Poetry at the Angel Tavern in the Fells Point area of Baltimore, MD, a series that Dyane Fancey and Clarinda Harriss ran in the 1970s. L to R: Jessica Locklear, Frank Evens and Clarinda. (Source: The Baltimore Sun)

Funny how these things happen.

I recently finished writing a story, “The Land Bridge Problem.” It was about a car thief who, while attempting escape on foot, unwittingly made his way onto an island in the middle of a raging river, probably by means of a slender strip of land that he could no longer locate, and had to scream for someone to come rescue him. It occurred in front of the house belonging to a narrator much like me, so I could not resist drawing parallels between a displaced person stranded in a strange land and the terrified car thief. The story began and ended with the character “Clarinda,” who was based on my friend and literary collaborator Clarinda Harriss, to whom the narrator tells her tale. And in the telling comes to see that there is a solution other than rescue to being stranded: someone who could make the inhospitable place seem more like home could be airdropped from the sky.

On the surface, Clarinda could not be less like me. For one, she is Baltimore born and bred, not someone who has had 35 separate addresses. For another, she has been involved with literature all her life, not someone who took up creative writing at an advanced age.

Her father was RP Harriss. He was was brought to Baltimore straight out of college to be HL Mencken’s special assistant. He went on to become an editor at The Evening Sun, then the editor of The Paris Herald. He also had short stories and a novel published. Clarinda followed in his footsteps, producing an epic poem by age eight and composing dirty ditties for her school chums. Her first publications were short stories, which she still writes and has recently collected in The White Rail. Her primary focus, however, has been poetry. She published her first collection, The Bone Tree, in 1971 through the New Poets Series, the predecessor of BrickHouse Books. That was followed by others, including Dirty Blue Voice and Mortmain. She also edited collections such as Hot Sonnets with Moira Egan.

It was Moira’s father, Michael Egan, who founded the New Poets Series in 1970 to give Maryland poets a voice. At that time, there was little opportunity for local poets—or writers of any sort—to find an interested publisher. Michael wanted to change that, and Clarinda was there to help. She started fundraising for the Series, obtaining financial support from luminaries such as Baltimore’s own Josephine Jacobsen, the first female United States Poet Laureate, and Ogden Nash, the master of light verse. Clarinda then took over as both editor and director, incorporating the press and securing nonprofit status. Renamed BrickHouse Books, it welcomed not only poetry but also fiction, drama and creative nonfiction. Today, it has the distinction of being Maryland’s oldest continuously operating small press.

I came across Clarinda in the summer of 2011, when I was the online editor at Little Patuxent Review. She had published a couple of poems in the Make Believe issue, and I wanted to do a piece on them for my “Concerning Craft” series. I sent an email message asking whether she would write up some material for me. When I got a draft within hours, I knew this was a woman after my own heart. That led to further collaboration, notably the outrageous “Self-Interview: Clarinda Harriss,” a takeoff on authors such as Vladimir Nabokov who fabricated entire interviews out of whole cloth. Soon I was proposing crazy-assed schemes beyond the bounds of LPR, usually in emails that started with the innocent question, “Wanna have some fun?”

When Clarinda invited me to the 2012  BrickHouse Books 40th birthday party, hosted by the inimitable Lorraine Whittlesey, the thought crossed my mind that I could contribute my talents to this congenial group. I immediately dismissed it, telling myself that what I needed to do was to concentrate on my own writing. To show how serious I was, I stepped down from my position at LPR in 2013. And retreated to my virtual island, where I wrote and wrote. And wondered how on Earth a little girl from Latvia had ended up in Ellicott City, MD.  And whether there was still a chance she could escape.

Then on 24 September 2014, Clarinda dropped down—if not from the sky, then surely from the ether—and under the guise of an email message entitled “something else to think about,” which referenced the fact that all I had on my mind for weeks was the workmen who were tearing up my historic house and taking my money, offered me the position of Fiction Editor at BHB. I shot back something flippant and then added a bit more graciously, “I would be honored.” And with that, the need to locate some submerged land bridge became less urgent. And my barren island began to fill up with all manner of Baltimore lore and literary legacy. And, for the first time, I felt that I was actually a part of it. So I decided it might be worth staying, after all.

Which takes me to what I suggest that you do if you write fiction and feel that you are isolated from the literary mainstream and maybe much more: send Clarinda and me a message, either here or at BrickHouse Books, and show us what you have. For my part, I prefer writers who have a distinctive voice and something meaningful to say, who have an obvious love of language and a subtle sense of play and who, beneath it all, show that they have good technique and an understanding of what constitutes literary fiction, even if they write in another genre. That said, I also like being surprised and having my preconceived notions blown away. If this is you, we might drop in on your remote island. And things might never be the same after that!

Apart from her role as a writer and a publisher, Clarinda Harriss is a professor emerita in English at Towson University, where she was once the department head, and the honoree of the The Clarinda Harriss Poetry Prize and Chapbook Contest, sponsored by Baltimore’s CityLit Project. In addition, she maintains an active interest in prison writers and restorative justice projects as well as a wide range of other social justice issues.

Regarding the above image, Clarinda’s mention of readings at The Angel for my LPR piece “Reader Response: The REAL Lucille Clifton” got me searching the Web. The only photo that I found was one on eBay, and Clarinda promptly purchased it. According to her, the “100” is written in the thick copy pencil that she remembers from her dad’s newspaper days.

NOTE: I am no longer with BrickHouse Books.