Ragged Psalms: Mutual Interview, Rebecca Weigold and Lorette C. Luzajic

Ragged Psalms: Mutual Interview, Rebecca Weigold and Lorette C. Luzajic

Ragged Psalms
Rebecca Weigold and Lorette C. Luzajic
Cyberwit Books, 2026
Click here to view or purchase on Amazon.

​Lorette C. Luzajic: Tell us about your relationship to visual art. How did you become interested in ekphrasis? How does the art feed your poems and your writing practice in general?
 
Rebecca Weigold: My introduction to The Ekphrastic Review several years ago was my initiation into the wonderful world of ekphrasis. I found the art to be compelling and the writing, magical. Art soon became the primary inspiration for my writing, as well. As someone who struggles with mental health, poetry based on art is as therapeutic for me as gardening may be to someone else. When I consider a painting, it is as though I have an inner dialogue with the artist as therapist, challenging me to examine my thought life from other perspectives. A centuries-old painting can give new context modern-day experience. I almost always find a thread of commonality between the artist or the art and me.
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: Many of your poems are deeply imagined, taking the reader into a life outside of yours and theirs. Tell us about what the process is like for you when you take on another history or persona.
 
Rebecca Weigold: At times, the process of writing an ekphrastic poem is like drawing from my past in theatre. I sometimes think of the artist or subject in a painting as a character on the literary stage.
 
For example, the subject of my poem, “Aria for Aloise,”  is the artist, Aloise Corbaz. Aloise was schizophrenic and lived in an asylum. Her dream of being an opera singer inspired my poem based on her colourful drawing, Star of the Paris Opera. As someone familiar with mental illness, I channeled Aloise through that perspective. Having experienced a stay in a psychiatric institution, I understand how she may have yearned for the power to change her destiny from that of grim isolation to something exotic and grand. Artists like Aloise, especially those oppressed or subject to mental illness, deserve their art to be seen and their stories heard. I hope that through this poem in some small sense, I got to help Aloise be memorialized as the opera star she always wanted to be. 
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: Other poems are very personal and candid. Does writing or sharing these intimate pieces feel vulnerable or empowering?
 
Rebecca Weigold: I do struggle with vulnerability. It may take weeks to get a poem on the page that is profoundly personal. Certain poems, admittedly, feel risky to share. Sometimes I submit a finished poem before I make peace with the fact that it may disappoint. But ultimately telling certain truths is empowering. Releasing it to the world is freeing and in that, I find empowerment.
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: Many of your poems explore spiritual faith with a very honest range of emotions, combining questioning and certainty, celebration and confusion. Does writing poetry resolve this relationship for you? Does communicating your deepest questions and experiences bring you closer to God and to others on their journey?
 
Rebecca Weigold: My hope is that someone resonates with something in my expressions of Christian faith--the things I am sure of, or the things I am not. My certainty, as well as my questioning. I don’t know if the cynical aspect of my poetry necessarily brings readers closer to me, though. Calling God “fallible” may offend some, as may my poem “canned christianity,” which is an indictment of what I have heard called American “churchianity.” On the other hand, I feel confident there will be readers who identify. But that’s where loyalty to self comes in. Something must ring true to me, even if I feel unsure how it will be received. And as far as questioning and expressing confusion of my faith in my writing, I know God can handle my doubts, fears, and cynicism, and that is what matters to me most.
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: Is there a poem that was particularly challenging to write? Tell us what happened behind the scenes.
 
Rebecca Weigold: My heart is heavy with unwritten poems about my dad who passed away in 2019. Unresolved grief has made it impossible to write them right now. This frustrating, unmet longing has led to periods of creative drought. 
 
During one such episode, I used that time to write, “the female poets, captive of a vengeful mage,” a poem about writer’s block. I had remembered you telling me some time ago to give writer’s block the middle finger. I took that advice and that’s exactly what I did. Happily. Sometimes I just need to ride out the process knowing, eventually, the poem longing to be written will work its way out. In this case, mine just hasn’t yet.
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: What was your experience like working in collaboration with another poet? Can you share some of the challenges and benefits in the process of putting a book together with another writer?
 
