In the Spotlight: Shoshana Razel Gordon-Guedalia

“I believe that my writing, be it scholarly, fiction, narrative non-fiction, or poetry, comes from a deep need to make a difference, to offer a lens that is not being appreciated.” Here, Shoshana Razel Gordon-Guedalia discusses her explorations through writing. You can read her experimental story, “A Hike,” in volume XXXV of The Worcester Review.


First of all, what got you into writing?

Well, if I think back, I suppose I can trace this to several things. For one thing, my home was one of storytelling. My grandparents were partisans in the woods of Belarus during the Holocaust, and I grew up on their war stories as well as their pre-war stories, told to me again and again in their melodious Yiddish, which was my first language. I also have strong memories of falling asleep to the sound of my father typing his doctoral thesis in Jewish philosophy on his old typewriter. I guess you could say that writing was like a lullaby to me in that way. Also, my parents both loved poetry. They both wrote poetry, and I remember reading poetry of many different kinds with them.

I wrote my first poem when I was ten. We had just moved to Israel from New York, and I felt torn between homes. So I wrote about it. I should say that while I wrote informally over the years, it was Paul Harding who first taught me how to write fiction.

Could you discuss how Paul Harding influenced you as a writer?


One summer, I think it was 2007, here in Newton, Massachusetts, where I've lived for years now, I decided to try my hand at a fiction writing course at Harvard Summer School. To my delight, my professor Paul really loved my writing and helped mold me as a writer. Paul embraced my style of writing, which can be rather associative. (By associative, I mean non-linear.) He helped me to stay in touch with my writerly instincts and let my writing flow with the characters’ voices leading the way. He also taught me the value of close attention to descriptive detail. He would often caution me that a good writer writes simply and precisely and that from such vivid description of what is, the deeper ideas emerge. Paul also assuaged my fear of allowing religion and political strife to enter my writing. He encouraged me to write from empathy no matter what I write about—which I like to think I do anyway—in which case, everything is allowed as long as it comes from empathy and human truth. I love that I am Orthodox Jewish and that I call him Rebbe. He us very much my rabbi.

A year or two later, John Canaday helped mold me as a poet. His award-winning book of poetry, The Invisible World, written based on his time living in Jordan and teaching the children of the king and queen, taught me a lot about empathy and the imbibing of a new culture. John also taught me a lot about different poetic styles with which he urged me to experiment. I credit him with teaching me that form need not hamper creative expression but can, in fact, deepen its effect.

The greatly political poet Pablo Neruda once said, "Poetry is an act of peace." What is your response to this? Considering your genre-bending piece in TWR and your other writings, do you consider yourself a political poet? What do you believe poetry's role in politics is?

from Volume 34: A poem by Jennifer Freed

Jennifer Freed

 

Lessons

 

 

If you were that woman, sitting

every Friday in the public library, one week working

through the who and how and why

of simple questions whispering from your tutor’s lips,

the next week learning price and pay and sale and save

and How much does it cost?—

if you were that woman,

then you, too,

would ask for repetition of bag and back and bank,

of leave and leaf and left and live,

and you would struggle to produce the English sounds

that held the meanings you still held

inside your head: the dappled murmuring of leaves

outside your childhood home, the trees

full of sweet yellow fruit you could not name in this new life,

the lives you left so you could live,

and as you moved your lips in all the unfamiliar ways

to make the sounds your tutor made, she would nod

and you would smile, but you would never

write, for you’d not yet know how

to form or read those fast, firm letters you watched pouring from her hand,

and so you’d have no way to store what you had learned

except in memory and hope,

alongside memories of why you’d never needed written words

in your native world, where your mother had taught you all the skills

of planting and harvesting and weaving and singing that you would ever need

for living in a lush, good place,

and alongside memories

of gunfire echoing beyond the trees,

of rebels begging for or stealing food,

of soldiers from some distant city standing in your

village, barking about loyalty

and able-bodied men,

and then the memories

of jungle paths for five long nights,

of sharing food and whispered hope with others who had dared

to flee,

and the memories of the daughter and the son, both

born and grown high as your eye in the refugee camp on the border.

