Synchronicity: Meadville, Pennsylvania is everywhere

[Bridge on the Allegheny College campus]

The second volume of my Dementia Blog, "She's Welcome to Her Disease," (Singing Horse Press) is off to the printer today, after several computer pratfalls.  First, this book about Alzheimer's disappeared from the publisher's computer and had to be re-designed.  Then, the version that I proofed seemed not to be corrected, although there was a corrected version on his computer. The book itself seemed to have acquired the disease.

My mother was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania; she lived in Canton, Ohio as a child, but returned to Meadville to attend and then graduate from Allegheny College (class of '39). When I google the town, I find that there are just over 13,500 residents. I hardly ever thought about Meadville until recently, even though my mother gave faithfully to her college every year during my childhood and received their alumni magazine.  I have early childhood memories of visiting Meadville and seeing the bridge on the college campus (above). The father of a college friend of mine, it turned out, had gone to Allegheny with my mother.  But still, not much about Meadville, even if I did drive through the town in graduate school with a boyfriend on the way to visiting Garrettsville, Ohio, where Hart Crane grew up, and was promptly forgotten. That changed shortly after my mother died. The lawyer who helped me with Tinfish's non-profit status, which dragged on for a while in the mid-2000s, introduced me to a new friend of hers, someone who had moved to Honolulu recently, someone whose daughter knew her son. We met at Starbucks. Vera Lee, as she turned out to be, is a poet and novelist. After our mutual friend, Melissa, left the cafe, I asked Vera where she grew up.  She told me I wouldn't have heard of the small town in Pennsylvania, that there was a small college there.  Meadville!  (Vera's first book of poems is just out this week from Tinfish, by the way.)

Since then, Vera and I have found out that one of my colleagues, also someone she knows by way of her son's basketball league, had a mentor in Meadville.  Then Vera met someone from Meadville who is renting a house in Mānoa Valley. And today, when a former colleague of mine wrote to ask if J. Vera Lee might be a former student of his, by name of Julia, I responded that no, she was not, but there was a story in there about how I met Vera.

His response? To my "further astonishment," he wrote, he had lived for four years in Meadville, and attended Meadville High School in the early 1950s.

My mother's brother and mother lived in Wooster, Ohio until they died many decades ago.  In my mother's dementia, she once called to say she was in Afghanistan and needed a ride to Wooster to see "Joe and Mother." On another occasion, perhaps, I'll write about the ways in which Wooster has been entering my life lately . . .

New book from Tinfish Press, by J. Vera Lee

Tinfish Press is pleased to announce publication of J. Vera Lee's first volume, Diary of Use. For more details, see our website page for the book.  Vera's self-interview can be found here, elsewhere on this blog.

"Our studies are now complete": Martha J. Schultz's earthly work is done

Is _Jack London is Dead_ a Community of Writers?

                                          [Flyer for the HCC event]

I drove home from Honolulu Community College wondering why I'd expressed such ambivalence when Eric Paul Shaffer, who'd organized an event for his English 201 (Introduction to Creative Writing) class expressed surprise that he felt community with other writers in Jack London is Dead: Euro-American Writing of Hawai`i (and some stories). Do we feel the same? he asked. "It's terrible, isn't it?" I began, sputtering about how, since founding Tinfish in 1995 I had tried to foster conversations between members of categories that I otherwise don't much like, how I had "succumbed" to the ethnic anthology in making this book. How I loved having the conversation with the students, most of whom are not white. These are feelings I expressed in the book's introduction and in my statement, mixed feelings (making me think perhaps Tom Gammarino's fictional place where feeling is illegal might not be all bad). But, after two fine readings and an extended conversation with Eric's students and the other writers at these events (Tyler McMahon and the writers on the flyer, above), some rethinking is in order.  Or, if not rethinking exactly, then recalibration. For, how are we to have these conversations if we haven't yet had the conversations with writers whose experiences (educational, ethnic, diasporic) are like your own? The logic of the ethnic anthology is becoming clearer to me, even as I still instinctively resist it and the very book I edited. The book is its own best defense against its editor, I suspect.

Monday's event was at Hawai`i Pacific University, and was organized by Tyler McMahon. Today's was at HCC in Kalihi, a working class concrete campus whose back parking lot was used by the makers of Lost to represent Iraq, complete with bombed out cars and Eric Paul Shaffer's part-Mexican brother-in-law, as an Iraqi. Eric's poem on the event gets at the layers of meaning and fakery in that film shoot.  "Disbelief is no longer willingly surrendered, but eagerly / and widely applied to horrendous events that overcome us," he writes in "On the Set of Lost: Dillingham Boulevard, Honolulu." "It looks so real on TV. Desert dust swirls around / my brother-in-law, the U.S. mail-carrier, an Iraqi-for-a-day. There must be / some truth in appearances, and whatever it is / must be what makes Hollywood a shrine and paves a sidewalk with stars."

