Erica Goss, Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California and "VIBRANT WORDS"

Christal Cooper 1,606 Words

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https://www.facebook.com/christalann.ricecooper

Erica Goss

“Cornfields of Vibrant Writing”

www.ericagoss.com

www.ericagosspoet.wordpress.com

“Poetry is my cheap means of transportation.  By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started.  I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.”

Billy Collins

“Billy Collins wants his readers to feel like he’s driven them to the edge of a cornfield, and left them in some strange place.  They started out one place but ended up in something else in the end.  And hopefully that is what these poetry prompts will do.”

Erica Goss

This past April of 2014 PushPen Press published Vibrant Words:  ideas and inspirations for poets by Erica Goss, Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California and author of the chapbook Wild Place. (https://finishinglinepress.com/product_info.php?products_id=97)

“I post poetry prompts on my poet laureate Facebook page every Friday.  I had people asking me if I collected those prompts into a book.  Then I bumped into PushPen Press representatives at a lunch party last fall.  I told them my idea and they said they would do a book.  The book came out March of this year which is lightning speed for publishing a book.”

Vibrant Words is a book of poetry prompts for poets of all levels, but geared toward poets who are facing some form of writer’s block, which Goss believes every writer has at some point.

“The point of the book was not to have long complicated writing instructions. I wanted it to be pretty punchy, and straightforward.   I wanted the readers to pick up their pen and start writing after reading the second sentence.” 

Goss did not encounter poetry prompts until she was an undergraduate student taking poetry classes at San Jose State University, where she was pursuing her degree in English.

“I thought they were great. They didn’t always work for me, certainly, but they had me thinking.”

       A poetry prompt is an exercise one does to take that first step into writing.  An example of a poetry prompt is from Vibrant Words excerpted below:                                                               

       Haiku

       At the Friends of the Los Gatos Library Bookstore, I found Oasis in the Heart: Haiku with Exposition by Toshimi Horiuchi (Shambhala Publications, 1995).  In his introduction, Horiuchi writes, “The true poet views the world with keen insight, sees much in little, and feels rapture even in what others might consider trivial or meaningless . . . a true haiku has something of an incantatory charm to store up spiritual and emotional energy in the human system.”

       Sometimes I go on haiku-writing binges.  Here are four from the same day in September:

The zinnias

want to die

       I keep watering

       autumn fires

       a woman calls for help

       once she stuttered

      

       digging

       roots in damp soil

       white hair

            date on a penny

       the year my father was born

       worth more then

Haiku contain as much energy as possible, squeezed into as few words as possible.  They are powerful little packages, beautiful and provocative.  To this day, Japanese haiku poets gather in walks called ginko, where they meditatively walk around fields and hills in order to create poetry.

Take a walk outside and write down what you see, hear, smell, and touch.  Create several haiku from a paragraph of reflection about nature.  Share them with friends.     

Pages 45 -47 from Vibrant Words: ideas and inspirations for poets.

Copyright granted by Erica Goss

Erica Goss recognizes that there are two schools of thought when it comes to poetry prompts – those that believe in it and those that don’t. 

“My theory on why there is such a conflict about poetry prompts is that it demystifies the writing of poetry.  I think that it reveals the craft element to writing poetry.  When we look at a piece of furniture and don’t know how it was put together we are impressed.  If we know how it was put together it might not be as impressive or as interesting.”

Goss believes poetry prompts are applicable to beginning and seasoned poets. 

“I think poetry prompts are absolutely appropriate.  You might end up with something totally different, but you write and think of all the possibilities.  And that’s the main thing – to write.”

Vibrant Words contains 51 poetry prompts by Erica Goss, Dave Bonta, Jennifer Swanton Brown, Ellaraine Lockie, Connie Post, K.S. Hardy, Eileen Malone, Kelly Cressio-Moeller, Evelyn A So, and Pushpa MacFarlane.  Majority of the poetry prompts are written by Goss.  One of her favorite prompts is “I left My Heart in the Los Angels Basin” which is excerpted below:

I Left My Heart in the Los Angeles Basin

Have you ever been completely in love with a city?  It’s no wonder that people leave their hearts in San Francisco, fall in love in Paris, and endlessly adore New York, in all of its various moods and guises.  In his poem “Chicago,” Carl Sandburg wrote, “Come and show me another city with lifted head singing/so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cutting.”  Who can forget the “Floral loops/Of the freeway” and the “calligraphy of cars” from Gary Snyder’s “Night Song of the Los Angels Basin?”  

