I loved reading poetry as a little kid – Lewis Carroll and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Keats and Wordsworth, and by high school when I found out that Alice Walker wrote poetry, I was hooked. Something about the writing of plays and poetry appealed to me. There’s a sparseness, a framing of things that leaves the reader to fi ll in bits of the page as well, so that what you have really is a conversation. Not only can the poet revel in the sounds of words and play with poetic devices like metaphor and internal rhyme, but you can weave images and concepts together. I found in poetry a place I could take a snapshot of a moment and really understand it, see it from multiple angles. Jonie McIntire: On Her New Book "Semidomesticated" and Living Out a New Chapter of Her Own Life Interviewed by By Ed Conn Jonie McIntire is author of chapbooks "Semidomesticated" (Red Flag Poetry, 2021), "Beyond the Sidewalk" (Nightballet Press, 2017) and "Not All Who Are Lost Wander" (Finishing Line Press, 2016). She hosts a popular monthly poetry reading series called Uncloistered Poetry, which brings poets in from around the country. She has received multiple Accelerator Grants from the Arts Commission of Greater Toledo, is a graduate of the juried Marge Piercy Intensive Poetry Workshop, and is known for her tireless advocacy for poets/poetry in Northwest Ohio. Her writing has been published in print journals and online, in anthologies and zines, and has even been stamped into cement as part of the Arts Commission of Greater Toledo’s Sidewalk Poetry series. Learn more about her at https://www. joniemcintire.net. Page 8 Q: You have a new book coming out called "Semidomesticated", which I just ordered and looking forward to receiving it. What can you share with us about it? This is my third book and I’m so grateful to Red Flag Poetry for picking it as the winner of their 2020 chapbook contest. I called it “Semidomesticated” because the poems were written after I quit working in a corporate setting. In 2017, I left the company I had worked with for over seventeen years to essentially retire. Maybe not retire, but to start a new life refocusing on things that were important to me that I’d been neglecting. Both of my kids were hitting their high school years and I became acutely aware that I’d made myself so busy over the years that I might miss these last few I’d have with them if I didn’t make some changes right away. I had been unhappy with myself at work and wanted to refocus how I spent my time and how I prioritized my energy. For years, I’ve been active in the literary community and I fi nally felt that my writing deserved some focus. So I stayed home and focused on things like cooking with ingredients, reading more, fi xing things instead of tossing them. And I wrote more. Not only wrote more but found that what I wrote had a little more substance. Not just a few lines jotted down between meetings, but longer pieces that delved into topics I needed to work through. And I started sending writing out for publication, which is a terrifying step for any writer. But that work started to pay off as poems started to fi nd their way into journals. I’m particularly excited about the cover and some artwork included in this book. Rob Jones is an incredible artist in Columbus, Ohio and I’ve wanted to be able to collaborate for years. His artwork has a rawness that always resonates for me, and I think the poems have that same grit. Q: When did you fi rst become interested in poetry and how has your poetry evolved? In college, I fell in with the literary crowd and loved the community it provided. Some of the people closest to me, my husband and some very dear friends, are poets I met in classes and open mics during that time. And having formed that community made it possible for me to return to writing when the demands of having little kids and work had taken all my artistic energy. About ten years ago or so, I found the itch to do more writing and get back more of that community that had been so important to me when I was younger. I started hosting open mics and helping to organize writing workshops. And Toledo always provides talent. We are blessed here with a lot of incredible people who work on their art despite their factory jobs, their offi ce work, the demands of families and economic limitations. Building that community helped push me to write more, to demand more of what I’d written, and to realize that writing is worth the time you invest in it. I starting writing poetry with more substance and overcoming some of the fears we all have about approaching diffi cult subject matter. Q: I read a poem of yours published in Dissonance Magazine in the UK, entitled Again We Rise, which if I read it correctly, is about fi nding life after loss. Having just lost my aunt to Covid, it touched me quite personally. What was your inspiration for the poem and may I share it with our readers? Loss is such a bittersweet thing. It’s what is most human about all of us, our fragility. That
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