Laura Madeline Wiseman's Blog

Earlier this month I headed up North to Toronto, Canada for the CCWWP, the two-year-old Canadian version of AWP. The panel was organized by Janelle Adsit, fellow contributor to Dispatches from the Classroom.

I read from my pedagogy essay in that anthology. It was a great to have the opportunity to read from the final incarnation of my essay, after all the revisions I did of it for my comprehensive exams and then, once accepted by the editors, all the additional revisions. Reading it aloud reminded me how much I love teaching and what a gift students are, how they teach me what I don’t know.

After the conference, I walked the streets of Toronto and hit the major tourists spots. By far, the best afternoon was the one I spent lakeside watching the birds, the people, and the sun glinting on that expanse of blue. CCWWP is set for Montreal in 2014. If anyone has a panel they’d like help organize, I’m up for another trip North.

Once I made it back stateside, I headed directly to my residency at the Prairie Center of the Arts. I was a resident here in 2011 and just loved it! It is very safe to say, I’m loving it again. Of the residencies I’ve had, it’s my absolute favorite. New this year, too, is a van to run residents into town, a Friday night dinner, and an increase in residents (I think the director told me PCA is at full capacity. Wow! I would say, maybe even beyond full capacity. I’m not even in the main residence building this year, but in the one next door. It is just absolutely lovely here. I went for a leisurely bike ride this morning through the woodland lined streets, pausing only to watch a blue heron in a lake surrounded by enormous houses.) As for what I’m working on, a little of this and a little of that, but really it’s too soon to tell, though I will say one of the projects is a digital collaboration.

In publishing news, I have poems forthcoming Vermillion Literary Project, Sugar Mule, The New Poet, Naugatuck River Review, Rose Red Review, and in the anthologies Poetry in the Cathedral and Squares and Rebels (Handtype Press). My essay “My Sister’s Ghost” is forthcoming in the anthology After Dark (Diversion Press) due out in September 2012.

And in my series on the chapbook, up next are interviews with J. Hope Stein

and Susana H. Case,

with several others in the works.

How did your chapbook, The Witches’ Index: Spells, Incantations, and Poems, begin? 

The project grew out of a convergence of my personal life and academic and creative work.  I’d been reading The Madwoman in the Attic and the idea of feminine afflictions really resonated with me.  Also, I was struggling with the pain of infertility, and it felt like I needed some super-human power to exorcise my grief.  On some level, these poems really were spells—desperate attempts to hold onto my sanity, to have a receptacle for these over-powering feelings.

The spells were also a pretty natural evolution from my previous work.  I’d written some poems in my full-length manuscript, White Nightgown, that had a witchy quality and I realized I really liked working in that mode.  In general, my poetry tends to make a sociological argument, but I’ve always valued poets who have an ear for sound and rhythm and who aren’t afraid of letting the language take primacy, or even supersede, logical meaning.  I’m frustrated by contemporary readers’ preoccupation with “sense” in poetry.  This isn’t how we first came to love language!  As children, did we go around reciting “Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,” and then say, “But wait a second—what does ‘diddle diddle’ mean?”  Do we read e. e. cummings and demand to know what a “pretty how town” is?  I think we just let ourselves be swept up by the music and the magical way that poems make dream-like, illogical, yet intuitive sense.  For this reason I return again and again to poets like Sylvia Plath, e.e. cummings, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Eamon Grennan, Karen Volkman, and Patricia Smith—they have amazing ears and let the language take the reins of the poems at times.

 

How long did you spend writing it? Did you have the opportunity to workshop it in a classroom setting? How many versions did it go through before you reached the final? How did your peers and teachers shape the revision process?

I wrote the first poem, “Casting Spell,” in Hilda Raz‘s first workshop my first Fall 2007 semester at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln—literally in the workshop.  We walked in the room, introduced ourselves, and Hilda said, “Write a poem—go!”  It was terrifying, and in subsequent classes it didn’t work for me.  (The idea of having to produce a poem on the spot in a room full of other poets is pretty much my worst nightmare.  The only thing that could make it worse is if the workshop took place on a turbulent airplane at 30,000 feet.)  Many of the other early poems came under similar time constraints, though.  That first semester I was taking three classes and teaching two and I’d have a two-hour window on a Monday night when I HAD to write a poem for workshop, so I’d just pound it out.  “Spell Against Aphasia,” “Genesis Spell,” “Cycle Spell,” “Spell to Survive the Stairwell,” “Housekeeping Spell” and “Spell to Reconcile Warring Wills” all came out of that intense, fruitful semester, and they were all workshopped, though most of them didn’t change much from their first drafts.

The following Spring 2008 I took Grace Bauer‘s workshop in which she required us to produce a chapbook manuscript by the end of the semester.  She also had us work in forms, using the wonderful book An Exaltation of Forms as our guide.  I’ve always felt like there needs to be a connection between the form and content of a poem—”no verse is free”—and with spells you can have a lot of fun with this synthesis (though there’s the danger of teetering into hokiness.) “Sibyl Spell,” Dickinson Spell,” “Spell to Survive the Adoption,” “Spell for the Birth Parents,” “Amnesia Spell” and “Aftermath Spell” came out of Grace’s class (though some had different titles.)  Again, all were workshopped, though the changes were still mostly little nips and tucks.  Perrin Carrell did make the brilliant suggestion to order the poems like a novel—to have the infertility poems somewhat buried in the book so that a reader going sequentially through the book would be led through thinking, “What is this woman’s problem?” and then finally arrive at their “ah-ha.”  That was a pretty watershed idea for which I’ll always be grateful to him.

Many of the forms for individual poems were no-brainers.  “Dickinson Spell” had to be written in ballad meter, make use of dashes, and have a ghostly, abstract quality; “Sibyl Spell” (which could also be called “Spell Against Claustrophobia,” and thus is the companion poem to the Agoraphobia poem, “Wide Spaces Spell”) needed to be written in pretty strict sibyls.  My brilliant poet husband, Miles Waggener, suggested sibyls as the perfect form for a claustrophobia spell—those initial stressed syllables of trochees and dactyls sound like someone beating on a door trying to get out—and then I thought, “that’s perfect—sibyls were young women hopped up on incense fumes, starved, and trapped in caves,” so the poem is both about sibyls and in sibyls.  (I did break the form in one tiny spot in the final stanza—I wanted to give a glimmer of hope that this poor girl would somehow find a way of scraping herself free!)

In other cases I had a form I wanted to work in and then I tried to think of a subject matter suited for the form.  I’ve written many failed villanelles over the years; finally I figured out that the repeated lines needed to be abstract and oracular enough that they could resonate or modulate meaning with each repetition.  Since Rumi is the king of one- or two-line zingers, I took some of his lines and changed the wording a little for my refrains, then figured out the rest of the poem around these lines.  In “Amnesia Spell” I wanted the cascading rhyme scheme of the terza rima to create the sense that the poem’s protagonist is using the repeated cycle of her daily routine to lull herself into complacency.

Some of the forms are more intuitive and tenuous.  It seemed logical that “Spell to Survive the Adoption” would have the cadence of a lullaby—a way of calling out to the absent child while trying to soothe the adoptive mother speaker into sleep.  I think my favorite poem, in terms of how the form and content connect, is “Spell for the Birth Parents.”  I wanted the sense that some woman’s longing in a distant country was compelling this young Chinese woman to conceive a child she couldn’t possibly hope to keep, so the poem was originally written in blank verse.  To me, it is the ghostliest, faintest poetic form—the reader has the nagging sense that a form is at work, but there’s no rhyme or repetition to confirm this sense.  The funny thing is, in revisions I dropped or added a syllable for the good of the poem, so now the formal feeling of the poem is even more diluted.  Maybe the siren-tug of the adoptive mother’s longing wouldn’t have been enough in the end.  (It wasn’t for us; we switched to a domestic adoption, and thank goodness!  I can’t imagine life without our home-grown son.)

Finally, a number of these poems came out of Carole Levin’s history class, “Saints, Witches and Madwomen.”  Dr. Levin is a writer, so she was supportive of me completing spells as my final project for the class.  “Consuming Spell,” “Wasting Spell,” “Spell Against Aphonia,” “Wide Spaces Spell,” “Stigmata Spell,” “Sappho Spell,” “Brontë Spell”  and “Sight Spell” were all written for this class.  Many of these were simply companion poems that I needed to write to round out the larger manuscript. (The anorexia “Wasting Spell” needed a bulimia “Consuming Spell,” the fear of not making sense in “Spell Against Aphasia” needed to be balanced by the fear of not being to speak at all in “Spell Against Aphonia,” and “Sibyl Spell” needed an agoraphobia spell to balance its claustrophobia.)  Others came out of our historical readings.  I was struck by how many prophetic women suffered from stigmata but also gained their authority through stigmata, and the fact that these women often characterized their stigmata as an erotic encounter with God or Christ was pretty trippy.   I wasn’t really happy with the finished poem, though; it seemed a little flat or didactic.  Then I wrote “Sappho Spell,” and loved how the brackets created a breathlessness in that poem, and I thought, “What if I took out some of the flat or expected words in ‘Stigmata Spell’ and replaced them with holes—five holes—the number of stigmatics?”  When I explain it this way the form sounds pretty gimmicky, but hopefully it’s also a good example of how an intellectual constraint that you place on a poem allows you to correct its creative short-comings.

