Nerissa Nields

The Surprising Cure for My A.D.D.

My poem came from Sarah Sullivan’s prompt to “copy” the poem “Small Talk” by Kirsten Shu-yin Chen. As listeners to my band The Nields know, I am a big fan of borrowing/stealing the forms and tropes of others to make something new of my own.

By the way, I have been using that Pilates bar regularly, and to give credit where it’s due, I’ll say that I got it from a company called “Stretched Fusion.” They did not pay me to say this. And if they offered me big bucks for endorsing them, I would take the money and run.

Now and Then

Sing to me, Muse, of complicated men
Take me down to the ground floor, 
Repossess my all-access pass

Gratitude

For the month of November, I write a poem a day to support the efforts of the Center for New Americans. Please support my efforts by contributing to this wonderful organization via my pledge page.

The Road and The Vaster Wilds: Anti-Odysseys (Part 3 in an ongoing series)

By happenstance, I read Cormac McCarthy’s 2007 apocalyptic novel The Road and followed it with Lauren Groff’s latest, The Vaster Wilds. It was September, technically still summer, but both of these novels take place in life-threateningly cold weather, and each author made me feel that cold, that terror of being consumed by the natural world, an awareness of the scarcity of essential resources, the distrust of other human beings–even our intimates. As I revisit these novels today, fittingly on Halloween, when the air in Massachusetts has grown chill and my body continues to fight against that novel corona virus, I find myself sharing some of these primal fears. When the terrain is unknown and the enemy invisible, who and what can we trust?

Digression from Book Talk

When we were first starting out, of course, we were in our twenties, with the bodies and immune systems of oxen. We thought nothing of spending nights on peoples’ couches and floors and subsisting on peanut butter and jelly, coffee and pizza. After shows, we drove well past midnight and then rose in the morning and drove another eight hours to the next gig. Back then, touring seemed inevitable. We were here, we had wheels, there were roads, and there were venues. There were radio stations and local papers who would play our music and announce our shows and people would show up to watch us play. It didn’t occur to me for a long time that everything rested on our human bodies, and that these bodies were not after all, the bodies of oxen.

Odyssey-Influenced Novels: Family and Ghosts (Part 2 of an ongoing series)

Although my Road Novel is nowhere near as dark (nor literary) as either of these books, it does share the theme of characters who are as dead set as the Bundrens on getting to their desired destination. Like both Faulkner’s and Ward’s stories, mine contains multiple narrators, characters who each have their own story arcs. Though they judge each other for their monomanias, they each have their own obsessions which blind them to the insanity of their quests. All this gives me a great sense of empathy for the characters in these novels who stand by helplessly as their Odysseus/Anse/Leonie plunges into their foolish journey which will lead to pain and family fracture. There is a reason we read these stories year after year, millennium after millennium. There is a reason why we keep writing them, too.

All Roads Lead to Homer: Quest-Driven Novels, (Part 1)

I started these stories because I knew I had to write about my years on the road as part of another folk-rock band. What I experienced as an itinerant musician, traveling and performing with family members and lovers, gave me an education I couldn’t have paid for, an education that makes my time in an Ivy League institution pale in comparison. As Melville’s character Ishmael says of the whale ship he lived aboard for the span of Moby-Dick’s timeline, “It was my Yale College and my Harvard.” So was my Moby, the white fifteen-passenger Dodge Ram van we traveled within for the better part of the 1990s. 

River Roads

Here’s the strange thing about me: I can completely forget I’m a musician until I arrive at the gig. It’s as though that part of me is a set of clothes for another season, kept in a moth-proof box in the attic, out of mind until the weather changes.

Barbie, Barbi and Me

…what woman born in the ‘60s could possibly resist a Gerwig/Baumbach treatment of that iconic, maddening, perfect representation of our twisted ideas of what girls were supposed to aspire to be?