Interview with Belle Waring and Dawn Reno’s Online Creative Writing Class

Nickole Brown: Hello, everyone! Welcome to the Sarabande in Education chat room. Tonight Dawn Reno's online creative writing class will be meeting with poet Belle Waring.

Tegan: Hello

Dawn Reno: Hi Nickole! Nice to "see" you. See you made it, too, Tegan.

Tegan: Yes

Belle: Good evening Nick. Hi Dawn.

Dawn Reno: Hi Belle -- How's it going?

Tegan: Hello Belle

Belle: We have all been under a bit of strain recently but hope things will now take a more peaceful turn. Turning to technical matters, I like the new website! It's cool.

Dawn Reno: You live near the sniper trail, don't you?

Belle: Yes. Several friends live in the various neighborhoods where people were killed.

Howard Freeman: Hello everyone

Belle: Tegan, that is an lovely and an unusual name. May I ask if it a family name?

Dawn Reno: What a horrible situation. I was talking to a colleague the other day and saying that my theory was that the sniper was a military man with a history of violence. I'm too close for comfort . . .

Dawn Reno: Hello Howard

Belle: Hello Howard. Dawn, how many students do you have in your class?
Tegan: It was on the english tv show that my mom used to watch Dr. Who.
Dawn Reno: I think we're down to about 9, Belle. Started with 19 at the beginning of the semester.

Belle: Maybe I could start by saying that I did a reading the other night with Steve Scafidi. He just published his first book with LSU -- that's Dave Smith's series -- and it's called SPARKS FROM A NINE-POUND HAMMER. He won the Larry Levis Award and I really liked his stuff. I recommend it.

Dawn Reno: What kind of poetry does he write?

Belle: Dawn, that's quite an attrition rate. OK, what would Tegan and Howard like to chat about? Are you all beginners? Or have you been writing for awhile?
Howard Freeman: Is it available from Sarabande?

Dawn Reno: Nickole -- One of my students can't get it. Says she's typing in Student/Learn but unable to get in. Is she doing it correctly?

Tegan: Beginner

Dawn Reno: Yes, unfortunately quite a few of my students have had problems this semester, Belle.

Belle: He writes these amazing lyric-narratives. Kind of like James Wright crosscut Keats crossed with your uncle Moe after a beer, telling tales of glory and disgrace.

Dawn Reno: Tegan, why don't you start? Howard, you'll go next.

Nickole Brown: Dawn, make sure she's capitalizing the first letter of each password.

Howard Freeman: I'm a beginner to writing. I'm an old man of 72, enjoying the class. Your have a tremendous ability to produce powerful emotions and contranst in your poems. How did you develop this ability? And over what period of time?

Dawn Reno: Quite a mix, Belle :-)

Tegan: ok

Tegan: I only had a small portion of the poems from Dark Blonde and was wondering if it had a reoccurring theme throughout, and if it does if it is with preemies? And what made you choose that as a topic?

Tegan: Many questions in one.

Belle: Steve Scafidi's book is from Louisiana University Press. I shouldn't be pumping another press -- except I just read with him, he was a nice guy, and it's his first book. I like to encourage people. So, Tegan and Howard, fire away. What would you like to know?

Tegan: I only had a small portion of the poems from Dark Blonde and was wondering if it had a reoccurring theme throughout, and if it does if it is with preemies? And what made you choose that as a topic?

Howard Freeman: Sorry I butted in Tegan.I was typing and failed to notice I follow you.

Tegan: That's fine Howard, no harm no foul.

Belle: Howard, that is amazing. My grandparents reared me -- from them I got my sense of history, of emotional intensity and how it can be brought to bear on a life lived in the name of principle -- not solipsism or narcissism. My grandpa was a country doctor and he never got rich. He took care of people whether they could pay or not because that's what doctors did. He told me many many stories about the old times and I became a nurse so that I could then work my way through med school. It didn't work out that way -- I got sidetracked -- and here I am. Tegan, as for the preemies, I spent 10 years in critical care. It took years to process this experience before I could write about it. So DO NOT BE DISCOURAGED if it takes you awhile to write about things that are important to you.

Tegan: My name is from an english show Dr. Who that my mom watch by the way.
Tegan: Thanks for the encouragement.

Belle: Anyway, as for the preemies, it was life and death every shift. (And the nurses -- they were amazing, wonderful. The docs were good too. Most of them, anyway.) Some people say your subject chooses you -- you don't choose it. What do you think? What are you trying to write about? What are you encountering?

Tegan: It sounded as if you knew a lot about preemies and I wondered if you had worked with them.

Tegan: Thank you, your turn Howard.

Belle: Tegan, I used to give a writing exercise called "The Story of My Name." You write 20 lines and explain how you got to be named -- so you would put yourself in your parents' or grandparents' shoes, imagine their lives, try to put down every detail. Use old photos if you can and describe them fully. What were their lives like? You could try that.

