Single Female Writer Seeks Kindred Spirit For Word Play and Satisfying Inspiration
It’s Valentine’s Day. The one day of the year we’re all forced to take stock of our love life, whether we want to or not. Luckily, I’ve had more than my share of valentines over the years and am now free to seek another kind of relationship—one without the lasting implications of a box of chocolates or the disappointment of wilting flowers.
As much as I tried to avoid it though, hearts and quotes from Emily Dickenson broke through my Facebook wall to mix with Covid lunacy and impending war. I yearned for a shot of inspiration. Something to inoculate me to this world gone mad. Where to turn for what ails my heart? A therapist? No, a novelist. A priest? No, a poet. A cardiologist? No, a romance writer. You can see a pattern forming.
I was in need of a kindred spirit who could understand what my heart needed. Someone to point the way to the ethereal. To give me hope before February 14th came around. And just in time, I found my kindred spirit! In fact, more than one, in several places. And I didn’t even have to place a personal ad.
A Place for Hungry Spirits
First, along with forty or so other souls hungry for it, I encountered all the inspiration I could handle, for nine straight days, in the virtual residency of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Carlow University. It truly was a smorgasbord of inspiration—man/woman, gay/straight, black/brown/white, young/old—with metaphors dripping like honey.
Brian Leyden, our Irish author.
To start us off, the dulcet tones of Irish author Brian Leyden, a long-distance faculty member and a come-hither temptation for the June residency in Ireland (in person, we were just told). He left us wanting more. He is memoirist, short story writer, novelist, screenwriter and editor with recent publications, Sweet Old World: New and Selected Stories, The Home Place, and Summer of ’63.
Brian was followed by a lineup of visiting authors that kept us all in a spin. Like Clint Smith, writer at The Atlantic and author of the narrative nonfiction #1 New York Times Bestseller, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. His cross-country tour of America’s slave history and his ability to speak with unlikely individuals, like the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and get them to talk back, was stunning. A timely discussion. His courage, clarity and confidence stirred me to my bones.
Christine Sneed, author of four books, most recently the story collection, The Virginity of Famous Men, and the novel, Paris, He Said, talked about creating vivid characters through description, dialogue, thoughts and actions. I was all ears. Or maybe it was my characters who were all ears, nudging me to take note.
Richard Blanco has been on the Carlow faculty for a few years. His name should ring a bell. He was Obama’s inaugural poet, the fifth inaugural poet in U.S. history, the youngest, the first Latino, immigrant, and gay person to serve in such a role. His rise on the national stage (think Amanda Gorman, Biden’s inaugural poet) has been thrilling to watch. Check out these four notable collections of his work: How to Love a Country, City of a Hundred Fires, Directions to The Beach of the Dead, and Looking for The Gulf Motel, which was highlighted in the PBS series, “Poetry in America” (see my comments below in that section).
Francine Prose blew me away. I mean, if you’re going to be a prose writer and you somehow end up with that last name, one has to expect big things. She does not disappoint. Prose has authored twenty-one works of fiction, including the highly acclaimed Mister Monkey, and two New York Times bestsellers: Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 and Reading Like a Writer (this classic is sitting on top of my to-read stack).
I’ve left out so many, including notable poets, novelists, short story writers and creative nonfiction writers, all in one place and with the sole goal of inspiring us. Like the Carlow MFA faculty: Joseph Bathanti, Diane Glancy, Gerry LaFemina, Karin Lin-Greenberg, Lee Ann Roripaugh and Judith Vollmer. And alums, who gave all of us students hope with their outstanding work. And each of us students was given the opportunity to read our work—and the amazing raw talent bursting forth was inspiring and intimidating.
Joseph Bathani - my advisor at Carlow
But for me, the cherry on top of this magnificent orgy of literary talent is the advisor I was matched with; a match made in lettered Heaven—Joseph Bathanti. He’s a Pittsburgh boy from East Liberty (the title of one of his novels). In addition to serving on the faculty of Carlow’s MFA program, he is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, where he has taught for forty years. Professor Bathanti (or Joseph as he insists on being called) came up in Pittsburgh a few years behind me, so he understands my generation and ground of being. And he’s steeped in Appalachian culture and history, just perfect for my novel for which he’ll be advising me. In addition to his literary talent and critiquing skills, Joseph is a kind, self-effacing, decent human being who is a bit of a rebel. Thank you, algorithm, for a good match.
A Word Lover’s Hideout– Thank you, PBS!
I found a hot spot for connection in an unlikely place—PBS’ Poetry In America. There was one morsel more tastier than the other.
Like our own Richard Blanco, this time offering up his poem, "Looking for The Gulf Motel." Host Elisa New, Gloria Estefan and a chorus of Cuban Americans and middle school students explored this work that recalls Blanco’s Cuban-American family vacation to the sparkling sands of Marco Island in 1970s Florida. Each one could relate to his portrait of family and home.
Blanco’s is one of many tantalizing poems in this three-season series examined and commented on by individuals from outside the literary world, who are touched by the words in unique ways. Like planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton, composer DJ Spooky, geologist Daniel Schrag, and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. These disparate individuals are catapulted into the cosmos as they consider A.R. Ammons’s poem, “Cascadilla Falls.” I traveled along with them as they reflected on Ammon’s simple walk along cascading falls connecting Cornell University to downtown Ithaca, New York and their discussion transformed a simple rock and flowing water into metaphors for our complex universe.
Walt Whitman’s poem, “The Dresser,” about his experience as a nurse during the Civil War and Evie Shockley’s poem, “you can say that again, Billie,” inspired by Billie Holiday’s song, “Strange Fruit,” bring a satisfying balance to Season Three.
But my favorite is the examination of * Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics and music, “Finishing the Hat,” in Season Two of this series. To explore the poetry of this famous song, the host included two Broadway performers who starred in Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, other Sondheim collaborators and a staff writer from The New Yorker. Their discussion, as the host says, “explores Aristotle’s question about poetry’s relation to the other arts and especially to the theater, where music, movement, visual spectacle and an audience raise written language to another level.” Be still my heart.
* I think at some point I’ll hold a contest to see how many times readers can find mention of Sondheim in my blog posts, kind of like a Where’s Waldo. This is Sondheim entry #2. :-)
And finally, The one that got away.
We’ve all experienced this—a book so elusive that you can’t get a good grip on it. For me, it was E.L. Doctorow’s City of God. I tried and failed more than twenty years ago. But I kept it on my shelf all this time. For some reason, whenever I would purge old books to make room for the new, I couldn’t let it go. The book jacket would whisper, “I’m not through with you.” So, I wrote it onto my reading list for my Carlow MFA program, like a teenage girl scribbling a sweet boy’s name over and over. This time, I read it! I analyzed it. And I wrote up my thoughts for my advisor. Although I agree with the reviews—not his best; maybe not even a novel—as I read Doctorow waxing poetic about the nature of God, the world, humanity, I felt his words enter me in a way that no box of chocolates or red, red roses ever could. I felt a lasting kind of love, complicated and enraging, and yet stirring in places I had always only hoped to be touched. Timing is everything.
And so, dear friends, on this Valentine’s Day,
I offer you this—
May you find your perfect match, whoever or whatever it turns out to be.
Mine is the written word and those beautiful souls who rise above and
show us what is possible.