August 16, 2025 • 77 mins
Cecilia Woloch is an American poet, writer, teacher, and performer. She’s published seven collections of poems, a novel, and numerous essays and reviews. Her honors include three fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CEC/ArtsLink International, the Center for International Theatre Development, and others, as well as a Pushcart Prize. Her writing has been published in translation into French, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Romanes and Spanish. An expanded and updated edition of her second book, Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem, has been the basis for multilingual, multi-media performances in Los Angeles, Paris, Warsaw, Athens and elsewhere. Her latest publication is a poetry chapbook, Labor: The Testimony of Ted Gall, which Joy Priest has called “an important contribution to Appalachian docu-poetics and cross-racial labor solidarity.” She was born in Pennsylvania and raised there and in rural Kentucky and has been fortunate to have traveled the world as a writer and teacher, leading writing workshops and teaching literature in China, Turkey, Mexico, Poland, France, Germany and across the U.S. In 2026, Cecilia will return to Poland as a Fulbright Scholar at Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
The Romani crush this episode is Tony Gatlif.
Cecilia reads poetry from KIN: An Anthology of Poetry, Story and Art by Women from Romani, Traveller and Nomadic Communities. Request from the library or your local bookstores, or buy online or wherever else you get books!
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Romanistan is hosted by Jezmina Von Thiele and Paulina Stevens
Conceived of by Paulina Stevens
Edited by Viktor Pachas
With Music by Viktor Pachas
And Artwork by Elijah Vardo
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to Romanistan .
We're your friendlyneighborhood gypsies.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
I'm Paulina and I'm Jez.
We're here today with CeciliaWallach, and we're so excited to
chat to you.
I actually interviewed youyears ago in New York for a
piece that I ended up not beingable to finish, and I always
wanted to interview you again,and so I'm so happy that we
could do this.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Well, I love that interview.
It was worth it just to havethe interview.
We were in a diner near GrandCentral in New York, weren't we?
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Yeah, I think we were pretty close to where I was
teaching at the time in Midtown.
It was fun.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
I just I can picture you sitting across the table.
I remember the conversation wasjust intense and lively and,
just you know, so much fun andit was such a weird setting that
I loved it's a really good time, so it was worth it to have it,
whether you're able to, youknow, finish anything from it or
(01:09):
not.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
I was just waiting for Ramon's time, really.
So yeah, we have our little biothat we love to read to
introduce our guest, paulinaCecilia.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Wolach is an American poet, writer, teacher and
performer.
She's published sevencollections of poems, a novel
and numerous essays and reviews.
Her honors include threefellowships from the Fulbright
Foundation and fellowships fromthe National Endowment for the
(01:46):
Arts, cec, artslinkInternational, the Center for
International TheaterDevelopment and others, as well
as the Pushcart Prize.
Her writing has been publishedin translation in French, german
, polish, ukrainian, bulgarian,hungarian, hebrew, romanesque
and Spanish.
(02:07):
An expanded and updated editionof her second book, sigan, the
Gypsy Poem, has been the basisfor multilingual multimedia
performances in Los Angeles,paris, warsaw, athens and
elsewhere.
Her latest publication is apoetry chapbook, labor, the
(02:37):
Testimony of Ted Gall, which JoyPriest has called an important
contribution to Appalachiandocu-poetics and cross-racial
labor solidarity.
She was born in Pennsylvaniaand raised there and in rural
Kentucky, and has been fortunateto have traveled the world as a
writer and teacher, leadingwriting workshops and teaching
literature in China, turkey,mexico, poland, france, germany
(03:01):
and across the US.
In 2026, cecilia will return toPoland as a Fulbright scholar
at Jagiellonian University inKrakow.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Yay, so happy to have you here.
Tell us.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
It's always impressive to hear my own bio.
How did I get here?
It's impressive, it's veryimpressive.
Thank you, thanks, but you kindof stick around long enough and
you get a few things done.
That's the only way I canexplain it.
But sometimes looking back,it's surprising, surprising.
(03:42):
It's surprising Surprisingbecause I always think you know,
(04:11):
the story about my paternalgrandmother was that she signed
her name with an X.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
I've come to doubt that she was really illiterate.
She was too smart and did toomany crazy things to be
illiterate.
But I think, wow, onegeneration and you know.
Look what happened.
Yeah, I love that.
Good to be here with you.
It's so good to have you.
Tell us a little more about you.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Know yourself your family story where are you from
your visa?
Anything you want to shareabout your background?
To start us off, oh, there's somuch.
Jess, I'm one of seven kids.
One of seven children.
My dad was an airplane mechanic.
My mom was busy with us, butshe was also a really gifted
seamstress and, as I found outlater as an adult, my father was
(04:42):
an ex-con and my mother hadbeen a teenage runaway.
So, and they both they wereremarkable people and remarkable
parents, and I may have anoutsized sense of loyalty and
belonging to my family, myfamily of birth.
So that's really defined me.
(05:06):
I think I could say I have a lotof problems with broad
identities meant to I don't knowsort of.
Sometimes it feels like tohomogenize us and to put us into
neat categories.
So you know, when people I'vebeen in a conference where
(05:30):
somebody asked me what's it liketo be actually a radio program
in Poland and somebody said oh,how does it feel to speak in
English?
And yet your soul is Polish?
And I said you know, my souldoes not have a nationality, but
I'm really tied to the familysoul and the family soul is deep
(05:51):
, dark and complicated, as somany, if not all, family souls
are.
But I was born in Pennsylvania.
We moved to Kentucky when I wasin my early adolescence and
Kentucky was the place that feltlike home to me.
We lived out in the country, wehad a house.
(06:13):
We built our house ourselvesand this is something that
Americans don't usually do.
You know, we my father paidsomebody to come in and excavate
and put down the foundation andput up the basic framework and
then we moved into it.
You know, we sort of hungbedsheets between sections to
give ourselves a little privacyin rooms and we, we lived in it
(06:36):
and built it around us.
That's come up in my, in my, inmy poems and it's it's glimpsed
, I think, in in Seagans.
So you know that was how welived.
We lived in a really that'skids on the schoolyard screaming
, playing.
If you hear that, don't worry.
(06:56):
We lived in a way that wasdifferent from our neighbors and
when we lived in Pennsylvania,in a kind of more middle-class
suburban community, we reallydidn't fit.
So when we moved to Kentuckyand lived, it was a poor
community there and we lived outin the country and it was
(07:20):
beautiful, and so that was theplace I first kind of touched
earth and felt that I was home.
So you know my family is prettyunusual and some might say
dysfunctional, but also in ourway extraordinary.
So I went to university inKentucky and then I had $100
(07:47):
burning a hole in my pocket anda friend who was driving west to
try to get into the filmbusiness.
So I hitched a ride with her.
I got to Los Angeles.
I didn't have enough money toget back, so I stayed with an
aunt and some cousins and founda job and stayed, did some work
(08:09):
in public relations andmarketing Don't ask me why
anybody hired me to do that anddid fine with that and was able
to kind of solidify myself.
You know, get a car, get anapartment, start a savings
account.
And almost as soon as I could Iwalked away from that and
(08:32):
started working independently asa freelance poet in the schools
, of all things.
And I thought my parents mightbe a little bit because I knew
they worried about me.
They wouldn't.
They never wanted to compromisemy independence, but I knew
they worried about me being sofar away and on my own.
But when I remember when Icalled my mom and said Mom, quit
(08:54):
my job, I quit my corporate job, I'm going to be a poet in the
schools and she said your fatherand I were wondering when you
were going to quit that job,were wondering when you were
going to quit that job.
So I had their support.
I was lucky I was very lucky.
(09:14):
That's lovely, yeah.
So I did that.
I worked as a poet in theschools for many years.
I was extraordinarily good atit.
I mean, I really connect withchildren.
They get it, they get poetry,they get the imagination, they
get the creative process.
They were always excited to seeme and I was excited to see
(09:35):
them and I made it work.
I made enough of a living tosupport myself and eventually to
be able to arrange my scheduleso that I could teach a part of
the year, teach reallyintensively, work really hard,
and then leave the country forthree or four months at a time
and travel.
And I started coming to Europe,in large part in search of the
(10:02):
story of this grandmother whosigned her name with an X.
So I was just kind of goingwhere.
I just really believed in fate.
I guess I believed if I keptmoving, kept meeting people, I
would eventually find the placewhere she had been born.
(10:27):
And that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
I love that journey.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
Yeah, it's about an hour from where I am now in
Zhezhov.
It's a small village, used tobe a big village, and it's about
an hour's drive away from here,so that's my connection to this
part of Poland.
My grandmother was born in avillage in the Carpathians that
(10:53):
was very not Polish but was inPoland and with a very
complicated history, with a verycomplicated history and it's a
really good example of theintricacies and vagaries and
(11:20):
even dangers of collectiveidentities.
And I can talk about that if youwant me to.
But it was a village with itwas primarily East Slavic people
who were called Rusyn,ruthenian, lemko and eventually
came to be identified as whetherthey chose it or not to be
(11:42):
identified as Ukrainians,although they had never lived in
any official Ukrainianterritory.
But it was a kind of similarculture and probably shared
roots at some point.
But the village also includedJewish people and Roma people
and, from what the priest Ifirst met there in 1999 told me,
(12:05):
they lived together happily,peacefully, until World War II.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Wow, it's really really horrible.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Yeah, you know, I mean there's so much trauma in
just like in the landscape inthat part of the world.
Yeah, but it took me decades tounderstand what had happened
there and why it had happenedand what it had to do with my
(12:41):
own family history.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Yeah, that uncovering ticks guts, pardon me.
And what it had to do with myown family history.
Yeah, that uncovering takesguts, pardon me, that uncovering
takes guts.
Sometimes I'm scared to lookinto questions I have around my
own family so I'm like, oh, it'sgoing to be a sad story.
I can feel that.
Well, you know, and you havethat intuition.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
I mean, I feel like we come from people.
I'm going to project and includeyou who you know that intuition
was a very important, it was apower you didn't dismiss.
I think I didn't reallyattribute it to Romani culture
(13:23):
necessarily, but you know, Ithink I've told you before I
sort of grew up with this a lotof uncertainty about my identity
, you know, because it was atime and a place where people
was Polish and when I wasgrowing up everything was behind
(13:50):
the Iron Curtain and the kindof little story in the family,
that kind of was almost a joke,but it wasn't a joke, was that
we were gypsies or that we hadgypsy heritage or gypsy blood,
as my mother would say.
But I didn't connect it.
I didn't connect the kind ofimportance given to intuition in
(14:17):
my family, you know, and I'mtalking about my extended family
, and I'm talking about myextended family I didn't connect
that to anything having to dowith Romani culture or beliefs
until much, much later.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
But I do remember when I was a teenager, my father
telling me you come from a longline of fortune tellers.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
Yeah, I just remember that.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
Yeah, we definitely have heard that.
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
So this grandmother, who was born near here in the
Carpathians, she read the cards.
I grew up hearing that she hada very special place, it seems,
in this village as a very youngwoman.
It was a girl, she was thevillage midwife, she was the
village barber, she was theperson who washed the bodies of
(15:14):
the dead and prepared them forburial.
And she read the cards.
So the priest I met there in1999 was kind of taken aback and
then he said well, she wouldhave been specially trained from
an early age Kinship.
(15:39):
A few of our world's peoplestill speak a tongue so old.
Its closest analog is birdsong,and a bird carved some 30 000
years ago may well be our firstwork of art.
Why mimic the palaver of athrush from wood or stone?
(16:00):
Why shape a turn body, itswings pressed tight against its
sides?
Or remember the dream momentsour beating arms took hold in
air, lifting us away from earth,trod smooth by our feet.
We each possess a bird soul.
(16:22):
On the highest branch of everyfamily tree, a winged spirit
preens in the sun, gleaming withiridescence, that sheen of our
common blood.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
We actually want to ask you one of our most famous
questions.
Do you consider yourself arebel?
Speaker 3 (16:53):
oh yeah, I didn't have a choice.
You know, I was born into arebel.
Like I said, my mother was ateenage runaway and my dad was
an ex-convict and, um, I think Ican say that all of my siblings
, we all have problems withauthority, with external
(17:17):
authority.
Like, don't tell us what to do.
So, yeah, I definitely would,would say I.
I told a former professor ofmine one time, a person to whom
I'm still close.
I said well, you know, I wasthinking on my life and I said
nobody ever told me I couldn'tdo what I wanted to do.
(17:37):
And he looked at me and he saidnobody would have dared.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
The reputation precedes you.
You know, I read Sagan, thegypsy poem, years ago and I fell
in love.
I think I was in my twentieswhen I found it and I had really
hadn't read too many Romaniwriters and I related so much to
how you grappled with yourmixed identity, what you've
shared now.
But also you know what you werewriting about in the book and
(18:07):
knowing some about your familyroots, but not everything.
And I feel like you navigatethis complex identity with such
grace.
We often have people writing inof mixed identities not really
knowing how to navigate it atall or how to talk about it, and
there's so much pressure to youknow publicly represent an
entire culture, especially ifyou're public in any way like a
(18:28):
writer.
So we would love if you couldshare a little advice from folks
.
Either you know that camethrough in the poetry or
otherwise.
