Sandra Beasley's Blog, page 17

VCCA (What Works, What Doesn't)

A variation of this appears at SheWrites, a professional Facebook for women writers with a mentoring tone. I am one of a dozen taking turns as the guest blog-editor while SW co-founder Kamy Wicoff takes well earned time off to work on her own book. So watch for guest posts I've lined up from Laura Susanne Yochelson, Bernadette Geyer, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Eugenia Kim, and Lisa Fay Coutley. 



As I've mentioned, this is my third time at Virginia Center for Creative Arts. There is a reason I keep coming back. The landscape fits me, and I get a lot of work done. Over time I've learned to pack the little items that make me more comfortable: postcards to warm up the studio's bare walls, a favorite pillow, an electric blanket, a sturdy printer, a few glasses from home that have a heft and size I like. 
In some ways I cling to "real life" more than others--I muddy my impractical heels in the gravel and soft lawns, I don't apologize for spending a few hours on email each day, I make trips to Charlottesville or Richmond to see friends and give readings. I do so because I've learned the hard way that I don't like having Real Life hit me like a ton of bricks on Day One post-colony. I'm secure in my sense of community. I'm pulling my weight. If we connect and share a dozen late-night talks in the studios, awesome. If we don't connect and I'm the muted breakfast wraith in snakeskin pajamas, sipping her coffee silently, that's okay too. 
Many Fellows are "colony hoppers," and we trade stories of where we've been. Occasionally you'll hear folks admit that the experience is not what they'd hoped, that they didn't get work done, that they wouldn't go back. And though hindsight is always 20/20, if you're considering applying to an art colony for the first time, it is important to realize that not all residencies are the same. If you're looking for a chance to workshop drafts, go to one of the places with a Master Artist in residence--Vermont Studio Center, or Atlantic Center for the Arts--and if you're not at one of those places, be prepared for the fact that asking a fellow Resident to read pages could be a fraught thing. If you're using up precious vacation days from work and will feel let down if there isn't an exotic view and a sense of adventure, pick a place with plenty of hiking options, such as Ucross in Wyoming, or an international residency held in a castle or resort town. 
The Millay Colony was my best experience in terms of eating, because only the dinners were communal and the cook was dealing with just six people, so she was happy and game to accommodate my allergies 100%. This has been my favorite chef and my best allergy experience yet at VCCA. But I face the same struggle I always do--giving myself permission to skip breakfast and lunch if they don't match my work schedule (knowing that if I skip a meal, the kitchen facilities available to then fix my own food is minimal), and knowing that skipping dinner without a day's previous notice is seriously frowned upon. It can be agonizing to tear myself away from the page at 6:05 PM some nights, yet you gotta do it.  
If you come to VCCA, you will be astonished by the care that has been put into developing the grounds for maximum places to hide away. An unexpected bench, a fishpond, so many sculptures that pop into view only as you dusk around a certain hedgerow. That said, bring a certain dormitory hardiness. Sound insulation is notoriously poor in the main house, carrying even the softest giggles in the Wavertree Library to the upper bank of bedrooms. The thermostat in one room controls an entire hall. You'll be at the mercy of a bathroom-mate, one with the power to leave his or her room with you (accidentally) locked out from shower access on occasion. I'm not reporting these things to complain; none of these factors have ever bothered me. But I've seen them be dealbreakers for others, and a bad fit for a Fellow is hard on everyone. 
Don't be afraid to be honest about your needs. If you need hi-speed internet to research your biography or upload sound files for an installation, that's perfectly legitimate. If you value new amenities, pick a fresh upstart like Ucross's sister residency, Jentel; don't go to Yaddo. Sure, that's some rich history and some famous residents, but that's also some old lace and moldy woodwork. If you can't appreciate it, no one wants to hear you moaning for five weeks straight. If you want a sense of family, choose a colony where everyone shares a one-month cycle. Otherwise you may find constant hellos and goodbyes emotionally draining. And if going to Vermont Studio Center on a two-week residency, and you tend toward insecurity in new groups, make sure it's not the second two weeks of the month. You'll arrive to find one-monthers grieving the loss of the first round of two-weekers. Nothing personal, but it can make anyone feel like a runner-up.
The point of all this detail is that you can't assume every colony will work as a haven--and that what causes it to be a "good" or "bad" experience for you, as an artist, will probably be rooted in something far quirkier than the prestige level. 
What I've realized I value most, especially in this time of constant travel, is being grounded. I don't need a castle. I need to get the work done, which for me requires nesting and routine. Part of what I love best about VCCA is exactly what others find most distracting; the sheer size of it, the flex and flow of Fellows on all different schedule (some come for as little as a weekend). I'm content to give a knowing nod to the other January regulars, create a handful of practical connections--here our proximity to my hometowns of DC and Virginia come in handy--plus one or two extraordinary friendships to take with me forward into the world. The rest I let go. 
Well, okay. I also value one awesome dance party. We got that covered this time around, thankfully on the night that the light sleeper was visiting family off grounds.  

