Fairfielder, MSAE English teacher, and outstanding poet, Tom Kepler, will read and discuss his soon-to-be book, Bare Ruined Choirs, with host Rustin Larson on the next installment of Irving Toast, Poetry Ghost.

Tom says of his interview (from his blog): "It was a fun and interesting experience. For most of my life I have been a writer, but it has been many years since I have conversed with writers about writing. I found myself articulating concepts that I believe but have never explicitly expressed.

In many ways, the interview was similar to writing this blog. It gave me the opportunity to think about what I write and why I write.

For myself, it was most interesting to discuss the relationship between autobiographical writing and art. I found myself discussing the idea that real art extends beyond the historical self and reaches for the transcendental--our "total" selves, one might say. This is where artbegins, when the artist leaves behind the point value self and focuses on the unbounded self--seeing the spiritual within the physical, seeing the soul beyond the mind.

This discussion connects to what I call consciousness-based writing, writing that inspires the reader to seek the transcendental basis of reality, writing that celebrates the spiritual.
It was fun to read some of the poems from Bare Ruined Choirs aloud. This is also something I have done only rarely. To hear the poems out loud--even if I was the one doing the reading--was to reawaken the experience of writing the poems. Sound--the vibrational value of language--is so integral to meaning.

Rustin is a good poet and an insightful interviewer. He is our local lion of literature. I recommend his books and his radio show. Some links are listed below.

The Wine-Dark House, by Rustin Larson

KRUU, 100.1 FM (See Archives for past shows of Irving Toast, Poetry Ghost)

Rustin Larson is also on Facebook."

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announcement: READING AT MUM LIBRARY

Heather Derr-Smith, who earlier made an appearance on Irving Toast, will be reading at the MUM Library, north lounge, on Tuesday, December 1st at 8:00 pm. This will be Heather's last state-side reading before her trip to Bosnia.

Heather Derr-Smith will be reading from The Bride Minaret and Each End of the Worldas well as from her latest work, in four cities in Bosnia in thefollowing venues: International University of Sarajevo, SarajevoInstitute of Science and Technology, BuyBook, CornerBook, the BritishCouncil, University of Travnik, University of Zenica, and University ofTuzla, December 3-9th. Check back in for full schedule dates and times!The Readings and Workshops are funded by the Iowa Arts Council, TheNational Endowment for the Arts, and a grant from Iowa State University.

The Bride Minaret is a book of emotional, literary, and cultural substance. As Mandelson wrote of Auden: the poems bear witness to the closeconnection between intelligence and love. The same can be said ofDerr-Smith, whose work is global, with settings in Iraq, BritishColumbia, Algiers, Paris, Sarajevo, Cairo, the West Bank, and variousU.S. locations. Her poems are intercultural, expansive while stillgrounded in the evocative complexities of motherhood, childhood, andfaith. The Bride Minaret is a wonderfully intense collection.
--Denise Duhamel

In the Bride Minaret, Heather Derr-Smith explores the complex anddifficult realities of our gloabl world more comprehensively andcomprehendingly than most American poets consider even attempting.Often paying close attention to those displaced and/or disconnectedfrom the society around them--Arabs in Europe, Americans in the MiddleEast, Mennonites in Iowa, Balkan refugees, Roma orphans, Palestinians,and at the heart of the book, a mother now dislocated from her former,childless self-- these poems ultimately argue that dislocation isitself a kind of location, just as living forever in one place can endup dislocating oneself from the realities of our time.
--Wayne Miller