In this episode, host Gina Hogan Edwards welcomes Jennifer Schomburg Kanke, a poet and writer whose work beautifully intertwines personal history and storytelling. Jennifer shares insights into her creative process, discussing how her Appalachian roots and family narratives shape her poetry. She reads from her latest collection, The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had, which explores themes of identity and resilience through the lens of her grandmother’s experiences during the floods in Ohio.

The conversation delves into the importance of clear narratives in poetry and the balance between research and creative expression. Jennifer also highlights her journey as a writer, emphasizing the value of practice and immersion in literature. Join us for an inspiring discussion that celebrates the art of storytelling and the power of poetry to connect us to our past and present. Tune in for a rich exploration of creativity and craft!

Jennifer Schomburg Kanke:

Ep. 55: Interview with Jennifer Schomberg Kanke

00:00:02
Dave Hogan, Gina’s Pop
Welcome to Around the Writer’s Table, a podcast focusing on the crossroads of creativity, craft, and conscious living for writers of all ages and backgrounds. Your hosts are Gina, Melody, and KimBoo, three close friends and women of a certain age, who bring to the table their eclectic backgrounds and unique perspectives on the trials, tribulations, and the joys of writing. So pull up a chair and get comfortable here around the writer’s table.

00:00:44
Gina Hogan Edwards
Hi, listeners. This is Gina Hogan Edwards coming to you on Around the Writer’s Table. Welcome back to us. As you can see here, I am here with a guest today. Usually you will hear from me and from KimBoo York and Melody, A Scout, my co-hosts, but this is one of our interview sessions. Our special guest today is Jennifer Schomberg Kanke, and I have been fortunate enough to meet her through KimBoo and got to hear her do a reading this past week. And we’re really delighted to have you here today, Jennifer.

00:01:22
Jen
Thank you, Gina. I’m very excited to be here with you.

00:01:25
Gina
So let me give our audience a little bit of a formal introduction. After spending most of her life in Ohio, Jennifer now lives in Florida, which is where I live. And that is where she edits confidential documents. That sounds kind of exciting and very mysterious. 

Jennifer’s work has recently appeared in New Ohio Review, Pleiades, Massachusetts Review, and Shenandoah. She’s a winner of the Sheila Na Gig Editor’s Choice Award for fiction, and her zine about her experiences undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, which is called Fine, Considering, is available from Rinky Dink Press. Her full-length poetry collection, which I got to hear her read from this past week, is called The Swellest Wife Anyone Ever Had. It’s about Appalachian Ohio and about her grandmother, and it’s available now from Kelsay Books. 

Jennifer can be found on YouTube on the Meter&Mayhem channel hosting the Meter Cute Interviews podcast focusing on interviews with contemporary writers. Welcome, Jennifer. It’s great to have you here.

00:02:39
Jen
Thank you, Gina. It’s wonderful to be here with you.

00:02:42
Gina
I’m going to be the first to tell you that I am not a poet. I love to hear the author read poetry like you did this past week when we were at our local bookstore, Midtown Reader. And so I’m not going to be able to ask you like, lots of academic poetry-type questions, but that brought me to a question that I always love to ask authors who write in multi genres, which you do. You’re not only a poet. How do you identify yourself primarily? Do you consider yourself a poet? or just a writer? or what?

00:03:29
Jen
Oh, that’s a good question. I think it depends on the context. If I’m doing something that involves my poetry, I’ll identify as a poet. But if I’m doing something that’s fiction, I’ll just say I’m a writer. Yeah, I kind of go back and forth between them. I think my academic degrees and things are all in poetry. So I think primarily I’m probably should be just saying I’m a poet, but because I do the other genres, I mix it up a little.

00:04:03
Gina
So tell me a little bit about what draws you to the kinds of things that you write about, whether it’s poetry or fiction. What typically is the tug.

