This spring, Jackie Craven met with four poetry friends in Johnstown, New York for an informal afternoon of feedback and discussion. The poets, who have been meeting regularly for more than a decade, listened to Jackie read “White Lightning” and asked her about the poem and her writing processes. A short bio of each poet appears at the end of the interview.

Sandra Manchester: Your poem reminds me of “Ego Tripping” by Nikki Giovanni. It’s an oral poem, and has powerful images spilling out, one after another.

Jackie Craven: Welcome to my strange, quirky world! My mother was an artist whose work explodes with surreal images— an old man grows angel wings, an angel sprouts a mermaid’s tail, monkeys wear human faces. Growing up with her paintings, I guess it’s natural for me to dwell in the realm of the fantastic. My fiction chapbook, Our Lives Became Unmanageable (Omnidawn, 2016), follows characters who grapple with otherworldly compulsions and dilemmas. “White Lightning” continues that theme, but the voice is different from anything I’ve attempted before. Writing this poem really was an adventure.

Catherine DeSalle: I can’t imagine what I’d be thinking of to come up with the images you used—lips like an iron gate, a tongue curled like a slug. Did the poem come from a memory? A dream?

JC: It’s hard to know what stew images bubble up from—maybe they’re just a part of me, like the images in my mother’s paintings. However, I do credit fellow writers (you guys!) and my teachers for helping me bring the strangeness to the surface. Several years ago, I took a workshop with Tim Seibles at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Tim encouraged us to experiment with metaphors and to seek unexpected juxtapositions. Whenever I read Tim’s work, I come away with a sense of shock and awe. Check out these lines from his poem “First Kiss”:

…her mouth pulled up
like a baby-blue Cadillac
packed with canaries driven
by a toucan…

The images are insane, but they overflow with emotion. I can hear a young, love-sick narrator grope for words as he struggles to describe sensations he doesn’t fully understand. I wanted to achieve something like this in “White Lightning.” Using Tim’s poem as a model, I filled pages with ideas, rooting around for the kind of outrageous statements that might be spoken by someone who is reeling out of control.

Virginia Bach Folger: As you wrote, did you imagine the words rushing up from the printed page? Or did you see this as a poem that you would recite to an audience?

JC: Both! I’m in awe of poets who have a flare for performance. I could listen all day to Tim Seibles, or the gorgeous, rolling voice of Yusef Komunyakaa. And I love the rhythm and energy of Danez Smith, who has won many poetry slam awards. I wish I could perform like that, and I’ve been participating in a lot of open mics to build confidence. But, I’m truly an introvert. I hope that my printed words will convey sounds and emotions, even when the poem isn’t presented aloud.

Catherine DeSalle: But you read it very well just now!

JC: Thank you. “White Lightning” is a persona poem—to read it aloud, I need to step inside the skin of an entirely different person. The narrator has his own experiences and his own vocabulary for expressing those experiences. He says things that would not occur to me naturally. So to read this poem aloud, I have to summon some acting skills.

Catherine Norr: Your speaker mentions several mythical gods and legends. I love these! Did the mythical references pop naturally into your mind, or did you need to do research?

JC:   Some, like Götterdämmerung and Jabberwock came automatically, but I doubt I would have thought of Nithhogr or Smaug without digging. I wanted my speaker to compare his experiences to grandiose events, so I searched for allusions from mythology, sci-fi movies, and Dungeons and Dragons lore. I selected Nithhogr and Smaug because I loved the sound of their names and the associations they stir. If you asked me specific details about the tales, I’m not sure how much I’d remember—I’m just taken with the sounds.

Virginia Bach Folger: That’s fascinating, and opens up permission for the rest of us. Tell us about your writing process. Do you find you’re more productive when you stick to a routine, or when you’re more flexible with time and places?

JC: My life is as chaotic as the situations in my stories and poems. I have no routine. There are periods when I do little writing, and then—without warning—stories and poems come in a gush. The funny thing is, some of my most productive writing times are when I’m also extremely busy with other activities.

