LK: How did you know or when did you know you were a poet?

Mark Hillringhouse (MH): I didn’t know until college, but I wrote in high school and was part of a poetry club. We had a teacher at Hackensack High who wrote and published a book of poetry and she was the adviser.  I published a poem at 14.  By college I was sending out to magazines and I had a few published in different magazines and then I took all the courses I could.  I never knew it just happened, it was something I couldn’t help. I was a weird kid who hung out in the library half the time in 8.11 of the Dewey Decimal system.  I grew comfortable being alone and I liked silence.  I read.

LK: What topics do you most like to explore in your poetry? What influences you?

MH: I don’t think that my poetry has a particular message to give.  I hope it gives readers pleasure.  I try to exercise some demons, expiate some guilt, and I try to locate my feelings within those poems.  It is as if I can point to them and say that is how I was feeling, that was what I felt, what I experienced and lived through.

I tell my students never wish away time.  I tell myself the same thing.  I want to pay attention to certain things, to appreciate them.  It is also why I love photography.  It is the only way I know to stop time.  I told George Tice once that I wanted to come back and photograph something I had seen and he said that it may not be there when I go back.  And he was right.  It amazes me how quickly things change.  People and relationships with family and friends is the most important aspect of living.  How we see ourselves is another.  I have poems that question the nature of things, the nature of identity.  It is a philosophical problem, sometimes a psychological problem, but it comes up in my poetry.

LK: What other types of writing, genre, art forms are you interested in?

MH: I was in my twenties when I got into photography.  I started to learn how to shoot with an old Ricoh 35 mm camera and then I hooked up with a professional photographer who was a recent graduate of the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.  He showed me how to handle film and compose and we went out shooting a lot together and we’d spend hours upon hours in his dark room developing and printing. I used it as a tool to help me write.  I’m a visual thinker and I loved the dark room, watching images appear in the developer “under water” as it were like a dream rising to the surface.  You can’t have that experience with digital photography, and seeing everything through negatives the black and white reversed. And because it is black and white it is abstract, removed from reality.

I still miss it, the dark room.  With digital photography I’ve pretty much taught myself, but I have taken a few classes.  Back when we had film cameras it was all about the lens, buying different lenses.  Now I have just downloaded “Lightroom 4” into my MacBook Pro, and I installed a tutorial app on my iPad for using Lightroom.  I got pretty good teaching myself Aperture 3, and Photoshop CS4.  I wanted to try Lightroom.  CS6 is out in Photoshop.  It is hard to keep up.  I go on YouTube for tutorials, or I take workshops.  There is quiet a learning curve.

It used to be that you got a good camera body like a Nikon and then invested in good glass and experimented with different film and paper.  But now the camera is the film and you have to keep changing cameras buying the newest and latest models.

George Tice, my mentor in photography, said to me and I quote him, “Photography died when Kodak stopped making black and white paper.”  I get his point.  There are young photographers now who have never seen film or a dark room.

I moved into artist housing in Paterson in 1984 when they opened the newly renovated Essex Mill on Mill Street which is part of the historic mill district.  I was one of the first artists who moved in there.  A community of artists developed and we got to know each other.  We put on readings, jazz concerts, some gallery shows.  I loved it.  I got to know a lot of musicians, painters, sculptors, photographers, writers and poets.  I had a loft that faced the Great Falls since I was in the back away from the street.  I had my studio there and I was always working on photography and writing poetry and reviews and articles and interviews.  Someone gave me a copy of George Tice’s book titled “Paterson” and I was taken with its clarity and austere beauty.  Twenty years later, I got to know George Tice and I got to help him with his sequel book to the first Paterson book, which he titled “Paterson II.”  It was published in 2006.  I learned a lot from him and he is a mentor.

But I also learned a lot from watching painters work.  At the end of the day picture making is picture making.  I took a life drawing class in Manhattan at the Eighth Street Studio School which is a fine art school run by professional working artists. Learning how to draw the human form was the hardest class I’ve ever taken.  It was three hours every Wednesday evening for a semester.  The class stood in a semi circle at our easels in front of the nude models and the instructor had us do five-minute charcoal sketches, ten-minute, fifteen-minute, thirty-minute sketches.  I would go through a giant sketch pad in two classes.  I remember sweating.  It was a work out.  The instructor would come over and tell me to work on this and work on that.  He would show me how to draw a line.  The feet and hands were extremely difficult.  One very important thing he taught me was that I had to feel the line and feel the line flowing from the movement of my hand and wrist onto the paper, that it was inside you and not just something you were staring at.  This applies to photography also in that there is a feeling of being connected physically through the camera’s lens to the image and that you learn to see how the camera sees.  But it helped my photography, helped me with line, understanding line.

