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[img_assist|nid=11508|title=Amy Lemmon|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=118|height=118]The sonnet is a paradox: fixed yet flexible, consistent yet versatile. It’s one of the most lasting modes of literary expression, dating back to the 13th Century writer Francesco Petrarca. I’ve been thinking about sonnets a lot lately. As more animated gifs, emoticons, and emoji creep into daily life, supplanting not only words but complex feelings, what’s the sonnet’s role? What can Twitter bards and emerging writers learn from the conventions and puzzles of sonnets?

For insight into this rich tradition, I turned to Amy Lemmon, author of two poetry collections: Fine Motor (Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Press, 2008) and Saint Nobody (Red Hen Press, 2009) and co-author with Denise Duhamel of ABBA: The Poems (Coconut Books, 2010) and Enjoy Hot or Iced: Poems in Conversation and a Conversation (Slapering Hol Press, 2011). Her work has been featured in Rolling Stone, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, The Journal, Barrow Street, just to name a few. An “omniformalist,” Amy writes convincingly in traditional forms, free verse, and everything in-between. Her work was included in the exciting anthology Hot Sonnets (Entasis Press, 2011), edited by Moira Egan and Clarinda Harriss. Amy is a Professor of English at the Fashion Institute of Technology where she encourages students to explore the intersections of visual art, music, and writing. On a sun-soaked April night, we met in Queens, New York, and discussed the enduring legacy, misconceptions, and permutations of sonnets.

Margot Douaihy: Do you remember the first sonnet that spoke to you or stood out in a unique way?

Amy Lemmon: Yes. There are about 154 of them. I was in graduate school at the University of Cincinnati, and I was taking a course called “Bibliography and Research.” The professor was a Shakespearian scholar, and he had us read all of the sonnets. We did all kinds of edgy readings of them, and there was a lot of gender-based inquiry, as well as the motions of scholarship. It was great education for me at the time, and that’s when I first started writing in form. I had already started writing in blank verse at the suggestion of Andrew Hudgins, who was my professor in my poetry workshop. It just seemed like a natural step. I wrote a couple of sonnets after that, but it wasn’t until I connected with a group of women poets [via a listserv] and we wrote a crown of sonnets together. That’s when I felt like I hit my stride with it.

Do you feel like the energy of the collective crown opened up a new kind of exploration?

Definitely. And, as you know with the crown, the last line of one sonnet becomes the first line of the next. So we were writing poems with each other, but in our own voices. It was really interesting and so much fun for me. I got hooked.

 How important is it to have that fidelity to either the Shakespearian or the Petrarchan style?

I would say it depends on the situation. When I was first writing sonnets, all I knew was that the poem had to be 14 lines; it was supposed to be iambic pentameter; and there are a couple different ways you could rhyme it. I am a real fan of the “snap” of that closing couplet. I’m kind of what Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes would call an “omniformalist,” writing in (or creating) the form that works for what you are doing at the moment. I think that there’s something to be said for starting with the idea, “I am going to do a series of Petrarchan sonnets.” It’s a great exercise. And then, when I collaborated with Denise Duhamel, the “ABBA” poems, [it confirmed] that the iambic pentameter is just there for me. It’s always there — always something that felt comfortable to me. But then I think of the sonnet form that was invented by Ernest Hilbert, a poet who lives in Philadelphia. Daniel Nester dubbed it, “The Hilbertian sonnet.” Basically, it’s sort of a hybrid of the Petrarchan and the Shakespearian. It has sestets, and then it has a couplet at the end. When I wrote my poem “Asymptotic,” it’s actually dedicated to him.

Who else is innovating in this space?

Kim Addonizio. Wyn Cooper. Quincy R. Lehr. Kathrine Varnes. Moira Egan and Clarinda Harriss. Jessica Piazza. Wyn Cooper’s book, Chaos is the New Calm, consists of 50 14-line poems he calls “sonnets,” though they don’t use the traditional meter and rhyme schemes. He visited my Poetry Writing class at FIT yesterday, and he told us that after writing the “postcard poems” that ended up in his book Postcards from the Interior, he started spontaneously writing 14-line poems. After writing 300, “they just ended.” What he does is so interesting; most of the poems are very short lines, shorter than pentameter. He also plays with stanza. He is mixing it up as much has he possibly can. He wanted there to be no repeats, in terms of the form. He wanted every poem to be different, which is what he accomplished. And Kim Addonizio’s latest book of poems is called Lucifer at the Starlight. She takes “Lucifer in Starlight” by George Meredith, and she rewrites it. It’s a dramatic monologue spoken by Lucifer, and she turns him into a guy at a bar, which is just so Kim. She also has a great sonnet called “Stolen Moments” where she uses the work “orange,” which, of course, has no rhyme in the English language. She rhymes it with “fridge,” and it totally works. She makes it work. She is somebody who’s played a lot with the meter. She plays fast and loose with it, but she knows it. The thing about Kim, when she does something, it’s deliberate. She’s doing it on purpose. Her craft is really, really top notch.

It’s tight. 

But at the same time, there may be looseness in the lines. She’s kind of the master of the slant rhyme. Again, think “orange” and “fridge.” She deliberately put the word orange in there.  

Do you feel that there’s a psychological advantage to slant rhyme?

That’s a great question. There is an ease of composition that comes from knowing that you have it at your disposal. It’s something I love to teach my students, because they feel enslaved to rhyme. Then they end up rhyming slant, anyway. So when I tell them, “You have your poetic license. You can do that,” it helps. And often what they come up with is actually more interesting.

Do you feel like there’s a growing appetite or hunger for sonnets right now?

As a teacher of undergraduate writers, I can tell you that some of them come to it on their own. The compression of the 14 lines is really compelling to them. It’s something that seems manageable. I just had a student write a villanelle, which she had apparently learned in high school. It was in trimeter; she wasn’t using pentameter, so it was really short lines. But it was a good poem!

Does formal poetry offer a different playing field for writers?

Definitely. Anything that offers guidelines — and guidance — is helpful. I return to Wyn and his Chaos is the New Calm. Everybody knows chaos. Everybody is feeling chaos. In a chaotic experience, whatever that might be, whether it’s societal, whether it’s personal, it’s good to have that. Molly Peacock has written about her experiences in very tight form poems. To write about chaotic, very difficult family experiences, the constriction helped. It was like a container that was enabling her to handle the material. It was the asbestos gloves that she needed to handle the volatile material. I think a lot of the younger writers that I am teaching experience it that way. It’ll be interesting to see what they come up with after reading Wyn Cooper — his fractal and exploded sonnets. They are special.

What advice might you give to someone sitting down to write a sonnet — specifically someone who is relatively new to the form? Would you have any particular words of support or wisdom?

I’ll say what Wyn said yesterday in my class, “Read.” Read Berryman’s sonnets. Read the sonnet sequences by Meredith and Rossetti. Read Kim Addonizio and Marilyn Taylor. Read Karen Volkman. Read A.E. Stallings, who shines by sticking to the rules, and Sandra Simonds, who reinvents them. Read the sonnets that are strict. Read the ones that are veering off from the constraints. Obviously, read Shakespeare. You’ll get that music in your ear, and then you’ll make it your own. You’ll see what you have to say to add to that conversation, because it’s a long conversation. It’s a long and rich and varied and contentious — in many cases —conversation. People take their sonnets really seriously.

Do you take your sonnets seriously?

I try to. I try not to take the writing of it too seriously, though, so that I don’t block myself from finishing it. You have to think: “Okay. I see this. I can do this.” And then you go off and solve the problem.

Solve the problem? Do all sonnets solve a problem?

Yes. I think so.

How do you keep your sonnets so nimble and agile? What’s your recipe?

That’s a great compliment. And I’m glad that you see them that way. I have to remain flexible [with the form], or else I’m going to completely silence myself. You have to. When I write a poem, my spirit has to be in it, or else I’m not going to finish it. That’s just kind of the way I work. For example, in “Asymptotic” — which is in “Hot Sonnets,” — there was an occasion that I felt needed that specific form. And I also wanted to use it as an homage to Ernest [Hilbert], “onlie begetter” of what Daniel Nester called the Hilbertian Sonnet. And it fit.   

Is it fun? Is writing sonnets fun?

[Laughter] Fun? It’s satisfying.

Thinking about the compression of form, and knowing that you have an evangelical background, does the sonnet feel reminiscent of a prayer? 

I would say it’s more like the hymn than a prayer. Hymns are prayers, too, because you’re using music along with the words to pray. My family stopped going to church for awhile when I was in junior high, but we did these little services at home, when I was a teenager. We had all these old hymn books. The family gathered around and would sing. Hymns are really ingrained in me. And, of course, that was the meter that Dickinson used. All of that informed me.

