Night Train Red Dust Book News

Laurie Hertzel, Senior Books Editor, Star Tribune

Here are links to book reviews and interviews:
Minneapolis Star Tribune 
September 20, 2014 Review by Elizabeth Hoover:

The epigraph to Sheila Packa’s fourth collection is from Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead,” a masterful long poem about West Virginia miners. Like Rukeyser, Packa acts as a powerful witness to the lives of people connected to the mines in a project that is poetry and documentary.

Packa writes about the Iron Range of Minnesota and its labor history: work, strikes and injuries: “Thick ores and clay and blood / mix in crush wounds and miner’s lung.” She includes poems about women miners “with the air of Amelia Earharts” who “face the lay off” when men return from war. Her syntax mimics the relentlessness of labor; readers work through long sentences squeezed into short-line poems.

From strawberries to saunas, Packa sensitively portrays the culture of this area’s immigrant communities. She writes of music that “echo[es] time and resistance,” and how “one language blooms from another.”

The landscape acts as a major character. It has its own history, but it also absorbs the stories of the people who live there: “Old rocks speak in grandfathers’ tongues / of workers strife, gun and knife.”

While below, the mines claim the lives of workers, above the landscape bursts with life: “The surface of the lake glints like silver-plate” and spring makes frogs in frozen mud “jump-start their hearts.”

Elizabeth Hoover is the assistant director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va.

Hibbing Daily Tribune, 
"Taken together, Packa’s poems act like a pack of strikers jumping the berm of an iron mine, hoping that in number one of them would avoid the bulls to reach the works. The elements of poems overlap, but the mission, the theme, each follows its own path. What it means to be an immigrant, what it is to be cheated, what it is to work your life out through your arms."

"More than that, though, also the landscape. The colors. The odd mix of isolation and community comprising life on the Iron Range. I’m no regular reader of poetry, certainly not in the form of anthologies like this. But “Night Train, Red Dust” resonated with me; like songs mixed onto a great album, back when albums meant something. I read this with the windows open and frogs practically screaming out in the swamp. There was a light breeze. Goosebumps speckled my arms for most of the evening." --Aaron J. Brown is an Iron Range blogger, author, radio producer and columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune. 

For the full review see: http://minnesotabrown.com/2014/06/hundred-years-went.html

Next: Grand Rapids Herald

"It shouldn’t be understated that besides the interesting content, looking at the local history in a new light, Packa’s collection of poems is wonderfully well written. Thoughtful in each word and punctuation mark, the poems with few exceptions offer readers a joyful experience in the aesthetic of language while at the same time giving those of us who won’t be satisfied until we’ve deconstructed the last phoneme a new reading project as well." --Nathan Bergstedt. The reviewer is the Arts and Entertainment Editor for the Grand Rapids (MN) Herald Review. He is also a gifted poet, playwright, story-teller and actor.
For the full review, see: http://www.grandrapidsmn.com/grand_people/reviewing-night-train-red-dust/article_822f12b4-e2ab-11e3-b60e-001a4bcf887a.html

And also thank you from Editor Jean Cole for this feature article in the Hometown Focus in Virginia, Minnesota!

http://www.hometownfocus.us/news/2014-05-30/PDF/Page_009.pdf




Thanks to Tony Potter of the Hibbing Tribune for this interview:
 "Through the use of research and words, an Eveleth-born poet paints images of life and death, success and struggle, hope and despair from the early days of the Iron Range."
http://www.hibbingmn.com/news/community/eveleth-native-publishes-book-on-red-dust-capitol/article_fb3ea7b0-3908-11e4-8b37-0019bb2963f4.html

Mesabi Daily News: 
"If you have experience with immigrants, you know the extreme change they make in language, culture and landscape,” she said. “It’s difficult and often perilous.”
Packa said she is continuously inspired by the rich history and culture of the Iron Range.
Read more at http://bit.ly/1AS68Kc

Mesabi Daily News:
http://www.virginiamn.com/news/business/poet-gets-subject-matter-from-iron-range/article_8f6057ba-63dc-11e4-8c65-33c3f575e206.html

And this from the Midwest Book Review Small Press Book Watch 
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/sbw/jan_12.htm
at http://www.midwestbookreview.com/sbw/jun_14.htm

Night Train Red Dust
Sheila Packa
Wildwood River Press
2 Chester Parkway, Duluth, MN 55805
9780984377770, $15.00, 98pp,
http://www.amazon.com/Night-Train-Red-Dust-Poems/dp/0984377778
or Barnes & Noble:  http://bit.ly/1n6sIsD
or through your independent bookstore!

