Transcription of Gibson Fay-LeBlanc for the show Words of Wisdom, #105
Lisa: As a relatively new radio show, it hasn’t been often that I’ve had the chance to sit across a microphone from someone who has previously been a guest but I am doing that today. This is Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, who was one of, I believe, our guest on the very first Dr. Lisa Radio Hour in September of 2011.
Gibson: Sounds right.
Lisa: Yup, talking about The Telling Room which was your life at the time. I believe you were exiting out of The Telling Room. Unfortunately, I think we didn’t get to spend as much time talking with you as we wanted. You’ve been doing a lot of very interesting things since then. Thanks for coming back and having another conversation with me.
Gibson: My pleasure, my pleasure. It’s great to be here.
Lisa: Now, Gibson, at the time you were with The Telling Room, I do want to talk about that but I subsequently went and listened to you read from your book, your collection of poems Death of a Ventriloquist, which went on to win the Vassar Miller Prize and received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, also spent several weeks on the Poetry Foundation’s list of contemporary best-sellers and was featured by poets and writers as one of a dozen debut collections to watch. You’ve really sort of manifested in a kind of completely different and unique way.
Gibson: Yeah, well I’ve always been a writer but it’s usually been sort of back burner for me. Teaching is really important to me as well. I love to work with kids and adults and kind of taught at every level there is to teach at. Working at The Telling Room is a tremendously gratifying place to work. I still am involved there. I still teach there. A couple years ago I had a chance to put the writing on the front burner and so that’s been exciting for me to do that. Interestingly, I’ve been working on this collection of poems for a long time, for several years. That counts as a long time, I think. I’d been very close to publishing it in many different small presses and contests, I was finalist.
I got notes from editors, effusive notes, saying how much they loved it and why, yet but, and it wasn’t until I decided to leave The Telling Room that it was actually won this prize and was published. It seemed almost like one of those things that I had finally committed to my writing and that’s when it finally broke through and was published. It was kind of a nice … The universe telling me maybe that I had made a good decision.
Lisa: That is what is always said is that once you finally focus your energies in the direction of your passion, then that sort of can, I don’t know, start that fire. It’s like the magnifying glass in the sunlight.
Gibson: Exactly.
Lisa: It is interesting that you were then subsequently rewarded from with that happening.
Gibson: Right, exactly, exactly.
Lisa: You have your book with you right here. I heard you do this at, I think, the Space Gallery when your book first came out. I was struck by the sort of range of poems, one of them was I think it was describing your child’s … Well, it was describing fatherhood.
Gibson: Yeah.
Lisa: Yeah?
Gibson: Yeah.
Lisa: You also did a poem about hockey, which is a passion of yours. I’m interested to see which one you’re going to read for us now.
Gibson: Yeah, I thought I might read one of my fatherhood poems because those … I mean many people can connect to that, whether you’re a father, a parent or just an uncle or an aunt or… that people can connect to that part. There’s a strain of poems in the book that come out of fatherhood and really trying to figure out how to be a father. This is one that I wrote while I was living in New York City and I had just finished grad school, where really focused on writing and teaching. Then, all of a sudden, I was home with this baby. My wife was back at work at finishing her residency at NYU. We’re in a 400-square foot apartment, New York City, third floor walk up. You can picture the thing here and this baby who cried all the time. It was a test. It was a really … It was a test. It really became one of my subjects over the last several years.
It’s become … I write about a lot is fatherhood and my kids and thinking about that. This is How to Make Fatherhood Lyrical. How to Make Fatherhood Lyrical: “I could describe the arch of piss as sanctifying the changing table or argue that his wailing resembles a certain style of opera. One develops a taste for its peaks as evidence of proper training, the cultivation of a gift. I might tell you that when the dog tugs the leash in one direction and the stroller rolls in the other, it’s similar to the push and pull of family and vocation and each in turn alters its course. Surely, I’d research and touch on why gerbils eat their young and moose will charge if you dare step between mother and calf. But none of this is the truth I tell myself or don’t depending on the morning. It’s not a set of lyrics. It’s prose, as in pedestrian, a man on foot, not some freak stallion, not a Clydesdale, not even a draft and everyday I have to choose whether to write myself in.”
Lisa: How old are your kids now?
Gibson: They’re now eight and five. They’re much further along.
Lisa: This really is something that I can relate to. Actually, it’s funny because I was going to refer to the arch. I had remembered that you had read that poem, I believe at Space Gallery. This is something that I think a lot of people in the creative field struggle with, that when you’re raising a child, all of your creativity kind of gets sucked over there.
