Molly Fisk : Process Note #72

The 'process note’ pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Molly Fisk are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Saint Mary’s College of California. Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

My interest in “the west” as a fictional place has been pretty steady since I was a little girl, but a couple of pieces caught my eye in adulthood, and I'll bet they were part of the spark for Walking Wheel. One is Molly Gloss's The Jump-Off Creek, about a single woman homesteader in Oregon, which I loved and sold many copies of when I worked in a bookstore in the 1990s.

The other horrified me: Annie Proulx's short story "Them Old Cowboy Songs" (from her book Fine Just the Way It Is), about a young couple who have a baby and every possible disaster occurs, leaving all of them dead at the end. Right from the get-go, I wanted to describe the incredible amount of work it took to stay alive in this kind of rural terrain, and also have nothing bad happen to my characters.

I'm pretty sure I wrote the first poem after a young woman entered my head in 1998 when I was sitting on a sofa in a rented cottage on Cape Cod with some writer friends. Everyone thinks I must have done a lot of research, but most of what's in here I knew about from reading and living and movies. I did have to double check a few things to verify them, though. I'm horribly likely to think I'm always right.

Someone asked me why I wanted to explore this century and these lives. I'm afraid I never consciously think about where a book is going or what it's exploring. I'm not analytical about the process, or trying to steer. I let things unfold and see what happens.
 

I was noticing some of the skills my friends and I have and regularly use, we who are now in our 60s through 80s, that younger people, and especially city-dwellers, don't seem to have. Making fires in a woodstove, cooking things from scratch, putting up jam, sewing and knitting, repairing. One of my grandmothers taught me a lot, when I'd stay with her in the summer, so I was also thinking of the circumstances under which we learn skills and pass them on.

Nevada City, California, where I've lived for 30 years, is a Gold Rush town, so I'm surrounded by buildings and a landscape that refers to the past, not just for tourists but for those of us who've been here a while and watched it change. Many of us know the trees that were imported by early settlers, grown from seeds someone brought west, like Little-Leaf Lindens, and Mirabelle plums. There's an abiding sense of history running beneath everyday life that I think affected me. Not everyone feels this, but a poet's job is to slow down and notice things, and I think I wanted to recreate the pace of life in an unelectrified, uncomputerized world. The pace and also the effort required.

I purposefully didn't set the book here, it's up in Cedarville, in the Surprise Valley, a place I came across on a road trip and feel oddly attached to. And I set the book after the Gold Rush, so this couple is second-generation, their parents crossed the country in covered wagons, but they were born in Oregon. The Gold Rush ushered in a lot of damage to the people and landscape throughout the west, and I discuss my feelings and decisions about that in an afterword to the book. My lineage is white New Englanders from way back, and Walking Wheel is a likely story about those people, but I'm paying attention to colonialism as a background to it, if not mentioning it specifically in the text.

No individual poems were problematic, the big adventure with Walking Wheel was writing poems sporadically over twenty years without realizing I was writing a book. This is so different from my other poems and essays in subject and tone, I didn't take it seriously for a long time. By the time I figured out it was trying to be a whole book, I had a huge continuity problem.

I'd just sort of written each poem by itself, in my mind, without reference. So I had to go back and try to sort them out, not just for meaning in relation to the one before and the one after, but also to not have summer last for two years, and Phoebe's pregnancy stall out so she was in her third month for several months in a row. My early readers helped a lot with this. Weather, crops, and gestation, those were the problem!

It took me about a year of working this out, some charts on the wall, pages of the book hung up in my kitchen on garden twine as if they were laundry... Luckily, my best friend from childhood was a midwife, so she looked at the book once I got it into a basic order. Instead of correcting things, she gave me a timeline of average pregnancies, so I had to do it myself, which was I'm sure the right thing to do but Lord it was hard. I had the baby doing somersaults in utero long before that would be possible. I also blithely mentioned an herb for tea to be drunk during pregnancy because I liked the sound of its name—at this moment I can't recall which one—and another friend who's a nurse told me this herb can cause miscarriages, and I needed something else.
 

