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Q&A with Joanna Rose, author of A Small Crowd of Strangers

“Wonder,” she said. “We are seeking wonder.” . . . Wonder is a lifting in the heart. Wonder is belief in the fleetest moment. Time stops and starts, goes away and comes back from somewhere. Frankie called Bullfrog the Wonder Dog. “He wonders what’s going on,” he said. It is a wonder she and Michael ended up married.

~ from A Small Crowd of Strangers. (Forest Avenue Press, 2020)

In these times of a pandemic/firestorm/unrest, time stops and starts. We are carried along by the news. We’ve stayed inside so long that our friends become strangers and strangers–in the grocery store, at the gas station–become friends. And like Pattianne Anthony, the protagonist in Joanna Rose’s new novel says, we too are seeking wonder, seeking answers. Watching for signs.

Though A Small Crowd of Strangers is a novel, it is easy to find bits and pieces of one’s own life in the unfolding of Pattianne’s. A young woman who seems to fall into life, Pattianne feels at first that if she was led to a place or a person, she must stay there in that city and in that relationship. 

Then, she begins working at a tiny bookstore run by a woman with a huge personality. Pattianne meets stranger after stranger and Bullfrog the Wonder dog, and they become her guides so that she is no longer falling into life but feeling grounded.

I’m honored to host Joanna Rose as she shares more about her new novel, about writing (this whole interview is a lesson in craft!), and about her favorite pandemic pastimes. Plus, there’s a giveaway (courtesy of Forest Avenue press!)

Enter HERE by Wednesday, September 30th.

Now welcome Joanna Rose!

Christi Craig (CC): What a cast of characters in A Small Crowd of Strangers! From Even-Steven, Pattianne’s “sometimes-boyfriend,” to Michael Bryn, the perfect husband (until his Catholicism gets the best of her). There is the interrogator priest and the priest gone rogue, Pattianne’s indifferent mother and Mrs. Taskey, who is everything her mother isn’t. And those are just a few of the people we meet! As each character rises to the page, we feel their pull on Pattianne, giving the story a natural ebb and flow as she is carried along from one place to another to what begins to feel like “home.” Do you build your characters from scratch or do they form from traces of personality in people you see on the street?

Joanna Rose (JR): Early in the story process I start with people I have known, and they are almost always people from my past. I am haunted by my own past and have connections to people I have lost, not necessarily to death but to time. Early in my life, as my parents moved around the country, I formed the habit of letting people drift away. I have spent most of my life interacting with strangers.

Every time we moved I would make up a new past for myself. When I was very young that past was rather absurd; my dog was the original Lassie. I was related to the Queen of England. I had a brother who died of polio. By the time the truth was out it was usually time for us to move again. I was never called out for my lies. Lying was a big problem for me.
 
What I know now is that in making up myself I was putting a wall around myself, and no one could get in. I am no longer in the habit of telling whoppers but that habit of not getting to know people, of assuming I don’t know people, in is a very basic part of who I am.

What else I know now is that I have always been making up stories and characters.

People are a mystery to me. Do I reconstruct them to seek out the roots of this mystery?

My characters come from all different places in my life. Miss Mimi Stein was very loosely based on my own dear Aunt Mimi, who was not Jewish (very Presbyterian) but who never had children, and was beautiful, and gracious, and had a lovely home. She treated me kindly and warmly and with humor – not something I ever got from my own parents.

Even-Steven is an amalgamation of several boyfriends (none named Steven!).

Jen is an exception; she is my own sister in pretty much every way. Smart-alecky and smart and funny, and we’re not close. I feel like I have managed to immortalize my sister’s smirk.  And Pattianne’s parents are my parents in that they were cold and distant.

But I have never known priests like either Father McGivens or Father Lucke.

Michael Bryn was made up out of whole cloth. He was the hardest character to write, and he didn’t even get  his own point of view until a very late draft.

So were Mrs. Taskey, and Mr Bleakman and Josie.

Mr. Patel is based on a really kind man who runs the QuickPrint shop near my house, who always helped me with the copy machine. Mr Patel looks like this man, and he’s kind like this man.

Lakshmi and Maya were easy; I’ve worked with youth for 20 years, and I know how funny and fun and annoying they are.

