This pandemic year has been challenging for public events at Miami University’s regional campuses. Among many programs put on hold was a performance of Coal Town Photograph, which showcased poetry by Pauletta Hansel [bio below*] brought to life by Northern Kentucky’s Falcon Theater, plus original music by the multi-talented Raison D’Etre. Vaccine permitting, hopefully this event will be rescheduled, but meantime, The Extraordinary Times caught up with Pauletta for the following interview.
[* Pauletta’s eight poetry collections include Friend, Coal Town Photograph and Palindrome, winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award for best Appalachian poetry; her writing has been featured in Oxford American, Rattle, Appalachian Journal, The Cincinnati Review, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily and Poetry Daily, among others. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate (2016-2018), managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary publication of Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative (2010-2020), and is a Core Member of the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition. Pauletta offers writing workshops and retreats for children, published authors and everyone in between.] *What have you been up to this summer? This summer and fall have both been active seasons for me. My primary work is as a teacher of creative writing, mostly poetry and memoir classes I offer for adults interested in developing their writing, and a few guest artist gigs in schools and community settings. In the spring things came to a screeching halt. I was able to keep one class going virtually, as the class project was epistolary poetry (letter poems)—a bit of serendipity during the pandemic to be writing letters to each other when we were unable to meet. I wrote a lot of poetry this spring, and then in the summer worked on two separate manuscripts. Both have been accepted for publication, Friend, the epistolary pandemic poems, for this year, and I Tell You Now, a poetic exploration of the intersection of gender and place, for 2022. I appreciated the quiet time for writing and revising, but I found myself really missing people, so I spent the latter part of the summer teaching myself to translate my in-person classes to online. So now I am leading as many classes now as I did last fall via Zoom. There are pros and cons to this for sure, but one thing I have really enjoyed is being able to work with writers from all over the country, and especially with other Appalachian writers. * What led you to write Coal Town Photograph? I often tell folks, “I don’t write books, I write poems.” What I mean by this is that I usually draft and revise individual poems based on whatever interests me at the moment, without thinking about an overall book project. Even Friend, with poems that are both thematically and temporally related, was not written as a book, but as letters to other poets. Coal Town Photograph began to emerge as a book in the summer of 2017 when I was leading a poetry manuscript class for a small group of poets who were putting together their first books. I always like to work alongside my students—it is often my most productive time as a writer—and so I began to organize the most recent of my “Appalachian” poems into a manuscript. I thought originally it would be a chapbook of around 20 poems, but I wrote more poems during this time, and was also able to add other poems previously published in a book now out of print. So it may be more accurate to say, “I start by writing poems, but I end by writing a book!” Coal Town Photograph’s themes of childhood, Appalachia, family, movement, etc., are my lifelong interests as a writer—even obsessions, you might say. Many of the poems in that collection began when I had the opportunity to revisit some of the eastern Kentucky towns I grew up in. That juxtaposition of the memories and the current experience of a place is a powerful writing prompt. Once the book was completed, I was asked to do some work as a teaching artist in the high school I had attended. I spent several days in my home town and later began working on a whole new set of poems which ended up in the manuscript, I Tell You Now. * How did you come to collaborate with Falcon Theater and Raison D'Etre? When Clint Ibele of Falcon Theater contacted me about the possibility of Coal Town Photograph being part of their annual Falcon Takes Flight series, I was thrilled. I had attended several of their past performances, and am also a huge fan of the musical group, Raison D'Etre. Falcon focusses their readers’ theater series on Kentucky authors. Believe me, I am in some good company, George Ella Lyon and Maurice Manning among them. I believe Falcon had first heard poems from Coal Town Photograph when I read there as part of a poetry and music program organized Roberta Schultz of Raison D'Etre. All of this pre-pandemic, of course. May we live to see live theater, music and literary readings once again. * What was it like becoming Cincinnati's first Poet Laureate? I hesitated putting my name in the hat for the honor, primarily because I am not a much of a public poet. My own poetry is quite intimate, and my preference is to work with others in small groups where a true exchange can occur. So I had to spend some time envisioning what such a role would encompass for me, with my particular skills and interests. Once I had come up with a sort of mission statement the work was easier to craft: Bringing poetry to people, and people together through poetry is a pretty good description of my professional life before and after the laureateship; as Cincinnati’s Poet Laureate I had the opportunity to do it on a slightly larger scale, and hopefully, to help put in place some structures that will help sustain Cincinnati’s literary community. * How has the experience of migration shaped your understanding of the world? There’s a Welsh word “hiraeth,” which has been useful to me in thinking about my relationship with Appalachia, and about the Appalachian community’s relationship with other exiled peoples. I have heard it translated as longing for a home that does not exist. In her essay “Dreaming in Welsh” Pamela Petro states, “Wales is a poor, rural place of mountains and ribboning hills with empty underground pockets where its coal used to be…” Does that make you think of anyplace else? Appalachia, like Wales, was long ago colonized for its resources, and thus never had the opportunity to become itself. “To feel hiraeth is to feel a deep incompleteness and recognize it as familiar,” Petro says. When I worked with students in my home county of Breathitt County, I felt from them that same sense of longing for what might have been, even among those teens who believed they would stay. For me, there was never really a question of returning. Appalachia is always home, and home is a place that does not belong to me. That awareness brings me into this larger community of those who are displaced, whether it be from a gentrified neighborhood, a nation at war, or a family that cannot accept their “otherness.” We are all, in our various ways, wayfaring strangers. My hope, always, is that a recognition of this can help up find common cause.
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AuthorMatthew Smith, PhD (History). Public Programs at Miami University Regionals. Historian of Appalachia, the Ohio Valley, & the early American republic. Archives
February 2024
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