Karin Cecile Davidson

The characters of Ramona Reeves’s debut story collection, It Falls Gently All Around, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize (University of Pittsburgh, 2022), lead us through the oak-lined streets, the trailer courts and truck stops, the tunnels and rough-hewn coastline of Mobile, Alabama. Like a love letter to her hometown, Reeves introduces these linked stories in honest and direct strokes, through the humor and compassion and grand mistakes of her main characters Babbie and Donnie, and from the perspectives of Corinne and Fay and the other personalities who appear inside these pages. The stories move through time, not chronologically, but in a way that makes sense to the collection, calling up themes of class and race and chasing down dreams, no matter the distance. From the portrayal of place to the exploration of lives on all sides of town, no matter how discrete, Reeves reveals a landscape that is as distinctive and dimensional as her prose, one which allows the reader to linger and, by the last page, wish for more.

“The beauty of Mobile was not found in its midtown or downtown high-ceilinged homes with their historic nameplates, prim azaleas, and impressive oaks. The beauty swelled from the dirty bay, the muck of oyster beds and oil rigs, and the fume-scarred Bankhead Tunnel … The cracked and broken parts of the city, if taken as a whole, amounted to shapes, color, and light that made Babbie want to live. That was her beautiful city.” —Babbie from “Wheel of Fortune”

KARIN CECILE DAVIDSON: Tell us about Babbie and her city, of your relationship to Mobile, and how place in these stories means much more than location?

RAMONA REEVES: Thank you for that question and for interviewing me, Karin. And thank you to Newfound for publishing this interview. About Babbie and place—on the one hand, Babbie is an insider in the stories of It Falls Gently All Around. She’s lived her entire life in Mobile, and she’s made some poor choices, some stemming from a belief that she doesn’t deserve better. As a character, I think she sees the surface beauty of Mobile, but it’s tainted and complicated for her because she’s experienced the underside of that beauty. In that sense, she’s also an outsider because she’s not permitted into the grand places of Mobile except as hired help (in “Queen of Frogs”) or as a potential nanny (in “Aphrodite Reclining”). So Babbie’s perspective on Mobile is informed by the way she feels about herself, the restrictions others have put on her, and the choices she’s made. Dorothy Allison wrote a great essay that’s included in The Writers Notebook, a book of essays published by Tin House. In the essay, Allison talks about place being informed by characters and their desire, emotions, and context. That’s what I tried to do in this collection, to build a sense of place through character perspectives. Because I’m a native of Mobile, I also wanted defamiliarize the city and bring fresh news to it through characters and objects that perhaps defy some stereotypes people may have about the Gulf Coast. I also use trees a lot in the book as a marker for class. Trees are a big part of the visual terrain in Mobile, but I hope they telegraph a lot more. I wanted them to connect to themes in the book.

DAVIDSON: That Dorothy Allison craft essay is truly amazing, I completely agree, and I think you’ve succeeded in creating that kind of informed place in your collection, partly in how you’ve established connections among the characters. To me, this recalls something Jennifer Egan once said. In her 2011 interview with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Jennifer Egan reflected on the characters of A Visit from the Goon Squad (which she also referred to elsewhere as “linked stories”) and how they were related: “At first, the characters were ‘little islands far apart—I didn’t see the land mass that connected them till later.’” Did you feel the same about your collection’s characters at any point? Which character was most difficult to write? And who came straight to you, telling you everything you needed to know? And did the overlapping relationships occur naturally over time in the drafting, or did you sometimes have to force these folks into the same space?

REEVES: I began this collection as part of a class I was taking. We were studying several interconnected story collections such as Olive Kitteridge, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, Mary and O’Neil and others. I wrote three or four stories while taking the class, so I always knew there would be connections, recurring characters, etc., between the stories. When I went back to finish writing all the stories, I think my experience was similar to Egan’s deft description. There were certain stories I knew would be part of the book and others that came as a surprise. When Fay, for example, showed up in the story “Anniversary,” I felt drawn to write an entire story in her POV, but it wasn’t until I wrote “Anniversary” that I knew that. She was one of the easiest characters to write, as least initially. I found Rowan and Claire the most difficult to write. Their privilege allows them to look away from situations and ignore many social issues, but in their stories I tried to hold their feet to the fire, so to speak. And yes, I sometimes needed to create situations for the necessary interactions between characters. Parties and group scenes created opportunities to further develop characters, and in some cases, forced them to confront problems they’d been avoiding. But there’s also a lot to be said for placing two characters in tight quarters and seeing what happens. I’m thinking of Babbie and her ex-husband in the bathroom stall in “Last Call.”

“Some people had to make do with pressing their noses against the pretty parts of life.” —Babbie from “Last Call”

“… the road between maybe and certain always seemed under construction in his mind.” —Donnie from “The Balanced Side”

DAVIDSON: In exploring the lives of your characters, you find language that not only tells the stories but is specific to and works to develop each character. The way you string together words and thoughts, with sensory details dashed with mild and sometimes outright humorous tones, to create an almost wild irreverence and at the same time a deep respect for your fictional world is phenomenal. How did your style of writing develop? Has it been present since the beginning, or did you find your way to this distinctive style over time?

REEVES: That’s a fantastic question, and you’re the first to ask it. Years ago, I had the idea that writers were supposed to know early on what their style was. Maybe some do, but that was not the case for me. I spent years writing stories in a range of styles until I finally found my own through practice. Writing is its own teacher, which basically means that I had to work at it to find my voice and style, and I think I’ll need to keep working at it. It doesn’t feel like something that’s completely settled, but rather, something that continues to grow and develop. And thank you so much for saying my style is distinctive. That’s nice to hear.

“Some mornings … he sat … and listened as the birds began to wake. In those moments, he heard his father urging him to fly.” —Donnie from “The Balanced Side”

“Driving over the water gave her a sense of flying.” —Fay from “The Right Side of the Dash”

DAVIDSON: There are motifs of falling and flying throughout the collection—falling into trouble, falling in love, falling out of one relationship and flying into another, feeling called to fly, and having the freedom to fly. Falling rain, flying debris, falling bowling balls, flying down the highway. I heard you say once that “Chicken Little” was a favorite childhood story, the refrain of which everyone knows as “the sky is falling!” Tell us about how falling and flying relate to the stories of It Falls Gently All Around and perhaps to other writing you’ve done.

REEVES: I’m so glad you picked up on those images in the book. I don’t know, but I think stumbling or falling in life and then getting back up is the nature of being human and that because of it, people long for and look forward to uplifting moments. I’m talking about those perfect moments that may last only seconds but can inspire us to continue marching forward. This feels true for Donnie and Babbie, the two main characters, and truthfully, for all the characters in the collection. They fall, recover, and try to soar. Sometimes, however, if they soar too high, too soon, there’s an Icarus consequence. I’m not sure what it says about me that I loved “Chicken Little” so much as kid. Maybe I loved that she’s a Captain Happen in the story—that’s a Charles Baxter term. She definitely stirs up the barnyard and makes the story happen. Ha!

“He liked Duran Duran. She preferred Bon Jovi and Prince.” —Babbie from “It Falls Gently All Around”

DAVIDSON: Mostly alluded to, but sometimes mentioned, are the songs your characters dance to, as in “Sighting Dolphins” when the Knockers softball team celebrates their tenth anniversary, and the music they listen to inside eighteen-wheeler cabs driving west on I-10 or under the pines of the Bay Oak Trailer Park, “a heavy guitar riff, crushing the quiet of the early afternoon.” From Southern rock to disco to gospel, what would your playlist for It Falls Gently All Around sound like?

REEVES: I’ve never shared them, but I do have playlists for both Babbie and Donnie. The playlists helped me get to know them better. Donnie’s playlist is heavy on Southern rock and country. Babbie’s picks include many women artists such as Dolly, Adele, Aretha, and Bonnie Raitt. I think if I created a playlist for the book as a whole, I’d include Emmylou Harris, Jason Isbell, Alabama Shakes, ZZ Top, Mobile’s Excelsior Band, Joy Oladokun, Tanya Tucker, Marcia Ball, and some Lena Horne. I’m thinking about Horne’s “Stormy Weather.” And Babbie is onto something, I think, with her Bonnie Raitt pick, so I would add Raitt as well.

“… what Corinne saw as truth: people destroyed what they could not understand.” —Corinne from “Aphrodite Reclining”

DAVIDSON: Thematically, these stories are linked in terms of place and class, with place defining and revealing class in diverse ways, specific to the viewpoint the story is told from. There are many moving parts, one connected to another, all working together beautifully. Babbie thinks of “the pine tree side of town” as her side of town, simpler and less refined than the neighborhoods rich in live oaks and magnolias. In contrast, Corinne considers her privilege as complicated by her love of a woman, understanding that “circles could provide … but also prevent,” exclusiveness weighted against inclusion. What was it like to explore and negotiate all the connections and divisions? Did the characters guide you in ways that helped make sense of exclusion and inclusion?

