Contributor Spotlight: Mark Bergen

The adage hard work never killed anyone is faint praise indeed. Is that the best we can say about hard work and its corollary, doing things the hard way? Ronald Reagan’s amusing variation — hard work never killed anyone, but why take the chance? — suggests it might be. I want to suggest otherwise.

My essay evolved out of a tough year at work in 2013, which led me to examine my priorities carefully. From this useful exercise I realized that not only was work still important to me but that a proclivity to do things the hard way had benefited me in surprising ways I had never articulated before. Others who had also benefited in surprising ways from doing things the hard way came to mind, and before long I had enough examples to support my developing theme.

I roughed out the essay in January of 2014, finished it in February, and then shelved it for a time. In April I cut a third of it in a Mark Twain rewrite (“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”) and sent it to Split Rock Review, where it was favorably received and now resides in Issue #3.

Contributor Spotlight: Leonore Hildebrandt & Heidi Daub

“The Shelter”: A Collaboration between poet Leonore Hildebrandt and painter Heidi Daub

The high tide of summer has passed now in the state of Maine, here on the Northeastern Atlantic shoreline. The collaborative project “The Shelter” with its themes of longing, personal agency, and the search for communion with the natural world, feels as current and exciting to me now, as the day when poet Leonore Hildebrandt and I first came together. Prior to this, the two of us did not know much of each other. Then we discovered that we had a lot in common: we both chose to live in a poor and remote part of Maine. We have raised daughters here. We grow food in our gardens. We play music and perform in various local ensembles. We volunteer in our communities, bringing the arts to schools, to libraries, and to fundraising events. Our creative work is both challenged and enriched by our many commitments; it is the center of the wheel from which everything else radiates.

I remember speaking with Leonore for the first time at an art opening featuring my work, and having a lovely conversation. She seemed to have an understanding of the thrust of my paintings, and was curious, looked deeper. She contacted me a couple years later, to inquire about collaborating for The Belfast Poetry Festival which has been happening yearly since 2005 every October in Belfast Maine, and features readings, workshops, and presentations of collaborations between visual artists and poets/ performance artists.

The call from Leonore sounded intriguing, and we plunged ahead with her looking through my website and choosing a group of paintings that spoke to her. The pieces she chose, without any input from me, were/are part of the same series and are almost sequential in executional time. I waited patiently to see what she would come up with and then she sent me her first draft.

I was in love.

I was honored.

Later Leonore described her work with the images: “I arranged a sequence of imaginary landscapes in which certain shapes, in particular that of a hut or tipi (the 'shelter'), reappear in different variations. The first images are calm, held almost in black and white, then emerge brilliant colors and movement. As I became immersed in Heidi's paintings, I began to hear a lyrical voice, which rather than describing the images, narrated from their specific moods. It is the voice of a woman ('I') who records bits of her life, sometimes addressing an absent ‘you.’ For me, the interplay of image and voice dramatizes a place both particular and timeless. Providing more than a setting, the land is form-giving. In this artistic space, we recognize how deeply human life is bonded to the natural world.”

During the conception of “The Shelter,” we grew as artists by immersing in each other’s medium. We listened flexibly and openly. The resulting work appealed to the live audience gathered at the 2013 Belfast Poetry Festival in part because it beautifully documents this coming together. Our hope is that the piece will engage both friends of fine art and of literature, and foster interaction between these communities.

Contributor Spotlight: Emily Corwin

Dream Play: Working with Dream & Nightmare Images in Poems

I have never been talented at sleeping.  Truly, I am a restless person—since I was a kid, I have been no stranger to fits of insomnia, fever dreams, night terrors.  The disorientation of sleep has always been, for me, a source of unease and agitation.  However, in my poetry workshop last fall, just as I was starting my MA, I began to actually work with images of sleep and sleeplessness as material for my writing.  Instead viewing sleep as just a space of anxiety, it started to become this fruitful, creative place that I could visit every night. 

In practicing dream poetry, I found the visual terrain of dreamscapes and the unsettling experience of hypnagogia (the space between waking and sleep) to be fleshy, surprising, and extremely playful.  The dreams, suddenly, became a kind of an endless repository for poems, where the images are often immediately visceral and striking.  As I continued writing, I wanted to better observe myself as a dreamer—keeping dream diaries and reading dream dictionaries to help unpack what I could remember.  Since then, I have written several series of poems concerned with dream work, usually using content from recurring dreams—everything from graduations and family trips to sex dreams, high school dances, and childhood monsters. 

For the moment, dream poetry as a mode of writing seems to best embody the aspects of a poem that I value most—particularly, an emphasis on the image, the visual, the cinematic.  I am currently writing my thesis collection around this subject, getting my hands on all kinds of dream theory, psychoanalysis, and dream poets of course.  I think that sleep will always be a spooky place for me, but at least now I can put that spookiness into a poem.

Contributor Spotlight: Mark Crimmins

“Big Baby Moses” is one of the stories form a collection I’m working on that explores psychopathy—and, more broadly, madness—from a variety of narrative angles. In this case, I wanted to show how the psychopathic narrator reveals himself without realizing he’s doing so—relating external events from the hidden space of his own vivid interiority. I wanted to draw on the ten years I lived in Utah (many of them in Provo) to provide the story with an authentic Utah backdrop. In my travels around the world, I’m often appalled at people’s strident ignorance of and about Utah, and in some ways I set about counteracting that ignorance in my Utah tales. At the same time, I myself was a transplant to Utah and so often experienced the place as an outsider. I hope that this gives my perspective on the human and geographical landscapes of Utah something of an alien quality. I try to do this obliquely, however, by situating my narrators deep inside Utah realities and circumstances as I knew them at my own points of maximum assimilation. One thing I was always conscious of in Utah was its status as a crossroads—it is often touted as ‘The Crossroads of the West’—and I wanted to get some of that intersectional notion of place into the story, particularly since it was indeed a crossroads for me, ultimately, a place I passed through on the way to somewhere else.