Speaking of The Pelton Papers: A Conversation Between Margot Livesey and Mari Coates

Margot Livesey and Mari Coates first met at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. At the time, Margot had published one book of stories-plus-novella, Learning by Heart, and one novel, Homework. She was “assisting” the famous writer Mari had signed up to work with, who had disappointed Mari by not offering comments on the short story she’d brought. Mari then turned to Margot who provided Mari with her first serious critical evaluation. Mari had read the stories in Learning by Heart during the conference, saving the title novella for later. Reading this at home in San Francisco, she was stunned to see that here, Margot was accomplishing with ease what Mari aspired to: fiction based on real life. She wrote Margot a note, extolling the novella and thanking her again for reading her story. Margot wrote back and they began a correspondence. It was Margot who suggested Mari apply to the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, in which she was teaching. They worked there together and have remained friends.

This interview—a conversation, really—comes out of that association and was conducted via email, before everyone was ordered to shelter in place. Along with Margot’s warm and generous friendship, she has provided Mari with literary shelter for more than twenty years, which Mari calls “above and beyond anything I had a right to expect.”

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Margot Livesey: I’m delighted to be talking about your wonderful novel, The Pelton Papers, which follows the life of the early twentieth-century modernist painter, Agnes Pelton. Your novel is so beautiful and atmospheric that I couldn’t help feeling that Agnes’s story had just sprung onto the page, but I know it has been in the works for a while. How did The Pelton Papers come to be? Can you tell us the origin story?

Mari Coates: I think there were a couple of origins, if that’s possible. First, I was interested in Agnes Pelton because I grew up with some of her paintings—the more conservative realistic ones. My grandparents were friends of hers, and she was a presence in our house with portraits of our family and a couple of lovely landscapes. Years later, after I moved to San Francisco, I discovered that she had also painted abstracts. A retrospective exhibit, the first major curated study of her art, was taking place just across the bay. When I saw those pictures, which are luminous—I don’t know how she did that—I was stunned. There were so different from the work I knew! I was enthralled and wanted to know everything about her. Once I started reading the exhibition catalog—Agnes Pelton: Poet of Nature, a brilliant rendering of her life and work by curator Michael Zakian—I was amazed at who she was and how difficult it must have been for her to make a life in art. I was very moved, awestruck actually, at her persistence in spite of a difficult family history, her delicate health, crippling shyness, and constant worries about money.

ML: But why fiction? Why not a biography?

MC: As I was beginning my research—the exhibit took place in 1996—there was nowhere near as much information on her as there is now—I found a few other short publications and brief mentions of Pelton in other exhibition catalogs. I was struck by a recurring phrase— “We don’t know this, or we can’t know that…”—things I wanted to know. Did she have a partner or love interest? Was she gay, as many have suggested? I spoke to Michael Zakian and asked him, and he said there was no evidence to substantiate that claim.

ML: So, Agnes’s romantic feelings, which you portray so intensely at various junctures in her life, before her time in Europe and later back in America, are all invented?

MC: They are.

ML: She did have a fraught background, though, and a lot of discouragement, didn’t she, even as she made a name for herself early on with the Armory Show in New York in 1913, and then later in Taos with her patron Mabel Dodge. But I also was touched by the novel’s account of her childhood in Brooklyn, with her mother, a piano teacher, and her grandmother.  You describe the household in a very intense, almost gothic way—a house of secrets.

MC: Yes, that’s exactly right. It was a house of secrets, and also, sad to say, a house of shame. But I was captivated by the idea of three generations of women, all living together and caring deeply for one another. It could not have been easy growing up there, but it is a fact that Agnes did not move away until after the deaths of first her grandmother and then her mother.

ML: You mentioned your grandparents were friends of hers? How did that connection come about?

MC: As a student and young man, my grandfather had been her neighbor in Brooklyn, and both their families were members of a religious sect called the Plymouth Brethren. In reading Zakian’s book I learned about the 1875 scandal that had led to this family connection. Agnes’s grandmother was Elizabeth Tilton, who admitted to an affair with her pastor, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe and a famous abolitionist in his own right. This affair led to a lawsuit by Elizabeth’s husband Theodore and a six-month trial that the tabloids covered with great enthusiasm. The notoriety devastated Elizabeth. She was banished from Beecher’s church, Theodore divorced her and exiled himself to Paris, and she was left abandoned. The Brethren welcomed her, and she spent the remainder of her life as a member. Elizabeth was modest, shy, and deeply religious, and refused to allow visitors or newspapers into their house. I believe that Agnes was permanently scarred by all of this.

ML: I suppose that is why the novel’s near romance with her friend Alice is so poignant. And you hint at something along those lines with her friend Dane Rudhyar. Both of these characters were actual friends of hers, right?

MC: Yes. Alice Brisbane, later Thursby, was herself a Paris trained artist, but then she married and gave up her art. After she was widowed, she moved to New York and established herself as a socialite—there’s a fantastic portrait of her by John Singer Sargent—and did indeed decide to take on Agnes Pelton as a project. It makes total sense to me that one could fall in love with a patron like Alice, who firmly believed in Agnes and did everything possible to further her career. She met Dane Rudhyar on her first stay in California. He was a composer who became a famous astrologer and wrote many books on the subject. He struck me as almost feline in nature, which I thought would be attractive to Agnes.

