You’re a Baltimore Police Academy instructor as well as a published poet. Which came first: police work or poetry?
I’ve always loved writing and reading, and I’ve always been fascinated by service. I started poetry in college, and in retrospect I wish I’d been an English major, but I became a history major because my plan was to become a military officer. I was in the Reserve Officers Training Corps at George Washington University, but I got injured, so when I graduated I looked toward education.

So you were a teacher before you joined the police force?
My first two years were in Baltimore City Public Schools, right out of college. I’d never been to a public school in my life. It was very much a fish-out-of-water situation. I had never seen an inner city. I had never seen a housing development. I had never seen that type of violence. It was nonstop culture shock, but it was very educational.

What kinds of situations did you face as a teacher that surprised you?
I would talk to the kids about what it was like to be in college, and I remember one student saying to me, “Did you have to fight a lot of people?” I said I didn’t fight with the people in college—I just went to class. There’s this moment of him staring at me like, “Why don’t you understand what I’m talking about?” and me saying, “Why would you ask that?” But, of course, I had to understand that a big part of his existence was establishing yourself through violence.

How did you transition into police work?
In 2011, I was in Johns Hopkins’ Master of Liberal Arts program and working for the university’s Success For All Foundation. One day I sat down to do my work, and my officemate said, “Hey, a plane hit the World Trade Center.” The second plane hit, and I thought, “Okay, I think this is my time to do something different.” 9/11 really got me focused. Four years later, I finished my master’s, I got my black belt, and I was in the first class of 2005 at the police academy. Now, I train officers. I teach classes on implicit bias, police legitimacy, hate crimes, white supremacist extremists, and sovereign citizens. I teach recruits about policing in Baltimore and the history of the city—good and bad.

How does your line of work influence your poetry?
Police work has worked its way into my writing quite a bit. I look for the poetry in the things that I see around me; there’s great raw material that just lays out in front of you. Milan Kundera, who wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being, said that every culture has its kitsch and its shit. You can see both in doing police work. It’s like, here’s the human condition: What do you make of it?

How would you describe your three poetry collections?
The first two [Masala Tea and Oranges and On the Later Addition of Sancho Panza] are pretty free-flowing. My best friend read my work, and he said, “Your work tends to be about myth, violence, and sensuality.” And those two books flow through those three big themes. The third one is named Socorro Prophesy after a place in New Mexico that I found particularly fascinating, and it’s about myth, legend, and the culture of mythic storytelling.

Does being a poet make it difficult to relate to other police officers?
Police work includes such a diverse group of people. I’ve definitely had situations in which I didn’t relate well. I worked in one unit where there was a set idea amongst some officers that there are these cultural shibboleths that you must have to be an officer—or a male officer, or a black male officer—and if you don’t put those things forth then you can’t be included in the tribe. Whereas I’ve met other cops that read a lot. Once you scratch the surface, it’s amazing the backgrounds you find here. I’ve met artists and photographers, other writers, rappers. It’s a neat learning environment because it is so diverse.

What on-the-job moments have stood out as visual or auditory poetry?
I was walking up to the library at Penn North and there was a woman sitting there. I leaned down and said, “Are you okay?” She spoke to me in that muted tone of a hearing-impaired person, and she used sign language to say, “Yes, I’m fine. I’m waiting, thank you very much.” As we were talking, a trans woman walked up and started talking to us. Then, this young man with a sketch pad—it’s almost as if someone ordered this very diverse group of people from central casting—walked up and said, “Hold still, I’m sketching all of y’all.” And I thought, I want these people, all these people who are so diverse and so flawed and beautiful, to feel like they’re safe.

We encounter the protagonist, Willa, as a child, a college student, married with kids, and then a senior citizen. Could you have written this book when you were in your 30s?
No, come to think of it, I don’t suppose I could have. There are some advantages to getting old! Well, a lot, actually. For instance, in her 60s, Willa’s attitude toward her mother is much kinder than it was in her youth. A certain sense of acceptance creeps in with age, and I wouldn’t have known that if I’d tried to write about a 61-year-old when I was a young woman.

Did you start with the idea of breaking the novel into these pivotal moments of her life, or did the characters come first and reveal this format?
Initially I thought the book would begin when Denise gets shot and would refer just in retrospect to those pivotal moments. Which shows you how a story can take over the reins from the writer: it had its own ideas. Then I decided to present those moments as widely separated episodes, leaping across great spans of time, because as a reader, I always feel a sense of relief when the author trusts me to imagine the intervening years for myself.