Tegan: That is a neat idea.

Belle: What the exercise does is require you to take something extremely familiar--your name-- and DEfamiliarize it. You imagine what life was like before you were born, or just afterwards. Do some research if you can: you have to go to the library for this one: not the Internet: but look up some old journals around the year of your birth. See what the world was like. Talk to your parents and grandparents.

I would say that we cannot be writers without a sense of history.

Howard, may I ask if you were you named for someone in your family?

Tegan: Do you still teach?

Howard Freeman: Are we still connected?

Nickole brown: Howard, make sure to set your refresh button.

Belle: p.s. on defamiliarization: there was a Russian literary critic back in the 1920s who said that defamiliarization was the essence of art. He said that everything becomes too familiar, that we take it for granted -- our loved ones, our jobs-- that even war begins to be familiar -- and that the essence of art was to look at things afresh and describe them as if we were seeing them for the first time. The word defamiliarization is a rough translation. The Russian word is more like "Making things strange." David Lodge discusses this in his nonfiction book on Fiction, I forget the title, but it's a very important idea.
Howard Freeman: No. No one in my family has my name; however our son is named after me.

Belle: No, I'm not teaching right now. I'm working in a photo archive. We do reference, research, and exhibits.

Nickole brown: Do you remember the name of this critic, Belle?

Tegan: How neat?

Belle: Dawn, what kind of reading is the class doing?

Belle: Nick, I will look it up for you. It may be Bakhtin but I can find out.

Dawn Reno: They've read Brian Griffin's short stories and your poetry. They've also read some creative nonfiction (a varied selection).

Tegan: ! not ? sorry

Howard Freeman: Do you have any background in the medical profession?

Emma D: There are some disturbing images in your poetry. What inspired you?

Belle: Tegan and Howard, do you want to be writers? Do you want to write? Can you tell me a little about yourselves?

Dawn Reno: Welcome, Emma.

Tegan: I have no Idea what I want to be. I'm at that stage in life, High School.

Belle: Yes I was an RN for 18 years. I'm still licensed but not practicing.
Emma, what inspired me was all that work -- and being from the city and keeping my eyes open. On the positive side, my mom sang jazz and light opera and she always had records on. She gave me my "ear."

Howard Freeman: Yes, I am a minister and plan to write inspirational essays. I've prepared hundreds of sermons, speak from notes; however I have had no training in writing short stories or poetry. I think I would also like to write short stories, now that I have gotten the feel of it.

Tegan: Senior this year and we are having our homecoming this week, very exciting.

Emma D: The image of a transvestite walking into a bathroom and a young girl pulling a gun on him is somewhat disturbing. Where did that come from?
Tegan: I was apart of our skit and helped in writing it. It won out of our competition amongst the classes, Go Seniors.

Belle: Well, we have quite a spread. Homecoming and the ministry. This is wonderful. Howard, I think that there can be a lot of overlap between sermons and stories and sermons and poems. Have you read Flannery O'Connor? Try her short stories? She is worth reading. Also Gerard Manley Hopkins work is wonderful. As for homecoming, I think you could just take notes; keep a log; and write a catalog poem from that. A catalog poem is a list poem and Dawn could help you with that, right Dawn?

Dawn Reno: Certainly can, Belle. I'm going to try to get everyone together for a chat with me in the next couple of weeks to talk about poetic shapes.
Howard Freeman: My wife and I are world travelers, and I think I might do some travel writing after I completely retire. I will complete an interim pastorate in three weeks. So, presently, I am preparing three sermons or studies including handouts each week and trying to keep up with the class, plus sandwiching a bit of local travel in between.

Belle: Emma, that poem, "In the Ladies' Room at the Honeybee Bar and Grille" was written on the occasion of the Persian Gulf War. It is an anti-war poem, only the war was being fought on a very small scale, at home, among poor people, who turn on each other rather than help each other. The poem came from imagination. I was lying in bed with a case of influenza listening to the radio as the bombs were falling and I wrote it in about four drafts. The poem is a plea for peace.

Dawn Reno: That's the first time you've told that story during one of our chats, Belle. Quite moving.

Tegan: Yes it is.

Howard Freeman: No, I haven't read either author, but appreciate the suggestion and will follow up on their stories.

Belle: Howard, Bill Bryson writes about Australia and Caryl Phillips writes about the Caribbean and Africa. His most recent book is about Europe. You could also look at Jamaica Kincaid's A SMALL PLACE.

Emma D: WOW! I guess I just don't read into things enough.

Dawn Reno: Kincaid's AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY MOTHER is also good -- on several different levels -- as a personal note, as a travelogue/memoir, and as lovely writing.

Tegan: What inspired you to write "Certain Tendancies of the Hippies". What a title!

