Mary Stike: At the beginning of your essay “What To Do On a Day Like This” you write, “…running was becoming my M.O.” Does this idea carry through the rest of the work? How so? Is this a description that is an underlying theme in your writing?

Danielle: Running occurs several times in the essay. I run from the state then run later to my room. There’s the assumption that the children run at some point as well as the shooter running away from the scene. Running plays a big role in the rest of my work and I attribute it to my Appalachian heritage. Growing up in West Virginia, I’ve felt the desire to stay and leave simultaneously. I didn’t want the label of the region to define who I was as a person, but even more so as a writer. I write what I know. My Appalachia is different than the Appalachia depicted in the books I read when I was younger. When I ran to Connecticut for Graduate School, I was running because of my misunderstanding of the region where I grew up. Similarly, I carry the same notion into my writing. Many of my characters run because they don’t understand the importance of their role in their larger setting.

Mary: You have a great strength of writing details into your work. Idina Mendel’s gritty voice, the naked mannequins, the scent of woodsy-musk and peppermint on your friend, the LORD tattoo on the man at McDonald’s all contribute to the depth of this piece. Do you think the use of this level of detail in a work is important? Why or why not?

Danielle: Detail is important in how the reader sees and interprets a piece of writing. I turned to the details of the piece to help me remember the ordinary on a day that turned into a national tragedy. The details I include are what I remember about my journey home on December 14^th; they are things I can name and recognize while surrounded by the unrecognizable. One detail that still sticks out to me are the naked mannequins. When I first drafted the piece, the mannequins were just there in a storefront. As the essay took shape, the mannequins took on more meaning, a foreshadowing of sorts to the events of the day. The mannequins are a great example of trusting first instincts when writing because in later drafts details will hold more meaning than the author originally intended.

Mary: In the face of the tragedy, the “arm to shoulder chain” of children seemed lacking in comfort to you. When you arrived home, your dad places his hand on your back when he says “You’re lucky.” Please comment on the strength of family ties and comfort that influence you in the piece.

Danielle: Not only am I a very family oriented person, I also am drawn to reading and researching the types of family structures. I grew up in what is considered a nuclear family structure, where Sundays and Holidays were spent around a dining room table, passing stories between generations. During my time away from home, I grew closer to my family. I called many immediate family members multiple times a day. The events at Sandy Hook shocked the nation and left us reaching out to hold our kids, parents, siblings, etc. As a nation, we were numb; I was numb. I kept revisiting the idea of physical touching between family members because I too spent months yearning for the physical touch from a family member or friend. Seeking comfort in a hand, a hug, or an arm around the shoulder from my family meant knowing I wasn’t alone. Those children needed to know they were not alone.

Mary: How did your chance encounter with this horrific event transform you as a person? How does your writing reflect that transformation?

Danielle: My chance encounter reminded me not to get so caught up in the small stuff. When I left that morning, I was unsure if I had made the right decision to leave Connecticut. For five months I swam in the “what ifs” and how my decision to leave would affect my future. I was lost, stressed, and depressed until I pulled into the driveway of my childhood home. I thought about the elementary school across the street and my dad who had taught in the public school system for 30+ years and suddenly my “what ifs” didn’t matter. What mattered were the daughters whose parents didn’t make it home from work that day. What mattered were the families that didn’t have their children to sling an arm around when they got home from school. What mattered were the children whose “what ifs” never took flight and the parents whose “what ifs” might never cease. I believe this piece, is full of those “what ifs”, giving them flight through small details that add up to a larger whole.

Mary Imo-Stike identifies as an American Indian, and a feminist. She worked “non-traditional” jobs as a rail worker, construction plumber, boiler operator and gas line inspector. Now retired from work-life, she obtained an MFA in Poetry from West Virginia Wesleyan College in 2015, and is currently the poetry co-editor of HeartWood Literary Magazine. Her work has been published in Antietam Review, Phoebe, The Pikeville Review, Appalachian Heritage Cactus Heart and Young Ravens Review, and will be included the forthcoming issues of riverSedge, and Connotation Press.

Elizabeth Creith: Lucinda, we met online in the Flash Factory office of Zoetrope. I remember being struck by your fearlessness and energy, by the funny and offbeat things you wrote and the enthusiasm with which you tackled every prompt. The first intimation I remember of something darker was the flash story “Cow and Calf”, in which the ancestral portrait in the child’s bedroom is a frightening presence.

