Interview with Maureen Lougen
Hunter Campbell: Congratulations on being published in rkvry!
Maureen Lougen: Thanks. It’s great (and surprising) to be among such outstanding company in such a wonderful journal.
HC: We’ve briefly discussed writing in the abstract before, but not in the specific, so let me get right to it: your story God’s Forgottens is a compact tale of love and redemption. Where did you get the idea for it?
ML: Honestly, I have no idea, other than it jumped off of the Rolodex of story ideas in my brain one day and refused to be ignored. Most of my stories and novels are about
something terrible happening to a person and they try and hide from it, and someone else from that person’s life finds them wherever they are, whether they’re hiding internally or externally, and brings them back into life. So, this was just one more cog in that wheel. Or – one more entry in that Rolodex.
HC: It’s a spare telling, very minimalistic in details and dialogue. Was that a conscious choice or just the way it came out?
ML: I’m not sure that anything I write is a conscious choice. I watched the story take place through the bartender’s eyes and listened to him describe it, and he’s apparently not one to waste words. One thing I’ve learned in all my long years of writing - the reader is much smarter than I am and can fill in all those bits of detail much better than I ever could.
HC: Did you notice that nobody in the story actually has a name?
ML: Caught that, did you? Yeah, the narrator, the bartender doesn’t know anybody’s name. He’s a good guy and a better bartender and he knows his clientele. He knows they don’t need or even want anybody knowing their names.
HC: Do you know their names?
ML: Oh, yeah. I mean, it took me writing a couple more chapters, but I found out what their names are. Most of them anyway.
HC: Where did you get the title for the story?
ML: I stole it from the narrator’s dialogue. When I heard him describing the patrons as “God’s Forgottens” I knew that had to be the title.
HC: You stole it from the dialogue? Isn’t that your dialogue? You wrote it, didn’t you?
ML: Honestly? No. Well, yes. But – I don’t create dialogue as much as I listen to the characters talking and then just write down what I hear. I didn’t hunt around in my brain for a name for the narrator to apply to his patrons; I just listened to him describing the scene and that’s the name he came up with. Most of the stories I write, it’s just a matter of me watching the scene unfold and listening to the characters talk and just writing it down.
HC: He has an interesting “voice”, the bartender. Do you know someone who talks that way, or did you make that up?
ML: I think it’s half Mater from the Cars movie (we watch that a lot at our house…) and half I don’t even know what. It’s just how I heard him talking in my head. If I can hear a character’s voice clearly, my job is half over. I find it hard if not impossible to write a character whose voice I can’t hear.
HC: For some reason, the line about Godzilla coming into the bar off the lightning storm really caught me, it’s a great detail.
ML: Thanks. I live half a block from the shores of Lake Ontario, and one night last year there was a dry lightning storm and I took my son down to the end of our street to watch it over the lake. Some clouds were bluish, some were reddish, and as the lightning jumped from one cloud to another, the phrase “Heaven & Hell playing keep away” came to me, and I knew I had to use it in a story. So into the Rolodex it went until I could put it into this story.
HC: You started writing when you were still in single digits. Do you remember the first story you ever wrote?
ML: I don’t remember the story itself, but I distinctly remember the thrill I got when I wrote it down and then realized that I could go back and read it over and over again. I remember thinking that that was the best thing ever. I was hooked.
HC: Your son Joshua recently turned 10. Did becoming a Mom change your writing?
ML: I don’t think there’s a single thing that becoming a Mom didn’t change. Joshua is the single biggest influence in my life. He’s outgoing and brilliant and charming and totally oblivious to the effect he has on people. How people are just drawn to him. A friend of mine said that having Joshua is the best thing that happened to me because something as simple as going to the store isn’t just going to the store, it’s having to stop to talk to fifty people. Because – no surprise since I’m a writer – left to my own devices, I am not a people person. I’m an I’ll-sit-in-the-corner-and-write-while-you-go-somewhere-else-and-not-bother-me person. I’ve always been that way, even at family functions. But with Joshua, my life has opened up to countless new situations and meeting people by the dozens. I don’t know if that’s changed my writing per se, but it has definitely changed my life.
HC: What’s the hardest thing about writing?
