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Hoosier poet Shari Wagner with two of her books.
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I first heard of
Shari Wagner last year when Sue Rekenthaler used her poem The
Farm Wife Turns Off the TV Evangelist as an opening chalice lighting for a Tree of Life U.U. Congregation Social
Justice Team meeting. It was an apt
pick for Sue who is a hard working vegetable
farmer with her husband as well
as an accomplished poet herself. I was
impressed by the choice and determined to find out more about the author.
It
turns out that Wagner was Indiana’s
fifth Poet Laureate from 2016 to
2017 and is the author of three books
of poems: The Harmonist at Nightfall: Poems of Indiana, Evening
Chore and The Farm Wife’s Almanac.
She lived the life she writes about and embraces not only memoir pieces
of farm life, but work inspired by Indiana history,
and her love of nature and rural life.
But she is not the reflexive
conservative you might suspect from a writer with official approbation in a deeply red state. She has a social justice view point nurtured by
her education at Goshen College, a Mennonite school and cross cultural experiences in Somalia, Kenya, Haiti, and Honduras as well as domestically
with the with the Clifton-Choctaw of
Louisiana.
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Downtown Markle, Indiana in the 1950's. In the '60's Wagner's doctor father had an office on the street.
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She
was born in the Mennonite community of Goshen,
Indiana and grew up near Markle, a small town along the Wabash River, in Wells and Huntington
Counties. Her father, Dr. Gerald Miller,
was a family practitioner and her mother, Mary Mishler Miller, contributed
her leadership skills to many community projects such as editing the town’s monthly newspaper and planning
the annual town festival. Later she and
her father co-wrote Making the Rounds: Memoirs of a
Small-Town Doctor about the healthful
advantages of living in a place where people feel connected.
At
age 13 her family moved to the Horn of
Africa where her father served Mennonite mission hospital in Somalia
where she first started writing poems to
describe the guban—the desert area that surrounded the village. She would later write another memoir with her
father, A Hundred Camels: A Mission Doctor’s Sojourn and Murder Trial in
Somalia detailing his story of being tried for murder after a patient
died on his operating table.
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The woods near Wagner's childhood home inspired some of her earliest poetry and is now a nature preserve,
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Back
in Indiana, the ten-acre woods where
Shari had grown up seemed more mysterious
than she remembered and she started searching for similes and metaphors to
describe what she saw and felt. English
teachers at Norwell High School encouraged
her and a Poet-in-the-Schools gave her
a valuable introduction to the elements of poetry writing.
At
home town Goshen College she studied
with Nicholas Lindsay, the son of Illinois poet Vachel Lindsay and a poet
and carpenter who emphasized poetry’s
connections to song, place, and people.
While in school she published
two Pinchpenny Press volumes, When
the Walls Crumble which included a one-act
play, poetry, and a short story,
and Feathers
in My Hat, an anthology of
poetry by residents at Fountainview Place, a senior facility in Elkhart, Indiana. She was editor of The Record, the Goshen student newspaper
After
graduation and doing ethnographical work
with the Clifton-Choctaw which sparked an interest in Native American life, Wagner earned a Master of Fine Arts Degree (MFA)
in creative writing from Indiana University at Bloomington.
Wagner’s
poems have been featured by Garrison
Keillor on The Writer's Almanac and by former U.S.
Poet Lauriat Ted Kooser in his column,
American
Life in Poetry. Her poems have also appeared in North American Review, Shenandoah,
Black Warrior Review, Indiana
Review, The Christian Century, Poetry East, Valparaiso Poetry Review,
and many other journals. Her work
has been selected for the anthologies
Best American Nonrequired Reading, And
Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana, and A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in
Poetry..
She
has been nominated four times for Pushcart Prizes, and she has been
awarded two Creative Renewal Fellowships
from the Arts Counsel of Indianapolis,
as well as twelve grants from the Indiana Arts Commission. In 2009, her essay, Camels, Cowries & a Poem
for
Aisha, was co-winner of Shenandoah’s Carter Prize for the Essay.
Wagner
has taught creative writing and
memoir writing to people of all ages and backgrounds, in grade schools, colleges,
libraries, community centers, and nursing
homes. She is the editor of Returning: Stories from the Indianapolis
Senior Center and co-editor of I Remember: Creative Writing by Indianapolis
Youth, 2012. She teaches with
the Indiana Writers Center, where
she has been a faculty member since 2008.
She is also on the faculty
for the Religion, Spirituality, and the Arts: A Program of Indiana University-Purdue University's
Humanities Institute, taught at Bethany
Seminary’s theopoetics and writing program.
She
lives north of Indianapolis in Hamilton County with her husband Chuck Wagner, a poet and English teacher at Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School. They are the parents of two adult
daughters.
The
poems from The Farm Wife’s Almanac feature
a fictional speaker of who Wagner says “many of her stories
harken back to stories from my family tree. I peeled, sliced, and simmered
these accounts, adding this and that, till they turned into something new, like
the fruit preserves in the farm wife’s larder.”
The Farm Wife Turns Off the TV Evangelist
The Jesus I grew
up with
likes to be
outside.
If he’s not
fishing, he’s picking figs
or showing us
his mustard crop.
He prefers dusty
roads, the common sparrow,
and lilies of
the field.
When he knocks
on your door
holding a
lantern, you know it’s time
to buckle on
overshoes
and go with him
to feed the sheep.
But this
preacher, who looks straight
into the camera
and claims he knows
Jesus, says what
he wants
is for me to
believe in him
so he can come
inside.
That sounds
shifty to me.
Like a wolf with
his paws dipped in flour.
Jesus who heals
the blind
said we will
know a tree by its fruit.
—Shari
Wagner
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