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Author Update 2024: Irene I. Blea

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Dr. Irene Blea is a nonfiction author, novelist and poet, as well as a retired university professor and civil rights activist. Her newest book release is Dragonfly (March 2024), a collection of poems spanning 50 years of her life in which she “shares her transformation from the prescription of traditional female roles riddled by confusion and conflict to one of peace, understanding, and redefinition.” Look for Irene on Facebook. You’ll find many of her books on her Amazon author page, but Dragonfly is available here. Read more about Irene’s work in SWW’s 2015 and 2017 interviews.

What are you trying to communicate to readers through Dragonfly?
Humans need beauty in their world. It is a healing element. Each year I wait for a golden dragonfly to visit my yard. It stays for hours in the same place, and we commune with one another. I thank it for sharing its beauty. It makes me feel connected. If it does not appear, I miss it and wait for it the following year. The cover is indicative of my need for beauty and connection. As humans, we sometimes need to heal from something that has no name or something to which we have paid little attention. Because I have experienced this, I offer my understanding as a spiritual guide via poems of transformation and healing.

Is there one piece in the collection that gets to the heart of the whole?
It is difficult to select one, but I feel it is hija de la tierra because it speaks to healing from racism, class discrimination, and sexism. I often switch between two languages because this is the way I think and feel things. It is how I navigate in two worlds.

♦◊♦◊♦hija de la tierra
♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦your ancestors were goddesses and kings
♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦who ruled across lifespans
♦◊♦◊♦your ancestors have been diminished
♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦to barrio dogs and cats
♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦dogs and cats who roam the alleys of society
♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦dogs and cats who teach us how to live
♦◊♦◊♦hija de la tierra
♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦you were born to reign above the mountains
♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦you should be born to live in peace

While going through your fifty years of poems, did you discover something about yourself or your poetry? Has your writing style changed over the years?
To my surprise, I discovered I was at the forefront of Chicano and Chicana poetry in the late 1960s and 70s. I had not realized this because I was busy researching, teaching, developing university courses, and writing textbooks because there were none in the beginning of the sociology of Chicano Studies. My feminism is consistent. The book is a composition of three chapbooks, and I inform the reader about how my style changed because of my education and some of it remained the same because of my politics.

What challenges did this work pose for you?
This work was not very challenging because I had read my poems to audiences for years, and I already had the work in print in the form of chapbooks. I dictated the work from the chapbooks to my computer, revised them a bit, and sent it to a couple of outside readers who made the work better.

How did the book come together?
I started the process on New Years Day of this year. The inspiration is the first sentence of the introduction to the book: “On January 1st, 2024, I opened my eyes and asked into the crispness of my bedroom if I would die that year. I have been obsessed with my death for decades… The room responded with, ‘I don’t know.’ I decided to rise and make some coffee….” While the coffee was brewing, I decided I did not want to die without letting readers know I had written poetry. My poems had been published in several places, but I did not have an entire book of poetry printed and distributed. It took a few months. As mentioned above, it was rather simple to put the book together since I had so much poetry categorized in the chapbooks.

The Dragonfly book cover is beautiful. Tell us about the process of working with the artist.
The publication is a composite of three talented females: me the author, Rose Kern the publisher, and my daughter, Raven, the cover artist who does not use her last name. We worked well together. Rose and Raven know their craft well and all I had to do was trust their feedback. I knew I wanted a “pretty” cover and Raven presented me with three options. Raven did the cover of my autobiography, Erené with Wolf Medicine, and I loved it. This made it easy to work with her.

How and why did you chose the title of the book?
The title is generally the most difficult part for me. It was late spring, and the publisher needed a title. Since I was waiting for the golden dragonfly to appear, Dragonfly seemed to fit.

Of all the books you’ve written, which one was the most challenging and which one was the easiest (or most enjoyable) to write?
Dragonfly was the easiest one to take from concept to publication and distribution. The most difficult book to write was my autobiography, Erené with Wolf Medicine. I wrote about leaving the Catholic Church, getting divorced, contemplating an abortion, domestic violence, and suicide. Each time I wrote about them, reviewed and edited them, I re-experienced the emotions. At the same time, in the end, it was cathartic, and I released a lot of sensations and found it healing. But it was difficult to take it from concept to publication, then release it for distribution.

