The Poetry of Transitions: Re-Shaping for an After-School Group

There's always someone creative taking charge of after-school groups of students who want to spend a few hours doing something "interesting."

So when one reached out to me a few weeks ago, asking what I could offer to her eager and probably very active students, I spilled out my enthusiasm about this new niche of mine, the poetry of transitions. I explained how it could become a nifty activity after school. I guess I had seventh and eighth graders in mind.

But these kiddos are younger than that, it turns out. So, the leader asked, what did I have up my sleeve that might suit that crew instead?

It took me back to my early years of poetry, when my mother modeled how to craft a birthday or Christmas card by making up a rhyme about the person, the occasion, or the things you love, like snow falling on a quiet evening or the first ringing bells of a holiday.

I emailed back:

How about "poems for special occasions" -- where we could lay out a range from birthdays and Christmas to completed homework, awesome book reports, new friends, broken friendships, and more. 

And that, of course, spun me into wanting to write some of those childhood rhymes again. It's always fun, and often surprising. The following is NOT, of course, for an after-school program, but thoughts on where my own poems have been wandering.

Over Labor Day weekend, one of the poets I studied with, Rachel Richardson, suggested ways to make a collage out of lines that others had already written. Using lines from e.e. cummings, Walt Whitman, Ted Kooser, Dyaln Thomas, and Nick Laird (new to me that day), I put this together:

my father moved through dooms of love
Captain, oh my captain
although I miss you every day
do not go gentle into that good night
what are the ceremonies of forgetting?

It's actually not a bad place to start, as I approach another anniversary of my father's death. And indeed, what a "transition" that was, 27 years ago, for me and for my siblings. 

Now, where will I take this? Where will you take your own? Can you still talk with your father face to face, or do you summon up his spirit for conversations while you're making a long drive? What would he say if you surprised him with --

Go ahead. Let a line form in your thoughts. That's the point of poetry ... or one of them, anyway. 

By the way, if you're curious about what poet Rachel Richardson achieves with her poetic collages -- check out her newest collection of poems, SMOTHER. I bought a copy to treat myself. 

How the WINDS OF FREEDOM Series Reached Book 3

Both softcover and ebook available!

Blame it on that heirloom gold locket that my dad gave to me, after my house burned to the ground. The midwinter fire devoured all the jewelry my mother gave me over the years, all her knitting projects, a half-made crocheted bedspread for my youngest brother that I claimed after her sudden death a few years earlier, saying, “I’ll finish it for you.” Raging on a twenty-three-degrees-below December night, the fire took our clothes, my work, the children’s new Christmas toys. None of that compared to the importance of the three of us escaping, with burns on our faces and frostbite on our toes, from sock-footed hike a third of a mile to the nearest neighbor.

Dad drove north to check on us, a day later. He brought some family photos, thoughtfulness that impressed me; he brought my youngest brother the contractor, who’d never receive that bedspread after all, but who brought me boxes of his spare tools; and he brought the locket. Gold, shaped like a tiny box on a short chain, it opened to emptiness. No photo of anyone inside, but I saw an intricate gold grating that flipped outward. “It’s a hair locket,” he explained. “You put a lock of hair of your beloved into it.”

 

During the night of the fire, a mile from where my ex-husband lived, the only “boyfriend” in my life was playing music in New Orleans. He got a busy signal when he tried to phone me, and bitterly assumed I’d taken the phone “off the hook” to silence it during a date with someone else. Days later, he’d finally phone a neighbor and learn that a fire burns through phone and electric lines. I didn’t put a lock of his hair into the locket; he left not much later, for a dancer he’d formed a crush on.

 

When I turned fifty, in accordance with the answer a prayerful friend of mine had received, I met and fell joyously in love with my soulmate. By then, the kids were grown and gone, but on their rare visits home, they agreed I’d finally found the right partner. Next time my darling got his hair trimmed, I collected a curl and popped it into the locket.

 

Historical fiction already meant a lot to me; a lifelong history writer, and a fumbling novelist, I found the combined threads satisfying. And I wanted very much to give readers a vicarious experience of Vermont’s approach to the Abolition movement and to diverse settlers (setting aside for the moment the state’s sometimes cruel treatment of Native Americans; I’d addressed that in my first work of historical fiction, and the book is a classic, The Darkness Under the Water, but also controversial). I figured, if readers followed along with the teens in my new story, they’d discover for themselves that Black people in Vermont in the 1850s were “free and safe,” as one of the state’s great historians puts it.

 

If you haven’t yet written a novel, this might surprise you: Often the characters stubbornly diverge from where you thought they were going. So did the girls in The Secret Room: One morning, halfway through writing, I realized at least one of them would head into a dark collapsing tunnel, in a desperate rescue effort. As dirt fell into her eyes and mouth and she moved resolutely forward, one hand landed on an object that she reflexively tucked into a pocket. Later, in daylight, she discovered it was an antique locket.

