Last July, shortly after announcing that Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s speculative essay collection, A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content, had won Diagram’s 2023 chapbook contest, editor Ander Monson received a raft of text messages from concerned friends. He discovered that he and Diagram, a literary magazine that publishes chapbooks through New Michigan Press, were being excoriated on X (formerly Twitter) because Bertram had created the chapbook using artificial intelligence (AI).
“So many people were attacking us and Lillian-Yvonne for what they thought was an ethical breach,” Monson says. “They heard ‘AI-written book wins literary contest,’ which is not exactly what happened.” While Bertram did use AI, it was explicitly to engage the technology in an artistic experiment: Bertram employed a process called “fine-tuning” with GPT-3, the technology underlying the ChatGPT chatbot, in which they fed it text by Gwendolyn Brooks to shift the AI engine’s linguistic “tone and approach,” as Bertram put it in the introduction to their chapbook. They then repeatedly prompted GPT-3 to “tell me a Black story.” Each time, GPT-3 came back with a different, often fascinating reply. Bertram lightly edited the most compelling responses for inclusion in the book.
“People had thought I’d intentionally tried to fool Diagram by submitting AI work,” Bertram says. “But Diagram knew what the project was. I wasn’t trying to fool anyone.”
Bertram’s case points to questions that editors and literary organizations are increasingly wrangling with as they face a rise of AI-generated and -enhanced submissions: Should they allow authors to use AI, and, if so, what counts as an acceptable use of the technology versus cheating? How can they weed out illegitimate AI submissions, not only for contests, but also during regular reading periods?
Sci-fi magazine Clarkesworld bans all submissions that have been touched by AI. “We consider them the fruit of a poisoned tree,” says Neil Clarke, the magazine’s publisher and editor in chief. He’s referring to the alleged training of AI on pirated text, which has spurred copyright-infringement lawsuits by the Authors Guild—a writer-advocacy organization—and numerous writers.
Mary Gannon, executive director of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), recommends magazines take a stance on AI and make it explicit in their submission guidelines, whether forbidding such tools or requiring disclosure of their use. She also suggests that publications consider other options to deal with AI, such as requiring authors to confirm during the submission process that AI was not used or testing suspect work with detection tools like Copyleaks or GPTZero, which charge rates between $8 and more than $20 per month, depending on the level of service.
“The big issue is whether or not an author is being transparent about the origin of the work,” Gannon says. In January, for example, author Rie Qudan, winner of Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize for her novel, Tōkyō-to Dōjō Tō (Tokyo Sympathy Tower), revealed at the award ceremony that about 5 percent of the book used verbatim language from ChatGPT.
Also in January, Jessica Bell, publisher of Vine Leaves Press in Athens, Greece, discovered an AI-generated memoir submission in the slush pile. She was taken with the query letter, from someone claiming to be a disabled man “who had gone through quite a bit of hardship.” But the sample pages were a dry how-to manual for surviving hardship, not the promised memoir. When she discovered that he had published more than ten books on Amazon in two months, she became suspicious and checked the memoir text with Copyleaks, which confirmed that the sample pages were AI-generated.
Bell decided to change the press’s submission guidelines, stating that AI-written submissions “will be rejected.” But, she says, “I fear that it’s not going to stop people.”
When Christine Stroud, editor of Pittsburgh-based Autumn House Press, heard about the Vine Leaves AI submission on an online forum through which CLMP members communicate, she revised Autumn House’s submission guidelines to forbid work generated or supported by AI. She had heard about the rise of AI-supported academic papers but had not realized literary writers would submit AI-generated work. “It was perhaps naive of me to assume folks were not doing it,” she says.
Some magazines, like Clarkesworld, have been inundated with AI submissions that are essentially spam. Clarke believes that charging a reading fee would deter these submissions. (Most contests do require a fee, though many regular magazine or book submissions do not.) But a fee could further marginalize already burdened populations, especially in communities that are geographically isolated—from which Clarke, for one, has been trying to cultivate submissions. Not only can even a few dollars be prohibitive for such communities, but credit cards may be unavailable to them. Short submission windows can be an alternative deterrent for AI fraudsters, says Clarke. But he has resisted shortening Clarkesworld’s reading period—despite receiving thousands of AI-generated submissions—because that step, too, would make it less likely for some overseas writers to contribute.
Clarke also avoids AI detection tools like GPTZero because, as a 2023 Stanford study showed, they are more likely to erroneously flag writers for whom English is not their first language.
Still, the fight against AI is only getting harder. Clarkesworld has banned several thousand individuals for submitting AI-generated stories and fields more AI-generated submissions as time goes on, says Clarke. He says he might reconsider the magazine’s stance against such submissions when AI systems are ethically trained, but he doubts he will change his mind even then—unless the quality of the writing improves. “A good story works on multiple levels, and an AI story doesn’t. It doesn’t know what it’s writing.”
Jonathan Vatner is the author of The Bridesmaids Union (St. Martin’s Press, 2022) and Carnegie Hill (Thomas Dunne Books, 2019). The managing editor of Hue, the magazine of the Fashion Institute of Technology, he teaches fiction writing at New York University and the Hudson Valley Writers Center.
Want a poem in the style of Frank O’Hara or a story in the style of Flannery O’Connor? Your wish is ChatGPT’s command: Just send the request and the words unfurl across your screen. In about thirty seconds, ChatGPT can unleash a 494-word “Flannery O’Connor–style” story about a quiet, plain-looking girl in a small Southern town hurling a Bible at a preacher’s head. A five-stanza “Frank O’Hara–style” poem, rhapsodizing the bustle of music and strangers on city sidewalks, takes ChatGPT less than fifteen seconds to write.
A chatbot created by the San Francisco–based research lab OpenAI, ChatGPT was released for use by the general public in November. Although artificial intelligence (AI) has been in development for decades, ChatGPT has struck a cultural nerve—particularly among those who make their living with language. ChatGPT’s learning model was trained on a mind-boggling 570 gigabytes of text, mostly English-language material from various sources and time periods. With powerful algorithms, ChatGPT uses a probability-based language-prediction model to generate each word in a sentence, producing coherent content in a conversational tone. Its poems and stories demonstrate an understanding of basic narrative structure and different genres while also incorporating customizable details about setting, style, and character.
These capabilities have raised fears that AI could render the human writer obsolete. ChatGPT has, indeed, already replaced some human authors for a certain set of readers. Through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program, users have been selling AI-generated picture books and quick-premise, high-concept works of “literature.” In February, Reuters reported that there were more than “200 e-books in Amazon’s Kindle store as of mid-February listing ChatGPT as an author or co-author.” And there may be more than that, since Amazon does not require writers to “disclose in the Kindle store that their great American novel was written wholesale by a computer,” according to Reuters.
For teachers of writing, many of whom are writers themselves, ChatGPT also poses concerns. Commentators have written diatribes about ChatGPT’s threat to education in publications such as the Atlantic and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Some have discovered that students are turning in assignments written by AI that contain factual errors and that they present as their own original thinking. It stands to reason, however, that creative writing students derive pleasure from the writing process, and so there may be less incentive for them to turn in an AI-generated story or poem to a workshop.
If the existential threat posed by ChatGPT to authorship is overblown, it has already caused havoc in parallel realms. In February the popular sci-fi magazine Clarkesworld announced that it would have to temporarily close to submissions because of an influx of AI-generated stories. Neil Clarke, Clarkesworld’s publisher and editor, tweeted about the decision, saying he thought the phenomenon was financially driven: With a pay rate of 12 cents per word and stories of as many as 22,000 words, Clarkesworld authors can earn $2,640 per story.
It’s not clear how lower-paying or nonpaying magazines will be affected, but editors of those publications are talking about it on the online member forum of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP). “We’ve decided to proactively ban the use of AI in works we publish unless specifically invited,” wrote Joshua Wilson, editor and publisher of the Fabulist. “Along with this stated policy, we’ve also updated our contract to include a no-AI section.” Miracle Jones, an editor at Epiphany and a contributing editor at the Evergreen Review, suggested that nominal submission fees could thwart people from running blanket-submission schemes with AI-authored work. And new apps designed to detect AI-generated writing, such as GPTZero, could help overwhelmed editorial staff by filtering such submissions.
Not all editors are raising red flags, though. Liza St. James, a senior editor at Noon, said the uproar over ChatGPT has prompted her to think about Oulipian constraint-based practices. “I guess my first thought is that if a bot-generated text merits publishing, we would likely credit the human who called it forth from the machine—who made it exist in the first place,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Most published works are already the result of some amount of collaboration. Why not find creative ways to embrace this, or even to showcase it?”
“I want to be open-minded about what imaginative people can do with new tools,” Jacob Smullyan, founding editor of Sagging Meniscus Press, wrote on the CLMP forum. “One reaction I hope to see is a critique of human practice akin to how artists reacted to photography. How much of what we already do is revealed by these new tools to have less inherent dignity, to be already mechanical and superficial?”
Writers dazzled by ChatGPT, however, may not be aware of the potentially harmful biases embedded within the texts it generates. When I asked the chatbot directly about the kind of texts it draws from, it told me that the majority was “likely to be from the public domain.” For books, that typically refers to volumes published in the first two decades of the twentieth century and earlier. “It is possible that a large portion of the literature in the public domain was written by white male authors, especially in earlier time periods when women and people of color had fewer opportunities to publish their work,” ChatGPT conceded. This is troubling because it means that ChatGPT’s language algorithm contains all the biases, including racist and sexist tropes, entrenched within older literature. (I requested a story “written in the style of Raymond Carver, if he were Chinese” and received as a first sentence: “He looked at the bowl of rice in front of him, feeling empty and lost.”)
Margaret Rhee, a feminist scholar and new media artist and poet, conjectured that writers who are new to experimenting with AI might not have thought about the ethical implications of working with biased technology, which should be reckoned with for a project to be effective. Often the best AI-assisted projects, Rhee said, will have a turn of some kind, using technology to serve a subversive agenda. One example is artist Rashaad Newsome’s recent “Digital Griot” projects, in which Newsome trained a chatbot with texts by writers such as bell hooks and James Baldwin, allowing users to move through indexes, archives, and history in a counter-hegemonic way.
In the New York Times and MIT Technology Review, various people associated with OpenAI and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot have said that the only way to continue improving AI technology is to release versions that are bound to make mistakes, which they will then address. AI is a new frontier, after all, with the many challenges and unimagined outcomes—both troubling and exciting—that a new frontier entails.
Bonnie Chau is the author of the short story collection All Roads Lead to Blood (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2018). She currently serves on the board of the American Literary Translators Association, teaches fiction writing and translation at Columbia University and Fordham University, and edits for 4Columns, Public Books, and the Evergreen Review.
Last year, Randye Kaye, anauthor and prolific audiobook narrator, was looking to create audio versions of her own two books, Happier Made Simple: Choose Your Words. Change Your Life, which she self-published with Ignite Press, and Ben Behind His Voices: One Family’s Journey From the Chaos of Schizophrenia to Hope, a memoir she published with Rowman & Littlefield.
Kaye’s motivation was to tap into a growing market for authors: Audiobooks “can reach an entire audience who might not have been able to find the time to sit down and read the book,” she says.
Indeed, audiobook revenue grew 25 percent in 2021 to $1.6 billion, the tenth straight year of double-digit growth, according to the Audio Publishers Association. In 2011, 7,237 audiobooks were produced; by 2021 that number rose more than tenfold to 73,898. While those figures do not differentiate between small and large publishers, more independent authors are trying their hand at audiobook production, says Michele Cobb, executive director of the Audio Publishers Association.
For Kaye’s audiobooks, Ignite Press suggested that she try Findaway Voices. Launched in 2016, this service enables anyone to produce professional audiobooks and distribute them through more than forty outlets, including Audible, the biggest name in audiobooks; Google Play; Libro.fm, which shares proceeds with independent bookstores; Chirp, which promotes discount audiobooks to a large audience; and OverDrive, which distributes to libraries. Another popular choice for independent authors and presses is ACX, a subsidiary of Audible, which is owned by Amazon. Both companies help authors cast a narrator and automate the distribution process, but Findaway Voices offers a higher royalty rate. ACX offers a comparable rate only if authors agree to distribute exclusively through Audible, Amazon, and iTunes.
Although Kaye had narrated a handful of audiobooks by other authors through ACX, she chose Findaway Voices for her books. “ACX can be fabulous—they offer a lot of help for authors,” she says. But she wanted wide distribution without sacrificing royalties.
Kaye may soon have a bigger audience than she expected. This past September, Findaway Voices titles became available on Spotify; the audio-streaming giant purchased parent company Findaway in June 2022 to add audiobooks to its music-streaming business. Findaway’s distribution arm allows any publisher to sell audiobooks on Spotify, from the Big Five through independent presses and authors. Findaway Voices is being touted as the smoothest route for the latter to get their audiobooks to Spotify, though authors can use any company willing to distribute through Findaway and Spotify.
Kaye, who is now working on advertising and marketing to boost her audiobook sales, is happy about the additional retail channel. “I’m not sure what it will do to the personal nature of Findaway, but as long as they continue to be professional and friendly, it doesn’t bother me.”
The move by Spotify to add Findaway not only expands the audience for audiobooks, but it also promises special features. A new section in the Spotify app lets users browse a library of 300,000 audio titles for purchase, allowing users to download books to their device, speed up or slow down the narration, pick up where they left off, and rate books they’ve completed. Spotify has not offered a streaming subscription for audiobooks, as the company does for music; each title must be purchased separately.
Spotify has not planned to create any exclusive contracts for audiobooks, so authors using Findaway Voices should still be able to sell through other outlets.
Cobb interprets Spotify’s entry into the audiobook market as good news for authors and publishers: “The Spotify listener is not the traditional book consumer, which might bring people who have never listened to an audiobook to the format.”
Cory Doctorow, coauthor of Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back (Beacon Press, 2022), is more skeptical of Spotify’s intentions. He points out that many podcasters lost significant portions of their audience when Spotify bought their podcasts and made them exclusive to its streaming platform. “It’d be pretty naive to think the way Spotify treats authors is better than the way they treat podcasters,” he says.
Overall, though, Doctorow believes Spotify’s foray into audiobooks is a step in the right direction. The added competition may even nudge Audible toward loosening restrictions—known as digital rights management, or DRM—that prevent its audiobooks from being listened to on other platforms. “If the alternative to Audible is nothing, then it can treat creators really badly. If there’s an alternative like Spotify, it’ll treat them better.”
Jonathan Vatner is the author of The Bridesmaids Union (St. Martin’s Press, 2022) and Carnegie Hill (Thomas Dunne Books, 2019). He is the managing editor of Hue, the magazine of the Fashion Institute of Technology, and teaches fiction writing at New York University and the Hudson Valley Writers Center.
Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories.