How do you navigate, like beingin between categories.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Yeah, I mean, I think it would add another layer of
complexity maybe if I had grownup in a family that explicitly
identified as Romani.
So that wasn't.
I mean, it was implicit, but weweren't.
You know, we were quite tribalas a family, but we weren't in a
(19:01):
, we weren't part of a.
And someone said one time, whensomeone said, you can't
consider yourself Roma if youdidn't grow up in a Roma
community, and I did so.
But I have, you know, I hadthose questions as a kid, one of
the most hurtful things, things, and I guess I've hung on to it
(19:26):
and should let it go.
But you know, as a little kidin elementary school, having the
other kids ask me what are you,you know, what are you anyway?
Yeah, and I didn't have ananswer.
I did not have an answer andinstead of going looking for an
answer, you know I looked for, Itried to figure out who I
(19:50):
really was, not what I reallywas, you know.
And the question answers whatare you meaning?
Are you white?
Are you black?
Are you Italian?
Are you, you know, black?
Are you Italian, are you?
You know, I was just a littlebit, I guess, an unusual looking
child.
I was dark, darker than I amnow.
When you're as you get older,you lose pigment, not only your
(20:14):
hair, your skin, everything.
But I was dark.
I had rather thick, darkeyebrows, kind of slanted eyes,
and my hair was really from thetime I hit adolescence, was
really wildly frizzy and curly.
So I don't know, Some peoplejust didn't like the way I
looked and it confused them.
(20:35):
But I didn't go looking for somuch an identity to wrap myself
in.
I wanted to understand on adeeper level who I was and who
the people I had come from were.
And it turns out the people Icame from weren't all that
(20:57):
comfortable with wrappingthemselves up in identities.
So you know, I had a danceteacher once.
I suppose she was biracial, shewas a dark skinned woman with
blonde hair and green eyes andshe wasn't saying this about her
racial identity, she was sayingit about herself as a teacher
and dancer.
She said nobody's going to putme in a box and when I'm asked
(21:22):
to check those boxes on you knowforms about how I identify
myself, I'm like, oh no, you'renot putting me in a box and I
guess that's the way I navigateit.
You know I.
You know somebody asked me.
You know, in recent years and ata party of artists you know
(21:44):
cool people in LA some womansaid, well, you know what are
you.
And I said, excuse me.
She said, well, I mean, what'syour nationality?
And I said, well, I'm anAmerican citizen.
And she said, yeah, but what'syour nationality?
And I said I do not believe inthe dogma of nationality, you
know, and she really tookoffense.
(22:09):
You know I believe in.
You know we're citizens, we'reall hybrids of some kind or
another and you know we drawfirm lines around our identities
at great peril, you know, toourselves and to others.
(22:30):
So I couldn't draw a firm linearound my identity if I wanted
to.
I do Jez.
I do have discomfort sometimeswhen I'm in communities that do
define themselves reallystrongly around some collective
identity and think, you know,like I have been with Ukrainian
(22:54):
people who say you're Ukrainianand it's like well, I don't know
, I never identified them.
My father said we came from theCarpathians.
He said the language that wasspoken was like Ukrainian.
(23:20):
I don't, you know and I can'tclaim.
I will happily identify somedifferent strands in my heritage
.
You know there are thesedifferent strands, but when I
(23:41):
did a DNA, have you ever done aDNA test.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
I think Paulina did you do one.
My grandma told me never to doone because she didn't want the
government to have our bloodsecrets, which I'm like no, my
brother is like that, mybrother's like I don't want them
to have that.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
I don't want them to have that.
That's definitely my family'sattitude.
And yet we all went ahead anddid it eventually.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
My mom too.
She's like well, now they haveall your blood and whatever, and
you know they want their blood,you know they want our blood.
But you can do it, I'm okaywith it.
Very passive, aggressive.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
But when you look at, you know, when you go to places
where you can see the kind ofrecords that Nazis kept, you
know, it's terrifying Becausethey did, you know, everything
down on an index card about you.
So I can understand that.
But it was so interestingbecause when I did a DNA test
and my friend here, who is she,was married to a Polish man for
(24:36):
many years.
She has, you know, Polishchildren.
She's a British citizen,product of rape, so father's
unknown, but apparentlypakistani, and um, she looked at
my you know little pie chart.
She said, my god, I've neverseen anything like that.
Because we're like I said whatyou know, like I'm everything.
She said, like I have basque,you know who has basque.
(25:01):
So my brothers are part of thewhat's called.
They have some identifier thatthey're part of the, the Arabic
haplope group.
So you know, obviously peopletraveled and you know seeds were
spread.
(25:22):
But I, you know, I just I resist, you know, to try to answer
your question, I resist a lot ofthe ideology, a lot of the kind
of you know this or that blackor white kind of ideas.
(25:44):
I mean, other people are freeto embrace that if they want,
but I can't, you know I can't.
I'm who I am and I am anAmerican citizen, and that's
something very different fromnationality.
I take citizenship quiteseriously, nationality, I take
(26:10):
citizenship quite seriously.
But that's somebody, an olderwoman when I was very young,
told me that a good response wasto when people ask kind of
inappropriate questions maybewas to say I'll forgive you for
asking that if you'll forgive mefor not answering.
I love that.
And my friend Natasha Trethewey, who's a really good work yeah
(26:34):
yeah.
Yeah, she's wonderful and she,you know she's biracial, she
identifies as as black, asAfrican American, but you know,
she said, when people ask youthat, what are you?
She just finds that to be aracist question.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
It is, yeah, it is.
Speaker 3 (26:56):
You know.
So you know she that's.
Her answer is I'm an American,I'm an American citizen, you
know.
So you know.
That's good enough for me.
Yeah, not for me.
And if people are curious aboutmy heritage and my family story
, they better be prepared tolisten for a while.
(27:17):
So maybe that's something else.
You say well, so maybe that'ssomething else.
You say Well, how much time doyou have?
So do you both consideryourself to be of mixed identity
?
Speaker 1 (27:35):
I do.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
I am not I.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
I grew up in a Roma family and then when I took the
bloodline it was like 99%Eastern European Roma.
I was like I mixed it at 1%.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
I didn't realize that there was a DNA marker for Roma
.
Last time I asked there wasn't,but this keeps evolving all the
time.
Relatively now, yeah, okay.
And what about you, jess?
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Yeah, I mean my maternal grandmother is, you
know, from a Sinti family andyeah, and then otherwise, you
know, a mixed European and Ispent so much time with my
grandmother that you know sheinfluenced so much of my, my
cultural, spiritual identity.
But I also really would feeluncomfortable, like not
(28:29):
specifying that I'm mixed and Igrew up like assimilated.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
You know it's a different so you didn't grow up
in a Roma community like Paulinadid no, no, my and my
grandmother's family, I think,are very uncomfortable about
being seen as Roma.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
They really are, like they don't want to talk about
it, um, and they're in Germanyand so you know.
That makes sense.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
I was like our families are the same, though.
Yeah, we.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
It's funny because, that's you know, paulina and I
were working on things,especially writing the book.
It's like, wow, we really havevery similar experiences in some
ways, and then always not.
But yeah, no, it's like, wow,we really have very similar
experiences in some ways andthen other ways not.
Yeah, no, it's just alwaysinteresting to see what people
share, regardless of you knowwhether you do it.
Speaker 3 (29:10):
I mean, and I thought , you know, as a kid, when I did
hear you know we have gypsyblood, I thought, great, you
know, why is this a secret?
Speaker 2 (29:24):
Yeah, I know I didn't understand.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
I thought great, wonderful, you know, and I guess
if I were going to, you know,if I could sort of embrace any
of my identities, I wouldembrace that, but I don't feel
like I have a right to, becauseI didn't grow up in a Roma
community, because there isn't,you know, like, you know, that
(29:47):
kind of substantiation.
But but yeah, I thought great,why should this be a secret?
But when I would ask my, mygreat aunts, they would be like,
talk about it?
No, no, no.
You know there would be like mygreat aunts, they would be like
don't talk about it, no, no, no, you know, they would be like
somehow you weren't supposed totalk about it.
And then, after I so it waswhen I traveled started to
(30:13):
travel in Europe and in the 90sand saw, you know how displaced
Roma, you know, after, you know,post-communism, were living and
experienced, especially inplaces like, I guess, germany,
poland, after you know,post-communism were living and
experienced, especially inplaces like, I guess, germany,
poland, france how Roma wereregarded and how they were
treated.
It's like, oh, I get it, yeah.
And then when I studied thehistory, I really got it, you
(30:38):
know, and you know when Siganwas published and I, you know,
gave presentations of the US.
People in the US had no notionthat Roma were targeted in the
Holocaust at all, so I got that.
After I did the research, afterI traveled, I wrote the book.
(31:01):
When the book was published Ithought I was really going to
get into trouble with my familybecause this was something we
never.
You know, you kind of jokedabout it.
You talked about it in thefamily, but was it serious?
Was it a joke?
And but you did, did not?
It didn't go beyond that andthe book came out.
(31:24):
My father had already passed, alot of his relatives had passed
, and I walked into my mother'sliving room one night.
I was in Kentucky on afellowship and I went to my
mom's for dinner and walkedthrough the screen door and my
mom was leaning back with and Iwent to my mom's for dinner and
walked through the screen doorand my mom was leaning back with
(31:46):
her eyes closed to my dad'srecliner, and my teenage niece,
who was already a young mother,was lying on the floor with her
black hair spread out around herand my sister, the hairdresser,
was sitting on the couchreading Sigan out loud to them.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Oh, that's beautiful.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
And I said you know what, the Pulitzer Prize doesn't
get better than this.
And I felt a little embarrassedand tried to say something and
my mother immediately said, shh,we're listening to this.
And she later told me that itwas her favorite of my books.
She really loved it.
My sister used to have a have acopy in her at her beauty shop
(32:27):
and it kept disappearing.
And I'd give her another copyand it would disappear oh so
yeah, so it um, I didn't get introuble for it, but my mother
did say, you know, I worry aboutyou traveling, now that you're
a public gypsy Mm hmm, for mygrandmother, in which she comes
(32:56):
to America circa 1913.
Circa 1913.
So there you are, landed in thelittle boat of the only self.
You have the only skirt, theonly scarf, your hair in the
long brown braid of the onlygirl you've ever been.
(33:20):
Now here comes the whistle'sscream, the laws, quick shove.
The crowd of others pushingpast with their cardboard
suitcases, cloth sacks, theirragged bundles at their backs.
When you step away from them,you stand in all that sharpened
(33:40):
light alone, beneath your blouse, a little pouch of herbs, dried
flowers, earth of home, alittle charm to keep you safe in
this new country.
At your throat, here comes thehunger.
Here come the machines.
(34:00):
Here comes the god of cash andsweat.
Here comes the egg that turnsto child inside your body.
Here comes death.
Here comes America, my love,all ship.
There is no going back.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
We actually wanted to ask you what was it like?
Speaker 3 (34:38):
for Sigan to be adapted to multimedia
performance.
The thrill of a lifetime youcan imagine.
You know just thrilling.
The first big performance inLos Angeles was part of I was
teaching, you know, a non-tenuretrack, not as an adjunct, but a
(35:01):
step above, but still at theUniversity of Southern
California and they had aprogram called Visions and
Voices where they didpresentations in their big
auditorium there and a woman hadfound me.
There's a woman named PaulaFaust who's made several films
about the Roma.
She's a documentary filmmakerand she came to a reading I was
(35:23):
giving from this book and sheasked if she could interview me
on film for something she wasdoing.
And then she was the one whocame up with the idea of turning
it into a multimediapresentation.
She had connections at USC, shewrote the grant and she brought
(35:43):
in a stage director, a youngLatino guy.
She brought in musicians SibleyCampo, who's an incredible
flamenco dancer, her husband,who's a musician.
They brought in a canto pandosinger from the south of france,
(36:03):
a roma man who does that, youknow that deep song, yeah, and
we only had him for a few daysand we were on the stage during
a dress rehearsal and I was atthe podium reading the poems and
seedley was dancing and this.
And there's a point in the poemI don't know if you remember it
well enough to know there's apoint in the poem I don't know
if you remember it well enoughto know there's a point where
(36:26):
somebody I'm stuck in trafficand somebody has fallen or
jumped from an overpass and justat that point this Roma singer
started that mournful just Imean, I cannot believe I'm
standing here.
I cannot believe I'm standinghere.
(36:48):
That voice just completely wentthrough my body.
It was, you know, this stunning, stunning moment where I
thought how, how did I get here?
I wrote this little thingstarted out to be about my
family and to have theseincredible artists, and what you
(37:09):
realize, paulina, or what Irealized, was like oh, this
doesn't just belong to me, thisis this.
I guess it was maybe like achild you know I haven't had
children, but you know a childand and other people picked it
up and interpreted it and puttheir experience and their gifts
(37:35):
and their souls into it and itbecame something else, much,
much bigger than anything Icould make on my own, and that
was a.
You can maybe imagine what kindof experience that was.
And then the same thing withyou know other places, even kind
(37:56):
of smaller things.
When I was in a village inEastern France for a festival
called Le Bruit de la Neige theNoise of the Snow and I kind of
didn't understand what I wasgetting into.
But I had been invited by amutual friend and basically we
(38:21):
sat in a circle.