ML: Having to stop writing to do something else. Anything else. If I have a minute to think, I’m thinking about writing. It’s like putting a videotape in, watching a movie play, “watching” my stories play out, tweaking them, polishing them, writing them even if I’m not at that moment writing them down. These days though, I’m more likely than not to have my attention called away every other minute by my son, “Mom! Guess what?!” and “Mom – look! Mom! Watch!” and “Mom! C’mere!” I love and adore my son. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me. It’s just when I’m in my head writing and I have to switch gears to focus on something else, it’s like stopping a tape and having to rewind to get back where I was.
HC: What was the hardest thing about writing this story?
ML: When I found out I was going to be published, it was the middle of the night, and I had no one to tell! Joshua and I were in Nashville for a convention, and it was after midnight when we got back to the room and Joshua went to sleep and I fired up my laptop to check my email. There was the email from Mary saying she wanted to publish the story – and no one I wanted to call was awake to share the news with. I had to wait until the next day. That was incredibly hard on my poor, fragile ego.
HC: Is your family supportive of your writing?
ML: Very. Especially my sister Mare. Every Christmas and birthday and vacation that involves souvenirs, she makes sure to keep me well-supplied with pens and paper. She listens to me when I rattle on about my characters like they’re real people I actually know, and she either knows or knows how to find out the answer to most of the questions I ever pose to her when I’m stuck in a spot in a story. Actually, now that I think about it, she probably would’ve been okay being rudely awakened at 2am to hear my good news.
HC: What are you working on these days?
ML: Lots of things, unfortunately. It’s hard for me to single out one thing to work on exclusively until it’s done. I usually have a dozen stories going all at once. I don’t know if that’s fear of failure or fear of success. Or adult attention deficit disorder. But – amongst the many things I’m working on, I’m trying to finish the next 2 chapters of God’s Forgottens and get them ready for public consumption. I also have some stories for sale on Amazon and I’m working on their next chapters as well.
HC: What stories do you have on Amazon?
ML: There are three so far. The Badge, which is set in 1852 Texas. A Scatter of Bones, which is set at the end of the Civil War. And The Best, which somehow managed to actually have a modern day setting, go figure.
HC: Do they all have the theme of recovery?
ML: They do. Most of my stories do. Well, The Badge not so much. A Scatter of Bones is about a young man returning home from a Confederate prisoner of war camp and trying to figure out where he fits into his family again. The Best is about a motherless little boy who’s supposed to write a paper for school about what moms do best. The Badge is about a teenage boy who has to bring in the man who shot and wounded his father. There’s recovery in a broad sense in the first two stories, but not so much in the third. You know, until I write the sequel.
HC: Are most of your stories part of a larger series?
ML: Apparently. I never plan it that way, but after a story is done, or even while I’m in the middle of it, something else in the characters’ lives will jump up into my awareness and I either start working on it right then, or it goes into the Rolodex to be worked on later. It just doesn’t stop.
HC: What does "recovery" mean to you?
ML: In simplest terms - it’s the healing after the horror.
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Interview with Benjamin Buchholz
Mary Akers: Hi, Ben. Thanks for agreeing to talk with me today. I just loved your story "Runner." We're honored to have it as part of this issue. I've been reading through some of your online work (links follow the interview, below) and I would love to talk with you about form for just a bit. You have some very unusual forms for your short stories. How do you decide on the best shape for a short story and do you find inspiration for form in the work of any particular authors?
Benjamin Buchholz: Well, Kerouac hit me like a bombshell about five years ago. And, by bombshell, I mean that with a little bit of a negative connotation insofar as it set me back in the writing of longer work (I tried, unsuccessfully, to place two full-length stream-of-conciousness novels) and had to relearn much of the art of writing-under-control in order to produce One Hundred and One Nights. Although, come to think of it, OHON also plays with form, albeit in a longer and slower way, taking the framing device from 1001 Nights and using it as a starting point until it eventually drops away as the narrator evolves (or devolves) inside the story. Now I find that short fiction often gives me an outlet to just riff, to let that wildness and associative fun explode and go where it may. One must adhere to Poe's dictum, though, that every word -- and also every structure -- 'tells' in a short story. I think that is the older denotation of 'tell' too, not the 'show' vs. 'tell' debate of modern writers' clinics but the telling of churchbell, resonance. Every word and every structure is precious and should therefore be applied to bring about a state of feeling or understanding in a reader. I hope the structures that some of my stories take contribute to that feeling and understanding. I'm not sure I conciously decide on form, certainly not at the outset of writing. Maybe afterwards, if something strikes me as worthwhile, as contributing to the overall expression, then I'll add or sharpen a form.
