In the opening pages of this tour-de-force, Javier Falcon, a Spanish homicide inspector in Seville, is called to the scene of a murder: a man bound and gagged, his eyelids removed and forced to watch . . . what? Falcon cannot get the scene out of his mind and throughout the novel, he never recovers his equilibrium. The identification of the victim eventually leads to a connection with Falcon’s own father, a famous, recently deceased painter whose house now belongs to Falcon himself.

If this were the extent of the novel, it would be a fine piece of writing: a psychological battle of wits between an emotionally deteriorating detective and a twisted killer with his own logic and motives. But Wilson gives us, in glorious decadent detail, the unread journals of Falcon’s father, and it is this thread from the past, interwoven with the present, that turns the novel into an exceptional piece of literature. In an author’s note at the end of the novel Wilson explains that half way through the writing of the novel, he realized he needed the journals of Francisco Falcon, the detective’s father; and took three months off from the novel to write them.

The novel is set initially in Seville, Spain, but Falcon moves freely around the country, tracing the history of his murder victim and his own father, and following the thread of his father’s journals, to Tangier. Wilson, an Englishman, is obviously at ease in both English and Spanish, interspersing Spanish phrases throughout the novel. These only add to the ambience of the setting. Most can be deciphered through context though it would be useful for the discerning reader to have a Spanish dictionary at hand.

Falcon’s father, in the execution of the will, directs Falcon to burn the entire contents of his studio: the unsold paintings, his journals, and a cache of money. Falcon disobeys as anyone with the psychological makeup of a detective would, and they lead him to discoveries that push his psyche close to the boundaries of sanity. The title of the novel is ironic here; we must wonder who the “blind man” referred to in the title actually is. Maybe the victims, but perhaps also Falcon himself who finds the illusions of his childhood and his life stripped away. At the end we are not surprised when Falcon does, indeed, carry out the last wishes of his father.

At the time of this publication (2003) Wilson had published six novels, including the celebrated title, A Small Death in Lisbon, and more since. I’m not sure there’s anything better for a book

Copyright 2010 by Toby Heaton

David Schulman, a writer and novelist who grew up in Sylva, in Western North Carolina, is the creator of the Gritz Goldberg books. I came to know David and his work through Tommy Hays’s Advanced Creative Prose Workshop at The Great Smokies Writing Program. As I read the pages of the novel-in-progress that David brought to the workshop—“The Late Gatsby,” a second Gritz Goldberg book—I fell in love with Gritz, a therapist turned part-time sleuth, and a thoroughly lovable and unique character. I had to know more about him so I acquired the first Gritz, “The Past Is Never Dead.” It was a delightful mystery, as entertaining as the pages I was reading in workshop. In his books, David combines humor and Asheville history, adds a dash of mayhem, a ghost (or two or more), various eccentric characters, and turns out a well-crafted novel that is a joy to read. I became curious about how the character of Gritz evolved and how David came up with the plots of his novels, and decided to ask him.

Genève Bacon: David, I know your family ran a retail clothing store and that after you were graduated from college you went into business for yourself, at the age of twenty-three, and opened your own retail clothing store. You built a highly successful chain of six stores—David’s and Boo-Boos Outlets—in Western North Carolina, which you sold in the early 1990s. How did you evolve from retailer to writer?

David Schulman: From 1971 to 1991, I wrote some radio spots for my stores and a few letters to the editor. After I went out of retailing I took some one-day workshops to get acquainted with the writing process. Then I discovered, in the early 1990s, that the University of Iowa granted degrees totally off- campus/online—the only state institution in the country to do so. I took writing classes with them for eight years, many of which were taught by MFA students at the Iowa Writers Workshop. It was during this time that I began working with Gritz and even took a screenplay course with the Gritz character. I took so many classes during those years I found out that if I combined my other credits from Western Carolina State University, I could get a new degree. The result was that in 1999, at the age of 50, I graduated U of I with a BLS degree. I followed up with more writing workshops.