REEVES: The characters often guided me. Corinne was a difficult one to write, though, until I realized her story hinges on her fall from grace, which happens because she is unable to live up to the expectations placed on her. Those expectations include marrying a man from her same or higher social stratum. She doesn’t marry a man, and her partner is from a class of people that some see as being beneath her. It was interesting exploring how Corinne is excluded. It became clear to me that her class standing is not only about money but also about conforming to a particular set of expectations and that this is one of the ways class operates to keep some people out and pressure others to remain in lockstep. Similarly, it was interesting to explore Donnie’s stories in which his brother and sister-in-law appear. Donnie doesn’t want to be like his affluent brother, and yet I think he wants his brother’s acceptance. Exploring those connections and divisions was exciting, but also sad at times. I could see characters almost connecting with others in the ways they most desired and then often falling short.

DAVIDSON: A trio of unrelated questions: (1) Which character would you most like to hang out with? (2) If these stories were made into a TV series, what actors could you see playing them? (3) Did any of the characters ever give you trouble, and if so, did you just lean into their direction or steer away from it?

REEVES: I’d most like to hang out with Deirdre or Fay. I honestly have no idea about who I would cast as that’s not my area of expertise, but Octavia Spencer came to mind for Deirdre, and Sally Field for Fay. Ha! Maybe Adam Driver for Donnie and an unknown for Babbie? But regardless, I hope people will read the stories and imagine their own casting! And yes, some of the characters did give me trouble, namely Rowan, Claire, and occasionally Donnie, but yes, I leaned into those challenges by continuing to write their stories. I also sometimes let those stories sit for a few weeks while I worked on something else. Doing that often helped me gain more clarity about a problem I was trying to work out in a story.

DAVIDSON: What directions do you see yourself taking in the future, with literary influences and aspirations in mind? Story collection, novel? New landscapes or maybe others familiar to you that we just don’t know about yet?

REEVES: I’ve been working on a novel for a while. It contains two time periods. One starts in Texas and ends up in Georgia, and the other starts in rural Alabama and ends up in New York City. The novel works with some of the same themes but adds new ones around truth/falsehood and independence/dependence.

Ramona Reeves lives with her wife in Texas. In addition to winning the 2022 Drue Heinz Prize, her work has appeared in The Southampton Review, Bayou Magazine, Texas Highways, Pembroke, Jabberwock Review, and others.

Karin Cecile Davidson is the author of the novel Sybelia Drive and the story collection The Geography of First Kisses, winner of the Acacia Fiction Prize.  Originally from New Orleans, she writes stories set mostly in the Gulf Coast region.

The post Her Beautiful City: An Interview with Ramona Reeves appeared first on Newfound.

Margo Orlando Littell

Parents and children, husbands and wives, the newest of acquaintances. No matter how intimate the relationship, people find ways of both connecting and damaging one another, and the harm is intentional just as often as it is offhandedly cruel. Love, death, hope, and heartache play out across the country in Karin Cecile Davidson’s story collection The Geography of First Kisses, winner of the Acacia Fiction Prize. The landscapes that serve as backdrops to these characters’ lives are varied and richly rendered, and readers familiar with Davidson’s prose from her debut novel Sybelia Drive will recognize its evocative poetry in these stories. But make no mistake: the beauty of the lines is gentle cover for the emotional evisceration she examines here.

“French toast, he calls it. He is from the heartland and doesn’t understand his mistake, that the French would never call this toast, the importance of words and meanings as lost to him as the sad rusks of baguette he dips in a bowl of beaten eggs and cream and nutmeg.” –from “Skylight,” page 23

MARGO ORLANDO LITTELL: Though some of these stories are set in glittering cities, others are set in less glamorous locales—Tulsa, Oklahoma; Columbus, Ohio; Dynamo, Iowa. What inspired you to use these places as settings for your stories? What about them sparks your imagination? And how do the various locales work together to shape this collection–its geography, if you will?

KARIN CECILE DAVIDSON: Place is pretty much where I begin in stories. Somewhere for my characters to stand, to feel their feet strike the ground, to understand the roll and curve of a road from the seat of a Harley or the cab of a Ford truck. Another starting point is the memory of where I’ve stood so that I can portray a story’s setting with as much detail as possible. There’s always the research one can do to carry the idea of location, but having been there in person creates another kind of picture altogether. Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Columbus, Ohio, and, well, not Dynamo, but an idea of Dynamo, Iowa—these are places I’ve visited and lived.

Tulsa surprised me. I was swayed as much by the sight of oil rigs across the Arkansas River on what had once been Cherokee land as by the city’s Art Deco architecture, the Praying Hands of Oral Roberts University, and the Golden Driller at the Expo Center entrance. I think I wrote that Tulsa story, “We Are Here Because of a Horse,” so I could live there for a while, if only in my mind. I was completely taken with the city.

I live in Columbus, an incredibly livable city, which lies within the easterly swath of fly-over states and the part of Ohio that is topographically uninteresting to most but holds the secrets of ravines and multiple watershed systems, as well as a thriving art and cultural scene, and some amazing places to eat and drink. “Skylight” was written when a good friend dared me to write an Ohio story, convinced I couldn’t do it. I won the dare but cheated, not entirely able to leave New Orleans and the Gulf Coast out of the narrative.

And I once lived in Iowa, but not in the fictional town of Dynamo. The state was as golden as it should have been—sun, corn, pigs, smiles, and even the Amana Colonies with their giant farm breakfasts and woolen mills and rolling fields.

To me, these places seemed perfect settings for stories, and to be honest, I didn’t set out to write the pieces to be part of a collection. Rather, they called to be written, and in the end had similar themes—searching, longing, hoping, loving. Think of that barn scene with Howdy in “Sweet Iowa,” when he’s surrounded by tractor parts, tools, the Allis Chalmers manual, and the heavy scent of hay. Something as mundane as a barn isn’t mundane at all; it’s rich with possibility, all those details, right? Then add in tornado weather and the-stranger-comes-to-town complication, the stranger a Texas high-plains woman searching for a particular kind of pig. The reader might think, Really? So, yeah, Iowa works.

As far as these stories and the shape of the collection, I think they’ve created an atmosphere of Americana. A few stories travel as far as France and Berlin, but mostly they lie within the sweep of states from the Gulf Coast to the Plains on up to the Midwest. Like the patchwork of a quilt, perhaps one made from old blouses and damask tablecloths and faded denim and even Carhartt overall pieces, the stories and their locations are very different, nevertheless connected with indigo thread and patterned with the determination and direction of the characters.

MOL: There’s a kind of love letter to Louisiana couched within the violence of “The Biker and the Girl,” where the biker–usually moving from place to place–explains he always wants to return to Louisiana because it “felt truer, heavier, something he could understand.” For your characters, or for you personally, what about Louisiana, or the South in general, exerts this gravitational pull?

KCD: I spent my childhood in Florida and Louisiana, the beaches and bayous practically our backyards, places where we swam and went fishing and crabbing. Travel within the states and beyond and understanding other cultures has always been important to my family, and there was always the act of returning home. Eventually, the idea of home changed, a university career anchoring us in a landlocked state, but New Orleans and the Gulf Coast kept calling me back. We had family there, so visits were possible, but the idea of returning home evolved.

By way of writing, I’ve been able to return. I’m constantly returning to that riverbend corner where the biker meets the girl, to Florida backroads, to the old Highway 90 that connects the gulf states. There is something, after all, about the places where one begins, where formative years are spent, where one forms a foothold in the world.

Many of the characters in the collection are infused with a sense of place, of belonging—like Antoinette in “In the Great Wide”—or of yearning to be somewhere else, namely the place they started out—like Chloe in “Skylight.” Add to this the idea of home and its complications, how a nostalgic sense of place is not always realistic, how families aren’t always easy to return to, how a city’s infrastructural failures might seem like adventures to a child but are challenges to an adult. In the end, it’s the sway of New Orleans that still calls and my characters that get to answer those calls.

“Celia recalled how her father had read poetry aloud to her mother. How her mother would lie back on the couch and listen, and Celia, still awake in her room, would listen too. Words like chicory, daisies, restlessness–words so pretty, so odd and ordered, still echoed inside her.” –from “Soon the First Star,” page 92

MOL: The devil is in the details, the saying goes, but in these stories it’s the soul that’s housed in the details. Specifics pile up across these stories, and within the stories; often, whole paragraphs are peppered with nouns as simple as they are evocative. In the first pages of the title story, for example: “the beaches were covered with rocks and sea glass and broken pottery” and “the metallic breeze carried traces of brackish water, diesel fuel, rubber boots.” Lines like this have their own rhythm and their own poetry. What images do you feel are most important in this collection? Which images were your guides as you created these stories?

KCD: The most important images? I suppose I don’t grant one more importance than another, for each story has its own, and there are many, that’s true—an imperfectly beautiful coastline, a flickering drive-in movie screen, the silhouette of a horse gone missing, jet trails seen through a skylight, a winding river road, the satellite image of a category 4 hurricane, a strand of pink rosary beads, the stunning sight of blue crabs, a courtyard crowded with books, the bristled golden back of a Tamworth pig, the brilliance of Cassiopeia on a December night, the depth of a gorilla’s gaze, milk-carton sailboats sent out into floodwaters, the fragility of a quail egg. The layering of tone and texture arrives out of images. The narrative of a teenage girl wanting more from life and getting more than she counted on arises from coastlines and sailing and desire. That of a woman caught in an abusive marriage is examined through an afternoon with her children in the ape house of the Berlin Zoo. The story of a young girl, sent to spend several months with relatives in the Mississippi countryside while her mother is hospitalized in New Orleans, takes on the attempt to understand how life and death are related.

