Review: Captive in the Here by Gary Metras

Review: Captive in the Here by Gary Metras ( Cervena Barva Press)
--reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos




If only, Gary Metras seems to ask in the poems of his latest collection Captive in the Here, if only we could stand outside of time and fully engage with the experience of each moment we inhabit. There is so much beauty in the world, so many beautiful moments. But, we are humans, after all, we have memories, we have histories, we are aware of time and our obligations, and we leave tracks we can’t escape or ignore.


The titles of the three sections of this book, “History as Good as Fictions,” “Weather and Such Deceptions,” and “The Real World, As They Say,” imply the difficulty of accepting life as we find it, and the poems contained in each bear out this qualification. The collection’s first poem, “Confrontation with What I Have to Do,” establishes the poet’s mission and dilemma: to be both observer and victim of time. “The wall clock,” Metras writes, “escorts without kindness, / nor hatred; it has its own life / without us.” Our awareness of time imprisons us, not only in the past we can’t escape because it is part of us, but also in a future full of worries we can’t help but be aware of: “my father’s death approaches, my wife’s cancer blossoming years from now, / . . . A daughter . . . new to mortgage/ and waiting for time to bring a holiday/ so she can finish painting a spare room.” But though the poet cannot overcome the troublesome backward-and-forward relationship with time, at least he is capable of recording this awareness in his “cadences,” his poetry, and though he unable to protect “those I love,” he can at least preserve them in a poem: “captive in the here, the now.”


If we are the victims of time, what are we to value? In “The Tree House,” Metras depicts a boy mastering skills that enable him to build something permanent, a tree house that takes shape in his mind first. After he actually creates the tree house, his “new world/ . . . his hands smiled their cuts.” This value of work, especially physical work that confronts and transforms the natural of world, is also reflected in “The Hooded Men.” The workers the narrator observes “digging foundations in the snow/ . . . keep a schedule despite the season” and “earn the evening paper / and cup of whiskey-kissed coffee / in a cozy room each night.”


But is it enough to admire the work of creators? Metras suggests that the admiration of that which we don’t personally create ourselves, what we don’t generationally “capture in the here” on our own, has a diminishing value. The poem “Goshen Stone” captures the detailed care a father takes to build a stone wall, which he later shows to his son “when he thought he was old enough” to appreciate it; yet the father can only describe the structure in words, and when that son, years later, pauses with his own boy to admire the stone wall “your grandfather built,” he can only say “a few things about stones / as if his own soft hands knew what that meant.”


Is there the same kind of futility in a poet’s effort to preserve a moment in time for the reader? Is the act of creation of value only to the poet? “My Spider” begins, “I’ve invented a spider, / the green-backed spider.” The new spider, it turns out, was created by accident, “brushed . . . aside with the paint brush that left its back green.” There will be no future generations of new arachnids—it is the green spider of the poet’s moment.

And if not only accidental spiders, but also solidly built structures like the wall of “Goshen Stone” lose their value over time, what is the legacy of literature and its forms?
Metras dips into the past, parodying Eliot’s “Prufrock” as he laments the role of the teacher of literature in “Imagine Huck,” which envisions Twain’s young adventurer rafting down a modern polluted river: “I am no Huck Finn,/ was never meant to be/am a lone child scribbling this down . . . after years/ of kidnapping children and torturing them with . . . Homer, Shakespeare and Dickens,/ so they can keep the cycle afloat, if only in a dream.”


Yet it remains possible, Metras seems to suggest, for literature to help us transcend time, bringing depth of appreciation to the moments in which we are “captive.” It’s possible a poet, reflecting on old forms, or using them as a lens, can place that moment in a greater context. In “All the Futures,” there are echoes of Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” and that poet’s gyres of history and artistic forms, as the narrator, playing with his granddaughter thinks, “how one thing builds upon another, how the golden walls/ of Troy lasted a thousand years, as flesh/ fell.” And, while Yeats wonders if Leda absorbs Zeus’s “knowledge,” of the eventual fall of Troy during their violent interaction, Metras contemplates the “blue rubber egg filled with pebbles” his granddaughter hands him and wonders at “all the eggs she carries, all the futures inside her, waiting.” Metras uses the frame offered by the Yeats poem to preserve his experience with his granddaughter. Though grandfather and granddaughter are “captive in the Here,” as we all are, the poet offers an opportunity to contemplate the future as he reaching into the past and, re-figuring an old poem, guides the reader into a vital, new experience.

