It's a GIRL!

I am very pleased to announce that ERRATA has been born, and I now have a new website. Sooner or later this information will make its way there, but for now you can purchase inscribed copies of ERRATA and/or In the Carnival of Breathing here through PayPal >>>. You can also visit each book's respective press website by clicking on each cover image.

For more information on News & Events, etc., please visit me at www.lisafaycoutley.com.

Thanks so much for your support!

xo,
LF

All On One's Own

Or: alone.

It's been far too long since I've said anything here, which means that I want to say everything at once and end up saying nothing (or that's been the case for months).

I wrote my last post here at the beginning of what I thought would be a happy time. Nine days later, my father died the day before I was slated to begin teaching at a new college in a new place where I was living for the first time in my life without my sons. In fact, for the first time in my entire life I was living alone and in this amazing ranch that I would be unceremoniously thrown out of during finals week--four months after my last post here. My luck with landlords--I tell ya. Oy. So.

Now that I am beginning to feel a bit normal(ish) again, I've found myself steeped in ideas as of late, but--having been under a 4/4 course load at a teaching-centered college--I'm finding myself starting and sputtering this past week. It's going to take a moment to grease the wheels, I suppose, and I should be more gentle and patient with myself.

After my PhD dissertation defense, which happened 10 days after my father died, my Jewish professor told me that I shouldn't have even been there. I should have been a few days out of sitting shiva with a ripped left breast pocket or sleeve or some other way to say, here--my heart's been shredded, and I'm trying to wait until such a time that I can say it will never be possible to suture it back together again, but I can keep walking just the same.

Alone: not with all but all on one's own. And when aren't we, I think? Ten years ago, I stood just outside of the garage and listened to my then love tell me he was afraid of dying. The wind was wild that night, pulling my hair all Medusa around me, and there were purple fits of lightning in every direction. My mother had been dead one, maybe two weeks. I can't remember if I told him I thought he was stupid or if just thought it, but I felt a little sorry for him and also knew even then that our love would never be the same because how can a woman lie down each night next to another human--with whom she should share all things--if he can't understand that it's not the dying that's frightening. It's the watching others who you love go before you.

The morning my father died, I went out on the deck of that amazing ranch to see if the sun was pushing up over the mountains. I was on the phone with a friend. Maybe she was saying something. Again, I can't recall. As I came around the corner, there was a wall of rain falling straighter than I've ever seen rain fall, and it was falling in only part of the yard--the sun behind it lighting everything into tinsel, like standing inside a rain lamp. That rain stood and fell so silver and still for about one minute, never moving forward or back, and then--it was just gone. I wept not in sadness but in awe. It was so amazing and so brief and I saw only a smidgen of it.

I don't categorize myself. I believe what my gut tells me to be true, and it coincides with no organized religion. I still don't know what to make of that rain. I suppose there's nothing to be made of that rain. Yet in that moment, I felt it was there for me alone--as if the very rain fell to give me a sign. How fucking arrogant, really. I joked that maybe once we're dead we can make it rain. It'd be just like my dad to show off on his first day freed of that unbreathable body he'd been locked in, burning for years.

Of course that rain was a lovely coincidence and perhaps the most apt metaphor for life--something we're lucky to experience in all of its brevity and beauty. To think that rain fell for me or anyone simply speaks to the human need not to be alone. So there, I've said it, damn it--I'm human. I joke, but I'm only now remembering that I'm a walker. Since I was born there has been a storm whirring around me--mattresses, old sweaters, a favorite spoon, two fists--or within me, and I have continued to walk, gashed knees and bruised palms and all.

It's hard to feel alone in a room of people, like yesterday when I sat in my doctoral robes at convocation where I was surrounded by thousands of people but not one of them who truly knows me or loves me, and it's even harder to feel alone inside yourself, such as I have many days in the stretch between these posts. And I'm sad to know that I am very far from alone in that.

SO--before we commence with the wrist splitting--some good news and some people to thank.

First of all--Sean Thomas Dougherty--for accepting my essay "Why to Run Racks," which more completely considers my love of pool and that amazing rain, to be included in the the forthcoming anthology, Double Kiss: Contemporary Writers on the Art of Billiards (Mammoth Books, 2016). And really just for always having my back.

To Marie Gauthier and Tupelo Press for selecting my poem "Never & One Thousand Years"--in which I was finally able to zoom in on one poignant moment of my mother's death and also able to incorporate a line I've been circling for ten years--for inclusion in Thirty Days: The Best of Tupelo Press' 30/30, which will be available for purchase any day now.

To Ron Riekki for including my poems "My Lake" and "Errata" in Here: Women Writing on Michigan's Upper Peninsula (MSU Press, 2015), which is now available for purchase!

To my professors and cohort at the University of Utah--I learned so much from you, and you made the hard road of the PhD (as it was for me and my kids) totally worth it.

I'm also super stoked and endlessly thankful to the folks at the Kenyon Review for featuring some of my poems AND for selecting them as their Poem of the Week this week.

Finally: here is the cover of my first, full-length collection--Errata--which won the 2014 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and is forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press in September 2015. I couldn't be more excited. A million thanks to all of the folks at COR and SIUP, and thank you to Eric Wilson for his amazing artwork and to Kelly Brooks for her amazing design eye.

More book related news (and likely more hokey posts) to come in the near future. Soon I'll post news of a website here, and I will begin to list reading events, etc., for any interested parties (and anyone who is patient and/or loves me enough to have gotten this far in this post).

xoxoxo,
LF

Life at Six Thousand Feet

is all windows & skies & juniper trees. Again hemmed by mountains but where the air is breathable and the relief is unbelievable, even if I’m holding both fists against the guilt in my gut for feeling grateful for a bit of peace in an extraordinarily lovely place. 

