Gary Percesepe

In the following interview with poet and philosopher Gary Percesepe, Andrea Lee reflects on the sources and influences of her new novel, Red Island House; the enduring beauty, poverty, and legacy of colonialism in Madagascar; the unique challenges of a Black American woman confronting cultural differences in a remote African nation; Jacques Derrida’s notion of survie as linked to notions of inheritance, memory, guilt, forgiveness, and the unforgivable; and whether Madagascar has a future. The New York Times ran an excerpt of Red Island House, which Newfound readers can find here. The daughter of a Black pastor who grew up in a prosperous Black neighborhood in Philadelphia, Lee is currently writing a memoir with the working title, Lincoln Went Down to the Nile.

GP: Andrea Lee, welcome to Newfound. Red Island House is so many things at once: an epic novel set in the remote African island of Madagascar; a look at neocolonial ravages in one of the poorest countries on earth; a deconstruction of the idea of “Paradise”; a narrative of a Black American heroine confronting her ancestral continent. What inspired you to write it?

AL: The novel grew out of my experience as a sojourner in Madagascar–that’s to say, someone who has visited the country every year since the late nineties. For a long time I resisted writing it because I felt my knowledge of the country was too shallow. As you know, I live in Italy, where the Indian Ocean is a popular tropical destination, and my family and I came to Madagascar purely as vacationers. Madagascar is one of the most beautiful places in the world, a huge Indian Ocean island with astounding biodiversity and a unique cultural mix, and it was easy to be captivated by the coral beaches, the lemurs, the baobabs, the intricate mixture of indigenous peoples. It was also impossible to ignore the fact that the country, a former French colony, is one of the world’s poorest, and carries the scars of centuries of foreign exploitation. Underneath my enjoyment I felt a queasy guilt at my own privilege.

As always, though, I was looking and listening, gathering up anecdotes from those coastal places where Malagasy and foreigners mingle. One night we ate in a pizzeria called Libertalia, with a pirate painted on the wall, and there I heard a local legend about a shipload of French and English pirates who found the coast so beautiful that they built a crude settlement of the same name: a brawling, “liberty”-minded colony that scandalized the local tribes and was finally eradicated in slaughter and flames.

That 200-year-old tale pushed me to write my novel. For a long time, I’d been intrigued by the trope of tropical paradise: first, that places so described often have a colonial past, and second, that modern foreigners who settle down on palmy beaches often find, not Arcadia, but existences full of misadventure. Behind the hotels and dive centers in Madagascar, I saw the ugly evidence of hyper development, sexual tourism, pillaging of resources.

So my Madagascar observations inspired stories, some of which appeared in The New Yorker. And then I joined them together into a larger narrative, a novel with a theme of neocolonialism. I wanted to explore what happens when humans try to exploit paradise: a parable of the Fall of Man. My working title was Paradise Twisted. To unify the novel, I created a single setting: a big villa, the Red House, built by foreigners on an edenic islet in Madagascar. I named the islet “Naratrany.” In Malagasy, the word means “wounded land.”

GP: I was fascinated by the physical description of the Red Island house itself, with floors that look like blood. You described it to me once as “a discount Tower of Babel.” How did these images of the house come to you?

AL: Traveling in the Indian Ocean, I saw the huge Italian villas of Malindi, and other grandiose European vacation houses, and I was struck by their vulgarity. On my first visit to Madagascar, we stayed in a decaying beach villa built in the 1950s, the last decade of French colonization. It was by far the grandest building in a community of fishermen and cane workers, and I immediately equated it with the big house on a plantation. That house had a gloomy, haunted atmosphere; I had horrible dreams there. The floors were painted a deep red common to a lot of old European houses in the region, but to my imagination this color irresistibly suggested bloodshed, an accumulation of old crimes. So, the Red House came into being, an emblem of human greed and colonial depredation. I intended the place to be–like Manderley, or Tara–an almost living presence.

GP: The main character in Red Island House is Shay, who is deeply conflicted on many levels. The “arc” of her character in this novel is fascinating. It is easy for you to relate to her?

AL: Shay is a unique literary character, a Black American woman confronting cultural differences in a remote African country. Her interior journey is the thread joining the vignettes that make up Red Island House. It’s easy for me to relate to her; through her I wanted to express an aspect of myself–my reaction to Madagascar, which ranged from a confused feeling of kinship with people who looked like me, to a deep shame at my own entitlement. I envisioned her as perceptive and adventurous, married to an Italian but deeply attached to her Black American heritage; so I made her an expatriate professor of black literature. Still, for all her learning, Shay is thrown off balance by Madagascar, and that conflict drives the narrative.

In her story, I wanted to play with another colonialist literary trope: the swashbuckling adventure yarn, where an explorer battles his way through a savage land. As a child I loved H. Rider Haggard and his genre, and always longed to see a heroine who was more like me. So I decided to subvert the old stereotype of a white man in a pith helmet, and create a Black heroine of the diaspora, who goes deep into the unknown continent of her ancestors. As the years pass, she gains humility and wisdom. The greatest challenge she faces is having to confront her own privilege as part of the developed world, her personal heart of darkness. And Shay does encounter “savages,” but in general their skin is white.

GP: The vivid descriptions of smells, tastes, sounds, and views made me feel as if I had spent a year in Madagascar. Beyond this, the book is a compendium of detail about the culture of the country. What research did you do for the book?

AL: As I said, I hesitated at first. In this period of public discourse about appropriation, the project seemed a bit presumptuous. So, I decided two things. The first was to focus on the in-between world of resident foreigners. The second was to offer respect to the country by researching history and cultural detail, thus avoiding the typical American tendency to see African countries as an undifferentiated mass.

Madagascar has one of the richest literary traditions of any African country–the first literary review in Africa was founded in the nineteenth century by Malagasy writers. I read poetry and prose from authors like Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo and Naivo (Patrick Naivoharisoa), as well as translations of the ancient national oral epic, Ibonia, and oral poetry like the Malagasy hainteny. I read foreign missionaries’ records, and the journals of Dutch slavers in the Indian Ocean. I read the eighteenth-century General History of the Pyrates by Captain Charles Johnson, which recounts the myth of Libertalia.