What poets do you continually go back to?
I return to the classic Spanish writers because Spanish is such a beautiful poetic language. Sometimes the mystical, magical, tone of a poem is difficult to translate into English. Fedrico Garcia Lorca, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Pablo Neruda are among my favorites.

Do you have a preference for poetry structure or form when you write or read?
I write poetry by inspiration. Something needs to affect me profoundly. I am not trained in poetry, so structure and form are only important to the degree that I want to render emotion or message. Most of my structure and form is in breaking mainstream rules. It comes from reading and writing Chicano, Native American, and Afro American resistance poetry by other writers, which I began to do at the height of the Chicano movement.

Do you remember what inspired you to write your first poem?
As a child, I shared a bedroom with my younger sister, who was very ill and could not sleep. To comfort her, I recited poems. But I did not write anything down. Sometimes in the darkness of our bedroom, she would request a story that rhymed. They were generally about an animal, child clown, or a pretty lady.

How does a poem begin for you, with an idea, a form, an image?
A poem begins for me with an emotional reaction. They are like prayers.

What do most well-written poems have in common?
They must be written within the economy of language and render an emotional tone. I seek images and feelings, or that the scene is fully rendered. Well-written poems for me are not terribly long, epic, although my poems have become longer recently, and I cannot explain that. Except to say that the issues I have been writing about have to do with the environmental factors that ravage the environment and how Mother Earth struggles to respond to those ravages.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
Healing must take place holistically at the physical, emotional and spiritual level. Pills, ointments, and massage can do some of that but there are other forms of medicine. Acupuncture, the sun, dragonflies, the presence of certain people, and animals can bring healing. These are healing elements, medicine, which address the physical, emotional, and spiritual components of health.

KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kat has a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.



An Interview with Poet Gayle Lauradunn

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Gayle Lauradunn is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in numerous journals as well as national and international anthologies. Some of her poems have also been included in art gallery exhibits and adapted for the stage. Her third poetry collection, The Geography of Absence (Mercury HeartLink, August 2022), prompted one reviewer to write: “Open this collection to the first poem—or to any poem—and lose yourself in words that matter.” Look for Gayle’s book on Amazon.

Tell us how and why you chose the title of your poetry book The Geography of Absence.
When I was camping in the Sahara I was struck by the immensity of the space and the gigantic proportions of the sand dunes that seemed to creep across the landscape. The sheer vastness. I wondered what was absent in that huge emptiness. Then we spied a brown speck in the distance between dunes and went toward it, and it turned out to be a large Berber tent, probably large enough to hold 80-100 people. But there was only an old woman and her 3-year-old grandson napping beside her. She invited us in and talked with our guide, who translated for us, carding and spinning the camel wool contained in a large bag beside her the entire time we were there. There was nothing else in the tent, not even cooking utensils, and I still wonder who or what was absent. That experience led me to become aware of absence throughout our lives. The poet Morgan Parker has said, “Absence implies a memory of what once took place.”

Your book cover has interesting details with randomly placed blocks, giving a fractured appearance. Is it representative of what this poetry collection is about?
Yes. I originally thought I wanted a photo of large sand dunes with a broad sky but could not find anything. I asked my friend Scott Wiggerman, who is both poet and artist, if he could suggest something. He sent me what he had posted on his website. Of the many items there, I kept going back to this piece even though it is not the kind of art I generally like. I went to Scott’s house to view the original and asked him what he was thinking when he created the piece. He said he was thinking about what was absent between the blocks. When he said the piece was untitled, I suggested we call it “absences” to which he agreed.

You mentioned that you write poetry to learn about the world and to learn more about who you are. What things can you share with your readers about your discoveries?
The process of writing poetry is organic for me. I begin with a vague thought, an idea, a landscape, etc., and write the first line, whatever occurs to me. The poem writes itself; I never know where it is going or how it will end. I don’t think ahead. I let it be what it seems to want to be. It’s similar to traveling to a culture that is different from ours, a landscape that is different, a different language. The absence of my own culture surrounding me is provocative and causes me to view the world in a new way. I’ve taken ten trips with a company that focuses on going off the beaten path. It’s the reason I rarely travel to Europe which is our heritage. I prefer places like Mongolia and Bhutan. After hiking up 12,000 feet in the Annapurna Mountains in Nepal, we had lunch in a tiny village and visited one of the homes. The woman had a television set and later I asked our guide what the people thought about how different much of the world is from their lives. He responded that they think what is on television are fairy tales.

