Romanistan

Cecilia Woloch, poet, educator, and Pushcart Prize winner

• Jezmina Von Thiele and Paulina Stevens • Season 5 • Episode 12

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Cecilia Woloch is an American poet, writer, teacher, and performer. She’s published seven collections of poems, a novel, and numerous essays and reviews. Her honors include three fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CEC/ArtsLink International, the Center for International Theatre Development, and others, as well as a Pushcart Prize. Her writing has been published in translation into French, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Romanes and Spanish. An expanded and updated edition of her second book, Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem, has been the basis for multilingual, multi-media performances in Los Angeles, Paris, Warsaw, Athens and elsewhere. Her latest publication is a poetry chapbook, Labor: The Testimony of Ted Gall, which Joy Priest has called “an important contribution to Appalachian docu-poetics and cross-racial labor solidarity.” She was born in Pennsylvania and raised there and in rural Kentucky and has been fortunate to have traveled the world as a writer and teacher, leading writing workshops and teaching literature in China, Turkey, Mexico, Poland, France, Germany and across the U.S. In 2026, Cecilia will return to Poland as a Fulbright Scholar at Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

The Romani crush this episode is Tony Gatlif.

Cecilia reads poetry from KIN: An Anthology of Poetry, Story and Art by Women from Romani, Traveller and Nomadic Communities. Request from the library or your local bookstores, or buy online or wherever else you get books!

Thank you for listening to Romanistan podcast.


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Follow Jez on Instagram @jezmina.vonthiele & Paulina @romaniholistic. 

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Romanistan is hosted by Jezmina Von Thiele and Paulina Stevens

Conceived of by Paulina Stevens

Edited by Viktor Pachas

With Music by Viktor Pachas

And Artwork by Elijah Vardo

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Romanistan. We're your friendly neighborhood gypsies.

Speaker 2:

I'm Paulina and I'm Jez. We're here today with Cecilia Wallach, and we're so excited to chat to you. I actually interviewed you years ago in New York for a piece that I ended up not being able to finish, and I always wanted to interview you again, and so I'm so happy that we could do this.

Speaker 3:

Well, I love that interview. It was worth it just to have the interview. We were in a diner near Grand Central in New York, weren't we?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think we were pretty close to where I was teaching at the time in Midtown. It was fun.

Speaker 3:

I just I can picture you sitting across the table. I remember the conversation was just intense and lively and, just you know, so much fun and it was such a weird setting that I loved it's a really good time, so it was worth it to have it, whether you're able to, you know, finish anything from it or not.

Speaker 2:

I was just waiting for Ramon's time, really. So yeah, we have our little bio that we love to read to introduce our guest, paulina Cecilia.

Speaker 1:

Wolach is an American poet, writer, teacher and performer. She's published seven collections of poems, a novel and numerous essays and reviews. Her honors include three fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, cec, artslink International, the Center for International Theater Development and others, as well as the Pushcart Prize. Her writing has been published in translation in French, german, polish, ukrainian, bulgarian, hungarian, hebrew, romanesque and Spanish. An expanded and updated edition of her second book, sigan, the Gypsy Poem, has been the basis for multilingual multimedia performances in Los Angeles, paris, warsaw, athens and elsewhere. Her latest publication is a poetry chapbook, labor, the Testimony of Ted Gall, which Joy Priest has called an important contribution to Appalachian docu-poetics and cross-racial labor solidarity. She was born in Pennsylvania and raised there and in rural Kentucky, and has been fortunate to have traveled the world as a writer and teacher, leading writing workshops and teaching literature in China, turkey, mexico, poland, france, germany and across the US. In 2026, cecilia will return to Poland as a Fulbright scholar at Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

Speaker 2:

Yay, so happy to have you here. Tell us.

Speaker 3:

It's always impressive to hear my own bio. How did I get here? It's impressive, it's very impressive. Thank you, thanks, but you kind of stick around long enough and you get a few things done. That's the only way I can explain it. But sometimes looking back, it's surprising, surprising. It's surprising Surprising because I always think you know, the story about my paternal grandmother was that she signed her name with an X.

Speaker 2:

I've come to doubt that she was really illiterate. She was too smart and did too many crazy things to be illiterate. But I think, wow, one generation and you know. Look what happened. Yeah, I love that. Good to be here with you. It's so good to have you. Tell us a little more about you.

Speaker 3:

Know yourself your family story where are you from your visa? Anything you want to share about your background? To start us off, oh, there's so much. Jess, I'm one of seven kids. One of seven children. My dad was an airplane mechanic. My mom was busy with us, but she was also a really gifted seamstress and, as I found out later as an adult, my father was an ex-con and my mother had been a teenage runaway. So, and they both they were remarkable people and remarkable parents, and I may have an outsized sense of loyalty and belonging to my family, my family of birth. So that's really defined me.

Speaker 3:

I think I could say I have a lot of problems with broad identities meant to I don't know sort of. Sometimes it feels like to homogenize us and to put us into neat categories. So you know, when people I've been in a conference where somebody asked me what's it like to be actually a radio program in Poland and somebody said oh, how does it feel to speak in English? And yet your soul is Polish? And I said you know, my soul does not have a nationality, but I'm really tied to the family soul and the family soul is deep, dark and complicated, as so many, if not all, family souls are.

Speaker 3:

But I was born in Pennsylvania. We moved to Kentucky when I was in my early adolescence and Kentucky was the place that felt like home to me. We lived out in the country, we had a house. We built our house ourselves and this is something that Americans don't usually do. You know, we my father paid somebody to come in and excavate and put down the foundation and put up the basic framework and then we moved into it. You know, we sort of hung bedsheets between sections to give ourselves a little privacy in rooms and we, we lived in it and built it around us. That's come up in my, in my, in my poems and it's it's glimpsed, I think, in in Seagans. So you know that was how we lived. We lived in a really that's kids on the schoolyard screaming, playing. If you hear that, don't worry. We lived in a way that was different from our neighbors and when we lived in Pennsylvania, in a kind of more middle-class suburban community, we really didn't fit. So when we moved to Kentucky and lived, it was a poor community there and we lived out in the country and it was beautiful, and so that was the place I first kind of touched earth and felt that I was home. So you know my family is pretty unusual and some might say dysfunctional, but also in our way extraordinary.

