Writing and Seeing | 7.1 Poet Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo

7.1 Poet Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo writes about a broken wrist and the ritual of seeing.

A few weeks ago, I broke my right wrist, the one I use to write. It’s currently immobilized—under the skin, with metal plate and screws, and over the skin, with a cast of purple fiberglass.  This has disturbed my regular rituals and rhythms of writing.

After more than twelve years of writing poetry regularly, I have developed more than a few. Some have to do with time of day, and others with how I set up my laptop or tracking system.  But the most important practice of what makes the poetry happen is opening the poetic eye. Not unlike Emerson’s transparent eyeball, it creates a kind of mystical awareness of the world.  But in true twenty-first century form, my poetic ‘eyeball’ doesn’t always let the self drop away.  It is a net in which ideas can be caught and held up to the light.  My juxtapositions are often between the sacred and the profane—a news report, a piece of art, commercial detritus, a personal experience--in the same field of vision as a religious idea or image.

The profane is everywhere, but connecting the sacred takes practice. Sometimes the sight of an unfamiliar object, or a snatch of conversation, reminds me of a particular theological idea, frequently one that I have sought to explain to students in my Hinduism or Judaism classes. A hesitant churchgoer, (I practice a kind of attendio divina), my beloved Episcopal Eucharist can also provide another sight of the liturgical God. Just reading scripture is not enough; the poems require the physical engagement of religious practice.

Close attention—visual, tactile, aural—requires practice too. It is symbiotic with the discipline of writing. Otherwise, what I notice can just pile up and rust into a poetic junkyard. I must keep writing to keep seeing.

Right now, I am watching for the purple cast’s reflection--what opens into the world (and in scripture) when life gets broken. And I’m learning to type with one hand.

Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo is author of "Flies" and "In Which Buddah Reads Aloud Firecracker Instructions"  in issue 7.1 of Relief.

Interview with 7.1 Author Jay Torrence

7.1 author Jay Torrence tells some of his motivations for writing Ivywild while sharing his faith, story and creative process through an interview with one of our volunteer staff members, Alyssa Dixon.  

What formal education did you receive?

For my undergraduate, I got an English degree from Wheaton College. For my MFA (Masters of Fine Art), I studied Creative writing at the University of British Columbia which is set up to dabble in different genres. I went in with a nonfiction focus and then played with nonfiction, graphic novel and play writing. I had done about ten years of professional play writing, and I wanted to play around with other creative writing genres.

How and when did you begin your career as an actor and playwright?

I actually started performing after I received my undergraduate degree. My younger brother, Ryan, and I created a sketch group in our home town, the Amish country of Ohio. Every month, we would put on a show in our church’s youth room, eventually as our crowd got larger we rented out the local high school’s auditorium.

We had a lot of fun in those years and it taught me a lot about performing and writing. I wrote the majority of what we performed and after four years of doing this, I auditioned and was casted for the Neo-Futurists. Their work was very similar to the work that I was doing with my brother.

How does your faith play into what you do as an artist?

I grew up in the church and heard these stories about flawed people and how they related to the world in very important ways. I think that these stories were meant to teach me how to think and how to respond to large issues that were beyond me as a child, adolescent and even at times as an adult. As often times, we are in the world and can not grasp these big issues. Those stories were always teaching me how to interact with the role of story telling and its relationship to real people and large concepts of wisdom and truth. That connection is in my work because it is the complexity of being human. I hope it is a small thumb print on our grasp of truth. It is not something that I am really thinking about all the time, but it is something I try to recognize and honor in my work.

How does your team work together to produce the plays you write?

Halena Kays, the creative director of The Hypocrites theatre, of whom I worked with on Burning Bluebeard and Ivy Wild, creates a collaborative room where we come together and play with what I have written. My team really does grow the pieces I write, and I totally depend on the group as a source of inspiration, when I start writing something new. They are constantly offering ideas and voice to further what I am trying to do.

I really credit the smoothness of the collaborative process to Halena because she is really good at leading a collaborative group. We all have this goal in mind and all of our ideas are meant only to serve that goal and not ourselves at all. That creative process is a love of ours.

I have found as a playwright, getting something as far as I can creatively and then bringing it to a collaborative table allows my work to go a step further.

What I like about art is taking something from an idea and pushing it through the creative process into a final thing. I like being on that journey.

What do you love about the writing process?

For the writing process, I usually get something about history which motivates me to do the research.

