So you have a poetry manuscript – now what? This is a question I have been wrestling with like Jacob with his angel since 1994 when I entered graduate school at McNeese State to study with John Wood and Robert Olen Butler. One would think it should be much easier, now more so than ever before! There are 4500 magazines according to Duotrope and so many presses, both independent small presses, bigger presses and the university affiliated ones, yet it is not uncommon for a poetry manuscript contest (really the only way to get published) to have 500 to 900 manuscripts to read and judge. Recently, I won 2^nd place in a chapbook contest with a new press called Emerging Literary Journal. Before that, my manuscript, which has been constantly changing over the years as new poems get added and old ones get edited or even removed from it, was a semi-finalist in 3 or 4 contests.

So you too have a “good” manuscript, ready for publication with a large number of them published in poetry journals (more print than online) and in anthologies. How does one get to the published stage without going the self-published route? How to become the bride and not a bride’s maid? Here are some things to think about:

Get as many eyes on it as possible. Go to conferences, apply to writing colonies, be a part of reading and workshop groups, anything that could be helpful. Meet editors, writers, publishers and be open to suggestions and critiques. A good place to look is The Shaw Guide or Newpages (Writing Conferences Page) for more information on these places. There are a growing number of online workshops too which I really like including Gotham Writers’ Workshop and the Writers Studio. Some writers even have online writing workshops like Kim Addonizio, Deborah Ager, and Susan Browne. I personally have never taken any of these but have heard good things from others. Also, it is important to have a solid group of constant, reliable and trustworthy readers. If you don’t, go to the local college and see if you can form one by talking to the campus magazine or the writing professors.

Living in rural Georgia, none of these things are easy to do. After earning my MFA in 1997, I sort of walked away from it, stopped writing, and became disinterested in the whole process. So I know first-hand what to do to get back into it. First, I took some writing workshops online. There are several affiliated with magazines and for a small fee ($200 to 400), I got to work with an instructor for a few weeks and to hear feedback from a small group. I also looked for writers with several books published who critique manuscripts for a fee ($300 to 500) by searching through Google and looking up writers I have read. This really helped me to see what others see who might be contest judges and have experience in the field as not only writers but instructors. I had not had a line by line and page by page critique since I was a graduate student, and my writing (and my “voice”) had definitely changed. Then I contacted my local college and found a few professors who write poetry. I formed a Poetry Party Group to meet at a coffee shop once a month to talk and edit each other’s poems. I also subscribed to AWP’s magazine (The Writer’s Chronicle), which is such a great resource for interesting articles and their section on latest submission calls, conference calls, and grant opportunities. Yes, Newpages is helpful too but I find The Writer’s Chronicle to be my primary source for this information. I used to also regularly check Duotrope as a source of information but now they are subscription based and I do not wish to pay to participate for this information.

One final thought: I also read, read, and read some more. I mean I read a lot! I try to pay the presses directly by ordering through them to support the presses, especially the smaller ones, and the authors. If I couldn’t afford the books, I used the library.

Here are a few sites that might be helpful that I recommend:

Some Ideas on Order & Creation:  http://jeffreyelevine.com/2011/10/12/on-making-the-poetry-manuscript/

Manuscript Tips: http://winningwriters.com/resources/advice/ura_tips.php#.UZDRGrXvt8E

Thinking Like an Editor: http://www.pw.org/content/thinking_like_an_editor_how_to_order_your_poetry_manuscript_0?cmnt_all=1

Two manuscript conferences I highly recommend: Colrain and Tupelo

Emerging LAbout the Author

M. E. Silverman is editor of Blue Lyra Review. His chapbook, The Breath before Birds Fly (ELJ Press, 2013), is available. His poems have appeared in over 70 journals, including: Crab Orchard Review, 32 Poems, December, Chicago Quarterly Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology, The Los Angeles Review, Mizmor L’David Anthology: The Shoah, Cloudbank, Neon, Many Mountains Moving, Pacific Review, Because I Said So Anthology, Sugar House Review, and other magazines. M. E. Silverman was a finalist for the 2008 New Letters Poetry Award, the 2008 DeNovo Contest and the 2009 Naugatuck River Review Contest. He is working on editing a contemporary Jewish anthology with Deborah Ager forthcoming in 2013 from Bloomsbury.

- Martin Ott

Who has been a major influence on your writing?

I’ve had a lot of influences, so I apologize to those I’m leaving out.  That being said . . .

My parents—both avid readers and language aficionados—made me aware early of the power and pleasure of words.  Both of them spoke well, and were very witty.  Humor, both verbal and physical, had a strong presence in the house where I grew up.  My mother, a librarian, kept me well-supplied with books.

My earliest literary influences weren’t poets. Twain, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky were among the first non-children’s authors that knocked me out.  Other than children’s poems recited by my mother when I was very young, the first poets I loved were Poe, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas.  A friend in high school English turned me on to Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti.  When I loved their work, and said, “I wish I could write something like that,” he said, “Don’t whine about it.  Try.”  So I did.

Ron Koertge, Gerry Locklin, Edward Field, James Tate, and Russell Edson had a big impact on me when I was first beginning to publish.  I’m sure their influence is still evident today.

