Valerie Nieman v. 3.0

Remembering Irene McKinney

2012-02-06T05:46:00.000-08:00

Women writers, and all who write about the working classand farmers and miners of Appalachia, lost a sterling voice over the weekend. IreneMcKinney, former poet laureate of the state, teacher, editor, and light in the darkness,diedFebruary 4, on her family farm. She was only a few weeks shy of her 73^rdbirthday.

The daughter of a schoolteacher, she grew up in Belington, WV,and returned to those acres after a life that took her first to West VirginiaWesleyan College, just down the road, then West Virginia University, and finallythe University of Utah. She traveled widely beyond those academic settings, buther heart was always home. “I’m a hillbilly, a woman, and a poet,” she oncesaid, “and I understood early on that nobody was going to listen to anything Ihad to say anyway, so I might as well just say what I want to.” But peoplelistened. She gathered up honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, theBread Loaf Writers Conference, the MacDowell Colony, the West VirginiaCommission on the Arts, the Utah Arts Council, the Kentucky Foundation forWomen.

She wrote six books of poetry including The Girl with the Stone in Her Lap(1976); SixO’Clock Mine Report (1989), which was chosen for the Pitt PoetrySeries; and Vivid Companion (2004). Unthinkable: Selected Poems 1976–2004was published in 2009. Another collection, HaveYou Had Enough Darkness Yet? No, I Haven't Had Enough Darkness, will bepublished posthumously by Red Hen Press.

Irene was always reaching out to other women and otherwriters in West Virginia and beyond. As a newbie writer, I was awed by her giftsand her assurance when I first met her at a West Virginia University gathering.I would go on running into Irene for the next 20 years, at writing conferenceslarge and small.

She invited me to speak at a writers’ conference at WestVirginia Wesleyan College, where she taught up to and past retirement. Thissmall liberal arts college, built around a “quad” at the edge of Buckhannon, attracteda who’s who of Appalachian writing for these events – Jayne Anne Phillips,Maggie Anderson, Richard Currey, Gerald Stern – I sat at table with them andjust drank in the writerly goodness.

Irene was also my introduction to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs,which is having its annual gathering right now. She asked me to be on a panel –with Denise Giardina and Tom Andrews – and I questioned her decision. I wasjust a newspaper reporter and farmer, with some poetry to my credit, and asingle novel. When she introduced me, it was as “a woman of letters.” I’llnever forget her generosity.

Like Churchill, she believed that you never, ever give up. Thelast time I saw Irene was at the West Virginia Book Festival. Her poetrycollection VividCompanion had just come out from WVU Press, which also published my shortstory collection Fidelitiesthat year. She had just recently been diagnosed with the bone cancer that wouldtake her life. Yet she was writing, and cogitating over the plans that wouldoccupy the last three years of her life, founding and directing the LowResidency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at West VirginiaWesleyan. Her last wishes were that donations be made to help support studentsenrolling in that program.

She was a sparkler – powerful, illuminating – at the end, thinbut still red-topped and glowing, refusing to just let go.

Here’s a link to a poem that so many who knew her arequoting today: “VisitingMy Gravesite: Talbott Churchyard, West Virginia.”

Short Story Collections by (and About) Women

2012-01-22T05:13:00.000-08:00

Riding down to the Weymouth Center on Saturday, I heard two bits of news from Press 53 publisher Kevin Morgan Watson.

One, that he was not going to publish any more novels or memoirs, so that he could focus on short story collections (his first love) and poetry. I'm happy he's making this move, even though it means I'll be back in the hunt for a publisher and/or agent for my next Southern/crime novel Backwater, now in the writing - because short fiction deserves its champion.

The other bit of news is that Darlin' Neal, author of Rattlesnakes and the Moon from Press 53, will be back soon with another collection of short fiction.

I love Rattlesnakes, an unflinching look into the lives of blue-collar woman that take us into the truck stops and trailer parks,but doesn't showing women at the hardscrabble end of things as simplyvictims. Her heartbreaking stories of the road andhard times are set in small places of the South and West. In “Lafayette,” a womanleaves behind a friend’s tragic death and a man’s love, heading back to NewMexico, where “the rocks and trees and sky will give memories to her,” but theway out of Plaquemines is a slow journey by bus that takes her only as far asLafayette for that first crucial night.

Loved ones in prison, rape, heroin addiction, aging – Neal’swomen face challenges very close to heart and home. At the end of “Piercings,” 15-year-oldStella demands the right to dress, to be,as she chooses. “She has some brass knuckles. She walks outside. She crossesFortification into Belhaven Heights. If anyone threatens her, they better keeptheir distance because she will smash their faces. She keeps crying. She walksfor hours, over there, defying all those dangers and they do not touch her.”

Neal's next collection will be one to look for. In the meantime, check out Diane Simmons' collection Little America that also features gutsy women living on the edge.

A quick and easy book trailer

2012-01-14T13:29:00.000-08:00

I ran into this "app" at the Books by Women site.
It only took me a couple of hours to put it together, using photos that I had taken along with videos from the site and a public domain image. Pretty slick! I only did the free 30-second one, but you can upgrade to a longer paid video.
For authors with small presses, this seems like a nice option. Check it out!

PERPETUAL FOLLY: The Year in Books — the Best of 2011

2012-01-01T04:29:00.000-08:00

PERPETUAL FOLLY: The Year in Books — the Best of 2011: Although I read a lot of books in 2011, I certainly didn’t read all that were published in 2011, and I didn’t read exclusively books tha...

A sonnet, on demand

2011-12-28T11:19:00.000-08:00

For my Facebook friends who wanted to see the Parisian sonnet I mentioned...

The poem appeared in the latest issue of the International Poetry Review, one dedicated to contemporary poetry from Romania. Since 1975, this fine publication has been bringing together poetry from around the globe, in the original language and in translation, as well as poetry from English-speaking realms.

Mark Smith-Soto edits this journal, with the able assistance of a number of associate, consulting, and guest editors. The journal is published out of UNC-Greensboro. A two-issue subscription is $12. For more information about the magazine, visit this webpage.

So - this sonnet - based on a December stay in an apartment in the Second Arrondissement, a place of amazing contrasts and a low incidence of tourists!

2^nd Honeymoon

Moonlight on watered cobblesof Montorgueil:

limp endive, aging coquilles, cigarettes

bob down the gutter. “My feet,” I plead, hobble

past cave et boucherie, Stohrer’s baguettes.

We sleep among the great,on Marie-Stuart,

pres de whereMadeleine drops her veils

to end as Saint-Denis, (yetafter dark

aren’t all cats gray, and lipsalike, female

and male?) Our nights areloud and mornings rue-

full. Look – on this place – a severed head listens

for a loving word. I leaninto the statue’s

stony hand, and oncommand, I grin.

Late marriages, likepoems, we revise,

but cannot step into thesame street twice.

2011-12-18T13:07:00.000-08:00

Poetry, Wordsworth said, is emotion recollected in tranquility.
For a definition of "tranquility," see the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities.

Home to the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame and home base for the North Carolina Poetry Society, Weymouth Center has a busy calendar of chamber music, garden events, and lectures. Those occupy the ground floor and the surrounding terraces and gardens.
But for a writer, Weymouth is upstairs. The second floor of the historic home - actually two homes joined together, plus - has several rooms for writers to just write. Nothing else. Just write.
I joined the elect earlier this month, when I spent five days at the Southern Pines center. North Carolina writers have completed more than 600 residencies there - if all were as productive as mine, then we have Weymouth to thank for many, many books.
I sat at my desk in the Paul Green room, overlooking the gardens with their bare architectural trees and winter-blooming camellias, and fell back into the novel that's been simmering, simmering, simmering. I found my characters still talking, though like half-wild cats, they had to be enticed back to full contact.
The Weymouth Center is a sort of blessed desert island where you have the necessities of life but none of the encumbrances. Can't believe it took me this long to find it!
Thank you, Hope and Alex, who made the stay so pleasant.
Thanks to the congenial folks of Southern Pines.
And a special salute to the train whistle at 7, not a wake-up call but a call to action....to the word.

Remembering the Old Home Place

2011-11-05T16:10:00.000-07:00

My old home places were all in the mountains. My childhoodwas spent in the Southern Tier of New York State, in the rolling hill-regioncalled the Allegheny Plateau. I grew up in a gaunt farmhouse that housed atreasure - a home library of oddly assorted volumes. Narrow books of Poe and Longfellow, volumes ofStevenson, Emerson, Shakespeare. Duringthe summers I ran happily wild on our seven acres, but in the winter I read,and can see how those books influenced my later writing – stories in which thehomely and comforting were permeated by the strange and troubling.

I can see the books in that dim room, among the oldfurniture and stored clothing.

