'Stay Brave' with Maria Mazziotti Gillan
‘Stay Brave’ is an interview series by woman-identifying creatives for woman-identifying creatives to inspire bravery in the creative life. [Created and curated by Leah Umansky]
Happy National Poetry Month Edition of ‘STAY BRAVE'. This month’s feature is no other than Maria Mazziotti Gillan one of my greatest poetry mentors and a someone I truly admire. She has inspired me since the day I met her, as a senior in college at SUNY Binghamton.
How do you interpret the phrase, "Stay Brave?"
The phrase “stay brave” applied to me especially while I was growing up. I was always so frightened: of teachers, of authority figures, afraid that I was speaking Italian instead of English, afraid that I didn’t fit in, afraid I was the wrong social class, afraid that my clothes were all wrong. It took me a very long time to claim my space in the world. I think that’s what staying brave is; learning to believe that you deserve a place in the world, and to act on that belief.
As a woman-identifying writer, what are the ways that you “stay brave” in your life?
As a woman identifying writer, I stay brave in my life by remembering how to be strong, to believe in myself, and also to help other people to believe in themselves. So many situations in the world try to keep women down, give us directions on how to behave as a woman, tell us the kinds of things woman are allowed to do. That is particularly true if the woman is an immigrant, especially those with rules about what women can or cannot do. I think we all have this crow in our heads, telling us, trying to hold us down, and really in order to stay brave we have to knock that crow out of our heads. We have to silence the crow and move forward and that’s something I’ve tried to teach my students to do.
Who is someone in your life who models “staying brave” for you?
For me, the Beat writer, Diane Di Prima, models “staying brave.” She was raised in a very strict Italian household and finally, when she was 17, she left home. She had been studying at Sarah Lawrence College where she felt so constricted that she didn’t want to study there anymore. She climbed out the window of her house and went to live in Greenwich Village. Her father was furious at her, but she knew it was something she had to do. She frequented the clubs and lived a very free lifestyle, one she had not lived before. Although I did not know her at that time, later on in life when I met her, I realized how much courage it must have taken for her to simply leave home, with no money, and with no way to support herself at first. Her grandparents were Italian immigrants, and her parents were second generation. Italians were very, very conservative, and really thought that there was only one way to be a woman and it wasn’t Diane’s way. Her father was an attorney, very set in his ways, but Diane was rebellious and just so smart. I didn’t meet her until she was at least 50, but she had an enormous influence on my life. Whenever I’d find my own courage lacking, I would think of that 17 year-old girl leaving home, climbing out of the window. But because she was still very Italian, she made dinner for her brothers first, and then, she climbed out of the window. Just listening to her stories about her life, and the things she did, gave me courage. I knew I’d never be brave in the same way that she was, having children with no husband present, raising them by herself (five children). She went from New York to California just because she decided to do it. She put the children in the car, drove to California, and set herself up in San Francisco. She wrote Diary of the Beatnik with made up stories about sexual exploits. Being in a house she shared with a lot of other people, she’d say, “I need a sex scene. I need a sex scene,” and she would wait until somebody gave her one, and then she put it in the book. Her publisher kept saying, “sexier sexier. It has to be sexier,” and she kept adding and adding, but it wasn’t actually true to her life. She told me about living in Northern California with the five kids in a house that was on stilts near the ocean. She would send one of the kids out to gather clams and muscles, and she would cook them for all the Beat men who were very happy to have her cooking for them. She had a very generous spirit, and she never gave up. I think that’s probably the most important thing she taught me, to never give up, no matter how bleak things seemed, to never give up. A couple of days before she died, she called and left a message on my cell phone. I kept it and once in awhile, when I needed to hear her voice, I would play it, and I feel bravery returning to me.
What writers, artists, and/or musicians do you look to to foster a sense of “bravery?”
There are several writers, who are personal friends, whose bravery always encourages me. I think of Laura Boss, who was a friend for more than 40 years, who died recently, and who was willing to say anything in a poem, and who broke stereotypes of what it meant to be a woman. I think of Joe Weil whose work is so amazing and original. I think of Adrienne Rich, and May Sarton, and Anne Sexton, whose works I read when I was a young mother and I’d get up in the middle of the night and sit in my midnight kitchen and read. They kept me company. They taught me what women can do if they are just not afraid.
What’s a piece of advice you would pass on to your younger self about “staying brave?” What’s something you know now, that you didn’t know in the past?
