Prairie Wolf Press hosting photo poem montage Nefertiti on the Astral

I hope you will consider submitting your prose or poetry or vidoe/media work to Prairie Wolf Press (http://www.prairiewolfpress.com/) in the future. Thanks to editors Joyce Daniels and Michael Sinclair for this opportunity.

Steve Pryputinewicz backs the poem, Nefertiti on the Astral, with the music of Bela Bartok (The Island of Bali) and Robyn Beattie supplied the exquisite bevy of photographs:

http://www.prairiewolfpress.com/premier_issue_volume_1_spring_2011/nefertiti_on_the_astral_by_tania_pryputniewicz

Nefertiti, Swimming to Antarctica, and The Creative Work Fund

I am pleased to announce Nefertiti on the Astral, my latest photo poem montage with the photography of Robyn Beattie and my father Stephen Pryputniewicz on the piano (playing us a bit of Bartok as the backdrop), is forthcoming from Prairie Wolf Press in March of 2011. I’ll post the link once it goes live.

In the meantime, we are busy at work on the next photo poem montage, Amelia; Robyn’s keen eye and art radius means we’ve snuck a Monty Monty plane sculpture with its lovely chocolate bronze tones, and a second shot of its shadow, into the series of frames. Despite my own tighter orbit at home raising the children, where dinner and Boyscouts and ballet keep gallery openings at a distance, I’m blessed to have Robyn’s steady flow of images from near and far flowing into my home.

Winter mornings here mean the plume of smoke from the wood burning stove, and maybe a little more propensity, with the lack of sun, to battle emotional vortices. I just finished Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer by Lynne Cox. I envy her physical challenges: the ocean’s cold, whirlpools, weather, sharks, channels, strangers, all external tangibles she perseveres through to swim across each new stretch of water she set as a goal for herself.

I have deep respect for the way Cox was able to braid her life’s dream, so young, into later humanitarian goals that involved putting a personal, human face on the United States at a time when there was fear and tension between the US and Russia. Her body was a physical bridge. What a profoundly brave and powerful act, and what a creative way to put her passion into service for the greater good. Of swimming across the English Channel, Cox writes, “At age fifteen I had reached my highest goal in life (p. 94).”

In direct opposition to Lynne, I feel I met one of my life’s nadirs at approximately the same age. I’d prefer my challenges to be hers (physical and tangible)—but they have been internal, spectres of the past. I’ve decided, of late, to turn and face them down by writing a new series of poems looking at that time in my life, with a focus on the hidden gifts in trauma. Because I sense the beauty waiting, available, past a layer of assumptions that need to be put to rest.

I’ve been busy applying, with Robyn, for a Creative Work Fund grant to support this endeavor; this San Francisco based agency is offering grants for the Literary Arts (poets! Spoken word poets! Creative nonfiction writers) and Traditional Arts for lead artists and writers pairing with a non-profit agency to create new work. They support lead artists from 14 of California’s counties.

I learned about The Creative Work Fun two years ago from my sculptor friend Sandy Frank (thank you Sandy—for the fun we had sneaking off to the city and for a fabulous dinner). The preliminary cover letter is due already March 4, 2011, but if you miss this deadline, try the next; they are offering another round of grants as early as this fall in several other categories. See the website for details here: http://www.creativeworkfund.org/.

Further reading:

Grayson, also by Lynne Cox, a beautiful story I’m reading to my children about a swimmer, a baby whale, the beauty of the ocean, synchronicity, and the gifts that come when one listens deeply while staying in one’s body despite fear.

A Room of Her Own Foundation 2011 Writers’ Retreat, Ghost Ranch NM

“...designed not so much to teach you what you don’t know (you already know a lot), but to discover new connections, forge new paths, and offer you plenty of time to write.” –excerpted from the site…to read the rest:

http://www.aroomofherownfoundation.org/retreat_2011.php

I’m very excited to announce that I’ll be attending the 2011 A Room of Her Own Foundation retreat at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico this August as both participant and presenter. Who could resist this line-up: Marilynne Robinson (Home, Gilead, Housekeeping), Mary Gordon (The Company of Women, Final Payments, Circling my Mother), Bhanu Kapil (The Vertical Iinterrogation of Strangers, Incubation: A Space for Monsters, humanimal), Ellen McLaughlin (Days and Nights Within, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, The Trojan Women), and a growing list of participating writers.