Gibson: Yeah, for sure.
Lisa: The growth that you would like to do in your own writing or music or whatever it is ends up being channeled towards this progeny of yours that you never realize that it was going to be quite as challenging.
Gibson: Hmmm (affirmative). Definitely.
Lisa: You’re right. It can be so physically exhausting that you wake up in the morning and you’re just lucky to get the diaper on the kid and take the kid on the school bus.
Gibson: Yeah, I went through several … I’m not sure exactly how much time but there were few years in there where I was not writing a lot or I was just taking notes or I was just in any 30-second break that I had I was trying to get something down. You’re right, the energy goes toward the kid as it has to, when you’re trying to survive that early period and make sure that the kid survives that early period. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lesson in it not being about you, being about this other being that you helped create.
It’s also I found it important and great to, as they gotten older to make sure I make my writing a priority and for them to see that and to see that it’s part of my life in this creative side and is something that I really need to do and that I’ve got to find the spaces of time to do. It’s a constant juggling act even at this point with eight and five, I still feel like I can’t quite imagine. I have writer friends who go and do the two-week or the month away at a colony and I can’t quite wrap my mind around that yet. Maybe, I can get up to a week at this point. I’ve done some stuff like that. It just seems like a long time to be away at this stage of their development.
Lisa: In the time that you are writing this poem, you were talking about it as being prose and really not poetry at all. On the other side of having a very small child who cries all the time, are you able to find any lyricism in it?
Gibson: For sure, there are those moments even in the middle of the night or when things just when … you’re about to cry and you laugh instead. There are those moments or just you’re … one of my sons looks at me a certain way or cocks their head in the same way as my wife or you just have those moments of clarity in the whole process. I think that’s what poetry is really about for me in those moments, good or bad or in between but just trying to unpack those moments and all the emotion that can be surging through you at those times.
Lisa: I think you embody or represent this sort of new man. You’re like the man of our generation. I mean you are a poet and a writer and educator and a father. You have a professional wife. You’re also a hockey player and a musician I believe.
Gibson: No, not so much with the music but …
Lisa: Not so much with the music.
Gibson: The other stuff, I’ll claim.
Lisa: The other stuff you’ll claim, okay. I think this is what we have all thought that we would aspire to. After the women … the equal rights movement, we all thought, well men and women are equal. We could all go out. We could all have everything but there are certain challenges and …
Gibson: For sure, for sure. I mean, there’s some things that there … I feel like there are some things that I … There are a lot of things that come much more naturally to me as a dad and other things that I really have to work at. I don’t know how much of it is related to me specifically being a man or it’s always hard to track what that stuff is. Certainly, some pieces of parenthood or fatherhood come a lot less easily to me especially as I’m doing work that is at least traditionally was or was thought as being a woman’s work in our house or with the kids or going to PTO meetings or things like that, that aren’t traditionally seen as being men’s stuff.
I feel lucky to be able to do it. I feel like a lot of fathers still in our culture miss out on a lot of stuff in their kids’ lives and aren’t able to see a lot. I feel privileged to be able to be a part of their lives and to see what’s going on. There are definitely times when I’m also saying to my sons, “You better … We better wait ‘til mom comes home to deal with that one.” There are certain things that they just aren’t going to want to … They’re just not as quick to open up to me about or they still really … There are times when they really, the comfort of their mom is … I can give them comfort but it’s a different kind of comfort. I’m a little bit more willing to let them do things that I think Renee would say, “Whoa, what are you doing?” Diving off the couch or I don’t know, something. There’s some things that I sort of let go a little farther and I think that there are times that’s good and times when maybe it’s not but …
Lisa: But you’re making it work?
Gibson: Yeah, yeah.
Lisa: You also spend a considerable amount of time with other people’s children.
Gibson: Right.
Lisa: You were involved in, I believe a year-long project with a local school here in Portland which was very much invested in bringing arts to the children in this school. Tell me about that.
Gibson: Yes. My oldest son goes to Ocean Avenue Elementary School here in Portland. He just finished the second grade. He’s just been there for three years. As I’ve gotten more involved with the school, I just wanted … I wanted to see more of a focus on arts. Having been involved with the arts community in Portland through The Telling Room, I know how great it is and how many great teaching artists there are and people who are really working on their particular craft, whatever it is and or really as we give to that … bringing that to kids in a way that even a great teacher is still a teacher in a different way than an artist who’s coming into a classroom. It’s just two different things.