The poem that I resisted writing was “Sight Spell.”  I abhor shape poems on principle, I find their hokiness quotient to be unforgivably high, but I knew I needed to write a poem about the real and imagined blindness which so many women artists and visionaries suffered from, and I simply couldn’t deny that a poem about vision needed to be visual.  So I sat down and made myself some anti-hokiness rules: 1) A shape poem is okay if the shape isn’t too outlandish.  Swan’s reflection—no.  Vague circular shape—yes.    2) A shape poem is okay if all of the line breaks are successful line breaks and not just arbitrarily plunked in to make the shape.  3) A shape poem is okay if it is reifying its content.  This is a poem about wanting to keep an open eye, so the poem is an eye open to its widest aperture.

I also wrote a number of failed spells in each of these classes that I pitched along the way.  That’s the interesting thing about spells—they’re either working, and the elements are all there, or they’re not, and there’s no way to infuse them with magic.

The remaining poems were written in summer months to fill in holes in the manuscript.  I worried at first that using the jump rope rhymes for “Spelling the Apprentice Witches” was too twee, but I liked the idea that jump rope rhymes are a hidden, recognizable language almost exclusive to women, and I hope the dark content saves the cadence from cutesiness.  The poem that I absolutely resisted writing for so long was “Spell Against the Unthinkable.”  I didn’t want to acknowledge this phenomenon, and yet I was absolutely haunted by this phenomenon.  I think, too, I was a little afraid that if the poem made it out into the world before our adoption was finalized then the powers-that-be would think better of letting me adopt a child!  However, once I became a mother I understood and had to acknowledge some powerful, pretty scary feelings.  No, I could never ever ever imagine harming my child, but I must admit that I can only fly when I have my son with me.  Isn’t that horrible?  If the plane is going to go down in a fiery ball of shredded steel, shouldn’t I want my son to live, with or without me?  I think as he gets older I start to feel that yes, I want him to live at all costs, but when he was really little I felt (irrationally) that he couldn’t survive without me, even though my husband is a wonderful, extremely capable co-parent.  In any case, I realized that I could understand how the extreme vigilance of first motherhood could eventually drive some women crazy.  Ultimately, you can’t keep your child safe from all the dangers of the world, and I think for a mother who has lost her grip, infanticide is a kind of extreme sheltering. As for the form, my husband wrote a sestina about St. John of the Cross (brilliant poem which he doesn’t like and thus has never published—sorry, world) and that’s when I first realized the sestina really calls for a speaker who is so obsessive in her thinking—returning again and again to the same six words—that she drives herself absolutely bonkers.  Thus, I always knew this poem would be a sestina; when I was finally able to write it I felt like I’d said pretty much all I needed to say with the spells.

 

How much time did you spend to find a home for it?

I sent out an earlier, much rougher version to one chapbook contest, and then I decided I needed to keep working on it.  I think I planned to keep writing and turn it into a full-length collection, but in the fall of 2011 I had an email from Katherine Riegel.  Katie is a fantastic poet and teacher in Florida, and we first connected a few years ago when she emailed to ask permission to use my poem “List of First Lines” in her course packet.  Obviously, I knew right then and there that she was a class act, but then she sent me some imitation poems that her students had done of “List,” and what can I say, my itty bitty poet’s ego ballooned.   Katie mentioned that she and her husband, Ira Sukrungruang, ran an online journal called Sweet, and she asked if I’d send poems.  Well, gee, twist my arm, lady-for-whom-I-would-do-anything-at-this-point anyway.  Sweet published the poems, and that was that until about a year or so later, when she sent me this email: “We’ve decided to start a chapbook series, and since this is our first one we’re going to solicit for it, so do you have a chapbook manuscript?”  I didn’t, quite, but a cobbled something together tout suite and sent it to her.  She liked it; she said, “sure, let’s do it;” quite possibly, it’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me.  I’d been sending out White Nightgown for eight years and having some close calls, but essentially beating my head against a locked door.  I’d begun sending out my first novel, Cumberland, and lo and behold, same experience.  It simply didn’t compute that something could fall into my lap out of the clear blue sky.  I literally didn’t believe it was going to happen until I was holding the book in my hands—I kept expecting something to go wrong.

 

What about the publication of the individual poems prior to the acceptance from Sweet Publications? Many of these poems first appeared in print. Do you seek to publish your poems in print, online or a mix? Is there a balance you prefer of published and unpublished poems in a collection?

Honestly, because Katie asked me for the manuscript before I even thought I had a manuscript, I hadn’t yet sent out the individuals poems very aggressively.  I’d sent a few and landed them in journals, but once I knew Katie was going to run the book I knew the clock was ticking and sent them to people who had more or less asked for work.   I think in general I have a bias towards print journals, just because I like to hold the physical object in my hands, but I do think the online poems get read more.  Ideally, I’d like to publish every poem in a journal first so that the poems get as much exposure as possible.  I guess I’ve had the best of both worlds: because the book as a whole has been rejected for so long, most of the individual poems in White Nightgown have had time to be published in journals, while with The Witch’s Index I didn’t have the chance to land those poems elsewhere.  Obviously, I’m not complaining.  I think individually the spells might be a little perplexing to literary journals anyway.  If an editor is only able to see three or four spells he probably can’t see the pairings and might worry that I’m some goddess worshipper rubbing crystals and cat semen on my naked belly under the full moon.

 

Tell me about that cover design and layout. I love the stitching on the binding, the onionskin press page, and the stamp design on the cover. How involved were you with the selection of cover and the interior layout and design?

Katie told me the books were going to be handmade, and I thought, “Cool.”  Who doesn’t love a handmade book?  Sometimes presses put out so many chapbooks that the production quality seems a little lacking, so I was really honored that Katie and Ira were only running my chapbook and Amy Monticello’s beautiful nonfiction chapbook, Close Quarters.   I’m really, really interested in design; I’ve jinxed all my other books by making covers for them.  I had the manuscript set in the font we used (Perpetua), and I picked the title font (Blackadder ITC), found the epigraph, and worked out the ordering.   One thing I did NOT have was a title.  I am notoriously HORRIBLE at titles.  My title was something like “The Witch’s List of Afflictions”—something hugely unwieldy and clunky for a delicate little chapbook.  Katie brainstormed synonyms for “list” with me, and she suggested “The Witch’s Index.”  I loved the multiple meanings of “index” and the assonance and quick clip of the title, so once again, Katie Riegel saved the day.  She and I also sent back and forth four or five versions of the book with line edits on the individual poems and she and Jim Miller then let me do not one, not two, but three final edits of the galleys. (I’m anal.)

As for design, early on Katie sent me a picture of a cool witchy-artifact-looking book, and then I whipped up a mock cover on this cheesy scrapbooking program I have and sent it to the Sweet design gal, Gloria Muñoz.  Then Gloria sent me back a better version, and we went with that cover until about a week before the book was to go into production (at which point I flipped out and decided maybe the cover should be completely different.)   Luckily, Katie and Jim Miller, another designer, have the patience of saints.  Jim sent me some other cover suggestions, but all it really took was one calm, collected email from Katie about how the original cover was really beautiful and I realized I was being a freak.   Jim came up with the onionskin page and how it would hide the dedication.  He also came up with the titles font, made all of the poems look gorgeous on the page, and made the stamp for the cover.  I don’t know who had the inspired idea of the binding (maybe Claire Stephens and Gloria Muñoz, the saints who actually constructed the books).   It was a complete surprise when I pulled the book out of the box, but I love it.  The book would look too sterile if the binding had been pulled taut.

 

What was the time between acceptance of your chapbook and publication date? How much editing of the poems and manuscript did you do during this time? When did you know, really know, The Witch’s Index was done and ready for the world?

Katie said yes in August or September, I got galleys in January, and the book was made and available for purchase at AWP in Chicago at the end of February.  That sounds like a pretty quick turn-around when I write it like that, but I think there were a few frantic emails to Katie in doldrum months when I hadn’t heard anything about the book for a while and was just positive the whole thing wasn’t going to happen.  Since Katie, Jim, Gloria, Claire, and I were all working under the funeral shroud of an academic semester, it makes sense that most of the work happened during breaks, but that didn’t keep me from freaking out at the time.