ML: I know that this book took a long time to write and I admire your persistence in figuring out Agnes’s story and the best way to tell it. Can you talk about the difficulties you encountered?

MC: Well, it did take a long time and I tried to quit more than once, but somehow Agnes would come back into my consciousness and I would pick it up again. I was inspired by how she herself persisted in painting her abstracts no matter what else happened. I wanted to do likewise. Some of the difficulties were entirely self-inflicted. For instance, the decision to cover her entire life. I felt a sense of obligation about this, that what I was learning about her life simply demanded inclusion. It seemed that Agnes herself was insisting on this. She also had very clear ideas about what I could and could not say! When I was given a month at Ragdale, I was elated about the unrestricted time and the freedom it implied. I reminded myself that this was fiction, and therefore I should be free to turn the story in any direction. But my fumbling attempts did not lead to anything. I was also using my time there to read and absorb the research material I had brought. I had heard Agnes’s voice in solitude and had thought of the project as just me and Agnes, communing with one another. But so many others came into it! Every time I dipped into another reference, it felt like I was opening a door to a room crowded with laughing, chattering people, and it was all overwhelming and terrifying.

ML: But like Agnes herself, you persisted, so you must have been enjoying the work even though it felt daunting.

MC: Oh, I was. I loved seeing the places where she had lived and traveled. I loved learning about the Armory Show. I read Mabel Dodge Luhan’s memoirs and loved the bristling excitement of the 1910s in New York City. And we, my wife Gloria and I, did things like travel to Cathedral City and Taos. We also flew south for the day to Orange County from San Francisco to see a marvelous exhibition that paired Agnes with Georgia O’Keeffe—seeing her paintings up next to O’Keeffe’s was a complete thrill. And made us ponder yet again why O’Keeffe was so successful and Pelton was not.

ML: Did you come to any conclusions about that?

MC: I did. The obvious one was that O’Keeffe had Alfred Steiglitz championing her in his 291 Gallery and then marrying her and taking care of the business side of things. Also, I think temperamentally O’Keeffe was always absolutely confident about her talent, whereas Pelton suffered anxiety about hers and stopped painting for years at a time. There’s also that background of growing up with two women who had retreated from life. And lastly, she treated the making of art as a spiritual practice, which meant she needed solitude and inspiration, and she took all the time she needed with each painting. Many of them took years to complete.

ML: And now she is again the focus of a major museum exhibition.

MC: She is! It’s so exciting. It was put together by the Phoenix Museum of art, traveled to Santa Fe, and will open in March at the Whitney in New York before returning to her desert and ending at the Palm Springs Art Museum. I cannot wait to see it.

ML: And how fitting that The Pelton Papers is being published in this year of Agnes’s rediscovery. For me, one of the deep pleasures of your novel is how beautifully you write about both Agnes’s life and her work—the two deeply intertwined. Reading your pages, I felt I could already see her work, but I am very happy that I will now be able to see her paintings not only in your words but in the world. Many congratulations on this wonderful accomplishment.        

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MARI COATES lives in San Francisco where she has been an arts writer and theater critic. Her regular column appeared in the SF Weekly with additional profiles and features appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle, East Bay Monthly, Advocate, and other news outlets. Her first novel, The Pelton Papers, is due out in April from She Writes Press, and she holds degrees from Connecticut College and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Find her on Facebook (Mari Coates Author) and at maricoates.com. 

MARGOT LIVESEY is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Flight of Gemma Hardy, The House on Fortune Street (winner of the 2009 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award), Banishing Verona, Eva Moves the Furniture, The Missing World, Criminals, Homework, and Mercury. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Vogue, and the Atlantic, and she is the recipient of grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She was born in the Scottish Highlands, currently lives in the Boston area, and is a professor of fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. 

Blood Ties, Mystery and LSD: A Review of Paul Vidich's The Coldest Warrior

Paul Vidich’s The Coldest Warrior is a spy novel that teeters the line between reportage and fiction, history and the imagined. In the novel, Vidich writes the character of Charles Wilson to reflect former real-life CIA employee and biological warfare scientist Frank Olson. In the novel’s world of CIA cover ups and LSD experiments, the plot anchors itself in the true events of Frank Olson’s life and death after the CIA administered psychedelics to him against his knowledge and will in the 1950s.

In the novel’s opening chapter, Charles Wilson is murdered by CIA, and his character and all he knows of the truth, is silenced for the rest of the story. The following chapter picks up twenty years later with Jack Gabriel, a former colleague and friend of Wilson. The new director of intelligence asks Gabriel to find out what really happened to his late friend: who was there the night he was given LSD, what lead to his death, was Wilson’s death more than a suicide and how can the CIA keep whatever they find quiet.

Throughout the novel, Gabriel fights to know the truth, and—much like what happened in reality—Charles Wilson becomes a ghost of sorts, haunting those who remain through guilt, tightly-kept secrets, and a reminder of what can happen when one questions an organization like the CIA. With ever-political and self-serving motives, most of Wilson’s killers hide under the mask of do-gooders and innocent country club goers, but those whose conscience still eats away at them decades later, find themselves facing a fate unlike that of Charles Wilson himself.

