In the past year, two Penn State alumnae--each with a very different writing style--have gone on to success by publishing their poetry in chapbooks. The program that produced the poets, however, has not shared a similar success.
An Awkward Mix of Beauty of Terror
Sheila Squillante is extremely fond of poetry, but she is also blunt when describing what she dislikes about it.
“I don’t love that, by and large, people feel that poems are these like born-from-the-breathe-of-God things that are not work,” she said.
Squillante, who received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Penn State in 2002, teaches English and creative writing at the university.
And, of course, she writes.
Her first chapbook, released in December 2011, is entitled “A Woman Traces the Shoreline.” In nine pages, Squillante manages to capture the awkward mix of beauty and terror that accompanies pregnancy.
“I wrote it when I was pregnant with my first child – very, very pregnant with my first child,” she said. “It is very much about the bounty of emotions that one goes through [during pregnancy].”
Squillante said that pregnancy, for her, was “the most profoundly weird thing ever.”
The strangeness of her pregnancy experience is best described in the third piece of her chapbook:
“I stare at my belly and he reads Bahktin. I read about amniotomies and they become potatoes thrown by aliens in my dreams. I’m gonna get you! I dream of old loves, of bears, of circumcision. I dream of women, of my own taut skin. I read around in books. I coexist. I am becoming, they tell me, ‘wholer.’”
“Yes, it [pregnancy] is inspiring, of course, but…there’s all this language around pregnacy and the pregnant body that is meant to inspire,” she said. “I think it’s meant to buoy women through what is really, to be totally blunt, a very difficult, painful, and uncomfortable bodily experience.”
“A Woman Traces the Shoreline” flows nicely from one piece to the next. Even the shortest piece, which reads simply “This is ritual,” does not seem the least bit out of place. The chapbook is available for $7.00 through sheilasquillante.com.
Nature and Words
Another Penn State graduate, Rachel Mennies, received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Penn State in 2011.Her extremely intriguing chapbook, “No Silence in the Fields,” is not a confessional work of poetry.
“When I started working on this, there were about five poems, and I realized this is a story – there is something happening between these poems that isn’t about me,” she said.
The chapbook is a series of 20 poems that read like a short story. Some poems are written from the perspective of a male character and some from a female character's point of view.
“I surprised myself when I started writing this piece,” she said. “I took a fiction workshop at Penn State, and while I loved taking the class, I do not have any talent in fiction writing or storytelling.”
Central Pennsylvania’s natural landscape influenced the imagery of “No Silence in the Fields” Mennies said.
“I definitely love the area and I see a lot of it in the chapbook,” she said. “I felt so extremely aware of how rural and how natural central Pennsylvania is…And it’s a really beautiful place to live.”
The chapbook is also a testament to Mennies’ strong love affair with language.
“The thing that has always been the most intriguing to me about poetry is how important and interesting and diverse and complicated the little, tiny words in our language are,” she said.
"A Terrible Shame"
Both Squillante and Mennies are products of a program that no longer exists.
“When I graduated, we had a scare when we were told the program was being
cut,” Mennies said.
Mennies, who graduated before the program was cut due to budget restraints, called the loss of the program a “tragedy.”
“I took so much from it,” she said. “It was very important for me to have
that kind of support and Penn State, in particular, had such a great program
for young writers wanting to be teachers.”
The lessons in writing and the tools she acquired while attending Penn State contributed to her well-crafted chapbook.
Squillante, who was the associate director of the creative writing M.F.A. program for eight years, said she was “heartbroken” when the program was cut.
“I think it’s a terrible shame,” she said. “It’s sort of indicative of this attitude we have towards the arts locally.”
Squillante also said that creative writing programs are “falling out” of every level of education across the country.
“Personally, I had a wonderful experience in the Penn State program,” she said “It makes me sad because it’s the end of an era.”
Even though their beloved program is no more, both writers will continue to use what they learned at Penn State in their future projects.
Mennies said that she has finished the first act of a full-length manuscript, and she is also working on a project that she started at Penn State that is “very different” from “No Silence in the Fields.”
Squillante’s next chapbook, “Women Who Pawn Their Jewelry,” includes “relationship poems” that “chronicle the breakup” of her first marriage. The chapbook can be pre-ordered until June 15th through Squillante’s website.
Additionally, Squillante has a project that she worked on with her current husband, Paul Bilger, who is an abstract photographer. It is a series of 10 of her poems that were written in response to 10 of his images.
Squillante does enjoy the thought of her work in other people’s hands.
“I do feel like once you write something and put it into the world, it’s no longer yours,” she said. “If someone reads my little chapbook, and it brings them to a place that I didn’t necessarily intend, but it’s an important place of self revelation or deep feeling, then I’m happy for that.”