“Almost all of our lives and thinking exist in spaces of ambiguity, uncertainty and doubt,” says Garth Greenwell. “Art seems to me precisely the tool we have for allowing ourselves the fullness of human thinking.” In a new conversation with Amy Gall, Greenwell talks writing process, politics and public life, sex and love. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, was published yesterday by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Poets & Writers Magazine)
Attorneys for Audible have announced the company will settle with the seven publishers who filed a lawsuit against the audiobook giant in August last year. The plaintiffs, which include all of the “Big Five” houses, had submitted that a new in-app feature, Audible Captions, violated copyright by generating unauthorized text. The terms of the settlement have not yet been disclosed, but documents are expected by January 21. (Guardian)
Having just completed ten years at Henry Holt, Steve Rubin shared that he will be leaving his position as chairman. “My time here has been among the happiest in my career,” Rubin says. (Publishers Lunch)
Jeanine Cummins talks to the New York Times about her forthcoming book, American Dirt, and the risks and responsibilities of writing from the perspective of Mexican migrants as someone far removed from their world.
Jenny Odell reflects on a fortuitous encounter with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, and what reading the transcendentalist taught her to see in her own writing. “Hard as I might work, I will be anything but self-made.” (Paris Review Daily)
Garth Greenwell isn’t interested in creating literary heroes. “There is a kind of luxury in narratives where the moral calculus is clear. I think it’s one of the reasons why we’re still so addicted to World War II dramas,” he says. “That was the last moment where we felt like the good guys and the bad guys were really obvious. But we don’t live in a world like that and we don’t inhabit selves in which goodness and badness are clear.”
There is perhaps no better example of Greenwell’s love of moral complexity than his wildly successful debut novel, What Belongs to You (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), which was long-listed for the National Book Award, named one of the best books of the year by more than fifty publications, translated into a dozen languages, and hailed as an “instant classic” by the New York Times Book Review. Though it is a work of fiction, What Belongs to You was, in part, inspired by Greenwell’s four-year stint as an English teacher at the American College of Sofia in Bulgaria from 2009 to 2013. The book explores a relationship between an unnamed, closeted American narrator teaching English at a high school in Sofia and his lover, Mitko, a young, broke, local hustler whom the narrator picks up in a public bathroom. What on its face might have seemed like a narrative of clear “moral calculus” was, in fact, a deeply nuanced exploration of sexuality, class, and citizenship.
But as Greenwell worked on What Belongs to You he kept having to set aside characters and storylines that fell beyond its scope. His new novel, Cleanness, out now from FSG, returns to the world of the narrator but allows readers a much fuller picture not only of his life but that of the citizens of Sofia and their dual struggle for identity and purpose. “It’s not like one book is a sequel or a prequel,” Greenwell says. “They’re promiscuous with each other,” with events in Cleanness happening before during and after those that take place in What Belongs to You. Each chapter in Cleanness functions as its own stand-alone story. In one, the narrator listens to the painful coming-out tale of one of his students which echoes back to his own doomed first love. In another, he meets his friends for a political protest and witnesses comradery, hope, and an incident that reminds him of the incredible precariousness of peace. In the central chapters of the novel, we witness the narrator fall in love with R, a fellow closeted man he meets online, with whom he experience new levels of trust and intimacy. We also watch the narrator engage in a sexual encounter with a stranger that nearly ends in his death. But each chapter continues to twist and complicate any easy judgements we might make about the characters we meet. And in turn it asks us to make room for contradiction and change in our own lives and to look at each other, not as heroes or villains but as humans.
Though he is best known for fiction, Greenwell got his start as a singer, having trained in opera beginning in high school, before moving on to poetry, criticism, and essay writing. Having moved back to the United States in 2013, he continues to balance a life of writing with a life of teaching in Iowa City, where he is a visiting professor at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
I spoke to Garth shortly before his book’s release about the uneasy marriage of capitalism and sex, the future of democracy, and, of course, love.
What I love so much about this book—and your writing in general—is how little you moralize sex that includes pain or violence or an embodiment of a kind of toxic masculinity. You leave readers feeling like maybe this kind of sex is healing, or maybe it reinforces shame, or maybe it’s both, but there’s a lot of breathing room for contradiction. I think the earliest really explicit piece of the book I wrote was “Gospodar” [which involves a sadomasochistic encounter the narrator has with a stranger in Sofia]. I remember as I was writing that feeling like I really wanted to get at a certain experience of sex that I wasn’t sure I had seen represented, and to get there, it required a commitment to explicitness and a lack of squeamishness and concern about audience. I had to write things that would be off-putting and disturbing to many people. But I wanted this experience of rawness and explicitness to be paired with a very high art feeling and all of the filters of consciousness and literary tradition. That was exciting to me, and I was trying to write in a way that gave me access to both of those things.
I hope that the book doesn’t offer any single message about sex or the kind of sex the narrator seeks out. The argument the book makes is sex is all of those things and sex is always going to present dilemmas that outpace any moral calculus we might bring to them. I think that’s true of a lot of things in human life and that doesn’t exempt us from responsibility or the necessity to hold ourselves accountable but it refuses us the luxury of any too-easy accounting.
It does feel like there is something more self-aware and therefore more connected about the narrator’s sexual relationships in Cleanness. I believe this is a much more social book than What Belongs to You—there are so many more characters and the narrator has many more relations. I know the bar is set in a different place, but to me this is also a much happier book and there are more moments when someone intervenes in the narrator’s ratiocination and kind of gives him a way out, especially in the central love story with R. In some way the book wants to posit that one of the things love is, is a way of opening a door for the other and giving the other relief.
Is that what you think love is? I do use fiction to think. One of the things I think narrative can very powerfully do is test ideas in a kind of reality simulation. In What Belongs to You the narrator had previously thought that attention is love, that to look at something and attend to it is a form of love. But he revises that and says love is not looking at someone but looking with someone and facing what they face. And it led me to a moment where I was like, I do think that’s true.
I feel like it will be years before I know whether something similar happened with this book, but I do think that one of the things we do as lovers is recontextualize one another’s lives. I would not want to turn it into something tritely optimistic—and I’m always skeptical of open doors or whether an open door will ever lead anywhere other than another room that will eventually feel as stifling as the ones we were in before—but that experience of opening out to someone else is exhilarating.
You mentioned “Gospodar,” which was originally published as a stand-alone story, as were some of the other chapters in this book. I’m curious how you approached structuring those pieces, because the book feels so seamless. There was a lot of revision. There were surface-level revisions of repetitions across previously published pieces that I took out, but then the big question was putting the pieces in relationship in the larger structure and figuring out how time would work across the book as a whole. I knew I didn’t want the book to be chronological. I wanted there to be relationships that were more mysterious and out of time. But then I wanted something chronological at the heart of the book. It felt important to me for the three R chapters, and for that central love story to have a beginning and a middle and an end. But then the first and third parts I found myself realizing I wanted to have a kind of mirroring structure, where they were resonating with each other but also showing very different reflections of the narrator and his experiences in Sofia.
And then when it came time to put a label on the book there was the question of what we called it. Is it a novel? Is it a story collection? I finally felt like neither of those were right to me. Cleanness really feels, to me, like a book of fiction which is how FSG is publishing it, which makes me really happen and readers can think of it however they want.
I know it’s been a while since you wrote poetry, but do you think poetry allows you to make bolder structural choices with fiction? I very much feel that poetry is akin to sculpture, and that I was carving language out of silence and trying to exempt language from time. I wanted to take a thought and make it suspended in white space. But that eventually came to feel kind of stifling to me. I sweated so much over individual words and over feeling like I had to choose the words that would kind of open in this infinite way and be infinitely resonant, and in prose I don’t feel the same anxiety about finding the precise single word because I’m so often drawn to syntax that says this or this, or some combination of this and this and this. I think both of those strategies [in poetry and prose] are after the same thing, which is amplitude and resonance. But the reason I’ve kept writing prose and haven’t yet returned to poetry, although I would love to, is there’s something exciting and surprising about the very un-sculptural movement that the kind of sentences I’m drawn to allow for.
There’s a kind of musicality in your prose, I think. The way the words rise and fall, the kind of drama of each sentence. I know you were an opera singer in your younger life, do you feel like you take that practice to the page, too? Music is endlessly inspiring to me. I don’t listen to music when I’m writing but I reach for musical analog for an effect I want in writing. Because of the training I had in the Bel Canto tradition, one of the lessons I take with me into writing is the fact that language is something that exists in our body. It has materiality and corporeality. And in a way that’s not so different from poetry; opera can show you the way that emotions can be generated by suspending language in time. An aria takes very few words and suspends them over great distances, and there’s a way in which that itself becomes a kind of expression or embodiment of desire.
But I also find inspiration in painting, film, theater, dance. Sometimes a particular artist becomes crucial to a project. My partner is Spanish, and we were in Madrid while I was editing What Belongs to You. There was a wonderful El Greco exhibition at the Prado, and I went almost every day, usually sitting for an hour or so in front of a single painting. I can’t really articulate why, but it was helpful. Maybe it’s that El Greco’s paintings so often seem to make artistic struggle visible; sitting with them gave me a weird sense of solidarity.
What is your writing schedule like? Is that something that also gives you a sense of solidarity? When I was working as a high school teacher, the only way I could be productive was to have a strict schedule: I wrote from 4:30 to 6:30 every morning. I still like to write first thing in the morning. Routines are important for me, and I find it hard to work well when I’m in an unsettled situation: traveling, say. My partner and I bought a house recently, and my writing room is the garage, which the previous owner converted into an artist’s studio. On warm days, if I keep the door open, a neighbor’s cat will come in to say hello: the best distraction.
I also can’t work with a word or page count: It makes me miserable to feel that I have to meet some metric of productivity. Anytime I have a deadline it takes over my life; I hate deadlines. The only metric that matters for me is time: I have to be at my desk, doing nothing else, for a certain amount of time. I write by hand, and keep all screens in another room. I tell myself that it doesn’t matter if I don’t write a word: As long as I sit with my notebook for a certain number of hours, I’ve done my work.
To go back to what you said about Cleanness being a “more social” book, I also think this book gives a larger sense of what it takes for gay men to navigate relationships in Sofia. Has the situation for LGBT folks in Bulgaria in general changed or improved since your time there? I don’t want to pretend to speak about that authoritatively because I do feel further and further away from life on the ground. When I was teaching at the American College of Sofia (ACS), I and a few other faculty members and a very passionate group of students tried to start a Gay Straight Alliance, and that was stamped out by the administration. So we had a club that was about human rights in a kind of generic way that was really a gay club even though we couldn’t call it that. But, shortly after I left, the campaign was continued by Garrard Conley, author of the book Boy Erased, and other faculty. And a couple years ago ACS became the first high school in the Balkans with a GSA.
At the same time, my sense is that the increasing influence of Putin in that part of the world has made gains achieved by queer people feel very provisional and perilous. I was in Bulgaria from 2009 to 2013, and for the first three years there was a feeling of incredible progress around LGBT rights and visibility and then around 2012 it felt like this very concerted pushback campaign in which conservative politicians and the Orthodox church began speaking in unison with Putin about gay propaganda. Which, let’s acknowledge, is very much what’s happening in the United States right now on all fronts.
Yes, the protest chapter in Cleanness felt like it contained a really familiar urgency. In what ways have your experiences of political protest in Bulgaria been similar or different to your experiences in the United States? I had never experienced anything in the United States that felt like what was happening in Bulgaria in 2013 with these enormous street protests across the country. You really did feel like all of Sofia was in the streets. There was also a kind of extremity that I have not seen in the United States. I think it was six people set themselves on fire in protest of conditions, and that kind of public martyrdom is not something we’ve experienced on that scale in the United States. But seeing the kind of misinformation campaigns and meddling on the part of Putin that happened in America in 2016 really felt like a kind of deja-vu. Again, I’m not qualified to make this statement, but it does feel like what Putin has been doing in the West by encouraging chaos is something he had been doing in the area of former Soviet influence for a long time.
What was most surprising to me about the protest scene in Cleanness is that it did not erupt in violence. One of the things that I wanted to explore in that chapter was the feeling of contingency, that at any moment what is a kind of haloed expression of democracy could become violent and that there were elements really trying to create that chaos. This is something I feel very strongly happening in the United States. I believe in the institutions and traditions of liberal democracy, not because they have ever been perfect but because they offer us the best mechanisms we have ever devised as human beings for addressing wrongs. It terrifies me how close we are to the brink of letting those institutions fall away and how that is a crisis coming from all sides.
I think there is active malevolence and an active desire to destroy those institutions in favor of a kind of authoritarianism and state violence coming from the right. And then from the left I think there is an entire loss of faith and confidence in the idea that those institutions are worth defending. There’s a way in which the central question of the chapter about the protest is a question that I feel very much in America right now, which is: Where do we look for a unifying story or vision? Where do we look for a story we can tell about ourselves that feels adequate to our history and also enabling of a future?
It’s interesting to think, if our structures of government and our relationship to power and capitalism were different, how would the sex we have be different? Yeah, one of the things that wasn’t talked about much with What Belongs To You was the intersection of the body and economics. How we inhabit our bodies, how we have sex happens in a context, and that context is ideological and economic and political and historical. Sex in a Soviet-style apartment block in Sofia is not exactly the same phenomenon as sex in an Italian city or sex in a park in Louisville, Kentucky.
But I’m also always trying in fiction, and of course one can only fail, to show how erotic relationship is structured and conditioned by politics and economics but not exhausted by them. I refuse a sense of human life as merely determined by these larger structures. To me, fiction lives in the relationship between those larger structural forces and human agency. That space, which is not exactly a space of freedom but is not a space that is foreclosed or fully determined.
That’s one of the most convincing arguments I’ve heard for why someone should be a writer. [Laughs.] Well, almost all of our lives and thinking exist in spaces of ambiguity, uncertainty and doubt. And yet in much of our public speech and all of our political discourse we use language in a way that wants to deny all of those things. Art seems to me precisely the tool we have for allowing ourselves the fullness of human thinking.
Amy Gall’s work has appeared in Tin House, Vice, Glamour, Women’s Health, the anthology Mapping Queer Spaces, and elsewhere. Recycle, a book of her collages and text, coauthored with Sarah Gerard, was published by Pacific Press in 2018. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship and earned her MFA in creative writing from the New School. She is currently working on a collection of linked essays about queer bodies, sex and pleasure.
Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You. (Credit: Bill Adams)
I first met Ilya Kaminsky more than two decades ago, when we were both undergraduates. Even before the publication of his first very beautiful book, Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), Ilya’s brilliance was unmistakable. He was different from anyone I had ever met, in the breadth of his knowledge of the poetic canon across time and languages, in the intensity of his commitment to poetry as something more than an art, as a kind of unifying principle of existence. Shortly after Ilya published Dancing in Odessa, he began circulating among his friends a new manuscript, a kind of parable-in-poems about a country whose inhabitants suddenly go deaf, refusing to hear the authorities. Ilya produced version after version of this project, eventually titled Deaf Republic, over more than a decade, while editing anthologies and publishing translations, until it acquired a nearly legendary status among his fellow poets. Graywolf will publish it in early March.
