On the Power and Magic of Words: An Interview With Karen Donovan

A 1925 Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language that once belonged to her grandfather became the inspiration for Karen Donovan’s forthcoming Aard-vark to Axolotl (Etruscan Press, 2018). It is an eclectic series of tiny stories and prose poems, based on a set of illustrations from the pages of that very dictionary. She collected pictures of plants and animals, diagrams and devices, and created a new narrative for each one. The charming result of her effort is an assortment of small poetic stories that work on the reader like alternative definitions for items drawn from a cabinet of curiosities.

How did Donovan come to be in possession of her grandfather’s dictionary? “My mother owned this dictionary for decades before I ever knew about it,” she says. “She had packed it away in a chest with a bunch of her father’s belongings long ago and forgotten it was there. One day she showed up at a family gathering with it in her arms and said to my husband, Walker, ‘Here, you like books.’ I think it amused her to unload this gigantic dictionary on him and see what he would do. Of course, he was delighted because she was right. He does like books. We trucked it home and immediately set it up on a bookstand.”

And that’s where the dictionary lives now. “It’s a venerable presence in a house full of books,” Donovan says. “Picture a very small cottage perched on the edge of a tidal marsh off a small cove of Narragansett Bay. Inside the house, you can pretty much get anywhere you need to go in a few steps. It’s really more of a boat than a house. The walls are covered with art, and the ratio of books to total square footage is considerable, so visitors don’t have much chance of noticing the dictionary per se right away. Once you see the darn thing on the bookstand in all its tonnage, though, there is a definite wow factor. The digital generation can’t quite believe it exists.”

Although she lives in a house full of books, she wouldn’t consider a love of books necessarily runs in her family. “To wit, my mother’s relief that we agreed to take the dictionary off her hands,” says Donovan. “But my lifelong practice of book hoarding has made up for any lost ground. It’s lucky that I turned out to be a poet, because you can easily fit four or five books of poems on a shelf in the same space a novel would occupy. That works out great.”

But there’s more to the story behind Aard-vark to Axolotl than meets the eye. Sure, it’s a fun and fascinating read, full of wit and whimsy and clever observations on life. But Donovan’s connection to her grandfather, to whom she dedicates this book, goes far beyond being captivated by the pictures in his old dictionary. She says, “I knew my grandfather Raymond as a gentle, soft-spoken man who taught me how to play chess and died when I was ten years old. Not until much later did I learn about his awful drinking problem and then finally understood why he did not live with my grandmother and why my mother was mad at him a lot.”

She goes on to describe a bookplate pasted on the flyleaf of the dictionary. “It reads ‘The R. H. Burton Estate Service, established 1921.’ It gives his office address in downtown Providence in the Industrial Bank Building, an iconic feature of the city skyline that everybody calls the Superman Building. An old leather bookmark is still stuck in at the start of the ‘O’ section. For me,” she says, “the dictionary is a token of the real man behind the disease. He managed to have a life before everything fell apart on him, and this dictionary tells me he would have been thoughtful with language—that he cared about words.”

It’s obvious this attention to the details of language and words was passed along. Not only is Donovan the author of two prior volumes of poetry, Your Enzymes Are Calling the Ancients (Persea Books, 2016) and Fugitive Red (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), but for 20 years she and her husband co-edited a literary journal of short prose called ¶: A Magazine of Paragraphs. It was a true labor of love. “We published ¶ from 1985 to 2005,” she says. “From the beginning, it was a tremendous amount of arduous, painstaking work and a total blast. We did our entire run of 25 issues before the Internet struck. Everything was paper. Piles and piles of submissions coming in the mail from everywhere, following us doggedly through three states and five changes of address. One day the postman asked me, ‘What is it you guys do again?’”

Donovan especially loved reading submissions. “Once the box of envelopes reached a certain unmanageable height, we would call time and spend a weekend reading,” she says. “The magic was that you never knew what might be in the envelope. When all you ask for is paragraphs of 250 words or less, you can get some wondrously berserk and idiosyncratic voices. The concept behind ¶ was homeopathic. Many small doses of reality in very short form, perfectly sized to fit in the back pocket of your jeans. We assembled each issue, printed only 400 copies, and sent them out as an antidote to the world’s ills.”

Donovan has continued this thread with Aard-vark to Axolotl. Her quirky images and definitions may not be the solution to the problems of our world, but they certainly are a welcome distraction and sure to cure what ails you.
 
Pamela Turchin is pursuing her M.F.A in fiction from Wilkes University, where she serves as a graduate assistant and as the production editor at Etruscan Press.
 
 

New Releases from Etruscan

Outreach in Youngstown

Remica Bingham-Risher, author of What We Ask of Flesh, and Aaron Poochigian, author of Mr. Either/Or, visited five schools and taught at both men and women's prison classes while in Youngstown, OH. 

AWP18: Meet Us in Tampa

About Etruscan Press: