(Debra Dean, Matthew Frank, Gregory Pardlo, Jennifer Pashley, Georgia Popoff) Since January 2001, the YMCA's Downtown Writers Center in Syracuse, New York, has been the Central New York State region's only community center for the literary arts. In its first 15 years, nearly 400 authors have read at the DWC, and thousands of students have honed their craft at the DWC's extensive creative writing workshop series. This panel of program staff and faculty, former students, and guest authors explores and celebrates the DWC's wide-reaching impact on the literary arts in the CNY region.

Published Date: August 31, 2016

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2016 A W P conference in Los Angeles. The recording features Deborah Dean, Matthew Frank, Gregory Parlow, Jennifer Paley, and Georgia Popoff. You will now hear Georgia Popoff provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:32):

Good morning everyone. Welcome. I'm Georgia Popoff, workshops coordinator at the Downtown Writer Center and faculty members since when we opened 15 years ago and I'm moderating this wonderful panel with dear friends, Deborah Kang, Dean Matthew Gavin, Frank Gregory Parlow, and Jennifer Pashley. Downtown Writer Center is part of the vision of the late Jason Shinder with the Writer's Voice Centers. When he saw that wellness was more than physical wellness within the Y M C A network, he was able to institute writer's, voice centers all over the country. And when we started 15 plus years ago, we were one of about 35 writers voice centers and we are now one of the three left in the country and the most thriving. Our director Phil Meer, is over in the corner and the first thing I want to do is say, Philip, you have done an amazing job of shepherding this program from the ground up and it's been my joy to be by your side in doing that.

Speaker 2 (00:01:38):

But Phil's gone from being a young man with an M F A, having worked at borders in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to now a father of two executive director of the Y Arts branch of our network of wise in upstate New York, which means he administers programs in the arts. He has five afterschool programs. We have art studios in each of our two main branches, music lessons, dance lessons, complete Arts Infusion within our Y entity, but the Downtown Writer Center is the core of it and in his heart, the strongest part. I'm going to give you a little bit of our history. In our 15 years, we have invited more than 300 writers to read for us, four of whom are sitting here now in the economics which are often overlooked in regards to the arts and certainly with writers, we have paid more than $150,000 in artist fees to visiting writers, and we have paid more than $250,000 to our faculty teaching the arts in our small community setting.

Speaker 2 (00:02:50):

We have had the pleasure of five Pulitzer Prize winners, Claudia Emerson, Tracy k Smith, several months before he found out Greg and also WD Snodgrass, and when Dee read for us, it was his last reading of his life. About six weeks later we lost him. We have also had the Pulitzer Prize winners and then Poets Laureate, Ted Zer and Charles Simmick. We've hosted their visits to Central New York. We have had in collaboration with another organization, the Friends of Central Library, which has a huge reading series every year, the Roseman Gifford series. We've had very intimate conversations with Wss Merwin, Jennifer Egan, Jeffrey Eugen, and it looks like we are going to have one with George Saunders who's a good friend of our program. We've collaborated with Syracuse University for an annual event called Syracuse Symposium for the last five years, which allowed us to feature Ilia Kaminsky, Steven Custo, Dorian Lux Cornelius, Edie BH Fairchild, Martha Collins Mini, Bruce Pratt and Brian Turner who has also read for us independently.

Speaker 2 (00:04:05):

We started with about 15 to 20 classes a year. We now have at least 40 a year. We have four seasons of classes, 16 a week, and they run approximately eight weeks for our adult program in the last four or five years. That means we've had 60 to 75 classes for adults in all the major genres of writing. We also have a program that is modeled on an M F A program called our DWC Pro Certification program in fiction, nonfiction and poetry where writers who don't necessarily need to go to a low residency program but want to do that rigor to move towards a book can work with us at a fraction of the cost. We have been hosting an annual retreat in August every year called August occasion, and many people have come to read for that. We have instituted an area C N Y book awards for an eight county region of Central New York where we honor fiction, non-fiction and poetry books produced in the year before with awards and lots of accolade.

Speaker 2 (00:05:13):

And then true to my heart is our Young Authors Academy for middle and high school students where we are training students. This is not a theme driven program. This is an academy of the craft of writing in fiction and poetry, predominantly playwriting. They've done comics, they're right now doing digital storytelling and we're introducing a spoken word component and a songwriting component in the fall, and we have approximately 35 students there with an incredibly diverse population of young people. Culturally, we have homeschool kids, we have kids from the suburbs, kids from the inner city. We have young people on the autism spectrum. We have kids who are identifying as queer and they all have one thing in common. They are writers and they are right now doing it as we are sitting here. They're workshopping in Syracuse while I'm here. My babies are working hard and we also, a big strength of our program is our collaboration and community.

Speaker 2 (00:06:11):

We are collaborating with Nine Mile Magazine for a podcast that Phil and I have been enjoying conversations and they're online, it's called Talk About Poetry, and we've had conversations among ourselves with Steve Custo and Bob Hers, our partners in poetry, and we've had great conversations with Ku Ali Lonna about Gwendolyn Brooks. I like to call him my poetry granddaddy, Marvin Bell, Jasmine Bailey, and some other people coming up and you can access those online. We are leaders in the arts and ed community and have been working in that realm for 20 years and we collaborate with many of our area cultural organizations for events and also in advocacy for the arts in our community. So when you think about the fact that there's great access in larger urban populations within a city the size of Syracuse, which is probably about 180,000 people surrounded by a lot of suburbs and then a rural area, our reach is probably 50 to 75 miles for students for our free readings on Friday nights that are 25 readers a year.

