Sundress Academy for the Arts Announces 2018 Summer Poetry Writing Retreat
The Sundress Academy for the Arts is thrilled to announce its Summer Poetry Writing Retreat, which runs from Friday, May 25th to Sunday, May 27th, 2017. The three-day, two-night camping retreat will be held at SAFTA’s own Firefly Farms in Knoxville, Tennessee. All SAFTA retreats focus on generative poetry writing, and this year’s poetry retreat will also include break-out sessions on writing political poetry, writing confession, kicking writer’s block, publishing, and more.
A weekend pass includes one-on-one and group instruction, writing supplies, food, drinks, transportation to and from the airport, and all on-site amenities for $250. Tents, sleeping bags, and other camping equipment are available to rent for $25. Payment plans are available if you reserve by March 31, 2017.
The event will be open to writers of all backgrounds and provide an opportunity to work with many talented, published poets from around the country, including workshop leaders Ruth Awad and Stevie Edwards
Ruth Awad is the author of Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), which won the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and she won the 2012 and 2013 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2011 Copper Nickel Poetry contest. Her work has appeared in New Republic, The Missouri Review, CALYX, Diode, The Adroit Journal, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. Learn more at www.ruthawadpoetry.com.
Stevie Edwards is the founder and editor-in-chief of Muzzle Magazine and senior editor in book development at YesYes Books. Her first book, Good Grief (Write Bloody, 2012), received the Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze in Poetry and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Her second book, Humanly, was released in 2015 by Small Doggies Press, and her chapbook, Sadness Workshop, is forthcoming from Button Poetry in January 2018. She has an M.F.A. in poetry from Cornell University and is a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at University of North Texas. Her writing is published and forthcoming in Indiana Review, Crazyhorse, TriQuarterly, Redivider, 32 Poems, West Branch, The Journal, Rattle, Verse Daily, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.
We have one full scholarship available for the retreat as well as limited 20% scholarships for those with financial need. To apply for a scholarship, send a packet of no more than (8) pages of poetry along with a brief statement on why you would like to attend this workshop to Erin Elizabeth Smith at erin@sundresspublications.com no later than March 31, 2018. Winners will be announced in April.
Space at this workshop is limited to 15 writers, so reserve your place today at:
The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is an artists’ residency that hosts workshops, retreats, and residencies for writers, actors, filmmakers, and visual artists. All are guided by experienced, professional instructors from a variety of creative disciplines who are dedicated to cultivating the arts in East Tennessee.
Sundress: Welcome to Lyric Essentials, where writers and poets share with us a passage or poem which is “essential” to their bookshelf and who they are as a writer. Today Stevie Edwards reads the poem, “Long Lines to Stave off Suicide” by Rachel Zucker.
The poem you picked to read for us is dynamic and intense. Before we listen to your recording, what can you tell us about Rachel Zucker’s work and Museum of Accidents?
Stevie Edwards: What I love about Museum of Accidents (and other work by Rachel Zucker) is that she demystifies motherhood. I think as a culture we have a tendency to put motherhood on this pedestal where everything is unicorns and apple pie. Although I don’t have children, I know that wasn’t the case for my mother, and that’s not to say she didn’t love her children. I think she did and does deeply. But I think Zucker’s bravery in talking about depression in motherhood, in talking about the fear of transmitting one’s more negative aspects onto a child, makes it a little bit easier for me to breathe. She tackles the fears I have about motherhood, in a way I can only really compare to Sharon Olds. Zucker has this amazing balance between tenderness and bite; the negative capability in the poems makes the moments of light seem more important, more expensive.
Sundress: “Long Lines to Stave off Suicide” has a great rhythm when read aloud. Is the form of the poem, and its use of the page, which it seems to undulate, typical of Zucker’s work?
Stevie Edwards: Rachel Zucker often has these kind of wild looking pages with lots of long lines and lots of somewhat erratic looking (but I would also argue quite skillful) indentations. Museum of Accidents has a non-standard trim size with a wider than usual page width, and her poems often take up the full thing. I’m not sure if this is a useful reference, but visually the poems in this book look a bit similar to the poems in Crush by Richard Siken. The ways she uses indentations and line breaks create a controlled world in which the reader is thrashed around. There will be these little hesitations of white space, and then the emotional explosion of a sprawling line.
