Writing and Arrival

While earning my undergraduate degree, I was ten years older than most of the students in my classes. I was filled with gratitude to finally know what I wanted to do with my life. I was mature enough to see my dreams through. But I struggled with the fear that I had come to writing too late. I had lost too much time. There would be no catching up.

I hope you know that these fears are ridiculous. Most days I know that they are ridiculous as well until I see an early-twenty-something poet old winning a national book prize. I would like to call this feeling fear, but its jealousy.

If I am going to get honest with myself, I need to face some facts:

1. I couldn't write about the things I am writing about now ten years ago. The view from my early 30s is much different than from my early 20s.

2. In my early 20s I was still in love with the idea of being a painter and was too undisciplined to actually paint or finish my degree.

3. If I am still writing poetry because I want to fame, not only is the line long, but I had better be prepared for heartbreak.

4. Jealousy can only generate so many poems before it will burn me into cinders.


An elderly woman purchasing a sci-fi novel from me confessed that she hadn’t started reading the genre until she was in her mid 50s. She said, “I was going through all sorts of horrible things in my life and needed an escape. I found sci-fi just in time.”

The truth is that I came to writing at the right time. If I had come to it any sooner, I would not have been ready to embrace the grinding work of writing and revising. I could not have handled the initial crush of rejection.

Writing arrived in my life at just the right time and it saved me.

Found Poems, From Your Own Material?

The wisdom of the Academy of American Poets website defines a found poem as "poems [that] take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems."

The Academy continues with "A pure found poem consists exclusively of..." But let's not go there.

Pilfering through my old notebooks, I am finding work that I don't remember jotting down. Sometimes I can't even read my own handwriting. I nod my head at poems I remember the drafts for and wince at some of the lines I had forgotten. But found poems got me wondering if you can create found poems from your own work.

Does making poems out of your old poems just become recycling, editing or revising? To celebrate old notebooks coming to light, I wanted to post some raw material.

Lucia Perillo says that writing poetry is a narcissistic act. Does creating new poems from my old poems make me completely self obsessed?

Here are some of the unedited lines from my past. Do with them as you will.


"They took us through a traveling tour ten miles up the road. Offered us coffee too hot to drink in a lobby too uncomfortable to sit in. Wicker furniture. Rattan. Cheap decor lit with a gas fireplace. Smell of dairy cattle and frying hamburgers."


***

"Know your directions before you go. For there is nothing on the horizon to help you keep your bearings. And the women here with blue eyeliner under each stare, proud in their forms, wear bright dresses over their curves to protest the flatness of this place."

Your Loss is My Gain (Poetry)

I wanted to note two new books of poems that I picked up at the bookstore where I work. We buy used books and the used buyers alert me if we get a glut of poetry. It is rare for anyone to sell us a large quantity of poetry, but on Saturday someone did.

Here are the two books that I picked up:



How Some People Like Their Eggs
by Sean Lovelace
Rose Metal Press, August 2009
ISBN: 9780978984878





Banalities
by Brane Mozetic
A Midsummer Night's Press, December 2008
ISBN: 9780979420832

Poetry: Nice Work If You Can Get It

I stumbled across a collection of essays at work by Thomas Lynch called “Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade.” Lynch, a poet, also works as an undertaker. He writes about how one trade informs the other.

Nancy Peacock the award-winning author is another writer who had a nonliterary job to pay the bills. She cleaned houses. Peacock wrote a book about her experiences called “A Broom of Her Own.” It took an honest look at what it takes to be writer in the face of hard economic realities.

These two authors are successful in literary circles, but they also hold jobs that are a far cry from what most consider the lofty world of literary success. Writing, like many of the other arts, does not often pay well enough to live on. This is why most artists, even writers, are described as "starving."

The literary world is filled with well-known authors who had other professions. John Rechy, author of “City of Night” and “Numbers” earned his literary fame writing about his career as a male hustler. While the poet Richard Hugo worked at Boeing for years until his first book was published. He spent many years working on airplanes and poems at the same time.

In creative writing classes one may hear the term "working poet" but instructors don't frequently mention that poets often be working full-time jobs unrelated to poetry or even writing. So what does it take? What does it take to make it as a writer? It takes and extraordinary amount of time and dedication. A writer must generate new work, revise it, and then send it out into the world. And when a writer's hard work is rejected (again and again) he or she must be willing to send it out all over again.

The longer I write and seek to put my work into print, the more I realize that writing is not only about craft. Writing is also equal parts patience and endurance.

Is Your Blog Eating Your Blog?