I’m not sure I had a single shining moment when I thought the book was done— it was more like the book slowly cemented into place.  The manuscript I sent to Katie was pretty much all the blood I could squeeze from the feminine-affliction stone, so I didn’t feel like there were outstanding poems yet to be written. Katie and I then scrutinized the individual poems (which I’d already done once in the drafting process) so that I felt pretty confident about the individual parts.  Then I agonized the order so that the companion poems were next to each other in the book, the Ars Poetica poems were towards the front, the infertility poems were in the middle, and the larger-violence-of-the-contemporary-world poems were towards the back.  I also like the way the erotic poems transition into the infertility poems, and how the sister-witch poems are sprinkled throughout.  (There are probably more of those to be written—a Woolf Spell, a Nin Spell…) Somewhat at the eleventh hour I switched the order of “Siren Spell” and “Echo Spell” and am really in love with that switch—the way the words in the drifting, untethered right-hand column of “Wide Spaces Spell” seem to align and anchor in the right hand column of “Echo Spell.”  It was worth splitting the companion poems of “Sibyl Spell” and “Wide Spaces Spell” from facing pages to have that little aesthetic yumminess happen.

 

It seems there might be a lingering sense among some poets, writers, and editors: poets must win prizes. Were you concerned at any point with chapbook contests? What made you decide to go with Sweet? What advice would you offer other poets considering contests and open reading periods for their chapbooks?

I am not one to look a gift book in the mouth; Katie offered me a chapbook and I jumped at the chance.  I guess prizes help you promote a book and your own career, but the most important thing is to get a book that you feel proud of out into the world as soon as possible.   Well, okay, within reason.  If you aspire to the life of an academic, self-publishing is pretty much professional suicide, and sure, if you win the Yale Younger you basically have a career handed to you on a silver platter, but outside of these two extremes, I’m not sure anyone really cares where your book came from; the book is the thing.  People have been really responsive to The Witch’s Index.  I think the poems are pretty good, but what people respond to first and most powerfully is the gorgeous handmade object that Sweet produced.   In the dying age of the paper book, more publishers should think about going to fewer copies of lovingly hand-made books.

 

What current projects are you working on?

I’m writing a new novel, tentatively entitled Claim, which is set in Jerome, Arizona in 1898.  I wrote 100 pages in roughly the same mode as my first novel, and then realized it was completely wrong—the form, the voice, the point of view.  My dad just gave me the coolest graduation present ever—a week in Jerome in a house built in 1898, and my research in the historical society and the parks helped change some of my ideas about the style and what would happen in the book.  (I’m also reading Anne Michaels’ The Winter Vault, which is putting me in the necessary stylistic mindset.)  I worry sometimes that the poem-writing part of my brain has atrophied to nothing because I’ve been working on fiction for the last few years, but this next book will need to have a more lyrical prose line, so maybe it will help resuscitate the poem-writing part of my brain.  I hope so.  I think maybe I’m stunted by the realization that I’m finished writing spells, and the next poems are going to require a major shift in subject matter and aesthetic.  I’m trying to be patient, read good books, let the words and ideas percolate while I work on the fiction, but I’m anxious for those poems. When I’m not writing poetry I feel like the days are just running through me like water through a sieve.  Writing poems is the only thing that makes me feel like I’m paying attention, like I’m earning my little allotment of  life.

I’m up in the UNL English department newsletter in April, twice. I have poems in the current issues of Poet Lore, Floorboard Review, Silver Blade, Sole Lit Journal, and Extract(s), the latter features poems from my forthcoming chapbook SHE WHO LOVES HER FATHER. I also have poems forthcoming in Broad River Review. My poem “Teacup” was included in the Les Femmes Folles: VOICE exhibit in Omaha.

Finally, I’m ever so grateful for Mindy Kronenberg’s smart review of BRANDING GIRLS “The Doll-Like Beauty of the Brand: Laura Madeline Wiseman’s Branding Girls” in Weave Magazine. Mindy writes:

Branding Girls amuses, alarms, and ultimately affirms in its eloquent confrontation of female stereotypes.

When you teach the senior level advance poetry workshop, you require students to write a chapbook. How do you structure the class to make such a project possible for undergrads?

Students in this class have already taken a sophomore-level Creative Writing class and the junior-level Poetry Workshop, and so come to the class having had lots of experience writing individual poems in response to prompts and assignments; some are already starting to develop a voice, maybe even something you’d call a “project.” If they elect to take this class, I let them know right off that I won’t be giving assignments or prompts (okay, sometimes I’ll give a prompt on request, or in response to a poem draft) — students must hand in new work every week, under their own steam. Additionally, they know, right from the get-go, that they will have to produce and “publish” (in an edition large enough so that every class member gets a copy) a chapbook-length collection, and that they should compose, workshop, respond and revise with that in mind. Students are paired with “response partners,” who give written feedback to each week’s poem and, when their partner is up for workshop, the partner starts the conversation about the poem. In the beginning of the semester, there are three chapbook reviews due — I bring in piles of chapbooks, students rummage through and take a few, then pick one about which to write a one-page, single-spaced review, focusing on both the poems themselves (content, theme, style, form, etc.) and on the design of the chapbook (typeface, images, binding, layout, etc.). They print off two copies of the review — one gets folded in half and tucked inside the chapbook; the other comes to me for a grade. Then everybody swaps chapbooks, and repeats the process — and now they can read reviews written by classmates. Additionally, I build in two “making chapbook” class sessions, where I teach them to sew a basic saddle stitch, and (sometimes) a Japanese stab binding technique. We look at lots of samples, both from “professionals” and from former students. I also use this time to show them how to use MS Word to format a booklet. Finally, I schedule two manuscript-in-process workshop days, where students bring drafts of “the whole thing” to swap with partners in order to get feedback on bigger picture stuff like arrangement, theme(s), and so on. Otherwise, it’s workshop every day. The semester culminates with the presentation and distribution of the published chapbooks and a celebratory reading. I also collect a short essay in which students reflect on their work.

 

Are their particular chapbooks or readings you like to teach to demonstrate and spark discussion on the “genre” of the chapbooks?

There are three “recommended” readings I’m currently using — “Weaving a Chapbook of Poems” by Robert Miltner (AWP Chronicle, May/Summer 1998), American Book Review’s chapbook feature (handful of articles) from the March-April 2005 issue, and “A Pulitzer Prize for a Chapbook?” by Elaine Sexton (AWP Chronicle, May/Summer 2006).

 

What is your definition of a chapbook?

A chapbook is a small serving-size of poetry, or microfiction, or maybe a short story. I tend to think of chapbooks as saddle-stitched or stapled, as opposed to perfect-bound, but of course, that’s not a rule. I tend to think of chapbooks as affordable, too — thinking of the tradition of the ‘zine, the pamphlet, the broadside — although of course there are some truly lovely letterpress chapbooks that will set you back some serious bucks. I’m interested in the chapbook’s ability to be very low-cost, occasional, and/or ephemeral OR high-end, artistic piece.

 

Have your students been successful in finding homes for the chapbooks they wrote in your workshops? Or do they keep them DIY?

Although a couple of my students have gone on to create new chapbooks after my class ended, none of them (that I’m aware of) published, exactly, the chapbooks they created in my class. I actually don’t place a lot of emphasis on publication beyond our course.

 

You also published chapbooks with your DIY press Ultima Obscura in conjunction with the , a graduate student creative writing reading series. What was your inspiration? What was that process like?

I made my first chapbook in 1994 (unless you want to count the yarn-bound booklet from Mrs. Spurling’s third grade class, with my brilliant musings on Thanksgiving).

It was called “The Power of Barbie,” and I made it because I was giving a reading and wanted to have something — let’s say a souvenir? — available for purchase and signing.

I had all sorts of Issues about self-publishing (it’s not “real” publishing, was what I was thinking), but swallowed them by making fun of myself. I made fun of myself by creating a “publisher” for the chapbook — “Ultima Obscura Press.” The faux Latin’s wink at “the ultimate in obscurity” was my way of saying (to myself, to others) that I was in on the joke — ha ha ha. It was not a beautiful chapbook, but it was more or less functional.

It went well enough that, for another reading, I created “Beginning Ballroom Dance,” and put a little more time and effort into it, feeling more comfortable about the DIY nature of the thing. I kept the “Ultima Obscura” label. Then I moved to Nebraska, where the vibrant “No-Name” Reading Series (connected with the UNL graduate programs in creative writing) afforded a regular occasion and a lot of writers, and so I started creating chapbooks connected with those readings.

