Rebecca Siegel

November 1, 2020

Calls for Submission, Deadlines, Events, Newsletter, Workshops, The Dipper

The Dipper - November 2020

Rebecca Siegel

November 1, 2020

Calls for Submission, Deadlines, Events, Newsletter, Workshops, The Dipper

"The Dipper" is our monthly newsletter, where we highlight readings, events, calls for submission, and other literary-related news for the coming month. If you have news or events to share, let us know!

November News

Thank you to everyone who attended Sierra Crane Murdoch’s talk in October. What a wonderful night! A huge thanks to Allie Levy of Still North Books for hosting via Crowdcast and to Angela Evancie of Brave Little State for interviewing Sierra. If you missed the event, you can still catch the replay. Don’t forget to pick up your copy of Sierra’s fantastic book, Yellow Bird.

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In case you missed them, in October we added three new interviews to our blog with writers whose recently released books we really love.

First, we welcomed a guest interviewer: poet, teacher and bookstore owner, Rena Mosteirin, who interviewed poet Alexandria Hall about her evocative debut poetry collection, Field Music (Ecco, October 6), which won the 2019 National Poetry Series award selected by Rosanna Warren. In their discussion, Alexandria and Rena talk about the musical quality of the poems in Field Music, the influence of writing in Vermont, and the best writing advice Alexandria’s ever gotten in a workshop.

We also interviewed writer Meredith Hall about her first novel, Beneficence (Godine, October 20), a quiet, unputdownable novel that focuses on the Senters, a farming family in rural Maine over the course of many years. Reminiscent of Wendell Berry and Marilynne Robinson, Hall’s writing is truly beautiful. Read our interview with Meredith to learn how the Senter family came into being, the role of light in her book, and what books she’s really loved recently.

And we interviewed Elizabeth Powell about her latest collection of poetry, Atomizer (LSU Press, September 9), an expansive, honest, and often very funny exploration of life and love in the digital age. Whether she’s writing about the perils and humor of online dating, the insidious workings of capitalism in our cultural and political lives, or her childhood memories of perfume and fashion, these poems are intelligent, accessible, and riveting. Read our interview with Liz to learn how her posh Parisian stepmother provided her early education in perfume, and the connection between her grandfather and Robert Frost.

p.s. Did you know that you can see a list of everything we’ve ever published on our blog on our handy Blog Post Directory? You can easily find back issues of The Dipper, all of our interview posts, reading lists, Friday Reads suggestions, and more!

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After a very busy several months of virtual events and other projects, we’re looking forward to having a quiet end to the year. Among other things, fewer projects means we’ll have more time to spend reading our final Slow Club Book Club selection, Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk.

But never fear! We are busy making plans for next year. In fact, we’re getting ready to announce a new Constellation community writing project in early 2021. Newsletter subscribers will be the first to find out the details.

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As this newsletter goes to press, our thoughts, of course, are turning to the events of early November (please tell us you all have voted or have a voting plan), the imminent winter, and the coming holiday season, which, like the rest of 2020 will be oh-so-strange.

One thing we know we can do for ourselves, our loved ones, and our local community is to give each other beautiful, meaningful (and sometimes distracting) books we purchase from independent bookstores. In the coming weeks, we’ll be highlighting some of our favorite books by local authors, our favorite books of 2020, and some favorites of our local independent booksellers. Watch our Twitter and Instagram feeds in November to see these special holiday book shopping suggestions.

November’s Shooting Stars

A cool literary find from each of us to help light up your month!

If you haven’t seen the new Sundog Poetry Center website, I encourage you to take a look. The redesign is wonderful. While there, you can check out their new virtual event series, Two Poets, Two Books, and read more about the Vermont Book Award. —Shari

Do you know Emergence Magazine? I landed there accidentally by way of a series of links that led me to this magical multimedia poem by Forrest Gander and Katie Holten. And then the “Language Keepers” podcast series about the struggle for indigenous language survival in California caught my little linguistic eye, and, yeah, I think I’ll be spending some time there. —Rebecca

November Highlights

Christa Parravani will be in conversation virtually with author Merritt Tierce to discuss Parravani’s new memoir, Loved and Wanted, via Northshire Live on November 10 at 6:00 pm.

Poets Elizabeth Powell and Anna Maria Hong will read as part of the new Sundog Poetry virtual series, “Two Poets, Two Books,” on November 11 at 7:00 pm.

On November 12 at 4:45 pm, join poets Forrest Gander and Nicole Sealey for an online reading and Q&A via Dartmouth College’s Leslie Center for the Humanities.

Terese Mailhot is giving a virtual reading and craft talk through Vermont Studio Center on November 13 and 14, respectively. The reading will begin at 7:00 pm and the craft talk starts at 10:00 am. (Slow Club Book Club members, take note!)

Poets Chen Chen and Jennifer Militello read as part of the virtual Loom Poetry Series via Toadstool Bookshop on November 15 at 4:30 pm.

On November 19 at 7:00 pm, François S. Clemmons, who played Officer Clemmons on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, reads from his memoir as part of Virtual Bookstock 2020.

Shawn Wong and Miciah Bay Gault will participate in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Fall Reading Series on November 20 at 5:30 pm. The event includes a round-table discussion on publishing with several agents from Folio Literary Management.

Visit our calendar for detailed information about these events and more!

Worth a Listen

What a treat to hear Ocean Vuong read a new poem (“Beautiful Short Loser”) and talk about his writing practice on In the Studio.
Rumaan Alam talks to Christopher and Drew of So Many Damn Books about his latest novel, Leave the World Behind.
Ali Smith talks with Linn Ullmann about her seasonal quartet of novels on the How to Proceed podcast.