 

Yes, there you have it: Dad’s little locket had crept right into my story. So it felt obvious, later, that I’d write another novel, this time set in 1850, when that locket first hung at the throat of a Vermont teen. That turned into The Long Shadow, a book I’d never imagined would be the first of a series.

 

Yet when I turned it in for publication, the cheerful editor said, “I hope we’ll be hearing more from these characters!” Shaken, I asked, “You mean a series? How long?” She replied, “How about until everyone is free?”

 

It doesn’t take a lot of American history to recognize that “when everyone is free” probably means the end of our Civil War: 1865. If I wrote a book for each year from 1850 until then, there’d be 15 books in the series. A nifty idea! However: My teenaged characters from the first book would be in their thirties. That wasn’t an age I wanted to write about – I love the voice of a teen observing her world. How could I solve this?

 

It took another week for the idea to arrive: If the teens had a reason for vanishing from the village at the end of each book, or maybe each second book, and the next book’s protagonist became a girl who’d been younger at the start, and I kept passing it along that way — well, you see how it would work, right? Sort of a relay race, passing along the Vermont fight for human liberty to each new girl, or set of girls. Yes! On the spot, I decided (since I’m far from young) that there would be two-year jumps between the books in the series. That meant seven or eight titles, which seemed workable, as long as I took my vitamins and avoided any repeat of the disastrous housefire.

 

Now we are in book 3 in what the editor and I decided to call the Winds of Freedom series. Almyra Alexander, who showed up in book 2 as a fashionable girl from Boston, longs to be a minister, a difficult if not impossible path for a woman in 1854. The Vermont village, with its changing ideas about people and their roles, may give her a way forward toward her dream.

 

But first she’ll have to puzzle out several newly arrived women at the local tavern, what they are carrying around the county, how to handle an aging criminal who arrives while her uncle the minister is out of town, and whether she can effectively assist the cause of Abolition.

 

If you’re ready to find out whether Almyra is up to those challenges, and what the risks are, and what allies she’s recruiting — get ready to read The Bitter and the Sweet.

The Poetry of Transitions: How to Splurge on a Holiday Weekend

Today it seems to me that nurturing poetry skills is a bit like childrearing: If your kiddo grows up well enough and heads out into the world, you don't say it's because you learned something in the last week and that made it all work out. It's the long haul, the small things like food allergies and birthday cakes and helping the unexperienced hand to shape a perfect O or the teen to question and improve an essay. It's being willing to let them try evenings in town with friends, and not flinching (much) when you accidentally overhear those first romantic diversions. No parent can do a perfect job -- we're human -- but bringing a child to maturity, reasonably healthy and brave and independent, is worth the years leading up to that.

When THRESHOLDS is published in February 2026, I expect I'll feel much the same way about that. But there's always the next poem and wanting it to be better, and that's a difference, for sure. Most of us don't start a second family, just to see whether we can do it better ... or have I missed something?

At any rate,  I opted to spend most of my Labor Day weekend pinned to my seat in Zoom'd poetry classes led  by five outstanding poets. There's still one more class to go, tomorrow. For the evening I'll be mulling over the lessons this afternoon about the power of short poems (if you want them to have power). It amazed me that I recognized the first poem that the teaching poet offered, an anonymous one:

“Western wind, when wilt thou blow/That the small rain down can rain/Christ, that my love were in my arms/And I in my bed again!”

And it amazed me even more to find online material from a class taught by Allen Ginsberg, opening with that very poem. Incredible to discover what those students were then exposed to. Check it out here. 

Okay, I'm off to scribble a bit. Or peel some of today's apples. Or take a walk first. Yep, that sounds about right. One beautiful day to be a poet, looking at life's transitions and wondering how to spill them and rearrange them in words on a page. 

Majoring in Art? Counterfeiting in the 1800s Offered You a Good Income

I've always enjoyed historical fiction. It's the classic "spoonful of sugar" for the facts of our past. As a writer of historical novels, I'm responsible for getting the underlying details—skirt fashion, maple sugaring, weather extremes, and famous persons like Harriet Beecher Stowe (real-life author of Uncle Tom's Cabin)—all correct in the stories I spin. My goal is to give readers an enjoyable ramble through Vermont's 1850s in my Winds of Freedom series, while making sure their experience in the lives of the characters is true to life.

The Long Shadow, This Ardent Flame, The Bitter and the Sweet: These are adventures of teens in the village of North Upton (based on our real North Danville), and each one explores the level of risk the teens undertake. There are scary threats around them, and as anyone who's lived in snow country knows, winter can be the most potent threat of all.

But each book also handles the dangers of 1850s life, from bounty hunters to deadly disease to unquenchable fires that take down houses, barns, and life itself.

In The Bitter and the Sweet, one of the scary aspects is counterfeiting. It took decades for the American system of coins, paper money, and banks to develop. Rampant counterfeiting took place in the 1820s and 1830s, and the effects still made problems for anyone dealing in Big Money in 1854, the year of this novel.