Speaker 2 (00:07:18):

And we have an incredible agency within the community of cultural organizations for what we're bringing and what we offer to writers and to listeners of the literary arts. So it's my honor today to share this news with you and then introduce my friends who are reading with us where I'm going to introduce each of them with their professional bios right now and then I'll say something before they each read. The first of our readers will be Deborah Kine to my left. She's the author of two full length collections of poetry from BOA editions, a chapbook of collaborative poetry and two prize-winning chapbooks, the most recent of which is Fugitive Blues. Her poems have appeared in many journals in a number of anthologies, including Bamboo Ridge, the best American poetry verse Daily in the Writer's Almanac. Her essays have most recently appeared in the expanded edition of The Colors of Nature Culture Identity in the Natural World, and until everything is continuous again, American poets on the recent work of WSS Merwin, she teaches in the low residency M F A in writing program at Spalding University and she's a marvelous, marvelous writer To my far right, Matthew Gavin Frank, he's the author of the nonfiction books, the Mad Feast and Ecstatic Tour through America's Food Preparing the Ghost, an essay concerning the Giant Squid and its first photographer Pot Farm.

Speaker 2 (00:08:47):

My favorite and Barolo, his poetry books are the Marrow Plots Warranty in Zulu and Sagittarius Agi prop and he has two chapbooks and then Preparing the Ghost was featured on the cover of the New York Times book review as well as in the Wall Street Journal, vanity Fair in the Los Angeles review of books. It was one of flavor wires most read books in July, New York Times Editor's Choice, an N P R, notable book and Shelf awareness best book of 2014 and one of the New Yorker books to watch for the Mad Feast was recently chosen as the best book of the year by Plowshares and was a staff pick at the Paris Review. His work can be found in the New Republic creative nonfiction salon Epic, the normal school Prairie schooner and elsewhere. He teaches in Northern Michigan University where he's the nonfiction editor of Passages North This winter he tempered his gin with two droplets, 750 milliliters of tincture of Odiferous Whitefish liver for health. He is a prolific and wonderful writer next to him, my dear friend, Gregory Barlow's, collection Digest, which came out with four way books, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and kind of changed your life a little bit.

Speaker 2 (00:10:09):

Digest was also shortlisted for the 2015 NAACP Image Award and was a finalist for the Hurst and Wright Legacy Award. His other honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His first collection Totem was selected by Brenda Hillman for the American Poetry Review M Prize in 2007. He's also the author of Air Traffic, a memoir of essays forthcoming from Knauf in 2017 or early 18. He joins the faculty of the M F A program in creative writing at Rutgers University Camden in the fall of 2016, currently living in Brooklyn and another person who just is doing as much as he possibly can in any given moment. Jennifer Paley is the author of three books, two collections of short stories states in the RE and her novel. The Scamp was released in 2015 from Tim House Books and amazing novel, very compelling.

Speaker 2 (00:11:05):

Her writing has appeared widely in journals including the Mississippi Review, pan Smoke, long Wing Leaf and Stone Canoe. Her awards include Mississippi Review Prize in 2009, the Redhead Prize for fiction in 2005 and the Carve Magazine Esoteric award for L G B T Q Fiction in 2012. She lives in upstate New York and will try to kiss your dog. She will definitely try to kiss your dog. If there is time left, I will share some poems. I have three books of poetry in print coaxing nectar from Longing from Hail Mary Press, the Doom Weaver from Main Street Rag and most recently from Tiger Bark Press, Salter, the agnostics book of common Curiosities. I also co-authored a book with Ali Lonna for teachers on teaching poetry in K 12 classrooms and community-based organizations. It's called Our Difficult Sunlight, A Guide to Poetry, literacy and Social Justice in Classroom and Community From Teachers and Writers Collaborative, which was also a finalist for an NAACP image award. So if there's time I'll share some poems as well. So to get us started with our readings, we're going to invite Debra Kang, Dean to the microphone. Debra was one of our instructors in our first residential August occasion. She's read first often and there's a gentleness and a strength that combine in a beautiful trunk that creates a tree with branches that just envelop us in an umbrella of language and gentility joy in nature. Our friend Deborah Kde,

Speaker 3 (00:12:48):

I'm going to be reading fast because I couldn't figure out where to cut and I gave this a little title, so they're poems put in with comments and I gave it a title to give you some idea of what I'm doing. One poet's way of making sense of where community and culture collide, and I'm embedding definitions in here. I hope the diction makes it clear that I've done that. The word community faces in two directions. On the one hand it binds people together through a locality and on the other it does so through cultural, religious, ethnic, or other characteristics in common. So in one respect for someone like me to enter a space like the YMCA's Downtown Writer's Center as a guest in the reading series in 2004 and as a workshop facilitator during the August occasion in the Finger Lakes region in 2008 is to enter a space with the potential for collisions between insiders and outsiders at the same time.

