Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Thirteen Tales from the Archives of Love
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.doreenstock.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 86847905
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n86847905
HEADING: Stock, Doreen
000 00363cz a2200133n 450
001 647417
005 20080611071506.0
008 860825n| acannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 86847905
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca01659989
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC |d DLC |d OCoLC
100 1_ |a Stock, Doreen
670 __ |a Her The politics of splendor, 1984: |b t.p. (Doreen Stock)
953 __ |a nf08 |b ed01
PERSONAL
Married; children: three.
EDUCATION:Attended the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, poet, essayist, editor, translator, publisher, and memoirist. D’Aurora Press, editor and publisher.
WRITINGS
Also author of the memoirs Five: The Transcript of a Journey, The Bookcase, and My Name is Y; the poetry collections Memorial Service and Poems of Arad; and the essay collection On Leaving Jerusalem: Prose of a Traveling Nature.
SIDELIGHTS
Doreen Stock is a poet, essayist, and memoirist who writes creative nonfiction “from the feminine point of view,” and has been doing so for some thirty years, noted a writer on the Book Passage website. She served as an editor and publisher for D’Aurora Press, a small press publisher, and has been a translator.
She is the author of several poetry collections, including collections Memorial Service and Poems of Arad. Her memoirs include Five: The Transcript of a Journey, The Bookcase, and My Name is Y. She also wrote the essay collection On Leaving Jerusalem: Prose of a Traveling Nature.
In Place of Me
In Place of Me is a collection of Stock’s poetry selected and edited by Jack Hirschman, a noted poet and social activist who has also served as poet laureate of the city of San Francisco, California. The book is a “rousing retrospective of the more recent work of a prolific poet, by turns wide-ranging and piercing,” commented a Kirkus Reviews writer. Throughout the book, Stock “she deals with heavy themes—death, war, religion—and yet never lets them become ponderous,” and always considering these themes in terms of what they mean to real people, the Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked.
For example, the poem “Cho” concerns the April, 2007 shooting at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). In this incident, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people at the school’s Blacksburg, Virginia campus. “The role of a poet in his/her society is being addressed here” in this poem, Stock commented in an interview in San Francisco Book Review. “I feel that my own role is to witness the trauma in its emotional intensity and try to glean meaning as well as memorialize the fallen. Poets are part of the national utterance. We are not journalists, but we must try to mirror the times in which we live,” Stock further stated. Other poems address significant social issues, such as “Redeemed Criminal Being Executed,” which is about the 2005 execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams, known as the founder of the Crips gang but who was said to have reformed in prison.
Three Tales from the Archives of Love
Three Tales from the Archives of Love is a collection of three novellas “drawn from the rich soil of Jewish history,” observed a Kirkus Reviews contributor. The stories are based on three sources, each of which provides some brief background on the lives of a woman of the time. They include two letters from medieval Europe, an inscription in stone from Rome, and a collection of papyri from ancient Egypt.
The first story involves a woman who converted to Judaism and who has to maintain her household after her husband dies. The second concerns a woman from Jerusalem who is captured and sent to Rome after the Great Temple falls. The third is about a Jewish slave to successfully builds a life for herself after becoming the wife of a Jewish priest. Stock “breathes life and energy into the narratives these artifacts imply,” commented the Kirkus Reviews writer, who concluded, “These stories about remarkable women deliver an elegant blend of history and art.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2015, review of In Place of Me; February 1, 2018, review of Three Tales from the Archives of Love.
ONLINE
Book Passage, http://www.bookpassage.com/ (June 26, 2018), biography of Doreen Stock.
San Francisco Book Review, http://www.sanfranciscobookreview.com/ (July 28, 2018), “Doreen Stock, Author if In Place of Me,” interview with Doreen Stock.
Doreen Stock is a poet, essayist, memoir practitioner, who has been exploring creative nonfiction for thirty plus years from the feminine point of view as a wife, mother of three, single human, and grandmother of ten. Her first book of poems The Politics of Splendor was part of a New American Writers exhibit at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
The Climb: Doreen Mogavero
By Suzanne McGee
It has been 34 years since Doreen Mogavero decided to transform her summer job working on the American Stock Exchange into a permanent position. "After a small family argument," she says, "I won." Decades later, Mogavero is one of the most senior women on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and cofounder and co-owner (with partner Jennifer Lee) of Mogavero, Lee & Co., the Big Board's only brokerage firm managed exclusively by women.
