Revisiting Home through Literature

blog2On this day in 2013, I was in Scotland. Last fall I studied abroad at the University of St. Andrews, and I couldn’t have been more delighted. Aside from the natural thrill of traveling to a foreign country, I was especially excited to see the United Kingdom. It was my first visit, and as an avid reader of British literature, I’d dreamed of going there for as long as I can remember. Reading stories set in Britain was intrinsically tied to my desire to be there in person – whether because of my fondness of the books that took place there, or because the authors made it sound so appealing. Which exactly I couldn’t say, but both probably played a large part.

I do know that some of my excitement to see Scotland in particular came from a novel I’d recently read – Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, a historical romance set in Scotland (now a series on Starz). I would have fallen in love with Scotland without any outside help, but visiting specific places I’d already read about and envisioned certainly heightened my anticipation and enjoyment.

Now that I’m home again, I’m experiencing the flip side of that kind of enjoyment by reading a book set in a place I know well: St. Andrews, Scotland. One of my professors at St. Andrews had told me that there was a medieval murder mystery series set in town, and as I love mysteries, my interest was piqued. I hunted down the first book in the series, Hue and Cry by Shirley McKay, at the local bookstore, absurdly pleased that the price printed on the back cover was listed in pounds, not dollars.

I never got around to reading the novel while I was at St. Andrews – I was too busy doing coursework and exploring Scotland – but now that I’m back in the States, I’ve picked it up again. I’m enjoying the story of Hue and Cry, but I’m primarily reading it because of blog4its setting, which I’ve never done before. When I read it, I almost feel like I’m back in St. Andrews. Granted, it’s set in the sixteenth century, so it’s not an exact recreation of the town I know. But I read about the protagonist walking the town’s three main streets (North, Market, and South) with pleasure, and I can even recognize the names of smaller lanes and wynds. It shows the cathedral now in ruins at the beginning of its decline, and although the seaside it describes is bustling with fishermen, it makes me recall my own peaceful walks along the chilly beach. Reading Hue and Cry takes me back to the place I called home for four months. It’s bittersweet as nostalgia always is, and can make me miss Scotland all the more.

Never before have I read literature as a way to revisit a place where I’ve lived and left. For me, it’s been much more common to learn about and envision places I’ve never been from authors’ descriptions, although I don’t always want to go there. I know I’m in the South now, and I’m sorry, Southerners, but reading Faulkner and O’Connor didn’t make the South especially appealing. But I imagine Southerners can appreciate the sense of place in those works best for the same reason I’m enjoying Hue and Cry, though I’m no Scottish native, and McKay is no O’Connor. The familiarity and truth in the writer’s description of place adds a whole other dimension to their work, which I’m only now beginning to appreciate.

For me, Hue and Cry has a kind of escapism I’ve never encountered before – one founded on real experiences. Instead of picturing somewhere I’ve never been but where I want to go, I’m remembering a well-loved place where I once lived. It’s a new way of reading for me, though I’m sure it’s familiar for many others. In time, as I continue to travel and explore new places, I expect I’ll come across it more and more. Maybe in the years to come I’ll search for literature set in Lexington, longing to recall those good old college days. But for now, I’ll be in St. Andrews.

 


The Trade

sarah1Professional conferences. We’ve all been to them, and I’ve probably attended more than my share. When I was in graduate school and then on the job market, the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference created both excitement and dismay as we newly-minted PhDs sent out our many applications and then compared notes on our interviews. In our first positions as assistant professors, we continued to attend, hoping to make our names as scholars and writers. Soon after I got my first tenure-track job, I returned to writing poems, and the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) annual meeting quickly eclipsed MLA, where writers could hear panels on the craft and individual readings, meet editors, find books from new or small presses, and connect with other poets and fiction writers. I would go to meet other poets and to seek out editors of journals I liked, had been published in, or aspired to be in. The book fair in those days was a highlight, because, well, we were there because we loved books and writing, right?

Not always. I found, as the years went by, that these conferences became monstrously rats-trapped-cagelarge and that the presentations on offer were too many in too short a time. Too many panels, too many readings: I couldn’t see them all and often ended up frustrated and exhausted. Rats in a cage. It wasn’t the mood I wanted to return to my writing in. And the book fair, especially at AWP, was so sprawling that finding anyone or really seeing anything among the packed tables and narrow aisles was practically impossible. Like MLA, AWP seemed to devolve into just another “look and veer” meeting, at which attendees encounter others, look quickly at their nametags, then veer away rapidly if the person isn’t famous enough.

