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| Julia Older |
There
are a lot of wonderful writers living in our state, some full-time, some part-time. As the Director of
the NH Center for the Book I get the opportunity to talk to many of
them. This interview series of Q&As with New Hampshire authors here on Book Notes lets me share that experience a bit with
my blog readers.
If someone hasn't read your work yet where should they
start?
It depends on their
interests. Nonfiction fans might enjoy
APPALACHAN ODYSSEY: Walking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to
Main, co-authored and hiked with Steve
Sherman. I was the 19th woman to hike the trail which now is hiked by
thousands. Novel readers
and biography enthusiasts may follow the life of
writer-mother-gardener-literary hostess Celia Thaxter in THE ISLAND QUEEN (the
first novel on my Shoals Trilogy.
Poetry
lovers who enjoy a good story may find my
booklength poem TALES OF THE FRANÇOIS VASE reader-friendly and it comes
with an audio CD of the NPR verse play
(music, sound effects, actors, students) which you can listen to as you read. Great
for tweens to seens (seniors). I'm honored to be included in the Hobblebush Press Granite
State Poetry Series.
When
did you first think of yourself as a writer?
"The
prophetic revelation that I was a poet occurred on a motorcycle honeymoon trip
through France and Spain. My new husband
and I sat in the bleached Roman arena at Arles. He insisted we leave to visit
the Church in Arles. I sat on the limestone bleachers listening to the ancient
voices of slaves, Christians and Romans entombed among the cypress groves.
"I'm writing a new poem," I told him. "Please—go on. You can
come back for me." Angry shouts echoed through the arena as he grabbed my
notebook. In horror I watched this man I swore I'd love till death rip the
pages to shreds and cast them into the wintry Mistral. A custodian hurried down
the steps past the madman rushing out and asked if Madame was all right. I
looked at my poems littering the arena like the flesh of gladiators and
actually smiled. From that moment I knew
no one could harm them or me—so long as I could write. (from LETTERS TO A NEWBORN POET, in
progress)."
Addendum: Three months later
my birth as a poet-writer was baptized by the salt spray of a small Ligurian fishing village on the Golfo
dei Poeti where Byron tried to save Shelley from drowning. In a balconied
studio I wrote, studied music, and translated while my husband was working on a
research ship. In a twin villino perched on a cove a few miles (and half
a century) away, D.H. Lawrence wrote his first novel. An outward manifestation
of my declaration of independence as a woman and writer was to drop my
family nickname (Julie) and sign all correspondence and poems with my given
name "Julia" (Giulia).
How did you end up in New Hampshire?
While I worked my way
through the University of Michigan, a job counselor handed me a thick file of
summer positions s at Maine and New Hampshire resorts. What hooked me on Eagle
Mountain House in Jackson, NH, was a photo of the dining room and menu offering
fresh Maine lobster, home-grown produce, and freshly baked breads and desserts.
The Inn driver circled around the sprawling Victorian hotel overlooking the
mountains and dropped me at the entrance to a barn with Shaker-bare dormitory
rooms. Co-workers and slackers included a disenchanted (often drunk) New Jersey
housewife, a feisty teenager from Tennessee who claimed she was destined for
the Grand ol Opry, a tough blond blueberry picker waiting for apple season and
a Maine student who recited Robert Burns more than is healthy. The grueling
seven day schedule landed me in the North Conway Hospital next to e. e.
cummings who, like me, wasn't allowed
visitors. Fortunately, I recovered in time to hop a freighter for a year of
independent study in France— where my first poems were published. The following
summer, although I was a counselor in Maine, my 10-15 year-old charges hiked New Hampshire's Presidential Mountains
(in the rain).
Surrounded by the violence of a
broken marriage, civil riots, and Vietnam protest marches, I went into
self-imposed exile for a six-month Writing Fellowship at the Instituto Allende
(San Miguel de Allernde, Mexico), I also
taught Mexican children at a bilingual school and gave music lessons at the
Bellas Artes. Upon my return I was hired as an Assistant Children's Book Editor
at the Putnam Publishing Co. in New York. Yaddo invited me for my first poetry
residency. Homeless and jobless, I was getting desperate when an audition
landed me a job with the Saõ Paulo
Philharmonic in Brazil. The MacDowell
Colony in Peterborough also came through and re-invited me the following winter. During
this residency I met writer Steve Sherman and with a book contract in hand we
set out on the 2000-mile Appalachian Trai1. Many blisters and soggy notebooks
later, in Hancock NH we co-authored Appalachian Odyssey. And the rest, as they
say, is history.
Where do you like to
write?
