-Patricia M Osborne

Spirit Mother can be purchased here: https://whitewingsbooks.com/shop/

The Interview

Q:1. How did you decide on the order of the poems in Spirit Mother?

It took me quite a long time to be honest. I spent days checking the lengths and topics in order to create variation throughout the book. I opened with White Lily as it was short but strong enough to keep the reader turning the page.

Q:2. Why Trees?

Well, I love trees. I find them spiritual, a place where you can relax or meditate, and they have so many interesting stories to tell. Although, Spirit Mother, unlike my debut collection, Taxus Baccata, extends the myths to other things in nature, such as birds, dragonflies, flowers. The reader discovers folklore about mistletoe, legends around lavender, white lily and amaryllis. They learn a myth about how the nightingale got its sweet voice and one about the devil tricking a fisherman when he turned himself into a dragonfly.

Q:3. What fascinates you about myths and folktales?

Gosh I’m not quite sure how to answer this. I suppose because I’m stepping into an enchanting, magical worlds. I never know what I’m going to discover. I decide on a subject and then set about exploring through my numerous mythology books or the internet to see what myths I can discover.  More than once Mike Powell’s blog has inspired me. For instance, Mike frequently posts photos of dragonflies so I set about to see if there were any myths or legends around them – and guess what? – there was. There seems to be at least one myth, if not several, around all things in nature.

Q:4. Why do you want to step into an enchanting, magical world?

This question is easy for me to answer. I love the escape it offers me. I can go anywhere I like and be anything I like. I frequently take on the personification of a tree or bird.

Q:5. How do you become the tree or the bird?

I suppose its just like anything else in writing. You get to know your character and become them.

Q:6. How important is form to you in this book?

Form is important as I wouldn’t go for closed form as the content needs freedom rather than being restricted to a specific syllable count, or end rhyme so opt for free verse. Again, using the freedom option, I like to experiment with white space using visual poetry.

Q:7. Once they have read the book what do you want your reader to leave with?

I hope the reader has learned some mythical tales. That when the reader closes the book, they feel like they’ve experienced the myth.

Thank you so much for your fabulous questions, Paul. It’s been fun answering them.

Limited edition copies of Spirit Mother can be ordered via my website shop.

: https://whitewingsbooks.com/shop/

Jake the Cat After I have made the bed Jake leaves me his toy This is his devotion and gift to me in the early morning. Jake leaves me his toy after I have left for work. Maybe he is hoping I’ll return? So, he waits. I find the toy Jake has left for me when I return home and it reminds me that I left early in the morning and he has been home all day sharing his toy. -Corinne Walsh Missy We knew she hadn’t long to live when she couldn’t move from the corner of the kitchen floor the night before she died, but it was still a shock when a neighbour knocked on the door next day to ask if we had a cat, a white one? Somehow she’d got outside to the pavement, not the road, thank goodness. Rescued by the RSPCA, a tear in her ear, we never guessed she’d last sixteen years. Her painful paws couldn’t carry her any further, her claws spiralled like fossils, they’d kept growing as she grew too old to have them cut. -Peter J. Donnelly Seven Species First there was Missy the mongrel from the RSPCA, at least 144 in cat years when she passed away. Then stray Kitty, dark as a witch’s cat with a kink in her tail who brought in a rat. Tiger the Tabbie was chalk to black Lilly’s cheese, as different as Biscuit, Grandma’s ginger tom from Heathcliff, her Siamese. Once white Willow goes there’ll be no more cats. I’d have one myself if I didn’t live in a flat. -Peter J. Donnelly Sunil Sharma tries to create a Murakami-laced moment by outlining a late afternoon conversation between strangers. The protagonist, a filmmaker find a subject of instant interest in a coconut-seller who seems unnaturally knowledgeable about Haruki Murakami. He tells an inspiring story of triumphing over evil and disappears completely (with his coconut stall) the next day. Sharma catcher his reader off-guard, drawing them in, warming their hearts and leaving them with a bewildered look on their faces. – Shreya, The Bombay Review The story appears in The Bombay Review: https://thebombayreview.com/2020/05/26/cats-murakami-and-a-mystery-encounter-sunil-sharma/ Another cat story by Sunil appears in Different Truths.

The Lost Catwoman

-Sunil Sharma Cat Called Nothing JPS calls me Nothing. (Apologies to Jean-Paul Sartre) Catness carries being at its heart. I am condemned to be free. If I tremble at the slightest noise, If each creak announces me a look. This is because I am already in the state Of being-looked-at. Catness haunts being. Hell is other people. Catness lies coiled at the heart of being like a worm. Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the Catness of its being. Bios And Links -Corinne Walsh As a small child Corinne Walsh wrote little notes and left them where people might accidentally find them, in mailboxes, in pockets, even under rocks. Composing thoughts and writing down feelings only to cast them out into the world started as a child’s experiment in expression, and 50 years later the habit survives. -Sunil Sharma a senior academic and author-freelance journalist from the suburban Mumbai, India. He has published 21 books so far, some of which are solo efforts and some joint. He edits Setu: http://www.setumag.com/p/setu-home.html -Peter J. Donnelly lives in York where he works as a hospital secretary.  He has a degree in English Literature and a MA in Creative Writing from the University of Wales Lampeter. He has been published in various magazines and anthologies including One Hand Clapping, Dreich,  High Window, Southlight and Writer’s Egg.  He came second in the Ripon Poetry Festival competition and was a joint runner up in the Buzzwords open poetry competition in 2020.