I find that when something satisfies a person’s need for repetition or musicality, it feels like putting a hand in a glove. It fits. There’s utility.

Beautifully put. That’s a great metaphor. There is utility. There’s comfort. And aesthetics, as well.  

Is there crossover with your formal poetic projects and music? 

Music is one of the most important forms of art in my life. It’s in my DNA. At my house we had my great-grandmother’s piano, handed down so that I could play. I started lessons when I was six. My musical background made form so natural to me, so when I started being told I could write in form it wasn’t much of a stretch. When I went to college, everyone was doing these free verse poems, and you didn’t really do form. It wasn’t done, right? So, when I go the “permission” from my professors in graduate school it felt very comfortable to me. Plus, my father had all of these anthologies of the classics. He would read Noyes’ The Highwayman, and Emerson’s Concord Hymn. And we’d have all these poems. And Kipling. Oh, my God. He loved Kipling. He read that to us. So, with all of this, it came naturally.  

Why do readers respond so strongly to repetition?

First of all, the human ear — the human body — is trained for rhythm. The heartbeat in the iamb, and the breath. Music is a physical — it’s all about the body. It’s natural. I think about the history of how poetry started, with the bards, as an oral art. You had to have repetition, you had to have rhythm to memorize and remember. That was sort of a mnemonic device, too.

In your mind, what makes a sonnet radical?

Hmm. I’ve always loved the definition of radical as “root.” It has to have close to 14 lines. There could be 13 or 15. It has to have some allusion to rhyme and meter. That’s the radical root of a sonnet. And, there has to be a lyric impulse — a strong emotion that has a need to be expressed. That has to be in there somewhere. They may tell little stories. There may be little anecdotes. There may be a joke quality to it, right? It may be a dream song. But it has to have a sense of urgency.

Last question: do we need sonnets?

I can’t imagine life without them. And I think it depends on who you mean by “we.” In the English language, there’s nothing more lasting. There are very few forms that have stood the test of time. And it didn’t even start in English. I think we have to go back to the origins — what the meaning of sonnet is. Sonnet means little song. And then, I also think about the word stanza, which means room. I think of the wonderful Wordsworth sonnet “Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room.” Roberta Allen’s assertion about micro fiction, that the compact story is “a container for change,” applies here. A container for change; a sonnet is that, exactly.

 For more information:

• Kim Addonizio

http://www.kimaddonizio.com

• Wyn Cooper

http://www.wyncooper.com

• Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes’s Omniformalism

http://anniefinch.com/omniformalism-revisited/

• Amy Lemmon

http://saint-nobody.blogspot.com

•  Sina Queyras

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/03/to-sonnet-to-son-net-tuscon-net/

•  Sandra Simonds

http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2012/08/shouldnt-the-sonnet-.html  

http://housefirebooks.com/four-sonnets-poetry-by-sandra-simonds/

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2012/12/poetry/three-simmons2012

 

 

 

Great writing has heart. It really is that simple, although it’s not easy. Former world- class athlete, Don Bajema, presents a ‘Baby Boomers’ generation that is wide-eyed and innocent. His self-styled anti-hero, Eddie Burnett, is taken to the horrible edge of things — but Bajema stops there, allowing the reader to bear witness and Burnett to make up his own mind.

Winged Shoes and a Shield (City Lights Booksellers, Fall 2012) follows the track and field star-turned-dropout’s trajectory through diaphanous rites of adulthood, dysfunctional family life, drug and spousal abuse, and the terrible reality of American racism — all under the specter of the draft for the Vietnam War. Bajema’s take on the dire nature of our national character during “Sunrise in America” is crushing, but there is always a choice offered in his work. His hero strives to remain beautifully awake. Don Bajema’s hero has heart.

1.    I’m quite struck by the innocence of some of your characters and point-of-views.  Their attitudes and perceptions seem to be from a more innocent time –almost like the adolescent idealism that was somehow forgotten in the generations following baby boomers, after what I would call “Sunrise in America.”

I think I’ve done all I can to deliberately retain innocence and an adolescent idealism in my life and work. Trauma fixes personalities in time and place and from ages 13 to 20, I saw that generation I write about — a perspective I will forever view the world from.  As the Kennedys, King and X were murdered, I saw riots, burned cities, dogs set on kids, and National Guardsmen open up on peaceful if vociferous protesters. I watched our military annihilate hundreds of thousands in a country of farming peasants, commit massacres of villages and napalm children running naked in dirt roads.  Then I was told Vietnam was our tragedy, and I watched my generation buy that lie, while I refused to believe it and became ‘unpatriotic ‘– an epithet I cherish since I am not a patriot.  We saw cops billy-clubbing hundreds of kids, watched the FBI pull civil rights workers out of swampy dams, saw churches bombed. We had grown up in duck-and-cover drills but saw nothing and no means to alleviate this stupidity and arrogance, wastefulness and corruption in our society. My perspectives are at once innocent and outraged.

I’ve felt sorry for the existence and fate of every generation that followed mine, knowing full well that I, and my generation, have failed miserably to realize the glimpse of what it could have been. 

2.    What do you think is a fundamental difference between the once-hopeful ‘flower power’ movement of the 60’s and subsequent generations? Are things more or less dire now?  

I think these are the best of times and the worst of times. I think the 60’s are perceived in error as the ‘flower power’ era. Nobody bought that flower in your hair nonsense.  That’s Wall Street advertising and appropriation. The Beatles were laughing behind “All you need is love.” We fought in the streets. Our rebellion was an affront to the police and dangerous as hell in most of the country. These times are worse in that we are at the beginning of ecological collapse, deprivation and constant foreign and domestic war in battlefields from Sandy Hook to the Middle East and back again. 

3.    Your perspectives, “at once innocent and outraged”, are very similar to Eddie Burnett’s.

I’m better at busting a lie than telling the truth. I don’t think we can know the truth. The world and our existence is chaos. We do all we can to delude ourselves, personally and through agreed upon delusions like government and the economy, to go forward in an overcrowded and unmanageable zoo. A zoo that is our overpopulated planet and a circus in which we observe it. Is there hope? Yes, if we just face the fact we are highly- complex primates conscious of our own mortality and freaked out by it. We do not have a god, we are not created in Superman’s image. Science cannot save us and most of our beliefs are ridiculous, especially any ones that are even remotely religious. But we are a very, very young species and we grow exponentially in intelligence if not in emotional compassion. 

Eddie and I in respect to these qualities? Yes, I think they are inseparable. So, the short answer is yes.

4.    The choice to remain “innocent” despite the horror and atrocities of the world, to choose good or to champion the inherent good within our human nature is quite insane, considering what is going on in the world around us.  

It does run contrary to the ‘fight or flight’ concept to champion, that which generates, protects, or provides for love and life, to be kind, to be generous, to be willing to extend these qualities first, in any given situation, is to be regarded or open to suspicion that one is weak, or a sucker.

I used to tell athletes enjoying their newly discovered power, and this is also true ethically and spiritually, that ‘strength gives the option to be kind’ but nobody ever knew what I was talking about.

It’s our values — as much as one’s neurosis or another. People want it simplified, and it’s the singular ego that holds sway over their thoughts and actions, especially in a competitive context. Yes, nature appears to be competitive but it’s really a kind of dance. Self-interest is important but it shouldn’t be paramount in our psyche. Nice guys finish last and “the meek shall inherit the earth” but to be meek is to be despised. For me, it’s war or not war, and my choice is not war. Which doesn’t mean if you invade my home with bad intentions I won’t go for it, but, and I have been in various potentially disastrous circumstances, — given the chance, I’ll opt for kindness every time.

The whole question of any individual and the world is a tale of heroic struggle, and I think a lot about Faulkner’s comment, “the only story worth telling is the story of the human heart in conflict with itself.”

5.    The inside look into Eddie Burnett in Winged Shoes and a Shield reveals the troubles of a seemingly well-adjusted athlete, at least you would think he’s well adjusted, — a star on the track and field, an operator like his dad, — but then you find out his back story, and all is not as rosy as it appears. Burnett is a winner, celebrated for his athleticism. He is victorious and stoic on the outside but, within, he is both too sensitive and too scared to admit it.

Jim, you are 100 percent right. Eddie Burnett’s and my own challenges are derived and contorted by being at once too sensitive and too afraid to admit it. 

6.    In Too Skinny, Too Small, your latest work, we find an adult, if not grown up, Eddie Burnett as a mega football star in a bloated and self-important NFL.