00:04:17
Jen
I think, as cheesy as it sounds and as sort of Internet meme like, I think what often draws me is that I write about the things that I wish I would have been able to read when I was younger or things that I want to read now. So I typically will write about—my short stories, especially, if I write a story where there’s not a 10-year-old working-class girl in the story, that’s how you’ll know it’s not, that it’s somebody imitating me or something. It’s not really me, because I always, almost every story, there’s a 10-year-old girl, usually working class. There’s a couple, I’ve got some stories based on my father’s life and so I’ve got some that don’t fit into that. But typically, that’s what I’m writing about. So wanting to get stories that are often overlooked and just wanting to get them into literature. Especially if you think about my collection that just came out, I’m writing about an Appalachian woman in mainly the 1930s to around the 1960s is what’s in the book. You really don’t hear too much about women during that time period and from that area in literature and especially not in formal poetry. So that’s kind of what draws me to it, I think, is things that I feel need a little bit more attention.

00:05:55
Gina
I can really see why KimBoo introduced us because there are a lot of things that we have in common. The novel that I’m working on has a nine-year-old young girl in it. We both are from Appalachia, different ends, but we’re both from Appalachia. And sense of place. I have felt from the things that I’ve heard you read that sense of place is really important in your work as well. You write about the flood in Ohio and some other things that we’re going to be talking about here. But I’m curious since we share that little bit of those roots in Appalachia, ‘identity’ as a theme in your writing, a theme in various works, how has your work been influenced by your family history and your Appalachian roots?

00:06:55
Jen
My brain goes off in three different ways and if I don’t address what it wants, then I’ll never get to the other ones. So I want to say also that my people are actually from the same area originally. Well, originally, they’re from North Carolina before they moved to Ohio. There’s parts of my family that are from the Asheville area in North Carolina. So we could be like cousins way back or something like that.

00:07:25
Gina
Yes. So to give some clarification for our listeners who, who may not know, I grew up in the western North Carolina area. And Jennifer, you grew up in, is it Scioto County, Ohio?

00:07:39
Jen
So I grew up in Ohio, but my family is from Scioto or I grew up in Columbus, but my family is from Scioto County. Yeah.

00:07:46
Gina
Okay, so back to the question.

00:07:51
Jen
Now that my brain has got allowed itself to say that. Now to, I think that my family—and I think this is true for a lot of Appalachian families—there was a really strong, strong roots in oral storytelling and in singing and folk music and that kind of stuff. So I grew up around those rhythms and valuing and the value of hearing poetry out loud. My grandfather, who I never knew, so I’m only getting this through stories, he would recite poems. Apparently Whittier was one of his favorites and also Longfellow. He would just break into a Longfellow poem. Right. He would do the introduction to Evangeline. He had a fifth-grade education and dropped out of school at 14, but he still, he had all those poems inside of him. He also played banjo and there were people in my family who played fiddle and dulcimer, and so those rhythms too, from the folk music, I think they all find their way into my poetry and have shaped my identity and my interaction with language.

00:09:20
Gina
I love that. So I’m probably getting a little ahead of myself in some of the things that we talked about that we were going to talk about, but I’m really interested in—I was thinking as you were talking about how my dad claims that he has trouble reading poetry, that he never understands it, and I can’t wait to take him your newest book, The Smallest Wife Anyone Ever Had, because one of the things that I love about it is how through the poems, you tell a story. It’s these discrete individual entries, some longer than others, some quite short. But if you look at it as a whole, it tells this beautiful story. I know that history is important to you, which is also one of my interests. And I’m curious about, as you go about the process of writing, how you weave in and incorporate that idea of history along with family identity and the poetic word from an academic aspect, just weaving in the history and the family. Tell me a little more about that. How do you balance your research and your writing?

00:10:54
Jen
I have no idea. I thought about this question. Right. I have thought about this, and I do whatever feels right, whatever. Sometimes I’ll be writing and I’ll get to a place where I’m like, oh, I need a detail here. There’s a poem called “Confluence,” which, if it’s okay, I, would you mind if I read that poem and then I can show you kind of where I did a little bit of research?

00:11:26
Gina
Absolutely. I’d love that.

00:11:29
Jen
Where I hit a… Is it okay if it’s a little bit risque?

00:11:34
Gina
Yes.

