Naomi Ruth Reimer, poet

Naomi Ruth Reimer used poetry
to explore family’s Mennonite odyssey

This is a guest post by Dean Kahn

Naomi Ruth Reimer was born in 1924 on a farm in west-central Oklahoma, the granddaughter of Mennonites from Ukraine who settled in the Panhandle State three decades earlier.

Naomi’s German-speaking family soon moved to the nearby small town of Corn, a Mennonite community, where her love of reading, and of writing poetry, helped her graduate as valedictorian of her high school class. The second oldest of eight children — five girls and three boys — Naomi would sit in the hall of their small home and read poetry to her younger siblings.

“She loved to entertain us by reading,” said Gordon Reimer, a younger brother who became an electrical engineer for Boeing Co. in Seattle and retired to Birch Bay. “I could read pretty well because Naomi taught me.”

In 1943, while Naomi attended college in the Midwest, her parents and siblings moved to the Custer area near Ferndale, where her father, Cornelius Reimer, operated a dairy farm. Later, the family moved to the Smith Road area north of Bellingham, where her father raised chickens.

The family’s move from the Midwest to the Northwest wasn’t an isolated decision. Dozens of Mennonites moved to the Whitehorn area, south of Birch Bay, to seek a better life in the 1930s and 1940s, and Cornelius had relatives in lower British Columbia.

When the family moved to Custer, Naomi enrolled at Washington State University to be closer to family. While in Seattle for a summer job, she met and married Bob Duke. Once their two sons reached school age, Naomi returned to school herself, earning a bachelor’s degree in education at the University of Washington and a master’s degree in literature at Seattle Pacific University.

One of her sons, Brian Duke, a retired school principal, said his mother kept a journal by her bed in which she wrote personal reflections and poetry. Her favorite poets included Theodore Roethke and Robert Frost, whom she read to her young boys to calm them during storms.

Reimer, who later divorced, taught middle school English for about five years, in Renton and in the small community of High Prairie, Alberta. She also worked at the state capital in Olympia as a research editor for Bellingham lawmaker Barney Goetz, for Senate Democrats, and for the governor’s office. She retired to Birch Bay in 1996.

Through the years Naomi wrote a novel, but it was never published. She also wrote poetry, much of it about her Mennonite heritage. Naomi was raised in the Mennonite Brethren Church, and later attended other churches, including a Baptist church in Seattle, the United Churches of Olympia, and the United Church of Christ in Blaine.

Brian Duke said his mother’s interest in her Mennonite background developed late in her life, and she traveled to Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine to explore the lands of her ancestors.

She wrote poems about the lives, the persecution, and the migration of Mennonites in the Old World, and about her family in the New World. The title of her book, The Taken, refers to the millions of people, including Mennonites, killed or exiled during the despotic rule of Joseph Stalin.

Reimer, who had several poems published in Mennonite journals and magazines, self-published her book in 1997. A review in the Journal of Mennonite Studies said the weight of history in some of Reimer’s poems crowded out “the potential for evocative power her subject might possess.” The reviewer, Sarah Klassen, found more satisfying Reimer’s poems about her parents, about her own life, and about her grandfather, whose suicide haunted his children.

“Reimer’s poems are never self-indulgent,” Klassen concluded. “Even in her most personal poems she keeps herself in the background, modestly preferring to draw the reader’s attention elsewhere.”

Reimer died of cancer two years after her book appeared. She’s buried at Enterprise Cemetery, south of Custer.

“On Learning Solitude”

Run alone, a scarecrow girl in an older
sister’s handed down everyday dress.

At table, eat cabbage soup, fried noodles,
calling them kjielkje, but except for food
speak English — concealing the Plautdietsch.

Afternoons hide in an upstairs hall corner
next to a bookcase, read Little Women
four times, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King,
Milton’s Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes —
not understanding the words, only knowing
the thunder of the lines like the shudder
and roar circling the house all one lightning
infested night, illumination coming and going,
mysterious, random — the terrible voice of God.

. . . . .

Dean Kahn worked for The Bellingham Herald for 29 years, with stints as a reporter, editor, and columnist.

This profile is an abridged version of one that appeared in the December 2019 issue of The Journal of the Whatcom County Historical Society. To purchase the issue, or other issues of the journal, go to https://www.whatcomhistory.net, or visit Village Books.

