Mary Byrne’s short story “What Doesn’t Choke Will Fatten” from her short story collection PLUGGING THE CASUAL BREACH #225

 *The images in this specific piece are granted copyright:  Public Domain, GNU Free Documentation Licenses, Fair Use Under The United States Copyright Law.

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***The CRC Blog welcomes submissions from published and unpublished fiction genre (including screenwriters and playwrights) for INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION.  Contact CRC Blog via email at caccoop@aol.com or personal Facebook messaging at https://www.facebook.com/car.cooper.7 

****Mary Byrne’s short story “What Doesn’t Choke Will Fatten” from her short story collection PLUGGING THE CASUAL BREACH #225 in the never-ending series called INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one specific excerpt from a fiction genre and how that fiction writer wrote that specific excerpt.  

Name of fiction work? And were there other names you considered that you would like to share with us? I first entitled this story ‘Existentialism for Dummies’ which I rather fancied, but when I asked my nephew to read it and he asked, ‘What’s existentialism?,’  (Right:  Mary Byrne's son Edwyn and her nephew Ian. Copyright by Mary Byrne)

I decided on my father’s adage: ‘What doesn’t choke will fatten’, a nice paraphrase of Nietzsche’s ‘What doesn’t kill me makes me strong’. (My father started life on a farm in south Monaghan and was never short of sayings, quotes, poetry – including Kavanagh, of course – and remembered doggerel from one of his aunts). 

What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? I wrote the story around 2011.

(Right:  Mary Byrne in 2011. Copyright by Mary Byrne)

Moving from Paris to Normandy some years earlier, I realised that the houses, villages and countryside I’d seen in WWII films were in fact Norman. My students introduced themselves and their region by saying, ‘The Allies bombed Caen without evacuating it.’ 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Goodwood 

(Above Left:  IWM caption : THE BRITISH ARMY IN THE NORMANDY CAMPAIGN 1944.  Sherman tanks carrying infantry wait for the order to advance at the start of Operaton Goodwood.  1944.) 

I began to understand the extent of the destruction that had been necessary to win the war. Le Guide du Routard for Normandy gave percentages of destruction for towns, sometimes up to 80%. When Allied bombing started on the coast, dishes rattled in dressers some 100 kms to the south. Many of the (by then) elderly men in our region had been POWs on farms in Germany. Theirs and other stories emerged. (Right: Between Chambois and Vimoutiers, in the exact location where the MontormelMemorial is situated today, the ultimate and most bitter battle of Normandy took place, from August 18th to 22nd, 1944. Montgomery called it “the beginning of the end of the war")

The clincher was a visit from friends of Polish origin and a visit to the Montormel memorial (http://memorial-montormel.org/history_2_109.html) which illustrates the final battle for Normandy: the ‘kettling’ of some 50,000 German soldiers into the ‘Falaise pocket’ in August 1944. Polish troops from Britain played a major role. The story was building itself around me. 

Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work?  And please describe in detail.  And can you please include a photo? I had no ‘official’ study at home at the time – my husband needed a room for his own work and I was often in Caen teaching – so I tended to camp my temporary study in bedrooms until dislodged by visitors (see two such encampments below). Any writing I did was snatched in haphazard breaks from teaching and happened in notebooks and sometimes in a deckchair in the garden, which was beautiful. (Right: Mary Byrne's writing space. Credit and Copyright by Mary Byrne)

What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? I tend to use music to put me in the mood, whatever I’m into (but Mozart when I need to be fast and efficient). However when seriously writing text, even music can be an interruption. I’ve now moved from notebooks direct to laptop and have a proper study (still pretty chaotic though). I drink tea all day. Favourite time varies from morning to evening according to mood and other interruptions. (Mary Byrne's notebooks.  Credit and Copyright by Mary Byrne)

Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference.  This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. The story’s narrator is a German former student of philosophy, who is captured in the ‘Falaise pocket’ in 1944.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falaise_Pocket  

The story consists of his backstory intercut with events in the present. Obviously it was his backstory that inspired me first. When he’s finally released, sometime in 1948 probably, he walks to Germany and, failing to find any trace of his family, returns to France, ‘the only other place anyone had ever cared for me.’ That person is Marguerite, a farm worker like himself: 

I bought an old motorbike and we would take off for the coast, Marguerite having forgotten her idea that we’d never remain friends if we made love again.

Marguerite had this thing about ocean liners, could never get enough of them. So I was jealous of ocean liners, especially American ones. We would spend Sundays in Le Havre, where most of the local boys were getting piecework for rebuilding the town, working as fast as they could. Many of the houses around here were paid and families reared on the rebuilding of towns like Caen, Le Havre and St Malo. I never even tried for such jobs, content to stay with Marguerite on farms. I thought no one would have wanted me anyway, although the French were shipping in cheap labor from all over: Germany, Poland, Italy, North Africa. I just kept a low profile and stayed where I was.

