A Mini-Interview with Priory Writers' Retreat Writer-in-Residence Angela Trudell Vasquez

This summer, we’re thrilled to host Madison poet laureate Angela Trudell Vasquez as on of our four Priory Writers’ Retreat writers-in residence! When you are accepted into The Priory, you’ll have the option to schedule a personal one-on-one session with Angie!

Angie Trudell Vasquez is a Mexican-American writer and holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Finishing Line Press published her third collection of poetry, In Light, Always Light, in 2019, and recently accepted her fourth collection, My People Redux, for publication. Her poems have appeared in the Yellow Medicine Review, The Slow Down, the Raven Chronicles, The Rumpus, on the Poetry Foundation’s website, and elsewhere. She is the current poet laureate of Madison, Wisconsin and the first Latina to hold the position.

Read on for a mini-interview with Angie!

1.     What about The Priory Retreat are you most excited by? Giving back to the writers what I have learned about putting a collection together, sharing my knowledge, and processes.

2.     Can you share a bit about a mentor or writing experience that helped shape your own work? Wow, this is such a big question. I can think back to when I was an undergrad in my twenties and Jody Swilky, one of my first early poetry mentors, asked me why I never write about my own culture. And later in my forties, I think of my poetry mentors at IAIA (Institute of American Indian Arts) and what they gave to me in terms of being able to edit my own work and other’s. Sherwin Bitsui, Joan Naviyuk Kane, and Santee Frazier were my poetry mentors at IAIA, and for two years all I did was live and breathe poetry. Post MFA, I examine and reflect on the inner architecture of a manuscript or a poem now. This is something I practice.

3.     What are you reading these days? Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer; the Yellow Medicine Review Fall 2021 edition, guest edited by Shauna Osborn, The Music Issue with a playlist; Sandra Cisneros’ Martita, I Remember You; Above the Bejeweled City by Jon Davis; and collected poems of Federico Garcia Lorca.

4.     Bonus: What has been keeping you creating during these pandemic days?

“Love. The world keeps spinning and we keep breathing alongside the people we love and care about. It is a way to recognize loss too. People live on in poems. ”

— Angie Trudell Vasquez

Love. The world keeps spinning and we keep breathing alongside the people we love and care about. It is a way to recognize loss too. People live on in poems. Writing has always been where I go to. I have been journaling my feelings during this time of the pandemic. It helps. Poetry is my salvation. I can carefully craft a poem. I am in control on the page, and there is so much to write about.

On Authenticity, Freedom in Form, and Imitation Crab: A Conversation with Katie Vagnino

 What is authenticity? In a culture that loves reality shows and movies “based on a true story,” yet puts on a facade for social media and our everyday lives, what’s real? What’s simply an “imitation” of the truth? In her new book Imitation Crab, poet Katie Vagnino explores questions of artificiality versus authenticity while maintaining a playful, humorous tone.

Katie Vagnino is a poet and a former professor at UW-Eau Claire. She is now based in the Twin Cities and working in marketing, yet her passion for teaching, creative writing, and poetry are still very apparent in her life. I had the opportunity to chat with Vagnino over the phone about Imitation Crab, releasing February 5th, 2021, as well as her perspective on the freedom that poetic forms provide, inspiringly weird critters and creatures, and collaborative cover art. Enjoy the interview below, and preorder your copy of Imitation Crab now on Finishing Line Press here!

Elise Eystad: Imitation Crab, what a fun title! I read the title poem on your website, and wondered, what was the inspiration behind titling the book with that poem? Does it hint at a general theme throughout the poems included?

Katie Vagnino: I decided to make that the title because I'm a fan of that poem, but I also think it reflects the themes echoed in the collection; questions of authenticity and how we determine what's real and what’s fake or artificial. Poetry as a genre gets accused of being off-putting or alienating because of some of the artifice that goes into it. Poems sometimes have rhyme or meter and it’s a little less natural than normal speech, right? That can make people suspicious of poetry. That’s kind of a meta-explanation of the title. More to the point, it's a trend that interests me: in our era we seem obsessed with truth and reality—whether we're having conversations about fake news or reality shows—and you see things marketed as being “based on a true story.” As a culture, we’re kind of obsessed with the idea that there’s more value if things are real. And also, just in our everyday lives, I imagine a lot of us are trying to live authentically or according to some sort of truth that is meaningful to us. I think that that’s something that bubbles up in the book: questions about where we may be performing in our lives, like playing different roles depending on where we are and who we are interacting with. Sometimes those roles are prescribed by gender or other things that relate to identity. I also just genuinely thought it would be fun to have a quirky title. There’s a lot of very serious poetry titles out there, and I just wanted something playful and a little bit weird. There's some humor in some of the poems, so I wanted that to be reflected in the title, as well.