Why was it important to include gun violence in Clock Dance’s Baltimore?
Shortly before I started writing Clock Dance, I read in The Baltimore Sun about yet another random shooting victim—this one a toddler who was just sitting in her father’s lap on their front porch. The police did ask around, but nothing came of their inquiries, and eventually the whole subject disappeared from the news. I was struck by how we all moved on from it—not that we didn’t care, but that we’d grown accustomed to such things, in the same way that we’re no longer shocked by school shootings. Once you give that any thought, it seems almost surreal.

The saguaros seem symbolic of a woman’s natural versus domesticated nature. Why did you choose this recurring image?
I had never seen a saguaro till I made a trip to Arizona in my 50s. I was struck by them in the same way Willa was; I didn’t know why, but they gave me a kind of physical ache. Even now I can’t put into words why Willa has that reaction, but I think it has something to do with their power and their reserve and their dignity—qualities that Willa, so conventional and so compliant, would instinctively long for.

A lot of people talk about writing a novel but never do, much less more than 20 of them. How do you stay disciplined to continue writing books?
It would take more discipline not to write a book. I don’t seem to feel that my life is properly filled unless I’m living some other, imaginary life at the same time. Not that it isn’t a chore, often, to plod through the practicalities—getting my characters from room to room and remembering that they have to eat lunch. But their conversations, the moments when they start talking to each other and I feel like merely their scribe: I love that part.

Are you working on, or planning for, another?
Yes, I’m in the early stages of another.

Is there a particular place you go to write?
I have an upstairs writing room at the front of my house, overlooking the street, and I sit at a desk in front of a window where I can be in touch with ordinary life. I like to hear people talking while I work, and I especially like to hear children playing. There is a scarcity of children on my street, but I’m always hopeful.

What writers are you reading these days who inspire you?
I was bowled over by Rachel Kushner’s new novel, The Mars Room. Its subject—women in prison—is hard reading, but every word of it was brilliant. And I loved Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place for Us, a novel about a family from India living in the U.S. Families and immigration: two of my favorite topics.

Ayurveda Beginner’s Guide

Susan Weis-Bohlen (Althea Press)

This debut book from Susan Weis-Bohlen—former owner of Breathe Books in Hampden and now an Ayurvedic practitioner and meditation instructor—serves as a primer on Ayurveda, an ancient, holistic system of medicine, as well as an abbreviated cookbook to complement the lifestyle. She lays down a strong foundation before delving into the more creative and playful aspects of daily rituals—crafting meals, yoga sequences, breathing exercises—based on your dosha (don’t worry, you’ll have a firm handle on what a dosha is—and what your dosha is—after reading this). Though Ayurveda is 5,000 years old, Weis-Bohlen also addresses modern health and dietary concerns, like environmental toxins. Through the lens of this ancient science, she covers everything from the importance of scraping your tongue in the morning to the importance of Ayurvedic-style sex. The warmth and serenity of Weis-Bohlen comes through on the pages. At times, reading it feels like a meditation in and of itself, especially if paired with a hot cup of spiced milk.

Chance Particulars

Sara Mansfield Taber (Johns Hopkins University Press)

Sara Mansfield Taber’s latest is part workbook and part how-to, and though it bills itself as an instructional guide that’s suited primarily for writers and artists, anyone wanting to more deeply understand his or her world will find its ideas useful. In fact, the book’s subtitle is fairly inclusive: A Writer’s Field Notebook for Travelers, Bloggers, Essayists, Memoirists, Novelists, Journalists, Adventurers, Naturalists, Sketchers, and Other Note-Takers and Recorders of Life. The phrase “chance particulars” is borrowed from Thomas Mallon, who says that writers should include any peculiar observations in their work. Taber, who has taught writing at Johns Hopkins University and the Bethesda Writer’s Center, builds on that idea and breaks down the methods for doing so, like talking with people, keeping records of such seemingly mundane things as gas prices and grocery lists, and using descriptions that evoke all five senses. She writes about the practicality (and joy) of keeping a commonplace book wherein you jot down any musings, snippets, or other useful information you come across. As the saying goes: God is in the details.

You’re best known for your trilogy of books about the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, which is really different subject matter from this book. How did you come up with the idea?

Well, there actually is a connection. The first glimmer of an idea for Behind the Moon came from this Judith Thurman article in The New Yorker about the Chauvet caves. There’s some anthropologists that have a theory that cave paintings were part of prehistoric religious practice, the original shamanism. Some of the details reminded me of my experiences in the context of Haitian Vodou. I tend to fall back on that kind of stuff in Behind the Moon.

How did the idea evolve from there?