MA: What is it about the use of numbering in your fiction that speaks to you? I find it fascinating. Is it the ordering? Is it the juxtaposition of two ways of making meaning out of a crazy world: letters and numbers? Is it driven by your character's mind? Tell me, please, what's up with Ben Buchholz and numbers? :)
BB: Numbers make the mind stop and shift into a different mode. They break the stream of scansion and signify something, in different stories and in different places different somethings. A lot of my characters struggle with various amounts of war-induced suffering and often are, like Bill Murray's "What about Bob?," trying to piece just little simple snippets of their lives back together again, one thing at a time, one thing after the next, baby steps to the door. Numbers show that chronology and that simple in-the-now fixation that is necessary for a lot of people to move through shattered lives. Numbers add chronicity to a tale and they do it in a way that is incremental rather than gradual, jerky, freeze-frame. They help me, sometimes, delimit and parse a story into only its essentials.
MA: I love your use of stream-of-consciousness and inventive word play. I was especially moved by "Mixtape for Annie Purpose" which includes the passage: "...no, hands out, show me, and the circus trick, gone, gone, headshots, all of them, in series like a photobooth confessional, palms up and empty, he'd seen her eyes, flashpoint, the facsimile of them, blank, folded in a motion into the inner crease, into the sleeve, nowhere and free and they were his, all his, on his heel, saluting, out and down the dustmote hall, clatter-waxed footfall, not knowing who but wanting, yes" That clatter-waxed footfall just absolutely sends me. Where do these onomatopoetic word-mixes come from? Do you wake up at night and have to write things down that bubble up into your subconscious?
BB: The writing doesn't happen unless I make myself write. So, nothing bubbles of its own in the middle of the night. But, once it starts very often it doesn't stop until its done (or I'm exhausted) like a possession. If I'm writing in the SOC mode then there is a big alliterative suggestion that helps move the sentences from word to word and sometimes the 'graphs from sentence to sentence. I also find a lot of tension in word choices, where one word can be made to say two things and leave two impressions in a reader's mind, thereby confusing, troubling, wrapping the reader into a state they might not otherwise experience. That one word then becoming, later, a source for follow-up impressions of the same dual nature. "Clatter-waxed" is on the precise and onomatopoetic side of this equation, whereas when you look at something earlier in that same sentence, like "headshots . . . confessional" I hope the reader has to back-up, break scansion, reread, and decide whether to prefer the image of the photobooth, or of the flashpoint, trigger-like, guilt-ridden undertone of an action this narrator might have done, an action in the background of his deliberations and regrets. Mixtape, especially, rewards additional close reading of this sort. By the way, these photos are somewhat autobiographical (isn't everything?) because the first time I saw my wife it was when I pulled a strip of photobooth headshots from a garbage can in the building where she and I both served as ROTC cadets. She was new. I found the photos, took them, kept them in the drawer of my desk. Love at first sight.
MA: I love that. What a wonderful story.
Hey, congratulations on the publication of One Hundred and One Nights! The cover is fantastic. I can't wait to peek inside. Can you tell us a little bit about what the process of publication was like for you?
BB: Thanks! Outside of the massive Toyota! high kicking Irish-jigging moments involved in pitching and having the work accepted by Little, Brown, the process itself involved a lot of very careful and prudent and wise reading, both close and thematic, first by my agent, Jon Sternfeld, then my editor Vanessa Kehren, and then the copyeditors at Little, Brown. I can't say how much this improved the novel, changed it, massaged it, reined it in. And I have to say that being open to revision on micro and macro levels is important for any author. Striking a balance between preserving an artistic vision and making a manuscript really work on multiple levels (as I hope One Hundred and One Nights actually does) is tough but it is best, in my opinion, especially for a new author, to put aside ideas of 'artistic vision' and trust the professionals teaming with you on the project. I was in Oman for most of this time, so the work occured long-distance, through the miracle of our modern communication networks. Due to the time-zone change and the fact that the Omani weekend is Thursday-Friday, the overlap in working hours was strange to deal with! Overall, a really great experience and one I hope to duplicate with my next novel.
MA: Have you been doing readings for the book? What reaction do you get from your audiences? Do veterans come up to you to talk and tell you their stories?