Ed Hirsch, whom I worked with at a writer’s conference some time later, also had a major influence on me, as did Robert Pinsky, with whom I worked at another writer’s conference.

My wife and son have also influenced my writing in many ways, all for the better.

Can you give us insight into your creative process?

Experience has installed a kind of Geiger counter in my brain that begins to tick when I’m in the presence of something interesting that might yield a poem.  I jot down what that something is, then, when I get a chance, start writing about it in a free-associational way to see what shows up on the page.  Writing poetry is an act of discovery for me.  If I’m lucky, something amazing turns up.  If I’m not lucky, no problem; I try again.  I work hard at my craft, but to generate anything worth working on, I have to trust my unconscious mind.

How has living, writing and teaching in Southern California shaped your work?

I think being in the entertainment capital of the country has reinforced my instinct—also reinforced by years as a professional musician—to shun the pedestrian, and make my poems as entertaining as I can.  I also think being in LA has heightened an already-present tendency toward strangeness, absurdism, hyperbole, and surrealism in my work.  That’s part of the natural environment here.

Speaking of natural environment—I suspect that living in LA has worked against my impulse to be a nature poet.   If I’d lived someplace more pastoral, I suspect that impulse would have been easier to follow.

Has your background as a trained psychotherapist influenced your poetry?

I started studying psychology in order to better understand the human psyche, and thus become a better writer.  I hope that happened.  I think it did.

I know that working as a therapist had a profound effect on me personally. Being allowed to look deeply into other people’s . . . what to call it—souls? . . . is humbling, and humanizing, and broadening in the extreme.

Revising, for me, is very similar to psychotherapy, in that I listen to a lot of rambling (my own), then try to pick out and foreground what is important in all that has been said.

Can you share an example of overcoming adversity to keep your writing dream alive?

I’ve heard Edward Hirsch say something to the effect that “Everyday life is the enemy of poetry.”  The contemporary world seems to conspire to keep us from the kind of patient observation, uninhibited emotionalism, and intense inferiority that is necessary to write good poetry.  Every hour that I manage to write is an hour wrested from the powers of social responsibility and psychic darkness.

What is something about you that writers and readers may not know?

I have a pin-prick-sized hole in the flesh of my right ear.  I inherited this from my dad.

On the other hand, if you read my work carefully, you’ll find out more about me than even I know.  Not that everything I write about happened to me . . .

About the Author:

Charles Harper Webb is the author of ten books of poetry, including Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems, and What Things Are Made Of.  Editor of Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology, Webb has received the Morse Prize, Pollak Prize, Saltman Prize, and Kate Tufts Discovery Award, as well as grants from the Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations. He teaches at California State University, Long Beach, where he has served as both Director of Creative Writing and MFA Director.

It is a very small world. I’d like to start with a bit of backstory. In short fiction, backstory is to be avoided, but this is real life and a certain context is required.

I met Martin Ott in basic training at Ft Leonardwood, Missouri. We didn’t become instant friends on day one; rather we grew into it because of our common path and mutual interests. We were both going to Fort Huachuca for Interrogator school and afterwards on to the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey.

There were actually three of us, the third being Eric Costlow, or Cos. We went through challenging times together at a point in our lives when we were trying to figure out who we were and who we wanted to be. Marty is a part of who I was and after more than 25 years, I reconnected with him on Facebook because he had done an interview about his latest book. I should have known he’d become a writer.

Marty started writing much sooner than I did. I’d decided in 2005 that I was going to finally lay it all on the line and see if I had what it took. I didn’t have lofty goals like being the next Stephen King or even being good enough to scrape out a living with my writing. No, my goal was more basic. I wanted to know if I could write a story that someone would want to read. I wanted to find out if I could learn the craft well enough that I could touch another person with my words and make them glad they had spent the time. This was my quest. I’d tried and quit several times starting when I was eighteen and in the Army. The reason I failed so often is irrelevant to this post, but finally in 2005, something clicked and I started down the path of becoming a writer.

In 2007, my father became ill and was hospitalized. He suffered several complications and eleven months later, he died. During those eleven months, I spent a lot of time with him in hospitals, much of it while he was asleep or unconscious.  It gave me time to reflect.

If you’re reading this, chances are that you are somewhere on the path. You have or will find out that working on your craft is only part of it. You also need to know how to market your writing so it can escape the confines of your computer and be read. I was frustrated with a lot of what I discovered when I tried to get published. Sitting in a waiting room, doing what the room was designed to do, I wrote down all of the things that frustrated me about getting published. The top two items on my list were long turn around times and form rejections. Most magazines or anthologies I was interested in didn’t allow simultaneous submissions. The average response time in 2005 was ninety days, with some lasting over a year. The response, if it was a rejection, was usually a short paragraph with no indication if your story had missed the mark by an inch or a mile. I was taught that if I was going to complain about a situation, I should also take the time to come up with a solution. But what could I do, I was a writer not a publisher.

Light bulb.

