In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Maria Zoccola
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Maria Zoccola
The following interview was conducted between contributor Maria Zoccola and assistant poetry editor Trisha Daigle discussing Maria’s poem “self-portrait as god” in Volume 24 and Maria’s work. The featured image, I SURRENDER, was created by Genesis TRAMAINE and included as a panel in 2019 at the Paul Robeson Gallery on Rutgers University.
I was immediately drawn to your poem “self-portrait as god” in Volume 24. It takes a certain amount of pluck to pull off a poem where the speaker takes the voice of god. What works for me in this poem though is that god takes on sorrow and regret. There is a humility to it. Art has often bestowed god with human emotions, but rarely do we see god as frail and uncertain. What was the motivation behind this poem? What made you decide to write as god?
In the poem, the concept of god swerves dramatically between God as creator to the creating god inside the human animal. It blurs; it blends until the two are a single entity of anxiety and regret, a consciousness that expands and collapses under and through the weight of in/determinism. At the core of the poem, I needed the speaker—this being that is sometimes mortal and sometimes not—to accept blame. To hold that blame inside them.
You are kind of on fire right now. Recently, you won a Dogwood Award, and your short story, “We Hold Our Treasures, We Bury Them” was a Best of the Net finalist. On your website you have listed 19 forthcoming publications for 2022, including a set of Helen of Troy poems that will appear in the Kenyon Review. Tell me a little about these poems. What was the inspiration behind Helen of Troy?
Oh, thank you so much for asking! I’m pretty jazzed about the Helen project. I’m a total Iliad nerd, and about a year ago I started writing persona poems in the voices of women from the epic—I had an Andromache poem in a recent issue of Grain, for example, and there’s an Iphigenia poem forthcoming from Salt Hill. I hadn’t touched Helen, though. She didn’t excite me the way the others did; there was no sense of doom about her, no scythe waiting just offscreen. She bounces through the Trojan War in safe luxury and then goes home with her former husband to resume the throne of Sparta. Isn’t there something just a little bit maddening about that? Aren’t you kind of on the side of the other gals, the ones who finish their run slain or enslaved?
But I finally sat down—grudgingly—to try a Helen poem. And completely shocked myself, because what came out on the page was this hilarious, disaffected housewife, this stifled, cliff-edge woman grasping for agency in a world that was not Bronze-Age Greece but instead the hills of my own Tennessee in the early nineties. It was like all the lights in the house turned on at once. I knew her, and I knew following her voice was going to be the work of more than just a poem or two. I’m maybe two-thirds of the way through a full-length manuscript now, and getting to share Helen poems with some of my favorite journals has been immensely validating. Other people are hearing her voice now, too.
A lot of your poems deal with transmutation and fantastical creatures. I think a lot of poets go through this shedding of skin, this molding an identity that feels more true to them than their old selves. I’ve heard that a lot of writers’ first books/early work lean toward coming of age, or young heroes’ journeys. Does this feel true for you? Are your new poems similar in style?
Fantasy and mythology allow us to take hold of emotions and concepts too enormous or amorphous to nail down in our own lives and begin to understand them in a way that is both outside and inside the realities of our lived experiences. Abandonment, grief, longing, even coming of age—these are high-stakes themes that feel differently to us when examined through the familiar or surprising rhythms of folklore, of known entities. Cooler to the touch, perhaps. Consumed in a way that doesn’t scar the throat going down. Sometimes the catgut emotions of real life vibrate too fast to hear the music within them. You’re too close to the canvas; all you see is paint splatter. For me, at least, the fantastical allows me to step back and see the way the brushstrokes line up to create art.
Speaking of new work, what are you writing these days? Or are you working on any big projects?
Helen is taking up most of my poetry brain these days, but I’ve also been starting to explore through my work what it means to be a girl raised by and in Memphis and the Mississippi Delta. It’s an enormous set of questions, and there are a thousand ways to get at the answers, some that hurt and some that heal.
All of your poems are written without capital letters. Is this simply a stylistic choice?
