Shaindel Beers is a college professor in Oregon who has recently been winning awards for her poetry.  She is active in her community and online in promoting small press as well as academic achievements.  Shaindel recently took the time to sit down and answer some questions for OW and share some of her work.

I know you are an English Professor and have been for several years at a few different colleges.  You are presently teaching at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, OR.  Can you tell us a bit about what you do there?


Absolutely! The beauty of teaching at BMCC is that it’s a small enough college that everyone in the English department gets to teach a bit of everything. There are only three full-time members of our department, so we all teach the regular composition sequence—those core personal essay/research paper courses that everyone has to take in college, and then we divide up everything else. I teach two out of the three sections of creative writing—fiction writing and poetry writing—and another instructor teaches creative nonfiction. I also teach the British literature and Shakespeare courses. It’s sort of a dream job, really. Everywhere else I’ve taught was so big that you were in this little niche. At one school, I taught creative writing and asked when I would get to teach British literature and was told that that was someone else’s because everyone only got one non-composition class that was theirs. It didn’t matter that I had graduate degrees in both British literature and creative writing; it was one or the other. It was really frustrating being in my twenties and thinking that that’s what I would be doing for the rest of my life. 


Do you find yourself encouraging your students to look to the small press for inspiration as well as some of the more well-known or classic writers?  And if so, what merits do you think the small press holds for your students?

Yes! For the creative writing classes, anyway, we rely almost exclusively on small presses and literary journals. For the literature courses, my job is to teach what has withstood the test of time, so to speak. But in both poetry and fiction writing, we have several “read and trade” days where I bring in giant stacks of literary journals, and students read journals and trade at their leisure, then we discuss what they thought of the journal, the writers in it, and the journal’s “place in the literary world”—who they are publishing—new writers or established writers, what awards their work has received and so on.

In poetry writing class, the students actually have a literary journal project for which they read an entire issue of a literary journal and write a review of the journal—what the journal’s philosophy seems to be, what kind of writers the journal publishes, if they feel that they could be published in the journal or would like to submit work, and any favorite works in the journal. Students are also required to put together a packet to send to a publisher and are graded on following the submission guidelines and their cover letter, and they receive extra credit for actually sending the packet to the journal. BMCC’s creative writing courses are divided by genre, so I feel this is fair. Where I taught previously, the creative writing courses were divided into Intro and Advanced, and Intro put together a packet and got extra credit for sending to publishers. Advanced creative writers were required to send to publishers. 

I think the merit the small press holds for my students is that the small press is publishing what is happening now. They can see how people writing now are really writing, and my students have a real chance of getting published there. There aren’t the hang ups about where someone went to school or who they studied with that might hold them back from other arenas. Because the small press makes little money (if any), it doesn’t have to do what the market demands, so what gets published seems to be based on the actual quality of the writing.

Anxious for the nine o’clock break,
at eight-thirty I would light the porch,
line the sink with gauze, cotton balls, peroxide—
austere tools of love—
wanting him to bring his hands to me—

small, delicate hands

an artist’s or surgeon’s

displaced by the lack of a diploma,

twisting wires ten hours a day.

When his Grand Prix rumbled into the drive,

I would look not at his face

but his hands

and nightly make the same, sharp sigh

when I had counted ten

like a new mother,

knowing that metal which cuts bricks

could lay siege to fingers too.

I’d fold his hands in mine

like folding sugar into butter

and lead him past my disapproving parents

to my makeshift triage

under the fluorescent buzz of bathroom lights.

Awed by the horrid beauty

of miniscule rivulets of blood,

the muted glitter of metal shards

just under the skin,

I’d begin my gentle ritual

of tweezing out steel slivers,

flooding the red rivers white with peroxide,

softly blowing away the sting—

then, I would send him back, bandaged,

with a sandwich,

to the big, block building just outside of town

and return to my geometry.


You were the recipient of the Karen Fredericks and Frances Willitts Poetry Prize for 2008 for your poem “Sleeping Man and Woman Circa 2000, CE”.  Can you tell us about this award and what it means to you?

This award is really important to me because it is named for two women who lost their battles with breast cancer, and the judges are Karen Fredericks’ mother, Carole Sineni, and Frances Willitts’ husband, Martin Willitts, Jr. My father’s mother (who passed away long before I was born) died of breast cancer, as did my undergraduate professor who first inspired me to go into higher education. Before her, the highest aspiration I could imagine was teaching high school English, which isn’t a bad goal to have, but I don’t think it ever occurred to me that women could teach college. I remember being nineteen and sitting in her class and thinking, “Wow. I could do this someday.” It was an epiphany, and it was all I worked for since that moment.

