(Suzanne Paola Antonetta, Linda Hogan, Honor Moore, Mary Rockcastle, Lidia Yuknavitch) Fall 2014 marks the 16th anniversary of the annual Meridel Le Sueur Essay in Water~Stone Review. A Minnesota journalist, fiction writer, essayist, and poet, Meridel Le Sueur’s work paid witness to the central economic, political, ecological, and social realities of the century. She wrote that the writer must go "all the way, with full belief, into the darkness"; Four award-winning writers will read from their essays.

Published Date: June 10, 2015

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2015 A W P conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Linda Hogan, Suzanne Annetta, honor More, and Lydia Vic. You will now hear Mary Rockcastle provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:33):

Good afternoon everyone. We're all here. Hello and welcome to our 16th anniversary reading of the annual Mariella Soar essay for Waterstone review.

Speaker 2 (00:00:53):

When we began the review in 1998, our aim was to create a national literary journal that would be a work of art inside and out. We wanted to publish writing that is distinctive, intelligent, daring, informed voice and or style writing that says something meaningful about the human condition in an artful and compelling way. Some of our early advisory board members cautioned us about claiming too strong a Midwestern connection, not wanting us to be branded a provincial magazine. God forbid. While we've always had a national reach, we have never shied away from honoring what we call in our mission statement, the artistic excellence of a proud Midwestern literary tradition. One of the ways we did this was to create an essay to pay homage to the spirit of Mariella Soar journalist, fiction, writer, essayist, poet, and biographer whose writings over 50 years depicted the lives of working class women and men, the children they cared for and the land they inhabited.

Speaker 2 (00:02:06):

Born in Murray, Iowa in 1900, Marielle lived in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Illinois, New York, and Minnesota. In her work, she paid witness to the central economic, political, ecological and social realities of the century. She exemplified a Midwestern tradition of radical thought and action. She was a listener learning early to write down what people were saying. She carried that listening ear into her writing life and throughout her writing life, grounding her work in the stories and experiences of working people, the poor, the disenfranchised, and the dispossessed. The writer she wrote must go all the way with full belief into the darkness. We wanted this vision to as an inspiration to the writer of the annual essay. With generous funding from Margaret Wordle, an alum of our master of Arts and Liberal studies program, we've been able to solicit the essay each year from a writer whose work we admire.

Speaker 2 (00:03:14):

The first Merit Esor essay was published in our second issue in the fall of 1999. We are thrilled to have the writer of that first essay, Linda Hogan with us today, Linda is filling in for Cheryl Stray who had to withdraw because of family commitments back in Portland. We also have Suzanne Antonina to my left writer of the essay in our fall 2008 issue. Honor more to her left writer of the essay in our 2010 issue and Lydia Kovich, writer of our 2011 essay, A number of other merit Ellisor sass are with us at the conference. We're in too many events to participate. Patricia Hampel, toy Deco bu, but they send their regards. Other sass have included Judith Ortiz Cofer, Evan Boland, Elizabeth Alexander, Scott Russell Sanders, the late Carol Bly, John Edgar Weidman, Terry Tempest Williams, and Brian Dahl. Each of the four essayists here today will read an excerpt from her essay.

Speaker 2 (00:04:27):

I will introduce each of the four writers and they will go in the order in which I introduce them. Linda Hogan is a highly accomplished writer of poetry, fiction and essays. She is the former writer in residence for the Chickasaw Nation and Professor Emerita from the University of Colorado. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment from the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lanin Foundation, a lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas and Oklahoma Book Award, a Colorado Book award and many others. Her novel Means Spirit was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent book, which is here at the conference, dark, sweet, new and selected poems, is being published by Coffee House Press. She'll be reading from her essay bones and other precious gems. Suzanne Annetta, also known as the Poet, Suzanne Paola. I love that. I love consolidating my name.

Speaker 2 (00:05:30):

Suzanne Paola and Tena. Yeah, that's it. Is the award-winning author of three books of creative nonfiction Make Me a Mother, a memoir, a Mind Apart, travels in a Neurodiverse World and Body Toxic, as well as two collections of poetry. Her Collection Bardo received the Britain Ham Prize in poetry. Suzanne co-authored with Brenda Miller, the Nonfiction Writing Handbook and textbook Tell It Slant, creating, refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction. She's currently teaching at Western Washington University and in the low residency M F A program located at City University in Hong Kong, China. She has just taken on the Editor's Reigns of Bellingham Review from Brenda Miller. She will be reading from her essay Lazarus. Honor Moore is an accomplished poet, memoirist nonfiction, writer and playwright. She has published three collections of poetry and is the editor of Poems from the Women's Movement and Amy Lowell selected poems. She's the co-editor of The Stray Dog Cabaret.