If I had to advise my younger self, I would say “Remember that crow sitting on your shoulder, telling you everything that’s wrong with you? Knock her off and don’t listen. Just decide what you’re going to do and keep putting one foot in front of another until you finish what you need to do. Being brave involves silencing the critic who lives in your head and forging into your life like a tank. Several years ago, I found my yearbook from high school. I was in classes with a lot of upper middle-class kids, and in the yearbook, they all said that I wanted to be a perfect wife and mother, and that I said I wanted to be a famous writer. Here I was, an immigrant kid with all the wrong clothes, not the right social class, without the background that could have helped me, yet when I decided I was going to do something, I just did it. I started the Poetry Center that way. I started my poetry career that way. And then, during the last 20 years, with the encouragement from Di Prima, I started painting, and I’ve been selling a lot of paintings, although I can’t draw a straight line. Painting uses another part of my brain and I’ll always be grateful to Diane for encouraging me to do it, for making me buy paints and brushes in San Francisco, insisting that I paint, telling me not to use the words, even if I wasn’t good, to just paint, and whatever happens, happens. There’s no one good way to paint. It’s really Maria’s way that I had to find. Just as I’ve told my students to find what they have to say in poems and stories
Can you remember a time in your life where you realized your own bravery? How did you use it to propel you forward?
I got my first teaching job at Caldwell College when I was 22. When I went to teach my first class, I felt so terrified. I was shaking all over and trying to teach the way that I had been taught, by lecturing, but within two minutes I realized it was not working, and it would never work for me. I made the all the students get up and sit in a circle. People didn’t do that then, and suddenly the class took off. I learned that I loved teaching although I felt shy and inarticulate. In the classroom, I found a way to be myself, to convey my love of literature to the students, and I asked them to love literature in the same way that I did. For me, that was brave. I did not think I could stand in front of them, in front of people, and speak without notes, speak directly from my head and my heart, but that’s what I did, and it worked. It was wonderful.
What do you do when you aren’t feeling brave? What inspires you or motivates you?
More and more as I’ve gotten older, I found a brave person inside me, although sometimes I found that little girl, that shy little girl, that little girl who was so ashamed was still there, some part of me. But I always bat her away now, and she appears less and less. There are many times when I slide backwards and that shy, timid, terrified kid appears inside me again and what I have to do is stop it from making me afraid to go forward. I’ve done things that were terrifying. I remember once being asked to give a keynote address in Albany to the National Association of English Teachers and I didn’t have anything written. I just got up and I started to talk and I couldn’t believe the response I got from the people. They lined up for more than two hours to have me sign their books. What motivates me is to try to get that connection with people that makes me feel so alive, makes me grow ten feet tall as though I could do anything that I decided to do.
In what ways would you like to be more brave in your creative life?
I think I’m very brave and at this point, I am 84, after all. I have to be grateful for all I’ve had accomplished, all the places I’ve been, all the people who know my work in other countries as well is in the United States. What else can I ask for? I don’t think I need to be more creative, either. I think I actually have been enormously creative in my life. I’m having fun experimenting with paintings. I’m having fun experimenting with new forms and new subjects.
What is your proudest moment of bravery?
In my life, I’ve accomplished something I never thought I could. I thought I’d be stuck between those two tenements and that narrow alley which led to the barren backyard. But instead, I’ve managed to go all over the world, reading my poems, talking to groups all over the United States, giving workshops, teaching at Binghamton University and teaching individual workshops for many many years. I remind myself often how amazing it is, that this immigrant kid, this poor kid, someone who had very limited resources, was able to do it all. I have a cousin, who when I was 17, asked me what I wanted to be. I said I wanted to be a poet and he said it was the most impractical ambition he’d ever heard. Years later, when he saw me on television being interviewed and reading my poems, he called me and he said he was really wrong. “You managed to do it. I never thought you could.”
What are you currently working on?
I am working on putting together a new poetry book on writing and also another manuscript of new poems. And also, I’m slowly working on a memoir.
Thank you, Maria !
Maria Mazziotti Gillan is winner of the 2014 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from AWP, the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and the 2008 American Book Award for her book, All That Lies Between Us. She has also received The Clara Lemlich Award for Social Activism (May 2022), and a Lifetime Achievement in the Arts award from the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at Salem State University (March 2020). She is the Founder/Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, editor of the Paterson Literary Review, and Professor Emerita in creative writing at Binghamton University—SUNY. She has published 23 books, including her latest book, When the Stars Were Visible (Stephen F. Austin University Press, April 2021). Visit her poetry website and her artist website.
Leah Umansky is a poet, writer, curator, writing coach, artist and teacher. Her new collection of poems is OF TYRANT out now with Word Works Books. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her creative work can be found in such places as The New York Times, POETRY, Bennington Review, American Poetry Review, Minyan Magazine, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day and others. She is a writing coach who has taught workshops to all ages at such places as Poets House, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering and elsewhere. She is working on a fourth collection of poems ORDINARY SPLENDOR, on wonder, joy and love. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com or @leah.umansky on IG.
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