This weekend, I found myself at a new kind of conference, the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association meeting. I sat at the book fair table of Knox Robinson Publishing, with whom I’ve published two novels, The Altarpiece (2013) and City of Ladies (2014). My third, The King’s Sisters, comes out next August. My previous books were all poetry collections, and I had no idea how different it is to market a novel, but I had sat at tables during AWP and thought this wouldn’t be too different.

sarah2The book fair was full, to be sure, but all of the publishers could fit into one large ballroom. Even though Knox Robinson is a small independent, we were given a good spot near a couple of the big publishers, and instead of being squeezed together, we could all see—and walk—easily across to the other side of the room. The fair was only open for one Saturday, which was perfect, as it concentrated all of the energy into a short time. Our table held Dana Robinson (founder of Knox Robinson), as well as KR authors Victoria Wilcox, Michael Oates, Hilary Holladay, and me. Booksellers kept us busy, and we talked to a steady stream of store owners from the eastern seaboard. We handed out advance review copies of our books (ARCs) as well as copies of our earlier novels to anyone who was interested, and they shared with us stories of the independent bookstore business. We talked history (Knox Robinson specializes in historical fiction), business, travel, and, of course books.

It was pleasant, friendly, yes, a bit hectic for a while, but energizing. I was having a great time, but it wasn’t until the middle of the afternoon that I was struck with the reason. We were all talking frankly and openly about the reason we were there: books and the business of books. There was little posturing and less pretentiousness. It was all about the books and not about who seemed personally cool and who did not. People certainly checked each other out, and introduced themselves to people they wanted to talk to, but they did it without the charade—so obvious to anyone who’s been at these meetings—of pretending to be too important to need to ask someone’s name.

Nobody who writes, publishes, or sells books needs to be told that the industry is hierarchical, but at this conference that stratification didn’t seem to govern the social interactions at meals, panels, or the book fair. I spoke to everyone I wanted to—and met many people who tirelessly work at promoting books in their stores. Many of them received their first Knox Robinson books from us—but they remembered who we were later that day and wanted to talk more about our books. Colleagues of our distributor, Midpoint Books, came over to say hello and meet the authors of the books they help get into the market.

NAIBA was informative, exciting, and (there’s no better word) fun. We didn’t have a big dance and no one got sloppy drunk and misbehaved. We didn’t pack the hotel. What we did, however, was talk, plan, and work toward our mutual goal of getting new hardcovers and paperbacks to readers in the most sensible, mutually beneficial ways possible. And in these days of talk about the death of print and the inability of American children to concentrate, I found the conversation both stimulating and optimistic. Publishing is a business, yes, but the product is unique—the source of our ideas, fantasies, and information—and many small bookstore owners are little short of heroic in their efforts to connect authors with their customers. This weekend, I saw that the business is thriving, and readers do still exist. They’re mostly not at conferences, however, either academic or “creative.” They’re mostly at home, curled up quietly in chairs, enjoying their books.

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Sarah Kennedy is the author of the novels Self-Portrait, with Ghost and The Altarpiece, City of Ladies, and The King’s Sisters, Books in The Cross and the Crown series, set in Tudor England.  She has also published seven books of poems.  A professor of English at Mary Baldwin University in Staunton, Virginia, Kennedy holds a PhD in Renaissance Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing.  She has received grants from both the NEA, the NEH, and the VA Commission for the Arts.  Please visit Sarah at her website:  http://sarahkennedybooks.com

SHENANDOAH Considering Fiction, Non-fiction Submissions

slogoAs of Monday, September 22, Shenandoah will be considering submissions of fiction and non-fiction for the spring, 2015 issue.  Manuscripts should be submitted through our submissions management program, which can be accessed by selecting SUBMISSIONS tab on the top tool bar on the homepage and following instructions from there.  This window should be open until early December.

The site will open to submissions of poetry and flash fiction in early October and will remain open until early December.  In November we will conduct our annual Graybeal-Gowen Contest for Virginia Poets.  See contest rules at our website (shenandoahliterary.org).

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feathersSHENANDOAH is a 24-7, no-fee journal, but we do pay out contributors, with a minimum of $50 for non-fiction features, flash fiction and poetry and an overall maximum of $200 per piece.  Exceptions are made in circumstances where an extended essay is assigned.

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[cover art by Suzanne Stryk]


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

Where’s Archie?

ammonscoverWhen A. R. Ammons died in 2001 he was widely considered (by Bloom, Vendler, Lieberman and other heavy-hitting critics) one of the half dozen most significant and original poets writing in English. By turns unflappable, faux naïve, authoritarian, wry, oracular, jocular and naughty, he was a master of melding vernacular speech with scientific jargon and even better at finding colloquial and seemingly inevitable phrases to clarify the intricate natural and technical world while making the invisible seem tactile and visual. His poems might span half a dozen words or cover the length of a collection. He was shifty, adroit, eccentric and humane. He was an experimentalist escaped from the lab.