We're Looking Forward to These November Releases

Theorem, by Elizabeth Bradfield and Antonia Contro (Poetry Northwest Editions, November 1)
Aphasia, by Mauro Javier Cardenas (FSG, November 3)
To Be a Man, by Nicole Krauss (Harper, November 3)
The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans (Riverhead, November 10)
Loved and Wanted, by Christa Parravani (Henry Holt & Co, November 10)
Self-Portrait, by Celia Paul (NYRB, November 10)
The Sun Collective, by Charles Baxter (Pantheon, November 17)

Calls For Submission and Upcoming Deadlines

Bennington Unbound
November 15 to December 15
This four-week intensive online courses in fiction and nonfiction is geared toward current college and college-ready students considering an academic gap year or looking to supplement their current coursework. The courses are taught by Bennington’s award-winning graduate and undergraduate writing and literature faculty. Weekly live video class meetings foster an intimate seminar experience. Web-based discussion forums and unique multimedia resources extend the classroom community. All students will write both creatively and critically. Students earn one college credit per course.
Deadline: November 8 | Cost: $600/course | Details

New England Review
New England Review is open for nonfiction submissions and for their digital “Confluences” series. For nonfiction, NER accepts a broad range, including dramatic works, essays in translation, interpretive and personal essays, critical reassessments, cultural criticism, travel writing, and environmental writing. The word limit is 20,000. For “Confluences,” they are seeking brief essays (500 to 100 words) in response to a book, play, poem, film, painting, sculpture, building, or other work of art.
Deadline: November 15 | Details

Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Prize
Open to anyone writing in the English language, the Sunken Garden prize includes includes a cash award of $1,000 in addition to publication by Tupelo Press, 25 copies of the winning title, a book launch, and national distribution with energetic publicity and promotion. Manuscripts are judged anonymously and all finalists will be considered for publication. This year’s final judge is Mark Bibbins.
Deadline: November 30 | Details

Bloodroot Literary Magazine
Bloodroot is now accepting new, unpublished poetry, fiction, and essays for its spring 2021 issue. Send a Word document including 3 to 5 pages of poetry or 10 to 12 pages of fiction and nonfiction. For anything outside that scope, like an experimental form or digital project, please send a one-page proposal and they will be in touch if we want to see more.
Deadline: December 15 | Details

The Dorset Prize for Poetry
Tupelo Press is seeking submissions of previously unpublished, full-length poetry manuscripts. The prize is open to anyone writing in the English language. This year’s judge is Tyehimba Jess. The winner receives a $3000 cash prize and a week-long residency at MASS MoCA, in addition to publication by Tupelo Press, 20 copies of the winning title, a book launch, and national distribution with energetic publicity and promotion.
Deadline: December 31 | Details

Vermont Writers’ Prize
The Vermont Writers’ Prize is accepting essays, short stories, plays, or poems on the subject of Vermont: its people, its places, its history, or its values—the choice is yours! Entries must be unpublished and 1,500 words or less. The Writers' Prize is open to all Vermont residents and students except for employees of Green Mountain Power and Vermont Magazine. Please submit only one entry.
Deadline: January 1 | Details

The Frost Place Chapbook Competition
The competition is open to any poet writing in English. The selected winner’s chapbook will be published by Bull City Press in the summer following the competition. The winner receives 10 complimentary copies (from a print run of 300), a $250 prize, full scholarship to attend the Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place, including room and board, and gives a featured reading from the chapbook at the Seminar. $28 entry fee.
Deadline: January 5 | Details

Zig Zag Lit Mag Issue.10
Submissions are open for Issue.10 for those who live, labor, or loiter in Addison County, Vermont. Zig Zag accepts submissions in any genre and topic, including fiction, nonfiction, dramatic forms, and poetry. They also accept art. You can submit up to three pieces of writing and/or art.
Deadline: January 5 | Details

Crossroads Magazine
The independent, student-run magazine based out of Burlington, Vermont, accepts very short fiction and poetry, 300 words or fewer. Submissions should be in Word or typed directly into an email. No PDFs, please.
Deadline: rolling submissions | Details

Dartmouth Poet in Residence
The Frost Place’s Dartmouth Poet in Residence program is a six-to-eight-week residency in poet Robert Frost’s former farmhouse. The residency begins July 1 and ends August 15, and includes an award of $1,000 from The Frost Place and an award of $1,000 from Dartmouth College. The recipient of the Dartmouth Poet in Residence will have an opportunity to give a series of public readings across the region, including at Dartmouth College and The Frost Place.
Deadline: none given | Details

Green Mountains Review
GMR is accepting fiction and experimental and hybrid poems. The editors are open to a wide range of styles and subject matter. Please submit a cover letter and include up to 25 pages of prose or up to five poems. $3 submission fee.
Deadline: none given | Details

The Hopper
The environmental literary magazine from Green Writers Press, is accepting submissions of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. They are interested in work that offers new and different articulations of the human experience in nature, specifically nature writing that is psychologically honest about the environmental crisis and the impacts of mechanical modernity.
Deadline: none given | Details

Isele Magazine
Isele Magazine is seeking submissions of essays, fiction, poetry, art, and photography. You may submit up to 8,000 words of prose, six pages of poetry, or one long poem.
Deadline: rolling submissions | Details

Mount Island digital magazine
To focus on their mission of supporting rural LGBTQ+ and POC voices, most of the submission categories are open only to folks who identify as LGBTQ+ and/or POC and who currently live in or hail from a rural area. They do welcome “allies” who do not identify as LGBTQ+/POC/rural to submit in certain categories, such as interviews, reviews, and blog articles. When such categories are open for “ally submissions,” they are labeled clearly as such.
Deadline: open year-round | Details

Nightingale Review
Nightingale accepts and celebrate all types of literary creative expression from queer authors, including poetry, plays, general fiction, nonfiction essays, and book/movie/music reviews. Both established and unpublished authors welcome.
Deadline: none given | Details

Six-Word Quarantine Stories
Do you have a six-word story about your quarantine to share? Tell yours on social media with the hashtag #quarantinesix, and tag @vtartscouncil so they can share your story, too.
Deadline: none given | Details

Three By Five
Share a small moment—anonymously—that has altered the path of your life. Record it on a 3" x 5" card and mail it to PO Box 308, Etna, NH, 03750. Or, take a photo of your card and email it to .
Deadline: none | Details

Listening in Place Sound Archive
The Vermont Folklife Center invites you to send in recorded interviews and sounds of daily life in an effort to open hundreds of small windows into the experiences of Vermonters during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Vermont Folklife Center will make these recordings available on their website and social media to foster connection and sharing, and will also archive the recordings for posterity.
Deadline: none | Details