The Iron Range is an informal and unofficially designated region that makes up the northeastern section of Minnesota in the United States. It is a region with multiple distinct bands of iron ore. The far eastern area, containing the Duluth Complex along the shore of Lake Superior, and the far northern area, along the Canadian border, of the region are not associated with iron ore mining. Due to its shape, the area is collectively referred to as the Arrowhead region of the state. Sheila Packa has a blog (www.nighttrainreddust.com) featuring essays about people and places to be found in the Iron Range and which serve to inspire her poetry anthologized in "Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range". The themes of her extraordinary and highly recommended free verse poems range from accordion music and strong women, to coal mining, unionizing, and radical politics. 'Grouse': Along a deserted road, at the edge / of October / a grouse between shadow and light arrives / with tentative steps -- / as if to say to fox or wolf or husband with a gun: / I've come this far -- has it all been a waste? / In his sights the bird / bolts into flight.

In a review published in the Summer 2014 issue of New World Finn, Julie Gard says: "Altogether, these poems vividly capture personal and collective experience and serve as a powerful example of how a writer can help to shape the identity of a place. The collection ends with haunting traces, silence, and smoke. Language emerges from and disappears into wind, “[e]ven after all the ink” (“Dictate of Wind’), yet Packa’s words leave a lasting impression. As in “Consanguinity,” “Her incantations come.' " For the full review, subscribe to NWF http://www.newworldfinn.com/ or read the review at:
http://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/06/book-review-by-julie-gard-night-train.html


New Interview published on June 30, 2014 by Minnesota Post Amy Goetzman: "Range Poet Sheila Packa Mines Region for Forgotten Stories"
 http://www.minnpost.com/books/2014/06/range-poet-sheila-packa-mines-region-forgotten-stories

And thank you to Garrison Keillor and Writer's Almanac for featuring the poem "Rhubarb" on June 30, 2014 and "North Star" on September 3, 2014  http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2014/06/30

Book Review by Julie Gard: Night Train Red Dust

Book Review 

Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range 
Reviewed by Julie Gard 
New World Finn, Summer 2014

In Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range, Sheila Packa fearlessly explores the Finnish and Northern Minnesota roots of her life and language. Family history, landscape, industry, and the animal world are all essential elements of the poet’s psyche and vocabulary.

In “My Geology,” language is excavated, hard-earned and fiercely chosen: “I claim my words from the broken / English, damaged roots, / Finnish syntax and geomagnetic fields.” Access to language and a place in history is claimed not just for the poet, but for her entire community. Packa’s voice is bold and Whitmanesque in poems like “Zenith City,” which is a playful, polyphonic tribute to Duluth, and “Strange Highway,” which encompasses multiple generations and experiences:

Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range

"I excavate these words from a vein of iron….” these poems are “test drills and core samples” — a weave of memory, archive, dream, song, story — drawn from the history and people of the Iron Range of northeastern Minnesota. These pages sound the whistles and roar of the mines, the dust in the lungs, the dangerous crossings into a new language, the accordion’s
breath. Culled from violence and tenderness, bone and ash, ore and light, they map a place, a time, a journey through love.”

Pamela Mittlefehldt, PhD and co-editor

The Heart of All That Is: Reflections on Home

Holy Cow! Press

CELEBRATION! THE BOOK! CELEBRATION! THE BOOK


Wildwood River Press announces the publication of Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range.  ISBN: 978-0-9843777-7-0  Available at bookstores. http://www.wildwoodriver.com/

This collection of poems draws from the rich geologic, mining, Native, immigrant, and women's stories on the Iron Range. The book has two sections, Track I: Night Train and Track II: Red Dust. Night Train is a narrative about travel and immigration. Red Dust is about derailments--of many kinds including labor strikes, cancer, violence, accidents, and relationship splits.  The project Night Train Red Dust is also more than a book. It's a work of transmedia and it forms a multiverse: the poems are in the book, several essays and articles about the poems and the Iron Range are on the Red Dust blog (linked on the book website, nighttrainreddust.com) and live music and video are done in theater or installation settings. The essays and articles offer literary explorations of writers, influences and Iron Range history. 

The book uncovers and excavates layers. It asks the questions: are we using everything until it's gone? taking from another body?  The characters in these stories are metamorphosing, dealing with overburden, effluence, and tailings. They walk on the Divide, like the Laurentian Divide, and they are rivers flowing in opposite directions. The stories reflect the lives of the people who built this community: Mary Bassett Bray, MD; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, union organizer; women miners in WWII; Meridel LeSueur, writer; Rev. Milma Lappala, Unitarian minister; Viola Turpeinen, accordionist. This is a working class story of the midwives, farmers, miners, immigrants, and many others with iron in their veins. 

The Iron Range is economically supported by and environmentally damaged by mining.The poems provide strong images of the beautiful landscape of open pit mines and ore dumps, the Boundary Waters, and the wildlife. My grandparents arrived here because of the employment opportunities: one grandfather was a lumberman, and many relatives worked in the mines. My aunts worked in the iron mines during World War II, in the war effort. I have tried to present the music and the frictions of the Iron Range. 

