Poem for a Monday: Happy Birthday, Robert Frost

When I was a 20-something student attending college in Vermont, Robert Frost wasn't just another poet on the syllabus. The "road not taken" guy. JFK's inaugural poet.

No, he was a demigod. We made pilgrimmages to his cabin in the woods, lounging about on the grass and taking turns reading aloud to each other. Birches. Mending Wall. Maple. Those were the poems I remember loving and rereading when I was young. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening was also a great favorite, especially when sung to the tune of "Hernando's Hideaway."

Thirty years later, I choose different Frost poems. The Draft Horse really spoke to me not long ago, but I've moved past that now, thank goodness. I still love Directive. And I'll confess that when I was 20 I didn't appreciate The Oven Bird; now it's a favorite.

So today, in honor of Robert Frost's birthday (March 26, 1874) I'm reading Hyla Brook. And wondering at the miracle that it was my daughter who reminded me that today is the poet's birthday. She'll be heading to that same mountain in Vermont come fall, to discover her own favorite poems.

Hyla Brook

By June our brook's run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will be found
Either to have gone groping underground
(And taken with it all the Hyla breed
That shouted in the mist a month ago,
Like ghost of sleigh bells in a ghost of snow) -
Or flourished and come up in jewelweed,
Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent,
Even against the way its waters went.
Its bed is left a faded paper sheet
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat -
A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.

Robert Frost 1874-1963

Follow on a Friday: Kate Egan

There must be something in the water in my town (Brunswick, Maine) because you can’t throw a stick without hitting a writer. Seriously, there are sooooo many writers in this town! And I’m lucky to know a few of the very coolest … including Kate Egan, who, in addition to being a prolific writer (she’s authored about 50 books for kids) is the editor of The Hunger Games.

Yes. Imagine it: Kate worked directly with author Suzanne Collins and was on hand, advising and commenting, as Suzanne revised and improved her drafts of The Hunger Games. Then, when the book was turned into a film, Kate was hired to author The Hunger Games: Official Illustrated Movie Companion and The World of the Hunger Games, which has just made the bestsellers list!

Hard to imagine that she’s also a mom in sleepy Brunswick … but being a mom has led to further creative endeavors, because her first picture book, Kate and Nate are Running Late! (a humorous tale about getting ready for school in the morning) is due out soon.

I had a chance to ask Kate a few questions about her work and, of course, the movie:

You’ve just returned from The Hunger Games premiere! What was that like?

The premiere was just amazing. I don't know how else to put it! It was the first time I'd seen Hunger Games fans up close, really seen their dedication to the books and the characters, really felt their excitement. The night before the movie, there were hundreds of kids camped outside the theater, hoping to get the handful of free tickets that would be available for them. They were curled up in sleeping bags, reading battered copies of the books, wearing t-shirts declaring their dedication to Peeta or to Gale. The Hunger Games logo kept coming up on giant video screens around the theater, flaming mockingjays everywhere... it was bigger than anything I'd imagined. It was astonishing to see the throngs of people waiting to see the stars next day. Just like in the movies! After seeing the film, I know that I will always picture Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss now. She's that good.

How did you feel the filmmakers did creating Panem?

Because I wrote the Official Illustrated Movie Companion (a New York Times bestseller!) I'd had an advance peek at many of the scenes. But seeing still photographs was very different from seeing it all come to life on screen. I was really moved by the way District 12 is portrayed in the movie. It is desperately poor, but it's Katniss's home, and it is wrenching to see her leave it. The Capitol scenes are dazzling and weird, which I mean in the best way. Every detail shows that the place is twisted and baffling. Like Katniss, you don't want to spend too much time there.

What’s it like to work with Suzanne Collins?

I'd say that my job is to ask Suzanne questions, to probe for details that might be in her head but haven't yet made it onto the page. She is a phenomenal writer, and sometimes she pushes back on editorial suggestions, and I trust her judgment. I have learned an enormous amount about writing from her. And Suzanne and I worked very closely with Scholastic's David Levithan on the books. He is a phenomenal writer and editor himself.

