Pub Day

      It has been such a whirlwind since publication day, of exciting ups and downs. I feel like I've been for an elephant ride!
     It was fun to have an event, my first official reading as Portsmouth Poet Laureate, on the same day as the book came out, which allowed me to sell and sign books.
     Yet more exciting was waking up the next morning to find For to See the Elephant on a couple of Amazon's lists of bestsellers. The first time I saw it my book was sitting in the #2 position right between Laurie Halse Anderson and Jason Reynolds on a list called Hot New Releases in Poetry for teens and young adults! I was stunned and overjoyed. Pub day far exceeded my wildest expectations. Though the book has slid up and down the list, yesterday almost sliding off when Amazon ran out of books, it rose back up to #5, then 7 today, and has remained on the list these twenty days it has been out.
      I haven't really figured out how to promote the book yet but I am working on it. I hope to get more reviews, but it feels so awkward to ask for them. I'm really not very good at sales, but I am good at PR. My latest idea (tell me what you think) was to buy a batch of little plush elephants to sell with the book when I do events. They are on the way now.
      I'm so happy with the Mother's Day gift my daughter made me; an author's website which you can view at www.tammitruax.com. That will certainly help me in my marketing efforts, as soon as I figure out what my marketing efforts should be!

       Check out this song!

Working with Marilyn Nelson

      This week, as the grand finale of my much too brief summer vacation, I took a little road trip up to Wolfeboro, New Hampshire to attend a couple of workshops taught by Marilyn Nelson. She is one of my favorite author / poets and I had never met her so was really looking forward to the day.

       She first read to us, poems by four poets and had us attend to particular words that stuck with us while she did. I especially enjoyed learning about YA artist Curtis Crisler's Tough Boy Sonatas.
        During our writing time she asked us to "think about the US at this moment" and then challenged us to write golden shovels using some of the words we'd attended to during the readings. I had tried writing golden shovels before with little success, and I'm not sure I did any better this time but I include my attempts below.

     If you are not familiar with the golden shovel form, a type of found poetry created by Terrance Hayes, here is a link to a full introduction:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/92023/introduction-586e948ad9af8

       I took this photo in the church, of the altar behind Marilyn, which I found so well suited to the mood of the poems we were working. (Created by a VT fiber artist, name unknown to me.)

Golden Shovels for Our America

    We survive so many yesterdays

gleeful or garbage

addiction ripening

holy blood in

your syringe, my syringe, pass the

spoon down the shit-hole hall.

I smile though grayed
dazzle in
flying and
wonder white bread gray
my dream
survives, makes
me pause just for a
minute, I become giddy
my poem the sound
I am not
supposed to make, turns strong.


                                I wonder will I?
                        I wonder if we shall?
                            Can we just create
                              a better ending if
                        we try harder, try not
                                          to make a
      joke of our freedom, a foot note
in a democracy that devolved into a
                                         shit - hole.

With this last one I excused myself from using words from the prompt poems to see what would result.

So many yesterdays
      accumulate like garbage;
            old apples ripening,
                    having fallen in
                          the shade, decomposing in the
dirt, uncherished, while a wooden bowl sits empty in the hall.

 

             Thanks to Marilyn, Arts on the Edge

and  Rev. Gina at The First Congregational Church for a wonderful experience. The following photos are from other stops made that day; a quick swim and feeding dinner to a duck out of my hand at the lake, a pullover at the Governor Wentworth summer house site (he's featured in my book https://www.amazon.com/Poets-Tale-Lady-Wentworth-Illustrated-ebook/dp/B00G6R06IC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1503844701&sr=8-1&keywords=A+Poets+Tale+lady ).

 I saw poetry prompts all over town!

Going nuts about Nutshell

     I need to talk about Nutshell.

     I recently finished reading Ian McEwan's Nutshell, his 17th novel (I believe) and I suppose I have no business questioning the man's writing but that is exactly what I am going to do.

     First, let me say I loved the book. And I loved it from the first sentence, "So here I am, upside down in a woman." It is brilliant. Everything about the book is brilliant.

     But the whole time I was reading it I struggled with the point of view. By that, I most definitely do not mean that the PoV is that of a fetus. I did not struggle with that and see it as the reason for much of the brilliance.

     Nor am I referring to the fetus's ability to talk, think, reason, or imagine. I accept all of that as brilliant too.

      No, I struggled with the first person PoV of the fetus only because it seemed inconsistent to me, so here I ask for your help. Was I wrong in that? I felt like it fluctuated and did so frequently from first to omniscient. It made me pause many times in my reading. Now I grant you that the average reader wouldn't have had as much trouble with that as I did, say a person who isn't spending a good two hours per day wrestling like a WWF star with PoV in her own novel, (or someone who hasn't taught prenatal development at the college level) but it gave me a lot of trouble.

     Early on I decided to accept anything the narrator could have heard no matter how implausible (the flip of a notebook page), and only question that which could not be heard, thus the narrator could not have known of it. I also let go everything the baby could have known, even temporal knowledge, by way of his mother experiencing it. Even with those allowances, I examined how the fetus could have knowledge of a great many things. Some just seemed impossible to me. A few of these might have been OK to slip in when absolutely necessary, (is it?) but I felt there were far too many. The editor I am currently working with would not let me get away with that for even one paragraph! There were so many of these that I began to question myself. Was I getting something wrong? What say you?

     A few examples are:

Speaking of his uncle on page 111: "Now he feels like getting up. It's 6 p.m., he notes. Enlivened, he stands, stretches his arms athletically with a creak of bone and gristle, ..."

Again on page 117: "Now he's at her side, sharing the view, trying to find her hand."

On page 144 going on at length about a social media site giving us seventy-one gender options.

On page 158 again of Claude: "He knows he must be kind. But kindness without desire, without promise of erotic reward, is difficult for him. The strain is in his throat."

    Well, you get the idea. Am I being overly critical? Can a writer be inconsistent in PoV? Or am I nuts?