I'll keep applying to other colonies. It's good to mix it up. I dream of a lunchbox with my name on it at MacDowell, I envy those who have been to Bellagio, I'm newly intrigued by stories of Caldera. But as I walked back from from the field where I'd sat all Sunday afternoon--wind whipping my hair, sun bright in my eyes, sipping from a tumbler of scotch to guard against the chill--and read the first 200 pages of Kevin Wilson's The Family Fang, I thought: Oh, VCCA. I already dream of returning to you. 

VCCA (Tidal)

My favorite artist left Virginia Center for Creative Arts today; the one who arrived right after I did, the one who quickly proved himself a fellow scotch drinker. On his way out, he stopped to feed the horses with an apple he'd taken from his first day's lunch buffet but had remained, untouched, on his studio windowsill. The owner of the horses that roam VCCA's grounds, a young Sweet Briar graduate named Virginia, was kind enough to come to my joint poetry reading with another Fellow. We were chatting afterwards and Virginia confessed that this horse's name on the paperwork is Pure Black Poison. She calls him Fella instead. 

A minute after the artist drove off, I looked again out my studio window and the latest arrival--a fiction writer from Boston--was introducing himself to the horses. Someone goes, someone comes. In four days I'll be the one going. There's a look people get in their eyes in the homestretch, a reticence at the dinner table. It can be misread as rudeness or at the least social exhaustion: I've made all the friends I need to make in my stay here. Really, we're just preparing ourselves for the jolt of returning home. A sign waits at the exit to Route 29 that warns: You are now entering The Real World.

VCCA (In Threes)

With a week to go, so far in my time at Virginia Center for Creative Arts I have...


-Put revisions on three essays to bed: one to appear in the Washington Post Magazine come February, one already up on Psychology Today's blog "The Fallible Mind," and one that I submitted to Ploughshares the day of their January 15 deadline. 


-Drafted three poems, and revised a sestina.


-Worked on three rounds of interview questions, including a live sit-down for a profile in Virginia Living and a Q & A up now at YRTEOP.com ("'poetry' turned around"). 


-Finished three books by friends--Amy Stolls (The Ninth Wife), Kevin Wilson (Tunneling to the Center of the Earth), and Danielle Evans (Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self). I recommend all of them, with my favorite stories being Wilson's "Grand Stand-In" and Evans'  "Robert E. Lee is Dead." The Ninth Wife is a perfect curl-up-in-front-of-the-fireplace read, a reminder that love is a good & sweet thing even when complicated.


-Wrote a prologue for...well, let's talk about that one at a later date.  


-Read aloud through the three collections I have by Sylvia Plath: The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Ariel. No one had an ear like Plath, no one, and your bones don't fully register the rhythm of "Mushrooms" and "Lady Lazarus" until you perform them. Anyone who saw me through my studio's windows--lights blazing at midnight, pacing in high heels as I read, bouncing as well to Erykah Badu--probably thought I was a madwoman. If you can't be a madwoman at an art colony, where can you be?


I report not to brag, but to assure anyone that has ever wondered that Yes, you really do get things done here. The wheels turn faster. No denying the fun: the dance party that spanned from 10 PM Blondie to 2 AM M.I.A.; the hilltop hike to hear wind whisper across a wheat field; the big bottles of red wine (at the moment I'm favoring a $9 Mondavi cabernet) you share with eight residents, then the midnight scotch you share with one. But what makes the fun fun is that it is a reward for doing the work. 


