Category Archives: Writer and Reader

Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2012


Greetings, loyal readers! It’s time for our annual roundup of the best books, blogs, and other big events of 2012. As usual, the books listed here are ones I read this year, not all published this year.

The Big Event:

Best Parenting Book:

Marc Weissbluth, Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child (2005)
Do you know why I have time to write this blog post? Because the Young Master slept 15 hours last night! Dr. ZZZ, as we call him, makes a good case that many behavioral problems seen in infants and young children are really just signs of overtiredness. The doctor tells you how to spot early signs of fatigue in your baby so you can put him down for a nap before he gets too charged up with adrenalin. If the big book is putting you to sleep, Weissbluth’s Your Fussy Baby is a quicker read that covers the same basic principles for infants 0-4 months.

Best Children’s Books:

Stephanie Burks & Kelli Bienvenu, While You Were Sleeping (2004)
This picture book makes me cry every time I read it to Shane. A lesbian couple get the phone call that a birthmother has chosen them to adopt her newborn boy. (I do wish the birthmother appeared as a character, but perhaps that would be too complicated for this age group.)

Anna Pignataro, Mama, Will You Hold My Hand? (2010)
A gentle, poetic picture book. Mother Bear reassures her child Sammy that she’ll be there through all their adventures. Similar to The Runaway Bunny but not so triggering.

Sandra Boynton, Happy Hippo, Angry Duck (2011)
Whimsical board book helps children learn the names for different feelings, and that it’s okay to have them. Bad moods don’t last forever. Good training for little Buddhists.

Best Poetry Book:

Nancy White, Detour (2010)
This poetry collection explores the breaking apart and remaking of a woman’s identity in the middle of her life, through a son’s birth and a painful divorce. Subject matter that in a lesser poet’s hands would be merely confessional here takes on a haiku-like precision and open-endedness, intimate yet unbounded by the confines of one person’s experience. This feat is accomplished through White’s use of the second-person voice and the way she narrates major events obliquely, through peripheral details described with quiet beauty. (Full disclosure: Nancy taught English at my high school, though I wasn’t in her class.)

Best Novel:

Kathie Giorgio, The Home for Wayward Clocks (2011)
An abused boy becomes a recluse who lavishes all his human warmth on the clocks he rescues and repairs for his museum. But a disabling accident, and the arrival of an abused teenage girl who needs his help, compel him to reach out to his neighbors and learn to trust again. His storyline is interspersed with the stories of the clock-owners. Look for the sequel to this beautiful novel, Learning to Tell (A Life)Time, from Main Street Rag Publishing in 2013.

Best General Nonfiction:

Bernadette Barton, Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays (2012)
Sociology professor examines how LGBT people in the American South survive the fundamentalist “panopticon”. Thoroughly researched but never dry, the book strikes a good balance between outrage and hope.

Best Memoir (tie):

Deborah Feldman, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots (2012)
This gripping memoir recounts a young woman’s escape from her family of Satmar Hasidim, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect living in the Brooklyn neighborhod of Williamsburg. Feldman depicts a repressive, patriarchal community where women are deliberately kept uneducated and forced into abusive marriages. One quibble: the final section of the book felt rushed. Follow Deborah on Twitter for a feminist watchdog perspective on Orthodox Judaism.

Martha Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Left the Mormons and Found My Faith (2005)
Do you see a trend in my reading habits? Part memoir, part religious history, this compelling, controversial book by a Harvard-educated sociologist describes the fallout from her recovered memories of sexual abuse by her father, a leading Mormon scholar. Her anger is leavened by compassion as she delves into the complicity of a secretive church culture in creating and shielding abusers with split personalities. Though the topic is a dark one, readers who accompany Beck on her healing journey will be rewarded with her account of her strengthened connection to God’s love and her own inner truth.

Best New Theoretical Framework for My Life (tie):

Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (1992, updated 1997)
This groundbreaking book shows the common patterns underlying private and public trauma, from domestic violence and child abuse to war and genocide, as well as the cultural conditions that determine whether such stories are shared or repressed. The Amazon blurb says it best: “The book puts individual experience in a broader political frame, arguing that psychological trauma can be understood only in a social context.”