The Coldest Warrior defies the ordinary spy thriller genre as Vidich grounds the novel deeply in the life story of Frank Olson, a CIA employee and scientist overseas. After growing concern and questioning of the CIA’s newest projects such as those having to do with biological warfare and mind control, Frank Olson was given LSD during a weekend trip with his colleagues at the CIA. This psychedelic experiment was a small part of the CIA’s MK Ultra project, a biological warfare project with the goal of testing and utilizing various substances for mind control. This drug-induced weekend sparked a series of tragic and many still unknown events which lead to Olson’s death in New York City, November 1953 when his hotel room window was found broken and he was found dead on the city sidewalk.

The Netflix documentary Wormwood tells Frank Olson’s story, all that we know of it, through Olson’s son, Eric. Eric Olson has spent his life digging for the truth: figuring out how, why, and because of whom his father plunged to that New York City sidewalk that November. For decades now, Eric Olson has dedicated his existence to definitively answering the question: a suicide, a slip or a murder? Despite a lifetime of searching, even digging up his father’s body, Eric Olson has been unable to uncover the whole truth due to the silence and secrets of the CIA.

By taking inspiration from true events for his latest novel, how does Vidich defy not just the spy thriller genre but the ordinary spy thriller author? Through his blood.

Paul Vidich, author of the The Coldest Warrior, is Eric Olson’s cousin and Frank Olson’s nephew. Vidich utilizes his uncle’s story as the grounding plot point for this new novel and incorporates verbatim quotations from Wormwood, press conferences and his cousin, Eric Olson, into the text. The novel touches upon the primary twists and turns of the actual Olson story: the question of jump or full, the politics of exhumation and CIA insiders with the tight-lipped truth.

Though Vidich utilizes his family history to write The Coldest Warrior and the character of Charles Wilson, Vidich doesn’t tell the story of the internal psychical turmoil that lead up to Olson or his character Wilson’s death. While Vidich touches upon the dark side of the CIA’s LSD use, he focuses more on the aftermath of what such secretive and unethical operations do to those involved: how it changes it their lives, catapults their career, and can even, years later, still get them killed, birthing a whole new set of secrets to be unveiled.

The Coldest Warrior reminds us that there are not only two sides to a story, but many intersecting sides to an infinitely-sided story that was ripped and torn apart, some of its contents buried for safe secret-keeping, some of them never having existed in the first place. Between the lines of his story, Vidich seems to ask: in the pursuit of truth, how can we piece together an infinitely-sided unfinished story? We can’t…or at least we can’t without getting some blood on our hands.

With Eric Olson’s life-deteriorating search for the truth and Vidich’s imagining of the truth, one could see The Coldest Warrior as a writing therapy of sorts, an exercise in filling in the blanks, imagining the unknown in order to help the family reckon with the mysterious death of their loved one. Paul Vidich’s The Coldest Warrior makes me wonder: can we heal from the pain of the unknown by writing light into the darkness?

A Magnificent, Sentient Beast of a Book: E. Briskin's Orange

E. Briskin makes a stunning poetry debut with his new release, Orange, which is more of a scavenger hunt of intertwining consciousness than a simple book. Before I critique a thing, I want to reinforce that the nature of poetry is to liquify and fill the mold of whoever might read and interpret it. The guided nature with which E. Briskin brings us into his post-dog-mortem world of footnotes and winding reading paths does not negate the identification process that makes poetry so near and dear to us. It enhances the experience.

I made my way through the maze of Briskin’s stream of consciousness in two different ways. First, following the numbers, and then again by reading the traditional way. Regardless of how you tackle this beautifully written and incredibly thoughtful book, you’ll want to have your phone, tablet, or laptop nearby. Briskin explains some of his most straying thoughts in the footnotes, but I still found myself dropping my book into my lap to Google things – like what the sculpture “Greyhounds Playing” by William Hunt Diedrich looked like – to fully understand the depth and brilliance of what was being said at a given moment. Briskin also sends you careening back and forth through the pages, as some footnotes refer to earlier or later ones. As you search wildly through his writings, you begin to see the spider web of thought weaving tightly together. I absolutely loved the scavenger hunt feel of this book, particularly for the thrill that this kind of hunt provides for me. The game of this narrative kept me active and engaged from cover to cover, then back and forth again. Wandering through the Orange labyrinth made me feel lost in a good way. Briskin pulls you into the speaker’s emotions, spins you around, and leaves just enough clues for you to find your way back to the heartbeat of this work.

The evident decision to write switchbacks into this story is one that lends to the shifting nature of the multiple themes laced throughout. The fluidity of gender, physical existence, and even breed and species is evident on every page, in a way that feels effortless and thoughtful rather than confusing. There is a purpose to every bend that Briskin takes in this regard. We are asked to consider all beings in this book as just that: beings. This, Briskin’s speaker appears to assert, is what equalizes all of us, human and dog alike. One of the most striking and thought-provoking moments in the story is when the speaker considers a group of intimidating men staring at them, and realizes that if the men were dogs, they would rush over to pet them. The shock of this realization dismantles the belief system that most of us spend our lives learning, navigating, and resenting. Gender roles, power dynamics, social constructs, and more are all dismantled with the delightful consideration of our furry companions and how they factor into our very human lives. Briskin smashes the boundaries of “black and white” thinking by making all of the simple things grey, and all of the grey things simple.

