Exploring the Myth of Annie Oakley with Sara Moore Wagner

Sara Moore Wagner (00:00):
Somebody asked to like buy her for marriage and she shot his picture apart <laugh>. She might have been one of the first ones to climb the Eiffel Tower and she went to the top of Mount Vesuvius and she was writing about all of these books that she was reading, which is not something that we think about with Annie Oakley...like reading Shakespeare and all of these kind of works of literature to try to understand the world better.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:26):
Welcome to Page Count, presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. This podcast celebrates authors, illustrators, librarians, booksellers, literary advocates and readers in and from the state of Ohio. I'm your host Laura Maylene Walter, the Ohio Center for the Book Fellow and author of the novel BODY OF STARS. Today we're joined by Sara Moore Wagner, author of three prizewinning, full-length books of poetry including her latest LADY WING SHOT, which surrounds the life and legend of Annie Oakley. We're posting this episode on Annie Oakley's birthday. She was born August 13, 1860, but we'll talk a lot more about Oakley soon. First, Sara, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for being here.

Sara Moore Wagner (01:13):
Thank you so much for having me.

Laura Maylene Walter (01:15):
Well, I'm really excited to dive into your poetry and Annie Oakley, but before we get to all of that, we often like to open here at Page Count with our Ohio roots. So in this case, not only are you an Ohioan, but the subject of your book Annie Oakley is as well. So can you discuss your connection to Ohio and also just a little bit about how you came to make Oakley the subject for your poetry?

Sara Moore Wagner (01:40):
Yeah, sure. Well, I was born in Ohio, born in Columbus where I lived until I was a teenager and then I moved to the Cincinnati area. My father is from the Hocking Hills area of Ohio and then my mother's from West Virginia, but she came here as a teenager also. And then Annie Oakley actually came to me because my mother was also a champion sharp shooter. So yeah, she was really a fan of Annie Oakley growing up. And so when Covid started, I had kind of two books that I'd already written that were a little bit personal and I thought, you know, I'm going to just go research a person. I've always loved to fall into obsession, especially about, you know, individuals sometimes about works of literature and things like that. I'll just, I'm going to write about that for a while. So I discovered that Annie Oakley lived about 45 minutes north of me here in Westchester, Ohio.

Sara Moore Wagner (02:36):
And I took a trip to her hometown. I went to her museum and then the poems just started to kind of take over. I decided I was going to write a hundred poems about Annie Oakley just to kind of pass the time <laugh>. Just to see if I could. But I was really fascinated by her story and I was really drawn to the connections between her and my mom and the things that I was kind of starting to understand about super stardom and gun culture in America. The beginning of America I just started learning and going down rabbit holes and then because her hometown is so close to me, it was really easy for me to kind of escape there and go right there and be in the place too.

Laura Maylene Walter (03:15):
That is so fascinating. We have to get into all of that, including your mother's history as a sharp shooter. But to start, I thought since it's a poetry collection, it would be nice if you could read us one of your poems to give listeners a taste of this work. So what would you like to read for us today?

Sara Moore Wagner (03:32):
I'm going to read "Even Her Hair was a Mask," which I think it just encompasses a lot of the main themes of this book. [Poem is redacted from this transcript.]

Laura Maylene Walter (05:40):
Thank you so much. That is just beautiful. Yeah. Listening to you read it mirrored just the experience I had of reading your book, which I learned a lot about Annie Oakley and it's also gorgeous and there's so many complicated themes in your book that we can get into. But one thing I really love is some of your poems are about Annie Oakley and some of them are actually written in her persona, which I found really fascinating. So for our listeners who maybe aren't incredibly familiar with Annie Oakley, or it's been a long time since they've learned about her or thought about her, maybe you could give us just an overview of, of her story and how she became who she was and we saw some snippets of her life in that poem, but what can you tell us about how Annie Oakley developed into the mythic figure that we know today?

Sara Moore Wagner (06:27):
And she really is such a mythic figure and I think that's what drew me to her. But you know, she was born in 1860, as you mentioned, in Ohio in a tiny little house. She had I think nine siblings. I tried to go to her house, it's not there anymore, but there's a little plaque <laugh>. And so when she was little, about eight or nine her father died of pneumonia. And then that's kind of when the myth of her picking up the gun starts that she picked up his gun off the mantle even though it was really big. And she was a little girl and she was able to kind of shoot food to feed her family. But eventually her mother remarried and they didn't have enough money still to kind of feed the family. So she went to this place called the Dark County Infirmary to be kind of a helpmate there and that's where she learned to sew.

