Fabulous Indiana Writers: Jean Harper

One of the cool things about my job as the Executive Director of the Writers' Center of Indiana is promoting the work of fabulous Indiana writers. I know a lot of them, which is one of my life's great pleasures. But I'm always discovering new ones--and Jean Harper, who lives and writes in Richmond, Indiana, is one of them. Rose City: A Memoir of Work was published by Mid-List Press in 2005.

Harper went to work as a rose cutter when she moved from her East Coast home Richmond, Indiana to be with a former professor whom she had loved since she was a student at Earlham College. She’s married; he’s married. It’s a difficult time. Harper risks everything for love and love is at the center of Rose City, but this memoir is not a love story. It’s the story of a smart, talented, well-educated woman in her thirties, who takes the only job available to her in this small college town, cutting roses, and whose co-workers accept her, teach her, and help her find her way into a new life. It’s about the rose industry, about roses. It’s about a once prosperous Midwestern town dying as new labor policies of the 1990’s lure American companies to countries where workers are unprotected and drastically greater profits can be made.

“All of it was foreign to me,” Harper writes early in the book. “I was an American, living and working in my own country, but it didn’t feel that way. I had crossed a border. I could have used a passport and a visa, entry stamped JUN 27 1992. RICHMOND, INDIANA, THE ROSE CITY.”

Thia world, which Harper so beautifully created on the page didn’t seem foreign to me at all. I grew up in the Calumet Region in the fifties, in a working class family that struggled to make ends meet—a world I left behind as soon as I could, but which, as time goes by, I realize shaped the strongest parts of me. I recognized Lil, Joy, Sammie Jo, Eddie, Bo, and Hank. They lived in my neighborhood in a different place, a different time, and so I know how well Harper captured the poignant mix of grace and resignation which they faced each day, the deep sense of responsibility they felt toward family and friends, the hope that sustained them even as the world seemed determined to drag them down.

I loved everything about Rose City: the story of this group of workers, which read like a novel; the social commentary about company practices with chemicals that put everyone in danger folded into their concerns about pregnant 17 year-old Sammie Jo; lush, lyrical forays into the world of roses; the deft characterization of Richmond, with its assortment of working class people and academics. The raw honesty with which Harper explored the disappointments and failures in her life that she knew she must face to be able to find happiness pretty much blew me away.

“The greenhouse saved me from an ordinary life,” she writes near the end of the book.

Having read Rose City, it’s hard for me to imagine that Jean Harper is a person capable of being ordinary. In any case, I’m glad she found work in the greenhouse and very glad she wrote this book about it.

Jean Harper grew up in Concord, Massachusetts. She earned her B.A. from Earlham College and her M.F.A. from Emerson College. Her short fiction, essays, and memoir have been published in The Iowa Review, Living Forge Journal, and Cimarron Review, among others. She is an assistant professor of English at Indiana University East and lives in Richmond, Indiana.

Poem in Your Pocket Day

Yesterday was “Poem in Your Pocket Day." I tried to trump up some excitement about going downtown to hand out poems on downtown—but, in the end, it was me, wandering around the Circle and over to the State House at lunchtime, a beautiful day, with a handful of poems.

Approaching people, I said, “It’s National Poetry in Your Pocket Day, part of the celebration of National Poetry Month. Here’s a poem by an Indiana poet from the Writers’ Center of Indiana.”

I gave a poem to a policeman, who took it with a smile; to a young clerk in a shoe store at Circle Center Mall, who turned out to be a journalism major who missed writing and was delighted to hear that the Writers’ Center existed. I dropped poems on the tables of people eating at outside cafes, handed them (or tried) to Men in Suits and down-and-outs at a bus stop. I handed them to legislators and lobbyists near the statehouse, adding, “Please support the arts!”

There was a guy on the street handing out flyers for a jewelry store. I took one, gave him a poem in return. A barista at Starbucks, a visual artist, said poetry often inspired his work and he took a bunch of the poems to hand out himself.

High point: handing poems to two businessmen in Starbucks and walking past a while later to see one guy, now sitting by himself, reading his. It was this one, by Norman Minnick, a poem I particularly love.

While You Work

While you sit at your desk
water striders dance upon the surface of a pond,
high, thin clouds stretch across the sky,
and acres of tall grass, reticent after a long dry summer,
practice nothing but grace.


Low point: I walked up beside a stout gray-haired woman, did my spiel, poem in hand. She took it (no eye contact), folded it in half without looking at it, and put it in the trash. “Bad karma,” I said in a cheerful voice, as she crossed in front of me to enter a building.

Most amusing: “It’s National Poem in Your Pocket Day, I said to a receptionist.” She looked confused. “Comb?” she asked. “No, no, poem,” I said. We laughed.

“I’d much rather have a poem,” she said—and happily took the one I offered.

