Marcus Clayton (He/Him): Welcome, how
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): Are we good, good.
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): Welcome, everybody. Welcome to gold mine press and Ricochet additions third events of our two by two reading series writing those surreal.
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): As some of you may already know goldline ricochet our sibling presses at the University of Southern California with different aesthetic traditions.
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): Over the years, presses have transformed with new PhD students and creative writing and literature fulfilling editor roles at both presses every year.
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): The two by two reading series is our way of funding our presses evolving identities celebrating the spectacular authors, we've had the great fortune of public publishing over the years and building connections with other community organizations that share our literary values.
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): Now before we move on. I'd like to take a moment to introduce the editors for these teams of four ricochet
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): We have Laura okay distribution editor on everything in
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): House and Julian editorial editor.
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): Kessler publicity editor.
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): At Tisha Murray recchia you're managing editor.
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): At Gold Line press you have myself non fiction editor and Marcus Clayton
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): Sarah feather off our coach editor who unfortunately could not make it to the event today due to illness. We all wish her well
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): Jocelyn topics are fiction editor and Mary Lang editor in chief is
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): A few accessibility notes about today's events one three of us will be live captioning. The events. So please refer to the closed captioning button on your zoom screen for subtitles.
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): You can click Show subtitles and view full transcription to follow along to we plan to upload the video to YouTube after the event with subtitles so you can view the reading again at home and share with everyone.
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): After the reading will have a Q AMP. A and time for audience, ask questions, please use the Q AMP a feature on zoom women are at the point to ask your questions.
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): Today's reading and discussion explores the transformative and malleable landscape of the surreal.
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): From works that synthesizes divinity and pop culture to pieces that explore the ethereal and heritage readers Lisa slaughter FT Bergman
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): Jane Huang index to booth will share poetry and prose complicate the very idea of form and ask the reader to interact with work beyond the confines of the normative text.
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): The Q AMP. A after the reading will be hosted by Vicki parties, author of palm fronds that stroke cuts a poetry collection that resists convention champions code switching and transformation and allows the mutation of form to to prevent histories from being forgotten.
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): So I'd like to now properly introduce today's moderator.
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): Vicki parties is the oldest child of an immigrant's Mexican family. She was born and raised in Bell gardens along the Los Angeles River.
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): Her first full collection poetry of palm fronds with sprockets was published in the Camino disallowed series by the University of Arizona press and won the
Marcus Clayton (He/Him): And American prize for poetry. She lives in Los Angeles. Thank you for being with us today.
Vickie Vertiz: Thank you for having me. Marcus and thank you to ricochet and Gold Line and all the
Students
Vickie Vertiz: And workers at USC I come to you from occupy tongue vocabulary non too much territory, also known as the cyclists.
Vickie Vertiz: Day after the 15th anniversary, which got a moratorium against the Vietnam War in the middle of so many things burning down in the middle of so many of us.
Vickie Vertiz: Trying to protect one another from harm and harms of white supremacy. So just I'm, I'm here with you in that spirit and I'm really glad to see you all. And really honored to be here with you. So let's begin with our first reader who I'll introduce
Vickie Vertiz: Elisa slaughters book of short stories, bad habitats, one that Gold Line 2012 fiction chocolate competition.
Vickie Vertiz: She's also published fiction and creative nonfiction and several literary journals, including Santa Monica review the misery review natural bridge le momentum and online at various other places. She lives in the mountains of Southern California. So please welcome Lisa slaughter.
Alisa Slaughter: Thanks to Gold Line for the interview for the invitation and greetings to my family in Oregon. If they managed to log on, thanks to my nephew's for managing that
Alisa Slaughter: I'm going to read bad habitats. The title story.
Alisa Slaughter: The party skunks to the South Bay.
Alisa Slaughter: When the conventions come to town. There's chicken sometimes sandwich shards among the square planters and the white trunk Ficus reflecting pools that reflect and color jets that fling chlorine drops of AMETHYST AND AMBER
Alisa Slaughter: Maybe it's the disinfectants or whatever they're feeding the chicken, but we can't think straight. The skunks totter past delicate and soft limbs that get closer, and it's evident, there's something wrong with those girls.
Alisa Slaughter: raccoon, they used to say, back when they could still make jokes raccoon go down to Belmont pier and tell me, those aren't plastic bags and the water and we've forgotten. Now why that seems so funny.
Alisa Slaughter: Considering our position we're unusually sensitive to current events. We've tried a lot of strategies and gone so far as to hire consultants, but we've started to believe all kinds of things we've started to feel something in common with what we formerly derided
Alisa Slaughter: raccoon gets his feelings hurt.
Alisa Slaughter: He disappears down the storm drain almost too fat to fit when the headlights sweet by. He grins wide and sly
Alisa Slaughter: raccoon considers himself a product of nature, but like the rest of us. He's designed by something the insecticide soap cockroaches. He throws down like peanuts every night.
Alisa Slaughter: He keeps company with the worst kinds of feral cats. The adult possums and Insomniac mockingbirds of 3am
Alisa Slaughter: all afternoon he sleeps in a tree and farts like a real degenerate.
Alisa Slaughter: That's his problem no follow through and we tried to work around it. But eventually we had to say something. Because when someone is that important to the whole operation.
Alisa Slaughter: When no one else can make sense of the latest email from human resources or the fine print on the 401K. We'd rather risk some hurt feelings. If it means keeping the usual victims from doing the usual flat on the asphalt victim thing.
Alisa Slaughter: Raccoons no idiot. He gets this expression on his face. His put upon smarmy look and there's some fear, too, because as we pointed out raccoon isn't 100% himself.
Alisa Slaughter: Things were fine than it was all went to hell.
Alisa Slaughter: We lived how we could below the berms and on the traffic wise fragile stocks of wild radish supported our cocoons we breathe diesel exhaust through the silken bundle and then one day we burst through
Alisa Slaughter: This place is no stranger to bucket and blade, the dregs of cement from the hopper.
Alisa Slaughter: rules exist, but they can't cover everything. No fair to expect that they'll answer every question, what should we do with this dump it in the weeds, the rain will wash it away, draw it down to the aquifer.
Alisa Slaughter: crisis mode.
Alisa Slaughter: Whatever bluish sure sent the seagulls inland where they will over the Esalen mall and the thousands of naked bears clutching the wheels in their current boxes.
Alisa Slaughter: We creatures of habit and habitat under macro cloud and frail palms spray whitewash on the weeds we shake the empties behind the Serbian brotherhood and line up for a handout at St. Mary's Star of the Sea.
Alisa Slaughter: The truth is that raccoon, and all those cats are real problem more trouble than help some days they make all of us look bad by shooting and getting into things.
Alisa Slaughter: But much as we try to escape it. We always agree to collective guilt around here. The blurred composite on the wanted poster a dozen traumatized witnesses.
Alisa Slaughter: We take comfort in this, it's still a civil society, nobody crowbars up the sidewalks to pay their patios
Alisa Slaughter: And when some enterprising bandit steals the pipes or the wire to sell for scrap they dress the part. They have a clipboard and a counterfeit work order and check in at the front desk.
Alisa Slaughter: After things go dark or the puddle spread the out of order signs appear on clean paper I level and square jawed even the frauds and the disasters, get a protocol.
Alisa Slaughter: Who gets the beads
Alisa Slaughter: There aren't as many of them and on our bad days, we start to think the illusion of competence is just that, that no one gets it. No one sees how everything eventually comes back to us what breaks down and what holds up
Alisa Slaughter: Nobody leaves early so the staff can clean up properly. No one considers how they're fouling the nests, the accidents that will shred the protocols.
Alisa Slaughter: We have materials for which we have no forms.
Alisa Slaughter: Mockingbird sings at all. But she's tired of telling the same story over and over. We don't know if raccoon just got sick of it all and hop the bus.
Alisa Slaughter: Or if there was something sinister something to mockingbirds hints about the parking lots sweeper the new sign that reads, it's your parking lot. Let's keep it clean.
Alisa Slaughter: Mockingbird composes in her own way her own ragged blues of cement labyrinth crushed kittens that look like tiny foxes from a horrified distance the silent owls of fate.
