Author: alisonmcghee

Poem of the Week, by Alden Nowlan

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IMG_0382When I was a kid, the school bus I rode back and forth to school was a horror show of cruelty perpetrated by bullies who were aided and abetted by the bus driver. Every four years I pretend to be British (a six-week election campaign! silence until September!) but it’s not working. Being bullied, watching others be bullied, staying silent about the crime of bullying, watching the as-yet-unbullied align themselves nervously behind the bullies with the goal of not being bullied themselves are all part of the same putrid bully swamp. A poem about someone rejecting the surround-sound meanness, even covertly, even though he’s scared, can act as partial antidote to the poison. Poem of the week, by Alden Nowlan.

Flossie at School
     – Alden Nowlan

Five laths in a cotton dress
was christened Flossie
and learned how to cry,
her eyes like wet daisies
behind thick glasses.

She was six grades ahead of me
and wore bangs; the big boys
called her “The Martian,”
they snowballed her home,
splashed her with their bicycles,
left horse dung in her coat pockets.

She jerked when anyone spoke to her,
and when I was ten
I caught up with her one day
on the way home from school,
and said, Flossie I really like you
but don’t let the other kids know I told you,
they’d pick on me, but I do like you,
I really do, but don’t tell anybody.
And afterwards I was ashamed
for crying when she cried.

 

For more about Alden Nowlan, click here.

Bookstore visits, March 7-10

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Maybe a Fox

Greetings, anyone and everyone who lives within driving distance of the below bookshops! My lovely, funny, talented friend and novel-writing collaborator Kathi Appelt and I are embarking on a whirlwind tour next week, visiting bookstores to read from Maybe a Fox and chitchat with y’all (I’m channeling Kathi’s Texas drawl, can you tell?) about books and reading and your favorite cocktail (kidding) (but not really – I’m always on the lookout for a tasty new cocktail).

Maybe a Fox has gotten a bunch of starred reviews and great press and those who’ve read advance copies seem to be fans. It’s a book about two sisters, one of them gone forever, and how their lives intertwine with a baby girl fox. Set in Vermont, in the woods by a rushing river, it’s also a story about grief, memory, love, hope and wonderment. We would LOVE to see you next week if you’re around. We’ll also be appearing in Los Angeles (both of us), Texas again (Kathi) and Dubai (Alison) next month, so check for updates if you’re interested.

Monday, March 7—Milwaukee, WI

Oak Creek Public Library—6:30 p.m.

Tuesday, March 8—Naperville, IL

Anderson’s Bookshop—6:00 p.m.

Wednesday, March 9—Houston, TX

Blue Willow Bookshop—5 p.m.

Thursday, March 10—College Station, TX

Jacque’s Toys and Books—5:30 p.m.

Saturday, March 20–Tustin, CA (Alison only)

Once Upon a Storybook, 11 a.m.

Hope to see you there!

 

Public radio interview

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Poetry hut, flowersFor anyone interested, here is the link to the public radio interview I did this morning. The thoughtful and talented Kerri Miller and I talked about poetry, my poetry hut (pictured to the left there), teaching, writing, the making of Firefly Hollow, the inner lives of children (and grownups), what it means to be a lifelong adventurer, the freedom that comes when you stop caring what others think of you in favor of resting with your own intentions, how the death of someone you loved when you were young affects you then and forever, how a book can momentarily take the poverty and pain out of a child’s life, a novel I feared and hated as a teenager but never forgot, the enormous usefulness of waiting instead of acting, Galway Kinnell, teaching at my beloved Metropolitan State University, school bus bullies, and a whole bunch of other things.

Poem of the Week, by Nancy Willard

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Pete in first snow, 2011Snow in the city is beautiful for about a day, sometimes two days if it’s a blizzard and no plows or cars can get through the streets. The minute the plows go through, that beauty degenerates into muddy ice, brown clumps flung up on curbs, nearly impassable single-file streets where cars take turns one by one. Snow in upstate New York, where I grew up, is beautiful for months (and months and months) on end, because there’s nothing to interfere with it. White and blue and green and pink, all the colors of snow in the shifting light, turn every field and wood into calm. I remember waking up in the middle of the night to the rumble of snowplows sweeping down Route 274, their orange revolving light circling the walls of my room. Someone out there is taking care of us, is what the memory of that sound still feels like to me.

 

The Snow Arrives After Long Silence
– by Nancy Willard

The snow arrives after long silence
from its high home where nothing leaves
tracks or stains or keeps time.
The sky it fell from, pale as oatmeal,
bears up like sheep before shearing.

The cat at my window watches
amazed. So many feathers and no bird!
All day the snow sets its table
with clean linen, putting its house
in order. The hungry deer walk

on the risen loaves of snow.
You can follow the broken hearts
their hooves punch in its crust.
Night after night the big plows rumble
and bale it like dirty laundry

and haul it to the Hudson.
Now I scan the sky for snow,
and the cool cheek it offers me,
and its body, thinned into petals,
and the still caves where it sleeps.