As I was finishing the book and the world was starting to feel more uncertain and dangerous, I thought “well, maybe this story and the slower pace can help people escape, be a distraction.” But it's turned into more than that, as I listen to reader reactions. It's comforting, but it also provides a kind of relief, a reminder about the benefits of work and love. It's a vote for humanity in a time when inhumanity is so prevalent. It is also speaking to men in some way. I've never had so many men tell me they felt seen and loved the story.

What people take away after reading a book is so varied and unpredictable. I didn't set out to say this, but now that the book is done, if I have a wish, it's that readers be reminded love is alive, and work is doable, and sometimes nothing goes wrong. That all is not lost.

 

A Fiddle String

 

Dark inside the house,
as black as the stove pipe's
interior and her eyes wide
as though it were noon.
Dark of the moon, no
moving air at this hour,
too early by far for birdsong.
But in her mind's eye
she can see the softness
of his face in sleep,
how his jaw slackens,
the muscles of temple
and cheek relax. Miles
is a calm man, unhurried
and steady but he can
acquire a certain tension
at times, when the weather
shifts to impede or hurry
his work, when a tree
falls off the mark, akimbo,
or one of the mules won't eat.
He doesn't borrow trouble
but he sees its tracks
and knows its scent.
Approaching fatherhood
has sharpened all his senses,
she thinks. More to be done.
More to protect. He isn't afraid
of the new life, just alert
in a different way. Tuned
like a fiddle string to a higher
note. A scatter of stars now,
through the open window.
They are so far from us,
she thinks. And cold. Why
do they bring me comfort?

 

 

Speculation 

 

What are we naming this child?
Her spine against his ribs
as her front needs half the bed now.
His fingers playing through her hair.
Is it silkier? Her skin
is like moonlight.
My favorite cow was called Bess,
he says. A Jersey.
Her laugh shakes them both
and her belly ripples.
Miles! 

That won't do for a boy,
though, I agree. How about Spike,
if it's a boy? 

SPIKE?

Or Aloysius?

Have you been drinking before
breakfast? Be serious. 

You married an unserious man,
as you may remember.
There's no going back now.
She smiles. The dog yawns
and stretches on the rug, dozing
again, dawn just hinting
at the square shapes of the windows.
None of the virtues, she says. 

What? He'd been thinking of something else.

Patience, Prudence, Constance.
I think they chide a baby. 

How about the sins?
Gluttony Imlay has a nice ring. 

Oh, hush!

Maybe we need another songbird
in the family? But not another pilgrim.
Perhaps the wee one will announce
its name on arrival. 

I've always liked Justin, she says,
if it's a boy.

 

 

The Silence 

 

The clouds have been low all day
and the air biting, sometimes wind
careening down the valley, pine cones
and small branches snapped and dropping
in its wake. Sometimes an uncanny
stillness, but not for long, as though
the weather is of two minds, arguing
with itself. They have fed
and bedded the animals early, with extra
hay for warmth. Bright in his stall calmly
chewing, Lion restive, aware of something
at large in the world and not happy
about it, always the more high-strung.
Miles hopes he'll absorb some of Bright's
equanimity over time, though there
is no evidence of that yet. Chickens
roosting, quiet. The goats wide-eyed.
Miles double-checks the door latches
and brings a shovel with him up to the house.
The shutters have been closed for weeks
against the cold — no chinks of light
shine out to greet him, thankfully.
Their first winter here, together, their first
big storm, he hopes there will be no
unlooked for surprises. Plenty of wood.
As he opens the door, warmth and the smell
of supper hitting him full force, and Phoebe's
half-worried smile, the silence falls —
always a wonder to him. Not an absence
of sound but its own living presence.
The first flakes lightly, sparsely, almost
as if they were dancing, drift down.