Fiction writing feels to me like marching into the world, like declaring myself into a microphone. Poetry feels so very different. Poetry feels like whispering, like passing notes under a desk, like drawing letters in ocean foam that run together and dissolve. The lowercase is a way of keeping that feeling even on the page.
I used to manage a wonderful nonprofit program that put creative writing workshops into public middle schools. Emotions are huge when you’re twelve. They’re all-consuming. When they got too big to fit inside a single body, I’d head out to the hallway with the young writer so we could sit on the floor with our backs against the cinderblock wall. Feet thudded past. Announcements blared overhead. Doors slammed. And the two of us kept talking quietly underneath it all, on the ground, our hearts in our hands. Lowercase feels like that.
Who are some of your favorite writers, poets, thinkers?
To keep the Iliad theme, I’ll start with Alice Oswald! Memorial is all-consuming. Anne Carson, of course. I had the privilege as a college freshman to take a class with Natasha Trethewey, and even after a whole semester of sitting two desks away from her in the workshop circle, I was still so in awe that I never got up the courage to ask her to sign my copy of Native Guard. The head of the creative writing department was Jericho Brown, and somehow I did find the courage to ask for his signature on Please. In a completely different genre, I’ve devoured everything Naomi Novik has ever written and am in agony waiting for her next book.
I’m always curious about a writer’s process. What does your process look like? From where do you draw inspiration?
Someday I’m actually going to learn how to write, and then I won’t have to figure it out all over again from scratch each time I turn the page in my notebook.
Maria Zoccola is a queer Southern writer with deep roots in the Mississippi Delta. She has writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, Salamander, and elsewhere. You can learn more about her and her work at her website.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Kasey Payette
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Kasey Payette
“We’re Not Weird About It” in Volume 24 is about a young person exploring their sexuality in the space of attending church events. What was the inspiration behind this story? How did it come to be?
“We’re Not Weird About It” is a fictional narrative based on my own experiences with Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity as a teen. In adulthood, through my writing, I keep returning to those settings because I’m fascinated with the general sense of longing that was so present in those spaces. I have written quite a bit of fiction involving church youth groups, including an in-progress novel manuscript, and I wrote this piece of flash fiction at a time when I was desperate to cut right to the core of what I was trying to say.
Is religion a theme you explore a lot in your writing? Does it show up in work that you like to read?
Absolutely. As a Virgo (hello, astrology-heads!) I often say I have a religious personality, although I am not necessarily a religious person. I am endlessly interested in the systems and narratives we lean on to make sense of our mind-boggling mortality, and the communities and subcultures that form around these narratives. Christianity and its intersections with empire and capitalism is a major factor in our cultural landscape, and as a person who is at least culturally Christian, I feel a huge amount of responsibility to engage with it. In my literary writing, I intentionally try to break religious experiences down to their most sensual, corporeal elements, and let that be the gateway to a broader commentary. As a reader, I definitely seek out religious themes as well. Recently, I particularly enjoyed the cult sub-plot in Louise Erdrich’s novel Plague of Doves. I also like to listen to theology stuff on audiobook (please hit me up with recommendations!) and have been listening to Cynthia Bourgeault’s The Meaning of Mary Magdalene.
So many readers shared with us how they loved that you used collective first-person POV, and yet the quiet distillation of meaning reveals that the speaker uses that as a safety mechanism. Did you try this story in a different POV? What made you decide this one was the right fit?
Great question! I have written other fictional pieces with a similar theme and setting to “We’re Not Weird About It” but using a close third-person POV. When I tried doing flash fiction on this subject matter using the collective first-person, I was delighted by the sudden sense of momentum and breathlessness it offered. In my fiction, I am very interested in exploring ecstatic group experiences—the simultaneous delight and danger in operating as a collective—and in this case, the first-person collective voice (and the switch to first-person singular near the end) was able to do a lot of the heavy lifting to illustrate the layers of safety, meaning, and delusion that group identity can provide.
I’m curious about the use of subtle irony. What made you decide that irony worked and that the point the story is making wasn’t lost for readers?