I really wanted to see more artists in the school. I noticed over time, working at the PTO, or being involved with the PTO and being at the school, that there also this … just in our school community, there are these great artists who are parents who are sort of this resource that the school wasn’t drawing on. I think we have one parent who’s a dancer and long-time teacher of dance at the high school the Portland Arts and Technology High School, and another parent who runs a local music program for kids where they do rock and roll.
There are some things that we decided, “okay let’s see if we can get some of this stuff into the school”. I was able to write a grant to the Arts Commission and we were able to get some funding to help support that, those programs. We’re hoping to do it again next year. It’s a great way to get these artists in front of kids to open up school a little bit more. I think whenever you do the arts, it does a couple things. One is it brings more kids into school, like into being interested in school in a way that often doesn’t happen. Those kids who are already figuring it out even at first or second grade that school is not for them and doing dance or a performance project or songwriting or writing comics for a school magazine. Those are things that aren’t often valued in school and so to value them in the school community is huge for those kids.
Then, the other thing is I also really wanted to see that great community moment where you’ve got kids and artists and parents who all come together and celebrate the arts and say this is something that’s important to us. We had a night at the end of May where we’re able to do that. We had 400-500 people packed into this cafeteria at the school. We had kids up there singing songs they wrote, dancing, reading things that they wrote. It was just a great community moment. We often do that for sports or other things but we don’t do it as much for the arts as we should especially at the younger ages. It was a really good way to value, to show how our community can be … can value the arts and be changed by the arts.
Lisa: You’ve had a broad variety of experiences in your life. What’s next for you?
Gibson: I’m trying to finish the novel that I have been working on for a few years pretty intensely which is one of the writing projects that’s taken the most of my attention since I left The Telling Room. Hopefully, I’m getting closer. I have a new draft that I’m just finishing up here that I’m going to put in front of some friends who are writers who can give me some thoughts on where it is. Then, we’ll see. I’m going to still … I’m going to continue to be teaching at The Telling Room and doing things at Ocean Avenue and at probably other schools because that to me… Even though the focus for me right now is more on the writing, I can’t not teach. It’s really important to me. It’s important for me to feel connected to my community and to feel like I’m giving something back to kids who might be interested in the arts in their lives in some way or who just need to see directly what the arts can bring to their own experiences.
Lisa: It’s almost two years since you left The Telling Room.
Gibson: Yeah.
Lisa: The Telling Room has been around for …
Gibson: Let’s see, five years before that so they’re going on seven, eight years, yeah.
Lisa: What has The Telling Room brought to Portland and the surrounding community?
Gibson: I think it’s really filled a really important niche and there’s a great arts community in Portland and Southern Maine. There are pockets all over Maine but there was nobody focused on writing and storytelling and kids, in the way that The Telling Room has. I think that’s the reason why the growth curve of The Telling Room has just been kind of crazy and ridiculous. It’s just been straight up pretty much since I started there, when we first started … When I first started at The Telling Room, they were just getting off the ground. I was working out of my living room. It was very part-time but we knew we had something and this great idea and people were already starting to get really interested in it. As we started working with kids, it just … The more and more people that saw what we could with storytelling and kids and writing, the more it’s grown and so, yeah, it’s really been … It’s a tremendous thing to be a part of. It’s also tremendous now to sit back and be involved but from more of a distance and to sort of watch it continue to grow and develop and push into new arenas.
I think The Telling Room has become like some other arts non-profits like Space Gallery or some other places, has become now at this point like a vital cog in the arts scene, something that people can’t imagine doing without, which is I think a testament to all the folks and all the many folks who are involved there.
Lisa: Gibson, your book, Death of a Ventriloquist, is available at Longfellow Books here in Portland.
Gibson: Yeah.
Lisa: How can people find out more about you and your writing?
Gibson: I have a website gibsonfayleblanc.com. They can check out poems and hear about things. I have something on there called The Sentence Project, which is a little pet project where I pick out favorite sentences from prose and poems that I’m reading and just talk a little bit about why I think they are interesting or why they work. They can also see more information about my book on there and order it through Amazon or different … or the independent booksellers, etcetera.
Lisa: Thank you for bringing the arts to the children of the City of Portland and surrounding communities through The Telling Room. Thank you for bringing your poetry to the airwaves with us this morning. I really appreciate taking the time to … or you taking the time to talk with us. We’ve been talking with Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, poet and educator and father.
Gibson: Thanks for having me.