And I explored outsiders’ fantasies about Madagascar, such as seen in early letters of Paul Gauguin–did you know that he first planned to live there, instead of Tahiti? And then, there is Hitler’s horrific plan to exile Jews to Madagascar. In Noel Coward’s Private Lives, frivolous socialites dream of escaping to Madagascar, as does Natasha in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. William Burroughs’s surrealistic novella Ghost of Chance takes place in Madagascar. Throughout the novel, I include pieces of this information to honor the complexity of a country familiar to most people around the world only through the Dreamworks film franchise.

GP: You grew up as the daughter of a pastor of an historic Black Baptist church in Philadelphia. As a philosopher and pastor of a church myself, I sense a deep, though not obvious, spirituality in this novel, particularly at the end, which I found deeply moving. I want to ask you what part does the sense of the sacred play in it? And do you feel that there is a kind of redemption operative in this novel?

AL: To open the novel, I borrowed a quote from Naivo, one of the foremost young Malagasy writers: “Madagascar is a sacred country, though at the mercy of outside interests.” And certainly, to me at least, there is an intense spirituality diffused through the air of the place. This may connect to the fact that, besides Christianity and Islam, one of the official state religions is Animism, which lends a sense of soul life to the landscape. As someone who grew up in a religious family, I sensed this atmosphere immediately–and I also felt that the damages wrought by human-induced climate change and foreign exploitation were a spiritual violation.

The novel ends with a look at the future and the new life it brings. Although there is loss and destruction, there is also birth. And birth is always a sacred event, bringing with it, however briefly, a primal sense of hope. I wanted to suggest the idea as well that the profound violence of colonialism is always in some ways accompanied by the creation of a new culture–a mixed culture–that springs up inevitably in spite of the bitter facts of conquest, enslavement, destruction, racism, classism, plundering. As Shay is forced to recognize, no culture colonizes another without being subtly colonized itself. So Red Island House does not have a happy ending, but it offers the redemptive sense that humanity survives and evolves.

GP: As you know, I’ve written about the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In our correspondence, you mentioned Derrida’s notion of survie, which in Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas is linked to notions of inheritance, memory, guilt, forgiveness, and the unforgivable. Shay, of course, is an academic who would be familiar with these broad themes in the Western tradition. I’d love to see literary critics and philosophers pick up on these themes in your work. Is there ever really a post in post-colonial? As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” What Ibram X. Kendi calls “racialized capitalism” is ravishing the island, along with the rest of Africa. The continent of Africa today is almost 90% unvaccinated for COVID. Of course, this question, posed from within the Christian tradition, cannot even be asked apart from the notion of hope. Another way of asking this question is, what hope is there for Madagascar today?

AL: To me, Derrida’s survie in general suggests the capability to witness and endure–to accept–paradox. I mean the Tiresian gift for contemplating both sides of the coin at once: past and present, self and other, life and death, male and female, oppressor and victim—and, as you have said, forgiveness and the unforgivable. By the end of Red Island House, Shay is approaching a glimmer of this kind of visionary acceptance.

As for the future of Madagascar, I think that hope is a subjective thing when you are dealing with a largely marginalized country of 30 million people, most of whom struggle to survive on less than a dollar a day, an island nation already enduring the ravages of climate change, where thousands in the famine-ridden Southern regions are reduced to eating locusts. As you have suggested, neocolonialism is alive and well, in the form of sex tourism, environmental degradation, and Wild West-style plundering of resources by kleptocratic politicians allied with foreign states. Yet, at the same time, those Malagasy who are surviving have an almost magical resilience and creativity: the country has a high literacy rate and is one of the most digitally advanced of any African nation, while the capital, Antananarivo, is home to an exploding art and music scene. There is an incredible young population–the median age in Madagascar is twenty–that is very future-minded, striving against all odds for a place in the contemporary world.

GP: These are complex themes you address. Was it difficult initially to identify an audience for the book?

AL: I think that in the industry there was an eagerness to pigeonhole it as a very different kind of book: a more conventional novel about love, marriage, and travel, against a flat, exoticized tropical background. In fact, I was advised by an experienced friend that it was best not to mention the word “identity” or “colonialism” in my book discussions, as it might hamper marketing! I found this very frustrating–yet now it seems that the book has reached its proper audience: readers interested in exploring cultural collision and the legacy of history in one of the most beautiful and least-known countries on earth.

GP: Andrea, you are currently writing a memoir. What can you tell us about it?

AL: In a way, I’m addressing the subject of Arcadian fantasies all over again. My memoir is called Lincoln Went Down to the Nile. It describes my childhood in the sixties and seventies in a prosperous Black suburb outside Philadelphia: an aspirational place in which the neat lawns of Lincoln Avenue did indeed run down to the Nile Swim Club–the first Black swim club of America. The doctors, ministers, teachers, and businessmen of the neighborhood were deeply involved in the civil rights movement, but also devoted to achieving the American suburban dream for their families. The result was a feeling of mingled comfort and uneasiness that influenced their children: an extraordinarily creative generation of Black writers, filmmakers, artists, and intellectuals, who grew up in that idyllic green space. I think the subject is particularly timely as attention has recently been drawn to the strong Black communities of the past, lost to deliberate destruction, or dissipated through increased possibilities offered by integration.

After writing about a place as far away from my American roots as Madagascar, it’s very moving for me to return to home territory. The more that I write about countries where I live as a foreigner, the more fascinating I find the small landscapes of my growing up. Even in the familiar there is always some deep mystery to explore.

The post Interviews • Andrea Lee appeared first on Newfound.

Who might Brielle be? Well, she’s my niece.

She won’t be the first person to call me “Aunt Megan.” She is, however, the firstborn of my only sibling. This was an exciting moment for our family. She is my parents’ first human grandchild. (Keyword human. I am the provider of the fur grand-babies.)

