NCLR Publishes Review of Two of My Books

New Review of Two of My Books in North Carolina Literary Review

North Carolina Literary Review has published a review of two of my recent books in their newest issue. Karen K. Mason has reviewed both For One Who Knows How to Own Land and Something Knows the Moment alongside two of Robert Morgan's books in a review called "The Regional Poet and the World." The review can be read in NCLR's new online version of the journal: http://issuu.com/eastcarolina/docs/nclr2013-online-final-issuu_1_/82#download.

John Morgan Interviews Ann Chandonnet

John Morgan Interviews Ann Chandonnet
Vale, NC

My book is "Write Quick": War & a Woman's Life in Letters, 1835-1867, published by the Bethel Historical Society, Bethel, Maine. It is historical non-fiction, 600 pages, with 50 illustrations.

The book is the result of 20 years of genealogical research by my third cousin, Roberta Pevear. When Roberta phoned to say she had completed her work, she added, "You know, there are letters." After I read the more than 100 letters between Eliza Foster, her husband Henry Foster and her brother, Andrew Bean, I knew that they should be preserved in a book. Three of the letters were written by my great-great-great grandmother, Mabelia Foster Fox, Henry's sister and Eliza's sister-in-law. One of my three brothers lives in the same house that Mabelia lived in--and I spent my first 21 years in, and my other two brothers live on the same land grant she and her husband farmed.

I asked Roberta's permission to use these previously unpublished letters (and a wealth of other documents such as grocery lists and rent receipts) in a book. I would give her equal billing, and share with her whatever profits were made from the effort--if we found a publisher. She agreed. Her mother had saved these documents from the fire, literally, in the 1930s when a house was being cleaned out after a death. One of these documents was Eliza's 1863 diary kept in Lowell, MA., while Henry was serving in the Union infantry.

I began writing the book in Juneau. Halfway through the process, my husband and I retired to North Carolina. Now I had the opportunity to visit places mentioned in the letters like Gettysburg and Fort Sumter, and to do research in Civil War archives. In 2007 we made a research trip to Lowell, Massachusetts--my birth place, and the home of textile mills where Eliza worked. We also visited Bethel, Maine, where Eliza and Andrew were born; Roberta was born there as well.

My husband took photos for me along the way.

It took me four years to complete the book. After 16 submissions, I had a publisher.

If the book were made into a movie, I would choose Jude Law to play Andrew; Jennifer Lawrence to play Eliza; Betty Suarez to play Mabelia Fox; and Joseph Gordon-Levitt to play Henry.

My synopsis: The story of a woman and the two men who loved her, played out against the backdrop of the War Between the States.

It took me two years to write the first draft, but I also garden intensively and quilt. The local libraries (Juneau and Hickory) did not provide sufficient sources, so I purchased some books myself. I also sent out thousands of queries via e-mail.

I decided to make this book a portrait of an ordinary, non-combatant, a Union woman --not a general or someone who led a charge of light horse. More books were written about the sufferings of Confederate women. Books have been written about New England's textile workers, but few follow their days after they leave the mills.

The majority of Union infantry units have histories written by their members. But Henry's unit did not. When putting together a list of his comrades in arms, I found that many of the names were repeated several times (with different spellings). Both armies kept records of officers who died, but no one kept records or ordinary soldiers. I discovered that many men were consigned to unmarked graves and their loved ones never knew what happened to them. Fortunately, in Henry's case, one of his comrades took the time to write to Eliza--even though he was wounded himself and his brother died in that same battle, at Winchester, Virginia. Winchester changed hands 70 times during the war. The book's annotated rosters make it valuable to relatives of other infantrymen.

Part of my inspiration was that I have family living in the exact spot where some of the letters were written. Eliza visited that farm, and her brother-in-law sold her firewood and provisions during the war. Four nieces and three nephews are growing up there, and the book would preserve a part of their family history. I dedicated the book to them.

I did not have an agent to represent the book. I did all the marketing to publishers myself, since I have a background as a publicist for Alaska Northwest Books. The publisher is the place where all the letters and artifacts (such as hair mourning bracelets, ledgers and period photos) are stored, the Bethel Historical Society.

Sam Ragan Day

from the NC Poetry Society


Sam Ragan Day Meeting
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities, Southern Pines, NC

Poet and novelist Victoria Redel, the 2012–13 McGee Professor of Writing at Davidson College and the author of three books of poetry, including Woman Without Umbrella, will lead a generative workshop to help us find the exceptional within the ordinary in our writing. Award-winning humorist, Laura Moore, and acoustic music duo, Katie Oates and Cheryl Hoover, will round out an excellent day of craft and song.

Please mark your calendars with this illuminating day of poetry! To find out more about the program, visit http://www.ncpoetrysociety.org/events.

Review of Daniel Nathan Terry's "Waxwings"

Review
by Scott Owens

WAXWINGS
Daniel Nathan Terry
Lethe Press
ISBN: 9781590213551

Daniel Nathan Terry’s book of poems, Waxwings, is a powerful exploration of the internal and external forces surrounding the phenomenon of personality development.