Speaker 3:

So I went to university in Kentucky and then I had $100 burning a hole in my pocket and a friend who was driving west to try to get into the film business. So I hitched a ride with her. I got to Los Angeles. I didn't have enough money to get back, so I stayed with an aunt and some cousins and found a job and stayed, did some work in public relations and marketing Don't ask me why anybody hired me to do that and did fine with that and was able to kind of solidify myself.

Speaker 3:

You know, get a car, get an apartment, start a savings account. And almost as soon as I could I walked away from that and started working independently as a freelance poet in the schools, of all things. And I thought my parents might be a little bit because I knew they worried about me. They wouldn't. They never wanted to compromise my independence, but I knew they worried about me being so far away and on my own. But when I remember when I called my mom and said Mom, quit my job, I quit my corporate job, I'm going to be a poet in the schools and she said your father and I were wondering when you were going to quit that job, were wondering when you were going to quit that job. So I had their support. I was lucky I was very lucky.

Speaker 3:

That's lovely, yeah. So I did that. I worked as a poet in the schools for many years. I was extraordinarily good at it. I mean, I really connect with children. They get it, they get poetry, they get the imagination, they get the creative process. They were always excited to see me and I was excited to see them and I made it work. I made enough of a living to support myself and eventually to be able to arrange my schedule so that I could teach a part of the year, teach really intensively, work really hard, and then leave the country for three or four months at a time and travel. And I started coming to Europe, in large part in search of the story of this grandmother who signed her name with an X. So I was just kind of going where. I just really believed in fate. I guess I believed if I kept moving, kept meeting people, I would eventually find the place where she had been born. And that's what happened.

Speaker 2:

I love that journey.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's about an hour from where I am now in Zhezhov. It's a small village, used to be a big village, and it's about an hour's drive away from here, so that's my connection to this part of Poland. My grandmother was born in a village in the Carpathians that was very not Polish but was in Poland and with a very complicated history, with a very complicated history and it's a really good example of the intricacies and vagaries and even dangers of collective identities.

Speaker 3:

And I can talk about that if you want me to. But it was a village with it was primarily East Slavic people who were called Rusyn, ruthenian, lemko and eventually came to be identified as whether they chose it or not to be identified as Ukrainians, although they had never lived in any official Ukrainian territory. But it was a kind of similar culture and probably shared roots at some point. But the village also included Jewish people and Roma people and, from what the priest I first met there in 1999 told me, they lived together happily, peacefully, until World War II.

Speaker 1:

Wow, it's really really horrible.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, you know, I mean there's so much trauma in just like in the landscape in that part of the world. Yeah, but it took me decades to understand what had happened there and why it had happened and what it had to do with my own family history.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that uncovering ticks guts, pardon me. And what it had to do with my own family history. Yeah, that uncovering takes guts, pardon me, that uncovering takes guts. Sometimes I'm scared to look into questions I have around my own family so I'm like, oh, it's going to be a sad story. I can feel that. Well, you know, and you have that intuition.

Speaker 3:

I mean, I feel like we come from people.

Speaker 3:

I'm going to project and include you who you know that intuition was a very important, it was a power you didn't dismiss. I think I didn't really attribute it to Romani culture necessarily, but you know, I think I've told you before I sort of grew up with this a lot of uncertainty about my identity, you know, because it was a time and a place where people was Polish and when I was growing up everything was behind the Iron Curtain and the kind of little story in the family, that kind of was almost a joke, but it wasn't a joke, was that we were gypsies or that we had gypsy heritage or gypsy blood, as my mother would say. But I didn't connect it. I didn't connect the kind of importance given to intuition in my family, you know, and I'm talking about my extended family, and I'm talking about my extended family I didn't connect that to anything having to do with Romani culture or beliefs until much, much later.

Speaker 1:

But I do remember when I was a teenager, my father telling me you come from a long line of fortune tellers.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I just remember that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we definitely have heard that. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3:

So this grandmother, who was born near here in the Carpathians, she read the cards. I grew up hearing that she had a very special place, it seems, in this village as a very young woman. It was a girl, she was the village midwife, she was the village barber, she was the person who washed the bodies of the dead and prepared them for burial. And she read the cards. So the priest I met there in 1999 was kind of taken aback and then he said well, she would have been specially trained from an early age Kinship.

Speaker 3:

A few of our world's people still speak a tongue so old. Its closest analog is birdsong, and a bird carved some 30 000 years ago may well be our first work of art. Why mimic the palaver of a thrush from wood or stone? Why shape a turn body, its wings pressed tight against its sides? Or remember the dream moments our beating arms took hold in air, lifting us away from earth, trod smooth by our feet. We each possess a bird soul. On the highest branch of every family tree, a winged spirit preens in the sun, gleaming with iridescence, that sheen of our common blood.

Speaker 1:

We actually want to ask you one of our most famous questions. Do you consider yourself a rebel?

Speaker 3:

oh yeah, I didn't have a choice. You know, I was born into a rebel. Like I said, my mother was a teenage runaway and my dad was an ex-convict and, um, I think I can say that all of my siblings, we all have problems with authority, with external authority. Like, don't tell us what to do. So, yeah, I definitely would, would say I. I told a former professor of mine one time, a person to whom I'm still close. I said well, you know, I was thinking on my life and I said nobody ever told me I couldn't do what I wanted to do. And he looked at me and he said nobody would have dared.

