Monday, February 1, 2016

Entry 242 - Margaret Mackinnon on Poetry's Connections Between Obscurity & Mystery

Entry 242 – Margaret Mackinnon on Poetry’s Connections Between Obscurity & Mystery

By Jan Bowman Margaret Mackinnon, winner of the Library of Virginia 2014 Poetry Award and winner of 2011 GERALD CABLE BOOK AWARD for THE INVENTED CHILD, talks with Jan Bowman about connecting the lines between the obscure and the mysterious. 

41tCNxHp2dL._SX330_BO1,204,203,200_“In THE INVENTED CHILD, Margaret Mackinnon can say of a tiny child’s appearance in a fairy tale ‘the air shimmers as this miracle unfurls’ and be speaking also of the way her poems appear on the page. Whether in celebration or grief, she presents poem after poem alert to history and family—poems that unfold with equal felicity to the heart’s ‘infinite and intricate discernments’ and the lucidity of a mind alive to the world’s stories.”— Gregory Orr

Jan:     First, let me say thank for taking the time for this interview. Second I want to tell you how much I love your poetry. You have said, “If I have a goal for my poetry, it is to explore that point of connection between what is clear and observable and what is infinitely obscure and mysterious.” I was reminded that Louise Gluck said that a poet must be surprised by what the mind is capable of unveiling. What most surprises you about what your mind unveils? Tell me more about this process.
images-1 Margaret:   At a reading I did last year, someone in the audience commented that I seemed to emphasize a “sense of balance” in my work. At first, I was surprised by the comment, but then, I thought the speaker understood something I hadn’t realized. I do think I am constantly searching for that balance between “the clear and observable” and the “infinitely obscure and mysterious.” Poems to me are always acts of faith, or acts of meaning and imagination. Wallace Stevens, among the poets I love most, writes, “We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole.” I think I am most interested in creating art (in my own small way) that meets at that intersection of obscurity and wholeness, which is where I think faith resides.

Margaret:    I do try to write out of a sense that art and faith, as acts of imagination, always intersect. I am the daughter of a Presbyterian minister—and I was a religion and art history major in college—and I view my poems as ways of thinking about what it means to be a person of imagination, observation, conscience, and history.



Jan:     I am thinking now about your poem about Marianne Moore, At the Rosenbach Library: Afternoons in the Archives. You have said, “The poems I have worked on in recent years often feel like little research projects.” Where do you begin? And where do you end? With the poem’s imagery or the idea that you are exploring?

Margaret:     Like many people who teach, I was someone who always loved school. As much as I love books that reflect years of research—I am a huge fan of literary biographies—I realized at a certain point that I wasn’t a “scholar” in the contemporary sense. However, I do love approaching a poem as an opportunity to integrate history, theory, observation, and reflection. Perhaps a bit like someone writing a novel set within a specific historical context, I do a lot of reading before I actually start a poem.
The poem on Moore came out of the great affection I have for her as a person and as a writer; I had also learned that it was possible to read in the archives on Moore at the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia without having any recognized academic credentials, so I spent several wonderful days reading Moore’s letters, looking at her notebooks, and marveling over postcards and notes from people like Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop.
Though Moore was not a mother, she was closely bound to her own mother; she also had what I would call a very maternal connection to several younger women, including Bishop. I set out with the vague idea of looking at the idea of “maternal love” in Moore’s work—and what I found resonated deeply with me. What came out of this experience is one of my most personal poems—both as a mother and as a daughter—so even if it’s not a poem that speaks to a wide audience, I am very glad I wrote it.

Jan:     Tell me a bit about Meditation on Three Landscapes?

