That plucky writer above with the grin-so-hard-it eats-your-upper-lip-smile is me, at the 22nd Winter Poetry and Prose Getaway, sponsored by Murphy Writing at Stockton College. As I described in this post, I won a scholarship to the conference through the Jan-ai Scholarship Foundation. Without this scholarship, I would never have been able to attend, as I am deeply in student loan debt (with a dash of credit card debt thrown in for fun–side note, if you find yourself in a similar situation, please visit this site, it has been a saving grace for me).

Now that I’ve used all of my allotted hyperlinks for one post, on to the enormous amount of fun I had at the conference. I met a woman there named Vashti who came all the way for this conference from Nigeria (!!), and she was assigned to be my roommate. She gave a tear-jerker of a lecture about Boko Haram’s effect on her students (she is a university professor) and how she uses poetry to help them navigate their fear. It was so incredibly moving, and I felt a greater appreciation for American culture and the privileges it affords its citizens than I have in a long time. Plus, Vashti’s husband calling us at 2 AM from Nigeria gave me a funny story to tell each morning (albeit groggily).

(above, Vashti and I, below, Vashti giving her lecture).

I met a bunch of other cool folk, and had a really interesting conversation with a woman named Kyle about being realistic about your talent. This is something I am very much coming to grips with. I am not one of today’s hottest young poets, sky rocketing into The New Yorker straight out of the crib, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t still publish and get my book out there. It’s hard to fully encapsulate the conversation and what it meant to me, but in sum: it meant a great deal.

I worked with poets J.C. Todd, Luray Gross, and Kenneth Hart, and Kim Addonizio and Stephen Dunn were there as well. Luray has become my new mental cheerleader–meeting with her was wonderfully powerful, and really spurred on my ambition for my manuscript, to push it further and see what I am leaving unsaid. I very much hope to stay in touch with her in one capacity or another. Kim Addonizio’s closing reading was hilarious and moving at the same time.

And there was intergenerational dancing!! Which is my favorite kind of dancing. When I am dancing next to a 75 year old man along to “Shout” that is really where life feels a-okay! All weddings, all the time.

I wrote one poem that I am convinced I will include in my manuscript. I brought it to Leonard Gontarek and crew for review, and he had some great suggestions on how to improve it. I was writing a difficult poem about my mother’s mental health, and only had an hour and a half to do so (that’s part of The Getaway structure), so adopted this refrain to push through the writing process. Leonard is suggesting I remove this refrain on account of cleverness, and leave the poem more vulnerable in its approach.

It reminded me of my manuscript consultation with Luray, where she wanted me to try saying what I was leaving unsaid on account of it being too difficult. Both teachers really pushed me over the course of this one week. Handling personal subject matter can be complicated in this regard, you can have all the poetic tools in the world, but if you don’t have the emotional fortitude to write what needs to be said to bring about the poem’s truth, it’s going to flop. You (I) run the risk of just having emotional subject matter on the page for the reader to be voyeur, but without making the connection to the reader of why it should matter to them.

In last words, I’m going to make a push for a workshop that very much helped me when I first moved to Philly, which I have linked to previously: The Red Sofa Salon. If I weren’t still in the financial dire straits I find myself in, I would be your classmate in a heartbeat. Which isn’t to say it’s not affordable, at $40 a class for her (Hila Ratzabi’s) expertise, yummy vegetarian food, and cocktails, it winds up being a bargain I am very sad to miss out on.

In final final words, I am off to the dentist. Look for poems about root canals in the near future.

and I get a shout out! Read the review in its entirety here. My section is quoted below:

“While quite a few other poems succeeded on one level or another, two resonated particularly deeply. In Shevaun Brannigan’s ‘To the cabbie who waits for me as I unlock the door,’ drunkenness and loneliness ‘in the 20 hour dress and its wrinkles,/in the body and its nightly defeat,’ engender a quiet cry for help, which in turn lays bare a desperate life: ‘A little girl is going to run out/the door, chased by her father./Get her out of here.'”

I am so glad they liked this poem, as it is one I am quite fond of! I wrote it in Hila Ratzabi’s Red Sofa Salon workshops. There is an open house for these workshops January 11th, from 1-4. Click on the link to register, she is a wonderful teacher and there is no obligation to join!

Excited to share my review of Take this Spoon by poet Julia Wendell! Thank you to the good folks over at Entropy for publishing it.

As someone who is perpetually being told I am too literal, I enjoyed this article on “Why Poems Don’t Make Sense” by Matthew Buckley Smith.

I feel as though many of the poems I read today don’t make sense, which is hard for me because I am very much a beginning, middle, end type person. I recognize this as a limitation of mine, and of my poetry.