When I began working with you on your memoir, I saw a lot of darkness. These five linked pieces are darker than your Factory flashes, but more hopeful than much of what I’ve seen of the memoir. In “Perseverance” and “On Failing” I see hope, in “On Mothers and Daughters” a realization that you can break the cycle by biting the “matrilineal tongue”. How did you choose these pieces to fit together?

Lucinda Kempe: The micro essays came from my first semester in graduate school. In Roger Rosenblatt’s class we had to write two 250-word pieces every week. The first semester I was afraid to reveal my story and I thought by writing small I could avoid it. In fact, I went to the crux and revealed it all. What I love about Roger’s essays is their brevity. They’re succinct and carry a punch. So I copied that.

I didn’t write the micros in any particular order, but I began where it hurt most – my father’s suicide. Roger pointed out that On Suicide and On Failure belonged together. But they all belong together. These five pieces form a tiny portrait of a family and how it survived. We persevered despite our perseverations.

EC: I’ve never been able to keep a diary, but you’ve kept one for years. In one piece you said that even as a teenager you were documenting your family to write about them later. Why is writing so important to you?

LK: I have been keeping a diary since I was fourteen. As as a little girl I wrote poems and drew pictures with characters’ words in balloons. I don’t understand anything until I write it down. Words on paper soothe. I have General Anxiety Disorder and one of the ways I feel less anxious is by writing down how I feel.

EC:You mine your journals for memoir – do you mine them for your fiction as well?

LK: The first memoir pieces I wrote came from memory. In fact, one story called Sam Soss Had Sex, which turned out to be some 5000 words, isn’t mentioned in the diary. I use the journals to get the rest right. My emotional memory is powerful, but the actual events, or the time line, are often wrong. A lot of my early fiction was disguised memoir, which also came from memory and not the journals. Today I write fiction based on things I don’t know. That’s so much more fun. So no, I don’t mine my journals for fiction, but I do steal from characters I knew and drop them in situations they’d never be in in life, which is exactly what Mr. Hemingway said not to do. Ha!

I am finally learning at the ripe age of 57 that I don’t have to tell everyone everything. I asked my therapist once, “Why do I compulsively tell everyone I meet my life story?” “Probably because you’re a diarist and you also assume that everyone is as interested in you are you are in yourself.”

EC: You use the term “laissez-faire” to describe your mother and grandmother, but you don’t have that approach to life at all. In fact, you remind me more of your several-times-great grandmother Mary Humphries.

LK: Oh, she was something. Her husband was Isaac Davis Stamps, Jefferson Davis’s favorite nephew. He was killed in the Civil War, right before the battle of Gettysburg, and Mary was left a widow with two little daughters. A year after the battle, she went to Peach Orchard, had his body exhumed and brought it home to MIssissippi, first by train, and when the train broke down she somehow got a wagon and loaded him onto that and took him home to be buried. And then she packed up her household and moved to New Orleans where she started up a girls’ school to support herself and her daughters.

EC: I see her in you – someone who takes steps to change her life. You write to make sense of things, you go to AA. And you somehow managed to talk yourself into the Academia de Belle Arte in Florence when you’d only been drawing for a few weeks, and into the music program at Loyola College when you didn’t know an instrument.

LK:That’s quite a complement, Elizabeth. Thank you! Yes, and I was kicked out of the Academia de Belle Arte, and didn’t complete the music program at Loyola! I graduated with a BA in Drama and Speech. I smartly transferred from the music school mid-way in college. My real training was with Ivan Uttal. He was a graduate of the director’s unit of the Actor’s Studio in New York and a brilliant director. He cast actors who were playing themselves and he knew how to mine their natural abilities. He even hired my mother as an Italian coach for his production of The Rose Tatoo! I’m a good dialogue writer and that came from his tutelage. He died from AIDS in 1996. He was one of the good guys in my life. I miss him still.

I persevere, I keep writing and I keep reading things to people. And I persevere with the memoir I began after my mother’ death; it’s a work in progress.

EC: Yes, we’ve been working on that together to compress – and to tidy up the grammar, punctuation and so on. I’ve seen you go from a wave-as-you-pass-in-the-street relationship with the technical bits of writing to gradually mastering them.