Thomas Hardy – Tess of the d’Urbervilles, with thedairylands so like my own home region, but overlying ancient and bloodyhistory.

Gene Stratton’s A Girl of the Limberlost, with asolitary teenager lured by the swamp and its exotic creatures, learning alsoabout poverty and madness and violence.

Hawthorne’s gloomy House of the Seven Gables, where“the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart.”

Tennyson’s Idyllsof the King, which fired my young imagination.

Later, SF and fantasy brought new landscapes - Ray Bradbury’stragic Mars, the jungle world of Rima in Green Mansions, Tolkein’s alien butfamiliar Middle-Earth, Ursula K. LeGuin’s harsh world of Winter.

This selection is from Huckleberry Finn, which along withother books in a complete edition of the works of Mark Twain books introducedme to landscapes from the Mississippi River to the Middle East.

It wasone of these regular summer storms. It would get so dark that it looked allblue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thickthat the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here wouldcome a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the paleunder-side of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would followalong and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; andnext, when it was just about the bluest and blackest -- fst! it was asbright as glory, and you'd have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging aboutaway off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could seebefore; dark as sin again in a second, and now you'd hear the thunder let gowith an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling, down the skytowards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs --where it's long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know.

I realized how deeply some of this writing had sunk in – only to rise in newform in my writing - in a storm scene from Blood Clay:

She lovedstorms but this kind scared her, out of sorts, out of season. Evening was coming on and the winds should bequieting, not whipping the tops of old trees back and forth. Back in Ohio, they’d be watching the TV, thereassurance of the Doppler radar showing yellow and orange, the blinking redcenters of swirling winds. The olderfolks didn’t trust such displays, but turned their black-and-white TVs all theway to black, and watched for the white bands of interference that screamedtornado and sent them to the cellars.

Hail or hardrain hammered on the tin roof. Thedriveway sizzled with the drops.

Tracy wentback to the sofa, feet curled under her, the essays piled left and right as sheread them and assigned grades. Thoughthe wind whined in the attic and lightning shuttered across the wall, sherefused to go to the basement and huddle.

Howvulnerable you are in the country. Thelack of streetlights and close neighbors, no one to count on but yourself. Her grandmother shouting up the stairs, “Comerun water, Tracy Ann. Stormcoming.” And the band of clouds rollingacross the cornfields, her grandmother yanking screens out of windows andslamming them shut, and she would be running water in the bathtub and standingon tiptoes to reach the faucets in the kitchen sink and fill pots and kettles.

The old home place for me was not a house or rooms full offurniture, but the world outside – the woods I roamed and waters I fished. Allaround my old home place – with its garden, swamp, stream and a small woods -were working farms and the remains of farms, where people had worked and thendisappeared. There was sense of loss, of things that have gone away, that risesthrough my earlier novels and through Blood Clay, where the land thatTracey claims is haunted by the history of settlement and war and thedisappearance of traditional ways. The failed farms of my youth had been takenover by the state as game lands, and I gathered fruit on them, and was lured bythe cellarholes and dumps. Here are some lines from a new poem that remembers:

From The Harvest

Across the roadfrom our bleak farmless farmhouse

was the socketof another: a tumble of cellar-stones

under anorchard of apples, pears, and plums.

We shook fruitdown and picked it up from summer til snow,

gifts fromthose householders – faltered, fizzled, ruined, dead –

the trees theyhad planted outlasting their other works…

When I left home, it was to anew rural homeplace in the central Appalachians, where I homesteaded a hillfarm in North Central West Virginia. Like my childhood home, it was a place oflayered imagination – the farm we built on the former pig farm, before that asettlement, virgin forest, the hunting grounds of Indian tribes. Thoseabandoned farm roads and sagging linefences, and the mine cracks opening into the deep underground, became anotherhome place that shows up everywhere in my poetry and fiction.

Finally, I’ve come home, to a home I knew before I camehere. I remember long ago finding Our Southern Highlanders andbeing entranced with the description of these great lonely mountains I wouldn’tcome to see for decades.

From almostany summit in Carolina one looks out upon a sea of flowing curves anddome-shaped eminences undulating, with no great disparity of height, unto thehorizon. … Every ridge is separated from its sisters by deep and narrowravines. Not one of the thousand water courses shows a glint of its dashingstream, save where some faroff river may reveal, through agap in the mountain, one single shimmering curve. In all this vast prospect, akeen eye, knowing where to look, may detect an occasional farmer's clearing,but to the stranger there is only mountain and forest, mountain and forest, asfar as the eye can reach. ... Characteristic, too, is the dreamy bluehaze, like that of Indian summer intensified, that ever hovers over themountains, unless they be swathed in cloud, or, for a few minutes, after asharp rain-storm has cleared the atmosphere...The foreground of such alandscape, in summer, is warm, soft, dreamy, caressing, habitable; beyond itare gentle and luring solitudes; the remote ranges are inexpressibly lonesome,isolated and mysterious; but everywhere the green forest mantle bespeaks avital present.

So I find myself now in themidst of those mountains, carrying images of other places like keepsakes in asack, or tote, or poke, as our language may shape it. The low green hills ofCattaraugus County, dotted with Holsteins. The steeper hills of West Virginia, rockystreams and blackberry lanes and laurel hells, and under all the tunneled darklike the caves of Tom Sawyer. And most recently, the gentle Piedmont risingtoward these fabled mountains that Horace Kephart loved and saved from the axe.Images blur and merge, like mountains at a distance, or those daguerrotypes ofmy Civil War ancestors, grave and beguiling, that can only be seen when theyare viewed aslant.

Blood Clay by Valerie Nieman | Our State Magazine

2011-10-01T10:37:00.000-07:00

Our State magazine is one of the gems of North Carolina - a state magazine that is chock-full of information and entertainment. I was so pleased to see Blood Clay get such a nice notice there.

Blood Clay by Valerie Nieman | Our State Magazine

2011-09-17T17:02:00.000-07:00

A poem from Wake Wake Wake - remembering AWP, taping this segment in the uproar of the book fair, while I was tired and really, really cold - but enjoying the whole experience!

PRE: Blood Clay - Valerie Nieman (2011-08-31)

2011-09-11T07:02:00.000-07:00

PRE: Blood Clay - Valerie Nieman (2011-08-31)

Passing it on

2011-09-10T04:15:00.000-07:00

I collect books - what writer doesn't? I fill the shelves and love to look at the colors of the spines and typography of the titles, remembering when I heard this poet read, or sat on a workshop led by that fiction writer.
So it's tough to give up a book. I lend with reluctance...knowing that books, once loosed, tend to be like wandering hounds, always headed for the next porch down the road.
But sometimes the book and the person come together. One young man went away with my (third) copy of Breece D'J Pancake's stories, and told me it changed his life. That book didn't come back, but it is where it needs to be. I'll get another.
A couple of weeks ago, a former student stopped by my office at North Carolina A&T State University. She had just landed a job as a schoolteacher, and one of her new duties would be teaching some creative writing.
"I don't know where to start," she admitted.
I rolled back to the bookshelves that loom ominously behind my desk (I wonder if they will topple over in an earthquake or just from misplaced weight) and pulled a thin book from the ranks. Meredith Sue Willis, a writer I knew from way back when in Shinnston, WV, had written a small volume of exercises for middle school students called Blazing Pencils. I've had the book for decades, use it sometimes, but mostly like to have its bright cover there next to other writing texts.
"Try this," I said. "This will get you started."
She went away with a smile on her face and maybe a bit less stress about the first day of school. so the book is where it needs to be.
Now about that copy of Kafka on the Shore that a former student left with me and never returned to get - the one that made me fall in love with Murakami....

J. California Cooper and John Edgar Wideman Short Fiction Prize

2011-09-07T07:28:00.000-07:00

Entries are being accepted now for the North Carolina A&T State University Creative Writing Program 2011 The J. California Cooper and John Edgar Wideman Short Fiction Prize. The deadline is Oct. 31 (postmark date).
Dr. Anjail Ahmad writes: "This competition seeks to honor the literary legacy of two of America's greatest writers. Both J. California Cooper and John Edgar Wideman have authored numerous collections of short fiction and novels among their accomplishments. They have been celebrated for their rich depictions of African-American families via their ability to translate the breadth of Black American experience into poignant tales of urban and rural life. Both Cooper and Wideman have labored long in the literary trenches of American literature, and as award winning writers, they each have championed the experiences of Black Americans by dealing with themes of pride, love, family, identity, the effects of racism and a people's will to triumph. Through their creative vision, they fuse history, myth, fiction, and autobiography to create a symphony of black voices, from the vernacular to the highly educated. Their works movingly articulates both Cooper and Wideman's commitment to the black masses because their fiction focuses on the real-life experiences of black people in the Americas."