The Relationship with Rhyme

Tracks

Every poet must contemplate his or her relationship with rhyme.  Meter and rhyme are often identified as the elements that make a poem a poem.  I consider poetry to be a pattern language. The images, marks and appearance on the page are not random. The idea of pattern encompasses more than meter and rhyme.  Poems draw patterns with image, metaphor, myth, and music.  Within the term music, I want to recall the phrase "in time," in other words, being able to hold the beat or rhythm. Timing. Secondarily, poems can be both in time and out of time (referring to temporality) but their rhyme and meter are about timing.

Night Train / Red Dust

About the project:

Night Train/ Red Dust began as a quest for my grandparents' stories. I grew up on the Vermilion Trail, also known as Highway 4, the road that runs through the Lake Superior National Forest, through the community of Island Lake, and to the Iron Range.  I learned this road was the original route to Lake Vermilion, and it was used since 1000 AD (by the Woodland Indian tribes whose burial mounds are found near Lake Esquagama). There is evidence of early mining among the Woodland Indians. In 1856, gold prospectors came to Lake Vermilion. The gold was there, but too difficult to extract from the quartz. Then iron ore was discovered. Around the small town of Biwabik (population 1500), the town where I went to elementary and high school, ten iron ore mines were working by the early 1900s and trains ran the length and breadth of the region.   

New Projects

I strive to re-create the flows of the northeastern Minnesota landscape, and I borrow metaphors that express the pattern of change in individual stories and narrative poems: the erosions, floods, migrations, lightning strikes, industrialization, excavation, mining, roads, and harbors. Night Train Red Dust will become part of a new media project, and I can't wait to get started!

 
Vestiges / My Geology : short work sample from Sheila Packa on Vimeo.

In this short sample are several layers. Web film: html5, css3, javascript (nodeJS server) This is a screen recording of a database driven web film. For detail about the origin of these poems:

The Multiverse: Stanzas in Transmedia

Instead of universe, I think of transmedia as a multiverse. I've borrowed the word from particle physics. "In the multiverse scenario, the big bang produced not just the universe that we see but also a very large number of variations of our universe that we do not see," say science writers Joseph Lykken and Maria Spiropulu in their article on supersymmetry, and the failure of the Large Hadron Collider to provide evidence.  Transmedia is for poets. The spiral image shown here, from Scientific American, suggests the hidden beauty of invisible forms. If you keep looking, you will find more. 

The word 'multiverse' is not unfamiliar to poets, who spend their time writing verses.  Stanzas are made for associational leaps and shifts in time. Using stanzas as a metaphor, artists and writers can apply the concept of shifts in time and space to the various media used in transmedia. Speaking metaphorically, each type of media in a transmedia project is like one stanza of an emerging poem.  One inherently understands that one stanza can not possibly carry the whole content, except haiku. I find term multiverse more interesting than multi-modal or multimedia (the words evoke slide projectors and powerpoints for me) because it expresses the single overall effect, and even the simultaneity, that can be achieved in a well crafted transmedia art.

The Vermilion Trail

Initially, the Vermilion Trail, the oldest road in the Arrowhead region of Minnesota, was a footpath and trail for horses.  It holds so much history. Marvin Lamppa has written about the Lake Esquagama location as an important location early in history. There are burial mounds of the Woodland Indians, about 1000 A.D. and many Native tribes afterward. Besides a road, a chain of lakes and streams flow nearby and eventually empty into Lake Superior. Soon after the end of the Civil War, veterans arrived on this road because of the news of a Gold Rush at Vermilion. There was gold, but it was embedded in quartz, and it proved too expensive and difficult to extract. Geologists arrived to evaluate the iron. Native people willingly relocated when plans were put in place to begin mining. They were given "scrip," not money.

Night Train Red Dust focuses on the Vermilion Trail or Highway 4, and some of its stories are excavated, as layers of earth might be, to reveal a different time. A common story form is 'the road story.'  The Canterbury Tales, for instance, focuses on pilgrims. Mark Twain's stories centered around the Mississippi River. My work offers several perspectives on one stretch of road, a hundred miles perhaps, in a landscape itself that is being mined and shipped on trains to ships in the Duluth harbor to go to the steel mills. It is not just people who are on the train, but the earth.

The Terrain of Heaven and Hell: Marilynne Robinson

Since the publication of Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, I have had deep admiration for this fiction writer who I felt explored realms common to poetry.  What does she think of poetry?  Housekeeping engages readers with women characters in a mountain town in Idaho. Robinson skillfully, fully, beautifully uses the metaphor of water: fluidity, flood, lack of boundaries, and erosion and loss. Robinson connects her stories to myth or deep cultural (and Biblical) stories.

