About Katherine

October 6, 2016:  My two books of poetry are Island and Living Room (prose poems).  My third book, My CIA, is a lyric essay/memoir.  My CIA was named a top ten book of 2012 by the Review of Art, Literature, Philosophy and Humanities and added to their ongoing list of great nonfiction reads.  It won a Baker Artist Award; was showcased on Maryland Public Television’s, An Artworks Special; and was featured through an art installation co-… more

RUN SCREAM UNBURY SAVE

The excerpt here is from my book-length, creative nonfiction manuscript that just won the Autumn House Open Book Competition.  The judge was Michael Martone.  The book, all 166 pages of it, will be out in February of 2017.  Here is what Michael said about the manuscript.

Run Scream Unbury Save
Katherine McCord
Autumn House Press
September 20, 2016
 
 
To “READ” (and yes I am using all that graphic punctuation with intent!) this extraordinary memoir, Run Scream Unbury Save, I had to employ a ZIP Extractor to extract (from the brain-like folds of the CLOUD) this gorgeously convoluted and original origamied textual text of the not so transparent text of this bookish book.  That is to say, embedded in this message is the message that this mean medium is the message (a blast from the past!) and what a divine mess of a message it is.
 
Too often, it seems to me, we construct our books as if they are mere transcriptions of oral tales, desiring to invoke a waking dream in the reader while disguising the scaffolding of the narrative delivery device (the book itself), suppressing, consciously, the self-conscious consideration of self-consciousness.  McCord, in Run Scream Unbury Save, reignites the curious rotary engine of curiosity, the spirographic folding back, that ululation, as a great storyteller confronting the unique high-techery of the book.  Believe me, this book cannot, ever, be made into a movie or binge TV series or streamed video.  No, it is a book’s BOOK.  A map more detailed than the thing it represents.  It confronts the BOOK and does what only the BOOK can do and does it with goddamn gumption and infinite grace.
 
Katherine McCord’s life here is an open book book, and the fine instrument of that opening is the story of that story.
 
 
Michael Martone
Author of Michael Martone and Memoranda
  • RUN SCREAM UNBURY SAVE
    RUN SCREAM UNBURY SAVE
    Google-illionth Final Draft that won the Autumn House Open Book Award in Creative Nonfiction recently, judged by Michael Martone, and will be out in February of 2017.
  • The Gazillionth Draft of Said Manuscript
    The Gazillionth Draft of Said Manuscript
    The gazillionth draft of said manuscript is incredibly messy because of re-reading, handwritten magical realism-type notes all over said manuscript and shuffling.
  • Slightly Better Picture of Said Manuscript
    Slightly Better Picture of Said Manuscript
    Ditto but perhaps this is a better (centered) picture of said manuscript to make us all happy.
  • RUN SCREAM UNBURY SAVE
    The phone rings after my on-air interview.
  • FullSizeRender.jpg
    FullSizeRender.jpg
    This is a picture of a copy of RUN SCREAM UNBURY SAVE that will be out February 1, 2017.

My CIA: A Memoir

About My CIA: A Memoir

Book Description on the back of the book:
In her third book, a memoir, Katherine McCord uses the lens of the present to delve into the past:  McCord was born in Monrovia, Liberia, Africa, the daughter of a CIA Officer and a beautiful, sheltered, young mother of Irish catholic descent, ten months after the birth of her sister.  After a brief stay in Florida, McCord's father would take on his next mission in Katmandu, Nepal.  There McCord's mother has a nervous breakdown and the family is secretly flown back to the states where McCord and her sister, fiercely close, would grow up in a "normal" Midwest environment but under and within a shroud of secrecy and propelled by disjointed memories, borrowed histories, and confusing recounts of the past.  In My CIA, McCord looks at her life, so far lived with the eyes of a poet, one who knows not how to report and "tell everything" but knows only to tell the truth--of her sorrow, of her hope, of her love and how it finds itself through lyric.  In other words, she gives us everything she has to give and finds that the answers are hard won and sometimes in the asking.