BB: No readings so far, although I've done a number of interviews. I think I'll have some readings in the future, including one at Princeton's Labyrinth Bookstore in April. For my first non-fiction book "Private Soldiers" I was priveleged to address a number of veterans groups, including a reunion of the WWII veterans from a unit in my brigade. It was fabulous to talk with them about the enduring similarities of war and the startling contrasts between how they fought and how we fought (no email for them, no video chat, no phone calls home, no mid-tour leave to visit families in America!) Also, at one such reading for "Private Soldiers" the father of one of my soldiers from the Iraq mission approached me to say that he appreciated the book but that, as a straight history, it lacked insight into the emotional aspect of war. That comment stuck in my mind and helped me when I started writing One Hundred and One Nights.
MA: And finally, what does "recovery" mean to you?
BB: I think there must be some sort of imaginative longing embedded in the word 'recovery' -- a sort of grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side falsehood. I really believe that there isn't any point in living in the past, except insofar as it improves our present, teaching us, allowing us to learn and be better people. Likewise for the future. So, to recover something implies that there was, at one time, a better state than the 'now' to which we are all, all the time and without exception, immediately subject to. Maybe a person really enjoyed a better time, a better life. Maybe they only imagine it was better. Either way, it does not improve the present. A person -- soldier, addict, bereaved, ill, wounded -- might be changed by the specific instances of war, loss, longing, need or physical incapacity that occur in their lives, but still that person cannot live in the past. It's now or never, always. Whatever we were we will never be again. We change. Eventually our time runs out. As Coca-Cola's ubiquitous branding proclaims, there is only one way to go, recovering or not, and that is, quite simply: "Enjoy!"
MA: Brilliant. I never once thought of the notion of recovery in that light. You just opened up my mind and let a little light in. Thank you.
Purchase: One Hundred and One Nights
Here's a great review at The Washington Post.
And some links to stories with the same character in them:
"Mixtape for Annie Purpose" at Storyglossia
"New Joe" at Storyglossia
"Unpacking Sonny" in Alice Blue Review
"Oedipus Simplex" in Mad Hatters Review (R.I.P. to the extraordinary Carol Novack, editor and champion of everything experimental and edgy.)
Interview with Brandon Jennings
Dustin Hoffman: Hey, Brandon, it’s a pleasure to interview someone I’ve spent so many nights drinking beers and discussing writing with. Now I have you where I want you, and you can’t just laugh off my questions with a joke about the literary continuum between Kafka and Looney Tunes. This time it’s serious. I’ve been reading your work in workshops and outside of class for years. You started writing mainly short fiction, but essays like “Paul Maidman ~ Banana Man” get a lot of your focus now. Could you talk a bit about how your process for approaching an essay differs from that of a story? What draws you to the essay form?
Brandon Davis Jennings: First it’s an honor to have this opportunity, to be interviewed by a writer I admire and have this interview published at a magazine that I respect. I’ll avoid all continuum references and get right to your questions. I’d be a liar if I claimed that most of the stories I’ve written weren’t rooted in my own experiences—good and bad. And I do consider myself a storywriter first. But the essay form is something I’ve been drawn to because the constraints it places on the narrative provides me with focus—sort of the way a poet might write a Sonnet in order to free himself from thinking about form. A lot of these essays, including this one about Paul, have things that I can’t shove out of my head; memories can become so distracting that in order to get past them, I have to write them and write them as truth. Simply put, I write these essays so that I can make room in my head for the stories I can’t tell yet. But I also feel the need to present these essay with all the care and attention that I would give a work of fiction.—Paul deserves nothing less than my best effort, and I wouldn’t want to present anything less than my best to an audience. And when it comes down to it, these essays are just the way I narrate my own life.
DH: Throughout this essay, we find inserts of dialogue that take place outside the reflective scenes. Arguments emerge through these excerpts that often strike at the very telling of the essay. What’s your drive to include these? How do you see them as contributing to the overall effect?
BJ: The internal discussions you’ve mentioned are something that happened by accident at first, and they’ve continued to show up in my non-fiction. Sometimes they are my conscience; sometimes they are complete artifice in order to get a laugh. Sometimes I’m not sure what they are until long after they’ve been written. As far as contributing to the overall effect, all I can say is that they exist within the essays because these essays are written by an older (and potentially wiser) me who feels comfortable making fun of himself and criticizing himself for being foolish or naïve or a jerk—for being human. There is always a voice in my head commenting on every thing I do; it’s like my conscience is work-shopping every choice I make (something that’s been going on for as long as I can remember); some of his comments are valuable, and sometimes he’s just talking to hear the sound of his voice. Maybe that’s a condition I should seek treatment for. But I’ve lived with it this long, so I won’t.
