Rivendell
Editor's Note
In jazz lore, the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins took a two-year hiatus from a thriving career. Famously, Rollins stepped off the stage and onto the Williamsburg Bridge, playing his saxophone to the wind. In doing so, Rollins allowed himself room to grow and mature as an artist outside the limelight. He entered the "woodshed" of creative process, that mythic retreat wherein the artist hones craft. By nature, writers go to the woodshed all the time. Like Sandburg out on his rock, or Dillard in her isolated cabin, we remove ourselves in order to connect. But this is often only half the story. Writers also attend workshops, give readings, participate in conferences, go to retreats, and collaborate with other artists. In doing so, we move ourselves out past the range of our own individual visions, mixing our voices into the larger voice of the choir. Even if we swear off the communal gathering of writers, we often will share our work with a small circle of friends. Indeed, we are perpetually moving between the "woodshed" of solitary work--in the study, alone at the desk--and the public, "literary" life of workshops, conferences and readings.
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Our opening interview is with poet Jean Pedrick, host of the Skimmilk Farm Workshops and one of the co-founders of Alice James Books. In her discussion with RIVENDELL editors, Pedrick talks about the various places that have influenced her recent book of poems, Catgut. She also discusses establishing a workshop and the challenges of small press publishing. She says, "Isolation is one of the problems of a writer. It's solitary work, and long and hard work, the goal is often very far away in terms of time. To have, in the meantime, an audience, as it were, and a skilled and exacting one, to have them see and encourage what you are up to, and cheer you on, keeps you on track, allays the depressive factors, alleviates the loneliness, the working in the dark." In complement to this interview, we showcase the work of more than a dozen long-time Skimmilk Farm workshoppers, including new poems by Pedrick, Marie Harris, Elizabeth Knies, Nancy Mairs, Charles Pratt, and Margo Lockwood. Nancy Mairs, in her candid essay on the workshop, writes: "This is what we can all do to nourish and strengthen one another: listen to one another hard, ask hard questions, too, send one another away to work again, and laugh in all the right places."
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In addition to the Skimmilk Farm Workshop, we also devote a special section to the work of writers who gathered together for the 2002 session of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference: showcasing a variety of work from faculty, fellows, working scholars, and conference contributors. Some of the work in the section is directly related to our theme, such as Carol Muske-Dukes' essay on her Los Angeles-based poetry workshop, Laurel Snyder's evocative poem "Work," Steve Armour's essay on playing jazz trombone, and James Hoch's lovely and elegiac poem about playing basketball with troubled youth.
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From the start, RIVENDELL was intentioned to highlight the personal connections that animate and fuel so much of literary life. Instead of hiding them, we have celebrated the mentor relationships, friendships, and collaborations that often inform the finished work. In this issue, for instance, collaboration is honored in works such as the "dual" dispatch from Holly Harden and Leo Hwang on the sound and light booth in Bread Loaf's Little Theater, as well as in the photographs by Ronald T. Simon and essay by Marc Estrin documenting the Bread & Puppet Theatre. And, in our archives, John Hanson Mitchell posits his theory on the unacknowledged collaboration between naturalist and photographer William Brewster and his African-American field assistant, Robert A. Gilbert. Mentor relationships are also important. In response to poet Dana Levin's excellent suggestion, we have begun our annual Emerging Writers Contest, asking more than two dozen RIVENDELL authors and friends to nominate students. This year's contest winner, Sarah Talpos (whose poem, "Antonina," was picked by our contest judge, Patrick Phillips) is introduced by her mentor, Gerry LaFemina. Lastly, we have gathered essays and poems that pay tribute to the legacies of Agha Shahid Ali, Larry Levis, and William Matthews-three beloved poets and revered teachers who died too young.
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Donald Hall has written about the condition of one's "life work," that nearly spiritual state in which living and working blend, with each transforming the other into something deeper, more meaningful. As with Frost's speaker in "Two Tramps in Mud Time," avocation and vocation fuse. By learning to do things well and by involving ourselves in our communities, we make a home in the world. In turn, this work informs and deepens our writing. Both of these states of being, these places, are vital to why and how we write. In a sense, we write out of them. Hopefully, one feeds the other, the way we go outside to breathe fresh air and then return home to sit by the fire and get warm.
Sebastian Matthews Asheville, NC Winter, 2002« Back to Excerpts