Speaker 3 (00:13:53):

It speaks to the value of spaces that exist outside Acade, thus creating for both writer and the writer reader a more expansive sense of the community of poetry writers and potential readers. The definition of the word collide involves the idea of a striking together sometimes violently. It makes a sound. Right now the world is full of noise and recently what started as an experiment ended up as a response. This is called everybody's talking. I can't hear you. You don't say, okay, everybody, you talking to me? Okay, everybody just don't say you talking to me. I can't hear you. Don't say so. Okay everybody, I'm not hearing you talking, you talking to me. Okay, everybody I can't hear. Please don't say speak for yourself. Don't say it. Okay. Anybody? Can you hear me? Please don't. Don't talk to me. I can't nod everybody. I can't hear, I can't hear you all talking at once.

Speaker 3 (00:15:08):

What did you say? Okay. Okay, everyone, I want to hear you. Let's talk 1, 2, 1 by one say you will. Inside the word collide is the word Ari meaning to injure by striking like the word community. The word injure has an outside and an inside in that it can suggest both physical and mental suffering. An inside injure to do an injustice to dishonor is the root word of justice which points toward the word culture, which means literally the tilling of land and figuratively care. Concern in honoring the question of what land I till as a writer has been a very vexing one and so to the question of two and for whom I speak though I've been away from it for 42 years in my heart of hearts, ultimately I feel that Hawaii is my home. I grew up on the slopes of punchbowl, the National Memorial Cemetery, the Pacific, a place where a specific locality and a national identity merge.

Speaker 3 (00:16:26):

I wrote the following poem in the aftermath of my husband's death in 2006. I find it sort of ironic that having to teach and so to study Asian American history, I was repelled to think about my life in the continental United States as an American of Asian ancestry rather than just as someone from Hawaii. This is called punchbowl. The light that puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Henry David Thau here in this theater under the stars, Ernie Pys marked grave is only one among a thousand others, simply marked unknown, but long before they were all killed along the Pacific rim, another drama unfolded, oblique reminder of what seems the uncurable law something must die that others might live. Here was the place of sacrifice. The bodies of lawbreakers drowned below in a pond born up to the crater and placed on a stone slab, some left alone, some reduced to ash and bone that the family gathered up and carried home.

Speaker 3 (00:17:39):

On a slope of this crater, I saw the after effect of slaughter on a small scale. Some mongoose or astray had found its way into my brother's pigeon coop and scattered the flock that never came back. Memory blinks and the smell of pigeon shit. Blood is conjured up, the featherless skin of hatchlings turning rubbery where they hung on perches or fell the road to the now locked gate branches off to homestead land so-called so we can forget the place. They say the crater's extinct, the pacific plate grinding steadily northward, but who can really know or see for sure what stirs under the surface. The inexorable blah of bodies tells us no two can occupy the same space. Some must leave that others might live. Go back where you came from but there's no there there to return to. Tonight I have climbed from my father's house up over the rim and descended into the crater to lie sober among the dead.

Speaker 3 (00:18:54):

This glimpse of the past, it's like looking at stars. Once you know what you're seeing, the hour of innocence is passed. The light of dying stars puts out our eyes again and again in the dark we stumble, we stumble and fall, and yet as if certain we know where we are, we get up. In addition to creating sound collisions, also release energy. In the mid nineties at a conference for unsettling America, a contemporary anthology of multicultural poetry at a high school gym in Patterson, New Jersey, a student stood up after a reading by one of the poets and asked, why do you hate us so much? The poet said, pointing at the student, I don't have to take that from you. Turned on her heel and returned to her seat on the stage. As you might imagine, it was very quiet. As the next reader stepped out to the podium, I like to think of myself as an ambassador.

Speaker 3 (00:20:04):

He began and then he read his poems. I have been both of them though not in such public ways. Looking at collide and lie led me to LA and laden, which has to do with burden and encumbrance and depression. And one thread unique to English also leads to the idea of drawing water. The community of poetry is an imagined one. Sometimes it is given a local habitation in a name like the YMCA's Downtown Writer's Center, a place to draw water from the living in this world on rare occasions. Now when I'm asked to give a reading, I often think of basho traveling long distances on foot to lead Hai Kai Noa parties. There was a host who underwrote the event and there were other guests from the community who would learn by writing with bacho and perhaps for bacho after an often arduous journey, a place to rest and also respite from in his case the city.

Speaker 3 (00:21:17):

My participation in events sponsored by the Y M C's Downtown writer Center framed my husband's death. I traveled there first with him and then without him. I'm particularly grateful for the invitation to the August occasion because it was so unexpected, a hand reaching out to one flailing in a crisis of poetic faith, magnified by death. There I met Georgia and Jennifer and also spent time with Steve Huff who was at the time the editor at boa. I wanted to say about Steve and about this experience in general and that I was given to the room to be who I am and also to keep growing and it remains the spirit in which I keep writing. I also want to thank Phil for creating the space today in Georgia for moderating and thank you all for being here and listening. And I'm going to conclude with one poem which I wrote about taking walks with my father-in-law after my husband died.

Speaker 3 (00:22:25):

My father-in-law was one of those men, he was easy to respect but not so easy to love. So this is called Juniper. Three days after the Equinox here by a window again reading Eternity's Woods because a friend asked me to though with my somber face resembling hope, it isn't a river and distant hills I see, but three pines, bare branches of deciduous trees and one crow in a wash of undivided blue. Two days it had rained and so it isn't hard to figure out why only one bear tree a little sheltered by a pine is deeply tinged with a leaf buds coral outside the window, a stop sign and farther out across the parking lot, the stars and stripes measured by the wind. Once I believed in the permanence of mountains, a wild horse against which a man might test himself. Now I know how fragile they are now.

