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Following is an interview conducted by Superstition Review s Poetry Editor, Erin Peters.Jaclyn Youhana Garver is a freelance writer in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She writes fiction and poetry, and she has been featured in Narrow Road, Poets Reading the News, and Prometheus Dreaming (forthcoming). Her work has also been chosen by the Wick Poetry Center as a Traveling Stanza selection.A COLLEGE GIRL MAKES WARDROBE DECISIONS BASED ON THE POSSIBILITY OF A RANDOM TSA SCREENING 1964White kid gloves / cinched waist / her perched hat the precise plum match to her two-piece suit / a corsage (seriously, a goddamned corsage)/ a Cherries in the Snow pout / a blushing visage coral or rose / a fur, perhaps, in beaver or lamb. 2004Pajama pants, peppered in cartoons / flip flops with jewels that stud the thongs / pigtails  (seriously, goddamn pigtails)/ a gray T-shirt that boasts, “Journalists do it daily.”Don’t look at me, Terry, standing in line. I know you’ve a quota to meet, so many at randomsearches to complete to assure you don’t permit on the plane any drugs, bombs or hydrogen dioxide.  (Water, Terry, I’m talking about water.)It doesn’t matter, though. You’ll search me nonetheless, just like that agent last time and the agent who’ll be next.And anyways, I’ll stick with PJs and pigtails, my sandwich board to shout I’m threatening like sidewalk chalk, an eagle scout, freckles, and winks, but apparently, the extra melanin in my skin, a gift from my father, means you must pull mefrom the line, away from my friends—none of whom youalso select at random, I see, goddamn it, Terry—so you run the backs of your Caucasian hands along my Persian arms, my cartooned inseam, my Assyrian torso. Then you make me move my Iranian pigtails from my Middle Eastern shoulders. You look so bored, Terry, and I wonder if you notice: We’re quite the chatty portrait of our country tis of thee.The setting of your poem is very specific and relatable for people who have travelled in American airports. What inspired you to write about the experience of a TSA screening?This summer, I found a photo of myself at an airport in 2004, with two college friends, on the way to a Society of Professional Journalists conference in NYC. For the three or so years after 9/11, I began to be “randomly” searched on every flight I boarded. Seriously. Every flight. I thought it would help if I dressed in an unintimidating way. I remember I did this each time I flew, but it was wild to see photographic proof, especially compared to two other young adults who were dressed in, you know, normal airplane-appropriate clothing. Finding the photo, seeing how 21-year-old me felt like she had to dress, seriously pissed me off.You’ve spent an impressive amount of time working for daily newspapers during your professional career. How do you feel this writing experience impacted you creatively?I can’t even imagine writing creatively without my journalism experience. Writing for a daily newspaper made me completely deadline-focused. If a journalist doesn’t finish her story on time, there could an actual hole in the newspaper. Plus, the piece needs to be done well and accurately, often in hours or less—journalists don’t have days and days to perfect a piece of writing.I adore the saying Done is better than perfect. Writers, especially creative writers, can get stuck in this I can’t show this to anyone because it’s not perfect hole. Then nothing ever gets finished. Writing for a daily newspaper was a wonderful way to keep from being too precious about my words. What I write matters, and it’s important to me, but once I turn in a story, it’s on to the next thing.Writing for daily publication also gave me tough skin. I adore editor feedback and love seeing how subsequent drafts improve. Similarly, I also trust my gut. Writing is a wonderful mixture of both subjectivity and objectivity, even in poetry. My newspaper experience gave me an almost scientific approach to being creative.What audience do you hope to reach through your poetry? Why is this audience meaningful to you?As a reader, the best feeling is “Oh my goodness, you too? I thought I was the only one.” As a writer, then, that’s who I want to reach—anyone who has felt like me, to help them feel less alone. Strangely, the opposite is true, too: It’s such a rush to be told “I never thought of it in that way before.”Those audiences are meaningful to me because it means we have a shared experience. Especially in 2020, feeling a connection—to anyone, even some writer you’ve never met—is vital.The pandemic hasn’t impacted my creative process so much as it’s impacted my creative output. I’ve written poetry since I was about 12 and I had a writing minor in college, so writing creatively has always been a part of my life. However, the pandemic made me itch to do more. I answered that by enrolling in a poetry class. The instructor helped me figure out what was missing from my poetry unlike any writing teacher I’ve had before. After the class, I asked where she was teaching next, and I signed up for that class, too. She helped me see where and how my work could be improved, which