In 2014, Wyatt Mason interviewed Marilynne Robinson for the New York Times. This is an excerpt of his article:

All four of the novels are in conversation with — at times tacitly, at times explicitly — the stories of the Bible. Housekeeping is the story of two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, who, after their mother commits suicide, are abandoned to the care of their grandmother and, after she dies, are abandoned to the care of their grandmother’s two maiden sisters-in-law. They, in turn, overwhelmed by the burden of caring for children, abandon the girls to the care of the girls’ aunt. And she, the girls come to understand, is not a stable person herself. Without question, the novel is preoccupied with the generational, genealogical succession of suffering. But it also makes sustained allusions to the book of Genesis, particularly the flood narrative: God’s failed attempt to wipe the world clean of the very errors he could not eradicate from creation — his creations.

Robinson's female characters are adrift, most often by accident or by dangers posed by others. She places her characters in domestic situations, but they are not and never seem like they could be domesticated, for the characters reveal dimensions of the truly wild and uncivilized. I like that she places her stories on the margins of society and she uses these margins to explore being.  Her characters are wary but not fearful.  Yet Robinson is concerned about the pervasive fear in our culture today, and she feels it becomes a rationale for avoiding action.  Mason wrote:

And it was here that Robinson brought up fear: How it has come to keep us at bay from our best selves, the selves that could and should “do something.” In her case, that “something” has been writing. For Robinson, writing is not a craft; it is “testimony,” a bearing witness: an act that demands much of its maker, not least of which is the courage to reveal what one loves. 

“A lot of people who actually believe in the sacredness of life, they write things that are horrible, desolating things, ” Robinson said. “Because, for some reason, this deeper belief doesn’t turn the world. . . . It comes down to fear; the fear of making self-revelation of the seriousness of ‘I sense a sacredness in things.’ ”

In Housekeeping, Robinson opens the story with a tale of the grandfather and a train derailment:

The disaster took place midway through a moonless night. The train, which was black and sleek and elegant, and was called the Fireball, had pulled more than halfway across the bridge when the engine nosed over toward the lake and then the rest of the train slid after it into the water like a weasel sliding off a rock.   

 The sound of the language evokes poetry: the image is drawn with vivid strokes.  The alliteration: "midway through a moonless night." The m sound shift to l sounds: "black and sleek and elegant...called the Fireball, pulled..."  "into the water like a weasel sliding..."  Some vowel sounds also are particularly powerful:  through/moonless; nosed over; off a rock.  The midway-ness of the night and the train on the bridge underline the midway-ness of the lives interrupted by the event. It marks the town. It presages the suicide of the girls' mother who also takes her car and drives off a cliff.  It begins a cascade of loss: The train disappears, the mother disappears, followed by the grandmother, and the great aunts.

In Lila, Robinson opens the story with Doll mercifully removing the child Lila from the cold porch where she's been put. Her decision was an impulsive act, a kidnapping, but had she not taken her, the child probably would have died:

She hitched up her apron to cover the child's legs and carried her out past the clearing. The door might have opened, and woman might have called after them, Where you going with that child? and then, after a minute, closed the door again, as if she done all decency required. "Well," Doll whispered, "we'll just have to see."  

The road wasn't really much more than a path, but Doll had walked it so often in the dark that she stepped over the roots and around the potholes and never paused or stumbled. She could walk quickly when there was no light at all. And was strong enough that even an awkward burden like a leggy child could rest in her arms almost asleep.   

Again the spare and vivid images and the alliterative phrases create a powerful beginning.  This is an act of courage that saves Lila's life, and marks a fugitive existence. Doll must fight with her ready and finely honed knife--the members of Lila's family have followed in pursuit or in revenge--and Doll takes the life of a man. After Lila meets the Reverend, marries him, and waits her child's birth, the novel traces her haunting memories, secrets, and speculations about her origins. Her early life, in the company of Doll and the loose group of homeless, itinerant workers was a tenuous existence.

The knife is a significant metaphor of survival used to prepare food, defend, and even cut the girl's fine hair. It severs Lila from her past; it protects her, and finally it becomes a talisman of the woman who loved her.  This last remaining link to Doll Lila treasures.  In this marriage, Lila constantly thinks of departure; the thoughts are a metaphorical knife that threatens to cut her marital and community ties. She is welcomed in Gilead, but she finds it difficult to acclimate to a routine, safe life.  Trust is slow in coming. Her world doesn't feel quite real. She has been so damaged by neglect, mistrust, and abuse she can hardly relate to her new role as the wife of a pastor.

Lila's questions about her past are never answered, and her questions of why life is like it is are also left to linger, and slowly she and her husband, the elderly Reverend, find their way to a conversation, in their growing intimacy, that explores that question.