 

For more information on Nancy Willard, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by ee cummings

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Abel Pann, breathing life into AdamWhen I was a kid I used to read ee cummings’ poems not so much for the words but for the way he put them down on the page, all shoved up against each other, parentheses around some, weird punctuation, missing spaces, and the complete lack of upper case letters, down to the way he spelled his own name. Why why why why does he do it that way, I used to wonder. The strangeness and unconventionality was so fascinating. He was a Famous Person so I knew that all these choices must be intentional, but why why why?

If at first I didn’t care about the poems themselves, now I love them. Mr. Cummings is one of my most beloved poets, in fact. A small white used paperback copy of his 50 Poems that I found at a garage sale sits on a shelf in the living room; this poem felt right for today.

in spite of everything
– e.e. cummings

in spite of everything
which breathes and moves, since Doom
(with white longest hands
neatening each crease)
will smooth entirely our minds

– before leaving my room
i turn, and (stooping
through the morning) kiss
this pillow, dear
where our heads lived and were.

 

For more about ee cummings, please click here.

 

Poem of the Week, by Ellery Akers

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California, choo choo train cloudsMany years ago I read Innumeracy, a slender, astonishing book by John Allen Paulos, about how the understanding or lack thereof of basic math and statistics affects everything about the way we live our lives. What I learned in that book humbled me and has stayed me with me ever since, especially the singular fact that every breath every one of us takes contains at least three molecules of the air breathed by every human being and creature who has ever lived on this earth. Gandhi. Hitler. Wooly mammoths. Jesus Christ. The prophet Mohammad. Your great grandparents, your great grandchildren. Every, single, breath. This poem makes me think of that all over again, in yet another way. Poem of the Week, by Ellery Akers.

Breathing
– Ellery Akers

I love to feel as if I’m just another body, a breather along with the others:
blackbirds taking sips of air, garter snakes
lapping it up with their split tongues,
and all those plants
that open and close and throw up streamers of oxygen:
maybe that cottonwood that tilts across the creekbed
is the very one that just sucked up carbon dioxide
and let me breathe, maybe I should hang a card around it,
Thank you for the next two minutes of my life,
maybe some of
the air I just swallowed used to be inside the hot larynx of a fox,
or the bill of an ash-throated flycatcher,
maybe it just coursed past
the scales of a lizard–a bluebelly –
as he wrapped himself around his mate,
maybe he took an extra breath and let it out
and that’s the one I got.
Maybe all of us are standing side by side on the earth
our chests moving up and down,
every single one of us, opening a window,
loosening a belt, unzipping a pair of pants to let our bellies swell,
while in the pond a water beetle
clips a bubble of air to its shell and comes back up for another.
You want sanitary? Go to some other planet:
I’m breathing the same air as the drunk Southerner,
the one who rolls cigarettes with stained yellow thumbs
on the bench in the train station,
I’m breathing the same air as the Siamese twins
at the circus, their heads talking to each other,
quarreling about what they want to do with their one pair of hands
and their one heart.
Tires have run over this air,
it’s passed right over the stiff hair of jackrabbits and road kill,
drifted through clouds of algae and cumulus,
passed through airplane propellers, jetprops,
blades of helicopters,
through spiderlings that balloon over the Tetons,
through sudden masses of smoke and sulfur,
the bleared Buick filled with smoke
from the Lucky Strikes my mother lit, one after another.
Though, as a child, I tried my best not to breathe,
I wanted to take only the faintest sips,
just enough to keep the sponges inside,
all the lung sacs, rising and falling.
I have never noticed it enough,
this colorless stuff I can’t see,
circulated by fans, pumped into tires,
sullenly exploding into bubbles of marsh gas,
while the man on the gurney drags it in and out of his lungs
until it leaves his corpse and floats past doorknobs
and gets trapped in an ice cube, dropped into a glass.
After all, we’re just hanging out here in our sneakers
or hooves or talons, gripping a branch, or thudding against the sidewalk:
as I hold onto my lover
and both of us breathe in the smell of wire screens on the windows
and the odor of buckeye.
This isn’t to say I haven’t had trouble breathing, I have:
sometimes I have to pull the car over and roll down the window,
and take in air, I have to remember I’m an animal,
I have to breathe with the other breathers,
even the stars breathe, even the soil,
even the sun is breathing up there,
all that helium and oxygen,
all those gases blowing and shredding into the solar wind.

 

For more information about Ellery Akers, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Rebecca Foust

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I had another poem all ready to go this morning. Then I got a text from a distant city where someone I love lives: “Went to the tree lighting last night but the crowd was so huge that we got afraid of being in the middle of it so we watched from afar.” This text and the following one, “Avoiding crowds at all costs,” felt like the capper to a hard week of hard news. So I turned to my file of comfort-poems, like The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry, like Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye, like To My Young Friends Who Are Afraid by William Stafford, but none of them felt right. Then I read this one, by Rebecca Foust, and it struck the right chord. Poem of the Week.