Sundress: The thrashing is audible. The first moment in this recording that struck me was as Zucker relates making pancakes for her son’s class and one of his classmates becomes oddly attached to her. As you read the lines it moves back and forth smoothly for a bit. The first shock—the boy’s mother was dead—is delivered with the same rhythm; it is that sentence that follows:
with its abrupt short line, that grabbed my attention. Her admittance of her sudden relief—that in her child’s life, she’d succeeded simply by being around during his development—comes as a punch. It is that same willingness to share a very human thought that Olds has, but of course Olds is less sprawling in comparison. There are more instances to investigate. Which lines hold particular meaning for you?
Stevie Edwards: Those lines you’ve quoted are definitely ones I’ve walked around with for awhile. The opening of this poem has always stuck with me:
First, I’m really struck by the choice of beginning the poem with “or,” which I take to suggest a contrasting action the speaker could take instead of suicide, another option. I think there’s a bit of biting humor to the phrase “everything for a long time is so / keep-the-baby-alive,” but also a lot of ache. I don’t have children, and I think one of the reasons I haven’t gone that route, at least not up to this point, is knowing that if I had them and killed myself it’d be the most monstrous thing I could imagine doing. As someone who’s dealt with suicidal ideation since my early teens, I have this tendency to guard others from depending upon or caring about me—though it doesn’t always work. However, I’ve also seen having children really, as corny as it might sound, give people I know who’ve struggled with depression a sense of purpose. A thing they feel they have to live for no matter what. I’ve also seen it do the opposite. I guess what really blows me away about that opening is how honest it feels and how much it gives us about what’s at stake for the speaker.
I also love the section where the speaker and her son are on the subway and the son looks at a sign and says “why…should you / say something if you see something?” which is both cute and heartbreaking.
Sundress: As an educator, tell us how you feel about these lines:
Stevie Edwards: I am currently working full-time in publishing, but I did teach at Cornell from 2012-2015. There’s a sentiment there that I certainly can connect to — a question I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and don’t have an answer to is whether or not one needs to have suffered to be good at writing poetry. That’s not to say I think all good poetry has to be about suffering. At times I’ve read student poems that lacked emotional resonance and thought that maybe they hadn’t felt enough loss to comprehend the miracle of a tulip opening. But that’s not all student work. Some student work has made me feel glad in my bones for poetry. Sometimes I feel so grateful I get to help discover poetry. And sometimes I think that my question about if poets need to have suffered is just me being bitter about my ideas of easy lives I haven’t been dealt.
Sundress: It does seem to be an interesting, common discussion in poetry circles though—“do you need to suffer to write (good) poetry?” Do you feel like the undercurrent of suffering in this poem came from a necessary truth, some sort of real occurrence? Or, perhaps, I should ask if you feel that while you can take some ownership of this poem—as you have by recording it, because of its personal importance to you—if that also allows you to speculate past the boundaries of the poem to the poet?
Stevie Edwards: I don’t really feel comfortable speculating past the bounds of the poem to the poet’s lived life. I think this is a poem of necessary truth, but I don’t think that means it has to be a “real occurrence.” To some degree, our writing is always informed by our own obsessions and experiences, but I don’t think it’s fair to assume that such influence always shows up in literal ways. That said, there’s a roundness to this speaker, to the full spectrum of emotions that ranges from such sweet moments like “banana after brush-your-teeth time” to the rage and despair of lines like “oh, for fucks sake, there’s no difference between ‘stones or ‘rocks’ in Virginia’s / frock. down, down, down…”— which I think would be challenging to achieve without some personal insight. However, I will say that I think it’s weird that there’s such a frequent impulse to interrogate whether or not people’s sadness in poems is real. Nobody ever is like, were those daffodils in Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” really THAT great? How do we know that it wasn’t really just a couple of tulips, but maybe daffodils sounded better? Was he exaggerating their beauty? There is such a strong cultural pressure to invalidate negative emotions, a pressure which I believe comes from a place of fear—fear of admitting what one’s actually felt, fear of perceiving what humans are capable of going through, fear of powerlessness.
Sundress: You mentioned how Zucker has impacted you as a reader—that her “bravery in talking about depression in motherhood… makes it a little bit easier for me to breathe.” How has Rachel Zucker influenced your work?
