The world outside of California hardly
noticed the blaze destroying Los Angeles Central Library in 1986. Although it
was the worst library fire in American history, it was largely ignored for it coincided
with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Library fires, often started deliberately,
are not rare events in the USA and elsewhere. There have been many such fires
throughout history. Caesar set alight the library at Alexandria. The Nazis were
infamous book burners. Often what is gone is irreplaceable. Manuscripts and
early editions vanish, taking part of human memory and identity with them.
Something more than paper burns. Something of life itself is lost.
There are also heroic tales of rescue.
Susan Orlean in The Library Book,
recounts the fire in a Russian library in 1988 when a crowd of onlookers defied
the police, firefighters and bulldozers by rescuing as many books as possible,
taking them home and drying them out.…
Chelsea Wagenaar’s poetry collection The Spinning Place is an intensely personal exploration of relationship, family, and motherhood. Her voice is that of a mystic, reporting to us the connections everywhere between the mundane and the sublime, the infinitesimal and the infinite. She fearlessly relates the sacred mysteries of life: the dreams of infants, the cold silence after an argument, the empty space where a barn once stood, and the miraculous odds of having been born at all.
Wagenaar’s sparkling train of thought stitches together these otherwise disparate elements, these connections we miss in the rhythm of our daily lives. In “The Spinning Place,” the first of three poems with the same title and the poem that opens the collection, Wagenaar leads us through a graceful flow of subjects, leaping from the creative writing classroom to the delivery room to the Mars Rover, singing “Happy Birthday” to itself alone on that red, alien planet.…
Julia Rowland is a multifaceted creator and an award-winning writer, producer, director, and recent graduate of the Canadian Film Centre. She developed two feature films, one of which, Parentals, is inspired by her life story with her parents. After she graduated, she was asked to produce the CFC’s (Canadian Film Centre) TV Teasers for the TV Writers program—six shoots in less than ten days which wrapped about a year ago. She’s also part of a script incubator called From Our Dark Side.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., founder and Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Rowland about her previously published piece, “Weight,” the creation of Parentals, her time at the CFC, and much more!
Carole Mertz is an author, poet, and editor who’s had works published in literary journals in America, Canada, Great Britain, and Africa. An Oberlin College graduate, she’s Book Review Editor for Dreamers Creative Writing; reader of prose and poetry for Mom Egg Review; member of the Prize Nomination Committee for Ekphrastic Review; and an advance reader for the WNBA 2018 Poetry Contest. Kendra Boileau of Penn State University Press notes: “Mertz is a master of poetic form, imagery, sonority, and wit.”
Your poems show a knowing of the darkness but also of the sunrises while “…searching for a distant view of everything.” The poems encompass childhood, courtship, marriage, maturity, and the reader is advised to “hang on to your memories.” How did you decide the chapbook’s title?…
Most of my friends, even the ones who share many of my interests, hate the books I recommend to them (at least for the first fifteen pages). Probably because I have an unconscious addiction to the trauma of being dropped into a confusing situation. Something about replicating birth. When I first meet a book, I like it to make me feel out of place. I like to feel the structure or language push up against me and be totally unsure about its rightness or wrongness. Andrew Weatherhead’s latest book of poetry, $50,000, has made me feel what all my favorite books do. What begins with jarring confusion over form transformed this reader into a believer in the pace and texture of the mundane.…
Carolyn Howard-Johnson is the author of the multi award-winning series of HowToDoItFrugally books for writers, including USA Book News’ winner for The Frugal Book Promoter (now in its third edition). An instructor for UCLA Extension’s renowned Writers Program for nearly a decade, she believes in entering (and winning!) contests and anthologies as an excellent way to separate our writing from the hundreds of thousands of books that get published each year. Two of her awards are “Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment” (given by members of the California Legislature) and “Women Who Make Life Happen” (given by the Pasadena Weekly newspaper). She is also an award-winning poet and novelist who shared what she’s learned.
I can see how you might be exhausted with two books released in a month, but I am hoping you’ll share a little about the second one because it’s brand new to me. …
Someone You Love is Still Alive – Ephraim Scott Sommers
Even before I read the poems in Someone
You Love is Still Alive, I heard reports from shootings in schools and
malls, in nightclubs and the bases of armed forces. I remembered hearing
stories from survivors of natural disasters in reports on radio and television.
I remembered how buildings like the Twin Towers in New York City fell. I
remembered the death of Prince. I remembered the crumbling of the Roman
Catholic Church under the sexual abuse claims against priests and bishops. I
remembered the death of my dad, the death of my first marriage, the death of a
dream that would never be. They were just too painful to remember. I am not sure
how to make sense of these events whose presence has become a fixture in my
memory.…
