Writing Neighborhood Histories

Neighborhoods and their histories can be a rich source of material for writers working in many genres.  We’re fortunate to offer workshops with David Taylor at Hill Center on Capitol Hill and also a new venue for us, Sandy Spring Museum.  As an added bonus, his blog post links to his Washington Post feature article detailing aspects of the life of Joaquin Miller. Miller’s name is kept alive because of a great Washington tradition, the Miller Cabin poetry reading series offered every summer by The Word Works. 

 

Harlem’s Lenox Avenue, when Ralph Ellison was a writer for the Works Progress Administration

Weaving It All into a Narrative

by David Taylor

Sometimes a story or subject –a personality, a landmark or event – haunts us to track it down through any means we can lay our hands on: manuscripts, biographies, snapshots, even walking tours. And sometimes the narrative that emerges from that hunger can feel more like a quilt than whole cloth. It has a rich texture but still, as a narrative it has to hold together.

One spring day 11 years ago, I took a walk and bus ride across Harlem that gave me the spine of a story about Ralph Ellison’s Harlem for Village Voice, on the 50^th anniversary of the publication of his Invisible Man.

Later the contrast of Meridian Hill Park’s position as a forested slope at the edge of DC in 1884, and a Meridian Conference held to establish ground zero for a world clock, gave focus to my article for the Washington Post magazine.

Recently for a new way into the story of the War of 1812, I worked with former National Geographic archivist Mark Collins Jenkins to gather firsthand accounts buried in the Library of Congress – from its manuscripts collection to its Rare Book Room (where white gloves are required) and its regular stacks. I also tagged along with an archaeological dive team in the Patuxent, searching for ships sunk when the British attacked Washington. With these, we stitched together a new picture of that divisive and perilous time, showing a wide range of people and backgrounds caught up in it: African-American freedmen in Maryland, naval clerks at the Washington Navy Yard, spies and runaways, blockade runners, husbands and wives.

For any writer, it’s easy to lose your way among the glittering bits and research. We all need handles for pulling these pieces together and making a textured whole that gives readers a larger, moving narrative. Because even when history is very local, it can be big as life.

So last summer within sight of the Library of Congress we tested a first workshop on Researching and Writing Neighborhood Profiles. It was hands-on and the students turned up a blast of discoveries: lives and hideaways that took us from DC’s Brookland neighborhood to Route 66 and on to the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Our group had wide-ranging curiosity and together we talked through how to tie the strands together. We got help from Sharon Leon of George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media for trying out new tools for historians and storytellers.

This fall we’ll do it again, starting with a one-session workshop at The Hill Center, on September 25. A four-session workshop starts a month later, digging further into these ways of drawing on research for writing powerful local stories and photo essays. I hope you’ll come, share your obsessions and explore how to pull them together.

Finally - though some argue against research for fiction – I find the same process can help fiction writers too (and possibly poets). Many possibilities. We look forward to seeing you at Hill Center or Sandy Spring Museum.

 



Joaquin Miller, poet of Meridian Hill in the 1880s.

 

Credits for images:

Joaquin Miller: Library of Congress

Harlem's Lenox Avenue: New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

(We are offering several workshops at Hill Center starting in September.  Click here to see the list, and here to register for David's workshop at Sandy Spring Museum.)

 

Politics & Prose Publishes District Lines

Politics & Prose Bookstore recently published the debut issue of District Lines, an anthology of original local work by writers from in and around the Washington, D.C. area. The anthology is a valuable addition to the literature of the metro area, and several contributors are long-time members and friends of The Writer’s Center. We recently asked Susan Coll, a member of the editorial staff, about the anthology, and we’re glad to post her comments here.  Susan also sent us a link to video from the publication reading at P& P, and to submission guidelines for writers who'd like to submit work for Volume 2. 

 

Does the anthology fill a void in the DC literary scene?

In some sense there will always be some sort of void in an arts or literary scene. But judging by the enthusiastic response we’ve had so far, and the number of submissions we had for the last Volume and now Volume 2, there are a lot of talented writers in this area and not enough outlets for them to publish.  

 

How did the fact that you are a brick-and-mortar bookstore inform the way you edited?

We wanted this to be an anthology of local writing and to be more inclusive than not—we saw this less as an attempt to be Granta or The Paris Review than to be a community-building endeavor. We wanted to encourage both veteran and novice writers to think about the communities in which they live and work. That said, we did look for work that hit the sweet spot of being on topic and well written, and because we received so many submissions, we had to be somewhat selective.