So, for instance, fiction writer Sherrie Flick and I gave a reading together — and at that reading, we sold copies of “Nobody’s Anything Yet,” a chapbook of the poems and short-shorts we were reading that night. I loved the occasional nature of those chapbooks in particular — there was a bit of the “souvenir program” to them that I’ve always liked as a collector of ephemera, a saver of ticket-stubs and concert programs. I like to think that the No-Name chapbooks, along with others I published while living in Lincoln from 1995-2001, contributed to a vibrant sense of community among those writers. I should clarify that writers made a financial contribution to cover production costs, but those contributions were always easily recovered through sales, with any profits going to authors, not to me.

 

You took an advanced poetry workshop for your PhD with Grace Bauer that required you to create a chapbook—a chapbook that was later published—and you’ve published a chapbook that won a chapbook prize (A Thirst That’s Partly Mine) and a chapbook (Luck), that’s perfect-bound and the length of what many might call a book (48 pages). Can you talk about the differences between DIY and the other presses with which you’ve worked?

The folks at Slapering Hol Press took so much time with me both fine-tuning the manuscript and coming up with an amazing design through-and-through — my poems were lovingly shepherded by people who truly cared about the work — mine, specifically, and poetry generally. At Slapering Hol, they do a hand-stitched, numbered edition of 500, with a letterpress cover. Mine also had a die cut window and a really nifty semi-transparent inner cover page with water droplets on it — just gorgeous! Working with them, as well as with Palmer Hall at Pecan Grove Press, who published Luck, helped me get a glimpse of what some writers who I’d published had told me before: that the gift of having an editor and a designer create a thoughtful and beautiful vehicle to get your work out into the world is incomparable. I’m not sure how to characterize the differences between my work on Ultima Obscura projects and my work with those two fine presses. It felt nice to have my work chosen by someone else — not having to make the thing myself, though I found pleasure in making my own chapbooks. It was narcissistically gratifying to see how they decided to design the chapbooks, I suppose!

I must acknowledge that the way I distribute chapbooks and have students write reviews, copies of which are kept folded up with the chapbook, is completely ripped off from Grace’s class!

 

How do you negotiate and maneuver within the hierarchy of the publishing industry that value certain types of presses (e.g. mega-conglomerates, university, literary presses, etc.) over others (e.g. DIY, chapbook presses, small press, epresses, etc.). Do you have advice for other poets considering where to submit their first chapbooks?

Well, up here in rural Northern New England, I feel very far away from “the hierarchy of the publishing industry,” and certainly when I think of the “industry,” I think mostly of novels and nonfiction books, less so of poetry, which tends to be published, by and large, by smaller presses, university presses, etc. I do know that as I’ve grown older (and more confident?) my feelings about that hierarchy have softened, at least in part because I am tenured, and so many of those hierarchical distinctions (real or imagined, for better or worse) are linked to the academic job market and to promotion within academia. I don’t think most poetry lovers care too much about whether the poems are packaged as a chapbook or a perfect-bound, longer collection; I don’t think they care about whether the publisher is Big or Small. In fact, I’d argue that, for some years now, there has been growing cache around the small/indie/fine press. There’s a hip factor, I think, connected to some of the DIY and letterpress and zine efforts at play out there.

 

Do you have advice for poets who what to start their own press and/or DIY their chapbook?

Regarding advice about where to submit a first chapbook – I highly recommend Slapering Hol, which ONLY considers FIRST chapbooks. They produce such beautiful work, and are so supportive of emerging voices. Really, though, there are so many great little presses out there creating quality chapbooks.

My knee-jerk response about starting new presses: do we really need more presses? How can there possibly not be enough? What about finding a press you love and working in support of it by buying books, reviewing books, submitting work there, etc? My second, more measured response: if you want to make books, you should make books! Why not? With respect to making your own chapbook, I’d also say go for it — but be realistic about distribution. Maybe create your first chapbook in conjunction with a reading or other occasion, so there’s a built-in way to distribute at least initially. Consider collaborating with another author on a chapbook — that can also help get it out there to folks who might not otherwise have read your work.

Tell me about your forthcoming chapbook, Talking About the Weather, from Seven Kitchen Press.

Talking About The Weather will be produced in the “Summer Kitchen” series, in an edition of 49 copies. I love a limited edition. Perhaps this is connected to the notion of publishing hierarchy — conventional wisdom privileges the large print run, and going “out of print” is seen as a bad thing. I get that, of course. But I really treasure (partly due to my great privilege of being a tenured academic!) the idea that only so many copies will be available — and then — that’s IT! No more! A treasure, a rarity. Not everybody can get one. I think I first got turned on to that notion in Nebraska, when I was studying book arts and learning how to set type and do letterpress printing with Joe Ruffo. I remember, after having spent AGES assembling type and image, and pulling proofs, and correcting, and re-setting bits, and all that — printing my first broadside, and then, finally, taking apart the type and putting it away. I remember thinking, wow, this is really it — even if I re-set everything, it won’t — it can’t — be the same. Once I ran out of those broadsides….well….I’d have to do something new.

 

Current projects

I want to do something new but I’m still figuring out what it is. I’m writing some poems, but they don’t feel like a project. Today, in class, I came up with the title, “Knowing What I Know About Rocks,” sort of jokingly. But it’s beginning to grow on me. Some students may be showing up next week with “Knowing What I Know About ___________” poems. We’ll see.

 

Number of chapbooks I own

eyeballing, I’m going to estimate between 250-350.

 

Number of chapbooks I’ve read

oh boy, I have to confess I haven’t read all the chapbooks I own — not completely — but I’ve easily read a couple hundred chapbooks.

 

Number of chapbooks I published

18-20 (and a small number — 5-7) broadsides

 

Ways I promote other poets

When I read something really spectacular, I try to mention it on my blog, rate it on Goodreads, mention it on Facebook. It’s an easy thing to do, really. I get book recommendations from my friends on Goodreads all the time. I buy poetry books and chapbooks — I am so lucky that Grolier’s Poetry Bookshop is less than 2 hours away, in Cambridge, MA; and once a year I get to visit Open Books, also a poetry-only bookstore, in Seattle.

 

Where I spend my chapbook earnings

buying other chapbooks

 

Inspirations and influences

There are so many, though certain inspirations/influences occupy my consciousness at certain times — other times, they fade to the background to make room for a new crew. Today, here’s what comes to mind: Elizabeth Bishop, William Matthews, Cornelius Eady, other artists generally — like, hanging out with them, watching them work (painters, actors, dancers, composers), Dylan Thomas, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, food/cooking/eating, Walt Whitman, Muriel Rukeyser, quantum physics, D.B. Cooper, the Apollo space program, and bourbon.

 

Residence

Holderness, NH

 

Job and education

Associate Professor of English, Plymouth State University; BFA – Emerson College; MFA – University of Pittsburgh; PhD – University of Nebraska-Lincoln

 

Bio

Liz Ahl is a poet and teacher who lives in New Hampshire. Her poems, some of which have received Pushcart Prize nominations, have appeared or are forthcoming in Four Corners, White Pelican Review, 5AM, Court Green, Margie, The Women’s Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, Alimentum, and North American Review. Her work has also been included in several anthologies, including Red, White and Blues: Poets on the Promise of America (University of Iowa Press, 2004), Mischief, Caprice, and Other Poetic Strategies (Red Hen Press, 2004), and Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence (University of Iowa Press, 2002). Her first chapbook, A Thirst That’s Partly Mine, won the 2008 Slapering Hol chapbook contest; a second chapbook, Luck, was published in 2010 by Pecan Grove Press. In 2012, Talking About the Weather will be published by Seven Kitchens Press. In 2002, a limited edition (30) collection of poetry, On The Avenue of Eternal Peace, was designed and printed by book artist Joe Ruffo (Lyra Press) and beautifully bound by Denise Brady. She has been awarded residencies at Jentel, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and The Vermont Studio Center.

 

Tell me about your flash fiction chapbook, Disparate Pathos from Monkey Puzzle Press (2011).

First of all, I want to thank you, Madeline, for inviting me to be interviewed. I so appreciate it. It is a theme of  ‘desire’,  a grouping of flash stories on people either connecting or completely missing the mark.

 

How much time did you spend to find a home for it?

I sent out a chapbook with fifteen stories, or so, and Monkey Puzzle Press got back to me and asked to publish twelve of them. I believe that Monkey Puzzle Press got back to me within three months. I sent it to seven different presses and forgot about it until I got the contract in the mail from Nate Jordon, Founder and Publisher of Monkey Puzzle Press out of Boulder, CO.

 

What about the publication of the individual short stories prior to the acceptance from Monkey Puzzle Press? Many of your stories in Disparate Pathos first appeared online in Prime Number Magazine, Boston Literary Magazine, and Journal of Truth & Consequence.

