Swann Travel Grant: North Dakota, June 2016

If you didn’t guess by my last name already—Jensen is one of the most common Danish family names around—I am part-Scandinavian as the paternal side of my family hails from Denmark. For my first ever Christmas, my dad’s parents sent me a big red book with gold gilt pages. I hadn’t yet left the hospital where I’d been born and they knew I’d be too young to read it for many, many years, but they sent it to me all the same. I still have their postcard note that had been tucked inside. Like the book, it is written in Danish:

Kære lille Rebecca, Du ønskes en rigtig god jul...

We hope that you will soon be big and strong so you can come home to mommy and daddy to read the wonderful stories of Hans Christian Andersen. We hope that one day you will be able to read it for yourself.

I’ve had the book sitting on my shelf at home for years, rarely opening it, rarely taking it down for fear of ruining the spine when I thought there was no way I’d ever be able to read it anyway. The Danish I know is scattered and basic; I can speak a little, but for the longest time I’d been scared to try to read it. And then, I took Dr. Becka McKay’s Translation workshop in the spring of 2016 and I decided, after almost 25 years, that it was time I made a better effort to read the thing myself. With my dad as my co-translator, I worked with the Old Danish to bring the lost stories of my childhood, Andersen’s lesser known tales, into modern English.

As the spring semester came to a close, my interest in translation had only begun to blossom, and I hopped on to a plane from sunny Florida to the great windy plains of North Dakota. Although not a popular vacation destination—especially not for us living in perpetual summer here—I was beyond excited to get out and to see what the Midwest had to offer. I’d been to the Dakotas before, but I’d never considered them as places where I could learn; the times I’d been before were to visit family and only that.

My plane landed in Fargo (yes, like that movie) and I spent the week getting lost in all things Scandinavian. From the early 19^th century, many Scandinavian people began to cross over the seas and settle in locations across the Upper Midwest in the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and North and South Dakota. Because of this movement, North Dakota today is still rich in Scandinavian heritage and the state is dotted with centers and sites where tourists and descendants (mainly Norwegian, but Danish, Finnish, Swedish, Icelandic, too) alike can gather to learn of the Nordic history and culture in the area.

Fargo sits on the eastern state line between North Dakota and Minnesota. A skip across the Red River took me to Moorhead, MN, where—conveniently—there is a Scandinavian heritage site, complete with Viking ship and Norwegian stave church. Each and every part of the church and surrounding buildings had been dismantled, numbered and inventoried, shipped from Norway to Minnesota, and reassembled exactly and precisely as they had been originally built in Norway. On just the second day of my trip, I had found a home from home.

            Of course, I wanted more. With a bit of research, I had discovered that my beloved Hans Christian Andersen lives on in North Dakota. A memorial and tribute to him sits with pride of place at the center of a Scandinavian Heritage Center in Minot, ND, only a five-hour drive from Fargo. 

I made the trip with no idea whether the place would live up to my expectations. It seems silly to say it, but my worries vanished when I stepped out of the car and laid eyes on the statue in the middle of the park. Set to the backdrop of an even bigger and more majestic stave church than the one I’d seen previously at the Hjemkomst Center (hjemkomst: homecoming) in Moorhead, beside a replica Danish windmill, a cluster of authentic Norwegian homes, and a Finnish sauna, and flanked by the flags of each of the five Scandinavian countries, Hans Christian Andersen perched with one hand on his hip, the other extended out to hold a little bronze bird. I sidled up to him and had my picture taken sitting on his knee. Later, inside the church, as I looked up at the intricate carvings around the beams in the ceiling, an elderly woman struck a conversation with me in Danish. It was the first Danish I’d spoken in years but it came freely without too much second-guessing myself. It felt natural and, after, I felt giddy and proud of myself for making this happen.

            But none of this would have happened without the help of the Swann Travel Grant. Every summer, MFA students at FAU are offered the opportunity to apply for this scholarship of $500 to travel—anywhere!—to pursue a project that will help/encourage/enlighten/enhance/develop our writing. And every summer only a small number of students apply. The application is simple:

1.      A proposed project/travel plan.  Where do you want to go? Why do you want to go there? How will a trip to this place help you with your writing?