It was a workshop kind of thingthat culminated in a circle.
It was a workshop kind of thingthat culminated in a
performance and the book hadbeen published, had been
translated and published inFrench.
So we were sitting there kindof in a circle and people were
just reading excerpts that theyloved from the French text, and
I'd come in with an excerpt fromthe English and then somebody
(38:43):
would start singing and and itturned into this kind of sonic
tapestry that, um, I still havea link to it somewhere, I don't
know if it still works, but thatthen was presented on the final
night of this festival andagain it was like that feeling
(39:06):
of you give birth to somethingand then it just kind of lifts
out of your arms and moves intothe world in ways you can't
imagine, much less control, andI'm fine with that.
You know, I had a background intheater.
(39:33):
I did theater as a young person.
I never intended to try tobecome a, you know, an actress.
I wasn't confident enough aboutmy physical appearance.
I was shy on camera At thattime.
There was an ingenue kind oflook that I did not have.
But I loved doing theater.
I loved that collaboration.
(39:54):
You know, when you kind ofcreate something in
collaboration with other peopleand it's like wow, I never, you
know, it goes beyond anything anindividual imagination could
have created.
So starting to do thoseperformances was it?
It brought me back into thatrealm, into that experience.
(40:16):
And you know, I'm always sohumbled by the gifts that people
bring.
You know people.
You know people to to playmusic.
They, they study all theirlives.
You know, to be able to createa sound with an instrument.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Um, we actually wanted to ask you, um, what is
your advice to people on makingwriting a sustainable path,
whether it's through fellowshipsand academic career or through
a day job with a meaningfulwriting practice?
Speaker 3 (40:49):
I think, pauline, it really depends on what works for
you.
I don't think there's any onepath.
I mean, I got some.
I loved being a poet in theschools and that gave me the
illusion that I could make apath just by being a poet,
because that's who I was tothese kids.
(41:09):
I mean, I was coming in andteaching, but really I was
coming in and being a poet andmodeling for them what being a
poet was.
But that was a time when therewas funding for things like that
.
You know, I wasn't paid a lot,but I was paid enough and that
funding disappeared.
So, you know, and I kind of gotinto teaching in academia
(41:33):
accidentally and I love teaching, but that was not a good fit
for me.
It's not a good fit for anybodywho has an iota of a rebellious
streak.
Yeah, it's a kind of acorporate atmosphere, even
though people would say it isn't.
Universities are run more andmore like corporations.
(41:58):
There's a kind of conformity Ifound, and no matter what
university I taught, where Itaught and I was at a bunch of
them I was always the onlyperson on the faculty who did
not have parents in theprofessional class, so it was
(42:18):
really almost more of a classthing.
You know a working class,scrappy, rebellious working
class kid.
In academia, even my colleagueswho were, you know, people of
color and all that they were,their parents were professors
and lawyers and teachers and notmen who wore a uniform and came
(42:39):
home with dirty hands.
So academia was not a good fitfor me but I loved being able to
be when I was working with kids.
It was like I got to be a poetall day.
I didn't have to separatemyself into I'm writing sales
promotion literature during theday and then I go home and try
(43:00):
to make the switch into being apoet.
I was like absorbed with poetryand imagination and creativity
and language all day and thatreally worked for me and I I had
.
I was educating myself as apoet because I was always
looking for ways in for the kids.
(43:20):
You know where's a what's apoem?
I used kids poems but I readthem Whitman and Nikki Giovanni
and I'm always looking for poemsthat I could feed them and that
would give them a way into apoem.
So I was reading a lot and youknow studying.
(43:45):
You know how do I explainextended metaphor to a room of
seven-year-olds?
How do I explain surrealism toa room?
Speaker 2 (43:55):
Such a fun thing to do too, it was a blast.
It was a blast, those werereally.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
I did that for about 10 or 12 years and those were
great years.
I know other people Paul,paulina for whom it really works
to have a day job that hasfinite borders, unfortunately,
like when I had a corporate job.
I left that job at five andthat was it.
You know, 5 pm every day, noone, a cell phone.
(44:21):
Your boss wouldn't dare callyou at home.
That never happened.
You know there wasn't such athing as email.
You clocked in, you clocked outand the rest of your time was
your own.
So when I worked that corporatejob, I was doing equity waiver
theater, I was going to poetryworkshops, I was doing readings,
because after 5pm my time wasmine, because after 5 pm my time
(44:42):
was mine.
And I don't think a lot of jobsaren't like that.
But I think for some people Iknow some poets for whom that's
worked really well.
If I had to advise someone now,it's a really tough time to be
a teacher, but I have poetfriends who work, as you know,
primary school and high schoolteachers, and that is a good fit
(45:05):
for them.
They need part of is how muchstability do you need?
I never needed much stabilitybecause, um, I have my family
and one of my sisters told oneof my husbands oh why does
cecilia need things like potsand pans?
She has us, so um nice so Ididn't.
(45:26):
I didn't choose to have childrenand I never stayed married very
long.
So, um, I just had to take careof myself and I felt, you know,
I can always.
I can always do that, I canalways waitress.
So I had different prioritiesthan some people who need more
(45:48):
stability, more financialsecurity.
But I would just my experience.
I would stay away from academia, but teaching in the classroom
in different ways could be great.
Or, you know, maybe we'llreturn to a time when people can
(46:10):
do what I did in the 90s andyou know, I just basically made
up my own job as a poet in theschools.
Other people were doing it, butI made it a full-time thing.
Speaker 2 (46:24):
That's beautiful, I think I'm probably gonna go to
her corporate job what do you do?
Speaker 3 (46:30):
what is your corporate job?
Can I?
Speaker 1 (46:31):
ask I am a marketing coordinator that's good useful
skills.
Speaker 3 (46:38):
I mean my years in the corporate world served me
really well.
I got really useful skills andI happen to be lucky enough to
work with good people.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Yeah it's a sales company, so I get a lot of like
every weekly meeting.
I learn so much people skillsI'm like okay, all right, those
are good skills.
Speaker 3 (47:01):
You know those are good skills and I got my five
years in the corporate world.
I got great skills.
I had a wonderful mentor.
I had a woman boss who was onlyabout who was.
It was unusual in the 70s and80s to have a woman boss and she
was only about 10 years olderthan I was and she had come up
through the ranks as a fileclerk into management and um
(47:25):
what a gift oh yeah, she wasgreat.
Speaker 1 (47:30):
Thank you so much.
I really appreciated it.
Really appreciate you coming onhere and helpful to talk to you
okay, have a good day, takecare bye.
Speaker 3 (47:42):
This is a poem by Lynn Hutchinson Lee, called what
they Ate.
On the Ship there was bread andoatmeal in a thin soup.
(48:04):
Scraps against hunger, eat upchavvies.
And then the moon came out andthey closed their eyes,
pretending to sleep.
They knew the words, why andwhere.
They knew the word drama, butnot that a drama could stretch
(48:32):
itself across an ocean.
Waves towered over their shipand the rocking was that of
their grandmother's arms, leftbehind, and her arms were more
scented, more enfolding, morepresent in her absence.
They ate the sky, drank theundertow, licked the drenching
(48:54):
mist from their arms, inhaledthe perfume of forgetting.
Speaker 2 (49:14):
I wanted to ask you too, because I don't know too
much about your recent chapbook.
Speaker 3 (49:24):
Labor, the testimony of Ted Gall.
What, what tell us about it?
What are you doing?
It's kind of an accidental poembut you know, researching this
grandmother who's been kind ofthe center of my creative life,
I guess my whole creative life,you know she was active in the
labor movement in the US.
She, my dad, was born in a coalmining town called Russellton
(49:46):
in Pennsylvania and I found outafter my father had passed that
Russellton was the epicenter ofthe biggest coal miners strike
in history.
And that happened when my dadwas probably about like two
years, two years old.
And I believe from my researchthat if my grandmother wasn't
(50:11):
radicalized before, then, that'swhen she became radicalized.
Because the only people whocould get in with aid, um, to
the work, I mean they.
It was like an armed camp.
They had the coal company, hadtheir own police.
Yeah, they controlled the road,the one road in, the one road
out.
Uh, people were thrown out oftheir houses because the company
(50:34):
owned the houses.
If you were striking, striking,you were thrown out.
It was the coldest winter onrecord.
They had no fuel for heat.
They, they had no food andnobody could get past those
company police, except theCommunist Party USA.
That's when they got in withaid and you know they tried to
(50:56):
start an alternative union.
There was all kinds ofpolitical stuff.
But in trying to find out aboutthis I stumbled across a book
called the Ragman's War Bucketof Blood, the Ragman's War it
was all about.
It was a novel, all about, thistime in Russellton, but it was
all based on the writer'sresearch of the area and on her
(51:21):
own family history area and onher own family history.
We got in touch.
Her name is Suzanne Gall-Sugel.
She basically invited me tocome to see her.
(51:41):
She was sure her father hadknown my grandmother.
He was a miner and then a laboractivist there and I went to
visit her and she sent me loosein his archive.
This is a man who went toschool until he was 12 years old
and then went to work for themining company.
But he was self-educated andthen educated probably at the
Little Red Schoolhouse which theCommunist Party USA ran the
(52:07):
Little Red Schoolhouse which theCommunist Party USA ran and he
left behind when he died thisjust immaculately, exquisitely
organized archive and she sentme.
It was in the basement ofSuzanne's home and she sent me
loose in there for a couple daysand there were testimonies,
(52:29):
days, and there were testimonies, there were letters, there was
a recording, a transcript of arecording he had made for his
daughter.
There were essays he'd written.
You know there was just so muchmaterial that I got lost in
that kind of forgot about.
That was good for mygrandmother.
But my one of my grand, mygrandmother's stepson, was one
of Ted Gall's lieutenants inthese wildcat strikes and I was
(52:49):
so moved by this man's life andI felt that I could hear his
voice, you know, speaking to me,and I just took a lot of notes
and copied things, copyingthings and you know, went on
(53:10):
with my life, went on, you know,working on this book about my
grandmother and from these notesI started like just moving the.
It was all his language.
But I just started kind ofmoving things around and
thinking how can I incorporatethis into the book about my
grandmother?
But it presented itself to mein lines.
It refused to be prose and Imean it's this man's voice.
(53:34):
This is how he spoke, yeah, ina kind of poetry, you know, very
plain spoken, very um.
So it was a poem.
I realized I couldn't fit itinto this memoir I was trying to
write, so I just put it asideand 10 years later or so, I
pulled it out and I thought youknow, what I really.
(53:58):
I think this wants to be outthere in the world.
He definitely left that archivehoping that his voice would be
heard someday.
So I was in touch with a womanin Kentucky, katerina Stojkova,
who runs a small press, and shesaid do you have anything?
(54:19):
You know, I'd love to publishsomething of yours.
And I said I'd love to publishsomething of yours.
And I said, well, I have thisthing and I sent her the
manuscript and she turns out herfather was a coal miner.
Oh cool, yeah.
So she was very moved by it andshe brought it out.
It's been challenging, jess,because I'm not really sure how
(54:40):
to promote it, because it'salmost like somebody else's poem
and it doesn't seem to be areally great time for people to
be.
Um, people don't seem to bebuying books a lot.
I think during the pandemicthey were during the lockdown,
but um, you know, I've givensome readings but I'm sort of I
(55:04):
feel like I haven't done itjustice, because I really want
it to be.
But I have done some readingslash performances with
musicians and that's been greatfriend of mine who does like the
kind of knows the old, likeworker songs and coal mining
songs.
We've collaborated on aperformance and that's been
great.
But yeah it's.
(55:24):
You know, I think it's um animportant piece of work.
Speaker 2 (55:28):
Like I said, I wouldn't say that if I felt like
it was, and it's all his words,I just arranged them yeah,
that's so interesting because weare at a strange time, um,
where I think we really need tobe focusing on the labor
movement and the working classespecially, absolutely.
Yeah.
So I don't know, while this isa difficult market for books, it
(55:52):
does seem like this is such agood time for this book to be
heard.
Maybe the audio format willtake off, you know, I think
that's.
Speaker 3 (56:02):
I guess I could ask the publisher if she wants to do
that.
Do it as an you know audio book.
I just don't.
I mean, marketing is not mystrong suit and but you know
I've always, when I've had bookscome out, you know, had a
publication party, had readingsand books sell readings and the
(56:23):
books sell this.
I've had a couple readings andthey were you know reasonably
well attended, but people didn'tbuy books.
Speaker 2 (56:39):
Yeah, it's a strange, strange economy, and yet people
need poetry and love poetry.
That was actually one of ourquestions too.
You know what brought you topoetry and why do you think
humans love it and write it andread it?
Speaker 3 (56:47):
boy, that's a great question.
I mean, I can say what broughtme to poetry, um, but, and I can
say why I need it yeah, that'splenty.
That's plenty of an answer Imean, you know she would read to
us and read and I loved beingread too.
(57:08):
And and my mother also sangkind of constantly.
And in my family there was thisalso, this weird thing that we
did between singing and speaking, like at the dinner table.
It was chaotic because therewere so many of us and my mother
was a kind of chaotic person,but my father really liked, you
(57:29):
know, order, so we weren'tallowed to yell at the dinner
table so we would sing.
