Notes on Poets and Painters; some progress on Men of Winter
This past week I had the pleasure of attending Poets and Painters at the H. D. Smith Gallery in the Hoogland Center for the Arts — a collaboration between two Springfield, Illinois-based groups: Springfield Poets and Writers, and Prairie Art Alliance. The poets and writers were invited to select a work from the gallery for which they would compose an original poem, which was then read at the Poets and Painters event October 7. The president of Springfield Poets and Writers, Anita Stienstra, served as the mistress of ceremonies; the inspirational piece of artwork would be displayed near the podium, then Stienstra would introduce the poet, who read the resulting poem; then the artist would be introduced and have an opportunity to speak about her/his piece. It was a great synergy of artistic expression, taking ekphrasis further than its usual mode, wherein a poem may be published alongside a piece of artwork that inspired it, by having the art and poem displayed together, live, via the artist and poet who created them, and adding an enthusiastic audience into the mix as well — a point that was well-articulated during the program by Ethan Lewis, a literature professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield who read his poem based on Jennifer Davis’s black-and-white photograph Welcome to Highgate. As an added bonus, each poet had his/her poem specially printed and framed, turning it into a piece of visual art as well.
I was impressed by all that I heard and saw, but I have to note in particular Anita Stienstra’s heart-wrenchingly beautiful poem that she wrote in association with Felicia Olin’s painting Blue Blooded. (When I first entered the gallery, I took special note of Olin’s gothic-esque portrait and knew that, if I’d been given the task, I would have chosen that piece as well.) This was the second Poets and Painters event, and examples from the first can be viewed at this blogspot. Do yourself a favor and check out the poems and artwork (Olin has two pieces on display on the site, Girl with Blue Hair and Heroine, both of a similar style to Blue Blooded).
On the creative writing front, graphic artist Julie McAnary sent me a proof for the back cover and spine of Men of Winter. I offered a couple of suggestions, but otherwise I’m very, very pleased. Punkin House Press is still looking at a November release as far as I know. Also, the editor of Pisgah Review, Jubal Tiner, sent me the galleys for “The Composure of Death,” which will appear in an upcoming issue. They look great — I’m impressed with the journal’s professional handling of me and my story.
I continue to read and enjoy Adam Braver‘s novel Crows over the Wheatfield — in fact, I’m going to cut this post a bit short so I can take advantage of this beautiful October day and go read on my front porch.
Cover for Men of Winter; Notes from the Route 66 Film Festival
Working with graphic artist Julie McAnary, we’ve finalized a cover design for Men of Winter, and to say I’m quite pleased with it would be a gross understatement. In one of our many email exchanges, I told Julie I’d like the cover to be both austere and alluring; and, by George, I think we’ve done it. The original cover idea I pitched to her, months ago, wound up being a no go because we couldn’t secure the rights to the photograph (a photo of a German soldier from the Second World War I found online — I couldn’t track down anyone who claimed ownership of the rights, hence there was no one to grant permission to use it). But that ended up being a stroke of great luck because it sent us back to the proverbial drawing board. I spent several hours culling the net for a photo or painting from a contemporary artist who could grant us permission to use her/his work (or not). After about three hours and lord knows how many pictures, I came across the portfolio of Paul Casagrande and specifically a set of portraiture titled “Sara & Stefano” — I was thunderstruck and I instantly envisioned how one of the photos in particular could be the focal point for a powerful cover. I immediately went about tracking down contact information for Mr. Casagrande, who is Italian. I sent him a message via Facebook, and was shortly contacted by his associate Gianluca Precone (who, by the way, has an amazing portfolio on photo.net as well). Gianluca indicated that his colleague was willing to let us use his work as a courtesy, one artist to another (amazing generosity!). We had a series of exchanges, with the help of Google translator (and, as luck would have it, one of my students this semester is from Italy and is fluently bilingual — so with Nate’s expert assistance we nailed down some of the particulars). Thus this beautiful photograph, “Beyond thought,”
from Paul Casagrande's "Sara & Stefano"
became the focus of this (thanks to Julie McAnary) beautiful cover
Cover for Men of Winter
I floated it on Facebook, and it received rave reviews — so thank you, Paul, Gianluca, Julie (and, absolutely, Nate) — I just hope the stuff between the front and back covers lives up to this amazing piece of art. While I’m at it, another thank-you to M. R. Branwen, the editor of Slush Pile Magazine, who graciously blurbed my book earlier this summer, and who graciously published an excerpt from Men of Winter in the debut issue of Slush Pile when it was still just a manuscript looking for a home. Speaking of Men of Winter, Punkin House Press has pushed back the release date a bit, now proposed for November, which is all right — I’d rather see it done well, if a bit behind original plans, than to have it rushed to press.