Rebecca Weigold: Your initial invitation to collaborate on this book was an incredible honour. I have always admired you as both writer and mentor. Working with you was freeing and fulfilling. This being my first book, your guidance gave me permission to ignore anticipatory anxiety and fear of rejection. A mutual goal gave me clarity of purpose. I have some ADHD qualities and, had I been working on the book alone, it may not have materialized. So, the sense of accountability to someone was imperative. It kept me writing. The process was an exciting learning opportunity as well as endearing. Sharing my anxieties and accomplishments--including the celebration and confusion of my Christian faith mentioned earlier--with you, brought us closer as writers and dear friends.
 
I also want to mention that your contributions to the book absolutely wowed me. For example, the sensory details of the poem, “Golgotha,” with its references to the blood “you can’t imagine,” and “the weeping,” truly resonated with my core convictions. Likewise, the phrase, “the second substitute who stood in for us,” from your poem, “Judas,” articulated a powerful truth. These are just two examples that illustrate why I hold your writing in such esteem. 
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: What’s next for Rebecca Weigold? 
 
Rebecca Weigold: I am thrilled to have completed this project alongside you! What an absolute accomplishment and delight it was working together. The goal for my poetry is to contribute writing that resonates with the reader and offers fresh emotional insight. I want my poems to be prismatic, something impactful in a multi-faceted way. I hope to carry the momentum from this book forward in pursuit of my next project, whatever that may be. It means exploring more art, straying even further from my comfort zone, and taking more risks while staying loyal to myself. It is my hope what I have to contribute to the world of ekphrastic poetry continues to be of value to lovers of ekphrasis.

Rebecca with Ragged Psalms.

Rebecca Weigold: Is there a poem in the book, Ragged Psalms, that was autobiographical in nature and especially painful to write?
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: A lot of my poems are autobiographical. If some camps subscribe to the belief that “mature” poems should never be about the poet, I hold the opposite view. While imagined events, or someone else’s experiences are also crucial raw material for writers, the most important stories a writer can tell are her own.

It’s one feat to make up a love story or death story, another to put your pen in someone else’s shoes. It’s another thing again to hold space for your own true stories. It can be difficult and painful to put yourself on the page, but it connects you deeply to your readers, and vice versa. When we read someone’s real experiences we enter into a profound relationship with them. Not that every poem should just be a rant or diary venting. But it can be really tough to be honest with yourself.

All true poems and stories are embellished, altered, or composites, what they call “poetic license,” rather than word for word accounts of something. But even so, sharing one’s own heart, the painful,  embarrassing, petty, mean, stupid stuff, all of it, brings a certain vulnerability and authenticity that fosters intimacy between writers and readers. It’s a kind of connection that can hold up a mirror, as we are less alone than we think when we go through something that requires writing about.
 
There are many subjects that have been difficult to write about over my lifetime, but perhaps the most difficult one is my relationship with my mother, and the impact of her dark reign on my family. Even as an adult of 54 years old, almost two years after her passing, I am still terrified of her. 
 
“The Mask” is a fictional piece, but its heart is true. I don’t have a brother who was in the theatre, the premise of the vignette. But the effect of the maternal character on the people in the poem is true. “Swan Sisters” is much closer to actual events, recounting a memory of childhood with reasonable accuracy. Of course, being an adult now, with many years of therapy, and many other experiences related and unrelated to this one, gives me/the narrator the gift of context. The poem is about the self-absorption, theatricality, and triangulation tactics of a person of "the dark tetrad," the way her children are mere pawns in her drama, and how she must pit them against each other to compete for her love. The benefit of hindsight is that even if the wound feels fresh 40 years later, the writer is on to her, no longer a victim in the game she’s writing about.

Writing a poem like this is, of course, cathartic, but perhaps the most important thing about such a poem is that it is true, and there are countless others out there who know this very archetype and scenario that I am writing about here.  
 
