This week The Extraordinary Times Catches up with Appalachian poets Pauletta Hansel and Sara Moore Wagner. On Monday, February 27 at 1.30 pm, Miami University Hamilton campus welcomes Pauletta and Sara for a special reading of their work entitled “Girl (Hoods) and Hollers.” This free public reading is co-sponsored by Miami Appalachian Studies and the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Writing.
Pauletta is familiar to readers of this blog from her November 2020 Q&A, and from previous appearances at Miami. Pauletta was the 2022 Writer-in-Residence for the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library. She served as the first Poet Laureate of Cincinnati from April 2016 through March 2018. She has written nine poetry collections including Heartbreak Tree, a poetic exploration of the intersection of gender and place in Appalachia. Sara has written two full length books of poetry, Swan Wife (winner of the 2021 Cider Press Review Editors Prize) and Hillbilly Madonna (2020 Driftwood Press Manuscript prize winner), a recipient of a 2022 Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, a 2021 National Poetry Series Finalist, and the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award. Her poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, and has been supported by a SAFTA residency, a merit scholarship from the Juniper Institute, and a scholarship to the Palm Beach Poetry Festival as a finalist for the Thomas Lux prize. She holds a BFA from Bowling Green State University and an MA in literature from Northern Kentucky University. * Can you say a little about where you each grew up, and how your childhoods shape your poetry? PH: I grew up in southeastern Kentucky, in small towns where my father taught college. He was a first-generation college student from the mountains who spent his career teaching college in the mountains. We moved pretty often in my grade school years, mostly within a 100-mile radius, but far enough away that I started over with every move. Books were the constant for me. I started writing poetry in the 6th grade, not too long after our final move as a family—to Breathitt County (having previously lived in Madison, Letcher, Knox, and Perry Counties). My initial influences were 19th century literature (especially the Brontës) and 1970s singer-songwriters, especially Joni Mitchell and Janis Ian. So in both cases, the Romantics! And Edna St. Vincent Millay, one of the few women poets whose books I could access. As a young writer, I did not consider my own family or environment worthy of literature. I am sure my young self would be shocked that these things have become major sources of inspiration for my writing. It took some distance, both temporal and geographic to understand how the people and place shaped who I am. I can also add the southern and Appalachian storytelling traditions to my influences: for me a poem often starts with a story, the memory of a specific event which needs more exploration. At a recent reading someone asked me if I was always as aware of my surroundings as I am now in my poems about my Appalachian girlhood. The answer is a resounding no! I was not an outdoors sort of girl, and felt no real sense of belonging to the land. But as I revisit in both body and mind, there is a sense of place that developed in a largely unconscious way. The landscape is more at home in my poems than I would have ever thought possible as a young poet. Heartbreak Tree, which I will be reading from, is largely about that intersection of place and gender. It explores my own girlhood and that of my foremothers using the lens of geography—mountains, switchback roads, coal, dirt. It is also about aging, becoming the elder, and seeing the changes in my own body even as I see them in the place from which I come. SMW: Pauletta and I have so much in common when it comes to our girlhoods, though we come from really different places. I was also more of an indoor kid. I was dragged out into the hills by my father, who loved them, so the landscape shaped me and my writing as much as he did. I grew up with divorced parents, split between them. I was born in Columbus, where my parents first met. My dad was from Ohio’s Appalachia (Jackson area), and my mom is from Parkersburg, West Virginia. They met, had me, and split very young. I spent my time between the both of them and my Mema, my dad’s mom, who cared for me a lot while my mom worked and was in college. My dad built a cabin in the woods near Hocking Hills, out of a strong desire to be back where he came from. I spent a lot of time there and in Tar Hollow State Park, one of his favorite places in the world. I never really thought of myself as Appalachian, but understand myself and my family identity now more, that we are urban Appalachians, thanks to Pauletta and her research and drive to educate. Like Pauletta, I started writing poetry very young. This was a result of the silencing I felt being carried back and forth between homes. I wanted to have a voice and space of my own, I was lonely, and I found a home and self in poetry. My first influences were writers like HD, Yeats, Emily Dickinson, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, in whose poetry I loved the mythic grandeur, sound, and focus on image. I then moved, like Pauletta, to music, my main muse being Tori Amos, who I discovered and became obsessed with at twelve. Tori Amos, like me, came from a religious background. I loved how her songs felt like codes. She expanded my sense of what language can do, and made me delve even deeper into myth and literature, as much of her music contains allusions to both. As an adult poet, I have turned to childhood often because it was such a confusing time for me. I am not someone who understood myself or my identity young, I needed to write into the questions and little wounds. Like Joan Didion said, I write to understand. I have returned to the spaces of my childhood to write many of the poems in both books. Channeling the girl I was in the spaces I inhabited sparks my imagination. I’m not sure I’ll ever stop mining the past this way. * How did your paths cross? PH: Now, for someone who relies on memory for my poems, my memory is not all that great! (I guess that’s where imagination comes in!) I am trying to remember where I first met Sara. Since she’s a few decades younger, maybe she can put a time and place. But over the last few years I have been encountering her poetry in online journals. I was so excited both by her poems and by the fact of her urban Appalachian story–then when she began writing and publishing more explicitly from that story, I knew we had to connect. I have been involved in Cincinnati’s urban Appalachian community for many years as part of the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition, including leading creative writing workshops with both kids and adults focused on speaking the lives of urban Appalachian people in the generations beyond migration. Sara brings that story to the page with craft and truth. It is my honor (in some ways, my responsibility) to help her make that story known. SMW: As for how I met Pauletta, I remember distinctly being a baby writer and seeing her at a reading. I knew she was someone important, and her work drew me in. In her time as poet laureate of Cincinnati, I watched from afar the work she did for the city and poetry. So, when she reached out to see if I might be interested in reviewing Heartbreak Tree for Still, I jumped at the chance to connect more deeply. Through that, we discovered so many connections in our work–and the rest is history! [PH: Or Herstory!] * What are some common themes in your poetry? SMW: What connects our work is definitely the wild girls we used to be, and in many ways still are. When I am with Pauletta, I feel as if those girls see and speak to each other. We have a soul understanding and a connection to the places we sprang from that, despite whatever differences in our work and those places, binds us. We are also both searching for the truth about ourselves and our families, and using landscape and place to do that. We are very different in style, though. Pauletta, as she mentioned, is a storyteller to her core. She embodies that Appalachian storyteller she spoke of in her explanation of her childhood. I like to say I spit fire. I write from a sense of panic. I tell stories, too, but they are a bit more fractured. I think you can see that difference in our musical muses too, Tori Amos vs. Joni Mitchell, in a way. I hope people get that sense of place from our readings, and of speaking truth into things that are often silenced about women, especially in Appalachia. Things are not black and white, there is gray everywhere. Our collaboration shows this, the line that stretches through generations of Appalachians who stayed in the region and who, like my family, left it for opportunities which never came. This collaboration highlights and explores both difference and commonality. We’re linked by girlhood, and it’s that girlhood, those girls, who speak and persevere. PH: Adding to what Sara said, I also hope that folks will experience the value of co-mentorship across generations. I was brought into the fold by other Appalachian and women writers in my early years. George Ella Lyon was (and is) an important influence in helping me tell the truths of my life as an Appalachian woman. It is important to me to offer that same doorway to other women writers who wish to pass through, and to communicate something of that lineage. Equally important is to be able to learn from younger writers who have been making doors into places where I might have never entered. Sara is one of those women, for sure. Her writing teaches me about my life. And I hope people enjoy our work and maybe see a bit of themselves there, regardless of gender or place.
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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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