Tag Archives: author

Christina Stoddard talks about poetry, Mormonism, feminism, gang violence, and revenge

Christina Stoddard is the author of the poetry collection HIVE, for which she is the winner of the 2014 Brittingham Prize in Poetry. Hive has just been published by the University of Wisconsin Press. We spoke with Stoddard about this fierce debut collection of poems about brutality, exaltation, rebellion, and allegiance.


Stoddard-Hive-c

I needed to write a poem that was absolutely boiling over with rage.


Where did the title of the book come from? Why Hive?   Beehives are actually an important symbol in Mormon culture, and have been dating back to pioneer times. The exact reason why is not known for sure, but there are a few theories. One is that honeybees embody many qualities that the Church teaches its members to prize: harmony, industriousness, order, communal labor. Everyone performing their assigned role and everyone working together for the common good. Bees are cohesive and single-minded, not individual. Bees don’t deviate from the path they’re given—and thematically that is perfect for my book, which is about a teenage girl who is doing exactly that: deviating from the path she’s supposed to follow. Utah’s nickname is the Beehive State—even though they don’t really raise bees there and Utah doesn’t produce a lot of honey.

I gather from the book that you did not grow up in Utah, however.   No, I didn’t. I was born in the Pacific Northwest and grew up in Tacoma, WA, which is where the book is set. But my father is from Utah, and we visited relatives there often, so I’m familiar with a few cities in Utah.

How long did it take you to write the book?  That’s a little difficult to answer, because I spent many years

Christina Stoddard

Christina Stoddard

trying to write it and mostly failing. Originally what I produced weren’t poems, they were more like polemics. I was a very angry person in my teens and twenties, and I had to work through that anger first. A few of the poems have existed in some form for more than a decade. But most of the book was written over a period of three years, 2010 to 2013, after I had taken some creative writing workshops from poets Claudia Emerson and Ellen Bryant Voigt. Those women gave me the keys that unlocked everything else.

What sorts of keys?  I took a summer workshop at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, from Claudia Emerson, and when she read the group of poems I had turned in for class, Claudia basically told me that it seemed like I was phoning it in. She said I wasn’t pushing myself in either form or subject matter, and she challenged me to do better.

Really?  Yes. That hurt at first, certainly, but I decided there were two options: I could either give up and go sulk in the corner, or I could fling myself off a cliff of experimentation and see what happened. I chose the cliff. I started trying to write lyric poems, whereas previously my style had been very chatty, straightforward and plain, very rooted in story, what are often called narrative poems. A narrative poem has a beginning, middle, and end, and there’s usually a lot of context about what’s going on.

I took that new lyrical work and applied the next summer to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. I had no idea if the poems were any good—they were way outside of my comfort zone. But I got accepted, and I took a workshop with Ellen Bryant Voigt. Ellen once  . . .  Full interview continued here Continue reading

Stefanie Zweig, Author Who Fled Nazis to Kenya, Dies at 81

Stefanie Zweig

From the NYT obituary: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/01/books/stefanie-zweig-author-who-fled-nazis-to-kenya-dies-at-81.html?_r=0
 

Stefanie Zweig, the author of Nowhere in Africa, a best-selling autobiographical novel about the life of a Jewish family in Kenya after their escape from Nazi Germany and the inspiration for an Oscar-winning film, died on Friday in Frankfurt. She was 81.

Her publisher in the United States, the University of Wisconsin Press, confirmed her death.

Nowhere in Africa, published in 1995, hewed closely to the story of her parents’ escape from Frankfurt with their 6-year-old daughter in 1938, and the family’s adjustment to life as farmers in British colonial Africa. The parents endured grinding work and bouts of depression. Stefanie, who had been withdrawn, blossomed into a venturesome, Swahili-speaking teenager.

The novel, the first of a dozen by Ms. Zweig, sold about 5 million copies. A German film adaptation with the same title, directed by Caroline Link, won the Academy Award for best foreign language film in 2003. Ms. Zweig and Ms. Link wrote the screenplay.

In a sequel novel, Somewhere in Germany, published in 1996, Ms. Zweig described the reverse adjustment the family had to make when, in 1947, her father, a lawyer, was appointed a judge in Frankfurt. As her father explained it to her at the time, she wrote, his credentials as a German lawyer with no Nazi affiliations made him one of the few people qualified for such a position after World War II.

In fact, she wrote, he missed “the sounds and memories of home,” which everyone except her oddly naïve father seemed to know were beyond recovery.

Returning to bombed-out Frankfurt in 1947, the family joined a hungry, traumatized population in rebuilding the country. Scores of their German relatives were missing. None had been heard from since the start of the war in 1939, except a grandmother, who got a letter out in 1941 with the help of the Red Cross.

“They were only allowed to write 20 words,” Ms. Zweig told an interviewer in 2003. “My grandmother wrote — ‘We are very excited. We are going to Poland tomorrow.’ ” Reading that, she continued, “my father said Poland meant Auschwitz.”

But her father cautioned her against indiscriminate hatred, she wrote in an essay in The Guardian in 2003. As a child she was not allowed to hate all Germans, she said, “only the Nazis.”

For a year after returning to Frankfurt, the family lived in one room at the city’s former Jewish hospital. She wrote, “We spent our days hunting for food and our evenings wondering why nearly every German we talked to told us that they had always hated Hitler and had felt pity for the persecuted Jews.”

Stefanie Zweig was born on Sept. 19, 1932, in Leobschütz, a German-speaking town in disputed territory belonging to Germany at the time and to Poland since the end of the war. Her family moved to Frankfurt when she was a toddler. After a decade of speaking English (and some Swahili) in Kenya, she had to relearn German on returning to Frankfurt at 15, she wrote.

Ms. Zweig was for many years the arts editor and film reviewer for a Frankfurt newspaper, Abendpost Nachtausgabe. She wrote children’s books in her spare time and began writing novels only after the newspaper closed in 1988. She lived for many years with a companion, Wolfgang Hafele, who died in 2013. She had no known survivors.

Ms. Zweig wrote Nowhere in Africa in German, as she did all her books, but admitted to remaining unsure throughout her life whether English or German was her true native language.

“I count in English, adore Alice in Wonderland, am best friends with Winnie-the-Pooh,” she wrote in her Guardian essay, “and I am still hunting for the humor in German jokes.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 1, 2014, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: “Stefanie Zweig, 81, Author Who Fled Nazis to Kenya.”