Barbara Trachtenburg: A Polymath, A Prison Poet.

Barbara Trachtenburg: A Polymath, A Prison Poet.

Barbara Trachtenburg is one of those people you can comfortably call a force of nature. She is a poet, educator, and currently involved in PEN’s Prison Writing Program. She is also a visual artist, and plays with chamber music, and other forms of creative expression in her spare time. She is a member of the Writer’s Room in Boston, and she is working on a memoir of her mother. Her writing has appeared in such journals as Arts/Editor, Latin American Anthropology Review, and others. She was also a resident at the prestigious artist/writers retreat the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. I talked with her on my show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer” airing on Somerville Community Access TV”

Doug Holder: You have worked as a school psychiatrist and teacher for over 30 years. Was this a rich lode for material?

Barbara Trachtenburg: It really has feed my short stories. Not so much my poetry. I have eight connected short stories with an ongoing character. They come from my first years working at a rehab center in Vermont. It was a residential center for multi-handicapped kids. I knew nothing. I was not a teacher. I was not trained. I was just thrown into this fascinating place. I learned a lot.

DH: As a psychologist you must have gained a lot of insight into the human condition. Did this help your work?

BT: I was a school psychologist. I worked with kids. Unfortunately those were my later years of working in the public schools. The unfortunate part was that working as a school psychologist meant at that time testing kids for their so called intelligence. The Wexler Intelligence Scale for children was a real drag. I couldn't develop relationships with kids because my role was detached in order to evaluate the tests. But of course I studied psychology and my favorite topic was family psychology. I used that to look at myself in the context of my family.

DH: You were a resident of the famous MacDowell Colony. Tell us about your experience. Who was there when you were there?

BT: Leonard Bernstein had just left. Jean Valentine was there. I lived in the area: Peterborough, New Hampshire. My kids were born there. I have to answer your question in the context of me living in the area. I was exposed to visual artists, painters, sculptors, also contemporary composers of music. I am a musician myself so I loved the newness of what was produced around there. I loved being exposed to it. The residency was great. I started to write the biography of a man I had worked with at the residential treatment center for handicapped people.

It was wonderful getting that knock on my cottage door at lunch time. Knowing the basket of food was waiting for me was pleasing.

DH: You are a member of the PEN NEW ENGLAND PRISION WRITING PROGRAM. Can you talk about your involvement in the program and the program itself?

BT: The genesis of my involvement with PEN was when I was riding my bike behind Framingham Women's Prison. I thought it would be great to get out of my world, my limitations and enter this place.

DH: Did other people ever tell you, you were slumming?

BT: No. This project makes you deal with the other side of yourself. I have been trying to get to the other side of myself and I don't think that is unusual. Most of us are faced with having to do that.

So what happened was that I went home, called the education director at Framingham. She told me to call Boston University; there was someone running the program there. I left a few messages but no one got back to me. Ultimately I went to a book celebration and I ran into the poet Fred Marchant. I told him I was looking to do a prison writing workshop. He recommended Springfield, Mass. The problem was that it was a two hour drive to North Hampton County Jail, and driving was very bad in the winter. Still it was a good experience and eventually we started a workshop at the Bay State Penitentiary, which was closer. That was about 4 years ago. This year I helped the Director of Treatment at Framingham State Prison. It is a pre-release. A number of volunteers work with me.

DH: What are the backgrounds of the volunteers?

BT: Everybody is writing. Most of the writers do teach or have taught. The volunteers we are looking for don't have to be published, writing or teaching.

DH: What do you get out of it?

BT: You get a look at yourself. Through the words and the struggles of other people. The women write memoirs and autobiographical pieces, and we don't try to change that. There are so many aspects of their own memoir writing-- food, growing up, that reach us...it is part of the human condition.

DH: What are the women serving time for?

BT: This information is not shared with us. We can only guess. The suspicion is drugs and alcohol.

DH: What was it like for you-- a white-upper middleclass woman to walk in a prison for the first time?

BT: First off, I am not an upper middle class woman. I really don't fear for my safety. The women are all eager to learn.

DH: Is it therapeutic for them?

BT: One or two have told me that. We don't intend the workshops to be therapeutic. But if they are, they are.

Ibbetson Poetry Prize Winners 2009// Kirk Etherton // Marc Goldfinger// Frank Bidart to get Ibbetson Lifetime Achievement Award

Both poets will read their award-winning poems at the Somerville News Writers Festival: Nov 14, 2009 7PM http://somervillenewswritersfestival.com


The Ibbetson Poetry contest was judged by poet Richard Wilhelm.


First prize:
"Georgia, 1963" by Kirk Etherton

Second runner-up
"Flower Days" by Marc Goldfinger







**** Frank Bidart is the winner of the Ibbetson Poetry Award. This will be presented at the Somerville News Writers Festival as well. Previous winners have been Robert K. Johnson, Louisa Solano, Robert Pinsky, Afaa Michael Weaver, Jack Powers, and David Godine, Jr.

New Mexico Poetry Review

New Mexico Poetry Review
http://newmexicopoetryreview.com


Review By Shannon O’Connor


The cover of New Mexico Poetry Review is graced by a painting by the great-grandmother of the editor, Blanche Bell Lefler Evans, a pioneer who moved from Kansas to New Mexico in 1909. One hundred years later, New Mexico Poetry Review has been brought to life, publishing mostly poets from the beginning and the end of the Santa Fe Trail, Kansas and New Mexico.

The journal blossoms with poems of nature. In Ron Houchin’s “Encounters with the Explained,” “life isn’t what it seems, “How do they know it works?/ Soon spring peepers will be keening/ in the cattail ditch beside Taco Bell/ The river will smell clean for a week.” The injection of Taco Bell brings the poem down to earth and makes it grittier and more honest. Not everything in the wide open spaces is the sky and mountains. Sometimes there’s a fast food chain in the foreground. In the poem “Early Spring,” by Linda Monicelli-Johnson, two hawks sweep up the narrator, “We’re buoyant as seed/ in the wind’s power/ My notebook pages/ flap, laughing flags.” This is a different take on the usual nature poem: it is a fantasy that hawks scoop her up and take her for a ride in the sky, with her notebook flapping. The hawks probably don’t like to be the subject of a poem. They want to scare her.

There are poems of change. In Santiago Lopez’s, “Mr. Kubrick or: How I Learned to Stop Acting and Love the Movies,” the narrator’s uncle stopped acting and became an usher at a “third-rate movie house in a fourth rate Texas town.” He was an extra in movies until Stanley Kubrick told him to get out of the shot and that improved the scene. According to the grandmother, she “wanted her first-born remembered/ for more than being the only child/ out of sixteen to never have left home.” In “The Approach,” Miriam Sagan writes of the decline of a western town, “tequila bottles/ shining like planets/ at the edge of the road.” The train in the poem comes through at different intervals: seven minutes, seven years, seven seconds.

