I had a fabulous time a few weeks ago reading at the Marliave Restaurant in Boston, as part of MassPoetry’s U35 reading series. You can check out the videos of the other readers from that evening (Chen Chen and Sarah Tourjee) on the U35 site, as well as the bios for November’s upcoming readers.
Also, don’t forget that MassPoetry is accepting festival session proposals until the end of this month! If you have a panel, reading, or workshop idea, make sure to submit here before October 30.
There are an awful lot of missing parents in middle grade, young adult, and classic adventure fiction. One or both (but more often the mother) are dead or missing or just mentally/emotionally absent, and substitute parental figures are often awful (I’m looking at you, fairytale stepmothers, wicked uncles, and well-intentioned but forgetful housemaids). I understand that one of the ways to have an adventure is to have no barriers of responsibility and care that will buffer you, but I’m convinced there are ways to have adventures with one’s parents, at least some of the time. It’s sad and strange and upsetting to pick up a book and within the first three pages, there’s another dead mother.
So I’m looking for suggestions of excellent adventures with living, non-awful parents. And in the meantime, have a snippet of one of mine I’m dabbling with:
The Dangers of Messing Around in Boats
Jessie leaned over the railing, nearly V-shaped, and her mother twitched, hand hovering unseen over the spot where Jessie’s jeans gaped at her back.
“Look at them go!” Jessie flung her arms out in classic Superman pose. “Whoo!”
Giving in to years of mothering instinct, Sylvia hooked a cautions finger through her daughter’s belt loop and her shoulders settled a bit when the teen didn’t react.
Jessie craned her head around. “You can’t even see the dolphins from there, Mom, you’ve got to get closer!”
Sylvia’s hand tightened on her daughter’s pants, finally earning her a glare, but she didn’t let go. “I can see just fine, baby.”
Jessie scoffed and tilted up onto her tiptoes so even more of her center of gravity hung off the racing boat, her hair coming loose from her ponytail and whipping wildly in the wind.
“Jessie!” her mother warned. Jessie tilted her head once more and grinned, fully upside down and giddy.
“I know you’ll catch me.”
Sylvia spread her feet and gripped the railing with her spare hand.
“It’s more that I’m likely to follow you,” she muttered.
“What?” Jessie straightened, heels coming back down and weight shifting.
“Nothing, you’re good.” Sylvia’s smile flickered, but Jessie’s feet were fully on deck now, and she used the rest of her momentum to push them both back against the cabin’s wall.
“Mom? You said this would be okay.” Jessie’s eyes flicked across Sylvia’s face and Sylvia swallowed hard against the increasing sensation of gills spreading out from her throat. No turning back now.
“Fine, baby, you know I want to see where you’re working this summer.” Sylvia’s voice took on a rasp as she extricated herself from Jessie’s grip, headed for the railing.
“A historic lighthouse is not worth re-activating a curse, Mom,” Jessie hissed.
Sylvia smiled, her eyes locked on her daughter’s. “Some things are meant to come full circle. Someday you’ll understand.”
And she let go.
What’s the buzz, you ask? The summer issue of Window Cat Press is out, and in it are four of my poems, accompanied by photography by the ever-delightful Michele Morris. Check them out, and all the other goodies within here!
There was, as those of us in eastern Massachusetts know, quite a band of rain and hail that crossed through yesterday afternoon, which might be why the leader of our writers’ group last night had puddles on the brain. For one writing prompt, we were challenged to use the words ‘middle, addle, and puddle’ in a scene. My brain went from Beatrix Potter’s oft-confused Jemima Puddleduck to ee cummings’ “puddle-wonderful,” and this is what happened next.
Promenade
by Meg Winikates
Misty morning meander to
the green in middle distance,
addle-pated chatter of a
governess’ persistence.
Mischief of a moment,
a jollity, a happenstance:
Puddles soak through petticoats!
The scold, the cold are
worth the dance,
to turn, to trip, from twenty
back to twelve,
to find beneath the formal figure
one’s former sense of elf.
Happy summer, all! In the wake of last week’s downright delightful Supreme Court decisions on health care and marriage equality, I have less-momentous but much more immediately personal good news; I have four poems that are being published this summer on Window Cat Press.
Window Cat is an online literary journal run by a fabulous trio of poet/artist/editors, who are dedicated to bringing the work of young & emerging poets, writers, and artists to the wider world. Their mission is to “seek to celebrate, inspire, innovate, and play.” About the poems that will appear there, they said:
“We were charmed by the interplay of light and color in Michele’s photographs and thrilled by the rhythmic beauty of your words.”
