Donna Miscolta | Seattle Washington State Filipina Mexican Latina Writer

We know the story: A beauty at the mercy of a mean stepmother or wicked witch is trapped in a tower or glass coffin awaiting rescue by a huntsman or a prince.

Beauty, youth, passivity are the salient female characteristics on display in these fairy tales. But what if these trapped damsels are freed, not by a strapping woodsman or a nobleman on a white steed, but of their own accord? On their own terms. Now there’s a happily-ever-after ending.

Not that it’s a cakewalk. A point not at all lost on Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Unexplained Fevers (New Binary Press). In her third book of poetry, Gailey turns the fairy tale inside out. Her heroines might contemplate their circumstances, piningly, dreamily. But they also act on their desires and needs, which can open up a whole new pit of perils. But at least they are awakened to the fact that life is not a fairy tale.

Rather than await rescue, these fairy tale heroines shy from it, spurn it, in fact.

Not a party princess, not ready to embrace/ the noisy party prince just yet; give me a little/ time to myself. (from “I Like the Quiet: Snow White”)

Who says I need a partner to dance? Here/ in this tower I am mistress of all. (from “I Like the Quiet: Rapunzel”)

Then there are the matter-of-fact undertones of the fairy tale that any self-respecting heroine must be alert to in “Advice Left Between the Pages of Grimms’ Fairy Tales.”

Princess, remember to fill your pockets/ with more than bread crumbs, and/if you can’t sleep don’t blame the legumes/ beneath the sheets.

From the opening poem titled “Once Upon a Time” to the final, fitting poem “At the End,” Gailey gives us images both starkly funny and dark, verses pithy with wit, and always, always a last line that stuns.

For more great fairy-tale busting poetry, read A New Red and What Big Teeth by Lana Hechtman Ayers.

In Burn this House (Red Hen Press), Kelly Davio explores relationships—how they falter or erode, how time distorts the memory of them, how family bonds disappoint with their fragility and fallibility. Her subjects are brought to life with the crack of consonants and words that pierce with their honed edges such as these in one of my favorites in the collection “Why Rent is Cheap in Shoe Lane.”

Mrs. Feneley walks halls at night/with Velcro shoes and a fragment of stained glass.

“The Way I Remember” opens with a line whose labial sounds give a muscular energy that is countered by the shush of the sibilants at the end of the line, giving a sense of secrecy to the poem.

It was my sister who walked barefoot/on the balance beam of a creosote-soaked/railroad tie abandoned in a field, and speared/ the soft flesh between toes.

In a section Davio calls Sin is a poem titled “Envy.” In it, the narrator compares her mother’s solicitous attention to her younger brothers’ coughs in the night to the obliviousness she exhibited toward her, the narrator’s own nighttime fears. You didn’t hunt that seeping dark as I/ eyes wide open, dreamed… . It’s accusatory. The poem is less about envy than a feeling much more raw, much more wounding as evidenced by the continuation of that line: I was sliced… . Even as the narrator owns up to her sin of envy, she is pleading guilty to another.

In “Pride,” an elderly couple’s passive aggressive behavior toward each other belies the feelings of violence they harbor.

He dangles/ his argyled heels above the cold floor.
Cold now that she’s filched the rug,

There’s a perverse beauty in Davio’s use of the word “filched,” which connotes a petty crime and which is a harbinger of the grimmer description of the action that ends the poem.

The title poem “Burn this House” appears last in the collection and describes not so much a razing as a cleansing. A divesting of the sins, errors and omissions. A beginning.

I met Jaina Sanga in 2009 when we were both associate artists at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. I remember hearing her read her work and being struck by how clearly I could visual the scene she had written. Jaina’s prose is vivid and sensory laden. In her recently released novel Silk Fish Opium, she conjures for the reader India in all its richness of colors, odors, textures and sounds.

Jaina grew up in Bombay and now lives in Dallas, Texas. She is an alumna of Hedgebrook, the women’s writing retreat north of Seattle. She will be back in Seattle to read from Silk Fish Opium at Elliott Bay Book Company on Saturday, April 20, at 5:00 p.m.

Here she answers a few questions about her work.

