Number Three would be a tie between “Interrogative” and “Don’t Forget.” I would choose these because they all tackle the large existential questions, and some of them also witness the political and environmental crises that loom over our planet’s future.
Mary: Do you have any other new work you’d like to mention, or any new books in the works?
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: I do. A third full-length manuscript is making the rounds–it is titled The Moon Bee. I also recently had a group of poems published online at Mudlark. They are poems that give voice to some painful experiences I have not written about so explicitly before.
Mary: You are a visual artist as well as a poet. How do these two aspects of your creative life influence one another?
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: Well, I have often been told that I am a very “visual” poet–that my imagery allows the reader to “zoom in” and focus. Over the years I have taught several workshops where we explored the painter/photographer’s techniques and language as useful tools for the poetry writing process. My life as a visual artist has taught me to “see”–to attend, remove the distance between myself and the subject; it has also helped me (especially watercolor painting) to recognize the fortunate accident, and to know (usually!!) when to stop.
Mary: How has your involvement in the Sacramento literary community influenced your work?
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: Stanley Kunitz once wrote: “Poetry withers without fellowship.” Our literary community casts a wide web of friendship, support and creative energy. Getting involved with the Sacramento Poetry Center in the late 70’s brought me into that web, and I have been there ever since. As one of the early members, readers, program directors, workshop facilitators, and editors of the literary magazine, I found my place in the world, and I continue to treasure every moment spent in that nurturing environment which does not differentiate between “inside” and “outside” the academy. The word “community” (as defined by Webster’s) says it: a unified body of individuals–and so it is, and so we are.
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?
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: Tough question! That said, “Apple Blossoms” would be my choice today because I think that it captures the struggle for survival, the beauties and complexities of the human dilemma in a very plain-spoken way. Kooser used it on his American Life in Poetry column, and I know that a lot of people have connected with it since then. I think it would still relate to a reader as long as there are people, long winter nights, bees and spring blossoms. Of course with Trump’s position on climate change, 500 years may be far too optimistic.
Mary: “Apple Blossoms” is one of my favorites too. Here it is, accompanied by your painting “Pink Leaves.”
Apple Blossoms
One evening in winter
when nothing has been enough,
when the days are too short,
the nights too long
and cheerless, the secret
and docile buds of the apple
blossoms begin their quick
ascent to light. Night
after interminable night
the sugars pucker and swell
into green slips, green
silks. And just as you find
yourself at the end
of winter’s long, cold
rope, the blossoms open
like pink thimbles
and that black dollop
of shine called
bumblebee stumbles in.
Copyright © by Susan Kelly-DeWitt Kelly Dewitt 2001
Mary: Do you have any upcoming readings or classes? How can people get in touch with you?
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: I am going to be teaching my Poet as Camera class in Stockton CA on June 24th as part of the University of the Pacific’s Creative Writing Conference . I will also be teaching a five month private workshop on hybrid forms in the fall. People can contact me via my website at: http://susankelly-dewitt.com/. My public email address is: skellydewitt@gmail.com.
As for readings–I just took part, as the Featured Poet for 2017, in Solano Community College’s annual launch-reading for the Suisun Valley Review, and I am happy to be part of the upcoming launch at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts on September 23rd for Know Me Here – An Anthology of Poetry by Women, edited by Katherine Hastings. Hopefully you and I will be reading together, Mary, since you are also in the anthology.
Mary: Thank you, Susan. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. I’m looking forward to reading the poems in The Moon Bee.
Join this People Who Make Books Happen conversation with Susan Kelly-DeWitt. You are warmly invited to leave a comment. People Who Make Books Happen is where the writers hang out.
For writing advice; a sneak peek at Mary’s most recent novel The Village of Bones; the latest news; course syllabi; resources for Women’s Studies, Women’s Visionary Fiction, Women’s Visionary Film, Women’s Visionary Poetry, and Advanced Composition and more information about writing and teaching, you are invited to visit my website homepage and click on the tabs where you will also find a number of stunning photos of Prehistoric Goddesses.
Using Trance To Get Ideas For Novels And Poems
Mining Your Unconscious Using A Simple Trance Technique
Your unconscious is packed with ideas, metaphors, visions, plots, dreams, colors, characters, emotions—in short, everything you need to write a great novel or collection of poems. But how do you get to it? How do you step out of the social agreement we call “reality,” and dip into this incredibly rich resource?