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Metras, finally, offers the reader a vision of the poet as a creator who transcends time by interpreting and preserving what might otherwise be only mundane experience. In the longest poem of the collection, “Thrust Reverser Actuator Access,” he records the experience of a jet flight from Cincinnati to Hartford; during his descent, the narrator’s attention is drawn to “small words printed white on blue metal,” words which the reader must take for granted are the words of the poem’s title. Metras understands that his purpose as a poet is to give this experience meaning: The words, as he sees them, “seem almost magical, almost un-human, unearthly, even/ words I could never use in conversation,/or anything else, except,/ perhaps, in a poem.”


And so, as with so many of the other poems in Captive in the Here, we join Metras in his contemplations, accepting him as our guide as he fills the time and space between Cincinnati and Hartford; we are resistless “captives” in the “here” these poems re-envision.

Gregory Wolos lives, writes, and runs in a small New England town. More than seventy of Gregory’s short stories have been published or are forthcoming in print and online journals such as Glimmer Train, The Georgia Review, The Florida Review, The Baltimore Review, The Pinch, Post Road, The Los Angeles Review, PANK, and Tahoma Literary Review

Mudanca: Poems by Kevin Cutrer

Kevin Cutrer

Mudanca

Poems by Kevin Cutrer

Dos Madres Press Inc.

Loveland, Ohio

www.dosmadres.com

ISBN: 978-1-948017-31-2

35 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Never underestimate the power of exuberance. Never, never underestimate the creative power of love’s exuberance. Kevin Cutrer’s new book Mudanca sings a melody of love like nothing I’ve heard in years. Can this be the return of courtly love? The poet’s words radiate authenticity as they reel through an emotional cross-cultural ether. Art, metrics, all of it fade into the distant background as Cutrer pulses out his evanescent, barely containable, joy.

Mispronunciations and other verbal missteps made by Cutrer’s persona in the opening poem, To the Woman for Whom He Is Learning Portuguese, become gentle love tokens as the poet woos and assures his lover that she is indeed his muse. Hilarity and amorous self-deprecation rule as the poem begins,

You must write about me. I’m your Moose!

O Moose, sing to me of the man who ordered pizza

by asking the waitress for a spanking, extra cheese.

The man who said, when introduced to your mother,

I am so pleased to meet you… Carrot.

Those are garlic bulbs that were my eyes.

The cheap dictionary turns roach faster

than you can say Gregor Samsa, scurries off,

and with it any hope of telling the barber not to short.

Cutrer, like all true lovers, considers separation from his lover anathema. His world also shrinks into the original garden, where he as Adam and his lover as Eve reign again as the center of the animate world. In the poem entitled Sepatos Cutrer laments the loneliness, even if temporary, which often plagues new-found love,

I can’t help feeling like some article

you didn’t need and didn’t pack,

like this pair of sneakers you abandoned

to the cold tiles of the bedroom floor.

At least they make one pair. I’m only one.

What will you wear on your bakery walk,

your morning quest for pao doce?

Will I have the appetite to breakfast alone?

I sit on the edge of our bed staring

at the blue canvas, the laces gray

with street dust, and my slouch deepens.

I touch the laces and say sapos,

my apprentice tongue transforming shoes

into toads, and off they hop…

With love comes magic. Cutrer, given a mango by his beloved, discovers its inherent enchantment. His lover as a child would race her sisters to the mango tree, then climb to its heights in an effort to win nature’s succulent prize. The poet succumbs to his muse

and imagines it in this charming way,

I see you perched on a branch

the marmosets fled in fright of you,

gloating as you hold your trophy aloft,

Stone-hearted tear larger than a heart,

And your sisters grunt their way toward you.

With a shining blade you trim off

whirligigs of mango peels

letting them drop…drop…your eyes falling

after them, past Eva, past Alba, landing

on roots that spill like the tresses of a witch’s

head of hair, root twining over root,

sprawled on the earth like petrified fire.

Perfect love songs say nothing. They simply tag an internal, searing need to available words that provide life-enhancing rhythms. Those rhythms can convey insuppressible joy or unendurable sadness. In his wonderfully written poem entitled Yes, Cutrer does both. He takes his reader from the rarified freedom of physical health through the flickering whispers of sedentary illness. Or from timelessness to a ticking clock. Here are a few of the poet’s more joyous lines,

Something in me said say yes,

say yes, and so I said yes, yes, let’s dance.

On the floor you giggled at what I called

my moves and kissed me for pity’s sake.

Can I see you again? Yes. Move in with me? Yes.

Yes to Brazil and the dilatory days.

Yes to Boston and the deciduous years.

Yes to anywhere and anywhen with you.