Alisa Slaughter: She's not nocturnal, by nature, she suffers from insomnia, in a way, we can't understand
Alisa Slaughter: Suffering as we do from so many things, but never from our beloved stars and streetlamps
Alisa Slaughter: It's an urban life. Alright, and it should be exciting, but they never warn you Mockingbird that survival is a habit like any other
Alisa Slaughter: Bad Company at the edges, things that could go wrong so quickly. It's best to watch and sing and grab whatever flies by
Alisa Slaughter: What would we do have some real specialist showed up a rare refugee with finicky tastes.
Alisa Slaughter: Form finds its material its own good time.
Alisa Slaughter: No one means any malice by it. The trucks and bulldozers show up blade, the mustard in the wild radish, the sea. Heather and the chaparral think beams into the ground deep foundations that puddle up in the winter rains.
Alisa Slaughter: One after another, they appear and white hard hats trace their blue lines on rolled paper or consider the glowing blue screens of silver machines.
Alisa Slaughter: For the lizards among us a pile of rocks means the world a thick of scrub is Mardi Gras for Mockingbird.
Alisa Slaughter: If we could find raccoon. If we could bring him back here pay him whatever he asked guilt him into helping us we issue a manifesto on what hatches and sprouts.
Alisa Slaughter: We'd ask you to leave it alone. We did numerate the fields of grim deportation and the damp trails of mist. What's really important what disappears as the sun comes up the bonfire embers. Cool. The warning boy who hoots its last across the bay.
Alisa Slaughter: Thank you.
Vickie Vertiz: Excuse my finger. You'll be seeing it.
Vickie Vertiz: The reading. Thank you so much, Lisa.
Vickie Vertiz: Our next reader is SJ Berkman
Vickie Vertiz: SJ edits poetry for Moebius the Journal of Social change. And again, temporarily at Star Line and imagines tragedies on or near exoplanets.
Vickie Vertiz: Promote specular work appears regularly in a bit of an apex analog Asimov's SF and elsewhere in the alphabet.
Vickie Vertiz: A dystopian collection of first contact expedition reports a catalog of the further sons won the 2017 going blind press poetry checkbook contest and the 2018 Sapa organ chat Book Award. Please welcome FDA.
FJ Bergmann: To be here.
FJ Bergmann: For three poems are from that trap book.
FJ Bergmann: Z know aesthetics
FJ Bergmann: In their language, the word for poet was troublemaker. The word for artist heretic any ornamentation artifice for its own sake was blasphemy.
FJ Bergmann: And even adjectives and adverbs were highly suspicious. They permitted no embellishments to lard. Their lean truths.
FJ Bergmann: We had difficulty justifying our Baroque embroideries, not to mention the floral an animal work decorating our pressure suits until one of our entomologists had the idea of explaining Betsy and mimicry, and camouflage.
FJ Bergmann: Or rollicking ballads and body limericks caused even more perturbation.
FJ Bergmann: But when we explored. They're busy marketplaces starved eyes followed us everywhere and delicate world ears strained to swivel toward our songs
FJ Bergmann: cultural climate.
FJ Bergmann: At the centers frozen lakes. They built crystal palace's of ice to demonstrate their faith.
FJ Bergmann: That climate was immutable.
FJ Bergmann: The study of paleontology and geology was outlawed a past it's were flung into Glacial rifts and moulins but certain academics concealed ancient records and core samples pretended to elicit but winked at affairs in storage closets to mask prescribed instruction.
FJ Bergmann: Long after no laws could conceal the cascades of meltwater or dwindling snows, it was still fashionable in those shrinking glassy rounds to burn the wood a forest upon last forest in suspended cages of black iron to pretend to shudder with cold.
FJ Bergmann: Zeno theology to
FJ Bergmann: on that planet they had learned to distrust their omens miracles hung in the sky and manifested from the land and sees around them daily
FJ Bergmann: But they all kept to themselves and their appointed tasks as if they were stoned blind and deaf, even though our sensors easily detect they're racing pulses penetrated their masked temblors
FJ Bergmann: When our glittering ship floated low over what had been the glory of their capital city or star Dr harmonics. Try coming from its fused ruins.
FJ Bergmann: Not one of them looked up.
FJ Bergmann: These are from elsewhere.
FJ Bergmann: Tech support for the apocalypse.
FJ Bergmann: Hello, how may I help you, assuming of course you can be helped.
FJ Bergmann: Are you updated on all viruses.
FJ Bergmann: Why do you think your dreams are infected.
FJ Bergmann: I'm just going through the motions. Everybody has nightmares about Red Dust. These days, like I just do what they tell me to which is probably for the best.
FJ Bergmann: Asked me what it means to be overqualified I finally remember the days when the internet sit on a floppy disk or the world in a sugar cube.
FJ Bergmann: But enough of me, you are experiencing some difficulties know
FJ Bergmann: Now would be a good time to stock up on booze and bullets.
FJ Bergmann: Don't ever change your brand of poison. She said, Not if I was the last human on Earth. I DON'T WANT TO DIE A VIRGIN, I don't want to die.
FJ Bergmann: I'm afraid I can't divulge my physical location.
FJ Bergmann: A grid of light plays upon the smoking upholstery of an ergonomic office chair.
FJ Bergmann: We were a big glowing spot on their star charts, even from 20 light years out.
FJ Bergmann: The psychic screams of their mother ships entering the heliosphere
FJ Bergmann: At least we still have each other, darling.
FJ Bergmann: Pay no attention to those black disks coming in low from the southeast. Personally I wear earplugs. I can't hear a word you're shrieking
FJ Bergmann: This poem is after another poem all about death by WT Earhart
FJ Bergmann: You ufology
FJ Bergmann: You don't want me to talk about UFO. But I'm going to tell you. Anyway, first you have to know that I've seen them, or at least their traces
FJ Bergmann: Pale contrail streaming across sleepless nights lit with an unearthly radiance and entities emerging from metal discs.
FJ Bergmann: Second, I felt their heaviness on my chest in the dark pinning me firmly terrorists strict into the mattress as a warm rush of blood, muttered urgently in my ears.
FJ Bergmann: Gray a smoke. They spoken all four of the languages. I knew with less than perfect accents unlimited vocabularies wanted me to relay messages important ones, if I remember correctly.
FJ Bergmann: Third, this terra firma is not an only world stars beyond number are orbited by planets, whose existence has been confirmed in there. Turn spied upon by alien eyes antenna in comprehensible Oregon's of perception.
FJ Bergmann: Forth. Even the data they harvest is beyond understanding. I felt them count the bones of my spine. The world's on my left thumb, the hairs on the back of my neck, then perform calculations. Upon whose results depend, the survival of our race.
FJ Bergmann: I believe race is what they said. Perhaps the word was essence of being or maybe even souls.
FJ Bergmann: I got the impression. They hadn't entirely mastered whichever language. It was they were speaking
FJ Bergmann: Survival could have been always or even eternity.
FJ Bergmann: A simpler time
FJ Bergmann: When differences of opinion could easily be settled.
FJ Bergmann: By pistols at moonrise loaded with silver
FJ Bergmann: I have one more short form, but I don't know if we have time for it. Let me know if you'd rather I save it for the end or not at all.
Vickie Vertiz: I think we're at about time. Is that okay
Vickie Vertiz: Thank you. I will be asking myself, why do you think your dreams are infected for a long time.
Vickie Vertiz: That's amazing. Thank you.
Vickie Vertiz: Our next reader is Jane want
Vickie Vertiz: Didn't want poems can be found in places such as the best American non required reading 2019 Best American poetry 2015
Vickie Vertiz: American poetry review Agni third coast New England review and many others arrestees have appeared in McSweeney's like warrior review equal tone the common
Vickie Vertiz: And this is the place women writing about home.
Vickie Vertiz: She's a coup de mon fellow. Can you mind forever. We love. Can you mind in this house. She is the author of over poor from action books 2016 and how not to be how to not be afraid of everything.
Vickie Vertiz: Which is forthcoming from Alice James and 2021 she's an assistant professor of creative writing at Western Washington University. Please welcome the fabulous stay warm.