Ilya was born in Odessa, in what was then the Soviet Union, in 1977. Substantially deaf from the age of four, he spoke no English when he immigrated to the United States with his family at sixteen. He studied at the University of Rochester and Georgetown University and has a JD from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. His honors include a Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Metcalf Award, a Lannan Fellowship, Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His anthology of twentieth-century poetry in translation, Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, was published in 2010. He is also the editor in chief of the literary journal Poetry International. After several years teaching in the graduate creative writing program at San Diego State University, Ilya now holds the Bourne Poetry Chair at Georgia Tech. The following exchange was conducted via e-mail this past November and December; it also draws on conversations, many of them on long evening walks, from the month Ilya and I spent together in Marfa, Texas, in late 2016, as Ilya was finishing his manuscript.
What was the genesis of Deaf Republic?How did the idea of a country suddenly going deaf come to you? I did not have hearing aids until I was sixteen: As a deaf child I experienced my country as a nation without sound. I heard the USSR fall apart with my eyes.
Walking through the city, I watched the people; their ears were open all the time, they had no lids. I was interested in what sounds might be like. The whooshing. The hissing. The whistle. The sound of keys turning in the lock, or water moving through the pipes two floors above us. I could easily notice how the people around me spoke to one another with their eyes without realizing it.
But what if the whole country was deaf like me? So that whenever a policeman’s commands were uttered no one could hear? I liked to imagine that. Silence, that last neighborhood, untouched, as ever, by the wisdom of the government.
Those childhood imaginings feel quite relevant for me in America today. When Trump performs his press conferences, wouldn’t it be brilliant if his words landed on the deaf ears of a whole nation? What if we simply refused to hear the hatred of his pronouncements?
I want the reader to see the deaf not in terms of their medical condition, but as a political minority, which empowers them. Throughout Deaf Republic, the townspeople teach one another sign language (illustrated in the book) as a way to coordinate their revolution while remaining unintelligible to the government.
What led you to write about this invented country at war, and how did you discover your central characters, Sonya, Alfonso, and Momma Galya? Like many others, I am a misplaced person, a refugee, a man cut in half by history. A part of me is still in Odessa, that ghost limb of a city I left. While these characters are imagined, they are also my family. I keep seeing images related by my grandmother about her arrest by Stalin’s regime in 1937:
When the police come to arrest her, they go straight to the kitchen. Right past her. The first policeman. Second policeman. Third. Straight to the kitchen. To the stove. To smell the stove, to see if she has burned any documents or letters. But the stove is cold. So they walk to her closet. They finger her clothes. They take some for their wives or daughters. “You won’t need any of this,” they tell her. And only then do they shove her into their black car.
They are so busy taking her things that they don’t notice the child in the cradle.
The infant stays in the empty apartment when she is taken to the judge. (The child in the cradle, my father, will be stolen and taken to another city. He will survive.)
She doesn’t know this. She also doesn’t know her husband was shot right away. The judge tells her, “You have to betray your husband in order to save yourself.”
She says, “How can I do that to the father of my child? How will I look into his eyes?”
She doesn’t know he is already dead.
And so she goes to Siberia for over a decade. And behind her, the infant stays.
Though the invented country you write about resembles Eastern Europe, the first and last poems in the book explicitly address our American moment. Do you think of this as a book about America? As Americans we want to distance ourselves from a text like this one. But there is pain right here in our neighborhoods: We see stolen elections, voter suppression. Is this happening in a foreign country? No. A young man shot by police in the open street lying for hours on the pavement behind police tape, lying there for many hours: That is a very American image. And we talk about it for a bit on TV and online. And then we move on, like it never happened. And children keep being killed in our streets. This silence is a very American silence.
That image of a shot boy lying in the middle of the street is central to Deaf Republic. Of course, the book is a dream, a fable. But as you note, it begins and ends in the reality of the United States today. That is intentional. It is a warning of what we might become. Of what kind of country we have already become.
Americans seem to keep pretending that history is something that happens elsewhere, a misfortune that befalls other people. But history is lying there in the middle of the street. Showing us who we are.
In all the years of our friendship, I don’t think I’ve ever asked you why you first began writing poems. How did you first discover poetry? The late 1980s in Odessa was the time when poets worked at newspapers. Many newspapers were faltering. It was a somewhat hungry time. It was the most exciting time. A publisher came to my classroom.
Who would like to write for a newspaper?
A room full of hands.
Who would like to write for free for the newspaper?
One hand goes up.
Which is how I found myself at twelve years of age writing articles for official and unofficial newspapers.
In the hallway at a newspaper I met an old man with a cane, Valentin Moroz, a legendary Odessa Ukrainian–language poet, a man who was often in trouble with the party officials in Soviet days.
He was reading Osip Mandelstam in the hallway, sitting next to me in the hallway, unable to sit still, unable to read quietly, unable to pretend that he isn’t inhaling the large gulps of free air with every line of verse. His voice trembling as he read a stanza, then turning to a young deaf boy: “Do you hear? Do you hear? This is Mandelstam, this son of a bitch, Mandelstam, no one writes better than this son of a bitch Mandelstam. Don’t you know this Mandelstam?”
I didn’t know.
Moroz stood up. He read in the busy hallway standing up. He took me by the hand.
To the tram.
To his apartment.
He recited poems by memory all the way from the hallway to the tram station and all the way on the tram to his place.
I left his place with a bag of books and with a handwritten note not to come back next week unless I had read and memorized poems by Mandelstam.
Thus began my education.
And how did you start writing in English? When we came to this country, I was sixteen years old. We settled in Rochester, New York. The question of writing poetry in English would have been funny, since none of us spoke English—I myself hardly knew the alphabet. But arriving in Rochester was rather a lucky event—that place was a magical gift; it was like arriving at a writing colony, a Yaddo of sorts. There was nothing to do except for writing poetry. Why English then—why not Russian? My father died in 1994, a year after our arrival to America. I understood right away that it would be impossible for me to write about his death in the Russian language, as one author says of his deceased father somewhere, “Ah, don’t become mere lines of beautiful poetry.” I chose English because no one in my family or friends knew it; no one I spoke to could read what I wrote. I myself did not know the language. It was a parallel reality, an insanely beautiful freedom. It still is.
What changes for you as a poet when you write in a second language? Even the shape of my face changed when I began to live inside the English language.
But I wouldn’t make a big deal out of writing in a language that is not one’s own. It’s the experience of so many people in the world; those who have left their homes because of wars, environmental disasters, and so on.
What’s important for a poet speaking another language are those little thefts between languages, those strange angles of looking at another literature, “slant” moments in speech, oddities and their music.
Could you say more about those oddities? The lyric itself is a strangeness inside the language. No great lyric poet ever speaks in the so-called proper language of his or her time. Emily Dickinson didn’t write in “proper” English grammar, but with a slanted music of fragmentary perception. César Vallejo placed three dots in the middle of the line, as if language itself were not enough, as if the poet’s voice needed to leap from one image to another, to make—to use T. S. Eliot’s phrase—a raid on the inarticulate. Our contemporary, M. NourbeSe Philip, has created her very own music out of the language of colonial power. Paul Celan wrote to his wife from Germany, where he briefly visited from his voluntary exile in France: “The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere.”
How important is language or nationality to your identity as a poet? Do you consider yourself a Russian poet? An American one? Is that a meaningful distinction to you? Well, I still write in Russian from time to time. And I read in Russian a great deal. But do I consider myself an American poet? Yes, I do. But, then, I must answer a question: What does it mean to be an American poet? What is my American experience? It is laughing with my friends, making love to my wife, fighting with my family, loving my family, loving the ocean (I love water), loving to travel on trains, loving this human speech. But we all have these things, don’t we? Yes, we do. And therefore, I fiercely resist being pigeonholed as a “Russian poet” or an “immigrant poet” or even an “American poet.” I am a human being. It is a marvelous thing to be.
Ilya Kaminsky (Credit: Bob Mahoney)
In these poems you don’t flinch from the terror and carnage of war. But there are also very beautiful, even ecstatic poems of marriage and new fatherhood. What is the role of joy in a poetry of witness? What place is there for beauty and laughter in art that confronts horror? Yes, many poems in this book have to do with civic strife. But the story circles around the life of two newlyweds, the moments of small joys in a young marriage. It is a book of motherhood and fatherhood; it is a book of private happiness. I am a love poet, or a poet in love with the world. It is just who I am. If the world is falling apart, I have to say the truth. But I don’t stop being in love with that world.
True witness isn’t just about violence and war. To only notice those things is to witness only a part of our existence. But there is also wonder.
I see it as my duty to report this lyricism in the whirl of our griefs. It is a personal responsibility for me: My father was a Jewish child in occupied Odessa who not only suffered, but also learned to dance. He was shaved bald so that Germans wouldn’t notice his dark hair. The Russian woman who hid him, Natalia, hid him for three years. It is not an easy thing, to keep a restless child inside for three years. Natalia taught him how to tango. And so they danced for the three years of that war, in a room where the curtains were always drawn. Once, he escaped outside to play and the German soldiers saw him, so he ran to the market and hid behind boxes of tomatoes. All my friends tell me there are too many tomatoes in my poems. They say there is too much dancing. Is there enough? I don’t know.
Today Ukraine is at war again. I go there about once a year. Donetsk is occupied. In Odessa, that party town, there are terrorist attacks. A café I liked to frequent got blown up hours before I was to meet a friend there. That friend, the poet Boris Khersonsky, gathered neighbors around the ruined entrance to the café and read his poems aloud. Some folks brought food to give away for free.
Even on the most unnerving days there are very tender moments. We have a duty to report them, too.
Here is another image from the early 1990s, from a different war: Transnistria, just sixty-five miles from our apartment in Odessa. I am fifteen years old. People knock on our door saying they fled without a change of underwear, asking to please let them make a phone call. In this chaos people lose their pensions, their homes, but they still go to the city garden in Odessa and dance while old men squeeze their accordions. Old women polka across the street, their medals clinking, beer bottles raised in the air as the rest of us clap from the benches. Time squeezes us like two pleats of an accordion.
Is it foolish to speak of little joys that occur in the middle of tragedy? It is our humanity. Whatever we have left of it. We must not deny it to ourselves.
Your story begins when a boy is shot while he’s watching a puppet show. In the second half of the collection, Momma Galya organizes a resistance movement from her position as a director of the local puppet theater. For American readers, can you talk a bit about the importance of puppet theater in Eastern Europe and about why you made puppet shows so central to your book? The carnival has often been a feature of rebellion. Puppets serve many purposes—on the one hand, especially here in the States, they make people laugh. But they aren’t just comedians; they are often the tools that bring the sharpest criticism to life, making those in power a laughingstock. They are an art of revolt.
At many points in European history puppetry was blamed for inciting revolutions and forbidden. England, Portugal, Germany, and France had laws criminalizing puppeteers at various times. This is not surprising, as the police state is always nervous of places where people gather together.
When the Czech language was banned in the Austro-Hungarian empire, puppeteers continued performing in Czech as an act of defiance. Later, during the Nazi invasion, Hitler closed hundreds of puppet theaters, but the anti-fascist puppet plays of Karel Capek were staged underground.
In England the puppets Punch and Judy were wildly popular, appearing onstage to laugh aloud at the powers that be and breaking every law. They were the heroes of the poor, gathering huge crowds at fairs. The church and government called Punch the corrupter, and, of course—happily—he was.
In America, we have Bread and Puppet Theater, which is one of the best things about Vermont. They believe in the revolutionary role of public art in a time when so much art has been commodified. They had plays in the time of the Vietnam War, after the Kent State shootings, and during both Bushes’ Iraq wars. And you won’t find it in mainstream newspapers, but here in America, riot police fired bean bag rounds at protesters who refused to disperse after watching puppet shows in Eugene, Oregon, in 2000.
Our reality, like that of Deaf Republic, is as fabulist and mythical as it was in medieval Europe. We just refuse to see it.
Russia’s most famous puppet is Petrushka, a Punch-like figure first played by the skomorokhi, traveling players. In Soviet times, the Sergey Obraztsov puppet theater in Moscow, the largest in the world, was wildly popular. And even in Siberia, in the gulag—as my grandmother, who spent over a decade there, told me many times—there were small puppet theaters put on by the prisoners.
She said when men or women from a puppet theater were executed or died of exhaustion, other prisoners hung puppets on their window, or laid their puppet on their empty bed.
Much of your career has involved making a case for the importance of poetry as a tool of political witness and resistance. I also think, from conversations we’ve had, that you believe poetry is the most powerful mode of human communication across gulfs of time. What are your thoughts on how poetry is able to address both its own particular moment and the no-moment of eternity? Poetry is the art that smashes the borders of time, to misquote Boris Pasternak. For me poetry is a moment of awe—that silence that travels from one human body to another by means of words. Gilgamesh was written four thousand years ago and it transforms us still. Or take our contemporary Gwendolyn Brooks. She died almost twenty years ago but is perhaps more relevant now than ever before; people feel compelled to make a whole new form—the golden shovel—in response to her music.
This is what poetry is: not a kind of public posturing but a private language of music and imagery that is strange and compelling enough that it can speak privately to thousands of people at the same time.
In poetry, borders of nationhood and time collapse: Sappho and Catullus are just as relevant now as Allen Ginsberg and Claudia Rankine.
The poem is a charm; it must actively cast a spell on the reader now. If it doesn’t, it fails, whether the poem is about a face that launched a thousand ships or about a woman standing in a line outside a prison wall or about plums in the icebox. That freshness of speech ravishes the human in us.
I don’t see any value in asking whether poetry can exist outside of the political. Poetry is not about an event. It is the event. Art is the resistance of complacency: It always stands in opposition to numbness.
That is why it just doesn’t die, poetry—despite so many death notices. It is always there, waking us up when we get numb, poking us in the eye.
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). A new book of fiction, Cleanness, is forthcoming from FSG in January 2020.
Marlon James and I have met before, many times, but never in Los Angeles. A Facebook update this morning informs me that James’s favorite city in America is L.A. I’m waiting for him in the lobby of the Line hotel, Koreatown’s very hip, very industrial, very dope—to quote its enthusiasts—singular travel destination, but I’m worried about the noise. Elevator jazz is playing overhead, and the aqua-blue couches and glass dining tables are packed with folks just like us talking about business deals, and art, and literature, and vastness, and coffee roasters, and Hollywood. When he arrives we sit at the far back of the lobby, away from the bustling entrance. I ask, “Why is Los Angeles your favorite city?” and he says “ha” in the new way we’ve all come to share the sentiment: being reminded that hundreds, sometimes thousands of “friends” and “followers” are reading the minutiae of our daily lives, even if they don’t click Like or leave a comment. The practice is popularly known as lurking. I call it research. “I still think art can happen here,” he says. “New York has museums, but museums aren’t culture. Museums are a graveyard for culture. If I am this year’s Patti Smith, I cannot go to New York, but I can still go to Los Angeles. There’s a sense of possibility here. Kendrick, and Anderson. Paak, the Black Hippy movement, Kamasi Washington, all of that is Los Angeles.” He turns the question on me, and I don’t even need to think about the answer. I love the desert, the mythos of the Western frontier, the apocalypse. “I’m going to die in the desert,” I say, and we both briefly acknowledge the setting sun, pink with hints of orange, bouncing off the backs of buses moving slowly down Wilshire Boulevard, before getting down to business.
