Fran Kimmel on Troubled Childhood

Fran Kimmel writes and teaches in central Alberta, Canada. The Shore Girl, her debut novel, was chosen as a Canada Reads Top 40 book and winner of the 2013 Alberta Readers’ Choice Award. Her stories  appear in literary journals and textbooks in Canada and Denmark. Kimmel is a passionate supporter of libraries, and serves as chair of the youth committee for the Writers’ Guild of Alberta.

"I believe we’re held together by fragile connections and too often these are broken in childhood," says Kimmel.

"I met many broken children during my early career when I worked as a youth worker and director of a Boys and Girls Club. Some of my daughters’ friends came from pretty rough homes, too, and I hated having to send them back. But these same kids found an inner strength that often left me speechless. I’m astounded by what children are able to endure and how they can end up okay. It’s this inexplicable resilience — this tenacity of spirit — that I seem to be drawn to again and again in my writing."

Fran Kimmel offers three good books on the theme of troubled childhood:

Rush Home Road
by Lori Lansens

Toronto writer Lori Lansens burst onto the literary scene in 2002 with her first novel Rush Home Road. At a trailer park near Lake Erie, we meet an ailing and lonely elderly black woman named Addy Shadd. Addy’s neighbor dumps her neglected five-year-old Sharla on Addy’s doorstep and then vanishes without a trace. Over time, a reluctant yet tender and courageous connection is formed between this older woman and little girl. We learn heartbreaking details from both their troubled childhoods. There’s a scene that haunts me to this day where baby Sharla gets her fingers jammed between the crib and the wall, and though she cries and cries, her mother never comes. Sharla has lived through unspeakable horrors, and Addy has tragic secrets of her own, yet somehow they manage to create a loving sense of home that transforms both their lives.   

A Complicated Kindness
by Miriam Toews

This book generated much excitement in Canada, earning critical acclaim, a Governor General’s Award, and the winning spot for CBC’s popular national reading program, Canada Reads. I quickly came to love 16-year-old Nomi Nickel, as she struggled to come to terms with her disintegrating family. Both her mother and sister had fled their Mennonite town with its abundance of strict rules, leaving Nomi to fend for herself while keeping an eye on her bumbling, neglectful father. Nomi is defiant, yet vulnerable, and her reflections on life are both hilarious and heartbreaking. Like so many kids I’ve known with troubled childhoods — loss piled upon loss — Nomi doesn’t give up her quest to find love and acceptance and things beautiful.

Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist affected me deeply when I was a little girl.  I don’t own this book, but I do remember borrowing it from the library, and staying up long past my bedtime to devour the pages. It’s a well-known, good versus evil story. An orphaned boy lives in a badly run workhouse where there is never enough food. “Please sir, I want some more,” is one of literature’s most famous lines. Oliver escapes to London, meets a gang of pickpockets, and struggles to survive before finally being rescued by long-lost family members. I remember lying in bed, so terrified for Oliver’s future that I thought my heart would stop beating. This book was my first exposure to a world in which innocent children could be trapped without options. Oliver had been abused and neglected and yet he never lost grace. This was amazing to me, and much of my writing over the years has explored how light can shine in even the darkest of corners.    

January Gill O'Neil on Marriage & Divorce

January Gill O’Neil is the author of two books of poetry: Misery Islands and Underlife. She is executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and is assistant professor of English at Salem State University.

Gill O’Neill was featured in Poets & Writers magazine's 2010 Debut Poets Roundup, is a Cave Canem fellow, and serves as chair of AWP's Northeast Council (Association of Writers & Writing Programs). She lives with her two children in Beverly, Massachusetts, and writes the blog Poet Mom.

In Misery Islands, Gill O’Neil explores love's coming together and tearing apart.

“Growing up in Norfolk, Virginia, a military town, I didn’t know anyone whose parents were divorced,” she explains. “My parents had a strong, occasionally rocky marriage, but they stayed together. For me, getting married meant mating for life—but life is full of surprises. I had no idea I’d face my own divorce after eight years, and would raise two small children as a single mom. Today I understand that sometimes couples get what they need from one another and then move on. I wouldn’t be the woman, mother, and writer that I am today without those experiences. And I would not have made it through the divorce without poetry."

January Gill O'Neil offers three good books that helped her "get through the most difficult time in my life."

Stag’s Leap
by Sharon Olds

To paraphrase one of her older poems, Sharon Olds is “excellent at the knife-throw,” meaning her precision in relation to imagery and depth of emotion is unmatched. There is no one who goes deeper into this poetic subject matter, in my opinion, than Sharon. The poems in Stag’s Leap (winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) are frank and honest as she writes about her husband’s infidelity and the end of her marriage. I read the book poem by poem, maybe one a day. I was too raw and the poems too visceral. But this is one of those books where I felt stronger for reading it, thankful for the experience.

Late Wife
by Claudia Emerson

Before her passing in December 2014, Claudia authored five poetry collections including Late Wife, also chronicling the dissolution of a marriage (a posthumous collection will be published in spring 2015). In Late Wife (winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry), Claudia included epistolary poems written to her first husband, and to her current husband, whose first wife had died of lung cancer. When I was facing a difficult time with my publisher about the poems in Misery Islands, also dealing with the topic of divorce, poet Nikky Finney who advised me to read this collection for its structure. I’m struck by Claudia’s ability to dangle a metaphor in a poem and never go too far.

From the poem “Eight Ball:”

“It was always possible
             for you to run the table, leave me
nothing. But I recall the easy
             shot you missed, and then the way
we both studied, circling—keeping
             what you had left me between us.”