Speaker 2:

The reputation precedes you. You know, I read Sagan, the gypsy poem, years ago and I fell in love. I think I was in my twenties when I found it and I had really hadn't read too many Romani writers and I related so much to how you grappled with your mixed identity, what you've shared now. But also you know what you were writing about in the book and knowing some about your family roots, but not everything. And I feel like you navigate this complex identity with such grace. We often have people writing in of mixed identities not really knowing how to navigate it at all or how to talk about it, and there's so much pressure to you know publicly represent an entire culture, especially if you're public in any way like a writer. So we would love if you could share a little advice from folks. Either you know that came through in the poetry or otherwise. How do you navigate, like being in between categories.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean, I think it would add another layer of complexity maybe if I had grown up in a family that explicitly identified as Romani. So that wasn't. I mean, it was implicit, but we weren't. You know, we were quite tribal as a family, but we weren't in a, we weren't part of a. And someone said one time, when someone said, you can't consider yourself Roma if you didn't grow up in a Roma community, and I did so.

Speaker 3:

But I have, you know, I had those questions as a kid, one of the most hurtful things, things, and I guess I've hung on to it and should let it go. But you know, as a little kid in elementary school, having the other kids ask me what are you, you know, what are you anyway? Yeah, and I didn't have an answer. I did not have an answer and instead of going looking for an answer, you know I looked for, I tried to figure out who I really was, not what I really was, you know. And the question answers what are you meaning? Are you white? Are you black? Are you Italian? Are you, you know, black? Are you Italian, are you? You know, I was just a little bit, I guess, an unusual looking child. I was dark, darker than I am now. When you're as you get older, you lose pigment, not only your hair, your skin, everything. But I was dark. I had rather thick, dark eyebrows, kind of slanted eyes, and my hair was really from the time I hit adolescence, was really wildly frizzy and curly. So I don't know, Some people just didn't like the way I looked and it confused them. But I didn't go looking for so much an identity to wrap myself in. I wanted to understand on a deeper level who I was and who the people I had come from were. And it turns out the people I came from weren't all that comfortable with wrapping themselves up in identities.

Speaker 3:

So you know, I had a dance teacher once. I suppose she was biracial, she was a dark skinned woman with blonde hair and green eyes and she wasn't saying this about her racial identity, she was saying it about herself as a teacher and dancer. She said nobody's going to put me in a box and when I'm asked to check those boxes on you know forms about how I identify myself, I'm like, oh no, you're not putting me in a box and I guess that's the way I navigate it. You know I. You know somebody asked me.

Speaker 3:

You know, in recent years and at a party of artists you know cool people in LA some woman said, well, you know what are you. And I said, excuse me. She said, well, I mean, what's your nationality? And I said, well, I'm an American citizen. And she said, yeah, but what's your nationality? And I said I do not believe in the dogma of nationality, you know, and she really took offense. You know I believe in.

Speaker 3:

You know we're citizens, we're all hybrids of some kind or another and you know we draw firm lines around our identities at great peril, you know, to ourselves and to others. So I couldn't draw a firm line around my identity if I wanted to. I do Jez. I do have discomfort sometimes when I'm in communities that do define themselves really strongly around some collective identity and think, you know, like I have been with Ukrainian people who say you're Ukrainian and it's like well, I don't know, I never identified them. My father said we came from the Carpathians. He said the language that was spoken was like Ukrainian. I don't, you know and I can't claim. I will happily identify some different strands in my heritage. You know there are these different strands, but when I did a DNA, have you ever done a DNA test.

Speaker 2:

I think Paulina did you do one. My grandma told me never to do one because she didn't want the government to have our blood secrets, which I'm like no, my brother is like that, my brother's like I don't want them to have that.

Speaker 3:

I don't want them to have that. That's definitely my family's attitude. And yet we all went ahead and did it eventually. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

My mom too. She's like well, now they have all your blood and whatever, and you know they want their blood, you know they want our blood. But you can do it, I'm okay with it. Very passive, aggressive.

Speaker 3:

But when you look at, you know, when you go to places where you can see the kind of records that Nazis kept, you know, it's terrifying Because they did, you know, everything down on an index card about you. So I can understand that. But it was so interesting because when I did a DNA test and my friend here, who is she, was married to a Polish man for many years. She has, you know, Polish children. She's a British citizen, product of rape, so father's unknown, but apparently pakistani, and um, she looked at my you know little pie chart. She said, my god, I've never seen anything like that. Because we're like I said what you know, like I'm everything. She said, like I have basque, you know who has basque. So my brothers are part of the what's called. They have some identifier that they're part of the, the Arabic haplope group. So you know, obviously people traveled and you know seeds were spread.

Speaker 3:

But I, you know, I just I resist, you know, to try to answer your question, I resist a lot of the ideology, a lot of the kind of you know this or that black or white kind of ideas. I mean, other people are free to embrace that if they want, but I can't, you know I can't. I'm who I am and I am an American citizen, and that's something very different from nationality. I take citizenship quite seriously, nationality, I take citizenship quite seriously. But that's somebody, an older woman when I was very young, told me that a good response was to when people ask kind of inappropriate questions maybe was to say I'll forgive you for asking that if you'll forgive me for not answering. I love that. And my friend Natasha Trethewey, who's a really good work yeah yeah.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, she's wonderful and she, you know she's biracial, she identifies as as black, as African American, but you know, she said, when people ask you that, what are you? She just finds that to be a racist question.

Speaker 2:

It is, yeah, it is.

Speaker 3:

You know. So you know she that's. Her answer is I'm an American, I'm an American citizen, you know. So you know. That's good enough for me. Yeah, not for me. And if people are curious about my heritage and my family story, they better be prepared to listen for a while. So maybe that's something else. You say well, so maybe that's something else. You say Well, how much time do you have? So do you both consider yourself to be of mixed identity?

Speaker 1:

I do.

Speaker 2:

I am not I.

Speaker 1:

I grew up in a Roma family and then when I took the bloodline it was like 99% Eastern European Roma. I was like I mixed it at 1%.

