|
|
|
|
The poetry and fiction chapbook contest winners have been chosen. I will be calling the winners on Sunday and everyone else will be getting letters mailed out to them next week. It took me longer than expected because of the fiction manuscripts. I spent time on every manuscript and gave them all my close attention. I am very impressed with the quality of work sent to me. Wow! It was a very tough decision. I am very happy with what I chose. Thank you so much to everyone who sent manuscripts to the press. In 2010, Cervena Barva Press will present a conference for writers in the Somerville/Cambridge area. This conference will be affordable for writers. I get tired of seeing conferences cost so much. So far, I have quite a line up but have more to ask to be a part of this. This is quite an undertaking but I look so forward to it. I'll keep you informed of its progress as time goes on. Cervena Barva is pleased to announce that Cervená author, Catherine Sasanov, has won the 2009 Sentence Book Award. Her manuscript, Had Slaves, will be published this fall by Firewheel Editions. The Sentence Book Award is given annually to a full-length poetry collection incorporating prose poetics as a whole or in-part. Other News from Cervena Barva Press FriendsKyke Flak won the 2008 New Sins Editors' Prize. Currently, an instructor at UMass/Amherst, he is a poet who manages to balance aesthetics, surrealism and lyricism in his works to sublime effect! His book is titled Harmonica Days. New Sins is anxious to publish this ms. and wishes him many readings in the Mass. area, many kudos and many awards! In case you missed The Judy Joy Jones live show with Dr. Maya Angelou; please enjoy the archives free of charge below. Also Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi; Spiritual leader of India, was a recent guest as well so do listen to it in the archives. Two great leaders of our time will help inspire you with noble and lofty goals! Dr. Maya Angelou; Beloved poet & Best-Selling Author! Indian Bay Press has their April Newsletter online. Go to the Poesia Forum at:
http://www.indianbaypress.com/about_us.html
I want to thank Bill Mayo for all his support. Their new issue of Poesia is available now.
Now in their seventh year of publication. Please support Indian Bay Press and order a copy. In the new issue,
writers include: CL Bledsoe, Carrie Acguire, Miranda Coimbra,
Mary Himmelweit, J. B. Hogan and more…
 Raves...THE SLOW VANISHING by Maureen Sherbondy THE SLOW VANISHING (ISBN 13: 978-1-59948-186-9) contains both flash fiction and longer stories. Some of the stories first appeared in literary journals, such as Stone Canoe, the North Carolina Literary Review, the Knoxville Writers' Guild Anthology, Low Explosions: Writings on the Body, and the Sierra Nevada College Review. To receive an advance order discount ($9.00), please order the book now online at the publisher's website: Off-beat stories with unexpected endings. Life's ordinary problems intruded on by the bizarre.
The Slow Vanishing has a mesmerizing, magical effect. What a wonderful collection this is. Maureen Sherbondy's The Slow Vanishing is remarkable for its abundance, its variety,
its range, and its sheer imagination. There are long, serious stories… There are comic stories, very short stories
(flash fictions), and in all of them Sherbondy's gift for vivid, sharp imagery and telling detail shines forth.
Everything seems to vanish-children, mothers, houses, comedians, body parts, husbands, even punctuation-and all
this vanishing asks us to think about life without that which has vanished. And we do think. We laugh, we worry,
we think, and we read on, because we want more." From the Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers A series of interviews with poets and writers that took place in the "Paris of New England," (Somerville, MA.) Doug Holder the founder of the small literary press "Ibbetson Street" conducted interviews on his Somerville Community Access TV Show "Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer," as well as for his literary column in The Somerville News, and at the Wilderness House Literary Retreat, founded by his friend Steve Glines. Poets and writers included in this volume are: Eva Salzman, Mike Basinski, Errol Uys, Lan Samantha Chang, Louisa Solano, Miriam Levine, Mark Doty, Claire Messud, Lisa Beatman, Martha Collins, Dick Lourie, Robert Creeley, Afaa Michael Weaver, Jack Powers, Ed Sanders, Tom Perrotta, Diana Der-Hovanessian, Luke Salisbury, Sarah Hannah, Hugh Fox, Lo galluccio, Timothy Gager, Gloria Mindock, March Widershien, Deborah M. Priestly, Steve Almond, Harris Gardner, Robert K. Johnson, Pagan Kennedy. The Woods Have Words by Mignon Ariel King, 2009 "Mignon Ariel King's first remarkable collection of poems, The Woods Have Words, is accomplished, joyful and a virtual
voice-romp through the new Boston--an inner travelogue of urban sights and people. Readers looking for a new book of poems
will be pleased--her poems are openminded and clear…" To order: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-woods-have-words/5979051
New Sins Press
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Photo: Nicole Terez Dutton |
Tom Daley was a machinist for many years and now teaches poetry writing at the Boston Center for Adult Education in Boston, Massachusetts (http://www.bcae.org/) and poetry and memoir writing at Lexington (MA) Community Education (http://lexingtoncommunityed.org/). He is a member of the faculty of the Online School of Poetry (http://onlineschoolofpoetry.org/faculty.html) and serves on the tutorial faculty of Walnut Hill School for the Arts. He has lectured on ekphrastic poetry at Brown University and on performance poetry at Stonehill College and SUNY Cobleskill. He conducted the poetry workshop at Writers in the Round's annual retreat for poets and songwriters on Star Island, NH in 2006. Tom's poetry has been published or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, Barrow Street, Del Sol Review, Diagram, Poetry Ireland Review, 32 Poems, Salamander, Perihelion, Archipelago, Hacks: The Grub Street Anthology, and The Bagel Bards Anthology (Numbers 1 and 2). His manuscript, Shim, was a finalist for the Emily Dickinson First Book Prize and the Brittingham and Pollak Poetry Prizes His poetry was nominated for inclusion in the anthology, The Best New Poets 2007. He graduated with highest honors in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina, where he won the Charles and Fanny Fay Wood Academy of American Poets Prize. |
Tom produced and performed in several gala evenings of poetry performance with musical accompaniment, including "The Musician and the Muse" in 2004 (featuring Regie Gibson, Kent Foreman, Nicole Terez Dutton, Iyeoka Ivie Okoawo, J*me, and L'Merchie Frazier) and "The Poetry Vaudeville Show" in 2008 (featuring Regie Gibson, Nicole Terez Dutton, and Lilli Lewis).