Oyster shells, azaleas, halyards and half-hitches; scratched jazz records, a hidden bruise, a Voightländer’s shutter release; cotton sheets, a wooden ruler, a small speckled egg. With the collection of images, the bigger picture emerges, the story taking on color and spectacle. Throughout the drafting, it’s really the characters who decide on their images; I just go along with their desires and then provide descriptive details that create scene and tension and forward movement. There’s an act of trust here, following along in what seems like the dark to me, but obviously is completely lit-up and clear to these fictional personalities.

“‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Seriously, how can a person live in a city for nineteen years and not call it home?’” –from “Skylight,” page 22

MOL: Many characters in this collection lack rootedness, lack even the desire to be rooted or the knowledge of how to become rooted. In “Skylight,” Chloe has lived for nineteen years in Ohio without feeling like it’s home. In “One Night, One Afternoon, Sooner or Later,” a girl wonders how long she’ll want to stay in the bayou. Tell us how the theme of wanderlust–or dissatisfaction–shapes the characters in this collection.

KCD: Thursday’s child has far to go, right? Seems to be a theme in my writing, in this collection. Whether they’re feeling emotionally and/or physically removed from the place they want to be, or challenged by the place they’d like to escape, the characters seem to find a way. To survive where they are, to embrace their surroundings, or to consider flight. In “Skylight,” the story written on a dare, Chloe finds a way to stay in Ohio, to feel content, but whether her solution is imaginary or real, well, that’s up to the reader. After all, shouldn’t one question the existence of Gus Van Sant, a pug named Lily, a Super-8 camera giving her reason to track the rest of her life? And in “One Night,” in truth a tale of revenge, what about Lors, poor confused Lors? Hers is the angle of a super-complicated triangle that seems to lose its sharp definition. She’s tested by her relationship with both Jude and Micah and with each of them separately, enough so that, despite all the fun they’ve been having, she doesn’t know if she can stay. Yearning for what was always familiar, longing for something that’s new and within arm’s reach—these desirous situations occur again and again, the characters having to negotiate rough territory, not just geographically but intellectually, as well as by way of their egos and desires and recollections.

“He had to consider the value of recklessness in a world that moved too slowly.” –from “Sweet Iowa,” page 56

MOL: In “Sweet Iowa,” farmer Howdy is drawn to a strange young woman who appears in town, a woman who attracts attention when she tosses a pig over a bar–she’s reckless in a way that captivates Howdy. But accepting this woman into his staid life is a kind of recklessness too, opening up a new set of possibilities for Howdy’s future. Do you think recklessness is always an opportunity for transformation? What other characters are impacted by rash decisions or unexpected paths?

KCD: Recklessness might be seen as the antithesis of routine, and Howdy’s life is nothing but routine. What Morgan brings him is another dimension of what is considered routine, and perhaps that is what disturbs him by the story’s end. Lors’s reckless summer makes her question the direction she’s been taking, but her considered transformation is off the page. Antoinette’s flirtatious route toward becoming an unwed mother definitely transformed her, but is it recklessness that causes her baby daughter Daphne’s transformation? Perhaps recklessness doesn’t always lead to subtle change or deep metamorphosis, but in these stories, there is evidence of just that.

“I could tell by her hard, questioning stare that she’d never seen a bodiless baby before. And Daphne hadn’t always been this way. In fact, I was just getting used to it myself.” –from “In the Great Wide,” page 75.

MOL: “In the Great Wide” is a story that carries its surreal elements as casually as you might carry a handbag. The narrator, Antoinette, reacts to the “slow disappearance” of her baby with concern, but there’s also a suggestion that this sort of event is no cause for alarm; she compares her bodiless baby to a “bright, child-size bowling ball.” Tell us the origins of this story, and how you came to tell it with such a stunning degree of matter-of-factness. How did your writing process or approach change when confronting this story, if it did?

KCD: “In the Great Wide” was written after Hurricane Katrina as an homage to New Orleans. Sometimes one writes stories that come out of a helplessness that is bound with love. When I was growing up in 1960s and ’70s, rainstorms constantly tested the city’s drainage pumps, and when a hurricane came to town, even just to skirt the area, the streets were flooded. These were the kinds of floods we rode through on our bicycles, not the kind that created mass devastation. After Katrina when the pumps failed and the levee breached and the city lost too many souls, New Orleans pulled herself up mostly of her own accord, with no thanks to government assistance. The city had the mind to rebuild, and slowly it did, but in the meanwhile, it didn’t have the body to get things back to where they’d been. Too much had been lost, folks had to grieve, many left or were forced to stay away. It took years and then decades to see normalcy again, the spirit of the city challenged but persevering.

Hence, bodiless baby as metaphor.

It’s strange to think that I had no idea what I was doing when attempting the first thoughts and words of the story. The process took years with a lot of resistance, and though Antoinette questioned her faith, I had faith in her, and so I pushed her character harder and harder. And she pushed back. Add to this the fact that I hadn’t lived in New Orleans for decades, though family and friends did, and the pull of place, especially this place, remained strong. By the fifth draft or so, I recognized what was happening. A city already veiled in fabulist threads, it didn’t seem beyond believing that in this fictional New Orleans cream-colored roses could appear overnight from sidewalk cracks, bowling alleys might be mysteriously draped in fishing nets, a baby’s body might diminish until all remaining was her sweet little head. And that Antoinette could be, as you’ve pointed out, “matter of fact” and in near denial of her baby’s slow disappearance. Her refusal to reveal her true panic is heavily clothed in how she questions faith, her Catholic upbringing, and in the end, I followed her where she wanted to go. The story is her journey. She is rebuilding her life, and life is dealing her a deck of cards that’s missing more than a few cards. She’s more than a bit jaded, and while she understands that miracles happen, for her the truest miracle is her child.

MOL: An element of carelessness mars many of these stories, in that adults fail to offer or fulfill appropriate care to their children. There are adults who yell in “We Are Here Because of a Horse”; adults who leave in “Soon the First Star”; and children buffeted by illness and tragedy in “Bobwhite.” Parents are a child’s primary landscape. Why are you compelled to examine characters who faced its decimation?

KCD: Most of my writing veers toward what is realistic, and in real life, wayward parents or those who are more concerned with their own reflection do exist. I’m interested in the landscapes that children come up with and gravitate to when parents are less attentive, even neglectful. There’s the adage among writers, “give your characters trouble,” right? And there are those characters we bump into, begin writing, and then wonder, Whoa, what happened to you? This would be more the case with Meli in “We Are Here Because of a Horse” as she is now an adult and still dealing with the neglect and seeming abuse of her elders. The fact that she changed her landscape early on by following a horse she’d sighted from her bedroom window and that she is still searching for that horse is compelling. Celia in “Soon the First Star” and Carly in “Bobwhite” have their landscapes changed for them, as their true parents cannot care for them, and so, others do instead.

I think the word “decimation” reveals a lot about these characters. There is destruction done to Meli’s childhood, but she resists and holds onto the spirit that, in essence, keeps her alive. It’s heartbreaking how many children in this world must survive their own childhoods. In her story Meli is still surviving hers. In “Soon the First Star,” Celia’s self-destructive mother sends shockwaves into her child’s world. I wanted to examine this through Celia’s viewpoint and see the kind of hurt and anger she felt. Thank goodness there’s rescue for Celia when her mother’s childhood friend Nicki steps in.

Decimation is also defined as “the culling of wild animals,” and here I can also reflect again on your question about images as guides when creating these stories. I remember watching a friend’s teenage brother defeathering and dressing bobwhite quail when I was about eight or nine years old, Carly’s age in “Bobwhite.” This image stayed with me over decades, and I wanted to write about it. Carly and Robbie and their relationship came from this moment, but so much more happened in terms of exploring death through a child’s eyes, especially as it appears when pinned up against life. The idea of the hunt and how the tiniest bird went from flight to death and eventually dinner was a gorgeous, terrible thing to examine, to define and try to give reason. Cast this inside a hazy Mississippi autumn in which a child is sent away from her New Orleans home because of her mother’s failing heart. Studying the connection of life and death from a child’s perspective is challenging, and yet I went there.

MOL: This collection follows your debut novel, Sybelia Drive, and some of its characters inhabit the same landscape. What landscape is inspiring–or might inspire–your next novel or stories?

KCD: I’ve nearly finished drafting a novel that covers a lot of landscape not yet approached in my previous books. I had been working on another story collection set—of course, where else?—in the Gulf Coast states, and I had a few stories completed but felt dissatisfied. So I began an entirely new story which wasn’t a story at all, but this novel, in which a character from one of those stories showed up, only she wasn’t a teenage girl but a woman in her thirties embarking on a road trip. The working title is Highway 61 and covers ground from Grand Marais, Minnesota, all the way down to New Orleans, where that highway ends. I love how the Mississippi River and its tributaries run alongside this highway nearly the entire way, and yes, I’m still returning to New Orleans in my fiction without even meaning to.

