Kelle Groom’s: How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays

Congratulations to SR Contributor Kelle Groom on her forthcoming book, How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays. 

The book has already earned strong praise from established voices. Read some of the reviews:

“Kelle Groom is a navigator of the soul’s voyage, from mooring to mooring, no matter the tumultuous seas. She is a writer of deepest heart and purest eye, who seizes you and takes you where she wanders. How to Live is one of the most beautiful books I know, a profound reckoning.” — Susanna Sonnenberg, author of Her Last Death and She Matters: A Life in Friendships

“At its simplest, this is the story of a restless search for a place to be– a way to live– after a series of devastating events. But there’s nothing simple about it. Kelle Groom has created a marvel: a haunted, haunting, beautifully sustained dream of a book.” — Joan Wickersham, author of The Suicide Index and The News from Spain

“Is home the place you left, or the place you are now? This is a central question in this fiercely won, wildly original, and ultimately beautiful meditation. Kelle Groom is one of our most gifted writers, and this book is her Odyssey, which means we will end up back where we started, only changed. Along the way we will visit strange lands, we will come face-to-face with our fears, we will find ourselves among kind strangers, and we will understand why we are alive. This is a book which wrestles with our hardest, darkest questions, and comes out on the side of gratitude. ” — Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and This is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire

“It’s really a book where the tissue between life and death feels very thin at times and Kelle Groom negotiates these mortal stations like a wandering medieval saint on residencies and short term teaching jobs who finds consolation, wisdom and suicidal despair in violet rain, flashes of feeling in the grasp of a hand, while the euphoria of love and eloquent scraps of knowledge keenly ornament this trail where being a bare faced reader is precisely enough. Kelle Groom writes with a relentless and avid consciousness and in this story there is a child and I think it her own becoming.” — Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls and Afterglow

Kelle Groom is the author of the award-winning memoir I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl and four poetry collections. Groom’s honors include numerous fellowships and grants, and her works have received Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, Library Journal Best Memoir, Oprah O Magazine selection, and Oxford American Editor’s Pick. Her work has appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among others.

Groom is a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in Prose and Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Nonfiction. She was previously Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Assistant Professor of Humanities at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe and formerly poetry editor of The Florida Review. She is now a nonfiction editor for AGNI Magazine and works as director of communications and foundation relations for Atlantic Center for the Arts. 

View four poems by Kelle Groom in issue 5 and “Dear Baby” in issue 13 of Superstition Review.

The book is available for preorder here. The book will be for sale from Tupelo Press starting October 1, 2023.

To learn more about Kelle Groom’s work, visit her website

Guest Post: William Cordeiro: Once More, with Feeling

Feel? Let the reader feel!
—Fernando Pessoa

James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, David Kalstone, and a couple others were once at Merrill’s house in Key West when they each decided to write a poem that morning. When Merrill came downstairs to show his work, Wilbur said, “Well, Jimmy, it’s very fine—very formally sound, it’s just… missing something.”

“Oh right,” Merrill said, “I forgot to put in the feelings!” He raced upstairs, and, in another hour or so, doctored his poem. He then read the new version to the delight of all.

I remembered this anecdote while down in Tucson a few weeks ago, attending the UA Poetry Center’s Bagley Wright Lecture Series. Timothy Donnelly made a comment that’s stuck with me; he claimed he was more of a “constructivist” poet, as opposed to an “expressivist” poet, meaning that he often didn’t have anything particular to say—he just liked building things, tinkering, working with the materials of his chosen medium. Constructivists, like Merrill and Donnelly, can sometimes forget to put in the feelings.

The impulse of a constructivist is to make patterns. Three rocks scattered in the woods might not seem significant, Donnelly said, but three rocks stacked in a cairn do. We observe the imposition of human consciousness. However, we don’t necessarily know what such patterns signify—turn left, straight ahead, or look out for the poison oak. Likewise, in poetry, patterns create music and architecture, arrangements which suggest mood and sensibility: penumbras inflecting and leaching out into the tone, the heft, the configuration of a poem beyond its ostensible content.

Expressivists, on the other hand, tend to have something specific to convey. Language acts as a medium of communication by means of which the author’s ideas, experience, or emotions can be transferred to the reader. An expressivist poem is thus a more chiseled version of the way we use language in everyday life. In some cases, it strives for a message, a moral, and it has designs to incite political action.

