Welcome James E. Dobson!

Bloodroot is committed to a rotating editorial team. This year we
welcome James E. Dobson, a scholar of nineteenth and twentieth-century
American literature and digital studies. He has assisted with the
publication of the past three volumes of Bloodroot by typesetting the
text and is excited to now help select the content. He is the author
of several academic articles and two books, Modernity and
Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary Representations
of Communication and Transportation Technologies (Palgrave, 2017) and
Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology (Univ. of
Illinois Press, forthcoming). He has written about technology and
literary studies and computational methods for the past fifteen years
and has just begun a new project addressing the development of
computer vision. Dobson will be reading all of our non-fiction and
essay submissions, as well as the proposals for experimental forms or
digital projects.

Guest Post by Ivy Schweitzer

“White Heat: Emily Dickinson in 1862, a Weekly Blog.”  http://sites.dartmouth.edu/whiteheat/

Created and edited by Ivy Schweitzer

I tell people who ask, that Dickinson called me. That is why I came up with a year-long project to document one of the most intense years in Dickinson’s writing life. I am both a scholar of early American literature with a particular focus on women, and a poet. Wanting to invigorate my relationship to poetry as a writer of it, I thought I would immerse myself in all things Dickinson and get as close as I could to her writing process and to the texture and contexts of her daily writing life. There are many exemplary biographies and accounts of Dickinson [could link to a list] and no end of fascinating fan literature and fiction, but I wanted something more experiential and sustained.

I had just finished a digital humanities project, The Occom Circle (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~occom/), a scholarly digital edition of works by and about Samson Occom, an 18^th century Mohegan Indian leader, public intellectual and Christian minister. In the course of working on that project, I explored the Dickinson Electronic Archive [put in link], an innovative research and teaching tool created by a collective of Dickinson scholars in the wake of the recently digitized Dickinson manuscripts by Harvard University and Amherst College. In 1981, the world of Dickinson scholarship had been revolutionized by the publication of Ralph’s Franklin’s The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, which afforded a unique view of Dickinson’s texts as she wrote (and rewrote and preserved) them. Since then, scholars have been busy “unediting” Dickinson’s writing, as Marta Werner expressed it in Emily Dickinson's Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing, “undoing” a century of distorting editorial and critical work so that we can finally begin to read what Dickinson actually wrote. Digital access to Dickinson’s manuscripts is producing another revolution, again in Werner’s words, “constellating these works not as still points of meaning or as incorruptible texts but, rather, as events and phenomena of freedom.” I wanted to explore and find a way to present Dickinson’s poems as events of freedom.

I thought I would use the digital technologies I learned about in The Occom Circle to create an immersive experience for a wider audience of poetry lovers, students of Dickinson, and folks interested in the nineteenth-century. I tried out this approach in the two iterations of a junior level colloquium on Dickinson I taught at my home institution of Dartmouth College, titled “The New Dickinson: After the Digital Turn.” It was a revelation to see how our readings of the poems changed, deepened and grew more complex and dynamic when we worked with the digital scans of the manuscripts. As my students often commented heatedly, they felt “gipped” when comparing printed versions of the poems with the manuscript images. How dare the editor make those choices about diction, syntax, line breaks, and the fixed length of Dickinson’s iconic dashes–– and without telling us! they complained. This “new” way of reading Dickinson was further aided by the ease of finding contextual materials on the web like newspapers, magazines, the Dickinson Lexicon, information about the Civil War and other players in her creative drama. That rich mix is what I imagined our weekly blog posts would offer.

Despite recent films about Dickinson (A Quiet Passion, 2017 and Wild Nights with Emily, 2018) that counteract the myth of the quaint recluse removed from the world, it still seems important to ground the poet in her time and place and suggest her engagement with contemporary events. To do so, each weekly blog offers several sets of related materials: what was happening in the wider world, nationally and internationally, in the local world of Amherst and the Dickinson family, and what was afoot in the literary worlds of her moment. These materials are not meant to be definitive or restrictive but suggestive and opening. We cannot know whether Dickinson read about or engaged in debates about current affairs, but they were in the air she breathed, perhaps on the lips of her family members and in the minds of her growing circle of correspondents. They formed part of the networks of sociability in which she moved and created.

Each weekly blog post consists of four parts:

1) national/international events of the week evoked through headlines, summaries and links to major news outlets that Dickinson’s family subscribed to and often read aloud to each other

2) biographical events of the week in Dickinson's life, domestic circle, and expanding correspondents evoked through daily events and letters

3) literary trends of the week or time that form a backdrop for a cluster of poems written during the year and curated in relation to the first two section, and evoked through summaries of scholarship and approaches. Our goal is not to interpret poems for readers, but to provide materials that will facilitate interpretation.

4) a reflection on and response to the weekly events and the poems. The nature of the reflections will vary, depending on who is reflecting. The project seeks to connect users to scholars and poets around the world who study and appreciate Dickinson’s work in order to offer diverse viewpoints through creative and critical musings. If you would like to be a guest respondent, please contact the editor, Ivy Schweitzer at Ivy.Schweitzer@Dartmouth.edu.

Welcome Hannah Howard!

Bloodroot is committed to a rotating editorial team. This year we welcome Hannah Howard, author of the forthcoming memoir Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen. Hannah Howard is a writer and food expert who spent her formative years in New York eating, drinking, serving, bartending, cooking on a hot line, and flipping giant wheels of cheese in Manhattan landmarks such as Picholine and Fairway Market. Her work has been published in New York magazine, VICE, and Self. She also mentors women recovering from eating disorders by helping them build happy, healthy relationships with food and themselves. 