-Patricia M Osborne

Spirit Mother can be purchased here: https://whitewingsbooks.com/shop/

The Interview

Q:7 Once they have read the book what do you want your reader to leave with?

I hope the reader has learned some mythical tales. That when the reader closes the book, they feel like they’ve experienced the myth.

Thank you so much for your fabulous questions, Paul. It’s been fun answering them.

Limited edition copies of Spirit Mother can be ordered via my website shop.

-Patricia M Osborne

Spirit Mother can be purchased here: https://whitewingsbooks.com/shop/

The Interview

Q:6. How important is form to you in this book?

Form is important as I wouldn’t go for closed form as the content needs freedom rather than being restricted to a specific syllable count, or end rhyme so opt for free verse. Again, using the freedom option, I like to experiment with white space using visual poetry.

More questions and answers to follow.

Clare O’Brien (Bio courtesy of Amazon)

has worked as a schoolteacher, a journalist, PR to a Scottish politician and PA to an American rock star. Originally a Londoner, she now lives beside a sea-loch in Scotland, which suits her much better. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies including Heather: An Anthology of Scottish Writing and Art (Alice Louise Lannon, 2022) The Sea Is Here (Unimpatient, 2020), The Anthology Of Contemporary Gothic Verse (Emma Press, 2019), Songs To Learn And Sing (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2018), The Powers Of Nature (White Craw Publishing 2017) and in journals such as Mslexia, Northwords Now, Lunate and The Ekphrastic Review. A new phase poet, she also writes short fiction and is working on an experimental novel entitled Light Switch.

The Interview

1. How did you decide on the order of the poems in your book?

That was easy – its the chronological order of the albums I chose to be the subjects for the 13 poems. The collection was a response to a call from Hedgehog Poetry for a “baker’s dozen” of linked poems on a single theme. I chose to make them ekphrastic poems in response to 13 of David Bowie’s albums.

2. Why Bowie?

Because he was the first musician I ever saw play live, back in 1973 when I was 15, and like so many other weird kids at the time, I was changed and in some measure, saved by it. 

Because I grew up a few miles down the road from where he grew up in south London and my friend’s big sister once babysat for him. 

Because he’d been an artistic influence, a sort of ghost friend in my head, all my life, on and off. And in some obscure way, I wanted to give something back.

3. How were you saved by his live performance?

I was one of the weird kids in my year at school. Introverted, a bit rebellious, with a vivid imagination.  I’d been playing the “Ziggy Stardust” album over and over, and seeing that show – it was my first ever rock show, and on Bowie’s home turf in south London – made me feel that it was OK to be different, to be a bit of a freak compared to the sociable and sporty types I was at school with.  It made me feel better about myself, and it kind of gave me permission to experiment with life a bit.

4. How important is the theme of dancing that weaves its way through your poetry?

I’d not been conscious of the way images of dance recur in this collection, but you;re abolutely right.  Tanks for pointing it out!    In the first poem, Your Face In Mine, the “dancing girl” is the ballet dancer Hermione Farthingale who dumped Bowie in 1969 for a role in a film, ‘Song Of Norway’.  He was still little known, and the end of the affair inspired several early songs.  He revisited that episode much later in his life by weaing a ‘Song Of Norway’ Tshirt in the video for ‘Where Are We Now’.  

In Standing Cinema, the word’s playful. On ‘Hunky Dory’, he’s itching for a change, ducking and diving as he tries to caper his way through to success.  But he’s being followed by ghosts. Hence “the past infects your dance”.

Cutting a Zero is assembled from cut-ups.  I thought I owed it to Bowie to try using that method at least once for this collection.  But one line which resulted,  ‘the dance of capital illness’, semed particularly relevant to the subject  of the album ‘1. Outside’.  Murder and mutilation sold as fine art.  It evoked some of the modern relationship between music, art, and money.  And all three have been i mportant to Bowie in his life and career.

Then, of course, the poem Get Things Done is a response to Bowie’s album ‘Let’s Dance’: it’s an ironic title for me, though, because the whole album is created with militaristic precision and a kind of haughty display.  Hence, ‘locked in cockstep’.  It’s almost armour-plated, that album. It dares you to defy it.

5. How important is the use of the second person “you” in the first poem?

Most of them are second-person, directly addressed, I suppose, to Bowie.  Those that aren’t are the ones where I felt more disconnected, more like an observer than half of an imaginary conversation. In the first poem I’m talking to a past version of Bowie, one who’s just beginning, just about to invent Major Tom.