Too Skinny Too Small was a disappointment as an experiment. I found myself too nauseated by the values of the corporate game and industry of the sport, and the ignorance and appalling lack of compassion and voyeuristic jack-off of the fans, commentators, and just about every disgusting value the game has to offer that I bummed out hard on the topic. But I’ll keep writing it to a conclusion. I overwrite when I am unclear of what I want to convey. Basically, I’m predicting the inevitable, on field, nationally televised death that will occur fairly soon on your blog.

Too Skinny Too Small is going to make a reappearance during the play-offs.

I enjoy writing on Going For The Throat and I like the idea of people being able to read it off of a blog.  I’m not sure where it’s going to go but I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens.

7.    What can you tell us about your writing process?  What does a day of writing look like for you?  You once said to me, “Never try to please your audience”.

Carmen and I both work and we have two young kids, so I write when I can. Frequently late at night or early in the morning. I used to write listening to music, but lately I haven’t been and find that I write better without it.

Music, for me, even if I’m only barely aware of it, takes some of what would be in the writing away.

Almost everything in Winged Shoes And a Shield was written to be read on stage and most of the stories in it were written on the day of a show. I found that it gave the work an immediacy. Almost everything in the collection is a ‘one- take’ kind of thing, with very little or no rewriting. Rewriting, for me, is a bad thing. I tend to overwrite, not so much in terms of flowery, self-indulgent stuff, but when I rewrite, I frequently find myself adding a lot of material so that the work is ‘new’ to me. But then it may not necessarily have the impact of the original words first set down on the page. So, for the time being I’ve been convinced, and most of my friends and collaborators almost insist, that I should never rewrite my work. I think my best material comes from writing that is done on the day of a show.

The idea of ‘pleasing your audience’ means that you are writing to an effect rather than just sort of channeling whatever it is that is coming out of you. That does not mean ‘do not be aware of your audience.’ A writer should be considerate as all hell of the audience — but not necessarily doing anything to please them. What that means is ‘don’t make them work too hard, don’t make them wade through a lot of stuff.’ So, my best writing addresses the audience as though they were in a club or wherever it is I’m reading. But I never try to please them. I don’t even try to please myself. I just write it and then read it and let the chips fall where they may.

I also read what I’ve written out loud, this reveals the clunkers in the work and I can change them on the spot. So it might be a page and then read it out loud, then go on.

8.    What’s next for you and Eddie Burnett?

Eddie will stare me down as less than the man I was born to be and I’ll try to provide him the words. Since he is the universal observer, he’ll be around or in anything I ever write.

Too Skinny, Too Small by Don Bajema is appearing serially on Going For The Throat throughout the 2014 NFL Season.  To read more visit jimtrainer.wordpress.org.

As a student-writer, I was hesitant to approach a writing professor with over thirty years of teaching experience under his belt—what questions could I ask that he hadn’t heard time and time again from students like me? But my correspondence with James A. Freeman yielded nothing but intuitive, down-to-earth responses. With particular emphasis on his connections to his home and his students, Mr. Freeman articulates his constant passion for, and his belief in, the personal truth of the written word. Later this month Mr. Freeman’s book of poetry, “Temporary Roses Dipped in Liquid Gold,” will be released through Finishing Line Press. 

 

1. What inspired you to want to be a writer? When was the first time you felt like a writer?   

I started writing fables as a very young kid, because I loved animals, and liked thinking that I could tell a story with a point. I began to feel like a writer when I learned to write in cursive in first and second grade and had filled up a leather folder with stories in cursive, not printing…

2. You’ve written over eighteen books in your writing career, including “Ishi’s Journey from the Center to the Edge of the World,” “Liars’ Tales of True Love,” and “Never the Same River Twice.” Which story was your personal favorite and why?   

That’s almost like picking a favorite child, politically incorrect, lol, but people tell me that Ishi’s tale is the most haunting, touching story.  I’m quite partial to the newer short stories in “Irish Wake: In Loving Memory of Us All’ (2011), and I have a book of poems that I’m proud of, “Temporary Roses Dipped in Liquid Gold,” due out in November with Finishing Line Press, and with a great color cover painting by a young area artist named Anna Gaul, now in pre-order which determines the press run.   

 

3. Do you think the stories that are more difficult to write are also the most rewarding? Or is a story that is difficult to write a story better left untold?  

Stories that are tough to write are dying to be told, need to be told.  It’s often a struggle to find the right form, or point-of-view, or setting, the right tone and atmosphere… That said, sometimes the muse is with us (Voltaire supposedly wrote “Candide” in three days) and things go rapidly and well.  Either manner is rewarding, even though the process is as much of the reward, the struggle, as the supposed end point.  Writers love and hate to write, more so love, are driven to, I should say, would do it anyway, without acclaim or positive strokes.

 

4. From where do you draw your inspiration? 

It sounds simplistic, but it’s the natural environment and people in it, feelings, touching souls with others.  Ernest Gaines once told me that he had to have great jazz music playing, preferably with footage of Dr. J playing basketball broadcast too, when he wrote.  Dr. Joyce Brothers told us that she had to have music on, any music, at a volume just below proper hearing to help distract her just enough to counter-focus on the task at hand, composing.  Carolyn See draws pictures of her books, the whole enchilada graphically.  I have to walk first, or take a shower, as there is something about running water that helps me plan, maybe those negative ions, I don’t know: I do know I write better, get inspiration from being or having been near water, the ocean, lakes, rivers, and, failing that, being near large mountains with snow caps.  I’m serious about that.  Then I use artist-easel-sized story board paper on the floor or walls, visually both characters, plot, conflict and resolution, drawing with colored markers, to plan the thing.

 

5. With so many stories to tell, how do you manage to write without repeating yourself?

There are far more stories to tell than I have time for… I work from scrap notes, usually analog, often on napkins, sometimes digital notes, but not often… as that comes later.  If a series of scribbled notes coalesce after being deliberately lost for some time, if they leap off the napkins or placemats or post-it notes back into my heart and skull, I know I have to write “it.”

 

6. How do you know when a story is complete?

I know it’s a cliché’, but you are never really done, in the sense that it can’t be revisited or suggestions made by a good editor.  Tess Gallagher just won a battle to have Ray Carver’s older Gordon Lisch heavily-edited stories restored to his finished intent, and the stories are the better for it, but Carver was a mad genius, and most often the editing dialogue improves, if it’s a partnership.  Many of the poems in “Temporary Roses Dipped in Liquid Gold” are new, but a couple of old chestnuts were totally re-examined, cut in places a bit, but mostly layered with more loving particular detail that I think enhances, in one case 25 years after the first draft of a poem was written and then left alone for all those years.

 

7. You’ve taught Language and Literature at Bucks County Community College for over thirty years. How has your career as an educator influenced you as a writer? 

I don’t steal student’s ideas, intellectual property, of course, but I am inspired by their passion to learn, to get better at the discipline they study, and, in the case of teaching writing, we are learning how to compose ourselves, literally and metaphorically, how to think, to communicate clearly, how to do thesis, antithesis and synthesis, to build an argument, to love and live ideas.  I love learning so much, self-improvement to be better able to help others, that I’ve never really left schools and schooling, teachers and students in dynamic.  I am disturbed by some community members’ negative attitudes toward public servants like teachers, and to them I suggest Matt Damon’s 2011 speech supporting teachers, as his Mom was one and he grew up loving them.  Or listen to Taylor Mali’s dynamite performance poem “What Teachers Make.” I am seldom if ever disturbed by my students’ attitudes toward education, as they are almost always appreciative of the opportunity and usually meet that gift more than, for which they are often paying themselves via work, more than halfway.  My students inspire me as they often overcome obstacles with grace.  In particular, my Creative Writers have been known to particularly inspire me with their bravery to write their lives, but to tell them with an imaginative “slant,” learning to soar by working the controls of fiction, poetry, drama or creative non-fiction.

 

8. What do you think is the most important thing to teach your writing students? If you could give aspiring writers one piece of advice, what would it be? Alternatively, what is one thing you wish someone had told you when you first began writing? 

I tell students that while people can lie verbally or with gesture, that it is impossible to lie in writing in a journal, that your hand, eyes, brain and heart won’t let you do it, physically, won’t let you write it down; therefore writing can save us.  I tell my creative writers to “start in the middle,” at the mid-point of conflict and rising action, to draw us in without excessive background, without pretense.  The mystery novelist James Crumley, who was my fiction teacher at Reed College many moons ago, told us, “You are not a writer until you have a steamer trunk full of manuscripts.”  Nowadays, that would be a USB drive full of files, most of which are the absolute best you can do.

 

9. What is the most important lesson your writing students have taught you?  

I have learned from them humility, the value of persistence, that learning can and should be fun in public, backed-up by reflection, re-cursiveness and just plain hard work in solitude.  