I tend to use quite a bit of humor and irony in my writing, and I’m now at a point where I trust myself with it. It’s my natural tone, but it still feels risky at times. As with everything I write with the intent to publish, I ran several drafts of this piece past my writing group to make sure it was coming across as I intended.
I was really struck by the line, “Pretty makes sin come easy; pretty saves you, then gives you away.” That line is really telling in what this young speaker is grappling with. I’m wondering if you would be willing to expand on it and fancy us with what your intention was with it.
For people socialized as women, particularly within certain Christian contexts, there’s always this tension between desirability and modesty. As a Christian youth, I remember sometimes wishing I was more conventionally pretty (read: thinner and more feminine—traits I somehow equated with being a better Christian), but also feeling a strange superiority at not having the right body, not having the right clothes. Certain “sins”— partying, drinking, having sex with boys—seemed so out of reach for me at the time that they simply were not a temptation. I could see the risk and danger in being perceived as attractive, and was not sure I wanted that.
How might stories like “We Not Weird About It” help us to explore who we are and the parts of ourselves that we keep hidden? How might more stories like this help readers, maybe even young readers, learn and shape healthy and safe perspectives on sexuality, autonomy, personal rights and freedoms?
This is a big question! I think what I’ll say, as a writer and teacher of writing, is that I think “We’re Not Weird About It” could be used as the basis for a writing prompt: Write a narrative using the first-person collective from the perspective of a group you’ve been a part of where you felt you both fit in and didn’t fit in. Somewhere in the narrative, switch to using first-person singular to say or confess something purely as yourself, possibly using the construction, “Between you and me, I…”
Something I love about this story is that it feels like it could be an essay. There is a grave truth in this story. We were fortunate to publish your essay “Preserves” in Vol. 21. Are you attracted to writing that blends genres or could be considered hybrid?
Especially with flash pieces, the designation of “fiction” or “nonfiction” seems less important to me than the overall impression the narrative has on the reader. I’ve written a few pieces, including “We’re Not Weird About It,” that come close enough to examining my lived experience to count as a personal essay, but are inventive and story-like enough to count as fiction. I honestly haven’t thought much about whether to label my work “hybrid” or “genre-bending,” but I’d like to mull that over more, especially as I approach a point where publishing an essay collection or short story collection might be a real possibility for me.
What do you think a good piece of flash writing needs? Is this a form you write in a lot? Do you have favorite pieces or writers that you love?
I love the short form. I think good flash pieces require urgency, even to the point of desperation. The reader should feel that the author has something to say, and that they need to say it right now. Some of my major influences for flash fiction are Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, and Lindsay Hunter.
The title of Vol. 24, “Ghost(s) Still Living” comes out of a line from a poem included by Heather A. Warren. Given all that’s occurred in our world in the past few years, what does the idea of “ghosts still living” mean to you?
Oof. I found Heather’s poem deeply affecting, especially in this moment in history. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying I feel like so many parts of my life and identity have died in the past couple of years. Both as a direct result of and set against the backdrop of the global pandemic, racial reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd, escalating climate crisis, and on and on, I am not the same person I was in 2019, and I’ll never be that person again. In some ways I feel like a more faded and more tired person waiting to come back to life, like a ghost. It seems like we’re all wandering around as compromised versions of ourselves—ghosts still living. I wish I had something more eloquent to say about this. I wish I had something more hopeful to say about this.
What projects are you working on now?
In theory I am working on my novel manuscript (working title: This Is My Body) which is similar to “We’re Not Weird About It” in setting and theme, but in reality I’ve mostly been writing essays these past couple of years. I’m realizing I’m probably much closer to having an essay collection than I am to having a finished novel.
Kasey Payette is a fiction writer and essayist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her work has appeared in CALYX, Gulf Coast, Juked, Revolver, and Water~Stone Review. Her writing has been supported by the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series program and the Minnesota State Arts Board. She is currently at work on her first novel. You can follow her on Instagram @kaseypayette.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—E.A. Farro
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—E.A. Farro
In your essay from Vol. 24, “Whatever Discomfort, Find Beauty”, the speaker directly addresses the reader during a trip in the Never Summer mountain range in Colorado. Can you tell us about the inspiration behind this piece? How did it come to be?