Briskin uses gender in a delightfully playful way throughout this poetry collection. There are very few moments that we are given even a glimpse of the dog in question. The dog holds a fluidity when it comes to gender, breed, and size. Briskin brilliantly uses more tangible things like physicality and appearance to cartwheel and backflip over binary-conforming pronoun use, and in this way, declares two deeply human truths. The first of which, of course, is that bonds like the ones we form with our animal companions are everlasting. This particular point reminded me of Dog Songs by Mary Oliver, where Oliver considers her many dogs’ lives and how their existence and bond with her had changed her own existence. But the second truth is one uniquely conjured in consideration with a dog’s physicality: gender is totally and completely a social construct. This, of course, is not a new idea. But attaching such human things to a dog, and vice versa, is one of the key functions that drives Briskin’s narrative and allows him to deconstruct such a classic duality. Briskin has managed to wrestle the human-dog connection into a new and refreshing form, proving conclusively that old dogs can, in fact, learn new tricks.

All in all, I will be revisiting this book not simply because there are a dozen different ways to explore within it (which there are) but because one could read it the same way a dozen times and find new things hidden in the language every time. More than that, as a dog lover myself, the shock of grief surrounding the passing of a pet and the ways in which it manifests in this book speak volumes. Briskin masterfully navigates the minefield of cliché grief portrayal and comes out the other side with a magnificent, sentient beast of a book that encompasses the abstract of what it means to mourn the loss of a pet. Pick up a copy of Orange if you wish to laugh, cry, learn wildly interesting dog facts that will wow the guests at your next gathering, or if you simply wish to read a piece of quality literature. If one of the above is the case, Orange will not disappoint you.

Our Everyday Madness: A Review of Katie Farris’s boysgirls

To read Katie Farris’ boysgirls is to step into a circus, a burlesque, a theater, a brothel, yourself—step up and preform, “You’re used to sitting back and eavesdropping,” our narrator flirtatiously scolds us, “playing the voyeur on the lives of others. But between these covers you will participate, whether you desire it or not.”

And you do. As you peel back the covers and descend deeper and deeper into this uncertain territory, new myths that read like poetry, you notice yourself both aroused and slightly ashamed, in the most enjoyable way. You meet a girl with a mirror for a face, loved by people, who yet desires nothing but a mouth so that she can eat. You realize you are both her, and the people who look into her.

You move on, and meet many other girls. The girl who grew and was feared, the girl who listens to Christian talk radio while sanding the blade that is her mother’s mother, the girl who is a cyclops and explains loss to scientists. Our narrator watches over you, gauges your needs and guides you to through the performance of these girls who are only performing you. And you move on.

Delightfully, you find the girl who Satan has enlisted to shit on his face. She reveals something more of yourself, of the anxieties sex encompasses, the absurdity of the orgasm as goal. The elusive line between performance and surrender. “She feels it a personal failure; she has never failed to fulfill a man sexually. She doesn’t think to blame it on the fact that he has never been a man.”

The performance continues, until you are asked again to participate, at what can serve as the intermission. If this entire collection has not been a type of riddle in itself with you as the answer, well then you, dear reader, must entertain the narrator by answering the riddle proposed between the section on girls and the section on boys.

The section on boys serves more as a parable than a series of myths. You meet the boy with one wing, a “halfway boy” who is seduced by a cheerleader, and makes love to another girl in the mud. While this is happening we meet the inventor of invented things and realize that we are nothing new, that each fear and joy we have experienced has already been created and that we have simply experienced them with our own bodies for the first time. Is there less shame in that? Less fear of our own shadow? No. That would diminish our exhilaration.

As any creator, The Inventor of invented things discovers the invention of love with the boy with one wing. “What is this?” he asks. To be a true invention does it need a name, a definite shape and rules? And what will they do with this new thing? 

Katie Farris creates a Kafkaesque reality that reveals our everyday madness. To read it is a dark and whimsical delight, a joy in the grotesque. A reminder that the grotesque is normal, and that it is the source of both shame and orgasm.

In their Own Rivers: A Conversation with Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes

I met Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes when I was nineteen. We were both Creative Writing students at Susquehanna University, a small college in a hilly, rural, rivered part of Pennsylvania. The first times I met Liz, she kind of intimidated me. She was outspoken and smart and hugged easily and would kiss her friends on the top of the head. I'd never met anyone like her.

Over the next few years, Liz would come to be one of my closest friends and favorite poets. I was thrilled to learn, a few months ago, that Liz’s debut poetry collection, Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf, would be published by Mason Jar Press in April 2020. As anyone who has met Liz knows, she is all magic and warmth, and so are her poems. However, they are also ferocious, bold, and biting.

Following is a conversation that Liz and I had (through a shared Google Doc!) in early January. We chat about wolf mythology, song lyrics, and the challenges of writing about violence. Fittingly, our conversation starts with Pennsylvania.

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Dana Diehl: Let’s start at the beginning. Where and how was Ashley Sugarnotch born? Where did she come from?

Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes: When I started dating my now husband, I would drive from Harrisburg, PA to Moscow, PA, mostly along 81 North. Just south of Wilkes-Barre, there is the Ashley / Sugar Notch exit. They are two discrete towns that get to share a sign. I loved that name. I knew I wanted to write something about her—I didn’t know what yet—so I held it with me. I remember saying to my husband, “All I know is Ashley Sugarnotch is a bitch.” She’s not—not in the end—but you can see how annoying she is in the first poem I wrote for her: “Ashley Sugarnotch & the Big Red Bow.” This poem is partially ekphrastic to Bob Diven’s painting “Red Bow” which was displayed at Susquehanna University’s art gallery in the fall of my senior year. I remember seeing that painting and thinking, “That’s her! That’s it!” 

