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Laurie Easter

~ Writer, Teacher, Editor

Laurie Easter

Monthly Archives: February 2016

The Sunday Spotlight: Poet & Renaissance Woman Elizabeth J. Coleman

28 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by Laurie Easter in art, Inspiration, interview, Poetry, The Sunday Spotlight, writing

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classical guitar, Elizabeth J. Coleman, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, One Way of Looking at Grace, Per Contra, Poetry, Proof, Spuyten Duyvil, The Fifth Generation, The Sunday Spotlight, watercolor painting

Today’s featured Poet: Elizabeth J. Coleman

The featured poem: “One Way of Looking at Grace” published at Per Contra: An International Journal of the Arts, Literature, and Ideas.

EJCWebBookPhoto

While my focus here on The Sunday Spotlight is to feature new and emerging writers, and technically with two chapbooks, two full poetry collections, and a work of translation, Elizabeth has already “emerged,” I think when it comes to poets, much like essayists, they can use all the promotion they can get. So I introduce you to Elizabeth J. Coleman, who attended Vermont College of Fine Arts at the same time as me, graduating with her MFA in poetry in 2012.

I didn’t know Elizabeth well during grad school. What I believed of her was that she was gracious, intelligent, respectful, and forthright; what I knew was that she was a very snazzy dresser, a talented classical guitarist in addition to poet, and a Jewish attorney from New York City. This last summer, I had the opportunity to hang out closely with Elizabeth, drinking wine and sharing long conversations, when we both attended VCFA’s Postgraduate Writers Conference (I highly recommend this conference, btw). At the conference, the things I had believed about Elizabeth were confirmed, but I also discovered that Elizabeth is a sort of Renaissance woman, talented in and passionate about an array of formidable activities and causes.

I was excited to discover that Elizabeth shares a passion for teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction along with my husband, who is also trained in MBSR, an eight-week program developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn that incorporates mindfulness meditation, body awareness, and yoga practice and was designed to help people deal with physical pain and stress. Elizabeth has taught MBSR for a decade. As an attorney, she now works with law firms and judges to teach them to manage stress through mindfulness. She was trained to teach MBSR through the Center for Mindfulness.

I also learned that Elizabeth is an accomplished watercolor painter responsible for the covers of her two chapbooks Let My Ears Be Open (Finishing Line Press, 2013) and The Saint of Lost Things (Word Temple Press, 2009); a translation into French of poet Lee Slonimsky’s Pythagoras in Love (Folded Word Press, 2015); and her two poetry collections Proof (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2014), a finalist for the University of Wisconsin Press’ Brittingham and Pollak prizes, and The Fifth Generation, released on February 8, 2016, also by Spuyten Duyvil.
fifthgeneration proof

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have not yet gotten my hands on The Fifth Generation, but I have a copy of Proof, which is full of depth and beauty. Today’s featured poem “One Way of Looking at Grace” and the poem “How Poppies Grow” (also published at Per Contra) are from Elizabeth’s new collection The Fifth Generation, of which poet Kathleen Graber has this to say:FifthGeneration-0537

 Here is an excerpt from “One Way of Looking at Grace”:

For 150 million years birds saw
their reflections only in the sea,

but now the last typewriter repair
shop in New York is going out

of business, and monk parrots
nest in Sheepshead bay.  Still

that fire escape casts a lovely shadow,
the way the wheel of a slow-moving

bicycle seems to slow time

Elizabeth’s poetry has been published in numerous journals, and her poems appear in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, and Poetry in Medicine Anthology (Persea Books 2014).

Liz the minstrel smallElizabeth also plays the classical guitar, playing regularly for the patients and families at Memorial Sloane Cancer Center. She performs annually at a concert sponsored by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

The bulk of Elizabeth’s career was as an attorney for twenty-five years. Her areas of specialty were poverty law, consumer rights, and civil rights. She holds a JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She is a member of the New York, Georgia and DC Bars.

Elizabeth is married to civil rights lawyer, Robert Stroup, and has two children and three splendid grandchildren. She lives in New York City. Visit her at elizabethjcoleman.com.

A few questions for Elizabeth:

I’m so impressed with your accomplishments in a variety of genres in the arts: poetry, music, and painting, which is why I have dubbed you a Renaissance woman. Did you always have an aptitude for all three, or did these each manifest at different times? Is there one genre that you identify with more than the others? I mean, do you primarily consider yourself a poet? Or do you consider yourself a painter and musician equally amidst your literary life? Does one genre carry more weight in terms of your soul’s survival, so to speak?