Hope you all enjoy it as much as I did!

Just wanted to share my call for submissions for a reading I am curating for female poets, to be held in Philadelphia.

I read at the first one, and below is a picture from that (very chilly but fun) reading:

Call for Readers:

I am organizing a new, all female poet reading series in Philadelphia. The first reading was held at the Philadelphia Sculpture Gym and featured Hila Ratzabi, Kimberly Ann Southwick, dawn lonsinger, and Chloe Martinez. There is one slot open for the next reading, to be held on February 13th at 1fiftyone Gallery, and I am also scheduling line-ups for future readings.

To submit, please email three poems and a bio as an attachment toloveantilovereading@gmail.com by December 31st, and indicate whether you are available on February 13th, and/or if you would like to be considered for future readings as well. The theme for the February 13th reading is love/anti-love, and you are encouraged to submit poems that fit that theme if you are interested in reading that date. Other poets reading on February 13th include Elliot Battzedek, Catherine Bancroft, Jennifer Hook, and Liz Solms.

Women of color and non-cis gendered poets are strongly encouraged to apply. Please include a note specifying as such if you consider yourself to be a member of a community underrepresented in the world of literature.

Three pieces of writing news:

1) I got a pushcart nomination from my beloved Four Chambers Press for “Local Church Falls in Love With Area Library“! I couldn’t be happier over this. I greatly love this journal, and it is nice to feel as though it’s mutual! Congratulations to their other nominees, Dexter L. Booth for “Nothing in Reverse,” Josh Rathkamp for “On the Way to a Party Neither One of Us Wants to Go To,” Zeke Jarvis for “Sex with Anne Hathaway,” Leon Hedstrom for “Borealis,” Allyson Boggess for “Phoenix Daycare Kid Eating Fake Snow.”

Please read all of their works, the majority of which are available online! And if you are dying to read Rathkamp’s piece as well, order Four Chambers Press Issue 2 here. It makes a great gift!

2) I received an honorable mention in The Feminist Wire‘s first annual poetry contest, judged by poet Evie Shockley. I am over the moon about this! I submitted two poems to them, “In Response to Learning the Lego Line of Female Scientists was Limited Edition,” (a poem I wrote about in this entry) and “House.” Not sure which one won, or if both did, but this is terribly encouraging!

3) I won first place out of 107 submissions for a scholarship to attend the Winter Poetry and Prose Getaway in Atlantic City, NJ from January 16th through 19th. I got the call notifying me when I was at a very noisy bar, and kept thinking I’d misheard. It’s wonderful news, and I am very excited about this! Haven’t figured out who I am studying with yet, but I will report back here after the retreat.

I check my submittable ob-sess-ive-ly. OBSESSIVELY. Read: I have a problem. There is a journal I have submitted to many, many, many times. I watch them sit in my submittable queue as unread for months, because there are many thousands of other people who submit to this journal many, many times as well.

I usually know the exact day they finally start reading my submission, because of previously mentioned obsession with checking my submittable. The most recent submission, I had the time-of-opening down to within an hour.

They rejected it twenty minutes or so after they opened it. Crushed. Crushed! I have this image of an intern reading it and going “meh” (sort of akin to an okc message I got once after changing my profile picture, back in the dating days), and then pressing “reject” immediately. That is the best case scenario with that timely of a rejection. It could be they all sat around a table laughing at my audacity to submit to such a journal with my shoddy little poems. It could be the twenty minutes was filled with guffaws, or even vomiting.

Maybe not vomiting.

Anyway.

So I got the email and felt terrible, and stewed, and complained about it to Joe, how I had spent months on these poems and all they could give me were twenty or so minutes and a best case scenario “meh,” which is of course true, that is all they could give me given the many thousands of other people who submit to this journal many, many times as well.

That was a few days ago.

Today I called and subscribed to it. Which I know might seem scandalous to some purists reading and clutching their pearls aghast that I would submit to a journal without subscribing to it, but I only have so much money for poetry journals, and besides they have a prominent online section I stalk in between refreshing my submittable queue.

Anyway, I am feeling like a responsible, if crazy, member of the poetry community.

That is all.

Rattle is doing this really great thing called “Poets Respond.” Click on the link to get the full gist, but basically it’s to provide a place online for poems written during the week on that week’s news. I think it’s a great idea, and offer Tim Green my greatest kudos for coming up with it.

I submitted this week and didn’t win (see the winning poem here), but my submission appears below. I hope you enjoy it (please click on the image below to see it larger, and then enlarge from there. I am having some technical problems preserving the blank space). It was very necessary for me to write.