I was always told a baby changes everything. I never quite believed it; I’m not all warm and fuzzy when it comes to young children. I’m only warm and fuzzy when it comes to pets, especially dogs.

But then I held that new born baby…

I melted. I blush while saying that because six days out of seven, I don’t melt. Then I hold a newborn, and I melt.

This child. This human child. This head that is so precious, so soft, so little in the palm of your hand. And I’m gone. I temporarily float away to this place where flashes of things from my past, present, and future collide while anxieties are put on hold for even just a few mere seconds. Where I am caught between not being able to wait to watch this babe grow and not wanting time to slip on by. Where I resent casual conversation, small talk, and every day writing; how can I care about the weather when I have this beautiful baby in my arms?

Reactions to babies are interesting. Some might have gibberish fall out of their mouths. Maybe your voice changes pitch or drops to a whisper. Maybe you move those little hands and little feet so they open their eyes to maybe look at you or just simply look around to show you their beautiful, little eyes. Even for just one second. Even if they were sleeping. Even if the parent/guardians glare at you for trying to wake them up, like my brother and sister-in-law have. And I am pretty sure we all take a big, long wiff of that baby head, just to bask in the new baby smell. We give kisses in between stolen smells.

Fun fact: Brielle swatted at Aunt Megan when Aunt Megan did that.

I can tell you that this little girl was showered with love and gifts before she even had a name. I even learned to crochet so I could make her a blanket. She changed all of our lives without lifting a finger.

I cannot wait for late night ice cream trips, sugar loaded visits with Aunt Megan. (I think these will be visits,  not sleep overs.) I cannot wait for gifts of paints and easels, Play-Doh, art sets. I cannot wait for musical toys. Will Brielle be a star drummer girl? With Aunt Megan’s help, sure.

A baby can change everything. They can bring smiles, hopes, aspirations, motivation, inspiration. If I had a dollar for every time I heard that my writing will change, especially with the birth of Brielle, I wouldn’t have to work too hard.

But it’s true. I was a part of a Haiku a day poetry challenge for National Poetry Writing Month in April. All my Haikus were about Brielle the day she was born and after.

But it was true. My writing has changed. And my life is changing.

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 theater.

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Writing Space

Oftentimes writers designate a specific physical space in which to do their work. I’m sure many famous authors have spoken about this, detailing their preferred spaces, perhaps with mixed emotions. These places of creative development house the messy, frustrating, fulfilling, and countless emotions found amidst the writing process. Much like the way a kitchen embodies a proving ground for a chef, a writer’s space can be many things; most of all it must be encouraging and welcoming to the writer themselves.

Filling Space

Filling the space of a page can be challenging. Writer’s block anyone? From the most seasoned to the greenest of writers, the blank space of a page (electronic or physical), can seem both daunting and inviting. A painter or sculptor comes to their medium with a similar purpose of creativity, but for writers, there is a more defining element. For example, the general public today has, at one time or another, composed an email. Most working people know that an email to your spouse is quite different in tone than one to your boss or a colleague. Likewise, telling a story, as a so-called “writer,” takes much more than conveying a string of events. Let’s compare it to a comedic routine; it’s not from the joke itself that humor springs forth, but rather how the comedian tells it. How a writer fills the space of a page—that’s what defines an author.

The Span of a Scene

Space can be a work of imagination; it can even mean a different place in time and space, but we won’t get too complicated with talking about dimensions and alternate realities. Suffice it to say that stories must take place, that is, actually take a place as their setting upon which conflict can occur. Cinderella took place in a time where royalty reigned but Fairy Godmothers ruled over affairs of true love and happiness. Multitudes of wild west dramas have paraded and thundered across the American plains. Secret spies trek the globe, searching out evil and saving humanity. Even the tiniest creatures below our feet play out their own struggles. Our tales must happen within the span of a place and time, if only because we ourselves are bound by such restraints.

Spaces in Your Writing Sessions

Writing happens in time, and in steps. Most writers draft their ideas from inspiration or a prompt, and then revise and polish their drafts until any more revision seems unnecessary. Notice the phrasing here: the final copy is really just the product of the last revision. All the same, it takes time to write, from the shortest poem to the longest manuscript. Particularly in the revision process, time between sessions is most productive. Writers might need time to develop a plot, or consider the next scene, or even to learn more about their characters. Readers don’t necessarily see the varying space of time taken up in a writer’s life by the poem, novel, short story, book series, drama, etc.; they deal more or less with the end product only (with exceptions). And that leads to our final topic of discussion: the space of a work.

A Work in Space

Now, I’d like to think more metaphorically about space, in that writing—the best writing—truly occupies a space in the minds, hearts, even homes of the public. I mean domestic and foreign, too.

Put quite simply, an author creates a work, which he or she then publishes. This “copy” of the writer’s work is what consumers purchase, either through an electronic version or in physical print. Readers then enter the world of said work, the space in which the writer’s story takes place. Things get quite interesting from here!

The most popular writing at this point becomes something like social currency, a “trending topic,” if you will. The writer’s work goes from “book” to posters and art, promotional trinkets and toys, costumes perhaps, most likely a movie or television series, a veritable movement on social media as it shows up in conversations, in jokes and memes, an amusement park theme, a springboard for fan writing.

In short, the writer’s work, if successful enough, takes on a life of its own in the social sphere. No longer simply occupying space on the library shelf, it resides in the lives of society, taking its place in the chapters and footnotes of the stories of our lives.

Writing and “Space”

At this point, I could detail for you the incredible ways in which writing opens doors for anyone willing to submit to strenuous schedules, those patient and dedicated enough to contend with the beast Revision herself, the few souls who seek to carve out a different world view—

But my space is up, so I’ll leave you with this question instead: how do you think about space and writing?

     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.

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It was only when I started university that I began to record my ideas in a notebook. Before that, I never wrote regularly.  I suppose I had never taken my writing seriously enough to keep a mostly-empty book of bad and pretentious ideas. Now I take notes religiously, partly because I don’t want to forget a brilliant, million-dollar idea, but mostly because when I’m famous, I’ll want to see how much my old scribbles go for at auction.