Begin by listing your impressions of a city you

love.  Why do you love it?  Are there details about the city that only you know?  Make us want to be there so much that it’s all we can do not to jump in the car, drive to the airport, and take the first plane there.

Here is a beautiful poem from Joie Cooke, who left us February 24, 2013:

There Are Nights In San Francisco

There are nights in San Francisco

When even the bedbugs come out to pray

Amongst the forest that is life here

And streets I believe I’ve been on before

Become hallucinations,

Every steep hill climbed,

An applause for gravity. . .

But I’ve taken it for granted

For over 30 years

The seven hills, the cable cars,

The view from twin Peaks

On a crisp, November night. . .

I fall in love with cities

The way most people fall in love,

Shamelessly hopeful; in the beginning,

Careless, naïve and blind . . .

And there are nights in San Francisco

I would wish to forget

Like a waning romance,

Waiting to crash,

Never looking back

At the wreckage behind.

Pages 23-25 from Vibrant Words: ideas and inspirations for poets.

Copyright granted by Erica Goss

      

       What makes “I left My Heart in Los Angles Basin”  special to Goss is that she’s lived on the southern and northern coasts of California since she was a baby.

       “It’s like my child.  I’ve written about San Francisco.  I’ve lived near San Francisco the last years of my life (and) to me it has a distinct personality.  Los Angeles has a distinct personality and San Jose an even different personality.”

       These days Goss has been having plenty of rich ideas based on her own personal life:  she is wife to her husband of 27 years, Don, and mother to their sons ages 23 and 15.

       “Writing about being a parent is always a very rich topic.  When you have your first baby, that caring hormone is within you to make the world safer and better for your children.  You learn your children are not carbon copies.  They are definitely their own people.  You change your expectations and try to be flexible.  You have to constantly shift roles.”

       It wasn’t until her 30s that Goss went to college to get her bachelor’s degree in English and her master of fine arts with a focus in poetry and in nonfiction.

       “I stopped working when my oldest son was five and I went to school full time only to find out I was pregnant - a big surprise.  I took a couple of years off.  It took me a long time – very slowly – one class at a time – to get my bachelor’s in English.  Then it took me three years to get my MFA in 2007.  I was 47 years old then. It was a very slow process.”

       With degree in hand, Goss worked as a poetry student coach at a local high school for five years.

       “It was a program strictly for poetry.  I gave them poetry prompts.  I worked with them individually one on one and would talk with them about their drafts.  The students that were there wanted to be there because it was an elective, not required, so they were very dedicated writers.”

       When the program ended after five years, Goss decided it was time to move on to other things and worked as a grant writer for the Poetry Center of San Jose for four years.  She also had her first book, Wild Place, published by Finishing Line Press. https://finishinglinepress.com

       Now Goss’s days are more structured and her routine not so chaotic – she is able to spend more time writing.  She’s at her desk by 8 a.m. and starts the day off by writing a haiku every morning, her favorite time of day. 

       “It really has to be quiet when I write.  I have to feel like I have a sacred place of my own, a place I can come up with ideas and I don’t have to share it with anybody.  The rest of the day goes from that point. You get up and show up and you do the work everyday – even if you have to do it between doctor appointments.”

       Goss is presently working on her poetry collection Timelocks, which focuses on the last year of her life.  She described some of the poems in Timelocks as tight haikus.

       “All writing is done one page at a time.  It’s not too mysterious – just a lot of hard work and discipline.”

Photograph Description and Copyright Information

Photo 1

Erica Goss

Copyright granted by Erica Goss.

Photo 2

Billy Collins at the 10^th annual Calabash Literary Festival in St. Elizabeth’s Jamaica.

May 10, 2010.

Photograph attributed to Suzannah Gilman.

CCASA 3.0 Unported License

Photo 3

Jacket cover of Vibrant Words: ideas and inspirations for poets

Photo 4

PushPen Press website logo

Photo 5

Jacket cover of Oasis In the Heart Haiku With Exposition

Photo 6

Erica Goss at a book singing for Vibrant Words: ideas and inspirations for poets.

Copyright granted by Erica Goss

Photo 8

Poet Joie Cook.

Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law.

Photo 11

Erica Goss guest teaching at her cousin’s English class in Germany.

Copyright granted by Erica Goss.

Photo 12.