A lover often adores items associated with his beloved. Cutrer praises his Brazilian lady by lauding her birth county’s currency. Each detail seems in bas relief. Each color nourishes a new beginning. He marvels at the wonders provided to him in compensation for his simple teaching chores,

And like a stall in the ark each bill houses

a subject of the animal kingdom.

A macaw peers with piratical eye.

A jaguar drapes her arm across a branch.

Sea turtles soar in a blue bay, frayed

in the interchange from hand to hand,

folded three-fold upon itself and stuffed

into a man’s shirt pocket, showing through the white.

I earn my weekly menagerie

preaching the verb to be.

Mudanca, a Brazilian word for change and this collection’s title poem, chronicles love’s transformative powers. Cutrer conjures up grade-school embarrassments and subsequent long-standing fears. Typical stuff but, nevertheless, traumatic. An early attempt at dancing takes a disastrous turn. Even his school teacher shows distain. Ouch! But all of this is a setup to showcase love’s exhilarating intervention,

…You ask

if I like to dance. Something in me

says say yes, say yes. So, I say yes.

It is all happening now

all in one moment

my first disastrous dance

our last I cannot see

in whatever catastrophe

awaits us to part us

some other where in time

I try not dare not think

but how can I not when

I awake and wake you

kiss the dark spot

on your finger one

more time one more turn

in the dance we began

that evening in Somerville…

Yes, dear readers, there are still troubadours among us. Cutrer, with this short, lovely collection, confirms it.

A Review of Layla and the Lake By Marcia D. Ross

A Review of Layla and the Lake

By Marcia D. Ross

Pelekinesis Printing, Claremont CA. April 2019

Review by Tom Miller

This is a work of fiction. The lake does not exist except on these pages. Layla does not exist except on these pages. None the less they both are real. They are recognizable. This is because the author, Marcia D. Ross does an excellent job of creating place and person in her story Layla and the Lake. The lake, unnamed in the book, could be one of hundreds that exist in Maine not unlike those that one finds in New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, or Minnesota. It is a pleasant place to be as is the forest that surrounds it.

Layla is a thirty something single mother with two children - a 14 year old son who is pushing limits and beginning to try his wings and an eight or nine year old daughter who still needs her mother in her life. Layla is a poet and an editor for a publisher of classical and academic works whose current project is an analysis of Milton's Paradise Lost , scenes of which pop into Layla’s internal narrative throughout the book. Layla is also everyone who has ever stumbled, erred, made bad choices in life and punishes themselves with constant recrimination and self-doubt. Her self-view is jumbled as is her life. She is confident in her competence with her work but less so in relationships with others, her children, her former in-laws, her ex-husband, and her somewhat mysterious lover whom she meets at the lake.

Layla has brought her children to her former in-laws’ summer home at the lake so they can spend time together as a family, (which is no longer really a family) in anticipation of her ex-husband and his current wife’s arrival the following week. Layla will then depart to give family time to that particular portion of the family, after which the children will return to their mother in Boston. At least that’s the plan.

The Lake is the setting but also a main character in the story. It is peaceful, relaxing, welcoming, beautiful and most of all…away. But it is also challenging and while not threatening, none- the- less --it is to be respected as at times it can be unexpected and tumultuous, potentially dangerous. This is unlike Bobby, the man who lives alone across the lake and with whom Layla engages upon a journey of discovery. Bobby is kind, caring, and gentle but a man with secrets. Layla who constantly berates herself for her impulsive actions and unthinking decisions follows her normal behavior pattern as their relationship evolves.

Of course this adds another layer to Layla’s constant self-derision and her search for indicators in others’ behavior that validate her conviction that they have judged her and found her wanting, but are too polite to be overt in their assessment.

In this her first novel, Ross portrays both Layla and the lake with excellent depth. Her ability to describe both place and character immerses the reader in them. You are there. You experience the lake and its surroundings. You come to know Layla and root for her. The cast of characters are each introduced as one dimensional, but as Ross peals away their layers they prove to be far more complex and real. The tensions between Layla and the in-laws build and are in flux. The same is true in the relationship with Bobby. And the arrival of the ex-husband presents another set of tensions which are resolved, more or less, in an interesting way.

And Layla’s self-esteem? Well, therein lies part of Ross’ artwork. You need to read the book in order to find out how that progresses. Ross is an excellent story teller and the reader will find themselves engrossed.