The decline in small towns due to centralization and the Walmart factor is discussed in one of the two interviews in the journal with Donald Levering, a Kansas poet. The New Mexico Poetry Review brings light to the Santa Fe Trail as it is now, as it

Shannon O'Connor is working on her MFA at Bennington College in Vermont.

Ibbetson Street Press Puschcart Nominees 2009

Ibbetson Street Press Pushcart Nominees 2009









1) Fall/Winter issue (#26): Gayle Roby: Strawberry Moon" by Gayle Roby

2) Spring/Summer issue (#25): Tony Artuso: "Norm Visits His Autistic Daughter."

3) Spring/Summer issue (#25): Lyn Lifshin: "Orals."

4) Spring/Summer issue (#25) Tunny Lee "At the Sackler Musuem the Day Before Thanksgiving"

5) Spring/Summer issue (#25) Philip Corwin "The American Cemetery at Nettuno."

6) Fall/Winter issue (#26) Dorian Brooks "Eclipse"

Under the El by David Stone

Under the El
by David Stone
Propaganda Press
2009


Review by Miriam Levine




In the Depths



It’s a fine thing to have these little chapbooks from Propaganda Press. The not-for-profit press is part of Alternating Current Arts Co-op based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and dedicated to “inexpensive publishing and distributing.” So far their list includes: A.D. Winans, Ed Galing, and B.Z. Niditch, among others. The slim publications printed on recycled paper measure four-and-a-quarter inches by five-and-a-half inches and will easily fit in your pocket or snug into your hand.


Sounds cute, doesn’t it? However, David Stone’s “Under the El” is not cute. Stone is a prophetic poet in the tradition of Ginsberg and Blake. Ginsberg of the Moloch section of “Howl.” Moloch, the cruel hungry god demanding blood sacrifice, burnt offerings. Ginsberg makes Moloch the god of the fallen city:

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in parks!

Demons and death spirits also haunt Stone’s fallen city of “burnt carcasses.” He mentions Pluto, Hecate, and Belphegor, a devil, who seduces people by suggesting ingenious devices to make them rich—certainly not a sin in our era of iPhone apps. He is also the demon of the deadly sin of sloth.

The atmosphere of Stone’s underworld is “toxic,” spirit-besmirching, giving off the “aroma of death” and “sulphur scent.” Stone repeatedly uses the word “hell.” His city is not the City of Light or glorious Athens or dynamic New York or enlightened Boston. It’s a “sad city/ where teachers/ are raped by students,” and where there are ‘more beatings on buses/ & on subways,” and “city/ vultures scan the debris.” The underworld is populated by disgusting creatures: wolves, rats, skunks, and “paleozoic carnivores.”

In this time of feel-good, I-love-this-I-love-that poems, it is shocking and clarifying to read Stone’s work and remember lines from Blake’s poem, “London”:

I wandered through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.

Stone conjures up his hellish city, jabs at us with spare lines:

crystals
+
streetcars
erode
&
glass crashed
&split nuclei
in Chicago.
Levine-3

In the title poem, the speaker emerges from underground where “in the subway tunnel/ bats slide down stalactites.” He smells chocolate, passes a restaurant, “people eating,/ drinking port,/ lighting up stogies.” These pleasures, Stone would say, exist in a city of “six million rats.” Yet, he composes these playfully constructed lines:

in the realm of the Dead
where sooo
ooo
L
s
survive on benches
with teethmarks
waiting for a
note of jazz.

His playfulness occurs only in his line arrangements, not in his dark vision of hellish Chicago.


** Miriam Levinet recent book is The Dark Opens, winner of the 2007 Autumn House Poetry Prize. She is the author of In Paterson, a novel, Devotion: A Memoir, three poetry collections, and A Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. Her work has appeared in Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, among many other places.

A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts writing fellowship and grants from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, she was a fellow at Yaddo, Hawthornden Castle, Le Château de Lavigny, Villa Montalvo, Fundación Valparaíso, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

She is Professor Emerita at Framingham State College, where she chaired the English Department and was Coordinator of the Arts and Humanities Program.

Review of BEFALLEN by K. Alma Peterson

Review of BEFALLEN by K. Alma Peterson, 2009, 21 pages, Propaganda Press ($7 plus $2 shipping) to Alternating Current, PO Box 398058, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA

By Barbara Bialick

BEFALLEN, by K. Alma Peterson, has some interesting lines—“little soldier of spring in tree bark fatigues” ; “I wasn’t meant to be in a family but there I was”; “Caught mid-swoon at dusk a code of fireflies a blink shy/a pulse fast etcetera too few breathe-holes in their/thought jars/signals the larger darkness…”

Ultimately I wasn’t drawn to one profound conclusion, but noted, rather, her interest in word play and streams of words disparately connected.

The title poem, “Befallen” concludes: “For the world so loved itself coming daily into light/the finish line of any sight beginning over there/where it isn’t such a stretch to think of truth and light.”

The gray book with a color cover is a trendy mini-sized format of 5 ½ x 4 inches with a red and blue print by the late Carolyn Ellingson.

The author, K. Alma Peterson, of Rosemount, Minnesota, is a graduate of the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 1999.
A book you can to carry in a pocket or a pocketbook, if you want to give it a try.

John Buffalo Mailer: A Writer with an illustrious literary pedigree comes to Somerville.

John Buffalo Mailer (Right), Norris Mailer (Center), Norman Mailer ( Far Left)



Interview by Reza Tokaloo


As a new member of the “Bagel Bard” collective, I found myself in an interesting position. While at a recent meeting of the Bards at the Somerville Au Bon Pain, I was asked by the arts editor of The Somerville News Doug Holder and Timothy Gager (co-founder of The Somerville News Writers Festival) if I was interested in interviewing someone for the upcoming Somerville Writers Fest on November 14th. Many years ago I had taken journalism classes, and while in college I studied film production and have been a big fan of documentary films. In fact I made a few documentary films myself. In the case of this proposal, I looked at myself like the first Europeans who viewed the American interior: vast, green, and without a lot of exploration.

So the challenge was issued to me and the person of interest to be named is John “Buffalo” Mailer (yes the son of Norman Mailer). I welcomed the challenge to bring to light, with a few questions, the background and work of this American writer, actor, and producer. Luckily, Mr. Mailer took time out of his very busy schedule to respond to the questions I emailed to him (due to his current acting role for the sequel to “Wall Street”).



You are often credited as “Buffalo” Mailer. Where did the “Buffalo” moniker come from?

“People often assume it is a nickname or stage name, but in fact it is my actual middle name. My parents decided to call me Buffalo before I was born. They contemplated just calling me Buffalo Mailer, but decided that it would create unnecessary difficulties for me in many administrative areas, and so they decided on John Buffalo. The other possibility was Beau Buffalo Mailer, but I think if they had gone that route, I would have had no choice but to become a professional boxer instead of a Writer/actor/producer. As to why they called me Buffalo, that remains a family secret known only to my mother, my father, and me. We agreed long ago to keep it that way.”


