 Joanne Greenbaum |
 Kathleen Gilje |
 Peter Schumann |
 Jerilea Zempel |
January Visiting Writers:
Excerpt from Jawbreaker Layers
By Larry Woiwode
It wasn’t my head or even my hat I forgot but my gloves. This habit of getting words in lines on scraps of paper with pens or pencils or at a keyboard (where I now tap) has my hands so used to the task they turn transparent. I hardly see them. So gloves don’t register on the drive to Elgin – four on gravel, fifteen on blacktop – until I’m almost there and glance at the seat.
A checkbook where my gloves should be, surfaces edged with a crystalline light that shimmers everywhere from the snow-layered landscape like fire on foil. Just as when you drive up a glaciated mountain above clouds, struggling with the effort to see, so, too, here, you struggle and blink. There is no pollution and the sky is so purged of clouds on winter days that a silver-blue line grips the white horizon, welding the light in place: North Dakota.
In its brilliance a car is a greenhouse.
My mind is off on a race for the right arrangement to a set of paragraphs for a commissioned piece I have in my head. After thirty years of this I’m at the stage where I have to run to the bank once a week to hurry in a sum or shift another small one to keep an account above zero – a nuisance, not a deterrent, and the pressure of that sends an afterthought rolling in: writer’s hands extension of mind, so good at unpacking the purl prose forms they’re feelers for words, burning to invisibility, sun on snow.
I’m trying to write a memoir that gets beneath the self-consciousness of self. And as so often happens when I have work on the planks, I hear, at the border of sleep, the first sentence for it. The rest will follow like a curtain of snow threading its way over plowed fields toward me. Or that’s the optimistic trend my thought tends to take and sometimes passages do fall in place in a cascade of inner recognition but more often the work is like shoving a plow single-handed through three-foot drifts.
I’ve spent most of my life listening, and if I have an enduring trait, that’s it. But the hour always arrives when the listening has to be translated into words.
Excerpt from School of Fish
By Eileen Myles:
Everything’s equal now. Blue leash blue bike blue socks covering my ankles today what about my friend — I never wear socks for a week or two she lived in the streets & it was such an illumination. What’s this human addiction to light. One morning I dreamt about homelessness, joked about it. Life reduced or expanded to getting doggie her very next can. Dog’s inexcusable addiction to eating. At the bottom of the sea, David said, the fishies are inexcusably addicted to light. Same day I and my dog were left on the street. No home, no keys, streams of pouring grey rain. Now what is this grey, in relationship to blue. Ask some painter is it less light or is it what. What kind of hat should I have worn yesterday in my crisis. The dog’s blue leash was gone. My feet reaching over the bounds of the sidewalks, its curbs and waves, pavement splashing up hard and grey. Where did I see that man? Someplace so human they even had one of them. In a dark blue teeshirt, laughing. There is nothing to my anecdote, my predicament, my color crisis. There is nothing but blue & grey. A glint hits the golden key, and it’s a bad one not the original and I kept turning and turning there were copies everywhere in the neighborhood that’s what I am trying to say. I simply walked and the apologies kept coming streaming in and I said I simply walked and the tree turned, no the key and the bottom of the sea is flooded with light, we just get used to it the deeper and deeper we go and the harder it is to turn the key and eventually we go and it is very very dark we just get used to the light but the blues and the greys and the feelings of lostness, it’s like home, it’s like family.
February Visiting Artists and Writers:
Cleopatra Mathis
Ellen Altfest
Amy Yoes
Jim Clark
Dan Rizze
Michael Waters
