Tanka Poems led to a Book & Combatting Writer’s Block: PRIORHOUSE INTERVIEW with Elizabeth (Liz) Gauffreau

Hello Readers.

It is time for the Priorhouse Interview featuring author Elizabeth (Liz) Gauffreau (Liz’s Blog is here). She writes fiction and poetry with a strong connection to family and place.

All photos and poems in this post are from Liz Gauffreau and belong to her. 

STARTING

Prior: Hello Elizabeth, or Liz, I am looking forward to our interview.

LIZ: Thank you for having me on your blog, Yvette. I greatly appreciate it!

Prior: Let’s start with a little background info.

LIZ: I grew up in New England as a child of the 1960s. I’ve lived in New Hampshire for twenty years, but my heart will always be in Vermont, where I graduated from high school.

• I spent twenty years as a Navy wife, living mostly in Virginia. 

• I lived in Florida for three very surreal years. Aside from experiencing some severe culture shock, I was terribly homesick for the four seasons.

• I hold an MA in English/Fiction Writing from the University of New Hampshire and a BA in English with a concentration in creative writing from Old Dominion University.

  

  Early wiriting sample from Liz

• As I was deciding career options, I was adamant that I was not about to waste a college education on career training or anything practical. I’ve never regretted it.

COMIC – Turkey as English Professor:  In your essay, you failed to consider the HUMANISTIC elements of the novel, the dynamic flux between innocence and pathos. You did not adequately deal with the work’s central themes: the tyranny of blind hypocrisy, the visionary eloquence of silence. You fell short of a full appreciation of the essential and ultimate value of compassion. You flunk.

LIZ: After a misguided attempt at teaching high school Latin and English, I spent my professional career in nontraditional higher education advising, teaching, and administering various departments and programs, including credit for prior experiential learning.

I retired last year to write full-time. I haven’t regretted that decision, either!

Prior: Oh wow, best wishes with your retirement and I hope the next phase (with more time for writing) will have many fruits.

And speaking of writing, Congratulations on having one of your short stories win an award recently. I grabbed this from your post about it (which is here) 

“I am thrilled to share that my short story “Henrietta’s Saving Grace” has won the 2022 Ben Nyberg contest sponsored by Choeofpleirn Press. The story was inspired one of my great-great aunts from Nova Scotia, who went by the nickname “Jen.” I sent the story out four times before it was accepted for publication by Coneflower Cafe, and the editor recommended that I also submit it to the Ben Nyberg Contest. The first rejection, from Carve Magazine, was an almost.”

LIZ: Thank you so much. I am very excited about that. 

WRITER’S BLOCK

Prior: I was recently reading about writer’s block in The Curious Reader.

• In The Curious Reader, a section on writer’s block noted that Steinbeck combatted it by imagining he was writing to a single person rather than a large, imaginary audience. This gave him flow with “a sense of freedom.”

• Pulitzer-prize winning fiction writer, Jhumpa Lahiri, suggested that writer’s block needed to be embraced as part of the process because ideas “gestate in the mind.” Lahiri noted that writer’s block is the time “when a story grows but isn’t necessarily being written in sentences on the page.”

• So Liz, any thoughts on writer’s block? 

LIZ: Free-writing often helps me combat writer’s block. (Just write without stopping until I get something workable and delete the rest.) Other times, I’ll have a hand-wringing conversation with a writing buddy. They’ll suggest ways to address my impasse that won’t work, and the idea for what will work will then just pop into my head.  Kind of a backwards way to go about it, but it works. 

LIZ: My experience with writer’s block is more what I call “a failure of imagination” than being unable to write at all.

LIZ: The failure of imagination happens when I’ve written myself into a corner with either a character or the plot–or a combination of both–and can’t figure a way out that is true to the character involved, plausible, and not contrived. 

Prior: Sometimes I will deal with writer’s block by doodling or just drawing in a notebook.

Two strategies for dealing with writer’s block that might help some writers are to work on a different project or go and read a book or watch a movie (Psychology Today).

READING 

Prior: I am not sure if you heard about the third annual #Dickenschallenge (post is here), which invites folks to read a Dickens novella between Feb 7th and June 9th (hosts are Trent, Marsha, and Yvette).   I hope you can join us.

LIZ: Oh I do have a few thoughts about Charles Dickens: 

My two favorite Dickens novels are Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol. A Christmas Carol holds a special place in my heart because my dad read it to me when I was a kid. It’s probably the best example of a redemption story I’ve ever read.

I studied Great Expectations in high school and again in grad school. The grad school course took a sociological approach to the novel rather than a literary one. While knowledge of historical and social context are valuable to provide depth of insight into a novel, I don’t like the sociological approach because it tends to reduce the characters to symbols of oppression.

I studied Hard Times in college, which I loved because of Dickens’s heavy-handed use of character names. (I’m talking about you, Mr. M’Choakumchild.)

I recently ran across the following Dickens quote on someone’s blog and immediately fell in love with it:

“Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new.”

~ Dombey and Son

Prior: I LOVE that snippet so much. And I wonder what it would have been like to read his work in the serial installments. 