 

How did the anthology help build or reinforce the P & P community? Were there outliers in the community that the anthology helped to bring into the fold?

I think it really turned out to be more of a community builder than I would have expected. For one thing we had submissions from all over the metropolitan region. One woman wrote her essay at a senior center in Annapolis and came into DC for the event. We also had someone write about the experience of being a Chinese immigrant in Centerville, Virginia.

We also had great attendance at the event itself. People hung around and mingled for a long time to chat about writing and living in the DC area, so it really did feel like a great community event in that sense, as well.

 

Did you have any expectations about what rough percent of submissions would be poems, fiction, and nonfiction, and were you surprised by the mix of submissions, by genre.

We had no expectations whatsoever---we weren’t sure we’d get any submissions, so it was a nice surprise to get a nearly perfect blend of poetry, fiction, and essays. We’d love more graphics, next time.

 

How did you get the word out to attract submissions?

We put the word out through our own email list, which reaches nearly 30,000 people, and also via social media. I also asked friends, including friends at The Writer’s Center, to help spread the word. It was amazing to see how far afield submissions came from—many submissions came from around the country from people who used to live in D.C. and have since moved away.

Were there particular surprises, or new things you learned about the Washington area as a result of the submissions?

Yes! There was a great essay about a period during the 1960s when people thought the Capital Beltway was actually speaking to them; evidently this story did the 1960s equivalent of going viral. There was also a lovely essay by Faye Moskowitz about Cleveland Park that taught me things about the history of my own neighborhood. And someone whose husband had worked as the plumber at the White House from the Truman through the Carter administrations had some great anecdotes.

 

Do you anticipate having more District Lines anthologies, and if so, roughly how often? 

We are hoping to publish twice a year. We hope to put out our next Volume sometime this winter.

How do you see the Opus printer influencing literature in the DC area?

Opus provides a unique opportunity for local writers to publish independently. We’ve had authors use Opus for all manner of publications—everything from poetry anthologies and short story collections to personal narratives, memoirs, and even textbooks. We’ve had events at the store where Opus-published authors can read their own work, which we think brings together a community of writers who aren’t published elsewhere. Of course, Opus was also instrumental in enabling us to put together and produce District Lines. I’m not sure we would have done it if we hadn’t had ready access to the machine; it made the whole process easy and affordable.

 

 

 

Free Fiction Workshop for Veterans, Active Duty Personnel and Family Members

 

The Writer’s Center has received funding from The National Endowment for the Arts to offer a tuition-free writing workshop starting September 23.  The workshop, which is offered to military veterans, service members and their families, meets at Hill Center, 921 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE, in Washington, D.C., two short blocks from the Eastern Market Metro station on the orange and blue line.  To register please email laura.spencer@writer.org and put “Free Workshop for Military” in the subject line.  We’d like to thank the NEA for funding this workshop  and Hill Center for generously providing a room.  A tuition-free nonfiction workshop, also funded by the NEA, will be offered at The Writer’s Center in 2014.

Fiction workshop at Hill Center
6 Mondays
September 23 through October 28
6:30 – 9:00 p.m.

This fiction workshop is offered to military veterans, service members, and their adult family members. It focuses on intensive writing and revision, with some required reading. Participants will submit short stories or novel chapters to the instructor and to their peers for critique. Typically, one or two stories or chapters are submitted during a workshop. Workshop participants will also submit detailed critiques of their fellow students' writing. The workshop is provided at no cost to the participants. Readings and some directed writing projects will be assigned by the instructor. Maximum attendance: 12.

Workshop Leader:  Ron Capps, founder  and director of the Veterans Writing Project,  served 25 years in the Army and Army Reserve and is a combat veteran of Afghanistan. He is a contributor to Time Magazine’s Battleland blog and to Foreign Policy; his literary writing has been featured in JMWW, The New York Times, Little Patuxent Review, Prime Number, and Riverlit. The Washington Post called his 2009 essay Back From the Brink, “stunningly good.” His essay The French Lieutenant’s iPod won first prize for creative non-fiction in Press 53′s 2011 Open Awards competition, and his 2011 essay Yellow was listed as a Notable in Best American Essays of 2012. He has been a featured speaker on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Pacifica Radio, the BBC World Service and has been a consultant to Time, Rolling Stone, and public broadcasting’s Frontline. His book, Writing War: A Guide to Telling Your Own Story serves as the curriculum for VWP seminars and workshops. A memoir, The French Lieutenant’s iPod, is forthcoming in 2014 from Schaffner Press.
 