I usually write in the dining room of my third floor apartment, which does triple service as my study, the place where I lead my Monday night workshops, and the place where I keep most of my poetry books. There's something comforting about all those astonishing words committed to ink and paper just an arm's length or two away. Some mornings I sit near the bay windows at one end of the rock maple dining room table and wait for the light to come in, Rapidograph pen at the ready. Sometimes I compose at the computer, surrounded by disorderly files, rubber stamps, a jar full of fountain pens, and an alto recorder I pick up sometimes and play when I am mulling something over. There's a stack of books at the end of a long desk-mostly the library books I've checked out recently or books I've bought that I aim to peruse. Right now the stack includes A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson, Paddy and the Republic, Erin's Daughters in America, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Open Letters (Carolyn Gregory) and How to Develop A Super Power Memory, a book I studied several years ago-I've forgotten almost everything in it.
In the cabinets above the desk, books and notebooks and cassette tapes try to keep an uneasy order with each other. I have wedged into the molding of the cabinet doors laminated snapshots by Katherine Adams, a participant in my poetry workshops. She has a keen eye for the quirky detail-something I admire tremendously in both poetry and graphic arts. A series of pen and ink sketches by Emily Dusser de Barenne (mother of Marion Kilson, another writing workshop participant) graces a small calendar which hangs over the printer on a small white string and sometimes spins, as if months were some kind of mobile, in the air currents. The walls are painted Turkey red, the trim a semi-gloss off-white. There's the comforting buzz of my eleven year old Apple G-4, the occasional airplane overhead, trucks rumbling over potholes on the street, the lingering whiff of tea bags from last night waiting to be transferred to my compost pile. My favorite thing to look at it in the room is an unfinished portrait of my partner's mother at age twelve playing a violin, her face steady and wistful as she poses with the bow poised over a tan outline of the instrument.
The room is lit by an electrified replica of a Shaker chandelier, the crimped faux wax receptacles looking for all the world like wide and shallow cupcake paper. At my desk, I use a pedestal lamp which we bought years ago from a saleswoman who shared my late stepmother's droll sense of humor. (I hope she doesn't share her sloppiness and vitriol when inebriated). I sit in a sturdy ladder back chair and which helps to remind me to not let my back slump too badly when I have been at the computer for six or seven hours.
A great joy. I am constantly astonished at the richness and diversity of the voices of writers who enroll in my workshops. Their skill, their vulnerability, their insights, their doggedness, and their enthusiasm teach me much about the craft of writing (I offer workshops in memoir writing as well as in poetry).
The workshops are all characterized by lively and intelligent discussion among the participants. While we sometimes reach a consensus about the strengths and shortcomings of a particular work, more often than not, we agree to disagree. Each participant then comes away with a range of suggestions for improving the piece. The most successful revisions that are brought to the workshop are informed by the spirit of some of the suggestions, and not the letter.
I ask that each participant bring a poem by someone whose work they admire (not themselves!) to read at the beginning of each meeting of the poetry workshops. This is one of the most exciting parts of the workshop to hear new (and almost always) compelling poems and to get a sense of the aesthetic of the participant.
Every week, I give each participant a poem by another author which reminds me in some way of the poem they brought in the previous week. I also offer optional exercises which focus on particular subjects or the work of particular poets. In my current Lexington Community Education poetry workshop, I am offering exercises in how poets can learn from songwriters. In other workshops, the current set of exercises involves writing about work. I have also used the letters and poems of Emily Dickinson as a model. Dickinson is a fine, if sometimes elusive, model for writing the epistolary poem, writing about transformations, using aphorisms, and using the common (or hymn or ballad) meter, and employing rhyme in unusual ways.