At the same time (the mid-1990s), I began to write a monthly column, called “Roaming the Past,” for a magazine underwritten by the Blumenthal Foundation in Charlotte. I interviewed mostly elderly Jewish citizens across the state about their lives and about notable historical events in North Carolina’s Jewish history. For two years in a row, 1994 and 1995, I won the annual N.C. Press Club’s prize for best personal columnist. The column was noticed by the Center for Jewish Studies at UNC-Asheville and I was hired by them to do a number of oral histories of Jewish citizens of Asheville and Western North Carolina.

GB: What led you to come up with the idea of the Gritz Goldberg character—a Jewish therapist and amateur detective ?

DS: Gritz was a vehicle for telling my story of being Jewish in the South during the 1950s and ’60s. It was a totally different experience from what other metropolitan Jews experienced, even very different from that of the Southern Jewish experience of today.

GB: How did you find the historical context of the Southern Jewish experience?

DS: During the tapings I did for UNC-A, many of the interviewees told me they had moved to Asheville in the 1920s and 1930s. Curious about what it would have been like in Asheville and Western North Carolina in those days, I visited Pack Library [in Asheville, the main branch of the library]. I searched through the microfilm issues of the local newspaper, “The Citizen,” now called the “Asheville Citizen Times.” Going day-by-day, I came across a 1936 murder at the Battery Park Hotel, one of Asheville’s premier hotels. The story fascinated me because the hotel itself was part of my own history. My Bar Mitzvah celebration had been held there and, as a kid, my father would take me out of school to go with him to the hotel to see the traveling salesmen who set up to sell merchandise for the stores in the area, including my family’s store. The story of that murder sparked the idea for the plot of my first Gritz novel, “The Past Is Never Dead.” I had gotten the start I needed.

At the same time, one of the people I taped for the UNC-A project, Leo Finkelstein of Finkelstein’s Pawn Shop, opened a closet to show me memorabilia he had collected on Asheville history in general and Jewish history in particular. What caught my eye was a Wanted Poster of William Dudley Pelley that Leo said he had taken directly off a telephone pole. When I asked Leo what the poster was all about, Leo said, “Oh, you wouldn’t be interested in that!” Oh, but I was.

I did further research and found that Pelley, a nationally known figure who had run for president, was a fanatical Nazi supporter with a wildly interesting, nutty and dangerous past. His followers, for example, had attacked the San Diego naval base in a rowboat. Pelly arrived in Asheville in the 1930s and set up a hate-mail-production operation—without much success, I might add. He also went around holding some séances. And I had another strand to weave into my novel.

Then one day in the late 1990s, in pursuit of more information about Asheville history, I went out to my father’s store in Sylva (which he ran until he was 91) to talk with one of his cronies, John Parris. John was a well-known, long-time journalist and columnist for the “Citizen Times.” He asked what I’d been doing since selling my stores and I told him I was thinking about writing a mystery based on the murder at the Battery Park Hotel. And John said, “Oh, I covered that for the ‘Citizen’ and spent the night next to Martin Moore [the Negro convicted of the crime] in Central Prison before he was executed. Would you like my notes? I save everything. . . .” As they say, the rest is history.

GB: What was the next step after you had a finished manuscript of “The Past Is Never Dead”?

DS: I took the usual route of sending it out to agents.

GB: How long did it take before you got an agent?

DS: It was something like two to three years. Let me tell you, it was a lonely and debilitating journey for a writer to receive so little affirmation for his writing. But in the end, I found a fantastic agent who was enthusiastic about the book. He presented it to 13 publishers in all. We both thought the major New York publishers would “eat up” the uniqueness of Southern Jewish history being told in a mystery setting. Boy, were we surprised. They didn’t get the book and were not excited by the idea, except for one major editor who did love it. He took it to committee where it did not get through. Twelve major publishers rejected the book; the 13th was a regional publisher that did get it!