Before I even think of a collection, I publish as many stories as I can. Then when I have a group that seem to have a similar theme I think about a collection and that is how Disparate Pathos came to be. I send the stories out first and waited for individual publication, before I sent to any publishers to consider as a chapbook.

 

What was the time between acceptance of your chapbook and publication date?

It took about six months from the acceptance letter to actual publication. We had to agree on a cover for the chapbook first and then we agreed on the stories for the collection. Nate Jordon was a joy to work with and I LOVE Monkey Puzzle Press. I think he put together an exceptional chapbook and I only get compliments from all who have seen it, read it. It was a great experience.

I love the cover art of Disparate Pathos and the interior design and logos for Monkey Puzzle Press! How involved were you with that process?

I actually got the cover art from an amazing writer and friend, Michelle Reale, who is a librarian at the Arcadia Library in Pennsylvania. She found an old French illustration and then Nate Jordon worked with it to make the vision pop. I thank them both for an exquisite cover.

 

Tell me about your novel-in-stories Domestic Apparition (San Francisco Bay Press) that also was published in 2011. You’ve been very successful in getting fantastic book reviews of Domestic Apparition in The Nervous Breakdown, Pank Magazine, Used Furniture Review, and elsewhere.

When Domestic Apparition first came out in June, 2011 I had a launch party in Santa Fe, NM, where I live and had a blast of a launch. We had music and I signed books and did readings and it was a damn good time. That was the beginning. I also sold many books online and did readings across the country from Portland to New York. I think an author of a book published by an Indie press needs to be ready to promote on whatever level they can. I had so much support from local writers and friends as well as all the writers I was in contact with on Facebook and as an editor of two magazines. And then there were the exceptional book reviews that came from many people who’d read my collection. It was quite humbling and a writer’s dream to have so much positive feedback. I still have reviews coming out on Domestic Apparition. I have one that is scheduled for June 2012 that will be up on Psychology Today Magazine’s blog.

 

What advice would you offer someone about to have their first flash fiction chapbook published?

My first bit of advice for any writer of flash, longer fiction or poetry is to read, read and read. Check out all the magazines online and in print that you might be interested in sending to before you send anything. Make sure that your work might be a good fit for the magazine and then send it when you feel it’s ready to put out there. I always read my work out loud as well as get feedback from a few other writers that I respect before I send a story out.

Once I have accumulated some stories that seem to fit together or have a general theme and at least half of them have been published then I might try and assemble a collection. That’s just my recipe. It may be completely different for other writers.

 

Has being the fiction editor for The Santa Fe Literary Review and Connotation Press shaped your writing and sense of the publishing industry in some ways?

I have really enjoyed being an editor as well as a writer. And getting the experience of editing a print magazine and a bi-monthly online magazine has been priceless. I have read so many different writers and have had the exceptional opportunity to publish work that I admire. Yes, I believe that my experience as an editor has only enhanced my writing. My truth is that the more you read, the better it is all the way around. And as an editor, you read quite a lot.

 

What current projects are you working on?

I’ve just sent out a collection of stories to various publishers to read. I’m working on a chapbook for a publisher right now that will be published sometime in the summer, which is poetry. I’m very excited about that! And I have a novel sitting waiting for an ending. I’m almost 200 pages into it and it’s close to the end of the first draft. Just need to get the focus back in that arena again.

 

Ways you promote other writers

I promote other writers that I love whenever I can. I put their poetry up on my Facebook page. Or excerpts from their novels and collections. I also put the word out when a writer I admire has a new collection coming out. I write book reviews when I read something that moves me. And I publish them and interview them up at Connotation Press whenever I find work that excites me.

 

Inspirations and influences

I am influenced by SO many writers. I’ll be teaching a flash fiction class this summer in Santa Fe at the college. The students will be reading many current writers as well as some from the past. It’s very difficult to give a list of my favorites. I adore so many writers past and present. A short list would include: Flannery O’Connor, Djuna Barnes, Flann O’Brien, Bruno Schulz, David Sedaris, Michelle Reale, Len Kuntz, Paula Bomer, Melissa Pritchard, Sara Lippmann, Jen Michalski, Robert Vaughan, Mary Stone Dockery, Susan Tepper, Alex Pruteanu, Julie Innis, Pat Pujolas, James Valvis, Kristine Ong Muslim, James Claffey, Sheldon Lee Compton, David Tomaloff and so many more. I have to stop at some point or this interview will never end.

 

Residence

I live in Santa Fe, NM.

 

Bio

Meg Tuite’s writing has appeared in numerous journals including Berkeley Fiction Review, 34th Parallel, Epiphany, JMWW, One, the Journal, Monkeybicycle and Boston Literary Magazine. She has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. She is the fiction editor of The Santa Fe Literary Review and Connotation Press. Her novel Domestic Apparition (2011) is available through San Francisco Bay Press and her chapbook, Disparate Pathos, is available (2012) through Monkey Puzzle Press. She has a monthly column, Exquisite Quartet, published up at Used Furniture Review. The Exquisite Quartet Anthology-2011 is available. Her blog: http://megtuite.wordpress.com.

 

 

How did your forthcoming chapbook, The Laughing Game, begin?

During my second semester as a PhD student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, I took a poetry workshop from Professor Grace Bauer and in it we discussed poetry chapbooks a great deal. Our final project in the class was to compile a chapbook of poetry, which really helped me start thinking about how to best organize my poems in book form. Of course, it wasn't until more than a year after that class ended that my chapbook was accepted for publication by Finishing Line Press.

 

How long did you spend writing it? How many versions did it go through before you reached the final?

About half of the poems in the book I wrote as an MFA student at the University of Florida from 2005 to 2007. It's exciting that these poems made it into a chapbook; many of them don't fit the theme of the full-length book manuscript I'm currently working on and wouldn't have found a home there. The Laughing Game went through at least three versions—different poems, different order—before reaching its final version. I revised it after receiving Professor Bauer's feedback, and then again after receiving the feedback of my dissertation chair Professor Stephen Behrendt, and once more after I showed it to my buddy (and chapbook extraordinaire with three of his own) UNL PhD student Trey Moody.

 

I remember workshopping an earlier version of "Tub Home" in the Alicia Ostriker master poetry workshop in 2011 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It's a powerful poem. Tell me more about the "resilience" theme that you address in such poems as "Tub Home." How did you decide upon the order of the poems, the narrative arc, and the necessity for laughter?

It's increasingly important to me that my poetry have an affirmative, or redemptive, quality to it. "Tub Home" is a fun little poem about a child making camp in a bathtub, but its ending turns sad when the child learns the impermanence of her new home. I tried to carefully balance feelings of joy and sadness—oftentimes these emotions intermingle in my poems—in The Laughing Game and open and close the book with images of laughter. For me, laughter can be a "game" in that it's a learned response or an emotional Band-Aid, but I also promote its extremely instinctive and healing nature. We can find our way out of sadness by discovering opportunities to laugh.

 

How much time did you spend to find a home for it?

About a year exactly. I didn't submit it to presses (I sent it to about 20) until six months after I conceived it. Before Finishing Line Press accepted it for publication, The Laughing Game was a finalist of The Sow's Ear Poetry Chapbook Competition, which I took as a sign that it was in good shape. I remember I couldn't believe when Finishing Line Press emailed me with an acceptance. I called Trey and read him the email to make sure it wasn't a joke. Ha!

 

What about the publication of the individual poems prior to the acceptance from Finishing Line Press? Many of the poems in The Laughing Game were previously published in print. Did you seek to publish in print, online or a mix? Is there a balance you prefer of published and unpublished poems in a collection?

When I began submitting poems for publication at the University of Florida, I was definitely enamored of the long-running print journals—I affectionately call them dinosaurs. More and more, I'm seeing authors that I admire publish exclusively online and so these days I submit poems to both print and online journals. It might seem ideal that all the poems in a chapbook be published elsewhere first, but I learned from The Laughing Game that some poems speak louder within a book, pushing the narrative from point A to B, than outside of it without this context. That's an important lesson, I think.

Tell me about that cover art, design, and layout. How involved were you with the selection of cover art and the overall chapbook cover, layout, and design?

Oh, one of my favorite parts of the book! The cover image, called "Toasted Wheat," is a painting by my friend Daniel McFarlane, an exceptionally talented artist from Houston. He and I met while were both MFA students at the University of Florida. I love his work; he paints on slabs of wood and plays a lot with bold color and dimensions. I was thrilled when I found a painting that echoed qualities of my chapbook—in the painting is a box that to me looks like the box of a board game, with bright and dark colors bursting from it. Very cool. As for the layout and design, that's the terrific work of graphic designer Jenny Alessandrelli, the sister of my friend Jeff, a UNL PhD student in poetry.