In your book description of The Geography of Absence you question the validity of memory. Can you elaborate? Do you find freedom with this prospect when it comes to writing, or is vague memory more of a hindrance?
Memory, vague or clear, allows me to write both the actual event and infuse it with imagination. Whatever the memory, imagination expands it, enhances it to get to the meaning of what really occurred.

What sort of decisions do you make when putting a poetry collection together?
Good question, one I’m dealing with right now as I work on the order of my next collection. The Geography of Absence and my first book, Reaching for Air, were both much easier as the poems lent themselves to sections. My second book, All the Wild and Holy: A Life of Eunice Williams 1696-1785, is a book-length persona poem which I wrote chronologically as I followed her life. This current manuscript has a central six-part poem which is the focus of the collection. My struggle is how to arrange the other poems around this one. All the other poems reflect the central idea in the long one and that is what I need to keep in mind as I organize them.

For someone new to poetry, can you recommend where they might start reading?
It depends on what kind of poetry you want to write: open or formal. Today there seems to be more call from publishers for the latter. I find much of it fairly boring as the traditional forms do not fit our contemporary language, which causes the poet to focus on the form rather than what is being said. People are inventing new forms such as the golden shovel and calling a single line a haiku. I’m a storytelling poet, so content is more important to me than form. I do occasionally write a form poem, such as a pantoum, but I am rarely satisfied with them as the content often becomes distorted to fit the form. Some poets write a sonnet which you would not recognize as such because they are more interested in content than form. For form poetry, start with Shakespeare and improvise on his sonnets. For open, start with Denise Levertov and Gwendolyn Brooks. Galway Kinnell wrote both open and formal.

How important is accessibility of meaning? Should a reader have to work to understand a poem, or should readers find their own meaning?
I have been giving readings since 1970. In the early days, I experienced an awakening when after a reading, people would come up to me and say such things as “I love your poem about….” or “I understood your poem X as I had a similar experience.” In such cases I had no idea to which poems they were relating as I did not see what they said in any of the poems. That taught me that when we write, if we are open and not tightly controlling, people can get inside any poem that speaks to their own experiences. All we must do is write from within ourselves, organically. I remember one of my high school English teachers taking us through ten unbearable weeks of poetry. She invariably asked such nonsense questions as “What does the word the on the third line mean?” I doubt if even the poet knew. Readers should let the poem speak to them and not try to control it. Poems are a gift to allow people to find their own meanings.

Do you have a favorite poet? Someone who inspired you along the way?
Too many poets to choose just one. My early influences were William Blake, Walt Whitman, Denise Levertov, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Galway Kinnell, C.K. Williams, and the early poems of Louise Glück.

What do most well-written poems have in common?
A broad and deep knowledge of craft. Learn it and then you can toss it away. It will be part of you and you will use it without being conscious of doing so.

Su Lierz writes dark fiction, short story fiction, and personal essays. Her short story “Twelve Days in April,” written under the pen name Laney Payne, appeared in the 2018 SouthWest Writers Sage Anthology. Su was a finalist in the 2017 and 2018 Albuquerque Museum Authors Festival Writing Contest. She lives in Corrales, New Mexico, with her husband Dennis.



Author Update: Dan Wetmore

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Among retired Air Force officer Dan Wetmore’s creative outlets is his passion for writing poetry. In 2016, he released My Mother’s Gentle Unbecoming: The Absentings of Alzheimer’s, a poetry collection published by Saint Andrews University Press. His second collection, Phoboudenopanophobia: Words Now for a Possible Then (July 2022), explores “dementia’s emotional toll on the leaving and the left behind.” You’ll find Dan on LinkedIn and his SWW Author Page. Look for his book on Amazon, and learn more about his work in his 2017 SWW interview.

Why did you write Phoboudenopanophobia?
Penning My Mother’s Gentle Unbecoming, about her descent into dementia, got me contemplating a similar fate, so I wrote this volume as an extended last letter to my family, sort of an “epitaph in absentia”; hoped insurance against having last feelings go unexpressed, in the event the body outlives the being.