You use to be an active editor at “High Times” magazine, a then counter culture hemp powerhouse. Are you in contact with the current staff there and do you still contribute to the magazine from time to time?


“I hear from one or two of them from time to time, but I don’t keep in regular contact, and I don’t write for the magazine anymore. What they are doing with the name brand and what Richard Stratton, Annie Nocenti, and myself were trying to do in 2004 could not be more different. Our goal was to restore High Times to what it started as, a politically charged independent magazine about outlaw culture. These days it is happy to be a magazine about growing pot, which is fine, but not my expertise.”


What are your thoughts and views on the legalization of cannabis?

“I think cannabis is illegal because of hemp as much as it is pot. Hemp is a direct threat to the Oil, Cotton, and Paper industries, while pot provides an alternative to Alcohol and Tobacco. Growing industrial Hemp and regulating and taxing marijuana in this country would be an economic and environmental godsend. Unfortunately, with some of these threatened industries have immensely powerful lobbyists, so I think regardless of whether there is a Democrat or Republican in office, it will be a long time before Cannabis is completely legal in America. But I do believe we will see decriminalization in most of the country before too long, and should.”


You published your first novella before graduating from college. How did this experience of success affect you looking back at this?


“My Father published The Naked And The Dead at the age of twenty-five and became the largest literary figure in American letters overnight, so getting a novella published in an elegant but small literary magazine at the age of twenty-one did not give me a big head. With the advantages I was given in terms of the interest people would have in regards to whether or not the writing genes were passed on to me, it was expected that I would publish young. The real test was whether or not I would last. The downside to the attention I received for my early works was that the critics would tend to come after me with forks and knives as if it were their duty, a necessary act for the good of humanity to show Mailer’s kid ain’t getting a free ride. In many ways the start of my literary career was the polar opposite of my father’s. I must say that those first few hard knocks thickened my skin and enabled me to appreciate even more the positive reviews from the kind of reviewers that understand what I am going for in my work, and so give a fair assessment as to how successful I was in pulling it off.”





Along with writing, you seem to have found a home in live theater. You received a BA in theater and you co-founded Back House Productions with a few fellow grad students. How has theater changed in your eyes since you first began?


“I wouldn’t say theater has changed drastically in the twenty years I have been doing it professionally except in a few respects. Ticket prices have gone up quite a bit, Broadway has taken a habit to recycling movies instead of gambling on brand new shows, and you need a star from television or film to get a large Off-Broadway production financed. That did not used to be the case. In The Heights, the most successful show Back House developed was in many ways an anomaly, having very few recognizable names. It was a case of Lin Manuel Miranda being so talented and writing such powerful songs, that some smart Broadway producers took a gamble and ended up extremely happy men. As did we all.”



It was during your time at “High Times” that you took a hiatus from theater. Why the change?


“At the time Richard Stratton offered me the job as Executive Editor of High Times, I was twenty-five and living in LA auditioning for movies. I had had a piece come out in People Magazine and decided to head to LA to see what I could do with it. I actually got a manager quite quickly and was close on a number of parts, but my mother got sick with cancer again, and so I needed any way to get back to New York so I could be there to help take care of her and my father, who was getting old. Richard’s offer came as a godsend and quickly I found myself entrenched in an industry that I had only done some freelance journalism for. I had interned at a hipster magazine in the 90’s before this position. I took a quite a bit of guff for that, but ultimately learned the magazine world from top to bottom and am proud of the issues we put out in that volatile year of Bush’s reelection.”




What made you want to become involved in the protest movement at the Republican National Convention? Do you view yourself as being very political? If so, how would you describe your political views?


“I’ve always had the sense that the mission in life is to do everything in your power to try to leave this world a slightly better place than when you entered it. Perhaps it’s the 16th Cherokee Indian in me, I don’t know. But with that in mind, I believe that if you are lucky enough to have parents with the means and conviction to give you a great education, come from a tradition of taking a stand on the issues of the day, were born with a voice (for better or worse) that enables you to get issues and events going on in the world hi-lighted, then it is not a choice, but a responsibility to be politically active in some capacity. So, yes, I like to think you could say I am politically active. As for my views, I think that would take too long to get into here. On some issues I’m so far Left I’m Right, and on others so far Right I’m Left. Independent is the easy way to describe it.”



Your play “Crazy Eyes” has quite an interesting plot. Very much tied to events that had happened in the real world in 2001 around the events of 9/11.


“My hope is that Crazy Eyes captures the effects that living under such fear of terrorism (as we did most in New York in October of 2001, at the height of the Anthrax scare) has on the decisions we make that define our national character. It’s taken nearly ten years, but I do believe we are finally ready to look back on that time and get some cues as to how to handle the next one, if God forbid it should happen.”





How was it working with Israeli actress Meital Dohan in her one-woman show?



“Working with Meital is like working with a tornado, you are mesmerized by it until it sweeps you up and you realize you have no idea where you are going to land. She is so driven, so talented, so sexy, and so dangerous. In other words, she is an Israeli super star for a reason. "You can see her latest web series with Jon Heder called 'Woke Up Dead' on Crackle.com"



As a writer myself, I have always found it difficult to work with other writers on projects. But you shared writing duties with your father in “The Big Empty.” How was it to work with another writer? And not only another writer, but a family member?


“Again, to describe the privilege and sensation of working with my father is deeper than I can get into here, as I would need to write a full book about it to fully capture even the essence of the experience. But in terms of working with other writers, depending on the medium, I have always been open to the idea and have collaborated with one or two other writers over the years on various projects. However, I always prefer to write alone, as that is the most fulfilling journey for me as a writer today.”


What can we expect from “Buffalo” Mailer in the future? Theater? Directing? Acting?


“I’ve been shooting Wall Street 2 for the past month and will be doing that until November 19th. I play Robby, an Options trader and The main Character’s best friend, which is not hard because Shia Labouef is not only easily one of the best actors of his generation, but a truly stand up guy, as well. After that, I have seven screenplays in play at various stages and will be tending to them. The magazine industry is drying up faster than anyone can pour water on it, but if the opportunity to do any journalism before it is too late presents itself, I’ll be all over that. And of course, there is the novel I have been working on for ten years, waiting for my preparations to meet the opportunity that will enable me to take a year off and do nothing else but write it. Either that, or hopefully get lucky enough to find myself with the time.”



Thank you Mr. Mailer for your time and we hope to see more of your work in the future.


“Thank you. It’s been a pleasure answering your questions.”


