I am absolutely delighted that my poem “Tanager’s Cantrip” was selected as editor’s choice for the April ekphrastic challenge over at Rattle literary magazine. My little magic spell of woodland birds and dappled light is on the front page today, and will shortly be listed in the archives of the ekphrastic challenge for future reading. I’m very grateful to both the editors and the artist; I loved Stephanie Trenchard‘s painting as soon as I saw it. I also really enjoyed the artist’s choice of poem as well, so I recommend that you check that one out when the two April winners are up in the archive!
What the series editor, Megan O’Reilly said about my poem:
“I was moved by ‘Tanager’s Cantrip’ before I even looked up the word “cantrip,” but when I read the definition–‘a magical spell’—I had a moment of ‘ah, of course.’ With its alliterative, chanting rhymes, this poem is an incantation, a blaze of magic language to match the visual magic of Stephanie Trenchard’s painting. The light, color, and movement in the image all contribute to its air of enchantment, and yet the figure of the girl is motionless and beige—an artistic choice that seems to lend credence to the poet’s use of the word still in ‘magic lives within you still.’ The girl in the painting, one could speculate, struggles to connect with the beauty around her. The last line of ‘Tanager’s Cantrip,’ seems to remind her that, despite this perceived separateness, she is where she belongs.”
Detail from a map in the collection of the Boston Public Library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map Center.
A few weeks ago, all the sins published my reflections on and exhortations to the wonders of gathering artistic inspiration in museums. (If you missed it, you can find it here.)
This week, they’re back with my best suggestions on how to outfit yourself for a museum exploration. Matthew Henson didn’t head for the North Pole without a coat, after all!
So if you’re suffering writer’s block, or it’s been ages since you went on that school trip to your local historical society, here are my 5 tips on using museums for inspiration.
…Inspiration can come from a fossil in a natural history collection, a scrap of wallpaper in a historic house, the view from a national park peak. What would a taxidermied specimen have to say to its collector? What words still resonate in the walls of an old structure? Whose hands molded the pot whose shards sit in that case, and how do the pieces evoke the whole?
My features essay, “Art Heists for Art’s Sake,” is now up to kick off Issue 3 of the lovely UK literary journal, all the sins!
…the day I stood in front of that Breugel painting and talked poetry with my mother was a turning point for me. Since then, I’ve worked inspiration from other art forms into my creative writing, both poetry and prose, both consciously and unconsciously. Museums have also become my career, both as a museum educator and as a museum advocate. Fortunately, one creative practice informs the other in a rewarding cycle.
One of the highlights of my writing-year is always the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. I started off as an attendee, then as a museum educator offering drop-in programs that tied the visual to the verbal arts for all ages, and then as an independent poet submitting workshop proposals on ekphrastic poetry.
For this year’s festival, I’m honored and excited to say that I’ve had two workshop proposals accepted! The schedule for the festival isn’t up yet, but sometime during the weekend of May 5-7, I will be offering the following two workshops:
Solarpunk, the optimistic, eco-conscious, sci-fi of the near future, is a great fit for the imagination and whimsy of a poet. We’ll look at some examples of poems old and new that reflect the solarpunk ideals, and experiment with writing prompts. Bring your futurist dreams of conversing with whales, living in a treehouse, and using solar sails to reach Mars to this workshop.
On Beyond Giggles: Writing Children’s Poetry
What makes a poem for children successful? Does it have to rhyme? Use short words? Feature at least one thing to gross you out? We’ll look at examples from a number of poets who write for younger audiences, and try out some of their techniques with a selection of writing prompts. Feel free to bring an example of one of your favorite poems for kids to add to the discussion!
As always, the Mass Poetry Festival was awesome. The sun shone on the small press fair and the Poetry Circus, the readers were in good voice, and it was fabulous catching up with friends. I particularly enjoyed the “embodied creativity” yoga & writing workshop and the poets who read their works written in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom. My thanks and compliments to everyone involved in carrying out the festival: the hard-working staff at MassPoetry, PEM, and the scores of volunteers.
As part of the festival, I had the pleasure of leading another workshop at the Peabody Essex Museum on connecting poetry to visual art, this time focusing on the idea of incorporating scale. I had a group of about 30 people and loved getting to introduce them to the Art & Nature Center’s current show, Sizing it Up: Scale in Nature and Art.