I’d only written short stories up to that point and all of them were horror. I didn’t make a conscious decision to write horror stories; it’s just what came out. I enjoy the genre because I feel it allows the exploration of the human condition  in the most concise manner. I don’t need to build a world or explain technology.

When I decided to start a short fiction magazine, it made sense to make it horror because I knew it better than other genres. I read voraciously and with the exception of romance, I don’t discriminate. I know SciFi, Fantasy, and Thriller, having cut my teeth on the classics in my youth. But what I wrote was horror, so

I had a better feel for what would make a good short horror story. While I was in one of those waiting rooms, a doctor came in to tell me about my father’s latest complication. One of my many theories is that doctors use Latin when speaking to patients or family members as a coping mechanism. It gives them some distance as well as a position of superiority. He informed me that my father’s colon was now “Necrotic Tissue,” and needed be removed.

At that point in my life, I needed a distraction from the pain. I took some solace from my writing, but I needed something more. I needed a quest. It all came together as these things do, and I decided to start a horror magazine called Necrotic Tissue. I got a friend to create my website and format the magazine. He also did all the layout and art. I got some other friends to help me with reading submissions. The magazine had a few simple goals:

- Fast turnaround averaging fourteen days

-  Personal rejections, even if it was only one sentence, give a reason for the rejection and, if possible, advice on how to improve

- Pay on time

- Always pick the best story

The last goal may seem obvious, but many magazines wouldn’t give a new writer a chance, regardless of how good the story was. They sought known names because known names sell magazines. Eventually, I solicited known writers and paid pro rates to help sales, but I never took a slot away from another writer, I just made the magazine longer by one story.

The one mistake I made was assuming I could break even. After three years, it became clear that I would run with a loss for at least two more years, possibly longer. The IRS allows you to declare a loss in only three of five years for a small business venture before they consider it a hobby. I pushed it to four years, risking an audit because I wanted NT to survive.

In the end, I couldn’t turn the corner and had to close shop, but not before I put out fourteen issues, one novel, one play collection and two anthologies as well as being the first publishing credit for dozens of writers. I would like to try again using a non-profit model. With margins so thin, a publisher has to worry about every single penny.

It’s easy to put editors and publishers (often the same thing in small press) in the role of the antagonist. They are often faceless villains that just don’t understand our art. The reality is that most of them are also writers and the time they take to run a small press is time that takes away from their writing. Some of them use it as a venue for their own writing and some use it as a way to trade publishing credits, a practice I find despicable. Still others jump in and out of ventures, most trying to network with well-known writers. But the majority of small press publishers just want to put out a good product.

Small press is not one thing. It varies as much as the varied people that own them and they change over time. You need to put in the time and effort on market research. It will save you a lot of heartache and pain. Beware of scammers and don’t be afraid to ask other writers what their experience with a given publisher has been. You can’t submit what you never write down and you can get a publishing credit if you never submit. Finally, thicken your skin, because if your goal is to be showered with complements and accolades, you need another line of work.

One last thing and I will step off my soapbox. Support the publishers that support you. Most writers are broke most of the time, but that doesn’t stop you from reposting news from your publishers on Facebook. You need reviews for your work, but you can also help out other writers by reading their work and posting review on Amazon. I’m not talking about anything unseemly. The fact is that even a bad review on Amazon helps. It’s a numbers game. Take the time to read some of your peers and post reviews. They may or may not reciprocate, but that’s not really the point. Regardless of whether you are selfless or selfish, helping your publisher can only help you in the long run.

Despite the fact that there are thousands of writers out there at various stages of their careers, it is a relatively small community. When I first met Marty and Cos, I was trying to escape who I had been. I saw the Army as a chance to be a better person and went about remaking myself in that image. It was a lofty goal and I would like to think that I’ve made progress towards it. I chose my friends carefully, wanting to surround myself with good people that would help me in my transformation. I’m glad to finally reconnect with Marty and share a mutual passion for writing. It is a very small and wonderful world.

When I first heard the story of the missing script from my favorite TV show Breaking Bad, my imagination went on overdrive. It tickled me that some fanboy or girl would pilfer the script because they just could not wait for the next/last season. That doesn’t appear to be the case, or does it? Here’s more conjecture: The Case of the Stolen “Breaking Bad” Finale Script.

- Martin Ott

- Martin Ott

Who has been a major influence on your writing?

With poets, I’d say Wallace Stevens, Rilke, Plath, Berryman, and Tomas Transtromer. With fiction writers, I’d say Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner, Chekov, and my newest love—Proust. These are writers I know I can repeatedly return to and each time find something new to admire—both in what their works have to say AND in how they say it.

Can you give us insight into your creative process?

About “process,” I wish I could say I had one. Each new writing project seems to demand a different manner of “making.” Possibly figuring out that new method of composition for each new project IS my process. I know I like, in poems, for the collections to be series, but how the poems will speak back and forth to each other—through what voices, from what tonalities and physical worlds—those issues I enjoy experimenting with. I probably keep only one out of every dozen separate poem drafts. I appreciate how a book project takes me into uncharted (for me) territory and requires me to learn what seems like a new kind of shaping. One of my first books of poem series, Beside Ourselves, came about largely through collage (of journal notes, a travel diary, and the fuzzy memories of a disastrous love affair), while this new book of linked stories, Boneland (due out in October), was an interesting experiment in trying to make a “family” of a cast of characters who’d populated some recent flash fictions and longer fictions. With both projects, I felt a certain stress that I wouldn’t be able to make each book coalesce; every time they threatened to implode I’d suddenly find a new little element that shed light on their commonalities.