Rebecca Weigold: Which of your poems in this book holds the most personal meaning to you and why?
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: “Mrs. Luzajic as Hebe” is a kind of “life flashing before your eyes” poem, reflecting on mortality, the experience of fighting breast cancer, and a lifetime of memory fragments, a poem for a poet friend who was fighting cancer, too. This is triply poignant because it is in a book written with you, who went through this battle right before it happened to me. Thinking about how cancer is everywhere, in one’s self and in one’s closest friends, is really overwhelming and frightening. But the poem is about the important things I learned: friendship is everything, and comes in unusual, unexpected ways and different forms. It’s a poem of gratitude to have friends who carry me, and for being able to see that every day is a gift.
 
Rebecca Weigold: I love the poem, "Mindemoya," about time spent on Manitoulin Island. How were you inspired to write this poem with its rich and lush imagery based on an abstract colour woodcut?
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: The cows in this artwork reminded me of the experience of seeing so many cows on my visit to the island, ambling through their routines. I was visiting an old friend on this magical island in northern Ontario. The power on the whole island went off while I was there. I’m such a city slicker, in contrast to my friend. I panic when the lights go out for five minutes or the phone battery dies. But my friend lives practically, prepared for emergencies. So the poem that came out was about friendship, and about those different personalities in a specific setting. That day, there was nothing to do but watch the cows and slow down, and the poem captures what we see when we slow down to contemplate our surroundings and the blessings we have already.
 
Rebecca Weigold: As an award-winning mixed media artist, how is creating your ekphrastic poems like creating collages?
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: I’ve come to realize lately that everything I do and am is a kind of collage process. It’s even the way I cook, eschewing recipes and following impulse and creativity: throwing a bit of this and a bit of that into the pot or salad bowl, contrasting with an unexpected seasoning or some fruits or seeds. Whether with words or images, I gather fragments and pieces, and put them together. The resulting juxtaposition presents possibilities and considerations from that particular combination, and then the pieces move again and show up in other stories, trying a new narrative on for size. Over time, my body of artworks has shown that there are motifs and symbols and themes that I return to over and over, imagery that mean something to me, and to viewers, that turns up in different scenarios repeatedly, cats, forget-me-nots, sacred hearts, hands, ducks, Frida Kahlo, candy. I notice that my stories and poems manifest this same phenomenon, recurring symbols and characters that weave in and out of different narrative possibilities.
 
Rebecca Weigold: Your story, "Marguerites," was selected for Best Microfiction 2026. Congratulations! I am fascinated by the phrase, "...an underlying thrum, something novel and neon wrestling at the staid gray seams...." This particular language and the sensual image of marguerites gives a fresh new way of looking at the complex relationship between three people. How did you write about so much happening subtextually in such a concise story?
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: Thanks so much. This prose poem was conjured straight out of the painting, of a woman smoking alone at a breakfast table. The subtext was palpable, tense with emotion, and I tried to capture that. I always see a painting as an invitation to go behind the scenes and find out more about the art and artist. Sometimes the poem or story is about what I find, and other times my own memories or imaginings end up in the drama. The painter, Elin Danielson-Gambogi, struggled with an affair that her husband had with a friend of hers, another artist. I imagined the painting in light of that conflict, something so personal and yet we all grapple with relationships, desire, choices. I didn’t want to say too much in this particular piece, so I let innuendo do the talking.
 
Rebecca Weigold: In your poem, "Walking After Midnight, you describe a scene: "Oh, there were times I felt as if I had no eyes at all, only heart, sleepwalking, feeling my way from one precipice to another." Have you ever felt this way about the writing process?
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: I think the fact that I feel too much is both the strength and weakness of my writing. Many writers are highly sensitive, oversensitive one might say unkindly, and from that very quality are driven to process and make sense of things through writing. Feeling things so intensely gives a writer the ability to notice and the drive to give a narrative to the drama or assign some kind of meaning to everything that happens. I don’t shy away from any emotion or experience, whether ebullient and joyful, or painful; I cop to my darkest fantasies and most embarrassing excesses, and I think that makes for rich and authentic poems that people can feel and relate to. It also gives me the tendency towards over-sharing, over dramatization, and heavy-handed sentimentality or related blunders. So yes, in a way, I feel this way about the writing process all the time! I hope what I have learned with time and experience is a little context, and to temper the intensity of the heart with complexity, motivation, contrast, and reason. I fear that’s not always the case, but I am a work in progress, like we all are.
 