Led to Your True Path, Joel Robison, 2014. Part of the Sizing it Up exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum
We started by defining ‘scale’ for the purposes of the workshop:
Visual (comparison to human scale)
Extra-visual (too extremely small or large for human perception)
Physical (in relation to your body)
Constructed (in relationship to your page or canvas)
To get our brains in gear, we did a ‘constructed scale’ poetry writing exercise, where people picked a piece of paper that was not their usual notebook size (register tape, index cards, post-it notes) and drafted a poem where the lines fit the size of the paper exactly, no line breaks too short or too long for the physical space.
Then we went into the gallery to read a few poems that use scale, next to visual art works that evoked the same feeling.
Searching for Goldilocks, by Angela Palmer, is an artwork that depicts all the exoplanets (planets found outside our solar system) including ones in the ‘Goldilocks zone’ that might contain recognizable life like our own Earth. (You can read more about planets in the Goldilocks zone here) Next to Searching for Goldilocks, we read “Kepler 62-F” by xYz, which is the pen name of Joanna Tilsley.
Metropolis, by Vaughn Bell, is an artwork that allows up to four people to get their faces at forest floor level by stepping under and up into a series of connected terrariums featuring local plantlife.
Workshop participants experiencing Metropolis.
Next to Metropolis, we read “The Scale of Things,” by Margaret Tait (originally published in The Hen and the Bees, 1960)
The Scale of Things
by Margaret Tait
There’s a whole country at the foot of the stone
If you care to look
These are the stones we have instead of trees
In the north.
Our trees all got lost,
Blown over or cut down
Long long ago, and some of them lie there still in the
peat moss
Or fossilized in limestone.
At the shady foot of trees
Certain things grow,
But at the foot of stone grow the sun-loving
wind–resisting short plants
With very small bright flowers
And compact, precise leaves.
The wind whips the tight stems into a vibration,
But they don’t break.
The full light of the sun reaches right down to the
ground,
And reflects obliquely and sideways in among and
under the snug leaves,
And settles on the stone too,
Makes a glow there,
A sufficient warmth and clarified light.
The stunning frequencies seem to get absorbed
And if you stare closely at the stone
It’s a calm light, not too blue,
Precisely indicating its variegated surface.
The great stone stands,
On a different scale, in a way, from the minute plants
at its base.
A proliferating green lichen
Grows on it
As well as round golden coin-patches of another
common lichen,
And only in the earth right up to the very stone but
not on it
Grow the crisp grass
And all the tiny plants and flowers
Which, together interlaced and inter-related,
Make the fine springing turf which people and animals
walk on.
Then I set the workshop participants free to spend about 20 minutes in the gallery brainstorming in front of one or more pieces of scale-related art, after which we shared our reactions and results. It was especially neat to hear which artworks drew people in, and how many participants felt the same dislocation as Alice or Gulliver, feeling themselves suddenly much larger or smaller than ever before. Several people also headed back into the gallery to spend more time with the art after the workshop, which felt like success to me.
You can download the handouts (writing exercise directions, poems, and more) here: The World in a Grain of Sand handout. I highly recommend a visit to the museum while you’re at it!
Finally, here are a few cool scale-related links I used in my research for the program, if you’d like to explore more:
“Something New, Something Strange:” Found Poetry Workshop
This workshop included lots of discussion of found poetry in the 21st century, including the many ways the internet has made found poetry more possible, varied, and hilarious. We tried illustrated found poetry using Henry Longfellow’s poetry, and also pages from a mystery novel and a historical fiction, and talked about fun everyday found poetry from sources like Pentametron and GooglePoetics.
My found poem of a sea sprite, from Longfellow’s “Musician’s Tale” in Tales of a Wayside Inn.
“Grace Unto Every Art:” Poetry and Visual Arts Workshop
This included getting to talk about the Longfellow family connections to the visual arts (Henry’s wife Fanny Appleton had a brother, Thomas, who was part of the founding of the MFA. Henry’s older son Charlie collected a lot of Asian art on his trip to Japan, and Henry’s younger son Ernest became a painter.) and taking a tour of the first floor of the house. Many thanks to the fabulous rangers who kept an eye on us and answered our dozens of questions as we each picked an object that inspired us to write!
