Forgotten Rooms by Ellen Estilai

I am overdue for that dream, the one in which I stumble upon a secret room in my house that I had forgotten about or maybe never knew existed. It’s been years since I’ve been visited by that kind of dream. The last one I had was not just about a room but a whole apartment—a series of dark rooms connected to one another, fully furnished—including an ungainly plaid couch I would never have chosen myself. Sometimes the rooms are dark, sometimes they’re full of light, but they always contain surprises—and cobwebs.

These dreams are a gift. I feel energized afterward, full of possibilities, but also enervated and melancholy. I spend the next few days revisiting the dream, yearning to be back in those rooms.

I was reminded of these forgotten room dreams by recent stories of two cultural finds. The first was the discovery of a long-lost manuscript by Harper Lee, the reclusive, famously unprolific author of the beloved classic, To Kill a Mockingbird. Since her first book’s publication in 1960, the author’s legion of fans have waited in vain for another novel, but Lee saw no need to give them one. She explained she was overwhelmed by the attention surrounding Mockingbird, and that she had already said what she had to say in that book. She was done.

Done, that is, until late 2014, when Lee’s attorney found a long-forgotten manuscript in a drawer. Go Set a Watchman, the precursor to Mockingbird, is set for release on July 14, 2015. It’s not clear just how much the choice to publish was Lee’s own, since the 88-year-old author is deaf and blind and has been confined to an assisted living facility following a stroke in 2007.

Critics point out that 55 years ago, her original editor rejected Go Set a Watchman, telling her to write the story from young Scout’s point of view. That version went on to become a Pulitzer-Prize-winning bestseller, while the first version languished in a drawer, like many first novels—and perhaps rightly so.

However, her current publisher, HarperCollins, says that the book will be published as is; it needs no editing. The fact that publishers almost never say that only adds to the dreamlike quality of this “forgotten drawer” story. We will have to wait until its launch to see whether the book should have stayed in the drawer. Will the novel have literary merit or will it be merely an artifact for critics and scholars to study? And why is Lee publishing it now, after so many years of silence?

For me as a writer, the more immediate issue is the silence: how could Lee not publish for 55 years? How could she forget about a 300-page manuscript? What makes a 34-year-old, first time writer decide she has nothing more to say? Why did she stop doing the work? For those of us toiling away at our computers, hoping that tomorrow will bring the elusive phrase, unique insight, or epiphany, the thought of nothing more to say is chilling—like a death, like a forgotten room that is sealed forever.

The second cultural find was Vivian Maier, whose entire life was a forgotten room. That room was unsealed in 2007 when architectural historian John Maloof bought a box of hundreds of her photographic negatives at a Chicago auction house. These images of Chicago streets scenes, taken in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, appeared to be the work of an accomplished professional street photographer whose work was on par with such mid-twentieth century giants as Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and Weegee. However, Maloof’s Google search for Vivian Maier failed to turn up any record of exhibitions or other evidence of professional activity. When Maloof posted links to a few of Maier’s photos on social media, he received thousands of enthusiastic responses, but no clues to the photographer’s story.

When Maloof’s second Google search revealed that Maier had died in 2009 at the age of 83, he had the beginnings of information he needed to research her life and work. He learned that she had been a nanny for forty years, most of that time with a Rolleiflex around her neck, taking over 150,000 images—most of which were never printed and none of which were ever exhibited. Some images never even made it out of the film canisters. That seemingly selfless dedication to process over product is reminiscent of Tibetan monks who sweep away their sand paintings when they are finished.

Maloof eventually acquired about 90 percent of Maier’s work: including over 100,000 negatives and 2,700 rolls of undeveloped film, as well as a storage locker full of ephemera—hats, clothes, plane tickets, letters, tchotchkes, audio and video tapes—which he used to piece together the mystery of her hidden genius. His Oscar-nominated 2014 documentary, Finding Vivian Maier, co-directed by Charlie Siskel, is the culmination of this research.

Interviews with Maier’s former charges and their parents, neighbors, and photographers create a portrait of a complex, eccentric artist, independent yet dependent, voluble yet tight lipped, aggressive yet reclusive. She demanded that her employers put heavy locks on her bedroom door. “Don’t ever open this door,” she warned them. No one did.

In a recent LA Times article, filmmakers Maloof and Siskel noted that Maier’s isolation from the art world “never stopped her from doing the work of the artist, averaging a roll of film per day for five decades. That’s what artists do, they do the work.”

By the end of the documentary, we still don’t know why Maier chose to live her life closed off from the art world. What is abundantly clear is that, while she was unable to share her work, that work is self-assured, mature, masterful, technically sophisticated, and devoid of clichés. She was an outsider, but her work is not “outsider art.”

It is tempting to wonder what would have happened if Maier had gone to art school. On the other hand, some people are better off outside the academy. I am reminded of the Iranian sculptor, Esmail Tavakoli , known as Masht Esmail, (1923-1994) who started out as a janitor in the University of Tehran’s Fine Arts Faculty. After many years watching students at work, he decided to try his hand. The resulting iron sculptures of figures from classical Persian mythology, monumental and rough, have found their way into museums and private collections around the world. When asked if he wished he had had a traditional college education, he replied that if he had gone to school at eighteen, he probably would have ended up as an accountant.