How does writing both poetry and fiction impact the other genre?

I don’t find that the actual methods of making poems and making stories have much at all in common. In fact, in learning to write fiction, I found my first major hurdle was realizing that the organic process by which I’d always written poems was just not going to cut it. In fiction some small glimmer of a route—maybe not an ending, but some grip on characters and/or dramatic events—that sort of advance knowing was not going to hurt a story. Hell, it was going to help! Over the years as I’ve worked on stories, my poems may have become less narrative, or less primarily narrative. Fiction seems to have sucked some of that away. And no doubt my love of and frequent use of persona in poems may have helped me toward that full emersion into a character’s mind so crucial to stories.

Can you share an example of overcoming adversity to keep your writing dream alive?

Aside from trying to ride out the waves of grief over certain loved ones’ deaths—notably my younger sister and father, I think these last couple of years may have presented the biggest challenge. I wake up worrying over my 87-year-old-mother and 97-year-old stepfather, trying to track on all the parts of their lives I now attend to FOR them: their meals, meds, doctors’ appointments, bills, etc. Not ever having had children, I have never really been responsible FOR other people before. It was not easy to step into this role. Writing has always been on the front burner for me, and all else that made demands of me I pushed onto back burners. Now I’m learning to be another kind of person, someone with a modicum of patience who can step up, as it were. To do so I had to quit worrying that I might lose a story if I didn’t immediately sit down and write it. Now I trust that if I lose a poem or a story, probably another one will come along in its own good time. I remember something Grace Paley said: “I don’t have a career; I have a life.” I’m not sorry writing was on the front burner for me for fifty years, and I’m not sorry it can’t be right now.

Can you tell us anything about your new poetry book Pacific Walkers?

In my mid-20’s I was a newspaper reporter, and some of the narrative voice and dramatic situation of these poems incorporates that world, a journalist’s responsibilities to facts, as well as the constrictions of time (deadlines) and space (number of words).

People put up signs for their missing pets; milk cartons carry photographs of missing children. But what of those who are found (dead) but NOT missed? These unidentified bodies are the persona’s immediate “story.” Several of the poems quote information from the Spokane Medical Examiner’s website, detailing information on specific John and Jane Does. Does turning such stories as these into news-bites eventually create a numbing effect on most of us? How is it possible for a human being to go completely un-missed? The book questions how well facts can render the “truth” of these sad lives. It seems a strange irony too that the bodies have no names but the particular items found with the bodies do. Pacific Walkers, for instance, is the brand name of a pair of boots found on one of the John Does. America’s anonymous dead. For me, their status as unnamable makes them all the more haunting. And perhaps their ghostly presence in the world suggests the eventual anonymity of most of us. We may leave behind descendants and/or names on tombstones, but ultimately we too become unknown.

Incorporating some of my visual art (digital photo-collage), I have created a 1.5 minute film offering a glimpse into the book’s world.

What is something about you that writers and readers may not know?

Lately I’ve been putting very spare poems on walls! I’m tagging back with my own little poetic bits of text among the graffiti and street art I find along my urban walks. But only digitally so. I have a new website devoted to this photo-collage work.

About the Author

Nance Van Winckel is the author of six collections of poems, including After A Spell, winner of the 1999 Washington State Governor’s Award for Poetry, and the recently released Pacific Walkers (U. of Washington Press, 2013). She is the recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships and awards from the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. Recent poems appear in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Crazyhorse, Field, and Gettysburg Review.

She is also the author of three collections of short fiction and a recent recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Fiction Fellowship. Her stories have been published in AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, The Sun, and Kenyon Review. Boneland, her fourth collection of fiction, is forthcoming in October from U. of Oklahoma Press.

She is Professor Emerita in Eastern Washington University’s graduate creative writing program, as well as a faculty member of Vermont College of Fine Arts’ low-residency MFA program. She lives near Spokane, Washington with her husband, the artist Rik Nelson.

- Martin Ott

OK, when did I do when I first read the brilliant poem – Elements of the Pasty and Its Relationship to the Lake – about two of my favorite things in the Spring/Summer 2013 issue of the Black Warrior Review? I did what any poetry fanboy would: jumped to the bio section to find out about this writer and discovered that Matthew Gavin Frank is a Midwest writer teaching up in Northern Michigan University not far from where I grew up. When I contacted him, he was kind enough to let me reprint it in its entirety below.

I have read the poem many times and I am still in awe. I love the way it bounces between food, facts about the Great Lakes, and tidbits of life from the mitten states that make me homesick. It weaves several narrative threads together loosely in a way that each section adds and informs to the other sections around it. It manages to have plenty of facts, but still weaves a spell, a story, that is more mythic than the sum of the parts. Just read it – you’ll be glad you did.