Cid Corman Boston Small Press Archive

Cid Corman 

Just spoke to Mark Pawlak, the founder of the Cid Corman Boston Small Press Archive at U/MASS Boston...they are planning for a formal opening at the Healey Library in the fall. This is a great collection of Boston area small press editors', poets' and publishers' work over the years. Mark Pawlak said they are thinking of having a display of my videos of poets that I have interviewed at the Somerville Media Studios ...perhaps even digitizing them ... I have a lot of our magazine, books, some of my Somerville Times interviews in the collection. This is a great resource for all of Boston.....

Greatest Hits: twelve years of compost magazine. Edited by Kevin Gallagher and Margaret Bezucha

Greatest Hits: twelve years of compost magazine. Edited by Kevin Gallagher and Margaret Bezucha. Preface by Rosanna Warren.  (Zephyr Press 50 Kenwood St. Brookline, Ma. 02446)   http:// www.zephyrpress.org  $15.

 

  Some years ago, 23 to be exact, I remember Richard Wilhelm (my trusted arts/editor at Ibbetson Street), his wife Elisa, my wife Dianne and I, picking up the late Diana Der-Hovanessian (president of the New England Poetry Club) at her house in order to go to a COMPOST reading both Der-Hovanessian and I were participating in. We were contributors to the new issue of COMPOST, (that was based in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston) titled “The Hub of the Universe: Celebrating Boston.” Some of the cream of the crop of the Boston poetry scene were in this issue, such as: Robert Pinsky, Sam Cornish, Rosanna Warren, Joe De Roche, Fred Marchant, Jack Powers, Kevin Bowen, and Richard Moore, to name a few.

 

  In the early 90’s, in the “low rent mecca” of Jamaica Plain, Boston, a haven for many artists, musicians, etc… COMPOST magazine was founded. Perhaps the germ of the idea was born in the Brendan Behan Pub, a gathering place for the young bohemian crowd of the area. Kevin Gallagher and Margaret Bezucha, founders of COMPOST, wrote in their introduction: “This group of emerging artists saw the Boston (and national) area poetry scene as a lull. To us, the long standing clan of university- based magazines seemed to have an iron curtain that blocked out innovation and all our submissions.” So they did what any self-respecting poets would do--they started their own magazine. It was a unique magazine that placed poetry in the context of visual art, theatre and discussions of society at large. According to the founders it was an “attempt to re-internationalize poetry in the United States--showcase Boston area artists alongside emerging and established artists across the United States and the globe.” COMPOST featured not only local poets, but poets from Haiti, Vietnam, India, China, Armenia, Ireland, etc… They also had a wonderful interview series with folks such as: Alan Dugan, Rosanna Warren, Ed Bullins, and Eavan Boland.

 

  Eventually real life reared its head and the artists decided to pay more attention to their individual work, to their families, and their professions and the magazine folded But they left quite a legacy.

 

  I am happy to report that Cris Mattison of the Zephyr Press published it with excellent results, both in production values and of course content.

 

  There is so much in this 12-year anthology. So I can only give you a small sampler. And since I am first and foremost a poet I’ll lay a couple of poems on you. In “Memory,” by the Chinese poet Bei Ling, (translated by Tony Barnstone and Xi Chuan) the poet characterizes the pained persistence of the past:

 

“You hear the sound of it peeling off,

The sound of its fall to earth

Its old eyes are astigmatic

Reluctant to leave quietly

Like a solitary river

It makes these small noises.

 

It’s always behind us

Walking us forward on our feet

Ready to give us pain.”

 

  And in the “Hub of the Universe: Celebrating Boston,” issue, Victor Howes has a sharp-as-a-tack take on a ill-fated young love affair, where neither party plays fair:

 

“Eddie and Juliet”

“

“She vows, “I’ll never speak to him again”

He only wanted one thing, as Mama

warned her, but breathless, she breathes, “When?”

when he suggests they meet. She is so far 

gone in the tragic love that turns to grief

now that he dropped her. Meeting now, he says

“So long. Let’s keep it brief.

I’m heading off to college in six days.”

He wants them to be friends, old friends. Just that.

He wants his frat pin back, and all those notes

he passed to her in math. “You are a rat.”

she moans thru tears, hating him with a hate

that will not die. Her turn to play her ace:

she says, “I’m pregnant,” just to watch his face.”

 

Ah! Ain’t love grand!

 

 This is a fine collection of one the independent lit. mags that made its mark on our vibrant arts scene.