Probably more than the other two, I consider myself a poet. Words were my tool as an attorney, and they are my tool now. Books were highly valued and prized in our house; my mother read me a lot of poetry at a young age, and I have always been a great reader. Though I did come to writing poetry itself late.

I feel the need to write and write every day. And I love the challenge of poetry, its off-the-wallness, its variety, that words are your palette, your medium, and that poetry is music too. I’m challenged by the fact that, as Archibald MacLeish says, a poem “should not mean, but be” and by what Emily Dickinson said about how a poem could make her feel physically as if the top of her head were “taken off.”

One reason I feel the most comfortable calling myself a poet is that it is the only one of the three where I have professional credentials, an MFA and several books to my name. If you had told me this would be the case 15 years ago, I would not have believed you. Nonetheless, I majored in French literature, and before going to law school taught French and English in junior high and high school.

I grew up in a house filled with music too. My mother and father played the piano, and I played the piano and cello. I love that you can communicate with someone else, of a different culture, or someone who is suffering, without having to use words. Sometimes when words divide us, music unites us. Selfportrait with yellow guitar

Of the three, I feel the least comfortable calling myself a visual artist. This is where I have the least training, though I love the extraordinary freedom and sense of abandon I get working in watercolor. I’m also very interested in collage. But visual art is where I feel the most timid, and I have not yet been able to devote as much time as I have to poetry and guitar.

But the three stem from a common impulse: to express my awe at being here and my gratitude. All three are like a prayer, or, as the non-deist Buddhist philosopher Stephen Batchelor put it, “How extraordinary it is to be here at all.”

I find it fascinating that in addition to being a multi-talented artist, you are also an attorney. What comes to mind, when I think of the journey to becoming an attorney is lots of studying, memorization, and test taking, which seems counter to using the part of your brain that dominates creativity. What was your incentive to pursue a career in law? Did this more left brain type of path come naturally to you?

That’s such a great question, Laurie. Yes and no. As a child of the ’60s, who felt I must work within the system to effect social change, it seemed like my duty to go to law school. I also came from a business background, and my parents encouraged me to pursue the law, as they encouraged me—to their credit—to be a professional. It was not easy for me, not so much because I’m not a left-brain thinker—I think that side of my brain is pretty strong (and that’s sometimes a problem in poetry!)—but because I’m a highly emotional person. I could not distance myself from the subject matter, could not be objective, as the professors taught us to be in law school. In retrospect, I’m thrilled because the only work I could really do involved helping people, and that brought me great satisfaction. Law school transforms some people as they become more “reasonable.” I think, both in good ways and bad, that did not happen to me. Also I met my husband in law school, and he has been an extraordinary partner all these years.

I know there is a personal story behind how you came to Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. Would you be willing to share some of that with us?

Sure, I came to MBSR after a bout with endometrial cancer in 2001. I’m fine, but it really made an impression and changed the course of my life. The combination of the experience of cancer and taking MBSR are what led me to being a poet and to devoting myself more to music and art. Again, another great quote from Stephen Batchelor comes to mind: “If my death is certain, but the date of my death is not certain, what should I do?”

In addition to being Jewish, Buddhism—in relation to your mindfulness practice—seems to have an influence on your poetry. How do these two cultural heritages inform your writing?

Among the amazing teachers I encountered at VCFA was Rick Jackson. Rick always used to say to write about your obsessions, and I would say I’m obsessed with both Judaism and Buddhism and with questions of spirituality in general. I was raised in a secular home, and a complex set of experiences caused me to want to delve further into that part of my heritage. My interest in Buddhism stems from learning and teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, which is really a kind of lay Buddhism.

The latter is an influence on process as well because Buddhism causes you to face your mortality, face reality, and is really quite existential. I think I feel the need to write, to play music, to create art now because I can’t put it off.

The combination of having had an experience of cancer and studying mindful meditation caused me to be interested in human spirituality and our relationship to our lives, compassion towards others, stewardship of our planet and mortality. I keep looking for angles on these essential subjects.

Who are your favorite poets? In addition to poetry, what do you like to read?

