My Life's Work, My Actual Calling: Project FLOW at the Water Works and in the Inquirer

We reach a certain juncture in life and we realize that there's only so much time left to us now. We look back and ask, Have we done enough, loved enough, been enough? We look ahead and ask, What now?

I have always been real with myself; I have known the me within. What are my passions? Children and stories. What have I done? Raised a son I love more than any story can tell and written books that a handful of kind souls have read. I've been flat-out lucky to publish as many books as I have. I've been unimaginably blessed to be given the chance to take my stories into classrooms and into the open hearts of the young. I learn from them, again and again. Frankly, I love them.

Two Tuesdays ago I taught at a multi-week camp for young scientists and activists at the Fairmount Water Works. The camp is called Project FLOW. My privilege is to get the children thinking and writing about the soul of the river, akin to my own work in Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River (Temple University Press). Kevin Ferris and the Inquirer team made the moment even brighter by agreeing to publish my photo essay (which includes the work of the young people) about that morning.

The link to the story is now live and can be found here. A few more photos from last week's post are here.

In the meantime, below, all of the children of the 2014 Project FLOW. Here they are listening to Sashoya read from her brilliant river creation myth.

Finally, thanks to my friend, the poet Kate Northrop, whose poem "Things Are Disappearing Here" got us all started.

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when it is time again to teach I turn to the poets

and, always, there, I find what I didn't know I was searching for.

In the dark hours of this cloudy day, just ahead of the morning I will spend with the seventh graders of Project Flow at Philadelphia's Water Works, I turned to Kate Northrop, Stanley Kunitz, Seamus Heaney, Mary Oliver, Ted Kooser, and Greg Djanikian and found:

* a title that leads me toward a game
* a scene that leads me toward a prompt
* a pair of divine metaphors
* a myth that will inspire myths

Whoever thinks poetry is superfluous has not spent a morning with children.

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three things loved, three things hated: Kate Northrop's haunted poetry

Out in Wyoming, where Alyson Hagy lives and teaches and writes, there are many very real, very committed artists.  One is named Kate Northrop, a poet with whom I have enjoyed a correspondence. 

Her poems have been called "haunted."  They have been likened to "the penumbra in painting, where light and shade blend." They have been described as "inclusive and generous, yet the tension, the thrill, never slackens."  Kate herself has been hailed as a poet with a "remarkable ability to combine erudition and empathy."  Last year she sent me an early copy of what would become the Persea publication Clean.  I read it in a sustained state of awe.

Today, thinking of Kate, I returned to Clean—the manuscript she'd sent—and found this page, these words.  I'm teaching this week at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  I'm taking Kate's words with me.

The first day they had to name
Three things they loved, three
They hated

Loved:  pulling moss from the seams
Between bricks; a stone
Cracked open; Jello, when you touch it

With a spoon, how it resists

Hated: a too-visible part
On the girl in front of you, scalp;
The skin formed on house paint;

Feet; white condiments

(Miracle whip, tartar sauce, mayonnaise)

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Peregrine magazine: standing among giants (and friends)

"You stand among giants," I could often be heard telling my students this semester, and there wasn't a speck of exaggeration in the claim.  For I had a class—oh, I had a class—and they taught me and one another.

It is perhaps fitting, then, that this past Tuesday, Peregrine, the Creative Writing Program magazine of the University of Pennsylvania, began to make its way into mailboxes and classrooms. It's the fourth issue of this beautiful publication, and all credit goes to the great poet, teacher, and CWP director Gregory Djanikian, who quietly sifts and mingles the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry of faculty, students, and alumni to bring this book to life.

I am so honored to be included in this magazine, and I am so touched to find myself here among the likes of C.K. Williams and Charles Bernstein, Alicia Oltuski and Rick Nichols, and my dear friends Karen Rile, Alice Elliott Dark, and Kate Northrop.  I've set this afternoon aside to read.  It will be time extremely well spent.

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Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives/Brad Watson: Some Thoughts

Sometimes it seems that I already know people I've never yet met. The profoundly talented Brad Watson is one of those. I first heard of him through my W.W. Norton editor, Alane Mason, who recounted discovering Watson's work in a literary magazine. He was a fresh talent, book worthy. She got in touch. Their first publication, Last days of the Dog-Men was uncanny and brave. It won the Sue Kauffman Award for First Fiction.

I was working with Alane then on a sequence of books, and so, from time to time, I would hear wind of a new Brad Watson book—this one a novel, The Heaven of Mercury, set in the early 20th century south. It was gothic, Faulknerian, adjective-rich, a thing utterly apart from the short stories. It was named a National Book Award finalist.

A few years ago, my friend Alyson Hagy, while having dinner at my house, spoke of her hope that a certain Brad Watson would join the creative writing staff at the University of Wyoming. After he did, I would sometimes hear stories of long hikes or fishing trips. A few weeks ago, Alyson mentioned that she'd seen an early copy of Watson's new collection of stories, Aliens in the Prime of their Lives. "It's gorgeous," she said.

Yesterday and this morning, I've been reading through. This isn't Dog-men. This absolutely isn't Mercury. This new collection of stories is so utterly new and once again bold; it is internally consistent. It's as if Watson, having expended so much energy on the lyrical and braided in Mercury, decided to see what might be done with a minimum of back story and a scarcity of adjectives.

A whole heck of a lot, is the answer. These stories achieve power, momentum, and absolute artistry through the accretion of odd facts, strange circumstances, and the wholly exposed wires of human circuitry, which are not, as it turns out, always so pretty. But pretty wouldn't be half as compelling as these stories are.

"Vacuum," my personal favorite, is the story of three boys who hear their overworked and unhappy mother threaten to walk away and not come back. With the boys' father already missing, the brothers set out to save the mother. Rarely have so many good intentions gone so terribly wrong; rarely does innocence yield such havoc. Watson lays it all out, one crooked turn after another, in language that is spare and terrifying. You finish reading "Vacuum" and you understand that you are going to have to steel yourself for whatever comes next. It will be undecorated and uncompromising. It won't be like any other story you've read.

Reading the collection, I thought again of just how lucky the creative writing students of the University of Wyoming are to have the equally talented Alyson Hagy working alongside Brad Watson, sharing space this semester with Edward Jones, among others. (Last semester they even had Kate Northrop, the poet, with whom, through Alyson, I've also become friends.) I never went to school to learn how to write prose, but if I were younger, just setting out, I'd want to know what these writers would teach me.

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My Unbirthday

Dear B, the card read, Happy Unbirthday! I thought you might be interested in the ghosts that haunt a fellow Pennsylvanian. Kate is now a colleague of mine.

When your birthday is in April and you receive an unbirthday gift in September, you are stopped in your tracks. When the gift comes from Alyson Hagy, a friend of whom I've written here before (her books—Graveyard of the Atlantic, Keeneland, and Snow, Ashes—on my shelves; her gifts to me strewn across the window sills of my house; her words of wisdom and weather a boon in my life), you pay careful attention.

The gift in question was a book of poems, back through interruption. The Kate was Kate Northrop, who has joined Alyson at the University of Wyoming, which has knit together (very much under Alyson's influence) one of the most exciting literature programs in the country, featuring teachers such as Brad Watson and Harvey Hix and Alyson herself, not to mention a cast of extraordinary visiting writers—Michael Ondaatje, Joy Williams, James Salter, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Art Spiegelman, Sigrid Nunez, and Dorothy Allison among them.

The point is: Alyson knows literature, she knows talent, her ear is adept. back through interruption is, I have discovered in these intervening days, a marvel—an exquisite parlaying of image and idea, a masterful jumbling of time. In poem after poem, Northrop turns incident into narrative, supposition into something that feels absolute and true. She gives you lines like this:

It was too urgent being human.

and this:

They are making matchbooks speak.

and:

...Is it
your business

after all, where a garden
winds up?

This is a book with which one settles in. This is a friendship for which I'm grateful.

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