Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

How Denise Levertov’s Poems 1972-1982 Made Me Stop Judging Myself

March 30, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

There are many ways I will fall in love with a book. Mysteries like Fletch wrap me up in their comforting blanket of action. Mind-bending fiction like The Trial make me question the world around me and help me learn to see. And then some books unlock the tumblers in my brain and make me want to write. Poems 1972-1982 by Denise Levertovis one of the latter. This book hit me at just the right time and it’s the first thing in a long while that made me put pen to paper on my own behalf.

The Wrong Poetry at the Wrong Time

The book of poetry I read just before Poems 1972-1982, Transfer by Naomi Shihab-Nye did not make me write. Recommended by a friend, I enjoyed some of Shihab-Nye’s language. I even related to the way she looked at the world, but her work was almost too close to me. As I read her poems, I kept wanting to edit them, to give them that last gloss that would make them mine. And as I read about her grief, I wanted it to be more resolved. That’s not to say that I’m a better poet than she–I’m a complete amateur in comparison–but I couldn’t distance myself enough from her work to let it exist on its own. It was almost like that unhealthy relationship you get into with a friend or loved one–the one where you know they could be perfect if they were just a little more like you.

It’s possible that Shihab-Nye’s work would be perfect for me at a later date when I’m more secure in my own writing, but I was not able to enjoy the work the way I hoped I would.

The Rules of Poetry

Levertov, on the other hand, grabbed me immediately. I’ve recently finished reading The Body Electric: 25 Years of America’s Best Poetry from the American Poetry Review to gain a better understanding of poetry, especially what I like, what I don’t, and what I might like to imitate. I annotated the book heavily with little rules about what makes a poem “good” in my eyes. I don’t like poems composed mostly of full sentences. I like language that isn’t too highfaluting. I like poems that are aware of themselves as poems.

In Denise Levertov: Poems 1972-1982, Levertov breaks every single one of those rules and shows me just how silly I was being. In the first poem of the collection, “From a Plane,” she uses the phrase “alluvial silvers” and I wanted to react and say that there’s a simpler word, but it was perfect. It was the perfect word for me. I had created some system for an imagined poetry I would someday write that negated all the things I like about me, and here is Levertov just doing what she’s doing and blowing my mind along the way.

Fanaticism for Beginners

Of course rules are something that many beginners cling to and proselytize–alcoholics, religious converts, and writers alike–but I’m excited to get beyond that “judging myself and others” phase and into the “judging my work for its own effect” phase. I’ll be a little patient for now because poetry is in many ways new for me. I haven’t devoted real time to writing poetry since high school and am still trying to shake some of those teacher-imparted rules (start your line with an active word and be sure to capitalize it) out of my head.

Imitation as Flattery

Levertov gave me a good start to writing my own poems in “Metamorphic Journal.” She writes:

Let me say
it is I who am a river.
Someone is walking along
the shore of me.

And that phrase, “I who am a river” struck me and stuck with me in my twilight sleep. The metaphor and how she develops it in the following lines wouldn’t let me go. Although it was far too late at night, I found a pen and wrote the words, “I who am an ocean” and several lines to follow. My poem–even in its raw state–is and is not like hers, but we are separate enough and close enough that I can see parts of who I might be in her without trying to make her me.

For some lovely synchronicity on this, read Levertov’s “Writing in the Dark” halfway down the page here.

Retreating to Write

I’m going on my first writing retreat in a couple of weeks. I swore to myself that I’d use that time to finally piece together the first draft of my next novel. But poetry is calling me and I have a project that I might be feeling brave enough to finally make some progress on. In this moment, in my writing chair where I’ve spent most of the morning looking for answers in my phone, the idea of delving into any kind of writing for myself seems pretty delicious. Maybe I’ll curl up with the rest of Poems 1972-1982 to get a head start.

Will you be celebrating National Poetry Month in April? Please share your plans–reading, writing, or avoiding–in the comments.

