Monthly Archives: August 2011

Interview with Author Mary Kennedy Eastham

Posted on August 23, 2011 by | 1 Comment

West Coast author Mary Kennedy Eastham has been quite busy lately.  Her book of poetry, the Shadow of a Dog I Can’t Forget, was one of my first review copies I received.  I talked with her via an email interview.  Here is what she had to say about her recent projects, the art of writing, her love of dogs, and her favorite writers.

WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR CREATIVE PROJECTS?

I am trying so hard to finish my novel NIGHT SURFING.  Writing a novel is very different from writing a short story or writing a poem.  There are so many more layers you must add to the whole.  I keep a Fragment File which is where I put story ideas, character traits, names I like, interesting snippets of conversations I’ve stumbled upon while pumping gas, standing in line at the grocery store, or at the bar waiting for a Take-Out order.  Oh, my, give a person a drink or two and they spill their guts!  They say the best writers steal.  I’ll add to that, nothing is lost on a writer.  It makes the world so much more interesting!  And I can actually say this: ‘I wish I had another life left to write even more!!!’  Although I probably wouldn’t be able to afford my health insurance!

About a week ago, I decided to take a break from my novel and start working on something new, a short story, “The Girl With Sand in Her Hair”, it’s almost writing itself.  This changing gears approach has taught me that when one thing isn’t working, you MUST start something new.  I am hoping to finish a first version of this story this week.  Beyond that, maybe this story can become the title for my second book, The Girl With Sand in Her Hair and Other Little Love Stories.  I’ve also been working on a long prose poem, “The Divorce Diarist”, for over a year.  A cinematographer I met recently wants to film a version of “Divorce Diarist” to post on YouTube.  That’s given me the incentive to finish the poem and start thinking about camera angles, flashpoints, where to film it.  Doing a mini-documentary was one of my 2011 writing goals, so I am very very excited about this project.

MY EXPERIENCE AS A CONTEST JUDGE…

To be a Judge frees you in a way as a writer.  You realize that  behind every Judge is a person, a person who is usually a writer or teacher or both, a person with writer’s styles and topics they are drawn to.  I have judged poetry, creative non-fiction, humour, memoirs, short stories and novels.  This year was my first experience judging e-books.  Wow, that was challenging, especially trying to read 150+ pages per entry online.  I closed down my laptop after a particularly long reading session and I swear for a few minutes, all I could see was a blurry cloud of jumbled words swirling in front of me.

The e-book competition asked its Judges what categories they wanted to Judge.  I put down Women’s Fiction and High School poetry.  The gave me Paranormal Romance and Fantasy.  Okay…but guess what?  I learned a very valuable lesson and it was this: a good story is a good story, no matter the genre.  I actually liked being in the otherworlds created by these very talented writers.  Near the end of the competition, they gave me the High School poetry entries to Judge, so the experience ended up being WIN/WIN.

My advice to all of you is to send your work out to a LOT of contests.  It will definitely increase your chances of being noticed.

WHAT WAS THE INSPIRATION FOR THE SHADOW OF A DOG I CAN’T FORGET?

Wow, Karl, you’re really making me work here!  Let’s see … I’d been writing for a while, and I simply wanted to get a book of mine out there in the world.  I took a class online with New York City writer M.J. Rose called BUZZ YOUR BOOK.  I used this experience as a challenge to complete a book.  My next decision was what to include.  That was a tough one.  But it helped me hone everything down to its purest.  Then I had to decide the order of stories and poems.  That took a while, a long while actually.  I knew what the very last piece would be because I loved the last line … the place where he last loved me …  Inspiration for me has turned into necessity.  I have to write.  I wouldn’t know what else to do.

The title of the book came from a poem of the same name.  I like its last line as well … as if he could tell me what follows love …

I think I’ve been questioning love for a long while now.  Like so many writers, moviemakers and poets before me, it’s a most fascinating, frustrating and forever after pursuit!

WHAT’S UP WITH MY FASCINATION WITH DOGS???