. . . . .
Naomi Ruth Reimer photos used with permission

Elizabeth Watts Henley, poet

Elizabeth Watts Henley’s poetry
survived life filled with personal challenges

This is a guest post by Dean Kahn

Elizabeth Artis (Watts) Henley was born into a prominent Bellingham family in 1912. Her parents, Arthur and Maud Watts, encouraged their four children to pursue higher education, and all of them left their mark.

Sister Ruth was a research chemist. Brother Arthur, Jr., became a general practitioner in Bellingham. Sister Catharine, who went by “Kitty,” took over her father’s real estate and insurance business and became a community, regional, and national civic leader.

Elizabeth, who went by “Betty,” showed literary promise when she won a children’s poetry contest judged by Ella Higginson, Bellingham’s nationally known writer. Elizabeth went on to publish numerous poems in prominent magazines, but her writing and teaching were derailed for several years by the Red Scare after World War II and by time in a mental institution.

The precise reasons she spent more than two years in a mental health facility remain opaque. John Henley, her sole surviving child, says he hasn’t explored public records about his mother’s life, and says any pertinent papers his parents might have possessed have disappeared.

Elizabeth began writing poetry professionally during the early years of the Great Depression. She also was a poetry editor at The Puget Sounder, a weekly newspaper created by June and Farrar Burn, a well-known literary couple who lived for many years in the Northwest, including time in Bellingham.

Elizabeth earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree at the University of Washington, where she wrote a master’s thesis about 16th century English poet Edmund Spenser, and taught English from 1934 to 1940. While at UW, her friends included left-leaning activists and at least one acknowledged communist.

She also met and married Preston Henley, who attended UW to study business. She and Preston moved to New York City, where Elizabeth taught at Hunter College High School and had more poems published. After the war, the family moved to Boise, Idaho, and then to Portland, Ore.

Elizabeth taught at Portland State College and became friends with many fellow Oregon poets, notably William Stafford and Vi Gale. Her poems appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, and in McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies Home Journal, which were more literary then.

But John Henley says his parents’ marriage became tense, in part because his mother kept her liberal views while his father was “very conservative.” In addition, investigations of alleged communists in academia arose after World War II. A legislative committee investigated the University of Washington. Among those questioned was English professor Sophus Winther, who acknowledged being a communist in the mid-1930s. Elizabeth knew Winther, and mere close association with communists posed risks for one’s job, reputation, even custody of one’s children.

Henley recalls that his mother told him that a top administrator at Portland State College asked her to resign, to protect the college from possible bad publicity. She left the college, then, to avoid bringing ruin on her family, committed herself to a mental health facility.

Elizabeth and Preston divorced in 1956. He gained custody of the children, and later remarried. Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s poet friends lobbied Oregon’s new governor, Mark Hatfield, to gain her release. Hatfield helped Elizabeth obtain a job in 1959 at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, teaching English composition to remedial students.

She disliked being paid less than male professors, and being sexually harassed by colleagues without recourse for help. On the positive side, she continued to write, she loved teaching, and her students loved her. She retired in 1975, and died Jan. 2, 1981, in Corvallis. She’s buried in Bayview Cemetery, in Bellingham.

No book of her poems was published during her lifetime, so, in 2000, her son John and a cousin, Ellen Watts Lodine, published To Hear Unspoken Things, a selection of her work. Here is one of her poems:

“Song of Wheels Turning”

Listen my child to the song I sing,
It is old, it is trite, it is true.
Never go back to the one green hill,
Let it come back to you.
Little and dark, a muffin of trees,
It fades where horizons drop.
You learn as you leave how partial a view
Of the earth you saw from the top.
Taller you travel for being there,
It is less if you return.
Let it come to you as a windy height
Captured from boulder and fern.
There would be tear, only tears, if you found
So much as a gnarled tree,
And cried, “It is here, It is just the same,
The change is in me, in me!”

. . . . .

Dean Kahn worked for The Bellingham Herald for 29 years, with stints as a reporter, editor, and columnist. He wrote more than 1,000 columns, of which about one-in-seven focused on local history.

This profile is an abridged version of one that appeared in the December 2019 issue of The Journal of the Whatcom County Historical Society. To purchase the issue, or other issues of the journal, go to https://www.whatcomhistory.net, or visit Village Books.

—–
Elizabeth Watts Henley photo courtesy of John Henley

On Spring Gratitude

This is a guest post by Caitlin Scarano.