Some Blurbs/Reviews for MY CIA (and some blurbs/reviews--included within the first few pages of the book also--for my other two books of poetry):
Katherine McCord's heartbreaking lyric memoir, My CIA, is a fine example of a literary work in which the artist has found the perfect form to contain the content, a shapely vessel to hold shards of memory and loss.  Just as the life and identity of a CIA agent (the author's father) is provisional, the persona narrating this story of a family fractured by a mysterious father's absences is a shape-shifter: now knowing, now child-like, now elegiac, now funny, now deeply compassionate and forgiving, and always wise and razor-sharp.  Whether McCord is writing about getting on a plane in the middle of the night as a child to go to Nepal or about driving over curbs after a run to the grocery store, talking to her children or mother or sister, or packing up the house to take her family and the dog on vacation in Maine, her voice sings.  This memoir is haunting, disturbing, beautiful, and resonant.  I could not put it down.
--Natalia Rachel Singer, author of Scraping by in the Big Eighties, a memoir.

You'll want to read My CIA in one go, like I did, greedily, ready for every twist and in-breath that comes from the intricate layers of this expressionist tale.  The poetic suspense of My CIA is a bit like Our Man in Havana colliding with Ariel, with deadpan humor and a poetic wit that cuts through the interstices between personal and public history. The family McCord creates, itself a kind of secret agency, operates like a postmodern dollhouse family with the banal-going-on-mysterious behaviors of Mother, Sisters, the Girls and the Father juxtaposed with genuine enigmas.  What family espionage is revealed during a conversation between the Sisters where one holds the phone to the washing machine and the other responds, "But you wash everything"? There are hints of underhand influence and Who is the manipulator? floats above the pages making the reader want to investigate anyone's daily reality; but McCord's language is true blue.  My CIA is at once smooth and complex, a comedy of manners and ghostly politics played on the stage of the Cold War, anticipating the epilogue of the 21st century.  Best enjoyed with a martini, shaken not stirred. --Kathleene West, author of The Summer of the Sub-Comandante and Water Witching

Naming My CIA a top ten book for 2012 and placing it on their ongoing list of Great Nonfiction Books, Sarah Lee Fox of The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities wrote, "Ms. McCord is a charming writer, and I was knocked out by my CIA, oops, I mean, MY CIA. There is a mix here of the normal and ordinary life, and the very exotic if now existentially threatening previous life . . . She's a stylist well capable of blending the banal and the scary."

“My CIA is an informative and curious read,” Reviewer's Choice, Midwest Book Review

“PROVOCATIVE,” NEWPAGES.COM



More Praise for McCord:

"The pared inscription, as well as the delicacy and discretion, of Katherine McCord's debut collection, Island, are always deeply compelling and often breathtaking. The honorable simplicity of this work rewards us time and time again with both wisdom and delight. Quietly elegant, and as intimate as a whisper, this is a book to hold close in the silence of night."
~David St. John, author of The Auroras

"McCord's is a searching poetry, asking questions that have answers too hard to bear."
~Sheila Cowing, author of Jackrabbit Highways
and Stronger in the Broken Places

"Katherine McCord explodes triumphantly onto the poetry scene with her newest collection of prose poems . . . She writes with fevered delicacy. . .and offers us an astounding package. This is the work of a mature, talented writer who integrates her personal amazement at the details of daily life with the inescapable act of being an artist . . . It is deeply compelling work that speaks to the artist's method and madness with delicious effect . . . McCord gives us a year of her life and it is a privilege to experience it through her passionate language."
~Jeanie C. Williams, co-editor of Saludos! Poemas

"Sometimes from dry ground some of the most important and exciting poetry springs. From the saturated reds and greens of New Mexico comes the moving lyric of a life told in poems. Katherine McCord's poems captured me from the first line . . . and carried me through their autobiography in poems. I knew it was a book I had to pay attention to and it's a collection I am proud to have had some small part in bringing to the public. It's the big emptiness of the desert sky crying out to be filled that pulls these lines from the poet's heart. It's a cool cloth on the dying man's brow, the only comfort for miles and the only comfort needed."
~Robert Bixby, author of Come Along

Here are the beginning pages of the book:
MY CIA

A Memoir

Katherine McCord

Telling Our Stories Press


Showcasing the Art of Literary Personal Narratives

Published by Telling Our Stories Press

The independent literary imprint with a focus on
the art of short memoir and
personal narratives.

Copyright ©2012 by Katherine McCord
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011933205

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

Excerpts from Parts I and II appear in South Loop Review, Volume 11,
and are used by permission of the author.

Excerpts from “Blowback” appear in Fogged Clarity, December 2009,
and are used by permission of the author.

