José Olivarez, Promises of Gold; "Upward Mobility"
[Text ID: dancing to avoid the fluttering / of roaches, the boy brushes his teeth / with one eye on the sink / & one eye on the bugs / & one eye on his teeth / & one eye on time / & one eye on homework / & one eye on his brothers / & one eye on the future— / years later when his friends joke / about how he has poor people teeth, / his head will shed its skin / to reveal 5000 eyes the size / of cockroach hearts.]
An excerpt from The Rumpus Poetry Book Club‘s February selection,
Promises of Gold by José Olivarez
forthcoming from Henry Holt and Co. on February 7, 2023.
Subscribe by January 15 to the Poetry Book Club to receive this title and an invitation to an exclusive conversation with the author via Crowdcast.
I printed out your column, “The Future Has An Ancient Heart,” and put it up on my wall so I can read it often. Many aspects of that column move me, but I think most of all, it’s this idea that (as you wrote) we “cannot possibly know what it is we’ve yet to make manifest in our lives.” The general mystery of becoming seems like a key idea in many of your columns. It’s made me want to know more. Will you give us a specific example of how something like this has played out in your life, Sugar?
Thank you.
Big Fan
Dear Big Fan,
The summer I was 18 I was driving down a country road with my mother. This was in the rural county where I grew up and all of the roads were country, the houses spread out over miles, hardly any of them in sight of a neighbor. Driving meant going past an endless stream of trees and fields and wildflowers. On this particular afternoon, my mother and I came upon a yard sale at a big house where a very old woman lived alone, her husband dead, her kids grown and gone.
“Let’s look and see what she has,” my mother said as we passed, so I turned the car around and pulled into the old woman’s driveway and the two of us got out.
We were the only people there. Even the old woman whose sale it was didn’t come out of the house, only waving to us from a window. It was August, the last stretch of time that I would I live with my mother. I’d completed my first year of college by then and I’d returned home for the summer because I’d gotten a job in a nearby town. In a few weeks I’d go back to college and I’d never again live in the place I called home, though I didn’t know that then.
There was nothing much of interest at the yard sale, I saw, as I made my way among the junk—old cooking pots and worn-out board games; incomplete sets of dishes in faded, unfashionable colors and appalling polyester pants—but as I turned away, just before I was about to suggest that we should go, something caught my eye.
It was a red velvet dress trimmed with white lace, fit for a toddler.
“Look at this,” I said and held it up to my mother, who said oh isn’t that the sweetest thing and I agreed and then set the dress back down.
In a month I’d be 19. In a year I’d be married. In three years I’d be standing in a meadow not far from that old woman’s yard holding the ashes of my mother’s body in my palms. I was pretty certain at that moment that I would never be a mother myself. Children were cute, but ultimately annoying, I thought then. I wanted more out of life.
And yet, ridiculously, inexplicably, on that day the month before I turned 19, as my mother and I poked among the detritus of someone else’s life, I kept returning to that red velvet dress fit for a toddler. I don’t know why. I cannot explain it even still except to say something about it called powerfully to me. I wanted that dress. I tried to talk myself out of wanting it as I smoothed my hands over the velvet. There was a small square of masking tape near its collar that said $1.
“You want that dress?” my mother asked nonchalantly, glancing up from her own perusals.
“Why would I?” I snapped, perturbed with myself more than her.
“For someday,” said my mother.
“But I’m not even going to have kids,” I argued.
“You can put it in a box,” she replied. “Then you’ll have it, no matter what you do.”
“I don’t have a dollar,” I said with finality.
“I do,” my mother said and reached for the dress.
I put it in a box, in a cedar chest that belonged to my mother. I dragged it with me all the way along the scorching trail of my twenties and into my thirties. I had two abortions and then I had two babies. The red dress was a secret only known by me, buried for years among my mother’s best things. When I finally unearthed it and held it again it was like being punched in the face and kissed at the same time, like the volume was being turned way up and also way down. The two things that were true about its existence had an opposite effect and were yet the same single fact:
My mother bought a dress for the granddaughter she’ll never know.
My mother bought a dress for the granddaughter she’ll never know.
How beautiful. How ugly.
How little. How big.
How painful. How sweet.
It’s almost never until later that we can draw a line between this and that. There was no force at work other than my own desire that compelled me to want that dress. It’s meaning was made only by my mother’s death and my daughter’s birth. And then it meant a lot. The red dress was the material evidence of my loss, but also of the way my mother’s love had carried me forth beyond her, her life extending years into my own in ways I never could have imagined. It was a becoming that I would not have dreamed was mine the moment that red dress caught my eye.
I don’t think my daughter connects me to my mother any more than my son does. My mother lives as brightly in my boy child as she does in my girl. But seeing my daughter in that red dress on the second Christmas of her life gave me something beyond words. The feeling I got was like that original double whammy I’d had when I first pulled that dress from the box of my mother’s best things, only now it was:
My daughter is wearing a dress that her grandmother bought for her at a yard sale.