When I began keeping notes, my eagerness was stronger than my powers of discernment. I wrote down any old nonsense. In them I see incredibly strange and ridiculous ideas, ideas I wouldn’t find in any of my contemporary notebooks. And this makes me wonder, have I become boring? Or, worse, am I just mistaking being boring for, well, being a more mature writer?

Perhaps the best thing to do would be to show you excerpts from my old notebooks and then work out why my notes have gone from scattered and strange to careful and controlled. So without further ado, my unedited and unashamed notes.

Notebook 1 – 2011:

1. Play Idea – Student/Teacher Affair

• A teacher is in love with a student
• Title: FISHING BY THE POWERPLANT

2. Adam and Eve Novella

• Adam and Eve rewrite, written as Adam talking to God (doctor?) until he leaves hospital having had a broken rib.
• Falling from a tree/snake related if possible?
• Meets Eve through this incident ‘from his rib’
• He is alone, no family, no job, no idea of the world – disabled? Unaware?

3. TOM THE WIZARD TRAIN

4. MEN – Woody Allen, Norman Mailer, Charles Bukowski

Notebook 2 – 2012:

1. Write a play about love and how bad it is.

Or, begin with a terrible play about love – play within a play – set in the future.

2. Plays

• Apocalypse – During then after
• Opening – ‘The scorpions are coming.’
• Halloween theme – two men in a pub. One realizes his friend is the devil.

3. Short Play

• Everyone wins the lottery.

4. Country Boys, episode one.

• He turns up at the door, cow’s giving birth and he has to do it.

Notebook 3 – 2014:

1. Dodo story

• Dodo at some point – time travel.
• Mainly Dutch sailor point of view with dodo sides.
• *But we don’t know it’s a dodo
• Preface it in the modern day, someone being hypnotized
• They’re hypnotized to remember the cause of their –
• Hypnotized by a charlatan who says it’s down to a past misdeed.

2. TV Drama

• A Hippie Commune
• Murder mystery? Invading stranger? Conspiracy? Supernatural.

3. The Fake Death

• He is in the field.
• HE MUST REPLACE THE OLD MAN’S GUN WITH BLANKS, or THE OLD MAN MUST TAKE HIS GUN WHICH HAS BLANKS.

For fear of revealing too much, I will end it there, and let the rest of my fragmented ideas and half-written mental bursts remain a mystery.

When I remind myself of these old ideas and type them out years later, I realize they aren’t so far from the thoughts I have now. Some of them I’ve dismissed more than once. Maybe it’s not that I become more mature or more boring. I might have just become more discerning. Perhaps my degrees and daily writing rituals have, in fact, made me better.

Good for you, you might be thinking, as you wonder whether this is MFA-sponsored content. For only the small price of two-years’ tuition, you too can rid yourself of bad ideas! But this isn’t the point. I have so many bad ideas. Maybe more than ever. It’s just that I no longer take any notice of them. That’s what becoming a better writer is about, isn’t it? Years ago the Adam and Eve novella might have made me think I’d hit my million-dollar idea. Now, however, I just think, I could never make that work.

I have also worked out that having bad ideas is unavoidable. Our brains aren’t supposed to be able to form perfect stories or invent meticulous fictional scenarios. They’re supposed to be able to recognize faces and be afraid of predators and remember where the tasty fruit was. We’re pushing the brain so far beyond its blueprints that it’s no wonder it occasionally misfires and gives us “TOM THE WIZARD TRAIN.”

Then we have to look at the flip side of this coin. Though it might go haywire enough to throw out bad sitcom ideas and vapid script premises, this also means it’s bound to throw out something good every now and then.

Having a whole heap of terrible ideas behind me is just fine. It has taught me to be more picky with how I spend my writing time (and to recognize a good idea when I see one). It’s made me see that having a lot of nonsense going on up there just means I have the kind of brain that is going to keep spewing out ideas, good and bad.

So whether you’re a young writer ashamed of your terrible ideas, a new graduate desperate for a new project to focus on or a seasoned professional, wondering if you’ll ever have a new idea again, I suggest taking a look through your old notebooks. If nothing else, it will remind you that you have a mind that is always working to find that million-dollar idea, even at the cost of having a lot of bad ones.

Josh King received his MFA from Adelphi University in New York, and now lives in the UK. He divides his time between writing fiction, drama and drawing comics.

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A quick Google search would have told me on the first hit: Pico-Union is a densely populated, low-income, youthful, 85.4% Latino, mostly immigrant neighborhood in Central Los Angeles, California.

Walking around the neighborhood I immediately noticed that I stood out. I felt like I was back in Cape Town, South Africa, where I lived on and off for a few years.

I was marked by so much more than skin tone in Cape Town, and then again in LA. My precious thrift store sun dresses, thick-rimmed nerd glasses, short hair, way of walking, the angle I carried my purse, and a million other factors I am not self-aware enough to name were arrows pointing the word OUTSIDER at me.

Perhaps less significant, I lived without many creature comforts on the road that week as well.

I slept on a mattress on the floor in an off-the-books hostel. After check-in I had doubts about staying there, but learned just how inept the AirBnB Help Desk is. So I stuck it out, and was uncomfortable. And aware of my surroundings. Every yap of the tiny dogs next door, the baby crying in the room next to mine, the drafty windows all made strong impressions on me.

Throughout the week, I exhaled moisture and breathed in smog. The flop house AirBnB had no hot running water.

It was worth it, so worth it, to be able to attend AWP 2016.

In a panel called “There and Back Again: Writing from the Road,” Kai Carlson-Wee spoke about the way traveling makes us pay attention, or makes us confront how strange and unfamiliar the world can be.

I felt this very strongly in LA, and would add that discomfort forces us to focus and look alive.

Every little detail of that week seemed so vivid at the time, and I was inspired to write it all down.

I left with the impression that every tenant in LA shares a poorly ventilated apartment with a lover who isn’t on the lease, at least one small dog, and a colony of fruit flies.