EE: What would you say some of the main themes of the book are? Are there consistent things that inspire your poetry?

“Not all of it is necessarily autobiographical, but most of my poems are pretty narrative. I like to tell stories or at least hint at them. ”

KV: Like I said, there are considerations of artificiality versus authenticity. There is also a feminist bent to the poems. I think I’m just drawn more to women's perspectives, women’s stories. Something that I didn't really intentionally do, but that became apparent as I was putting it all together, is that there are also a lot of small creatures and insects [in the book]. I'm not sure what that necessarily means, per say, but it seems to be a trope. For example, I have a sonnet about oysters, and there's some other critters that come up. In terms of imagery, it seems to be something I'm drawn to. There’s a poem called “Small Mammals of Tree Haven” about creatures that are in a diorama that I saw when I was in Rhinelander, WI. It’s all about weasels, voles, and other little weird animals that populate the Northwoods forest.

Obviously, there are also poems about relationships and family. Not all of it is necessarily autobiographical, but most of my poems are pretty narrative. I like to tell stories or at least hint at them. Stylistically, there's definitely a lot of formal pieces. I do tend to write more in verse forms, like sonnets, sestinas, villanelles. There is some free verse in the collection, too, but I’d say one of the hallmarks of my style is narrative formalism.

EE: I was going to ask about some of the poetic techniques and devices that you use. It seems that you like more of the formal side of poetry!

“I feel like it actually can be paradoxically freeing to have some constraints to work with. Free verse can be a little daunting, because you have literally all possibilities open to you...”

KV: Yeah, I feel like it actually can be paradoxically freeing to have some constraints to work with. Free verse can be a little daunting, because you have literally all possibilities open to you. Sometimes by having some rules or guidelines, you wind up making more interesting, unusual, or surprising choices, which can be exciting. If you’re not having to think about rhyme, meter, or a repeating word in a particular place, I find that a little bit paralyzing; it's like too much freedom. I also think the things I might come up with aren’t necessarily as interesting as how my mind works if I'm working within a form.

Sound is also really important to me. My poems don't necessarily have a lot of rhyme, which is what people tend to think of when they're thinking about sound in a poem. But there are a lot of other tools and devices that can make a poem musical. All the same things we think about and talk about with music apply to poetry, in terms of rhythm and pacing. You can use sound to speed up how a reader moves through a poem or slow them down, so modifying sound impacts tempo, if you will. Also, just how the words sound, how they feel in your mouth, how your ear interprets different sounds makes a difference. Long vowel sounds have a very different impact than a lot of short plosives syllables, right? There's a reason that expletives have hard consonants: it gives them more impact. So, basically I believe the words, the music, and the sound of the poem should tell the story of the poem, ideally. Whatever the poem is about should in some way be reinforced or expressed in the music of it.

EE: Yeah, definitely! I like that a lot. So, this is your first published collection of poetry. Can you walk me through the process of getting to this point?

KV: A chunk of the poems came from my MFA thesis. As part of getting my MFA in Creative Writing, my final project was a book-length project. This book is not that project, but some of the poems started there; I'd say a lot of them started there, though they changed. I continued to edit them, rearrange them, and whatnot. And I continued to write, because it's been almost a decade since I finished that degree. When I came out of school, I felt like I didn't really have a book of poems yet. I felt like I had a start, and then just in the last few years, I started thinking about trying to put together a manuscript, which involved looking at everything I had. A traditional full-length collection is anywhere from 48 to 100 or pages, so I had to decide what I wanted in, what I didn't want to include, and how I wanted to organize the poems, which was which was difficult, because it's not like a novel where there’s a story that is told in some sort of order. It was hard for me to wrap my mind around how it would make sense to cohesively group the poems, so I got some input from other folks. I shared some poems with them and got some ideas around how to think about arranging them.