Conversation about Etheridge Knight

The African American poet Etheridge Knight was raised Indianapolis and for the most part made his home here after an eight-year stint in prison in the 1960’s. He discovered poetry while incarcerated, publishing his first collection, Poems from Prison, a year before his 1968 release. According to Poets.org, “The book was a success, and Knight soon joined such poets as Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez (to whom he was once married) in what came to be called the Black Arts Movement.

“This movement, according to the poet and critic Larry Neal, was 'radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Arts is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America.' Knight embraced these ideals in his own work and in 1970 edited a collection entitled Black Voices From Prison.”

His sister, Eunice Knight-Bowens, established the Etheridge Knight Festival of the Arts after his death in 1991 to celebrate his life and work and to encourage people, young and old, to choose words as a way of expressing themselves and changing the world they live in.

Last weekend, the Writers’ Center co-sponsored the EK Festival’s “The House that Etheridge Built” as part of our “Be a Better Writer” craft lecture series. The program featured four African poets who never knew the poet Etheridge Knight, but were profoundly influenced by his work and his life. Dwayne Betts, Randall Horton, Marcus Jackson, and John Murillo read their own work and Etheridge’s, reflecting along the way about what might be called Knight’s literary family tree.

The night before the festival, we hosted a “conversation” at the Writers’ Center and invited people who’d known Etheridge to talk with the visiting poets about their personal relationships with Knight. He was a mentor to African American poets Michael L.L. Collins and Sonny Bates. Saundra Jo Holiday only met him once, when her college creative writing class visited him in his apartment. She’d been having difficulty in the class, nobody seemed to be able to relate to her poems at all, and she was about to give up on writing. She was shy, sat down on a couch while others in the class clustered around EK. But he left them and came and sat beside her and said, “We are an aural people.”

“As if he knew I was struggling,” she said. “It changed my life.”

Kittrell Andis talked about going to a poetry reading at the Hummingbird Café in the 70’s and being blown away by Etheridge Kight who “said” his poems, who “knew how to take up the space.” Later that evening, he read a poem of his own and Knight came up to him afterward and said he should come back. He did—and developed a close relationship with Knight over the years.

I never met EK myself. I might have; he was in and out of Indianapolis a lot in the years after I started writing. He read around town, hung out at the Hummingbird Café and the Chatterbox, gave his legendary Free People Poetry Workshops. But I was put off by how people were in awe of his prison creds, thrilled by his outrageous behavior. He drank to excess, did drugs, conned people out of money. Fairly regularly, he’d show up drunk or stoned or worse at readings that people had gone to a lot of trouble to put together for him—if he showed up at all.

Why would I want to know somebody like that?

Growing up in a household with an alcoholic father had scared me away from drinking or drugs —or anything likely to make me lose control. It gave me a nasty little puritan streak that I am sorry to say still occasionally plagues me.

But over the years, I’ve come to love Etheridge Knight’s poetry, its honesty and originality, its depth of intelligence and compassion. I understand that he wrote them to save his life—and they did save his life. Listening to Friday night’s conversation, I understood something else about him. Writers—the best ones, the ones with promise—are people who don’t really fit anywhere, solitary in their pursuit of words. EK recognized them, embraced them, and made himself the community that each one needed. He was the guy at the reading who said, “Come back;” the mentor who said, “Be your own self.” the one who saw right through you. He was your friend, your literary father, your own lost dad. He was the poem slid under the prison door.

I wish I’d had the courage show up at a Free People’s Poetry Workshop when I was just beginning. Who knows how completely or subtly different my work might have been for it.

Bagels

Einstein’s Bagels kindly agreed to give us all their leftover bagels on Friday for our Gathering of Writers on Saturday. At the last minute, though, we found out we weren’t allowed to take any of our own food into the venue.

What to do? I felt kind of dumb calling them up and saying we didn’t need the bagels, after all and I thought it would be rude to just not show up. How many bagels could there be, I thought. I’ll just pick them up and we can all take some home and freeze them.

I got there. There didn’t seem to be that many, some of the trays were empty. But when 5:00 arrived and the employees dumped them all—along with probably a dozen plastic cups with “bagel poppers”—in them, they filled a gargantuan garbage bag. One of the guys had to carry it out for me.

Within five minutes my whole car smelled like garlic.

Anyway. We had the Gathering of Writers the next day, at which the caterer provided those crummy little wrapped muffins that get all sticky from sweating in their cellophane packages.

Nonetheless, Marian University was a lovely place to have our event and a good time was had by all. Elizabeth Stuckey-French gave an inspiring keynote, tailor-made for this year’s theme, “Unlock Your Voice.” Tom Chiarella, Skip Berry, Alessandra Lynch, Jill Christman and others gave sessions on fiction, screenwriting, poetry and the memoir.

Cathy Day’s session jolted me out of my confusion about the novel I recently started—at least temporarily.

Of course, I brought our fabulous prize wheel—featuring photos of the day’s presenters. Elizabeth was the best prize, a tee-shirt. I got to be a notebook!

As always, the best part for me at Writers' Center events watching writers connect with one another.