- Martin Ott

Elements of the Pasty and Its Relation to The Lake

It’s not like this with Cream of Mushroom soup and La Choy Fried Onions.  In the pasty, in the singular shell, dinner shares space with dessert.  We start with dinner and eat downward.  It’s not like this with Hot Dish, with casserole, with pizza with a Saltine crust.  In the pasty is an eating toward—a sinking into the bottom of food.  In this way, eating mimics drowning.  Ambiance mimics drowning.  In the pasty, is difficulty breathing, is eyes adjusting to the mineshaft dark and to the daylight, is anticipation, is harbinger, is a whole new world beyond the chuck and the rutabaga, is apples-and-cinnamon, is an eating toward, and an eating toward sweetness.

*

It’s not like this with backyard swimming pools, the facedown hair fanning the surface, the beach ball rolling pink over green.  In Lake Superior, drowning is an expected tragedy.  It’s dark at the bottom of a lake.

*

According to the Great Lakes Surf Rescue Project (GLSRP), “Overall since 2010, 210 people have drowned in the Great Lakes (74 in 2010; 87 in 2011; and 49 to date in 2012).

‘Just unbelievable how these drowning numbers just keep rising week after week,” said Dave Benjamin [GLSRP Executive Director of Public Relations].  “At this rate we could see well over 100 by the end of the year.’”

*

After days in mineshaft darkness, my uncle, or somebody’s uncle, or so many of our uncles swear by backstroking in Lake Superior.  It has to do with currents, tides, white-caps.  It has to do with everything wet and huge and cool enough to float on.  If a body of water this large isn’t killing us, Uncle says, it’s supporting our weight.

*

Like the dessert section of the pasty, the number 100 is something to reach for, to attain.  100 is a milestone.  A goal, sweet and morbid.  A perfect, even number.  Nothing is more even, more steady, than the hands of the drowned.  Not even 100.

*

Like the mine, Lake Superior supports its own agriculture.  Off the shore of my hometown, in 2010, the body of Rod Nilsestuen, Wisconsin Secretary of Agriculture was found floating in Lake Superior.

*

My uncle has a bumper sticker that says FUCK CORNWALL, THIS IS MICHIGAN.  If my uncle doesn’t have this bumper sticker, then he has black lung, and if he doesn’t have black lung, then he’s depressed due to a lack of light, and if he’s not depressed due to a lack of light, he can call this only soul-sickness, can only lament the ways in which we’re not jacketed in pastry dough brushed with egg yolk, a crust that will protect us from birds who scream from the dark, from the lack of air that, in the beginning, seemed to exhilarate.

*

ANIMALS DROWN AT LAKE SUPERIOR ZOO, reads the headline, and Uncle laughs.  It’s his one day off.  He’s just come back from his swim, for lunch.

*

This is goal-oriented eating.  The meat as a means to an end.  Macerated plums on Thursday.  The brake to a shaking hand.  In the bath of the headlamp is the pasty and the hand that holds it.  The batteries here are strong.  Once we bite through the crust, release the steam, the heat, the wet, something of the ghost and something of the future, things begin to go cold, dry, the batteries here are the only things that are strong.  Tomorrow, I want to lie in bed all day.  I wish I lived closer to the Lake.  I want to lie in bed all day and listen to whitefish court other whitefish.  I want to hear people swimming safely.  It’s good to have a goal.

*

In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, from 1843 through the 1920’s, pure native copper just about leaked from the earth, exploded from it, and towns were established and boomed, and folks ate food and drank liquor and men spread their legs and women spread their legs and with food and liquor and spread legs made descendants who can visit these towns in the name of communion and reunion and union and none, and we call these gatherings heartfelt and we call these gatherings historical, and we use words like ancestry and inheritance and we stand on the rock piles and bluffs and tailings of Central Mine and Gay and Mandan and Cliff and Delaware and Phoenix and we eat pasties not because we need to, but because they are some sort of souvenir, some kind of shaft that leads, definitively down, toward something like heritage or lake-bed, something makeshift, but geologic and collapsible, and we pretend that these towns are not popularly preceded by the word ghost.

*

The old Phoenix church, in 1858, was called St. Mary’s.  Later, it was disassembled and rebuilt and renamed The Church of the Assumption.

*

We assume there are meanings in names.

*

Superior derives from the Latin superiorum or superus, meaning: situated above, or upper.  Lake Superior has the greatest depth of the Great Lakes, which means something to a miner.  It’s something to one day descend into.  It’s a milestone.  Lake Superior has the highest elevation of the Great Lakes, though Uncle backfloats upon it.  To the drowned, Lake Superior lives up to its name.

*

Here, to float upon is better than to float within.  The upper implies the angelic, though implication is often misleading.

*

The Ontonagon Boulder, of the Upper Peninsula’s village of Old Victoria, is a 3,708-pound massif of native copper.  It can now be found in the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, where, should a tourist decide not to read the exhibit’s plastic 3×5 placard, he or she will wonder about the specialness of this big, ugly rock.