I have to admit that my favorite poet is generally the one I’m reading right now. For example, I’m reading a book by Grace Schulman at this moment, and I’m just blown away by the beauty. I keep coming upon new poets and loving their work. The other day I read Jessica Greenbaum’s, “A Poem for S,” and it moved me immeasurably. I love many, many poets from every century and every country and civilization. Each day I discover a new one who excites me. Here are a few I adore, though the list is far from complete: Guillaume Apollinaire, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Yehudi Amichai, W.B. Yeats, Czeslaw Milosz, Nazim Hikmet, Cesare Pavese, Robert Hass, Philip Levine, Gerald Stern…. I’ve given you these in no particular order. I’ve decided not to list the terrific poets I worked with at VCFA, but they were uniformly wonderful.

As to other reading, I try, as poet and teacher Natasha Saje always says, to “follow my nose.” Right now in addition to poetry, in fiction I’m reading The Brothers Karamazov, and in nonfiction Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquahar. I tend to read what grabs me. One of my goals is to read more about philosophy, Judaism, and astronomy. I have read much fiction over the years and am a particular fan of the nineteenth century British novelists. Those are books I go back to over and over for comfort. I also read a fair amount of Buddhist philosophy, and Pema Chodron always inspires me.

Can you offer up a quote that has helped to guide your life for all the aspiring artists out there?

There are many great quotes, but here’s one I keep coming back to. In Stephen Sondheim’s play Sunday in the Park with George, there is a moment when Seurat’s grandson, also named George, is having a crisis about being a visual artist, feels he has no talent, and he sings to his grandmother, “There’s nothing that’s not been said,” and she answers, “But said by you, George?”

 

 

 

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The Sunday Spotlight: Writer & Critic Michele Filgate

21 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by Laurie Easter in essay, Inspiration, interview, The Sunday Spotlight, writing

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dogs, essay, Gulf Coast, literary citizenship, Loss, Michele Filgate, Red Ink, writing

Today’s featured writer: Michele Filgate

The featured writing: “Possessed” published at Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts.

I’m thrilled to feature Michele Filgate and her gorgeous essay “Possessed” today.Michele1 This is a bit of a gamble because Michele’s essay is published in the print edition of the literary journal Gulf Coast out of the University of Houston’s English department. While Gulf Coast does publish online exclusives, the content in their biannual print journal (which features 250+ pages of writing from both emerging and established writers and full-page color artwork) is not normally posted online. But for a limited time, you can read selections from issue 28.1 Winter/Spring 2016 at their website. Gulf CoastI don’t know how long or short this limited time will be—thus the gamble on my promoting Michele’s essay via an online link—so hurry and read it while you can; you don’t want to miss this essay. It is nothing short of stunning. But if you miss out on the online posting, you can purchase a print edition at Gulf Coast and enjoy the many quality writers they publish.

“Possessed” is a segmented lyric essay in seven parts about a woman who, with her partner, adopts a sensitive dog from a shelter, in what appears to be a stab at saving their troubled relationship, only she has to leave the dog once the relationship comes to an end. It’s also a meditation on possession. About the things we possess and how those things, accumulated throughout life, possess us. Like anxiety. Or depression. Or the way a dog can possess a person’s heart and how that can lead to gluttonous grief. It is also about a writer trying to make sense of her profound loss and seeking a way to process her experience. In the essay, Michele writes:

How many writers have sliced their hearts into confetti and thrown the pieces into the wind? Never sure of where the bits will fall. Hoping that by deconstructing, one can make some kind of sense out of it.

From interviewing Michele, I get a sense that the above quote reflects her process in the writing of “Possessed.” She sliced open her heart and made an attempt, deconstructing towards some sort of answer or resolution. Yet the final product does not reflect this at all; the essay comes together brilliantly, and rather, it reflects essaying at its very best. In addition, there are so many exquisite phrases and achingly beautiful sections of this essay, I had trouble choosing what to quote. Here is a passage to entice you:

Imagine, if you will, that what you possess, what you used to possess, what you will possess possesses you, and you need some kind of emotional exorcist to release you from the burden of carrying so many things around.

A dog is not a possession. It’s a living thing that snuggles up to you on cold winter nights, curled in a ball underneath the blanket, occasionally licking your shin. It’s a creature that looks at you in a way that says, I know you’re sad. I’m sad, too. Let’s be sad together.

Birdie possesses my heart.

Things that possess us weigh just as heavily as the possessions themselves. The absence of the thing that possesses us replaces the actual possession, and that absence grows and grows until it is lodged and stuck. It’s amazing that we’re not crippled by what we’ve had and lost.

