Tiferet Talk with Julie Maloney

This upcoming Monday, 2/25/13 at 7 PM EST, 6 PM Central, I'll have the pleasure of interviewing writer and writing teacher, Julie Maloney for Tiferet Talk. Maloney’s first poetry collection, Private Landscape, was published in 2007, and in 2003 she founded Women Reading Aloud, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting women writers through special events and workshops. Maloney is a trained workshop leader in the Amherst Writers and Artists Method, an organization whose philosophy is that “every person is a writer, and every writer deserves a safe environment in which to experiment, learn, and develop craft.” Maloney’s teachings focus on what she calls the 3-in-1 principle, which asserts the equal value of the writer, the reader, and the listener. “Listening is one of the greatest gifts we can give to each other,” Maloney says.

Of Maloney’s first collection, Poet and Barnard University Lecturer Charlotte Mandel states, “Julie Maloney's poems in her collection - Private Landscape - move with the exquisite grace of her abilities as a dancer and choreographer. Dream narratives sing in delicate imagery. Pain of cancer is here, honestly revealed and transcended; love is here, in its greatest giving. There is not a trace of easy sentimentality. This is a collection to remember, at once personal and universal.”

As well, Maloney, has been kind enough to share one of her new poems with us below. Enjoy!

PEE

Darkness seeps over the walls,

slides across my mouth and

silences my wail.  Inside the palm

of my hand lays a dead emergency button.

Broken and unplugged, the button drags

me down inside a pool of piss.

Squeeze tight.  Squeeze tight.

Where do I put my pee?

No one to hear me, no where

to drain the neglected vessel.

I fantasize letting it all run down

my legs onto the clean sheets.

Relief sends a shiver up my body. 

“Yes, do it,” a voice says.  “Let it go.”

I stare down the pain of being full.

Focus on the steady contraction

of a bladder bulging into ferocity.

I call on my resolve and wait 

through the night without a clock

to tell me how long I have lived.