It has been more than a couple of years now since I participated as faculty at the San Miguel Writers Conference, but shining bright in my memory is a chat in the emerald cool shade of some palm trees there with Donna Baier Stein. And then we crossed paths again at the Women Writing the West Conference. Pequeño mundo! And at some point in between, to my great honor, she published an excerpt from my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution, in her journal, Tiferet. Donna Baier Stein’s latest book is a collection of short stories inspired by artworks by Thomas Hart Benton– one of the greatest of the greats among American artists, and a personal favorite of mine.
“When a contemporary writer turns her imagination loose inside the images of an iconic artist of the past, the result is storytelling magic at its best. Here are nine tales that bring to vivid life the early decades of the 20th century as witnessed by one of America’s most well-known painters. Thomas Hart Benton sketched fiddlers and farm wives, preachers and soldiers, folks gathering in dance halls and tent meetings. Though his lithographs depict the past, the real-life people he portrayed face issues that are front and center today: corruption, women’s rights, racial inequality.
“In these stories we enter the imagined lives of Midwesterners in the late 1930s and early 1940s. A mysterious woman dancing to fiddle music makes one small gesture of kindness that helps heal the rift of racial tensions in her small town. A man leaves his childhood home after a tragic accident and becomes involved with the big-time gamblers who have made Hot Springs, Arkansas, their summer playground. After watching her mother being sent to an insane asylum simply for grieving over a miscarriage, a girl determines to never let any man have any say over her body.
“Then as now, Americans have struggled with poverty, illness, and betrayal. These fictions reveal our fellow countrymen and women living with grace and strong leanings toward virtue, despite the troubles that face them.”
C.M. MAYO: When and where did you first encounter Thomas Hart Benton’s work, and what inspired you do write this whole collection of stories?
DONNA BAIER STEIN: My father, a nearly lifelong Kansas Citian, was given an early edition lithograph by Benton in the 1950s. This was passed on to me, and I had it hanging on my office wall for many years. One day, moved by a desire that my next writing project be based on something something outside of my own life experiences, I started writing down what I saw in the picture, which showed a horse galloping across a field and two boys riding bareback, one of whom has just fallen off the animal. This led to the creation of fictional characters and a plot. After that first story was published in Virginia Quarterly Review, I wrote eight more. I owned a book of Benton’s black and white lithographs compiled and edited by Creekmore Fath and picked out images from that book that resonated with me.
C.M. MAYO: If a reader were to read one story in this collection, which one would you suggest, and why?
DONNA BAIER STEIN: Probably “Morning Train.” It’s one of my favorites because I am most intrigued by its main character, Ruth, and how she deals with the masculine.
C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about which writers have been the most important influences for you?
DONNA BAIER STEIN: Writers I grew up admiring were John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, Ray Bradbury. Unfortunately when I was in high school we weren’t reading a lot of women writers! I also loved Faulkner, Melville, Woolf.
C.M. MAYO: Which writers are you reading now?
DONNA BAIER STEIN: I just finished Great American Desert by Terese Svoboda, which is absolutely stunning. I look forward to reading more of her books. After finishing Plainsong by Kent Haruf I immediately dove into its follow-up, Eventide.
C.M. MAYO: Before earning your MFA in writing, you had had a career as a copywriter. How do you think doing this kind of writing affected your literary writing?
DONNA BAIER STEIN: Well, it had good and bad effects! Good in the sense that it taught me to write even when I didn’t feel like it, made me comfortable with writing imperfect first drafts, and helped build the muscle memory of writing. It was bad in that I spent many years avoiding my own creative writing, or doing it only in bits and pieces on the side.
C.M. MAYO: You are founding editor and publisher of Tiferet Journal. Can you talk about what inspired you to do that? And how do you see Tiferet now and in the future?
DONNA BAIER STEIN: I had been fortunate enough to be asked to help found the Bellevue Literary Review. Their niche was “at the nexus of medicine and literature.” I started thinking that in addition to the body and literature, we should look at what happens at the nexus of spirit and literature. At the time I was studying something called integrated kabbalistic healing and was very interested in the spiritual matters and the ways the Word appears in all religions. My teacher in that school called language the first particularization of nothingness, and that definition appealed to me. I also learned the meaning of the word tiferet (heart, compassion, reconciliation of opposites) and fell in love with it. I am the only child of a Christian mother and Jewish father, and I grew up thinking we all need to get along. I founded Tiferet as a way to help foster interfaith dialogue. It’s a labor of love, really, and I often think about closing it down. But we have a terrific group of volunteer editors and an enthusiastic and supportive community of writers and readers. And considering how divisive our country is these days, it doesn’t seem to be the time to close up shop.
C.M. MAYO: As both an author and an editor, what is the best, most important piece of advice you would give to a writer who is just starting out to look to publish in magazines and perhaps publish a first book?
DONNA BAIER STEIN: My advice is to polish and persist. Don’t be sloppy. If your manuscript has egregious errors on the first page, it may well be ignored. If you receive rejections, consider revising and resubmit to other publications. Editors are inundated these days so your work may be rejected for reasons beyond your control.
C.M. MAYO: You have been a productive writer for many years. How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
DONNA BAIER STEIN: I spend way too much time on social media, especially now as I promote Scenes from the Heartland. And I sometimes consider email the bane of my existence. That said, both social media and email are essential vehicles of communication these days. In my imagination, I envy those writers I mentioned earlier (Updike, Vonnegut, et al.) who could concentrate on writing, not on self-promotion. The self-promotion side of our brain is very different from the writer’s side, and I definitely prefer the latter. One trick that helps me is removing Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter from my cell phone and only visiting those sites when I’m at my desk on my computer. It’s very, very addictive, uncomfortably so. The plus side of the internet though is the wealth of material it puts at our fingertips. I absolutely love doing historical research for my stories and novels online.
C.M. MAYO: Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
DONNA BAIER STEIN: I remember my former husband gave me an IBM self-correcting Selectric typewriter in, I believe, 1982. And I remember buying a lifetime supply of WhiteOut at my first trip to Price Club many years ago! I worked on a typewriter in my first job as a copywriter at Times Mirror Magazines and for many years as a freelance copywriter. I think I got my first computer, a Televideo, in the mid 1980s. Amber letters on a black screen. I LOVE the ability to correct without retyping an entire page and am pretty addicted to my laptop. I have terrible handwriting and as much as I’d like to write first drafts by hand, it’s not efficient for me. Thoughts seem to come too fast to write well with pen on paper. That said, I write drafts on the computer then print out the pages, edit by hand, input those corrections on computer, and repeat.
C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you as a writer?
DONNA BAIER STEIN: I’m working on another historical novel that features Sarah Bernhardt, Nikola Tesla, and Swami Vivekananda and takes place in Paris and New York in the 1890s. I’m fascinated by the fact that these three knew each other and were friends.
One of the blogs I’ve been following for a good long time is poet Joseph Hutchison’s The Perpetual Bird. We have never met in person but I feel as if we have; moreover, we have friends in common, among them, poet, essayist and translator Patricia Dubrava– and if my memory serves, it was her blog, Holding the Light, that first sent me to The Perpetual Bird. Here on my desk I have Hutchison’s collection of his works of several decades,The World As Is. From publisher NYQ Books’ catalog copy:
“In The World As Is Colorado Poet Laureate Joseph Hutchison gives voice to pain and passion, sorrow and joy, longing and exhalation. His poems seem to result from a wrestling with angels–the angels of transformation we all must confront to survive what Robert Penn Warren called ‘this century, and moment, of mania.'”
From The World As Is (originally in The Rain at Midnight), posted here by permission of the author.
THE BLUE by Joseph Hutchison
In memory of Michael Nigg, April 28, 1969 – September 8, 1995
The dream refused me his face. There was only Mike, turned away; damp tendrils of hair curled out from under the ribbed, rolled brim of a knit ski cap. He’s hiding
the wound, I thought, and my heart shrank. Then Mike began to talk— to me, it seemed, though gazing off at a distant, sunstruck stand of aspen that blazed against a ragged wall
of pines. His voice flowed like sweet smoke, or amber Irish whiskey; or better: a brook littered with colors torn out of autumn. The syllables swept by on the surface of his voice—
so many, so swift, I couldn’t catch their meanings … yet struggled not to interrupt, not to ask or plead— as though distress would be exactly the wrong emotion. Then a wind
gusted into the aspen grove, turned its yellows to a blizzard of sparks. When the first breath of it touched us, Mike fell silent. Then he stood. I felt the dream letting go, and called,
“Don’t!” Mike flung out his arms, shouted an answer … and each word shimmered like a hammered bell. (Too soon the dream would take back all but their resonance.) The wind
surged. Then Mike leaned into it, slipped away like a wavering flame. And all at once I noticed the sky: its sheer, light-scoured immensity; the lavish tenderness of its blue.
C.M. MAYO: You have been the Poet Laureate of Colorado from 2014. What does that mean, and what does that involve? (And how do you look back on that experience now?)
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: As I write this, I’m nearing the end of my Laureate term. It’s officially a 4-year term but mine was extended by a year to bring the selection of the next Laureate in line with Colorado’s political calendar. The PL is chosen by the Governor, and the organizations that administer the program—Colorado Humanities and Colorado Creative Industries—wanted to be sure the new Governor would have that opportunity.
Being selected was a great honor, of course, especially because it was John Hickenlooper who made the choice. He’s a real reader, an English major who started out with the aim of becoming a writer but decided early on that it wasn’t for him. Writing creatively, after all, is more of a calling than an occupation for most of us. If you’re not obsessed, what would be the point?
The best aspect of serving as the state Laureate has been traveling around the state and meeting lots of poets and poetry readers in communities large and small. I was born in Denver, which sits on the eastern plains at the foot of what we call “the Front Range”: 300 miles of the Rocky Mountains stretching from southeastern Wyoming to more-or-less the New Mexico border. Nearly the poets I knew coming up were in this region. So it’s been an exhilarating experience to find so many excellent poets within and on the western side of the Front Range. There is a poetic renaissance going on across Colorado, at the community level, and I’ve gotten to witness it close up. That’s been the main privilege.
I’ve also helped to shape the Poets section of the online Colorado Encyclopedia, which I’d never have been able to do without the PL cachet. The project is looking for more funding at the moment, but in the long run I’m sure it will serve as a resource for teachers around the state. I’ve always thought that the way poetry is taught often ruins it for young readers. It’s seldom taught the way fiction is taught—as a source of knowledge with deep roots in the human psyche; instead, it’s used as an instrument to teach about techniques: meter, rhyme, metaphor, symbolism … blah blah blah. No wonder so many people recoil from poetry once they’re out of school!
Anyway, I’m hoping the Encylopedia will help teachers connect with the poets in their own community and bring them and their work into their classes. I was 22 and in college before I saw a living poet—it happened to be Robert Bly; until then I’d been dabbling with poetry, but after that experience, after I witnessed what poetry could be, I was hooked. My fondest hope that my appearances around the state may have helped some fledgling poet discover that deeper commitment, and maybe encourage people in some community or other to honor that poet’s work when it surfaces in their midst.
C.M. MAYO: One of the things that struck me in your bio is that, although you teach in a university, you describe yourself as a community poet “using language that is at once direct and layered.” Can you talk a little about some of the poets you have taught and/or read who are not part of the academic world?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: A quick sketch of my writing life. I started writing poetry in high school, continued in college, went on to an MFA. After grad school I floundered—too credentialed to teach in Denver area public schools (teacher glut), under-credentialed to teach full time in a college (no yen for a PhD). Wanted to be a working writer but could write only poetry, which as everyone knows pays nada. Worked in a college bookstore for a several years, buying used text books and later university press and mass market paperbacks. Got invited to apply for a writing job in a bank marketing department (7 years), then a real estate network (3 years), then a software company (2 years), then went out on my own for 2 years, then created a “boutique” marketing company with my wife which sustained us, more or less, for 22 years. All along I was writing and publishing poetry, giving readings, conducting workshops—and teaching off and on as an adjunct. It was only in 2014, just after I had turned 64, that I entered the Academy full time to direct a program in which I had taught as an adjunct once or twice a year for more than a decade.
