Rachel Dacus's Blog, page 51

Poet in Exile - A New Fringe Magazine Interview

I was delighted to interview the fascinating poet Deema Shehabi for the current issue of Fringe Magazine about what it's like to be a poet living in two worlds, the country of current residence, and the country of memory. Deema's new book, Thirteen Departures from the Moon, is a transcendently beautiful collection centering on that dual identity and experience.

How to Get an Idea

Go to Paris. At least, that's what worked to kickstart Colin Kelley's first novel, according to this delightful essay. His first completed and published novel was born on a trip to Paris. I often find that traveling awakens my senses and sets me adrift into my interior space. My own just-completed novel THE RENAISSANCE CLUB, was born on a three-week art history tour of northern Italy. Even a short trip -- say around the block and downtown -- can yield story ideas. Glimpsed faces, people in action, events unfolding in front of you can kick off ideas that later weave together. Having just finished a book I find myself automatically searching for more ideas. Some of them will find their way into poems, some into plays, and perhaps a few into another novel. Even just traveling out onto my deck and watching the action on the street below me. Be like a dreamcatcher: look for what gets snagged in the weave.

The Italy in my mind

I've spent the last year in the Italy of my mind ... a remembered place that I couldn't resist at first writing essays about, and finally using as the setting for a novel. To answer those who've asked what the book's about, here's a short summary:

A month-long art history tour promises its organizer, middle-aged professor Norman Wesley, a new life of freedom from his abusive marriage and deadening career, but what he gets is his old life in shambles. His fellow colleagues at Mount Antioch Community College, The Renaissance Club, wander through Italy with him, following broken loves and unsatisfied desires. Enter some down-to-earth saints come alive from their sculptures and paintings, and four couples find the marital deck shuffled and love and art proved to be chameleons. Their enigmatic tour guide, George St. James, keeps losing his gold cigarette lighter, which, passing through many hands, kindles surprising transformations. This tale's imps include a cranky Michelangelo, Theresa of Avila arising out of ecstasy to give an earthy lecture, a young Francis of Assisi in a Venetian herb garden, and the Facebook page "Be a Franciscan," guiding travelers to new lives of love, beauty, and self-sacrifice.

Bloghopping Rocket Kid

I found some litmags that appeal to a rocket kid. Moonshot Magazine not only has graphic poetry and an interesting blog, but links to interesting Indie publishers like Kristy Bowen's Dancing Girl Press, which has a chapbook series, a journal, and an art studio, plus a blog, dulcetly, with links to all things art and photo related.

I love doing this bloghopping, because as Adam Deutsch of Cooper Dillon Books reminded me in an interview I did with him for Fringe Magazine, writers and poets are community. We need to join hands in this venture of publishing our work, and that means helping bring attention to all the good work out there we encounter, as well as promoting our own.

Fire On Her Tongue

I'm thrilled and honored to be included in the first e-Book anthology of contemporary women's poetry, published by Two Sylvias Press and edited by Annette spaulding-Convy and Kelli Russell Agodon. Fire On Her Tongue is available as an e-book at Amazon, and is described as a ground-breaking literary project



Fire On Her Tongue: An eBook Anthology of Contemporary Women's Poetry is the first electronic collection of poems by women writing today. Poets Kelli Russell Agodon and Annette Spaulding-Convy, Co-Editors of Crab Creek Review and Co-Founders of Two Sylvias Press, have collaborated on this ground-breaking literary project. Featuring over 70 of the most extraordinary poets from a variety of backgrounds and whose ages span from thirteen to ninety-one, Fire On Her Tongue showcases superbly crafted poems exploring the contemporary woman's experience. Fire On Her Tongue: An eBook Anthology of Contemporary Women's Poetry includes poems by Kim Addonizio, Nin Andrews, Madeline DeFrees, Patricia Fargnoli, Annie Finch, Kate Greenstreet, Lola Haskins, Jane Hirshfield, Keetje Kuipers, Dorianne Laux, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Alicia Ostriker, Natasha Sajé, Peggy Shumaker, Patricia Smith, A.E. Stallings, Rachel Zucker, and many other accomplished poets. Fire On Her Tongue is a unique collection created specifically with eBook readers in mind. This anthology has been entirely produced with a zero-carbon footprint as a "green" way to share today's most exciting poetry with a larger audience. Fire On Her Tongue is an amazing resource for any reader or student who wants to explore an in-depth selection of work from some of today's strongest women poets.

Light, Light, Light!

Time to bring out the old light panel, even though the days are getting perceptibly longer. Still now enough light in my eyes to lift my spirits the way spring does. I bought this natural light panel that you look into for a half hour each day and it does something indescribable to your feelings. So of course I had to try to describe it in this prose poem, now appearing in the current issue of Spirits, out of Indiana University Northwest.