 

 

Bathing 

 

On Saturday nights, Phoebe and Miles
take their weekly bath. This is one of the secret
luxuries of marriage: only two bodies
to be cleaned in the steaming water, rather
than the multitudes at home. Phoebe hauls
the first two buckets and builds the fire up
in the stove. The kettles hiss a little
and the cabin’s air gathers humidity. Miles
hauls the next and strips as Phoebe pours
the hot water into her wash tub and refills
the kettles with what he’s carried. Before he
steps in, his body stark white where his clothes
have covered him and acorn-brown at his neck
and forearms which have been bare, Phoebe
pours in another measure of cold. She hands him
a square of the soap she’s made, scented
with mint from her mother’s garden, a cooling odor.
He rubs its harsh surface down his shins and scrubs
his feet, wets arms and chest, shoulders, lathers
the brown hair of his groin and thighs.
Phoebe pours water from the kettles, not fully
hot yet, over his hair, down his back and soaps
and rinses. Gradually his skin loses its deep brown
as grime and the salts of his body are sluiced away,
and his white parts become rosy with heat.
When he is done, she stands ready in her shift.
She empties the kettles into the tub and steps in,
slipping the cotton over her head. While Miles
dries his back and legs he watches the way
she bends and straightens, attending to toes, heels,
under her arms and breasts, the slight moon-shape
her belly makes now, her long white flanks, her face.
He soaps her back for her and pours the rinse water
over her hair twice, three times, her neck arched
back and her eyes closed. These rituals almost
always end in their bed with tongues and minty
fingertips, but not before she has dried herself,
showing him the apple of her bottom and the dark
vee of hair veiling what’s between her legs.
He almost cannot bear the exquisiteness of waiting
as she dries her hair beside the stove, so he walks out
naked to the porch and hurls the cooling wash-water
over the rail.

 

 

 

 

Molly Fisk sent poets into schools state-wide and edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She's received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, her new collection Walking Wheel, a novel-in-verse, is just out from Red Hen Press. She lives in California's Sierra foothills.

 

 

 

 

 

Maw Shein Win’s most recent full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) which was shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) was longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, the recipient of the 2026 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature, 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2025 Nomadic/SF Foundation Literary Award for Non-fiction. She is a member of The Writers Grotto and a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse. She teaches poetry in the MFA Programs at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. mawsheinwin.com

 

Kim Fahner : Blue Atlas, by Susan Rich

Blue Atlas, Susan Rich
Red Hen Press, 2024

 

 

 

 

I first came to meet Susan Rich, and to read her poetry, in Summer 2012, on a writing retreat at the Anam Cara Writers’ and Artists’ Retreat in Eyeries, County Cork, Ireland. I signed up for her ekphrastic poetry workshop, which ran a week, and for which I will always be grateful. I’ve been an admirer of her work ever since. Her most recent book, Blue Atlas, documents a challenging childhood, a yearning for the world of travel and exploration, and tells the story of an unplanned pregnancy and abortion. This is a collection that speaks of a fully led life, one leapt into with curiosity and a keen desire to learn more about the world and its people. It’s also a collection that has, as its centre, a pinpoint of loss that ripples outwards, and a poetic reflection that questions the complexity of life’s experiences.

The poet begins the collection by documenting what it feels like to experience an abortion that is not of their choosing. In the poem, “Arborist/Abortionist,” it’s revealed that the abortion was arranged “by anxious relatives” who wished for a “disappearing act,” and that the doctor “extracted the troublesome little branch/that obscured the golden overlook.” The one thing that would certainly change the landscape of a life is removed. In “Metaphors,” the metaphor continues to build as there are references to the fetus as an “unfinished dance step—unripe mango;/an infinitesimal beansprout cut back/to the nub” and of how it feels to engage with the conundrum “of choice/no choice.” There are, too, references back to the Blue Atlas Cedar tree that is native to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. A gymnosperm, “the Blue Atlas has neither flowers nor fruits. It is the hardiest species and can reproduce spontaneously from seeds.” The metaphor of this particular tree, along with other plant images and metaphors, is one that the poet weaves through the collection.