My online workshop at the Online School of Poetry (http://onlineschoolofpoetry.org/TomDaleyWorkshop.html) is a somewhat more intensive experience. The exercises that are optional in other workshops are assignments in the online workshop. Each participant writes at least two thoroughgoing critiques of another participant's work every week. I also offer advice to participants on publishing in the online workshop
I teach writers at all different levels, from the person just trying her or his hand for the first time at poetry or memoir to writers who have had books published. I have led workshops in which one participant's last poetry teacher was Elizabeth Bishop and another participant's work seemed more informed by the aesthetic of the greeting card. The two actually learned something from each other!
Although most of my workshops are open to all levels of skill, I do have a joint workshop for poets and prose memoir writers that meets on Monday nights at my house in which the general level of craft is quite high. Some of the participants are working on book manuscripts and are publishing poems in respected journals. I also select more experienced and skilled writers for my advanced online workshop. In the memoir workshops, some participants enroll who are breaking away from the academic and technical writing that was their bread and butter to forge memoir pieces with a more robustly personal style. Others write in a fascinating hybrid of street patois and Hemingwayesque elegance.
I think the most important lesson a writer finding her or his way can learn is the value of one's own experience of the world as one is framing poems and prose pieces. Many writers come to the first couple of workshops with work that marches in the heavy boots of abstraction and generalization. I always hear some wrongheaded phantom whispering over their shoulder "No one would be interested in your story or your observation. You need to be universal to be understood." I suggest that that they consider the old Russian proverb, "Taste mouthfuls--taste the ocean." Or the adage (I think it is Paul Valery's) "It is a thousand times easier to be profound than it is to be precise." Precision comes from an acuity of perception, from giving expression to the individual genius that inhabits all mentally competent human beings, from mining the rich lodes of our unique experience in the world. This is the first and sometimes most difficult lesson to teach, because it involves not just a shift in aesthetic orientation, but also an acute shift in awareness.
Whether in poetry or prose, I try to help writers develop a sense of the almost magical properties of well-tuned language. For poetry especially, a sense of "heightened attention to language" (to use Coleridge's formula) is critical to my sense of a successful poem. So many poems these days ignore this important requirement, focusing on narrative or precept without any attention to the lyrical (i.e. musical) impulse that was poetry's hallmark for most of its long history. I encourage explorations with rhyme and meter and writing in forms. I am constantly battling the silly prejudice against rhyme fostered by many poetry teachers in the Modernist and post-Modernist tradition, a prejudice I had to unlearn myself.
The chapbook is a pastiche of ekphrastic poems (poems written in response to paintings, photographs, and other works of art), poems about my experience as a machinist, meditations on the bizarre world of the nuclear family, and elegiac tributes to my brother, father, and a past that always hovers in the sinews of my hands, waiting to break into some kind of song or sojourn. I tried to make the chapbook as aesthetically pleasing as I could, using a typeface called Adobe Garamond and having it printed (by union labor) at a press in Newburyport that has state of the art offset presses.
That would be a list too long to do your question justice without overwhelming your readers! If my writing has any life to it, it derives from a cross-pollination of many different sources. The most influential poets are Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, Charles Olson, Robert Browning, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Gwendolyn Brooks, Pablo Neruda and John Berryman. Recent engagements with the work of poets Aime Cesaire and Thomas McGrath have also been very influential. There are literally hundreds of other poets whose work I admire and from whom I learn. There are many prose writers whose work is often more poetic than that of some of the "leading lights" of American poetry today, and I have studied their work with an ear to gleaning lessons about poetry from their prose as much as the plot or message of their work. These include Toni Morrison, William Faulkner and Thomas Hardy. Garbiel Garcia Marquez wrote the novel I love above all others, Love in the Time of Cholera. Leon Trotsky is the best polemicist I know, the King James Version of the Bible the most beautiful collection of religious propaganda. Beck, Elliott Smith and Sam Beam (of Iron and Wine) write some of the smartest songs I've been listening to in the last few years. Emerson is the headiest aphorist, Heather McHugh the most strikingly original critic, Camille Paglia the greatest shoot-from the-hipster. Besides the misnamed Norton Anthology of Poetry (it's rather presumptuous to have an anthology "of Poetry" which only includes poems in English), two anthologies have received a lot of attention from my eye, ear, and brain: A Celtic Miscellany (translated and edited by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson) and Technicians of the Sacred (edited by Jerome Rothenberg).
Mostly revamping the Emily Dickinson play (see below). Under the leadership of my friend (and the very fine writer) Nicole Terez Dutton, I participated in a project of writing a poem a day for thirty days last October--every one of which was (allegedly) in the voice of my mother. I would like to extend and deepen that collection. A small press publisher asked me to put together a book of homages I have written to poets and other performers and send it to them for their consideration, so I will be working on that post April 4.