Poetry takes many forms; and I find it in the writing of Marilynne Robinson. In a review of Harold Bloom's American Religious Poems, Marilynne Robinson writes:

The threshold between the life we know and whatever follows is a mystery religion has always addressed, and for which it has tended to provide the imagination with language and imagery. Dante and Milton created grand visions of a cosmos ordered to serve the ends of divine justice. But there is strikingly little interest among American poets in mapping the terrain of heaven and hell. In place of mythopoesis, their attention is turned on the actual, the phenomenal. And it is turned on the universal, solitary, subjective experience of the transformation, or the end, of consciousness. If death is the mother of beauty, it is the mother also of the deepest self-awareness, the consciousness of the nerves and senses that translate experience as beauty, and as meaning.

The marriage of Lila and the Reverend is a good marriage, and yet it measures the distance between the two people with vastly different life experiences. They almost don't speak the same language.  Lila grew up illiterate and unschooled, except for one year.  She doesn't have words for things, but like many illiterate people, she makes like she understands. The one thing that she does read is the Bible, rich in poetry. Robinson's new book maps the terrain of heaven and hell with aching beauty.

Night Train Red Dust - NEMBA Award

The 27th Annual North East Minnesota Book Awards was on May 21, 2015.   Night Train Red Dust received recognition!
http://www.d.umn.edu/lib/nemba/

The judges wrote: "Sheila Packa’s newest collection of poetry is filled with three-dimensional images of the variety and complexity of life on Minnesota’s Iron Range during the middle years of the twentieth century. Like the iron itself, these poems 'bleed with rust/ and come with their own rules.'"

Consanguinity: Gladys Koski Holmes

Consanguinity by Gladys Koski Holmes

Bedding Plants by Gladys Koski Holmes

Gladys Koski Holmes (1932-2005)  lived almost all of her life in the same small community of Angora, on the edge of the Iron Range. Her work was drawn from her own experience in a familiar Northern Minnesota rural environment, and from roots that extend back through grandparents who emigrated from Finland. Koski earned a master's degree in art from the University of Wisconsin-Superior in 1989.

Self Portrait by Gladys Koski Holmes

Iron Range Transition by Gladys Koski Holmes

 

Koski won the prestigious George Morrison Art Award in 2002 for significant artistic contributions to the arts of the Arrowhead Region. She exhibited her work in a number of exhibitions in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Finland.

In an exhibition catalog for the Viola Hart Endowment exhibit, Gladys wrote about herself, "Because I have always lived in this remote area where art is a foreign language spoken only by a few, I have found myself stretched across a chasm that bridges two disparate worlds: the Iron Range and the Urban-out-there. It has meant a continual search for elements from each and a struggle to synthesize them into some sort of cohesive whole. Through using recognizable imagery that provides a sense of place, while using symbolism and surrealism as transportation into yet another world--observations, ideas, and perhaps a bit of nailing down of culture and history are taking place. It is both the tangible and intangible--tangible objects collaged onto the frames, and the painted realm within.  

"I think these traits come from the very inborn, Finnish characteristics of protecting one's privacy while maintaining persistence in pursuing whatever needs pursuing, and of a spiritual quest for the unknown that draws upon trees, rocks and water. The use of materials stems from a heritage that reaches back for generations in which there is an inner drive to make something out of little or nothing, and make it good as possible, no matter the painstaking process. The strength of women, ancestral women, and the example set by old, rural Finnish women, reaches out through my work."

Night Train / Red Dust at the 2013 Fringe Festival in Minneapolis!

I excavate these words from a vein of iron
from stones broken
beneath old growth 

from the open pit – lit by dynamite

Sheila Packa will be at the Fringe Festival with her new work, Night Train / Red Dust, at Intermedia Arts Theater, 2822 Lyndale Ave, Minneapolis (with film and live music by Kathy McTavish):  

Friday, August 2, 8:30 pm 
Saturday, August 3, 1 pm
Tuesday, August 6, 10 pm
Thursday, August 8, 8:30 pm 
Sunday, August 11, 1:00 pm  

These performances start on time, and end within the hour.  

This project is made possible through a fiscal year 2012 Arts Fellowship grant and a Career Opportunity Grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council (www.aracouncil.org) which is funded in part with money from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund as appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008; an appropriation from the Minnesota State Legislature; The McKnight Foundation.

See a sample:

origin of red from Wildwood River on Vimeo.

The Blog Tour: Welcome!

What am I working on?

Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range: stories of women’s, labor, immigrant and mining on the Iron Range in Minnesota. Forthcoming June 2014 from Wildwood River Press.