Pass me the butter.
You know, we would just sing.
That's so cute.
So for me that line between youknow prosaic language and song
language it was kind of blurry.
(57:50):
Like I said, my mother sang,she read to me.
I taught myself to read byhaving her read me the same book
over and over.
Boy, can I remember the first.
And then I had a sixth gradeteacher, seventh no, I think it
was a seventh grade teacher whooffered extra credit for
memorizing poems and I could dothat.
(58:13):
And then I would stand up andmake a big like jokey, overblown
thing of reciting these poems.
But actually I loved, loved itand loved doing them.
So it kind of was like a not,it was just like a glide into it
.
It was kind of always there andI didn't like ever make a
(58:35):
decision oh, I'm going to be apoet.
And then, you know, I kept.
I liked writing in secret, whichis, I mean, I think, in poetry
that's often what we're doing.
We're, you know, we're kind oflistening to that inner voice in
a kind of intensely private way.
(58:56):
And that was really appealingto me as a little kid who was
kind of obsessed with myfamily's secretiveness.
Yeah, so that's you know.
And then I had a high schoolteacher who I love.
(59:16):
She, like everybody, loved her.
So we took classes with her andshe created a class it was the
mid 70s called Modern Song andVerse and it was.
We were reading poetry andlooking at song lyrics.
She loved Willie Nelson and BobDylan and we could bring in the
(59:39):
album liner notes with lyricsand talk about them as poems,
talk about the metaphors and therhymes.
And she also subscribed to theAtlantic Monthly for us in this
little you know rural highschool and so that we could read
.
You know it was reading poemsby Lucille Clifton and Anne
Sexton and so and she made uskeep journals.
(01:00:04):
She said you can, this is your.
Whether you pass or fail thisclass depends on whether you
write in your journal everysingle day.
And I started doing that andkind of never stopped.
I took a pause for a littlewhile but never really stopped.
So that's you know, and it'sjust.
(01:00:27):
I was reading an article a fewdays ago about graphomania, like
people who just kind of need tobe writing all the time, and
that it's.
It's more about the act ofwriting, the process, than it is
about.
Oh, I want to like make a poem,I want to make a book, I want
to like make a poem, I want tomake a book, I want to make a
story.
It's just like I really lovethat active writing and with
(01:00:53):
poetry, and one of the reasons Ithink one of the reasons that I
love poetry and that I thinkthis holds for other people
certainly some of my closefriends who are also poets, is
that with poetry, I think evenmore than other forms of writing
(01:01:16):
, something's going to happen.
You don't know what it is, butyou're going to start putting
words together in some way thatyou can't you know, you can only
see as far as those headlightsgo.
(01:01:40):
Something really surprising canhappen, that you can find out
something you didn't know, youknew or felt, or you can just go
into this whole other territory, because a poem doesn't have to
follow linear logic, doesn'thave to be rational.
So there's a little bit more ofthat, and so that's the process
(01:02:02):
that I love.
And if you keep, the trick withwriting, poetry is you want,
when that happens, you want thatto happen in the language, so
that when somebody else reads it, it happens for them.
They have that sense of comingupon something that may be
(01:02:26):
startling or funny or, you know,profound in some way.
And I just think language is,you know, language is one of the
things that makes us human.
You know Animals I guessthey're starting to see have
different ways of communicating.
(01:02:48):
That can be pretty complicated,but language is this human
thing and I think that that'spart of the.
And you know, poetry is morepurely about language than any
other kind of writing.
I mean, with poetry it's really.
It's just, it's made of words,it's not.
(01:03:10):
You know, a poem can tell astory, it can be like a song,
but you know it's words and Ithink there's something that can
be really elemental about itthat can speak to people.
You, you know, a lot of peopleare talking about this poet who
recently passed away, who Ididn't know.
(01:03:31):
Yeah, andrea gibson.
Yeah, yeah and when I do see herpoems or their poems, there's
something like so at the bottomof the soul about them.
Yeah, I kind of.
You know I would tell mystudents I'm the only professor
(01:03:56):
you'll ever have in an Englishdepartment who eschews TS Eliot.
But you know, there is a kindof poetry that one of my
ex-husbands used to call doilymaking Too embroidered and fancy
, and I think some people lovethat because they're drawn maybe
to the music of it, even to thecomplexity of it.
(01:04:19):
I think poets like you know,andrea Gibson, it gets at
something you know speaks topeople at a soul level and that
people need to hear.
I feel like that's what's atrisk right now in the current
(01:04:40):
environment is the human soul.
Speaker 2 (01:04:44):
Yeah, and truth telling and the essence of
things, yeah, it makes a lot ofsense as I'm listening to your
answer around why you lovepoetry.
I understand why you teach itand also why you want to teach
it in your own way too.
It sounds like youropportunities to learn really
brought you somewhere beautifuland you made a whole life in
poetry and I just I love that.
Speaker 3 (01:05:08):
Thank you.
Yeah, I love it too, I feelvery lucky.
But, yeah, and I feel likethat's a a kind of a that's like
our challenge right now, with akind of way that you know,
technology has accelerated, youknow, in some good ways and some
not so good ways.
We're kind of shattered intothese millions of little, not
(01:05:35):
even communities, but you knowwe're not sharing reality
anymore.
But what's, you know, what's atrisk here is the soul, and you
know we need it.
We need it.
Life feels hollow, empty,sterile without that engagement
(01:05:57):
at the soul level yeah, yeahcalled earth, called Earth.
We've traveled like this all ourlives, all our life as a people
on the earth.
We've gathered and scatteredand gathered again in rooms made
(01:06:22):
of firelight or of song.
We've buried our dead when wecould, in places they loved or
the bones of them.
Every step, a turn of the wheel, a word set down and no other
word.
Every turn of the wheel, aprayer in mud, the answer of one
(01:06:46):
God.
Sometimes we've veiledourselves and sometimes we've
stood clothed only in sunlightand wind.
Sugar of flowers on our breath,honey of bird call in our
mouths.
Once I'd forgotten the way tothe well and the smell of cool
(01:07:07):
rain led me there.
Once I was only a child in mysleep.
Then I awoke and was everywhere.
Speaker 2 (01:07:26):
We also love to ask because we love to have an
opportunity for our guests toshare who inspires them or whose
work they adore.
Who is your Romani crush?
Who do you think is just doingsuch a great job and you want
listeners to learn about them orthink about them?
Speaker 3 (01:07:46):
Romani crush.
Hmm, it's hard for me to thinkabout crush in, I mean yeah this
is a platonic or maybe evenintellectual crush.
Okay, I get intellectual crush.
Artistic crush, I would say,would be um, I mean, they're
(01:08:06):
like loads and loads ofmusicians.
But let me go in a differentdirection and talk about tony
got leaf.
Oh, yes, yes, those films.
You know those films, um, yeah,are incredible.
You know um lacho Drum andGaggio Dillo and what was what
(01:08:28):
were some of the other onesthere's?
Did he make Transylvania or wasthat somebody else?
But anyway, yeah, those thosefilms are.
Yeah, liberté, if you saw thatLiberté was really I think it's
(01:08:48):
corcoran and um, and yeah, hedid make transylvania.
Uh, but just wonderful,wonderful films.
And he has a great face too.
Speaking of crushes, he's thatkind of face, face like the side
of a mountain so I love theface with character.
Speaker 2 (01:09:08):
Yeah, he's so gifted.
I don't know if you can hearthe train going by right now,
but apologies if, uh, if peoplecan pick it up, I just hear the
kids out on the schoolyard.
Speaker 3 (01:09:17):
My apartment overlooks a schoolyard and in
summertime the kids are outthere shooting baskets and stuff
and playing soccer.
Speaker 2 (01:09:24):
That's so sweet.
Yeah yeah, tony Gottlieb is sotalented Latro Drum.
I've been wanting to do like ascreening of it somewhere
because I think it's difficultto find, but you can find it on
YouTube listeners.
They have it in several parts.
Speaker 3 (01:09:38):
You know, I have my own copy.
Oh cool, and I think I stillhave it, but it's video.
Speaker 2 (01:09:44):
Yeah, I mean, it's like watch it, you have it.
It's like, oh man, it's gettingthere.
Speaker 3 (01:09:54):
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I still have it, but it's like
a, you know, the videotape, thatthing, that's like this and you
have to, you know, yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:09:59):
Who has a VCR?
Speaker 3 (01:10:01):
I know exactly, but yeah, but I, oh, I would love
that you know screening it's.
You know, I don't know.
You have a Roma film festivalsometime, Wouldn't it be nice?
Yeah, A festival somewhere inthe US with, like Gypsy music,
Roma film.
Speaker 2 (01:10:31):
Did you see the exhibit gosh Gosha, whose work
was in the uh, venice Biennial?
Oh, I didn't get to see GoshaMir in um in New York, but I
remember we talked about itbecause I was so excited.
Um, just just astounding.
Oh yeah, I ended up missing it.
I think I'm only in New Yorksometimes.
Now, you know, academia is agreat Romani film fest, but I
don't believe it's been in theUS.
(01:10:51):
I could be wrong, but I thinkusually it's in Berlin or in
Europe.
Speaker 1 (01:10:56):
But we need.
Speaker 2 (01:10:57):
Yeah, I would like, I would love more American
festivals.
We, paulina and I, did theRomanistan Festival just as an
opportunity to have Romani artsand it was like an all LGBTQ
cast and we did that in Marchand it was so, so fun and we're
just, you know, we need thefunding to do more.
You know, I think that's thething is like.
You know where does the moneycome from, but people always and
(01:11:20):
where did you?
all do it.
Where did you do it?
We were in New Orleans becauseour friend Ilva knew, you know,
plenty of performers who arehappy to jump in, and so it was
a blast.
We had so much fun.
Yeah, new Orleans is a greatplace for stuff like that.
Yeah, it's such a great city.
What do you have coming up onthe horizon that you would like
(01:11:42):
people to know about, and youknow how can people find you and
support your work.
Speaker 3 (01:11:46):
Well, I run this reading series on zoom that's
become, you know it's like inits fifth year.
We started it during thepandemic, my assistant and I,
and it's just become a big thing.
So so people can.
How can people find out aboutFacebook?
The links are posted on myFacebook, on my Facebook page,
(01:12:08):
and I have a page that's likeCecilia Wallach author, but it's
kind of neglected.
Everything's on my personalpage and so, like I have a.
There's a reading coming up onSunday with two fabulous poets
Laurie Badikian, who's anArmenian American poet, child of
the diaspora, and Lee Herrick,who's the California Poet
(01:12:32):
Laureate.
His work is wonderful.
He was adopted from Korea as a10-month-old, like abandoned.
There's no knowledge of who hisbirth parents were and he
writes about that justexquisitely.
So they'll be reading on Sundayon Zoom and I host a reading
(01:12:54):
like this every month on thelast Sunday of the month and I
also put out a newsletter once amonth and the newsletter gets
posted on Facebook.
So if you go on my Facebookpage, you'll see that the July
newsletter has just been postedand you can click on it and read
it and subscribe and get thenewsletter and then you'll get
(01:13:17):
news of like workshops I'm doingLike this summer I did the
workshop in Paris and I didsomething in Nice.
So the workshops and readingsand things like that, oh, that's
great and I hope I'll have.
I mean, I have a couple of newpoetry manuscripts, one that's
ready, although you know,nowadays you keep fussing with
it, I keep fussing with it.
(01:13:38):
But you know, I hope to have anew book of poems out in the
next year or two, at least one,maybe more than one, which would
be great.
And then I'll do readings andstuff like that.
I love doing live readings andperformances and collaborative
performances.
It's just it's gotten a littlebit harder to find venues and
(01:14:05):
that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (01:14:06):
Yeah, yeah, that's so good to know.
I am not exactly sure when thisepisode is coming out, but I
love that you have thatnewsletter so people can find
you, you know, whenever thisreaches them.
Yeah, if you find me onfacebook, then you'll see.
Speaker 3 (01:14:21):
You know that things get posted there.
My assistant is good aboutmaking sure they're there.
That's a good point of access.
I have a website, but it's likeeverybody's website it's not
kept real up to date.
Speaker 2 (01:14:34):
It's hard.
It's hard to do everything.
Yeah, thank you so much forspeaking with us.
I'm just so so glad that we gotto do this interview again and
have like the perfect place forit to live, so thank you Thanks
yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:14:50):
Wonderful.
Speaker 3 (01:14:51):
Anyway, I hope we can see each other in person one of
these days before.
I hope so too.
Are you traveling at all or youstay put where you are?
Speaker 2 (01:14:59):
I mostly travel nationally.
Speaker 3 (01:15:02):
I haven't really been abroad in a minute, but yeah,
if you're, whenever you're backin the States, let me know where
you are okay, I'm gonna do areading at this festival in
youngstown, ohio, and then I'llbe, you know, on that side of
the country a bit, but not up inplans to be up in new england.
But yeah, keep in touch yes,you too.
So good to see you great to seeyou and let me know when this is
(01:15:24):
shareable and I'll share it inmy newsletter and share it on
Facebook.
Awesome, thank you, all rightBye.
Speaker 1 (01:15:43):
Take good care.
Bye, bye.