Has being the managing editor of Prairie Schooner shaped your writing and sense of the publishing industry in some ways?

I hope so! So much good writing finds its way to Prairie Schooner and I feel lucky that I get to read a lot of it. Reading improves writing, you hear, and I notice when I sit down to write now I sometimes try out lyrical approaches—turns of phrase, surprising images, startling voltas—that I've read in others' poems. I have about five years of experience (internships and jobs) in the publishing industry, so I'm less surprised by this part of my Prairie Schooner work. One of the most difficult and rewarding tasks of Prairie Schooner Editor-in-Chief Kwame Dawes is finding the exceptional in a stack of very good work, so I'm tickled that Finishing Line Press found my chapbook worthy of publication.

 

What strategies have you been trying to promote The Laughing Game?

Self-promotion is new to me, and I admit I'm a little awkward about it, but the staff of Finishing Line Press does a fine job offering promotion tips to their authors. Like many people, I'm connected to a large community on Facebook so I announced my chapbook this way and have posted about it several times. Thanks to your and Sally Deskins's invitation, I participated in a poetry reading a few weeks ago and brought to it flyers advertising The Laughing Game. And, of course, interviews help! So I'll say it here: please buy my book!

 

What advice would you offer someone about to begin promoting their first chapbook during its pre-sale period?

Figure out an approach that works for you. Think about what promotion methods generally pique your interest, and start there. I appreciate candidness and humor, so I've been trying to be direct with my friends and acquaintances that sales of my book during the pre-sale period influence its print run and the Press's confidence in me as a dynamic author. I think I've even said, "Help me convince the Press that they didn't make a mistake by publishing my chapbook!"

 

Where can we order The Laughing Game?

www.finishinglinepress.com. You want to go to there!

 

What current projects are you working on?

My new project is a full-length book manuscript that considers the lives and experiences of today's young girls. I've always written about my own childhood and I'm interested in representing the stories of other girls. More generally, I'm interested in how female poets choose to remember and make sense of their childhood. I've noticed that, compared to male poets, not enough female poets write about this time in their lives, perhaps because it can seem like a time of ignorance and vulnerability, but it's also a time of discovery and empowerment. Lately, I'm having fun writing poems that imagine controversial women—Serena Williams, Courtney Love—as young girls.

 

Inspirations and influences: Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, Lucille Clifton, Tony Hoagland

Residence: Lincoln, NE

Job and education: Managing Editor of Prairie Schooner, BA from Auburn University, MFA from University of Florida, PhD (forthcoming) from University of Nebraska-Lincoln

It's that time again. Here's what my writing students think of my classes:

"I think in class writings and conferences really helped me learn more."

"Professor Wiseman was able to teach so much without it being boring. She really made learning fun and interesting."

"She enjoys what she does. There's a lot of coherence between everything we do in class."

"This teacher makes everything so easy to understand and she's always in a good mood. She has a great attitude and personality. Everything we did helped me learn."

"Always there to help and replied quickly to emails when I had questions. One of my favorite teachers this semester."

"She has a lot of great ideas and she knows how to work well with the class."

"She is very smart and talented. She knew exactly how to challenge us."

"She tells us exactly what she wants and answers all of our questions. I think she was a really awesome teacher. My favorite by far."

"Professor Wiseman understands how many students feel about this class, and really worked with us as students. She also has a love for English, this being a good area for her to teach."

"The teacher was organized and followed her syllabus very well."

"She is very approachable and helpful one on one. Very engaging."

"She is good with interacting with us, and she taught me how to write a good essay."

"I became a much better writer. My writing skills improved immensely. She was very helpful and a wonderful teacher. She explained everything clearly and grading papers fairly. She was readily available and returned work pretty fast."

"Very nice and easy to understand her teaching method. Very effective at teaching the material."

"She was always on time and organized. All assignments/instructions were clear and understandable. All questions were answered and work was returned in a reasonable time."

When I took your graduate workshop in poetry, you framed the class as an invitation to create a chapbook for the final portfolio, though when you teach the advanced poetry workshop it is required. How do you structure the class to make such a project possible?

Creating a chapbook as part of the final project is more than an "invitation" in my advanced poetry workshop; it's a requirement. The class is also a workshop/seminar on poetic form, so I do frame the chapbook as a kind of book/form or genre, and ask the writers in the class to think about the composition of the manuscript, about how the poems can speak to each other, and a potential reader, in different ways, depending on arrangement. About how the whole can become more than the sum of its parts.

I added the chapbook requirement to this course – which I generally teach every other year – maybe ten years ago, and have continued to include it because it has proved very successful. I originally added the requirement to give the class some kind of focus beyond the poetic forms that students are also required to work/play with in the class. This includes both "traditional/fixed" and "experimental" forms. (I put those labels in quotes, because my mantra for the class is: all poems are, on some level, formal and all poems are, on some level, experimental). I thought that having a larger "project" to work on might ease the anxiety some students – though certainly not all – felt about "working in forms." Another reason for adding the chapbook requirement was practical. It is often easier – and quicker – to get a chapbook published than a full length book, and I thought it would be beneficial for students to leave the class with a potentially publishable manuscript well under way.

The class meets once a week for two and a half hours, and we divide our time between discussion of formal "exercises" and traditional workshopping of poems – which may originate in the formal exercises or not. I have a sizable collection of chapbooks I share with the students, who are also invited to share any chapbooks they may have. Everyone's required to review a half-dozen or more of them and share their reviews with each other so we can get a conversation going. The discussion is focused on what they think makes a successful chapbook and what doesn't.

The general consensus tends to be that a successful chapbook has some kind of unifying principal that holds it together. Because the shorter form of a chapbook (as opposed to a full-length collection) invites the reader to – at least potentially — go through it from cover to cover in one sitting, the reader looks for a sense of cohesiveness, which is why I think chapbooks lend themselves to a poetic series. On the other hand, there tends to be a consensus among the students that there' something like too much cohesion – or a focus that ends up feeling too singular, a kind of one trick pony. A balance between cohesion and complexity is what seems to work best.

Every few weeks the students bring in their own developing manuscripts and they pair up, or trio up, depending on the size of the group. We end up with pages spread out all over the many tables in the room, sometimes on the floors – whatever it takes. The students have to have a manuscript of about 24 pages by the end of the 16 week semester, which is a bit of a tall order – though I do allow them to include some poems they may have written in previous classes. It's a struggle for some, but many end up with manuscripts they can begin submitting to publishers, which segues nicely into your next question.

 

Have your students been successful in finding homes for the chapbooks they created for your workshop?

The short answer is yes. Many students have published the chapbooks they created for the class – or versions of them. Liz Ahl, Karen Head, Benjamin Vogt, Amber Harris Leightner, Mathias Svalina, Megan Gannon, Jeff Alessendrelli, Trey Moody, Lisa Verigin, Christine Stewart Nunez – I'm probably forgetting some and will owe them apologies. Others eventually developed full length books that began with this class project – Zachary Schomburg and Joshua Ware come to mind. So the track record is pretty good. If nothing else, I think doing the work of this course better prepares students to put together their thesis or dissertation manuscripts when it comes time to do that.

 

When you teach the week-long chapbook workshop at the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference, how does your pedagogy differ?

I only taught that workshop one time, and it was a challenge but – based on my own observations and comments from participants – ultimately successful. The challenges were several: having only five days for the group to work together, beginning with a group of total strangers, having students ranging from 19 to 70-something years old in the group. Of course the group was also self-selecting; they wanted to be working on a short collection and they came prepared to spend their five days doing that. I had everyone send me five or six poems ahead of time – things they thought would be part of the manuscript – and we divided our time between critiquing individual poems and working on arrangement. As with my graduate course, people in the workshop served as each others' readers. We spread out possible manuscripts on the tables and floors and shuffled and reshuffled. For one day, Zach Schomburg, one of the editors of Octopus Press, came in and talked about chapbooks from an editor's perspective, and also about DIY possibilities. I know at least one person from that workshop self-published a limited edition of the chapbook he worked on. He is, I believe, quite happy with it.

 

You've had three chapbooks published – Where You've Seen Her (Pennywhistle Press), The House Where I've Never Lived (Anabiosis Press), and Field Guide to the Ineffable: Poems on Marcel Duchamp (Snail's Pace Press). How did your chapbooks begin?

It's been a while, so my memory may not be 100% reliable on this. Memory is also complicated by the fact that some of these chapbooks were in-progress simultaneously and at the same time as the full-length books. The House Where I Never Lived and Where You've Seen Her even came out around the same time – both in 1993 – so many things overlap.