Sara Moore Wagner (07:18):
And she was actually kind of adopted out by a family. They've still not been able to locate exactly who that was, but she called them "the wolves" in her writing. This was a really formative experience for her kind of learning about who she is and how much she wants to fight to protect herself. But eventually she escapes "the wolves" by getting a train ticket actually and going back to her mother and then she's kind of has to go back into the infirmary because the he-wolf is still after her. It's very dramatic and she writes about it really well herself. And so she is pulled out of school and put back into the infirmary where she kind of grows up and eventually she goes back to living with her mother again, supporting her mother. She's able to, through her shooting, pay off her mother's mortgage because she starts selling game in Cincinnati, which is close to where I live.

Sara Moore Wagner (08:10):
So around that time she has a shooting match with a man named Frank Butler who becomes her husband. And that's kind of the plot of ANNIE GET YOUR GUN <laugh>, you know, and then except in ANNIE GET YOUR GUN, she doesn't beat him, but she really did beat him. So after that they kind of start touring around together. They join up with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show where she becomes the first American superstar, especially first female. Buffalo Bill's arguably the first superstar but then Annie Oakley comes and is the first female superstar going all over Europe, showing what America is, which is kind of guns and lots of animals and this big kind of stadium performance through her sharp shooting abilities. She could, you know, ride on a horse, go over a, do a mirror and shoot over her back and hit things out of the sky.

Sara Moore Wagner (09:04):
She would shoot cigarettes out of people's mouths and cards...really amazing things. But in her private life she was very kind of demure. She would read her Bible, she would sew, she was very much like a proper lady outside of her performances. So like in the poem, she eventually, there was an, I think in 1901, a train accident with the Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, which left her injured and she did kind of go back to performing for a little bit after that until after she recovered. They said her hair turned white overnight too and she kind of started wearing a wig and it was sort of the, the climax and the downfall. In her later life she kind of thought about being in the movies. She was in one of the first motion moving pictures. She represents a lot of things because she represents the Wild West in this kind of untamed America.

Sara Moore Wagner (09:58):
But then we also don't think of her as being there when they were starting to make films and electricity and all of these things are happening at the same time, which is really cool. And I think through her and through the Wild West Show, we can kind of see those origins, how quickly the origins of America were created and how much myth they were. But yeah, she got in a car accident later toward the end of her life, which kind of left her really incapacitated. And then after that she died a few weeks apart from her husband in 1926.

Laura Maylene Walter (10:31):
Yeah, she definitely had a fascinating life. You know, there's so much in her life that seems to lend itself well to poetry. I mean just the fact that the people she lived with, she called them "the wolves". Which is so great. And then of course the Wild West and her travels and everything. And I love by the way that you sort of challenged yourself to write a hundred poems about her, which I think is a good lesson for the writers listening to this that sometimes you just have to give yourself a challenge and see what comes of it and look what came of it, this book, right? So I think that's really great. And obviously you're a poet, so you're interest in Annie Oakley, this is your form, this is what you're going to do. But could you talk a little bit about how you found poetry to be a good way for you to dive into her life versus say trying to write a biography about her or doing some other kind of maybe essays or something about her, what is it about poetry? What did that do for you in bringing her to life on the page?

Sara Moore Wagner (11:24):
Well what's interesting and maybe when I was talking about Annie, you noticed there are a lot of inconsistencies in her story. It's really hard to figure out what exactly was the truth of Annie Oakley because like calling them "the wolves", she controlled her own stories, she made herself a myth in a lot of ways. And as a poet, I'm someone who's always loved folklore and myth poets since the beginning of time. That's kind of what we use. And I think she appealed to me on that level because of all the holes in her story and because of the way she's been made into a representation of femininity, of American values, all of those things made her larger than life. And I think when I turned to poetry, it has to do more than...I think it was Jason Schneiderman was talking about poetry goes past just simply describing something or telling a story.

Sara Moore Wagner (12:25):
I wanted to tell her story, but I also think it's impossible to tell her story because it's impossible to know. You know, there's documents that say that she got married in 1876 when she was 16, and then there are other people that were like, no, the dates were wrong and the real document says this. And she was 21, you know. And there were times that she actually changed her own age to seem younger. So for me that's like, okay, there are a lot of things about Annie Oakley that are biography. And so I wanted to make her pure representation in a lot of ways. Make her a metaphor, and I don't think there's a better form than poetry for making something a symbol in that way.