2.      Cost of travel. How will you get there? How much will this cost?

3.      Accommodation plans. Where will you stay? Again, how much will this cost.

Altogether, it was a short summary (mine was maybe 350-400 words) of the intentions of the trip and that’s it. I put mine together over a few days, hit ‘send’ on the email to the department, and waited for their decision.

            The best piece of advice I’ve received since starting the program here at FAU is this: get involved and do anything that seems even slightly interesting to you. If you don’t apply, you won’t know. If I hadn’t taken a small chance on sending in that application for the Swann, I don’t know if I’d still feel the desire and urge to keep translating the big red book whose spine is now creased and whose pages are loved.

           

Rebecca Jensen is a third-year MFA candidate in nonfiction. She has served as fiction editor for Driftwood Press and as Managing Editor for FAU’s Coastlines. She was recently a nominee for the 2016 AWP Intro Journals Project in nonfiction, and her poetry appears in Eunoia Review, Firefly Magazine, and FishFood Magazine.

Facing Our Dragons: A Week with Tom Sleigh

It is inevitable in writing that, sooner or later, we will come face to face with a dragon. My dragon is often my grandmother’s death; I want to write about her, but nothing I put down on the page feels good enough. I get overwhelmed and it scares me to look the dragon in the eye. It is so much easier to put down my pen and wait for the dragon to curl back into its cave. I’m not ready. Maybe it’s not my story to tell. Perhaps I’ll write about something else.

Tom Sleigh described the writing process to our workshop group as a combination of emotions, thoughts and words. Emotion finds a thought, that thought finds a word. We took out old pieces of things we’d written days, weeks or months earlier and began to revise them, recasting our sentences because that, Tom said, is the joy of writing. The lines we had initially written were stretched and broken and changed until our emotions found the right thoughts and the right words to portray them on the page. And in that workshop, we watched ourselves (and each other) transform.

Eventually, we writers want people to read what we’ve written. Why else would we keep submitting to journals or showing up to workshops? But when we’re faced with material that is overwhelming to us, difficult to write because it’s too personal, too tough to get out and on to the page, sometimes we give up. Sometimes the dragon looms over us, breathing heavily down our necks and we can’t take the heat. Our emotion found the thought—waking the dragon—but the words aren’t there yet.

In our classroom, on the board, Tom draws a dot. “This is you,” he tells us, “and this—” he draws another dot, “is your dragon.” He connects the two dots with one very short line. “Now, you can’t fight a dragon with your bare hands, but if only you had a sword.” Tom draws another dot, redirecting the route from “you” to “sword” to “dragon” making a triangle for us to observe. “Put something between you and the dragon and you’ll get that distance you need to fight it.”

We use language as a disguise. We want the world to know what happened to us but we don’t want the world to see through the experience to find us cowering in a corner afraid of what we might have unleashed. By focusing on individual words and sentences first, building up from there and allowing our material to grow, Tom Sleigh encouraged us not to hide from our material, guiding us to see that it’s not about what you write—it’s about how we move through it. Orchestrating the perception of the reader through manipulation of the line will create the thing so many might refer to as “voice.” Tom, however, calls this “style.”  

Rebecca Jensen is a second-year MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction. Her poetry appears in Eunoia Review, Firefly Magazine and FishFood Magazine, and she is a nominee for the 2016 AWP Intro Journals Project in creative nonfiction. 

Palm Beach Poetry Festival – January 2015

     Brenda Shaughnessy’s flight to Fort Lauderdale was delayed by almost four hours. That was four extra hours I had not planned on having. Four more hours of panicking over what it would be like to finally meet her. I had received the call back in early November, the one informing me I would be interning for Brenda’s workshop at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival the following January. I spent those four hours wandering the colorful streets of Delray Beach, discovering the city I would be calling home for the rest of the week.

     Cut to 9pm, and there we were. Brenda and I stood side by side behind my little grey Mazda that I suddenly wished I had made time to clean before her arrival. But poets are people, too. I opened the trunk, pushing aside empty Publix bags and a roll of half-used Christmas wrapping paper, sliding her suitcase inside. I told myself it could have been worse. We clambered into the front seats of my car and began the journey back to Delray. Any worries I had about the fluidity of our conversation quickly dissipated. I had imagined a woman exhausted from travel, but Brenda showed no signs of tiredness. In the first five minutes, I had already created a fresh new reading list in my head from her recommendations. Her enthusiasm transferred into the writing workshop the following morning, and continued relentlessly through the rest of the week.  