 

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

Review of "The Patient": A Play by Lawrence Kessenich and Doug Holder

THE PATIENT

ADAPTED by Lawrence Kessenich from Short story by Doug Holder

Staged Reading Presented by the Playwright's Platform

Reviewed by Playwright, Mary M. McCullough

The Patient, a play adapted by Lawrence Kessenich from a short story by Doug Holder, has three characters. LEON, a mental health generalist, as he refers to himself, sleeps days in his boarding house room. He is getting a graduate degree in American Literature, while working nights in a mental hospital. His work entails sitting by the bedside of a drugged and bound PATIENT. Other than speaking directly to the audience, his only interactions are with the patient and an overly friendly NURSE who attempts to engage Leon in her social life, outside the hospital. The play raises questions about sanity. When the patient wakes to confront Leon, the patient’s questions and analysis of Leon life threatens Leon’s fragile sense of himself. Leon tells him to go back to sleep but who is really asleep? The patient is more alive and more rational than Leon, asserting that Leon can choose to live differently. He also tells Leon that his boarding house room is a “suicide suite.” Leon, in a beautifully written, poetic monologue, early in the play, confirms he is “dreaming of remote possibilities that are actual dead ends.” Is Leon a suicide candidate? The play leaves one thinking that Leon and the patient are opposite sides of the same coin; and that the coin is about to be flipped. The play is well written and very intriguing.

Mary McCullough is a founder of the  http://www.streetfeetwomen.org, and an accomplished playwright, performer and writer.

Sam Cornish Tribute Reading: Cambridge Public Library: April 28, 2019. Jean Joachim, Doug Holder, Fanny Howe, Charles Coe, Enzo Surin, Molly Watt, Dan Wuenschel, James Cook

(Click on Pic to Enlarge)

A New Play: "The Patient" by Lawrence Kessenich and Doug Holder

Paul Victor Walsh (center-as the patient) Greg Hovanesian (as Leon--the mental health worker),
Lis Adams (the nurse). Presented as a staged reading by the Playwright's Platform of Boston. Imagine working at a psychiatric hospital outside of Boston, and you are stuck with a patient who picks you apart for eight hours on the night shift.
Who in the end would have the upperhand?
Here is a short clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2Z9ToHN99I


" Really enjoyed it. It has great potential." Lauren Elias ( Founder of the Hub Theatre Company--Boston)





Reviewed by Playwright, Mary M. McCullough Mary McCullough (Co-founder of the Streetfeet Women) http://www.streetfeetwomen.org


The Patient, a play adapted by Lawrence Kessenich from a short story by Doug Holder, has three characters. LEON, a mental health generalist, as he refers to himself, sleeps days in his boarding house room. He is getting a graduate degree in American Literature, while working nights in a mental hospital. His work entails sitting by the bedside of a drugged and bound PATIENT. Other than speaking directly to the audience, his only interactions are with the patient and an overly friendly NURSE who attempts to engage Leon in her social life, outside the hospital. The play raises questions about sanity. When the patient wakes to confront Leon, the patient’s questions and analysis of Leon life threatens Leon’s fragile sense of himself. Leon tells him to go back to sleep but who is really asleep? The patient is more alive and more rational than Leon, asserting that Leon can choose to live differently. He also tells Leon that his boarding house room is a “suicide suite.” Leon, in a beautifully written, poetic monologue, early in the play, confirms he is “dreaming of remote possibilities that are actual dead ends.” Is Leon a suicide candidate? The play leaves one thinking that Leon and the patient are opposite sides of the same coin; and that the coin is about to be flipped. The play is well written and very intriguing.



Congratulations to Lawrence Kessenich (playwright) and Doug Holder (memoir author) for the 26 minute actors’ reading last night of THE PATIENT: a wonderful story brought powerfully to the stage. I loved the contrasts between monologue, where the young writer character, appeals to audience sympathy for his lonely and hardscrabble life; and dialogue, as he is upstaged by a restrained and sedated mental patient, whom he’s supposed to watch all night—his miserable job. Where the writer has been appealing to “us” to listen and commiserate with his situation, the patient reads his character, even in silence, all too well, and berates him for self-pity: no girl, shacked up in some “suicide suite.” Get a life! Finally a nurse sedates the patient, leaving him silent, while the writer’s eyes fill with tears. I was reminded of that scene in Richard Yates’s REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, where the self-doubting Frank Wheeler is critiqued and exposed by a mental patient on family furlough--arguably the best scene in Sam Mendes’s film version, with Givings, the patient, played by Michael Shannon......DeWitt Henry .... (Founder of Ploughshares Magazine.)




The play takes place in 1985 at a psychiatric hospital outside of Boston....


"-Beautifully written prose (Leon's monologues)"




"This is one of the better plays I've read this season. It's very well done. A psychological sketch with a bit of suspense. I really enjoyed it."


It's very sad, but I really the stark realism of it. Plus, the characters are so distinctively different.