I savored some surprisingly great European pastries throughout my time in LA, paired with crappy coffee. It’s the Los Angeles water supply, I tell you. (Feel free to leave your jibes about my New Jersey residency in the comments; as long as I never have to drink LA water again, nothing can upset me!) I drank gallons of the stuff—this was a writers conference, after all.

I will remember my first AWP as a jittery, overstimulated newbie. Fascinated by everything, attending four panels in a row, wanting to ask every Book Fair attendee what they are reading right now. Constantly looking over my shoulder, staying alone in an area where I stood out. On edge, but paying attention.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 2008 with a degree in Journalism, and she’s been writing creatively ever since. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

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“What Cement is Made of” chronicles the inner city racial violence and poverty-stricken neighborhoods Donaghy grew up around. Donaghy has received awards such as the Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence for his most recent book “Start with the Trouble.” He was also awarded the Board of Regents Teaching Award from Eastern Connecticut State University where he currently teaches poetry and creative writing.

Donaghy was encouraged by his poetry professor at Kuztown University to share his work and believe in his voice, and now he encourages his students to do the same.

Taeler Kallmerten: When did you start writing poetry? Why did you choose to write poetry?

Daniel Donaghy: I didn’t start to write poetry seriously until I took Harry Humes’s poetry writing course at Kutztown.

The first poem I wrote for that class was about the tension in my father’s life, which often manifested itself as violence toward my mom. I was a struggling physics major at the time, not sure what was going to happen to me. I honestly cannot tell you why I signed up for the class. It didn’t fill any requirements or electives. I just wanted to take it, I guess.

The class after I’d turned the poem in, Harry asked me to stay after class. I thought, “Oh great. I can’t do physics. Now I can’t do poetry. Where am I headed?” After class, though, he said that he liked what was at the heart of the poem and named four or five poets (including Len Roberts, whom I think should be far more widely known) to check out if I wanted to learn how to write poems about family. I hogged Harry’s office hours for the rest of my time at Kutztown. I cannot overstate his influence on my professional and writing life.

“Why poetry?” is a good question. Over the years, I’ve come to understand that I’m addicted to the compression of a poem. I love the potency of poetry, the energy that the best poems capture and transfer in such a short space.

The poems I like most come alive when you read them aloud. You can feel the force of life behind the poet’s words. They believe what they’re saying is important and they’ve organized their words in such a way so that I feel that way, too. And when I connect with their ideas, emotions, and energy on that level, I feel less alone in the world. I feel more alive. Just like when I hear a great song. The artist taps into a vein he/she shares with me and gives me something I didn’t know I needed. I always go back to Rainer Maria Rilke, who says in his “Letters to a Young Poet” that if you don’t have to write, don’t.

I am rarely if ever compelled to remember poems that feel as though they were composed entirely in the poet’s head, that have no emotional urgency driving them. I’ve always been someone who has a lot of energy, so writing, for me, is a physical exercise. So is reading. And that physical engagement is often most intense for me when I’m reading and writing poetry.

Kallmerten: You are a professor and your past students describe you as being knowledgeable, patient, engaging, and even “awesome” in one of your reviews on Rate My Professor. One review left on the site claims to be someone who never wrote poetry before your class but now they describes themselves as a true poet. You inspire your students to create. Can you say the same for your students?

Donaghy: I can certainly say the same for my students, many of whom are far more articulate, poised, and mature than I was at their age.

Teaching poetry writing at a state school is a job that I always wanted to have. There is not one day, not half of one day, when I am not fully aware of how fortunate I am to have a position that allows me to help students, many of whom have overcome great odds to become the first person in their family to go to college, to believe in the value of their own stories and their own voices.

When I started college, I had no idea what I wanted to be, what was going to happen to me. I was this kid with a lot of energy, looking for someplace to put it. I tell my students on the first day that they may have signed up for a poetry writing or a creative writing class, but they really signed up for a voice class. We spend a lot of time talking about what that means, about understanding the difference between the language that the world imposes on us and that language each of us owns, which only we own, which no other person who ever lives will have access to. I don’t want my students to sound like me or any other writer when they write. I try to help them to sound like themselves.

Throughout the course, I keep reinforcing the mantra that that I may be their professor, but books (the books we talk about, the books they find on their own) are their teachers. We read writers with widely varying styles, and we talk all the time about reading like mechanics, like thieves, so that we can learn from great writers how to move people with our own work, how to use language and images and memories they’ve mined from their own minds and hearts.

Next, hear silence falling flat
as awning shadows

over Osage, where in every
boarded window a nail gun

still rings rifle-loud
-Daniel Donaghy

Kallmerten: Your poems reference life in Philadelphia while you were growing up, the racial conflicts, the bombing of Osage Avenue, and the eleven people who lost their lives that day. Do you feel like you are a voice for those whose city turned their backs on them?

Donaghy: I wouldn’t ever claim to be a voice for anyone but myself. I think we can get into trouble pretty quickly if we ever try to speak for anyone else.

That said, I think that I have a responsibility in my writing to bear witness to what I’ve seen and to argue in whatever way I can for social justice. Without, I hope, going on too much of a tangent (or a rant), what the city of Philadelphia did on Osage Avenue on May 13, 1985, and what it has done to the residents of that block and the surrounding neighborhood over the subsequent decades is unconscionable.

I recap the story in the poem about the day the city tried to “mobilize,” if not kill, members of an African American liberation group named MOVE (it’s not an acronym; the name is in all caps to emphasize the organization’s sense of urgency), with whom police had had many conflicts over the years, by dropping explosives on a row home that was linked to blocks of other row homes owned by residents who were completely uninvolved with MOVE. All of the houses burned down. The city, as the evidence has revealed, rebuilt those houses cheaply and shabbily then denied for years that it did so.

I was living on the other side of the city when that happened, in a mostly white, Irish-Catholic neighborhood. The fathers in my neighborhood were pretty unsympathetic to the plight of the mostly African American neighborhood that had been bombed. There was no outrage that I recall. In fact, I don’t remember much talk about it. It was around that time that I began to realize that I was being taught to be a racist by men I otherwise admired in many other respects. For a lot of reasons, I turned from their examples.