Writing the Land
Writing the Land is a collaboration between local land trusts and poets to help raise awareness for the preservation of land, ecosystems, and biodiversity. Poets and land trusts are being enrolled on a rolling basis. They are especially seeking under-represented poetic and environmental voices, but welcome all poets at any stage of their career and would like everyone to contribute to this project. If you are an interested poet, please fill out the information in the contact form on their website or email Lis McLaughlin at . You will need to submit a 50- to 75-word third-person bio, three pieces of work, and list which locations or regions you are willing to travel to.
Deadline: rolling submissions | Details

Upcoming Workshops and Classes

Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop
Various dates and times
Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop offers a number of online creative writing workshops, including multi-week classes and one-day sessions. Among other workshops, they offer a free online gathering for writers of all levels and genres every first and third Friday of the month. These sessions are a great way to get back into the flow of your work in the supportive presence of other writers. Other workshops beginning in November are on topics that include fiction writing, creating characters, generative translation, memoir, narrative structure, hybrid forms, and much more.
Location: online | Cost: $30 to $275 | Details

Art Meets Expressive Writing Workshop with Vivian Ladd and Joni B. Cole
November 5, 5:30 to 7:00 pm
This workshop fuses explorations of works of art with fun and meaningful expressive writing exercises. No writing experience required, just a willing pen and curious mind.
Location: online | Cost: free | Details

Writing for Healing Workshop with Vicky Fish
Wednesdays, November 11 and 18, December 2, 9, and 16; 6:30 to 8:00 pm
This five-week workshop will create a safe and supportive environment for you to explore your healing through the written word. Through writing we discover and can recover parts of ourselves. Writing taps into our wise unconscious, where healing and hidden resources often reside. Through writing we have a chance to understand our stories and rewrite our stories. During each session, prompts will be offered as the springboard for in-session writing. Sharing will be encouraged but not required. Prompts will also be offered for your own writing between sessions. Preregister by contacting the instructor at .
Location: online | Cost: $165 |

The Fluidity of Memory: Finding Strength in Your Story
November 14, 9:30 am to 12:00 pm
Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Candidate Ruth Amara Okolo is offering a workshop that gives insights into the importance of creative nonfiction. Through an exploration of the elements of the genre, she presents an approach and technique to creating, writing memories that shows life in all its color, description, and realism.
Location: online | Cost: $25 to 65 | Details

Listening in Place - Thanksgiving Family Interviews
November 14: 10:00 am to 12:00 pm
Part of the Vermont Folklife Center’s Listening in Place initiative developed in response to COVID-19, this workshop covers the basics of recording interviews (online, over the phone or in person within your household if it’s safe to do so). It also introduces the VFC’s Sound Archive, where your interviews and documentary recordings may be submitted to be included in this open access, crowdsourced audio collection of Vermonters’ experiences of pandemic and 2020.
Location: online | Cost: by donation | Details

Everyday Poetry: Accessing the Poetry Within
November 15, 9:30 am to 12:00 pm
Enjoy the art of poetry with Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Candidate Sara Stancliffe as she unearths why poetry is a life force and examines poetry as an essence. Prepare to demystify poetry in this workshop by beginning with a low-key discussion on what we think poetry is, where it shows up in our everyday lives, and how we might access poetry to elevate our everyday existence. In this workshop, we’ll share music and collectively enjoy sounds of rhythm. This will be a “come as you are” workshop where no prior poetic experience or vocabulary or even passion is needed.
Location: online | Cost: $25 to 65 | Details

Listening in Place - Building Conversations for Civic Action
December 5, 2:00 to 4:30 pm
This workshop focuses on the crises of 2020 as an opportunity to reflect and learn from the social unrest, vulnerabilities and sacrifices experienced across the state and nation. This workshop will introduce and demonstrate the tools of Listening in Place, an initiative of the Vermont Folklife Center, that was launched at the early stages of the pandemic as a way to share our common experience and to create a record of how Vermonters are responding to this unprecedented time. Now calls to support Black Lives Matter and pledge greater commitments to eradicate racism in all its forms have propelled many of us out of lockdown and to re-evaluate how we stand for justice for our communities. This workshop is an open call for anyone who desires to prioritize these concerns.
Location: online | Cost: by donation | Details

Inner & Outer Weather: Character in Fiction
December 12, 9:30 am to 12:00 pm
Join Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA Candidate Jonathan Calloway as he discusses how our stories’ characters, like ourselves, each carry a lifetime’s worth of experience, much of which the outer world is oblivious. Through generative writing exercises and close readings of excerpts from a wide range of fiction authors, you will investigate how perception can be used as a tool to shape evocative environments, sharpen focus, and redefine the boundary between the individual and the whole. You will have the opportunity to share and receive direct feedback from instructors and fellow participants, as well as acquire a set of tools to further your own unique explorations of the caverns of character development.
Location: online | Cost: $25 to 65 | Details

Rebecca Siegel

October 28, 2020

Interview

Interview: Elizabeth Powell

Rebecca Siegel

October 28, 2020

Interview

Elizabeth Powell’s third poetry collection, Atomizer (LSU Press, September 9, 2020) is an expansive, honest, and often very funny exploration of life and love in the digital age. Whether she’s writing about the perils and humor of online dating, the insidious workings of capitalism in our cultural and political lives, or her childhood memories of perfume and fashion, these poems are intelligent, accessible, and riveting.

As she says in our interview, “Olfaction gets right into our limbic system, which is what makes smell so evocative and provocative.” And she’s so right. As we read these evocative poems, we remembered the scents of our own pasts: the perfumes and aftershaves, the kitchens and streets, the gardens and forests. Thank you, Liz, for sharing this memorable collection with us!

“…I have inhaled
my worldview from the sterility
of Brutalist architecture, schoolrooms
I have sat in. I am having a smell dialogue
with mold and wet earth and sand
that resides in the woods and playground
inside my memory.”

—Elizabeth Powell, from “The Ordinary Odor of Reality”

Liz will be reading as part of Sundog Poetry Center’s virtual “Two Poets, Two Books” series on November 11, at 7:00 pm. She’ll also be giving a virtual reading on November 18 as part of this year’s Wisconsin Book Festival.

Literary North: The poems in Atomizer are blooming with scents of all types. What drew you to write about olfactory experience?