From the very first poem, “Scarecrow,” the reader is invited into an internal drama that begins with the recognition of identity as an artifact, a creation, a projection of the individual’s concept of self, tested, influenced, re-tested, and ultimately determined against the backdrop of familial and social expectations and pressures. Successfully employing an ambiguity that seems almost whimsical at the same time it is somehow disturbing, this modern-day Pygmalion refers to himself as “Scarecrow crafter, burlap-tailor, / black-eye smudger” and claims such prowess in his crafting that “crows mistake you for a man.” As in the original Greek myth of Pygmalion, the creator has a rather intimate relationship with the creation as he “fisted through your flannel” and “perfumed your thighs with summer sweet.” Not surprisingly given that level of intimacy, the distinctions between creator and created become blurred as the speaker worries about “flies . . . who do not care / if you are flesh or straw” and “the sun, the wind, the rain” which will “make fast work of you until your pie-pan hands / cease to flutter” and ultimately wonders “How long before the snow and I / take you down?”

The theme of personality development and the individual as identity-artist, treated metaphorically in this first poem’s conceit, is addressed more plainly in subsequent poems. In “Self-Portrait (Gay Son of a Preacher),” for example, the speaker desperately seeks redemption for, perhaps even salvation from, identity elements he has been taught to be ashamed of through such traditional religious concepts as baptism (“washed seven times in the river Jordan”) and communion (“He rises, joins the altar call”). In fact many of the poems in the first third of the book chronicle the speaker’s increasingly desperate attempts to reconcile his identity with the demands and expectations of a world that denounces and even disallows that identity, forming a collective narrative of a difficult childhood marked by taught shame and a reluctance to accept oneself because that self is deemed unacceptable to others. Thus in “Wicker Man” the speaker reflects, “if you believe the talk, you know your kind was consigned to the fire by God in the cities of the plain.” And in “Called colored, in my youth,” he explains, “I already knew I shouldn’t want to play with those boys, shouldn’t // want boys of any color the way I wanted the oldest of them.”

As the book progresses, the speaker experiences exile and loneliness, as in the beautifully simple-stated “Since they put you out”:

no chair receives you,
no bath invites you,
no stove pot simmers
you to supper, no mattress
gives to cradle you,
no down rises to fill
the empty spaces.

Eventually, with much work in the realm of human emotion including the losses that teach us better how to love, the speaker is able to move beyond the taught shame, the loneliness, and the uncertainty of a disallowed identity towards self-awareness, acceptance, and love of self and others. In a book of wonderful poems, the most wonderful embodies this entire process. “Snow falls in Hartsville,” is a brilliant linked sonnet sequence about love, self-knowledge and acceptance, illustrating how we come to be and accept who we are, narrated so evocatively that readers can’t help but feel, despite the uncommon details, that the speaker is relating their own story. Indicating the speaker’s arrival at the fulfillment of the self-discovery process, the poem concludes:

Now, I’d like to believe
I’m the man I was always meant to be—leaning in
to my lover, to my life, to the wonder
of having once been a man who loved a woman
who was almost the perfect man for me.

This vital story of self-realization that constitutes Waxwings is expressed through luminous, original, and breathtaking imagery and symbolism that make the book, regardless of subject-matter, just good poetry. Thus, in “Waxwings,” we hear of “thirty-seven waxwings / necklacing the telephone wire” who suggest to the speaker the possibilities of human collaboration and love as he imagines his disparate classmates “joined together in a star of arms and legs / that kaleidoscopes in the blackness” and longs to respond to the poetic urge developing inside him, to “read their characters on the white sky // until he understands, until they become a story / he can share.” And in “The Swan,” we see “one lone swan // chalked on the surface of the black water.” And in “Burning the Peach,” as the speaker prepares for the loss of a loved one, we know how it feels when he tells us, “Black smoke made invisible by the night invaded our throats, settled inside us like an unwelcome truth.”

Sometimes these days it seems popular culture suggests that drama is only conceivable against a sensationalistic backdrop of vampires or a zombie apocalypse or a teacher-turned-meth-cook. It’s refreshing to see real, familiar human drama, the drama of one’s struggle to enact selfhood, treated with the honesty, dignity, respect, relevance, and insight our lives, our human processes, truly deserve. Simply put, for both the process it dramatizes and the poetic brilliance it exhibits, Waxwings is the best book of poems I read in 2012, one that should be read by all, and one I will return to to read again and again.

Two Upcoming Readings

First, I'll be on Wordplay with Jeff Davis this Sunday at 5:00. You can listen to it live at http://www.ashevillefm.org/wordplay or recorded at the same url for a week afterward. After that, you would have to wait until Jeff gets it added to the show's archives (which he'll tell you can take a while -- in fact, this is my fourth appearance on the show, and only of them has been archived so far).

Then, here is a flyer for my reading with Rand Brandes and Susan Woodring at the Bethlehem Branch Library on 2/28

Country Roads Exhibit and Reading

In the midst of everything going on with Shadows Trail Them Home, my new collaboration with Pris Campbell just published by Clemson University Press, Joe Young has put together an exhibit and reading for us based on our 2012 collaboration, Country Roads, Travels Through Rural North Carolina at the Burke County Arts Council. The reception, which will include a reading and discussion, will take place next Friday, February 8, 2013, at 5:00. Prints of Joe's photos and copies of the book will be available for purchase. The gallery is at 115 Meeting Street in Morganton. Here is a link to their website: http://www.burkearts.org/?page_id=33

Shadows Trail Them Home on Clemson University Press Website

You can now order copies of Shadows Trail Them Home on the Clemson University Press website. Of course, if you want it signed, you'll need to order it from me, or meet me at one of the readings I'll be giving in the next few months. Here is a link to the Clemson website: