The “ish” portion of the poems in Matters of Record is fairly dominant. I’m a poet turned fiction-writer turned poet turned fiction-writer turned…well, you see the pattern. I really love poetry AND fiction; I didn’t write non-fiction until now, sort of.
Full creative license is my way. I also found blurring the line between fiction and non-fiction, or obliterating the line, a necessity in writing this collection, not just a desire. This need is due to the intricacy and complications in all of these women’s stories. I found myself having to point my finger on one specific object or angle or moment in each story, then unleashing my imagination within that small area: a last meal, the setting, the setup, the jury, victim, a single moment, a strange persona. In some ways, my imagination allowed me to narrow their stories and focus fully. I will also admit that the facts of their stories were too difficult to take in at times, so, in true fictionista fashion, I began to make some up.
But this is also how the surprises happened, and I am all about surprises, in writing. I don’t plan anything. I usually sit down to the page with an unfocused idea, one line, one image, nothing at all oftentimes, and then I get to see the crazy world of my unconscious work. I fed my brain with the “facts” of these women’s cases and lives and voices, and then I just let my mind go wild.
Peter Davies has explained the blurring of non-fiction and fiction like this, “The instinct to lay fiction over the top of history, if you like, is simply the instinct to understand why certain things happened.” Simply put, and I obviously agree completely. I’ll never know the “truth,” so I guess and imagine to try and find some sense of the truth. Davies goes on to say, “One of the consolations of fiction is that it provides explanations for things we don’t understand in life, in our own lives, and in the world around us.”
One of the most exciting discoveries I received through the process of writing Matters of Record was “Wal-Mart Murderess”. The basics of this crime are the following: Lynda Lyon Block shot a cop in a Wal-Mart parking lot. I’m sure there’s a lot more to her story, but I became obsessed with the onlookers, the witnesses, in this story, because as we all know a Wal-Mart parking lot is never empty. I took the persona of an employee who happens to be pushing in the grocery carts as this shooting occurs. The narrator takes in Lynda Block, but he/she doesn’t see Block as a killer or evil in what becomes a slow-motion-moment on the page. The narrator is mesmerized and in awe of this powerful woman.
So Block’s background isn’t one I could tell you much about, but I could speak in length about the narrator’s desire for this woman who has killed a cop in front of his/her eyes. Maybe it has to do with all of our infatuations with violence and danger, or with my own obsession with these women. Who knows? I’ll leave the full psychoanalysis to someone else while I keep on writing true(ish) poems and stories.
Click here to order your copy and read “Wal-Mart Murderess” for yourself. Here’s a little sneak peek:
That’s when it was her,
crouched down beside the payphone
with a mean cat’s grin, one eye closed,
the other squint open,
gun pointed across the lot
like a John Wayne woman.
Hot damn, I thought, a lady
and a good shot. The kind
of woman you can’t find
in modern day Alabama.
Photo of Lynda Lyon Block