A sadness of being here this long is that I've had to say a round of goodbyes to people I really came to know. Once you've been serenaded by Jamie Cat Callan on her concertina, she has your heart forever. But we'll see each other again. 


Tonight I'll read after dinner with Stephen Tapscott, poet and translator, awesome dancer (ass-slap-worthy, I tell you), expert builder of fires, and late-afternoon lunch buddy. At a colony you are in a constant cycle of introducing yourself and talking about your work without actually sharing your work. Time to pull back the curtain. 


On Thursday I'll venture out to Charlotesville, to speak at WriterHouse on "How to Get Your Memoir Out in the World." I'll give a 10-minute reading from Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, followed by a moderated conversation with Sandy Hausman, the Charlottesville bureau chief and editor for Virginia Public Radio. We'll have a frank discussion about developing a proposal and shepherding a book through the gauntlet of agents, editors, and publicists, drawing on my own experiences with DKTBG. WriterHouse is behind the Preston Avenue Bodo's Bagels; the event starts at 7 PM and is free and open to the public. Join us if you can~

VCCA (Rhythms)

Wake at 7 AM because of footsteps overhead. Refuse to wake. Wake at 8:32 AM, realize that unless I'm of bed by 8:40 AM, I will miss breakfast. Haul out of bed and into slippers. Slap contacts in. 
If there is fresh oatmeal, go for it it; otherwise the usual breakfast of almonds and a banana, orange juice (ducking back to the fellow's fridge for a pour of my personal stash); either way, two cups of coffee. If they happen to take the coffee back at 8:57 AM without fixing a fresh pot, there will always be someone who dashes in with an empty thermos. There will be a mournful sigh as they settle for leftover decaf. 
Snuggle back under the electric blanket I remembered to bring from last time (thank goodness). Do a round of Facebook, Twitter, email, so the world knows I have not vanished entirely. Work out, and pray no passerby complains about overhearing my Cee Lo Green from under the door. Wander to the studios at 1:30 PM for an intentionally late lunch, because I can't handle the hum & scrum of the conversation. 
Each day I aim to do one practical thing (a query, a manuscript critique, an interview) and one creative thing. I flirt around with the practical, break for tea at 3 PM--a way to bring heat into my studio. The practical thing gets done before the 6 PM dinner hour.  
Dinner: Meet the new fellow arrival, ponder the allergy dangers of the latest house salad dressing (roasted red pepper vinaigrette? yes...cilantro & lime? hmm), navigate the politics of sharing one small bottle of wine among a table of six. 
We talk what we did today, what we'll do tomorrow. Weather. We talk the taxonomy of pears. We talk about crazy grand-aunts we didn't know about until we researched the memoir. We talk New York. We talk Iowa. We echo distant blips of news from the outside world. We talk what we're talking a break from, what we're running toward.
Find another night owl and walk back to the studios. Pour a scotch. Get to real work. Last night, I wrote a poem for an ongoing sequence and--as I push-pinned it to the wall--it formalized a space for another as-yet-unwritten poem. Rhythm sustains rhythm. Working hands you the work you need to do. Is it exotic? No. It's home. 

Greetings from Mt. San Angelo

Hiya. So I'm on my second full day at Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and while I'll be laying low on the internet in order to work for the rest of the month, I did want to check in.  It's wonderful to be back; it feels like home. 


Outside snapshots will have to wait for a sunnier day, but step inside my studio. I'm in W6, which has been home to many other writers I admire--Richard McCann, Melissa Stein, Leslie Pietrzyk, Eduardo C. Corral, and Meg Kearney (before we go, we sign our names and dates of residency on a paddle by the door). The VCCA staff calls this the "sunken living room" studio--it has a unusual faux foyer--and because I face the main road, I get to see everyone come and go. 