I spent the first decade of my career as a field geologist. I’d live off-grid in a tent for days or weeks at a time collecting samples to study ancient periods of climate warming. The physical intimacy with the landscape was a kind of poetry. I found things I lost in the city when I went into remote wilderness. My relationship to essays is deeply tied to trying to find a language for those experiences.
Nature is very much a character in this essay. The speaker is interacting with water and sediment, adding and removing layers of clothing depending on the movements of the sun, trying to avoid moose in the wild. Did you take notes on your excursion? Take photos? When you sit down to write and paint a realistic scene like this from memory, what’s your process for writing it to how you remember it?
The first tool I acquired as a geologist was a Rite-in-the-Rain notebook. It was small and yellow and had a waxy feel. Even when I got a rock hammer and an ice ax, it was still my notebook that made me feel most powerful. I used it to record data and the location of lakes we sampled, but I also free-wrote thoughts, poetry, and observations. I rely on those notebooks to transport me back with both their content and the muddy fingerprints. Field work is physical, hard, and repetitive. The memory comes as much from my body as my mind.
One of the aspects from it that our readers loved is how deftly it moves through time. I’m curious—is there an earlier draft of this essay that is longer? Was it difficult to keep it concise without meandering too far from the structure?
This essay is part of a collection my agent is sending out for publication consideration, Fieldnotes from the Anthropocene. I wrote this piece thinking it would merge or expand, but, ultimately, I decided to let it breathe on its own.
Let’s talk about that title! To me it reads like a mantra for seeking deeper meaning to our world. I most connected it to the line “Your life is a blip, a yelp, a fleeting moment out of the thousands of years archived in cores of mud piled up on the platform behind you.” Would you be willing to indulge us and expand on what the title means to you and how you wish for readers to experience it?
As a geologist I exist in two different scales of time, almost like living in parallel worlds. Collecting samples to study changes in climate over thousands of years puts time into perspective. The title is a call to connect with the beauty of landscape and sky and water alongside our immediate human concerns—not to dismiss our human needs, but to remember that we are part of something large and wild.
You’re a climate scientist and you have free zines available on your website. What made you decide to make your work accessible for free, and also, what do you hope for people to know about these zines? What do you hope people will do with them?
In August, my husband had a breakthrough case of COVID and our family quarantined for a long time. I made a stop-motion animation of my zine, Solving Climate Change Together. I mixed Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” and Glass Animals’ “Heat Wave,” thinking about the music of climate change. This video is the culmination of several pandemic projects.
Early in the pandemic I took awesome free online classes through the Minnesota Center for Book Arts with my kids. Our whole life was taking place at our dining room table, and for a brief period we’d clear away the distance learning and work to create. When it warmed up, I met up outside with a group of artists now organized in zines about warmth by the amazing Karine Rupp Stanko. When I saw a class by Regula Russelle called Zine Making Against Climate Change—I had to take it. Russelle talks about zines as the most democratic form of publishing. Anyone can make and distribute them. That really inspires me.
In my zine Science and Scientist, I humanize the scientific process. In Solving Climate Change Together, I share my takeaway from working in politics that effective policy making needs to braid science with other ways of knowing and other kinds of expertise—I am using the word “braid” as a reference to the powerful book, Braiding Sweetgrass by Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Who are some of your favorite climate-scientist/eco-lit writers?
I love the Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin – sci-fi about coming in contact with aliens and understanding the physical boundary conditions of life on a planet. It is a page turner packed with academic theory, which I didn’t know was possible. The Little Prince by Antoine Saint-Exupe`ry similarly shows how our spirit is tied to place. Without the fun of aliens, Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels has gorgeous exploration of landscape and identity. Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights makes me so aware of my body and my body on the landscape. I want to read it over and over. Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams does an amazing job of moving between the personal and the universal and making clear what is at stake in the level of a lake.
