Interviews

Conversations With Our Authors

Below are interviews with Alissa Lukara and Dennis Sampson, authors of Homestead Lighthouse Press’s inaugural titles, Secrets of the Trees and Selected Poems, respectively.

Conducted for HLP by Nancy Bloom, host of Life Passages, Alissa Lukara’s interview highlights the novelist’s creative process and describes what her book about the small nation of Latvia has to teach us about resilience in trying times, the healing power of art, song, and nature, the “Singing Revolution” in Latvia that helped bring Soviet rule to an end, and the importance of healing ancestral trauma. The interview first aired on Rogue Valley Community Television in southern Oregon.

Poet Dennis Sampson is the author of Selected Poems, the second of HLP’s publications. Sampson discusses his inspirations and addresses questions about his spiritual or religious beliefs, the presence of nature and animals in his poems, poetry’s place in culture and society, teaching, and public performance of poetry.

For additional information about the interviewees, see the Books & Authors section of this website.

Alissa Lukara

Dennis Sampson

Interview with Alissa Lukara

Homestead Lighthouse Press: Who or what inspired you to write?

Alissa Lukara: As a child, I wanted to touch people’s lives in the ways my own had been touched by the books I read. But I did not begin writing until later. I had been an English major in college, studied journalism in graduate school, then worked at a public relations agency in New York City. In my heart, though, I longed to write creative nonfiction and fiction. I signed up for Elaine Sorel’s workshop for creative people, described by The New York Times as “the Shape Up or Ship Out or Get Off the Dime clinic” for creative people struggling with some aspect of their creative expression. Elaine had been an artist’s and photographer’s representative and had worked with many well-known writers as well. During our introductory meeting, I brought out a poem I had written for it, and she asked me to read it out loud to her. She responded with one word, “More.” Four months later, I quit my job and become a freelance writer. Four months after that, I had a contract for a nonfiction book with Ballantine Books.

HLP: Are you spiritual or religious? If you are, how does that enter your fiction & non-fiction?

AL: Spirituality is central in my life and, as such, makes its way into my writing. To me, life is one long lesson from the divine opening us to the love at our core. I included spiritual experiences that refected that in my memoir about a transformational healing. When the character of Nikkie emerged, I knew her dancing would be an embodiment of her spirituality. Throughout her transformation, Nikkie deepens her recognition of the divine in herself and in all creation, most notably nature and trees, a concept which is central to Latvian spirituality. Nikkie also strengthens her connection to the divine feminine in the form of the main Latvian goddesses Māra and Laima, who support and guide her.

HLP: What led to your creation of this novel?

AL: I had a strong calling to write a novel set in Latvia that would touch on both my ancestry and family history and this deep connection I felt to them growing up. But I did not only want the novel to retell my family’s story of living in or escaping from Latvia. After completing my memoir, I was hiking in a local park, longing to find inspiration for the new book, when a young boy ran up to me. He asked me if my name was Nikkie and if I was lost in the woods. Nikkie had carved her name into a tree, he said, and he was looking for her with his father and sister. They had made a game of it, his father told me. That encounter sparked the idea for the novel and the main character, named Nikkie. But I did not know how or if the book would tie into Latvia until scenes set in Latvia began to emerge two years into the writing. I had recently traveled to Latvia and spent time with relatives and my mother’s friends, including several involved in the arts and folklore. These Latvians were now experiencing freedom of choice and living in a democracy for the first time.

HLP: Share with us your deep and wide connection to Latvia.

AL: I am a first generation American with several generations of Latvian ancestry. My parents and maternal family escaped Latvia during WWII and were refugees and lived in a Displaced Persons camp in Würzburg, Bavaria, Germany for five years before emigrating to the U.S. My relatives in Latvia lived through the Soviet Occupation. Others had been arrested and sent to Siberia, where most died. This family history has struck a deep chord in me.