The inspiration for the project came from Jessica Lange’s beautiful book of black-and-white photography by the same title. For each photograph I wrote a paragraph and eventually for clusters of photographs taken in New Orleans, I wrote scenes. The photographic inspiration evolved into a fictional world for which I studied maps and details of towns, many of the places already known along with their trees and birds and contrasting topographies, from white pines to live oaks, from chipping sparrows to great blue herons, from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico. Oh, and throw Florida in, because I just couldn’t help myself. In the book’s beginning tones, think of a tempered version of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. Structurally, think of Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies. Then add in a good amount of love and loss, and don’t forget recklessness, an old Ford Fairlane, biology, fraternal twins, and a band called The Lovers. I must admit, I’ve loved writing this book. It’s nearly there!

 
 
Karin Cecile Davidson is the author of the novel Sybelia Drive and the story collection The Geography of First Kisses, winner of the Acacia Fiction Prize. Her stories have appeared in Five Points, Colorado Review, Story, and elsewhere. Originally from New Orleans, she lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Margo Orlando Littell is the author of the novels Each Vagabond by Name and The Distance from Four Points. She lives in Pittsburgh.
 
 

The post Words So Odd and Ordered: An Interview with Karin Cecile Davidson appeared first on Newfound.

Patricia Q. Bidar

1. On a Sleepless Night, Your Slumbering Spouse Beside You

Ever think about how another student from the film department introduced us, and how I started calling you late at the adult theater you managed and how you’d chat with me between ticket sales? Ever think about the night I visited you at your apartment with all those Russian housemates? How someone brought out firecrackers, and I made a dumb joke about calling the police and was met with those hard, pale stares? How we went to your room and you said I shouldn’t joke about the police because of the firearms? How you told me you were a professional typist and played me the outgoing voicemail message and it was a funny take on your business name, “Finger King,” that had out of work pianists pounding out final papers for rich college students?

How you’d brought a six-pack into your room and how we started fooling around how you couldn’t get hard, and how just before you passed out I asked for cab fare and you gestured to your wallet and how all it contained was your driver’s license—I was suspicious enough to check your unusual last name but there it was on the government document—and some expired coupons for cat food? How a few days later I got you to come to my apartment and you couldn’t get hard and I asked if it was me and you said, not in a million years, and made me cum with your fingers?

And how you, carless like me, accompanied me on the airport shuttle to SFO for a visit to my folks? And how we got there early and started drinking beer and kissing and how I missed the plane even though we were sitting in the waiting area right in front of the boarding gate?  And how you ghosted me for real after I returned, and I obsessively called your number from pay phones all over the city? 

Remember how you kept that stupid Finger King/Pianists outgoing message on there? And how, one rainy night in front of the La Brea Tar Pits, I called you one last time and your outgoing message was clearly for your girlfriend, who had a Catholic-sounding name like Mary Theresa or Catherine Anne? How you pleaded with her, weeping, in your outgoing voicemail message to give you another chance? How you swore I was just a lost soul whom you’d helped at school and who wouldn’t stop calling you and how you promised you were still pure for her, for Mary Tess?

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2. The Finger King’s Best Times Are Behind Him

In his salad days, he’d studied literature at Santa Monica College. His professors had been encouraging, especially once they heard he was from San Francisco and had once managed an XXX movie theater on Market Street; that he’d known Hunter S. Thompson, then famously serving as the night manager at the Mitchell Brothers on O’Farrell.

The Finger King had been a big drinker of beer or vodka shots out on the patio with his Russian roommates or every night alone in his room. He had a girl back home, a nice Catholic girl who was saving herself for marriage. That was okay with the Finger King.

He practiced on pretty, insecure girls from the theatre or film department. Grew adept at eliciting orgasms using his hands. The joke was that The Finger King was also the name of his business. He was a nimble typist, and prepared papers for other students.

Every month, he’d take the Greyhound back home to San Francisco. Church, then brunch with his widowed father and of course Mary Theresa. “I’ll leave you kids to visit,” the old man would say after they ate, and retire to his room for a lie-down. The Finger King and Mary Theresa would make out with The Wide World of Sports turned up.

The Finger King grew up without a mother. This pulled a certain kind of woman to him and would for most of his life. One such woman, twelve years his senior, became his wife and the mother of his children. He thinks of those adult theater days as his misspent youth. “But I sure had fun!” he always adds with a wink and a grin before his mouth settles back into its slot-like form.

Now, alone in the car on I-5 after driving his daughter to college in Berkeley, he thinks of a certain blue-eyed girl from the film department. How she used to call him from phone booths all over town. He never answered. He’d been so loyal to Mary Theresa he’d never done anything with these girls but fool around.

He can’t recall the name of that little gal from the film department, with her dimples and sad eyes. The way she’d curl her body around him as he used his fingers on her. How he’d put her in a cab afterward and return to his vodka and his tippity-typing. Maggie, was that it? Marnie? Suddenly, with the marriage and child rearing part of his life behind him, it seems crucial for him to remember. He has to pull over at Mission San Miguel and pace the hushed flagstones there, a self-pitying sob caught in his throat; it nags at him so much. 

He’d had a cat back then, too. At least, he thinks he did.

Bio: Patricia Q. Bidar is a working-class writer from San Pedro, California. She lives with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area. Connect with Patricia at her website (https://patriciaqbidar.com).

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KB Thors: Can you tell us about where you’re from, places you’ve worked, and where you’re based now?

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl: I’m from Ísafjörður, northwest of Iceland. It’s a town of 2,700 people and it takes about five hours to drive to a town that’s bigger than that. I live there, most of the time, but I spent about a decade away–mostly Berlin and Helsinki, but also different places in the Nordic countries–and even since I’ve moved back, I’ve spent serious time in Vietnam, Honduras and Sweden. Ísafjörður is the best–lively, cultural, with a fabulous movie theatre, beautiful library–but everything else is rather poorly placed in relation to it.

KB Thors: Your books have been translated into German, French, Danish, Greek, Swedish, English, Spanish, and Croatian, with editions in Macedonia and the Ukraine forthcoming. Your novel “Illska” (Evil, 2012), translated into French by Eric Boury and published in France as “Illska: Le Mal” in 2015, was shortlisted for the Prix Médicis Étranger and Prix Meilleur Livre Étranger, and received the Transfuge award for best Nordic fiction. How have you found the process of your work being translated by another person? Are there noticeable differences in how it has been received across languages and readerships?

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl: Absolutely. Not only does the success vary (the French absolutely loved “Illska,” the Danes couldn’t have cared less) but what it is that people pick up about it and put into focus is different. Some places will see it as a reckoning with history and other places will see it as a portrait of the present. Most will probably recognize that it is both, but the emphasis will be different. I’ve seen reviewers from different countries draw absolutely opposite conclusions about some of the “messages” of the book. For instance whether or not the Holocaust can or should be compared to anything else. The book discusses it but doesn’t say. People do read themselves into books a lot, their preconceptions, and will see their own arguments more clearly than the counterarguments. And then they blame the book for their own ideas.

Another difference is of course the grasp I have on the different languages. I can read Swedish with ease, most Danish, and I have some German and some French. But Greek or Ukrainian – not only can I not read the translation at all, but I’ve given up on google-translating the reviews (also because I have better things to do than obsess).

As for being translated by different people, it’s always a new experience. Sometimes I never hear from the translators at all (which I guess would constitute a re-enactment of the same experience) but when I’m involved it’s been anywhere from a very intense professional cooperation, to friendly relaxed communication, to making a friend for life.

KB Thors: Your translations into Icelandic vary in subject and genre from Anthony Bozza’s book “Eminem” to Allen Ginsberg’s poetry to Lucy Pebble’s play “ENRON.” In 2008 you were awarded the Icelandic Translators Award for your translation of Jonathan Lethem’s tourettic novel, “Motherless Brooklyn.” What compels you to take on a translation project? What do these works have in common?

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl: Not much. In 2007 I “quit my day job” which meant for a few years I would just take any writing job given. I’d thought that since I’d translated Ginsberg and Lethem I could have some say in what I’d translate from then on, that I’d get more interesting projects, but the marketplace apparently wanted transient, forgettable fun. Which is fine for plowing through on a lazy Sunday but reading crime-fiction at the speed at which one translates is the pits. Lots of bad books were translated in this time. Some of those projects were fulfilling and provided an opportunity to learn new things, such as the structure and style of thrillers and crime fiction, or the floral musings of the more kitschy grown-up literature. Others were just mind-numbingly stupid – racist even – and resulted in me giving up translating for a few years as I’d started to find the process more than a little dissatisfying. For a while that meant I was even poorer than before but eventually things started to even out. And when I didn’t feel I was doing it just for the cash I felt I could start translating again. “ENRON” was actually the first thing I translated after that break.

If I never needed money, I’d probably only translate poetry. Not because poetry is so much better than prose but because as a translation practice, I so thoroughly enjoy it. It’s just crazier – there’s more more there.