 

 

Hal Wilson, left, of the Eastern Shore Writers Association, interviews Ron Capps in Delmarva Public Radio’s studio (WSDL-FM, Salisbury) – Photographed by Wilson Wyatt. Click here to hear the interview.

 

 

 

Trialogue: Poetry in Translation

We're looking forward to hosting Trialogue, an afternoon of poetry and discussion about the art of translation, at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, June 30, and we'd like to thank the Goethe Institut Washington for this First Person Plural blog posting.

 

Imagine a neighborhood that spans three continents, inhabited by people of diverse interests and varied backgrounds, and who speak at least three different native languages. That, in a nutshell, is what Trialogue is all about—a three-way conversation across time and distance undertaken in the hope of helping turn former enemies and uneasy strangers into neighbors.

 

Since February this year, the Goethe Institut Washington, the Confucius Institute at George Mason University, and the D.C. Public Library System have collaborated on a series of readings featuring poems by German, Chinese, and American poets, each of which have been translated into the other two languages. The focus of all the poems was “passions”—things that generate excitement in many cultures—from art, to sports, to political protest, to life after dark.

 

The final reading in this series, to be held at the Writer’s Center, on Sunday June 30, will focus on the challenge, frustration, and fun of translation itself—particularly the translation of poetry.  It will feature live readings in German and Chinese (including a performance via phone-link with Germany’s champion rap-poet Bastian Boettcher) as well as original poems in English by Sarah Browning, Joseph Ross, and Fred Joiner.  In addition, professors Peter Beicken from the German Department at the University of Maryland and Dr. Lihong Wang, who teaches comparative literature and Chinese at George Mason University, will be on hand to discuss the translation process and their own personal experiences with literary translation. 

 

Moderating the session will be Lane Jennings, whose activity over the years as poet, scholar, and translator “without portfolio” gives him a non-professional’s perspective on the translation process.  As an enthusiastic amateur, translating only what he likes for the sheer fun of it, Jennings insists that no translation is ever finished—merely abandoned, that no existing translation should ever be considered “definitive,” and that even badly flawed translations can have real literary value.

 

Poets will read their own work and react to hearing others read that same work in translation, discuss which elements of poetry can and cannot be accurately passed back and forth between languages, and be available to respond to questions and comments from the audience.

 

More about the poems in the Trialogue project can be found at www.goethe.de/usa/trialogue.

We're happy to help spread the word about the first Books Alive! Conference sponsored by The Washington Independent Review of Books.  The conference will be held Saturday, June 8 at the North Bethesda Marriott Hotel Conference Center, opposite the White Flint Metro.

Books Alive 2013 is not only for authors and would-be authors but also for book lovers, book clubbers and for anyone who wants to learn more from top writers about how they do their craft.  For those who want to pitch a book, there will also be nearly 20 agents present. 

The subjects of the panels range from the state of the market and new platforms for publishing to memoir, biography, research, crime noir and plain old fiction. The day begins with a conversation between two Pulitzer winners, Washington Post critic Michael Dirda and Bill McPherson, the Washington Post Book World's first editor.  The luncheon speaker is Marie Arana, Bolivar biographer, memoirist and the last editor of Book World. 

 Several panels will run through the day.  Participating authors and agents include Paul Dickson, Tom Mann, George Pelecanos, Laura Lippman, Allison Leotta, Susan Coll, Marita Goldman, Sara Taber, Ken Ackerman, Kathryn Johnson, Ron Goldfarb,  David Stewart, Gail Ross, Keith Donohue, Jack Farrell, and National Book Award winner Alice McDermott.

An early bird registration rate is in effect through Wednesday, May 15. 