On the quay at Le Havre we stood, keeping our voices down, among American soldiers leaning against American cars, waiting and wanting to go home. Their uniforms weren’t half so crisp or handsome as in the films that portrayed them. But they were better fed than us, from better-fed parents. Good teeth filled their big smiles. They smiled and waited and watched. Marguerite would watch the ships and I would watch her, in a yellow button-down dress with oranges and apples on it, watching those gigantic ships come and go, bearing glamorous passengers and other people’s dreams. Her favorite liner was the Ile de France. Back in the village she would throw her hands together like a child and describe it to friends. One Christmas I found her a poster for the Cunard line. She installed it on the wall of our first house together. By then it was the ‘60s: the crones were being silenced by new clothes, new music, new mœurs. They didn’t like us, but they had no power over us. (Plugging the Causal Breach, Regal House publishing 2019, p.21). 

https://www.regalhousepublishing.com/ 

Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write?  And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? My experience in Normandy left me sad for everyone in and around the war. I admired people’s physical and mental strength. I sensed buried rancour, as in any place ravaged by war. I loved the idea of a Franco-German post-war love affair between two people the world hadn’t managed to break. It was even sadder to imagine how difficult such a relationship might have been for them: they would probably have encountered considerable hostility.  

Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. I cannot find any trace of the actual story in notebooks I haven’t yet decommissioned. I can find lots of research about the war etc. It’s possible I wrote it straight onto the computer, because most of the elements of the story were already there in my mind. 

Has this been published?  And if yes, where? Short story first published in Prairie Schooner Vol. 86, No. 1 (SPRING 2012), pp. 132-147 (16 pages)

Published By: University of Nebraska Press

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41441671 

Now collected in Plugging the causal breach (Regal House, 2019). 

https://www.regalhousepublishing.com/product/plugging-the-causal-breach/ 

Or via Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Plugging-Causal-Breach-Mary-Byrne/dp/1947548719/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?crid=3ONQ6JM96R2W9&keywords=mary%20byrne%20plugging%20the%20casual%20beach&qid=1569343738&sprefix=mary%20byrne%2Caps%2C217&sr=8-1-fkmr0 

Biography of Mary Byrne:  “I’m a writer, a voracious reader, former editor and translator, and a recovering academic. I was born in Ireland and started life in the picturesque village of Tallanstown, Co. Louth before moving to Ardee where I attended the Mercy Convent before going to Clochar Lughaidh Gaelscoil in Monaghan. At University College Dublin I studied English and Philosophy and eventually completed an MA in Modern English and American Literature. I’ve worked in Dublin, London, Essen, Rabat, Paris and Caen and now live in Montpellier where I’m working on further collections of short fiction - and planning further travels.” (Left:  Mary Byrne.  Credit to Didier Barthelemy.  Copyright by Mary Byrne)

All of the Inside the Emotion of Fiction LIVE LINKS can be found at the VERY END of the below feature: 

http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/03/stephenson-holts-arranged-marriage-is.html 

Hope Whitby’s “Love Letter to a Stranger” is #273 in the never-ending series called BACKSTORY OF THE POEM

 *The images in this specific piece are granted copyright:  Public Domain, GNU Free Documentation Licenses, Fair Use Under The United States Copyright Law.

The other images are granted copyright permission by the copyright holder, which is identified beneath each photo. 

**Some of the links will have to be copied and then posted in your search engine in order to pull up properly

*** The CRC Blog welcomes submissions from published and unpublished poets for BACKSTORY OF THE POEM series.  Contact CRC Blog via email at caccoop@aol.com or personal Facebook messaging at https://www.facebook.com/car.cooper.7

***Hope Whitby’s “Love Letter to a Stranger” is #273 in the never-ending series called BACKSTORY OF THE POEM where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one specific poem and how the poet wrote that specific poem.  All BACKSTORY OF THE POEM links are at the end of this piece. 

 

Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form?  On June 10, 2013, I had a heart attack and spent three days in the hospital where a stent was put in. Five days later, I had a second heart attack and was rushed back to the hospital where another stent was put in because the first one failed. I have 48% heart damage. During my second stay in the hospital, someone passed away from the same condition I had, and she received the same treatment. Even though I felt very fortunate to be alive, I suffered from terrible survivor’s guilt. 

For a few months afterward, I was not writing, so when a friend offered me a spot at her writer’s retreat that November at Porches in Nelson County, VA., I went. I needed the stimulation and the encouragement. During a group journal writing session, I wrote of this person who I did not know but was in the same cardiac critical care unit and she passed away at the same time I was waking up from my procedure. 