KB Thors: “A poem about the art of standing in a gallery,” your poem and self-translation in Newfound’s Spring 2020 issue, is from your book” Óratorrek: Ljóð um samfélagsleg málefni” (2017). What made you decide to translate selections from Óratorrek yourself?

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl: I’ve just always been doing it. When I was starting out as a poet, I was living abroad a lot. And I would want to participate in literary scenes. I was very much interested in the stage as a place for poetry (or just the “place” in poetry itself – the “room” and the “audience” and transgressions of both). And that meant I needed to have my poems in English – or “English as a second language”, what the late great Finnish poet, Leevi Lehto, called “barbaric English – the largest language in the world, with little literature to speak of”. Usually I’d know that a text was about to be ready by the fact that I’d get the urge to translate it. Later I would use translation as a tool of composition – Hnefi eða vitstola orð (Fist or words bereft of sense) was composed in these circular translations between Icelandic, Swedish and English, looking for interesting deformations in the gaps.

KB Thors: How does the translation process differ when the material is your own writing?

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl: Well I get to make all the changes I want, of course. And when translating unpublished poetry (and even when translating published poetry) I can retrofit those changes to the “original.” It’s more akin to actually just writing.

But then my English is what my English is. I’m not a native speaker and it’s not perfect. While looking for a publisher for these translations I’ve emphasized that they probably need a good native editor and, in some cases, probably a re-translation. In any case I don’t feel as an authority, as I would in Icelandic. If you say the language of a poem I write in Icelandic is shit, I can tell you it’s not. I know the tool I’m using and what it does is what I want it to do (mostly). In English I’m a bit more lost. If you tell me I’m shit, I’ll just apologize and move on.

KB Thors: “I can’t help but read “A poem about the art of standing in a gallery” as more than a poem and translation thereof. For the record, I think this poem in your English is a great read, in general and translation-wise. There’s a driving directness to it, though the language is nuanced. Given your formal dexterity and penchant for experimenting, how do you view an exercise like self-translation?

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl: All of the poems in Óratorrek were written for an occasion. Well, the first one, which does stick out a bit, “A Poem for My Daughter” just came about as a Facebook-rant when I was feeling particularly irritated (and a bit self-righteous, I guess). But in it I discovered a rhetorical contra-sensical voice that I felt like exploring. And I felt it could be a vehicle through all sorts of language, from love to war to sex to art. A way of traversing through political thought without engaging in its rigid inanity, while still portraying the rigid inanities and, at least at times, sincerely engaging in political thought.

As a form these pieces are somewhere between being poems and an essays or speeches. For a few years anytime anybody would ask me to write a poem or an essay or a speech I’d suggest I do one of these pieces. “A Poem About the Art of Standing in a Gallery” was originally written in English and performed in a gallery in Sweden, at an exhibition of watercolors from the Guerlain Foundation collection. Hence the perfume allusions and references to actual work in the collection. I was a part of the exhibition for a few hours when they were doing tours. I would stand in a corner facing the wall reading it over and over again, quite loudly. It was a very strange experience for me. People are so quiet in galleries. I was never sure if there was one person or fifty or no one in the room. And then slowly my voice was giving in also. Which is fun and something that I’ve always worked with in reading, that breaking point, be it from screaming or speaking fast or even whispering or just cracking.

I tend to like poems that are not quite poems also. Poems that could be mistaken for something else. And I categorically don’t subscribe to the whole “most meaning in the fewest words” definition of poetry.

KB Thors: What are you working on these days?

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl: Translating poetry! I just finished a new novel – it’s literally being distributed tomorrow. So I’ve decided I will now finish three poetry translation projects. Hopefully. At least one of them. First one is an anthology. I’ve been translating poetry for 20 years now and I did an anthology about 10 years ago, but it was published print-on-demand through Finland and the logistics of distributing it ended up being a nightmare so very few people saw it. But I have about a thousand pages worth of poetry translations – contemporary and 20th century, mostly – that I need to sort through and organize and edit and throw away and see what’ll fit where etc. Second is translating “Tender Buttons” (I’m about a third in) and lastly translating Inger Christensen’s “Alphabet,” I’m also about a third into that.

K.B. Thors is a poet, educator, and translator from Treaty 7 land in rural Alberta, Canada. Her first book, “Vulgar Mechanics” is out now from Coach House Books. Her translation of “Stormwarning” by Icelandic poet Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir was nominated for the PEN Literary Award for Poetry in Translation and won the American Scandinavian Foundation’s Leif and Inger Sjöberg Prize. She is also the Spanish-English translator of Soledad Marambio’s “Chintungo: The Story of Someone Else.” Proud to be Newfound’s Translation Editor, she is also the 2020 CBC/QWF Montréal Writer in Residence.

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I was driven by the forces that create and break language: sound, migration, immigration, alienation, speech, accent, imperialism, place, longing, myth, consciousness, archetype, universality, magic.” – Shilpa Kamat, “Saraswati Takes Back the Alphabet”

Poet, visual artist, and educator Shilpa Kamat contends with the violent legacies of imperialism, her lived experience, language, and threats of erasure in her chapbook, “Saraswati Takes Back the Alphabet,” finalist for the 2018 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize. In “eleven,” mid-way through the chapbook, Kamat writes, “the demons were never/ evil just regular/ people who prayed.”  

The content of Kamat’s life—the experience of thinking across multiple languages, and being rooted in a particular lineage, Konkani, while having grown up elsewhere—is woven into the chapbook. She is concerned with nuance and layers, integrating her fascinations with magic and the sociopolitical without oversimplifying the past. Kamat is committed to exploring where magic still resides despite every violent attempt to erase it.

In the chapbook’s title poem, Kamat writes: “when she is done/ everyone/ uses plural in the singular/ stuffs their heartbeat/ into the first pocket”

Patrycja Humienik: When did you begin writing “Saraswati Takes Back the Alphabet?” Is there an image, idea, feeling that initiated the project?

Shilpa Kamat: Many, perhaps all, of these poems were written in an effort to transmute pain while at the same time, creating space for the experiences that often slip through the cracks of (personal, global) history. I was driven by the forces that create and break language: sound, migration, immigration, alienation, speech, accent, imperialism, place, longing, myth, consciousness, archetype, universality, magic.  

The “speech migration” poems emerged while I was writing in an old growth redwood forest a few years ago. My experience of my voice, of how I lost access to it in my childhood, emerged as I wrote. I should note that I am a highly emergent writer. The content of my life springs up.

The poems that span some of the history of my lineage (as well as my interactions with other histories) began in response to a painful discussion. I found myself exploring cultural pain, ranging from misunderstandings or micro-aggressions to outright oppression and cultural/linguistic erasure. I am rooted in a specific lineage, but I grew up in multiple places, and the histories of those places also inform my experience.  

Many of the Konkani and “Konglish” poems that I included in this manuscript are some combination of surreal and lyrical. I wasn’t sure what to do with them when I wrote them since the market for experimental Konkani poetry seems nonexistent. When I was pulling together this chapbook, I saw that there was finally a place for them to “fit.”

Humienik: Your manuscript generously provides snippets of Konkani history. Is poetry a way you stay connected to that history and lineage? Is poetry a part of your family history?

Kamat: I love the connective potential of poetry for many reasons, including the potential for exploring my linguistic and historical roots while remaining present.

As a toddler, I spoke fluent Konkani in each of my parents’ dialects. My experiences in school led to the silencing of my Konkani for many years. Although my parents never stopped speaking Konkani at home, I didn’t speak back to them in Konkani again until adulthood.

Now, my accent is somewhat Americanized, and I generally only feel comfortable conversing with my family members or with children—but I still think in multiple languages, and the connotations of Konkani words and phrases inform my daily existence. Even during the long period of silence that I mentioned, I explored writing and performing contemporary poetry in Konkani.

I want to keep my language alive in my world as well as to claim my own expression of it, which may differ from expressions in other regions. I resent the ways in which the beasts of monolingualism erase diversity and stifle creative potential. I want something better for the planet than the cultural/linguistic extinctions that we are facing (along with plant/species extinction). Poems and songs help.

Humienik: You contend with a large swatch of justice issues in the chapbook. You also named, as one of those many “forces that create and break language,” universality, myth, consciousness, and magic, indicating this as a place you naturally go. Can you say more about this fascination, and how you see these forces—magic and the sociopolitical—as connected?

Kamat: The sociopolitical intersects with magic only in the places where it doesn’t seek to constrain, to rigidly define, to contain within linear boundaries. Whenever people’s interpretations of language, of the world, grow too literal, the potential for magic fizzles. Fundamentalist attitudes neutralize this potential. Even radical/intersectional theories, for all their scope and idealism, can lose magic when their interpretations are overly rigid/polarizing. When trying to access the parts of the consciousness in which the potential for magic resides, nuance is essential.

There is magic in the social, in the natural—and when I say “natural,” I include the bodies and psyches of human beings. There is magic in the wisdom and worldviews of indigenous communities that forces seeking to dominate or colonize often strip away.

