Francine Ringold is the feisty Poet Laureate of the state of Oklahoma. She is an author of prose, poetry and plays. Her books, The Trouble with Voices and Still Dancing, received the Oklahoma Book Award in 1996 and 2005, respectively.

Ringold has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry for more than 35 years and each year organizes the prestigious Nimrod Hardman Awards, which draw participants from around the world.

Over the past four decades, Fran has taught literature, creative writing and theater at the University of Tulsa, in the Oklahoma State Arts in Education and Artists in the Schools programs, at the Oklahoma School of the Deaf, and at the Tulsa Center for the Physically Limited. She is the mother of four grown children and lives for each day with her husband, poet Manly Johnson, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

I had met Fran briefly at the Nimrod Hardman Awards and Conference a month or so before conducting this interview. She was busy making sure everyone made it to the respective master classes in fiction or poetry on time or off to one of the readings by prize-winners, so I only had time to introduce myself. Yet, I was surprised to find out in my research a few days later that she had been with Nimrod since the early Sixties. Had she only been fifteen years old when she took over as editor-in-chief? It's just that her energy and enthusiasm that day at the conference and the day of our interview was that of a girl twenty-five years her junior.

So as Fran worked on finishing her lunch, she told me about knitting argyle socks, Dante's twenty-four points against Dayton, the irrationality of war, and her plans to invite the writer/poet parents of famous siblings, with the last name of Gyllenhaal, to a conference in the future.

It became clear in the first few minutes with Francine that she is passionate about the words that absolutely have to be written and the poetic gifts that we stitch together for ourselves and others. The words that are created and woven together from the material of our lives.

This is what we talked about when we met recently at Borders Bookstore...

by Joe Myers

JOE: When did you know you wanted to write creatively?

FRAN: Strangely enough, that is a very hard question for me. Because my childhood was very challenging, I never really thought ahead, as to what I could do. The first story I wrote was when I was twelve years old. It was a book of sorts for my uncle about raising his daughter and was accompanied by a pair or argyle socks that I knitted for him. I've never said this to anyone, but it was something about the complexity of the socks, the weaving, the pattern, that made me realize that a writer could do the same thing weaving different elements into a story. After that, it became a big fascination to me, not just telling the idea of a sequential narrative, but weaving all of these different elements into the same package.

JOE: Where were you first published?

FRAN: I don't recall the title of the poetry journal, but it was 1965 and I was almost 32 years old. The poem was something I wrote about "Mrs. Prufrock" or involved her somehow.

JOE: Can you tell me what inspired the poem "Dear Uncle Willie"?

FRAN: Certainly. Let me think...This was to my husband, Manly Johnson, and "Uncle Willie" was his grandfather. Manly's grandfather was referred to as "Uncle Willie" and the quote about God making the walnuts and leaving us to crack them actually came from him. The largest portion of the poem referred to the courting process, family, a walk we had taken, the fact that Manly is much older than I (he is the poplar growing new roots in the poem) and Manly's wisdom, which he got primarily from Uncle Willie.

JOE: How about the impetus for the poem "Weaving Down The Court"?

FRAN: The night of the invasion of Iraq (March 20, 2003), my nephew's wife was giving birth and we were watching the basketball team from the University of Tulsa playing against the University of Dayton on television in the NAIA playoffs. Normally I am not that involved in basketball, but several of my students in a class I taught called Sports in Literature, were playing on the team, including a student named Dante (Swanson). I had asked Dante once if he knew where his name came from and he said, "Uh, yeah, uh, from some, sort-of-like, rock star." I just loved him [Dante] as a student. This is a perfect example of that weaving, like the argyle socks, of different elements. And my theory is that people don't have to know the impetus for the poem, just that the elements work together. I was just so emotionally involved in everything going on that night.

JOE: I'm also interested to know what motivated you to write "A Letter from Aunt Vinnie."

FRAN: Oh, that's an old one. It came from a 19th century painting of two old women I had seen and the fact that I had just gone through some experiences with my mother-in-law, involving her hip surgery and her well-being afterwards. That feeling of just wanting to be alone with what is bothering you inspired the last portion starting with "Some day, she says, you might be welcome." And that line says that sometimes that [the aloneness] is comforting and sufficient.