You can imagine my key-smashing delight!
Publication date will be sometime mid-summer; as soon as the issue is live I will be posting the link here, as well as on Palettes of Light, as several of the poems to be published are part of that collection, with integral accompanying photography by the lovely and talented Michele Morris, as mentioned above.
In other happy news, I will also be reading this fall at Mass Poetry’s U35 reading series at the Marliave in Boston, on September 22nd. Hope to see you there!
Happy Monday, all, this is going to be a science-fiction week on Sea Dreams & Time Machines! We’re starting with a really fun video about sci-fi predictions that are now today’s everyday facts from the awesome folks over at “It’s Okay to Be Smart.”
Enjoy!
Plus, Top 10 Star Trek Technologies that Actually Came True (transparent aluminum!)
I have a fabulous time at the Mass Poetry Festival every year. Every year I learn something new about writing, I am bowled over by a poet (or multiple poets) whose work I hadn’t before had a chance to appreciate, I get to spend time surrounded by people who love words as much as I do, and I come away exhilarausted, which is that peculiar state of wiped out and buzzed that comes from too much inspiration in too short a time period.
As always, the headline poets were fantastic. I didn’t make it to all the headline sessions, but both the Friday and Saturday night readings were interesting, featuring Nick Flynn, Adrian Matejka, Denise Duhamel, Rita Dove, and Richard Blanco. I was especially enamored of Rita Dove’s reading, and most particularly loved her poem “Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967,” linked below:
Full text of the poem can also be found here.
Other moments that caught my imagination included the reading of marine-inspired poetry to a running background of underwater photography, the highly entertaining “Digital Age Poetics” workshop from the lovely folks at Window Cat Press, and the absolutely fabulous “Writing Sound to Sound” workshop with Moira Linehan and Mary Pinard, which focused on exercises that build sound consciousness into your writing from the very start. As someone who loves the music of language, syllable and rhythm, I found that session especially inspiring. Overall, from humorous memes and ‘flarf’ searches to dictionary page and abecedarius poetry, I came away with a ton of new writing prompts and a few promising new poem kernels.
I learned about Edna St. Vincent Millay, read aloud and listened to a great collection of winter and spring poems from my fellow long-suffering New Englanders, and had many a meal with friends old and new. Finally, I was pleased to see that PEM continued to play with words and art, featuring Mad Libs Muse prompts featuring ‘erasures’ from famous poems, paint chip poetry focused on color and brevity, and even a giant Scrabble game.
Thanks and congratulations again to Michael, Jan, and Laurin for putting together another spectacular weekend!
I have lots of thoughts about the last few days of the Mass Poetry Festival, so expect those in a subsequent post, but first I’d like to say ‘thanks!’ to everyone who attended my workshop “Found Narratives” on Sunday morning at the Peabody Essex Museum. I promised I’d put my presentation up online, so the slides are below, with a summary of the ideas that kicked off our writing session.
http://www.slideshare.net/mwinikates/meg-w-mapofest15foundnarratives
What is the role of curators in creating an exhibition, and how is that like (or unlike) the role of a poet?
Curators have a number of roles:
Arguably, a poet has much the same set of roles:
The power of both of these roles is in the choices that we make.
Blank walls, blank paper, blank screen. You can put anything there in any order, so where do you start? It all depends on the impact you want to have. Are you aiming for accessible or inscrutable? Mysterious? Open? Comforting or confronting? Your goal determines your choices as much as your natural voice does.
In the case of an exhibition, there are numerous voices involved, of course. Aside from the curator, there are exhibition designers, an interpretive editor, often an educator, all offering suggestions which will help highlight and shape the story the curator wants to tell. The team’s choices form the bridges for the connections visitors will make when standing in the space.
Will there be long sight lines or lots of small spaces? Which pieces are in conversation with each other, whether in support or in opposition? Do you hang them together or separately? What color are the walls? How much extra information do you put on the labels/wall text? What style font do you use?
For poets, this correlates to choices about line length, word juxtaposition, rhyme and meter, form. Where do you want your viewer’s/reader’s eyes to go next?
The Idea for the Workshop
All this discussion grew out of a collaborative project between myself and photographer Michele Morris, Palettes of Light, in which we paired images from two of her series and then I wrote a poem connecting the two. It seemed a natural progression to me that this would work with any pair of artworks, provided that the poet started with two pieces that resonated with them for one or more reasons. Ekphrastic poetry has a long and proud history (Musee des Beaux Arts, anyone?), and this is a way to celebrate not only the creative efforts of the visual artist, but also the imaginative connective power of the viewer. (A workshop participant later described this exercise as ‘Next Level Ekphrasis’ and said she was going to teach it to her students, which made me very happy indeed.)