*

Ontonagon, in the Chippewa language, translates as “Lost Bowl.”  Regarding the pasty, I’m not sure what this should mean.  Regarding the Lake, this is convoluted metaphor at best.

*

According to a travel brochure titled, Visit the Upper Peninsula of Michigan’s world famous “Copper Country,” Old Victoria is “a very picturesque ghost town.”

*

The atomic weight of copper is 63.55 g/mol.  The atomic weight of iron is 55.85.  The atomic weight of sulfur is 32.07.  The atomic weight of gold is 196.97.  The average pasty—a baked pastry shell, half of which includes a savory dinner of stewed meat and root vegetable, half of which includes dessert—weighs two pounds.  The average human lung weighs about 14 ounces, so much heavier than this underground air, so much lighter than the pasty.

*

Lake Superior is comparatively obese, but not lazy.

*

While many immigrant miners in the Upper Peninsula were from Cornwall, many more were Finns, Austrian, Croatian, Italian, Canadian, and Swedish.  Each group impacted the pasty’s regional evolution, with seasoning, with ingredient.  Culinary arguments were fierce. Regardless, each version varied little (those who lived near Superior often used lakewater in the dough), and each version was easily portable, heavy and hearty, but clutch-able in one hand, and each version, in the cold of the deep, could be heated up on a shovel held over the candleflame of the miner’s headlamp.  The pasties are cooking.  The canaries are screaming.  Someone coughs.  That means they’ve not yet drowned.

*

The U.P. pasty, when compared to the Cornish variety, contained larger chucks of vegetable, a higher ratio of vegetable to meat, encased in a thinner crust.

*

The U.P. pasty as thin-skinned, even in all of this winter, the weather, and the water, closer to the blood.

*

The U.P. pasty as a little of this, a little of that, as Yiddish, as Fanagolo, as Esperanto, and the language through which we all can communicate up here/down here, as a means to understanding, as overused symbology, as cliché, as Kumbaya, as all things savory sharing space with all things sweet.  As reminder.  As anchor.  As something even a really big lake can’t wash away.

*

Often, a homestead requires leaving home, and then never leaving the homestead.  A life of two places.  For the subsequent generations, it requires never leaving home in the first place.  The pasty as perspective, encased in a hard crust.  As riding a snowmobile before you can walk.  As backfloating over 100 bodies.  As your great-grandson doing the same thing.  As I remember when I…

*

An 1861 proverb proclaimed that the more ingredients one crams into the pasty, the more protection one has from the devil, as the devil may fear that he may end up as just another ingredient for the filling.

*

In Superior National Forest, over two dozen attractions—islands, campgrounds, inland lakes, waterfalls, trails, jumps (the Devil’s Washtub jump, while technically outside of the Forest’s boundaries, claims lives each year as folks attempt to leap from a cliff, over a series of jagged rocks, into Lake Superior)—are named after the devil.

*

On the playgrounds of the turn of the century U.P., schoolboys would sing:

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John

Ate a pasty five feet long,

Bit it once, bit it twice,

Oh, my Lord, it’s full of mice.

*

The pasty sits fixed in the hands of the miner, poised, poisoned.  The Lake unfixes itself, runs from the hands we eat with.

*

Breton may have said, They lowered a humpback into a copper mine to determine

the quality of its air.  The human lung can hold only six liters of breath, which is nothing compared to Lake Superior. Where are the headlamps when you need them?  My uncle took them into the mine.  He says, Whales are the canaries of the ocean.  He says, the pasty is no kind of savior.

*

Regarding the Quincy Mine Shelter, from the aforementioned brochure, “Hopefully this historic site will be restored.”  An eating toward.  Before we die, we take the elevator up.  As with surfacing from the Lake, it takes a few seconds to recognize the sun.

*

The pasty as doubling-back on itself, as a confused plot line, as a figure-eight, Möbius strip, infinity, a late bite downward, toward the sweet, the sweet being closest to the hands.

*

In the candle-shadow of the pasty and the birds and the shovel, coughing, we can’t tell where umbra becomes penumbra becomes antumbra.  We can’t tell hands from feet.  We can’t tell if that’s a shadow dying, or a man.  We can’t tell if the body is broken, or celestial.  We can’t tell that Lake Superior has been called the Earth’s youngest major feature—at only 10,000 years old, a side-effect of last retreat of the glaciers.  We can’t tell that the Lake is tantruming like a little sister, can’t tell that retreat is sometimes an answer and, to a superior lake, a Big Bang.  We can’t tell that our uncles, still young, look so old.

*

So, we eat.  And, in swimming after eating, test our ability to stave off the drowning.  On the beach, the smell of cooking dinner.  Of greasy waxpaper unwrapping from pastry shells.  In them, the sounds of lakes masquerading as oceans.  Sometimes, the sun is out.  In it, we must come up to the surface of the earth.  We must retreat to the shore.  It’s lighter there.

