91探花

Program Coordinator and Associate Instructor for Rhetoric Catherine Pritchard Childress is releasing her first full-length book, the poetry collection “Outside the Frame,” on Tuesday, April 18.

This milestone is a long time coming for Childress, who said some of the poems that will be published in this collection are nearly 10 years old. Despite the years of personal, professional, and artistic growth and development Childress has experienced in the meantime, she said much of her voice and the topics she addresses in her work have remained consistent.

As the daughter of a Baptist minister, Childress said her religious upbringing has had a significant influence on her work. In “Outside the Frame” Childress uses poetry to explore the voices and personas of biblical women, an “obsession” of hers she said began in graduate school when she wrote a poem from the perspective of Lot’s wife, the disobedient woman who was turned into a pillar of salt in the Book of Genesis.

“It became not just about her, but about me, about women that I knew, about my upbringing, so then that did become a bit of an obsession,” Childress said. “All those biblical women, and all the things that came up for me while writing them could have been about any woman. Are about any woman. I do tend to write about feelings that are gendered in some ways.”

While the collection features many poems sharing the perspectives of oft forgotten or misrepresented women, Childress said another section of poems in the book highlight flashbulb memories, whether real or imagined, from childhood, and shine a light on growing up in Appalachia, particularly as a young girl.

Childress arranged the book by printing out each poem and laying them on her floor, trying to fit together the puzzle pieces that would give the book its structure and flow. Throughout this process she wondered if these two halves could come together to make a cohesive whole and if they made sense as one collection. Soon enough, however, the connecting thread became clear to her.

“I realized that they did speak to each other, because part of growing up in Appalachia had to do with women’s roles and the way women should function in those families, or the way women didn’t function in those families,” Childress said. “Those poems were working together, and I think thinking about women and their roles is the common thread.”

Childress said that even though she sees a connecting thread throughout the pieces in the book, one of her favorite things about poetry as an artistic medium is that each poem can be interpreted in a different way for each reader. Within the limited space of a poem, Childress enjoys the process of paying close attention to her word choice and breaking down how words and phrases can be interpreted on different levels. The possibility of language in a poem is expansive, despite the minimal words on the page, and Childress hopes that each reader will develop their own relationship with her work.

She also brings this philosophy into the classroom when teaching poetry, encouraging her students to understand and process the words on the page while recognizing that those words can mean different things and be interpreted differently from person to person. She traces this idea back to a philosophy preached by one of her professors in graduate school: “a poem can be more than the words on the page, but not other than.”

Lees-91探花 students, faculty, and staff will have the opportunity to build their own interpretations of Childress’ work when she delivers a reading from “Outside the Frame” at 4 p.m. on Monday, April 24. The reading will be held in Evans Auditorium in Cannon Student Center and will allow guests to hear local poetry and enjoy an evening in celebration of Childress and her work.