What, Why, How: Karrie Waarala

What?

Poems, mostly, and mostly persona poems told from the point of view of characters in and around a circus sideshow. The book version of those poems, which centers on a sword swallower and a tattooed lady and is tentatively titled Pierce & Brand’s World of Dangerous Wonders, is currently looking for a home, though it did come close this past year as a book prize finalist. The performance version, LONG GONE: A Poetry Sideshow, is a one-woman show that focuses on telling the tattooed lady’s story through an assortment of poems, monologues, and multimedia. I most recently performed it as part of the 2015 Renegade Theatre Festival in Lansing, Michigan.

There’s another poetry manuscript that I keep pulling apart and putting back together, this one held together thematically through a series of instructional poems. And lately I’ve had the prose itch and have been starting to dabble in essays and short stories.

Really, though, lately I’ve mostly been focused on others’ writing instead of my own: the poems that get submitted to the museum of americana, or the essays and stories of the community college students I teach, or the books I’m ordering for the public library where I work.

Why?

I’m fascinated by so many things about the circus and particularly the sideshow — the archetypes, the embracing of “other,” the idea of a self-contained environment that stays static as the world revolves around it and each day the scenery changes. But mostly it is the language — the circus has a language all its own, a rich vernacular full of the most delicious phrases. Often a newly discovered bit of circus or carny lingo would send me off after a poem to fit it.Possum belly queen, turn the tip, hey rube!, ballyhoo… how could I not have wanted to find a way to work those into poems?

How?

Inconsistently. I write in fits and starts, going through nerve-wracking spells between projects when I’m hardly writing at all, but ideas are percolating around my brain. (One of my MFA mentors once told me that I’m the kind of writer who is writing even when I’m just staring out the window. Remembering that keeps me sane sometimes.) When I am in the throes of a project like the circus poems, I’m all over the place: sometimes a poem starts at the keyboard with a prompt, sometimes it starts by freewriting from a character’s point of view in a notebook over lunch, sometimes a monologue for the show starts by just talking to myself in the car.

The prose seems to be more grounded in the day-to-day of my own life, even if the end result is fantastical. I start with a moment or a memory or a story someone has shared with me and ask, “What if…?” and see where the what-ifs take me. “What if I got brave enough to try a pin-up makeover and photo shoot?” led to an essay about body image, photography, and working free of the fallout of an abusive relationship. Being haunted by the many what-ifs around a serious motorcycle accident my partner survived years ago before we met led me to a short story about a motorcycle racer who loses everything in a crash and finds himself in a purgatory of recurring dreams and wasted days in the aftermath. And just this week I picked up an odd little doctor’s journal from 1919 in a used book store that is only partially filled with barely legible notes from the early 20th century. It looks like first someone used it as a ledger for the front room they rented out in their house, and later it contains some scraps about a trip that a couple named Jack and Gladys took. I found myself wanting to know more about Jack and Gladys, so I bought the journal and plan on deciphering the spidery handwriting in it to set me off on the next “what if…?”

Bio:

Links: