Art Chowder September | October, Issue 17 | Page 32

AN INTERVIEW WITH
LAURIE LAMON
I
n fall 2017, I was awarded Whitworth
University’s Amy Ryan Endowed Professorship,
the Inaugural Chair for the Liberal Arts. Our
English department and the Whitworth community
are greatly honored and grateful for Dave and
Carol Myers, Amy Ryan’s granddaughter, and the
family’s gift to our work and mission. This is an
incredible blessing for me, providing release time
from full-time teaching to write, initiate poetry
projects, and have more one-on-one time with
students.
Fall 2017 I initiated the Amy Ryan Alumni
Reading Series which will bring our next poet,
Janine Oshiro, to Whitworth University for a
reading October 24th, 2018. I will be reading in
the spring, 2019.

What other interests do you have
and does this inform your work?
Innisfree Poetry Journal, Issue 26, Spring, the poems “here” and
“After his death”
Get Lit! 20th Anniversary Anthology, Spring 2018, “I stopped
writing the poem”
North American Review, Volume 303, Number 2, “Holed Up”
Ploughshares, Volume 43, Spring 2018, “The Dogs in the
Neighborhood”
Plume Poetry Journal, April 2018, “The Myth of the Eternal
Return”
J Journal: New Writing on Justice, April 2018, “Giant”
_________________________________________________________
The Dogs in the Neighborhood
At the end of his lead our new dog stalls
in darkness between yards and digs in his two-year weight.
He has a scent. A God in the garden. I crouch and point my light.
Characters run across yards with pumpkin buckets
Everything informs my work. I’m interested in
the historical, cultural, and political context of
the areas I teach: seminar in Dickinson/Whitman
and seminar in Poetry of Witness, which includes
contemporary Arab and Israeli poetry as well as
European and Eastern European poetry (all in
translation).
and faces in masks or marked with paint.
This is what trembling feels like.
I’ve left the old dog home with bed and bone.
My husband has a glass of wine, a plate, Channel 7 news.
Blue rafts are pulled to blackness stretched on rock
Animals! I spend time reading and researching
animals. My husband and I go to Maui every
January to witness the amazing surface activity of
humpback whale who have migrated from Alaska
to the Maui Nui basin to give birth and mate. It
is an experience I’ve never written about — it is
utter mystery and beauty which doesn’t have a
human vocabulary. I’m currently reading about
the laboratory primates that are being released into
sanctuaries, and the ethical questions raised about
the elderly primates in particular.
32
ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE
a
If you want to seek out more of Laurie
Lamon’s writing, here is a list of recent
publications:
in surf that doesn’t quiet. Everyone knew this.
The men lift children whose bodies
are built of missing parts.
At the end of the night, I open the door
to a boy in a black cape and beak. He notices the old dog
behind me whose kind stare no one breaks.
When I ask him, he doesn’t know what character he is.
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