Thank you for listening toRomanistan Podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:15:58):
You can find us on Instagram, tiktok and Facebook
at Romanistan Podcast and onTwitter at Romanistan Pod, to
support us.
Join our Patreon for extracontent or just donate to our
Ko-Fi fundraiser, ko-ficombackslash Romanasan, and please
rate, review and subscribe.
It helps people find our show.
It helps us so much.
Speaker 1 (01:16:17):
You can follow Jez on Instagram at jasminavantila and
Paulina at Romani Holistic andpaulina at romani holistic.
You can get our book secrets ofromani fortune telling online
or wherever books are sold.
Visit romanistanpodcastcom forevents, educational resources
and more.
Email us at romanistanpodcastat gmailcom for inquiries.
Welcome to Romanistan .
We're your friendlyneighborhood gypsies.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
I'm Paulina and I'm Jez.
We're here today with CeciliaWallach, and we're so excited to
chat to you.
I actually interviewed youyears ago in New York for a
piece that I ended up not beingable to finish, and I always
wanted to interview you again,and so I'm so happy that we
could do this.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Well, I love that interview.
It was worth it just to havethe interview.
We were in a diner near GrandCentral in New York, weren't we?
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Yeah, I think we were pretty close to where I was
teaching at the time in Midtown.
It was fun.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
I just I can picture you sitting across the table.
I remember the conversation wasjust intense and lively and,
just you know, so much fun andit was such a weird setting that
I loved it's a really good time, so it was worth it to have it,
whether you're able to, youknow, finish anything from it or
(01:09):
not.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
I was just waiting for Ramon's time, really.
So yeah, we have our little biothat we love to read to
introduce our guest, paulinaCecilia.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Wolach is an American poet, writer, teacher and
performer.
She's published sevencollections of poems, a novel
and numerous essays and reviews.
Her honors include threefellowships from the Fulbright
Foundation and fellowships fromthe National Endowment for the
(01:46):
Arts, cec, artslinkInternational, the Center for
International TheaterDevelopment and others, as well
as the Pushcart Prize.
Her writing has been publishedin translation in French, german
, polish, ukrainian, bulgarian,hungarian, hebrew, romanesque
and Spanish.
(02:07):
An expanded and updated editionof her second book, sigan, the
Gypsy Poem, has been the basisfor multilingual multimedia
performances in Los Angeles,paris, warsaw, athens and
elsewhere.
Her latest publication is apoetry chapbook, labor, the
(02:37):
Testimony of Ted Gall, which JoyPriest has called an important
contribution to Appalachiandocu-poetics and cross-racial
labor solidarity.
She was born in Pennsylvaniaand raised there and in rural
Kentucky, and has been fortunateto have traveled the world as a
writer and teacher, leadingwriting workshops and teaching
literature in China, turkey,mexico, poland, france, germany
(03:01):
and across the US.
In 2026, cecilia will return toPoland as a Fulbright scholar
at Jagiellonian University inKrakow.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Yay, so happy to have you here.
Tell us.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
It's always impressive to hear my own bio.
How did I get here?
It's impressive, it's veryimpressive.
Thank you, thanks, but you kindof stick around long enough and
you get a few things done.
That's the only way I canexplain it.
But sometimes looking back,it's surprising, surprising.
(03:42):
It's surprising Surprisingbecause I always think you know,
(04:11):
the story about my paternalgrandmother was that she signed
her name with an X.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
I've come to doubt that she was really illiterate.
She was too smart and did toomany crazy things to be
illiterate.
But I think, wow, onegeneration and you know.
Look what happened.
Yeah, I love that.
Good to be here with you.
It's so good to have you.
Tell us a little more about you.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
Know yourself your family story where are you from
your visa?
Anything you want to shareabout your background?
To start us off, oh, there's somuch.
Jess, I'm one of seven kids.
One of seven children.
My dad was an airplane mechanic.
My mom was busy with us, butshe was also a really gifted
seamstress and, as I found outlater as an adult, my father was
(04:42):
an ex-con and my mother hadbeen a teenage runaway.
So, and they both they wereremarkable people and remarkable
parents, and I may have anoutsized sense of loyalty and
belonging to my family, myfamily of birth.
So that's really defined me.
(05:06):
I think I could say I have a lotof problems with broad
identities meant to I don't knowsort of.
Sometimes it feels like tohomogenize us and to put us into
neat categories.
So you know, when people I'vebeen in a conference where
(05:30):
somebody asked me what's it liketo be actually a radio program
in Poland and somebody said oh,how does it feel to speak in
English?
And yet your soul is Polish?
And I said you know, my souldoes not have a nationality, but
I'm really tied to the familysoul and the family soul is deep
(05:51):
, dark and complicated, as somany, if not all, family souls
are.
But I was born in Pennsylvania.
We moved to Kentucky when I wasin my early adolescence and
Kentucky was the place that feltlike home to me.
We lived out in the country, wehad a house.
(06:13):
We built our house ourselvesand this is something that
Americans don't usually do.
You know, we my father paidsomebody to come in and excavate
and put down the foundation andput up the basic framework and
then we moved into it.
You know, we sort of hungbedsheets between sections to
give ourselves a little privacyin rooms and we, we lived in it
(06:36):
and built it around us.
That's come up in my, in my, inmy poems and it's it's glimpsed
, I think, in in Seagans.
So you know that was how welived.
We lived in a really that'skids on the schoolyard screaming
, playing.
If you hear that, don't worry.
(06:56):
We lived in a way that wasdifferent from our neighbors and
when we lived in Pennsylvania,in a kind of more middle-class
suburban community, we reallydidn't fit.
So when we moved to Kentuckyand lived, it was a poor
community there and we lived outin the country and it was
(07:20):
beautiful, and so that was theplace I first kind of touched
earth and felt that I was home.
So you know my family is prettyunusual and some might say
dysfunctional, but also in ourway extraordinary.
So I went to university inKentucky and then I had $100
(07:47):
burning a hole in my pocket anda friend who was driving west to
try to get into the filmbusiness.
So I hitched a ride with her.
I got to Los Angeles.
I didn't have enough money toget back, so I stayed with an
aunt and some cousins and founda job and stayed, did some work
(08:09):
in public relations andmarketing Don't ask me why
anybody hired me to do that anddid fine with that and was able
to kind of solidify myself.
You know, get a car, get anapartment, start a savings
account.
And almost as soon as I could Iwalked away from that and
(08:32):
started working independently asa freelance poet in the schools
, of all things.
And I thought my parents mightbe a little bit because I knew
they worried about me.
They wouldn't.
They never wanted to compromisemy independence, but I knew
they worried about me being sofar away and on my own.
But when I remember when Icalled my mom and said Mom, quit
(08:54):
my job, I quit my corporate job, I'm going to be a poet in the
schools and she said your fatherand I were wondering when you
were going to quit that job,were wondering when you were
going to quit that job.
So I had their support.
I was lucky I was very lucky.
(09:14):
That's lovely, yeah.
So I did that.
I worked as a poet in theschools for many years.
I was extraordinarily good atit.
I mean, I really connect withchildren.
They get it, they get poetry,they get the imagination, they
get the creative process.
They were always excited to seeme and I was excited to see
(09:35):
them and I made it work.
I made enough of a living tosupport myself and eventually to
be able to arrange my scheduleso that I could teach a part of
the year, teach reallyintensively, work really hard,
and then leave the country forthree or four months at a time
and travel.
And I started coming to Europe,in large part in search of the
(10:02):
story of this grandmother whosigned her name with an X.
So I was just kind of goingwhere.
I just really believed in fate.
I guess I believed if I keptmoving, kept meeting people, I
would eventually find the placewhere she had been born.
(10:27):
And that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
I love that journey.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
Yeah, it's about an hour from where I am now in
Zhezhov.
It's a small village, used tobe a big village, and it's about
an hour's drive away from here,so that's my connection to this
part of Poland.
My grandmother was born in avillage in the Carpathians that
(10:53):
was very not Polish but was inPoland and with a very
complicated history, with a verycomplicated history and it's a
really good example of theintricacies and vagaries and
(11:20):
even dangers of collectiveidentities.
And I can talk about that if youwant me to.
But it was a village with itwas primarily East Slavic people
who were called Rusyn,ruthenian, lemko and eventually
came to be identified as whetherthey chose it or not to be
(11:42):
identified as Ukrainians,although they had never lived in
any official Ukrainianterritory.
But it was a kind of similarculture and probably shared
roots at some point.
But the village also includedJewish people and Roma people
and, from what the priest Ifirst met there in 1999 told me,
(12:05):
they lived together happily,peacefully, until World War II.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Wow, it's really really horrible.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Yeah, you know, I mean there's so much trauma in
just like in the landscape inthat part of the world.
Yeah, but it took me decades tounderstand what had happened
there and why it had happenedand what it had to do with my
(12:41):
own family history.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Yeah, that uncovering ticks guts, pardon me.
And what it had to do with myown family history.
Yeah, that uncovering takesguts, pardon me, that uncovering
takes guts.
Sometimes I'm scared to lookinto questions I have around my
own family so I'm like, oh, it'sgoing to be a sad story.
I can feel that.
Well, you know, and you havethat intuition.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
I mean, I feel like we come from people.
I'm going to project and includeyou who you know that intuition
was a very important, it was apower you didn't dismiss.
I think I didn't reallyattribute it to Romani culture
(13:23):
necessarily, but you know, Ithink I've told you before I
sort of grew up with this a lotof uncertainty about my identity
, you know, because it was atime and a place where people
was Polish and when I wasgrowing up everything was behind
(13:50):
the Iron Curtain and the kindof little story in the family,
that kind of was almost a joke,but it wasn't a joke, was that
we were gypsies or that we hadgypsy heritage or gypsy blood,
as my mother would say.
But I didn't connect it.
I didn't connect the kind ofimportance given to intuition in
(14:17):
my family, you know, and I'mtalking about my extended family
, and I'm talking about myextended family I didn't connect
that to anything having to dowith Romani culture or beliefs
until much, much later.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
But I do remember when I was a teenager, my father
telling me you come from a longline of fortune tellers.
Speaker 3 (14:43):
Yeah, I just remember that.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
Yeah, we definitely have heard that.
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
So this grandmother, who was born near here in the
Carpathians, she read the cards.
I grew up hearing that she hada very special place, it seems,
in this village as a very youngwoman.
It was a girl, she was thevillage midwife, she was the
village barber, she was theperson who washed the bodies of
(15:14):
the dead and prepared them forburial.
And she read the cards.
So the priest I met there in1999 was kind of taken aback and
then he said well, she wouldhave been specially trained from
an early age Kinship.
(15:39):
A few of our world's peoplestill speak a tongue so old.
Its closest analog is birdsong,and a bird carved some 30 000
years ago may well be our firstwork of art.
Why mimic the palaver of athrush from wood or stone?
(16:00):
Why shape a turn body, itswings pressed tight against its
sides?
Or remember the dream momentsour beating arms took hold in
air, lifting us away from earth,trod smooth by our feet.
We each possess a bird soul.
(16:22):
On the highest branch of everyfamily tree, a winged spirit
preens in the sun, gleaming withiridescence, that sheen of our
common blood.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
We actually want to ask you one of our most famous
questions.
Do you consider yourself arebel?
Speaker 3 (16:53):
oh yeah, I didn't have a choice.
You know, I was born into arebel.
Like I said, my mother was ateenage runaway and my dad was
an ex-convict and, um, I think Ican say that all of my siblings
, we all have problems withauthority, with external
(17:17):
authority.
Like, don't tell us what to do.
So, yeah, I definitely would,would say I.
I told a former professor ofmine one time, a person to whom
I'm still close.
I said well, you know, I wasthinking on my life and I said
nobody ever told me I couldn'tdo what I wanted to do.
(17:37):
And he looked at me and he saidnobody would have dared.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
The reputation precedes you.
You know, I read Sagan, thegypsy poem, years ago and I fell
in love.
I think I was in my twentieswhen I found it and I had really
hadn't read too many Romaniwriters and I related so much to
how you grappled with yourmixed identity, what you've
shared now.
But also you know what you werewriting about in the book and
(18:07):
knowing some about your familyroots, but not everything.
And I feel like you navigatethis complex identity with such
grace.
We often have people writing inof mixed identities not really
knowing how to navigate it atall or how to talk about it, and
there's so much pressure to youknow publicly represent an
entire culture, especially ifyou're public in any way like a
(18:28):
writer.
So we would love if you couldshare a little advice from folks
.
Either you know that camethrough in the poetry or
otherwise.
How do you navigate, like beingin between categories.
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Yeah, I mean, I think it would add another layer of
complexity maybe if I had grownup in a family that explicitly
identified as Romani.
So that wasn't.
I mean, it was implicit, but weweren't.
You know, we were quite tribalas a family, but we weren't in a
(19:01):
, we weren't part of a.
And someone said one time, whensomeone said, you can't
consider yourself Roma if youdidn't grow up in a Roma
community, and I did so.
But I have, you know, I hadthose questions as a kid, one of
the most hurtful things, things, and I guess I've hung on to it
(19:26):
and should let it go.
But you know, as a little kidin elementary school, having the
other kids ask me what are you,you know, what are you anyway?
Yeah, and I didn't have ananswer.