About the Author

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of Pot Farm (The University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books), Barolo (The University of Nebraska Press), Warranty in Zulu (Barrow Street Press), The Morrow Plots (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books), Sagittarius Agitprop (Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books), and the chapbooks Four Hours to Mpumalanga (Pudding House Publications), and Aardvark (West Town Press).  Recent work appears in The New Republic, The Huffington Post, Field, Epoch, AGNI, The Iowa Review, Seneca Review, DIAGRAM, Black Warrior Review, The Normal School, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, North American Review, Pleiades, Crab Orchard Review, The Best Food Writing, The Best Travel Writing, Creative Nonfiction, Prairie Schooner, Hotel Amerika, Gastronomica, and others. He was born and raised in Illinois, and currently teaches Creative Writing in the MFA Program at Northern Michigan University, where he is the Nonfiction Editor of Passages North.  This winter, he prepared his first batch of whitefish-thimbleberry ice cream.

- Martin Ott

Who has been a major influence on your writing?

Influences are a matter of adolescence and early adulthood. After that, if you’re real, you’re on your own path. American prosody comes from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and that’s where I started. I read widely and had an excellent education in British and Irish literature in the Honors program at the University of Michigan and in grad school at Northwestern. In the latter, I began an intensive exploration of American literature which I continued after I left to work.

Allen Ginsberg opened my eyes to the possibility of writing far more directly and emotionally out of my own experience and politics than I had been led to believe was something that could be done.

I’d say the news is a far more extensive influence on me, the economy, what happens to people I know or don’t know but feel for than any “influence” of the sort you mean. I’m not in the academy but out in the regular world. At the moment about half my town is out of electricity from the snow hurricane – people without heat or water. NSTAR seems in no hurry to get them back up. I just wrote a poem about that. That’s my influence of the moment.

Can you give us insight into your creative process?

My creative process is to sit down at the computer and work. I write most days I am not on the road for gigs. More ideas swarm in me than I can get to before they evaporate. I write. I read aloud. My cats approve but often I don’t. I revise. I try again. I revise again. I turn the poem about trying different line breaks, verse paragraph or stanza breaks, beginnings, endings. I look at my imagery with a cold eye. I put the title through several revisions, usually. The first time I perform the poem, I find the weak spots and go home and rewrite again.

How does writing both fiction and poetry impact the other genre?

There’s very little cross over between the fiction and the poetry. Generally an idea comes with the genre attached. One exception happened recently when I jotted notes while I was doing a miniresidency. I thought it would be a poem. Then when I sat down to write it, it became an essay instead. It was just too prosy and diffuse to be a poem, but it was something I wanted to write about. “Gentrification and its discontents.”

The other exception is when I am doing research for a novel or nonfiction, often I experience things that produce poetry. They are about our experiences during research and have no direct connection with the prose work. Examples: Slides from my recent European trip in Available Light; the poem “The happy man” in The Hunger Moon.

Can you share an example of overcoming adversity to keep your writing dream alive?

I left graduate school and worked part time living in a slum apartment in Chicago in order to write what I needed to. Staying in academia was stifling my poetry and fiction. It was a hard life. I dressed from rummage sales, ate whatever was cheap, dealt with the experience that nobody but me took me seriously as a writer. That went on for some years. I could not publish serious fiction about being a woman at that time. My poetry got published long before my fiction could. The world had to change from women’s liberation before I could break through with my fiction beyond an occasional short story. I could not make a living from my writing until I was 32. I have done so ever since.

What project(s) are you working on now?

I have a contract with PM Press for a book of short stories. Some of them I wrote years ago, but once I had the contract, I began writing new ones. I’ve written eight so far and hope to write a couple more before the book is due. I have been sending them out and getting them into various zines. I am enjoying working on short fiction very much. It feels good to get back into a genre after two decades away from it.

My agent has a new novel I completed just before I started writing short stories.

I am writing a lot of poetry, as usual.

As I said, I wrote an essay two weeks ago. I am not sure what to do with it.  Usually I only write essays when approached to do so.  Haven’t figured out where to send it.

What is something about you that writers and readers may not know?

I am an avid gardener. Ira Wood and I grow almost all our own vegetables (exceptions being red onions, avocados, artichokes) and bush fruit, sour cherries and pears. I freeze, dry, can. Put up enough paste tomatoes & 4 kinds of tomato sauce so we never have to buy any. I planted what has become a rhododendron forest years ago. Many beautiful trees. A rose garden (no hybrid teas; no bushes requiring poisons) – I actually know a lot about roses and freely give advice. Lots of daylilies. Very few annuals except marigolds & sunflowers that I start from seed. I actually start almost everything we grow from seed, except perennials. Our ornamental gardens are like British cottage gardens, a mix of perennials and bushes. I grow lots of herbs for cooking and medicinal uses.

I’m a very good cook. These days I mostly cook Mediterranean – all the way around.  Provencal, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Middle Eastern, Moroccan. The exception is on the Jewish holidays when I do some traditional Ashkenazi dishes as well as Sephardic and Mitzraki. For over thirty years, I have conducted a Seder for friends and now into the third generation. I update my Haggadah a bit every year and do most of the cooking. We no longer hold it in our dining room as we only have room for fifteen and it has grown far beyond that.

I find that gardening and cooking make a good accompaniment to writing. The rewards are physical and it’s good to do something besides sit on my ass in front of a computer.

