Stream of Consciousness

The Next Big Thing!

 

Six degrees of separation meet a literary chain letter:

Wendy Willis, accomplished poet and democracy advocate (and member of my Stumptown monthly poetry critique group) tagged me for The Next Big Thing interview series. Thanks, Wendy.

Wendy’s full-length poetry collection, Blood Sisters of the Republic, is now available from Press 53. You know you need to get a copy of a book with a title like that! And wait until you see its spectacular cover photograph.

My second chapbook, Eternity a Coal’s Throw, was published by Burning River Press in November 2012. Finishing Line Press published my first, The Hours of Us, in 2007.

In the past year, I’ve also put together a full-length collection, If Won’t Burn All Night. It includes some of the poems from Eternity and is currently doing the (requisite?) tour of a few poetry contests and small-press open-reading cycles hoping to find its publishing home.

Meanwhile, not wanting to have my idle hands become the devil’s playthings, I am nearly done with the draft of a second book. Miss Scarlet in the Library with a Rope gathers an abecedarian of poems all “named after” book titles by prose authors I’ve loved and read voraciously over the years—Margaret Atwood, Italo Calvino, Wallace Stegner, and Virginia Woolf to name a few.

But back to Eternity for now—

What is the title of the book?

Eternity a Coal’s Throw. That phrase comes toward the end of the faux ode/ fractured fairy tale I wrote about Plymouth, my hometown in the anthracite coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania: 

You’re just another in the long, long line—/ prodigal daughters who could do far, far worse /than spend eternity a coal’s throw from a front-yard Virgin, / halo-blue and lustrous in an up-stood, claw foot tub.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I’m not sure that there was ever a single idea, a light bulb that suddenly flashed on and urged me forward to write this particular book. What is true is that I have been attempting to shine a patch of light on the landscape and culture of the corner of Appalachia where I was born and grew up for a long, long time now.

As I wrote in the introductory essay that begins the chapbook, there is, indeed:

Something about that place—the wrecked and ugly landscape; its century of post-industrial impoverishment; its beaten-down but oddly resilient, near-to-beautiful dishevelment; the ties that bind the many people who stay (including nearly everyone in my family) as well as the many who leave only to return; the crazy quilt stitched together out of dozens of immigrant cultures; the still reliable (in this virtual, often cruel 21^st century) generations of kinship, friendship, heartfelt community—well, all my life, it has both mocked and bedeviled me. Exerted a gravitational force yanking me back, insisting on its rightful even righteous claim as “home.”

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry. Some of the poems strain to be more formally contained; others ramble and range the field of the page. A few are multi-part narratives with lyrical, occasionally leaping and surreal language and a preoccupation with the (enigmatic) art of language itself.

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

The poem in my chapbook I would love to see turned into a movie—or even a Broadway musical!— would be the eighteen-part poetic sequence called “In Pursuit of the Impossible Syllable.”

Using multiple points of view and a handful of (reliable and perhaps unreliable) narrators, this “poem” attempts to solve the mystery of Mary Edith Heffernan, an iconoclastic (and stuttering) woman who lived in and left her home in a small town in coal country after a “dangerous liaison” with a migrant worker in 1938.

Mary Edith. Wow. I think she has to be Frances McDormand. Because Frances and I actually have similar roots. We both grew up steeped in the same Protestant denomination (Disciples of Christ); Frances was adopted by a Canadian minister and his wife who, for a time, were at a church in Benton, Pennsylvania not far from my hometown, a couple my parents actually knew. And of course there is also her extraordinary range—funky and earthbound, fetching and sincere, gutsy and willing to go it utterly alone.

And for Anthony? Idris Elba without his British accent. Some of you may know him as Stringer Bell from The Wire; he’s now the star of a superb BBC series called Luther.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

I’ll borrow the epigraph I used from Alice Munro:

“Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.”