1. In your novel a young Hindu woman from a wealthy family falls in love with a Muslim musician of ordinary means. You set the story at the time of Indian Independence and Partition—a time of great upheaval. So you have class, religion, culture and politics, not to mention the history and effects of the Raj. How did you manage all of these sources of conflict in writing the novel?

The notion of conflict is integral to novels. Whether on a large scale such as the subcontinent’s Independence and Partition, or the subtler, internal struggle of a character, the depiction of conflict and its resolution generates the narrative arc of a novel. Yet, during the process of writing, I didn’t actively think about these issues of class, religion, politics, and history as conflict-generating blocks that should be inserted at certain points. The main thing I was concerned with was telling the story in an efficient, imaginative way, and, indeed, the trick was to posit these sources of conflict in a true and organic manner that would continuously propel the narrative forward.

2. How would you approach writing the story of Rohini and Hanif if it were set in today’s world?

The issues surrounding a Hindu-Muslim romance are complex even in today’s India. While there has been substantial advancement in people’s thinking, the sense of the ‘other’ still prevails among many families. It has been more than fifty years since Partition, yet India and Pakistan have not reconciled their differences. To set Rohini and Hanif’s story in today’s world would mean bringing these issues to bear on the narrative.

3. You started as an academician. What prompted you to turn to writing fiction?

I taught English and South Asian Studies at a university for a few years and although I enjoyed being in the classroom and interacting with students, I was frustrated with department politics. Having written academic articles and books, I thought it would be easy to make the switch to writing fiction. Of course, I was mistaken, and I soon discovered that writing fiction is much more difficult. At least, for me it is more difficult. But having made the turn, I’m fascinated and humbled by the creative process; I’m amazed at the stillness that I feel on those rare good days when I’m totally focused on the page and the words seem to flow.

4. You’ve taught and written about Salman Rushdie’s work. How has he influenced your own work in theme, style and story?

I read Salman Rushdie’s novels as a graduate student, and was immediately struck by his use of the English language. Moreover, his novels are all grand in vision and scope. I was born and raised in Bombay, and Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh, helped me identify with the city of my birth in protean ways. The main thing that I’ve learned from Rushdie is that politics and history matter. You can write a simple love story, but if you set it in a politically charged moment in history, it becomes more complicated, and ultimately more interesting.

5. What’s next for you in terms of your publication goals? Do you have another project in the works? How does it differ from Silk Fish Opium?

I’m working on two projects. A short story collection with seven stories, all set in Bombay. One of the stories is called “Train to Bombay,” and that will probably become the title of the collection. It’s refreshing in many ways to write short stories after having tackled a novel, which is such an all-consuming beast of an undertaking. Of course, writing a short story is draining, too, for you have to work on drawing large ideas in a much smaller space. I’m also working on another novel; unlike Silk Fish Opium, this one is set in contemporary India and focuses on environmental issues. It’s mapped out and I’ve written several drafts, but it’s not quite there yet. Hopefully, I can focus on it this summer.

Excerpt from Silk Fish Opium

After strolling for a while, Motilal found a bench on the edge of the beach. The sun had made its exit, leaving behind a gently lit sky. A breeze form the Arabian Sea moved the pleats of his dhoti between his ankles. He leaned back on the bench. He could hear the waves and seagulls, and behind him the low, familiar din of the city when he sensed someone approaching. Two men were moving purposefully toward him—a British naval officer, carrying his hat by its visor, his face pink and blotchy from the Bombay sun, and a slightly built Indian, barefoot, in baggy short pants and an oversized shirt. The officer stopped in front of Motilal and in one swift official motion put his hat on his head and gestured with his index finger for Motilal to stand.

Deborah Miranda’s book Bad Indians (Heyday) is a powerful collage of oral histories, personal narrative, poems, newspaper clippings and haunting photographs. Reading Deborah’s personal story within the larger story of her California Indian ancestors is sobering, unsettling, and absorbing. Deborah graciously answered my questions about Bad Indians and she did it with the same passion and potency of prose that characterizes this very essential book.

1. Bad Indians is called a tribal memoir. But it’s also a personal memoir. In your story, you can’t have one without the other. Please talk about that.