I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said we become one with what we surround ourselves with. I live in a house full of Golden Retrievers.  I’m a part-time breeder and there is always one or two or three or four dogs underfoot as I write, work-out, cook dinner, live my life.  I remember the wonderful writer Raymond Carver (Google his short story ‘Cathedral’ to read  this succinctly brilliant work of art) was an alcoholic for many of his early writing years.  When I would read one of his stories, he was primarily a short-story writer, at some point in the story the main character would open a beer or take a swig from a near empty vodka bottle or pour himself glass after glass of wine.  As a reader, you would almost get dizzy drunk reading Carver’s words.  When he quit drinking, Carver wrote a story about a man who was going back to a reunion at the prestigious university he graduated from.  Carver graduated from Stanford.  In the story, as Carver’s character sits down to be served drinks and dinner, he turns his wine glass upside down on the table.  Small, heartbreaking details like that one are my daily inspiration/motivation to get better and better at this craft we call writing.

WHO ARE MY FAVORITE WRITERS?

Karl, you always intimidate me with your own extensive reading list.  I like any writer who tells a good story.  I know that sounds so simplistic and if I could teach that skill to myself and get paid to teach novice writers that secret, I could retire to Paris!  I like being surprised in an O’Henry sort of way.  I like being whisked away to a world I know nothing about like the circus world Sarah Gruen creates in her novel Water for Elephants.  One of the first short stories I couldn’t put down was Michael Cunningham’s “White Angel”.  He went on to THE HOURS book and movie fame.  He also wrote the screenplay along with another fave writer of mine, Susan Minot, to the movie adapted from Minot’s book EVENING.  I love the poet Pablo Neruda.  Writer/political & social activist Simone De Beauvoir was one of my very earliest influences.  I like Lorrie Moore, I like the author of White Oleander whose name escapes me right now.  [It’s Janet Fitch.  – KW]  I like the vulnerable quirkiness of Annie Lamott.  I love Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, William S. Burroughs, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  I just know I’m forgetting someone.

Oh, I like your mind and your writing, Karl, and I can’t wait for you to put a book out there into this crazy world. One more writer just popped into my head – Muriel Barbery – author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

WEST COAST LITERARY SCENE CRAZINESS…

That ANY of us continue to write at all in a Twitter/Facebook/YouTube obsessed world is a feat in and of itself. Sadly, most of the writer’s groups I belong to are online, so I don’t know how much insight I can shed on the California literary scene.  Writer/Filmmaker/Performance Artist Miranda July seems to have cut quite a fancy swath across this state with her book, No One Belongs Here More Than You, her films, Me and You and Everyone We Know (she directed and starred in the film) and The Future, a film debuting in New York and L.A. this week.  She also has a participatory website learningtoloveyoumore .  Google her.  She seems as quirky as the characters she writes about.  I’m a little, no, make that a LOT jealous of her genius in promoting herself and her work.

Dave Eggers, author of the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, is a prominent San Francisco writer/ social activist who started 826 Valencia, a writing program for underprivileged kids in the city.  I believe there’s now a program in L.A. as well.  Dave’s own back story is quite interesting – Dad leaves mom and kids early on to basically become a drunk, Dad dies, then mom dies of cancer, leaving poor Dave to raise his younger brother Troph.  Again, I act like I know these people, I don’t, but they are I guess prominent California writers. Jennifer Egan, author of The Geek Squad lives in San Francisco and seems really lovely.  I asked if she would be my ‘friend’ on Facebook and she sent me a lovely response.  Karl, this question has made me realize I need to get out more!

WORDS FOR ASPIRING WRITERS…

I think I’ll end with my philosophy on writing: I really like my writing.  I believe in my writing. To be successful, you need to do your best every dayfor a really long time…

Thanks, Karl, this was fun!

Website: www.RP-author/MKE

 

 

 

 

 

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Play Fair! The Art of Friendship and Relationship by Kimberly A. Taylor

Posted on August 21, 2011 by | 1 Comment

    One doesn’t have to walk far into a bookstore to get assaulted with self-help books and memoirs.  Much like people with blogs, everyone thinks they have something valuable to say.  In addition to memoirs by randomly generated Kardashians the upcoming election season brings with it the fatuous “campaign biography” ghostwritten by the candidate’s staffers not currently concocting an attack ad or planting a piece of journalism with a compliant member of the Fourth Estate.  It is with relief that Kimberly A. Taylor’s hybrid memoir/self-help book is available.  Play Fair! The Art of Relationship and Friendship presents the reader with a fusion of personal reminisces and informative sections on how to deal with others.