Poetry is fleeting
and requires instant attention anywhere on anything (toilet paper, bank
statements, end papers, skin). I recently worked on a poem in the Keene Honda
dealer's front showroom (WiFi, office chairs, hot coffee). Train compartments
are great. Steve and I finished the rough draft of a movie script on a
cross-country train trip to California. My favorite annual retreat is on
Webhannet marsh at Wells, Maine.
How
important is place in your writing?
Much of my childhood
was spent roaming the woods and fields,
wading streams, biking and on horseback, and after living in a tent on the
Appalachian Trail it was difficult to sleep indoors. Like
my naturalist friend Sy Montgomery, I'm a "walkabout." and so are the
historical characters that people my novels and poems. The telekinetic
attraction of earth-sea-sky is predominate. Tahirih (a Persian 19th century
women's rights leader and poet) rode a camel caravan across the desert to meet
her spiritual leader and fled on horseback over the Elburtz mountains to find
refuge from the Shah's wrath on the Caspian sea. Celia Thaxter on the Isles of Shoals off Portsmouth, NH,
also was a child of nature. Her Shoals garden, artist colony, and writing were
nurtured by the other-worldly Shoals. The characters I inhabit love the Ocean,
flora and fauna. And they are
inextricably tied to the loci of my own peregrinations from the15th century
cloistered cell where I studied in Aix en Provence to the Hancock "Common"
and Revere bell that wakes me each morning.
What
do you do when you're not writing?
Read and meditate. Swim, walk. Play my flute. Dance.
What's the best advice you were ever giving.
The one I practice most? Know thyself. And what seems to
follow—You can't really know someone until you've walked in their shoes.
What books do you love and what about them speaks to
you?
A Cautionary Tale I wish I'd read William Butler's THE WAY OF ALL FLESH
sooner. He shows how as children we are manipulated by parents and our
siblings—especially if we are of a sensitive nature.
References throughout my seven-storied life: KING JAMES BIBLE
(Psalms, Prophets, Job, Kings, Song of Solomon); The Complete SHAKESPEARE,
Dante's COMEDIA Homer's ODYSSEY. The OED, INTERNATIONAL THESAURUS, language and
classical dictionaries. Reference books
continue to reflect and connect. Each day a new word, new concept, diagram.
What poet Peter Viereck calls "the tall ideas dancing."
Early Joys: I still dote on Jules Verne adventures. His "romantic
plots" are duds. But the scientific exploration, earth-sky-seascapes
sparked my imagination. Lately, I read a French children's classic THE GREEN
RAY" based on an optical sun-sea phenomenon. When I was fourteen the
(Midwest) town librarian scolded me for checking out Tolstoy's ANNA KARENINA
and demanded I bring a written note from my parents. They complied and the
haunting love story remains a favorite.
Russian Novels Yes, the list
of names can be disturbing but I've learned much over
the years from the
broad backdrop of WAR AND PEACE, the microcosm of intimacy and passionate
personal relationships in Pasternak's
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO broadened by the Universal spiritual-political upheaval.
I like Russian novels because they are layered, multi-charactered like plays,
costumed, philosophically demanding. THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by Mikhail
Bulgakov was a mid-life discovery. With the skill and wit of Aristophanes and
Dante, this 20th century author turns political satire into high art .
Memoir Nabokov's memoir
SPEAK, MEMORY is the newest Russian visitor to my reading table. LOLITA and Vlad's other novels let me down
whereas the lyrical soliloquy of
Nabokov's memoir seems to shimmer and float over childhood like one of the
butterflies he chases throughout the book. M.F.K. FISHER'S non-fiction essays
are memoirs written with the skill and observation of a novelist. The four
books in THE ART OF EATING travel, sing, flow with finesse, grace and natural
élan. I admit Mary Frances, was a
friend. But were she not, like Auden, I'd still sing her praises. How
did she do it? Write so naturally? New Hampshire's own Celia Thaxter's boatload
of stories AMONG THE ISLES OF SHOALS is
written with the same effortless charm.
The Sea Faulkner wrote
an early story THE OLD MAN I discovered researching my third novel.
Faulkner's page-long sentences always got in the way—until I read this novella. It takes place in a boat (like Hemingway's
OLD MAN AND THE SEA) but is oh so less
self-conscious. Conrad's NOSTROMO trumps LORD JIM yet they're both remarkable. How could
a Polish-born author write such engaging English novels? It's uncanny. Then
there's MOBY DICK and Melville's sea voyages. I'll never climb to the poop
deck—although my Shoals protagonist Thom Taylor learns the ropes. But
fortunately we have Conrad and Melville to hoist the sails for us.