Elizabeth Powell: Olfaction gets right into our limbic system, which is what makes smell so evocative and provocative. Scent can trigger fragments of recollection, a pastiche of past days, as if conjured by a kind of charmed magic. In this book of poems, I wanted to explore how image is relayed through olfaction rather than sight. I think we as poets can sometimes overlook that an image isn’t always visual, but that imagery can be based upon any sense. I like what the Ukrainian born Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector says in her work Água Viva (it is the epigraph to my book): “What am I doing in writing to you? Trying to photograph perfume.”

I have been drawn to the olfactory experience vis-à-vis perfume since my haunted childhood. My posh Parisian stepmother worked in the beauty industry for a French perfume house. My mother worked in the fashion industry, so, between the two, them I was schooled early and often in the fundamentals of fashion and fragrance. They favored the olfactory art of Bal a Versailles by Jean Desprez, the romanticism of Guerlain, and the abstract expressionism of Francis Fabron’s L’Interdit for Givenchy, but I was a Chanel girl.

Anyway, as a very young latchkey kid, I’d drift down to the perfume shop in the village and follow the congenial and charitable shopkeeper, Ingrid, around. I learned by studying her erudition and easy way with customers, the way she wrote receipts in a fabulous script, the way she winked at certain people when they understood they had, alas, found their scent. I was impressed with the magnificence and artifice of the bottles and labels. So years later, as an adult, when I dated a man who was a bit of a perfume scholar, I was lured in. I began to realize the ways in which perfume and olfaction can gaslight us, tell us different narratives than those that are fundamentally true. Sometimes people call this romance, but that’s a mistake. It’s a kind of violence toward reality.

I mean initially perfume or incense was a way to honor God, but capitalism in the shower-in-every-house world has changed that quite a bit. The perfumes of Baudelaire’s day meant something different than they might now. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for mystery and romance, but compounded with advertising, marketing, and online dating, it becomes a vehicle for truth distortion, an Orwellian world of love. I hope my poems are a stay against the confusion, my love letter to Truth.

LN: In the title poem, you ask, "Is it right to write about love during the new regime?" and then you proceed to write quite a bit a out love throughout the book. Did you answer your own question? Is it right?

EP: It’s complicated. It’s not a new question by any means. Poet Paul Celan and poet/playwright Berthold Brecht engaged deeply in that dichotomy/quandary and thought discussion. I tend to side with Celan that we must always write about love because it is the thing that makes us most human. Love is a form of human spirituality. Of course, Brecht is correct also that the writer must interrogate the society’s egregious political and social sins. It is the writer’s duty to chronicle the human experience in all forms, each writer from their distinct vantage point and experience. In some ways, our psychological make-ups are per-ordained by the love we did or did not get as our brains and bodies were developing: that is, the political is personal. Sometimes things are not either/or, but instead are and & and. However, it is a question I continue to ask myself.

I can’t help but think that self-realization is a means to general human progress. The great thing about poetry is that it is prescient, sort of psychic. As one writes a poem one must also simultaneously live the experience in order to explore the question. Sometimes poems show you the thing you could not see in your life before. Writing is generative in so many ways, a way to stay alive, and a stay against impermanence.

LN: Many of your poems explore the current state of our country and the humorous and frustrating roles of technology in our lives. What questions were in your mind as you were working on the poems in Atomizer?

EP: Sometimes we must laugh, so that we don’t cry. Humor is a self-protective stratagem, a kind of its own singing and phrasing. There is a thin distinction between laughing and crying, and it is at the core of our human empathy and ability to process intellectual and emotional information. Personally, when writing some of the poems, I was exploring and living into the question of how much human interaction around love and dating has changed so dramatically over the past 25 years. An important book in my thinking about technology and love is the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s work, In Praise of Love. Badiou’s’ central tenet in that book is that love is a philosophical event whose power lies in collaborative ongoingness, love as a production of Truth. Badiou talks about the advent of online dating as eroding humanity into a kind of consumer fulfillment.

LN: One theme we really enjoyed in this book is the way tiny bits of matter make up the whole: the atoms of perfume dispersed by the atomizer, the pointillism dots in a painting, the events that linger as memories. Is this something you thought a lot about before writing these poems book, or did it arise during the process of writing them?

EP: Thank you for that. I am fascinated by the dispersal and reshaping of form. I love to be an amateur observer of physics. It’s important to me to see and appreciate connectivity. I spent a lot of my growing up hanging out with my scientist, science journalist grandfather, and those walks and talks through art galleries with him really captured my imagination. He became a Unitarian to become a better atheist, and from him I learned how science could inform spirituality.

He helped me to see early on what Frost said about the importance of poetic metaphor, how if you can’t understand metaphor, you are lost in history, lost in science, etc. Even though he was a science guy, Frost had influenced him a lot; as a student at Dartmouth in the 1930’s when Frost visited he drove him around. One of my prized possessions is my grandfather’s signed book of Frost’s poems. But, really, I also think my seeing parts in the whole is from suffering from ocular migraines as a young person, and seeing dots, which seemed to be the building blocks of visual space, float about me, endlessly.

LN: Perfume and certain smells seem to invite memories much like the way taste functions in Proust. How does smell influence memory in your poems?

EP: Smell and memory narrate the fragments of our lives we can’t or don’t want to forget. They are the vehicles for nostalgia. One book on perfume I found fascinating is The Secret of Scent, by Luca Turin, who is known for the vibration theory of olfaction. Turin, a perfume and fragrance industry authority, is a biophysicist interested in bioelectronics. In The Secret of Scent he talks about the way in which smell and memory work together in a way I find intellectually pleasing:

“The top notes, the first ones to fly out, say it is still early in the evening that feels full of promise. Next come the heart notes, where the perfumer’s art really shows itself, where fragrance tries (like us) to be as distinctive, beautiful and intelligent as possible. Lastly, by three am the perfume has literally boiled down to its darkest, heaviest molecules at a time when our basest instincts, whether for sleep or other hobbies, manifest themselves.”

That really captures essence (in all its definitions) in regards to perfume.

LN: The poems in this collection really speak to each other, more so than any collection we’ve read recently. What was putting the collection together like? Do you enjoy moving the poems around to get the sequence right?