Linda Hogan says, “History is our illness.” I’m reminded of this when I think of the legacies that Missionization and colonization have left us: diabetes, substance abuse, obesity, depression, domestic violence, racism. Who needs a colonizer anymore—we can do ourselves quite a bit of damage without outside help! Bonnie Duran and Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart call this Postcolonial Stress Disorder, or Historical Trauma. Our personal histories are shorter versions of the tribal histories we have endured. In my case, I realized that my life, short as it has been, is like a fractal of my larger tribal history—full of the same traumas, the same losses, just on a smaller scale. Poverty, sexual violence, loss of language, family dysfunction, self-medicating with alcohol and sugar—it’s all there, in both timelines. No, this isn’t all just because my father was Indian—my mother’s (Euro-American) family came with its own dysfunction—but it is impossible to ignore the fact that certain commonalities run through Native lives and identities that come directly from the colonized experience.

My father and mother separated when I was three—my father went to San Quentin for eight years, and my mother moved with me away to Washington State. When my father returned to us, I was thirteen years old and everything I knew about being Indian was unarticulated, unconscious, and self-referential—I had little information about my tribe, and a very rough idea of what “Indian” meant to the local tribes around me. I also had dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes, and was the only Native kid in any class from grade school through high school. So my father’s sudden reappearance in my life was like taking a crash course in becoming Indian, and my primary teacher was a man shaped by both his indigenous roots and by the vicious history his family had survived.

And I needed that education—I needed to learn about the Native part of my own identity—but I didn’t just get the typical California Fourth Grade curriculum, that lovely mythology about happy Indians, gentle Padres and the nobility of sacrificing yourself to build missions out of adobe bricks for future tourists to visit. No, I got the real deal—the blessings and the genocide—and so when I came to write Bad Indians, the poems and stories themselves made it very clear that I was not allowed to claim amnesty. I could not “opt out” or maintain an “objective” distance from the materials I collected or remembered. California Indian history is brutal. I learned the realities of it from my father. The academic knowledge came later. And they were the same thing.

2. You make the point that loss of land, language, and way of life will decimate a culture, but will not completely extinguish it as long as story survives. How much can the revival, nurturing and dissemination of story lead to the recovery of those other losses?

What a great question! Story is the great healer—of people, of histories, of imbalance. The best examples I can think of are the stories of Isabel Meadows, a Carmel Indian woman who lived from 1846-1939. Isabel had inherited generations (over 200 years) of oral family and community stories and knowledge, but knew that the way things were going, there probably wouldn’t be any one person to whom she could pass them on. She did not read or write, and she lived in a time when most people expected California Indians to become extinct soon.

Along comes J.P. Harrington, an ethnologist/linguist from the Smithsonian, and I swear, a light must have gone on in Isabel’s mind. Because she told him hundreds of stories, and Harrington, being the OCD guy that he was, wrote every single one down, using exactly the words Isabel used—Spanish, English, or one of several Indian dialects she spoke. And those stories are preserved, still, at the Smithsonian. In one of them, Isabel tells the story of Vicenta Gutierrez, a young girl who is raped by the priest at the Carmel mission when she goes to services for Lent. Isabel tells the story very tersely, almost brutally, and emphasizes “the girl went running to her house, saying the Padre had grabbed her.”

When I first read this story, and began talking about it, I thought of it as mostly a piece of evidence about the exploitation of power, about the victimization of Indian women. One scholar actually told me, “Don’t pay too much attention to that story, Harrington liked those dirty stories.” But I knew it wasn’t a titillating story; it wasn’t colonization porn. Researching the lives of Isabel, Vicenta, and the priest, Padre Real, I discovered that Isabel was telling a story that had happened fully 100 years before; it had to be a story she had heard from her mother and her mother’s contemporaries. Why had these women thought the story important enough to pass it on? Why had Isabel chosen that story to tell Harrington? To serve as testimony against Padre Real, the Church, Missionization itself?

I kept returning to that final line: “the girl went running to her house, saying the Padre had grabbed her.” Those two verbs! “Running” and “saying”—they are active, assertive, they change things, they cause things to happen. I realized that Isabel, and her mother’s generation, were probably proud of Vicenta’s voice, her refusal to be silenced about sexual violence toward Indian women, something they had certainly all either endured or witnessed during and after Missionization. Not only did they want to memorialize Vicenta, these women also wanted to speak to future generations of Indian women. After all, they could probably not conceive of a future in which sexual violence was not still a reality for Indian women—and sadly, tragically, they were right about that.