Love on the Iron Range: Liz, the main character, grows up on the Iron Range to work in a taconite mine and later, become a musician. This novel is structured with twelve linked stories (daughter, sister, mother) based on Minnesota’s Iron Range and its immigrant, women’s and labor history. Several motifs or images of engagement, rings, wedding dresses, birds, water-life, and naming connect the stories. The narrator’s names are various, and the structure of the narrative is musical.

Recent Collaborations: “Migrations:” A collaboration with Finnish composer Ollie Ortekangas who has been commissioned to create music for Osmo Vanska and the Minnesota Orchestra. We also plan to work together on an opera. A collaboration with media artist and composer Kathy McTavish around her net - art installation “origin of birds.”

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I am from the Iron Range. It has geologic layers and friction between the natural and industrial. I excavate. There are fractures. Glimpses at objects often open up other perspectives and histories. I work out of certain tensions and silences. I search for structures instilled by my landscape: rivers, forests, and shorelines. I believe there is a connection between women and birds.

Because I grew up in two languages, I am influenced by the rhythms and culture of Finland, and also its modernism. Traditional forms in poetry do not appeal to me. I believe that writing is a physical art, that it must find ways to enter the body. Good art must “break something open.” 

In my fiction, the narrators have odd perceptual experiences. I explore obsessions. I discover that certain motifs or objects appear in different stories and they become visual languages. It happens subconsciously. My poems in Night Train Red Dust are driven. They are fast moving trains or rivers.  Previous books of poems:   The Mother Tongue poems are about growing up on the Iron Range and mother/daughters. Echo & Lightning explores bird migration as a language of women's intersections with the divine.  Cloud Birds explores women walking through violence and a story of immigration.    

Why do I write what I do?

Does any writer get to choose the material? I believe this is given. We can either accept it or reject it. Certain things haunt me: images, phrases, absences, and I write about them. I write about my dreams, I find patterns and I read a lot. 

How does your writing process work?

The process is always changing.  Each project has a new set of rules that I need to discover. It’s my job to follow and learn.  Carl Jung wrote “…a work of art is not transmitted or derived - it is a creative reorganization…. One might almost describe it as a living being that uses man only as a nutrient medium, employing his capacities according to its own laws and shaping itself to the fulfillment of its own creative purpose.” In some ways, this is alarming idea, but I do think that creative work does take a life of its own. It's wise to learn to nurture this plant and make it beautiful.

My process works best if I have more than one project going, because then if one needs time or I if reach an obstacle, then I can work on the other. Somehow they cross-pollinate. Sometimes I will take what I wrote in a poem and try to create a story from it or I will create a character based on favorite authors and add them to my fictions. I experiment and find what works the best. I like to wander through archives, scan microfiche newspaper files, and surf the internet. I fall into rabbit holes. I feel a personal mission to write women’s stories in order to honor and make those stories stronger. I am inspired by many great writers.

Three Dimensional Poetry

In the last year, I've been revising a collection of short stories and this last month, I wrote a play.  It's been like riding two horses, using the language as a poet and exploring narratives based on Minnesota's history.  Several poets have written plays: William Shakespeare, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, WB Yeats, Lorcas, Langston Hughes, TS Eliot, Rita Dove, and many others.  So of course I have excellent role models in past and in contemporary literary circles.  

John Lahr of the New Yorker interviewed Sarah Ruhl, poet turned playwright. He writes:

Ruhl began her career as a poet—her first book, Death in Another Country, a collection of verse, was published when she was twenty—and she sees her plays as “three-dimensional poems.” Ruhl’s characters occupy, she has said, “the real world and also a suspended state.” ... She wants to project the delights of pretense, “the interplay between the actual and the magical.” 

Her literary volte-face was due in part to her confusion about the confessional “I” of her poetic voice, which she felt had been exhausted in mourning her father. In “Dream,” for instance, she wrote, “I wake this morning and gather a mouthful of dirt— / words—with a teaspoon, that you may speak to me again.” “I didn’t know what a poem should be anymore,” she said. “Plays provided a way to open up content and have many voices. I felt that onstage one could speak lyrically and with emotion, and that the actor was longing for that kind of speech, whereas in poetic discourse emotion was in some circles becoming embarrassing.”

Poetry is the genre known for its compression, imagery, and patterned language (which also can occur in plays and other genres), but poetry is not known for its characters, plot or dialogue. It's possible to never have to grapple with these elements at all.  When I began writing Night Train Red Dust, the narratives swept me along and I enjoyed the opportunity to explore other voices beside my own.  The book began to feel like a fully developed world to me; it connects to landscape and community.  This year, my writing explores more narratives of this place--northern Minnesota.  When Night Train Red Dust was published, I felt as if I'd only begun.  The poetic "I" in this book encompasses many, and I have found that writing a play provides a natural and logical step of exploring more voices.