Play Fair! begins with Kimberly at age four chiding a fellow classmate for taking away a toy.  Throughout this small book (only 84 pages), we see Kimberly’s assertiveness and confidence.  Her extroverted personality eventually led her to a Fulbright scholarship in the former Yugoslavia, only a couple years after the Cold War ended.  The strange culture and awkward political transition create ample opportunity for Kimberly to explain issues about interpersonal relationships.  She encounters strange laws, especially those concerning removal of large amounts of currency from former Eastern Bloc nations to Austria and Germany.  She also uses her privileged position as a visiting student to help others, including defusing potentially dangerous situations with oppressive officials and bureaucrats.  (This tiny book is a wonderful complement to William T. Vollmann’s coverage of the former Yugoslavia in his massive Rising Up and Rising Down.)

Zagreb, Croatia

     Aiding in her development is Kimberly’s acquisition of languages.  Boasting fluency in at least five languages, this allows her to streamline through dangerous or exploitative situations.  Several times, native residents comment on how she sounds like she was born there.  The languages she mastered include challenging tongues like Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, and Russian.  She also knows relatively easier languages like German and French.  (Easy by terms of comparison, since learning a language is tough.  This reviewer learned German and Latin, but found learning Arabic truly difficult and alien.)

Dr. Miller and her ad agency clients.

While language acquisition and intercultural encounters mean certain things within the academic realm, Kimberly eventually became a professor of psychology and applied it to international business.  Season 4 of Mad Men was illustrative of this very thing.  In one episode, Don Draper and his hard-drinking colleagues compete against a rival ad agency to win the Honda account.  This involved an understanding of the Japanese culture and their business ethic, not to mention reining in Roger Sterling’s racist belligerence.  (Sterling was a veteran of World War II and saw the Japanese, not as business partners, but as The Enemy.)  The season also saw the introduction of a female business psychologist, Dr. Faye Miller.  She worked with several firms in dissecting the preferences of potential customers.  She also dealt with male prejudice and many seeing her job as fake or a kind of trickery.  In the Sixties, many still saw the reliance of psychology as a manifestation of personal weakness.

The second half of the book elaborates on the notion of interpersonal interaction, specifically relationships with the client.  How should one treat an analytical personality?  Or an extroverted personality?  The explanations are terse and informative.  Since this is for the business class, the book is free of New Age-y half-baked psychobabble.  Granted, one needs self-confidence and assertiveness in the cutthroat world of modern business, but Kimberly explains how one can thrive and survive in this environment.

Play Fair! also shows that a self-published work can be done effectively.  At under 100 pages and a simple black and white cover avoids the usual opportunities for self-indulgent silliness.  The Internet is full of websites mocking badly done self-published works.  Play Fair! is professionally done with an eye towards brevity and high quality.  If the major publishers churning out Kardashian Extruded Product would do the same, perhaps they might not be in a financial scramble.

Kontains krap.

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Interview with author Chad Faries

Posted on August 5, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Chad Faries is the author of The Book of Knowledge and his forthcoming memoir Drive Me Out of My Mind.  Chad’s Midwestern upbringing and international experiences give his poetry a unique perspective.  His brand of poetry possesses a singular combination of the humbly playful and historically engaged.  In the words of publisher Lisa Flowers, founder of Vulgar Marsala Press, “his work [is like ] a trip through Disney through the eyes of Woody Guthrie through the eyes of Ezra Pound, like an ever-overlapping pair of bifocals.”  Chad answered my questions I emailed to him.

What are some of your current projects?