LK: Ha! Wave-as-you-pass-in-the-street is a hyphenated adjectival phrase! I wouldn’t have known that from a Georgia mule when I first began writing stories. I left punctuation and grammar behind decades ago in my hypergraphic journaling. I have written millions of words and the pressing need to record obliterated everything else. When I first began shaping story I was ignorant. I have gotten better because I am a dogged rewriter, and I have been blessed to have you as a friend and editor. What’s better for a lackadaisical grammarian writer than a dominatrix of punctuation and grammar?

I had an another editor tell me, “I don’t care about your story. All I care about is the language.” I thought that was hard, but it’s true. Writing is language. It’s not painting or acting or sculpting. There is a craft and the craft is knowing the rules so that you can use them to make the story better. I don’t want to just tell a story. I want to write a story, and I want the language to move and to sing. When you give edits is you always include little lessons on my usual stumpers; hyphens and those fiends commas! You believe I will get it even when I don’t.

Elizabeth Creith is a writer and editor in northern Ontario. Her memoir “Shepherd in Residence” won the 2013 Louise de Kiriline Lawrence award for northern Ontario non-fiction. Her work has appeared in The Linnet’s Wings, Old Farmer’s Almanac, Flash fiction Online and many other print and online venues. She’s currently working on a YA fantasy trilogy. You can read her blog at http://ecreith.wordpress.com/

Laura Taylor: We all come to the writing life as a consequence of inspiration. Sometimes it’s subtle, and sometimes it’s life altering. Whatever its origins, it serves as a catalyst for the writer. What originally inspired you to write, and do you feel even more inspired in your writing life all these years later?

Cyndy Muscatel: I am one of those people who has written most of my life. There is something that builds inside of me until it becomes sentences in my head that must get written down. That’s why I try to have a tablet, either paper or electronic, within reach. Even during the time period of this essay, “A Fine Line,” I took a notebook and pen with me to the hospital. That, and clean underwear.

When I feel something, I need to write about it. Poetry came first. The story telling started with paper dolls. I’d make up stories for my little sister, who’d watch enthralled as tragedy struck down the fragile figures. I think I learned to construct my dramatic arc from radio. I listened to soap operas like Stella Dallas and Ma Perkins while I was supposed to be napping as a child. I was an avid reader, as well, which teaches you almost everything you need to know on a subliminal level.

In my writing now, I want to reach people. I used to be in love with the words and their juxtaposition on the page. Now, my syntax is simpler and my stories, both fiction and non-fiction, reflect everyday life. I also use humor a lot more than I did in my younger days of Bronte worship.

I have moved into a new phase of writing—I’m not sure if it was inspired by blogging, but I love writing the non-fiction essays about my life. I still like a positive ending, even if not a happy one.

LT: Many writers are prone to creative habits, requiring a specific tone and tenor to their work space and their mindset. You’re a world traveler, by instinct and by design. Knowing that about you, I often wonder if you have an ideal writing environment, or are you able to adapt to most any environment with your imagination and a notepad?

CM: My worst fault as a writer is not giving myself time to write. I’m always multi-tasking and never have enough time in a day to get it all done. Although I’m not particularly materialistic, I want to have everything in my life: fresh flowers and fresh vegetables, good relationships with my kids, grandkids, my husband, friends and family. I want to be fit and flexible, to travel and learn Spanish. All this takes time from writing. I used to be a genius at multi-tasking; not so much anymore.

I ideally like to write at my desk in my office. I have two desk spaces; one for my computer and one for other work. I can swivel from one to the other.

LT: Many writers find the observations of some of their colleagues to be particularly meaningful in their writing lives. If asked to name the three writers who’ve most profoundly influenced your writing life, who would they be?

CM: Erma Bombeck certainly is one. I loved her columns and I wanted to grow up to be her. My humor columns are an ode to her. Laura, you are definitely another. You are both a model and a mentor for me. A third is my colleague, Carol Mann Stanfield. She and I used to meet every other week. We’d write for 45 minutes and then read what we’d written to each other. We still bounce stories and ideas off of each other.

LT: You’re an educator from a multi-faceted family background, and you’re surrounded by high achievers in the arts and in business. Do your family members perceive your writing as a reflection of both your life experiences and their own lives?

CM: Honestly, my family barely perceives that I write. I just sent them a copy of this essay, “A Fine Line”. I was shocked that my son had time to read it. He told me he hadn’t realized how sick I was at the time. When my kids were teenagers, I wrote slice-of-life humor pieces for the local newspaper. I had strict orders not to embarrass them. As for my husband? For years he couldn’t understand why I spent long hours at my computer.