I have been working on a play (or dramatic presentation) based on Emily Dickinson's poems and letters for about a year, but the play really came into focus in January when I decided to concentrate on material about her servants (I am indebted to the work of Jay Leyda, who wrote a long paper on the subject of her servants called "Miss Emily's Maggie" in the nineteen fifties and the work of Aife Murray, who has a book coming out this spring called Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson's Life and Language, and of course to Emily Dickinson's surviving letters and poems, which is where I gleaned much of the material for the play.
The play takes place on the day of Emily Dickinson's funeral and burial. Dickinson, whose parents inhabited the upper tiers of Protestant Yankee society in Amherst, Massachusetts, had an ambivalent attitude towards the Irish immigrants and other working class people who were employed by her family. She could be affectionate, condescending, and hostile. Her appointment of six of her father's Irish Catholic groundskeepers and helpers to be her pallbearers was controversial at a time when Irish were considered a sub-species by many well-to-do Yankees.
In one letter, she speaks with great affection about one of these pallbearers, Tom Kelley, who was the brother-in-law of her housekeeper of thirty years, Maggie Maher. I have made these two central characters in the play, and their reciprocal affection towards Dickinson is counterpointed by the ambivalent hostility of another pallbearer, who seduces the housekeeper so he can get a hold of Dickinson's papers for the purposes of blackmailing her family. In the process, the malevolent pallbearer becomes enchanted with her poems. There is a back and forth between these three and other pallbearers. Other working class citizens of Amherst emerge as characters, including Henry Jackson and Angeline Palmer and a Jewish worker at the hat factory across from the Dickinson manse. (Jackson, a African American entrenpeneur who is to be played by the internationally acclaimed performance poet, Regie Gibson, was defended by Emily Dickinson's father, Edward, when Jackson was tried for abduction. Jackson had whisked the young black servant Angeline Palmer away when a Yankee mistress was threatening to sell her into slavery on an upcoming trip to South Carolina).
Emily Dickinson appears in several manifestations in the play, including as a wraith reading her own poems as events unfold after her burial, and in several flashback scenes. There are a number of musical and dance numbers in the play, including the performance of an aria from Gian Carlo Menotti's opera The Old Maid and the Thief; a song first popularized by Aretha Franklin, and a song by Sam Beam.
The play is being directed by Peter Berkrot, an acting coach and instructor with a lot of experience in community theater and staged readings, which is how this play is being produced. Peter has acted in many movies and directed his own theater company on the North Shore.
I find Dickinson fascinating. Once you peel away the "Queen Recluse" stereotype, a woman of great charm, humor, spiritual intensity, and genius emerges. I find that the more I study her poetry, the more astonished I am at the breadth of her vision and the daring of her project. When the literary critic Harold Bloom said hers was the most original mind in Western letters since Shakespeare, it wasn't a casual aside.
"you could be anywhere. but you're here in the room. don't turn your back. wait. there are possibilities still with us." from "Mortality", the opening poem in Judy's recent collection, When Performers Swim, the Dice Are Cast.
As a child I was surrounded by loving, dynamic, creative individuals. My mother loved to read, and I believe I was inspired by her to become a writer. I began writing in an elementary school class with a Mrs. Lingren who wrote children's books, and I met the writer Ilo Orleans in her class. So I began writing in elementary school and remember doing a lot of drawing, flute-playing, and running and swinging on vines. I was a very active as a child in the landscape of an intensely creative family: my grandmother for instance played classical and stride piano at all our family gatherings; and my brother, cousins and I always performed; my father was a very sensitive man with a great sense of humor and a flair for art. Both parents had stunning, vibrant, theatrical personalities. My father was a map-maker during WWII. My brother Paul played piano starting at age four, and we would sometimes play music together. My brother Larry is an athlete and inspires with his grace. So the music and family life around and inside of me inspired my poetry even at an early age.
I am an extremely determined person. I swing between being emotionally supportive of family members, doing household chores, being an office support for my husband's acupuncture business, and taking care of other family obligations, and creating poetry and music. I attempt to do this with fluidity which has been enhanced by meditation and tai chi. I will attend to a chore or emotional situation, then return to a deeper mode of writing poetry with great intensity. I do not let anything stop me and have written under some very trying circumstances.
Denise was a great force and river of influence in my writing life. I know her work extremely well, and have read and reread her collected poems, books such as The Freeing Of the Dust, Tesserae, Life in the Forest, and The Sorrow Dance, over and over again. She emphasized an organic approach to writing poetry, with the poem growing out of an intense impulse to create, rather than an academic exercise. Although, I have often favored the prose poem due to my study of French in college, she emphasized an organic line. She also had spiritual gifts, and would often use an I/thou approach, gleaned from the philosophy of Martin Buber, in her poetry and in working with people. She had a beautiful, spiritual gaze. As a teacher, Denise emphasized friendship and community, and especially at the time I studied with her was involved in protesting the war in Vietnam. She at that time freely gave me books to read, such as the works of Jules Supervielle, and paintings by Zen masters preserved in books, and once cooked me a currant pie. She had her poet friends over for dinner and favored a spontaneous form of teaching, with great honesty and musicality placed in high regard in the poem. "A Tree Telling of Orpheus" is one poem of hers which celebrates musicality in poetry.