6. How important was it to define inner and outer space?

I had to really think hard about this one!  Very important, I think, because the whole Major Tom metaphor – and its variant personae, such as Ziggy, Spaceboy and the dead astronaut in the ‘Blackstar’ video – all seemed to me to be about the secret space inside the artist’s mind, turned inside out and projected out into the wider universe.  It’s lonely out there floating round your tin can, just as it can be inside your head when you’re writing.  And Major Tom and his fictional friends may be about addiction too, but creating can be in itself addictive.

7. What made you pick the title of your book?

Given that every poem in the collection is titled with a phrase from one of the songs on the album in question, I wanted something special for the title of the whole collection. 

It’s from an outtake, or perhaps a dry run, for Bowie’s album 1.Outside – what’s known among fans as the “Leon Suites”.   If you#d like to head down that particular rabbit hole, there’s all kinds of info about it here: https://facingthestranger.wordpress.com/2020/01/22/inside-outside-an-extended-stay-at-the-leon-suites/

The part I quoted is a spoken word passage – Bowie’s adopting multiple personae, really acting his socks off, and then says “I mean, who am I supposed to be driving?  I thought it was apt considering how many personae David Jones, aka Bowie,  has “driven” in his career.

8. What do you find appealing about Bowie’s mercurial onstage presence?

The fact that whatever he’s doing – and I’ve never expected to love every genre of music he’s experimented with – he’s never, ever bored me for so much as a second.  He’s a thrilling performer.

9. What did you discover when using Bowie’s cut up method for writing songs for writing some of the poems?

I only used the technique for one of the poems, ‘Cutting A Zero’.  I’d never written that way before, and I’d always wondered how Bowie managed to be so expressive when he used the technique.  What surprised me the most was how well it worked.  It’s like collage would be if you were making visual art.  Using found materials to make a new piece of work. You just need to manipulate them in the right way and do a bit of editing, to paper over the cracks and make everything interact smoothly.

10. How did his art of blending different genres affect these poems?

I knew I was dealing with a chameleon.  His work was always changing, and even now it’s a finite body of work – now we know there won’t be any more – I find the songs have different effects on me depending on the angle from which I approach them, what mood I’m in, what I’m thinking.  It’s as though they change depending on how the light hits them, like  jewels that have ben skilfully cut and polished. He put so much in them, his art was such a synthesis of different elements, that he still has the power to surprise me.  I wanted to get some of that shifting perspective into the poems.

11. Once the reader has read this collection what do you want them to leave with?

A desire to go away and listen to the music!  Whether they’re revisiting it or discovering it for the first time. 

Pinned

The distant hum of storm’s fret
In an anonymity of sea.
Low slow sound as long years strain
Through oak beams and bone rings.
Vessel pinned, hearts hemmed in,
To this scrolled embroidery of wind.

-Larissa Reid

door to the Pacific 

when you stroll along
the wet cold sand

shifted by el nino’s hand
the door opens

shallow waters of matador
beach pools reflect two lovers

stars tingle with rain mists
look down where the undertow

churns the little float parade
there’s this palace of flat stones

just out of the stars next kiss
beads of stars caught in ocean

tears
roll back into deep black amber flashes of sunset

jealous fog thick thunder
angry at lightning gone by

footprint histories suddenly
erased eaten by a small child

hungry to return to memories
snow ice on thin strip of

Matador beach
we all belong
here

barefoot
when the sun’s

warms the flat stone
shoes
ocean sprays
the kneeling rocks

waiting to be
knighted again
fin

 

Bios And Links

–Larissa Reid

A freelance science writer by trade, Larissa has written poetry and prose regularly since 2016. Notable publications include Northwords Now, Silk & Smoke, Green Ink Poetry, Fenacular, Black Bough Poetry Anthologies, and the Beyond the Swelkie Anthology. She had a poem shortlisted for the Janet Coats Memorial Prize 2020. Larissa is intrigued by visible and invisible boundary lines in landscapes – geological faultlines, myth and reality, edge-lines of land and sea. Based on Scotland’s east coast, she balances her writing life with bringing up her daughters. Larissa is a founder member of the Edinburgh-based writing group, Twisted::Colon.

-Keith Antar Mason

was told by Miss Bell , his fifth grade teacher, that he should be a writer one that one special day when a child needs to have his or hers secret dream needs to be encouraged. Keith went on to have his performance done on Broadway.

-Patricia M Osborne

Spirit Mother can be purchased here: https://whitewingsbooks.com/shop/

The Interview

5. How do you become the tree or the bird? I suppose its just like anything else in writing. You get to know your character and become them

More questions and answers to follow.

-Patricia M Osborne

Spirit Mother can be purchased here: https://whitewingsbooks.com/shop/

The Interview

-Patricia M Osborne

Spirit Mother can be purchased here: https://whitewingsbooks.com/shop/

The Interview

More questions and answers to follow.