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Every day every day Ev ery day every day every day ?

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Every day I write the book ?

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-Welcome.

I'm Rose Martin, and we are Write Around The Corner in Roanoke, Virginia, with an accomplished poet, Cathryn Hankla.

You may know of Cathryn because she has more than a dozen books of poetry and prose in print.

Her work is really personal.

It covers a wide range of topics, and it will touch parts of you that you weren't even aware that maybe needed to be revisited.

Hi, Cathy.

Thanks for joining us for Write Around The Corner.

-Well, I'm a big fan of your show, Rose, so I'm really delighted to be with you.

-And you have so many great books in print and so much prose, so many stories to share.

Before we get to those stories, let's wind the clock back a little bit to you growing up in the Appalachian Mountains, and then moving to Pulaski.

What was it like for a little girl growing up here?

-Well, those are two very distinctive areas that you've mentioned.

Far Southwest Virginia gets stranger and stranger as I reflect on it.

And I started that reflection of the first ten years of my life when I wrote the novel, A Blue Moon In Poorwater , turning rich lands into Poorwater, an imaginary town.

And that's what I really started learning about the areas when I did the research for that novel.

And then you mentioned that I lived in Pulaski County, and that was from ten until 18.

So, I went to high school in Pulaski County High School in the second class of the consolidated High School.

So, very distinctly different places, rich lands, everything was built around the coal industry at that time in the '60s.

And of course, in Pulaski County, people were much more geared to factory work.

-So, the fourth-grade poem, you as a budding writer, and you write this poem, and you've spent a lot of time on it, and you're presenting it to the class, and things didn't go quite as planned.

-Well, yes, that's funny, you mentioned that.

I was just reading recently about how formative these moments can be in elementary school, when we have teachers who are either very supportive or not.

And that was the moment when I and everybody else in class read our poems, and one by one we stood up and excitedly read our poems, and everybody else sat down, and got a polite little bit of applause.

And instead, when I read mine, I got an interrogation from the teacher inviting me to say that I hadn't written the poem, which I had.

It was kind of hilarious because my mother was the kind of mother who would have never helped me with my homework - never, never, in a million years.

So, but the refrain was, who wrote that for you?

Who wrote that for you?

Who wrote that for you?

Until I was almost in tears, and the rest of the day, you know, the kids would come up, okay, why didn't you just tell her your mom wrote it?

Well, for one, she didn't, and for two, she would be so angry to have anybody think that she did my homework.

But it's kind of interesting how if we want to do something, we can even take encouragement from something that is embarrassing or humiliating, which that incident was for me.

But the outcome of it was that the next time we had an assignment to write a poem, she just put mine up on construction paper and it went on the board.

And nothing else was ever said.

But it's a good lesson in how not to teach, I guess.

-Well, then you weren't discouraged, right, because luckily, you weren't discouraged by her initially as a nine-year-old or eight-year-old, because your work has been continuing throughout, not only elementary school, but I'm sure through middle school and high school.

What were some of those early other literary experiences that you, you know, you discovered about yourself on this journey towards poetry?

-Well, there's that period of time, Rose, when you're hitting that Twain and things, teen age where you want to like stay in your room and play records and all that kind of stuff and kind of figure out who you are.

And from the age of 12, I was in my room writing.

So, I spent a lot of time just kind of reacting to the world and doing my best thinking through my writing, and that still characterizes my work.

I take things that I'm excited about or things that I'm troubled by or things I'm just thinking about, and they all kind of sift in one way or another into my work and get transformed in the artistry of fiction or poetry or nonfiction.

But for me, writing is just an outgrowth of thinking deeply.

-And maybe for figuring stuff out.

You know, it's kind of like your own therapy, right, because you can process, you can think about the things that are really bothering you, you can maybe make resolutions with some things that may be going on.

Have you found that true from even as a young writer to where you are now evolving and knowing who you are and what you want to write about, or making those deeper experiences?

-Well, I think it was Chekhov who said that writing is about finding the best questions to ask rather than offering answers.