Because the furnishings tend to be a bit ratty and the decor spartan, it's a priority to make it feel like home. This time around my inspiration table holds books of art by Anselm Kiefer, Kara Walker, and Hiroshi Sugimoto; a big beautiful portfolio of photographs called Mississippi: State of Blues; and the graphic novel Cuba: My Revolution, by Inverna Lockpez and my friend Dean Haspiel. The erasure on the windowsill was handmade for me by the poet Hailey Leithauser. I bought that cut-glass decanter at a rusted-out yard sale in Johnstown when I went to my very first art colony, Vermont Studio Center. There is a hunk of coral beside it I picked up when staying in Miami with the LegalArt crew. And the wall is festooned with Penguin book cover postcards (the novelist Dylan Landis gave me a whole box of them for my birthday) and an amazing concert poster designed and screened by DC artist Anthony Dihle. 


And yes, if you look close you can spy horses through my window. They spend all day nuzzling each other. Except when they're kicking at each other.




A critical advantage of coming to an art colony within driving distance is that I can pack all kinds of stuff--including a printer. Having a printer comes in handy...




...when you're push-pinning your entire poetry manuscript (or what exists of it so far) to the wall. It's the best way to explore different sequences, recognize patterns--not just thematic ones but style of last line, shapes on the page--and understand the book as a whole. Plus I like the way the pages flutter when a breeze comes into the room.


Today's late lunch was turkey & mushroom fricasse (leftovers from last night's dinner) ladled over chopped greens. I'm lucky: the chef right now is an integrative nutritionist who cooks with olive oil 99% of the time. People ask what accommodations I request at colonies, and the answer is "the bare minimum." The key for me is clear, reliable information on how something is prepared. If I can eat it, I do; if not, I get a cup of tea and eat back in my room from the supplies I brought. No grumping. No demands. In a crowd of people I'm just getting to know, I don't want every meal to kick off with an explanation of my allergies. I'm here to talk poems. And write a few as well. 

On Travel

In case you're wondering: yep, that's me. A photo my sister snapped while on the crest of the sunrise on a very high mountain in Hawaii. I'd foolishly predicted the temperature for my family based on sea level and Oh oh oh, we were freezing at 5 AM.


I've been in the grip of a spate of fellowship applications as of late--to New Hampshire, to Stonington, to Tokyo and Riga--which raises the question of "Um, why?" I am not fleeing a 9-to-5 job, or motherhood. I seem to have stumbled into this vagabond life.


That was never what I intended for this decade. I thought I'd do what most folks (and certainly, my high school girlfriends) do: get married, invest in significant pieces of furniture and fine place settings, have a kid or two. But things happened, and I had to upturn the apple cart and run hollering into a different kind of life.


2012 is going to be a lot like 2011. 2011 put 30,000 miles on my car, so I say that with a certain amount of trepidation. But I am learning how to take it all in: when to push, when to stop, when to crash for 18 minutes in the McDonald's parking lot. When to pay for the fancy sushi and when to skimp on canned sardines in the hotel room. 


During November's Miami trip, I marched a friend through a fancy-ass hotel lobby at midnight (en route to a sublimely ridiculous South Beach poolside lounge) and he said "You seem very comfortable in this world." Nah. I have no natural affinity for skinny jeans and Laboutins, anymore than I'd make a natural Brooklyner. It's not about being comfortable in the world; it's about being mildly uneasy, but proceeding regardless. Always. You arrive. You orient. You risk embarrassment. You plunge.


Growing up, my father's Army commands always took him away from us. Sometimes it was far--Panama, Bosnia, Kuwait--but more often it was within driving distance. When I mention I was a military kid people always assume I was a peripatetic "brat," but the truth is we stayed in proximity to the Pentagon via homes in Virginia, while my dad journeyed on his own. He went to Fort Bragg in North Carolina; to the Civil Affairs command in Pensacola; to Fort Snelling in Minnesota. He went. We stayed. I thought surely that in becoming a poet, I was following a career path very unlike his. So it's funny that I find myself following the same merciless paths of I-95, I-81, I-40.


I travel because I'm strong enough to travel, alone, which is part of proving to myself that I can step into this time of life alone. I travel because I'm crafty and I guess where to find the free microwave access. I travel because I don't speak many languages, but I'm polite and a quick study. I travel because I can stop and appreciate a view. I travel because I'm thirsty (and not just for scotch, though that helps). I travel because I'm unsure of myself on some fronts. I travel because I'm damn cocky on other fronts.


