Tell us a little about your books
In Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For, a cracked, heart-shaped stone inspired
artist Karen Elias and myself to collaborate in creating nuanced portrayals of love, obsession, grief, joy, loneliness, anger, protest, and hope. Looking backward to memories and forward to our responsibility for the earth, their individual visions combine to create an expansive understanding of our beautiful, complicated world, a world constantly reimagined through the persistence of our fragile, courageous hearts. The book was published by Shanti Arts on World Poetry Day, March 21, 2022.
Karen and I talk about our collaborative process and inspiration here: https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic/living-within-the-art-a-poet-and-photographer-discuss-their-collaboration-marjorie-maddox-and-karen-elias
In addition, the book has garnered early praise:
“Via an original and provocative tapestry of contemplative prose and intimate imagery, these two
artists take both reader and viewer on a journey laced with personal experiences that ring true with the song of universality. This sojourn reminds us it is possible to witness the Cosmos in a drop of pond water or in the surface texture of a weathered fragment of granite. The wonderfully reductive nature of both word and picture herein remind us that less is most often more, that the unadorned will sometimes bring us to that place where greater realizations dwell. In this realm the poet and photographer have combined talents and successfully set a stage for quiet contemplations that are both worldly and private. Opening one’s heart is indeed an act of bravery and love.”
• Greg Mort, internationally recognized artist with work in many prominent private and public
collections, including the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the White House
“It is often said that taking photos teaches us to see, and here, Karen shows us that love is everywhere if we just open our eyes. Marjorie’s thoughtful, heartfelt poems take all our grief over darkness and loss and expose it back to the light.”
• Lorette C. Luzajic, artist and writer; editor, The Ekphrastic Review
“What enchantment to discover the heart—that most ancient of symbols—
in the strikingly fresh and poignant depictions of these exquisite poems and photographs. The pages of this collection fall open to so many of our stories, both individual and collective. The hearts invoked from fairy tales that beat deep in our psyches are joined here by heart transplants, by the national tragedy of George Floyd’s heart stopped by cruelty, by hearts quarantined in windows, and by a cracked stone heart mourning the Earth. These poems and photographs inspire and reflect one another, magically creating the lub-dub of a single heart beating. Reading Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For, we hear our own hearts speaking and being spoken for.”
• Judith Sornberger, author of Angel Chimes: Poems of Advent and Christmas
Karen and I found this an exciting, mutually inspiring project, combining poetry and photography in creative collaboration. Our work has been exhibited at The Station Gallery (Lock
Haven, Pennsylvania). Additional collaborations have appeared in such journals as About Place: Works of Resistance and Resilience, Cold Mountain Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Glint, Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, and Ars Medica.
Our bios:
Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 13 collections of poetry—most recently Begin with a Question and Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For, an ekphrastic collaboration with photographer Karen Elias—the short story collection What She Was Saying; four children’s/YA books—including Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises (Finalist International Book Awards), Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems, A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry; I’m Feeling Blue, Too! (a 2021 NCTE Notable Poetry Book)—Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (co-editor); Presence (assistant editor). See www.marjoriemaddox.com
Dr. Karen Elias taught college English for 40 years and is now an artist/activist, using photography to record the fragility of the natural world and raise awareness about climate change. Her work is in private collections, has been exhibited in several galleries, and has won numerous awards. She is a board member of the Clinton County Arts Council where she serves as membership chair and curator of the annual juried photography exhibit.
2.In some ways a very different book, Begin with a Question explores how the life of faith is a continuous voyage. This is a book of contemplation and motion, a journey—often in stops and starts—toward the Divine, a pilgrimage paved with prayer, praise, pause, penitence, and (of course) questions. Begin with a Question keeps us moving, seeking, reaching, lifting us out of ourselves to something beyond. Using a variety of fixed forms and free verse, I examine our relationship to the one who asks, “Who do you say that I am?” A book for seekers, doubters, and believers alike, these poems bring us face to face with anguish, anger, awe, and adoration. They give us permission not to demand answers, but to follow questions.