While art schools can be nurturing, academia in the 1940s and 50s was often an unwelcoming place for young women artists, undervaluing and marginalizing them. Outside the academy, Maier was free to take her work seriously. Whether she took herself seriously is another matter.

Of course, it’s an artist’s business whether or not she writes or exhibits, but it’s hard not to see her refusal to do so as a kind of betrayal. That is why the stories of Harper Lee and Vivian Maier are unsettling. In Maloof’s documentary, photographer Mary Ellen Mark places Maier in the pantheon, citing her affinities with many twentieth century greats. “Had she made herself known,” she says, “she would have become a famous photographer.” The street photographer Joel Meyerowitz says, “She didn’t defend herself as an artist. She just did the work.”

Maier did the work, more than most artists ever do in a lifetime, but did she honor the work? It is very easy not to honor the work, to keep it hidden, to second-guess oneself, to assume rejection. That is what is so disquieting about the silence of these two women artists—one who thought she had said enough and one who had so much to say but couldn’t find someone to say it to. It is so easy to close that door. It is so easy to quit.

In a recent Inlandia workshop, our instructor, Jo Scott-Coe, assigned this twenty-minute exercise: “Why are you writing right now?” My response was this:

Actually, I haven’t been writing lately, but I will write so I don’t have to hear myself say that. I will write to make sense of my experience. I will write to have a conversation with myself—or that elusive intended reader. I will write to fall in love with writing again, as I did when I first started, when I couldn’t wait for the next sentence to see what I had to say, when I stole time from my day job to finish a paragraph, when I was amazed at what my experiences revealed, when I didn’t second-guess myself, when the pieces of the puzzle came together, one jagged sentence fragment at a time.

I am overdue for that dream, but I will not wait until I stumble into another forgotten room. Instead, I will do the work, because that’s what artists do.

Note: A shorter version of this essay ran in the Inlandia Literary Journeys column in the Press-Enterprise last spring.

Verses for Those Lost to Violence by David Stone

Death in summer seems unnatural. Summer’s the season of growth from flower to fruit, but across our country, violence involving law enforcement cuts lives of civilians and police officers, an average of three a day.

Southern California is no exception. With so much death, we feel a need to put into words our loss. We need to make sense of our world. We need to lament.

Later this week I will join other writers in participating in Lament for the Dead, an online community poetry project that will mark with a poem the death of every person killed by police this summer and every police officer lost in the line of duty. The novelist, poet, and Time magazine correspondent Carey Wallace founded and curates this project.

Wallace says, “The topic of police violence in this country is incredibly raw, and the dialogue around it is filled with pain, rage, and blame. Victims of police violence and police who are killed in the line of duty very quickly become symbols in the public mind, either heroes or villains. As we shape them to fit our arguments, they’re stripped of their humanity, and we forget to cry for them.”

“Lament is a poetic form of public grief that gives us a language beyond what we hear in the public sphere,” says Wallace. “Strategy, argument, and reckoning are all crucial to change. But to heal, we must mourn.”

According to the project’s website, “When poets join, they do not know whether they will be lamenting the death of an officer or someone who is killed by police. Poets commit to writing on a specific date, and compose each poem in less than 24 hours, based on the events of the previous day. Death notices are posted as they are reported in the press, according to the time of each death, and then replaced by a poem.”

Robbi Nester, the first Southern Californian poet to participate in the project, says, “The article I received initially didn’t have any name on it or details. After doing a search for other sources, I found the man’s name and a photograph that inspired my poem.” Kenneth Garcia, 28, of Stockton, CA died on June 14.

“I wanted to participate,” says Orange County poet Nester, “because I, like so many others, have felt helpless to do anything about the terrible trend of violence in the streets, with police becoming increasingly militarized and alienated from the public, especially people of color, and the price of life seeming to be so cheap.”

“Garcia was not the kind of person I might have thought of as representative of these problems,” says Nester, “yet writing the poem forced me to recognize that a life is a life, and this person, like all others had unspoken tragedies and trauma that may have led to his violent behavior.”

Claremont poet and retired psychologist Karen Greenbaum-Maya received an article on the death of Kris Jackson, 22, of Peretuth Lake Tahoe, CA who died on June 15, 2015. Greenbaum-Maya says, “Kris Jackson turned out to be a very unsympathetic character. In fact, my first reaction was, ‘No loss there.’ However, that wasn’t the project. I took a long walk and thought about how lamentable his life was, how much had gone wrong, rather than his death—caught myself thinking, ‘I have so many questions’—and I realized that those questions were what would make the poem.”

Greenbaum-Maya’s lament titled “Interrogation, or, Questions No One Asked Kris Jackson” artfully lists a series of emotionally charged questions, leaving a reader connected to Jackson as a fellow human.

