An Interview with Author Janet Rendall

by Silver Webb

Janet Rendall is the author of “Blue Brain Terrain,” which will be published this June in SB Lit Jo. I knew virtually nothing of Janet before I opened her submission email and fell into a complex story about a future where engaging too deeply with your senses might just be cause for extermination. Or, as Janet says, “During the 1990s, in the so-called “decade of the brain,” I became fascinated by that three-pound organ and how scientists saw it as our new and unlimited frontier. I wanted to explore what might happen if the feared artificial intelligence destroyed part of the world and to fight back, the human brain was enhanced. What could go wrong?”

When I interview Janet, possibly I am expecting a wild woman, an iconoclast, perhaps someone who keeps a binder of conspiracy theories by the bedside. I instead hear about a childhood that is surprisingly picture perfect. “I was born in Hollywood, back when they used to call it a city. I lived there until seven, when my parents moved to the very first track homes in West Covina, three streets all pretty much identical and we had a baseball team on each street, a close-knit neighborhood. That was back in the day when moms used to make popcorn balls on Halloween. Now you can’t ever hand out something home-made.” She mentions that this innocent time is reflected in her book TubeLight. Although she is quick to assure me that unlike the main character’s mother, her mother was not an alien. Her mother, in fact, graduated from Graceland College in 1932, in a time when it was not all that common for women to go to college. Janet went to the same college, but then transferred to San Jose State to study occupational therapy.

What to make of this bright imagination and practical career? Her friends would say she is “a nurturing person, warm, but someone who thinks outside the box and tries to inspire people to do the same.” Let us turn to my standard, prescriptions of the zodiac. Janet is a Sagittarius, and in the Chinese zodiac, a Horse. A Horse is energetic, warm-hearted, and positive. A Sagittarius is philosophical, a traveler, extrovert, and enthusiastic. Which pretty much means that Janet is a ball of energy. In fact, she just returned from a travel adventure in Africa.

When I ask what kind of a writer she is, Janet reveals that it takes her a long time to write a story, that she is an organic writer who is guilty of the same thing we all are: the crappy rough draft. “I am driven to write,” she says. “I try to write every day. Sometimes it takes the form of trying to prepare something for a blog. So if I’m not writing a short story or working on a novel, I have to write something. I lose myself in the writing, lose total track of time, which is a good thing.” When I ask if she is ever satisfied with her writing, she laughs. “No! I always think that I could be better and a lot of times it’s really hard for me to let go of it! I go back and fiddle with it and sometimes that doesn’t really make it better. I guess most writers feel that way. And if they were to go back and look at previous work they’d want to rewrite it.” She participates in a writing group regularly and counts Matt Pallamary, Dale Griffiths Stamos, Karen Ford, and Donald Maass as teachers and mentors who have encouraged her to write.

When I ask her about the writing process for “Blue Brain Terrain,” she says, “With this particular work I find myself being too left brain because I’m trying to make sure it has some scientific basis. This has been the most challenging thing I’ve ever worked on. My two novels were more historical. Route 66 to the Milky Way was set in 1949, and TubeLight is set in 1968. This new story is speculative. I wanted to leave it open-ended, with the idea that the future is open and we don’t really know what exactly is going to happen.” “Blue Brain Terrain” plays with the dichotomy between purely cerebral characters, who have “evolved” past the point of relying on their senses. But the story is also populated with sensual characters with “synesthesia” or meshed senses, who might be able to taste color or hear textures. Janet says, “I thought this would make for a really fascinating character where they’ve intentionally tried to enhance all the senses, so they’d be super creative, which a society might need…but not too many…that would be dangerous.”

When I ask how she wants people to feel after they read “Blue Brain Terrain,” she says, “I hope that they will feel interested and also challenged a bit to learn more about the brain. The brain is the final frontier. But I’m also hopeful that even if future societies make mistakes, they’re made by people who are trying to help things along, even if they get it wrong. I also feel that Ebol [the main character] is able to get away, because he’s a survivor. The underdog has a chance to live, even in a society where he’s beyond hope.”

This leads to my trickiest and final question. “Which sense could you live without?” She thinks about that, and says, “I wouldn’t want to give up vision, hearing, touch…maybe smell. Since it’s integral to taste I’d be a lot thinner! Maybe that’s why I elected to pick that sense for this story. It is the most basic of the senses.” But I promise that all of your senses will be engaged and rewarded when you read “Blue Brain Terrain” in Volume 1 of Santa Barbara Literary Journal, out on June 1, 2018!