LT: Book reviews can be the bane of a writer’s existence, but I believe they can also serve a constructive purpose. What is the toughest criticism you’ve ever received as a writer, and how have you turned it around and utilized it to improve your writing?

CM: This is a multi-faceted question. The toughest criticism I ever received was from a college professor, a well known poet, who was forced to teach a beginning short story writing class. He actually gave me the only C I ever got. He considered me a “Sally Sorority” girl and treated me with disdain. He wrote on the top of one of my stories, “Who would ever want to read this?” You know, that kind of thing stays with you forever. I don’t remember learning anything about craft in his class, and I quit writing for years after it. I learned from him to be careful what I wrote on my students’ papers. When I finally returned to writing twenty years later, one of my first stories was about a character returning to the University of Washington and shooting him.

The Santa Barbara Writers Conference is where I received tough critiques that benefited me. I started learning about story structure, plot development and characterization. I remember coming to one of your classes, Laura, with a story that I thought was finished. When you read it, the group didn’t like the ending. They also felt the main character needed to be stronger. Though I really didn’t want to, I took it home and reworked it, using some of their recommendations. Also, in one of Sid Stebel’s classes, he told me I should change my short story into a play. I don’t write plays. But I kept his critique in mind and changed the voice from third to first person, which brought immediacy to the story. Both stories were published as soon as I sent them out.

Laura Taylor is a Southern California based multi-published writer, editorial consultant, public speaker, and the recipient of numerous professional writing awards, including 6 RT Book Awards and 2 MAGGIE Awards. A long-time faculty member at the Southern California Writers’ Conference, she is an original Founding Member and served on the Board of Directors of Novelists, Inc.  Visit Laura at www.LauraTaylorBooks.com to learn more about the author and her novels.

Brandi George: I’m always shocked by how much we have in common. We’re both from working-class families in the Midwest, and we’ve both endured childhood trauma. We are the first in our families to graduate from college, and we’re working poets and scholars. And yet, at least for me, this success often feels hollow. It’s tough to write through painful emotions while also teaching, researching, publishing, and competing for academic jobs (what a stressful sentence!). How do you juggle all of these different responsibilities while also writing powerful poems about your past experiences?

Jennifer Schomburg Kanke: I try to give myself the time and space I need for each thing when I need it. There was an old TV show on Lifetime back in the late 90s called Maggie and there’s a dream sequence scene where she’s learning how to spin plates and the secret to spinning plates turns out to be that you don’t have to have your hand on every plate at once. You keep your eye out and see which plate needs your attention and let the others do their thing. And I think that’s how I balance all my responsibilities, just keep my eye out for which plate needs me. Granted though, that’s tough when writing poems about the kind of life I’ve had because opening myself up to certain issues could make me unfit for human consumption for a day or so and you really don’t have that kind of luxury when you have 100 students relying on you. I have a good counselor and a lot of good self-care that lets it happen.

But another part of your question that I wanted to clarify is that I don’t always consider myself to be the first person in my family to have graduated from college (and some days I don’t consider myself to have had a traumatic childhood, but that’s another issue entirely). It all depends on how you define college and first, and even family. Only one of my grandparents was able to graduate from high school, but my father has an associates from a tech school and I always thought of that as “college” until I got to Ohio University and realized that most other people weren’t counting that. And my Aunt Bunky and my cousin Cindy finished their bachelor’s before I did, but they had both taken a lot of time off to have children after high school and came back as non-traditional students. So the joke in the family is that I’m the first non-non-traditional graduate. But according to all the Federal programs for first generation students, I’m a first generation college student because, by their definition, my aunt and cousin aren’t “family,” family is only immediate family to them. And I’m not sure if that definition of family sits well with me. My family is rooted in Appalachian traditions and family is incredibly important to me.

BG: Writing about family members can lead to hurt feelings, conflicts, and often, guilt. We don’t want to hurt the people we love, and yet they have hurt us. How do you hold people responsible for what they have done, while also taking into account their own, often traumatic, lives? What role does poetry play in this process?