You could go to sleep and try to mine your dreams, but even if you dreamed an entire novel, the moment you woke up, you would forget most of it within seconds, because you hadn’t processed the ideas into your long term memory. Worse yet, when you dream, you are not in control, so you can’t do specific things like talk to one of your characters or work out a specific plot problem. Granted, some people manage lucid dreaming, but lucid dreaming is not a practical writing technique for a number of reasons. For example, you cannot always go to sleep when you need to.
Many years ago, I started looking for a technique that would allow me to be asleep and awake at the same time. What I came up with, after much trial and error, was a form of creative trance that allows me to delve into my unconscious whenever I want to, get the material I need for my poems and novels, bring that material up to my waking reality, remember it, and write it down.
Developing this technique wasn’t easy. Besides relying on my own imagination, I drew on many sources such as self-hypnosis, theta cycle sessions, neurophysiology, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, and the Surrealist technique of Automatic Writing. As you might expect, I had many failures, but in the end I came up with a deceptively simple technique, which has proved extremely effective. Since I taught myself how to use creative trance, I have written many novels, collections of poetry, and screenplays. Better yet, I have avoided writers block.
I’ve used my creative trance technique weekly, sometimes daily, for many years. As with all things that are visionary and out of the range of ordinary consciousness, it can’t be completely described in words, only experienced. So, since I cannot sit down with you and personally guide you through the process step by step, I am going to give you a chance to get a feel for it by taking you into the heart of my creative process as I worked on my most recent novel The Village of Bones.
The Village of Bones is Historical Fiction which has visionary elements, but even in my novels which are purely Historical Fiction (such as my bestseller A Grand Passion, the story of three generations of women involved in ballet), I created most of the original storyline in a voluntarily induced creative trance.
Unlike A Grand Passion, The Village of Bones presented a special problem. On one hand, it was meticulously researched historical fiction firmly based on archaeological evidence, yet at the same time, it was set in Prehistoric Europe in Goddess-worshiping cultures that were filled with myths, visions, and prophecies.
With this contradiction in mind, I put my phone in Airplane Mode, sat down in a comfortable chair, picked up a pen (I find computers get in the way), opened my notebook, closed my eyes, took several deep breaths, and counted backwards to ten, imagining as I did so that I was walking down a flight of stairs. By the time I got to the bottom, I was in a light trance. The word “light” is important. I was neither awake nor asleep. Instead, I was poised on the threshold between my conscious mind and my unconscious mind, ready to move in either direction.
On this particular day, I had some work planned. Sabalah, my main character, was in big trouble. She was caught in a storm, her boat had turned over, and she was drowning. As she struggled to stay afloat, she going to have a vision of the Sea Goddess that might or might not be a hallucination. There were no surviving statues of this particular Neolithic Sea Goddesses as far as I knew, so my task for this afternoon was to envision the Sea Goddess so I could describe her.
I started with the Goddess’ name which I had created the previous day: “Amonah, Amonah, Amonah,” I silently chanted. ”Come to me”. A vague, shadowy form began to materialize behind my eyelids.
Before I go on, I want to be clear about what was happening. As I thought the word “Amonah,” I didn’t believe I was conjuring up a real spirit, channeling a mystical force, or having a religious experience. I believed, and still believe, that I was simply unlocking the resources of my own consciousness and my own imagination using the very practical tool of creative trance. I don’t claim to know where these visions come from, but I am convinced that under the right conditions, anyone can have them.
The form grew brighter and more distinct. I saw a woman walking toward me across the waves. Walking on water. Interesting. Since question/answer is the key to this technique, I settled down and began to ask myself questions.
“What color is her hair?” I asked myself. “Black, brown, blonde?” Suddenly the word “seaweed” came into my mind. Instantly, the woman’s hair turned green.
“What kind of jewelry is she wearing? Diamonds, topaz, garnets?” No, she’s wearing pearls, and something else, something reddish, something like . . . coral!
“What color are her eyes?” For a moment her eyes shifted back and forth between brown and green. Then, suddenly they glowed.
“Skin color?” All colors. No colors. She’s a Goddess. She is all of us.
“What’s she wearing?” Not skinny jeans for sure. (Odd thoughts sometimes interrupt the flow of the trance). Long dress. Yes. She’s wearing a long dress. Wave-like. Blue of course like the sea.
“What does she smell like? Wind, salt, kelp?” Like flowers. She smells like flowers. “What kind of flowers?” Roses.
“How much does she weigh?” She weighs nothing. She’s a spirit.
For a long time, I sat there asking specific questions and waiting for answers most of which came in the form of wordless images. For some reason, I never could figure out how tall She was. My unconscious wouldn’t give that one up. But by now, the Sea Goddess Amonah looked real to me. I could see Her distinctly right down to the coral rings on Her toes.