When I next check in, it will be from Virginia Center for Creative Arts. A writer's job is to venture. Doesn't have to be measured in geography--I respect inner delving. But for me, for now, I gotta move. 2012: See where I land. Follow along, if you've got time. 

Some End-of-Year Poetry Picks

...so, I won't claim these are "best of" anything; my travels were too peripatetic to read as much as I hoped, and what I read was equal parts poetry, fiction, and memoir. But these three 2011 collections made me stop, drop whatever else I was doing, and read from A to Z--in part to enjoy, in part to (selfishly) (strategically) (enviously) consider their poetics in light of my own projects. 





TALKING ABOUT MOVIES WITH JESUS
David Kirby 
(Louisiana State University Press)


Kirby is a born storyteller adept with dialogue, arc, and recurring cast; these ebullient, rangy poems channel the energy of rock and roll, the wry humor of middle adulthood, and the curiosities of an inveterate traveler.


Favorite lines: "...I have put a single raisin of doubt on the government's snowy / white cake of confidence."


*


APPLIES TO ORANGES
Maureen Thorson 
(Ugly Duckling Presse)


This physically beautiful, intimate collection of Thorson's untitled lyrics cycles through a vocabulary of icons--oranges, stars, a Zenith TV's blue light--to hint at a story of loss and dislocation, both emotional and geographic.


Favorite lines: "...my love / follows you a little more slowly each day, / like a dog that wants to lie down, making signs with its tired eyes."


*


AMERICAN BUSBOY
Matthew Guenette
(The University of Akron Press)


The most fun collection I read in 2011, Guenette focuses the frustration of America's working class via the lens of THE CLAM SHACK!, a veritable Dantean hell of dictatorial managers, forlorn waitresses, and yesterday's butter.


Favorite lines: "...the restaurant / never asked you to / imagine imaginary / things like the brittle / bones of onion rings."



*


Last night I met up with a a couple of brilliant NBCC folks for beers at the Black Squirrel. The Black Squirrel's basement is a DC dive right in the heart of Adams Morgan (great on a Wednesday, hell on a Saturday). The music was a little ridiculous, the duck rolls a little weird, the dessert menu MIA. But it's a quiet joint where you can chat, the brick walls are bright with graffiti that's not too hipstery, and I love that you can get 4 oz pours for $2-3, everything from IPAs to Porters, Bells to Stone. Anyway. I am not a NBCC member, and I admitted to these folks my reticence to step into the field of criticism. But I do dip a toe in, here and there, and there are theories of poetry I want to articulate when I have a few more books of my own under my belt. 


In the meantime, I'm a pushover for whatever Susan Settlemyre Williams at Blackbird asks me to do. So here I am in the latest issue reviewing Traci Brimhall's Rookery .
An excerpt:

On a formal level, Brimhall often uses an indented line in her stanzas. This device has been used to various ends over the last two centuries of American free verse, from William Carlos Williams's triadic stanza (meant to cue pause and breath) and Marianne Moore's syllabics (meant to signify parallel counts of beat), to the excesses of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Frank O'Hara, in which jumping from left-alignment toward the right-hand margin captured acrobatic shifts in attention or literal roaming through space. Contemporary poets such as Henri Cole and David Kirby have associated the indented line with a meditative mode that takes advantage of the traditional line break, plus the additional white space, to counterbalance a loping line of five to six stresses.

In many ways, Brimhall is an inheritor of all these influences. But I would add that her indented stanzas have a waterfall quality, as if the speaker is cascading toward a conclusion driven more by instinct or fate than intellect. The verbs that inhabit these indented poems tend to be passive—describing what is known, what is suffered, what is desired, with few fundamental changes in course—and in "Falling," a tribute to the 146 garment workers killed in the fire at the Triangle Waist Company factory, the form visually and viscerally evokes their helpless plummet.

Onward to 2012. Three weeks at Virginia Center for Creative Arts beckon in January. I can't imagine a better way to start off the year than hiding away and poem-ing. 

Live from the Botanic Gardens in DC

I don't have a lot of winter traditions. I don't go caroling, or ice skating; mostly I trudge around cursing the cold. (I'm allergic to wool, damn it! It's no fun trying to dress up in scarves and sweaters when you have to be dodging wool at every turn.) 