Sylvia Brinton Perera, The Scapegoat Complex: Toward a Mythology of Shadow and Guilt (1985)
Jungian analyst interprets scapegoat themes in the family and society. As in Johnny Cash’s song “The Man in Black”, the scapegoat is a priestly yet despised figure who takes on the burden of others’ psychological dark side (or has it thrust upon them) in order to heal the social system. But this role, formerly expressed through public ritual, can be too much for mere individuals to bear. This brief but dense book discusses how to appreciate but also break free from one’s scapegoat characteristics.

Blogs You Should Know About:

Be the Change (Dianna Anderson)
Christian feminist critiques rape-enabling myths and other harmful beliefs about gender and sexuality. She has a good sense of humor.

Sarah Over the Moon
Another Christian feminist and survivor of evangelical purity culture who lived to tell the tale.

Ana Mardoll’s Ramblings
Ana wittily deconstructs pop culture for classism, disability prejudice, fat-shaming, and other forms of oppression. Some idols are toppled (C.S. Lewis) and some unexpected tales are championed (Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”).
 

Rachel Power Reflects on Art and/or Motherhood

Bless me, readers, for I have sinned. It has been three weeks since my last blog post. I’ve been busy lying on the floor and squealing and kicking the coffee table. (I like to share Shane’s interests.) This excerpt from Australian writer Rachel Power’s anthology The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood eloquently expresses the conflict that women seem to feel most acutely: What should I do with my scarce time? How do I balance the interiority of creative work with the outer-directed availability of a mother for her child? In the introduction, Power writes:

…While on the surface motherhood triggered in me a frantic need to grasp onto any minute that could be called mine, I was also opening out into a newfound sense of infinity. It was strangely liberating to have my children’s needs overtake my own. My ego shrank back to its near-invisible place in the cosmos and with that came an unexpected relief, a sense that I could die knowing I had done all I needed to do.

In a matter of months, what had been the centre of my world — namely, my passion for art — became so flimsy and irrelevant it seemed close to total collapse. I didn’t know if I had what it took to demand all that I had to demand of myself, and of everyone around me, in order to write. I had to rail against my own instinct to admit defeat.

Sometimes a thrilling sense of lightness washed through me: finally I was being given permission to retreat into a ‘normal’ life, free from the burden of the artistic imperative, of that constant desire to record everything almost before it’s happened. Together my babies and I floated around the house, equally delighted by their small discoveries, me vicariously reliving my own babyhood and feeling humbled by the insight that someone had cared for me with this same constancy and devotion.

As they got older, I became more and more aware that those days when I sank into my children’s routine without resistance — when I spent hours building sandcastles or reading the same book over and over again; when I let them cook with me no matter the mess, or turned off my ‘adult’ radio station in favour of Raffi and Patsy Biscoe — were our happiest. Not just their happiest, but also mine. But it was a state reliant on the denial of that niggling compulsion to always be turning my experiences into something else, something more.

A year after my first child was born, I wrote in my journal (the same ‘writing’ journal that has as its first line on its first page in red texta: ‘Whole house — clean!!’):

It is what is sustained in our life — through hard work — that creates fulfillment. It’s the stuff we don’t give up easily. The stuff we have to fight for. Day-to-day is easy; I can get caught up in all manner of small tasks. And these could make up a life. So why can’t I be happy with that? What is a life worth living but one lived attentively, with a passion for the small things? Some days those things are good. Baking a cake. Planting a herb garden. Making a picture for my son’s room. But they feel like small asides — distractions from the bigger picture, from the things I really want to achieve.

For the first time in my life, I envied women without strong ambitions outside of the home. Art was like a monkey on my back and I resented its skittish hold on me, the way it caused me to strain away from my babies, to live a split life, be a split self. I was burdened by the knowledge of what it would cost my family (financially, but more so emotionally) for me to keep writing — just as I became aware of how much it would cost me not to.

More than anything, I longed to plunge into the job of mothering in all its fullness, to wake up each morning needing nothing more than this daily existence: a life for life’s sake. It felt greedy, selfish, unworkable, to try maintaining an identity which seemed entirely at odds with the characteristics of a devoted — a ‘good’ — mother.

