Richard Beban, author of the books of poetry, What the Heart Weighs (Red Hen Press, Los Angeles, 2004) and Young Girl Eating a Bird (Red Hen Press, Los Angeles, 2006), turned to poetry in 1993 after spending over 30 years as a journalist, and then a television and screen writer.

Beban, his wife, Kaaren Kitchell, and three other poets, helped organize and run one of the most successful weekly reading series in Los Angeles at Venice's Rose Cafe. Beban and Kitchell also produced the 2003 Freshwater Marsh Ecopoetry Celebration at Playa Vista California in a five-hour celebration of the new freshwater marsh constructed to help restore Ballona Wetlands.

A graduate with an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles, Beban and his wife co-authored a non-fiction book on mythology, as well as running monthly poetry and fiction writing workshops in their living room inPlaya del Rey, California.

Derek Alger: Young Girl Eating a Bird is quite an extensive collection of poetry. What was its evolution and your decision to divide your poems into different sections?

Richard Beban: Eating a Bird is my MFA senior manuscript, and consists of poems produced between December 2001 and December 2003, all for the Creative Writing program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. I added some post-MFA work, since the manuscript wasn't accepted by Red Hen Press until late 2004, but the bulk of it is MFA writing.

DA: You obviously went through a productive period.

RB: It's a large volume — big as a doorstop at 192 pages and 130 some-odd poems — because I had an extraordinary productive two years at Antioch. It has a low-residency program with some of the finest core and mentoring faculty in the world, and they stimulated me to better and better (and more and more) writing. I went over the manuscript in my final semester, and my then-mentor, Eloise Klein Healy, and I agreed that the surviving poems all deserved their place in the book.

The structure of the book is quite simple. I've based both my first book What The Heart Weighs, and my second, Young Girl Eating A Bird, on the storytelling structure of Joe Campbell laid out in Hero With A Thousand Faces. The poems being in "this world," generally in present-day, generally happy (or not too scary), then descend into the underworld labyrinth, where the dark, painful, juicy, horrific, are-they-dreams-or-are-they-real adventures take place. Then there's a gradual ascent from the underworld (generally through the wreckage of failed relationships and broken dreams) to return the redemptive boon to the tribe.

In both books thus far, the redemptive boon has been love, and my wife, Kaaren, is the symbol and actuality of that in my life. We met twelve years ago, after we'd each been through the wringer and rigors of other relationships for some decades, and were ready to recognize each other as "The Right One" by then.