Virginia Bach Folger: The title “White Lightning” gave me the impression that this would be a sexual poem. On first reading, I imagined something bright and flashing—like a climax—rather than about drinking.

Catherine DeSalle: I thought so, too!

Catherine Norr: White lightning is a kind of alcohol. I think the double meaning adds to the poem. I love the layers of meaning and the shifting images– “squeezing music / out my pores till my skin stretched to cellophane…”

Catherine DeSalle: I was reminded of a stream-of-consciousness story by George Saunders. As you read, I didn’t think too hard about the literal meaning of the words. I was caught up in the sound of your voice, and the rhythm.

Virginia Bach Folger: How happy are you with the title?

JC: True confession? I’ve changed it. After “White Lightning” appeared in r.kv.r.y., I decided to include the poem in my collection, Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters (forthcoming from Brick Road Poetry Press). The collection is about the thirst for magic potions and the desire to alter reality. Many of the poems are based on paintings by my mother, so I gave “White Lightning” a name that corresponds with that theme. The poem is now called “The Absinthe Drinker (Egg Tempera & Oil).” It’s probably a good thing Secret Formulas will be in print soon, or I’d never stop rewriting the poems.

Virginia Bach Folger: How do you know when you’re finished?

JC: You should see my cabinets—overflowing with half-finished manuscripts, work I’ve tinkered with for years and can’t let go of. I just hope that the old poems don’t crowd out the new—there are so many ideas clamoring to get out.

Catherine DeSalle is a visual artist who writes poetry and essays.

Catherine Norr is the author Return to Ground (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Her work has also appeared in Avocet, The Evening Street Review, Oriel, The Sun, and other journals.

Sandra Manchester studied with Robert Pinsky at the New York State Writers Institute. She writes poetry and memoir based on her life growing up with itinerant farmers.    

Virginia Bach Folger has recent work published or forthcoming in Constellations: A Journal of Poetry and Fiction, The Fourth River, Lumina, The Bacopa Literary Review, and The Virginia Normal.

Lauren Kettler: Susan, this is a rare treat for me because you and I have been comrades in writing more than a decade now, and our friendship spans even longer than that. I feel privileged to have perused the gamut of your writing, all of it nonfiction and personal. In addition to an array of smaller autobiographical pieces, your manuscript Laughing Goat: A Sailing Memoir chronicles your life cruising the Caribbean with your husband John and daughter Kate. There are so many ways to tell a story. Tell us a little about why memoir and who’s influenced you most in this genre.

Susan Cole: I began writing the story of our three-year voyage a few years after we returned. Our sailing adventure was a transformational experience—leaving our home and roots in Fairfield, Connecticut behind and setting out to sea. I wanted to understand why I went on the voyage and how it changed my life. Two memoirs that influenced me: Abigail Thomas’ Three Dog Life and Lee Martin’s Such a Life. Thomas’ frankness about living with her husband’s brain injury helped me to realize I needed to put myself in the center of the story. I loved Martin’s strong sense of place.

LK: Below is one of my favorite Laughing Goat passages:

“Some time after John moved in, I had a dream in which I was sitting in a crowded train station at night. I was on a bench with other passengers, next to a broad plate glass window that reflected the high arched ceilings and glittering glass chandeliers inside. The window overlooked a busy downtown thoroughfare. Waiting for my train, I was alert yet absorbed in the book I was reading. Suddenly, a giant bare foot crashed through the window and a big laughing bearded man popped through.”

The above is for me a seminal description of John’s footprint, pun entirely intended, on your life. In a smaller piece you said, “Bashert, soul of my soul. I fell into your dream and you awakened mine.” I think more than the cruising, John was the adventure of your life. How did and does his presence continue to shape your writing?