Speaker 2 (00:06:42):

A book of Russian poems translated by Paul Schmidt. Her memoir, the Bishop's Daughter, was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Award and named an Editor's Choice by the New York Times. She has also written a biography entitled The White Black Bird, A Life of the Painter, Margaret Sergeant by Her Granddaughter. She is on the faculty of the Graduate Writing program at the New School in New York City, and she will be reading from her essay A Window at Cella. Lydia Vic is the author of two novels, the Small Backs of Children, a novel just out from Harper Books and Dora, a Head Case as well as several collections of short fiction, including Real to real, r e a l to R E E L. Her memoir, the Chronology of Water was a finalist for the Penn Center Creative Nonfiction Award and won an Oregon book award. Reader's Choice also won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and made many best books lists. She has also published a book of criticism, allegories of Violence. She's the founder of the magazine, two Girls Review and co-editor of Northwest Edge Deviant Fiction with her husband. She created Chiasmus' Press and Productions. She teaches writing literature, film and women's studies in Oregon. She will be reading from her essay The Work of Art. Thank you for coming. We're really excited to hear these amazing writers read from their essays. And we're going to start with Linda Hogan.

Speaker 3 (00:08:29):

I wanted to show you my 1983 t-shirt, Marielle er in the center. Pete Seeger and Ronnie Gilbert.

Speaker 4 (00:08:39):

I knew Marielle. We traveled together one time. She wanted to go to a cemetery where many children were conceived at night. She once said things, she always great things. One was survival is a form of resistance, and she was in the 1980, she was at the Black Hills Survival Gathering. I took Tilly Olsson to be with Marielle and spent time and they were talking about how when they were young in the first writer's union, they were so intimidated by each other because they each thought the other one was a better communist than they were, and Tilly even had a communist uniform and Marielle didn't. So she really felt bad. And that was at the first writer's union in New York, which was revived for a time in 1981, and I was at that one. I didn't know we were reading from the essays. In fact, I wasn't really knowing that I was on the panel.

Speaker 4 (00:09:46):

Mary just told me I was on the panel and then told me what I was reading. So sometimes you just go with the flow because people tell you and you just go ahead and do it, and it seems like some other people didn't. And I guess I should have learned my lessons, but I'm glad to be here and I'm grateful for this panel and for the memories of Marielle and her great sense of humor and her wonderful writing, which her publisher now John Crawford, I just saw him this morning before he had to leave. He's been very ill. So if you know him, sent him letters, cards, gifts, love he did. The Girl and Florence Feminist Press redid the collected works or selected works, and Marielle was just an incredible all the way around. Not Midwestern writer, but everything writer. Studied at the Helen Keller University when Helen Keller started as university Marielle's parents taught.

Speaker 4 (00:10:51):

There she was in New York with Emma Goldman and Eugene Debs. She had an amazing life and a library of her journals, which was so big that I couldn't walk through it because she had kept journals for long over 50 years of her writing. I mean it was like the whole history of America. And also I heard that the father of Rachel was listed in one of them, but it's still a secret. So they took it out. I don't know who he was and one time she was smoking a black cigarette and drinking tequila at the age of 80 something and we were at a dance and there was a very famous writer that put his forehead against mine and she came over and said, stay away from him. He's the devil.

Speaker 4 (00:11:46):

He said he was trying to read my brain, but back in those days we were all young and she was afraid that I was going to be taken away. I've swept off my feet, but I had a bunch of kids at home and now I have a bunch of grandkids and I'm supposed to read something and I wasn't sure that it was, I didn't know it was from this essay. So I just went through very quickly trying to figure out what I could read from here. But I really wanted to just talk about Marielle because I loved her and she wrote to me, and I have some of her clothes and one of her scarves and some wheat builds she had from Guatemala and I put them over the backs of my chairs because I don't want to wear them. They're too fragile now. They're over a hundred, they're probably 150 years old, and the embroidery on them is beautiful, so I want it to show, but I don't want to to be messed with.

Speaker 4 (00:12:46):

So let me read just this one section. The veneration of body and bones is common to all humanity, not just the tribal. We have to think of the Egyptians and their methods of preserving the bodies of their royalty. The calcium phosphate by which a person stands is the closest thing the body has to eternity. In that respect, the soul and the bones are not so different from one another. Both are thought to be eternal or nearly so elephant bones. The care for bones is not only common to most of humanity, those without that marvelous network at the base of the brain, but to other species as well. Elephant researchers, Cynthia Moss has written about how elephants care for the bones of their dead. It is haunting and touching. She says the elephants return to the bones, sometimes lifting them and turning them with their feet and trunks traveling.

Speaker 4 (00:13:57):

Elephants must observed detour from their root in order to visit the bones of their dead. They return and touch their kin time and again resting against the skull bones of child or mother. The son of one matriarch remained behind moving his mother's bones, placing his trunk mournfully on her skull and jaw each time he passed. By another time Moss chance to see a burial ritual in which the elephants were putting earth on the body, going away and returning with palm fronds to cover it. They had begun to bury in this poignant manner with purpose until they were interrupted by the plane that carried ivory seekers travels to the end of the world. In our more recent times, there are ultrasounds, x-rays and MRIs that reach into the human body to diagnose, but traditional healers in times both old and new, know the terrain not only of a sick person but of many worlds seeing inside the body with a vision unknown to the rest of us.

Speaker 4 (00:15:16):

Seeing and reading the bones, sorting through the anatomy, they determine the source of illness not in a careless manner as Western doctors once did in the past when they operated on merely a kind of hope cutting people open. And this is true and unwittingly rearranging their organs with not knowing what belonged where nor our traditional aboriginal healers, spiritually careless as those who count on the patient's belief and faith to heal themselves. Like a preacher who blamed a deaf girl I knew as a child for her own lack of hearing because she didn't have enough faith. What the old ones knew is evidenced in the rock paintings of humans with bones made visible and some surviving written records. The Egyptians had medical knowledge of the circulation system over a thousand years before this knowledge was learned by western medicine, the Mayans also had medical knowledge, but it was burned by the Spanish except for one or two collections.