As a poet, I have a great variety of influences, and look for startling images, clear and simple language, and intense emotional force, in the writings of other poets. Therefore, I have loved the work of Neruda, Lorca, Levertov, her friend Muriel Rukeyser, too, the Zen poet Ryokan, Blake, Vasko Popa, Paul Celan, Rodnoti, Yannis Ritsos, Rilke., Georg Trakl, and I have to say that jazz has been "A Love Supreme" (to quote John Coltrane) and formative for my poetry.
I also like mystical poems of Tagore, the stories of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, and the Tales of the Chassidim by Martin Buber.
My father was an insurance agent in New Jersey. I saw him struggle with his career, and knew I wanted to build on his struggles and open my life to the world of art. He was a creative man caught in a hard business. Though my family wasn't very religious, I always have had mystical leanings which I associate with my early childhood in New Jersey. The landscape of forsythia in spring, for example, brought on a formative mystical experience at age four. William Carlos Williams, also from New Jersey, in the books Paterson and Kora from Hell, also inspires a love of place, in this case New Jersey, in my work.
I actually have always struggled with my health to some degree since age twelve when I was diagnosed with an auto-immune disease of the thyroid gland. This awareness that life ís precious has made me very wary of using my time in any way that is not creative and positive. I have other health issues, too, and have had to work hard to maintain my energy to be a positive influence on our son and in my marriage, and believe also in the development of profound friendships as part of a writer's life.
Denise Levertov supported funding for my first chapbook, The Umpire, and Other Masks. Firefly Press published two chapbooks, Carpenter and Tending. I self published Speaking With Deaf-Blind Children and it was very successful. I had a grant which helped to support the funding for my first full-length collection, When the Arms of Our Dreams Embrace. This a was collaborative venture in nature, and I helped to distribute the books for that one, and also for my recent collection Ocarina. The publisher also distributed and publicized the books. My newest chapbook, When Performers Swim, the Dice Are Cast with Ahadada books, is also collaborative in nature, meaning that the publisher helps to distribute the books and provides some funding, or subscribers volunteer funding. In these times, I have been very fortunate to be able to continue to publish my work via the small press, internet, and magazines such as Salamander, The Sun, The Bitter Oleander, and Origin 2008. My friend and publisher Drew Stroud (Saru Press) who had a stroke about a year and a half ago, tragically, was instrumental in publishing Ocarina and When the Arms of Our Dreams Embrace, and I am indebted to him for his guidance.
I actually do not experience writer's block. If I have trouble, I play music, the blues or a simple jazz piece, then return to writing. I play jazz flute almost daily, and it inspires deep moods. I am very disciplined, and try to get something down on paper every day.
I think any aspiring writer should first acknowledge to herself/himself that she/he has something special and unique to contribute as a writer. Roots are important, as Isaac Singer emphasized at a conference I once attended. Also, read voraciously. Discipline is a hidden must, and mystery.
Holly Guran, author of River Tracks, and Judy Katz-Levine have worked together for many years and have collaborated on a series of pantoums. They know each other's work well.
"This interview originally appeared in the Ukrainian Weekly in February 2009."
Orlowsky/Motyl Interview
December 10, 2008
A resident of New York City, Alexander J. Motyl is a writer, painter, and professor. His novels include Whiskey Priest and Who Killed Andrei Warhol (which was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2008); his art is represented by The Tori Collection (www.toricollection.com); and his scholarly writing includes six authored books and over ten edited volumes. He's currently a professor at Rutgers University-Newark.
Dzvinia Orlowsky is the author of four poetry collections published by Carnegie Mellon University Press and currently teaches at the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College in Boston.
Winking aside, tedium is a good reason for doing anything, isn't it? For instance, I know when a work is finished, whether non-fiction or fiction, when I get bored editing it. I usually go through some 20-30 edits, and most of them are either exasperating or exhilarating, but when they get tedious, I know it's time to move on. By the same token, part of the reason I took to writing fiction was that academic writing had stopped being a challenge. Once you know what your argument will be, the rest pretty much follows. In contrast, fiction was a whole new universe for me. You think it's easy: after all, it's all made up, right? But making it all up turned out to be incredibly difficult. And making it all up for some 200 pages or more was terrifying - but also exhilarating. You finish the draft, whether first or last, and you wonder, "Where did that come from?" In that sense, fiction is like painting: I always look at the finished painting with a sense of awe and mystery: "Did I do that?" On the other hand, it's true that I'm always winking, that I can never take anything too seriously - especially my own work. The universe is so big, history is so big, God is so big - and we're so ridiculously small. How can you not wink?