While motherhood was calling on me to find ever-greater resources of patience, empathy and composure, art felt like an opposing force — an uncompromising, masculine domain. By this logic, to be an artist would mean putting my babies at risk, starving them of their foremost source of attention and stimulus…

…To be an artist means a compulsive process of self-realisation, a struggle toward the ideal that lurks at the edges of our vision. In spite, or perhaps because of, my battle to find time for creative work after having a child, I began to value it like never before. More than that, I began to write like my life depended on it. Art was the only way I knew of coming to terms with the psychic shock of becoming a mother — a role that uncovered the angriest, weakest and most self-seeking, and in turn the most tender, gracious and devoted parts of myself.

I knew that if I buried that creative urge in myself, it would only re-emerge in some ugly and distorted form; that it would not, in fact, make me a better mother but one full of bitterness and frustration — a recipe for martyrdom. Or, perhaps worse, turn me into a monster whose own thwarted ambitions have been transferred on to her children. Sometimes I looked at my baby and experienced his gaze as a challenge, as if he more than anyone would recognise all my terrible failings. I did not want his mother to be a woman who gave up, who didn’t strive to become all she might have been.

Numerous feminist texts have examined the long struggle against educational and institutional barriers that, among other things, considered art an unsuitable occupation for a woman. Many of these books have counted marriage and motherhood among those institutions that serve to limit women’s sphere of influence to the private and domestic. It hardly needs repeating that, by and large, women are still given almost total responsibility for the rearing of children without the cultural recognition of the difficulty and importance of this role.

We seem no closer than 30 years ago to creating a system that genuinely enables women and men to share equally in raising their children. Yet, despite all it demands of women and the inequities that remain, motherhood cannot be reduced to a mere institution of control. Mothers and their children are bound together in ways that defy all simplistic definitions.

In a comment that has stayed with me, writer Helen Garner once talked of ‘the terrific struggle for women’ striving to fulfil destinies beyond being wives and mothers. ‘It’s terribly sad, it’s a very sad thing — a woman trying to be an artist and a mother at the same time. It’s a tremendous clash … ’ She trailed off, perhaps aware of having innocently stumbled into one of those quicksand zones, where the implications of what you are saying are so enormous and unwieldy that you risk being swallowed up. ‘Sad’ was the word she used. It’s a terribly sad thing for women trying to be an artist and mother at the same time.

It is a good word, because sadness is a problem of the heart. And as much as motherhood is a political issue, it can never be only that; the predicament of the artist–mother moves well beyond the boundaries of policy and the expectations of society.

As Susan Rubein Suleiman wrote, perhaps the greatest struggle for a woman artist who has or desires children is the struggle against herself. No amount of money, no amount of structural change, can entirely resolve the fundamental dilemma for the artist–mother: the seeming incompatibility of her two greatest passions. The effect is a divided heart; a split self; the fear that to succeed at one means to fail at the other.

Buy the anthology here.

Poetry by Amberle L. Husbands: “You Heard What?”

Apologies for the blog hiatus, loyal readers. It’s been a busy month at Winning Writers and I had some tech support issues. For your reading pleasure, here is a memorable poem by Amberle L. Husbands of Georgia, winner of first prize in the adult category of the Spring 2012 Odes to the Olympians Poetry Contest (theme: Ares/Mars, the God of War). This free contest is sponsored by Victoria Grossack and Alice Underwood, authors of The Tapestry of Bronze series of historical novels about ancient Greece. The current contest, seeking poems about Venus/Aphrodite, is open through November 30. Thanks to Amberle and Victoria for permission to reprint here.

“You Heard What?”

Ares is dead?
I don’t believe it.
Not in these modern days.
Just yesterday, I swear,
I saw his face going down into the subway.

Or outside some church in Lebanon,
eating ice cream on the steps of the Pantheon,
his mouth Cherry Garcia red–thinking of something dire.

Ares is sketched as bloodthirsty,
written in as the ne’er do well
likely to appear at any time;
distinct from all the races, but he’s everybody’s friend.

Ares is still in business, keeping all the stray dogs fat,
and so is the hateful guru, with his basement napalm lab.

Ares is one who revolves,
strolls from the pent house down Pauper’s Lane.
The insane, and the beaten, all know his shadow,
they know that peace is fleeting,
and they know when to go underground.

