Please welcome Ronda to the
Scribbler.
She is an award winning author/poet
and we are happy to have her visit this week and tell us about her latest work.
Read on, my friends.
Ronda Wicks Eller was born in Toronto in 1965, raised in Woodstock and
now lives near Stratford, Ontario. She is a poet with exposure in Canadian and
International forums with six published collections, a collaborative one, and
many individual poems in newsletters, journals and anthologies online and in
print; two of which were nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. Her
works have received recognition through numerous awards. Ronda served for eight
years as National Media Coordinator for the Canadian Poetry Association, three
years as a Consul for the Canadian Poets' Guild and she was an Associate Member
with the League of Canadian Poets in 2008/9. She is currently the Mitchell and
Midwestern Region Branch Manager for The Ontario Poetry Society and their
Publication Layout Designer, while also being a Member-at-Large
on their Executive. In another capacity Ronda is a consulting Editor for the New Generation Beat Poets Canada. She owns SkyWing Press, a poetry micro-press that is
currently on hiatus due to her otherwise busy schedule. She does contract
editing and is also a novelist. Her first four novels, a
historical-mystery-family-romance fiction set in 1855 England is contained in a
single manuscript, with the working title “For
Adam’s Sake”, and is in the submission phase with publishers now.
Working Title: “Salmagundi – an omnium gatherum” by Ronda Wicks Eller
2023,
Poetry Friendly Press, Toronto, ON.
Limited 1st edition – 50 copies, $25 CAD (includes
shipping inside Canada), purchase from the author only.
Synopsis: “Salmagundi” is an East Indian word for “tossed salad”, the
large assortment of food choices that offer the diner a wide variety of
flavours, textures and aromatic bouquets on a plate intended to provide a
delightfully well-rounded feast for the senses. It is derived from the root
salmagondis, meaning “a hodgepodge or mix of widely disparate things”, while
the latin “omnium gatherum” means “great collection”.
The book “Salmagundi” is just that. It
is laid out in sections organized chronologically according to each of my
previously published books, with select poems from each, and concludes with a
section of ‘Poems New and Old’. There are 52 poems in this section that were
either 1) published singly in other media or 2) didn’t make the cut for other
books although they were no less worthy. This way the reader can follow
approximately forty years of writing development and the use of a variety of
sub-genre (rhyme schemes, free verse, minimalist, haiku, senryu, haikai, sufi/rumi
style, et al) expressing a broad palate of themes.
The Story behind the Story: Putting Salmagundi together began
with a desire to keep early publications alive— ones that have been out of
print for decades. It became the largest collection I’ve ever offered (242
pages) owing to a few factors:
1)
I felt some poems from the later books deserved more outreach
2)
poems from early books link to later poems like a chain-work
of thought building one on the other, and
3)
by incorporating poems from each book the reader gets a
better sense of what each one contains in case they want to get the full
version. For example, Hoofprints on the Moon (SkyWing Press 2019) and Ashram of
Love (River Bones Press, 2019) are available online as P.O.D. publications.
They are always available (until officially retired) but previews are more
limited for Ashram than what I’ve given in ‘Salmagundi’ and non-existent for
Hoofprints, to protect the 31 pieces of sketch art contained in it.
In
my early twenties I had a dear friend and neighbour, Marjorie, who enjoyed
listening to me read my poems—she also went as far as to drag me out to meet my
first publisher, who was in town launching one of his own books. Through this,
I fell into the arms of the C.P.A. and the greater poetic adventures that have
followed, but here’s the crux of my story: Marjorie often commented on how I
wrote so much like W.B. Yeats and I’d given little mind to it, having only a
vague remembrance of his name from high school English classes. At that time I
also worried that reading other poets might result in a sort of plagiarism so I
avoided it (I have since realized that my own voice comes through regardless).
After Marjorie died, in reflecting over her contributions to my life, I finally
decided to read some Yeats and my prolific juices began to flood torrentially.
She was right about her comparison—I not only used the same imagery and
symbolism but I understood his particular use of those devices instinctively.
“Salmagundi” includes poems from ‘Whale Songs in the Aurora Borealis’ and “the
Lion and the Golden Calf’ with definitive Yeatsian context.
Fast
forward to 2012 and an evening when I’m re-watching a DVD of “The Favorite
Game” (based on Leonard Cohen’s 1963 novel). I’d been taking comfort in his
music after a recent break-up but I’d given little attention to the poetry I
knew he wrote. I felt the urge to read about him online and learned that Yeats
was a favourite of his too… and then I began reading his poems and song lyrics.
I felt a soul connection to him, perhaps he was destined to become another muse
for me (?), as my foci easily merged with his. Then, on his birthday in 2015,
not knowing the day it was for him, a poem seemed to write itself (no revision
required). It is in “Salmagundi” under the title ‘Sweet Refrain’: Let me be your sweet refrain/ the one
that brings you back again./ Let me be the song you sing/ that fills the void
in everything/ you left unsung and left unheard/ because you couldn’t find the
words./ Let me be your sweet refrain. It became the theme for my book
“Hoofprints on the Moon”, also contained in part in “Salmagundi”. It is
predominantly Cohenesque in flavour.
Yeats
and Cohen reflect through so much of “Salmagundi” it might be difficult to
untangle them even from the earliest works like in the “My Harmonic Perfection”
section, my earliest chapbook reprinted in its entirety—poems from before I
felt any kinship of a kind to either of them.
On
the whole, “Salmagundi” really offers my readers a potpourri through which they
can savour and meet with me where I’ve been at in each stage of life and its
creative expression so far. I invite them to claim their own translation for
the lines within as they relate from their own perspectives!
Website: https://rwicksellercwg.wixsite.com/home/books
A
question before you go Ronda:
Can you tell us about the perfect setting you have, or desire,
for your writing? Music or quiet? Coffee or tequila? Neat or notes everywhere?
Ha! My notes are scattered everywhere from actual pieces of paper and
notepads to napkins and paper towels, the inside covers of Sudoku and Crossword
Puzzle books, the back of store receipts et al… on whatever I have handy when a
catchy line or thought crosses my busy little brain. Most often, if I’m
drinking a beverage, it’s coffee or cola and, for music, it’s classical, celtic
or other type of elevator music that uplifts the writing flow… except Cohen.
When I want to write Cohen he’s usually singing to me in the background. I
rarely write in silence. I can’t really say there’s a perfect setting for me
because I’m either in a prolific phase where my words spill out anywhere and
everywhere or I’ve hit a writer’s block and nothing moves. That said, I often
envision myself living in a small cottage in the woods with a little creek or
river close by and a small community not too far away. This is a place where I
could access the internet at will or sit by the creek to write or sketch.
Thank you for being our guest this
week, Ronda. Wishing you continued success with your writing.
Abd a special thank you to our visitors
and readers.
Fascinated to learn about her background and approach to writing. Thanks.
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