So I put this story in Bad Indians, and whenever I read it, Indian women in the audience let me know—either in conversation afterwards, or in emails and notes days later—that the story speaks to them, personally. You know, one of the key treatments for Postcolonial Stress Disorder (or Historical Trauma) is to tell your story, to validate your wounds—it’s crucial for healing. So there’s a long answer to your question: that’s how story, even when most everything else has been lost or stolen, can help revive a Native community. Indian women have to claim our wounds, our history, in order to recover. And when Indian women start healing, start recovering self-esteem, strength, pride—well, just look at Idle No More. We are shedding our shame. And that’s empowering for every kind of cultural revival, whether we’re talking about languages or basket-weaving or self-governance.

3. Myths are traditional or legendary stories that explain phenomena or beings and are an important part of indigenous cultures. The word myth is also used for what Merriam-Webster terms “an unfounded or false notion.”  What role does each of these definitions play in Bad Indians?

In Bad Indians I play with both meanings of “mythology.” California history has been turned into a myth, a creation myth, about Californian identities—white, Mexican, Hispanic, Indian, Mestiza. In fact, California history is taught in schools with a reverence and awe and authority that I would normally attribute to a cultural myth. The difference is, this “myth” isn’t true, isn’t based on a spiritual knowledge, but on lies and greed. So by calling California mission history curriculum/culture a “mythology,” I am doing two things: first, throwing the pejorative nature of that word back in the face of that curriculum, and second, reclaiming what I think is a much more honorable word for Native knowledge, which is simply “story.” In a way, this is a specifically California Indian act; perhaps other tribal peoples with other colonization histories don’t feel the need to reject the word “myth” that I do. But California Missions are still a big part of the Californian economy, the identity of a Californian public school student, the life of any Californian walking down a street lined with faux-adobe buildings, which have “mission” architecture, red tile roof tiles, iron grates and doors and windows trimmed out in heavy oak. This lie that Missionization was good, that it was benevolent or at worst, inevitable, is a constant, invasive project that needs to be resisted. Calling it a myth does that, for me.

4. As I read the book, a range of strong emotions rose up in me—anger, sadness, bitterness, indignation. Yet, I also felt joy and hope. What was it like emotionally for you to research and write this book?

Researching and writing this book was pretty much the emotional rollercoaster you just described; large parts rage and grief, and smaller, but sustaining, parts of joy or pride or love. I spent ten months living in Los Angeles, on sabbatical, during the majority of my research and much of the original writing. When I returned to my home institution the next fall, many of my colleagues greeted me by asking things like, “So, are you all rested up and recharged after a whole year off?” and I realized that no, I didn’t feel rested up at all—in fact, I felt like I had just spent a year studying the Holocaust.

Battered, bruised, exhausted, hyper-aware of all kinds of anti-Indian or racist or violent words and behaviors, battling sadness and grief from all the stories I had carried home with me. I sort of needed a sabbatical to recover from my sabbatical! Of course, that wasn’t going to happen, so I did the next best thing, which was to write, and teach, and go into therapy! Seriously, that personal/tribal resonance was a difficult thing to negotiate. Working at a predominantly white (both faculty and student) institution far from family also made returning to work tough. Luckily, my partner took good care of me, and encouraged me to see a wonderful Latina therapist from Texas who understood a lot of what I was experiencing, and who helped me process those emotions. I also am blessed with a tremendous department full of good, empathetic, smart souls.

I’m still dealing with all the same history and materials, but I think I have a slightly less visceral reaction now… and maybe that’s not a good thing. I was visiting at a university recently, and had lost my voice, so I asked a young Indian woman if she would read “Novena to Bad Indians” for the class in my stead. She had already heard me read it twice at various venues, and we’d had some conversation that made me feel I could trust her with that poem. Oh, big mistake—on my part, not hers. She got to the third day of the Novena and just broke down in front of the whole class, sobbing. She said it was too real; that these slurs and scenes were too real for her to go on, that it was too much like real life for her as an Indian woman.