If you want to see if Levertov is the right poet for you, pick up a copy of Poems 1972-1982 from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Finding Community in BOMB: The Author Interviews

March 23, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA 6 Comments

The first clue (or at least an early one) that I wanted to be a writer should have been when I started reading, then heavily underlining, author interviews in The Paris Review. I loved reading about the writing lives of major writers like Joan Didion and William Faulkner so much that I collected every edition of The Paris Review Interviews and then started putting the editions of Writers at Work (an earlier collection of interviews from The Paris Review) on my Christmas list.

I still love reading author interviews, but the ones that get me most excited these days are in BOMB, so when I saw an advance sampler of BOMB: The Author Interviews at AWP, I had to have it.

The Difference Between BOMB and The Paris Review

I flat-out love both of these magazines and the interviews therein, but I read them for different reasons. Where The Paris Review is polished and full of names that have been accepted into the literary world (and often elevated to the canon) and often focuses on the craft of writing, BOMB is edgier–frequently introducing me to people I haven’t yet heard of–and can veer into whatever the writers want to discuss. Many of the writers interviewed in BOMB are well known in some circles, but they haven’t broken through the mainstream for whatever reason. That’s true of the interviewers too.

What I mean is that in The Paris Review Interviews, especially the collected interviews, you’re likely to learn more about the best writers you encountered in high school. In BOMB, you’re more likely to encounter writers that your really in-the-know college lit professor talks about. BOMB is where I first heard of Heidi Julavits, who I’ve gushed about here and here.

One of the things I love about both magazines is that they cross artistic genres. And I don’t mean poetry vs. fiction (although they do that). Both thoughtfully incorporate visual art too. BOMB takes it a step further by going into performance art, sculpture, and video, and one of my favorite things is reading interviews between artists who work in media I’ll never attempt. I like to see in what ways their discussions of art and process are the same and different as the ways writers talk about their work. And it’s all edgy and I hate (don’t understand) 80% of the artwork, but I learn from what they’re doing and become a more thoughtful artist as a result.

“Reading BOMB interviews was one of the ways I began to conceive of myself as an artist.” – Miranda July

Discussions Between Writers

Where The Paris Review seems to send an up-and-coming writer (who is often barely present in the interview except in the shape of the questions) out to focus on the writer they are interviewing, the interviews in BOMB: The Author Interviews are a collaboration and a discussion. I think that’s part of the reason I like them at this stage in my writing life.

Watching Edwidge Danticat riff off of Junot Diaz (or was it the other way around) teaches me so much more about life on Hispaniola (the island that contains Haiti and the Dominican Republic) than I could ever learn if one or the other was being interviewed by someone who was expected to facilitate the interview instead of being part of the conversation. So you often get introduced to two great authors at once and to see them in context.

Danticat’s first question of Diaz is “What the heck took you so long?” in writing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and he responds, “I’m a slow writer. Which is bad enough but given that I’m in a world where it’s considered abnormal if a writer doesn’t produce a book every year or two–it makes me look even worse.”

“I’m a crazy perfectionist. I suffer from crippling bouts of depression. I write two score pages for every one I keep. I hear this question and want to laugh and cry because there’s no answer.” – Junot Diaz, BOMB: The Author Interviews

The conversation feels real and revealing. Diaz talks about everything from his use of the N-word (which I know is a question he speaks to often) to the relationship between writers and dictators.

Meanwhile, when Mark Magill interviews Kathy Acker, the short, almost bullet-like back and forth comes off like performance art. He asks her about everything from her biographical facts to quotidian things like how often she brushes. It could be (and is) really weird, but it works and it speaks to the experimental nature of Acker’s work. At one point Magill gives her multiple choice questions on preferred dinner table discussions and what to do with the last bit of pie. The interview is revealing in an unexpected way.

A Writing Community on the Page

The thing about being a writer is that it’s lonely. You both need people and you need to be alone. BOMB: The Author Interviews lets me poke my head up on a writing break and learn about what other writers are thinking and how they approach their art even when my writing friends are holed up creating their masterpieces. It’s not a substitute for an actual community, but it’s a fantastic addendum.

I’m only reading a sample copy of BOMB: The Author Interviews right now, but the full edition will contain interviews by and with writers like Chris Abani, Oscar Hijuelos, Ben Marcus, Heidi Julavits, and Amy Hempel. I can’t wait to get the full book when it comes out in November and highly recommend it to anyone who loves author interviews as much as I do.

