Jennifer Perrine's Blog - Posts Tagged "home"

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.

Happy New Year, folks! I've now been living on the West Coast for a full calendar year, and I can see the effect of my new residence all over my work. The new issue of Cream City Review includes four poems I wrote shortly after moving to Oregon, and reading them now, a year later, I can see how much I was trying to make sense of starting over in a new place. Two of the poems take the shape of origin stories, and one is called "Spell to Leave Behind a Life." The fourth emerged from an experiment, in which I culled all the words spoken by Pearl in The Scarlet Letter and used only those words to write a poem. This might not seem all that significant, except that when I talk about my origin story as a writer, I often recall my junior year of high school, when a teacher assigned me the task of writing a poem from the perspective of a character in a book we read. I chose Pearl and discovered the power of persona. Revisiting Pearl now, twenty-plus years later, was a sort of homecoming.

This last year also saw the publication of my first short story, "Out of Order", in Literal Latte. The story's protagonist wakes from an elective process he undertook in his forties to find himself now ninety, lonely and disoriented by his new world. Again, I wasn't conscious of the questions I was grappling with at the time I was writing--one month after I moved to Oregon--but rereading the story now, it's clear I was, well, lonely and disoriented, even while I loved (and continue to love) this place.

Those initial feelings have dissipated, I'm happy to say. I'm finally starting to get a feel for the writing communities in the area, and I've got two readings coming up in the next two months, with a few more in the works. It feels good to get my work back in front of people, and even better to be with kindred spirits: one reading is for Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, and the other is part of the Unchaste Readers series. Nasty and unchaste--that's exactly the kind of company I want to keep.

I've also got a new poem, "Now Is Not the Time to Talk About Gun Control," that will be released on the Broadsided website next week as part of their feature, "Bearing Arms: Responding to Guns in American Culture." The poem is paired with Kristen Woodward's startling, provocative "Female Target," and includes the word Oregunian. (Yes, living here has added to my vocabulary, for better or worse.) I'm excited to see our broadside and those of the other writers and artists vectorized, and I hope that the broadsides spark some conversations, since--if the irony wasn't clear--now is absolutely the time to talk about gun control. Let's hope that's one of the many changes 2018 brings.

As for 2017, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention all the amazing books I read. Without further ado, my favorite reads from 2017 were:

Poetry
Spirit Boxing, Afaa Michael Weaver
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Chen Chen
Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing, Charif Shanahan
Lena: Poems, Cassie Pruyn
Magdalene, Marie Howe
3arabi Song, Zeina Hashem Beck
Hands that Break and Scar, Sarah A. Chavez
Transformations, Anne Sexton
The Whetting Stone, Taylor Mali

Nonfiction
Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World, Suzy Hansen
Catastrophic Happiness: Finding Joy in Childhood's Messy Years, Catherine Newman
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates

Fiction
Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
Spoonbenders, Daryl Gregory
A Monster Calls, Patrick Ness
The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin
Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado
Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng

Mixed Genre
Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days, Jeanette Winterson

Here's to 2018--may the new year bring you clarity, community, and abundant good reads!