Fanny Longfellow’s writing desk in the parlor of the Longfellow National Historic Site
Inspirational Books
I brought these to the workshops for people to leaf through for inspiration; you can find them at your local library or bookstore (or museum gift shop!):
Missed out on the workshops? There’s lots of cool programs coming up at Longfellow for their summer festival, and the Mass Poetry Festival is this weekend in Salem, MA. I’ll be at the Peabody Essex Museum talking scale in poetry & art on Saturday afternoon. Hope to see you there!
So Arisia was a big, busy, beautiful mess of a weekend. I didn’t make it to all the panels I intended, I accidentally ended up in sessions that were awesome, and John Scalzi made me cry (in the good way).
I am not going to even try to cover everything, but here are a few highlights from this past weekend:
Nonstandard Paths to Magic
Honestly, I thought there would be more discussion of cool non-Latinate, non-Hogwarts, non-Western magic systems, but it was mostly a series of thought-provoking questions about the assumptions we make about magic, how it works, and who uses it. Some of my favorites:
Is magic transformative? If so, how does it change the user? How big are the changes, and how much of that depends on where in society the magic user starts?
Magic as ‘spiritual technology’ – do you have to believe in the tools to make them work?
How does magic-as-mystery (Tolkien) stack up against magic-as-textbook (Sanderson) and what are the strengths and weaknesses of each? When can you get a magical solution to a non-magical problem, or a non-magical solution to a magical problem (haul that ring to the volcano and throw it in, ’cause nothing else will unmake it!)?
Do you always need the good/evil dichotomy, when referring either to magic or to the people that use it? Where is the line between them, and is it the same for all people in that system?
Standard magic almost always comes with a price; should it? Is it a human thing, to feel like things ought to have a price attached? [and a corollary not discussed in the panel, but which I want to explore now: what if magic were an exhaustible resource, like fossil fuels, rather than renewable/constant/growing like the Force?]
My new watercolor by Julia of Pelagiella Designs (link below)
Shifting the Language of SF
If you’re not super into the geekiness of language, scroll on. I *am* into the super geekiness of language, and there were points when I wanted to just throw up my hands and ask what the Klingon word for ‘surrender’ was. (I don’t actually think there is one, come to that. Klingons are not into surrender.)
This panel ranged wildly all over the discussion of language, from why you shouldn’t try to write dialect out phonetically, to the poetics of rhythm in language from different time periods, to what English might sound like if the Normans had never invaded (apparently you should read ‘Uncleftish Beholding‘ if you want to find out).
Here are a few of the panelists’ suggested ‘shortcuts’ to making your language not sound like 21st century English (with or without Tumblr-speak, a variation on netlanguage they didn’t get around to discussing, but I heard used by panelists in other sessions, because language):
Take an element of your speculative fiction (McDonald’s takes over the Western world and thus this fiction is all about fast food and consumer culture) and incorporate the ticks of that existing ‘language’ to create your new McPolitics, McFashion, and McTech.
Make it sound like a historical period instead. Have your aliens speak like Shakespeare, or your warp field engineers write reports like Fitzwilliam Darcy.
Use a poetic meter not standard to English (hexameter instead of pentameter). Caveat: Do not ever make your characters speak in rhyme, or your audience will hunt you down, if your editor doesn’t do it first.
Consider what the street slang of your alien/future tongue sounds like, as well as the cultured spaceship captain’s commands.
Mess around with the ‘easy’ grammar; change up prepositions, use synonyms not common in daily speech, use similes that don’t exist yet (“Your hair smells like freeze-dried rheolene fibers”). Use only the 1000 top words in the language and build the words you need additively like German does (‘glove’ translates to ‘hand-shoe,’ and no, I am not making that up).
Complexities of Voice
This built really nicely off the above language panel, and also one I went to on character interactions, which was a little basic but still interesting. (One did get the feeling that some of the folks in the audience asking questions were young, and as interested in getting ideas on how to interact in real life as they were trying to get their characters to talk to each other.) The best tips from this panel:
Read your work aloud. Have someone else read it aloud. Can you tell the characters apart?
Use styles that suit the kind of character you’re building. Think about levels of formality, slang and syntax, long sentences or short ones, incomplete thoughts or run-ons and tangents. Put all that info in your character cheat sheets with eye color, favorite food, and all that other background you need.