00:11:38
Jen
So this is:

Confluence – 1933

Afternoon heat with mosquitos in every small, shady spot,

she and Dete headed to swim where the creek meets the Little Scioto,

down by Bobwhite Hollow and out past old Wheeler’s Millhouse.

Modest black swimsuits with no frills to speak of, they’d worked long and hard for the 

store-bought contraptions with worsted wool and a mermaid-stamped tag.

Such an extravagance, weren’t they so fancy, didn’t their calluses

spark to the chill of the water as they giggled and splashed in their secret

world with the warblers and wrens their sweet stalwart companions and guardians.

But up around a subtle bend, those hot, ornery boys,

they were hopping in and, would you believe, were just naked as jays.

All dingles and dangles, with muscles ripe from the hogs and the hay.

They would swear later on that they had no idea that the girls were right there.

Just funning and sunning, a lark and a dare, not meaning to make

a show of themselves, not meaning to scare the birds all away.

00:12:48
Gina
I’m right there with them.

00:12:51
Jen
So with that poem, it has its core in a story that my granny told me about how she and her sister were swimming and a bunch of boys came floating down completely naked. And they were like, “Oh, we didn’t know you all were there.” One of those boys actually ends up being my grandfather. Anytime there’s any time there’s a young boy doing something he probably shouldn’t be doing, that is most likely my grandfather. When I sat down to write the poem, I go through a process known as enrhythming that I learned from Annie Finch, which is where you take a poem that’s in a meter that you want to write in, so say, you want to write in iambic pentameter. You could pull up a Shakespeare sonnet and you read that poem that’s in the meter you want to eventually write in. You read that over and over again, and the goal is that your brain will latch on to that rhythm. Then when you go to write right after, you kind of got it already in your heart and soul and mind, and it just kind of pours out. Technically, I think the actual linguistic term for it, I think it falls under semantic priming, but in the poetry world, we call it enrhythming because it sounds cooler.

00:14:29
Gina
Does sound cool.

00:14:33
Jen
So I enrhythmed and then just started trying to write Granny’s story out. I came to a place where I was like, I want to write about her swimsuit. But Granny passed away in 2006, and all of her brothers and sisters have also passed. There’s nobody who was there who I can ask, “Hey, what did the swimsuits look like?” That’s where the research part comes in that I can look up and see, okay, we’re in 1933, we’re in Ohio, shhow me some swimsuits. Oh, oh, great Google, show me what swimsuits look like in 1933. Then I had to figure out, okay, what was an upper class swimsuit going to look like? What was something that somebody who was more working class could afford? Although, mostly they made a lot of stuff, but I wanted it to be something kind of store bought. I found one that I was like, yeah, this looks like something she would probably like. There was even—I saw The Little Mermaid. A mermaid was on the tag of the swimsuit, and I was like, okay, I’m going to work that in. So in that way, I started with the story and then the research. The research filled in the gaps I had. 

But then sometimes I start with the research. So thinking about my poem, I have a longer poem which I’m not going to. I will not read the entire poem. Also, it’s pretty intense, some of the sections of it. So the poem “Scenes from the Flood,” I guess this kind of starts with a granny story, but not. She told me about when the flood hit in 1937. The Ohio River flooded in 1937. It also flooded again in 1938. So sometimes when you hear people talk about the Ohio River flood and then they start to… This actually happened between me and a friend of mine that we were both writing about, oh, the Ohio River flood in the late ’30s. And then I was like, ’37. She’s like, no, ’38. And then finally we went back and forth and, finally, we looked it up and went, oh, it flooded both years. We’re talking about two different floods. Wow. She talked about all the trains were stopped, and so she and her sister walked across the Ohio River on one of the railway bridges. They walked from Scioto County to Northern Kentucky.

00:17:15
Gina
Wow.