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

Most of these poems emerged in the past three years. The long, multi-part narrative began in a 2009 class I took with Paulann Petersen, now Oregon’s Poet Laureate: a “free write” exercise about the contents of a sewing box. Some of its sections had been fits and starts, miscellaneous scraps of lost and found language I have been tinkering with for around a decade.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Once upon a time—when I was another person, it often seems—here’s how I began an overly ambitious novel (still in progress): “You could be born in a place, live there long and never really know what it meant. No matter if you walked the mountains and climbed to the tops of trees, taking in the broadest view. Or drove a tunnel deep in the earth finishing miles from where you began. In the end, you’d only find wildness and another dark and hidden spot.”

I’m thinking it still comes down to that.

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

Well, you might get to learn a lot/more than you ever wanted to know about the geology behind the creation of anthracite coal! And, really, how can you pass up a poem about a town’s mascot that is a human kielbasa costumed in a sleeping bag and flip-flops?

Is your book self-published or represented by an agency?

My book was plucked from the slush pile of the up-and-coming Burning River Press based in Cleveland, Ohio whose publisher, Chris Bowen, is a very gifted writer himself.

My tagged writers (thus far) for next Wednesday, February 6^th are:

Chris Bowen

Miles Budimir

Lauren Sweet

More about my writing and publications is at www.nancyflynn.com.

Walking the Susquehanna, September 2005

As part of the funding that the Army Corps of Engineers received to (finally) raise the height of the dikes (now known as the Susquehanna Levee system) after the disastrous Agnes 1972, a network of recreation trails was created, essentially asphalt paths laid down on top of each dike. This trip back to Plymouth to see family I was saved by these trails. The Plymouth Passage, as it is known, runs pretty much the length of the town from just below the old Carey Avenue bridge site to the levee across from the National Guard Armory down on Flat Road. The markers erected at the various entry points into the trail do a great job talking about the history and the system of trails itself but they don't detail mileage so, truth to tell, I never know how far I walked. But most days I did the entire loop and it seemed to take 75 minutes or so. I'm sure there's some well-known algorithm for how many miles per hour that is.

You Can Go Home Again

I'm finally back in western Oregon after nearly three weeks in the Northeast, visiting with family in northeastern Pennsylvania; two nights and three days up in Ithaca, meals with friends, a haircut, and seeing the wreck of Ithaca's small town spirit in the short seven years since we left; two trips to New York to help C. pack up, drive his possessions back to Plymouth to box and ship; then finally a rental car drive with C. to Washington DC to see M. and march in the September 24th anti-war march before flying back to Portland on Sunday.

Nut hatches, chickadees, stellar jays zoom from tree branches to the feeder to the green ceramic bird bath hanging on the stunted pear tree. Organic beef and bean chili simmering since this morning in the crockpot. Flowers on the deck still blooming, The afternoon still sunny and warm and the night, coming more quickly, cooler, half days of light and night, it's definitely autumn.

There were many more moments on this too-long trip than I can count that were grueling, nearly pushing me to the edge of tolerance. Some had to do with family and family relationships, others with the mean-spirited ugliness of visiting in a place that is definitely on more than a slippery slide down, down, down. And all this with the backdrop melodrama of the Katrina disaster in the Gulf Coast, the flooding in New Orleans, the abandonment of its citizens.

At least I've now had my fill of east coast pizza! And read five Kinky Friedman comic detective mysteries. But mostly being back there made me sad. It's a world that's in decline, with too-long waits at traffic light, too many people lured into debt for too-large SUVs and cars. There's not enough silence, there are people who spend too much time meddling in one another's business or watching the world go by on the screen of a T.V. The price of gasoline was a recurring, worrying topic. Home heating oil and natural gas also appeared on the radar as the bodies were recovered from nursing homes, hospitals, ramshackle shacks masquerading as houses in New Orlean's 9th ward.