EP: Poems in a collection are always in conversation, you are so right. I find it an enjoyable exercise to move poems around when putting a collection together to see how they speak to one another. The poet’s job at that point is to eavesdrop on the conversation the poems are having with each other, because that is what will deepen and create greater meaning, It is like fashion, how you can change the feeling of an outfit by letting different pieces speak to one another. Artists do this with images, especially in diptychs and triptychs and so forth. Putting this collection together was difficult on a personal level. Each time I thought the book was finished, some life experience would turn up that I’d have to work to understand and process through the poems. I guess that’s why my mother always said: It is always darkest before the dawn.

Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of three books of poems and a novel. Most recent is Atomizer just out from Louisiana State University Press. Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances won the 2015 Anhinga Robert Dana Prize, and was named a “Books We Love 2016” by The New Yorker. Her first book, The Republic of Self, was a New Issue First Book Prize winner, selected by C.K. Williams. Her novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, was published in the winter of 2019 in the U.K. Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Poetry Review, Brooklyn Vol. 1, The Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Electric Literature, Seneca Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University.

Rebecca Siegel

October 20, 2020

Interview

Interview: Meredith Hall

Rebecca Siegel

October 20, 2020

Interview

Meredith Hall’s first novel, Beneficence, focuses on the Senters, a farming family in rural Maine over the course of many years. This is a quiet novel, one attuned to both the changing seasons of the natural world as well as the changing emotional landscapes of the characters. It is a novel that considers grief, forgiveness, family, work, and love. Reminiscent of Wendell Berry and Marilynne Robinson, Hall’s writing is truly beautiful. What a pleasure it was to be in the world of this book! We are grateful to Joshua Bodwell at Godine for putting this book into our hands and highly recommend you add Beneficence to your autumn reading list.

Meredith Hall will be the guest of honor at the virtual Literary Lunch with author Simon Van Booy on Wednesday, November 18 at 12:00 pm, hosted by Portland Public Library and Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.

Literary North: When did the Senter family come into existence for you and how did you decide that you wanted to tell the story from the perspectives of three of the family members (Tup, the father; Doris, the mother; and Dodie, the daughter)? Is it significant that the youngest son, Beston, doesn’t have his own voice in this story? Did you consider having his thoughts included, or did you always know the story would be told from only Doris, Dodie, and Tup’s points of view?

Meredith Hall: After writing my memoir, Without a Map, I knew I wanted to write a novel. I expected that the centralizing idea would be floating close at hand and I would get right down to work. But it took a very long time for me to find this story. It finally came to me as a small bit of conversation with a friend on a snowy day in my driveway. I knew instantly that I had my story: a tragedy of some sort would hit a family, and the husband would behave badly, failing his wife and children when they most needed him. I immediately understood that this would be a study of a man’s selfishness, his self-delusion as he justified his decisions. But that isn’t at all who Tup Senter was. As soon as he started to talk to us, I recognized that the story was not what I had at first imagined. Instead, it would be a study of a deeply attached family having to make their way through extreme loss, and their costly efforts to make their way back to the stronghold of their love for each other and their farm.

From that moment, I knew that other characters needed a chance to reveal themselves to us. I gave Doris and Dodie each a voice. They opened up the story for me—wife and mother, daughter and sister, their powerful identification as family bound by the daily work of the farm. I knew from the start that Beston would not have a voice. I felt that following four distinct voices would be a lot to ask of the reader. Also, Beston was very young at the start of the book, and I believed that readers would want a more adult understanding than he could bring.

But Beston is known to us through the other characters, especially Dodie. She often shares stories about him, and tells us what she knows and understands about this quiet, acquiescing boy. Ultimately, she is forced to mother him, and she reports him to us as a mother would her child. I relied on Dodie to bring us to care about Beston.

LN: As you sat down to write Beneficence, what ideas or questions were in your mind?

MH: The overriding issue of Tup’s personal character, my desire to reveal him in his self-concerned decisions and self-justifications, drove me to this story at the start. That interest lasted about four pages! I quickly felt Tup slipping away from me and determining for himself what the real questions of this book would be. He tells us early in the book, “I am a good man.” And Doris tells us that she is a good mother. But both of them express fear, a foreboding or dread, that something will arrive in their life and they will fail at their love, for each other and their children. I wanted to watch these good people as they struggle against tragedy to redefine themselves and the nature of their loyalty and faith in each other and all goodness.

LN: The Senter farm itself—its chores, its seasons, its joys, and its hardships—seems like another member of the family. Why did you decide to set the story on a farm? How do you see the setting as being integral to the telling of this particular story.

MH: I did not grow up on a farm, although Northern New England farms are familiar to me. I grew up keeping sheep with my sister, and, with other families in my area, raised sheep and chickens and big gardens while my children grew up. I think I have always felt a deep longing for the farm I wrote for the Senters. I feel a powerful nostalgia, a hunger, for a life I never had. I love the Senter farm, and left it at the end of this book with a lot of regret. I feel something like homesickness when I am there with Tup and Doris and their children. So it was wonderful to wake every morning during the writing of Beneficence and feel almost as if I were going home. I am actually thinking about returning to this family and writing another novel, focusing on Grace or Beston.

But beyond my deep sense of the reality of this place, the family is shaped by the land they work as much it is shaped by their hands. None of these people could imagine themselves separate from their farm—the barn, the pastures, the orchard and pine hill, the creek, and the house itself. Several generations of Senters have husbanded this land. Tup and Doris and the children retain that powerful sense of belonging, of being defined by the land and its work.

LN: Your novel has the most beautiful descriptions of light that we have ever read. Was this focus on light deliberate? It feels like a counteractive to the grief in the novel.

MH: It pleases me very much that readers might feel the effect of that focus. It was not deliberate. I was unaware of my attention to light as I wrote. Now, from outside the writing, I can see that light plays throughout the story.

But I pay close attention to light in my own days, and to beauty, so inseparable from light. I can see now that my gratitude for that gift, our strange and mysterious ability to perceive and love beauty and light, inevitably found its way to the page.

