I was lucky enough to become a Stegner fellow in fiction a number of years ago, and then became a lecturer in Continuing Studies at Stanford.

It was a dream job (it was in fact a surreal dream job—this hillbilly girl getting to be in charge of a classroom at Stanford? Surely they’d catch on and kick me out at some point). I loved teaching there—the students had incredible stories to tell, and they all taught me so much while being consistently grateful for the chance to learn and to create. The only trouble was that living in the Bay Area was expensive and my lectureship was a two-year position.

So I took a job with a different Continuing Studies program and moved back to Madison, a city I love. But it wasn’t at all the same. At Stanford, I’d been able to recruit local writers to teach—a financial and CV-building opportunity for them, and a boon for local students. The program in Madison wouldn’t do that and I became increasingly frustrated at the gap between my vision and reality, so I quit. I was lucky enough to teach some courses online for Stanford and at the local public libraries. (Libraries are such a great place for writing classes, btw. Contact your library and ask if you could teach one; often the Friends programs of libraries can underwrite the cost.)

Still, I wanted Madison to have more writing opportunities. I couldn’t let go of the dream of having a place where emerging and established writers share their knowledge with beginning writers. With a few friends (notably Angela Voras-Hills, Bridget Birdsall, and Genia Daniels), I helped form a group called The Watershed: A Place for Writers. When we were just a couple of months old, we met Jolynne Roorda, the founder of Arts + Literature Laboratory (ALL). ALL is a non-profit organization that encourages visual, literary, and performing artists to explore and develop their craft. It encourages the exchange of ideas and support and fosters collaboration. Jolynne had been looking for someone to start a reading series at ALL when it opened, but we quickly realized that our two organizations were much stronger together, and we merged.

Since then, we’ve offered monthly craft talks that are open to the public, a reading series, a handful of workshops, and monthly write-ins. It’s so gratifying to be part of this writing community.

When I was mired in and then giving up on my university position, I thought of dynamic movements of writers such as the Harlem Renaissance, which was more than writers—it was a community of writers, artists, thinkers, activists; and many of these artists were without institutional support. I did wish that the vision I had was just there waiting for me to participate in it, but it wasn’t. But I started saying out loud what I wanted and figuring out a way to make it happen. I hope anyone out there frustrated in their search for a teaching position, or disappointed with the one they have (or even those fairly content in those positions), to dream big and look beyond the university to other models of creating writing communities. Look around, see what your community has and what it’s missing, and start reaching out. You can’t build it alone, but you can build it.

Finale

Today I’m thinking of Dmitri Shostakovich on the train
after Lady Macbeth in Mensk and Stalin’s sniggering,
his round glasses mirrors
for the darkness moving outside the windows.
I’m thinking about how he rode that train for the rest of his life,
friends in camps and friends shot and friends without work
getting on at every stop and he can’t get off that train.
Still there was music, often so faint,
he had to eliminate the sound of Stalin
the way a bloodhound eliminates the scents of everyone
but the pursued.
How much was lost in the din?
I’ve never really understood the nature of art until now.

 

The Whiteness of the Whale

I am a white woman sitting in the gallery,
my two white girls fighting for space on my lap

as black boys mostly avoid looking
at the pictures on the walls
and at the three of us
huddled on our plastic chair.

I am a long chapter on nothing they want to know
who only occasionally wants to erase herself.

I am required reading.

They are there to see the photos
of incarcerated youth on the walls.
They are there, some looking,
some not looking, for maybe fifteen minutes.

Fifteen minutes of containing the arms and legs
and bristling curiosity of the girls,

fifteen minutes of trying to let the boys be
but not ignore them,
trying to think of some thing to say or do
to make them feel at ease,
while the boys grow into men,
find work, fall in love, lose work,
go to school, start a family, get sick,
get worried, get pulled over, get shot.
Get shot. Get shot.
Get shot. Get
shot. Get
shot.

I have the keys to the building.
I’m just waiting for them to leave
so I can lock up.

We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press 2017 Poetry Month Contest. We received many outstanding entries, from which this piece by Sully Pujol stood out. We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did.