simultaneously showed me how to edit my own work.This year has been hard, and there are a few things I can point to and say “That, specifically, made things a little easier.” Writing poetry is one of those things.In college, a journalism professor taught us to let the other person have the last say. When someone reaches out to a reporter to complain about something they wrote, the caller or emailer doesn’t actually care what the writer has to say about it. They just want to be heard (and maybe to be nasty). That knowledge, that someone who has something mean to say isn’t looking for a response, is incredibly freeing.I have a number of manuscripts in the works, but two are currently taking up the most of my time—a poetry book and a women’s fiction novel, which I will be pitching to agents early next year. I also write horror short stories. I love bouncing between genres and working on projects of varying lengths.Join Superstition Review in congratulating past contributor Patricia Ann McNair on her forthcoming book Responsible Adults by Cornerstone Press, which will be released on December 4th. The book was selected for Cornerstone Press Legacy Series and takes a look at the Midwestern human experience and makes the reader wonder  What happens when responsible adults are anything but responsible people? When they are at best, irresponsible, and at worst, dangerous? With startling honesty, precise observation, and a deep faith in the beauty of language, Patricia Ann McNair creates a world where the so-called adults in the room abandon, lie, cheat, steal. They’re familiar, these faults, you think as McNair traces the delicate cracks and gaping chasms of the human condition, her gaze unflinching, unnerving, watching as opposing forces collide, unleash catastrophe. Especially then. Who, she seems to ask, is left behind and why turn away? In this remarkable collection, McNair hits her writerly stride with a sureness that is nothing less than breathtaking. Christine Rice, author ofSwarm TheoryJoin Superstition Review in congratulating past contributor, Darrin Doyle, on his upcoming release. Darrin will be releasing a new short story collection called The Big Baby Crime Spree and Other Delusions. It is part of Wolfson Press’s American Storyteller’s series and it’s scheduled to release in March 2021. Darrin Doyle teaches at Central Michigan University. The Big Baby Crime Spree and Other Delusions is his fifth book of fiction. He’s the author of the story collections Scoundrels Among Us and The Dark Will End the Dark (Tortoise Books) and the novels The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo (St. Martin’s Press) and Revenge of the Teacher s Pet:A Love Story (LSU Press). He lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan with three other humans and a cat. “The stories in Darrin Doyle’s new collection are full of rich, complicated characters and unique, unusual situations. The dark humor and pathos in these highly imaginative stories reminded me of the brilliant films of David Lynch. If Lynch wrote short fiction, it would doubtless lurk in the same neighborhood as Darrin Doyle’s.” Christine Sneed, author of The Virginity of Famous Men and Little Known FactsFollowing is an interview conducted by Superstition Review s Poetry Editor, Erin Peters.Paul Chuks is an emerging Nigerian poet, writer and song writer, studying philosophy at the University of Benin, Edo state, Nigeria. He has appeared or is forthcoming in StreetCake Magazine, Kalahari Review, Neurological Magazine, Afritondo, The Remnant Archive and was recently shortlisted for The 49th Street s top ten poets in Nigeria. When Paul is not reading or writing songs, he s critiquing the hiphop game or mimicking Michael Jackson.To the Man Standing at the corner lifting the placard that said All Lives Matter as a protest against Black Lives Matter.But in this one, you are standing in a corner watching black lives evanesce like lights beholding a murky sky.My ancestors tears are the ghosts of this poem/appearing as metaphors/telling you to drop that placard, go home shut your mouth like Trump s border[s]/because you are slow-dancing with the injustice of their history.This poem is a scar tissue/like the body of a slave/telling the world/that blacks wouldn t clamour for their lives to matter if there was fairness/as the world wouldn t know dryness if there were no tongues.What motivated you to write your poem as a direct address? What impact do you hope this form will have on your audience?I wrote the poem as a direct address, because many have allowed themselves to elude the important message of the movement, that is: take black lives seriously as you take others. When George Floyd s sad situation happened, the BLM movement kicked off to an almost untamable situation, many on the internet, sewed threads that ran counter to the BLM movement, with the prevalent theme: ALL LIVES MATTER. It irked me because they have not recognized that ALL LIVES MATTER remains a superstition, if a black boy can be shot at, because he reached into his car for his hair-brush, but the officer mistook it for a gun. And the jury acquits the officer on account that he tried to clamp