Tell us about your new picture book.

It's my first original book -- the first that wasn't assigned to me as a writer for hire. It took me a while to make that leap! It's a picture book called Kate and Nate Are Running Late, illustrated by Dan Yaccarino (an artist my kids have grown up loving). It's a funny story about a family scrambling to get out the door in the morning. There will be many back-to-school books out there this fall, but this one shows what getting ready for school is REALLY like. At least at my house...

Kate Egan has worked in publishing for almost twenty years, both as an editor and a writer. The first book she edited was 99 1/2 Animal Jokes, Riddles and Nonsense (which still makes her laugh), and the first book she wrote was Pony Party (featuring My Little Pony dolls at a celebration). More recently, she has edited the novels in the Hunger Games trilogy, and her first picture book, Kate and Nate Are Running Late!, will be published this fall by Feiwel and Friends. Kate lives in Brunswick, Maine, with her husband, two kids, and two cats.

Poem for a Monday

Poems surprise me with unexpected details. A few carefully chosen words can evoke an entire scene in my imagination.

"The Catfish" by Matthew Beacom does this so beautifully.

The Connecticut Review awarded "The Catfish" the Leo Connellan Prize, and published it in their Spring 2010 issue.

note: The artwork featured here, "Pisces," is by fiber artist Catherine Worthington of Brunswick, Maine. http://www.earthtonesandfishbonesart.com/

The Catfish

After Sunday Mass, with nothing
in my stomach but the Eucharist
and a couple crackers, we went
up the new highway to see the dam
across the Missouri at Gavin’s Point.
Dad drove the ten of us in the red
Ford wagon, the one that had a golden
letter B on the door before we bought it,
second hand, from Braunger’s Meats.
I had to sit between Mom and Dad,
since I was the smallest and hadn’t
been good in church that morning
(I hid under the pew during the sermon.)
We drove along the top of the dam.
A pile of earth and chalk and concrete,
it was as wide as a country road
and almost two miles long. Bluffs rose
high above the water, and power
lines from the electric dynamos hung
above low, grassy hills dried brown.
The dam stopped the river to make
a lake that drowned 30,000 acres.
I’d never seen so much water before.
We took a tour of the turbine room
and aquarium. There was a glass wall
with the lake behind it, and in the water
I saw a catfish as big as a man looking
at me—its whiskers as long as my arm.
I couldn’t speak; I could hear nothing;
and darkness constricted around me
like a camera’s aperture shutting.
I fell—like Jonah swallowed by the whale.




Matthew Beacom was born and raised in Sioux City, Iowa, and has lived in Connecticut with his wife and children for over 20 years. He is a part-time student in the creative writing MFA program at Southern Connecticut State University and is employed as the Head of Technical Services at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

Follow on a Friday: Donna Gephart

I first met author Donna Gephart at a Random House "It's a First" reception in Philadelphia. Both of us had debut novels coming out that spring, and our publisher had hosted a lovely party during the ALA convention to introduce several of us new authors to each other, agents, staff, etc.

It was definitely an opportunity for pretention: but Donna is one of those refreshingly real, down-to-earth women you like right off the bat. Her novels reflect her genuine kindness and humor, and based on their runaway success, it's pretty clear that kids love them!

OLIVIA BEAN, TRIVIA QUEEN is her latest middle grade novel, and just launched this week. Her other books include AS IF BEING 12-3/4 ISN'T BAD ENOUGH, MY MOTHER IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT!, which won the Sid Fleischman Humor Award and a Florida State Book Award, and HOW TO SURVIVE MIDDLE SCHOOL, which received starred reviews from both Kirkus and School Library Journal.

I checked in with Donna this week (launch week!) and she graciously answered a few of my questions about OLIVIA:

How did the idea for OLIVIA BEAN, TRIVIA QUEEN come about, and are you by any chance a JEOPARDY! fan?

