An Interview with Parker Boom

Parker Boom

Parker Boom graduated Summa Cum Laude from Southern Oregon University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing. Among other things, she served as president of the Creative Writing Club and was selected to present her poetry at the Oregon House of Representatives. Her work has been published in The Hyacinth Review, Anodyne, and The Texas Review. Originally from the Central Valley of California, she will be entering study in a Master’s in Fine Arts program at the University of St. Andrew’s in Scotland.

Ed Battistella: Congratulations on your graduation from SOU.

Parker Boom: Thank you! It’s a little surreal. It was a long, deliberate effort toward graduating and it still happened more quickly than I could have expected.

EB: I understand that you were the student commencement speaker. Can you give our reader’s the 10-word version of your speech?

PB: Language belongs to us until it’s taken. Use it now.

EB: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

PB: Not until I was already in school. I was uncertain, and nervous, at first; I enjoyed writing but only knew it as a hobby. It was my first poetry class that truly decided it—it felt as if I had encountered something so beyond me it spoke to me as nothing else could. Language was peeled down to its DNA and then braided back together. It was exciting, intimidating, harrowing, fun; it made me want to run down every street. I began to see language as material, and how the way I shaped it (intellectually, structurally, phonetically, etc.) created certain and lasting resonances. I knew then there was no other thing for me.

EB: What sort of themes do you explore in your poetry?

PB: At the end of my first term at SOU I became slowly but seriously ill. By the end of my first year, I balanced classes, projects, and papers with emergency room visits and a half-dozen new doctors. For a long while it was an exhausting search for what was wrong with me, which seemed severe and unending. This became an exhausting search for simply a word, any diagnostic word, to contain it. I have never felt so keenly the controversy, the distance, between the language of something and the experience of it. I have ankylosing spondylitis, which is a form of autoimmune arthritis located in the spine. For a clearer picture, I like to describe it like this: if left untreated, my spine would fuse into one, long bone. It feels like that.

So, to answer the question: I often write about illness. Writing is occasionally useful to vent exhaustion and grief and pain, but writing only for that purpose is, to me, limiting. In my writing of illness, the intangible structure and materiality demonstrates the internal realities of an eternally sick person—a sculpture, in a sense, to reveal the relationships between the self, the body, and language. My work tends to focus on the experience of illness, the body as separate and inseparable from the self and the larger world, and pain, for which language fails, for which language is its only failing translator. This body-language-self dynamic extends, as it must, to other themes, like queerness, faith, and politics (though I hate to describe my work as political when literature is inherently political, and insistence on its depoliticization even more so). I want to explore broader themes in the future, such as nonlinearity, history, multimedia and digital literature.

EB: I listened to “Were Awe” the poem you presented at the Oregon State House of Representatives. How did that reading come about?

PB: I was approached by the Dean of Arts and Communication, Andrew Gay, about the opportunity, and he was the one who invited me to write a poem specifically for the occasion. Between his endorsement and the nomination of both of my Creative Writing professors, Craig Wright and Kasey Mohammad, I was chosen to read my work for SOU’s Lobby Day. I was honored to represent SOU as a young artist in higher education, and for the opportunity to speak to the House Representatives who are with us at this critical moment, who have some power to wield and the opportunity to wield it. That poem aims to be an evocative, nebulous reminder of something much larger than person or nation. It is happening right now—what are we mortals going to do about it?

EB: Who are some of your influences or writers you admire?

PB: There are too many to name, but I’ll try. For the heavyweight classics, I love Dickinson and Whitman. Then, Claudia Rankine, Lyn Hejinian, and Joan Didion, for more modern picks. Some contemporary poets who were integral to building my poetic sensibilities were sam sax, Omar Sakr, and George Abraham. All three use language to illuminate realities of identity and place. Anne Carson is brilliant. Her work is complex to the point of astonishing simplicity. Anne Boyer is arguably the most influential writer for me. Her work combines the personal, political, economic and medical in writings beyond genre and in a voice that is both distant and intimate.

EB: Do you have a favorite book?

PB: Forgive me, I have to choose more than one! In nonfiction: Anne Boyer’s The Undying. In fiction: Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet. In poetry: Anne Carson’s Plainwater.

EB: You are headed off to Scotland. How did you choose the program at St. Andrews?