00:17:16
Jen
Yeah. And I changed the story a little bit, but so I knew the flood was a huge thing for folks in that area and I knew I wanted to do something with it, but I didn’t feel like I had enough from just her story. So I went and did a whole bunch of research and I looked at New York Times articles that were contemporary to that time. I watched a documentary called River Voices that’s available on YouTube. That’s where some filmmakers by the last name of Lorenz, they are in Scioto County, and they interviewed a bunch of people in the early aughts who had been through the flood. And so I did that. Also, the Minford school where my grandmother went, their alumni or somebody runs a wonderful part of their school district’s website that’s for alumni and it has old newspaper articles. So I could look up and see there what was it like for folks in that area as opposed to people who were in Portsmouth, which was much closer to the river. So Minford didn’t get it as bad. So I was able to see articles about that. So “Scenes from the Flood” really starts from a more research-based place. And then I went through an enrhythming process and then just was like, okay, okay, brain, what do you have? What do you got now? What can you put out there? And so I wanted to read a couple sections from it, if I may.

00:18:57
Gina
Oh, definitely.

00:19:00
Jen
I’m gonna read the first section, which was one of the most fun ones to research, because I made up a date that Granny went on, which she had this guy that she did tell me about who she wasn’t really dating. They weren’t really a couple. She’d say there was nothing tricksy going on. Like, okay, Granny, I believe you. I believe you. But I wanted her to go on some dates with this guy, wanted her to get to have a moment. I got to watch the Don Ameche film One in a Million. Super. I was like, I want to pretend that they went to see this film. So I had to research and see, okay, what could have been playing at the movie theater in Portsmouth during the time that I’m going to write about. And so One in a Million. I think I may have even found something. I know what it was. There were pictures of the movie theater when it was flooded, and you can see the sign, and you could see that One in a Million had been playing before all the rain started. So I was like, okay, I’m going to watch One in a Million and see what I got. This is what came out of watching it. 

First Date, One in a Million at the Columbia – January 5, 1937 

Wet, but not too terribly so,

the couple that still weren’t

a couple, settled into their seats

amid the rustle of coats

and newspapers, waiting sparks

catch the electricity between them.

Static or desire, who knows?

Don Ameche plays the part

of savior and wise man, witty

on the silver screen ahead

while crowds cheer a skating girl

fast on the slickness of the ice

knowing she’ll come out of her spin

ready to do it again.

Thank you. And that was a real. That was a pleasure to research because I just got to sit down and watch a movie and try to look at it through her eyes. But then there’s another section that I think that I pulled most of the images and ideas from that River Voices documentary. So it was completely researched, and nothing from any of my family or anybody that I knew personally. And this one’s called:

Heroes in All Sizes – January 27, 1937

Many people owe their lives

to teenage boys who got

fancy motorboats for Christmas

or National Guardsmen who said

If you don’t get in this boat,

I will shoot you in the leg

and carry you down myself

when stubborn men wouldn’t leave

their homes and their women

wouldn’t leave them.

But how many people

owe their lives to little skinny

Albert Egbert shimming through

the top floor window of Wurster’s Drugs

to keep filling prescriptions

for people as long as he could

even if he’d never

seen them before that very second.

00:22:13
Gina
You have given me such a new experience of poetry. I just, I mean, what you have shown me in your writing is more storytelling to me than any poetry that I’ve ever read before. I love it.

00:22:38
Jen
Thank you. I’m glad that I can help bring people into poetry. I think one of the things that has helped with that is I studied with Mark Halliday up at Ohio University and also David Kirby and Barbara Hamby down here at Florida State, and all of them really focus on clear narratives. If Mark was confused about a poem, he would say, “Give me eight more words or eight more lines to help me understand this.” From working with them, I really gained the ability to tell a clear narrative in as short an amount of space as I possibly could. I think that that has blended really well with… I later worked with Annie Finch learning how to write metrical poetry. So that allows me to write metrical poems that have, hopefully, a nice lyrical bent to them, but are still clear narratives. And it’s because I’ve got those two different things coming from my background that have helped make that work. I’m glad that folks are enjoying them and that you’re enjoying it.