My point is that I never been an “academic” poet and never written what I think of as academic poetry. To be honest, I’m not sure what academic poetry is, though—like pornography—I feel like I know it when I see it! Essentially, I think of it as poetry written for graduate students, which speaks to the concerns of graduate students: their fascination with “schools” and the recondite reaches of aesthetic theory. In The Satire Lounge I wrote a poem lampooning this kind of stuff, and not just for fun.
The fact that the audience for poetry seems to be growing is a testament to the resurgence of poets who reach beyond schools and theories to address readers where they live. The poets of Merwin’s generation did this—think of Levertov and Rich, Kinnell and Wright and Bly*—and I think we’re seeing a return (with differences, of course) to this kind of poetry.
I have so many poets in mind that it’s probably best just to list some of them, including a few from my own generation: Ted Kooser, Louise Glück, Kay Ryan, Li-Young Lee, Bill Knott, Yusef Komunyakaa, Mark Irwin, Jared Smith, Carl Phillips, Ada Limón, Terence Hayes, Wayne Miller, Ilya Kaminsky, Tracy K. Smith, Wendy Videlock, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer….
This is kind of silly, now that I think of it. These are just some of my personal favorites. And who knows if they’d all get along if put in the same room together!
C.M. MAYO: How might you describe the ideal reader for your poems and, in particular, for your collection of new and selected poems 1972-2015, The World As Is?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: Someone capable of being moved emotionally and intellectually by language that aims to express those moments with the inner world and the outer world meet.
C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about which poets have been the most important influences for you as a poet and writer—and which ones you are reading now?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: Honestly, my earliest poetic influences were Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Joni Mitchell—I took up guitar but discovered I had little talent for it.
On the more formal side, I would have to say, in poetry and in no particular order: T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Robert Browning, Robert Bly, W. S. Merwin (both his own poems and his translations), Galway Kinnell, Denise Levertov, James Wright, Theodore Roethke, Rilke, Tranströmer, Neruda, Paz, Miłosz, Cavafy, Seferis, Zbigniew Herbert, Zagajewski, Szymborska.
In literature broadly speaking: Hemingway, Fowles, Márquez, Dürrenmatt, Cortázar (the short stories), Raymond Carver, Joseph Campbell, David Loy.
C.M. MAYO: What is the best, most important piece of advice you would give to a poet who is just starting to look to publish in magazines and perhaps publish a first book?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: Consider your own reading passions among your contemporaries and the generation just prior. Pick maybe 10 whose aesthetic ballpark you feel you’re playing in yourself. Then look at their Acknowledgments pages and see where they’ve published. Track down those publications and see if they make sense for you. Then submit.Submit over and over. When a batch of poems bounces back (this willhappen), read them over, make any changes that have become obvious in their time on the road, then send the batch out again. Do this over and over and journal publication will almost certainly come your way.
I have no good advice for book publication. I despise contests, though I’ve entered them a few times and had a manuscript picked up only once. My other books have come about via query letters or by invitation from a publisher who saw my work in a journal or anthology.
I do recommend that you create a blog. I believe I would never have become PL without The Perpetual Bird, the blog I started in 2008. Since becoming PL, I haven’t kept up with it the way I should, and it’s one of the things I look forward to getting back to!
From The World As Is (originally in House of Mirrors), posted here by permission of the author.
CITY LIMITS by Joseph Hutchison
For Melody
You’re like wildwood at the edge of a city. And I’m the city: steam, sirens, a jumble of lit and unlit windows in the night.
You’re the land as it must have been and will be—before me, after me. It’s your natural openness I want to enfold me. But then you’d become city; or you’d hide away your wildness to save it.
So I stay within limits—city limits, heart limits. Although, under everything, I have felt unlimited Earth Unlimited you
“I do recommend that you create a blog. I believe I would never have become PL [Poet Laureate] without The Perpetual Bird, the blog I started in 2008.”
C.M. MAYO: If a reader who knew nothing of your work were to read only one poem of yours, which would you suggest, and why?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: This is a tough one! I have personal favorites but have no idea what any given reader might think of them. Off the top of my head, I’d suggest “Touch,” from The World As Is. It’s a sestina, the only successful one I’ve ever written, and speaks on multiple levels to the political and cultural moment we’re in and have been in for a good two decades, if not longer. It’s one that audiences at readings always respond to, which is one indication that it may be worth reading on the page.
C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently and remarkably productive poet and writer for many years. How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: I wouldn’t say I’ve been consistently productive. I don’t have a writing routine, but when a poem does rear its Hyacinthine head, I become obsessive—preoccupied, distracted—and I pretty much stop answering emails. I have my blog set up so that my posts automatically flow through to a few social media sites, but I don’t generally visit those sites myself, even less so now that I’ve turned off notifications. Unfortunately, I follow numerous sites for political and poetical news, so that when a poem’s finished, I have to wade through days of unread articles. Overall, I’d say that I don’t feel much of a stake in social media, which is generally antisocial and trivializing. I don’t consider it a writerly medium.
“I don’t feel much of a stake in social media, which is generally antisocial and trivializing. I don’t consider it a writerly medium.”
From The World As Is (originally in The Earth-Boat), posted here by permission of the author.
GUANÁBANA by Joseph Hutchison
After Hurricane Gilbert, this place was only shredded jungle. Now it’s Jesús and Lídia’s casa,
built by him, by hand, weekends and vacations, the way my father built our first house. Years
we’ve watched the house expand, two rooms to three, to four, to five. The yard, just a patch of gouged
sand and shattered palmettos once, is covered now in trimmed grass, bordered by blushing frangipani
and pepper plants—jalapeños, habaneros—and this slender tree Jesús planted three years back,
a stick with tentative leaves then out of a Yuban coffee can, but now thirty feet high, its branches laden
with guanábana—dark green pear-shaped fruit with spiky skin and snowy flesh, with seeds
like obsidian tears. Jesús carves out a bite and offers it on the flat of his big knife’s blade:
the texture’s melonish, the taste wild and sweet—like the lives we build after hurricanes.
C.M. MAYO: And another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: I still work on paper. I write by hand, with different pens (ballpoint or felt tip, in various colors, depending on my mood), scribbling in notebooks—I sometimes have trouble reading my own writing—and get a poem pretty far along before I type it into Word; even then, I print out each draft and scribble in the margins, draw arrows, question marks, exclamation points, notes-to-self (“Look this up,” “Feels like a quote,” “Weak…,” “Expand…,” etc.): a physical dialogue with the page. I have tried off and on to write on screen but have never succeeded. I read every line aloud as I’m revising (I do this with most prose, too), which is why I end up revising in different locations: I move to wherever my muttering won’t bother my wife. So yes, paper is necessary. When I think of a great poet like A. R. Ammons composing on a typewriter, I confess to feeling baffled.
C.M. MAYO: You have recently brought out a very unusual book, the bilingual Ojos del Crow / Eyes of the Cuervo. Can you talk about this a bit, and what prompted you to write it?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: This is a bit of a long story.
To celebrate our first wedding anniversary, my wife Melody and I went to a beautiful, small seaside resort on the Caribbean coast of Yucatán called Capitán Lafitte, situated between Puerto Morelos and Playa del Carmen. We fell in love with it and started going back every year around our anniversary.
A few years into that routine, our business ran into some problems and we figured we’d have to forgo our annual trip. But Melody came up with the idea of doing a yoga retreat, which she called Yoga Fiesta. This venture essentially paid for our vacation.
When Capitán was severely damaged two years in a row, the owners sold the property, but one of them bought a less damaged hotel a couple of kilometers south, restored it, and opened up the following year as Petit Lafitte. All of our friends from Capitán came back to work at Petit, and Melody moved Yoga Fiesta there as well. (This April will be the 15thannual Yoga Fiesta!) Anyway, the two Lafittes have been inspirational for me, in terms of the natural beauty of that coast, the richness of Mayan culture, and the many friendships that we’ve enjoyed there.
Over the years, I’ve written many poems about the place and the people, and in 2012 a wonderful small press called Folded Word published a selection of these Mexico poems in a book called The Earth-Boat.
A few years later, Patricia Herminia, a former student and good friend of mine, who had been living in San Miguel de Allende and working as a professional translator, moved back to Colorado. She’d seen a copy of The Earth-Boat and wanted to translate the poems into Spanish. I revised a few of the poems and added a few more from my stash, then Patricia and I spent several months off and on bringing them over into Spanish. Another friend, the fine artist Sabina Espinet, provided some evocative illustrations, and Eyes of the Cuervo / Ojos del Crow was born. I consider it an homage to a region that is struggling to maintain its beauty and integrity against a tidal wave North American money.
C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you as a poet and writer?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: Over the years, as I pulled together poems for various books, I often found that I had to set aside poems that felt worthy but just didn’t fit into the arc of a particular collection. So I’ve “rescued” some of those older poems and am working to see what kind of book they make. So far, so good.
I’m also working on adapting some of my teaching materials into a small book on writing poetry. It’s always seemed to me that we try to use the vocabulary of criticism to talk about the creative process, but the terms are inadequate. Critics analyze (from the Greek root meaning “a breaking up, a loosening, releasing”), while poets synthesize (from the Greek root meaning “put together, combine”). These processes are opposed to one another, and it makes no sense to me that we should approach the creative process using the tools and concepts of criticism. On the other hand, who needs another book of this kind?
*
C.M. MAYO: I recently posted on a visit to the home/ museum of Swiss German writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt [the post is here; scroll down to the end for the part about Dürrenmatt], which was prompted by Hutchison’s recommendation, so I asked him:
Which one of Dürrenmatt’s works would you recommend an English-language reader to start with?
JOSEPH HUTCHISON: I suggest The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion, which are published together as The Inspector Barlach Mysteries. Dürrenmatt’s novels are addictive, frightening and comic by turns, as are his plays. His essays on art, literature, philosophy, politics, and the theater make exhilarating reading, too!
I was delighted to get the announcement for Sleight Work from W. Nick Hill, a poet and translator I have long admired. Sleight Work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License. The author invites you to download the free PDF from his website and have a read right now!
Here is one of the poems from W. Nick Hill’s Sleight Work which seems to me the very spirit of the book:
Walter Nickerson Hill was born in Chicago, raised in São Paulo, Brazil, and has spent lots of time in Oaxaca, Mexico. He shared Latin American culture with U.S. college students for a long time. Author of numerous academic reviews and articles, he has also translated the work of noted Latin American novelists and poets including Alvaro Mutis, David Huerta, and Miguel Barnet: Biography of a Runaway Slave. His English versions of poems by Mexican Jorge Fernández Granados’ Principle of Uncertainty, appeared as Constructed on Coincidence (Mid-American Review 2010). He is currently translating Gary Lemons’ Día De Los Muertos into Spanish. Hill has one slim award for a chapbook and will have three collections of poetry after Sleight Work comes out in November 2018. He lives on the Olympic Peninsula with his wife. Visit http://wnickhill.net
Before we delve into the Q & A, another favorite from Sleight Work:
After Hyde’s The Gift by W. Nick Hill
Breathe it in and with your panorama lit up just now to the scope of the cherries’ effervescent blossoming into the ether, their tiny china on a weather-beaten wrought iron pea-colored table with chair, a scent of July in vague Lapins where the leaves would have been were it a Camellia sinensis whose tiny white flowers ain’t tea;
something you have to pass on, give away with an authentic gesture over palm fronds shadowed against the wall in a mauve kind-of-awareness that brings out Matisse in the Mediterranean, probably at siesta like a breath you have to give away to make room for the next
and recognize that’s the way energy flows, like the random steps of the Egyptian Walking onion, its scallion agglomerations all over the garden in clumps the wandering Buddhist monk gave us an age ago that continue on walking around us all this time.