Contest Guidelines

Fiction entries: (No more than 7,000 words per short story, only 1 story per submission, any style.) Competition will be judged by a committee of poets and writers. Should the entries not be up to our standards, we reserve the right to withhold the prize in a given year. The winner receives $250 and
publication on the NC A&T web site. Applicants must write in English. Please include the following per entry:
* Four typed, double spaced, stapled (12 point font) copies of an
unpublished manuscript (author's name must not appear on manuscript).
* One cover sheet with name, address, telephone, email, word count and
title of story.
* $15 reading fee in check or money order, per submission, made
payable to NCAT/CWP-Fiction Prize.
* Writers can submit more than one entry. Each entry must be
accompanied by a separate entry fee.
* Winners to be announced December 1, 2011.
* The competition is open to writers without regard to geographical
region or previous publication background.
* SASE for acknowledgement of receipt of manuscript (optional).
* Winners and honorable mentions to be published on web site.

Please mail your submission to: Dr. Anjail Rashida Ahmad, Creative Writing Program-Short
Fiction Prize, A427 GCB, North Carolina A&T State University, 1601 E. Market
St., Greensboro, NC 27411.

2011-09-07T04:15:00.000-07:00

Come one, come all!
The Fall Community Day at Weatherspoon Art Gallery at UNCG will bring together poetry, music, and of course, incredible art. From 1-4 we'll "peek behind the mask" of superheroes and saints and write persona poems.
This is also part of the "17 Days" art event in Greensboro - and 100,000 Poets for Change worldwide.

The Big Tent

2011-09-06T12:11:00.000-07:00

BookMarks comes back to Winston-Salem on Saturday, and these days it's downtown in the Arts District. This makes for an interesting melange of books, art, and good food (check out Sweet Potatoes!)
The first time I participated in BookMarks, it was set up on the fields of Bethabara Park, sharing space for the day with a gathering of Porsche aficianados. Booklovers walked the gravel paths and enjoyed views of the foundations of a Mennonite community. Readings and panel discussions pulled people into tents that offered shade from the late summer sun but allowed the literature to leak out!
I'll miss some of that "big tent" atmosphere, because it was a visual reminder of where we are as writers. Whether we write historical fiction or contemporary short stories, paranormal romance or poetry, accounts of worlds grittily real or loftily imagined, we are all under that big tent of the word.
And it's the word that matters. There is a lot of discussion about "platforms" and "ereaders," and loyalists for both Nook and Kindle - but those are just delivery systems, new and elegant but not different in the most basic of ways from papyrus scrolls or hand-lettered manuscripts. They are conveyances, so that the eye can take in the word, and the word can open unexpected vistas in the mind.
Hope to see you Sept. 10 in Winston-Salem, or down the road.

Welcome, bloggers!

2011-08-16T17:36:00.000-07:00

Thanks for stopping by!
I blog about writing and writers, especially those in North Carolina, my beloved, adopted home.
I've been on tour for my new novel, Blood Clay, and will try to do better about posting from the road. Here's a photo from the North Carolina Writers Conference.
President Pat Riviere-Seel (at left) has just presented the first-ever award honoring the state's great bookstores to Emoke B'Racz, founder of Malaprop's in Asheville.

Personal archaelogy

2011-08-16T17:11:00.000-07:00

I was up early, watching a UNC-EX program on the crocodile god in Egypt. Lots of images of sand sifting through ruins, and archaologists digging layer by careful layer.
I've been asked lately about how a book begins, and it seems at least for me it begins only when there is enough history accumulated. What happened when I was 5 or 11 or 23 or 36 is still there, like the ruins buried in the desert. Then something new occurs that reaches right back through the layers like a shaft dug straight into the past.
It's a certain slant of light .... a note from an old bell ... the way a dirt road curves into a forest and the sky reflects from a crescent puddle.
Then, and only then, my senses and emotions awakened, is there a sense of a story waiting to be told.
And interviewers have asked, of course, how much overlap there is between author and character. Does Tracey in Blood Clay represent my feelings in her sometimes caustic comments? Is she me?
Well, no. But she has some parts of me, as Dave does, and others.

If the story rises out of a deep place, I think what makes it more than a moment of nostalgia is when this intensely personal element intersects with wider societal issues. It gains breadth and moves out from a single source, opening to embrace the world.
Like an X/Y graph, the upright runs through the writer's spine - the chakras - the centers of all that we are, phobias and pains, triumphs, strengths, desires. The character, however outwardly shaped, is made out of the person that I am as well as the writer I've become. The horizontal arm - society, family, community - intersects with the vertical, and at that point - a story.

Tomcats

2011-08-08T10:34:00.000-07:00

My neighbor's been trying to rehabilitate a feral cat. Francis, or Francis, named for the saint, this skinny cat arrived a few weeks back, white with pale marmalade patches. No one could get close enough to determine the gender, hence, a name that would serve in either eventuality.
She was able to trap Francis, as he turned out to be, and take him to the vet for vaccinations and neutering. He complained loudly from the screened porch that afternoon, his usual interrogatives turned to outrage.
The main character in Blood Clay, Tracey, is engaged in rehabilitating a passel of cats abandoned by earlier occupants of her farmhouse. It's not an easy task, and I'll leave it to the novel to show how well she does in it. But I will say that Garland, who has the largest "walk-on" part from the cat world, is modeled closely on a great old tomcat from my youth.
I had some wonderful cat friends - Heckle and Jeckle, Goldie, Tiger. Boogie was special, though. He was a big black-and-white cat, very affectionate, who seemed to roll more than run, and had a white "towel" that sashayed across his backside when he walked.
The day I left home for college, he disappeared. Did he die of old age? Get killed in the road? Fall sick, or fall prey?
Many months later, when I was home for a while, I was standing outside talking with my parents when I heard a familiar yowl. I called back.
The yowls moved closer, and then Boogie - complaining all the while - came out of the meadow and made his way to the house. He didn't run. He walked with dignity and affronted pride. I was allowed to greet him, but there was a coldness there that would never go away. He became my sister's cat, and lived for many more years.
My abandonment, and his image, returned as I worked on the novel.
Pace, Boogie.

Sustainability

2011-08-05T12:21:00.000-07:00

I've been following the Facebook conversation launched by a friend in Pennsylvania who is considering opening a bookstore. "Try with all your might to find the tiniest, nookiest, very least expensive, spot to rent," one comment read. "Bookstores ARE NOT a thing of the past!" said another. And people had suggestions for ways an indie store could add to its revenue stream, as well as warnings about the hazard of starting a new business, any new business.
It made me think of Barnhill's in Winston-Salem, a newish store that's working hard to revitalize a community on and around Burke Street. In addition to books, and strong support for the small press (especially W-S's own Press 53), Barnhill's has wine tastings from regional vineyards, local art on the walls, children's items, fudge from a nearby shop.
None of this is new, but it is part of a pattern of local businesses helping each other out, making networks to sustain them and their customers.
It's like the local food movement - rely more on your neighbors and less on corporate giants.
On Saturday, I'll be visiting Loco for Coco, one of those small businesses that offers a superior product and superior service. From 1-3, I'll be there to talk books and chat with customers. Loco for Coco also hosts receptions for artists in its Lawndale location.
When I stopped there today (try the Key Lime dark chocolate bark!) I picked up a flyer that encapsulates this new business ethos. "Sustainability and the Local Economy" will be discussed at 7 p.m. Monday, Aug. 8, at the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, 607 N. Greene St., Greensboro NC. Eric Henry of TS Designs will be the speaker.
If you can't be there to become part of the solution for our community, stop by the website to learn more.

Regal Cities

2011-08-01T05:15:00.000-07:00

I was in Asheville this weekend for a gathering of writers, and was delighted to read at Malaprop's, one of the great bookstores. Emoke, founder of Malaprop's some 30 years ago, was honored for her life's work by the state's writers, and it was a well-deserved recognition. And here's a shout-out to Alsace, Jan, and all the folks who make an author feel welcome in the shop.
Asheville crowns the mountains with grace and good humor, a irrepressible young queen of the high country. The annual Bele Chere festival filled the downtown for the weekend, and despite the heat and threat of thunderstorms, everyone seemed to have a grand time. I enjoyed the music, both the stage productions and the intimate sound of buskers along the streets, and art of every variety.
Speaking of queens - I'm in the Queen City on Aug. 13 to visit Park Road Books from 1-3 p.m. Pam Kelley is giving away a copy of Blood Clay - stop by her website before Wednesday, Aug. 3, to get your name in the hat.