As an adult, now, I feel a strong sense of purpose to write about those experiences, to bear witness to that racism, that anger, the scary smallness of that life view, and to speak my truth about some very complicated and frightening times I have lived through.

“T-shirts, ball caps. They wait for each other
to pull on clean socks, lace their boots, then rise
together, laughing, toward their evenings.

– Daniel Donaghy

Kallmerten: What inspired you to write “What Cement is made of”?

Donaghy: I wrote that poem shortly after visiting the workplace of brother-in-law, Shawn. At the time, he was a truck dispatcher for a cement company. While I was visiting one time, he’d forgotten something at work and asked me if I wanted to come along. We had to walk through the locker room and shower area to get to where he worked. All of the details in the poem come directly from that experience.

The heart of the poem comes from what I saw growing up as men in my neighborhood, including my father, worked long, hard hours of physical labor. With Shawn’s workplace in my head, I finally had a place to situate these men collectively and individually. They came home from work five, six days a week exhausted, smelly, spent. They’d fall into the couch or out onto the front stoop or onto a stool at a corner bar for a while before did it all again the next day.

It’s an incredibly hard way to make a living. It’s no way to make a life, really, but it’s the life I was headed toward, like most of the people I grew up around. I remember my father sitting me down at the kitchen when I was 8 or 9, telling me about what it was like to be an electrician at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, how he’d wire boats for ten, twelve hours a day in any weather.

I remember that he told me, “Work with your mind. Your hands will fail you someday.” It’s like he had seen his own future; that’s what happened to him ten years later. I think about that talk with my dad a lot. It’s another moment, maybe the first moment, that put me on a path to be a teacher.

Kallmerten: Readers of ‘What Cement is Made of’ encounter racial injustices in Philadelphia, the poverty you grew up around, and about life in the Kensington neighborhood. What about these places inspired you to write about them?

Donaghy: It’s the story I have to tell. Simple as that. Each of us carries inside the story of where we come from and how we got where we are.

As we get to know new friends, we spend so much time talking what it was like where we grew up. And we’re always reminded in our present lives of someone or something from that earlier place. You grew up around some colorful people, I bet, Taeler––people who gave you, through their actions and their words, great examples of the kind of person you should grow up to be and the kind of person you should work your whole life trying not to become.

You could drive a friend up and down the streets of your hometown, I bet, and talk about what’s happened there over the years, how things have changed, what the local secrets are that no one likes to talk about. The longer we think about the houses we grew up in, about our hometowns, questions about “what was it like?” gets more and more complicated. At least they have for me. I love to be in the middle of writing a new piece in which I’m speaking to something that I thought I’d forgotten, that raises some part of my past from the dead so that I can wrestle with it again, maybe make some sense of it, some art out of it, maybe bring people back to life and let them have their say.

Kallmerten: What are you working on next?

Donaghy: I’m finishing up the third of a trilogy of book-length poetry collections about life in the inner city. Many of the poems from the chapbook manuscript I entered in to the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize is from that collection. This project has led me to do more research that I’d done previously. It includes poems triggered by memories as well by current events, which, where I’m from, have been pretty harrowing. This project also has led me to work in a variety of forms that I hadn’t tried before. I also have a short story manuscript that I keep coming back to––sometimes I start writing a poem and it turns into a story. When that happens, I just go with it. And I’d really like to publish a novel.
 

Taeler Kallmerten, Staff Writer

The post ‘What Cement is Made of’- An Interview with Daniel Donaghy appeared first on Newfound.

In heavier times, the smallest gesture of courtesy or compassion can feel like a breath of fresh air. It may be what gets someone through the day, or the week, or the month. Or even the year.

Likewise, when we function optimally in a happy zone, it behooves us to observe with empathy the people around us. You can never be sure what unspoken sufferings and frustrations trouble the lives of our significant others, friends, family, coworkers, friendquaintances, or perfect strangers.

In our busy U.S. culture (especially in the Northeast, from whence I hail), we’d do better to offer one another more daily acts of simple kindness. Offer your subway seat to a pregnant woman. Help someone carry their grocery bags to their destination. Ask your depressed coworker, “How are you?” Smile at a stranger. Hold the elevator for someone. Hold the door for someone. Let a fellow driver into your lane; yes, even during rush hour. These very simple acts cultivate a culture of kindness that all can benefit from both as giver and receiver, no matter how happy or unhappy we are.

Additionally, practicing kindness opens us to the broader human experience, which better informs our creation of art. Science agrees this is good for our own selves, too. Artists, specifically writers, tend toward inwardness, and like all people, we have issues which can be somewhat alleviated by our own benevolence. Researchers at the University of British Columbia found socially anxious people felt their unquiet significantly alleviated, and an increase in  positive mood by regularly doing things for others. Altruism is for your self-preservation, conscious or not.

To get specific, psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky at the University of California Riverside found that doing a kind deed once a week leads to a greater sense of overall happiness. Once a week!? And this deed can, over time, increase lifespan and life satisfaction. Sign me up. And remind me of this post mid-Winter, when I’m dragging myself around in a seasonal affective disorder slump.

Lauren Kronisch is a nutrition nerd by day, writer by night. With degrees in history and nutritional science, when she’s not counseling clients to eat a balanced diet, you’ll find her traveling the world’s mountaintops or chomping on dark chocolate while writing poetry, creative non-fiction, and nutrition articles.

The post Empathy: The Science-Backed Fortune Cookie appeared first on Newfound.

objects stay grounded easily
but not me – come on
two parts for thunder owe two parts
at once – soon to keep our need

Taeler Kallmerten: The way you organized your chapbook is interesting, can you explain your intentions of breaking your chapbook up into two parts? Can you explain the title to your chapbook “empathy for cars / force of july”?