Margaret:   Perhaps because I teach Emerson and Thoreau in my working life, I have thought a lot about how nature can offer us a transformative experience, one that connects equally to both loss and redemption. This is the idea I wanted to explore in this poem. There are three actual landscapes in the poem: the Lake Tahoe area of California (which I experienced at the Squaw Valley Writers’ Conference), Vermont (with a reference to an artist at the Vermont Studio Center, where I had a fellowship), and northern New Mexico (where we had rented a house). To speak quite honestly, this was my attempt to reflect on the losses I had experienced as a woman—in terms of pregnancy losses—and equally, the resurrections I know in my life—and have found reflected in my amazing daughter, my fortunate marriage, and many loved landscapes.

Jan:     I loved this collection and many of poems about your parents resonate with me still. Which among those was the most difficult to discover?

Margaret:   All of these poems were a challenge. I wanted to honor my parents’ stories, but I also wanted to think honestly about what those stories meant to me. Alice Munro’s complex stories on her relationship with her mother helped set me on the path toward writing these poems. Greg Orr’s encouragement also helped. “For My Father, Buried under Other Trees” is a poem I am proud of because I think I did honor the complex tragedy of my father’s childhood—and to the way he needed to remember this story. With my mother, I struggled with deciding whether I could write her story in “My Mother’s Photographs,” which is about learning, after my mother’s death, that she had had an affair during my teenage years. In both cases, writing the poems became an exercise in stepping back and thinking about how rich my parents’ lives were, apart from their connection to me.

Jan:     Which of your current poems in The Invented Child (2013) are among your favorites to read before an audience? And I wondered how do you select particular poems to read aloud?

Margaret:   Not that I do so many, but readings used to be events I dreaded. However, I think they’ve now become opportunities that feel like the best moments in my classroom: a chance to talk about my enthusiasms and to share my observations. When I go to an intimate concert, I enjoy having the performer talk about what he or she is playing; in the same way, I like reading poems that have a bit of a back story. “The Invented Child,” which is based on my reading of Justin Kaplan’s biography of Walt Whitman, is a favorite poem to share at readings for these reasons.

Jan:     Who are among your favorite contemporary poets?

Margaret:   I have so many! And I’m a great believer in loving a poet for one magnificent poem—or even one magnificent line. Deborah Digges is a writer whose work I’ve studied to learn how she can follow a line of connection that unites in an unexpected way; her poems “Laws of Falling Bodies” and “Ancestral Lights” are what I would consider close to perfect. Like many people who write, I keep a notebook. Along with my own thoughts, I also collect specific poems I admire for the writer’s ambition and sense of craft. Among the poems I’m currently reading for ideas and inspiration are “Giving and Getting” by Tony Hoagland, “Still-Life With Turkey” by Diane Seuss, and a wonderful poem by Ron Smith called “The Beauty in the Trees.”

Jan:     So what are you working on now and what is your next writing project?

Margaret:   I’m currently working on several poems that came out of a trip my husband and I took to Scotland last summer. My father’s family came from the Isle of Skye in Scotland and then settled in eastern North Carolina (which is hot and humid and nothing like the Highlands) in the late 18th century. Though none of them ever saw Scotland, they had a strong sense of pride in their roots. I’m hoping these new poems will be a way of digging deeper into my family’s past—and also a way to celebrate a country and a landscape that enchanted me.

Jan:     What is the best writing advice that helped you most in your writing?

Margaret:   I’ve been fortunate to take several summer classes with poet Gregory Orr, and some of his ideas have become central to what I want to do with my writing. In Poetry As Survival, he states, “The essential point is that for a poem to move us it must bring us near our own threshold.” For me, this idea of “threshold” is as true for the writer as for the reader. I think of this as taking the poem—its emotions, its subject matter, its rhetorical choices—to the point where it begins to feel a bit risky, and therefore most rewarding. Of course, I’ve realized that we all have different thresholds, so what might seem risky to me would be quite tame to a writer like Sharon Olds. But Greg’s theory has encouraged me to push what I think I can do in a poem. And in a similar vein, in a wonderfully rewarding class at the Tinker Mountain workshop, Thorpe Moeckel (who was Greg Orr’s student) told us all to risk trying those things everyone in a workshop might tell us we “can’t do.”