I think because the award honors the people they lost, they put a lot of themselves into the judging. They seem to be looking for poems that are important, not just good. I’m not saying that as an egomaniac, but I tried to write this poem to say something really important about peace. The premise of the poem is that there has been so much war and violence in the world that a peacefully sleeping couple holding each other becomes a museum display. It was a poem I sent out to many, many publishers and kept getting rejected. I knew there were these little quirks in it that were awkward to read, but I meant for them to be there for various philosophical reasons and just knew the poem would find a place, and it did. It was also reprinted in Open Windows III by Ghost Road Press and is supposed to be appearing in Arabesques, an international literary journal published in Algeria. Martin Willitts, Jr., also supplied a beautiful piece of his original artwork in addition to the cash prize.

I feel similarly about my poem “Rewind” which won the Dylan Days competition in 2007 (honoring Bob Dylan). I felt I wrote this work that really spoke against war and violence but in an unconventional way. It wasn’t having the prize money (which is normally quite modest in poetry) or another honor to add to my cv; it was that someone felt it resonated with them the same way that Bob Dylan’s peace songs did. It was a true honor.


I have been a big fan of NPR and the Prairie Home Companion.  How did you come to be published on their website and did it have any more significance for you since you hail from the Midwest?

I actually have one of my students, Jessica Kollecker, to thank for this honor. (Students really are the greatest people.) Her goal has always been to have Garrison Keillor publish her; maybe she’s even said to have him “know she’s alive” or something like that. During Poetry Writing class, we were in a computer lab so that students could write their cover letters and send work to publishers, and Jessica told me her Garrison Keillor plot. I had no idea what she was talking about because I was thinking of The Writer’s Almanac, which doesn’t take unsolicited poems; they call you if they want you, and she said, “No. There’s this thing on the Prairie Home Companion website.” And there it was, a form to submit your poem. So, we both sent in poems.

A few weeks later, I was “googling” myself, which you can laugh at but I think is important for writers to do—you have to know what people are saying about you—and there was my poem on the Prairie Home Companion website. I couldn’t believe it. It was ridiculously early, like 5:30 in the morning, and I was screaming like a little girl. My husband (then boyfriend) couldn’t believe it, either. It was definitely thrilling.  Some students thought Jessica should be jealous or mad, but she has plenty of publications ahead of her. It’s all in sending the right poems to the right places, and she’s truly a great writer.

I might get in trouble for this part, but I don’t know if you can truly appreciate the Prairie Home Companion if you’re not from the Midwest. As fictitious and over-the-top as all of the Lake Wobegon stories seem; they’re real to you if you’re from the Midwest. There’s a coffee table book co-authored by Garrison Keillor called In Search of Lake Wobegon. The photographs are by Richard Olsenius, and they depict places that Keillor felt could be Lake Wobegon if it were real. The gravel road on the front cover looks like the road outside of my grandma’s house if I bicycled in one direction, and the lake on the back cover of the book looks like Eddy Lake behind my grandma’s house if I’d cycled the other direction.  I especially love those competitions you get into in the upper Midwest of who’s been in the coldest weather. I think I’ve been in -36° F actual temperature. I don’t even want to know what the wind chill was. But things like that become a part of you. When I lived in Florida, I wrote snow poems, I had snow pictures as my desktop background on my office computer. I dreamed about snow. I even wrote my poem “The Thermophobic’s Wife,” in Florida. I hated being hot all the time and tried to imagine who else would—someone who works in a steel mill! So, some good things did come out of my time there, but all in a negative capability sort of way. Even though Oregon isn’t the Midwest, where I am is rural and has the same feel. There are horses, cows, and sheep on my college campus—in the agriculture department—not wandering the halls or anything—and people say “spendy” instead of “expensive” like in Minnesota. We could get more snow; it could be colder. But I’m happy.  Inside, I’m still a flatlander, though. 


What Will We Do With You?  This Bone Has Almost No Flesh Protecting It— 

But I am like any porcelain doll, waiting to be destroyed

by a hammer.  Brothers do these things

to incite the cries of their sisters.  They think

This is power.  Someday they will learn that power

is smiling gleefully up at the anvil.  Where I am from,

everyone looks like a corpse.  We are ivory

and blue-veined until cooled at 0◦ for 28-32 minutes. 