Speaker 3 (00:23:30):

We break, we blast them for vain of coal last week flying into the springs, the sight of snowcap peaks and there it was from deep within me that audible in drawn breath and the silence one hears afterwards and the seemingly inconsolable child a chance encountered drawing her back. The next day, Fred and I would walk the rim rock of the outcropping I stared and stared at from the kitchen window. It was that close out past the oil rigs and platforms passed tires and plastic bottles, the a t v tracks and makeshift campsite draped in a sheet we walked. The first time the trail drops steeply, he said, walk like a duck. Short, wide steps to slow you down. I'd heard it before falling in behind him I saw evidence of the stroke, how he lifted his right foot toe close to the ground for a moment before the heel touched down as a dog or coyote might.

Speaker 3 (00:24:40):

Here was this esplanade of wind and cliff edge carved by water where he told me Rocko's nest, where Jays might fly from tree to scrubby tree as if to light his walk when pointing, I asked, he gave me a name, strawberry cactus. He bent a little to break off juniper needles, rubbing them between his palms, then lifting his cupped hands up to my face as if holding a bird he'd plucked from the air out here he said in this high desert by reason of water, of wind and soil, no to give off exactly the same sound there the air so clear unaided he could hear and speak beyond the krab masculinity of what he has been warrior and hunter country, son of the ravaged city of Flint, father of the men I loved who now living among the dead yet walks between us when the trail levels sometimes holding our hands even with all the stories I've heard, what do I really know of where they have been? Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:26:05):

Thank you Deborah. Before I introduce Matthew Gavin Frank, I did leave something really important out which is Downtown Writers Center has now been doing some publishing. We have an anthology called Hopeful Grateful Strong, which are survivor stories that grew out of a workshop for people who have survived cancer to thrive and share their experience. Our young authors Academy produced a book called The Library of Lost Thoughts and Anthology of Their Own Work and most importantly is we have adopted the Arts Journal, stone Canoe and stop and see fill afterwards for your own free copy. It's a beautiful anthology that comes out every year of visual and literary arts and we have an online moving images component as well and it publishes work by artists who have ties to upstate New York. So please be sure to get a copy before you leave. Our next panelist is Matthew Gavin Frank, who taught me in the world of nonfiction that you're actually having a conversation with a reader, not necessarily talking at them, and it's changed how I look at language and I've also constantly been amused by Matthew as well as impressed by what an incredible writer he is and the fact that it is possible to be equally competent in fiction and nonfiction.

Speaker 2 (00:27:28):

And so I've taken up the gauntlet because my two friends have done the same. Matthew Gavin, Frank,

Speaker 4 (00:27:41):

Thank you so much Georgia. Thank you so much Phil. Thank you so much for Deborah for that. That was beautiful. It's such an honor to share the stage with you all. I spent most of my work life in restaurant kitchens. I had my first job when I was 11, washing dishes in a fast food chicken shack on the outskirts of Chicago and just kind of stayed in it on and off for the next 18 or so years. Eventually, I mean if you can even apply this to the restaurant industry, I climbed the ladder and cracked the fine dining world, which meant I was now lucky enough to work 19 hour shifts in a very militaristic sort of construct. However, occasionally tasty. I remember in restaurant kitchens at that level, the chefs would oftentimes challenge each other to take two or more seemingly dissimilar ingredients and then try to find a third ingredient that would perfectly bridge the original two.

Speaker 4 (00:28:46):

For instance, soused lamb loin and burnt orange R go. The answer was black olive sorbet. That was the perfect bridge ingredient that was mine. I'm telling you it was delicious. It went on the menu for a week and things I feel as if I'm pulling from a similar imaginative alchemy when I write both poetry and non-fiction to that I gleaned from that time in my life taking two or more seemingly dissimilar bits of information and then laboring through sufficient research and imaginative alchemy to uncover that perfect bridge ingredient. But I didn't know that then. And I remember when a bunch of us chefs would go out to drink in order to unwind after a long shift at one bar or another. Eventually the conversation turned to, so what do you like to do when you're not cooking? Because cooking was seemingly all encompassing for all of us at that time, and I remember I said, I like to write poems, and that was a fabulous conversation killer and that made me sad.

Speaker 4 (00:29:57):

And that moment, however frivolous it seemed at the time something in me shifted and I was really hungering for this sense of community. I wanted some sort of cloister within the larger community in which I could talk to some like-minded people about some of these concerns and hash out what I was beginning to perceive as some kind of however hazy but essential dialogue. And the downtown writer center certainly provides that for its community. I wish I had something like that in Chicago at the time. I ended up running to an M F A program seeking out precisely that sort of thing and I just adore how the downtown writer center provides that essential alternative to that construct. I'm going to read a short essay. As George said, I do see the essay in nonfiction as part of a larger conversation. My least favorite essays are the ones that tend to presume certainty. I see the duty of the essay is more grappling toward something that the author may likely be misperceiving as certainty. And I like to journey along with the author on that grappling. This is an essay called A Brief Atmospheric Future and strangely pigeons and rock Tubs showed up in your work of this is in part about pigeons.