I had forgotten. I had been reading these pieces a lot lately, and I had forgotten how powerful the stories of these ancestors are. I should never have asked a student to read that poem aloud; but I had become a little desensitized to the words. I’ll have to be careful of that. I don’t ever want to stop feeling that connection, that sense of reality—it’s a fine line to walk, to speak that reality. But sometimes, the most honest thing a person can do is cry. That young woman came back and finished reading that poem. “It’s important,” she said, swallowing her tears. I knew what she meant. That’s where the joy and pride and love come in; that’s where those emotions rise up and get you through. You do it for the Ancestors, because they endured much worse for us.

5. I would love to see your book read far and wide, in and out of schools, by Americans of every color and class. Do you have a sense of who your readers are? What kind of responses are you getting?

Thank you! I would love that too. Bad Indians is such a collaborative work—the Ancestors, Isabel, my mother’s genealogy, my father and grandfather’s stories, my sister’s Esselen language work, Harrington, the help of librarians, researchers, other scholars—I want their voices heard. Partly because of the diversity of voices in the book, I think my readers are also quite varied. I’ve read for mostly Native audiences, I’ve read for mostly Euro-American audiences, I’ve read for young people, elderly, people at TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), in libraries, universities, bookstores, at professional conferences, for people who know me and people who don’t have a clue who I am or even what a California Mission is.

Overwhelmingly (and to me, incredibly), people respond with honest sorrow, grief, amazement that any of us survived, appreciation for the histories they have never learned, or mis-learned, and a determination to change that. Recently, I gave a reading at my own school, and a colleague had her Anthro 101 students attend and write responses. One of those responses began, “Hearing Professor Miranda read from her book was a blessing.” Wow. I can’t take that personally—that was about the stories, the Ancestors. And Isabel Meadows’s great-nephew contacted me to say some lovely things about the book, words I hold close to my heart.

Once in a while, I get someone who wants to argue with me about the validity of my research (one man insisted that it only looked like Padre Real had fathered a bunch of children with Indian women, despite the 25-minute PowerPoint I had just laid out with birth certificates, Church documents and personal testimony from other priests of the time), and a few times, someone has asked the wearisome question, “After all this time, can’t you forgive and forget?” Oh, and a couple of people have accused me of hating the Catholic Church and all Catholics (I don’t). But for the most part, people are willing to hear the stories in this book, and consider them, and allow the stories to speak with authority. (Maybe people are just nicer face-to-face. These responses have all been in person; online, on my blog, I often get very agitated responses to the California Fourth Grade Mission Project posts, and had to announce that I would no longer post anonymous comments—if I can put my name on what I do, so can you!) I don’t doubt that negative responses are out there, and hope I’m ready to deal with them when the time comes.

6. Do you ever expect to see Bad Indians on the shelf of a mission gift shop?

Ha! Did you see the L. Frank (Tongva-Acjachemen) cartoon near the end of Bad Indians? The one where the Mission Gift Shop is run by Coyote, selling “mission tours” and “mission art” and “tell me your dreams” interpretation? Maybe in that universe. Otherwise, nope. I’ve been to too many Mission gift shops to think otherwise. You know, they still ask (demand) that visitors—even California Indians whose ancestors were enslaved in those missions—“make a donation” to get in? “It’s not a fee, it’s a donation,” the docents insist, but they also don’t want to let you in if you don’t actually hand over some form of money. My sister Louise refuses to pay. “We’ve already paid enough,” she says, and goes on through. I tell you what: if they put my book in the mission gift shop, I’ll make a donation to get into the mission!

Read more about Deborah and her work on her blog.

“Annette Spaulding-Convy was a nun and she is a poet.”

This simple sentence by Hilda Raz encapsulates for me the beauty of Annette Spaulding-Convy’s book of poems In Broken Latin. There are the contrasting verb tenses that demarcate past from present, but also at some level suggest a kind of inherent bipolarity. There are the sensibilities we ascribe to the two vocations—nun, poet—which overlap in many respects and in others deeply diverge. There is the fact of the verb itself, the form of to be—the state of being or essence— which goes to the heart of who we are and how we live our lives.