JOE: Your husband, Manly Johnson, is a well-known poet in his own right. You collaborated on the poetry collection Every Other One, published in 2001. Can you share what that process was like?

FRAN: I loved it, mainly because I really enjoy that type of process. It was a much different experience for Manly, not as enjoyable, because he doesn't necessarily like to collaborate. He just doesn't work that way. He likes to do his own thing. But I began to notice how, because we read each other's work, how we were spinning [our works of poetry] off of each other's images. Very often, the last line of one poem [in Every Other One] is the impetus for the next poem after it. We did not, however, go through an overt process.

JOE: How did the book Every Other One move forward?

FRAN: I was very taken with a book of poetry called Renga: A Chain of Poems, by Octavio Paz and translated by Charles Tomlinson. This was a collaborative book of poetry written by Paz with Tomlinson, Jacques Roubaud and Edoardo Sanguineti. Renga is a Japanese form of poetry, which the monks used to write, and it is a chain of the Tanka style of poems, which consist of five units (often treated as separate lines when Romanized or translated) usually with the following syllable pattern of 5-7-5 / 7-7. I just thought it was a fascinating process from a different culture, and I just love that collaborative process, because in some sense, when you write, you are always collaborating with something. Not necessarily another person. Sometimes it's the weather, sometimes where you are or literature from the past that comes forward.

JOE: How did you come to be the Editor-in-Chief for the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry?

FRAN: I think it was by default. When I first started teaching [at the University of Tulsa] in the Sixties, Winston Weathers, the original editor of Nimrod asked me if I would help read the fiction manuscript submissions. There was a five-foot tall file cabinet full of unread manuscripts. I said I would be willing to try and did so for the next few years. Winston decided to retire and when he left, the position just came to me. I knew nothing about how you put a magazine together. About editing, I learned from editors. About printing, I learned from printers. I had no hesitancy to ask questions.

JOE: How has the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry changed through the years?

FRAN: Oh, lots. When it started out, it was sixteen pages, folded and stapled, and printed on a letter press. Originally, it was just a journal for student submissions, though from the beginning we had submissions from the outside. In the very earliest issues in 1958, for example, we have William Stafford "Traveling Through the Dark," we have Allen Ginsberg "Howl," and W.S. Merwin "The Carrier of Ladders" early on. It sort of proved the point about the little magazine.

JOE: How many submissions to the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry arrive for each volume?

FRAN: Certainly a couple of thousand, at least four thousand. For the prizes [The Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry], we average probably sixteen-hundred entries.

JOE: Who are some of the writers published by the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry who have gone on to alter the current landscape of prose or poetry?

FRAN: Of course, as I mentioned before, William Stafford. Pablo Neruda [Cansion de Gesta] and Octavio Paz [Piedra de Sol] were both in our first Latin American issue. Later, Manuel Puig [Kiss of the Spider Woman] was virtually unknown, when we published a chapter of Kiss of the Spider Woman for our second Latin American issue, as a novel in progress. Najib Mahfuz [The Novelist Philosopher of Cairo] who went on to be the first Arab to win the Nobel Prize with Novelist. Charles Johnson [Faith and the Good Thing, Oxherding Tales] was in our New Black Voices issue and later became one our first fiction judges for the fiction prize. And I can't forget to mention Harryette Mullen [Runaway Tongue].

JOE: If you were able to invite, through an email, every person around the world that self-identifies as a writer or poet, to submit to the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, what would you ask them to submit?

FRAN: [jokingly] You are mean. I would ask them to submit not their best piece, but the piece they love the most, because often it is a stepchild piece that may not sell anywhere else.

JOE: Have you had any crazy/oddball/weird submissions over the years that jump out in your memory?

FRAN: [laughs] We had a prize-winning story about twenty years ago that was submitted, typed single-spaced on both sides of the page with no punctuation. I believe her last name began with an "F." Forer was her name, I think, something like that. It really was a wonderful story.

JOE: As the niece/daughter of a vaudeville dancer and a journalist, how did your formative years in that environment influence who you are today?