down a druggie. ALL LIVES MATTER is a remark of the ignorant, or the devil, who enjoys the maltreatment of black people.I think my biggest inspiration to write about the BLM movement, is the fact that I m black. I have an ambition of taking a Masters course in America. The moment I get there, I ll wear the profile of a black boy. I also write about them, because I can feel perceive their pain. The Injustice makes all of us bleed from sealed places.What audience do you hope to reach through your poetry? Why is this audience meaningful to you?My poetry is intended to be variegated with everything possible to make a subject of, so i want the whole world to listen to me, while i play the game of painting pictures with words inkling of my feeling(s). B: the audience is meaningful because without them, my tag as a poet is a facade. My pets can t read, neither can the birds that perch on the trees behind my house.The pandemic has not affected my creative process, so far. Rather, my academic life. It has cancelled an academic year, pushing my future farther..all in this transient life.My best advice as a writer was gotten from another awesome writer I admire: Nome Patrick. He said: Paul, read more than you write. It was an interesting discussion on the essence of reading and the miracle it does to one s repertoire. It has worked so far.Join Superstition Review in celebrating the release of past contributor, Muriel Nelson s forthcoming chapbook! It is called Please Hold and won the Encircle Publications prize and will come out in April. “Hold Sway,”a poem published in Superstition Review, will be in the chapbook. Please Hold is a pandemic collection, or more accurately a collection with Covid as its underlying condition. Stay tuned for updates concerning the chapbook from Encircle Publications. Muriel Nelson has two collections of poems:Part Song, winner of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Book Prize (Bear Star Press), andMost Wanted, winner of the ByLine Chapbook Award (ByLine Press). Nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared inThe New Republic,Ploughshares,Beloit Poetry Journal,The Massachusetts Review,Northwest Review, and several anthologies, and on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. She holds master s degrees from the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers and the University of Illinois School of Music and lives near Seattle, Washington.Join the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing in their annual Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writing Conference! Here is their message about the event: With COVID cases rising across the country, we re moving this year s conference from our house to yours.The Desert Nights, Rising Stars Virtual Writers Conference is February 18 20, 2021 on Zoom. Advance your craft, meet other writers, and produce new work with your choice ofover 60 sessionsin fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, memoir, fantasy, romance, science fiction, screenwriting, publishing, and more. Writers of all experience levels and backgrounds are welcome.Advanced workshopsandpitch sessionswith agents and editors are available, too. This year s keynotes are Linda Hogan and Beverly Jenkins. Otherfacultyinclude Mahogany L. Browne, Matt Bell, Alan Dean Foster, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Cynthia Pelayo, Evan Winter, and Erika T. Wurth. Early registration isonly $225 before December 31. Meet our faculty, view the schedule, and learn more today here. To learn more about the Virgina G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, click here. Join Superstition Review in congratulating past contributor, Dmitry Borshch, on some exciting news! Since being featured in Superstition Review Issue 12 in 2013, Dmitry has had some amazing art exhibitions in his home state of New York. Here are just a few:Disasters of War in East Ukraine, an exhibition about the continuing war in Donbass. Check out full details of this exhibition on Actipedia. When I mentioned to a friend employed by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in New York that I am preparing a series on the war in East Ukraine, which involves traveling there, he encouraged me and even gave the number of two employees of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. One of them, a monitor with its Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, provided me with valuable security information as I traveled to Donetsk, Poltava, Kiev, Mariupol, and other places from Dnepropetrovsk, my place of birth. There in 2015 I began to research Disasters through interviews with переселенцы , persons resettled from ATO, the zone of Ukrainian government’s anti-terrorist operation' , Borshch explains, adding I wanted the series, whose title obviously refers to Goya’s Los desastres de la Guerra , to be first exhibited in cities afflicted by the war. Turkish past, Ottoman present and Spengler in Turkey. Check out full details of this exhibition on Actipeida. Two weeks after Erdoğan ascended to the presidency Borshch organized an exhibition in Istanbul, Turkey s New Sultan , for which, the artist explains, [he] had to