----Pittsburgh New Works Festival









I appreciate the setup - nighttime, nightshift, a kind of "No Exit" hell, yes? Great intensity of the dyadic encounter; one tied up, one free, in a sense, but not, really. Because we're all human. Because sanity/insanity is on a spectrum. Your characters know that. We all have secrets. We all fear being exposed. Having also worked in an inpatient setting (many years ago) as a therapist on an adolescent substance abuse unit, I totally get the fraught nature of this encounter. -- Kelly Dumar--- Producer Our Voices Festival of Boston Area Women Playwrights,-- Wellesley College

Treading the Uneven Road by L.M. Brown

Treading the Uneven Road by L.M. Brown Fomite Publishing, 2019, 190 pages, $15.

Book Review

By Ed Meek

“Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly,” Kafka said. L.M. Brown is obsessed with the people in a small Irish town in the 80s and 90s. This is her second book, an interconnected collection of short stories that reads like a novel. Brown, who grew up in Ireland, writes with a sure hand the stories of men and women who have dreams and longings, who fall in and out of love with each other, and who harbor secrets that shape their lives. The Irish are known for oppression and suppression and it is the latter that Brown explores.

In our ever-changing multi-media world, our culture offers us many entertainment options. Fiction, with its limitation of words on the page, still manages to captivate us with the writer’s ability to create character in a way that cannot be duplicated in film or television. Brown is particularly adept at bringing a small community of characters to life. She also works within the confines of short stories to keep coming back to aspects of related tales from the point of view of different characters. So, a minor character in one story will be the main character in another. Although Treading the Uneven Road is a collection of stories, because they are all related, the reader comes away with a satisfying feeling that usually only occurs in reading novels. In this sense and in its obsession with the Irish and the complex relationships in their families, she reminds me of Colm Toibin in his great collection Mothers and Sons.

The uneven road (from a line by Yeats) refers to the emotional ups and downs of the characters as they travel along the road of life. In one story a young wife, estranged from her husband, slowly discovers that he is not the person she thought he was. In another, two brothers who dream of going to London to create a business together, are separated when family illness keeps one brother home. Like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, complications ensue and the story leads to unexpected twists and turns. Unlike the Frank Capra movie, these stories are often heartbreaking, yet the characters persist. The Irish, as Tom Wolfe liked to say in Bonfire of the Vanities, are a stubborn lot. We don’t give up. Eventually, in these stories, secrets are divulged and characters make amends or come to understand why their friends and lovers acted the way they did.

Brown is also not afraid to tackle the stories that perplex us in our lives. Why does a mother leave her family? Why is a teacher cruel to children and can she be forgiven by a child with whom she was cruel? Why would someone leave her best friend to go and live with an older man who seems completely wrong for her? Why would someone choose to live alone in a strange town?

Some of the difficulties faced by the characters have to do with the way their culture is changing. Young people moving away from their friends and families, a father who has a hard time dealing with a gay son, a teacher who assumes a student with a learning disability is stupid. All of the characters are sympathetic and the secrets in the stories function like mysteries. In addition, the way the author keeps returning to characters reflects back on earlier stories in the book. It’s all written in strong, clean prose.

Today, it sometimes seems as if people are living their lives on their phones and in front of screens and what’s in between takes the form of pauses when we actually talk to people or take a walk in the woods or put down our phone and pick up a fork. In gyms and department stores and even gas stations, televisions draw our attention. People seem to be waking slowly up to the notion that this media onslaught is both addictive and unhealthy. One way out of this is through focusing on art, poetry, theatre, and fiction. In Treading the Uneven Road, L.M. Brown brings us on a welcome journey to an imaginative village in Ireland and introduces us to characters who, like us, follow an uneven road of discovery and understanding.

The 4th Annual IWWG Boston Area Conference: Writing the Heroine’s Journey – In Poetry, Prose, Memoir & Drama, will be held in Medfield, MA, May 10 and 11, 2019

The 4^th Annual IWWG Boston Area Conference: Writing the Heroine’s Journey – In Poetry, Prose, Memoir & Drama, will be held in Medfield, MA, May 10 and 11, 2019

   

The International Women’s Writing Guild (IWWG) will host its 4^th Annual Boston area writing conference, featuring four outstanding IWWG instructors, on Friday, May 10, and Saturday, May 11, 2019. The conference offers new and experienced writers craft insights into writing memoir, poetry, prose and monologue, and will be held at The Montrose School, 29 North Street, Medfield, MA from 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. May 10, and from 9:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. on May 11.