Hilda Raz’s sentence is nestled among many vivid descriptors on the back cover of In Broken Latin, each of them accurate and well-deserved. As I read the poems in this collection, I affirmed again and again for myself their aptness: lurid, sumptuous, riveting, playful irreverence, deep thoughtfulness.

And yet, it was Raz’s unembellished statement that resonated most with my own experience of reading the book. When I finished the book, I was eager to interview Annette. I’m grateful to her for taking the time to answer my questions. I wonder how anyone who has not yet read In Broken Latin could resist doing so after reading Annette’s responses.

1. Talk about the intersection of poetry and faith in your life. When did you start writing poetry? When did you decide to become a nun?

In a high school English class, I became obsessed with Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T.S. Eliot, so the first poems I wrote as a teenager simply mimicked these poets in content and style (and I did not mimic well), so my initial poetic attempts were terrible. In college, I took a poetry writing course from a wonderful instructor and it was in this class that I found my own poetic voice, resulting in a couple of my poems being published in the college literary journal. Following college, I didn’t write poetry again until I was in my late thirties, when I joined a women’s writing group led by my good friend, Kelli Russell Agodon, here in Kingston. I began submitting poems for the first time in 2000, and after a few publications, decided to write a book about my experience in the convent.

I initially thought about becoming a nun during the years I attended a Catholic high school in the California Bay Area. The devotion and generosity of the nuns who taught me were an inspiration and I considered entering the convent because of their example. For a few years I struggled with my vocation, unsure if I wanted to make such a life-changing commitment. I entered the Dominican Sisters at age twenty-two and for five years I attended graduate school, taught high school, and lived in various convents in the Bay Area.

After leaving the order at twenty-seven, marrying, and having two children, I started several nonfiction pieces about my experience as a nun because I wanted to explore the contradictory feelings I had about the convent—the positive and negative aspects of religious life that I had neither completely defined nor articulated and which seemed to haunt me. After becoming frustrated with the straightforward prose attempts to tell my story, I realized poetry would be the ideal vehicle for expressing my interior struggle—symbol, metaphor, myth—the devices most used to articulate sorrow, religious experience, love. Once I began to formulate my story through poems, I found myself experiencing a certain clarity as well as a much needed catharsis.

2. I remember watching several movies about nuns when I was growing up. The Nun’s Story with Audrey Hepburn, The Singing Nun with Debbie Reynolds. Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, with Deborah Kerr as the nun. The Trouble with Angels with Hayley Mills and Stella Stevens. The nuns in these stories were always beautiful. In your poem “When the Priest Stays for Sunday Brunch,” the nuns who serve the priest are slender and lovely while those not so attractive are relegated to the kitchen to wash dishes. There’s this intention by the church to hide the nun’s physicality in the habit, and then there is the duty of the nun is to strip away her vanity. And yet, there is inevitably the fact of the pretty young face and there is also the fact that we like the idea of the beautiful nun. Can you comment on this and how your views are reflected in some of the poems in your collection?

I recently watched The Trouble with Angels and its sequel Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows and I think Rosalind Russell, who plays the Mother Superior in both movies, pulls off one of the most authentic nun performances of that era. She had the walk, the manner of speaking, and the overall aura of many of the older nuns I knew, though her character, like most Hollywood nuns, wore make-up with well-tweezed eyebrows. A few years ago, I watched The Nun’s Story with Audrey Hepburn and I couldn’t help grumbling over the loads of make-up and the saccharin, flat portrayal.

In my book, and particularly in “When the Priest Stays for Sunday Brunch,” I wanted to explore the contradiction between humility and the emphasis of spirit over body with the ways in which societal norms of beauty were operative even in a convent setting. The poem about the priest servers is based on stories I had heard from the older nuns who were in the convent before Vatican II, which was the Catholic Church’s commitment to renewal/overhaul in the mid-1960s. I was struck not only by certain nuns being singled out who were “pretty” but how the pain from the grouping of “attractive” vs. “non-attractive” had lingered with some of these women for nearly twenty years.