Every poet, perhaps every poem, must figure out how to reconcile these divergent motives. The results of this balancing act contribute to one’s style. Although there are limitations to this (or any) binary, Donnelly’s distinction proves useful in observing a trend and unpacking the forces behind it: American poetry is having an expressivist moment.

In the ’90s and 2000s, the pendulum swung away from the Confessional poets. New Formalists and LANGUAGE poets, New York Schoolers and Ellipticals alike could be deemed constructivists while Slam poetry, as an example of expressivist work of that era, infrequently saw the pages of literary journals. One might argue, too, that the immediacy of Slam poetry is suited for the voice and stage, rather than the drier archival pages of journals anyway.

Today’s poetry scene, with journals now mostly online and many hosting video content, values immediacy. Expressivist poems appear urgent, direct, sincere, visceral, approachable, and woke. They’re bone spurs and gut-punches, shivers and fist bumps. Constructivists poems, by contrast, will always have critics who accuse them of being empty, academic, confusing, oblique, or baroque. Constructivist poems can be ponderous, requiring interpretation and repeated readings, though a handful of constructivists have developed enough panache or sprezzatura to avoid this fate. A certain elitism prevails among constructivist poets, since their work, whether harnessing traditional modes or disrupting them, appeals to what Milton called a “fit audience… though few.” They require the reader to pick among the stones they’ve set and wander in the runes, as it were. The reader must construct and deconstruct along with them.

That said, the expressivist poem, so popular currently, faces the dangers of being obvious, too literal, a tad boring, blunt and underwritten, and ultimately little more than dressed-up journalism. Expressivists foreground the author over the work. Thus, expressivists can develop hang-ups about authenticity. An expressivist poet may fall to repeating herself, boxed in by her own voice, the work shrinking to the size of a single viewpoint instead of expanding to encompass the multiplicities of the imagination.

The trend toward expressivists might, of course, result from a political climate in which readers are spoiling for poems that give voice to their anger and disorientation, as well as greater institutional awareness and efforts to expand the variety of perspectives represented at all levels of publication. Also, poems that spill their guts might rise to the top of slush piles: blood floats on ink. Busy editors sometimes just don’t have time to re-read and interpret delicate, challenging, or more subtly structured work before casting it aside in today’s clamorous marketplace.

A counterargument to my own analysis above, however, is the state of creative nonfiction (CNF) today. CNF has been trending more constructivist lately. The heyday of the echt memoir was the 90s and early 2000s—think Mary Karr, Frank McCourt, James Frey. As opposed to straight narrative, today’s CNF is lyrical, collaged, broken, braided, collated, curated, speculative, or anagogical: it emphasizes its structure and shifting registers and embedded texts; it’s by turns hermetic and punchy, colloquial and precious, erudite and rude. Given this newfound stress on form, and the play that form affords, essays are increasingly like poems—at least, poems with a constructivist bent—and it’s no accident that many of our major essayists are bona fide poets: Maggie Nelson, Ander Monson, Anne Carson, John D’Agata, Kevin Young, Lia Purpura, Nick Flynn, and Claudia Rankine, to name just a few.

This tendentious bifurcation between “constructivists” and “expressivists” aside, as writers we should perhaps recognize that all expression must be constructed; all construction yields some expression. So, writers whose temperament is mushy might benefit from thinking how to give shape and definition to their sentiment through more attention to structures, logics, forms, and outward facts. And those, like myself, who tend to dawdle over form for form’s sake, need to circle back to ask: What am I bothering to say? Does it matter? And, importantly, am I giving my reader the feels?

Being Flynn

Each week we feature one of out many talented interns here at Superstition Review. This week’s piece comes from Fiction Editor Stephanie De La Rosa.

Nick Flynn is an American author known for his poetry and plays. His memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City won a PEN award in 2004. Superstition Review had the honor of interviewing Flynn in Spring 2009, in Issue 5. Flynn shared a few of his thoughts on the writing style he used in Another Bullshit Night, and mentioned, “I wrote my way toward a sense of compassion for my father, which was perhaps the only way I could go, since I began with very little.”

Superstition Review is glad to share with our readers that Flynn’s memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, is soon to be released as a major motion film directed by Paul Weitz, and starring Robert de Niro and Paul Dano. The synopsis for the movie begins, “Can one life story have two authors?”  We hope to see the answer to this question upon the film’s release, March 2, 2012.

For more information, to watch the trailer, and to read more about the film, visit

http://focusfeatures.com/being_flynn.