JSK: I don’t know if I’m particularly interested in holding people responsible for what they’ve done. It might sound self-centered, but my goal is my own healing and placing responsibility or demanding atonement isn’t a large part of that. Not to bring up TV again, but there’s an episode of Northern Exposure where authorities from West Virginia come looking for Chris and they try him for something he did a long time ago. He’s able to get off by proving that he’s just not that same person anymore and so can’t be tried for the crimes. I can’t try my family for crimes their old selves committed against me. Well, I mean, I can, but I’m not sure what good it does any of us. It doesn’t change the past. It doesn’t change how those things have affected me or how they’ve become part of my own self-perception and self-talk that I have to fight against every day.

What I am interested in being able to do is to have conversations with them about what things were like back then and how those things effect the person I am today and the life I’ve had since then. And that’s where poetry comes in for me. It opens up those conversations in a smoother way than me trying to just brazenly bring it up. Which probably says a lot about my personality that I think it’s easier to write a poem, publish it where anyone with an internet connection can see it than to just say “hey ya’ll, that sucked, let’s talk about it.” Maxine Kumin once said that writing in form helped her deal with tough emotions because it gave her control (or something of that nature) and I think poetry in general also does that for me.

BG: Personally, I’ve found that there is great power in the images that are pulled from traumatic experiences. In your poem, “I Am Not Worth $8.50,” you open with the following image:

The hallway mirror is veined with gold paint,
each square a repetition of the last,
making the distance from the living room
to my bedroom look farther than it is. (1-4)

The image is resonant and unsettling. Would you talk a little about how and why you chose it? Do images do a different sort of work in poems about violence?

JSK: Is it a horrible and unpoetic answer to say that I chose it because it’s just what the end of the hallway looked like? I know, I know, that’s a simplification and there are always layers to any choice that we make. We lived in a three bedroom ranch and the hallway with the bedrooms and bathroom were off the living room area. I spent a good amount of time running from that living room, trying to make it back to my bedroom and get the door shut. That mirror (a sort of ghastly relic from the previous owners) is burned into most of my memories, it was always like I was running toward myself. Safety was my own image. Or at least my own image adjacent.

I don’t really think that images do any different work in poems about violence than they do in poems on other topics. The image’s job is always to give us access to the moment, whether that moment is one of violence or of ice cream and unicorns, or of violent unicorns eating ice cream. The image is like that episode on Charmed when Prue and Piper get sucked into the painting. The image is the magic spell, there to pull us in and not let us go. Or at least part of that spell, the other part being the use of rhythm and sound elements. It can be easy to overthink it all and what those lines are between the image itself and the way the image is rendered, especially when writing violence.

BG: It’s easy to overwrite painful experiences, but “I Am Not Worth $8.50” does a lot of work in a very short space. How did you arrive at the final draft of the poem?

JSK: Would you hate me if I said the poem really only had one draft? There were a few tweaks, mainly with me trying to decide how much a lock cost in the mid-80s and deciding how forthcoming to be about how long it took for the lock to break. In my poems where I’m trying to be honest about what my life was like and how I felt about it, I have to go for shorter because if I let myself think too long or write too long, I start making jokes and referencing pop culture stuff. Which is cool, I love pop culture, especially TV (as I’m sure is probably pretty apparent by my earlier answers), but I use it as a protective mechanism. Which works wonderfully in my fiction ( I think, I don’t know, I guess you’d have to ask editors who are looking at my submissions to get a real answer on that one!), but for poetry I think it doesn’t work as well. It becomes a shield against the pain. And there are days when I really want that, but if I want my poems to do the work I’d like them to, I’ve got to put the shield down and come just with my heart open. My crazy, needy, angsty little heart.

BG: You are one of those lucky, multiple-genre writers. Are there other things you can express in your poetry that you can’t express in your fiction and vice versa?

JSK: I think poetry lets me express things faster. Poetry lets me do a ripple effect thing, it takes five seconds for the pebble to hit, but you’re seeing the disruption on the water for a few minutes after and it’s spreading out over the whole lake. Fiction lets me hide more. And I’m a big fan of hiding. I feel like poetry gives me less wiggle room with the facts. I try to stay as close to the truth as I can with poetry. I know that’s not the way it is for everyone, but it’s the way it is for me unless I’m being very clear that it’s a persona poem. I still honor the lyrical I. I think poetry comes from a sacred place and you defile it by taking too many liberties with the facts of the situation. Those liberties become ways of hiding from the truth and from ourselves. That said, I think a little bit of tweaking (like saying something’s blue when it was really red if that scans better or emphasizes a point or saying it took a month for a lock to break when really it was a much shorter period of time), is okay, but not much more than that. But with fiction I can mix my real memories with other things that are completely made up and no one knows which are which. That makes me feel safe and comfortable and hidden. I’ve been trying to write creative nonfiction and that’s not going so well. I don’t have the “Truth instead of truth” of fiction or the vagueness of poetry to hide behind. I feel a little too exposed in creative nonfiction. I’m also just more familiar with the forms of poetry than with creative nonfiction, so there’s that too.