A bunch of things happened in the 1990s that led me to fiction. The Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine became independent, and the struggle - and I had been involved in the anti-Soviet struggle since the early 1970s - was suddenly over. At the same time, my own academic writing had become increasingly theoretical and meta-theoretical and meta-meta-theoretical, and at some point I began wondering what the point of so much unremitting self-refection and navel-gazing was. Searching for more concrete alternatives, I returned to painting after a hiatus of about 15 years and began reading novels with a vengeance. And then I had my first epiphany. I still recall the day I visited the galleries in Soho and thought, "Heck, my work is at least as bad as most of this." And if they could exhibit, why couldn't I? Something similar happened with fiction writing. The more I read, the more I thought: "Heck, I can do no worse than this." Fiction then became a new challenge, and it's remained that since.
That was actually a short story that appeared at the very end of my high-school senior yearbook. I had always struggled with English class, probably because I believed that writing had to "mean" something deep and important. Then, in my senior year, I accidentally stumbled into a creative writing class and, much to my surprise, did extremely well - mostly, I suspect, because I just threw all that meaning stuff out the window and let my imagination guide my hand. The teacher of that class asked me to write some appropriately serious conclusion for the yearbook; instead, I produced a silly story and he liked it. But that was an anomaly. It took me many, many years to feel confident about my creative writing and to get rid of that meaning albatross and to realize that writing is, first and foremost, about writing - just as painting is about painting. All that interpretation and meaning stuff is at best a bit of icing, at worst too much confectioner's sugar.
That happened several years ago, when I was trying to find an agent for Whiskey Priest. I sent out hundreds of jazzy cover letters, with a neat synopsis and a brief cv outlining all my very many academic publications, prizes, etc. One agent sent back my letter, with a scribble at the bottom: "Interesting, but we don't represent unknown authors." Ouch.
Back in the mid-1990s, I did try to write a kind of creative memoir, but that turned out awfully soppy and downright embarrassing. And once in a while, the poetry muse takes a wrong turn and inspires me to do some verse. The only really sustained poetry writing I did was quite spontaneous. Just after my father passed away in late May 2007, I wrote four short poems about his illness and death. Poetry felt like the only medium for the grief I felt. In general, though, I'm not sure I "get" poetry. I'm in awe of poets, as much as I'm in awe of musicians and composers. I'm still the high-school freshman who believes that all poetry must be about something incomprehensibly profound and is terribly intimidated by the very thought of composing verse. Who, me? No way!
That's an easy question. Irene Zabytko has shown that a writer can tell great stories and still have a Ukrainian point of view. Askold Melnyczuk has shown that a Ukrainian writer can be concerned with questions of morality and identity without falling into Ukrainian clichés. And Marina Lewycka has shown that it's possible to be Ukrainian and still retain a sense of humor, as you have through your poetry. I only wish that Ukraine's writers would stop writing about their sexual awakening and personal Angst and turn to some of the themes and styles employed by Zabytko, Melnyczuk, and Lewycka.
I've always been fascinated by spies. I'm not sure exactly why, though I suspect that it has something to do with the moral ambiguity of their world. My first exposure to fictional spies was in the sixth grade, when I got two paperbacks by Eric Ambler (who, by the way, is a terrific writer) from a friend for Christmas: Judgment on Deltchev and Cause for Alarm. That started the addiction. It was compounded by my own interest in the Ukrainian nationalist movement and my experiences with the KGB, which made several attempts to recruit me - and they in turn led to attempts by the FBI to recruit me. That sounds hilarious now, but then, back in the late 1970s, it was an extremely unpleasant experience, especially as it wasn't clear which side was more heavy-handed. Believe me, John le Carre's Smiley's People is an uncannily accurate depiction of the world of anti-Soviet émigrés and could have been written about Ukrainians.
The idea for Whiskey Priest began with a hunch about the ending. It occurred to me one day back in the summer of 2001 - and I have no idea why - that having a secret agent first save someone and then betray him would be an interesting twist with all sorts of morally ambiguous implications. I even imagined the last line, in which the agent says, "You can have him," to the killers closing in on their prey and just walks away. The next step was to write everything leading up to the last line. As I did so, my own experiences with the world of espionage began intruding and structuring the characters, the dialogues, and of course the plot.
I wrote the first draft of Whiskey Priest in about three-four months. I get somewhat obsessive while I'm writing and can spend anywhere from two to six hours a day, every day, writing whatever comes to my mind. That's generally how long it takes me to write any book-length manuscript, whether fiction or non-fiction. But that's the easy part. I then spend another year or more rewriting, editing, and reediting - until that feeling of tedium comes over me and I know I'm done. My first drafts are usually pretty awful, but once they exist - once there's a real live text - that first hurdle is overcome and the real fun - the rewriting and editing - can begin.
I love Greene. I love his crisp, compact writing; I love his concern with ethical-political issues and moral ambiguity; I love his interest in spies; and I love his story-telling. Greene makes writing look easy. But of course all good writers do. He also proves that a writer can be deep and complex and meaningful without having to resort to self-consciously deep and complex and meaningful prose. That's the trick - to say important things without seeming to say important things. Shevchenko was able to pull that off. As did Beckett, whose first line in Murphy - "The sun shone having no alternative on the nothing new" - has got to be one of the best in literature. That's why I love Morandi's simple bottles, Modigliani's portraits, and Matisse's still lives and detest the pretentiousness of painters like Dali, Damien Hirst, and Julian Schnabel. That's also why I love writers such as Arthur Schnitzler, James Agee, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Albert Camus, and Peter Schneider - and hate Dostoevsky. Or why I'm completely blown away by Antonioni's L'Eclisse and L'Avventura (of course, I'm also madly in love with Monica Vitti) and think he then went off the deep end. That's also why I think your poetry is so compelling.