Traveling on Faith

2011-07-18T12:08:00.000-07:00

It was the long way around, but I got there.
On Saturday, I was driving to the Literary Bookpost in Salisbury, using the car's navigation system for directions. When I got off I-85, the sign pointed right to downtown - but the nav system sent me left. Hmmmm .... well, maybe it was the back way around a lot of traffic lights. So I followed. Out into the country. Really into the country. Three miles, four miles.
Then I saw the sign, "Welcome to Faith."
The nav system came alive and told me I was approaching my destination, 110 S. Main St.
And there it was, in the tiny downtown of Faith, a house on the lefthand side. And the nav system insisting that I was in Salisbury.
So I tried the GPS on my phone, and it sent me back the way I'd come, toward the downtown, and to 110 S. Main St., the Literary Bookpost.
A few minutes lost, no more. One of the folks attending the workshop said it was meant to be, that taking the detour had perhaps prevented an accident, had taken me into another place for a reason.
There is something a bit eerie about the place I was taken was called "Faith."
It made me consider the work that I do as a writer, the work that other writers tell me about. We open our hearts and minds to some image, some voice, some idea, and then follow it wherever it leads. On faith. On belief that our writing minds will find/create a new path that others can follow.
So I'll leave with this image, taken this morning in the Bog Garden, and this story:

A legend out of the Dark Ages tells of Scottish hero Robert the Bruce,

on the run during the winter of 1305–06.

He was hiding in a cave off the north coast of Ireland, where he watched a spider spinning a web.

It kept trying to make a connection from one side of the cave's roof to the other.

It failed, and failed, and failed, but finally caught a hold on the far point and completed its web.

Bruce was inspired, and went on to wage successful war against the English, to eventual victory.

Promise and fulfilment

2011-07-12T07:46:00.000-07:00

I've been re-reading a classic novel that I knew as a girl.
Gene Stratton Porter wrote "A Girl of the Limberlost" about Indiana's great wooded swamps, thick with moths and mysteries. It appealed to me because I, too, was a solitary child wandering the woods, exploring the patch of second-growth woods below our house, chasing butterflies in the hayfields.
The book (I remember it with pale green covers, the color of a luna moth) seems antique now, the sentiments labored and the transitions often choppy, yet the old allure is there, like the music of the Limberlost. The poor country girl facing the challenges of a city school, her hunger for knowledge, the dangerous beauties of wild places - those remain fresh.
Each chapter is titled with a promise of what lies ahead, "Wherein Elnora has more financial troubles, and Mrs. Comstock again hears the song of the Limberlost." These titles are an enticement, but also a pledge - you will experience this, you will learn this.
I'm working right now on a novel about a teenage girl living at the edge of great mysteries and facing dangers - and as I work, I outline chapters yet to be written on large file cards. Chapter 10, now recently completed, was shorthanded as "WV chapter - back story. The trip back to WV. Maggie's discomfort w/sex roles boys vs. girls. The challenge to her."
The chapter cards help me stay on track and pull the various threads of the story together. They are both a come-hither to the writing, and a vow to see it through.

Community of Writers

2011-07-02T07:56:00.000-07:00

Press 53 has announced the winners and finalists of its Open Competition, and it's exciting to welcome these authors into the family.
One thing about being part of an Indie publisher like Press 53 is that, year by year, you see the community grow and make connections with other writers from coast to coast - and beyond. Among the winners and finalists this year were friends from the Triad - Michael Gaspeny, Ray Morrison and others. Their work emerged from blind judging, along with that from writers from as far away as Bellingham, WA; Watsonville, CA; Brooklyn, NY; and British Columbia, Canada. It will be fun to get to know them through their work in the 2012 anthology.
Publisher Kevin Morgan Watson often speaks about choosing his first two poets, without knowing where they were from, and finding after he decided on the manuscripts that they were from Greensboro (me) and Winston-Salem (Joseph Mills.) Although the press publishes North Carolinians, its reach is nationwide, with a recent strong connection to Washington State.
As the publishing industry reshapes itself, small presses like Press 53 are gaining readers - and prestige. Just consider that the National Book Award this past year went to a novel (The Lord of Misrule) published by indie press McPherson and Co.
Congrats to the Open honorees, one and all!

Brainstorming a Workshop

2011-06-29T16:47:00.000-07:00

This fall it seems like I've been scheduling a lot of workshops at new places. A novel workshop here, a character workshop there. While I have a handful of "tried and true" programs to work from, it's a lot more fun for the teacher to have something new as well.

One of the most successful "brainstorms" to come up with a fresh workshop on a theme happened a few days ago at Tate Street Coffee.

I'd already worked withTerri Dowell-Dennis, associate curator of education for the Weatherspoon Art Museum, on an ekphrasis workshop. I had gotten a note from Richard Krawiec about a Poets for Change day on September 24 - he wanted to get poets thinking about what they could do in their communities to promote literacy and general Good Things on that day.

The date clicked with the new United Arts Council "17 Days" of arts happening in September and October all around Greensboro. Why not put these together? I emailed Terri to ask if she was interested... and it just so happened she was working on a Community Arts Day for Sept. 24!

Synchronicity, as Sting would sing.

So over coffee, and with an eye on the clock (30 minute parking), we tossed ideas back and forth. The exhibit at the time focused on persona. Persona poems! Secret identities. Superheroes! The hidden self. What about images - film - music. Drumming? Poems in performance. A stage?

I left bubbling with ideas, 15 minutes over my limit. Dang, a ticket!

But it was worth it.

I roughed out a plan, Terri refined it - and here it is:

Peeking Behind the Mask: Weatherspoon’s Fall Community Day

Saturday, September 24, 1:00-4:00 pm

Each day we go about our routine lives, but inside we are superheroes or explorers, pirates or rock stars, hiding our secret identities behind a mask of an unassuming face and daily clothes. With the backdrop of Weatherspoon’s current exhibition, “Persona: A Body in Parts,” we’ll explore our own secret identities and “peek behind the mask” of famous folks (real or fictional) to imagine their thoughts and lives. One way to enter this secret world is to write a persona poem – persona meaning mask – in which we give a voice to that alternate identity. Join poet and novelist Valerie Nieman in the Weatherspoon lobby for a drop-in poetry experience for all ages. In addition, use a variety of materials to create your own magnificent mask to wear. At 3:00 pm we’ll celebrate with live improvisational jazz and a spoken word sharing. Don’t miss this high-energy exploration of hidden realms of the self.

Author Ed Davis: Great Summer Reading: A Writer to Watch

2011-06-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

If you're picking up some novels for summer reading, Ed Davis had nice things to say about Blood Clay.
Author Ed Davis: Great Summer Reading: A Writer to Watch
Speaking of watching writers - Ed's novel won the Hackney Award, so watch for him moving up the charts in a few months.

1st Author Interviews: Interview with Valerie Nieman Author of 'Blood Cla...

2011-06-22T06:43:00.000-07:00

1st Author Interviews: Interview with Valerie Nieman Author of 'Blood Cla...: "Book Title: Blood Clay Publisher: Press 53 Author: Valerie Nieman Genre: Literary fiction/Southern fiction Amazon: Blood Clay [paperb..."

Show the love: visit your local bookstore June 18-19 and June 25

2011-06-18T07:46:00.000-07:00

Indie bookstores keep the flame of literature alive.
Press 53 is supporting "indies" all over the nation with "Support our Indie Friends Weekend" right now - including one of my faves, Barnhill's in Winston-Salem.
June 25 is "Save a Bookstore" day, and all of us readers who enjoy browsing and sipping some good coffee need to come on out and show the love by actually (ahem) buying a book.
Me, I'll be at McIntyre's in Fearrington Village, where I'm scheduled to read at 11 a.m. Maybe I'll see you there!

Interviewing Myself

2011-06-17T07:02:00.000-07:00

Seems like things come in threes - most recently, three Q&As.
Two I've just sent off to their respective e-publications, but the first of the trio is now up at StorySouth. Ben Klinkner, formerly of the Greensboro Review, did a great review of Blood Clay, and sent a list of questions to follow the review.
They were interesting, and demanding - the questions that come when a person has read the book and taken mental notes - I was hard pressed to respond in kind.
(I have to say, being likened to Alice Munro will give an author the big head!)
Since leaving journalism, I've found myself on the opposite side of the table from my 25-year experience as an interviewer. Now I'm the one trying to make a cogent sentence, or come up with a name or title from the lumber room of my memory. And it's tough. Hats off to those celebrities and newly formed celebrities who have to be poised and polished for a ceaseless round of interviews.

Performing as a Writer

2011-06-15T10:04:00.000-07:00

For all of us who read our work in public - here's a great piece by Joe Mills, a fellow Press 53 poet and a truly excellent workshop leader and reader.
We owe it to our audiences to be as practiced and prepared as any other performing artist.