The past two weeks have kept me moving. Graduate school applications, academic resumes, writing statements, Form A and Form B burned up a good amount of time and energy. Between working full-time and panicking about my academic future, I haven’t felt up to doing much writing…Excluding the essays and letters that I’ve been agonizing over, Does this sentence make me look like I should be relegated to the unfunded pile?

During the time that I’ve been “forced” to write, I’ve also considered the direction in which I want to grow my blog. In the original vision, I dreamed of a blog that would both showcase some of my writing that had gone to print, but was not available online and give me room to explore and comment on a wide range of writing. But rarely does the vision match the practice.

What happened: instead I used my blog to re-circulate reviews and interviews that I had written previously. I used the blog to post new book reviews and a few musings on poetry. Because so much of my writing has been queer focused, I became locked in an unintentional LGBT trajectory.

I love writing about queer authors and queer literature, but when I started out, I didn’t intend for the blog to become homocentric. Then the guilt set in. Why NOT have an exclusively queer blog? Why NOT promote LGBT authors and artists? Why NOT increase queer art visibility on the Web? I had no good argument against doing these things.

During the two weeks in which I hammered out forms and formulas, I found some reasons NOT to keep this blog exclusive to the LGBT writing world. The most important is that I do not limit my own life and literature consumption to some queer-only zone. Truth be told, I haven’t been reading any queer authors in the past three weeks. I was derailed rereading A Country Called Home by Kim Barnes and Radio Crackling, Radio Gone by Lisa Olstein. I started and completed Jackalope Dreams by Mary Clearman Blew and 30 Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius by Paul Mariani. Some of these books were better than others, but not one of them was written by a LGBT author nor dealt with queer themes. But I want to talk about some of these books on my blog, especially a poet as brilliant as Lisa Olstein.

So where does this leave Literary Magpie? Rather than use the excuse of blog-fatigue or that the demands of life grew too great, I will just admit that I am not perfect. I am inconsistent and mercurial. I start running in one direction and then something catches my eye and I start running in another direction. (My reading list should have told you that much.)

For the next few weeks expect a shake-up. I am going to blog about all kinds of authors and writing. I may even delve into the dreaded world of poetry prompts. Or I might just repost snippets of what I’m reading to share with the rest of you.

The bottom line is that there are a lot of different things that inform me as a writer and I don’t want to put blinders on this blog (or my life) just to make things “fit.”

An Interview with author and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of two novels, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly (City Lights 2008) and Pulling Taffy (Suspect Thoughts 2003). Sycamore is the editor of four nonfiction anthologies, most recently Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity (Seal 2007) and an expanded second edition of That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation (Soft Skull 2008). She lives in San Francisco, CA.

This interview was conducted in September 2008


Jory Mickelson: Tell us more about yourself.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: I grew up in an upper class Jewish family and was the typical overachiever student. In order to learn what I wanted to learn—that is unlearn my background, privilege masking itself as violence, I came to San Francisco when I was nineteen. I became immersed in finding and creating the kinds of cultures I write about. I learned the truths behind the myths of higher education, the idea of career, and the values of assimilation.



JM: When did you start writing?

MBS: I started writing as a child. Writing is the one way that I have to process my life, to cope. I started by writing elaborate escape fantasies. In my late teens, I mostly wrote poetry and became interested in language poetry…how to take everything you think and reduce it into five words, the concentration on the placement of words on the page, distilling my experience into something tiny. I became obsessed with form.

I then started writing prose, stories about sex work. I always believed in experimentation. I felt like I articulated and experience I didn’t see translated on any interesting level in print. This is where writing became about simultaneously articulating and processing my life and the lives of those around me. From this point, I began writing political essays. Not many people doing direct action (activism) write about it.



JM: You also edit anthologies?

MBS: I learned a lot about writing by editing anthologies. It taught me how to think of an idea and to put the idea out there, seeing how people relate to it. The goal is not to create consensus, but to gather as many voices as possible.

My first publication was in an anthology, Queerview Mirror. Anthologies are more like what literary magazines are supposed to be. They allow a space for writers who don’t have a career or connection already. It is a place to find publication, usually around a specific idea.


JM: Has having several books published affected your writing?

MBS: Being published was exciting, but it did not change my confidence in my work. I have always been confident in my writing. I was excited that other people had access to my work and that I was able to see how they responded to it.

I have six books that have been published and in some ways, I am still an outsider to mainstream, commercial publishing. I think the big tragedy in publishing is the current obsession with niche marketing. This limits the kind of work that is allowed to been seen in the world.