In navigating my work, I am aware of the play between Western philosophies that elevate diversity and Eastern philosophies that elevate oneness/union. There are stories of shapeshifters, of rebirth, in which superficial aspects of identity are revealed as ephemeral rather than essential. There are stories in which ancestry, profession, migration histories, etc. are vital. Frequently, those mired in a single orientation will condemn the other as “wrong”; I prefer to wrestle my way to the best of both.

Earlier, I described how the majority of poems in “Saraswati Takes Back the Alphabet” explore and transmute pain. I would say that there is a magic in moving through and beyond the pain of history, in inviting unheard or silenced narratives to express themselves, in creating new narratives or assembling bridges between narratives—however we can lead ourselves to wholeness, balance, renewal.

I wanted to break language so that fluent readers of English would experience the dissonance that those struggling to break into the language might experience.” – Shilpa Kamat

Humienik: I was drawn to the play with organic form in your chapbook—the way you use space between and within lines and also between letters. Do you remember when you began to play more with form in your work? Has form always been a fascination for you as a poet?

Kamat: I am a visual artist as well as a poet, so yes, I am as fascinated by the form of my words (and the ways in which their placement may inform readers) as I am by their sounds. Both image and sound can inform meaning, and I strive to understand and stretch these elements within the constraints of typed language.

When working with pulling sounds apart in “anoutofcontrolsilence” (from which I pulled the “speech migration” poems), I wanted to break language so that fluent readers of English would experience the dissonance that those struggling to break into the language might experience. I wanted readers to slow down, to pull together sounds in the way we all had to when we were first beginning to read. Speech precedes sound; by decomposing speech, I wanted to parallel the breaking of the world as old growth languages and forests alike are threatened. The form of each poem reflects my experience: its density, or its meandering, the way it breaks off. The content extends to contain collective experience as well.

My more “historical” poems explore form in other ways, such as the “glitter” poems (“It Became Theirs!” and its Konkani equivalent). I wanted the scope of these experiences or histories to sprawl across the page while also being contained by the page.  

Humienik: Do you find your visual art converging with poetry, or are those creative practices distinct for you?

Kamat: I often engage in interdisciplinary art, whether I am incorporating dance and/or visual art into a literary performance, illustrating my writing, or incorporating the written word into visual art pieces. There are specific questions that emerge when considering illustration as an art form. For instance, as I approach the illustration of my speculative poetry manuscript, I want to intrude minimally upon the reader’s imagination. But when my writing is entering my art rather than the other way around, the pieces are generally more abstract than representational—the writing, in a manner, becomes the “illustration.”

Humienik: How is this project in conversation with your current work? What are your current fascinations?

Kamat: While reading my works in progress, such as my verse novel or my speculative fiction YA novel, people have often commented that they are “global” or “international” in scope. I recognize that my upbringing in multiple countries and states, with multiple languages and dialects around me, informs all of my writing. Not all of my writing works with explicitly diverse content—for instance, I recently found myself working on a series of existential poems about old school arcade games. Yet, my background informs my worldview, which I believe must be present in everything that I write.

It has also been noted that I tend to infuse my work with mythical themes that are grounded in reality—in the title poem of the chapbook, for instance. I have written a children’s book centralizing the experience of a child whose parents are in the middle of a separation. While I was driven to write this story after years of working with separating families, seeing/hearing the emotional experiences and needs of children, the character’s turning to imagination/mythology to make sense of her experience is something generally unseen in books exploring “serious” content— but this is a place where I naturally go.

Humienik: What helps keep your writing practice alive? Do you have any rituals that help ground you in poetry? Do you have writing mentors, collaborators and/or a writing community?

Kamat: I always have several projects going on at once, and generating content is never an issue. This doesn’t mean that I can always manage to be consistent. I may be distracted by lesson planning, by the needs of family and friends, by the demands of my respiratory health when fires in the region are out of control.

There are times when my writing practice goes through periods of dormancy. The leaves fall off my projects; they are naked, subsumed by snow. Even then, there are ways to engage—touching the roots, working from the core, allowing the surprise of flower buds emerging on trees in the middle of winter.  

I find spiritual/connective practices vital. I do best when I am walking daily in nature. I may practice yoga or meditate or work with mantras. Ideally, I am engaging in some kind of centering practice and working on one of my writing projects (or a stand-alone piece) every day, even if only for five minutes.

There have been periods of time when I was writing a certain amount of words or pages per day, tracking the quantity. There are times when a poem or a project emerges spontaneously and times when I have to make myself sit down and get to work. I can enjoy writing in forests, but I frequently write indoors. Sometimes, I listen to music while writing, and sometimes I don’t. I find it important to be adaptable and to meet the needs of each piece.   

I appreciate being around other artists, engaging in artistic dialogue, and occasionally practicing with others. I find at a point that readership—any type of readership, even if it isn’t terribly critical—is vital to completing books and novels. I have a few MFA cohort members who are local as well as close friends who are visual artists and dancers, and I particularly appreciate their community. I appreciate the diversity of my networks; too much insularity of any kind can begin to feel debilitating to me as an artist and as a human.

I resonated with the centrality that Anzaldúa’s work ascribed to people who were previously considered peripheral/marginal: those of us who walk between multiple worlds, borders, boundaries …” — Shilpa Kamat

Humienik: Who are some of the poets that make up your poetic lineage?

Kamat: At one point during my MFA program, I worked on a short project presenting poet/freedom fighter/educator Rabindranath Tagore, recognizing that most poets around me had never heard of him. Most translations of Tagore’s work, including his own, do not adequately transmit the poetics of his original Bengali creations. I do not know Bengali, and I find that the English translations often have an archaic/formal tone that I need to read beyond to appreciate the content, which ranges from love poetry to critiques of imperialism. As a poet and educator who is concerned with social and ecological justice issues, I deeply resonate with Tagore’s transmission of spirit, even if I cannot understand what is reputedly the best of his poetry. I love his writing on education, that he never wrote a formal treatise, that he used his Nobel Prize money to fund his student-centered school in which young people learned outside beneath trees. I love that his art supported his teaching. And some of his poems do speak to me—but that is not the point.

I will also name Gloria Anzaldúa. I loved “Borderlands/La Frontera” when I read it in college. I was refreshed by the fusion of the “academic” and the spiritual, by the normalization of Spanglish (anyone who grew up with multiple languages in the home may relate), by the casual inclusion of poetics, by her reclamation of the indigenous and her unabashedly claiming her lived experience. I resonated with the centrality that Anzaldúa’s work ascribed to people who were previously considered peripheral/marginal: those of us who walk between multiple worlds, borders, boundaries; whose lived experiences are largely unrecognized; whose ways of knowing are not respected or understood by academia; who are on the “wrong” side of imperial power dynamics. I particularly appreciate her poetry that is channeled from the soul rather than the spirit. I would say that Tagore’s work is more rooted in spirit; in general, his poetics seek to rise and elevate while Anzaldúa’s descend and embody.

Shilpa Kamat is a writer, educator, and healing arts practitioner based in Northern California. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, where she was awarded the Marion Hood Boess Haworth Prize. She was a finalist for Tu Books’ New Visions award. Her work is informed by her intersectional identities, her spiritual journey, her diverse communities, and the natural world.

Patrycja Humienik is a trilingual Polish-American writer and performance artist. She works in service of underrepresented grad students and faculty at the University of Washington. Patrycja collaborates on performance projects with people in solitary confinement through letters via Dances for Solidarity. She was a finalist for the 2018 Kay Murphy Prize for Poetry. 

The post “Saraswati Takes Back the Alphabet”: An Interview with Shilpa Kamat appeared first on Newfound.

Rennie Ament’s work has appeared in Colorado Review, Sixth Finch, Redivider, Yalobusha Review, minnesota review, The Journal, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2018 Yellowwood Prize in Poetry from Yalobusha Review and a nominee for both the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. She’s also received fellowships from the Millay Colony, the Saltonstall Foundation, the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in New York City.

Jamie Wagman: I would love to hear a bit about your writing life and your process. What’s influenced your writing? When did you first know you were a writer, and what has your journey as a writer been like? What delights and what scares you most as a writer?

Rennie Ament: Poem-wise, I don’t pay attention to semantics at first. I’ll give myself some kind of formal constraint (a sonnet, “e” the only vowel allowed, words can only come from a specific source text), but mostly I want to play in language and surprise myself. It’s fun to scribble gibberish until something sounds both strange and true.

Nonfiction is great for flipping through if your thoughts rut. Hildegard von Bingen’s “Physica” has been near me for a year now. Mostly a 12th Century catalog of herbal remedies, she also gives advice like: A mouse is hot and has insidious habits and devilish skills. Since it always flees, its flesh is harmful to humans and not much use as medicine. But, if someone having epilepsy falls on the ground, after he gets up, place a mouse in a vessel of water. Give that water to the person to drink, and wash his forehead and feet in that water. This should be done each time he falls and he will be cured.

—I love that book.

I’m always researching alongside the scribbling, but no one will ever know how long I spent reading about mouse water or whatever when I’m done. Most of “the facts” I collect invisibly buttress poems.

Growing up, my mom was singing unless in conversation or asleep. I knew dozens of folk songs before I could read. I liked the songs with nonsense choruses best. Maybe because of those songs and when they happened to me developmentally, my syntax leans musical?