Speaker 4 (00:31:23):

If we're to believe the neuroscientist Marcus Pembury from University College London who concluded that behavior can be affected by events in previous generations which have been passed on through a form of genetic memory, phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders, even a sensitivity to a cherry blossom scent, then the pigeon nose of its ancestors lives as Genghis Khan's messengers as carriers of tepo sultan's poetry, silk plantation blueprints and schematics for the advancement of rocket artillery. The pigeon knows that it was once used to announce the winners of the Olympics, the beginnings and ends of wars that Paul Reuter founder of the Reuters press agency compelled its progenitors to transport information about stock prices from one telegraph line terminus to another that apothecaries depended on them for the delivery of medicine that rival armies trained hawks to eviscerate the pigeons of their enemies, causing a communication breakdown that we've given to them, our voices that we've made of their bodies, the earliest and most organic of radio waves, that when we place our faith in the tenacity of the carrier pigeon, our lives and our loves and our heartaches and our deaths can float above us.

Speaker 4 (00:32:58):

And the most important parts of our self narratives are on air. I nose deeply into the feathers of my pillow, know that a feather stripped the barbs is bone, the code of the body, the positioning system and the synapses, the electric impulses, the capillaries, the heart. My wife takes another pain pill and says something about trying again in the new year that some couples like her sister-in-law and brother successfully conceive only after losing a half dozen and when they're like us in their low forties, like all of us, the pigeon roosting in our eaves knows something but does not know how. It knows it. The bird does not even coup. The bird, in fact shows no outward signs of pleasure or affection at all. The carrier pigeon's. Life is one of servitude and thereby mutilation of flight. Girdled trainers have designed tiny backpacks fitted to the pigeon's bodies and filled with anything from confidential blueprints for spacecraft meant to land on Mars to heroin, meant for prison inmates to declarations of love and war to blood samples to heart tissue, to diamonds, anything we secretly desire or desire to keep secret, our underbellies, our interior lives, our fetishes, our wishes, some clandestine network mapping ethnographically, the diagrams and fluctuations of our IDs tied to bird backs and bird feet twining the air above us.

Speaker 4 (00:34:57):

The air we're so busy trying to dominate, bring down to our level. Perhaps it's not God or God who has the answers to our seemingly unanswerable questions about ourselves, but the loaded up pigeons, some of whom in a crisis of weight will randomly land offer us a clue into the circulatory map of all the things we wish to hide from the rest of our race. The pigeons slither along shafts of air shafts within shafts, wormholes. They don't eat worms so much as french fries, pretzel salt. Hand me down. Popcorn anatomy dictates when the pigeon steps forward its head for just a moment is briefly left behind. There's something buried both in their little backpacks and their anatomy, diamonds, blood samples, bloodlines codes. They aim to deliver all of these things to our waiting hands. My wife and I sit up in bed, stretch our hands out in front of us, fingers splayed.

Speaker 4 (00:36:16):

We do these exercises together to increase as the ob g y n said, blood flow to decrease the chance of her cramping in sleep. Our hands enjoying a brief atmospheric future waiting for the rest of our bodies to catch up. Our hands are the empty nests, the egg list zeroes, reding only because our hearts are beating with so many old sadnesses we are ever circling our losses, trying to find the way into them so we can find the way out. Always getting over, always recovering. We need salve medicine and diamonds. We need to convince ourselves that we are strong enough to carry the weight of a pigeon. They're soft. 9.3 to 13.4 ounce bodies. They come to us as we've trained them to do. They have popcorn skins in their throats, ketchup in their feathers. We've trained them well and they slither in the air above us recalling their serpentine ancestors, counting the seconds until they can land. Thanks.

Speaker 2 (00:37:44):

I'll never look at them the same way. Thank you. Oh, I love when people put poetry into their prose. It's great. Gregory Parlow is someone that I think of as organically infused in every cell as a scholar, not a head scholar, like a cellular scholar. His brain works in ways that I just marvel at and I kind of have a smart brain but nothing like Greg and then his urgency to turn it into language, beautiful language that when I read it, I'm a better writer my dear friend Gregory.

Speaker 5 (00:38:28):

Thank you Georgia. Hey Phil, thanks a lot. So in I guess it was like 2008, my first had just come out. I was on the board of the Frost place and I rented a car with money that I had gotten or that I was expecting to get from a gig at the Y. And so I rented a car, went up to the Dartmouth area where the board meeting was and slept over in another board member's house. Then drove across to Syracuse where I was reading at the Y and slept in Georgia's house where Georgia had made dinner and gathered a bunch of writers from the community to come to dinner. And this was just the most amazingly glamorous thing I ever experienced. There's an analogy that comes to mind during segregation, black musicians would travel to a very specific circuit of venues that would put them on and this was called the Chitlin circuit and I was thinking this is poetry chitlin circuit, this is the grassroots, this is the network that keeps this stuff circulating.