[The parking lot at HCC that was made to look like war-time Iraq, with Tom Gammarino on the left and Eric Paul Shaffer on the right]


We local readers from Jack London is Dead have settled into a rhythm of sorts: one of us introduces the anthology, explains why Jack London is dead, holds forth on how contemporary white writers are working within a context more diverse and complicated than any dreamed of by Jack.  (That I am beginning to pity Jack should inspire me to read his work, now that I've proclaimed his death as a literary figure in Hawai`i. Maybe.) Then we do the following in alphabetical or reverse alphabetical order: Jaimie Gusman reads from her Shekinah poems, beginning with one called "Ejaculation," which is very much about a goddess creating the world from her own thighs (today I thought of it as being like the passage in "Song of Myself" where Whitman masturbates a world, except that in Jaimie's version it's a female deity); Evan Nagle reads flarf poems in utter deadpan, moving from the crazy to occasional lyrical passages that quickly flit away; Eric Paul Shaffer reads his "Lost" poem and also a poem about the `okina (we talked later today about punctuation as meaning); I read some memory cards, today making a link between adoption and my living in Hawai`i (a relationship of love, family, but not genealogical in the usual sense); Julia Wieting reads poems about animals that are actually about parts of speech; Tom Gammarino reads one of his two short stories in the book about Peter-or-whatever who lives in a place where feeling is illegal.  Poor Peter writes a poem, which is his downfall.  He must have snuck into the poetry anthology by writing a short story about a poem. I wish that Tyler had read from his short story on Monday, but he assured us he'd read at his campus just recently.

Eric's students had read the anthology because he gave them copies, so they quoted to us from some of our statements, knew what was at stake, and mostly--this was wonderful--had questions about being a writer.  When do you write?  How do you write? What do you write about? Some of the questions then led into the territory of whiteness, of living in a place where the central wound is colonialism, of thinking about how to write about Hawai`i in ways that might help to mend that wound. It was a good, a fruitful, conversation, for both what I had imagined for Tinfish when I founded it (conversations across cultures, experiences), and for what I had not (those conversations coming from a recognition that those of us who are white writers in Hawai`i have certain experiences that mold us as writers).

                                          [Eric's marvelous class]


I've heard from several readers ("readers are the most important people," said Eric's students, on cue) that the prose statements are the most compelling parts of the book. The more I hear the contributors read their poems, however, the more I believe that the poetry is what matters, even if readers need the context offered by the prose. "Why are you in the anthology?" Eric's students asked him, thinking he was not as "innovative" as other contributors. To which I would say that it's the diversity of forms and content that draws me back to the book, as well as I think I know it. I'd like to start thinking about ways in which poems are in conversation: Eric's poem about Lost with mine about an Iraq vet calling in airstrikes on Waikiki Beach (a story told me by Adam Aitken); Evan Nagle's flarf with Tom Gammarino's wickedly dark funny prose; Scott Abels's and Rob Wilson's poems about Waikiki; Jaimie Gusman's and Janna Plant's poems about the earth; Julia Wieting's and Endi Bogue Hartigan's poems ostensibly about animals and plants. Perhaps one day we can have a call and response reading, foregoing the alphabet and entering a more fluid ground of poems as conversation.

[Tyler McMahon at HPU, 3/18/13]
















                                   [The rest of the band at HCC, 3/20/13]

Next Big Thing: J. Vera Lee

J. Vera Lee, aka Jee Young Lee, is a poet who has lived in Hawai`i for the past year and a few months. She grew up in Meadville, Pennsylvania, attended schools in Berkeley and Seattle, and has a son in intensest Little League here in Honolulu.  Tinfish Press will be publishing her first book of poems.

What is the working title of the book?
Diary of Use.  It will be published Summer/Fall (2013) by Tinfish Press.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
‘Diary of use’ comes from my poem ‘item’ about hummingbirds and red-tubed flowers. There’s a kind of used beauty or used idea about the flower’s red tubes and I have a strong sense of recovering images from loss and dreams.

What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
Plants, water, snow, but no animals, even though there is some mention of animals in the poems. My son usually says we are animals too.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
The poems in this first collection try to make a place for human relationships in nature, that banal or spiritual place.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
I started writing the many of these poems in December 2011, but I’ve included some poems that were written and published around 2005-2007.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The book started, though many of the specific images have disappeared from it, because there are no deciduous tress in my yard in Makiki. At night - the wind can seem stronger then - I noticed green shoots that would later harden into branches and had the idea of a scalpel parting the leaves. It was my first experience of a play on Eden and/or paradise, and I think my poems, though I hadn’t ever been religious, bear out the disaffection.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
The poems verge on hope, even faith. This feels almost mawkish or unfashionable to say except that the poems have a denuded look.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

No.

Make up a question you think is pressing in way of poetry today.

What is the lineage of influence in contemporary American poetry? Is this important to evaluate?

Some fresh links

Ron Silliman did a good review the other day at his blog about new anthologies, among them Tinfish Press's Jack London is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry of Hawai`i (and some stories).  You can find that here.

Tony Trigilio interviewed Tinfish Editor, and has just posted the podcast on his Radio Free Albion series, here.  We talked about many things, from the St. Louis Cardinals, to dementia writing, to Jack London, and then to memory cards.  Tony is a lovely, lively host who already has a wonderful line-up of podcast people.

I'm just back from five sick days at the Boston AWP. The Tinfish table was located in outer nowhere.  Not the best of our conference stints, but really lovely to see some good friends and meet some more.