About two years ago is when I started sending out the manuscript. I started entering it into contests. There are a number of first book contests, or contests for people who haven't yet published a book of poetry. I felt like that was a good way to get my foot in the door. I also just entered contests that were open to anyone. Also, some small presses have open reading periods, where you're allowed to send them your work. That’s the way a lot of poetry books come into the world. It’s a little different than fiction, for example. Poets don't usually work through agents. It’s more direct; you send your stuff and either have to win a contest or be memorable out of a pile of submissions during an open reading period. So, I got a lot of rejections, obviously, and a few promising ones, where they didn't accept the manuscript but said it came close or that they thought it had potential. I was a finalist a few times in different contests, and then this past May, I got notified that Finishing Line Press was interested in publishing it.

EE: Local artist Jen Schultz created your cover art. Were there any specifications that you had or an image in your head for it? Or did she just create something and give it to you?

KV: It was definitely a collaborative process. I found Jen through Volume One and saw some of her work on her Instagram. I liked her collage style; I thought it had a fun, surreal, playful energy to it. We met up in June, in Eau Claire (socially distanced, of course), and I shared some poems with her. We talked a little bit about what kind of aesthetic I was looking for, but I didn't give her real prescriptive guidelines. I thought I wanted some sort of crab representation on the cover, whether that was going to be a literal crab or crab claws. I was curious to see what she would come up with.

After we met initially, she mocked up a few design ideas with some images that she had found. The first image she sent me had those women with the crab accessories, and I immediately responded to that. It’s funny because she sent me maybe eight or ten images that involved crabs, and that just happened to be the first one in the group, and then that one just kept coming back as a favorite. From there, she laid out a few different covers, and then there was some back and forth about fonts and the color palette. So, it was very collaborative; I wasn't doing the work of making the changes, but there was back and forth until we landed on something we both really liked.

EE: Lastly, anything you’d like to share about yourself? What do you do when you’re not writing a poetry book?

“I joke sometimes that I feel like marketing and poetry are diametrically opposed. Like, you can’t get more opposite. Poetry is interested in truth, and marketing is interested in selling and promoting, creating the appearance of value. There’s that real vs. fake dichotomy again!”

KV: I still really love teaching; that's what brought me to Eau Claire in the first place. I still feel connected to friends there and the University, and I'm still doing some teaching. I teach my own monthly workshop, currently on Zoom. Otherwise, my day job is marketing for a digital health company. I joke sometimes that I feel like marketing and poetry are diametrically opposed. Like, you can’t get more opposite. Poetry is interested in truth, and marketing is interested in selling and promoting, creating the appearance of value. There’s that real vs. fake dichotomy again! Also, I’m still in a band that's based in Eau Claire: The Flaming Doublewides, so I sing in my band when there's not a pandemic happening! 

EE: What’s the release date and where can people get a copy of Imitation Crab?

KV: It releases Febuary 5th. You can preorder it now through the Finishing Line Press website. Once it comes out, it will be available on Amazon and the publisher’s website, and hopefully in some local bookstores! I live in the Twin Cities, but I’m hoping to get it to some Eau Claire bookstores, as well.

"Meeting An Old Friend": A Review of Richard Terrill's "What Falls Away Is Always"

Debbie Campbell

The best art takes us places: Berkeley, a garden of red potatoes, father’s cabin leaning north, 10 a.m. at Papa’s Café. It reminds us to search for the new in the familiar: insights hidden in stage directions or news clippings. And it draws us in effortlessly, transporting us before we realize we’ve gone.

Richard Terrill’s What Falls Away Is Always is a tour of such magnitude. I found myself getting lost in these slices of life outside my own, a much needed escape during our present time. Having lucked into learning from Terrill some years ago, it was like meeting an old friend on these pages, too. His trademark wit, humor, appreciation for good art, and musical ear shine here.

“Having lucked into learning from Terrill some years ago, it was like meeting an old friend on these pages, too. His trademark wit, humor, appreciation for good art, and musical ear shine here.”

When you pick up this collection of poetry and conversations, you may very well find yourself, like me, returning often to catch another glimpse of a shy and smiling Coltrane, or to watch Italian-dubbed cinema with Terrill on a Polish TV. As I remember it, he always had strong opinions on worthwhile cinema.

Most of all, you might find for yourself an excellent teacher of craft, lyricism, and life in these pages. I find myself grateful to continue to learn from Professor Terrill, as I knew him, through this candid and clever book.

Poetry and Pandemonium: A Conversation with Claire Wahmanholm

Hayley Jacobson

Claire Wahmanholm is no stranger to sudden changes. As a high school teacher, she has to deal with students, parents, and lesson planning on a daily basis. Balancing this and her writing life, it isn’t much of a leap to say it can be hectic. She reflects this constant change and other feelings through her poetry. Her newest book, Redmouth, is now available. She has one other full collection, Wilder, and a chapbook, Night Vision. She has been published in multiple literary magazines, including but not limited to; Beloit Poetry Journal, Grist, RHINO, The Los Angeles Review, The Paris-American, anthropoid, Fairy Tale Review, New Poetry from the Midwest 2017, and Saltfront.