Speaker 5 (00:39:53):

It keeps us moving and connected. So it is more than the front lines, the Downtown Writer's center, it's people and we think about these things as institutions and certainly they are very necessary institutions, but it's flesh and blood, friends and community and people. So I really appreciate the why. I'm going to read just a few poems. I want to start with since the two times I read there was just as each book came out, so one from the first book, this is Restoring O'Keefe. So George O'Keefe, she and Alfred Stig had a home off of Lake George and their friend Jean Tuber at the time was translating work of this mystic philosopher named Ger George iff. O'Keefe was recovering from one of her breakdowns at this vacation home and Stig suggested that Gene tum, while he's doing these translations, could also use the house. And that was a convenient meeting place as it turned out. It's called Restoring O'Keefe, something of a cure Lay in that rustic lodge, clear exhaust off Lake George Winter ticking and tagos across the pan and gene tumor tapping on his underwood in the guest room upstairs all week she shared with him her soups and the baskets arrived from New York, remarked the nub of the citrus fruit against his hesitating palm, his Tawny raceless hand,

Speaker 5 (00:41:39):

Whether he leaked GIF's, freedom of love into the frond of her ear or Georgia had the servant tincture a remedy with the herb used to seduce. She pulled together one night with a calvados in the sniffer like a handful of flame and Santa Fe whistling through her mind like a desert train, Tony Earth and the electable sky. She thought though the window held a power of snow and moon crusted to the clearing beyond a grid of gaslight cold hushing, the cantor of Harlem alighting his orbit with hers. You have a feminine soul, she said pooling his face in her hands, measuring his eyes against a gray scale of sexuality. She held his head to her skirted hip cleft of peach he said with his hands at the small of her back. So I'm going to read a couple this project, I'm trying to find the language for describing the poems that I'm constantly revising it, but I think the new way I'm thinking about them is as inverse epigraphs. So in other words that the epigraphs serve as prompts for the poems. Aquinas the mover gives what he has to the one who was moved in that it causes him to be in motion.

Speaker 5 (00:43:19):

Jumping often refers to something you'd rather not get involved in, but when you've left the parking lights on overnight, a jump can mean the difference between being employed and not worse than having to buy a swipe from a stranger on the bus is having to flag a neighbor for a jump. People willing to defibrillate flat lining cars on ice scraper mornings are like organ donors and subway heroes. For karma like that, you need a Winnebago covered with solar panels sprouting a fountain of jumper cables so you can spend your day suckling weary vehicles like an electric wet nurse. By your example, thugs would soon measure their cred by a tattooed lightning bolt under the eye to symbolize each battery they have sprung back to life. Soon gangs will jump in, initiates one toothy clamp at a time, and civilians will jump all over each other with reciprocal gifts and hugs. Finding power where power is given a residual lifting of the spirits in the act.

Speaker 5 (00:44:31):

Ham, every body has an impetus which allows it to continue to move. Being moved is passing from potential to the act. You often size up the random demographic holiday traffic makes, hoping to see yourself inside a picture bigger than the neighborhood, but the knots of cars strung in rows like ink and pu ordain your destination for they script your possibilities in the Nielsen lingo abstracted from ad copy instead of the tangible planet. So who is really driving the soap box? You find transporting your thoughts while you inch the highway like the Pope's bubble. Mobile lines at the toll plaza are a poem where you idle in this way mindless as sunny corleone. Every procession ends in a funeral. Think of the chain gang of reindeer and the tiny hands making toys in Santas MLAs. Will you spend the whole poem reading bumpers and vanity plates concerned how they outpace you? At the end of this poem full of furtive glances, will you count yourself among the seers or the scene? No one sees you sleeping but your wife and for her you thought of nothing. Look how little you give of yourself, how little of yourself you've been given.

Speaker 5 (00:46:08):

And one more gas alo ergo sum, we labor to maintain them in the macadam fields around pep boys where legs dangle from the mall of Upraised hoods like tail fins draping a pelican's beak. We can say about cars, what Jefferson said about slavery when seeking pity for his hardships. It's like holding a wolf by the ears. He said, talk about awkward. Yet it's for domesticating horses that he charges Europeans with the degeneracy of the human body. Perhaps we are all like him, exhausted by our compulsion to be free from carrying our weight human to heap our load on some other burdensome body we've subordinated to our sloth. I who could go on schlepping the lanes flanking Eastern Parkway beneath plane trees as trumpets from dollar vans below. Dixie Few haven't caved to the run Againsts dream of those chariots come to carry us home. Hasidim fill the streets on Saturdays with Ambling demonstrations of civil resistance. James Meredith trot a shoulder in Mississippi to be free and we may all one day go pan like marching transported by the rapturous clopping of the only two hooves we can master. Thank you

Speaker 2 (00:47:44):

Jennifer Pashley. First of all, she understands humans in a way without judgment, no matter their circumstance and helps us to understand humans that way as well. And as a craftsperson, she uses the same deliberation for every word in a manner that is usually attributed to poets, but rightfully so, fiction writers do the same and she proves that regularly. She's now going to share from her newest book The Scamp, Jennifer Pashley.

Speaker 6 (00:48:26):

Thanks Georgia and thanks Phil. And I just want to say that Georgia's introductions for all of us were really wonderful and don't be fooled, she is the woman running the show. Her introduction of herself was very humble, but if anyone's pedaling this bike, it's Georgia.

Speaker 6 (00:48:50):

I think I'm the only one, at least on the panel who came to the Downtown Writer's Center originally as a student. I was a year or so out of college and had a baby and had bought a house and had acquired an insane amount of debt and was working in advertising and I really just wanted to write some stories again. And I saw a flyer downtown that was just like, here, try this. And I had been to a couple free writers groups at Libraries and Borders and they're weird. They're just weird. They're weird. They're full of weirdos. So I would go once and be like, oh, this is not what I need. I took one class at the Downtown Writer center and realized this was a much better path, and then I started teaching for them and that was 12 years ago or whatever. So it was exactly the foray I needed back into a workshop setting that was outside of academia that wasn't an M F A.