Janet Rendall has received several writing awards from the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference and many practice awards from the American Society of Hand Therapists and the Occupational Therapy Association of California. Route 66 to the Milky Way is her debut novel, TubeLight is her second. She is currently writing an anthology, or possibly a novel, on the brain. You can visit her at www.janetrendall.com.

An Interview with Artist and Poet Mary Freericks

by Silver Webb

Mary is a contributor to Volume 1 of SB Lit Jo, which will be out in June. 

I met Mary dancing. As one does. In full Regency dress, at the Winter Dreams Ball. “Will you take a picture of me?” I believe that was her opening line. How could I refuse a beauty in a sparkly green ballroom skirt with an abalone necklace, purple flowers in her hair, and long white gloves on? I said yes to her, of course. And Mary flung herself into a pose worthy of Martha Graham. As I snapped a few photos, I thought, There is a story here. What is it?

It did not take me long to find out that Mary is both a poet and an artist. Normally I would smile brightly, and brace myself for Ring-Around-the-Rosy and Color-in-the-Lines. The vast majority of people who write or paint should do so with complete abandon within the privacy of their own home, and leave the rest of us out of it. But there was something about Mary, if you’ll excuse the well-worn phrase, which made me think, “This lady might just be amazingly talented.”

It turns out that she is. At watercolors, acrylics, collage, clothing design, and pretty much anything she puts her hand to. And she can write. Her book Blue Watermelon gathers poems about her childhood in Iran. You might not guess from her accent and auburn hair that English is Mary’s fourth language. She was born to a Russian Jewish woman and an Armenian Gregorian carpet merchant living in Iran, then immigrated with her mother to New York after her father passed away, and then to California after her own husband passed. 

A few weeks after the dance, I met Mary for lunch as she walked out of church with her black coat belted at the waist, little buckles and lace and unexpected touches, at least one or two older gentleman following after her. She knew exactly what to make of them, although they hardly know what to make of her. “Now I just say I’m from New Jersey. It’s easier,” she mused, as we got into her car, the back seat filled with paintings she made over the weekend at an art workshop. We arrived at a nice deli and settled in for a conversation that began with the paintings of Velasquez and ended with musings on the way women hold one another up over the generations, even after they’ve passed.

Mary is intensely aware of history. She remembers precisely the Atlantic passage on a Victory Ship, as one of three females on a ship full of sailors. She remembers also listening to Hitler on the radio in Tabriz, frightened of his manic shouting. Even now, she doesn’t like large stadiums of people cheering and shouting. She remembers hiding in the basement, lights out, while Tabriz was bombed. She remembers the family garden, her grandmother directing all of the women in the making of tomato paste. Such are the topics of her poems, and even her paintings. The cover of Volume 1 of the journal is a detail of a larger painting of Mary’s that shows the making of the tomato paste. A spur-of-the-moment venture into surreal, primitive color from an artist who can paint Russian tea glass with the precision of a watchmaker.

"Making Tomato Puree" by Mary Freericks

The first time I went to her apartment, I was struck by two cabinets filled with exquisite dolls. “My mother made them,” she informed me, and took out a doll with auburn hair in a blue taffeta evening dress. “This is me.” Not only did her artist mother make these dolls and sew their dresses, but she made a doll of Mary, at twenty, about to go to her college Junior Prom. The auburn hair on the doll is Mary’s hair, the dress is a miniature replication of the actual dress her mother sewed for her to go to that dance. It was about that time I started to realize, there was magic afoot. I half expected the doll to start talking to me and tell me a story of far-away Russia, where Mary’s mother, perhaps wishing to escape Stalin’s regime, took a chance on an Armenian rug merchant and moved to Tabriz. Her father “was such a good man,” Mary tells me, “And good looking!”

But there are more than dolls. The small apartment has paintings stacked everywhere. Exuberant watercolors of flowers, experimental splashes of paint, studious and precise, then wild and unpredictable. But the painting she really wanted to show me is the one of her matrilineal line. An Eiffel Tower of ancestors, one standing upon the shoulders on the other. In this reckoning of things, Mary is standing on the shoulders of powerful women, and her daughter-in-law stands on her shoulders, and at the top, young and enthusiastic, is her granddaughter Rachel. 