The English words would nestle in amidst

all this,

get lost, be found again, and you would have to try

to pull them out but leave the rest behind, try

to let the new sounds tell you 

not only the hard-edged names and places

of this brick and concrete life, 

but also how to live in it:

how to take

a city bus, how to

pay for

light, 

and you would sit again, again, again

in a mauve chair at a round table in the library, 

amidst the shelves and worlds

of words,

struggling with your who and how and why,

and you would not allow yourself

to figure how much it had cost

or how much you still had to pay.

You would just smile and thank your tutor,

and come back

next Friday.

In the Spotlight: Jennifer L. Freed, poet

Photo credit: Sharon Freed

As an English Second Language teacher and teacher-trainer, Jennifer L. Freed currently volunteers her time to help resettled refugees in the Worcester area learn English. Her poem, "Lessons," which appears in The Worcester Review Volume XXXIV, is at first glance a response to those who wonder why it takes so "long" for someone to learn the English language, but ultimately, it is to get into the mindset of a person who struggles to overcome the language barrier.  




Was “Lessons” based on a personal experience?

Before having children, I worked as an ESL teacher not only here in the U.S. but also in China and the Czech Republic. Since 2010 I've been volunteering as an English tutor for refugees who've been resettled in the Worcester area. The poem comes from all that background. More specifically, though, it was inspired by a few of those refugees. I didn't want to name them or their country because I didn't want to limit the poem to those specific women only, or even to people from their country only; the many difficulties of learning a new language, especially when you do not come from a culture that allowed you much of an education, would be the same for all of us. Add culture shock and the burden of past traumatic experiences, and the task is far harder than many people in the U.S. might imagine.

How did you decide that the subject of learning a language was something you wanted to write about for your poem?

The refugees I have been tutoring know how to weave their own clothes, how to build a home out of bamboo, how to grow their own food. But none of those skills serve them here in their new lives. Upon arriving in this country, they not only had to find a way to support themselves in what is to them an alien place, but also to learn an entirely new language.

Yet I've met people who, in spite of having sympathy and good will toward immigrants, nevertheless don’t understand why it may take so “long” to become proficient in English. The poem was my response to that.

You've written about your experiences in China and The Czech Republic. Did living in other countries influence the poem?

Yes, especially my time in China. When we English teachers arrived there, none of us had any ability to speak Chinese. We were told we would have a chance to learn the language when we arrived at the university where we were to work, but our promised Chinese instructors never materialized.

In addition, we were fairly isolated from Chinese people, presumably for political reasons. We were in a separate dorm for foreigners only, and visitors had to sign in at a guard’s desk, which may be why we had very few visitors. We had our meals separately too, just the five of us in a little dining hall set across the campus from the student cafeteria. We never got to mingle with or even meet the rest of the university faculty. So, for most of a year, we mainly interacted only with each other—and, in a very formal, controlled way, using English only, with our students during class. We had to ask how to say various useful phrases—“I want...,” “I don’t understand…,” “how much…,” and so we learned how to do practical things—how to count money, to order our favorite soup from a street vendor, to mail a letter home—but other than that, we had little opportunity to deal with Chinese people, and they didn't seek us out.

So I had the experience, right out of college, of hearing the sound of foreign speech all around me, and yet of having no entry into it. You don’t just “pick it up” by being in its midst. If you do not have a community of people who can interact with you in the new language in any kind of patient, daily, sustained way—as immigrants often do not—then the sound of that language becomes like traffic sounds. We all tune out what is unintelligible to us. So in the right (or wrong) circumstances, it is surprisingly natural to live in a foreign place and yet not learn its speech.

From Volume 34: A poem by Jaydn DeWald

Jaydn DeWald            

 

The One Time I Saw Monk Playing at Minton’s

 

 

He looked like a drunk hammering on a typewriter. Me and Corwell in gray silk suits, black-on-black shirts, and Butcher Boys shoes. Cigars and whiskies and little hotties on our shoulders. Did his “angular rhythms clash like gods in the smoke overhead”? Come on, kid, I wasn’t even listening.

In the Spotlight: Jaydn DeWald, poet

Jazz. The theme for Volume XXXIV of The Worcester Review. Jaydn DeWald titles his poem after the famous jazz pianist and composer, Thelonious Monk who played at Minton's Playhouse in New York.