revive the Soviet practice of apartment exhibitions. No gallery in Turkey that we contacted would agree to mount it, fearful of being prosecuted on charges of insulting Turkishness – Article 301, Turkish Penal Code. So, as in eighty-nine when I and other nonconformists mounted exhibitions in Dnepropetrovsk apartments because galleries could only exhibit Soviet (meaning Socialist Realist) works, the curator of this exhibition found an apartment in south Istanbul where we showed fifteen drawings on the prime ministership of Erdoğan and invited sympathetic locals to visit; about seventy visited during the exhibition s almost three weeks, many of them artists. Turkish past, Ottoman present is an outgrowth of Turkey s New Sultan . All fifteen collages in it depict Erdoğan and members of his sultanic, neo-ottoman court, such as Binali Yıldırım, Ahmet Davutoğlu, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu. Denial of Family Values, Gay and Anti-gay Propaganda in Russia. Check out full details of this exhibition on Actipedia. This exhibition was created in America but premiered in Russia a year after the passage of what many know as gay propaganda law , the bill unanimously approved by the State Duma (with one abstention) and signed into law by President Putin in June, 2013. We contacted five galleries and several cultural centers, not just in Moscow, but none of them agreed to mount our exhibition because of the new law and broad anti-gay, anti-trans sentiment in the country. As thirty years ago in Dnepropetrovsk when I organized apartment exhibitions because only Socialist Realist art could be officially exhibited, we rented a three-bedroom apartment on Moscow s Budyonny Prospekt, mounted the exhibition, and invited only those who were sympathetic to or could tolerate our views on gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans rights, would not report us to the police who could impose a fine for an unsanctioned exhibition or – this has happened with some exhibitions in Russia deemed offensive to religious or national feelings – damage the pictures, explains Borshch, adding, There was another apartment exhibition in Moscow, on Tverskaya Street, followed by one more in Saint Petersburg’s Kalininsky District, both lasting a month in early 2016 . Figurative drawings like The Making of Brothers are displayed in our exhibition alongside excerpts from speeches on homosexuality and its evils by Russian public figures, which are rendered calligraphically on white, yellow, and pink sheets. This was the first of two apartment exhibitions mounted by the artist in 2014. Less than three months after it, reacting to the presidential campaign victory of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Borshch had the other apartment exhibition in Istanbul. As some nonconformists did in the Soviet Union, he continues to employ this tactic of apartment exhibitions in Putin s Russia, Erdoğan s Turkey, and elsewhere, writes Dr. Khidekel in the introduction to Denial of Family Values, Gay and Anti-gay Propaganda in Russia , which she curated. It is happening on the sixth anniversary of anti-gay legislation s passage, and during the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Pride Month in America. Having read one of many Soviet children s editions of the book as a child and later becoming impressed by its global success, I have never attempted to illustrate it traditionally, in the manner of Hammatt Billings, its first illustrator, and those who followed him, says Dmitry. In this exhibition I illustrate the handling of the book by Russian censors, editors, preface and afterword writers, publishers. Although it was published in Russia about three years before statutory abolition of serfdom, and already then manipulated for the Russian government s benefit, I focus in the exhibition on Soviet manipulations of the classic, performed by those who were living in Soviet bondage upon a novel about bondage in America. Excerpts from their prefaces to the book, afterwords, and translations are rendered calligraphically: Stowe s English and translators Russian passages are organized into parallel columns on the same pink sheets, which helps the viewer to notice politicized manipulations of the translators and their censor-editors. All these pictures were made recently but are informed by thirty-five-year-old memories: like you [the exhibition s curator] I still remember the late Soviet treatment of this novel, when it was employed widely for anti-capitalist, anti-American propaganda, extolment of USSR as the righteous opposite of USA, advancement of Soviet hegemonic goals, concludes the artist. The Second October Revolution, about 1993 constitutional crisis in Russia. Check out full details of this exhibition on ArtRabbit. 