House is different than the other two chapbooks in that it is not a series of poems, though one will certainly find recurring themes and motifs in the book – much of it about family and the idea of home. The poems in that collection were mostly part of my MFA thesis and part of a first book manuscript I sent around for a very long time. It was a finalist and/or semi finalist in more than a dozen contests – I stopped counting after a while because it became so depressing. So, at some point – out of sheer frustration — I put together a shorter version of that book as a chapbook and it pretty quickly won the Anabiosis competition.

Where You've Seen Her is obviously a series – based on Cindy Sherman's early photographs, her "untitled movie stills" series. The poems aren't a response to specific images so much as me trying to do a version of what I thought Sherman was doing in those photos – a kind of everywoman series of evocative scenes and scenarios. I sent that manuscript to Pennywhistle after seeing and admiring some of their previous chapbooks, and it was accepted, though they had page limitations and I had to cut several poems from the series when the chapbook came out. These were re-instated years later when I republished that series as a section of my full-length book, Beholding Eye.

Beholding Eye also includes the entire chapbook Field Guide to the Ineffable: Poems on Marcel Duchamp – another poetic series, though this one I never really intended to write. At the time, I was working on what became the first section of Beholding Eye – a series of ekphrastic and persona poems based on women artists and/or famous images of women in art. I decided I had to include a poem on Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, a painting I had seen as a child in the Philadelphia Art Museum and had an almost hallucinatory response to. I went back to the museum one summer to look at the Duchamp collection and ended up spending hours in those galleries. I became sort of obsessed. I came back to Lincoln and read every book on Duchamp I could find and started taking notes and writing all these poems that I knew would be as obscure as all hell to most readers, but I couldn't not do it. I knew most of the poems would be difficult or impossible to place in journals, but as it turned out, I never had much time to try. Maybe three poems from the manuscript were accepted before the chapbook won the Snail's Pace contest. So that one came out pretty quickly.

 

Tell me about the impetus to fold poems from chapbooks into books. Were your poems always part of "the book," but the chapbook happened to be accepted first? Or did you envision the chapbooks as separate, but the idea of the book arrived later?

Where You've Seen Her definitely began as a series from the get-go, and I realized fairly quickly that the Duchamp poems "wanted" to be a series – but I had no idea how long either of those series would eventually be. My experience with working in series is that you just have to see where things go, let the creative impetus run its course. The first full-length book I published (though not the first I wrote) was The Women at the Well, a series of persona poems all based on women from the Bible. That series became a book – pretty much on its own volition. The poems just kept on happening. Until they – or I—ran out of steam. The other two series ran out of steam more quickly and ended up being shorter – mini series, if you will. Conveniently chapbook length.

Working in persona and working with ekphrasis are two things that have always interested me, and still do. I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm part frustrated actor and part frustrated painter, but, for whatever reason, I keep coming back to those two ways of  making poems. At some point it occurred to me that the two chapbook series, combined with the new series of persona/art poems I was working on, might make an interesting collection – a kind of triptych. And that's how Beholding Eye came about.

Meanwhile, I was also working on other poems – more based in personal experience – which became Retreats & Recognitions. That was a manuscript I almost gave up on. It includes some poems that were written in the mid-1980s combined with work written in the same year it was accepted (2006). The manuscript had seen numerous incarnations, worn several titles, been a finalist or semi-finalist many times. I could barely look at the damn thing anymore. And I couldn't really see the poems when I did look at them. Sometimes I'd think, "yes, this is definitely a manuscript; it holds together; it's some good work." Other times I'd think it was too all-over-the place in both subject matter and style, or that maybe the whole thing was just total crap – though most of the poems in it had been published in journals. I was about ready to put it in a drawer and move on.  Then I happened to be looking at Annie Finch's book, Calendars – at the end of which she lists a calendar of when the poems in the collection were finished. The dates ranged from 1970 – 2000 — a much longer time period than the poems in my manuscript – so that gave me courage (and I've thanked Annie for this). Hilda Raz was also working on a book at the time, so we agreed to exchange manuscripts and provide each other feedback, as we'd done before. Hilda recommended I pull a few poems, rearranged a few others, and helped me choose between a couple of titles I was considering. I took pretty much every piece of advice she gave me and sent it out for what I swore was the last round of contests ever, and voila!, it won the Idaho Poetry Prize and was published by Lost Horse Press. This is a story I often tell to my students – a lesson in persistence. When I give them the old "life is short and art is long" lecture, I've got some street cred.

 

What about publication of the individual poems prior to the acceptance of chapbooks or books? Many of your poems appear in journals –The American Literary Review, Georgia Review, Poetry, Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, and many others – often in print journals. Do you seek to publish poems in print, on-line, or a mix? Is there a balance you prefer of published and unpublished poems in a collection? What advice do you offer your students?

In my case – and I suspect this is true for many writers – much of this is out of our control. I generally work on individual poems for a long time; I revise a lot. When I finally consider it time to call a poem "finished," I begin to send it out to journals. Some poems are taken quickly; others take a long time to find a home in a journal. There are so many factors involved in a poem getting published.

I tell my students another story — an experience I had early on in my publishing career: I sent a group of poems out to a certain journal and they were rejected. About six months later, I inadvertently sent the same poems back to that same journal. Not one word, not so much as a comma had been changed, but this time a poem was accepted. Why? I have no idea. I was not about to examine the teeth on that particular gift horse. I don't mean to dismiss the importance of talent, the hard work of revision, the quality of the poems, etc. – but there's also the serendipitous factor of the poems finding their way into the right editor's hands at the right time. I guess that's where persistence comes in. And what I can only think of as luck.

I don't have any particular balance in mind regarding published and unpublished poems in a collection. A book can be fully realized, or not, either way – though I suspect having an impressive acknowledgements page may have some influence on the judges and/or editors reading a manuscript. As I'm sending chapbook or book manuscripts around, I continue to send poems to journals, and hope for the best on all fronts. Like most poets, I just want my poems out there in the world of readers, hopefully speaking to them in some way that matters – the way so many poems have spoken to me.

As for on-line and print journals – when I started publishing, there was no such thing as an on-line journal, so initially I was a bit skeptical of the on-line only versions. I'm also somewhat technically challenged, so for a while I even avoided journals with on-line submissions. But, I'm over all of that. I submit both ways and have been published in both kinds of venues – Blood Lotus, PIF Magazine, Switched-On Gutenberg, to name some on-line journals I've been in. I have a poem coming out in terrain, for which I also was invited to submit a recording of me reading the poem, which will be a nice addition to seeing it on screen. I certainly respect both kinds of journals. I advise my students to try both as well. It's simply part of the times we live in – and who knows what on-line publishing will morph into in the future?

I will admit that I'm one of those people who still prefers the physicality of a book. I find it easier to curl up on the couch with a book than a screen of whatever kind, but that may also change as technology develops.

 

What advice would you offer other poets considering chapbook or book publication?

Do your best work. Revise and polish – both the individual poems and the manuscript as a whole. If you can, find a few readers you trust to be supportive but demanding critics/readers of your work, people who may see things with a fresh eye and offer you useful feedback. The beauty – and a great deal of the usefulness – of creative writing programs is that, for a certain period of time, they provide writers with that willing group of readers. It's a good place to practice the old "do unto others" rule, a place to foster a community you may take with you when you go out into the so-called "real" world.

Once you think you're ready to send a manuscript out, do your homework. Don't waste time and reading fees sending to presses where the kind of work you do doesn't have a prayer of being accepted. See what kinds of books the press has published, how they've promoted them, etc. Consider who the final judge is, if that information is available.

Of course, many – perhaps most – university and literary presses have limited advertising budgets, so a certain amount of responsibility for promoting a book always falls to the author. That used to mean mostly readings, but now there's all the social media that can be utilized. I must admit to not being very good at this part of po-biz. I love to give readings; I love hanging out and talking to other writers, but I'm not very good at out-and-out schmoozing. It's like behind my big mouth there's a little bit of Emily Dickinson wanting to select my own society and shut the damn door on the rest of it, but I try to resist that urge.

Humor plays a big part in your poetry – and even in your author's bio, your notes to the poems, your epigraphs. Why humor?

I'm not sure any writer can decide to try to be – or not to be – funny. It's more a matter of temperament. Or perspective. I think humor – often of the dark variety – is just part of my world view I don't know how to look at some of the things one witnesses every day and not see them as funny. Human beings are odd and quirky in such an infinite variety of ways – our interactions with each other, and even the "natural world," are destined to a certain quota of absurdity, I think.