     Each morning, I met with fellow interns in the library at the Crest Theater. We would discuss our schedule and duties for the day before heading upstairs to our respective classrooms for workshop. As my workshop began, Brenda gifted the group with snippets of advice and anecdotes from the writer’s world, from the life of a real poet. Her words were nuggets of gold that I transcribed in ink, into my journal, and into my head. You don’t have to know what you’re doing, but something is happening, and that’s poetry. Complexity is irreducible and that’s why poetry exists. After workshop were craft talks leading up to evening readings where I reclined in the back row of the theater’s balcony with the other interns and listened to our poets, our friends read their work.

     The week moved quickly. Already, Wednesday had arrived and we were sat in the Vintage Gymnasium at the gala dinner. The old white building had enchanting string lights draped from the warm wooden beams of its ceiling. The gym was crowded; the floor filled with hundreds of dancing poets. Poets are people, and some of them are dancers. Yes, I saw you, Thomas Lux.

     Of the other faculty poets at the festival, I had studied Patricia Smith’s work during my years as an undergraduate English major at the University of South Florida. It was a pleasure and privilege to hear her craft talk and surprise reading of her spoken word poem, Skinhead. In this moment, everything fell into place for me. This is real life. I’m hanging out with world-famous poets, with the people who have inspired, prompted and still push me to do what I love to do. These are the people who make me want to write. Back in the lounge, I asked Patricia to sign a book for me. My copy of her Teahouse of the Almighty now opens with this:

Rebecca – May the voices in here inspire you to raise your own. – Patricia.

I’m not sure if she knew how much I needed to hear these words, how much they resonate with the kind of writer and person that I am. My one goal for this year ­– a new year’s resolution – is to raise my voice and to have the confidence to throw myself headfirst and completely into the creative world.

     Sunday morning, Brenda hopped back into my car for the trip to the airport, and on to Iowa; from perpetual summer into the depths of winter. Our last forty-five minutes consisted of extending my reading list and learning that magic happens in the first summer between years one and two of the MFA. Her last golden nugget for me was this: write. And keep in touch. 

Rebecca Jensen is a first-year MFA student in nonfiction at Florida Atlantic University. She graduated from the Honors College at the University of South Florida in 2014. She has worked as fiction editor for Driftwood Press, a literary magazine, and is currently nonfiction editor at FAU’s Coastlines. She writes feature articles for Fort Lauderdale’s city magazine, Go Riverwalk, and her creative work appears or is forthcoming in FishFood Literary and Creative Arts Magazine. 

Submerging

Lately, I’ve been thinking about my relation to time and space. More specifically, I’m interested in discovering what this means for my writing and for my process in creating new work. Some people need that quiet, empty, clean space to write. No distractions. Some people set aside time specifically to write and only write. But I’ve never been as regimented in my writing as that. Before I moved to Florida from England, I spent years of my life waiting for trains to and from school. In the moments before the train rolled into the station, and then during the train journeys themselves, when I wasn’t reading, I would be writing. From this experience alone, I know that I am able to pick up a pen and write anywhere, no matter how loud or disruptive the atmosphere is. Those train journeys were rarely quiet. The problem I face is not with finding space or finding time, but finding a way to tackle the blank page. The dreaded blank page.

I first encountered Jo Ann Beard’s work during my undergraduate career at the University of South Florida. I was in my first creative nonfiction class, staring at "The Fourth State of Matter." My first reaction was to ask if what I was reading was really true. Not because I doubted Jo Ann, not for a second, but because the quality of each braid of the essay was perfectly intertwined with each of the others in a way I could only dream of being able to master one day. I studied Jo Ann’s work again in my first semester of the MFA here at FAU and again was struck by the seamlessness of her work, not only in "The Fourth State of Matter," but in other essays featured in The Boys of My Youth. I wondered how she did it.

