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Rose Front Cover Only

Cover Art Review: Kelly Airo on Bloomsbury’s Late Rose

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Editor’s Note: on September 1, 2019, Chickadee Prince Books will publish Bloomsbury’s Late Rose, a novel by Pen Pearson about the often-overlooked Edwardian poet, Charlotte Mew. For this cover, like several others, we used San Francisco artist, Kelly Airo. Here, Kelly talks about the cover, how she created the art, and what artists inspired her. It is available for pre-order in paperback from your favorite local independent bookstore, on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and on Kindle.

Kelly Airo: For this illustration/portrait I mostly wanted to capture Charlotte Mew as the independent, artistic woman she was. I wanted the portrait to show Charlotte as a complex and intelligent person. To me the painting was more about capturing her character rather than an exact likeness, as there aren’t a lot of photos of her for reference.

As for the style of the painting, I drew inspiration from the illustrators of Mew’s era like Elizabeth Shippen Green and Charles Dana Gibson. My intention was to make a book cover that would draw in the modern reader, but wouldn’t have looked all that out of place in the time of Charlotte and Anne Mew.

Rose Front Cover Only

Pen Pearson: Why Charlotte Mew’s poems will be read when other poets’ work is forgotten

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Bloomsbury’s Late Rose, by Pen Pearson, will be published by Chickadee Prince Books on September 1, 2019. It is available for pre-order in paperback from your favorite local independent bookstore, on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and on Kindle.

Audere: Tell us a little about Bloomsbury’s Late Rose.

Pearson: It’s a novel about Charlotte Mew, a real-life British poet whose personal life was as fascinating as her career as a poet. When Charlotte and her sister Anne were young adults, their older brother and little sister were institutionalized with schizophrenia. Afraid of passing insanity onto children, Charlotte and Anne made a secret pact to never marry. Following their father’s death, the sisters survived day to day on a dwindling inheritance. Unable to work as professional women because of their invalid mother’s gentility, each sister earned pin money through her chosen art: Charlotte as a poet, Anne as a painter.

In 1909, when the novel opens, Charlotte is on the cusp of minor celebrity, winning popular and critical acclaim for her poems. Meanwhile, Anne’s paintings suffer increasing critical neglect. Further testing the sisters’ close relationship and their pact, each sister is on the brink of falling in love: Anne with an Italian emigrant, Charlotte with novelist May Sinclair.

What inspired you to dramatize Mew’s life?

Along with her compelling personal story, I was drawn to the historical period in which Charlotte wrote. Born in 1869, Charlotte lived through significant events in British and world history. The New Woman and Art for Art’s Sake movements. The death of Queen Victoria and the reign of King Edward. World War I. The waning of class distinctions and genteel society. Women’s suffrage. The birth of modernist literature and the little magazines that published modernist works.

Telling Mew’s personal story was impossible without including the effects of those momentous events on her life.

What research did you do?

I drew on the events recorded in Penelope Fitzgerald’s biography, Charlotte Mew and her friends, Charlotte’s correspondence in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, and letters from and to Mew, which helped me appreciate her wry voice and self-deprecating sense of humor. They also revealed her attitudes toward the various people she corresponded with. Visiting Mew’s homes and haunts in London, even where buildings no longer exist, was equally helpful. Those sites include her childhood home on Doughty Street (which still exists), her adult home on Gordon Street (which no longer exists), Gordon Square garden (where a placard pays tribute to the Bloomsbury Group but not to Mew), the building on Charlotte Street that housed Hogarth Studios, and Charlotte and Anne’s grave in Hampstead Cemetery.

When did you first learn about Charlotte Mew’s poetry?

I was looking for a topic for my M.A. thesis. Among many American and British poets’ work, Mew’s poems asked to be read, reread, and studied. From that introduction to this day, I admire her poems’ preoccupation with the haunting aspects of romantic love and their poignant yet unsentimental vision of life. But, most of all, I love her poetry’s language. The sounds and rhythms are at once colloquial and musical, and the varying line lengths are as original as the unconventional line breaks and spare imagery. Mew’s poetry stands by itself, of course. But when read in the context of her life, the matter-of-fact pathos of her best poems is heartbreaking. Even before I finished my thesis, I decided I would one day attempt a creative project centered on her life. More than fifteen years later, I have been fortunate enough to do just that.

What’s the significance of the title?

Charlotte Mew loved roses, and she used them frequently as a motif in her poems. She lived in Bloomsbury almost the entirety of her adult life. And, as a poet, she was a late bloomer.

Did Charlotte cross paths with members of the Bloomsbury Group?

