sister joey was a friend of mine in high school in des moines iowa and my picture in my mind is of you and your sisters in the kitchen so that's my memory of you but i've been so fun to follow your career as a poet now that we both living in a different city so tell us a little bit about when you started writing i've already said where you grew up but tell us a little bit about when you started and how you committed yourself to the life of poetry  boards and math but those poems got sent to whatever the educational station was in des moines and so sometimes i would go to church and people would say oh i heard your poem on the radio learnedly so i was kind of a privileged and probably inaccurate way to see how poetry was integrated into daily life but i still give a lot of credit to teachers libraries books the des moines art center for making an environment where those things seem possible that's lovely i think you know as a person from des moines i've often felt that they little the environment i was put into i grew up with magazines everywhere in the house and you know a variety of the new yorker was in my home all the time and i think we do take we don't understand just how vital that civic infrastructure is to fostering all these other things so we both got to be the product of that environment so i love hearing that but i had no idea that you'd been had your problems so how old were you when you first saw in yourself when you're so almost right on the radio wow and i can remember my teacher was  think i actually knowledge her in my first book of poetry i can remember standing beside her as she was typing up everyone's poem and i was so thrilled to see mine being typed that i picked it up before she was finished and she and the level of literacy and commitment to the arts is it's really quite extraordinary and i think unexpected in other places in america is that yeah we can talk a little bit more about that so this is not your first book of poetry but we will just say this one has just now been honored for the minnesota book award and poetry and we'll talk a little bit more about the award a minute but talk a little bit about the the process that you've gone through what you started writing did you write in college did you write when you how did that go you know in my family no one had been to college before and so i very much wanted to go as did all my sisters and there weren't a lot of choices always thought i should write and study english and of course i wanted no part of that in high school and for actually for a good part of college until i sort of saw the light so was that their resistance just simply because it was mother daughter or was there some other resistance all right i don't think it was that as much as you know you and i were talking earlier there was such a pull for me or i actually should call it a push to get out of the midwest but i think  anything with my upbringing or background with something to abandon and you know throwing out the baby with the bathwater the way many of us do so i think that was more than i mean i didn't even start studying english at the university of i was studying political science and history and all those things which i thought were much more important and more interesting i don't necessarily think that now but and then it was my senior year in college where i started taking writing courses from people in there were writing workshop and i was i'd signed on to shall we say and did you do a graduate work or did you say i did that was actually why initially i went to san francisco  study i followed a poet kathleen fraser who i had met and heard read at the university of iowa and she became a mentor for me in san francisco and that's a completely different poetry scene obviously than even i was city was or or the midwest it was sort of overwhelming but it was also wonderful to be thrown into you know i lived a pretty bohemian life worked in a movie theater making capital knows and we didn't call  then and went to school and and read and walked and looked at the ocean and tried things i probably wouldn't of tried in des moines or i was city and also you mention my sister joey both both my sister in chris and me too always went to the art center and always took art classes so i think i was always very influenced by visual art and probably before i turned to really writing is my life's work maybe thought i was going to be an artist or you know do something in that way but you just briefly tell them who joey is because she's so renowned and i don't know as much about chris but i do know i follow joey's career joey kirk patrick my i'm the oldest of four daughters and then chris who's a magnificent teacher in des moines and the one we would want all our children to be in her classroom and then joey was the third and she is now pretty much internationally known as a glass artist and painter sculpture she and her partner flora mays have worked together for over thirty years they were both mentored by dale jr who even now are really colleagues of his and kind of have set the standard for women and it's you know nominal and she lives in the seattle area but it's it is astounding to you know walk into a museum and see a piece of someone you went to high school with sad lovingly so i just did it in boston even though i know her work was there in the boston museum of fine arts and wonderful see joey kirkpatrick course i taught her everything she got her as well and it's interesting that you thought of yourself in visual terms so i think as a writer myself and i was i went to college and wrote poetry  informing all your senses are working when you're doing this so the fact that we are a visual culture and you're writing visually and how we makes maybe one of the things that the committee appreciated about your work when giving you this this award i hope so who knows i think i'm very influenced by what i see and what i remember and i think it was faulkner that said the three things a writer needs are observation memory and imagination and i always say to students i have no imagination which of course isn't true but those other things are really strong for me so they definitely comes here and there were so just briefly tell us about the other so you've published multiple books or i published a children's book called plowboy a story from the prairie and actually my sister joey's