The evaluations were overwhelmingly positive.

The bagels, however, were still in my car.

I’d bought a box of bags and I opened up the hatch and sort of bullied people into taking bagels home with them. I made up a bag for our freezer, then took some to my daughters.

My son-in-law, Jim, packaged up the rest to drop off at a shelter the next day. Which, I know, is what I should have done with them in the first place.

Still, they made an such an amusing little subplot for the day that I can’t quite make myself feel guilty about it.

The War Nobody Notices

Last night, journalist Doug Wissing presented a lecture entitled "Finding Truths in Afghanistan: An Indiana Writer Talks about War," during which he observed that the U.S. has been trying for years to be involved in a war that nobody notices—and seems to have achieved this with the war in Afghanistan.

Booking this lecture as part of the Writers’ Center of Indiana’s Clowes Craft Lecture Series, “Be a (Better) Writer” seemed like a no-brainer to me. What serious writer wouldn’t be interested in knowing about how your personal experience under fire finds its way into stories, what responsible American citizen wouldn’t find it interesting and necessary to hear, first-hand, from a person who’s been in the thick of it—from living with soldiers in the field to eavesdropping on policy wonks in Kabul?

But only about twenty people showed up at Central Library to listen to what Wissing learned while embedded one of the Army’s Agricultural Development Teams, unfortunately proving his point.

So, do I just do a rant about that? I mean, it’s a temptation. What’s wrong with people, anyway?

But been there, done that—and, mainly, it makes me weary and depressed.

Instead, I’ll just say—you guys missed a truly enlightening event.

Against a changing backdrop of slides portraying the ADT team, the Afghan villagers, and the harshly beautiful landscape of Afghanistan, Wissing introduced us to some of the ADT team and talked about their good work with respect and admiration, but also described the tangle of graft and corruption that results in all too much of the billions we’ve spent in Afghanistan falling into the hands of unscrupulous politicians and contractors—not to mention the Taliban.

He described the virtual training soldiers undergo—like living in a video game. He talked about the relationship between women soldiers and the Afghans, the complex negotiations that must occur for each baby step of progress that’s made there, what it’s like to wake up and find yourself under fire. He talked about the increasing concern about after-effects of mild brain damage in Afghanistan vets and the failure of the military to acknowledge and provide much-needed treatment.

“Remember Agent Orange?” he said.

Notice: the title of his talk was “Finding Truths in Afghanistan,” not “Finding the Truth in Afghanistan.” As he so brilliantly illustrated, there are countless truths in Afghanistan—many of which are contradictory.

There is no one simple answer to the questions we all should be asking, a few of which are:

Should we be there?
Can we win if we stay?
What is the cost in dollars and integrity and heartbreak?
Can we afford it?


The important questions we encounter in life—whether they are personal or political—never have simple answers. Some (maybe most) don’t even have answers. All you can do is face a problem honestly, seek reliable information to help you see it more clearly, and then form an opinion, staying open to adjusting that opinion as new truths emerge.

I learned a lot last night, some of my opinions about what’s happening in Afghanistan shifted based on the story Doug Wissing told about his experiences there. He raised many questions in my mind that I feel compelled to explore.

Too bad so few people were curious enough to come out and hear what he had to say.

Writers Roulette & Other Literary Pursuits

I spent Saturday and Sunday manning (womaning?) the Writers’ Center of Indiana’s booth at the Broad Ripple Art Fair, along with a group of fabulous volunteers. Betsy Lewis, volunteer extraordinaire in all manner of Writers’ Center needs, had the genius idea of having a prize wheel, which turned out to be the absolute best part of the weekend—both for raising money and for sheer entertainment.

I mean, who (in their deepest heart of hearts) doesn’t want to gamble?

Who can’t afford a dollar—for a good cause? (Well, at an art fair, anyway.)

Plus, there was the unexpected benefit of parents feeling guilty for dragging their kids around looking at art who were willing to throw in a dollar to let them spin the wheel.

Betsy also made very cool story-starters, which also drew kids to our booth (and the wheel) and it was lovely to watch them bent over, writing earnestly. My grandkids, Heidi and Jake, volunteered, too. Their job was to write sample stories to post on the tent. Needless to say, the stories were…brilliant.

For adults and teens, there was an ongoing story to add too—also lots of fun.

Tony Brewer and Jason Ammerman, of the Reservoir Dogwoods, as well as Sarah Skwire and Joyce Brinkman were on hand to write poems on demand for $5. Sarah wrote one for a brand new baby, also one for a couple’s sixth wedding anniversary, which made the bride cry (in a good way:-).

Best, we talked to so many people who were interested in writing and glad to know we existed. We collected well over a hundred names to add to our e-mail newsletter list and there was an unusually large number of online memberships and class registrations waiting to be processed on Monday morning.