My other writing projects are interviews and essays.  I also reviewed for many years.  I was a founding editor of the American Book Review in Manhattan.  This was in my twenties.  I was a member of the National Book Critics’ Circle.  I also was interviewing poets and taking their portraits.  I covered the New York School of Ashbery, Schuyler, Koch, Guest, Berrigan, Waldman and others who felt that they were part of this school loosely associated with Frank O’Hara.  My favorite genre is creative non, sometimes called the fourth genre.  It can’t be labeled, but it uses the elements of fiction yet it reports from the real world.

I was a freelance writer for a few years and this is what I did, long pieces, New Yorker type pieces for magazines. Recently, I’ve gotten into the photo-essay which is a form of creative non.

Recently, I’ve begun making film documentaries with a film maker friend of mine.  It is a learning curve, but I am learning and the photography basics are the same. We just finished a film now in DVD on the life of Maria Gillan.  It is getting some press and some reviews and we’ve premiered the film a few times.  I am going up to Binghampton University next week to show it there and then NYU.  I liked the process of collaboration of working with another artist and teaming up and pooling our resources, talents and skills.  I did some of the shooting and sound and the lighting, and he did a lot of the video taping and editing. I asked the interview questions and we would go over the cuts and the edits.  It took a year.  I thought Maria a great subject for a documentary because of all she has done and accomplished and the fact that she is like a force of nature in the poetry world in this state, a phenomenon really.

We plan on doing another documentary together on the novelist and story writer Tom E. Kennedy who lives in Copenhagen. I’m just fascinated by his work, and his story. He’s an ex pat from Queens who escaped this country for a life in Denmark when he was 30.

LK: What do you most struggle with during the revision process?

MH: That is a very good question.  I found it a challenge to match the poems with the photographs in Between Frames and sometimes vice versa, but I found a way to see what the poem was seeing as if it could take a photograph and so I thought of the poem as a kind of verbal camera.  There were connections in my poems to real places and things and that made it easier in some cases such as my diner poems.  The diner represents a maternal womb for me, a way to huddle in the light in surrounding darkness.  The forces of light and dark are in constant flux in my work and I love the edges of light.  I like the time just after the sun has set as my favorite time to shoot.  This can sometimes switch to just before sunrise.  I tend towards twilight.  I’m a crepuscular writer, northern, and I write during those times and of course late into the evening. But my process is slow when I revise.  I will put poems away for a year and then come back to them.  I need that much time to get my distance.  I finish maybe a handful of poems a year, yet I take thousands of photographs.  But out of a thousand photographs maybe only one or two are good.  The same goes for poetry, but it is slower, so slow I may live long enough for another book although I am trying.  I have a dozen new poems, but I have so many projects going.

I’m finishing an interview with George Tice and I have a date to interview Alice Notley this month.  I am actually considering making a documentary film about her.

LK: What are you working on now? What’s next?

MH: I have been invited all over to read since my book came out. I’m headed to Michigan to give a reading, and then to Princeton, and I just read at the Hunterdon Art Museum.  It has been fun reading and showing the work.  I worked out a system whereby I can project the photographs that are in the book when I read the poems so that the audience can see them.

I have several photography projects that are on-going for a few years. One is Hoboken. I’ve been going there for a couple of years in different seasons and times of day or night.  I start with exteriors and I work my way into the interior of the some people who live there. I ask if I can shoot where they live and I take their portraits. I may try nudes to work that in as well.  I cover the street, the people in the street, the different places, buildings, stores, neighborhoods.  I have many night shots and snow shots and from the Path and the train station.  It may take five years to finish.

My other photography project is barber shops.  I started this six years ago.  I realize that the old Italian immigrant barber is dying out, the shops are closing and the kids don’t go into the old man’s business.  These guys are in their 80s and 90s even.  I am trying to document them.  They were a real institution in every town in North Jersey which is heavily Italian-American.

My next book is my book of all my interviews and the portraits I took to go along with the interviews.  This is over twenty years worth of work going back to 1980. I have thirty interviews all published in different magazines.  Now it is time to collect them into a volume.  I have a publisher interested.  I will need a sabbatical.

There is no way I can do this and work full time teaching.  So I hope to apply soon for a sabbatical so that I can see this through.