I did not have an answer andinstead of going looking for an
answer, you know I looked for, Itried to figure out who I
(19:50):
really was, not what I reallywas, you know.
And the question answers whatare you meaning?
Are you white?
Are you black?
Are you Italian?
Are you, you know, black?
Are you Italian, are you?
You know, I was just a littlebit, I guess, an unusual looking
child.
I was dark, darker than I amnow.
When you're as you get older,you lose pigment, not only your
(20:14):
hair, your skin, everything.
But I was dark.
I had rather thick, darkeyebrows, kind of slanted eyes,
and my hair was really from thetime I hit adolescence, was
really wildly frizzy and curly.
So I don't know, Some peoplejust didn't like the way I
looked and it confused them.
(20:35):
But I didn't go looking for somuch an identity to wrap myself
in.
I wanted to understand on adeeper level who I was and who
the people I had come from were.
And it turns out the people Icame from weren't all that
(20:57):
comfortable with wrappingthemselves up in identities.
So you know, I had a danceteacher once.
I suppose she was biracial, shewas a dark skinned woman with
blonde hair and green eyes andshe wasn't saying this about her
racial identity, she was sayingit about herself as a teacher
and dancer.
She said nobody's going to putme in a box and when I'm asked
(21:22):
to check those boxes on you knowforms about how I identify
myself, I'm like, oh no, you'renot putting me in a box and I
guess that's the way I navigateit.
You know I.
You know somebody asked me.
You know, in recent years and ata party of artists you know
(21:44):
cool people in LA some womansaid, well, you know what are
you.
And I said, excuse me.
She said, well, I mean, what'syour nationality?
And I said, well, I'm anAmerican citizen.
And she said, yeah, but what'syour nationality?
And I said I do not believe inthe dogma of nationality, you
know, and she really tookoffense.
(22:09):
You know I believe in.
You know we're citizens, we'reall hybrids of some kind or
another and you know we drawfirm lines around our identities
at great peril, you know, toourselves and to others.
(22:30):
So I couldn't draw a firm linearound my identity if I wanted
to.
I do Jez.
I do have discomfort sometimeswhen I'm in communities that do
define themselves reallystrongly around some collective
identity and think, you know,like I have been with Ukrainian
(22:54):
people who say you're Ukrainianand it's like well, I don't know
, I never identified them.
My father said we came from theCarpathians.
He said the language that wasspoken was like Ukrainian.
(23:20):
I don't, you know and I can'tclaim.
I will happily identify somedifferent strands in my heritage
.
You know there are thesedifferent strands, but when I
(23:41):
did a DNA, have you ever done aDNA test.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
I think Paulina did you do one.
My grandma told me never to doone because she didn't want the
government to have our bloodsecrets, which I'm like no, my
brother is like that, mybrother's like I don't want them
to have that.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
I don't want them to have that.
That's definitely my family'sattitude.
And yet we all went ahead anddid it eventually.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
My mom too.
She's like well, now they haveall your blood and whatever, and
you know they want their blood,you know they want our blood.
But you can do it, I'm okaywith it.
Very passive, aggressive.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
But when you look at, you know, when you go to places
where you can see the kind ofrecords that Nazis kept, you
know, it's terrifying Becausethey did, you know, everything
down on an index card about you.
So I can understand that.
But it was so interestingbecause when I did a DNA test
and my friend here, who is she,was married to a Polish man for
(24:36):
many years.
She has, you know, Polishchildren.
She's a British citizen,product of rape, so father's
unknown, but apparentlypakistani, and um, she looked at
my you know little pie chart.
She said, my god, I've neverseen anything like that.
Because we're like I said whatyou know, like I'm everything.
She said, like I have basque,you know who has basque.
(25:01):
So my brothers are part of thewhat's called.
They have some identifier thatthey're part of the, the Arabic
haplope group.
So you know, obviously peopletraveled and you know seeds were
spread.
(25:22):
But I, you know, I just I resist, you know, to try to answer
your question, I resist a lot ofthe ideology, a lot of the kind
of you know this or that blackor white kind of ideas.
(25:44):
I mean, other people are freeto embrace that if they want,
but I can't, you know I can't.
I'm who I am and I am anAmerican citizen, and that's
something very different fromnationality.
I take citizenship quiteseriously, nationality, I take
(26:10):
citizenship quite seriously.
But that's somebody, an olderwoman when I was very young,
told me that a good response wasto when people ask kind of
inappropriate questions maybewas to say I'll forgive you for
asking that if you'll forgive mefor not answering.
I love that.
And my friend Natasha Trethewey, who's a really good work yeah
(26:34):
yeah.
Yeah, she's wonderful and she,you know she's biracial, she
identifies as as black, asAfrican American, but you know,
she said, when people ask youthat, what are you?
She just finds that to be aracist question.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
It is, yeah, it is.
Speaker 3 (26:56):
You know.
So you know she that's.
Her answer is I'm an American,I'm an American citizen, you
know.
So you know.
That's good enough for me.
Yeah, not for me.
And if people are curious aboutmy heritage and my family story
, they better be prepared tolisten for a while.
(27:17):
So maybe that's something else.
You say well, so maybe that'ssomething else.
You say Well, how much time doyou have?
So do you both consideryourself to be of mixed identity
?
Speaker 1 (27:35):
I do.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
I am not I.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
I grew up in a Roma family and then when I took the
bloodline it was like 99%Eastern European Roma.
I was like I mixed it at 1%.
Speaker 3 (27:50):
I didn't realize that there was a DNA marker for Roma
.
Last time I asked there wasn't,but this keeps evolving all the
time.
Relatively now, yeah, okay.
And what about you, jess?
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Yeah, I mean my maternal grandmother is, you
know, from a Sinti family andyeah, and then otherwise, you
know, a mixed European and Ispent so much time with my
grandmother that you know sheinfluenced so much of my, my
cultural, spiritual identity.
But I also really would feeluncomfortable, like not
(28:29):
specifying that I'm mixed and Igrew up like assimilated.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
You know it's a different so you didn't grow up
in a Roma community like Paulinadid no, no, my and my
grandmother's family, I think,are very uncomfortable about
being seen as Roma.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
They really are, like they don't want to talk about
it, um, and they're in Germanyand so you know.
That makes sense.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
I was like our families are the same, though.
Yeah, we.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
It's funny because, that's you know, paulina and I
were working on things,especially writing the book.
It's like, wow, we really havevery similar experiences in some
ways, and then always not.
But yeah, no, it's like, wow,we really have very similar
experiences in some ways andthen other ways not.
Yeah, no, it's just alwaysinteresting to see what people
share, regardless of you knowwhether you do it.
Speaker 3 (29:10):
I mean, and I thought , you know, as a kid, when I did
hear you know we have gypsyblood, I thought, great, you
know, why is this a secret?
Speaker 2 (29:24):
Yeah, I know I didn't understand.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
I thought great, wonderful, you know, and I guess
if I were going to, you know,if I could sort of embrace any
of my identities, I wouldembrace that, but I don't feel
like I have a right to, becauseI didn't grow up in a Roma
community, because there isn't,you know, like, you know, that
(29:47):
kind of substantiation.
But but yeah, I thought great,why should this be a secret?
But when I would ask my, mygreat aunts, they would be like,
talk about it?
No, no, no.
You know there would be like mygreat aunts, they would be like
don't talk about it, no, no, no, you know, they would be like
somehow you weren't supposed totalk about it.
And then, after I so it waswhen I traveled started to
(30:13):
travel in Europe and in the 90sand saw, you know how displaced
Roma, you know, after, you know,post-communism, were living and
experienced, especially inplaces like, I guess, germany,
poland, after you know,post-communism were living and
experienced, especially inplaces like, I guess, germany,
poland, france how Roma wereregarded and how they were
treated.
It's like, oh, I get it, yeah.
And then when I studied thehistory, I really got it, you
(30:38):
know, and you know when Siganwas published and I, you know,
gave presentations of the US.
People in the US had no notionthat Roma were targeted in the
Holocaust at all, so I got that.
After I did the research, afterI traveled, I wrote the book.
(31:01):
When the book was published Ithought I was really going to
get into trouble with my familybecause this was something we
never.
You know, you kind of jokedabout it.
You talked about it in thefamily, but was it serious?
Was it a joke?
And but you did, did not?
It didn't go beyond that andthe book came out.
(31:24):
My father had already passed, alot of his relatives had passed
, and I walked into my mother'sliving room one night.
I was in Kentucky on afellowship and I went to my
mom's for dinner and walkedthrough the screen door and my
mom was leaning back with and Iwent to my mom's for dinner and
walked through the screen doorand my mom was leaning back with
(31:46):
her eyes closed to my dad'srecliner, and my teenage niece,
who was already a young mother,was lying on the floor with her
black hair spread out around herand my sister, the hairdresser,
was sitting on the couchreading Sigan out loud to them.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Oh, that's beautiful.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
And I said you know what, the Pulitzer Prize doesn't
get better than this.
And I felt a little embarrassedand tried to say something and
my mother immediately said, shh,we're listening to this.
And she later told me that itwas her favorite of my books.
She really loved it.
My sister used to have a have acopy in her at her beauty shop
(32:27):
and it kept disappearing.
And I'd give her another copyand it would disappear oh so
yeah, so it um, I didn't get introuble for it, but my mother
did say, you know, I worry aboutyou traveling, now that you're
a public gypsy Mm hmm, for mygrandmother, in which she comes
(32:56):
to America circa 1913.
Circa 1913.
So there you are, landed in thelittle boat of the only self.
You have the only skirt, theonly scarf, your hair in the
long brown braid of the onlygirl you've ever been.
(33:20):
Now here comes the whistle'sscream, the laws, quick shove.
The crowd of others pushingpast with their cardboard
suitcases, cloth sacks, theirragged bundles at their backs.
When you step away from them,you stand in all that sharpened
(33:40):
light alone, beneath your blouse, a little pouch of herbs, dried
flowers, earth of home, alittle charm to keep you safe in
this new country.
At your throat, here comes thehunger.
Here come the machines.
(34:00):
Here comes the god of cash andsweat.
Here comes the egg that turnsto child inside your body.
Here comes death.
Here comes America, my love,all ship.
There is no going back.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
We actually wanted to ask you what was it like?
Speaker 3 (34:38):
for Sigan to be adapted to multimedia
performance.
The thrill of a lifetime youcan imagine.
You know just thrilling.
The first big performance inLos Angeles was part of I was
teaching, you know, a non-tenuretrack, not as an adjunct, but a
(35:01):
step above, but still at theUniversity of Southern
California and they had aprogram called Visions and
Voices where they didpresentations in their big
auditorium there and a woman hadfound me.
There's a woman named PaulaFaust who's made several films
about the Roma.
She's a documentary filmmakerand she came to a reading I was
(35:23):
giving from this book and sheasked if she could interview me
on film for something she wasdoing.
And then she was the one whocame up with the idea of turning
it into a multimediapresentation.
She had connections at USC, shewrote the grant and she brought
(35:43):
in a stage director, a youngLatino guy.
She brought in musicians SibleyCampo, who's an incredible
flamenco dancer, her husband,who's a musician.
They brought in a canto pandosinger from the south of france,
(36:03):
a roma man who does that, youknow that deep song, yeah, and
we only had him for a few daysand we were on the stage during
a dress rehearsal and I was atthe podium reading the poems and
seedley was dancing and this.
And there's a point in the poemI don't know if you remember it
well enough to know there's apoint in the poem I don't know
if you remember it well enoughto know there's a point where
(36:26):
somebody I'm stuck in trafficand somebody has fallen or
jumped from an overpass and justat that point this Roma singer
started that mournful just Imean, I cannot believe I'm
standing here.
I cannot believe I'm standinghere.
(36:48):
That voice just completely wentthrough my body.
It was, you know, this stunning, stunning moment where I
thought how, how did I get here?
I wrote this little thingstarted out to be about my
family and to have theseincredible artists, and what you
(37:09):
realize, paulina, or what Irealized, was like oh, this
doesn't just belong to me, thisis this.
I guess it was maybe like achild you know I haven't had
children, but you know a childand and other people picked it
up and interpreted it and puttheir experience and their gifts
(37:35):
and their souls into it and itbecame something else, much,
much bigger than anything Icould make on my own, and that
was a.
You can maybe imagine what kindof experience that was.
And then the same thing withyou know other places, even kind
(37:56):
of smaller things.
When I was in a village inEastern France for a festival
called Le Bruit de la Neige theNoise of the Snow and I kind of
didn't understand what I wasgetting into.
But I had been invited by amutual friend and basically we
(38:21):
sat in a circle.
It was a workshop kind of thingthat culminated in a circle.
It was a workshop kind of thingthat culminated in a
performance and the book hadbeen published, had been
translated and published inFrench.
So we were sitting there kindof in a circle and people were
just reading excerpts that theyloved from the French text, and
I'd come in with an excerpt fromthe English and then somebody
(38:43):
would start singing and and itturned into this kind of sonic
tapestry that, um, I still havea link to it somewhere, I don't
know if it still works, but thatthen was presented on the final
night of this festival andagain it was like that feeling
(39:06):
of you give birth to somethingand then it just kind of lifts
out of your arms and moves intothe world in ways you can't
imagine, much less control, andI'm fine with that.