FRAN: [surprised] You are so nice to have asked about this. This is interesting because my children and my interns keep asking me variations of this question. [Because of that] I started my memoirs and I lasted about two mornings. I think so much of my poetry has my history in it. My mother wanted to be a dancer and never got to be one. I remember a day that I was walking down the hill with my mother, and by the hill, I mean The Bronx. That was the day she registered me in dance classes. But I never got there, because she got sick and life happened. Both of my aunts, my mother's sisters, were dancers in Vaudeville and certainly they influenced me in what I wanted to do. My mother always wanted to be on stage and only actually got to be on stage once, and because of her, a lot of that theatricality is within my writing and within my persona poems. I like to read works in which the language bounds in my head and moves rhythmically.

JOE: As the Poet Laureate of the state of Oklahoma, (for two concurrent two year appointments) what does your position entail?

FRAN: [laughs and looks around quickly] Nobody knows. And that is true with all the other state Poet Laureates that I have encountered. There aren't any rules. Your position is to promote poetry, but how you do it is up to you. I found this out [about the other Poet Laureates] when we met for a conference in North Dakota. So I went all around the state for poetry readings and the like. Lately, I have begun a new project for the Cistina form of poetry that is interesting to mathematicians, as well as poets.

JOE: You were twice selected for the Oklahoma Book Award. Your book of poetry The Trouble with Voices, won in 1996 and Still Dancing won in 2005. How does it feel to receive this award twice?

FRAN: It was surprising. This time more than the first.

JOE: Would you share how you came to write A Magic Journey: Writing and Painting at Gatesway (a school/foundation for persons with developmental disabilities)?

FRAN: There was a period of time when I was the Art Director for the State Arts Council that led to the Gatesway project. A Magic Journey: Writing and Painting at Gatesway came about because I had a residency once a week, and I met there with these individuals, and it was a tremendous learning experience, and I didn't know what I was getting myself into. As I evolved methods to help them work on this fabulously creative thing, then I got the idea that we've got to publish this, so people can see the wonderful work that these folks did. I had them write their words on the paintings and then we typeset the words in the book. That's because no one would believe it that they wrote it if they didn't see it for themselves. I didn't change a word of it.

JOE: How did you come to write Making Your Own Mark: A Guide to Writing and Drawing for Senior Citizens?

FRAN: Making Your Own Mark: A Guide to Writing and Drawing for Senior Citizens was produced through the State of Oklahoma Arts Council program for senior citizens' nutrition sites. We went around to all of these nutrition sites, and as it was progressing, we knew we had to do a book on this as well and the State Arts Council supported the first printing.

JOE: Writing poetry, crafting plays and books on creative writing – which gives you the most enjoyment?

FRAN: If I could spend the consistent time, which I've never been able to do, it's probably the plays, even though it's the area that I've been the least successful. Playwriting takes so much time to create the entire environment, and poetry was something I could do while I waited for my children at dance practice.

JOE: What are you reading right now?

FRAN: That's an interesting question, because I've been having a hard time finding something. I'm about to read Myla Goldberg's Bee Seasons, because I saw the movie. It was wonderful and the screenplay was written by Naomi Foner, mother to actors Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal. It's interesting; we had published a long poem in Nimrod by her husband, Stephen Gyllenhaal, and I worked with him on several revisions of it and had no idea who he was.

JOE: Do you have any thoughts on the so-called decline of literary fiction?

FRAN: Yes. I agree. I believe it is happening. We buy so many books, when we should sit [in the library or bookstore] and read before we buy, because so much of what is out there, we may read half of, or part of, and never finish. What sells is not particularly what I am interested in. People aren't interested in authors who are really working at [the craft of writing]. I think this is caused by the publishing industry and then, later on, by the writers wanting to publish. Particularly after the first novel, a lot of writers seem to decline or nosedive.

JOE: Do you have any words of inspiration for non-published poets and writers out there?

FRAN: You do it [write] because you have to and you want to and it's not about the possibility of publishing. I believe writing is a gift that you give to yourself first and then to someone else. After the process of revision, the writing is truly a crafted gift for someone else that is more than just emotional outpouring.

Email Joe Myers at joe.myers@okstate.edu.