Mr. Mailer will read at the Somerville News Writers Festival Nov 14, 2009 http://somervillenewswritersfestival.com

Set in Motion by Karen McKinnon

Set in Motion
Karen McKinnon
$14.00
The Wildflower Press
www.thewildflowerpress.com

REVIEW BY: Renee Schwiesow


Chance meetings are not always chance. Nor does time and distance sever the connection made during brief encounters that we may brush aside as trivial. For Karen McKinnon and Pastor Ian (Murdo) MacKenzie, even an absence that covered the span of forty-one years did not diminish the connection these two soul-others had together.

While in her twenties, Karen shared a mere forty minutes with Ian on a train ride from Edinburgh to Newcastle, Scotland. They held a forty-minute conversation that lived on for Karen and a pointed question Ian asked stuck with her: what is writing for? After Karen returned to the states where she planned on marrying her fiancé, Ian wrote to her. In the fifties women who were about to be married did not carry on as pen pals with other men. Karen did not write Ian back. But she never forgot him and with the understanding of her second husband, set out to find Ian on a trip to Scotland. She would find him on that trip, through another chance encounter with an Elder at St. Giles Cathedral, but it would be little over a year before the two actually met again on a second trip Karen and her husband took to Scotland. During the interim, their relationship blossomed through letters.

Karen’s memoir shared with us through journal entries, poetry, and letters relates love through Spirit in a way far too many of us discount. Not only are we allowed into the inner circle of the relation between Karen and Ian; but also we are drawn into the understanding, the openness, the love that is shared between Karen and her husband, Richard, and Ian and his wife of 40 years, Elizabeth. Ian and Karen write of their connection, which Karen addresses in this way:

“I am not trying to reclaim what never was; just participate in what is, here and now. This is all we’ve got.”

And, Karen and Ian’s exchanges poignantly offer that the present is a gift and true connection, is something not to be taken lightly or for granted.

Karen McKinnon is a poet. And the introduction offered by Robert Creeley in her last book of poetry, “Coming True,” is well deserved. The poems she offers in “Set in Motion,” were all shared over the years with Ian. He often requested that she send more, never tired of her work. In reading “On an Island,” I realized that I secluded myself on a metaphorical island in the reading of “Set in Motion.” I sat curled in my green, corduroy wingback chair and the water of the words shared between Karen and Ian, the emotion of her poetry flowed around me:


A tapestry of words
threaded into
my narrowed awareness
tugs my sleeve
unravels

The hibiscus blooms
with impertinence
blushes
fuschia, orange, pink
bows before us
making tunes
under its breath like every-
thing else that breathes

I finished the book with a sigh, knew that I was unraveled and was happy to have been undone by the threading of Karen’s tapestry of words.

An Adventure of Economy in Gringo Guadalupe, poems by Kevin Gallagher: Article by Michael T. Steffen

An Adventure of Economy in Gringo Guadalupe,
poems by Kevin Gallagher

article by Michael T. Steffen



A nifty, true to the term “pocket” book (from the French “livre de poche”), a 7”x 4” paperback distributed by Ibbetson Street Press, Kevin Gallagher’s Gringo Guadalupe is handily organized into two sections that immediately solicit comparison.

The first section, consisting of eleven formal poems, seven sonnets and four villanelles, evokes the tradition of the sonnet sequence that recounts a narrative. Gallagher’s story in this first sequence of poems combines contemporary secular elements with traditional mystical ones. It is of a North American who moves his family (his wife…daughter…) to Mexico, to Guadalupe, to take a job in a factory. Set in lyrics, the narrative is cursory, suggestive, leaving us to make connections and put the story together. From the first line of the book we gather the narrator’s reasons for pulling up and moving across the border have somewhat to do with our current economic
discouragements.

Everything is too expensive to be poor.

We have heard of those with five-digit bank accounts who go to South America to live like millionaires, though it’s not easy from Gallagher’s narrative to guess that we are just so well off in Gringo Guadalupe. One curiously infers a geographical fiction here telling of the hard times we face, cutting back to more modest standards, such as, ironically, the

…one town where the employees live.
It has a school where teachers speak English.
The shopping mall is fully equipped with
TV’s and burgers—whatever you wish.
(“At the Company Orientation…, p. 6)

Yet the geographical setting also proves pivotal to the unexpected turn of events in the narrative which deepens Gallagher’s boldly spiritual reckoning, on the bridge of public language in poetry, from a deeply private experience and revelation. We won’t give the details of the story away. I’ll venture to say I appreciated Kevin Gallagher’s idea that imaginative possibilities have a different intensity and grandeur when set among a people with different beliefs and values than ours.
Back to the comparison between the two sections of the book: If the opening sequence lends itself to our reading comprehension through clarity of language and buoyancy of temperament, the second part, “Frescoes,” consisting of twenty untitled sections, reads as shorthand, symbolic-imagistic, around a less determined, more cryptic challenge to the poet’s meditation.
These “enigmas” share with the poems from Gallagher’s first section a knack for juxtaposing older and newer language and imagery, as Anastasios Kozaitis has pointed out, referring to an idea from Pound and Eliot, of shaping poetic language “in perpetual pursuit to make it new.”
Gringo Guadalupe offers the reader a unique clarity of contrasts in ways to approach sustained poetic forms, while both sections remain cordial in their selective concision. We do not get the sense that Gallagher is rambling on and on.
True to its theme, economical stylistically as well as physically, this little book, aptly designed by Steven Glines at ISCS Press, in our age of pocket communication gadgets, makes for a handy companion to take along with us and read conveniently here and there wherever we have a few minutes to direct our attention to all that is urgent and persistent with us.


Gringo Guadalupe by Kevin Gallagher
is available for $10
from Ibbetson Street Press
25 School Street
Somerville MA 02143

Susan Tepper, Doug Holder, Gloria Mindock, Pam Laskin, Martin Golan to read in NYC at KGB BAR OCT 9,2009 7PM

CERVENA BARVA PRESS READING
KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street New York City, NY
October 09, 2009
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm


Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbetson St. Press. His poetry and prose have appeared in The Boston Globe, Rattle, Cafe Review, The New Renaissance, Home Planet News, Boog City, Poetry Bay, Word Riot and many others. He holds an M.A. in Literature from Harvard University, and recently released: “From the Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers.”

Pamela L. Laskin is a lecturer in the English Department at The City College, as well as director of The Poetry Outreach Center. She is a published author of five picture books and four volumes of poetry, most recently, SECRETS OF SHEETS (Plain View Press) and GHOSTS, GOBLINS, GODS AND GEODES. (World Audience Press.) LIFE ON THE MOON: MY BEST FRIEND’S SECRETS, a textbook of teen fiction that she edited, will be published in the fall.