Jane Wong: Thank you so much, Vicki for that. Intro Hi.
Jane Wong: And thank you to marry all for the NBA invitation. And it's so great to read with Dexter and ELISA and FDA to. So thank you all so much.
Jane Wong: The first one I'm going to be reading is actually the last poem of my forthcoming book, How to not be afraid of everything.
Jane Wong: And it's called after preparing the altar that goes feast feverish Lee and this is for my ancestors who
Jane Wong: Were lost during China's great leap forward in which I basically imagine them having a giant party and they eat whatever the hell they want
Jane Wong: So after preparing the altar that goes feast feverish Lee and it begins with a quote from the incredible Audrey, Lord, which is how hard it is to sleep in the middle of a life.
Jane Wong: After preparing the altar that goes feast fever, surely.
Jane Wong: We wake in the middle of a life hungry. We smear durian along our mouths sings soft deaths a lullaby caucus press arrow select fingers and the finest perfume.
Jane Wong: What does love if not rot. We were the fruits Hall as a spike crown grinning in green armor death to the grub fact and his milky shuffle death to lawlessness of dirt.
Jane Wong: Death to mud and it's false chocolate to bloat it son, we want to slice open yoke all over the village.
Jane Wong: We want a sun dried slung feast, an omelet listening, it's full. It's like hot jello. We want the marble fat a steak and all its swirling pink galaxies who wanted to draw the Nash the pluck of each corn kernel raw and some are swell.
Jane Wong: tears welling up oil order up pickled cucumbers piles like logs for a fire like fat limbs. We pepper and succulent in order up shrimp chips curling and a porcelain bull like subway seats.
Jane Wong: Grapes peeled from bitter bark almost translucent like eyes would rather see little girl. What do you leave 11 in your sights.
Jane Wong: Death to the open eyes of the dying here. There's so many open eyes. We can't close each one. No, we did not say the scenes. I have a fish no eyelids fluttering like know butterfly wings. No purple yam lips. We said, I still and resolute as a heartbreaker look this is break your heart.
Jane Wong: We don't want to be rude but seconds. Please want globes of oranges swallowed whole like a basketball or Mars or whatever planet is the most delicious slather Saturn.
Jane Wong: Mercury lap up it's film of dust, second, third, fourth meet wool bouquet of chicken feet a garden of melons monstrous and they're bold prune back nothing we PR in this garden. We comb through berries and come up so blue
Jane Wong: Little girl last so tofu, the rope slicing its belly clean
Jane Wong: Defy a cloud. So, it tastes like the bitter gourd or your father, leaving the exhaust of his car charred serenade a snake and slither its tongue into yours and bite, love, love. What is love that not even garlic.
Jane Wong: Child moves your graves like eels delicious with our heads. First, our mouths. A gape our teeth little needles to stitch factory of everything. Made in China. You ask, are you hungry.
Jane Wong: Hungry. It's through the air like ozone. You ask wasn't meant to be ruthless with a good to us as toothpicks.
Jane Wong: You how can you wake up in the middle of a life we shot and open our eyes like the sun shining on task pennies and forgotten well
Jane Wong: Bald copper blood, Utah. I bought into roses down here while you were sleeping. We walk to the old leaves in your backyard shed and we ate that
Jane Wong: And then we ate one of your last flip flops to in a future life, we saw rats overtake a supermarket with so much milk returned opaque.
Jane Wong: We wait to something boiling. We wait to watch dirt from lettuce to blossom into your face.
Jane Wong: A fence along the lashes little girl. Don't forget to take care of the chicken squawking in their message stench that our mouths buckle at the side of you devouring slice after slice of pizza and the greasy box to is this frontier swim for you.
Jane Wong: It's time to wake up wake the tapeworm who loves his home with the ants and let them go see do a spoonful of peanut butter. Tell us a little girl. Are you hungry awake astonished enough
Jane Wong: That's actually a lottery drink some water.
Jane Wong: I'm continuing with some more food I'm
Jane Wong: These next few poems are a kind of dreamscape in which I have a dream daughter kind of takes place in the near future.
Jane Wong: Dream daughter with onions.
Jane Wong: My dream daughter is chopping onions. She has been chopping for hours slipping off the skin like T colored lingerie slicing them thinly like the rings a sample of it planet.
Jane Wong: As she chops. She not just them to the side and growing mound of interlocking circles measuring the wide circumference of her selves.
Jane Wong: With each onion beheaded her hair grow sweaty and the sharp armpits smell with a stinging sweetness in a temperate center.
Jane Wong: Each long strands of hers unraveling behind her to large ears like mine gramophone where the queen worthy. I look her wayward strands dangling like lamp shade pulls
Jane Wong: And I pull up my own willing hair who doesn't desire beauty, you can call your own. Did you know I tell her that back in the day, onions, used to make people cry.
Jane Wong: That sometimes as she stops me right there. Her handheld high was her knife shining like a waning moon and says, gently direct hallucinate each full let's keep bad men out of this poem, and she just keeps chopping
Jane Wong: And. Okay, another, Dream, Dream daughter as idiom watering I wait to deer shooting BlackBerry pellets steaming mountains all broken bush.
Jane Wong: A guideline crispy to fruits matted and mangled in dripping dirt my dream daughters wrong out hair what during the pity craps.
Jane Wong: I woke to the gardens moving side to side sludge as sputtered squash and plum fallen cheeks pelting the Crimson ground. Everything is a mess I welp slickly plummeting my chin anchoring into myself into what came before bridges collapsing at once brutto bellow backed
Jane Wong: Do not open that door do not walk at night alone do them out the door open wide that look down, up, they say a growing dyers smuggled self say that's my girl, my comfort my thing that whistles want want
Jane Wong: But I lock up your daughter's mother's daughter locked. In what world I feeble spout my fear peak snout stink of surrender. I can't help it.
Jane Wong: But my dream daughter reroutes me what during her hair. What during the puckered pumpkins vines some furious for cons elsewhere, watch her we've a spider into each hollow
Jane Wong: And just this last one here called overgrown
Jane Wong: And thank you all for for listening and I'm looking forward to
Jane Wong: Our discussion afterwards to overgrown
Jane Wong: The garden in which we kiss all the Beatles silver and stupid. The garden, which leaves simmer in oxtail broth and chili oil so thick, it becomes a kind of whether
Jane Wong: The garden which we kiss all slow spit and bazell tongue and rosemary Brown, I can no longer be orderly the garden which the marrow of memory melts and hisses into scally incentive walk
Jane Wong: The Guardian, which you never left. We were never leaving in which an imprint and fog was not a shadow shouldered and midriff ache.
Jane Wong: The garden and which I am a pond monstrous my mouth devouring we puckered water algae caught between the ladders and my teeth.
Jane Wong: The garden which we list so closely our ears grow ears. The garden which my grandmother plucks carrots or Leafy tales each clownish tuber breaking so easily. She laughs down to their wrinkled toes.
Jane Wong: The garden which spiders knit a telephone whispering the future, the future to each other. The garden which my brother spoons of fly out of his cereal bowl wings a Washington sweet glue
Jane Wong: The garden which no one asks, Are you sure or what did he ever do to deserve. But what's the context.
Jane Wong: The garden which sunflowers wave their heads heavy with seats we crack on whistle back and forth.
Jane Wong: The garden which may dream daughter sees her reflection, the frog footed pontiff thinks I look exactly like my mother who looks exactly like my mother and so on and so on.
Jane Wong: The garden which we never left home in which we never left home. The garden which repeat what we must packed fractals of dolly has
Jane Wong: The garden which I nursed BlackBerry brambles back to life for this is how bad it got
Jane Wong: The garden which my mother cradles me close her Jade bracelet clanging against my xylophone rim singing this heart I made
Jane Wong: The garden which I have not made to stand in the corner for years arm strategy behind my back legs loosening a sorrow asking look cruelty makes silence run through me like an eel.
Jane Wong: The garden which we'd like this. Think of a wound the garden which lady bugs pour out of water pitcher little Ruby's golfing aphids.