Translate from the breath into an object of delight like the scent of Japan in the white frills on a purple plum in the springtime when it should be and make sure somebody else gets it.
C.M. MAYO: How might you describe the ideal reader for Sleight Work?
W. NICK HILL: My “cousin,” Quentin Deming, M. D., Chip, as he was known, and his wife, Vida Ginsberg, were role models. They treated Barbara and me like royalty, wined and dined us when we visited them in Manhattan and we knew from stories it was like that with any and all. Chip was gracious, cosmopolitan, much loved by his patients and colleagues, idiosyncratic, capable of skate boarding in his red suit on his 70th birthday, and always ready to explain how some part of your anatomy worked. His daughters called recently to tell us he had died peacefully at 99. And that a constant companion in the time up to his end was my book And We’d Understand Crows Laughing. Chip would have been the ideal reader of Sleight Work; Vida too, who was widely admired for her knowledge of theater and her sense of humor. Maybe their daughters, Maeve and Lilith, but I can’t say for sure.
C.M. MAYO: And that cover image!?
W. NICK HILL: I write virtually every morning and those pages pile up fast! When I realized that I was working on something inchoate I began to shape the whole into a collection. Well that’s one of my principal ways of working. But in this case, I began then to look around for an image for the cover, all the while I was also investigating what would happen if I set off on my own, that is to “publish” it on my website. The image on the cover was a cell phone picture I’d taken of a busker on the Andador, the pedestrian walkway in Oaxaca, the city center on Day of the Dead, November 2017. When I’d worked out how the pose was accomplished, I was ready for the fact that the trick was after the fact, your money already in his cup. There’s an easy congress between busking and begging that goes back certainly to the picaresque tradition, and probably from time immemorial. And busking in Mexico, as you know is a worthy art. I’ve seen a Statue of Liberty across the street from an Uncle Sam, Roman Centurions, and so on. Taking money for little work is also sleight work, it’s true, though not a comely used phrase. But there’s a kind of trust the busker maintains in day long poses that she will be supported with contributions, that their bowl will not often be robbed, a presumption not so easily believed perhaps today. And then I don’t mind at all that the cover image invites the reader to consider the relation between a gift economy and the industry of book publishing in which the value of words has become more perhaps than at any other time in history the value of commerce.
C.M. MAYO: Can you also talk a little about your previous book, Blue Nocturne, and the hexagram poems?
W. NICK HILL: At some point in 2011 I began to compose what I called hexagrams out of a need for a simple meditative practice of writing. With the I Ching in mind, I tried to write those two three line terse stanzas called hexagrams like those I had thrown using coins in the 60s and 70s to find guidance in the words of that venerable book of ancient wisdom. At least I fancied it told me appreciable things. The hexagram’s inner dynamism could change very quickly depending on the lines that moved, so there was always the possibility of surprises, changes. It was known as the Book of Changes, after all. I have also kept up with reading Tang and Sung dynasty poets, though I claim no expertise. I’m just a serial reader of Li Bo, Wang Wei, and many others. That discipline of composition continued for more than 64 days in a row and though I have all of them, only 18 or 19, depending, appear in BN.
Those little poems themselves began to very lightly sketch a
consciousness that was connected to mine but wasn’t exactly. I sensed that this
individual wanted to take himself, or herself, away for extended quiet, as in a
remote cabin in the mountains around here in the Pacific Northwest. The
speaker’s gender seemed to be male but I don’t think that it’s so clear. In the course of this quiet time alone, the
speaker awaits changes for the better that may arise out of paying close
attention to the surroundings, especially nighttime and dreaming, and to the
writing every morning.
Another set of incidents became entangled with these six line practice pieces. During what has become my almost yearly visit to Oaxaca, specifically in 2000, a chance encounter with Una constelación de noches / A Constellation of Nights, a glossy illustrated book of an art exhibit that the Mexican poet Alberto Blanco put together in which he paired paintings and poems. That handsome coffee table book came into my hands in the quiet inner patio under a bougainvillea “roof” at the IAGO, the painter Francisco Toledo’s Institute for Graphic Arts. I have not since seen the book again, though I tried for several years to lay my hands on it. The theme of nocturnes, more easily found in music and painting of course, were still a small literary presence in my memory, particularly Alvaro Mutis’ atmospheric nocturnes that evoked his family’s coffee plantation in torrid lands. This all came together in a rush in 2013 as Blue Nocturne. The color blue, aside from the celestial, came from a personal myth. As a child in Sao Paulo, I found a book with a blue cover in a box in an unused room over the garage, the former carriage horse stable in the old house we occupied. I don’t think I read much of it then because my brother and our friends got our dad to make the space into a floor hockey rink. But the notion of that book surely underlies some part of my desire to make them.
C.M. MAYO: As a poet writing in English, which English language poets would you say have been the most influential for you? And as one who also reads Portuguese and Spanish, which poets in those languages would you say have influenced your own work?
W. NICK HILL: Allow me to answer both the above in one. In Sao Paulo, Brazil, my school mates and I spoke a bilingual mix of English and Portuguese. I loved the way those sounds danced around together! I was very much at home in Brazil. Portuguese wasn’t taught in the high school I went to when I returned to the States, so Spanish became my other language. Consequently, when I read it wasn’t English writers alone that interested me. One of the defining moments in my early life with poetry came in a flash of understanding how García Lorca made a verbal image come alive in “Romance sonámbulo,” from the Gypsy Ballads. So it’s somewhat of a twist to focus on English, but I did pay attention to Modernists, especially Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, because I considered it a kind of (very opinionated) handbook of poetry in English, “The Seafarer,” and the ancient Chinese, in translation, of course, a reading habit I continue with Su Tung P’o, Hsieh Ling Yun, P’o Chu-ie, and so on. I also had a lot fun reading e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and for a time I thought a lot of Delmore Schwartz. Over time I went backwards, to Whitman, Dickinson, and sideways to the Beattles, Bob Dylan, and that would now have to include Leonard Cohen.
Much later, I was able to participate in a poetry workshop
for a heady week with Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and Michael Harper. That
experience invited me to be more serious about my own writing. After that I did short-term workshops with
Marie Howe, Cleopatra Mathis, and then, a chapbook workshop with Jason Shinder
at the New School.
I had a career as an academic, Ph.D. in Latin American literature. I wrote a monograph, Tradición y modernidad en la poesía de Carlos Germán Belli that was published in Madrid. Belli is one of the fine poets Peru has produced. He writes about contemporary angst in Golden Age formalisms. I studied with Oscar Hahn, a powerful Chilean poet whose Mal de amor, Love’s Sickness, among many others, made a big impression. Through Hahn, I met Chilean poets, Pedro Lastra, Enrique Lihn, Nicanor Parra, Lucía Guerra, Javier Campos, and others. Javier later became my colleague at Fairfield University. Lihn became a model for my writing for a long time. He and I had long loopy talks about modernity. I was fuzzy whereas he had a clear understanding, some of which rubbed off on me, of what people were calling the Post-modern. I also developed an interest in the Summa de Maqrol el Gaviero, by the Colombian writer Alvaro Mutis. My first serious attempt to translate from Spanish were poems spoken by the existential philosopher cum sailor, Maqrol, The Lookout.
I don’t know how it is for others who teach about
literature, but for me, after a time, when you’ve dealt with so many
accomplished, brilliant writers and poets, it wasn’t so much that I was
influenced by anyone in particular. It was more that I admired specific
characteristics, or that the history of genres of writing became clearer
because of the way Vallejo, for instance, who did have a serious part to play
in what I wanted to do with poetry, the way he broke down previous measures of
value to challenge language itself served as a path. Similarly with parts of
Neruda, whose Odes touched a thread with simple language anybody could
understand, like that of the ancient Chinese in English though because their
poems were formally complex and were sung.
C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about writing your own poems in Spanish?
W. NICK HILL: I began writing poetry in my early 20s and those attempts were in English. After college where I studied sciences and social sciences, I went to Spain to teach English for a year and to try my hand at writing fiction. Literature of all kinds, in both English and Spanish, occupied my reading. Bilingualism was imprinted on me growing up in Brazil. Over the years I’ve drifted away from Portuguese. In any case, when I turned to my own poetry it came out mixed English-Spanish. I wrote a chapbook called Mundane Rites / Ritos mundanos that was third place in the 1997Sow’s Ear Poetry Review’s chapbook contest but they only published the winner. Some of the poems came out in the minnesota review, and others, and in the Américas Review under a pseudonym I quickly dropped, Nicolas Colina. Poems in my chapbook came directly from the Central American conflicts of the 80s and 90s, border issues, as well. One of them was an experiment in the subconscious dialogue between Cortés and La Malinche that interwove Spanish and English. I have difficulty separating my poetry from politics broadly speaking. Because bilingualism involving U.S. Latinxs is contested territory, I drifted away from “code switching,” though I continued to publish in Spanish in The Bilingual Review, Ventana Abierta from UC Santa Barbara, and in Chile. It became clear to me in my teaching that the up and coming programs of studies in the 3 principle groups of Spanish Americans in the U. S. –Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans– weren’t being represented culturally, in my university anyway, in their bona fide condition as USians who wrote as they lived, in English, Spanish, and mixed up all together. And that’s not even considering interesting writing by Central Americans, Dominicans, and others, nor much attention paid to American Indigenous languages. I got a fellowship to get caught up on Chicano Studies at Yale, and began to develop university courses that addressed those communities, in literary culture at least. After all, at Fairfield University I had a whole range of speakers in my classes: English only speaking Mexican Americans, fluent bilinguals from the Caribbean, and foreign students whose English was good. This was during a time in the 90s and early 00s that I intensified my trips to Mexico, pointedly to Oaxaca where a former student, Kurt Hackbarth, had gone to teach English. He subsequently became a Mexican citizen and writes in both English and Spanish, plays, fiction, and commentary.
I compose in Spanish, not in the same way as in English
exactly, but directly, that is to say I don’t translate, though that too is
inaccurate. There is a mental space, or a consciousness accompanied by
intuition and emotion where languages intermingle. The closest analogy would be
sexual. And it’s in that embrace of languages where I enjoy hanging out.
C.M. MAYO: What is the best, most important piece of advice you would give to a poet who would like to try translating another poet?
W. NICK HILL: After a career of teaching, I no longer want to tell anybody or teach anybody anything. But the practice dies slowly, so rather than begging off, I’ll offer thoughts based solely on my own experience.
I believe, with others, that bringing a poem into another
language is a recreation and a service to readers. I have read that a
translator of poetry should find work that fits their sensibilities. I’ve read
the opposite too. I met someone awhile back who was translating Horace for fun.
So that is probably a good start at advice. Do it because you’re wrapped up in
the words, and the vision, and you like it. But this individual wasn’t going to
try to publish.
“I believe, with others, that bringing a poem into another language is a recreation and a service to readers.”