Ares is dead?
I don’t believe it.
I saw him just now, down at the Hinge for a beer.
Had a whole crowd with him,
men in suits, wearing gold chains, heavy boots;
Ares dead? Think again, friend–
Think twice and fear–
Ares is here

“Julian’s Yearbook” Published in Chapter One Promotions Anthology

Back in 2008, I was excited to learn that my short story “Julian’s Yearbook”, featuring the protagonist of my endless novel, had won the Chapter One Promotions International Short Story Competition. You can read the first page here. Four years later, the long-awaited prizewinners’ anthology is now available for purchase. Titled Infinite, it features an evocative cover photo that complements my tale of a young man’s yearning for freedom and intimate connection.

Order a copy by mail using this form, or online here (more convenient for readers outside the UK).

Winners of the 2012 PEN Prison Writing Program Awards

The PEN American Center, a literary organization with a human rights focus, sponsors writing programs in U.S. prisons and gives annual awards for the best submissions of poetry and prose by incarcerated writers. This year’s winners were posted on their website in July. Here are some highlights of my reading so far.

Christopher Myers’s second-prize poem “Tell Me the Story Again About the Frogs and the Seeds” is a poignant and hopeful message from a father to his young son about the future springtime when he will be released.

In Ezekiel Caliguiri’s gorgeously written first-prize memoir “The Last Visit from the Girl in the Willow Tree”, the girl he loved as a teenager remains in his heart as a radiant image, like Dante’s Beatrice–a bittersweet reminder of the life he could have had, if he hadn’t yielded to fatalism and the desire to appear tough.

Atif Rafay’s first-prize scholarly essay “Bleak Housing & Black Americans” indicts American prison policy as a disguised return to segregation and disenfranchisement of African-Americans, and asks why our prison system is more brutal and ugly than either crime-prevention or fair punishment require. Because racism is irrational and covert, rational appeals for reform have a limited impact. In addition, he argues, “The argument from racial disparity ultimately scants the crucial point: present policies are wrong because they are destructively harsh…An argument that invites human beings to regard themselves as part of a ‘race’ and to think of compassion for the Other rather than to think of justice for all will ineluctably break any promise it might seem to hold out.”

Leonard Scovens’s honorable mention memoir “How I Became My Father” takes us inside the struggles of a fatherless young black man seeking male role models. “You grow up without a dad and you dream his ghost into a god. When Luke [Skywalker]’s phantom god was smashed and broken across Vader’s confession, he lost his grip. If Vader was his father, what did it mean for his fate? The sins of the father, after all, are visited upon the son.”

40 Years of Book Love: The 1980s in Prose


Continuing my tour through the formative books of my youth, today I’ll talk about the prose writers who guided my middle school and high school years.

Some of these choices may raise some hackles. They certainly did for my teachers. I won’t defend, as an ideal, the horror of weakness that characterizes both Rand and Nietzsche. I didn’t take it uncritically even then. But I also didn’t feel that adults had a lot of credibility to criticize my attempt at psychological survival, if they weren’t going to protect me from the bullying and ostracism that I endured pretty much non-stop from 1st through 10th grade. Smart, lonely, funny-looking teenage girls love Ayn Rand for the same reason that small children are obsessed with superheroes and dinosaurs. Adults who are gratified by innocence, but don’t want to bear the burden of having it themselves, sentimentalize the helplessness of children. But we just want to get out.

Yes, I was mad, and so was my hair.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
My mother read this to me, and I think I’d read it again on my own by the time I was 11 or 12, and at least twice thereafter, most recently this year. Everything I believe about the dignity of the human soul, the importance of speaking truth to power, and the equality of all people before God, is all in there. Jane is the anti-Dickens heroine. Chaste and modest, but fiercely self-possessed, she doesn’t suffer in silence in hopes of melting the abuser’s heart. She survives because she knows she deserves to, and she would rather brave the world on her own than be dependent on someone who doesn’t respect her. Hooray, Jane!
****

The Collected Dorothy Parker
I remember two things that terrified me in the summer of 1983: the sudden appearance of cellulite on my thighs, signaling my transformation from a pretty little girl to a flabby, awkward adolescent, and Parker’s story “Big Blonde”. The protagonist plays the role of the pretty, lively, “good sport” girl who never imposes her feelings on others, because that’s how she needs to be to catch a husband. Once she gets one, she feels she can relax and have her true feelings, and so she cries all the time. This alienates her lumpish spouse, who leaves her. By then she is no longer young and pretty, so she cries some more and becomes an alcoholic, unsuccessfully attempts suicide and has to pretend to the nurses (once again playing the good sport) that she feels lucky to be alive. I have always lived in dread of becoming this woman. Though drink holds no appeal, I come from a long line of women who drowned in their own tears. I’m only now beginning to unravel the false beliefs that make me afraid of my emotions.
****