What I see as I consider them all is this: I start out with a character like me and a couple people whom I give characteristics that are like people I know. Brushstrokes of reality just to get me started. But as I create the story they become who they need to be in the story, and my work is in fleshing them out. I have to pay very close attention to what they do in the story, and I have to understand why they do it, and not only I terms of story dynamics. They all have to be real in their own stories even if their own stories never emerge. They develop from the story itself.

It’s the same with place. I have to make it up, but for a reason.

I have even never been to Montclair New Jersey, but I lived near there quite a bit as a child, and I loved the name Claire  – St Claire was kind of a female St Francis, who was a big hero to me from very early on. I had a little paperback book called The Lives of the Saints, and while I was too young to read many of the stories, which are mostly pretty gory, I did learn that St Francis could apparently talk to animals, and somehow I learned that St Claire was a female St Francis.  One of the first churches we went to was St Francis Church in Edison new Jersey. This might be a good time to say that while I was never a believer when it came to God in the clouds or Jesus and miracles or guardian angels, I loved going to Mass. The Latin chanting, the music, the priest in his beautiful robes. So I learned that St Francis talked to animals, and they to him. I actually equated him with Shari Lewis. When I got a Lamb Chops puppet for Christmas I was disappointed that she didn’t talk. My mother explained that Lamb Chop only talked to Shari Lewis. I remember thinking Aha! Just like St Francis.

Is this a good reason for making Montclair the beginning of the story?

These beginnings are sacred to me: my love of the drama of the liturgy and my love of animals and the natural world. So it made sense for Montclair to be the beginning of the story.

CC: I’d love to know a little more about Bullfrog, the unassuming hound-dog like companion that Pattianne calls her “spirit guide…St. Francis’s Brother in Christ.” He’s made famous in gracing the cover of your book. Were you anticipating that he would make the cover design?
 
JR: Bullfrog. That’s an easy one – he was my first dog (as a grown up.) We’d always had dogs when I was a kid, and a few of them were basset hounds. When I was about 20 I got this basset mix puppy, whose name was Bullfrog but whom I renamed Frisco,  after the little mountain town I was living in then. He became my hitchhiking  buddy – I was the girl on the side of the road with a dog, thumb out, just me and him. There were some dark years there. I had him until he was 17.

When he died I cried for a year. I’ve had other dogs – I’m on numbers 5, 6 and 7 now. But he was the first creature that I had to take care of, and taking care of him meant taking care of myself. Get home at night. Make sure there’s some food around. Like Pattianne and Bullfrog, alone against the world.

And I do find animals, dogs in particular, to be spirit guides. I am kind of crazy for dogs.

Frisco has been gone for 40 years, and here he is again. I find his presence both in the story and on the cover compelling. There is my past, haunting me.

And no, I never thought of Bullfrog being part of the cover. Gigi Little, the artist who created the cover, came up with that. I love it. She looked at a few old fuzzy Polaroids I have of him, and she got him perfectly, which thrills me. The cover speaks to a gentler, funnier side of the story.

CC: One of the things I love most about your book–about Pattianne, really–is the way she takes in the world around her, often in bits and pieces. Small bits and pieces…a bobbing Adam’s Apple, the short painted fingernails of a woman who drinks too much, “Cuticles, too, bright red.” Sometimes we never get a full glimpse of a character, but we get just enough details from Pattianne’s perspective that we know that character. Putting those kinds of telling details together in such a way isn’t easy. But I know you write poetry as well as novels. Does your craft in poetry play a big part in how you craft your novels?

JR: My poetry owes much to the tendency of the ordinary. I love the drama of objects and the physical world.

When we pay close attention to the sensory world we are strangers in a strange land. This may be the influence of Alice in Wonderland, which was my favorite book as a child, and quite possibly still is. I still read it every so often.

I love how the concrete world can be stepping stones through a story.

Sound is also important to me. Mark Twain said “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”   I understand this to go beyond content. The sound of words can build create or ease tension and can affect pace.

A longer line in poetry goes by a little slower. A short line speeds things up. Same with sentences, and clauses within sentences, in prose.

And vowels and consonants have specific sounds that resonate in the body. Harsh sounds like Ks and Ts cause tension. Low vowel sounds like Os  or short Es can create calm or dread. High sounds like long Es or long Is can create a sense of excitement or panic.