If publishing is the aim, then get the rights! There are a number of ways to do that, most
of which mean convincing somebody, poet or publisher –whoever holds the
rights– to let you do the work, or accepts the work you’ve done. To do that
you have to become the ideal reader, critic, and boatwoman to cross the mighty
river between languages. Understand where compromises are required in the
target language and decide throughout how to compensate. One way is to shift the untranslatable gerund
over to another one that suggest a similar affect
C.M. MAYO: You have also done book length translations, for example, of Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave. Can you tell a little about this experience and how it affected your own work?
W. NICK HILL: I had been tried out so to speak on Barnet’s lesser testimonial novel, Rachel’s Song, the story of a dance hall girl before Sandy Taylor at Curbstone Press asked me to do Biography. I’m not certain I’d done a very good job with Rachel who was as shallow and frivolous as cabaret life allowed in Cuba in the 20 and 30s when it was a playground for privilege. But apparently it was good enough to give me a crack at Esteban Monetejo’s story. It was a daunting challenge. Esteban was an old man when Barnet interviewed him about the saga of how he ran away from slavery, lived alone in the bush, fought in the War of Independence, and watched the Cuban Revolution triumph before he died at 105 years of age. Esteban was uneducated of course, but he was smart, wily, curious, resolute, was steeped in the lore and rituals of various Afro Cuban spiritual beliefs, and he had a sharp memory. How does such a man sound in English? Though I read U.S. slave narratives, Montejo wasn’t going to sound like them. The details of everyday life he narrated differed greatly from slaves in the U.S. in large degree because Cubans were able to hold on to parts of their heritage from Africa.
As I progressed I realized that in a very real sense as translator I was mimicking Barnet’s role in his relationship with Montejo more closely perhaps than in other translations projects. Hence the confusion of titles between my version and the previous one by Jocasta Innes who knew a lot about ethnography and didn’t want to recognize the newness of what Barnet was doing. She published her translation in England as Autobiography, thus making Montejo into the sole author. What Barnet was after was to present the runaway slave’s voice as clearly and as transparently as white man could convey. And that’s what I tried to convey in the English version of the testimony of a man who was a character, a man of contradictions, tics in his speech, and great humanity, who gave convincing details of what life as a slave and as a free man in Cuba was like before the Cuban Revolution.
I made as literal a version as I could get and then worked
to shape it within all the prohibitions and permissions I was aware of as a
person who bridges the gap between slave and free, Cuba and the United States.
I didn’t try to round Esteban out, I left phrases in Spanish or Yoruba that had
no equivalent because the original already had a Glossary that clarified
details of ethnicity, history, and the like.
I judged it to be acceptable to simply add to it. In all, I tried to fashion a voice of great
humanity in an English that was understandable but particular. A new edition came out from Northwestern
University Press in 2016, with a fine introduction by Professor Wiliam Luis.
C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive writer for many years. How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?And another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
W. NICK HILL: I have been much aided and hindered both by digital media. Before I left teaching I was deeply involved in using the web and programs like WebCT –programs like Chalkboard today– to help students manipulate at their own speed the conjunction of sight and sound that is central to learning another language.
After I left academics, I really dove into writing poetry. I
had already withdrawn from some of those very distractions you mention because I could feel how they drew me further
into time on computers and into a popular culture that relies increasingly on
violence and the propagation of stereotypes. I don’t mean to say that there
aren’t meaty blogs, You Tubes, and the like to enrich one’s thought, but even
so it can be overwhelming, as you suggest. Thus, to say that I’m distracted
from writing by elements of Virtual Reality would be erroneous however, because
I’ve guarded against it. In fact, the
digital has benefitted my writing in two ways.
As I said previously, I published Sleight Work on my website to take advantage of the movement to
ensure access to materials remains as open and free as possible. In the world
of publishing today, there are so many access points to creative work it
boggles the mind. At the same time, so much of it has been infused with
commercialism that I for one find it disturbing. I’m sure there are exceptions,
but much of the discussion of writing on the web and in print revolves around
volume of sales, numbers of prizes, and other markers of what? Subject matter? Craft? Raw writing as a
practice? Justice? Art?
The second way that the Digital Revolution has not
distracted me resides in the fact that I have made it a focus of my work.
Awhile back I became intrigued by the Mesoamerican ballgame that was played in
ancient times and is still played in some few areas of Mexico today. The game,
variously called ullamalitzli, Pok-Ta-Pok, Tachli, was played with a heavy latex rubber ball five hundred
years before Europeans came to colonize. I’ve been writing poems about the
continuity of games in these lands. I have come to see that a continuity worthy
of further exploration exists between the contemporary world of video gaming,
itself a world apart, and those age-old games. This is a body of work that I’m
still actively pursuing.
As for tips, I’d say the policy of following a middle course
between Luddite no contact and game players who rarely see natural light is
called for. And a good healthy skepticism about how electronics will deliver
the biosphere from the predations of capitalism. Anthropologist David Graeber
has my ear when he writes about anarchism in a compelling way in his Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology.
I have always written on paper first and then make hard
copies of what seems interesting enough to work further. The most unsettling
aspect of this practice is that the pages keep on piling up. Some small
fraction of those words do get digitized. Apart from that who’s going to wade
through all those pounds of paper if I don’t. Which would seem to be a good
argument for going paperless though I can’t shake it.
C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you as a poet and translator?
W. NICK HILL: I’m preparing for another stay in my adopted city of Oaxaca, Mexico where I will finish translating Gary Lemons’ Día de los muertos that Red Hen brought out in 2016 as a coloring book. The chiste, the joke is that I’m translating it into Spanish. More realistically, I hope to polish enough of a sample to interest a poet in Mexico to sign on with me to make it ring true with the goal of seeing about a publisher. I’ve already asked Jorge Fernández Granados, but it was a year ago and was put off-handedly so he’s probably not thinking about it now. I have published a handful of poems from his Principle of Uncertainty, so I’m hoping he is amenable. In any case, Lemons’ work dances with surreal abandon that juxtaposes eccentric, intuitive images of the splendor and suffering of creatures, from burros, to dusty young gringos, and sea tortoises, all creatures encountered in Oaxaca at various times between the late 60s and the 80s. A happy, hubristic effort of mine to render this whirling dervish of words into Spanish.
In addition, I’m going to double down on a bilingual
collection of poems that builds on Mundane
Rites / Ritos mundanos and will poke around in matters related to
Americanismus, a tentative title, for new worldisms. What the adventure of
website publishing has suggested to me is that no existing publisher I know of
will chance it with a book for bilinguals not by a Latinx writer. I’m cognizant
of the political nature of cultural work and don’t want to distract from worthy
goals of U.S. Latin@s. At the moment only on the web could I present a book for
bilingual readers who might understand what I’m celebrating. Perhaps this effort
is akin to the recognition that jazz and blues are universal art forms that
honor African American originators and share their creativity even in the midst
of racism. And then there’s that ball game project at the end of a joystick.
Thanks for giving me the chance to share
with you. Keep up the good work.
Yenta Mash and her stories will be remembered because they have rare and masterful elegance, uncanny insight into vast prairie-like swaths human nature, and unusual heart. They also tell stories entirely new for many English-speaking people, that of the Jewish exiles to Siberia under Stalin during World War II, and their later migration to Israel. Translator Ellen Cassedy’s is a transcendent achievement; with Mash’s On the Landing she has brought a landmark book into English.
Translator Ellen Cassedy’s is a transcendent achievement; with Mash’s On the Landing she has brought a landmark book into English.
Ellen Cassedy is the author of We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust and co-translator (with Yermiyahu Ahron Taub) of Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel. She was a 2015 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow, and On the Landing is a result of her fellowship. Her website is www.ellencassedy.com.
C.M. MAYO: How might you describe the ideal reader for these stories?
ELLEN CASSEDY: Anyone interested in fine literature! Mash is a great read – clear, sometimes funny, and full of ground-level truths about what it was like to live through great cataclysms of the 20th Century.
C.M. MAYO: When and why were you inspired to translate Yenta Mash?
ELLEN CASSEDY: I learned of Mash’s work through the Yiddish Book Center’s translation fellowship program. Having died in 2013, she’s basically a contemporary writer. She was a down-to-earth and often witty observer of a changing world, who drew on her own life of multiple uprootings in telling the stories of people who are forever on the move.
Even in the most harrowing settings, Mash is somehow inspiring. Young and old, her characters are solid, sturdy people with a sense of humor. They’re survivors, people who land on their feet.
The
collection begins in a vibrant Jewish town reminiscent of the one in “Fiddler
on the Roof.”
We then join women prisoners being transported into the Siberian gulag, with its frozen steppes, snowy forests, and surging rivers. After the exile, we see the Jewish community rebuilding itself behind the postwar Iron Curtain. Finally, we join refugees in Israel in the 1970’s, struggling with the challenges of assimilation and the awkwardness of a land where young people instruct their elders, instead of the other way around.
C.M. MAYO: You are also a translator of the Yiddish writer Blume Lempel. Both Lempel and Mash write of suffering, exile, and grief, and yet they are very different writers, with very different experiences during and after the war. In a writerly sense, what are some of the differences that especially strike you?
ELLEN CASSEDY: Mash (1922-2013) and Blume Lempel (1907-1999) grew up in tiny towns in Eastern Europe, not far apart from each other. Both suffered persecution, displacement, and appalling losses.
Lempel left home for Paris as a young woman, fled to America in 1939, and spent the remainder of her life in New York. Her work feels shattered, fractured, unhinged. Her gemlike, poetic style and decidedly unconventional narrative strategies take readers into a realm of trauma and madness. The title story, “Oedipus in Brooklyn,” is Exhibit #1 of her taboo-defying oeuvre.
As a young woman, Mash was deported to Siberia by the Soviets in 1941. She did seven years of hard labor there, then spent three decades in Soviet Moldova before immigrating to Israel in the 1970’s. Her work bears witness in an urgent, orderly, and exacting fashion to a life full of tumult. Her language is alive with regionalisms carried to new places, bits of multiple languages picked up along the way, and neologisms invented to describe new circumstances.
ELLEN CASSEDY: The world of Yiddish writers after World War II was like a virtual café on a global scale. Yiddish newspapers, literary journals, and literary prizes flourished, as did intense epistolary friendships. I don’t have any evidence that Mash and Lempel corresponded, but they must have read each other’s work in Di goldene keyt, the flagship literary journal published in Tel Aviv. And they knew some of the same Yiddish literary figures, including the eminent poet and journal editor Abraham Sutzkever.
“The world of Yiddish writers after World War II was like a virtual café on a global scale. “
C.M. MAYO: How did working on On the Landing compare to working on Lempel’s Oedipus in Brooklyn and to your other translation projects?
ELLEN CASSEDY: I was fortunate to have Yermiyahu Ahron Taub as a co-translator for the Lempel project. We had a rich collaboration, full of constant back and forth. For the Mash project, I drew on the resources of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA – a wonderful organization that provided me with mentors and a vibrant and an engaged community.
I did the English translation for Yiddish Zoo, a collection of Yiddish poetry for children in three languages. That was a joyful romp with lions and tigers and bears – great fun.
Now I’m working with a gifted cartoonist who’s embarked on a graphic project involving handwritten Yiddish archives. Quite a decoding challenge!
C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about Yenta Mash’s literary influences? (And in which languages did she read?)
ELLEN CASSEDY: Mash knew Russian, Rumanian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. She was drawn to Yiddish literature from early childhood. As a small child, she knew poems by Y.L. Peretz by heart and was familiar with the classical Yiddish writers Sholem Aleichem and Mendele Moykher Sforim. After her years in Siberia, she joined the vibrant Jewish literary circle in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau. But it wasn’t until she was in her fifties, when she immigrated to Israel, that she began to write. She joined the Yiddish literary scene in Israel and was a member of Leivick House, a Yiddish cultural center.
