This is Melissa Ford Lucken, Rosalie Petrouske, Susan Serafin-Jess, editors for the Washington Square Review. Washington Square On-Air showcases the poetry and fiction of the latest edition of LCC's literary journal, The Washington Square Review, read by the poets, authors, and editors themselves. Expect the unexpected as our contributors express experience and fantasy with humor, imagination, poetic license, irony, and passion. If you love language at its most original, please join us in our audio Town Square to celebrate a community of writers spanning from around the world to Lansing.

Hello, I'm Susan Serafin-Jess, one of the poetry editors of Washington Square Review, LCC's English department literary journal of poetry and prose. Today is our first Washington Square on Air, and our first guest is Cheryl Caesar. Welcome, Cheryl.

Thanks for having me, Suzy.

Cheryl Caesar has an interesting biography. She lived in Europe for 25 years and earned her doctorate in Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne. She now teaches writing at msu. Her chapbook of anti Trump protest poetry, Flatman, is available from Amazon. I discovered that she and I have something in common besides teaching, writing and being poets, and that is we both love turtles and have written poems which have turtles playing a prominent role. So today she is going to read two poems. The first one is shorter and it's called Turtle of the Month. And the second is longer and more complex, and it's called Manuela the tortoise found after 30 years alone in a Junk Room. So I'm going to ask you to read your first poem and then we'll discuss it.

Okay. I'd just like to point out that we actually have one turtle and one tortoise.

Correct.

Sorry. And I'm often reminded of the difference between them by that lovely little song, Turtle Tortoise, that you can see on YouTube. Turtle,.

Stand corrected.

So the first one is an actual turtle, and it was inspired by the September image on my calendar, which showed baby turtles hatching and heading for the sea. And it's quite a glorious sight. So Turtle of the Month goes September hatchling heading for the sea, leaving a perfect sand freeze silvered by sunlight and my bedroom lamp reflecting from the page. All of us cheer you on. The small waves sparkle in delight, frothing like champagne for this, your maiden voyage.

It's a lovely poem. It's a joyous poem. And I love the image of frothing like champagne. Tell me a little bit about the genesis of that poem, if you would.

It was from a calendar, a calendar that hung over my desk. And I just found the image to be so joyous. The little, little bits of water Were flying up like sparkles or confetti or jewels. And the beautiful pattern in the sand and all little turtles trying to make it to the sea. I know most of them don't, but we're cheering them on all the same. I read a suggestion in the Times at the beginning of the year that if you don't have time to do writing, you could do a rough haiku every day. And this is kind of that sort of thing, just something that you see and you make a little short response to it in kind of the feeling of haiku that this is longer than haiku.

Well, that's a nice option for writing teachers because I know we often despair of having any time for our own writing during semesters when we're busy looking at our students writing.

Yeah. Stephen King, I think, said when he was teaching high school that trying to write while you're teaching writing is like trying to drive your car while you're giving someone the jump start for their battery. So you can, you know, charge yourself or charge them. I'm not sure that's true, but it's a good excuse.

Yes. Well, every year for my daughter's birthday, I write her a poem. And this year she challenged me to write a haiku. And I found I couldn't just write a haiku of three lines. I ended up writing a longer poem where every stanza was a haiku. And now I've been charged with writing a poem for her wedding. So that's really scary.

Wow. Yeah.

All right, so that was Turtle of the Month. Now I'd like to move on to the tortoise. Manuela, the tortoise found after 30 years alone in a junk room. And, yes, that really did happen in Brazil. Tell us a little bit about that story.

I just read it in the National Geographic. I was at a writing retreat and I was avoiding writing a pedagogical essay as I was supposed to be doing. But I was browsing National Geographic and I was just so struck by this story, these pictures of people carrying boxes out. An older gentleman had passed and his kids were cleaning this room out. And apparently a neighbor said, hey, that box of vinyl records, are you throwing out the tortoise as well? And they looked, and there was a tortoise. And it just. So many questions for me. We feel sorry for the tortoise, but wasn't it always a captive? Anyway, how did the tortoise live this experience? Could they have felt like their life was taken or stolen from them or. This was it. This is life. Right. And then I Thought of just iconic people who've lost years of their lives, been captive. What does it mean? Is it possible to lose years of your life, to be robbed of years? Or as Ann Tyler would say, that the life you live is the one you were meant to have, it's the one you have.

Well, and there are several references to those people or some of those people in the poem. So let's have you read the poem and then maybe we can go back and talk about some of those lives.