Well, don't forget that I was born and raised in New York, in the Ukrainian Lower East Side, which is just a few blocks away from Warhol's Factory on Union Square. But I was too young, and too strait-laced, to have experienced the Sixties in New York. I do remember, very, very unclearly, walking along St. Mark's Place and seeing posters for some of Warhol's musical events. I also remember that Chelsea Girls played at the St. Mark's Theatre and that it was rated Adults Only. I vaguely recall seeing articles in Time or Life about Warhol's scene, and I do remember when he was shot in 1968. But none of that meant much to me. It was all taking place in the larger "American" world, and I, like many of my Ukrainian friends, was much more interested in rebelling against the Ukrainian establishment. Besides, I was a complete square. I resisted wearing bell bottoms until straight-leg pants went out of style, and I thought that Woodstock was just a big hoo-ha.
My specific interest in Warhol began with seeing, back in 2001 or so, a documentary about his relatives in eastern Slovakia, Absolut Warhola. I was struck by how familiar they seemed, especially as I have Ukrainian relatives not far from his parents' home town. I suddenly realized what I had sort of known all the time - that Warhol was a Slav and that he grew up in an immigrant neighborhood, went to church every Sunday, celebrated Christmas on January 7, and then eventually broke out of the ghetto and came to the big city. His story was my story - well, sort of - and that piqued my interest in his life and career and work.
I assume that my readers will know a thing or two about literature and life, but I don't assume - or insist - that they know what I know or as much (or as little) as I do. I firmly believe that every artwork can be enjoyed - and must be enjoyed - on several levels. The most obvious level is the "surface" story or image. I firmly believe that has to be there, and it has to be persuasive to the reader or viewer. The surface level is arguably the most important. It's the structure, it's the meat and potatoes, it's the foundation - use whichever metaphor you like. And then there are other, supposedly "deeper" levels, where metaphors, jokes, inter-textual references, meanings, symbols, portentous implications, and all sorts of supposedly profound stuff come into play. A work that consists only of these deep levels is never persuasive; it's often just second-rate philosophy masquerading as art. A work that consists only of the surface may never be great, but, like Mickey Spillane's bone-crunching prose, it is what it is, and that's often enough. Then again, what the heck do I know?
I start with hunches or insights - never, ever from an outline. Whiskey Priest started with the notion that it would be interesting to explore just why a spy who saves someone would then turn on him. Who Killed Andrei Warhol was born when, while reading about Warhol's life, I came upon a reference to the fact that his Factory was located in the same building as the Communist Party USA. That coincidence struck me as surreal and tailor-made for an absurdist novel. My latest novel, The Jew Who Was Ukrainian, started in the most unlikely fashion. I was reading some German-language novel a few years ago and came upon the word, Frauenzimmer, an antiquated version of Frau, or woman. For some reason, I started rhyming Frauenzimmer with Volodymyr and was amused by the flow and silliness of the name. And then I knew I had a hero for my next novel: Volodymyr Frauenzimmer, a man who has a Ukrainian mother who hates Jews and a Jewish father who hates Ukrainians. And once I had the name, I was able to construct something like a story around it.
Absolutely. The one thing I've learned about writing fiction is that, somewhere along the way, you lose control, and the characters take over. I had read about that, but never quite believed it, but it's quite true. You start a scene between X and Y and you think you know what they're going to say and how the scene will end, but more often than not, they just start blabbering and, before you know it, the characters have mutinied and taken hold of the ship. At best, you then try to keep the ship on course, although that sometimes doesn't work and then you have no choice but to change direction. You can't beat the characters. They always win - or should win.
They've all been hard, but The Jew Who Was Ukrainian was by far the hardest. Whiskey Priest is, after all, a story. There are flashbacks and internal monologues, but it is a story with a beginning, middle, and end. So, too, is Who Killed Andrei Warhol, though there the challenge was twofold: to make the encounter between the Soviet Ukrainian journalist and Andy seem natural, and not contrived, and to turn a curious encounter into something with dramatic tension, a story. But The Jew Who Was Ukrainian takes the cake. It doesn't really have a plot; it doesn't really have a beginning, middle, and end; and it incorporates third-person narrative, first-person reflections, two-person, three-person, and five-person interrogations, and actual texts from published sources. Stitching all that together into something that flows (I hope) and is tight (I pray) was extremely challenging.
I'm keeping my toes crossed.
For me, writing is editing. The first draft is, as I've already said, pretty lousy, but that doesn't matter, because the real writing takes place only after that first draft is in place. So I never share first drafts with others; that would be an insult to their intelligence. But I tend to share works about two-thirds of the way through the editing process. By then, I usually feel fairly comfortable with the text and, although I know it's not quite there yet, it's no longer embarrassing.