I ask him a question about the world since Donald Trump when he lets out another hearty laugh. Hearty laughter and Facebook will become a theme of our two and a half hours together. “That’s usually a question I get from the foreign press,” he says. James doesn’t take a breath between sentences. “The most powerful aspect of fascism is that nobody knows they are sitting in fascism when they’re in it. Trump is disruptive, but he’s not transformative. We’re going to see more literature coming out of this administration than coming out of 9/11. 9/11 was instantaneous. We’re not even sure how to process this yet.” I’m reminded of the tense, private conversations I’ve had with friends since the 2016 election: reviewing our savings, taking on extra work, scaling back, canceling vacations. We’re sure that the worst of the recession is on its way, and none of us are prepared to survive it. Forget talking about the bizarre, carnival-like press conferences; no comment on the sitting president’s outrageous ideas regarding climate change; I don’t bring up the migrant children in detention centers. I’m still anchored to the end of James’s last sentence. He’s right, I can’t even process the daily news. In the name of self-care, unplugging, unwinding, getting over and getting through, I close my app like everyone else.
I’ve sat down with James many times before, so I know his cadence. We’re talking about novelists now, and apathy, and James is about to bring his point full circle. “Every book is political. Not political is politics,” he says. “I’m not on a mission, but I think a writer has to talk about what’s in front of them, even when writing about shape-shifting creatures.”
Marlon James is the author of four highly acclaimed novels. His first, John Crow’s Devil, which was rejected seventy-eight times before it was published by Akashic Books in 2005, went on to be named a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. His follow-up, The Book of Night Women (Riverhead Books, 2009), won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and an NAACP Image Award. His magnum opus (to date), A Brief History of Seven Killings, won the 2015 Man Booker Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award.
His new novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, published by Riverhead Books in February, is the first book of an epic fantasy trilogy about Tracker, a hunter known widely for “his nose,” who is tasked with hunting down a mysterious boy who hasn’t been seen in three years. Tracker, who some have called a wolf, finds himself working with a ragtag band of hunters, some human and others supernatural, including a shape-shifting mercenary named Leopard, all searching for the boy. As Tracker and his group move closer to discovering the boy’s location and true identity, they come under attack by enemies near and far. Weighing in at 640 pages, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is in many ways the novel that James was destined to write. While much of the media hype has been focused on the fact that James wrote an epic fantasy, I am intrigued for all of its other riches: This is James’s first book that is not set in his native Jamaica, his first book about empire. I would argue that James has never been more free. Though he read African mythologies and epics for three years before writing one word, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a testament to his own make-believe. “I really wanted to geek out and write the story I wish I read as a kid,” he says. “I am writing the stories that I want to read about Jamaica. I wrote the stories that I wanted to read about Jamaica.”
Mic drop.
The Man Booker Prize win catapulted James to international stardom. With the win, he joined the “one-name club,” composed of those writers and artists whose legend has no ceiling and no floor: Jesmyn, Edwidge, Colson, Zadie, Toni, Hilton, Jamaica, Gwendolyn, and now Marlon. With that kind of glory comes fame: Melina Matsoukas, the visionary, two-time Grammy Award–winning director of music videos, films, and television shows (most notably Issa Rae’s Insecure on HBO), is leading the adaptation of A Brief History of Seven Killings for Amazon Studios.
After such a meteoric rise to the heights of literary fame, I am curious about whether his approach to writing this new book was different from the others. “All my books start with trial and error,” he says. “There were four or five versions that I tried. This is the one that worked. I was talking to Melina [Matsoukas]—do you know her?” he stops to ask me. It was my turn for hearty laughter. Of course I know Beyoncé and Solange’s personal director. We have brunch all the time. He returns the laughter. “Well, we were talking about Showtime’s The Affair and the changing perspective. That’s when it occurred to me that Tracker could tell this story, but if you want to believe him, that’s your business.” How perfect, I thought. The Black woman director adapting your most critically acclaimed novel is also talking shop with you about your draft-in-progress. This is some kind of psychedelic, neon-haired P-Funk dream that could only happen in a Black Los Angeles where Black people not only know the future, they are writing and directing it.
Still, James is modest in discussing his success. “I write the kind of books where if people don’t say, ‘Read it,’ people don’t read it. God bless those people who can write best-sellers. I don’t write great white saviors; my books are pretty nihilistic; things don’t end well, and I think something like a Booker Prize got more and more people to read my work. It’s hard for literary authors, for authors writing people of color.” James is standing for his ovation, but he’s also aware that every pair of hands in the auditorium counts.
“Yeah, but what about the bad parts?” I ask. There’s rarely a story this enchanted without a poison apple.
James is only the second Caribbean winner to win the Booker, following Trinidad-born V. S. Naipaul, who won the award in 1971. “It also changed the kinds of scrutiny I get,” James says, “which brings us back to Facebook. Any little thing I say on Facebook ends up in the Guardian and international media, but it hasn’t made me less outspoken.”
James is referring to two particular instances here but offers no further elaboration, and I don’t prompt him to say more. In November 2015 James responded to novelist Claire Vaye Watkins’s five-thousand-word Tin House essay “On Pandering” that would rock the Internet for weeks. In it Watkins discusses motherhood, misogyny, publishing, and pandering, which she refers to as performing for the imaginary white, male audience. “I have been writing to impress old white men,” she wrote. For as much as “On Pandering” does do, there is so much that it doesn’t do: It doesn’t consider the lives and journeys of writers of color, it doesn’t consider that her readers are people of color, and it doesn’t hold white, female publishing gatekeepers accountable for continuing to popularize and publish a very particular type of literature again and again. James wrote on Facebook: “While she [Watkins] recognizes how much she was pandering to the white man, we writers of colour spend way too much time pandering to the white woman. I’ve mentioned this before, how there is such a thing as ‘the critically acclaimed story.’ You see it occasionally in certain highbrow magazines and journals. Astringent, observed, clipped, wallowing in its own middle-style prose and private ennui, porn for certain publications.” The Guardian would go on to say that James “slammed” and “blasted” the publishing world in his retort, but James did what Black people do every day: He pointed at what was standing right in front of him and called it out for exactly what it is.
Fast-forward two years and James would find his Facebook posts in the news again. On June 16, 2017, a jury acquitted officer Jeronimo Yanez in the shooting death of thirty-two-year-old Philando Castile during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, just north of Saint Paul, where James has lived for more than a decade. Castile, an employee of Saint Paul Public Schools, was shot seven times. Diamond Reynolds, Castile’s girlfriend, live-streamed the immediate aftermath of the shooting on Facebook, and one can see Officer Yanez still pointing his gun at Castile’s dead body. Reynolds’s four-year-old daughter is in the backseat.
The Washington Post picked up the story following James’s Facebook essay-post “Smaller, and Smaller, and Smaller,” written the day after Yanez’s acquittal. Though James is one of the most famous people in Saint Paul and one of the most recognizable, he carries the burden of not appearing “too big” or “too close” (a phrase coined by comedian Dick Gregory in 1971) to white people but especially to police officers. He points out that while some Minnesotans want to “rebrand this state as North,” in reality, North is merely a romanticized concept in race relations. This is where I press James for more. We talk about living in this country, in the world as Black people, as writers, as people who travel frequently and observe everything. I bring up Garnette Cadogan’s groundbreaking essay “Walking While Black” and James nods in recognition. “Garnette’s piece made me think about how I don’t know how to stand still. Talking about Philando Castile, I don’t know if I should stand up and get shot, read my phone and get shot, blink and get shot. I don’t know what actual physical activity I can do, including standing still, that I can do and not get shot.”
“And Tracker?” I ask, thinking of James’s protagonist roving through forests, mountains, and enemy territory with bands of people after him.
It’s obvious that James has thought a lot about his newest protagonist and state-sanctioned surveillance and violence. “It’s important for Tracker and Leopard that shape-shifting is a pleasure, and it’s a nature, a survival, but not in the same way. They’re not being monitored and watched. They don’t have a city system and a state working against them.”
At this point we take a few moments for ourselves to clear the air of the weight of Black death. Thankfully James has one of those urgent texts that happen when you land in L.A., and I need more water.
When we return to the table, James is laughing. “It’s amazing that people think I am outspoken on Facebook, because I still feel like I have to hold back. I feel if I really, really said what I want to say, I could still be deported,” he says. We are laughing again partly because that is both a half and whole truth, and as Black people we are on the inside of it: It is true that James will always say what needs to be said, and that’s the source of his authority and mastery, and it is also true that James lives with the everyday threat of harassment, deportation, and violence, if someone in power decided to make it so.
“Are you ready to talk about this novel finally?” I ask. Beaming, he claps his hands and pumps his shoulders a few times like a beautiful, broad-shouldered athlete being interviewed after a victory. “Ready!” he says with a smile.
James explains that break dancing, Labelle, Star Wars, and Jamaican fashion magazines of the eighties and nineties were his first experiences of futurism. I want to know what appeals to him about genre, specifically. Any close reader of James’s work will tell you that A Brief History of Seven Killings, which delves into three electrifying decades of Jamaican history around the attempted assassination of Bob Marley, is pretty genre-defying itself. It is clear that James has a fondness for crime and mystery, an admiration threaded through all four of his novels. “Most of the books I read when I was younger were fantasy, comics, crime, and children’s books, and children’s books themselves are usually all of those things. Part of it is growing up in the Caribbean.” Here, James paraphrases Gabriel García Márquez: “Living in the Caribbean is wilder than the wildest fiction.” James credits his grandparents and his favorite aunt for his love of imaginative fiction. “Stories you’re told as a kid are always fantastical. I’m growing up in Jamaica, and I’m in a Jamaican pharmacy, not even a bookstore, you’re not going to find Moby-Dick. You’re going to find a novelization of Star Trek. Even my sci-fi fantasy cinema language is not the movies; it’s the books I read. It’s very dime-store, very pop comics; quite frankly it’s whatever got dumped in the third world, and I gobbled up all of it. I mean, I read Superman III as a book.” He returns to his love of Los Angeles briefly and says, “L.A. is the place where genre fiction exploded with the two genres I like the most: sci-fi/fantasy and crime. The crime novels of L.A. have a wider campus than anywhere else.”
James wants readers to be “exhausted” by the time they finish Black Leopard, Red Wolf from putting the full story together for themselves. “I realized reading all of the African epics, the awesome complexity of these narratives and how much intelligence that they’re expecting from the reader. People are more complicated than simple story; the gods are more complicated than that. They expect you to have the intelligence to navigate the treacherous waters.” And James flings us directly into turbulent, unreliable waters in Black Leopard, Red Wolf. He forces us to second-guess Tracker, Leopard, the entire cast of characters, and ourselves. While most epic fantasies look to the hero-crusade model, James knew from the outset that his trilogy would do none of that. “Respectability politics is Black people playing Anglo. It’s tying to a value system that I have no interest in writing about. I wasn’t interested in writing a sci-fi movie in brown face. Firstly, if you’re interested in African storytelling, realize that the trickster is telling the story, so the whole sense of authenticity and authority that we attach to storytelling—throw that out of the window. I knew I was going to write a hedonistic, queer, selfish character. I’m not interested in inner nobility. That’s a European, Christian narrative from the Crusades.”
And the novel is gay. “Gay gay,” James adds. We’re both reminiscing about our time as baby queers who weren’t yet out. I tell him about my times riding the train from Poughkeepsie to basement parties in Brooklyn where money was collected at the door by a dyke elder, bottles of Heineken were for sale in the kitchen, and we were left alone to grind against each other for hours in the dark. Ladies only. James chimes in, recalling his own closetedness and coming out. “I was in the Bronx with the Jamaicans,” he says, “and I’d take the 5 train to Barnes and Noble, to Union Square. Just to walk around. Just to be out. Our built-in desire to shape-shift is always there.” James scoffs at the notion that an African epic can’t also be queer. “The novel is super fluid and super sexual because Africa is fluid and sexual. Pansexuality, queerness, nonbinary is not new to Africa. White people like to think it is.” Being queer doesn’t mean that someone isn’t problematic, and Black Leopard, Red Wolf’s Tracker isn’t without his problems. He’s a misogynist, but unlike other authors, James takes his character to task. “It was very important to me that Tracker is called out on his sexism. I’m not having that.”
Before our time together comes to an end, I tell James that he can’t get away without talking about process and craft. James is a tenured creative writing and literature professor at Macalester College in Saint Paul. When I ask him how he managed to write another 600-plus-page book, he scoots closer to me and shows me his iPhone screen. He opens his gallery to dozens and dozens of panoramic photos of his office wallpapered in bright index cards and sticky notes, mostly pink, yellow, and green. He shows me maps of various African dynasties and the map of his own new novel that he designed himself. I can see that besides being meticulous and organized, he’s simply happy that someone asked him about craft—for once. Before closing his phone he gives me a final observation on craft: “People disregard plot because they’re not really that interested in their characters.”
We get up to hug and ask the lobby attendant to take our photo together, though we’ll see each other soon: The very next night, on the rooftop of the same hotel, Riverhead Books and Entertainment Weekly will throw a party for him. The Los Angeles Times will be there, Roxane Gay, Carolyn Kellogg, the who’s who of literary L.A.
James will be standing in the center of the room, dashing in a traditional Arabic black thobe with a high slit on one side, his thick hair pulled back, a composed celebrity. There will be two signature cocktails, a large spread, and heaps and heaps of praise for what is sure to be this year’s blockbuster book. Every guest will be greeted at the door by James’s team with the question, “Are you a black leopard or a red wolf?” When I arrive and it is my turn to answer, I scan the room for James and lock eyes, blow him a kiss, before turning to his team and saying, “I am both.”
Kima Jones is a poet and prose writer living in Los Angeles, where she owns and operates Jack Jones Literary Arts, a book publicity company.
Twenty-two writers, including Alexander Chee and Rebecca Makkai, offer their personal take on the best retreats for productivity, motivation, networking, and more.
Our annual Writers Retreats Issue features twenty-two of the most inspiring retreats in the country; a profile of Marlon James on the release of his new epic fantasy novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf; an interview with Valeria Luiselli about her new novel, Lost Children Archive; a conversation with poet Ilya Kaminsky about his new collection, Deaf Republic; the second installment of How to Get Paid; Reviewers & Critics; the art of translation; writing prompts; and more.
In the twenty-fourth episode of Ampersand, editor in chief Kevin Larimer and senior editor Melissa Faliveno discuss new books by the three authors featured in the new issue: Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James; Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, and Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky.
02:40Marlon James, the author of three previous books of fiction, including the Man Booker Prize winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, is back this month with Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the first installment of his Dark Star Trilogy, an epic fantasy that’s being called “The African Games of Thrones.” And this book is truly epic: It follows two shape-shifting mercenaries, Leopard and Tracker, on an odyssey through a Dark Ages version of the African continent, across ancient cities and dense forests, in search of a missing boy. Along the way they encounter all sorts of mythical creatures, including vampires, witches, wizards, trickster monkeys, and one very wise buffalo. Adventure and swashbuckling ensue, but so do deeper explorations: of truth, power, queerness, and the desire to understand one another.
04:25 Marlon James reads an excerpt from Black Leopard, Red Wolf.
The opening spread of this issue’s conversation between Ilya Kaminsky by Garth Greenwell. Photo by Bob Mahoney.
12:03Ilya Kaminsky’s new book, Deaf Republic, is a kind of parable-in-poems set in an unnamed occupied territory during a time of political unrest. The poetic narrative starts with a gunshot: While breaking up a protest, a soldier shoots and kills a young deaf boy—and this horrific act renders the entire town deaf. The citizens coordinate their silent insurgency with sign language as the book follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence. It’s a love story, a collection of poems about terror and carnage and witness and political dissent—and the power of puppeteering. Ilya was born in Odessa, in what was then the Soviet Union, in 1977. Substantially deaf from the age of four, he spoke no English when he immigrated to the United States with his family at sixteen. And yet he studied at the University of Rochester and Georgetown University and has a JD from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. His honors include a Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Metcalf Award, a Lannan Fellowship, Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the editor in chief of the literary journal Poetry International and, after several years teaching in the graduate creative writing program at San Diego State University, Ilya now holds the Bourne Poetry Chair at Georgia Tech.
15:12 Ilya Kaminsky reads three poems from Deaf Republic.
The opening spread of this issue’s interview with Valeria Luiselli by Lauren LeBlanc. Photo by Tony Gale.
19:44Valeria Luiselli’s new novel, Lost Children Archive, follows a family of four—whose names and ethnicities we never learn—as they road-trip across the country, from New York to Arizona. The couple are audio archivists, and their destination on this journey is Apacheria, the place the Apaches once called home. “Why Apaches?” asks the ten-year-old son. “Because they were the last of something,” answers the father. The family, which is facing a crisis of its own, is trying to hold onto its own foundations while attempting to understand those of the country across which they travel. It’s a book that is at once a great American road trip novel and an investigation of the complexities of family, immigration, justice, and equality in the United States. Born in Mexico City in 1983, Luiselli has lived in South Korea, India, Spain, and elsewhere; she now lives in New York, where she teaches a creative writing workshop with her niece, at an immigration detention center, to mostly Guatemalan children for whom Spanish is their second language. In the fall she will begin teaching at Bard College, where he was recently appointed writer in residence. She is the author of four previous books, including Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, The Story of My Teeth, Faces in the Crowd, and Sidewalks.
21:58 Valeria Luiselli reads an excerpt from Lost Children Archive.
27:48 The cohosts talk about one of their favorite subjects—made-up words!—after receiving an e-mail from Jim Armstrong, an avid listener of Ampersand who shared a project in which he came up with a new word for each letter of the alphabet, including wrught, vocabullary, and emaul. On his website, armstrongwords.com, he offers the definition and etymology of each word, then provides some useful examples. Thanks for reaching out, Jim!
This episode is brought to you in part by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. From July 16–28, the University of the South will host the 30th annual Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Thanks to the generosity of the Walter E. Dakin Memorial Fund, supported by the estate of Tennessee Williams, the Conference will gather distinguished faculty to provide instruction and criticism through workshops and craft lectures in poetry, fiction, and playwriting. Fellowships and scholarships are available, and the application deadline is March 20. Apply online and find out more at sewaneewriters.org.
Valeria Luiselli audio excerpted courtesy Penguin Random House Audio from Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, read by the author, Kivlighan de Montebello, William DeMeritt and Maia Enrigue Luiselli.
Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast is a production of Poets & Writers, Inc., and is edited and mixed by Melissa Faliveno. Music for this episode is provided by YACHT, BitBasic, Adam & Alma, and Clinic. Comments or suggestions? E-mail ampersand@pw.org.
One can make a home wherever the body finds itself at rest. I imagine this to be true always, but especially now, while taking in the large plastic novelty fish hanging high on the wall above the head of Terrance Hayes. Even while slouching in his chair, Hayes towers above the table in front of him, so that the fish, a marlin, appears as a crown under the glow of red light humming overhead, darkening half of the marlin and half of the face of the poet. We are at Great Jones Cafe in lower Manhattan, a place Hayes told me is his “go-to spot” when we spoke earlier, trying to nail down where to meet. When I arrive, I find him alone in a corner, drink already on the table. Hayes is a Southerner at heart, having spent his childhood and early adulthood in South Carolina, so it comes as no surprise to find out why he has led me here, to this place he tells me he comes to every weekend, often alone. “I didn’t know how quiet it would or wouldn’t be in here,” he tells me as I sit down, in reference to my request that we find a low-key location for our interview. “But it’s the only place in this city where I can get good grits, so it’s one of the few places in this city I love.” I imagine this to be his way of welcoming me into a small corner of his home.
We are talking about primary colors, Hayes and I. He is describing for me his most recent project. His poems were commissioned by composer Tyshawn Sorey for Cycles of My Being, a song cycle that “explores the realities of life as a black man in America” (or so it is described in the publicity material), performed by renowned tenor Lawrence Brownlee at Carnegie Hall, Opera Philadelphia, and Lyric Opera of Chicago. So Hayes sent Sorey some work to be played in front of a mass audience. He tells me he agonized over which poems to send—“you know how I am with this shit; nobody knows what poems are except for poets,” he says—and eventually bent to the will of the composer, who had asked Hayes if he had any poems about hope, or about hate. Hayes balked at the idea.
“They wanted [it] to be hopeful, but a hopeful poem isn’t my tendency,” he says. “And a hateful poem isn’t my tendency either.” He eventually wrote a poem specifically for the show but then set it aside.
This story is less about the song cycle for me and more about what is happening with the interior of Terrance Hayes. “I’m not interested in primary colors,” he tells me when I ask him why he has no interest in hope or hate. “It’s not nuanced enough. I’m interested in the spaces where colors overlap. It’s like when people call someone a racist and think that’s the end of it. That ain’t the end. Racism is a symptom of fear, or greed, or some other bullshit. So even if I wrote a poem about hate, it ain’t gonna be about hate when I’m done with it. My personality likes a challenge, so I can write a poem that many would consider hopeful.”
“But aren’t you a hopeful person?” I ask.
“Am I?” he shoots back playfully, smiling before sighing and stirring a small tornado into his drink with the tip of his straw. “I mean, the endgame is always going to be death, so how hopeful can anyone really be?”
We are talking about death, Hayes and I. Or, it seems, death is the river’s mouth our conversation is flowing into. This makes sense, in some ways. We are here to talk about his new book of poems, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, published by Penguin in June, which is overwhelming in every sense. Overwhelming in its brilliance, yes, but also overwhelming in its pacing, its style. Each poem is the exact same length—a sonnet’s requisite fourteen lines—and carries the exact same title: “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin.” The book, despite its breadth and clever turns, is a confrontation. Not an unwelcome one but a confrontation nonetheless. Hayes is too crafty to force his way, unwanted, into a room, so his poems are like the slow and steady picking of a lock, until the door handle clicks. Instead of entering, the poet stands outside, satisfied with his work.
Hayes began the process of writing the sonnets with inspiration from Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets series. Coleman’s sonnets, much like Hayes’s own, are winding, endlessly questioning, and rich with syntax and alliteration. A stunning formalist, yet inventive and often two steps ahead of her peers, Coleman, who died in 2013 at the age of sixty-seven, spent much of her life as a poet struggling to make a living from her craft. Born and raised in L.A.’s Watts neighborhood, Coleman worked several odd jobs until her poems began to take off, and even then it was hard for her to make ends meet. Her hustle manifested itself in her poems; chasing new ways of crafting a poem became a form of survival. She was a mentor to some and an inspiration to many more, but Coleman wasn’t always granted the acclaim she deserved. Her work—unlike the work of Hayes—wasn’t fully celebrated until after her death.
Hayes is gathering his roses while he is still alive to grasp them—thorns and all. One such thorn: Hayes, who now lives in New York City after several years in Pittsburgh, where he taught at the University of Pittsburgh and was codirector of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics there, appreciated the love he was shown in the smaller city but notes that it became overwhelming. “They had my face up in the airport,” he says. “I couldn’t handle it.”
This is not to say that Hayes is entirely humble, however—nor should he be. But he is grounded, possessing a healthy blend of logic and confidence. You know the long list. The author of six poetry collections—Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999), Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006), Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), How to Be Drawn (Penguin, 2015), and now the new book—he has won much of what a poet can win, including the National Book Award for Lighthead; the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for Muscular Music; a Whiting Award; an NAACP Image Award; and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. He is also a chancellor at the Academy of American Poets. All that and he’s still relatively young, just forty-six years old. Young enough to have decades of future success but old enough to have watched skilled but less decorated writers die, without much control over their legacies.
As for his own legacy, Hayes tells me that he is most concerned with how he’s viewed as a teacher. He is at NYU now and finds himself at home in the classroom. He tells stories about his talented students and how there is a mutual pushing and pulling forward. None of it is about money, he tells me.
“This is why I just want to leave my kids my poems,” he says, referring to his two children. “I want to leave them art.” He pauses and references something he recently mentioned to his ex-wife, the poet Yona Harvey. “Money is nothing to be governed by, because once you get it, it’s never enough. When I die, I want my kids to have my art. Surely that will be worth something one day.”
Confidence and logic.
We are talking about Wanda Coleman again, as the darkness falling on Great Jones Street becomes richer, nighttime beginning to flood in through the windows. “I wrote an American Sonnet to Wanda Coleman,” he tells me, picking apart the catfish on his plate. “And I sent it to her. We exchanged letters, and then suddenly she was ill. She died in 2013, and I registered that, and then,” he pauses, “and then around the election I decided to do something else.”
Hayes says he had a “reaction” to the election, and I understand instantly what he means, as I felt it too. For all of the “now more than ever” tropes about writers and poets being needed at this particular moment—particularly writers and poets of color—the election did create a sense of urgency for many, not necessarily to share all of their work at once, but to establish a legacy of work, something that might be left behind, if there would be nothing else left of us. If things got “real bad,” whatever that meant. For Hayes, though, the week of the election also had another emotional touch point: Wanda Coleman’s seventieth birthday would have been on November 13, 2016.
“I had this obsession with writing these shorter poems, because I had been writing long poems,” he says, referring to the work in his last book, How to Be Drawn, which included a number of multiple-page poems such as “Who Are the Tribes” and “How to Draw a Perfect Circle.” He continues: “And I thought I could do this for her. I thought to myself, ‘Can I access the thing I most love about what she did, in these times?’” It became something he chased after relentlessly. “Also,” he smirks, after I ask him what other motivations existed for his use of the form, “I like a volta.”
It seems, at least to me, that a volta is defined best by the hand that crafts it, and so therefore a volta can be anything. Formalists will define it as the turn, or the rhetorical division, the shift, between the sonnet’s first eight lines and the final six. For Hayes the volta is in the project itself, tethered to his always shifting definition of the assassin in the work. “I’m trying to go in one way and come out another way. So, yeah, I’m trying to see how many turns I can fit into a poem, but also I like the sonnet as a way of addressing an idea: How can I write a traditional love poem to someone or something I don’t deem worthy of my love?” After a long pull of his drink, he adds, “I just don’t know what other form would be able to hold this particular moment.”
A love poem for an enemy or a foe is largely about restraint, I suppose. Which makes the project of the book and the restraints on the poems themselves even more fascinating. The central conceit is this: How can I reach out and gently touch that which might not be so gentle toward me? And how can I be sure that in honoring these foes with love, in my turning to face them, they won’t change?
Sometimes the foes are invented, and sometimes the foes are direct and predictable—country, or president, or racism. But the book is most interesting when the foe is Hayes himself. “I’m in a different phase of my life now,” he tells me after we talk briefly about what it is to want to love yourself when you are your own enemy. “Having been married and not being married [now] also bears on the sonnets,” he says, staring into his drink. Hayes is recently divorced from Harvey, though they remain on good terms, he insists, raising their children, a son and a daughter, shuttling between Pittsburgh and New York. “I haven’t talked…. People been asking this shit, but I don’t wanna talk too much about it. But what I will say to you is that sometimes the assassin is you, or sometimes the assassin is a beloved, and that role feels transferrable. It’s like the stuff in the book about Orpheus and Eurydice.” He pauses here, which is rare for Hayes when he gets into a stream of conversation. He is talking about a series of poems in the book that detail the ancient legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. The poems are decidedly distinct from the others, in both tone and what they are attempting to unravel. They are the poems in the book in which Hayes is hiding the least, taking himself to task, or taking the idea of love to task, or taking the idea of forever to task.
In one of the sonnets he writes:
I tried to tell the woman
Who sent me songs, it’s departure that makes company Hard to master. I tried to tell her I’m a muser, a miser With time. I love poems more than money & pussy. From now on I will eat brunch alone. I believe Eurydice is actually the poet, not Orpheus. Her muse Has his back to her with his ear bent to his own heart. As if what you learn making love to yourself matters More than what you learn when loving someone else.
“Most of that is me tying back to a different kind of relationship,” he says. “Who is the assassin between Eurydice and Orpheus? Who is the poet between those two? I’m thinking about…what does it mean to be married to a poet? What does it mean to be married to a motherfucker who’s gonna be playing his music no matter what? He’s a poet. It’s what he’s gonna do. But there are consequences to that. And so you might say, well, maybe she’s the poet then. I’m just…I’m wondering about the beloved as an assassin.”
This sits between us heavy on the table, the most open Hayes has been to this point in our talk. We leave it there, untouched.
I write the poems so I don’t have to talk about this shit,” Hayes tells me when I ask him which part of the response to his work he values more: his playfulness and precision with language or his sentimentality. He is not saying this to dismiss me, and we both understand this. It’s a moment in the conversation when he is talking to me as a writer, someone who he knows has likely had similar responses to questions like this. “Anything I say in a poem, I mean it,” he says. “Feeling and intuition is the only important thing to me. You can persuade someone through logic that perhaps what they’re thinking is wrong. But you can’t persuade someone that their feelings are wrong. You can’t tell a motherfucker that they ain’t hungry if they’re hungry. No words in the world can do that. So I trust feeling as a bedrock thing. Can you want to kill a motherfucker and simultaneously love them?”