When I started working on the floor of the American Stock Exchange, I don't think I knew what I wanted to do with my life. It was just that I enjoyed it so much, even though the job was just ripping papers off the old Teletype machine and getting everyone's lunch at my father's firm. [Mogavero's father, William Earle, was a member of the American Stock Exchange.] At that time, you had to use hand signals to transmit and confirm orders, and I was very good at that. I had learned all the signals from my father when I was young. We would use them at the dinner table so that no one could tell what we were saying, and we would drive my mother crazy. So by the time I was down on the floor, I was fast and accurate. And that caught the eye of some guys at Ivan Boesky's firm, who asked me to come to work for them.
It was prestigious to work for Ivan then, in the mid-1970s. His firm was growing rapidly and doing cutting-edge trading, from risk arbitrage to options-related tax programs. At the time, it was very sophisticated. When the New York Stock Exchange opened a futures exchange a few years later, Ivan asked me if I wanted to come over and learn to trade [futures contracts tied to the value of Treasury] bonds and bills and currencies. I did that, and when the NYSE closed the futures floor, Ivan said, Go and work on the equities side of the floor. So that's how I became a member of the exchange in 1980.
That was a great job until the firm collapsed. [In the late 1980s, Boesky was banned for life from the securities business after pleading guilty to his part in a massive insider-trading scandal. He served two years in prison and was fined $100 million. ] There were serious offenses, obviously, and people were skeptical about traders who had worked with Ivan. It was a difficult period. But because I knew a lot of people from my years with Boesky, a two-dollar broker [a NYSE floor broker who executes trades only for other brokers] asked me if I thought I could use those contacts to generate some business. I said I could try. He hired me, and I did. I stayed for only about a year and a half, though. I was bringing in a lot of business and felt I was not being paid enough. So in 1989, I decided that it was time to start my own firm.
I've been lucky--the men in my life have always been very supportive. Because no one ever told me I couldn't do anything, I didn't know there was anything I couldn't do. Your spouse is key when you start a business like this, because you're not going to be home a lot. So my husband--who was also a trader--and I put up the capital, and I went looking for a partner. Jennifer Lee had just had a baby, and her husband, who was also on the floor, said he thought she would be interested. We went out for dinner and that was that. We formed Mogavero, Lee.
Everyone on the exchange told me it was going to be impossible to get business. We were the new kids on the block, with almost no sales experience. But don't challenge me, because I will just try even harder to win. We called on everyone either of us had ever known for orders. Then the phone rang, and it was this great guy--a veteran trader. He said if we were brave enough to start the firm, he was brave enough to give us an order. The relationships we made in the early days have lasted ever since.
At first, we just wanted to make our salaries, and to see what we could do. The turning point came when we decided to reach out directly to buy-side institutions [such as mutual funds] for orders. This was the way to be paid properly for the work we did and to grow our business [by getting orders directly from the institutions placing them, rather than portions of orders from larger brokerage firms]. Our firm grew from there. At its largest, between 1998 and 2000, we had 21 people. And then the dot-com boom went bust, and we shrank. I never had to fire people; they just left when I couldn't pay bonuses. Today we have about a dozen people.
Since then, we have had to adjust to using electronic trading systems. We all decided that we would do whatever was necessary to get through the transition, but our profit margins have been squeezed. All of us on the trading floor are now competing with computers as well as with each other. For buy-side clients, the technology is the best thing in the world, because they can keep more control of orders. Today, the orders we receive are those that are too big or difficult for them to do themselves. We can keep going seamlessly even if the computers seize up.
My son, who is now 12, has grown up on the floor. His favorite person was [former exchange CEO Richard] Grasso; he would call him "Uncle Grasso." When I had to come to a meeting after hours, he would sit in our trading booth on the floor, and the guards would look after him and bring him potato chips.
Every year, it seems, my responsibilities at the exchange have grown, and there are more meetings. At every stage of my career, someone has seen something in me and given me a new kind of opportunity, starting with Ivan. I was here only a year before I was asked to be a floor official. I said yes; I'm interested in rules and seeing that things are done properly. I was invited to join the board of executives by John Reed after he became chairman in 2003.
Technology has leveled the playing field. There used to be an advantage for men, who were taller and bigger--people could see them, so they would trade with them. It was all running and shoving and yelling. As a woman, you had to push your way in and be a bit more feisty. My role model was Ellen Lee, a broker at Bache & Co. She was always poised; she did her job well without flipping out. But I don't think technology will ever mean that the trading floor will close. I am looking forward to the day when our new global footprint [the NYSE merged with Euronext in 2007] means that we can trade a whole range of stocks in their local currencies from our little booth on the floor. That is my dream. I will be the last one to leave the floor. If they closed it, they would have to drag me out the door kicking and screaming every inch of the way.
