I have been in correspondence with a grand dame of Australian Poetry.  I met Doris Leadbetter in 2002, when she and her husband Richard spent their winter holiday (our summertime) away from Melbourne attending writers’ conferences in the US and visiting Richard’s home state of Montana.  All of us at the Colorado Mt. Writers’ Workshop laughed ourselves to tears and were touched many times as Doris read from what she’d written during workshop classes and from her previous work.

As I listened to Doris’ theatrical reading and witnessed her willingness appear outrageous, I thought of the day my graduate school writing program advisor, the poet William Matthews, told our class that in its root, the word “nice” means not to know, to be ignorant of.  He offered this information in support of our need to free ourselves from public and family opinion if we were going to write our poems more fully and deeply.

Doris Leadbetter had certainly done this and we loved her work! She’d used a persona to speak strongly as most of us had hoped we would learn to do by attending the writers’ conference, delving into our material, and sharing it with others.

Those of us writing from personal experience have a lesson to learn from those who invent personas:

We might be able to write our viewpoint more freely in the voice of someone we create.

We might include personal thoughts and insight we would edit out if we believed we were writing in our own voice.

We’ll get back to this, but now without further ado–let me introduce Doris Leadbetter; well, first her alter ego, Mrs. Arthur P. Craven.

THE FIRST POEM ABOUT MRS ARTHUR P. CRAVEN

Mrs. Arthur P. Craven damp-pressed the satin bodice,
stitched in the zipper with her Swedish sewing machine
and sealed the seams tight with her Janome overlocker
his gift for her last birthday.
She slid into the frock.  The chivalrous cheval glass
 shaded her size 22 to size 18 in the late afternoon light.
She smoothed the soft fabric over her bust
and pulled in what she could to a smooth, alpine slope.
Twirling made the fluffy hem shed a flirt of swansdown,
twisting in the air like diasporic seeds
confident of a soft landfall on nurturing soil.
The shoes matched.  The heels were high enough
but not too high.
Another twirl put her in mind of the spin
of lemon peel in a long glass
of excited vodka.
She patted her hair, whose golden waves
were diamond-clipped into sensuous obedience.
The frock’s nervously pink folds shook
like a scurry of flamingos.
She flexed her arms, loosened her shoulders,
remembered to strive for good extension.
The music started with a throbbing tenor saxophone.
As she stepped into the frame, other dancers stopped,
stood back, smiled and pointed.
The gold faded, left her hair a shining white,
and as she twirled the frock flung away its colour.
Ice-white, making gracefully grey shadows,
she moved slowly,
swaying to the rhythm of the music,
out onto the dance floor.
He came towards her, smooth and sleek as a dolphin.
His hat was at a rakish angle, until he spun it away.
She noticed that he had less hair than her husband.
He tapped the end of his cane on the floor,
and held out his hand to her.
Come to me, it said.
The violins played louder, she threw back her head and,
with a throaty laugh, Mrs Arthur P. Craven
insinuated herself
into the arms of Fred Astaire.

****

Sheila
Doris, how did this unstoppable and flirtatious figure had come into your writing life?

Doris
Mrs. Arthur P. Craven came into my life when I was judging a poetry competition.  I had read three hundred poems – some of them twice – most of them about the Beauty of Nature, the Delight of being Young, or the Agony of Love.  Some of them were about all three.

There I was, a fat, middle-aged woman bored by scenery, glad to be rid of the problems of youth and content in her marriage.  Not, it was clear, the substance of poetry.

Mrs. Arthur P. Craven begged to differ.

She is, perhaps, my alter ego, the person I wish I had the courage to be.  She doesn’t waste time regretting her lost youth; she ignores it.  If a bit of history gets in her way, she lives through it.  Literally.

As I started her first poem, I asked, “What does this woman want?”  And she replied, “To experience everything.”  And that she does.