Speaker 3:

I didn't realize that there was a DNA marker for Roma. Last time I asked there wasn't, but this keeps evolving all the time. Relatively now, yeah, okay. And what about you, jess?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean my maternal grandmother is, you know, from a Sinti family and yeah, and then otherwise, you know, a mixed European and I spent so much time with my grandmother that you know she influenced so much of my, my cultural, spiritual identity. But I also really would feel uncomfortable, like not specifying that I'm mixed and I grew up like assimilated.

Speaker 3:

You know it's a different so you didn't grow up in a Roma community like Paulina did no, no, my and my grandmother's family, I think, are very uncomfortable about being seen as Roma.

Speaker 2:

They really are, like they don't want to talk about it, um, and they're in Germany and so you know. That makes sense.

Speaker 1:

I was like our families are the same, though. Yeah, we.

Speaker 2:

It's funny because, that's you know, paulina and I were working on things, especially writing the book. It's like, wow, we really have very similar experiences in some ways, and then always not. But yeah, no, it's like, wow, we really have very similar experiences in some ways and then other ways not. Yeah, no, it's just always interesting to see what people share, regardless of you know whether you do it.

Speaker 3:

I mean, and I thought, you know, as a kid, when I did hear you know we have gypsy blood, I thought, great, you know, why is this a secret?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I know I didn't understand.

Speaker 3:

I thought great, wonderful, you know, and I guess if I were going to, you know, if I could sort of embrace any of my identities, I would embrace that, but I don't feel like I have a right to, because I didn't grow up in a Roma community, because there isn't, you know, like, you know, that kind of substantiation. But but yeah, I thought great, why should this be a secret? But when I would ask my, my great aunts, they would be like, talk about it? No, no, no. You know there would be like my great aunts, they would be like don't talk about it, no, no, no, you know, they would be like somehow you weren't supposed to talk about it. And then, after I so it was when I traveled started to travel in Europe and in the 90s and saw, you know how displaced Roma, you know, after, you know, post-communism, were living and experienced, especially in places like, I guess, germany, poland, after you know, post-communism were living and experienced, especially in places like, I guess, germany, poland, france how Roma were regarded and how they were treated. It's like, oh, I get it, yeah. And then when I studied the history, I really got it, you know, and you know when Sigan was published and I, you know, gave presentations of the US. People in the US had no notion that Roma were targeted in the Holocaust at all, so I got that.

Speaker 3:

After I did the research, after I traveled, I wrote the book. When the book was published I thought I was really going to get into trouble with my family because this was something we never. You know, you kind of joked about it. You talked about it in the family, but was it serious? Was it a joke? And but you did, did not? It didn't go beyond that and the book came out. My father had already passed, a lot of his relatives had passed, and I walked into my mother's living room one night. I was in Kentucky on a fellowship and I went to my mom's for dinner and walked through the screen door and my mom was leaning back with and I went to my mom's for dinner and walked through the screen door and my mom was leaning back with her eyes closed to my dad's recliner, and my teenage niece, who was already a young mother, was lying on the floor with her black hair spread out around her and my sister, the hairdresser, was sitting on the couch reading Sigan out loud to them.

Speaker 2:

Oh, that's beautiful.

Speaker 3:

And I said you know what, the Pulitzer Prize doesn't get better than this. And I felt a little embarrassed and tried to say something and my mother immediately said, shh, we're listening to this. And she later told me that it was her favorite of my books. She really loved it. My sister used to have a have a copy in her at her beauty shop and it kept disappearing.

Speaker 3:

And I'd give her another copy and it would disappear oh so yeah, so it um, I didn't get in trouble for it, but my mother did say, you know, I worry about you traveling, now that you're a public gypsy Mm hmm, for my grandmother, in which she comes to America circa 1913. Circa 1913. So there you are, landed in the little boat of the only self. You have the only skirt, the only scarf, your hair in the long brown braid of the only girl you've ever been.

Speaker 3:

Now here comes the whistle's scream, the laws, quick shove. The crowd of others pushing past with their cardboard suitcases, cloth sacks, their ragged bundles at their backs. When you step away from them, you stand in all that sharpened light alone, beneath your blouse, a little pouch of herbs, dried flowers, earth of home, a little charm to keep you safe in this new country. At your throat, here comes the hunger. Here come the machines. Here comes the god of cash and sweat. Here comes the egg that turns to child inside your body. Here comes death. Here comes America, my love, all ship. There is no going back.

Speaker 1:

We actually wanted to ask you what was it like?

Speaker 3:

for Sigan to be adapted to multimedia performance. The thrill of a lifetime you can imagine. You know just thrilling. The first big performance in Los Angeles was part of I was teaching, you know, a non-tenure track, not as an adjunct, but a step above, but still at the University of Southern California and they had a program called Visions and Voices where they did presentations in their big auditorium there and a woman had found me. There's a woman named Paula Faust who's made several films about the Roma. She's a documentary filmmaker and she came to a reading I was giving from this book and she asked if she could interview me on film for something she was doing. And then she was the one who came up with the idea of turning it into a multimedia presentation. She had connections at USC, she wrote the grant and she brought in a stage director, a young Latino guy. She brought in musicians Sibley Campo, who's an incredible flamenco dancer, her husband, who's a musician. They brought in a canto pando singer from the south of france, a roma man who does that, you know that deep song, yeah, and we only had him for a few days and we were on the stage during a dress rehearsal and I was at the podium reading the poems and seedley was dancing and this.

Speaker 3:

And there's a point in the poem I don't know if you remember it well enough to know there's a point in the poem I don't know if you remember it well enough to know there's a point where somebody I'm stuck in traffic and somebody has fallen or jumped from an overpass and just at that point this Roma singer started that mournful just I mean, I cannot believe I'm standing here. I cannot believe I'm standing here. That voice just completely went through my body. It was, you know, this stunning, stunning moment where I thought how, how did I get here? I wrote this little thing started out to be about my family and to have these incredible artists, and what you realize, paulina, or what I realized, was like oh, this doesn't just belong to me, this is this. I guess it was maybe like a child you know I haven't had children, but you know a child and and other people picked it up and interpreted it and put their experience and their gifts and their souls into it and it became something else, much, much bigger than anything I could make on my own, and that was a. You can maybe imagine what kind of experience that was. And then the same thing with you know other places, even kind of smaller things.