My previous novel The Color of Night had been rejected by my usual New York publisher, which perplexed me because I thought it was one of my best. About nine months went by where I didn’t know what was going to happen with that book, and then my New York editor changed his mind about it and published it anyway, which was nice. But during that gap, I was in the situation where I needed to write something, but I didn’t need to write to please anybody, so I thought I’d do something different, I’d do something strange and hopefully have a good time doing it. 

I rely a lot on unconscious processes and with this project maybe more so than most. Particularly the first movement had this thing going on where I found myself repeatedly fracturing the story line so episodes repeat with minor variations. Then the Marisa character appeared and she has a more conventional story line, and the parts with her in them are more realistic. Once she was in there, it hardened into an area of South Dakota. The upside of all of this, which I’ve really just started to understand from hearing people react to it, is there’s a non-linear process going on that’s in contention with the more linear story line. But that all happened kind of by accident. I didn’t do much planning for this one. 

I really appreciated the overall mood of the book.
One of the things I realized during the overall publication period—I was not conscious of this goal at the time—is not to describe the shamanic journey to readers but to have them actually experience that. So all the vagaries in the writing were toward that end. It’s a pleasant way to write. If you can write without thinking about what you’re doing too much, that’s the best way. 

I read an article in The New Yorker in which you talked said you put yourself in a trance to write. Is that still part of your method?
I honestly think that every writer does it, we just don’t necessarily think that’s what we’re doing. My wife and I were living in London in the early 1980s, and I went to a therapeutic hypnotist for some trivial cause. It was a really interesting experience. One part of me was saying, “Hey, this is cool, I could probably use this for teaching,” and the other part of me was experiencing it and thinking, “Wow, I didn’t know this was possible.” 

I thought it over afterward and I realized that writers try to get into a flow state where you’re writing easily, you’re not conscious of your material tools or craft knowledge, it just happens. It gets deployed automatically in the same way that musicians and athletes deploy their training automatically, and I think the mechanism for getting there is a kind of self-hypnosis through all the writerly rituals you hear about—the sharpening of pencils, writing in a certain place. Those basically are elements of the self-hypnotic induction.

Did you use that method when you were writing Behind the Moon?
It wasn’t so much that I thought, “Oh, I’m now going to do this.” I just realized I had always done it. I was a naturally committed daydreamer from the time I was a small child. Before I had this experience with hypnosis, I was trying to say to students, “I’m going to teach you craft, but the most important thing that can be taught is to enter the world you are writing about with your entire imagination. Once you can do that, describe what you’re experiencing and the whole thing becomes a lot easier.” 

You and your wife, poet Elizabeth Spires, have taught at Goucher College since 1984. How do you balance your own writing with your teaching?
The program has grown so much in the last few years. When my wife and I started it in the 1980s, there were a couple of courses and now we have this whole four-year program with about 60 students in it. A side effect of that is, though I used to teach everybody, now I get them typically in their third year so they’re all worked out and very committed and have some pretty good skill sets, so it’s really a luxurious teaching experience. 

For most of my teaching career, I’ve been able to say, “I’m going to write for two or three hours every morning and do whatever else I have to do after that.” I teach half time, since my wife and I split a single position at Goucher, so it’s not too arduous and probably more important than any of that, I am not one of those writers who feel drained by teaching. I’m actually able to take energy out of it and use it for my own projects. That’s a piece of good luck there. 

How has the Baltimore literary scene changed since you’ve started the program?
Having spent 25 years running around to readings and stuff like that, I don’t do too much of that any more. I’m an admirer of what Gregg Wilhelm and Jen Michalski do in terms of running reading series. And then the academic writing program at Johns Hopkins University—I think we can give them a run for their money at the undergraduate level, but at the graduate level, we’re not really doing what they do.

What can we expect to see next from you?
I have a novel that’s in submission right now, and then I have two contracts. One to do a biography of the late novelist Robert Stone. And then he actually owed a book to a publisher when he died, and they needed someone to curate that whole process, so I’m doing that on a second contract. I’m pretty busy. The unfortunate thing about that is I can’t really permit myself to write fiction until I’ve finished these project and I’m starting to get a little itchy about that. I’m on sabbatical this coming year and I hope to wrap both of them up in that amount of time.

When you start writing fiction again, do you already have ideas that you want to pursue, or do those come out once you start writing?
I do have a couple of projects that I had started before the Robert Stone stuff happened. One of them I might not go back to and one of them I probably will. 