Merely quoting from this essay is insufficient to relay the masterful rendering of the whole, and that’s why I implore you to go now, while you have a chance, and read this essay!

Michele Filgate is a contributing editor at Literary Hub and VP/Awards for the National Book Critics Circle. Her work has appeared in Refinery29, Slice, The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Salon, Interview Magazine, Buzzfeed, The Barnes & Noble Review, Poets & Writers, The Boston Globe, Fine Books & Collections Magazine, DAME Magazine, Biographile, The Brooklyn Quarterly, Time Out New York, People, The Daily Beast, O, The Oprah Magazine, Men’s Journal, Vulture, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Capital New York, The Star Tribune, Bookslut, The Quarterly Conversation, The Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. For seven years she worked as an events coordinator at several different independent bookstores: first at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, NH; then at McNally Jackson in Manhattan; and finally at Community Bookstore in Brooklyn. Michele was the producer of a segment for the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric called “Assignment America” and has also produced literary segments for “Word of Mouth” on New Hampshire Public Radio. She teaches creative nonfiction for The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop and Catapult.Michele2

A few questions for Michele:

Writing and publishing creative nonfiction that has to do with personal loss can have a two-fold effect. On the one hand, it can be healing, on the other, scary and difficult. The subject matter in “Possessed“—to leave a beloved animal friend behind—is heart wrenching. How difficult was it for you to write this piece? Can you speak about your process in writing this essay?

I’ve tried (and failed) to write about this subject many times before. I think this is the most difficult essay I’ve ever written, to be honest. I didn’t know what I wanted to say until I said it. And that required many revisions and lots of time writing and deleting and writing and deleting. Originally, my friend approached me about writing a piece for Gulf Coast that dealt with women and books. That ended up being part of the essay, but not the entire thing. It went in a completely different direction.

Besides your own essays and articles, you actively publish reviews, interviews, and author profiles, as well as teach, participate in readings, and serve as a contributing editor, among other things. How do you balance and integrate all these literary endeavors with your own writing? Do you find that one takes precedence over others? 

Balance? What is that? Ha! I go to yoga twice a week and I run three times a week, and I guess part of the reason I do both is because I’m always seeking those moments of either reflection or the ability to turn my brain off. I am probably the worst person at balancing that I know. I take on tons of projects, am always stressed out, and don’t know how to relax. I watch TV when I should be writing. I chat with friends on Facebook when I should be writing. I clean the dishes when I should be writing. Anxiety and guilt loom large in my life, and I’m constantly fighting both by either blatantly ignoring my to-do list or saying “Fuck it” and sitting down and writing. Once I start, I feel so much better. If only I could bottle that productive feeling up and carry it with me during the other moments in my life.

Even though you make your living from your literary skills, your participation in so many endeavors denotes you are an exemplary literary citizen. Can you speak to the notion of literary citizenship? What does it mean to you? How important of a role does it play in your life?

Being a literary citizen means a different thing when you’re also a writer. I know some exemplary literary citizens who aren’t writers. They are generous, passionate readers who spend a lot of their time promoting the work of others. I think being a literary citizen and a writer means that you value other writers’ work just as much as you value your own. That doesn’t mean you have to like it. You can even give the book a bad review in a newspaper. But it means that you take the work seriously, you do what you can to tell the world about books you love and believe in, and you participate in the literary conversation. You attend author readings and write recommendation letters for friends who are applying for fellowships and do what you can to make the literary world inclusive.

Literary Hub recently announced you will be curating Red Ink, a series on women writers in Brooklyn, New York. Can you tell us more about Red Ink? What is your goal for the series, how did it come about, and will it reach beyond the local vicinity of Brooklyn?

I hope it reaches beyond Brooklyn! That’s why I’ve asked Lit Hub to co-sponsor it. They will publish edited transcripts of the events. I ran events at indie bookstores for seven years before leaving to focus on my writing career. But once an events coordinator, always a coordinator, I suppose. I created Red Ink because I love curating and moderating conversations between smart writers, and also because I wanted to focus on women writers, past and present. The reason I chose BookCourt is because it’s my local indie, and they host a ton of great events. The first one is on May 9th at 7pm: “Finding Solitude in a Noisy World” featuring Katherine Towler (The Penny Poet of Portsmouth), Angela Flournoy (The Turner House), Molly Crabapple (Drawing Blood), Leslie Jamison (The Empathy Exams), and Valeria Luiselli (The Story of My Teeth).