The red marker in this screenshot from Google Maps shows Chisinau, in Moldova, where Yenta Mash lived after her exile to Siberia.
C.M. MAYO: Which writers, in any language, could you compare her to?
ELLEN CASSEDY: Yenta Mash is a master chronicler of exile. Her characters are always on their way to somewhere or from somewhere. That’s why I chose the name “On the Landing,” the name of one of her stories, for the title of my translated collection.
“Yenta Mash is a master chronicler of exile.”
I compare her to other voices of assimilation and resilience – Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake), André Aciman (Out of Egypt), and Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Refugees). Her work is keenly relevant today as displaced people seek refuge across the globe.
C.M. MAYO: I am astonished that writing of such quality is only appearing in English for the first time in 2018. Is there more?
ELLEN CASSEDY: Absolutely! Only a fraction of Yiddish literature from the past 150 years has ever been translated into English. As we gain access to more and more of these buried treasures, I believe Yiddish literature will take its rightful place in the world, as what has been called “a major literature in a minor language.”
“As we gain access to more and more of these buried treasures, I believe Yiddish literature will take its rightful place in the world, as what has been called ‘a major literature in a minor language.'”
There’s an expression in Yiddish, “di goldene keyt,” the golden chain, which refers to how Yiddish literature has been passed down through the ages, with one writer after another adding links to the chain. Yiddish was the language that my Jewish forebears spoke in kitchens, marketplaces, and meeting halls on both sides of the Atlantic. I’m thrilled to be able to add my own link to the chain.
This blog posts on Mondays. This year the fourth Monday of the month is dedicated to a Q & A with a fellow writer.
I was excited to see David A. Taylor’s Cork Wars: Intrigue and Industry in World War II, firstly because I know from his previous works that this promises to be a thoroughly researched and superbly written history; and secondly because I have some tangentially related family history with another strategic material during World War II. My grandfather, organic chemist Frank R. Mayo, was then a research chemist at U.S. Rubber Company working on the crucial task of creating a synthetic rubber that could be mass-produced in a dangerously narrowing window of time; sources of natural rubber –essential for making automobile and airplane tires as well as tank caterpillar tracks–had been cut off when the Japanese invaded southeast Asia. Moreover, these days I am not the only one nervously aware that as we become increasingly dependent on our computers, smartphones, and electric vehicles, we are becoming increasingly beholden to a supply of “rare earths,” many found nowhere near the United States, for the batteries (as David mentions in this interview).
Taylor’s Cork Wars has been garnering rich praise. Meredith Hindley, author of Destination Casablanca, calls Cork Wars “fascinating;” Mary Otto, author of Teeth, says: “Cork Wars captures the drama of three families whose lives are bound up with a precious forest product—and the urgency of war;” and noted biographer Douglas Brinkley calls Cork Wars “a landmark achievement!”
C.M. MAYO: How might you describe the ideal reader for Cork Wars?
DAVID A. TAYLOR: The story is narrative nonfiction, so really the ideal reader is anyone who loves a good story. Because it involves espionage and World War II, that tends toward a male reader but the focus on families and how they respond to a crisis will make it interesting to a wider audience. I’ve been pleased that a wide range of readers have responded warmly to the book.
C.M. MAYO: An unsung commodity turns out to be crucial for national defense. It seems to me there are many parallels to this, both in the past and the present. Can you talk about this a bit?
DAVID A. TAYLOR: That’s long been an interest of mine,
especially commodities that come from nature. We’ve come to know that water can
be a flashpoint for conflict and security. And many of us grew up hearing
“Blood for oil!” as a shorthand describing the motivation for wars fought over petroleum
reserves.
But other parallels
today are less well known. One is an obscure ingredient in electronics like our
cellphones: minerals called “rare earths.” Your cellphone contains just a tiny
amount of rare earths, but they’re irreplaceable – and China holds practically a
monopoly on them. That’s why the Pentagon recently issued a report saying rare earths are a matter of
U.S. national security.
That’s a factor in
the current trade conflict. It helps to know these things as world citizens. And
for writers, I think that holds dramatic possibilities as well.
C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about which writers have been the most important influences for your writing in general and for Cork Wars in particular?
DAVID A. TAYLOR: My reading taste has been shaped by
so many wonderful writers of both fiction and nonfiction. It’s hard to keep to
just a few. In fiction I’ve loved the works of Alice Munro, Grace Paley, Amy
Bloom, George Saunders, Kate Wheeler, Chekhov, Tagore (stories), Borges, and
Machado de Assis, the Brazilian master who combines wit and poignancy. In
nonfiction I’ve been influenced by John McPhee, Rebecca Skloot, Isabel
Wilkerson and others.
For Cork Wars, I was very impressed by a novel by Alan Furst called Dark Voyage, set during World War II and in the Mediterranean, in which the crew of a freighter (hauling a cargo of cork for part of the voyage) figures prominently. Furst evoked a world that’s noir and world-wise with vital characters, a combination I wanted for my book.
The other novel that I admired recently – it didn’t influence me because of when it came out – was Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach, which has beautiful writing and characters in that wartime atmosphere of New York harbor.
C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive writer for many years. How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
DAVID A. TAYLOR: Thanks, so have you! The digital
revolution has had a huge affect on my process. Yes, the distractions – and
even the requirements – of email and social media have cut a chunk out of my
writing time. I still write in the mornings, right after I get up, and that
helps. And at some point in the day I like to write on paper, for a different
neural connection to work. But I wish I had more tricks for staying focused
(apart from self-imposed deadlines).
C.M. MAYO: Another question apropos of the digital revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
DAVID A. TAYLOR: Yes, I started writing on computers
but printing out to review and revise. I’ve seen research findings that reading
hardcopy can help foster focus on longform reading (and revising). So as much
as I write and revise onscreen, I do also edit on paper. The visceral circling
of passages to move around can be satisfying.
I also read my work
aloud to get my ear involved in hearing points for improvement.
C.M. MAYO: Organization… Keeping the research and working library all in order is a titantic task in writing a book of this nature. What were some of the things you did for this book that worked especially well for you?
DAVID A. TAYLOR: It’s interesting – have you found your own process has changed with each book? Mine has. For my first book, I used index cards to map out scenes, chapter by chapter. Later books relied on folders on the computer.
This one was
challenging in terms of structure – it took a while to find the braided
structure woven in three strands, with three families. As the structure
evolved, the way I sorted my text, interview transcripts and images shifted.
One strength in
this story’s evolution was the rhythm of research and interviews, writing and
revision. The research led me to people to talk with – including Frank DiCara at his home in
Baltimore, and Gloria Marsa, the daughter of a man recruited for spying by the
OSS. I spoke with her often by phone in Mexico City, where she lives.
Those conversations
in turn pointed me forward with search terms for more documentary research,
which often yielded details that would be hard to recall, but that help the
narrative.
DAVID A. TAYLOR: I’ve been encouraged by the response to Cork Wars and I think there are other formats in which the story and its characters can speak to us. In earlier work, I was fortunate to have partners for adapting my book about the WPA writers of the 1930s, Soul of a People, as a documentary and later as a feature screenplay (not yet produced, but it did get some nice WGA recognition). So I’d like to explore something like that with this story.
I also have several new projects. I’m in awe of the vision of August Wilson, whose Twentieth Century Cycle is so monumental. I love the idea of imagining a vast canvas, and carving it up by decade! On my own much smaller scale, I have my Thirties story with the WPA writers, and now Cork Wars in the 1940s. So I have a few more to go.
>>Visit David A. Taylor here, and check out this excellent trailer for Cork Wars:
This year, with some exceptions, the post for the fourth Monday of the month is dedicated to a Q & A with a fellow writer. This is the last Q & A for 2018; look for the series to resume on the fourth Monday in January 2019.
I had the pleasure of meeting Amy Hale Auker and of hearing her read
from her work back in 2016 at the Women Writing the West conference in Santa
Fe. She’s the author of several works of poetry, fiction and essay, including Rightful
Place, the 2012 WILLA winner for creative nonfiction and Foreword
Reviews Book of the Year for essays. Her latest collection, Ordinary Skin:
Essays from Willow Springs, is a treat for anyone who relishes
fine creative nonfiction– and it’s a vivid and moving look at a life lived
close to the land, on a working ranch in Arizona.
As those of you who follow my blog well know, my
work to date has focused on Mexico, but for a while now I’ve been at work on a
book about Far West Texas, and this had led me to read widely and closely about
the West. It has a grand if sometimes underappreciated literary tradition, so
if you’re not familiar with it, take special note of Amy Hale Auker, and of her
reading recommendations here. You will be richly rewarded.
From the catalog copy for Ordinary Skin:
“Touching on faith and body image and belonging, these essays explore our role in deciding what is favorable or unfavorable, as well as where we someday want to dwell, and who came before us. In that touching, they feel their way with observations about current affairs, drought, mystery, and the hard decisions that face us all as we continue to move toward more questions with fewer answers. This exploration is informed and softened by hummingbirds, Gila monsters, bats, foxes, bears, wildflowers, and hidden seep springs where life goes on whether we are there to see it or not. It is about work in a wild and wilderness environment. In the end, even as life changes drastically around us, we are better off for knowing that the ugly mud bug turns into a jewel-toned dragonfly.”
C.M. MAYO: How might you describe the ideal reader for the essays in Ordinary Skin?
AMY HALE AUKER: Ordinary
Skin is a book for anyone who loves language and story and first person
narrative, who craves an intimate look at the natural world and the land, who
recognizes the value of hard work and sweat with a pause, or many pauses, for
falling in love with life, over and over again. While I think that women will
find the deeper messages of the instinctual feminine, it is also a refresher
course for men on why they love our Mother Earth.
C.M. MAYO: If a reader were to read only one essay in your collection, which would you recommend and why?
AMY HALE AUKER:“Using Tools
Backward.” That essay reflects our sense of place and those who came
before, paving the way, and who we are as we stand in these places.
C. M. MAYO: You have been a longtime participant in cowboy poetry festivals, including the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Alpine, Texas. My impression is that while cowboy poetry, fiction and song are beloved to many in the western US and Canada and elesewhere, they are also considered exotic, and alas, something to even disdain, by many in the literary communities in urban areas of the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Your writing seems to me to fall squarely in both camps– cowboy and what I would call (for lack of a better term) literary. Can you offer your thoughts about this? And perhaps comment on what people who read literary prose but who are unfamiliar with cowboy poetry (and cowboy culture generally) might look for and reconsider?
AMY HALE AUKER: I
have to admit to having run with this question directly to my editor and dear
friend, Andy Wilkinson,
who is often a clearer thinker and better communicator about labels and
definitions than I am. I tend to simply write what I write and bang my head
against category later. Wilkinson responded to my query in this way:
“The only way out is to question … artificial categorization. Stevens didn’t write ‘insurance executive’ poetry, Williams didn’t write ‘pediatrics’ poetry, Frost didn’t write ‘farmer’ poetry, etc. Poets write poetry, and though their poems may be about a kind of life, the poets are neither the subjects nor the classifications.”
I agree with Editor Dearest, but would also add
that it is not my job to ask any reader to look more closely at any culture. It
is my responsibility to simply do my job and step back (my clumsy paraphrase of
Lao Tzu). This question looks too closely, in my opinion, at genre, marries me,
as a writer/poet, too closely to a day job, a skill set, a means to earn a
paycheck. Of course, my work in the natural world, with animals, growing food,
informs my writing, my creative process, as did Frost’s… as does Wendell
Berry’s. And yes, there are stereotypes out there, always, surrounding any
profession or region that has been grossly, and often erroneously, romanticized
to the point of becoming myth rather than reality. But an astute reader and
listener will be quick to see where the stereotype breaks down and were reality
shines through.