Laura Maylene Walter (13:08):
Yeah, agreed. And her age, it was interesting because she, when she was performing with Buffalo Bill, she at one point had, I want to say rival, but...

Sara Moore Wagner (13:17):
It was her rival. Yeah, Lillian Smith

Laura Maylene Walter (13:20):
Who was like a teenager. And she was younger than Annie. So maybe that was the pressure that Annie changed her age, which is a bit depressing that even for someone like Annie Oakley that the importance of youth as a woman still factored in. Yeah. So that was her rival. How long did they perform together and what was that like for them?

Sara Moore Wagner (13:38):
They definitely were in London together. They performed for several years, but Annie did not like Lillian Smith. She has an article, a newspaper article that she wrote about Lillian Smith where she literally calls her chubby <laugh>.

Laura Maylene Walter (13:50):
Wow, wow.

Sara Moore Wagner (13:52):
She was not happy with having other women. And that's what was funny to me too is because we like to think of Annie Oakley as this sort of empowering feminist force. But she was, she had to kind of survive in this all male world. So that was complex for me too. Kind of grappling with her anti...she did not support suffrage even though there are people who tried to claim that she did.

Laura Maylene Walter (14:19):
<Laugh>

Sara Moore Wagner (14:20):
I did a lot of research and there are people that are like, no, ignore that look this way. I mean she did want to teach women to shoot also. So they're complicated.

Laura Maylene Walter (14:28):
Yeah, that's really interesting because she, her story in a lot of ways says a lot about girlhood and womanhood and independence and you know, she traveled the world and performed for some really powerful people. She never had children. She has a lot of details in her life that do speak to sort of a feminist angle, but yes, it's also complicated that maybe she, she really wasn't, she kind of supported herself and not other women. So that's really, really interesting. So I guess I'm curious, since we're talking about themes a little bit, so many big themes do kind of surface in the book. Everything from America's sort of unique obsession, destructive obsession with guns, the womanhood angle, fame, and sort of spectacle, and just the myth of the wild West, all of these things. How did that come together for you as you were working? And are there any themes in particular you'd like to pull out right now and and kind of discuss a little more in depth?

Sara Moore Wagner (15:22):
As I mentioned, I just started kind of writing through her life and then I think all of these themes started coming up and that's why poetry's so good too, is because you can kind of hold all of these things together in this sort of discursive leaping way. Where it's like all of these things are existing at the same time. And one of the main things I kept thinking about was where we are currently in our country and how that timeline...you can kind of trace it really easily back to these kind of first myths and this origin story of America, which really we think about being so far in the past but, but wasn't really, you know. So that's kind of where the themes started to coalesce for me. And then I luckily was able to pull out different themes that kind of centered around different parts of her life, which is how I tried to organize the book like chronologically. But then here is kind of where she's having more of her rivalry so I can talk more about the women aspect and then here's where she meets Sitting Bull. So I can talk a little bit about the genocide of the first people of this country and her hypocrisy in some ways with that.

Laura Maylene Walter (16:37):
The subject of guns was so fascinating in this book and your poem, meditation on American schooling, has a line for example, like..."There are graves and there are schools, there are schools made of graves". And it was, you know, hard when reading this book sometimes not to think about where we are today with guns and school shootings. And if you think about Annie when she, what was she seven when she took her father's gun and shot a rabbit, you know, that would be horrific story today of a 7-year-old getting their hands on a gun and back then she was feeding her family and to see how the gun culture has evolved and where we are today is just very startling and very jarring.

Sara Moore Wagner (17:18):
And that was difficult for me too because I come from, you know, I'm probably the only person in my family who doesn't love guns <laugh> like maybe singularly just in me and I'm kind of seen as being a little crazy for that or like that I don't understand and how could, like it's a betrayal in some way. In my mind I'm like, can't you see what's happening in the larger world? You know? And so I think that's something I tried to kind of put through the book, that kind of disconnect of the way people think about guns as being sort of back in the Annie time, like we have to feed ourselves and we have to protect ourselves. And it's like, no actually it's gotten really out of control. You know? Like actually that's not what people are doing with guns anymore and why are we still holding so tight to this idea that guns are necessary? It's just baffling.

Laura Maylene Walter (18:14):
Well speaking of your family, can you tell us a bit about your mother being a sharpshooter? Because that is, you know, not many people can say that and I'm just curious, I don't know much about that at all. So tell us like what that means and what she did.