Who are some of your favorite authors who have influenced your work?  What impact have they had on your writing?

It’s impossible to list all of them, but some of my very favorite writers include Virginia Woolf, Lidia Yuknavitch, Rebecca Solnit, Cheryl Strayed, Clarice Lispector, Paul Harding, Fernando Pessoa, and George Eliot. I write because their words have helped shape me; they’ve made it possible for me to find my very own shape, if that makes sense.

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

Don’t compare yourself to others. You’ll paralyze yourself if you do that. You can spend all of your time fretting and finding reasons not to write, or you can get your ass in a chair and open a blank Word document. You can type one word, and then another, and then maybe another. And eventually if you write enough words (and they can be very middling, bad, boring words) something beautiful will emerge in the middle of all of that muck.

 

 

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The Sunday Spotlight: Writer Suzanne Farrell Smith

14 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by Laurie Easter in essay, Inspiration, interview, The Sunday Spotlight, writing

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essay, Listing to Love, Lists, Love, Pank, Suzanne Farrell Smith, The Sunday Spotlight, Vermont College of Fine Arts, writing

Today’s featured writer: Suzanne Farrell Smith

The featured writing: “Listing to Love” published at Pank.

Okay, prepare yourselves. This is going to be a gush-fest. And I’m not sorry about it in the least. In honor of Valentine’s Day and this week’s featured essay “Listing to Love,” I’ve compiled a short list on what I believe about Love:

  1. Love makes the world go round. (Yes, that’s a cliché. And maybe love doesn’t actually make the world go round—that has something to do with science—but without love there’d be no reason for the world to exist, and likewise none of us, so you get where I’m going with this, right?)
  2. It’s important and necessary to tell the ones you love that you love them. Often. Shout it, whisper it, show it, act it.
  3. Love manifests in big and small ways.
  4. Love is free.
  5. Love leads to more love.

In this spirit, I intend to spread the love…

I met Suzanne Farrell Smith my first semester at Vermont College of Fine Arts. We were in an all cnf workshop together facilitated by Sue William Silverman and Robert Vivian that was, surprisingly for a writing workshop, quite the lovefest in itself. imageThis workshop was where I met some of my closest friends, brilliant writers all. Suzanne and I bonded, and even though I never see her, because she lives on the east coast and I in the west, I remain steadfastly in awe of this woman. She’s smart. She’s authentic. She’s kind and compassionate. She’s gorgeous. (Just look at the picture below!) And she’s a thoroughly gifted writer. (I told you this was going to be a gush-fest. But, hey, it’s all true.)

As the title suggests, “Listing to Love” is a list essay that chronicles the love of “little things.” Suzanne writes,

“I don’t mean little things like a rainbow or a baby’s smile. Who doesn’t love a rainbow or a baby’s smile? You’d have to be such a jerk. I mean really, really little things.”

There is so much I love about this essay:

  1. The form, written as an outline.
  2. The unique details and how they are perfectly wrought from keen observation.
  3. The way the essay keeps unfolding, going deeper and deeper with each list within the list.
  4. The way personality and character are revealed through what’s included in the list.
  5. The connections between details and the circular nature of the essay from the beginning, “I love little things,” to the end.

AuthorPhotoA Connecticut native, Suzanne Farrell Smith writes from her home on the Byram River border between Connecticut and New York. She spent a decade teaching elementary and middle school students, fascinated by how children both respond to stories and craft their own. With two master’s degrees, one in literature and criticism and the other in creative nonfiction writing, she now teaches undergraduate academic writing and methods of literacy instruction to graduate students. Suzanne is raising three sons, but she is missing a large portion of her own childhood memory; she writes a great deal about memory, trauma, health, parenting, and education. Recent work appears in Ascent, Crab Creek Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Literary Mama, Community Health Narratives, and the anthology Oh, Baby! True Stories about Conception, Adoption, Surrogacy, Pregnancy, Labor, and Love. A new piece, written over seven days while her twins were in neonatal intensive care, is forthcoming in Under the Gum Tree. Suzanne uses her blog to promote literary markets and publications she admires, explore facets of the writing life, and reflect on personal experiences, most recently in “8 Things I’ve Learned (So Far) as a Parent of a Child with Special Needs.” She lives online at suzannefarrellsmith.wordpress.com.

A few questions for Suzanne:

How did you come up with the concept for “Listing to Love“? Did you have a particular inspiration, goal, or intention when writing this piece?

