Friday Interviews: Zev Levinson, Author

Today I am excited to bring to you an interview with friend and author, Zev Levinson. Zev and I were introduced through my friend Jen Rand, and through them I found my way to the Lost Coast Writers Retreat. I have had the joy of getting to know Zev as a person, a poet and a writer. His writings are eloquent and colorful. He brings images to life in his poetry, especially in his new book that walks the reader through the  beauty and history of Humboldt county. His book, Song of Six Rivers, is a delightful epic poem to read and a visual experience with pictures from the archives of Humboldt State University. His writing comes from a deep connection with the Humboldt region through his working and teaching.  Zev is also a teacher of poetry working with California Poets in the Schools and works with the Redwood Writing Project.

1) Please introduce yourself to us. Tell us about your work with California Poets in the Schools as well as the Redwood Writing Project.

I have been with California Poets in the Schools since 1998. It’s one of the largest writers-in-residence programs in the country. We go into schools, hospitals, juvenile halls. I get students to read and write a lot of poetry. I’m in a classroom or several classrooms for a week at a time. Since I mostly do this for my living, as well as being an editor, I sometimes stay a week at a time in places far enough away from home to preclude commuting.
I’ve been with the Redwood Writing Project [RWP] since 2001, which is part of the National Writing Project. When I joined, its two main objectives, as I understood, were teachers teaching teachers about writing; and also that if you teach writing, you should be a practicing writer. With the RWP I have been teaching the Young Writers Camp since summer 2003, and the main poetry teacher for their Young Writers Conference which is a separate event. When I teach in the schools, I always advertise RWP’s Young Writers Programs, so we get a lot of crossover signups for these events.

2) What drives your passion to stay involved with these projects?

[Laughs] I don’t know what else I would do. I was on the path to become a professor and that didn’t work out. Teaching kids was going to be a side project. I received so much positive feedback from teachers, principals and parents that I kept teaching. I keep my calendar filled with teaching nearly every week during the school year. I have seen thousands of young minds light up when I present poetry and love the interchange that happens. All kids are ready to be poets if they aren’t already, whereas adults have walls up. Even when I walk into a place with reluctance and resistance, I try to break the ice really quickly and blow their minds really quickly. Most of the time, one hundred percent of the students get on board pretty rapidly. It’s been impossible to want to turn away.

3) Let’s talk about your new book. Tell me about the title of your epic poem, Song of Six Rivers.

It’s about the area I live, Humboldt County, in the far north of California. With the title, I had some guidance from Jim Dodge, a great local author. He encouraged me to settle on a title that didn’t specify a politically mandated name like “Humboldt County.” The area where I live is called the Six Rivers region or the Humboldt Bay region. We have the Six Rivers National Forest, emphasizing six main watersheds. It sounds good and people know the area. It’s a bioregional name. The poem is an ode to the region as well as to Guy Kuttner, who is its muse. When I was searching for the right title, Bob Sizoo, former codirector of the RWP, suggested it.

4) What are your connections to Humboldt County and what does that bring to your writing?

I haven’t lived here my whole life: less than thirty years. But I am deeply connected to this place. I moved away, and came back, and never want to leave again. Humboldt is a special place. It has very beautiful natural surroundings, rural, with a small population. We’re on the ocean; we have the mountains and the forests. There’s a strong sense of community with people helping each other a lot. I bonded with the place quickly. When I moved here I became Dan the Flower Man, selling flowers in Arcata and Eureka. That’s how people knew me. Then I kept morphing into one thing or another, mostly a teacher and writer.

5) Can you tell my readers about Guy Kuttner and what is his significance to your poem? What is your dad’s influence in the poem?

Guy passed away about seven years ago. He was an educator, naturalist, peace activist, and one of the founders of the Lost Coast Writers Retreat. Bob Sizoo originally created the retreat through RWP, mainly for teachers. When funding dried up, a group of us turned it into a retreat for writers with published authors presenting workshops. It was a lot of work and we had to charge campers much more than we do now. We would have meetings in Guy and Cindy’s living room [Cindy was Guy’s wife]. Guy kept saying that if this was too much work, we should just rent Camp Mattole by ourselves and let it be a collective with our own workshops.