Requests for information should be forwarded to
Telling Our Stories Press
visit
www.TellingOurStoriesPress.com

Cover Design by Chris Schramm
Typeset and book layout by Chris Schramm

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN-13: 978-0982922842
ISBN-10: 0982922842



For Tom, Greta and Adi
again and again and again. . . .


and for my mother and my father
and my sister and my brothers
and my brother-in-law and my nieces. . . .

Here are some of my pieces (and excerpts) introducing the prose of the book:

“O, my god,” Sylvia said, “O, my god, what am I / That these late mouths should cry open / In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.” --my italics.

---


It seemed there was a room for playing house--

a kitchen, dolls.

And then indecipherable things.

Finally, a heart I made with glue.

The boy across. His head on his folded arms.

Until I can’t take it anymore. And everything,

everything

is a dare. Becomes love.

Explodes into words.


---

Day by day my father flies backwards.



And the pure black dog who was true.



The inside light of winter



and the last few leaves shine through.



Like the book I read with its anguish.



I say, to anyone, it is true.



I tell my students, read it.


It will change you through.

---

Blowback



And where were her people? Spun tight? Deep?

(for Greta and Adi)



“‘Blowback’ is a CIA term first used in March
1954. . . . It is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the US government’s international activities that have been kept secret from the American people.”
—Chalmers Johnson
---

I write a book for her. Then my sister and I dredge up the past. And after the last kid is sealed inside, we ride to the sound of phones. The house and life before me. The fan fires. The light flickers. An explosion behind the jets in the sky. We call it Sun. From a friend’s we go on a walk. See a house behind hollyhocks swaying in lanes. Fixated, I’m uprooted by my sister’s hand. Come on, she says. I don’t remember ever being so far from home. At the hospital stairs are carpeted like tires. A Coke machine dispenses cups for a quarter. It is our childhood. We race. Choose the best damned one. ?
So I list things. Like where I can no longer go. A series of sagging second-story porches. And how upon waking I see it. That the mirror reflects the truth. Like a bullet hole.


So oblivion’s a mirror. Shame intermingles. How to proceed with the body and heart and soul you’ve been given. Then there are two trees. Red apples. White. Prodigious. Scarce. Separated by a path. The thunk of a prize tumbling down a shaft slow.


And what’s with the shoes? Always upright.
Unlaced. One of two. At the same intersection. All winter. Dispersed. As if some of us are lifted, willing ourselves to stay intact.
  • Dad
    Dad
    This is a picture of my dad, a couple years before I was born, probably during the time he joined the CIA. His decision of course will change the entire course of our family, my birth, my lens for life, all that I write about in MY CIA: A MEMOIR. Here is a link to audio of an interview I did about the book on Aaron Henkin's wonderful show, THE SIGNAL (Baltimore, WYPR, 88.1): http://wypr.org/post/signal-13114.
  • Front Cover and a Little More
    Front Cover and a Little More
    This is a shot of the front, back and spine of MY CIA: A MEMOIR. It's a nontraditional memoir. While creative nonfiction, it is a lyric essay, hovering over the line between poetry and prose, therefore embracing both.
  • My CIA, the book, an excerpt
    What I have to tell you

ISLAND

Here is what some others wrote about my first book, poetry, ISLAND:

"[Katherine McCord] is a remarkable poet whose work is certain and hesitant at once, compressed and expansive. She wants silence to speak as carefully as her words. She sees poetry in the purest sense, working toward pieces where important things aren't merely described or reported but transformed. Katherine McCord is an artist, through and through, taking aspects of ordinary life and finding fear and wonder in them." --Marianne Boruch

"The pared inscription, as well as the delicacy and discretion, of Katherine McCord's debut collection, ISLAND, are always deeply compelling and often breathtaking. The honorable simplicity of this work rewards us time and time again with both wisdom and delight. Quietly elegant, and as intimate as a whisper, this is a book to hold close in the silence of the night." --David St. John
  • Flower, me
    Flower, me
    This is a picture of me, and our beloved dog, Flower, taken by one of my girls!--we can't remember which--and she would have been only 3 or 5 or so!--during the time I was finalizing ISLAND. The picture says everything. I'm outside with my girls in New Mexico (yay!), I'm "holding" the dog, talking on the phone, and they are running around playing. :)
  • ISLAND, an excerpt
    Blue is Someone else’s sun.