I constantly list concepts, but very few of them grow into complete pieces, and most of my writing becomes conceptual only through drafting. This piece started as one list, and I didn’t predict it would bourgeon into an outline of embedded lists. But I liked the single list I created, so I wrote more. The act of listing, especially in outline form, is like writing an essay. You search underneath for the next bit of truth, and the next, and the next, until you’re at the basic elements, the level IA1a)(1)(a)(i). When you pull back again, you’ve found a big idea that you didn’t realize you were looking for. In this piece, once I’d listed from macro to micro, literally hitting the right margin of the page, I pulled out to see what I’d uncovered. Only then did I revise with intention.

You’ve got lists within this list essay, among them one sub-list is “Awkward moments with my in-laws.” You then list three of those awkward moments, which for me, as a reader, incites incredible curiosity. I’m left wondering what happened “That time in the garage” and “That time at the spa,” along with other tidbits listed in the essay such as the misunderstanding between you and your friend about the United Kingdom that “settled over the table.” Have you ever or would you consider writing a companion essay to “Listing to Love” where you would elaborate on some of these things?

A companion essay … hadn’t thought of that! As it happens, my father-in-law died less than a year after I published this essay. I almost told the story of one of those awkward moments (the garage), at his Memorial Service. Almost. My husband knows the stories all too well (and prefers not to relive them!). I suspect a little more time must pass before I share the details.

In the essay, you say “I stuck the paint swatch card that I use as a bookmark into the back of my book and noticed, in the few seconds before the train stopped, that the book’s inside cover was exactly the same color as one of the choices on the card.” What was the title of that book whose inside cover was the color of “First Snowfall”?

BookMy brain is doing gymnastics over this one. I can’t remember! We moved six months ago, and much of our library is packed up and stored, so I can’t check the books (though I’m tempted to brave the labyrinth in our storage unit). I wrote that particular list right after graduating from Vermont College of Fine Arts. My husband had coordinated an amazing graduation gift for me—friends and family members sent books for my bookshelf, with notes explaining why they chose those titles. So I likely was reading one of those gifted books. I can see it in my mind—hard cover, in the common 6×9 size, end papers a serene (rather than drab) gray. Benjamin Moore, on its website, says of “First Snowfall”: “Reminiscent of the first sleigh ride through freshly fallen snow, this soft, light blue-gray is as delicate as a snowflake.” Doesn’t that make you wonder about the writer behind descriptions of paint colors? That bookmark was recycled long ago. My current bookmark begins with Benjamin Moore’s “Breath of Fresh Air” and ends on a saturated “Blueberry Hill.”

Who are some of your favorite authors who have influenced your work?  What impact have they had on your writing?

I’ve got lists for this one. I have no memory of childhood, so while teaching elementary school, I fell in love with children’s literature as if reading it for the first time. I even thought I might write for children. I still have a list of math-related titles I wanted to make into a series. But in graduate school, I studied dozens of authors who inspired me to become a writer of prose for adults: Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Annie Dillard, Zora Neale Hurston, Frank McCourt, Flannery O’Connor, Andrew Lam, David Sedaris, Jessica Mitford, Barbara Ehrenreich, and on and on. I’d copy their sentences and study the structure, listen to the music, wonder at the craft. Other authors taught me directly, so I learned from their work while learning from their feedback on mine—Sue William Silverman, Margo Jefferson, Laurie Alberts, Sascha Feinstein, Randy Fertel, Robert Vivian, Diane Lefer, and Rebecca McClanahan. I open their books when I feel stuck or need a boost, as if they’re still teaching me. I learn a lot about the writing process from writer friends in groups and workshops. And I follow emerging authors who are regularly published in my favorite journals. I still love children’s literature and am inspired by the picture books I read to my kids. Plus, they bring me to places and into situations—let’s crawl up this muddy hill just because!—that influence my writing in some way.TwinsExplore

Would you share a bit about your current writing life? What topics or themes are you presently focused on? What forms do you find yourself working in?

TwinsHatsI have three sons: a preschooler and twin toddlers. And I’ve just restarted teaching, editing, and publishing, after an extended leave during which I had the twins and my mother died. So time is a bit limited right now. When I have a few minutes to spend inside my writing life, I focus on my favorite form, the personal essay, though it’s always on my mind to develop my poetry and short stories. My first manuscript digs into memory, and I’m working on my second, which explores parenting in the world of genetic differences.