The Worcester Review: Why did you decide to write "The One Time I Saw Monk Playing at Minton's" in open form rather than something else?

Jaydn DeWald: Because [it] is the product of an assignment—Write a piece of prose in 50 words or less—put to me by my terrific friend and fellow writer Kyle Bilinski (whose work can be found here: http://kylebilinski.weebly.com). There was far less freedom, less openness, involved than one might expect. But I feel impelled to mention that, for me, “open form” poetry, or “free verse,” tends to produce too many choices, too many possible (and equally alluring) paths. Preferring my choices to be fewer and more susceptible to the vagaries of chance, I almost always adhere to some self-imposed requirement(s), whether traditional (rhyme, meter, syllabics) or non- (lipogram, found poetry, N+7).

Furthermore, since we’re on the subject of jazz, I find it somewhat odd that “free jazz”—the music equivalent of free verse, one might argue—should be reserved for our most virtuosic and most eccentric musicians (the Ornette Colemans and Cecil Taylors among us), while verse libre should be so ubiquitous and, in general, dull.

TWR: Did you actually see Monk perform live himself at Minton’s? Or was the inspiration for the poem the desire to experience the music from a perspective of that time period?

JD: Monk died in ’82, the year before I was born, so I never had the opportunity to see him perform live at all, much less at Minton’s Playhouse—the club Miles dubbed “the bebop laboratory”—where he (Monk) served as house pianist during most of World War II.

For better or worse, I also think it’s impossible for me to “experience the music from a perspective of that time period.” While I can appreciate the historical freshness of the bebop vocabulary, for instance, I would struggle to hear its historical freshness; it even strikes me, in certain moods, as quaint.

More precisely, “The One Time I Saw Monk Playing at Minton’s” is a quick exploration of conflicting interests and temperaments: the juxtaposition of a jazz enthusiast (“Did [Monk’s] ‘angular rhythms clash like gods in the smoke overhead?’”) and a stereotypical club-goer (“Cigars and whiskies and little hotties on our shoulders”).

TWR: Do you enjoy writing about the small moments in life as you did with “The One Time I Saw Monk Playing at Minton’s?” If so, is there a particular reason as to why that is?

JD: I do like to write about small moments, particularly moments of fantastic, life-altering interiority in which nothing, outside of a person’s mind, happens. Lyric poetry often seems to have been created for, or to have arisen out of, these moments, and though it’s unfashionable to admit it, I tend to think of myself as writing old-fashioned lyric poems.

Poet Interview: Lisa Taylor

Each post on Lisa Taylor's blog is a story; they are "observations about the ordinary and extraordinary in literature, life, and teaching."  Taylor encourages people to expand their creativity. She believes poetry is written from a deep emotional and personal place and fiction is from the imagination. Sometimes people need to slow down in order to analyze and appreciate those life's moments' importance. Two of her works, Necessary Silence (2013) and The Other Side of Longing (2011) have been published Syracuse University Press.

Do you remember the first poem or creative story you wrote? Did you ever go back to them for revisions? What were your thoughts upon your return to them?

I began writing at age 12. My first effort was a poem called “The Storm.” My sixth grade teacher put it up on the bulletin board. In high school, I won first prize in the National Scholastic Writing Awards for poetry. I wasn't very good at revision then. Now I’m an ardent reviser of my work, going through sometimes thirty or more drafts before I consider something worthy. Even then, I’m often dissatisfied. When I look at what I wrote as a child or a teenager, I think it is clumsy but still representative of my love affair with language. I came from a family where I was read poetry. My father was a visual artist who loved poetry and literature. My mother was an English teacher.

You wrote on your website that “[w]riting matters because it is how we communicate.” In this time and age, people are short-cutting through writing by abbreviating or shortening words, particularly in the dimension of texting. What do you think of the world we live in where technology is constantly developing and texting is the fastest way for people to communicate? Is texting defined as writing, talking, or both? Or something else entirely?

I feel encouraged by the trend of texting because it is getting people to write more. As a professor, I do not accept texting shortcuts as writing, but as a person in the world, I appreciate it because I have always found writing easier than speaking. I think technology will continue to redefine our methods of communication and I’m okay with that. Communication has changed throughout history. That said, I will always prefer letters to emails, and I am saddened that the process of sending someone a letter is quickly disappearing.