LIVING ROOM: A Year in the Life of a Writing Mother

Here is what some others have written to describe LIVING ROOM:

Katherine McCord's moving sequence of prose poems, LIVING ROOM, expresses truthfully and with poignant, even painful clarity the trials and triumphs of a life claimed by conflicting loves: love of writing, love of husband and children. She gives us a year of this life, and it is a privilege to experience it through her evocative, passionate language. --Kelly Cherry

Katherine McCord explodes triumphantly onto the poetry scene with her newest collection of prose poems written over the course of a year. She writes with fevered delicacy as she details her daily struggles with conflicting passions often at odds with one another: writing and family. She writes of "days lost" and "the sick feeling I'd been given too much" from her entry on June 6th to "The fear first and foremost that I can't do it, that I can't write anything worth anything today" from June 7th.

Her first entry reveals that: "It's the same for me, being a mother and writing. I live in the existence of being forever in love with the irreparable inescapable acts. I'm good at both. I'm lousy at both." McCord writes with poignant clarity and truth as she exposes her perilous relationship with the blank page each day: "Greta asks me if she'll ever have to have another blood test. She knows I don't know. I say, holding her, you're probably done." And then "I suppose none of us knew the difference between each others' pain." From July 23rd. She infuses the activities of daily living and all that entails with the blank page and offers us an astounding package. This is the work of a mature, talented writer who integrates her personal amazement at the details of daily life with the inescapable act of being an artist

It is brave and daring writing when the poet bares her soul and shows up with the naked truth of her journey: "You see, I'm atop my favorite desert city, out the window, just lights and stars." From August 3rd. On August 5th she discusses her teaching experiences and offers: "How do I explain? Students, while lovely, can sometimes be cruel. Or every once in a while there's one who rears up from the center of the class, cruel. She can't help it. In class I don't react. That's what you get, I suppose, for teaching what's at the core of your life. No less than asking for comments on a beating heart."

On August 6th she confesses "Of course these entries almost always begin with long narratives, in long hand, on the page. Then I go to the heart of them and pull out the truth - often a line or phrase and begin there." On August 7th she writes: "The truth is I've learned to love without success. I've watched so many people reach old age without it. In my youth, success was something glamorous, ... It flew above us like the sheer streaks of a plane. In my life, I've reconciled glamour. I want art" ... On the same day she writes of her daughters: "Right now - the oldest especially - they seem outraged. They are already living a woman's life." Sometime during the time period from August 9 - 11 she shares: "As a child I had a knack for getting people mad at my silence."

Reading this book of prose poems is to bear witness to the transformation of the artist from bud to flowering blossom. This is sobering work. Herein are the moving lyrics of a life told in verse and, as such, a poetic autobiography. It is deeply compelling work that speaks to the artist's method and madness with delicious effect. McCord gives us a year of her life and it is a privilege to experience it through her passionate language. She is an artist through and through.

Reviewed by Jeanie C. Williams (originally published in SOUTHWEST BOOKVIEWS)
  • Greta, Adi
    Greta, Adi
    This is a picture of my girls, Greta and Adi (Adelaide), when they were five and three years old. Gorgeous, amazing, funny, smart, wonderful. This is of them during the time, year, years?, I wrote LIVING ROOM.
  • LIVING ROOM: A Year in the Life of a Writing Mother (an excerpt)
    my other daughter’s rainbow above us, framed, perpendicular to the flowered ground

Muse Annie

Muse Annie is a sequence of poems that turns on a conversation the speaker is having with Annie, an other, a second self, anyone, everyone, that begins a short time after the death of her father. The prose poems, sometimes funny, sometimes dark ask everything of the artist, the writer, saying, It must be better, it must be more, it must be joy, in the end. Five, all five that I sent, were taken by and recently published in AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW. Ten were melded into a "story" by CAKETRAIN and published there. Many others have been published in various literary magazines and journals.
  • Muse Annie (an excerpt)
    I hide her shoes.
  • Dad, Mom, me
    Dad, Mom, me
    This is my dad and mom (holding me) in Monrovia, Liberia, Africa, where I was born. Many of the themes taken up in Muse Annie are of this time.