And I agree that light relieves us of the weight of grief, or fear, or regret. I think that each of the Senters felt that grace. Dodie is filled with calm as she describes the light in the upper lofts of the barn, or on the rocks and water creatures as they swim in the creek, or the moonlight bath of silver the night they go smelting. Doris loves the big blocks of sunlight that lay across the bedroom she shares with her husband, and the tender lamplight in the front room when the family rests together in the evening. Tup knows the rhythms of light through the day and night in his barn, and the welcome of the kitchen lamp by the sink when he comes in from his work at the end of the day. Light comforts and eases them.

LN: There is such a contrast between Doris (who came to the farm from the outside), who wants so desperately to keep the outside world from her home and family, and Tup (who grew up on the farm), who tells her, “You have to let the world into their home...Nothing good will come of your holding too tight to them.” Where does this contrast come from? Is it their personalities, or their experiences, or something else?

MH: This is a wonderful question, and I have had to think about it. Tup and Doris have both known loss of parents, but their lives have been graced beyond that. I don’t think they are expressing fears born of experience.

Doris has found something so vital in the land and the old house it becomes for her a sanctuary, a stronghold. Her fierce protectiveness of her children extends to a sense of protection of everything that binds them, a deep and troubled awareness of harm that might come.

Tup has always lived on this farm, and has done its work since he was very small. It is as familiar to him, as much a part of his body, as his hands. He left as a young man to go to college, but returned in full faith of the farm’s rightness and generosity. Tup, in many ways, has more faith in the world than Doris does. He trusts more than she does. Doris’s strength and capability belie a fragility that she senses. Ir causes her to doubt the permanence and invincibility of their lives together. Tup trusts and takes for granted that permanence. Each of them react to tragedy from those inner landscapes.

LN: What does your writing practice look like and have you been writing during the pandemic?

MH: I love to write. It feels drug-like, a state I can enter and don’t want to leave at the end of the day. I love making a story, with the possibility that absolutely anything can happen. I sit down to write at 9:00 each morning in my small, welcoming writing room with its big window. I listen to an hours-long loop of Gregorian chants while I write. I have done this for so long now, the moment I click the music on, I feel myself swoop down into another world, my creating world, apart from everything I know in my daily life. And the writing opens.

I wrote deeply for the first several months of the pandemic, but sending Beneficence into the world is taking a lot of time, and so my writing is quietly waiting for me.

LN: Have you read any novels this year that have had an impact on you? If so, which ones and why?

MH: I always like to talk books!

Have you read Andrew Krivak’s The Sojourn? This is not a comfortable read, but it is really powerful. His control over time is extraordinary. It is a slim book but feels like an epic.

Yiyun Li’s first novel, The Vagrants, is stunning in its rendering of characters in a small town in China. Li reveals their fears and capitulations to power and history, their loves and compromises, their losses and silences, in a story which allows us into the intimacy of their homes and the harsh demands of their public lives.

I just reread Marilynne Robinson’s Lila and was knocked over again by her control of the very close narrator. I have studied how she does this and have not figured it out. We are always almost inside her characters, but Robinson never abandons the guardrail of third-person narrative. She draws such full and real characters with so much tenderness and decency. It was a joy to return to the world she created in Gilead and Home.

Thank you. That was a wonderful conversation about writing!

LN: Thank you so much, Meredith. It was a pleasure!

Meredith Hall's memoir Without a Map was instantly recognized as a classic of the genre and became a New York Times bestseller. It was named a best book of the year by Kirkus and BookSense, and was an Elle magazine Reader’s Pick of the Year. Hall was a recipient of the 2004 Gift of Freedom Award from A Room of Her Own Foundation. Her work has appeared in Five Points, The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The New York Times, and many other publications. Hall divides her time between Maine and California.

Rebecca Siegel

October 6, 2020

Interview, Guest Post

Interview: Alexandria Hall

Rebecca Siegel

October 6, 2020

Interview, Guest Post

Maybe you wonder sometimes why we interview the writers we do, or choose the books we want to highlight and it’s kind of a magic process, that same magic you feel when you’re browsing the shelves of one of those really great indie bookstores that seems to carry only books that you haven’t heard of before and that you are irresistibly drawn to. That magic.

Just so, sometimes we’re browsing the internet or book catalog and a book jumps out at us. Such is the case with Field Music, the debut book by Alexandria Hall. Its evocative title, geometrically lovely cover, and Vermont pedigree made this book irresistible to us, and we’re so glad we didn’t resist! We thoroughly enjoyed the poems in Field Music.

For this interview, we asked our dear friend Rena J. Mosteirin (also an exceptional poet) if she’d like to ask the interview questions. Rena immediately had an ear for Alexandria’s work and appreciated it as much as we did. Below is the conversation between Rena and Alexandria. Thank you both. And congratulations, Alexandria, on the publication of Field Music!

Alexandria is launching her book at a virtual reading on October 9, at 7:00 pm, via White Whale Bookstore. She will be joined by poets Jihyun Yun and S. Brook Corfman.

Rena Mosteirin: Many poems in Field Music are set in Vermont and have a certain resonance. When you choose to set a poem in Vermont, what are the stakes of that choice? Is it any different process-wise, then when you set a poem somewhere else?

Alexandria Hall: I feel like, at least in Field Music, I never really considered choosing a setting as part of the process. Rather than deciding to set a poem in Vermont, I might write from a memory or a constellation of memories and each of those is tied to its original setting. I grew up in Vermont and I was living there when I began writing the book. Place plays an important role in the book, but the setting of each poem was a result of the memory or images belonging to a given place.

For example, one poem, “Travel Narrative," mentions Middlebury, Hamburg, and Galicia, because that’s where the poem led me when I was writing it, through memories of those places, but I hadn't planned on writing a poem about those three places. I think in these poems, there's always a setting, and it poses this kind of inescapable challenge: how do I come to know myself and my experiences here?

RM: I love the rhythmic quality of Field Music. The lines borrowed from pop music work really well because the music of the poetry is distinctly not pop. I mean, the syncopations are unpredictable. For me, this is a distinct pleasure of the book. How does your background as a musician show up in these poems?

AH: My first relationship to poetry was to its sounds. My teacher, David St. John, says, “poems persuade by their music, not their argument.” And I think when I first fell in love with poetry when I was young, it was the music that moved me and that prompted me to linger in the language. The music of language is really powerful, not just in poetry, but also in conversation, thought, and play. It carries its own logic, one that’s probably always present, though not always at the forefront of our consciousness, forming conceptual and affective connections through sonic relationships.

