‘It makes the work feel real,’ upcoming poetry reading at Francie & Finch

Photo Courtesy of Four Way Review

Situated in the heart of downtown Lincoln, Francie & Finch has been a hub for literature lovers to gather for nearly 10 years. On Saturday, Feb. 22, the independent bookstore will host a poetry reading with Maria Zoccola and Carolina Hotchandani. 

Hotchandani and Zoccola met on X, formerly known as Twitter. They will be reading with each other for the first time while in Lincoln.

Zoccola is a poet and educator from Memphis, Tennessee. Her debut poetry book, “Helen of Troy, 1993: Poems” reimagines the infamous Helen of Troy as an unfulfilled housewife from a small town in 1990s Tennessee. 

“I know that's kind of a wild premise that froze people a little bit, but I've been amazed to see people embrace this book,” Zoccola said. “When I first started writing these poems, I kind of thought maybe they'd stay between me and my notebook. I wasn't sure if anybody would be interested in these poems, but pretty quickly, I realized that folks were excited about the book.” 

Zoccola has always loved Greek mythology. As a girl, she would check out mythology books from the Memphis Public Libraries, turning the pages on epic gods, monsters and heroes. Her passion for Greek mythology started long before she ever read Homer’s “The Iliad” for the first time in ninth grade, she said. 

“I fell in love with (‘The Iliad’) and its characters, the language, the passion, the forms of epic poetry just really swept me away,” Zoccola said. “That story remained with me for the rest of my life. When I started writing poetry in a serious way, many of the poems I was writing drew on Greek mythology and characters from ‘The Iliad’ for their inspiration.”

Despite her adoration for the story, she had a general aversion to Helen as a character. Helen’s narrative arc in “The Iliad” was dissatisfying compared to the other female characters, Zoccola said. Zoccola avoided discussing Helen in her poetry before she was struck by inspiration one day, writing poems about Helen in a row. Suddenly, Helen felt familiar to her. 

“What I had to do was to keep writing until Helen had finished telling me her story, and the process of writing that book was completely transformational for my relationship with Helen as a character,” Zoccola said. “I began to understand that far from being this unworthy, fallen woman, (Helen) was, in fact, a character without choices in her story…She's treated as an object throughout ‘The Iliad’ and it became my role in writing this book to return Helen some of her agency, to allow her to make every choice, even when the choices that she was making were imperfect choices.” 

Zoccola wasn’t always a poet. Her undergraduate and graduate degrees are both in fiction. It wasn’t until she managed a non-profit program in Savannah, Georgia, Deep Center’s Young Author Project, that she found her love for poetry. The program provided creative writing workshops to students in the Savannah-Chatham County Public School System. 

“Being in the classroom with young people…and watching them approach creative writing often for the first time, and dive into new genres and new forms with fearlessness and bravery, it really made me think, ‘if they can do it, surely, I can give this another try here with poetry,’” Zoccola said. 

Zoccala will be joined by Hotchandani for the reading. Hotchandani is an assistant professor of English for the Goodrich Scholarship program at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. She also teaches in the medical humanities program, instructing courses on trauma in literature. 

“I actually didn't try to publish until 2016 and that was after the birth of my daughter. So something about that very dramatic life change inspired me to put my words out there,” Hotchandani said. “When you have a child, it's both a lack of time and this sudden awareness of your own mortality. It really hits you, or at least it hit me.” 

Hotchandani has long had a formal education and training in poetry by obtaining an MFA in creative writing. She started publishing individual poems in magazines and literary journals until 2022, when she felt she had enough to publish a poetry collection, “The Book Eaters,” which won the Perugia Press Prize, an award for women poets.

“The Book Eaters” explores topics surrounding agency over narratives. Throughout the collection, Hotchandani balances dualities between creation and destruction and fullness and emptiness. 

“It's always interesting just to learn from people about the poems that they connect with. When they ask questions…it makes the work feel real,” Hotchandani said, “Sometimes there's a poet whose work is primarily solitary, and you're writing to an imagined audience, and you hope that it eventually gets an audience.”  

Poetry readings are beneficial for both the poet and the readers. The readers get to connect with the people who have written poems that have resonated with them. And poets get the opportunity to see the impact of their poetry on their readers.  

“There are some poets who say that poetry is best experienced out loud that when you read it on the page, you're only getting half of the poem, and the complete experience is listening to it as it is spoken into the world,” Zoccola said. “I'm excited to have that experience with folks in Lincoln as well, and of course, to be reading poems with Carolina…who is a proud Nebraskan and an amazing poet and a dear friend. It is a dream to share the stage with her.” 

The two poets will be reading at 4:30 p.m. on Feb. 22 at Franice & Finch. Zoccola will read from “Helen of Troy, 1993: Poems” and Hotchandani will read from “The Book Eaters” as well as recent poems from her current working manuscript. More event details can be found here.

Published in the Daily Nebraskan, read here.