Becky’s Pick of the Month (Crow Mercies is Magically Delicious)

This month, we’re excited to release Crow Mercies by Penelope Scambly Schott. I was personally very drawn to this manuscript early in the production process. Schott’s poetry has a magical realism quality to it that I admire in fiction authors like Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez, and Toni Morrison (also, Kathleen Alcalá, who published this fantastic book), but that unusual to find in the contemporary poetry of the Pacific Northwest.  Her imaginative narratives push the boundaries of what is metaphor and what is description, to a place that my “poetry gut” desperately wants to go.

My favorite poem, “Holes in the World” is a good example of what I mean by this.  In other poems, her mother is a Calypso Orchid, a homeless woman lives in someone’s closet, and the speaker sits with an ancient Croatian woman, but in “Holes in the World,” Schott’s subject is a bear husband.

She starts off with an italicized section that establishes our interconnectivity, “breath from the mouth/ blood from the womb // vertebrae of dead whales / reamed by the seas.”

In the verse that follows, the speaker is taken by a bear husband “to wive/ and we mated in a cave.”  The poem is broken into couplets to better illustrate this coupling of nature and human, and freedom and captivity.

I tell my husband the bear

I am not you

This, I explain is the source

of our lonesomeness

paw to paw

and the air between us.

It’s writing that dares to venture into the strange and the magical that is brave enough to say something real.  While Schott’s writing is still fairly linear and deeply rooted in narratives, her subjects and imaginative leaps twist the experience of the reader in surprising ways.

While I tend to think of Schott’s work as magical realism, Poet Peter Sears in this blurb calls it surrealism. How would you classify Schott’s work? Or, does her poetry resist this kind of categorization?

Remember, all month Crow Mercies is 20% off and has free shipping. Don’t miss your chance to read it for yourself!

–Rebecca Olson, Assistant Editor

Staff Pick of the Week

Staff Pick Discount: FREE SHIPPING

This week our staff pick is Open Heart, a full length collection by Judith Sornberger, to celebrate the news that a CD including a song written to her poem “Pioneer Child’s Doll” has received several Grammy nominations. “Pioneer Child’s Doll” appeared in Open Heart in 1993.

Judith writes, “The song by that title is part of a song cycle called ‘Within These Spaces’ on a CD of composer Lori Laitman’s songs by the same title. In addition to the other nominations for the album as a whole, the song cycle has been nominated under the ‘contemporary classical composition’ category.”

We on the staff still cannot get enough of her poems, even seventeen years later. Hilda Raz, editor of Prairie Schooner, praised Open Heart saying “Judith Sornberger’s superb first collection of poems is about the fracture of conventional wisdom under the pressure of women’s experience…. The poet’s control of form holds her readers in place while Sornberger steals, retells, and resignifies women’s stories.”

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Feminism Friday: “Feminist Press: You Mean, Like, Books for Girls?”

As an editor of CALYX Press, a 34 year-old feminist publisher of art and literature that has published the likes of Barbara Kingsolver and Jane Hirshfield, it’s necessary to sometimes explain to curious parties what it means to be a feminist publisher.

I know what it means to be a feminist.  To me, it means a freedom of choice.  It’s not about women or men necessarily; it’s about the freedom that we deserve as human beings to choose what kind of lives we make for ourselves.  To some, this means the choice to have children, marry a partner, and be a stay at home mom.  For others, it means traveling the world or owning a motorcycle.  For me, it means living in Oregon apart from my family and devoting my life to books and writing because that’s what I love—I’m grateful that I had the ability to make that decision for myself.

So how does that freedom translate into publishing? Well, for one, the women of CALYX have always had freedom of editorial choice.  All of our editorial decisions are made collectively—that means that every submission that comes into the office is read by at least two women.  Twenty-five percent of all submissions are then discussed by 6 women and voted on—we sometimes hold stories and poems to read again later.  That means that we practice equality and fairness in our decision-making.

Freedom of choice is also big around the office in how we run our non-profit.  We work collectively to get jobs done, from our Director down to our wonderful student interns—everyone is encouraged to share their ideas about how to get the word out about different projects.   You should have seen us Wednesday crowded into the backroom, every staff member sticking stamps onto envelopes because that’s what we needed to get done and we all wanted to help.

We also choose to publish exceptional work by women that is representative of that freedom to be ourselves.  Some of the poetry and prose that goes into the journal has nothing to do with women or personal identity.  One story going into the new Summer Journal Vol. 26:2, for example, has a homeless man as the main protagonist (you’ll be excited when Lego Bionic Moses comes into the story).  On the other hand, some poems in Vol. 26:2 deeply personal and intimately explain experiences from women’s perspectives: what it’s like to give birth, look for a job as a woman, learn to Kayak for the first time.  The editors of CALYX choose work that we feel is well-written, interesting to read, and represents some important part of the diverse and dynamic experience of women.  There’s no one perspective that embodies everything that it means to be a woman (or a feminist, for that matter), so representing as many different viewpoints as we can is a good place to start.

What do you think about this? How does a business, a person, or a piece of writing be “feminist”?

-Rebecca Olson, Associate Editor

Staff Pick of the Week

Thank you to all for the great response on our first pick of the week: The Violet Shyness of Their Eyes: Notes from Nepal. As many of you know, CALYX’s mission is to provide the finest art and literature by women to a wide audience. We’ve decided to do discounts each week on a favorite book or journal of the staff. That way, more people can have the chance to fall in love with the many writers, poets, and artists of CALYX!

Staff Pick of the Week- Beverly McFarland (senior editor) recommends:

Vol. 20:3, Summer 2002, is my “Journal Pick of the Week”! Because included in all the wonderful work is one of my most favorite stories we’ve ever published—“Wings” by Teresa S. Mathes. Who among us has never dreamed of literally having “wings” and being able to really fly? Women in Mathes’ story are born with wings! Great summer reading about girls learning to test their freedom.

Enjoy our discount this week.

- Beverly McFarland, senior editor

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