 

 

Susan Okie Wins Bethesda Poetry Competition

Susan Okie's poem "Perseid" was selected by Michael Collier as winner of the 2013 Poetry Contest organized by Bethesda Urban Partnership and Bethesda Magazine.  Ms. Okie is a member of The Writer's Center, and she has taken many workshops over the years.  We're glad to post her blog entry and winning poem. - The Editors

 

 

 

            I am a family practice doctor and medical writer who rediscovered my love of writing poetry in a workshop at Chautauqua about 15 years ago.  I am enormously grateful to the Writer’s Center for its role in helping me develop as a poet.  I’ve learned from the center’s gifted teachers, including Rose Solari, Judith McCombs,  Charles Jensen, Sue Ellen Thompson and, especially, Stanley Plumly. Friendships with other local poets have been an enduring gift of my studies there.

            In January, 2012, I embarked on the low-residency MFA program in poetry at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC. Although I questioned the wisdom of entering graduate school at 61, I can say now (as I near the end of the third semester) that it has been a transformative, joyous experience.  Each term, we work intensively with a single faculty member. My supervisors – Maurice Manning, Alan Shapiro and Marianne Boruch -- have nurtured my craft, expanded the breadth and depth of my reading, and helped me learn how to begin, how to be patient with a poem, how to revise.

            As a journalist who spent almost twenty years as a reporter and editor for the Washington Post, my greatest challenge has been moving away from linear thinking and narrative, toward the lyric and the unexpected. I wrote “Perseid” in late 2012, after my husband and I watched the August meteor shower with our younger son during a visit to  the Wind River range near Lander, Wyoming.

            My poems have been published in The Bellevue Literary Review, The Gettysburg Review, Passager, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. One is forthcoming in Hospital Drive, the literature and humanities journal of the University of Virginia School of Medicine. I am still active in medicine, volunteering weekly in a Montgomery County clinic for uninsured adults and teaching first-year medical students at Georgetown University about how to talk with and listen to patients.

 

                                                                                                            -- Susan Okie

 

             PERSEID 

 
Three of us in plastic chairs,
wearing all we brought, legs
under a quilt, tipping back.
The galaxy’s rim spins
above, silver churning
on starless black. That dark
is interstellar dust, says
my husband, not nothing.
I choose a black hole
in the wild white river,
and let my eyes unfocus, till
stars at my vision’s edge
brighten and burn,
steady in this high air.
Then a rushing spark,
a wake that glows and vanishes.
Under the blanket, Jacob
squeezes my hand. Nothing,
then another spark, another,
and on our right a flash
aims right for us and
goes out, burned to ash.
 

                                    --  Susan Okie

 

         

Tom Kirlin at The Writer's Center



We’ve just scheduled a poetry reading at 3:00 p.m. on April 27 with Tom Kirlin, whose Under The Potato Moon was published by Little Red Tree Publishing with support from The William Meredith Foundation. The book continues a Little Red Tree tradition of combining poetry and visual art, in this case reproductions of artwork by Nancy Frankel, who will also be in attendance.

The reading will be held here at The Writer's Center, 4508 Walsh Street, in downtown Bethesda. It's free and open to the public, and will be followed by a reception and book signing.

Richard Harteis, President of The William Meredith Foundation, will be joining us, and he is helping to coordinate the program. Long-time members of The Writer’s Center will recall William and Richard as old friends of the Center; it’ll be nice to have Richard back. Under The Potato Moon comes with a Foreword by Richard Harteis and an introduction by Michael Collier, posted here:

Introduction

In Thomas Kirlin’s passionate, soberly rollicking Under the Potato Moon a weathervane “turned preacher” prays for the “Archangel rain” to nurture our world “with such crippled grace” that “Van Gogh himself would lurch afield to paint his breath away.” There is such exuberance of imagination and such abundance of transformation that his poems are apt to leave a reader breathless and gasping in surprise. Kirlin is like a capacious, melodic barker calling us to the carnival of an intensely vivid and deeply humane circus of life.

But the energized and rambunctious imagination is only one feature of Under the Potato Moon. The collection contains forthright yet gorgeous and poignant love poems. In “Banquet,” one of several sonnets, a couple, in the aftermath of a dinner party, take sustenance in the unrequited looks they stored up for each other during the evening by recognizing an illumination in their bodies that:

          “...sings:
          Feast & appetite, feast & appetite—what
          but love of bones ever set out table right?”

In “Delivery,” while working his way through a stack of mail, Kirlin considers the “vanities of love.” The poem leads him in a typically delightful and unpredictable way not only to forgive “love rages” and
the “torn heart” but also to mull over the meaning of Christmas and Salvation Army Santas.