The corner where you are

2011-06-13T08:24:00.000-07:00

The best writing, in my experience, comes out of direct experience of a place, a people, a time. These are things you know in your body, a somatic memory that allows your character to move in a developed, authentic setting. Grounding, some call this, and it’s a good analogy – like Anteus we take strength from touching our mother earth.

Sometimes people write best what they have left behind or lost. Nostalgia perhaps, but it can also be powerful.

So what makes a place/setting? Macrosetting is the larger place and time, including the historical and political milieu, artistic and religious presence, climate, architecture, scientific or technological advancement and ethical concerns. And microsetting is the immediate, intimate surround of the story – whether an Atlanta apartment or a West Virginia hill farm.

Specifics are the key – a mountain valley in the Smokies has its own biota, from trees to birds, as well as geographic underpinnings, the land-record of logging and farming and mining that can be found. A valley over, some things can differ – even more so from here to Virginia, to West Virginia, to the end of the Appalachians in western New York. In North Carolina's mountains a traveler might kick at a rock and see it glisten with mica and garnet – in Salamanca, NY, a trilobite might roll up. And of course if we transplant our characters to the Rockies or the Alps then we have a lot of ground to cover fictionally as well as physically.

Why be so specific? Because otherwise characters are in limbo – like the perceived place where unbaptized children go, neither hell nor heaven. It’s like being in a mall – it seems every one of them smells of Cinnabon and had a Spencer Gifts somewhere. It’s a kind of limbo, because once inside that cocoon you could be literally anywhere in the United States.

So – participate in the environment. Be sense-ate. Some things you immediately know or recognize. The smell of the slow waters of the Bog Garden near my home as opposed to pluff mud. The way mist nestles down into the valleys between the mountains, or lies like a comforter on lowland fields. The taste of iron-tinged spring water. The taste of livermush. The way a Carolina chickadee’s song is different from a northern Chickadee’s – and no it doesn’t sing bless your heart! Others you must dig down to get, the smallest of details.

You can’t fake these things. You can research some of them. Sometimes you goof - I was reminded my my errors by a reviewer who noted that I'd made my folks stoop to "top" tobacco when it would be tall - this was my humbling moment, as I'd noted the errors in other writers along the way.

I don’t think there is a substitute for being on the ground in the place you wish to write about, with any luck for a good chunk of your life. An impulse with younger writers to set stories in glamorous places and among glamorous people – not in their own perceived limited and dull experience. But the Bronte sisters constrained to a rural parsonage were able to use the moor’s reality to create powerful literature. “Brighten the corner where you are,” is a great saying as well as a book by Fred Chappell, who used his native place of Canton to range far and wide thematically.

The heart of a (mountain) woman

2011-06-02T13:23:00.000-07:00

I've been reading a lovely book of poetry, "Living Above the Frost Line,"and it's become essential preparation for my trip this week to the mountains of North Carolina and Georgia.
You see, I'm living out of the mountains for the first time in my life. From the rolling Allegheny Plateau to the hills of north-central West Virginia, I've been wrapped in mountain mists and lulled by the sounds of flowing streams and deep-woods birds such as vireos and thrushes. But in 1997 I came down to the flatlands, to Greensboro, and it has been a wonderful transition but not without some pangs for a former life.
Nancy Simpson's book of new and selected poems, out last year from Carolina Wren Press, takes me back. In 108 pages, it covers a lifetime as woman and poet, from 1977 to 2009. I've begun to know something of this devoted teacher and activist, beyond the exchanged e-mail messages when she drew me into the family of the John C. Campbell Folk School. I still remember her email heading: "So you wanna teach? Yes! Yes!" And I've loved every minute spent at Brasstown.
But back to her poems.
Early on, she takes up the image of water, water "in which memories converge." In "Water in the Highway," she writes that "Water on the pavement moves before me/Witch water, I say, as though some sorceress waits/snapping her crooked fingers." Yet this water is real, whether visible or not, and she writes of driving home, "knowing as I go/I will have to cross water to get there." Crossing water, in many traditions, is a way to shake off ghosts, and spirits too pervade these poems, from those dead in wrecks and dead in war to those who accepted death in readiness for communion with God.
These poems sing of solitude, that lovely twin of loneliness, that has the poet declare she will "sit here until someone tells me different,/afraid everything is going to fall." In another poem, Simpson writes that "Sometimes you get what you asked for,/to be left alone," the opening to a poem that ends, "Rubble from lives in one lifetime passes before me./This is the end, the new start,/rock I remember, and clay soft beneath my feet."
And these poems sing of family. I was particularly taken by "Sharing the Bed With Mother" in which the women make themselves narrow, and sleep on the stones of lies. "This could go on all night,/my wanting to build a bridge/and tear it down, and build it back again."
Ultimately, however, it is about the mountains. Images of soil and rock and weather shape these poems, and they are adorned by trees and flowers and the living creatures that make up a beautiful but demanding place. Simpson echoes Whittier in "Storm," as a snow storm closes out the world and she learns that "there are things worse than being all alone in a blizzard."
The title poem closes the book, and it is a poem of affirmation - against all odds, against war and abandonment and loss and struggle, the writer returns to the image of what will, or won't grow above the frost line. "Along the mulched path, it's clear/experts are wrong. Red nasturtiums bloom./Here in my garden/knockout roses still bloom their hearts out."
I'll get the chance to talk with Nancy on Saturday. But then , I've already come to know her heart through this beautiful book.

Georgia Bound

2011-05-26T07:08:00.001-07:00

I'll be in Blairsville, Ga., next weekend for the Bryon Herbert Reece Society gathering. This poet and novelist was known for his love of farm life and nature.
Like North Carolina's own John Ehle, he's a writer intimately in tune with the land, and not as well known today as he should be.

Save the Date: BookMarks

2011-05-19T04:33:00.000-07:00

If you live in or near the Piedmont, or will be visiting here in September, save Sept. 10 for a visit to the BookMarks Festival in downtown Winston-Salem.
Not only will you enjoy a stirring encounter with literature in the midst of the galleries and restaurants of the arts district, but you'll be helping to support literacy programs and reading in the schools.
Here's a look at the 2011 summer reading list, featuring works by the authors who'll be there in September.

FICTION

o Elin Hilderbrand - Silver Girl; The Island; The Castaways

o Cameron Kent - The Road to Devotion; When the Ravens Die

o Margaret Maron - Christmas Mourning; Sand Sharks, Bloody Kin

o Valerie Nieman - Blood Clay (novel); Fidelities (short stories); Wake Wake Wake (poetry)

o Drew Perry - This is Just Exactly Like You

o Brian Ray - Through the Pale Door

o Kimberla Lawson Roby - Love, Honor, and Betray; Secret Obsession; The Best of Everything

o Lisa See - Snow Flower and the Secret Fan; Dreams of Joy; Shanghai Girls; Peony in Love

NONFICTION

o Walter Boyne - How the Helicopter Changed Modern Warfare; Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age

o Marshall Chapman - They Came to Nashville; Goodbye Little Rock N’ Roller

o Scott Douglas - The Little Red Book of Running

o Robert Edelstein - Nascar Legends: Memorable Men, Moments and Machines in Racing History

o Joseph Glatthaar - General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse; Soldering in the Army of Northern

Virginia: A Statistical Portrait of the Troops Who Served under Robert E. Lee

o Linda K. Randall - Finding Grace in the Concert Hall: Community and Meaning among Springsteen Fans

o Justin Spring - Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward

o Vanessa Woods - Bonobo Handshake; It’s Every Monkey for Themselves

POETRY

o Terri Kirby Erickson - Telling Tales of Dusk; In the Palms of Angels

o Alice Osborn - Unfinished Projects; Right Lane Ends

TEEN CENTRAL

o Henry Neff - The Tapestry fantasy series: The Hound of Rowan, The Second Siege; The Fiend and Forge

o Shana Norris - Troy High and Something to Blog About

YOUNG READERS CENTRAL

o Megan E. Bryant - Princess Valentine, Build a Snowman, 1-2-3!; The Sugar Egg (preschool)

o Dallas Clayton - The Awesome Book of Thanks; The Awesome Book (ages 4 – 8)

o Jamie Gilson - Chess! I Love It I Love It I Love It!; Thirteen Ways to Sink a Ship; Gotcha! (ages 9 - 12)

o Gran’daddy Junebug (storyteller) – Great Stories for Young Folks; The Jealous Farmer (ages 5-9)

o Cameron Kent - Make Me Disappear (ages 9 – 12)

o Jane Williams, Sandra Gilmer, and Mina Cook - Who2Bee: The Inside Story (ages 6 - 10)

o Vanessa Woods - Bonobo Handshake (ages 11 – 13)

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

o Sheri Castle - The New Southern Garden Cookbook: Enjoying the Best from Homegrown Gardens,

Farmers’ Markets, Roadside Stands, and CSA Farm Boxes

o Stephanie Tyson and Vivian Joiner - Well, Shut My Mouth: The Sweet Potatoes Cookbook

— 5/17/11

BOOKMARKS FESTIVAL OF BOOKS

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2O11 o 1O:OO AM – 5:OO PM

DOWNTOWN ARTS DISTRICT o WINSTON-SALEM, NC o FREE

Blog Tour for Blood Clay

2011-05-09T06:34:00.000-07:00

I'm setting up a blog tour for the spring and summer. If you are interested in interviewing me, reviewing Blood Clay, or hosting a book giveaway on your blog, please get in touch with me at valnieman@gmail.com or respond to this post and I'll be happy to work with you. Make sure to include your email address so I can reply to you.