This morning I am thinking about spring. It is sunny again after seven days of rain. There are robins in my yard and my partner planted kale and spinach starts in the garden boxes. The grass is too tall but too wet to cut, a convenient excuse that probably won’t last much longer.

I recognize the impulse to clean, organize, and restructure my space and life that always reemerges around this time a year. I also recognize the impulse to start booking travel plans and adventures for the summer. At this point in my life, I’m torn between taking time to stay and dwell in my current life in Bellingham or taking the opportunity to go and explore our strange, wide country. I think this is a new and specific kind of privilege, to have finally put down roots somewhere long enough that I want to stay. This is the longest I’ve lived in one region since I was a teenager. I’ve been in Bellingham since September of 2021 but moved to western Washington in the summer of 2017. That was about a year after I got sober, another topic that has been on my mind lately.

These topics — the return of spring, opportunities to travel, and my seventh year sober — intersect around a clear idea or theme I’d like to hold on to: gratitude. I keep an index card taped above my writing desk that reads: Gratitude always. I often forget it is there, as we tend to do with things that are closest to us, and often forget to feel gratitude. But it is the prevailing emotion of my life at age thirty-five. All the twists and turns, traumas and opportunities, that led me to being the person I am now, living in this little house with these two dogs, having this yard and this partner and this specific community of friends, activities, and writers, these trails to run, etc.

It is hard to name the specific feeling of anticipation for that which you already have and are also growing; the feeling of looking forward to the home and community you’re making and the adventure that comes with knowing and loving a place intimately. It calls to mind this quote from adrienne maree brown from her novel Grievers, an apt thought to end on: “Abundance comes through meaningful work, the opportunity to be somebody who means something to other somebodies.”

Ed. note: You can hear Caitlin Scarano, live and in person, tonight, Wednesday, April 26, 2023, at 6:00pm, at Village Books in Fairhaven, where she will be joined by Jane Wong and Jessica Gigot.

. . . . .

Originally from Southside Virginia, Caitlin Scarano is a writer based in Bellingham, Washington. She holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and an MA from Bowling Green State University. Her second full length collection of poems, The Necessity of Wildfire, was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the Wren Poetry Prize and won a 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award. Her work has appeared in Granta, Carve, and Colorado Review. Caitlin served as a judge for the 2023 Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest.

. . . . .
crabapple blossoms photo by J.I. Kleinberg
author photo

Breaking Through: In Praise of Persona Poetry

This is a guest post by Maria McLeod.

One way to break through the parameters our personal identities impose upon us is through writing persona poetry. Of course, when a poet invokes the “I,” the vast majority of poetry readers assume the “I” is the author, a prepackaged identity. On one hand, the illusion of autobiography might make readers more interested in sticking with the poem — voyeurism piquing curiosity — but on the other hand (the one I write with), I’d rather be recognized for my skills as a writer than to be confused with the characters I create. Wouldn’t you?

Aligning the “I” with the author took root during a poetic movement that came to be known as confessionalism, which marked a shift in what was deemed acceptable in poetry, to take on subjects that seemed personal, intimate, and tied to the events of the poet’s life. But this impulse to examine a narrative for what it revealed of the writer’s autobiography (or, by extension, their psychological state) did not give equal recognition to the art of generating poetic personas. Because, of course, once we put pen to page and invoke the I, we are creating and composing a version of a self. The truth of the “I” of the poem becomes a slippery fish.

This matter of identity leads me to recall a former creative writing instructor’s refrain: content dictates form. Similarly, the identities we construct, and the voices from which we speak, are necessitated by the stories we choose to tell. “I” might wear a mini skirt or hip waders, carry a hatchet or rest a baby on my right hip. Or, like Mary Poppins, I might open my umbrella, leap from a rooftop, and fly through the night sky. In poetry, anyone is made possible.

. . . . .

Maria adds: “The persona poet I admire so much is Ai, whom I had the good fortune to dine with one evening when she came to visit Pittsburgh. Here is a link to more than a few of her poems posted by the Poetry Foundation.”

Read one of Maria McLeod’s persona poems, “Ghosts of Those,” in The Penn Review.

. . . . .

