A Virtual Interview with Amy Shimshon-Santo

Background

Thursday, November 10, 2022 7:15 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bookwoman-2nd-thursday-poetry-reading-and-open-mic-w-amy-shimshon-santo-tickets-414854941297

Feature Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo is a writer and educator who believes that creativity is a powerful tool for personal and social transformation. She is author of Catastrophic Molting (Flowersong Press, 2022), Even the Milky Way is Undocumented (Unsolicited Press, 2020), the limited edition chapbook Endless Bowls of Sky (Placeholder Press, 2020), and numerous peer-reviewed essays (GeoHumanities; Education, Citizenship, and Social Justice; UC Press, Imagining America, SUNY Press, Writers Project Ghana). Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, ArtPlace America, Zócalo Public Square, Entropy, Tilt West, Boom CA, Yes Poetry, and are featured on Google Arts & Culture. Amy has been nominated for an Emmy Award, three Pushcart Prizes in poetry and creative nonfiction, a Rainbow Reads Award, and was a finalist for the Nightboat Book Poetry Prize. She has edited two books amplifying community voices: Et Al: New Voices in Arts Management with Genevieve Kaplan (Illinois Open Publishing Network, 2022) and Arts = Education (UC Press, 2010). Her teaching career has spanned research universities, community centers, K-12 schools, arts organizations, and spaces of incarceration. 

The Interview

CH: I’m delighted to welcome you to the Bookwoman 2^nd Thursday series! I want to start by asking about how you became interested in poetry and writing. What’s your first memory of poetry? Was there a particular early experience that drew you toward writing it?

AS²: My first memorable exposure to a poet was witnessing Maya Angelou read to friends from her new book And Still I Rise in a loft in San Francisco. I was a tween, and still wondering how to become a woman in a racist and patriarchal society. I wouldn’t have used those words yet, but I already knew that being beautiful meant being magazine thin, wealthy, Christian, and blonde. I was none of those things. 

Some people have seen la Virgen de Guadalupe in a tortilla. I saw Dr. Angelou in her natural flow, and it was a sacred experience. She was wearing a head wrap, canvas cargo pants, and stood tall as a woman possibly can, and must. She was a living tree. She enjoyed herself.  I immediately knew that being a woman could become a noble endeavor. Her voice and song and dance made me think, If that is what a woman could be, I could become one too. From the very start, “being a poet” has meant being a subaltern woman in her natural power.

I learned much later that my lineage is grounded in poetry, but a kind of verse that hegemonic society doesn’t recognize or name. My mother’s first language was Hebrew — one of the many ancient languages of the world. After reading a book on poetic form that didn’t mention any Jewish or African poets, I asked my mother if we had a poetic tradition. She is 90 and has translated the mystical writings of Abram Abulafia who wrote poems in the form of mandalas. She said, “of course we do,” and started singing the Shemah. Both she, and Yonatan Perry (an Ashkenasi and African American Rabbi), helped me see that our culture was born in song, verse, and meditation. One thing I love about ancient languages is the connection between poetry and music. Both Hebrew and Yoruba have tonal or musical notation and tropes. For us, language is culture and faith, and reading and writing are also singing and listening. While I was never told this in school. I came to this from family and friends. We were never without poetry.  We are made of it.

CH: I understand your creative career began in dance, performance, and capoeira. How have these embodied expressions influenced your writing?

I spent most of my life using movement to recalibrate my body vessel. I am a retired dancer. My regular writing practice begins with yoga asana or walking. Moving and writing are wed for me.When the new book, Catastrophic Molting, came out this September, I prepared for the launch by going into the studio everyday like a dancer would rehearse. I improvised dancing to each poem. I made images and short videos with them. I made collages. I wanted to create an experience where everyone could be inside the book together as a performance. The launch became a performance with live music, song, voice, dance, and imagery. That is an example of  me being in my nature. If I could, I would always perform to music and I would always dance with the poems.

CH: In addition to your Ph.D. and M.A. in urban planning from UCLA, you hold an M.F.A. in creative writing from Antioch University and a B. A. in Latin American Studies from UC Santa Cruz. What influenced your decision to study writing at Antioch? How did it change your writing practice?