Davy Knittle: I was interested in ways of riffing on a crown of sonnets, a sequence of sonnets that link the final line of one poem in the sequence to the first line of the next. While these poems don’t link in that way, I liked the idea of having a set of sonnets that connected to one another thematically and structurally. Each of these poems is made up of five stanzas that are 28 syllables each, with twelve poems in each of the two sets. Each set feels a little different from the other, at least to me. I wanted to use the same form to engage a couple of different kinds of moving through the poem, and of the space that each poem might make.

Kallmerten: What are you trying to communicate throughout your chapbook?

Knittle: I’m interested in exploring a kind of attention that’s not by any means singular to me or my work. I’m interested in the way people privately narrate experiences of public space–in what happens to a train station or a school or a public park if while you’re there you can’t stop thinking about something that happened four years ago or what you read in the newspaper or someone you miss or what you’re going to eat for lunch. I want to know more about how a neighborhood or a street or a single spot in a city is a unit of feeling. For me, these poems speak to some of those explorations, which I hope I get to continue for a long time.

Kallmerten: Describe some routines you have adopted during your creative process.

Knittle: I think my main routine is trying to change my routine to adapt to what makes the most sense for me on a given day or week or month. I do try to write every day, and usually I do, but that means a lot of different things, especially for this project, which was composed of fragments of a larger free form document that I wrote with the hope that I’d be able to build poems out of it.

Kallmerten: Can you explain what you learned about yourself after writing this chapbook?

Knittle: I’m not sure. I learned that I like writing poems as part of a larger project, which is something the poet Brandon Brown talks about as necessary to his practice–to start with a project that frames the writing. I hadn’t done that before, and so I learned that having a frame on the scale of the project was generative for me.

Kallmerten: What advice would you give to other creative-minded people who want to write?

Knittle: Try to do it more often than feels absolutely necessary. For me, there are a million reasons not to write, and so finding a way to return to my work out of some of the same general familiar obligation by which teeth are brushed and dogs are walked (I don’t have a dog, but if I did) is helpful for me. I find that if I’ve been writing at least semi-regularly, it’s easier to keep writing. I know that’s true of so many repeated things, of practice in general, but it’s felt different for me to know that than it has for me to build it into my life.

Kallmerten: What are you looking forward to working on next?

Knittle: I’m in the process of expanding this project to include two additional sections: a set of twelve fourteen-line sonnets (again syllabic, but not metrical) and a set of twelve sevenlings, where each line is twenty syllables. I’m looking forward to situating the poems in “empathy for cars / force of july” in a bigger family of poems with some of the same questions and curiosities.

Kallmerten: Finally is there a question you would like to be asked, or one you would ask another poet?

Knittle: There are so many questions I’d like to ask other poets. My academic work has been thinking, recently, about how city planning, poetry and criticism can interact–about what it would look like to read poems as a kind of planning theory. The poet who is the locus of that work for me is Leslie Scalapino, a spectacular poet, publisher and essayist who died in 2010, and who I never met, but have heard so many stories about from people who were close to her.

Scalapino wrote and talked often about the way poetry might participate in the public sphere, where she really believed it could work alongside other kinds of discourse, like criticism and journalism. Where, for instance, a poem might appear in a newspaper as an opinion piece. Today (and many days) if I got to ask a poet one question, I’d ask her what she thought a city that took her poetry as the framework of its plan and systems would look like, and if there were urban spaces that came close to doing some of the things she wanted a city to do.

 Taeler Kallmerten, Staff Writer

The post “empathy for cars / force of July” – An Interview with Poet Davy Knittle appeared first on Newfound.

Having lived in the Empire State for more than a year now, I have become used to idle small talk.

But this was not enough to prepare me for the woman on the train station platform.

I was on Long Island, two lengthy train rides away from my home in Brooklyn, attempting to get inside the locked door of a government building. When you are foreign and constantly filling out forms to avoid being kicked out, you may not know about office-closing holidays such as Labor Day.

Soon after arriving, I was back on the platform, reading a book, ready to return home.

“What you reading there?” came a sing-song voice from behind me.

Looking side to side and seeing nothing but an empty platform, I deduced that she must be talking to me. In my hand was a beaten old copy of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.

I thought of all possible reactions this woman could have, everything the biased British documentaries and skewed opinions on sitcoms had taught me about the United States. Every debate I’ve ever seen between Professor Dawkins and an American minister. Oh dear, I thought.

“Oh, just a book,” I replied. An answer that, though brief, was undoubtedly true.

Before I knew it, she had risen from her seat and taken it from my hand. Perhaps, I thought, I’ve come across the most polite and literary mugger known to man. Her eyebrow raised. “What is this?” she said, her side-eye gaze letting me know the subtext.

“Well, uh, it’s a book,” I added again, reminding myself I suppose, “explaining why there probably isn’t… a god.”

“So you don’t believe?” she blinked.

“Well, no…” I said, and she took a deep breath.

I’d already been denied access to the social security office, and now I was being told that the devil has a hold of me. And I should stop reading evil books and living in sin.

The train pulled up, to my great relief, and we went our separate ways, with her advice on slinging the book into the nearest trash receptacle and the state of my soul contextualizing me nicely for the passengers watching me board.

Sitting down, I tried to wonder how to make sense of what had just happened. I felt suddenly at odds with the city and its people. All the jarring experiences that New York had thrown at me came to my mind all at once. Being scammed out of an apartment by a fake real-estate agent (on my first day); living for four months in a cricket-infested boiler room basement; being trapped by a snowstorm that, after twenty-two years in the cloudy and mild UK, made me think the world was truly ending; waking up to find a week’s worth of groceries being eaten by Brooklyn maggots; being lost countless times after being told the taxi driver couldn’t understand my directions, and wandering the dark streets of Brooklyn for sometimes hours on end. This was now topped off with someone consigning me to an eternity in hell.

Man, I thought, this place going to kill me. Perhaps the Big Apple is not the place of bright lights, muses and inspiration that the movies led me to believe. Maybe a writer coming here is a writer intent on avoiding beauty and encouragement, condemning themselves to mental obstacles for the sake of being close to reputable publishers.

But then, if that’s what I thought, why was I having such a giddy thrill in remembering the woman at the train station platform? Why did her words ring within me like a beautiful Shakespearean monologue? Why were all these misfortunes tinged with a feeling of gratitude? Is this what it takes to realize my masochism, I wondered.