--As told to Suzanne McGee
Doreen Stock, Author of In Place of Me
by editor | Jul 28, 2015 | Author Interviews, Written
Doreen Stock, Author of In Place of Me
Doreen Stock is a poet, essayist and memoir practitioner who has been exploring creative nonfiction for thirty plus years from the feminine point of view as a wife, mother of three, single human, and grandmother of eleven. Her first book of poems, The Politics of Splendor, was part of a New American Writers exhibit at the Frankfurt Book Fair that year. It combined her own poetry and prose poems with her translation from the work of Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova.
While raising her three children, she wrote two book-length memoirs: FIVE: The Transcript of a Journey, detailing her family’s travels through Europe in a VW van, and My Name is Y, an anti-nuclear demonstrator’s family memoir. She was also a small press (D’Aurora Press) editor and publisher at that time.
The Bookcase, a memoir exploring totalitarianism and the self, was begun in Amsterdam in the eighties, and after that, Rani, describing Stock’s first five-month stay in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. During seven years of travel in the nineties, she composed several collection of poems, Memorial Service, Poems of Arad among them, and the essays which eventually became, On Leaving Jerusalem: Prose of a Traveling Nature.
Q. In Place of Me is a selection of your poems assembled and introduced by Jack Hirschman. Could you tell me a bit about your history with Hirschman, and how this collection came about?
A. Jack Hirschman was my lit professor at UCLA in the early sixties. Royce Hall was a huge lecture space, and he filled it completely with his dynamic oral readings of the novels he was teaching: Mrs. Dalloway, Nightwood, Ulysses, etc. Ten years later I chanced upon him reading his own stirring political poems and translations at Intersection for the Arts in North Beach, SF. and there began our long literary friendship, as we were both translating from the Russian at that time. Fast-forward thirty-five years. He was the featured reader at a series in Sausalito, heard a poem I read that night and afterward said, “Do you have any more of those?”
“Jack, I have a lot more!” He looked at me intently.
“Have you been true to the poem all of these years?”
“Yes.”
“Send me everything you’ve got!”
I spared him that request and sent only the most recent ten years of work, all collected into chapbooks, from which he created In Place of Me.
Q. Could you describe the North Beach literary scene of the 70’s and 80’s for us?
A. I was somewhat removed form the North Beach literary scene as I was living in Mill Valley, raising three young children. But I became part of Barbara Gravelle’s woman’s writing workshop at Intersection for the Arts, and when we had worked up enough steam in our poetry she got us a reading at The Coffee Gallery on Grant St. That night ruth weiss was the MC, and after the reading she came up to me to compliment me on my work. This was the beginning of another long literary friendship. I edited and published her work in Single Out, years later, as well as a translation from the Russian by Hirschman, titled simply Hunger. I also traveled to the readings at Intersection (which was then located in the heart of North Beach on Union Street) whenever I could, and it was there that I found George and Mary Oppen, as well as Stephen Kessler. These life-long friendships enriched my writing life, which was often solitary and sandwiched in between domestic duties. I began a reading series in Mill Valley at the library, and invited many North Beach writers to read there. One day I had all of North Beach spilling out of my little Mill Valley house to celebrate with my friend, Eugene Ruggles when he first read from his beautiful collection, A Lifeguard in the Snow.
Q. In the Introduction to ‘In Place of Me,’ Hirschman notes that he is especially moved by your poem for Tookie Williams, ‘Redeemed Criminal Being Executed,’ which he finds himself reading again and again. The poem features you not at the jail, but swimming in a lighted pool. What motivated this contrast?
A. I was part of a task force from my San Rafael synagogue to educate ourselves and demonstrate against capital punishment at San Quentin. We went whenever there was an execution by lethal injection and demonstrated until it was over. On the night of Tookie Williams’ execution there was a huge traffic jam on the way to the prison. I felt myself to be superfluous at such a scene and turned back to San Rafael, and my swimming pool at the local JCC. Thus this poem, unlike others I’ve written on the subject, was actually partially composed during that night swim, and the simultaneity evoked in it was real.
Q. The other poem that Hirschman notes in the Introduction, that I found especially haunting, was the poem “Cho,” about the Virginia Tech shooting. In it, you say “Carnage is not a word for a poem,/but that’s where we are…” Does this explain, in some way, your choice to write about tougher subject matter?