This other character showed up in one of the first seven or so poems I wrote, but at the time he didn’t have a name. I think I originally even thought of him as me! But then I had a dream where I was in a room with a dear friend filled with books and warm light and dust. He was reading to me, and I pulled his mustache off and plopped it on my forehead. And then I was like: Oh. Here’s this other person. I think this person is more sinister than I am. I think he’s a wolf. So I read everything I could find on mythic wolves. 

DD: Have your dreams inspired your poems in the past? How big of a role does your unconscious play in your writing?

EDML: Yes! I dream pretty intensely almost every night and have for most of my life. From the ages of 19 until I got pregnant at 27, I had a dream about once a month where I had miscarried a pregnancy or given birth to a stillborn child. Sometimes fetuses would bloom in my tea. In one of the dreams I miscarried in a birch wood in fall and buried the child under the only oak tree and wept, “Alison Dubai, I'm so sorry.” That was the main one that became poems. I wrote a series of epistles to Alison Dubai in some alternate timeline where I had gotten pregnant as a 21-year-old. I even wrote a poem from the perspective of Kenny! It got published as a very short run chapbook, Letters to Alison Dubai. At the reading, I read the first and last poem and had people in the crowd read the other poems. Kenny read his! Truly weird and beautiful.

The thing about dreams is they feel like something has happened in your sleep. I know that some of the more nonsensical parts are maybe less-than-interesting, so I usually wait until something very beautiful or pertinent to put in a poem.

One of Kenny's dreams makes it in the book too! The beginning of “The Wolf: A Shadow Manifested” are words he said to me as soon as he woke up one morning: i died on a ship / last night in my dream. // the ship had sunk i / was in the only unsunk room.”

DD: Fairytale retellings and adaptations are so prolific in our modern-day culture. Why do you think these old stories are still so accessible and irresistible to us? In Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf, you play with the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. Why were you drawn to this narrative? 

EDML: You’re not wrong to bring up Little Red—I bring her up in that first poem! But Ashley isn’t explicitly Little Red. I think it was Ian Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief (and cover designer!) at Mason Jar who said Ashley was more like Red’s older cousin who teaches her to smoke cigarettes. When I was doing all of that research of wolves in folklore, I came across a bunch of versions (old versions!) of that story. What was most striking to me was that the version we know best was in fact not the most common version. Often times the Wolf won. (In fact, Kenny just read our kid a version of it where the Wolf eats her and it just ends there!) Occasionally, Red saved herself. But seeing the story over and over like that made me start thinking about cycles of violence. Why did Red survive sometimes but not others? Or, why was the Wolf sometimes successful? And how does the moral tale change depending on the outcome?

Ashley and the Wolf live in modern times but they are Big Picture characters. I knew of three different stories where, for example, a daughter was left orphaned because her father killed her mother. One of the mothers, Trisha Edelman, was someone I went to elementary school and junior high with (she has a poem at the end). Is what I write about specific? Of course, to the point that I actually created an annotated version of my own book so I could keep track of everything I’m referencing. But are Ashley and the Wolf stuck in their own cycles—are they bigger than themselves? Yes. 

DD: Please tell us more about the wolf mythology you discovered through your research. Is the wolf always the bad guy? Did the wolf as a symbol change based on where or when the myth originated? 

EDML: I could have told you so much about this during my second year of grad school, but yes—the Wolf is always the bad guy. I read all the Grimm Fairy tales I could find (a very nice collected that the library had). I also read everything I could from this website, D.L. Ashliman’s Folktexts. The Wolf is intrinsically bad in folktales. That’s one of his characteristics. He’s never redeemed or redeemable. In fact, part of the moral of these tales is that people should know better something that on the one hand seems obvious (if fire is always hot, don’t be surprised when you’re burned) and yet also put the blame back onto the victim of the Wolf’s crimes. The last Wolf poem, the one where he’s killed Ashley, was written fairly early in the process. Later, I had peers suggest (as I mention in “Statement”) that I would be contributing to this negative cycle if I explicitly wrote about it happening. So I tried writing some alternative endings where those poems just stopped short of the murder itself. But I never, never wrote an ending where the Wolf redeemed himself or where Ashley got away. Of course that can happen, but that’s not the story these characters are telling.

We love highlighting narratives where someone overcomes adversity against all odds. Even less violent things: I’ve read more than one article on this woman who got some weird loan/grant situation, without a huge down payment, and bought a house in D.C. in such a way that her mortgage is under $1,000 dollars a month. Housing prices are so high here that, for example, even if I had a $100k downpayment, I’d still be paying $400 dollars more a month than I do in rent, and my rent is already more than double that woman’s mortgage. Sorry for all the numbers! My point is this woman is the exception, in fact nearly an impossibility, and yet people write about her like: see! It’s possible! It’s possible for you to climb into homeownership if only you know the tricks! If only you work hard enough! Ashley, Little Red, the kittens that the Wolf eats in one of the stories—it’s not their fault. And while it would be nice if they could break out of this cycle, they aren’t the ones that can do it. 