‘Borrow’ a real-world person for your voice (may want/need to ask permission, if you know them personally!) or ‘fancast’ your characters with appropriate actors. Does your character sound like Alan Rickman? Maggie Smith? Will Smith?
Avoid infodumps and mansplaining. Even if it ‘sounds’ like your character, very few people get away with talking in paragraphs.
Find and then listen to/read the stories and conversations of people who come from the background you’re trying to write. The Smithsonian, NPR’s StoryCorps, and the Library of Congress are all good places to start for free oral history sources.
Listening to John Scalzi read hilarious excerpts from some cool new projects we’re forbidden to talk about, and then hearing him read “Raising Strong Women,” which is the part where I cried. (So did he.)
I bought one of Julia Burns Liberman‘s beautiful abstract story/watercolor paintings (looks awesome in my dining room!)
Saw an incredibly cool wood-turning demo by artist guest of honor Johnna Klukas
Got a great list of recommendations for places to read speculative poetry (and some specific poems/poets to follow) from the folks on the “Speculative Poetry is Awesome!” panel. You can find a bunch of those recommendations collated on Twitter under the hashtag #poetrypanel (though some of the tweets seem to have disappeared? If you click through to AJ Odasso’s individual feed, they’re still there)
As January gets into swing and we’re all readjusted to the demands of the school and work week, I thought it would be nice to take a moment to reflect on some of what was awesome about the holidays, and the good feelings, things, and ideas that I’m carrying into the new year. (I invite you to do the same in the comments below!)
I had a very literary Christmas, which was awesome. Being the daughter of a librarian, I can always count on getting books for gift-giving occasions, and this year was no exception.
As you can see, this was a glorious occasion for bookish and literary-adjacent gifts (and writing tools not pictured like a planbook and beautiful hand-bound blank book to tote about with me in my rambles). I have to admit, I already finished Felicia Day’s memoir, and it was excellent; funny, brave, insightful, and inspiring. I’m pacing myself on picking up the others so I don’t run through them too fast.
In the spirit of starting the new year right, I decided this year I’d actually attempt Goodreads’ book challenge, where you can set your own goal for how many books you want to read in 2016. Inspired by Stellar Four’s 52 books/year challenge, I went for 52; we’ll see how it goes. Feel free to friend me on Goodreads to keep me honest. (I’ll also be setting some creative goals for 2016, but I’m giving myself the rest of this month to get organized on them first!)
It must be noted that in addition to the genre-filled Bookmas, I had a very Merry Geekmas as well. I would post pictures of my Star Wars, Agent Carter and other geeky spoils, but I don’t want to make you all too jealous. Suffice it to say that I can now wear, carry, and otherwise use my fannishness in many happy-making ways.
Speaking of geekery, I’ll be heading to Arisia down at the Boston waterfront this weekend, so I’ll post a list of what I’m hoping to attend a little later in the week. If you have suggestions, as always, please fill me in.
What creative treasures, projects, or inspirations are you excited about in 2016? Tell me all about them!
I rang in the New Year by spending some quality time in Middle Earth, and found myself still there today courtesy of this beautiful art project by Friedrich van Schoor and Tarek Mawad. Surely Imladris or Lothlorien looked like this?
I never get tired of being impressed and surprised by my friends. My friend and former colleague Kyle Browne is an environmental artist, and has been remarkably busy this summer, with artist residencies, a piece from which is appearing in PEM’s Art & Nature Center show opening next week, Branching Out: Trees as Art, and apparently also walking the coastline on the North Shore, reading and writing the landscape there.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the New England coastline myself, between a project with my photographic collaborator on the West Coast, and my trip to Provincetown earlier this summer. [There are poems brewing!] I’ve always appreciated the kinds of patterns one gets on the sand in shallow tidal water, or rippled into the rocks of a bouldersome stream, but Kyle’s latest work gives me a new appreciation for the subtle curves and breaks of the rocky shores that are such a pain to carry scuba gear over. They look like brush strokes, and make me want to spend more time on my favorite rock down at Collins Cove, watching the stones as well as the sea.
Check out the video of Kyle’s piece below or related photography on her site here.
Sea Dreams and Time Machines 
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