Muse Annie II

Construction:

For Muse Annie II, a chapbook of prose poems I wrote, unpublished as a whole but some of the poems published singly in literary journals, I used mostly vintage construction paper, with contemporary, woven in, most medium weight, and sometimes used, very old wrapping paper (or the front or back of also (truly) vintage wallpaper and on) found by, and generously and kindly given to me at my careful request, my very dear mother-in-law at my husband’s very dear father’s parents’ lake house after they had both died. The text is in Times New Roman, mostly 12-point font while the “book”/package description on the back is in Thonburi at 10 point. I don’t remember how I created the illustrations. I was out of my body when doing so, but I can tell you the women/girls are indicative of drawings I did as a child and was told by a probably well-meaning, I’m sure, bless her/him, family friend to draw more fluidly. I think her/his words were, Don’t use triangles for their bodies/dresses. As a child, I never made them fly. I’m making them fly now. Because I can. The packaging, again to mirror, the way my sister, mother and I found delicious construction paper on store shelves when my sister and I were children, but is this time eco friendly—because I had to. Even the price stickers I was lucky enough to find and stick on the outside are old and wonderfully familiar in that way.

In other words, everything is real.

In the end I created a total of 21 packets/”books.” Upon opening, the owner can change the order of the prose poems inside, one on each page/sheet of construction paper because most of the pieces aren’t numbered. Otherwise all 21 “books”/packets of construction paper are the same minus one or two variances in each, such as colors of construction paper and the ordering of the colors/truly vintage pieces or vintage wallpaper used and that here and there in a few packets a page number or two appears suggesting the package can be/is/was once/will be a book. Each packet is about 9 x 12 inches and a little over 1/4th to 1/2 of an inch thick.

Finally, based on memory, I have housed the 21 packets in a “blond” wood cabinet I unearthed in a warehouse because it’s reminiscent of the one my most favorite elementary school teacher, Mrs. Cornelius, had to house art supplies, shelves and shelves of construction paper in all colors and paint and glue within, but this time with blue lights (to me, the best winter holiday color of all, especially when reflected on snow!) to pull the joy forward to 2015/16 and on.

--Katherine McCord, November 2015
  • Muse Annie II's Cabinet
    Muse Annie II's Cabinet
    This is the inside of that blond wood cabinet I found in a warehouse, the "edition" of 21 Muse Annie II packets/books.
  • Muse Annie II - The Back
    Muse Annie II - The Back
    Here is one example of what the book description given in the Project Overview looks like "on" the back of the book (really just packaged after the last piece of construction paper, the last "page" of the chapbook). Here I've printed it on vintage wallpaper.
  • Muse Annie II - From Within
    Muse Annie II - From Within
    Here I've pulled out three pages from the content of one book package, the acknowledgements page (listing where some of the poems have been published, such as AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW and PARAGRAPH, for example), the title page, and one of the (prose) poems. The lavender piece of construction paper is from the 70s and came in a package still sealed, the orange piece is from the 50s and came gently bound but not sealed in a package of 12 and the "buff" (as it was described) piece of construction paper is also from the 70s.
  • Muse Annie II Unpackaged
    Muse Annie II Unpackaged
    This is Muse Annie "unpackaged." I want the experience of "opening" this chapbook to be like when one opens a package of construction paper, especially as it was packaged in the 70s when I was a child, the smells, the plastic crinkling, the pulp feel of the soft but rough paper, even the paste smell. And, oh, those colors! Although I added in, among the vintage, pieces I found from a package of "Multicultural Construction Paper"--every skin color possible! Each "bookpackage" is slightly different, unique, offers its own version of itself upon opening.
  • Muse Annie II
    Muse Annie II
    Book Art Version of Muse Annie as described in the Project Overview. There are also excerpts from the manuscript above in Muse Annie and the work samples above. Here you can especially see the "cover" (eco friendly packaging, as close as I could get to shrinkwrap as I couldn't find eco friendly shrinkwrap). Notice, also, the vintage price sticker from a roll of them I found! So familiar to me!--this, too, is from the 70s!

