Poet’s latest book captures stories of the Holocaust, is a tribute to the living and the dead.
by Nita Sweeney, author of the running and mental health memoir, Depression Hates a Moving Target: How Running with My Dog Brought Me Back from the Brink and co-creator of You Should Be Writing: A Journal of Inspiration & Instruction to Keep Your Pen Moving
Nita Sweeney (NS): Before we dive into questions specific to writing, tell our members, with the world beginning to open ever-so-slightly, but still somewhat suspended, how are you taking care of yourself?
(GN): I divide my time between San Francisco and Sebastopol, and now that it’s spring I’m mostly in Sebastopol—gardening, cooking, reading, writing. The garden is blooming, the flowers raising their heads, opening buds, beaming with self-adoration. I’m with my husband, and our son is with us, so I am not alone. I don’t need a multitude, and solitude has always been my companion, but it feels wonderful to get together with friends again, unmasked, with some sense of renewed freedom.
NS: What led you to the writing life?
Gail Newman (GN): Before I was a writer, I was a reader. When I was a child, my mother often took me to the library. My ambition was to read through the shelves alphabetically. I found the world—adventure, friendship, travel, excitement—between the pages. I wanted to be a writer like Jo in Little Women, eating apples up in the attic with ink stained fingers. My grandfather was a journalist and although I never knew him, I like to think that writing is in my blood.
NS: Have you always preferred to write poetry? If so, what drew you to it and what keeps you there?
GN: I loved poetry, but I didn’t know I could write it until, in my mid 20’s, I joined a women’s workshop suggested by a friend. This was during the height of the women’s movement, a time when feminist presses began to emerge and publish women’s poetry in anthologies and collections. Once I began to write poetry, I felt a depth of perception and form of expression that absorbed me. Robert Frost said, “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” I think that is an apt description.
NS: Your most recent poetry collection, Blood Memory, “traces the path of Holocaust survivors from Poland to America during and after World War II.” What brought you to write about the Holocaust at this time in your life and at this time in history?
GN: These poems have been in me all my life. I tried to write about the Holocaust and my family when I was younger, but I think I needed more experience as a writer and more distance as a child of survivors.
When my father died, I started writing more poems about him and my mother. I decided then, in a conscious way, to write a book of poems about my parents’ lives.
The book is a narrative that tells a story based on what my parents told me as well as my own experience and research. I think the book is a tribute to the living and the dead, and my own realization of the importance of memory and heritage.
I didn’t know that the book would be released at this particular moment in history when antisemitism and racism-against blacks, Asian, Muslims, immigrants-has come again into our public consciousness.
NS: If there is one key message that you want readers to get from your book, what would it be?
GN: I think of the poem, Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski. People can withstand the most horrific experiences and build meaningful and even joyful lives. We remember the Holocaust to honor the living and the dead. And we remember so that we will be vigilant and compassionate, so that we don’t stand idle when others, of any religion, culture or race, experience bigotry, hatred, or genocide.
We remember the Holocaust in the hope that it will never happen again in any nation, to any people. We want to remember the past, those who died, our heritage and our people. We want to remember so we can live with compassion. We remember so we will not stand as silent witness to others’ suffering.
NS: You were born in Germany, raised in Los Angeles, and have lived many years in the Bay Area. What impact, if any, do these places have on your work?
GN: Though I don’t remember Germany, or the war, my parents’ lives is part of my inherited memory. The title of my book, Blood Memory, refers to what we carry with us from our parent’s past, from the places we came from and the events that brought us to the present.
Los Angeles enters my poems in a kind of reverie of childhood and growing up. Moments flicker into my mind in the form of images, snapshots, and evoke feelings that inspire poems.
The Bay Area had a big impact on my work. It was there that I discovered poetry. I was drawn to City Lights [bookstore] in North Beach. I felt the history of the city, writers’ breath in the air and in the streets.
NS: Writers love to hear how other writers work. What is your process? Is it the same from book to book?
GN: I would say, looking back on my life, that my writing is erratic. I don’t have a set routine. I don’t get up and go to my desk at a specific time. I love to sit by a window, gazing out, drinking coffee, daydreaming. Some nights, when I wake with the lines of a poem in my head, I get up and go to the computer. I don’t have to turn the light on, but type by the Apple’s glow.
When I write I enter a kind of meditative state, but I think it’s just natural to my writing process and doesn’t come from training or conscious effort. I might go back later to make the details more precise. That is the editor stepping in to perfect the craft. I see images in my mind. Some are memories, some imagination. I remember once bemoaning to another writer about my poor memory and she said, “You’re a poet. Make it up.” That gave me a lot of freedom.
NS: Are you ever surprised in the writing process? If so, how and when?
GN: Writing poetry is a process of discovery, so I’m always surprised. I love poems with a turn, when a thought or images pivots into unknown territory or makes a surprising connection. It’s like walking around a corner in an unfamiliar neighborhood.
NS: Tell us about the publishing journey of Blood Memory.
GN: I entered a number of contests, about twenty, sponsored by small press poetry book publishers. Then I began to wait. I expected to wait a long time. I expected rejections. I thought I would continue to submit the following year. One morning I received an email from Marsh Hawk Press asking for a hard copy of my manuscript. Because I was among the finalists, my book would be read by the judge, Marge Piercy. This alone was an honor. I was surprised and thrilled to receive an email a few weeks later saying that I was the first-place winner and that Marge Piercy had chosen my book.
NS: Please share a favorite writing or publishing tip with our WNBA-SF members? Is there one thing you return to again and again, or something you wish you had known or realized much earlier?
GN: Aim high. Try and try again. If your work is rejected, don’t feel rejected. When you submit to publications — journals, magazines, contests — acceptance may be dependent on many factors. Have faith in yourself.
NS: What’s next for you writing-wise?
GN: When I finished Blood Memory, I thought, what will I write about now, without a specific idea? The answer is: everything. Small moments, the most ordinary objects can become the subject of a poem. I’m writing about time, the way it changes, slows down, speeds up, the past coming closer, the present fading away. I may remember a feeling, a sensation, and the memory grows into a poem.
I’m still writing about my parents. So maybe it’s a story that has no end. Some teachers have asked about using the book to teach Holocaust Studies, and since I’m an educator, I could help or become involved in that. I would love to share my book with readers in other countries, especially Eastern Europe, and to use it as a message of hope, resilience, and resistance.
Gail Newman was born after WW II in a displaced persons camp in Lansberg, Germany. The daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, she was raised in a community of Jewish immigrants in Los Angeles where her mother, who recently celebrated her 100th birthday, still lives.
Gail has worked as an educator at the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum, and as a poet-teacher for California Poets in the Schools. Co-founder and editor of Room, a Women’s Literary Journal, Gail also edited Inside Out, a book of poetry lessons for teachers, and two collections of children’s poems, C is for California and Dear Earth.
Her poems have appeared in journals including Canary, Prairie Schooner, Calyx, Nimrod International, The Bellingham Review, and in anthologies including Ghosts of the Holocaust, The Doll Collection, and Fog and Light. A book of poetry, One World, was published by Moon Tide Press.
Blood Memory, chosen by Marge Piercy for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize was published in 2020. Piercy writes:
Writing about the Holocaust can be difficult now, not that it was ever easy….those who know, who went through it, are dying off. Those who deny what happened multiply. To make fresh powerful poems rooted in Shoah is amazing.
For signed copies of Blood Memory, please contact Gail through her website.
Facebook: Gail Newman
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