Stevie Edwards: I think the lines from this poem that have most directly influenced my work are somewhat less directly tied to bravery and more to do with aesthetic (although, those things aren’t completely separate). I do appreciate the ways in which Rachel Zucker makes spaces for women to write about less idealized versions of motherhood. When I read really pristine portraits of motherhood, frankly, it makes me think that I could never be good enough to be a mother. And, more and more, I don’t think that’s true.
The lines from this poem that have influenced my writing the most are:
There was a period of time where I was cutting and cutting and cutting my poems down to shreds. But these lines shook something loose in me. Yes, I love it when poems have real world things. When there are blue jays and bass. I love the ability to reenact an instant through language and form. I love Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died,” the list of stuff I can touch with my hands, even if I have to Google half the items. And I love how wild Zucker’s form is—how she’s chucking objects all over the place. There is nothing dainty about this poem’s form or style, and I love her for doing that. I think Zucker’s writing is beautiful but not pretty. Perhaps, to some extent, it would be a lie to put this poem in pretty little couplets with a bunch of highly ornate language. For awhile, I operated under and idea that if I was going to write about something as controversial as suicide, I had to do it in the prettiest lines to get away with it—as if I might trick editors who’d ordinarily scoff at the topic with some really enticing assonance.
Sundress: Are there any other Zucker poems, reviews, or interviews you would recommend?
What is essential to you as a writer or poet? What piece changed your life? Gave you hope, validated and voiced your fears, was there while you triumphed over them? What piece brings you joy? Made you laugh or grin like a fool? Who was it who made you sit back in wonder, inspiring you to be a stronger writer? We want to know. Send us a recording (or packet of short recordings) of you reading your Lyric Essential—a short story, a handful of poems, an excerpt or two—to SundressLyricEssentials AT gmail DOT com. Then we’ll talk.
Stevie Edwards is a poet, editor, and educator. She is Editor-in-Chief at Muzzle Magazine and Acquisitions Editor at YesYes Books. Her first book, GOOD GRIEF (Write Bloody 2012), received two post-publication awards, the Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze in Poetry and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from Southern Illinois University – Carbondale. Her second book, HUMANLY, was recently released by Small Doggies Press. Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, The Offing, PANK, Vinyl, Devil’s Lake, Indiana Review, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Cornell University and a BA from Albion College. She currently lives in Charleston, SC, where she works for a nonfiction publisher by day and is a poet by night.
Rachel Zucker is the author of nine books, including her memoir MOTHERs (Counterpath Press, 2014), and The Pedestrians, a double collection of prose and poetry forthcoming from Wave Books. Museum of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and named one of the best books of 2009 by Publisher’s Weekly. Widely published, her poems have appeared in journals including: Barrow Street, Iowa Review, Pleiades, and Prairie Schooner. Zucker received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2013 and currently teaches poetry at New York University.
Sometimes Chicago says goodbye with a tire iron, a gallon of gasoline,
and a promise, and I still want it to take me back. I like to dip my
fingertips in the pooled wax of lit candles and peel the paraffin off. I
like to have my hair pulled. I’ve never been hit by a man I wasn’t related
to. I only can walk like a lady in heels when I’m walking away. I feel
relieved when fire trucks stop in front of apartments that aren’t mine.
I like the smell of tobacco when I’m trying to sleep. I was born with
my grandmother’s bad lungs. I can’t chase anything down. Sometimes
I try when I drink too much. I wake up bloody-kneed and alone. In
college I won a prize for best kisser. I quit studying economics to write
poetry. I know how to calculate the Gini coeffcient of a hungry city
but can’t solve anything, not even dinner for one. On my last day in
Chicago, I gave a homeless man a twenty and felt a little better. I’d
like to give you a try, especially if you’ve quit at least one addiction
and still shake out of habit at night. I’d like to feel a little better about
my life. I curse worst in the morning. I’m not sure about love, but I’d
like somebody to make me coffee, maybe bacon and eggs. I’ll give you
everything but a key to my place. I’ll say your name until you wish
you were never given it. Stranger, I can bend into anything but a wife.
—
This selection comes from Stevie Edwards’ book Good Grief, available from Write Bloody Publishing! Purchase your copy here!