Mrs. Arthur P. Craven sees the gold, the faded garlands, the carved and sullen guards inside Tutankhamen’s tomb.  She is inside the tomb when Arthur finds it.  This fat, middle-aged woman goes down with the Titanic; she sees the blown eyes of the Captain, the upright wine bottle, the doll on the bottom of the ocean – and is greeted by television cameras when she reaches safety.  She is on holiday in a small Italian resort when Vesuvius blows its top and she has to leave Pompeii in a hurry.

She is with the balloonists who are the first people to fly.  She undertakes to ring the Wright Brothers about it later that afternoon.
Like so many children, I grew up believing that anything is possible.  If Alice could walk through a looking glass or fall down a rabbit hole into a different world, then so could I.  Fairies and giants were as real to me as guardian angels and Santa Claus are to many children today.

As I grew older, I became a skeptic.  I believed nothing that science could not demonstrate to be true.  I’m still like that.  I call it being sensible and honest, pragmatic.  Then I read Gabriel Garcia Marques.  Magic realism gave me the freedom to believe anything again.  Harry Potter?  Yes, of course!  Politicians?  They wouldn’t lie, would they?

Mrs. Arthur P. Craven stirred.  Why shouldn’t a fat, aging woman have the adventures denied to her by common sense?

Her adventures continue.  At the moment, she is planning a voyage with Captain Cook to discover America (the first mate is called Disney); she is helping an Elizabethan playwright understand why his youthful lovers should be much, much older.  And she is already frolicking with Robin Hood and his Merry Men and Women.

Sheila
How has the advent of Mrs. Arthur P. Craven into your poetry changed the way you teach others to write?

Doris
I don’t know that she changed the way I teach.  Perhaps she clarified the process.

Isn’t all writing autobiographical to some extent? Even fantasy writers give wings to their own slow feet and base magic potions on family recipes. Mrs Arthur P. Craven reflects some of her inventor. I was once middle-aged, I was once fat, and I was always ambitious to Do Everything. In my mind’s eye (where the images for poetry, short stories and novels take focus), I see her in the full blossom of her eccentricity.

When I teach writers, I urge them to find this special place in their “mind’s eye”, to take what is familiar and add to it; to take risks with reality and let their characters Do Anything.  A small poem about Aunt Mary can become an epic – if you will let Aunt Mary loose.  Your tiny back garden can overflow with flowers, with perfumes, with silence – if you forget that all it really contains is weeds, and a noisy dog.

Many of my students are of “mature age”.  They bring to writing so many experiences, good and bad.  Sometimes they want to write only ‘the truth’; what really happened.  What it is really like to fall in love; to gather rosebuds in May; to lose someone important.  Nonsense, I tell them!  Think about what should have happened, what might have happened, shock yourself with anger, joy, envy, passion!  Then write the novel, story, poem!

Maybe what I am after is indeed the truth.  Certainly, Mrs. APC and I do wonderful things.  My mind’s eye made a perfect record of it all.  I tell students their mind’s eyes are doing it, too.

****

“Write what you know,” say the teachers and books of writing advice.  Now that we know Mrs. Arthur P. Craven, let’s add, “Write what you know is possible given your flashes of how you might behave if you weren’t concerned about public opinion.” Don’t worry about being nice or normal.  Allow yourself to build an alter ego.  You will probably find that the alter ego uses the kinds of things that you normally think about but censor to great or at least unabashed purposes. What woman hasn’t thought of being able to make her own dress? But what woman has admitted she would enjoy making one for a large frame? Mrs. Arthur P. Craven sews dresses and enjoys them despite the size she must make them in.

Let yourself fall into the arms of a celebrity, or take one in your arms, if you have ever dreamt about doing that.  But take your time getting to the embrace. Doris Leadbetter writes 41 lines before her character falls into Fred Astaire’s arms! In your writing, you might gather some new momentum if you let the person inside who daydreams about particular amazing moments speak.  To start, use Doris’ model and let your persona write about the preparation for these moments and then about the seconds before these moments happen.

Encouraging an alter ego to speak in some of your writing will definitely recharge your batteries.  You can create someone who helps you write more expansively and allows you to entertain more of your thoughts, images and ideas.   You might enjoy talking with this persona and develop a friendship–one that uses, if not lasts, a lifetime.