PB: Anne Boyer teaches there! At SOU, we’re taught her collection Garments Against Women (which I almost included above, but figured I was breaking enough rules), and I connected with it immediately. St. Andrews is also a program that balances workshop with seminar. I appreciate this emphasis on our role as literary citizens—a major part of creating one’s own work is engaging with the work of others, past and present. I was accepted and waitlisted at other programs but chose St. Andrews to learn this way, with a writer I admire, in a completely new country. Moving across the entire length of California and then some (from San Diego to Ashland) was a major shift; now, I get the chance to do that tenfold.

EB: Thanks for talking with us. Best of luck going forward.

PB: Thank you for the chance to talk! I know wherever I go, Ashland will be with me.

 

Posted in Ideas and Opinions, Interviews, Language | Comments Off on An Interview with Parker Boom

The View from the International Chess Festival

I participated in the National Open chess tournament in Las Vegas, part of the International Chess Festival. It’s billed as the chess vacation of the year (if you consider playing chess for 7 or 8 hours a day a vacation). There were just over 1000 players in 8 sections. You can find the festival website here.

I finished with 4 points out of 7 in my weight-class, the Under 2100 section: 3 wins, 2 draws, and 2 losses. One of these days I’ll play in the open section, which will give me the opportunity to play the strongest international players and lose big. This year’s open section was won by Viktor Matviishen from Ukraine, Bilel Bellahcene from Algeria, and Jianchao Zhou from Massachusetts, each of whom finished with 7 out of 9 points.

The high points of the festival were the organization of the tournament with its competent, knowledgeable staff. The rounds were mostly on time, participants were wanded when they returned to the hall from the bathroom, the organizers used text messaging to arrange the round pairing to avoid the inevitable traffic jam in front of wall postings. The prize fund is also nothing to sneeze at and brings players from all over the world. There were plenty of side events for those with the energy after you’ve got the energy after playing classical games twice a day. In the simultaneous exhibition I managed to draw the legendary Ben Finegold.

I’m in the hoodie

The travelling bookstore was another gem, loaded with bargain books, fancy and not so fancy chess sets, and other merch (bags, boards, and for some reason, chess neckties). The bookstore folks would also help you set your clock if you are tech-challenged and they offered a $50 gift certificate to any player ending the tournament with a positive score.

There were lots of lectures, blitz side-tournaments, opportunities for game review and to meet streamers and chess influencers (yep, it’s a thing). I got to chat with Susan Polgar, former world women’s champion and author of Rebel Queen.  You can find my review here:

Shaking hands with Susan Polgar

The venue is goodish. The Flamingo Hotel (think Bugsy Seigel) is convenient, has responsive, knowledgeable staff, and is reasonable (for Las Vegas). There are no coffeemakers in the rooms, so they force you to forage for coffee at exorbitant prices. And the hotel seems to have no control over the temperature: it was consistently 55-65 degrees inside and that meant you were playing in a meat locker. I felt especially bad for the chess office staff who were shivering in the coldest part of the hall. (Space heaters next time, folks!).

The chess parents set up ramshackle camps in the hallways, cheerfully ignoring the hotel’s injunction not to bring in outside food. The parents ranged from supportive to tolerant to overbearing: my favorite was a woman who had a tee-shirt proclaiming MOTHER OF NERDS. Well played.

I got a chance to chat with Oregon State Champion Zoey Tang, who writes for the American Chess Magazine.

Selfie with Zoey Tang

You can learn more about Zoey here:

And in the interests of ending on a positive note, I won’t mention the flight delay leaving Las Vegas that caused us to miss our San Diego to Medford connection BY FOUR MINUTES. The only time trouble in the entire event.

 

Posted in Ideas and Opinions | Comments Off on The View from the International Chess Festival

What I’m reading (May, 2025)

Win by Harlan Coben

I’ve been listening to the Myron Bolitar books as I exercise and have gotten intrigued by his partner Winthrop (Win) Horne Lockwood III. Like James Lee Burke’s Clete Purcell, Robert B. Parker’s Hawk, Dennis Lehane’s Bubba Rogowski, Walter Mosely’s Mouse, and other partners who do the gritty violence that the protagonists are too scrupulous to do. Here Win gets his own book, fleshing out his backstory with a pair of FBI cases from the 1970s: a radical bombing and the kidnapping of his cousin. Win unravels the pairs of cases and his own family history in a well-paced tale with plenty of action.