25 years ago, while staying with relatives in Moscow, I observed what was a genuine possibility of restoration of the Soviet Union, meaning the imposition of Soviet rule and governance on all the former republics of USSR. I heard megaphone speeches by parliamentarians at their White House, promising exactly this and lamenting the Union s dissolution. That was on September 26; on October 4 I was able to hear from New Arbat (then Kalinin Prospekt) tanks shelling the parliament building. My show is a dramatization of that and other actions ordered by Boris Yeltsin which effectively ended attempts to restore the Union. Blackened stories of the White House I saw on October 8, a week before leaving Moscow, announced this end, says Borshch.When I thought about writing this I was stumped for an opening. What catchy first line speaks to being a writer in these socially traumatic times? Then it came to me. Thank you. Thank you for all the work I know you must have done, all the work I know you must be doing. Thank you for caring about the world even when that caring takes away from the time you have to write the novel, finish the poem or invent a new form we haven’t seen yet. Thank you for even thinking about doing something – that’s actually an active step in socially responsible responses. Thanks for helping where you can, at a foodbank, in a volunteer program, on a political campaign. Or on six political campaigns.I live in Pennsylvania, where there are always at least six political campaigns that could use my help, my money, my time and my gasoline. I’m nearly 71 so I’m not able to do all the things my younger political friends and allies can, but the one good thing about a state as mucked up as Pennsylvania is today is that there is always a job to do that will fit your skills and energy. So, although there are countless ways you can respond to the social disfunction we call modern American, I want to talk a bit here about political activity.Full disclosure: I did not come to politics naturally. The hot ticket items of the 70’s and 80’s involved me, the Vietnam War, Nuclear Power Plants, but I was not active in social movements like aiding AIDS victims. I’ve marched on Washington a few times, but I have not marched to end genocide or to change voter laws. I kept many issues at the periphery of my attention and I hoped that someone was addressing those issues. I was a poet. I made art. And art matters. I volunteered in the art field, teaching in schools and running a free writing workshop in my living room for fifteen years. But I was not a political operative.Then came Trump. When I got past the flattening shock of the elections results, I realized that Pennsylvania put him over the line. The Republicans who crafted his campaign had been smart and sneaky. It was new to me, the way they got him elected. I knew they were able to do it in part because I had been asleep at the wheel. Politics, I’d thought, was not my domain. I was a good enough person doing lots of good things. Other good people were taking care of this political stuff. I thought they did not need me.So that’s me. If you’re a conservative, you can still listen to (or read) this. Just substitute your values for mine, and consider what writers are called to do when a political crisis of this magnitude overtakes their country and their generation. I will set down a few things I had to do in the past election season, and in my ongoing involvement in politics. Other writers will probably need to do them too.I had to get educated about my local situation, and meet the local people responding to it. Here’s where I got lucky. A University of Pittsburgh professor, Marie Norman, responded to the 2016 election by forming a Facebook group to organize political action. She called it Order of the Phoenix (yup) and as soon as I caught wind of it, I joined. I was not alone.The group attracted a lot of people who were appalled not only by Trump as a man, but by the policies we knew his election would enable. When Trump said he would have all the “best people” running things Stephen Miller and Betsy De Vos showed up.I read a critical book that described in excruciating detail the Red Mapping that had damaged the fairness of state and federal districts in my state. “Ratf**ked” by David Daley, tells the story of the gerrymandering of America, state by painful state. Daley’s facts motivated me to get involved with elections and with a group that fights gerrymandering. In Pennsylvania, legal activists took the Republican controlled State Senate to court when they drew highly gerrymandered districts that violated legal constraints. The State Supreme Court ruled that they had to re-draw the maps using parameters that resulted in fairer representation for Pennsylvania’s citizens. I could explain all this, but just read Daley’s book – especially if you live in Arizona, or Wisconsin, or Florida, or Ohio, or Michigan. Or anywhere really, just read it.That led me into working on the 2018 election where we did well in southwestern PA. Republican control of our State legislature was impacted by the election of many Democrats. It’s great when things go that way. But there was no time to bask in that success.When 2019 came around, I asked, “there’s a 2019 election?” Yes, Deborah. There’s an election every year – not just when Senate and House seats are up for grabs. That year we worked to elect a better District Attorney for Allegheny County. We had a great candidate, but we lost. I look forward to helping her win next time. For me this was another lesson: if you want social change you have to