Every morning, I would thank the powers that be for keeping me here, but I would also question those same powers on why they kept me and not her. I felt a release of some of the weight I had been carrying by writing about it and then sharing the experience aloud with other writers. When I returned from the retreat, I began pulling the poem out of the journal entry. I didn’t know at that time that it would become one of my most requested poems to be read at poetry readings. (Above Right and Left:  Writer's Retreat at Porches in Nelson County, Virginia.)

Where were you when you started to actually write the poem?  And please describe the place in great detail. On some Sundays, pre-Covid, I would take my laptop and have lunch at the café at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. The Best Café (Right) has a lovely view of sculptures, water, and mature trees. You will often see writers there writing because it is a pleasant environment. 

What month and year did you start writing this poem? I wrote the first draft of this poem in December 2013. The white Christmas lights at the museum and around it seemed to add to the spirituality of the poem. (Left: and the two below are Hope Whitby's journal entries.  Credit and Copyright by Hope Whitby)

How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?) I found the original journal entry from the journal writing class. I can share those pages. What I remember about writing this poem, was how I wrote all around the poem before I found its core or its heart. I wrote about things that didn’t happen to try to make the poem sometimes appear more dramatic or sometimes less dramatic. 

I took a break and let what I had written rest and looked at some art, and by doing that, the poem, the true poem came off the page as soon as I opened the document. I deleted everything around those lines because they were merely lines of me just talking myself through the process rather than actual lines of poetry.

Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version?  And can you share them with us? After I found the poem, I wrote the poem in 7 syllable lines so I could tighten up the language. With that version, I shared it with a writing group I belonged to at the time, where a few minor changes were made with punctuation and one line changed to 6 syllables and another one to 8. Those small changes didn’t disrupt the flow of the poem. (Right: Hope Whitby's writing space in her home.  Credit and Copyright by Hope Whitby)

What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I want the readers of my poem to come away with an understanding of my release of survivor’s guilt because I don’t have the answers to the big questions. What I would like for a writer to take away from the poem, is form. "Love Letter to a Stranger" is one stanza with twenty-three lines. I didn’t break the lines into stanzas or couplets because I didn’t want the reader to take any pauses. I wanted this poem to move along quickly as if it was happening in real-time. 

Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? The most emotional part of this poem for me to write was visualizing the stranger departing from this world and ascending to another. I am always aware that the roles in this poem could have been reversed and I could have departed. My hope is when that time comes, I would transition in a beautiful way as she did in this poem.

Has this poem been published before?  And if so where? Love Letter to a Stranger was first published in the 2015 Women Artist Datebook published by Syracuse Cultural Workers and then it was reprinted in 2019 in my first volume of poetry, Traveling the River, published by Life in 10 Minutes Press.

https://www.lifein10minutes.com/traveling-the-river-hope-whitby 

Love Letter to a Stranger

 By Hope Whitby

I was later told that at

the same time my heartbeat, lost

for moments, came back in a faint

green bleep, that you, the woman

in 4C, took your last breath.

I saw you dancing under 

the oak as the sun streamed

golden through its leaves and, Wow,

you were so happy as you

twirled while raising your arms high

above your head. The light, so 

inviting, felt warm on my 

face. And the closer I moved 

toward you, the farther you

danced away until I could

only see your figure bathed 

in white, then you were gone.

I wanted to ask, who are you?

But before my voice made sound,

I felt gentle fingers on

my shoulder bringing me back

to a room with monitors

and intravenous tubing.

https://www.hopewhitby.com/ 

Michael J. Sahno’s Whizzers is #224 in the never-ending series called INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION

 *The images in this specific piece are granted copyright:  Public Domain, GNU Free Documentation Licenses, Fair Use Under The United States Copyright Law.

The other images are granted copyright permission by the copyright holder, which is identified beneath each photo. 

**Some of the links will have to be copied and then posted in your search engine in order to pull up properly

***The CRC Blog welcomes submissions from published and unpublished fiction genre (including screenwriters and playwrights) for INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION.  Contact CRC Blog via email at caccoop@aol.com or personal Facebook messaging at https://www.facebook.com/car.cooper.7 

****Michael J. Sahno’s Whizzers is #224 in the never-ending series called INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one specific excerpt from a fiction genre and how that fiction writer wrote that specific excerpt.  

What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? Oddly, I began this novel sometime around 2000, but then set it aside. I had the first few chapters of Whizzers and Miles of Files going around the same time, and eventually put all my effort into finishing Miles of Files. It wasn’t until I’d finished and published my first three novels—Brothers’ Hand, Jana, and Miles of Files—that I committed to completing Whizzers. So even though the first few chapters date all the way back to 2000, the majority of the book was written between 2018 and 2019.

Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work?  And please describe in detail.  And can you please include a photo?  Since I began running Sahno Publishing full-time in 2016, I’ve worked entirely from my home office on an iMac. With the exception of those first few chapters mentioned above, written in another location, all or Whizzers came to being here. Not much to describe, either. It’s a pretty bare-bones setup facing away from the window in order to avoid distractions! 

What were your writing habits while writing this work—did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? I listen to instrumental music almost all the time when writing fiction—typically jazz, ambient, or electronic. If it’s morning, I might be drinking coffee; afternoon, anything from water to Thai tea. Although I composed my first couple novels by hand before transferring them to print, I wrote both Miles of Files and Whizzers entirely on iMac.  

My wheelhouse for composition runs from afternoon through mid-evening, but I do my best editing in the morning and have been known to write the occasional bit of a scene right before bedtime.

Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference.  This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. This scene runs from pp. 163-68 of Whizzers. I feel like it should include a trigger warning: bullying, homophobic slurs, profanity, etc. It’s the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever written, but it was even more heartbreaking when I experienced the abuse in the scene.

I can’t see any point in hanging around here longer than necessary, so I just go for the door right away. It opens onto a scene I never expected. Instead of a generic parking lot for a standard issue hotel, outside the door is a church. The room I’m leaving is within a school, as if it were a classroom. It makes no sense, but then, not much seems to make sense anymore. I haven’t even shaken off the experience in the hospital, and now this.

Even more shocking, I’m instantly aware it’s winter here and I’m dressed in a heavy coat, pants, gloves, and hat. I wasn’t wearing them a moment ago—was I? I don’t think so. The jarring effect of the view of the church and the school behind me almost makes me dizzy. I feel sick. I try to open the door again, retreat into the room, but it’s locked.

I know the school, of course. I know the church. It’s St. Joseph’s, Bristol, Connecticut. I don’t even have to guess the timeframe or reason: it’s late 1977 or early 1978. This was my junior high. That church, St. Joseph’s, has a small cemetery attached to it. I can see a few headstones from here. Another six or seven years from this time and my grandmother and grandfather will be buried here.

My breath comes in short bursts of steam as the wave of sadness and rage comes over me. I already know exactly why I’m here, although there’s not a soul around. I’m going to see, and maybe try to somehow comfort, the thirteen-year-old version of myself.

Early adolescence can be the hardest, most turbulent time in life, and mine was no exception. It was incredibly painful because I made a simple error in judgment: after I discovered masturbation, I told another kid about it.

He took my confiding in him as some kind of sexual threat. He decided I must be gay to make such a confession. And when he told all the other boys in the class, they believed him.

This is the time I’m revisiting now. I’m sure of it. Within the space of a few days, I go from a friendly, popular kid to an absolute pariah. Every boy in that class knows me as the masturbator—none of them do it, of course—and they’re convinced I’m gay as well.

Denying it means it must be true. Denying it only makes things worse. I’m attacked in class, attacked on the blacktop basketball court.

I have to fight for my life.

When another of the building’s metal doors flies open and boys pour out onto the cold blacktop in their white shirts and green pants and ties, I stand watching in silence. I’m not usually invisible in these visits to the past, but today I can’t help thinking I must be. What purpose could it serve otherwise? I doubt I’m going to be the adult breaking up children fighting.

Sure enough, this is it—the day I’m attacked on the playground. Ironic word in this situation. There’s no play here, and the ground is covered by this hard, icy blacktop beneath our feet. The boys spill out into a whirling dervish of malice. The shape of this mob is like that of an octopus, swarming and falling in on itself. I hear the words, words misapplied to me, and my outrage rises far beyond just for myself. It’s for all the abused, all the broken, all the damned.

“Fucking faggot.”

“You’re a fucking pussy, man.”

And then I see myself, the teenaged me, in the middle of that savage group of thirteen. The dreadful bowl haircut so popular to the time, and a look in my eyes that I can’t describe as anything other than devastated.

“Leave me alone,” I hear Michael say. “You guys are full of shit.”

Not a single adult around, not even a nun. They have turned this little mob loose outside without a thought of supervision. This must be their only respite from them, a fifteen-minute recess where the little monsters can do as they like. The girls in our class are nowhere to be seen, and I suppose that meant they had a separate recess from us boys. I don’t recall anything about it. So much my mind has blocked, mercifully.

The mob swirls around, and at length I see a boy hit me. My own adult body winces in sympathy pain. It was horrific enough to be that victim, surrounded by a group, in the full knowledge there wasn’t a single friend among them. Yet watching it happen is somehow worse. The outrage in my heart makes the ringing in my ears jump from an eight to a ten.

Michael hits back, but without success. The kid is rangy, taller, longer arms. He’s outmatched, like a boxer with a shorter reach. The mob is almost irrelevant, I can see, though I know it didn’t feel that way.

I step forward, meaning to intervene if I can somehow. And in that moment, I feel a small hand up against my leg.