When I ask Mary what her favorite drink is, she thinks about it, and says, “Does soup count? I have soup two or three times a day. Soup is almost like a mother. It’s very cozy and comforting.” I wonder if this practical side of Mary comes from the sharp shift from being the daughter of a wealthy merchant in Tehran to the daughter of a single mother who made it by with help from the family’s wholesale rug business in Manhattan on West 33rd street. “Uncle Mesrop ran it,” she says, just as she mentions many such family members from her past, as if I might know them, as if they are still right there with her. Perhaps they are. But I suspect they are practical too. Her mother rented a few rooms in a house in Nyack, and had to learn how to cook food for the family, now that their life of servants in Tabriz and Tehran was over. Her mother never remarried, although she’d been widowed young. “My dad was her everything,” Mary says frankly.

Mary went to Beaver College on scholarships, performed in college plays, and at her mother’s insistence, majored in the practical career of teaching. On campus there was literally a castle, where she met her husband-to-be in the mirror room. He’d come from Princeton for a mixer. Mary describes him as having sandy-colored hair with beautiful green eyes, tall, well built, and slow to ask her to marry him (three years, she tells me, as if that is outrageously long). For a while they lived in Ohio, while he worked for the railroad. She was a young mother then, and didn’t really know that she wanted to be a writer or a painter. She was too busy trying to find a teaching job. But she did write poems, and over time began to take poetry workshops, taught by writers like Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell, and even went to Columbia for her M.F.A.

After Mary’s husband passed away, Mary moved to Santa Barbara in 1992, to be closer to her sons. “I discovered Adult Ed and took watercolor with Margaret Singer, then to Rose Margaret Braiden for more watercolor for many years. Then I started spreading into other areas, oil painting was only $5 for the semester, so I took that. I took various other courses. Now I’m doing acrylics.” When I ask if she paints every day, she responds vehemently, “No! I have too many paintings. I only paint once a week! And I probably write once a week.”

What else can I tell you about Mary? She was born at the tail end of the Chinese year of the Wood Dog, and she’s a Capricorn. So that would be an independent, stubborn, sure-footed person, who is patient and persistent in their work. That last one is a crucial characteristic for an artist or writer, in my opinion. She has taught poetry as well as contributed to the anthologies To Give Life a Shape, For She is the Tree of Life, Poetry in the Garden, and Armenian-American Poets. She has also read at the Distinguished Poets Series, William Carlos Williams Poetry Center, International Women’s Writers, Armenian Students’ Association, and the Karpeles Manuscript Library. Mary recently showed her work in the Abstract Art Collective in Faulkner Gallery and in Corridan Gallery with the Santa Barbara Visual Artists. She is currently working on a new book of poetry “to give strength to my grand-daughter, to future generations, to understand the pedestal we’re standing on and how we’re all holding each other up, giving each other courage to find ourselves.” Cheer for Freedom is the tentative title, and it will include both poems and works of art. 

Mary Freericks is a prize-winning poet with publications in anthologies including To Give Life a Shape, For she is the Tree of Life, Poetry in the Garden, and Armenian-American Poets. She has taught poetry both for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and California Poet in the Schools as well as in service courses to teachers in New Jersey, New York, and California. She has led workshops for the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Foundation. Her poetry readings include Distinguished Poets Series, William Carlos Williams Poetry Center, International Women’s Writers, Armenian Students’ Association, and the Karpeles Manuscript Library.

The Gloves are Off! Send us your submissions by April Fool's Day!

An Interview with Playwright Stuart Orenstein, by Silver Webb

Stuart Orenstein is our first contributor to Volume 1 of the Santa Barbara Literary Journal, forthcoming in June 2018. Stuart's play "I Do-nut find that A-Muse-ing" will be included. I recently sat down with Stuart to learn more about him.

What do you need to know about Stuart? That he was born in the Bronx, attended medical school in Belgium for six years, that he speaks French and Flemish? No, no, no. What you need to know about this writer are these crucial distinctions: He is a libra, and in the Chinese zodiac, an ox. And oh, he’s an actor featured on imdb.com 

But back to the Ox Libra. As far as I can tell, that either makes Stuart a diplomatic, charming, dependable traditionalist or a stubborn hothead. I'll let his favorite drink, coffee, be the tie breaker, and I'll go with the former, as the man sitting across from me at Lilac Patisserie is very even-keeled, funny, and observant…as one might expect from a man who served as a psychiatrist in Los Angeles for many years (more laid back than the Bronx, he assures me). But what you might not expect from Dr. Stuart is that he’s tread the boards quite a bit. He fell into acting, literally, in a play put on during Purim, in which the curtain opened, he “rode” out on a horse, the bad guy fired shots, and Stuart dropped like a brick. But it was a lucky fall. The director saw something in him, and soon he stepped into bigger roles in community theater. Although he was once paid in gummy worms, success has not eluded him. After he retired to Santa Barbara, he began starring in movies like Group Therapy and Salsipuedes Street (not to mention the 2017 classic, A Rabbi, a Priest and an Ex-Gumba). 

