Mitzi Rapkin: There are some lines in there about mothering and about specifically mothering daughters, and that there are a lot of mothers or mother figures who are scarred by their daughters. There’s a line in there, which is very simple but it’s so powerful, and it says, “Girls are unnerving.”

Anna Solomon: Oh right, I think Vee says that, right? Yes, I think it’s true. I mean, having been a girl and and I think, you know, again, this comes back to power and is it true that girls themselves are scary? I think no, like that they’re out to unnerve? No. I think that is the way we experience girls, even when we’ve been one and believe in them and believe in their power. Still, do we perceive them as scary? I think, yeah.

I mean, think about The Crucible and the ways in which girls have been written and performed across centuries. I don’t feel proud of, but I have felt as a mother now of a daughter and having been a daughter to a mother, like, Oh, yeah, there’s a lot of power in this young woman, and it doesn’t always feel safe. It’s interesting even as I want her to come into her power. It’s really tricky.

Read the rest of the interview (or listen to the full podcast) here: https://lithub.com/anna-solomon-girls-can-be-scary/

EW: How did you become a writer?

CM: Somewhat unintentionally and somewhat intentionally. I always wrote these weird little books as a kid. A family friend and a colleague of my mom was a writer, Susan Ito, who invited me to read a poem I had written as a school assignment at a poetry reading. I think I was nine or 10 and being treated as a legitimate serious writer at that age was a pretty magical thing and I think I was kind of hooked from there. I didn’t take my writing super seriously until I was an undergrad. In my senior year, there was this poetry workshop that I had always wanted to take but was too scared to apply for and finally it was like, I’m going to graduate…I have nothing left to lose so I’m going to submit some poems and see if I get into it, and I did. I had an opportunity to work with Eleanor Wilner, an incredible poet and teacher, and from there it kept me connected with the work and I continue to do it.

EW:  What sort of things were you writing about?

CM: The poem I wrote as a kid was about the Japanese American internment. In the workshop in college, the main text we were reading that semester was Ovid’s Metamorphoses, so like, Greek myth and tragedy, but always I think my poetry has been a lot about identity. It’s something I think about a lot as a person and something I think about as a writer.

EW: Did you Journal as a young person?

CM: I did. I journaled a lot. There are many, many, many diaries sitting on my bookshelf. I journal less now probably because I’m writing in other ways, but yeah, I was sort of a compulsive journaler as an only child with big, big feelings, and yeah, I gotta tell somebody all this stuff and it sure is not going to be my mom and dad.

EW: It’s a really good tool. As a kid, I would journal and I would also ride the bus just to journal; it’s kind of an observational thing.

CM: Yeah, the bus, you see good things on the bus. I have a poem about all the good shit I saw on the bus one day.

EW: You mentioned that identity is a big issue for you. How do you describe your family background?

CM: Well the easiest way to describe me in terms of racial identity is the term Hapa, which is a little fraught and problematic in terms of whether it’s been appropriated from native Hawaiian folks. It’s a term I stopped using over the years, but I’m mixed-race Chinese and Irish. My father is ABC, American Born Chinese, born and raised in Chinatown San Francisco, and my mom’s family background is almost entirely Irish American going back several generations all the way back to Ireland. My mom and I are actually planning to go to Ireland next summer, a trip to the motherland.

Read the rest of the interview and listen to Carrie read some of her poetry here: https://eastwindezine.com/caroline-m-mar-herstories/

On March 12th, I assigned myself a uniform: my blue denim shirt. I needed something that was just right for the temperature inside the house in early spring. I needed something to signal daytime and the work of getting through one day of this or one thousand. I needed this one thing to be decided for the duration.

The blue denim shirt makes me feel like, I don’t know, I mean business? It’s denim, but it’s a collared shirt, so it’s a very particular kind of business. It’s a Rosie the Riveter shirt, if Rosie shopped at TJ Maxx. 

Rosie’s business in her blue denim shirt was building airplanes to defeat Nazis. My business in my blue shirt now is subpar Montessori teacher rodeo clown hype woman. My business is Kindergarten app passwords snacks snacks snacks, screams, questions I can’t answer, little sad lonely sobs, my business is knock knock jokes is this ok am I doing today right and I don’t know when it will end or if you can go swimming or see nanna soon.  