The Task: Find your Narrative
In preparation for spending time in two exhibitions, I asked the workshop participants to do the following:
How do we get there? The Source Material
Using Visual Thinking Strategies, we spent a few minutes in each gallery as a group looking at one art work. I asked only three questions (“What do you see?” “Why do you say that?” and “What else?”), and let people build upon their own and others’ observations to discuss the work in front of them, then let them go to explore each gallery.
Stop 1: Duane Michals, Storyteller
I picked this show because Michals often treats his photographs as a storyboard: there’s a lot of narrative, sometimes with his own reflections, stories, memories, and poems written directly on the surface of the print. He has a playfulness to a lot of his work that I find appealing, and many of his themes tie easily into poetry (time, mortality, desire, wonder, discomfort, humor).
Stop 2: Branching Out, Trees as Art
This show focuses on the way artists use trees as both artistic material and as inspiration. There are many more abstract works in this exhibition, and lots of themes about the ways humans relate to their environment.
On their own time, I encouraged participants to explore the rest of the museum as well and try this exercise again.
Possible Connections
There are a lot of ways to find a bridge that connects two seemingly disparate artworks. The following list I had up on display for participants to consider as they began their writing:
Participants then had about 15 minutes to work on their poems, and time at the end of the session to share their favorite lines (or the whole poem if it was short). About half the workshop chose to share, and I was really impressed with the vivid language, the fantastic imagery, and the unusual connections they made. I was also pleased, amused, and a little surprised that a few people chose an interactive element (an amadinda, similar to a log xylophone) instead of an artwork for their second piece. I had, after all, asked them to find a piece that ‘sang’ to them–a few took me quite literally!
Do you find visual art a stimulus to your writing? Would you try this exercise or share it with your students/writing group? Have you tried it and do you have a result to share? Add your thoughts to the discussion in the comments below!
The Massachusetts Poetry Festival is this weekend, and I’m geared up and ready to go! If you’ll be in Salem for the festival, here are places to find me:*
Friday
1:15 pm – “Because, the Internet” workshop
3:30 pm – Poetry meetup at Howling Wolf
7:30 pm – Headliner reading with Denise Duhamel, Nick Flynn, and Adrian Matejka
Saturday
9:30 am – “Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Massachusetts Poetry” workshop
11:00 am – “Writing Sound to Sound” workshop
sometime between 11 am – 2 pm – Poetry Carnival
12:15 pm – “From Zero to One” panel
2:00 pm – “Narrative Poetry” workshop with Naugatuck River Review
3:15 pm – either “Flatline Poetry” or “Aloha, Winter. Aloha, Spring.” readings
7:30 pm – Headliner reading with Rita Dove and Richard Blanco
Sunday
10ish am – Paint Chip Poetry and other art activity drop-ins at PEM
11:30 am – “Found Narratives” workshop led by me! The workshop is currently sold out, but there’s a waitlist available, and it’s always worth turning up day-of in case there are no-shows. Hope to see you there!
1 pm – either Rita Dove reading or “Shakespeare’s *itches, a Poetry Musical”
2:30 pm – Headliner Jorie Graham and Stephen Burt reading
If I’m not where I’ve said I’ll be, I may be hanging out at the art activities, or walking down to the waterfront for a brain break, because when the ocean’s that close, why not take it in?
*As with any festival kind of event, a schedule is more of a guideline than actual rules. I reserve the right to be a poetry pirate and sail off on a different tack if that’s how the wind blows on the day. 🙂
How strongly are your emotions tied to places you know? Does thinking about the airport lead to frustration or elation? Do you automatically smile when you turn a corner that brings you closer to a favorite view? How much of what you feel bleeds into what you write, and how does where your writing take place influence the characters/perspective of your narrative?
And what would it look like if you made an emotional map that goes with your world-building? It might look like Stanford University’s “Mapping the Emotions of Victorian London” project. The New York Times has a great write up of it here. Or it might look like Toronto’s Poetry Map. Or maybe it looks like this:
(I’m having visions now of writing a character who treats their entire existence as if it’s lifted from other fictional sources. That could be fun.) Maybe it’s as simple as this, to help remember how your various characters are going to be likely to react in certain locations or under certain conditions: 
As the weather’s been getting better and people’s spirits are rising, these are the kinds of things I’m thinking about, especially since I also recently moved and am learning a whole new set of favorite haunts. What are your thoughts on the impact of place on your writing?
Sea Dreams and Time Machines 
