Monday, September 25, 2017

Award Winning Poet's First Fiction Novel Set During The St. Louis World's Fair of 1904 . .

Chris Rice Cooper 


 Chris Rice Cooper’s Analysis on the historical/fiction/suspense novel Finding the Raven
by Poet Patty Dickson Pieczka

“My main focus of writing has been poetry, but with Finding the Raven, I've branched out into fiction using the skills I learned studying poetic imagery. I was inspired by my grandparents' era, and most particularly by my great uncle Charlie (uncle charlie above with Patty's grandfather John right in 1900), who was a hobo and wrote of his travels to the St. Louis World's Fair and across the country to live with Native Americans. I imagined what he might have seen in St. Louis and what he might have done, though he didn't appear as a main character in the book. Researching the times was fascinating, and at the SIU Library I found newspapers from April 1904. I wondered what it would be like to have answered ads from the classifieds at that time. So in my story I used actual excerpts from the old newspapers and went in search of "what if."
--Patty Dickson Pieczka on the writing of Finding the Raven



Finding the Raven, published by White Stagg an imprint of Ravenswood Publishing http://ravenswoodpublishing.
com/bookpages/findingtheraven.html is about many things – history, murder, suspense, domestic violence, love, but more compellingly it is about authentic friendship between two women -  poor Julia Dulac and wealthy Rose Hillman.


Julia and her father are enjoying their last night working for William Piquette’s traveling theater troupe in 1904 St. Louis.  For the first time Julia is in the audience watching her father give his last performance, only to watch him being crushed to death by a metal weight on stage. Photo left Starr husband and wife team in the Traveling Troupe production of Mahatman Mysteries in St. Louis.

After his quick burial at Calvary Cemetery (right) Julia learns from her father’s attorney that she is penniless due to her father’s so called debts.  Everything must be sold – the house and all of its contents - to go toward the so-called debt.  Julia immediately goes back to their house to pack what little she is able to take - clothes, candles, comb, brush, a few books, her father’s four-leaf clover in wax paper, and the 4-inch ceramic pink Buddha her father always said would bring good luck.  With her last $10 she rents a room from Mrs. McKinney’s boarding house . . .

Rose Hillman is from a wealthy family but is not ashamed of the love she has for poor bank-teller Eric Swenson.  Despite her parent’s disapproval she wants to marry him, especially when she discovers she is pregnant with his child.  Her father is furious and kicks her out of the home and community of St. Paul, Minnesota and onto a ship that is sailing for St. Louis where he accompanies his daughter to Mrs. McKinney’s boarding house and leaves her there with only $60 and a warning – he will return exactly one year from today and he will only take her back if she’s married with someone of an equal or higher standing or if she is single and childless. Above image is of the St. Louis World's Fair in Festival Hall 1904 public domain.

The two young women become the best of friends sharing each others secrets, dreams and fears.  Rose answers a matrimonial ad and Julie finds a job as a seamstress. Image right from an advertisement in The St. Louis Republic May 8, 1905.  Public Domain. 

Then Julia’s boss makes a sexual advance that she resists.  As a result she has no job and returns to her room in the boarding house and in anger hurls the pink ceramic Buddha against the wall.  With regret she picks up the shards and discovers black crystal.  


She takes the black crystal to a reputable and honest jeweler to have it appraised and learns it is a very rare and highly valuable tourmaline black crystal.  The jeweler tells her it has a rainbow of colors and is used by sorcerers and soothsayers.  He recommends that she keep the black crystal in a bank box in her own name.

That very night Julia returns home and before she goes to bed she looks into the black crystal and sees a black raven flying, its beak holding colorful ribbons.

Then Julia learns from a fortune-teller that the black crystal is more than tourmaline but a spirit called the Raven that knows all things – and slowly the Raven reveals secrets and visions to Julia. . things that could lead to her own happiness or her own demise. 




*Raised in Evanston, Illinois as a writer's daughter, Patty Dickson Pieczka found a strong appreciation of poetry. She graduated from the Creative Writing Program at Southern Illinois University in 2006 and, while there, spent two summers as an editorial intern at Crab Orchard Review
She fell in love with the area and moved to Carbondale, where she and her husband John own and manage a small rental business. They spend their free time exploring the lakes, trails, and bluffs of southern Illinois, from which Patty draws inspiration for her writing. She also enjoys music and played cello with the SIU symphony for more than ten years.

Her first book, Lacing Through Time, was published by Bellowing Ark Press in 2011, and her chapbook Word Paintings (Snark Publishing) was published in 2002. One of her poems was nominated for an Illinois Arts Council Award, and she was the recipient of the 2010 Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award.




Her second book of poetry Painting the Egret’s Echo won the Library of Poetry Book Award for 2012 from the Bitter Oleander Press, and she was the featured poet in their Spring 2014 issue.  

Her short play won first prize from the Paradise Alley Players and she received first place in the fiction contest at John A Logan College.  Other awards include the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest in the Best Sonnet category, the ISPS poetry contest for 2012.

Readers can contact Patty via her web page http://www.
patty writes.net  or her Face-
book page at https://

Friday, September 22, 2017

Scripted Interview with Poet John Gallaher on "IN A LANDSCAPE"

Chris Rice Cooper 



Scripted Interview with Poet John Gallaher on His Poetry Collection In A Landscape
The Unadorned Nonfiction In Verse

001
The date you first started writing In A Landscape and the date In A Landscape was completed?
August 25th, 2009 – January 6th, 2010.  I’m guessing.  But it was something like that. 