GB: It’s been some five years since the first Gritz appeared. What did you do in the interim between Gritz 1 and the start of Gritz 2?

DS: After “The Past Is Never Dead” was published, I toyed with two other novels: one was a second Gritz, the other a non-Gritz novel. After about 60 pages of each, I realized they weren’t working. The plots seemed to vaporize and I lost interest in them.

GB: How, then, did you find Gritz 2?

DS: I kept remembering one of the things people commented on during my two-week book tour across five states in 2004. They pointed out the fact that Zelda Fitzgerald had a long history at Highland Hospital in Asheville where she died, and that F. Scott Fitzgerald had a history with Asheville as well. I researched almost all the books written on the two and fell in love with their dynamic as a couple. I envisioned Scott and Zelda appearing to Gritz to ask him to solve a problem, and bingo! Plot and characters clicked into place. And that’s how “The Late Gatsby” was born.

GB: How close are you to finishing Gritz 2?

DS: I was putting the finishing touches on it and close to sending it off to my agent when I got a letter from him saying that he had closed up shop—a victim of the downturn in the publishing business. So now I have to start the process of finding an agent all over again.

GB: Will you being working on a third Gritz while you make the rounds with Gritz 2?

DS: I certainly hope to continue the series, although I have not decided on the plot of Gritz 3.

GB: Thanks, David, for sharing your and Gritz’s history with us. I wish you luck with “The Late Gatsby.”

Check out David’s website: www.thedavidschulman.com. David’s first Gritz, “The Past Is Never Dead,” may be obtained through amazon.com.

Jerry Stubblefield is a playwright turned novelist who published his first book, Homunculus, earlier this year. His plays have been produced in New York City’s Off-Broadway theaters and at SART. He has published short fiction and has taught creative writing at the Asheville School’s Summer Academic Adventures Program. Jerry is a native of Texas who moved to Asheville from New York City in 1990 with his wife and their two children.

GB: Why did you decide to forgo an agent and shop the book yourself to a publisher?

JS: I made that decision after having squandered a lot of opportunities sending out the manuscript to just about every agent in the country before it was anywhere near ready. So I pulled back and worked and revised to make sure the manuscript was ready before I sent it anywhere else. I was lucky to have as a personal friend a professional editor/writer who was willing to go through the book with me and suggest changes. Once I had a publishable product I analyzed myself the way a publisher would look at me: a writer with no agent, living in a smallish city far from New York, with no fiction credits beyond a published story or two. I knew it would be difficult to get the manuscript read let alone published.

GB: How did you go about finding a publisher and what were your criteria?

JS: I went to the library and asked for the Literary Marketplace. This huge volume lists all agents, publishers, publications, etc. , and I checked out every single book publisher in the country using the following criteria. First was no reading fee, followed by: would read new/unknown writers; would accept unagented submissions; did not do “subsidy” publishing and had no association with any such operation; did not offer services such as editing, marketing, etc., for a fee; published literary fiction and did not specialize in genre fiction; was not in business to publish any particular author (such as himself or his girlfriend); paid the author. It turned out that some of these criteria seemed, at first, to be met, according to the listing in the LMP. But closer investigation showed that they weren’t. I might have wasted a lot of time on one publisher had I not taken the extra step of verifying that by “literary fiction” he really meant “fiction written by my brother-in-law.” There are clues sometimes, but I had to follow up on some of the publishers. The list I developed narrowed down to one publisher, a small press in Seattle called Black Heron Press.

GB: And did they pay you?

JS: Well, while I required that I be paid, I didn’t restrict myself to how much and or when. Black Heron Press does not pay an advance, it only pays a royalty based on sales, and even that’s a long time coming. But for getting my first book published, that was okay. My criteria had led me to a sincere and serious publisher, and as a result I got a very nice, high quality hardback, and distribution through a group called Midpoint Trade Books.

GB: Did Black Heron promote the book through advertising or marketing?