The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
You know who else was afraid of emotions and hated being a girl? Ayn Rand! But through rational introspection and artistic excellence, you too can grow up to have hot sex with the guy who fixes your fireplace! Actually that part of the book did nothing for me. The two lessons I took away from Rand’s novel, which were the beginning of my adult strength, were these: (1) It is possible to live mindfully and responsibly, by knowing your values and comparing them to your actions, rather than being at the mercy of unexamined emotions and heedlessly hurting yourself and others. (Since none of the real adults in my life modeled this for me, I had to learn it from a book.) (2) Sometimes people hate you for your strengths, not your weaknesses. You don’t have to internalize their contempt.
****

The Valley of Horses, by Jean M. Auel
Conversation, when I was 11, went something like this:
“Mom, I just read this book and I have a weird tingly feeling.”
“That’s sexual arousal.”
“Oh, so that’s what that feels like! What do I do about it?”
“You can masturbate.”
Seriously, my mom was that cool.
****

Dawn of Day, by Friedrich Nietzsche
Again, I didn’t have much interest in the “Ubermenschen” aspects of Nietzsche’s thought that became disreputable because the Nazis claimed him as an influence. Like Rand, he championed the prophetic, creative, innovative individual against the jealousy of the herd. I also valued his critique of asceticism as a psychological splitting mechanism, where a person denied certain aspects of his life force (e.g. sexuality, aggression, unconscious wishes) and pushed them off onto a scapegoat. My favorite quote from him went something like this: “In every ascetic morality, man worships one part of himself as God and demonizes the rest.”
****

The Book of the Dun Cow, by Walter Wangerin Jr.
And just to counter-program all the others, this Christian allegory of Jesus as a goofy, despised barnyard dog! Wangerin’s storytelling gave me my first personal experience of God’s love in a Christian context.
 

40 Years of Book Love: The 1980s in Poetry


My impending 40th birthday has occasioned this look backward through the decades at the books that shaped my identity. The first post in this series can be found here. (Update to that post: Adam read it and bought Gockel, Hinkel and Gackeliah for me for only $36.95 on Alibris. What a guy!)

My book consumption ramped up in my middle-school and teenage years, so I’m going to cover poetry and prose in two separate posts. I was a lonely, precocious young person with a smaller budget and more time to reread books than I have now, so my relationship to those favorite volumes had an intensity that gave this budding writer a good training in close reading. I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about my main influences: Anne Sexton, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden. Below are a few of the lesser-known collections that found their way into my soul, with excerpts.

There are no acceptable photos of me from this period.

Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale, edited by Marya Zaturenska
Teasdale (1886-1933) was an American lyric poet, a contemporary of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I stumbled upon her final chapbook, Strange Victory, in the Stockbridge, MA library when I was about 10 years old, on summer vacation, and was thrilled and stirred by her tragic yet unsentimental voice. She used rhyme and meter in a well-patterned but not rigid way. The darkness in her poems is pregnant with a spiritual presence that will endure while our little lives come and go. It’s a consolation for those sober-minded enough to face it. Perhaps that was the terrifying yet desired presence I sensed just beyond the looming nighttime trees and star-clustered sky of Western Massachusetts, where God seemed a lot closer than in the city. This poem says it all for me.

Return to a Country House

Nothing but darkness enters in this room,
Nothing but darkness and the winter night,
Yet on this bed once years ago a light
Silvered the sheets with an unearthly bloom;
It was the planet Venus in the west
Casting a square of brightness on this bed,
And in that light your dark and lovely head
Lay for a while and seemed to be at rest.
But that the light is gone, and that no more
Even if it were here, would you be here,–
That is one line in a long tragic play
That has been acted many times before,
And acted best when not a single tear
Falls,– when the mind and not the heart holds sway.
****

Rupert Brooke: The Poetical Works, edited by Geoffrey Keynes
Romantic poet who died young in World War I. Plus he was smokin’ hot. What more could a teen girl want? Though the first half of this poem seems a little cliche to me now, the second half still raises goosebumps. That’s the kind of love I always wanted, and have found: a comrade in arms who marches with me, jauntily, into the great unknown that waits for us all. (Adam might not appreciate the implication that he has “scarlet lips”, though.)