think long-term while you work as if this is your only chance. You must persist in the face of defeat.Then there was this year – and you no doubt know that Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes put Biden over the top. You might not know how big a part Allegheny County played in that. We made a difference, maybe even the difference. In Allegheny County the group that may have had the biggest effect is Order of the Phoenix. And when the race was called for President-Elect Biden, we all got to feel something we cannot expect to feel again soon.So that brings us to now. What does this history have to do with you, with writers in the age of Social Unrest? Well, here are a few thoughts:Social unrest means there’s something very wrong. Contented citizens do not spend their time hollering. So whichever side of our current divide you’re on, there is a place for you to work, and work you should. That does not mean you can’t write poems, essays and novels as well. There is no “one size fits all” in responding to current events. The many things that happen in our personal lives matter. Family and friends still matter. Music matters. Art matters. Gardening matters. Having fun matters. Laughing matters. Being lazy matters. Looking at clouds matters. But there should be some time and energy that you put into bettering this world at every stage of your life. When I was between trying to stop Nuclear Proliferation and trying to stop Trumpism, I was raising kids, sustaining my community, being a lover, a wife, a writer, a teacher and you will be (or are) those things too. Those were worthy pursuits, but I regret not keeping my eye on the way things were going nationally. I regret that my serious political involvement came so late. I regret that we were on the way to this place for such a long time while I was ignorant. This will be a lifelong regret. Mea culpa.So we can work. We can educate ourselves in lots of areas, not just in the literary world. We should learn about our states, our towns, our cities, our neighborhoods. Who is feeding your homeless? How are school funds disbursed? None of us can work on every problem but we can keep swinging our eyes around the landscape to keep it all in mind. We can choose something to learn a lot about. I have a political ally who studies how elections are conducted. She knows the safety records behind various kinds of balloting. She knows who makes voting machines and how the contracts to do that are awarded. She knows what local governing bodies have the final say on issues related to voting. I didn’t even know we had a County Council here who makes these decisions. When I need to know about election issues, I contact Julie. I’m re-visiting everything I can find about gerrymandering – the laws and practices, the US Supreme Court cases. I hope to be a useful resource about that when I’m done. But my other specialty is being a good foot soldier. I take orders well these. When we need to get yard signs distributed, when thousands of postcards need to go in the mail to get voters to the polls, when we need to recruit other workers, I’m a good person to contact. There is always a critical issue here, and there are always great people to work with – folks who keep me at it, or let me off the hook when I need time off, because we all have lives, need rest, and all that other good stuff. But – for a start – we can get educated about how things work where we live.I had to admit that the things I do, and the things I don t do matter. That’s not complicated, but it’s easy to forget. Take a look at climate issues, the economy, the educational system, the healthcare system, voting rights, energy production, food distribution, and especially racial inequity which will be a part of the story in each of the preceding areas.Find your tribe, your people, your interests, and once you do, stay loyal. These are the people who will sustain you all your life. It may be something as personal as reminding you to keep sending out your work, or as big as reminding you to care about the generations who will need this planet when we are long gone. This is what is currently called “selfcare” – a phrase I find chilly and antiseptic, but then I’m an old lady.And that’s it from me. Thanks for reading this. I’d love to hear from those of you engaged in political work, big issue work, little issue work, any of it. I don’t go to writers’ conventions anymore, but I sometimes imagine a session where there is no panel, no major writer. Regular writers just come in and write briefly about the work for the world they are doing. Then those descriptions, those pieces of paper, are pinned to a very big wall so we can see how effective we can be. This is the age for the fully engaged citizen and the fully engaged writer. Meet you on the ramparts.In late autumn of 1972, when I was twenty-two-years-old, I visited Mozarts Geburtshaus (Mozart’s Birth House), in Salzburg, Austria. I was one of only a handful of pilgrims climbing the narrow stairs to the cramped, former living quarters. Looking into a display case containing some of Mozart’s personal effects, I became transfixed by a lock of the composer’s hair. I recalled a familiar