Jane Wong: The garden which I peel fibers pedal after pedal and find all my last vocabularies inside of an artichoke heart.
Jane Wong: The garden which I correct my own face because it is the face of my mother and her mother and her mother, and so on.
Jane Wong: The garden which all our Ghost Light down next to each other in the dust happy with rice and caramelized onions lips dripping with this. The lab types of sugar and salt.
Jane Wong: The garden which I wrap all my love's in the case of onion skin.
Jane Wong: The garden which we rewrite our histories important for our names or names glistening kaleidoscope of knowledge along the ancient gummy mouth of a torness
Jane Wong: The garden which I spend the algae my teeth into a net to carry us to safety. The Guardian, which we let glow that which grows taller than this.
Jane Wong: The garden which I carry the soft intestines of our survival. The garden which the spiders. They telephone again, they say, stay, stay, the garden in which we have whatever we want. Because we deserve it.
Jane Wong: Thank you.
Vickie Vertiz: I'm going to go ahead and curse and say, fuck yeah, that's right.
Vickie Vertiz: You're right. Thank you for your, your furious second elsewhere. Again, that was amazing. I feel changed. I don't know if anybody else does, and
Vickie Vertiz: Our next reader, surely will changes to Dexter booth, who is the author of scratching the ghosts from grey wolf press as well as the checkbook Rhapsody.
Vickie Vertiz: From upper rubber boots books with received his PhD in creative writing from USC and is the residential and is residential English faculty at Paradise Valley Community College.
Vickie Vertiz: He also teaches poetry in the actual University MFA program booth is currently a contributing editor for Waxman journal and his second collection of poetry Abracadabra sunshine. This is forthcoming from Red Hen press in 2021 please welcome Dexter.
Dexter L. Booth: Hi everybody.
Dexter L. Booth: Hear me, my good
Vickie Vertiz: Okay.
Dexter L. Booth: I want to start real quickly best thinking Gold Line and Ricochet for having me here. And also thinking ELISA and Jane after a
Dexter L. Booth: Meeting with you all. I'm going to be just two poems here.
Dexter L. Booth: That a fun project that I'm currently working on the first poem, the title of the Congress rolls right into
Dexter L. Booth: The choir sings as Porky Pig sits next to a boy in the street needs to lunch. My picnic basket on a check a blanket. The color of blood.
Dexter L. Booth: Neighborhood watch volunteer. Make sure a boy is just about it now.
Dexter L. Booth: The scatter crows return and bow their heads, not to pray, thanks for this meal. No, they won't take the bodies flesh into the peaks know lick the crested wounds.
Dexter L. Booth: That the pig cleans his entire face with his tongue until all evidence of breadcrumbs is gone.
Dexter L. Booth: That's all, folks.
Dexter L. Booth: He was tired of cliches should have word 30s cartoons in the evening news no jail time for cop who shot unarmed black man operation ghetto storm.
Dexter L. Booth: Another unarmed black team shot and killed.
Dexter L. Booth: Every gun is a tour.
Dexter L. Booth: Of The Dead boys pretending the bullets are crazy cane.
Dexter L. Booth: Freeze for the articulate in ham exits the scene to sell has done to the highest bidder.
Dexter L. Booth: Tell the media, the Guggenheim wants to place it behind glass preserve it like a mother's memory of her only son.
Dexter L. Booth: For murder lifts the boy.
Dexter L. Booth: The murder various the body beneath the echo tree.
Dexter L. Booth: Pretend this show is not a rerun that we aren't shot for syndication.
Dexter L. Booth: Another cartoon. And what's the dead won't stay
Dexter L. Booth: Come back.
Dexter L. Booth: Say three times loud is GUNSHOTS
Dexter L. Booth: For
Dexter L. Booth: For
Dexter L. Booth: For
Dexter L. Booth: A second, I'm going to read just the first section of a much longer poem
Dexter L. Booth: Entitled classes crows we counting of being filled with the Spirit
Dexter L. Booth: My brothers. I swear I saw two angels guarding the gates to the hood.
Dexter L. Booth: El Hajj Malik El Shabazz with his burner. Do we Freeman is flame and sword.
Dexter L. Booth: Liberty, my brothers the world ends with Liberty a proof of lemon grass from a cell pinks prophecy of Bill enough piece of bone.
Dexter L. Booth: What I saw dwelling in the house of the labor.
Dexter L. Booth: hellfire and blood roasting of trees have grass smoldering Marbury then number and ebony beneath the bare feet of comedians flushing the heads of politicians one during the viscera of churches.
Dexter L. Booth: I witness Uncle Tom and Uncle Sam sharing both have green fingers thing for the juice impulse democracy.
Dexter L. Booth: Alice Coltrane at the altar reading the devil beard.
Dexter L. Booth: We are that window in each other's hardest.
Dexter L. Booth: Course
Dexter L. Booth: Till
Dexter L. Booth: Till
Dexter L. Booth: Till
Dexter L. Booth: And black children in the pews harmonizing bridges over troubled water to polish entire walls hotter than the roof of a white man's mouth, how to open the mouth of a White Plains gun.
Dexter L. Booth: Hat as a potato of this race war for the spirit of the stolen name.
Dexter L. Booth: My brother's I swear I saw a governor in blackface moonwalking two Q's feet squeaking to the blood of Katrina victims.
Dexter L. Booth: I felt it coming on.
Dexter L. Booth: But I swallowed it.
Dexter L. Booth: From the mother touched me when the preachers passed by carrying their own eyeballs in the palms chanting behold the invisible Thy will be done. No, Lord, I see all know our tell all your all
Dexter L. Booth: One whisper, you should see the unknown wonders.
Dexter L. Booth: So I followed them into the rain where black mothers will kneeling on the Lawn of the White House a second line blowing Dixie in the distance. Oh, what must alone has been thinking, feeling spill the wine from the senators vocals.
Dexter L. Booth: My brothers. I swear eyes opened in the earth newborn deities, a new coops fresh eyes chains and Adidas or white.
Dexter L. Booth: Are God's called nodes in December disavow each other.
Dexter L. Booth: stretch their interests across the lawn to the mouth of the White House, the leader waiting with his double helix crown RCS tissue phone drone.
Dexter L. Booth: And he levitate over the garnet
Dexter L. Booth: Feet above everyone forked tongue preening baby fingers negligent to the Confederate toilet paper clutching his shoe.
Dexter L. Booth: And as he passed the mothers elect each one on the forehead.
Dexter L. Booth: Or brothers. I'm choking on the spirit, I feel it filming through the battle records of my heart, I swear.
Dexter L. Booth: I swear.
Dexter L. Booth: Thank you.
Vickie Vertiz: Thank you so much, sir. I was really moving
Vickie Vertiz: Really powerful thank you all for sharing your work for showing us
Vickie Vertiz: How to Be hold the invisible and
Vickie Vertiz: The, the roundtable discussion part of our time together. Um, I have some questions that we generated previously, but after the the roundtable there will be time for our Q AMP a
Vickie Vertiz: And folks from ricochet
Vickie Vertiz: Or from USC, is there a way that you
Vickie Vertiz: Would want people to ask those questions via the chat.
Tisha Reichle-Aguilera (she/her): And the Q AMP a section at the bottom of the webinar.
Vickie Vertiz: Awesome. Thank you so much.
Vickie Vertiz: Okay. Um, so given so sticky notes while everyone was reading
Vickie Vertiz: Some groundwork for conversation in in both the the soundscapes that you created for us in your writing, but also in the body and what my body was telling me to ask you about is how
Vickie Vertiz: Writing can make trouble. So one of our questions is, and so this is for the panel a full panel so any of you can answer welcome all of you to answer this
Vickie Vertiz: And I'm going to say his name wrong.
Vickie Vertiz: But I try not to me see, is there a black Caribbean writer writing and French had described surrealism as a method for liberation and quote a weapon that exploded the French language.
Vickie Vertiz: What relationship do you see between surrealism
Vickie Vertiz: And decolonization or liberation in your own work.
Vickie Vertiz: What relationship do you see between surrealism and decolonization or liberation in your own work.
