Jenny

This interview forms a part of the “We’Moon Anthology Blog Tour.” Mother Tongue Ink has published an anniversary anthology entitled, In the Spirit of We’Moon, Celebrating 30 Years, An Anthology of We’Moon Art and Writing. This gorgeous compilation includes the work of many of the artists and authors who have contributed to the internationally acclaimed lunar calendar datebook for the last three decades. We’Moon invited all those contributors to the anthology who have our own blogs to interview another contributor, and to then post our interviews on our blogs. We’Moon will link our blog interviews to their facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/wemoon

I am honored to interview We’Moon contributor Susa Silvermarie from Asheville North Carolina USA. Susa, How has being published in the We’Moon Calendar affected your work?

Susa

Being in We’Moon joined me to a community of women artists and gifted me with readers all over the world. Since 1993 I’ve been honored to have twenty-one of my poems appear We’Moon over the years, and six of the pieces are reprinted in the anthology. I get excited every time a new We’Moon hits the shelves, whether I have a poem in it or not. I was 45 when I first submitted a piece, and now I’m 64. I feel like I grew up with We’Moon. So it’s with great gratitude that I reviewed the anthology on my site. I have also added my We’Moon poems to the site, www.susasilvermarie.com under the page My Writing.

Jenny

What else are you up to as a poet?

Susa

Glad you asked, because I have an event coming up in August I’d like to tell readers about. I’ll be attending the Aroho (A Room of Her Own, aroho.org) Retreat at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico on a Wise Woman Fellowship. Aroho is the preeminent nonprofit institution working on behalf of women writers today, and the annual retreats are designed around the passions of peers.

I’m thrilled to be participating in the retreat and to be offering a “Mind Stretch” called How to Love the World According to Mary Oliver, in which I will perform selected poetry by Mary Oliver while listeners play a game of Catch-the-line-that-calls-you, followed by reading the caught lines as a group poem. Mind Stretch presentations are videotaped and select moments may be posted to AROHO’s YouTube channel. I think this will be great fun and I’m looking forward to putting on my performance hat again.

Overall, I’m anticipating the essential nourishment of connections with diverse feminist thinkers and out-of-the-box writers. For any We’Moon readers who write, I encourage you to check out the Aroho guidelines and submit your work for the many prizes and awards that Aroho gives out each year.

Jenny

So you’re a poet now writing young adult fiction. Can you talk about that?

Susa

I began writing as a poet and I will always be a poet. But when I turned 60 I went back to school for an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. I’m hooked on writing for young people and I’m passionate about helping them write their experiences as well. I want to be part of reaching them, and I want to do what Madeleine L'Engle says: “I write for the child in everybody, that part of us that is aware and open and courageous, that part that isn't afraid to explore the mythical depths…that part where art is born.”

A year ago I retired from my job life to write full-time. I’m so grateful for this new beginning in my life, which I call my Third Trimester. Writing fiction and performing poetry and following my artist nose wherever it leads me, ahh— it feels like my true road, what I am meant to be doing. I’m 64, becoming more fluid than ever before, and I’m in love with life.

Jenny

Are you looking for agent representation for any particular work at this time and if so, can you share the pitch?

Susa

Yes! I’m actively seeking an agent for my young adult novel in verse, Telling It.

The pitch: The year is 1969 and eighteen-year-old Sheila embodies the clash of cultural mores at the end of the 60’s. When she adventures to Brazil and conceives by date rape, her mother disowns her, and Sheila grapples with homelessness, the welfare system, and the process of deciding whether to keep the baby. She draws close to a priest expelled from his parish for firebrand sermons against the Viet Nam war, and she transforms herself from an isolated girl in need to a young woman who belongs to a community, one who gives raw, luminous voice to a new era.

I visualize this historical fiction tale resonating with kids today, kids who like Sheila must also find their way and come of age in a challenging era when old ways are truly crumbling and it is the young who must create the new.

Jenny

Your site, www.SusaSilvermarie.com showcases your blog posts as well as other writing. What’s it like for you to share yourself in that way?

Susa

I call the blog entries flash essays and I love posting them. For a writer who began publishing the hard, slow way in the 70’s, there is nothing like the thrill of hitting “publish” when I add a blog essay or a poem, a book review or a story. I don’t know who my readers are but I know I’m reaching them, at last count over a thousand hits. To complete the circle of giving my art, I need it to be received. We are so blessed to have this new capability of seizing the means of production! I invite We’Moon readers to subscribe to my blog.

Jenny

Can you talk about what the process of writing means in your life?