Maria McLeod is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Mother Want, winner of WaterSedge Chapbook Contest, judged by Kim Stafford, and Skin. Hair. Bones., published by Finishing Line Press. She’s also won the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, judged by Denise Duhamel, and the Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Prize, judged by Thisbe Nissen. Listen to Maria’s writing discussed by the editors of Painted Bride Quarterly on their Slush Pile Podcast, Episode 103, and hear McLeod read and discuss her work on Sound Poetry, Radio Tacoma, interviewed by David Gilmour. In addition to writing creatively, McLeod serves as a professor of journalism for Western Washington University.

. . . . .
Maria McLeod photo by Stephen S. Howie
top image

salmon poetry

This is a guest post by Rena Priest.

Greetings Poets! Happy National Poetry Month!

As the month winds down and I head into my second year as Washington State Poet Laureate, I’m delighted to have this opportunity to share a few words with you. It has been a fantastic year full of new faces and reconnecting with old friends in the poetry community. I’ve shared poetry with many organizations, libraries, schools, and institutions, and I’ve written several new poems for special occasions. I have even collected a new manuscript!

Now I want to read your poems, specifically your salmon poems. Over the summer and early fall, I will be offering a traveling workshop called How to Catch a Salmon Poem. In this workshop, we’ll respond to a series of prompts to cultivate poems for a salmon-themed anthology. By the end of our time together, attendees will have a fresh catch of ideas to help them reel in new poems.

Why salmon? Salmon are the unsung heroes of our region. Adventurous and brave, they swim from their natal rivers out into the perils of the open ocean, where their bodies soak up the rich nutrients of the sea. Persistent, resilient, and strong, they swim upstream against swift currents for hundreds of miles to return home to spawn and complete the cycle of life. A keystone species, after spawning, they die and transfer all the marine-derived nutrients carried in their bodies to the animals, insects, soil, and plants in and around their natal stream.

Salmon are sacred to my tribe, the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation. We celebrate them in ceremony and song, and they have long been central to our Sche’le’ngen, our way of life. By celebrating salmon through poetry in every corner of the state, I hope to raise goodwill and a feeling of reverence for the salmon, a feeling that my people have felt since time immemorial.

Seattle-based writer Timothy Egan writes, “The Pacific Northwest is simply this: wherever the salmon can get to.” Before dams were installed, salmon inhabited streams throughout Washington state, even as far inland as Spokane, the Tri-Cities, and beyond. They have been a massive part of our regional identity, and with many species struggling, it’s time to love them enough to save them.

Saving salmon and acknowledging our shared humanity through poetry is at the heart of my motivation to create an anthology celebrating our state’s salmon runs as well as our poets. I hope you will join us in one of these generative workshop offerings and be inspired to submit a poem or two about our iconic wild salmon of Washington state. I will be sharing workshop dates as they are set.

In the meantime, if you happen to have salmon poems in your repertoire, you can submit 1-3 poems via email to poet [AT] humanities.org. The open call deadline is June 1, 2022.

In your email, please affirm that

• you currently live in Washington State
• your poems are previously unpublished, or
• your poems are published, but you retain the right to republish

If your poem is previously published

• give the places and dates of all previous publications
• affirm that you retain all rights to the work, and
• include links to websites where available

If you’d like to have me offer a workshop in your community, you can send a message through my website (www.renapriest.com) and we can talk about scheduling a date. Stay tuned for more info! I look forward to reading your poems!!

Yours,
Rena Priest
Washington State Poet Laureate (2021-2023)

. . . . .

Rena Priest is a poet and an enrolled member of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation. She has been appointed to serve as the Washington State Poet Laureate from April 2021 to 2023. She is the 2022 Maxine Cushing Gray Distinguished Writing Fellow, an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow, a Jack Straw Writer (2019), and a Vadon Foundation Fellow. She is also the recipient of an Allied Arts Foundation Professional Poets Award. Her debut collection, Patriarchy Blues, received an American Book Award, and her second collection, Sublime Subliminal, was published as the finalist for the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. Priest holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.

. . . . .
author photo by Savanna Estey
salmon photo from Salmon Need Water

The Shy Poet’s Guide to the Contemporary Poetry World: 7 Quick and Simple Tips

This is a guest post by Susan Rich

I’ve recently returned to the joyous quiet of my home after attending the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Philadelphia. Once again, I was made acutely aware of my discomfort at sojourning with 7,000 of my peers. And I would bet I am not alone in this uneasiness. Those of us who enjoy a well-lit stanza or the swagger of an em dash may not be equally at ease at a cocktail party or karaoke bar. However, over time, I’ve adopted several strategies for managing my shyness because honestly, I do want to connect with other poets. I hope you find some of these ideas helpful.