DH: Time becomes unhinged in this essay. We start with the banana show and then take big leaps to moments before and after. Rather than linear chronology, the essay scatters time into modular sections. How do you approach time when writing, and in this essay, how did you find the sequence that works best, as in, for example, framing this piece with the banana show?
BJ: Because I’ve been a literature student for a while now, it’s easy to write something and then look at it in retrospect and make up an answer to a question like this. I could say that time is unhinged in the essay because I want it to reflect the way that the memories came to me. But I think a more reasonable explanation is that I wrote this with the frame of the banana show because it was about Paul, and he was The Banana Man to me before he was anything else, before I knew what the name meant. And although I could have just come right out and said why and how he earned that nickname, I wasn’t ready to say how it happened until the final paragraph. Certainly suspense played a role in my decision to reveal all the details at the end, but it wasn’t the most important factor. I didn’t intend for this to have a big twist at the end; that kind of narrative is rarely something I find worth writing or reading. But I needed the space in between when I introduced Paul in the essay and when I explain how he earned his nickname to prepare myself to deliver it honestly to the reader. It was like a written representation of the space I often need between myself and an event in order to write about it artfully. Although I do think it’s possible to analyze these kinds of decisions in retrospect, I didn’t think about any of this until I’d had the essay drafted. I’m a sweeper, as Vonnegut put it. So the essay often has to be on the page before I know how it needs to be written.
DH: There are some really funny moments in this essay, and then some moments that make me laugh and then make me feel bad for laughing. How do you approach humor?
BJ: There is little about life that isn’t funny to me; it borders on sick. This year my fiancé asked me to play in an annual softball game, and I don’t play sports anymore (partly) because I don’t want to injure myself in pointless competitions. I played because I knew it would make her happy, and then I pulled my hamstring. I was angry in the moment, but things like that have happened to me my entire life, and if I didn’t laugh at them, I’d be even less fun to be around. So I don’t think I approach humor; humor approaches me. And if you feel bad for laughing at something I’ve written, then that has the potential to teach you something about yourself and about me. But I’m also a firm believer that if you understand exactly why something is funny, then it isn’t as funny as it could be. I won’t risk trying to explain that. I think that Craig Paulenich’s Goat Man poems achieve something along the lines of this; he blends horrifying and hilarious. A goat man is funny in a poem; a goat man is not funny when he’s reading a poem to you.
DH: In the last sequence of the essay, the narrator says, “Eulogies are terrible—almost without fail.” Yet, this essay leans in that direction at times. Perhaps even this statement denying eulogy draws my sentiments in that direction. How is and isn’t this a eulogy? How do you approach writing about the dead, honoring them and remembering them through what we might initially imagine as unflattering vehicles?
BJ: I like how you call me “the narrator”. That makes me feel like I’ve achieved a level of dream state in the essay, and that hopefully when people read this they forget that they are being told facts and just enjoy the ride of the narrative. But this was one of the most difficult essays for me to write because it feels like I’m taking advantage of a tragedy. Maybe that’s foolish, but it’s how I feel; so maybe I’m a fool. But when I heard Paul died, I read a few articles that talked about him, things that claimed he was all these things and that had he lived, he could have been all these other things. I didn’t give a damn about what he could have been because he was a great guy to me when we were stationed together, and even though he’s gone now, that is all that matters. If I died in ten minutes I wouldn’t want people to make me out to be some potentially amazing person. I want people to remember the great moments we had together and the shitty ones too. This is a eulogy for Paul, but it’s also a thank you, for giving me the inspiration to talk about things that I have been afraid to talk about for a long time. Writing this essay opened up a vault I’d locked down for a couple decades.
DH: What authors inspire you when writing about the delicately harsh themes of military life?