Poetry I recently picked up the collected poems of my
favorite author-thinker-polymath Samuel Taylor Coleridge and reread RIME OF THE
ANCIENT MARINER and KUBLA KHAN. Why do I like these poems? The music. The
narrative. The otherworldly interior conversation of Coleridge with himself.
His BIOGRAFIA LITERARIA is a brilliant compendium of thought about everything
old under the sun—with a new spin by a genius mind. OK where was I? Poets:
I'd been looking for the writing o f Taoist poet Sun Buer for seven years and
suddenly in the local Toadstool Book Shop I paged through IMMORTAL SISTERS and
she appeared. I call this felicitous conjunction Book Zen. Yeats was and
is my first love for his lyrical-narrative gift. Yeats MYTHOLOGIES, like Rainer
Maria Rilke's STORIES OF GOD (a recent pre-read treasure) are prose folk tales
told by pros. They flow through the memory like forgotten fairy tales. I have
long admired Elizabeth Bishop's poems for their "distance" and
"detail."
Translation Loves: BORIS VIAN was a Satrap of Pataphysique (the
20th century School of Imaginary Solutions). I've translated and published
his short stories and am bringing out a
Vian Reader (poems, essays, stories, songs). I love Vian (and Coleridge)
because they wanted to know everything—learn, and explore all forms and
disciplines. Vian wrote 42 novels plays poems (400 songs), recorded, acted,
invented, was an engineer, died at 39. Fifty years later his work is still
fresh with his own voice. I
discovered PERSIAN SKETCHES by GERTRUDE
BELL while translating the poems of TAHIRIH. Bell was a brilliant linguist and
diplomat in Iraq (where she founded the
now war-bombed archeology museum). Her poetic descriptions of Persia are suffused
with the romantic assignations and hightened awareness of
Gertrude-in-love. I also recommend
Bell's translations of POEMS BY HAFEZ,
Persia's second favorite writer (the first being the Prophet Muhammed). The
more I translate the later poems of Sicilian
Nobel Poet-translator SALVATORE QUASIMODO, the more I'm honored he was a friend
and mentor. It's as if the Russian sputnik replica on his desk sent his poems
into orbit. The spatial time continuum is light years ahead of his early work.
Philosophers Soren
Kierkegaard's existentialist novels are
obvious vehicles for his ideas Yet for me they don't have as profound an impact
as the raw retelling of Abraham and Isaac in FEAR AND TREMBLING or the creative
thoughts on artistic evolution and human nature posed in REPETITION. What makes these companion books
on my shelf are their daring examination
of family, religion, and the artistic individual in society.
American Classics: I dote on
land-locked American family sagas because they represent the best (and yes,
worst) of our heritage in myriad forms. Wallace Stegner's ANGLE OF REPOSE,
Margory Stoneman Douglas' RIVER OF GRASS (The Everglades) are doozies. Douglas can turn a paragraph of biography
into flesh and blood. I wished my latest find AN OWL ON EVERY POST by Sanora
Babb (written in the '40s) would never end. Sanora's ancestor was the bloody
bawdy tavernkeep Philip Babb of Hog Island (Isles of Shoals 1600s). The
publisher turned this novel down for GRAPES OF WRATH—and it's every bit as
powerful. If you're a publisher or agent, I'd definitely look into
this one.
What are you working
on now?
I rarely answer this
question so I'll be brief.
1. The third novel of
my Isles of Shoals Trilogy.
2. ON THE BALCONY OF
A DREAM: Essays On Reading And Writing.
My second
translation collection, BORIS VIAN INVENTS BORIS VIAN (selected poems, songs,
stories, and essays), is scheduled for Black Widow Translation Series,
Commonwealth Books, Boston 2014.
What do you want
to share?
Thank you, Mary,
for inviting me to reveal some of my everyday world.
This also seems a
good time to express my gratitude to NH libraries and Librarians for
supporting me and my books. I don't own a single credit card, but have access to four interest-free library
cards that allow us to attend lectures, readings and exhibits, offer free
passes to Boston Museums, research special collections and national
Interlibrary Loan systems. Heartfelt thanks to Amy Markus at the Hancock
Library who surely has the most engaging book launches and age-specific events
in the State. Thanks also to the newly
appointed Peterborough Town Library
Director, Connie Chronopoulos, her assistant Linda
Kepner and Reference Librarian Brian Hackert.
Steve Sherman and I also are indebted to Circulation Services Librarian,
Jill Wixom et al at the Franklin Pierce College DiPietro Library,
Director Nancy Vincent and her fine, friendly staff at the Keene Public Library, and Circulation
Librarian Robin Riley at the Keene State
College Mason Library. The combined Keene catalogues create a double treasure
for independent writers/researchers like me.