I also love to read field guides. Field guides to ferns, aquatic plants, trees, wildflowers. I keep them by my desk and on my nightstand.
I see the landscape as a character in these books. But, for me, landscape is a character in all books.
What projects are you working on now?
I am working on a novel, Providence Murder Ballad. I grew up in a city full of ghosts. I drank from the fountain cursed by H.P. Lovecraft and visited a loved one in the same psychiatric hospital where his parents died. Walking to my best friend’s, I passed where Edgar Allan Poe lived when he came to court his beloved. Going out on Federal Hill, I passed the Coin O’Matic used by Mob boss Raymond Patriarca to launder money. Providence, my hometown, is a character in the book along with all its ghosts. But at its heart, the book is about the romance, betrayal, and importance of our childhood friendships.
E.A. Farro is a climate scientist who spent several years working in politics. She is the founder of The Nature Library, a literary art installation in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her publications have appeared in The Rumpus, Kenyon Review, and The Normal School, among others. She is a recipient of a 2010 Loft Literary Center Mentor Award and a 2019 Minnesota State Arts Board grant. You can learn more about her work at her website.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Kristin Laurel
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Kristin Laurel
In “Lucas”, your poem from Volume 24, the speaker is taking a bath after witnessing a man receive medical attention from a chest compression device. Can you tell us what inspired this poem? How did it come to be?
Literally, this poem came about after a twenty-four-hour shift as a flight nurse. I wasn’t thinking of all the benefits from a medical perspective, but thinking of the device through a tired poet’s eyes. Plus, something a coworker said when we started using this device years ago “codes sure are controlled and easier now.” Giving chest compressions is hard work, and there’s something about not having the cardio and adrenaline—it makes it less dramatic, and may I daresay less exciting. So for me, therein lies the danger— becoming too detached.
There is a little bit of humor in this poem that diffuses the intensity of witnessing medical trauma. I think the humor always highlights the intimacy in the poem: the speaker bathing, her reflections on desire for a man’s touch. If desire is derived from emotions and environment, in what ways did you mine through your own interiority to convey such a personally-nuanced but universally-shared expression?
Well, I’m glad there was some humor that seeped through despite the content. Truth is, I was probably missing my wife. At the time, we were only spending about six months a year together. She lived in NC and I lived in MN. We did the long-distance deal for over ten years, so longing and desire come naturally for me. Lol. If the LUCAS device was named Lolita or Lucy, it would have been a woman’s touch. I chose to stick with more masculine nouns and pronouns to make the poem less confusing.
I read in another interview that you write a lot from personal experience. There’s this nice NPR article about you in which you discuss compassion fatigue, a concept that may have been unknown to many of us until fairly recently. Does “Lucas” draw upon this concept of compassion fatigue? I’m thinking of how the speaker desires a man’s hands on her chest, not some medical device delivering chest compressions. Do you find that poetry is an outlet for human compassion? How do you wish for your poems to convey connections between humanity? 
Yes, definitely. That’s exactly what I was aiming for. There’s a fine line to compartmentalizing for self-care vs. not caring (burn out). Technology makes it easier to dissociate and we need to be careful. When I was a student nurse over thirty years ago, we were taught massage. Can you imagine that now? I spend more time staring at a computer screen and entering information than I do actual hands-on nursing.
I do think poetry is an outlet for compassion among other things. I’ve turned to poetry in some of the darkest and hardest periods in my life—as both writer and reader. As a reader it’s always a comfort to me to read something that makes me not feel so alone, especially during periods of grief or despair. Poetry can unite us on a deeper level. My old mentor Thomas R. Smith once told me something like “poetry is where our best selves come out.” I’m still looking for my best self, lol, but I’ve written two books with extremely heavy, painful material. The writing act itself was therapeutic, but I felt compelled to put it all out there in hopes it might make a connection and/or help someone else.
One of our readers noted “Lucas” feels timely while we’re still enduring the Covid-19 pandemic, and yet I think the idea of desire for human compassion and decency will resonate with readers well into the future. Can you think of any poems or poets that you’ve read lately whose work feels both poignant now and transcendent of future time?