Wahmanholm was asked to be a speaker at the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild’s “Feather, Flower and Field” poetry event which was to happen mid-April. The event was to focus on poetry and ecology and how the two intertwined but has since been cancelled to better protect both the public and the speakers from catching the strand of coronavirus, COVID-19, that is sweeping the nation.

While Wahmanholm will not be able to read her poetry in public any time soon, she, like many Americans, has more time on her hands. She hopes it will give her time to work on new poetry, as well as configure her classes for an online format, but she more so hopes that it will get better she says.

Hayley Jacobson: Your poems have been published in multiple literary magazines. What was it like when you got the news that your first poem was published?

Claire Wahmanholm: My first real publication was the poem “Dover in November” (a poem of the same title appears in Redmouth, but they’re very very different). It was accepted by Cider Press Review back in July of 2010. I was doing a fellowship in Florence, Italy at the time, and I remember drinking Limoncello that night and then also accidentally sticking my finger in the electrical outlet underneath the desk in my excitement. PSA: don’t drink Limoncello and try to plug anything into foreign outlets.

HJ: What was your inspiration for your second collection, Redmouth? What was your favorite poem to write?

CW: I wrote a lot of Redmouth during my exam year at Utah, and my lists were focused on the elegy as well as the religious and scientific sublime. So Classical elegiac texts (especially Theocritus and Ovid) loom behind many of these poems, as does Lucretius, Pascal, the Book of Job, Julian of Norwich, Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, and Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Redmouth is a lot about how grief pulverizes the self and makes it a stranger to the rest of the world.

My favorite poems to write aren’t necessarily the ones that end up being my favorites to read. But if we’re talking about craft, and which poems were fun to write in the moment, it would probably be one that was really process-intensive (and there are a lot of these in the book!). “Answer” and “Dover in November” both relied on working pretty closely with their source texts (May Swenson’s “Question” and Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” respectively). I love both of those poems dearly, so spending that time with them was really rewarding. But the poems that feature rhyme schemes (all the sonnets, “Lullaby,” “Heliosphere”) were also fun to try to pull off. And the erasures were also satisfying to puzzle out. I love having restrictions to work against—there’s very much that “sense of difficulty overcome.”

HJ: I notice you tend to focus on darker subjects. One of my favorite poems of yours was “The Carrion Flower” that was published in Winter Tangerine. What draws you to the darker side of life? How do you reflect that in your work? 

CW: Oh, I’m so glad you like that one! I do, too. I don’t know if I would go so far as Tolstoy does and say that “all happy families are alike,” but I will say that other people’s happiness doesn’t do much for me. That is, happiness in some way feels more subjective, more private, more inaccessible, than grief does. This isn’t to say it isn’t interesting—just that it doesn’t share particularly well (for me). But for some reason, reading about other people’s grief is far more interesting and immediate. When I’m inhabiting terror or grief or panic, it feels productive to solidify the borders of that experience—to make them more tangible or “knowable” in some way (which is what poetry does, at least for me). When I’m feeling sublime happiness, it feels far less necessary to provide that same level of structure. 

HJ: Titles have always been hard for me. How do you come up with some titles for your work?

CW: It really depends on the overarching project. I rarely think of poems as individual entities anymore—I think about them as eventual characters in a larger project. For the prose poems in Night Vision (and later Wilder), I wanted the titles to not distract from the world-building, so I tried to keep them as uniform and neutral as possible (so they’re mostly “The X,” “The Y,” etc.).

But I also like to repeat titles (four of the above prose poems are called “Relaxation Tape,” for example). In my new manuscript I have a bunch of titles that start “The New” (“The New Fear,” “The New Horticulture”); I have a series about glaciers that are titled “Glacier 1,” “Glacier 2,” etc.; and I have several that riff on the phrase “a land where everything is trying to kill you” (“You Will Soon Enter a Land Where Everything Will Try to Kill You”; “In a Land Where Everything is Trying to Kill Me, I Enter a New Phase of My Life in Which It Would be Very Bad if I Died”; “In a Land Where Everything Is Trying to Kill You, I Teach You to be an Autotomist”). I like using titles to tie the various threads of a manuscript together. Doing this also forms little families within a manuscript, which I’m into. I use it as a rhythmic element in some ways.  