Speaker 6 (00:50:02):

I didn't want to be in an M F A program. I wanted to have a life outside of that. So this was a much, much better option and it's pleasing to me to see that what we started there so long ago as sort of cropping up in other places now as an alternative for people who want to study even rigorously, but need a space write in their own communities. So thanks for creating that. I'm going to read a section of the scam and if you don't know anything about it, my husband always jokes that the subtitle of this book should just be trigger warning.

Speaker 6 (00:50:43):

I was the last one standing. My mother had had four miscarriages and three abortions. One baby born dead and my sister Aubrey, who died of an infection at four days old, they brought her home only to rush her back to the hospital. No one bothered with a car seat. My mother just held the dead bundle on her lap screaming. I didn't want any more babies. Babies had wrecked my mother from the inside out and I was still too young to understand why she kept getting pregnant or why she kept losing them. But by the time Aubrey died in her bassinet, which looked like a casket anyway, all pillowed and tufted and white, I thought I could will them to go away. I thought I was in charge of it all. I leaned over her while she was sleeping. She looked like a doll, like the ugly composition dolls in my grandmother's dining room.

Speaker 6 (00:51:41):

Aubrey was bald, which I thought meant she would be blonde like me, like Elle and not dark haired like my mother or my brother. Aubrey's face was fat and smushed her eyes squinted shut and crusty. One was pinkish, oozing her fists never opened. You belong to me. I said to her, they don't want you. Aubrey was what my mother had called fussy. She'd been home only one day, restless, whiny. She was hot, feverish. I remember my mother wrapping and unwrapping her, unsure of how to make her comfortable. She sent me to my cousins to play to spend the night, the two of us in Disney, nightgowns watching TV on the floor in the living room and making a tent out of blankets and couch cushions in the morning. Aubrey was dead.

Speaker 6 (00:52:34):

My mother's body gave out on her. She weakened with every pregnancy, every miscarriage drained her a little more. She spoke less, smoked more, drank more. When she was 35, they told her she had cancer and removed her voice box. She could speak through a robotic straw but preferred just to whisper. If you weren't close enough to hear her or weren't listening, she wasn't repeating it. When her neck was uncovered, her throat had a red hole that moved with her breathing. If she went out, she wore a scarf. She had to cover the hole with a handkerchief to cough or to smoke, which she kept doing. The hell difference does it make now. She said to me when the opening wasn't covered, smoke trailed out of her neck and curled at her collarbone. My brother died before she did. She had to live through that. She had the abortions after she got cancer and still my father kept fucking her even when she had cancer, when she'd lay in bed sick from treatment, her skin was sweaty all the time.

Speaker 6 (00:53:42):

Her once curvy body had shrunk down to a rack of bones, loose and empty. Her bed was her solace. Ivory sat in sheets and ivory pin noir that I'd picked out for her at Macy's. I told her she looked like a movie star. She kept a glass of vodka neat on the bedside table, a row of painkillers, a bucket to throw up in and he kept coming in to fuck her even while he was fucking me. When she died, I was the one who found her. If nothing else, that's how it should have been. I hate and I mean I hate hard to think of what would've happened if he had found her. Instead, it was late past eight in the morning and I needed a ride to school. The bus had come and gone doing its slow creep at the edge of the driveway, waiting to see if I would come rushing out. Sometimes I'd open the door and run down the steps and the bus driver she'd wait. She'd also let us smoke at the very back of the bus with the windows down if we were quiet about it. You need women like that in the world. Women who are looking out for you. Women who turn a blind eye when necessary.

Speaker 6 (00:54:54):

When someone dies at home, you call 9 1 1 and they take them to the hospital even when they know that the person is dead, even when that person is your mother. They kept me on the line and I was okay. I was numb sitting there in her room in a padded oval back chair watching her stillness. 9 1 1. What's your emergency? My mother is dead. When my father found me in the hospital waiting room, surrounded by other people waiting to be seen for emergencies and birth, the bustle of deliveries, flowers, carts with lunches on them, orderlies and nurses and doctors walking together. He told me I was the woman of the house. Now I was holding a pen that the nurse had given me a click pen that said Enfamil formula on the side. I kept opening and closing it. An undone word search magazine on my lap.

Speaker 6 (00:55:46):

The nurse had given me that too to keep my mind occupied. She said she was an oncology nurse short and round. I wondered how many motherless girls she'd ushered through the last days and then my father plunked down beside me on a vinyl chair that was connected to all the other chairs in a row. Well, you're the woman of the house now. He said it was 1130 in the morning and he smiled like whiskey and sweat and sex. I jammed the pen into the back of his hand deep enough to stick. I wished it had gone all the way through because we were in public. He barely uttered a sound. He grimaced and looked murder at me and I could hear the stuttered click of his teeth clenching. I walked out. I walked all the way down route eight without a jacket to my cousins where I didn't want her.

Speaker 6 (00:56:38):

I didn't know what I wanted. Something was different in me. The instant I turned over my mother's body, the instant I realized I was alone without her. Why? I asked my Aunt Carlene, why would that happen? I hadn't seen it coming. Couldn't have known that that was how it would be. The heart has funny ways. Carlene said. I knew it. Rabbits can stop their hearts out of fear if in danger or cornered, it saves them from the grizzly death that's coming, like flicking a switch. They just turn themselves off and die on the spot. I thought about my mother lying in bed about my father coming in anyway, smelling like booze and like someone else's pussy, even though he said he hated the room. The light, the flowers, the pretty gold leaf and the wallpaper, the satin sheets. I'd hear it. The movement of their bed, the running water, her dry voiceless cough.