Susan Tepper’s collection DEER & Other Stories has just been published by Wilderness House Press. A five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she’s had fiction and poetry in American Letters & Commentary, Green Mountains Review, Salt Hill, New Millennium Writings, Crannog and elsewhere. Cervena Barva Press published her chapbook Blue Edge (2006). Susan is assistant editor of Istanbul Literary Review. www.susantepper.com

Martin Golan’s latest book is Where Things Are When You Lose Them, a collection of stories. It follows his novel, My Wife’s Last Lover, which was No. 1 on Amazon’s best-seller list for Montclair for over a year. You can read about him at http://martingolan.com

HOST: Gloria Mindock is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Blood Soaked Dresses (Ibbetson Street, 2007), Nothing Divine Here (U Soku Stampa, Montenegro, 2009), and At the Heaven’s Gates, (Cogito Press, Romania, 2009). She is editor of Cervena Barva Press, and the Istanbul Literary Review. Her work has been widely published in the US and abroad.

Interview with Fiction Writer Susan Tepper: Author of “Deer and Other Stories”

Interview with Fiction Writer Susan Tepper: Author of “Deer and Other Stories”

Susan Tepper has been described as a “dear” person by many people I have talked with. She also likes to use “Deer” and other animals in her work. Tepper is the author of the newly released “Deer and Other Stories” (Wilderness House Press). Tepper has a book of poetry published by the Cervana Barva Press “Blue Edge,” she has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes, and her writings have appeared in such journals as: Salt Hill, American Letters& Commentary, Ibbetson Street and others. She has worn many hats; a hat of the actor, singer, TV producer, etc… I talked with her on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.


Doug Holder: Susan in an interview you said that your early influences were playwright Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams. What do you bring to your own writing from these men?

Susan Tepper: I think playwrights are all about dialogue. I think playwrights capture how people speak naturally. I love to write dialogue. I love the dialogue of Pinter and Mamet for instance.


DH: So you write down snippets of conversations that you overhear in cafes for instance?

ST: No. I never write down anything. I write spontaneously. I think my years of acting on the stage, makes me multi-dimensional as a writer. I write a lot about male protagonists, Gay guys, and straight guys. I think I am trying to struggle to solve the enigma of men. They are very confusing! I just write whatever comes into my mind, in the end.

DH: You have described "loss" as one of the main themes of your writing. Did life events spur you on to explore this theme?

ST: It is interesting. I was teaching last night in Boston at Grub St., and I told my students that I started a story that read, “It should have been the start of a perfect morning on one of the worst days in my life." Something was happening that was terrible in my life, so my story began that way. But what happened was the story took on a life of its own, and became a very black story in a funny way. I was also laughing over my computer about this story on a very, very dramatic day in my life. Writing kept me going at this time in my life. I wrote two novels over a period of ten years where there was nothing but family crisis.

DH: What can an actor bring to writing? What can a writer bring to acting?

ST: Personally I don't know anyone who has gone to writing to acting. I know a lot of actors who are writing. I think what happens with acting is you are using other people's words. There is a time when you get tired of the New York acting thing. It is a very hard life. As you get older you start getting tired of doing auditions. You don't want to go on tour, etc...

DH: In your new collection "Deer..." a deer rears its pretty head in every story. What is it about these animals that compelled you to make it a focal point in each story?

ST: I didn't know I was doing it. These are stories that I have written over the past twelve years. I think deer are very beautiful and gentle creatures. There is so much controversy around them. People are shooting them, electrocuting them...so when I see deer hit by a car I feel pained. So it is sort of a mystical thing. Over the course of time when I wrote my stories the deer would appear as a live deer, or a plastic lawn deer, or a wire deer. The Deer… they just kept on coming! When I put this collection together I realized it was a common theme. The deer is a mirror image for the human being. We, like the deer can be beautiful, fearful and dangerous.

DH: You write a lot about estrangement in relationships. Is the deer's visage a sort of wakeup call to couples who are blind about the machinations of their relationships?

ST: I don't really analyze the work. I write the story, either it works or it doesn't. I think the deer is just some mystical force that keeps coming across for me.

DH: Do you know another writer who uses animals like you do in their work?

ST: I personally don't, but I am sure people have. I was a Method actor. We used to do animal exercises to work on certain characters. I remember hearing that Marlin Brando aped an ape, when he was working on "Streetcar Named Desire." When I was in "Cat on the Hot Tin Roof," I worked on the cat. I would crawl on the stage. It has worked for me as an actor, maybe that's how it worked its way into my writing.

DH: How is the Small Press valuable for the writer? How has it been valuable for you?

ST: The Small Press is so huge for the literary writer. Commercial presses are in it to make money, and they purchase books on the basis of what sells. And it is usually not a great work of literature because our culture is moving away from that. People have to publish in the Small Press. The literary community depends on the Small Press to keep their work out there.

DH:Is there a future for the physical book?

ST: I hope so. I like the idea of holding a book and turning the pages. People like to hold and look at the cover. I can't imagine reading a book on the computer--it doesn't appeal to me at all.

I’m Just A Gigolo: Ronan Noone’s New Play: Little Black Dress

I’m Just A Gigolo: Ronan Noone’s New Play: Little Black Dress

Directed by Ari Edelson

Boston Playwright’s Theatre

Oct 1 to 25

http://www.bostonplaywrights.org

Review by Doug Holder

Every now and then I make my way back to my old stomping grounds of Boston University to review a play at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. I attended Boston University from 1973 to 1975, and I am always surprised how much it has expanded and changed. On this evening I was to review Ronan Noone’s new play “Little Black Dress,” for The Somerville News. After shaking hands with Kate Snodgrass, the Artistic Director of the Theatre, my wife and I took our seats. The stage was already set with two actors portraying a scene of silent, bored domesticity in a sort of white trash abode.

I’ve heard a lot about Noone’s work. My brother Donald Holder, a Tony Award- winning lighting designer, and his wife Evan Yionoulis a professor and Director at Yale Drama, always like to talk shop, so I keep my ear alert for interesting fodder from the stage as well as the page. I have heard a lot about the playwright Noone, a 39-year-old young lion of the theatre.

The play concerns a couple of adolescents in a startup Gigolo business that serves a client base of long-in-the-tooth, frustrated housewives. Alex Pollack, along with Karl Baker Olson play the nascent Gigolos. Pollack’s portrayal of this reluctant, sorry and hurting sex worker is beautifully conceived. Marianna Bassham plays a self-deluded, long-suffering wife to a three sheets to the wind husband and mother of one of these naughty boys.

Throughout the play Henry David Thoreau’s oft used quote “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation” is liberally evoked. I don’t think the desperation here is quiet, with the father (played by veteran stage actor Jeremiah Kissel) an Adonis of spontaneous combustion, and the mother caught up in an all-encompassing fantasy world of Sinatra, Grace Kelly, Rock Hudson, and ah yes, romance. Every one of these characters are in search of, or in mourning for an identity.

Now the actor Jeremiah Kissel is a contemporary of mine, and I have seen him play characters in a walk-up, cramped theatre (boy did I love the old Lyric Stage!) on Beacon Hill, to many other venues over time. I have always been impressed with his range. He can play a working-class lout as in this play, or a dandy in a drawing room with an upturned snout. Man, this cat can act!