Tell us about the structure of the book and how you worked through “putting everything in order.”
As the number of poems multiplied, I saw six different tones emerge: overwhelmsion, dread, desperation, gratitude, resolve, and acceptance, similar to the five stages of grief, it being a book about loss, simply of self. So, to reassure the reader—at risk of spoon-feeding them—that the “voices” constituted an evolution rather than an equivocation, I grouped the birds of a feather, in hope the whole would ultimately take greater flight.

When did you decide to make this a project and step into the journey to put it together?
As the previous volume was dwindling down to completion, this one suggested itself. Though having said all about the subject (my mother), the subject matter wasn’t exhausted, since we speak our empathies and our personal experience with different voices. It was the passing of a baton from one runner to the next.

How did you choose the book title?
The title is a mash-up of three fears:

The norm and the hope is that animacy and identity will prove co-terminal, but death by dementia denies that. So, first fear is of its final phase—having lost all which effectively makes one human: fear of (having) Nothing: oudenophobia.

I suspect the penultimate state of consciousness—just shy of unawareness—is incomprehension. And as what’s feared most is the unknown (and, at that point, everything will be unknowable), the final fear will be that of panophobia: fear of Everything.

And the double-teaming by those possible tomorrows threatens to taint today, prompting a fear of succumbing to dread, sacrificing all remaining moments to a prolonged flinch: fear of Fear (phobophobia).

At what point did you know you had taken the manuscript as far as it could go, that it was finished and ready for publishing?
When the flow slowed to a trickle, and further attempts at purging felt affected; trying to fabricate emotion rather than free it. That said, every quake has aftershocks, and the ledger—echoing the life—is ever a work in progression (and hopefully of progress). A few guests always arrive late at table, but fashionably so—the most composed of the bunch, because not rushed by the deadline which some impatience or another dictated.

What were the expected, or unexpected, results of putting this project together?
Somewhat managing to untie the Gordian Knot of emotions the situation set to roiling; to at least depict the Moebius nature of the matter, given the impossibility of ironing it perfectly flat. Gaining an appreciation of how many others are walking this particular road, and having the opportunity to hopefully return the favor done for me by so many others, of finding something to point to and say, “Yes—THAT!”

Do you have a favorite quote from the book that you’d like to share?
“Though fast flat on a mountain of limestone-capped granite, this is akin to falling: moving without the ability to arrest, orient, or anticipate; the trifecta of entropies which constitutes chaos.”

What does your mature self now bring to the writing table that your younger self never could have?
Appreciation that (despite occasional appearances otherwise) less is more. An identifiable/consistent voice, reflecting settled priorities and a gelled perspective. Grudging admittance that Ben Franklin was right about that perspiration business. And realization that writing is primarily about having written (vice being read). If you can comprehend your own words, you’ve already achieved audience, and everything else is icing on the cake, which liberates you from chasing acceptance beyond (and potentially exclusive of) your own, insulating you from the temptation to pander.

Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently if you started your writing/publishing journey today?
Resist viewing quantity as the enemy of quality, rather as one means to it, having realized that the more frequently you go to the pump, the less you have to prime it.

What do most well-written poems have in common?
Concision, to include leashed ambiguity (selectively implying multiple things for the price of saying one). Perspicuity, to include exercising the rods of the mind’s eye rather than the cones—seeing peripherally, intimating rather than stating (to include liberal use of simile and metaphor—the more novel, the most mind-blowing).

Is there something that always triggers your creativity?
Always? A strong emotional spasm, usually of the yearning sort; a visceral (pre-lingual) feeling. Which throws down the gauntlet to become midwife to that muddled. And, as closest kin to the ineffable is the oblique, it usually comes into the air as poetry or poetic prose.

Often? Discerning a way in which seeming incommensurables are some way kindred.

What writing projects are you working on now?
A third volume of verse, On Our Knees in Ironies, about my dad’s dissolution at Alzheimer’s hands. Though the last generated, that’s an accident of time, it being thematically second. (Viewing the disease—more to the point, its host—as the subject, when the afflicted was my mother, Dad was serving as caregiver, and I merely spectator [third-person]. In a succession of roles, he became she, and I he, raising [razing?] my status to second-person. Trying to place myself in their shoes had me not only behind the lens, but in front of it; the wolf, at end, fully at the door.)

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
Building on the question (above), about what my mature self brings to the writing table, as far as dividends go, adulation and commiseration are nice, but catharsis suffices.

KLWagoner150_2KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kat has a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.



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