I will be presenting a mind-stretch session on the process of making photo-poem montages, consulting on poetry manuscripts and facilitating one of the daily small writing groups ("The Exquisite Now with Feral Mom Feral Writer"). I’m a little hard to be around here at home, because I’ve sort of already left…(despite clear evidence we are only now on the verge of February)….ecstatic about the daily hike to and from my summer retreat room...anticipating the inspiration hangover I’ll have after spending a week with so many powerful minds. I believe they are still accepting applications…hope to see you there.

Sleepwalking with Heidi

The house quiets. The children sleep, their anchors lifting out of me one by one. And my naked self, neither mother nor wife nor friend, floats downstairs for a cup of tea, the open space between the wooden slats of the stairs tainted gold by tree-light and the lit lamps of the xmas village resting in eternal snow.

Too thirsty to sleep, too tired to write in the journal; the steam jet from kettle’s end curls the kids’ drawings on the side of the fridge. The fire needs a log. The rain-wet deck beneath my bare feet, night’s frigid blue-black backwood’s dark tangible as an entity, and Emma, the outcast feral cat, perched on the railing. She flees. The other three ferals, though tolerant of her presence at feeding time, fight her out of the cat-bed under the house.

Mug’s heat singing knuckles, I’ll linger at the top of the stairs, standing, reading, in front of the bookshelf next to the bedroom that’s long needed a velvet chair and lamp to call its own. Johanna Spyri’s Heidi falls open to chapter 12, The Sesemman House is Haunted, in which Heidi’s sleepwalking earns her an interview with the good doctor, who asks, “…just tell me where you were going.”

To which she replies, “‘…every night I dream the same thing. I think I am with my grandfather, and I hear the wind in the pines, and the stars are shining in the sky. And I jump up quick, and open the door of the hut, and oh, it is so beautiful! But when I awake, I am always in Frankfort,’ And Heidi began to sob, and fight with the trouble that swelled her little throat almost to bursting (p. 162).”

I’m transported into the fierceness of Heidi’s longing for the taste of goat milk, the round window through which the moonlight of the Alps slips down over her sleeping face and the gruff peace she finds in her grandfather’s care. And recognize immediately this image of a self that might travel outside of itself at night in pursuit of what one’s day self might ignore or need to set aside.

Molly Peacock, in her dew drop of an essay on the allure of flowers, State of Grace, writes, “‘I had two selves, really: a robot self to dispense my obligations, and a true self that was dangerously buried or, as gardeners say, “caught in the bulb.” But in that garden, where I was able to act dreamy, my true self was released’” (p. 134). This image appeals equally: the state of resting, dormant, lingering before the inevitable ascension sunwards.

I’m careful, though, to love my current placement in incarnation and in time, thriving under the maelstrom of raising children and negotiating marriage, taking as a self-stated mentor Pattiann Rogers, who writes in her essay, Degree and Circumstance, “If, through caring for my children, I lost writing time, I gained by the expansion of vision and insight and compassion my experiences with them gave me…The writing I was able to do in those years is suffused with the energy my children radiated” (p. 161).

My preoccupation with the fracturing of the self comes after a return to teaching after ten years of raising my children at home; one side-effect: an armful of books from the school library including an anthology titled, Women on War, stumbled upon while in the stacks on my way to some other volume (as is often the case).

In a post-grading brain-fog, I’d opened Women on War to Isabelle Allende’s excerpt from House of Spirits: The Hour of Truth with its brutal depiction of a detained woman’s torture. I opened The Sweet Breathing of Plants to a similarly intense passage titled, Fate of the Wise Women by Jeanne Achterberg; the paragraph my eye fell on gave a graphic description of the ways a woman accused of witchcraft might be terminated in Germany in 1629 (involving ladders, alcohol, matches, ropes, hoistings, weights, and hour long intervals of waiting to for the torture to repeat if the accused lived through the first round). There’s a holographic quality to such reading experiences for me, the words goading a cellular memory of the layers of horror women have survived.

I’m aware that men have suffered their atrocities over the centuries too. But, given this lifetime’s gender, I’m thinking of all of this in the context of what Eckhart Tolle describes as “the female pain-body,” (The New Earth) which, named, acknowledged, has a chance to heal. It’ll take women and men--and who knows how many years--to fathom and heal such outrageous trespasses, such devastating twists of the human psyche’s past.