A few years back, for instance, I spent part of the fall living and writing at the Jersey Shore. This was nothing like the Jersey Shore of T.V. infamy, but a lovely little town – very quiet, fairly isolated out of season. I was looking for peace. I was looking for transcendence. I was reading A.R. Ammons and writing a response to his poem "Corsons Inlet," an inlet which happens to be in the area I was staying. I'd take long walks on the beach several times a day, do a lot bird watching. I'd read a lot, talk to very few people, except on the weekends when I had visitors. One morning I was taking my morning walk after an overnight storm and the beach was covered with jelly fish – thousands of them — all small and clear and perfectly round (and totally gross to step on) — and all I could think of was how much they looked like silicone breast implants! I half expected to run into a gang of Pamela Anderson types, clutching their now under-filled double- D bikini tops as they side-stepped all the fake boobs littering the sand. This was not exactly a Mary Oliver kind of epiphany or a Wallace Stevens' pondering of singer, song and sea! This was more absurdity than transcendence.

I did manage to write my Ammons' tribute (that's the poem coming out in terrain), which is suitably meditative in tone, and I have written a lot of poems that are perfectly serious, even somber, in tone and would not evoke so much as a smile from most readers, but now and then, absurdity continues to present itself – something to amuse my muse.

Or maybe it's like the old bluesmen used to say – sometimes you gotta laugh to keep from crying.

 

Finally, can you talk about current projects you are working on.

I don't like to talk about too many specifics early on, because sometimes the talk seems to dissipate the energy from the writing, but I do have both a full-length collection and a chapbook manuscript I'm sending around at the moment, and a longish abecedarian poem I think might make an interesting chapbook. I have other poetry projects in the works, and I'm also working on some prose – both creative nonfiction and fiction. The challenge is always finding the time for my own work amidst the tons of grading, advising, recommendation writing, etc. I have to do. That's why god made summer vacation.

 

 

I'm up on the department's newsletter for March 1. I have poems in The Meadowland Review and in UNL Womanhouse: The House That Feminism Built. My essay "Bicycle Face" appears in Ginger Piglet.

I have five poems forthcoming in the spring issue of Feminist Studies. My poem "Aubade" is forthcoming in Paddlefish and my poem "Our Move, My Climb" is forthcoming in The Delinquent. Later this week to promote my forthcoming chapbook, SHE WHO LOVES HER FATHER, I have three poems from that collection, "Guilt Dream: Doing This to Myself," "A Contemplation of Murder (or Desert Blood)," and "Mummy Treatment," in Extract(s).

I read in the wonderful Les Femmes Folles: The Women, 2011 reading at Parallax Space in Lincoln last weekend. My collaborative broadside project has been in the show "Belles Lettres" during the month of March at the Altered Esthetic Art Gallery in Minneapolis.

Finally, SHE WHO LOVES HER FATHER is set to release in June from Dancing Girl Press. There will be a chapbook launch in Chicago. So if you're in the area, stop by for the launch. I keep giggling about the word "launch" in relation to chapbooks and books. Where exactly is the book going to be launched to? Who is doing the launching? Is it a cannon? A slingshot? A rocket? Is it, it can't be, I think it is….Pigs in Space…..Chapbooks in Space (cue the muppet's voice over).

How did your chapbook, One Life Shining: Addie Finch, Farmwife, begin? Tell me more about the character of Addie Finch, as well as the supporting characters—her husband William, the daughters, the landlord, and the neighbors. How did you come up with the character of Addie? Is she a historical figure, an ancestor, or pure imagination? What was the process like to create a chapbook framed around her life?

For as long as I've been writing, I've been attracted to the idea of writing in another person's skin. There's a certain freedom about it, the excitement of playing pretend, living out challenges and having experiences I wouldn't have in my own life. And I can write whatever bold, but utterly honest thing that comes to my mind, no matter what. It isn't me writing it, after all, it is the character in the poem. I don't always write in persona, of course, but when I do, more often than not, I like the results.

A few years ago, I re-read Bill Kloefkorn's Alvin Turner as Farmer—a book written from the point of view of a farmer living during hard times in Kansas in the early 1900's, and something clicked. I grew up in rural Nebraska, and I, too, wanted to write poems of people of the land—people loving it, wresting a living from it, and being betrayed by it. And when that happened, finding a way to go on.

It was with this in the back of my mind that I started writing poems using the viewpoint of women I knew growing up—my mother, my grandmothers, aunts, neighbor women, even the teachers I knew attending country schools. The first poem I wrote in this vein was "Butchering," about a farm woman doing the hard work of cutting up hog fat and rendering lard, while the man in her life admonished her to stay in the kitchen, do her work and thus be "protected" from the brutality of the killing. But of course she is not protected. There are too many other hard facts in her life, and she cannot help but be involved in it all.

After "Butchering," similar pieces followed, and I set a goal of writing a series of such poems. They would be from the perspective of a farm wife married to a tenant farmer in Nebraska, and the time frame would be the 1950's and 60's. I chose the name of Addie Finch, and when I wrote, I could become Addie, live her life, and write the poems that only she would write.

I used some of the poems already written as 'core poems' and spent another year writing new poems to complete the series. One poem followed the other, and I found myself in a little flood of creativity. I loved it, and altogether wrote about 45 poems in Addie's voice. Ultimately I cut this number down to 27 to make up the manuscript.

Addie Finch is an amalgam of the voices of the women described above. Primarily, she is my mother, and of course, some of her sensibilities and dreams and wants are my own, projected onto her. The character of William is my father; the four daughters are my three sisters and myself, and the landlord poem is representative of the landlords of the various tenant farms where we lived. The neighbors were our neighbors, and most, if not all, of the events described are actual events.

How did you decide upon the order of the poems, the narrative arc, and the various themes such as the those you introduce in the opening poem "We were married in a drought year" and continue to develop in others such as "It was a beautiful spring day"? Tell me about the final poem "Saying Yes".

Basically, the book is linear in nature, the poems following in what I hope is a natural order. It begins with a wedding, the bride a young woman from a small town who will move to the country and become a farm wife. She grows a garden and learns to clean chickens. She has encounters with rats, windstorms, and drought, and with a landlord whose presence reminds her of where she and her family are ranked in the social order of the time. She looks for meaning in all this, in a land where the Pawnee once lived and raised their children and now are gone, and realizes "we are all tenants here." And in the course of this, she raises four daughters.

The opening poem, "We were married in a drought year" might serve to represent the life she will live–a hard life, but a beautiful one, and one steeped in love. But I don't want to analyze my own poem, I just wrote it. Or maybe it's better to say that I put my pen on the paper and that was what came out. And the ending poem, "Saying Yes" is (perhaps) her realization of the joy she has found. But let me say something else about "Saying Yes." I love that poem—the newborn lambs and baby pigs in cardboard boxes behind the stove—I knew that as a little girl, and I wish for all children growing up the occasional newborn lamb in the kitchen, once in a while a baby pig!!

How much time did you spend to find a home for One Life Shining?

It took about two years (or was it three?) to find a home for the chapbook. Some of the earlier poems had already been published, and I began submitting individual poems to various journals. It's nice if a fair number of the poems can be published in journals before submitting in chapbook form. But in deciding which poems went into the chapbook, their ability to tell Addie's story was more important.

In regards to the process of bringing the book to print, I submitted to several publishers, but in the beginning had a good feeling about Pudding House. I had had a poem accepted in a journal they once published; and I've seen (and purchased) other chapbooks they put together. And they were speedy. Once the manuscript was accepted, copies of the book were in my hands within six or seven months.

I'm not concerned about winning chapbook contests, though I do enter them. I do so because a contest deadline encourages me to complete what I am working on. I look at each piece with fresh eyes, find a way to put them in the best order, and discover what poems seem to be missing. And yes, it would be nice to win, but in the meantime I am doing my work as a writer, and that is enough. My advice to other writers would be to go ahead and enter contests if it suits your needs. But let those needs be based on what will work to encourage you to write and to improve your writing.

What current projects are you working on?

Right now I am working on another collection—poems about the two years I lived in Selma, Alabama five years after the Civil Rights turbulence of the 60's. That was a long time ago, and it was as if I had forgotten all that. But in the last couple of years, poems have been coming, and I am now intentionally working to write more poems and form them into a book. And in the back of my mind are two other projects—one about "A Crazy Little Thing" (called love) and the other about experiences I had and people I knew when I was a child. Also, along with my writing partner, Becky Breed, I have just completed a non-fiction book about the creative process, and am looking for a publisher for it. So I have lots of irons in the fire—which is wonderful. I am so lucky to be able to do what I love.

I am also lucky that I live in a city which has a supportive community of writers. I belong to several writing groups which have encouraged me to keep writing, keep submitting, and keep trying to put books together. Most of these groups are generative in nature. That is, each time we meet, we generate new work. It's a kind of magic, I think, something about the meeting of minds and the expectation that you will write and then read aloud what you have written. And when we do read, we find that what we have written is pretty darn good.