Clara: This is Story Behind The Story. I'm Clara Sherley-Appel, and my guest today is poet Lauren Eggert-Crowe. Lauren lived in Santa Cruz for some time and in 2010 and 2011 was voted Best Poet in Santa Cruz at Santa Cruz Weekly. During that same period, composer Chris Pratorius set some of her work to music in his piece, "Diary of a Black Widow," which premiered in Santa Cruz Chamber Players in 2010. She now lives in Los Angeles, where she serves on the leadership team for Women Who Submit, an organization that empowers women to publish their work by creating spaces where they can meet, write and helping them navigate the submission process. Lauren, it's so lovely to have you here today. Welcome to Story Behind The Story.

Lauren: Thank you so much for having me, it's wonderful to be here.

Clara: Tell me about your poetry. What's unique about it? What are you trying to work out or work through when you're writing?

Lauren: That's a really good question. Oftentimes, I don't know. Sometimes I feel as if I'm writing with my eyes closed and choosing words out of the ether that I think actually come from somewhere inside my subconscious, and I guess that's one way of saying that I write about subjects that are very personal but that also I try to have, make them have, a sort of universal appeal. I write a lot about the natural worlds. I write a lot about human interaction in personal relationships, and I try to bring the lyrical and the unexpected and the strangeness to all of my poetry.

Clara: Tell me what you mean by that -- "the unexpected and the strangeness."

Lauren: What I like about poetry is that it doesn't have to follow the rules that prose does. With poetry, you can have all different kinds of syntaxes. You can change your sentence structure. You can bring in all sorts of odd vocabulary. You can make juxtapositions. You can use metaphors to really get across the feeling and the images that you're trying to evoke and in doing that, you tap into hopefully a greater emotional resonance than prose always can. When I say that I bring the lyrical into my poetry, I prefer to read and I prefer to write poetry that feels different than just talking or that feels different than just reading a paragraph of narrative. I wanted to feel a little surreal and a little out of the ordinary. I might move really fast from metaphor to metaphor or from setting to setting. I might change the position of the speaker. I might even change the apostrophe, meaning the person who's being addressed and I do that to create a kind of sense of confusion even or just feeling a little bit, like you've stepped into a different world.

Clara: That's interesting to me in part because as I was preparing for this interview, I'm not somebody who consumes poetry a lot in my life and so, I had to kind of like remind myself of all the things that I used to know about poetry and do some research to really come into this interview and one of the things I kept feeling is that, for so many of us who consume poetry but don't write it, it can feel very mysterious which I think is sort of a kin to what you're talking about when you say surreal. It's so evocative, it's so packed full of metaphors and it is really removed from the way that we talk and conduct our everyday lives, so it gets us kind of out of them.

Lauren: Absolutely.

Clara: Do you think that's a requirement of poetry? Does it have to be mysterious to be effective?

Lauren: Absolutely not. I think there's a lot of really wonderful narrative poets that are doing great work and I wouldn't want to see a world where all the poetry looked like mine or all the poetry made you feel a little bit disoriented and unsettled. Poetry is so important because it helps us access feelings and emotions and truths that we wouldn't necessarily access in our daily waking lives. You can do that with straight up narrative poetry. You can do that with spoken word poetry. You can do that with prose poetry or a lyrical poetry too. What you were saying about your interpretation of poetry being kind of mysterious, I think that a lot of people have that same feeling and so it makes people feel intimidated by poetry and what I would love is if -- if everyone felt as if they could access poetry. That it wasn't something far removed from them that they'll just never understand, like it's a code to be cracked or a safe to be unlocked and that if you can't figure out what this metaphor means, then you're just not going to understand the poem. I would love it if people felt the freedom and the curiosity and the joy to read poetry as a process of exploration and discovery and playfulness, which means some poems will resonate with you and some poems won't and that's okay but if the images and the metaphors and the movement of the poetry brings up feelings and memories and insights for you, then I think poetry is doing its job.