Between Water and Song

Last night I went to a poetry reading at Marian University to celebrate the publication of my friend Norman Minnick’s new anthology, Between Water and Song: New Poets for the Twenty-First Century. David Shumate, a Marian professor and prose poet, began the program with this poem from the anthology, by Ruth Forman:

Stand

why so afraid to stand up?
someone will tell you
sit down?

but here is the truth
someone will always tell you
sit down

the ones we remember
kept standing

He said that of his students loved this poem so much he declared he was going to have it tattooed on his body. The student was there, he admitted he hadn’t done this quite yet, but…he might. Which I hope he does—not because I like tattoos; I don’t, particularly—but because I think it’s such a fabulous example of how the right poem can totally blow you away.

It’s not the same poem for everyone. I’ve taken to reading poetry collections the same way I look at paintings in a museum—wandering through, letting myself be drawn to the work that seems to have been made just for me. Like Vermeer’s “View of Delft” or Jill Bialosky’s “Another Loss to Stop For,” which I carry, folded up in my wallet.

Malina Morling, whose work is featured in the anthology, said that when her high school English teacher read “The Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” aloud to the class she knew suddenly, absolutely that she wanted to be a poet.

Talking about how she collects the details and sentences that make their way into her poems, she observed that writing poems is a lot like remembering dreams. People often say they don’t dream or they don’t remember dreams, but if they make an effort to remember their dreams—they do. Poetry is like that, she said. If you make up your mind to write poems and keep writing them, the things you notice start to make themselves into poems.


I was glad I went to the reading last night. It made me remember that, in the right frame of mind, the whole world becomes a poem--and a a single wonderful poem can crack open the universe with its astonishing, ordinary truth.

Like this one by Norman Minnick:

While You Work

While you sit at your desk
water striders dance upon the surface of a pond,
high, thin clouds stretch across the sky,
and acres of tall grass, reticent after a long dry summer,
practice nothing but grace.

Watching People Write

Few things make me as happy as watching people write. I love the bent heads, the scratch of pencils, the occasional whisper of a page turning. The particular silence of people lost in a world of words.

Yesterday was the Writers' Center's "New Year's Resolution: Write," an annual class geared to get kick recalcitrant writers' butts into the new year. We dredged up material, which brought both laughter and tears. We experimented, doing exercises on character, voice, and the ten-minute play. We wrote rough drafts of poems using stories from the news, and wonderfully absurd lists inspired by Sei Shonagon's "Pillow Book." (My favorite was: "Why It Is Terrible to Be the Least Crazy Person in a Mental Hospital.)

It was the kind of day that makes me remember why I love to teach writing. That silence, yes. And, okay, I've got to admit I like a captive audience, too. Hardly anybody in my real life wants to talk about this stuff.

But what I love best is the moment when a tentative aspiring writer surprises herself by writing something wonderful, something she didn't know she knew.

The Organizing Gene

I have a weird, blissful, very vivid memory of myself at, maybe eight years old, “organizing” the Christmas cards that my mom had addressed and put in a shoebox to await mailing. Was I alphabetizing them? I have no idea whether I knew how to do that yet. The memory is all about the niftiness of the shoebox, so like the filing drawers I’d seen in the office of the pawn shop where my dad worked; the feel of my fingers organizing the cards into whatever system I had in mind; and a kind of secretarial sense of purpose.

I had forgotten this memory, which surfaced when I was organizing classes for the Writers’ Center of Indiana’s winter/spring term last week. I was feeling overwhelmed with dates and descriptions, wracking my brain for a place to start. Of course, I needed a calendar, a chart. There would be markers and highlights and post-its involved.

What could be better than that?

I was happy as a clam making the calendar, placing the post-its just so—coded for day, night, single session, multiple sessions. I loved the way that slowly, visually the schedule began to make sense. Eventually, I transferred everything its very own DayMinder Calender—and did a little color-coding there, too. Who-hoo!

I moved from that task to finishing the second (and maybe, maybe close to the last) draft of Looking for Jack Kerouac, a novel I’ve been working on for a couple of years. Then it was time to do my never-fail, anal-retentive novel assessment exercise. This involves going through the draft, chapter-by-chapter, typing the first line, doing “bullet” summaries of what happens in the chapter, typing the last line…from beginning to end.

It takes hours. Actually, days.

I love it!

Concentrating on that utterly left-brain task, my right brain is left to its own devices. I feel the novel’s flow, hold the whole thing in my head—sort of like an ecosystem,. I know where everything is, I see large and small patterns and repetitions—some effective, some just…repetitive. I recognize serendipitous details that an English teacher might later identify as symbols.

Things float up. Questions, observations, issues to consider in setting revision tasks for the next draft—and there are always revision tasks. You could keep revising forever, really. Which, in truth, I would be perfectly happy to do.

Toni Morrison said, “The best part of all, the absolutely delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over again.” Amen to that!

Anyway, the exercise. Next comes my favorite part: highlighting.

I love, love, love highlighters.