Los Angeles poet Judith Terzi wrote on the June 16, death of Jermaine Benjamin, 42, of Gifford, FL. Terzi says, “There was scant info about Benjamin or the incident, though I did search the net to find out when he was born and if he had had any prior incidents. I found out that the police had been called to his house something like 70 times already in 10 years.”

“I decided,” says Terzi, “to write the poem in the form of a prayer using repetition and the second person. Like an ode to him. At the last minute I got the idea to include the epigraph from “Wayfaring Stranger” because staring into his photo, Jermaine Benjamin seemed so lost and forlorn. I began to feel pity for him.”

Laments allow us to see the human commonalities that bind us, to recognize how we all have added to the world and harmed it, to preserve another’s memory, and to comfort those of us who remain alive.

Almost as surely as the heat of summer rises, so will the toll from police violence. Don’t let the news reports be another number. Go to www.lamentforthedead.org and grieve another human life.

Swapping Stories by Victoria Waddle

To paraphrase bestselling author Jane Smiley, you either love the work or the rewards, and life is a lot easier if you love the work. In her either/or construct, I believe Smiley meant ‘money’ when she said ‘rewards.’ Hers is a truth any author understands because, despite Smiley’s own financial success, there’s not much in the way of monetary rewards in the world of literature.

I’ve always been compelled to write and have found joy in the process. Yet as I make my final edits on a novel, I am questioning the either/or construct of work and rewards as it relates to writers. A delight of having my short stories published in journals has been the thought that, finally, someone will read them. To fabricate a world inhabited by characters of the imagination, to sweat through drafts of refining that world, is to answer to a passion. The ultimate goal of writing fiction is not to be published (with the possibility of its monetary reward)—that’s just the means to the goal. To connect with a reader is the actual reward a writer seeks; to find someone else to inhabit her world and share her passion. Achieved, it makes both life and the work a lot easier.

The problem for the serious writer in making connections with readers is that there are just too many others trying to do the same thing. Full-time promotion of one’s work on social networking sites appears to be a necessity. I’ve noticed when joining any online readers’ group, there’s always a caveat to members: don’t expect to promote your book here unless you’re willing to promote others. I have no issue with promoting the writing of others. I’ve maintained a book review blog for several years; as a teacher librarian, I spend many evening hours reading others’ work. When I feel that a writer has made a connection with me, I buy multiple copies of the book and chat it up to students, hoping to create new fans for the author.

The problem with the culture of author self-promotion is that book groups now appear to be more about trading favors than they are about reading. They remind me of the ‘independent consultants’ that I so often find among friends and colleagues. They invite you to a party—but not really. They want to sell you their products—kitchen gadgets that you’ll never use, fingernail wraps that you won’t bother to apply, candles never to be lit. I think that those who go to such parties are those that expect repayment in purchases when they have their own ‘parties.’ No one actually cares about any of this stuff; they are just trading favors. I imagine that few of the many book trades among authors actually result in novels being enjoyed, worlds mutually inhabited.

Immediately after I joined several reading groups, I began to receive notices from self-published writers that I should buy, read and review their work. Some of these appeared to be from authors who really were trying to connect with the right readers. Other messages were just spam. I also received promises of reviews of my ‘published ebook on Amazon’ which ‘looked like a high quality ebook.’ Lest one wonder why she should pay for such a review, one sender leaves the author to ponder: ‘Do you want a quality ebook reviewer or would you rather settle for a mediocre review from someone who doesn’t even know how to write a book review to begin with?’

I started to wonder how any of us could avoid becoming poet Emily Dickinson’s frog—the dreary “somebody” who publically tells “one’s name–the livelong June–/To an admiring Bog!” However, since I don’t actually have an ebook on Amazon, and the offers of quality reviews were just more spam, the question of a mediocre review didn’t keep me up at night.

No. I slept and dreamt about my real worry: how will I ever make an honest connection with readers? Dreaming, I was among adults who were behaving as exuberant children, jumping through puddles of black ink. I wasn’t interested in joining, but when I looked in the mirror, I saw that I had the telltale sign of my own childhood—a bridge of freckles across my cheeks and nose. Surprised at its reappearance, I wondered how I could cover it up since freckles on a grown woman are considered flaws. Looking closer, I saw that on a microscopic level, every freckle was made up of words—each, in fact, was a story. I was delighted.

I awoke not having any better idea how to avoid the author book-trading game. But I’m hoping to find others who are willing to look closely. And find that they, too, have story written all over them.

Theft by Judy Kronenfeld

I hope there is a special place among the lower circles of hell, perhaps among the serpents and the rivers of blood, for the thief who stole my husband’s suitcase and briefcase from our own driveway at the end of May, as we were getting ready to drive to the airport for a quickly arranged flight to New York where my cousin’s 48-year-old son had just died of a rare bone cancer he had fought with uncommon grace and optimism.

