Honeyfishing with Poet Lauren Alleyne

The Creative Writing Minor at Washington and Lee University was pleased to host Lauren K. Alleyne yesterday! Pleased? We were lucky, blessed, gifted with her presence...all of the above. It was a moment of sheer joy for all of us, faculty and students alike. Lesley Wheeler's beginning poetry class joined my advanced poetry workshop for Lauren, tea and cookies, and later for an outstanding reading. Books were signed, questions asked, and words of wisdom bestowed. I've sprinkled some of those gems below, in between my somewhat fuzzy photographs (sometimes the phone camera loves me, sometimes it acts like we never met).

Lauren K. Alleyne hails from the twin island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Her fiction, poetry and non-fiction have been widely published in journals and anthologies, including The Atlantic, Ms. Muse, Women's Studies Quarterly, Interviewing the Caribbean, Crab Orchard Review, among many others. She is author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014) and Honeyfish (New Issues (US) & Peepal Tree (UK), 2019).

With Professor and Poet Lesley Wheeler

Lauren's work has been awarded many honors, most recently, the Phillip Freund Alumni Prize for Excellence in Publishing from Cornell University (2017), the Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press (2017), the Split This Rock Poetry Prize (2016), the Picador Guest Professorship in Literature at the University of Leipzig, Germany (2015), and an Iowa Arts Council Fellowship (2014). In 2015, the journal IthacaLit named its annual prize the Lauren K. Alleyne/Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize.

Alleyne currently resides in Virginia, USA, where she is an Associate Professor of English at James Madison University, Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and Editor-in-Chief of The Fight & The Fiddle.

 "Punctuation doesn't have meaning - it has uses."

 

 "If I were a lawyer and saw an injustice, I'd drop everything, fly to that location, and offer to help people pro bono. But I'm not a lawyer (something my mother still regrets). But I still have an expertise - in words, with language. That's how I can help others who have experienced injustice."

 "A poem will come back to you when it's ready. And sometimes we're not ready for our poems! It can take ten years or more. But rather than put a bad poem out there, wait. The poem you want to write will come back for you when it's ready, and when you're ready."

 "Image, sensory experiences - your brain stores what it needs, whatever it is you need in order to go on from a particular moment. Later, during a freewrite, you push past what you know - and then you have access to those images and sensory memories that inform you, inform your writing."

 "What your life is determines what your relationship with words is, and will be."

One of my favorite poems from Lauren's reading last night was "Variations in Blue," - a poem about a kind of freedom or privilege we don't think about very often.   

Lauren ended our session by giving us this guided freewrite prompt:

1. think of a place.
2. Think of a story that happened there.
3. Now think of a memory or story of yours that is unrelated to that place.
4. Ask a question to the you (or subject or object) from the 1st place you thought of.
5. Answer the question.


Where the prompt led me:

Up in the Tehachapi Mountains
the dry earth is home
to ants, gophers,
gila monsters. Once,
at my Aunt Sally's 
house, I sat down
beside a black widow,
her geometric warning
bright as a glass bead.
What is it about the color red
that looks so pretty
to a four-year-old-child
who hasn't seen her parents
in a year? Perhaps the memory
of her mother's favorite
lipstick, skillfully applied  -
a ruby promise left behind 
on her cheek.

Deborah A. Miranda 

 

THANK YOU, LAUREN!