Tell us about your path to writing.
I grew up in a journalism-degree household in Portland, Oregon. My father was in advertising and my mother had worked for years in the fields of advertising and public relations, even though most women didn’t work in that era. Though she stopped working when I was born, there were always books in the house, we all read, my father was very into language, particularly names, because of his copywriting. He would try advertising slogans out on us at the dinner table. I always loved the written word and had my first poem (a haiku) published in seventh grade. I grabbed onto poetry in high school and wrote the typical teenage mush, about boys and nature. In high school I won a creative writing award at graduation and then went smack up against reality once I got to college, where my writing – either stories or poems – clearly needed to get to the next level. Spending a year at junior college with excellent writing teachers who set a high bar gave me the discipline and momentum to pull myself up to a higher level when I went onto university in the creative writing program.
What tips would you give someone taking their first steps in creative work? What did you need to hear when you were getting started?
First of all, don’t be afraid. You will write bad poems. You will write less-bad poems. You will write better poems. I remember my first poetry class at the jr. college, the teacher outlining how we would be required to type or handwrite our poems on mimeograph paper and drop them at her office, so copies could be run, then in each class we’d sit in a circle and read the poem aloud and then receive real-time critique from the others. I was horrified. In front of people? But I soon got over it and realized the value of it. You have to have this kind of feedback. And you have to be willing to revise. And revise. You have to develop the skills to step back from the poem and think about the feedback, and decide where you think changes will improve the work and where you want to leave it alone. It’s all about concrete images, I had to learn that fast. Set the reader in the poem immediately. The way they’ll get into the poem is through your creation of the scene. Lastly, don’t be afraid.
Give us some background on the pieces you contributed to this issue.
At my Sunday school, there was a child in our kindergarten room, as described in the poem. I always had a stomach ache when we drove to church, knowing he would be in class, and his behavior would be erratic. When he was calm, he was okay, you could talk to him, but you just never knew. Years later, when I was fourteen, he showed up at a week of church camp. The recreation area in the lodge had an upright piano and he would pound on it, declaring he was Captain Nemo, of Jules Vernes’ Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and red-faced. He probably was autistic, sadly undiagnosed in that era. Later when I was eighteen, I had a roommate who knew him and he came by from time to time with her friends and was just a regular kid. I wanted to capture the apprehension you can feel in uncomfortable situations as a child, and not tell anyone, but not tell the story in a condescending way.
Martha Clarkson’s writing can be found in The Seattle Times, Clackamas Literary Review, Seattle Review, Portland Review, The Sun magazine, Mothering magazine, Feminine Rising, Quarter Past Eight, and Nimrod. She is the winner of the Anderbo Fiction Prize for the story “Her Voices, Her Room,” which has been produced as a podcast by PenDust Radio. She has two notable short stories in Best American Short Stories. Martha was a former poetry editor for Word Riot.