Again Alex Pollack is a young actor to watch. His role as a sexually conflicted, video gaming freak, and reluctant American Gigolo, is tragic and hilarious. Amy, the mother, played by Marianna Bassham, is wonderfully done, with a mixture of camp, vamp, and tragedy. My wife, who I drag along to many of these events, left with her two thumbs—up. Folks- you would be well served to see this black comedy—it will leave you unsure whether to laugh or cry.

Don Winter's Last Book of Poetry?! A Review of Saturday Night Desperate by Todd Moore.

(Don Winter Center)





Don Winter told me this is his last book of poetry and it has been reviewed by small press icon Todd Moore, so I decided to publish this insightful review in addition to Irene Koronas'. Hope you enjoy, and I hope this isn't really Don Winter's last book!



SATURDAY NIGHT DESPERATE, DON WINTER, AND THE BLACK MITTEN OF POETRY

Todd Moore

I remember getting hit once with a baseball bat right in the middle of the back and the force of that blow spun me around toward a girl who was laughing. Sometimes a book will have that same effect on me. Reading Tom McGrath’s LETTER TO AN IMAGINARY FRIEND was like that. It was years ago. I was sitting in a shot and beer joint, some back booth, eating a burger with the blood and grease pouring out on my plate, and the beer tasted good and cold and I read that first page of LETTER and was hooked on McGrath. For me, reading poetry is personal and visceral, up close, in your face, mano a mano, like a fist in the eye.

Don Winter’s poetry hits me like that. I didn’t know much about his work until I read NO WAY OUT BUT IN, Working Stiff Press, 2008. The format itself is nothing to speak of. Maybe twenty pages or so, eight and a half is by eleven, the print font typewriter graphics, the cover a color snapshot of I assume his mother and father sitting on a sofa with Winter in the middle. She has her head cushioned affectionately on his shoulder. The chapbook is side stapled and then duct taped over. Something about the unpretentious way it was put together made me like it immediately. I liked it because it was a kind of fuck you way of saying I’m a little beaten up but I am still standing. I reviewed that chapbook the same day I got it because I had to. There are some books and that just seem to reach over, grab you by the shirt front, and there is nothing you can do but read them.

The same thing happened to me when I grabbed SATURDAY NIGHT DESPERATE out of the mailbox. The second I ripped the envelope open I knew I had to read it. I not only knew I had to read it, but I also had to start writing about it even while I was reading because I know Don Winter’s poetry and it’s the kind of stuff I go for. The same thing happens whenever I read a new Gary Goude poem or a new Ben Smith poem or a new John Yamrus poem or a new Ron Androla poem or a new Mark Weber poem or a new Milner Place poem. What I know more than anything else is that this is going to be a poem that is essential, vital, real and when I come away from reading it, it will be like walking out of a really good movie that I hated to see come to an end.

SATURDAY NIGHT DESPERATE , Working Stiff Press, 2009, is a working man’s selected, gathering the best of Don Winter from 1999-2009. It’s not hardcover, it’s not even glossy paperback. Instead, this is folded and stapled and stark black and white, definitely nailgun noir, bar whiskey jagged.

Roofing

Mornings we ripped
shingles. When air temp topped
body temp we got buzzed.
We sat and smoked.

“I’d get monkeys
to do your jobs
if I could teach them not to shit
on the roof,” boss yelled.

We laughed like struck
match sticks. Down in the street
sheets just hung there on the line
like movie screens.


Winter understands the down and out world of the working man. “In Niles, Michigan, the working class town where I grew up, you were educated (euphemism for ‘socially managed’) for docility: conformity to the rules, obedience to authority, and receptivity to rote learning.” From Press of the Real: Poetry of the Working Class. Author’s Introduction.

Dressing Burgers at Wanda’s Grill

During his 23 years here,
on each one
he curls ketchup
into a mouth,
places two pickles
for eyes, two lines
of mustard for eyebrows.
The onion bits,
he says,
are pimples.

We watch him
leave alone after
work, come in the same
time each morning,
take his break
by himself, always the same
station blaring.

We watch him
finish off
each face with a top hat, mash
the condiments together,
bury each one
in a thin, wax box.
All those little white caskets
on the greasy steel rack.


As far as the academic world is concerned, the low life world of work and sweat and angst and going without and living with those impossible power ball dreams and getting laid off and getting fucked up and going out from a heart attack, cancer, or stroke should have no room for poetry in it. After all, isn’t poetry the private reserve for the MFA elite? The university professors? What about the poetry of Charles Bukowski? What about the poetry of Kell Robertson? What about the poetry of Fred Voss? What about the poetry of John Yamrus? What about the poetry of Gary Goude? What about the poetry of Mark Weber? What about the poetry of John Macker? What about the poetry of Ron Androla? What about the poetry of Gerald Locklin? What about the poetry of Tony Moffeit? What about the poetry of Raindog Armstrong? I wouldn’t trade one line of any of their work for all the academic poetry written in the last thirty years.

Breaking Down

I bought that car for $50.

To open the door
you had to pound
just below the handle.

When you turned a corner
the dash lights flickered
like a busted marquee.

The rolling noise
that charmed Vera
was a can of Budweiser
under her seat.

Night we split up,
she held my erection
& looked out the window
like someone
with a hand on a doorknob
stopping to say one last thing
before goodbye.


On the inside of the back cover there are these words:

From 1999-2009 Don Winters’ poems appeared in most small press (and many academic press) journals. He is off to discover a new path.

I could be very wrong and totally off base, but my take here is this book is Don Winter’s path, past present and future and he would be betraying himself along with Tom McGrath and Charles Bukowski and Gary Goude and John Yamrus and everyone else who put his own blood on the line for the line if he strayed from it. In his introduction, Winter tells a story about McGrath dying in a single room wearing a black mitten on a hand that he could not keep warm after it had received surgery. In some larger more important way, once you start writing poetry you put on that black mitten and you can never take it off.

Todd Moore

Doug Holder to teach: Residencies at the Asylum: Poets at McLean Hospital / Newton Community Education / Starting Jan 12, 2010

To register for "...Poets at McLean Hospital" contact:

Newton Community Education http://newtoncommunityed.org

360 Lowell Ave
Newton, MA 02460-1831
(617) 559-6999



McLean Hospital is known as a top shelf psychiatric hospital with Harvard faculty psychiatrists, groundbreaking research, etc... But it also has been a residency of sorts for poets such as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton. Poet Doug Holder worked at McLean Hospital for 27 years and ran poetry groups for patients for over a decade. He has interviewed the social worker for Plath and Sexton as well as the manager of Anne Sexton's rock band, he wrote an introduction to Lowell's classic poem about the hospital "Waking In the Blue" for Robert Pinsky's anthology "America's Favorite Poems", he was interviewed by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam for material for his controversial book "Gracefully Insane" and has talked to many others who provided a trove of anecdotes about these renowned and tragic poets. In this course we will cover McLean Hospital as a muse for their poetry, and the experience of these poets in the "Asylum."



