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Don Gronning
DIAMOND LAKE — Readers of The Miner have seen Elaine Magdalene Faires poetry in our Poetry Corner section on the lifestyle page for years. Faires, 81, has compiled her poems into a newly released book, “30 Animal Stories and Pictures,” available on Amazon.
The 64-page hardcover book is illustrated by her niece, Sophia Clark, 17, of Deer Park. The book is the first for both.
“It took a couple of years writing the poems,” she said. Faires spends about a month on each poem, handwriting then reworking them until she’s satisfied. Natasha Baumgartner helps with typing and editing the poems. “I couldn’t have done it without her,” Faires says.
Faires found a niche with the animal poems.
“I used to write a lot of different kinds of poems, but now I focus on animal poems,” she says.
Faires has been writing poetry for more than 30 years. She got her start with a Spokane poetry group, the Poetry Scribes. Now she is involved with the Diamond Lake Writers and Poets group. The group meets twice a month at the Diamond Lake fire station, on the first and third Wednesday of the month, at 10 a.m.
Faires says the thing she like the most about writing poetry is using her imagination.
“It’s important to keep your imagination,” she says.
Her poems are certainly imaginative. The new book features poems titled “Rosebud The Hip Hippopotamus,” “Gerald The Teenage Giraffe” and “Rattle Snakes in Heaven,” all with full color illustrations.
Faires moved to Diamond Lake 24 years ago. She and her late husband, Randall Faires, met while they were both in the Air Force, where she was a medic.
She liked studying. “I took night courses when I was in the Air Force,” she said. She went on to study at Spokane Falls Community College, then what was then Eastern Washington State College in Cheney, where she earned a degree in art education.
Like most writers she has a process to her poetry. These days she knows she wants to write about animals.
“I take out a clean sheet of paper and write down as many as I can think of,” she says. She takes the list, then goes to the internet to find out as much as she can about the various animals, choosing one to be the central character in the poem. Then her imagination takes over.
After the first draft, she goes to work.
“I have to do a lot of refining on my poems,” she says.
Ideas sometime occur when she is sleeping.
“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and have an idea and write right then,” she says.
Faires was raised in Ohio, 2,200 feet from Lake Erie, in a village called Vermillion on the Lake.
“I like lakes,” she says. “I love to see the sparkling diamonds, I like watching the fishing and boating, I like everything about the lake.”
The book just came out and is available on Amazon for $28. “It’s costs about a dollar apiece to read a poem,” she jokes.
Faires says sometimes people recognize her.
“Sometimes people say, that’s the lady that writes for the paper,” she says.