paintings it's a picture book are there and it was the visuals for that are the living history farm which is just outside of des moines the story is actually a story from our grandmother and i also published a first book of poetry and i had sent out my poetry manuscript for that for sixteen years sixteen years just so everybody gets a sense of what a life of poetry can be like and that's either braver or stupid who knows and so it's kind of amazing to me with this book the first place i sent it it was not only accepted but has won a number of awards for systems matters i think it does i think it does and obviously it wasn't driven as it as i was driving here there was a introduction on the radio as i said on talk of the nation they were saying the the life of the poet the solitary and occasional public life with a poet i was thinking how true for you then so you had this very public comes through in the book itself so why don't you talk a little bit about the title of the book as odessa could you tell us a little bit about kind of what the some of the themes sure that you're writing about and why the title cover a few things well odessa is actually the name of a tiny minnesota town that's on the border of minnesota and south dakota three hundred thirteen people and i see when was this i guess room two thousand and five two thousand and six i had received a grant from the loft in the night foundation here and had started driving out to see that prairie on a regular basis so i was very interested in seeing how  seeing the landscape that robert bly james right paul group go carol bligh phoebe hanson many really outstanding writers thomas mcgrath had written about and it was thrilling to see that landscape but this little town which has a very small i guess you'd call it a jail or prison that's still on the national historic register no floor no insulation just brick walls and a dirt floor a dirt floor and it haunted me the idea of nine hundred thirteen such a place being built and still standing and who might have been put there and the other thing i would say is that i felt a very strong presence of a culture a civilization that was invisible and i think those were the dakota people and i had dakota students at the time and so that became a real thing influencing me and informing me and then i got a brain tumour so everything changed at that point i wasn't able to drive out there anymore it was a very serious tumour i was very lucky to have it removed it was the size of a baseball discovered very suddenly and learned how to walk again went to the sister kenny institute here in st paul in minneapolis and got very interested in the language of not only a craniotomy in the name of the tube or in the lobe in the brain that the tumour was on but the language of anatomy and also the sense of self that develops or changes when something as profound as one's brain has been touched and so is a tampered with well thought of if you're just joining us i'm speaking with patricia kirkpatrick a poet and recent winner of the minnesota book award so so i was saying a language the language of the both brain anatomy brain surgery brain neural science at roosevelt and des moines the high school we both went to i was looking out the window when we had chemistry and physics and biology i wasn't paying much attention and what was interesting to me about that language was how much of it overlapped with words from natural history the core of the earth mantle of the earth the globe you know a lot of those things and i guess as a poet language is always just interesting to me in its own right also there's the end of the mer of the marriage in the book and there's language from the legal system and after brain tumor you have to do a lot of things to get yourself back to where you were i was really lucky that that happened for me it doesn't always happen for people for some reason i wanted to learn the mythology and the goddesses so i just made all these flash cards to learn about them and it was it was a helpful thing to do to rebuild the neurons and i got very taken by perception and so then i started reading a lot of greek mythology in the story of her being abducted by hades who was the the brother of zeus who was the ruler of the world and she was taken to the underworld and i was trying to figure out how that story would fit in a mid western and particularly a prairie setting so i guess those are the same as for for me what you read the one we just talked about that relates to your experience at united hospital sure which is an invisible life to the way i was saying out on the prairie there's the invisible life of other cultures and civilizations being there when you're in that kind of situation and you see not only the suffering of other people but the incredible skill that of course i heard voices in the night saw visions felt the presence of dying that white fringed place shallow breath narrow entrance the door to death opened them can't then came steroids and lack of inhibition there was terror i admit it just before i learned the news i realized all you have meant to me and i thought i had too much feeling to continue to spend time with so much of life we find in the funniest places boundaries love bone cutting and stitches more blood than the surgeon had ever ordered i knew i needed your help for the children the family i might have to leave i am writing to say i can make the changes i am writing to say i have been opened and closed i am writing to say that today when the nurse came to change my dressing she glanced up and said oh look is that snow we looked out the window and saw it together first flakes of those white fringe birds flying the first snow of the new season landscape as well and and that is what i'm interested in to is that you've expressed sort of what the inquiry process for you in a sense of the life of the writer is you know sometimes i think the best books are someone has a question they want to answer and they spend they all that the process of the book exploring their answer or answers to that question do you have a similar experience or do you see it it sounds to me i get a question about odessa i mean that's part of where you start i think goodman original question was what happens when one people or one civilization overtakes another and i think we know some of the answers to that it's it's tragic in