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The Sunday Spotlight: Writer Melissa Matthewson

07 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by Laurie Easter in essay, Inspiration, interview, The Sunday Spotlight, writing

≈ 2 Comments

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As Snow Designs, essay, Loss, Melissa Mattewson, The Bellingham Review, The Sunday Spotlight, writing

Today’s featured writer: Melissa Matthewson.

The featured writing: “As Snow Designs” published at The Bellingham Review.

I live in a small, rural town, so in order to fulfill my literary cravings and needs, I rely upon social media to keep connected. While having that online access is great, interacting with people virtually is definitely a poor substitute to being with people in the flesh. And while there are writers and literary-minded folk in my region of Southern Oregon, obviously the opportunities pale in comparison to more populated areas like Portland, which is five hours north. I was thrilled then to discover (actually she gets credit for discovering me via a fellow VCFA alum) and meet Melissa Matthewson, who lives over the ridge in the next valley from me. When we met, Melissa had just begun the MFA in writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where I, too, received my MFA in creative nonfiction. Finally, I had flesh and blood literary connection to share the love of words with over glasses of wine at Peace of Pizza in the Applegate valley or a local-made hard cider or ale at the taco joint in my town of Williams. (And someone to travel with to AWP. Here we are outside Hell’s Kitchen in Minneapolis last year.)IMG_3898

Since our meeting, Melissa has graduated and gone on to publish many striking essays in very fine publications, the most recent being “As Snow Designs” published at The Bellingham Review and recently nominated by them for a pushcart prize. Her lyric essay is a segmented meditation on loss, full of both gorgeous language and thoughtful rumination, that stems from a time when her future husband was caught in the mountains in a sudden snow storm.

I felt the possibility of loss as an exertion of pressure on my chest as I walked, the force overwhelming as if I were to be swallowed into the buried sky. This loss as an interruption to the ordinary. My fiancée had gone to the mountains with two friends hours before. I wondered about them in the woods with the snow. I wondered about the blurry confusion of a quick storm. You could say I was worried. As a couple, we were so new, our love like fresh soap taken from the plastic and sweet like lavender.

Melissa 1Melissa Matthewson lives and writes in the Applegate Valley of southwestern Oregon. She holds degrees from the University of California, Santa Cruz (BA), University of Montana (MS), and Vermont College of Fine Arts (MFA). Her essays have appeared in the Mid-American Review, Bellingham Review, River Teeth, Sweet, Defunct, Numero Cinq, Terrain.org, Pithead Chapel, This Magazine, Literary Mama, Prime Number, Under the Gum Tree, and Cobra Lily Review among other publications. Her essay, “A Gathering of Then & Now” won the 2015 AWP Intro Journals Award in creative nonfiction. She has been a finalist for the Terrain.org Nonfiction Prize and the Orlando Prize for Nonfiction.  She serves as an Assistant Essays Editor at The Rumpus, teaches writing workshops and Zumba dance classes, and runs an organic farm. She’s working on a collection of lyric essays. Visit her at melissamatthewson.com or on twitter @melmatthewson.

A few questions for Melissa:

Each section in “As Snow Designs” attempts to open the essay anew with a fresh angle of beginning, while also building upon the previous section(s) until the last two sections shift towards finding the ending. Can you speak to that? How did this structure come about?

The essay’s genesis began in a lecture on juxtaposition in poetry and prose at a Vermont College of Fine Arts residency. Danielle Cadena Deulen gave us a writing prompt in which we were to juxtapose three events. The first prompt was to write about a time when you were in an extreme state of being, using metaphor to explain. I decided on writing about losing my husband to the snow. Then she had us write about a city we had traveled to or lived in. I wrote about Missoula. Then she had us tell a story with a clear narrative. Any story. I wrote about coming upon a performer on the Santa Cruz streets painted all silver. She then had us try to connect the first fragment about the extreme emotion to the other two fragments. I left the lecture loving what the writing prompt generated, so I went home and wrote the essay that is now, “As Snow Designs.” I sort of stumbled upon the structure just through experimentation. I was reading a lot of experimental essays at the time and I was influenced by their playfulness in terms of form. In my own writing, I couldn’t find a way to tell this particular story, so it just came to me as I was writing that I should just try a number of different beginnings with titles for each section. The essay evolved over almost two years of writing and revising.

Do you have a specific writing process? How do your essay ideas come to you?