The cat’s gone nocturne. I’ve learned I can drown a mouse. And I’m now the proud owner, more or less, of two dogs so in love I wonder if I’ve ever felt anything comparable. Nighttime I separate them by glass, but Sophie (Flan’s new love) is always waiting when we wake. She can hear me stir in bed from outside. She’s lovely, and I cannot beat her, no matter how many times my elderly rancher neighbor brings me a rolled, duct taped newspaper and tells me I must hurt her feelings if she’s ever going to go home again. Who is he to say where home is. Who am I to “train” another man’s dog. To deny my dog (or his) some love on this terrain where only the tenacious survive.

I didn’t think home for me was nestled here at an elevation where my sinuses feel like peach pits on a spit in the sun and I don’t eat right without anyone to cook for, but I guess home is where the parts of my heart are slogging slowly across the floor to one another again.

God I’ve missed cartwheels across the floor and laughing at the absolute grandeur of a sun that day after day presses over the mountains and dives down among others each night. I have a few friends to thank for helping me to get here and for allowing me to stay. You know who you are, and I love you, even if I’m a controlling, micromanaging, neurotic freak who worries too much and has to talk herself through the fear of every doorway. Fuck it. Life. Love it.

xo, 

LF 

Blog Tour

First of all, my sincerest apologies to Lisa Ampleman, who invited me to partake of this blog tour that highlights writers' processes. I'm terribly late in posting this but grateful to have been included.

Lisa Ampleman is the author of a book of poetry, Full Cry (NFSPS Press, 2013), and a chapbook, I’ve Been Collecting This to Tell You (Kent State University Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, 32 Poems, Poetry Daily and Verse Daily.

You can find her blogpost here (and thanks again, Lisa!). 

And my small (if tardy) contribution-- 

1) What are you working on?

Currently, I’m a syllabi-writing machine, which isn’t necessarily the art of which you want to know, but it requires the same balance and honing as any writing project. Creatively, I’ve been dormant for a bit. I finished my PhD dissertation this year, and I’ve been patting that putty from palm to palm for a while, trying to mold it into a book that explores distance as a way to find closeness otherwise impossible. The personas goes to space, fall in love when they shouldn’t, fall out of it when they wish they weren’t, love the earth and despair for her, and hope to find the same proximity from the self that a human in space finds from Earth. The poems explore spacing and a lack of punctuation in a way that my previous work doesn’t. They also play with the idea of the pre-lingual versus the lingual self. Oh, and clouds … lots of clouds.

2) How does your work differ from others’ work in the same genre?

I suppose it differs in the same way as anyone’s work when they are attempting to make genuine discovers inside him/herself. No one else feels the world the way I do (and no, that shouldn’t sound as adolescent as it might), which is to say that I experience joy, sadness, motherhood, loneliness, laughter, death, etc., in the way that only Lisa Fay can, and I hope that translates in the way I build poems. I strive to be honest and harsh and real with myself and my language, which is the only way by which I can try to identify myself and my surroundings, even if identification via sign and signifier is only ever an approximation.

A mentor once told me that I write poems that make people uncomfortable. I’m certainly not the first or only poet to do so, but it was never a thing I set out to do. It just so happened that what was gnawing at me enough to demand the time and attention I give to lines of verse happen to be things that hurt to look at. In many ways, and I’ve said this elsewhere, writing (for me) signifies a desire to live, to keep moving through the world, so I try to chase down and tackle—or sometimes allow myself to be tackled by—impossible ache and confusion because it’s really either me or it, I guess. And I refuse to give up.

3) Why do you write what you do?

Don’t you hate it when you answer the next question before you get to it?

4) How does your writing process work?

My process depends, in part, on whether or not I’m working on a deadline or allowing myself time to ruminate. If the former, I glue myself to the chair and either start tinkering with the line that’s been nagging at me, or I read around in an area of interest (such as clouds), as a way to ignite interest in sound and idea. Very often I get really geeked out on the metaphorical crossover between science and emotion. From there, a poem can almost build itself. Once I’m interested, I’m in. If the latter, well, there may not be a process to speak of, really, but it’s taken me years to get to a point where I can allow myself to go long periods without writing and not feel guilty for it or worry that I’ve lost something.

I guess anyone who knows me might be surprised to know that it’s really one of the only areas of my life where I’ve learned to roll with it and not get my undies in a bunch if things aren’t pouring out of me. I know that I’ll return to myself, to my language, and to the extreme pleasure I take in making discoveries through the process of exploring pattern, expectation, and fulfillment or destruction of such.

(& as a bonus, two of the faces that made me late to post)

LF's Annual Cross-Rockies Move

is on in t-minus 14 days, SO I have little to say that doesn't involve packing, etc., but I AM excited to post with a couple new writing-related tidbits.

First of all big, big thanks to the editors at Tupelo Quarterly for including four poems from my second manuscript in the most recent issue, which is rocking, and which you should really read from start to finish. These poems are still like strangers to me in a way, and it's nice to have so many of them in conversation with one another in one place.

And thank you to the editors at 42 Miles Press for selecting tether (my second ms) as a finalist on its first run out of the gate! Congratulations to Tracey Knapp!

Now--to finish stacking all the breakables in the least breakable way and selling all the possessions and trekking once again to a higher, drier place and planning the courses I'll teach at my brand new position at Snow College. So much happening. So much to be mired by. So much reaching to see the light these days, which is why I wanted to stop and share a bit of good stuff here.

More intelligible posts to come in the months ahead...

xoxo,
LF