Then we begin to color up—cheeks become pink,

eyes, a teary blue, lips, a red slash,

sometimes painted crooked by a drunken artist.

Because, as Linus Torvalds said, “there is nothing to

do at home but drink.”  Where I want to take you

the mountain passes are cleared in July—

until it snows at the end of August and some years

Hidden Lake is always under snow, but I

will climb until I find it.  Though you seem

to be made of sand and fashioned for warmth,

I will lock you in a cabinet—porcelain dolls are

dangerous like this sometimes.  You and I are not

so different, the same color when the sun shines

through the khaki sheets.  But this sun is too much.

Even the sheets can’t stop it—It is scarier than

the hammer.  This sun, even in the morning,

in February, is going to obliterate us all.


You are the poetry editor for Contrary Magazine, which used to be funded by the University of Chicago, but is now a not for profit publication.  How did you get this position and how do you think it has changed the way you look at your own writing and the writing of others?

I actually checked with Jeff McMahon, our founding editor, to get this right.  We were never funded by the U of Chicago. We were just founded there. Basically, Jeff and I met through emails that had little to do with writing. I was walking in the Avon Breast Cancer Three-Day and sent this email out to our graduate program’s listserve that the White Sox were having a special game where part of your ticket proceeds would go to support people walking for breast cancer funding, and Jeff bought a ticket. (He’s a White Sox fan; I’m a Cubs fan, yet we still run a magazine together!). He emailed me that my name would look great on the cover of a novel, so when my name was on the cover of a literary journal (albeit, the back one) I sent him a copy. He told me he was thinking of starting a literary journal and asked if I would like to be the poetry editor since the bio in the journal indicated that most of my publications had been poems. So this is what we’ve been doing since Autumn of ’03, along with picking on each other about our Cubs/White Sox rivalry. It’s really a beautiful working relationship and we’ve been through a lot together in five years. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that I’ve only met Jeff in person once at a poetry reading, and that some members of the editorial staff have never met in person. Online publishing is an amazing thing.   

I still can’t believe how Contrary has grown. In 2007, we had 106,620 page views, and we get about 1,000 submissions per issue, of which we publish about a dozen pieces per issue. Most of the works are rejected by preliminary readers first, and I get the last twenty or so that make it through and have a final say on them.  It’s those numbers that have changed the way I look at my writing and others’ writing. There are just so many people sending out to literary journals, that the competition is fierce. I can be reading an otherwise great poem and I get to a certain word which just doesn’t work, and it takes me out of the poem, so it’s a no. Sometimes we’ll write personalized rejections where we suggest changes or ask someone to send in a revision, but it’s really hard with those numbers. It’s made me realize that my work has to be at its best to send out. There’s no point in sending out poems that you’re not sure about or that are “kind of” there. It’s also made me take rejection better because I’m rejecting people. Maybe the poem still needs work, or maybe there were just a lot of poems on that theme, and they couldn’t publish another poem that mentions “autumn leaves” in that issue.

Being a poetry editor has shaped my creative writing teaching as well. I’m harder on students. I teach all of my creative writing classes from the perspective that students are writing for publication, and they have the literary journal project I mentioned earlier and have to put together a packet to send to a publisher. It’s important because too many people send things to literary journals that just aren’t appropriate—greeting card sorts of poems or something they wrote to read at their sister’s wedding. I don’t want my students to be out of touch with what’s going on. I also encourage them to be first readers for literary journals as well. Some students get to class and aren’t happy with it, but they’re the ones who thought they would take an elective and get an A. I have at least six former students currently in MFA programs or who have already graduated from MFA programs. I think that’s really admirable for a community college instructor. I seriously see great writers every year who I hope will remember to say they studied with me way back when.


To CKC, Stillborn, April 22, 2006

Little flicker flame of a person, too fragile

to survive the world you were pushed out into—

I study charts of 20 weeks after conception

24 weeks— and wonder where in that odd float

between miscarriage and pre-term you fell

and learn new terms—Lanugo—

the fine, downy hair covering a fetus,

new facts—that you must have weighed

between ten ounces and a pound

(the size of a three to five week old kitten)

but still picture a girl looking like your mother,

only smaller.  Hair as fine and black as raven's

wings.  Tiny eyes I see open from naps

when friends bring babies back from China,

cooing magical incantations to lure them to sleep,

mei-mei , bao, chan juan. 

