Tuesday, November 20, 2018
Sunday, November 18, 2018
Short Fiction: TOKYO TOUR
It's Naughty Time! Find new short fiction in Why Nicht? Available in bookstores in Vienna.
Monday, November 5, 2018
Poetry Workshop!
Come join me for a poetry workshop, and get inspired to write!
Themes include narrative poetry, witness and grace.
Monday, October 1, 2018
Column: Desire & Creativity
Excited to present a new column! http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/features/the-mother-load
One of the 5 most popular posts for October 2018 on The Independent!
Monday, September 24, 2018
Podcast Interview: on writing discipline
 |
| The control room at the Newseum |
Loved being interviewed at the Newseum by dynamos Rachel Coonce and
Courtney Lynn. On writing and staying alive! My interview starts
approximately 29 minutes into this great episode on bringing back the
writing discipline!
Also reading a poem
Women at the Peace Memorial / Hiroshima
which appeared in Plume 6 (a print anthology), March 2018. Thanks to the editors of Plume 6!
Thursday, July 19, 2018
Personal essay: Close to the End
Published in District Lines 4, 2017, by Politics and
Prose Bookstore, Washington D.C.
I do not know when she will leave us. Before we came back to
her house this morning the resident at Sibley Hospital in Washington said death
was imminent, but I’ve seen her like this many times before, curled up like a
snail in her bed, knees to her chest, eyes tightly shut, pretending to sleep,
her poodle guarding her.
I leave her upstairs to rest and go down to the kitchen with its
French doors that look out onto the enclosed stone yard. It is the last days of
June. It is ninety degrees outside and the ginger cat is under the patio table
in the shade, listening to the birds, too hot to pursue them. He lasts five
minutes in the heat and comes up the steps, luxuriating in his heft, all
Emperor. I let him in and give him a bowl of defrosted shrimp from Whole Foods.
I know that’s the sort of thing she does, feeding the animals treats. She sneaks
the dog jam sandwiches with extra butter. Those she loves are anointed in
butter. Her daughter stocks the top shelf of the refrigerator door with slabs
of Irish Kerrygold. Before we moved in together, my now husband spent a week
with her between rental apartments. The first morning he came down to a big
greasy breakfast, “Oh, you don’t have to make me breakfast,” he said to her. She
said, “It’s not for you darling, it’s for my poodle.”
When I hear her footfalls above me I go to the stairs to make
sure she is all right. I try not to bother her. Now the dementia is getting
worse, she wants family near her constantly and I am just a close friend. Her
daughter, who she lives with, is her favorite but she is away on a much-needed
vacation in Africa. Her grandson is visiting from California and has taken her
daughter’s place.
She grew up in Minnesota and spent most of her adult life in
the Bay area. She turned ninety last November, and my husband adapted one of
her favorite songs, ‘The Lady is a Tramp’ – he sang, “she left California for
this glorified swamp.” She can’t remember we were there. I met her in 2004, my
first Thanksgiving in Washington. I had arrived from Mumbai, where I grew up. She’s
a friend of my husband’s family but we are all a bunch of strays here and we’ve
ended up spending recent Christmas holidays together. I do not like to take too
many liberties with her. Too helpful and she gets angry. Or maybe it is better
that I am not family, for she is mostly civil with me when I keep a distance.
With family it is hard to set boundaries and fights can be vicious.
She is standing at the top of the stairs, leaning over the
banister. She says, “I want to cut off the blood.” She yells for scissors. Her
grandson brings them upstairs but I ask him to wait since she is pointing to
her stomach. For a moment I think she is attached to the memory of when she
gave birth in her hometown of San Francisco and they had to cut the umbilical
cord that tied her to her babies. How silly I am. She just wants to cut off her
diaper.
I change her diaper as she stands beside her bed. Then I slide
her gown off her shoulders so I can put her in a fresh pair of pajamas. Her
mastectomy took one breast, the other looks out of place, puzzled to still be
there. Her ninety-year old body could be made of stone, it has no supple
contours, and everything is set and hard, unbendable. Metal-like. She must
weigh eighty pounds at best and her body is gnarled, but there is nothing to
look away from. Old bodies should not be judged. They are. That’s all.