If you want to commune with some fantastic authors, pre-order a copy of BOMB: The Author Interviews from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Capturing Anomie in City Water Light & Power

March 17, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Matt Pine’s first novel City Water Light & Power so clearly captures the experience of living in a modern day city that at times I wasn’t sure I could go on reading it. The basic gist is that friends Jake and Michelle navigate the city of Chicago as it changes and they do. Touching on everything from urban renewal to mental illness, the book provides insight into what creates a lost generation.

Capturing a City (and a Life) in Transition

The central metaphor that pairs the changes in Jake’s and Michelle’s lives to the changes in Jake’s neighborhood is strong. It’s fascinating to read as Jake’s neighborhood bar and everything he loves about the place he is living starts to give way to gentrification while he faces a personal struggle with how he fits in the shiny corporate world. You hope that his chances are better than that of his favorite bar, but it doesn’t seem likely.

Meanwhile, Michelle seems as wrapped up in the opportunities of urban renewal as she is in her developer boyfriend. Wrapped up in, but also succumbing, albeit in a more socially acceptable way.

If you’ve lived in a city and worked too many hours just to pay too much money for the roof over your head and a bunch of trappings you’re not sure you even want, this book will feel familiar.

Reading for Escape

At times, the book felt altogether too familiar. I don’t normally consider myself an escapist reader. Sure, I spend the odd afternoon with Fletch, but usually I’m chasing big ideas from far away. Reading City Water Light & Power made me realize how much emphasis I put on the “far away” in my reading.

I started this book on the bus the morning after the time change. I was running late and feeling frustrated about rushing in to a day that I felt I had no control over. I wanted to meet expectations and be on time, but I wasn’t sure what those expectations were and I wondered where I left mine along the way (or whether 20 minutes really mattered to anyone). As Jake works his soul-crushing job doing QA for a call center, Pine does an excellent job of showing just how hard we’ve all worked to take the meaning straight out of life.

At the same time, Michelle spends much of her time drunk or stoned enough to tolerate her job as a paralegal with a jerk of a boyfriend. There is a glimmer of hope as she gets accepted to law school, but given how much she hates the people she works with, you have to wonder what she’s rushing toward.

Reading about the suffering of others gives me a way to think about the way the world works and how we can all work to improve it. It affords me a macro-level view because I can sympathize while maintaining my own experience. Reading about Jake and Michelle hit too close to home. The book is well written, but I found myself wanting to get away from it before I became mired in self pity.

This might be an excellent read if you have better boundaries with books than I do. It might also be good for a reader of a different generation or from a rural area or even another country who wants to understand why people who seem to have it all are so freaking miserable. But if you’re in the rat race, it will likely hit too close to home.

A book has to be well written to elicit this kind of visceral response in me, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to read it again soon. Maybe I’ll pick it up when I’m old and retired to see what ever I was whining about.

Passive Characters

Passive characters are a huge no-no in fiction workshops, but it often feels like they abound in modern stories and novels. At a panel I attended at AWP, a professor confronted the idea that passive characters can serve as a political statement–to show how oppressive a situation is. City Water Light & Power definitely wants to fall into this category.

And while this sense of oppression is well portrayed, the passivity (especially of Michelle) was absolutely maddening to me. That must have been the point. But the book did not incite me to revolt against my corporate life or the world around me. And for this passive character as political statement thing to have worked for me, I would have had to come out of the book feeling that rush to change rather than the urge to drink myself into oblivion.

What do you think about passivity as political statement? Did Pine succeed when he made me feel stuck or should the book have done something else? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Reading Outside My Comfort Zone with Marston Bates

March 9, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

I don’t usually read nonfiction. In fact, it’s the one genre I get snobby about (especially those self-help-type business books that regurgitate info rather than creating anything). I really do have strong feelings about those books. But the rest of nonfiction, for me, simply falls victim to my desire to lose myself in the dream worlds of poetry and fiction. So I have no idea what inspired me to pluck The Forest and the Sea by Marston Bates, but I’m glad I did because it opened me up to a whole world of ideas and helped me see the world from a variety of fresh perspectives.