Speaker 4 (00:16:32):

The hidden inside, as with art and love is revealed in these cultures. The ancient ones knew the inside body viscera and recorded it in their medical histories. A medical indigenous healer searches the universe of the ocean for stolen souls. One gone astray. They travel across the threshold, a body and skin to enter another world because there are other journeys than the inward ones. The sojourner may travel into the sky world or to the underworld or beneath the ocean to the Eskimo goddess who lives in the sea or he enters a mountain of 40 rivers and mineral medicines as with the Cree and anishnabe of Canada, as with outward journeys, the journey to the bones, the organs, the interior is one a healer must take in order to seek a cure as if following illness back to its origins and remembering the body history as a kind of map or story, and here I'm going to skip.

Speaker 4 (00:17:51):

Sometimes the spirit of the ill is found and returned to the body. Sometimes even with all the temptations to return on earth. It is not in old China. It was the river God that was ENT treaty and so was the soul of the departing the river. God is said to live in a fish scale, house in the water, and it is there that the healer goes on a journey in order to retrieve the soul of a sick person whose life energy has wandered away. There is a man on earth below who I would help. His soul has left him. Oh, soul says the God's helper. Why have you gone to the four far corners of the earth in the east? You cannot abide. There are giants there, a thousand fathoms tall in the south. You cannot stay there. The people have tattooed faces and blackened teeth.

Speaker 4 (00:18:52):

They sacrifice the flesh of men and pound their bones to paste and to the west it said there are shifting, moving sands and empty deserts. Red ants huge as elephants, wasps as big as gourds in the north says the helper, the ice rises high, there are wolves and jackals. And then he tells the soul all that awaits, it's returns, it's return. He tells What makes the world desirable. There are silks and balconies, views of the high mountains, good air, pearls and precious stones, vermilion and a pool with the lotus blossoms. All the beautiful comforts of the world are spoken in order to tempt back the soul of the dying person. For most of us, our journeys are not so large. We travel over the boundaries of suffering, illness and war. Because there is no choice too often there is no one to call us back to take away illness or to reassemble us. Our bodies are passing through life following tracks of a different order than our desires and wills and to the soul is still sometimes lost today perhaps in smaller ways even than death. We lose the soul a peace at a time as when we turn away from what needs our help. Remain silent when words are necessary or take something from the world that can't be replaced, A plant, an animal, a love.

Speaker 5 (00:20:48):

Thank you.

Speaker 6 (00:21:00):

That was terrific Linda. Thank you. Four women I really admire. I'm just going to soak that in for a minutes. I'm really happy to be here. Thank you Mary for putting this together. And I just want to say when I got the notice about doing the Mariella lasso, it was really exciting. It was very affirming and it gave me a chance to really sink into something. And I wrote about something that was going on at the time where I live in Bellingham, Washington, which is that there's a species of swan called trumpeter swans, almost all of which spend the winters in the county I live in and a few counties around it. It was actually a species declared extinct, but there were several thousand of them that somehow had hung on in Alaska and they did make a comeback but to maybe 20,000 now they were hunted to extinction for powder puff material and their feathers for ladies hats and they're actually not very good to eat.

Speaker 6 (00:21:57):

And at the time this really strange thing was going on in Washington in the counties where the trumpeter swans came, which is that they began obsessively and for no reason anyone has to this date figured out, began eating what's called historical lead. All birds will sometimes consume stones to help them digest, but lead that had been in the ground for hundreds of years, they started eating for no particular reason and dying really fast because of this lead poisoning. So I was kind of putting that together, that very strange scary thing that was happening when we actually had swan alerts and swan hotlines with Freud's idea of the uncanny, which I really love. And just to make it too simplistic, one of the things Freud identified about what makes something uncanny is that it's feeling the darkness and strangeness in what's familiar. And to me living in northwest Washington surrounded by endangered species, many of which scientists really do know are not going to make it.

Speaker 6 (00:23:01):

It has this feeling of the uncanny because you're always encountering creatures that are living and dead basically in the same moment. So I'm going to read from that and if I have time, I brought a really short new piece that to me kind of speaks to this in a certain way and I may read that but I may not trumpeter swan and I'm kind of beginning in the middle. Trumpeter swans appear in large flocks a field of white pillows. A hundred years ago this would've been a sign of angels or of apocalypse trumpeter swans were considered extinct then until 1913, a specimen preserved in a museum was the only evidence trumpeter swans had ever been in this area. A few in remote mountains had escaped the massive hunting and birds began to come back. How strange Like our finding the extinct fish, the seal can presumed gone for hundreds of millions of years alive off the coast of Africa in 1938, it spooked people.