 

Stuart believes that humans need to continue to grow and learn after they retire, and his plays come as a result of courses taken at Santa Barbara City College. He wrote “Zt’L” with SBCC teacher Ellen Anderson, a play whose title is the Hebrew equivalent of “R.I.P.” A serious play about father-son relationships, he was looking to write something a little lighter after that. The result was “I Do-nut Think that’s A-Muse-ing” about a struggling writer whose muse is a disembodied lover of doughnuts. When asked why he picked this subject, Stuart replies, “Well, I like doughnuts. My first play was very personal and serious. I wanted my second play to be funny.” And funny it is. You’ll have to read Stuart’s play in Issue 1 of The Santa Barbara Literary Journal to see just how wry he is.

But I’m not sure I have Stuart sold on his Ox-Libra-ness, and so I try again with the unforgivable interview question of “How would friends describe your personality?”  He thinks about it, because I have the sense that most things that come out of his mouth have already been through a fast wash cycle, and says, “overly intellectual, not sentimental. I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist.” I wait for it. He goes off on a tangent about a friend who died, and how much better it is to be a realist. But then, just when I think he’s forgotten the question, he bursts out with a triumphant “A-ha!” and says, “Sarcastic New York Jewish guy who gets in a lot of trouble!” “Trouble?” I ask, quite sure there are more than a few stories he has yet to tell. He says that when he was young, a friend, in exasperation at Stuart’s stubbornness, asked him, “Would you rather be right or likeable?” At the time, he would rather have been right, but says, “In my senior years, I see his point.” As Stuart is already quite likable, I think he may as well go for both qualities.

Whenever I sit down with an author, I expect certain common ground. Someone driven to create, someone who loses sleep at night over characters, plot, endings. Someone who has the iron-willed eagle-gazed madness of Don Quixote in search of the perfect novel. You know, average writer stuff. But Stuart is delightfully laid-back. He doesn’t require fame and fortune. He may write another play, he may not. Right now he’s enrolled in a poetry class and loving it. When I ask if he’s ever happy with his work, if he rewrites much, he says with humor, “I do not see myself as a dilettante. Rather, I am a Renaissance man.” Which pretty much means he’s a dabbler. But I can’t hold that against him, as he's a very talented dabbler. If you’re lucky enough to see him perform his own pieces, you will be utterly taken in. 

After his latest poetry class, he’ll be taking a class on screenwriting. So goes the progression of a Renaissance Man About Town. Personally, I can’t wait to see what he produces next. Sometimes art that is born of a free hand, someone who has their days to do as they wish, who is not driven by an unforgiving impetus, sometimes delivers gems. I hope you will read and enjoy his play “I Do-nut Think That’s A-Muse-ing.” Who knows, maybe one of these days, you’ll see it performed at the Granada or the Lobero. You can find Stuart on Facebook, but keep your eye on Santa Barbara performing arts news, and see if you don’t find a play or two of his performed around town.

Letter from the Editrix

Who is to say what is literary? In my mind, if it is a story and it is well-written, it’s literature. But I find that stories considered “genre” are often deemed to be a different universe than literary fiction. Is it possible to have a literary werewolf? Would he have to wear a tuxedo and enunciate like Lord Mountbatten before he is considered literary? Can a witch be literary? Only if she goes to Harvard? (Believe me, I’ve befriended more than one unusual creature with a Ph.D. from that place.) I dislike the idea that literary fiction really means boring fiction, and that it is somehow valued more than anything with a teaspoon of imagination to it.

Improbable characters, things with tentacles, cauldrons of foul brew…all of these are welcome at SB Lit Jo, as long as they are well written. So send me your werewolves, your steampunk dandies, your cackling beauties and black cats. If it defies genre and is wonderfully weird, send it too.

The most important thing, really, is that you keep writing, keep improving your craft, and keep bringing stories worth telling into this world.

Best,
Angela

SB Lit Jo Editrix