Vickie Vertiz: Giant question start off
Vickie Vertiz: Or what does that make you think that maybe the question is not something that you can answer, but what does that
Jane Wong: I love how ELISA, you just totally said like you better answers question, J.
Jane Wong: I feel like when my students where I'm just kind of like, I'll just not unmute myself for a while.
Jane Wong: That's such a great question. Vicki, and it's one that yeah it's incredibly massive but I mean I think a big part of it is that you know so much of whatever the real world is
Jane Wong: Is so real and its own fucked up this. And so I think I honestly feel like kind of the surreal worlds that you know I create like you know my ancestors having
Jane Wong: A giant party where they start eating flip flops and pizza, you know, because they're real world was starvation, you know, back in, like, you know,
Jane Wong: And state that's that was what was real to me that's absurd.
Jane Wong: You know, thinking about, you know, the mouse campaign that led to that. And so I think that for me when I'm writing the things that feels surreal.
Jane Wong: Very much feel real and and i think they necessarily have to be real. Like, I feel comforted by them. I feel like this should be. What's the reality.
Jane Wong: I can't help but when I'm writing these newer poems about this kind of like near future with this daughter that I don't have
Jane Wong: I am trying to stay in the space of like what could be possible if I could imagine a world that is full of safety and joy, but still in those poems. I'm still fearful. I can't. It's still sneaks in
Jane Wong: But maybe that's a way to answer it. I just kind of want to, you know, as, as a kind of future ancestor, but also you know the the child of ancestor is like create a surreal real mess that is something that you know is maybe
Jane Wong: more gentle more tender than what came before. And what will come. So, I feel, I feel like that's maybe a way to answer that, as a means of kind of T colonizing the narrative.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Vickie Vertiz: What is possible.
Vickie Vertiz: What is possible, do you folks have have thoughts or have thoughts now that Jane has spoken about what she said are
Dexter L. Booth: You good question again.
Vickie Vertiz: Yeah, I mean, it's a big question, but I feel like we're kind of moving towards like what what is possible in the surreal for you, um,
Vickie Vertiz: Yeah, maybe that's a good place to kick off now from that bigger question around decolonization because it feels like this massive thing.
Dexter L. Booth: I'm going to attempt to answer your question, but I might get way off track. I'm
Dexter L. Booth: Good. I'm working on now is a collection of poems that are in effect. The react minstrel show
Dexter L. Booth: Until I'm really looking at
Dexter L. Booth: Not just a sort of textbook history of
Dexter L. Booth: Africans and African Americans in America, but I'm looking at their culture. I'm looking at this stories. I'm looking at
Dexter L. Booth: What they believe prior to coming here, the sort of things that have been suppressed over time and I'm looking at their existence to find moments of subversion and so
Dexter L. Booth: One example for me is the laughing barrel, which if anyone, doesn't know there would be these barrels along the plantation that were sort of filled with water and
Dexter L. Booth: Slaves were told not to laugh like slave masters often thought if if slaves were laughing. They will be laughing at the slave master.
Dexter L. Booth: Right, and so they wanted to be humanized them and take all the joy and the slaves with uses laughing bells are going over to the sparrows put their head in the water and just laugh into the water.
Dexter L. Booth: If they had any reason to laugh. If they just suddenly felt joy and this idea that you could feel that kind of joy.
Dexter L. Booth: Under those circumstances of oppression and dehumanization is surreal to me. And so I think, from the moment that Africans arrived in America experience of being African and African American in America was surreal.
Dexter L. Booth: And
Dexter L. Booth: So I'm working
Dexter L. Booth: With the things that I think that we sort of distance ourselves from. So in the film that I'm working with come looking at
Dexter L. Booth: The stories that have come from Africa, but I'm also thinking about things that are very much American so
Dexter L. Booth: The minstrel show and the sort of cartoons that we watch every day have distanced themselves from have forgotten.
Dexter L. Booth: Are connected dimensional see so Merrie Melodies, for example, Disney. For example, the white gloves that Mickey Mouse. And look, where's it's like that's that's a part of the outfit dimensional see
Dexter L. Booth: And so what I'm writing. It's pretty heavy.
Dexter L. Booth: But I think
Dexter L. Booth: Pulling from the sort of pop culture element that is also connected to the suppression is a way for me to take this real in and try to be subversive with it, but also not being so overwhelming crushed by
Vickie Vertiz: Like how to continue to be
Vickie Vertiz: How, how to live in the body, given the circumstances, right, which goes back to your original question, you know how to how to, how do people. How do people. How do we have joy under these circumstances that we're living in.
Vickie Vertiz: And particularly, black people on petition. Absolutely. Yeah, the Soviet like none of this should be real, but it is for some of us, right.
Vickie Vertiz: Absolutely.
Vickie Vertiz: Do our other writers want to comment on what the surreal makes possible for them.
FJ Bergmann: What it does for me is to
FJ Bergmann: Enter.
FJ Bergmann: A universe.
FJ Bergmann: Where their infinite reduce, as it were.
FJ Bergmann: But where I am always afraid that humans. And for that matter, non humans will continue to make the same mistake.
FJ Bergmann: With
FJ Bergmann: Every everyone everything they encounter. That's different.
FJ Bergmann: The, the entire goldline press book of mine is
FJ Bergmann: Reports from first contact expeditions.
FJ Bergmann: Which reiterate kind of the litany of
FJ Bergmann: Various types of colonialism and how all those
FJ Bergmann: Contacts can go wrong.
FJ Bergmann: Both the the exploitive, and the well intentioned
FJ Bergmann: And I
FJ Bergmann: am afraid, as someone who focuses mainly on science fiction that we're going to keep on making the same kind of mistakes and that all those mistakes are reflected in how we interact with other people on this planet who aren't like us or who don't believe quite the same things we believe
Vickie Vertiz: Makes me think of
Vickie Vertiz: Reincarnation but at least I have something to say.
Alisa Slaughter: I just want to echo all of this. I mean, I write about in my in the book I read about animals and it's hard for an animal to be poor and defenseless.
Alisa Slaughter: And I have animal characters who are making a lot of money, but they're still defenseless. And I'm thinking, you know, a child is the definition of a defenseless being. And I think that being a child is a surreal position right it's a surreal status.
Alisa Slaughter: I think that's why children just when they watch cartoons. They just believe that the animals are real.
Alisa Slaughter: It's not a surreal situation for them to watch an animal. The animal is real and and that to me is one of the powers of this kind of writing.
Vickie Vertiz: I mean, that makes me think of imagination and it makes me think of the cartoons that I grew up watching the Dexter is talking about and referencing and has word right the
Vickie Vertiz: And then like in creating bondage. Somebody had to imagine that. And so children have to imagine other ways of being because what they're in
Vickie Vertiz: Is flat, but sometimes it's not flat or sometimes it's not healthy or safe. And so we we we find refuge in imagination and I'm thinking, the otherwise. Right. The, the furious second elsewhere. Right. And for children. It's
Vickie Vertiz: I see, actually, interestingly, a lot of agency in children through the imagination and what can be possible, right.
Vickie Vertiz: I have this friend.
Vickie Vertiz: From Maywood California who grew up in a house with eight seven siblings eight total. And she had a sheet that she could pull around
Vickie Vertiz: Her bed in some way. And that was the world that she created for herself like her privacy. Right. So there's a resourcefulness. I think actually children have
Vickie Vertiz: That I find a wonder and a beautiful thing.
Vickie Vertiz: Thank you for your, your responses there. So you have a few more minutes for more of our previously written questions, um,
Vickie Vertiz: So here's something that is interesting that I thought we would talk about the aesthetics described as and canonized as realism often arise from and support interpretations of the world rooted in whiteness and colonization or white western but
Vickie Vertiz: I'd also say patriarchy. How does your work.
Vickie Vertiz: Seek to challenge ideas about realism.
Vickie Vertiz: Let's start there.
Vickie Vertiz: And we've kind of these are all related but
Vickie Vertiz: Or maybe makes you think of something
Vickie Vertiz: All that's fair.
Vickie Vertiz: How does your work, seek to challenge ideas about realism.