Speaker 6 (00:23:59):

The six and a half foot splotched Loeb fin presumed dead fish and inspired a B movie, which is wonderful by the way, monster on campus where Aquir of Sila Kath blood caused a living to revert to primitive stages of evolution. Dogs went wild, humans went othe scene and loped around the screen and glued on fur. Freud had always said he didn't himself have any sense of the uncanny obtuse Freud would've been a very poor writer of B movies. I put Freud with his heavy frames and his whiskers pruned like an obsessive compulsive hedge in a scene when those first swans returned to the wets of our dimm mining and brothel towns, massive white in the way of sun drained vision and as far as anyone knew, dead and gone at the time in Bellingham, people would've been pulling plentiful salmon out of the water logging umber cedars bobbing like the fish.

Speaker 6 (00:24:57):

Many mines collapsed and the town would've been fresh with stories of ghosts. The houses built on filled mines as white wingspans the size of a man and a half returned perhaps at the time of the swan's return with fewer extinctions then and those much less noted. The site of trumpeter swans made no difference beyond the return of a resource. I can imagine we would seem strange fetishistic to that age crowding and whale watching trawlers to chase orcas and whatever blackening our eyes with binoculars. Do you have the ated woodpecker? Is that an old man walking by in the peninsula's temperate rainforest and are they so rare you never see them?

Speaker 6 (00:25:42):

I have felt that old man's almost quails need drawing up lists of things I want to see in the wild cougars, moose, whales, bears elk, so meticulous and driven. I could be hunting them. I dragged the family I love along demanding much to their edness that they turn their eyes this way, that way. I have seen the ated woodpecker, a candidate for endangered out the window of a camping cabin on one of my state's, many islands, and I felt that ripple through my chest, that flutter of the uncanny as the bird poked in a Douglas f.

Speaker 6 (00:26:21):

I saw it and the site was both exhilarating and queasy loaded with the same anxiety, not seeing it would've held. We see so much here, the spotted owl, the flipping chinook. No one in the future is likely to see again the gray whale puum out in the water. It is there breathing one individual behaving as if this week's krill is its biggest problem. I tote my child around to these things. Gin son, please look hundreds of us unsure trying to drive the image up our retina as if that could be a permanent record of anything. I think I'm going to stop that part of this here and move on to what's newer because I think sometimes it's fun to kind of talk about how a chain of thought kind of moves you to another chain of thought as writers and I just wanted to do something that was a little newer than 2008 as well.

Speaker 6 (00:27:24):

So I had this challenge of figuring out why this particular new piece seemed to me to work with that older piece on Lazarus species as they're sometimes called. And this is a memoir piece and it's probably my earliest, one of my earliest sustained memories and it's of a homicide and I thought actually we all have these themes in our lives and one of my unfortunate ones is far too much gun violence in my life and the life of those close to me. And I think one of the reasons I really remember this crime is because it was my first experience of homicide and it happened in Elizabeth New Jersey in 1966 and it has a cemetery in it. I don't know if any children were ever conceived there. Certainly not impossible and I think in terms of the environment, our culture and the things that happen in our lives are their own kind of ecology.

Speaker 6 (00:28:21):

So I'm just going to read this and it's fairly short. The girl Wendy Sue Wolin was seven two years younger than me. She waited at the curb in front of her apartment as her mother pulled the car around. She'd been told to wait there so she did. Some onlookers reported that she'd been skipping. My brother and I would've run down the street to the candy store or over to the graveyard. There were errands to run the child young and it's after school so she has to be taken along. It's common a mother in the car with her child out doing things the child doesn't really understand though the mother will mutter a list to her, the grocery store, the butcher, the hallmark store cards to tell people what a mother may be thinking. The apartment named Pierce Manor, and I'm sorry for this, it's too neat, like the graveyard across the street from my apartment, the Evergreen, my early life fell into me as if it came from a book, not a very good one.

Speaker 6 (00:29:31):

If I'd understood meaning and strange coincidence, I would've worked harder to forget the details. Newspapers would call her an Elizabethan girl. Every paper referred to her as skinny. I can see how historically I would've looked thin Elizabethan like a piece of theater. It could be a treat Then for a woman to leave the house, much of what they used came to the women in their apartments from the milkman, the fuller brush man with his stiff brushes and his soaps. The swan cleaner man with the shirts pinned with little pins to a piece of cardboard. It was my job to undo these shirts, which was difficult holding all those tiny little pins in my hand without dropping them. My mother took the shirts back with a ssn of her lips if I spilled pins on the floor, some wives used their teeth to hold them and wore pins bristling from their mouths.

Speaker 6 (00:30:31):

This was my mother's life too, but she didn't drive, nor did she sit with the other wives on the apartments stoops in the evenings, painting fingernails and hollering at children, a quiet woman and very small, but she would brush a hand across the coffee table lifting dust. She would comb her hair and purse her lips at herself in the mirror. Today is the day for the fuller brush man. She'd tell me the swan man, though the same men came for years, she must have known their names. So Wendy stood stopped in her obedience a few miles away from me in a warm march in 1966, I might've been sitting in the graveyard then I sat in there for hours as a child. I loved it. All the stones my size, my reading level, the carvings of bent winged women, though the closeness of the graves terrified me when I tried to sleep.