Speaker 3:

When I was in a village in Eastern France for a festival called Le Bruit de la Neige the Noise of the Snow and I kind of didn't understand what I was getting into. But I had been invited by a mutual friend and basically we sat in a circle. It was a workshop kind of thing that culminated in a circle. It was a workshop kind of thing that culminated in a performance and the book had been published, had been translated and published in French. So we were sitting there kind of in a circle and people were just reading excerpts that they loved from the French text, and I'd come in with an excerpt from the English and then somebody would start singing and and it turned into this kind of sonic tapestry that, um, I still have a link to it somewhere, I don't know if it still works, but that then was presented on the final night of this festival and again it was like that feeling of you give birth to something and then it just kind of lifts out of your arms and moves into the world in ways you can't imagine, much less control, and I'm fine with that.

Speaker 3:

You know, I had a background in theater. I did theater as a young person. I never intended to try to become a, you know, an actress. I wasn't confident enough about my physical appearance. I was shy on camera At that time. There was an ingenue kind of look that I did not have. But I loved doing theater. I loved that collaboration. You know, when you kind of create something in collaboration with other people and it's like wow, I never, you know, it goes beyond anything an individual imagination could have created. So starting to do those performances was it? It brought me back into that realm, into that experience. And you know, I'm always so humbled by the gifts that people bring. You know people. You know people to to play music. They, they study all their lives. You know, to be able to create a sound with an instrument.

Speaker 1:

Um, we actually wanted to ask you, um, what is your advice to people on making writing a sustainable path, whether it's through fellowships and academic career or through a day job with a meaningful writing practice?

Speaker 3:

I think, pauline, it really depends on what works for you. I don't think there's any one path. I mean, I got some. I loved being a poet in the schools and that gave me the illusion that I could make a path just by being a poet, because that's who I was to these kids. I mean, I was coming in and teaching, but really I was coming in and being a poet and modeling for them what being a poet was. But that was a time when there was funding for things like that. You know, I wasn't paid a lot, but I was paid enough and that funding disappeared.

Speaker 3:

So, you know, and I kind of got into teaching in academia accidentally and I love teaching, but that was not a good fit for me. It's not a good fit for anybody who has an iota of a rebellious streak. Yeah, it's a kind of a corporate atmosphere, even though people would say it isn't. Universities are run more and more like corporations. There's a kind of conformity I found, and no matter what university I taught, where I taught and I was at a bunch of them I was always the only person on the faculty who did not have parents in the professional class, so it was really almost more of a class thing. You know a working class, scrappy, rebellious working class kid. In academia, even my colleagues who were, you know, people of color and all that they were, their parents were professors and lawyers and teachers and not men who wore a uniform and came home with dirty hands. So academia was not a good fit for me but I loved being able to be when I was working with kids.

Speaker 3:

It was like I got to be a poet all day. I didn't have to separate myself into I'm writing sales promotion literature during the day and then I go home and try to make the switch into being a poet. I was like absorbed with poetry and imagination and creativity and language all day and that really worked for me and I I had. I was educating myself as a poet because I was always looking for ways in for the kids. You know where's a what's a poem? I used kids poems but I read them Whitman and Nikki Giovanni and I'm always looking for poems that I could feed them and that would give them a way into a poem. So I was reading a lot and you know studying. You know how do I explain extended metaphor to a room of seven-year-olds? How do I explain surrealism to a room?

Speaker 2:

Such a fun thing to do too, it was a blast. It was a blast, those were really.

Speaker 3:

I did that for about 10 or 12 years and those were great years. I know other people Paul, paulina for whom it really works to have a day job that has finite borders, unfortunately, like when I had a corporate job. I left that job at five and that was it. You know, 5 pm every day, no one, a cell phone. Your boss wouldn't dare call you at home. That never happened. You know there wasn't such a thing as email. You clocked in, you clocked out and the rest of your time was your own. So when I worked that corporate job, I was doing equity waiver theater, I was going to poetry workshops, I was doing readings, because after 5pm my time was mine, because after 5 pm my time was mine.

Speaker 3:

And I don't think a lot of jobs aren't like that. But I think for some people I know some poets for whom that's worked really well. If I had to advise someone now, it's a really tough time to be a teacher, but I have poet friends who work, as you know, primary school and high school teachers, and that is a good fit for them. They need part of is how much stability do you need? I never needed much stability because, um, I have my family and one of my sisters told one of my husbands oh why does cecilia need things like pots and pans? She has us, so um nice so I didn't.

Speaker 3:

I didn't choose to have children and I never stayed married very long. So, um, I just had to take care of myself and I felt, you know, I can always. I can always do that, I can always waitress. So I had different priorities than some people who need more stability, more financial security. But I would just my experience. I would stay away from academia, but teaching in the classroom in different ways could be great. Or, you know, maybe we'll return to a time when people can do what I did in the 90s and you know, I just basically made up my own job as a poet in the schools. Other people were doing it, but I made it a full-time thing.

Speaker 2:

That's beautiful, I think I'm probably gonna go to her corporate job what do you do?

Speaker 3:

what is your corporate job? Can I?

Speaker 1:

ask I am a marketing coordinator that's good useful skills.

Speaker 3:

I mean my years in the corporate world served me really well. I got really useful skills and I happen to be lucky enough to work with good people.

Speaker 1:

Yeah it's a sales company, so I get a lot of like every weekly meeting. I learn so much people skills I'm like okay, all right, those are good skills.

Speaker 3:

You know those are good skills and I got my five years in the corporate world. I got great skills. I had a wonderful mentor. I had a woman boss who was only about who was. It was unusual in the 70s and 80s to have a woman boss and she was only about 10 years older than I was and she had come up through the ranks as a file clerk into management and um what a gift oh yeah, she was great.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much. I really appreciated it. Really appreciate you coming on here and helpful to talk to you okay, have a good day, take care bye.

