The Next Big Thing: Interview with Chella Courington

The following is a "Next Big Thing" interview with Chella Courington about her book, Talking Did Not Come Easily to Diana.

What is the working title of the book?

Talking Did Not Come Easily to Diana

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Diana McPhear first appears in a poem entitled “Redder than Diane’s Lipstick” published in Gargoyle. I like her name and became attached, looking for a place where she could thrive. I teach at a community college where many of my friends are adjuncts, always struggling to make ends meet while writing novels and painting watercolors on the side. I want to show their lives through Diana, who has an MFA in Poetry and teaches at Earl Warren Community College.

What genre does your book fall under?

Prose Poetry and Flash Fiction while Musa, Diana’s online publisher, lists it as microfiction.

What actors would you choose to play the part of characters in a movie rendition?

Since Talking Did Not Come Easily to Diana is told largely from Diana’s perspective with much of the focus on internal thought, I would choose Kate Winslet as Diana. Winslet does a fine job with introspective characters like Ruth in Holy Smoke and Julia in Hideous Kinky. She’s also the right age for Diana. There are several Xs: two boyfriends, a girlfriend, and a husband. The husband is a controlling CPA whom Kevin Bacon can portray. One boyfriend is a lumbering outdoorsman. Maybe Seth Rogen. The other boyfriend is unbelievably traditional and wants a good cook to wait on him. Jon Hamm is perfect. The manipulative girlfriend is Jodie Foster.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Diana's a quirky, adjunct writing professor who spends a lot of time in her head, thinking about the past and depending on her cat Rhoda for affection.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

When I received my MFA in 2009, I didn’t want to become a statistic. So I’d show up almost everyday to write and found it much easier to follow a character than write a new poem each day. Of course, if I’d been working on a novel-length poem like Robert Browning’s Ring and the Book or an epic poem like Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette, it would have been easier to enter the work on a daily basis. By the end of my MFA, I had moved largely to prose poetry, a step away from flash fiction, and felt comfortable in that space. It seemed right for Diana’s story as her mind was her playground. To return to the question, I spent nine months to a year writing and revising Diana while teaching 140 community college students.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The vast number of talented and undervalued adjuncts with whom I teach at Santa Barbara City College.

What else about this book might pique the reader’s interest?

Here’s a telling review by Barbara Schweitzer on Amazon: “Chella Courington's new book is a coming-of-age story of an English major pursuing academic teaching. Her character moves through the adjunct-slave-labor camps to a professorship with eyes opening wide for us. Diana's complexity, dark humor, and slanted view of the world make for a fabulous relationship with the reader. This Diana is true, and the prose poetry that drew her so clearly is sheer pleasure to the ear. I wish she had stayed around longer in the pages, and I hope Chella Courington gives us more of her, or another Diana, soon.”

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It's published by Musa Publishing online, and available through Amazon.

Opening Piece

Diana loved anything orange—cats, lipstick, hunting vests, nail polish, hard hats, life jackets, water guns. When she slipped through her mother’s legs, almost butting the doctor’s stomach, her skin turned a yellowish red. “I did crave pumpkin,” her mother said. “Before my water broke, I ate a whole pie, crust and all.” It took eleven days of being rubbed in olive oil and resin, her mother’s fingers lightly massaging Diana’s new skin that capitulated to air in March before trout season, before her father deserted them for Pennsylvania streams. Her eighth Halloween she painted her nose and toes tangerine and swathed herself in a sheet, RIT-dyed sunshine orange, that her mother soaked in white vinegar until the bleeding stopped. Even then in third grade, she knew what they didn’t. How we climb into our wombs at night, sheets over our heads, and wait for the water to float us back.


Next week's interviews will be with:

1. Robin Winter
2. Theo Winter
3.Rob Stephens
4. Marcia Meier
5. Claudia McGarry

The Next Big Thing: Interview With Jenn Monroe

What is the working title of the book?

Something More Like Love—the e-book edition!

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I wrote almost all of the poems in this chapbook during the month of April doing the “30 poems in 30 days” challenge. Most of them were composed in my office at Chester College of New England. At the end of the month it seemed to me that they were alike enough in tone, subject, and form that they would make a solid chapbook.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

This is an interesting question for a collection of poetry. My poems don’t really have characters, but voices. I think Cate Blanchett would be great for all the “female/feminine” voices. And Gary Oldman for the few male/masculine voices.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

In the same way there are no characters, there’s not a singular narrative that unites these poems, so it is difficult to think about it in those terms. Poet Barbara Louise Ungar offered this in her blurb, and I think it gets to the heart of what you’ll find: Jenn Monroe's poetry finds its wellspring in divine reality in which everything moves through and out of love. "Imagine," she playfully exhorts in the poem "Love for Oil," "a love spill" that results in "slicks of love." "Imagine the mess we'd be in then." We are in a mess--but you will feel better about it after reading this lovely chapbook: happier, calmer, and more joyful.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

For the core of it, about a month, give or take. But many of these poems are combinations of events and situations that happened years ago between people who are only memories to me now, but that I wrote about then.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My husband, my friends and my students at Chester College of New England. Everyone and everything that I sincerely loved at the time.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Some of the poems are funny. Some of them are surreal. All of them are honest. I think there’s something in there for everyone.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It was published by Finishing Line Press in February 2012 they will offer the e-book as well.