You can also check out Nick Flynn’s Website and his interview with Superstition Review.

Here at SR, we wish Nick Flynn continued success and look forward to viewing his memoir’s film adaptation, Being Flynn.

 

Issue 5 Launch

Hello SR readers,

The team at Superstition Review is happy to announce that issue 5 is now online.


Art ImageOur art editors Lauren Brown and Gary Blair gathered work from 6 artists, including Edna Dapo, Nicki Reed, and Daniel Elson (pictured left).Born in northern Illinois, Daniel Elson has made props and animatronics for spook houses and theme parks, co-starred on a reality television series about torture for the History Channel, and sold the rights to his likeness to Cartoon Network. Former clients include Disney, Playboy, The Tonight Show, Rockstar Energy Drink and “Screech” from Saved by the Bell. He now exhibits “fine art” internationally and works for his alma mater, Columbus College of Art and Design. His paintings and sculptures can be found in the private collections of people like Kevin Smith, Pete Wentz, and Ashlee Simpson.

Click here to view the art in Issue 5.


Fiction ImageFiction editors Donald Weir and Ginna Rosi collected stories from 10 writers, including Sean Lovelace, Fletcher Cline, and Anthony Varallo (pictured left).Anthony Varallo’s short story collection, Out Loud, won the 2008 Drue Heinz Literature Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press). His first collection, This Day in History, won the 2005 John Simmons Short Fiction Award (University of Iowa Press). Varallo is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Literature, and his stories have appeared in Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Epoch, Shenandoah, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa/Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his PhD from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Currently he is assistant professor of English at the College of Charleston, where he is the fiction editor for Crazyhorse.

Click here to read the fiction in Issue 5.


Interviews ImageOur editors conducted interviews with seven authors, including Pam Houston, David St. John, and Nick Flynn (pictured left).Nick Flynn’s most recent book is The Ticking is the Bomb (Norton, 2010), a memoir of bewilderment and becoming a father, which Kirkus calls “. . . a stunningly beautiful cascade of images.” His previous memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, was shortlisted for France’s Prix Femina, and has been translated into thirteen languages. He is also the author of two books of poetry, Some Ether (Graywolf, 2000), and Blind Huber (Graywolf, 2002), and a play, Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins (Faber, 2008), for which he received fellowships from, among other organizations, The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress. Some of the venues his poems, essays and non-fiction have appeared in include The New Yorker, the Paris Review, National Public Radio’s This American Life, and The New York Times Book Review. His film credits include artistic collaborator and “field poet” on the film Darwin’s Nightmare, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006. Each spring he teaches at the University of Houston, and he then spends the rest of the year in Brooklyn (and elsewhere).

Click here to read the interviews in Issue 5.


Nonfiction ImageNonfiction editors Britney Gulbrandsen and Kimberly Singleton gathered eight essays from authors such as Jerry Eckert, Susan Messer, and Marie Mockett (pictured left).

Marie was born in Carmel, California to a Japanese mother and American father. Her Japanese family owns a Zen Buddhist temple where she often played as a child, and which, among other things, performs exorcisms. In 2009, Marie attended the Bread Loaf Conference as a Bernard O’Keefe Scholar in Nonfiction. Marie’s essay “Letter from a Japanese Crematorium” was published in Agni 65, cited as distinguished in the 2008 Best American Essays, and anthologized in Creative Nonfiction 3, edited by Lee Gutkind. Marie’s debut novel, Picking Bones from Ash, was published by Graywolf Press on October 1st, 2009.

Click here to read the nonfiction in Issue 5.


Poetry ImagePoetry editors Haley Coles and Anthony Cuevas gathered poems from 17 poets, including Jesse Lee Kercheval, Marcia Golub, Simon Perchik, and Kelle Groom (pictured left).Kelle Groom’s poetry collections are Five Kingdoms (Anhinga Press, 2010), Luckily, winner of a Florida Book Award, and Underwater City (University Press of Florida, 2004). Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Poetry and is forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2010. She has published nonfiction in Agni, Bloomsbury Review, Ploughshares, West Branch, and Witness, among others. Groom has been awarded fellowships and scholarships from Atlantic Center for the Arts, Millay Colony, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a grant award from the State of Florida, Division of Cultural Affairs.

Click here to read the poetry in Issue 5.


Many thanks to all of the student interns, faculty advisors, and supporters who made this possible. I hope you enjoy the magazine.

Sincerely,

Patricia Colleen Murphy,
Managing Editor