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“The most astonishing thing to happen in the almost 14 billion years since the birth of the cosmos is that ordinary, apparentle inert matter, has—by its self-organizing capacity (or, autopoesis)—become conscious.” Harry Dodge reads from his debut book, My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing (Penguin Books, 2020), and discusses its themes in a conversation with Maggie Nelson in their Los Angeles home.
Today I’m continuing my series of interviews during the quarantine with poet Carolyn Hembree. Hembree’s debut poetry collection, Skinny, was published by Kore Press in 2012. In 2016, Trio House Books published her second collection, Rigging a Chevy Into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague, winner of the 2015 Trio Award and the 2015 Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award. Hembree’s work has appeared in Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Daily, West Branch, and other publications. She received a 2016-2017 ATLAS grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents and has also received grants and fellowships from PEN America, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the Southern Arts Federation. Hembree is an associate professor at the University of New Orleans and serves as poetry editor of Bayou Magazine.
How has this pandemic impacted you personally and professionally?
I’m a tenured associate professor, so while migrating brick-and-mortar classes online has been kind of awful, I have a job and health insurance, whereas many of my friends and students rely on our gig economy. An introvert who feels exhausted rather than invigorated by social events, I’m good nesting with my family. My mother is in a retirement facility, and a close friend has Stage 4 cancer: I worry about them.
What books are you reading while quarantined?
With the semester going, I primarily read MFA theses and workshop poems, as well as undergraduate writing in all genres. I’ve been reading Toi Derricotte and Kalamu ya Salaam in preparation for their upcoming visits to our MFA program. I’ve been rereading the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales to think about plagues of the past, what it means to tell (or post) our stories, and what a pilgrimage would look like now. I’m also settling into the newest issue of one of my favorite literary magazines, West Branch.
If you knew five months ago what you know now, how would you have prepared for this moment?
Gone to see my mother before they closed the home to guests.
Have you attended or participated in any virtual readings? Do you think they’re here to stay or do you prefer to return to in-person readings?
Yes, I have attended and participated in virtual readings, thesis defenses, faculty meetings, and workshops. Full disclosure: I’m a Luddite with a flip phone, so virtual anything makes my list of “hateful things,” à la Sei Shōnagon’s list in The Pillow Book. As a vain person and a control freak, I like a filter that peels off ten years, a control panel to diminish or enlarge others, and an “End Meeting” button. I like that I can wear makeup, a fancy blouse, and PJ bottoms. I like being able to mute myself and black out my screen, so no one can see that I walked off during a meeting. In sum, I think it encourages me to be phony—yes, more comfortable, but comfortable comes at a price. It’s too curated. Andy Warhol said, “I want to be a machine.” Me too, but then what: How do we machine together? Will we go back to in-person readings? I think so. People need each other. Will in-person gatherings be “zoomed” or what have you? Sure. Now that we have a taste, folks will want that synchronous, “participatory” experience you don’t get from a recording.
What’s your hope for New Orleans during and after this pandemic?
My hope for New Orleans is the same as before the pandemic: equal access to education for all kids. As a teaching artist in grammar, middle, and high schools and the mother of a ten-year-old, I’ve noticed that funding, class sizes, and quality of education vary significantly from school to school. In general, I see white kids getting better stuff. I believe that doing away with admissions tests and lotteries, and opening enrollment to all students would advance our community.
As part of a fundraising effort to help Chicago independent bookstore Volumes Bookcafe during the coronavirus pandemic shutdown, Rebecca Makkai enlisted over two dozen writers—including Kristen Arnett, Alexander Chee, Garth Greenwell, Andrew Sean Greer, Lauren Groff, Mira Jacob, Mitchell S. Jackson, R. O. Kwon, Victor LaValle, and Susan Orlean—to participate in a collective performance of the dance scene from John Hughes’s classic 1985 high school film, The Breakfast Club.
Last week I started off a series of posts featuring some of the ways the Houston literary world has been rising to the occasion with innovation and community in mind during the pandemic. I covered University of Houston’s CoogSlam, and this week I want to give some love to Casa Ramirez Folkart Gallery.