Historians divide written evidence of the past into two kinds: primary, written by the people alive then, and secondary, the books that the historians then write, where they line up the details and pull together the themes. For The Bitter and the Sweet, I used a "secondary" source called A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, by professor Stephen Mihm. (He also kindly answered some correspondence as I narrowed the details I'd be using in my story.)

I already knew about Vermont counterfeiter Christian Meadows, whose history is repeatedly rediscovered for popular articles (here's one). A skilled engraver and silversmith, he strayed from his daily work into counterfeiting, applying his skills to the design and crafting of printing plates. He was captured, convicted, and imprisoned -- but did such elegant design work that Daniel Webster spoke up for him, and Vermont governor Erastus Fairbanks in 1853 pardoned him so he could return to the legitimate side of his engraving.

Devouring the well-written pages of Mihm's comprehensive book A Nation of Counterfeiters, I discovered an even more fascinating fellow: Seneca Paige, who led a major collaborative of "money makers," including multiple artists, just across the Canada border from Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. In his later years he "reformed" and his grave in Bakersfield, Vermont, praises his life, saying, “His Loss will be felt by many; particularly by the poor. He was truly the poor man’s friend.”

I wanted my characters to meet this man (under a new name, of course, for the novel: Foster Pierce). But by 1854, the year of The Bitter and the Sweet, he was already that reformed character that won such acclaim. How could I include him in a way that would be true to the facts, but also potentially terrifying to the teens meeting him in their village?

Yes, I solved it. I won't spoil your fun by saying how! But I loved writing this book, and now that it's in print (softcover and ebook), it's a great joy to share the lives of "my" people with readers.

And I remind the artists I meet: 125 years ago, your precision skills could have been making you an excellent living ... as long as you didn't get caught. 

The Poetry of Transitions: When and Why

When I say I've been writing poems ever since I could shape the letters of the words, well, that was really my second stage. The first came as soon as I could repeat the lines my mother spoke or sang: "Jack and Jill -- went up the hill -- to fetch a pail of water," we repeated to each other. And very soon, I began to protest about that particular poem: "Mommy, water and after do NOT rhyme." 

But they almost do, and that too was something to learn.

In The Art of the Poetic Line, James Longenbach teaches that "All poems live or die on their capacity to lure us from their beginnings to their ends by a pattern of sounds." 

Reading that, more than sixty years after Mom and I began poetry together, brought all the strands together for me. California poet Ellen Bass pointed to Longenbach's book during one of her classes that I first enrolled in during the Covid pandemic. Between her lessons and the resources she listed, I found new strengths.

And now a book of my poems, THRESHOLDS, will be published in a few more months. 

Starting with an OLLI (aka Osher) talk on September 25, I'm inviting you to join me to explore the poetry of transition. After all, autumn in Vermont practically defines transition: blazing with color, gusting with northwest wind, stripping the gardens and toughening our word-winged selves for winter.

As they say: Watch this spot for more.

* 

Eve in Vermont

 

She sits on the front step

potato in her hand, peeling

turning the round cool white

and brown form, rubbing off

the traces of soil, rejoicing—

“potato, potato,” naming it.

When the bird flies past it calls

and again she says “potato” but then

she looks up, shakes her hair,

follows the angled wings in flight.

She grins and calls out “blue jay”

and it answers.

 

A (Vermont) Romance of the Revolution: DEAREST BLOOD by Jessie Haas

Ready to detach from the politics of the moment, to celebrate the American Revolution? Although the big national festivities will blossom next year, when we reach 250 years from the Declaration of Independence, this past April marked a quarter century from the Battles of Lexington and Concord. In many ways the push for independence was already "old" by 1775, with initial historical moments coming in 1763 (end of war with the French) and 1765 (protests begin).

Vermont author Jessie Haas, an expert in the history of the Vermont towns of Westminster and Westminster West, provides an exciting, enjoyable, and yes, romantic way to step into the flow of revolution in her newly self-published novel DEAREST BLOOD. (I bet some traditional publishers are hating that they missed out on this!) Cleverly, she positions her 250-page tale on the very edge of the young adult/adult reading line: Fifteen-year-old Fanny Montresor is the daughter -- well, that's complicated, because neither of her parents in Westminster is her birth parent -- but let's keep this simple for now and say that, as the townspeople see her, she is the daughter of a British-loyal civil servant whose wealth is mostly in land, and a lovely and skilled mother who's even more loyal to The Crown. In a town and state on the verge of armed rebellion, that's not a helpful heritage. And it's a shock to Fanny when her mother prescribes marriage to a man of means, locally, as a way to keep Fanny safe in the likely dangerous times ahead.