I'm not really a technically skilled musician. I didn’t study music in college and I never really mastered any of the instruments I play. But I've been a songwriter for about as long as I’ve written poetry, and I think more than anything, that background shows up in the attention to sound, to establishing patterns and then breaking them.

RM: How did you begin writing poetry? When you started out, who were you reading?

AH: I fell in love with poetry when I was pretty young. I was kind of a sad, lonely kid, and I had this third and fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Brown, who taught us poetry. She would have students memorize poems of our choosing and then recite them to the class. I loved it. I started writing poems then, and she would give me my own extra little poem-writing assignments.

And my mom had a couple W.H. Auden poems around that she loved, and she used to write down the lyrics to the songs she loved on scraps of paper. I remember looking through those and loving the words and her handwriting. So those were my earliest introductions. But I'd say in middle and early high school, I really started to concentrate more on writing poetry. Then, I was reading e. e. cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, and Anne Sexton. In high school I started to discover more contemporary poets in magazines like the New Yorker. I loved Carl Phillips and Louise Glück. When I found a poem I really loved, I'd write it on my bedroom wall with a permanent marker.

RM: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten in workshop?

AH: This is a tough one because I've gotten a lot of really good advice from friends and mentors in and outside of workshop over the years, but some of the greatest lessons I’ve learned have actually been from the social and communal elements of the workshop, from reading others’ work and hearing how others have read and received my work. Also, Catherine Barnett, who was my thesis advisor at NYU, constantly created opportunities for us to surprise ourselves in workshop, to continue to be more open to new possibilities. She even brought our workshop to do an improv comedy class.

RM: What inspires you?

AH: I’m always inspired by my friends and loved ones—their work or bits of our conversations. I’m also inspired by other mediums: movies, music, dance, visual art. I feel like the things that really move and inspire me tend to hang together and mingle in the background for a while, not leading to direct or immediate creation, waiting for some spark that lights up a path between them. What inspires me to write may be an image, a memory, a sound, or a problem that needs to be solved. I do a lot of thinking through writing. Also, I feel like I’m not the best at expressing myself in conversation, so sometimes a poem is inspired by a need to express what I wasn't able to express in the moment.

RM: Which new poets are you really excited about right now? I’m particularly interested in little-known poets that you think we should be paying attention to.

AH: I don't know how known or unknown anyone is, but two people whose work I'm most excited about are Ama Codjoe, whose chapbook Blood of the Air came out earlier this year with Northwestern University Press, and Erin Marie Lynch.

RM: Field Music is a gorgeous collection. What’s next for you? Is there a new collection in the works, are you focusing on your music or your dissertation? Perhaps all of these inform one another?

AH: Thank you! Lately, I've been focusing on two main projects: a collection of short stories and a second book of poems. In both, I've been exploring themes of mortality and immortality, fleetingness and lastingness, anxiety and dread. I haven't been writing music at all lately, but I've gotten back into playing the piano. I'm still finishing coursework for the PhD, so my writing, research, and creative projects have felt mostly exploratory. I'm just kind of letting it take me wherever it takes me.

Alexandria Hall is a poet and musician from Vermont. She received her MFA from New York University and is now a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. She is founder and editor-in-chief of tele- magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, BOAAT, The Bennington Review, Foundry, Memorious, and elsewhere.

Rebecca Siegel

October 1, 2020

Calls for Submission, Deadlines, Events, Newsletter, Workshops, The Dipper

The Dipper - October 2020

Rebecca Siegel

October 1, 2020

Calls for Submission, Deadlines, Events, Newsletter, Workshops, The Dipper

October News

We are so pleased to bring you another great virtual author event in partnership with Hanover’s Still North Books. On October 14 at 7:30 pm, Sierra Crane Murdoch will be in conversation with Angela Evancie of VPR’s Brave Little State to discuss Sierra’s compelling nonfiction book, Yellow Bird.

Yellow Bird tells the story of Lissa Yellow Bird as she obsessively hunts for clues to the disappearance of Kristopher “KC” Clark, a young white oil worker who worked on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota. Drawing on eight years of immersive investigation, Sierra Crane Murdoch has produced a profound examination of the legacy of systematic violence inflicted on a tribal nation and a tale of extraordinary healing. Sierra and Angela’s conversation is bound to be riveting. Register today to attend!

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Alexandria Hall’s debut book of poetry, Field Music, will be published by Ecco on October 6. Alexandria is a poet and a musician from Vermont (and currently a PhD candidate in California). Publishers Weekly calls Field Music, “a striking debut…This atmospheric collection will transport readers to Hall’s layered landscapes.”

We are so fortunate that Alexandria agreed do to an interview with us, and we are equally fortunate that Rena J. Mosteirin enthusiastically agreed to pose the interview questions. The interview will be published on our site on Field Music’s publication day, October 6, so check our blog then.

—

In Slow Club Book Club news, we recently announced the last book in our year of reading books by Canadian authors: Dionne Brand's 2018 hybrid poetry collection, The Blue Clerk. In this intriguing book—an Ars Poetica in 59 versos—Dionne Brand stages a conversation and an argument between the poet and the Blue Clerk, who is the keeper of the poet's pages.

A sampling of The Blue Clerk reveals its mesmerizing power. Listen to Dionne Brand read two of the prose poem versos on the Griffin Poetry Prize website (the book was shortlisted for the 2019 prize) and fall under its liquid language spell. We hope you decide to join us in reading The Blue Clerk beginning on October 15. If you do, please let us know; it's nice to know you're out there.

October’s Shooting Stars

A cool literary find from each of us to help light up your month!