10. Is there a sentence or passage you’ve read that has stuck with you? Or do you have a favorite writer you recommend?  

I’m not big on organized religion, but that biblical passage about love being “patient and kind” is pretty hard to beat.  And Aesop’s shortest fable is pretty cool.  “A vixen (female fox) sneered to a lioness the question, ‘why do you bear only one cub?’  ‘Only one’ answered the lion, ‘but a Lion.’”

Hmm, quality is more important than quality in two sentences: pretty cool!  And over two thousand years old.  Some things never change…   Oh, and my favorite American writer is John Steinbeck, who rocked my world as a high school reader and who still does.   Love “Tortilla Flat” and “Cannery Row” as well as the big ones.  Love his non-fiction too, like “To a God Unknown,” Travels with Charlie,” and “Sea of Cortez.”  Mark Twain is pretty hard to beat too; Hemingway might have been the best American ever if he would have written more women like his strong feminine protagonist in the jewel of a story “The End of Something.”  “For Whom the Bell Tolls” changed my life.  Carolyn See is an amazing writer; her daughter Lisa See is a NYT’s bestseller for a reason, too.  

 

11. In another interview in ‘Times Publishing Newspapers, Inc.,’ you explained that you grew up in California so your writing was usually set there, but over time your stories settings shifted to more local areas. How crucial is it to be familiar with your setting in writing? What role does the idea of “home” play in your stories?  

A writer has to know his or her settings intimately (unless it’s Mars in the 26^th century and even then) or he/she risks wasting the setting as backdrop when it should be integral to everything that matters to the characters and this time and place with them in it, acting.  Home place, or the Latin ‘patria’, is everything.  I am lucky enough to have at least two of them.  

 

12. In the same interview with ‘Times Publishing Newspapers, Inc.,’ you said that the common theme of your short story collection, “Irish Wake, In Loving Memory of Us All,” was that, “we are all caring individuals who have more in common than differences,” and “that as humans we will touch other’s lives and souls throughout life.” Are any of the protagonists or characters in these stories reflections of the people you’ve met in your newer home in Pennsylvania?  

All of “my” characters are amalgams of characteristics, physical, intellectual or emotional, of people I’ve known, many of them from right here and now and then.  But it’s a mistake to assume real person A is character C, because it’s all spun in a centrifuge of  whole cloth invention, real pieces and parts becoming invented folks, who, hopefully, are as real or real as your next door neighbor.  That’s why they call it fiction or poetry, not memoir or auto-biography.

 

13. If you had to describe the entirety of your writing career in only a handful of words, what would they be?  

I came, I saw, I’ll never conquer nor earn a statue, but I’m having fun, making a soft, small chalk mark, and rubbing up against other humans and creatures as we all sing and dance and play in this pageant parade called life.  

 

For Meet the Author:  

DATE: Dec. 11, 2013

TIME: 7:15pm to 8:30 pm

LOCATION: Bucks County Community College, in the Orangery Building, 275 Swamp Rd., Newtown, PA 18940

Finishing Line Press author James Andrew Freeman will be part of a Wordsmiths Book Launch for his new “Temporary Roses Dipped in Liquid Gold,” published in Nov. by Finishing Line Press.  Free to all and with refreshments served.  Contact Dr. Chris Bursk at 215-968-8167 or the English Department at 215-968-8150 for more information or via burskc@bucks.edu.   Jim and his new FLP chapbook are featured in the Winter Issue 2013-14 of “Bucks County Magazine” on news-stands now. 

 

DATE: January 21, 2014

TIME: 7:00pm to 8:15pm

LOCATION: Beth El, 375 Stony Hill Rd.  Yardley, PA 19067

James Andrew Freeman will also be the featured guest with the Yardley women’s chapter of the AAUP for a free writing process discussion/ book launch on January 21, 2014, at Beth El, 375 Stony Hill Rd.  Yardley, PA 19067 (215) 493-1707 from to 7:00 to 8:15 pm.  Refreshments served.  Please contact AAUP coordinator Carol Curland at 215-949-2489 or curland38F@aol.com for more information.  

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Through her innovative technique of crossing lines of charcoal, Anastasia Alexandrin is charting a fresh, new, course in the art world. A skilled draftsman, Anastasia is combining a distinctly modern use of line with classic modalities of contrast and tone. Her distinctive style sets the stage for a visual collision that offers a soulful departure from traditional expressions of European beauty. “With each line I am creating a statement,” she says. “There is something very simple about a straight line. To draw it over and over can be very meditative. It’s a repetition of simplicity through which a complexity of forms can emerge.”

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The result is a contemporary narrative of female empowerment infused with fragments of metaphorical structure that provide reflections of new wave feminine identity. “The subject of women and modern day struggles are a huge wellspring for me,” she says. “Partially because they keep moving and changing and I am a woman living in these times, surrounded by these circumstances as they are happening.”

Currently residing in Philadelphia, Anastasia credits living in the Northeast with being a significant factor in her choice of palette. “I don’t think I would be a black and white artist if I lived out west or in a warm climate,” she says. “I like the seasons and the ebbs and flows the city goes through. There’s a prolonged period of grey skies and cold weather that my creative side enjoys thoroughly.” Alexandrin’s artwork has appeared in solo exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco, as well as in group exhibitions all over the United States. Her art is housed in various museum collections including, The Woodmere Art Museum, DiCarlo Gallery, and Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia.

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A native of the Ukraine, Anastasia fled the Soviet Union with her parents and brother when she was 5 years old. The family eventually settled in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where Anastasia attended Barnstone Studios, a nearby academy of drawing and design. “I was always an artist even as a kid,” she said. “My parents knew that if they gave me a piece of paper and pencils I was satisfied for hours.” When she was a senior in High School, Anastasia won the National Scholastic Silver award. She eventually matriculated at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art (PAFA), where she served as a teacher’s assistant on her way to achieving her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.

It was at PAFA that she found her voice under mentor, Peter Paone. “I very much admire Peter Paone,” she said. “He is able to work in so many different forms of art and he’s never lost who he is through all the changes his work has gone through.” Referencing a transition in Paone’s career, when he left New York City to pursue a new direction with his art in Philadelphia, Anastasia emphasized how important it is to continue evolving as an artist. “What leads me is the entire process of evolving,” she said. “Sales can drive an artist into making art that is no longer his own but driven by the market. That is when your imagination begins to stagnate and you start to repeat yourself.”

For an artist that is driven by perspectives of female identity, it’s conceivable that may create a chasm in the art. After all, an artist must evolve if he or she is to provide a relevant and timely social commentary. It is easy to be drawn into the narrative complexities that manifest as a result of Anastasia’s frenetic style. Her hyperactive use of line suggests motion and projects a timeless dream-like quality. “My soul is charcoal,” she says. “My way of working changes with each drawing, and different types of paper and pencils. I don’t perceive myself as having a style as much as a visual voice that is very much my own.”

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Anastasia’s art playfully shrugs at convention and celebrates transcendence. “It’s about confidence and enjoying it all,” she says. “These women are smart and driven to be seen and heard, as well as look as beautiful as they can be.” Through incorporating recognizable symbols, such as a smattering of bubbles or a towering wave, she clues viewers in to the psychological processes of women, as well as the obstacles they confront on their way toward reaching self-actualization. The women in her art address their fears and embrace individuality. In the process, they offer brave conceptions of self. As the viewer is staring at them, they aren’t afraid to stare back. “A woman’s courage is different from a man’s,” she says. “A man becomes solid and tough, while a woman persists and permeates. She keeps moving forward.”

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She credits much of her understanding of that feminine resolve to the city that supported her growth as an artist. “Philadelphia is a wonderful place to work,” she says. “I am inspired by the people I meet and places I visit. The surroundings influence my choice of palette. Even when it is warm and full of color here, there is still a certain draw for drawing in black and white.”

Anastasia has built a strong following among collectors. An appointment to her Philadelphia studio to view her art has become a sought-after invitation among collectors. Having had that opportunity, I’d equate the experience to being in a carnival fun house. When she talks about each work, it is much like seeing her stand before a wall of contorted silvery mirrors. Her art frames and magnifies fragments of female transcendence and reflects a bright visage of their brash and sassy creator.

“I say what I want to say in my drawings without hesitation or worry of satisfying anyone but myself,” she says. “It’s been quite a ride and I love it.”

Marc Londo is a media scholar and popular culture critic. When he is not writing about the arts, his creative energy is spent researching the effects of mass communication on our global culture. Marc has always been fascinated by culture. An avid traveler, he is intrigued by the celebrations of humanity that bond societies and transcend differences across cultures. Through writing about the unique expressions that touch his imagination, it is his ambition to serve as a bridge between global networks. Presently, he is working toward completing his doctoral dissertation at Temple University.