1. Write notes of appreciation to poets you admire. Don’t be afraid to be a fan girl. Poets are not like John Legend or Taylor Swift; they do not sell out stadiums (okay, Edna St. Vincent Millay did). I believe even a “big” name poet wants to hear how their words were important to you. Anytime I’ve written to a “famous” poet, I’ve always received a generous reply.
2. Invite a poet to lunch! Perhaps this is pushing you out of your comfort zone but it might also be the best way to get to know someone whose work you admire. Twenty years ago I wrote a “brave” email to Kelli Russell Agodon asking her out to lunch to talk about publishing in this new way — on the internet. I’m so glad I did. Kelli is now one of my closest friends.
3. Thank poets who approach you: someone who comes up to you after a reading or an elementary school student who needs to write a report due tomorrow or a poet who saw your work on-line. They are reaching out to you, why not reach right back?
4. Post poems you admire on social media or on a blog. This is a very easy way to make friends! It’s a great surprise and an honor. This can be done in whatever way that you would enjoy; match a poem with a photograph or a color. Make it fun!
5. Find a couple of close poet friends that you can share work with, and laughter. These are the people that will keep you going: attending readings together, sharing favorite poems and lots of laughter. Keep them close. One of my closest poetry friends is Geraldine Mills whom I met in Ireland when our first books had just come out.
6. Be generous. Push yourself to approach a poet at AWP (the writing conference comes to Seattle next year). This year, I went to a couple of different poets’ book signings as I know how awkward it feels to sit at a table and watch people walk right by.
7. Know other poets are probably as shy as you are. Broadly speaking, we poets are not extroverts. And yet, we want our poems to touch the lives of other people. We want to connect.

. . . . .

Susan Rich is the author of five books of poetry; most recently GALLERY OF POSTCARDS AND MAPS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (Salmon Poetry, 2022). Until it launches more widely in July, you can find her new book at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company. Visit Susan at http://poetsusanrich.com.

Author photo by Kristie McLean.

. . . . .
NOTE: Raven Talk, Raven’s online podcast, will present Harold Taw in conversation with Susan Rich this Wednesday, April 27, 2022, at 7:00pm, discussing Susan’s new book, Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems. Details and registration link here.

Where we look

This is a guest post by Kathryn Smith

I grew up close to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, an arm of ocean that divides Washington from British Columbia. Some would say I grew up near the ocean, and I sometimes say that, too, but when I visit the Pacific coast, I am reminded of how different the two are. I am so much smaller at the actual ocean, the expanse of it, no land between water and horizon, the other shore like an act of faith.

Now I live inland, and I go to the ocean for the roar in my ears. To feel my skin plump with sea air. To feel small against its vastness.

I also go to look at tidepools. This has been a fascination of mine since childhood, and my enthusiasm for them has only grown. These pools teem with strange life — and by strange, I mean unlike me. Exoskeletal creatures and creatures with no skeletons at all. I watch barnacles extend their feathery limbs into the water and retract them again. I watch anemone tentacles sway with the tidal pulse. I look for flashes of movement — hermit crabs, small fishes. I look for less-common creatures — sea stars, urchins — those exposed only when the tide is at its lowest.

And then I look up. Wave upon wave upon wave. The ocean is constantly in motion. The ocean’s state of rest is motion. Water upon water, its unfathomable fathoms extending beyond my field of vision, and therefore, to my limited human brain, forever. I turn around, and the beach reaches back toward unscalable cliffs. I feel the vastness of this place in its enormity.* And in the tidepools, the vastness of the microscopic.

Poetry is like this. A space where the infinite and the infinitesimal co-exist. The universal jammed right up against the particular, and me somewhere in between. I extend my small appendages into the salt of it, sometimes feeling a little lost, grasping at the invisible, but knowing at some point I’ll latch onto something that sustains me.

*Yes, enormity. I know it’s not the same as enormousness, but there’s something sinister in the sense of scale here, something threatening to me in my small and small-minded humanness.

. . . . .

Kathryn Smith is the author of the poetry collections Self-Portrait with Cephalopod (Milkweed Editions, 2021), winner of the 2019 Jake Adam York Prize, and Book of Exodus (Scablands Books, 2017), as well as the chapbook Chosen Companions of the Goblin, winner of the 2018 Open Country Press Chapbook Contest. Her poems and visual poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Gettysburg Review, Copper Nickel, Ninth Letter, DIAGRAM, Willow Springs, Fugue, Brink, and elsewhere. She lives in Spokane. Find her online at kathrynsmithpoetry.com.

