WELCOME TO MY BARBIE WORLD
by J.C. Sutton
I doubt that I could be a bit more famous!
Designers wowed by bathing suit all strapless!
I inspired outfits, accessories, and bling!
More millions of me sold than Burger King!
Catch a trailer, won’t you? for my movie?
Very cool and oh so very groovy!
I tower over baby dolls while I enthrall
their mommies! To my worship called
by breasts and legs and pretty, pouty lips
by teeny heels and oh-so-swivel hips.
Genital free, though. Of course Ken is too.
What oh what can all those mommies do?
Don’t ask me. Like Oz’s lion,
I am heartless. Keep on buyin’…
What calls you to the literary arts
Being alive pretty much sums it up.
What are your muses?
I've yet to run across a better description than this one, by David Wagoner (lots of google on ohio-born poet & novelist)] Saw it posted in the window of an independent Miami bookstore in the mid-90's. Wrote it down right then. Still so now...
MUSE
Cackling, smelling of camphor, crumbs of pink icing
clinging to her lips, her lipstick smeared
halfway around her neck, her cracked teeth bristling
with bloody splinters, she leans over my shoulder.
Oh my only hope, my lost dumbfounding baggage,
my gristle-breasted, slack-jawed zealot, kiss me again.
Much of your work draws on historical narrative. What works for you about this medium?
The poems aren't subject to history - or anything else. When the muse kisses I just get it on paper (yellow legal pad every other line first best choice) as best I can before I put it on the computer screen and work on it from there.
With prose and poetry alike, whatever it is takes at least! 3 go-rounds before it - and I - am anything like ready to let go and launch.
Yes, the two novels I've published (barely pre-pandemic and last year) are drawn on historical narratives.
Actual memoirs (dreadful writing, fascinating inside tidbits to fact-check) inspired the French Revolutionary era's Until the Guillotine: A Tale of Two Royals.
Actual life-as-lived-and-observed inspired Beau & Eros, one woman's coming-of-aging tale, from the Fifties to a fiftieth college reunion.
You have a new book out. Tell us a little about “Until the Guillotine: A Tale of Two Royals”
See above. Better still, visit my self-publisher website www.WordsworthPublicatons.com It’s all there – and there’s even a blog coming soon!
Over breakfast at a writing conference, you casually mentioned having met Jim Morrison of The Doors before he was famous. Can you tell our readers a little bit more about this chance encounter?
It happened before he became a Door. I had to add "Claim to Fame" to original title, "The Night I Met Jim Morrison", when one too many listeners asked if I wrote it and/or did it really happen? It's too long for here, but am happy to share if you message me through the website 'contact' page.
As a working editor and former book seller, what advice do you have for polishing work for publication and moving it onto the market?
Never underestimate the need for an editorial eye that's not in the head of a friend or relation. Ask any writer worth the read and they will tell you nothing emerges just the way they wanted the first time through. That's what drafts are for. And editing. And rewriting. By self and other/s.
The move onto the market is a different breed of cat entirely, although it starts with a finished, edited, polished poem, essay, short story, full-length manuscript, etc.
The stigma attaching to self-publishing has, thankfully, diminished. (Quick plug here: the Little Egg Harbor branch of Ocean County Library will be doing a self-publishing panel - probably next year, date not firm. Your blogger will be a panelist as will this interviewee.)
As for agented, with the funneling of what was once an array of publishers to next to none, going the traditional agent query route hasn't gotten any easier.
Direct queries to smaller, more independent publishers are worth pursuing - especially for poetry. Any approach has to be based on thorough research into your choices, what they're known for, and, crucially, what they ask of you and your work.
Where can we read more of your writing/buy your books?
Website is the place to buy "direct from publisher" – including the e-book. And “big A” can’t send signed first editions.
My poetry's been included in something like a dozen anthologies published by Philadelphia's Moonstone Press.
A recent essay appears in dorothyparkersashes.com, an online literary magazine. (Forewarned: it appears in the "libido" themed issue). A favorite essay appears in Peter Murphy’s More Challenges For the Delusional (Diode editions, 2018).
I do a lot of spoken word, but night-drive limitations keep me closer to Tuckerton, NJ than I'd like. (Have such fond memories of the open mics at Marlton Barnes & Noble where I worked pre-retirement - shoutout to Anna and Bruce and all those great voices!)
Contact: J.C. Sutton (she/her) 609-857-5345 suttonjc.writer@gmail.com
www.WordsWorthPublications.com
J.C. Sutton is a working editor, published poet, and award-winning novelist whose writing life has embraced arts reviewing, magazine work, copy and ghostwriting, and a freelance business. She is also an ecology volunteer, active in community theater, poetry and book groups.
John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he works as a licensed clinical social worker and adjunct professor. He has been featured on Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM and several of his poems were chosen to be exhibited in Princeton University's 2021 Unique Minds: Creative Voices art show at the Lewis Center for the Arts. He has been nominated 3x for a Pushcart Prize and serves as the Local Lyrics contributor for The Mad Poets Society Blog. His debut chapbook Roadside Oddities: A Poetic Guide to American Oddities was released in early 2022 and can be purchased at www.johnwojtowicz.com. John lives with his wife and two children in Upper Deerfield, NJ.