Speaker 3:

This is a poem by Lynn Hutchinson Lee, called what they Ate. On the Ship there was bread and oatmeal in a thin soup. Scraps against hunger, eat up chavvies. And then the moon came out and they closed their eyes, pretending to sleep. They knew the words, why and where. They knew the word drama, but not that a drama could stretch itself across an ocean. Waves towered over their ship and the rocking was that of their grandmother's arms, left behind, and her arms were more scented, more enfolding, more present in her absence. They ate the sky, drank the undertow, licked the drenching mist from their arms, inhaled the perfume of forgetting.

Speaker 2:

I wanted to ask you too, because I don't know too much about your recent chapbook.

Speaker 3:

Labor, the testimony of Ted Gall. What, what tell us about it? What are you doing? It's kind of an accidental poem but you know, researching this grandmother who's been kind of the center of my creative life, I guess my whole creative life, you know she was active in the labor movement in the US. She, my dad, was born in a coal mining town called Russellton in Pennsylvania and I found out after my father had passed that Russellton was the epicenter of the biggest coal miners strike in history. And that happened when my dad was probably about like two years, two years old. And I believe from my research that if my grandmother wasn't radicalized before, then, that's when she became radicalized.

Speaker 3:

Because the only people who could get in with aid, um, to the work, I mean they. It was like an armed camp. They had the coal company, had their own police. Yeah, they controlled the road, the one road in, the one road out. Uh, people were thrown out of their houses because the company owned the houses. If you were striking, striking, you were thrown out. It was the coldest winter on record. They had no fuel for heat. They, they had no food and nobody could get past those company police, except the Communist Party USA. That's when they got in with aid and you know they tried to start an alternative union. There was all kinds of political stuff.

Speaker 3:

But in trying to find out about this I stumbled across a book called the Ragman's War Bucket of Blood, the Ragman's War it was all about. It was a novel, all about, this time in Russellton, but it was all based on the writer's research of the area and on her own family history area and on her own family history. We got in touch. Her name is Suzanne Gall-Sugel. She basically invited me to come to see her. She was sure her father had known my grandmother. He was a miner and then a labor activist there and I went to visit her and she sent me loose in his archive. This is a man who went to school until he was 12 years old and then went to work for the mining company. But he was self-educated and then educated probably at the Little Red Schoolhouse which the Communist Party USA ran the Little Red Schoolhouse which the Communist Party USA ran and he left behind when he died this just immaculately, exquisitely organized archive and she sent me. It was in the basement of Suzanne's home and she sent me loose in there for a couple days and there were testimonies, days, and there were testimonies, there were letters, there was a recording, a transcript of a recording he had made for his daughter. There were essays he'd written. You know there was just so much material that I got lost in that kind of forgot about. That was good for my grandmother.

Speaker 3:

But my one of my grand, my grandmother's stepson, was one of Ted Gall's lieutenants in these wildcat strikes and I was so moved by this man's life and I felt that I could hear his voice, you know, speaking to me, and I just took a lot of notes and copied things, copying things and you know, went on with my life, went on, you know, working on this book about my grandmother and from these notes I started like just moving the. It was all his language. But I just started kind of moving things around and thinking how can I incorporate this into the book about my grandmother? But it presented itself to me in lines. It refused to be prose and I mean it's this man's voice. This is how he spoke, yeah, in a kind of poetry, you know, very plain spoken, very um. So it was a poem. I realized I couldn't fit it into this memoir I was trying to write, so I just put it aside and 10 years later or so, I pulled it out and I thought you know, what I really.

Speaker 3:

I think this wants to be out there in the world. He definitely left that archive hoping that his voice would be heard someday. So I was in touch with a woman in Kentucky, katerina Stojkova, who runs a small press, and she said do you have anything? You know, I'd love to publish something of yours. And I said I'd love to publish something of yours. And I said, well, I have this thing and I sent her the manuscript and she turns out her father was a coal miner. Oh cool, yeah. So she was very moved by it and she brought it out.

Speaker 3:

It's been challenging, jess, because I'm not really sure how to promote it, because it's almost like somebody else's poem and it doesn't seem to be a really great time for people to be. Um, people don't seem to be buying books a lot. I think during the pandemic they were during the lockdown, but um, you know, I've given some readings but I'm sort of I feel like I haven't done it justice, because I really want it to be. But I have done some reading slash performances with musicians and that's been great friend of mine who does like the kind of knows the old, like worker songs and coal mining songs. We've collaborated on a performance and that's been great. But yeah it's. You know, I think it's um an important piece of work.

Speaker 2:

Like I said, I wouldn't say that if I felt like it was, and it's all his words, I just arranged them yeah, that's so interesting because we are at a strange time, um, where I think we really need to be focusing on the labor movement and the working class especially, absolutely. Yeah. So I don't know, while this is a difficult market for books, it does seem like this is such a good time for this book to be heard. Maybe the audio format will take off, you know, I think that's.

Speaker 3:

I guess I could ask the publisher if she wants to do that. Do it as an you know audio book. I just don't. I mean, marketing is not my strong suit and but you know I've always, when I've had books come out, you know, had a publication party, had readings and books sell readings and the books sell this. I've had a couple readings and they were you know reasonably well attended, but people didn't buy books.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's a strange, strange economy, and yet people need poetry and love poetry. That was actually one of our questions too. You know what brought you to poetry and why do you think humans love it and write it and read it?

Speaker 3:

boy, that's a great question. I mean, I can say what brought me to poetry, um, but, and I can say why I need it yeah, that's plenty.

Speaker 3:

That's plenty of an answer I mean, you know she would read to us and read and I loved being read too. And and my mother also sang kind of constantly. And in my family there was this also, this weird thing that we did between singing and speaking, like at the dinner table. It was chaotic because there were so many of us and my mother was a kind of chaotic person, but my father really liked, you know, order, so we weren't allowed to yell at the dinner table so we would sing. Pass me the butter. You know, we would just sing. That's so cute. So for me that line between you know prosaic language and song language it was kind of blurry. Like I said, my mother sang, she read to me. I taught myself to read by having her read me the same book over and over. Boy, can I remember the first.

