r.k.vr.y

We were honored to have Michael Milburn’s wonderful, unique essay “Hot Glass” appear in the Spring 2012 issue of r.kv.r.y. He currently teaches high school English in New Haven, CT and his book of essays, Odd Man In, was published by MidList Press in 2005.

His forthcoming book, Carpe Something, is a collection of poems and will be available sometime this spring.

Here are links to some of Michael's other fine work:

“Tenants of the House,” in Readerville Journal.

Description: Buying a house once owned by a favorite author leads to some educational epiphanies.

“The Sunlight of a Suggestion,” in Brink.
Description: College teaching always seemed like the goal, until the author found himself among poetry loving sixth graders.

“The Second Education,” in Hippocampus.
Description: There’s more to teaching than “information that walks through the door and announces itself by light of day.”

“Jack’s Room,” in The Montreal Review.
Description: An older sibling’s childhood bedroom embodies a world of influence and rebellion.

His personal website containing links to and Pdfs of his published essays can be found here: http://www.michael-milburn.com.

Shame is something like this:

The morning horror of mirror pinching and posing and propping your hair this way across your forehead so that the acne is covered and tilting far enough to one direction so that the reflection is false enough to please you. And then, it's something like this, like every reflective surface at school today, every piece of glass, is a reason to contort and to pull and pull and pull at the corners of your shirt to cover your biscuit dough stomach. It’s pulling and pulling so maybe the cotton will stretch out enough, maybe the shirt will grow in size, maybe it will fit properly if you yank the threads and test the boundaries of a size Large. Hooking a finger around the back belt loop of your pants so the sliver of separation that starts low on your back won't slide out of the pants three sizes too small.

Shame is leaving the dog's leash coiled, too perfectly, in the center of the front room, so Mom comes home and thinks you've been outside today, outside this week. It's when you quit the soccer team after the first practice because running the length of the field fills your lungs with sharp crystals and you can't breathe but you can't cough, either. It’s the six visits to the physical therapists for the ankles you keep cracking, twisting, pulling. The nurse says your name and points and you stare at the wall in front of your nose and you don’t look at the number she rights on the piece of paper and you step down and you don’t look at her either. The doctor, he draws a bell curve on a yellow pad and he points to the far right tail. Your ankles are too small to support your bigness.

Shame is not eating for seventeen, thirty-four hours, and then it’s the empty burn at the top of your throat and you open the fridge and the shining Kraft bag of shredded yellow cheese shocks your body into automatic consumption. And then it's a bowl of ice cream with hardened, caramelized chocolate syrup dripping between the cleavage of three bulbous scoops; four slices of salami meat rolled around crushed Goldfish crackers and consumed in one bite; a miniature pizza, frozen at first and still frozen in the middle when it slides out of the toaster oven, stared with cubes of pepperoni, hot cheese hot enough to blister the roof of your mouth and cold dough in the center that tastes just like clay, like disastrous uncooked food that you eat anyway; and then its peanut butter on bread and honey from the spoon and handfuls of chocolate chips and coated pretzel bites and cups of raisins and a bag of grapes because finally fruit cools the cheek-burning insanity. Fruit makes you feel healthy and empowered. Fruit is good so you eat a pound of grapes and leave the browned stems in piles on the carpet.

Shame is the bowls and the napkins and the plates that take two trips to remove from your upstairs bedroom down to the kitchen, and it's when you wash and dry and return every dish to the cabinet except for one -- one dirty dish left on the countertop -- so Mom knows you ate, but she doesn't know how much.

Shame is something like this.

Allison Smith is a soon-to-be graduate of the Literature and Language program at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. She writes about recovery from Binge Eating Disorder here.

Joan Hanna: We were so excited to have “Afterword: a Draft” in our April issue of r.kv.r.y. This was a personal and intimate piece about a rape that took place in the early 70s. Can you share a little with our readers about how the passage of time factored into your perspective?

