Valerie Nieman v. 3.0

T.S. Eliot wrote in “Little Gidding” that                 We shall not cease from exploration                And the end of all our exploring               Will be to arrive where we started                And know the place for the first time. Sometimes, the person we’re closest with can be the most difficult to comprehend. Lately I’ve been writing poems that reach back toward my mother, who died in 2012. Many of the poems arrived while I was hiking alone in Scotland. Like Cheryl Strayed in her Pacific Coast trek, it took solitude, as well as encounters with women across the Highland landscape who were mentors, guides, occasionally saviors, for me to begin to consider my mother’s life and my own as both a reaction to, and completion of, hers. My mother came out of that generation born in the Depression, their lives upende...

I've been touring around with Hotel Worthy   since it was released in March. I've read at Piccolo Spoleto and gotten to know beautiful Charleston, SC. It was a hot July Sunday when I read in the Joaquin Miller Poetry Series in Rock Creek Park - a real pleasure to join Grace Cavalieri for the first time. Always, whether the event is large or small, local or distant, a Reading in the Dock Street Theater courtyard at Piccolo Spoleto poetry reading draws the "People of the Word," those who treasure language and make the effort to seek it out in a noisy world. New friends and old - always the chance to make that connection. I am looking forward to reading Oct. 9 for the Center for Women Writers at Salem College, then Oct. 10 in Fairmont, WV, for the 34th Kestrel Festival . It's hard to believe that it has been 34 years, 34 festivals, since I met Marty Lammon and John King to discuss starting a magazine. Sadly, John is no longer with us. There will be old friend...

I read the other day that Paul Simon wrote "Homeward Bound" while on a train trip in or around Manchester, England. That song was a favorite when I was a teenager, though I'd traveled no farther than Maine, and still calls up strong emotion when I hear it. So it's not surprising that when I connected with the folks at Kestrel literary journal to appear again this year at the Kestrel Festival in October, that music began playing in my thoughts. Kestrel was a special part of my years in West Virginia, where I began my work as a writer, gained my first publications, and then was "brought into the fold" as a literary magazine editor with the nascent Kestrel. Martin Lammon and the late John King and I would gather over coffee at the Poky Dot restaurant in Fairmont, WV, a classic "breakfast all day" diner that's been upscaled in recent years, to exchange our stacks of manuscripts and discuss what we liked, and what we weren't certain about. I...

I enjoyed taking part in the "Books by the Bed" feature at We Wanted to Be Writers. It's a bit of a fiction, however, as I just chose a handful of volumes from the stacks by the bed, ignoring the musch larger deposits in the den, the living room, bathroom, etc. etc. They are everywhere. Hallelujah. Books by Valerie Nieman’s Bed

I was trying to explain the Folk School experience to a friend the other day. How nourishing it is, how you learn within the classroom and over meals and on rambles across the mountain landscape. How it is a place apart that returns you to the world restored. I am anticipating my return in July as both a teacher and then a student. In this interview for the John C. Campbell website, I talk about teaching and learning in a noncompetitive environment. http://blog.folkschool.org/2015/03/03/discovering-author-valerie-nieman

Technology can be a marvelous thing, especially when it links you with readers and writers all around the world. That was the case with  a blogger from Ghana, West-Africa, who posts at "Geosi Reads." He says, "I am a book addict and I just can’t stop reading. I am particularly interested in literary fiction, be it contemporary or classic and poetry." It was a pleasure to correspond with Geoffrey and be interviewed by him about my work, from my first novel to my newest poetry collection. If you'd like to read the interview, click here.

However you celebrate the turning of the year - wishing you light and happiness on our fragile blue planet. Stunning Time-Lapse Reveals Auroras and Earth From Space

A big thank you to James Tate Hill, my colleague at North Carolina A&T State University, for inviting me on this blog tour, My Writing Process. His post appeared last week at this site. It’s always interesting when people ask us to step back and explain exactly what we’re doing, what I’m doing there in the corner in front of the computer, early in the morning or into the night, typing in words in uneven bursts. 1)                    What are you working on? Right now, I’m engaged in far too many projects. I am completing final edits to a new collection of poetry, Hotel Worthy , which will be published in the spring by Press 53. I’m pretty pumped about that – the best of ten years’ worth of poetizing. The editing has been light from the publisher, but I have to skinny down three formal poems – a ghazal, pantoum, and sestina – to fit the page width. Free verse and prose poems are not an issue...

Don't you just love that cover? I took one look at it and immediately thought of our legislative "process" these days. The summer issue of The Missouri Review is out, with a theme of "Fast Living." It's fun to see how an issue comes together, how a theme emerges from the submissions even if not imposed from the start. We used to see this kind of synergy back when I was opening snail mail submissions to Kestrel , and today as I scroll through Submittable for Prime Number.  (And watch for a redesign there soon!) Of course, I'm especially excited as six poems from my novel-in-verse, "The Leopard Lady Speaks," are featured - watch for the audio to be released soon, and another of the poems to be the "Poem of the Week." The issue also Diane Seuss writing about art and Andrew Grace in the voice of a man with a dangerous past.  Prose features include stories by Carol Ghiglieri, Ben Hoffman, Sharon Pomerantz, and  Amanda Harris, a...

