Here goes-- more venting-- ... You don't have to listen or reassure me if you're tired of my dips and plateaus followed by my literary fiats. Eject now-- or not. I am writing this online because I don't want to be alone in my pain....
My old nemesis Insomnia has returned. I can't sleep. I've been up for days, getting fewer and fewer hours, crashing and getting six or seven hours, then up again and getting fewer hours, to crash again. I hate this.
Nothing makes me want to jump off a cliff more than not sleeping. How ironic that I've named the new blog The Spirited Word... I am in so much trouble.
Something about lying down in my so peaceful, pretty room in my apartment makes me feel vulnerable and vigilant. I think it's that I am caught between lives-- the old one in which I was afraid, stuck, helpless, and the new one in which I'm busy, happy and I feel like I'm about to turn 62 with some good years ahead.
Yesterday when I got tied up in my underwear about not resting I went out to "the place"--- actually D's house now, where we are horseless but still up to the ears in yellow cats and kittens. I went into my old room where I often rest for a few hours in between our great talks about writing....
I lay down in the musty, torn-lace dark and lay there from 4 in the afternoon until 9. I did get a nap and then I didn't want to kill all the cats: I was glad to see the little beggars..
But then I came home and it all started again; I've been torturing myself with the following, running the laments I've run before and that you've been so patient with::
I got angry at the surgeon who didn't tell me my leg was deforming and fled to the country where it deformed some more. Now, I'm stuck with a crooked leg three inches shorter than the other and the rest of my life in a walker and brace unless I face it all.
I think of the surgeon's saw near my leg again, which has taken three years to become strong enough for me to use it to walk with a cane-- and I wince, just thinking about it. How do you get past that? (yes, I have a new therapist, but she's so young I don't have a whole lot of confidence in her yet.)
And how do you get your trust back? How do you reclaim an innocence about all of the things and people you lose faith in and shut down toward-- the Church, doctors, people I was once close to.
So, the writer with a novel, a memoir, a collection of poetry, two blogs, who looked forward to a work day, is tied to the stake of exhaustion again.
I am tired. I want somebody else to do it, be the grown up and take care of me. I am so jealous of people who have husbands and wives. They've committed to support each other in adversity.
Years ago I had a child in my Poets in the Schools program write: "When you're alone, it makes you Capone." No shit!
These are the things that work on me when I can't sleep. This is the lonely corner I occupy at my lowest. I have been running, trying to feel safe in my own home and in my own skin for a very long time and have had to chip away at this immense chunk of self-doubt.
Chip, chip, chip, chip....tink tink tink tink.....
WELCOME! BENVENUTI!
Professor Jenne' Rodey Andrews, M.F.A., is a highly regarded American poet, critic and memoirist. Recent work has appeared in former Autumn House Publisher Michael Simms' Vox Populi (over fifteen poems) The Passionate Transitory, Belletrist Coterie, The Adirondack Review and elsewhere.
Andrews' current ms of poetry Beautiful Dust was a finalist for the 2014 Autumn House and she recently withdrew the work from Salmon Ltd, Ireland to protest unmoderated bashing of American writers by Irish writers on the press's social media pages.
Her most recent collection, Blackbirds Dance in the Empire of Love, lauded by Robert Bly and endorsed by poets Jim Moore, Dawn Potter and Patricia Kirkpatrick, appeared from Finishing Line Press 2013. A booklength collection Beautiful Dust was 2014 finalist for the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and solicited by Salmon Press, Ireland. Turning on work set in the West and her native Southwest the collection is under submission to 2019 publication prizes.
Andrews is currently hard at work on two new memoirs: The Shame Garden: A Woman Writes of Isolation, Despair and Self-Redemption, which in intensely wrought and imagistic prose poetry chronicles the anatomy of shame; it is the poet's late-in-life tour d'force, sending the reader through Dante's circles of hell, the sewers of Paris ala Les Mis, mano a mano confrontations with the Alien mater familias, fusing literary and vintage cinematic works in an elliptical dance with human history and experience of being Other. The poet has no idea of what will become of this work but hopes it finds a home as memoir with a small press.