JS: Since the print run was small, one thousand copies, there was no appreciable advertising beyond sending out review copies, and I haven’t expected much in the way of sales. More important to me, the publisher has stood behind the book, though, and has, at considerable expense to himself, submitted it to nominating committees for several highly prestigious awards.

GB: I know you’re working on a second novel. Will you return to Black Heron to publish it?

JS: If Black Heron is interested, I would certainly be interested in Black Heron, having had a positive experience there. Certainly they will have the opportunity to consider it. However, I’m planning a different approach this time and it may not be as good a fit for Black Heron. For the second novel, I plan to seek an agent rather than look for a publisher on my own. In a word, the first book was about getting published; the second one must be about receiving some income. I need to come through for my infinitely patient and faithful family as well as myself. So trying to get a reputable New York agent to sign me on is the obvious step once I’ve finished the book.

GB: Homunculus has been called an “often funny, penetrating psychological study” and a work of “dark genius.” What can you tell us about the new novel you’re working on?

JS: The second novel is a more ambitious, more complex work concerning, among other issues, the spiritual aspect of a difficult, unconventional relationship. The working (and probable) title is The Paraclete. I have a rough draft completed and a lot of work ahead to get a publishable manuscript done by the end of this year. If I meet my deadline, somebody should buy me a large drink, Genève.

GB: You’re on, Jerry, and thanks for talking with me.

Translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy

A book synopsis on the back or inside cover is there to entice the reader inside, to titillate and excite. That enticement for The Black Path, Åsa Larsson’s latest murder/mystery describes the tale of a beautiful young unknown woman whose tortured body is found in an ice-house on a lake in the north of Sweden. The truth of the story and its telling is far more interesting.
Larsson does an excellent job of creating and defining her characters, both protagonists and antagonists alike, and it is the actions of those characters that lead to the events that precipitate the murder and mayhem. The characters are what make this novel literature and far more than a standard whodunit.

The novel has the feel of Thorton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey where five unrelated travelers die on a collapsed bridge and a monk who sees the disaster traces the lives of those five people and how they were destined to be on that bridge. In Larsson’s capable hands, she shows us her collection of characters: the Swedish industrialist from a deprived and loveless childhood, a semi-incestuous upper-crust brother and sister, a lawyer back to the wars after suffering a nervous breakdown, a detective, a mother of three, with a ruthless streak, and perhaps most interesting, a young artist who defines her Black Path as a run over complicated terrain made over and over, blindfolded, until it is letter perfect.

The gathering of these story threads at the confrontational ending has more of the characteristics of a thriller than a murder/mystery, yet it manages to be both surprising and consistent with the story. The untidy lives of the major characters leaves a plethora of loose ends yet the rough justice of the novel is completely satisfying.

This is a modern novel in every sense of the word: multiple story lines, multiple points of view, tense shifts. For a reader there is only a single question: does it work? The answer is a resounding Yes. This is another piece of writing that reminds us that there is a body of fine literature to be found outside of our own boundaries.

The Black Path is the third book in a series by Larsson. He first novel, Sun Storm, won Sweden’s Best First Crime Novel award and The Blood Spilt was awarded Sweden’s Best Crime Novel prize.

Copyright 2009 by Toby Heaton

Gail Jones is a professor of literature, cinema and cultural studies at the University of Western Australia and those disciplines play a prominent role in her latest novel Sorry. The novel centers around the childhood of Perdita Keene whose dysfunctional English parents have come to the Australian backcountry where she is born. Her father has a job as an anthropologist which keeps him gone for long periods of time, while her mother Stella, mentally unstable and never able to make the transition from a middle-class life in London to the Outback or from a single woman to a wife and mother, obsessively recites Shakespeare. Their life is a shack with a metal roof on the edge of a desert, its inside walls covered with newspaper clippings documenting the ongoing progress of WWII, stacks of books creating aisles of walking space, a single bed for the parents, a sleeping rug for the unwanted child.