Sure. So, Manuela, what does a tortoise think? What does she feel? She lives long and moves slow, heavy and protected. 30 Years may pass like a sluggish dream. We may rail against her long incarceration, like Ricky Jackson's, deserving of reparations, but wonder as a pet, was she not always captive? Or we may cheer her escape, like Billy Hayes fleeing on the midnight Express from his 30 year sentence, although it seems she never scratched the door or pity her stolen life like J.C. dugaert's. But as Dugard found out, little by little, the life you live becomes the real one. Around her, termites flashed emissaries of light. They live only a year or two. They feed on the trees whose prana we block and hide in darkened rooms. But nature always finds her way in. In 30 years of encephalitic lethargy, Ms. R, a patient of Oliver Sacks, thought of nothing. It's dead easy once you know how turning the corners of a cerebral quadrangle, silently repeating seven notes of a Verdi aria, drawing mental maps of maps of maps. My posture leads to itself, she said. Perhaps Manuela too, curled endlessly inward, a shell in a shell. Perhaps she too, repeated for 30 years in tortoise, I am what I am, what I am, what I am.

Thank you, Cheryl. I noticed that the poem is bookended by Manuela, who was hidden, shall we say, for 30 years, and Ms. R, who was also hidden for 30 years. But first I'd like to go through the different humans that you have used as a parallel. So could you tell me about Ricky Jackson, J.C. dugard, Billy Hayes, and then finally Ms. R. Sure.

Ricky Jackson was wrongfully convicted of murder as a young man in Cleveland in 1975, and he was unjustly imprisoned for 39 years and then exonerated. He received, Wikipedia calls it, several million dollars from the state in reparations. What can this even mean?

What can it mean? And I did research this a little bit and found that it wasn't DNA that exonerated him, it was the eyewitness. Testimony had been coerced. He had been a teenager when he was arrested, tried and convicted. And the young man who testified against him was also a black teenager who was coerced by the police officers. And so because of that and police misconduct, he was finally exonerated after years. 3, 39 Years. That's how long he was wrongly incarcerated. Terrible story. All right, Billy Hayes.

Billy Hayes. Well, if you've seen Midnight Express, which is just an incredibly moving film, I don't think I've ever seen a movie, Prison Break that makes me gasp and cheer in the same way. He's just. He's a figure of someone who keeps his. I am. Who keeps his core. There's a scene in the movie where all the prisoners are walking around and around this kind of central pillar for their exercise. They're all going clockwise, and he insists on going counterclockwise. And it's, I think, just a way of preserving the core of himself. And that was able to last and then to escape.

Yes. And I read that at first they were going to charge him with possession, which was only a few years, and then they decided to throw the book at him for smuggling, which was a life sentence. So he's in Turkey in prison, and then they transferred him to a quote, unquote lunatic asylum, maybe for walking counterclockwise. I don't know what he did to land him there, but when he escaped, he escaped in a rowboat. That is quite a story. Yes.

All right.

Jacy Dugard, I think she might be the best known of these because of the interest in true crime, but tell us about her.

Well, she was abducted while walking to the school bus stop at age 11 and kept captive for 18 years. She seems to have kept her optimism, her positivity. I note that her first memoir was called A Stolen Life, but her second is Freedom, My Book of Firsts. So I think that she had her time to mourn what was taken from her, but she is rejoicing in her life, in her what we might call core self that has lasted.

That is quite a story of resilience to be 11 years old. You're walking to the bus stop and somebody stuns you with a stun gun and takes you, and now you're being sexually assaulted. You bear two children, this man, and you're in captivity for 18 years, and yet she's come out on the other side, as you say, not ruined.

Not ruined, not destroyed. And it isn't just years that she's lost. She's lost her adolescence. It's this kind of formative period in her life, she's lost. The experience of motherhood has been, well, let's say, compromised. But she. She came through it, and she took her life back. So I just. Yeah, I cheer for all these people, although I'm indignant as well. I'm furious at what was done to her. But ultimately, it's her courage that comes through.

Final person that you use as a parallel to Manuela is Ms. R. And I find her story actually to be the most horrifying. I had not heard of. Let me see if I can pronounce it correctly. Encephalitis. Lethargia. Encephalitic lethargy.

Okay.

Which is a sleeping sickness. And I kind of jumped to the conclusion that because it happened around the time of the Spanish influenza, that it might be part of that, but they think not. But people around that time, there was an epidemic which most of us haven't heard about. And there were, I guess, up to a million people who had this. 500,000 People who died. And. Well, you tell us about what happened.

To Ms. R. She went into this kind of twilight state. Not quite a coma, because there was a little bit of consciousness. And she stayed there for 30 years until her doctor, Oliver Sacks, treated her with L dopa. And you've probably read the Awakenings or seen the movie that was kind of a Faustian bargain, because the L dopa eventually pushed the patients into a kind of hyperactive state. And for many of them, it wasn't possible to find a balance where they could live normally, and they slipped back into the twilight again. But when she describes, doesn't seem like a blank, like just a boring nothingness. She was in her mind, and she said I would draw maps, and then I would draw maps of the maps and maps of those maps. She said I would repeat those seven notes from a favorite aria. Her brain slowed down. Maybe it's the way a tortoise's brain works when they're in captiv. So that the thinking, it felt normal to her.