Speaker 6 (00:31:28):

Wendy's mother curving around in her car, a man white middle aged in a green fedora and a quarter eye coat, his arm drawing out towards the girl and then a man punched me. She said he vanished like something. The crowd collectively made unmade. The man had had a hunting knife that cost him a dollar 50. Police found it later cleaned. It was not a punch. The body can take time to understand. Some women walked Wendy to a fire station across the street. They pulled the girl's coat open, loosed the hid testimony of her blood. She died soon after it was midday, crowded. Still the killer melted off and survived with this memory. This one day of hiss act more focused, more true to intent than any other. He has likely known the simple economical blow, the palmed knife, joly, well dressed, the kind of man I'd have hit up for change later in my life.

Speaker 6 (00:32:37):

I generally need appearance. The wanted poster said, eyes that looked absent, tired to me like a doctor's. He attacked other girls, stabbed one, punched one, grabbed one all in one day, failed to kill the others. Soon my town wore his face on telephone poles and trees, black and white flyers with his bland face and the legend. This man is a child killer under it. My mother walked me to school every day, then grew tired and left me to myself with my soft abdomen. This sneed I could feel on the wind it all I feel now exhausted. My parents. There were things to do with the cemetery. An altar boy killed there over a cigarette. We were never ever supposed to go, but we did and they couldn't stop us. I have a child, I understand this now, the dangers, the way children cannot be stopped. It was 1966. 30 years later, police said they'd solved the case. A detail. A woman who'd been there at the scene suddenly remembered she knew its importance. Though decades had passed newspapers everywhere around the story, the murder of innocence. The monster caught at last, but just as suddenly the police released, the man dropped all charges one more randomness to go with corduroy, fedora and that weary, intelligible face. Thank you.

Speaker 7 (00:34:20):

Hi, I am honor Moore. I'm very happy to be here. I remember being on the earth at the same time as Maryelle Lacer. The name of the essay essay I'll read from is a window at Ella. I would not have written it had it not been for the Mad Mary Rock castle, so I'm very grateful to her. It begins with an epigraph from Lucer. They never die who have the future in them. A window it of Atella, which is an artist colony in Umbria in Italy. The year is 2010. After two hours of sleep, I wake up and remember I am in Italy and that I have jet lag. I had a cup of espresso at lunch and half a cup at dinner. When I accepted coffee at supper, I said yes, and I'm an idiot, but I wanted the taste. It is the middle of the night after my first day, a dozen of us in a castle in Umbria, writers, composers, and visual artists from all over the world, Columbia, Greece, Russia, Thailand, Norway, the United States.

Speaker 7 (00:35:33):

As always, I fear I will not be able to do what I have come to do. It is the fear I have lived with since I decided to do this and whenever it comes, I attach it to a particular situation in my life. Love, family, money, body. And then I remember this is what I do, how it begins. I am halfway through my 65th year. My parents are dead. I am single and childless. So much is changing. Tonight I could not remember the name of a monastery city in Russia. Al guest Dimitri, the painter from Moscow. Yes, I exclaimed, but I had forgotten the name of a place I had always remembered one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. As I tried to retrieve its name, I saw it white and far away, a square structure with towers myself walking along the muddy road as a young woman, the man I then lived with at my side.

Speaker 7 (00:36:34):

I pulled at its name but it would not come white. I finally said a monastery two. Every missed opportunity has poignance. Now looking at myself in the mirror, close up with the light at a certain angle I see chasms of age in my face. Human beings are in such denial about the lives of animals. Gabrielle, a young poet from Los Angeles says, what do you mean animals have such short lives? We also deny the brevity of our own lives. I say I am making a comparison of my face to the chasms of age in a landscape and I'm thinking of an afternoon in the rain in Sicily. It was March a year ago in cold. I was having my picture taken. I had been hired to write a travel piece for a magazine and a photographer was assigned. It is a cold day and I don't know who I am as I sit on a curved stone bleacher in an ancient theater and he looks at me through his camera.

Speaker 7 (00:37:43):

What does he see? He is a German man, 10 years younger than I am, and in spite of who we are and what our real lives are, we fall in love for a few days and now we'll have a coffee, he says, and we sit and have cappuccino. I've lost my camera so it is as if I never sat opposite him. There we woke at five to watch the moon recede and the reflection of sunrise on the pink ruins at Argento. I invented another story for those days, the story I had been assigned to write and so I have not told our story. We fell in love for a few days and after I got home we spoke on the phone twice and then we stopped calling each other. Even stopped writing emails in my life at home I was alone. His was with another woman and in another language, if I were to write the story, I would begin with our embrace at the car.

Speaker 7 (00:38:43):

The morning I left, we were alone outside the driver's side and for the first time he took me in his arms and pressed me against him because the part of me who was in love had already left. It took time to feel his body, to hear his voice break as he said, I don't know what to say and to feel desire. Then I actually did leave holding in my sense of loss. My sister was with me and the size of what I felt able to say to her could not accommodate the dimension of what I had felt those days with him. What I was feeling now, what was moving through me, which was another loss. I put my hands on the steering wheel and drove down the winding road from Tarina Mount Aetna, which had been in a shroud of clouds ever since we got here, was still hidden from view until now.