Kathryn Winograd: Of course it was the poet Wordsworth who said poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility,” and I think the same can be said for creative nonfiction. The raw wound, that “spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions,” does not always allow language its transforming capacity for communion, for enlightenment, even transcendence, dark as that might translate itself. Now why it took me almost 40 years to reach a state of mind from which I could write this is something for me to ponder. When I was raped in the early 70s, I was a scared little girl, overwhelmed by the weight of familial, legal and societal expectations, and, to be honest, only half-veiled condemnations and ridicule, especially by my peer group. Despite the efforts and the progress made by women advocate groups at the time to shift legal scrutiny from the women rape victims themselves--states still required victims to prove that they had resisted “to the utmost” despite most certain physical imperilment and jurors were often instructed to give the victims’ testimony “special scrutiny,” a sobering 17^th century residue from when women rape victims were referred to as the “never so innocent,”--publically, rape victims were still regarded as culpable or tainted and thus pressured, however unconsciously or well-meaning, into silence, into the acquiescence of shame. I think having my own daughters and seeing their fragile, beautiful innocence unfold before me gave me the distance I needed from that little silent girl I carried inside me to begin to understand the ramifications of an act of violence on all levels. I am not that little girl, but a woman of 52 years who can look upon her with the greatest of tenderness now, and maybe even look upon those who wounded her most with at least wisdom or clarity, or, more powerfully for me, with neither as I try to understand the great gaps, as the poet Natasha Trethewey might say, in this history.

JH: In your essay you make a very strong distinction about your attacker being a “boy” at the time of the attack and the feelings you had about your attacker spending 25 years in prison. How do you think that changes the perception of the attack from your present perspective? Do you think his age factored in at all for you at the time of the attack?

KW: At least for me at thirteen, a nineteen year old seemed very old. A grown up I had no understanding of.  My parents’ periodic “updates,” I barely registered--ashamed, embarrassed to be reminded of something I was trying so hard to bury. My view of him as a “boy” emerged, again, as a result of my daughters and their friendships with male friends who seemed sometimes so heartbreakingly clueless and immature despite their outward bravado. One of their friends did something, nothing even close on the scale of what my perpetuator did to me that could have affected him legally for the rest of his life. Despite his good upbringing, his manners, his intelligence, he committed a stupid act against a girl his age, done out of great immaturity for which he regretted and still regrets to this day. What if the authorities had not recognized his immaturity, his capacity for change? Of course even as I write this, I am thinking that perhaps this is the crux of the issue: this boy had a core of goodness from which change could come. Did my perpetuator (notice here I don’t even call him a “boy”)? He already had a long list of offenses, each more invasive, more violent. Is there no hope then? Right now in Colorado, the courts reconsider a law that allowed children under the age of 18 to be convicted as adults for felony crimes, convictions that include life in prison without parole. Even for 14 year olds. Yet children under 18 do kill. Even 14 year olds kill. And families grieve. In the Super Max prison located in Florence, Colorado, inmates are in isolation 23 hours a day. For life. And yet some or all would kill me, and a hundred others, without a thought. I have no answer here. I could call myself a “bleeding-heart liberal,” yet the thought of stepping into a prison to teach inmates creative writing as some of my colleagues do leaves me sickened. My present perspective? That is still a gap.

JH: How do you think the pressure of a young girl knowing she “had to be the one to stop him” affected recovery from such a vicious act?

KW: Now I see it differently, but back then I was my parents’ loving, obedient daughter, affectionately called “KeeKee” by my father. This is what they said I must do and so I did. They did not ask me to do this unkindly. I know now, as a parent myself, that it must have been agonizing to watch me, so awkwardly clueless, have to answer the questions I did, meet the people I did, testify on the sexual matters that I had to.  I think only the summer before my mother had taken me into her bedroom and presented me with a pink Kotex box and helped me read the instructions on how to use them and why. I still remember the little blue belt that fastened around my hips. And that year, our junior high phys ed/health classes were still showing us cautionary animations about light bulbs (boys) and irons (girls). My parents could have buried this, sheltered me, but they both had a fine sense of moral responsibility, which I respect. They wanted to protect other girls and so they hoped through the concept of altruism to give me strength. Traumatic as the court procedures and all that went before might have been (I remember so little of it), I think they had little effect, good or bad, on my recovery. But of course once more I am dealing with gaps.

JH: You quote some horrifying statistics including, 40 women raped a day in the Democratic Republic of Congo and 200,000 women raped during the Bangladesh Liberation War. Can you talk a little more about the use of sexual violence as a tactic of war?

KW: I don’t know when I first heard the reports that the whole concept of rape in war had changed. I still had the Hollywood version in my head: rape happened as a side-consequence of brutal men, renegades swept over by the primalness of war. Then I began to hear of women raped by the thousands in a systematic manner designed to destroy whole cultures through decimation of the family unit, the introduction of the enemy sperm into the very bloodlines of a civilization, the civilization usurped not just by death, but, by birth. When I thought I had finished my manuscript on my own rape, I realized that I needed another voice, another perspective; one that looked beyond the individual case into the spectrum of gender worldwide. Too long I had nursed this as something that happened only to me, not realizing that I was merely a statistic, not even a faint blimp on the world radar. I barely had to do any research before I began to be overwhelmed by the vastness of this sisterhood I had unwillingly and unknowingly joined, and the ferocity of the men who would maim and annihilate what birthed them. Start with the United Nations Human Rights website and look up “Rape: Weapon of War” and learn for yourself.

