Janet McMillan Rives first moved to Tucson as a teenager and years later as a retired professor of economics. Neither was an easy transition. She was initially lonely, disoriented. Her poetry often reflects her struggle to find a foothold in her new environment, to learn to garden where “everything is backward,” to enjoy the local rodeo, or to make it through the hot season. “Each summer I dream about New England and the Midwest as I try to survive the heat and keep my flowers alive.” Janet has published three poetry chapbooks, all focused on the details of places she’s lived and the people who live there: “the prairies and small towns of Nebraska and Iowa, the Arizona desert, and most recently the hill where I grew up in rural Connecticut.”
Janet also writes memoir and has recently published a book of “hybrid poems” called Thread: A Memoir in Woven Poems. A teaching mentor encouraged her to intertwine her interests for the book. “I chose poems I had already written, broke them into sections, and added memoir prose to flesh out the stories. The book contains 19 hybrids in more or less chronological order, from my childhood to my current life.”
Her parents encouraged Janet’s writing as a child. She recalls, “They owned a book called One Hundred and One Famous Poems, in which each of them marked poems they had learned as children and young adults.” But it wasn’t till her 40s that she began seriously writing, inspired by the work of local poets and teachers in Iowa. “I joined a women’s poetry group, an important step in developing my writing. My goal each year was to have a poem accepted in Lyrical Iowa, the publication of the Iowa Poetry Association.”
Her themes are often drawn from nature. “The sound of a verdin or hummingbird, the fading color of a blossom, the feel of a winter morning chill might trigger a memory or a metaphor.” She has a favorite location and time for writing. “My writing spot is a desk in the alcove of a bay window, with a view of my garden and a glimpse of the north face of the Santa Catalina Mountains. I tend to write in the morning, but sometimes I jump out of bed in the middle of the night to write down an idea for a poem. I write several drafts in longhand before typing the poem on the computer.” And she instinctively knows whether a poem will come to her that day. “I know from the moment I wake up if it will be a writing day or not.”
In “Twice a Cowgirl” Janet visits her theme of displacement. “The photograph that sparked the poem was of me in my happy place, standing on the front steps of our farmhouse, dressed in full cowgirl regalia. That happy moment contrasted so starkly with the year I moved to Tucson as a teenager and felt so lonely, so very out of place just trying to survive. Rodeo week gave me the opportunity to once again dress as a cowgirl, but that didn’t make me feel any more at home in the West.”
Janet is quick to emphasize that her discomfort was short-lived. “After high school, I went to the University of Arizona and had a wonderful time. My grandmother, a great storyteller, lived three blocks from campus, and I enjoyed spending time with her.” Over the years, she has come to feel much more at home in her new land, beginning as a snowbird, splitting her time between Iowa and Arizona, then in 2018 moving here year-round, “where I enjoy the company of family, old friends, new friends, and my dog.” She belongs to local poetry groups in Tucson, participates in the Arizona Poetry Society, and attends poetry readings and workshops. “My life revolves around gardening, playing golf, reading and writing. Like my flowers in the Tucson summer heat, I did survive. So it all worked out!”
More at janetmrives.com.
That was the year I ate alone almost every Saturday,
listened to KTKT on my unwieldy portable,
used my clothes allowance to buy Levi 501s,
turquoise western shirt, white cowboy belt
with a huge silver buckle. That was the year
I turned seventeen, the year we moved west,
traded our maple syrup for prickly pear jelly.
I thought western clothes might turn me into
a happy teenager, might make me feel like I did
ten years earlier, on my seventh birthday,
no doubt a frigid February in New England.
In the dog-eared photo taken that day,
my jacket hangs on the porch railing — no way
I’d cover up the plaid shirt with pearl buttons,
red bandana tied around my neck,
rabbit’s foot suspended from a belt loop
on my jeans, me smiling a lost-baby-tooth grin
on that my lucky day.
By seventeen I was ten years and twenty-five
hundred miles from that tiny cowgirl in the photo,
a teenager now, dressed not just for a birthday party
but for the entire rodeo week in Tucson
including two days off from school
to watch barrel racers, bull riders, calf ropers.
What made me think looking like a cowgirl
could bring back the joy of childhood?
The tooth fairy had long ago filled the gap
in my smile, but other pieces were missing —
a sister gone off to college, parents out again
at some fund-raiser, my friends of a lifetime
back east, sledding the hills of my homeplace.
Dee Cohen is a Prescott poet and photographer. deecohen@cox.net.