I would like to add that the elitist view of
literature and life is what furthers the divide in this nation. That the only
writing worthy of consideration can’t come from the pen of someone who grows
food, who works as a peasant, who has shit on their boots, who works with their
hands. This us vs them view of art, literature, and philosophy is
dangerous and furthers our separateness.
C.M. MAYO: Speaking of shit, my own favorite writer on that topic is Gene Logsdon, who called himself “The Contrary Farmer,” and who wrote a book I highly recommend– it’s informative, beautifully written, and hilarious– with the title, Holy Shit.
For someone who appreciates good writing but is unfamiliar with writing about rural life / farming / ranching, apart from your works, what might be a few reading suggestions?
AMY HALE AUKER: I just added Logsdon
to my list of things to read! Thank you.
I hope you will consider all of Wendell Berry’s
work… poetry, prose, essay…. all of it. I highly recommend The Unsettling
of America, essays surrounding the “green
revolution” and the industrialization of agriculture.
Some other authors include James Galvin (Fencing
the Sky), Verlyn Klinkenborg (The Rural Life), and Merrill Gilfillan
(Magpie Rising).
Teresa Jordan wrote a gorgeous memoir, “Ride
the White Horse Home.”
These are just a few, but if you really want to
the peak of the pile, read The Unsettling of America. Berry is
brilliant.
C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about which writers have been the most important influences for your writing– and which ones you are reading now?
AMY HALE AUKER: My influences are
eclectic and many… but I tribute the poetry and songwriting of Andy Wilkinson
as an influence to write any and everything that burns brightly in me. I
tribute Merrill Gilfillan, Jeanette Winterson, E. B. White, Verylyn
Klinkenborg, Barbara Kingsolver, and Edward Abbey with influencing my first
person narrative. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Natalie Goldbberg, Ann Lamott, and
Julia Cameron are on my “forever shelf.” Recently I started reading
Pema Chodron. I read a lot of fiction when I am writing nonfiction. So, right
now I am reading novels. By my elbow is News of the World by Paulette
Jiles. I love how she writes literary fiction in a western setting, breaking
out of genre.
C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive writer for many years. How has the digital revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
AMY HALE AUKER: I view my time
as a pie chart. It is important to give of my creative energy consciously.
However, my journey has also led me to consider all of the roles in my life as
part of who I am as a creative being… author, cowboy, grandmother, gardner,
cook, poet, performer, speaker. So, it has been fun to see how very creative I
can be on my social media platforms, in particular Instagram. People point
their cameras at things they love, so it is a glimpse at their hearts. That
said, the most important thing I can do is to go to cow camp where I am
unplugged and write in longhand on the unlined page. Or put a 38 pound pack on
my back and walk off in the wilderness, solo except for the dog. And I do. When
I am home, it takes discipline to turn it all off. But that is what we all
should do, for more of the day rather than less.
C.M. MAYO: Another question apropos of the digital revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
AMY HALE AUKER: I
write three pages of longhand every single morning a la Julia
Cameron. It is my discipline and my practice and it serves me well.
Even if I don’t get to write the rest of the day, I know I showed up at the
page Even if it reads like a “to do” list, I know I was present to my
creative fire. I wrote most of “The Story Is the Thing” in longhand
on yellow legal pad because a character in the book wrote in the same manner.
What startled me was the dramatic and interesting process of transfering my
handwriting to the screen. There was a magic there that I have not forgotten
and crave to duplicate. So I am grateful that there are so many tools available
to us… from uniball pens on blank journal pages to speaking into our phones
while we drive to Schrivener (which baffles me) to Word where I can hurry up
and get it all down. There is a freedom in having multiple ways to approach art
in any medium.
AMY HALE AUKER: I joined Women Writing the West because my publisher, Texas Tech University Press, told me to. It has been an honor to be part of that group of highly talented people.
[C.M.M. post-interview note: Women Writing the West is open to writers (both women and men) living in and/or writing about the West, in any genre. I’ve been a member for several years now, and highly recommend it.]
C. M. MAYO: What’s next for you as a writer?
AMY HALE AUKER: So many things…. I am working on both a very weird collection of short short pieces that are a mixed bag of fiction and nonfiction and meditations as well as what may very well end up being a new collection of essays. However, I don’t believe artists should discuss what they are working on at the time in much detail. It is too easy to talk about our process rather than dig deep and stay in it…. all the way to completion… if there is such a thing.
COMMENTS: Ms. Mayo: Fascinating interview with Amy Hale Auker. I have two of her essay collections: Ordinary Skin and Rightful Place. Her word choices are poetic; her thoughts on ranch life are inspiring. Thank you for asking inciteful questions—they are challenging but she is up to the task. –Judith Grout www.judithgrout.com
Thanks for your interview of Amy Hale Auker. I have read both her essays and her fiction and admire both, and heard her poetry at one of the WWW conferences (perhaps Tucson?). Your questions and her answers were thoughtful and interesting. I appreciated your delving into her thought processes and comments on poetry and essays. I loved both of your recommendations for books! –Julie Weston
This year, 2018, I have been aiming to post a Q & A with a fellow writer, poet and/or translator on the fourth Monday of the month. This usually happens! This month however I am posting two Q & As– this third Monday, and another for the fourth.
The Internet invites us be everywhere allwhen, so it seems, but in ye olde 3D meatspace, I have a habit of attempting to be in three places at the same time. (I leave all other impossible things for before breakfast!) One of those places is California, because that’s where my mother was living, and in recent years I flew out there from Mexico City to see her more times than I can count. Initially, when I realized I needed to go more often, I imagined that I could attend literary gatherings while in California, so I joined the San Francisco chapter of the Women’s National Book Association, an organization I warmly supported in the years I was living in Washington DC. Alas –(those with elderly parents will smile sadly with understanding)– I never could make it to a meeting. But I did read the SF WNBA newsletters and announcements, including news of Mary Mackey’s books. Her latest, The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, a collection of her poetry from 1974 – 2018, promises to be an especially rich read.
Mary Mackey is the author of a multitude of award-winning poetry collections, novels and more. Read about her distinguished career, and the unusual and highly original nature of her works, here. Though we have yet to meet in California, here we are, at least, on the same page in cyberspace: via email, Mary Mackey graciously answered several of my questions about her work. May you, dear extra curious and adventurous writerly reader, find her answers as fascinating and inspiring as I did.
Here’s the catalogue copy for her latest, The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams:
“Mary Mackey writes of life, death, love, and passion with intensity and grace. Her poems are hugely imaginative and multi-layered. Part One contains forty-eight new poems including twenty-one set in Western Kentucky from 1742 to 1975; and twenty-six unified by an exploration of the tropical jungle outside and within us, plus a surreal and sometimes hallucinatory appreciation of the visionary power of fever. Part Two offers the reader seventy-eight poems drawn from Mackey’s seven previous collections including Sugar Zone, winner of the 2012 Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. “
“Mary Mackey’s poems are powerful, beautiful, and have extraordinary range. This is the poetry of a woman who has lived richly, and felt deeply. May her concern for the planet help save it.”—Maxine Hong Kingston
“Always Mackey’s eye is drawn to the marginalized, the poor, the outcast, the trivialized. [In] The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, she has created an oeuvre, wilder, more open to change with each passing year. Hers is a monumental achievement.”—D. Nurkse
MARY MACKEY: As Maxine Hong
Kingston observed, my poetry has “extraordinary range.” I write for readers who
love the mystical, visionary poetry of Mirabai, Blake, Pablo Neruda, and
Saint John of the the Cross; for readers who want to step into the heart of our
disappearing tropical jungles; for women struggling against sexual harassment.
My ideal reader hates to be preached to and doesn’t like poems that are
obscure—academic poems that read like puzzles. Instead, my ideal reader loves
beautiful, well-crafted, complex, profound poetry that can be understood on
many levels. My ideal reader also likes to laugh because some of my poems are
very funny.
C.M.MAYO: What was the most important challenge for you in selecting poems from your now very substantial ouevre?
MARY MACKEY: When I started
selecting, I came up with 280 poems which, when combined with the 48 new poems
in Jaguars, would have resulted in a book the size of a cinder block. No
poet writes 280 great poems, so I started culling. I ended up with 78 of my
very best poems. Not one has a line I don’t like; not one is a second choice.
Another challenge was to make sure the poems I picked had stood the test of
time, since some were written as early as 1974. Some didn’t, but to my
amazement several I wrote in the early seventies as part of the Second Wave
women’s movement read as if they had been written today.
C.M. MAYO: In the process of selecting the poems, did you see your development as a poet in a new light? Are your poems very different now, and if so, how?
MARY MACKEY: I didn’t see my poetry
in a new light as I went over my previous collections, and although my poems
are different in content, they are not different in essence. My poetry has
always had an inward and an outward stroke. That is to say, it has always been
both highly personal and highly engaged with what is happening in the world. I
don’t preach. I don’t tell people what to do. I think it’s the duty of a poet
to bear witness to her times, and that’s what I have done for over 40 years:
bear witness. Right now I am not writing for those of us who are alive in 2018.
I am writing for future generations who will never see a live elephant, a
tropical jungle, or a healthy coral reef. I am writing poems to tell them how
beautiful our Earth was and what parts of it we are losing due to climate
change.
That said, I did discover some changes in my
poetry over the years. My lines grew longer, as if I were not as rushed. I
married happily and so wrote fewer sad love poems. I fell in love with
Portuguese and incorporated some Portuguese words in my last four collections.
In 2011, I began to speak openly about the fact that I have run a number of
life-threatening fevers (often near 107 degrees) and began to write poems about
the visions and fever-induced hallucinations I had during these near-death
experiences.
C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive poet and writer for many years. How has the digital revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
MARY MACKEY: I’ve been using
computers since the early 80’s, so the Digital Revolution did not come as a
surprise. It hasn’t affected my writing, but, like all writers these days, I
have to spend time on social media that I would have otherwise spent writing,
so I ration my online time carefully. To write poetry, to create anything, you
need long periods of silence and intense concentration. You need to be able to
hear your inner voice. You can’t do this if you are always checking your phone.
My solution is rigorous compartmentalization. I set aside times to write and
times to do social media.
When I am writing, my phone is off, my browser is
closed, and I am completely and absolutely focused on my writing or on the
essential daydreaming that precedes writing. When I am doing social media, I am
absolutely focused on social media. The two don’t bleed over into one another.
I also add a third element: time in the real world with physically present
people. I write or do social media for about 5 hours a day beginning in the
morning. Then I stop, turn off my computer, and see friends and family, take
long walks, talk to strangers, look at the stars or watch an ant or a sparrow.
In the evenings, I usually read instead of watching Netflix or something on
cable, because I’ve had enough screen time for the day.
C.M. MAYO: Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
MARY MACKEY: When I started
writing, paper was the only option. I still write out the first drafts of my
poems in cursive in a special journal because I don’t like to have any
technical interface between me and my imagination, nor any temptation to look
something up in the initial moments of inspiration. I write freely without
thinking about quality or organization. I let my hand and my mind wander. Then
I transfer the result to my laptop and begin a rigorous process of cutting,
improving, altering, editing, and crafting the final poem. I have taken a 4
page poem, written out in almost unreadable script, and transformed it into a
polished, poem of three lines.