It’s David, appearing to me for the first time in this brutal tableau, though I have no idea how long he’s been here. He holds up the hand and shakes his head no. I see him mouth the words, It’s okay.

It’s not okay. But I understand now—I can’t move. I’m frozen here, powerless to intervene. I can’t change the course of history one iota. For once, I can’t even talk to any of them.

My heart pounds as I look back to the awful scene before me. Like so many teenage fights, the mob is egging it on, but no one cheers for Michael. The kid hits him again, and then they tussle, an ugly flurry of hooded jackets and flying arms. I know what’s coming, but when it happens, it’s still a shock: the bully pulls Michael’s hood, my hood, over my face. Blows rain down, blows unseen.

But now I see them as they happen. And I see what I couldn’t have seen at the time: the ugly mob of jeering boys cheers the bully on as he fights dirtier. Fists pumping into the air.

“Yeah, get him. Fuck him up.”

I watch the small body sag as little Michael surrenders. He falls, every last bit of fight bullied, beaten, out of him.

The crowd scatters. Back to normal. Who cares? Forget that kid.

At last, David’s hand drops. I look at him and notice that he’s translucent again.

And so am I.

David nods, and I understand somehow what I have to do. It’s the only thing I can do.

I walk to the boy, the small, crumpled figure. His face is red—distorted with rage, shame, silent tears. I hold my translucent hand up and wipe the tears from his eyes. I wrap my arms around him in a hug that he can neither feel nor return.

Then I, too, begin to cry.

Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write?  And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? This scene recreates an incident from seventh grade, when I was not only bullied, but surrounded by all my male classmates, egging on the boy who started the fight. Rarely had I ever felt so alone and despairing. It was, quite literally, me against all of them.

By the time I finished Whizzers, I’d already completed three novels and a short story collection, but never with an autobiographical scene as potent as this. When I finished the first draft of the scene, I broke down and cried. And when I first edited the book from start to finish, this scene made me cry again. For context, I don’t typically cry more than once or twice every few years.

Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything like that. My editor made a few punctuation suggestions, but nothing that would really be interesting to see.

Anything you would like to add? I appreciate the opportunity to share this, and I'm always happy to answer additional questions from readers if I can.

Before he became a publisher or even a writer, Mike Sahno was a speaker. "I started talking at a very young age, and would engage strangers in conversation from my perch in the shopping cart," he says with a chuckle. "They'd look at my mother and say, How old is he?"

Sahno began reading before he'd even been taught his ABCs, much to the surprise of his family.

"My parents were always great about reading to me, and I guess I decoded the language from looking at the words," he explains. "This was in an era when they didn't teach you to read until first grade – it was See Spot run, 'Dick and Jane,' all that stuff.

"One night my grandmother was reading the newspaper, and I started reading an article about the Cincinnati Reds out loud to her. She thought I was making it up until she looked down and saw I was reading it word for word. That got everyone's attention."

Sahno also began writing stories at an early age. In high school and college, he was Editor-in-Chief of the campus literary magazine. The quality of his work led to multiple awards and honors. After earning his Bachelor’s from Lynchburg College, he went on to complete his Master’s in English from Binghamton University at the age of 24.

Sahno served in management positions for several companies, including Director at a market research firm, and Assistant Vice President at a Tampa mortgage company. He also taught composition at the college level.

He became a full-time professional writer in 2001 and, in the following years, wrote more than 1,000 marketing articles on a wide range of topics. His delivery of quality copy put him in high demand across the southeastern United States, and several of his articles won Addy Awards in 2008 and 2010.

Since founding Sahno Publishing in 2015, he has gone on to achieve national and international recognition, gaining over 25,000 followers on Twitter and publishing and selling three novels both in the U.S. and abroad. Sahno has ghostwritten books for entrepreneurs in the U.S., and continues to electrify audiences with his story and his natural gift for entertaining while informing. He is available for professional speaking engagements upon request.

https://msahno.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sahno/

https://twitter.com/MikeSahno 

Paypal: info@msahno.com

Venmo: @Michael-Sahno

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07SNGWB9V

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Whizzers-Paperback-9781944173104/176408592

https://books.apple.com/us/book/x/id1467299561

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1131955183

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/whizzers-1

All of the Inside the Emotion of Fiction LIVE LINKS can be found at the VERY END of the below feature: 

http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/03/stephenson-holts-arranged-marriage-is.html 

Rye Aker’s “A Penance of Sundays” is #272 in the never-ending series called BACKSTORY OF THE POEM

 *The images in this specific piece are granted copyright:  Public Domain, GNU Free Documentation Licenses, Fair Use Under The United States Copyright Law.

The other images are granted copyright permission by the copyright holder, which is identified beneath each photo. 