I decide what I want to look at. For example, in “Jack” I’m looking at music, ideas, 60’s details, flashbacks, and baseball. Books, generally, and On the Road, particularly. I’m looking at the balance of scene and narrative. I’m tracking characters to make sure they appear and disappear effectively throughout the book; I’ll track the main character’s relationship with them, how it changes, how it resolves. And tension--where it is, where it's not.

I'll go through my “outline” again and again, once for each thing I’m tracking—often noticing things I missed previously, marking them. So I end up with a handful of markers. (And sometimes a rather colorful face.)

In time, it becomes clear what I need to do in the next draft. I make a list, and start to work--knowing the list will change in process. I’ll abandon some things for new, better ideas.

I’d never seen this before—probably because I’ve never gone so directly from one organizing task to another—but, dang, the classes and the novel exercise use the exact same part of my brain.

I first felt the pleasure of that organizing gene, playing with the Christmas cards when I was a little girl.

Playing. Yes. It feels like that.

The creative process is (serious) play, after all.

On Saying "Yes"

I am one of those people who can’t resist saying "Yes" to—well, a lot. Whatever it is I say yes to sounds fascinating, maybe exciting: or it matters to someone I care about. (Sometimes to people I don’t even know.) And there’s the calendar factor, whatever I say yes to isn’t…now. The calendar is more or less empty when I mark it down.

Then the day comes. The calendar is crammed with stuff to do all around it; new possibilities have offered themselves up. Things I might rather do, or even should do. But I said, yes. So, unless it’s absolutely impossible, I do what I said I’d do.

Who says creative people can’t be terminally responsible, too?

Anyway. I said I would participate in this mosaic workshop presented by the CompleteLife Program at the IU Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center:

From Broken to Whole

Individuals with serious illnesses and their families are invited to share personal stories, create artistic imagery, and fashion a collaborative mosaic in this healing workshop that illuminates inspirational journeys.

I must have realized it was on a Saturday, all day on a Saturday, when I said yes to it. And I wanted to do it. I really did. I admire and am fascinated by the work that my friend Dr. Larry Cripe does there with cancer patients, cancer survivors, and those whose lives are profoundly affected by the suffering of their loved ones. I lost my sister Jackie to brain cancer in 2003. The day of the workshop, my daughter Jenny would keeping vigil with her husband’s family for her brother-in-law, who was dying of that same terrible disease.

But I’d been so busy the past weeks. Plus, doing the workshop meant I would have to miss my grandson’s laser tag birthday party.

Competing guilt, I hate that. I said I’d do the workshop; I miss Jake’s birthday party if I do the workshop. Lose/lose.

I’d go, do the writing exercise, beg off afterwards, I decided. Grandchildren trump, after all. Right?

I got there, sat down in a circle of a dozen or so sad people who’d come, hoping to find some light. Among them were a mother and her teenage-age daughter, in a wheelchair, who hoped to begin to learn how to talk about the daughter’s chronic illness; an elderly lady, whose loss of loved ones over the years had become too much to bear; a cancer survivor on crutches, making her way in the body left to her after her illness.

There was a woman, maybe in her early forties, who’d suffered two bouts of lymphoma and had recently learned that the cancer had spread to her kidneys. I thought, when she came in and sat down, her mother and her six-year-old daughter on either side of her, that she was the saddest person I had ever seen.

We introduced ourselves. I did my never-fail “I Remember” writing exercise. “Write ‘I remember…’ about your illness,” I said. “Anything, everything that comes to mind. Don’t worry if what you write seems disorganized or insignificant. Just—write.”

They did—and I watched, as I always do when I give this assignment, moved by whisper of pens on paper, the particular silence of people alive inside their own heads.

Some read—the elderly lady, a really lovely piece about her mother.

“She was there while you were writing, wasn’t she?” I asked.

Momentarily beatific, she said, “Yes.”

How could I leave then?

And, okay, there was a family birthday party for Jake the next day. So it wasn’t like I was going to be a complete failure as a grandmother. Plus, playing laser tag makes me anxious. Should “killing” people be so much fun? Even children?

After a few others read, we moved into a room set up for the mosaic-making process. We divided into groups, each at one of the two long tables. Watercolors and brushes were laid out, and we were directed to paint how the writing had made us feel. It might be an image, it might be something abstract. Or just color. I painted the yellow of my sister’s hair, the blue of her eyes, a dot of orange here and there--freckles. Some green. Life? I loved the feel of the brush in my hand, the bright shock of color on the page, the surprise as one blended into another and became something new. Painting, remembered my sister as a little girl, which pleased me because since the moment of her diagnosis I have had a hard time remembering her as anything but frightened, helpless, and sick.

The sad woman was in my group. Her watercolor was intense and luminous: a band of black at the bottom, one of deep purple, one of drenched blue. A golden sun, a sick green ring around it, took up the top left corner. Something—a tree, a bush—grew up from the bottom left corner. With bare branches.

Some drawings were happy, some dark and disturbing, some peaceful. We looked at them together, and Tina (from Creating Hope) sketched on a piece of mason board as we talked. A lotus, a butterfly, spirals, bits of confetti from someone’s broken rattle, a figure emerging from darkness, bands of color, something growing. Black, brown, blue, green, orange. A wide swath of yellow light.

