Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form?
I have several Latino neighbors with small children, and one of them was the model for the child in this poem. The child and I were talking about the English and Spanish words for something, and then she told me the word in Mam. I asked her what Mam was. She said it was a language. I asked who spoke the language, and she said her mother and father and two brothers and she did. So I looked it up, and found that it was a Mayan language spoken in Chiapas and in Guatemala. One of the child’s parents is from Mexico and the other from Guatemala, so that made sense.
I also have signed up for a lot of alerts from immigrants’ rights groups so that I can show up for demonstrations, etc. One of them gives me text alerts on my phone warning about immigration checkpoints.
BELOW: Protestors call for immigration reform at the March 21, 2020 March for America protest in Washington, DC. Photo by Border Community Action.
My neighbors put a chili plant in front of their door when they moved in. The Fruitvale, the Latino neighborhood of Oakland adjacent to my own neighborhood, has a shop with tin ornaments. And one of the Latino families on my street gave me a bucket of tamales near Christmas that were delicious.
BELOW: Right Day of the Dead Parade in Fruitvale.
I keep a list of ideas for poems, and the penultimate stanza about the sun hitting the fence and turning the clothesline pole into a sundial came from that list. That and the fat squirrel and all the acorns is what I see when I sit in my back yard every morning drinking coffee and petting our cat. We have two California live oaks back there. That was the prompt that started the poem off for me on the day that I wrote it.
BELOW: The two California oaks in Jan’s backyard. Photo by Jan Steckel.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail.
I was at the apartment of my friend and poetry mentor Julia Vinograd when I wrote this poem. It was near Christmas, and all these elements came together to make this Christmas poem. Julia’s disabled and gets HUD housing, an old studio apartment with a galley kitchen and a walk-in closet that leads to the bathroom. Julia has a horror vacui, a fear of emptiness, and every bit of space on her walls is covered with art or memorabilia. Even the windows are decorated with stained glass pieces. She’s particularly into skeletons, skulls, masks, gargoyles, Bosch, the pre-Raphaelites, colored glass globes, and rubber rats and snakes. The place is a giant incubator for the imagination.
BELOW: Julia Winograd in her apartment. Photo by Robert A. Fischer.
Quirky Berkeley in Berkeley, Calif., on June 15th, 2017.
What month and year did you start writing this poem?
December 2017
How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?)
Just a couple of drafts. Sorry, I don’t have the old ones. I just correct the document on my computer.
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us?
Well, the chili plant was a tree, which is wrong, as you tactfully pointed out, so now it’s a plant.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem?
I want them to see through the small girl’s eyes, the warmth of her family, and see the threat to her family posed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
BELOW: Girl’s Eyes by Jan Steckel.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why?
Probably the stanza about immigration checkpoints. I get very agitated about my friends and neighbors getting arrested or thrown out of the country.
BELOW Photo by Border Community Action
Have you been to Guatemala and/ or Chiapas, Mexico and can you give me two specific memories – one per place – that influenced you in the writing of this poem?
No, I’ve never been to either place, though I’ve been to Guadalara in Mexico and to a fishing village in the Mexican state of Sonora called Guaymas, as well as to Tijuana.
BELOW: An outdoor market in Chichicastenango Guatemala in 2009
Jan Steckel is a former pediatrician who stopped practicing medicine because of chronic pain. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her work was nominated three times each for the Pushcart and Sundress Best of the Net anthologies, won the Goodreads Poetry Contest twice, and won various other awards. She lives in Oakland, California.
Backstory of the Poem Series
001 Backstory of the Poem
“12 – 2014” from the poetry collection BEFORE THE DROUGHT by Margo Berdeshevsky published by Glass Lyre Press on September 15, 2017
#002 Backstory of the Poem
“82 Miles from the Beach, We Order The Lobster At Clear Lake Café”
by Alexis Rhone Fancher
#003 Backstory of the Poem
“Orange”
by Barbara Crooker
#004 Backstory of the Poem
“Modern Matsushima”
by Sonia Saikaley
#005 Backstory of the Poem
“Side Yard”
By Ellen Foos
#006 Backstory of the Poem
“The Ringmaster”
By Susan Sundwall
#007 Backstory of the Poem
“That Night”
by Leslea Newman
#008 Backstory of the Poem
“June Fairchild Isn’t Dead”
by Alexis Rhone Fancher
#009 Backstory of the Poem
“The Gift of the Year with Granny”
By Charles Clifford Brooks III
#010 Backstory of the Poem
“The Natural Reflection of Your Palms”
by Scott Thomas Outlar
#011 Backstory of the Poem
“After Diane Beatty’s Photograph “History Abandoned”
by Anya Francesca Jenkins
#012 Backstory of the Poem
“What I Learned This Week”
By Angela Narciso Torres
