Ederlezi, the Romani (Gypsy) Spring Festival, is one of my very favorite holidays. It’s celebrated with dancing, eating, singing a hauntingly beautiful folk song, and literally throwing flowers everywhere. Flowers in your house, flowers on your lawn, flowers in the river, flowers in the sea…. How could anyone not love this?
My favorite rendition of the Ederlezi folksong is performed by Tatiana Eva Marie of the Avalon Jazz Band. I was lucky enough to conduct an interview with the very smart and talented Tatiana in Quail Bell Magazine.
Another exciting Quail Bell surprise just in time for the holiday– Rita Banjerjee’s mistranslation poems were just released, including one poem inspired by my lackluster performance of Ederlezi at our last Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Writing & Yoga Retreat in France. Speaking of which, the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop summer retreat deadlines for both Paris and Granada have been extended to May 25th. So Baxtalo Ederlezi! Have a beautiful and fortune-blessed Spring– hope to see you this summer!
I’ve been honored to have three poems about childhood sexual trauma appear in Luna Luna Magazine, a favorite ezine of mine (and sister publication to Quail Bell Magazine). These poems are the first to be published from a series on trauma that I’ve been working on for many years. I’m putting together the manuscript alongside the novel I’m working on about Coco, a half-Romani (Gypsy) dancer and fortune teller at a Parisian circus who becomes a Nazi hunter. Coincidentally, the novel will contain a few poems. I’m so motivated to finish both projects within the next year. A large part of that is due to the warm reception that these poems have gotten– I couldn’t be more grateful or more touched. Many thanks. And a big thank you to Lisa A. Flowers, founder of Vulgar Marsala Press and author of diotomhero, who solicited me. I also got a lot of good advice about writing trauma poetry from Erin Belieu, Florida State University professor and co-founder of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and I so appreciate her help and encouragement. Check out Erin’s latest book Slant Six, and its starred review in Publisher’s Weekly.
Enjoying yoga with magnificent Elissa Joi Lewis. I’m the one, all in black, lounging beside the thousand year old moat. Image Source: Quail Bell Magazine
It’s my badass, literary summer beach-read and it’s so good! The first line: “I have two lobsters in my bathtub and I’m not sure I can kill them.” And it just gets better. To celebrate, I’m wearing mermaid green sparkly Stila eye-shadow and my floppy sun hat from the CWW Yoga & Writing Retreat’s trip to the Clignancourt Flea Market in Paris (which makes me think of ‘Klingon Court,’ a court for Klingons, every time). Y’all gotta read this book. Click on the pic to purchase via Amazon
All hail “The Bammer” and her seraphic entourage of pugs, maker of dreams and angel of satire!
Saint Bamford & pug seraphs
If you remember my post back in December in which I made my first invocation of Saint Maria “The Bammer” Bamford and asked her to grant my manifest destiny magic wish to return to Europe and research my novel some more this summer, then congratulations and thank you, you’re one of 5 or so people who reads this and gives a flying bat shit about what I write here. (5 might even be too optimistic.) If you don’t remember but you’re still reading anyway, thank you too! Miracles do happen.
I’ve been waiting to write this so that I could figure out what I want to say, how can I eloquently thank the All Mighty Bammer for her inspiring and guiding light that has led me to my destiny, but I’ve delayed long enough and I’m not any wittier than before so I’m just going for it. You see, after I posted my tongue-in-cheek shameless begging for someone out there to help me get to Europe, it happened. Last year I wet on a fantastic Yoga & Writing Retreat in Verderonne, France, led by The Cambridge Writers Workshop, and it was art-changing. I learned so much, I wrote so much, I was in France, my novel is set in France, I swam in a moat, I did yoga in a garden on the chateau grounds… it was a good thing. I also spent all my money going there so it was a once-in-a-decade-or-two opportunity. But little did I know that the directors were reading my plaintive wails! They got in touch and were like, “Yo girl, you want to teach Fiction on the next retreat? Would that help?” And I was like, “Um. Yes. That’s helps a lot.” Except I was jumping up and down and screaming.