**Some of the links will have to be copied and then posted in your search engine in order to pull up properly

*** The CRC Blog welcomes submissions from published and unpublished poets for BACKSTORY OF THE POEM series.  Contact CRC Blog via email at caccoop@aol.com or personal Facebook messaging at https://www.facebook.com/car.cooper.7

***Rye Aker’s “A Penance of Sundays” is #272 in the never-ending series called BACKSTORY OF THE POEM where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one specific poem and how the poet wrote that specific poem.  All BACKSTORY OF THE POEM links are at the end of this piece. 

  

Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? I arrived in the beautiful city of Galway, Ireland in late 2019 to cover in poetry the European Capital of Culture programme for my publisher. My plan was to spend a year in marvel at the wonderful programme of events the Galway 2020 people had scheduled.  I made some great friends from a time when I was in Ireland in 2014, so they brought me to sport and culture and eating out and many nights drinking and singing. They told me I should go to Catholic Novena over nine days. There were three masses every day, but they did not say I only had to go to one each day, so in nine days I went to 27 masses. This made my friends laugh a lot.  But I got to meet many people who were elderly and I had tea and buttery scones in a cafe near the river after every Mass. The connection between this and my chosen poem A Penance of Sundays was the great faith they had and the concept of if you had any misfortune in life, you ‘offer it up’ as penance. There I got the name for it because Lockdown saw Ireland’s streets reduced to the silence there used to be 40 years earlier when nothing happened. It also gave me a sense of what these people would be missing during lockdown which helped me to write other poems.

In Ireland, people look back to the summer Sundays of childhood because they evoke memories of sunny days and Gaelic football matches with a commentator called Micheal O Hehir (Left) who had an inimitable high pitched voice. This voice and the mention of it, raises the memories for the Irish people. So too, did the concept of going to Mass and having a traditional dinner of potatoes and meat and peas and dessert of jelly.  The old Irish Sundays were timeless and represented a simpler time. The possibility of lockdown represented a throwback to those simpler times and I wanted my poem to mirror the reality of that. I think it succeeded.

Where were you when you started to actually write the poem?  And please describe the place in great detail. I was in my rented cottage in Galway. It is a very cosy place where the big fireplace dominates the room, throwing orange light around the room. I had just been talking on Skype to my friend Seamus and his wife Maureen and we were trying to encourage each other about the possibility to maintaining our sanity through the next ten weeks of lockdown, same day after same day. I think they were feeling sorry for me because I would be on my own with no event to go to. But I knew that I would be fine and that isolation would be good for me. Three months earlier, I put my mobile phone away and I knew that this would like a Robinson Crusoe time for me. When the solitude would spark inspiration in my mind. The Irish people have wonderful language, as in the the wonderful English words that give great meaning to their sayings. Like when they say “I will yeah,” that means “I won’t.” Or “I will in me hole,” means we won’t.

In the year since I have been here, I have found a richness in the words that I am keen to explore. I live a simple life. I eschew public readings and my telephone. I offer my poems to charity so that the karma of goodness will come back to me. And it has. I have been treated with wonderful kindness. I publish my books and I live on what they bring me. So I have an incentive to write and to sell and if they don’t I sense a failure as a failure of the words. So far, I have lived frugally and happily. Many people have thought that I was part of the European Capital of Culture programme, and not that I was an independent poet who came to record the momentous year. Alas, many of the events did not happen so I had to find myself a different purpose for being here in Galway.  I have written poems for national organisations and books while I have been here. So my work is resonating, I think. (Above Left: Catholic Novena.)

What month and year did you start writing this poem? I started the poem on March 29 and wrote it over one night. I recall going to sleep happy with it and in the morning I took to it again and then a few hours later, I posted it on my twitter account and went for a walk. When I came back I was amazed with the response. I had more than 10,000 views by the end of that day. I do that with all of my poems. I make my notes and my research and then I start the writing of it. My friends, let me tell you, get rid of your phones and the words will flow. I love to interact with my readers online, but I discipline myself to shut it off as soon as my purpose of posting my poem is complete. (Right: Dublin at Lockdown)

How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?) I had just the one draft. Any changes in the morning were just stylistic. I do not do many drafts. I like my poems to be written with a sense of just baked, you see. I have compiled a collection of more than 400 Irish sayings and expressions. I think that some day I might write about these in a book because they are funny. But I want to use as many of them in my work. I often ask my readers what a word means. I write my poems straight into my laptop. I have written more than 120 poems since I came to Galway one year ago, and I intend for most of these to be posted and published before I leave. If I ever leave. (Left: Place where Rye Aker wrote "A Penance of Sundays" Credit and Copyright by Rye Aker)

What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I knew that my first few poems needed to make a subliminal connection with the Irish people so I used images of times past that would resonate with the readers. 