BG: “I Am Not Worth $8.50” is not written in a traditional form, and yet it has a very strong sense of sound and rhythm, including a few iambic lines. What is your relationship to traditional forms, and what role do they play in your work?

JSK: When I was a kid I was a voracious reader and my wonderful Aunt Jannie, one of my father’s sisters, would take me to the Goodwill Bookstore, which she called “The Day Old Bookstore” (because we’d also usually hit up the day-old-bread store while we were out). There wasn’t a lot of selection for a tween, but there certainly was quantity! For fifty cents you could get a paper grocery bag full of books, but you had no idea what was in the bag before you bought it. I got lots and lots of Nortons and old poetry books that way. So, Thomas Campion was my first poetry love. Not Shakespeare, not even Spenser, nope, Campion all the way. And Campion was also a composer who did music for masque dances and songs for lutes. My parents also loved Steeleye Span, a British folk rock group, and we were in a contra dance band together. The early forms I was exposed to were all musical forms. I don’t think consciously about sound and rhythm too much, I just feel it, I dance it. Of course, I’m also a child of the 80s and 90s, so sometimes that dance is slam and sometimes it’s the pogo and sometimes it’s the Boot Scoot Boogie. But I also love sonnets, but that love came later when I took English classes in college and then studied poetry more deeply in graduate school.

BG: Since you began writing about your childhood, you’ve received messages of gratitude from readers who have endured similar experiences. What poets do you feel thankful for?

JSK: That’s a tough question. I think the answer to that has changed over time I’m grateful to Gwendolyn Brooks because she showed you could take a formal foundation and build something new and powerfully contemporary out of it and also for her poem “a song in the front yard,” which, along with Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us,” is one of those poems that just pops into my head when I’m in a bit of a mood. I hear them in my mind and think, “yep, other people were sick of this shit too” and it makes it easier to put one foot in front of another. Catie Rosemurgy’s “The Office Party” is another one of those poems. Her line “I want my maybe back” is pretty much the story of my life and I love her for that line. I feel grateful to Anne Sexton and Marge Piercy because they were the first female poets I read that talked about things I didn’t realize you were allowed to talk about in poetry (because, remember, I’d been reading Campion and Donne, and other members of the Old Bros’ Club).

I’m also thankful for Marge Piercy beyond her work though because she was the first person to tell me that my story needed to be told and that I needed to stop hiding behind poetic craft and just say what things had been like. She, and the other poets that were in her annual workshop in Wellfleet this summer, made me feel that my voice was important and that my story and the story of my family is just as important as others. Because I tend to downplay it. I never became a drug addict or had affairs or did anything all that exciting by the standards of contemporary poetry (I’ve played only in the front yard, in Brooks’s terms). I had a 3.9 GPA in high school and undergrad and went on to get a PhD. I’m the kind of person who people are surprised has had the kind of life I’ve had, probably because I’ve learned to just not talk about it. Marge made me see that that resilience is exactly why I need to be writing about it, to show the variety of experience.

I’m also thankful for Mark Halliday, J. Allyn Rosser, Janis Butler Holm, Barbara Hamby, and David Kirby for not only their great poems, but also for putting up with me in graduate school while I’ve floundered around trying to find my voice. And Josephine Yu,Wendy McVicker, Becca Lachman, Kathryn Nuernberger, Lydia McDermott, and you for being great writing and personal supports as I work on this stuff. The orchestra’s probably about ready to play me off on this question, but believe me, I could go on and on with this. There are so many poets who have made a difference to me with their work and also with their love, support and community. You write poems alone, but you need community to be a poet.