Sara Moore Wagner (18:26):
Yeah, she competed, I mean she had a lot of trophies and a lot of awards and a cool vest that's still actually hanging in my closet that she competed in a lot of different competitions across the United States really. And she just was very good at hitting a target, which that's another area that I started thinking about and it made me feel that kind of confusing disconnect because also part of this book is about the murder of her mother and grandmother by her grandfather or her step-grandfather who is one of the ones who taught her how to use a gun. And she was there at the time and she, as I was writing this and over Covid started to open up to me about, you know, her learning to shoot and her sharp shooting career and then also about the murder of her mother because of this book that came out from a man called VIOLENCE IN THE VALLEY.

Sara Moore Wagner (19:22):
The police officer who worked the case came out with a book that had like photographs, a description of the murder and had pictures about how there were even like bullet holes in the mirror at the bottom of the stairs from where my mother was like running away with her sisters trying to escape. And so I'm like, you see what guns do, but then it, it just, it feels a lot like Annie Oakley to me in her trauma and her experience with "the wolves" and her desire to protect herself that sometimes a gun can mean different things to different people. So to my mom, I think it was kind of this empowering sportsmanship type thing like it was to Annie, but it's like how can you, how can you and your mind separate this from like the trauma and like what people do with guns when you've seen that firsthand. And that was kind of the central, I think things that kept me going through the story was this question of like how does this even make sense?

Laura Maylene Walter (20:14):
You have a poem titled "At the Annie Oakley Festival There are So Many Trump 2024 Banners," which just I would like to hear about the Annie Oakley Festival more broadly. So can you talk a bit about that?

Sara Moore Wagner (20:28):
Yeah, I mean the Annie Oakley Festival's amazing. It's in July so I really suggest everyone goes because it's really...like the Annie Oakley Foundation and Center that is responsible for her research, they're fantastic. They put this on from the Garst Center, there's a little bus that takes you around to all her locations. Girls come and they compete to be Little Miss Annie Oakley and they shoot and they stand on horses and they do all these tricks. It's actually really small. Like anytime I've been, it's not like your normal festival where there are tons of people, it's like me and my kids and a few people, but it's really cool. But what I noticed was both times that I've been in the back, there's like booths set up to sell things, you know, flea market-y kind of booths and other things like that. And just huge banners with those pictures of Donald Trump with like the machine gun and like shirtless. Have you seen those?

Laura Maylene Walter (21:27):
I'm <laugh> trying to erase my memory right now of it. Yeah.

Sara Moore Wagner (21:32):
Yes. It was just baffling to me because it's like mostly women who are the researchers for Annie Oakley and little girls who are doing these kind of competitions and it feels very kind of safe and family friendly and then you're, you're like confronted with this and it feels very menacing and male and overwhelming and it made me think like what would even Annie Oakley think of this? I have no idea.

Laura Maylene Walter (21:57):
Yeah, no, that's what I was just thinking too. I mean obviously we can't pluck someone from history and put them in our modern day. We don't know what she would be like. I can say though, I'd love to see her social media presence because she was publishing full articles insulting the appearance of her rivals. Like she would be wild online <laugh>.

Sara Moore Wagner (22:14):
She would!

Laura Maylene Walter (22:14):
Yeah. But yeah, like who knows what her politics would be in today's modern world. It would be really interesting. But yeah, it speaks to a lot that I see in your book as well about the concept of fame and American celebrity and how we project what we want to see on these famous figures. I'm sure a lot of people at the festival thought that Annie Oakley would be a Trump supporter, so it's fascinating. Yeah.

Sara Moore Wagner (22:36):
And maybe she, I mean there are a lot of things about Buffalo Bill actually that that whole cult of personality and just the way that Buffalo Bill also just kind of made up his own story and said what he was and had people write novels about him and people just kind of blindly followed in the cult of Buffalo Bill.

Laura Maylene Walter (22:55):
Interesting. Yeah, a lot of parallels. Fascinating. Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about any other research you did for this book? So visiting her birthplace and the festival, but what else did you do for research?

Sara Moore Wagner (23:10):
Well the two of the books that were most influential to me were a book called THE COLONEL AND LITTLE MISSIE, which I've kind of listed these in the back of my book. But I found interestingly enough, most of the books about Annie Oakley are written for children. It was very difficult to find like biographies written for an adult audience, you know, because she made herself so simple in a way. She was very palatable for children and actually Buffalo Bill used her to be like, oh kids and women who are all simple can like use a gun, it's okay.