SC: As you know, John died last summer of lung cancer. I wrote “Harbor Lights” about those last months (r.kv.r.y, April issue). John and I were together 44 years. We met at work in our twenties. He was a sailor from Connecticut; I grew up in landlocked Ohio. He talked me into buying a leaky 50’ 1903 Fire Island ferryboat and living in Long Island Sound—our first boat, which later sank. When I met John, I was in psychoanalysis and beginning to come to terms with the deep love I’d had for my dad, who died when I was ten and about whom I never spoke. John burst through my reserves. He had tremendous vitality. He remains my inspiration.

LK: Kate was seven when you and John set sail with her for a cruising life in the Caribbean. You say in your sailing memoir:

“Kate bounded in from her cabin. She showed me a poem she had just written about having to wear shoes again. She stood next to me while I read it, peering over my shoulder. In the poem, she imagined going back to the States and wrote about shoes that pinch, that make you sweat and slow you down. … I realized how much I loved the wildness. I had loved watching her shinny up the mast and seeing her lead children and dogs into crazy tropical adventures where she hadn’t known what the outcome would be. I hadn’t wanted to stuff her or us into tight shoes that pinch– that slow you down.”

What did it mean for you as a woman to take your young daughter on this adventure?

SC: During the voyage, Kate operated the dinghy by herself, swung on the halyard in long graceful arcs over the water from bow to stern, wrote two novels and befriended “boat kids” from around the world. On the other hand, when there were no kids around, she was lonely. Peeking into her cabin one day when she was reading aloud, her stuffed animals arrayed attentively around her, pierced my heart; another time in Belize, when we were stuck on an island waiting for a part, Kate said, “This is no way to raise a child, moving from place to place!” Although I was torn about ripping apart the secure life Kate had in Fairfield, I was glad that she could experience the freedom of blue-water sailing.

LK: A riveting aspect of your sailing memoir is that the places you encounter are as central as the characters themselves:

“I swatted back branches and vines that crept over the dock and screened out the hot afternoon sun. Lizards scurried across the dock and butterflies fluttered in the still air. Something–a bird? an iguana?–clicked from the bushes. On the river, we passed fishermen in cayucos casting their nets. Flocks of birds rose, silhouetted against the pale dawn light. We were back on the Rio Dulce.”

Talk about your seduction with exploring the new and seemingly uncharted.

SC: John and I first read about the Rio Dulce, a lush river in the heart of Guatemala, twenty years before we left on our voyage. The Rio Dulce is a “hurricane hole” where boats take shelter during hurricane season. After arriving at the river, we sailed through a narrow green canyon where red-tailed hawks swooped and spider monkeys raced along the treetops, into an isolated world of boaters thrown together in a remote jungle—grizzled old loners, romantic young single-handers, scammers on the lam and families who crossed oceans to get there. At a dilapidated marina in a lagoon, Kate and I weathered Hurricane Mitch while John was on a business trip in New York. Despite the dangers, the Rio Dulce filled my senses and empowered me.

LK: At one point in the manuscript, you say:

“Yet that time in our lives, the time we had together on Laughing Goat, was like a warm beating heart.”

In your writing, how much of this traversing the seas is the recounting of real life and how much, in your personal journey, is metaphor?

SC: While voyaging, we faced adversity together–a sudden squall, water in the diesel tank, a sheared coupling on the engine shaft. I learned to engage in what was in front of me, to listen and to move quickly. This differed from my life in Connecticut, where I could lose myself for hours (most likely, in depression) after just a phone call from my unstable mother. Learning to navigate the seas helped me navigate other challenges, like John’s cancer.

LK: French writer Francoise Sagan once said, “If I didn’t live well, I couldn’t write well. And if I didn’t write well, I couldn’t live well.” Paraphrase that for yourself.

SC: “I shall write so I may learn to live.”

When Kate was in college, John and I moved aboard Smooch, a catamaran, and sailed between Fort Lauderdale and the Bahamas. After we found out about John’s cancer, we stayed put in Florida so he could get treatment. He remained relatively robust but not strong enough to sail. During those years, I awakened at 4:30 in the morning, made coffee, settled down with our golden retriever at my feet, listened to the water slapping gently against the hull, and worked on the Laughing Goat manuscript. While my actual world involved chemotherapy, surgery and radiation, I imagined myself on Laughing Goat with John and seven-year-old Kate. Remembering my hopes, fears and uncertainties on the voyage, recalling John’s tenacity, helped me through the day-to-day challenges of living with his illness.