Sort of related—since I can remember, when falling asleep sometimes I see a word floating above the bed in neon. DILATE or BUNKER or CORAL. The word changes, but the sensation is always the same: eventually, the word compresses, comes down into my mouth, and weighs my jaw down. I feel blissed out and pass out.

I started writing around when I learned to read. I liked the typewriter clacking and got steady attention for my stories in school. I wrote mostly fiction and nonfiction until college. Got lucky with my first poetry teacher. She was a human rights activist who could convince you a higher level of consciousness was attainable only through the reading and writing of poems (poetry is a cult).

In one class, I remember being asked to describe, plot-wise, what was happening in an Emily Dickinson poem. Had no clue. And that was embarrassing—to admit I didn’t explicitly get it. But I could taste how dense the poem was. CF bedtime word snacks.

What scares me? Describing beauty. I don’t run from flowers in life so why in poems? It must be connected to gender performance anxiety and not wanting to be a woman who writes about gardens. Wild—to be afraid of saying hyacinth. I have one garden in my book and that garden is a succulent patch.

What else? Inauthenticity, though I don’t know what it means to write an “authentic” poem.

What do I love: Cognitive dissonance. Oxymorons. Absurdity. Research. Learning through writing poems. Discovery in general. Trying to create my own shorthand.

I have my obsessions and they pop up in all the poems like a gopher infestation. Gophers hold things together. Or horses—Horses are forward motion.
— Rennie Ament

Wagman: Some of your work here has appeared in Hysterical, Bone Bouquet, cream city review, and Yalobusha Review. Can you speak to the creation of this chapbook? The title is “French Braid.” Why did you choose this title? Can you speak to the repetition of home and references to horses throughout your work?

Ament: Initially I thought, “You need to do your book’s hair.” Then I culled the chapbook from the full-length first collection I’ve been working on. There were ten sections in that manuscript at the time. “French Braid” is three of those sections braided together: short, skinny little poems about home interwoven with prose poems that respond to lines taken André Breton’s “Ode to Charles Fourier” plus a group of poems I think of as cascading poems—quatrains and tercets that break down across the page.

I wanted to see if the poems did better together. They did. I have my obsessions and they pop up in all the poems like a gopher infestation. So. Gophers hold things together. Or horses—

The horses! Horses are forward motion. My thoughts are, at their best, horses. The underlying word driving most of my poems is Go. My thoughts are, at their worst, also horses. Dumb and snuffling. I don’t know. Sometimes you gotta climb into a horse.

I write about home because I don’t understand what or who home is and I’m always trying to root while galloping.

Wagman: So many lines from “French Braid,” stay with me–from the line about sitting shiva for Pangea in “My People The Horse Thieves” to “I stopped reading men” in “Under the Never Failing Anesthesia of Banners.” How does gender function in your work?

Ament: I hate this question. It’s an important question. I wish this question on all male-identified writers.

A few women-identifying poets I admire say their consciousness is genderless on the page. Being a floating eyeball sounds freeing. But there’s something in me that also wants to slam the door on that option. I’m not a confessional poet (or a writer of apparently personal poetry—a better descriptor from Sharon Olds); I use vaguely conceptual, Language-oriented techniques to generate writing. But I still feel entitled to pillage my own life at will. Without access to subjectivity, I would feel rootless, ahistorical.

I’m not on a mission to write polemical poems about misogyny. But it’s useful to write with an enemy in mind. Who am I quoting?

Anyway, if you write about women you write about men you write about desire for men (if you lean that way) you write about power you write about powerlessness you write about systems of power you write about abuse of power and all the -isms enter the picture, hopefully.

Read Jehovah’s Witness religious pamphlets. Read piano tuning guides. Read an outdated copy of the DSM. Buy random, cheap used books. Stock up your language pantry.
— Rennie Ament

Wagman: What advice do you have for aspiring poets?

Ament: Read interviews with living poets you like and they’ll lead you to books and writers you’ll like.

Read as many poems in translation as possible!

Read Jehovah’s Witness religious pamphlets. Read piano tuning guides. Read an outdated copy of the DSM. Buy random, cheap used books. Stock up your language pantry.

People can’t help but rub their own taste all over your work. Don’t let one person’s hot take crush you. I’m floating in an Olympic-sized pool of accumulated rejections as I write this.

Wagman: What is the function of poetry today, do you think?

Ament: Poems should complexify, add nuance to, interrogate the status quo re?

Jamie Wagman is an Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and History at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana.

The post “French Braid”: An Interview with Rennie Ament appeared first on Newfound.

I smile in response, looking down at my hands as I dry them. It doesn’t take but one glance around the building surrounding us to know that money is a stark marker between types of people. “I think you’re right, it does depend on personality.”

As he walks away, I think about all the times I’ve seen him striding around the dealership lot, always with a purpose. The fine lines around his eyes and the slightly hunched-over posture belies a tired soul. Yet, though another of my coworkers dismisses his abilities—due to his age, of course—but I’m not so quick to judge. I find that the most capable of us out there are more comfortable away from the spotlight, the responsibilities, and even the big money.

Later that day, as I’m commuting back home, I consider the cars around me. Their drivers’ behavior, as well as the states their vehicles are in, tells a story. A story much like the one told to me earlier, which ended in the life lesson shared over the hand-washing station in a high-end dealership.

Years ago, my senior coworker had been traveling across the country with a few friends. They stopped at a farm one day to rest. A farmer enlisted their help and afterwards offered to pay them for their time and effort. “You only had to take one look around the place to know he needed every cent he could earn,” my coworker had told me. “So we politely declined, telling him it was all we could do in exchange for some food and a place to rest.” The farmer, however, would not hear of letting them go without proper appreciation. Though he was near destitute, his heart was still generous enough to show his fellow human beings his gratitude.

Thinking back to a few hours earlier, I knew that such an experience made a great impact upon my coworker’s outlook on life. I feel it does not matter how much or little you have in the bank. It’s the inside that matters most.

It’s tough to write this story; I feel corny and preachy. Numerous songs and bad rom-coms play off this very idea to jaded audiences all the time. We’ve all heard that money and happiness are two concepts not often associated with one another, but does that mean to be happy you have to swear off ever being comfortable—or, dare I say it, rich?

When I think about where I’ve come from and how much I’ve worked to get where I am, I think that money can be a great tool, but one that should be used with a sense of conscientiousness. Both my boyfriend and I know the value of a dollar and as much as we would love to spend all our paychecks on nice things, this life brings responsibilities. We are not all so fortunate to have others in our lives to relieve some of those burdens for us.

Truth be told, I used to be bitter about the amount of money I had spent on my family. The one resource I worked hard to obtain, meant to ease the stress of my loved ones, was a tool turned into a weapon against me.

I now realize that as much injustice as was done to me, I also allowed myself to endure. With money now on the table, problems would disappear from my life like bubbles popping on a summer day. That’s what I thought would happen.

Like hammer blows upon forged metal, the cards we are dealt show no mercy. As players, it is up to us to make our best out of what we’ve been handed. No matter how forcefully that hand comes to us.

So far this year, I’ve experienced many new things, some of which have broken me. My only friend in this life besides my beloved journeyed away from me and the one job I considered to be my salvation tore at my mental wounds and exposed shameful parts of me. In fact, it made me turn against the world, pushing away the one who loved me most.

I cannot tell you why the story of the impoverished farmer stays with me, even now. Why a man who fights the earth day and night would open his hand towards his fellow man and give what he seemingly cannot afford to part with. I felt shame at worrying about the trivial issues I surround myself with on a daily basis when I heard about this act of kindness. We are all meant to fight our own battles, but perhaps we can learn a few things from the struggles of others.

You may consider this post to be an opinion on the larger aspects of life that we all struggle with, but I encourage you, rather, to ponder your own life instead. What do you hold before you, what standards do you create for yourself? Who are you living for?

Some of us are so lucky to learn these answers while we are still living.

Rebecca Henderson holds a Master’s in German and a Bachelor’s in Creative Writing. Best expressing herself through the written word, she enjoys the smell of burning rubber and can recite the ABC’s of the automotive world upon command. Rebecca hopes to shift your world perspective through her words, because looking out the same window every day hardly makes for an interesting life.

The post Money and Pride Reveal Who We Are appeared first on Newfound.

A vague feeling of dread makes me turn my attention to commiserating, as if blaming society will help me climb the financial ladder. It could also be that I live in a college town, where there are more degrees than jobs available.

As I scan the job listings each day, I find that the market holds either extremely lucrative jobs that require more experience or menial, physical-labor jobs that are more suited to a time when I was earning my degree, not after having taken possession of it. It’s hard to be excited for the future—a home to call our own, a garage we can both work in and no neighbors to share the most intimate experiences with—when you can’t make more than $30,000 a year.

About a year ago, I stumbled upon Gary Vaynerchuk, a man who has made quite a name for himself on social media, and found some hope. While we don’t share too much beyond the fact that we love to create, I picked up Vaynerchuk’s book “Crushing It!” to see if I could glean any further wisdom. I learned that Gary V. took a company that was doing rather well and seized upon every opportunity he could to build it into the $60 million business it is today. You’ve got to respect a guy that has accomplished that much.