DD: One of the most challenging aspects of this book is that it asks us to engage with the aggressor. In “The Wolf Attempts to Explain Himself,” there’s this lovely and startling passage, in which the Wolf laments Ashley’s inescapable death and his part in it:

[…] the last thing / i want is to find you in my dreams tonight / and crack open your ribs and rid your body / of its organs. is it so unreasonable to want a justice / for myself? a new ending where i justify / i’m not a wolf inevitable. finding you in the water / of the river and holding you down your body / putting up a fight because that’s human ashley

When we talk about cycles of violence, our first instinct might be to silence or look away from the perpetrator. Why was it important for you to include the Wolf’s voice in this story? What was the experience like of going inside his head?

EDML: I want and need to start by saying I don’t think the Wolf is excusable. And I don’t think you should side with him. I also think it’s worth noting that Ashley and the Wolf are both white. That’s how both of them can survive for as long as they do—the privilege of their whiteness. That’s also largely what Ashley’s first poem is about: how she was so privileged, even if she felt so destroyed. 

I wrote all of these poems before #MeToo. I think it’s incredibly important for us to call out the people who have done terrible things, even if the justice can only be a public record (See: my poem “Statement”). But, I think going forward we have to consider how we can prevent these cycles from happening. I had a friend (mentioned in the “Be Kind” poem) who raped someone. I haven’t actually spoken to this person in more than half a decade now, but I still remained friends with him at the time. What he did was inexcusable. But I also know he was incredibly sick for months leading up to the choice he made. He did not have resources to get help. He tried on more than one occasion and was either waylaid or outright rejected. I was there; I saw this. It was not my job or my other friend’s jobs to take care of him more than we did, which was the most we could. But I wonder: what would have happened if he had gotten help in all of those moments before? What if he had been able to utilize the resources that would have stabilized him? There’s a graphic memoir (and now a movie, apparently) called My Friend Dahmer about a dude who went to school with Jeffrey Dahmer before he committed all of his terrible acts. He also muses here—what structures could have been in place to prevent him from murdering? The story about Pinegrove, the band, and how the lead singer was accused of some misconduct is, I think, a good example of something that could happen. An intimate partner of his called him out, and he took a full year to reflect—including taking time off from touring and being in the public. He only returned after, through a mitigator, his accuser gave her blessing. If that hadn’t happened, he might have ended up like Jesse Lacey, lead singer of Brand New, who spent years abusing women, some of which were minors! 

None of this is a full solution, but I wanted us to be with the Wolf in the moments before he acted. He fails, but he’s also in a system that lets him fail. Ashley and the Wolf are both walking upstream their own rivers.

DD: You’re open about the importance of music in your life. In fact, your poem, “The Wolf: A Shadow Manifested,” is written after a mewithoutYou song. What has music taught you about poetry? Are there any other musical artists who influenced this book?

EDML: Truly, the music I love the most is music that makes me feel like I’ve been torn apart and put back together. I want and hope my poems make people feel that way too.

There are a few sneaky lines that I added that were misheard lyrics, if I’m being honest. “you knew / hate is defined / as spitting out / each other’s mouths” is from the song “Still” by Daughter. She means that two people are fighting and spewing hate. I misunderstood it as people turning an intimate act, like kissing, into chewing each other’s faces off and then spitting them out. Yikes, Liz. 

The poem about the Ashley having windmills in her chest instead of lungs is also an actual dream I had, but the line itself is from “Almost Crimes” by Broken Social Scene. The actual line is, “You’re like a messiah, pal. Little kingdoms in your chest.” I thought he was saying windmills for years! Ironically, “little windmill” IS in a song, just not one I found until much later: in the Blink-182 song, “All the Small Things,” they end by singing, “The night will go on, my little windmill!” A term of endearment!

Another tiny note: I have a line about dragging a lake because it shows up in two songs: “Cicatriz E.S.P.” by the Mars Volta and “Floater” by Every Time I Die. No one else, when I workshopped that, knew what that phrase meant! 

So I guess music has mostly taught me weird words and turns of phrase, intentionally or not!

DD: If your book was a band, what genre of music would it play? Where would it perform?

EDML: They would play mid-aughts punk rock. No, actually—it would probably just be my favorite band, Roof Beams, which is folk rock. And because it was my book, and not the actual Roof Beams, they would play in my living room whenever I pleased. And sometimes outside in the summer in the grass. And sometimes next to my bed as I fell asleep. 

DD: Something people in the lit world might not know is that you co-host a podcast, The Smug Buds, with author and editor Will Hoffacker. So, I have to ask. What are you most smug about in your book?

EDML: Two things: the first is the sestina, “The Wolf Attempts to Explain Himself.” I had a teacher in a workshop setting tell me, “Well, it got pretty close to succeeding, too bad it won’t.” Basically, saying I had made a good effort but that the poem was impossible to fix. Well, considering it got published on its own and is now in this book, I feel pretty smug about that. 

The second is general, but: it’s the book itself. I had a lot of support writing this book, but very few people got really excited about it. Workshop, something that I am not super precious about, was mostly grueling. So often it seemed like people didn’t understand what I was saying/doing. I thought it all made sense in my head, but sometimes I would explain myself into circles. I didn’t think I needed to revise the book more (by the end of the writing process) but most of the feedback I got back was pretty lukewarm. But I knew the book was there, I knew all of its intricate parts, so I just went for it. The most gratifying part of getting this book published is—starting with my press, Mason Jar, and then onto the many people who so graciously blurbed my book—they all get it. At first it was relief. And now I’m just hella smug about it.