Vernal
– Rebecca Foust

Some things we believe cannot be redeemed.
But in a valley the Railroad finally forgot,
the silted, slugged ditch we would not eat fish from
runs again, a river, rilled as before
by clear water, not black. Grass grows back
between tracks and rails. Limestone spalls
hewn from the mountain heal into soil.
Stumps heaped with live coals, split, and winched out
in spring frail a new circlet of green.
Panthers are seen. A son is born blue, and lives.
Some things we believe cannot be redeemed,
but the dawn, as yet, is diurnal. The woods keep
a hushed vigil, then rustle with life we can’t see;
small ponds well from the ground while we sleep.

 

For more information on Rebecca Foust, please click here.

My Facebook page.

What I'm Reading, November 2015

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Reading list, November 2015My son recently returned from a year trekking in Nepal and Australia, where he migrated from hostel to tent to hammock to hostel, living out of a single backpack and waiting tables, bartending, reading and writing nonstop. Each month he would post a photo of his current book supply lined up on a wooden floor. I loved those photos, which is why I’m totally stealing the idea from him.

1. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, by Elana Ferrante. This is the fourth and final of a quartet of novels set in Naples (translated from the original Italian) about the intense, lifelong, always-challenging friendship between two women. From girlhood to old age, these books track their lives against the backdrop of a gritty neighborhood in a gritty city in a rapidly changing country. I was obsessed with these novels and read them one after another as fast as I could (which is not fast; I’m a slow reader). I can’t even tell you why they absorbed me so utterly; they tell instead of show, they are full of minute, step by step description of action, both women frequently annoyed me . . . and yet I couldn’t put them down and will never forget them. Highly recommend.

2. We Forgot Brock! I picked this book up at a book conference in Los Angeles at the end of October, read it through on the spot, and immediately began gnashing my teeth that I hadn’t thought this idea up myself –about a little kid and his invisible friend, both of whom are hilarious beyond measure– and written this book myself, so that then I could look at it and feel full of happiness that I had done something worthwhile with my life, instead of looking at it and feeling jealous that nooooo, somebody named Carter Goodrich had written it. AND illustrated it. Curses! Carter Goodrich happened to be sitting at the table next to me at the time, and I told him how jealous I was, and he turned out to be a really great and funny guy, which was even worse because I couldn’t be pissed at him. Go out and read this book because I guarantee you will love it.

3. A Spool of Blue Thread, by Anne Tyler. I have been reading Anne Tyler novels all my life. She’s one of my favorite writers. This one was a tough read for me, different from her others in a way I can’t pinpoint. Maybe because it felt too close to some aspects of old age as I have observed them? Not sure. I recommend it anyway.

4. Yes, Please! by Amy Poehler. A few years ago, when Bossypants (by Tina Fey) came out, I lay on a window seat in my friends’ house in Canada and read it straight through, laughing out loud the entire way. Amy’s book is a worthy successor, or maybe a lady-in-waiting, to the throne of Hilarious Badass Women Who Write Disjointed All Over the Map Books. Amy and Tina are fearless and confident in the way I want all girls to be fearless and confident.

5. All American Boys, by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. I was at the launch reading of this book, at an old church-turned-public-library in Greenwich Village, at the end of October, and I was electrified by the reading. This book is co-written in two voices, a black teen and a white teen. It takes as its central event the brutal beating of the black teen and spirals out from there into a personal exploration of what it means to be white and what it means to be black in the  same school, same neighborhood, same city. A fast and intense and thought-provoking read.

6. Between Me and the World, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. 150 slim pages of pure, intense, distilled thinking and experience of race, the assumptions of human beings on what race is, and how those assumptions play out in the everyday life of those considered by themselves and others to be black or white. All of which serves as the framework and context for the murder of Coates’ friend Prince Jones. This is an astonishing, disturbing, brilliant and profound book told in eerily calm words, a letter from a black man to his black son, written and framed in terms of the physical body, on what it means to live in this country.

7. Maybe a Fox, by Kathi Appelt and me. I read this thing for the seven zillionth time this week, changing a few pronouns and swapping out the word “gulped” for anything else that would make sense in its place. (How many times can one smallish novel contain the word gulped? Not nearly as many as we had, I can tell you that.) My lovely friend Kathi and I, inspired by 1) a poem about a fox and 2) the fact that we adore each other, started writing this book together a bunch of years ago, and I just went through it for the last –please dear God let us hope– time, because it goes to print next week. How many times did we re-write this sucker? We have no idea. We don’t even want to know. Suffice it to say that our eyes are glazed over, our brains are fried, and we are both in need of strong drink.