Overall, I could not wait to get back to Oregon. To get back to green and light rail and space and fewer people and people who care about the words sustainable and organic, a place where flowers grow ten months out of the year. So much early on in the trip became me--as so often happens when I go back to Pennsylvania, to home, ancient invocation of that word--putting my life, what I do, who I am on a kind of hold. By last weekend, in spite of the energy of the anti-war protest, I was ready to get on that plane and BE home.

So here, even with the changes of C.'s move and presence, remains better than anything there. Oregon has become home. It's a good feeling to have this astonishing clarity around that.

Gotta Get My Act Together

An old high school friend sends clippings, reminders of all I'm missing, all I could be covering if I lived back home, in the Valley with a Heart instead of here, the heart of the valley.

I have a semi-novel semi-written. There's definitely something I know I can make out of all that. The new, improved, 49-year-old productive me ought to be able to fashion, at the very least, a chapbook of prose poems out of the material that won that 1993 James Jones award. Think: product. Think: recycling. Think: your talent is far greater than your angst. Think: just do it. Think: what have I lived, done, been through that makes story that would sell, sell, sell? Think: chapbook of poems or prose poems about G. that you can then submit to the endless contests advertised in Poets & Writers that seem to have contests for unpublished poets with unpublished chapbooks. Think -- and remember -- this IS what I do.

Essay: Comfort

Combing through my archives of writing today and found this. Thought it would be good to post it here in Anthracite Diaries...It's a brief essay about being in my hometown on September 11, 2001 after being in New York City visiting my adult son the day before, September 10th. I guess everyone has their stories of where they were that day. Maybe writers moreso. Here's one of mine.

--NF

COMFORT

I grew up in Plymouth, a town of 6500 on the Susquehanna River in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The only person in my immediate family who’s ever left, I lived two hours “up the road” in Ithaca, New York for nineteen years before moving across the country to the Pacific Northwest in 1998.

Whenever I go home, I draw the curtain on the person I am the rest of the time in the rest of my life—fretting, churning, striving—and try my best to enter into Plymouth’s small town pace: more 19th century than 21st, a place where everyone seems to know everyone else. Church bells chime the hour every day of the week not just Sundays, a comfort more than an aural reminder that I’m wasting my day, or my life. Few things are considered urgent or done with more than a single motivation or purpose. A walk along the dike is a walk along the dike, not the requisite twenty-minutes-three-times-a-week so you’ll have a healthy heart. The blue plastic tarp roped to a hole in the side of a restaurant damaged by fire ten years before is part of the landscape instead of an eyesore. When I ask why the tarp’s still there, everyone knows the story—how the owner never got the insurance money, if he never fixes it, maybe he’ll get a HUD grant instead.

I was home, visiting family, when four hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and a field in southwestern Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. Plymouth is barely 100 miles as the crow flies from New York City, where I’d been until the night before helping my 24-year old college student son set up his new apartment in Staten Island. I’d planned to stay until the 11th but we’d finished our chores ahead of schedule, my son had schoolwork to do, and it was muggy and hot. I said goodbye, knowing I’d see my son the following week on my way home to Oregon, and pointed my rental car toward the Jersey turnpike. I missed rush hour but not the storm that made the next day cool and clear.

That Tuesday morning I woke up early. My parents were out of town, visiting my mother’s sister in southern New Jersey so I had the house to myself. I was having my second cup of coffee when one of my sisters called from work to tell me to turn on the T.V. The first tower had just been hit.
The calm of my life one second before metamorphosed into an urgency of smoke, fire, and dread, seeping out of the television into my parent’s living room, spilling blood on the floor, pouring into the streets of Plymouth like the ’72 Agnes flood. My first call was to my still-sleeping husband in Oregon. Then I dialed my son in New York on my parents’ rotary phone. I dialed over and over, 20, 30, 40 times and heard “all circuits busy” again and again and again. I finally got through to my son’s girlfriend and left a message with her before all lines into the city went dead.