“Where are my suitcase and briefcase?” my usually calm husband exclaimed in near panic, coming back into the house. As if I might have gone outside and taken them in for safe-keeping. I wish. A well-trained New Yorker in origin, who knew how to carry her bookbag and purse in a way to prevent theft or groping on the crowded subway she rode to high school, and whose similar habits avoided the purse-slitting incurred by her companions in a market in Toluca, Mexico, I had always warned my husband not to leave anything on the driveway, even for the few seconds required to go back into the house for forgotten car keys (and yes, those seconds did wind up being distracted minutes). “You were right this time,” he said.

We had to go to New York. So my husband spoke to the police I had called, while trying to repack his pills. And I ran into the bedroom and threw clothes for him, in record minutes, into a small carry-on. We made it to Ontario with a half-hour to spare since I usually err on the side of allowing too much time to get to the airport. And aside from trying to compose a list of everything that was missing, and calling our insurance company, and my sending up a silent thank you to the powers-that-be that it wasn’t my suitcase, which I had not yet taken outside that morning, that had been stolen (in which case repacking in six minutes would have been a pipe dream), we shelved this annoyance in the midst of a tragedy, as we entered the world of a family devastated by the loss of an adult child, and a brother—still far too young—a loss putting material losses into the perspective they deserve.

Still, when we came back home, glad we had been able to offer what little support we could to my cousin’s family, the annoyance felt increasingly annoying. The thief—or someone connected to the thief—had tried to use a check from our account (we had forgotten the checkbook when we made our list) for a considerable sum at a local store, so we had to cancel ours and open a new checking account. And, fearing some private information could have been found among our things, we cancelled our credit cards, but the replacement cards, although the package was listed as delivered by UPS, were nowhere to be found. At that point, a sense of being watched or targeted made me feel almost as uncomfortable in my own house as I had been when a roof rat took up residence inside for almost two weeks the previous summer. It turned out, according to the UPS person who successfully delivered yet another set of replacement cards a few days later, that the previous guy had never even been to our house, but had misdelivered packages all over our neighborhood, even dropping a pile of them on the street. A weird form of small solace?

It has taken several weeks, but we are emerging from the woods, are pretty much finished, we think, with all those calls to banks and creditors, those online morasses when we try to change our information—all of which made me coin a new acronym: NEWTWIST (Nothing Ever Works The Way It’s Supposed To).

I think now of a friend whose insurance company was less cooperative than ours turned out to be, and who gave up her claim; some valuable jewelry was stolen while her house was tented for termites (!), but the insurance people wanted pictures.

I think of what it might feel like to be less middle class, less able to deal with the re-arrangements of our finances, the collection and calculation of receipts for the insurance company, the replacement of essentials lost, or to have no insurance, no recourse, few or no “essentials.”

I think of what it might be like to feel targeted or vulnerable all the time.

Excerpt from Sylvia Broadbent’s “History of a Horticulturist” Memoirs

Ever since I was big enough to heft a trowel, I have been interested in horticulture. Well, maybe not horticulture, but at least in gardening. I guess it is in the blood or something. My elder brother discarded his pea-shooter for a spade at a very early age. Some people I know say I just copied him, but I always insist that it must be an hereditary predilection, being careful to stress the “an” before an aspirate “h”, or whatever it is—it just sounds learned, anyway.

It all began, I think, when I was about four. I had a playhouse at the end of the garden, in a spot later occupied by the henhouse when we started our wartime menagerie like millions of loyal British suburbanites. Perhaps my playhouse was prophetic. It was always a mess, but it was fun. In front of it was a ten by six foot area of beaten earth, with a few unhappy straggling snapdragons along one edge. This was my garden, the first of many. I don’t remember much about it, except a vague sense of proprietary pride. I think it was intended to promote respect for natural growing things, property rights, and all that sort of thing. I imagine it was an admirable place to dump a four-year-old with reasonable safety. It was a comfortable distance away from the house, and I could break as many things as I like down there without disturbing the peace of the household. Also, the mess did not matter because grown-ups could not get into the playhouse anyway.

That phase, however, was more domestic than horticultural. The second phase started when I was about six. At that time I had mumps or measles or something equally puerile and contagious, and while I was still confined and untouchable, my brother and uncle knocked together a new playhouse for me. This was a much smarter affair than the other, with a neat gabled roof, a little bow window, and a real house door that my brother had somehow body-snatched from some dismantlement or other. It was painted green, the other one had been merely creosoted.* It was a playhouse to delight any six-year-old, especially one recovering from chickenpox or whatever it was.

However, it was not the playhouse itself that interested me. It had in front of it a strip of flowerbed about ten feet long planted with some strange vegetable whose name I have long since forgotten and which I could never pronounce anyway. This became my new garden. However, I still didn’t do much about it. It was dug and planted and even occasionally weeded by my brother, who was then an amateur gardener, and hence interested to a certain degree in the welfare of our own backyard. When he later attained professional status all such interest waned abruptly. However, he still grows a few dahlias—mostly, I fear, so that he could have new plants from the tubers that he could use in the garden he cared for professionally.