Laura Maylene Walter (23:48):
<laugh> Great.

Sara Moore Wagner (23:49):
So. I think she gets really simplified. But THE COLONEL AND LITTLE MISSIE...it's called THE COLONEL AND LITTLE MISSIE: BUFFALO BILL, ANNIE OAKLEY, AND THE BEGINNINGS OF SUPERSTARDOM IN AMERICA that's by Larry McMurtry. That was a really good book for me to kind of see her from an adult angle and most of the things are through Buffalo Bill to her, to give that kind of portrait that's more complicated. Another really good one was BLOOD BROTHERS: THE STORY OF A STRANGE FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN SITTING BULL AND BUFFALO BILL and that's by Deanne Stillman. That book is phenomenal and gave me a lot of information, but I did read a lot of those children's books about Annie, the dime store novels, the comics, the things that made her into a myth. I would put ANNIE GET YOUR GUN on in the background because I wanted to be immersed in the story that we tell about Annie Oakley, which is kind of different from her. But I also, the Garst Museum has put together her writings that she did for newspapers as her autobiography and that's as far as I know, the only place you can buy that. But also it has Frank Butler, her husband's writings and his poems for her.

Laura Maylene Walter (24:53):
What'd you think of his poetry?

Sara Moore Wagner (24:57):
Oh my goodness. I mean he was very cheesy <laugh>. The thing that struck me was how often he would call her like little girl, little fairy.

Laura Maylene Walter (25:06):
Ohhh, don't love that.

Sara Moore Wagner (25:09):
Yeah, this feels weird. Especially with the age difference.

Laura Maylene Walter (25:12):
Yeah. How much older than her was he?

Sara Moore Wagner (25:15):
He was like 28 I think and she was like 16 and he had already had a marriage that he had abandoned...with children. I mean we think about that and then we think about he did like just let her be the star. I mean he was the sharpshooter too and he was perfectly happy to kind of step back and handle the business for her and like be a devotee.

Laura Maylene Walter (25:40):
The bar is low, especially for men at that time. But that is, I mean that is good, right, that he kind of celebrated her skill and let her be the star. And it is interesting in ANNIE GET YOUR GUN that it doesn't end that way. It's with her like losing on purpose to ingratiate herself, which is sort of depressing that that's, you know.

Sara Moore Wagner (25:59):
I know!

Laura Maylene Walter (25:59):
How that story was told. Yeah, and by the way, for listeners, I'll link to everything including some information about some of these resources in our show notes. But you know, ANNIE GET YOUR GUN...I had to re-familiarize myself with the production of that movie and I had either didn't know or forgot that there was a lot of drama with the production of...Judy Garland was originally meant to play Annie and ended up getting fired after a lot of conflicts. I feel like there's just drama packed in every inch of Annie Oakley's story, which is great for writers. So.

Sara Moore Wagner (26:29):
It is <laugh>.

Laura Maylene Walter (26:31):
Yeah. Is there a favorite story about Annie's life that you'd like to share? Just an anecdote or a story about her that you really love or found interesting?

Sara Moore Wagner (26:40):
I just love, and I wrote a poem about it too. I love to think about her. I just went to Paris and I did a reading of this Annie Oakley book there, which was really, really cool for me.

Laura Maylene Walter (26:51):
Amazing.

Sara Moore Wagner (26:52):
Yeah. And I love to think about Annie Oakley in Paris in 1889 and in Europe in general, like when she went and performed for Queen Victoria, they were all just so impressed with her and she was kind of very in their face like we don't respect men in America. The women go first <laugh>. You know, she was very like <laugh>. So I love her just thinking about her in Europe being representative of this kind of wildness. And then also in Paris somebody asked to like buy her for marriage and she shot his picture apart <laugh> and she, she might've been one of the first ones to climb the Eiffel Tower and she went to the top of Mount Vesuvius and she was writing about all of these books that she was reading, which is not something that we think about with Annie Oakley like reading Shakespeare and all of these kind of works of literature to try to understand the world better. We like to make her very simple, like I said. And so I think it's interesting to take her outside of America and give her more agency and see how powerful that she was, you know, in Europe, in Paris, all of that. That was kind of exciting for me to learn.