Ms. Karl's Blog

In the first frame on the left is a picture of an illustration I'm using to introduce Ms. Karl's Blog, a series of vignettes, blog style, I started at the request of my husband. I'd like to think the picture is of Ms. Karl somewhat. At least the drawing is in response to someone telling me as a child I was drawing wrong (nope, not a family member!). You see, my female characters were all in dresses, and their dresses were triangles. I immediately stopped drawing. But, hey, the triangles are back. :) And I in no way claim this picture is art--writing is my medium--but sometimes I try to jog myself with things like this, simply, as a part of my process.
  • Flying
    Flying
    So here is the image I described before. Here are a few excerpts from Ms. Karl's Blog: He’s a physicist who has a penchant for rock music. In his parallel universe, he gets to conduct experiments and write songs. In this one he works “in the industry” and strolls the house with his guitar in hand, playing, a faraway look in his eyes. Karl has two kids and a wife, me. We love him desperately. We love him dearly. “Pure science” almost impossible for a non-theorist to conduct in today’s world and a family to support, Karl has decided on Karma. And a business, on the side, to put his two girls through college. That’s Karl. Always thinking. First it was Blue Skies, Bagels and Pies. Then it was Hot Ketchup. Now it’s this. But this one he’s really doing. And he wants it to turn on Karma. I tell him I get goose bumps when I hear there’ll be a Team Hope. That’s mine, I say. I want that one. If we can just get them through college, says Karl. *** Karl doesn’t want me to write about Karl. It’s embarrassing, he says. I say, Don’t tell me what to write about. You asked me to do this, I say. Karl shuffles away. Karl is tired. But I’m not supposed to tell you that. Karl is fictitious anyway, I yell after Karl. He laughs. Okay, you want ideology? I say. I’ve been thinking about loyalty between friends. Since we don’t have any friends. Here. Karl laughs again. You’re the one who put the Obama sign in the yard, says Karl. You’re the one who bought the peace sign bumper sticker, I say. You’re the one who let your hair grow so long and straight and parted down the middle one of your students called it hippie hair, he says. Which I love. Quit changing the subject, I say. Notice how the people here ditch you when they find out your proclivities: equality, social welfare, affirmative action. Maybe they think it’s catching, says Karl. I’m hurt, I say. I don’t want our kids to stick out at school. For what they didn’t ask for. Let’s move, I add. I have to work, says Karl. Put the girls through college. So they can save the world. Too late, I say. That’s what you think, says Karl. *** It’s that you say I’m a physicist, says Karl. That’s what I don’t want you to say. Because I’m not, he says. You got your doctorate in it, I say. Isn’t that enough? No, says Karl. You have to be chosen. You have to have money. You have to practice. Well, then don’t call me a poet, I say. You wrote two books, he says. Rilke never conceded he was a poet, not even at the end of his life, I say. Okay, says Karl. *** We are deep in November and I’m canceling appointments left and right. Karl, I say, do me a favor, por favor? Karl knows what’s coming. Go out and get me some treats? I can’t move, I say, to Karl. Since it’s late, the dogs, too, are in fetal positions on our bed. Karl puts on a T-shirt. Karl goes out. Karl comes back. Balances the still-wrapped straw on the lid. Team Wayward, says Karl. Team Problem with Authority. Team Where Do We Go From Here. *** “Good-bye to Shy.” Our local community college is offering the course. Online. I tell Karl we should take it together. That it will help with his business. And that I’ll figure out why I clam up when I’m in a room with others who do what I do. Karl, I say, you can uncover something about the fragile human psyche that’ll make your Karma T-shirts better. People will snap them up. It’ll be simpler. Being who we really are. Karl thinks this is a good idea except he decides it’s enough to follow me around taking notes. *** Looking up from my book, I say to Karl, I LOVE Kerouac but we just can’t run around like that. We have to focus. You are just getting this? says Karl. He’s right, but I had been looking for inspiration, knowing, ideas. These days we have to extricate the girls from their rooms. Pry them from their computers. Force-feed them healthy food. While the dogs follow us around, room to room, like beggars, our girls we feel completely outwitted by--what is this horrible adolescence?--did we actually live through it? In the beginning, to us, theirs had something to do with schools. But now that’s all gone vague. Now it’s about survival. Have you eaten? we say. Slept? Then, on the worst days: It’s all going to be okay. Go to your art, we tell the oldest who won’t talk. What are you out of? Paint? Canvas? Film? And stumped, to the youngest, the horse rescuer, we say, Let’s just get you to the farm.
  • Big Bang
    Big Bang
    More Mrs. Karl's to introduce a couple more from Mrs. Karl's Blog: We are deep in November and I’m canceling appointments left and right. Karl, I say, do me a favor, por favor? Karl knows what’s coming. Go out and get me some treats? I can’t move, I say, to Karl. Since it’s late, the dogs, too, are in fetal positions on our bed. Karl puts on a T-shirt. Karl goes out. Karl comes back. Balances the still-wrapped straw on the lid. Team Wayward, says Karl. Team Problem with Authority. Team Where Do We Go From Here. *** “Good-bye to Shy.” Our local community college is offering the course. Online. I tell Karl we should take it together. That it will help with his business. And that I’ll figure out why I clam up when I’m in a room with others who do what I do. Karl, I say, you can uncover something about the fragile human psyche that’ll make your Karma T-shirts better. People will snap them up. It’ll be simpler. Being who we really are. Karl thinks this is a good idea except he decides it’s enough to follow me around taking notes.
  • East
    East
    Another: Looking up from my book, I say to Karl, I LOVE Kerouac but we just can’t run around like that. We have to focus. You are just getting this? says Karl. He’s right, but I had been looking for inspiration, knowing, ideas. These days we have to extricate the girls from their rooms. Pry them from their computers. Force-feed them healthy food. While the dogs follow us around, room to room, like beggars, our girls we feel completely outwitted by--what is this horrible adolescence?--did we actually live through it? In the beginning, to us, theirs had something to do with schools. But now that’s all gone vague. Now it’s about survival. Have you eaten? we say. Slept? Then, on the worst days: It’s all going to be okay. Go to your art, we tell the oldest who won’t talk. What are you out of? Paint? Canvas? Film? And stumped, to the youngest, the horse rescuer, we say, Let’s just get you to the farm.
  • Mercy
    Mercy
    And lastly: Karl, I say, I'm going crazy. I have to have a plan. Karl, I say, once when I was little we were taken by our grandmother to a restored theater in downtown St. Joe. We saw a travel film. First the velvet, the hush. And then we were somewhere overseas. An ancient city. Sunlight. Sea. Karl, I say, my father about to leave us, my mother wearily but beautifully making sure we saw his mother. Karl, I say, so much of the film was sky. Karl, I say, I'm at a stoplight and our oldest--I don't even see her get her camera out it's become just another motion of her body--Karl, I say, she wants to see what I cannot see.