A four part interview with Andrews went live at poet Maureen Doallas's blog Writing without Paper in 2010.
Other collections include the full-length Reunion, Lynx House Press, The Dark Animal of Liberty, Leaping Mountain Press, and In Pursuit of the Family, edited and published by Robert Bly and the Minnesota Writers Publishing House.
Her work has been anthologized in Heartland II, Northern Illinois University Press, 25 Minnesota Vols. I and II, Wingbone: An Anthology of Colorado Poetry, Women Poets of the Twin Cities, Oil and Water and Other Things that Don't Mix, and elsewhere.
Essays have appeared in MPR's Magazine, The Colorado Review, The Twin Falls Times News, and miscellaneous journals.
IIt is Prof. Andrews' belief that one's collection of poetry must be judged on the quality of its craft, voice, and language, not its themes.
With Mr. Bly the memoirist Patricia Hampl wrote a forward to her first collection and is considered the "mother" of the modern American memoir although she arguably shares this title with Mary Karr for Karr's The Liar's Club. Andrews mentored Karr in Minneapolis when the former was circa 19.
Professor Andrews has had an illustrious teaching career at Colorado State University and the University of Colorado where she taught prelaw students in the making of argument and the issues-oriented seminar The American West. She was the highest rated instructor in the University Writing program during her tenure at Boulder.
Currently Professor Andrews writes daily at age 70, having been rendered housebound in 2007 in a fall from a horse, at home with her lover and companion of thirty years the fiction writer Jack Brooks, ten new poems a month, and is working on an additional memoir about her pioneer roots, "Territory Fever: The Story of an Albuquerque Family," posted as chapters are finished to Loquaciously Yours where the poet has produced over 450 essays in the past decade on a variety of topics as well as book reviews. Upcoming: a review of Ethna McKiernan's new Salmon Collection.
Ms. Andrews is also a Civil Rights Advocate advocating in 2019 for the civil rights of the poet Ping Wang who recently won the AWP Award for Memoir.
In 2015, after a long battle, Andrews extracted her MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Colorado State University, begun and finished in the 80's, self-advocating under the Americans with Disabilities Act. In fact Andrews was instrumental in the Colorado Commission on Higher Education's approval of the MFA at CSU.
She is a literary fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Minnesota Arts Board Fellowship, was short-listed for a Bush Foundation Fellowship, and was full-time Poet in Residence for the St. Paul Schools from '74-78.
She lived in St. Paul from 1971-78 during the first wave of the Twin Cities literary renaissance, one of the first poets to inaugurate The Loft Literary Center, co-founding Women Poets of the Twin Cities which as noted boosted the careers of Mary Karr, Ethna McKiernan and others, and spent the summer of 1973 in Reggio Calabria, Italy which gave rise to the "voluptuous prose-poetry" memoir Nightfall in Verona posted in entirety here, designated by arts maven and former friend Caroline Marshall of NPR The Writer Reads as "fabulous."
Circa 2010 Andrews also founded a poetry group on She Writes which included Dawn Potter, Katha Pollock and other noteworthy writers, and supported the work of Meg Waite Clayton, fiction writer in addition to mentoring a number of other up and coming writers.
There is no way to estimate the influence on the lives and work of the some 12,000 students k-12 she met and encouraged in the seventies, but the poet James Tolan has attributed his career to her work as it was anthologized in Heartland II, Lucien Stryk, Editor. Professor Stryk read the title poem of In Pursuit of the Family on NPR.
As noted the poet lives in northern Colorado's Poudre River Valley with her husband, fiction writer Jack Brooks; the couple's daily life is centered around writing and enjoying their beautiful imported Golden Retrievers;-- see the Ardorgold website for details. Contact: jenneandrews2010@gmail.com.
Signed copies of the Blackbirds Dance collection, endorsed by James Moore, Patricia Kirkpatrick and Dawn Potter, are available from the poet. She posts new work below and is available for mentorship and virtual readings via Skype.
She is happy to critique ms. of poetry, fiction and memoir for a small fee.
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