My daughter is wearing a dress that her grandmother bought for her at a yard sale.
It’s so simple it breaks my heart. How unspecial that fact is to so many, how ordinary for a child to wear a dress her grandmother bought her, but how very extraordinary it was to me.
I suppose this is what I meant when I wrote what I did, sweet pea, about how it is we cannot possibly know what will manifest in our lives. We live and have experiences and leave people we love and get left by them. People we thought would be with us forever aren’t and people we didn’t know would come into our lives do. Our work here is to keep faith with that, to put it in a box and wait. To trust that someday we will know what it means, so that when the ordinary miraculous is revealed to us we will be there, standing before the baby girl in the pretty dress, grateful for the smallest things.
Sketch Book Reviews: Poetry Unbound by Pádraig Ó Tuama
Written and illustrated by Kateri Kramer
"This book is so ridiculously good and is perfect for National Poetry Month! Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World is a collection of poems by 50 different writers and accompanying interpretation. It covers a wide range of topics, forms, and writing styles making it a fantastic read for poetry-lovers and reluctant poetry-readers alike."
Writing Beyond the Bars: A Mini Interview with Geneva Phillips
By Cass Lewis
Geneva Phillips is currently an incarcerated writer completing the end of a prison sentence in Oklahoma. She writes about a broad range of topics and has been actively involved in a writing program called Poetic Justice in addition to PEN America’s Prison Writing Mentor Program, which pairs more than 300 working writers on the outside with close to 300 incarcerated writers. She and I were paired about a year ago, well after she wrote these award-winning pieces. It’s called a mentorship program, but it has prompted me to think about how it’s really a partnership, as we both exchange writing advice and build community.
Phillips’ short memoir piece, “Holding,” received Honorable Mention and was just published in PEN America’s 2023 Prison Writing Awards anthology, Thank the Bloom. Her award-winning work was also included in the PEN America Prison Writing Awards anthologies, The Named and The Nameless (2018), and Variations on an Undisclosed Location (2022). She is the author of the memoir, Disappearing in Glimpses (Mongrel Empire Press, 2020).
I was delighted when she agreed to share her thoughts on writing and community through an interview conducted via letter and telephone.
***
The Rumpus: When you think about your writing community, how would you describe it?
Geneva Phillips: I would describe it as a constellation of hopefuls. We write together inside to find our voices and perfect them. We write with the hope of being heard. Though the distance of our confinement makes it challenging, those outside keep us buoyant with ideas, opportunities, feedback, and encouragement. I think it all culminates into a reciprocating microcosm. We hope together, with each other, for each other. We write, we listen, the confinement loses some power.
Rumpus: While writing is a solitary activity, I’ve found there is something potentially transformative about a group of people all responding to the same prompt and sharing our work. How has writing in groups impacted your work as a writer?
Phillips: I’m definitely a better writer for the writing groups I’ve had the privilege to grow with. The relationships and community make writing a transformative activity.
Rumpus: Do you have any favorite writing prompts you’d like to share?
Phillips: One of my favorites was to open with the line, “Something happened,” and that one line produced a wealth of good material in our writing group. Also, we recently tried some unorthodox story writing where we used a selection of words and random sequence writing to produce short stories. I’m going to send you the directions so you can try it.
Rumpus: Thank you. I’m always looking for new prompts. Who are some authors you admire?
Phillips: Tanith Lee, Sandra Cisneros, Joy Harjo, N.K. Jemisin for the bottomless depths of beauty of their words. Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson for limitless imagination and the sheer scope of their world building.
Rumpus: When did writing become a central focus for you?
Phillips: I discovered writing poetry when I was eleven or twelve. It was a way to capture complicated feelings and experiences in words and helped me to process them. After I was incarcerated, I had a lot more time to write and I utilized it to practice other methods.
Rumpus: Recently, in the PEN America newsletter, “Works of Justice,” the Prison and Justice Writing Mentorship Coordinator, Jess Abolafia, and another award-winning incarcerated writer named Leo Paul Carmona discussed your memoir piece, “The Hard Part.” Carmona wrote, “Geneva Phillips’ piece hit me to my very core…It resonated so much, because I have lived and continue to live every word of what she wrote… Much like Geneva pointed out, we form friendships and bonds as we all go through the struggle of what it is to live in captivity. I have found that our bonds with others are solidified and strengthened when we face the same struggles together. Geneva speaks to the trauma of having friends ripped from you, or for us to be ripped away from them.” When you see the impact your work has on readers, how does this add to your sense of community and how does it align with your intentions as a writer?