Stevie Edwards is a poet, editor, and educator. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Good Grief, was published by Write Bloody in 2012 and subsequently won the Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze in Poetry and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award. Her second book, Humanly, is forthcoming from Small Doggies Press in 2015. She is Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine and Acquisitions Editor at YesYes Books. She lives in a castle in Ithaca, NY.
Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.
A boy, a half-decade too young, brings me roses
at work, like I’m a woman who owns a vase.
I fixed the snapped silver clasp of my favorite
necklace tonight, the one I snagged off,
too drunk for the precision of fingers.
When I was a child church ladies said
I had piano fingers, so I prayed for a piano
so hard I found music in every empty space.
I sang praise from my snug closet walls
and the branches of the cherry tree out back.
I never shut up. Mom would leave me
in the bath alone. She knew I wasn’t drowning.
I never shut up. It took me years to understand
I came from a lineage of tone-deaf housewives.
But I bent the forgiving metal of this clasp
between slender thumb and middle finger
with such precision it must’ve made
a shattering pitch. Thank god there wasn’t
any glass in the room. It’s comforting to say
that everything happens for a reason.
I never got my piano. Nobody I’ve loved
has ever given me a rose when I loved them.
I didn’t take the 63rd bus home from work
the night the boys threw bricks through
the windows near Cottage. When shards
must’ve had their two seconds of night glitter
before nicking a woman’s hand. When the bus
evacuated into the street. When the boys
shot a another boy who evacuated that breaking.
I am this blessed: I don’t know how to judge
if gun wounds in movies are realistic.
—
This selection comes from Stevie Edwards’ book Good Grief, available from Write Bloody Publishing! Purchase your copy here!
Stevie Edwards is a poet, editor, and educator. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Good Grief, was published by Write Bloody in 2012 and subsequently won the Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze in Poetry and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award. Her second book, Humanly, is forthcoming from Small Doggies Press in 2015. She is Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine and Acquisitions Editor at YesYes Books. She lives in a castle in Ithaca, NY.
Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.
I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. — Robert Hass
Every day people wake with spines in need of mending, nights spent
spooning absence. There’s no sense in cursing at the barista for the
chew of grounds in your latte. Sometimes it’s impossible to get a job
right, especially early mornings, especially when there’s a frontier
of people impatient to leave you. You’ve miscarried jobs before. A
belayer, you made sure the man put his harness on snug, told him if
his foot slipped off the fidgeting cable, you’d hold him flopping around
in the treetops. One foot in front of the other, the stuck pulley, you
should have noticed the slack was too much to save him, no point in
the care you put into the knots. He didn’t slip or sue you. Call this
grace if you can believe in grace today. The news didn’t say what kind
of knot the boy tied. His parents found him with his freckles still on.
It doesn’t matter what kind of tree as long as the boughs were strong
enough to bear him. Perhaps you could’ve moved to California and
told him a faggot is a bundle of twigs, but who’s to say he wasn’t ready
to set himself on fire? Or, you could’ve told him the kids meant he was
a fancy stitch that binds delicate fabrics, old lace to silk, but it’s hard to
feel fancy while bees swarm your eyes. But sometimes the dictionary
is useless, which is what you tell your dad when he says that in Merriam Webster it says marriage is between a man and a woman. And you don’t
mention too much gin grinding your body against your roommate’s
or the small of a younger woman’s back in the morning but bring
home a law-school-boy from a good family to plan your future over
strawberry pie. The boy probably didn’t drink coffee yet. He might
have grown to make chewy lattes too slowly. Maybe he’d never learn
to sew, hem his pants with staples. What must be true is this: if a boy
hangs from a sturdy branch alone, if wind swings his limbs for hours,
it makes a sound here.
—
This selection comes from Stevie Edwards’ book Good Grief, available from Write Bloody Publishing! Purchase your copy here!
Stevie Edwards is a poet, editor, and educator. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Good Grief, was published by Write Bloody in 2012 and subsequently won the Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze in Poetry and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award. Her second book, Humanly, is forthcoming from Small Doggies Press in 2015. She is Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine and Acquisitions Editor at YesYes Books. She lives in a castle in Ithaca, NY.
Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.
There’s a shelter in your voice shaped
like a rustbelt factory, some gravel
I could kick into dust.
The air last night was thick remnants
of burnt coffee. We couldn’t get its syrup
off our salty skins.
We were parched and trying
to suckle anything left wet
out of each other. We’d forgotten
about coldness.