A. The role of a poet in his/her society is being addressed here. In addition to “the poet as cheerleader,” as happened at the Virginia Tech graduation that followed the massacre, I feel that my own role is to witness the trauma in its emotional intensity and try to glean meaning as well as memorialize the fallen. Poets are part of the national utterance. We are not journalists, but we must try to mirror the times in which we live.
Q. The poems in this collection are assembled in reverse date order, from most recent to earliest, except for the ending collection from 2009. Reading through your work in a retrospective way, how do you feel you’ve evolved?
A. In the nineties I was on the move a great deal, primarily healing myself from my divorce. Those earlier poems, written in seven years of travel, were generated in a wandering mode. They do not suffer from this, because in a certain way the naïveté of the journeyer can intensify the impact of a scene or event. But my later work, such as the two poems you mentioned previously, are more grounded in present American realities. Also, as I have grown, the politics of any given situation has become far more nuanced. I’m not sure that this is evident in my writing, however.
Q. You’ve worked as a translator, editor, and publisher. How have these many roles influenced your own work?
A. Literary translation has been my on-going private poetry workshop. What greater way is there to learn about language and the poem than to struggle with this endeavor? In addition, the women poets I’ve worked in, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Gabriela Mistral, and Alejandra Pizarnik are great teachers. Nothing enlarges perspective, suggests themes, ideas, and humbles one more than working in this way.
As for editing and publishing, these experiences have made me aware of the terrific amount of work, creativity and attention to detail necessary to produce even one such artifact… Long Live the Book!
Q. Some of your poems take place in Jerusalem—you’ve spent time in both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Can you talk about how your time there affected your work?
A. Again, literary friendships are the life blood of a writer’s life. I was fortunate to meet the writer, David Ehrlich, in his remarkable bookstore/café ‘Tmol Shilshom in Jerusalem, as well as many great Israeli writers and thinkers in the space he has created for them. But also, the two great Israeli cities you mention, very different from one another, have shown me their streets, their essences, their people. They are a part of my consciousness. In fact, an entire book of personal essays, On Leaving Jerusalem, Prose of a Traveling Nature, came from my time there.
Q. Although your poems travel from Jerusalem to Spain, they always come back to the Bay Area, as you are a local North Bay author. Has the Bay Area’s evolution affected you in any way?
A. I have a slightly mournful sense that we are becoming an on-line literary community due to the rise in housing costs (See Rebecca Solnit, The London Review, on this subject). But the vitality of the SF bay area writing scene is attested to by PoetryFlash, our local rag-become-electronic review/calendar. And I still feel a sense of community when I participate in events of The Marin Poetry Center (of which I was a founding member,) and when I go to Reader’s Café at Fort Mason, where Jack Hirschman still hosts a weekly reading series, and when I meet with monthly with a small response group of poets under the auspices of Jackie Kudler. Our local independent bookstore, Book Passage, has been invaluable in supporting independent publishers and creating a vibrant cross-pollination of writers and readers.
Q. Do you have a favorite poem from the collection that you can tell us about?
A. The title poem, “I Was Swimming.” Again, it is one of synchronicity. As the horrors of 9/11 were happening, I was taking my early morning swim. Then I went to check on my elderly mother, who was watching TV, and I found out about the enormity of what had happened. The title of this book, In Place of Me, refers, in part, to my feeling that all those who died that day were taking my place in an international drama that continues to unfold at this very moment…
Q. You’ve gone from being a writer, to a writing mother. You even traveled with your family across Europe in a VW van, and found time to write a memoir of that! What advice would you give to women out there trying to make time for their children and their writing?
A.
Keep a dream journal
Always know where your pen is. You can write on anything. (Sigh! Or your cellphone.)
Jack Hirschman: “Everytime you feel LIKE THAT, WRITE IT DOWN!”
George Oppen: “You will move the children in and out of your poems. THROUGH them.”
Translate your favorite poet into the language. You can start this at the kitchen table while the kids are doing homework…
Employ a babysitter if you need to, to get out to readings or get time, space to write.And find a location, like a café or coffee shop, outside of your domestic space that works for you to write in.
Q. Now that ‘In Place of Me’ has been published, what is up next for you?
A. I want to read In Place of Me to as many people as I can. I am trying to schedule readings in LA, St. Paul, Minn. (my birthplace), and NYC. Someday I would like to read it at ‘Tmol Shilshom in Jerusalem as well.
I want, also, to find a publisher for my historical novel, a triptych of novelettes based on Jewish artifacts: two parchment letters, a stone epigraph, and eight Egyptian papyri, which have been juxtaposed to resonate with one another. All three concern the lives of women.
And I’d like to find an editor/publisher for my next book of poems, Not Being Bombed.