The Wayfarers

Is it the hour? We leave this resting-place
  
Made fair by one another for a while.
Now, for a god-speed, one last mad embrace;
  
The long road then, unlit by your faint smile.
Ah! the long road! and you so far away!
  
Oh, I’ll remember! but…each crawling day
Will pale a little your scarlet lips, each mile
  
Dull the dear pain of your remembered face.

…Do you think there’s a far border town, somewhere,
  
The desert’s edge, last of the lands we know,
Some gaunt eventual limit of our light,
  
In which I’ll find you waiting; and we’ll go
Together, hand in hand again, out there,
  Into the waste we know not, into the night?
****
Contemporary Poetry: A Retrospective from the Quarterly Review of Literature, edited by Theodore and Renee Weiss (1974)
Lest you think my tastes ran entirely to Edwardian schmaltz, this anthology was also a close companion of my high school days. It may have been a gift from St. Ann’s School classmate Alissa Quart, or one of the precious freebies I picked up as an intern at the Poetry Society of America, where my tasks included returning improper submissions in SASEs and shelving their burgeoning and disorganized collection of review copies. This book gave me glimpses into modern subcultures and ways of speaking that were new to me, all the more fascinating because I lacked the context to understand them fully. So much of the content looks unfamiliar to me now, that I suspect I focused on a few favorites and reread those while skimming the rest. Some of those old friends were:

Yehuda Amichai, “As for the World”
Edith Sitwell, “Dirge for the New Sunrise”
Richard Wilbur, “The Good Servant”
Charles Tomlinson, “Mad Song” and “Obsession”
W.S. Merwin, “Song With the Eyes Closed”
Raphael Rudnik, “A Letter for Emily”
Howard Nemerov, “Brainstorm”
W.D. Snodgrass, “Inquest”
Richard Hugo, “Keen to Leaky Flowers” and “Bluejays Adjusted”
M.L. Rosenthal, “Liston Cows Patterson and Knocks Him Silly”
Harvey Shapiro, “National Cold Storage Company”
Herbert Morris, “The Neighbor’s Son”
Michael Hamburger, “Friends”
Frederick Feirstein, “The Anti-Life: A Fantasy”
Phyllis Thompson, “The Last Thing”

You can buy this book for one cent on Amazon. And you should.
****

Darker, by Mark Strand
My 9th-grade English teacher introduced me to Strand’s koan-like poem “Reasons for Moving”, after which I snapped up this early collection at the sadly now-defunct Gotham Book Mart. (First published in 1968, the 1985 reissue by Atheneum, which I own, appears to be out of print, so I’ve linked to a Strand compendium that includes it.) This book seemed innovative to me because the weird, horror-movie images were not mere poetic similes, but were actually happening in the narrative of the poems. A more predictable writer might say his neighbor’s face is menacing like a hawk’s, but Strand says this, in the apocalyptic final poem, “The Way It Is”:

…My neighbor marches in his room,
wearing the sleek
mask of a hawk with a large beak.
He stands by the window. A violet plume

rises from his helmet’s dome.
The moon’s light
spills over him like milk and the wind rinses
  the white
glass bowls of his eyes.

His helmet in a shopping bag,
he sits in the park, waving a small American flag…
****

The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir, by Richard Hugo
I’ve always been sensitive to the vibe of a place, and Hugo was a master at putting those intuitions into words. His free verse has a stately, compact quality that feels like formal poetry, an echo of iambic pentameter holding up the poem like the indestructible old girders of the abandoned factories he elegized in “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg”.
****

Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987, by Diane Wakoski
I won the high school poetry award from the Poetry Society of America the same year (1988) that this collection won their William Carlos Williams Award, and we both read at the award ceremony at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park. What a head rush! Wakoski’s talky, vulnerable, raw, female voice was a good balance for the high-modernist male poets that mainly influenced me during this period. At the ceremony, she read the powerful poem “Joyce Carol Oates Plays the Saturn Piano”. I remember feeling awed and discomfited that a writer so much more famous and old than myself would still be haunted by self-comparison to other writers, and by the feeling that she had let time slip away from her — ironically, because her younger self cared more about external validation than about devoting herself to art. “I promised myself/that if, by 40, I had won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry/I would let myself play the piano again,” she begins, going on to say that when she reached that milestone with no Pulitzer in sight, her hands had forever lost the flexibility to play as she had done at 20. Upon hearing that Oates has taken up piano, the speaker feels:

…Envy?
No. Past that.
A sense of failure?
Perhaps. For I gave up something
I loved/ to attain something
unknown, and now I have neither.

