Jennifer Perrine's Blog - Posts Tagged "cccc"

Maybe it's the upcoming move, but I've been thinking a lot about place and how location does or doesn't change my writing. Back before I was a writer, I was a visual artist--or at least, an art student. I drew huge portraits and figure studies, and as my teachers pointed out, the bodies were almost always floating in space. Occasionally, I would paint landscapes; these depicted the way the world looked in the dark of night, when many details that mark a particular geography become more difficult to discern. In art, as in life, I was unmoored--I never lived in one home for more than a few years, and that sense of transience showed up in my work.

I've been living in Iowa just shy of ten years now, and aspects of this place have found their way into poems and stories: the native birds, the rhythms of speech, the vulnerability of vast fields. As I make my peace with leaving for pastures that, if not greener, are certainly more likely to be sheltered by mountains, I am finally recognizing the places here that have mattered to me. In the midst of this, Chris Rice Cooper kindly invited me to represent Iowa in the Sacred Spaces, Sacred Places project, which features the places sacred to over 100 poets, including some of my favorites. (Ellen Bass, Sarah A. Chavez, and Wang Ping are just a few of the many poets who show and write about their sacred spaces.) It's strange to know that I've been called upon to represent a state that still doesn't feel like home, and yet, I've made a home here.

The last month, though, I've hardly been home, flittering from one place to another for different events and festivities. April began with this year's AWP conference in Los Angeles, where I met amazing writers by day and accidentally roamed through Skid Row by night. Highlights of AWP included meeting fiction writer and quoll researcher Amanda Niehaus at the Writer to Writer booth; happily chanting the word queer at a panel on teaching LGBTQ literature; listening to literary all-stars Jennine Capo Crucet, Roxane Gay, Natalie Díaz, and Jess Walter read their beautiful and often astoundingly funny work; and being enthralled by a conversation among Maggie Nelson, Leslie Jamison, and Geoff Dyer. Only at AWP.

I swung back home for a couple of days to teach and to discover the pile of anthologies and journals mounting in my mailbox. (Now that this travel-heavy month is over, I'll finally have time to read Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity, Veils, Halos & Shackles, The Doll Collection, and the new issue of Crazyhorse.) Then, it was off to a conference in Houston to talk about activism and writing with talented folks like Stacey Waite and Brandon Som.

There was a bit of rest for a week or so before I took off for NYC and a reading at Manhattan College. Sadly, I arrived in town just a bit too late to attend the Publishing Triangle's awards ceremony, where No Confession, No Mass won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. (I know, I'm burying the lede here, but when I started writing this post, I didn't know that I'd won!)

So, as of today, I am back in Iowa, my travels done--at least, until it's time to move. No doubt this month was hectic, but it was good to be reminded of that untethered feeling. There are no bodies floating in space showing up in my writing--not yet, anyway--but there are references to atlases and maps, to conversations overheard in airports, to flora and fauna that you just can't find in the Midwest. It makes me look forward to the move this summer and to whatever perspectives my new home--my new sacred space--will bring.