WNMU Assistant Professor Heather Frankland is publishing a new chapbook of poetry, soon to be released by Finishing Line Press, a widely respected publisher in literary circles. The chapbook, “Midwest Musings,” collects together poems completed recently as well as some from earlier in Frankland’s career that she has since revised.
The chapbook came together as Frankland, a native of Muncie, Indiana, reflected on the connections between her various poems. “I realized I had a lot of poems that were interrogating the Midwest, family, loss, and identity,” she said, “I had never put all [of the poems] together before, but when I did, I realized that there was a theme that was running through them.” This new collection, Frankland said, is about “identity, regionality, and connections to land and landscape.” She uses an analogy about fruit from a farmer’s market to describe the relationship between her poetry and place. “If you buy fruit from the farmer’s market,” Frankland explained, “you are tasting the soil and everything that went into [growing] it.” Similarly, she said, “Those landscapes you grew up in, that you live in, they are the taste of the poem—they are integral to the poem.”
A creative writer since she was five years old, Frankland wrote her first poem when she was nine. Poetry was a marvel to her at that age. She described how her local bookmobile, which she frequented, only had one book of poetry for children, Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat,” so she checked it out repeatedly. “It was like an old friend that I always looked for on that bookmobile,” she said.
Despite her love of language, Frankland never planned on becoming a professional poet. After serving in the Peace Corps and as a Peace Corps Response volunteer in Peru and Panama, she earned a Master of Public Health degree before completing her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. While many people might find the two fields disparate, Frankland does not. “My work in poetry actually helped my work in public health,” she said, “because as a poet, you are so analytical, and that works well when you think about health care programs. The disciplines are not so separate, and they feed each other.”
She is drawn to poetry, she said, because of how it allows one to create imagined worlds and share those worlds with others. “I love music and . . . language,” said Frankland, “and I love how you can paint a picture with words and you can bring someone into that world that you have created. And they have their own agency, but you have created the structure for them to explore.”
Her work has been influenced by the work of other contemporary writers, especially Ada Limón, the current poet laureate of the United States, Maggie Smith, the award-winning poet, editor and essayist, and internationally acclaimed writer, Marge Piercy. Piercy chose Frankland to be one of a select group of poets to participate in a week-long Intensive Poetry Workshop, which she attended last summer. Said Piercy of “Midwest Musings,” “Heather Frankland writes thoughtful poems that exhibit a strong sense of place and an equally strong compassion for people alive and dead, animals, even a moth and a creek. She examines herself with an equally keen eye, her feelings, her attachments, her mistakes, her pretensions. These are non-pretentious poems that seek wisdom and often find it.”
Frankland is also inspired and influenced by her conversations and collaborations with other artists. The cover of her forthcoming chapbook is the result of one such collaboration, as it was created by a friend that she first met as an undergraduate, visual artist Tina Browder. Said Frankland of such collaborations, “Those conversations feed you. . . As artists and writers and poets, we are a community, and we need to support each other [and take] joy in each other’s success.”
As an English professor, she tries to foster a similar sense of community among her students and advises aspiring writers to “Keep on trying.” She acknowledges that the road to publication can be difficult but advises writers to “Keep throwing those pebbles out there. Not all of them are going to sink; some are going to travel.”
“Midwest Musings” is not the only project that Frankland is looking forward to in the near future. She is one of a number of Silver City poets whose work will be published in the forthcoming “New Mexico Poetry Anthology,” set to be released this year by the Museum of New Mexico Press. Her other projects include revising a book-length collection to prepare it for publication as well as two additional chapbooks at different stages of development.
For the moment, though, Frankland is excited and pleased to have “Midwest Musings” coming to print. “I have worked so hard on my writing, and it is such a key part of who I am,” she said, “It feels good to have the collection out.”
“Midwest Musings” can be preordered here until August 11, and interested readers can read a sample of Frankland’s poetry from the collection here.