With the front cover under our belt, I revised tedmorrissey.com and added a page devoted specifically to Men of Winter. Feel free to visit, as often as you like.
Switching gears, this weekend is the Route 66 International Film Festival here in Springfield, Illinois, and my son and I attended last night’s double session, and were thus treated to some terrific independent films. I don’t have space to do them justice here, but I want to give kudos to a few films in particular. One of our favorite dramas was Ben-Hur Sepehr’s The Desperate, which won Best History Short — about a Nazi general who pleads with a Jewish doctor to save the general’s only son: in a word, tremendous. We also greatly enjoyed the film that won Best Drama Feature, Alex Gaynor’s Wid Winner & the Slipstream: quirky, touching, somehow both sad and uplifting: terrific filmmaking, terrific storytelling. In the thriller/horror contest session, we got a great kick out of David Britton’s Parking Space — very Twilight Zone-esque, and I say that as an extreme compliment. We also enjoyed Sunday Punch by Dennis Hauck (whose lead actor, Dichen Lachman, is a treat as cool, tough and razor-sharply sarcastic boxing ring-girl Jill). However, both my son and I had to give our audience votes to Delaney by Carles Torrens: horrific, weird, laugh-outloud funny, with a host of offbeat characters whom one comes to love against all common sense (of decency).
I also have to mention an animated short that blew me away: The Magical Porno Theater by Jovanna Tosello: strange, yes, but Tosello’s use of cool colors and odd imagery, juxtaposed in intriguing ways, gives an undercurrent (could be an inside pun, but isn’t) of narrative to what otherwise seems a chaos of barely related yet fluid (another non-inside pun) scenes. When one sees what can be done with a modest budget but a lot of talent and creativity, it really underscores how amazingly bad most Hollywood offerings are.
A last note today: I’m reading Adam Braver‘s Crows over the Wheatfield, and I just wanted to share a brief passage that is so engaging I lingered over it for several minutes this morning:
Claire skirted across the lawn on a treaded path, where the trees were bare, like sadly misshapen arms shamed without strength. And in them, their simplicity was their beauty, their resolve to stand defenseless against the elements. Still they stood proud, their mangled branches witnessing the events that had passed under them. (p. 64, Harper Perennial paperback edition)
Quite lovely.
Dostoevsky’s “The Double” and Earl’s “Forbidden Beowulf”
It’s been awhile since I entered the blogosphere, so I thought I’d do a post. As I’d written about a couple of times, at the end of the summer I was reading a collection of Turgenev’s stories that I enjoyed very much, which encouraged me to pick up a collection of Dostoevsky’s shorter works that I’ve had lying about for, well, years, and have been wanting to crack open. So I have. I’ve been reading the collection’s opening tale, “The Double” (1846, trans. George Bird), and have found it a classic indeed. Thus far it’s been both haunting and funny by turns. The descriptive paragraphs are most remarkable. Here’s the opening to one that I read over again and again because it’s just so good:
It was a dreadful night, a real November night, dark, misty, rainy and snowy, a night pregnant with colds, agues, quinsies, gumboils, and fevers of every conceivable shape and size — put in a nutshell, bestowing all the bounties of a St. Petersburg November. (p. 38, Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, ed. Ronald Hingley, Perennial Classic, 1968)
There is much to love here, but I especially admire the image of the pregnant night and the sarcasm of referring to the bounties of such a night. My first encounter with Dostoevsky, I believe, was reading Crime and Punishment in a world lit seminar while working on my doctorate. I’m partly on my Russian writers kick because I’ve always been interested in their works but have managed to miss most of them in my life as a student — but also the great William Gaddis scholar Steven Moore said somewhere (maybe it was on the Gaddis list serve) that there hasn’t been much work done on the Russians’ influence of Gaddis’s fiction, and there ought to be. Moore’s comment, wherever I read it, has stuck with me, and I fancy that eventually I’ll try to connect some of the dots between Gaddis and the Russians.
