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The Marvelous Bones of Time: Excavations and Explanations
Author Interview
On The Marvelous Bones of Time: Brenda Coultas in conversation with Robert McDaniel
Q: Congratulations on the upcoming publication of your two poems, “The Abolition Journal” and “A Lonely Cemetery” in The Marvelous Bones of Time. Did you develop their two story lines simultaneously?
A: No, a year apart. Both projects came about from teaching at the Naropa University Summer Writing Program. Each week of the program has a theme, and I taught during the week of Investigative Narrative. That led to the ghost stories as I began to think of the pleasure of narrative and ways to develop it. I remembered one evening with friends telling tales of the uncanny, each one of us trying to top the other with true tales of weirdness and coincidences.
“The Abolition Journal” was the result of a week of focusing on the theme of borders: border states of the mind or cultural or political ones. I began to think of the border I was literally born on (crossing the Ohio River, my head crowning in the back seat while my father drove my mother and our doctor to the hospital). And realizing the significance of the north-south border I grew up on, of how radical that border must have been: a free state and a slave state staring at each other. I wondered if there was any Underground Railroad activity in my own county. And I thought about the history embedded in the names of schools (South Spencer Rebels, Heritage Hills Patriots, etc.) and in the Indiana-Kentucky jokes I grew up with.
Q: When you were attending the Area Industrial Institute studying welding (in Evansville, Indiana) were you doing any writing at that time?
A: No, I had given up on writing at that time. When I was about ten, I tried to write a novel, but I could never figure out how to move the characters around without following every thought or breath. It drove me crazy. I wrote short, funny (inspired by Salinger, of course) essays in high school. I had a wonderful English teacher who encouraged me by reading some of my writing aloud to the class. My mother saved them and sometimes I go back and read them.
I didn’t begin to write again until I was 26. I had a nervous breakdown after the death of my grandmother. I was stuck in a job I hated and drifting. I had to figure out what was going to make me happy. So I returned to writing for which I had a passion since first grade. Once I began to read, I read under the covers with a flashlight. Nothing could stop me. I started college, majored in English Lit and quit fighting my desire.
The great things about the Area Industrial Institute were meeting you and your sister and gaining a trade. I became a welder and went to work at Firestone Steel mending rims.
Q: Brenda, that’s great. At ten years old I was still trying to figure out how many fingers and toes I had. Do you remember the title of the novel you attempted at that age?
A: No, but I remember the setting. A green diner and the narrator was a gum chewing wiseass. It’s not as impressive as it sounds, I only wrote about four pages before giving up in frustration. I had a terrible problem translating the voice or image in my head to paper. I couldn’t get the words to do what I wanted.
Q: Before our visit to Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, California, did you have any idea it would lead to the paranormal extravaganza that lay ahead?
A: No. I had no notion of it being other than another lonely cemetery. I am a huge cemetery fan. I played in our local graveyard when I was child. It’s still a place of comfort, and will be my final resting stop. I always loved the view (from a hill looking out onto a valley) and to decorate the stones and to read the names and dates, to imagine the lives of people who lived in my township a hundred years earlier.
Back to the Chapel of the Chimes. Maybe it was so intense since I was a little lost and it was my first visit to a crematorium. I never knew that people could store the ashes there. I thought you had to bring your loved one home in an urn. Then the motifs, the older crematory with the flower names, spiral staircases. But just walking in and passing through the weird neighborhood where all sorts of lonely men seemed to be hanging out, added to the edge. And there was the hushed and mysterious movement of workers. Ovens. Later, returning with you, exploring the neglected, I still felt like I was walking in a metaphysical realm.
Robert McDaniel is an artist living in Oakland, California who met poet Brenda Coultas when she was studying welding at the Area Industrial Institute in Evansville, Indiana. His painting is reproduced on the jacket of The Marvelous Bones of Time and his trips with Brenda Coultas to the famously mysterious Winchester House in San Jose and the Chapel of the Chimes crematory and columbarium in Oakland helped inspire sections of Coultas’s poem “A Lonely Cemetery.”
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