Connected to Kirlin’s spry and sparring imagination is a quick literary wit that showcases itself in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Aquarius,” a parody of Wallace Stevens that begins:

          “Sporting a suave tuft
          a titmouse circles
          the crystalline globe—
          now even the blackbird knows:
          icicles, in the right hands
          weep to fill
          Aquarius’ bowl.”

Kirlin is drawn to allusion not because he feels it’s necessary to display his erudition but to show how his own work is part of the woven fabric of literary conversation and tradition.

For all the vociferous charm of Kirlin’s poems and the lightness of touch they can produce, he is a poet of deep and committed social consciousness. In “Anthem,” banter and play give way to a serious poem about the Cold War and Vietnam era when, as he writes:

          “there was blood on the sky each time you
           sighed;”

In the disagreements of those decades, he locates the genesis of America’s current social and political polarizations:

          “Yes, we strangled Cold War paranoia to a stillborn stupor;
          yes, we broke old colonial maps in two, setting
          democracy free, but we also destroyed intergenerational
          communion, the brightest path to e pluribus unum.”

Finally, among the many reasons we read poems, one of them is to see how a particular person takes him or herself. In other words, the presentation of a life measured against a particular time and place, foregrounded in the personal but always with the social, political, and cultural coloring in the background. Thomas Kirlin’s poems amply answer this need and as such they offer a vivid record of what it’s like to be alive straddling two centuries.

Michael Collier, Director
Bread Load Writers’ Conference

"Telescope I" by Nancy Frankel

[Fired Clay, Acrylic] - 17" L x 6" Dia

Private Collection of Charles and Pat Timberlake

Think Global; Write Local:

TWC’s Writing Staycation

By Angela Swayze

After researching writer’s retreats a few years ago, workshop leader Zahara Heckscher came to an inspired conclusion: there should be an affordable writing retreat in the D.C. area for busy people who can’t afford the time or cost of leaving their family and responsibilities. Thus was born Writing Staycation, The Writer’s Center’s week-long retreat for writers who need to get away and write.

Heckscher’s workshop seeks to transport busy D.C. area residents to a place where “their souls and bodies are being nurtured so that their minds can focus on writing.”

Bringing in paintings, flowers, healthy foods, and in part guided by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, Heckscher leads participants through five consecutive days of structured writing.

“We start on time and end on time,” she says. “Within the structure comes the freedom.” But it’s the space, and nurturing energy of that space, she likes to emphasize, that matters most.

Her participants agree. A self-proclaimed “staycation junkie,” Sheila Walker wrote on a recent First Person Plural blog that “The continuity and intensity of five consecutive days of Staycationing, rather than the usual once a week for several weeks, was exactly what I needed.” Andrea Solarz shares that the Staycation helped her jump start her writing and gave her a lot of motivation that “continued long after the week ended.”

So how does it work?

The day starts with a reading, Heckscher explains, often from such names as Pablo Neruda or Thich Nhat Hanh.

There may also be a writing prompt, however both take as little as 30 minutes. Then, it’s time to write.

Lunch involves guest speakers, like writer Danuta Hinc or acclaimed poet E. Ethelbert Miller, all of whom are open to one-on-one sessions afterwards. Lunch is followed by more time to write. Another break if offered later in the day, such as an outdoor walk.

“It’s good for the body to take a break from writing and gets creative juices going,” Heckscher says.

The day typically closes with a brief check-in to help participants become more self-aware of their process, such as identifying at what point they felt most productive during that day.

Outside the daily structure, participants also have the option to work on technique or talk nuts-and-bolts of writing with Heckscher or one of the lunch speakers. They also have the option of retreating to their own private space.

“Some need to be in a room alone,” says Heckscher.

Either way, Heckscher makes a conscious decision to stay away from workshopping students’ material, emphasizing that the purpose of the class is to focus on writing. “Critiquing is another class,” she says.

Born in part from “desperation and poverty,” the Writing Staycation has hit its mark. Over time, the workshop has seen its share of repeat attendees as well as new participants of varying stripes. Heckscher describes participants as “early 20s to their 70s and everyone in-between novice writers and already published authors.”

She goes on to say that she has a “radical faith in everyone that comes to Staycation, whatever their stage in the writing process.”