Laura Maylene Walter (28:05):
Yeah, it's true when you think of Annie Oakley, the average person doesn't think of her in Paris, right? They think of her like out on the dusty range or something shooting her rifle. Yeah, I love that story too about the marriage proposal that she shot the man's picture. Where was it...you excerpted the description in your book where his brains should have been or something. It was also an insult and then she mailed it back to him and saying she declined, which was great.

Sara Moore Wagner (28:29):
She declined, but I think that was her own words. Yeah, she was like, no!

Laura Maylene Walter (28:33):
I suppose he knew she was married and just didn't care.

Sara Moore Wagner (28:36):
Yeah.

Laura Maylene Walter (28:36):
I don't know. Not that that's the issue here, but that's really funny. Yeah. Well we were talking a little bit before we started recording about how by writing this book and publishing this book, you're sort of considered an Annie Oakley expert now. And I'm just curious what has that been like? How do you feel about that, that now you know, as a poet now it's almost as if you're also an expert? Well you are an expert on Annie Oakley, so how do you feel about that and how do you approach that?

Sara Moore Wagner (29:00):
It's strange because I, I think she has a little bit of a cult following, so I worry, you know, the things that I'm saying about Annie are critical a lot of the time. You know, clearly I like her too and I think she's hilarious in a lot of the things that she did. You know, she captivated me in a lot of ways, but in a way that made me want to kind of tear her apart I guess. But you know, not so much that she doesn't survive it, but I wonder about that and about her...I don't know that I mentioned she sunk a lot of her money into lawsuits towards the end of her life suing the newspapers because they had come out with a story that she stole a man's pants to buy cocaine and that she was in jail. But it was actually a woman who looked just like her.

Sara Moore Wagner (29:45):
I mean I don't know how much she looked like her, but the newspapers kind of ran away with that and said, oh, Annie Oakley is a coke addict and thief and all of this. And so she sunk I think the majority of her money into fighting these newspapers, an impossible campaign. Like it was impossible for her to win. She should have just let it go, you know. But she was like, I have to keep my reputation. So I think about that sometimes when I'm talking about her because I don't want to call her a coke addict who stole a mans pants <laugh>. Because she wasn't. Because she is a real person, but I also do, or she was a real person. I also do represent that she's also not a real person. Like she's also ANNIE GET YOUR GUN is not about Annie at all.

Laura Maylene Walter (30:31):
Right, right. That's fiction.

Sara Moore Wagner (30:33):
Yeah.

Laura Maylene Walter (30:33):
Based on her life.

Sara Moore Wagner (30:33):
And that was even a stage name, like she's Phoebe Ann Moses or Mosey because nobody can agree on what her actual last name was either. So.

Laura Maylene Walter (30:41):
Oh that's interesting. Even her name is up for debate. That's yeah.

Sara Moore Wagner (30:45):
Yeah. I think that's the thing that gets me is I'm like, can anyone be an expert on her and accept her?

Laura Maylene Walter (30:51):
It's like you can be an expert on all the stories surrounding her, right? And like what information is out there and then the question is what's real and what's not. We might never never know those answers.

Sara Moore Wagner (31:02):
Yeah. Cause she only also appears on like two census documents ever.

Laura Maylene Walter (31:07):
Really. Huh. What was that about? <Laugh>

Sara Moore Wagner (31:10):
I don't know. Yeah. And so I think for me the biggest thing that happened was I was talking to Brenda Arnett who's like the lead researcher at the Garst Museum and she's like, you know what you're talking about. And I'm like, okay, <laugh>. Like I still don't feel that I know exactly. And I think it's impossible, like I said, about something that's so fuzzy and so also deeply ingrained into the fabric of America.

Laura Maylene Walter (31:34):
Yeah, absolutely. Well if we could transition a little bit to talking about writing and poetry, because I know we have a lot of aspiring poets who listen to this podcast. I'm wondering if you could sort of give an overview for people who might be working on their first poetry collection or who might be a little newer, like earlier on in their journeys to publishing. You've published three full length books and also some chap books and LADY WING SHOT by the way is the winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize and your full length collections have won prizes. Can you talk a bit about that to introduce listeners to the current poetry landscape and how contests and prizes tend to come into play for that?

Sara Moore Wagner (32:15):
It's interesting because I think people often approach putting a full length book of poetry together, different ways. I know for a long time, it was just kind of a loose collection of poems and I've heard a lot of people who are like, why do we have to be so themed? You know. Now like, can't we just have these loose collections? But the way I approach putting a collection together is the same way I approach putting a poem together. I want everything to be thought out, the placement of each poem to be like the placement of each line in a poem and for it to kind of build to something for it to have those kind of leaps and things like that and layers through it is important to me. So that's the way I've approached collecting my books. It didn't start like that. My first book SWAN WIFE was just a collection of poems I'd written for like 10 years that I was trying to force into some kind of order <laugh> that made sense.