Early praise for Begin with a Question:
"One of Marjorie Maddox’s gifts is her ability to knit together unlikely pairings into original visions: Eve smells the salt wafting off Lot’s calcified wife, Apple’s Siri becomes a gnostic saint, and St. Victor of Marseilles stars in a spinoff of The Walking Dead. Her poems question our default ways of organizing and categorizing: a backyard haircut becomes an exploration of many of the dichotomies that shape our thinking—inner vs. outer, before vs. after, childhood vs. adulthood. Her imaginative leaps work toward discernment, facing into the world’s strange bewilderments to find connections across time and place. Begin with a Question faces the ways that the notes of human imagination are often 'off-key, shrill, and wobbly' and builds from them a chorus large enough to hold the living and the dead." —Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award
"To enter the universe of Maddox's new poetry Begin with a Question is to be invited to participate in an amazingly powerful and intricate work of art. Intensely personal, inventive, often ironic and complex but accessible upon careful reading, this skilled poetry opens our windows to wonder at a universe penetrated by divine power and grace." —Luci Shaw, author of Angels Everywhere
"Marjorie Maddox’s new collection Begin with a Question begins with a question, 'But why?' The poet then sets about providing an abundance of possible answers to the most provocative of all the interrogatives, taking readers on a careening journey through human history to discover the sources and salves for our discontents—from Eve cradling her murdered son in the ruins of Eden to Mary holding hers against her own 'crucified heart' on Golgotha; from the impending death of the poet’s suffering mother in a distant assisted living facility to the young mother who nurses her baby in the small hours of the morning accompanied by the hymn-playing Church organist on the other side of the duplex wall; from 'the hard Epiphany' of January 6th, 2021 when a hate-filled mob overruns the seat of government to the 'random acts' of kindness whereby a suicide is saved, an accident avoided, a toll paid. These poems bear faithful witness to suffering on both the small and the grand scale and bravely offer the antidote, asserting over and over the radical fact that when all seems lost we must begin again. In the face of sorrow, the death of loved ones, and the acedia of everyday suburban life, Maddox’s book posits nothing short of a theodicy of love." —Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, author of Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O’Connor and Love in the Time of Coronavirus: A Pandemic Pilgrimage
It has been many years since I first encountered Marjorie Maddox’s work, through her early deeply meaningful collection titled Perpendicular As I. Since then, I have sought out her books, reviewed them when I could, savored them in private, and conversed about them with fellow poets and readers of poetry. So, I should not be amazed by the resonance in me as well as the objective expressiveness, that is to say, relevance, of Begin with a Question.
Ah, how to describe this persuasive and substantive collection… Let’s see. To begin with, I love the line, “My heart takes off its sandals of maybe”, which appears early in the book, advising us that, for every question, there is not only a this-or-that response, but also the resounding answer, from the poet of faith, that can only be summed up by "yes": yes to embracing life in all its complexity, yes to its sorrows and joys, ironies and paradoxes, earthiness and heavenliness, most importantly, yes to a God-soaked, God-imbued, God-redeemed life. Maddox has a way of bringing opposites together without forcing meaning, yet finding meaning—even in, or I should say especially in, the most mundane actions: a crochet chain, a backyard haircut, “suburban dirt and city gardens”....
There are also, more often than not, deeper territories to explore: painful, yet redeeming territories: a father’s heart transplant, a mother who knows she’s dying, who says to her daughter, “I am slowly fading away”, a poet-friend lost to cancer, their final visits. Through these and multiple other instances, the reader is given the clear impression that something very important, something vital, is happening all the time in the poet’s life and in our lives, in the earth around us, in nature, in society, in time—and in eternity. It is all consequential, whether it is occurring below the surface or before our eyes, as we sense in these following lines. “Today, / a woman, not unlike me, / offered tea; the teen / the car in front of me / took on my toll; / the not-random angel / on the highway shifted / slightly to the right / a patch of ice / I did not see— / or was that me / become me / in them, finally folding / my fingers just so, the water / brimming, cool and clear / just as a stranger walks by?”