Perdita discovers friendships with Billy, the deaf-mute son of a neighboring rancher and Mary, an aborigine girl who comes to live with them and care for her increasingly depressed mother. Though Perdita can’t escape the fractured learning from Stella’s half-mad recitations, it is Mary who pulls Deeta into the sensory real world—of the desert, and the wandering heritage of the aborigines.

The murder of her father, seen through the gauzy filter of Perdita’s memory—the four of them there: Perdita, Mary, Billy and Stella—destroys the balance of her life in the backcountry. Mary confesses to the murder, is taken off to a juvenile detention facility; and Perdita and Stella move to the town of Broome.

But these are only the external outlines. This is the story of a childhood, told from many interspersed points of view: the first person adult Perdita, the child Perdita, and a third person narrator. As a reader, the book has the feeling of a series of movie scenes, of constantly shifting camera angles and focus. Those changes happen in front of your eyes, yet your consciousness remains firmly fixed on the story surrounding Perdita’s childhood.

If that weren’t interesting enough, following her father’s murder, Perdita develops a speech impediment, where she is unable to express herself in language. The story moves into a kind of one-sided dialog and into the realm of an almost silent movie. But it continues without losing a beat, going underground into Perdita’s internal observation of her condition.

In her masterful poetic language Jones translates the universal experience of the Australian Sorry Day, the government’s apology to the indigenous peoples of their country for past mistreatments and relocations, into Perdita’s final wrenching experience of her childhood—the single unsaid word that is the book’s title.
This is literature worthy of any must-reads list.

Copyright 2009 by Toby Heaton

In 1978, Velma Barfield, of Robeson County, N.C., was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death for murdering Stuart Taylor, a man with whom she had a romantic relationship. She also confessed to the murder of her mother and two elderly people she worked for as a live-in nursing assistant. She did not admit to the murder of her first husband—the father of her two children—or of her second husband, but both bodies, when exhumed, were found to contain traces of arsenic. Velma Barfield was executed on November 2, 1984. She was fifty-three years old and the first female murderer executed in the United States since 1976. Surviving her were a daughter, a son, and three grandchildren.

This is not a sensational story about a discontented loner who goes off the rails and kills people. Nor does its protagonist have the perverse fascination of serial killers like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. Velma Barfield was an ordinary, fiftyish live-in nursing assistant—an ordinary, working-class woman of no discernible distinction, unless you knew her secrets. These secrets included an addiction to prescription drugs, for which she needed money, and the habit of leaving behind dead patients, including her mother, which is how she got the money. Surely, a woman like Velma is not the stuff of which poetry is made—yet that is exactly what Pat Riviere-Seel, a journalist-turned-poet, has done. She takes the common clay of Velma’s life and, using her reporter’s skills and poet’s sensibilities, explores the tragic fate of a daughter who has a serial killer for a mother.

The facts in the poems, Riviere-Seel tells us, are real, but the thoughts and voices expressed arise out of the artistry and, in this case, the bravery of the poet. And it is a brave poet who puts herself into the mind of Velma to find her voice, and into the heart of the daughter to find her anguish.

The story of Velma and her daughter, who is never named, is told in a series of twenty-seven short poems narrated by the poet, the daughter, Velma, and, in one poem, Velma’s fiancé (Stuart Taylor, of whose murder she was convicted) as he is dying of rat poisoning. Riviere-Seel first introduces us to the present life of the daughter as seen through the poet’s eye: “The serial killer’s daughter wears tight curls made of cypress roots/ and washes them in buttermilk from the moon.” In the next poem, the poet switches to her reporter’s eye to describe the rural North Carolina background, with its poverty and despair, that is the setting of the story. From there, she moves easily into the daughter’s voice with its revealing glimpses of her parents’ marriage and the prophetic words of her father: “That woman’s gonna kill me.” The poet then segues into Velma’s voice, dark and ominous: “…my life/ muddy, uncharted—swallows/ everything without warning.” We next hear the daughter after she has put together the pieces of the various deaths that follow her mother and says, despairingly: “…I know, Mama/ someone has to stop you.” The daughter’s voice is poignant when she remembers the mother who baked yeast rolls and sugar cookies and blackberry pies, and who watched her play basketball “fifth row behind the home bench.”