In the convents of the pre-Vatican II Church, the nuns wore full habits, covered their hair, and of course, didn’t have access to cosmetics. By the time I entered the order in the mid-1980s, the nuns in my community were no longer wearing full habits, but modified versions (knee-length white dresses and short veils), and a number of nuns were choosing not to wear the habit at all, opting for lay clothing. What I observed was a tension between those who wore the habit and those who did not, as well as an interesting dynamic among the nuns who wore lay clothing—nuns with wealthy family members wore modest but gorgeous skirts, blouses, and shoes from Nordstrom or Macy’s, while other nuns used their small stipend to find clothing at Goodwill. I remember being frustrated and confused by this undercurrent of inequality and status, because one of the reasons I had entered the convent was to make an anti-societal statement about the emphasis on “looks” and the rampant materialism of the 1980s.

As I further reflect on “When the Priest Stays for Sunday Brunch,” I think another element at work in this poem is the inequality between nuns and priests in terms of the power structure of parishes. Many convents and schools in which the sisters taught (pre-Vatican II) were connected with parishes run by priests. The sisters were not in positions of leadership but found themselves in a subservient role with very little input on decisions that affected their convents and schools. What better way to keep the parish priest happy after he said mass at the convent—young virginal women pouring coffee who were as stunning as Raphael’s Madonna portraits. And I wanted the privileged tasks of the “pretty” nuns to contrast with the more menial jobs of the “less attractive” nuns, who according to spiritual tradition, were actually in a greater state of grace because they had no cause to be vain. This level of contradiction and hypocrisy still gives me a headache.

3. One of my favorite poems in this collection is “Feeding Stations of the Cross.” Some of the things that come together for me in this poem are the ideas of fasting, cleansing, nourishment both physical and spiritual, and a bodily sense of self. Also, I love the little “recipes” in the poem with their robust, even aggressive verbs and the last lines that leave you stunned, smiling or both. I’m including one here for the readers.

Pope Lady Buns

Scald milk and sugar
Add yeast and flour until soft
Punch down
Cut into ladies
Poke in currants for eyes
Let rise

Talk about the inspiration for the whole poem and why you structured it the way you did.

This poem began to take shape when I came across an article that mentioned how Clare of Pisa, a nun who lived in the 14th Century, would mix ashes in her food to mortify herself (mortification of the flesh and suffering being viewed as virtuous by the Church). The ashes obviously made her food unpalatable, and, therefore, Clare barely ate and she became dangerously thin, but according to the theology of the time, she became holier. This intrigued me because several poems that I had already written played with this idea of medieval women saints who mortified themselves in the extreme by wearing nail belts, refusing food and water, scrubbing their skin with lye and how these saints have been role models for Catholic girls for centuries. I connected this idea of mortification with the nuns and young women students whom I knew were anorexic, bulimic, and/or cutters.

Around the same time that I discovered the Clare of Pisa article, I came across an amusing website of specifically Catholic recipes for various saint feast days and holy days. Some of the recipe titles jumped out at me and screamed for inclusion in the collection: Virgin Martyrs’ Chiffon Dessert, Christ’s Diaper Cookies, Pope Lady Buns, Dry Bones Cookies, and Virgin Dinner Knots. I wanted to write a poem incorporating the idea of dangerous fasting practices with these recipes and I also wanted to include snippets of experience (being scolded at the dinner table for not eating everything, one of the very thin nuns fainting during mass, forgetting to fast on Good Friday, a friend telling me she won’t eat in front of men).

In thinking about how to organize these disparate elements into a poem, I knew that I needed a pre-existing structure to give me focus and to deepen the symbolism, so I landed upon The Stations of the Cross—14 scenes depicting Jesus carrying the cross, being crucified and entombed. These scenes (paintings or sculpture) can be viewed on the walls of most Catholic Churches and on Good Friday before Easter, there is a ritual of meditating in front of each scene or station. For instance, as Jesus is carrying the cross, he falls three times (stations 3, 7, and 9), so in my poem, sections 3, 7, and 9 are the recipes that I chose to include and which, in terms of fasting, represent “downfall.” Section 6 of the poem reads: And some days when I faint, a fat nun finds a crumb / of doughnut on her kneeler, tucks it zealously under my tongue. This section corresponds to the 6th station, which depicts Veronica offering assistance to Jesus by wiping the sweat from his forehead as he carries the cross. Utilizing the structure and the symbolism of this devotional practice, I was able to intertwine and unite my scattered ideas into a single poem.