As we live in a fast-paced world. I know that for you poetry is one way of slowing down. How do you suggest others take a moment and jot down their thoughts and feelings? 

Poetry is not only a way to slow down; it is also a way to encourage observation. We miss so much in our fast-paced lives. I don’t believe that a person has to be a writer to benefit from writing. Some people keep journals or jot down poems without any desire to publish or even share their work. Creativity can be cultivated, and really, it is necessary to keep pace with the changes in our culture. The employers of tomorrow will want employees who can think critically and creatively, and becoming a good observer and writer are skills that can benefit everyone. Reading, analyzing what you see and read, and writing are ways to develop critical thinking and creativity.

As a creative writer and poet, is the emotional truth the same for both prose and poetry? Or does it vary? 

Emotional truth simply means that my first allegiance is to the emotional viability of a situation rather than the literal truth. The emotions must feel authentic, revealing some aspect of human nature. It is less important that anything else in the story or poem be plausible. I do think poetry allows for more leeway with experimentation. It is a very different process for me than fiction. To me, poetry comes from a deeply emotional place while fiction is completely the work of the imagination. There is something very freeing about writing fiction. I can create characters who bear no resemblance to anyone I know.

Can you talk about the fiction you’re currently working on? Is there a correlation between your creative stories?

I am currently working on a collection of short stories as well as a novel. My short stories have a range of topics and settings but one thing that is consistent about my writing is my fascination for unreliable narrators and the complexity of deception people can unleash on each other. One of the stories in my collection came from a painting by an artist I met at Vermont Studio Center in 2012. My narrators range from a recently deceased young man to a teenager meeting her absent father after ten years to a woman whose dreams reveal brutal truths. My novel is a character-driven love story between two childhood friends from different backgrounds who meet again twenty years later. I use an experimental narrative form with repeated lines, some from his wounded past or her memories. PTSD, the Vietnam War, mental illness, and the changing definition of family all play a part in this story. I am about halfway done with the first draft.

The Worcester Review would like to thank Lisa Taylor for her time to participate in the interview and her contribution to the publication. 

From Volume 34: A poem by Lisa Taylor

Lisa C. Taylor

 

Cathedral of Shadows

 

 

The saddest lies

are ones we tell ourselves.

 

Church doors

inviting the disillusioned

 

who imagine

 

answers rest

in the chisel of stone

or lead seams on cobalt blue.

 

Eyes follow, someone

is speaking; we decipher

 

the language which sounds

both familiar and unfamiliar.

 

Does truth speak in tongues?

 

Ask the windows looking out

on the shifting shoulder

of day. Each step

 

leading us closer

to the mirrored hall,

cathedral of shadows.

 

One woman lifts a bronze arm,

another has no mouth

 

but we hear

a psalm; her name.

We chant liturgy,

disguise ourselves with veils,

fickle light.

Poet Interview: Brian Simoneau

Brian Simoneau, a contributor to Volume XXXIV of The Worcester Review, currently resides in Connecticut with his wife and two daughters. He finds inspirations for his poems through the everyday life's moments that stick out to him. These moments can be a memory, an observation of the people at a bus stop, or a bug on a windshield.  



What’s the procedure you use when writing a poem? What comes first? For instance, does a topic come to your mind first and then you choose which form to use, and so on?

The process is different for almost every poem. Sometimes a poem emerges from a memory, or from an idea, or from something I've noticed in the course of my day, or simply from a word or phrase that catches my imagination somehow. Once I've figured out where the poem is trying to go, I might think about what forms will help to get it there. Other times, I might give myself a formal challenge—write a sonnet, or write lines that break after seven syllables, or write a poem that would fit on a postcard to an old friend—in order to help myself break out of habit, to push myself out of a rut. Even then, as I revise and rewrite over weeks and months (and sometimes years), I might try out several different forms until I find the one that seems the best fit for what the poem’s language is trying to do.

How did you decide which format and form was right for “From Too Much Dwelling on What Has Been” and “Minute” (both of which appear in The Worcester Review Volume XXXIV)?