BJ: I can answer with Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Tim O’Brien, Bruce Weigl—I could go on for pages probably. But I don’t read them or feel connected to these writers because I believe military life is any harsher than many of the kinds of life that people live. I think military life is romanticized a lot, and that’s something the above-mentioned writers work against; they aren’t recruiters—at least not on purpose. And I believe that having some kind of emotional pain that you can’t shake off is one of the draws of the military. People want their lives to matter and sometimes they think the best way to go about living a worthwhile life is by seeing how it feels to watch your friends explode. I’d be surprised if the number of people who signed up for EOD didn’t spike after The Hurt Locker came out, and I’d be a liar if I said there weren’t days that I wish I’d have done more while I was enlisted. Usually that only happens when writing is a challenge. I’m glad that I have all my parts and that I never saw anyone die.
DH: I’ve been enjoying reading archives on r.kv.r.y., and your essay fits the theme. What does “recovery” mean to you?
BJ: This is probably going to sound corny, but for me recovery is getting out of bed each day and being me. Some days it’s easy to recognize the things I should be grateful for, and other days it’s not. If I woke up one day and felt recovered, I don’t know what I would do with myself. There are always things pushing against me; recovery might be pushing back. And the only way I know how to push back is with words. That’s something that writing this essay about Paul helped me to understand more clearly.
Dustin M. Hoffman spent ten years as a house painter and drywaller before getting his MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University. He is currently working on his PhD in creative writing at Western Michigan University. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Blue Mesa Review, Puerto del Sol, Artifice, Cream City Review, Copper Nickel, Witness, Palooka, Southeast Review, and Indiana Review.
Interview with Millicent Accardi
Susan Rogers: You and I have both written several poems together with a group of poets organized by Kathabela Wilson called POETS ON SITE. One focus of this group is writing poetry inspired by the artwork in local galleries and museums and then performing these poems in the location of the artwork. These ekphrastic poems are always an interesting collaboration with the poet and the artist and are part of a long tradition of poets engaging artwork. Sometimes ekphrastic poems are narratives about the artists who created the artwork. Sometimes ekphrastic poems are interpretations of the story that seems to be held within the artwork. I really love your poem “Still Life with Bird” that you wrote for Susan Dobay’s painting “Still Life With Bird.” This poem will be published soon in the POETS ON SITE collection, “On Awakening.” In this poem you manage to engage both visual art and music, spinning a riff on Charlie Parker. The poem is written in a very fluid, jazzy style that resonates both with the painting and with Parker. What was the process you used to engage Susan Dobay’s painting and write that poem?
Millicent Accardi: I looked at the painting and tried to see what it was telling me and, from the table and the feeling of falling from the perspective as well as the title. It reminded me of the music and the life of Charlie Parker. So I went with that, like I “go with” a jazz piece. From that premise, I tried to build an adlib solo impromptu response to both the painting and the music and how they tied into each other.
SR: You have created a wonderful forum for poets to get together and workshop their poetry: The Westside Women Writers. This group both encourages the creation of new poetry and facilitates the process of revision, in that it provides constructive feedback to the poets on their poems. In addition to bringing your poems to this group, what else do you do to craft your poems? Do you have any personal guidelines you follow in revising your work and how do you decide whether a poem you have written is “finished” and ready for publication?
MA: I write in purple notebooks; I write on the computer; I write in my mind, in the shower, while driving. It depends. Poems beget more poems and I find when I am “on a roll,” the poems come easily and frequently. When I am not, they are non-existent and I do not press myself to produce work. There are times when I set the stage for poetry to “be possible,” like when I participate in poetry prompt exercises. One that is sponsored by Molly Fisk has been of particular use to me. She posts one prompt per day and a group of writers write to that prompt every day for a month. Early in 2011, I did 3 or 4 solid months of these prompts. Then, I felt I needed a break. And my day job called out to me to get to work to earn money for the mortgage and taxes. Writing is like that for me, either feast or famine!
As far as completion, sometimes I feel as if a poem is never finished, but, for me, it is usually one of two things: either I have nothing left to add or take away to make it better and I give up and surrender that it is complete, OR what I have written matches what I have in my mind. When it matches, then my job, for whatever it is worth, is finished. Done. Otherwise, every poem I have ever written is open to change, open and available for revision. Even after a poem has been in print.
Here’s a quote that comes to mind, "Some poems are very hard to write, must be carved into granite with a feather. Others burst out of the head armored and ready to command a chariot drawn by swans." --Dean Young
SR: Which three poets would you say have had the most influence on your poetry and why?