I’ve realized that, as he states, we are in the age of a digital revolution. Having a presence on social media has changed in our society—it has replaced the old ways of obtaining a job and getting your foot in the door. (I’ve personally avoided sites like Facebook altogether because my family seems to drum up enough drama the way it is. Call it personal preference, but I never saw the value in social media.)

My eyes have now focused upon a new facet of social media: LinkedIn and Instagram. Those are two platforms most businesses ought to invest in. Gary V. talks a lot about the benefits of being on those social media platforms  but the true value that lies in his book “Crushing It!” comes from the emphasis on being an entrepreneur.

“Personal branding” is a hot phrase in these times, and critical to making it in the digital world. Just take a look at the number of young people who’ve made their mark on YouTube. It is a profitable and sustainable business model to create and post YouTube videos. I repeat: it is profitable and sustainable to shoot video of yourself and your friends and post it online.

Isn’t that amazing?

This is exactly the stance Gary V. takes, and it’s one I’m excited to hear. I rely on the internet to grow my own on-the-side business of being a writer and editor, and to hear that someday I could potentially quit the menial job I work—one that rots my brain instead of enhances it—and make it big doing what I love . . . it’s like hearing that you can take a vacation, and yes, pick anywhere and the whole trip is free.

An immense feeling of joy rises up and the ambition to achieve great things bubbles inside my nerves.

What really matters here is that we’re in a time of shift, a space where graduating from college and moving straight into the firm you interned for isn’t as common as it used to be. Employees don’t commit to spending two decades of their life in one career. Turn-over rates might be higher, sure, but people are finding out that having to put your head down and plow through the corporate minefield isn’t a requirement anymore. If you can find a good opportunity and work as hard as is humanly possible, those stacks of paperwork and corporate bum-kissing days are long gone.

Right now, I’m hardly making rent with my writing and editing, but someday, somehow, I’m going to support myself and my boyfriend on my ability to fill pages with swooping strokes of my pen and creative character-block landscaping. I advise you to check out Gary V.’s book the next time you’re in a bookstore or the library. To start, watch a few of his videos. The time of making yourself known online is now.

Here’s hoping I land myself a better job. I just might have to create my own space to do it.

Rebecca Henderson holds a Master’s in German and a Bachelor’s in Creative Writing. Best expressing herself through the written word, she enjoys the smell of burning rubber and can recite the ABC’s of the automotive world upon command. Rebecca hopes to shift your world perspective through her words, because looking out the same window every day hardly makes for an interesting life.

The post Who Do You Work For? appeared first on Newfound.

A few years ago I worked an intensely stressful job where I handled hundreds of thousands of dollars (of someone else’s money) a month. I decided I needed some change. I thought if I changed my career, I would change the stress. If I would change the stress, I would change my life.

I became a massage therapist. I’d wanted to be a massage therapist long before I earned my bachelor’s degree, and I believed the idea that few other jobs could be so stress-free. I’d be allowed to work in a darkened room, with soothing music and relaxing smells all day long.

How come this lyric still weighs heavy on my chest?

I uprooted my career to a less stressful career. My job description is to decompress and relieve stress. I introduced qi-gong, yoga and meditation in my weekly (if not daily) routine. How is it that I still find myself in a place I don’t want to be? How am I still stressing? Why do I feel so stuck?

I understand that there will always be some amount of stress in one’s life, I started to think, to dig, and to ask: What is it? Why am I still in a place of high stress?

It hit me. I thought just changing my career would do it. I thought adding a maybe once- or twice-a-week routine of stress-free time would be the magic cure!

Change? Well, it can be scary. It can be daunting. It can be discouraging. But it’s coming. It’s often necessary. And it can certainly be encouraging, too.

It can also be done only halfway.

I only partially changed.

I didn’t change what I eat, what I watch, what I buy, who I spend my time with, what I spend my time doing, what I think, how I speak … I could go on listing these minor changes I didn’t even think about looking into to help lessen stress.

I’ve been saying for years that positivity breeds positivity, yet I haven’t been the most optimistic. Instead, I hold on to the concept that I often find myself some place I don’t want to be, I refuse (or I’m scared, discouraged, exhausted, ignorant) to change the place I find myself not wanting to be.

When I sat to write this blog post, I procrastinated and visited social media. And there it was. A quote. As if I needed a kick in the butt. It was along the lines of, How do you expect to get healthier if you stay in the place that’s making you sick?

Change isn’t always easy. Stress will always be there. We all feel stuck at times, and that is okay. Growth is also okay. Change is also okay.

If I want to feel better, I have to also help myself feel better.

Megan Andreuzzi is an animal lover and a traveler from the New Jersey Shore. She earned a degree from Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania, USA in Liberal Studies with a dual concentration in writing and a minor in theatre.

The post Change is Coming and That’s Okay appeared first on Newfound.

In May my boyfriend and I made the excruciating decision to put our cat, Tiger, to sleep. We made jokes about Star Wars but tears were falling from my eyes, dripping down upon quivering lips. On that Friday, it didn’t matter that I had two days off from work, or that the weekend proved to be sunny and bright. My world had dimmed.

Though his name had been Tigger during his stay at PetsMart, we removed a “g” from his name and gave him a sense of masculinity. To be honest, though, his sturdy build gave him enough cat cred that he didn’t want for much.

I think most animals end up choosing their favorites, no matter where they are. It just so happened, of course, that Tiger chose me as his human. He would lay on my bed rather than my sister’s and eventually, when I moved out to attend college, his little furry orange and white body followed me there too. My first apartment off campus didn’t allow pets, but as soon as one opened up across the street, in a pet-friendly zone, out came the cat carrier—and the curious meows as we drove to our new home together.

I worked a lot through college and yet I still had a smile in store at nearly midnight when I would trudge up the stairs to my apartment. Who would be sitting there peering through the door-length window but my little Squish? That of course was the (one of many) pet name I had come up with for him. Those golden eyes and twitching whiskers would stare up at me for moments before his form disappeared behind swinging blinds. Life’s problems seemed to fade as I cuddled with my furry little baby. I always felt a sense of love as I walked to the car in the morning and his twinkling eyes slowly closed behind the glass. It was a kitty goodbye wave if I ever saw one.

All of these thoughts and memories washed over me that Friday. The same apartment we had been living in was the only one he had escaped from for a short time. Intent on following after my boyfriend, I believed he had slipped out one night and couldn’t find his way back. It was the day I moved in, and one of the most horrible, sleepless nights of my life. He came back home the next day, but I have never cried so much in my life.

Until that Friday.

How do you look into a loved one’s eyes and tell them that this is the best thing for them, that you’re only thinking of their well-being? How do you know when it’s the right time, and that they approve?

I’ve never experienced loss of this kind before. I could hardly focus on my work, and driving home took every ounce of my concentration.

My boyfriend agreed to drive us to the vet that Friday afternoon, and if it weren’t for the knowing voice in my head, I’m pretty sure I would have had Tiger out of his kennel and on my lap. His small form seemed so tiny next to the memories of the burly cat that flooded my mind. Nights of waking up due to his weight upon my chest and tiny kitty paws in my stomach were ones I wanted to recall and live again. Tiny nose kisses and tickling whiskers—those were all things I missed more than ever in those final moments.

The back room at the vet was cozy, but expectations hung in the air as much as they would at a normal doctor’s office with hospital beds, medical equipment and sterilized floors. I focused upon the curious furry form in the carrier and tried to hold my emotions back. That floodgate would soon fail.

Perhaps it was the discussions we’d had, the empathy and compassion of the vet, or the simple fact that I knew I had to let go, but the decision itself was easier to make than I had imagined. It felt right in my heart.

Our final moments together are too precious and emotional for me to put down here, but I know in my heart that my Squish is up with all the little kitties in heaven, probably walking across angel chests and snuggling up to their porcelain legs. Fluent in German, I would often talk to him in rambling Deutsch, all loving words of course. “He’s going to teach those kitties up there some German,” I joked to my boyfriend. The glassiness in his eyes must have been mirrored in mine.

I still can’t get rid of the chair Squish used to sit in and I still see him around the house at times, but knowing he is no longer in pain is a comforting feeling, even as I miss the soft touch of his darting tail and the cold, wet tickle of his pink, one-freckled nose. So while I bawled my eyes out and hugged his tiny form to my chest, I knew that in this instance, I wasn’t so much saying goodbye as I was letting go. There’s a song that has been comforting to me in the month since. As the lyrics go, per my recall, “Come to teach us, then they leave us, to find some other soul to save.”

Here’s to Squish, my kleines Popo, Captain Shtinkpants. May God watch over you.

Rebecca Henderson holds a Master’s in German and a Bachelor’s in Creative Writing. Best expressing herself through the written word, she enjoys the smell of burning rubber and can recite the ABC’s of the automotive world upon command. Rebecca hopes to shift your world perspective through her words, because looking out the same window every day hardly makes for an interesting life.

The post All Souls Day: Putting a Beloved Pet to Rest appeared first on Newfound.