Slowly I began to count backwards from ten to one, moving out of the trance as I climbed back up the stairs toward waking consciousness. On every step, I paused and made myself visualize Amonah again, and I commanded myself: “Remember. Remember.”
This final command to “remember,” is perhaps the most important part of a creative trance. If I couldn’t carry a complete image of Amonah back into the waking world, I’d have to start all over again.
When I got to ten, I opened my eyes just wide enough to see my notebook. Grabbing my pen before the last bits of trance faded away, I quickly wrote everything down paying no attention to grammar, spelling, or logic. I even wrote down the silly bit about the skinny jeans.
The result was not something I could use immediately. What you get out of your own unconscious is raw material. After creativity comes craft. So over the course of the next year, I polished this description of Amonah. Now I worked wide-awake, using all the techniques of novel-writing that I had learned over the years. I read the passage out loud over and over again. Searched for better words. Took out commas and put them in again. Here is the result which appears in Chapter One of The Village of Bones:
A woman emerged from the wall of crashing waves and walked across the sea toward Sabalah. Sabalah abruptly stopped crying and stared at the woman, stunned. This was impossible! . . .The woman kept walking, stepping over the waves as if they were furrows in a field of wheat. Her flowing dress was blue as a summer sea; her hair long and green, twined with seaweed and pearls. Her skin was dark and light at the same time, her eyes so bright, they glowed like the last flash of the sun when it falls into the sea at midsummer. . . . A sweet scent suddenly filled the air like the perfume of roses blown across water.
“Don’t be afraid,” the woman said. “I am Amonah, Goddess of the Sea,” and water is my path. I can walk above or beneath it as I wish.
Sitting down beside Sabalah, Amonah let Her feet dangle in the water. They were bare except for toe rings of rose-colored coral. She must have weighed nothing, because the end of the mast didn’t tilt the way it would have it a flesh-and-blood human being had sat there.
The Village of Bones was created from scores of similar visions, as were all the poems I wrote that year, and even part of one of the screenplays which I co-wrote with director Renée de Palma.
Using creative trance is a gentle, pleasant way to create the raw materials for a work of fiction. It is not like meditation because your goal is not transcendence. It is not like many forms of self-hypnosis because you are not trying to lose weight, stop smoking, or change your behavior in any way. It is not like prayer, because you are not seeking a closer relationship with God. Creative trance is a tool, a key if you will, that lets you unlock the riches you already have stored in your own unconscious.
Yet its power should not be underestimated. So let me leave you with a warning: If you decide to go deeply into your own unconscious, you have to be ready to deal with what you find there. Creative trance is not therapy. If you are upset, unhappy, depressed, or anxious, wait until you have a calm mind and specific writing goals and can set firm limits on what you will accept from your unconscious.
When you are in a creative trance, you should always be in control. If your Goddess appears before you with a hairdo made of snakes, you should be able to instantly turn those vipers into cobwebs and seaweed. Nothing you experience should harm you, scare you, or make you uncomfortable for more than a few seconds. A creative trance should be enjoyable from start to finish.
In The Village of Bones, the Goddess Earth gives Her people six commandments. The First Commandment is: “Live together in love and harmony.” The Sixth is: “Enjoy yourselves, for your joy is pleasing to Her.”
(An earlier version of this essay appeared as a Guest Post on the Visionary Fiction Alliance Blog on October 10, 2016).
Celebrate the Day of the Dead With Pandemonium Press
Tuesday, November 1, 2016, Oakland CA at the Spice Monkey Cafe
Pandemonium Press celebrates the the Day of the Dead/Dia de Los Muertos with readings by poet/novelists Mary Mackey, Rafael Jesus Gonzalez, Cassandra Dallett, and Andrew O. Dugas, followed by an Open Mic. Curated by Leila Rae. Come listen to the featured readers and showcase your own work at the Open Mic. TIME: 6:30 pm. PLACE: Spice Monkey Cafe, 1268 Webster St., Oakland CA.
Come Celebrate National Poetry Month With Mary Mackey
Tuesday, April 19, 6 pm, Montclair Branch/Oakland Public Library, Mary will be reading from her new and collected poems to celebrate National Poetry Month. Reading with her will be poets Grace Marie Grafton; John Rowe; Sheryl J. Bize Boutte; Grace Morizawa; William Winston; and Carol Pingree. Linda Brown, Past President of the California Writers Club will MC. TIME: 6:00 to 8:00 pm. PLACE: Montclair Branch/Oakland Public Library, 1687 Mountain Boulevard, Oakland, CA 94611. Free and open to the public. Open mic after the reading.