Susan Lang

ARRIVING in Prescott more than four decades ago, poet Susan Lang reshaped the town’s creative landscape, designing and implementing two innovative programs that welcomed famed writers and presented opportunities for students and residents to interact with and learn from these masterful authors.

The road wasn’t easy. Susan was teaching writing at Yavapai College, at the time a small community college geared toward vocational training and core classes, not the lofty creative enterprises Susan envisioned. Through trial and error she learned to submit grants and to convince her supervisors of their value. In collaboration with Prescott College she was eventually able to establish the Southwest Writers Series in 1985. She directed that program for over 20 years, bringing in dozens of leading writers to read and speak. “These were all the writers I loved, too many to mention: Grace Paley, Carolyn Forche, Marge Piercy, Tim O’Brien, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, John Nichols . . ..” Many of the writers became close friends with Susan over time, returning often. Looking back, Susan is still amazed by the project’s impact on the community and herself. “The program came from the center of my being. I got to do things I never dreamed I could.”

In 1996 Susan also launched the Hassayampa Institute for Creative Writing, an annual conference offering workshops, readings and lectures by many of the same talented writers. “It was the perfect opportunity for people to get to know them, learn from them, share with them. It put our small town on the literary map. We were nationally and internationally known.” Although the program was very popular, the college withdrew support and it closed after twelve years. Despite the difficulties getting these programs going, Susan feels she was always on the right path. “When you’re doing what you’re meant to do against odds, it seems to generate synchronistic experiences or incidents that light your path in the right direction.”

During those years Susan worked on her own writing. Among other works of fiction she published a trilogy about a woman homesteading in the southwestern wilderness in the years leading up to World War II. She recently published a memoir, Running Barefoot, that details her fascinating life, including growing up on a homestead, communal living, teaching on the Navajo reservation, and talking her way into college without the benefit of a high-school education. She also managed to raise seven children, often as a single parent. Susan’s fiction is populated with brave and feisty women much like herself.

At heart, though, Susan considers herself a poet. “I found myself in poetry. Poetry opened me up.” She has had many poems published in renowned journals, including Idaho Review, Red Rock Review, Iris, and The Raven Review. She believes poetry is a search for meaning that will disclose itself if allowed. “In poetry, different things connect. A synchronicity reveals itself. I can be walking in the forest and stumble on an idea. Out of nowhere something unexpected comes to me that has resonance, that belongs in the poem.” She feels that staying open to these events permits poems to discover/uncover their purpose. “It’s hard to talk about what can’t be said. And that’s what poetry’s about — it gets to the heart of every experience.”

In discussing the following poem, Susan details several incidents where a kind of synchronicity influenced her writing. The Leonid meteor shower is an annual event that takes place on November 17, and on that date Susan started in her current position as event coordinator for the Peregrine Book Company. Her fascination with physics creates an underlying connection between science, stars,and human existence, and while writing the poem, she was reading Stephen Hawking’s book. She attended a conference in Aspen where, unknown to her, he was the keynote speaker at another nearby conference. While there she turned a corner, tripped on his wheelchair and accidentally fell in his lap. These diverse and comical factors combine to create a poem that succeeds on a profound level.

A little synchronicity helped Susan though her early days in Prescott, and continues to influence her work in positive ways. She is still writing and sharing her poetry at open mics in town. She will be the featured poet at Peregrine Book Company in February. Much has changed over the years, but Susan’s imaginative efforts are still felt and appreciated throughout the community.

Contact Susan at susan@peregrinebookcompany.com.

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Waiting for the Leonids

(Flagstaff, November 17, 1998)

For Stephen Hawking

Star after star punctuates the darkness

as the cosmic question mark rises above the horizon,

inverted,

as if it were its own question and not ours. Higher

and higher Leo floats into sight,

and we wait on this cold earth night for illumination

to shatter the sky, to remind

us why we are here warping time and space with our gravity:

mere densities of matter born of some quantum fluctuation

who look back with Heisenberg eyes and fall in love

with the self we imagine we were

before time mattered

inflated and radiated into space

finite and without boundary,

crammed as we were into the same particle.

What strange energy formations we earthlings are:

thermodynamic bodies separate unto ourselves,

each mind a singularity, radiating consciousness

back into the universe. Are we but the thoughts

of stars? Surely they would have finer thoughts. Are we

their suffering, their laughter, their joy?

For our being is but an extension of their being,

Tonight, a few meteors flash and fade above,

fleeting events in a field of possibility,

as are we.

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