HJ: Your works are both dark and fantastical. How do you walk the line of realistic while tying in fantasy so well?

CW: For me at least, realism is necessary for the fantasy to land. I like speculative stuff when it adheres fairly closely to what we might think of as the “real world.” I don’t want folks to have an excuse to feel removed from the context of the poems—I want it to feel like this world, but with a couple horrifying slants. So, I like to use fairly familiar landscapes (forests, fields, valleys, etc.) that behave in hostile, off-kilter ways. I want the effect to be uncanny in the Freudian sense of the term.

HJ: Poetry is all about balancing life and writing. What are some tips you have for keeping balance in your life when times seem tough—especially right now with the outbreak of COVID-19?

CW: Great great question. I’m very much living in this tension right now (as we all are to various degrees). I teach high school, so I’m only ever able to write in the summer anyway, which leads to an admittedly pretty unbalanced schedule where I have to go go go in the summer, shut it all off for nine months, and then pick up where I left off and hit the ground running again. But the thing that keeps me tethered to the writing life during the school year is reading (which is, really, just as much a part of “doing poetry” as the actual writing is). And that’s what I’m doing a lot of right now—both because I’m reconfiguring my classes for distance learning (which means having to rebuild a portion of the syllabus), and also because reading other people’s stuff takes me out of myself in a helpful way (also it’s helping me live in a steadier world than social media can provide right now). My students are scheduled to do blank verse + sonnets when we start up online, so I’ve been immersing myself in those forms while I put this new syllabus together. There’s this great chunk of lines from Tennyson’s In Memoriam: “But, for the unquiet heart and brain,/ A use in measured language lies;/ The sad mechanic exercise/ Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.”

HJ: What advice do you have for young writers and poets?

CW: Try to write as many different kinds of poems as possible. I think it’s very easy to be like, “oh, I don’t write in form,” or “I don’t write persona poems” or “I don’t write about cities” etc. I get it—once you’ve mastered a certain kind of mode or voice or material, it can be tempting to stay in that space. Who doesn’t like to do what they’re good at? And I certainly haven’t been awesome at this, historically. When I was first starting out, I was pretty sure that free verse was it for me and that everything else was trash. But then in my MFA program I was forced to take form seriously, and I was like jkjkjk this is the best most rigorous thing and everything else is trash. Then I got into prose poems and was like jkjkjk this is it, for real. I wasted a lot of time being resistant to trying new things, and I’d like that time back now.

I also have some more advice at the bottom of this interview , which basically boils down to a) read, b) find a good workshop group, and c) surprise yourself.

The Beautiful & Complex: A Conversation with Heid E. Erdrich

Lauren Becker

credit: Chris Felver

On April 25, the Chippewa Valley Book Festival, in partnership with the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild and the UW-Eau Claire Department of English, have the pleasure of hosting acclaimed author, poet, educator, and interdisciplinary artist Heid E. Erdrich.

Heid has authored six collections of poetry, is the editor of two anthologies of literature by Native writers, and has been the recipient of numerous writing awards highlighting her beautiful and complex work. Heid grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota and is Ojibwe, enrolled at Turtle Mountain.

Throughout the evening, Heid will read from her own recent work and present brief poetry videos, “poemeos”. These poemeos are made through the collaboration of an all-Indigenous team of artists, animators, filmmakers, and composers. Join us at 7PM in the Woodland Theater in UWEC’s Davies Center.

Lauren Becker: Could you speak a little on what you’re looking forward to sharing with us on the 25th?

Heid E. Erdrich: The poems and poem videos (tiny films and animations) I'll share are part of my most recent book and one coming out later this year. My most recent book of poems focuses on forms of communication and expressions, everything from cave art to music lyrics and cell phones. The more ways we find to communicate, the less we seem to understand one another.

I'll read some new poems and talk about the anthology I edited for Graywolf Press and that came out in summer last year, but is in its fourth printing already!

LB: What’s led you to this path of creation and advocacy?

HE: I am pretty much as creation made me - someone who has always been interested in art, words, justice and deep listening to the world. Poetry has always been a part of my life and I've loved collaborating, but did not find the time and company to really engage it until recently.

LB: Could you speak on your experience collaborating with all-Indigenous teams of creatives?

HE: My team of collaborators were, first of all, my friends and colleagues. We worked together in a lot of settings including with choreographers and in community development, so I knew they would understand my aims in making short films and other art projects based in poetry.