My dad, 84, is a huge Jeopardy! fan. It's so much fun to watch the show with him because he yells the answers at the TV. I wrote Olivia Bean, Trivia Queen as part of the National Novel Writing Month initiative, and finished the book in 29 days. It took months, however, to revise it. The title came to me and the rest flowed from there.

Your middle grade books are laugh-out-loud funny. Did you intentionally pursue writing humor for children, or did it just ... happen?

Thank you. That's just naturally how I write, how I talk, etc. Life has so many bumps, I figure we should get in all the laughs we can when we can.

Are you working on anything new you can tell us about?

I am working on a new funny middle grade novel that I'm super excited about, but I can't share details this early in the process. Again, it began with the title and mushroomed from there. I love when that happens!

I'll confess, I'm so impressed that Ken Jennings of JEOPARDY! fame "blurbed" the back of your book! How did that happen and, more importantly, have you met him?

I sent him a copy of my book, autographed to him. The character in my book is a huge fan of his (page 123). Ken Jennings has been so generous to not only blurb my book, but to endorse it on his blog. I haven't met him . . . yet. But when I do, he can expect a great big THANK YOU from me (and Olivia)!

Donna Gephart's new book, Olivia Bean, Trivia Queen, came into the world Tuesday with a starred Kirkus review and an endorsement from Jeopardy! champ, Ken Jennings. To learn more, visit Donna at http://www.donnagephart.com/

Poem for a Monday

I love poetry. Love love love it. Volumes of poems teeter dangerously on my bedside table. I purchase mini-books of poems to carry in my shoulder bag so I'll have a few to read whenever I'm waiting on line somewhere. Old poems, contemp poems, laugh-out-loud poems and devastatingly dark poems (think: Robert Frost's "The Draft Horse." Yeah, even that one.) I can't get enough.

So I guess it's one of the tragedies of my writing life that I'm an AWFUL poet. Really, no false modesty here: my poems are abysmal. Unless you count limericks (which I don't, even though I can spin out any number of limericks on demand; a strange but useless gift) I am poetically-challenged.

Combine my enthusiasm with my lack of talent and you have: Poems for a Monday. Something new I plan for my blog. Every Monday (hopefully every Monday) I'll post a poem here with a little something about the extremely talented person who wrote it.

So here it is, the inaugural Poem for a Monday: Kristen Lindquist's "Transportation," from her collection of the same title, published by Megunticook Press, cover art by Eric Hopkins.

Transportation

Everyone in O'Hare is happy today.
Sun shines benevolently
onto glorious packaged snack foods
and racks of Bulls t-shirts.
My plane was twenty minutes early.
Even before I descend into the trippy light show
of the walkway between terminals,
I am ecstatic. I can't stop smiling.
On my flight we saw Niagara Falls
and Middle America green and gold below.
Passengers thanked the pilot for his smooth landing
with such gratitude that I too
thanked him, with sudden and wholehearted sincerity.
A group of schoolchildren passes on the escalator,
and I want to ask where they're going.
Tell me your story, I want to say.
This is life in motion.
A young couple embraces tearfully at a gate;
she's leaving, he's not.
How can I bring this new self back to you, intact?
He yells to her departing back,
"Hey, I like the way you move!"
Any kind of love seems possible.
We walk through this light together.
So what if it's an airport?
So what if it won't last?




Kristen Lindquist lives with her husband Paul in her hometown of Camden, Maine, where she works as development director for Coastal Mountains Land Trust. She received her MFA from the University of Oregon. Her poetry and other writings have appeared in Down East Magazine, the Maine Times, and the Bangor Daily News, as well as various literary journals and anthologies. Her chapbook Invocation to the Birds was published in 2001 by Oyster River Press. An avid birder, she writes a monthly natural history column for the Herald Gazette.

