This Sunday Gloria Frym joined us at Lightrail Studios to discuss her upcoming book The True Patriot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2015). Gloria, who writes both poetry and prose, shared this collection of 'proses,' narratives without traditional narrative arcs. We read an excerpt from the manuscript in preparation for the show but the final product is still in it's final stages of completion.
These pieces incorporate and communicate with news and current events. Gloria read from the piece "Tete Offensive," which is part of a larger story weaved throughout the manuscript; it takes place in the post 9/11 era and engages with the war as well as the AIDS epidemic. Here, as in the other proses in the book, Gloria expertly uses tangent and digression to display the workings of human thought and social negotiations.
After the break we heard "Lie" and "To Whom it May Concern." We considered the differences between working in prose as opposed to poetry; as Gloria says, "thoughts have their own form," and the paragraph tends to "fills space with thought." Towards the end of the interview, we focused on the title of the book, which shares its title with a piece within, but speaks to the notion that critique is a sign of a true patriot.
At the end, Gloria talked about her past work teaching in San Francisco county jails as part of the Community Works West program. She used this work with prisoners to inform her curriculum at San Francisco State University.
Check out her book in 2015!!!!
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