And so, I do think that, for me, writing is a way of thinking, it's a way of asking questions that other people can also engage in and creating that opportunity for people to meet the world in a way that gives them a contemplative space because I think it's, I couldn't have anticipated the world that we live in now when I was beginning to write because we were still very much, even though the TV was a big thing, family entertainment, I never would have anticipated that our focus would move so far away from the book in daily life, and even from printed matter.

I won't say it's moved away from writing or reading but it's moved away from the mechanism of the book.

So, I think for people to sit down with a book, even if you read it in another format, it opens a space inside a person a way that other entertainment experiences just can't, because it takes you to a certain brain wave that only exists when you are reading.

And so, you can meet those parts of yourself that I've engaged.

I know you said my writing was personal, and to some extent, I think it's also personal to readers who read it.

So, there's a bit of impersonality that goes into personal writing.

So, it gets transformed in the medium so that it can be available to somebody else.

-Well, and find a way that anyone can resonate with it, right.

So, impersonal in the fact that you're not writing necessarily about me or about someone else, but my journey may be similar or dissimilar, depending on where we are with it, right.

-Yes, and either way, it opens up space for you to think about your own journey through whatever that happens to be.

And I think, you know, one thing that writing about the natural world does these days is give it a space to be in that can preserve it.

And I often think about writing about the natural world is, everything is a kind of elegy these days to a world that we've impacted so much that is vanishing.

But to preserve some of that connection in a poem or in an essay creates a space for people to value that which they may not have that much contact with because so many people live in cities and don't live in the rural areas where I have made my home.

I think of, you know, Roanoke too as just a big town, right.

It's got plenty of green spaces to enjoy.

-That makes me think about the parallel between nature as it impacts us and the idea of being grounded, grounded in your living, in your working and even in your space.

And you do a beautiful job, but I think grounding the thought, but just having us push outside the limits in a way to think about the possibilities or to think about that journey, or to think about flexibility and all of those things.

Is that a very conscious move on your part with each of the words because you very carefully select words, I can see.

Which word you choose, and you massage those words and are very meticulous about that?

-Well, that comes out of working in the miniature space of poetry.

And sometimes, writing prose or fiction can take forever because I'm still, as you said, massaging the words in a way that maybe some other prose writers don't think they have to do.

But you mentioned the idea of grounding, and I think there are so many ways in which people find their belonging, lose and find their belonging, which I referenced in the subtitle of my memoir on losing and finding home, which I was thinking about as a cycle.

Not that you lose it once and you find it once, but that we're continually in this process of finding ways we belong and finding distance from that, making domestic spaces that we enjoy or feel unsettled in, for whatever reason.

We break camp, we tend to have many homes during our lifetimes, not just one, as people used to call the home place, right.

-Right, or where we even feel centered, you know, what is that home space that we feel centered when we're there, or those risks that we take in order to, like the seasons of the year, right.

It's constantly evolving and changing and renewing and breaking down.

And I find that in so many of your beautiful poems that you take us there, you take us up and you take us down and it can be emotional, it can be happy, it can be tragic, it can be filled with joy, it can be filled with love.

And that emotional roller coaster, I think, is a positive journey for inward retrospection even.

-Oh, you mentioned the connection between landscape and inscape or, you know, the emotional landscape, but I do love living in a place where we can experience all four seasons in the way that renews and even deadens, and then revives our emotional life in the life of the year, you know, even that living where the light changes and then changes again.

I think we all have that sense of renewed energy in the spring when the light comes back.

And so, just being attuned to things, I still remember when I lived out in the Catawba Valley, where it's dark, not a lot of a natural light, you know, heading up, that the phases of the moon were so prominent in my little house out there that I could get up in the middle of the night and if it were a full moon, my shadow would literally be falling on my floor from the moonlight coming in the house.

So, I think we're really lucky to be able to live in less light, more darkness, and experience natural cycles.

And those are some things that I like to write about, too.