I don’t think you noticed the blisters
on my cracked heels
as you pinned them back
beneath your shoulders.
You weren’t the first body to open me
against the damp dread
of summer sheets.
There’s a man on a plane home from Jamaica
who’s claimed the territory of my hip bones
with his lips, named them his
favorite part of a woman.
I’m not the desert type. I need
to see water to believe it’s there.
Sometimes I get confused about the body,
go searching for its ends, ask the dark
skin of a barrel-chested stranger
if it’s ever been mine.
—
This selection comes from Stevie Edwards’ book Good Grief, available from Write Bloody Publishing! Purchase your copy here!
Stevie Edwards is a poet, editor, and educator. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Good Grief, was published by Write Bloody in 2012 and subsequently won the Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze in Poetry and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award. Her second book, Humanly, is forthcoming from Small Doggies Press in 2015. She is Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine and Acquisitions Editor at YesYes Books. She lives in a castle in Ithaca, NY.
Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.
Where is that sea, that once solved the whole loneliness of the Midwest? — James Wright
The vacancy of atheist prayers and too much wine
walk me out to Montrose Harbor.
Dad said that in AA you don’t have to accept God,
just that something is greater than yourself.
I press my palms together, tell the lake
I’ve always had trouble loving the whole
of a man, so I started with the dip in his shoulders
and ended with a strand of hair too dark to be mine.
I bought multivitamins today, which is the opposite
of killing myself. All my dreams are in French,
but I can’t understand the sounds. I say
endless, something about light pollution
and gunshots, two hampers of dirty laundry
and no quarters, a guitar I can’t play.
A man who looks too much like him, all beard
and bones and blue jeans, walks toward me,
then turns. I am the morning’s torn lace
and aches, which will have to be enough.
If I walked into the lake, I don’t think it’d leave.
The lake keeps licking the sand like I like,
which will have to be enough.
—
This selection comes from Stevie Edwards’ book Good Grief, available from Write Bloody Publishing! Purchase your copy here!
Stevie Edwards is a poet, editor, and educator. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Good Grief, was published by Write Bloody in 2012 and subsequently won the Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze in Poetry and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award. Her second book, Humanly, is forthcoming from Small Doggies Press in 2015. She is Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine and Acquisitions Editor at YesYes Books. She lives in a castle in Ithaca, NY.
Darren C. Demaree is the author of three poetry collections, As We Refer to Our Bodies (2013, 8th House), Temporary Champions (2014, Main Street Rag), and Not For Art For Prayer (2015, 8th House). He is the recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations and a Best of the Net nomination. He is also a founding editor of Ovenbird Poetry and AltOhio. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.
Ruth Awad is the author of Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), which won the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and she won the 2012 and 2013 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2011 Copper Nickel Poetry contest. Her work has appeared in New Republic, The Missouri Review, CALYX, Diode, The Adroit Journal, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. Learn more at www.ruthawadpoetry.com.
received the Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze in Poetry and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Her second book, Humanly, was released in 2015 by Small Doggies Press, and her chapbook, Sadness Workshop, is forthcoming from Button Poetry in January 2018. She has an M.F.A. in poetry from Cornell University and is a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at University of North Texas. Her writing is published and forthcoming in Indiana Review, Crazyhorse, TriQuarterly, Redivider, 32 Poems, West Branch, The Journal, Rattle, Verse Daily, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.
Stevie Edwards is a poet, editor, and educator. She is Editor-in-Chief at Muzzle Magazine and Acquisitions Editor at YesYes Books. Her first book, GOOD GRIEF (Write Bloody 2012), received two post-publication awards, the Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze in Poetry and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from Southern Illinois University – Carbondale. Her second book, HUMANLY, was recently released by Small Doggies Press. Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, The Offing, PANK, Vinyl, Devil’s Lake, Indiana Review, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Cornell University and a BA from Albion College. She currently lives in Charleston, SC, where she works for a nonfiction publisher by day and is a poet by night.
THERs (Counterpath Press, 2014), and The Pedestrians, a double collection of prose and poetry forthcoming from Wave Books. Museum of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and named one of the best books of 2009 by Publisher’s Weekly. Widely published, her poems have appeared in journals including: Barrow Street, Iowa Review, Pleiades, and Prairie Schooner. Zucker received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2013 and currently teaches poetry at New York University.