Phillips: With my nonfiction work, essays, and memoirs, I wanted to expose the parts of being incarcerated that no one thinks to talk about. The emotions behind the injustices. The humans having human experiences inside the boxes where people believe only monsters exist. To have confirmation that others find commonality in experiences I write about just proves to me the importance of writing about these things.
Rumpus: When you’re writing, do you picture a specific audience for your work?
Phillips: I really don’t. Mostly, I just wonder how it will land with my writing group. They’re the thermostat I use to gauge the success of a story.
Rumpus: Where do you find inspiration for your writing?
Phillips: The strangest places. A misheard sentence. Happenstance and serendipity. Inspiration is everywhere.
Rumpus: You have written poetry, memoir, short stories, and other forms. When you write, do you know when you first start working on a piece what form it will take, or is it a surprise or does this process change each time?
Phillips: With poetry, I usually know the tone I’m looking for in a piece. With my memoir, it was a little different. I had an idea, but found the individual pieces fit their own tone. I have found short stories to be a surprise from the beginning to the end.
Rumpus: What are you working on now?
Phillips: I’m writing a genre-crossing collection of fictional short stories.
Rumpus: One of the things I love about your work is how it is haunting and raw but with a refined beauty, like a controlled burn. How do you maintain that balance between revealing what is harrowing while recognizing the universal humanity and even offering what could be interpreted as hope?
Phillips: Well, first of all, thank you. I’m going to save that description forever. I think that it’s really just the truth about life that reveals itself when I write. Life is terrible. Life is beautiful. In the midst of the beautiful, we hurt. And in the midst of the terrible, we hope.
Rumpus: If you were going to share some advice with someone who just started writing, what would you tell them?
Phillips: Write. Practice your craft. Hone your skills. Read. Read things you don’t want to read. And find other people who also read and write to be in community with.
Rumpus: What is some helpful advice you’ve received about writing?
Phillips: Probably the most helpful words of advice anyone has ever given me were “go with your gut.” That was you! It was so helpful when I was revising. And at the end of the day, you have to go with what’s right for you.
Rumpus: Well, thanks. I’m glad it was helpful. It’s hard when different readers give different feedback and it’s all so subjective. I’d like to share a passage that really stuck with me from your poetic memoir, Disappearing in Glimpses: “So, she’s trained her eyes to not-see. Not see the trees. The wooded hills. The fields. The road leading away. She only sees the fence. The razor wire. This is reality. This is where reality is contained. A few square acres. For all intents and purposes, the rest of the world does not exist to her just like she does not exist to the rest of the world.” Can you talk a little bit about how you decided to write this story in a close third-person perspective, and how this poetic memoir came to be?
Phillips: The whole idea for this was inspired by The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. I had never encountered a book written in the form of vignettes. Once I had, my immediate thought was, I could write a book in this style. The POV was a decision I made so that the book would be not just my story. It is my story, but it is also archetypally all our stories. We, women of the locked boxes.
***
Cass Lewis is an award-winning writer, currently working on a memoir that explores mental health, mass incarceration, and the climate crisis. Connect with her here: www.CassLewis.com.
Sketch Book Reviews: Night Vision by Mariana Alessandri
Written and illustrated by Kateri Kramer
[Text ID: "I love it when a book forces me to re-assess my thinking on a particular subject. NIGHT VISION not only did that but also helped me to better understand our so called negative emotions. In the introduction, Alessandri gets right down to it. 'There are times, many of which we keep secret, when we free-fall into darkness...' The book is about all the ways we can understand and process that darkness we all experience. Part-science, part-philosophy, part-personal narrative, this book is excellently braided and balanced. The author's candor and personal experience draws you in and keeps you in. She makes you want to keep reading and learning. This book is an invitation to investigate our own dark moods and out relationships to them. It's an invitation to take a deep dive into psychology and philosophy with the author."]
"For anyone who reads a lot, you've probably, at lease once, had an encounter with a book that happens at the exact time with the exact right book. One of the most memorable for me was WINTERING by Katherine May. I found it during the early days of the pandemic and it was exactly what I needed. This that bring me enchantment lately! Black-capped chickadees that come to my bird feeder..."
[Text ID: "At a conference for booksellers last fall, I met part of the lovely team at Europa Editions. They told me about Mrs. S, a new book they were publishing. They described it steamy and sensual. I could tell how excited they were. The book is atmospheric and beautifully written. Set in an English boarding school, readers follow the new matron as she learns about herself, her students, and her body. We're brought along for some of the best writing about infatuation and obsessions I've come across. The setting is fantastic and transports you to the school's halls and the English countryside. But the real pull is the poetic, lilting writing that turns up the heat and makes the character's longing feel all the more real. Mrs. S asks readers to consider the ways characters inhabit bodies, how we inhabit our our bodies. We are given the opportunity to inspect sexuality and sensuality, love and longing, and what happens in the heat drenched days of summer."]