My writing process is to fit in writing where I can! I try to commit myself to three large chunks of writing time per week, but of course, this is usually interrupted for whatever reason. I don’t have a specific time of day that works. It’s whenever I can sit down. I like to write in bed under my wool blanket. I write a lot while my children are running around the house. Perhaps it’s their craziness that inspires me?Melissa 4 Or I need the chaos of their voices to fuel me? I tend to write very short pieces of prose. I can’t seem to just sit down and pour out pages and pages of words. I craft sentences slowly, paying attention to word choice, rhythm, syntax. I resist straight narrative, so I like to experiment with form and play with blurring the lines between poetry and nonfiction. Sometimes ideas come to me very easily. I often think of it as a process of enchantment with an experience or an affection for an idea. For instance, I happened upon an amazing place in northern California recently and had an almost spiritual experience in the woods. I was so compelled by the experience that a short piece of prose immediately poured out of me. Or, a friend died recently, so I tried to make sense of the grief and loss through a short poem. Or recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about scarcity, stability, and the course of nature and its uncertainty and somehow I want to take those ideas and craft them into an essay. Big topics and of course, they’ve been written on before, but I like tackling old ideas in new ways. I guess ideas come to me based on experience, emotion, and thought.

What are you currently reading, and what recent books, essays, poems, or stories do you recommend and why?

I’m currently reading The Beauty of the Husband, Anne Carson; Find Me, Laura Van Den Berg; and Bright, Dead Things, Ada Limon. I’m slowly reading essays in After Montaigne edited by Patrick Madden and David Lazar and Ander Monson’s new collection, Letter to a Future Lover.

A friend of mine from VCFA, Genevieve Thurtle, just published a stunning essay in the most recent issue of The Sun. The essay, “Twenty Three Weeks,” is a devastatingly beautiful essay about losing her daughter. I also read Ada Limon’s essay on Richard Blanco’s blog “To What Do We Owe This Pleasure: On the Value of Not Writing” that I can’t stop thinking about. I have a secret crush on Ada Limon. Guess it’s not so secret anymore. Eula Biss published an essay in the New York Times “White Debt” that I think was very provocative and important and which I’ve read several times and recommend to everyone. An essay in the 2015 Best American Essay anthology gutted me: Justin Cronin’s “My Daughter & God.” I recently read James Baldwin’s story “Sonny’s Blues” and it’s just an amazing story in so many ways: plot, character, and sentence construction!

Nonfiction books I read last year that affected me greatly were Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and Citizen from Claudia Rankine. Also, I devoured Laura Groff’s novel Fates and Furies. Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation too. I’ve been drawn to literature about marriage and desire based on the writing I’m doing. I’ve also been drawn to understanding, learning, and engaging in issues and literature around race so reading Coates and Rankine’s books has been a part of that education.

I’ve got a long to-read list. Books I can’t wait to read in the next few months include: The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson; How to Be Drawn, Terrance Hayes; Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Ross Gay; Negroland, Margo Jefferson; H is for Hawk; Helen Macdonald; and Ordinary Light, Tracy K. Smith.

What book do you wish you could have written?

What a good question! I don’t know…maybe anything that Virginia Woolf has ever written. Maybe Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Or Lorrie Moore’s collection of stories, Self-Help. Anything Joan Didion. Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Or Crime and Punishment, only because I loved that book in high school.

Melissa 5

What inspires you? 

The mountains. Trees. Music. Poetry.

Can you share a bit with us about the essay collection you are working on? Does it have a tentative title?

Sure! Right now, it’s a collection of twenty-five lyric essays, though some of these could be considered prose poems or short flash nonfiction. It’s tentatively titled Home, As It Were: Essays. Together, the essays examine the paradox of limitation versus freedom within a marriage. I like to think they form an intimate inquiry into identity as explored through subjects and themes of desire, farming, marriage, sexuality, polyamory, domesticity (and the rejection thereof), music, and motherhood, all tied and threaded to the landscape. Each essay attempts to build a loose chronological story of a marriage from the middle of a relationship to the break, all told through lyrical narrative and hybrid forms. I hope for the essays to blend and fuse writing that is lyrical, intellectually curious and to provoke and arouse the reader through an artful investigation into desire and marriage. We’ll see. It’s an attempt. As in all essays!

 

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Laurie Easter

Laurie Easter

Laurie Easter lives and writes in a funky little cabin off the grid and on the edge of wilderness in Southern Oregon. She holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She loves to read, cook, garden, travel, eat chocolate, and spend time with her family and friends, especially out in nature.

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