Speaker 3:

And then I had a sixth grade teacher, seventh no, I think it was a seventh grade teacher who offered extra credit for memorizing poems and I could do that. And then I would stand up and make a big like jokey, overblown thing of reciting these poems. But actually I loved, loved it and loved doing them. So it kind of was like a not, it was just like a glide into it. It was kind of always there and I didn't like ever make a decision oh, I'm going to be a poet. And then, you know, I kept.

Speaker 3:

I liked writing in secret, which is, I mean, I think, in poetry that's often what we're doing. We're, you know, we're kind of listening to that inner voice in a kind of intensely private way. And that was really appealing to me as a little kid who was kind of obsessed with my family's secretiveness. Yeah, so that's you know. And then I had a high school teacher who I love. She, like everybody, loved her. So we took classes with her and she created a class it was the mid 70s called Modern Song and Verse and it was. We were reading poetry and looking at song lyrics. She loved Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan and we could bring in the album liner notes with lyrics and talk about them as poems, talk about the metaphors and the rhymes. And she also subscribed to the Atlantic Monthly for us in this little you know rural high school and so that we could read. You know it was reading poems by Lucille Clifton and Anne Sexton and so and she made us keep journals. She said you can, this is your. Whether you pass or fail this class depends on whether you write in your journal every single day. And I started doing that and kind of never stopped. I took a pause for a little while but never really stopped. So that's you know, and it's just.

Speaker 3:

I was reading an article a few days ago about graphomania, like people who just kind of need to be writing all the time, and that it's. It's more about the act of writing, the process, than it is about. Oh, I want to like make a poem, I want to make a book, I want to like make a poem, I want to make a book, I want to make a story. It's just like I really love that active writing and with poetry, and one of the reasons I think one of the reasons that I love poetry and that I think this holds for other people certainly some of my close friends who are also poets, is that with poetry, I think even more than other forms of writing, something's going to happen. You don't know what it is, but you're going to start putting words together in some way that you can't you know, you can only see as far as those headlights go. Something really surprising can happen, that you can find out something you didn't know, you knew or felt, or you can just go into this whole other territory, because a poem doesn't have to follow linear logic, doesn't have to be rational. So there's a little bit more of that, and so that's the process that I love.

Speaker 3:

And if you keep, the trick with writing, poetry is you want, when that happens, you want that to happen in the language, so that when somebody else reads it, it happens for them. They have that sense of coming upon something that may be startling or funny or, you know, profound in some way. And I just think language is, you know, language is one of the things that makes us human. You know Animals I guess they're starting to see have different ways of communicating. That can be pretty complicated, but language is this human thing and I think that that's part of the. And you know, poetry is more purely about language than any other kind of writing. I mean, with poetry it's really. It's just, it's made of words, it's not. You know, a poem can tell a story, it can be like a song, but you know it's words and I think there's something that can be really elemental about it that can speak to people. You, you know, a lot of people are talking about this poet who recently passed away, who I didn't know. Yeah, andrea gibson.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah and when I do see her poems or their poems, there's something like so at the bottom of the soul about them. Yeah, I kind of. You know I would tell my students I'm the only professor you'll ever have in an English department who eschews TS Eliot. But you know, there is a kind of poetry that one of my ex-husbands used to call doily making Too embroidered and fancy, and I think some people love that because they're drawn maybe to the music of it, even to the complexity of it. I think poets like you know, andrea Gibson, it gets at something you know speaks to people at a soul level and that people need to hear. I feel like that's what's at risk right now in the current environment is the human soul.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and truth telling and the essence of things, yeah, it makes a lot of sense as I'm listening to your answer around why you love poetry. I understand why you teach it and also why you want to teach it in your own way too. It sounds like your opportunities to learn really brought you somewhere beautiful and you made a whole life in poetry and I just I love that.

Speaker 3:

Thank you. Yeah, I love it too, I feel very lucky. But, yeah, and I feel like that's a a kind of a that's like our challenge right now, with a kind of way that you know, technology has accelerated, you know, in some good ways and some not so good ways. We're kind of shattered into these millions of little, not even communities, but you know we're not sharing reality anymore. But what's, you know, what's at risk here is the soul, and you know we need it. We need it. Life feels hollow, empty, sterile without that engagement at the soul level yeah, yeah called earth, called Earth.

Speaker 3:

We've traveled like this all our lives, all our life as a people on the earth. We've gathered and scattered and gathered again in rooms made of firelight or of song. We've buried our dead when we could, in places they loved or the bones of them. Every step, a turn of the wheel, a word set down and no other word. Every turn of the wheel, a prayer in mud, the answer of one God. Sometimes we've veiled ourselves and sometimes we've stood clothed only in sunlight and wind. Sugar of flowers on our breath, honey of bird call in our mouths. Once I'd forgotten the way to the well and the smell of cool rain led me there. Once I was only a child in my sleep. Then I awoke and was everywhere.

Speaker 2:

We also love to ask because we love to have an opportunity for our guests to share who inspires them or whose work they adore. Who is your Romani crush? Who do you think is just doing such a great job and you want listeners to learn about them or think about them?

Speaker 3:

Romani crush. Hmm, it's hard for me to think about crush in, I mean yeah this is a platonic or maybe even intellectual crush.

Speaker 3:

Okay, I get intellectual crush. Artistic crush, I would say, would be um, I mean, they're like loads and loads of musicians. But let me go in a different direction and talk about tony got leaf. Oh, yes, yes, those films. You know those films, um, yeah, are incredible. You know um lacho Drum and Gaggio Dillo and what was what were some of the other ones there's? Did he make Transylvania or was that somebody else? But anyway, yeah, those those films are. Yeah, liberté, if you saw that Liberté was really I think it's corcoran and um, and yeah, he did make transylvania. Uh, but just wonderful, wonderful films. And he has a great face too. Speaking of crushes, he's that kind of face, face like the side of a mountain so I love the face with character.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, he's so gifted. I don't know if you can hear the train going by right now, but apologies if, uh, if people can pick it up, I just hear the kids out on the schoolyard.

