


Passager editors discuss the pieces that left lasting impressions, featuring Virginia B. Anderson, Richard Frank Gillum and Kathy O’Fallon.
8 minutes
TRANSCRIPT
I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I’d just had a birthday. What I forgot to say was that Passager’s three editors had birthdays within a couple weeks of each other in December. So it seems only fair that we celebrate their birthdays, too. I asked them to tell me a piece that’s stuck with them from Passager’s archive.
Mary Azrael said that Virginia B. Anderson’s poem “Adventures of an Old Woman” from Passager’s 2007 Poetry Contest issue “. . . is funny and smart and makes me laugh every time I read it.” She said, “I love the attitude and the wild freedom of Virginia Anderson’s imagination.”
He was in the alley
walking past me
as I entered my yard.
“Hello, Granny,” he said.
He did not stop walking,
did not turn to smile.
“Hello,” I said.
He continued walking,
had no more good times to offer.
He was a showoff. So I put a spell on him
which was a bit of showing off on my part.
I wasn’t sure it was going to work
until his feet faded. He hung in the air.
He didn’t cry out in pain, didn’t seem
to be uncomfortable. “Do you read fairy tales?”
I asked. He made no sound but shook his head.
Possibly he didn’t feel like speaking to me anymore.
I could only see the part of him that was turned away.
“Read them,” I said. “Fairy tales in all languages
teach you to be careful about meeting old women
on the road.” He did not respond.
“You never know what’s inside an old woman,”
I said. “We have all those years, you know,
to develop new skills.”
He wiggled a bit but without his feet,
he really couldn’t go free. I wondered
if the word granny was some kind of lump
he’d had to swallow. But I was tired of him.
I don’t much like to use spells.
They are old fashioned.
I gave him his feet and he was gone.
Virginia B. Anderson’s poem “Adventures of an Old Woman” from Passager Issue 44.
Rosanne Singer recommended Richard Frank Gillum’s memoir “Graveyard to Schoolyard” from Passager’s Winter 2024 issue. She said, “It’s an understated depiction of growing up in pre-Civil Rights era Kansas City, a reminder of the daily insults, hurts, and threats and the contrast with the growing up his daughter had in Silver Spring, Maryland where she went to good schools and ‘was spared racial abuse and bullying.’” Rosanne said, “What resonates is that this history is so recent and so many people are still alive who were shaped by that era.”
“Graveyard to Schoolyard.” Here’s an excerpt.
My mother, then in her forties and I about eight or ten, often took a shortcut to the bus line through Mount Calvary Catholic Cemetery.
Occasionally we returned after dark and took that walk by moonlight. The widely spaced trees cast eerie shadows on the grave markers. My mother, a tall, olive-skinned woman in sensible shoes strode purposefully past the graves at the same pace as in daylight. I hurried my steps to stay at her side.
It must have been the year following the Brown vs (Topeka, Kansas) Board of Education Supreme Court decision. The ugly school desegregation battles in Little Rock and other cities lay in the future. My mother was not an activist or organizer. Just a parent who decided to challenge the white folks in charge of public schools by enrolling me in the sixth grade at that all-white school near our house instead of continuing to allow me to be bussed to an all black school on N. 9th Street in the black area of the city near downtown. I don’t recall hearing my parents discuss it before my mother told me I would be in a new school that fall. I didn’t dare object or ask why I had to change. I could tell her mind was made up.
Now I wonder what the reaction of the staff in the school office was when my mother walked in to enroll me. Did they make her wait a long time? Try to discourage her? She never told me. Somehow the school system allowed my transfer. Oddly, I do not remember the new school’s name or exact location. Several other black families with children lived on our street, but my mother was the only parent who dared to do this.
From Passager Issue 76, an excerpt from Richard Frank Gillum’s memoir “Graveyard to Schoolyard.”
Kendra Kopelke said Kathy O’Fallon’s poem “Listening for Tchaikovsky” from Passager’s 2024 Poetry Contest Issue resonated with her. She said, “I was swept up and into this poem with the musician-father, his trumpet coming alive in the poem, the daughter’s awareness of contrast between who he was to others and who he was to her, her tone playing underneath the jazz music. And then the mother’s violin, the mother as violin, depicted so perfectly, her right elbow ‘like a wing, ready for take-off.’ It takes me inside childhood itself, and family, the complex music it makes.”
Here’s “Listening for Tchaikovsky.” It begins with the epigraph “Violin Concerto Op. 35, Romeo and Juliet.”
Sometimes, when his band would get a gig, my dad would be gone
for hours – a wedding or dance if he was lucky – his lips wet
with the spit of the trumpet’s mouthpiece (and who knows what else),
valves oiled, and slides, greased pistons, pipes. And with his instrument
all polished and shiny, the smooth sounds of Belafonte and the jazz of Louis.
My dad, dimple-chinned, long and lean – Cary Grant, some thought – man,
he could really blow a horn,
but home was where I lived, greedy for evenings without the slingshot
of his tempers, where I could rest my head to the click of Mom’s violin
case opening, the clack of the music stand unfolding, the oily smell
of resin-stroked bow hairs, knowing what she loved was tucked under
her chin, right elbow cocked like a wing, ready for take-off,
and the sound of Heifetz leading his flock to Romeo and Juliet,
where music flew to the cage of my dreams, safe as unsafe could be.
From the newest issue of Passager, the 2024 Poetry Contest issue, Kathy O’Fallon’s “Listening For Tchaikovsky.”
Together, Mary, Rosanne, and Kendra are about 225 years old. And together, they’ve been editing Passager for over 80 years.
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For Kendra, Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of Passager’s constantly aging staff, I’m Jon Shorr.