The act of writing, in this process of art, is the most miserable part for me. It is the most isolated and lonely part about theatre. Sometimes when I am there, there is inspiration, but for the most part, that part of the process is pretty agonizing. It is just such an intense birthing process going from nothing to something.

I haven’t found that I am good at it and I definitely haven't found a way to avoid the misery of it. However, I have gotten good at recognizing the fact that, oh, this is familiar and I can get through it.

I wish I could say that I love sitting down and writing, but I do not. That is the part that feels like work and it is good work, a discipline. But it does not end there for me, I love hanging out and creating with the people on my team. Then getting it in front of an audience is really fun and that usually is the most rewarding and satisfying part of the process.

What was your motivation for writing Ivy Wild?

Halena Kays approached me about writing something for the The Hypocrites theatre. So we sat down and threw out a couple of ideas for new plays. When I did my research for Burning Bluebeard, I had stumbled upon the Levee District and the names “Bathhouse John” and “Hinky Dink.” I decided to come back to it when writing Ivy Wild.

I had researched about this red-light district and all the vice that was concentrated in one terrible neighborhood in Chicago. And at the helm of it was this duo Bathhouse John and Hinky DInk. The people loved John and he was this loud, brass character. He would walk down the street and people would just follow him. His partner, Hinky Dink, was the fist behind John’s life, on the sidelines taking care of business. But as a duo, historically, they set up the biggest money laundering scheme the city had ever seen.

When I stumbled on these characters, I got so excited. I get fascinated with the historical things of this world that are forgotten. I often get this romantic idea of paying tribute to people that are forgotten and I relate that to the art and the type of art that I make. Theatre happens for the people that are there, and then it disappears like a circus leaving town or like a tragic fire that consumes everything, it is very temporary. So I relate to these people who spent their lives creating art in the way that I create art, and then they are forgotten or dead. History has forgotten them.

I was fascinated about why he went to Colorado and decided to build this amusement park, it just seemed weird to me on paper. When I do research, there are always these gaps and conflicting ideas. I am just piecing it together and often take the liberty of putting myself into it and trying to answer the question “why?”. I mean, I don’t know who Bathhouse John was, other than what these people wrote and described him as. I don’t know the intentions behind his actions.

Through exploring these ideas, I became fascinated with the idea of penance, atonement and what it means to live a life of good works. I asked questions like; “Do our good works make up for our bad?” “Is that true and what does that mean?”, and “What is forgiveness?”.

I did know for sure that John went to Colorado to make an amusement park that was fun for family and kids. As I read, it felt like his life there was very distinct from his life in Chicago. I inferred that Colorado meant something to this guy, but it failed miserably.

So, I was very curious about this idea of what it means to be forgiven.

Through my research, I never knew if John’s heart was really pure, because for every gesture of goodness, there was also this flip side of gain that could be read into it. John did take a train full of dying prostitutes to Colorado Springs to get treatment. If he were a sincere person, the act of trying to help these prostitutes would be a selfless and wonderful act. However, then the Hinky Dink side of that was like “ya! get those girls better so we can make cash off of them.”

Historically, I do not know where they landed on that spectrum because its a mixture of goodness and gain. There was this tension between the two of them that I tried to create: Bathhouse John was all heart and Hinky Dink encouraged that heart because of the money it produced.

Bathhouse didn’t really think in those terms, at least in my play he didn’t. In reality, historically they could have been totally different. Their gestures of goodness are seemingly good, but what was it motivated by? Was it motivated by heart or by gain? In reality, none of that is clear historically.

My heart for my play was this: Bathhouse John returns to this abandoned park and he is given another chance to make it a place of beauty and wholesome goodness. John is hoping that it will be enough to release him from whatever void or guilt that he was in.

The first scene is just him walking around in the void, holding this consumptive amusement. That image is really specific and I wanted him to enter through nothing. He is back at the place where he got it all wrong. Now is his chance to do it all again, where he might be released from this blind empty place of guilt.

I also wanted the art of my story to celebrate fun parts of their lives and different details about the park. Some of that allows me to celebrate their lives historically and also this story of Bathhouse John trying to get it right. Ultimately, he fails again and the park burns and what he doesn't want to happen, happens. He tried to create this beautiful place that people could come and be happy at. I believe his effort was self-motivated because he wanted to make up for all the bad that he had done and in my play that was not enough.