It has been an eventful summer, but that likely is the wrong adjective.  My grandmother, the matriarch of my new memoir, Drive Me Out of My Mind, died a couple of days after the release in late June.  Then I had to drive across the country to Arizona to spend some time with my biological father who didn’t know I existed until about 15 years ago.  In those 15 years, we have spent about 5 days together.  Now, he is dying and I am with him, learning about him, and talking a lot about movies and women and it is wonderful.  He gave me a treasure of journals from his 70s exploits last night and I plan on doing something with them. I have also been working on a series of what I call Death Poems.  They are different than the tradition of death poems where one writes a poem on his/her death bed.  The Koreans had a strong tradition of this. I guess my poems are more direct ruminations on death.  The cliché is that indiscriminate readers say poems are always about death, so, there you go….Death Poems.  And of course some are completely antithetical and celebrate a life force.

What drew you to The Children’s Encyclopedia by Arthur Mee for The Book of Knowledge?

I had just finished my collection, The Border Will Be Soon, and those poems were written in a very heavy, war trodden, first person narrative.  The subject matter was based on my travels to the former Yugoslavia between 1995 and 2000.  It was so difficult to read those poems in public because of their immediacy.  Sometime in 2000, my father gave me an old copy of one of the original 1911 volumes.  When I read the titles of the entries—“The Wonderful Things That Happen When You Hurt Your Finger” and “Why It is Bad to Sleep With Flowers in Your Room”—poems started taking shape.  The diction in the book was freeing because the first person in those poems was really distanced from a first person that was closer to the actual voice of the author.  Plus, it was just so damn cool to look at and cradle in my hands.  It smelled wonderful.

How does the poetry in The Book of Knowledge relate to your memoir Drive Me Out of My Mind?

Autobiography and the play of innocence and experience are an integral part of both.  In both the poetry and the memoir, there is no “moral” to the stories because judgment is withheld.  There may be some moralizing, but that is likely done on a more emotional level—the emotions being created through tone and image, not necessarily through expository prose.

One section of The Book of Knowledge focuses on the history of the Iron Range in Michigan.  How does the practice of history relate to the creation of your poetry?

The way I see it, there is recorded history, and then there is this blossoming history that surrounds our every moment.  I like to posit autobiographical history into the context of a known and documented history.  For example, in the poem you refer to, some of the recorded history of the first settlers in Iron County Michigan are contrasted with the exploits of friends and family members from the region so that the histories blend into a single, inclusive narrative.  Also, the geological descriptions of the land of the land are metaphorically transferred to the actions of the characters.

How did your vision influence the overall design for the book?

I wanted the cover and every page to tell a visual story that also contextualized the somewhat awkward diction that peppers the book.  I wanted the design to be beautiful, yet disorienting.  Hopefully the reader might ask “Where am I? What are ducks doing at the bottom of this poem? Why don’t people design books like this anymore?”

In these days of political and economic upheaval, what can poetry offer the individual?

A deeper contemplation and an entirely new dimension that might make fear and mortality seem utterly absurd.

Who are some of your favorite authors and why?

I like Ezra Pound because of the way he collapses the personal and historical.  The Cantos does this over and over.  Pound drags us through the literary and cultural histories of the world, and then describes his cage, or tells us about the smell of a tent.  Marianne Moore is capable of this too.  She can encapsulate humanity into the scientific description of a spider.  Paul Celan has also been a favorite because he has his own emotional lexicon of lightness and darkness.  “He speaks truly who speaks in the shade.”  And then there are the two pillars of America poetry, Whitman and Dickinson.  One speaking in long, uncertain breaths, and the other in short, terse jabs.  That is what makes American poetry so dynamic.

Can a favorite author’s influence be detrimental or beneficial to the creative process?

It would only be detrimental if a writer didn’t make allowances for surprises.  The History of Iron County Michigan I mentioned above is an homage to Pound, but I am sure there are occasions in the poem where Pound would have taken out his pen, as he often did, and slashed entire lines.  This wasn’t his poem.  This was my poem.  If you lose your poem in your nod to a favorite author, the poem has failed.  And if the favorite author were to read that poem, he/she would tell you so.

Do you have any helpful tips or words of encouragement for aspiring writers out there?

Go find a flock of resting birds and run at them as fast as you can.  When they lift, keep running, but raise your head and track their assent until you lose sight of the horizon and all you see is bird and sky.  At that moment you will be flying too. Harness that sensation and translate it into a new language.

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