Rebecca Weigold: What do you hope is the take-away for readers of this book?
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: This collection is a journey with a friend- you. A dialogue with art and with each other, a bond that shows the way different writers and personalities can take the same raw material and themes and reveal very different ways of thinking about them. Writing together is a kind of intimacy and a window into how friends, writers, strangers, might all experience the same subjects from a very different perspective. I hope those readers who find their way to this book will simply witness for a moment the things we have witnessed, feel the things we felt, and perhaps join the conversation by writing their own poems about art, illness, family, love and faith.
 

Weide 47, by Ewald Matare (Germany) 1947

Cows on Manitoulin Island. Photo by Lorette C. Luzajic.

Rebecca and Lorette

Star of the Paris Opera, by Aloïse Corbaz (Switzerland) 1954

Aria for Aloïse (An Opera in Two Acts)
 
1. Sing, Aloïse! Step out of your confinement,
adorned as Alceste in pink pastel peplos; 
daisy garland crowns your saffron rivulets
and a floweret falls to your breast.
Glorious magenta lips give rise to verse,
mezzo-soprano of Teatro La Fenice;
gold phiale in hand bears tokens of your 
love for Admeto: pink sapphire, blood-red 
garnet, encore lapis, intermezzo
tourmaline, and candlelight topaz.
Non, ce n’est point un sacrifice, you sing
No, it’s not a sacrifice, and trade
your life for his, as curtains fall. Generale
whose hand is at your breast, guides you to
gondola; you drift away from the
pali da casada as applause echoes
down ancient stone walls, frolics with 
moonlight on the Grand Canal.
Geraniums and Jasmine plunge from 
windows. Handkerchiefs fly from balconets.
 
     O Mio Aloïse, sing! Raise your arias,
     release them like a flutter of pink doves.
 
2. Sing, Aloïse! Step out of your frigid bath, 
emerge from your clamshell asylum and 
into 1809 Paris as Giuseppina in the 
Theatre des Tuileries; nude Venus in
headdress of Myrtle and shells, with chorus 
of harmonious rosettes swung across
your bosom, hung about your waist. 
With eyes like sea stars, lift your arms and
project contralto song from Rosière lips.
Your face flushes with power as you warm
marble into flesh, present Galatea to 
Pimmalione and curtains fall. You are the 
laurel-crowned goddess on the Emperor’s 
badge d’honneur; he gifts you a kiss of 
French blue diamond, carries your 
portrait in his pocket as you sway
into crowds and headlines with fanfare.
Empress Josephine in royal gold brocade
lavishes you with rubies.
 
     O Mon Aloïse, sing! Raise your arias
     which dance like water nymphs,
     transform into flickers of damselflies.
 
Rebecca Weigold

Conscience, Judas, by Nikolai Ge (Russia) 1891

Judas
 
You are the shadow in the shadows, pacing the bleak and barren pits of the desert, looking for your soul. It spilled out of you, right here, under the tree that could not hold you, where your guts unspooled in the beaks of birds. Just after you sold Him for thirty pieces of silver, the one you betrayed descended into that same darkness, on another tree that did not hold. Then, He ascended to his throne. Was it in time to save you? Oh, despised one, you were the disciple that he loved. Was repentance too late for redemption? Will there be another kind of mercy? You were the second substitute who stood in for us, the one whose sins we shared. The one who killed Jesus, because it was us. And what terrible destiny for all, had you had not fulfilled yours? We are all Judas, aren’t we now, easily bought, easily sold. We all have you inside the deep recesses of our hearts, Judas. Even your name whiffs of tainted meat and treason. 

​Lorette C. Luzajic