passage from Michael Kelly’s Reminiscences: “[Mozart] was a remarkably small man, very thin and pale, with a profusion of fine fair hair, of which he was rather vain.” And there it was: a lock of that same “fine fair hair”—exactly as described by one of Mozart’s personal friends. I was in a dream-like state, until a tall, uniformed man, in his late-sixties or early-seventies, tapped my shoulder and motioned for me to follow him. I didn’t think I had done anything wrong—so I followed without complaint, and was led to a small, eighteenth-century clavichord. The curator’s stern face suddenly gave way to a benevolent smile, as he pulled back a plexiglass covering from the clavichord’s keyboard: granting me permission to play. A placard identified the instrument as the one used by Mozart while composing his opera The Magic Flute. I was a tubist; not a pianist. But thanks to a former college piano proficiency class, I was able to plunk out the opening measures from Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11. My fingers were touching the very keys Mozart touched.It’s not my intention to present the above memory as a travel-log boast—or a “Bucket List” notch (the Bucket List craze was not around in 1972; and at my current stage of life, I consider that practice an empty pursuit, and more than a little macabre). Mozart was—and remains to this day—my absolute favorite composer. My experience in Salzburg freed the composer from his plaster-of-Paris bust and helped me to see him as a fellow human being, with whom I could have shared bread and wine and enjoyable conversation. And for reasons I can’t explain, my newfound “long-distance” friendship enhanced my awe of the inscrutable genius of this “remarkably small” man’s remarkably profound music.Around 1980, my professional music career was cut short by a non-life-threatening condition called “Embouchure Dystonia.”A few years later, I was able to lose my self-pity,and turn my creative energies to writing short stories. Good friend that he is, Mozart stuck around; and his music has continued to be a balm for my soul, and an influence on my writing. Which brings me to the Mozartean. For most of my years writing short stories, I have considered the Mozarteana touchstone. My use of the term refers not to musicological analysis, but rather the emotional and spiritual elements Mozart’s music lends to deep expressions of the human condition. The fact is, I’ma bit rusty on my music theory. And even if I were able to outline an analysis of, say, the finale movement of the “Jupiter Symphony,” it wouldn’t explain the workings of Mozart’s imagination. Genius and the imagination cannot be deconstructed,distilled, or tacked upon a Periodic Table. The best we can do is attempt informed and thoughtful descriptions of the mystery. In 1956 (the bi-centennial of Mozart’s birth),theologian Karl Barth wrote: “What occurs in Mozart is rather a glorious upsetting of balance, a turning in which the light rises and the shadows fall, though without disappearing . . .”That same year Frank O’Connor (a patron saint of the Mozartean short story) describes the Mozartean way of seeing things as “half way betweentragedy and comedy, [representing] a human norm.”Cross-pollination in the arts is nothing new. Ernest Hemingway, on more than one occasion, said that he wanted to write the way Cézanne painted. In a 1958 interview for the Paris Review, Hemingway was asked to name his “literary forebears.” He responded with a long list of great writers, painters, and two composers: Bach and Mozart. He said: “I should think what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious.”The actual study of harmony and counterpoint would be a stretch for most people these days (or even in 1958). There are, of course, less severe approaches for the layperson. One approach would be to find Leonard Bernstein’s Young Person’s Concerts on YouTube. These incredible concert/lectures were broadcast on CBS (network television!), from 1958 to 1972.A certain amount of spadework is necessary for all levels of art appreciation. We become better readers if we are able to see, hear and explain the differences between free verse and a Shakespearian sonnet. We become better listeners if we are able to hear and explain the differences between a Gregorian Chant and a Bach Cantata. Great art does not reveal its deepest treasures to a passive audience. It won’t happen by osmosis or pharmaceuticals.But at the risk of sounding contradictory, I think it would be perfectly reasonable to begin the Mozartean quest simply by listening to some of Mozart’s compositions. I highly recommend beginning with two very short pieces: The Clarinet Concerto, and Ave Verum Corpus. Both of these pieces were written in the last year of Mozart’s short life; and both are exemplary of music in which the light rises and the shadows fall, though without disappearing.Following is an interview conducted by Superstition Review s Poetry Editor, Erin Peters. Usha Kishore is an Indian born British poet, and translator, resident on the Isle of Man, UK. Usha is currently a Research Scholar in Postcolonial Poetry at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland. She