A little more than half of the poems deal with the arrest, confession, conviction, and execution of Velma. Following the conviction, the media spotlight moves in to follow the daughter all the way through the last appeal. For the poem, “In the Hours Before the Execution,” Riviere-Seel quotes Velma as she approaches her death: “When I go into that chamber at 2 a.m., it’s my gateway to heaven” and goes on to place herself in Velma’s cell. There the poet listens to the sounds of the cellblock as and waits with Velma for the final call.

The last poem comes full circle back to the daughter and allows her to conclude her own story. And although she has forged a new life, an anonymous life in an anonymous place, she will never leave the past behind.

The Serial Killer’s Daughter is highly recommended for its masterful story-telling and a powerful poetic achievement.

The book is available from the publisher (www.mainstreetrag.com/store). And be sure to check out Pat’s website: www.patriviereseel.com.
Copyright © 2009 Genève Bacon

Johan Theorin
Translated by Marlaine Delargy

Echoes From the Dead is as unexpected as it is wonderful. The novel revolves around the disappearance of five-year-old Jens Davidsson from an island home twenty years before. Now, his grandfather Gerlof who lives in a retirement home has received a package in the mail which contains one of Jens’ sandals. Gerlof calls his estranged daughter Julia, Jens’ mother, a nurse whose life has degenerated into depression and alcohol abuse, and the two of them slowly begin their revitalized search for the boy’s fate.

Also on the island is a wealthy family whose son, Nils Kant, committed a series of murders, then fled – many years before Jens’ disappearance. Theorin does a masterful job connecting the two cases with seemingly unrelated facts and the chance meeting of the boy and man in the prolog. He reinforces that connection by writing the story in two threads: the first, the search by Julia and Gerlof written in the present time; and the second, the life of Nils Kant, written in the past.

The novel is set in the stark landscape of Oland, an island off the coast of Sweden. Even though the story is framed as a mystery, it is the depth of character – of Julia, of Nils Kant, and most of all, of Gerlof, a retired sea captain beset with physical infirmaries, that drives the novel. This is Gerlof’s story more than the others, and in the end, his bittersweet triumph.

We expect to discover the connection between Nils Kant and Jens’ disappearance in the end but Theorin easily exceeds our expectations with an outcome both amazing in its convoluted logic, and in retrospect, almost inevitable. Finally, it is the evolution of the relationship between Gerlof and Julia, father and daughter, that make this an extremely satisfying work.

The novel was translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy who also does the Asa Larsson mysteries. With many foreign works, the reader is sometimes jarred by inappropriate idiom or language. There is none of that here. The novel’s excellence in English is a testament to the partnership between writer and translator.

Highly recommended.

Abigail De Witt studied at Harvard and the Iowa Writers Workshop, an has taught creative writing at Applachian State University, University of North Carolina-Asheville, Harvard Summer School, and the Duke Writers Workshop. She is the author of two novels, Lili and Dogs, and works privately with writers out of her home in Burnsville, NC.

Genève Bacon: Abigail, I have worked with you for eight years and have had the benefit of your unflagging encouragement and astute criticism. Speaking for myself, you have helped and inspired me to grow as a writer. What inspires you?

Abigail De Witt: I draw inspiration and have learned most of what I know about writing from reading good books and teaching passionate students. The truth is, an eager but unskilled student can teach me as much as a brilliant one. Helping someone who doesn’t have a facility with language, who doesn’t know how to get inside his or her characters, or who can’t develop a conflict, gives me a deeper understanding of language, character, and conflict—but a gifted student is easier to learn from.

GB: What do you think is the most important element is writing?