Seeing her role more as a facilitator than a leader, her goal is to create the space for people to be at their creative best. “If you want mint tea, I make sure you have mint tea. I know everyone who has walked in the door has made a huge commitment. I honor them all for making that commitment to writing.”

Heckscher is co-author of the book How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas. She has also written numerous articles that have appeared in books and the online travel magazine www.TransitionsAbroad.com, where she serves as contributing editor. Heckscher teaches professional writing at University of Maryland at College Park.

The next Writing Staycation is set for 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. April 22 – 26 in Bethesda. Check our website for more information. Visit The Writer’s Center’s youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/TheWritersCenter) for a video of Zahara discussing Writing Staycation.



Two Writing Staycations are now posted on our Website. To join a workshop give us a call or click the start date to register online.  Writing Stacation starting: April 22 or June 24.   .

O-Dark-Thirty Publishes Second Issue

We’ve been very fortunate to receive grants from the National Endowment for the Arts over the last few years to offer support for writing workshops for veterans, active duty service members, and their family members. Through these workshops we’ve come to know and appreciate the good work of the Veterans Writing Project. In addition to writing workshops, VWP produces a literary journal, O-Dark-Thirty, which has just published its second issue. We’d like to thank Dario DiBattista for this blog posting to First Person Plural.

‘For Us to Bear the Report’: The Writer’s Center and O-Dark Thirty, a Military Veteran-Run Literary Journal


By: Dario DiBattista


The Veterans Writing Project, for which I’m an instructor, provides free writing workshops to veterans, service members, and their families at places like the George Washington University, and also provides instructors through the National Endowment for the Arts for writing workshops at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center at Bethesda because we believe that every veteran has a story tell, those stories are important, and they can serve to heal. The Writer’s Center supports us in partnership through teaching and through helping sharing veterans’ stories with our online and print literary journal O-Dark Thirty.

Our newest issue, our second issue, had an ominously recurring theme: our “ghost issue.” And the artwork on the cover, a piece called “Cody” by Army veteran Joe Olney, sets the tone appropriately.

A wonderfully reflective essay by John Purdue (letters of his to our editor) continues the theme in the nonfiction section. Purdue served stateside during Vietnam, sometimes dealing with burn victims, more often dealing with the mental tragedies of war in a special unit for some of the broken men who returned from combat. His goal was to help provide them a better facility than the one in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and help them “not blow the back of their heads off.” None died under his care. But two were successful at suicide while on leave. The emotion and struggle of Purdue of coping with those experiences, among others, perhaps lead him to hold a gun later in the narrative, considering his own suicide.

Next, the theme is also explored in the fiction section in Rod Merkley’s “Walk Until You Sleep.” The former Army medic author envisions a protagonist who has struggled too long with his demons from war and decides that killing himself is the only solution. But he doesn’t want to make it seem like suicide, because he thinks that truth will damage his memory to his son who will survive him. He considers a planned motorcycle wreck or “death by police” but ultimately just plans to go on a long walk, which takes an unexpected turn.

There are other excellently crafted works loosely related to the theme (and don’t forget to check out our profile of William Zinsser, who is a veteran of WWII).

We thank the Writer’s Center for their support of what we’re doing, and hope you’ll check out 0-Dark Thirty and consider subscribing.

Poet Lore's 124th Birthday Reading

Cover of A Night in Brooklyn

We undid a button,

turned out the light,

and in that narrow bed

we built the great city—

—D. Nurkse,
from “A Night in Brooklyn”

This Sunday at The Writer’s Center, former poet laureate of Brooklyn D. Nurkse and local poet Teri Ellen Cross will read in celebration of the 124^th birthday of Poet Lore, the semi-annual poetry journal published by The Writer’s Center.

 

Widely recognized as a distinctive voice in contemporary poetry, D. Nurkse will read from his newest collection, A Night in Brooklyn (Knopf, 2012), which will be available for purchase and signing at the event. D. Nurkse’s previously published books have moved through such diverse terrains as the fragility of a second-generation son’s exchange with his immigrant father, the biblical past and the complexities of its legacy, and the mysterious systems of ocean life.

The poems of his newest collection, separated into three parts, read—in its publisher’s words—as a “haunted love letter to the far corners of his hometown.” Tina Chang, current poet laureate of Brooklyn, understands the book to be “as much a celebration of the borough as it is a meditation on history, time, and the furious love of the places the poet inhabits.” These poems roam freely in time and the borough’s landscape, and yet, as Margot Farrington noted in a 2002 interview with Nurkse for The Brooklyn Rail, his poems have a reliable signature: always, a “touch of strangeness draws us inward to a deeper truth.”




