Along with the other winners of the 2013 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition, I will be reading at the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival this Sunday. The festival will feature panels and discussions by North Carolina publishers as well as by Fady Joudah and Kathryn Stripling Byer. If you’re in the Cary area, come on out & join us!
Page Walker Arts & History Center
119 Ambassador Loop, Cary, NC 27513
Many thanks to Megan Roberts, author of Matters of Record, for tagging me to participate in Next Big Thing, an expanding blog project of author interviews.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
My older sister Chelsea, to whom the book is dedicated, scared the hell out of me when I was little with these ghost stories about a butcher who had built our house, so I guess the idea was planted then. What surprised me was that as I got older, other people around the little town where I grew up began to elaborate on some of her stories: for instance, when I was waiting tables many years later at the Lumberton 68 Family Restaurant, one of my older regulars asked where I lived, and when I told her, she replied, “Oh, the old slaughterhouse. I looked at that place when it was on the market in the ‘80’s. You know the butcher used to drain the blood in that creek?”
So I guess you could say that the collection is part history and part ghost story, though sometimes it’s hard for me to tell those threads apart.
I should also say that the more I looked into the history of the place, the more bizarre the stories got—so much so that they would not all fit in the chapbook. In the full-length collection, readers can expect, in addition to the butcher poems, some poems about an elephant, Helen McGregor, who died while traveling by foot through the area with the circus in 1832.
What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry
What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
Hmmm, I think I’d pick Winona Ryder to play my sister. Anthony Hopkins would make an excellent butcher, and Natalie Portman could play the ghost of his wife. For the parents, I would pick Kathy Bates and Jeremy Irons.
What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
These poems were stitched together with human hair and highway lines in haunted landscapes.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
The oldest poem in the collection (“Stray”) is from 2007, and the newest (“Dressing the Hog”) is from 2012. So that makes something like six years. I would add, though, that I did not begin to think in terms of “a manuscript” until around 2009, and it took a couple of years more to muster the courage to write the poems that dealt with the theme of incest.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Well, I would say I was initially motivated by my sister’s death and a cathartic impulse, but I don’t think that counts as inspiration exactly. Some individual poems, on the other hand, were definitely inspired by people I know & love (shout out to my ever-supportive husband, Gerard) and by other writers, teachers, mentors, and peers who encouraged me and showed me how it’s done (I’ll save the complete list for a full-length collection, but for now, I’ll just mention a few: many thanks to Dorianne Laux, Michael Colonnese, and Robin Greene, especially).
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
I attempted a poem that contains two dirty jokes.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Neither–it is being published by Longleaf Press.
The writers I tag will post their own interviews on March 20, 2013:
1. Kelly Michels, author of Mother and Child with Flowers (forthcoming from Finishing Line Press)
2. Rachel Herrick, author of A Guide to the North American Obeast (Forthcoming from The Institute for Contemporary Art.)
3. Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, author of Everyday Chica (Longleaf Press)
4. Michael S. Begnal, author of Future Blues (Salmon Poetry)
My chapbook, Blood Creek, is due out from Longleaf Press soon, so I thought I’d share with you all the cover image, which was designed by Michael Duprey, a good friend & very talented graphic artist. For the creek, Mike used satellite imagery he’s been mapping out. I’ll be sending out some promotional postcards soon; if you would like one, please email your address to shannoncamlin@gmail.com or message me on Facebook. Cheers!
Check it out: I’m this week’s featured poet on Superstition Review‘s podcast. Listen free through iTunes U.
Many thanks to Trish Murphy & her amazing editorial staff!
One of the pleasures of the writing life is getting to know the other people who gravitate toward that sphere. Writers are fun. They spend prolonged periods holed up with their creations, and then (with the exception of your Dickinsons and Salingers) they emerge from their caves into the bigger world, usually feeling somewhere between mildly disoriented and bat-shit stir-crazy. Excellent company, by my standards.