Clara: I like that idea of playfulness. I think it's really important to a lot of art and literature -- in poetry but also I think in visual art, and yet I think you're right. I think like a lot of people do feel intimidated by art and have sort of lost the playfulness of it. I was reading this interview with another poet, Jill Bialosky, I think is her name. The interviewer was talking about how the kids really love poetry and we all seem to love poetry as children but then at some point, in middle school or high school or maybe even college, we start to turn away from it and he asked her, why she thinks it is that people turn away from it but I'm kind of interested in the other side of it. What is it about poetry that kept your interest into adulthood?

Lauren: I've been writing poetry since I was a little kid and it was all through high school and even through some of college, it was the poetry that rhymed and followed a certain form. I think what got me into continuing to read poetry through adulthood is having great teachers who showed me the possibilities of what poetry could do. I'm not really sure what led to this but I had been operating under the assumption that poetry had to -- it had to have a thesis statement. It had to mean something, and it had to be very obvious, and so poems that I felt were stranger or maybe were language poetry or very lyrical, they intimidated me, and I didn't know how to respond to them. For some reason, I was able to let my brain relax a little bit and then just enjoy poetry the way I would enjoy visual art, and bringing in the images and bringing in the beauty and not necessarily worrying about understanding what it meant or figuring out the strategy of the author because I think a lot of us know that that's sort of how we're taught it in the high school.

Clara: Right, the sort of taking apart.

Lauren: Yeah, and I don't want to completely abandon that method of learning poetry because we should be learning about literary language, and we should be learning about the different tricks that poets can do with line breaks and with similes and metaphors and conceits and all the different tropes out there. And we should be learning about symbolism. But I do think that it makes a lot of us feel intimidated and makes it seem like poetry isn't something you can just enjoy the way you might enjoy a surreal film or a piece of modern art.

Clara: Yeah, sometimes, it's just enjoyable because it's jarring.

Lauren: Yeah, exactly. And sometimes it just evokes a feeling, and I think that is okay too.

Clara: I think this is then a good time to turn to some of your work because for me, reading it, there's this through line in a lot of it that I think concerns a couple of different things. One, there's a lot of sort of exploration of agency and kind of the difference between choosing your path and letting yourself be pushed along, but there's also, I think, a lot of anger, especially in "Bitches of the Drought," which is a collection that we'll talk about a little bit later, and it tends to cluster around these moments when agency seems to have been compromised. Am I imagining that or is that something you were exploring?

Lauren: You're definitely not imagining it. I think I have a series of poems that arise from delayed anger. I think that probably a lot of women can identify with this feeling of, in the moment when your agency is taken away or in a moment when your boundaries are crossed, and you did not say anything because of the fight or flight response. Then later, there's a delayed reaction of feeling really angry and having nowhere for that anger to go. There's definitely a lot of anger and a lot of rage and cynicism in Bitches of the Drought. Not all of my poetry has that tone to it. Plenty of it doesn't. Plenty of it has a lot more intimate or joyful or surreal kinds of feeling to it. "Bitches of the Drought," I mean, the title alone is definitely a little surly, and I think that's kind of what I was going for with this. I just wanted to not give -- well, I don't know if I can swear on this, so I just wanted to not care about what anyone might think. And so I gave myself some freedom to use profanity, and I gave myself some freedom to use internet slang and just kind of be a little more flippant and sarcastic and see what that could do to my poetry.

Clara: What do you think it did?

Lauren: I think that it really took it in a different direction. If I look at the poetry I was writing when I was in grad school and when I was in college, it's very controlled. It's very focused on standard line lengths and standard ways of expressing metaphor. It's very focused on the natural world. It's definitely not -- I wouldn't call it stodgy, but in a lot of ways, my earlier poetry follows traditional poetic ways of writing. And then I think "Bitches of the Drought" is kind of all over the place, and I feel like it gives it a little bit more freedom.

Clara: It's interesting because there's a long set of poems in there that all -- the titles are very similar. They all start with, "I came back," and so, in some ways, I think it gives it this impression of being really tightly focused.

Lauren: Yeah, so that's one of the things that I like about the chapbook form in general is that because it's a shorter collection, because chapbooks are shorter collections, they have the ability to be more contained and more focused on one subject matter or one particular theme. I think that's why I keep coming back to writing chapbooks. I do want to write and publish a full-length collection one day, but the chapbook form is very dear to my heart because it's just this little condensed piece of poetry that feels very singular and project oriented, and that's why I love reading chapbooks, and it's why I love writing them.