D. Nurkse; photo credit: Jeremiah Kuhfeld

The gravity of Nurkse’s poetry may relate in part to his human rights work and familial history. His work has taken him, as an educator, into prisons such as Rikers Island Correctional Facility; as Brooklyn’s poet laureate, into inner city schools; and, now, as an elected member of Amnesty International’s board of directors, into a position of governance over the organization’s wide-reaching humanitarian activity. Refugees from Nazi Europe, Nurkse’s parents moved to New York during World War II.  His family moved back to live in Europe and then returned again to the United States at the time of the Vietnam War. In the same interview with Farrington, he speaks of his experience of war “like a radio playing in another room.” Likewise, in some poems, troubling realities impinge on the intimate dynamics of its subjects from afar. They remain out of sight and elude finality.




Teri Ellen Cross


D. Nurkse’s powerful work has found a happy home in Poet Lore. The same is true of the work of his co-reader Teri Ellen Cross, whose poems have been widely published. A Ford Foundation and Cave Canem fellow, Teri Ellen Cross serves as the Poetry and Lectures Coordinator at the Folger Shakespeare Library and was formerly a producer with WAMU’s The Kojo Nnamdi Show.

This event also marks the release of Poet Lore’s newest issue, our Spring/Summer 2013 volume. Both Poet Lore’s editors—Jody Bolz and Ethelbert Miller—will be present, and a cake-and-champagne reception and D. Nurkse’s book signing will follow the readings. Please join us there! We look forward to sharing poetry, cake, and champagne at this free and public occasion in honor of Poet Lore’s longevity.

Poet Lore’s 124^th Birthday Reading, Sunday, April 7, 2:00 PM, will be held in the Jane Fox Reading Room of The Writer’s Center. Visit this link for directions to The Writer's Center. Or phone in at (301) 654-8664 for more information.

References and more information on D. Nurkse can be found at the following links:

Random House’s webpage for A Night in Brooklyn:
(http://www.randomhouse.com/book/217598/a-night-in-brooklyn-by-d-nurkse)
Random House’s interview with D. Nurkse for Bold Type Magazine:
(http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1202/nurkse/interview.html)
Poetry Foundation’s profile of D. Nurkse:
(http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/d-nurkse) 
Title poem of A Night in Brooklyn published online: (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/180548)
The Brooklyn Rail Interview with D. Nurkse by Margot Farrington, 2002: (http://www.brooklynrail.org/2002/03/books/in-conversation-with-d-nurkse)

Irish Poets at The Writer's Center

We recently received an email asking if we'd like to host a reading by three visiting Irish poets, and fortunately we were able to schedule the event.  They'll be reading here at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, April 8.  There's no admission charge, and all are welcome. The reading will be followed by a wine reception courtesy of the Embassy of Ireland, Washington DC.

The Writer's Center welcomes visiting Irish poets Siobhan Campbell, Anne-Marie Fyfe, and Iggy McGovern.  Monday, 8 Apr, 2013 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM at The Writer’s Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, Maryland. Email us at post.master@writer.org or call 301-654-8664 for directions.

Siobhan Campbell is known for her quirky take on contemporary Ireland and on the limping Celtic Tiger. As well as writing poetry, she works with veterans of the forces in the US and the UK and edited Courage and Strength, Stories and Poems by Combat Stress Veterans  (2012). Her most recent poetry collections are Cross-Talk, That Water Speaks in Tongues and The Cold that Burns. She has published in Poetry, The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, Magma, Poetry Ireland, The Irish Times, Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets and other journals and anthologies. Awards include prizes in the National poetry competition, Troubadour and Wigtown International poetry prize and Templar Chapbook prize. Siobhan writes accessible, wry and sometimes satirical verse,

Iggy McGovern lives in Dublin where he is Associate Professor of Physics at Trinity College. His poetry has been widely published in anthologies and journals in Ireland and abroad, as well as in the popular ‘Poetry in Motion’ series on trains in the Dublin suburban rail system (DART). He is author of two collections of poetry, The King of Suburbia, and Safe House. He also edited the anthology 2012: Twenty Irish Poets Respond to Science in Twelve Lines, published by Dedalus Press in association with Quaternia Press, and co-edited (with Jean-Patrick Connerade) Science Meets Poetry 3, published by Euroscience. Well-known for his witty, playful, but emotionally engaged poems, McGovern is the recipient of the McCrae Literary Award and the Hennessy Literary Award for poetry.