Among the other great pleasures are getting to watch a friend’s work evolve, to hear the voice in its varied contexts, and to notice the patina building over time. It’s such a long process that (for me, at least) it’s hard to envision the finished form. So I had no idea how delighted I would be when I opened my mail and found my friend Mike Begnal’s poetry collection, Future Blues, right there in my hands—so many of the loose pages we had pored over a few years ago in workshop all bound up in a beautiful, proper book:
Reading these poems feels a little like watching footage of fish in the deep ocean: their forms have evolved for purposes logical—particular to their terrain—but a little mystic somehow too. The images float by strangely, yet there is a sensibility in the negative space between them as well as between the lines and stanzas:
nothing will be okay
nothing remains pristine for long
stretched out in a dark bed,
the spectacular lights of death
all this terror,
the flying humanoids in the air for real,
the sinister people who want
to come back from the past,
a leafless time
that wind shook.
(“Blues for Tomorrow,” 13-22)
The form and content are raveled together artfully here. The poem’s stanzas hover much like the flying humanoids, in some places vaguely threatening my ability to navigate the current of the page, yet never drowning me in it entirely. Although Begnal steers toward an abstract place, when I arrive, I get the sense that I have been there before, lying sleepless in that room, antagonized by those ghosts. The metaphor triggers an unsettled feeling a little like déjà vu, but the resulting tension is appropriate and complementary to the concept.
These poems not only reckon with the dead, but also commune with them. An informal ode called “Samhain,” for instance, pays tribute to those dead who “are there, in a word or line/you thought was your own,/ and walk among us to/ night” (30-34). In this poem, Begnal is particularly conscientious of the line, as evidenced by the break between “to” and “night,” suggesting both toward our own demise and tonight, as in on Samhain (the Gaelic festival which begat Halloween.)
The central concept is broader in scope, though, and extends to the idea that we invoke the dead by simply speaking, so many of our words weighed down as they are with history. Fittingly, the poem is dedicated to Mongán, a seventh-century Irish chieftain whose namesake is a semi-divine figure from Gaelic literature. Such ghosts rustle through the lines, and in the introductory stanza especially, the rift between words reflects the rift between worlds:
for all the dead who have spoke before
me spoke for all the dead who have before
spoke for all the dead who have before
dead for all who have spoke before the
me
I trust in language always.
(1-6)
This is a poetry that makes room for its ghosts. The intentionally muddled syntax of the worried line leaves an impression of language as an inheritance, something that (as those of us who teach freshman composition know all too well) sometimes comes in jumbled variations and barely decipherable waves. Just when the syntax pushes my patience toward its limits though, I am soothed and surprised by that single, simple line, “I trust in language always.”
Publication in Great River Review
I’m so happy to report that Great River Review took one of my poems for the 2013 Spring/Summer issue. This is a beautiful journal; if y’all don’t already know it, you should check it out!
Here is a blog post I wrote earlier this month but didn’t get to post until now. There’s no wireless here at the Anderson Center.
I have been neglecting this blog and my writing in general for several months now, but today, I am in the top of an old water tower that has been converted into a writing studio. At the beginning of June, I arrived for a residency at the Anderson Center for the Arts in Red Wing, Minnesota. The Center was originally used as a working farm and research laboratory for experiments on everything from cereal to robotic arms that were used to handle uranium, but now it functions as a thriving artists’ community: home to Red Dragonfly Press, many painting and printmaking studios, and to me and four other residents for the next month. We are staying in a lovely old house with hand-painted ceilings, dark wood trim, and lots of great little book nooks & places to write.
On a jog along the Cannon Valley Trail this morning, I heard a lovely whoosh—something like damp sheets flapping on a laundry line—and glanced over to see a blue heron taking off downstream. Summer is just beginning here, and I feel the way that I always feel when I go someplace new: I want to know the names of things. Out of the window right now, I can see the pointy tops of pine trees, a variety that we don’t have in North Carolina. I’ve seen something like them in Maine though. What are they called?
While here, I am hoping to finish the book of poetry that I have been working on for the last five years. I have a plan. I have inventoried all of my poems. There are 46, but of the 46, around half are flops that have some vaguely redeeming qualities. I am going to take a pair of scissors, cut out the salvageable lines—like harvesting organs, I think—and see if I can collage them into some little Frankenstein poems.