[img_assist|nid=9907|title=|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=150|height=225]Earlier this year, Alexander Long was kind enough to discuss with me his latest book of poems, Still Life, published by White Pine Press and winner of its Poetry Prize. I was delighted to find that his prose is just as compelling as his poetry; with candor and a great deal of awareness, Mr. Long answered my questions about how to live and write in the modern age.

 

Q: Writers often perform a juggling act, with many different jobs, careers, and interests swirling around them.  Perhaps most obviously, you’re a university faculty member, an editor, and a musician.  How do those aspects of your life, as well as any others, shape your approach to a writing life?

[img_assist|nid=9906|title=|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=250|height=213]A: Hmm…I’ve never thought of my life in this way, maybe because I’m a lousy compartmentalist. Everything I do that may seem different or separate from my writing, in fact, feeds my writing. I’m writing all the time, as I suspect most of us writers are, but I don’t mean physically putting pen to paper. Phil Levine calls this approach to writing scouting, simply (or not so simply) wandering around the world, not necessarily looking for material (though we do that all the time, don’t we?) but letting material reveal itself to us. It takes me years, sometimes, to understand an experience on levels so I can then write, I hope, something meaningful about it. . . .That formal feeling Dickinson talks about—after great pain, etc.—is a very slow process, and I’m a very slow healer, slow reader…come to think of it, I’m slow in just about everything I do! . . .I’ve had, as the great poet put it, a “succession of stupid jobs”: fry cook, obituary writer, technical writer for the glorious Siemen’s corporation, Cutco knife salesman, 7-11 cashier, bartender. A shabby résumé. But all the while, during those lousy shifts, I was always sneaking poems at my desk, or on break. I’d call out “sick," and eat the lost pay, if I felt my writing was getting “hot,” as Berryman liked to put it. No matter what job I end up with, I’ll be writing. Like most people, I’ve worked very hard to get where I am now, having a tenure-track job in allegedly the greatest city in the world. Unlike most people, I’ve also been incredibly lucky. I get to teach poems and talk about poems and “great” literature and all that. It’s an incredible gift, and I realize how pollyanna and kumbaya I sound. But, life is often wave after wave of loss—a casting off, as Linda Loman puts it—, and teaching is the only job I’ve had during which the hair on my arm still stands up with amazement. . .One of the chief benefits of teaching isn’t so much the time it affords me to write (summers off, and all that, which is huge), but the fact that I get to talk about writing with students and friends and colleagues. Access to minds like these simply isn’t going to happen writing obituaries or chopping onions or analyzing code for some software that will be obsolete in two months. 

And, yes, I’ve been avoiding my life as a musician and how it may, or may not, dovetail with my life as a poet. I’m reluctant to talk about my life as a musician because I consider myself a fraud musically. I’m largely self-trained and am aware just enough to know just how much I don’t know. Both my poet and musician friends are surprised when they hear me say this, but it’s the truth: there’s very little intersection. . . . There’s the inevitable crossover if you’re awake to your life, and I’ve drawn from my life as a musician for some poems. And I’ve tried to write song lyrics, and have failed miserably. . . .Just don’t confuse those words for poetry, because they’re not. Dylan, at his best, sure. Paul Simon. Leonard Cohen. Neil Young. Springsteen. Jagger’s best stuff from the late ‘60s to the early ‘70s are brilliant at times…if you can make out what the hell he’s saying. The more coherent lyrics of Cobain and Jeff Buckley. 

But, you see, I’m talking about two very different forms of verbal expression that are too often perceived as interchangeable. They’re not. There’s a reason Springsteen, for example, has an eight piece band behind him, or why Dylan toured and recorded with The Band. Even scaled down, there’s a reason they’re playing guitar and singing rather than simply relying on the words themselves to sustain their art. . .One form of expression isn’t superior to another; they’re just different. Rap comes closer to poetry in my mind than the music I’ve tried to play and write. The Roots approach poetry. Chuck D approaches poetry. A Tribe Called Quest, too. But they’re not doing poetry. They’re doing something else, something perhaps more powerful because they reach a larger audience. I keep hoping to get bit by the bug of slam poetry, but I haven’t yet because so much of it on the page is weak, but the performances can be incredible. 

A poem that hums and comes just as powerfully on the page as it does on the stage…now, that’s something. 

Q: In Still Life, your most recent collection of poems and the winner of the White Press Poetry Prize, many of the “still lifes” seem to be filled to the brim with personal—and often painful—recollections, which are often at odds with the historical characters and determinedly objective tone that pervades them.  How do you see the trope of the still life shaping this collection?

A: Still Life is a book largely invested in the ekphrastic, but the ekphrastic as I understand, or misunderstand, it. Photographs have always fascinated me more than paintings, which flies in the face of the ekphrastic tradition. Maybe I misunderstand ekphrasis just enough [to make it] somehow meaningful or useful to me.

The trope of the still life provides me access to trespass on moments, places, and lives I’d otherwise never get to experience. The Lincoln poem was the breakthrough, the slightly ajar door with a huge light behind it that I still haven’t seen clearly. When I tried to nudge that door open a bit more, the brighter the light became and the more poems started coming despite the wicked headache from such a bright light.  

Trespass seems a bit harsh, doesn’t it? I was talking about this, this trespassing, with my friend Dan Lynam, a musician, a brilliant natural guitarist. He asked me if I was making it all up in Still Life or if I was relying on historical facts. Both, I told him. I’m using history as a malleable reality to help me trust my imagination. History itself is malleable, just as objectivity is a myth. So, the objective tone is really a farce, a stance I was curious about. It can be intoxicating, thinking you’ve got it all figured out, that you know the x, y, & z’s of this life. But none of us do. . .

By the time I’d started writing Still Life, I’d published two books of poems that were largely greeted with the reaction of eh. A poet of my reputation is lucky to have any reaction at all, even if it is one of indifference, mild disapproval. The first two books are, I guess, so personal, genuine…all that. Essentially, boring. I’d run out of me to write about…thank God. I wanted to write a book that was genuine and not boring. And certainly not about me. I also wanted to write a book that was not a smattering of pretty ok poems. I wanted a book that was a book, something unified, however associatively. The still life trope afforded me structure. But, the more still life poems I tried to write, the more I realized I was approaching something gimmicky, something false, a simple trope to sustain a larger, yet weaker façade that would eventually collapse.

My friend Kate Northrop took a look at a few of the poems that I’d been tinkering with, specifically, the Kafka poem. She said, insightfully, that I needed more poems like that one, poems truer to the ekphrastic gaze, poems that lend credence to the title. And that’s when it all opened up: I was/am trying to write a poem that involves, engages all the tenses, simultaneously. Why not intertwine moments across history? Why not try to overlay America’s horrific legacy of slavery, for example, with the Nazi’s genocidal regime because, really, are they all that different? Why not place September 11^th, 2001 beside Auden, Chopin, and Brueghel? Why can’t they exist in the same poem?  

Q: As the arts community finally seems to be embracing technology, with publications like Philadelphia Stories emphasizing their online presence as much as their physical events and magazine, how do you see this affecting the future of poetry?  How do you, as an artist, use social media and the internet in general?

A: There are some terrific virtual venues for poets, writers, et al (why are poets, by the way, classified separately from writers?). Matt O’Donnell’s From the Fishouse and Virginia Commonwealth University’s Blackbird. Blackbird, for example, has video clips of Larry Levis reading poems yet to be published. From the Fishouse’s catalog is growing, and quite beautifully. Edward Byrne’s Valparaiso Poetry Review has been around a while now, maybe more than a decade, and is a place I return to. The Offending Adam is still new, but the editors there are doing some innovative things in publishing on the web; they’re finding new work, new writers who might not be able to bust down the doors in New York and Chicago and Boston and L. A., but deserve a stage. Philadelphia Stories’ ramped up presence on the web is impressive, and a welcome addition. 

I’m a terrible self-promoter, and promoter in general. I don’t do it, partly out of ignorance and partly out of laziness. Social media has helped me some. How I use social media is pretty boring and expected: . . .I try to make as many “friends” as possible if only to get the word out about my work. I’m engaged in a shabby marketing campaign, but the price is right. 

Q: How would you describe your voice as a poet?  What issues, questions, or anxieties are most important to your work? Does this carry through all genres of your writing, or do you find that your poetry is in some ways separate from your other projects?