First Wednesdays from Vermont Humanities are back, beginning October 7. This time around we are lucky to be able to listen to these lectures from our homes. I’m particularly excited to hear Jarvis Green’s lecture, “Atlantic Is a Sea of Bones” on November 7 We’ve posted the literary lectures from this series in our calendar of events. For the rest (including some really amazing topics from dance and Muhammad Ali to bird migration to food justice), please visit the Vermont Humanities website. —Shari
These days I often feel closed, tight, compressed into myself. I need reminders of expansiveness: drop the shoulders from my ears, breathe deeply. The other day I saw a link to a recording of Seamus Heaney reading “Postscript,” one of my favorites of his poems. Rereading it always blows me open, as the last line intends. Hearing Seamus’ own voice makes it even better.—Rebecca

October Highlights

Layli Long Soldier will read as part of the virtual Poetry at Bennington series on October 7 at 7:00 pm.

Samantha Kolber celebrates the release of her new chapbook, Birth of a Daughter, with a virtual event at Bear Pond Books on October 9 at 7:00 pm.

Sierra Crane Murdoch discusses her book Yellow Bird with Brave Little State’s Angela Evancie via Still North Books & Bar on October 14 at 7:30 pm.

The Brattleboro Literary Festival takes place virtually this year from October 16 to 18, featuring writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Jason Lutes appears as a part of Virtual Bookstock 2020 on October 15 at 7:00 pm.

Phil Klay will read and discuss his latest novel, Missionaries, on October 16 at 7:00 pm. This online event is presented by both The Norwich Bookstore and Still North Books & Bar.

603: The Writers’ Conferences is online this year on October 17 from 8:00 am to 5:30 pm, with featured speaker Brunonia Barry.

Charles Simic gives a virtual reading sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and Gibson’s Bookstore on October 20 at 7:00 pm.

Visit our calendar for detailed information about these events and more!

Worth a Listen

Artwork by Sludge Thunder — *Artwork by* *Sludge Thunder*

Daniel Hornsby speaks about his debut, Via Negativa, on Marginalia. His new novel was recently recommended by Lauren Groff on Twitter.
On the Slow Stories podcast, Sanaë Lemoine discusses her writing process for her debut, The Margot Affair.
Middlebury grad Bianca Giaever has a wonderful new podcast for The Believer called Constellation Prize. Five episodes about strangers, religion, poetry, and art are available now.
Dustin Schell and Alexander Chee (curators of the Still Queer reading series) were featured on Christine Lee’s podcast, Front Yard Politics, talking about gardening during the pandemic.

We're Looking Forward to These October Releases

Mantel Pieces, by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate, October 1)
Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam (Ecco, October 6)
The Hole, by Hiroko Oyamada, translated by David Boyd (New Directions, October 6)
The Superationals, by Stephanie La Cava (Semiotext(e)/Native Agents, October 13)
Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I write, by Claire Messud (W.W. Norton & Company, October 13)
The Century, by Éireann Lorung (Milkweed Editions, October 13)
The Silence, by Don DeLillo (Scribner, October 20)
Divorcing, by Susan Taubes (NYRB Classics, October 27)
Memorial, by Bryan Washington (Riverhead, October 27)

Calls For Submission and Upcoming Deadlines

Hunger Mountain Issue 25: Art Saves
Send your manifestos and rhetoric, your stories and poems, your essays and forays into justifying art as an answer to—and escape from?—these trying times: pandemics, forest fires, catastrophe, white-supremacy, murder, burning buildings as the only way to be heard, and fascism. Please submit prose of no more than 8,000 words, or up to three flash pieces all in one document; for poetry, 1 to 5 poems all in one file.
Deadline: October 15 | Details

Sundog Poetry Center’s First or Second Book Award Prize for a Vermont Poet
Sundog Poetry Center is pleased to announce the inaugural book award for a first or second poetry manuscript, in partnership with Green Writers Press, who will design, print and distribute the book nationwide. The final judge is Vermont Poet Laureate Mary Ruefle. A cash prize of $500 will be awarded along with 50 copies. Manuscripts should be between 48 and 64 pages. All submissions must be authored by a poet who resides in Vermont; proof of residency will be requested along with a $20 application fee.
Deadline: October 31 | Details

Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize for Poetry
Tupelo Press’ Sunken Garden Prize seeks submissions of previously unpublished, chapbook-length poetry manuscripts. The prize is open to anyone writing in the English language. This year’s judge is Mark Bibbins. The winner receives a $1000 cash prize, in addition to publication by Tupelo Press, 25 copies of the winning title, a book launch, and national distribution with energetic publicity and promotion.
Deadline: October 31 | Details

Bennington Unbound
October 15 to December 15
These four-week intensive online courses in fiction and nonfiction (October 15 to November 15, and November 15 to December 15) are geared toward current college and college-ready students considering an academic gap year or looking to supplement their current coursework. The courses are taught by Bennington’s award-winning graduate and undergraduate writing and literature faculty. Weekly live video class meetings foster an intimate seminar experience. Web-based discussion forums and unique multimedia resources extend the classroom community. All students will write both creatively and critically. Students earn one college credit per course.
Deadline: one week prior to the beginning of each course | Cost: $600/course | Details

The Dorset Prize for Poetry
Tupelo Press’ Dorset Prize is seeking submissions of previously unpublished, full-length poetry manuscripts. The prize is open to anyone writing in the English language. This year’s judge is Tyehimba Jess. The winner receives at $3000 cash prize and a week-long residency at MASS MoCA, in addition to publication by Tupelo Press, 20 copies of the winning title, a book launch, and national distribution with energetic publicity and promotion.
Deadline: December 31 | Details

Junction Magazine Editorial Board
If you're passionate about the vibrant community of the Upper Valley, and showcasing the myriad cultures that exist here, consider joining the Junction Magazine Editorial Board. Their areas of coverage are Arts and Culture, Food and Farm, People, and the Wild. Editors meet bi-weekly, and share pitching, writing, editing, and layout duties, as well as the (small) financial cost of the website and hosting.
Deadline: none given |

Upcoming Workshops and Classes

Horace Greeley Writers’ Symposium
October 17, 10:00 am to 3:00 pm
Aspiring writers, published authors welcome. Writing workshops, networking, Q&A, and more. Location: United Baptist Church, East Poultney | Cost: $65 adults; $20 students | Details

Expressive Writing with Vivian Ladd and Joni B. Cole
November 5, 5:30 to 7:00 pm
This workshop fuses explorations of works of art with fun and meaningful expressive writing exercises. No writing experience required, just a willing pen and curious mind.
Location: online | Cost: free | Details