Rivendell
A Farm's Time: A Talk with Jean Pedrick
Jean Pedrick grew up on Boston's North Shore, first in Salem, her birthplace, later in Marblehead and Danvers. She summers at Skimmilk Farm in Brentwood, New Hampshire. In winter she lives in Boston, where she has taught at Northeastern University's School of Continuing Education and the Boston Center for Adult Education. Her books include Wolf Moon and Pride & Splendor (Alice James Books), Greenfellow (New Rivers Press), The World of Grey and The Man in the Picture (a double chapbook in the Walking to Windward series published by Oyster River Press) and, most recently, Catgut (Pomme Press). A founding member of Alice James Books, Pedrick has hosted a peer workshop at Skimmilk Farm since l975.
What follows only appears to be a straight interview, conducted over the course of an afternoon, with the three participants sitting across the table from each other with a tape recorder between them. In reality, it is a pastiche of visits, emails and correspondence. We began with a series of email discussions spanning a six-month period. Monica Fauble, assistant editor at RIVENDELL, subsequently emailed her own questions. I then met with Jean face to face at Skimmilk Farm in June of 2001, the day after a workshop. We met again at Jean's Beacon Hill apartment later that year, over the winter holidays.
On Memorial Day weekend, 2003, I went back to the farm to participate in a workshop. As well as bringing a new poem, I dropped off our last interview questions. Pedrick's latest book, Catgut, was about to come out from Pomme Press, and the book's cover art was on brief display. Many of the "old guard" poets were in attendance, along with many new faces. After a few minutes of greetings, of people getting their cups of tea and catching up on the week's goings-on, we gathered around the long wooden table, ready for the first poem to be passed around.
SEBASTIAN MATTHEWS & MONICA FAUBLE
SM: You have led a summer workshop at Skimmlk Farm in New Hampshire for more than twenty years. Has the group stayed the same or have there been major changes?
JP: The workshop is winding up its 25th summer, with hopefully some nice fall Mondays before I have to close up and go to the city. It makes sense of the French adage that says something like the more it changes the more it's the same thing. We began one day with three, sitting under the pear tree. The pear trees are long gone but we sit under the maple tree, anywhere from seven to l5 or so of us. Some additions are virtual strangers when they come, but not for long, less due to our natural friendliness around here than to the poems. Getting to know someone through a poem makes for a kind of fast-forward. I measure the workshop not by publications or advancements into fascinating new jobs or arts venues having something to do with the poetry, but by the consistent usefulness, visible in the rewrites, and the warm sense of community and continuity of it all. The food varies. We have wonderful Feast Years and patchwork years, but the nourishment is pretty unchanging on the mental level. (I have to say in the less than Over-populated-with-Culinary-Geniuses years, those who shop on the way shop at the better gourmet/take-out places!)
I am hoping next year we can have a gala gathering of as many as possible who have been part of it and moved away, or into a busyness that precludes participation, or forgotten how to say to everything else in life, "Mondays are out of the question!" I think the level of work waves up and down; and sometimes one or another will be hot on vast projects that we have to make room for and others are at the same time slogging through the fallows, so there is the room; poetry itself is always changing, or trying to, or someone is trying to change it, and we think and talk about those changes, both out there and in our own urgencies and own work. But the thing itself, the motley gathering of assorted intense souls whose one absolutely common interest is the writing of poetry--how has that ever changed since the troubadors or the Romantics or the Beats were sitting around somewhere talking about it all, reading or singing poems, breaking bread?
MF: You've mentioned the waxing and waning of workshop participants. How are folks invited to join? By invitation? How do writers hear about Skimmilk?
JP: It has always been very word-of-mouth, a friend inviting a friend. Never a formal invitation, I think. People bring people or urge them to come and try it. If they like it and are liked for what they bring to it, it gets made clear, somehow, that they are very welcome to come again. Often I think people ask me if they may bring a friend, but they don't have to ask me. Sometimes if we're running horrendously busy with almost more people than garden chairs and one or two of them writing prose and taking too much time, I may say, I think week after next if I foresee a thinning because of travels, conferences, etc. Mostly to protect the newcomer from overwhelmment and give her/him a chance to see what it's optimally capable of being for one, work wise.
Again, we don't have a law against prose but we sometimes make prose writers read last. For one thing, we forget, all of us, to treat of it differently, and it is different! So there's a tendency to start in on it phrase by phrase, even word by word and comma by comma, as we sometimes do in a poem, which is absurd and probably even harmful to both prose and prose writer.
SM: Is there a group style, or protocol?
JP: The rules, surely, are unwritten. The first is, I imagine, no barracuda. The concept of the workshop as arena, in which one may kill or be killed, never made any sense. There is almost always something, even in a bad poem, on which to begin to build a good one. In an actual shop dedicated to work, one would take a likely piece and add it to the good piece, and progress from there, learning by doing, mentored, encouraged, nurtured along the way by other workers. Probably the second rule would be no prima donnas. They, having, in their own minds, arrived, can not listen or benefit or really give in return. For the rest, the more unruly, malleable, bendable to the needs of the particular person or occasion--sometimes someone is preparing something important on deadline--well, the more free and responsive the group can be, the better. As to lunch, there have been seasons when it outstripped the poetry! The whole thing works together--the setting, the farm with its old charms, pool for hot days, the casualness and flexibility and sharing, no one "in charge," no one "under pressure."
SM: What has it been like working with this group for so many years? Can you talk about some of the relationships you've formed in and through it?
JP: It has been, really, like water in the desert. In the beginning, a core of friends, but friends coming and bringing, week after week; friends concentered around the deepest common interest. I can't single out any one example. I would have to single them all out in a row, one by one, and it would be book length. 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 the vacuum, afraid and shy. I am always telling people to get into a group, or if there isn't one, to find a bulletin board at the library or the supermarket or the local watering place and pin up a plea and start one. As soon as there are two of you, you can shape it; as soon as there are ten you have ten leaders, ten gift-bearers, grammarians, lexicographers, pushers of the envelope. Throw in some good food and some iced tea or whatever and the poems will generate, transfigure, and shine.
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