JH: I think that people may often have a strong reaction when presented with these types of statistics of sexual violence as tool a of war but do you think that they have as violent a reaction to rape when it occurs as yours did, in the everyday?

KW: No I don’t think so. I think there is still the residual of “she deserved it” or “she made some stupid mistake that I would not make.” Or “he must be sick.” Who wants to believe that, on a large scale, the men we love, that we are paired with biologically, could have such evil in them that they could knowingly, systematically, strategically rape innocent women, girls, children even as they woo, wed, make tender love to their women at home?

JH: One thing that I found interesting in your essay was your perception of perpetuating the crime through silence. But, to me, it seems as though you were anything but silent. You went the authorities, you identified the attacker, you testified and he was sentenced. So you did speak up in the legal sense but I began to see another psychological dimension emerge as a sort of social silence, which becomes significant in the aftermath of a rape. Can you embellish a little on this aspect for our readers?

KW: I still remember, and it’s in the first essay I ever wrote about being raped, “Speaking the Word,” this ugly little bald male poet (whoops, I guess I’m still a little bitter) basically slapping his hand across my mouth the first time I was able to write the word, “rape,” down in some kind of cathartic attempt to make sense of what had happened:  “I know what you are saying,” he wrote in a little note on a little poem. “Kick it in the teeth and don’t ever say it again.” How can you talk about it? Who can you talk about it to without exposing this vulnerability?

JH: These are uncomfortable issues to discuss in many ways, thank you for speaking so honestly not only from your very personal perspective but also for giving us a little more of a worldview. I know that you have much work that is not specific to this topic; can you share links to your website and other publications to give a broader sense of the your writing?

KW: My website is www.kathrynwinograd.com.

Perhaps a good view of me as NOT the rape victim can be read at Literary Mama: “Talismans of the Whirlpool”

JH: Thank you for sharing your essay, Afterword: a Draft and for taking the time to discuss your essay and your writing with our readers. Just one final question, can you tell us what "recovery" means to you?

KW: Perfect example:  I started a creative writing capstone project with a student who presented me with a cute little essay on adopting an abandoned dog. The woman is an excellent writer in terms of voice, style, and language. But her work was always on the glib and witty side, something she herself wanted to change. We talked about her essay on the little cowering sheltie and then she made the statement:

“Well, you know this is all about me. My fear of everything.” Really?

She drew connections for me. She wept and said, “I can’t write this.” Really?

Week after week, tissue after tissue, we drilled down to her fear of death beneath the trembling dog, her fear of abandonment beneath the peeing dog, her stint in a Scottish prison for a DUI where she, numbered, abandoned, unable to bear children herself, brought food to the women prisoners who had killed their infants. No dog there.

Some weeks, she could barely uncrumple herself from the chair.

“Don’t ever let anybody read this,” she made me swear.

“Don’t ever make me read this,” she said.

Really?

This week, the two of us bent over her newest draft, weighing it line by line, word by beautiful word.

“Cathartic,” she declared it and sat straight up in her chair.

“I’ll read it at the capstone reading if you want,” she said.

Dry-eyed.

Writing: that is recovery.

Elizabeth Glixman: Bev, I’ve always enjoyed reading your poetry. I am glad I have this opportunity to ask you questions about your work. The Red Car, your poem in the spring 2012 issue has different imagery and a different tone than the poems in your chapbook Every Burning Thing Pudding House Publications, 2008. Burning Thing’s poems were confessional to me. The Red Car doesn’t read that way. The imagery is surreal even magical. The women in the red car work at a sex factory. They are old and toothless with labias for mouths (amazing image) and there is a desert beneath their skirt (a powerful comparison). The traffic lights are not green, red, and yellow but all black moons (evocative image). The car is not moving. The images elicit feelings of decay, stagnation, loss, aged women and their sexuality, economic exploitation and history. Do you agree that this poem is not like others you’ve written? What was your intention when writing it? Is it part of a larger group of poems?

Beverly Jackson: Thanks, Elizabeth. I do agree that this poem is a little different. I don’t think it’s too off the mark of a theme that’s developed in my later work. A bit of surrealism seems to creep into many of my poems, especially those dealing with age. The first poem in my chapbook (borrowing from Rilke's angels) is called Resurrection:

My own terrifying angels reappear after years of silence...
.. they dip into the bowl of my brain to wash their long white fingers...