LB: Your work has been characterized as ecologically centered, deeply complex, critical, strikingly beautiful, and simultaneously ironic. What does your creative process look like?

HE: It often looks like daydreaming, walking around an urban lake, laughing at the absurdity of the world, texting pictures and ideas back and forth with visual artists and reading aloud to groups of people so I can hear where my voice works and what does not work.

LB: Before attending this event, is there anything you wish your audience would know more about?

HE: It would be great if audiences came to poetry readings without any worries that they might not "get" a poem. Not all poems need to be figured out. Sometimes it's just fun to let the words flow over you, to enjoy the humor or other tones. I usually give time for questions, too, so the audience can ask about anything the poems bring up. I like my audience to expect an enjoyable evening with some laughs, even.

LB: Is there anything else you’d like to share with us?

HE: I really appreciate being invited to these literary events and it's how I make my living, in fact. As my 94 year old Dad in North Dakota says, "People actually pay you to read poems, huh? Well, how about that!"

How about that indeed!

You can check out Heid’s latest collection of poetry, Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media here.

For those who would like to form a better understanding of the traditional homelands of the Nations of Wisconsin, please visit https://wisconsinfirstnations.org/.

Poetry & Pi(e): An Intersection

Dasha Kelly Hamilton • Credit: Va’Na Barki

Lauren Becker

Interdisciplinary. A term defined by Google’s dictionary as “Relating to more than one branch of knowledge.” A buzzword. A mindset.

 Perhaps you’re in the mindset that if you go to a coffee shop, you’re in a space limited to casual chats and creamer. If you go to a museum, you’re in a space limited to mummies and dinosaur bones. I think we can all say that we were once in the same boat, believing that everything had its “place”. Believing that history didn’t belong in my dream of someday becoming a rodeo cowgirl. Or that calculus didn’t belong in your dream of becoming a children’s author.

As it turns out, many things that we once thought of as polar opposites are actually quite intertwined. For example, the art of poetry and the art of mathematics. On March 14, we at the Guild, along with our collaborators at the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters, are hosting an event that will make math and spoken word’s cross-over crystal clear.

Join us at Pablo Center on National Pi Day for a reading and discussion led by acclaimed poet, writer, artist, and founder of Still Waters Collective - Dasha Kelly Hamilton. Throughout the evening, we’ll celebrate the beauty that is interdisciplinary thinking, with the help of coffee from Shift Cyclery and Coffee Bar and pies from Randy’s Family Restaurant. . Thanks, too, to the UWEC Student Office of Sustainability for sponsoring student tickets.

 Academy associate director, and editor of Wisconsin People & Ideas, Jason Smith shared a bit about the nature of Poetry and Pi(e) and his take on the term “interdisciplinary”.

Lauren Becker: Given the nature of this event, what has your experience at the Wisconsin Academy taught you about interdisciplinary studies?

Jason Smith: Sometimes the best conversations happen when different disciplines collide, whether by design or by accident. These “creative collisions” can complicate our understanding of a person, place, or thing by providing a different lens through which to see, say, the mathematical precision found in haiku or the beauty of carbon atoms arranged into a graphene nanotube.

LB: As a Madison-based writer, what's your perception of the literary scene here in our Valley?

JS: I think that what is going on in the Valley is exceptional and a model for other areas in Wisconsin that want to help grow what I see as one of our state's greatest potential exports: excellent writing. Of course it doesn’t hurt that you have committed community partners—the CVWG, the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library, UWEC, Pablo, Volume One etc.—and people like BJ Hollars and Nick Butler working together to cultivate the scene, and I’m not even counting Shift!, the Oxbow, and the other local hangouts that host and promote Valley writers.

LB: What do you hope folks will take away from this event as a whole?

JS: Well, first I hope they enjoy the poetry. Dasha is an incredible poet, and her performances resonate with people from all different background, poets and non-poets alike, and this is a rare opportunity to just kind of submerge oneself in the world of her words. I also think that this is a great opportunity for people to get together and talk about the great poets we have in Wisconsin. I am continually amazed at the depth of talent we have in our statewide poetry community, and the ways in which Wisconsin poets support each other—showing up for readings, teaching classes, reviewing chapbooks. Right now, Wisconsin is a great state for poets and writers.

LB: What sparked your interest in partnering with us?

