My Writing Process Blog Tour Returns: Moving Past Siren's Lament

Thanks to an invitation from Erica Goss, poet laureate of Los Gatos, I'm joining The Virtual Book Tour for a second round; here are my responses from this summer: First Poetry Book Publication: Reckoning with Exposure, and Astral Rubbernecking. 

You can read Erica's answers to the four questions and her guest post at Transformative Blogging, Fairytales, Facebook, and Poetry Prompts, in which she describes the process behind writing her book, Vibrant Words, ideas and inspirations for poets (PushPen Press, 2014); she is also the author of Wild Place (Finishing Line Press, 2012). I highly recommend checking out the video poetry column Goss writes for Connotation Press, The Third Form.

What are you currently working on?

To be honest, I’m working on getting used to a bit of reckless joy. My first poetry collection, November Butterfly, comes out on November 1, 2014, thanks to Saddle Road Press. I am pretty much levitating at this point.

When the box of ARC’s (Advanced Reading Copies) came in August and I first held the book, I realized what an evaporative state I’ve inhabited since most of my writing "lives" online. I’ve blogged since 2007 here at Feral, Mom, Feral Writer and since roughly 2012 at Transformative Blogging and Mother Writer Mentor. While blogging is a satisfying extension of journaling and single poems appearing in online journals benefit from possibly a wider readership than those in print journals, nothing replaces the feeling of holding a physical book of one's own poems for the very first time.

photo by Robyn Beattie

When I lost a friend to cancer in 2011, I decided to stop leaning so heavily on (and waiting for) outside validation. To grow as an artist, I began making short poetry videos. So far, I've "video illustrated" seven of my poems and dedicated the first one, She Dressed in a Hurry, for Lady Di to my late friend Barbara Robinette Moss. The others to date are: Amelia, Nefertiti on the Astral, Nefertiti Among Us, The Corridor (Guinevere), Thumbelina, and Mordred's Dream. New projects are underway for The Three Oranges, Black Angel: Scripted, Never Shot, and several Joan of Arc poems.

I’m also working on a manuscript about an Illinois commune I lived on as a child from the age of five to eleven.  The blizzards of Illinois coupled with disillusionment regarding the group’s spiritual path--disintegrating under post leader exile--inspired our family to leave. My father built a wooden camper for the back of our maroon 67 Chevy and off we trundled to California.

Memories of a sincere longing for spiritual beauty mingle with memories of witnessing human fallibility, and as an adult, I'm left with questions. Why do people join communes or other groups? Why do they leave, and what becomes of the children, parents, and leaders of abandoned communes? 

How does your work differ from others of its genre?

During the first blog tour, I talked about the process of writing poetry; here I'd like to talk about poetry videos/movies. I love the collaborations between Nicelle Davis and Cheryl Gross; watching In The Circus of You you'll find drawings and animation with narration (there's a lovely bell tone to Nicelle's reading voice). Through Erica Goss’s Connotation Press Video Poetry Column mentioned earlier, The Third Form, I fell in love with Nic Sebastian’s, "let me tell you about yourself" (scroll a third of the way down to see Sebastian's video with its amazing Hubble generated imagery). Goss also interviewed two pairs of video poetry collaborators about their process.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

I haven't ventured into animation--my collaborator photographer Robyn Beattie and I call our videos "photo poem montages;" in comparison to animated work or videos with actors, ours are more static, frames fading one into the next. Robyn and I are both drawn to images that suggest or imply but don’t necessarily correspond directly to the line of poetry at hand. 


The third collaborator is often my father (composing and selecting music and performing it on keyboard/piano). Years of kinship make each project flow effortlessly, and each time we finish a new one, I'm relieved to have mapped another portion of the heart. A fourth collaborator technically is a group made up of the artists Robyn encounters. We have been blessed to receive permission to use photographs of work by painters, sculptors, assemblage artists and more. 




Feedback regarding the photo poem montages continues to be overwhelmingly positive, though we also have heard that the words of the poem stimulate one set of images in the viewer’s mind's eye that in turn compete with the photographs. And that the voice recording of the poem also potentially competes with the music.

Trying to finish any particular project given raising my three children always seems a miracle--I get a little crazy trying to nail as much beauty down as possible when the opportunity arises. Or maybe the desire to have those competing strains (photographs, narration of poem, music, motion of the images bleeding one to the next) reflects the effects of our media conscious culture of burgeoning stimuli. I only know I am flooded with happiness when I sit down with Robyn to sort through her gorgeous images and listen to my father's choices for music. 

Why do you write/create what you do?

Lighthouse Eye by Tania Pryputniewicz
Point Loma

I write to ground. As a compulsive empath and eldest child, I have a habit of scanning and jumping ahead of the moment. I see in layers if that makes sense--I’m not sure why. It's great for night time dreaming, though in other instances--dipping into the past, or trying on incarnations from other times--the psychic/emotional projections can be intense. Poetry is a perfect place to channel that kind of seeing. If I had my way, my art would move past siren's lament to bring others closer to their own soul forms of unbridled asking, listening, and responding.