Sara Moore Wagner (33:15):
And it went from like when I was born to when I was married, it was like a lot of different things and it was too much. So it helps for me to kind of break things apart by theme, shuffle them around, see what's working, see what has an arc. And so SWAN WIFE eventually became focused on one year, even though the poem spanned a lot more. I kind of fitted into this narrative of the first year of marriage and then the poems that came out of that became HILLYBILLY MADONNA, which was focused on childhood and opioids and Appalachia. And my third book LADY WING SHOT here just kind of came organically as I was writing through Annie's life. So. But if you have this kind of massive poems, basically going and thinking about the themes and possible arcs and the way that you might organize those is if they were kind of lines in a single poem is a nice way to approach it.

Sara Moore Wagner (34:03):
Especially when we think about the contest system, which the landscape of poetry now is difficult. I'm an editor, I'm managing editor now of Driftwood, which published my book HILLYBILL MADONNA. And since I've come on there, I'm like, how did I ever win anything? I have no idea. You know, <laugh> because there's so much, there's so many books and they're so good. What you want to do is make sure that someone can see what you're doing right away, that you know what you're doing and that someone can see it and that there's work into it. Because that'll make someone keep reading, keep trying to discover. And the more complexity you can get in there, the more surprising you can be that's going to kind of catch an editor's eye. But yeah, there's just a lot out there and whatever you can do to show like this is something that should move forward, do it.

Laura Maylene Walter (34:53):
Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to ask about your work with Driftwood Press. Can you tell us a little more about that? Are you usually reading full manuscripts for the contest and what else have you learned by? Because I know I've read for some short story collection contest before and it is very eye-opening to see sort of trends of what people are submitting, what people might be doing really wrong, and ultimately how many great manuscripts there are that someone is going to have to choose ultimately the one winner. So what else have you learned through that process?

Sara Moore Wagner (35:22):
As managing editor, I kind of manage a team of poetry editors. I also will read some first round submissions, but right now we're doing a chap book contest, which is judged by Diane Seuss, who you know, won the Pulitzer Prize. So everybody's submitting to that. We're going to get, we're going to get probably thousands of submissions. So what will happen with that then is that my poetry editors will kind of give me their top 10% and then I'll have to give her 10 of those to judge from. So I'll have to maybe cull a hundred down to 10. So it's a lot of reading. I read full length too. I've just picked my first full length collection by Jessica Rae Bergamino, which is really cool. It's about Nancy Drew and girlhood and...

Laura Maylene Walter (36:07):
Oh really?

Sara Moore Wagner (36:08):
Instrumental and cool. Yeah, it's very neat. And that one, it was hard because I had maybe like five that I was like, these are all good. Like, I don't know, I could just throw a dart, you know? So for me it was then going to my other editors and being like, okay, everybody just bowed on this and if we get a consensus, it depends on how many editors there are. If it's one editor, I don't see how it can't be just based on I woke up and and have a feeling.

Laura Maylene Walter (36:35):
Right, right.

Sara Moore Wagner (36:36):
There's so much good stuff out there. It's made me really think differently about rejection in that way too. Like it makes me feel differently about acceptance and rejection. It's like, well whatever I did was not what five other people had also done at that time. Or just somebody had something for breakfast that made them think about <laugh> my poem or something. And that's why I won. I mean I know that Jessica's book is amazing, but I mean it just was like something that made us all be like, okay. And anything else could have been it too. I've seen so many people get down like, oh my book's not getting published, it means I'm terrible and no.

Laura Maylene Walter (37:14):
Yeah, it's not personal, it's just there's so much out there and yeah. Yeah, definitely working on the other side as an editor really teaches you how difficult it can be. And I mean all writers can do is keep improving their work and if you happen to land on a concept or something that's just really working and is really holding together, it can make it harder for the editors to say no. So that's, that's always my goal as a writer. Like whether it's a residency application or or whatever, send it in in a way where I make them want to say yes, you know? So.

Sara Moore Wagner (37:46):
And also it's about the individual editor because I know editors who love clarity in poetry, I love complicated messiness, you know, like the messier and weirder you are the more I'm going to like it. And other people hate that. So.