I wanted to create a sense of time, slow time, not fast time like we have now. Slow time where it drags and stays in your memory. I have such memories from a small village in Holland. Perhaps they were not innocent times but when you are looking at life through the rear-view mirrors, it seems magic and slowed-down, almost static. This slowed-down static feel is what I wanted to achieve in my poem A Penance of Sundays.  As if the penance of months of lockdown was a sort of punishment or discipline that we would have to go through before life turns normal again. I had had many readers who say that this poem resonated with them because of that. (Right: Opening film scene of THE RIORDANS)

Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? I made questions to my Irish friends about what Sundays were like when they were in their childhood. It was interesting to see what rich memories they had. There was one television channel in Ireland in the 1970s and everybody watched the programmes. There was one soap opera The Riordans (above left) where the theme music at the end used to send chills down the spines of the children who would not have their homework done for school. The lines which moved me were the “Old Irish Sundays had a lot of nothing, so we sat around and devoured it.” The reaction to the poem was very moving too, more so for native Irish people who lived through those long hot summer childhoods and who saw the same nothing ness in those warm sunny days of early lockdown in the summer of 2020. (Left: Gabriel Byrne who appeared in THE RIORDANS)

Has this poem been published before?  And if so where? The poem has been published in my 2020 collection Fifty Akers —A Penance of Sundays, Galway Collection Vol 1, which contained 50 poems from my first year in Galway, Ireland. The book went on sale in August 2020 and sold well. The second collection 100 Akers — The Man With The Clock Galway Collection Vol 2 is due to be published in March 2021. I had intended to be leaving Ireland in this time because the Galway 2020 year was to be complete, but I have been so happy here that I am to stay until this changes, which I hope will be a long time away.

A Penance of Sundays

(Reflection on a Galway lockdown)

Think of it like a hundred Sundays,

Seamus says to me down the skype.

Not modern Sundays, but old Sundays.

Old Irish Sundays, me little 

non-rhyming Dutchman friend.

Old Sundays where nothing moved

‘cept the marrowfat peas on the Sunday roast

and the volume dial to bring that summer Sunday

sound of gladiators in some field;

Batin’ into each other 

feeding O Hehir’s excited prose

Modern Sundays have shopping centres 

and Sky Sports and brunch 

where luvvies clutch the pearls

while devouring newspaper supplements

covered in crumbs of toasted brioche.

Old Irish Sundays had a lot of nothing 

So we sat around and devoured it.

Car-less, we walked, slowly, like everyone

did in those days, not fast like now.

We contemplated 

inhaling the sweet incense 

of evening benediction, hugging pews

hours after our morning sweat had dried.

Days of chops and jelly and custard

and Spot The Ball and Pub Spy 

to the air of a Glenroe tune that sent chills

down the spine of all who hadn’t

Read their scothscealta or Frank O’Connor.

This is like those Sundays. 

Every day an old Irish Sunday.

An endurance test of our forbearance. 

A penance to be endured.

A medical act of contrition from this side 

of the mesh. 

’Tis like the priest said, ye’ll do

A hundred Irish Sundays 

and then you’ll be cleansed.

All of the Backstory of the Poem LIVE LINKS can be found at the VERY END of the below feature: 

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David Blair’s “For Dion in Belmont” is #271 in the never-ending series called BACKSTORY OF THE POEM

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***David Blair’s “For Dion in Belmont” is #271 in the never-ending series called BACKSTORY OF THE POEM where the Chris Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one specific poem and how the poet wrote that specific poem.  All BACKSTORY OF THE POEM links are at the end of this piece. (Below Left: David Blair in March of 2021.  Copyright by David Blair) 

Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? I wrote the first draft of this poem in my notebook in the spring of 2017. It was May, and the semester was finally over, so I could spend a lot of time just being outside and looking at stuff. A few mornings, I sat in this old-fashioned bakery and drank coffee after dropping my daughter after school, and I was able to really clock the decor, which reminded me of other old bakeries I remembered. (Above Right:  David Blair (middle) with friends Jim and Danielle. Copyright by David Blair)

      

I was cheering myself up with was the sound of how we rag on our friends and our friends rag on us, and somehow I remembered two things. One was a picture of Dion from Dion and the Belmonts come back to Arthur Avenue for a photo shoot to publicize a new album in say 1990 or so, and he had this big five piece newsboy hat on in front of Full Moon Pizza, and I realized I was returning to a draft of a poem about girls working in bakeries with crazy long nails that I had tried to write years before about old-fashioned bakeries in the Bronx. I also remembered how I once got big laughs on the street wearing some unfortunate shoes.

        

Then I threw the poem about for two years. I stopped looking at it until I was putting together the final manuscript of my book Barbarian Seasons in the summer of 2019. (Right:  David Blair in Summer of 2019.  Copyright by David Blair.)  