But there's little time for Fanny to seek other options: "War was normal in America, and left its long trail of debris and grief." Whether battling Abenaquis or the French or pestilence, Fanny's seen enough to believe her mother's insistence that an arranged marriage is suddenly a must.

Armed conflict breaks out far sooner than either expects, and surrounds Fanny's home; she witnesses the death of a young man her own age, and there's ample reason to fear she and her mother could be attacked soon. Her discoveries quickly shatter her worldview, even bringing her toward the rebel cause in her own reasoning.

Haas is a seasoned author, noted for both her often horse-focused children's and adult fiction, and her dedicated historical research that bore fruit in her 2011 book Revolutionary Westminster. Scene by exciting scene, she draws Fanny into deeper understanding of what freedom and liberty might mean, personal and national. Sharp-eyed readers will spot the potential romance that will become a force in the second half of the novel, which jumps to the year 1783, when the Treaty of Paris affirmed America's liberation and (more or less) safety. 

But it is also a time of grief for Fanny, who's endured multiple large losses in the meantime. Returning to Westminster with her mother, she visits the grave of the man she saw killed, and here is the source of the book's title -- on his marker stone, "For Liberty and his Countrys Good / he Lost his Life his Dearest blood." Fanny reflects, "His dearest blood. In my mind's eye I saw that dark smudge on [friend] Isaac's handkerchief. The lump in my throat grew."

How Fanny will resolve her compromises and take agency in her own life becomes a delightful background to a much happier situation than an arranged marriage "for safety." The sweetness and cleverness of the remaining plot -- based on real people and events -- make this novel of the American Revolution into a swift and uplifting read. 

And that, in short, is why historians like Haas sometimes bring their deep knowledge around the corner to a fictional approach. Lucky readers: Those who love American history, Vermont history, historical fiction, and a true-life romance can all savor this book. Do you know a dreamer who's paying attention to friendship and maybe the scary edge of current events, and wish you could draw that person's eye to what this nation has achieved in the past? Here's a great gift, then. Order two copies, because you'll want to hold onto your own. 

DEAREST BLOOD can be ordered by bookstores, or online; read more about the author and her other publications at her website, https://www.jessiehaas.com.

PS: Watch for family names of people who settled much of Vermont; Haas writes that her "work of fiction" is "closely based on historical people and events." Maybe you will spot some relatives or familiar neighbors among the names. I did! 

Historical Erasure: Far From New!

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Westminster_Town_Hall.jpg

Earlier this week I shared some resources for parts of New England history that are often buried in the rush to "explain" who we are and what has happened. In this season of thinking about the early battles of the American Revolution, 250 years ago, I've been mulling over that sharply uncomfortable phrase, "History is written by the victors."

According to Slate.com, although the line is often attributed to Winston Churchill, it has earlier and maybe more authentic roots. Remember my mention of the Battle of Culloden in Scotland, with a survivor who came to my part of Vermont and has an extensive tribute on his burial stone? Check this out: 

"One biographer’s description of the 1746 Battle of Culloden in Scotland laments that we will never know how many members of his subject’s clan died on the battlefield, because 'it is the victor who writes the history and counts the dead.'"

That's what Matthew Phelan wrote at slate.com (https://slate.com/culture/2019/11/history-is-written-by-the-victors-quote-origin.html).

As we work hard to sort out the most credible parts of each day's global news now, this second example from Phelan may be equally important: 

"Two years later, the saying was in use in United States. In 1891, Missouri Sen. George Graham Vest, a former congressman for the Confederacy who was still at that late date an advocate for the rights of states to secede, used the phrase in a speech, reprinted by the Kansas City Gazette and other papers on the next day, Aug. 21, 1891. 'In all revolutions the vanquished are the ones who are guilty of treason, even by the historians,' Vest said, 'for history is written by the victors and framed according to the prejudices and bias existing on their side.'"  (https://slate.com/culture/2019/11/history-is-written-by-the-victors-quote-origin.html)

The next post here will be, accordingly, an invitation into a newly published novel of the American Revolution, by Vermont's own Jesse Haas and set in Westminster, Vermont. 

Preserving and Reconnecting With Our History

Time chugs along -- I will soon mark 50 years of living in my adopted state among the Green Mountains and the many rivers. When I first arrived here, people still liked to say Vermont had more cows than people. It probably wasn't quite true then, and it's definitely not so today. But still, with about six hundred thousand people making up the entire state, there's an illusion that a person can learn and catch up with the intimate details of its history.

That's sort a a fun-house mirror effect, maybe because we don't see many people around us (not counting life in Burlington, our big city). If you know the name of each person you talk with in the grocery store, and standing in line to check out refreshes your memory of recent losses among them, well, it's easy to think you can know most of what there is to know about Vermont.

Nope.

The town where I first began delving into Vermont's history, Barnet, is a dozen miles from where I now live. I left Barnet in 2002, but I'm still learning from my explorations there. The church, the beach, the back roads I walked as I adjusted to single parenting, the school where my sons developed their determination and their desire to mingle with other cultures and travel far and wide -- all those are "mine" even though I don't live there any longer. 

