MIA CUPPA FRESNO TV

In focusing on the feminine, Dixie did what I both want to do and want to see more of in Fresno writing.

MIA CUPPA FRESNO TV

Her persona poem, “In the Kitchen with the TV Mothers,” features the imagined experiences of Harriet Nelson, June Cleaver, and Donna Reed, famous TV wives who, in this poem, are tired of their married lives. I seem to sense in some of her poems genuine feminine play of soft over hard.” His introduction went on in admiration for his friend and fellow writer - in a way, it felt like an extended blurb for an upcoming work.Īs I listened to Dixie’s work, I could feel the sense of “feminine play” at work she dedicated poems to her daughter, friends, and referenced women in history throughout. But both served as examples of that intersection of the emotional and the physical.Īt the Fresno Art Museum reading I transcribed, Moulton introduced Dixie at one point he noted: “Whatever she brings into poems seems so real. This collection was released in 2013, more than a decade after the work she read in the video I worked on. I just recently re-read the collection she read from at the time, “Altar for Escaped Voices.” This collection served as a way for Dixie to mourn/grieve for various people and periods of her life, both symbolic and explicit personal history built around the image of the altar. I was struck by her calm demeanor and could feel the audience around me responding in the same way. She read these poems and spoke of Jon with such calm admiration, sounding nearly at peace, that I remember made me tear up despite lacking any real context for her life and the people she mentioned at that point in time. She talked about her late husband, Jon Veinberg, and read what I now recognize was a poem memorializing another late poet, C. Working on transcribing this video gave me an opportunity to do that - I was also able to spend more time with Dixie Salazar’s work, which I was somewhat familiar with already.Ī few years ago, I attended a LitHop reading at Mia Cuppa Cafe that included Dixie in its reader lineup. I wanted to focus my energy on these Fresno women writers - Williams, Janzen, Spear, Salazar - and whoever else I could find among the ranks of more easily recognizable men. It was difficult for me in that moment to even name a few female writers in the same vein and admittedly, this hurt. We rattled off names - Levine, Levis, Trejo, Montoya - the usual suspects (that I’d nonetheless grown to love). As I was reading work by Fresno writers in the How Much Earth anthology, I texted my friend: all the fresno writers are men.

Mia cuppa fresno