The most significant position in the world of poetry is that of the United States Poet Laureate.  Every year the Librarian of the U.S. Congress selects a poet for this position.  As America’s official poet, the Poet Laureate serves a term from October to May and sets the national tone for the poetry field.  In June 2012, Natasha Trethewey was appointed as the 19^th Poet Laureate of the United States; she is also the Mississippi Poet Laureate.

At only 46 years old, Trethewey is one of the youngest poets to assume this reveredposition.  Trethewey’s appointment is particularly significant not only because of her age range, but also because of her racial and geographical origins.  She is the first African-American Poet Laureate since Rita Dove, who held the position from 1993-1995.  Trethewey is also the first Southern poet to hold this prestigious post since Robert Penn Warren in the 1940s.

Trethewey’s fascinating yet tragic past has shaped her as both an effective poet and a biracial woman.  She was born in Gulfport, Mississippi in 1966, a period of great racial strife in America, particularly within the Southern states.  At this time, the marriage between her white father and colored mother was considered illegal.  Her parents divorced during her childhood, and her mother remarried a man she later divorced.  In a tragic turn of events, this ex-husband later murdered Trethewey’s mother.  Trethewey draws on this heart-breaking event and her complex racial and Southern identity in many of her poetry collections, such as Native Guard, which was published in 2006.  This collection earned Trethewey the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.  The poet has also authored Thrall (2002), Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010), Bollocq’s Ophelia (2002), and Domestic Work (2000).

Trethewey directs Emory University’s Creative Writing Program and is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing (Poetry Foundation).  Trethewey’s style blends both modern and traditional techniques. While employing free verse, poetry that neither rhymes nor has regular meter, Trethewey also invokes the established sonnet and villanelle forms (“New Poet Looks Deep Into Memory, The New York Times).  Her use of these forms parallels her exploration of American racial history and the modern racial crisis.

During my reading of Native Guard, I was amazed at Trethewey’s pervasive themes of familial loss, racial struggle, and Southern identity.  One of my favorite poems in this collection is “The Elegy for the Native Guards,” which mourns the black regiments in the Civil War, the Native Guards.  While the white Confederate soldiers are memorialized for their service in the war, Trethewey questions the lack of commemoration for the colored soldiers.  Her poem is meant to eternally honor their sacrifice.  As the current U.S. Poet Laureate, Trethewey has already played a major role in leading the literary world in her exploration of memory as well as the racial and geographical identification of oneself.

– Maddie Thorpe

In compiling and selecting works for Shenandoah, I constantly wonder why people read fiction and especially why authors want to write fiction.  In considering this question, I turned to the words of fiction authors in order to understand their motivations for producing their works.  Toni Morrison, author of Home, the novel we reviewed for the magazine last semester, sums up the task of fiction writers quite perfectly: “the ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”  Is fiction writing the ultimate challenge for writers, considerably more so than nonfiction?  Morrison relates fiction writing as a multifaceted trial for writers.

This process involves great imagination as well as the ability to make mundane ideas interesting and complex ideas relatable.  I believe that Morrison and many other authors write fiction for the sheer challenge it presents.  Ray Bradbury described the writing process in a more emotional sense: “the answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.”  The key to writing and the desire to write is passion.

While I agree that omnipresent challenges and passion are inherent in writing fiction, I also believe that authors write fiction in order to reconcile their own experiences in reality as well as their imaginations.  Instead of writing non-fiction about their lives and the issues they have faced, they transcribe this reality into fantasy.  I also believe that this can be a form of escapism from reality.  For example, books in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series provide an alternate world for readers, one of magical spells and castles.  However, the characters are youths facing the trials and tribulations that plague every teenager and young adult.  Rowling creates this fantastic realm while reconciling the true issues of morality, love, and relationships.  J.K. Rowling has said, “Sometimes the ideas just come to me.  Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come.  It’s a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works.  I like a mystery, as you may have noticed.”  Like Bradbury, Rowling also describes writing as a deep-seeded desire: “I’ll be writing until I can’t write anymore.  It’s a compulsion with me.  I love writing.”

 I agree with Rowling’s description of writing as a compulsion, or a craving.  As one of the most popular fiction writers of our generation, Rowling was driven to finish the wildly successful series.  She and other fiction writers reconcile reality with fantasy, appealing to the masses. They provide both an escape and a relatable tale for readers.

– Maddie Thorpe