Wakoski was 45 when she wrote that poem. That seemed a lot older to me in 1988!

My Writing Career Continues to Thrive in My Absence


Since Shane was born in April, I have written one serious poem (about baby poop) and one parody poem (ditto). However, like Noah’s dove, the contest entries I sent out in the winter and spring are still returning to me, bearing sprigs of green in their little beaks.

“Poem Written on the Side of a Cow” won the 2012 Betsy Colquitt Award for Poetry. This $500 award is sponsored by Descant: Fort Worth’s Journal of Poetry & Fiction, the literary journal of Texas Christian University, for the best poem published in the magazine in the past year. Their annual submission period is September 1-April 30. This poem, which I wrote in 2003, was inspired by an anecdote I read about Sylvia Plath setting out bread and milk for her children before she committed suicide. Adam suggested the title and I figured out a plot to go with it.

After a dozen years of trying, I will finally be published in the excellent journal New Millennium Writings, which selected my poem “Robot Deer Shot 1,000 Times” as an honorable mention in their winter 2012 contest, the 33rd New Millennium Writings Awards. This twice-yearly contest awards prizes of $1,000 for poetry, fiction, flash fiction, and essays. The 34th contest is currently open through July 31. The poem was based on a “news of the weird” story that Adam sent me, about a mechanical deer that game wardens use to entrap poachers.

My poem “I Wish I Were in Love Again” was one of 20 International Publication Award winners in the Poetry 2012 International Poetry Competition from Atlanta Review. The most recent deadline for this $1,000 prize was March 1. Late one night, last winter, Adam and I were driving home from some high-pressure, adoption-related event, and Sinatra’s song by that name came on the radio. The tongue-in-cheek ballad romanticizes what social workers would call a high-conflict relationship, complete with black eyes and broken dishes. Adam said, “‘Love’ sounds like it should be the name of a violent town in Texas,” and that’s what the poem is about.

The guy is pretty good luck, don’t you think?
 

40 Years of Book Love: The 1970s


Your intrepid blogger turns 40 years old this coming July 13. Books have been part of my identity from the very beginning. Now that I have a baby of my own, I’m starting to re-read the children’s books that I saved from my own youth, remembered as special but unopened for decades. Often I’m surprised by stories I assumed were familiar, thanks to my new adult perspective and the amnesia of time.

Then I look around my office with new eyes, re-encountering titles that were formative during my teens, 20s, and 30s. What did I see in Camille Paglia, George Steiner, Sara Teasdale, Richard Hugo, Rupert Brooke, that makes the spines of those long-unread books stand out like the faces of old friends in a yearbook, whose names you can’t quite place?

In the weeks ahead, I intend to revisit some of those books and blog about what they meant to me and how I view them now. But “let’s start at the very beginning…the very best place to start”: with some of the books that stand out from my childhood memories. I’m passing over well-known classics like Anne of Green Gables and The Chronicles of Narnia. Though I did read these lovingly, many times over, everyone knows about them. Let’s get to the weird stuff.

(1978, age 6: my brief experiment with playing the guitar, which I gave up because I got blisters. Still have the guitar, though. Rock it, Shane.)

Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care
I really have no idea what’s in this book, but the family legend is that I said my first word (“baby”) at 6 months old while pointing to the cover photo.

Stuart Little, by E.B. White
Haven’t you ever felt like a talking mouse inexplicably born to human parents? I know I have. Family legend, again, says this was the first book I read on my own, at one year old. The sad, yearning, open-ended conclusion of this tale frustrated my youthful sense of the way stories ought to work, and yet for that very reason it grabbed hold of me, compelling me to act out alternate endings with my toys.