Of Teaching and Writing

2011-05-08T05:03:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I sat in among the massed faculty on the floor of the Greensboro Coliseum to witness that great rite of passage, college graduation. The students were exhorted to follow their dreams, work hard, maintain their ethical standards, trust in God, thank their parents...all the standard tropes of commencement.

Amid all the celebration - the cheers, the signs, the lovingly decorated mortarboards, the bouquets and beach balls - the faculty sat as a silent chorus. Each of us had students crossing the stage who had grown from students into fellow scholars, others whose nurturing and guidance demanded a more parental approach, but every name called was a witness to success.

Those who can, in my experience, also teach. It is a great mission, to pass on what one has learned to another person. Writing is a particularly knotty subject, as we truly cannot teach someone how to write. The writing comes from within. But we can show a comelier turn of phrase, direct reading that will inspire and inform, help the writer see his or her vision more clearly, and encourage each new generation to be brave in the story and honest in the poem.

Congratulations, graduates of North Carolina A and T State University!

Guest blog on editing

2011-05-06T16:05:00.000-07:00

Stop by my friend Nancy's blog for my look at editing....

Winner!

2011-05-04T15:12:00.000-07:00

I'm not the person who usually wins - but I did today, thanks to the Reading Life blog book giveaway. I'll have the pleasure of reading The Watery Part of the World by Greensboro's own Michael Parker this summer, thanks to Pam Kelley.

Thinking about writing in multiple genres

2011-05-04T03:10:00.000-07:00

I thought I was to going to be a poet.

First publication: sixth grade, a poem about peregrine falcons and Pavlova, of all things, neither of which I’d ever seen. By the time I was in college, however, “All the President’s Men” had turned my fancy toward journalism, along with the promise of a steady if modest paycheck.

I wrote, off and on, and had some poems published and took part in a poetry group. But I also wanted to write novels – insane, surely, because by then I was homesteading a West Virginia hill farm along with covering city hall. So I began writing a science fiction novel – and short stories too, why not, and the poems were still coming, and long poems that were stories in verse. My muse, it seemed, had ADD.

Then I ran into Fred Chappell, a writer of magnificent talent generously applied to fiction long and short, poetry epic and lyric. He lured me into accepting the writing as the words came, and eventually out of West Virginia and into Carolina. By that time I had heard it was a species of bad manners to write in too many forms, but Ol’ Fred said, write what comes. All of it.

Gertrude Stein, usually thought of as opaque and difficult, had this straightforward approach to writing:

"Write without thinking of the result
in terms of a result, but think of the writing
in terms of discovery …

It will come if it is there
and if you will let it come."

So what are the pros and cons of writing in multiple genres?

First, consider it as cross training.

Maybe you are a poet and you have been thinking about a novel. In sports terms, that would be a sprinter deciding to take on the marathon. Before she could do that, she would have to change her training and develop new muscle sets and learn different skills. Multiple genres train a somewhat different part of the writing mind. For me, it feels physically different when I write a poem compared with times when I am working on a novel. And doing both at the same time lets me breath and opens up space for new writing.

Cross-training combines exercises for various muscle groups and parts of the body. It takes advantage of the particular effectiveness of each training method, while combining it with other methods that address its weaknesses. Jogging is great for endurance, while Tai chi adds flexibility. Weight lifting builds muscle and increases upper body strength. You end up with good overall fitness, more strength and stamina, less chance of stress or damage.

And the same with writing – different forms not only challenge your mind to master the techniques, but also liberate your writing mind by freeing it from the treadmill of repetitive motion. You hear dialog in your poetry, and write with a fine-tipped brush in your novels.

I liked what Marge Piercy had to say about the sensation of writing in different forms. “Poetry feels as if I transcend myself while working on what is often very personal material … the “I” is less intrusive, less present, than at any other times except deep meditation.” She points out that in meditation, however, you are seeking to clear the mind, while in writing poetry, we invite in all the images and allusions and thoughts of a busy mind.

We also find different kinds of work in different places, I think. Piercy, again, said that poems come from “memory, fantasy, the need to communicate with the living, the dead, the unborn. Poems come directly out of daily life, from the garden, the cats, the newspaper, the lives of friends, quarrels, a good or bad time in bed, from cooking, from writing itself, from disasters and nuisances, gifts and celebrations. They go back into daily life,” she points out as we employ them at occasions or put them on the refrigerator.

I agree with her when she says the desire to write fiction comes from the part of our minds that want to eavesdrop, to hear gossip, to hear how the stories come out. “I am a nosy person,” she says, and it is this characteristic that made me a good journalist, and, I hope, a good writer of fiction. We want to take control of the threads of numerous lives and make sense of a chaotic world.

Another point in favor of writing across genre lines is that this can eliminate the dreaded “I can’t think” or writer’s block – because if one thing isn’t flowing, you can work on something else. The Olympic athlete can’t complain that the pool is closed so he’ll just go eat potato chips. There is always the track or the weight room.

Former poet laureate William Stafford wrote: I believe that the so-called ‘writing block’ is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance... One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing... You should be more willing to forgive yourself.”

So you do what you can, and don’t beat yourself up over it. If you revise a poem, that’s progress – words addressed, even if the novel is on hold.

Ultimately, whether we consider ourselves novelists or poets or multi-genre writers, what we do is a kind of echolocation. Like a bat, flying at top speed in search of prey we cannot see, we are forming an image of the world in the dark.

Richard Wright wrote:

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”

And so speak – shout – and write. If that peripatetic muse leaps from chair to desk and onto the window ledge, all you can do is shrug and follow.

Welcome Bloggers!

2011-04-19T16:34:00.000-07:00

Welcome, book bloggers! I'm just getting restarted in blogging, and will be doing reviews on mostly Southern poetry and fiction, as well as writing information and the occasion life lesson!

Wealth

2011-04-18T06:09:00.000-07:00

I am counting up my wealth - books piled like gold coins - watch for upcoming reviews of "Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls," "Living Above the Frost Line," "Whale Man," and more.
Not "visible" but very much on my mind is the electronic ARC for Marjorie Hudson's "Accidental Birds of the Carolinas." We are muy sympatico and are hatching a dual book tour for later this year.

Honoring National Poetry Month

2011-04-10T07:07:00.000-07:00

We had a great gathering April 9 in Winston-Salem at A Gathering of Poets - put it on your calendar for the first weekend in April 2012!

It's a third of the way through National Poetry Month, and it seems the reminders are everywhere. This morning, with the air heavy from last night's rain, is also thick with the perfume of wisteria, iris, and from a neighbor's yard, old-fashioned lilacs. These don't grow so well here in the South, not like the magnificent tree that swelled at the back corner of my grandparents' house in Little Valley, but the perfume is the same.

I never could decide the difference between Persian lilacs and French lilacs, but I know the ones I have in mind, a magnificent light purple fading toward blue, for me the color and scent of death, seductive and sad. These were heavy blooms, toppling the branches on wet days. We broke them from the trees and massed them in Mason jars for the gravesites in spring. And so in grief I hear Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” -

In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’d palings,

Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,

With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,

With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the dooryard,

With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,

A sprig with its flower I break.

The Haunting

2011-04-02T07:03:00.000-07:00

It could have been the story about handcuffs ….

In 1994, I was a writer with a science fiction novel and assorted short stories and poems to my credit. The West Virginia Humanities Foundation, in honor of its 20^th anniversary, created the Circuit Writer program and dispatched a number of authors around the state. I was thrilled to be asked, and even happier to be assigned Weirton – home of my friend and mentor Timothy Russell. Over coffee, he talked about his experiences as a “visiting writer,” including the night he stayed at one host’s home and found a set of handcuffs fastened to the sturdy headboard of his guest room bed.

I had a full day, speaking to classes at the high school and reading at the public library. After the reading we drove out of town, climbing from river level to a bluff overlooking the Ohio. It was dark early, so my visit must have been in winter, though I can’t place the date. I was to stay at the country club, which certainly sounded grand. The entrance road wound through thick woods until we broke out onto the golf course and the colorless apparition of a stone building. I believe it must have been the Williams Golf Club, though the website’s publicity photos, drenched in summer sunlight, make it look, if not welcoming, at least unthreatening.