Dexter L. Booth: Me. So I think these these Scott Miller will be fo through the manifesto and in that he said that others quote others, people who are other
Dexter L. Booth: Who create from their lived experience are serious about the nature of that experience. And so for me, I think that that's that's my answer is that my live expanses of black person in America is infused with materialism.
Dexter L. Booth: Simply because I exist in the space.
Vickie Vertiz: Feel like we've been all of these questions are so interconnected right again we're we're live at so many different intersections right in our writing comes to those places the animals that Lisa writes about who you know have a lot of things to say and
Vickie Vertiz: Are like us and not like us reflect us back to ourselves, right.
Vickie Vertiz: Yeah.
Vickie Vertiz: So that was the Afro surrealist manifesto Dexter.
Dexter L. Booth: Yeah.
Dexter L. Booth: Miller.
Vickie Vertiz: Miller. Thank you.
Vickie Vertiz: But other folks thoughts today.
FJ Bergmann: Well, it's basically what I said before that I can explore
FJ Bergmann: Symbolically mistakes that have been made before but also I'm worried about mistakes that can be made in the future. It's not just problems with language problems with customer with firms, but I'm and
FJ Bergmann: poles of political thought but even even problems with technologies that are completely misunderstood.
FJ Bergmann: That don't have
FJ Bergmann: The
FJ Bergmann: The same ability to commingle
FJ Bergmann: You know in in a safe or appropriate way.
FJ Bergmann: And I wonder how a lot of these things are going, are going to pan out
FJ Bergmann: And and
FJ Bergmann: It worries me most, I think.
FJ Bergmann: That
FJ Bergmann: Not so much that people are going to deliberately be evil because that's easy to recognize and easy to
FJ Bergmann: persuade people to rise up again.
FJ Bergmann: Against but but people
FJ Bergmann: Do things sometimes where they absolutely mean well and sometimes those actions are even more catastrophic
FJ Bergmann: Either because they weren't thought through, or because the
FJ Bergmann: actual outcome could not be predicted
Vickie Vertiz: It actually actually thanks for saying that because it reminded me of what I wanted to say about your comment earlier, which is that in some ways.
Vickie Vertiz: There's
Vickie Vertiz: The language of colonization is us so much in
Vickie Vertiz: Kind of the concepts of space and space travel, so this mission is called this. And so what as you were talking and you were saying that we're repeating the same things over and over again.
Vickie Vertiz: Part of what one of the earlier questions was asking is, like, how does your work.
Vickie Vertiz: Fight against realism, which is canonized through white western thought and what that makes me think of is how education.
Vickie Vertiz: Trains us and white western thought and white supremacy there to support to survive it to thrive in it to somehow be adjacent to it.
Vickie Vertiz: And yet you're writing FDA is pushing against something else, right, pushing against that thing.
Vickie Vertiz: And it also makes me think of in terms of like individual liberation and not making the same mistakes over and over again like us.
Vickie Vertiz: Like, how, how do we as humanity create like a self awareness, like a global self awareness so that you are that person in your line that's like, I'm not going to pick
Vickie Vertiz: Fucked up unavailable people anymore to love or whatever. I'm not going to continue to harm the earth or I will no longer hold white supremacy is as truth and I rejected and everything that I do like what is
Vickie Vertiz: Is there anything in your work that you hope can give people like that tool to like not do that thing again.
Vickie Vertiz: That's just a question for one
FJ Bergmann: I'd like to think so, but I'm afraid that probably not. It's amazing what people can take away from a poem or for or from fiction that sometimes you not only didn't intend, but that
FJ Bergmann: Is not actually there yeah i i read a story once public about a child who discovers
FJ Bergmann: A crashed spaceship in the woods with a dead alien in it.
FJ Bergmann: And after I had read the story, a woman came up to me crying and thanked me and told me how brave I was to read that story about my stepfather molesting me
FJ Bergmann: In the simply wasn't in the story, and it was. I've always wondered what it was that that made her interpret it that way.
Vickie Vertiz: Linearity
Vickie Vertiz: Doesn't work for a lot of people. For most of us, and we take kind of what we need from
Vickie Vertiz: What we hear and what we we've read
Vickie Vertiz: Which actually makes me think of maybe next question for all of you. Dexter you you brought in a lot of
Vickie Vertiz: I heard when Dylan's name Gwendolyn Brooks. So who were who were who gave you that
Vickie Vertiz: That tool.
Vickie Vertiz: To help you be where you are now. Who are your for your literary tool givers.
Jane Wong: I don't know if this is like a I mean I can give like maybe a list of writers that have, like, give me those tools, but I'm just gonna say my mom I
Jane Wong: Have the odd like storyteller. The person who is like you know when the rest and get a lot about realism, the things that are
Jane Wong: Also not told are silenced or, you know, hidden there's like a huge part of my family's history that's just like censored like I have no idea. I'm
Jane Wong: Like you know what happens, you know, to my family during the Cultural Revolution, for instance.
Jane Wong: Or the fact that, you know, my mom may change the story of like how she arrived in the US, over and over again like
Jane Wong: I mean just recently and my mom just told me that she's not actually her age, and like, how old are you when is your birthday, like she keeps changing it. And so I think there's something about, you know, my mom is this kind of continual literary. I don't know.
Jane Wong: You know motive inspiration, I think, like, you know, speaking of children. I feel like, you know, my mom telling me stories.
Jane Wong: All the time when I was a little kid, and really sent me down this path of creating these little worlds that I felt
Jane Wong: Could really truly be be possible. And so maybe that's kind of a, an answer to the realism questions. Who am I, you know,
Jane Wong: I guess you know storytellers that you know kind of stay with me. Of course, like I love like Audrey Lord's work and
Jane Wong: Lucille Clifton, in particular, and beyond. I have always been kind of enamored by to make a case work to is something that's real. And I mean there's like one sentence stories. I'm like, where do we just go, I just love that.
Jane Wong: But in my dream world. I feel like my log would meet all these writers that I love and they would just like eat snacks and and just make up stuff.
Jane Wong: To feel like they're in community and together. And so, um, yeah. Lots of Auntie's mostly just telling me crazy things that they made up.
Jane Wong: But at the same time, they could be real. This is the thing is that I don't know actually, if some for stories are real and some of them are false, because
Jane Wong: She told me the story about cutting cutting this boy's foot open when she was 16 in school and I thought she was making up a story. And you know, when I went to China for the first time, then as a teenager he came wobbling out with like no toe.
And so
Jane Wong: You know, I don't know what's real, what's
Jane Wong: Real I don't know anymore, but my mom.
Jane Wong: That's me. And for for now.
Vickie Vertiz: Yeah, I mean the countryside is real gangster.
Vickie Vertiz: Like you have to, you know, when my mom was young, you know, also the farm stories are like the ancestor. Sorry. So like, yeah, like my brothers, we had like a
Vickie Vertiz: Giant rifle in the house and my brothers are playing with. And they shot me lay and now there's like this giant star on her leg. And that's how we know it's true, but like, how do you know it's true it's just because it's it's a story. So maybe that makes it true, yeah.
Jane Wong: I like that kind of like if it's, it becomes more real when the story is passed on and on and on and on to the next generation. It's it feels like that must be the truth there that's that's that's closest we can get to true. Yeah.
Vickie Vertiz: I like also repair like in my work. I'm really interested in
Vickie Vertiz: Repair or changing or like trying to do with a different thing.
Vickie Vertiz: With the harm that's been done whether I was interested at home or not or part of it somehow. And so, like when we tell our own stories when we reimagine them when perhaps they're set in outer space like
Vickie Vertiz: I feel like we're trying to, you know, imagine that elsewhere. And what else is possible and otherwise, or like Dexter said, Like what else is there, what is the kind of Georgia could be felt. Under the circumstances, let's feel it.
Right.
Dexter L. Booth: I think my answer to that question. I like to move to our meetings and art, Jonathan. So in terms of literary post, I would say right now. Toni Morrison. And when we do mass
Dexter L. Booth: Because of how consistently in the works. They try to hold on to those stories that I was talking about the cultural stories that have been sort of suppressed by by white history and
Dexter L. Booth: Then also really inspired by visual art and one of the visual artists who most inspired my wife is Hindi Wiley.