The Red Car, however, is a more in your face with sexual imagery. Aging is this slowly evolving phenomenon that ultimately shocks most of us, I think. We still feel like our younger selves inside, but all has changed. Many adults who have been sexual beings feel suddenly like discards and unloved. Viagra has been developed for men, but women are mostly shelved for younger sexual versions of themselves. But for both genders, loss of sexuality is the taboo subject/the unaddressed grief of aging.

You mentioned that you found Every Burning Thing to be confessional. I'm guilty. I worry that it’s become an accusation these days to critique poetry as "confessional," that it dismisses work as subjective self-indulgence. Do you, yourself a poet, worry about that?

It seems to me that all poets must be guilty, and I think it might account for the veiling of meaning and inaccessibility of much poetry. Just to avoid the accusation. However I don’t understand how anyone writes decent poetry at all without pulling out their own insides through their fingertips, trying not to leave blood on the page. So, I write what I feel—whether it’s about me personally or about others, it’s coming from some depths of me that I don’t tackle the same way in prose or painting. I guess The Red Car might be
considered confessional as well.

EG: I hear what you’re saying about the confessional poet label. I’ve had similar thoughts. I think a “confessional” poem can transform a personal experience into a universal one. I don’t think this is self-indulgent at all: “pulling out their own insides through their fingertips, trying not to leave blood on the page.” That communication of feeling is what poetry is about IMO. I find it hard to keep the “I” out of poems.

As to the veiling of meaning and inaccessibility of much poetry some people seem to like reading poems where things are not clear, they like to work at getting it. I can see how other readers might get turned off by that and look for poets whose work is easily accessible. Each to his or her own. Sometimes the “veiled” poems do seem like a form of hiding. Then again poets often think in terms of symbols so perhaps it isn’t hiding at all.

What poets have influenced you?

BJ: My first influence at a very girlish age was Edna St. Vincent Millay. She is still a flower in my heart. Today I am enamored of Dorianne Laux, Thomas Lux, Chase Twitchell, and so many more. I’m not sure that my work is directly influenced by these fine poets, but they always inspire me to write.

EG: Along with being a talented poet you also write fiction and non-fiction are an artist and you were the editor of a print and online-lit magazine. How do you juggle all these activities and where is writing poems on your daily creative “to do” list?

BJ: Ha. I do all these things over decades, I’m afraid. Not all at once, at all. I can barely juggle lunch and a nap these days. I haven’t painted for a couple of years, and poetry is on the back burner until I finish the memoir I’m working on. So it’s sort of my own crazies that drive me from one endeavor to another. I have always felt there is not enough time to do all the things in this world that I want to do, and I’m cramming them in as fast as I can – including quilting, macramé, needlepoint, sculpting, collage, decoupage, and encaustics, tournament backgammon, to name only a few. I really do hope we all reincarnate because I’d like to have one lifetime to tackle just one endeavor and master it, for once.

EG: Do you think being a visual artist is an asset in writing poetry?

BJ: I don’t really know. They seem totally different to me. Painting comes from a place that doesn’t have words, so I hold it differently than the art of language. Emotionally they don’t even feel the same. I think there’s more joy in painting for me. It's a kind of 'dance' and release. But my life doesn’t seem to want to focus on joy. Even though I have a very good time, writing seems more natural, and somehow (to me) more important.

EG The Loose Fish Chronicles is your memoir in the works. http://www.echapbook.com/memoir/jackson/ At this link are excerpts from the book and a quote by Herman Melville from Moby Dick of which the following is a part:

"What are all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish too?”

If this quote is from the book, please explain the choice and relevance of the Loose-Fish and Fast-Fish idea in the memoir.

BJ: In Melville’s time, when whalers threw a harpoon and it stuck in the hide of the fish, they had “dibs” on that whale and would chase it down without fear of another
boat stealing it because they had encountered it first, thus the harpoon held it “fast.” A loose fish was a whale that nobody had hooked, so it was fair game, anybody’s for the
taking. Melville pointed this up as a metaphor, and when reading Moby Dick, I instantly identified with it, since I have never been held fast to anyone or anything for very long. I’ve lived in dozens of different cities, countries, houses. I am without husband, children, parents, so truly a “loose fish.” So much of my writing has chronicled this loner lifestyle that I thought it was a fitting title and theme for the memoir.

EG: When will The Loose Fish Chronicles be finished?

BJ: Hopefully while I’m still alive. It feels like the endless project. But I’m guessing by the end of 2012.