My guide let us in and took me to the “apartments” upstairs, unlocking an ironwork gate to gain access to the stairs.

“It should be nice and quiet,” she said, and indeed it was. No other visitors, no gala events that night. My room was decorated in the masculine standard of an earlier era, including (as I remember it) prints of heavy-haunched horses and fox hunts.

I put down my things. “There’s a telephone in the hall,” she pointed out, a spindly black device on a stand. “And the groundskeeper is somewhere on the property. Be back to get you for breakfast!”

She closed the wrought iron gate gently behind her.

The building was quiet, but not still. I could hear the groans of the furnace, the refrigerators in the kitchen, the creak of wood against nails.

The groundskeeper was somewhere on the property.

I’m not usually timid, so maybe it was the handcuffs story, or those intermittent thumps that I couldn’t explain away. I didn’t undress. I left the light on. I lay flat on my back in the center of the bed. I drifted in and out of sleep, haunted by the image of Jack Nicholson, hatchet in hand, leering through the iron gates.

Creator and creations

2011-03-27T08:07:00.000-07:00

It's one of those family stories.
My father, with two girls but no boys, being kidded by his brother-in-law, with four sons (and a daughter) in his family.
He answered, I'm told, that "it takes more skill to create what you don't know than to duplicate yourself."
That remark has stayed with me as a writer, because as parents to our fictional children, we both replicate our own experiences and pull in threads of all we have seen, known, encountered, read, remembered, overheard, and imagined. I've worked all along the spectrum, from newspaper reporter to writer of fantasy, and know how tough it is to thread the needle of plausibility, whether in trying to faithfully recreate the scene at a fatal traffic accident, or imagine the lives of people in the worlds of never-has-been.
In an argument about the nature of the novel today, David Shields writes, “There is the commonsensical assertion that while the novelist is engaged on a work of the creative imagination, the duty of the journalist is to tell what really happened, as it happened. That distinction is easy to voice but hard to sustain in logic. For imagination and memory are Siamese twins, and you cannot cut them so cleanly apart. There’s a good case for arguing that any narrative account is a work of fiction. The moment you start to arrange the world in words, you alter its nature. The words themselves begin to suggest patterns and connections… Then the story takes hold.” (I come to this through an article by Martha Cooley.)
"The story takes hold" - that's the moment of generation, the quickening in the mind, as the people of our minds take independent shape and breathe into life.

Trifecta

2011-03-17T15:59:00.000-07:00

What a St. Patrick's Day...
My senior seminar class for creative writing is held in a small library, and today a student asked to be allowed to stay there and read during the session. At the end, he asked, "What is this class," and we told him. Then he asked, "Can I come back and attend the class? It's so interesting!"
Yes, of course, we said. He won't get any course credit, but that didn't seem to matter.
Bless you, Andre - a moment like that can keep a teacher going for years. Better energy than uranium.
Then...
The first shipment of Blood Clay arrived....
Then...
I saw a flock of cedar waxwings down the street, wonderful to run into these nomads, so quickly present and gone, so quiet in their discussions as they fed.

Two weeks left for Sanchez/Baraka Poetry entries

2011-03-16T06:17:00.000-07:00

The deadline date has been extended to April 1 (postmark) for the inaugural Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka Prize in Poetry at the North Carolina A&T State University Creative Writing Program. Packets must be received in-house no later than April 4.

On the anniversary of the A&T Four Greensboro Sit-in Movement and the onset of Black History Month, we celebrate the courageous legacy of African-American literary achievement by
honoring the legacies of two literary giants. Their literary works and personal life energies have
been spent in service to the uplifting of black people worldwide and to the struggle for freedom, justice and equality for all oppressed peoples. Their scholarship, activism, and poetry have reminded the world about the sacredness of human dignity and the need to preserve it. We
are looking for poetry that seeks to honor the spirit of this tradition.

The competition is open to writers without regard to geographical region or previous publication
background. Winners to be announced April 28, 2011.

Poetry entries: (No more than 50 lines per poem, up to 3 poems per submission, any style.) Competition will be judged by a committee of poets and writers (should the entries not be up to our standards, we reserve the right to withhold the prize in a given year). The winner receives $250 and publication on the NC A&T web site. Applicants must write in English.

Please include the following per entry:

Four typed copies of unpublished manuscript (author's name must not appear on manuscript).

One cover sheet with name, address, telephone, email, line count and titles of poems.

$15 reading fee in check or money order, per submission, made payable to NCAT/CWP-Poetry
Prize.

Writers can submit more than one entry. Each entry must be accompanied by a separate entry fee.

SASE for acknowledgement of receipt of manuscript (optional).

Winners and honorable mentions to be published on web site.

Please mail your submission to:
Creative Writing Program-Poetry Prize, A427 GCB, NC A&T State University, 1601 E. Market St., Greensboro, NC 27411.

Writing and Art

2011-03-08T12:31:00.000-08:00

A dozen writers - dozens of images, figurative and otherwise.
Add a couple of hours on a Thursday night and some inspiration from poets past - Rilke, Auden - and voila!
The Art After Dark program that I presented a couple of weeks ago at the Weatherspoon Gallery yielded a stunning crop of poems, early drafts that sparkled and glowed even before put to the polish.
Now three of those writers have posted their work here for others to enjoy.
I'll be looking forward to seeing more.

http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/03/06/1030135/wasps-inspire-stick-sculpture.html

2011-03-07T12:18:00.000-08:00

This was amazing - if you're in the Greensboro area, visit the wasp nest-inspired installation on the Guilford College campus. Amazingly sturdy - with doors, windows, passages wide enough for a child - and the tops twisted into spires.
http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/03/06/1030135/wasps-inspire-stick-sculpture.html

Celestial navigation

2011-03-05T11:38:00.000-08:00

The AWP Conference in Washington, D.C., last month (was it really a month ago?) gave me the opportunity to meet up with John Cochran, a fellow staffer at the News & Record during my time there, later reporter at the Congressional Quarterly.

We chatted about our novels-in-progress - not one but two for him! - over breakfast in the wonderful Omni Shoreham. A good bit of the conversation concerned that eternal problem for the writer: Is this any good?

Today he posted this great comment on Facebook: "I was talking to a friend and former boss not long ago about the difference between news writing and fiction writing. Here's how he put it: Daily journalism is like sailing around a harbor or a bay, within sight of land; fiction writing is like navigating in open waters with nothing but the stars and wind to guide you."

Such an apt analogy! News writing nearly always provides you with buoys and lighthouses and channel markers in abundance. We have information, know how to get more information, and then how to structure it into an acceptable, standard news article.

But writing a poem or short story or novel is another thing entirely. We have cobbled-up, fragmentary charts - something of our own lives, things overheard, things read, dreams, imagined conversations, memories, doppelganger places. We know a direction - a star to steer by. And we have our need to write filling the sails.

So off we go.

Third Novel By Local Native Due Out March 31 - post-journal.com | News, Sports, Jobs, Community Information - Jamestown | Post-Journal

2011-03-03T06:28:00.000-08:00

Third Novel By Local Native Due Out March 31 - post-journal.com | News, Sports, Jobs, Community Information - Jamestown | Post-Journal

Apt words

2011-02-27T15:19:00.000-08:00

"There are two freedoms; The false, where man is free to do what he likes; The true, where man is free to do what he ought."
A quote from Charles Kingsley, 19th century British writer, clergyman, and teacher. I pulled his historical novel Hereward the Wake from a discarded book pile, and still have it somewhere, but have managed to never read The Water-Babies, which is his best-known work.
When I came across this quote, it seemed to be so apt for the people in Blood Clay - and when we look at what's going on in this country and elsewhere, it seems to be a universal sentiment "devoutly to be wished."

Working Titles

2011-02-26T06:17:00.001-08:00

It's only five weeks until the release of Blood Clay, yet this morning I had another title ghost through my head. There's something about naming the child that is difficult, sometimes impossible - the right name has already been taken, is too close to another, too plain, too exotic. Just like in families. One aunt has a lovely name but an unfortunate history. The father loves Angela and the mother loves Helene and the great-aunt chooses - Zenobia?
Blood Clay started life with a working title of Feral, which links to the behavior of cats, dogs, people, and communities - but also conjures up images of horror movies.
I tried Birds Without Nests - maybe it was the negativity, but that didn't fly.
My publisher loved the book but hated the title, and there was a flurry of email as we tried various options. Finally, a recurrent image in the text provided a path.
But should it be Blood/Clay? Clay/Blood? Blood and Clay?
We settled, at last, on Blood Clay. And I like it.
You can run a title through Lulu's titlescorer for a computer-generated rating, based on a statistical analysis of bestsellers (full disclosure: my title has a 63.7 percent chance of being a best seller, exactly the same as Feral. We won't talk about Birds Without Nests).
Oh, about that title this morning. The Road to Hell.
Now, that won't work. Immediately I was reminded of The Road to Perdition, which is another version of the same proverb. Yet like Feral it's descriptive of the plot. There's not a single major character in the book who's not trying to do the right thing, as he or she sees it, all following that road paved with best intentions.