There are many reasons people come to live in New York City, I have found. Maybe it’s for business. Perhaps it’s for the culture. It can entice lovers of history, skylines, famous faces. Someone must even enjoy the merry chorus of people screaming for taxis and at tourists in accents that I still associate more with cartoons than with real people.

I came for the inspiration. There is no better way to be inspired than to take a walk around New York and allow it to happen to you.

And it does happen to you.

What I had gone through were not moments of bad luck, they were gifts. It wasn’t the problems that I was enjoying, but the fact that my inner writer was being force-fed new and interesting situations. The beauty of being a writer is that even if you go through a harrowing series of events, pain, anguish and torture, there is always a silver lining. We can use it. It is subject matter, life experience. It is inspiration.

It took this forthright woman to make me see what a great privilege it is to call oneself a writer. Everything that doesn’t kill me is at least good for something, and I see the real value that comes from New York City. Yes, it can be grotty, and yes, it’s frightening, but there is beauty, there is inspiration in here, as long as you have your writer’s mind open. The woman at the platform may have made me scurry away at the time, but I now have her wonderful quotes and characterization, the knowledge of my own emotion in that situation, to draw upon.

Opening myself up to what I have come to call the writer’s relief has allowed me to notice it all. Including genuine moments of beauty.

I was in Washington Square Park waiting for a friend. Sitting on the fountain, I saw the usual squirrel-dodging acrobats, rag-tag jazz bands, tarot card readers pleading silently with passers-by, tourists photographing anything that dared move. An average day in New York.

Then I noticed the girl sitting next to me. She had lined up five pennies on the stone rim by her side. One by one she tossed them into the water, taking a moment of breath and thought between each. I watched her make her way through the line, throwing each one as if it were a separate idea, deserving of its own moment.

One day you can be doomed to hellfire, and the next you can witness a perfect, personal moment of quiet.

We all have ways of dealing with life, and for dealing with the big city too. We need ways to curb the blows of reality. And it seems that being able to call these experiences inspiration, recycling them into our own stories and our own versions of artistic beauty, is the perfect way to do that.

It made me thank my lucky stars I can call myself a writer. Otherwise, I may as well ride that train right back to the airport.

Josh King is a second-year MFA student at Adelphi University in New York, and moved from the UK in 2014. He is curator of the blog As & When for the literary website Village of Crickets, and divides his time between writing fiction and sampling the New York literary scene.

The post Strangers, Stations and Surprises: How I Learned to be Inspired by New York appeared first on Newfound.

A fun fact about that year’s housing situation: I had three roommates, and each was still dating their high school boyfriend. (We don’t keep in touch, but I hear they’ve all married their their prom dates now. Yay.) Every weekend, each girl left to visit her boyfriend, and I got a four-person suite—with private bathroom—all to myself.

On Fridays, when my roommates left, the headphones came off. I could listen to music through speakers and do… whatever I wanted.

I wanted to listen to music.

The album I kept on repeat was named for two barren landscapes. An apt title: the lyrics and sometimes bizarre orchestration of The Moon and Antarctica seem to be a letter from a person in isolation back to civilization. Song titles include “The Cold Part” and “Alone Down There.”

While some tracks play like a campfire sing-a-long (“Wild Packs of Family Dogs”), others borrow guitar riffs from acid rock, accompanied by heavily philosophical lyrics.

“Gravity Rides Everything” presents a childlike awe of mortality:
Like fruit drops, flesh it sags
Everything will fall right into place
When we die, some sink and some lay
But at least I won’t see you float away

Another mystical vision of death is presented in “Life Like Weeds”:
And in the places you go, you’ll see the place where you’re from
And in the faces you meet, you’ll see the place where you’ll die
And on the day that you die, you’ll see the people you’d met
And in the faces you see, you’ll see just who you’ve been

To this day, the song that drives me to quiet, solitary contemplation is “Lives.” It begins, “Everyone’s afraid of their own lives. If you could be anything you’d want to be, you’d be disappointed, am I right?” Yeah, if you need me I’ll be in my room. ALONE.

The time alone was revolutionary for me. I’d grown up in a large family, sharing a bedroom with a sister until my eighteenth birthday. From there, I went to a dormitory, where freshmen get herded from classroom to packed dining hall to cramped residence hall, with nary a minute of quiet time.

Don’t get me wrong—at university I developed new friendships and deepened others. But I also discovered who I am and what I like, what I want to work on and what conditions help me work. In my empty dorm room, I began to assign myself (and actually complete) short stories. Spending lots of weekend time in solitude, I also learned things about myself I hadn’t known, and formed habits that I imagine will last my lifetime.

I learned that I need—not just enjoy, but require—long walks alone. At least three miles in one direction, say, to a beautiful lakeside café in Milwaukee. (Now I walk like this through paths along the Jersey Shore.)

I learned that I sometimes need to walk through an art museum, or even see a movie in a theater, alone.

I also craved novels. I was a Journalism major and double minor in History and Philosophy. I read. A lot. But not always fiction, and I needed fiction, so when the homework was done, I found novels. This was the year I read Joyce Carol Oates for the first time, a really formative experience for me as a reader and writer.

I’d forgotten about this year of my life and how significant it was, until things came full-circle this summer. I saw Modest Mouse in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and I wasn’t in a dorm room, alone. I was surrounded by a crowd in a public place, but more specifically, I went with my brother and my boyfriend. These are two people with whom I share a lot—we even share a creative project I’m proud of, a podcast called GameNight media. It felt so right to have these people at my side, as these offbeat yet beautiful songs rolled over us.

My memories of Modest Mouse are tied to discovering and carving out my creative process, but they’re also tied to place. I left the East Coast when I was eighteen, to discover myself. I returned seven years later, discovering even more.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 2008 with a degree in Journalism, and she’s been writing creatively ever since.

The post The Moon, Antarctica and Other Sites of Fruitful Solitude appeared first on Newfound.