The Forest and the Sea is a tiny book about just that, the creatures, vegetation, and environment of the forest and the sea. He explains and investigates, in a very accessible way, the parallels and differences between these environs. He also looks into man’s relationship with our environment. I am not certain that this book is a precursor to the environmental movement, but I do see how it could be a rallying cry to create one, even for someone as disengaged with that on a daily basis as me.

The Family Perspective

I actually didn’t even know why I had The Forest and the Sea until I opened the front cover. It’s a tiny little paperback with snails on the cover and it just doesn’t look like something I’d buy or read. So I knew it had either come from my grandmother’s library or my mother’s. In the upper-right corner of the first page was the name “McKetta” in a handwriting that wasn’t quite my grandmother’s but it was definitely not my mom’s. Then I read the dedication and title pages. The book, written in 1960, is dedicated to Bates’ Zoology students at the University of Michigan.

I was holding my father’s textbook. He would have been at Michigan a few years after that, actually, but the coincidence was too great. As I read this book, I felt closer to my dad (who I’m proud to say reads this blog) and found myself considering each bit of knowledge from his point of view. He’s a forest economist by trade and that experience really enriched my reading. It was the next best thing to talking with him about what I was learning

If you have family textbooks available to you, go read one now. It’ll change the way you view all the facts.

The Science Perspective

I was hardly a dumb blonde in school, but somewhere along the line, I started to treat science as this weird other thing that I could never understand. It’s a shame, really, because when my husband turns on Nova, I usually wait for the next day’s summary. I do care. I am interested. But my specialization of knowledge has focused so deeply (especially lately) on the literary that I think I’m limiting myself. The Forest and the Sea opened, in really intelligible language, a whole new world to me and I’m so glad I read it. Because science isn’t jargon or formulas anymore than literature is jargon or sentence diagrams. I just forgot that for a little while.

The Pre-Global Warming Perspective

I do worry about our effect as humans on the environment (as does Bates, especially toward the end of the book) but I sometimes get lost in the political rhetoric around global warming. The whole thing makes me want to disengage. So when Bates writes “We are still living in an ice age,” it is so easy for me to cut through all that noise and pay attention to the science in front of me. He does have an agenda, but he’s relatively transparent about it, and I was so grateful for the chance to engage with what he was saying instead of having to understand then fight a hidden agenda just to understand the truth behind the words.

The Creative Perspective

If you’re like me, you are sick to death of biped aliens in movies with two eyes and maybe, if the creature designer was feeling really creative, four fingers on each hand instead of five. It’s as easy to get stuck in a creative rut as it is in a reading one, but there is so much out there.

When I started reading Bates’ descriptions of how and why undersea creatures and vegetation had developed the way it did (how the wavelengths of light fish have access to changes their coloration and that their eyes are very sensitive or even blind because light isn’t a primary part of their environment) There were about five minutes where I thought I might try to be the next Ursula K. LeGuin. I wanted to go out and design a new world with different constraints and see what creatures developed as a result.

I know there are amazing science fiction writers out there who are way into this stuff (including LeGuin) and I probably won’t be poaching on their territory anytime soon. But it was a relief to start to think of something like creature design in a totally new way for me.

The Perspective of Balance

One of the most exciting parts of this book for me was when Bates started talking about seawater as an equilibrium and how complex that equilibrium is. I loved the idea of the environment balancing itself out and the way he described it, “Materials are constantly being added, but materials are also constantly removed” was so simple and clean that it allowed my brain to take off in all kinds of crazy directions and think about how much I value balance, how I can achieve it, and what that might mean for my work. It reminded me of an amniotic fluid that I could run off and let my work and my life gestate in.

There’s so much else in this book, inter-connectivity, the gorgeous metaphor of the forest being like the sea but on land, and wonderful stories about Bates’ own research. And it’s all completely intelligible to a non-scientist like me. It was a delightful book to read to broaden my knowledge of the world at large.