Here's a short Q&A with Hannah:

Tell us about your book!

It’s my first book, a memoir called Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen. Feast is my story of working my way through restaurants and grocery stores in NYC, LA, and Philadelphia, falling in love with food (and the wrong men!), and recovering from an eating disorder. It’s a coming of age story, really. It’s about making peace with food, my body, my heart, and my world. It comes out on April 1, and I couldn’t be more thrilled, or more terrified. 

Do you write on paper or use your computer to generate a first draft?

I love the romance of writing on paper! But I’m terrible at it. I think too fast for my hand to keep up with my brain, and my fingers keep cramping up. So I’m a computer writer all the way, although I’ve knocked out more than a few pages with my thumbs on my phone during a long subway ride. Phone writing is not ideal. 

What inspires you?

The people and dreams and stories that come together in NYC, where I’m lucky enough to call home. And travel! I’m in Kerala right now, on the southwestern coast of India. The air is drippingly humid, the women wear such vibrant rainbows of colors, the smells of the sea and coconuts and trash overwhelm…I’m flooded with inspiration. I’m inspired by people I love, people I don’t understand, and people I meet for a moment or a day but think about for so much longer. Food has always been a juicy source of inspiration for me: the way it brings people together and carries with it both tradition and the possibility of something brand new. The way it can satisfy body and soul. 

Who are you reading right now?

I just finished Ariel Levy’s memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply, and I sobbed my way through. What a beautiful book! I’ve been devouring Alice Munro stories recently, and returning to some favorites: Zadie Smith, Ann Patchett, Mary Karr, and James Baldwin, who belongs in his own sphere of brilliance. 

Submissions Are Now Closed

Thank you for your submissions and stay tuned!

Submissions are open!

Bloodroot v. 9

Bloodroot's Second Digital edition just went live!

Check it out here: http://www.bloodrootlit.org

Bring some new work to read or just come hang out with us tomorrow night at 7PM at Left Bank Books in Hanover for our launch party. If you can't make it, we'll raise a glass for you. Thank you for being part of our literary community

Guest Post from Joanne M. Clarkson

Fate afforded me the opportunity to write for this Blog.  More precisely, “The Fates,” and an old hotel.  My manuscript by this auspicious title won Bright Hill Press’ annual contest and will be published in late spring 2017.  I wrote to Bloodroot’s editors to obtain permission to reprint my poem, “Hotel ZZZ,” which had appeared in Bloodroot 2014.   They then invited me to blog something about my poetry writing/reading process and my upcoming collection.

Most often I write to answer questions, to make sense of something mysterious or incomprehensible to me.  Formulating the question using the best language is an answer in itself.  Because I worked for years as a Hospice RN, lots of my work deals with the why of suffering and death.  I found the Greek myth of the Fates, the Three Sisters who spin, measure and sever  the thread of life, apt when contemplating the what’s up with this? of living and dying.

Not all the poems in the book are about death.  Many more address different aspects of life, affirmations of life.  A good example is my hotel poem. 

In 2013, my husband spoke at a conference and they put us up in a quaint hotel that was a remodeled very old grade school.  We were in the Math Room, never my best subject.  I always travel with fresh notebooks – yes, I write on paper first, in my Catholic schoolgirl cursive – and then polish and transition my words into technology.  That night I thought I could actually feel the people in other rooms.  I wondered what brought them here and what we all might have in common.  My poem was born from one moment of united dream.

In the highest sense, I see all poetry as dreams-in-common.  I believe strongly in a chain of inspiration.  Poetry is a different form of thought: life through the linguistic lens of beauty or despair.  And certain sounds and combinations of sound facilitate this.  That is why immersing ourselves in the canon of poetic expression is essential to being a poet at all.

I have a ritual when I write. I start by looking out the window and thanking the day by finding something individual and extraordinary.  Like a cloud shape, a nameless bird, wind in the branches, an empty swing.  Then I read a poem sometimes at random and often from a collection I am working through.   Recently at a friend’s book sale, I bought The Poets Laureate Anthology (W.W. Norton, 2010).   I thought I had a pretty good acquaintance with famous American poets of the past 70 years.  I was awe-struck by what I uncovered in this volume. Fate, right?

I realized I had never really known greats like Stanley Kunitz, Joseph Brodsky and Mona Van Duyn.  I went to the library and checked out more by these amazing writers.  In return, each gave me a poem of my own.  I am now working on Louise Gluck.  One of the other bloggers mentioned her.  My absolute favorite book right now is her Faithful and Virtuous Night (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) which won the National Book Award.

Another aspect of “The Fates” is my attempt to both understand and honor my maternal grandmother, Esther.  She was a psychic and a seamstress, a Fate in her way. She came to America with her sisters expecting to find love and riches.  Instead she found hard work.  Her older sister learned to read cards from Gypsies in an alley behind their boarding house.  Grandma became very good at it and read cards for extra money all her life.  But her ability to predict events in people’s lives seemed to afford more torment than pleasure.    

In a way, poets are ‘mediums.’  We get into our ‘poetry place’ and write what our Muse dictates, what society shouts, what suffering whimpers, the fervent spark of joy.  Emotion passes through us and becomes – a fortunate word.

I am very excited about Bloodroot’s new online format and direction.  I am forever grateful to people who have the courage to invest their time, finances and spirit into promoting what they honor as most true.  What could be truer than words forged in passion?  Although I believe Fate is real, I believe even more strongly in Will.  We can create!  Thank you Bloodroot editors, supporters, readers and writers.  You make me proud to be a poet.