00:23:59
Gina
I’m fascinated, too, by the process that you talked about enrhythming and how reading a poem in the—is the word meter? pacing?—that you want to have in your own poetry is an intentional practice. So often I have talked with fiction writers who say, “Oh, I’m writing historical fiction and while I’m writing, I can’t read any other work because I’m always afraid I’m going to sound like that writer.” This seems to be flipping that idea on its head. I love that because I think it’s important for all writers to read, to immerse themselves in the works of others. Of course, we don’t want to mimic or copy, but I think that there is a lot to be said for really immersing yourself in the works of the writers that you admire. I know that there’s many, many writers in the past who would sit down and handwrite out the novels that they admired in order to get that feel for the pacing and the sentence structure and all of those things. So that’s what the enrhythming reminds me of.

00:25:26
Jen
Yeah. I really think enrhythming works just as well when writing fiction as when writing poetry. I do a Substack where I have writing prompts for folks, and part of the writing prompt is always enrhythming. Every time I’ll say, write a poem or a short story or essay, because I really think that it’s still—you get those rhythms and you’re not doing the line breaks—but you still can get the rhythms in your mind. I think that it’s important to choose what you’re reading when you’re writing for that very reason. That there are some times I will pick up a novel, like Jeff Vandermeer has a new one out, and so he writes climate, science fiction stuff. I picked it up, and his sentences, his sentence structures are very distinct. They’re not really something that my writing tends to gravitate towards or that the writing that I do often calls for. I found myself like, Right. I was like, no, no, no, let’s read something else. Let’s get something else in there that’s more like what I’m going for. Because, yeah, your brain is just a sponge, and it will take it all in. I think when people worry about sounding like somebody else, I understand where the worry is coming from, but it’s also an unfounded worry because you will always sound like yourself, no matter what filter you’re putting it through. No matter what you’re putting in, it will always come through the filter of you. So you will always sound like yourself, no matter what you’re reading, no matter what you’re watching on television or singing. It’s going to always come through the filter of you. You will always sound like yourself, but maybe you’ll sound like yourself in a certain tone or a meter. That’s always fun to play around with and see. What do I think of this version of myself?

00:27:38
Gina
Yeah, and I think the playing around with the different versions is very important for writers, too. I kind of preach that I think that fiction writers don’t practice enough. So many writers that I know think that everything that they write has to be the thing, it has to be whatever they’re going to share or whatever they’re going to publish or for somebody else to lay their eyes on. They don’t give themselves permission to just write as practice and maybe not show it. Maybe write something intentionally to just throw away, but as a practice intentionally.

00:28:26
Jen
Oh, I like that idea. I wrote a novel and it hasn’t been going well in terms of getting it to be something that’s cohesive and that others can get with quite yet. I wonder, maybe it’s my practice novel. Maybe it was. I was practicing the ideas of structure and practicing. I was just practicing. And then maybe I’ll do something else.

00:28:59
Gina
Yeah, well, practice is a good lead-in to a final question that I have for you and something that I always like to ask our guests. So share a little bit about your writing process. Do you have a routine? What does your typical writing day or period of time, if you don’t write every day, what does your writing routine look like?

00:29:27
Jen
I will go through periods where I will write every day, but those are kind of few and far between. I’m more the kind of person that is like, okay, in the next three days, I’m gonna write 15 poems, and then I write 15 poems in three days. And then work on revising them for the next year or whatever. But one of the things that  I do is another thing I picked up from Annie Finch, which is that before I start to write and before I enrhythm, I will get in tune with the energies of the world around me. That can take the form of just meditating or I’ll do a thing that’s called “Calling the Corners.” I just check in with each direction, each compass direction and each energy that might be associated with that direction just to be grounding myself and getting ready. Then I also have this little thing that I will say before I start to write, which is, “May my work be seen by all who feel seen by my work.” 

I had been through, because I went through graduate programs, there’s a real emphasis on are you being published in the right places? Right? As often, who’s publishing your book? There’s that heavy emphasis on being at the right part of the hierarchy, and it almost killed me in many ways, I think, or at least made me miserable. So being able to say that I want my work to be seen by all who feel seen by my work is kind of my way of reclaiming what I really, really want. That it doesn’t matter if the journal I’m in is the top tier journal. What matters is are the people who are going to read this and say, is it going to get to those folks? And so I like to do that before I start to write. And then I’ll enrhythm. 