Clara: You've mentioned that in that collection, there's a lot -- there's sort of a lot of stuff that deals with delayed anger.

Lauren: Mm-hmm.

Clara: Is that something that you knew you wanted to explore or is it something that just sort of came out of the writing process for you?

Lauren: I wrote a lot of these poems in the summer of 2015, some were written in 2014, and they were all part of an effort to try to write every day in the summer. And I think, as any writer will know, that can really feel like a slog and the feeling of writer's block and just not make you feel great. But I would keep writing and I would just -- and then I'd put it away and then several months later, I was actually at a Women Who Submit orientation party, and I was looking through all of my free writes, and I thought, "Ohm actually, no way, I can -- maybe this can be a chapbook." Then I put them all together and did a lot of extensive editing, and then added some poems that I had written several years earlier that have been published. The earliest poems in the collection are "Confection," which was written in 2012 and also, "Things I Have Burned Intentionally" was written in 2012. There's a little bit of an editing and curating that happens with a chapbook, too. Very rarely have I written a chapbook and sat down to write and know that everything I write is going to go in it. There's usually a bit of like pulling from other places and seeing how I can patchwork everything together.

Clara: I think one of the things that I end up really liking about that, and I think it goes with the delayed anger theme, though it doesn't have to, there's just -- there's a lot of really great -- there's a lot of really evocative lines in there, right? "When I said I was sorry, I was lying" in "Things I Have Burned Intentionally," in "Every Boy Thinks He's Socrates," which I'll have you read later, there's, "I'm tired of saying, 'well, okay sure'" and "Whoever sent you the memo that said your job was to say, 'actually, okay, but actually,'" right, like there's all these -- there's all these great little pieces in there that really just sort of, I don't know, they come at you like daggers almost. Yeah, this is the other one in that, I'll just have you read that poem. "What is sex but the jabbing of an old wound anyway?" Well, I love that.

Lauren: I know. No one who wants to date me should read these poems.

Clara: That's really funny, but I mean also, right, I think part of it is if this is about under personal relationships and about the damage they can do, then I would say, anyone who wants to date you, should read them.

Lauren: Well, thank you. I mean, yes, I think one of the things that I like about any kind of feminist poetry is the way that it makes the personal political, and so,you might be just writing about interpersonal dynamics, but you're also writing about gender. You're also writing about power, and that's a little bit of the through line in all of my work. How power is built and confronted and how it is constructed and what we do with it when we have it and what we do to get it.

Clara: Yeah.

Lauren: I don't set out -- like I said, I don't set out to say, "no, I'm going to write about power," but I just think it's always there, and the metaphors that I choose ,and the way I often choose to write in first person -- there's someone in the poem that is a you being addressed -- that's something that I do pretty often, and maybe that creates a kind of like, intimacy, between the speaker and the reader. It all depends on who's reading it I guess.

Clara: Well, but I think ... I mean, going back to some of that, right, why is women's anger so often delayed? It's delayed because it's unacceptable in the moment or it's seen as unacceptable in the moment.

Lauren: Yeah, we usually don't express it in the moment because survival teaches us not to express it. If we want to survive socially, then we've learned to not express anger in the moment because that might be detrimental to our belonging to the group. Belonging to the group is what keeps us safe. If we lash out, if we stand up for ourselves, if we assert our boundaries, then that might put our place in jeopardy.

Clara: I think that's also why it's so important. I mean, I made that comment kind of glibly, "anyone who wants to date you should read this," but I think that's also why it's kind of important for the people who we bring into our lives to be able to see the expression of that anger -- and to see it before it becomes something that has to do with them -- so they can see the sort of things that we are keeping under the surface, that are so hard to access in those moments.

Lauren: Absolutely. I would love it if all the men in the world read nothing but women for a year and especially women poets. It would be great. It would probably help a lot.

Clara: You're listening to Story Behind The Story on KSQD 90.7 FM. I'm your host Clara Sherley-Appel and today, I'm talking to poet and former Santa Cruz resident, Lauren Eggert-Crowe. Who are some of your favorite women poets?