Brandi George grew up in rural Michigan. Her first book, Gog (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), won the gold medal in the Florida Book Awards. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Ninth Letter, Columbia Poetry Review, and The Iowa Review. She has been awarded residencies at Hambidge Center for the Arts and the Hill House Institute for Sustainable Living, Art & Natural Design, and she attended the Sewanee Writer’s Conference as a Tennessee Williams Scholar. She currently resides in Hattiesburg, where she is Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi.

My second husband left me when I brought home an adopted three-hour-old daughter. A male colleague asked, “Were you raised to be independent?” I answered yes, though the thought was buried in my subconscious. The biological mother took the baby back, and I kept teaching.

When I was hired to teach at The Hockaday School, a girls’ school founded in 1913, the headmaster said, “Kay is a role model for our students.” I’d lived in Viêt-Nam where my husband Jon was a pilot for Air America, a subsidiary of the CIA. Jon was killed flying in Laos. I returned to Dallas, a widow with PTSD, and began teaching at Hockaday in 1973. No one knew I lived with PTSD. No one knew I’d suffered a nervous breakdown. No one knew I was learning disabled. No one knew I’d washed sheets in a bathtub and ridden buses in Bangkok, burned a body in a Buddhist funeral, snorkeled off Con Son Island near the Tiger Cages, witnessed Vietnamese strippers dancing in my dining room for my husband’s Captain’s Party.

In 1970 no one knew about PTSD. Gold Star Families weren’t yet created. Nevertheless, my stomach kept hurting, I froze whenever sirens screamed and ambulances and fire trucks drove by. Once a tornado siren was wailing, and I stood frozen on the sidewalk until a neighbor took me by the hand and led me to safety. My internist kept testing me for Asian bugs and found nothing. I finally did biofeedback and starting writing. I had Agent Orange on my legs, my nerves were shattered. After the nervous breakdown my junior year at TCU, I had my father’s words seared in my brain: The first one is free. The second one they cancel your insurance. My psychiatrist lessons apply today: 1.Learn to say no. 2. Tea Kettle Theory: Let off steam. 3. Ladies don’t have much fun.

At school, I found a mentor, the lesbian English Department Chair, who suggested we read WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES (Clarissa Pinkoa Estes). “Be wild; that is how to clear the river.” No encouragement needed. War is fun—unless you get killed. THEY PUT ON MASKS (Byrd Baylor) explained to my sixth-grade students that we separate ourselves with masks of makeup, clothes, cars, religion, politics. I knew about masks. While teaching English to Middle School girls, I defended my thesis and published THE CONSTITUTION OF ADVANCED OBJECTS: A THEORY AND APPLICATION. Reading T.S. Eliot, W.V. Quine, and Melanie Klein, I created a reading paradigm to teach reading using objects viewed in a circular direction rather than in the traditional Fictean graph. Reading with a learning disability is an arduous task. I read from object to object, stringing leitmotif “beads” on a necklace, the topic sentence wrapping with the concluding sentence, as James Joyce FINNEGANS WAKE—

A way a lone a last loved a long the

wraps back to the beginning—the piano recital and the forgotten notes—the nervous breakdown—Jon’s death.

A last loved a lone.

A journey back to Southeast Asia

riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s

from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of

recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

I gain entry to an hermeneutically sealed text—a Gadamerian notion in Quinean terms—by viewing the writing as a seamless web of objects.

Another faculty mentor twenty years my senior gave me a poster with these words—

Writing is easy: You just open your veins and let the blood drip out.

This mentor helped me apply for a grant and attend my first Writing Project. “Enjoy the journey on the ‘write’ track” became my motto: WRITE is displayed on my Texas license plate. My unpublished novel titled Z.O.S., “Zone of Silence,” the acronym for the CIA’s subsidiary, is a personal mantra. I write to know how I feel. I write to quiet my anxieties. I write to keep depression at bay. I write to come home to the Texas red dirt.

Thai temple rubbings Jon made were stolen. Letters of his were lost. I feared one day nothing would be left of my husband. “Painting the Elephant Gold,” originally a haibun—a writing combination of prose and haiku—wrote itself when I dropped the ceramic elephant purchased from Udorn Thailand days following Jon’s death. After being shipped around the world, residing in multiple apartments and homes, moving the elephant one night, my treasure crashed into pieces at my feet. I glued the pottery back together, painted it gold, and wrote the pain away. Kintsugi—like my life—gluing heart break together with American blood and Asian gold.

–Kay Merkel Boruff @KayMerkelBoruff  http://www.writeink.org