Another poet who explores all the genres is Anne Carson. In Decreation, she brings together poetry, essays, a screenplay, an opera libretto, an oratorio ("Lots of Guns: An Oratorio for Five Voices") and a documentary written as a film's shot list. Of her original works, she told Sam Anderson of the New York Times:

We have a kind of inertia, sitting and listening. But it’s really important to get somehow into the mind and make it move somewhere it has never moved before. That happens partly because the material is mysterious or unknown but mostly because of the way you push the material around from word to word in a sentence. And it’s that that I’m more interested in doing, generally, than mystifying by having unexpected content or bizarre forms. It’s more like: Given whatever material we’re going to talk about, and we all know what it is, how can we move within it in a way we’ve never moved before, mentally? That seems like the most exciting thing to do with your head. I think it’s a weakness to fall back into merely mystifying the audience, which anybody can do.

Reading Anne Carson's work is exhilarating. I feel the release of any genre-related stops. Why not use whatever works? Why not find energy in juxtaposing stories and forms of any kind?  Why not think outside the box? We see this sort of playfulness in many writers, for example, Lydia Davis (fiction).  With a draft of my new stories and play in hand, I now plow into this landscape to listen and develop the rhythms, characters, and plot.

I like Carson's objective of making the mind move. But it's not exactly how I would describe my own aims. Exploring change and desire, my work arises from the landscape. Mesabi means the "giant in the earth."  The term has been interpreted to refer the economic power of the ore, but I think the capitalists have ignored the spiritual meaning. The earth--a spiritual power? Mainstream culture seems not to recognize such a thing, and yet people who go to the Boundary Waters or spend time along the shore of Lake Superior and its forests know what I mean.  As a writer, I want to acknowledge and honor this sense of landscape.

As far as the writing, there is definitely a feeling that I've released this stream, and it keeps pouring. Maybe the poems have just gotten much bigger--and they have grown into essays and stories and drama--more three dimensional.

Opening the Eyes

Opening the eyes is one of the important benefits of art and poetry. A work is truly great if it can make us see differently.  One of my missions in Night Train Red Dust was to restore lost history of women. Any geographic area has layers of geology, people, and events. Do you know what happened in the place beneath your feet? Who walked on the same ground where you travel?

Women's stories are often forgotten. They are not considered "important" in the way the city builders and bridge builders and presidents, which is a terrible omission.  New biographies of women are changing the telling of history.  These new perspectives are essential.  Our geography has a spectrum of color. Aside from white immigrants, the First People, Native Americans, travelled on these rivers and pathways.  Highway 4 from Duluth to the Iron Range, once called the Rudy Perpich Memorial Highway, once called the Vermilion Trail began as an Indian path. It was used in 1850s for exploration.  In the 1860s, Civil War veterans arrived with the Gold Rush and they travelled on the Vermilion Trail to Lake Vermilion.  The gold wasn't accessible, but iron ore was discovered. Corporate interests paid the Anishinabe people in 'scrip' in exchange for the land. The people did not resist being relocated as the mining companies moved in to drill and excavate.  These stories are essential.

Readings & Book Signing

Poetry Reading  Nov 13, 2017 at 6 pm

Knights and Ladies of the Kaleva
Aallottaren Tupa 15, Duluth
Kenwood Lutheran Church,
2720 Myers Ave., Duluth.

Book Signing

Night Train Red Dust

November 25, 2017 2:00-3:00 pm
Zenith Bookstore
318 Central Ave N, Duluth, Minnesota 55807

Celebrating Our Common Ground

Saturday, December 2, 2017 7:00-9:00 pm 

Duluth Township Hall, Homestead Road, Duluth 55804

(This is a Community Arts and Heritage Event) Images, Words and Music.
Photography Exhibit, Drawings by students at NSCS, Music and Storytelling

I'll talk about writing about place and read a few excerpts of Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range and new work in progress.  

Muriel Rukeyser: These Roads Will Take You Into Your Own Country

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) is described by an essay on the website of the American Poetry Foundation in this way: "Impassioned, self-confident, eclectic, a poet of powerful expression, a poet of the political and the personal...."  In an earlier era, 1938, she travelled to the coal mining region and wrote about what she witnessed using her form: poetry.  This work inspired me to take on the same challenge of writing about mining in northern Minnesota. For this reason, I chose a line from one of her poems, "The Book of the Dead," as an inscription for Night Train Red Dust.  

Her title refers to the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It expressed her metaphor that the miners in the coal industry were archetypal figures that descended into the underworld. The Academy of American Poets has an essay about this important work that reflected many voices in the community, historical documentation, and a socio-political perspective:

høle in the skY: a poetics

The word poetics describes literary or artistic styles or theories. Aristotle explored all of its aspects in his book, Poetics: plot, tragedy, diction, language, rhythm, meter.  Just like the sun, the mind works. Understanding sometimes arrives after a long night. The mind makes associations. When I first encountered Kathy McTavish’s title for her new work, høle in The SkY, I had images of eclipse, Chief Hole in the Day, and falling stars.