Background Information
Poetry. Winner of the Library of Virginia 2014 Poetry Award. “In THE INVENTED CHILD, and 2011 winner of the GERALD CABLE BOOK AWARD,  Margaret Mackinnon can say of a tiny child’s appearance in a fairy tale ‘the air shimmers as this miracle unfurls’ and be speaking also of the way her poems appear on the page. Whether in celebration or grief, she presents poem after poem alert to history and family—poems that unfold with equal felicity to the heart’s ‘infinite and intricate discernments’ and the lucidity of a mind alive to the world’s stories.”—Gregory Orr

images
Through her poems, Margaret MacKinnon lets us enter the inner lives of writers and artists from other ages—figures like Mary Shelly, Grant Wood, Walt Whitman, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her rich imagination creates vivid, concrete scenes in which to set her “characters,” as well as persuasive inner landscapes that make distant and stately figures recognizably and empathetically human. More than a parlor trick, her ability to dwell so fully in other times, places, and minds becomes a way of enlarging the world, and of bringing us along for the journey as she pursues the connection between, in her words, “what is clear” and “what is mysterious.” From lives we know mainly through their artistic output, she draws the ordinary worries and joys of marriage, children, financial cares, old age, and loss. Rather than making these luminary figures less, she makes our own lives deeper and richer through the possibility of connection. Her poetic language is quietly musical, with a carefully executed use of form and line and a generous delight in the five senses. She paints a vibrant natural world of sensations and phenomena that constantly attracts and draws us on, and that keeps the spiritual, intellectual, and narrative dimensions of her work continually grounded in the physical world.
You can view Margaret Mackinnon’s work in IMAGE issue 71 here.
You can read Margaret Mackinnon’s poem, “Writing on the Window” winner of Shenandoah’s (2012) Graybeal-Gower Prize at this link:  http://shenandoahliterary.org/blog/2012/01/graybeal-gowen-prize-results/

Current Projects
In “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” Wallace Stevens describes a moment when he senses “the obscurity of an order,” which, for him, becomes “light” and is “enough.” If I have a goal for my poetry, it is to explore that point of connection between what is clear and observable and what is infinitely obscure and mysterious. The poems I have worked on in recent years often feel like little research projects: they take time to construct and are often based in hours of reading. But I am also trying to write poems that themselves move in different times. My poem on Whitman, for example, came out of thinking about his “invented child” and how his experience linked to my own feelings about my daughter.

Recently, I have been working on a series of poems about my parents, both now deceased. I am also drawn to poems reflecting on writers and artists whose work has touched me in different ways: Mary Shelly, Grant Wood, and Whitman, among others. Marianne Moore, whose rigor and complexity I love, is a subject for a future poem, I hope. What interests me in looking at the lives of other people—whether well-known artists or the members of my own family—is the way the specific details of a life, of the world, can take us right up to the edge of understanding—and then leave us with a recognition of the boundlessness of all we can love and appreciate but never fully understand.

Biography
Margaret Mackinnon grew up in the South, influenced by a lush landscape and a family that emphasized a deep connection between language and meaning. Her mother wrote poetry as a young woman (and generously encouraged all her earliest literary efforts). Her father was a Presbyterian minister, so every Sunday, she watched him try to give shape to beliefs and questions through the words of sermons, prayers, and creeds.
In college, at Vassar and the University of North Carolina, Mackinnon studied art history and religion, thinking about how image and pattern intersect with what we see as significant. And then came five years in Japan, where she taught English and studied textile design in a small circle of Japanese women artists. She learned something there about the discipline of a craft, and how that kind of focus can take one into a deeper attention to the everyday world. Back in the United States, she entered the graduate program in creative writing at the University of Florida.