I wrote Lucas pre-pandemic, so yes, I think the desire for human compassion and decency is a universal and transcendental theme. I think so many poets do this; it would be hard to name just a few. An old poem (with a title that would not be acceptable today) that comes to mind and that definitely resonates with this theme is the poem by the late Alden Nowlan “He Sits Down on the Floor of a School for the Retarded.” The poem describes what it is like going to a group home and giving one of the residents a hug. I especially love the lines:
It’s what we all want, in the end,
to be held, merely to be held,
to be kissed (not necessarily with the lips,
for every touching is a kind of kiss.)
Yet, it’s what we all want, in the end,
not to be worshipped, not to be admired,
not to be famous, not to be feared,
not even to be loved, but simply to be held.
The title of Vol. 24, “Ghost(s) Still Living” comes out of a line from a poem by Heather A. Warren. Given all that’s occurred in our world in the past year or two, what does the idea of “ghosts still living” mean to you?
So many interpretations for this. And wow, that is a great poem “What Wounds Become” by Warren. For me, what comes to mind is grief. I wrote about the ghosts of my nephews after they died. As a poet, I carry the dead with me per se. My dead are my ghosts. They show up in my imagination, my psyche, dreams, or even as memory. After the last two years, there’s been a collective grief that’s almost palpable. Warren’s poem hints at (via my interpretation) “ghosts still living” inside of us.
What does your writing process look like? Are you still working as a nurse, and if so, has Covid changed your writing process? Is Covid providing new material for you to work with?
Pre-Covid, and pre-move to NC, I had structure and a writing group. I was disciplined and also very task-driven to complete a manuscript for the writing program I was in, and then another to honor the death of my nephews. I guess my process is obsession driven. I have a thought or idea (usually from an experience) and then set out to experiment on paper. I have been working as an ER nurse seasonally and now as a travel nurse. Covid has changed my writing process, I think. Why not? Blame it all on Covid. –When I’m on assignment it is draining and all-consuming. I find that when I am off work, I have this “ I need to fill up” mentality. Spending time with my loved ones and outdoors has taken priority. Writing, at times, feels like work, especially, writing about nursing or working with Covid patients. Covid has given me material, along with travel nursing. I’ve scribbled away at stuff in my journal to jog a memory here or there to come back to it later, but I haven’t written a work poem in over two years.
What projects are you working on now?
I’ve really been trying to write lighter stuff—which hasn’t been working out so great, at least on a prolific level. I’ve been consciously trying to be more mindful and grateful, and writing more poems inspired by the natural world. I’ve been working on a poem for my grandson for a few months. I’ve been trying to finish a short story for fifteen years. I’ve been dabbling and composing. Slowing myself down and enjoying the little things. Maybe that’s the one good thing that Covid has changed for us all.
Kristin Laurel has been employed as a nurse for over thirty years. She owes her passion for poetry to The Loft Literary Center, where she completed a two-year apprenticeship. Her poetry and essays have been published in CALYX, Chautauqua, Gravel, The Raleigh Review, The Portland Review, and others, and have been featured on NPR. She is the author of Giving Them All Away (Evening Street Press) and Questions About the Ride (Main Street Rag). She and her spouse divide their time between the 10,000 lakes of Minnesota and the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina. You can learn more about her and her work at her website.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Pamela R. Fletcher Bush
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Pamela R. Fletcher Bush
Your memoir essay “The Complexion of Love” in Vol. 24 recounts a pivotal moment when the young narrator Renny is confronted with racism by the white kids she’s attracted to, and then feels compelled to stay silent about it. Can you tell us a bit about how this essay came to be? What inspired you to write it?