Lauren: I have so many. It's hard to narrow the list down. Okay, so she's super popular and so many people have heard of her but I'm going to give a shout out to Morgan Parker who is one of the best poets of this generation writing in this time period. She has a book called "There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé," which is just wonderful. Her new book that came out this year is a called Magical Negro and that's also amazing. I also really like Wendy Xu. Her last name is spelled X-U. She had a book called "You Are Not Dead," which -- both of those poets, Morgan and Wendy, I find are the queen of titles.

Lauren: Their titles are just incredible and when I read their poetry, I'm just thinking, how do you do it, how do you come up with the ... they have these long sentence titles that are just wonderful and they add a certain dimension to the poem. In Los Angeles, I'm going to also shout out the ... two of the founders of Women Who Submit who are also poets, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo and Ashaki Jackson. They are both writing some really important and beautiful and powerful poetry of witness. Xochitl has a book out from Sundress Publications, which also published "Bitches of the Drought." Her book is called "Posada," and Ashaki Jackson has two chapbooks, one is called "Surveillance" and one is called "Language Lesson." Those are two great LA poets. Another great LA poet who is also a press sister of mine, she has a chapbook with Dancing Girl Press, which published in the "Songbird Laboratory." That's Lisa Cheby. She has a collection of poetry called "Love Lessons from Buffy The Vampire Slayer." If there are any Buffy fans out there, I highly recommend that. Then, actually, I have some names of Bay Area poets that all live up in the San Francisco Bay Area. There's Leticia Hernandez. There's Norma Liliana Valdez. There's Maya Chichilla, Yaccaira Salvatierra and Suzy Huerta. These are actually all recommendations that my friend Xochitl just gave to me, because I realized I don't know enough Bay Area poets. I know a lot who live in LA or New York or the Midwest or other parts of the country, and even though I lived in the Bay Area, I was blanking. I was like, who lives in the Bay Area who's a poet? I often don't know where people live either because I just know them as -- I know them through Twitter or through reading their work on the internet, so I don't know where they're located. That's the list of some women poets up in the Bay Area that everyone should check out too. I'm sure, I'm forgetting so many people but there's a lot. Once you start reading poetry, you just keep finding more and it just becomes this cumulative effect of you find more poets by reading more poets.

Clara: That's actually a good question though, how do you find new poets and new poetry?

Lauren: The people that I mentioned, I suggest following them on Twitter and then seeing whose books they're posting about. Another thing you can do is find a book of poetry that you like and look back in the back of the book, where their bio and acknowledgments are, and see what literary journals they have been publishing in and then check out those journals to see what other poets are published there. Or another thing you can do is you can pick up an anthology that might have a unified theme to it. People who are interested in Los Angeles-based poetry can read "The Coiled Serpent" from Tia Chucha Press because it's all Los Angeles-based poetry. People who are interested in spoken word poetry can read the BreakBeat Poets. There's three volumes of that, and it has some really amazing spoken word poetry, particularly young black and brown poets who are writing amazing poetry of witness and poetry that deals with both interpersonal themes and political themes and themes of social justice.

Clara: It's interesting you were saying earlier that you tend to write about personal topics and of course personal, if you're into the political but one thing that I was thinking of, as I was reading through a lot of your poetry and I'm trying to think about what it means to write poetry that's personal and also about some of the sort of issues you were talking about before around sort of the way women are positioned in your poems was this memory I had in high school and college of the way that so many men that I encountered would kind of pooh-pooh confessional poetry, and I was thinking about that term, and about the fact that there's so many poets who are confessional, that they are confessing things, but who we don't class as confessional, and they're all men. Like Shakespeare was confessing about love. Robert Browning was confessing about love. There's so much confessional poetry out there but when we say that confessional poetry is somehow -- when we denigrate confessional poetry, we're always talking about women's poetry.

