{"id":1419,"date":"2011-09-10T13:19:00","date_gmt":"2011-09-10T20:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=1419"},"modified":"2025-02-27T10:52:49","modified_gmt":"2025-02-27T18:52:49","slug":"jan-beatty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/jan-beatty\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 68: Jan Beatty"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"JanBeatty_NewBioImage\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

About Jan Beatty<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Jan Beatty\u2019s books include Red Sugar (2008), Boneshaker (2002), and Mad River (1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize), published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Beatty hosts and produces Prosody, a public radio show on NPR affiliate WYEP-FM featuring national writers. She worked as a welfare caseworker, an abortion counselor, in maximum security prisons, and as a waitress for fifteen years. She directs the creative writing program at Carlow University, where she teaches in the MFA program. She\u2019s hoping to complete her fourth book of poems this summer.<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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A Profile of the Author<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Notes on \u201cAmerican Revolver\u201d<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been trying to write \u201cAmerican Revolver\u201d for a number of years, but just couldn\u2019t figure out how to write a poem about a guy who robbed whorehouses for a living. Not a lot of models out there. In my previous books, I have poems about prison, some of them reflecting the time I spent in maximum security as a social worker, and later as a teacher. I didn\u2019t want to repeat or revisit the issues of these poems. What makes \u201cAmerican Revolver\u201d work, I think, is highlighting the oddness of both the ex-con and the speaker\u2014he\u2019s robbing whorehouses and she\u2019s decided to have sex with him while he\u2019s reciting the 19th amendment. Can she be a feminist if she turns her back, so to speak, on the women\u2019s right to vote? To what degree is she implicated, as someone who engages with him, knowing that he terrorizes people? How does desire relate to the oddness and danger, or does it? My hope is to make this messy and unresolved: having humor on the edge of desire\/on the edge of self-destruction.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes on Reading<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Right now I\u2019m reading D.A. Powell\u2019s Chronic, Anne Carson\u2019s Nox, Ross Gay\u2019s Bringing the Shovel Down, Stacey Waite\u2019s the lake has no saint, Reginald Shepherd\u2019s Red Clay Weather, A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos, and Scavenge by RJ Gibson. I\u2019mreally looking forward to some books that are coming out: Judith Vollmer\u2019s The Water Books, Toi Derricotte\u2019s The Undertaker\u2019s Daughter, and Aaron Smith\u2019s Appetite. I always go back to Ed Ochester\u2019s Unreconstructed, James Allen Hall\u2019s Now You\u2019re the Enemy, Wanda Coleman\u2019s Ostinato Vamps, Off-Season City Pipe by Allison Hedge Coke, and work by Alicia Ostriker, Gerald Stern, and Etheridge Knight to name a few.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I read a lot of nonfiction\u2014right now a lot of books on Canada, since I\u2019m heading off on a train trip across Canada in August. I\u2019m reading a book on Winnipeg, since I\u2019m half-Canadian, and that\u2019s where my birth father is from. I\u2019m reading some books on arctic exploration. Nonfiction that I always return to: In-Between Places and The West Pole by Diane Glancy, anything by Gretel Erlich, Jon Krakauer, Terry Tempest Williams, Rick Bass.<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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\"Willow<\/figure>\n\n\n

“American Revolver” by Jan Beatty<\/a><\/h2>\n\n

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