Howard Freeman: Being a private pilot, I was interested in AN ENGINE ON FIRE and would like to know what prompted that and its contrast with the totoise.
Belle: Emma, there's no way you could have known any of this from the poem. A lot of the poems are made up, fiction, but they draw on various incidents that I read about or that happened to friends. Or sometimes I just exaggerate. One time I was at a dance and a drag queen walked in the ladies' room and we girlzz didn't like it. We had gay men friends but we felt funny sharing our space witha guy. There was some tension there: it was a strange situation and nobody got hurt, but I remember when I wrote the poem, I wondered what would happened if somebody had lost their mind in there? What if somebody was just hard up enough, drunk enough, whatever, to pull a pistol out? Not good, not good at all. Because where could the drag queen go? He was a junkie. He was ill. He didn't belong anywhere, really. The poem is about having compassion for people who are different, and the mess we get in when we don't have any empathy or insight.
Belle: OH, Howard, now that is a true story. I was in a plane with an engine fire. John Cheever also has a story about this: "A Country Husband." The weird psychological aftermath of this. And the tortoise is otherworldly. I just put the very modern creature into the frame with a speaker who's been shaken up by the very, very modern-- the airplane-- and took a look at the contrast.

Howard Freeman: I thought it was an excellent contrast. I enjoyed it.

Belle: Sorry, I meant to say a very ANCIENT creature in with a very modern one.
By the way, that desert tortoise was very gentle. I fed him by hand.

Emma D: Why did you throw the word tyrannosaurus in the middle of your poem. I was especially eye catching.

Tegan: I also noticed words in the poems that are out of place in your poems or I just did not know what they meant.

Belle: Hm, Tegan, I write about hippies sometimes 'cause for a brief moment in 1969, 1970, and 1971, I was a hippie peacenik. Emma, I threw in t-rex because sometimes people act like lizards and there is nothing to do but get out of their way. Anyway, I liked the way it sounded.

Howard Freeman: Have you limited your writing career to poems, or do you also write short stories? I realize poems are short stories too, but there is a distinction.

Belle: Tegan, that is a very good question. Out of place: maybe you mean something called catachresis, which means you use a noun as a verb. You shake the grammatical tree. Try to surprise the reader.

Howard Freeman: That was a concern of mine too. It seemed so out of place.
Tegan: Oh I just did not understand.

Belle: I write essays, or commentaries, for National Public Radio but I have only been on half a dozen times. These are the only things I have had any luck getting published, other than the poems. But I am working on fiction, and I am interested in the point where the genres meld.

Dawn Reno: I have several students trying to log in. Don't konw what the problem is, but I hope they get in before we're done.

Belle: My mom sang jazz. And jazz (because it is based in blues) bends the notes. I try to do the same thing with words. It is a risk because you don't want to bore people, but you don't want to confuse them either.

Emma D: Whom do you like to read? Who is one of your favorite authors?
Howard Freeman: You didn't write any of Garrison Keillor's material, did you?!

Nickole brown: Hey, guys, we're rolling up on 8:00. . . does anyone have any final questions for Belle?

Belle: I think if you got used to reading contemporary poetry -- or if you went to poetry readings perhaps -- or maybe rent some videos of Shakespeare, try Much Ado about Nothing -- and just let the words wash over you. Try that. It might be confusing but you will train your ear a little to hear the poetry side of things.

Tegan: That is my fav. Shakespearian play Much Ado about Nothing

Dawn Reno: I love Twelfth Night both for language and the bending of sexuality. My students love that one best of all Shakespeare's works.

Nickole brown: That's a good suggestion, Belle.

Belle: We have season tickets at the Shakespeare Theatre so I have to recommend the Bard but you already knew that. I love the tragedies. I love Chekhov. I love Dickinson.

Emma D: I love them both and I have them on video

Belle: James Wright, who said, "Poetry must think." Thanks everyone.

Belle: I like Anne Carson too although she is uneven but who isn't?

Jennifer: I'm not the greatest at writing poems. Any tips?

Emma D: Thanks

Tegan: Bye, everyone I must go. Thank you Belle for the wonderful suggestions.

Nickole brown: Dawn, should I send the transcript to you to distribute to your students? Or did they register?

Howard Freeman: This was an informative session. Thanks.

Belle: I love Frank O'Hara too. Dickens, Hard Times. Brigid Pegeen Kelly. And I have a soft spot for Raymond Chandler.

Belle: thanks Nick. I'll call tomorrow. Good night!

Nickole brown: Belle, you know you should be at a chalkboard instead of behind a desk. . . what a teacher you are. Thank you so much, once again.

Belle: Nick I'm signing off.

Dawn Reno: Yes, send the transcript to me, Nickole.

Nickole brown: Goodbye, everyone. Thank you