Lauren: Of course. It's so similar to how, you might go into a bookstore and those books by Karl Ove Knausgård will be placed in literature, even though they're like a three-volume memoir that's basically his diary, but then a book that's written in first person and is non-fiction by a woman will be placed in memoir. I mean, there's nothing wrong with the genre of memoir, but the gendered way we determine genre is very interesting. Yes, I mean, confessional poetry, what is that word even mean? To confess to me seems to imply that you are admitting to something.

Clara: Yeah, there's a sense of shame.

Lauren: Yeah, there's a sense of shame. There's a sense of indiscriminately pouring out whatever is in your heart as if there's no editing process, as if there's no sense of art making to it. You're just unloading your words onto the page, you're confessing. I will say that I do think there's -- I do think Robert Lowell is considered a confessional poet, so there might be some men that are considered confessional, but yes, I think in the common parlance, it is deemed as a woman's kind of -- a woman's genre. And I'm not really interested in that. I mean, I wouldn't describe my poetry as confessional. I think that it is very personal but I don't feel as if I am just putting everything out there. I think that there's an editing process, and I think that there's something that I'm trying to build, and I think most of the women poets -- actually, all of the women poets that I have loved and taken inspiration from -- are writing their poetry very deliberately.

Clara: Yeah.

Lauren: They're also not writing everything about themselves. They're calling different -- they're creating an image. They're creating a story and a narrative or creating a mood within the space of the poem. And that's what I love about poetry.

Clara: Let's hear some of your poems now.

Lauren: Okay.

Clara: I'm going to ask you to just set each one up before you read it. Why don't we start with "Every Boy Thinks He's Socrates"?

Lauren: Sure. Can I tell a little story about it?

Clara: Yeah, absolutely.

Lauren: When I had the release party for "Bitches of the Drought" at Stories Books in Los Angeles, I invited four of my women writer friends in LA to come be part of the reading, and what I ask each of them to do was read five minutes of their own work and then pick one poem from "Bitches of the Drought" that they would read themselves. One person, my writer friend Kate Durbin, picked "Every Boy Thinks He's Socrates," and it's kind of cool to hear another poet up on stage reading your work. It just gives the different -- you get to see how other people interpret it and it was cool.

Lauren: Here is "Every Boy Thinks He's Socrates": "And I am undone by the arguments in memory. The smart people say we have two selves. No word on which of ours still loves the other. One of these days, yours will be the small cruelty I miss. I am tired of saying, 'well, okay, sure.' I am reached all the way out. Holes are unextraordinary but you keep glorifying the poking of them. What is sex but the jabbing of an old wound anyway? I cannot stop writing, declarative, transitive. I would like to deliver cheap carnations to whoever sent you the memo that said your job was to say, 'actually, okay but actually.'"

Clara: I love that, I'd like to deliver cheap carnations to ...

Lauren: Thank you though.

Clara: It's so biting.

Lauren: I definitely like to have some bite in my poetry. I found that that's been coming up more and more lately. Honestly, I think that reading contemporary poets of this generation is what's giving me permission to do that. They are loosening the rules and making poetry into way more of a beautiful imaginative playground than it's been in a long time.

Clara: Good to have more play. The next one I'd like you to read is "Heaven Make Me A Warrior To Slay All The Bad Magic." Again, if you can just tell us a little bit about it, set it up a bit.

Lauren: Absolutely, so that was another poem that I wrote in that same summer, and usually what happens is I write my poetry without any line breaks. I just do it stream of consciousness, and it's all like prose poetry, and then later, I'll add in line breaks and stanza breaks and change up the words. I guess that's a pretty normal editing process, now that I think about it. But this poem was one of those, and it was actually selected by Hoa Nguyen in the Black Warrior Review 2016 Poetry Contest as the runner up. That was really exciting to have that accolade, and I like Hoa Nguyen's poetry, and so it was really great to have her judge that and select it as a runner up in that competition.

Lauren: This is "Heaven Make Me a Warrior to Slay All The Bad Magic.": "Your voice in me and then the ghost of your voice in me. Spent my last nickels on your pretty blues. Vexing declaratives, honey-tongued and fortune, I am still, I am still, I am still furious as a boxed up zephyr. Make me make you regret coming towards me and my barred elbows. Sideways thunder on a Thursday.

Clara: Again, it's got a lot of those really evocative phrases, right? The "furious as a boxed up zephyr" and "vexing declaratives." The next one I have in here is "How It Felt To Be Born."

Lauren: I don't know if you would want to keep this in, but can I confess that I don't like the title of this poem? Sometimes titles just come to me and a lot -- most of the time -- I feel like if I like the title, I actually come up with it before I write the poem.

Clara: Interesting.

Lauren: Very often, I write the poem without a title and then I'm racking my brain to think of what to call it. I wanted to submit this and I was like, what do I call this thing, and then I picked this title and this was chosen as a finalist in the Tupelo Quarterly's competition. I was just like, man, I don't like the title, but I can't change it. So maybe if I ever publish it in a collection, I'll think of a different title for it.

Lauren: Here is "How It Felt To Be Born": "I had been a ghost in boots and lace, the green wheat beyond the wire and the wind unbuttoning my scent when all was hardscrabble. Coal dust ignites like a religion. One by one, the finch bodies drop. I cannot but read the portents. A sharp crescent glints, ever ready. You can throw river stones until dawn but they will only ripple the unwanted answer. Go where the drawn line is both wound and seam. I said yes and I said wake and the world crushed into fearful form. Where will it take you when the heart begins to clap its ruby meter beneath your sung-out throat?"

Lauren: Another thing about this poem that I don't know if it would be interesting, but it's actually inspired by the Hunger Games.

Clara: The book, the Suzanne Collins book?

Lauren: Yes, yes. The Suzanne Collins book, the Hunger Games. Sometimes I look to various cultural artifacts as inspiration or as just writing prompts and occasionally then a poem will come out of that, that won't be tied to the original subject matter or the original cultural object but that still is a little bit part of that.

Clara: The last one that I have on my list and then I'd like you to select something. The last one on my list is "Constellation."

Lauren: Yeah. This was done for my friend. Lisa O'Neill, who I went to grad school with, has a blog called the Dictionary Project where she assigns writers a different word and then ask them to write a poem based on that word. She assigned me the word constellation, and this is the poem that I wrote.

Lauren: "Constellation": "We drew a line from star to star. It did not give us a map but a story of our drawing. We drew the line deeper. It did not give us blue and chalk-white chart but a vibration as in the string between two tin cans. It did not give us a song but the beginning of a song. We drew the line farther, we tried to connect. It did not give us a connection but a severance as lines do. We were many. The name of the line was time. There were years between each star. Orion was the story of a million years. I said, draw a picture of me in the sky. But the points you marked my outline with, some didn't exist anymore."

Clara: There are piece of about it that are so interesting. I like the part about the blue and chalk-white chart because that's about how we see constellation's represented a lot of the time.

Lauren: Mm-hmm.

Clara: There still are these sort of pieces that seem like they are in some ways about personal relationships. We tried to connect, it did not give us a connection but a severance, right? Those ways that it becomes not just about the word itself and the object but about something deeper.

Lauren: The poems that I love best tend to pull metaphor that is multivalent. I think that what's the most beautiful about poetry is that there's multiple ways of interpreting it and internalizing it.

Clara: Now, I'll let you set up whatever it is you've chosen for us.

Lauren: I have a couple of poems that were published a few summers ago from my chapbook in progress and they're all untitled but I'm going to read one that was published in DUM DUM Zine which ... this was in 2017. This is the poem: "Put a little hunger in it, would you? I don't have all day to be capsized. I uncoil in summer waiting for boys to roll a barrel of watermelons my way, kiss me dry across California. The ones who think of me are never the ones. I am prettiest when sleepless and sad. Oblivious, effortless selfies. Pornographic fruits cracking milky by the window. My door un-magicked. My attempts decidedly a cut scene. Nobody is buffering the moon. Each time I text you, I lose a coin. There is a server somewhere holding us all until further instruction."

Clara: Tell me about how you ... I mean, you told me a little bit of pieces about your process, in general, tell me about the process for that specific one.

