Jackson County just had a poet, Laura Van Prooyen, stay at Brackenridge Corner to visit Gretchen Bernabei.
Upon first meeting over a handful of years ago out of the blue, they quickly learned they taught children and used similar methods, in addition to other ages.
Soon after, the pair wrote a book together, Text Structures From Poetry, Grades 4-12, published in 2020.
They’ve been friends since, and as Bernabei said, ‘the rest is history.’
Her books of poetry collections and awards can be found at the end of this article.
Van Prooyen’s poems are raw, at times sharp, and cover topics like childhood, marriage and motherhood. In person, she is soft-spoken but strong in choosing her words. When she speaks, it’s akin to her poems, which causes one to take time with her words.
“Sometimes I joke and say I have a short attention span,” she joked, “but what I love about poetry is how it makes you slow down and pay attention. It forces you to savor language and makes you pay attention to what you’re seeing and hearing and I was really
see POET OFFERS GUIDANCE TO OTHERS on page A8 drawn to that.
Laura Van Prooyen
“I’m a real contemplative person, I’m reflective, and that was something you could do that was really appealing to me,” she said.”
Initially thinking she was going to be a visual artist, Van Prooyen found she was writing in her spare time and not creating art in other ways. It began in her first semester of college when she was assigned Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.
“It was a big turning point. I transferred to another university and began taking poetry workshops, and realized it was something I liked to do,” she said. “I’m first gen, so I didn’t grow up reading or grow up in a big house of readers, but I was always scribbling in journals.”
Something Van Prooyen is very proud of is her work with a nonprofit out of Washington D.C., called Community Building Art Works, cbaw.org. This summer, the organization will change its name to Mission Belonging to better reflect its growth and inclusive programming. It began with veterans as a response to the pandemic, and now reaches healthcare workers as well.
“I’ve been doing that with them for four years now and I’m really interested in that at the moment: how reading and writing facilitate healing,” she said.
Community Building Art Works, or Mission Belonging, offers free workshops every single week, for writing, art, music, and more. On Fridays, there’s one that’s open to everyone, all one has to do is register for the program and a zoom link will arrive by email.
“It’s all about how art facilitates healing and combat loneliness,” Van Prooyen said. “All the programming is available, and everyone is invited. It’s not like someone will tell you, ‘you don’t belong here.’” Van Prooyen also founded Next Page Press, to give a home for poets who are trying to publish their second or third books. The press came from a place of difficulty she experienced, in addition to it being in the middle of the pandemic.
“After you have two books published you think, ‘this should be easier,’ but it wasn’t. The editor I worked with for my second book wanted to publish my third,” she said. “But when I was ready that editor wasn’t there anymore. It took me another three years to publish again.”
By ‘giving a home’ she means creating a place to give people the option to work with her again, so they don’t have to be pounding the pavement looking for a publisher, but she only publishes two titles a year.
She also does private mentoring and consulting, which can be found on her website. Van Prooyen has helped a nurse self-publish a book, and has been working with a physician for two years, or sometimes she’ll read someone’s manuscript and design something around that.
“Normally I assign reading and then they send me creative work and we’ll have a monthly exchange,” she said. “I used to teach in a low-residential MFA program, so I model what I do on that, kind of like the MFA without the degree. I get to know their work very closely and see their growth. So I do that with poetry and creative non-fiction, short form, but poetry is really the truer love.”
Van Prooyen hopes to visit Jackson County and Brackenridge Corner again during a longer stretch, but her days keep her busy. She is a visiting professor at Trinity, and will be for the next school year, as well as working on her chapbook.
“Sometimes I’ll go to an artist colony and give my work two or three weeks,” she said. “I try not to have expectations around the work, and just let it come.”
From San Antonio, Van Prooyen grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago, and has published three books of collections, in order: Inkblot and Altar, Our House Was On Fire, and Frances of the Wider Field. Her most recent was a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters Helen C. Smith award for best book of poetry, and her second book was the winner of the Robert McGovern Memorial Publication Prize.
She just signed a contract for a chapbook, which contains fewer poems than a full-length book, and will be released next year through FlowerSong Press, from the valley.
More can be found about her on her website, lauravanprooyen. com.