My other sister had the day off. She and her four year old son drove over from where they live, across the river in south Wilkes-Barre. They picked up tuna hoagies from Red’s Subs and we ate lunch soldered to the news. The bottom edge of every local station crawled with emergency information: I-80 and I-81 closed to all traffic; the whereabouts of the Martz Bus commuters who left Public Square every weekday before dawn for Wall Street; classes at the community college cancelled, the YMCA day care letting out early, no evening novenas for the St. Ignatius Ladies Sodality. My nephew played with the only toy he could find in my parents’ house: a set of wooden blocks that used to belong to my son. He built a tower out of the blue squares and orange rectangles, balanced an unstable red arch on top, then sat back and waited for blocks to fall.

Eventually my sister left and I took a break from the relentlessness of the news on T.V. I got in my rental car, the idea being to fill the gas tank just in case I had to drive somewhere in the next day or two. But where? To New York City to rescue my son, stranded now by a moat of closed bridges and roads? The 2400 miles back to Oregon, my speedy getaway from the crazy, targeted East?
The few stores still in business on Plymouth’s Main Street had closed for the day, including the state-run store that sells liquor and wine. I got gas and kept driving, through town and south down US Route 11. Piles of wasted coal and dirt bike trails filled the land between the highway and the river. I passed a front lawn used car lot, the National Guard Armory built on the site where anthracite was first mined in 1807, the boarded-up Stoney’s Tavern, a repair shop called Mister Brakes.

Right before the junction with PA 29, I decided to turn around. I pulled off the road at the spot where a blue and gold Pennsylvania historical marker commemorating the Avondale Mine disaster had been planted in the coal and ash that serves as road shoulder in that part of the world. Even though the marker was easy to read from the front seat of the car, I got out anyway.
“ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1869, A FIRE BROKE OUT AT THE NEARBY AVONDALE COLLIERY,
TRAPPING THE MINERS. THE EVENTUAL DEATH TOLL WAS 110. THIS INCLUDED FIVE
BOYS BETWEEN THE AGES OF TWELVE AND SEVENTEEN, AND TWO VOLUNTEERS WHO WERE
SUFFOCATED WHILE ATTEMPTING RESCUE. AS A RESULT OF THIS DISASTER,
PENNSYLVANIA’S GENERAL ASSEMBLY ENACTED LEGISLATION IN 1870 WHICH WAS
DESIGNED TO ENFORCE GREATER SAFETY IN THE INDUSTRY.”

What the marker didn’t say—what I knew from research for a novel I was once writing—was that the Avondale fire was the first and only time Plymouth made the international news. Avondale was considered the anthracite industry’s first major disaster. It had been the first day back to work for the miners after a long, bitterly feuded strike. Headlines claimed that the civilized world woke up that morning and was shocked by news of the conflagration. There was public outrage at the danger the miners had been put in by the coal breaker’s faulty design. Harper’s published a long article complete with lithographed renderings of the grisly scene. People from all over the world sent money to the relief fund for victims’ families, over $150,000. I think someone even wrote a song to memorialize the catastrophic event.

Amazing as it seems, they recovered all the bodies. Passageways were flooded and many of the openings to the undamaged chambers in the mine’s convoluted maze were blocked by fallen timber and smoldering debris. When rescuers could finally descend the shaft, they found the bodies of old men with young boys by their feet, nesting like lambs, and others, heads bent, their hands clasped, the tips of their fingers black. One newspaper told how two miners, David Williams and his cousin Eddie, looked like they were boxing. They were brought to the surface as they’d been found, stiff, with both arms raised and fists clenched, asphyxiated while they swung at the air.
I stood in front of the historical marker, a September day 132 years later, and stared at the words “Avondale Hill” painted in hasty, yellow letters on a cement wall across the highway. Below the words, a white arrow pointed in the direction of a one-lane road that snaked up to what surely was the old breaker site.