002
Can you describe in great detail the step by step process of writing In A Landscape from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final book form?
This book came about through several things happening at the same time.  First, I had just come off a long collaborative project and wanted to do something very different.  I happened to be re-reading John Cage’s book SILENCE at that time, and I had just recently watched a
Pitchfork Classic documentary on the making of The Flaming Lips album The Soft Bulletin, where Wayne Coyne talks about moving away from making things up in his lyrics to just saying what he thought about things.  The Coyne and the Cage went together nicely in my mind, and I decided to try just talking, without thinking what it was leading to. 

I had about an hour every morning in the fall of 2009, before waking the family up for work and school, and I had a little writing ritual I would follow.  I would put on the album In a Landscape, a collection of compositions by John Cage with Stephen Drury on piano.  Then I would ask myself a question and try to answer it without making anything up.  Whatever “without making anything up” might mean. 

That was how I specifically started section one, and I then used the chance elements of how section one turned out, to become something of a blueprint for the rest of the book; how each section usually starts off with something like a general question; how each section is three thick stanzas; how the middle stanza is often unfiltered autobiography.  “Unfiltered autobiography” is as close as I can come to naming the process right now.  Maybe tomorrow I’d name it something else.  But what I mean is that I was consciously trying to not make a poem.  I wasn’t thinking about craft or coherence so much as I was really just turning over ideas and experiences, to see what I thought of them.  People have called this book a “diary-poem,” a “daybook,” “essay-poem.”  I was just trying to think some things over.  I’d recently seen the video (it was everywhere for a time) of Randy Pausch’s “Last Lecture” at Carnegie Mellon, and I think a lot of the issues he brought up were still with me. 

As for its form, the book is poetry, it looks like poetry (the lines break!), but yet, it doesn’t do a lot of the things poems usually do.  The “just talking” aspect of the book works against things such as central unity, resolution, and a narrative or formal arc.  I think it helps to hybridize the description.  If one were to come to the poem thinking only “here’s a poem!” that would probably still work fine, but thinking “here’s a shot at non-fiction in verse” might help situate the reading a little more.  I guess I’m just uncomfortable with myself maybe.  I feel very, well, present in this book.  Unadorned, maybe.  There’s not much to hide behind in this book.  It’s all pretty much right there: what I really think about things, what I’ve been through.  And some of it’s slight and some of it’s uncomfortable.  Calling it non-fiction or something makes me feel I have this other genre to help me out, that I can call to for support.  It’s probably just a game I’m playing with myself, but it’s working so far. 

But in a larger context, I’ve written the way I have for years from out of the idea that, as Robert Lowell (right, at the Harvard Bookshop in the 1960s. CCbySA3.0) says, “I wanted to make something imagined, not recalled.”  And to recall, to place memory and my experience to the front like this, that made me very uncomfortable.  All my life I’ve had problems with authority, both as someone living under authority, and being seen in any way as an authority figure.  I am suspicious of closed, or final, authoritative meaning, as well as the authoritative voice.  But at some point I want (or I need) to say things, to name what I believe.  This book is part of that struggle. 

003
Can you describe the publishing process of In A Landscape?
There’s not much to say about this, really.  The individual sections that were published, were published with the title “In a Landscape” followed by the section number.  As for the book, I was already under contract with BOA from the book I co-wrote with G.C. Waldrep, Your Father On the Train of Ghosts.  BOA had right of first refusal on my next manuscript, and I sent them this one and, bless them, they took it.  It was a gamble on their part, as it’s not an easy book to classify or describe, and I will forever be grateful for their support. 






Excerpt from In A Landscape given copyright privilege by John Gallaher

I
“Are you happy?”  That’s a good place to start, or maybe,
“Do you think you’re happy?” with its more negative
tone.  Sometimes you’re walking, sometimes falling. That’s part
of the problem too, but not all of the problem.  Flowers out the window
or on the windowsill, and so someone brought flowers.
We spend a long time interested in which way the car would
best go in the driveway.  Is that the beginning of an answer?
Some way to say who we are?

Well, it brings us up to now, at any rate, as the limitations
of structure, which is the way we need for it to be.  Invent some muses
and invoke them, or save them for the yard, some animus
to get us going.  And what was it Michael said yesterday?  That
the committee to do all these good things has an agenda to do all these
other things as well, that we decide are less good in our estimation,
so then we have this difficulty.  It just gets to you sometimes.  We have
a table of red apples and a table of green apples, and someone asks you
about apples, but that’s too general, you think, as you’ve made
several distinctions to get to this place of two tables, two colors.
How can that be an answer to anything? Or we can play the forgetting game,
How, for twenty years, my mother would answer for her forgetfulness
by saying it was Old-Timer’s Disease, until she forgot that too.

On the television, a truck passes left to right, in stereo.  Outside,
a garbage truck passes right to left.  They intersect.  And so the world continues
around two corners.  The table gets turned over, with several people
standing around seemingly not sure of what comes next.  Look at them
politely as you can, they’re beginners too.  And they say the right question
is far more difficult to get to than the right answer.  It sounds good,
anyway, in the way other people’s lives are a form of distance, something
you can look at, like landscape, until your own starts to look that way
as well.  Looking back at the alternatives, we never had children
or we had more children.  And what were their names?  As the living room parts
into halls and ridges, where we spend the afternoon imagining a plant,
a filing cabinet or two . . . because some of these questions
you have with others, and some you have only with yourself.