The third phase of my horticultural career constituted a real advance. For the first time I started taking care of “my” garden myself. Until then someone else had always dug the thing over and planted a few things left over from other parts of the garden. Now, at the age of about eight, I suddenly became violently interested in the actual working side of gardening. One late winter’s day I struggled down the garden path with my brother’s spade, a hefty, man-sized weapon, and, with sweat and toil and blistered palms, dug over my ten foot flower bed. It was hard work for an eight-year-old. I then planted some marigold seeds I had bought at Woolworth’s. They never grew. I shall always suspect that someone else dug that bed over again later—perhaps even intentionally. I made no accusations, but after that I was wary.

Soon after this phase began, the family hen-house was moved to the site of my second playhouse, which had been torn down and its beloved boards put into that awful structure. There, as least, it was serving the war effort. That was a consolation, more of less—that nice cliché that became the reason for so many privations, great and small.

The new position of the henhouse meant that my garden was no longer accessible, and in any case was in grave danger from the hens, who could stick their heads through the wire netting in that region, and eat everything within about a foot—and the only thing there was my garden. So that garden went. I was given another area to play with; I insisted on that. It was a trapezoid area between the henhouse and the air raid shelter. It was thoroughly shaded by an apple tree and the shelter, but it was fine for me. It was cut off on three sides from the rest of the garden, a secluded little peninsula of grass and good black loam. The side of the air raid shelter facing my garden was covered by a sort of rock garden, since the shelter was an Anderson, a corrugated iron arch covered with earth. They were good protection against blast, but rather fatal in the event of a direct hit. I soon took over the rock garden, and then the entire earth covering of the shelter.

In this area my golden age of horticulture began. I cultivated it with an economy that would have put the Belgians to shame. I grew sage and thyme in patches of clay a foot square. I grew honesty on the top of the air raid shelter, where no one would see it. I found an old washtub and made it into a pond for tadpoles. As a gallant gesture of patriotism, I grew half a dozen Romaine lettuces—my most successful crop. I discovered that parsley and poppies could not be successfully transplanted. I collected seeds from everything in the garden that had them and grew some fine columbines that never bloomed. I think I bought perhaps two packets of seeds for the garden—the rest of the plants I begged, borrowed or stole from other parts of the garden.

My ambition spread. I thought of the other side of the air raid shelter—a still more secluded area, then filled with weeds, apple tree prunings, and cold frame lights, plus a quantity of broken glass. I did not bother to ask anyone’s permission. One day, when no one else was around, I cleared out the rubbish, stacked the cold frame lights and flower pots where my brother was sure to trip over them when he tried to get into the greenhouse, and dug the area over. Here at last was virgin ground. There was no garden already there to be worked on and developed; I had to make it. I found some old bricks and made a sort of a path. I got grass seed and planted a handkerchief-sized lawn, which since it was never rolled, was always too soft to cut successfully with the lawn mower. Being at the romantic or rather sentimental age of ten or eleven—it must have been then I was reading “Ivanhoe” I remember—I converted the dangling trails of our neighbour’s pet rambler rose into my idea of a bower. It was one of the oddest roses I ever saw; the blossoms were a bluish pink at first, and later faded to a pinkish blue. My blue rose bower added exactly the right touch of unreality to my secret and secluded garden. I made a small rockery in one corner, and planted a bed of pansies, with sweet peas behind, intended to cover the side of the air aid shelter, but which somehow never achieved its purpose. I even made a little lath fence and gate to keep the dog out—a rather over optimistic enterprise choice.

In the late summer of that year, this six by ten foot area seemed like heaven to me. I could go there and lie on the grass to read Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, Lord Peter Wimsey and Father Brown, Arthur Ransome and “Biggles”. I could steal apples without fear of discovery. No grown-up could ever intrude on this ideal haven it seemed. I could go there and satisfy my mother’s vague feeling that I should be out-of-doors, without having to go and play cowboys and Indians with the boy across the street, whom I hated energetically. I always ended up fighting him, using my head as a battering ram, although he was a much better fighter than I. I could read and dream as much as I wanted.

This joy, however, was short-lived. As soon as the war was over, my brother and uncle started making plans for the no longer needed air raid shelter. They planned to dig it up, fit it together with a similar shelter, and set it, on a concrete foundation right on top of my beloved garden, for use as a tool shed. My astonishment, rage, and disappointment at this, to me, unwarrantable betrayal were more than I had ever known in my twelve or thirteen years. This was incredible. That my brother could take away from me this, my most precious possession, was more than I could understand. I had had my garden moved before. But this was different. This was a garden I had made all myself, from nothing. My faith in humanity suffered a very severe blow.

As always in such cases, I, as the youngest, lost out. My garden went. Instead I was given a bed in the front garden, and another in the back garden. I suppose my brother tried to make up for the loss of the garden I had made myself. However, the front garden was open to everyone’s view—there was no hiding there with a book on a sunny afternoon. Also, it was gummy, yellow London clay instead of the rich fine loam of the back garden. It was hard to work, and harder still to get things to grow in. I tried, but my heart was never in it. My backyard patch I converted into a vegetable garden. I grew a few peas and radishes, but for some reason that bed was infested with chickweed, and nothing I could do would get rid of it. I finally gave up the battle. By that time I was becoming more or less responsible for most of the garden. I cut the grass occaisionally, did a bit of weeding now and then, and cut down the perennials at the end of the season, and left it at that, apart from climbing the apple trees as often as possible, ostensibly to pick apples, but mostly just for the fun of climbing.