A: . . .I’ve never thought about how I would describe my voice. I mean, I’m always thinking about my voice when I’m writing, but never consciously. My voice may be the strongest talent I have as a writer, and I’ve done virtually nothing to earn it. It’s a pure gift. It kind of just showed up when I was 18 after having read Larry Levis’ Winter Stars. But, to describe my voice, to provide adjectives for it…I don’t know. To offer such a description would be like trying to describe how I hear rain. For years, I tried to write like Larry Levis. Something about the contemplative, meditative, almost Keatsian repose, in Levis’ voice I find, still, incredibly alluring. Levis’ voice casts a spell. Then, I wanted to be James Wright, specifically his voice in Two Citizens, a book that doesn’t receive the praise it deserves. His embrace of the colloquial, specifically his southern Ohio, enabled me to embrace my own colloquial, specifically my Sharon Hill, my west Philly. Then, I wanted to sound like myself. I’m still figuring that out. I’d like to think my voice is always evolving, always changing however slightly, always somehow getting stronger or better or more vulnerable or wider reaching. . . My voice, for sure, is what emboldens me to write whatever it is I write. It’s a genuine mask. It’s a safety net. It’s air. It’s water. It helps me realize what I’m trying to say. My teacher, Herb Scott—a real sweet cat and wickedly shrewd and wise teacher…a master surgeon Herb was—once took me aside and had some kind words about a poem I’d submitted to workshop. This was a very rare moment for me, for Herb didn’t suffer fools, sweet and kind and generous as he was. Herb told me—this evidences his genius—he didn’t realize how smart I was until he’d read my poems. What a terrifically left[-]handed compliment! . . . And Herb was right. My IQ when I’m not writing a poem is maybe around 100, but when I’m writing a poem it’s maybe around 130. I’m not all that smart, but something happens when I find the right notes in my voice while I’m working on a poem. I’m given insights or epiphanies I wouldn’t ordinarily have. I raise questions I wouldn’t have thought to raise. Confusion clarifies, sometimes. I don’t know why. I try to ride those moments out as long as I can.   

To characterize my voice more concretely…that’s tough. It’s fun to consider. One line has stuck with me when I first read T. S. Eliot’s “Preludes.” I was, I guess, 18, 19 years old. That moment when he writes “some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing….” Something in that acknowledgement, simultaneously audacious and humble, spoke to that late adolescent version of myself. When I read that line, I made a secret pact with myself to try to write in a voice that lives up to that. But you know, that sort of voice can only sustain itself for so long, however “infinite” its intentions may be. It can become a gateway into self pity, which I’m certainly guilty of committing in some of my poems. It can be, too, a wellspring for beauty, which I’m still working on. 

What I’m interested in now are poems that have so little to do with me. I’m trying to write generously. But, I can’t escape being me. Specifically, I’m concerned with racism, suicide, genocide, and animals. I prefer animals to people specifically because they don’t participate in suicide, racism, and genocide. . .One of my primary anxieties as a writer, and as a person, is naïveté. Another is narcissism. Essentially, I’m both naïve and a narcissist because, essentially, we all are. I’d rather be an altruist, but altruism, I fear, is impossible. I’m always battling ego, about it being about me. None of us is special because each of us dies, which makes arrogance seem all the sillier. 

Q: And, of course—what advice, anecdote, or other juicy tidbit of life experience would you like to give to those of us who are just starting out as writers?  What started you writing, and what keeps you writing?

A: Juicy tidbit…I try to avoid gossip with the same diligence I try to avoid divas. . . I once asked Phil what could make or break a poet, and he, simply and powerfully, told me, “Success too soon, or success too late.” I didn’t press him on what “success” looks like because his point was clear: don’t worry about success. Just write, and write as if your life depends on it because, in fact, it does. 

My first and best teacher, Chris Buckley, has drilled this into my head for the past twenty years: Don’t write in hopes of being recognized. Don’t turn your soul into a career; better to lose the latter than the former. If you want to write a real poem, listen to a tree, a cloud, a photograph, a cat, the ocean. Writing the poem is its own reward. Don’t get greedy. Be grateful you’re not Willy Loman. That sort of priceless, essential advice.   

More practically, write every day. I mean every day, for at least two hours if you can. Do this for six, seven years. That’s about 2,500 days, or about 5,000 hours, of generating material. About 95% of it will be rubbish, unless you’re a genius, which means about 85% percent of it will be rubbish. This is what I did during my twenties, and lo and behold when I stopped to catch my breath I realized I had two manuscripts of poems, which became books eventually. I’m not trying to press anymore, which can be just as damaging to one’s writing as being lax and lazy. But, I had to press because I felt as though I had a great deal to catch up on. That’s still true. It’ll always be true. Now, I know what I’m up to a bit more clearly, so I can go a week without writing and it’s no great disaster. If I took a week off 10, 15 years ago, I would be in a deep hole, would’ve lost a lot of momentum.

I don’t have the answers. Each of us has to find the right routine, the right balance. I found mine through . . . writing a lot of really bad stuff, taking it all very seriously, and embracing failure. After all, failure is often all we’ve got.   

I began writing because the simple beauty of language lured me into adoring it. Beauty convinced me it needed me, when, in fact, I needed, and need it. I was duped! And I couldn’t be more grateful. The possibility that I could offer that kind of distilled language to someone else, especially someone I’ll never meet, was, and is, everything. 

Why else do poems exist but to give, to help bridge distances?

Alexander Long’s third book, Still Life, won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize for 2011. His work has appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Callaloo, Hotel Amerika, From the Fishouse, Philadelphia Stories, and The Southern Review, among others. Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York–John Jay College, Long splits his time between two Philadelphia area bands, Big Terrible and Field of Play. 

Still Life is available through Amazon.com, the publisher’s website (www.whitepine.org), and other online booksellers.

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For novelist Thaddeus Rutkowski, 2012 has been a very good year. His third novel, Haywire, a tragicomic bildungsroman, was published to rave reviews by Starcherone Books, an independent publisher of innovative fiction. He was awarded a $7,000 fiction fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, one of just 18 selected by a statewide panel from many hundreds of applicants; his flash fiction “The Mountain Man” was published in The New York Times and just after that, his essay about anxiety, “Toasted” (about an obsessive fear that, after leaving for work, he’d left the toaster oven on and set fire to his apartment), was also published in the Times. Both were teased on the front page of the Times’ online edition, beckoning millions of readers to take a look at Rutkowski’s writing. “Toasted” was subsequently republished print edition of The International Herald Tribune and soon after that, Rutkowski was invited to talk about his anxiety on an NPR show. “A doctor who runs an anxiety clinic was on the show,” he says, “and I guess I was a potential patient.”

[img_assist|nid=9846|title=|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=200|height=283]Such irony and self-deprecating humor is evident everywhere in Haywire, creating an alluring mask for a narrator named Thaddeus Rutkowski, who, like the author himself, grew up in rural central Pennsylvania, the son of a Polish American artist father and a Chinese immigrant mother. Rutkowski is forthright about the autobiographical aspects of his fiction, but he clarifies, “I select and distill events to the degree that I’m not writing a memoir or an autobiography–too many facts are left out. Plus, the narrator’s point of view limits the factual content of Haywire. We only know only what he knows, and he is not omniscient.”

Far from knowing all, Haywire’s narrator is a postmodern naïf, albeit one who loves both guns and blades and who has a penchant for settings fires and playing with explosives. He makes his biracial way through a harrowing family life with a brilliant but violent alcoholic father, who “wanted to start a revolution with my art. But instead, I’m a chauffeur and a nursemaid,” and a pragmatic atheist mother, the chief wage earner, who carries on the daily work of the household oblivious or indifferent to both her husband’s abuses and her three children’s needs or desires. Home is no refuge , but the outside world is worse, as the narrator and his siblings are also victims of various torments from their peers at school. (Late in the book, when the narrator’s brother threatens suicide, the mother begs him, “Please don’t kill yourself while you’re so far away. I’ll have to buy a plane ticket to clean up the mess. Why don’t you wait until you’re here before you do it? I’ll be able to clean up more easily.”)

“I make up and combine elements, say the qualities of different people I know, in service to the story,” says Rutkowski, who’s earned a devoted following of readers and listeners as a quintessential “indie” writer. “I may give a character dialogue that I’ve heard in a different setting, for example…Still, my process has a lot to do with remembering things, and putting together flashes of incident that come to me.”

Haywire displays a clear coming of age narrative arc but its narrator’s quest for self (“In my case, the self wasn’t Asian or Caucasian, but sometimes felt like one or the other”), and his discovery of connection and sexual fulfillment in scenarios of bondage, domination and surrender, is anything but ordinary. The 49 flash fictions that make up the novel are titled but do not have traditional chapter numbers. While the stories can be read individually, when read sequentially they build to an almost agonizing crescendo, then discharge into a lovely and entirely unexpected denouement. Spoiler alert: a happy ending! The stories range from hilarious to heartbreaking, some devastating as IEDs, others funnier, quirkier and edgier than anything else in contemporary publishing. In a novel full of surprises, of reversals and thwarted expectations, it’s impossible to figure out what’s coming next, which is precisely what Rutkowski strives for.