I want her to know that she still has dignity even though I am
helping her change. She is a proud woman. She was a beauty, Miss Minneapolis,
exquisitely dressed, with intelligent blue eyes that could see through all
bullshit. She hates help. She is nasty to gardeners and housekeepers. She’s
said in the past, on hands and knees, scrubbing her floors, “I come from a long
line of Irish washer women.” So imagine her now, movie star looks, Chanel suit,
eighty-eight years old, yes, that’s right, scrubbing her floors.
Some time ago, when the gardener was
over she complained about him to my husband who mimics her well, “I asked the
man, once he finished with that noisy thing of his, very sweetly I said to him,
sir, sir, look at all these tiny leaves that are still on the ground, don’t you
want to rake those up? Do you know what this person told me? He told me that he
didn’t have a rake. Not even in his
truck. So I told him: you’re no gardener, you’re just a mower and a blower.”
As I change her, the dog wraps his black body between her legs
and growls softly at me. He is nervous I may harm her. I say to her, “It’s for
me. You’re letting me help you for me, because it’s nice to feel needed.” This
softens her in a way I haven’t seen before. Her gratitude is sweet and she stops
fighting, agreeing to sip her water. This is a big deal. She likes vodka. She likes
white wine. She used to say, “Darling, no one ever drank water or exercised
where I come from.”
When the dog sees how happy she is he licks my legs. I do not
like my legs licked so profusely but I let him do it.
When she is tucked back in bed and I am inquiring about her
next meal, she says, as if pleasantly surprised by her hunger, “I should fill this
belly, shouldn’t I?”
“How about a BLT?” I say.
“Oh yes, darling,” she agrees.
The house fills up with the smell of bacon. I cut it into
small bite sized pieces. Then I take the thinnest slice of tomato, a tender
part of the lettuce and press it together between two slices of soft buttered
potato bread so it is flat, easy to chew with her dentures. She lifts the
squares delicately into her mouth.
The last time I coaxed her to eat was four days ago in the hospital;
she had been brought in for dehydration and for refusing to eat for days. The
BLT worked then too. I said, “Do you remember, when I was so sick from being
pregnant, how you cooked me a pork chop and it was the first meal I ate in
three months? Now it’s your turn.” She couldn’t remember, “Really?” she said,
but she liked the story and polished off the BLT and a brownie between sips of
black coffee.
At the hospital she was disoriented. She tore the IV out of
her arm in the middle of the night and ignored the awful hospital food tray. At
home she likes the TV on all the time, but the TV didn’t work and she thought
she was in an odd shaped apartment, “Which no one will buy. They will have to
tear down the whole building soon. No one would want to live in a place where
the walls are so ugly.” A moment later she thought we were in a car dealership.
Then she announced, “This Church has too many rooms.” As if on cue, a woman
stopped by to ask if she wanted Holy Communion. It was a Filipina accent she
couldn’t understand so I told her what she was there for. “Yes,” she said, her
orange Irish bob perking up at the question. “Big wafer or small,” she was
asked. “Small,” I suggested, and she agreed, this time a lady. Earlier that day
she had yelled at me to take her pills and “stuff them up my asshole”.
At home she is content and her short-term memory seems better.
Today I read her the first page of my novel and she kept bringing it up through
the day. Yesterday, at the hospital, she was mad at me for coming to visit her,
“Who are you?” she asked, giving me a dirty look as I quietly worked in a
corner. She hasn’t recognized me for over a year now.
“It doesn’t matter who I am,” I said to her, “but I’d like to
stay anyway if that’s okay with you?”
Now, as she eats a cinnamon swirl in the bed she shares with
her daughter, I think of my grandmother, Armaity. She died seven years ago in
Mumbai, on a June day quite like this one. I lived much of my life with her
until I moved to America. She loved cats too. It would be nice to spend one
more meal with her. We’ve got so much love to give and we are still figuring
that part out—how to love better—and we keep losing people before we have
mastered the art of it.
Afterword: My friend died
shortly after I wrote this, in November, just before her ninety-first birthday.
November is the month of my grandmother’s birthday too.
Permission received to post this essay online.
You can purchase District Lines IV here:
About District Lines: The
fourth edition of the popular P&P anthology of work by local
writers and artists testifies to the city’s diverse social and cultural
range; as we know, there’s much more than politics going on here.
