Emma Wippermann, Joan of Arkansas

 

                HERE BEGIN THE
         PROCEEDINGS AGAINST A
             DEAD WOMAN JEANNE

It has pleased divine Providence
that                  the woman known as Jeanne

should be taken                        apprehended
by famous warriors

The reputation of this woman
has already gone forth

and having thrown off
the bonds                                 of shame

she wore
with an astonishing      and monstrous
                                    brazenness
immodest garments
belonging to the male sex;        moreover

she was not afraid to perform  speak   and
disseminate
many things     she is

guilty               of no inconsiderable offense

Lately I’ve been going through New York writer Emma Wippermann’s Joan of Arkansas (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023), a book the author self-describes on their website as “a queer drama about climate catastrophe, internet fame, and political divinity.” The title alone is one of the more impressive and striking I’ve encountered in some time, as the author reworks a contemporary reimagining of the facts and fictions of Joan of Arc and George Bernard Shaw’s 1923 play Saint Joan. I wonder, also, if the author is aware of the television series Joan of Arcadia (2003-2005)? Structured in four sections—“The Legend of Petit Jean,” “Joan of Arkansas,” “Trial of Jeanne D’Arc: Some Excerpts” and “The Dove”—Wippermann reimagines the space and time of Joan of Arc across a play script, prose and short lyrics, offering notes such as “PLACE: Domremy, Arkansas / in the increasing Heat / of the U.S.A.” and “TIME: The future, now— / or, Election Season / —but with the Medieval logic / of the Hundred Years’ War [.]” Immediately following, Wippermann’s “A NOTE ON STYLE” reads:

If performing, do it with a lot of speed; the spaces and line breaks are emphasis; talk as fast as you can read. No one waits for anybody to finish speaking. Imagine a fifteenth-century brain on amphetamines will full knowledge that the earth is burning.

Wippermann’s text is sharp, smart, fast moving and urgent, cycling across elements of climate crisis and the crisis of faith itself, through this blend of contemporary and fifteenth-century France, an updated chronicle play on Saint Joan that is chillingly relevant to increased climate shifts. There is an element of this particular work that feels akin to Wippermann blending Saint Joan with Don’t Look Up (2021), offering an urgency and religious fervor that fights against a self-destruction that might almost be inevitable.

I woke one morning with a sore throat. Smoke from the mountains had flooded down into the valley. The other side of the river was shrouded and Domremy felt shrunken, diminished by its sudden lack of context. School was cancelled and I stayed in bed.

This feels like the end of the world, I texted Joan.

Except everyone will go back to school in a couple days and act like nothing happened.

As if the world wasn’t literally on fire.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jendia Gammon

Jendia Gammon is the author of fantasy, science fiction, and horror novels and short stories. Jendia writes compelling characters within rich world-building.

Jendia conducts workshops and participates in panels on creative writing for international conventions. She holds a degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Jendia is also a science writer and an artist. She has also written under the pen name J. Dianne Dotson.

Born in Southern Appalachia, Jendia now lives in Los Angeles with her family. She is married to British author Gareth L. Powell.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first published book, HELIOPAUSE, written under my alt pen name J. Dianne Dotson, was not my first actual book. I had written two novels by the time I was 14 years old. But I didn't submit them. I reused their ideas for THE QUESTRISON SAGA. HELIOPAUSE and its three sequels I published myself, learning a lot about the work involved in being a publisher and hiring contractors to edit and provide cover art for the book. That was great experience. I have two traditionally published books out this year, the cross-genre THE SHADOW GALAXY: A Collection of Short Stories and Poetry, and the upcoming Young Adult SFF adventure, THE INN AT THE AMETHYST LANTERN. Each is both similar and dissimilar to THE QUESTRISON SAGA, and all of them have elements of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. I'm pleased I didn't have to publish those myself!

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I've written all three most of my life. I've always been a writer.
 
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I write incredibly fast because my work in science journalism was on deadline, so that fire tends to carry over to my fiction as well. I enter knowing exactly where I want to go and I simply write it. I don't have copious notes.
 
4 - Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I work on novels as novels. I write short stories as short stories. But two of my published short stories are carrying forward as two novels.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do enjoy them; people usually ask me afterward if I was ever in theater (I wasn't).
 
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I just write stories I like to read. I interweave my life experience with fiction, and I like to speculate on what is possible...or not.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
We wouldn't have a lot of the things we enjoy without writers: songs, TV, books, instructions...humans are natural storytellers and that won't go away.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Oh I love working with editors. Absolutely essential and most welcome.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Carve out the time to write.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to novels; fantasy to horror to science fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
Very easy. I love to write what I love to read, and I love to read quite a few genres!

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I write whenever I can. I'm busy with a part-time science writing gig and parenting, so I just write in the margins, so to speak, as fast as I can.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
The only reason my writing would stall is something emotional or physical, not because of the story; never that. I never, ever run out of inspiration. My greatest enemy is time!

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Well, I've had a lot of homes. I grew up in East Tennessee, so sometimes I'm reminded by distant woodsmoke, or how the air smells before it snows, or the smell of the TVA lakes, or sawdust from Dad making things when I was a kid. In Los Angeles, I love the smell of a pinon log fire, of tacos, of jasmine everywhere, and of the ocean.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I am always surrounded by inspiration in all those things and more.  