I should mention here that I am also the author
of fourteen novels. Paper figures big in this part of my writing life. I wrote
my first novel out in cursive in a notebook in the Scandinavian statistics
section of the University of Chicago Library (a place where you could be sure
no one would appear to interrupt you). I wrote the second on a manual typewriter;
the third on an IBM Correcting Selectric typewriter, and the fourth on a
computer so primitive it didn’t have a hard drive. I’ve used computers ever
since for my subsequent ten novels, but at the end of each day, I print out all
additions and changes, because I like to have hard copies of my work. I find it
easier to edit hard copy, because you can see an entire page and move back and
forth more easily. Also you can actually see what you’ve crossed out in case
you want to change your mind. You can’t do this with deleted text. Then too, if
the Internet goes down, my backups get stolen, my hard drive goes up in smoke,
my passwords are compromised, the cloud is hacked, or my computer gets invaded
with ransom ware, I have hard copy.
C.M. MAYO: Your papers are archived in the Sophia Smith Special Collections Library, Smith College, Northampton, MA and your website offers a “Guide to Women Writers Archives.” https://marymackey.com/educators/guide-to-women-writers-archives/ . As a writer with an archive myself and as one who has made grateful use of many archives over the years –and one also keenly aware of how many valuable collections of papers, alas, end up lost— I am especially interested to know: How did this come about?
MARY MACKEY: It
took me fifteen years to get up the courage to try to place my literary papers,
because like so many women, I thought no one would want them. Imagine my
surprise when I finally sent out emails and got almost immediate replies from
nine universities who not only wanted my work, but offered to pay me
substantial sums for my archives. I ended turning down monetary offers and
donating my archives to Smith College, because they are dedicated to preserving
the archives of women writers and the history of women. I’m not an alumna of
Smith. I went to Harvard, but I didn’t donate my papers to Harvard because the
university wouldn’t let me use Lamont, the Harvard undergraduate library, when
I was a student there. In fact, until 1967, no women could enter Lamont. The
guards at the door even turned away Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
After my experience with archiving, I decided to
help women writers and artists archive their work. I have also helped men, but
my focus has been on women, because if you tell a women about archiving, she
will invariably say: “No one will want my papers. There’s no use trying.” In
contrast, a man will say: “No one will want my papers, but I might as well give
it a try.” I tell women that I want our history to be written on stone, not on
water. I don’t archive their work for them, but I give them a packet of
instructions on how to do it, encourage them to give it a try, tell them my own
story of being timid and uncertain, and remind them that they can only control
what goes into their archives while they are still alive. When they have
successfully placed their papers, I list them on my website in my Guide To
Women Writers’ Archives, congratulate them on my Facebook Page, and
congratulate them again in my quarterly
newsletter.
C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you as a poet and as a writer?
MARY MACKEY: Right now I’m working
on a plot outline for the final book in a series of
novels about the Goddess-worshiping peoples of Neolithic Europe and
their struggle to fight off Sky-worshiping, patriarchal invaders from the
steppes. These novels are based on the research of archaeologist and UCLA
Professor Marija Gimbutas who helped me with the first two novels in the
series.
I’m also working on a series of visionary poems
with the working title “Cassandra.” I think Cassandra is the perfect
spokeswoman for our era. She saw the future, but when she tried to warn people
that disaster was coming, no one believed her.
Reading poetry in translation can be like wafting through a door into an eerily beautiful palace. The tiles glow in new colors, shapes are peaked or oval when you expect square, juxtapositions startle, and the cats don’t meow but miau or nya or, as in Norwegian, mjau…
C.M. MAYO: How might you describe, in just a sentence or two, the ideal reader for this book?
ROGER GREENWALD: These
poems are accessible but deep, and they reflect an unusual sensibility, so
anyone who is open to a new experience in poetry is an ideal reader. My
introduction explores why this poetry that is easy to “get” is so hard to
discuss critically; the essay will be of special interest to people concerned
with our relation to the natural world and with ecocriticism.
CMM:What inspired you to translate this work?
RG: Tarjei Vesaas was and is a
famous novelist, but his poetry was like a secret shared among other writers
and a small number of readers. When I first read his poems, I realized that the
best of them were unlike any I had ever read. In addition to his special
sensibility, he has a distinctive voice, pace, and turn of phrase, as well as a
very fine ear for the music of language. And by the time of his death in 1970,
almost none of his poetry was available in English, never mind in versions that
did it justice. In some ways it is very difficult to translate. Twenty years
passed before I had translated a selection to my satisfaction, and then it took
me another eight years (eight drafts) to write my introduction.
CMM: How did you learn the language?
RG: This apparently simple
question poses a problem at once: Which language is “the language”?! I first
learned Norwegian on my own from a textbook. But Norwegian has two official
written norms, and the textbook was about Bokmål, which ultimately derives from
Danish and reflects Norway’s urban dialects. Tarjei Vesaas wrote in Nynorsk,
which ultimately derives from Old Norse via Norway’s rural dialects. I advanced
my knowledge of Bokmål by living in Norway at various times, by doing more
reading, and by bothering my friends with a million questions. Dealing with
Nynorsk required further study, and I cannot claim to have mastered it even as
a reader, so I need more advice and feedback when translating from it than when
translating from Bokmål.
CMM: What was the most important challenge for you in this translation?
RG: Vesaas has certain characteristically odd turns of phrase that are difficult or impossible to render in English. They stretch Norwegian but are not un-Norwegian, so they require creative equivalents that stretch English but are not un-English. And of course English cannot be stretched in exactly the same was as Norwegian can be. But the greatest challenge lay in the responsibility I felt to introduce English-speaking readers to this poetry in a way that would help them to see that it was modern even though it was not urban, and that its relation to the natural world was profound and not a throwback to the English Romantic poets.
CMM: Has his work been an influence for your work as a poet?
RG: I think Vesaas’s poetry
hasn’t exerted as great an influence on my own poetry as has the work of some
other Scandinavian poets, but in one of my poems (“The Milky Way. Big and
Beautiful”) I refer to him and quote three lines; and I’d say that in another
(“The Voice”), the deliberate pace and the way silence creeps into the stanza
breaks probably owe something to Vesaas.
CMM:You have been a consistently productive poet and writer for many years. How has the digital revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
RG: I started using computers in
the early 1970s to produce files for the literary annual I edited, WRIT Magazine.
Coach House Press, where the journal was printed, was a test bed for
cutting-edge digital typesetting and layout. I learned enough about
computerized editing and typesetting on a UNIX system so that I could take
advantage of it for my own work for about twenty years before I acquired my
first Windows machine. This was an enormous benefit when it came to revision,
especially for translations, and it enabled me to get book manuscripts several
stages closer to publication than had been possible earlier. I felt that
computers trebled my productivity, not in the sense that I wrote more or
translated more, but insofar as they saved large amounts of time and encouraged
me to produce finished manuscripts and files that I knew could be used for
printing.
That was, you might say, the first digital
revolution, the second being that of the Internet and later the World Wide Web.
Online resources have made it much easier and faster to answer certain
questions that arise in writing and translating, whether these be about language
as such, about allusions in texts, or about what a certain landscape, building,
or object looks like. Email has greatly facilitated getting advice and feedback
from friends and colleagues in distant locations, consulting with authors I’ve
translated, and getting proofs from publishers. And the web has made it
possible for me to post descriptions of my books, sample poems, and ordering
links.
Resisting distraction is really a question of
psychology, work habits, and time management. We tend to forget that it was
almost as easy to be distracted and to waste time before the Internet existed
as it is now. One could read magazines and watch TV for hours a day. Those
were, though, less fragmented activities than online distractions can be now,
and were less likely to interrupt constantly. I made an early decision to stay
off all social media, mainly because of concerns about privacy and distrust of
the motives and methods of people like Mr. Green T-shirt. That decision has
meant being uninformed about a few events now and then, and it has perhaps
reduced my ability to promote my work (how many people would really have
followed a Facebook page that posted new material only a few times a year?).
But it has prevented most of the woes we all associate with social media,
including invasion of privacy, online harassment, and the expense of countless
hours on reading and posting.
CMM: Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
RG: In my formative years, my
choice was between handwriting on paper and writing on an electric typewriter.
I always used paper then for any work that required real thought and much
revision during the writing process. Later I got to the point where I could
write letters and reports on the typewriter, and sometimes even fiction when it
was driven by a type of nervous energy that was in tune with the hum of the
typewriter. Even after decades of using computers, I still write poetry by
hand, and I tend to translate poetry by hand also. I can write a first draft of
fiction or translated fiction on a computer. Handwritten drafts make it easier
to see all the choices one has tried and then crossed out.
CMM: What’s next for you as a poet and as a translator?
RG: I have more or less
withdrawn from translation to focus on my own work (there is one more large
translation project that I may or may not get to someday). But I do what I can
for my previously published translations, like the Tarjei Vesaas book, which was
first published in 2000 and was out of print for many years. Finding a
publisher for a new edition enabled me to make revisions – the second time I
have been able to revise and/or expand a major selection (on the other occasion
the gap was from 1985 to 2002, when the University of Chicago Press issued North in the
World: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen). Don’t ask me whether
such opportunities are translators’ dreams or nightmares!
My first book of poems was published in 1993, my
second (Slow Mountain
Train) in 2015. Now I am hoping to get out my third and fourth
books in the next two years. I have manuscripts beyond those and will be
working on getting them into near-final form. So get off Facebook and watch my
website: www.rogergreenwald.org !
Starting this year, every fourth Monday I post a
Q & A with a fellow writer. This month’s Q & A is with Lynn Downey, my fellow Women Writing the West
member, apropos of the news that her book Life in a Lung Resort
will be published next year by University of Oklahoma Press.
Lynn Downey is a widely-published historian of the West, with
degrees in history and library science from San Francisco State University and
the University of California, Berkeley. She has published books and articles on
the history of jeans, the treatment of tuberculosis in California, American art
pottery, and the history of Arizona. She was the Historian for
Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco for twenty-five years. Her biography of
the company’s founder, Levi Strauss:
The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World,was published
by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2016, and won the 2017 Foreword
Reviews silver INDIE award for Biography. Her next book, Life in a
Lung Resort, is the history of an early 20th century
women’s tuberculosis sanatorium in California where her grandmother received
treatment in the 1920s. In 2012 Lynn received a Charles Donald O’Malley
Short-Term Research Fellowship from the Special Collections Division of the
David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles,
where she studied the history of tuberculosis treatment. Lynn now works as a
historical/archival consultant and exhibition writer, and is also a board
member of the Frank Lloyd Wright Marin County Civic Center Conservancy. She
lives in Sonoma County, California.
C.M. MAYO: On organizing research: Any lessons learned from your previous book? And lessons learned from this one? Also, are there basic mistakes first time writers oftentimes make in organizing their research?
LYNN DOWNEY: Organizing research
materials — whether for fiction or non-fiction — is a very personal thing.
And I think it depends on your life and educational experience. I’m 63 years
old, and I loved researching and writing history from my very first term paper
in the 5th grade. I’m also an archivist, so I like to keep paper files for the
most part, and that has worked for me on all the books I’ve written.
My last book, Levi Strauss:
The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World, posed the greatest
challenge because it was the longest and most detailed book I’ve ever written.
I used to organize my research materials by chapter– just throw all notes,
copies of articles, etc. into files by chapter. But that ended up being
cumbersome. So I started keeping files by subject or topic, and also kept a
running list of what topics would go into each chapter. I could then put my
hands on a subject easily.
But again, when it comes to research, I don’t
know of anything first time writers could do that would be called a
“mistake.” The best way to organize research is to find what works
for you. That might mean doing down a few paths that lead nowhere — like I did
— but as long as you find a method that helps you write, that’s the important
thing. Research must serve the writer, not the other way around.
C.M. MAYO: On research files: What happens to them when you are finished with the book? How do you store them? Do you give them to an archive? (Do you have any related advice for other writers with books that required significant original research?)