No surprise, though, that Rutkowski, a minimalist who eschews exposition and explanation, who forces the reader to “fill in the blanks,” would name as his influences the postmodernists Richard Brautigan (Trout Fishing in America, A Confederate General From Big Sur) and Donald Barthelme (Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts; Overnight to Many Distant Cities) “Brautigan had a lot of sadness, along with his whimsy. Don B. was hilarious.” With them, he shares a finely honed absurdist perspective but, through the humility, curiosity, wonder, insecurities and obsessions of his narrators, Rutkowski digs deeper into the dysfunctional messes of contemporary family life, and his work is, hence, more human, less cerebral. It stays with you.

Rutkowski, who has two undergraduate degrees from Cornell and a master’s from Johns Hopkins, lives with his wife and young daughter in Manhattan, where he works full-time as a copyeditor for a business publication. He also teaches fiction workshops at such venues as the West Side YMCA and literature at the City University of New York. During his decades in New York, before harvesting this year’s bounty of mainstream recognition, Rutkowski had his work published widely in such journals as CutBank, Pleiades, Faultline and Hayden’s Ferry Review, and honored with half a dozen Pushcart nominations. He’s earned fellowships to Yaddo and MacDowell and has traveled for invited readings to such cities as Paris, Berlin, Budapest, London and Hong Kong.

For Rutkowski, with his life-long passion for theater, such live reading is nearly as important as his writing and he will often try out material on audiences before he commits it to the page. For him, live reading “is a way to make an immediate emotional connection with an audience; that’s the important and exciting thing.” He feels a synergy between his writing and live readings: “If something works live, it might also work on the page, and vice versa.”

In fact, Rutkowski first developed a following and a name by reading at open mics, most often at the ABC No Rio gallery on the Lower East Side, and at slam poetry competitions. He twice won the Poetry Versus Comedy slam at the Bowery Poetry Club and once each the Nuyorican Poets Café Friday slam and the Syracuse poetry slam. He reads locally at Mount Airy’s Big Blue Marble Bookstore. You can visit his web site www.thaddeusrutkowski.com for his schedule of readings.

As for his writing practice, he squeezes in some writing time in the mornings before his daughter goes to school, and he belongs to an ‘urban colony’ of writers, a loft space near his apartment, with desks in cubicles where no talking is allowed. “A perfect place to work,” says Rutkowski, who makes his way there a couple of times a week. But he’s also depended on extended-stay writers’ colonies such as Ragdale and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts—“more than 20 times over the years” – for uninterrupted time to focus on his novels.

The structure of all three of Rutkowski’s novels displays not just the finite bits of time he has to work on them, but also a highly effective way of presenting emotionally difficult material. Roughhouse (Kaya Press, 1999) is described as ‘a novel in snapshots;’ Tetched (Behler, 2005) as a novel in fractals, and Haywire, a novel of 49 linked flash fictions. As with Faulkner’s famed explorations of Yoknapatawpha County and Louise Erdrich’s North Dakota Native American reservations, Rutkowski rarely strays from the his geographical turf—rural Pennsylvania and New York City. Too, all three novels obsess over similar material, a family on the edge; children, outsiders all, struggling to survive. But each book approaches setting and subject matter in deeper, more emotionally accessible ways, and with keener sharper insights.

Molly Peacock’s blurb for Roughhouse could speak for all three: “Rutkowski gives us a novel in bites and slices: sharp, shocking, and certainly not for the faint-hearted. Here is gall with gusto, a voice of reckoning, and writing to be reckoned with.”

All three of Rutkowski’s novels can be purchased online at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble, from his web site or from those of his publishers.

Here is a passage from Haywire; the story “Recovery Is for Quitters,” during which the narrator participates in a group therapy session in hopes of getting out from under his pot addiction:

After the meeting, I started doing my take-home assignment. I recorded my feelings before, during and after getting high. I was allowed to identify only four feelings: fear, love, anger, and pain. Every other feeling had to fall under one of those headings. Jumpiness was fear, for example, amusement love, impatience anger, and ennui pain. Since the four basics began with the letters F, L, A, and P, recording them was ‘flapping.’ Whenever I felt a pang, I made a hash mark in a notebook.

I flapped some fear. I was afraid of being late for work, of not finishing my assignments in the time given, of insulting my office mates with indifference, and of being terminated for my lack of interest.

I flapped pain. The hurt was centered in my head—a pain that came from eyestrain. Maybe I was reading too much text. I probably needed to see an ophthalmologist. I probably needed new corrective lenses.

I flapped anger. I was ticked at having wasted hours on activities that weren’t important to me. I wasn’t a team player. I wasn’t a corporate go-getter. I was a bonger. I wanted to light up, lay back and stay poor.

At the next meeting, it was shockingly clear that in the preceding week, I’d flapped no love.

“You’ve got to flap some love,” the group leader said.

“How?” I asked.

“Think of the money you’ll save by not buying pot and not paying for a course to quit”

I calculated the amount—about $7,000 a year. I loved that figure. I could a lot with that dough. I could travel, or move to an apartment with central heat. Or I could use the money to buy cheaper drugs. Acid was selling for $5 a hit in my circle.”

[img_assist|nid=9444|title=|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=150|height=213]This fall, PS Books releases its latest title, Public Displays of Affectation by local author Shaun Harin. Marc Schuster interviewed Shaun to learn more. 

Q: All of the stories in Public Displays of Affectation are set in Philadelphia and its surrounding suburbs. What’s your connection to the city, and what makes it an ideal setting for this collection?

A: Aside from my having been born and raised here, the stories are set in Philadelphia because this city is a perfect metaphor for two seemingly contradictory sides of my personality. I’ve long since tried to reconcile the dreamy artist in me with the working-class pragmatist who says I should be doing something more respectable or lucrative with my life. (Many of the characters in PDA are struggling or failed artists at odds with themselves.) Obviously there’s a thriving arts scene here in Philly, but in my experience there’s also a stigma associated with making art, as if it’s frivolous or somehow not hard work. As a fiction writer, I can tell you that all worthwhile fiction is hard work.   

Q: Many of the stories in your collection are about love and the many forms it takes—as Liz Moore says in one of your blurbs, “new love, old love, faithful and unfaithful love.” What draws you to this theme?

A: Walter Ego once said that all thematic roads, no matter how circuitous, eventually lead back to love. 

Q: What’s the unifying theme of your collection, and how did you decide on the sequence of stories?   

A: Love, of course! But other detectable themes include squandered talent and this driving need we all have to constantly reinvent ourselves, whether reinvention means sporting a new pair of spectacles on any given day or something more profound and truly life-altering. 

Q: Public Displays of Affectation features a fairly long piece, a novella-length story titled “Me, Tarzan.” What’s it about, and what was behind the decision to include it?

A: “Me, Tarzan” is a coming-of-age story that deals with the question of personal fulfillment vs. familial duty. The adolescent protagonist is in search of a father figure, and he finds a flamboyant (though less-than-satisfactory) one in the person of Johnny Paradise. I included the story because it serves as a thematic microcosm for the entire collection. 

Q: Your book trailer features a young woman walking the streets of Philadelphia armed with a water pistol and haunted by a pair of lovers. How does the trailer relate to the collection?

A: “Blondie Girl” (as she appears in the credits) is not a big fan of public displays of affection/affectation, although she too traffics heavily in the trappings of reinvention. There are quotations from the book interspersed throughout the trailer, but we didn’t take ourselves too seriously while shooting it. Once I had the image of her filling a water pistol at the beginning, Chekhov pretty much dictated how it would end. 

Q: Are you working on anything new?

A: Yes, the novel I’m currently working on is another exploration of the theme of reinvention, only now the emphasis has shifted a bit to the ways in which we invent each other. 

 To order a copy of Public Displays of Affectation, visit www.psbookspublishing.org

How will you be celebrating National Poetry Month this year?

I am taking part in National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) 30 poems in 30 days challenge. This is my fifth year participating and I find it to be an excellent motivator. It pushes me to take ever-greater risks as the month progresses; I find myself trying new things, testing alternative entries into poems, discovering startling new voices. Additionally, on April 22nd at the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City, photographer Jonathan Weiskopf and I (as editor) released the portrait and poem anthology, For Some Time Now: Performance Poets of New York City.

Your poem "Hereditary" just won the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry. Please explain the creative process you went through in writing it, why you chose to submit it, and what inspired you to write it?

Yes, I’m thrilled about the prize.