You know, I had a background intheater.
(39:33):
I did theater as a young person.
I never intended to try tobecome a, you know, an actress.
I wasn't confident enough aboutmy physical appearance.
I was shy on camera At thattime.
There was an ingenue kind oflook that I did not have.
But I loved doing theater.
I loved that collaboration.
(39:54):
You know, when you kind ofcreate something in
collaboration with other peopleand it's like wow, I never, you
know, it goes beyond anything anindividual imagination could
have created.
So starting to do thoseperformances was it?
It brought me back into thatrealm, into that experience.
(40:16):
And you know, I'm always sohumbled by the gifts that people
bring.
You know people.
You know people to to playmusic.
They, they study all theirlives.
You know, to be able to createa sound with an instrument.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Um, we actually wanted to ask you, um, what is
your advice to people on makingwriting a sustainable path,
whether it's through fellowshipsand academic career or through
a day job with a meaningfulwriting practice?
Speaker 3 (40:49):
I think, pauline, it really depends on what works for
you.
I don't think there's any onepath.
I mean, I got some.
I loved being a poet in theschools and that gave me the
illusion that I could make apath just by being a poet,
because that's who I was tothese kids.
(41:09):
I mean, I was coming in andteaching, but really I was
coming in and being a poet andmodeling for them what being a
poet was.
But that was a time when therewas funding for things like that
.
You know, I wasn't paid a lot,but I was paid enough and that
funding disappeared.
So, you know, and I kind of gotinto teaching in academia
(41:33):
accidentally and I love teaching, but that was not a good fit
for me.
It's not a good fit for anybodywho has an iota of a rebellious
streak.
Yeah, it's a kind of acorporate atmosphere, even
though people would say it isn't.
Universities are run more andmore like corporations.
(41:58):
There's a kind of conformity Ifound, and no matter what
university I taught, where Itaught and I was at a bunch of
them I was always the onlyperson on the faculty who did
not have parents in theprofessional class, so it was
(42:18):
really almost more of a classthing.
You know a working class,scrappy, rebellious working
class kid.
In academia, even my colleagueswho were, you know, people of
color and all that they were,their parents were professors
and lawyers and teachers and notmen who wore a uniform and came
(42:39):
home with dirty hands.
So academia was not a good fitfor me but I loved being able to
be when I was working with kids.
It was like I got to be a poetall day.
I didn't have to separatemyself into I'm writing sales
promotion literature during theday and then I go home and try
(43:00):
to make the switch into being apoet.
I was like absorbed with poetryand imagination and creativity
and language all day and thatreally worked for me and I I had
.
I was educating myself as apoet because I was always
looking for ways in for the kids.
(43:20):
You know where's a what's apoem?
I used kids poems but I readthem Whitman and Nikki Giovanni
and I'm always looking for poemsthat I could feed them and that
would give them a way into apoem.
So I was reading a lot and youknow studying.
(43:45):
You know how do I explainextended metaphor to a room of
seven-year-olds?
How do I explain surrealism toa room?
Speaker 2 (43:55):
Such a fun thing to do too, it was a blast.
It was a blast, those werereally.
Speaker 3 (44:00):
I did that for about 10 or 12 years and those were
great years.
I know other people Paul,paulina for whom it really works
to have a day job that hasfinite borders, unfortunately,
like when I had a corporate job.
I left that job at five andthat was it.
You know, 5 pm every day, noone, a cell phone.
(44:21):
Your boss wouldn't dare callyou at home.
That never happened.
You know there wasn't such athing as email.
You clocked in, you clocked outand the rest of your time was
your own.
So when I worked that corporatejob, I was doing equity waiver
theater, I was going to poetryworkshops, I was doing readings,
because after 5pm my time wasmine, because after 5 pm my time
(44:42):
was mine.
And I don't think a lot of jobsaren't like that.
But I think for some people Iknow some poets for whom that's
worked really well.
If I had to advise someone now,it's a really tough time to be
a teacher, but I have poetfriends who work, as you know,
primary school and high schoolteachers, and that is a good fit
(45:05):
for them.
They need part of is how muchstability do you need?
I never needed much stabilitybecause, um, I have my family
and one of my sisters told oneof my husbands oh why does
cecilia need things like potsand pans?
She has us, so um nice so Ididn't.
(45:26):
I didn't choose to have childrenand I never stayed married very
long.
So, um, I just had to take careof myself and I felt, you know,
I can always.
I can always do that, I canalways waitress.
So I had different prioritiesthan some people who need more
(45:48):
stability, more financialsecurity.
But I would just my experience.
I would stay away from academia, but teaching in the classroom
in different ways could be great.
Or, you know, maybe we'llreturn to a time when people can
(46:10):
do what I did in the 90s andyou know, I just basically made
up my own job as a poet in theschools.
Other people were doing it, butI made it a full-time thing.
Speaker 2 (46:24):
That's beautiful, I think I'm probably gonna go to
her corporate job what do you do?
Speaker 3 (46:30):
what is your corporate job?
Can I?
Speaker 1 (46:31):
ask I am a marketing coordinator that's good useful
skills.
Speaker 3 (46:38):
I mean my years in the corporate world served me
really well.
I got really useful skills andI happen to be lucky enough to
work with good people.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
Yeah it's a sales company, so I get a lot of like
every weekly meeting.
I learn so much people skillsI'm like okay, all right, those
are good skills.
Speaker 3 (47:01):
You know those are good skills and I got my five
years in the corporate world.
I got great skills.
I had a wonderful mentor.
I had a woman boss who was onlyabout who was.
It was unusual in the 70s and80s to have a woman boss and she
was only about 10 years olderthan I was and she had come up
through the ranks as a fileclerk into management and um
(47:25):
what a gift oh yeah, she wasgreat.
Speaker 1 (47:30):
Thank you so much.
I really appreciated it.
Really appreciate you coming onhere and helpful to talk to you
okay, have a good day, takecare bye.
Speaker 3 (47:42):
This is a poem by Lynn Hutchinson Lee, called what
they Ate.
On the Ship there was bread andoatmeal in a thin soup.
(48:04):
Scraps against hunger, eat upchavvies.
And then the moon came out andthey closed their eyes,
pretending to sleep.
They knew the words, why andwhere.
They knew the word drama, butnot that a drama could stretch
(48:32):
itself across an ocean.
Waves towered over their shipand the rocking was that of
their grandmother's arms, leftbehind, and her arms were more
scented, more enfolding, morepresent in her absence.
They ate the sky, drank theundertow, licked the drenching
(48:54):
mist from their arms, inhaledthe perfume of forgetting.
Speaker 2 (49:14):
I wanted to ask you too, because I don't know too
much about your recent chapbook.
Speaker 3 (49:24):
Labor, the testimony of Ted Gall.
What, what tell us about it?
What are you doing?
It's kind of an accidental poembut you know, researching this
grandmother who's been kind ofthe center of my creative life,
I guess my whole creative life,you know she was active in the
labor movement in the US.
She, my dad, was born in a coalmining town called Russellton
(49:46):
in Pennsylvania and I found outafter my father had passed that
Russellton was the epicenter ofthe biggest coal miners strike
in history.
And that happened when my dadwas probably about like two
years, two years old.
And I believe from my researchthat if my grandmother wasn't
(50:11):
radicalized before, then, that'swhen she became radicalized.
Because the only people whocould get in with aid, um, to
the work, I mean they.
It was like an armed camp.
They had the coal company, hadtheir own police.
Yeah, they controlled the road,the one road in, the one road
out.
Uh, people were thrown out oftheir houses because the company
(50:34):
owned the houses.
If you were striking, striking,you were thrown out.
It was the coldest winter onrecord.
They had no fuel for heat.
They, they had no food andnobody could get past those
company police, except theCommunist Party USA.
That's when they got in withaid and you know they tried to
(50:56):
start an alternative union.
There was all kinds ofpolitical stuff.
But in trying to find out aboutthis I stumbled across a book
called the Ragman's War Bucketof Blood, the Ragman's War it
was all about.
It was a novel, all about, thistime in Russellton, but it was
all based on the writer'sresearch of the area and on her
(51:21):
own family history area and onher own family history.
We got in touch.
Her name is Suzanne Gall-Sugel.
She basically invited me tocome to see her.
(51:41):
She was sure her father hadknown my grandmother.
He was a miner and then a laboractivist there and I went to
visit her and she sent me loosein his archive.
This is a man who went toschool until he was 12 years old
and then went to work for themining company.
But he was self-educated andthen educated probably at the
Little Red Schoolhouse which theCommunist Party USA ran the
(52:07):
Little Red Schoolhouse which theCommunist Party USA ran and he
left behind when he died thisjust immaculately, exquisitely
organized archive and she sentme.
It was in the basement ofSuzanne's home and she sent me
loose in there for a couple daysand there were testimonies,
(52:29):
days, and there were testimonies, there were letters, there was
a recording, a transcript of arecording he had made for his
daughter.
There were essays he'd written.
You know there was just so muchmaterial that I got lost in
that kind of forgot about.
That was good for mygrandmother.
But my one of my grand, mygrandmother's stepson, was one
of Ted Gall's lieutenants inthese wildcat strikes and I was
(52:49):
so moved by this man's life andI felt that I could hear his
voice, you know, speaking to me,and I just took a lot of notes
and copied things, copyingthings and you know, went on
(53:10):
with my life, went on, you know,working on this book about my
grandmother and from these notesI started like just moving the.
It was all his language.
But I just started kind ofmoving things around and
thinking how can I incorporatethis into the book about my
grandmother?
But it presented itself to mein lines.
It refused to be prose and Imean it's this man's voice.
(53:34):
This is how he spoke, yeah, ina kind of poetry, you know, very
plain spoken, very um.
So it was a poem.
I realized I couldn't fit itinto this memoir I was trying to
write, so I just put it asideand 10 years later or so, I
pulled it out and I thought youknow, what I really.
(53:58):
I think this wants to be outthere in the world.
He definitely left that archivehoping that his voice would be
heard someday.
So I was in touch with a womanin Kentucky, katerina Stojkova,
who runs a small press, and shesaid do you have anything?
(54:19):
You know, I'd love to publishsomething of yours.
And I said I'd love to publishsomething of yours.
And I said, well, I have thisthing and I sent her the
manuscript and she turns out herfather was a coal miner.
Oh cool, yeah.
So she was very moved by it andshe brought it out.
It's been challenging, jess,because I'm not really sure how
(54:40):
to promote it, because it'salmost like somebody else's poem
and it doesn't seem to be areally great time for people to
be.
Um, people don't seem to bebuying books a lot.
I think during the pandemicthey were during the lockdown,
but um, you know, I've givensome readings but I'm sort of I
(55:04):
feel like I haven't done itjustice, because I really want
it to be.
But I have done some readingslash performances with
musicians and that's been greatfriend of mine who does like the
kind of knows the old, likeworker songs and coal mining
songs.
We've collaborated on aperformance and that's been
great.
But yeah it's.
(55:24):
You know, I think it's um animportant piece of work.
Speaker 2 (55:28):
Like I said, I wouldn't say that if I felt like
it was, and it's all his words,I just arranged them yeah,
that's so interesting because weare at a strange time, um,
where I think we really need tobe focusing on the labor
movement and the working classespecially, absolutely.
Yeah.
So I don't know, while this isa difficult market for books, it
(55:52):
does seem like this is such agood time for this book to be
heard.
Maybe the audio format willtake off, you know, I think
that's.
Speaker 3 (56:02):
I guess I could ask the publisher if she wants to do
that.
Do it as an you know audio book.
I just don't.
I mean, marketing is not mystrong suit and but you know
I've always, when I've had bookscome out, you know, had a
publication party, had readingsand books sell readings and the
(56:23):
books sell this.
I've had a couple readings andthey were you know reasonably
well attended, but people didn'tbuy books.
Speaker 2 (56:39):
Yeah, it's a strange, strange economy, and yet people
need poetry and love poetry.
That was actually one of ourquestions too.
You know what brought you topoetry and why do you think
humans love it and write it andread it?
Speaker 3 (56:47):
boy, that's a great question.
I mean, I can say what broughtme to poetry, um, but, and I can
say why I need it yeah, that'splenty.
That's plenty of an answer Imean, you know she would read to
us and read and I loved beingread too.
(57:08):
And and my mother also sangkind of constantly.
And in my family there was thisalso, this weird thing that we
did between singing and speaking, like at the dinner table.
It was chaotic because therewere so many of us and my mother
was a kind of chaotic person,but my father really liked, you
(57:29):
know, order, so we weren'tallowed to yell at the dinner
table so we would sing.
Pass me the butter.
You know, we would just sing.
That's so cute.
So for me that line between youknow prosaic language and song
language it was kind of blurry.
(57:50):
Like I said, my mother sang,she read to me.
I taught myself to read byhaving her read me the same book
over and over.
Boy, can I remember the first.
And then I had a sixth gradeteacher, seventh no, I think it
was a seventh grade teacher whooffered extra credit for
memorizing poems and I could dothat.
(58:13):
And then I would stand up andmake a big like jokey, overblown
thing of reciting these poems.
But actually I loved, loved itand loved doing them.
So it kind of was like a not,it was just like a glide into it
.