I pulled away from the Latvian community as an adult in order to find myself and my artistic voice outside my ancestral heritage. But starting in 2003, I traveled to Latvia three times and became a dual citizen. In researching Secrets of the Trees there, in meeting my family, in attending its song and dance festival, I realized that much of what was important to me as an individual in fact had its roots in my Latvian heritage and its land: my love of the arts and nature, spirituality that sees the divine in nature, poetry, dance, a longing for freedom, my resilience./

Growing up, I was active in the Latvian culture and community in Cleveland, Ohio, learning to speak, read and write Latvian, speaking it at home, attending Latvian school, events and camps. Since the Soviet Union was trying to destroy the culture in Latvia itself, my parents and many other Latvian parents taught their children that it was up to the Latvian diaspora to carry forth the culture so it would not die. I participated in Latvian Song and Dance festivals in the U.S. and Canada and as a young adult was part of the Latvian community in New York City. I get teary when I sing the Latvian national anthem or it’s unofficial anthem, Put Vejini, in a way that makes no logical sense, given I have always lived in the U.S.

HLP: What is the novel’s place in culture and society?

AL: This novel explores themes of home, homeland, and the impact of displacement during a time when the refugee and immigrant crisis is prominent. It looks at the impact of war, oppression, displacement and trauma not only on present, but also future generations. The field of epigenetics reveals how the effects of these are actually passed on in our DNA. The novel considers in what form present generation and ancestral healing are possible for traumas suffered in the past. This applies not only to Latvians but to all countries. I think part of the fascination with genealogy is that we are hoping to understand how our roots and what our ancestors faced impacts us today, who we really are in relation to the ancestors and cultural influences that subconsciously informed an aspects of our lives.

In addition, Latvia is a country most people know little about. Yet, its culture is rich. Too often, our world seems to value only the accomplishments of the super powers while ignoring or discounting what smaller countries have to teach us. The novel offers a look at what Latvians have to share globally through the filter of what has most touched me about it. For instance, they have managed to create and preserve their cultural identity and identification as a singing nation despite living through centuries of oppression and serfdom. During Glasnost and Atmoda, Latvians’ conscious decision to stage a nonviolent Singing Revolution led to the dissolution of fifty years of Soviet Oppression. They continue to hold a Latvian song and dance festival, as they have since 1873, that is on the UNESCO Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity list. It involves mass choir and dance events of forty thousand plus participants (fifteen thousand singers, fifteen thousand dancers) from a country with a population of two million. And only the top choirs and dance groups in the country participate.

Numerous Latvian classical music and opera stars grace the top opera houses and symphony halls in the world and the country’s choirs repeatedly win gold medals in world competitions. The country also maintains a deep connection to and respect for nature, the land and its forests.

HLP: Do you enjoy teaching? How does teaching co-exist with fiction?

AL: Yes, I do enjoy it. I teach and coach mostly adult writers in person and using online workshops, webinars and other technologies. I find that helping other writers hone their craft hones my own. I feel inspired and excited by the voices, stories and creative dreams of those writers and enjoy creating communities of writers.

HLP: What are your thoughts regarding the public performance of fiction?

AL: I love doing readings of my fiction and hearing other fiction writers read and perform their work. I feel transported by the rhythm of words, the poetic elements, the unique voices and styles, the dramatic impact – and enjoy sharing all that.

HLP: Is there perhaps a sequel in the works? AL: In writing the first draft of Secrets of the Trees, several chapters of Nikkie in Egypt crept in that I cut but thought might turn into a sequel. I also wrote chapters in the voice and point of view of Tom, Nikkie’s twin brother. His poetic voice intrigued me. At the same time, I feel like I’m on a whole new journey in my life and in my writing and can’t wait to see what emerges from that.

Interview with Dennis Sampson

Homestead Lighthouse Press: Who or what inspired you to become a poet and to write poetry

Dennis Sampson: My mother was a voracious reader of decent literature – no romance novels and the like – and would site in her recliner by the living room window with Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms or Faulkner’s Light in August in her lap. My father was a musician who probably never read a book of fiction in his life. I put on one of the covers of my books a photograph of him taken by my mother when the two of them were snow-birding along the Alabama coastline, and he looked at himself there and then said to my mother, “Gee whiz, Lu, I wish I had worn another hat.” But his trills on his clarinet in his den – they found their way into the way I put together a sentence in my poems, I think. My teacher in collegte, Dave Evans, played no small part in my development as a poet. Among many other things, Dave showed me why concision and imagery are so crucial to the success of a good poem.