LK: So what did you leave out? And what haven’t you written yet?

SC: I attended a writer’s workshop at the University of Iowa two weeks after John died. Although I’ve taken writer’s workshops in Iowa for about ten years, I’m now stunned that I went so soon. I learned in the workshop that while it was too early then, I wanted to write in some way about the experience we had been through during his illness, either in essays or a book. As for what I’ve left out, in nearly every piece of writing, I dabble at the edges of the darkness and dysfunction in my original family. I’ve never tackled it head-on.

Lauren Kettler is a playwright and sometime journalist who moonlights as a copywriter in her day job. Her full-length plays have had readings and/or productions across the country, including “Good Night, Mrs. Bernstein” featured in the OPEN Festival at the 14th Street Y, Manhattan, and “Knock” which took 1st place in both Stage 3 Theatre New Play Festival in Sonora, CA, and the Florida Playwrights Competition. Lauren, an inveterate New Yorker, has been temporarily living in Florida for the past twenty-six years.

Juditha Dowd:  Your poem in this issue of r.kv.r.y, “Into the Fire,” starts with the line, “Around a Philadelphia piano bar sweaty with beads/off glass…” Years ago you moved to the Southwest from the Philadelphia/Jersey Shore area, where you still have close ties and visit often. What prompted the relocation, and what has kept you there?

Kyle Laws:  I was born in Philadelphia and grew up on the Delaware Bay side of the Jersey shore. I suppose you always want what you don’t have. In high school, a friend and I plotted to go west. We wanted to experience the desert.  She went to Tucson and I ended up in Pueblo, Colorado, a town on the Arkansas River, the old border with Mexico up until 1848. I came there with another friend at the time.  The first stay was short, six months. Then we moved back to Wildwood, NJ, and stayed in the area for four years. I lived down the road from Town Bank, an old whaling community. I had first met the friend, a Colorado native, in Wildwood.  He became my husband. After four years, he wanted to move back to his hometown of Pueblo. I followed him, somewhat reluctantly. Before leaving, I did a big research project on the historical whaling community for a South Jersey history class I was taking at the time. It was a form of good-bye to the landscape I loved. I still use the research in my writings. In many ways, being away from that landscape deepened my appreciation for it while I was becoming rooted in the Southwest. I have written about both in poems, the dichotomy and the sameness. That area of Southern New Jersey on the Delaware Bay remained largely untouched for centuries, and what people experienced when they came west in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a wide open primitive land, is what I grew up with. It was like spanning time and space. Pueblo has what was—at the end of the nineteenth century—the largest steel mill west of the Mississippi. People came from all over the world to work there. Guggenheim’s first foundry was in Pueblo. My father was a machinist at the same factory in Philadelphia for forty years, retiring from the plant in his sixties.  The similarities are interesting. The ethnic mix in Pueblo is broad because of the international labor force. Many of the ethnic neighborhoods still exist. It’s an unusual place to live and relatively inexpensive. The art scene is lively. And I was able to make a living independently, working out of a Victorian house that is also my residence in one of the historic neighborhoods for thirty years now. Because of the independence, I could concentrate on writing and go back to New Jersey and Philadelphia for research and retreats. My sister lives in South Philadelphia in a brownstone she inherited from our mother. She’s very willing to share it.

JD:  In your book So Bright to Blind you tackle the subject of Los Alamos, giving voice to scientists, like Oppenheimer, and others involved in the project or someway affected. What drew you to this subject?