I’ve mentioned Casa Ramirez before which makes them being on this list maybe a little overindulgent but if you are like me, you celebrate your elders when they keep things fresh. Casa Ramirez is doing just that. For the most part, Casa Ramirez is like any staple small business here in Houston, but what makes this space unique is that the couple in charge, Macario Ramirez and Chrissie Dickerson Ramirez, are good luck charms for every Latino in the city.
If you are an artist or writer, fan or hobbyist, Casa Ramirez is like a shrine. If you have a literary event there, having your book in their shop makes it destined for success. I have seen it with my own two eyes. It might be a “folk art” gallery, but don’t let the Ramirezes fool you—they are book lovers and carry an extensive bookstore inside the shop with all the texts to build up an ethnic studies library in Latinx lit.
That said, the stay-at-home orders in Houston have been devastating to businesses and now that Texas has chosen to slowly open up this month, so has Casa Ramirez—but with new safety measures. The shop has created a “retail-to-go” shopping experience: Patrons get to peruse all the art and books with a “curator” by their side to answer questions and make recommendations. Only one person, one couple, or one family is allowed in the shop at a time and you must wear a mask (employees also wear masks). You have access to the whole bookstore and gallery area for thirty to forty minutes, buy what you want and then, boom, you are out the door. The shop has limited hours from noon to 4:00 PM every day.
From what I have heard, they’ve had a line a block long every day. Leave it to Casa Ramirez to lead the way. Check out their Facebook page and their Instagram, @casaramirezfolkartgallery, to see what they have going on.
Lupe Mendez is the literary outreach coordinator for Poets & Writers in Houston. Contact him at [email protected] or on Twitter, @houstonpworg.“It is an ancient Mariner, / And he stoppeth one of three. / ‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, / Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?’” Jeremy Irons reads the opening lines of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” accompanied by Glenn Brown’s oil painting The Shallow End, for the “Ancient Mariner” Big Read, an online audio and visual art project curated and produced by the University of Plymouth with forty readers—including Simon Armitage, Alan Cumming, Willem Dafoe, Olivia Laing, Hilary Mantel, Iggy Pop, Ali Smith, Tilda Swinton, Neil Tennant, and Jeanette Winterson.
On May 9, I had the pleasure of joining End Prejudice, a diverse Metro Detroit collective united by a common dream of a future without prejudice, as the featured poet for their virtual series Slam at Home. This series is hosted by LaShaun Phoenix Moore and features one poet and one musical artist each week.
Prior to Michigan’s stay-at-home order, End Prejudice put on several events such as the Storytellers Slam that took place this past winter. Phoenix told me a bit about how End Prejudice had to shift gears for their 2020 programming due to the pandemic: “Once the pandemic hit, we had a team call in late March to determine what we should do, now that much of our programming would be suspended. H. (the founder) decided that we should follow suit with a lot of other folks in the country and do Instagram Live events.” The group has been hosting virtual events for nearly two months and do their best to get their featured artists paid by offering donations directly to the artists. They’ve supported fourteen Detroit artists so far.
You can follow @endprejudice on Instagram and tune in to their Slam at Home live events at 8:00 PM on Saturdays. End Prejudice also provides more information on their blog about what they do. This collective has a clear, dedicated focus to not only address prejudice, but also support local artists and their community.
End Prejudice’s Slam at Home poster. Justin Rogers is the literary outreach coordinator for Poets & Writers in Detroit. Contact him at [email protected] or on Twitter, @Detroitpworg.“I think for art you do kind of have to wait for the inspiration to strike. You have to let all these feelings sort of simmer and build up inside you.” C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold (Riverhead Books, 2020), talks about her writing process and how the characters of her novel pushed her to write their stories in this interview for Late Night With Seth Meyers.
“The more words he knew the more clearly he could share with the world what he was thinking, feeling, and dreaming.” In this video, Barack and Michelle Obama join Chicago Public Library’s “Live From the Library” storytime session, to speak about their love of libraries and read The Word Collector (Orchard Books, 2018) written and illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds.
The author of And Then We Grew Up considers solitude, loneliness, and the act of writing in a city hit hard by COVID-19.
In this installment of the AAWW at Home series, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of the novel Starling Days (Overlook Press, 2020), talks about how she’s been occupied during the coronavirus pandemic lockdown and reads from Alexander Chee’s essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (Mariner Books, 2018).