But it was the cemeteries that adjusted my sense of America, and of time, of history. On the hillside halfway between the church and the dairy barn where I shoveled sawdust every Sunday for more than a year, my favorite of the town's handful of burying grounds shelters the stone markers of many a Scottish settler who farmed here in the 1800s and even earlier. Although many people call it "the West Barnet cemetery," its other name is the Stuart Cemetery. Among the Scottish immigrants buried in it, there lies Claudius "Cloud" Stuart, also spelled Stewart. I am still amazed to find that Claud Stuart fought in Scotland's Battle of Culloden in 1746 with the supporters of Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Alas, not all of Vermont's history has been so proudly or clearly preserved. Its vanishing is called "historical erasure" -- and today a number of organizations and individuals work to undue that erasing. One I appreciate is called Atlantic Black Box, and features the work of both professional historians and grass-roots sorts. It asks: "Why have we been telling certain stories about New England and not others? How did we come to unknow the region’s deep complicity in the institution of slavery and systems of oppression?" 

I connect with those questions because I've found details of both enslavers and enslaved in the Northeast Kingdom, yet we "don't talk about that" very much ... maybe because it embarrasses us?  But Atlantic Black Box is geared mostly to the New England coast,

 To counter historical erasure in our area, grass-roots historians work with the actual Census pages of the 1800s, to see who lived where and did what. My historical fiction is crammed with details gained in this way. Another resource is the Northeast Slavery Records Index (NESRI), which has a searchable database that includes Vermont. Nola Forbes, a retired teacher and ardent historian in our area, also recommends these: DAR has this database Patriots of Color, and this a research guide for Forgotten Patriots (Black Americans & American Indians).

 Try one out. See who you find. Share your discoveries, if you like.

It takes all of us to preserve our history, and to make sure we know what is "real."

 

 

 

Amelia Earhart and My Mother: Another Reason to Write Poems

(Tap the image to read the poem.)

There are scraps of paper piled at the far right corner of my desk, bits of poems emerging. I've learned to write down "something" when the notion or metaphor or string of words comes tapping.  The more important they are, the more quickly they seem to vanish if I don't write them down.

This poem, though, came via a different route. My mother died "too soon" at age 53, while I was pregnant with my second baby. I needed to grieve and mourn, but I was also afraid to cry too much or too hard -- I didn't want the baby to arrive early, from my own stress. So that was a hushed-down, tamped-down farewell from me, while my younger sister assigned to herself the tasks of steering our father into his own new life chapter.

In the years since, one of the frustrations (of course) has been the many questions I would have asked, if we'd had more time together as two generations of mothers. But I've also learned to question the notions I had about who my mother was. We don't show our adult selves in depth to our kids when they are too young to understand.

My mother, when she was 8 years old, experienced the death of her own mother, from breast cancer. I knew that. I didn't know until pretty recently that as a child, she'd been an outcast among her New England cousins -- Joanie, the girl whose mother died, and who was fat, too. And unskilled with other children. 

Another thing I knew: that she resented being told she must touch the cold dead hand of her mother's corpse in the casket. She said it robbed her of other, warmer, memories of her mother.

What I didn't realize until this poem began "appearing on paper" was how close the timing of Mom's mother's death was to the mysterious loss in flight of Amelia Earhart. As I put them together, I began, strangely, to understand more about my mother. 

Which, of course, also means I learned something about myself.

Much appreciation to New Feathers for including the poem in its newly released anthology. 

Book Recommendation: THE AMATEUR by Robert Littell, an Espionage Classic

Soho Crime, a Soho Press imprint, today releases a reissue of Robert Littell's 1981 espionage classic, THE AMATEUR. What a gift! Littell even catches the tang of some sardonic Russian fiction of that time, as he positions one angry coding analyst, Charlie Heller, as an American geek who find he just has to do something about the murder of his darling fiancée. When Heller discovers that the CIA -- to him, the Company -- knows which three terrorists have killed his sweet and beautiful Sarah Diamond, jeering at her for being a Jew, and knows where those three are, yet plans to do nothing about this, his unexpected emotions lead him to an insistence on action.

Heller's quickly aware that no action will come from his employer. In fact, he's subtly demoted, moved away from the urgent daily coding and deciphering that have been his area. He's been managing communication for an embedded spy located near where the killers now reside. What can he do about all this?

His geeky decision to take matters into his own untrained hands leads him to blackmail his boss into letting him train to go after the murderers. Even the Company's trainer thinks he'll fail -- a gun in the hands of such an amateur is less than fifty percent likely to hit what he fires at. And as a desk jockey, he's not in the physical shape to choose other killing methods, is he?