Margaret Mackinnon’s work has appeared in Image, Poetry, New England Review, Georgia Review, Quarterly West, RHINO, Poet Lore, Shenandoah, Southern Humanities Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and other publications. Her awards include the Richard Eberhart Poetry Prize from Florida State University, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. She teaches at a private girls’ high school and lives in Falls Church, Virginia.

======================================================================

ABOUT JAN BOWMAN
IMG_0345 
Jan’s story collection, Flight Path & Other Stories published by Evening Street Press. Available online for immediate shipment.
coverOrder it here: http://eveningstreetpress.com/jan-bowman.html
For group or store orders contact Barbara Bergmann, Managing Editor    Email:       editor@eveningstreetpress.com
Soon Available: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, & GoogleBooks (print & e-books)

Winner of the Roanoke Review Fiction Award, Jan’s stories have been nominated for Best American Short Stories, Pushcart and Pen/O’Henry awards. Her fiction has appeared in Evening Street Review, Uncertain Promise: An Anthology of Short Fiction and Creative Nonfiction, Roanoke Review, The Broadkill Review, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, and others. Glimmer Train named a story as Honorable Mention for Short Story Awards for New Writers Jan’s stories have been finalists or short- listed for the Broad River Review RASH Award for Fiction, The Phoebe Fiction Contest and So-to-Speak fiction contest. She is working on a new story collection, working title, Life Boat Drills for Children. She has nonfiction publications in Atticus Review, Trajectory, and Pen-in-Hand. She writes a regular blog on her website on the writing life and interviews writers and publishers. 
Learn more at:  www.janbowmanwriter.com

 
This entry was posted by Jan Bowman on Monday, February 1, 2016.
 
Filed under: DELMARVA Writers, Interviews, On Writing
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site. Edit Link Edit this entry.
Comments are closed.

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Entry 241 - Linda Trice - on KENYA'S ART, KENYA'S WORD - And Are Agents Necessary?




4602bec0de81a7f3e759cd943dbcee4c


JAN:     Your new picture book for ages 4-8, Kenya's Art (Charlesbridge Publishing) is now available from all booksellers as of Tuesday, January 12, 2016. It's such a heart-warming story. The daddy in the story helps his daughter Kenya find something wonderful to do during spring vacation. When school begins again Kenya inspires her multicultural classmates and her teacher, Mrs. Garcia to use recycled materials to make art. Some readers may remember their grandparents’ tales about making quilts and toys from recycled materials. This is your third book in the Kenya series and joins Kenya's Word and Kenya's Song. What inspired you to write Kenya’s Art?

07a67a4c6b6c962da54cd362c671987b
LINDA:     Two things inspired me.

FIRST GRADE STUDENTS: I taught a group or remarkable students in a New York City public school. Their parents were involved, supportive and helpful. I asked my students to tell their classmates about their spring vacations. Cecile went to the Bahamas, showed us some of the shells she collected and told us about each one. Brian told us about each of the three books he’d read, Diane showed us her science project and Imani read her one page report about Martin Luther King.

STUDIO MUSEUM OF HARLEM: Elan Ferguson, a teaching artist gave weekly workshops for children and parents at the Studio Museum of Harlem. Each workshop was inspired by one of the museum’s exhibit. Once Elan helped the children turn old postcards into 3 D art. Elan has advanced degrees and has worked in helping children create art for more than fifteen years. Her bio and some of the projects she’s helped kids develop are on her Diverse Art for Kids blog: http://diverseart4kids.blogspot.com/
Five Year old Bryce Simmons & her finished art project.
Five-Year old Bryce Simmons & her finished art project.

 JAN:     What were your favorite childhood books?

LINDA:     There weren’t stories that I could relate to when I was a child. The books I read had rural and suburban white children in them. When Black people were included in a story, which was rare, they were often offensively portrayed.
The result of this was that in elementary school, when I started writing stories, I wrote about white people who lived in the suburbs in homes with, believe it or not, white picket fences. I lived in Brooklyn, New York and had never even seen such houses.
I’ve recently read about other Black writers who had the same experience when they were children. Some of them like me wrote stories about white suburban families and not portrayals of families like their own. We wrote stories like the ones that we were reading. There were no books for children that reflected the diversity of Black life.