When the rape scandals began to emerge in the Alt-Lit movement, I read about them with horror, but not particularly surprise. I experienced something awful at my writing grad school, and know that the writing world, for all of our sensitive natures or what-have-you, is not a vacuum within society. What is unique about the alt-lit scandals, in my opinion, has been the rallying response. So often when I hear women talk about their rapes, they talk about the reaction to it–the accusations and blame, the doubt, the losses of friends and family. Perhaps it is just the corner of the internet I inhabit (and I am sure this is part of it, but thank goodness for this corner), but so many people have come out to support, and share their own stories in relation to sexual assault. (Yes, there have been jerks. And those who just don’t understand, and so unwittingly say jerk-ish things, but are not themselves jerks. There have been men’s rights activists, there have been friends of the accused, there have been people who don’t want to admit what a widespread societal issue this is speaking with authority on a subject about which they are ill informed, but there have been strong voices combating all of this, and for that I am grateful).

Delirious Hem issued a call for submissions of stories and poems relating to rape, following a series of their remarkable essays on the subject as it related to the Alt-lit community. I have a number of poems I could have submitted to the journal, all revolving around other people’s experiences. Instead I chose to submit one that I wrote about 2.5 years ago, regarding a relationship I was in during my late teens and early twenties. I was thinking when I submitted, if I could say anything about rape culture in a poem, what would I want to say, and so which one should I pick to submit.

What I want to say about rape, what I feel I have to say about rape with authority and experience, is that there is a great nuance to it. Rape is not solely a stranger in an alley with a knife, but as long as this is the perception of rape (and even then, how quickly people will find ways to dismantle any blame–she was out late, she was by herself, she was dressed provocatively) women will continue to blame themselves for any permutation that does not meet society’s accepted guidelines. And that is the other thing that I would say about rape. That the majority of women I know who have been raped blame themselves so hard, feel so stupid and guilty and shameful. To compound that with victim blaming is a disastrous combination. It is a wonder anyone can recover when internal and external is all combining to say “you brought this on yourself,” to find any excuse to cut the rapist a break. I think a lot of people find it easier than the truth, it’s nicer if you can pardon it away, case-by-case, as not meeting the criteria, the line drawn in the sand just an inch or two out of reach, each time.

I chose to submit a poem that reflects the nuance. It may not meet your personal criteria of rape. You may blame me as much as I blame myself in the poem. It was a hard decision to submit it, but I wanted to connect with the other women out there in the world who don’t have these textbook cases of assault. I don’t ultimately care about the label assigned to this experience, I just know that it was awful and represented some of the worst months of my life. The poem that was accepted is called, “Even Though We Were Vegetarian.” I am nervous about having it out there in the world, I am nervous to hear blame as I did so often after that experience, from my family and friends. It is a scary period of my life to revisit.

But if it brings anyone comfort in knowing they are not alone, then I will feel like it was the right thing to do to publish it.

I wish that in the poem was the story of how I left. I feel like that should be the next step, not just sharing the durings, but the afters. Sharing how we found the courage to leave. How our lives are now different, and better.

To anyone else who is struggling in a traumatic relationship, I am sorry. You are not alone. It happens to so very many of us.

For survivors and sufferers: https://www.rainn.org/get-help/national-sexual-assault-hotline

And so I post a third update in one day, only to recede into silence again for months. Or not! Who knows!

I wanted to share some images and video from a recent video I did with Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence at the Indiana Writers’ Consortium. They appear below.

Further, video from the readings! Here I am reading my own poem “Don’t,” “Why My Mother is Afraid of Heights,” and Amanda Auchter’s poem “Creole Tomatoes.”

I flew into Chicago for the reading, and spent a few days there. One day I was walking down Milwaukee Ave and a man called out “Poems! Poetry! Poems! Poetry!” He was an older man with cataracts and most likely homeless. He was reading people his poems for donations. I asked him to read me one, and he did, a love poem. I gave him all the change in my pockets. He told me he was saving up for a new pair of boots because last Chicago winter he had fallen four times and injured himself.

When I had been walking down the street, I felt wonderful. Here I was, in another city for a poetry reading; my father and stepmother, with support from my uncle, had been generous enough to fund my trip. I have two degrees in creative writing. I joke about being a poor poet, I am many thousands in debt for my love of the craft, but I have a sturdy pair of boots and a place to live, people to support me if times get hard, and people to support me if times get promising. I am afforded privileges by my skin color.

I only had $2.00 in my pockets.

I wrote a poem about this last night. Maybe it will find a home somewhere and I will feel validated for my skills as a writer. It won’t help this man find sure footing.

Limitations.

But then at the same time, the book I was there to read from has brought so many women solace and a degree of peace. I believe in the power of poetry, I do.

No conclusion to be found here.