Form's Intervention

As a writer, I'm always struggling with finding a form to house the end result of my impulse to write. This picture taken by my aunt (Margot Howard) and my prose poem (?), strung out, on its own, fitting no other group of poems so that it can find it's way into a book, address that, I believe.
  • Form's Intervention
    Form's Intervention
    I chose this picture taken by my aunt (Margot Howard) as she was driving around St. Joseph, MO, our home town, to introduce my poem (next frame) because I think it is heartbreaking and desperate and funny (if you don't laugh, you will cry) in the way that we are often absurd as humans. I love the way "Derrill" is spelled. I love the all-out-at-wit's-end voice of the speaker who made this sign. I love how even the pole of the sign is used as canvas for the speaker's message: "No Tresspassing." "Derrill," it seems, would have To trespass to read the sign. I am a writer exactly like the author of this sign. I am just as desperate. But her piece has found its form: a sign in a yard in the Midwest, my childhood home. My poem about form that I think this picture illustrates is in the next frame.
  • Form's Intervention
    "Form, what have you got to say for yourself?"

Gatekeeper

This is new work. I'm seeing where it is headed. Given that, I can't shake these poems that will follow. They are introducing something I have yet to "know." I keep writing, but other than these poems and a few other prose pieces that all link, I'm throwing a lot away. Here they are



Spring Explains



The blooms were

falling over themselves, dropping,

tangled, spoken,

loud, elegant, nothing. Away



---


The desert, on the other hand, was sometimes

a line, a loop, a swirl.


---

At the opening, among the paintings and poems, are a wine glass, a couple exiting, some scattered programs and pamphlets, a huge arrangement of flowers.

I am the last one in.

What accompanies me is sideways rain. Two gridlocked beltways, anguish, my inability to see well in the dark. And there is a lot of dark.

Then I think of my husband singing. Like aftermath. The voice rising up.



--Katherine McCord

Here is a link to one of the other opening pieces for Gatekeeper. It was published recently in PLATH PROFILES:

http://www.iun.edu/%7enwadmin/plath/vol5/Poetry_McCord.pdf
  • Spring Explains
    Spring Explains
    This picture, taken by my daughter, an amazing photographer, is the "cover" here of my new work, Gatekeeper.
  • Memoir Mercy
    Memoir Mercy
    This picture is of the manuscript I read in the next box/frame (to the right of this one, the one with the film reel on it :) here; it is also of Gatekeeper. The writing on the manuscript in the picture introduces the video. Click on the video icon in the next box/frame to see me reading it.
  • Memoir Mercy
    This is the poem introduced by the last photograph. I like how part of the picture is cut off and almost half is not white but black space; it emphasizes perspective to me. Your perspective, while maybe different from someone else's, is still true. And I want to honor that. :)