To trust one’s feelings can be all-consuming, especially if those feelings are brought into a harsher light by a mess of a political moment. Hayes is invested in his obsessions, even if his obsessions are about the nation unraveling.
There are poets who are slow and deliberate speakers, working to make sure every sentence holds weight. But Hayes is a rapid-fire conversationalist, spreading his long arms wide, or gesturing with one massive hand. Like his work, he is challenging you to keep up with him and to pick out what’s worth expanding on. And if you don’t catch it, he’ll expand on it for you anyway. And in this moment the topic worth expanding on is Donald Trump.
“Everything I do has to be in service of poetry,” he says, with a little more excitement in his voice. “I can’t be waking up and thinking about Trump all day. And if I do, I have to do it in service of a poem, or else he’ll be a block.”
He is talking about boxes and how every box, like every poem, has multiple sides through which it can be entered. He decided to put Trump in a box and kept turning the box until his truth looked different from every angle. He found this to be more interesting than it would have been with, say, Barack Obama.
“Obama is super interesting to me, but I already know some of the sides to that cube. He’s a six-sided truth, but I know about half of those sides. As a brother, as a dude who loves basketball, as a dude who got old. To look at something and see yourself in it is easy. I’m not moved by that. With Trump it’s about power and the way his power has a bearing on everyone else. I can meditate on that for at least six months.”
The restraints of the sonnets have been liberating, he tells me. This is only interesting because of how the book wrestles readers inside of it and gives them little room to move within it. If anything, a reader then becomes a part of the interior of the box, which Hayes is turning around in his hand. I don’t mean this to sound negative: One of the book’s strongest points is how readers have to fight their way into and then out of it. Like all of the work Hayes has offered in his career so far, it is both inviting and asking a reader to earn enjoyment of it, in this case through a means of discomfort with the repetitive nature of the poems and their aim.
Hayes tells me he has become so obsessed with the project that he can’t unravel himself from it, which makes sense. He is conflicted, because he knows he can’t do another book like this, but he also knows that he isn’t done with the fascination. “I mean, I got seventy good ones, and I don’t want to overdo it,” he says, blending his usual cool and confidence with the anxieties he holds. “It’s like [ John] Berryman, right? He put out 77 Dream Songs, and then later he put out all of them. And like, there were some all-right ones in there, but shit. I was good with seventy-seven.”
It is political, in some ways: Hayes is surviving the world by writing against it. When I ask him if the work has made him feel any better, he matter-of-factly states, “Well, the shit is still going on, you know?”
There are other ways out, Hayes says. He draws, going to a class once a week and trying to improve his hand as a visual artist. Hayes has experience in the craft, receiving a BA from Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina, where he studied both English and painting. His drawings and paintings provide the artwork for the covers of his books. It’s easy to get lost in the visual form, but he keeps returning to the sonnets. Twisting a forkful of mashed potatoes around, and up toward his mouth, he pauses.
“There’s no law that says an obsession can’t continue beyond the production of the obsession, you know?”
It’s getting late, and the fish over the head of Terrance Hayes has begun to droop its long face lower. This is a trick of the eye, I’m sure. Perhaps Hayes is growing taller, more excitable with conversation, and the fish is shrinking in the face of that. Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” is playing through the café’s speakers, and small crowds of revelers have started to filter in, the way one might expect as a night stretches its palms wider. It is perhaps late only for me. Hayes insists he doesn’t sleep much. “I go to bed around two or three in the morning and wake up around seven. I’m good with four hours a night,” he tells me, as my body involuntarily trembles at the prospect of such little time in bed. He does his best work in the hours after these, when even the revelers beside us begin to lose steam (“I like a nap, though,” he insists). This disclosure makes for an interesting moment between us: me winding down, and him warming up.
Hayes and I find ourselves in the golden hour of our conversation, too. The talk about poems and craft has perhaps drawn all it can draw from the two of us, and now we’re just talking about basketball. Hayes was an Academic All-American basketball player during his time at Coker and has remained attached to the sport. Throughout the conversation Hayes insists that he is always thinking about poems, no matter what else we’re speaking on, but he seems at ease here talking NBA. The plates are cleared off the table, and he has leaned over his drink, swinging his massive palms in one direction or another as he makes a point. An athlete and sports fan and writer, Hayes has an intimate relationship with the game. Like me, he is in it for the narratives, which I do suppose means that even in our talk about basketball, we are talking about poems.
“LeBron James shoots free throws every day,” Hayes tells me. “And you gotta think, ‘Why is this dude shooting free throws every day if he gets paid to shoot free throws?’ He’s doing that shit with no one watching, because he’s after something different.”
I nod, and Hayes continues.
“I think about that versus someone like [Philadelphia 76ers rookie] Ben Simmons, right? Ben Simmons should be a huge star right now, and he’s perplexed by that….”
I take the opportunity to interject that Simmons isn’t a huge star yet because he can’t really shoot, but Hayes is off, sprinting a mile a minute to reach the end of his thought.
“Yeah, but Kobe Bryant struggled with that same shit too, right? Kobe had to fight through the same thing of doing the things that should make you famous and expecting fame. But it ain’t about the fame, though.”
In many ways, I know what’s coming next—Hayes the speaker is rarely separate from Hayes the poet—but I let him draw back the curtain with his own language. “It’s about the glory. There’s a difference in fame and glory. Fame is when everyone else is peeping what you’re doing, but glory is when your peers recognize the work you’re putting in. Glory has to be number one. Glory has to be number one, because no one else has to be there.”
I ask the obvious question, the one about whether or not an artist or an athlete or a parent or a construction worker can have glory without fame. Because this is the thing with Hayes, who is undoubtedly famous and has basked in his share of glory. It has created a mythology around him that he seems equal parts thrilled to revel in and sometimes uncomfortable with. Minutes before the conversation took this turn, we were speaking about pressure, and in the middle of a response, Hayes shook his head and said, “God forbid I ever start writing bad poems,” and one ear might hear I know all of my poems are good, but to another, the poet is saying I don’t know what I would be without my insistence on living up to my own standards. So I wonder out loud how you survive at the intersection of fame and glory, or if you can cut one off in service of the other. Hayes takes a moment.
“Yeah, I think so. On the days I’m writing and I’m in a good groove, I hit moments where I think, ‘Where the fuck did that come from?’ It’s the closest I can get from this,” he says, gesturing toward his head, “to getting it together on that page. And that’s glory. I’m doing that for me, with no one watching, knowing that the people I’m writing for—poets—are doing the same thing. And it only happens a few times, but when it happens it feels good. I did a 360 dunk once, and I was alone in a gym. No one saw it but the other guys on my basketball team, and those are the only people I cared to see it. A 360 dunk is fucking hard. I want the people who know how difficult the work is to bear witness to the work.”
The red light above our heads has only become more aggressive in its lapping up of the darkness, and by now we are both radiating in its shine. Hayes casually regales me with a tale of watching basketball with former NBA player and coach Phil Jackson last April, a story that few poets would have in their back pocket. “We talked about Buddhism and shit. You know, it was a good afternoon,” he says in an “Isn’t New York wild?” kind of way, to which I nod, thinking about the times I’ve been to this city and felt tiny. The gist of the story is that during their first basketball-watching excursion, Jackson insisted that Hayes not mention LeBron James, whom Jackson had found himself feuding with over a Twitter debate. When the 2017 NBA Finals came around, Jackson invited Hayes to his Manhattan apartment to watch them with him, and Hayes balked. “He invited me back to watch the NBA Finals and told me I couldn’t talk about LeBron James!” Hayes says, half-yelling and half-laughing, as energetic as he has been all night. “I can’t talk about LeBron James during the NBA Finals? I like LeBron James! So I was like, ‘Nah, I’ll pass.’ I watched the Finals alone.”
It’s the kind of casual story told by Hayes during which one realizes that he moves through multiple worlds in a singular way, something that can’t be said for many of his peers, though he is still very much among them and often in service to them. He blurbs books vigorously, he reads poems endlessly, and until recently he served as the poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. (Rita Dove took the reins in June.) He derives great pleasure from teaching—during our conversation he is most excited when talking about the ways his students show him to and through poems. But he is also someone who pens work for operas and has his face in an airport and casually watches basketball with one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time. And it all seems simple to him, something he has been working toward since he began working. Both fame and glory.
We are talking about death and isolation again, Hayes and I. It’s a fitting end to our time together. Hayes says his true inclination is to stay inside; he likes New York because he feels like he can do that here, and not many other places. He tells me he both loves and hates the way the city folds around him—loves it for its many options and hates it for its many options, all at once.
When we get to the topic of rap, Hayes is succinct, melancholic. “I think when it comes to rappers, Biggie Smalls is closest to my sensibilities,” he insists, spinning the last bit of ice around in his drink. “He scares me, and the consequences of his art, too…. The consequences of his art informed his life. I think of this like Sylvia Plath. The fact that Sylvia Plath would write ‘Ariel’ and then put her head in an oven, or the fact that Biggie Smalls would say he’s ready to die and then die. There’s something closer to the truth for me. Closer to my understanding of the consequences of what we do. The body’s relationship to the art’s consequences.”
I nod, and look at the time. When I look back up, Hayes is looking outside, while the street, drenched in sirens, howls.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet and critic from Columbus, Ohio.
In the twentieth episode of Ampersand, editor in chief Kevin Larimer and senior editor Melissa Faliveno preview the July/August 2018 issue, featuring a look at how authors, agents, editors, booksellers and publicists work together to reach readers; the secrets to maintaining a long-term author-agent relationship; the summer’s best debut fiction; a profile of poet Terrance Hayes; author Lauren Groff on her new story collection, Florida; self-publishing advice, writing prompts; and more.
00:01 Terrance Hayes reads an excerpt of a poem from his new collection, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.
01:12 The cohosts discuss Lauren Groff’s complicated relationship with her state of residence, Florida, which serves as both backdrop and inspiration for her new collection of stories of the same name, out this month from Riverhead Books. Contributor Bethanne Patrick, otherwise known as @TheBookMaven, profiles Groff for the new issue of the magazine. Kevin and Melissa talk about some of the stranger aspects of Florida (hat tip to the website Florida Man) and share some of their own stories about the Sunshine State, which involve hair removal, Tinkerbell, sunburn, and unsupervised teenagers on the loose.
07:22Lauren Groff reads an excerpt from one of the stories in Florida, “Dogs Go Wolf.”
12:55Terrance Hayes reads a poem from his new collection, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, out this month from Penguin. Hayes is the cover profile of the new issue, and poet, essayist, and critic Hanif Abdurraqib, author of the essay collection They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), interviewed Hayes at the Great Jones Cafe in Manhattan for the piece.
14:56Hanif Abdurraqib reads the opening section of his profile on Hayes from the new issue, “My Past and Future Assassin.”
18:52Terrance Hayes reads two more poems from his new collection, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.
22:18 A. M. Homes, the celebrated author of more than ten books—including novels, story collections, and a memoir—reads an excerpt from the title story in her new collection, Days of Awe, out this month from Viking.
28:31 In honor of the twentieth episode of Ampersand, Kevin and Melissa compose a celebratory haiku. (With sincere apologies to the masters of the form.) If you can do better—and we’re pretty sure you can—send us your Ampersand haiku at ampersand@pw.org.
Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast is a production of Poets & Writers, Inc., and is edited and mixed by Melissa Faliveno. Music for this episode is provided by Podington Bear, Blue Ducks, Audiobinger, and YACHT. Comments or suggestions? E-mail ampersand@pw.org.
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is located at the intersection of 135th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem. It is eight blocks from Langston Hughes’s famous brownstone, seven blocks from where James Baldwin once attended high school, and a three-minute walk from Zora Neale Hurston’s former artist-collective residence. It sits directly across from the Harlem Hospital Center and is surrounded by an array of delis, bodegas, and brownstones—quintessential emblems of Harlem that drape the neighborhood’s landscape.
After stepping off the subway, I walk fifteen feet to the right and purchase a chicken-and-rice meal from the shawarma cart that is parked near the sidewalk in front of the center each day. I sit on one of the benches in front of the building as cars glide down Malcolm X Boulevard, their music thumping with enough bass to shake the street.
Mid-chew I look up and see Barry Jenkins, director of the Academy Award–winning film Moonlight, surveying a table of used books. The moment is almost too prototypically Harlem to be true. Here is one of the preeminent black artists of our time—and one of the most critically acclaimed directors in Hollywood—quietly perusing used books on Malcolm X Boulevard as passersby bustle along without saying a word to him, as if he were simply a fixture of the Harlem ecosystem. The Schomburg Center is, in many ways, the central home to the culture that Jenkins embodies, and its new director, the poet Kevin Young, sits at the nexus of participant and purveyor.
When I step inside the Schomburg, I am escorted to meet Young in a small conference room with a dozen chairs, two square tables pushed against each other, and three rectangular windows that overlook a small courtyard. Young walks into the room with a stack of papers and several books with innumerable dog-eared pages. He moves with a sense of self-assuredness that one would expect from someone with his résumé, but counterbalances it with a disarming sense of humor.
Today he is wearing a light-blue oxford shirt with its sleeves rolled up to just below his elbows. The screen of his watch flickers as he moves his hand during the conversation. The ID at the end of his black lanyard is tucked into his left shirt pocket as if he didn’t want you to know that he is the director of the leading research center for black culture in the country. His thick, black beard is flecked with subtle streaks of gray, and he often runs his fingers through it while his other hand rests on the opposite arm. His hair is closely cropped on the sides, but the top of his head abounds with tightly coiled black curls that sprout up along his scalp. His glasses are round and thick and black and slide from the bridge of his nose when he laughs, which he does often, in a way that invites you into the conversation. I’m here to talk to him not only about his position at the Schomburg Center but also about his new role as poetry editor of the New Yorker as well as his new book of nonfiction, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, published this month by Graywolf Press.
I first met Young two summers ago at the Cave Canem retreat—an annual weeklong workshop for black poets that serves as a refuge from the predominantly white literary spaces we spend most of our time in. Many of the fellows came from MFA programs and workshops where, as Junot Díaz put it in his 2014 treatise in the New Yorker, “the default subject position of reading and writing—of Literature with a capital L—was white, straight, and male.”
I was not in an MFA program myself but had taken a poetry workshop as a small weekly reprieve from the datasets and statistical analyses of my own graduate studies in the sociology of education, only to have a similarly disillusioning experience as the only black person in a room full of mostly white writers. I talked to Young, for example, about how I had written a series of poems in the voice of my barber and didn’t bring any of those poems into the class because I didn’t want to endure the stress of navigating a scenario where my workshop mates had to decide how to engage a poem laden with the N-word. He laughed in the way some people do to signal that they understand—that they really understand—and nodded. “Cave Canem exists because of that need,” he said.