CC: What are you reading these days?

JR: Ack! I always have several books going at once. I eat up UK crime novels (Anne Cleeves, PD James, Elizabeth George) and am always looking for new ones. I love the way language is so different from character to character, and the landscapes of the north of Britain. They usually stay on my bedside table for when I wake up and can’t go back to sleep in the middle of the night. That’s when I need a good plot to carry me along.

I usually have beefy non-fiction book going. I just finished The Architecture of Happiness (Alain de Botton) which is actually about architecture. Now I’m reading The Gene (Siddhartha Mukkergee).

I had to stop everything to read the new Anne Tyler. And dear friends gave me the new Carl Hiasson, which means I won’t get any work done on Sunday.

And poetry: Norman Dubie, Jack Gilbert and Brigit Pegeen Kelly tend to float around the house these days. And I love poetry essays. Right now I’m reading What Light Can Do (Robert Hass)
David Biespiel has a new memoir called A Place of Exodus: Home, memory and Texas. This one I’ll probably save for when I can dive deep into it. Like take it away for a rainy beach weekend. He was one of my poetry mentors at the Attic Institute and this is prose but his sentences are each small journeys.

CC: Favorite Pandemic Pastime?

JR: Watching re-runs of Perry Mason and Big Bang Theory.

Going for long walks in Lone Fir Cemetery. It’s a big and it’s easy to veer wide around d other walkers. It’s a pioneer cemetery, and I read the gravestones and it helps me remember that there are entire lives that have come and gone during other times, troubled times and peaceful times alike. Gravestones are beautiful. I’ve always loved going into cemeteries anyway, and now it feels particularly powerful to be among the dead. 

And while it’s not really a pastime, I like getting up at 3 AM. As do many people I have trouble sleeping now. I finally gave trying up at one point and just started getting up and going downstairs and puttering about. I find it a particularly good time to read those beefy non-fiction books I mentioned  I find it soothing to be up then. Since the shut-down the streets of my urban neighborhood are depressingly still. The busy little cafes are closed, and the shops are closed. No music from the bars, no outbursts of rowdy laughter. At 3AM all that stillness feels normal. I look out and see lights on in here and there and know there are other people awake and it’s comforting. It plays hell with my productivity though. I would like to cultivate the habit of napping.

JOANNA ROSE is the author of the award-winning novel Little Miss Strange (winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Prize, and finalist for the Oregon Book Award). Her poetry, essays and short fiction (as well as other pieces that don’t fall into any of those categories) have appeared in Oregon Humanities, High Desert Journal, VoiceCatcher, Calyx, and Bellingham Review, among others. Her essay “That Thing With Feathers” was cited as Notable in 2015 Best American Essays. She works with youth in Portland Public Schools and cohosts the long-running critique group Pinewood Table. When she’s not at the beach she lives in Portland OR with her husband and, at any given time, several dogs.

A Small Crowd of Strangers (Forest Avenue Press) is part slightly sideways spiritual journey, part coming of age: a middle-aged librarian from New Jersey accidentally gets married and ends up in a convenience store on the wild west coast of Vancouver Island playing Bible Scrabble with a Korean physicist and a drunk priest.

DON’T FORGET: Enter the book giveaway by Wednesday, September 30th, for a chance to win a copy of A Small Crowd of Strangers!

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Sunday Series: Gail Hosking on Why I Write

In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Gail Hosking who shares on the need to pay attention and on writing to remember.

When you grow up surrounded by the Cold War in Europe behind the so-called Iron Curtain, and you live among American soldiers trying to protect you from the next war, and the remnants of Dachau with its ghastly photographs are only an hour away and you are a Girl Scout who promises to make the world a better place, then you begin to pay attention to what is around you. You keep a diary. You spend hours with imaginative paper doll play. You write letters to pen pals. You listen to your teachers who tell you about the universe far from your small apartment on an American Army base in the Alps.

When the world around you speaks another language and you don’t understand all of it, you pay close attention to what people do. You stare a lot and bring your attention to everything going on around you. You watch your father lean his chair back with his arms behind his head to tell war stories you will never understand. When there is nothing else for young girls on an army base to do except the base library, you read a lot of books and get caught up in the world further away, the one with the likes of Nancy Drew and Clara Barton and the Vermont Mountain Boys. When you are a curious child, you ask a lot of questions, desperate for answers.