In addition to Dostoevsky, I’ve spent the last couple of days reading through James W. Earl’s article “The Forbidden Beowulf: Haunted by Incest” in the March 2010 PMLA. I’m a great admirer of Earl’s Beowulf scholarship, and it was very useful to me when working on the Beowulf chapters of my dissertation, though I came to it rather late in the process. A fellow after my own academic heart, Earl brings much to bear on the poem from other (perhaps unexpected) disciplines — psychology, yes (which, of course, is expected), but, as in this article, a little astronomy and quantum physics as well. He writes,
How can we tell whether an author knows or does not know such backstories [e.g., Homer’s knowing the judgment of Paris] if he or she does not tell them? The situation is a little like detecting dark matter in the universe: the best we can do is try to detect subtle distortions in the matter that we can see. (p. 289)
Something that I really appreciate about Earl’s technique in the article is that, while he does put forward a thesis, his organizational strategy is essentially thinking through the related issues and the various scholars who have weighed in on them, and considering how their views may affect his own leanings. He concludes his third paragraph by saying, “I pose many questions and try to untangle such a mess of evidence that it is bound to get confusing at times” (p. 289). His erudition is impressive, to put it mildly, yet his tone is . . . inviting, one might even say conversational, at times anyway — of course, it’s a conversation with a very learned scholar who wants you to be learned too, someday, if not today exactly. Earl suggests that the mood of foreboding that Beowulf tends to cast upon readers, experienced and inexperienced ones alike, has more to do with what’s not said in the poem than what is on the page:
Beowulf is haunted by these [Scylding] analogues, and much of what is disturbing about the poem is due to this haunting. The poem is disturbing in many ways, among them the feeling one gets after long familiarity with it that something is missing, that something important is not said — or, as Freud might say, that something is repressed. (p. 292)
Given my interests in the psychic origins of creativity — of creating fictive narrative especially — Earl’s observations are most provocative.
On the creative writing front, the editor of Pisgah Review, Jubal Tiner, suggested that my story “The Composure of Death” should keep its title, but that we use the quote from Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” — where I derive the phrase — as an epigraph to the story: a good suggestion indeed. I sent an electronic copy of the story, epigraph included, to Jubal last week. I’m not sure which issue the story will appear in.
With the arrival of September, the floodgates have opened and lit journals across the land are accepting submissions again. As such, I’ve been busily getting “Melvill in the Marquesas” (the opening chapter of my unpublished novella Weeping with an Ancient God) in the mail (e- or otherwise). In the process of looking for journals to send it to, I came across a unique one: Textofiction, which is “an online literary publication dedicated to bringing the best writing in under 140 characters” — clearly inspired by Twitter. When I was working on my masters, Kent Haruf (who ended up being my thesis chair) liked to begin writing workshops by having us write complete stories in under 250 words, and that was a challenge. I’m not sure how one writes a complete story in 140 characters or less. I’ll have to keep an eye on the journal to see what writers come up with.
As far as I know, my publisher, Punkin House Press, is still planning on releasing Men of Winter in October, but I haven’t seen a page proof or a cover design yet; perhaps soon.
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