Snow by John Banville

This was a pick for my book club and turned out to be a nice introduction to the Irish author (and Booker Prize winner) John Banville. Set in the late 1950s, it’s kind of an anti-Father Brown story—a police procedural in which St. John (“Sinjin”) Strafford, investigates the murder and emasculation of a Catholic priest in an Irish mansion. Strafford is an interesting character, wry and astute, if somewhat detached, though the other characters, with the exception of the innkeeper and his wife, were subpar. Strafford’s observations and Banville’s writing kept me reading, but the plot was a bit predictable.

The Real-Town Murders by Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is a new author to me. Set in techno-futuristic England, The Real-Town Murders, (Roberts’s 16th novel, who knew) starts off with a locked room – or locked trunk – murder: a body is found in a car being built on the robotic assembly-line there are no human working. The dystopian sci-fi has some nice world building (and word-building) and the world is revealed slowly but surely. The noirish hero, Alma, a free-lance sleuth, must return home every four hours to tend to her ailing lover who has been infected with a neoplastic lipid. The treatments must come exactly every four hours and involve tasks that only she can do because of the bio-engineering of the disease. There are Hitchcock allusions, a government whistleblower called Derp Throat, teleportation, and an artificial environment called The Shine. It’s an elegantly written, ingenious novel.

Broken Fields by Marci Rendon

The fourth book in the Cash Blackbear series, now published by SOHO Press. Cash Blackbear continues to grow as she finds herself taking responsibility for a young Native girl who is found hiding in the house of a murder victim. Cash goes off in search of the mother, but she is forced to leave the girl with the wife of the murdered farmer, who is now engaged in an affair with a local farm boy. Things get messy. In the meantime, there is a bank robbery and Cash’s mentor Sheriff Wheaton get s locked in the trunk off his cruiser when the robbers get the drop on him. A strong fourth novel for Marcy Rendon.

Posted in Ideas and Opinions | Comments Off on What I’m reading (May, 2025)

An Interview with Marcie Rendon

Marcie R. Rendon is the author of four mysteries featuring Cash Blackbear, an Ojibwe woman who defies the damaged protagonist stereotype. Cash is tough, slow to trust, and courageous, careful in everything she does. Cash hasn’t exactly come to terms with the shit the world’s thrown at her, but perhaps in part because of the shit, Cash Blackbear stands tall and strong in her everyday life. She’s conscious of her inside/outside status and uses it to advantage, but when it comes to crime, stands for justice and for Native people.

Marcie R. Rendon

Set in Northern Minnesota, Rendon’s writing is descriptive, lyrical, and compelling, drawing the reader into the physical, human and spiritual landscape. “I write what I know,” Rendon states, and she knows her subject well. Rendon explores bigotry, racism, and genocide as real in Cash Blackbear’s 1970s setting as these are today. The mystery format works perfectly for Rendon’s narrative style and is used to good effect, shining a powerful spotlight on social and cultural wrongs that Native people experience.

Murder on the Red River gives Cash and so Rendon, a platform to explore traumatized families and communities, torn by unexplained loss and the foster care system. Girl Gone Missing focuses on sex trafficking, the disappearance of Native women, and a legal system that turns a blind eye to abuse. And in Sinister Graves, evil in the guise of religion recalls generations of abduction, forced assimilation, and unmarked graves.

Maureen Flanagan Battistella: Your first Cash Blackbear mystery, Murder on the Red River, hit home on many fronts. Were you surprised at the success of your debut work?

MARCIE R. RENDON:   Murder on the Red River received the Pinckley Debut Crime Novel Award for Women.  I am kind of naive about some things; I didn’t know awards were a ‘thing’ so that was a very pleasant surprise and I believe set the book on the trajectory to be noticed. I always felt it was a good story, but it was five years of rejection before finding a publisher, so that was a lesson in determination. I think my women’s writing group was always more believing that it would ‘hit’ than I was. 

MFB: Soho has picked up the series, which is major! How did that happen?

MARCIE R. RENDON:   The first publisher of Murder on the Red River and Girl Gone Missing was Cinco Puntos Press. They sold their publishing company to Lee and Low Publishers, which focuses on children’s lit by folks of color. Cash Blackbear drinks beer and smokes cigarettes so I secured an agent (Jacqui Lipton) and she was the one who negotiated the series going to Soho Press. And they have published Sinister Graves and the most recent release, Broken Fields. We seem to be a good fit for each other.

MFB: Where did Cash come from? Is she a mystic, a witch or something else entirely?