“The Complexion of Love” is included in a larger work that I’ve written and have revised over many years. Overall, the work is an account of the interior world of a young girl who becomes increasingly aware of both her mental and physical landscapes. Renny gathers and sifts through information about the fascinating racially constructed and racially constrained society enveloping her mind and her relationships. Living in the white dominant environment of La Puente, California (a suburb of Los Angeles), how does this racialized society impinge upon her friendships? Can interracial friendships survive? These questions intrigue me, because, as we know, friendship is vital to children. A sense of acceptance and belonging inside and outside our homes shape the evolution of ourselves. Antagonism and rejection based on something we cannot control or change about ourselves, like our skin complexion, is harmful and haunting.
In this story Renny, who is eight years old, encounters a lack of acceptance and belonging when she becomes attracted to Calvin, a white classmate. During this time, she also becomes aware of the taboo of interracial love when her best friend BK, a white girl, tells her, “You should stick to your own kind.” Although Renny becomes confused and upset upon hearing about this societal rule, she learns to keep her objection to herself and to be quiet about her romantic feelings for Calvin.
To her horror, however, when Calvin and his friends deride her after she attempts to befriend them, she attacks Calvin and beats him to the ground. His rejection and racial derision is hard for Renny to endure, but after the incident, she remains naively optimistic.
I wrote this piece because I hadn’t read stories about the unique experiences of young Black girls living in white dominant suburbs. While racism often connects these girls’ experiences to the overall American “Black” experience, their lives, the nuances of their situations, differ due to the setting in which they live. I’d venture to say that Black girls who grew up in similar places in the 1960s, such as the metropolitan areas of the Twin Cities, probably would have experienced situations like those that Renny experienced.
You have a new essay published called “Summer 1964” in the anthology We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World. That essay also features the same neighbor girls young Renny played with. But while these two essays have overlapping characters and some similar themes, they are distinctly different in tone and form. Did you write them around the same time? What was it like to write these two essays and keep them separate from each other?
The two pieces were written during different periods, though “Summer 1964” was written first. It’s also included in that larger work I mentioned previously. Renny’s and BK’s friendship is inextricably woven in the fabric of Renny’s young life. BK and her family are the first white people Renny meets who appear to genuinely accept and respect her. Over time, BK proves herself trustworthy, leading Renny to consider BK her sister, so their relationship becomes central to Renny’s sense of self. Until…
The tone and form of this story differ because Renny’s halcyon days are numbered. In her mind, the pieces of the puzzle begin to fit. Her innocence becomes shattered when BK shuns her to avoid the ridicule of some new white friends. Leading up to that moment, Renny encounters the criticism of her colored friends (the respectful term used for Black people at the time), who are suspicious of white people. These playmates question Renny’s loyalty, causing her to wonder why skin color is such a big deal.
Given Renny’s evolving state of mind during that year, it wasn’t difficult to keep the two stories separate from each other.
One thing that stood out to me in both, that I feel you expertly crafted, was how young Renny saw the world. In “Complexion of Love” we spend almost the entire essay in one scene, whereas in “Summer 1964”, we travel with Renny through multiple spaces over the course of a season. She really comes at her “aha moments” from a different approach. How can memoirists use writing elements like time, location, setting, or scene to flesh out these interior spaces for their younger selves?
I love this question about craft! I’m glad you detected what I’m up to in these two pieces that are part of a book I’m writing. The pivotal time of 1964 and the location of La Puente in these stories coincide with the racially divided world Renny grapples with in her mind. When recalling the past in a memoir, fleshing out the exact and necessary details of the setting (e.g., time and location) is crucial in rendering the meaning of the situations and circumstances of the story. Depicting the setting just so helps to portray the attitudes, culture, customs, traditions, etc. of a place that somehow influences the characters’ thoughts and actions.
As I alluded to earlier, in “Complexion of Love,” Renny is at an age where she’s beginning to contemplate love in a naïve, refreshing way. Bianca, BK’s eldest sister, disrupts this contemplation when she broaches the subject of interracial love with Renny. Surprised and speechless, Renny doesn’t have the experience or the language to express her thoughts about something she didn’t know existed. Like many young girls at that time, she has a crush on Paul McCartney of The Beatles. She doesn’t consider his skin color; she perceives him as just a cute guy in a new band playing the guitar on the Ed Sullivan show.