The year we decided to change it to a collective, he died suddenly. He was stricken with a rare disease and within a few weeks he was gone. He was a really powerful presence. Several hundred people came to his memorial. He was uncompromising in his beliefs, kind, loving, gentle, and changed our community. He had a big personality. When I began to write the poem, I was nearing fifty, wondering about my own legacy and what I would leave behind when I go. In the poem, I am asking why am I here, what am I doing, is my teaching in the schools enough? Guy responds by speaking to me from the beyond and instructing me to sing of these lands that we both love. He was a mentor figure to me as well as somewhat of a father figure, being twenty years my senior.

My father was also a community leader, a professor, a cantor in a synagogue, and he died when I was fourteen. He was in a car accident, then a coma for four months, then died. A thousand people were at his funeral. So that has always been a part of my psyche. He was my role model who left behind this legacy. He was also a published author, and there is still a Robert Levinson Memorial Lecture every year at San Jose State University where he taught, as well as a library named after him. There is all of this legacy in my life. As I was working on the poem, I was asked to work on the third edition of his book, The Jews in the California Gold Rush. The first edition was published while he was alive, the second one after he passed. Now a third edition was requested by the Commission for the Preservation of Pioneer Jewish Cemeteries and Landmarks in the West.

It was the first time that the text was digitally scanned, which caused a whole riot of errors and I had to go in and correct them, comparing one text to another, all the while working with an editor from someplace else through email. It turned out to be a complicated process. The book took four years to put together. While I was writing the poem, I was very present with my father as well. You might say that editing his book was my first collaboration with him ever. It was a deep process to read his words over and over.

It had taken me decades to read his book in the first place, telling myself I wasn’t too interested because it was dry history. Of course I was in denial, not wanting to get that close to him after he was gone, open up the wound. When I finally read it, I could hear his voice speaking every sentence and it was as though he was talking to me. So I read it very, very slowly and savored that. Then he unintentionally walked into the poem. He is not as present as Guy, but the two books came out around the same time.

6) What inspired you to take on the project of writing an epic poem about Humboldt?

I was wanting to leave something memorable behind. I didn’t know it was going to be as long as it was, but I did want it to be somewhat epic in scale, to honor the land. The poem spontaneously formed as I continued to work on it. I didn’t always know where it was going. The more I went with it, the more I realized it was a sweeping view of the Humboldt area. In order to name so many places here, and to honor the Native Americans living here now and the ones who were decimated, it was going to take a lot of lines. I guess it was two things: I was going for something big, and the epic suited itself to my needs. And it was also fed by my love of British Romantic poets who wrote epic poetry. I was also inspired as a teenager by progressive rock, musicians who created great epic songs. I felt I was working in a true vein. When I was younger, before I was serious about or schooled in poetry, that kind of poem would come to me. The musicality of meter and rhyme works well for me.

7) How does teaching influence your writing?

I’m inspired by the natural beauty of the places where I teach. And teaching and writing feed each other. I couldn’t have written Song of Six Rivers without the teaching aspect. Since I go all over the county to teach, and sometimes stay for a week at a time in faraway communities, I take walks every day, asking the locals about good places to explore and what secrets I ought to know. I get invited into people’s homes for dinner, and get to know the communities intimately.

Although my poetry isn’t always inspired by teaching, I am grateful that poetry has become the main focus of my life. As I’ve gotten older, poems have come less spontaneously to me; so one of the benefits of teaching is that during writing time in the classroom, sometimes I can work on my poems while students are writing theirs. I might chip away at a poem for years while working in schools.

8) Tell me about your writing routine. What was your process in writing this poem?

My routine is not as rigorous as I wish it were. This is mostly because I’m a self-employed freelancer who spends a lot of time organizing my work. Being an editor and a teacher means that often I don’t have time for my own writing. When writing an epic poem, you can’t just go back to it a day at a time because there is so much to read through, to recall, to mull over. I need chunks of time, and that’s what’s so valuable about the Lost Coast Writers Retreat and having some summer vacation. It gives me time to reorient myself and remember what I was trying to say.