For the excellence of his work, Ammons received the National Book Critics Award, the Bollingen Prize, two National Book Awards and a MacArthur Fellowship. An explorer of the natural world, he was the ultimate peripatetic; not even Wordsworth would have gone so far as to declare and argue (even tongue in cheek) that “A Poem Is a Walk,” as Ammons’ essay of that title does. No one could make sentences more sinuous, organic, surprising but coherent than Archie. He was also an accomplished pianist and water colorist who could construct an elaborate a joke or write a botanical manual . . . in a poem.

In person he could be quick, erudite, acerbic, cracker barrel punny, mercurial, owlish or foxy. When he died at seventy-five, he was still writing poems nearly every poetry lover would want to read for the puzzlement, the wit or the exhilaration. But after he passed his reputation began to fade, his work ceased to be essential to any conversation about American poetry. Or so it has seemed to me. James Dickey, another of my favorites, died four years before Ammons, but his work still appears in anthologies that declare themselves “contemporary.” Is his work more alive than Archie’s? What I hope to do here is to awaken the curiosity of younger readers and provide older ones with a reason to look again at the spiraling, elegant, jittery, rattletrapping, challenging and rewarding poems of A. R. Ammons. First, I’d like to indulge in a touch of personal reminiscence, then to offer one of his poems I keep returning to, not because it’s typical of his work – what would be? – but because it’s irascible and indelible, daring me to be offended or bewildered, but never allowing either to happen.

Almost forty years ago I was one of twenty poets invited to a two-week retreat at the Reynolds family’s historic homestead near Critz, Virginia. I was still green, next-to-youngest in the cadre, which included Kathryn Stripling Byer, Ann Deagon, James Applewhite and other poets who had published books, won prizes, made a name. And Archie. The rest of us stayed in a one-room barracks bisected by a long curtain for gender segregation. Mosquitoes, noise, involuntary proximity – when the sponsoring foundation decided to pull together an anthology of participant work, they called it The Gritloaf Anthology. Archie stayed in a cottage with his family, and twice a day we sat in a circle and talked of poetry. It was the closest to a workshop I’d ever be in, but when most of the participants have creative writing degrees and are poetry teachers, the ante goes up, the games and dynamics become byzantine. Nuance and innuendo occupy every pause in the talk. I was way out of my depth.

Two moments from one particular afternoon provide me with the benchmarks of what I would come to know of Archie in our correspondence and few encounters over the next thirty years. First: on my way out to meet the other the merry campers for volleyball, I walked by Archie, who was sitting at the piano staring at his hands. When he asked me where I was going, I responded, “Out to create a sequel to Sphere.” (One of Archie’s award-winning and very demanding books was Sphere: The Form of a Motion). He scowled and said, “Not in this life.” He was in a raspy mood, and I felt, well, scolded but not quite scalded.

Later that afternoon we were sitting alone discussing one of my poems. I was discussing; he was listening. When I realized I was wasting a great opportunity and shut up, he began to anatomize in detail the opening stanzas, in which the narrator sitting on a diving board high above a lake at night marvels at the stars, both above and reflected in the water. I had written something like, “I can watch constellations twice, once in natural sky, once caught false,” and Archie raised his eyebrows and said, “What if you said ‘truly caught false’? How would does that mesh with the overall project of this poem?” The proverbial light bulb came on, and after a couple of other comments he winked and said the rest was up to me.

A dozen years later he was (unknown to me) judging an annual contest for the best poetry collection by a North Carolina writer. When I learned he had chosen my From the High Dive for the prize, I wrote him expressing my gratitude but also said that I thought that an eligible book by another of the Critz Gritloafers was probably better. He responded that he’d made mistakes in his life, but that prize wasn’t one of them. I could imagine his grin and his gentle Eastern N.C. voice, as well as a twist of ironic mirth.archie

More importantly, though, I remember his poems, which were often daring and introspective but also alert to the nuances and wonders of the natural world. Here’s a keeper with a tasty pun in the title and a periodic sentence even John Lyly would envy:

The City Limits

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breath of such calmly turns to praise.

[from Briefings: Norton, 1971]

Try that slight-of-hand anaphora, diagram that sentence, say that paragraph with quiet precision and feeling, feel “the dark work of the deepest cells,” see how much light will accept you and “consider that radiance.” Reading him will reward a wide audience, for despite Yeats’ claim that things fall apart, Ammons as Puck, Caliban and Prospero could make poems that hold in any wind.

ammonsautograph


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.