At the end, I wrote this monologue of him owning the facts of who he is and what he did. It ends with a simple statement of him just earnestly apologizing and when he does, the park comes alive. The park in a sense accepted his apology.

Jay Torrence is author of the drama "Ivywild" in issue 7.1 of Relief.  

A Need for Order | 7.1 Author Lindsey DeLoach Jones

7.1 Author Lindsey DeLoach Jones talks rituals and the need for order. I like my drinks very, very cold.

A plastic tumbler, 6 ice cubes, and a can of Diet Coke chilled at least twenty-four hours in a 35-degree refrigerator. Limit one per day.

Occasionally, I joke about being obsessive compulsive or a control freak or both, but I’m neither of these things really.

Maybe it’s the pressure to confront the veiled chaos of the blank page or the daily, private rumpus of my soul. Maybe it’s the anger I hear already in the voice of my one-year-old daughter, anger I didn’t put there and can’t control. Something compels me to keep a very few things in a very particular order.

Writers need ritual, I tell myself. We look for order everywhere, but it often seems in short supply. And so the soda-slush that predictably forms on the ice cubes in my cup are a solace. Order is present, at least, within the insulated confines of my preferred chalice.

A few other things compel this same rigidity: the temperature of the house at night (so cold my husband pleads for just one extra degree), my position on the sofa in front of the television, the relative greenness of my morning banana. It is a ceremonial pleasure to peel back the skin of a banana and find fruit suitably firm and tart.

My inflexibility embarrasses me. My husband should not come home from the grocery store beaming, having found an entire bunch of bananas for me “so green they’re practically neon.” People all over the world would love to eat a mottled yellow banana, drink a lukewarm soda.

How do I know the difference between a tradition that serves something greater than me – the ritual “confession of sin” we make in our church service between hymns numbers 2 and 3 – and a tradition I have begun to serve? Have I become a slave to my man-made rituals?

At 7:30 every evening, before my husband and I sit down to dinner, I zip up my daughter in a sleep sack, spin the volume dial on the sound machine that sits on the floor of her room with my big toe, and push her hair from her forehead before leaving the room. This liturgy is her safety.

And yet soon, she will need to learn to sleep without the sack, without the sound machine, and – one day – without me.

I can excuse the custom Diet Coke experience, for now, can’t I? I can pray that when I am called, perhaps I will be ready to move from ritual into the wild, where lives tepid soda and mushy bananas.

Lindsey DeLoach Jones is author of "Cutting Our Fingernails" in issue 7.1 of Relief.

Wanting Freedom | 7.1 Poet Joel Fry

7.1 Poet Joel Fry talks about being free.

I hardly ever remember writing first drafts, unless they are connected to a specific event, and most of my work is not.  My poem "Such a Bright Future" describes my varied thought life, in which I attempt to get at the meat of my existence, but ultimately I realize Jesus Christ is my refuge, and like Paul, I feel that I am being poured out in a sense, and that God is pleased with me.

My life entails defining my existence in a way that makes sense to me.  I can do what I want, but that soon leads to addiction.  I am even addicted to Facebook.  So true freedom (or at least the highest form of freedom) seems to be the liberation from selfish desires, not so much the ability to do whatever I want.  I like what the Lord says: "If you drink of this water you will never thirst again."  This is also like the 23rd Psalm: "The Lord is my shepherd.  I shall not want."  Everyone is free to be included with God in Christ.  That is the ultimate, and very simple, revelation.

Joel Fry's poem "Such a Bright Future" appears in issue 7.1 of Relief.

The Liturgy of Listening | 7.1 Poet Kerri Snell

7.1 Poet Kerri Snell tells about the importance of listening for writing poetry.

A poem that “works” for an audience is at once both personal and universal. It is still a mystery to me how some of my poems transcend ambiguity and self-consciousness and become living works. I write to understand, and yet my poetry usually provides me with more questions than answers about God, about Nature, about relationships.

Why do I write poetry? I think it is because reading and writing poetry comforts me in a mothering sort of way. I can bed down with my own lack of knowledge and feel that through creation of a poem, I can accept, as I believe God accepts, my glaring limitations. Poetry is for me an experience of Grace.