Lauren: Sure, so these collection of poems came about in a really similar way that Bitches of the Drought did and that it was a summer of writing and free writing and then it was actually put away for three years and then worked on later. What's different about this than most of my poetry is that it barely plays with line breaks at all. It's just contained short lines that are entire phrases. That's something that I -- I just tend to be drawn to that lately. Not all of my poetry does that. In fact, I've written some newer stuff that has -- that goes back to the enjambments and goes back to stanzas and stanza breaks but this particular collection of poems is similar to "Bitches of the Drought." It's a very summer infused collection of kind of lying delirious in the heat and battling summer depression and making all sorts of disconnected observations. I think maybe that's why the lines are all singular and short and not involving any kind of playing with line breaks or stanzas. They're just, here's a litany of the speaker's thoughts and feelings and surroundings.

Clara: It's interesting to me too. I mean, you mentioned surroundings and you mentioned earlier that you tend to write a lot of poetry that is very tied to the natural world. I'm curious how the physical space here occupying and the way its set up and things like seasons influence your writing in general.

Lauren: It's been interesting living in Los Angeles because it's the biggest city that I've lived in and so, the natural world and how it is expressed through a city is coming through my poetry more whereas, the natural world is still always there but it's now negotiating with concrete and asphalt and the world of commerce and the world of commuting and so that's -- especially in this particular collection, the one that's unpublished and what I just read from, I feel like that's coming out a lot there, where I'm just ... the speaker in the poems is just bringing out all of the different observations from her world, some of which might include the pastoral or the natural but a lot of it also includes the world of being in the city too.

Clara: You're listening to Story Behind The Story on KSQD 90.7 FM. I'm your host Clara Sherley-Appel and today, I'm talking to poet and former Santa Cruz resident Lauren Eggert-Crowe.

Clara: How do you find your poetry changing as you get older?

Lauren: That's a really good question. I feel as if I've gone through several different stages. In grad school, I was writing the kind of poetry that would make my professors happy. Like I said, doing the typical things that you should be doing in poetry and all of the poems being about something. Around 10 years ago, I got really into writing surreal prose poetry which is what my collection, "The Exhibit," is really centered on. That was when I was living in -- well, actually no, that was when I was -- I've just moved out of Santa Cruz. Then, now, I'm going away from prose poetry, getting more into the specificity of a line and what a line break can do and I'm making my lines shorter and smaller.

Lauren: A lot of if all has to do with whatever poets I am reading and whatever poetry I am digesting. It all kinds of ... their influences then will come out in what I'm writing. When I was reading Sabrina Orah Mark for instance or a Lisa Ciccarello, my poetry was very much into prose poetry where I would just write, long stream of consciousness lines followed by sentences that didn't have a structure. I would make verbs into nouns and nouns into verbs. Since then, I've been reading other poets. For instance Emily Kendal Frey. Her poetry is all very short one liners, and I'm finding that form is interesting to me too so my poetry is starting to be like that. I'm not trying to imply that I'm just copying off of them which I hope I'm not but I do find that the form of my poetry changes as what I read changes. As I get older, I think my poetry is getting a lot more irreverent. There's definitely a lot more anger than there's used to be. I think when there was anger before it was sort of barely there or couched in traditional metaphors. Now, I get to write something like "Every Boy Thinks He's Socrates" and talk about sex and have a lot of anger and just really let the speaker loose -- like, let her hair down and let it all fly. That might be a consequence of just getting older and feeling a little more stable and a little freer in what I can write and what I can do.

Clara: We talked a little bit about Women Who Submit, I just want to ask you to speak a little bit about that. What is it and why is it important to you?

Lauren: Absolutely, and I'm so glad you asked because I love talking about Women Who Submit. First I have to talk about another women's arts organization called VIDA. In 2010 VIDA published a count of all of the tier one journals so that means journals that have a wide circulation pay, their writers are very big and well known. The New Yorker, Paris Review, Granta, and then other -- even like newspapers too. They did a gender breakdown of how many men were published and how many women. As you can probably guess, most of these journals did very poorly when it came to gender parody. They mostly publish men. There were not enough women represented. VIDA published this in pie charts and graph. They did all of the big charts. This is like a year long undertaking where countless volunteers and interns would painstakingly go through every byline and every published work and do a gender breakdown. When male editors were asked why they didn't published more women, they said, well, women don't submit their work as much or when women are rejected, they don't resubmit their work. We get more submissions from men. There's no way to really prove if they're telling the truth.