DD: Who should read Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf? Who would you like to read it?

EDML: You know, I have a lot of coworkers who have told me that my writing is too sad. To one of them I actually said, “But aren’t you concerned with the human condition!?” And she said, “NO!” One of them, who read my essay, “Touch Me,” told me it was just so sad. I said, “Oh no! That’s the warmest thing I’ve ever written! No one dies!” (I then followed this up, after a pause, with “There are some things worse than death, though,” and wow did he roll his eyes!)

Which is to say, if you just want to escape, like maybe not my book? But if you like stories, if you like poems, if you like things that aren’t exactly one thing or another, please read my book. I feel like I’ve always been in all places at once. I’m pansexual, neither here nor there. My poems tell a story but also have very specific forms. I sewed a man’s dress shirt to a skirt and wore it to a wedding this spring. If the things you like most you have trouble explaining because they seem to wimble-womble—then you. You should read my book!

The Price of Living Your Beliefs: A Review of Her Sister's Tattoo by Ellen Meeropol

Failing to learn from history is an unspoken warning in the new novel, Her Sister’s Tattoo, by Ellen Meeropol. Spanning decades and told from multiple points-of-view, the repercussions and lessons gleaned from the protests of the Vietnam War are rendered viscerally through the story of two sisters raised to be activists. Social activism has been present in all of Ellen Meeropol’s fiction. She comes by it naturally. She is married to Robby Meeropol, one of the surviving sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, executed as spies in 1953. Robby and his brother were later adopted by the Meeropol family.

Rosa and Esther have twin red star tattoos on their left breasts but their temperaments are not alike. Rosa, red-haired and fiery, sees activism as vital and necessary. The atrocities of Vietnam weigh heavily on her and she acts accordingly, sometimes without considering the consequences. Esther, the mother of an infant, is more cautious, as is her husband, a pediatrician. When the two attend an anti-war protest and mounted police begin to attack the protestors, Rosa suggests throwing the hard green apples they are carrying in their bag. Like many stories, a seemingly innocuous incident explodes into a major life-altering event when one of the apples hits a horse, causing the animal to throw the mounted policeman. A paralyzing injury is the result and both sisters are charged with felony offenses that could result in lengthy jail terms. Esther, in consultation with her attorney, testifies against her sister to avoid prison. This act leads to the estrangement of the sisters and Rosa’s disappearance for a time. Once she resurfaces and is charged (and labeled Red Rosa), the relationship that was once an anchor for both seems over.

Our current perilous times make this novel all the more relevant. My Sister’s Tattoo shows that sometimes well-intentioned actions can have longstanding consequences. Vietnam War protests did accomplish the goal of ending the war but many were maimed and killed both fighting and protesting. The implicit question never asked is if the price of living your beliefs is worth it. The story picks up with the next generation, the now young teen daughters of Rosa and Esther who meet at an activist camp their parents attended. Esther’s daughter, Molly, has trouble hearing the story she wasn’t told about her mother and the aunt she never knew. Emma, Rosa’s daughter “repeated the whole story again, about cops beating people and throwing apples and the horse rearing up and the cop falling down. Except this time she told it with two sisters, Rosa and Esther. This time it was worse because I knew what was coming, and her sentences punched holes in my lungs, up one side and down the other.”

The book demonstrates the costs and responsibilities of standing up for one’s beliefs. Has the country learned from Vietnam? What is the price of freedom? Is protesting a catalyst for change? Ellen Meeropol doesn’t answer these questions, but her characters wrestle with the consequences of both inaction and activism. Can families bridge differences? In our current times, lines have been drawn politically and it’s often difficult to open a dialogue with people of opposing views, as it is in this story. Esther contemplates her choices as the novel moves toward its conclusion. The years that have been lost will not be recovered but forgiveness and empathy can manifest in future generations. Perhaps the lessons of history are imperfect and ongoing and by staying active and alert, her characters, like all of us, claim the right to a more optimistic future.

Occasions for Poetry: A Review of Joseph J. Capista’s Intrusive Beauty

I love this book of poems and its wild sensibility that tide pools, street violence, a vase of flowers that should have been thrown away, an osprey with its prey, teaching, fatherhood, a 19th century photograph, a crossing-guard at an elementary school, all are occasions for poetry. I appreciate that the poet looks in equal measure out at the wide world and in toward his private corner. When I was studying poetry, I was taught that in some poems, every word and phrase are like bricks in a wall—if one can be moved, the poem isn’t done. Strong walls with secure bricks—this is what a reader finds in this fine first book.   

The first poem, “Telescope” is an invitation to the reader to join him. The opening couplet tells the reader look through the same telescope as the speaker. What follows is a list of what the speaker sees shifting in a delightful kaleidoscopic way. The egret turns into a cloud and more clouds, which is like the sand, then like the waves, then like shells and farther out a freighter. At the heart, where according to Gregory Orr, we come closest to a meeting between chaos and order, a poet has many choices to make including how to position himself in his own poem and this speaker, one might say, keeps his distance, but I’d add that by doing so, does the opposite. The heart of the poem occurs when the speaker looks at the egret and then at a freighter that is

farther out
Than one might ever hope

To swim, especially you

The distance that seems impossible to cross could signify any goal, artistic or otherwise, and what endears me is that the speaker tries to be distant from his fear of failure and fails. He accomplishes this via his chose of pronouns: first third-person, “one might ever hope” and then second person “especially you,” where “you” is really an aching “I”. I love this modulation and that there is no “I” in this poem, yet all we need to know is here. The self-restraint makes this listener lean in to hear.