EG: You’ve written your memoir as a series of short stories. I am not familiar with this manner of writing a memoir. I know of linked short story collections. Are there any linked memoir collections you know of on the market that may have influenced you? Why did you decide to write your memoir in this form?

BJ: No, I don’t know if it’s been done, though I’m sure it probably has. I had many short stories that were fictionalized versions of personal experiences. I decided to remove the fiction and let the truth stand alone. The truth is a loose fish too. I wondered if I was made of stern enough stuff to just tell it like it is, to be fearless It’s been a wonderful process. It's very challenging to weed out the rationalizations, distortions and downright self-lies in telling a true story. In fiction, it doesn't matter, so I find non-fiction much more difficult.

EG: I read on your blog that you are learning stock option trading. How does stock option trading compare to writing? Why stock option trading?

BJ: It doesn’t compare to writing. It’s the side of my brain that pays the rent and feeds the dogs and pays for the ink cartridges. I do it to make money. When I get good at it, I
hope to make a lot of money. Wall Street and stocks and bonds were always terrifying to me. Just to look at the Wall Street Journal pages of tiny lists of stocks with their secret
abbreviations and acronyms would make my eyes cross. But all the things that used to terrify me went on my Bucket List. I love conquering my fears. I didn't have enough money to invest in stocks, but options are an inexpensive way to play the market. It requires much skill, so I've worked hard at it. I’m starting to understand investments now. (I used to be afraid of guns too. When I lived in North Carolina, I bought two of them, learned how to shoot them, and I just sold them the other day. I don’t need them anymore. I’m not afraid. Another item off the Bucket List.)

EG: I know you’ve done a lot of different things in your life: writer, artist, traveler, editor of Ink Pot, Literary Potpourri literary magazine. I imagine the memoir will be very interesting. Was it easy to know what to include or leave out about your life while writing it?

BJ: The memoir hasn’t been edited yet. Still a work in progress. I’m hoping an agent or editor will help cull what doesn’t belong in the book eventually. But yes there’s much to
write about. When you’re a loose fish, there’s lots to explore, and my life has stretched from 9 to 5 jobs to the New York stage and a stint on the Ed Sullivan show to fighting a
bull in Madrid, to say nothing of two failed marriages, myriad relationships and assorted dramas that they entailed. I’ve lived in North Africa, Trinidad, and Spain. I worked in the movie industry in Hollywood and rubbed elbows with celebrities. There’s more than enough material to use for the ‘bones’ of short stories, but the fabric covering them is the stuff of bildungsroman. And that's what the book is really about. That journey which is so different for each of us, and yet somehow so much the same.

EG: rkvry is a magazine with a recovery theme. Recovery is defined in the magazine as “an act, process, or instance of recovering; a return to normal conditions; something gained or restored in recovering; obtaining usable substances from unusable sources.” How does The Red Car fit into this recovery theme?

BJ: When I submitted this poem to rkvry, I felt it was a fit because it was about misfits. Old women waiting to die, women who once "fit" and now they don't.

Such people cry for resolution, for acceptance, for transformation. All of which can be generally encompassed in recovery.

There is no recovery unless there is an unhealthy or uncomfortable condition preceding it. For me, this is life. I feel like I have been recovering my entire lifetime from conditions of dysfunction, discomfort or dismay. The very fact of being born Homo sapiens is the condition. I would guess that most of my energies have been used in this lifetime to improve my condition, whatever level it may have attained. There has always been the next level, the next rung on the ladder of experience to be scaled. To me, it is a process – moving tirelessly from darkness to light for lack of a better image. Always waiting/hoping for the blacks lights to turn red, yellow, green. A recovery of sorts.

EG: Your take on recovery is a powerfully constructive perspective. It reminds me of this quote by life coach Michael Pritchard, “Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed.” You are changing the negatives in the dark room. That is inspiring.

BJ: Thanks very much, Elizabeth. Your questions and observations are very much appreciated. As a poet yourself, it's lovely having you do this interview. I'm also very grateful to r.kv.ry for taking the poem and inviting us to this conversation.

Elizabeth P. Glixman is a poet, writer and artist. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks A White Girl Lynching, 2008; Cowboy Writes a Letter & Other Love Poems, 2010; both published by Pudding House Publications and The Wonder of It All, 2011 published by Propaganda Pressl.  Her latest chapbook  I Am the Flame is in the works at Finishing Line Press. Her author interviews, articles, book reviews and  non-fiction have appeared in Whole Life Times, Hadassah Magazine, and the anthology Chocolate for A Woman's Soul II.  Visit her at http://elizabeth-inthemoment.blogspot.com/