KL:  The time of the development of the atomic bomb was the same time as the early years of the marriage of my mother and father. So much was happening in the world at that time that directly impacted them, which ended up impacting me even though I wasn’t born until the 1950s.  I wanted to understand that part of history in order to understand my family. The dilemmas and decisions that the scientists faced were huge. One of the interesting books I read in my research was Oppenheimer’s The Open Mind, a book of essays on the shelf next to Marilyn Monroe’s bed at the time of her death. The cultural foresight he showed in those essays along with the apologia for the bomb ranks only after Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis written while he was in jail. Both are gripping emotionally and philosophically. And the development of the atomic bomb happened not far from where I live, in a landscape very similar, an isolated high desert that had been captured on film for decades in Westerns.

JD:  I admire the way you braid historical events, geographies and lives that intrigue you.  Where does inspiration typically begin—in the personal or the external?

KL:  It begins in both. But often it is the external that prompts a response, something I read or see or hear. And because my natural inclination is to place it in history and landscape and within my own frame of reference related to my family, the personal comes in. I will often physically place myself in a historical setting. In late 2015, I took a studio a block from the river walk in what had been a commercial building beginning in 1891with furnished rooms on the second floor. There was a tremendous need for housing at that time for steel and railroad workers because both industries had grown so quickly. The remodeled building purchased by the Pueblo Arts Alliance for artist studios kept the basic layout of rooms. I’m in Suite A at the top of the stairs, an L shaped room. I did research on the residents and commercial tenants. Out of that came a series Woman in Suite A about a writer who came west and took a room in the building in 1922. She contributes to magazines that popped up after World War I about her life in the bustling steel town. And she befriends a steelworker from Luxembourg and a saddle and harness maker in the shop below. Both are based on historical people. I didn’t start out taking the studio to do that, but my curiosity led me there and the narratives started popping into my head. That series is coming out this year in collaboration with a photographer who integrated the poems into her photographs of Pueblo and the surrounding area.

JD:  Many poems set a fragment of your own history against a desert landscape. I’m thinking now of “Roving,” “Over the Precipice” and “Running of Blanco Sol” from So Bright to Blind. Place seems very important to you, both as concept and daily reality. Do you find the desert geography particularly evocative?

KL:  The desert is a diverse place geographically. In Pueblo, we’re in the high desert at 4,500 feet. And Pueblo is in a bowl useful for agriculture. We’re surrounded by mountains on three sides and to the east is land that was part of the Dust Bowl.  For a number of years I used to walk that landscape in spring and fall, the only time it’s hospitable for hiking. From the highway and even walking, it seems entirely flat and then you come to a precipice of a canyon carved by a river. The Purgatory River is one I’ve descended a canyon to walk along. Its historical name is El Rio de Las Animas Perdidas en Purgatório, River of Souls Lost in Purgatory, named by the Spanish, first whites through here. The name gives you an idea of the desolation. Yet there are people who settled along the canyon bottom happy for the water. Electrical wires were strung on cut trees. And you can find petroglyphs carved in the canyon face from earlier peoples. The orioles that you find nesting there in late spring are visually stunning in their orange and yellow against the pale rock and tracks along the river. I never came across another hiker. That is the landscape that was used in “Roving.”  “Over the Precipice” was in Canyon de Chelly in Arizona when I camped along the bottom with a Navajo guide and two photographers. “Running of Blanco Sol” was on La Veta Pass. Because we’re in a bowl, most of the ways out are over passes so they show up repeatedly in poems. All three of those poems, along with other poems in the book were part of a series I did in response to Zane Grey’s Desert Gold. He is one of the historical writers who beautifully captured the western landscape.

JD:  Some poems take opera as a subject, others have a theatrical feel, like mini dramas. Does the poem initially come to you visually, as a scene? Or aurally, as music? Or … ?