The Doll’s House, by Rumer Godden
Besides mice, my passions back then were dolls and all things British. This is another slightly dark chapter book for young readers that includes a bereavement, handled in a matter-of-fact (British?) way rather than the therapeutic gooey-ness that one might expect today. It probably resonated more with me because I lost both grandparents by the time I was 6, though I don’t remember drawing that connection at the time. I named my dolls after these characters and subsequently lost one in the park…life imitates art. Wherever you are, Tottie, I hope you had a good life.

The Tale of Gockel, Hinkel and Gackeliah, by Clemens Brentano, illustrated by Maurice Sendak
A weird, intricate, fantastic story about a family and their magical rooster, who has a jewel in his throat and dies and comes to life again. I could never remember the name of this book or where it was shelved in the Jefferson Market Library children’s section, which made each re-discovery a magical quest in itself. Then it vanished completely. I may have to spend the $86 on Amazon to unearth a copy of this out-of-print picture book.

Little Witch, by Anna Elizabeth Bennett
A little girl has no friends because her strict and evil mother, the witch, turns people into flowerpots when they piss her off. But who is that sweet sad woman trapped in the enchanted mirror, and can the girl set her free? A surprisingly accurate picture of my home life. Sorry. Hat tip to Harrison Solow for recognizing my description and helping me find this book again, which I read in my elementary school library.

She Was Nice to Mice, by Alexandra Elizabeth Sheedy
Mice. British. Need I say more? Before Ally Sheedy was a movie star, she was the 13-year-old published author of this quirky book that depicts the doomed romance of Queen Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex from the perspective of the palace mice. I was inspired by her example as a young writer, but my main interest in this book was the character of Essex, with whom I fell madly in love for quite some time (a fantasy that wisely substituted for dating such men in real life; see also, Phantom of the Opera, 15 years later). My mother identified strongly with QEI — charismatic, fashionable, autocratic, voluntarily single, controversially wedded to her vocation (in her case, parenthood, not ruling England). As a result, I grew up immersed in a sort of tragic feminism: you can aspire to anything but you can’t have it all. The price of power is cutting your boyfriend’s head off when he gets too uppity. Talk about work-life balance.

How Babies Are Made, by Steven Schepp and Andrew Andry
I’ve got to hand it to my mom, she wasn’t a prude. I’m grateful that I could always get age-appropriate information about the human body, without shame or awkwardness. (In later years, she would also accede to my requests for a Chinese erotic art book and a huge Latin dictionary to translate the naughty passages that for some reason were encoded in this language.) First published in 1968, this picture book accurately depicts the process of reproduction in plants, chickens, dogs, and humans, through gently colored and pleasant-looking paper-collage art. Consistent color themes highlight similar functions across species. 

Heidi, by Johanna Spyri
Why did I love this book so much? Non-traditional family? Longing for wide open spaces? All I know is, my mother and I used to act out “Heidi and Clara in the wheelchair” with my kiddie rocking chair. Heidi and her little playmates in the Alps lived in an atmosphere of wholesomeness that was sometimes hard to find among the private-school children of 1970s Manhattan. Even 30+ years ago, modern kids seemed to lack the empathy, maturity, and sweetness I’d unrealistically grown to expect from my steady diet of 19th-century classics. Were kids different then, or simply not portrayed accurately?

Ant and Bee, by Angela Banner
Quaint board books from the 1940s teach kids about colors, shapes, numbers, and letters, through the somewhat surreal adventures of two insect friends. I’ve started reading these delightful books to Shane, though it’s hard to refrain from inappropriate commentary: “Ant went for a ride on Bee’s back, and then they exchanged hats, and were friends forever…and got married in Massachusetts!” Bee does look just like my high school English teacher who came out to us at the end of the semester…

In Memoriam: Martin Steele


Winning Writers lost one of our most prolific and imaginative subscribers this year, the writer Martin Steele, who passed away in February after a battle with cancer. (We only received the notice this week.) Martin won several prizes in our contests over the years, representing only a small portion of his vast output of prose-poems, humorous tales, ghost stories, and poetry on subjects from African wars to tennis.

Probably my favorite piece of his writing is the flash fiction “The Girls in the Tree“, which we reprinted on this blog last year. Some of his war poetry can be found here and here. Also check out his Poet of the Week page at Poetry Super Highway.

If you’ve been touched by his work, please sign his guestbook on the website of Beth Israel Memorial Chapel and make a donation to the American Cancer Society.