Because I was not lonely

I knocked on your bedroom door: because I’m
not seeking access to your most private thoughts,
dusty gems in costume shops,

because I heard a silence I couldn’t shake,
full of things you wouldn’t push past your lips.

I started to wrench words, like teeth

and watched them drop, and drop, and drop
while the blood fled my fingers.

Because I wanted to catch you,

unwind you, reweave your design.
Because there was room in my suitcase, and empty spools.

Those nights were chilled, my skin all snow and salt;
because our doors were closed,

that night of your mourning,
the eve of my hangover.

Because I didn’t come with you,

didn’t see those crusted-over jewels, didn’t pack my bag
with a little of your pain.

We are delighted to present the winner of April’s Brain Mill Press Student Poetry Contest for 2017:

“self-portrait as joan of arc” by Sabine Holzman.

We received submissions from student poets of a very high caliber, from which poetry month coordinator C. Kubasta selected the winning poem, as well as a short list of finalists (see below).

We are grateful to C. Kubasta for her hard work in organizing our poetry month event, as well as to all of the contributors, contest entrants, and readers for making this such a rich and wonderful month. If, after reading Sabine Holzman’s winning poem, you’re in the mood for still more wonderful poetry, check out our editors’ choice picks for week 1 and week 2, and investigate the full list of poetry month essays and poems.

–Ruthie Knox & Mary Ann Rivers, Brain Mill Press Publishers

***

During the month of April, we read poems that arrived from around the country — from Texas and California and New York, from Indiana and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, from Oregon and Alabama and Connecticut. We read poems that winged their way to us from Singapore. These voices clamored: a variety of forms & images & words called out to be heard, to be read aloud, to be spoken softly and proclaimed, their peculiar musics sweet and salt on the tongue.

I’ve just come back from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets spring conference, where poetry filled the air too, and where we were blessed to listen to Mark Doty read his poetry. Poems like “In Two Seconds” speak of the two seconds between when the police cruiser ground to a halt and Tamir Rice’s life did too. Poems like “Atlantis” where Doty weaves a symphony of memory and love: the human desire to hold on — to each other and this life, to save the things we can, to impetus to write of the things that pass from our hands, whether cities submerged or the hurt loon we hope to nurse so that it will leave us. Between poems, Doty spoke of how the poet must nurse a poem in uncertainty, giving it space to surprise both the poet and the reader.

In selecting the below poems, I choose poems that surprised me. The winning and finalist poets are willing to let poems develop, to follow where the poem wishes to go — to understand poetry as a collaboration between the poet, the moment, and the language available at that moment. Since I read Sabine Holzman’s “Self-Portrait as Joan of Arc,” those final lines ring in me, sing in me. The speaker’s question is a question that perhaps cannot be asked (except in a poem). The answer cannot be given, except in a future unwritten poem. May we all stay “hungry / & lonely & sometimes lethal” if it leads to poems like this.

—C. Kubasta, BMP Assistant Poetry Editor and Contest Judge

i go into / the living room

not to pray not to recite scripture

but because i am thinking about dying or

possibly living like this like a thing

with teeth for a heart

joan you were 19 when you burned at stake

17 when you ended the siege of orleans

& i am just now 17, not leading armies or

fighting a war or delivering god’s word

i’ve got no armor on my breast / no angels in my ears

i don’t know holiness i don’t know how to live a legend,

die a martyr

joan i’m not a saint like you not a story like you

i’m 17 and i’m just trying to survive but i don’t

know how to survive i’m just a girl who’s hungry

& lonely & sometimes lethal, i’m no joan of arc

not something that knows how to be soft

my mother tells me i’m something violent

did your mother too, joan / did your mother too

Valerie Wu, “This Land of Color of Mine”

Courtney Felle, “A Reckoning”

Topaz Winters, “Dream Sequence”*

Sully Pujol, “Islamophobia”**

***

*Topaz Winters’s poem “When My First Boyfriend Learned I Was on Anti-Psychotics, He Laughed and Told Me He Always Suspected I Was Crazier Than I Let On” was an editors’ choice pick. Read it here.

** Sully Pujol’s poem “Admission” was an editors’ choice pick. Read it here.