MA: I think I will go with contemporary poets first: citing Lynda Hull, Ralph Angel, Pablo Neruda, WS Merwin, William Stafford, CK Williams, ai, Michael S Harper, CD Wright, Ruth Stone, and a wonderful Portuguese poet, Nuno Júdice. From other times: Yeats, TS Eliot, and Christina Rossetti. In particular I appreciate and am amazed by poets who transport me to new worlds, new places either inside their heads or in a literary landscape.
SR: Imagine you are sitting in a coffee shop in a city where you do not know anyone. You are quietly reading a book of poetry and you overhear a conversation at the next table between two people. They are talking about poetry and you hear them mention your name and one of your books of poems. It could be “Injuring Eternity,” “Woman on a Shaky Bridge,” or your soon to be published book, “Only More So.” Or it could be the unwritten book you will publish after that one. They say something very complimentary about this book of poems. What would you most like to hear them say about your poetry? What would you consider to be the highest praise for a poet?
MA: My answer is very simple; that they are reading the work. This is all a writer can ask, except perhaps that the work affects them in some way, either by actions in their life or causing them to sit and stare into space for a moment to think, to ponder, to see the world or their lives in a new way.
I am continually astonished when I “meet” someone in cyberspace who has read my work. The other day, Carlo Matos, a poet in Chicago, posted a line from one of my poems “Spitting Nails” as his Facebook Status. Now, THAT made my day!
SA: On September 24th 2011 you participated along with your Westside Women Writers group in a 100 Thousand Poets for Change event. This event was a global initiative to use poetry as a vehicle to promote peace as well as positive social, environmental and political change. The Westside Women Writers wrote poems about peace and recited them on that day. Then afterwards you posted the poems the group had written online as part of this global event. The poem that you included in this event, “Renovation” is a beautifully written and very poignant contribution describing a veteran’s painful journey to reconstruct his life. I felt it was a very apt choice for this purpose as it eloquently speaks to the lingering pain and the wounds that never heal inflicted by war and thus speaks to the importance of maintaining peace in the world. Is this role of poetry as a force for change in the world important to you?
MA: “Renovation” was originally written as a piece about a man who had lived through a way (I was thinking of the Vietnam War) and who had returned home to mundane chores and a daily life that, while it felt familiar and safe, was also seen through new eyes, that everything was or had been transformed because it was now seen through a new veil, a veil of war and having served overseas and having seen horrific things and that he was not or no longer capable of existing as the same person he was before; incapable of putting in tile or a floor or even hugging his wife. There was this wall of separation. He’s been to a place of pain that he could not talk about or express and it clouded every aspect of his daily life. And he could do nothing and felt helpless to change it.
As a teacher a community college I had many students in my night classes who had returned from the Middle East, who had served in the Army or the Marines and were back home, many of them with young families and new marriages and they were making their way as grocery checkers or working in gun factories or making deliveries. They were plodding along, trying to do the right thing, but in their minds they were back in the sand, nervous, alone, in a place of killing that no amount of normal life back home could erase. I saw many of them end up in jail for odd reasons, drunk driving, abuse, petty thieving. They did not know or understand how to “be” normal as they were.
SR: Just as there are many different forms and types of poetry there are also many different reasons for both writing and reading poetry. Poems can be inspiring, informative, transformational and even therapeutic. Reading poetry can help us recover a part of ourselves that we have lost and writing poetry can help us process and recover what we once knew but has been buried deep within. In what way has poetry been an action of “recovery” for you? In what way do you hope it will serve as a sense of "recovery" for your readers?
MA: Recovery, to me is recovering one’s life. Plain and simple. It is getting back or unearthing what a soul should be, before whatever happened that took away livelihood and free will. Recovery may be recovering from drugs or alcohol or grief. It could be recovering from a sickness? It could be a healing from a place of artificiality to a place of real. Recovery is a process of peeling back the layers to get to “self.” To return to or to find for the first time the person you were or were or are meant to be. To be not in recovery is to deny life, to cover life up and bear false witness to your own being.