Speaker 6 (00:57:34):

He'd move to the couch after and I'd hear him snoring. What had decided for her brain or her heart? Which one threw up the white flag and gave up imploding cornered, saved from something more grizzly. I wish I had been there. I should have been in that room with her. I should have held her hand, stroked her head, given her water, rubbed her feet, anything, anything, but left her alone in that room. Trust up like a dead body where he came and went as he pleased. I hadn't heard her last breath. I hadn't seen her heartbreak. She'd been alone, used up and broken all of her shitty 44 years, dead babies and miscarriages, my brother with a goddamn bomb to his face, her unstoppable hound of a husband, all of it. Too much strain for the body. No one should have to die that way. I thanks.

Speaker 2 (00:58:40):

Now you got to find out what happened. Before I close with a couple of poems of my own, I want to thank my friends and colleagues, Deborah Kang, Dean Matthew, Gavin Frank, Greg Parlow, Jennifer Pashley, and the person who's really driving the bus is Phil Meir, who is not only precise as a nonprofit organization administrator, but there's nothing like the precision and beauty of his poetry and we've not been able to hear any of that today I am going to read several poems from the Doom Weaver and with gratitude for your choosing to be here with us. Make sure you get a copy of Stone Canoe. Thank you for allocating your time to hear our words and know about our program. This first poem from Salter that I'm going to share is because when this was just a glimpse of a cycle of poems that eight years later turned out to be a book, Deborah advised me and I always connect this poem with her. It's called the Agnostic Notices. She talks to herself all the time, each step, every query, a running dialogue, a living alone habit, moments of rage, curiosity, awe, sometimes a chore list like a bird babbling at the feeder. The banter quieter than dragon flies. Not prayer. She doesn't expect guidance, just routine. A small relief in front of eggs at the I G A. She loves double yolks like a cracker jack box, jumbos, make good omelets, extra large or cheaper.

Speaker 2 (01:00:20):

The man considering cheese's scolds. You're way too young to chatter on that way. This is name inconsequential from Reuters, a meteor streaked across the sky and exploded over central Russia on Friday, raining fireballs over a vast area and causing a shockwave that smashed windows, damaged buildings, and injured 1200 people.

Speaker 2 (01:00:54):

All the clever waiting this standby life. A blank face just beyond a terror curtain, an undefined skittish cloak, thick as oatmeal, invisible womb for meteors, shuttling in a chaotic tumble, a palpable and futile electricity. The tenacity to await the leonids for a year and then be tricked again by the fickle neglect of weather. Wood is resistant unlike the boundary of skin. Wood is inert. Wood holds silent things together in small boxes and terse cupboards. What is this notion of future? A stalled execution. Tattered sweaters and lone sneakers. The lost wife of a glove. Ceiling bulbs dangling, frayed strings, fly paper spotted and brittle with death.

Speaker 2 (01:01:51):

Surely there is a whizzed face behind that confounded curtain. Surely there is a tongue spewing answers. If not meteors have no value and trees bend for nothing. This is my hammer. Heart pounding courage into wood. Joining strangers, an arranged marriage of right angles flaunting a disregard for the open space of love. Surely these are the corners in which ghosts whisper tender threats to the living. Soon we will be together soon you will understand. And I'm going to close with a poem called Confession, which came out of a workshop with Roger Boner agard at the Downtown Writer Center. And little did I know when I walked out that I have a poem that I was going to clinging to for a very long time. Confession, I come to the garden alone. Pulling weeds is always church intoxicating soil. The dank, insistent pressure of survival, heady with impossibility.

Speaker 2 (01:02:57):

The conundrum of growing things, how they march toward light. Never bending a pedal or spindly stem, the universe itself. A glistening worm. Even as a baby gardener, I knew I bend and breathe differently than squirrels or the sad pace of barren women. But like squirrels, I am relentless. On Sunday cars jerk from driveways and carports, then stoically. Slide away to a small slip of salvation. Iced tea solace a gentle word of scripture to carry like a hanky through the weary week. On Sundays, my weeded worship taunts the good men of the Baptist church across the street who drop off their women mothers, children, the finery of flower parade. They saunter from their cars and trim suits to climb the stairs to the red wood door solid from a century of preaching steeped into the grain. At one time it seemed a sacrilege to rip weeds from their beds.

Speaker 2 (01:04:00):

But the passion required of garden gardening is sacrament. I testify to the ephemeral. My thighs are sturdy trunks. The men open. The red door pastor extends his hand. Some return to their gardens to pick snap peas. The little boats they will ride on confused currents barely uttering their confessions. That fear is at the helm and perhaps silent passion is sin. Some of us stay home and battled with chicory. What if a wish was an actual light with a three-way opportunity to turn tears to soft gray ash? Would any of us exercise the right to cry as our choice? Pastor frequently invites me to his sanctuary. He says, come as you are. Instead, I carry a vase brimming with new blooms to the church mothers on Saturday. Instead, I commit murder in the garden. Thank you. Have a great rest of your day. Get a copy of Stone Canoe a w P. We're still mainlining. Have a great day.

Speaker 7 (01:05:25):

Thank you for tuning into the AW WP Podcast series. For other podcasts. Please visit our website at www.awpwriter.org.