Newton Community Education newtoncommunityed.org

360 Lowell Ave
Newton, MA 02460-1831
(617) 559-6999

Reviews of Don Winter's "Saturday Night Desperate" and Ed Galing's "Burlesque"

( Don Winter)



( Ed Galing)


Saturday Night Desperate
A retrospective 1999-2009
Don Winter
Working Stiff Press
dansheridanwsp@yahoo.com

Winter is like a portrait painter. Unlike Edouard Vuillard or even Picasso, in which the light tends to be diffused, Winter, like Rembrandt, who touches the darkness with a brilliant orange light. Rembrandt’s characters are the ordinary workers of their day captured in light and focused on, as their background fades in subdued color and form.

Fishing Near Dark

The wind stiffens between my teeth.
I watch old men lean
into it, cast their lines
out of the shadows.
All afternoon
we fished, caught nothing.
I should turn back
to the cabin. But he breathes
below the surface.
I change bait and I cast.
If I could I’d pull
the water over my head.
Beneath the choking air
I’d wait, know everything that falls
becomes my food at last.

The poets’ pen misses nothing in the experiences of his working class people and his insights reveal the extra-ordinary

“a man slips
into his seat
with a sigh
like an accordion
folding into its case”

Irene Koronas
Submissions Editor
Ibbetson Street Press


burlesque
ed galing
iniquity press/vendetta books
isbn: 1-877968-33-1
2005 4.00

Ed Galing presents a time almost all of us have never heard of, or seen or been privy to, yet, his poems expose us to the bump and grind; strippers and comedians trying to entertain an audience of visually sex starved men. All this comes across in the poems. The reader will enjoy the show and will get acquainted with some of the characters behind the scenes. the poems look at life as it once was, naïve, compared to today.

“puttin the powder
on his scraggly
face

he looked at me
sadly and said

kid, whatever
you do,

don’t go into
burlesque”

Although the verse is brief in presentation, we the reader will come to understand what it means to reveal something never seen in public and we will dance with excitement.

“its only the chorus
girls, mostly,

who will go as far
as your money does.”

Irene Koronas
Submissions Editor
Ibbetson Street Press

Scarab-- the first literary magazine for the iPhone

PRESS RELEASE...

Hey folks, another medium for poetry... a brave new world:



Scarab, the first literary magazine for the iPhone, now available in the AppStore
Scarab, the only literary magazine for the iPhone, is taking poetry out of dusty journals andputting it into people’s pockets. Featuring well known poets like Tony Hoagland and Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Simic, Scarab is the first application where writers read their work to you.

Scarab represents the next step in literary magazines. The 2006 study Poetry in America,released by the Poetry Foundation, revealed that while the majority of Americans enjoyed poetry, less that 20% read literary magazines. Print journals are out of touch with their audience,of which about half reported listening to poetry as their main interaction with the art. By publishing through an iPhone application, Scarab offers a way for writers and readers to reconnect.

Scarab combines the intimacy of reading with the thrill of being read to by your favorite author.Taking full advantage of the iPhone’s capablilites, Scarab plays a recording of a poem, essay, or short story as the reader scrolls along with the text. Beta-testers found the experience to be an,“Ingenious concept that brought the poems to life.”

Each edition of Scarab consists of 11 works of poetry or prose, and an interview with a respected author. The content of the first issue is even more stunning than the use of the new medium.Scarab offers work by former Poet Laureate Charles Simic, National Book Critics Award Finalist,Tony Hoagland, David Rivard—recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship—and Chase Twichell,winner of the Hugh Ogden Prize for Poetry. There is also work by exciting new writers MRB,Chelko, Hannah Gamble, and David Blair.

The application is available through iTunes for $0.99 in the US, and makes use of the iPhone 3.0SDK’s new “in app purchasing”. The editions of Scarab are purchased and downloaded directly in the application to your iPhone or iPod Touch for $2.99 or a similar price worldwide.

About the Company Scarab is published by Old Brick Press, LLC, a company founded by former College of William and Mary roommates Ian Terrell and Brian Wilkins. Believing that exposure to the arts is vital to one’s quality of life, they work to take the best in contemporary poetry and prose available to the public. Because they want to support good writers as well as good writing, 20% of the purchase price for each issue of Scarab goes directly to the artists involved.

Review of TWINE by Martha Boss

Review of TWINE by Martha Boss, March Hare Press, 200 Norfolk Street, Cambridge, MA 02139, 2009, 35 pages

By Barbara Bialick

Martha Boss, the author of this chapbook, declined to print a bio. No problem; she’s been a locally-loved poet for years and the lucky ones have copies of her previous chapbooks, individually hand-typed on a manual typewriter, with original drawings. Indeed, she penciled a sepia roll of twine to be printed for the cover, with the poems presented in typed form. There’s even a length of light brown twine wrapped around the spine and middle.

In the entry poem, “this twine” she notes: ”these beads on a string/this twisted existence of mine/this dna/encoded stranded string of me…in this earth…/in that sphere we share/once entwined, and then/undone,/still the same twine we wear/ & now redo in verse” Her poems are wry, sardonic, and yet beautiful streams that demand you to read the whole poem, one poem after the other, till the end of the book…

Contemplating the every day in light of the cosmos, she writes in “same idea”:
“there are some stars that/take years to burn out./these are thoughts it seems…some days it seems a dream/can only be realized in another dream/this must be what the earth is thinking.”

Or check “how do we know”: “how do we know/the accumulated hurt of millions/when daisies are picked/when trees are cut/…wasn’t it sad/when the machine broke/when houses foreclosed/when the air can’t breathe/when men sent to war can’t wait/to kill the enemy/when they come home & if they do/did you hear they sometimes shoot/themselves…”

Which leads us to “people use the word ‘heaven’ a lot” She wonders isn’t there really a heaven: “isn’t there a star over there with a/forest with nibbling deer & people/with fires & songs & pets to caress/and cross-stitch samplers that say/god bless our home?”

I could and will keep pulling quotes, but I say just read the book. As the author concludes about her craft in “there’s no end to a poem”: “it’s growing/showing up somewhere./it seems to end at the desk/& later pops up in the living room/…then it wakes up a good sleep/like an infant’s demand feeding/you feel like killing it./this poem/that cord/you can’t cut/…take it out for a walk./throw it in one of those trash bins/that recycle./it doesn’t care./it’s even ok/with being a bottle label.” She’s still hoping there really is a heaven we ourselves recycle to…

9-27-2009

CHRIS CASTELLANI: FEEDS HUNGRY WRITERS WITH GRUB STREET

CHRIS CASTELLANI: FEEDS HUNGRY WRITERS WITH GRUB STREET
By Doug Holder

It is one thing to tell The Somerville News what a wonderful thing the Somerville News Writers Festival is, it is quite another to put your money where your mouth is. Every year Grub St., along with Porter Square Books and others sponsor the festival founded by Tim Gager and yours truly in 2003.