SUSAN ROGERS considers poetry a vehicle for light and a tool for the exchange of positive energy. She is a practitioner of Sukyo Mahikari— a spiritual practice that promotes positive thoughts, words and action. She is also a photographer and a licensed attorney. Her work can be found in the book Chopin and Cherries, numerous journals, anthologies and chapbooks including the forthcoming San Diego Annual: The Best Poems of San Diego 2011-2012. In 2011, her comments about poetry and poetry workshops were published in an essay on the national site, Women's Voices for Change. Her poetry can be heard online or in person as part of two audio tours for the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, California. She has also been interviewed by Lois P. Jones for KPFK’s Poets Café. This interview is archived at http://www.timothy-green.org/blog/susanrogers/.·
Sukyo Mahikari North America - www.sukyomahikari.org
Interview with Patrick Cook
Joan Hanna: Patrick, we were thrilled to have your essay The End of the War as part of our military and war themed issue. One of the things that struck me while reading this piece was the correlation between your time in Vietnam and the death of your mother. Can you share with our readers how these two incidents came together in this story?
Patrick Cook: Thanks for this opportunity, Joan. I don’t get published so often, so this is a big thrill. Of course the surface connection between my time as a hospital corpsman on the USS Sanctuary and my mother’s death is that these experiences were both nursing. The more important connection, though, is that they were both times of profound emotional involvement. I remember standing on the deck of the Sanctuary, looking at one of the glorious tropical sunsets. The way the light shone through the clouds, glowing dark red, reminded me of the deep exit wounds caused by an AK 47 round through a patient’s thigh. I had to turn away from the sunset. Too many images like that were burned into my brain.
Incidents in my mom’s care, even things that weren’t that similar, inevitably reminded me of my time in Vietnam. Long watches in the night, seeing her in pain even through the morphine—the connections kept bubbling up. I felt the emotions again, remembered the scenes again.
JH: I love the parallels and contrasts in your story. There is a tactile sense of responsibility between the two memories. Can you elaborate a little on how you think that incident in Vietnam may have affected your response to your mother's illness?
PC: I’m glad you picked up on the sense of responsibility that runs through the essay. Nursing is very important in the healing of wounded patients. For the first time in my life, things I did were truly vital, actions that could mean life or death. I wasn’t that young—I turned 24 that year—but it was the first time I had to act like an adult. In the same way, nursing my mother was a maturing event. Her death meant not only that she depended on me, but also that I could no longer depend on her. Again, it was time for another step into maturity, into responsibility.
JH: There are often conflicting emotions with siblings when a parent is ill and you illustrate this well in your story. You also have the added layer of your response to this incident shadowed by your experiences in Vietnam. Do you think your siblings understood how your service in Vietnam affected your reaction to your mother's illness even though it was so many years later?
PC: We were concentrating on helping Mom get through this. I don’t think my extra private pain came into the picture. Actually, I hope it didn’t. I was impressed by my sisters-in-law, who demonstrated their kindness and love so clearly, by my brothers and my sister, who cooperated so well. I think we were all trying to be extra careful, because we knew this was one of those times when misunderstandings arise, and cause pain for years. One more thing to recover from, and we didn’t need that.
JH: Sometimes we feel that we are able to handle trauma with a certain sense of detachment because of experiences we have had. For instance, someone with medical training could be considered somewhat of an expert and is expected to handle a personal trauma more easily. Your story illustrates that our experiences don't always give us a strong foundation for dealing with trauma in our own lives. Can you describe how personal trauma affects you as a writer?
PC: I’ll make one of those blanket statements, which is almost entirely true. Personal trauma is the only reason I write—to express a pain that readers can understand and recognize in their own lives. This is true even of my humor pieces. Yes, I write humor, too. It’s harder than a straight narrative. But even in a funny piece, my account of frustration with bureaucrats or my garden is ultimately based on some kind of pain.
JH: Do you have any other stories, publications or websites that you would like to share with our readers?
PC: Some years ago, I published a piece on the very different circumstances of my younger brother’s death. You can find “The Mayor of Gardenville.” at www.conteonline.net. For the funny stuff, go to www.fonsandporter.com for “Laments of a Quilter’s husband.”
JH: Patrick, thank you for sharing your story with our readers. We were delighted to have you as part of our winter issue and we especially thank you for sharing such personal thoughts and feelings about your essay. Just one final question: could you share with our readers what recovery means to you?
PC: I’ve had a lot of opportunities to recover. I handled some of them better than others. I’ve been sober for twenty-six years now. I was able to stop smoking. I don’t get a sinking feeling when I hear a helicopter any more. Most of all, I’m able to use traumatic experiences to make a kind of art. That helps a lot in my recovery. Thanks again for publishing my essay, and for giving me the opportunity to talk about it.
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