Dexter L. Booth: Who does a lot of painter who go out on the streets or city will find black people and say, hey, do you want to model for me.
Dexter L. Booth: And he lets them pick out their own like classical background pays the patents, whatever, and he puts them in the positions of his classical paintings and he recreates the classical painting with
Dexter L. Booth: People who are black and seeing his work really made me feel like like it's one thing to read a book and to see yourself in a book.
Dexter L. Booth: To see yourself in pages. It's another thing to see yourself like visually in the art world like he he went to my hometown of Richmond, Virginia recently. And he did this sculpture, where he has a black man on a horse.
Dexter L. Booth: And it's representative it's reflecting monument Avenue, which is in Virginia, which is this like series of blocks. That's just Confederate statues. Right. And so to see someone put a black person in that position.
Dexter L. Booth: I think that a lot from my writing for me thinking, like, what can I do, how can I, how can I make it for the other people who look like me, Stephen self and that was that was a huge deal for me.
Vickie Vertiz: Absolutely.
Dexter L. Booth: I can
Feel that
Vickie Vertiz: The seeing the seeing of ourselves in the material world and in our
Vickie Vertiz: Agenda, while his work is really beautiful.
Vickie Vertiz: You are other Yes, Lisa.
Alisa Slaughter: I think most writers are magpies i mean i see shiny things and and pick him up my mom grew up milking a cow named reverse because it would always backup and so
Alisa Slaughter: You know that's that's the way you think about animals is some sort of logical association with their behavior.
Alisa Slaughter: And I actually started writing the first story in my collection. I was really stuck. And I heard about a mountain lion that got into somebody's house.
Alisa Slaughter: And it seemed like kind of a sexy story, but I didn't really know how to tell it. Um, and so I started writing it as a long poem I wrote it as a poem with a really long line and eats dancers.
Alisa Slaughter: And that I just caught it back into prose, but I was reading a lot of Philip Levine, I was reading some si K Williams at the time who, you know, I don't necessarily always love them.
Alisa Slaughter: But the the rhythm of their writing really helped me solve some writing problems. So, so, yeah, shiny things we're lucky.
Alisa Slaughter: Yes.
Vickie Vertiz: And also what genre.
Vickie Vertiz: Sj. Do you go between do you use other genres to help you get into your storytelling or what you need. Say, or other art works.
FJ Bergmann: Oh yes, I, I do a lot of fresh to work. There's a local painter.
FJ Bergmann: Kelly Hartman
FJ Bergmann: Whose work is really wonderful. And we've collaborated on on a couple of books as well as individual poems and she she's illustrated my poems and I've written poems about her paintings. So it works both ways.
FJ Bergmann: Oh, I had a lot of
FJ Bergmann: science classes when I was
FJ Bergmann: Going University and
FJ Bergmann: I still try to read in the sciences and draw on some of those things, the part about and in one of the poems that I read about teaching in the
FJ Bergmann: In the closet and pretending to have an affair, so no one would know.
FJ Bergmann: That came from a story that my genetics professor told me about a guy who was teaching in Russia will listen co was in power who believe that that acquired traits were inheritable
FJ Bergmann: And he was teaching his students in the janitors closets that no one would know that he was teaching them stuff that went against the official government position.
FJ Bergmann: Say nothing of of of the governor, Florida, making it illegal for state employees to say anything about climate change.
FJ Bergmann: But I try to
FJ Bergmann: What what what little Alyssa said about being a magpie. Absolutely. I think one of the most important influences on my writing is in fact Steve Martin when he was a comedian.
Vickie Vertiz: Yeah, I love Margaret Cho fan.
Vickie Vertiz: Pretty hard
Vickie Vertiz: Myself. But yes, of course, like artists, just like all of us people we all are influenced and shaped by the songs we heard growing up by the things we watched her didn't watch
Vickie Vertiz: It didn't watch rather yeah thank you all for your, your answers and for this really amazing roundtable wish we could be here another
Vickie Vertiz: Two days talking about how to use the otherwise to be free and to live in joy and our bodies, but the time has come for some questions from audience members and
Vickie Vertiz: Tisha, did you do you have instruction about how to use that for folks who maybe haven't used to do just click on it.
Tisha Reichle-Aguilera (she/her): It's at the bottom of the screen.
Tisha Reichle-Aguilera (she/her): The chat button, it should say just Q AMP. A and if you click in there. You should be able to type a question right in, Ricky. If you click on it, you'll box will pop up and you'll be able to see their questions.
Vickie Vertiz: In the reason. Okay, here comes a finger again, sorry.
Tisha Reichle-Aguilera (she/her): Anybody in any of the participants any the attendees have questions, you can put those right in the Q AMP a
Tisha Reichle-Aguilera (she/her): For any of the readers or Vicki.
Yeah.
Vickie Vertiz: That's things that you're thinking about
Vickie Vertiz: Jane, you're totally right about like, who are the core your literary influences is like a my mom was earrings. I'm wearing like
Vickie Vertiz: My uncle from the country who like writes writing poems, to this day, like
Yeah.
Everywhere.
Vickie Vertiz: I know there are a lot of poets on this list. Okay.
Let's see.
Vickie Vertiz: Interesting. So this question is from
Vickie Vertiz: Lisa G beta
Vickie Vertiz: Thank you for this wonderful experience just this. They say, My question is for Dexter, and they asked, Where can I read more about laughing barrels.
Vickie Vertiz: I'm makes me think of you doing Google search for that. But if you've got other texts, a particular Dexter, that would be great. And then, have you heard about the talking book. And this question is for Dexter.
Dexter L. Booth: I have heard about the talking. But to answer the question about the laughing Barrow, the best I can say, Is Google or J store.
Dexter L. Booth: It's not, it's not information that is really known my my dissertation to my PhD was specifically about finding the stories that don't get as much attention that don't have books written about them. And so I did a lot of like digging through scholarly journal sites to try to find information.
Vickie Vertiz: Yes, thank you.
Dexter L. Booth: Thank you for that.
Vickie Vertiz: Yeah, I think we got the internet when I was still in college. And I was like, oh, wow, what's this thing.
Vickie Vertiz: Called the internet. Okay. This question is for FDA, but also for everyone just wondering, does the UFO poem factor into first contact literature for you, and if so, doesn't imagine first contact help you think about the historical first contacts that are already been
FJ Bergmann: Will
FJ Bergmann: Be only first contact with it. I, I recognize our force first contacts between human cultures, to the best of my knowledge we have not actually experienced first contact with an alien culture and non human culture, regardless of what anyone may think
FJ Bergmann: That poem in some ways makes fun of people who are UFO true believers, but it also I'm
FJ Bergmann: Enters the the realm of and when, when these aliens do arrive, how do we interact with them and we can't even
FJ Bergmann: Reliably translate or interpret
FJ Bergmann: All the human languages that exist. How on earth are we going to
FJ Bergmann: Understand what aliens are trying to tell us, or ask us, um,
FJ Bergmann: Oh,
FJ Bergmann: I I did bring a lot of the
FJ Bergmann: Historical human errors into into the book the UFO poem is is not is not one of those
Vickie Vertiz: Thank you, Jay. And I mean it just like first contacted me, like, the first thing I think about, like, oh yeah, like
Vickie Vertiz: That dummy Columbus. I mean, just think of so many
Vickie Vertiz: Current applications for that, right, like the concept of immigrants and refugees aliens like these are not metaphors. We're like in them. We live them all the time.
Vickie Vertiz: Other folks. I know there's a lot of poets on this.
Vickie Vertiz: I'm looking at you. Oh, it's
Dexter L. Booth: The first time back in about my
Vickie Vertiz: Three is
Dexter L. Booth: Something, there's one book that I remember.
Dexter L. Booth: It's called drums and shadows and it's an excerpt from the federal writers project. And there are interviews with slaves and former slaves in the South and Georgia in in that book there from slave to also talk about the left there with
Vickie Vertiz: Guns and shadows.