But Heller's almost father-in-law, Sarah's father, is a Holocaust survivor who already lost his first family, and tells Heller bluntly, "To survive the death of people close to you, you need ritual. ... I spent three years tracking the doctor who sent them to the gas." Mr. Diamond confesses that he strangled that doctor. When Heller says, "it didn't bring them back from the dead," the old man gives him the real point: "It brought me back from the dead!"

Even the Company shrink seems to agree: "From a medical point of view, revenge is very therapeutic." So Heller feels he has all the best reasons to pursue his new plan.

Things get tangled up, of course. The spy he chases isn't who he thought it was. His feelings aren't manageable. He is, indeed, a clumsy amateur, and when the Company tries to control his actions, things get quickly even more dangerous.

Littell's delightful plot takes Heller into highly satisfying changes and actions, and reveals slyly the other meaning of amateur that we've known all along: One who loves.

Pick up a copy for the pleasure of this still great story, for insight into how Littell cut a path for today's espionage authors, and for the foreword by Mick Herron. Totally worth it!

Lyric, Lyrical, and Is It Poetry Yet? A Story About Writing

Barnet VT post office, Wikimedia Commons, photo by Jared and Corin (Thanks!).

I've signed up for a class this weekend on the lyric poem. The price to enroll equaled a week of groceries. Trust me, at that price, I spent some time soul-searching before pressing "Register" for the class.

The moment that changed "everything" for the way I write happened at a rural post office in a small village many years ago. And it wasn't about a poem -- but about a story I'd written, fictional but framed with things I'd experienced, and published in a very small regional newspaper.

My mail carrier was just coming out to his truck when I was entering. He stopped me at the door, beaming with pleasure. "That story of yours, that was a good one, did it really happen?'

"More or less," I said. He grinned. 

An explosion was taking place in my chest. THIS. This was why I was writing. For my neighbors to read all the way to the end of a story or poem and wonder, Did this really happen? Or, equally good, So someone else has felt the way I did, imagine that!

This episode saved me.

I'd already been to a couple of sessions of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, where people I'd never heard of stood at the front of the lecture hall and read aloud their work, most of it so foreign to my life (like, tied to Greek heroes, or braiding together angels and the Irish with some foreign words as well) that I felt smaller and smaller. I'd brought my very best poems, the ones I really cared about, and one of them made it to a critique session. The mostly unshaven poet in charge, who lived in a city a thousand miles a way, lifted my page, waved it in the air, and said "This says nothing to me." He dropped it back on his desk and went on to someone else's poem. Frozen into stillness, I watched my page flutter to the floor.  

At the post office, though, later that year, I finally understood: When I'm writing a poem, I can't care whether a city resident from a very different culture "gets it." It would be nice, sure, but ... what I care about is whether my neighbor recognizes that same feeling about the bird feeder, or the cold spell, or the pain of wanting to fix your grown child's life and make it all better ... and knowing it's no longer your business to do that.

Literally decades later, after the death of my much-loved (much-missed) husband Dave, I took another long look at what was going on with my poems. Maybe you knew Dave -- if so, you won't be surprised to hear that he didn't really "get" my poems. But oh man, did he ever love to bask in a poetry reading by an outstanding poet like Jane Hirshfield or Galway Kinnell or Donald Hall or Ellen Bryant Voigt. No fancy language or critique from my darling, though. He'd push back in his seat afterward, look at me with glowing eyes, and say "That was the real thing."

So now, even with Dave's body out of reach, I wanted to bring my poems up to a level where if Dave were blindfolded and the sound was distorted so he didn't know it was his own spouse, he might listen for forty-five minutes and say what he said about those other poets. Not for everything I write, maybe, but for some of them. Workable goal? 

I began by applying to my stash of poems some lessons that Vermont (and nationally awarded) poet Sydny Lea gave me one afternoon on the front porch of Robert Frost's home in Franconia, NH: Circle any "new" language -- the surprising phrases and twists. Cross out bland words. Pay attention to how lines of poems end and begin, making them stronger.

It was working, I thought. But the handful of poems that I mailed or emailed to publishers and contests still resulted in polite "canned" rejection notes.

Then another Vermont poet, a woman I trust deeply, suggested that I take a class with poetry professor Ellen Bass -- thanks to the pandemic, the class would be online. This time the price, covering six sessions, added up to three weeks of groceries. In the fine print though was an invitation to explain your situation if you'd like a scholarship. I did (husband recently dead, finances a disaster, barely scraping by) and golly gee (as people used to say), a response said Yes. Scholarship awarded. Come learn.

It would take more than six weeks to explain now all that I learned from this gifted teacher, as I kept taking more of her classes, and carefully setting aside the money in advance to pay properly. But I can give you the single most important thing that I inked onto a piece of posterboard and taped to a nearby wall: 

"All poems live or die on their capacity to lure us from their beginnings to their ends by a pattern of sounds." 

That's from another poet who liked to teach, James Longenbach.