Then we set to work on it, choosing from an array of colored tiles, breaking them in to the sizes and shapes we needed to fill in the shapes. Breaking, yes. It felt good. And it felt good make something from the broken pieces. Beautiful. Our own.

We talked as we worked. About cancer. About life.




















But what I loved best about the day was watching the sad woman lose her sadness, for a little while. Little by little, painting, breaking, gluing, she was released from thought and knowledge. I watched her guide her daughter’s hand, concentrating on placing the piece onto the mosaic just right. I watched her pleasure at the little girl’s accomplishment. I watched her own mother watch her, tears in her eyes.

“I know she worries about me all the time,” the sad woman said, at one point. “But she drives me crazy.” And they both laughed.

She had made up her mind, she had told us earlier. If the treatment she was undergoing for the kidney cancer now didn’t work, that would be the end of it. No more. She couldn’t bear it. Whether she had any real hope that the treatment would work, she didn’t say.

The cancer was was still there at the end of the afternoon, in any case. There was plenty more suffering to face before it was all over—one way or the other.

But she left, smiling. Restored, for that moment, to her true self.

And I left, humbled, grateful. Glad, as I almost always am, that I said, “Yes.”

Alice's Workshop

I’ve published some poems, but I’m not really a poet. What I mean by that is, I might write a decent poem, but I couldn’t explain why it’s decent. If a poem is seriously flawed, I generally can’t identify the source of the flaw; thus, I have no idea how to fix it. I can’t take apart a poem, like I can take apart a story or a novel to see how it “works.”

Still, there’s something so satisfying about writing a poem—a moment caught and saved forever or a thought made visible in images.

The poet Alice Friman says that writing a poem is like trying to capture a ghost. Imagine that someone gives you a sheet and says, ‘Find the Ghost.’ So you go around the room throwing the sheet into the air until, suddenly, there’s form beneath it—and that’s how you know where the ghost is.

“The poem is the ghost,” Alice says. “The words, the sheet that gives it form.”

I treated myself to a poetry workshop at the Writers’ Center of Indiana with Alice last Sunday afternoon—several delicious hours of considering one poems-in-progress from each of eight participants. Alice is a marvelous teacher, smart, practical, passionate about poetry. She sees what you’re trying to do and is able to make you see what’s actually there. (As opposed to what you thought, hoped was there.)

“What if?” she says. “What if?” Thinking out loud about strategies and solutions, surprising herself with her own ideas along the way, which is a pleasure to observe. But it’s your poem,” she always concludes. And it is—though always better once you apply whatever she had to say about it.

Here’s the poem I submitted—improved by the cuts that Alice and the group suggested. But I’m still not sure about the last stanza. I like it, but do I need it? Alice said, “I can live with it. But it’s your poem.”

What do you think? Keep? Cut?


FINALLY SEEING CANALETTO

1.

I worked a whole year in this museum
and never saw the painting until that summer
you nearly died. The year of the drought,
the whole world burned brown,
so that sometimes, outside,
away from where you lay in the hospital bed,
the air seemed more alive than anything else, pressed
against me until I thought I could not breathe.

I came alone one afternoon, while you slept,
wandered the galleries, hoping
to find sadness larger than my own, made beautiful
and saw this painting
I had passed a hundred times, saw the care
with which Canaletto had rendered the architecture:
the precision of the domes and arches,
the perfect regularity of the windows,
the long balustrade above the promenade,
the repeating diamond design on the face
of the Doges’ Palace.

I saw the luminous pink of that building.
I saw the blue sky.
I saw people: quick, curved colors, sometimes
no more than dots on a balcony,
half-hidden by pillars--
like ghosts
like the second thoughts they were.

He had made the world first, I saw that
in the way the stones of the piazzetta bled
right through the men and women there.

2.

Five years pass. It is November: cold,
clear, and I come back because I am happy,
because I think I know what this poem will be.
I will sit before the “View of the Piazzetta
San Marco Looking South,” paint
with words what I remember.

But the bench where I sat before is gone,
the walls are pink, the painting hangs
near the doorway to a room flooded
with sunlight, and the Doges’ Palace
dissolves into it, all the lovely verticals
collapse, leaving a clutter
of shacks at the base of the campanile,
hungry dogs, children at play, ladies gossiping,
tradesmen leaning into secrets--
in the far corner, a solitary figure
in a black cloak with red cuffs, vivid
as the bells that announce themselves
in the long shadow of the tower falling
across the square.

And I see
that I know nothing, I am prepared
for nothing. Each painting, each sadness
and happiness will yield to me
what and when it chooses.

The Gathering of Writers

About a year ago, when nonprofits everywhere were crashing, I became the Executive Director of the Writers’ Center of Indiana. Long story. Mainly, I took on the job, as a volunteer, because the Writers’ Center was there when I finally trumped up the courage to try to write and I wanted it to be there for others who dreamed of being writers and needed a place to begin.

