features LANA HECHTMAN AYERS

features LANA HECHTMAN AYERS

"The biggest challenge of my interactive project was to figure out how one train of thought could leave the station, travel three different tracks, yet still arrive at the same depot. Even with my math background, the best way I could come up with to handle this was to write the poem from the perspective of a ruminating persona. As she ruminates, I imagine her to be in different states of mind — resigned, hopeful, rebellious — but ultimately she knows where her own reality lies. Thus, she always ends up in the same mental place, the one that sparked the series of ruminations."

~ Lana Hechtman Ayers

"Red Riding's Wood"

E. A. Hanninen - 2007

There is no snow on the ground.
The woods are filled with the sound
of no sound, not even my own breathing.
It isn't dark. The air is thin with purple
light and the faster I step the quieter
it gets. Where am I going?

Up ahead I see the trees dwindle
to patchy pine and I near the clearing
where the thatched cottage
of my grandma's house should be.
I pass the balsam tree into which
I carved my initials when I was
only three – ER (Eve Riding) –
and for which I received
the untender kiss of a switch.

Instead of ER there is a fresh wound
in the bark onto which a rainbow-
shaped arc has been cut, a symbol
for what I do not know. I turn
and turn and turn but cannot see
anyone nearby who could have
made this mark. My finger traces
the shape and feels the dampness
of the wood, as if the tree's
rough life had bled out
when gouged by the knife . . .

Am I in bed, is this another dream?
Will I wake to find myself alone?
I think of Frost's poem.
That wood in which two paths diverged
and I have the urge to travel only

the beaten path, that goes . . .

the road less traveled, where . . .

off-road, no path at all, except . . .

"Bark 'n' Bite"

E. A. Hanninen - 2007

Eve Anthony Hanninen: What was your favorite part about working on your chosen Option? Least favorite?

Lana Hechtman Ayers: It was particularly helpful for me to use for my persona a modern version of Red Riding Hood, all grown up, because she is one of the main characters in the poetry manuscript I am working on currently. That manuscript attempts to tell a story in a series of poems. As a poet with little experience writing fiction, it is a new challenge for me to think about the motivations and histories of various characters in a story. Writing this poem for the interactive project forced me to go deeper into the character as I was envisioning her. The difficult part about that was trying to prevent her from being a cliché by giving her fixed ideas or goals. As humans, we are always processing, agonizing over, trying to make up our minds which actions to take. So the interactive exercise actually helped me to flesh out my character more, make her more real. The part of this project I least enjoyed was having to write answers to these questions because, as is obvious by now, I am a dull and uninventive, terrible prose writer.

EAH: Hardly that! So what attracted you to writing poetry, and what other occupations have you explored with as much enthusiasm?

LHA: There are only two things I ever really wanted to be since childhood – a poet or an astronaut. All the way back to my earliest memory, I can recall feeling this void inside me I had no words for, but now would call an innate cosmic sense of the aloneness of being in a body. Somehow, when I read my first poems, and had poetry read aloud to me in school, I experienced the reaching out of words to connect with another being, despite the boundaries selfhood imposed. That was it – I was hooked as a reader of poetry, and then a writer of it. Also, at a young age, I experienced something profoundly moving about the night sky so full of galaxies and stars, and thought maybe out there other beings are searching for something more, some way to deeply connect. Since my dad told me girls couldn't be astronauts, and my college physics professors had accents I couldn't decipher, I gave up on the astronaut thing and pursued poetry as my sole passion. For a living, I've done any innumerable things, never pursuing any with even an iota of my passion for poetry. But someday, I just may get back to that astronaut thing.

Lana Hechtman Ayers of Kirkland, WA is a manuscript consultant, workshop leader, and runs Concrete Wolf Chapbook Press. She has authored two collections of poetry, Dance From Inside My Bones, winner of the 2006 Violet Reed Haas Award, and Love is a Weed (chapbook), both available from her website.

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