Featuring both written and visual arts, from fiction, poetry, and essays
to photography and drawings, this collection is a vivid kaleidoscope of
District life.
Friday, June 22, 2018
Tuesday, May 8, 2018
Instant Poem: Popcorn dreams
I had an amazing experience typing poems on demand in Annapolis at the Mitchell Gallery event on April 21 2018. We typed on the street outside Brice House and had many people stop in to ask for a
poem. Here is an instant poem written for a little fellow who hasn't
learned to sleep as yet.
Popcorn dreams
It is hard to sleep when bird calls
Ring through the morning sky
And stay twittering into the dusk
As if there is too much life to
Keep night closed from joy that pops like
Corn kernels turning into stars.
Popcorn dreams
It is hard to sleep when bird calls
Ring through the morning sky
And stay twittering into the dusk
As if there is too much life to
Keep night closed from joy that pops like
Corn kernels turning into stars.
Thursday, March 22, 2018
Panel: Split this Rock Festival
https://www.facebook.com/events/179391169350029/
Save the date! And join us on April 20 at 11am. "Riding through Despair" explores Chilean poet#RaulZurita following the 1973 overthrow of the Allende government, Chinese poetry, Valmiki’s Ramayana, Alexander Xaver Gwerder (1923 - 1952), a Swiss poet, Dom Moraes and more!
Riding Through Despair
Panel for 2018 Split this Rock
Panel Description:
We citizens of the twenty-first century are not the first to know suffering, political oppression, and personal anguish. Yet our contemporary world often feels more complex and more threatened than we imagine the past. In this panel presentation five distinguished writers will explore how we confront the difficulties of our own culture through cross-cultural understanding and literary translation, including examples such as the Chilean poet Raul Zurita following the 1973 overthrow of the Allende government, interactions between family intimacies and physical geography whether in India or the United States, the new Chinese poetry emerging near the end of the Cultural Revolution, and responses to the complexity of despair in Valmiki’s Ramayana. Through their own experiences, as well as through the lives and writings of poets they have translated, the panelists will attempt to convey, among other topics, the possibility of “riding through despair.” Each panelist will make a brief but substantial presentation relating specific questions of translation to the broader issue of cross-cultural understanding. All five will share thoughts among themselves regarding the topic, and then allow about half an hour for questions and comments from others who have chosen to participate in the session.
Panelist Mini-biographies:
Leeya Mehta is the author of The Towers of Silence. She has just completed a novel, Extinction. Leeya is the winner of the 2016 Readers’ Choice Award in poetry from DistrictLit and an International Publication Award in 2017 with the Atlanta Review. She is an editor at Plume Poetry. Her work has appeared in District Lines, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Origins Journal, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Fulcrum, Poetry London, Vinyl Poetry, and many other publications.
Anna Deeny Morales is a literary critic and translator. Translations of Raúl Zurita’s works include Purgatory, Dreams for Kurosawa, and Sky Below: Selected Works. Other recent
translations include Mercedes Roffé’s Floating Lanterns, Alejandra Pizarnik’s Diana’s Tree,
and Amanda Berenguer’s The Identity of Certain Fruits. Her essays and translations of Gabriela Mistral, Nicanor Parra, among others, have appeared in the Paris Review, the Harvard Review, and BOMB. Deeny teaches at Georgetown University and is writing a book called Other Solitudes.
Vivek Narayanan's books of poems include Universal Beach and Life and Times of Mr S. His honors include fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies and the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library to work on his current project, an experimental translation from the Sanskrit of Valmiki. He is Co-editor of Almost Island, a ten-year old India-based international literary journal.
John Rosenwald has engaged with Split This Rock since its inception: co-editing Beloit Poetry Journal chapbooks in 2008 and 2012; organizing sessions (Poetry in China: A Force for Change & How Political Engagement Affects the Writing Process, 2012; The Logic of Yoo, 2014). He has held Fulbrights in Germany and China, and has attempted through his translations, as well as through his own poetry, to help others understand the importance and complexities of cross-cultural interactions.