The poem “Thaw” has a different structure. Rather than kaleidoscopic images that bear down on a private moment, the poem braids together two narratives: a moment among Baltimore’s poorest residents and a moment in a married couple’s life. The couple drives through the city watching workers perform yearly spring chores I think of as medieval; collecting the dead from mounds of snow. After the couple reaches home, an argument ensues, and the poem ends with an achingly beautiful image. In the middle, literally of the poem, the speaker sees a “drifter” who is walking through three lanes of traffic and thinks that maybe he is

conducting a rush hour
motet his ears alone could hear. 
He waved. I almost waved right back.

No matter how bleak, in the middle of it all, the speaker is ready to wave, to offer and receive the smallest solace from wherever it might come. It is stunning. 

“History of the Inevitable” is like a wine that begins sweet with a bitter aftertaste, an effect Capista is able to create because of the formal constraints he plays by. The poem begins funny and ends poignant. It also employs a gorgeous list, this time, more fanciful, and it too tries to create distance between the speaker and the heart of the matter; it seems to me the speaker of this poem pulls out all the stops to contain his feelings, and that makes it all the more moving. This time, instead of his pronoun choice creating distance, the tool he uses is his choice of words. The title is regal and odd—it’s impossible to write a history of the inevitable—the scope is too vague and unending, and perhaps the poet intends to suggest that the desire to do so creates one more item for this impossible history book; the title seems ironic, which is a distancing strategy to manage the emotional temperature, which all wonderfully collapses as the poem takes its turn inward. The poem begins:

Fire wants to be ash, which, wants
a bucket to hold it with unseeping certainty.

The bucket wants to look like the moon,
which it does some nights, while the moon

wants to be the storefront window, full
of something. 

These images are surreal and childlike sequence, yet also stunning: that fire wants to turn to ash is devastating—who doesn’t want “unseeping certainty”? I feel for the moon. The entrance of Mainstreet into the poem surprises, yet who doesn’t window shop and dream? Instead of the Latinate word “longing, the poet uses a Germanic word want three times in the first three stanzas. For all kinds of reasons, a Germanic word places the emotion inside the ribcage rather than in the mind. Then the poem gradually returns to more Latinate words (long, boughs, propel) to prepare us, to distance us, before the last couplet and the heart of the poem. A feeling of being conflicted, I read once, Freud introduced to us in a non-religious context in the word ambivalent. That is, before he gave us this word, I read, people didn’t think much about this internal split or if they thought about it, it was in a religious context. Here the speaker feels pulled in two directions between, well, I assume between his poetry and the demands of the world. To my reading, the speaker distances from the feeling by his use of diction. The final item in the sequence is a man in repose wondering “how he will ever go to his desire when / the universe so needs his tending hand.” There is no “I” in this poem or “you” understood as “I” but a poem full of feeling non the less. 

Another way to look at these poems is that they navigate the sacred and secular, sometimes with wit and sometimes with prayer and often with both. “Devotional of Daily Apprehension” is eighteen tercets. The title suggests a page from a Book of Days, a daily reading to calm an agitated mind, to put one’s mind on God. With archaic diction and inverted syntax, the poem’s first line, “When at dawn, I set forth to find the bell resounding,” repeats sixteen times, suggesting many things:  a ringing bell, urgency, prayer. I think it is gorgeous. The poem begins:

When at dawn I set forth to find the bell resounding
Through unclouded air I find myself beside the tide pool
Anemones, exquisite predators enamored of a world.

The religious overtones are Judaic-Christian in tone, but not content—the speaker is not looking for God of any of the versions of the Bible, the speaker is looking at “exquisite predators enamored of the world.” Isn’t this wonderful, this oxymoron—and it resonates with many poems in the book. In each tercet the speaker finds himself somewhere new. The diction is religious in tone; the subject matter is earth bound. As lyrical, meditative, prayerful as this poem is, it is anchored by place: the speaker is looking at a tide pool by the ocean at the beginning and in the last stanza “wakes up” still by the sea. In between, the poem tumbles from world to world like the pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope. The final image, what an image, soars:

When at dawn I set forth to find the bell resounding
I come to on the dune and if to bend’s to ache O
these swallows how they ache supreme in flight. 

These are formal poems. The collection includes sonnets, villanelles, pantoums and blank verse; I’m pretty sure there isn’t a free verse poem among this collection. Capista employs all the tools of creating melodic lines in his poems. These are poems of the ear more than the eye. The musicality of the lines allows these poems to play cords—they juxtapose what is said with how it is said again and again and again. One last comment on prosody: the first poem of the book “Telescope” discussed earlier that invites the reader to come along, it uses a capital letter at the beginning of each line which seems a practice of yesteryear, and it seems to me that by doing this in the first poem, Capista is signaling that he has his mind on poetry’s past as well as on his own good verse.

The variety of subject matter, the formal constraints, the way the poet positions himself within the poems, the way the poems look out at the world and find an occasion for poetry in the most unexpected places and lastly, the images—a look at Capista’s images is worth another essay—all makes this a terrifically satisfying book. Did I mention that these poems contain echoes of poets who have past—the more I read them, the more I hear their guiding hand.