I’m finishing up edits on my manuscript for my second collection, Dust Bowl Venus: Poems, set to be published by Sixteen Rivers Press in April 2021. Here’s the unedited book description written by the lovely Gillian Wegener:
Sometimes the ground shifts under our feet and leaves us stumbling, our world changed. This collection of poems documents that stumbling, that changed world, and also the regaining of a footing, that if not what we had hoped for, is what we live with despite ourselves. Stella Beratlis brings us her second powerful collection of poetry in Dust Bowl Venus. Framed by the lyrics of Modesto-based country-bluegrass songwriter, Hazel Houser, this collection explores the landscapes of California’s Great Central Valley, the landscapes of fear and hope in her daughter’s cancer diagnosis, and the landscape of regret -- what we have let go and what we have gained in that letting go. Beratlis pays her characteristic attention to detail, invoking, for example, Louis Armstrong’s blue kitchen and the hinges squeaking on an ice chest lid, in order to create her complex and lyrical images. She writes, “ghosts/have always been walking/through the spaces of our home” and she has listened to these ghosts. Stella Beratlis’ poems are filled with imagery and emotion that builds and curves and accumulates with the kind of density that leaves the reader breathless, ears ringing with lyric, heart glad for the earth that shifted and granted us these poems.
(Of course I read that and cried—Jesus! Love to Gillian forever for her goodness to me.)
This poetry project has been made even more meaningful to me by the involvement of one Hazel Houser-Spencer—or rather the ghost of Hazel Houser-Spencer, erstwhile Modesto resident and star country music songwriter—whose songwriting and whose relatively unknown personal story has inspired me in an overarching manner as a poet/artist living in the Central Valley.
If you look up Hazel Marie Houser online, you’ll find scant biographical information aside from what’s well known: she wrote songs made famous by the Louvin Brothers and was named Best New Songwriter in 1959 for “My Baby’s Gone,” a bluegrass and country staple which was originally released the year before. She was a divorced mother who later remarried and operated Spencer’s Driving School with her husband. And that’s it! You really have to dig to find more.
Poking around in the online bluegrass universe, I discovered that Hazel Houser played in Ray Park’s band (Ray—later of Vern and Ray, California bluegrass pioneers) and co-wrote songs with Chester Smith and played in his band as well.
If there’s one thing you know about Modesto if you’ve lived here for a long stretch or if you grew up here, it’s this: everyone knows everyone else. We are merely two degrees of separation from every citizen living in this city of 280,000 people. I’ve been talking about Hazel Houser at poetry readings since 2015, when I became obsessed with the Louvin Brothers (SATAN IS REAL, FOLKS), who recorded quite a few Hazel-penned songs. I mentioned her at one reading at the Northern California Women’s Music Festival as part of my preface when reading a few Hazel-inspired poems, and I asked for anyone with knowledge of Hazel to step forward and lay it on me. I got a few bits and pieces, but nothing directly related to Hazel.
I talked about Hazel to my friend, the journalist Scott Bransford who expressed interest in pursuing the Hazel story. My friend, the photographer Jeremy Center, is the nephew of Chester Smith; his cousins might have something to say about Hazel, possibly. But those efforts were never realized. I mean, I am super intrigued about writing some sort of story on the life and times of Hazel Houser—but I’m a poet, a full-time librarian, and a full-time mom, so I really didn’t have time to do anything other than to write poems about her/inspired by her.
But this past summer, as my daughter got settled into the house and hunkered down to do her second year of college via remote operations, I posted something yet again on Facebook about Hazel Houser. This time, though, a friend of mine, Tina Jamison, happened to see it. And Tina was friends with someone with the same last name: one Brandi Houser. Tina connected me with Brandi and her husband Kris. Kris, as it turns out, is Hazel’s grandson, and he was keen to connect me to his father, Doug Houser (also a poet!) so we could discuss further his grandmother and her legacy. So we set up a Zoom meeting that took place at Kris’s house.
By now, I conversed with two of Hazel’s grown children: Doug Houser and his sister Gerry Bell, both of whom live in Modesto. (Sidebar: Gerry is somehow related to Don and Dan Bell, these studly guys I worked with at Foster Farms/went to high school with in the 80s. She doesn’t yet know that I know Dan and Don.) I started on Zoom. A few weeks later, we had a socially-distanced visit with Doug and Gerry in Doug’s front yard on one of the hottest days of Modesto’s pandemic summer. During this visit, we discovered exciting things about Hazel’s work, got to see Hazel’s guitar in the flesh, and looked at the Library of Congress and I am itching to get her name and work back out into the community again. A working-class woman and mother whose words made an impact on people across the nation through her beautiful songs, she deserves to be acknowledged here in the town in which she lived and worked—and beyond. Hazel Houser was a child of the Dust Bowl whose influenced still ripples out into the world. In her honor (and thanks to my dear friend Sara Coito—who graciously handed me the term dust bowl venus when we both seized upon it during a lecture on worldbuilding in science fiction presented at MJC just before the pandemic), my upcoming collection is entitled Dust Bowl Venus. <3