It was bound to be a special night. Marjorie Hudson , stellar author/teacher/cook, came to Greensboro on June 14 so that we could reprise the call and response" readings we had created from our 2012 books - my novel Blood Clay and her short story collection Accidental Birds of the Carolinas.  We had had a blast on our original book tour, reading selections that spoke to mutual themes of strangers in the South, religion, race, the natural world, sex and love, so I was anticipating another night of this writerly dialog. Before we set out for Scuppernong Books , however, Marjorie had a surprise. She presented me with a jade-colored medallion and said it was part of her new focus on confidence building for herself and other women. It did go beautifully with my dress - but its value lay in how with each breath I got a gentle reminder, a tactile moment like fingers moving along a string of prayer beads. Like many women, I have suffered from what an Atlantic article calls  The...

It should have been heaven. An ice storm closed me in the house but left the power on. I had heat, food, five kinds of tea, and uninterrupted time. I wanted to plunge into the novel-in-verse that's now past the halfway point - turn some of those ideas into finished poems. (To read one, click here . Six more poems will appear in The Missouri Review this summer.) But the poems wouldn't come. I edited some earlier poems, work that needed doing, but it wasn't new work. I kept myself in the chair, doing other bits of writer-biz, putting myself in the place for writing to happen. But that doesn't mean it will. So I gritted my teeth and plunged into the half-formed ideas. It wasn't sweet inspiration. It was that other kind - perspiration, like loading wood. One chunk after the other. Slowly, the poem took shape. It's not finished - the language isn't singing yet - but it has a shape. And the second poem is starting to round into reality as a call-and-respons...

Writing is a tough business. It’s not laying bricks, sure, but it does demand the mental toughness to keep hitting the keyboard long after saner folks would have taken up orchid hybridization as an easier hobby. But we keep on keeping on, putting one word after the other. The late Octavia Butler, a black woman writer in science fiction (for far too long a bastion of white males), commented, "You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say that one of the most valuable traits is persistence." So – we work, in order to do better work. It’s an apprenticeship, and if we want to become better writers, we create journeyman efforts until we can accomplish a masterwork. We’ve seen a lot of advice for writers over the years – write every day, write so many words every day, take part in marathons like Nanowrimo. But the best advice I ever received came from the ...

Decent. That seems like faint praise, but good, decent, upright, honorable - words like that, describing people who are like that, say more than effusive puffery. Len Gross was a decent man, a good man, and seeing his name under "in memory of" on the last page of the School of Journalism newsletter this afternoon took me right back to those West Virginia newsrooms and the inevitable calls, unwanted on both ends, to find out what happened when a mine accident took a life. Len - later the Rev. Leonard Gross - graduated from the journalism program at West Virginia University in 1949 and went to work at various newspapers and TV stations around the state. In 1962, he went "over the fence" as we say and joined the public relations staff at Consolidation Coal Co ., one of the predominant corporations mining in the northern coalfields. It was inevitable that I would be calling Len after I graduated from WVU in 1978 and went to work in local newspapers. The relationship ...

The happiest days of my childhood, those I couldn't spend wandering the woods, were spent in a library. The small town library in Randolph , NY, was started as a private library more than 100 years ago, and was chartered as a public library in 1918. That's where I encountered Rachel Carson on the shelves of Natural History, and where I read biography and history and poetry - but fiction was reserved downstairs for Adults Only. Luckily, my mother would venture into the basement to keep me stocked with novels. My elementary school library was presided over by the estimable Mrs. Bohall, who made me a library aide. I enjoyed shelving books using the Dewey Decimal System, and still have the book ( Ocelot ) that I received as a gift at the end of the school year. The high school library led me to encounters with The Once and Future King, Uhuru, On the Beach , and The Lord of the Rings , while the J ames Prendergast Library in Jamestown offered opera recordings (and The Who) ...

I could start with the tent. Which was not where it started, but was in fact the most recent “rediscovery” of this strange and wonderful year. I will be going kayak-camping this fall, and so I needed a tent. But I thought I already had a tent – which I couldn’t find. So I hied myself off to Sports Authority (with a coupon!) to get a bare-bones backpacking tent. Mission accomplished. Three weeks later, with a (returned) ladder, I worked my way to the back of the loft in the shed and found – the original tent. Nicely packed in its blue stuff sack, complete and, surprisingly, without mold or mildew or rot. It’s been that kind of year. A year of rediscovery. Last fall, an e-mail out of the blue from Permuted Press started the process of bringing my first novel, Neena Gathering , back to life after 25 years out of print. New cover, new electronic edition, even a new voice for Neena through an Audible book.  An anthology on Persephone is going to reprint "Persephone in...