JS: Well, at the Academy we believe that Wisconsin ideas move the world forward. So, we like to work with organizations that help writers and artists to achieve their goals—to get their writing seen and heard—while bringing people of all stripes together to take part in our state’s literary heritage. I admire the work the CVWG is doing, so it just seems like a good fit.

A good fit indeed!

Excited to come to a better understanding of how our world is connected?

Purchase your tickets for an interdisciplinary evening here.

3 Questions with Max Garland--Deliverer of Keynote Addresses and More!

credit: Justin Patchin

Former Wisconsin poet laureate Max Garland is the author of The Word We Used for It, winner of the 2017-18 Brittingham Poetry Prize. Other books include The Postal Confessions, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and Hunger Wide as Heaven, which won the Cleveland State Poetry Center Open Competition, and a chapbook, Apparition, from the University of Wisconsin Press. This summer, he’ll provide the keynote address at The Priory Writers’ Retreat.

I recently chatted with Max to learn more about his experiences as a rural letter carrier, humility, caffeine, and Dylan Thomas. Read on!

B.J. Hollars: This summer you'll be giving the keynote address for our inaugural summer at The Priory Writers' Retreat.  First, no pressure (though this address will surely go down in literary lore as the moment dozens of writers reaffirmed themselves to their craft).  the talk is titled "What I Learned On My First Day Of Writing" or "Don't Quit Your Job."  Without giving too much away, what inspired this talk?

Max Garland: After working almost 10 years as a rural letter carrier on the route where I was born, where I lived, my parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles lived, my first true love lived (we were 6-year-olds at the time), I quit that job, placed the last letter in the last mailbox on Rural Route 7, Paducah, Ky. 42001, and drove my mail car 442 miles to the Iowa Writers' Workshop for my first official day of Poetry School. My talk is a cautionary tale inspired by the mixed results of this journey.

BH: Over the years, you've had the privilege of working with thousands of writers in a variety of settings.  What conditions do you find to be the most conducive to creativity?

The conditions I find most conducive to creativity are attentiveness, humility, and the stubborn conviction that you are the one best equipped to tell your own story, and also, of course, there's caffeine. I realize these aren't really "conditions," but more like qualities or attitudes, and in one case, a psychoactive drug composed of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, which, coincidently, are the four most abundant elements in the human body.

BH: Finally, was there a poem or poet or piece of writing that inspired you to take the poetic plunge?  If so, what, specifically, inspired you?  A line?  A phrase?  An idea?

MG: Writing that inspired me early on? I'd have to say the Elizabethan cadences (I didn't know it was poetry at the time), of the King James Bible rolling off my grandmother's tongue in her western Kentucky accent. Then in college we were assigned a poem by Dylan Thomas that went-- "Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs/About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green/...Time let me hail and climb/ Golden in the heydays of his eyes/ And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns/ And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves/ Trail with daisies and barley/Down the rivers of the windfall light.."  By the end of that poem, when I read, "Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means/ Time held me green and dying/ Though I sang in my chains like the sea," I thought my head might fall off. The words were simple, but the order cast them like a spell. I was a goner. 

Hear Max’s keynote address this summer at The Priory Writers’ Retreat! Click below to apply!

Bruce Taylor On His New Book, Breaking Forms, and Fish Chowder

credit: Justin Patchin

by Chloe Ackerman 

I will never stop being amazed by the awe-inspiring power of words. In my studies as a creative writing major at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, I have consistently found myself motivated by the writing processes of other writers. I was especially excited to have the opportunity to interview Bruce Taylor—former poet laureate of Eau Claire, and professor emeritus at UWEC—about his new book Poetry Sex Love Music Booze & Death. Bruce Taylor will be reading from this book at The Local Store in downtown Eau Claire at 5PM on Monday, October 8th. Be sure to swing by and pick up a copy!

Chloe Ackerman: Has your poetry style evolved over time? If it has, how has it changed? 

 Bruce Taylor: As a young poet in the 60’s I would say, along with many others, things like “the sonnet is where old poets go to die” What I didn’t know I meant was I wasn’t good enough to write one. It takes a while to get your chops. Formal poetry is easy to do badly but hard to do well. You try.

CA: Have you noticed any changes in the poetry or literary scene around Eau Claire?

BT: I don’t know if more folks are writing across the Chippewa Valley, though it seems so. There are certainly many more venues to share: the readings at places like the library, The Local Store, The Pablo Center, publications such as Local Lit, Barstow & Grand, Twig. And the CVWG is directly responsible for injecting new energy and interest in writing. For a population the size of ours, the CVWG list an extraordinary number of writing groups, and book clubs.