What I’d love to know about, though, is books you’ve read that have been outside of your comfort zone and how they’ve influenced or changed you as a writer.

Remembering AWP 2014

March 5, 2014 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

I needed AWP this year. I don’t think I knew how much until I was on my way to the airport to pick up my conference buddy, Liza and nearly started crying. It’s been a wonderful year of getting books accepted and working my ass off to get them in shape, but I haven’t been writing which means I haven’t felt much like a writer. AWP was a chance to commune with my people and to find that writer part of me, not just the marketer part of me. Here are my memories for AWP and a little advice for anyone who’s going to AWP in Minneapolis in 2015.

Readings

I was so glad to be invited to do a reading this year. It gave me a chance to gather with old friends and new. I got to engage with an audience and my work again. It even made me work up the balls to ask Ravenna Third Place to sell my book on consignment (because if you have a book, you should be selling that book). If you look around at your writing community and no one is setting up a reading, set one up yourself. My friend Ann did that at AWP Chicago and not only did she find a new audience, but she made new connections to boot.

Connecting with Friends

I have no idea what I did before I had a cell phone, because one of the highlights of the conference was the IMs I’d get from friends during this panel or that saying where they were headed next or where and when we’d meet for dinner. I know I missed people and of course I wanted more time than I had, but it was fantastic.

Leading a Panel

I also suggest you pitch a panel if you have any kind of expertise at all. In some ways it’s better and more interesting if that expertise is only tangentially related to writing. Figure out what sets you apart, then find some other writers who can add to the discussion. People are flattered to be asked.

I pulled together a panel entitled “Four Ways Blogging Benefits a Writer” with Rebecca Bridge, Ann Hedreen, Jack Remick, and Elissa Washuta. We tried to make it as conversational as possible (I hate the panels where people get up and read their essay on _____ for 15 minutes before passing the mic to the next droning essayist who also can’t make eye contact with the audience). I ended up being really grateful that our panel was the first panel of the first day. Our room filled up really early and by the time we got going, there was a crowd out in the hall. For the rest of the conference, people were coming up to all of us and telling us that it was the best blogging panel they’d seen at AWP.

The whole experience made me feel really confident and happy to be there. I had something to offer people and I was glad to share.

Connecting Your Work Life and Your Writing Life

If you have a day job like so many of us do, AWP is your chance to connect who you are in your day and night jobs. I work in Internet marketing, which means it wasn’t a stretch to build a panel around a writer’s biggest marketing tool. It was a good opportunity to put my and my company’s expertise in front of people and to expose us to a new market. It also meant that they paid for my conference fees and the time I was there. The fact that writing craft is an essential part of what I do on a day-to-day basis just made that argument easier because I learned a lot from the panels and connected with a couple of potential freelancers. I loved integrating my two selves.

Marketing for Publishers

I actually wrote an entire post on this for work, but the things I learned about marketing just by wandering the book fair were myriad and fascinating. Maybe that marketing self is more integrated than I thought…

Don’t Choose a Panel Based on the Author

More than one really big name did not show up at the conference this year. I think that happens a lot. And then sometimes when the big name shows up, they don’t live up to your expectations. I was pretty lucky that most of the panels I went to were really good, and even the one I chose based on the headliner was great in her absence. Turns out there are lots of other writers who write on the same subjects and I got to learn about them as well.

Taking Care of Yourself

AWP is happy writer fun time. From all-day panels to nighttime readings and then all night parties (I mostly skipped these), it’s easy to wear yourself out. A friend had offered me keys to her apartment near the Convention Center so I could take a nap. I wish I’d taken her up on it. I also wish I’d run home really quickly to drop off the full tote bag of books I bought early on Saturday. But I survived and haven’t even gotten sick yet. I may have fallen asleep during one conversation yesterday–my husband has been too nice to say whether that was true.

The day the writers all left, it started pouring in Seattle. But I’m not crying. I feel full and happy to move forward. There’s a lot of marketing in my future, and (I hope) some writing. However that balance shakes out, I’m really grateful that I was able to be part of AWP this year.

How do you reconnect with your writer self? Or am I the only one who loses that connection occasionally? I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.