KL:  Many poems come to me visually as it’s a reaction to what I see. And then something strikes a chord emotionally based on experiences and the beginning of a narrative starts to take place. And as the narrative develops, it moves forward into an idea that I’ve been thinking about.  And the idea could be rooted in history in this place or another, and it springs into something more universal that you can understand whether you are in that place or not, but you have the feel for where it began, an image you can take with you. Some poems do come aurally as sounds influence me, the simple call of a bird out the window, but also because there are a number of musicians in the building my studio is in. There’s a violinist across the hall. And musicians and singers practice for performances one studio down. I will hear the same song over and over, and the repetition brings thoughts of the background of the song. I hear a lot based in rhythm and blues and soul. I’ve worked with experimental musicians to give joint performances with poetry, gone to a number of concerts at their house and written while the musicians are performing. The poems that took opera as the subject were largely written while the music was being played. And if poems have a theatrical feel, that is most likely based on the storytelling I grew up with, my mother a wonderful teller of tales. Most of our experiences were bracketed into what could be considered short plays that highlighted some element of human nature. Even into her eighties, she could keep a corner of a restaurant entertained.

JD:  Your interests are far-reaching, and you spend considerable time on research. Where might you take us next?

KL:  I’ve written a novella in poems about Fishing Creek, the original name of the town I grew up in on the Delaware Bay. Unknown to me until ten years ago, each lot sold until 1958 contained a covenant restricting it to the white race. It’s told from the point of view of the husband and wife who were the developers, trying to come to terms with what would have been their motivations. I spent quite a bit of time for that project in the county office where the deeds are kept. The employees were quite nice to me, even though at times I would get really upset at how long the injustice had gone on, even after it was outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1948. I would ask over and over how could they have let it happen. I kept on waiting for the sheriff to show up and escort me out of the building. No one ever did.

Juditha Dowd’s poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, The Florida Review, Ekphrasis, Spillway, Kestrel and elsewhere. Her most recent book is the full-length collection Mango in Winter. She is a member of Cool Women, an ensemble that performs poetry in the New York-Philadelphia area and on the West Coast.

Mary Akers: Hi, Penelope. Thanks for agreeing to talk with me today about your wonderful photographs. We were so fortunate to have you offer up your talents for our April 2017 issue and I had a lot of fun matching the words to the images. I’m inspired by how your close attention to objects, people, and the natural world makes the ordinary seem extraordinary. All artists spend time in composition and also time in creation, but I’m curious, which you feel takes more time and effort in your case? Do you prefer the composition and capture phase? Or the processing and selection phase?

Penelope Breen: Without a doubt the composition and capture phase is the most enjoyable. I tend to get lost in it more often than not. Being dreamy, focused and in the moment at the same time–the so called zone–is the best part of being an artist. Processing and selection provides the opportunity to see the concept completed but feels much more technical. It has its creative moments as well but takes more time and effort.

MA: In terms of “image hunting,” do you go to a certain place looking for specific things that catch your eye? Or do you set out with openness to the process and assume that interesting objects are everywhere and your job is to discover them?

PB: While I do capture numerous images close to home there is always the “pull” of my garden, books, films and chores. If I am traveling and working on a project I am able to put all my energy and focus on that one thing. The freedom to do that is essential to creativity for me. Invariably, film and the influences of favored directors are referenced. Books play a significant role as well. Sometimes a sentence alone or a phrase provide a spark. My work for the last several years has not been random. There is intention.

I have been working on the notion of thematic purpose within the structure of a photographic project. I explore a set of ideas (inspired by films, books, poetry, etc.) and photograph scenes. An artist’s statement accompanies the project, which enables the viewer to have an understanding of my intentions. Engagement of the viewer, exploration of themes and interpretive conflict are my primary concerns.

MA: I feel as if the images you choose become something more than the thing that they already are, by virtue of your focus and composition and I would imagine this leads to emotional interpretations specific to the individual viewer. I know some of our contributors contacted you about your work. Did any of them interpret your images in ways that surprised you?

PB: I am always surprised by the interpretations of my work. An effort is made on my part to create a moody cohesiveness, however, I am interested in exploring ambiguity and interpretive conflict. Each viewer is encouraged to read the image and use their imagination. Cinema is always a strong influence. So, yes, the interpretations produced by some the writers were surprising but welcomed. I am in awe of their work.