Lauren: Women Who Submit was founded by Ashaki Jackson, Alyss Dixson and Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo in 2011, as a way of gathering women to get together in real-time and submit their work for publication. It's all about having a spirit of camaraderie and encouragement and mutual joy and that we break down the submission process for new writers and help people see how the submission process works and then also, we cheer each other on and encourage each other. The first submission party happened in 2011 and this is before I joined but everyone gathered in Xochitl's house and had food and drinks and they brought their laptops and they brought literary journals and they brought finished work and every time they submitted their work, they would announce it to the room and everybody would clap and cheer. That's the backbone of what Women Who Submit does. Every month, we have a gathering where we invite new writers and writers who we know to come together and submit a work for publication.

Lauren: When you submit something, you announce it to the room and everyone claps and cheers. We have ... we also have virtual spaces. We have a Facebook group and a Facebook page. We're on Instagram and Twitter and we also include -- in our submission parties, we'll usually have a workshop or a panel or a speaker, speak on topics such as applying to residencies or finding an agent or making an author website or submitting your work to contest. I've been on the ... on the Women Who Submit leadership team for three years now and it's been a wonderful experience in my life. It's such an important part of my life in LA and I think it's a really important part of the literary landscape in general.

Lauren: We bring in -- there are new women writers and I should say, women and non-binary writers are coming in every week, every month, bringing in their new work, bringing in their finished work, ready for publication and learning about all the different journals that are out there, learning how to put a submission packet together. Learning about how to write a cover letter and one of the things that we like to do is we also have a rejection brag. Whenever we get rejected from something, we also announce that and every one cheers because getting rejected means that you put your work out there. This is all to advocate for greater representation of women and non-binary writers in the literary world because it's too dominated by people who have more power and it's too dominated by voices who we've been hearing for so long in publishing and in writing.

Lauren: Anyway, it's a wonderful organization. Anyone who wants to check it out should go to womenwhosubmitlit.org. We're going to have a fun drive in September to fund our next year of programming. We also received a grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation and the California Arts Council and so this is to supplement that and to be able to put on more workshops and panels that have submission parties and go to conferences and all of the things that we do to empower women and non-binary writers to submit their work for publication.

Clara: Well, that's great because this episode is going to come up in September.

Lauren: Wonderful.

Clara: Perfect timing and the information is again, that website is womenwhosubmitlit dot com, is that right?

Lauren: Dot org, womenwhosubmitlit.org. You can follow us there. You can follow us yeah, @WomenWhoSubmit on Twitter, we have a Facebook page that you can follow. Our headquarters is in Los Angeles but there are chapters all over the country and some, in some international countries as well so you don't have to live in LA to be part of Women Who Submit. I think we have a couple of Bay Area chapters and you can find all of that info on the website, too.

Clara: Great.

Lauren: I'm a huge advocate for what we're doing. I'm really proud of everyone who's part of it.

Clara: It's about time for us to wrap up but I want to ask you before we leave. What are you working on these days?

Lauren: These days, I am trying to get this unpublished chapbook published but I'm also writing some new poetry that hopefully will become part of a full length collection. It is nowhere near finished yet but I think that this time, I actually want to set out with the express intention of writing a full length collection that has one through line and that is longer than a chapbook so I'm working on that.

Clara: Lauren Eggert-Crowe thank you so much for joining me today.

Lauren: Thank you so much for having me.

Clara: You can learn more about Lauren and her poetry on her website, laureneggertcrowe.com, where you can also find links to her poems, essays and chapbooks and you can find out more about Women Who Submit at womenwhosubmitlit.org. I'll put both of those links on the KSQD blog, which you can find at ksqd.org. The Story Behind The Story is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me, Clara Sherley-Appel. Our Sound engineer is Lanier Sammons. He also wrote our theme. The music you're hearing is Diary of Black Widow by Chris Pratorius Gómez and it features poetry written by Lauren Eggert-Crowe specifically for the project. You can find the full length recording as well as the score on Chris's website, www.pratorius.com.