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Obviously I love the works of my husband (Gareth L. Powell). I'm a big fan of L. Frank Baum, Ray Bradbury, L.M. Montgomery, Robin McKinley, Philip Pullman, Adrian Tchaikovsky, the list goes on and on.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I'd like a massive book deal and a TV or film option!

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I mean, I've worked as a biologist both in ecology and clinical research. So I've been in science for decades. I also do artwork on the side.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I've written since I could hold a crayon. I also learned to make art alongside that. Then I learned science. I like to do many, many things.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I really enjoyed the heck out of Peter McLean's PRIEST OF BONES. I haven't seen a film I've loved in a very long time; mostly I stream TV shows.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Multiple books in multiple genres as well as several short stories.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Lisa Samuels, Livestream

 

Ligature

the water is eating the sun
  chomping it into tiny bits
sea or tune or new design
open tratten rock face
  wet with shadow this side
steel spray lings the curve
and shaking it the boat
picks up the island from her
  mouth cage loosening
halfway cross now
scatter opt her brow
  words come in back steel
like arithmetic it’s all over
for the water’s pride
  chomp chomp

The latest from poet Lisa Samuels, following titles such as Foreign Native (Black Radish Books, 2018) [see my review of such here] and Breach (Norwich England: Boiler House Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], is Livestream (2023), her seventh poetry book from UK publisher Shearsman Books. The collection is described on the back cover as “digital capture thrown elsewhere, body fluids that charge being and planetary liquid flows. Livestream’s poetry entangles with those phenomena. The poems erupt, stagger, hold, and reflect as they evoke events and responses distributed through bodies and ethical borders.” The short lyrics of Livestream are clustered into quarters: four sections, each of which open with a black-and-white digital image, offering the suggestion that the poems within each section respond, or bounce of, said image. These images, according to the table of contents, are titled “floater,” “diorama,” “caliber” and “ganglion,” and the poems that follow suggest a book-length trajectory of responses, quartering this suite of short lyric bursts of rhythm, sound and meaning. “Scouring the planet’s nerve geometry / in the same speak-shore out of which / some clods turn on the side to rest,” the opening poem, “Gorge time,” reads, “the double-touch veins umwelt / our of which throbs the voice is / over-faint turns on its side to speak [.]”

Samuels’ poems, however they might be shaped, begin at a moment and the rush forward from that singular point, headlong into a lyric running across a myriad of sound, rhythm and reference, very much in the vein of one thought or sound immediately following another. “Even if a cold / statute really is curative you believe it,” the poem “Aquifer” offers, “its closeness to your feeling bears relief.” Hers is a lyric populated with physicality from starts and air to limbs and nervous fictions, allowing meaning to emerge out of what might, at first, appear a jumble but is filled with purpose, akin to certain of the language poets, whether Stephen Cain or Meredith Quartermain, allowing a way through the collision of sound and meaning into something far larger, just on the other side. Or, as the poem “Pitch in the dark” ends:

        Living specific nervous fictions
we said    tall and beautiful withers
a long tail for a clear advantage
airborn    sprecht

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Flare Corona

 

My Life Is an Accident

of DNA and radiation, a million missed chances
for death to sweep me off my feet.

Too much of this, not enough of that—
a witch’s spell for trouble. Red-haired

and scarlet-fevered, born with wings and a tail,
an immune system weak as a kitten and a knack

for being in the wrong weeds at the wrong time.
Fascinated with systems, folders, and fossils,

tracking down each dinosaur and later, delivery systems
for rare anti-virals. Government research into nuclear facilities,

conspiracy theories linked to aliens and solar flares.
I was never meant, not planned, not absorbed into the mainstream,

never meant to survive this long according to charts and scans.
She’s a miracle, they said, she’s a mutant, she’s a baby born

of a bad seed. Modern living makes a body bitter, our blood
and flesh filled with hormone disrupters, flame retardants and false

positives. But I’m a hay-maker, a harbinger,
a fateful warning of things to come.

The latest from Redmond, Washington poet (and that city’s second official poet laureate) Jeannine Hall Gailey is Flare Corona (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2023), a constellation of first-person narrative lyric portraits and self-portraits clustered into four sections—“Post-Life,” “Harbingers,” “Blood Moon” and “Corona”—as she articulates an uncertain future around the weather, ongoing fires and the opening months of the pandemic, and of living with Multiple sclerosis. “You were warned.” she writes, as part of the poem “To Survive So Many Disasters,” “You promised / never to return. You set out on a journey / far from home. You looked out into darkness / and saw possibility.” Her poems explore layers of complication, both from within and surrounding, simultaneously burning out and refusing to fade away. There are moments in poems that see powerful lines occasionally buried, but Gailey writes from the centre and frin all sides of each of these ongoing crises, offering her lyric as a way to document what has happened, what is happening, what might still be happening. “Under the mountains,” she writes, as part of the short poem “That Summer,” “the earth tried to shake us off. / The oldest oak trees fell, / people sheltered and burned in swimming pools, / the screams of horses in the air.” She speaks of climate crisis and its ongoing traumas, as the poem ends: “We were tied to a troubled earth. / You said it was too late to leave anyway.”