But one thing I do love is my annual trek down to the United States Botanic Gardens to see their display of model trains, which are let loose in an incredible multi-level landscape (bridges, tunnels, a waterfall) made from plant elements that fills an entire gallery room. I go on a Thursday, when they stay open until 8 PM and there is music. I watch the kids run around, then stop in their tracks and gape in awe. I poke my head into the orchid parlor,  inhale that warm and sweet-scented air for a minute, and imagine I'm somewhere tropical and lush instead of slushy and gray. 


Walking through the Railway Garden is free. It's very DC. And each year, no matter where I am in life, it fills me with joy. 


The trains range from the recognizable Thomas the Tank Engine characters that make kids crow with joy to classic vintage silver bullets that are usually run on the above-head tracks, perhaps to keep them away from curious hands. 


2011's structures--it changes every year--are themed "Who Lives Here?" From "Fairy Flats" to "Critter Condos" to a peacock palace. An opossum house hangs upside down by a tail, while "Giraffe Garage" has a lonnngggg staircase up to the second floor. The cleverness and attention to detail of these buildings never fails to surprise me. And the designers are not afraid to be slightly weird. This year's Monkey Mansion made me think of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom--I kept expecting it to reach out and gobble up the bumblebee train. 

In the central atrium of the Garden, the Russian folk band "Samovar" kept the crowd cheering through traditional songs. One guy was rocking out on a balalaika. Just last week I was writing a poem that included a random line about "common household balalaikas." This felt like a good omen, to see one live & in action within the week. 


You may notice what appears to be a scale version of the Washington Monument looming in back of the band. It is. They render many of DC's great structures--Capitol, Supreme Court--again in all-plant materials. You have not lived until you've seen the great dome of the Jefferson Memorial's rotunda reincarnated as the belly of a big gourd.


You can't go to the Botanic Gardens and not take in the plants as well. So my father, sister  and I got lost in the greenery for a while. Christina had a very fancy camera (as you can tell from these photos, I did not have a very fancy camera) and took a lot of close-ups. People sometimes forget that in the world of exotic plants, texture can be as much of a surprise as color. Here Christina is posing with a monkey-tail tree whose branches (fronds?) felt like lanyards braided from the thick plastic floss they'd give us as kids at camp. 


My dad and I in Hawai'i. Or at least the Hawai'i room. Later in the evening, it was raining hard and he made an elaborate show of using the one umbrella to protect my leather jacket. "You have on a leather jacket too," I pointed out. "Yes," he said, "but this one has been through three wars." Couldn't argue with that.

You know how goldfish, if they are not limited by the size of their bowl, continue to grow bigger and bigger and bigger? Poinsettias are the goldfish of the holiday plant world. They can easily reach six feet tall and keep growing. You have to admire their ambition. 
If you want to drop by the Botanic Gardens, it is not too late. They'll continue to have their extended hours on Tuesday, December 27 (Hot Club of DC, gypsy jazz and swing) and Thursday, December 29 (40 Thieves, Irish rock music). Tell 'em I sent ya. And for a grand finale, as promised, a little live action filmed by yours truly:

Happy holidays, folks!

Delivery o' Gratitude

Writers love the mail. Not email; old school, wait-by-the mailbox mail. For many of us still focused on print and/or freelance the mail brings our news, our wages, the physical evidence of our labors. So we keep an eye on the latest stamp series, shiver at the thought of suspending Saturday delivery, and curse when a new neighborhood turns out to have a late or lazy mailman (I once had one so bad he'd just skip days).

Here is a quartet of ways the last week's mail has reminded me of all I can be grateful for in this writing life. 

Out of nowhere, a noted European poet named Ron Winkler contacted me to ask if he could translate some of my poems into German. I said yes, and he jumped through all the hoops--securing permission from W. W. Norton and New Issues, working with Hochroth Press to release a chapbook, and going on to circulate individual poems to editors. So Lo and Behold, I get this gorgeous big glossy magazine in the mail...
WESPENNEST
In it, four poems:"Unit of Measure," "Theories of Falling," "The Field," and a somewhat obscure poem of mine, "She Falls Asleep in Strange Places," that never made it into a book. 