LIZ: I think I would have enjoyed reading each chapter of a novel released as a serial, but that’s about it as far as it goes for living in Dickens’s time period. Everything I’ve read about living in cities at that time sounds just dreadful, not to mention having no rights of my own as a woman.

Prior: While on the topic of reading, do you have any books that you can read again and again?

LIZ: I haven’t been rereading books lately because I have so many books on my TBR. 

Liz’s TBR pile

Prior: Do you have any books that you reread for a lift or a mood boost?

Liz: For a number of years, my go-to read to lift my mood has been “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” For a human being to use language to create something so beautiful makes me think there just might be hope for us yet.

Reading William Faulkner’s Nobel-Prize speech does the same thing for me.

Also, reading a preschool teacher’s blog post about a children’s book I loved as a child will always lift my spirits. (Winnie the Pooh, my dear, gentle friend!)

RUMINATING

Prior: Where do you write? 

LIZ: I normally write in my study reclining in my big fancy office chair that I purchased with a work bonus years ago. The catalog called it “The Rumination Station.”  And so here is my Rumination Station:

LIZ: I write in different places. I wrote the poems for Grief Songs in a notebook in bed before going to sleep. I have to write prose on the computer because my handwriting is so bad. I also find it much easier to compose on the computer because I can type almost as fast as I can think. (With lots of typos, but that’s what editing’s for!)

Prior: One of the reasons I wanted to interview you, Liz, was to chat about your book, Grief Songs. 

LIZ: Grief Songs came about as a result of being encouraged by Colleen Chesebro to try writing tanka poems. (Prior to following her blog, I’d stayed far, far away from syllabic poetry.)

• A month before my mother died, I wrote my first tanka. 

• After my mother died, writing a poetry collection was the furthest thing from my mind.

• Then, as I was going through family photograph albums, out of nowhere, certain photographs prompted lines of poetry.

• As I wrote the lines down, I discovered that the traditional structure of English tanka (five lines with a syllable count of 5-7-5-7-7) was the appropriate form to capture and preserve what those photographs represented. 

I soon had enough poems for a short collection. I arranged them in an associative order to tell a story and that led to my book, Grief Songs. 

Prior: Thanks for sharing about how the book unfolded. It almost seems like it wrote itself – or was an outpouring of creative inspiration fueled by deep family love! In fact, after I read the book, which is a delightfully quick read with such a minimalist vibe, I realized that you lightly coverd the life-span with a photo to go with each poem. 

LIZ: I wasn’t sure about publishing this poetry collection because the poems are so personal — it felt like a risk — but a writing community I belong to encouraged me to go ahead and take the risk. I was advised that the collection could give readers an opportunity to reflect on their own experiences of losing loved ones.

Prior: I am glad you DID publish your “personal poems” because you invite us into YOUR inner world and then allow readers to extract different takeaways.  And rather than focusing on the loss of loved ones, your book really felt like a celebration of life and togetherness. 

I think the title of your book, Grief Songs, is a bit misleading. I was expecting a book with a sort of heaviness related to bereavement but it was light and airy. 

Even though your book was spawned during early grief, the content felt like “life songs” or “familial melodies” – and not really grief songs. 

SAMPLING

 Here are three of Liz’s tanka poems (with the hand-selected images) that readers can find in Grief Songs: 

Grief Songs is available on Amazon here.

WELLNESS

Prior: Can you share what you do for wellness and mental sanity?

LIZ: The main thing I do for physical wellness is exercise every day. (I should probably do more; I sit at the computer way too long.) For my mental sanity, I have to write fiction or poetry on a regular basis to maintain my equilibrium and keep from getting depressed.

Prior: Can you share about your approach to blogging?

LIZ: My main strategy for blogging is to post something new every other week (with a few exceptions if the spirit moves me). This schedule allows me time to visit and engage with the folks I follow. I read new posts and comment twice a day: in the morning and in the evening.

I have learned so much from the bloggers I follow, it’s like being back in college—with no tuition and no grades! I’ve also been inspired (and encouraged!) to try new avenues of creative expression I otherwise never would have tried.

The only times I start feeling burned out are when I have to deal with WordPress bugs, which seem to be the bane of our existence these days.

CONNECTING

Elizabeth (Liz) Gauffreau online: 

• Website: https://lizgauffreau.com

  • Blog: https://lizgauffreau.com/category/blog/

  • Book Reviews: https://lizgauffreau.com/bookshelf/

• Amazon Author’s Page: https://www.amazon.com/Elizabeth-Gauffreau/e/B07NTZFVSF

• BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/elizabeth-gauffreau

• Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/egauffreau  

• Poets & Writers Directory: https://www.pw.org/node/1079971

• Facebook: https://www.Facebook.com/ElizabethGauffreau

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liz-gauffreau

Thanks for joining us today!

Questions for readers:

• Do you have any comments or questions for Liz?

• Have you written any Tanka poems? If you want to try it with others, go here to Tanka Tuesday

• We briefly taked about writer’s block in this interview. Do you have tips for dealing with writer’s block?

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