Anne-Marie Fyfe: poet, creative-writing teacher, and former Chair of the Poetry Society, (2006-2009), lives in West London. She has published four volumes of poetry, including Understudies: New and Selected Poems (Seren Books, 2010) and has won several awards including the Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition with her poem Curaçao Dusk. Anne-Marie has been organiser of Coffee-House Poetry in London for 14 years and is co-founder and organizer of the John Hewitt Spring Festival on the Antrim Coast. She has edited anthologies, has guest-edited and written for poetry magazines, and has worked with writers’ groups, schools, hospitals, libraries and prisons. Anne-Marie is a mesmerizing reader of her wonderfully musical lyric poetry.

Delphi Quarterly: We Want to Hear Your Voice

(Former workshop leader Ramola D, who moved to Boston a few years ago, recently emailed to let us know about Delphi Quarterly, a newly-launched online site she co-founded that publishes interviews with writers. She was glad to write about the site for First Person Plural.)

 
Delphi rose out of a feminist vision of connection—writers connecting with other writers, writers speaking with, inspiring, and supporting each other—and when I first began to mull over the idea of starting a journal of craft interviews and literary conversations online, I was drawn especially to the notion of creating an across-all-levels platform for a diversity of writers’ voices.

We seem to live in a world dominated by the promotion, publicity, and hype generated by mainstream publishing—an old-school model that reeks of commerce and patriarchy. Too often we do not hear the voices of the visionary poet, the experimental prose writer, the serious fiction writer or essayist, the playful linguist, the revolutionary satirist, the documentary ecologist, the thoughtful memoirist or dramatist. If you are young, a beginning writer, an “emerging” writer (emerging into publication, I assume that means), a writer struggling for years to publish your manuscripts, a writer writing outside the norms of acceptability for mainstream publishers to recognize, your voice is not heard except in your own immediate environs—for years and years—while entrenched others, deserving or not, are lionized to perdition.

A Platform for Your Voice

We at Delphi think there is value in your voice, in hearing your voice and in including your voice, while you are writing, reading, publishing pieces in local or larger forums, living your writing life, and living your creating, rather than only when you land the agent, the book deal, the million-dollar movie deal. We know and live the understanding that writing is a process, and can accompany a life. We want to create a space where you and I and all the writers we know can talk shop, talk craft, and exchange insights while we are living this one-and-only writing life.

The Writer as Publisher & From the Workshops

Early in Delphi’s inception, Joe Ponepinto, Book Review Editor for The Los Angeles Review, who co-edits the journal with me, offered for inclusion a series of his interviews with writers as publishers. This now forms a regular feature—our launch issue highlighted Sarah Gorham, of the wide-reaching Sarabande Books—and we hope to keep it going. With the launch, we also introduced a workshop feature, where we highlight a writing workshop: participants can interview the workshop leader, or the other way around, or each other, mainly to give a glimpse of what the workshop is about, its high points and excitements. Our launch featured the Bangalore Writers Workshop, a fearless venture embarked on by a recent MFA graduate, Rheea Mukherjee, with her writer friend Bhumika Anand—participants from their workshops interviewed them. We are moving currently to also include documentary filmmakers in our rubric.

 

Writers Interviewing Writers

We invite you to join the conversation. Literally, this means, if you are a writer, beginning or established, if you admire the work of any writer you know or work with, please interview her or him! Send us a note first to introduce the writer to us. We are looking for interviews that highlight craft and focus surrounding a single published work, whether a book, a poem, a story, an essay, or a play—recent, or from another time. We want to encourage writers to interview each other—interview the writers you know and the ones you admire; do round-robin interviews of writers in your writing workshop, short or long. If you are in a workshop, as participant or leader or peer, whether a paid-for or private workshop, offer us insights into how your workshop works, what it does best, to be featured in From the Workshops.

Please drop in at Delphi Quarterly online for more information and to read our unique launch issue featuring Vermont poet Neil Shepard and Baltimore writer Justin Sirois. Delphi wants to feature your voice!