The Next Big Thing: Interview with Jane Rosenberg LaForge

What is the working title of the book?

With Apologies to Mick Jagger, Other Gods, and All Women.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I wrote one of the poems, “O Luminent Object,’’ while at Chelsea Piers. Chelsea Piers is a bunch of old warehouses on the docks of the Hudson River that have been converted into athletic facilities—a gym, a soccer field, a bowling alley, an ice skating rink. My daughter takes gymnastics classes there, and on Parents’ Day, parents are invited to come onto the floor of the gym and see their children perform their tricks up close and personal. So I was traipsing around on the gym floor, and I got the feeling of how the place is much like a carnival, or a three-ring circus. The ceiling is very high, with pipes and other utilities exposed, like a tent and its rigging. It’s loud, and overwhelming, and on that particular Parents’ Day, the parents were congealing around a celebrity whose daughter happened to be in the class. I had a kind of “bread and circuses” feeling, not so much of being duped but of being swept up in a romance I knew to be temporary. I wrote the poem, saw what I had, and realized how that feeling applied to some of my other work.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry: confessional, narrative, free verse.

What actors would you choose to play the part of characters in a movie rendition?

Naturally, I’d want Mick Jagger to play himself, although he is not so much a character as a metaphor for a time, place, and interminable youth. “Good Night Goodtime Hour” is about Glen Campbell, who lived in my neighborhood when I was a kid; I suppose Matt Damon could play him, since he played Glen Campbell’s part in the re-make of “True Grit.” The other characters in the poems are my mother, my sister, my father, old boyfriends, kids from school, even my daughter; people I know from my everyday life. They already loom so large in my imagination, they would be hard for me to cast. But I think my sister would want to be portrayed by an actress she was once obsessed with. Her name was Dana Hill, but she died from diabetes in 1996. My mother was a huge fan of Meryl Streep; she’d like that. I’d like to think that the girls the poem “Plummer Park” alludes to, including me, were like the girls

in the 1980 movie “Foxes” with Jodie Foster and Cherie Currie (the vocalist in the all-girl band The Runaways), but we really weren’t. The woman described in “To An Accomplished Ceramicist” is said to look much like Joni Mitchell, and has been mistaken for Rickie Lee Jones, so either one of them might work. “On the Day of the Military Coup” was written as Hosni Mubarak was being deposed; maybe Al Pacino chewing up the presidential palace might be good for that part. The inspiration for “Doctor Appleman’s Rest’’ looked like Carroll O’Connor when O’Connor played Archie Bunker, but all fathers begin to look like that, after a while.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Self-absorbed, silly teen-age girl takes a look at her mostly male idols and decides she’d better model her own life after the girls and women she’s known; their accomplishments are more real, and more accessible.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

That’s hard to say, because I don’t have a regular writing schedule for most of the year; only during the summer, when I’m not working. So when I say “years,’’ they aren’t full 365-day years. It may take me months to write a poem, so while I’m thinking about it on and off for a long period of time, I’m only actually writing in bursts or during whatever time I can steal. “Putin” is based on a quote I got from a documentary on 9/11; I had been thinking about that quote for close to a decade before I wrote that poem. The Mick Jagger poem I wrote before 2007, but it went through several drafts over the years. I wrote “O Luminent Object” in 2007, although it went through a couple of drafts. “Facebook Status” I wrote in the summer of 2009, so I had time to really work on it; it probably took several days. The poems about my mother and sister I wrote after July 2010, when my sister died. I put together a potential chapbook in the early summer of 2011 and didn’t get anywhere with it, so I kept adding to it until I had this collection.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I’ve heard it said that the death of a writer’s mother is what finally frees that person to do his or her most real work, and I suppose my own mother’s death has spurred me to think about things I otherwise would have forgotten. My MFA is in fiction and although I had published a few poems over the years it wasn’t until my father temporarily lost his voice to throat cancer in 2003 that I began to write poetry more seriously, because I had to seriously consider what voice and sound meant, and poetry is partially about sound. Perhaps the most succinct answer is that aging--finally growing up after thirty years of adolescence--has inspired me, and continues to inspire me; to remember how both I and the world I grew up in have changed, because I’m losing the people who would otherwise do that for me.

What else about this book might pique the reader’s interest?

I hope the book encapsulates a certain time when children, and teen-agers, were left more to their own devices, and this—the stories contained in these poems--is what they did with them. They didn’t play video games or commit crimes or bully their peers on social media, but observed their environments and the people in them, and these observations became the foundation for all their impressions afterward. So I guess this book might interest readers in its depiction of adolescence, how so many ideas are forged during this period, and so many patterns are set, because of the intensity of those experiences, whether real or imagined.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

The book has been published by The Aldrich Press, an imprint of Kelsay Books: http://kelsaybooks.com.