Yoga in the garden beside the moat with wonder woman yoga teacher Elissa Lewis, photo by Rita Banerjee
So now, all I want is for wonderful people to come and do this with us. I’ll be teaching a workshop on novel-writing, the fabulous Elissa will be teaching yoga twice a day as well as an art workshop (she’s a marvelous artist too), and the fantastic Cambridge Writers Workshop co-founders and co-directors Rita Banerjee and Diana Norma Szokolyai are both wonderful poets, scholars, and fiction writers, will be teaching workshops on their specialties. It’s going to be magnificent.
Getting some writing done in our private courtyard. Photo by Rita
Getting some writing done in Paris– I was doing a character exercise on the lady behind me. Photo by Rita
There are optional field trips to Paris, Chantilly, and Versailles as well, so there’s time for work and time for adventures. In Paris, we’ll probably stop in at Spoken Word Paris for a reading.
Spoken Word Paris, photo by Rita Banerjee
There will also be quite a bit of eating homemade delicious French food, and even though I was raw vegan at the time (I fell off the wagon since, getting back on the wagon, slowly) the spectacular chef Joelle not only accommodated me but ended up trying it herself! She is so kind, and much of the food is organically grown right there on the grounds. She even makes her own yogurt!
With a gorgeous salad. Photo by Rita
The dinner table. Photo by Rita
Joelle feeding chickens. Photo by Rita
Here are the details:
Location: Château de Verderonne,
Picardy, France Dates: August 7, 2014 – August 20, 2014 Application Deadline: May 15, 2014 Apply: cww.submittable.com
The Cambridge Writers’ Workshop Annual Yoga & Writing Retreat will be held from August 7 -20, 2014 at the Château de Verderonne in Picardy, France, located approximately 50 miles north of Paris. The conference features workshops in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, as well as craft of writing seminars, art classes, free time to write, and daily yoga and meditation classes. Writers of all genres and levels are welcome. Yoga practitioners of all levels are also welcomed (we have experience adapting the yoga sequences to meet the level of beginner-advanced participants). Participants are encouraged, but not required, to bring their own long-term projects to work on. Whether writers are beginners or advanced, CWW workshops have a history of success in generating new writing.
Optional excursions to Paris and Chantilly are also available to participants. The faculty includes Rita Banerjee, Diana Norma Szokolyai, Jessica Reidy, and Elissa Lewis. The cost of the conference is $3,200, which includes lodging, meals, writing workshops, yoga classes and transportation to and from the airport.
So, I hope you, dear reader, apply for the retreat. I’m so excited to be there. Praise the Bammer!
All of us in Versailles. From left going clockwise: Tiffanie, Norma, Elissa, me, Rita, and Kareema. I felt so lucky to work with such brilliant and delightfully kind women!
An unpublished outtake then published in LIFE Magazine’s retrospect of Givenchy’s career. This guy dolled up Audrey Hepburn every chance he could get. And who could blame him? But do you have any idea how difficult it’s been to find descriptions and (god forbid) names of 1952 haute couture purses? Still, I’m rather fond of the idea of a vintage box purse like the one in the photo… I suppose Givenchy made that one, too, though I haven’t been able to find conclusive evidence one way or another, it being an unpublished outtake and all. You know what, he made it. Let’s make the safe bet that he made it.
This is my great-great grandmother Mathilde. She was the last generation of our Romani family to live, though briefly, as a nomad, travelling up and down the Danube from Germany to Hungary, dancing in riparian towns along the way. In the picture, she’s posing in her dancing garb. She’s pretty fabulous.
Obviously I’ve never met her, but I love the idea I have of her from my grandmother’s stories. Her stories about Mathilde are the reason I became a dancer and a fortune teller when I was younger– I set myself the task of reviving old family trades that otherwise would have died out with Mathilde and the Holocaust. Now, being a writer lets me revive all manner of things, some I’ve seen and some I haven’t, so I can only hope this novel breathes good life into something.
On day four, Len, Sean, and Jen and I went to Monmartre and explored the windy streets, the vendors, the cafes and drank pastisse in the sun at a table on the cobblestone street, and chocolate chaud in The Two Windmills. That’s what you do there. Tourists and pigeons dotted the grass below the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur.
Later that night we ventured to L’atlier Charonne for some Manouche or Tzigane (Gypsy) Jazz. They have performances every night from 9-12 and oh holy chickadees it was incredible. We saw the Moreno orkestra tzigane quartet, and the performers, though in their later years, had more energy than most of the young-ones I’ve see on stage. Two men played steel string guitars with the ghost of Django Reinhardt in their fingers. At one point, they both played the same guitar, occasionally holding each other’s hands to show that yes, they really can play that quickly, and yes, they really are that good. And for a few songs, a woman sang with a voice as powerful as a sob, but she was laughing almost continuously. She brought the microphone around the crowd, a happy mix of Parisians, tourists, and Romanies, and good-naturedly teased some audience members into singing the chorus. She wore a magenta and violet ankle-length skirt with ruffles that my grandmother would have gone mad for, and she snapped her fingers above her head and swayed her hips as she warbled her laugh-cry songs.
That evening, I noticed that as the Romani flower sellers came along, the majority of the audience who adored the performers reviled the sellers with icy sneers and without so much as a non, merci. The only person the flower seller could coax into buying a rose was the guitarist, who seemed to give into his “help a brother out” appeal. He gifted it then to the singer, who twirled it in her left hand as she smoked with her right.
This is the evening that I realized I had come to the right place to research Tzigane Jazz and recreate what these performances might have been like from 1920’s-1950’s. Romani culture changes, of course, like any other, but some things, like music and dance, change very little. They simply enrich. I also realized that I’m going to need a hell of a lot more than a week to get what I need to write this novel.
Did I mention that the Tzigane Cultural Center is closed in August? It is, I discovered that day. Another reason that the research trip, while fruitful, didn’t quite fill me up. I’m currently seeking grants that might allow Len and I to live in Paris next summer, preferably funded, so I can continue my research. So, if you hear of anything, help a sister out, will you? 😉
Sometimes research is practical: where is my train? how do I find myself on the map of Montparnasse? How do I say, do you sell comfort shoe-inserts for my 16-year-old combat boots? in French? These things I learned, except the last one. Instead I discovered how many pharmacies are in a 2 km radius from the hotel (Answer: 6).
It’s been nice to map things out for a change: I’m not nearly as organized as most put-together tweens as I’d like to be. Len and I fell in love circling each other for a few weeks, then circling Italy, then Croatia, too giddy to concentrate on maps, too polite to make an actual suggestion. Circling is fun, let’s not kid ourselves. Who hasn’t gone an extra time around a roundabout at least once? Metaphorically or otherwise. Yet now, seven years later, I’m learning the joys of having a plan. Maybe it’s because I (finally) made myself full outline my novel during the Cambridge Writers Workshop writing and yoga retreat in Verderonne, France for the past two weeks. Such relief! Such clarity! Circling the novel became exhausting and much less inspiring, but saying what, when, where, and how was so powerful, like architecture and alchemy together. And sure, Len and I circled and it was whimsical and romantic, but then I locked that down with paperwork and wedding rings in a Roanoke, VA courthouse. So, plans are nice, too. Balance, right?
For instance, to research Romani culture in France between 1920 and circa 1952, I will go here: Centre des études Tsiganes
Médiathèque Fnasat-Gens du voyage-Etudes Tsiganes
59 rue de l’Ourcq
75019 PARIS
France
01 40 35 12 17
and I will be very happy. I am already.This novel takes up about 70% of my brain. Sometimes that’s agonizing (I will admit this), but lately, especially when I’m in a community of writers like my MFA program, or the Writing and Yoga retreat that I just adored and finished, the novel-brain phenomenon is delightful and fulfilling .
So, some sample plans: to learn more about jazz, I could to go Le Petite Journal, and for Romani/Manouche jazz I could check out these gems compiled by Jane Parry of Paris Voice. I will go to catacombs and odd museums, cafes and gardens, I will try to catch some burlesque culture, I will go to Spoken Word Paris to met the wonderful expat writers and listen to their wonderful word-magics, and maybe read something myself. I will probably deviate from my raw-vegan lifestyle and eat a crepe. For research. The point is, I have about 6 maps of Paris, I understand the metro system, I found my comfy inserts, and I’ve had these combat boots since I was 11. I’ve got a plan.
jessica reidy 