4602bec0de81a7f3e759cd943dbcee4cJ









JAN:   You have written books that have strong historical connections. What about your background and experience influences topics that you choose for your writing projects?

LINDA:     I took Black studies courses when I was a student at Howard University. I earned advanced degrees and taught Black Studies on the university level. Many believed and hoped that when modern Black Studies programs began in the 1970s the information would be included in mainstream courses from pre-K to graduate school. Regrettably that has not happened.

I often write about famous Black people because few Americans know about them. I wrote an article about Charlotte Forten (1837-1914) for Pockets, a children’s magazine. Charlotte was the daughter of a socially prominent, wealthy, Black abolitionist family in Philadelphia. During the Civil War she went to South Carolina’s Sea Islands to teach the newly freed people. Had she been captured she could have been killed or sold into slavery. According to the National Women’s History museum she was “the first African-American teacher to be hired in Massachusetts (and) probably was the first in the world to teach white students.”

I also write for adults. In my article for the magazine, "Black Women Entrepreneurs" that was published in the magazine, Opportunities for the Minority College Graduate, I included Maggie Lena Walker (1864-1934). This Black woman was the first female bank president of any race in the United States.

One of the objectives of my written work is to show the economic and cultural diversity of African Americans. For instance the children in Kenya’s Song have grandparents who embrace their Caribbean culture.

Kenya’s Art and other books in the series show a loving and encouraging middle class two-parent family. Kenya is a strong and creative girl who lives in a multicultural community and whose culturally diverse classmates are kind and supportive of each other.

JAN:   What writing advice do you have for adults and in particular, beginning writers?

LINDA:     I’ve been teaching adults how to write for some time now. I was on the faculty of several colleges and at the Institute of Children’s Literature. I gave writing courses in adult education programs and had columns about writing in newspapers and magazines. I am invited to speak at regional conferences of the Society for Children Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). Often attendees sign up to get my critique of their work in progress.
Many beginning writers want to start off writing a book. I suggest they start by getting published! I suggest that they write and send letters to the editor of their local paper about something they care about. They can write for community newsletters or the newsletters of their church, library, even the one for their job. They may not get paid, but will get good experience in the writing world.

I like to remind beginning writers that book authors do the same thing. For example, I work on my books during the week and on weekends I work on articles, poems, and stories. Some are good enough to submit to magazines and newspapers, while others still need work. So the next time I have a few hours I work on them and continue until they are polished.

JAN:     What can you tell readers about your experiences working with agents? How did you get your first agent? What's it like to work with and without an agent?

LINDA:     Well, let me tell you how I found my first agent. I was at a new friend’s party for her five-year old daughter and met a woman who wrote screenplays for a television soap opera. She asked what I had published. Although I hadn’t had a book published yet, my articles and short stories had been. She gave me the name of her agent, Sally Wechsler.

Sally looked at my published articles and short stories and then took me on. By that time I’d written articles for the United Methodist Church and reviewed children’s books for them too. The United Presbyterian Church had hired me to write stories for their Sunday schools. I’d also done some articles for neighborhood newspapers. They didn’t pay, but I did get a byline.
Sally told me that McGraw Hill was doing a series of books for ages 9-12 and needed someone to do a biography of Charles Drew, MD, the Black surgeon who had discovered a way to preserve blood. The American Red Cross asked him to set up America’s first blood banks. He did and they saved lives. Dr. Drew had been a hero to my parents and one of Drew’s daughters had been my classmate at Howard University’s Law School.

McGraw Hill was considering two other writers. I was persuasive in my letter to McGraw Hill and got the contract. The book was a success and, with the help of my sister, the first edition quickly sold out.