One of the things that I’ve started to do lately, which I don’t know why I didn’t think about it before, because I’m working on a retelling of Longfellow’s poem “Evangeline,” but it’s based on the stories of a friend of mine living in the Panhandle in Wakulla and Leon counties in the ’80s and ’90s is the primary focus. It’s a long poem. “Evangeline” is a very long poem and I’ve been working on it for a year and a half and I’m about halfway done and I was like, how can I get this done while still trying to get done? I tend to do native gardening, but my whole yard we rent and then there’s just tons of invasives and it’s a never-ending battle against the cat’s claw and the nandina and things like that. Right? I’m just constantly needing to be out there. I was finding that I wasn’t able to get both done to any satisfactory. So I made videos of myself reading the portions of “Evangeline” that I would be writing about next, that I would be mimicking next. And made little videos that were like 10 minutes long of me reading. Then I play them while I’m gardening. It reminds me to take a break. Every 10 minutes the video ends and it’s like, okay, time to go write a little bit. So my video is kind of enrhythming for me and brilliant. Yeah. And I’ve gotten so much more done on both of them since I started doing that.

00:33:21
Gina
That’s an incredible idea. I love that. Gardening has always been, until the last couple of years, one of the places where I’ve gone to to get myself settled and grounded. It’s a thinking time for me. I miss that because I haven’t been doing much in the last few years. I love your idea of tying the writing in with the gardening and making the best use of that time in a way that really nourishes both. Thank you for sharing also, about your saying that you use to get yourself grounded, because that is really beautiful. I try to emphasize to the writers that I work with that the people who need their work are going to find it, and it’s hard sometimes for them to believe in that. I think that there’s a preoccupation oftentimes with that hierarchy that you referred to, and that can kill our creativity. So your reclamation of your power in using that saying is, I think that’s brilliant. Thank you for sharing it.

00:34:35
Jen
Thank you. You’re welcome. And feel free to use it and share it and with whoever you think might want to hear it.

00:34:43
Gina
So now, hopefully, the whole world will hear it since we’ve got you on recording.

00:34:47
Jen
Yeah. Wonderful.

00:34:51
Gina
So, Jennifer, this has been delightful. I’m so glad that we got to spend this time together. I’m excited to know that you’re close here to where I live so that we can get together hopefully on maybe a, you know, if not regular, an occasional basis that we can have coffee together or something.

00:35:09
Jen
Yes, that would be lovely. It’s been wonderful talking to you today.

00:35:13
Gina
Was there anything else you want to leave our listeners with or maybe let them know you mentioned your Substack? Maybe let them know how to find that and remind them about your YouTube channel.

00:35:21
Jen
Yeah. Excellent. So my Substack and my YouTube both have the same name, which is Meter&Mayhem. The ‘and’ is an ampersand on YouTube, but I think that Substack made me actually spell it out. So you can find me under Meter and Mayhem, and my logo is a raccoon reading a book. Yes.

00:35:45
Gina
I love it.

00:35:46
Jen
Yeah. And that was done by a local Tallahassee artist named Diane Thompson. Did I call him Mayhem? His name is Mayhem, the Raccoon. Tthen I did another podcast called Granny Love, which is also available on the Meter&Mayhem channel, that is Appalachian folks reading poems about their grandmothers. And so I had Diane do, what would Mayhem’s granny look like? She took a picture of my granny and then was like, okay, how would she look like as a raccoon? So we have that little logo for that one, too. So folks can find us.

00:36:27
Gina
That’s terrific. That’s great. That’s great. Well, thank you, Jennifer. I appreciate you being here. It’s been wonderful spending time with you. And listeners, thank you for joining us today. Stay tuned next time for another podcast from Melody, KimBoo, and I. We’ll see you next time. Thank you.

00:36:47
Gina’s Pop
Thanks for joining us around the writer’s table. Please feel free to suggest a topic or a guest by emailing info@aroundthewriterstable.com. Music provided with gracious permission by Langtry. A link to their music is on our homepage at AroundTheWritersTable.com. Everyone here around the writer’s table wishes you joy in your writing and everyday grace in your living. Take care, until next time.

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