Susa

I see myself as a writer in the shamanic tradition, one who journeys to other worlds, and shapeshifts beyond my kind, in order to harvest fruits and fictions that surprise me. The shaman and the writer are solitary figures, and yet, the purpose of my writing is to connect, especially to young people. I know what their isolation feels like. I hope my writing can help mend it, so they will experience their connection with the human family and our planet home. I want to be one of the writers who offers them alternatives to traditional ways.  I want to write for children so that I may encourage their boldness, their tenderness and their creativity in a world that so urgently needs these qualities

What I work to nurture now in my writing is the sense of connection, all of us belonging to one family on one beautiful fragile planet. Writing is my tilling the soil of belonging, writing is my shining a light on the seed of belonging, writing is my quenching the thirst for belonging.  What writing means to me now is finding and offering that sense to the youth into whose hands I hope to send my writing, as well as to the child in myself still seeking it.

All along my path, writing has been a spiritual tool. I consider my process of writing to be a sacred charge of heroic proportions. For the joy of writing, I have gladly re-visioned setbacks as opportunities, and I have gladly given up many things that feed me less than writing does. What I ask of writing now is that it call me and my potential readers to the true enormity of our spirits.  I want my writing to give kids heroes and to make kids heroes. What my writing means to me now is a way to help young readers find that they themselves belong to that heroic realm. To me the fruit of writing is community connection.

Jenny

Who or what are your influences?

Susa

I am inspired by the awesome art of nature Herself in every form.

Some of my individual influences have been Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, Pema Chodron,Thich Nhat Hanh, Patricia Lee Gouch, Joanna Macy, Fran Cheny, Joanna Macy, my son David Sartori, and my mother Marie Himley Sartori, and Jeannie David.

Back in the day, the National Feminist Writers Guild influenced and expanded me, as did my participation in Dianic Wicca. I recall how the first feminist spirituality conference in Boston in the 70’s called Through the Looking Glass blew my perception doors wide open. I wrote about that in an essay that’s on my site called Remembering the Mothertongue. Nowadays Alanon and Buddhist practice keep me honest and humble. The people of my beloved Mexico have also been a profound influence on me, the poetry of the everyday people who have shown me their souls.

Jenny

Before you began to write for children and young adults, I understand you worked with elders and published a book about that. What’s the connection?

Susa

For many years, my work with elders was my doorway into spiritual opulence. I pioneered a form of poetry therapy for people with dementia. Poetry allowed me to meet people heart to heart in that rich place, in the shimmering fullness of our human potential. Even those with Alzheimer’s Disease were able to open to art’s moment.  I owe them a special debt of gratitude, and I called my third book of poetry Tales From My Teachers on the Alzheimer’s Unit. I am currently in the process of sharing those poems on my website. 

These days I inhabit the world of children as much as I can. I now work in schools rather than in nursing homes. I have used the oral composition techniques I learned as a poetry therapist with elders to work with preschool children, and have created anthologies of their extraordinary poems for their families and classrooms. I worked with folks at the end of life and now I’m working closer to the beginning, but you know what? They’re right next to each other on the circle.

Jenny

What is one thing you’re willing to share with me that most might not know about you?

Susa

I’m a shy person hiding inside someone born in the middle of a big family, a natural introvert who had to learn how to pile enough on my plate before the food was gone, how to claim space, how to get heard.

Jenny

If you could share your wisdom with girls on the cusp of womanhood, what might you say to them?

Susa

Sisters! Those of us who have been doing it for awhile are no different from you. We have the same obstacles and fears and blocks. I’m here to assure you that it is completely possible to walk through them and find the joy and pleasure of sharing your art. Come on, we’re waiting for you with open arms. And as much as you need our old wisdom, we need your new wisdom.

Jenny

Anything else?

Susa

Come visit me at susasilvermarie.com and let me know that Jenny sent you. The latest addition to my site is an audio of my grad lecture, Gender Fluidity in Selected Young Adult Novels.

BIO

Susa Silvermarie is the author Tales From My Teachers on the Alzheimer’s Unit, three chapbooks of poetry, and hundreds of poems published in periodicals over the last forty years, as well as recent children’s stories. She has edited six anthologies of poetry composed in her nursing home workshops, and her freelance credits include features, columns and essays. She taught storytelling to kindergarteners in public school and poetry to teenagers at writing camp. She’s currently writing young adult fiction and she blogs at susasilvermarie.com. This past winter she lived more simply than she ever has, as she wrote and blogged from Yelapa Mexico, a village on the Bay of Banderas reachable only by boat. Earned MSW at age 42 and MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at age 63. Currently seeking representation for three completed young adult novels.

                 Click on interviewer Jenny Weston’s site to read about her healing work.              www.healingmeditations.co.uk