At that first meeting, the gap between us couldn’t have felt wider. I was a twenty-something-year-old poet and graduate student who had not yet finished a draft of my first manuscript. I was simply thrilled to have even been accepted to the retreat. Young was a Guggenheim fellow and the author of ten poetry collections, including Jelly Roll: A Blues (Knopf, 2003), a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and a book of nonfiction, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a winner of the PEN/Open Book Award. He was a professor of creative writing and curator of one of the most impressive literary archives in the country at Emory University. All that by the age of forty-six. And yet he was so different from what we imagine our preeminent literary figures to be. There was no bravado or pretense. There was no condescension or sense of snobbery. My first memory of Young is seeing him playing pool with poet Major Jackson in the lobby of the dormitories where we were all staying. He snacked on a bag of chips between shots, and when I walked in he looked up and asked, “You know how to play?”
That week, as Young led our workshop, it was clear that the collective project we were all embarking on was about far more than what we were putting onto the page. It served as reaffirmation that our work, our experiences, and the cultural idiosyncrasies of our voices were not something that should be compromised in order to be part of the literary community, but something that meaningfully contributed to its terrain. For many, it is often the only reminder they receive. “I think [Cave Canem] often serves as a healing place for folks,” Young says. “It helps focus the tradition that has always been there.”
More than simply being a space of healing, Cave Canem, Young points out, has fundamentally transformed the landscape of black literature since it was founded two decades ago. He is adamant about this point.
In the past decade alone, for example, there have been four black winners of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry—Tyehimba Jess (2017), Gregory Pardlo (2015), Tracy K. Smith (2012), and Natasha Trethewey (2007)—as compared with three winners in the previous eighty-five years of the prize combined. Smith and Trethewey would go on to serve as poets laureate of the United States. Both of their first books were published after winning the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Young was the judge who selected Smith’s debut, The Body’s Question (Graywolf Press, 2003).
“It’s just like this unprecedented thing,” he says, leaning back in his chair, soaking in the realization as if having it for the first time. “Obviously not all of that is because of Cave, but Cave is part of what I would call the Renaissance of Black Letters, and it’s one that I think the Schomburg can be, and should be, at the center of.”
For young writers, part of Young’s approachability stems from his recognition that not so long ago he was also a young writer attempting to find a literary community. The community he found would be both personally and artistically transformative.
In 1987, Sharan Strange and Thomas Sayers Ellis, who would soon become friends and peers of Young’s, hopped in a car and drove from Boston to Harlem to attend James Baldwin’s funeral. The prophetic luminary had died in France, but his body had been brought back to the neighborhood of his birth. His community wanted to give him a homegoing celebration imbued with Harlem’s unique character and give so many of those who loved him most an opportunity to say goodbye for themselves. At the funeral the young writers encountered figures like Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Amiri Baraka, all of whom spoke at Baldwin’s service and all of whom represented the pinnacle of African American letters. Baldwin’s death was made especially difficult for the young writers who trekked from Boston not only because they were mourning the death of a distinguished black literary figure, but also because they never had the opportunity to meet him while he was alive. As Young puts it, they “swore to themselves that they would not let another black writer die without having met that person and connected.” As a way to remedy that problem, Strange and Ellis, joined by their friend Janice Lowe, started a reading series in which they paired young emerging black writers alongside their more established counterparts. The group became known as the Dark Room Collective and held the reading series in an old Victorian at 31 Inman Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where several of the young artists lived.
Writers like Derek Walcott, Alice Walker, and Yusef Komunyakaa made their way through the Cambridge residence—metal chairs unfolded across wooden floors and couches slid against the walls to make room for the guests who had come to see these literary forebears alongside their progeny.
Young, then an undergraduate at Harvard studying under the likes of Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido, remembers attending some events there, before he became an official member of the collective himself, and being stunned at the sight of two hundred fifty black people packed into a single room—sitting on floors, peeking around corners, holding their breath—listening to poetry. “I think it spurred a community,” he says, pausing, reflecting on the word. “It spurred the writing community in Boston, which was really interesting then but probably was whiter than it knew, to really think about itself in new ways. It was important in that way.”
He must see it in my face as he describes how the series unfolded because he smiles knowingly as I share how shocked I am that a group of relatively unknown aspiring writers could get some of the most important artists of the day to show up and read at their house—for free. Young says that they simply wrote to them and said, “Hey, we have this thing and it’s special and we get this many people and we can get you great dinner.” “And folks came out,” he adds. “It was both a different time and also it’s an eternal thing that if you provide the space and build it,” they will come.
After Young joined the group, the collective began traveling to venues beyond the Inman Street house to read their work. They read in other places throughout Boston and then across the country. “We’d read in a bar in Miami or we’d all get in a car, and me and Major [Jackson] had the cars and we’d drive,” he says with a laugh. “We’d drive to D.C. and sleep on people’s floors. Even then I knew it was a particular moment in time.”
There were many poets who weren’t formally in the collective but whose presence and friendships shaped the distinctive literary sensibilities of the group. Among them was Elizabeth Alexander, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a current professor at Columbia University, and someone to whom Young felt particularly close. Alexander recounts with nostalgic tenderness the moment she met Young and another young undergraduate writer at Harvard, both of whom were in the nascent stages of their literary careers.
“I read on Harvard’s campus through the Grolier Bookstore when my first book of poems came out in 1990. There were these two adorable, alive young men listening very, very carefully and they came up to introduce themselves afterward—Kevin Young and Colson Whitehead,” she wrote to me in an e-mail. “Kevin sent me copies of the literary journal he edited and told me about younger writers who were his friends and comrades. We talked about writers and poems we admired and loved. Later on, we sent each other manuscripts—we’ve been good book editors to each other. Now we text to make each other laugh.”
There is a photograph of the Dark Room Collective taken in 1996 that serves as an illuminating artifact of the time. Seven of the members—Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Young, Major Jackson, Nehassaiu deGannes, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Sharan Strange, and Adisa Vera Beatty—are sitting on a New England beach, some looking off in different directions, some looking directly at the camera. The photo is in black and white, and the young writers each appear to be wearing a mix of black, white, and beige clothing so their bodies blend into the sand. Young sits between Jackson and Trethewey—looking directly at the camera—his full beard then a tightly groomed goatee, the tight coils of hair on his head and a flock of thin dreadlocks falling down just past his shoulders.
The very existence of the photo and others like it—color coordinated, posed, pensive—captures the group’s youthful ambition. Even before they achieved such high standing in American letters, they understood themselves as something worthy of being documented, archived.
The collective would dissolve in the late nineties as its members transitioned to graduate school, new jobs, and opportunities to pursue their work full-time.
Young’s life prior to his literary ascent was one of constant movement, expanding his conception of home beyond the limits of geographical location. His mother and father—both of whom grew up in segregated, rural Louisiana and were the first in their families to attend and graduate from college—were studying to become a chemist and an eye surgeon, respectively. As a result, they moved the family around every few years as the two of them pursued their careers. Before Young turned ten years old, he had lived in six different cities. But he always thought of Louisiana, where much of his family remained and where he frequently visited, as home.
He attended high school in Topeka, Kansas, a place from which few might expect great writers to emerge, though Young points out that among both his heroes (Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes) and his contemporaries (Ed Skoog, Gary Jackson, Ben Lerner), Topeka has produced some of the top literary talent in American poetics.
Young attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he joined the Dark Room Collective, and in the years that followed, his career, like many of his collective-mates, took off. He was awarded a Stegner fellowship from Stanford before going on to receive his MFA from Brown. He had brief tenures at the University of Georgia and Indiana University before moving to Emory University, where he remained for eleven years and served as curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, a 75,000-volume collection of both contemporary and centuries-old work. He also served as curator of the library’s Literary Collections, which contains the archival work of canonical writers such as Seamus Heaney, Lucille Clifton, Alice Walker, Jack Kerouac, and Flannery O’Connor, among others.
During this period, Young’s writing was prolific, and his work helped to shape the twenty-first-century landscape of American poetry. He won or was a finalist for some of the genre’s most prestigious awards and served as steward not only to the work of the past—through his work in the archives—but also to the work of the present, editing several anthologies, including The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink (Bloomsbury, 2012), The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (Bloomsbury, 2010), and Jazz Poems (Everyman’s Library, 2006). Part of what served as a catalyst for Young’s prolific output was the unexpected death of his father in 2004. “I think I realized life is short,” he says. And part of Young’s mourning took place in his work. His books Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008) and Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014) eulogize his father in a series of poems that move between gentle nostalgia and violent grief.
Last fall Young left the temperate seasons of Atlanta for the dynamism of Harlem to become the new director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Upon his arrival, he wasted little time ensuring that he would continue to build on the work of his predecessor, Khalil Gibran Muhammad (who left his post after five years to become a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School). Within the first few months of Young’s tenure, the Schomburg Center was named a National Historic Landmark by the Obama administration, and the center finalized plans to acquire James Baldwin’s papers, something that was of particular import to Young both because Baldwin is a son of Harlem and because the nature of our social and political moment renewed public interest in his work.
“It was very important to me that the papers not just be announced, but be open,” he says. “And so, the day after we announced them, they were open to research service. And the researchers have come in droves to see them.”
The connection to Baldwin is also personal for Young, who says he could not have written his debut nonfiction project, The Grey Album, without the virtuosic guidance of Baldwin’s prose. The Grey Album was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the PEN/Open Book Award, but, more important, it expanded Young’s reputation from that of an acclaimed poet to a distinguished and erudite cultural critic. “Even [for] this new book, in which I think a lot about America and American history and race…his spirit provided an essential guide,” he says about Baldwin.
Young’s new book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, and his new job fit together in ways that have aligned with unsettling relevance. The book traces the history of the hoax and deceit in the American cultural and political life—moving from P. T. Barnum (who founded the Barnum & Bailey Circus) in the late nineteenth century to Greg Mortenson’s infamously fabricated memoir Three Cups of Tea (Penguin, 2007) to Melania Trump’s plagiarism of Michelle Obama’s Democratic National Convention speech. Young began research for the book long before the assent of Trump into mainstream national politics and certainly long before anyone could anticipate the extent that “fake news” would become common parlance in contemporary political discourse.
But as Young outlines in Bunk, there is a long and often insidious precedent for a society in which facts become secondary. And both through his book and in his role as director of the Schomburg, he hopes to more forcefully push back against the insurgent phenomenon. “Libraries are more important than ever now, because we provide free and accurate information for people across learning levels,” he says. “That’s what we do.”
The greatest hoax of them all, Young believes, is race. No other type of insidiously conjured fraudulence has endured as long and has had effects as deleterious. “I trace the hoax [of race], as an idea and a concept, and one that emerges in the eighteenth century—it isn’t a word until then,” he says. “I came to understand that that’s not an accident. In many ways, some of the aspects of the hoax and its systematic and stereotypical qualities allowed race to become more fixed around the nineteenth century. We tend to think there’s progress and things get better, but there’s a real hardening along originally unclear racial lines—or blurry ones, or ones not fully understood as biological and unredeemable in the case of black people, brown people, Native American people—all of these qualities became more and more fixed for very different reasons but similar ends, which is to justify slavery or displacement or aspects of supremacy.”
Ideas like those in Bunk serve as the bedrock of discourse at the Schomburg, where many black writers, artists, and public intellectuals come to share their work. Part of Young’s commitment as director is to flatten the hierarchies of intellectual engagement. It’s not that he wants to reduce such writers’ standing as thought-leaders in the community—indeed, many of them are his friends and colleagues—but he wants to continue opening up the space for more people to enter it. In reflecting on an event that took place right after he became director, Young says, “The discourse at that event, which was one of my first events as director, was so impressive. Just community folk asking really smart, interesting questions. The way I think of it is it’s not just scholars. Every student is a scholar; every scholar is a student. We have a lot of folks who are doing deep reading who are really engaged.”
Inevitably, the nature of Young’s new job means that he doesn’t have the same chunks of time to write that he once did as a young professor, but he says it’s well worth it. “I get to go to a place, every day, where Langston Hughes is buried and his spirit is felt. That’s amazing.” And it isn’t as if Young feels like he has less writing time; it’s just that now he has to be more purposeful in creating it. “I feel like people have this notion of writing that it’s inspiration-based and romantic. Both little-R and big-R romantic. I don’t think that’s how it works. I think we can put it many ways—perspiration not inspiration—but I think it’s really just being there in your space. It’s physical in order to prompt a mental space, but it isn’t inspiration, exactly. It’s being there and writing.”
I share with him my own struggles of clearly demarcating how much of my time I spend reading and how much of my time I spend writing. That when I do more of one, I never feel like I am doing enough of the other. I tell him how, for different writing projects, like the piece I am writing on him, I attempt to set specific word goals each day but become overwhelmed when I don’t meet them. He balks. “No, God no. You have to just think of it [all] as work. I think that’s the thing that changed for me a long time ago,” he says in the way people do when they’re reintroduced to a habit they attempted to leave behind. “It’s working. That’s why they call it your work.”
Going forward, Young will have to be even more purposeful about making time for his personal reading and writing—this month he begins his tenure as the poetry editor of the New Yorker, the first black person to hold the position. David Remnick, editor in chief of the magazine, gushed over Young’s work as both writer and editor when I called him. The two had met briefly at a dinner party at Elizabeth Alexander’s home years ago, and Remnick continued following, and then publishing, Young’s poetry and essays. “I love his work and have read him for a long time,” he says.
While online poetry journals and literary magazines have provided more and more opportunities for poets to be published, the New Yorker, with its circulation of 1.2 million, remains the largest commercial platform for poets to have their work engage the larger world. “The opportunity to get read at that scale is not a common thing for poets,” says Remnick, who wanted someone in that position who not only understands the role that the New Yorker has played in putting poems in front of those who may not regularly read them, but who would also use the platform to publish a range of different voices. “I think Kevin will,” he adds.
When I ask Young about it, he becomes more coy than he’s been in the previous moments of our conversation. His responses become briefer, as if the opportunity were a fragile vase that the wrong words might break into pieces. “I remember reading the New Yorker book of poems when I was a kid. I’m looking forward to participating in that tradition too,” he says shyly. I try to hype him up. “This is a big deal!” I tell him, attempting to pull something from him that it becomes increasingly clear he is not willing to give. I try again: “When these things happen to you, are you able to step back and say, ‘Man, I am the director of the preeminent center on black culture in the country. I’m going to be poetry editor of one of the most historically renowned literary magazines—”
He leans back in the wooden chair and laughs. “Every night, I say those exact words.”
He then becomes more reflective. “I think you’re busy doing the work of it, but that’s why you have friends, so you can sit back and celebrate or reflect. Also, it’s an actual day-in and day-out thing. You’re trying to get that work done.”