Many of my writer friends have found publishing success without an agent. After Sally Wecksler died I was able to find another agent. But she didn’t work out. And working without an agent won't prevent writers from success. For example, Highlights Foundation gives workshops for people who want to write and for writers who want to take advanced workshops in writing. I was at one of them when I heard Yolanda Scott, the executive editor of Charlesbridge Publishing speak. I sent my new manuscript, Kenya’s Word to her and she accepted it. I had no agent. Once again my sister helped and the first edition sold out.  

Charlesbridge was so pleased that they offered me a contact for two more books about my character Kenya. I have been invited to speak at schools, community centers, churches, and book fairs.

JAN:     You have won numerous awards for your writing over the years including the Pewter Plate Award from Highlights for Children for your profile of Harlem Renaissance painter, Jacob Lawrence and you wrote a wonderful book about Charles Drew: Pioneer of Blood Plasma. Which of your many awards has touched you the most?

LINDA:    Writing awards are appreciated because they tell an author that her talent and achievements have been recognized. As you mention, I have won several. Among my favorites: the Delaware Diamond because kids voted for it. Also another of my favorites is a profile of author Walter Dean Myers that won an award from Parenting Media Association. I especially appreciate these two because these are the people who publish magazines that parents and teachers read.

Sometimes what touches me most are the heart-felt letters I find in my fan mail. A woman wrote that my article on Black Women Entrepreneurs inspired her because, although she is Black, she had not known about Black women business owners.

Writers try to express what is in people’s hearts. We write the words that people often wish they could say. One of my professors once told me, “Linda, you will be a voice of your people.”  I hope he was right and that other people will write about the concerns of their communities too. Writers can educate, console and inspire their readers. And isn’t that why we read?

Walter Dean Myers, was a noted and prolific author was the Library of Congress’ Ambassador for Children’s Literature.

ABOUT LINDA TRICE
4b24a917ad7370ccb5cf3634954a6282
Author Linda Trice




 Linda Trice was born and raised in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, NY. She received an undergraduate degree from Howard University in Washington, DC, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Columbia University. She also holds a Ph.D. in Black Studies and is a member of Pi Gamma Mu, the international honor society in social studies. She was a Fellow at the following artist colonies: Millay, Alfred, Hambidge and The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.


Before making writing her full-time career, Linda taught lower grades in public schools in New York City, Connecticut and Washington, DC. On the college level, she taught undergraduate, graduate and adult education courses and workshops in writing and Black Studies. She was a columnist and book reviewer for Comcast, The Hartford Courant, QBR Kids, Black Enterprise, The Bulletin of The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators and other periodicals.

Please tell your friends about Kenya's Art.  AVAILABLE RIGHT NOW.      Ask them to visit https://www.scbwi.org/display-book-launch-party/?id=366968



IMG_0345ABOUT JAN BOWMAN

Jan’s story collection, Flight Path & Other Stories published by Evening Street Press. Available online for immediate shipment.
Order it here: http://eveningstreetpress.com/jan-bowman.html
For group or store orders contact Barbara Bergmann, Managing Editor    Email:       editor@eveningstreetpress.com
Soon Available: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, & GoogleBooks (print & e-books)

Winner of the Roanoke Review Fiction Award, Jan's stories have been nominated for Best American Short Stories, Pushcart and Pen/O’Henry awards. Her fiction has appeared in Evening Street Review, Uncertain Promise: An Anthology of Short Fiction and Creative Nonfiction, Roanoke Review, The Broadkill Review, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, and others. Glimmer Train named a story as Honorable Mention for Short Story Awards for New Writers Jan’s stories have been finalists or short- listed for the Broad River Review RASH Award for Fiction, The Phoebe Fiction Contest and So-to-Speak fiction contest. She is working on a new story collection, working title, Life Boat Drills for Children. She has nonfiction publications in Atticus Review, Trajectory, and Pen-in-Hand. She writes a regular blog on her website on the writing life and interviews writers and publishers. 
Learn more at: www.janbowmanwriter.com