This year’s conference theme focuses on writing the “heroine’s journey,” a narrative process developed by author of the bestselling The Heroine’s Journey, Maureen Murdock. In 1949, Joseph Campbell presented a model of the mythological journey of the hero that has since been used as a template for the psycho-spiritual development of the individual. This model, however, did not address the task for today's woman, which is to heal the wounding of the feminine that exists deep within herself and the culture. Now, more than ever, women are speaking their truth as the feminine demands healing.

Throughout the conference, writers will apply insights and themes of The Heroine's Journey, which redefines the heroic quest for women in memoir, poetry, prose and drama. Attendees will experience all four workshops, including: Boston area playwright and poet, Kelly DuMar, presenting: Voices of Unsung Heroines - Writing Photo Inspired Monologues for the Stage; Brooklyn, NY based poet, Vanessa Jimenez Gabb, presenting How the Political is Personal: The Heroine Probes Context in Poetry; Geneva, Switzerland based author Susan Tiberghien, presenting The Alchemy of Journaling: Emerging from Darkness as Heroine; and California based author and Pacifica Graduate Institute faculty member, Maureen Murdock, presenting The Heroine’s Journey as a Narrative Structure for Memoir & Myth.

The conference opens Friday evening with Maureen Murdock’s workshop exploring the stages in 

The Heroine's Journey. As women claim their voice and name their experience, this workshop will provide a framework for their voice to be heard. Come prepared to write your own narrative as a heroine’s journey.

In Susan Tiberghien’s workshop, The Alchemy of Journaling, she asks, why are we afraid to see ourselves as heroines?  Why are we afraid of the dark? If we enter the dark, we will emerge as heroines: vibrant, creative, compassionate. We will look at examples from C.G. Jung, Etty Hillesum, and Marion Woodman. We will see journaling as alchemy with its three steps: entering the dark, nigredo; distilling the memory, albedo; polishing the gold, the new consciousness, rubedo.  Through active imagination, we will find a memory, a dream, an image and take into the dark, we will distill its meaning, and find its worth. 

How is the Political Personal? Vanessa Jimenez Gabb will invite participants to think about the ways we can generate poetry based on the heroine's journey to bring attention to the various systems of which we are products, privileged, oppressed. We will reflect on and write our respective journeys through poetry, and share with one another so that we may realize their collective power. 

Kelly DuMar invites participants to write the voices of unsung heroines. “You hear them, you see them, you know them – these women from your families, your personal history, and your community – but their stories are as yet unwritten,” she says. In this workshop you’ll develop a draft of a short, dramatic monologue for the stage, inspired by voices of unsung heroines. Bring 1-3 photos of unsung heroines (from your life or from history) to write from.

The mission of the non-profit IWWG is to foster the personal and professional empowerment of women through writing. Our regional conferences, as well as our online digital village of writing webinars, and our annual summer, writing intensive at Muhlenberg College, offer women writers the support necessary to hone their writing craft and benefit from ongoing personal and artistic development.

Writers of all levels and genres are welcome. The space is wheelchair accessible. The cost is $130 for IWWG Members; $150 for non-members, and $95 for students with ID. It’s possible to register for just Friday or just Saturday. There is a new member special of $185 (includes $75 Annual IWWG membership dues). Registration fee includes snacks and lunch. To learn more about the workshops, presenter bios, and to register online, go to http://www.iwwg.org/boston-2019. You may also contact Dana at iwwgquestions@iwwg.org or Kelly DuMar at kellydumar@kellydumar.com

The Clearing. Play by Helen Edmundson. Hub Theatre Company--Boston.

 

  Review by Doug Holder

Imagine--if you were arrested for speaking your native tongue. If the land you poured your sweat, your spirit, your very life was taken away with hardly a second thought. Imagine being deported to another country, culture, that will probably view you as yet another alien, pocking the landscape. No this ain't "Let's Make America, Great" territory, but 17th century Ireland, when Oliver Cromwell's English army ravaged the countryside, seizing land, separating families, and killing up to 620,000 people between 1641 and 1653.

In " The Clearing" by Helen Edmundson and directed by Daniel Bourque, presented by the Hub Theatre Company of Boston, the play focuses on the fate of two couples who are affected by draconian British law and its barbaric manifestation. Basically, the play centers around a young couple expertly played by Brashani Reece ( Madeline Preston) and Matthew Zahnzinger ( Robert Preston). The actors show the slow burn and raging fire of a crumbling marriage, as they are consumed by cruel fate.