Your mother had such hopes for you,

wanted you to save her, needed to save herself

to save you but couldn't and fell back

into the life and the bottle and needle

we all try to save each other from,

your adopted aunts who have loved your mother

for the little girl in her

the one who comes back and is taken away

every few years when she remembers her brother

prying his way into her, giving her to friends

in exchange for marijuana, booze, all those things

that seem valuable when we are young,

but which is infinitely old

to you, who will always be twenty weeks

too young to be born

who will always be just out of reach

another untouchable girl on the periphery—

the one who gets to be safe.

 
Months ago, you and I had a chat about the AWP Conference that is being held in Chicago in February of 2009.  I know you are planning on attending.   What do you hope to come away with after this conference as a writer and as a teacher?

My simple answer is more knowledge and more connections. The schedule isn’t even out for AWP as far as I know, so I don’t know what lectures and panels I will be attending. In 2004, I went to lectures and panels on translating poetry from other languages into English and getting funding to do research as a poet. I just go to things and soak up knowledge and have no idea how I’ll use it. That was four years ago, and now I’m working on hosting a radio talk show on poetry in translation, and I’m starting to write poetry based on historical events and figures, so maybe someday I’ll use what I learned from that panel on research funding, too.  It’s a huge conference. Last year, there were 8,000 attendees; I don’t know if that’s because it was in NYC, but there will be at least 4,000 in Chicago.  That’s one-quarter the size of the town I live in now, and everyone there is a publisher or writer. So I hope to bring back the energy of the experience for my students. Some people scoff that writing teachers are name-droppers, but I don’t think the good teachers do it out of ego; they do it because it gives you a certain authority to say, “When I was talking with (this particular author or publisher)….” in your class discussions. You have the information from the primary source. I hope I make more connections, so that I know more authors and publishers who will be important to my students.

I also plan to hit the bookfair and bring back copies of literary journals and books for my students, as well as submission guidelines from all of the journals. If Contrary has a table, I hope to meet some of our contributors and staff I’ve never met before. And I want to visit with people from my graduate program and see what everyone’s been up to. For a hermit, I seem to miss a lot of people. If AWP’s ever closer to this side of the country, I’ll definitely look into funding to take a group of students. I think seeing creative writing students at a bookfair of this magnitude would be like watching kids on Christmas morning, but with plane tickets alone being $700/each, it’s not even a possibility.   


What is on the horizon for Shaindel Beers this year?

I hope a book in the works as far as poetry’s concerned—meaning signed with a publisher for a book-length collection. I’ve received one contract from a publisher but just wasn’t happy with the terms of the contract, so I’m trying to hold out for something better. I want to keep working on my fiction writing. In the last calendar year, I’ve had five short stories published, but I know I’m still just getting a handle on fiction writing and have a lot more to learn. Of course, we’re always growing, but my MFA is in Poetry, so I feel like it’s miles ahead of my fiction because of that intense devotion to it in graduate school. If I could get enough quality fiction written and published in journals to start sending out a fiction collection, I would be thrilled. I have the Translated By radio show that I’m going to start hosting, which is very exciting, and I’ve started writing a chapbook of poems based on artwork by children in war-torn countries. I hope to keep writing book reviews and just be the best creative writing instructor I can be. So, I guess, total immersion in writing is what we see on the horizon.



“First Love” The Prairie Home Companion (website)

“What Will We Do With You?  This Bone Has Almost No Flesh Protecting It—“ Eleventh Muse, 3^rd Place 2006 Poetry Contest

Bio:  Shaindel Beers’ poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is currently a professor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, in Eastern Oregon’s high desert and also serves as Poetry Editor of Contrary, and as a Poetry Reviewer for Bookslut.

Recent Awards and Honors:  First place Karen Fredericks and Frances Willitts Poetry Prize (2008) Grand Prize Co-winner Trellis Magazine sestina contest (2008) First place Dylan Days Poetry Competition (2007) Award-winning poem published, Eleventh Muse (2006) Honorable mention, Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Awards (2005) Honorable mention, Juniper Creek/Unnamed Writers Award (2005) Pushcart nominated poem “A Brief History of Time” (2004)

Last update : 20-08-2008 05:11

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