My interest in gardening became more and more vague after that, but it has never quite waned. Last year I cleared a patch two feet long by the barbecue pit and planted some parsley. The last I saw of it, a rather hungry looking robin was attacking it with might and main. I turned my back and walked away in disgust.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Submitting by Cati Porter

Most of you know me as the face of Inlandia. Recently I had the pleasure of being interviewed for the My Awesome Empire radio broadcast. One of the things they asked was how did I get involved with Inlandia. I have Marion Mitchell-Wilson to thank, who invited me to coffee and the rest is history. Everyone who knows her knows that you can’t say no to Marion.

Marion and I met at an Inlandia event—I can’t even remember which, this was so long ago, but Inlandia was still housed at the Riverside Public Library, and Marion ran the organization from her post as Development Officer at the library, curating their arts and culture calendar. I was just a few years in to my own foray into arts & culture, having founded Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry, an online literary journal dedicated to poetry. The first Advisory Council meeting that I attended was in 2009, and shortly after that Inlandia broke from the library and formed its own independent nonprofit. I never envisioned then that I would someday be at the helm.

Marion had as one aspect of her vision for Inlandia, the preservation of the voices and stories of those that make this place home. In furthering that mission and vision, coupled with my own interest in writing and publishing, I have been working hard toward expanding Inlandia’s publications program. We have been slowly adding books to our catalog, both through Heyday and independently, and with the launch of the Hillary Gravendyk Prize, we hope to continue to bring books to the public for many years to come. It’s a slow process, though, one that requires patience as we gain speed.

Through Poemeleon first, and now through Inlandia, I’ve learned many things about publishing. It hasn’t been easy, and as a writer myself, it’s been challenging to follow my own advice sometimes, but years ago I found a very helpful list of “50 dos and don’ts”, which I’ve modified for my own use. For those of you looking for a publisher, or looking to submit work to Inlandia, try to keep these things in mind:

– Do read submissions guidelines carefully—it shows you respect the editor’s time, and that you take the submission process seriously.

– Don’t ask for feedback on your work, because, again, it shows you respect the editor’s time; if you want feedback, find a writers workshop to join or form your own.

– Do keep cover letters brief; don’t include anything personal other than your contact info, and don’t try to summarize what you are trying to do with the poems.

– Don’t include a bio that is a mile long—editors don’t need to see everywhere you’ve ever published; only include a handful of recognizable and recent credits, or don’t include any at all.

– Do spell check everything and proofread until you’re certain they are no typos, and don’t freak out if you find out later that there was a typo, because if the work is good, that can be fixed later; editors understand.

– Don’t center your poems or use any other weird formatting or font or use ALL CAPS unless you have a very strategic reason to do so.

– Do your research and submit only to journals that you’ve actually read and think might like your work.

– Don’t put the copyright symbol on your poems—copyright is inherent from the moment of creation. (And if someone is out to steal your work, the copyright symbol isn’t going to stop them.)

– Do submit to more than one press or journal at a time, as that ups the odds of the work getting picked. (Exception: if a press or journal specifically states no simultaneous submissions.)

And lastly:

– Don’t take rejection personally! There are so many reasons why an editor might pass something up. And if you get a personalized rejection, submit again—promptly!

Right now, Inlandia is gearing up to reopen submissions but we are not currently accepting full-length manuscripts. One of our goals is to provide services to authors—whether they are looking for a publisher, or want help publishing it themselves. All writing has an audience somewhere, it just takes patience, strategic submitting, and time.

But while you’re waiting, if you have individual prose or poetry selections, check out Inlandia’s online literary journal, Inlandia: A Literary Journey (www.InlandiaJournal.org). Or try these other So Cal presses and venues:

IE-centric Lit Journals:

Presses:

Metaphysical Circus Press

For the Love of Words

I’m sure there are more presses out there—if you know of any, send me a link! Help me build a list of resources for Inlandia’s writers to include on our website.

Somnambulist & Funambulist’s 4Q’s and a Witch Doctor’s 4A’s… Throw the Bones: From Whence You Learn to Dance, Learn to Vomit, Learn to Heal by Maureen Alsop

A recent encounter/interview with Witch Doctor, Nicky Auren, author of African Spirits Speak and The Spirit Speaks, offered a curious, magical, and miraculous Morongo Valley eventide!

How is the practice of divination used in the healing craft?

In throwing the bones a consistent telepathic message arose, a repeated pattern: a big shell (among smaller shells, dice, & bones) rolled across a reed mat.

You’ve got spirit, you must find a trainer and learn.

I was quiet and then saw chickens…stop, let the brain open, I still saw chickens.

What I learned took a long time…we are a system…when a relative dies one must return to the village and kill a goat or a cow to help the deceased transition to the other world…certain motions appear around the spirit & the old ways must be engaged to appease the conciousness of the spirit clan.