Blowout
by Denise Duhamel

Nominated for the National Book Critic Circle Award in 2013, Blowout details the stages of Denise Duhamel’s uncoupling: love lost, love grieved, and love found. Her poems cover a range of topics, from young love and mature love. The language is playful and accessible, bold and satiric, and she does not shy away from pop references. From movies to Madonna, Denise is most powerful when she brings humor to the darkest corners of the soul.

Win! Free Books for Poetry Month

Hello Reader,

Nice to see you here.

It's National Poetry Month. To celebrate, poets across the globe
are giving away books. Lucky you!

I'm giving away two books — my own and one of my favorites.

Playing is easy but time is short. For your chance to win,
go here to enter the drawing by Thursday, April 30.

No gimmicks or glitches. No pressure or spam. 

Just good books. Just because.

Read on!

Drew

Drew Myron
Push Pull Books - Founder/Hostess

Erin Block on Wild Places

Erin Block lives in the mountains of Colorado, and is librarian by day and writer by night. She is editor-at-large for Trout Unlimited’s magazine, Trout, and her work has appeared in Guernica, The Flatirons Literary Review, American Angler, Waterlog, and Gray’s Sporting Journal. Her debut book, The View from Coal Creek,  published in 2013, is a personal, passionate, and place-based reflection on fishing, fly rods and life.

"Wild places — open, public lands — are where I gain my bearings, where I hike and run and think," explains Block. "I grew up in the rural Midwest, in a small farming community. And so when I came out West “wild places” really struck me. I hadn’t experienced anything like being able to walk for days and days and not run into private property signs or an angry farmer with a gun. So I really treasure that about the West, the wilderness areas and national forests: places designated and set aside for the wild."

Still, she notes, wild places are everywhere, from farm country to big cities.

"I recently read that the first gray fox in over a decade has returned to San Francisco," she says. "And that’s really important, their return, and that humanity has made a way for it. That we’re realizing “wild places” can’t just be set aside and protected from human interaction (although that may play a part, too), but that we need to learn to cohabitate and adjust our way of living, if need be. Just like any good relationship."

Erin Block offers her three favorite books on wild places:

The Solace of Open Spaces
by Gretel Ehrlich

Of Gretel Ehrlich, Annie Dillard said, “Wyoming has found its Whitman.” And while I don’t know Dillard’s specific reason for comparison, what I see is Ehrlich’s same look to nature and wild places to explore things within ourselves — both the darkness and the light. The expanses of land and big sky shrink everything in the world but our thoughts. And through hers and her prose, Ehrlich makes real the human need for space — it “represents sanity,” she writes. Moving from urban California to the high plains of Wyoming to shepherd on a ranch, The Solace of Open Spaces is Ehrlich’s tribute to a very old, yet very new-to-her way of life. And a homage to a wildness in the West that “…however disfigured, persists.” As I hope it always will.

Crossing Open Ground
by Barry Lopez

Barry Lopez won the 1986 National Book Award for nonfiction for his book, Arctic Dreams. However it would be two years later, with his collected essays Crossing Open Ground, that I think his finest work appears. For as much as he loves it, Lopez never romanticizes the wild. And through his writing you realize that the “wild” we’re fed through magazines, photography, and cleverly shot documentaries, is only our wish to see a world that’s not as spent as our own. He skips nothing, but above all, writes of humanity’s relation to and place in the wild. From a stone horse made from rocks in the desert to tackling conservation issues such as the Wilderness Act (“…there is something unsettling in this kind of purity,” Lopez writes, “To banish all evidence of ourselves means the wilderness is to that extent, contrived.”), Lopez possesses a deep wisdom for not only wild places and wildlife, but for the history of us a species and how we’ve evolved and grown (or not) alongside.

Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild
by Ellen Meloy

You wouldn’t expect to laugh out loud while reading a book about declining populations of desert bighorn sheep. But I did. Ellen Meloy’s prose is as beautiful as it is blunt truth. And it is this dry wit, this honest self-awareness and deprecation, that makes Eating Stone unlike any other nature writing I’ve read. Meloy takes readers through the seasons of Utah’s desert canyon lands, as she follows The Blue Door Band, a herd of desert bighorns that often pasture near a crumbled old cabin with the blue paint still on the doorframe. And through her writing, you learn just as much about the biology and history of this species and the conservation efforts put in place to recover their population numbers and territory, as you do your own worldview and how even subconsciously you relate to the wild. She passionately makes the case for the importance of wild, native species, and for wild places where they can breed, live and die (she also questions its worth as anti-Darwinian). Nearing the end of the book she warns, “The spellbound threshold between humanity and the rest of nature is very nearly pulled shut to the latching point. Soon we shall turn our backs and walk away entirely, place-blind and terribly lonely.” Ellen Meloy died suddenly in 2004 at the age of 58. And while her voice is missed, it’s louder than ever.

Read, Write, Win

Focus on light, by Drew Myron

Hello,

I've been thinking of you.

Let's make April a little less cruel.

Please join me:

Big Poetry Giveaway
To celebrate National Poetry Month, I'm giving away books. No pressure or tricks, just free books. Go here to enter the drawing.

Twitter Poetry Contest
Short is the new long. Stenhouse Publishers invites your brevity with a poem that is 140 characters or less. Go here for details.

Poem In Your Pocket Day
Pick a poem, carry it with you, and share it with others throughout the day. The result? Schools, bookstores, libraries, parks, workplaces — the world — will buzz with the beauty of poetry. Poem In Your Pocket Day is on April 30, 2015.

It's nice to have you here.

Write on,

Drew

Drew Myron
Director of Push Pull Books