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 

Tripping with the Girls at La Posada: Architects, Painters, and First Ladies

La Posada Corridor by Robyn Beattie

I closed out summer with a road trip to Winslow, Arizona’s La Posada Hotel for a gathering of the girls on my father’s side of the family. My aunts chose the location for its reputation as “the masterpiece and favorite building” of architect Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter, for its ambience, for the luxurious garden grounds and how the Southwest Hacienda style hotel of Colter’s vision doubles as a museum.

After the ten-hour desert drive from San Diego, faces puffy, necks trailing heat rash dots and brains dulled, we unpacked our suitcases, shocked to find every article of clothing warm to the touch and damp. Over dinner, when the aunts asked after the state of our vehicle’s air conditioning, our California trio really couldn’t come up with an answer for why we didn’t turn it on…

…so we laughed uncontrollably later in our room, gripping the wooden spires of our bed-frames for support, chalking the oversight up to a combination of the heat’s gradual anesthetization and the distractive glee of marking our sojourn by bird: canyon wren, western king, red tail hawk, raven, boat-tailed Grackle, scrub jay, and scores of random no-special-name (but darling) sparrows.

La Posada’s artwork laden interior made up for the strain of arriving. I rose early and took over the

Window, Tina Mion Gallery, La Posada

Tina Mion mini-gallery room with its walls a deep rose-guava in the early light. Under the gabled window, on maroon leather couch, I wrote to the sound of the trains passing, my photo poem montage collaborator Robyn Beattie ranging the corridors with her camera for her own morning muse.

We spent the latter part of the day playing photo hide and seek with my sister and strolling the hallways upstairs where the canvases of painter Tina Mion live. Coming off my own inquiry using poetry to inhabit iconic women in November Butterfly, I was fascinated to see Mion’s series of paintings of the First Ladies (titled Ladies First). Warnings abound (and rightly so) to refrain from photographing or touching the artwork, so take a virtual peek here on Mion’s official website. 

Referring to her Ladies First series and her painting process in general, Mion states:

As the paintings evolved, it wasn’t the events that held my interest as much as the philosophical underpinnings of the people involved: what brought about their actions, and what were the consequences — public triumph, personal tragedy, love, betrayal, power and its loss, brilliance, mediocrity, poverty and a climb to riches, crushing fate, great opportunity, and apple pie.

Postcards, La Posada, Robyn Beattie

I love that summation, though the first-person poems I wrote for Marilyn, Sylvia, Joan d’Arc, Nefertiti, Amelia Earhart and Guinevere were more emotionally than philosophically driven, spurred by desperate empathy. I wanted the women I wrote about to have more agency—a longing intensified by my own contortions to balance lover, mother, writer, and wife selves. Though I remain curious, like Mion, about the wages of circumstance.

Just outside my room, I found Mion’s painting, “Jacqueline Kennedy, The King of Hearts;” Jacqueline dons the famous pink hat, holding in one gloved hand the King of Hearts playing card (it faces out and bears the face of her husband) neatly halved by bullet’s trajectory, bullet beneath card’s confetti. Mion writes, “The painting is meant to capture the last moment of innocence for Jackie — and an entire generation.”

I love that Mion ties history to her point of entry for each rendering; the inspirational backdrop for King of Hearts draws on stop-motion concepts or “stroboscopic photography” and the way television in 1963 was able to present the “stop-action assassination of Kennedy.” I love the nested visual metaphor Mion capitalizes on here—since that’s what poems and paintings already do—present a “stop-action” frame, a moment stilled.

Still, a poem moves for the seconds it takes a reader to read and cull the cumulative impact of the words. For a work of art, its narrative moves depending on where the viewer roams physically.

And keeps moving, when memory ranges back over the imagery (of poem or work of art), divining and gleaning in ways not possible during the fluid onslaught of life itself. I love that about poetry and art, that chance to enter or re-consider the stilled moment or occasion, again and again, from multiple angles.

With the Haiku Room’s one-a-day commitment nipping at my heels through sleet, snow, or infernal road trip, I responded to Mion in haiku:

Private feral eyes—

Tina Mion’s Jackie O—

Bullet’s public path.

That evening, we ate an exceptional dinner as the indigo light darkened the window panes, rootlets of lightning followed by the cool rush of rivulets of rain. We woke the following morning to the sound of the trains passing.

La Posada Rocker by Robyn Beattie

Down dawn’s rain slick tracks,

Steel plumage of two trains’ brakes

Wincing, mingling wills.

And we left La Posada no less in love with the will of the architect gracing every aspect of the hotel and grounds, including the fencing:

Mary Colter’s wall—

Embeds arrowhead of sky—

Absence shapes our forms.

Additional Notes:

My First Poetry Book:

Advance Reader Copies of November Butterfly are here! Though the book is officially available November 1st, I have a limited number of ARCs and of course unlimited eARCs available for reviewers; if you are interested in blogging about or reviewing the book, please contact me here on my main site. I’m unapologetically, intolerably, incandescent with joy that the poems have found such a beautiful home, thanks to Ruth Thompson and Don Mitchell of Saddle Road Press.

Forthcoming Poetry:

A poem from the new manuscript in progress took third place in the Snow Jewel and Grey Sparrow Flash/Poetry Contest; the print journal comes out October 1st. To order, visit Grey Sparrow’s contact page. 

Here’s Long River Review’s Interview with Diane Smith, Joseph Michael Owens, and Annam Manthiram, editors of “Grey Sparrow.”

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Fall Classes: On-line and In Person Blogging

Beginning Blogging, Story Circle Network (on-line)

Join us to discover your blogging focus or to re-invigorate your relationship to an existing blog. These classes tend to fire the imagination and invite reckless play that (I’m warning you) yields unabashed writing we later distill into future blogposts. This is your one and only beautiful life; join us to decide which part of it you want to share on-line through the malleable form of blogging.

Starts Monday, September 15th and runs six weeks.

Full course description for Beginning Blogging. 

Intermediate Blogging, San Diego Writers, Ink (in-person)

Your blog is up and running but you’d like some ongoing support developing your blogging practice and trying new post variations. Join this class to consider how to grow your blogging tribe, try your hand at video blogging, blog tours and more.

Starts Tuesday night, 6:30-8:30 p.m. September 16th and runs six weeks.

Full course description for Intermediate Blogging.

Photos: Are all by Robyn Beattie as attributed in caption; all others are photos I took.