By the way, I do my academic writing in exactly the same way. I also paint that way. You start with some smears, vague outlines, hints of something or other. And then you refine the whole picture by continually adjusting something here in light of the whole or the whole in light of something there. I suppose you could say I'm obsessed with composition - with the relationship of the words to words, with the relationship of lines and colors and forms to lines and colors and forms. As far as I'm concerned, the artwork is inside the artwork - not outside. I'm with Susan Sontag in being, as she put it in her famous essay, "Against Interpretation." The New York art critic Clement Greenberg also had it right. When he first looked at a painting, he'd stand with his back to it and then suddenly pivot to view it, thereby hoping to acquire as direct, and meaning-less, a relationship with the artwork as possible.
There's the rub. Ideally, just the right person or persons will provide just the right commentary at just the right time. So the meal should be ready enough to be served, and the taster should be discerning enough - and gentle enough - to tell you exactly what ingredients are missing or should be missing, without gagging too visibly in the process. But what do you do when trustworthy and discerning people respond differently to the same text? That's why I let others view the work-in-progress only after I feel more or less confident that it's at least good enough. That way, if the criticism is negative, one can always dismiss it. And if the criticism is targeted and useful, one can always say, "But of course!"
That was all Irene's inspiration and work. It would never have occurred to me that one could just contact the Cornelia people and suggest a Ukrainian literary anything. Irene said, "Why not?" She sent them an email - not even a formal letter or anything like that - and they said, sure, you're in. And that was that. I was totally floored by how simple and obvious the whole process was. Of course, Irene is fearless and smart and experienced and she knows how to get things done. I'm just a neophyte.
I do paint and write at the same time, all the time, but I'm not sure I see any cross-fertilization, certainly not thematically. My fiction is very much "Ukrainian", while my paintings have, as far as I can tell, nothing Ukrainian or Slavic or East European about them. But the two activities do overlap and, I'm tempted to say, are identical in one way. Being obsessed with composition, I want my texts and artworks to "hang together." And that means that, ideally at least, no word and no brushstroke should ever be extraneous. Of course, that's an impossible goal, but it is possible, I think, to prevent texts and artworks and films from "sagging" - from feeling like wet blankets. I wouldn't remove a single word from Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, Kurban Said's Ali and Nino, or Volodymyr Vynnychenko's Na toy bik, or a single drip from a Pollock, or a single scene from Dovzhenko's Zemlya. Most of Fellini's later films, on the other hand, could easily be cut by half - any half - and you'd never know the difference. Since editing a text is like "editing" a painting, I suppose there's some sort of resonance going on between these two activities.
You know, he never said that it was supposed to be fifteen consecutive minutes. And since fifteen minutes make for 900 seconds, I suspect I've had just about that many moments of extremely transitory fame. But my major claim to fame took place back in late 1993, when I was on Charlie Rose together with David Remnick and some Russian journalist. I couldn't figure out just why I had been invited, until, at one point, Rose turned to me and said, "Now you're from the Ukraine, Mr. Motyl, aren't you?" I'm usually at a loss for repartees, but this time I managed to blurt, "No, I'm just a New York boy," and watch his jaw drop as he realized that I wasn't the Ukrainian complement to the American and Russian. I haven't been invited back.
I met her at one of my readings about two years ago, at the Ukrainian Institute of America. We exchanged cards, she said to call her - and, naturally, I didn't. And then, last spring, I received several telephone calls and emails from her in one day. She invited me to lunch, I came - having no idea just why and feeling completely intimidated - but she turned out to be one of the sweetest and warmest and funniest people I know, and we hit it off immediately. She then showed me a text - featuring a dialogue between Warhol and Hitler - and, after a few more meetings and some to-ing and fro-ing, we agreed that I'd help her make a play of it. It's called Wintertime for Warhol. Meeting her has been quite an experience, especially for a Ukrainian boy from the Lower East Side. She's an excellent artist in her own right and she's very religious. She's a Mormon, and I even accompanied her one Sunday morning to the Mormon Church on East 87th Street in Manhattan.
It'll be on April 25th, 2009 - but this time there'll only be one session, from 6pm to 8pm. And with you, Askold Melnyczuk, and Irene Zabytko in the spotlight, I think we'll have a super-duper show and a standing-room only crowd.
If you would like to be added to my monthly e-mail newsletter, which gives information on readings, book signings, contests, workshops, and other related topics...
To subscribe to the newsletter send an email to:
newsletter@cervenabarvapress.com
with "newsletter" or "subscribe" in the subject line.
To unsubscribe from the newsletter send an email to:
unsubscribenewsletter@cervenabarvapress.com
with "unsubscribe" in the subject line.
Index | Bookstore | Submissions | Newsletter | Interviews | Readings | Workshops | Fundraising | Contact | Links
Copyright © 2005-2008 ČERVENÁ BARVA PRESS - All Rights Reserved