many ways but then when i went through the experience of the brain tumor and craniotomy and surgery and rehabilitation and that does inform the book it's not an autobiography everything that's in the book did not happen exactly the way it's said here but that question then became what happens to a person when they are so physically changed is there a self that remains stable or is that the very daily life and you know someone touched my brain does that change me forever or was it just a physical thing that does give any of us pause and how long was that recovery i mean i love the fact that you've talked about the you've given credit to that process the sister can institute and the process i mean there sis relationship of recovery of the physical recovery the emotional recovery  and you write about some of that what's the what what more can you share with us about that process how long was that taking and it's still ongoing for you i would say it is still ongoing i was in the rehabilitation center for three weeks after the surgery and then i went home i had to learn to walk you know most of the physical things came back pretty quickly although learning to walk again is pretty major change for someone emotionally it was very hard for me crowds were difficult surprises things that i didn't expect i had various extreme reactions to things which aren't necessarily a bad thing for a  poet to have that kind of emotional reaction to many things i think my son said it best to he used to drive me down to brain tumour support group and say mom i don't know why you're going to this support group anymore you don't have a brain tumor sort of over and done and then people would ask him how's your mom how's your mom doing and he said well my mom is still my mom but she's just not herself for as long a period of time freshman isn't that you know and i thought that i was and i thought it was very kind very insightful and i think that is one of the questions that that's being explored in the book not only my own experience but what happens to any of us when we lose a job we've done for most of our life for a marriage ins or health has been compromised in a way that will never be returned to us the way it was before so i think that's really the question that's motivating the poems forward in this book and i hope that that works for other readers as they read it so as you think about this life changing experience and as you describe what you just did there's do you experience a sense  of things falling away that aren't as important or are there is there a new focus in your life how do you how do you see that now i would say that the main change was just the writing of the book because there was a time where i didn't know how long i was going to live i don't mean film melodramatic but and i was very clear of what i wanted to do if that were the case i want to spend time with my children and my friends and i wanted to write something that i gave myself to fully and i sort of felt that i'd lost everything there was still lots to lose so i had nothing to lose and i also would say one thing that happened i don't know how typical this is for surgery patients brain patients and it all depends on where the tumor is it you know it's going to affect different things in different places but i found that the part of my brain that would censor things before they hit the page that would say that's not a good idea but that down was really diminished and that helped too and they just made it they award winner it is i don't know i don't know that's beautiful so well i'm excited that it that i had that left not that you had to go through what you went through but i'm excited that you turned it into something so beautiful let's talk just for a second with a little bit of time we have there's a special in this in not only getting the award is fantastic the minnesota book awards are a great recognition you have a great publisher and milkweed additions about you also have a special a very special award tell us a little bit about that this book won something called the lindquist and venom poetry prize it was the first year that the prize was offered the prize is  offered through a foundation supported by the lindquist and then a law firm there was an attorney there richard irig who really cared and loved poetry and he wanted to this prize and when he went to milkweed he you know presented the idea to them and of course they were thrilled with what publisher doesn't want to you know to take on those kind of resources but he wanted it to be done very fast and so the award last year was announced in april of two thousand and twelve and the foundation and mr eric wanted the book to be published within the same year usually takes the books two years for a book to come out well six states the two dakotas minnesota iowa wisconsin and i guess that's five only so it's no ward to bring attention to mit we the midwest riders  there's a ten thousand dollar prize that i was with so that's a lot of money that's great for poetry but really i find that the the attention is is really worth more even than the money you know writing every day just as you said being especially many poets or interviewer it's almost have to work not to be hermits but writing any kind of art is not about awards and there's something subjective about who doesn't who doesn't get them but they do bring the attention to to the artist to the writer and they bring the work to a public and so that's one wonderful thing that was has happened and i think will continue to happen through this particular board and probably the book awards you know do the same kind of thing for readers and writers well one of things i loved about your i read about your knowledge when i was in the audience but you acknowledge that also at the book awards there were people accepting and ojibwe and and the native languages and it brings attention to all kinds of important things so really wonderful so we want to be sure that people know that they can online and i found the book in my neighborhood that yes cobbers which i love but it's in it's in barnes and noble and on amazon and it's called odessa so i would say don't be afraid to read poetry i would definitely say that and enjoy it and i don't think we have time for another poem but i really thank you for joining us thanks for joining us on the forum that's all we have time