And during 2020, when we were all, you know, ripped from each other and kind of stuffed in our houses, one of the things I did to relieve the pressure on that was to take long walks on the Greenway, and I started this little Facebook series called Miracle Report, where I would just take pictures of pretty much, you know, things that were in the natural world that were happening out there that when you're slowed down and kind of confined, you have a tendency to see suddenly that you wouldn't have seen it before if you were rushing somewhere outside.

-Well, and that's.

you're also a visual artist, so photographs, painting.

So, I read somewhere that you take sometimes a break from words, and need to express that creativity in other ways?

-Yes, I've always participated in the art broadly.

You asked about, you know, going back to my upbringing - I was one of those kids who was just immersed in all the arts.

I love to draw, I was involved in theater, I took ballet lessons, I loved piano, I played in the band, so I had all these kinds of things going, and I worked on the Literary Magazine.

I was editor of Literary Magazine in high school.

And I had all of these kind of burners going but they all pretty much were connected to the arts, and as that went along in my life, I had to kind of narrow it down.

So, in college, I narrowed it down to filmmaking, and post college, I got more involved in photography as I had before, which had led me to filmmaking.

And then, about 20 years ago, I thought, well, heck, I want to paint because I'd always loved painting.

I loved going to galleries, I've collected paintings and prints.

But color was so daunting.

I was scared of color because I spent so long as a black and white photographer and filmmaker, kind of translating the color of the world into the gray scale.

So, I had to flip that back.

And I found that I got pretty loud with my color as a painter, which led me to get involved in pattern making as a painter and kind of working with those color combinations and pattern as a basis for my work so that most of the stuff I do is non-representational.

But it does.

I like to have things going across the hall from each other.

I have my study on one side of the hall and my studio, my art studio on the other side, and I'll start a painting when I get stuck in the words and walk by it, think about the layers of that.

And then I'll get some ideas I can crack through with the words and go back.

-So, you've got a method planned out to be able to do that.

It's great.

I think when you get stuck by the words, you can express yourself in a different way and be able to unravel that.

I read some more that you had described "literary fiction is different than poetry or regular fiction "because it creates an experience, "not just the event, but we follow the language of a book."

And I thought, ooh, I really liked that description.

Go into that in a little bit more detail for me.

-Well, the idea of a book being an experience for the reader rather than about something - that's what I was going toward.

And of course, the first question that writers are always asked is, what's your book about?

I noticed that you didn't ask that.

-No.

-Good on you.

-No.

-So, the idea in literary work is that you are pointing toward a subject matter and themes, but you're also pointing a reader toward language, and showing what the experience of emotion and language is like.

And we all carry language around with us.

We use words, we're talking right now, right, but the language of literature is a different language, it's a more refined language, it's a higher register of language, which gives us another register in ourselves to get to know.

And that's why I think that, you know, you can't paraphrase a literary work, you can't paraphrase a poem.

It says exactly in the words that it chose what it wants you to know.

So, it's kind of like the difference from hearing about something and knowing something.

-Well, and each of the words are critical to the overall message or the overall feeling of the poem.

So, if you leave any of them out, it changes the context and it changes everything that we think we might, maybe your message to the reader and also maybe what we hope to get from it.

You know, so that's really interesting.

-Yes, I think, you know, when you write, you're using an art form - a poem is an art form and, therefore, it's also kind of a craft, a skill set that a writer uses.

But beyond that, it's a made thing.

You make the thing as well as you can make it and then you let it go, and other people find in it what they will.

You hope they'll find themselves and not you, right, because that's a medium of expression but it's also a meaning, expression, a place where readers can express themselves.

-Is that intentional on your part?

-It's the way I think about writing.

I do fall on the side of wanting, writing to communicate and not just be about itself.

I mean, there's a whole school, language school of poetry that is more about language, talking the language, and for me, I do think that language is a way of connecting with other people, that it raises the consciousness of the writer.