“Work, Shirt” appeared on the Triangle House Blog. Read the rest of the essay here: https://www.triangle.house/housebound/work-shirt

James Baldwin finds a unique way to interiority in “Sonny’s Blues,” which was first published in 1957. I say unique, because I’m not sure there’s another story like this; a character’s thoughts and perceptions are normally voiced from that particular character’s point of view. But because Baldwin’s narrator is seeing his brother in a new light, because Baldwin understands the complexities of jazz, and, I believe, because the narrator learns to love his brother in this moment, he is able to look deeply at what Sonny is feeling and thinking, able to get to the internal workings of another soul on the page. Baldwin relies on empathy in “Sonny’s Blues” and brandishes it as a tool, a unique craft element used to construct an effective story.

Late in the story, as the brothers arrive at the nightclub where Sonny will play, Baldwin creates a mood by talking in generalities about music—these sentences aren’t about Sonny, and yet they tell us something about him: “The man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason.” This is Sonny’s struggle and dilemma, to find order in that void. Everything we’ve learned about Sonny to this point adds to the depth of this search. And the narrator sees Sonny’s struggle on stage: “His face was troubled, he was working hard, but he wasn’t with it.”

The beauty and depth of emotion required for jazz and blues are analogous to Sonny’s life in these paragraphs, and the narrator sees this for the first time—he hadn’t bothered to venture into Sonny’s world before. He notes the connection—the humanity, really—that flows back and forth between the musicians on the stage. He sees that Creole, his brother’s friend and bandleader, shares an understanding with Sonny that their journey, in life or music, is the same: “[Creole] wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing—he had been there, and he knew.” Sonny’s life has been troubled, and the narrator senses that, for Sonny, joy and beauty must necessarily be found through struggle.

Baldwin writes, “Sonny moved, deep within, exactly like someone in torment. I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and the instrument…While there’s only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try: to try and make it do everything.” The narrator sees Sonny’s struggles through this lens now and, for the first time, understands his brother. “He wasn’t on much better terms with his life, not the life that stretched before him now. He and the piano stammered, started one way, got scared, stopped; started another way, panicked, marked time, started again; then seemed to have found a direction, panicked again, got stuck.”

The essay was published in CRAFT. Read the rest of it here: https://www.craftliterary.com/2020/05/19/empathy-as-craft-gerry-stanek/?fbclid=IwAR02yoMzNdmFfxkAdeBU8zr5HdRjdGzib5_aA2iJ7sHjcKUw4Msx0Vf95Zg

Is there a moment, image, memory, or experience from your childhood that jumps out at you now as hinting at or communicating the possibility that you would become an artist, a poet?

Tommye Blount: Nope, never a poet—ha! That was never a part of my thinking as a child. The need to tell a story, however, was always there. My mother worked in an office at Michigan Bell, a typist of some sort. I forgot how it all started, but she would bring big reams of dot matrix paper home. The sight of it just made me so excited. There was something so stimulating about seeing all of that blank space with no lines or margins. It was very different from the green lined paper we would use learning cursive in school. This was an invitation to fill up as much space as I could. I would doodle and write all over the sheets. There was a child’s hunger for maximalism that faded in my teen and part of my adult years.

In those years, and still now somewhat, there is safety in wanting to take up as less space as possible. It’s partly why the book is big. A challenge to myself, I wanted to force myself to take up, and earn, the space of this book. In a world that would rather deny me, a Black gay man, space I wanted to claim it for this book. I did not come to the realization on my own, but it was partly seeing the work of Detroit artists like Tylonn J. Sawyer and Sydney G. James—artists who have created massive murals in which every wrinkle and hair of its Black subject must be reckoned with. When one encounters the work, they have no choice but to consider the subject.

Read the rest of the interview here: https://lithub.com/tommye-blount-no-one-gets-off-the-hook-in-my-poems/?fbclid=IwAR2lLUAhrUsvUJXRmp15qdL412725J88k3c0BogXyvkbkPXkh-Ke5ztIUk4