Author photo by Dean Davis.

Finding Light Together

This is a guest post by Holly J. Hughes

To share stories during dark times has long been a necessary, radical act.
~ from the Introduction to
Keep a Green Bough: Voices from the Heart of Cascadia

As I write this, we’re losing just four seconds of light each day as we approach the winter solstice, when the days will begin to stretch longer again. This incremental, daily loss of light is elemental as gravity, our seasonal rhythm, but for the last two years, the darkness has felt darker, deeper. And for the last two months, I’ve had to look hard each day to find the glimmers of light that sustain me. I know they’re there — all I need do is step out my door to see them: rain-slick rhododendron leaves, abandoned apple trees still holding a few apples, bright berries of the madrona, billowing clouds that part for a few stray rays of sun. But some days even those glimpses aren’t enough. For me, one of the enduring lessons of the pandemic is that we’re in this together — and that’s when I turn to other writers to help sustain my spirit.

A year ago, I was invited by the publisher of Empty Bowl Press to edit an issue of The Madrona Project. Responding to the mission of Empty Bowl as a publisher of “literature that reveals human communities in wild places,” I put out a call for submissions, asking my sister writers how living in our Cascadia bioregion has sustained them during the past challenging year. I was hopeful that in these divisive times, this invitation might offer a way to come together around this place and our shared common fate.

My hope was to express the diversity of voices in the Cascadia bioregion, so I reached out to many writers, starting with those who’ve lived here since Time Immemorial, as well as women working the land and the sea. My inbox was soon overflowing with poems, essays, and art reflecting not just the beauty of our place but the resiliency of the human spirit. As the voices came together, the title, too, came: Keep a Green Bough: Voices from the Heart of Cascadia, after the Chinese saying, “Keep a green bough in your heart, the singing bird will come.”

Keep a Green Bough has been out in the world for six months now. From the amazing turnout at our Finnriver farm launch to our last Zoom reading hosted by Peninsula College’s ʔaʔkʷustəŋáw̕txʷ House of Learning, those in the audience have been visibly touched and, I hope, heartened. Each time we read together, I find myself in tears at the end, moved by the beauty and power of words spoken honestly, and the resilience not only of the human spirit but of all our kin.

For me, this collection has become a steady reminder of what was affirmed last year: how essential that we connect with our living Earth and witness her human history, even the painful parts, then join together to do all we can to create a just and sustainable future for all beings.

As Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us, this is the role of the poet:

O tell us, poet, what do you do? — I praise.
But those dark, deadly, devastating ways,
how do you bear them, suffer them? — I praise.

. . . . .

In addition to editing Keep a Green Bough: Voices from the Heart of Cascadia, Holly J. Hughes is the author of Hold Fast and Sailing by Ravens, coauthor of The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, and editor of Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease. Her fine-art chapbook Passings received an American Book Award in 2017. She lives on the Olympic Peninsula, where she leads writing and mindfulness workshops, consults as a writing coach, and directs Flying Squirrel Studio, a writing retreat for women on the aboriginal territory of the Suquamish (suq̀ʷabš), who continue to live on and protect the land and waters of their ancestors for future generations. You can find out more at her website: hollyjhughes.com

author photo by John Pierce

Inspiration takes form

This is a guest post by
Caitlin Thomson Jans

Over the last two years, many writers have struggled to find time, space, energy, and inspiration to write. I am not an exception to this rule. For the first time in many years I considered not writing a poem a day in April. However, when I decided that every poem I wrote should be a formal one, I found a way forward.

Even though I have written poetry my whole life, I didn’t consider writing formal poetry till my mid-twenties. Formal poetry struck me as dated, stiff, and predictable. In the last decade I’ve discovered that I was wrong about every one of these statements, and have come to embrace Golden Shovels, Sestinas, Bops, and Pantoums, among others.

However, this April the form I came to embrace the most was the Zuihitsu.

The Zuihitsu is a Japanese form and genre that is often compared to a lyric essay. Zuihitsu are generally on the shorter side of the essay form, often one page in length, sometimes longer. They are made of fragmented ideas that are only tenuously connected; their order is best described as haphazard.