Marc Vincenz’s recent poetry collections are Leaning into the Infinite (Dos Madres Press) and The Syndicate of Water & Light (Station Hill Press). His latest work of translation, Unexpected Development (White Pine Press, 2018), by prize-winning Swiss novelist, poet and playwright, Klaus Merz, was a finalist for the 2105 Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. He is Executive Editor of MadHat Press and Plume Editions and serves on the editorial boards of Plume and Fulcrum.
Save the date! And join us on April 20 at 11am. "Riding through Despair" explores Chilean poet
Riding Through Despair
Panel for 2018 Split this Rock
Panel Description:
We citizens of the twenty-first century are not the first to know suffering, political oppression, and personal anguish. Yet our contemporary world often feels more complex and more threatened than we imagine the past. In this panel presentation five distinguished writers will explore how we confront the difficulties of our own culture through cross-cultural understanding and literary translation, including examples such as the Chilean poet Raul Zurita following the 1973 overthrow of the Allende government, interactions between family intimacies and physical geography whether in India or the United States, the new Chinese poetry emerging near the end of the Cultural Revolution, and responses to the complexity of despair in Valmiki’s Ramayana. Through their own experiences, as well as through the lives and writings of poets they have translated, the panelists will attempt to convey, among other topics, the possibility of “riding through despair.” Each panelist will make a brief but substantial presentation relating specific questions of translation to the broader issue of cross-cultural understanding. All five will share thoughts among themselves regarding the topic, and then allow about half an hour for questions and comments from others who have chosen to participate in the session.
Panelist Mini-biographies:
Leeya Mehta is the author of The Towers of Silence. She has just completed a novel, Extinction. Leeya is the winner of the 2016 Readers’ Choice Award in poetry from DistrictLit and an International Publication Award in 2017 with the Atlanta Review. She is an editor at Plume Poetry. Her work has appeared in District Lines, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Origins Journal, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Fulcrum, Poetry London, Vinyl Poetry, and many other publications.
Anna Deeny Morales is a literary critic and translator. Translations of Raúl Zurita’s works include Purgatory, Dreams for Kurosawa, and Sky Below: Selected Works. Other recent
translations include Mercedes Roffé’s Floating Lanterns, Alejandra Pizarnik’s Diana’s Tree,
and Amanda Berenguer’s The Identity of Certain Fruits. Her essays and translations of Gabriela Mistral, Nicanor Parra, among others, have appeared in the Paris Review, the Harvard Review, and BOMB. Deeny teaches at Georgetown University and is writing a book called Other Solitudes.
Vivek Narayanan's books of poems include Universal Beach and Life and Times of Mr S. His honors include fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies and the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library to work on his current project, an experimental translation from the Sanskrit of Valmiki. He is Co-editor of Almost Island, a ten-year old India-based international literary journal.
John Rosenwald has engaged with Split This Rock since its inception: co-editing Beloit Poetry Journal chapbooks in 2008 and 2012; organizing sessions (Poetry in China: A Force for Change & How Political Engagement Affects the Writing Process, 2012; The Logic of Yoo, 2014). He has held Fulbrights in Germany and China, and has attempted through his translations, as well as through his own poetry, to help others understand the importance and complexities of cross-cultural interactions.
Marc Vincenz’s recent poetry collections are Leaning into the Infinite (Dos Madres Press) and The Syndicate of Water & Light (Station Hill Press). His latest work of translation, Unexpected Development (White Pine Press, 2018), by prize-winning Swiss novelist, poet and playwright, Klaus Merz, was a finalist for the 2105 Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. He is Executive Editor of MadHat Press and Plume Editions and serves on the editorial boards of Plume and Fulcrum.
Friday, March 2, 2018
Poems: Nudes I & II in Plume Poetry
Three new poems out...! Thank you to Plume and Daniel Lawless! Find Nudes I and II in http://plumepoetry.com/2018/02/nudes-i-ii/ Also you can buy Plume 6 at #AWP - it has my poem Women in the Peace Memorial in it- many thanks to Marc Vincenz!
Come hear me read from this new series at #AWP in Tampa - Wed 7-9 at the Aloft.
They are part of this series in Vinyl. http://vinylpoetryandprose.com/2016/09/leeya-mehta/
Come hear me read from this new series at #AWP in Tampa - Wed 7-9 at the Aloft.
They are part of this series in Vinyl. http://vinylpoetryandprose.com/2016/09/leeya-mehta/
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