When you are isolated and lonely on your grandfather’s farm in southern Illinois while your father is away at war again, you write more letters and begin to feel the earth’s vibrations. You notice the suffering everywhere. You carry it with you.

If you are someone whose thoughts connect up with other thoughts floating by in the universe, you must seek somewhere to put them. You feel you need to tell others of those connections. In your thirties you take a memoir class for the heck of it and then an essay course, then find yourself sinking into that world of words so comfortably, so at home that you wonder why it took you this long to find that world.

When you arrive close to the age your father was when he was killed at war, you suddenly want to know more about that war and about your father. You go in search of the photographs and letters he left behind. You do your best to recreate a relationship with a man who died while you are still in high school. You go to the warzone and take notes. You are determined to put it into words even when an editor tells you that Viet Nam is passé.  You know it’s not because you have spoken with the aging soldiers, you have read the books, and you carry that war in your body.

When you finally make it to graduate school for creative writing, you sit with Robert Bly at breakfast who says he writes a poem every morning before he gets out of bed, and you are so taken with that thought, so glad to hear of another writer’s obsessions, that you begin to ignore your husband saying that writing poetry is a hobby. You want to spend the rest of your life with a pen.   

When you read Stephen Dunn’s poem Emptiness, you know what he means about desire or dreams, how they can’t be filled, “only alchemized.” Thus, as he said, “many times it’s become a paragraph or a page.” You wonder how people get through life without story, without words on paper. Talk to any artist. Any writer. Anyone praying on their knees. You’ve learned that empty can be seen, touched, and felt. You keep writing, year after year like a bird in flight landing on that naked tree across your parking lot.            

Saying you write to make sense of the world sounds like cliché, something you’ve read in many writing textbooks. It’s true, of course, but it’s more than that. You need to make the connections for others to see. You need the intellectual struggle to bring thoughts together, one by one, as if in doing so there’s a path forward or a road backwards. You need to remember.

GAIL HOSKING is the author of the memoir Snake’s Daughter: The Roads in and out of War (U of Iowa Press), the poetry chapbook The Tug (Finishing Line Press), and a recent book of poems (March 2020) Retrieval from Main Street Rag Press. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and taught at Rochester Institute of Technology for 15 years.

Her essays and poems have appeared in such places as Nimrod International, The Florida Review, Post Road, Reed Magazine, Waxwing and Assay. Several pieces have been anthologized. She’s been a finalist for several contests and her essays have appeared as “most notable” in Best American Essays.

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Q&A with Erika Dreifus, author of BIRTHRIGHT: Poems

“You say that the Bible is just an old book, / But when I consider the story of a Levite’s concubine, / I wonder what has changed since those ancient times.”

~ “On Reading Chapter 19 in the Book of Judges” in Birthright

Give me a box of old letters, a shelf full of ancient books, or a roll of microfilm and I will spend all day thumbing through pages, scanning old newspapers, studying the text, digging for connections between words of the past and my understanding of the present. Rarely, though, do I pick up my old King James version of the Bible, except to fan the pages for a bookmark or note I may have left behind when I was thirteen or to look back on what I was dreaming about in 1981 (“Christi + Kyle”) hoping God was listening.

Birthright (Kelsay Books), a new book of poems by Erika Dreifus, gives one pause to reconsider the ancient texts we grew up with, if only to gain new insight into the ways they influence who we have become. From there, her poems reflect on the Jewish experience of her grandparents as well as herself, on the work of past poets, on life and death, celebration and sorrow.

Birthright as a collection is, as author Matthew Lippman says, “the spellbound silence of history that helps to bind you with the people right next to you and to the ‘ancestral spirits that mingle above.'” A perfect example of the reasons why we write, and why we read.

I’m thrilled to host Erika, who talks more about Birthright, and to offer a giveaway. Enter by Tuesday, November 12th for a chance to win a copy of her new book!

Now, welcome Erika!

Christi Craig (CC): In Poet Laureate Joy Harjo’s Inaugural reading she says, “[poetry] emerges from the soul of a community, from a community’s history, mythological structures, the heart of the people….” Your collection speaks to this with poems that build on your own history, Jewish culture and experience, and historical texts. Writing from a close study of our past can provide unique insight into our current understanding of, well, everything around us. What insights have you gained from writing these poems and putting them together in this book?