AS²: At the time, I didn’t want to live if I could not write. It felt necessary. Pleasure came from doing something I had always wanted to do. In an immigrant family, I was always pushed to do something reasonable yet revolutionary — something to help society but also ensure my self sufficiency. My mother famously advised that if I wanted to be an artist I must also be a plumber. That all comes from a fear of poverty, which I ingested at a young age. Maybe that’s also a psychic remnant of the trauma experienced by certain generations of Jewish people. Rationally or not, one fear’s that history’s shoe could drop at any moment —the next catastrophe, the next migration, the next exile. Fascism is always around the bend. 

As an artist, I struggled to feel that my creative impulses could be a responsible choice. Making art was a way to practice freedom of speech and to animate freedom as a verb. In retrospect, I should have just read Sylvia Wynter much sooner. Freedom of choice came with my father’s death. Life is not forever. Do what you love before it is too late. We can be in our nature and still do good in the world.

Studying at Antioch taught me the habits and discipline of a writer’s life: how to establish and keep reading and writing practices and goals. The MFA taught me to row my own little craft out on the water. It also placed me in a field where I could see other people writing, not necessarily the way I envisioned it, but something semelhante. It was good to be around people who share a passion for reading and writing. It also gave me Gayle Brandeis, who is a goddess of a person, and it gave me my first serious writers community.

CH: Your limited edition chapbook Endless Bowls of Sky came out from Placeholder Press in 2020. I understand the work of Nigerian-British poet and novelist Ben Okri is the source text for these erasures. How were you first exposed to Okri’s work and what made you choose it for this project? What was your process as you created these poems?

AS²: I made the chapbook when I became ill with COVID 19 before the invention of a vaccine. My life was suspended. I was afraid and felt powerless. Both the living and the dead, the human and the nonhuman, have creative agency in Okri’s The Famished Road. I read and read. I xeroxed random pages from the book and made erasures with a Sharpie. I also woke from a dream with the image of a calabash being cut in half, as if the planet had broken open. I used the visual elements of the half bowls of erased lines to accompany the poems. When I realized that I was finally mending — that I would live —I saw myself taking photos of flowers from the garden and placing them in my eyes, ears, and mouth. The graphic chapbook is a combination of all of these elements, the erasure poems, the bowls, and the collages with bodies and flowers. I learned that if I only had a few weeks left to live that I wanted to spend it writing and creating.

CH: Also in 2020, Unsolicited Press published your first full-length collection, Even the Milky Way is Undocumented. Tell us a little about this collection. When did you first conceive of it? Over what period were its poems written?

AS²: Even the Milky Way is Undocumented begins with the birth of my first born. It flows through almost 20 years including a family transition, becoming a single mother, my children growing into adults, and learning to parent myself and find value in my own voice. The last poem “esh” is Hebrew for ashes. Along the way, I went from burning my journals to lifting my words UP. 

I worked on many of the poems during the MFA. One day I visited my daughter who was working on a film in Puerto Rico. Poems circled around me like insects around a light. I came home with many new poems, extracted the poems from my thesis, and began to decipher the overarching story. I saw a woman trying to heal herself from an experience that was both magical (creating and caring for life) and traumatic (experiencing betrayal and loss). I wanted to get it all out of my body, and claim authorial rights over my life. I didn’t want to become the sum of things done unto me. I wanted to place myself in the front seat of my life. 

In one of the poems, “Autobiography of Air,” a woman comes back to meet herself 27 years later and gives love and respect to her own soul. She speaks in tongues of her burrows and planks. That poem came in the night and I found shards of it in the journal by my bedside when I awoke. This made me laugh and delight in knowing that time is circular, not linear. We can honor our labor and live again anytime that we are ready. 

With the new book, Catastrophic Molting, after all the work was done preparing for publication, I felt like a cocoon. I wanted to be the butterfly that emerged from the cocoon of the book, but I wasn’t. I was spun thread. The empty vessel. The book was the cocoon that made it possible. I thought a lot about this. Why am I the cocoon and not the butterfly? But what I came away from the process was: respect the cocoon. Writing is my cocoon. It is where I can dwell in transformation.

CH: Congratulations on the publication of Catastrophic Molting (Flowersong Press, 2022). I’m fascinated to read that the title refers to sea elephants’ collective ritual of loss and regeneration. Was this a project that began during the pandemic? Please tell us a little about this collection.

AS²: Thank you! 

The title came from my first journey away from home during the pandemic. After the uprising, I left my old life behind and became devoted to daily practice. I also reduced my teaching load and released my administrative duties at the university. Poetry led me though the pandemic as a companion and guide. After months of seclusion, I went with my children, and my son’s partner, up the Californian coast to visit Big Sur. 