There are formulas to what supposedly sells. An agent told me that my newest book needed more narrative structure and closure or that I should call it a memoire. The agent believed that this would allow my book to become a hot marketing item. I resisted this. I have been lucky enough and persistent enough to publish my work on my own terms.



JM: What are your views on queer literature and publishing?

MBS: In the 1980s and 1990s there was a lot of nonconventional literature being published. Kathy Acker and Paris Schulman were considered edgy. Now corporate publishing wouldn’t pick up these writers. It seems that everything needs to be clearly delineated, such as gay white men who write funny memoires. People are uncomfortable with things that don’t fit. Even small presses suffer from this. Is it a lesbian book? Is it a gay men’s book? It always comes down to marketing. Trans(gender) is trendy now. There are memoires by several trans people. What about a book about being a trans person who doesn’t want to go through the entire transition? A theme like this would not be embraced by the publishing industry.

I think that publishers should begin by instead of asking, “Will this sell?” they should find something that inspires them and then figure out how to make it sell.



JM: What writers have influenced your own work?

MBS: David Wojnarowicz’s Close to Knives is the first book that ever expressed my own sense of rage at the world, and also hope in the same world. The writing is explosive, elegant and hallucinatory. It is a deeply political work at the same time.

Lissa McLaughlin’s Troubled by His Complexion is written in the second person. She uses narrative, but not in a linear manner. It freed me. It allowed me to break away from any set style of writing.

Rebecca Brown creates a world that you have to enter into. You ask yourself, “Where am I?” Her writing overlaps between what is felt and what really happens. Her work is much messier than conventional prose. Emotion and reality are on par with one another. These are just a few of the authors how have influenced me.



JM: What is your role as a writer in the world?

MBS: I feel that being a writer means that I process the world around me and articulate myself in the world. At its most primal, writing is about survival. On a second level, a lot of my writing is editing. As an editor, my role is to put others work out there on their own terms. I always want to interject critical voices onto ideas that remain silent or are being erased: queer assimilation, sex abuse and sex work to name a few. Writing for me comes down to survival, critique, accountability and instigation.

Meat Pies, Mountain Men and Mining: An Interview with Jeff Mann

Jeff Mann grew up in Covington, Virginia, and Hinton, West Virginia, receiving degrees in English and forestry from West Virginia University. His poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in many publications, including The Spoon River Poetry Review, Wild Sweet Notes: Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry 1950-1999, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Laurel Review, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, Crab Orchard Review, West Branch, Bloom, Appalachian Heritage, Best Gay Erotica, Best Gay Poetry, and Best Gay Stories. He has published three award-winning poetry chapbooks, Bliss, Mountain Fireflies, and Flint Shards from Sussex; two full-length books of poetry, Bones Washed with Wine and On the Tongue; a collection of personal essays, Edge: Travels of an Appalachian Leather Bear; a novella, Devoured, included in Masters of Midnight: Erotic Tales of the Vampire; a book of poetry and memoir, Loving Mountains, Loving Men; and a volume of short fiction, A History of Barbed Wire, which won a Lambda Literary Award. He teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

This interview was conducted in March 2009.

Jory Mickelson: When did you start writing or consider yourself a writer?

Jeff Mann: I attended West Virginia University and graduated with an English literature degree and an outdoor recreation degree. I ran across a book of poetry by Sylvia Plath my senior year of college. After I graduated, I moved home and worked odd jobs. I read more about Plath and the criticism of her work. I decided I wanted to be a poet. I contacted an undergraduate professor I respected and talked to him about getting a Master’s degree in English. There was no Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing at WVU in 1984. I got my Master’s in English.



JM: You currently teach creative writing at Virginia Tech, what prompted you to become a teacher?

Mann: Why teach? I ask myself that quite a bit. (Laughs.) In graduate school, it’s what you had to do to get your tuition waived. Teaching didn’t interest me, but I didn’t know how else to make a living. It was also a way to talk about writing and literature and get paid for it. I have been teaching ever since graduate school.

After all this practice, I have gotten pretty good at teaching. I got an certificate of teaching excellence award from Virginia Tech. I have reached a point in my life where it isn’t about my own dreams anymore. Teaching is about helping other people. I have a strong sense of myself as a teacher now. It is a privilege to be part of the creative process for my MFA students. I get to contribute to the next wave of writers who will come after me.

I have taught many kinds of creative writing—poetry, creative nonfiction and fiction. I used to teach a GLBT literature class off and on. I am currently trying to make it a permanent course here at Virginia Tech.