Jeff Gill, a veteran actor, was certainly a standout in this performance. He plays the British Governor,  a man with a craggy face and persistent hacking cough. The couple pleads their case in front of him to no avail. Gill sticks out like an angry wound, stating between coughs, " Ireland is a whore. And a whore can't be trusted." He is an unblinking stooge of the state, and blathers off his senseless edicts like any drunk on a bar stool.

At certain points it was heard to hear the actors, especially when they addressed opposite sides of the audience. I could definitely see the hand of the director , as the scenes flowed, and were well-orchestrated. 

Hats off to Lauren Elias  a co-founder of the Hub Theatre Company, and her band of friends and actors.

THREE HANDS NONE BY DENISE BERGMAN

“THREE HANDS NONE” BY DENISE BERGMAN  ( Black Lawrence Press)

Review by Lee Varon

Denise Bergman’s new book of poetry “Three Hands None” is a stunning collection. The incident at the heart of the book is the assault of the narrator by a stranger who breaks into her apartment. She describes: “a twenty-year old woman alone in a tiny speck of bed/ deep inside sleep wakes up to a man with a knife at her throat.”

The “three hands” in the title refers to the confusion and disorientation the narrator feels as she attempts to recount her horrific ordeal: “his three hands one on my mouth one with his knife one/ holding the flashlight so close my eyes were on fire.

She feels as if her attacker has three hands to her “none” since she feels paralyzed in the moment of the attack— “this is what powerless is.”

The ten poems of the book are divided by long dashes enclosed in brackets which give the reader a pause between each of the connected poems. The often long lines without capitalization create a strong forward momentum—I couldn’t put the book down.

The story moves from the night the narrator is assaulted to her attempt to recognize her assailant from the many mug shots she is shown by the authorities—“photos of men was it this one that I tell them that I hadn’t seen his face.” In the aftermath of the assault the narrator is haunted by the feeling that threat is pervasive: “he knows who I am/ each man I pass on my way to work/ knows who I am.” He could be anywhere with his “surveillant camera” watching her, ready to strike again. And apart from the daily way in which the attack intrudes in every aspect of her life is the overarching question so many survivors ask: “why me/who was I to him…”

Like all survivors, the narrator’s being is shaken to its very core. The attack has stripped her of her sense of self and safety: “he he he gleaned me. what’s left are leafless stalks too thin to/ catch a wind.”

Bergman keenly depicts the disconnection and confusion which disrupts everything in the narrator’s world: “she sleeps I sleep for weeks a waking sleep though I can’t sleep/ can’t fall or stay asleep.”

Yet there is still a kernel of herself that endures and pulls her through the nightmare she is experiencing. It is midway through the book that: “on hands and knees I retrieve the kernel lock it in my fist.” There is a glimmer of reawakening and yet the narrator keeps circling back to the assault even as she moves forward.

It will take decades in which “speech was a pageless lexicon” before she is able to write about her experience. Some people don’t understand and wonder why she chooses to write about her ordeal after so many decades. Her answer to them rings out with conviction and clarity: “I say to sleep” and then, “to find the me back then.”

In this volume of striking poems the narrator finds “the me” that was stripped from her as a young woman and we as her readers are in awe of her courage and gratified by her incremental triumphs in regaining her selfhood.

In the final section of the book, the narrator broadens her view beyond her own experience to encompass the plight of all survivors of violence—both women and men. She connects with other survivors and encourages the reader to: “go to her though she doesn’t ask beg or hint” and also, “bring her a siren bring her a bell bullhorn megaphone/ microphone but know she will choose to whisper.”

In “Three Hands None” Bergman goes beyond a whisper to a full-throated, powerful, beautifully crafted work of art that will reverberate long after you have finished her book.

Susan Donnelly, Doug Holder, and George Kalogeris to read at the Old Manse May 3, 2019

Click on to enlarge

Doug Holder Interviews Daniel Lynn Watt about his memoir "History Lessons"

Lloyd Schwartz-- Somerville Poet Laureate--Announces!

"My first event as poet laureate is called Poems We Love, in which a grand variety of Somerville residents, including the mayor, the former mayor and congresman, members of the city council, state reps, and the Somerville Arts Council, social activists, librarians, teachers, school kids, writers, artists, actors, doctors, and Miss Black Massachusetts of 2018 will each read a poem or song lyric they love. It's all happening at the Somerville Armory on Wednesday evening April 17, at 7:00 PM. It's free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. You don't have to live in Somerville to attend. 

Then on Saturday morning, April 20, at 10:00 AM, anyone who'd like to talk with me about poetry is invited to join me at the East Branch Public Library on Broadway. We''ll be discussing Robert Hayden's great and moving poem about his father, "Those Winter Sundays." Copies of the poem will be provided."