We financed the trip with a commission from the poem: “And Still We Are Trying to Dream ” that became an exhibition in Cary, North Carolina. It was used in the first event the city’s public art program produced after being shuttered. They wanted to use the poem, along with key questions that Reva and Itzel had designed with their company Honey and Smoke, to engage youth and families in a discussion about racial justice. I zoomed in for the opening. It was exciting to see how a poem could catalyze a community conversation and help provide a safe space for talking about things that matter. I’d love to do more public art in the future. 

Anyway, we borrowed my brother’s SUV, and drove up the coast. Tall trees. Lichen. Seals, Seagulls, seaweed and tide pools. We witnessed the catastrophic molting of thousands of sea lions that gather each year on the coast. I was awestruck. As soon as I read the naturalists’ signs explaining why sea lions were resting together on the beach, I knew I wanted to make catastrophic molting into a poem or a book. Catastrophic Molting described how the pandemic and uprising had felt to me.  

The themes of the new book are illness, uprising, war, and recommitment to futures. They are summed up in two questions that guide the work: What have you had to let go of? What new fur (or skin) are you growing? The themes are difficult for a reason: we are shedding and becoming something new. The last four poems of the collection are finally able to move with this new energy into the world. They carry a kind of patience, self awareness, and devotion. This starts to happen with “Cease Fire,” and the confidence of “New Moon in Cancer” that speaks of “wanting and knowing how to be.”

CH: These three books coming out in two years suggest a period of prolific creativity. How have you created the space in your life to do this work? How has it transformed you?

AS²: When I respect myself, and allow myself the time, I am naturally prolific. My idea of a good day includes moving and writing. Creating is a ritual for living my best life. I love learning. Study, travel, and the creative process excite me. These practices have shaped the woman I have come to be. 

Coming to this understanding feels like a renewal for me later in my life.  I’m an extrovert who learned habits of codependency early on. I spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs, wants, and dreams over my own. Writing helps me redirect this tendency and focus inward like I should. Inward is also outward. It’s just an “outward” where I am included in the story and not made to be  invisible. 

A friend in the Ifa tradition once described my hyper-external focus as an overdeveloped quality of Yemanja (the mother of the fishes). Yemanja is my small mother, but my crowning Ori is cared for by Oya (the winds of change). Over time, I have learned that I am a healthier and happier person when my creativity is at the throne of my life in a leadership role. I can do other things, but I prefer engaging with the world as an artist. I’m happier that way. I feel closer to the bone, and closer to my truth. 

“Being prolific” is just me allowing myself to live and be as I actually am. I am prioritizing what the creative process has to teach me. When I honor my imagination, and grant it the space and grace to be, creativity brings me into the world alongside everything and everyone else. Being different is not a problem. It is not irresponsible. It is a gift and a superpower.

CH: In your bio, you state that you believe “creativity is a powerful tool for personal and social transformation,” and it seems to me your role as educator places you at that nexus as well. How has your work as an educator informed your work as a writer?

AS²: I have taught for over 30 years now. Teaching has been a way to remain curious, to cohabitate with ideas, literatures, and histories in a socialized way while investing in the next generation. In many ways, my heart lives in community. I teach because I love people. It is a way to do the necessary work of healing, decolonization, and decarbonizing in relationship. I teach to be a good mortal member of an ancient and interconnected world. I teach because I can (even as a mere momentary flash of consciousness, ideation, and sentiment). Teaching is a joyful investment in futures beyond my reach. I will always teach. It is one of the ways that I love.

CH: In the work you do at this intersection of creativity and social engagement, who are some of the poets to whom you turn for inspiration?

AS²: I read like most people eat. I want to always be open to inspiration. The public library helps me do that. The public library is the most radical (and, as a result, my favorite!) social institution that I’m aware of. Everywhere should have one. 

If you mean by inspiration, keeping company with the dead, I consistently return to the voices of Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Thich Nhat Hanh by listening to them read their own works. They have entered into my walking meditations and are a part of my personal biosphere. I study poets and poetry from my bookshelf, the library, and friendships: Rabindranath Tagore, Aimé Césaire, Cesar Vallejo, Yehuda Amichai, Adrienne Rich, Mary Oliver, Yusef Komunyaaka, Aracelis Girmay, Linda Hogan, Deena Metzger, Gioconda Belli, Efe Paul Azino, Gloria Carrera, Eleuterio Exaggat, Manuel Bolom Pale, Jenise Miller, Luivette Resto, V Kali, Leonora Simonovis, Adrian Ernesto Cepeda, Matthew Zapruder, Dan Bellm, Gayle Brandeis, A’bena Awuku Larbi, Katleho Kano, Raymond Antrobus, Dami Ajayi, Aremu Gemini, Jolyn Phillips, Mbali Malimela, the list goes on…

CH: What’s the most recent book of poetry you’ve read?