Believe me, being the Executive Director of anything was the last thing in the world I ever thought I’d be.

(Once, in Las Vegas, my husband and I watched a disgustingly scruffy, eastern-European guy losing big-time at the high stakes Baccarat table and being a really bad sport about it. When the Casino employee leaned down and said something to him, the guy leapt up, pointed his finger at the Casino employee, and shouted, “You! You are imbecile! I want never you should be in charge of nothing!”

This has become a joke in our family. When somebody screws up—or has major potential to screw up—it’s what we say. It says a lot about I felt about this unlikely turn of events in my life.)

Anyway.

With the help of an amazing Board of Directors, numerous volunteers and supporters, and the indispensible Roxanna Santoro, who keeps chaos at bay in the office, the Writers’ Center is not only surviving, but thriving!

Plus, I love this work. Who’d have thought?

Saturday we had our annual Gathering of Readers and Writers, coordinated by Victoria Barrett, who, in my humble opinion, should be put in charge of organizing the universe. Award-winning poet Alice Friman, who helped found the Writers’ Center in 1979 (just in time for me to take my first class)gave a keynote address that celebrated the Writers' Center's 30th anniversary by way telling of her own story--and ended with a reading of a half-dozen poets who were there from the start.

More than a dozen Indiana writers gave break-out sessions and participated in panels on poetry, fiction, memoir, mystery-writing, screenplay, publishing, and other topics. (FYI: there are many, many accomplished, award-winning Indiana writers whose work is recognized on the national level and beyond.)

It was a wonderful day. The foyer and galleries of the Indianapolis Art Center, where the conference was held, were lined with Day of the Dead altars, each one just waiting to be turned into a story, a poem, a memoir, a movie—maybe a mystery. Even the weather was inspiring; sunny and balmy, autumn’s last gift.

But my absolute favorite moment of the day was glancing into the library where Norman Minnick, a new, young voice in poetry, was presenting a session and seeing Roger Mitchell—

well, here’s his (abridged) bio:

Roger Mitchell is the author of nine books of poetry and a work of nonfiction. Roger Mitchell is the author of nine books of poetry and a work of nonfiction. The University of Akron Press published his most recent book, Half/Mask in January, as they did his previous book, Delicate Bait, which Charles Simic chose for the Akron Prize in 2002. Mitchell is formerly the director of the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University, where he held the Ruth Lilly Chair of Poetry. Other recognition for his writing includes the Midland Poetry Award, the John Ben Snow Award for Clear pond, his work of nonfiction, two fellowships each from the Indiana Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, the River Styx International Poetry Award, and others. He was a 2005 Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

…sitting in the audience, taking notes.

“All writers are beginners,” Alice Friman said.

She’s right. And it made me really, really happy to watch close to a hundred writers spend a whole day beginning together.

Begging Bowl

In April, David Shumate, a prose poet, gave the first in a series of lectures about craft at the Writers’ Center of Indiana. Not craft, as in “how-to,” but craft in the deepest sense: where writing comes from and how it is made. In his lecture, “No Maps, No Rules,” Shumate talked about the process by which his poems are dreamed into being out of silence. The poet is an architect of silences,” he said. Poets are hostages to silence; poems are the frames they make around the sacred space that only silence brings.

He writes in the early morning silence. “I wait and I write what comes to me,” he said.

I haven’t written many poems, but what he said made sense to me when I thought about how the poems I had written came to me, as if out of nowhere. It felt like magic, but it wasn’t. I was listening for them. I just hadn’t realized it.

Poet Marianne Boruch says poems come from the begging bowl, which is another way of saying the same thing. The poet humbly begs the silence to give her a poem; it is her sacred task to find meaning in what she is given.

Fiction, however, does not feel that way at all. Especially novels.

Last week, the novelist Patricia Henley gave the second lecture in the craft series, and during the Q&A session afterwards, someone who’d heard Shumate speak described what he had said about silence and asked, “Is it like that for you, too?”

“God, no!” she said—and described waking every morning to scenes unfolding in her head, voice speaking, compelling her to get out of bed.

Yes, I thought. It feels exactly like that.

Poets step into the silence and dream a poem into being; novelists step into an ongoing dream, alive, clamoring for their attention.

Where’s the begging bowl then, where’s the silence?

Once, working on a novel up in Michigan, I drove over to Empire, the little town near Sleeping Bear Dunes where the book was set. Walking the beach, listening to the mix of Sixties music I’d made that evoked my character’s past, I passed a young guy hauling rocks—some the size of watermelons—from the shallow water to the shore and setting them in little piles. On my way back, I saw that he had begun to form them into words. I stopped and looked, couldn't figure out what they were.

“What are you spelling?” I asked.

He grinned. “Will you marry me?”