I recently met with Grub St. head Christopher Castellani at the Diesel Café in Davis Square, Somerville. Castellani frequents the café along with a slew of other writers. One the day of our interview Castellani pointed out Boston Herald sports reporter Steve Buckley. Never at a loss to press the flesh I introduced myself to Buckley and he told me he has a long Somerville lineage as well as a new book out: “Wicked Good Year: How the Red Sox, Patriots, and Celtics Turned the Hub of the Universe into the Capital of Sports.” Castellani told me Buckley was regular at this bustling hub of java and laptops.

Castellani is not only the director of Grub Street, but he is an accomplished author himself. He has published two novels, most recently: “The Saint of Lost Things.” He has long sunned himself in the light of the Academy—earning a M.A. at Tufts and an MFA at Boston University. After Boston University, Castellani, a tall, balding man in his late 30’s, told me he taught at the much lauded Grub St. (now located in Boston) after graduating from B.U.

Grub St. was founded in Brookline, Mass. by Eve Bridburg in 1997. It had a stint in Somerville. It was originally in Bridburg’s home in the “Ville (I remember interviewing her amidst the din of her crying newborn), and later moved to a storefront in Union Square, Somerville. Castellani said: “Somerville was a great place for Grub. You can’t throw a rock without hitting a writer.”

Castellani told me that the philosophy of the school is to be supportive of the writer but provide him or her with rigorous instruction. There are classes for the dabbler with no critical feedback, but he tells his students to be prepared for critical comments in the workshops. The workshops are on “university level” according to the website, and are full of constructive criticism by the students and teachers.

Grub St. is not only valuable for its teaching, but also for its outlets for networking. They hold many literary events and conferences, where the nascent writer can make important contacts. Castellani, is no stranger to giving recommendations to worthy students so they can enter graduate writing programs.

I asked Castellani why he is a supporter of The Somerville News Writers Festival. He said: “It is a great way to connect with other writers and readers. In fact many of the readers over the last seven years like former Somerville resident Steve Almond have taught at Grub St. Grub St will have a table at the Book Fair that will take place at the Arts Armory on Highland Ave, Somerville from 11:30AM to 4PM before the main event at 7PM. All happenings will take place on Nov. 14, 2009.

After our interview Castellani and I shared our table for awhile, he on his laptop, me, with a pen and a schoolboy’s notebook, doing what we like best…writing.

For more information about Grub St. go to http://www.grubstreet.org
For more information about the Somerville News Writers Festival go to: http://somervillenewswritersfestival.com

Ibbetson 26 due out in late October!

IBBETSON 26












Poetry from: Elizabeth Swados, Simon Perchik, Zvi Sesling, Kim Triedman, AD Winans, and more. Exclusive interview with poet Fred Marchant and great art work from Bridget Galway! $8 Magazine will be out in late October reserve your copy send check or cash to Ibbetson Street Press 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143






*****Front and Back Cover by Somerville, Mass. artist Bridget Galway

The Gates Unbarred: A History of University Extension at Harvard 1910-2009. Michael Shinagel

The Gates Unbarred: A History of University Extension at Harvard 1910-2009. Michael Shinagel (Harvard University Press)
$15

Review by Doug Holder


" At the stroke of eight every lecture evening notebooks were spread and until nine o’clock not a glance wandered to the clock nor was there any sign of wavering interest. The students were all voluntary seekers of knowledge who elected philosophy as an aid in constructive thinking. Young and old, black and white, artisans and teachers, men and women--who had questioned the meaning of life, and the universe, were eager to compare their thoughts with the questioners of all time. It was an audience to challenge any professor's attention and respect...” (Quote taken from “The Gates Unbarred…” Boston Evening Transcript June 15, 1910)

Although this quote is almost 100 years old, it could still apply today. I remember studying for my Master's degree at the Extension School during the mid 90's. I was in my late 30's, working 40 hours a week at McLean Hospital while attending classes several nights a week. Was it a difficult course of study? Yes. But I loved it. The teachers were first rate, I feel in love with the winding, tome- filled stacks at the Widener Library, but most importantly I gained more confidence as a writer-- and I would like to think I graduated as a better, more complete person.

Michael Shinagel, the present Dean of the Extension School has written a thorough and scholarly, (but not inaccessible) history of the said school titled: "The Gates Unbarred: A History of University Extension at Harvard 1910-2009." I took a course on the novel with Dr. Shinagel. I remember coming into his office with a convoluted proposal for a paper on Defoe’s "Robinson Crusoe" In his tactful, avuncular manner, he advised me (in so many words) to trash it and start fresh. He told me that it would be a rewarding challenge for me, this nascent scholar. I was doubtful, but in the end the man was right on the money. And this could be said about the development of the school itself, a rewarding challenge.

The University Extension was created in 1910 by A. Lawrence Lowell, with the idea to provide the community access to Harvard, and give them the opportunity to earn degrees. The Extension started small with courses mainly offered to teachers. But over the years,
and many battles, it expanded, offering TV courses to the Navy's Polaris submarine fleet, and by the 21st Century it offered advanced degrees to the general public. Because of the quality of the Harvard faculty, and the faculties of Boston University, Tufts and other area institutions, Harvard Extension has raised the status of "Evening Schools" nationwide; schools that were often afterthoughts of the Academy.

On a personal note I was fascinated to read that a Professor Bertocci, my old undergraduate philosophy teacher from Boston University, offered the first Extension radio course on WBMS FM titled: “Introductory Psychology.” He was one of the more popular professors at the Extension, and had a loyal and large following.

Throughout this century under Shinagel, the Extension offers a number of advanced degrees in management, journalism, creative writing, biotechnology, and other disciplines. The Master's in Journalism is of interest to this community journalist. Shinagel writes:

" upon completion of several courses, candidates put their skills to the test by completing internships at newspaper or magazine offices. In many cases the students work has been rewarded by appearing in print in local newspapers."

These days the Extension degree is a sought after sheepskin. And buyer beware, this is no diploma mill, it is a rigorous course of study, as Shinagel puts it:

" ... the high academic standards...were never compromised for earning a degree. Even though many more degrees are awarded now, it is important to bear in mind that the nearly 12,500 graduates to date represent a minute percentage of the 500,000 students who have taken classes...."many are called, but few are chosen."

This book is a fairly exhaustive study. It will definitely be of interest to folks who have been involved with the Extension School. But I think the casual reader can glean a great deal about the evolution of education in general, as well as the “Evening School." And hey, after reading the book, they may make haste to matriculate.