AS²: I just returned from communing and performing at two wonderful literary festivals in West Africa: the Pa Gya! Festival in Accra, Ghana run by Writers’ Project Ghana,  and the Lagos International Poetry Festival in Nigeria founded by Efe Paul Azino. The first two poetry books I’ve read that came home with me are October Blue by Obiageli A. Iloakasia and Woman Eat Me Whole by Ama Asantewa Diaka.

A Virtual Interview with Christopher Manes

Background

Thursday, August 13, 2020  7:15 – 9:00 p.m. — Contact bookwoman2ndthursdaypoetry@gmail.com for meeting information.

Feature Christopher Lee Manes is the author of the newly-released poetry collection Naming the Leper, (LSU Press, 2020). He is a poet, scholar, and educator, and his work has appeared in Louisiana History, the Southwestern Review, Carville: Remembering Leprosy in America, and Think Global Health, an online publication of the Council of Foreign Relations. Manes is a Lecturer I Rhetoric instructor at the University of Texas at Dallas and teaches History at Richland College, where is primary role is Response to Intervention Coordinator for Richland Collegiate High School, a charter school of Dallas County Community College District at Richland College. He lives in Dallas, Texas.

The Interview

CH: What is your first memory of poetry?

CM: My first memory is listening to my mother read Edgar Allan Poe poems to me from a book that belonged to my grandfather. “The Raven” captured my imagination. My next memory is listening to my high school English teacher read aloud William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”; I remember the language being hypnotic, in a way, and my teacher (Mrs. Segura) read it twice: one time just reciting it, but the second time, she stopped after each line and analyzed it. That is when I realized poems had this whole other world that could be discovered. I suddenly became interested in reading poetry and trying to figure out what I could discover from it.

CH: When did you begin writing poetry? When did you begin to think yourself of a poet?

CM: I began writing poetry in the 8^th grade. Sonnets. But I did not think of myself as a poet until my first year in grad school when I wrote a chapbook of about 10 poems. Prior to that period, I had written poetry, but I would do so as a means of brainstorming ideas for what I thought would be works of fiction. After I wrote the chapbook, however, I began thinking of other chapbooks and considered myself a poet. It was after I finished my doctoral studies in 2011 that I had the time to investigate topics and write for myself instead of for academic requirements. Between 2012 and 2017, I wrote 9 manuscripts: four book-length and five chapbooks, each ranging from 15-40 pages.

CH: When did you first envision the project that became your new book, Naming the Leper?

CM: The first chapbook I wrote in 2001 was originally titled “Regardez” and included about 10 poems that eventually became my master’s thesis by the same title. In 2017, after the death of a friend of mine, I reread my thesis and, well, frankly, I found it lacking in parts. I felt that what I had written about “leprosy” lacked multiple perspectives and did not fully represent all my family’s experiences. So that April in 2017 I put my thesis aside, stacked my copies of family letters in front of me and opened a binder of medical papers and I gave time to just reading the documents. In May I wrote about 15 new poems, which then inspired the manuscript that would become Naming the Leper. Unlike the first time I had written on the subject, I was 20 years older—in fact, close to the same age of my great-grandfather the year he died—and looked at my family’s medical papers with a completely different understanding and weight.

CH: The LSU Press release for your book mentions interviews with your relatives that were incarcerated in the National Leprosarium at Carville. Were you able to conduct some of these interviews? How was it for you to hear your relatives’ first-hand experience?

CM: The interviews were not with my relatives in Carville but included patients who had known my relatives. My last relative in Carville died the year before I was born in 1977. Additionally, I had interviewed cousins, some of whom had memories of my Uncle Albert. When I first went to Carville in the late 1990s, I had also interviewed one of the nuns who had known some of my family in the leprosarium.

CH: What was your process in crafting the book? To what constraints did you adhere in writing a book of documentary poetry?