How does the spirit realm heal?

The whole house shook & strange things happen.

They test you through trance and call out spirits to report back to the practitioner on your spirits; you begin to see psychically, you master the practice of discovering hidden things (both literal and mental).

Practice cleansing in a tiny room.

Don a red skirt, white t-shirt, dred locks lathered in car oil and red ochre.

What was your most profound experience as a Witch Doctor?

Piercing, by spear, the back of a cow’s throat to provide a merciful death.

Followed by a thankful feast: raising a plate of cow flesh boiled with eggs & greens.

A rainbow.

Sungoma’s (medicine woman, traditional healer) final initiation.

Who were special practitioners, healers, you admire and learned from?

No god, no devil, only the trickster.

Joyce (whose name means “Lord”).

Self.

Ritual, candle, ancestors, impetigo.

Inland Area Influences Poems of Hard Truths: Yossi, Yasser, & Other Soldiers by Joan Koerper

Award-winning books are often birthed in pieces, over several years in different locations. During the 10 years that poet Jon Sebba lived in Redlands and commuted to work in Riverside and San Bernardino, he confronted his ghosts of war by writing. In 2013, poems he penned in the shadows of the San Gorgonio Mountains helped earn him the title of Poet of the Year by the Utah State Poetry Society for his book, Yossi, Yasser, & Other Soldiers.

Rising from his young soldier’s soul, Sebba’s poems record, reflect, and meditate on the images, sounds, and psychological realities of war. They offer an indelible expression of the invisible scars Sebba has carried with him since he witnessed his friend, Yossi Levi, killed in the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six-Day War: “that a man you knew for weeks who died in a war of only six days / can be mourned for 45 years and counting.” And he gives voice to those caught in battle who can no longer speak for themselves.

His poems are authentic: embodying truths he refuses to couch, hide, or deny. As Dr. Rob Carney writes in the preface: “The power of these poems is that they don’t explain. They present.”

After witnessing a man severely beaten in front of his family, and learning an inquiry into the incident was to occur, Sebba writes: “Too late for that Palestinian farmer / in ripped, blood-splattered pajamas. / Too late for me, still carrying / invisible scars all these years.”

The first 25 poems in the collection focus directly on the 1967 Six-Day War. Twenty-one poems speak to “Others’ Wars”: WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. During a phone interview, Sebba explained, “I included poems about other wars, and other conflicts or situations, that I was driven to write because they were about things that bothered me.”

I met Jon Sebba when we were members of the Redlands Branch of the American Association of University Women (AAUW). He was one of two men who broke the gender barrier, joining the group when males were allowed membership. He quickly started a play reading group for the Branch. For four years, being part of that group was my favorite monthly activity.

I also was a member of a writer’s support group he hosted, one of the multitude of writer’s groups he has either anchored, or participated in, wherever he has lived. When he moved, we lost touch. Recently, I located him in relation to a book I’m writing about a former center of intellectual, literary, and creative activity for women in Redlands where he took part in a community program I organized and produced.

Born and raised in South Africa, Sebba left after high school to live in Israel. He studied geology, among other subjects and held various jobs. When the Six-Day War broke out he was mobilized as a reservist and fought in Jerusalem while his wife and 3-month-old son huddled in a bomb shelter a few miles behind the front lines. Transformed by the experience of random death, he committed to the belief that war should be avoided. “We didn’t know / that every rifle bullet / manufactured for the army / is intended for some mother’s child / But, by God, we do now,” he writes.

Sebba immigrated to the United States in 1968. He studied civil engineering, became a specialist in water-resources engineering, eventually working in six states. He welcomed another son into the family, and later divorced and re-married. For five years he was also an adjunct instructor in the engineering department at Salt Lake Community College, Salt Lake City, Utah until he retired. He and his wife now balance their time between Utah and Arizona.

Writing and being able to share his poems with others has been deeply therapeutic, says Sebba. In turn, his poems are therapeutic to others.

In demand as a speaker, he relates, “I often focus on writing as a way to work through trauma. And I always offer to connect with veterans. I want to help. And because family members are sharing stories with me after [readings and] speaking engagements, I’ve grown more aware of the trauma and stress the family goes through because they’ve been left behind.”

In 2013, The Gallery Theatre in Ogden, Utah produced a play he wrote. From November to June each year he teaches poetry at a low security prison in Tucson, Arizona. He is also organizing a program to work with veterans in Arizona using writing as therapy. And Yossi, Yasser, & Other Soldiers is a text used in a Social Justice class at Salt Lake Community College.

Sebba’s current writing projects tackle another volatile subject: apartheid. He has written a second play, and is working on a novel, both based on people he knew while growing up in South Africa. And, of course, another book of poems about the effects of war is taking shape. “If I can help others through my experience, and writing, it is both satisfying and fulfilling,” he shared.

Yossi, Yasser, & Other Soldiers is available at Amazon.com.

Jon Sebba can be reached at: yossi.yasser.soldiers@gmail.com.

This column was published in the Riverside Press-Enterprise, May 24, 2015; Section: Life; Page Z2 & Z5.

Exemplary Friendship by Judy Kronenfeld

A good friend of my husband’s and mine, Theda Shapiro, who was Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature in the Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages at UCR, passed away in March, to our shock and dismay, after a somewhat precipitous decline due to cancer. We have been to two memorials for Theda, an informal one at the house of her close friend, Stephanie Hammer, in LA, and, just a week ago, one hosted by Thomas Scanlon, the Chair of her department, at the Alumni House on the UCR campus, and have thought about her a great deal from the onset of her illness; all of this has made me realize just what it is for a person to have a profound effect on other people, to create a lasting legacy of kindness and exemplary friendship.

For Theda, joy was so definitely not a zero-sum game—that is, if you have some good luck or some joy, there’s less to go around for me. Certainly, the extended family of my youth sometimes involved a certain zero-sum competition and even schadenfreude , especially among cousins’ parents. And I’ve had certain friends (should I call them that?) like the one who shot back an email, after I sent her a link to pictures of my kids and grandkids, saying “save these for someone who’s interested”—an expression completely inimical to someone like Theda. In her capacious mind, it was as if she had files and subfiles for all her many friends’ children and extended families. She kept up with those children and their accomplishments; she always asked to be remembered to them. Even after her awful cancer diagnosis, when I talked to her regularly on the phone, she made a point of asking about ours, and—hoping, perhaps, for more time than she had—looked forward to seeing some recent pictures of our grandkids. For Theda, if you had some good luck, or your kids gave you naches, it was her joy, too. She made herself into the best kind of family member for so many people—colleagues, students and younger faculty she mentored and mothered, and all her other friends. She was incredibly smart and knowledgeable, and also unassuming, kind, supportive, loyal, and utterly positive. There’s plenty of schadenfreude in academia; for Theda, with her amazing generosity, it was a place to share the wealth, to be supportive to students and faculty. Their testimonies at her memorials and the way in which her friends stepped up to help during her decline and afterwards made so clear how universal her generosity was, and gave me a heartwarming sense that the kindness she taught by her example is a living tradition, and will be passed on.

Poetry Month Scouts: A Guest Post by Marsha Schuh

Since the Academy of American Poets first established National Poetry Month in 1996, poets and poetry lovers have celebrated the month through readings, workshops, festivals, and “poem-a-day” challenges. Each year, the number of events seems to grow. Each year, I begin a poem-a-day challenge with the intention of writing 30 poems during the month of April, but I’ve never been successful—until 2015.

In March of this year, I stumbled upon a particularly inspiring challenge called PoMoSco, short for Poetry Month Scouts. PoMoSco was sponsored by the Found Poetry Review, and 213 poets from 43 states and 12 countries around the world took part. By its conclusion, they produced more than 6,000 poems, and I was one of them! Each participating poet had the possibility of earning 30 digital merit badges for the month’s creative work. The prompts were divided into five categories named for the method of their generation: remixing, erasure, out and about, conceptual, and chance operation. You can read all about the badges and more at PoMoSco.com. Each category provided six distinct badges that varied in their level of difficulty. Poets chose their own source texts and venues from which to craft their poems.

One of my own favorites was “First in Line” according to which we were to choose a published book of poems and craft our own poem using select first lines, keeping the wording of the original intact, and organizing them in any order, thus creating an original “cento.” I chose Barbara Crooker’s wonderful book, Gold, and after the experience of creating my cento, I was hooked. Two other badges that I especially enjoyed were “Crowd Source” and “Survey Says.” In the first, we were to choose a concrete noun (I chose “doorway”) and ask at least ten people to either define the word or explain what the word made them think about or feel. From the gathered words alone, we had to create a poem that did not mention the original word. The second badge entails making up a questionnaire of eight to ten questions and asking several people to answer them in writing. The words we collected from their answers constituted the word bank for our poem. Not only did this challenge result in a pretty good poem, but it also helped me learn some fascinating things about my friends.

I think this poem-a-day challenge was so much fun and so motivating for me because of the quality and inventiveness of the prompts. Jenni Baker, Editor in Chief of the Found Poetry Journal, and her team of scoutmasters and badgemasters did a great job of creating the challenge, motivating us, and maintaining the very professional website. Poets who took part in PoMoSco were forced to write outside their comfort zones and to experiment with new ways of thinking and writing. We discovered new tools and learned to let go of our own techniques and favorite ways of doing things; this sparked more creativity. We also met and learned from the fellow “scouts,” made new friends, and created a close and supportive community of writers.

PoMoSco is the Found Poetry Review’s fourth National Poetry Project, and this one was, in the words of one of the other participants, “the best poetry month project yet.” She wonders how they will be able to top it next year. Be sure to check next March for the 2016 challenge. If this year’s project is any indication, it should be great fun, highly original, and exceptionally motivational. You may still visit the website—PoMoSco.com until May 31, 2015 to read this year’s great—and sometimes wild—collection of poetry.