And then there are the ideas for new poems that I have been meaning to get to. During the academic year, I don’t usually have much mental energy left for my own writing, so I keep a running list in my phone of the ideas that I get. I like to think of it like putting them in an incubator. Currently, there are 29. And even if I don’t get to all of them this month, I think I have a decent shot of finally finishing this thing before the summer’s end. It’s a good feeling!
Many Thanks to Patricia Colleen Murphy and everybody else at The Superstition Review for another fabulous issue! I’m thrilled to have a couple of poems alongside those by Dorianne Laux, Sherman Alexie, and several other talented souls! 
On my way home from a Halloween party a couple of weekends ago, I hit a deer. Five minutes earlier, I had been thinking about how it seemed like exactly the kind of night when one would hit a deer and how I should be extra careful, and no sooner had the thought situated itself toward the back of my mind than I saw a large doe running toward the driver’s side of my car, too close to miss. I didn’t have my brights on (there was a car several hundred yards in front of me), so it seemed like the poor thing just materialized. At the same time that I knew there was no avoiding it, I insisted, no, it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe by some miracle, I’ll avoid it! I didn’t though. I don’t see how I could have, sans miracle. I must have closed my eyes for a split second at the point of impact. When I opened them, I was skidding like crazy, fish-tailing to the point that I barely managed to stay on the road. It was scary.
A couple of things now strike me as being odd. First of all, as it happened, my mind meta-consciously divided. One part of me was screaming while the other part was steering. The former part initiated the process, but when the latter part took over, I could still hear myself screaming. It seemed strange to be simultaneously carrying out two such contrary actions. Screamy-me and stunt-car-driver-me duked it out after the initial impact, and thankfully, stunt car driver won.
Second of all, I didn’t go back. I called the state highway patrol and asked them to look for a dead or injured deer in the vicinity, but I was too chicken to go back. I thought, well, I don’t have a gun, so even if the poor thing is suffering, there’s nothing I can do, and I am a woman alone on a country road at night. This is the opening scene of at least a dozen horror films. So I pulled over in a driveway next to a double-wide, popped the wheel well out so that it wouldn’t flatten the tire, and drove home. But it seemed like the wrong reaction.
A manifestation of this event includes the development of two irrational superstitions. Irrational reaction A: I will no longer drive to or from Halloween parties. This is the second time I have gotten into day-of-the-Halloween-party car accidents. The first time was in Raleigh back in ’08 on my way to a party Gerard and I were hosting. It turned out to be a great party (met Tina & Tim, a couple of my best friends now), but I was too scared to drive for like six months afterward the first time around. Instead, I bought a down jacket, an umbrella, and rain boots so that I could walk to school in any weather.
Irrational reaction #2: I might adopt a dog. There is a little beagle that comes out of the swamp behind our house sometimes—a stray that our schizophrenic neighbor had been feeding before he moved out. The day after the party, I saw the dog in the empty yard for the first time since our neighbor split (it’s been a few weeks). I have some bones in the cupboard that I throw out to a different neighbor’s dogs late at night when they won’t stop barking. So I threw Swamp Dog a couple of bones. It seems well-behaved (besides being basically feral and refusing to come anywhere near me, so by well-behaved, I mean that it doesn’t bark). And anyway, an act of kindness motivated by a desire for atonement (and a general love of animals) should nullify (or at least lessen) the bad karma resulting from hitting a deer with my old, newfangled car and leaving it to die on the side of the road, right? I know it’s ridiculous, and I’m pretty sure that’s not at all the way karma works, but it might make me feel a little bit better. So I went out and bought some mid-grade dog food (okay, it was Pet Smart gourmet generic, and I bought the hard and soft kinds to mix together), and Gerard and I have been feeding it for just over a week. I still can’t get close enough to start using a gender-specific pronoun though, let alone get it to a vet. I think I will ask my vet if he can procure me some K-9 roofies so I can slip it one and bring it on home.
Also, I have a couple of poems coming out in the upcoming edition of Superstition Review. Many thanks to Trish Murphy for the publication & for facilitating this site!
RIP Mr. Deer (and perhaps my beloved 2003 Hyundai Tiburon. We’ve yet to see whether it’s repairable.)
Thanks for visiting my new author’s website. Check back for updates soon.