The Pearl. Every morning for an hour, I stare into a row of fluorescent tubes called a Brite-Wave, remedy for a part of brain that has forgotten how to bloom these winter mornings. Following printed directions, I gaze as if floating in the mother-of-pearl pool I once swam in at an Arizona resort at midnight, floating in opalescence beneath the vaulted dark. Light sears my retina with atoms. They are supposed to pry open the sleeping folds. For thirty minutes a day this beam raises my mental sun. The manual advises glancing occasionally, but more and more I am compelled to stare, and the effects are noticeable. The first morning I can barely lift my coffee cup while watching the light. The day after, I pedal my wheeling thoughts into star-fields. A week in, and I am bobbing in a raft on foaming waves. Two weeks, and I can backstroke any foggy morning, do laps despite the rain. Tomorrow, I'll be able to shove old Sol aside and with my own focused stare illuminate the parking lot.

Reading hour and the new world

I spend so much time looking at my phone anyway, between reading email, texting, facebooking, googling, and playing games, that I decided I might as well try out reading books as well. To my surprise, a Kindle book is downloadable to an iPhone as well as an iPad, and the text is very readable. I already read poetry on my phone from such sites as Poetry Foundation and poets.org. It seemed to me that for 99 cents or even $9 I could test-drive my idea. And I'm still driving.

One of the things I discovered is the instant gratification of buying an eBook. Last night I had a wish to read a new novel that's a contemporary version of Midsummer Night's Dream, one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. I debated: the library? the book's too new -- Amazon, too slow -- B&N, too expensive. Kindle's price was cheaper than print and the delivery time was RIGHT NOW!

That's when I realized I wasn't just in the reading hour, I was in a whole new publishing world whose rules aren't just about carrying your library around with you. It's about much more ... changing font sizes, getting a book ASAP, copying quotations, searching for names or specific phrases or words. It's much more than reading words on a page, it can be using them for research purposes. I'm getting quickly hooked and also hooked on seeing how different is the experience of reading a book this way than the other way. I wonder if there will be a tiered publishing format, similar to the straight-to-DVD movie, maybe there will be straight-to-Kindle books. I guess some self-published books already are.

Which makes me wonder about the need for eBook review magazines. How do you sort it all out and find what you want to read in this new world? We need review zines to help. Maybe I'll start one!

Publishers, Zines, and the Changing Landscape

Discovered a fascinating and informative page by Aaron Shephard on self-publishing and the changing landscape of eBooks.

Speaking of publishers, the ever-innovative micro press Cooper Dillon Books now has a link to my interview with publisher Adam Deutsch published at Fringe. Stay tuned for more. I plan to get Deutsch talking again about poetry publishing and the literary community.

Found some new (to me) zines I want to read and submit work to: for flash fiction, Smokelong Quarterly and Linebreak which describes itself as "a weekly magazine with a bias for good poetry." Always fun bloghopping the literary Internet.

New poems published in Umbrella

I'm honored to be included in Umbrella Journal's fifth anniversary issue. the Orsorum section features my work, as well as that of:

C.B. Anderson
Seth Braver
Michael Cantor
Robin Chapman
Maryann Corbett
Tammy Ho Lai-Ming
Paul Hostovsky
Rose Kelleher
Kathleen Kirk
John Milbury-Steen
Ken Poyner
Jason Primm
Jennifer Reeser
Sarah J. Sloat
David Stephenson
Sherry Chandler (Book Review)

Huge congratulations to publisher/editor Kate Bernadette Benedict for steering this publication to a wider audience, through innovative and fresh ideas, and also creating an umbrella for Tilt-A-Whirl and Carmine Street Metrics. Umbrella is a journal unlike any I know of, with surprises and new dimensions all the time. Here's to another five years of delight!

Occupy with Poetry!

Among the many Occupy events I've been following are literary ones. It's a good moment in history for poets and writers to speak up through their art. I was happy to see that Fringe Magazine started an Occupy area on their blog. An Occupy poetry anthology is online and still accepting more works, I've heard. And I'm sure much more literature will come out of this new movement some are calling "the end of the beginning" of a change in world consciousness of equality and justice.

I feel that, as the Arab Spring demonstrated, and the Autumn Occupy is reinforcing, a new awareness of the need for more humane values is spontaneously emerging among great numbers of people on our planet. I don't believe this can be contained within politics -- certainly not politics as usual. It's organic and self-organizing, as my wise and funny friend Emily Levine pointed out, the way water molecules organize themselves to be liquid. You can't stop or even define this kind of thing. You can't demand it produce its list of demands. But you can make poetry about it.