Can you tell what it’s about?
A school shooting. It’s got the Columbine element in it. I created this imaginary place, a private school in this pocket between affluent neighborhoods that’s in the Rust Belt sector. The linchpin figure in this is a janitor who lives within the premises of the school who can go out the back gate to get to this other neighborhood, so he’s a person between two worlds. 

You could say that about Behind the Moon, too. The character Julie is literally caught between two worlds.
Yeah, I thought about calling it Girlfriend In a Coma, but that title was already taken.

Jen Michalski has been a force in the Baltimore writing scene for years, providing support and community for writers by hosting a well-known reading series. She joined us to talk about her new novel, The Summer She Was Under Water.

This is such an interesting book in that it seems relatively simple on the surface, but then dives into extreme emotional depths. How did you come up with the idea?
It wasn’t the book I started out to write. It was probably in 2006 that I started writing it, and initially it was about a family vacation by the lake and initially, [the main character] Sam and her friend Eve were going to get together. But it just felt like a really standard coming out novel, and I didn’t feel anything good or bad about it. So I put it aside and thought, ‘Maybe this isn’t the novel I want to write, maybe it’s just one of those aborted novels.’

In between, I wrote some short stories, had some other ideas, and wrote a novella called Water Moon about a man who’d been pregnant. I’m not sure how that came about, but I really liked the voice, and that he had this secret he had to carry to term. I wrote it, but didn’t really do anything with it—what can you do with a surrealistic novel about a pregnant man?—but I kept thinking about it, and there was just something about that novella that was trying to tell me something about the novel that I’d stopped writing. Maybe it wasn’t that Sam was a lesbian, maybe there was something else that was causing her so much distress. So I spliced the two texts together a bit, and it became clear to me what the real story was.

Not to give too much away, but incest plays a role. What was the response to that?
There was a lot of, ‘You’re a good writer, but I can’t really sell this.’ And that was fine. I researched, and there are novels out there with incest in them. Some of them are memoirs and obviously those are more justifiable, having the cathartic experience of writing about incest. Nabakov wrote a novel with incest in it, Iac McKeown wrote one, so there have been other authors who have dealt with it, I’m not the first one. I don’t judge things, I just write about things that I don’t understand and put myself in the shoes of someone I don’t understand, and I try to understand them by channeling myself through that person.

There was one criticism that the characters were too cynical. I realized that I put the worst of myself in Sam. A lot of us are this way, and I was this way too for a long time, that when something bad happens, we feel like we are owed an apology, and we’re bitter about it. Sam feels very violated and wants someone to apologize, like she can’t move on. And I think it’s once she realizes that it’s how she chooses to live, that’s where the healing begins, not while waiting around for her abuser to tell her he’s sorry. It’s how we learn to keep living, and I think in the end Sam starts to learn that we can still be mad at each other, and we may never have a relationship with one another, but we can at least try to find a way to be in each other’s lives. I think a lot of people and families everywhere deal with these kinds of issues that there aren’t easy answers for, and you just have to make the best of the situation.

You have a day job, which is writing related, but I’m still wondering how you find time for your own work.
I usually write in bed at night or on the weekends. I don’t really have a set schedule, and I’m not the type of person who has to get up every day and force myself to write something. A lot of the work is in my head, it percolates there until it’s ready, and then I’ll sit down and it has to come out right then. A lot of it happens when I’m dreaming. There’s a lot of emotional energy in dreams, and I’ll wake up after a really strange dream that has affected me so profoundly, and I’ll want to find a way to bring that energy to the page. I feel like I’m cheating, but I take a lot from my dreams to.

How do you come up with your characters?
It’s interesting, sometimes what you want from the character isn’t how they evolve. When I started writing this book, I had this picture of Eve as this girl I saw at the Club Charles one night drinking whiskey and a beer and reading. And it didn’t seem like she was waiting for anyone, and it was late and she was by herself. I thought, ‘I wonder what kind of person finds solace in a dimly lit bar,’ and I thought it was kind of ballsy. And then this girl who became Sam came in at started talking to her, and I suddenly became more interested in why this introverted, tightly-wound person would come in during the middle of the week and talk to this other person. And then all of a sudden, the book became about Sam.

I always say that the characters thwart you on every level when you try do something. It’s not even a voice, but something will say, ‘this is what’s going to happen,’ and you’re like, ‘Oh.’ And maybe you’re half way through the novel and everything has changed.

What is your ideal creative environment?
One of my big fantasies, and it’s terrible, is that I always wanted to have a book that was successful enough that I could go and be a hermit and write what I want. I guess all musicians just want to go in the studio and be like Kate Bush and do anything they want.

