Contributor Spotlight: Patricia Hamilton

Patricia Hamilton on "Lullaby of the Wall Street Investment Banker"

In the aftermath of the mortgage banking crisis of 2007, my husband, a management professor, was explaining collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps to me.  “Those are just forms of gambling!” I exclaimed.  My realization that Wall Street bankers had been wantonly toying with the lives of millions of people for their own thrill-seeking pleasure lit a slow-burning fuse.  

My father had spent several years as a loan credit examiner on the trail of one of the biggest fraudsters in banking history, so greed and corruption in high finance were not new phenomena to me.  Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of peoplewere so far removed from the lives of ordinary Americans that they never paused to calculate the consequences of their actions—a catastrophic failure of moral imagination.  What could awaken their consciences?  What might foster empathy in them for people outside their own affluent circles? Immediately I began to conceive the resistance I might encounter if I offered to drive a Wall Street investment banker around the neighborhoods of people whose lives his actions had disrupted or ruined.  That furnished the poem’s premise: what would such a person see if he were to visit the region where I live?  

I remember telling a friend that I wanted to write a poem called “Lullaby of the Wall Street Investment Banker,” but for some reason I wasn’t ready.  Another two years passed before I accompanied my husband on a trip down U. S. Highway 45 south from Jackson, TN, to Tupelo, MS, one sunny June afternoon, scribbling notes on what I saw along the way.  Once I had specific images to work with, it was a matter of listening to the narrative voice in my head that kept beckoning, “Come with me.”

That slow fuse I mentioned?  Eventually it led to the small explosion that detonates in the poem’s last stanza.    

Jeff Ewing: Contributor Spotlight

JEFF EWING on "Under Sandhill Cranes"

Every time a turkey walks past my window, which is often, I think how they used to be rare. You could find them in the foothills, if you knew where to look and could move quietly. They were considered intelligent, elusive; now they’re everywhere and don’t have the sense to stay out of traffic. Time falls away like that, the world changing in unforeseen ways. Even old habits drop out of use. Cobwebs form in a fireplace that in the past burned regularly. A big branch falls from an old oak—the light changes as a result, shade patterns alter. It gets cold, but we have central heat now so the firewood sits in its basket. We pack some of my daughter’s old toys and clothes into boxes. Similar boxes—still older and falling apart—sit in the back hallway of my mother’s house. Time kicks ahead like a kid on a new bike. Continuity isn’t everything, but there’s a measure of reassurance in the yearly return of a migrating flock passing over the house that’s listing a little on its plot, and whose chimney, to be honest, could use re-mortaring.

Contributor Spotlight: Kathleen Bangs

Kathleen Bangs: How "Cold Woods" Came to Life

It was a drizzly, cold November morning on the opener of Minnesota’s deer hunting season. I was driving into the remote town of Grand Marais, an outpost hugging the north shore of Lake Superior, to attend the second day of a writer’s conference. We were meeting in a log building on the main drag. The day’s class was titled Write What Haunts You. 

With a few minutes to spare, I ducked into an adjacent coffee shop. As the barista handed me a mug, I puzzled over a sign on the wall. “Oh. Yesterday I thought this place was called Java Loon. But it’s named after a different north woods animal?” I asked.

She smiled. “Yes, we’re Java Moose. There’s a sticker if you’d like one,” the barista said, pointing to a pile of large round stickers on the counter between us. Not really a sticker person, I didn’t know what possessed me to pick one up. The sticker indeed displayed a drawing of a moose, not a loon.  I stuck it into my jacket front pocket and headed to class.

A police officer, moonlighting as a mystery writer, sat across the table from me in Write What Haunts You. Before the instructor began, I took him aside. “You know, there’s this unsolved case that often bothers me this time of year, about a missing man in the Minnesota woods.” I had no intention of ever writing about the missing person. But the opportunity to ask a cop if he had ever heard of the case was too tempting to resist. 

During the break I went to step outside for a moment to enjoy the pine scented air, and a close view of the world’s biggest lake. As I pushed open the glass double doors, something caught my eye. A blur of animal coming toward me at a gallop. For a split second I thought it was a freakishly giant Newfoundland dog, with wiry colored fur the shade of green moss. 

With my right leg through the door, and only a pane of glass separating whatever was barreling toward me, its wild eyes caught mine. I saw mostly white, the look of panic. With a collision imminent, instinct kicked in. Stepping backwards, I yanked the door shut.

The animal’s head slammed against the glass with a loud thunk. 

Apparently unfazed, it made a sharp turn to the left, disappearing across the street toward the coffee shop, gone in an instant.

“Did anybody see that?” I yelled, flustered.

“I did,” said a man’s voice, from behind. It was the police officer. “That was a juvenile moose.”

***

What were the odds? Of a near-miss with a wild creature, a moose no less. With the moose sticker still in my pocket. After just getting up the nerve to finally ask law enforcement about the case of a missing man. I still don’t know if the universe was trying to jar me into action, or silence. But I did feel that the story of a man, long presumed dead, needed to come to life. I stepped inside, sat down, and wrote "Cold Woods."

Contributor Spotlight: Beverly Burch

Beverly Burch on "Psalm of the Glass City"

“Psalm of the Glass City” began when I spent time in Vancouver, BC. I love this city, how its glassiness reflects the surrounding mountains and water, its green space on high buildings, but being there I also sank into what was missing.

The poem is one of a series of Psalms about the sometimes alluring damage humans inflict on the natural world, especially wealthy humans. Imagining the missing wildlife and the disappeared trees seems a necessity when living in a city, as I do in Oakland, CA.

Bay Area cities have turned to glass as well. These psalms are praise songs to what we don’t see or know and they became part of a manuscript about the aftermath of Eden, the afterlife of a fleeing Eve as she enters the contemporary world. This manuscript, The Book of Eve, explores natural destruction, gender relations, and the potential dystopia all our lives seem headed toward.