Jacket cover of Wild Place

Photo 13

Erica Goss in her office

Copyright granted by Erica Goss

Tony D'Souza And His Novel "The Konkans"

Christal Cooper  1,663 Words

caccoop@gmail.com   caccoop@aol.com

https://www.facebook.com/christalann.ricecooper

“When the sun goes down”

“I only write once the sun has gone down.”

Tony D’Souza

www.tonydsouza.com

citoyen0@yahoo.com

         When Tony D’Souza was a child he and his Uncle Stan gardened, cooked, and hunted together.  They also participated in that great tradition of telling stories – Uncle Stan the storyteller and Tony the captivated listener.  Uncle Stan’s stories were not the typical stories you told a young child; but rather detailed stories about the family’s experience in their home country of India and of migrating to America.

         D’Souza remembered his Uncle Stan's stories and has incorporated some of those stories in his novels:  Whiteman, The Konkans, and Mule.  Perhaps the most biographical novel to date is the The Konkans (www.HarcourtBooks.com).

         “It is very close to the actual events of my family, my mother’s service in the Peace Corps in India, her marriage to my father, and their coming to the United States and the issues of race they faced in Chicago.  It’s also historically accurate about the political changes that went on in India when the British left.”

         The Konkans is told through the eyes of Francisco D’Sai, and is about three main characters who are searching for identity:  his American mother Denise, who yearns for India; his Indian father Lawrence who yearns to be American and posses the American dream, which is outside his reach; and his Uncle Sam, who is dissatisfied with life, but the most healthy of the bunch.  Uncle Sam accepts reality, and finds pleasure in the most minor of things such as cooking, drinking, and sex.  He also finds fulfillment in his relationship with his sister-in-law and lover Denise (the affair between Francisco’s mother and Francisco’s Uncle Sam is fiction) and his nephew Francisco.

 “We see how three different people confront life in this book; for Lawrence, working hard and keeping a stiff upper lip are how he deals with the ups and downs of life. His approach is not nearly as sensual as the other characters' and he clearly suffers because of it. He simply doesn't find a way to enjoy life as they do, even if what they do hurts themselves and those around them.  Sam has the least opportunities of anyone in the book and still finds ways to really have a good time.” 

One could argue that the two brothers are denied the identity they crave due to racism, which D’Souza himself has experienced.

“I know what racism is. Being mixed race and being able to pass for white made me acutely aware of how America perceived and treated the Indian half of my family as opposed to my white mother.”

When D’Souza started writing The Konkans he was certain of one thing:  he wanted to write in the same style as March Behr’s The Smell of Apples, which he credits with giving Francisco’s voice.  

         “The opening of Behr’s book begins right away with the very strong voice of a child. You feel like you can hear that child talking to you and he becomes such a rich character.  That’s the same style I use in The Konkans.”

A long time ago, my uncles bought a pig.  I was a few months old at the time.  I’d like to say that my uncles bought the pig to herald my birth, but no, it was instead to celebrate the feast of St. Francis Xavier, my namesake and our family’s patron saint, the man who had brought Catholicism and the roots of Konkani, my uncles’ language, to the western coast of India, where they and my father were from, in the early sixteenth century.

                           First paragraph of The Konkans

                           Copyright granted by Tony D’Souza

                          

He wrote the first 200 pages of the novel in pen and paper while living with his girlfriend in Phoenix, Arizona.

         “I was a younger writer when I wrote this book and relatively new to the novel form.  Moving in these episodes helped me pace myself through the book. I started this book with the first lines and no real plan.  I just had these stories and told them one at a time.  They built on each other and made a timeline.  I wrote everyday during that time, had a messy manuscript and then revised it relentlessly. The revisions continued through the year long editing process.”

         After the 200 pages were written, and 4 ½ months had passed, D’Souza moved to London where he rented a small apartment off the Kensington Gardens.  It was in London that he wrote directly on the laptop due to time constraints.
         “I only had six weeks in London and wanted to be finished before I left. I wrote all day and took walks in the park when I needed breaks.”

         At first D’Souza was writing seven to eight hours a day, from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m., but soon The Konkans consumed his every hour and he was writing all day and night.   The writing process took six months.   

         During the writing of The Konkans, D’Souza was at his most emotional when he wrote the scene about an intruder in his mother’s apartment.

         “There is a scene before she goes to India when Francisco’s mother is a young teenager in her apartment in Chicago and a man breaks in and stands above her in the dark.  She’s terrified.  That did happen to my mother when she was 19 years old and she still feels the terror of that keenly, though she’s now 74, more than 55 years later.”

When my mother was thirteen, her bones ached from her growth spurt, and she had a terrible time sleeping.  So she was awake when a naked man opened the door and stood in it.   He was backlit.  My mother knew her mother was passed out somewhere.  The girls were asleep in their beds; she could hear their breathing.  There was no one in this world that could save her from this man.  He weaved across the room, kneeled on the bed, licked her neck, squeezed her breasts, laid heavily on her, and fell asleep.  When she was certain he wouldn’t wake, she inched her way out from under him.

                           Page 26, The Konkans

                           Copyright granted by Tony D’Souza

         “I had the most fun writing the scene where the Peace Corps Volunteer with an attitude problems puts the dead Indian cook on the bus. Again, that really happened and I still shake my head that anyone could have done such a horrible thing and think he could get away with it.”

                 

     Peter carried the cook’s body up the steps of the idling bus to Mangalore.  There was a half hour yet before it departed, plenty of time for a drunk old man to have a heart attack in his sleep.  He arranged the cook’s face against the window, set the bottle against the wall of the bus beside him, put two fifty-rupee notes in the pocket of his shirt.  The ticket wallah had that money in his own pocket moments after Peter left, just as Peter had known he would.  The ticket wallah tilted his hat on his head, smoothed down the creases of his shirt, and his mustache twitched under his nose as he thought about this luck.  Then he sat back down at his desk in the office, and his mind went on to other things.  

                                    Pages 262 – 263, The Konkans

                                    Copyright granted by Tony D’Souza

         Both Whiteman and The Konkans have similarities; both books are in the first person, focus on the Indian culture, contain individual short stories that can stand on their own; and focus on characters and their idiosyncrasies.  

The major difference between Whiteman and The Konkans is the setting or location - Whiteman takes place in a small West African Village, The Konkans take place in India and Chicago. 

         There has been criticism about D’Souza’s book The Konkans  - how did Francisco have first hand knowledge of all of these events especially when some of the events occurred before his parents even met, and while he was a baby?

“Francisco learns it all over the years through his mother’s and uncle’s storytelling.  This book is a memoir and it is implied that Francisco is telling these stories through the filters of how they were told to him and how they have been shaped by his memories. I think that Francisco serves as a good set of eyes and ears to the adults around him and is a good narrator since he doesn't understand why his parents are doing what they do, even if the reader does. It allows the events to happen without much judgement or commentary. He doesn't enter the events much because he is a child. The structure of the book is clearly an older Francisco (me) growing up in a vibrant, immigrant household among people he loved.”

         The great question of The Konkans is this – What determine one’s identity – one’s home country; educational background; career choice; perceptions of America; religion; or ancestry?

         “I don't have an easy answer and I wouldn't want a book to offer one. I think that's the goal of a story like this, to leave a reader with lingering emotions and questions to think about after the reading is done.” 

         D’Souza is flexible when it comes to writing – as long as it is nighttime, he has a desk, and is in a quiet environment. 

D’Souza once placed writer as his number one priority.  Now writer takes backseat to his new identity of father.

         “I have two small kids and am a single father so that’s what I do.  And sleep when I can.  I have a few drawings by my kids taped to the wall. My daughter drew one of me in the middle of her and her brother and she wrote I Love Dad at the top. My son drew me a colorful dragon. I like to look at them and remember how much love has come into my life with them.”

Photo Description And Copyright Information

Photos 1, 7

Tony D’Souza

Copyright granted by Tony D’Souza

Photo 2

Alice and Walter D’Souza’s wedding , June 3, 1968, Top, and Far Left

Bottom right, Tony D’Souza and his sister Allyson D’Souza in India.

Copyright granted by Tony D’Souza.

Photo 3

Allyson, Walter, and Tony D’Souza at Disney “back in the day”.

Copyright granted by Tony D’Souza

Photo 4

Jacket cover of (1) of The Konkans

Tony, Walter, and

Photo 5

Jacket cover of The Smell of Apples

Photo 6

Jacket cover (2) of The Konkans

Photo 8

Tony D’Souza fishing in Grand Lake Stream, Maine

Copyright granted by Tony D’Souza

Photo 9

Jacket cover (3) of The Konkans

Photo 10

Jacket cover of Whiteman

Photo 11

Tony D’Souza, middle, in India.

Copyright granted by Tony D’Souza.

Photo 12

Tony D’Souza, son, and daughter on May 3, 2014 in Wisconsin

Copyright granted by Tony D’Souza