I thought about my son in New York, my stepdaughter who’d just moved to D.C., my parents driving back from New Jersey hurtling toward shut down roads. I thought about David and Eddie Williams, wondered if their mothers saw when they lifted their bodies out of the shaft. And I thought about what I’d seen on television earlier in the day, footage—captured unexpectedly and shown only once—of people leaping from the Trade Center windows, their bodies falling, weighted feathers, and how more than a few were two people holding hands.
I got back into the car, pulled into the right lane, and followed the arrow, a sharp, angled left. The sun was high in the sky when I opened the car door and tiptoed into a flat, grassy field on the top of Avondale Hill. There were many hours of church bells to go before that day would reach its end.

I Come From...

I come from...

A small town in the anthracite coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania (the northern edge of Appalachia), a place few people leave—three, four generations in the same town, family members on the same street, even next door—and only poor people move to.

A Welsh grandmother who baked cookies on a black cast iron griddle and made tiny Jackie Kennedy suits for my 1959 Barbie with the platinum bubble cut and Irish great-grandparents who fled County Mayo to run a pub in London where my Irish grandmother was born.

One grandfather who was a stone mason and the other (who died before I was born) was a coal miner and a drunk. A grandmother who worked as a switchboard operator for a utility company after her husband, the drunken coal-miner, died.

Relatives who lived together in a single-family house—at one time, my grandmother and her husband and children, her mother, her spinster sister, her retarded brother, relatives who still had outhouses in the 1970s.

A father who was spared a Catholic upbringing when his mother, my grandmother, insisted he and my aunt attend her church and a mother who never learned to ride a bike, hates to use public bathrooms, and refuses to drive a car. Parents who met in church and married at the ages of 21 and 19.

A family where everyone talks at the same time during holiday dinner.

Culm banks, mine fires, underground tunnels, cave-ins.

The smell of sulfur and the headache you got because of coal burning round-the-clock in the furnace, October until May.

Coal ashes used to break up ice on sidewalks, give car tires traction in the snow.

Rag rugs, pulley clotheslines, clothes sewn at home and of course handed down.

The Susquehanna River, too polluted to fish or swim.

Easter bonnets and velvet Christmas dresses, wrist-length gloves that smothered each finger, fur muffs, black patent leather shoes with slippery soles and straps.

Piano lessons at Wyoming Seminary School of Music and recitals with the Easter bonnets and white gloves.

Reading books as escape from family fighting and the ever-present television—Ed Sullivan, Disney and the Hallmark Hall of Fame, Dark Shadows and the Dialing for Dollars movie after school.

Christian summer camp in the Endless Mountains where my first kiss was a black boy from Philadelphia who taught me to dance the Bump.

A flood the summer before my senior year that washed away holiday ornaments, family photos, all our childhood board games because we forgot to take them upstairs.

Transformation thanks to a college in hill-free Ohio where I fell in with vegetarians and organic farmers, with pot heads and ne’er do wells, many of whom had trust fund safety nets.

Love with a boy who looked like a girl and couldn’t love me back until eighteen years later because way back then he had decided he could only love boys.

Dropping out of college to trail the boy who preferred boys.

Living like a character and as if life were a novel —lost weekends, wild, howling-at-the-moon nights, sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Unplanned pregnancy and then marriage to the father and having a baby—born the month I was supposed to graduate college, then divorce two years later, at 24.

Welfare and food stamps, WIC vouchers and rusted-out cars that barely work, scholarships and loans to finish college, welfare and the Ivy League, in Ithaca, New York.

Cornell University where close to twenty yeras I worked at jobs I mostly hated and where I learned to have nothing but disdain for incompetence, bureaucracy and overpaid self-promoting nincompoops.

The Coast Range woods of western Oregon where I live below the dominant culture's radar, blessed by liberation from the 9 to 5. Where I remain, as always, motivated by the desire to live an authentic and compassionate life.