I started working on Song of Six Rivers at Camp Mattole [Lost Coast Writers Retreat] because it has become a sacred place for all of us who knew Guy. Cindy even had us release some of Guy’s ashes at our favorite swimming hole. That’s where I began working on the poem. I finished half of it by the time the retreat ended. I wrote the other half over the rest of the summer. I made myself keep working on it. It was such a challenging process and I wanted to run it by someone like Jim Dodge, who has such a keen eye and ear.

He tore it apart. He’s kindhearted but an unforgiving critic. He didn’t finish reading it, as other things had come up in his life. He said he’d read the rest if I wanted, but I was trying to be generous and I regrettably told him that I got the overall gist of his comments. I wish I had had him continue with detailed critique. Besides some helpful ideas regarding logic, he pointed out weaknesses in the meter and rhyme scheme and stanza structure. So I ended up rewriting the whole thing. The first draft was around four hundred and fifty lines but I tightened up the meter, changed the rhyme scheme and the stanza structure. It took another year to finish it.

9) How did you discover that writing was your path?

Writers always say that it’s something they can’t help but do. The hard-core ones say they would rather not be alive than not write. I’m not so extreme. When I was younger I was inspired more by music. Music was probably more important to me than poetry. Then a shift came and I didn’t care about the labels: musician, writer, etc. When I was a teenager, poems would just come to me, and that continued into my twenties and beyond. As for a career, I wasn’t sure. I always loved reading and writing, so I chose the path of becoming a teacher of writing. The writing grew over time. I think I would have written some book on my own—and I have put together unpublished collections over time—but I was lucky and discovered the Redwood Writing Project which led to the Lost Coast Writers Retreat. Without those, the epic poem, the book, wouldn’t have happened. Now that it’s out in the world, I feel more that being an author is a possible career, enjoying working hard to get other books into the world.

10) What is the most difficult aspect of writing?

Getting the words perfect. A writer wants to share inspiring ideas. It’s not hard to share these, but to share them in a powerful and intriguing way . . . that is the great challenge. And poetry has to be musical as well. It has to sound good or history won’t remember it. I like to push language. I like to make it unique, sometimes verging on language poetry, where the emphasis is on the sound and normal channels of meaning are not always accessible.

11) Did you plan on Song of Six Rivers to also be such a visual book?

No. I was only thinking of the poem. When I presented it to Kyle Morgan at Humboldt State University Press, he liked the project. But he also saw it as a visual book, with accompanying archival photos from the library’s Special Collections. I said yes, even though I thought the poem stood on its own. I was pretty naïve about that, since many people buy the book for its visual appeal. There was a team at HSU that put the book together. CM Phillips and Ashley Schumann went through over twelve thousand photos that the public mostly hadn’t seen before, and matched photos with the text. In the end, forty-something archival photos were used, as well as four contemporary photos from local photographers. My partner, Jennifer Rand, also helped with the design a bit. Now it is this beautiful book to look at. Pharmacies even buy it because it’s not just a poem about the area; folks can look at it and see the pictures too. I am now much more open to books being visual.

12) Are you working on another project?

Well, I can’t talk about the subject of the current project. I’m one of those people for whom talking about it lets the air out of the balloon, takes away the magic of creation. However, I am working on something that is twice as long as the last one. I learned so much about the process of creating an epic poem that I am happier as I put this one together. I don’t know if I’m going to keep writing epic poetry, because a thousand-line poem takes years to put together. One- to two-page poems still pop up from time to time, when they want to. I also have a couple of other writing projects that aren’t poetry: books on different topics.

It was a pleasure to interview Zev, and to share his writing with you. Here are the links to purchase his book. If you want to support and independent book store you can request the book through IndieBound.org or you can purchase through Amazon, Song of Six Rivers. Visit him at his website: www.zevlev.com