JM: Your work expresses a deep love for Appalachia. Would you call yourself a regional writer or a writer of place?

Mann: I realize that my insistence on being frank about my sexuality and about living where I live has limited me in some ways. Being a regional writer or a gay writer allows some authors to dismiss me, to not consider me a serious writer. LGBT writers and regional writers are constantly dismissed.

A lot of details in my fiction are from Appalachia. Much of my nonfiction and my memoir have been about being queer in Appalachia. My poetry tends to be more universal. I want it to transcend, geographical region and sexual orientation.

I would say that the sense I get from the AWP (Associated Writing Programs) and some of my MFA students are that queer and regional writing aren’t worth paying attention to. I have a large ego, like all writers and Southern men. I am easily offended. (Laughs.)



JM: You are one of the few writers that I know who talks about both your love of place and the environmental degradation of it. Annick Smith does this in her book In This We Are Native. Can you tell me more about that?

Mann: It is hard not to talk about environmental degradation in Appalachia. Mountain top removal is a very heated topic here. Mining companies have destroyed Central Appalachia with coal mining. Central Appalachia is what gets written about most of the time—the poverty, the coalfields, and the uneducated hillbilly stereotype. I don’t live in Central Appalachia, but I feel passionately about this.

The economy is failing, the coal is running out, and the new method of mining is blowing up the tops of mountains with tons of dynamite. The mining companies take what little coal there is and ruin the environment in the process. A few years ago, I attended a tour of mountain top removal for West Virginia writers.

Ann Pancake has written a novel on this topic, I think it’s called, Strange as This Weather Has Been. You are probably familiar with her; I think she lives out in your part of the country too.



JM: She does live in the Pacific Northwest. Another topic that comes up frequently in your work is food, why food?

Mann: I am always about to be on a diet. I love food. I am a daddy bear and that sounds better than “slightly overweight, graying, middle-aged man.” (Laughs.) My writing deals with physical pleasure, the senses and the body. My work is sensual, whether I am writing about sex, alcohol, nature or food. That is part of it.

I come from a family where preparing and serving food was about how you care. It is also a masculine role for me. In my family men cook as often as women. My father won’t say “I love you,” he will make you a batch of biscuits instead. Food is about family traditions, kinship and heritage. So many of the dishes I eat or ate growing up are related to the fruits of Appalachia and the South. There are also the English, Scottish, Irish and German traditions to consider. I think about my ancestors and the food that has been passed down by them. I grew up eating all sorts of pot pies. When I was in England, there were all kinds of different meat pies. There is a direct food connection there. It gets passed on.



JM: Tell me something about your approach to writing, your technique if you will.

Mann: I am old fashioned in a certain sense. I am interested in poetry that deals frankly with real human issues and emotions. Poetry just isn’t about language play or intellectual ideas for me. I am not an elitist. Although my poetry is multilayered, you can take away something from it after the first reading.

Robert Frost and Nathanial Hawthorne are my models. You can get something from the first reading of a Frost poem, but every time you come back to it there are other layers, other meanings to explore. It isn’t confusing or impenetrable.

I write in a free verse style, but I am concerned about sound devices and rhythm. I don’t mean just rhyme, but there is assonance, alliteration, etc. I have a pretty good ear. I have been playing around with some formal verse recently.



JM: What would you say is the hardest challenge about being a writer in Appalachia or a queer writer in a rural area?

Mann: Just to keep writing. That is hard enough for most writers to do. Even though we writers think our work is fascinating, the world meets us with a resounding “I don’t give a shit.” The mainstream gay community has little interest in small town or rural queer experience. It is hard to get published as a queer or regional author. There are limitations.

Then I think, “What the hell else would I do?” If I were not to write, what would I do with myself? Just being a teacher isn’t sufficient for me. A friend of mine Irene McKinney, the Poet Laureate of West Virginia, said that when she was young she felt all sorts of painful passions and if she didn’t express them, she would explode. As an older person now, in her seventies, she says she writes because her whole self-definition is wrapped up in being a writer. I have to agree with her on that.

The greatest challenge is to keep on writing when the rest of the world doesn’t give a shit. Just continuing to write is saying, “Fuck you.”



JM: Do you have any last words for our readers?

Mann: William Faulkner, after The Sound and the Fury was published, wrote a commentary on it. He said of the black characters: "They endured." When I hear that phrase, it gets me shaking.

To LGBT writers, I say keep going. Be stubborn and ornery. Endure. As I know from my own writing niche as a queer mountain man, there is an audience out there for my work. It may be small, but people are hungry for it. That is who I am writing for.