It was kind of always there andI didn't like ever make a
(58:35):
decision oh, I'm going to be apoet.
And then, you know, I kept.
I liked writing in secret, whichis, I mean, I think, in poetry
that's often what we're doing.
We're, you know, we're kind oflistening to that inner voice in
a kind of intensely private way.
(58:56):
And that was really appealingto me as a little kid who was
kind of obsessed with myfamily's secretiveness.
Yeah, so that's you know.
And then I had a high schoolteacher who I love.
(59:16):
She, like everybody, loved her.
So we took classes with her andshe created a class it was the
mid 70s called Modern Song andVerse and it was.
We were reading poetry andlooking at song lyrics.
She loved Willie Nelson and BobDylan and we could bring in the
(59:39):
album liner notes with lyricsand talk about them as poems,
talk about the metaphors and therhymes.
And she also subscribed to theAtlantic Monthly for us in this
little you know rural highschool and so that we could read
.
You know it was reading poemsby Lucille Clifton and Anne
Sexton and so and she made uskeep journals.
(01:00:04):
She said you can, this is your.
Whether you pass or fail thisclass depends on whether you
write in your journal everysingle day.
And I started doing that andkind of never stopped.
I took a pause for a littlewhile but never really stopped.
So that's you know, and it'sjust.
(01:00:27):
I was reading an article a fewdays ago about graphomania, like
people who just kind of need tobe writing all the time, and
that it's.
It's more about the act ofwriting, the process, than it is
about.
Oh, I want to like make a poem,I want to make a book, I want
to like make a poem, I want tomake a book, I want to make a
story.
It's just like I really lovethat active writing and with
(01:00:53):
poetry, and one of the reasons Ithink one of the reasons that I
love poetry and that I thinkthis holds for other people
certainly some of my closefriends who are also poets, is
that with poetry, I think evenmore than other forms of writing
(01:01:16):
, something's going to happen.
You don't know what it is, butyou're going to start putting
words together in some way thatyou can't you know, you can only
see as far as those headlightsgo.
(01:01:40):
Something really surprising canhappen, that you can find out
something you didn't know, youknew or felt, or you can just go
into this whole other territory, because a poem doesn't have to
follow linear logic, doesn'thave to be rational.
So there's a little bit more ofthat, and so that's the process
(01:02:02):
that I love.
And if you keep, the trick withwriting, poetry is you want,
when that happens, you want thatto happen in the language, so
that when somebody else reads it, it happens for them.
They have that sense of comingupon something that may be
(01:02:26):
startling or funny or, you know,profound in some way.
And I just think language is,you know, language is one of the
things that makes us human.
You know Animals I guessthey're starting to see have
different ways of communicating.
(01:02:48):
That can be pretty complicated,but language is this human
thing and I think that that'spart of the.
And you know, poetry is morepurely about language than any
other kind of writing.
I mean, with poetry it's really.
It's just, it's made of words,it's not.
(01:03:10):
You know, a poem can tell astory, it can be like a song,
but you know it's words and Ithink there's something that can
be really elemental about itthat can speak to people.
You, you know, a lot of peopleare talking about this poet who
recently passed away, who Ididn't know.
(01:03:31):
Yeah, andrea gibson.
Yeah, yeah and when I do see herpoems or their poems, there's
something like so at the bottomof the soul about them.
Yeah, I kind of.
You know I would tell mystudents I'm the only professor
(01:03:56):
you'll ever have in an Englishdepartment who eschews TS Eliot.
But you know, there is a kindof poetry that one of my
ex-husbands used to call doilymaking Too embroidered and fancy
, and I think some people lovethat because they're drawn maybe
to the music of it, even to thecomplexity of it.
(01:04:19):
I think poets like you know,andrea Gibson, it gets at
something you know speaks topeople at a soul level and that
people need to hear.
I feel like that's what's atrisk right now in the current
(01:04:40):
environment is the human soul.
Speaker 2 (01:04:44):
Yeah, and truth telling and the essence of
things, yeah, it makes a lot ofsense as I'm listening to your
answer around why you lovepoetry.
I understand why you teach itand also why you want to teach
it in your own way too.
It sounds like youropportunities to learn really
brought you somewhere beautifuland you made a whole life in
poetry and I just I love that.
Speaker 3 (01:05:08):
Thank you.
Yeah, I love it too, I feelvery lucky.
But, yeah, and I feel likethat's a a kind of a that's like
our challenge right now, with akind of way that you know,
technology has accelerated, youknow, in some good ways and some
not so good ways.
We're kind of shattered intothese millions of little, not
(01:05:35):
even communities, but you knowwe're not sharing reality
anymore.
But what's, you know, what's atrisk here is the soul, and you
know we need it.
We need it.
Life feels hollow, empty,sterile without that engagement
(01:05:57):
at the soul level yeah, yeahcalled earth, called Earth.
We've traveled like this all ourlives, all our life as a people
on the earth.
We've gathered and scatteredand gathered again in rooms made
(01:06:22):
of firelight or of song.
We've buried our dead when wecould, in places they loved or
the bones of them.
Every step, a turn of the wheel, a word set down and no other
word.
Every turn of the wheel, aprayer in mud, the answer of one
(01:06:46):
God.
Sometimes we've veiledourselves and sometimes we've
stood clothed only in sunlightand wind.
Sugar of flowers on our breath,honey of bird call in our
mouths.
Once I'd forgotten the way tothe well and the smell of cool
(01:07:07):
rain led me there.
Once I was only a child in mysleep.
Then I awoke and was everywhere.
Speaker 2 (01:07:26):
We also love to ask because we love to have an
opportunity for our guests toshare who inspires them or whose
work they adore.
Who is your Romani crush?
Who do you think is just doingsuch a great job and you want
listeners to learn about them orthink about them?
Speaker 3 (01:07:46):
Romani crush.
Hmm, it's hard for me to thinkabout crush in, I mean yeah this
is a platonic or maybe evenintellectual crush.
Okay, I get intellectual crush.
Artistic crush, I would say,would be um, I mean, they're
(01:08:06):
like loads and loads ofmusicians.
But let me go in a differentdirection and talk about tony
got leaf.
Oh, yes, yes, those films.
You know those films, um, yeah,are incredible.
You know um lacho Drum andGaggio Dillo and what was what
(01:08:28):
were some of the other onesthere's?
Did he make Transylvania or wasthat somebody else?
But anyway, yeah, those thosefilms are.
Yeah, liberté, if you saw thatLiberté was really I think it's
(01:08:48):
corcoran and um, and yeah, hedid make transylvania.
Uh, but just wonderful,wonderful films.
And he has a great face too.
Speaking of crushes, he's thatkind of face, face like the side
of a mountain so I love theface with character.
Speaker 2 (01:09:08):
Yeah, he's so gifted.
I don't know if you can hearthe train going by right now,
but apologies if, uh, if peoplecan pick it up, I just hear the
kids out on the schoolyard.
Speaker 3 (01:09:17):
My apartment overlooks a schoolyard and in
summertime the kids are outthere shooting baskets and stuff
and playing soccer.
Speaker 2 (01:09:24):
That's so sweet.
Yeah yeah, tony Gottlieb is sotalented Latro Drum.
I've been wanting to do like ascreening of it somewhere
because I think it's difficultto find, but you can find it on
YouTube listeners.
They have it in several parts.
Speaker 3 (01:09:38):
You know, I have my own copy.
Oh cool, and I think I stillhave it, but it's video.
Speaker 2 (01:09:44):
Yeah, I mean, it's like watch it, you have it.
It's like, oh man, it's gettingthere.
Speaker 3 (01:09:54):
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I still have it, but it's like
a, you know, the videotape, thatthing, that's like this and you
have to, you know, yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:09:59):
Who has a VCR?
Speaker 3 (01:10:01):
I know exactly, but yeah, but I, oh, I would love
that you know screening it's.
You know, I don't know.
You have a Roma film festivalsometime, Wouldn't it be nice?
Yeah, A festival somewhere inthe US with, like Gypsy music,
Roma film.
Speaker 2 (01:10:31):
Did you see the exhibit gosh Gosha, whose work
was in the uh, venice Biennial?
Oh, I didn't get to see GoshaMir in um in New York, but I
remember we talked about itbecause I was so excited.
Um, just just astounding.
Oh yeah, I ended up missing it.
I think I'm only in New Yorksometimes.
Now, you know, academia is agreat Romani film fest, but I
don't believe it's been in theUS.
(01:10:51):
I could be wrong, but I thinkusually it's in Berlin or in
Europe.
Speaker 1 (01:10:56):
But we need.
Speaker 2 (01:10:57):
Yeah, I would like, I would love more American
festivals.
We, paulina and I, did theRomanistan Festival just as an
opportunity to have Romani artsand it was like an all LGBTQ
cast and we did that in Marchand it was so, so fun and we're
just, you know, we need thefunding to do more.
You know, I think that's thething is like.
You know where does the moneycome from, but people always and
(01:11:20):
where did you?
all do it.
Where did you do it?
We were in New Orleans becauseour friend Ilva knew, you know,
plenty of performers who arehappy to jump in, and so it was
a blast.
We had so much fun.
Yeah, new Orleans is a greatplace for stuff like that.
Yeah, it's such a great city.
What do you have coming up onthe horizon that you would like
(01:11:42):
people to know about, and youknow how can people find you and
support your work.
Speaker 3 (01:11:46):
Well, I run this reading series on zoom that's
become, you know it's like inits fifth year.
We started it during thepandemic, my assistant and I,
and it's just become a big thing.
So so people can.
How can people find out aboutFacebook?
The links are posted on myFacebook, on my Facebook page,
(01:12:08):
and I have a page that's likeCecilia Wallach author, but it's
kind of neglected.
Everything's on my personalpage and so, like I have a.
There's a reading coming up onSunday with two fabulous poets
Laurie Badikian, who's anArmenian American poet, child of
the diaspora, and Lee Herrick,who's the California Poet
(01:12:32):
Laureate.
His work is wonderful.
He was adopted from Korea as a10-month-old, like abandoned.
There's no knowledge of who hisbirth parents were and he
writes about that justexquisitely.
So they'll be reading on Sundayon Zoom and I host a reading
(01:12:54):
like this every month on thelast Sunday of the month and I
also put out a newsletter once amonth and the newsletter gets
posted on Facebook.
So if you go on my Facebookpage, you'll see that the July
newsletter has just been postedand you can click on it and read
it and subscribe and get thenewsletter and then you'll get
(01:13:17):
news of like workshops I'm doingLike this summer I did the
workshop in Paris and I didsomething in Nice.
So the workshops and readingsand things like that, oh, that's
great and I hope I'll have.
I mean, I have a couple of newpoetry manuscripts, one that's
ready, although you know,nowadays you keep fussing with
it, I keep fussing with it.
(01:13:38):
But you know, I hope to have anew book of poems out in the
next year or two, at least one,maybe more than one, which would
be great.
And then I'll do readings andstuff like that.
I love doing live readings andperformances and collaborative
performances.
It's just it's gotten a littlebit harder to find venues and
(01:14:05):
that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (01:14:06):
Yeah, yeah, that's so good to know.
I am not exactly sure when thisepisode is coming out, but I
love that you have thatnewsletter so people can find
you, you know, whenever thisreaches them.
Yeah, if you find me onfacebook, then you'll see.
Speaker 3 (01:14:21):
You know that things get posted there.
My assistant is good aboutmaking sure they're there.
That's a good point of access.
I have a website, but it's likeeverybody's website it's not
kept real up to date.
Speaker 2 (01:14:34):
It's hard.
It's hard to do everything.
Yeah, thank you so much forspeaking with us.
I'm just so so glad that we gotto do this interview again and
have like the perfect place forit to live, so thank you Thanks
yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:14:50):
Wonderful.
Speaker 3 (01:14:51):
Anyway, I hope we can see each other in person one of
these days before.
I hope so too.
Are you traveling at all or youstay put where you are?
Speaker 2 (01:14:59):
I mostly travel nationally.
Speaker 3 (01:15:02):
I haven't really been abroad in a minute, but yeah,
if you're, whenever you're backin the States, let me know where
you are okay, I'm gonna do areading at this festival in
youngstown, ohio, and then I'llbe, you know, on that side of
the country a bit, but not up inplans to be up in new england.
But yeah, keep in touch yes,you too.
So good to see you great to seeyou and let me know when this is
(01:15:24):
shareable and I'll share it inmy newsletter and share it on
Facebook.
Awesome, thank you, all rightBye.
Speaker 1 (01:15:43):
Take good care.
Bye, bye.
Thank you for listening toRomanistan Podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:15:58):
You can find us on Instagram, tiktok and Facebook
at Romanistan Podcast and onTwitter at Romanistan Pod, to
support us.
Join our Patreon for extracontent or just donate to our
Ko-Fi fundraiser, ko-ficombackslash Romanasan, and please
rate, review and subscribe.
It helps people find our show.
It helps us so much.
Speaker 1 (01:16:17):
You can follow Jez on Instagram at jasminavantila and
Paulina at Romani Holistic andpaulina at romani holistic.
You can get our book secrets ofromani fortune telling online
or wherever books are sold.
Visit romanistanpodcastcom forevents, educational resources
and more.
Email us at romanistanpodcastat gmailcom for inquiries.
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