And it’s available through Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/With-Apologies-Jagger-Other-Women/dp/06156777002

For even more information, there’s my web site: http://jane-rosenberg-laforge.com/


Title Poem

With Apologies to Mick Jagger

The only performance that makes it,
that really makes it, is the one that
achieves total madness, Mick Jagger
said, but it was a trick. Those words
were merely given to him, as if dictated
from a shadow on a loft wall or a skein
of crushed filaments, when the continents
were overlapping backwards from the
Pangaea’s completion. What he should
have said was about water, and lard,
and how country girls will attempt
to subsist on it; if they can’t, they will
diminish into sand, into powder, into
unidentifiable piles of cement stacked
by uncompleted roadways. We will
pave our next concepts with skeletons.
We tried to fight the government, but
the government had been counting on
it. It had been counting on all of us, so
when we could no longer defy auguries
in public, we submitted to its poor laws,
locking us in wheat and cambric. Every
night on the television—or was it the cinema,
if we could afford it—the newsreels were
hysterical, and we were mad. For light,
for heat, for molecules and messages;
as if love and murder were not arrows
sent through the mail, or the telegraph.
They were impelled by fuel, force, and
pressure, these copied trajectories from
Greece—or was it Rome? We had forgotten
the difference. Today the world turns without
us. Now it is the young who wait for a renewed
point of contact: a solar flare, a warp, the formation
of new capillaries, to recreate the species through poses,
stalled moments, and discard the compromises sculptors
must make to give their figures balance. Just allow me
to calculate my own wreckage through mirrors and poetry,
and other fantasies of measurement.

The Next Big Thing: Interview With Howard Faerstein

What follows is a self-interview entitled “The Next Big Thing” that is making its way through the blogosphere. Every Wednesday, writers who have a recent or forthcoming book answer the following questions, post them on a blog somewhere, and tag five more writers to do the same the following Wednesday. This interview is of and by Howard Faerstein.

What is the working title of the book?

Dreaming of the Rain in Brooklyn is the title of my book.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

It has been a lifelong dream of mine to see my poems collected in a book…(Actually, I did have a chapbook published, my juvenalia, but that was 36 years ago.) I guess the question could be focused on where the idea for some/all of the poetry comes from, and to that I’d answer: from my life. There are poems about childhood, my parents, my living through the sixties, the jobs that I’ve had. There are political poems that were written in response to political events; poems of exile and return; poems of love and the end of love; poems evoked by the natural world, poems that attempt to paint every space of white on the canvas and those that focus on the tiny corner hidden by clouds.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a
 movie rendition?

Have they started making movies out of poetry collections? No one told me…damn. Well, most of the actors that come to mind are dead: Sal Mineo, W. C. Fields, Paul Newman, Harpo Marx…How about Pacino or DeNiro?

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Wrong question for a book of poetry, especially for one like mine that isn’t a “themed” work. Dreaming of the Rain in Brooklyn is collection of poems that come out of my experiences. It is one possible way of being & surviving as a human being in a beautiful, terrifying and absurd world, in this case, being Howie Faerstein who has lived for 65 years (and counting).

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

I’ve been working on & revising the book for about a decade, maybe longer…Some poems go back at least that far while others were written over the past six months.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Gerald Stern, Michael Waters, Larry Levis, Allen Ginsberg, are some of the poets who have inspired me by their writing and by their teaching. Old rock & roll (doo wop even), the great jazz of the 1960s, and delta blues are other sources of inspiration. I’ve wanted to write the book for as long as I can remember…and I finally found a publisher willing to take it on.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

If you’re interested in reading poetry of place you’ll find works that are set in Brooklyn, the Berkshire Hills & Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts, Taos & Santa Fe, New Mexico, Southwestern Colorado, to name a few of the many locations.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

The book has been published by Press 53. (Check out their website: As of now it’s in the pre-order stage. I expect that it will be available in a few days…It can now be purchased on Amazon.com & Barnes & Noble.com…

And here’s a poem from the book—(originally published in Nimrod)

MISSIONARY RIDGE

On October Sundays
when we lived in Colorado
we'd drive to watch the osprey

in Vallecito,
to see if they'd left.
We'd pass the ridge

burned 2 years before,
buffalo & grama grass
rising toward somber foothills.

Under a Neanderthal moon
blackened pine lined the lake's rim
& the raptors flew on

both sides of the darkening road.
We weren't there for the fire,
we were in New Mexico

with its orange-furred bumblebees
& ring-tailed cats
in the ruthless Sandias.

It was a roaming time, my late 50s,
I was always thinking of other towns--
of Roanoke, its crepe myrtles

& I'd begun dreaming of the rain in Brooklyn
& the Italians
wrapping their fig trees in burlap

& a doctor at my daughter's birth
diagnosing an enzyme deficiency
he said would lead to retardation.

He was wrong,
but we spent a day in Bellevue
finding that out in a closet-sized room

filled with broken parents.
Months before Vallecito,
in the dining hall

by the Contoocook,
a phoebe flapped in panic
below the ceiling.

Its mate in a willow outside a window.
In the wildfire
the ospreys stayed with their chicks

as flames slapped at their tree.
I saw the charred
wingtips. Then

talons-first
they plunged
into water.