Erika Dreifus

Erika Dreifus (ED): I’ve always been pretty self-aware, and attuned to time, place, and environment. But for lack of a better term, I think that I’m even more “anchored,” more in conversation with my past and present thanks to these poems and the book. I feel enriched by newer discoveries, approaches, and experiences.

CC: Several of your poems like “The Book of Vashti” and “Complicity” were inspired by biblical texts. Some poems give voice to women who were silenced (these poems in particular reveal ancient “Me Too” stories). Many, in the way they are written, connect narratives from a far-distant past with affairs of the immediate present (here I am thinking of “On Reading Chapter 19 in the Book of Judges”). For some who might not be familiar with religious texts, what do you hope readers gain from these poems?

ED: I’m not sure that I set out to do this, but I suppose that one hope is that some readers may be moved to revisit or explore the religious texts themselves. I grew up with a working knowledge of only some of the texts—I arrived at the texts and commentaries grounding “Complicity” and “On Reading Chapter 19,” for example, only through adult study in the past few years. Even the understanding I carried from childhood of Vashti—who plays a role in a major Jewish holiday that I grew up observing—was vastly simplified from the version I’ve explored more recently in the company of other grown-ups. And perhaps that message may be extrapolated to other texts and traditions—all of this material has been handed down to us, and it’s never too late to (re)consider it.

CC: Outside of Birthright, you also have a collection of short stories (Quiet Americans, 2011) and a long list of essays and articles. For you, are there certain stories or experiences better suited for one genre versus another? Or, another question might be, are there certain topics easier to approach in a poem versus an essay?

ED: I love this question (even as I doubt my ability to answer it!). In my early days as a fiction writer, I thought often about what makes a fiction writer realize that something is “meant” for a novel instead of, say, a short story. So pondering these questions is not new to me, even if I don’t have much more confidence in the answers.

I do think that brief observations or vignettes—I think here of a poem in the collection about my mother’s typewriter, and one about walking through fresh snow in the city—are so impressionistic that they’re better suited to the poetic form than to the essay. On the other hand, I’ve found that sometimes, compressing what readers may consider more weighty narrative (and sometimes political material) into poetic form can make the work different from—and perhaps more compelling than—a more conventional “think-piece.”

CC: What are you reading these days?

ED: I almost feel as though a better question is “what are you not reading these days—which books are stacked in your home waiting for you to get to?” As I receive your question, I’ve just cracked open a fascinating history that I’ve been meaning to read for some months: Peter Schrag’s The World of Aufbau: Hitler’s Refugees in America. It’s a book grounded in the history of a German-language newspaper that I can remember seeing in my own grandparents’ home.

I’m also (re)reading everything that I’ve assigned to the undergraduates in my “21st-Century Jewish Literature” course. At the moment, that means that I’m returning to Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, which is even more stunning to me now than it was when I first read it 15 years ago.

CC: This season, you are teaching, your book has just been published, you continue editing a free newsletter for writers once a month with resources and information on submission opportunities, and you post weekly blogs with news of jobs for writers and curated lists of other writerly links (phew!). To keep up your creativity and energy, what’s a favorite activity you find both restful and inspiring?

ED: Naps. And exercise. I’m lucky enough to live fairly close to New York’s famed Central Park, and I try to work in a jog (or a walk) there several times each week.

Sometimes it’s difficult to get myself out of my chair (or to rouse myself from a nap!). But invariably, I feel refreshed after that time moving outside. And I find that ideas both come to me and sort themselves out during the time away from the desk, too.

~

Erika Dreifus is the author of Birthright: Poems (Kelsay Books, November 2019). She is also the author of Quiet Americans: Stories, a short-story collection that is largely inspired by the histories and experiences of her paternal grandparents, German Jews who escaped Nazi persecution and immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s. Erika earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University, where she taught history, literature, and writing for several years.

Currently, she lives in New York City, where she is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College of The City University of New York. Since 2004, Erika has published The Practicing Writer, a free (and popular) e-newsletter for writers of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.

DON’T FORGET: Enter the giveaway by Tuesday, November 12th,
for a chance to win a copy of Birthright: Poems