Dr. Irene Blea is a nonfiction author, novelist and poet, as well as a retired university professor and civil rights activist. Her newest book release is Dragonfly (March 2024), a collection of poems spanning 50 years of her life in which she “shares her transformation from the prescription of traditional female roles riddled by confusion and conflict to one of peace, understanding, and redefinition.” Look for Irene on Facebook. You’ll find many of her books on her Amazon author page, but Dragonfly is available here. Read more about Irene’s work in SWW’s 2015 and 2017 interviews.
What are you trying to communicate to readers through Dragonfly?
Humans need beauty in their world. It is a healing element. Each year I wait for a golden dragonfly to visit my yard. It stays for hours in the same place, and we commune with one another. I thank it for sharing its beauty. It makes me feel connected. If it does not appear, I miss it and wait for it the following year. The cover is indicative of my need for beauty and connection. As humans, we sometimes need to heal from something that has no name or something to which we have paid little attention. Because I have experienced this, I offer my understanding as a spiritual guide via poems of transformation and healing.
Is there one piece in the collection that gets to the heart of the whole?
It is difficult to select one, but I feel it is hija de la tierra because it speaks to healing from racism, class discrimination, and sexism. I often switch between two languages because this is the way I think and feel things. It is how I navigate in two worlds.
♦◊♦◊♦hija de la tierra
♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦your ancestors were goddesses and kings
♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦who ruled across lifespans
♦◊♦◊♦your ancestors have been diminished
♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦to barrio dogs and cats
♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦dogs and cats who roam the alleys of society
♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦dogs and cats who teach us how to live
♦◊♦◊♦hija de la tierra
♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦you were born to reign above the mountains
♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦♦◊♦◊♦you should be born to live in peace
While going through your fifty years of poems, did you discover something about yourself or your poetry? Has your writing style changed over the years?
To my surprise, I discovered I was at the forefront of Chicano and Chicana poetry in the late 1960s and 70s. I had not realized this because I was busy researching, teaching, developing university courses, and writing textbooks because there were none in the beginning of the sociology of Chicano Studies. My feminism is consistent. The book is a composition of three chapbooks, and I inform the reader about how my style changed because of my education and some of it remained the same because of my politics.
What challenges did this work pose for you?
This work was not very challenging because I had read my poems to audiences for years, and I already had the work in print in the form of chapbooks. I dictated the work from the chapbooks to my computer, revised them a bit, and sent it to a couple of outside readers who made the work better.
How did the book come together?
I started the process on New Years Day of this year. The inspiration is the first sentence of the introduction to the book: “On January 1st, 2024, I opened my eyes and asked into the crispness of my bedroom if I would die that year. I have been obsessed with my death for decades… The room responded with, ‘I don’t know.’ I decided to rise and make some coffee….” While the coffee was brewing, I decided I did not want to die without letting readers know I had written poetry. My poems had been published in several places, but I did not have an entire book of poetry printed and distributed. It took a few months. As mentioned above, it was rather simple to put the book together since I had so much poetry categorized in the chapbooks.
The Dragonfly book cover is beautiful. Tell us about the process of working with the artist.
The publication is a composite of three talented females: me the author, Rose Kern the publisher, and my daughter, Raven, the cover artist who does not use her last name. We worked well together. Rose and Raven know their craft well and all I had to do was trust their feedback. I knew I wanted a “pretty” cover and Raven presented me with three options. Raven did the cover of my autobiography, Erené with Wolf Medicine, and I loved it. This made it easy to work with her.
How and why did you chose the title of the book?
The title is generally the most difficult part for me. It was late spring, and the publisher needed a title. Since I was waiting for the golden dragonfly to appear, Dragonfly seemed to fit.
Of all the books you’ve written, which one was the most challenging and which one was the easiest (or most enjoyable) to write?
Dragonfly was the easiest one to take from concept to publication and distribution. The most difficult book to write was my autobiography, Erené with Wolf Medicine. I wrote about leaving the Catholic Church, getting divorced, contemplating an abortion, domestic violence, and suicide. Each time I wrote about them, reviewed and edited them, I re-experienced the emotions. At the same time, in the end, it was cathartic, and I released a lot of sensations and found it healing. But it was difficult to take it from concept to publication, then release it for distribution.
What poets do you continually go back to?
I return to the classic Spanish writers because Spanish is such a beautiful poetic language. Sometimes the mystical, magical, tone of a poem is difficult to translate into English. Fedrico Garcia Lorca, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Pablo Neruda are among my favorites.
Do you have a preference for poetry structure or form when you write or read?
I write poetry by inspiration. Something needs to affect me profoundly. I am not trained in poetry, so structure and form are only important to the degree that I want to render emotion or message. Most of my structure and form is in breaking mainstream rules. It comes from reading and writing Chicano, Native American, and Afro American resistance poetry by other writers, which I began to do at the height of the Chicano movement.
Do you remember what inspired you to write your first poem?
As a child, I shared a bedroom with my younger sister, who was very ill and could not sleep. To comfort her, I recited poems. But I did not write anything down. Sometimes in the darkness of our bedroom, she would request a story that rhymed. They were generally about an animal, child clown, or a pretty lady.
How does a poem begin for you, with an idea, a form, an image?
A poem begins for me with an emotional reaction. They are like prayers.
What do most well-written poems have in common?
They must be written within the economy of language and render an emotional tone. I seek images and feelings, or that the scene is fully rendered. Well-written poems for me are not terribly long, epic, although my poems have become longer recently, and I cannot explain that. Except to say that the issues I have been writing about have to do with the environmental factors that ravage the environment and how Mother Earth struggles to respond to those ravages.
Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?
Healing must take place holistically at the physical, emotional and spiritual level. Pills, ointments, and massage can do some of that but there are other forms of medicine. Acupuncture, the sun, dragonflies, the presence of certain people, and animals can bring healing. These are healing elements, medicine, which address the physical, emotional, and spiritual components of health.
KL Wagoner (writing as Cate Macabe) is the author of This New Mountain: a memoir of AJ Jackson, private investigator, repossessor, and grandmother. Kat has a speculative fiction blog at klwagoner.com and writes about memoir at ThisNewMountain.com.
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