by Case Duckworth
MEACHAM, FALL 2009: There were many great writers here at UTC for the biannual Meacham Writers’ Workshop, but there was also something new this time: a songwriting workshop with Red Heart the Ticker, a band from Vermont composed of Tyler Gibbons and Robin MacArthur. I got the chance to interview Ty for the Sequoya Review.
ME: How do you write songs?
TY: I’ve always written songs–it’s how I express myself. I feel the most whole when I’m writing a song.
ME: What is touring like?
TY: It’s an amazing way to enter in to a place and have a reason to be there. It makes it easy to meet people–it’s a great excuse to travel. However, it’s very hard to make a living. It’s a privilege to get to see new cities, and if we break even doing it, that’s a start . . .
ME: So I guess you have a day job.
TY: I do carpentry, compose for media and film and also do some boom mic work for documentaries. Robin and I decided together that trying to make a living exclusively with music could be dangerous, both for our relationship and our love of music. We’ve had many friends who tried and their passion was squelched, and they dropped out. We do it when we want, because we love it, and if it works, that’s awesome. It’s not the best business model but it’s how we have been working it so far.
ME: What about publishing your albums?
TY: We’re on a very small label, Auger Down Records, where we paid for our studio time and they helped with the promotion around. This was good for us because we own all our masters, something that you can’t do with the bigger labels. We had management out of New York for a while, but we weren’t easy to work with: they’d come and say, “Do you want to do this ad?” or something, but we kept saying no, and after a while we felt pretty bad about it. It was these people’s job to help us make money, and we kept dodging things. These days, there seems to be very little benefit to being on major labels, at least artistically. There are some good things in being on the indies though–publicity, etc. Both of them, all labels, in fact, want you to tour. That’s their business–they make their money from bands touring around and selling albums. Essentially, the more people that get involved, the less control we have over our record, so it’s often a balancing act.
ME: You guys just had a kid recently, Avah. How has that changed the dynamic?
TY: Well, it’s harder to rehearse! She has this Johnny Jumpup though, and when we play she dances in it, spinning like a ballerina or something, going up and down. We’re touring less though, to spend more time with her, and when we do we often have a friend along to help out during shows. But night after night touring is difficult now–it’s too hard on us and Avah. We’re still finding time to record, and in some ways the energy of Avah transfers to new creativity in our little studio.
ME: Who are you all’s top albums and artists?
ROBIN: Loretta Lynne, Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams, Bonny “Prince” Billy, that kind of thing.
TY: Lyrically, I think Leonard Cohen is one of the best. Most of the rest are pretty similar to Robin, though I also have some jazz influences, like Charles Mingus on the bass.
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If anyone missed Red Heart the Ticker, check them out at rhtt.net, or listen to their Meacham shows by subscribing to the podcast at meachamwriters.org.
Even the language and the speaker falls victim to the flux in Pamela Uschuk’s new collection, Crazy Love, from Wings Press.”I will be the torture rack/that stretches out my own truth,” she writes. Her poetry is both wrought by war and tended for its beauty, both bitter with “regret’s venom” and exuberant with love. After all, “What is the tender palm without the tough skeleton/forming the back of the hand,” she asks in the poem, “Geometry Lesson.” The persistent voice of these poems speaks of the tension of the dance between violence and benevolence, man and woman, nature and humanity, as well as the hesitation after the music has stopped. Here, in Uschuk’s world of encounters, nothing is complete, and everything is moving, extending, reaching, growing. Even the buck, the chickadee, the tigrita lily sway in the gust of Uschuk’s rhythmical words, and the reader has no choice but to follow suit.
Sebastian Matthews, a graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program, teaches part-time at Warren Wilson College and edits Rivendell, a place-based literary journal. He is the author of the memoir, In My Father’s Footsteps, and co-editor, with Stanley Plumly, of Search Party: Collected Poems of William Matthews. His poems have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, New England Review, Post Road, Seneca Review, Tin House, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Matthews was a recent Bernard De Voto Fellow in Nonfiction at Bread Loaf. His chapbook, Coming to Flood, was published by Hollyridge Press in 2005 and a collection of poems, We Generous, was published by Red Hen Press in February 2007.
A work of art is like a gem. Important elements of the world are compressed together to create a concise and beautiful artifact. Like the notes of a song, every word is important to a written work’s aesthetic appeal, not one too many or too few. Marc Fitten uses this description of art in a writer’s workshop he teaches for students at the UTC Meacham Writer’s Conference. “Bathe in art”, he tells them. “It’s important to experience artistic expression outside of your own expertise. If you are a fiction writer, go to poetry readings and fine art exhibitions.” There is a social dialogue mingling amongst all of the arts. Though each of us may have an independent form of expression, we must keep others works in consideration when creating our own.
It is with an appetite, even after the feast, that Gaylord Brewer writes the poems of Exit Pursued by a Bear, the 2004 collection from Cherry Grove. Beyond the innocuous fruit fetishes, the near pornographic pole beans of “Co-op Girl,” Brewer dines on the ironies of interaction, and likewise, in assuming the authority of speaker, he chooses, with great immediacy and poignancy, what words to swallow, what to leave out of his lyrics. He writes, “and though I believe/I am correct, I couldn’t identify about what.” It is in these silences that the uneasiness, the regret, surfaces much like oil on still water and nudges the reader towards “some saner madness.”
Xu Xi is the author of seven books of fiction & essays, and editor of three anthologies of Hong Kong literature in English. A Chinese-Indonesian native of Hong Kong, the city was home until her mid-twenties, after which she led a peripatetic existence around Europe, America and Asia. She now inhabits the flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong and New Zealand.