The Mews’ house on Gordon Street stood half a block from the Gordon Square house where the Bloomsbury Group met in the early 1900s. In 1920, Virginia Woolf wrote of Mew and her poetry: “I think her good and interesting and unlike anyone else,” but the two women didn’t meet until 1926 when they happened to visit Thomas Hardy’s wife, Florence, in the hospital at the same time. However, the two women were too shy to speak to one another. Of course, Bloomsbury and timidity weren’t the only things Woolf and Mew had in common. Each writer had a sister who was a visual artist.

What are your goals for the novel?

Though Mew’s poems continue to be anthologized online and in print, as well as taught in England’s high schools, I believe Mew’s poetry remains underappreciated today. I hope this novel introduces more readers to her poems and helps fulfill Thomas Hardy’s prophecy that Charlotte Mew’s poems will be read when other poets’ work is forgotten.

 

World War I

June, 1915: A Poem by Charlotte Mew

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In September, Chickadee Prince will publish Bloomsbury’s Late Rose, by Pen Pearson, a great new novel about the neglected Edwardian poet, Charlotte Mew.

In addition to publishing the novel, Chickadee Prince Books is further promoting Mew’s poetry in Audere Magazine, the CPB webzine, as well as on the publisher’s website: you can read more poetry by Charlotte Mew here.

 

Boston Poem

Poetry for Winter and Spring, by Pen Pearson and Elizabeth Johnson Drachman

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Pen Pearson (Winter Sparrows) is the author of Bloomsbury’s Late Rose, a novel about the poet Charlotte Mew, which will be published in September 2019 by Chickadee Prince Books. Elizabeth Johnson Drachman (City Cycle), as she was referred to here, was a poet and potter.

Originally published in English Journal 53.6 (September 1964), p. 469, by the National Council of Teachers of English. Used by permission.

To a Forgotten Poet

To a Forgotten Poet

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As we approach the publication of Pen Pearson’s acclaimed new novel, Bloomsbury’s Late Rose, which dramatizes the life of the Edwardian poet, Charlotte Mew, we continue to celebrate Mew’s poetry, Pearson’s poetry, with a few others tossed in for some perspective.

Today, in addition to Mew and Pearson, we take a look back at Julian M. Drachman, a poet whose works appeared in The Nation, among many others, and who died in 1983. You can see more poetry by Charlotte Mew on the Chickadee Prince website. You pre-purchase Pearson’s novel about Mew on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any bookstore in America.

Fin de fete is by Mew; Winter’s Sparrows is by Pearson; and To a Forgotten Poet is by Drachman. Photograph by J.R. Korpa/Unsplash.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BeFunky-photo

This Fire: Poetry by Pen Pearson, Stuart Witt and Charlotte Mew

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Remember when every newspaper and magazine published poetry? Let’s get poetry out of its corner, and back into our daily life. Anyway, we’re giving it a try.

Stuart Witt is a poet and retired math teacher. Charlotte Mew was a great but little-known English poet of the late 19th century. Pen Pearson teaches writing and literature at Northern State University and is the author of Bloomsbury’s Late Rose, a novel about Charlotte Mew, which Chickadee Prince Books will publish in Fall 2019.

 

 

This Fire (by Pen Pearson)

 

She says, I’m just a firefighter working for the U.S. Forest Service.

She says, I’m just a woman trying to make a living doing her job.

She says, I’m just a person who’s got her co-workers’ backs when fire rages.

 

I’ll tell you about other women like her.

 

They wake naked on sheet-less beds, disoriented and ashamed.

They wake with bruises on their bodies, tattoos on their minds.

 

If they report the abuse, they’re demoted and threatened.

They’re told: Don’t be “one of those girls,” which they know means “bitch.”

 

What happens to their drinking buddies, their peerless firefighters

who say, If women can’t take the heat, they should go back to the kitchen?

 

They must think it’s a man’s job we’re trying to do.

 

We say:

 

Why grope our breasts and crotches, call us names and harass us?

Why not prove we can’t do the job based on the job, not our sex?

 

Don’t write QUIT in the soot on our cars when we file a report.

Don’t leave pornography in the driver’s seat for us to find.

Don’t call us “one of those girls,” which we know means “ballbreaker.”

 

Even now, smell kindling catch fire. Hear the flames’ whispers

transmogrify to rattled breath, witches cackling over spoils.

Feel the fire’s heart rage out of control, explode with fury.

 

See flames tower above skyscraping redwoods and blackening smoke

lay down on and strangle the air. Sense oxygen emptying your lungs,

your own life give birth to an anonymous, amorphous monster

 

whose tyrannical power sears you. Know we’re here to fight fire with water,

with dust, with fire itself, and with our comrades, women and men,

an armed front attacking this wall with ungloved hands, mouths uncovered.

 

We’re here to fight fire with words, with our words against his words

when necessary. We’re here to walk through the fire’s center and come out alive—

fierce shoots of cedar saplings engendered by this fire’s ash.

Design by Steven S. Drachman from an image by Alexas Fotos/Pixabay