I have immersed myself in the poetry of Maurice Manning of late, stunned to discover the form he has mastered in capturing old ways and old voices. His poems are linguistic artifacts described through one of the purest voices I have encountered. Like Manning, I write from a distinct geographical landscape. His is Kentucky and mine is Oklahoma. Nurturing my poetic landscape is my personal window into the heterocosm of a poem and it is for me worship. My landscape requests certain liturgical activities more in keeping with Emily Dickinson’s concept of the Sabbath than with the Evangelical Church.

In order to enjoy a successful day of writing, I must get outside every day, usually for a walk or a run. I have to engage in some form of physical exertion in order to slow down my thought processes so that I can record them. Creating on optimal environment for poetry to happen is integral to my success as a writer. I seek light, open, minimally-cluttered space, and of course, solitude. My writing process involves engaging the works of other poets, remembering old hymns, reading the Bible, reading a ton of nonfiction, and then writing, writing, writing. It is remembering loved ones. It is reading history. It is contemplating the future. Mostly, it is prayerfully working to respect the perspectives of others. Poetry requires courage, as does faith. In the midst of doubt, we must create a fluid knowing.  When we begin to see everything as a possible prayer, we begin to learn to listen. Listening is the pivotal liturgical act of poetry.

Kerri Vinson Snell's poems ""Freedom", "The Well", and "Bride"" appear in issue 7.1 of Relief.

Rituals | 7.1 Author Timothy Reilly

7.1 author Timothy Reilly talks about daily rituals ranging from oatmeal to writing.

For the past several years I have eaten oatmeal for breakfast, six days of the week.  I suppose it’s a ritual: I eat the oatmeal at about the same time each day; I prepare it the same way; it comforts me.

At my age (62), a risk comes with admitting to an oatmeal regiment.  I could be accused of stodginess: one of those “old guys” who gives up wearing belts in favor of suspenders, filling his wallet with store coupons.

I’ll take that risk. I am a firm believer in Rites of Passage (sans suspenders and coupons) and the maintenance of productive disciplines.

I first learned the beauty and benefits of ritual and discipline through my upbringing in the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church. (I will not go into my pseudo-agnostic hiatus, but I will say that I have returned to reciting daily the Apostle’s Creed).

I spent my early adult life as a professional musician: a tubaist.  It takes a good deal of mental and physical discipline to maintain a professional level of musicianship.  The ritual of regular daily practice is an absolute necessity.

My music career was cut short by something called “dystonia,” a cruel condition that strikes right where it hurts: the musician’s physical means of making music (with brass and wind players, it hits the embouchure).

For the past 23 years my creative ritual has been writing. I write first thing in the morning, six days a week (before oatmeal).  My wife, Jo-Anne (a poet and scholar), maintains a similar writing ritual.

Listening to music is a ritual.  Lately we have been listening to the music of Morten Lauridsen.  O Magnum Mysterium is our favorite.

The other day I found a dead sparrow on our patio.  Jo-Anne cried.  We both thought about Matthew 10:29: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?  And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will.”

I buried the sparrow under a tree.  I marked its grave with a stone painted with a cross.  It was a necessary ritual.

Timothy Reilly was a professional tuba player in both the United States and Europe (in the latter, he was a member of the orchestra of the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy). He is currently a substitute elementary teacher, living in Southern California with his wife, Jo-Anne Cappeluti, a published poet and scholar, who also teaches university English courses. His short stories have been published in The Seattle Review, Flash Fiction Magazine (UK), Blue Lake Review, Slow Trains Literary Journal, Amarillo Bay, Foliate Oak Literary Review, Passenger, and several other print and online journals.

Literature, Apocalypse, and National Tragedy

In the following (a reprint of the editor's note for issue 6.2, available now at a presale rate.) EIC Brad Fruhauff tries to figure out how literature may help us process real life tragedy. Only a few days after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary I sat down to watch the first episode of season two of The Walking Dead. The tragedy was not a relevant context in my mind when I began the episode, but by the end the two had nearly collapsed upon one another in a powerful way that, I think, is quite typical of fiction.

Without giving away too much for those who are even more behind than me, the episode ends with a shocking act of violence against a child. When it happened, my breath froze and my heart leapt and all the normal physiological responses to something truly horrible. I was in tears with something like real fear and distress for the child, and for the parents I felt something more like fellowship than the sympathy of the outsider.

As I decompressed during the credits, I thought, “Why—when real tragedies are happening to real children—why am I watching fictionalized versions of them?” The immediate possibilities were discomfiting. Am I simply that perverse? Am I so out of touch with my experience and my world that I don’t feel the contradiction? Am I seeking an escape from real pain in some aestheticized form?