The careful words of the writers who have picked their way through the carnage and made a map of their understanding, as well as a map of what eluded them, places me at the very beginning of the labyrinth (ever-shifting as it is, concentric, multi-dimensional). I’m indebted to every writer I’ve discussed here, as well as many others, for the threshold I have the means to cross—if I can just get both the sleep-walker and the day-walker inside to arrive simultaneously.

Further reading:

Photo of Heidi and the moon, Heidi and her grandfather appear in Heidi by Johanna Spyri, translated by Louise Brooks, Illustrated by Roberta Macdonald, Children’s Classics Edition

The House of Spirits: The Hour of Truth by Isabelle Allende appears in Women on War: An International Anthology of Writings from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Daniela Gioseffi

Degree and Circumstance by Pattiann Rogers appears in Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition, Edited by Sharon Bryan

The State of Grace by Molly Peacock and Fate of the Wise Women by Jeanne Achterberg appear in The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women Writing on the Green World, an anthology edited by Linda Hogan and Brenda Peterson

5 Things I Learned About Writing in 2010

I pledge to return with renewed vigor in January 2011! I bow down, for now, before the altar of teaching (I returned this fall semester to teaching after a ten year hiatus from the formal classroom). I did manage to post, in response to She Writes co-founder Deborah Siegel’s prompt “5 Things I Learned About Writing in 2010,” to my She Writes blog.

Motherhood, Matrices, and Accountability can be read here:

http://www.shewrites.com/profiles/blogs/motherhood-matrices-and

Ananda's Line Live at Connotation Press

Please celebrate with Robyn Beattie and I by stopping by to view the 5 poems and 5 photographs in honor of the late artist, writer, sculptress Ananda Beattie:

http://www.connotationpress.com/poetry/598-tania-pryputniewicz-poetry

Guest Poetry Editor Nicelle Davis at Connotation Press was kind enough to also interview Robyn and I regarding our artistic process of collaborating on poems and photography.

The Tenth Stair and the Making of “Amelia”

Lately, I’m Owl in Arnold Lobel’s children’s story “Upstairs and Downstairs” from the collection, Owl at Home, in which Owl spends the evening rushing from his downstairs to his upstairs, calling, whenever he arrives in either location, “Owl, are you there?!” only to rush madly to the opposite spot to ask the same question of himself in the new spot. He never answers (how can he?) and finally, in exhaustion, sits on the middle stair, where he can best survey both destinations

The Tenth stair is not a bad location, and who wouldn’t want to live in any one of Lobel’s settings (given the sloping ceilings of Frog and Toad’s worlds, the moonlit path extending before solitary Grasshopper, the armchair and hot bowl of soup waiting—once Weasel’s outsmarted—for Mouse, arched neck of lamp with blossom shade warming head and book).

While the tenth stair’s a good metaphor for our psychic position, I have little desire to write about our family’s two-city dilemma nor the siphon of creative energy resulting from missed airplanes, trips to the ER, work obligations, the overlay of possible new grids and patterns to forge in a new city while still driving the old--you know, the human minutae song of what needs to be done, done better, now, while slicing cucumbers for lunches, peeling bandaids for skinned foreheads and vacuuming bobby pins up in the wake of the Sunbeam Fairy on her way to weekend Nutcracker practice.

I sequestered a day, though, to sit beside Robyn, my accomplice, so we could preview her images for the making of three new photo-poem montages.

And mercifully, within moments of sitting beside her with my double-bergamot Earl (tea housed in a substantial globe-bottomed Barbara Hoffman muted orange and grey gold petalled mug), I’m “home”—at peace, and the images for the poem “Amelia” take an order in my mind: here, opalescent mounds of buried pearls in an abalone shell will echo a line of cream buttons down the waist of a crepe dress will echo the silver rivets of an airplane’s wing.

Since the poem names its own set of images, it’s tricky which photos to choose…not overstate, not understate or compete with the words. What furthers the dream? Like here, these milk tendrils of brushed wool, so like incense rings, barely present enough to touch.

Because the poem isn’t about flying, or lovers, directly. But transport past thresholds alone. “And god approving” before the sun breaks through that sliver of sky-time, pre-dawn (finite! mercurial!) when hearing the sound of your own breath is enough.

Photo, abalone: Robyn Beattie www.robynbeattie.com

Link to our first photo montage:
at the Mom Egg.

To view more of Barbara Hoffman’s work:

http://www.occidentalpotteryandwood.com/