ADW: The use of sensory detail. Besides drawing the reader in—how can we inhabit a character’s world if we do not know how it smells, tastes, sounds, and looks?—a single sensory detail is often the genesis of an entire novel. A writer can take one sensory detail—a woman’s bloodstained hands, for example—and, simply by asking why?, come up with a plot and a cast of characters.
Sensory detail keeps us honest. It’s easy to fudge the truth with abstractions—she was sad, he was angry, they were upset; what do those phrases really mean?—but when the narrator of “What I Did for Love,” having had an abortion, is sickened by a plate of runny eggs, I know how deeply un-nourished she is, how uncared-for. To be abandoned is to feel a kind of nausea—to be homesick—and when I see those runny eggs I feel lonely with the character. To use another example, in one of the stories in “Coping With Purgatory,” when Toby Heaton’s narrator describes hitting “a small girl in pigtails” with his car—“I hear the ‘whumpff’ of her slight impact as she hits the side of the car, feel the tremor through the steering wheel”—I feel that tremor shudder through my body. And when Heather Newton (“Water Stories”) describes the log-home salesman trudging up the road to a customer’s house and “water seeps through the soles of his worn Gucci shoes,” that image sums up the character’s failed life.
Having worked with you, Genève, I know your stories best, but in Irons in the Fire, all of you have created worlds that are vivid, honest, and compelling, and I am grateful to have been introduced to the stories of Toby Heaton and Heather Newton. I know I will be re-reading them and learning from this wonderful collection for years to come.

GB: Thank you, Abigail. Your generous words about our book are much appreciated.

Copyright © 2009 by Genève Bacon

Pat Riviere-Seel has been a newspaper journalist, publicist, editor, and free-lance writer. She is currently associate editor of the Asheville Poetry Review and past president of the NC Poetry Society. Her first collection of poems, No Turning Back Now, published in 2004, was nominated for a prestigious Pushcart Prize.

Genève Bacon: Pat, given your nonfiction writing background, how did you wind up as a poet?

Pat Riviere-Seel: I began writing poetry in high school and had a few poems published there, and as an undergraduate I won a couple of awards for my poetry. In the 1990s, I attended a writers’ workshop in Spoleto, Italy, and I took a workshop with poet A. Van Jordan in Asheville. It was then I decided to apply to MFA programs. I found a low-residency program at Queens Univer-sity in Charlotte in 2001 that had just gotten under way. Being part of that first class, where everyone—teachers and students—were still molding the program, was appealing. An additional plus was the low student-faculty ratio with the emphasis on producing creative work. It was there, as I worked my way toward the Masters degree, that I called myself a poet. And that was the turning point in my growth as a writer.

GB: In what way?

PR-S: When I began the program, I had no idea how much I did not know! I needed an MFA program to take my work to a higher level. The greatest benefits of the program were being in a community with other poets, the lasting friendships I developed there, and beginning a system-atic approach to the study of poetry: history, theory, and craft. An added bonus was the excite-ment, joy, creativity, and spirit of exploration that we all brought to that first graduating class.

GB: Do you recommend that writers—fiction as well as poets—pursue an MFA?

PR-S: No, not at all. MFA programs are not necessary—or even desirable—for all poets and writers. For me, it signaled my willingness to claim an important part of my identity. I dis-covered there was a big difference between saying, “I write poems,” and saying, “I am a poet.” There are fine poets and poets far more academically disciplined than I who can devise their own course of study and approach to poetry. Neither Walt Whitman nor Emily Dickinson had the benefits of an MFA program. Whitman even self-published Leaves of Grass, and Dickinson had only 7 of her 1,775 poems published during her lifetime—and those were done anonymously.

GB: Thanks, Pat. For those interested in reading some of Pat’s work, sample poems from her new book, The Serial Killer’s Daughter, due out in February, may be found at: www.mainstreetrag.com/store/ComingSoon.php Click “author information” under the cover. And note: the publisher is currently offering a 30% discount on advance sales of books ordered online. Also, be sure to check out her website: www.patriviereseel.com/.