Speaker 7 (00:39:39):

I have not allowed my imagination to enter those days with him. It was an experiment. Maybe the pain would be less this time and so that landscape remained within me. The green hill behind the cold pink temple, the man with blonde hair who directed me where to stand and sit myself. Suddenly a woman so far inside herself, she could not be seen even as something within her begged to be seen to be seen by him. Three, we are a tribe, still a generation of women now in our sixties, some of us a few years older, we were born at the end of World War II and as we entered our twenties, we found each other and undertook to change the lives of women. Some of us thought about the lives of our mothers or of women other than ourselves. Others thought about our own lives.

Speaker 7 (00:40:36):

I remember hours in a dark apartment on Riverside Drive in the living room of a narrow house on 15th street with children running in and out, the tiny living room of a midtown, one bedroom. In these rooms we spoke as best we could, who we were, how we had grown up, who and how. We loved what we dreamed for our work, what we imagined for women, how all of this might begin to articulate a new politics, a new way of life. We organized to free women from prison to create daycare centers. We organized against the Vietnam War for the freedom of women to control our bodies. I remember that the women with children spoke as mothers and that the women without children, no matter how old they were, spoke his daughters, they seemed so sure of themselves. As I sat there listening, more silent than some of them fighting the hard truths we articulated.

Speaker 7 (00:41:35):

Something was pulling me toward who I have now become toward a life of writing and solitude. At the time there were those who considered my ambition self-indulgent. For a long time I considered the fact that I was financially able to make such a choice, a moral defect. Finally, I said out loud that I wanted to write and needed to change my life so I could do that. I said I would speak our truth through my writing. A woman named Jesse questioned me. Did I really intend to write? She made me promise you can't leave us. She said, unless you really write. It took me four years to publish my first poem.

Speaker 7 (00:42:24):

Six. It's Sunday and outside my window, swallow circle, brushing the thick foliage of the trees, just missing the brick of my turret, aged hundreds of years to the color of honey. Shot with cream beyond the trees is a green field, then a hedgerow, then a vast field marked in parallel lines by a plow and beyond the field, another hedgerow and then a mountain green with trees on its flank. Two mowed fields that look like scars. One a third of the way up the other at what if the mountain were a man would be his shoulder. I am listening, listening to the Goldberg Variations played with deliberate slowness but also lyricism by a young woman. And even though I have on earphones, I can hear the chatter of birds. The computer clock tells me two hours have passed, and so I go to the kitchen for coffee As I heat it, Gabrielle comes in, I am going to make iced coffee.

Speaker 7 (00:43:28):

She says, hot and cold. She is a poet younger than I, as young as my oldest nephew. Seven. Back at the window, I realize I have not mentioned red roofs and something that looks white, another roof at the foot of the mountain or that there is a fly quietly making its way along the mulian of the window in front of my desk. I am grieving the photographer and also my brothers and sisters, the ones who turned against me because of a book I wrote and I'm also grieving the brother who has gone mad. This is what happens when it is quiet and I am not yet writing what I once believed about the brothers and sisters, that it was all just a misunderstanding that it would dissolve because really we love each other has not been born out. I have been forced to accept my difference from them. If I were an actor asked to physicalize this, I would throw myself against a wall again and again until exhausted, I fell to the floor. There is blood, but they do not see the blood. The photographer had blonde hair to his shoulders and the brother who has gone mad chops at his own hair. Life remains outside my power, but art through its mysteries yields, if not understanding at least other mysteries and also help hope and also help and hope.

Speaker 7 (00:45:00):

Eight Last night I woke in a pool of sweat. I could see that the sun had not yet risen, and so I pushed the blanket partway off and went back to sleep. By the time the alarm sounded bach on my blackberry, I was no longer sweating and the room was cool. In my dream, I was with Kathy on a street in New York that was actually in Italy and I had forgotten to pay my rent. When I woke up, I was depressed and lonely and after I walked in circles for a while, there was a knock on the door. Oh, I'm sorry. It was the woman who cleans a woman from Eritrea, a beautiful young woman. I was just leaving. I lied. I'll wait. She said. I got myself ready to head to the kitchen and forge for breakfast. I found her and told her I had left my room.

Speaker 7 (00:45:53):

I was carrying my laptop. She was sweeping. And then I asked her name, lm, she said, and I told her I was honor. Do you like it here? She asked. I considered admitting that I was lonely, but thought better of it. She was about to clean the room in Italy, which I had been given for a month of writing. How dare I complain? Yes, it's so beautiful. I managed and then barely out of her hearing, I burst into tears and ran right into Gabrielle. Do you have a moment? I asked anything. She said, I tried unsuccessfully not to continue weeping. I don't know what it is I said, and I told her about deciding not to tell Elem I felt lonely. Do you want to walk to town? When I returned to my room to change my shoes, LMM was leaving me some things. I had asked for an extra pillow and a second bath towel. Are you all right? She asked. She had seen me crying. After all, thank you.

Speaker 8 (00:47:08):

I want to thank you for staying when your last name starts with Y, you get to go last a lot. And yesterday I went last on the panel and I decided to throw my paper out and instead I sort of made everyone stand up and did an art revival. I'm trying to resist that temptation. Now, Marielle Ser for me has always meant something huge in this way. And that is I never wanted to be rich and I never wanted to be famous in terms of being a writer. I wanted to hold the question of what is the labor of making art open and keep asking it my whole life. Like when you make art, if you're not doing it to be rich and you're not doing it to be famous, why are you doing it? And I think that's a question worth holding open for yourself rather than succumbing to an answer.