How does your writing/creating process work?

I keep my journal with me and write throughout the day as I ferry children to and from their activities. Without the luxury of portioning out time slots for the various kinds of writing (poetry, blogposts, etc.), I lift blog paragraphs and poem starts directly from the seedbed of the journal.  I run poems by members of my writing group (a beautiful array of friends, many I met through A Room of Her Own Foundation retreats). I subscribe to a number of online newsletters with calls for entries; these calls for entries become deadlines to create new work.

Up Next: 

Jill G. Hall uses found objects to create whimsical mosaics that are displayed in galleries, private homes and downtown San Diego street corners. Her poetry has been published in A Year in Ink, Serving House Journal, City Works, The Avocet: A Journal of Nature Poetry as well as Wild Women Wild Voices. She plans to publish her first novel in 2015. At Inspirations Gallery she curates themed work by local artists and facilitates workshops to help others find their unique paths. Her blog posts share personal musings on the art of practicing a creative lifestyle. Find Jill at: www.jillghall.com

Cathe Shubert is currently living, writing, teaching and learning in Wilmington, NC, where she is enrolled as a MFA student and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington during the academic year. During the summer, she participates in a MA program called the Bread Loaf School of English. She's taught all over the country and world, having spent two years teaching Spanish and English in Philadelphia, a year abroad teaching ESL in Andorra, and a year in Detroit teaching creative writing in public schools. You can read her Virtual Blog Tour post here and follow her blog at ilmwritinglife.wordpress.com 

First Book Anxieties and Remedies: Suncatchers, Poetry Umbrellas and Butterfly Doors

"There is no single location of miracle..."

 Mark Doty, My Alexandria, from the poem Advent Calendars

Let’s say the sun were made of words. And the poet in the direct line of its transmission. So she spends her life spinning words back out in a carousel of patterns across a hardwood floor…a halo of fractal replicas of her many angles sliding like minnows across bare feet. Raveling the light/words into discrete units of color…dually winnowing and amplifying. 

I aspire to be a suncatcher, though sometimes I feel more like a shadowcaster. I realized this when I went through my own poems looking for a “sunny” poem for Nicelle Davis who has offered to paint poems across umbrellas she will give away at AWP, Seattle 2014 (send her a poem for the Living Poetry Project’s RAIN). Though she didn’t specify what kind of poem she wanted, I sent her a darkly celebratory marriage poem, The Painter’s Wife, only because it mentions rain. 

Then some other self in me perked up and decided a sunny poem might be “nice,” and you can guess the rest, I started the tallying of dark vs. light poems…until an hour later...I implored my husband and the Husky to rescue me for coffee. (My husband, reading over my shoulder, says I should drop words like fractal, raveling. But I play to stay sane on this personal blog in a way I don’t on other sites. So weigh in: can you stand lead-ins with metaphors? Even long-winded, mixed ones?)

On the upside, all this talk of rain made me miss the Midwestern storms of Iowa City where one can count on a righteous soaking while riding a bicycle home from work, raindrops as firm and as thick as a melon scooper’s chilled butter balls. To say nothing of the lightning, no simple jag, threading instead with multiple tendrils multiple banks of clouds, outdone only by the thunder, rolling, growing momentum, to land on the roof of one’s heart. I'm hoping one of these summers to return to either partake as a student and/or teacher at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

Since last posting I’ve made more than one trip to Balboa Gardens, fallen in love with the lily pond and the shady relief of the botanical gardens where the redwood lath creates a lattice of shade where constellations of leopard plants reign, their pale spots more like stars fallen straight from the Milky Way. Found new saints to research at The Timken Art Museum and stood in awe in front of Rembrandt’s St. Bartholomew (taking the docent’s cue to discern the signature dimly present beside St. Bartholomew’s face). Ate lunch in the sculpture garden with Aunt Rose and stood beneath the elephantine roots of the trees gracing the tiny amphitheater where three butterfly doors announce the existence of Zoro Garden (named after Zorine, the "queen of the nudist colony's pageant" formerly hosted on this site during the 1935 California Pacific International Exposition according to Balboa Park's website). 

What I love about these butterfly doors is that each depicts the butterfly and the cocoon perched on corresponding plant of choice. That the doors are closed, set as they are up a tiny flight of stairs and embedded in the hillside. What lies behind them? Who gets to go through? Are you watching? Are you next?

Lately, with the forthcoming publication of my first poetry collection (November Butterfly, Saddle Road Press, 2014) I feel dogged by the Emperor's New Clothes syndrome, akin to the shadowcaster fears discussed above. Or to use a metaphor from the tattoo artist world, "my canvas is in a bit of pain"...suffering a projected anxiousness about exposure. One thing to write quietly and share one poem at a time here and there. Another to shift psyche to grow into a self with a book on its way.