Well, that makes the parallel even more fitting, I suppose. I just keyed in on the word slow that you chose, because when we do think of turtles or tortoises, we think of something that moves slowly. And I think I shared with you that my name is Susan Seraphin Jess. And one time I received mail addressed to Susan Terrapin, which I thought was quite fitting because I do move through life rather slowly. But it almost gives me hope that perhaps Manuela had something similar going on. Of course, she's a tortoise, not a human, but that it wasn't just. It wasn't feeling panicked or suffocated, but that there was something freeing going on in her cerebration. But we will not ever know that.

As is kind of symbolized by the way, she managed to hydrate and nourish herself. Apparently there were drops of condensation in the storage room and she lapped them up. And there were termites. And you can just imagine these termites, these little fast short lived creatures who came in and nourished her during this spell of captivity. And I like to think too, that something nourished her consciousness of.

Well, so she was slow, but those termites couldn't get away from her. So she found nourishment and hydration. She had a will to live and survive. All right, tell me how you chose these people to weave into the poem. When did you get the idea that you wanted to put human beings into the poem about Manuela?

I immediately thought of it, Ms. R. Because I've always been just in awe of her finding the resources, the nourishment in her own brain for 30 years. Then I thought of Billy Hayes. He didn't give in. He continued to walk in the opposite direction, but he too was saved. And then JC I think that she managed. She bore children, she managed to love those children. She kept some kind of connection to other human beings, some kind of caring. And then Ricky Jackson, I just, that was the connection. There was just anger, anger at injustice. And, you know, I feel angry at animals who are abandoned or locked up or mistreated. And that we would actually do this to people is just beyond belief.

So would you say that? Because I know that you've written a book of anti Trump protest poetry which is available on Amazon. It's called Flatman. Is a lot of your poetry informed by, I guess, what some people might call news or world events? Because I know some poets stay very far away from that. Or is your poetry a bland.

It became very informed by news and world events during the Trump reign. I just, I couldn't help it. That was my first published book. I was just so enraged every day. And the kind of dominant image that came to my mind is that he is a flat man. He is two dimensional, he has fewer senses, fewer human feelings. But in calmer times, I like to read and write poems about kind of investigating other consciousnesses, like a tortoise's, about memory and the kinds of filters that it goes through. And I've been doing this with my with my visual artwork as well.

Yes. I'm glad you brought up your visual artwork, because Cheryl Caesar also did the COVID art for the 2022 volume of the Washington Square Review, and it's called Van Gogh Immersion. Could you talk about that?

Yes. I went to the Immersion. It was amazing. And I actually made a piece that has a poem on top of that image with little kind of couplets about the experience of the immersion in Detroit at the old Colo Hall. What I was trying to capture on that cover is a very delicate view on the walls of flower petals falling and then kind of refraction of light. It ended up looking like corn kernels or corn nuts or something. But that's still interesting. I have been doing more and more visual art things, and a lot of those are based on events in the news. I did a kind of a charcoal smudge drawing of that awful brawl in Congress during the vote for the speaker of the House with one congressman covering the mouth of another one. I did a collage called A Cold Coming of those immigrants in Texas who were shipped off to Kamala Harris's house on Christmas Eve in the freezing cold. They look like biblical figures looking for the stable. And I did one about Tyre Nichols called Castlegate. You can see in this screenshot from the video that was taken on the police cameras. You can see this big stop sign and the street sign, castle Gate. And he's almost home, but he's locked out of the castle. And they're screaming, stop, stop. And they're the ones who need to be stopped. It was just such a strong image for me.

Wow.

Yeah.

I also went to the Van Gogh immersion. We could possibly have been there on the same day because I went to Detroit. I know it's been to Grand Rapids and maybe a couple of other Michigan cities.

What did you think?

I loved it. And, you know, what I really wanted to do was to lie down on the floor and just look up. But I really. That was not socially acceptable.

That was part of my poem, because a child I was watching did that. There was a little boy who. There was a star figure on the floor, and he centered his feet on it, and he stood there like a superhero in the star. But a little girl lay down and let those flower petals cover her up.

Well, that little girl was me, as they say, or who I wanted to be. Oh. Sometimes it's just no fun being a grown up. But I loved it. And I've always admired Van Gogh. I mean, who does not admire Van Gogh? He's universally loved. I think for good reason, and it's.

A wonderful presentation of his work.

Well, thank you so much for sharing those with us, and I hope that they interest some of our listeners. And it's been wonderful talking to you.

You too, Susie. Thank you for having me.

You're welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to our talented poets and authors. Until next time, this has been Washington Square On-Air, where we showcase selections from Lansing Community College's literary journal, The Washington Square Review, a publication featuring writers from the Great Lakes State, across the nation and around the world. To find out more about The Washington Square Review, visit lcc.edu/wsr. We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed sharing.