PCCC: How did you know or when did you know you were a poet?

Claudia Serea (CS):I never planned to be a poet, it sort of happened. I started writing when I was in my early teens, I think I was in seventh grade. I first wrote a sci-fi novel trilogy about kids my age who had a series of adventures in space. Poetry came later, when I was sixteen or so, and it was always something I did on the side, not really my main focus until 2006, I think. Someone else first referred to me as a poet after I joined The Red Wheelbarrow Poets group and started writing consistently every week.

PCCC: What topics do you most like to explore in your poetry?

CS: I write a lot about growing up in communist Romania, about my family who is still there, but also about my immigration experience, and my current life in New Jersey and New York. There are also myths, Romanian folk tales, dreams, my daughter, many different things. I change styles and themes frequently to get myself out of a comfort zone.

PCCC: What other types of writing do you also focus on? Genre?

CS: I wrote some memoir non-fiction pieces about the Romanian revolution from December 1989 and a couple of articles on the process of writing. I continue to translate Romanian contemporary poetry. I would very much like to write more prose, but I don’t have enough time to dedicate to it. For now, just the occasional flash-fiction, prose poems, short forms that can be written during my daily bus commute.

PCCC: What do you most struggle with during the revision process?

CS: Word choice is important. Musicality. Throwing out parts of the poem that don’t work and keeping what is good. Line breaks, commas, lots of things. My notebooks are a mess.

PCCC: Talk about your latest book? What’s next?

CS: My latest title is The System, a chapbook published by Cold Hub Press, New Zealand, and inspired by my father’s experience as a political prisoner in Romania in the late fifties/early sixties. It’s a little book that speaks against repression systems everywhere in the world. I feel strongly that my father’s and grandmother’s stories are important to tell. It’s my way to honor the victims of the communist genocide. You can find the book HERE.I have two other books forthcoming: To Part Is to Die a Little from Cervena Barva Press, and A Dirt Road Hangs From the Sky, from 8th House Publishing in Montreal, Canada. I am looking forward to their release in the near future. I also collaborated recently with four other Romanian-American writers and now we are actively looking for a publisher for our collection. Poetry has been very kind to me and I made many friends through it. I can’t wait to see what else it has in store.

* * *

The other day, I got into a discussion with someone about why authors might skip the editing process before publishing. Now, I didn’t know this guy, and I’m sure he’s a perfectly great guy. I don’t hold anything against him. We had a lively debate on the topic.

In my own experience, I’ve picked up a few ebooks on free days that I’ve put down just as quickly when I discovered that they were filled with basic errors. I’ll be honest… I edit for a living. That means I spend my life reading unedited writing, so I’m extremely choosy about what I read during my limited time for leisure reading. The occasional editorial flub is no big deal, it happens in every book, even those put out by the Big Six publishers. But I can tell the difference between the occasional editorial flub and an unedited manuscript. Remember Elaine from Seinfeld testing her dates to see if they were sponge-worthy? Well, unedited books are not time-worthy.

Anyway, back to my discussion. My worthy opponent brought up cost. He said editing costs a minimum of $1500. I know writers are notoriously poor. I’m an editor and I’m notoriously poor. I get it. Money can be hard to come by. There’s a reason they say it doesn’t grow on trees, because if it did, we’d all be horticulturalists. As I told him, not all of us editors charge an arm and a leg. Some of us softies even offer payment plans and bend over backwards to work within budgets. Why? Because we all have families to support. You gotta feed your kids, I gotta feed mine (and boy, it seems they eat more every year, doesn’t it?). I can’t speak for every editor out there, but this is why I work with several clients at one time… to keep my prices as low as I can. My rent won’t get any lower, but hey, I can spread my costs out to make it easier on my clients, right? So, authors… you may think we charge a lot at first glance, but we’re also having to use our fees to not only run our business, but to pay all those pesky bills that you have to pay at your house. It seems as soon as one month starts, it’s over and the cycle begins all over again. I’m sure you feel the same way. So, I do what I can to keep it reasonable, including a big discount for payment in full upfront. If you can afford it, you don’t have to worry about making payments, I don’t have to worry about sending reminders, you save money, it’s all good.

He suggested that most people don’t press the quality issue when I suggested that you can’t redo a first impression, and maybe that’s true. But they won’t buy book two, either. Putting out a second poorly done book won’t help you sell more books. While some may ask the seller for a refund, others won’t. When authors are signing petitions to convince Amazon not to refund ebooks after seven days (and part of me doesn’t blame them… you can read any ebook in seven days and return it, quality or not) the issue over quality becomes clouded. Was the book returned because the final quality was not up to par or because the reader knew they could get their money back, no questions asked?