About the Author

Marge Piercy is the author of seventeen novels including The New York Times Bestseller Gone To Soldiers; the National Bestsellers Braided Lives and The Longings of Women, and the classic Woman on the Edge of Time; eighteen volumes of poetry including The Hunger Moon and The Moon is Always Female, and a critically acclaimed memoir Sleeping with Cats. Born in center city Detroit, educated at the University of Michigan, the recipient of four honorary doctorates, she has been a key player in some of the major progressive battles of our time, including the anti-Vietnam war and the women’s movement, and more recently an active participant in the resistance to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Poet Kent Shaw is the next in our series of wanderers. Kent’s peripatetic nature has led him out to sea and back again. Landlubbers in West Virginia have got him now, and here’s what he has to say about it.

- David Schuman

Where do you originally come from?

I want to say St. Louis. Because it makes me proud to say I’m from the Midwest. I understand for some people Midwesterners are dull. But what’s really dull is Oklahoma, where I spent at least half of my childhood. Everything in Oklahoma is flat. The oldest mountain range in the United States, the Arbuckles, are in Oklahoma, and before the state could be accepted into the union, it had to agree to push the mountains into the earth so that the whole state would be an undying, uniform flatness. There is nothing mythic in Oklahoma. I think I might have broken my fingers in Oklahoma trying to dig up red clay. That’s the most remarkable part of Oklahoma.

But I am from St. Louis. Because the eight years I lived in Oklahoma, I wished I could live in St. Louis. And when I was discharged from the Navy I returned to St. Louis. And, honestly, my wife and I have established a careful account for my emotional immaturity where you have to subtract 8 years from my age to find my Actual Human Maturity. In Actual Human Maturity terms, my years from 24-35 were still formative, like they were on the edge of my childhood. And since I was living in St. Louis during those years, it is undeniably proven that I am of St. Louis stock.

What geographical area would you say defines you as a person and maybe also as a writer? This can be a specific place (New York, Cleveland) or a geographical element (mountains, prairies, ocean). How has this place or element defined your work, if it all?

I like oceans. I am writing poems for a third book right now, and there are oceans everywhere. Moving in. Imposing themselves. Employing financial derivatives. Posing for sculptures. The title to my second book (in manuscript) is Gigantic. The title to my first book (published) is Calenture. And these are both codes for OCEANS EVERYWHERE, MOTHER FUCKERS!! The first time I saw the ocean at sea was in the middle of the North Atlantic. We were steaming to the Persian Gulf. I had followed some friends up to the top of the Tower to look out at the ocean. And there aren’t words for what I saw. The ocean is gigantic. It is blue. But not the blue you’re thinking. It’s a deep blue. The darkest blue. The blue that you reach for from 10-stories at the top of the Tower on the U.S.S Eisenhower, but I assure you that’s still not the blue that you’re thinking. I will be in love with that blue for the rest of my life.

Describe where you are now–describe a few things you’ve learned about this new place that have surprised/frightened/frustrated you?

I live in West Virginia now. And I don’t belong here. And this isn’t an I’m-supposed-to-be-from-the-Midwest kind of non-belonging. West Virginia feels like a foreign country. And I don’t know why that is. But I am not of these people. I felt the same way when I lived in Houston. I am not, will not be, cannot be, have no wish to be Texan. Even a Houston, Texan. I could comfortably spectate on Texans. They are fascinatingly arrogant. But there is something about West Virginians, and I haven’t learned how I am supposed to fit among them.

I am frightened by the poverty in this state. It is insidious. It is unrelenting. I looked up the median income for Huntington, where I live, and it’s a third of the national average. This is no joke. The people who have money live in the mountains so that they are looking down on the city. I used to mock that “noble steed” they put at the doorway for P. F. Chang’s. I thought it was a piece of suburban kitsch. A couple weeks ago, my wife and I took a day trip to Lexington, and I thought the horse aesthetically pleasing.

How has your current location filtered into your work or your writing life?

The geography of the state is gorgeous. I drive 45 minutes to work. The sunrise over the mountains is beautiful. The trees, bare of leaves, standing in formation at either side of the highway are beautiful. Last year leaving a Starbucks, I saw a herd of 20 deer leaping along the edge of a mountain, and I felt a rush of life. I don’t understand mountains, which is to say I feel humbled and troubled and awed being among them.

Before we moved here, there were mountains in my poems, but they were the Rocky Mountains. My mother lives in Denver. Coming here the fall of last year, the mountains started showing up everywhere in my writing. I suppose mountains and oceans are the primary population of my poems. Essentially I put anything that’s bigger than me in my poems. And since I’m not really that tall, that usually includes most people I meet. And a lot of these people are from West Virginia. And I keep trying to figure out what they’re doing there. And what they think of me.

About the Author 

Kent Shaw’s first book Calenture was published by University of Tampa Press. His poems have since appeared in The Believer, Ploughshares, Boston Review, TriQuarterly and elsewhere. He is currently an Assistant Professor at West Virginia State University.

Read Kent’s review of Murder Ballad by Jane Springer at The Rumpus here:

http://therumpus.net/2013/02/murder-ballad-by-jane-springer/