Perhaps in our do-this, do-that schedules, we may not take the time to pause and ask the questions Maddox asks—at least not consciously. But, here she is, the poet, asking them for us, nudging us to contemplate the answers, which always exist—hidden, tantalizing, frequently unknown, but no less real. The poems in Begin with a Question are as honest and open as the day, and as intriguing and haunting as the night. The people who inhabit the poems speak from their own places, yet enter into our space with as much ease as the fears and expectations that abide in us. Interestingly, we are never left simply with disembodied questions, because Maddox has a particularly heightened gift: that of connecting intimately with the reader. You hear her voice in the poem; you sense her insistence, the joy when there is joy, the gravity when there is gravity—and often both. This ability to connect is almost uncanny; the hospitality of Maddox's poems translates into her asking the reader, generously, to return for a second and a third perusal. And you will find it difficult to resist.
At the book’s closing, Maddox leaves us with the assurance that the questions are worth posing because the answer, no less impactful when it is yet to be discerned, involves ultimately a communion of saints, a communion of “mercy in perpetuity”, where we, all of us, sing “off-key, shrill, and wobbly”, but oh—by God, in God—ever so human.
—Sofia M. Starnes, Virginia Poet Laureate, Emerita, author of A Consequence of Moonlight and other works
What inspired these books?
As mentioned above, Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For was inspired by a cracked heart-shaped stone that Karen found on the shores of Maine. In some instances, she first took the photograph, and I then responded to her work. In other cases, the poem came first with Karen creating a composite photograph that interprets my poem. It was a true collaborative process described in more detail here: https://www.ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic/living-within-the-art-a-poet-and-photographer-discuss-their-collaboration-marjorie-maddox-and-karen-elias
Whereas Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For was collaboratively written relatively quickly, then sent out to publishers over a several-year period, Begin with a Question took a different path. The poems, which chronicle a journey of questions—the problem of suffering in the world, my mother’s declining health, etc.—took many years to write, but was accepted rather quickly by Paraclete Press. Then the pandemic hit! The time span between when the book was accepted for publication and when it was published was 2.5 years, primarily because of Covid-19 and the way it also affected the publishing industry. Nevertheless, this also allowed me to keep revising and adding to the earlier version, making room for responses to the virus and to social justice issues during 2020—2021. I believe this made Begin with a Question a much more powerful collection, one that, despite addressing tough topics, also embraces hope.
Did you find it easy to write two books at the same time?
Although, due to the circumstances described above, the books came out one day apart (March 21 and March 22, 2022), they were not written at the same time. (Some of the final revisions, though, occurred during the same months). Sometimes, book publication works in strange ways!
What has been both more challenging (and sometimes a blessing) is marketing both books at the same time. On one hand, I’ve been able to plan events that celebrate both poetry collections. On the other hand, life has become even busier than usual—and that’s saying something.
Where will our readers be able to purchase your books?
Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (Shanti Arts)
http://www.shantiarts.co/uploads/files/mno/MADDOX_ELIAS_HEART.html
Use the coupon code Heart10 until April 21, 2022 for a 10% off discount
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Heart-Speaks-Spoken-Marjorie-Maddox/dp/1956056068/ref=sr_1_1?crid=Q14ZDC4SRM7C&keywords=marjorie+maddox+heart+speaks&qid=1648502582&s=books&sprefix=marjorie+maddox+heart%2Cstripbooks%2C115&sr=1-1#customerReviews
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/books/heart-speaks-is-spoken-for/9781956056068
My website: http://www.marjoriemaddox.com/heart-speaks-is-spoken-for-description
Begin with a Question (Paraclete Press)
Paraclete Press Website (20% discount with the coupon code Begin): https://paracletepress.com/products/begin-with-a-question?_pos=1&_sid=8cc2169e8&_ss=r
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Begin-Question-Poems-Marjorie-Maddox/dp/1640605371/ref=sr_1_3?qid=1648594679&refinements=p_27%3AMarjorie+Maddox&s=books&sr=1-3
Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/books/begin-with-a-question-poems/9781640605374
My website: https://marjorie-maddox-2zr5.squarespace.com/begin-with-a-question-description?p?p=null&p=null
All other books, including 13 poetry collections, a short story collection, and 4 children’s and YA books: www.marjoriemaddox.com
Where can we find you?
At my website you also will find my bio, book reviews, upcoming and recent events, and information about scheduling author visits, both virtually and in-person.
Thanks so much, Nicole, for this opportunity to chat about these two new collections: Begin with a Question and Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For, my ekphrastic collaboration with photographer Karen Elias!