Now, Amazon does have certain standards in place, but many of them don’t kick in unless complaints are made by readers. How many readers know how to make these complaints? How many readers actually write reviews? There’s the rub. Without the extra layer of an editor, how do these errors get expunged from the book?

To take it a step further, how do you know you have a competent editor? If you don’t know other authors who can recommend one for you, how do you know you don’t have one who isn’t an author just like yourself who decided they’d hang out an editorial shingle to earn a few bucks?

These are good questions. First, ask your author friends. They may have worked with an editor they liked. Second, (blatant self-promotion) you could hire me. Third, you can go to an editorial association like the Editorial Freelancers Association and peruse their members. If you go that route, make sure and look for editors who work on fiction. Fiction and non-fiction are two different animals, and not every editor is familiar with both. Not every good editor is a member of associations like this (not all of us can afford it yet), but you can bet that you can avoid the bad ones by going there.

If you’re not sure about an editor, look at their client testimonials. Ask them if they’re willing to edit a few pages for free as a sample of their work. When you send a sample, pick a few of your worst pages so you can make a fair assessment. If you’re testing more than one editor, send them the same pages so you can compare. Cheaper isn’t always the best choice, just like the most expensive isn’t always the best choice.

So, don’t sell yourself short. Put out the best book you can. Don’t skimp on the editing. You want a book as close to error-free as you can make it. You want your story as tight as it can be. You want it to be a pleasure to read, not something someone puts down after a few paragraphs.

Bio:

Toni Rakestraw is a freelance fiction editor. You can find her at:

Her Blog * Twitter * Rakestraw Book Design Facebook * Unbridled Editor Facebook

Google+

She co-wrote Titanic Deception with her husband, John, and is the author of several short stories.

Titanic Deception can be purchased on: Amazon

I’d like to welcome Annetta Ribken to the blog! Freelance writer and content editor of over seventy indie novels, Annetta Ribken has been writing since a tender young age, when letters were chiseled on stone tablets. A precocious student, Annetta earned her Ph.D in the School of Hard Knocks, with honors, in the early Age of Disco. Her mission: to take over the Universe, one word at a time. She lives and works just outside of St. Louis with her evil feline overlord, a rescued shelter cat named Athena.

Loren Kleinman (LK): How would my friends describe me in 20 words or less?

Annetta Ribken  (AR): “She is one crazy biotch, and I mean that with the utmost love and respect.”

LK: What part of the writing process do you love? What part do you hate?

AR: I love every aspect of the writing process, because there’s always something to learn. It can be frustrating at times to translate the story in my head to paper, but it’s an amazing, creative process. The only thing I really hate is formatting, and that’s not really about the writing—that’s just mechanics.

LK: Did you do any research before start or during of the writing of the books?

AR: Sure do. Since the Aegean Trilogy is based upon a life-long fascination with Greek mythology, even though I take a lot of literary license there are certain details I need to have correct. With my Sally Mae Riddley series, which is quite different from the Aegean Trilogy, I’ve had to research Southern sayings, settings, and customs. Also the habits of certain farm animals. No, seriously.

LK: Are there any particular books and/or authors that inspired you and continue to do so?

AR: I couldn’t possibly list all the books and authors who have inspired me in my life. Books are very special to me—I learned to read when I was three and they have been the one constant in my life. I’m a fan of Stephen King, especially the Dark Tower series, but since working with independent writers I am inspired every day by the people with whom I am honored to work.

LK: What’s your favorite vacation spot?

AR: Between the pages of a book

LK: Are you working on any other projects except writing, right now?

AR: As a matter of fact, I am. In addition to working on the sequels to ATHENA'S PROMISE and THE TRAILER PARK TIARA AND THE GOAT INCIDENT, I'm also a full-time content editor. And because I am nut-ball crazy, I am also working on an exciting project, an anthology titled ALLEGORIES OF THE TAROT based on the Major Arcana of the Tarot. Twenty-two cards, twenty-two amazing writers, twenty-two amazing stories. You can find the Indiegogo campaign HERE. I am particularly excited about this project because the line-up of writers is stellar, and I find the images and meanings of the cards absolutely fascinating.

Where can you find Annetta Ribken?

Website

Facebook Fan page

Amazon Author Page

Twitter

Allegories of the Tarot Project

About Me