Reinventing the Creative Self

The art of changing genres with poet/thriller writer Maria Kelson

“Writers go through ups and downs, highs and troughs of inspiration.” —Maria Kelson, poet and thriller writer

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 146 with Maria Kelson

What happens if one day you wake up and think, huh, this art form I’ve dedicated myself to for fifteen years just isn’t it for me right now? That’s what happened to poet Maria Kelson. The other thing she knew: she wasn’t done with writing. She poured all her creative energy into a new genre: thriller novels. And if you're a mystery/thriller reader drawn to strong female leads, the scary beauty of the redwood country, moms who push it to the limit, or crime-fighting ESL teachers, she wrote her debut novel NOT THE KILLING KIND for you! And if you are a poetry lover, well, there’s a lot of poetry in this book, too, hidden as prose. We talk with Maria about the difficulties and joys of trying something new, how she found a new community of writers, and how writing novels has allowed her to explore “the dark side.”

Maria Kelson has two collections of poetry (as Maria Melendez) with University of Arizona Press, which were finalists for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Colorado Book Award. NOT THE KILLING KIND is her debut novel. It received the inaugural Eleanor Taylor Bland Award for Crime Fiction Writers of Color from Sisters in Crime and just won the WILLA award for best mystery/thriller. She has served as an American Voices arts envoy in Bogotá, Colombia. A Mexican-American educator from California, Maria lives near Yellowstone. She’s writing a new thriller set there.

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What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• Writing compelling poems about contentment—well, it’s just not easy. They run the risk of being sappy or saccharine. And then you get poems such as these two by Michael Simms. I have so much respect for the quiet, tender devotion in this writing and how it touches on the ephemeral nature of love and beauty.

• At the Telluride Film Festival last weekend, I saw several incredible films that really honored how creative practice can help us turn toward the most difficult events in our lives and meet heartbreak with art. One is Hamnet, directed by Chloé Zhao, adapted from the book by the same name by Maggie O’Farrell. It explores how Shakespeare and his wife Agnes meet the loss of their son, Hamnet. It will come out in national theaters in December.

• The other film to highlight on creative practice is Sentimental Value, directed by Joachim Trier, about how a family finds a way forward after trauma and separation. Gosh, writing that last reductive sentence actually hurt—the film is about so much more than that. It’s about place and intergenerational heartache. It’s about patience and wishing the world (and the people we love) could be different and reconciling ourselves with reality. It’s about forgiveness and integrity and willingness to meet what is most difficult. It will come out in theaters November 7.

Christie:

• My book club read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy this month. It’s a classic I’d never read, and although I think I would have enjoyed it more 20 years ago (parts seem pretty dated) it was entertaining and I even found a quote about uncertainty from Vroomfondel (a philosopher character) that I will probably use as an epigraph in a future work.

• I’m 3/4 of the way through Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy and I was so intrigued by the setting (Shearwater, a tiny island between Antarctica and Tasmania) that I was disappointed to look it up and discover that it’s a fictional place. The colonies of penguins and sea are so vivid, I assumed it was real. (It might be loosely based on a real place called Macquarie Island.) The story takes place in the not very distant future, when sea waters are rising and threatening a seed bank on the island meant to preserve biodiversity for future generations. The story is told from the alternating perspectives of a widowed father and his three children who are there as caretakers of the island and are its last remaining residents (maybe? There’s some ongoing mystery…) The fifth and perhaps main character is a mysterious woman who washes up on shore one day. It’s a thriller as well as a story of love and loss. I’m not entirely sure where it will end up.

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In the Dark of the Cinema

My daughter dangles
her legs over mine.
I rest my head on her
shoulder. Is it true
every film is an exploration
of how growth depends
on letting something go?
Or is it simply the glasses
I wear, lenses grubby
from tears, that make it
seem this way? All I know
is it’s easier to practice
letting go when
we’re curled in together,
her hand pressed into mine,
tears sliding down
both of our cheeks,
scent of popcorn
thick in the air,
and all around us
others sniffling, too,
the light blue against
our upturned faces.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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Two Questions:

(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)

1. If you could give yourself a new name (first, last or both), what would it be? Why?

2. If you could pursue any other creative practice, what would it be? (And what’s stopping you?)

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