Speaker 3:

My apartment overlooks a schoolyard and in summertime the kids are out there shooting baskets and stuff and playing soccer.

Speaker 2:

That's so sweet. Yeah yeah, tony Gottlieb is so talented Latro Drum. I've been wanting to do like a screening of it somewhere because I think it's difficult to find, but you can find it on YouTube listeners. They have it in several parts.

Speaker 3:

You know, I have my own copy. Oh cool, and I think I still have it, but it's video.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, it's like watch it, you have it. It's like, oh man, it's getting there.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I still have it, but it's like a, you know, the videotape, that thing, that's like this and you have to, you know, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Who has a VCR?

Speaker 3:

I know exactly, but yeah, but I, oh, I would love that you know screening it's. You know, I don't know. You have a Roma film festival sometime, Wouldn't it be nice? Yeah, A festival somewhere in the US with, like Gypsy music, Roma film.

Speaker 2:

Did you see the exhibit gosh Gosha, whose work was in the uh, venice Biennial? Oh, I didn't get to see Gosha Mir in um in New York, but I remember we talked about it because I was so excited. Um, just just astounding. Oh yeah, I ended up missing it. I think I'm only in New York sometimes. Now, you know, academia is a great Romani film fest, but I don't believe it's been in the US. I could be wrong, but I think usually it's in Berlin or in Europe.

Speaker 1:

But we need.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I would like, I would love more American festivals. We, paulina and I, did the Romanistan Festival just as an opportunity to have Romani arts and it was like an all LGBTQ cast and we did that in March and it was so, so fun and we're just, you know, we need the funding to do more. You know, I think that's the thing is like. You know where does the money come from, but people always and where did you?

Speaker 2:

all do it. Where did you do it? We were in New Orleans because our friend Ilva knew, you know, plenty of performers who are happy to jump in, and so it was a blast. We had so much fun. Yeah, new Orleans is a great place for stuff like that. Yeah, it's such a great city. What do you have coming up on the horizon that you would like people to know about, and you know how can people find you and support your work.

Speaker 3:

Well, I run this reading series on zoom that's become, you know it's like in its fifth year.

Speaker 3:

We started it during the pandemic, my assistant and I, and it's just become a big thing. So so people can. How can people find out about Facebook? The links are posted on my Facebook, on my Facebook page, and I have a page that's like Cecilia Wallach author, but it's kind of neglected. Everything's on my personal page and so, like I have a.

Speaker 3:

There's a reading coming up on Sunday with two fabulous poets Laurie Badikian, who's an Armenian American poet, child of the diaspora, and Lee Herrick, who's the California Poet Laureate. His work is wonderful. He was adopted from Korea as a 10-month-old, like abandoned. There's no knowledge of who his birth parents were and he writes about that just exquisitely. So they'll be reading on Sunday on Zoom and I host a reading like this every month on the last Sunday of the month and I also put out a newsletter once a month and the newsletter gets posted on Facebook. So if you go on my Facebook page, you'll see that the July newsletter has just been posted and you can click on it and read it and subscribe and get the newsletter and then you'll get news of like workshops I'm doing Like this summer I did the workshop in Paris and I did something in Nice.

Speaker 3:

So the workshops and readings and things like that, oh, that's great and I hope I'll have. I mean, I have a couple of new poetry manuscripts, one that's ready, although you know, nowadays you keep fussing with it, I keep fussing with it. But you know, I hope to have a new book of poems out in the next year or two, at least one, maybe more than one, which would be great. And then I'll do readings and stuff like that. I love doing live readings and performances and collaborative performances. It's just it's gotten a little bit harder to find venues and that kind of thing.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, that's so good to know. I am not exactly sure when this episode is coming out, but I love that you have that newsletter so people can find you, you know, whenever this reaches them. Yeah, if you find me on facebook, then you'll see.

Speaker 3:

You know that things get posted there. My assistant is good about making sure they're there. That's a good point of access. I have a website, but it's like everybody's website it's not kept real up to date.

Speaker 2:

It's hard. It's hard to do everything. Yeah, thank you so much for speaking with us. I'm just so so glad that we got to do this interview again and have like the perfect place for it to live, so thank you Thanks yeah.

Speaker 1:

Wonderful.

Speaker 3:

Anyway, I hope we can see each other in person one of these days before. I hope so too. Are you traveling at all or you stay put where you are?

Speaker 2:

I mostly travel nationally.

Speaker 3:

I haven't really been abroad in a minute, but yeah, if you're, whenever you're back in the States, let me know where you are okay, I'm gonna do a reading at this festival in youngstown, ohio, and then I'll be, you know, on that side of the country a bit, but not up in plans to be up in new england. But yeah, keep in touch yes, you too.

Speaker 3:

So good to see you great to see you and let me know when this is shareable and I'll share it in my newsletter and share it on Facebook. Awesome, thank you, all right Bye.

Speaker 1:

Take good care. Bye, bye. Thank you for listening to Romanistan Podcast.

Speaker 2:

You can find us on Instagram, tiktok and Facebook at Romanistan Podcast and on Twitter at Romanistan Pod, to support us. Join our Patreon for extra content or just donate to our Ko-Fi fundraiser, ko-ficom backslash Romanasan, and please rate, review and subscribe. It helps people find our show. It helps us so much.

Speaker 1:

You can follow Jez on Instagram at jasminavantila and Paulina at Romani Holistic and paulina at romani holistic. You can get our book secrets of romani fortune telling online or wherever books are sold. Visit romanistanpodcastcom for events, educational resources and more. Email us at romanistanpodcast at gmailcom for inquiries.