I hadn’t been able to read the words because I had been looking at them as if he'd spelled them toward the lake. But I saw them immediately when he explained that he’d placed them to be seen from a lookout perch on the high dune that rose up from where we stood. He meant to take his girlfriend there that evening, he said.

By noon the following day, this small gift from the cosmos had made its way into my novel. This happens fairly frequently to me, especially when I’m in the middle of something, totally engaged.

Sometimes the nature of the gift is like the words on the beach: obvious, immediate, a puzzle piece I didn’t know I was looking for that makes everything fall into place. Sometimes I notice something in passing (or maybe I didn’t notice at all) and I’m surprised when, years later, it emerges—exactly what I need.

This is the magic of creative process, which, it took me a long time to learn, can’t be separated from the idea of craft. It’s all true.

You listen. You teach yourself to be fully alive to your surroundings. Poet or novelist, you keep your begging bowl at the ready. You take what the cosmos gives you and dream your own world into being.

Evening with the Muse

These days, all arts organizations, large and (especially) small, are experiencing hard times. The Writers’ Center of Indiana is one of them. I have a long history with the WCI. It was a brand new organization in 1979, when I finally got up the courage to try to write--I can’t imagine how I’d have begun if it hadn’t been there. I often wonder if I’d have begun. I took my first classes at the Writers' Center, but more importantly I learned that there was such a thing as a community of writers—even in a place like Indianapolis. Over the years, I took more classes, and I attended readings and mini writers’ conferences at the Writers’ Center, some of them featuring accomplished writers, like Tim O’Brien and Mary Oliver. Eventually, I taught classes and was a presenter at Writers’ Center events. In 2002, I became writer-in-residence; in 2006, I became the program director; and a few months ago I agreed to take over the reins as director. Alas, major cuts in funding made it impossible for us to proceed with our plans. We’ve given up our leased space at the Arts Center, laid off our paid staff—but…

The world needs organizations like the Writers’ Center more than ever—and we’re going to do what we can. Which means me continuing as a volunteer and a whole bunch of people helping out where they can. (More on this in later posts.) Sometimes I wake up, bug-eyed, in the middle of the thing thinking, Oh. My. God. I said I would do what?

Really, it is pretty crazy.

But, you know what? The challenge of reinventing the Writers’ Center to suit these difficult times feels a lot like writing a novel. A vision in my head, the pleasures and frustrations I feel as I try to figure out how to translate it to the real world. The surprises along the way—some happy surprises, others disappointing.

That feeling of being “in-process” makes the effort seem worthwhile to me. But what I think about most when I feel discouraged is “Evening with the Muse.” This group of poets meets the second Sunday evening of every month at the Writers’ Center. There’s a featured reader, a break for socializing and refreshments (brought by the regulars), then an open mic. Most of the poets are older, some with many publications to their credit, with a long history of supporting and benefiting from the Center.

Let me give you an example of how important poetry is to them. A while back, I attended Poetry Salon, a free critiquing group run by Richard Pflum, to help plan an upcoming program. One of the regulars, Rohana McCormack, wasn’t there. She’d had an eye operation that afternoon, Richard said. We made our plans, and I left them to their work. As I pulled out of the parking lot, here came a taxi bearing Rohana, wearing a black patch on her eye. I will never forget that. It is a picture definition of what writing means to some people.

As we say in the Writers' trade, "Show, don't tell."

The “Muse” regulars were, needless to say, distressed to learn that they’ll be losing their meeting space, but when they met last Sunday evening, the conversation was less about that and more about their feelings for the group and their long history with the Writers’ Center.

I was touched by this—and, listening, made up my mind to find a way to make this program continue, no matter what.

So for this week’s Poetry Friday, here are two poems that were read Sunday evening at the “Muse.”

ELEGY FOR THE WRITERS’ CENTER, IF NEEDED, IF NOT, I GET A GREATLY EXAGGERATED POEM OUT OF IT ANYWAY
or
One Last Thing To Blame On Bush

Scatter ashes slowly,
meticulously over the beloved valley.
All around mountains shimmer,
or shiver in the cold.
There are countless trees.
Dust on the needles of the pines.
Needles perform tricks
and necessities in sharpened words.

What forest is this we come from?
What wilderness have we lost?
The sky over this peculiar country
turns and turns.
Seeds in the dark soil persist.
The moon still calls them.
And poems continue in the darkness,
moving toward the light.

Steve Roberts

WRITERS' (1/11/09)

Note: The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of quantum physics posits the impossibility of learning both a particle's position and mass because their measurement necessarily alters at least one.

We gather again
the strange ones
who relish words and feelings
and we each toss in a verse
for our potluck poetry
revealing our peculiarities
and our favorite
comfort clothes.

We celebratingly study
rivers, trees and mountains
that utterly ignore us.
Hope against hope
we think
that the Heisenberg principle
might apply in this world too,
that the motley verse
might change something.

Nicholas Georgakopoulos

TRY YOUR HAND AT A POEM
Write a poem about something that matters deeply to you in a way that decribes that thing but does not mention it.