And then it can work to connect that to a piece of somebody else, whether they're a writer, whether they're a reader, that this language connection sometimes, can be more poignant and real than anything else in people's lives.

-So, three of the books that I want to talk about, and I want you to explain a little bit about - we're going to Not Xanadu , confronting recurrent imprints of the past, culturally, you know, past seeps, the past.

I wrote this as a note, th e past seeps into the present and needs to be reckoned with.

So, that's really interesting.

The second one, Galaxies , actually started out as paintings, so I think that's really curious.

I'm curious about that.

And finally, your memoir.

So, in the next just couple of minutes, walk me through either Not Xanadu or Galaxies for the poetry, so we have a few minutes to talk about the memoir.

-Okay.

Well, Not Xanadu is my latest collection of poetry, and you'll find a thematic material running through that that has to do with the way personal past and cultural past isn't really over.

And I use a lot of form in the book.

And that is also the past of poetry as well as the present of poetry is poets reckon with form.

And so, I use a lot of what's called traditional forms or received forms in the book as a way of also talking about how we receive other kinds of form and how we break form, because so much of life has to do with confronting the status quo and changing it for the better.

So, that's a way of resonating with those things in the book.

-How about Galaxies ?

- Galaxies , as you mentioned, was started as a series of paintings.

And I had these kind of imaginary galaxies that I wanted to paint, and I started down that road with that.

And then I thought, oh, that's such a cool idea for a book of poems.

So, then the poems took over, and I didn't get back to the painting series.

I probably have five or six paintings in that series.

But I'm working on something right now that came out of the book, Ga laxies , in collaboration with the Director of the Radford Planetarium at Radford University.

We were working on a digital planetarium show with recordings of the poems from Galaxies , together with imagery in the planetarium.

-Oh, that sounds exciting.

Would you be willing to read something for us?

-From Galaxies ?

-Your choice.

-Well, let's see.

Maybe I'll read something from Galaxies since you mentioned that, but.

here's one of the poems that we used on the planetarium show.

This is called May Meteors .

"If clouds clear before dawn, "we'll see remnants of Halley's dust ripping the sky.

"If we wake in time, we'll monitor the spectacle "for the peak hour during the dim New Moon.

"If all continues as planned, "we can endure the crick in our necks "to taste the crisp air of spring.

"The back door opens, we tiptoe outside, "and there's a warning growl.

"The black bear tenders its ritual "down the muddy mountainside.

"The train whistles and wheels rattling the whole valley below.

"Cotton clouds scrim, bright orbs hide Aquarius "high in the Southeast.

"If we are patient, if we are good, "if we are silent, if we are amenable, if we are waiting, we never arrive."

-In the couple of minutes we have left, how about something from Not Xanadu ?

-Let me read this point In the Garden .

I just recently realized that it kind of plays on that old hymn in the garden.

"Tomatoes cling to withering vines, "outpacing split skins and chill.

"At the end of the Republic, "some voices are heard and some not.

"Hasn't it always been like this?

"Your body only a seed pod for what lies ahead.

"As Jesus said, 'I will, like Jonah, arise.'

"They came weeping to tend to his crypt, "He visited to Mary's first.

"I go out into my garden "what's left of it giving last shrugs, "seeking now just powdery leaves, places where the light might linger."

-That's a great place to end.

So, I'm so grateful that you spent time with us today.

Thank you.

-Oh, my pleasure.

-My special thanks to Cathryn Hankla for inviting us here to her beautiful home in Roanoke, and for teaching us a few things and giving us a chance to experience the wonder and the beauty of her prose and her poetry.

Please make sure to stick around because we didn't even get a chance to get to her memoir, so we're going to be doing that online after the show.

And tell your friends about us.

And I'd be grateful if you share this link and the others.

Until next time, I'm Rose Martin, and I will see you next time Write Around The Corner .

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Every day every day Ev ery day every day every day ?

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Every day I write the book ?

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Every day every day Every day ?

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Every day I write the book ?

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Every day every day Every day ?

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Every day I write the book ?