MARCIE R. RENDON:   Cash is Ojibwe, from Northern Minnesota. Her superpower is being a Native woman. She is a composite of all the powerful and resilient Native women I know.

MFB:  Why serial killers? You avoid gruesome but really get the point across.

MARCIE R. RENDON:   I grew up rural and was always intrigued by the different crimes people in isolated areas could get away with. I think the Cash Blackbear series explores rural, isolated life and instead of the crimes remaining unsolved, she finds the culprit and brings justice for folks.

MFB: The places you write of are so familiar. I love how you describe the fields, the seasons, the sounds and smells. I can almost feel the mud, the chafe of wheat against my skin. It seems so natural to you.

MARCIE R. RENDON    Again, they tell you to ‘write what you know’ – and I know Minnesota and both the rural and reservation land of this part of the country. It is a beautiful and fulfilling spot on planet earth.

MFB: Who is your audience?

MARCIE R. RENDON:  I write to create mirrors for Native people. We are so invisibilized in the landscape of North America and I want my people to be able to ‘see themselves’ and I want for ‘others’ to know that we still exist and to get to know us, know our worldview, and to know our resilience in the face of the historical oppression we have lived under and with.

MFB: You write of micro aggression so well, not just the act or the words but the feelings they provoke in your characters. You make me more aware of unconscious bias and cultural assumptions.

MARCIE R. RENDON: I am writing what I know, from my worldview. Truly, my initial goal is to write a good crime novel that those who read crime can pick up at 3 in the afternoon and not be able to put down until 3 in the morning. The created awareness in the reader is a side ‘win’.

MFB: I’m curious about white writers whose work features Indigenous people or Native customs and heritage. I’m thinking of Thomas Perry, Tony Hillerman, James Doss, William Kent Kruger for example. Is this cultural appropriation?

MARCIE R. RENDON:  I think you have to ask them. I write from my lived experience and knowledge. I don’t have to research Native life or make Native friends to flesh out my writing. In this current period of time I contemplate writing a book about ‘other’ – like a blond, blue-eyed detective who rescues blond, blue-eyed women. (Less chance of being banned I think).

MFB: You use your crime fiction to address serious social issues. One of these is the theme of generational trauma which comes up often in your writing. It seems that the trauma can be just one generation or two, but also over many more years. Can you talk about what this is and how it can influence Native people today?

MARCIE R. RENDON: I am writing what I know. So many Native folks have told me, you wrote my story. I am honored that I have this opportunity to write our stories in ways that make it accessible to non-Native readers. 

MFB: Cash seems most comfortable with Wheaton, but also with her bar buddies and work crew. Can you talk about what makes Cash feel comfortable, safe and what character development arc you are working towards in the series?

MARCIE R. RENDON:    I am an untrained writer. Seriously, I have no idea what the arc of the series is. I write one book and by the end I have the crime for the next book and know that Cash will solve it. In that sense, I have been told that my books are character driven.

MFB: So what’s next for Cash Blackbear?

MARCIE R. RENDON: Broken Fields, book four was just released and I have started book five. No spoiler alerts.

Miigwech.

MARCIE R. RENDON

MARCIE R. RENDON is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation. She was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by Adler University and the McKnight Distinguished Artist award by the State of Minnesota, both in 2020. Murder on the Red River (Cinco Puntos Press, 2017 and re-issued by Soho Crime, 2022) was the 2018 winner of the Pinckley Women’s Debut Crime Novel Award and also a Western Writers of America Spur award finalist. Girl Gone Missing (Cinco Puntos Press, 2019 and re-issued by Soho Crime, 2021) was a 2020 Edgar Award Nominee for best novel in a series featuring a female protagonist. Sinister Graves (Soho Crime, 2022) was a Minnesota Book Award Finalist, Minnesota Public Radio News Best Book of 2022, Ms. Magazine Most Anticipated Book of 2022, Publishers Weekly Big Indie Book of Fall, and CrimeReads’ Most Anticipated Crime Book of Fall. Broken Fields, the 4th in the series was published in 2025. A standalone mystery, Where They Last Saw Her was published in 2024 by Bantam. This one features Quill, a woman who lives on the Red Pine reservation where she revives and renews strength through unity among the women of the community.

You can visit her website at: Marcie R. Rendon.

Posted in Ideas and Opinions, Interviews, What People Are Reading | Comments Off on An Interview with Marcie Rendon