"Every word is either current, or strange, or metaphorical, or ornamental, or newly-coined, or lengthened, or contracted, or altered," wrote Aristotle. How curious and true, not only generally, but for each poet, even each person. 

Two eclipses occurred recently, a blood moon on April 15 and a solar eclipse on April 29. Eclipses always make people uneasy. Eclipses carry shades of the apocalypse; some Christians think the end-times are imminent. Recent scientific news of climate change seems apocalyptic. Astrologers believe eclipses are significant and portentous. Writers have also been fascinated by the phenomenon: Emily Dickinson, James Fenimore Cooper, Virginia Woolf, Annie Dillard, and Anne Carson have written about the eclipse.

Losing the sun, the center of the universe, even for a few minutes causes deep disturbance. Many events dislodge routines and expectations, and such events trigger writing and art. 

Meridel LeSueur: Bonfire of Roses

I'm at work on a new manuscript.  I reach for my grandmother and other literary grandmothers.  The cadences of Meridel LeSeuer resound in me.  I want to celebrate her, sing her poems from Rites of Ancient Ripening and roll in the sound of her voice.  This is from her essay, "The Ancient People and the Newly Come":

Born out of the caul of winter in the north, in the swing and circle of the horizon, I am rocked in the ancient land. As a child I first read the scriptures written on the scroll of moisture by wolf and rabbit, by the ancient people and the newly come. In the beginning the century the Indian smoke still mingled with ours. The frontier of the whites was violent, already injured by vast seizures and massacres. The winter nightmares of fear poisoned the plains nights with psychic airs of theft and utopia. The stolen wheat in the cathedral-like granaries cried out for vengeance.

I know these roots: populist, the struggle of the worker against the corporation, the striving of people for fairness and dignity against greed.  She writes about the depression, about mortgages and foreclosure, about her grandmother losing her home.   The beginning of the unions, the fight for an 8 hour workday, for safe working conditions, for a system of social security.  She writes about her mother's effort to earn money only to have her own bank account seized by the bank to pay her husband's debts.   She writes about being reared by three strong women who worked hard to maintain a life despite the "drunkenness, chicanery, and violence" of men in their life.   Violence, she says, is linear.  Love is round, curved like the earth and horizon, like the cheek and breast of the women.

How lucky we are that she sat down to write.  In her Journal in 1930 she wrote:

Whittle myself down to the edge of suffering. We do not know ourselves except when we suffer... In joy I know only myself, in sorrow I know others.  In happiness we are seperete (sic)... In suffering we are fused.

Her strength is in the language, the ability to speak against injustice, to use the power of her voice to tell about the lives of those the world might forget, the poor and disenfranchised.  She inhabits a mythic space of a "green girl,"  a daughter or Persephone going into darkness and also she inhabits the strong mother and earth, the Demeter who can punish with drought and cold or bless us with harvest.   Meridel strikes the iron bough and from her words spring roses -- a "bonfire of roses."

In her essay, "The Ancient People and Newly Come," I found these words, a story about a country dance and the night, outdoors, where men and women would disappear for awhile in "a bonfire of roses." The image brings together her physicality as a writer, always in the sensual body, the use of landscape as a metaphor for emergence, the growth of seed and bud and blossom. Roses also are associated with Bread and Roses, the slogan of the 1912 workers strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. "A police attack on mothers and children at the trained station prompted a Congressional hearing that publicized the strikers' low wages and barebones living conditions."   She was writing about her birth and early family life on the prairie.  One of her images are the small houses that dot the landscape:

Let yourself down, as if under water, into these lost walls, to hunt for treasure, to illuminate violence with meaning. Under sea-strange light these little houses glimmer in memory, powerful as radium. (Ripenings, p 53)

When I heard Meridel LeSueur speak, her voice drove into me like a train. Here was a woman with a writer's voice akin to God: deep, resonant, and calling. I borrowed a phrase of Meridel LeSueur for the title of a poem that pays homage to her: "Bonfire of Roses" in Night Train Red Dust.

Work Cited

LeSueur, Meridel. Ripening: Selected Work, 1927-1980. Edited and with an Introduction by Elaine Hedges. The Feminist Press. Old Westbury, New York. c1982.   Print.

Night Train Red Dust, in a cross-media installation, will be at the Northrup King Bldg in Minneapolis on Nov 7, 8, and 9, 2014.  Experience the traffic and hear the train pulling earth. Walk in the same footsteps as the women miners, journalists, organizers, doctors, ministers, farmers and artists that made Minnesota strong.  http://www.northrupkingbuilding.com/artattack