What do you try to get out of writing?
It’s hard to say. Writing is not like a goal, it’s how I analyze the world. I can’t articulate what’s going on to you in words, I need to write it down so I can make sense of it. It’s really the only way that I know how to interpret the world. If I stopped writing, I would feel really confused.

Even if I was never published again, I’d still be writing stories for myself. I don’t know how to stop. I have all these other people in my head who aren’t real, but they feel real to me. Sometimes I’ll wake up in the night and I’ll follow along with the soap operas in my head. It gets crowded in there, so it’s good to write them out.

In March of 2009, when Mary Claire Helldorfer first learned that her book Kissed by an Angel had hit USA Today’s Top 150 Books, she was working as a 10th-grade English teacher at Friends School of Baltimore.

“An editor from another company had called to talk to me about an idea I had submitted for an adult book,” recalls the 56-year-old Helldorfer, who uses the nom de plume Elizabeth Chandler for her young adult fiction. “And he commented that Kissed by an Angel was doing really well. I said, ‘I guess so, if you add up all the copies that have been sold since 1995.’ And he said, ‘Don’t you know it was reissued?’ I knew it had never gone out of print,” she says, “but it hadn’t exactly taken the world by storm.”

The book’s rise up the charts is a story in itself. First published in 1995, two sequels followed, and the entire trilogy was reprinted as a single, “bind-up” book in the late ’90s. Then, in the wake of Stephenie Meyer’s blockbuster Twilight series, Helldorfer’s own series on teen love from beyond the grave was re-released in December 2008 with a new cover.

The re-release not only made USA Today’s list, but it also found a spot on The New York Times Bestseller Children’s Series list. “Because of the way they mix all the categories, one week, on USA Today’s list, I was next to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby,” says Helldorfer with a laugh. “It was such a shock.”

Sitting on the daybed in her second-floor office, the publicity-shy Helldorfer is one of Baltimore’s best-kept literary secrets. As the author of 30 books, including the Dark Secrets series, Helldorfer, who retired from teaching last year to focus on writing, turns out teen fiction in the charming Towson row home she shares with her husband, Bob, and their brown tabby, Puck. Her newest entry in the Dark Secrets series, The Back Door of Midnight (in which a young girl attempts to solve her uncle’s murder on Maryland’s Eastern Shore), was released in November, and she is at work on the March release of Evercrossed, the first book in the second set of Kissed by an Angel trilogies. There’s also talk of a Kissed by an Angel movie, though nothing is official.

The unpretentious author, who dresses in jeans and sneakers, might have kept plugging away in obscurity, too, if not for the Twilight phenomenon. And though the Twilight books have been derided in some literary circles, Helldorfer will have none of it.

“I’m delighted when books like those in the Twilight series or Harry Potter prove once again that a book can cast a spell on readers,” she says pragmatically. “I’m a believer in popular fiction. If it wasn’t for Nancy Drew . . . I might not have continued to read my way to Milton and Shakespeare.”

Indeed, growing up in Rodgers Forge, she was more interested in playing with the neighborhood kids than literature. “I was not a reader,” she says. “My mother was constantly giving me the Newbery prize winners—I just didn’t want to read them. I’d start the books we picked out together at the library, then I’d imagine the rest.”

At Mercy High School, a young English teacher helped harness Helldorfer’s imagination. “Before that, I’d only written organized paragraphs on serious subjects, but she encouraged me to write poems or stories I was daydreaming about—I couldn’t believe anyone would like what was in my head.”

After earning her doctorate in literature from the University of Rochester in 1984, Helldorfer set her sights on becoming a writer in the Big Apple. After a few lean years, she moved back to more affordable Baltimore to continue to write and work part time at the University of Baltimore. In the mid-’90s, she got her first big break—a contract with a book packaging company (which produces books, then sells them to publishing companies) to write Kissed by an Angel.

As is often the case with mass-market books, the packager provided the premise.

“They told me, ‘Girl believes in angels, girl’s boyfriend does not, boyfriend dies and comes back as her guardian angel,’” she deadpans.

Still, the story was hers to shape. And though she chose to set the Kissed by an Angel books in Connecticut, she often inserts Maryland references in her other stories. Friends and family even make veiled appearances. For instance, her cold-blooded villain in the Kissed by an Angel books is named Gregory after one of her favorite cousins. “I had to feel positive about my murderer to make him convincing through three books,” she says, smiling.

Stay tuned for more stories. “I have always carried stories in my head,” says Helldorfer. “I began to think of myself as a writer when I realized that no matter what happened, I would write—when I realized that for better or worse, I couldn’t not write.”