Meanwhile, as the days of 1964 pass, the hot water of racial politics comes to a rapid boil, given the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banning public racial segregation. In the background—or in the foreground, depending on where you are—people in several New York cities are rebelling against racial injustice. The news coverage is ripe with social protest and political conflict, but Renny isn’t directly impacted by these events; she lives in a Southern California suburb, not in the south or on the east coast. Yet, in her small world, she begins experiencing personal fallout among her friends. Relating the specific details of these social and political occurrences are meant to reflect the swift change happening in both society and in Renny’s mind.
We know that memory is a challenging place to write from. What is it like for you to revisit your childhood when you’re writing? You paint such lovely and detailed scenes with just the right amount of description; how did you recall sights and sounds? What was your creative process like while mining your childhood memories?
Memory is a fascinating thing. I had totally forgotten about the situations and events of my young life that had involved BK and her family. When I got to junior high school, I moved on, as BK and I went our separate ways, becoming racially segregated in our new social circles. I think my mind kept the memory locked in a safe until it was time to release it. Then, one day out of the blue, decades later, the memory of that day when I no longer considered BK my friend, my sister rushed into the forefront of my mind. So I plopped myself down at my desk and wrote the story in one sitting.
I kept no journal of that time, though I sketched a lot and wrote many poems and short stories. Nonetheless, I recalled the vivid details of situations, facial expressions, spoken words, the music we listened and danced to, our houses and yards, my thoughts, and my emotions. And as I wrote, I wept. Although it was painful to recall some of those times, I was glad that I had retrieved a part of myself that I had banished. Following the writing of “Summer 1964,” a few years later after attending a family reunion, I became interested in my parents’ young lives. I began writing an account of the intersection between their experiences and my own childhood. I wrote quick episodes. It was a wonderful exercise because I realized that the home of my youth had such a strange and huge impact on my life. I suppose that’s the case for everyone.
In January 2020, you took over as the new Executive Director of Saint Paul Almanac. Can you share with us any literary-arts initiatives that you’re pursuing in your role? 
Thank you for asking about my work at Saint Paul Almanac! Currently, we have a lot of literary-arts projects in the hopper. We’re collaborating with the University of Saint Thomas on an important initiative, “The Power of Storytelling for Environmental Justice in Our Communities” to sponsor a community storytelling contest that seeks to bring awareness and storytelling around the theme of environmental justice. The call of submissions will occur by February 15 and the judging will happen in April. We’ll have a public celebration of the contest recipients in May. The contests will offer prizes to the top submissions.
Also in February, Saint Paul Almanac will hold a writing contest featuring poetry, flash fiction, and flash creative nonfiction focusing on the theme, BREAK THROUGH. The submissions are due on February 28 and the recipients of the three categories will be announced by the end of March. The contests will offer prizes to the top submissions.
For April, we’re planning our second annual Global Poetry Celebration on Earth Day, which will feature participants reading poetry in at least 20 languages. Last year, participants read poetry in 21 languages; two participants from Albania and India, who found us via Facebook, contributed to the reading, and attendees joined our event from around the country.
In October, we’re eagerly anticipating the launch of Volume 13 of our anthology, The Almanac.
I invite everyone to visit our website and social media platforms to keep up with our exciting endeavors.
What projects of your own are you working on now?
I’m wrapping up the work that includes “Complexion of Love” and “Summer of 1964.” I’m also writing another account of my life, but it’ll be focused on the latter years of my life.
Pamela R. Fletcher Bush is professor emerita of English (St. Catherine University) and a widely published writer in various genres, having won literary awards and fellowships for creative nonfiction, arts criticism, and poetry (Loft Literary Center, Minnesota State Arts Board, Pan African Literary Forum at the New School, and St. Catherine University, among others). She’s also an editor, whose works include Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press); The Way We See It: A Fresh Look at Vision Loss (Arcata Press); Saint Paul Almanac (Arcata Press); and Transforming a Rape Culture (Milkweed Editions). She is the executive director of the Saint Paul Almanac.