 CA: At what point in the poem writing process do you decide to put it in a form?

 BT: Very early, and you don’t “put” it into a form as much as coax, tease, worry, beat it in that direction. The form can always be abandoned, and the poem turns into something more free (er) verse, and often better. Or you can simply cheat. We call it “pushing the envelope.” I have some 16-line sonnets, 3-line couplets and an envoi-less sestina. A form is only as good as it can be challenged, stretched, adapted. Still only about half of my poems are in traditional forms. The new book brings them together for the first time in one volume.

 CA: What question would you like to be asked that gets at the core of you as a writer and/or your writing?

 BT: You just asked it.

 CA: On October 8th at 5pm you are reading from your new book, Poetry Sex Love Music Booze & Death, at a Local Lit: Off the Page event in the Local Store. What do you hope people will take from this event and other events in the series with other local authors?

 BT: A book.

 CA: Is there anything else you would like to share?

 BT: I make a very good fish chowder.

Spotlight: Andy Patrie on Half-Life

By B.J. Hollars

We meet at Sacred Heart Church in the early evening—a place I’ve never been, but one Andy Patrie returned to daily for five years as a child.

            “I went to school next door here to the church,” 40-year-old Patrie tells me as we slip inside the propped wooden door leading us into the foyer.  “I spent a lot of time in this church, and probably a great deal of my 20s trying to figure out what that meant.”

            For Patrie, poems became the perfect vehicle for untangling his oft-fraught relationship with his faith, a “messy divorce” of sorts that ultimately inspired a series of poems on God, guilt and growing up, all of which inhabit the center of his soon-to-be released second collection, Half-Life. 

            Yet faith is but one of many themes Patrie tackles in its pages, the most prominent theme, perhaps, explores his candid assessment of his own mortality.        

            “I was doing dishes and the name ‘half-life’ came to me,” Patrie says, “and I thought, ‘There it is!  Now I have sort of a focus for this collection.’”

            While many of his poems explore the realities of reaching mid-life, for Patrie, this milestone is hardly a crisis.  His poems are more celebratory than elegiac, more filled with wide-eyed-wonder than a dirge-like lament for the past.  Whether recounting male-pattern baldness (“Black hole / swallowing strands of light”) or a kayaking trip with his wife (“The lake assures / it will flip / these kayaks / and dip us / as we slip inside”), Patrie always manages to excavate the beauty in the mundane.

            Tied to the subject of mortality is legacy, and I ask Patrie what he hopes his nine-year-old child, Simon, might one day take from his father’s work. 

            “That’s a great question,” Patrie says, leaving it to linger for a moment as the church returns to silence.  “I often think of [my wife] Adrienne as the person I’m writing for, but I would say oftentimes I’m thinking about Simon, too, and these little mementoes, I guess, for him, as he approaches these milestones, and what that will mean for him.”

            Patrie explains that the collection’s most personal poem is its last—one simply titled, “Simon.”

            “Simon is just really different,” Patrie says, “and I know every kid’s different, but in that sense of how he approaches what it means to be a boy.  There’s some gender nonconformity going on…so that poem really became just a way to say to him that it’s okay, it’s cool, with me, with us.”

            I smile though the night’s grown so dark he can’t see it.  By the glow of my computer screen, Patrie reads a poem, and then, at our interview’s conclusion, we leave that place, exiting through the same propped door we’d entered.

            Outside, an elderly man awaits us, and, in the kindest way possible, makes clear he’s curious about what we were up to in the church.

            “Not to worry!  There’s a simple explanation,” I explain, “we’re just two grown men reading poems in the dark.”

            Thankfully, before those words leave my mouth, Patrie offers a simpler explanation, explaining to the man that he’d attended the school many years prior, and that he’d just completed some poems on that experience.

            The answer seems to satisfy the man, and after a bit more conversation, he promises to see to it that the church door gets locked before the hour grows too late.

            We thank him, and then, after Patrie and I say our farewells, we get into our cars and drive off.

            In the rearview I spot the church’s twin towers, and between them, the circular stained glass peering out.

            Call it what you will—a marvel, a miracle, a mistake—but for me, our time in the church was nothing short of revelatory.

            How curious, I think, that for a man exploring life on the outside of faith, on this night, the doors remained open.

Half-Life will be available for purchase at Red's Mercantile and The Local Store in mid-March. 

The book release will take place at The Plus on March 19.

Interview music courtesy of Lee Rosevere