In writing the piece, I wanted to show variable manifestations of manic rage, and to blur the lines between the I, we, and she, so that landing on the mother-daughter relationship would be amplified. Titling came last, though its concept clearly drove the poem. Formatting this piece on the page took substantially more work than is typical for me. Most of my poems settle in to their form during initial drafts, but "Hereditary" underwent many shapes prior to landing at Philadelphia Stories.

Friend and colleague, Syreeta McFadden, notified me about the contest but my newer work (I had just finished compiling my second full-length manuscript) was locked up in submissions. While I make it a rule to never simultaneously submit poems, Syreeta convinced me to do so expressly for this competition. When "Hereditary" won, I had to scramble to pull the piece from another publication. I’m incredibly excited, and still in a fair amount of shock.

A longstanding theme in my work is the shame behind manic rage within manic depression – particularly its manifestation in women. Women are not allotted much forgiveness in violence; often expected to show quieter emotions. As such, shame is a pervasive function of the illness. I wanted to try to explore feminine rage without apology.

In an interview for HTML Giant by Roxanne Gay, you wrote that you enjoy the fact that your writing is never finished. What are the creative steps to feeling like one of your poems is ready to be shared with other people?

I try to come at each piece with the same careful attention. From conception to first draft, I work and rework: omissions and rewrites, rearranging lines and words, pushing toward risk, fine-tuning. I talk myself through each line, focus on how the reader’s eye is guided. Once I’ve worked a piece to the point I can no longer see the poem clearly/objectively, I ask for feedback from close friends and editors. Then I might dip the poem’s toes at an open mic, then more editors, then submissions, etc. I come back to the poem at each interval, working and tightening, looking for every loose cog, missed opportunity. Even still, after publication, I invariably find things I’d like to change or rework. Thus the concept, "never finished."

What ranges of political engagement and modes of resistance does writing/reading poetry offer you?

As both a liberal and a feminist, there is often a social/political undercurrent in my own work – regardless of each poem’s content. However, much of my newer work addresses a limited set of social issues, and as such, speaks to a rather finite audience (e.g., women facing the close of childbearing years, or individuals with manic depression). In that, I don’t know if my work can be perceived as "politically relevant" as it may have previously been.

Still, I’ve often asserted that to some extent all poems are both love poems and political poems. Poetry allows more (artistically) political freedom than, say, journalism. Meaning, poets can address a given politician without the rigmarole of trying to schedule a dialogue, or arguing fact-checkers, or navigating backlash counter-reports from the "other" guys (though response poems are fairly popular). Further, poets are not bound to journalistic rules of truth. If I want to stir Rush Limbaugh into a pot of vegetable stew, I can. I can relieve tortured baby Afreen Farooq’s suffering by turning her into a field of daffodils. I can imagine my way through anything and still keep my job. This (to me) means a wider scope of engagement and more fierce modes of resistance. Even if they are untrue in real-world terms, consumers of poetry recognize the intent.

In your experience, what are the pros and cons of getting published online versus in print?

Online publications are increasingly more popular as a matter of immediate gratification. Writers can post links to their poetry on websites/social media sites and get instant reaction from readers. I imagine there is also greater readership online-if for no other reason than the internet is vast and free. Print, however, still holds a certain esteem. Somewhere in all of us, we long for acceptance to that one special journal we’ve always coveted. There is no denying the excitement and pride of such an acceptance-and the later joy holding the issue in our own hands.

What drew you to live in New York City and how has it shaped you as a poet /person?

I wanted to live in New York City after my first visit at 5 years old. I was in awe of the vibrancy-a city so wholly alive. I finally arrived years later, primarily in pursuit of theatre, which I eventually abandoned. Coming out of the dark side of a divorce, among other things, I landed back in the lap of poetry. Only then did I realize it had been nearly a decade since working on my own writing. I immersed myself in various writing communities across the city, participating in workshops and open mics, and (though I originally resisted the game) poetry slams. I’ve been lucky in my involvement with the poetry community in this city; I have access to a broad network of artists and am continually challenged by incredibly talented writers and editors. New York makes me work harder.

What was your favorite band in seventh grade?

GBH. (http://gbhuk.com)

How will you be celebrating National Poetry Month this year?

I am taking part in National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) 30 poems in 30 days challenge. This is my fifth year participating and I find it to be an excellent motivator. It pushes me to take ever-greater risks as the month progresses; I find myself trying new things, testing alternative entries into poems, discovering startling new voices. Additionally, on April 22nd at the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City, photographer Jonathan Weiskopf and I (as editor) released the portrait and poem anthology, For Some Time Now: Performance Poets of New York City.

Your poem "Hereditary" just won the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry. Please explain the creative process you went through in writing it, why you chose to submit it, and what inspired you to write it?

Yes, I’m thrilled about the prize. 

In writing the piece, I wanted to show variable manifestations of manic rage, and to blur the lines between the I, we, and she, so that landing on the mother-daughter relationship would be amplified. Titling came last, though its concept clearly drove the poem. Formatting this piece on the page took substantially more work than is typical for me. Most of my poems settle in to their form during initial drafts, but "Hereditary" underwent many shapes prior to landing at Philadelphia Stories. 

Friend and colleague, Syreeta McFadden, notified me about the contest but my newer work (I had just finished compiling my second full-length manuscript) was locked up in submissions. While I make it a rule to never simultaneously submit poems, Syreeta convinced me to do so expressly for this competition. When "Hereditary" won, I had to scramble to pull the piece from another publication. I’m incredibly excited, and still in a fair amount of shock. 

A longstanding theme in my work is the shame behind manic rage within manic depression – particularly its manifestation in women. Women are not allotted much forgiveness in violence; often expected to show quieter emotions. As such, shame is a pervasive function of the illness. I wanted to try to explore feminine rage without apology.

In an interview for HTML Giant by Roxanne Gay, you wrote that you enjoy the fact that your writing is never finished. What are the creative steps to feeling like one of your poems is ready to be shared with other people?

I try to come at each piece with the same careful attention. From conception to first draft, I work and rework: omissions and rewrites, rearranging lines and words, pushing toward risk, fine-tuning. I talk myself through each line, focus on how the reader’s eye is guided. Once I’ve worked a piece to the point I can no longer see the poem clearly/objectively, I ask for feedback from close friends and editors. Then I might dip the poem’s toes at an open mic, then more editors, then submissions, etc. I come back to the poem at each interval, working and tightening, looking for every loose cog, missed opportunity. Even still, after publication, I invariably find things I’d like to change or rework. Thus the concept, "never finished." 

What ranges of political engagement and modes of resistance does writing/reading poetry offer you?

As both a liberal and a feminist, there is often a social/political undercurrent in my own work – regardless of each poem’s content. However, much of my newer work addresses a limited set of social issues, and as such, speaks to a rather finite audience (e.g., women facing the close of childbearing years, or individuals with manic depression). In that, I don’t know if my work can be perceived as "politically relevant" as it may have previously been. 

Still, I’ve often asserted that to some extent all poems are both love poems and political poems. Poetry allows more (artistically) political freedom than, say, journalism. Meaning, poets can address a given politician without the rigmarole of trying to schedule a dialogue, or arguing fact-checkers, or navigating backlash counter-reports from the "other" guys (though response poems are fairly popular). Further, poets are not bound to journalistic rules of truth. If I want to stir Rush Limbaugh into a pot of vegetable stew, I can. I can relieve tortured baby Afreen Farooq’s suffering by turning her into a field of daffodils. I can imagine my way through anything and still keep my job. This (to me) means a wider scope of engagement and more fierce modes of resistance. Even if they are untrue in real-world terms, consumers of poetry recognize the intent. 

In your experience, what are the pros and cons of getting published online versus in print?

Online publications are increasingly more popular as a matter of immediate gratification. Writers can post links to their poetry on websites/social media sites and get instant reaction from readers. I imagine there is also greater readership online-if for no other reason than the internet is vast and free. Print, however, still holds a certain esteem. Somewhere in all of us, we long for acceptance to that one special journal we’ve always coveted. There is no denying the excitement and pride of such an acceptance-and the later joy holding the issue in our own hands. 

What drew you to live in New York City and how has it shaped you as a poet /person?

I wanted to live in New York City after my first visit at 5 years old. I was in awe of the vibrancy-a city so wholly alive. I finally arrived years later, primarily in pursuit of theatre, which I eventually abandoned. Coming out of the dark side of a divorce, among other things, I landed back in the lap of poetry. Only then did I realize it had been nearly a decade since working on my own writing. I immersed myself in various writing communities across the city, participating in workshops and open mics, and (though I originally resisted the game) poetry slams. I’ve been lucky in my involvement with the poetry community in this city; I have access to a broad network of artists and am continually challenged by incredibly talented writers and editors. New York makes me work harder. 

What was your favorite band in seventh grade?

GBH. (http://gbhuk.com)