In a section titled, “Compass of Desire,” Rich creates an archive of past lovers. In the poem, “No One Knew,” the poet conjures the electric magic of first love at sixteen, with the speaker remembering how “He appled and oranged me afternoons/in his bedroom.” The two “were each/other’s first what? Our idea of what might be?” Another poem, “Anatomy of Desire at the Cactus Café,” captures the intensity of the magnetic pull that exists between two lovers, an indescribable attraction that cannot be denied, with the poet writing: “I’d still tip my mojito to the muse of hands//almost meeting, shoulders nearly touching—/the desire for human pretzels rising above//our heads in little thought balloons.” The lovers become “weed-wild and wonderous—//a page torn from a blue pocket notebook/or the first hum of a feral embrace.” Here is a poet who uses language, and brilliantly crafted poetry, to paint a vivid and artistic picture inside the reader’s mind and heart. She moves from documenting past loves to working through a series of pieces that become a post-abortion narrative.  

Loss permeates the poetic fabric of Blue Atlas. The poem “Once Mother and Father Were Buried,” the second in the section titled “Apparitions,” is a witnessing of what happens after we lose major figures in our lives, in terms of how the things they leave behind become artifacts of a life: “After the garlic press, the musical penny bank,/the silverware from a rosewood box/were presented, argued over, stripped bare—” and “after the claiming of the Seder plate, inlaid Aladdin table, and father’s Hamilton watch,” the question arises as to “what did we learn of belongings?” The reader sits uncomfortably, knowing the tug of war that occurs between siblings after parental deaths. One possibility is “total sibling divorce, division, and “lives cracking open.” This section of the book deals with the ghosts of loss. Here are dead parents who haunt, and a “ghost-child” spoken of as “little biscuit, lemon peel,”  as well as a former love who slams the door and leaves silence behind him as “a fast-forming habit that untied its shoelaces,/sank into the loveseat and prepared to stay/up with me all night,” to a tiny bee or yellow jacket that stings and departs, so that “all I have left//of him is a raised scar, burning like a silver dollar.” Yes, I kept thinking as I read through Blue Atlas, this is exactly what loss of all incarnations is like. It wounds, scars, and haunts you for the rest of your life, and so you are forced to wrestle with it for as long as you live.

It makes perfect sense, then, that Rich references a well-known and loved American poet (who is sometimes claimed by Canada, as well) in “Compass” when she writes: “Elizabeth Bishop often kept a compass/in her small jacket pocket,” as she “regularly fell from a delicate/map of sobriety, lost her keys, entire weeks—even countries.” Rich suggests, near the end of the poem, that perhaps “her brokenness could orient her” to move forward from great loss and grief. This is what Rich does in all her work in Blue Atlas—she nudges her reader to see the world in all its detailed sorrow and joy, creates images and metaphors that paint visual art on the page, and reminds them that life is complex, challenging, and richly rewarding. Our tenacity as humans is honoured in these poems, as well.

What will most stay with me as a reader is the idea that the poems of Blue Atlas speak to the need to not search frantically for closure or try to box up past experiences into categories. Our lives are timelines like the plots we read in novels, but they are never linear ones. In “String Theory with Heartache,” the poet writes: “But what if the point/is not the point? Under the world’s microscope we see that//no picture frame, no old love, no sigh/actually stays still.” In the places where we experienced trauma in our younger lives and incarnations—whether locked in dark attics by siblings, or in dealing with the ripple effect of pregnancies that have been ended, or in dealing with the expectations and social pressures of our parents’ inherited religions—we hope for some sort of clarity. The place where we might find peace comes from our acceptance that our paths, our life choices, have been complex and often painful. In “Binocular Vision,” there is a poignant sense of ‘what if’ that hovers above the words, as the speaker wonders whether the “zygote/who never becomes” might be “a geologist or lounge singer.” The poem ends with the speaker defining herself as “half-mother,//half-old crone, longing for/my lovely disembodied—my dear, body of a boy.” In all our human gains and losses, and in our learning, we are haunted by absences that we must learn to live with as we continually move forward. This is what Susan Rich’s Blue Atlas has reminded me—to be kind to younger incarnations of myself, to be mindful of each moment I’m here, and to show compassion to myself and others.  

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest full collection of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022) and she's just published a poetry chapbook, Fault Lines and Shatter Cones (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023). She is the First Vice-Chair for The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim's first novel, The Donoghue Girl, has just been published by Latitude 46 Publishing. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com