CM: It was important to me to not write about my family’s experiences as if they were only in the past. I wanted to show the legacy of trauma that I believe was caused by my family’s forced separation and the terrible knowledge that this isolation did not have to happen, that there was medical and scientific evidence to warrant questioning the stigma about this disease in the 1920s and 1930s, when my great-great Uncle Norbert and my great-grandfather Edmond were forced to go to the leprosarium (Norbert in 1919 and Edmond in 1924).

As someone who teaches history, I believe the past is present, that something from it can be learned and most importantly used today. When I reread my family’s letters, I realized these relatives had longed for a sense of purpose. My great-grandfather, for example, did not mind being studied if he thought the examination would prove useful to medicine and science or improve someone else with his disease. My great-great aunt Marie asked to work in a “leper colony”; therefore, when I wrote Naming the Leper I wanted the documents to have weight and, equally important, to be understood from multiple perspectives since I believe that for far too long amid my own family there has been a tendency to tell only parts of the story but often without analysis or historical context.

As long as “leper colonies” exist, there is a dehumanizing namelessness that people with this disease suffer. When writing these poems, I wanted the names of my relatives and complexity of their perspectives and of their memories to be forefront in the poetry. Without scrutiny, stories about my loved ones become reduced to past events and dates that can seem without relevance today; they may be self-preserving for some in my family, but are not entirely accurate to the lives, tribulations, and legacies of my relatives (Norbert, Edmond, Amelie, Marie, and Albert) who were forced to live inside Carville. While the name of the disease was changed to Hansen’s disease in the mid-twentieth century, people today continue to be shunned because of the stigma and misconceptions of “leprosy”.

CH: Who are some of the poets whose work inspired you as you wrote Naming the Leper?

CM: My poetry guides are Joy Harjo and Natasha Trethewey.

CH: It seems we’re at a unique juncture, in terms of pandemic and its necessity of quarantine, to receive this book. And since quarantine in Carville was effectively a life sentence, I’m also reminded of current conversations about carceral systems. Where do you see connections between your relatives’ experience and current-day issues?

CM: Too often these systems fail to rehabilitate, improve, and regard the people inside them. Carville, for example, was established with good intentions: to provide safety and quality health care for people with “leprosy”, but that is not what happened in it, not for decades. It quickly became a place to send people and then forget them.

Institutions like the National Leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana cannot exist without a society that is complicit in doing nothing but pass responsibility off to someone else. “Leprosy” was thought to be a sexually transmitted disease in the early twentieth century. People diagnosed with it were often blamed for their own illness. They were ostracized for what they had and not regarded for who they were.

Incarceration of any kind, in my opinion, assumes a very one-dimensional focus and narrow-mindedness. My own relatives in Carville were not understood and their experiences were not validated by family outside of the institution. My great-grandmother did not make any effort to hear her husband’s grievances about the place because if she had, she would have had to do something, to act outside of her comfort zone. Therefore, she in many ways dismissed him, not in words but in her silence. She abandoned him and convinced herself that he was in the right place, even though he more than once wrote her and his folks that he was not being helped or treated in Carville, and that his disease was not the dread that she believed it to be. My great-grandfather and his siblings did not argue against quarantine, but I think they feared being caged and forgotten, without purpose or hope.

Even today, there is a tendency to think of “leprosy” as being in the past or as a disease that occurs elsewhere. There is a tendency to do as my great-grandmother did and perhaps feel pity for people with this disease but not do the work to change mindsets and advocate for political and social reforms. “Leprosy”—what is today called Hansen’s disease—is not a terminal disease nor does it make limbs fall off, but if left untreated or mistreated, people with this disease can suffer from side effects and other illnesses or compromised health, causing disfigurement or scarring. The fact that in the twenty-first century, globally, we lack healthcare systems that can properly treat these patients, among others, and still have need for leprosariums or “leper colonies” should be a critique of our inhumanity and incompetence. That as a human race we have not done enough to enfold the sick and disabled into our everyday routines is more than a problem; it is a public health crisis and, in the case of the history of “leprosy,” a human rights concern.

CH: What are you working on right now?

CM: A series of poems based on prison stories and racial injustice.

CH: What’s the most recent book of poetry you’ve read?

CM: Two books: the first is Pierre Reverdy’s The Song of the Dead, translated by Dan Bellm and the second is Unfinished City by Nan Cohen, both of which I picked up at this year’s AWP Conference in San Antonio.

CH: Where can readers find your book?

CM: My book can be obtained at LSU Press or ordered at most bookstores including Book Woman.