Never Done

Last week I received fabulous news: my editor is happy with my latest revisions to the manuscript-in-progress, considers it “accepted” and is sending it off to copyediting, which means another pair of editorial eyes will look it over for grammar/typos/inconsistencies, etc. So while it’s not completely finished, it’s mostly finished. Thoughts have turned to covers, acknowledgements, book jacket copy … all the parts that spell: Done.

Prosecco was poured, cheers ensued, dancing about the office happened (which was very confusing to the dog) and this morning … I’m channeling Anne Bradstreet.

Here’s the thing: it’s never really done. Even when I spy one of my books on the shelves in a bookstore, I’m tempted to leaf through it with a pencil in hand and change a word or two. Or cross out an entire chapter. Or add an entire chapter.

And this latest book, in particular, unsettles me. I’m so not sure I’ve got it “right,” and when I pass it off to a reader I’m more anxious than usual. It’s as if I’ve sent my child out into a winter storm dressed only in her pajamas. I took some risks in this book. It scares me. I suspect it will never be ready.

Which is where the poet, Anne Bradstreet, comes in. Amazingly, this woman born in Northampton, England in 1612, who sailed with her husband and other Puritans on the Arabella in the 1630s and lived out the rest of her life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, tapped me on the shoulder this morning and said, “I know, right?”

Mother of eight, survivor of smallpox, a “Pilgrim,” to boot, she was also a writer, and one of her friends got hold of her poems and bundled them off to England, where, unbeknownst to her, they were published. She wasn’t … pleased. She felt they weren’t ready. They needed more work. And she wrote this poem about the experience of seeing her unreadied child exposed:

The Author to Her Book

Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth did'st by my side remain,
Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call.
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
The visage was so irksome in my sight,
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.
I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.
I stretcht thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet.
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save home-spun cloth, i' th' house I find.
In this array, 'mongst vulgars may'st thou roam.
In critic's hands, beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known.
If for thy father askt, say, thou hadst none;
And for thy mother, she alas is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.

I know, right?

Getting to Whoa

A dear friend just accomplished a remarkable thing. She finished writing her dissertation, an original, hundreds-of-pages long scholarly paper. It’s a work that’s taken more than two decades to complete, and an effort that spanned multiple jobs, the births of three children, the care of aged and ailing family members, and all the rest life throws at you.

When she was finally done and typed that last word (at least, I imagine her typing some last words … I need to ask her, did she actually write “The End”?) she posted on Facebook: Whoa.

Yes. That’s it. That’s the feeling and that’s the moment. Whoa.

It’s completely personal and solitary and surprising and exhilarating. The whoa, when you’ve given your last bit of effort to some creative endeavor, and finally seen it through to completion. It’s done, it represents the best you can do, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s published or well reviewed or applauded by anyone. It is a perfect thing in that moment, like reaching the top of K2 or holding a newborn. You stare down from a dizzying height and feel: whoa.

Getting to whoa is so hard. It’s not just the hours and the actual work you have to put in. It’s the distractions, all the Life that keep popping up and keeping you away from the desk or the studio. It’s the self doubt (“Who am I kidding? I can’t write/paint/sing/dance!") and it’s the mortgage (“I need a real job; screw the novel I’m going to law school.”) and it’s the nagging Why? that kills the whoa.

Why am I bothering to do this? Especially on days when the work doesn’t go well and I have nothing to show for it, wouldn’t I have been better off vacuuming the car? Tangible results and all that?

It takes a lot of courage to get to whoa, and to my friend I say: Yay for you! You are amazing.

But she’s not the only one.

I have a father who, at age 75, has finally given himself leave to pick up a paintbrush and create. He’s always loved art and he’s always had a gift, but he always had a million distractions and other responsibilities. Still, he never let go of his dream to paint, and these days, not for profit or praise but for himself, because he loves it, he creates wonderful landscapes. The painting at the beginning of this post is one of his.

I look at it and think: whoa.