Seeing your work in another language (one you do not speak) is surreal and wonderful.

Also, they capitalized "Capybara" every gosh darn time, which made me laugh.
Then came the arrival of The Oxford American's annual music issue, this year dedicated to...Mississippi. As anyone who reads this blog knows, I keep a little piece of my heart there at all times. When the editors asked me if I'd take part by writing about one of the tracks for their sampler CD, I was beyond thrilled. (To give you a sense of the company I got to keep, David Kirby wrote about Bo Diddley; Yuzef Komunyakaa wrote about Howlin' Wolf). If you don't know about the OA, which calls itself "The Southern Magazine of Good Writing,"you should check it out. I've been reading it for a decade, long before I ever fathomed that one day my name could be on the cover. I picked up my first copy at the Olsson's that used to be south of Dupont Circle. 

I write about Mattie Delaney, a haunting 1920s/30s Delta songwriter and guitarist about whom we know very little--she recorded just two songs. The OA crew did such a gorgeous job laying this piece out (look at that art) I could cry. These music issues aren't magazines that feel dated after a month; they are rich, nuanced, highly collectible portraits of American music themed one state at a time. Anthology + CD for $10.95? It's a steal. It's not too late to go back and get ones from previous years as gifts--I can testify that the Arkansas one is a favorite, filled with excellent driving music. Excellent driving music was key to surviving 2011, in which I put 30,000 miles on my car. 
Freelancers have to be hustle forward as they look back. So I'm working toward sending out poems and essays. I just had a poem picked up by POETRY. (!) (!!!) In 2012 I have a travel piece coming out in the Washington Post Magazine. Postage-paid Point of Gratitude #3: there are still editors out there who send you pencil-marked hard copy. David Rowell is my editor. Years ago, just out of the MFA at American University, I submitted and he replied with a phone call and suggestions for edits--even though he was not taking it, but wanting to encourage a young writer. Just a really classy guy, and it means so much to work with him now. (Ahem. This photo is sideways to discourage you from trying to read it.)All of these things to celebrate mean nothing without people I care about to celebrate them with. This week, every day has brought a card from a friend who is also a fellow writer. Every day. I've arrayed them in the decorative bramble-thing that sits by my fireplace; it's no sparkling and tinsled Christmas tree (for that I'll be going to my parents' house), but each time I look at it I smile. Thank you, guys. And thank you, United States Postal Service.

Just the Right Book

Today I was asked by the good folks at JUST THE RIGHT BOOK, which is a neat personalized book-of-the-month subscription service, to contribute to a series they are doing throughout December, in which they ask authors to tell a story of the best book they received for Christmas, Hanukkah, or any of the winter holidays. Other contributors include James Patterson, Gina Barreca, Nicholas Sparks. Here's how my piece opens~

The best book I ever received for Christmas is a first edition of W. S. Merwin's THE FOLDING CLIFFS, "a narrative of 19th-century Hawaii"--in other words, one of the great epic poems written in our time. In elegant, urgent verses Merwin tells the story of a family determined to stay together as they flee government capture during a quarantine effort on Kauai. Woven in amidst the action is an appreciation of the native culture, mythology, and landscape of this gorgeous island. The book is dedicated to Olivia Breitha (1916-2006); Breitha was known as an outspoken advocate of those discriminated against for leprosy, and her firsthand experience resonated with later generations affected by the AIDS epidemic. 

It would be enough to appreciate this gift in terms of its literary merit...but the real reason I share it with you is because of the spirit in which it was given. It was the first Christmas that I had chosen to spend away from home to be with a love, and I was on the eve of making a trip to Kauai myself--without him. He was a huge Merwin fan. The day after Christmas, after all the "official" gifts had been opened, I was packing to make the 15-hour drive back to see my family for a day and catch a plane to Hawaii. That was when took his own copy of this book, signed it to me, and told me I must read it. I carried this spontaneous gesture to Kauai's beaches....

And exclusive to the blog, here is a snapshot of the book with a second inscription--from Merwin himself. Read the full essay here to get that half of the story. For regular blog readers, you might recognize an intersection with this May entry, "Swoon.")