Dexter L. Booth: Drums and shadows.
Vickie Vertiz: Drums and shadows. Thank you.
Vickie Vertiz: Other books.
Vickie Vertiz: All of her. Hi, Oliver.
Vickie Vertiz: What Oliver asks what surface, other than paper. Would you like would you most like to write on
Vickie Vertiz: A question, Oliver.
Vickie Vertiz: What surface, other than paper which is most like to write on I live in newsprint and that's all I'm fairly small right there until you
Dexter L. Booth: Going to see canvas.
Dexter L. Booth: There are lots of like paint markers and things and I oftentimes to like write a poem, like on canvas to paint markers opposed to paper.
Vickie Vertiz: How does it feel, what do you have to do to yeah with
Dexter L. Booth: That the markers are and they're like these little tools and have a ball in them. And I think the pain is like driving the ball like activates the paint. But there's something like this rule about like
Dexter L. Booth: Painting words as opposed like handwriting them and it's just a different like mind body experience that happens to me.
Vickie Vertiz: It takes longer, right. Like there's more the gesture or the processing of other folks the surface and other people like to write on
FJ Bergmann: Like the femoral
FJ Bergmann: Um, I like the idea of of ephemeral surfaces of
FJ Bergmann: Using water on stone for or or water.
FJ Bergmann: On on dirt.
FJ Bergmann: Writing in mud, something that will be destroyed. The next with the next heavy rain, but the idea of of of planting.
FJ Bergmann: Flowers or vegetables in the shape of words or mowing a lawn into letters is is really appealing and I have, I have to confess is a project in a typography class I'm I made a cookie cutter in the shape of letters.
FJ Bergmann: And and brought him chocolate chip cookies and got an A for that.
Vickie Vertiz: Yeah, you get an A for me for that idea.
Vickie Vertiz: Jane, what were you gonna say
Jane Wong: Um, I was actually that's funny that you mentioned that Fj because I was going to say something with food because
Jane Wong: I and Dexter to when you're talking about like visual art. I had this some visual art sculptural show at the fine art museum guess last year.
Jane Wong: And you know, when you're brainstorming things for things that you I personally don't have experience making sculptural poems that was the first time I ever did anything like that.
Jane Wong: And I ended up, you know, putting a bunch of poems on inside of like Lino restaurant bowls giant table like I grew up in a restaurant but one idea that I didn't do because they thought it was too well impossible.
Jane Wong: Was to, you know, various Chinese noodles. There's like longevity noodles. They're just like super long like one giant noodle like so long that it could wrap around in an entire like room, and then I would, you know, write the poem on the the noodle.
Jane Wong: And then it would have this like floppy dusty Iowa no quality to it. And the idea. I know it's not possible, but the imagining like slurping up that giant like one noodle poem I think like would be a dream of mine so
Jane Wong: Thank you all for for that question because I've actually been thinking about this and when I told the people at the Friday like
Jane Wong: I also wanted an inflatable you know when you have those you know inflatable swans, you know, when you go swimming or whatever live inflatable poor fun
Jane Wong: Because yes, yeah. I wanted to pull that just have a giant port been in it and then. Yeah. And then that could be a poem. Um, anyway. I think I don't know. One day I think I'd like to do it. And Tim to write on a giant noodle.
Vickie Vertiz: That's totally possible. I'm, I'm with you. I want to help you figure that out.
Vickie Vertiz: Also there's
Vickie Vertiz: A link the video so in like Mexican grocery stores. You can buy the bag of letters. I mean, that's like their noodles, but their letters already so you can spell shit in your spoon. So anyway, yes. Yeah. Sorry, I'm with you with writing
Vickie Vertiz: Next level food writing I
Alisa Slaughter: Would like to eat an entire book of poetry.
Alisa Slaughter: Written with noodles and some maybe some black bean sauce. So I think that should be
FJ Bergmann: Somebody published a book where each page is a slice of American cheese.
Vickie Vertiz: That's so appropriate for so many reasons.
Vickie Vertiz: Yeah, I love it. I eat those through like plastic PS. That's a fun way to eat it. Tisha also said writing on glass of markers amazing
Vickie Vertiz: Um, I have a few friends on this viewing this who also like to do that. And then I want to mention in plain sight which is
Vickie Vertiz: in plain sight map just out there, an Instagram handle is at in plain sight map, which was a project to end immigrant detention. Now it was had a lot of different artists and then they collaborated to create skywriting right so
Vickie Vertiz: Free them all over the sky in Los Angeles and New York and world and everywhere. There were detention centers. So look up at in plain sight mouth to learn more about that projects. And with that, we are at time almost there was one more question. No, I must have warned us that I miss anyone
Vickie Vertiz: Alright, so now I am going to turn it over to Laura. Okay. But first I want to thank our panelists. I want to thank all the folks who asked questions everyone who's listening, wherever you are. I hope you're safe. I hope you're happy I was beautiful Sunday.
Jane Wong: Thank you, Vicki.
FJ Bergmann: Thank you very much for inviting me. This was
Laura Roque (she/her): Everyone. So yeah, so thank you to all the attendees for joining us for the third and final installment of our two by two reading series writing the surreal.
Laura Roque (she/her): Thank you, Vicki again for leading us this evening. Thank you to Elisa slaughter, F, G, Bergman J Wang and Dexter booth for being part of the Gold Line and Ricochet community and reading amazing surrealist work that complicates form.
Laura Roque (she/her): And goes beyond the confines of normative texts. So it's a tradition we like to take a group photo after our events, Tisha, or you want selfie duty.
Tisha Reichle-Aguilera (she/her): I am ready. As soon as I everyone
Laura Roque (she/her): Like these weird like rays of sun on my face but
Vickie Vertiz: It's very 80s. I mean, very Corey Hart, like I wear my sunglasses at night.
Tisha Reichle-Aguilera (she/her): Because my thing just closed. I'm opening it again. Sorry. Also, when you are old things take a while on the computer.
Tisha Reichle-Aguilera (she/her): Already to go in and it said just
Kidding.
Tisha Reichle-Aguilera (she/her): Okay.
Tisha Reichle-Aguilera (she/her): Everybody's ready. Everybody ready for a mouth mouth wide open and talking ready
Vickie Vertiz: This is so weird.
Tisha Reichle-Aguilera (she/her): Now also
Vickie Vertiz: Marissa Leon, for sure. Like reaching out
Laura Roque (she/her): Yeah. So we hope that you continue to support our readers work.
Laura Roque (she/her): Beyond this event by purchasing their books and following them on social media to stay
Laura Roque (she/her): Up to date on next events, please see the links in our chat box. For more information you can follow go online, press and Ricochet additions on social media to stay up to date on our next events and programming.
Laura Roque (she/her): Or ricochet additions reading period has recently concluded, please follow the press on social media to see what editors are reading these days and other flood news.
Laura Roque (she/her): If you sent in work during the call for submissions for say additions is so thankful for your manuscript and we look forward to reading you
Laura Roque (she/her): In the meantime, the reading query for Gold Line presses 2020 chat book contest and fiction nonfiction and poetry comes to a close. Today I'll get you manuscripts and if you haven't already.
Laura Roque (she/her): Left. Yeah.
Tisha Reichle-Aguilera (she/her): I put the link in the chat for you.
Laura Roque (she/her): Know interrupting me.
Laura Roque (she/her): Colin for us and ricochets two by two reading series brings together authors from both are astounding catalogs and conversation with writers we admire from our surrounding literary community.
Laura Roque (she/her): Thank you again to Vicki Elisa of Jane. Jane and Dexter for making our third reading so exceptional and to everyone watching, thank you for joining us today. Please stay tuned for the video of this event on YouTube and share with those who couldn't make it today. Thank you.
Vickie Vertiz: Yay.
Hi.
Vickie Vertiz: I'm going into the social media to follow all of you here, there, there you are. Dexter.
Vickie Vertiz: Thanks, everyone.
Vickie Vertiz: Thanks for your work. Hi, David Ulan
David Ulin (he/him): VICKI, HOW ARE YOU. That was wonderful. Thanks for doing
You know, mice.