ISLAND, black and white cover version

What follows is the description of the black and white cover version of Island within book artish, limited edition packages I made for it:  Island, my first book of poetry, is enclosed. Island is out of print but for some reason I felt compelled to take my last copies with black and white covers and package them attuned to memory. While the poems within are about elements of my adult life (such as being a mother, thinking of the past), I spend a lot of time daydreaming about the sights and feel of my childhood when I would get internally lost, experience reverie. Being still, say, and feeling the summer heat, the breeze, while squatting among roots of one of our old oak trees, and watching the tiny world before me, one of acorns, grass blades, and gaps in the wood I imagined as little homes for various wondrous animals (and fairies). And I can call up more memories that lead to, if not reverie, a kind of peace, satisfaction, the feel of pulling a felt tip pen across a page; eyeing those ubiquitous S&H Green Stamps spilling from a drawer; or trying out each ink color of those bulky pens still made today, a knob you slide down for the different inks enabling you to make an array of colored words. So the enclosed felt tips and/or multi ink pen and the original S&H Green Stamps and/or some other truly vintage sticker may, as they did for me, call up times you can use and, perhaps, even reimagine: Maybe the poems of I will make you want to draw, further illustrating the cover, or write on the pages of I; the stamps will make you remember; the feel of the slips of various kinds of truly vintage paper I have tucked throughout I, along with the poems, will make you want to dream. And if you are a woman, especially, dream (and persevere) you must, given the white male-dominated art world tinged with class and bravado, a scholarly one handed to us by elite schools determining the bounds of a woman’s art, designating she must produce craft or risk being “shrill” and that that craft is insignificant. So maybe reimagine these pieces while you embrace them allowing your memories to be said, as deep as they are. Dare yourself. Irony is a cool, wild thing. Haki Madhubuti, Poet and Founder of the Black Arts Movement, did. See this excerpt from his poem, “In the Interest of Black Salvation”: When I was 17, / I didn’t have time to dream, / Dreams didn’t exist-- / Prayers did, as dreams. / I am now 17 & 8, / I still don’t dream. / Father forgive us for we know what we do. / Jesus saves, / Jesus saves, / Jesus saves--S&H Green Stamps. 
Contents: Island, felt tip pens and/or a “multi color pen,” original S&H Green Stamps from the 60s and 70s, shelf paper that’s tvg* and/or other kinds of tvg* paper (from the 60s and 70s), and even, on the package, a tvg* price sticker. ☺ Oh, and your package may contain an additional sticker, tvg*. Bio: Katherine McCord’s 2 books of poetry are Island and Living Room. Her third book, My CIA, is a lyric essay. My CIA was named a top ten book of 2012 by the Review of Art, Literature, Philosophy and Humanities and added to their ongoing list, Great Nonfiction. It won a Baker Artist Award; was showcased on Maryland Public Television’s An Artworks Special; was featured through an art installation co-produced by MICA’s MFA in Curatorial Practice in early December 2013 in Baltimore; and won Honorable Mention, Eric Hoffer Award, Legacy Nonfiction, 2016. Katherine has published widely in literary journals such as American Poetry Review. She has an MFA in Poetry and MA in Creative Writing. In 2011 and 2014, she won Maryland Individual Artist Awards (state grants in creative writing). She has been awarded finalist/semi-finalist status or Honorable Mention in the Emerging Writer Fellowship Competition, The Writer's Center, Maryland; the Joaquin Miller Cabin Reading Series, DC; the Autumn House Press Competition; The "Discovery"/The Nation Poetry Contest; the Poet Lore Narrative Competition; The Chester H. Jones Foundation National Poetry Competition; The Maryland Poetry Review Poetry Contest; and the fellowship competition, Summer Literary Seminars in Lithuania/Kenya, 2013. She teaches Creative Writing at Stevenson U and UMUC. Finally, she recently won the Gabehart Prize for an excerpt from her newest manuscript, RUN SCREAM UNBURY SAVE, and was named one of 3 finalists for the Quagliano International Poetry Award, 2016. All here either made from recycled materials and/or can be recycled. *tvg – truly vintage 
  • ISLAND, black and white
    This is how I housed the black and white cover version of ISLAND.
  • ISLAND, black and white, back cover
    ISLAND, black and white, back cover
    This is the back cover of ISLAND, my first book of poetry, that is within the "package"/book artish version as described and illustrated.