HLP: Are you spiritual or religious? If you are either, how does that enter the poetry?

DS: This is a question that probably should be asked of someone other than me but I will give you a hint: Religions are mostly stupid, because like all ideologies, they think they have it all figured out. I say “mostly stupid” because the lost of the world often find refuge in religion, and I would be a fool if I were anything but sympathetic toward a mother, say, whose daughter has been raped and murdered and who finds spiritual consolation in prayer and in the church.

HLP: Do you consider yourself a “nature poet”? A poet of the city?

DS: I have always hated the phrase “nature poet.” Read Theodore Roethke’s short early poem “The Herson” and you will get a good idea of what it really means to be, ugh, a “nature poet.” That said, there has been, for me at least, a lifelong struggle going on between my fascination with and love for our world of blossoms and silkworms and morning deer in the yard and lions and tigers and bears, and my often crushing disappointment with the way my brothers and sisters on Planet Earth behave. James Wright’s poem “To a Blossoming Pear Tree” explains far better this essential quarrel with oneself. His poem concludes, “The dark blood in my body drags me down with my brother.” I am not sure it can be any other way.

HLP: How important are animals in your life and poetry?

DS: I like it when I look into an animal’s eyes. I saw a snake crossing a dirt road in Tennessee years ago that turned its slender body and looked ever so briefly at me. I have looked into the eyes of turtles and had my look returned. Have you ever looked into the rolling eyes of a horse? Sometimes, my last old dog and I would get lost for a good long time in one another’s eyes. Jane Goodall has a chapter in her Through a Window in which she refutes the notion that to look directly into the eyes of a chimpanzee is threatening. Looked at with love, [an animal] returns love. This is why I am drawn again and again in my poems to those creatures that inhabit the earth with us and, alas, depend on our understanding of them to survive. “The donkey brays like a pump gone dry.”: That is Elizabeth Bishop. “Humpbacked bees in pirate pants.”: That is John Ciardi in one of his poems. Those who do not consider themselves to be a nature poet do not know what they are missing. Even Baudelaire described a dead pig on its back alongside the road as looking “like a whore with its legs up in the air.”

HLP: What is poetry’s place in culture and society?

DS: Good poems have no place to abide in America right now. Future generations will have to look for the reclusive Emily Dickinson among us who went on writing against the most compelling of odds. Who is it who once said that “indifference is the one sin that most brings the angels to tears”? The poet barks in our day and age and the caravan moves on.

HLP: Did you enjoy teaching? How does teaching co-exist with poetry?

DS: There are two poems in my book What More Could the Universe Want that address what might be a conflict between the teaching of literature and the writing of one’s own poems. Those two poems are “The Russian,” about a reading given by poet Joseph Brodsky to graduate students at the University of Alabama and “Those Beautiful People in the Room.” I couldn’t add anything to that that wouldn’t sound like whining.

HLP: What are your thoughts about public performance of poetry?

DS: Poems are a performance of the written word. There is no getting around that. Marvell’s first line of his famous poem “To His Coy Mistress” – “If I had but world enough and time” – makes clear that what will follow will be a performance. The same goes for Ammon’s “I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth” and Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-personed God.” You try to find, as a poet, the right ingress into the event of the poem, knowing, as Dickinson did, that “the first line is god given. You have to do the rest for yourself.” Performance poetry with open mics in bars . . . a fine time, I guess, for all. I have been to a couple of those performances and have left them wanting to slit my throat. I am reminded of how Auden responded after being asked while he was in American what he thought of Dylan: that he thought the questioner had asked about Dylan Thomas and not the troubadour Bob Dylan, who would get the goddamn Nobel Prize well down the line. If anything signaled the end of the world, it was that. So when the subject of poetry as performance is brought up, I don’t think of young folks screaming horseshit from behind a podium in the smoky dark but of what I have tried to speak to above: the drama of poetry. Poems that in being dramatic do not forget the simple beauty of the human voice.