Stock, Doreen: THREE TALES FROM THE
ARCHIVES OF LOVE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Stock, Doreen THREE TALES FROM THE ARCHIVES OF LOVE Norfolk Press (Indie Fiction) $None 1, 25 ISBN: 978-1-60052-144-7
A collection of novellas offers three tales drawn from the rich soil of Jewish history.
This book finds its origin in a handful of artifacts: a pair of letters from medieval Europe, a stone inscription from imperial Rome, and an
assortment of papyri from ancient Egypt. These treasures bear traces of the lives of a trio of extraordinary women: a convert to Judaism forced to
carry on after her husband's death; a Jerusalemite captured and sent to Rome after the fall of the Great Temple; and an Egyptian slave who builds
a family and a home with the Jewish priest who takes her as his bride. In this collection, Stock (In Place of Me, 2015, etc.) takes the stories--
whose contours are merely hinted at in the artifacts themselves--and fleshes them out, extrapolating lives and worlds from ancient etchings on
rock, paper, and parchment. For too long, the history of Jews (and gentiles, for that matter) has focused on men, and one of Stock's goals in
building out her tales is to give voices to the women whose lives made up so much of the rich tapestry of Judaism. As Senior Rabbi Stacy
Friedman writes in her liner notes, these voices have been "long suppressed by the larger currents of history." Stock's excavation, then, is an
extremely worthy project. But it's clear her fascination with these tales is not only political; it is also imaginative, and she breathes life and energy
into the narratives these artifacts imply ("The destruction of the Great Temple in Jerusalem flickered through her. Often when she closed her eyes
some part of the horror would rise up, tilting crazily then turning in her mind, until she seemed to be seeing it all under water"). A skilled prose
stylist, the author pulls off a delicate balancing act between the modern and the ancient; her rendering of these lives feels both contemporary and
of their own time. The enterprise's only weakness is its structure. Stock decides to set her stories in reverse chronological order, and the effect is a
bit confusing: presumably, the culmination of these tales comes in the experiences of Jewish women today, so it's a bit odd that the end of her
collection leaves readers on an island in the Nile two and a half millennia ago.
These stories about remarkable women deliver an elegant blend of history and art.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Stock, Doreen: THREE TALES FROM THE ARCHIVES OF LOVE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461327/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b480dfc9. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461327
Stock, Doreen: IN PLACE OF ME
Kirkus Reviews.
(Oct. 1, 2015):
COPYRIGHT 2015 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Stock, Doreen IN PLACE OF ME Self (Indie Poetry) $40.00 5, 18 ISBN: 978-0-9909203-0-4
A rousing retrospective of the more recent work of a prolific poet, by turns wide-ranging and piercing.Ezra Pound taught readers most succinctly
about the power of juxtaposition in his famous--and famously brief--1913 poem "In a Station of the Metro": "The apparition of these faces in the
crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough." By bringing together two unlikely images, Pound opened up new meanings in both, and the relationship
that links them remains tantalizingly mysterious. Such juxtaposition is one of the tools that Stock (Just Like in the Song of Songs, 2009, etc.) ably
wields in her new volume of selected verse, culled from just one decade of her work as a publishing poet. In "While the Men Prayed," for
example, Stock sets people at prayer next to a "large sabra cactus" with "yellow blossoms / which grew red and exploded / before my very eyes."
In "Torture," tiny jellyfish are compared with egg yolks "before / being broken into by the tine / of a fork." Most startlingly, in "Cho," the narrator
describes the moment that a charging deer collides with her automobile and then deftly shifts to reflections on the man who killed dozens at
Virginia Tech. This collection is thus a kaleidoscope of surprising images, arrayed in a pattern whose logic, while alluring, is sometimes elusive.
The volume pulls from more than a dozen different books, but unlike similar collections by others, it's organized in reverse chronological order,
so that readers see Stock's more recent work first, starting from 2008. (The final section, however, from 2009, is an exception to this rule.) This
idiosyncratic arrangement is an excellent decision, for it turns the reading experience into a process of excavation and lets Stock's mature work
serve as a heuristic for earlier offerings. Throughout, she deals with heavy themes--death, war, religion--and yet never lets them become
ponderous, instead situating them in the real lives of real people. For instance, she reflects on the murders of five homeless men while her
"laundry is in the machines down the street." Of course, the poet subtly reminds readers that laundry and murder exist in the same world--our
world. A forceful argument for Stock's growing relevance as a West Coast poet.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Stock, Doreen: IN PLACE OF ME." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2015. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A430104085/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=31ba02eb. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A430104085