A pattern of sounds. When I added that kind of attention to how I was writing and revising, poems began at long last to get published beyond my local paper. Dave would be excited about that ... 

So that's why I'm blowing the price of another week of groceries on a class focused on "lyric" poetry, because I suspect that's the proper term for what I'm writing now. I really enjoy it.

Oxford Languages describes lyrical this way: expressing the writer's emotions in an imaginative and beautiful way.

Watch for the poems. With Dave out of the room, I'm counting on you to let me know when it's "the real thing."

 

Every Word Matters: A Touch of the Irish

design by Vermont's Danforth Pewter

Writing historical fiction, like my three volumes (so far!) in the Winds of Freedom series, means paying attention to all the little words. It's not automatic to "speak" in the rhythms and vocabulary of another time, and there are days when I spend more hours checking language than I do pushing the plot forward. What did counterfeiters call each other? How did Canadians talk about the "money artists" living in their Eastern Townships? If you're adapting your best dress to a new style in 1854, what do you call the trimmings that you're stitching, if you're classroom educated or if you're happier helping with your father's horses?

All of those came into play as I wrote The Bitter and the Sweet, where Bible-studying Almyra Alexander needs to reach across class and social lines to admit she needs help from Susannah Hall in order to climb into a saddle. Riding a pony in Boston certainly didn't prepare her for carrying urgent messages while perched high above the ground on a full-size horse. (Don't get me started on how tall the horse was. Thank goodness for true experts like Amanda Gustin at the Vermont Historical Society, who can talk clearly and with authority about Vermont Morgan horses.)

As a poet as well as a novelist, I also want the words to sound fluid and interesting in the reader's "ear." One result of that is that I sometimes recognize my own writing in places I hadn't expected to see it -- a description of a local town that someone borrows from my own, posted online, or a review on the back of a book, mentioning the author's earlier work. 

Yes, that's a great gift of being a published author: If you choose to, and don't mind working without pay (we can discuss that more at some other time), you can get involved in reviewing other historical fiction. I treasure the chance to do that for the Historical Novels Review. It can be a great challenge to devour 400 pages, then work out a description to guide other readers -- condensing it to 300 words,  which is a bit less than a page. (The end of that sentence reached 359 words here, just to give you a better notion.)

One book I am reading for review this week is set in the 1850s, like my work, and by 10 pages into the story, I realized its author didn't care about language in the same way that I do. Probably the most shocking moment was when one of the characters, of Irish heritage, referred to Irish immigration to the United States as caused by "the potato famine." That raised two problems: First, Irish immigration began much earlier than that, and Irish Americans were well represented in our patriots of the American Revolution. Second, and what drives me to write about this today, is I knew that the Irish didn't say "the potato famine."

At least, I was pretty sure. But it's part of my way of writing and researching, that I needed to check. So I pulled out one of the vital books on my reference shelf: The Story of the Irish Race by Seumas MacManus. It came to my collection during the writing of Cold Midnight, a novel set in 1920 in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, when many people working for the well-to-do came from Ireland. And I bet you might not ever have heard of Seumas MacManus, because he died in 1967, but here's how he's been described: "Seamus MacManus is considered by many to be the last great seanchaí, or storyteller of the ancient oral tradition. He wrote down and interpreted traditional stories so that they would not be lost to future generations." (Wikipedia summary.)

Sure enough, his chapter LXX starts on page 602 (people did write longer books then), and is titled The Great Famine. It begins:

The Great Famine, usually known as the famine of '47, really began in '45, with the blighting and failure of the potato crop, the people's chief means of sustenance. 

You'll search long and hard for a copy of that book. But you can get a marvelously well-written modern (2015) exploration of America's relationship with that part of Irish history in Maureen O'Rourke Murphy's book Compassionate Stranger: Asenath Nicholson and the Great Irish Famine. Are you hooked on Vermont and its history? Asenath Nicholson was born Asenath Hatch in Chelsea, Vermont, on February 24, 1792.

Give yourself an adventure for this month of St. Patrick's Day: Look up a bit more about Asenath Nicholson. Let me know what you think, when you discover what she did. 

And I hope you noticed the phrase "the Great Irish Famine." Not the potato famine. See, you're already gaining an ear for the well-chosen words of  well-written historical fiction. Go ahead, tell someone else what you've discovered!

 

To Be a New England "Girl"

My mother, managing five children and the social commitments that went with my father's management job, rarely spent money on herself (if we don't count those cigarettes). But she indulged in two magazine subscriptions that meant the world to her: Yankee Magazine, and Down East, "The Magazine of Maine." When a copy of one of those arrived in the mail, she'd curl up in her armchair under the portrait of her four-greats grandmother, and reconnect with the New England self she'd left behind in 1950 when she married my dad and moved with him to that land of plentiful engineering jobs: New Jersey.