Speaker 8 (00:48:12):

That's easy. I'm really tired because that's the question of my life. Never answer it. I'm going to read the second half of an essay. I'll just tell you about the first half. I'll shorthand it. The opening of the essay starts out when my daughter died in the belly world of me, I became a writer, which is true. The day my daughter was born, she also died. And in an effort not to go insane, I became a writer. And so the first part of the essay tells a little bit of a story about that and it's about the kind of labor that came from grief, which I bet everyone in the room has some experience with. And it also carries a little bit of a micro story within it, which is one day my evil aunt sent me a box. My father was an abusive prick and yet he also taught me to love art. So I have a lot of these experiences in my life where somebody bad gave me something good. And so my evil aunt, who's my father, the prick sister, sent me a box out of the blue one day and for a week I didn't open the box. This is what's in the essay. So trust me, this is a faster version.

Speaker 8 (00:49:38):

And I opened the box. After about a week I kind of wanted to burn the box because fuck them, just evil family. But I opened the box and inside the box were many, many photographs, black and white photographs of my Lithuanian heritage and family. And I'd lived my whole life up until that point never really finding anyone in crowds who looks like this giant jaw and shoulders and little beaty blue eyes. I never felt like my kin were in the room until I opened this box and looked at the photos and they were so eastern European, they looked like they were born with plow hands, potato diggers. And also in the box was a series of articles about a relative of mine who had been one of my uncles and he'd been arrested and sent to a Siberian prison because he took a bunch of photos of an illegal massacre at a hospital and Russians came and found him and took all his camera and stuff and put him in a gulag for 17 years. And he got out after 17 years. He came home to my aunt who waited and waited and waited and loved and loved and loved him and had hidden all the photos and kept them. And he died a week later because life is awesome. The first part of the essay is that, okay, you got it.

Speaker 8 (00:51:18):

And the second half of the essay is about a woman who still haunts me, who's a friend I have who's almost 80 now, and she's a Lithuanian painter. And I've never been able to perfectly capture inwards what her paintings are. I've so not been able to capture it that I ended up writing a whole novel about it that's coming out in July. You should buy it. It's called The Small Backs of Children. But to me it's a failure of language that's beautiful that I can't capture what's in her paintings. It's a beautiful failure. It's my homage to her that I can't speak it. So halfway through, I know a woman named Manus who's a painter in Lithuania, though she travels to vies monthly for food to perhaps see an old friend or for supplies. She lives in a rural area with very few people, but there are many trees and many streams and many animals. So she's not alone. When I say Manus is a painter, you may wonder, well, where does she show her work? Where can I see her? What gallery? Have you seen her paintings? Is she on the internet? Can we friend her on Facebook? Can we click like will somebody make a tweet?

Speaker 8 (00:52:38):

But when I ask Manus about painting, she laughs and says, painting is the labor of dream. There isn't anything wrong with her English. Maus lives alone on a falling apart farm. In the past, the farm was a Soviet Russia work farm. And in the present, the farm simply houses her as both she and the buildings do. What women's bodies do, move away from children and family and scripted desires as the aches and pains and changes in bending and blood and bone, toughen and wrinkle flesh and hair like wood and weeds. Her paintings live in a barn that was used in the past for horses and cows and chickens and goats and machinery, and they rest stacked against one another in a great monuments to her dream labor, but haphazardly nothing like an American painter studio. More like history gone from the order of power to the chaos of ordinary wild flowers and rodents. The paintings smell like hay and dirt and wood more than turpentine and linseed oil. Sometimes the dirt and refuse perhaps even rodent insect shit probably gets into the paintings I know I've seen spiders caught there. Mid crawl becoming art history to speak to you about art in America. I have to bend language because to speak to you in art in America terms about Manus seems stupid or worse like a grave injustice. I can only speak to you about bodies. The body of her work is not an ooh.

Speaker 8 (00:54:25):

It is not the end product or output of her artistic production that you can put a monetary value on and catalog her work is her body. When I stand in front of one of her larger works, say six by 10, I feel inside river, inside rocks crumbling under the soles of my feet, the ice of the water traveling up the bones in my shins to my ribs and shoulders and skull. Or I feel moved by the wind and leaves and my body raising its hair and flesh toward the sky. And before I know it, I see that I've extended both of my arms out to the side of my body and close my eyes and rock my head back as if to say yes in the painting or I feel turn literally by the colors of fall leaves in that moment before the deep hues of gold and red and brown and purple dere into winter's dead detritus In these paintings, I don't feel out here, up against the painting. I feel the painting is in my body.

Speaker 8 (00:55:36):

So when people ask me about Manus, I say, I know a woman artist in Lithuania who fed her children on dirt and roots and potatoes and weeds and the milk from a cow and a goat and rainwater for years. And still they grew. I say she loved her husband so much, she carved his name on her own belly with a knife and the pulp of wild raspberries turned it into a tattoo. There's no story of this woman of what happened to her or how she came to be a painter or an artist. There's no news that carries her name. I can't point to something that will show you how important her work is. If a painter is a painter, are they always a painter? If a painter has no gallery or critic to write her name, is she still a painter? Is a painter a painter?