has been anthologised by Macmillan, Hodder Wayland, Oxford University Press and Harper Collins among others. Her work has appeared in international journals like Asia Literary Review, Index on Censorship, Indian Literature, Pirene’s Fountain, Poetry Salzburg Review, South Asian Ensemble, South Asian Review, The Stinging Fly and The Warwick Review.Usha s poetry has won prizes in UK competitions, is part of international projects and features in the British Primary and Secondary syllabi and Indian Middle School and Undergraduate syllabi. Winner of an Isle of Man Arts Council Award and two Culture Vannin Awards, she is the author of three poetry collections and a book of translation from the Sanskrit. Her latest collection, Immigrant was published in 2018 by Eyewear Publishing London.cross stitch, chain stitch, smyrna, herringbone; In a previous exchange, you had mentioned that this piece is particularly close to your heart. Could you speak more to that statement?‘Drug Mule’ is based on drug trafficking and the use of women as drug carriers. The poem is close to my heart as I am committed to gender equality and I feel that the vulnerability of women is being exploited. According to BBC statistics (2005), 18% of the UK’s female prison population are foreigners and are imprisoned for drug related offences. It is also a painful fact that older South Asian women are being used as drug mules. It makes you wonder if these women are criminals or victims.Many of my poems are themed on social justice, especially on race and gender equality. As a member of an ethnic minority community in the UK, I am very much aware of differences and my poems highlight the need for more integration. My third collection, Immigrant (Eyewear Publishing, London, 2018) highlights the politics of being an immigrant professional interacting with discrimination and reflects on the binary perspectives of assimilation and marginalisation.My second collection, Night Sky Between the Stars (Cyberwit India, 2015) reflects my pre-occupation with Indian womanhood and articulates concerns of a marginalised gendered identity. The poems in this collection draw heavily from Indian myth, rendering voices to female mythical characters and projects Indian womanhood in a different light.You have written three books of poetry as well as a book of translation from Sanskrit. How has your work in translation influenced your more personal writing projects?My translations from the Sanskrit certainly influence my poetry in the form of thematic concerns and uniquely Sanskrit literary devices such as vyatireka (comparative excellence), dṛṣṭānta (a figurative device that can be described as ‘simile-like’ or parallel) and vakrokti (creative twist).I am an English teacher in a secondary school on the Isle of Man, where thankfully, the effect of the pandemic has not been that severe. So, the schools are open and functioning (we were only briefly shut in Spring. We re-opened in Summer). I usually have to find time to write, amidst a busy schedule. I am currently a PhD scholar in Postcolonial Poetry with Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland. So, in the last two years, my writing has been put on the back burner.The global pandemic has brought a creative surge, especially in poetry, signifying that the human spirit rises above global challenges. At this difficult time, a considerable number of poetry anthologies, themed issues of journals and discussions on poetry have all come to the forefront. Poetry is a healer!Some editor friends have been keeping my work alive by soliciting submissions and giving me opportunities to participate in poetry webinars. Coincidentally, a friend of mine alerted me to your call for submissions on Social Justice. My writing has certainly picked up again.It was a real struggle to get my first collection into print, despite being published internationally. I was about to quit. The above advice, ‘it’s not over yet,’ was given to me by the founder-member of the Isle of Man Poetry Society, the late Jeff Garland. Soon after this conversation with Jeff, I received Arts Council and Culture Vannin grants and my first collection, On Manannan’s Isle was published on island in 2014. I have not looked back hence.However Translation wise, I have completed the translation of the Sanskrit epyllion, Ṛtusaṃhāram by the legendary Kalidasa. I am seeking a publisher for this project.I am also translating Jaisankar Prasad’s Hindi epic, Kamayani (1936) that falls under the Chhayavaadi school of Hindi Poetry. Chhayavaad has been interpreted as Neo-Romanticism, I would call it Romantic mysticism. Kamayani addresses human emotions in pathetic fallacy, personification, and mythological metaphors. This has been a slow process as I would like to do justice to this epic, amidst time constraints. I have found this translation extremely challenging, but highly inspiring and enlightening.The poetry goes on! I don’t think I am ready for another collection yet. But recently, I have started submitting to journals like Superstition Review! Thank you very much for accepting my work for your blog on social justice.

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