Each summer she'd craft lengthy lists of meal plans and clothing needed, and we'd all head to New England for family camping. Our visits to great-aunts and various sorts of cousins dwindled with time, as either they passed away or the chaos of a large family couldn't be welcomed. So my memories of "Auntie Mi" (my grandfather Palmer's sister) and her husband are very faint indeed. I recall a donkey and maybe a pony at their New Hampshire home. And one of the more distant cousins, also called Aunt out of respect for her age, made doughnuts in Vermont. I don't know which town, now.

My folks had a challenging marriage, but around 1980 Dad went to a "gestalt" psychological workshop in Florida and came home repentant, determined to start over. They put their house on the market, quickly accepted an offer, and were weeks away from moving to Mexico City, where Dad would manage a lighting factory in transition, when Mom dropped to the ground outside the nursing home where she worked, and in a shockingly short time, she died.

In between the fresh start and the devastating ending, Mom sold or gave away most of her family treasures that spoke of New England. "You kids aren't interested in the stuff," she said firmly.

I can't say for sure about my siblings, but I was already in Vermont, rebuilding the family connection to New England, parenting a toddler, and expecting a second child. By the time I knew what Mom was up to, she'd done it. 

Then three years later my home burned to the cellarhole, in one of those devastating Vermont winter fires where there's nothing left—except in this case me and my children, which of course meant the most important part survived and went forward. (Yes, this is part of why my novels often include a fire.)

Somehow, these many years later, I do have a few small items from Mom's New England life. That probably means my father held onto them and passed them to me after the house fire. Two of them, small and without family initials, remain tiny treasures to me ... and those are what I carried to the Concord Historical Society last year, when I suddenly needed cover images for my newest novel, THE BITTER AND THE SWEET (Winds of Freedom Book 3). Concord's Beth Quimby kindly opened the museum to me, so I could stage a few photographs.

This one didn't get chosen for the cover, but it includes the two small items that remind me of Mom's New England roots: a locket that now holds a bit of my late husband's hair in its specially made interior, and a tiny mirror, far smaller than the one that always rested on my mother's "dressing table" next to her rose-scented eau de toilette and her face powder.

Somehow it seems like I should look into getting my own subscriptions again to those two classic New England magazines that engaged my mother so deeply. The story keeps spiraling, though: My first published poem in a national magazine? Yes, it was in Yankee Magazine, in 1995 -- too late for Mom to see it, but confirming for me anyway that I was becoming the New England "girl" she had always been at heart.

 

MAPS: Poetry, Historical Fiction, and My Mind

It feels like I've always loved maps: looking at them, figuring out how places are connected, planning trips, and with historical fiction, discovering more about how things used to be. One of my pleasures has been trying to re-draw maps of the two neighborhoods I lived in as a kid, seeing how many family names I could still place on the houses.

So I was very surprised to learn, some years ago, that maps are not intuitive -- someone has to sit with you and show you how they represent places and distances and relationships. Ever since then, I've tried to include them in school presentations, and once helped a kindergarten/first grade create a map of their town and the bus routes, on an old white sheet.

This map of my home town of Waterford is such a big reference item for me that I have it on the refrigerator, not on the front (where grandkid items and medical appointments may cluster) but on one side, all to itself. Even the smallest notes and family connections on it remind me of things I should make clear in my 1850s historical fiction. I depended on "old" maps of Peacham and Danville for THE BITTER AND THE SWEET. I needed to know the turns that Almyra would make with the horses, and what she'd see along the way.

In the past few months I've tried writing poems in clusters around themes, and MAPS became one of them. So I was tickled when Hole in the Head Review published this one. If the type here feels too small, look on their page at this link.

What kinds of things might you "map" about your life -- as a kid, or now? 

"Day Job" + Poem = A Winner ... in Lit Shark Magazine's "The Best of 2024 Anthology"

Where do poems come from? Each one comes differently for me. My "day job" is copyediting articles and books written by other people, often in the sciences, and one day I noticed some writing about resilience in nature -- how it happens, how to plan for it as you work with your yard or woodlot or forest. 

It sounded good, but I was having a tough time that day on the personal side, really missing my late husband Dave and the way two people do things so much differently from one alone. So I felt a bit skeptical about "resilience." And maybe a little guilty, too, because I don't want to feel sorry for myself. Dave and I had a great "run" of 17 years and there are plenty of great memories. Plus I grew into a different kind of person through that marriage and his constant curiosity and encouragement.

So the poem became both a talking-back to the article, and another bit of the grief process. Lit Shark Magazine's editor chose it to be one of the Poem of the Month group last summer, and she also pulled it into this year-end anthology.

 

Then the editor had the notion of asking for an "old" poem from each of her poets, to add to the anthology -- actually she asked for three so she could pick one -- and that's how Never-Ending List also slid into the pages!

 There are such varied and tasty poems in this anthology. To pick up your own copy, here's a link to the paperback version (you'll see a hardcover is available too, for an extra $5). Let me know if you opt to buy one ... I'll be thrilled.