4. Were these poems hard to write? If so, were some harder to write than others? I’m asking more in the sense of content than craft, although of course, the two are intertwined. I’m particularly interested in issues of faith and feminism, solitude and engagement with the world, and spiritual fulfillment and the physical needs for food, sex and, yes, sometimes, alcohol—where they converge and where they conflict.

Yes, the poems in this collection were hard to write because I felt compelled not to end up with a book that simply ranted against the Church or was stereotypically sacrilegious or seemed intent on communicating certain injustices at the expense of any humor. One of my mantras as I wrote was “find the sacred in the profane and find the profane in the sacred.” It was important to me to convey my convent experience in an honest way that did not demean the genuinely unselfish lives of the nuns in my order, but rather acknowledged their commitment to social justice that was evident in their educational endeavors, assisting of those in poverty, advocating abolishment of the death penalty, participating in anti-war rallies, etc.

Another aspect of the book is my personal critique of the Catholic Church as a patriarchal entity and its stance regarding women, gays, science, politics, etc. Though these thematic elements could potentially lead to a serious, message-laden collection, I wanted a humorous/ironic thread to run throughout the work, so that even in the most disturbing, dark poem, the reader might be surprised to find himself or herself chuckling. I think the most difficult poems for me to write were those that deal directly with women harming themselves within the context of Church and convent in order to become “holy” or the “ideal” nun, who suffers silently and serves the world with a passive, sweet demeanor. What happens when a nun wants to identify so much with the crucified Christ that she is willing to cut herself and this is seen as “holiness” and not addressed as a mental health issue? I also feel that I took a bit of a risk in writing many of the anorexic/cutting poems in the first person because I know some readers immediately link “I” poems with the real life of the poet.

This collection not only draws on my personal experience, but on the hidden, desperate lives of some of the women with whom I became acquainted in the convent and the lives of some of the young Catholic women whom I taught. I wanted to give a voice to all of this underlying pain, whether personal or through association, whether it occurred in 1362 or 1950 or 1988. I am also intrigued by the interplay of the individual and society, and specifically how the woman who identifies herself as an introvert or contemplative (in the convent or not) interacts with the world, while maintaining her inner aloneness, her inner sense of being intact. It was interesting for me to explore this in my poems since I am a woman no longer living in a cloistered setting, who, nonetheless, still struggles with the intersection of self and community. I think the last few poems in the collection reflect my own battle to confront the part of myself who, at times, desires to be a hermit but finds herself a wife, mother, poet engaged inextricably with her family and her community.

5. What do you most want readers to take away from this collection?

I think I would be pleased if, after reading In Broken Latin, readers felt that they had gained insight into the human side of individuals who join a religious order in the Roman Catholic Church. A previous question dealt with the Hollywood depiction of nuns and I believe the sappy sweet and seductively innocent nun is not only a creation in the movies, but is a pervasive stereotype in the minds of many people who have no direct experience with individuals who have been in a convent or a monastery. I also hope that I have conveyed a historical sense of the mixed message that has been handed down by the Church in terms of spirit and matter, soul and body. On one hand, we’re told the body is a temple and should be treated as such, yet on the other hand, we see how bodily suffering is exalted and made exemplary. And spirit is always viewed as “better than” matter, rather than a more balanced perspective that celebrates each as equal aspects of our humanity.

The book is obviously based on my personal experience, but many poems are quirky, pointed, exaggerated retellings with imaginative additions—I chose the genre of poetry, not nonfiction, so, in a sense, I gave myself permission to fictionalize and create. I value the time I spent in the convent and value the fascinating, rich, sometimes painful experiences I had, especially on an interior level as I confronted my concepts of divinity and self, confronted my relationship to the world and why I desired to lead a life of service—genuine altruism or escapism? And lastly, I hope each person who picks up the book, will be able to relate to the themes because there is a universal element to our search for meaning, love, service, and some sort of inspirational power that is greater than our own selves. If readers read a humorous poem in the collection and experience a moment of darkness; if readers read a dark poem and experience a moment of humor—this would make me happy.

If you’re in Seattle, you can buy In Broken Latin at Open Books. Or buy it online from the
University of Arkansas Press, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.