LYNN DOWNEY: I keep my research materials for quite awhile after a book is published, because I sometimes need them again: for interviews, for follow-up articles, etc. All of my files for the Levi Strauss biography will go back to the company eventually. I was the Levi Strauss & Co. Historian for 25 years and did all of my research while I was on the job. I wrote the book after I retired but the materials actually belong to the company and they will go back there once I have a moment to throw them in my car and take them to San Francisco. Once I no longer need the research files I used for my book A Short History of SonomaI will give them to the Sonoma Valley Historical Society. My advice is to not jettison your files too quickly after you finish a book. They can still come in handy.
C.M. MAYO: What were some of the more interesting books you read in the process of writing your book? (And would you recommend them?)
LYNN DOWNEY: My book is a
history of the Arequipa tuberculosis sanatorium for women in northern
California, where my grandmother was treated in the 1920s. It was in business
from 1911-1957. In addition to doing a number of oral history interviews with
former patients, I read a lot of books about the history of TB treatment, how a
cure was finally found, and about San Francisco history. The sanatorium’s
founder was a male doctor named Philip King Brown but his mother was Dr.
Charlotte Brown, one of San Francisco’s first female surgeons. She taught him
to value women’s health, and most of the doctors who treated the patients at
Arequipa were women. I did read some extraordinary books to prepare to
write.
C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about your working library?
LYNN DOWNEY: I have a bookcase in
my office where I keep all the books needed for my current project. Sometimes I
have to pile them on the floor too, but at least they are all in one place!
When I finish a project they get moved to one of the five other bookcases I
have in my house, and the books for the next project go into my office. I also
have filing cabinets in my office for my working files: the subject files I
mentioned earlier. Sometimes I have more than will fit in the cabinet and that
means I have banker’s boxes on the floor, too.
C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive writer for many years. How has the digital revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, Facebook, Twitter, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
LYNN DOWNEY: The best thing about
the digital revolution for a historian like me is the availability of historic
newspapers online. Sites like Newspapers.com, Genealogybank.com, and the
Library of Congress Chronicling America site have fully searchable databases.
These are the only places that have a “siren call” for me. I have
spent many hours in my pajamas in front of my computer following a research
rabbit hole on these sites!
The other digital distractions really don’t get
to me. Maybe it’s because I’m older and did not grow up with the instant
availability of communication and information that we have now. After years of
doing research and writing I am able to focus easily and not get distracted. I
really don’t know how to advise someone how to do that, though. Like research,
finding a method to stay on track is very personal. Some people I know keep a
timer by their computer, and they can’t check email or social media until they
hear the bell after an hour is up.
There’s no single fix for what society throws at
us, and what society expects us to do. Which I think is part of the problem.
We’re supposed to be constantly checking up on everyone who wants to
communicate with us. But my work and my time are important. I’ll check email
now and then while I’m working, and if there are no emergencies I go back to
what I’ve been working on.
The joy of research, of writing, of getting the
best words on the page far outweighs the need to have a constant connection in
cyberspace.
C.M. MAYO: Did you experience any blocks while writing this book, and if so, how did you break through them?
LYNN DOWNEY: Honestly, I don’t really get blocks. That was especially true with Life in a Lung Resort because it’s a personal and family story as well as a work of history. I spent decades working full-time and commuting and only had weekends to do my writing. Blocks were not an option, and they also just didn’t arise. I was so happy to be at my desk working on projects I loved.
C.M. MAYO: Back to a digital question. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
LYNN DOWNEY: Do
you mean writing longhand instead of on the computer? I did both with this book
as well as all my others. Sometimes when I couldn’t get a topic to gel while
writing on my laptop, I would switch to a pen and paper. This uses a completely
different part of the brain and it always works. Once I was really stuck trying
to get a difficult chapter started. I live 20 minutes from the ranch where
writer Jack London lived (it’s now a State Park). So I went to the ranch, sat
on a picnic table near London’s house, took out a pad of paper and a pen and
started to write. Forty-five minutes later I had my chapter opening and a good
start on the rest of it.
I also collect vintage typewriters and I have one
that I use now and then; again, to work another part of my brain to keep my
writing from going stale.
C.M. MAYO: Do you keep in active touch with your readers? If so, do you prefer hearing from them by email, sending a newsletter, a conversation via social media, some combination, or snail mail?
LYNN DOWNEY: I haven’t yet found a
good way to keep in touch with readers, but I give a lot of lectures about my
books and often keep in touch with people who have come to hear me speak. I am
working with my website designer to make it easier for people to communicate
with me, and I hope to do more when Life in a Lung Resort comes out. I
am happy to hear from readers any way they like: email, social media, whatever.
LYNN DOWNEY: Women are often seen
as the second-class-citizens of western writing, whether fiction or
non-fiction. The West is so often portrayed as a male domain but women have so
much to say about this region! When I heard about Women Writing the West I
joined up right away. We have to stake our claim here, girls.
Starting this year, every fourth Monday I run a Q & A with a fellow writer. This fourth Monday features Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, the author of Prodigal Children in the House of G-d: Stories (2018) and six books of poetry, including A Mouse Among Tottering Skyscrapers: Selected Yiddish Poems (2017). Preparing to Dance: New Yiddish Songs, a CD of nine of his Yiddish poems set to music by Michał Gorczyński, was released in 2014. Taub was honored by the Museum of Jewish Heritage as one of New York’s best emerging Jewish artists and has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and twice for a Best of the Net award. With Ellen Cassedy, he is the recipient of the 2012 Yiddish Book Center Translation Prize for Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel (2016). His short stories have appeared in such publications as Hamilton Stone Review, Jewish Fiction .net, The Jewish Literary Journal, Jewrotica, Penshaft: New Yiddish Writing, and Second Hand Stories Podcast.
C.M. MAYO: You are co-translator (with Ellen Cassedy) from the Yiddish of Blume Lempel’s extraordinary short stories, Oedipus in Brooklyn. Would you say that Lempel’s work has been an influence on your own fiction? Can you talk a bit about some of your influences, and your favorite writers?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: Blume Lempel is certainly a source of personal inspiration, and working with Ellen Cassedy on that project was and continues to be a great joy. Despite suffering enormous familial loss in the Holocaust and years of creative block, Lempel built a career as a Yiddish writer with single-minded focus and commitment. She created an authorial voice that was uniquely her own and a prose rich in poetry, experimentation in time and voice, and empathy. She looked at characters at the margins of society and at themes still considered taboo, including abortion, prostitution, and incest. I was drawn to Lempel’s work for all of these reasons and in researching her autobiography, came to be inspired also by the example of her courage in life and art. Our work overlaps somewhat in our interest in life at the margins and blurring the line between poetry and prose, although I think much of Lempel’s work is more firmly anchored than mine in the realm of the experimental and avant-garde. I do see Lempel as a kindred literary spirit.
I have been reading voraciously and widely since childhood. It’s difficult to pinpoint specific literary influences. I prefer to think of texts whose effects remain with me. Even if I don’t recall particular plots, the authors’ themes and concerns, and overall sensibilities remain. I am interested in writers who take risks, who go against the grain, who can create a marriage of emotional impact and beauty of language, who write with psychological acuity and care.
A partial list of favorite English-language fictional texts, in alphabetical order of author’s last name, include:
Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents Michelle Cliff, Abeng Marian Engel, Bear Janet Hobhouse, The Furies F.M. Mayor, The Rector’s Daughter Elizabeth McCracken, The Giant’s House: a Romance Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place Joyce Carol Oates, Where is Here? James Purdy, 69: Dream Palace and Other Stories Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, Home, and Lila Sinclair Ross, As For Me and My House Elizabeth Taylor, Angel and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
If we include non-fiction, poetry, and Yiddish literature and world literature in translation, there would be many more titles to add.
C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive writer and poet for many years. How has the digital revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, Facebook, Twitter, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: The digital revolution has helped bring about a dynamic international literary culture. Poems and stories can now be read by anyone with computer access. Blogs such as yours also support the work of writers and connect writers and readers. Before appearing in book form, much of my work has appeared in online publications. In the digital age, it is more affordable to publish literary ‘zines, although maintaining the availability of defunct journals remains an issue of concern for literary publishers, writers, and readers. Facebook is useful for sending out announcements of new work and seeing what colleagues and friends have been doing. I also enjoy the travel, food, and family photos that people post! I started on Facebook fairly recently. I thought it would take more of my time that it actually has. I am not on Twitter or other social media.
There’s only a limited amount of time in the day. I like to set aside time for daily translation, reading, and/or writing or writing-related business, as well. The proliferation of media in the digital age offers tempting distractions from writing. There are now so many offerings in television and film, many of them quite literary and demanding extensive viewing time.
Still, I always return to the written word. And I prefer to read in hard copy. Nothing has replaced words on a paper—the joy that comes from concentration on those words, turning the page, the touch of paper, the heft of a book in one’s hand or one’s lap. The poems “Eavesdropping” and “Luddite’s Exhortation” in my fourth collection Prayers of a Heretic explore the pleasures—cerebral, sensual, and otherwise—of books and reading from books. The key to productivity is tuning out all of the distractions to draw on the creativity that emerges from focus and quiet, or perhaps more aptly put, quietude. One can be sitting in a noisy cafe and still be in a place of internal quiet.
But, of course, there are many ways to live and work as a writer. Find what works for you and honor that process.
C.M. MAYO: Are you in a writing group? If so, can you talk about the members, the process, and the value for you?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: When I lived in New York, I was in the Yugntruf Yiddish writers’ circle for many years. Attendees brought in a poem or a story and shared it with the group. It was a great way for me to get feedback on my Yiddish writing and to encounter new Yiddish creativity. That group continues to meet. I have attended two sessions of a poetry group here in Washington, D.C. I’m not sure if that qualifies as being “in a writing group.” Here too, folks distribute the poems, read it aloud, and then provide comments. The feedback was quite rigorous and helpful, and I enjoyed the gatherings. However, I’ve only attended two sessions since my recent focus has been on writing prose and on translating from the Yiddish.
C.M. MAYO: Did you experience any blocks while writing these stories, and if so, how did you break through them?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: Fortunately, I did not experience writer’s block while writing these stories. As I note in the book, I wrote Prodigal Children in the House of G-d while on an artist’s residency at The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow (Eureka Springs, Arkansas). Having three weeks to concentrate solely on writing enabled my turn from poetry to fiction. TWCDH was a magical experience — a great studio, friendly staff and writers in residence, and the ideal setting that combined natural beauty and a charming, historical small town. During the afternoons, I took walks and worked through ideas for the writing I was doing in the studio. Sometimes, I took walks with other writers in residence.
C.M. MAYO: Back to a digital question At what point, if any, were you working on paper for these stories? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: My writing life as an adult has largely been conducted on the computer. Of course, the digital revolution has made it easier to submit work to literary magazines. Instead of having to print out hard copies, write and include a self-addressed stamped envelope, and go to the mailbox or post office, one can now submit work electronically. Writing on the computer also allows for extensive revision. In my childhood and youth, I wrote by hand. In college, I sometimes submitted papers typed on a typewriter. So I remember well the challenges in the revision process back then.
C.M. MAYO: Do you keep in active touch with your readers? If so, do you prefer hearing from them by email, sending a newsletter, a conversation via social media, some combination, or snail mail?
YERMIYAHU AHRON TAUB: I welcome feedback from readers. I prefer e-mail over other forms of communication. I sometimes go for long periods of time without checking Facebook. I rarely use snail mail. I try to answer all letters. Giving readings, particularly ones that include a Q & A, is another great way to connect with readers.