But the storm is mostly in my head; when I open my eyes, I see what I need to see to keep going. Nicelle Davis (umbrella girl), fearless luminary, gives me courage and inspires me to take risks in my work; especially via her latest poetry collection from Red Hen Press, Becoming Judas. The title metaphor creates an amazing stage for what she'll explore in an eclectic weave of prose poem, Biblical reference, song and image play, poems juxtaposed with illustrations by Cheryl Gross. I was not only fascinated by her way of confessing assumptions while defining her childhood's constructed faith, but moved by how far she takes us in to her relationship to faith's veerings and the mother/daughter nexus of lifelong bonding and individuation.

Just for context on defining constructed faith, here's a couple lines from her poem Disclaimer: Assumptions Made By This Homemade Religion: "I mistook the pastel picture/ of Jesus hung in every home for John Lennon. Both/ called the Prince of Peace." As I read the collection, questions burgeoned, and I put on my Mother Writer Mentor hat and asked Nicelle, what is it like to write poems about one's mother? To reveal and honor the depth of that connection, as evidenced by lines that ignite the imagination of the reader: "[My mother is the one] who put me in this blue dress lit on fire..."


In return we received much more than a guest post from Nicelle; I'd call it a prose aubade for her mother, No Love is Singular: Confessions of a Poet Daughter accompanied generously by photographs and two poems from Becoming Judas. I took comfort in not only her poems, but her words about the process of reckoning with having written those poems: 

Yes, [my mother is] "the one who put me in this blue dress lit on fire,” but there would be nothing without fire to burn new ground, to open the potential found in a fallen seed. 

I wrote my mother into a book to tell her she is my fire, but this has and will be read wrong. Fine. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. We can’t get it right—I’ll never be good—but there is potential in every effort. Fire and love are interchangeable verbs." 

I love Nicelle's reminder here about the powerlessness writers face when allowing work to go out into the world. When it enters the public domain, public questions arise. I asked her mine. But that risk and that bravery she exhibits in putting both work and process reflections out there affords other writers a measure of strength, a nod, a "come along" if you will. 

Another process boon for the anxious writing self comes via Barbara Ann Yoder's book I had the privilege to read in draft form. She defines her forthcoming book as a "guide to overcoming self-censorship." Here's a link to the page where she offers excerpts full of exercises: A Breakthrough Book for Women Writers. Or jump straight to one of the excerpts here, Writing With Courage, in which you are asked to write a fairytale about yourself and your writing life.

And my other combative strategy isn't really a strategy, it's just where the joy is: creating new work. Here are links and teaser first lines to the latest Perhaps Maybe collaborations. Liz Brennan is ready for more collaborators, so please send her a prose Perhaps to which she'll craft a Maybe or maybe she'll send it to me, or perhaps you and a friend could team up and write your own pairing and send it to her. This first treads the line between humor and possibility from the threshold of witnessing a daughter on the verge of puberty (the possible boys of her future already talking later in the poem through metaphors of tree): 
 
 Text of Metaphors: Perhaps when my daughter orders me to stop using metaphors (You're not off the hook. Don't ride me. Give up the goat) she secretly likes it. I can't stop anyway...

 Video recording of us reading Simply Poems (a reading with a breeze):  Perhaps until a spot more fertile for the flower is found, its pale shade stands as a reminder of what must come. Because leaves understand the inevitable, do we need to be told?  

This one turns on a powerful short story by Isaac Asimov, written in 1956, that has astounding relevancy for our technologically dependent and saturated state of being. Should we rely on people or machines when we use up our planet's resources? Neither? Both?  Here's Asimov's Last Question and here's how Liz started us off down our own line of questioning:

Text of The Last Question:  Perhaps while we can’t yet turn smoke and ash back into a tree, we can

train impossibly shattered things to mend themselves: a crushed hope, a fractured trust – an anguish suspended in a dream...

Which in turn inspired a miniscule debate about entropy. Maybe love is the opposite of entropy, but for this perhaps maybe, we settled on light: 

Text of Light: Perhaps light is the opposite of entropy, travelling at a speed hummingbirds match in nectared dreams of planets without kestrels...   

Further reading:Cathe Shubert, another AROHO find, offers an infusion of poetry goodwill here; she argues why poetry matters... in an essay she wrote last summer at Breadloaf: In Praise of a Poetry of Action.

October 10 addition: Just came across this beautiful process post by Marilyn Bousquin in which she addresses the ways men and women react to rejection in  On Shameless Self-promotion: Keep Hitting the Send Button; she takes apart the concept of shameless self-promotion by looking at the role of shame in women's writing lives.

Photos: are mine with exception of the cover for Becoming Judas; the stained glass mermaid above is the artwork of stained glass artist Rebecca Lichau out of Sonoma County.