No response to these questions can entirely escape the possibility of being mere rationalization, but the more I thought about it the more appropriate the whole thing seemed, and the reasons had a lot to do with how art works and what it does for us.

I have two small children at home, one of whom attends preschool twice a week. When the news from Newtown, CT, came across the radio that Friday morning, I reacted in disbelief and confusion like I imagine most people did, and I almost couldn’t think about it or my children at the same time. Later that morning, I scanned the Internet for more information, the kind of information that we need to construct a narrative that makes reality possible again. I realized it was not going to be available anytime soon, but I had to get to work, so I took a moment to meditate and live in the grief and despair, to offer my own helplessness up to God in prayer and to seek forgiveness for any lack of love in my own life that may be contributing to a world in which such grave sins befall us. And then I got to work.

My grief began to ebb from that point, as it must have done if I was going to go on living. My sympathy with the parents, families, friends, and citizens of Newtown, however, was necessarily distant. The only route from my experience to theirs is one of imagination—of moral imagination, even. A fictional narrative of the trauma of a child’s injury or death will never be identical to the actual experience (who would want it to be?). But it may have the power to bring one closer to that experience than any process of reflection could. I certainly felt the gravity of losing a child via the fiction much more powerfully than I did via the Internet.

The scandal of such a claim is actually that it seems so old, so dependent, apparently, on a mimetic theory that judges art by its consonance with some pre-existing reality and that comforts itself with the illusion that art provides real presence. This theory undergirds Aristotle’s account of catharsis, for instance. As Romantics like Coleridge realized, though, art need not imitate the reality of our senses so much as the reality of our human or moral nature, the kind of being all artists and audiences share by virtue of consciousness.

This is not, I think, the same as presence. I don’t know if Aristotle thought it was, but the Augustans of the 18^th century seemed to. They didn’t make strong distinctions between the sympathy you feel for a person and the emotions you experience in literature. But this is problematic, and not because it treats reality like fiction but because it treats fiction like reality. It’s actually quite important that fictions are not real and that we know they are not real. There are some realities that we cannot quite process—that’s why we have trauma and repression. One of literature’s powers is to create a play-space wherein we can actually begin to feel traumatic emotion and to work through it alongside characters, through a narrative, or through the accumulation of and relationships among tropes—those revealing “twists” of reality we sometimes call images. The whole point of this play-space is to shift the stakes to the level of moral imagination, away from the deadly seriousness of our everyday physical survival.

Aristotle had an insight like this when he compared the pleasure of imitation in theater to the pleasure children take in imitation. And, just like when children play, this kind of imaginative engagement is not escapism but something more like therapy, art’s way of helping reconcile us to our reality, and if it returns us to the high stakes of life a little sadder and wiser, it also helps us to get back on with the business of life.

This is Relief, however, not the Midnight Diner, so there won’t be any zombies or the like. The works in here all act more subtly, inviting you into another’s experience and offering the opportunity, for those who will let the words work on them, to have an experience, to be taken somewhere and to return to a point different from your departure. To approach the world of someone trying to find a normal life after breast cancer, to deal with a rape in a small town and a mother’s anxiety about her daughters, to see a biblical tale anew as a miracle of moral action.

In the wake of a national tragedy, when we are all vulnerable to the impulses born of shock and fear, literature becomes all the more important. When reality becomes unreality it is in fact most real, the veil of comfort is ripped away and the world appears as perverse and inverted as it actually is. Good literature serves as the survival guide for this post-apocalyptic unreality, from which it will not let us escape. Every time apocalypse fires a warning shot across the bow of our complacency, we can choose to respond with the violence of our illusions or with the ennobling force of visionary art. May this issue of Relief serve you well as the world marches on towards its end.

Prepping Isaac | 6.2 Poet John Gosslee

It's hard to excerpt poetry, but we wanted to give you a flavor of some of what's coming in 6.2. (Pre-sales will last only a little longer, folks. Order today!) This from a poem by John Gosslee about Abraham and Isaac:

He Could Not Count That High

The knife fresh off the whet-stone reflected the sun above them. Twigs cross-stacked, bent under body-weight and Issac’s throat was shaved.

Announcing 6.2 Poets

Relief is excited to present the following barrage of perspicacious poets for issue 6.2 (get your copy at the presale price here): [table id=9]