You can read an excellent example of a Zuihitsu here, by Jenny Xie. It should give you a good feeling for the flow and tone of the form.

The poets Kimiko Hahn and Tina Chang have both crafted some powerful and exhilarating Zuihitsu. Hybrida by Tina Chang is one of the most exciting books of poetry I have read in the last year and I highly encourage anyone interested in writing Zuihitsu to pick up a copy. The Narrow Road to the Interior by Kimiko Hahn was published in 2008 and it was many Westerners’ first exposure to the form.

I really engage with Zuihitsu because even though they are often chaotic and scattered, that approach interacts well with the way my mind works, particularly during times of anxiety. I find that, unlike a more traditional free-verse approach, the first draft of a Zuihitsu is open to a world of possibilities, where one fragment of thought leads to another in an unexpected and exciting way.

I like to write Zuihitsu with a 30-minute timer, but that might just be a personal quirk. I know some writers like having a collection of quotes from other authors to jump off. I encourage you to experiment and find out what works best for you.

– – – – –

Caitlin Thomson Jans is co-founder of The Poetry Marathon, an international writing event. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals including: The Adroit Journal, The Penn Review, Rust + Moth, and Typehouse. For the last nine years she has run Authors Publish Magazine. You can learn more about her writing at her website or read a Zuihitsu she wrote here.

. . . . .
top image: title page of Ogata Gekko’s Zuihitsu
author photo by Jacob Jans

Virtual AWP 2021: How to Release a Book in a Pandemic

This is a guest post by
Kelli Russell Agodon

I did not screenshot the one-on-one Meet and Greet with Copper Canyon Press, but I wore a paisley button-down shirt and people arrived, to ask questions and just to talk. I had been a little nervous about that event for two reasons. The first was, I wasn’t exactly sure how it would work: would I be chatting with people via text or would we all arrive on Zoom (Zoom it was)? The second reason was, what if it was just me sitting in a Zoom room by myself because no one showed up? Oh the sad life of a poet!, I thought. But thankfully, people did show up, Zoom worked well, and as usual, my worries were for nothing.

The rest of AWP felt like wandering around an empty virtual game. Since you can’t see other participants unless you go to the tab with a list of attendees, it felt like an AWP of one’s own, which for me is the opposite of why I go to AWP. I go to AWP to walk the bookfair and for the surprise encounters with favorite poets and friends I haven’t seen for a while. I go to AWP to hold books, to flip the pages of poetry books, to sit in an audience and listen to a panel.

In my current world, I am Zoomed out, so clicking on a panel (many pre-recorded) and tuning in seemed like another opportunity for too much screentime. But I discovered that because everyone is just sitting in their offices off screen, I could click on a panel, listen, and clean my office! The panels I listened to were good and if they weren’t, there was no awkward leaving mid-panel, just a click of the pause button or shutting the laptop.

While Two Sylvias Press had a virtual booth, we mostly set it up and answered questions by message. We didn’t sell as many books as a normal AWP, but we didn’t have to carry any books from a van to the conference center either!

While this wasn’t the most inspiring conference, I admire AWP for coming up with something that wasn’t too hard to navigate, had a virtual bookfair, and allowed us a little bit of the AWP feel through panels and readings (even if they were on a screen).

This would have been the AWP my book, Dialogues with Rising Tides, would have been released with Copper Canyon Press, or almost (it’s due to be published April 27, 2021). Do I feel cheated or sad that my book is coming out during a pandemic? Not really. Actually, not at all. Mostly, I am thankful for the new ways we unite online, how we find our way through this difficult time. I’m reminded of the many ways we still have to connect and know we are turning the corner for more in-person time.

Since I’m not doing in-person events right now for my book, the online world has oddly become a stage (one I’m occasionally falling off, due to too much screentime). Virtual AWP was a way to meet some new readers, hear my favorites talk about their poetry lives, and actually sell a few more books. During the pandemic I have learned that things do not need to be perfect; good enough suits me just fine these days.

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Kelli Russell Agodon is the author of Dialogues with Rising Tides from Copper Canyon Press (which you can preorder here or on Amazon.) Kelli is also the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press and the Co-Director of Poets on the Coast: A Weekend Retreat for Women. On May 1, 2021, she will be teaching a workshop on The Surrealists Toolkit, writing poems from prompts and play of surrealist artists and writers. Visit her website to read more of her work.