Most of the work I did on that manuscript in the end was on the book's closing sequence, and on tightening up the free-verse prosody techniques in different poems—things I could point out and explain working on both individual lines and individual groups of lines, but which I don't necessarily want the reader to think about as much as to feel as palpable, if unsettling. 

The last part of the last sequence uses "sprung rhythm" in a way that calls attention to itself, so I made the middle of the poem, which I saw as a bridge to the end of the book, work the same way just about.

Where were you when you started to actually write the poem?  And please describe the place in great detail. I was in Somerville when I began to write the poem. The thing I like about Somerville (Below Right: Davis Square in Somerville)  is that it is a good place to walk, and it has a lot of old pockets of strange buildings and a feeling that it is layered by time. It's like walking in my head sometimes. 

The bakery reminding me of old bakeries in the Bronx and Pittsburgh is a good example of this.  In a way, I think poems are written in parts all over as you see various things. So I saw those egrets on the edge of Pelham Bay toxic dump site from a Bx12 bus heading to City Island, I don't know, thirty years ago, remembered a thousand times, different windows. And I noticed the bronze egg with peppermint spring in May of 2017. Poems are written where they are. 

How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?) Somewhere in a stack of 68 or so chemistry notebooks I have my original handwritten draft of the poem. The first version was 229 words, the second  149 words, and the published version 126 words. The final version is 15 lines long, and in some respects, it has sonnet-like qualities. It's not a sonnet, but it alludes to the sonnet. (Left: Rough Draft 001 of "For Dion in Belmont" by David Blair.  Credit and Copyright by David Blair)

For instance, there are three quatrains, only the poem ends with a quatrain. The first two stanzas function as an octet, and the last two stanzas are a single sentence, so they function as single unit, almost like a sestet, only seven lines. I thought about making it into a sonnet, but it felt right to resist the impulse, to let the poem go out of time within time, all its allusions, sitcoms and songs and forms, its overheard valences, like passing under the clock built into theatrical doorway to the ovens. 

One of the best ways of using form is resist it particularly if you are using form as a way of expressing and finding emotion. Expressive formal technique is somewhat different than replicating pattern—which is how some people sensibly regard any kind of form—but actually form can mean shifting patterns, mutability, breaking, reassembling, departing, arriving, or whatever, according to the emotional content or message of a piece as we make or discover this as we go along. I like to make small changes to a number of poems every day, and over the months and years, the poems change in an unforced way.  

What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? Primarily, I think of poems as modes of experience and processes rather than message machines, but I want readers to have a sense of life's amazing strangeness and that readers should have a sense of increased receptiveness to people, animals, plants, foods, feelings, places and things, and I want readers to have a sense that these experiences can be known personally and shared. (Above Right: The Rhyme Scheme of a Shakespearean Sonnet.)

Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? I really was happy when I realized that the there was a shift in the sonic qualities in the second stanza and I had a groove on, like a good break going, and the rest of the poem would have a musical aspect. Generally, what I feel when I am writing is happiness. Even if I am writing about something terrible, there is a baseline of happiness to be using language and making images and all that, sometimes resisting the glooms that might be requiring some cathartic happiness or physicality.  

Has this poem been published before?  And if so where? A poem from Barbarian Seasons by David Blair, MadHat Books, 2020

For Dion in Belmont

 

The Napoleons got theatrical. 

The bakery surrounded me with cakes

years after when I got along

with an invisible transistor

and getting called Hey-Boom-Boom-Washington, nice hat, ah, walk on.

Dull bronze eggs of peppermint-striped string dispensers hung on chains

level with a modish clock built into the paneling above an egress. 

I saw snowy egrets by the dump on the edge of Pelham Bay Park. The hunt.  

And in a dark night the bread-only bakery was open and windowless,

its doorframe full of bare bulbs, no fluorescence, and the crust 

would rivulet into floury cracks,

the gush that swells and dissolves

with traces of peppery dust, fresh. 

In the morning, the girls had nail extensions

with glue-on rhinestones on them like spaceships.

David Blair lives and works around Boston. Thomas Lux chose his first book of poetry, Ascension Days, for the Del Sol Poetry Prize in 2007. His second book, Friends with Dogs, was a Must-Read Selection for the Massachusetts Book Awards, and his third book, Arsonville, was published as part of the Green Rose Prize Series by New Issues Poetry & Prose. A graduate of Fordham University and the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Blair has taught in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire, and in the online master's degree program in creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University. MadHat Press published his new collection of poetry, Barbarian Seasons, in 2020. www.davidblairpoetry.com (Above Left: David Blair in March of 2021. Copyright by David Blair)

All of the Backstory of the Poem LIVE LINKS can be found at the VERY END of the below feature: 

http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/02/will-justice-drakes-intercession-is-251.html