Jo Ann Beard doesn’t revise. Not in the way we would expect, anyway. She told us she revises her work sentence by sentence, word by word, before her ideas move from her mind to the page. The blank page. The draft is the final product, the finished piece, which we see printed in those celebrated magazines and published as books. Each day in our workshop with Jo Ann, she asked us to spend thirty minutes free writing. Each day I left workshop with a piece I could polish and edit and that I have since turned into longer, more thoughtful essays than my initial scribbles. Her key to getting to this stage is not to fear the blank page, the space, the emptiness. The key is to submerge: into the conscious, into the subconscious, into the place where the deepest and truest stories are. Go there and stay there and pull your stories from there. Pour them onto that blank page.

As I drove Jo Ann back to her hotel after class one day, we talked about exercise. She was excited to play tennis the following morning and asked me if I worked out. Not as recently as I would have liked to admit. But writing is exercise too, or so she made me believe. Spending that time submerged in the writing is as straining mentally and emotionally as a good workout is for the body physically. She explained, “The work is that I’ve gone to that place and I’ve used that muscle.”  And after a week of daily workshops, delving deep into the craft and pulling my own stories up from the depths of myself, I felt drained in the best possible way. Like I’d discovered that muscle and not only stretched it, but worked it out. Jo Ann pushed me to do the work, stretch the muscles, find the place, and fearlessly face that blank page. To submerge. 

Rebecca Jensen is a first-year MFA student in nonfiction at Florida Atlantic University. She graduated from the Honors College at the University of South Florida in 2014. She has worked as fiction editor for Driftwood Press, a literary magazine, and is currently nonfiction editor at FAU’s Coastlines. She writes feature articles for Fort Lauderdale’s city magazine, Go Riverwalk, and her creative work appears or is forthcoming in FishFood Literary and Creative Arts Magazine. 

Adjusting

If I told you how many times I've tried to give up studying English, you probably wouldn't believe me. You'd think I hated it. Not true. It just took me a long time to dig up that passion from deep in my subconscious, and draw it out into the open. Accept it.

The first time I tried to quit, I convinced myself I wanted to grow up to be an interpreter for the European Union. I lived in England at the time. I found out the hard way that I hated speaking French in front of my class. So how could I possibly do that in front of complete strangers? And to make a living? That year, I was sixteen, and it was the year I fell into the arms of Raymond Chandler and Edgar Allan Poe. Our love affair lasted another twelve months or so before I convinced myself I couldn’t commit anymore.

A few years passed and I moved to Tampa, Florida, to earn my bachelor's degree. I started out as a French major. What was I thinking? I knew it wasn't going to work out when more of my schedule was spent fueling my Shakespeare obsession than, well, anything else. My interpreting career quickly fell to the wayside.

In early March of this year, I found myself holding an acceptance letter to the MFA program at Florida Atlantic University. Yes, it belonged to me. The shaky hands, those tears wearing holes in the folds of the page, those were mine too.

We’re now on week three of my first semester as a graduate student, and the MFA at FAU has far exceeded my expectations. I finally feel I am where I’m supposed to be. It helps that the program offers funding, so there’s no worrying about when and where my next meal will come from. Maybe I’m still eating Ramen noodles and microwaveable pots of macaroni cheese; maybe this is a personal choice.

The people I’m studying with actually care about what they’re doing. My instructors and mentors are masters of their craft. It’s refreshing. But the biggest change since moving into graduate studies is adjusting to a schedule split between the classes in which I’m a student, and those I am teaching. The opportunity was one I couldn’t refuse: three consecutive years of teaching English, gaining professional experience in the field, and escaping from waiting tables at run-down beachfront diners. When I’m not studying, I’m grading assignments and planning lessons for my forty-four unsuspecting undergrads. There I was, convinced I’d given up on English forever. I’d never be a teacher. And yet, the faces of my students are already haunting my dreams. I suppose that shows how much I care about them. I’ve gotten so used to being part of the sea of drooping eyelids and blank faces, that I can’t quite believe I’m here; I’m on the wrong side of the podium and I think I could get used to it.

Rebecca Jensen graduated from the Honors College at the University of South Florida in 2014. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English (creative writing) with a minor in French. Her writing is mainly creative nonfiction, focusing on the themes of travel and identity. She has worked as fiction editor for the literary magazine Driftwood Press, and is a new member of the Coastlines editing team at FAU.