Laura Maylene Walter (38:00):
Yeah, it comes down to, you know, everyone has their own personal like taste and biases and yeah, yeah. Well on the other side of publishing poetry, beyond just full length books, there's publishing individual poems and journals and a lot of these poems in your book were published in journals. First, can you talk about that, your experience with submitting to journals? What's your kind of philosophy on approaching that? Are you someone who stockpiles the work and does a lot of submissions? Are you doing it slowly over time? Because as any writer who has submitted to journals knows that can feel like a full-time job sometimes and it can take so long to hear back. So how do you approach submitting to journals?

Sara Moore Wagner (38:36):
The last few years, I haven't been as called it hustling as much as I was. I mean this book, it has a few, but not nearly as much as SWAN WIFE and HILLBILLY MADONNA. Almost all of the poems, especially in HILLBILLY MADONNA were in journals. For me, as someone who I don't have a lot of like big university and writer connections, you know, I needed people to know that I was taking this serious and that I was, I needed people to know who I was, you know? So journals not only gave me a platform for that, they also gave me a space when my books did come out for reviews for an audience. And the thing about poetry is we don't have a built-in audience at all. You know, it's only other poets really most of the time who are reading poetry. So the more work that's published in journals, the more people will be interested or curious about your book is how I see it. It also is kind of a trial by fire for the individual poems. So if my individual poems are not getting any attention at journals, I might kind of tweak what I'm doing or think about like, is this boring? You know? Annie on the other hand, didn't get a lot of attention from journal publications, I think because sometimes in works like this, the individual poems need the other poems around them.

Laura Maylene Walter (40:00):
Yeah I can see that.

Sara Moore Wagner (40:00):
I think it depends on the book you're writing. If the poems are more standalone, then I think as many journals as you can publish in before you publish the book, the better for marketing and everything else. Publicity, all that.

Laura Maylene Walter (40:12):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I love the individual poems in this collection so much just individually, but there is a richness when it's read, you know, cover to cover all the poems together, really tell a story. Absolutely. Well, we are about out of time, so I think for my last question, I'll make it a quick two-parter, which is, first of all, do you have a favorite independent bookstore you like to recommend people buy LADY WING SHOT or any other books? And also Annie Oakley kind of was your obsession for a while and and it led to this book. Do you have any other obsessions or subjects you just want to hint at a little bit of what you might be working on next or interested in next?

Sara Moore Wagner (40:52):
Well, the bookstore I'll recommend is Joseph-Beth Booksellers, which is here in Cincinnati right next to Oakley, which <laugh> is good for Annie Oakley. You can go to Joseph-Beth and then you can go over to Oakley, which some people say she took her name from. Some people say she took it from the man who bought her a train ticket. Again, there's another case where who knows <laugh>. Yeah, so I have discovered that I just went to Romania to teach a study abroad about Dracula that Bram Stoker and Annie Oakley were likely in the same places at the same time. He came to America and definitely saw the Wild West Show. And she was in London and he was at a coach with his master, Henry Irving and Buffalo Bill.

Laura Maylene Walter (41:36):
Wow.

Sara Moore Wagner (41:36):
And Annie is maybe not in her grave, <laugh>.

Laura Maylene Walter (41:40):
Wait, what? <Laugh>, what does that mean?

Sara Moore Wagner (41:44):
She's definitely not in her grave. She might be ashes at the shoulder of her husband, Frank in his coffin. But this is giving me all kinds of ideas.

Laura Maylene Walter (41:54):
Yeah, there's some crossover there with Dracula and hmm.

Sara Moore Wagner (41:58):
My deep research. And so folklore and Bram Stoker and Wild West Show, that'll just give you a hint.

Laura Maylene Walter (42:05):
Wow. You know, we started this interview with Annie Oakley and we ended with Dracula, which I did not expect, and that is my favorite kind of interview. So Sara, thank you so much for sharing your poetry with us and sharing your interest in and questions about Annie Oakley. This has been a delight. Thank you so much.

Sara Moore Wagner (42:23):
Thank you.

Laura Maylene Walter (42:34):
Page Count is presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate and leave a review for Page Count wherever you get your podcast. Learn more online or find a transcript of this episode at ohiocenterforthebook.org. Follow us on Instagram @ohiocenterforthebook or find us on Facebook. If you'd like to get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org and put 'podcast' in the subject line. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back in two weeks for another chapter of Page Count.