After the first few drafts of “From Too Much Dwelling on What Has Been,” I noticed some similarities to Robert Frost’s “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.” Instead of editing away from Frost’s influence, I decided to try emphasizing it. While my poem uses shorter lines and somewhat clipped rhythms, the quatrains are straight out of Frost and the title is borrowed directly from one of his lines. I really liked the idea of trying to steal Frost’s poem from its rural setting and to fit it around my experience of the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, where I grew up.

In “Minute,” once the language began to feel settled, I wanted to use a caesura similar to the one we see in Anglo-Saxon verse, a space that would open up each line on the page and emphasize the alliterative connections between the halves of each line. Breaking the lines this way—single lines becoming staggered couplets—also seemed like a way to make a line that was both long and short, a way perhaps to mirror the conflict between the improbably small and impossibly large that plays out in the poem.

I enjoyed reading your poems because of how relatable they are.  We all have moments when our minds wander off and question the little things that might not be immediately relevant. What does writing poetically about these moments mean to you? 

“From Too Much Dwelling on What Has Been” came out of a childhood memory of a fire in Lowell. In my father’s car, waiting to cross one of the bridges over the Merrimack, I asked about the dark smoke and orange glow in the sky, and my father told me what it was. I don’t know why that moment has stayed with me, but it began to seem especially important to me as I moved away from home, as the city continued to change, as even my memories of home began to fade.

I originally wrote “Minute” as part of the poem-a-day challenge during National Poetry Month. About two weeks in, I was already running out of steam, already feeling like I was straining for something to write. As I drove home from work, I happened to notice a bug smeared across my windshield. Later, after several failed attempts to start a poem, I wrote, “I want there to be metaphor in the bugs on my windshield.” With another anniversary of my father’s death on the way, questions about mortality and consciousness weren't far from my mind, and the poem began to take shape.

I’d like to believe that writing about these moments leads to the “momentary stay against confusion” that Frost says a poem should offer. But really, poems are often more interesting to me as attempts to acknowledge the confusion, to enact the mind as it wrestles with the mysteries of the world around me.

Two poems by Brian Simoneau from Volume 34

From Too Much Dwelling on What Has Been

 

 

How many pigeons, blackbirds,

phoebes took flight when the eaves

caught fire and fell, the night sky

glowing red? One of the mills

 

was burning. Heavy air smoked

over the river, strands of

shadow drawn across the stars.

Did the birds peer through rising

 

pillars of ash? Could they see

flickering lights of untouched homes

below? Would we hear their songs

like sighs against the din of

 

sirens, or only whispers

of flames, the cold air rushing           

to reclaim its place? And how

many nights would pass before

 

they’d circle back, alighting

among the faded embers

as if they’d simply fallen

through rays of a setting sun?

 

 

 

Minute

 

 

For a moment there’s

                        metaphor in the collision

 

of insect and windshield,

                                    moths and mosquitoes

 

pressed to the grill

                        when I arrive after midnight

 

where I want to be, held

                                    in the embrace

 

of a lamppost’s light—

                                    a shared irrelevance,

 

such smallness useless

                                    in a universe spinning

 

away from itself,

                        each of us careening along

 

unable to see forest

                        or trees for the dark—

 

but the difference hits me

                                    square, aware of what’s coming

 

and the impossibility

                        of getting out of its path.

Sample Poems from Volume XXXIV

Jody Azzouni

 

The reflection yearns

 

 

Winged grace

echoed in the water:

a ripple fishing for attention.

 

You deny its hope: sidelong

it out of existence.

 

We don't remember the twin

we bury.

 

 

 

When that last snowflake has been stamped out

 

 

We come to

our senses; green

explodes.  The blinking dew

feeds us awake.

 

Hope is

   eternally spring.

Sample Poem from Volume XXXIV

Alessandra Gelmi

 

Haitia

 

 

My father owned coffee plantations in Madagascar.

He had polio and

when I came home from school and

knocked on the door of our white house

I heard his metal brace scrape the floor

before I saw his face

and the marks he made on the Italian tile.

 

Haitia was my nanny, soil-black,

smelling of sweet almost lambent oil,

smelling of grapefruits, lemons, and limes.

My mother was an obstetrician,

smelling of dust,

an erect woman with alabaster skin

and a black bag

filled with silver instruments.

 

When I was born

my father planted a grapefruit tree.

For six years it bore no fruit.

On my sixth birthday, a single grapefruit appeared.

Don't pick it, my father warned.

 

It was then, outside,

between aggressive sunbursts,

my girlfriends urged me on.

Jump and get it! they shouted

Jump and get it!

Restless we were for this epiphany.

 

That evening, my father

burned me on the arm with a soldering iron.

Haitia had to leave the room.

I could hear her wailing through blunt walls.

My father frightened her

even though she was much bigger than he.

 

My mother, at the time,

was somewhere doing a Caesarian or

she would have stopped him I think.

Still, thirty-five years later to the day

I never pick flowers or fruit from trees.

I've learned my lesson, I'm respectful,

I walk without scarring a clean surface

something my father could never do.

Sample Poem from Volume XXXIV

Kelley Jean White

 Essay Questions

Chose three of five:

 

1. Discuss the character of the mother in Book 1. How does her bedtime story of the rabbit and the lost meadow reflect the birth of the narrator and the family secret?

 

2. Discuss the symbolism of kettles in light of the coming of age theme.

 

3. In chapter 7, Nora Jean claims that Margo’s loss of innocence is the cause of Jeremy’s suicide. Do you agree? Is the narrator unreliable? Does your opinion matter?

 

4. History seems unimportant in the secondary narrative of Aunt Virginia’s courtship. Discuss 18^th century cotton mills anyway.

 

5. The book does not deal with religion or business ethics. Choose another book you have read that does. Quote a specific page in this book. Note: you will be judged on the accuracy of your recreation of specific sentences as well as the spiritual principles you claim they espouse.

 

Short answer:

 

1. Compare and contrast the Northern Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. Use at least three specific examples of coal from the narrative to demonstrate your understanding. Chose three minor characters and change their names.

 

2. If   x=(t) x (m) and y= f (m) x (h-t) calculate the price of coal.

 

3. Define maturity as it relates to your parents.

 

4. Choose your favorite food. Show how it undermines Jeremy’s suicidal intent and ultimate choice of weapon.

 

5. Imagine another ending for Book 7. Prove how that ending would make Book 8 impossible.

 

6. Consider the effect on the environment of John Doe’s execution by electric chair in chapter eleven. Will utility rates rise or fall? Illustrate your answer with specific bills your roommate has received.

 

7. Define the seventh word in the second paragraph of page 127.

 

8. How many words are on page 246? Why? Can any of these words be eliminated?

 

9. What synonym for charisma would improve your appreciation of the student seated in the front row of yesterday’s lecture’s tattoo?

 

10. Do you think this class should have met before or after lunch? Why?

 

11. Make up a definition of ‘truth.’ Prove the error of this definition based on the clothing worn by three of the girls in the class.

 

12. Professor Tanner wrote her thesis on the influence of Moroccan tile on the fast food industry. Why was she chosen to teach this course?

 

13. Show how the books in this course will enhance your likelihood of choosing a supportive life partner? (alternate: explain why your parents chose poorly.)

 

 

Extra Credit: Write your own novel of intrigue and sexual coercion. Get it published.

Pushcart Nominees

Congratulations to the 2013 Pushcart Nominees from Volume XXXIV of The Worcester Review.

 

In order of appearance in The Review:

 

"Gutting" by Colin Dekkeersgieter

"The Fishing Village" by Dmitry Berenson
"Essay Questions" by Kelley Jean White

"In the Truck" by Fred Yannantuono

"Cool Jazz" by Fern G. Z. Carr

  

Best of luck to all nominees!

What happens at The Review in the summer?

The Worcester Review is an annual publication. So you might be wondering, what exactly do we do to keep busy all year long? Turns out one of the reasons publishing is such a slow industry is that it takes a long time to prepare, design, and layout an issue. In the months of May and June, those are the primary tasks around here. Yesterday, my husband and I had the pleasure of visiting Worcester Academy to take some photos for the 2013 Feature Section on Cole Porter. It wasn't as glamorous as a photo shoot for Glamour, but it was cool to see the memorabilia. Photographing other photos (faded, fragile, and framed photos at that) did prove a challenge. Here's a peek inside the action:

We can't wait for the publication to appear this fall so we can share all the stories and images that Frank Callahan, Worcester Academy's historian, shared with us. Coming this fall!