Speaker 8 (00:56:28):

If no one will ever know how art came alive in her hands, how painting day after day in labor no one ever saw was hers? Why should anyone give a shit how grief birthed her art? What is a work of art? Do we toil differently? Me with my domestic and capitalistic trials and tribulations and manus with her chickens laying eggs or the ones that try to leg eggs but hatched deformed things, Chernobyl in her past, something you can hold in the palm of your hand. Her farm gone to seed her family like a supernova Flash. Manus trades me paintings for stories. She tells me in a letter, many thanks for your stories. They keep me. I'm alive of them. There's nothing wrong with her English. Lithuanians Latvian Estonians were rural people for centuries, their largest cities inhabited by other ethnic groups. The lyrics of their folk songs ring and rise with forests and mushrooms and animals and Azure shimmering lakes. But I don't think you've heard them. Most Americans don't know how to picture the city dwellers in viness stuffed as they are with their big boned and thick muscle bodies in concrete apartments as the heat turns them into ovens in the summer and cold cells in the winter. And yet they're laughing and happy together as families.

Speaker 8 (00:57:59):

Manus tells me about saunas this new invention. Saunas. A Lithuanian sauna is a mixture of Russian traditions and a kind of Finnish comfort. The bath houses are usually two story wooden houses with a sauna cabin on the first floor, rooms on the second and a pond to jump in right after the sweat. Manus tells me how to fill a day with fishing and lakes. So cold and blue, you can see the underworld of water life, how to ride horses across land, knuckled with rounded hills and through birch and pine forests. And in the evenings over this new thing called email. Manus tells me over and over again how her entire family was blown to bits, husband, son, daughter in front of her eyes while she held a basket of kindling for the fire. Her hair blowing back away from her face and the skin around her eyes and mouth pinching with heat. And each time she tells it to me, it's the first time Mena says, oh, well I became painter to live.

Speaker 8 (00:59:14):

But I think maybe it's simpler her becoming, I think it's a choice to face not staying alive with expression and labor and body. She's out there right now making new forms without any of us. Trauma brought me to the page. Years ago when Manus learned that my daughter had died in the belly of me. She said, ah, then you are down at the bottom of the water. Now it's good. See, you can walk the deep. That is why you hear. Can you see me? Possibly the most perfect sentences. Anyone anywhere has ever said to me, she is beautiful and terrible all at once. And I'm looking at a photo of her painting right now, and it's black and blue and as big as the wall of a house. Maybe it's the bottom of the water, maybe it's mauss lost family in there floating or walking the depths. And maybe too many beautiful dead daughters are down there with her like mine. I must remember to push on the sentences until they break open and reveal our otherness to each other. I must remember to be a body that generates new ways of seeing and saying that's the labor of art, a woman's body and labor without apology. This language held by the white.

Speaker 8 (01:00:43):

My daughter's name was Lily. Thanks.

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):

We have quite a few present and former members of our Waterstone review editorial board here. And one of the things we talk about with the different editors, whether it's fiction, poetry or creative non-fiction, is when you go through all the elements of the craft and you put your litmus test up, does it do this? Does it do this? Does it do this? Does it do this? Does it do this? And so all of those things have been met. The beauty of the writing, the structure, the form, the voice, et cetera. And then in the end we say, so what is it really about? And does it matter? And of course, that's a subjective question and answer because matter to whom? Well, how many of you does it matter to? And one of the beautiful things about this essay is that every single essay has been beautifully written because we ask really fine writers to write them.

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):

And in the end when we get them that, so what question just kind of sings because they are about material that really matters. Wide ranging material that's distinctive and original to each of the writers, but that really matters. And so I want to say thank you for your work and you see what the Mariella Soar spirit has created in Waterstone review. I am going to open this up for questions, but I realized when I was sitting there that I never said who I was. And so thank you to honor more for saying the Mad Mary Rockcastle, which I will now put on my tombstone and can be buried with it as long as my vacuum cleaner is with me, which is what my children say has to go with me. I am Mary Rockcastle and I'm the founding editor of Waterstone Review. And just must say how much pleasure and a feeling of gratitude I feel and the other editors feel when we get these essays. And that although it comes across as something that you read with your eyes as a piece of text, by the time it's done and we've held it and felt it and edited it, it is an object that it feels like has gone sifting through our hands because we have loved and looked at and treasured every word. So if you have any questions about the essay to the individual writers, now's your time.

Speaker 2 (01:03:38):

Yes. So the question, if I can hopefully honor it in paraphrase, is when you're writing about grief and trauma, how do you do that in a way that's honest, but that also can take care of yourself? So you get the experience on the page, but at the same time you have to cushion the writer against the blows that you're putting on the page. So I will open that up to

Speaker 7 (01:04:10):

You mean cushion the reader or the writer?

Speaker 2 (01:04:12):

I think

Speaker 8 (01:04:15):

Both more about

Speaker 7 (01:04:16):

The writer. Oh, as a writer. Well, all I can say is that I almost always go to that horribly frightened place when I begin to write. And somehow what happens in the process of writing is it becomes other than me. And it returns to kind of embrace me and hold me safe because, well, this is what I've learned over years of having some readers and also getting fast readers by giving readings. Is that just that I am protected by it?

Speaker 8 (