Poetry Group

2011-02-24T03:15:00.001-08:00

Last night's poetry group:
Two poems with the word "whorls."
Two poems with a science fictional feel.
News of a fine review by Brad Leithauser in which he chooses Sarah Lindsay and Greg Williamson as two of our finest contemporary poets flying under the radar.
"With her first book, Primate Behavior (1997), Lindsay might well have declared—were she not a poet who tempers her statements—that her subject was the world. Primate Behavior showed her continually sallying off to the planet’s outermost reaches: there were poems about arctic expeditions and jungles and crushing marine depths. She was likewise venturesome across history: there were poems about Constantinople and prehistoric cave-painters and various animals that vanished long before we humans could contribute to their extinction. From the outset of her career, Lindsay has employed a flexible free verse, and since her poems have often embraced evolutionary subjects (both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace have made notable appearances), her loose meter might be considered a means of adaptation; whenever her imagination has found an ecological niche where a poem might survive (an alpine rockface, a horse-dotted steppe, a moon of Jupiter), she has gone there."
You can only read a bit more of it online, unless you have a subscription, so find a hard copy of the current (March 10) edition and savor.

Fetch

2011-02-23T10:53:00.000-08:00

Hanging around Merriam-Webster online today, looking for some inspiration as I approach teaching "image" in my intro to creative writing class.

The dictionary reminds me that an image is "a reproduction or imitation of the form of a person or thing" or its "optical counterpart" or "a visual representation of something" or "an exact likeness." Not much there...

Ah, but in the synonyms, following after carbon and clone and doppelganger...."fetch."

What a lovely word! To fetch, to bring back. A fetch in sailing, to reach a shore or mark, or that expanse of water across which wind can build and waves grow. A fetch, a likeness, an image, perhaps only familiar today in the expression "a fetching girl."

The image demands that we focus the attention and find the this in that, the identity that was trained in us as, waiting our turn in the dentist's chair, we looked for the differences between the drawings. The image is not the thing, certainly, but it calls it to mind, fetches it back from wherever in the brain that memory resides. And so we go looking for that right word, that resonant image, that likeness.

The Careful Editor

2011-02-21T05:16:00.000-08:00

I'm off to meet with my publisher this morning, going over the final edits for Blood Clay and looking at the cover.
It's worth noting that these edits mark about the fifth time I've been been through the MSS since it was accepted, approving changes and making a few more. Kevin, Sheryl, the "Saras", Alexandria, and the other interns - all have combed through the text, looking for consistency problems, awkward phrasing, repetitions, and more. Their work has been careful, thorough, and surprising - because as a longtime reporter and editor, I prided myself on "clean copy."
We don't see this kind of editing much any more in the publishing business. Things move too quickly, there aren't as many eyes on the text. Even expensive hardcover books from major writers and leading publishers can have eye-popping mistakes.
Check out this site for a look into the work of copy editors. And if you know one, send a thank you to these too-little-recognized keepers of the word!

Writers at Work

2011-02-17T16:55:00.000-08:00

Cris Mazza stopped by North Carolina A&T today, a guest of the Creative Writing undergraduate program, to read from her latest novel, Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls. She's an intense woman with short-cropped hair who reads with a controlled passion - just right for the subject matter, young women exploited by men, sometimes because they lack power, and sometimes because their own psychological problems make it possible.

She answered probing questions from faculty about language and intent, and the direct questions of students who wanted to know if she had "actually experienced" any of the story.

"I was going to put on the cover that one-third of this book is true," she said, and then revealed the paths by which life experience is transmuted into fiction.

Writers are generous folk, and never more so than when they help young writers struggling with their first projects.

Thanks, Cris! We were happy to have you spend time with us in the Tarheel State.

Welcome Book Bloggers!

2011-02-17T03:36:00.000-08:00

Thanks for stopping by!
I'm new to blogging, so I guess my tip is the Nike slogan, "Just Do It!" When you have those fleeting thoughts about something you're reading, get it down and post it.

Author Dates

2011-02-16T16:34:00.000-08:00

I'm excited to be hosting Cris Mazza tomorrow at North Carolina A and T State University. She's on a book tour for Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls, stopping most recently at Davidson College, UNC Charlotte, and UNC Chapel Hill.

We've never met except by way of social media, that potent new force that can bring down dictators, unite a nation, and on a smaller scale, bring together authors and readers who otherwise would never have met.

The writing world gets larger and larger, and the number of books swells every year, but the power of networks and searches lets us find similar souls across continents and oceans and centuries.

It's been fun to work with Cris, who like me has a history of successful angling for large and toothy fish! And it will be fun to see where connections take me this year as I launch my new novel.

Poems on Newshour site

2011-02-14T06:36:00.000-08:00

Keep an eye on the PBS webpage - crews filmed poets at AWP for videos that will be posted each Monday. Here is today's.
I'll be among the poets coming up. Thanks, Tom & Co.!

Three books from Appalachia

2011-02-14T02:55:00.001-08:00

I've just finished a review of Meredith Sue Willis's Out of the Mountains, a new collection of stories about people from the heart of the mountains. I'd seen a couple of the stories already in her earlier collection, and felt comfortable and familiar in the new ones, recognizing a landscape we shared for many years. MSW grew up in the Shinnston area of northern West Virginia, though she moved to New Jersey in adulthood- I grew up in New York State but lived for many years near Farmington, WV, just down the highway. So we saw those mountains from similar angles.

This book follows close on another, Degrees of Elevation, a new anthology of stories about Appalachia today. I treasured that chorus of voices considering that familiar mountain landscape in unique ways, from Chris Offutt to Crystal Wilkinson to Ron Rash, and was pleased to be counted among their number.

And that followed a reading of Miracle Boy by Pinckney Benedict, a native son of Southern Appalachia who walks some of the same paths as Breece Pancake, but who finds darker and more twisted ways into the laurel hells and isolated farms.

What links these three new story collections, all of them stellar, is a view of mountain culture that shares little with the popular perception of Appalachia - which extends from my birthplace in New York State all the way to Georgia. That's a great physical expanse, north to south, and like the degrees of elevation in the title of the anthology edited by Charles Dodd White and Page Seay, offers an incredible diversity of ecologies, human included.

This land of the popular imagination is thick with quilt-making grannies, moonshiners, coal miners, mental defectives, religious zealots, pure-hearted farmers, axe-men.

The reality is as diverse as the American landscape it traverses - a place of gated communities and mining "camps," of pristine streams and rivers clotted with red mine runoff, of colleges as diverse as Berea and West Virginia University and Warren Wilson, of high culture and traditional crafts pushed beyond the tradition, of every kind of hyphenated American.

Flying back from Washington after AWP, our commuter jet crossed Virginia, and from the air the last outliers of the Appalachians emerged from the flattening plain. They were wrinkled topographies of an ancient landscape, swallowed by erosion. I thought that they looked very much like those "necks" that extend into the ocean, dissected from the the mainland by the rivers near their end. So Appalachia continues, apart from the main, rising out of the main, and slowly returning to it.

Time and tense

2011-02-13T15:53:00.001-08:00

Time to take a break from reading a student's novel-in-progress - great characters, interesting plot, crackling pace - but we have to have a heart-to-heart talk about maintaining tense.
Maybe it's a result of the fluidity of thought and flattening of time with Tivo and downloads, but seems like many young writers just fluctuate, not from chapter to chapter but from paragraph. And present tense seems to be favored overall - there was a bit of brouhaha last fall with the Man Booker Prize, and Philip Pullman called the use of present tense in three of the finalists a "silly affectation."

Firsts

2011-02-13T12:49:00.000-08:00

Yesterday in the Bog Garden, I came upon a single blossom of winter aconite. Amazing bright yellow, a gift - and just around the corner, in the sun, a burst of these earliest of flowers.

A haiku:

In the Bog Garden,

winter aconite sets flame

to last season's rags

At this time of year, I'm in search of firsts. The first killdeer calling, the first crocus, first peeper-frog, first red-and-yellow flowers of maples, first green leaves showing like mist in the treetops.

I grew up where winter was long and dark and cold. I've been fleeing ever since, south and south, now in North Carolina (where it seems those NY winters won't leave me alone!) What gets you through February are those hints and clues, the land coming back to life.