Throughout his career his friends have indeed lifted him up in celebration, and still, they recognize that despite the success he remains the person so many of them knew as an eager undergraduate trying to emerge in the landscape of black literature. “Kevin feels like his same self to me over all these years,” Elizabeth Alexander says. “He has always been prolific, hilarious, omnivorous, meticulous, dauntless, and sure-footed, a lover of black culture in its everythingness.”
Clint Smith is a writer, a doctoral candidate at Harvard University, and the author of Counting Descent (Write Bloody Publishing, 2016), which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He is a 2014 National Poetry Slam champion and a 2017 recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review. His writing has been published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the New Republic, among other publications. He was born and raised in New Orleans.
Arundhati Roy must be tired of hearing the same question: What took you so long? But then, it has been two decades since her debut novel, The God of Small Things, was translated into forty-two languages, sold eight million copies, and won the prestigious Man Booker Prize, and she was catapulted to international fame and remarkable financial success. Now, with the June release of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Knopf), she is not apologizing for the wait. Busy traveling, writing, and establishing herself as an outspoken activist, Roy explains that about ten years ago, the “mad souls,” the constellation of characters in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, grew insistent. “Anjum, Tilo, Saddam, Musa, and the gang moved in with me and colonized my imagination,” she says. “And for me, while fiction is necessary, I prefer it to be timeless rather than timely. So when I write fiction, I am prepared to wait for it to come to me. I am never in a hurry.”
Yet for someone who prefers not to hurry when it comes to fiction, she is certainly capable of moving with a sense of urgency, if her prolific, and often polemic, nonfiction is any measure. Roy cites a “watershed moment” when, in 1998, the newly formed Hindu Nationalist government in India conducted a series of nuclear tests, “which were greeted by the media and establishment with a nationalist fervor and talk about the return of ‘Hindu pride’ that changed the nature of what could and could not be said politically.” Roy had her say in an essay titled “The End of Imagination,” a critique of these policies. “While India was being hailed as a great new economic power,” she says in retrospect, “within India millions of poor people were being further impoverished by the new economic policies; tens of thousands of small farmers, deep in debt, were committing suicide. Young Muslim men accused of being ‘terrorists’ on very flimsy and often fabricated grounds were being thrown in prison. Kashmir was on fire.” Her essays and speeches turned into a steady stream of books, including Power Politics (South End Press, 2001), The Algebra of Infinite Justice (Viking, 2001), War Talk (South End Press, 2003), Public Power in the Age of Empire (Seven Stories Press, 2004), Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (Haymarket Books, 2009), Broken Republic (Penguin, 2011), and Capitalism: A Ghost Story (Haymarket Books, 2014). Fiction had to wait because, she says, she had no choice: “I could not watch all this happen as I continued my glittering career as a prize-winning novelist. I began to travel and write about these things because it was urgent and necessary to do so.” Her efforts did not go unnoticed. Roy was awarded the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award in 2002, the Sydney Peace Prize in 2004, and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2006. (She rejected the most recent award, from the Indian Academy of Letters, because she opposes the government’s policies.) And she’s been giving back, contributing prize money and royalties to fund various causes and small organizations, mainly in India.
Even though the characters from The Ministry of Utmost Happiness took up residence in her imagination, she wasn’t ready to share them until about seven years ago, after a visit with her friend John Berger at his home in France. A mentor and also a Booker Prize winner, in 1972, for his novel G—in other words, someone whom she listened to before his death early this year—Berger told her to go to her computer and read to him whatever fiction she was writing, which she did. Impressed, he said she should go right home and finish the book, which she intended to do. But a few weeks later, in Delhi, she found an anonymous note pushed under her apartment door asking her to visit the Maoists in the jungles of central India—an offer she couldn’t refuse. This was followed by a period of still more waiting, though eventually, she asserts, those characters themselves brought the novel to closure: “They compelled me! Stubborn people. I had no choice.”
“She lives in the graveyard like a tree,” reads the first sentence of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness—an opening that is enigmatic, tantalizing, and predictive. The “she” is the aging Anjum, a central character whose mother, thrilled to have given birth to a boy, discovers “nestling underneath his boy-parts, a small, unformed, but undoubtedly girl-part.” So Anjum, originally known as Aftab, begins her journey, as readers begin theirs, into the world of the Hijra. A somewhat ambiguous term, Hijra refers to a person whose gender is neither male nor female, including those born intersex, though it most frequently refers to individuals who were born male but identify as women. (In 2014, the Supreme Court of India recognized Hijra as “a third gender,” thus conveying legal status.) Roy is careful to point out, however, that she has not “used” Anjum, whom she refers to as “a Beloved,” to typify a category of people: “She is herself and distinct. Yes, she has a schism running through her, like many others in the book. Many of them have borders of caste and out-casteness, of religious conversion, of nation and geography.”
The novel crosses other borders of both perspective and place. Set primarily in present-day New Delhi, with a political backdrop of Kashmir’s struggle for independence, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness spans more than thirty years, often through Anjum’s eyes as she establishes herself in that space where her relatives are buried. “Over time, Anjum began to enclose the graves of her relatives and build rooms around them,” Roy writes. “Each room had a grave (or two) and a bed. Or two. She built a separate bathhouse…[she] called her Guest house Jannat. Paradise.” Beginning by taking in down-and-out travelers, Jannat Guest House becomes a community center of sorts, where nearly all the characters in this intricately plotted novel find themselves—some, as Roy playfully writes, “for The Rest of Their Lives,” some to bond as family, some only for a moment of comforting connection.
It is in Jannat Guest House, a place of physical as well as spiritual union, that Anjum and others recognize as well as honor a continuum of life and death—a place where “the battered angels in the graveyard that kept watch over their battered charges held open the doors between worlds (illegally, just a crack), so that the souls of the present and the departed could mingle, like guests at the same party.” This became a guiding image for Roy, who worked with designer David Eldridge and photojournalist Mayank Austen Soofi to create the cover art for the novel: a vertical picture of a decaying white marble grave with a withered rose placed right below the title. The haunting image melds beauty and decay and suggests the compatibility of change and permanence.
In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Roy shifts places, time periods, and viewpoints with the grace of a master choreographer as characters take circuitous paths that are at times parallel, then intersecting or conflicting, ultimately seeming a matter of both coincidence and fate. She works at that unstructured structure. “To me, the way a story is told is almost more important than the story itself. I think I might be incapable of telling a story in chronological order,” she says. “For me, a story is like the map of a great city or, at the very least, a large building. You can’t explore it by driving down the main street or entering from the front door and exiting through the back. You have to live in it, wander through the by-lanes, take blind alleys and have a smoke with the people who live there, look into the rooms from the outside in. That’s the fun of it!”
Arundhati Roy in New York City.
(Credit: Tony Gale)
The novel is teeming with indelible characters: politicians—some murderously demented—accountants, teachers, militants, and mothers in a multigenerational story. There’s the irrepressible Ustad Kulsoom Bi, guru and head of the Hijra household that Anjem joins initially; the incorrigible Saddam Hussain, a name he chose for himself; the two Miss Jebeens, one killed by a bullet that passed through her skull into her mother’s heart, the other abandoned on a Delhi street and claimed by Anjum; the shape-shifting Amrik Singh, “a cheery cold-blooded killer.” A central quartet of characters—Musa, Naga, Garson Hobart (a code name for Biplab Dasgupta), and Tilo, the one the other three love—meet as students, go their separate ways, then weave in and out of one another’s lives in a plot that moves between the poverty-stricken neighborhoods of Old Delhi, the glittering new wealth of malls and hotels, and the mountains and valleys of Kashmir.
Although it’s tempting to see some of these characters as representations of different viewpoints in Indian politics, Roy objects: “Even Dasgupta is partly the voice of the establishment and partly a lost, lovelorn wreck. Hazrat Sarmad, Hazrat of the Indeterminate, is the deity of this book.” Thus, Roy’s characters are, first and foremost, complicated human beings who remind us that “we do a great injustice to people when we ‘unsee’ their identities and the discrimination they suffer because of that identity,” she says. “Equally, we do great injustice when we see nothing of a person except to brand them with one single identity. Sometimes people do this even to themselves.”
The dazzling array of characters, while hardly autobiographical, does suggest Roy’s own wide spectrum of experiences, lived passionately and thoughtfully. She was born Suzanna Arundhati Roy in 1961 in northeast India to Mary, a Syrian Christian, and Rajib, a Bengali Hindu from Calcutta. Her parents divorced when she was two and her brother, Lalith, three and a half. In interviews, Roy emphasizes that she did not come from a privileged background. Quite the contrary: When her mother left her alcoholic husband, she struggled to make a living, finally starting an independent school in Kerala. Roy went to boarding school and began secretarial college. At sixteen, she quit and moved to Delhi to study at the School of Planning and Architecture. For a while, she lived what has often been described as a bohemian lifestyle with architect Gerard da Cunha. After they broke up, Roy returned to Delhi to work at the National Institute of Urban Affairs, where she met and married Pradeep Kishen, a former history professor and Oxford graduate who had become an independent filmmaker. Roy wrote screenplays and acted in several films they collaborated on, but she became disillusioned with what she saw as the elitism of the film world. After they divorced, she made her living in various jobs, including leading aerobics and yoga classes, until she turned her attention to writing.
It’s no surprise then that Roy dismisses those questions about what took her so long by pointing out that we are the sum of our experiences. A couple of decades between novels was hardly time wasted. “I absolutely could not have written this book without having lived the last twenty years in the way that I have. All that I saw and understood and experienced has been infused in me and then sweated out as fiction.”
With only two novels to her name, what accounts for Roy’s enormous international popularity as both novelist and dissident? Some argue that she reinforces the views of the Western liberal media and literary elite and affirms a tourist’s romanticized view of India’s ancient but flawed and crumbling beauty. That’s way too simplistic a perspective for many, however, including scholars such as Pranav Jani, an English professor at Ohio State University and the author of Decentering Rushdie: Cosmopolitanism and the Indian Novel in English (Ohio State University Press, 2010). He acknowledges that the West often views Indian authors through “a veneer of exoticism” because they are “deliciously Other.” Roy to some extent fulfills that expectation with her descriptions of the lush environment and her “unequivocal condemnation of caste and gender oppression,” Jani says, but she offers more. “While her sustained focus has always been on India, she has consistently contextualized Indian issues within global ones: The same systems of capitalism and militarism that produce inequality in India are the ones that create inequality here.”
Controversial as well as charismatic, Roy recently took on the icon of icons not only to India but the Western world: Mahatma Gandhi. What began initially as a brief introduction for a new edition of The Annihilation of Caste by B. R. Ambedkar turned into a book-length essay titled The Doctor and the Saint, in which Roy analyzes the political debate between Ambedkar and Gandhi, arguing that the latter’s more moderate call for the dissolution of only the “untouchable” caste sidelined the former’s fight for justice. She characterizes Ambedkar, himself born an “untouchable,” as the true champion of the poor—with predictably heated results. Writing the introduction to the 2017 edition, published by Haymarket Books, Roy defended herself: “Given the exalted, almost divine status that Gandhi occupies in the imagination of the modern world, in particular the Western world, I felt that unless his hugely influential and, to my mind, inexcusable position on caste and race was looked at carefully, Ambedkar’s rage would not be fully understood.”
In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy strides onto similarly dangerous ground with the Maoists, or Naxalites, a revolutionary guerrilla force in central India. Believing that “there is an unreported war taking place against these populations,” she interrupted her writing to follow instructions that began with the note under her door and spent time living with Maoist insurgents and tribal villagers. Her initial article, published as a cover story for the Indian newsweekly Outlook, became the book Walking With the Comrades (Penguin, 2012). She argues that the official military campaign against the Maoists is actually a war against the poor, specifically the indigenous tribes who live on land with great mineral reserves. “Here in the forests of Dantewada,” she writes, “a battle rages for the soul of India.” Not surprisingly, response ranged from adulation to outrage.
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes some of the same risks. Toward the end of the novel, Roy presents a ten-page letter from Miss Jebeen the Second’s mother, Revathy, a member of the Maoist Communist Party of India. The letter explains the plight of those like her who have few choices, experience rape and torture, “live and die by [the] gun,” yet who recognize that the party “does many wrong things,” that “women join because they are revolutionaries but also because they cannot bear their sufferings at home.” Likely some will interpret this letter as an eloquent exposé of an unreported war; others are likely to interpret it as a lengthy intrusion of political polemic.
Roy, however, does not see a conflict or controversy in this example or in other overtly political dimensions of the novel. “I am very much against the idea of a novel as a disguised vehicle to write about ‘issues.’ To me a novel is a prayer, a world, a way of seeing. But in the telling of a story, these issues are the very air we breathe. To avoid them would make me a dishonest storyteller. It has always amazed me how people manage to tell stories about India without mentioning caste. It’s like writing about South Africa in the 1960s without mentioning apartheid. Apartheid was not an ‘issue.’ It was the DNA of that society at the time. So too with the practice of caste and what is happening in Kashmir. So too with the brutal violence, both state and societal, against the poor, and so too with the people who resist it.”
In the twenty years since the publication of The God of Small Things, speculation has run high about what Roy’s next novel might be. Satire was one guess. It’s true that irony, even cynicism, makes its way into the novel: There are soldiers who “fired their light machine guns,” the concept of “post-massacre protocol,” and sadistic officers who take a “torture break.” There is sly sarcasm in Roy’s description of India as the new superpower: “Namaste, they said in exotic accents, and smiled like the turbaned doormen with maharaja mustaches who greeted foreign guests in five-star hotels.” And there’s the Shiraz Cinema, converted to an “enclave of barracks and officers’ quarters.” She writes, “What had once been the cinema snack bar now functioned as a reception-cum-registration counter for torturers and torturees.”
But despite such dark humor and sardonic observations, Roy’s generously expansive novel lacks the brittle spirit of satire. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is filled with utopian communities—unconventional, misguided, and temporary as they may be—the Khwagagah or Dream Palace of the Hijra, the Jannat Guest House, even the fighters in Kashmir calling for Azadi, or freedom. It’s a novel filled with the search to belong, to find “my people,” to seize love in some form, whether as romance, motherhood, or camaraderie. Roy even tucks in Anna Akhmatova’s brave optimism: “I am not yet cured of happiness.” In fact, when asked to respond to Appalachian novelist Ann Pancake’s charge that “the greatest challenge for many twenty-first century artists is to create literature that imagines a way forward,” Roy sounds downright idealistic: “The ‘way forward’ will only come about when we change our way of seeing, when we redefine what we mean by words like ‘progress,’ ‘civilization,’ and ‘happiness.’ To do that we have to take a good look at ourselves. I think good novels help us to do that. And perhaps some are, in themselves, another way of seeing the world. In a non-didactic way, I hope The Ministry is that and does that.”
She’s right. Ultimately, it’s not politics that stay with us; it’s a beautifully written, powerful story. One of the most touching scenes in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is Musa recalling his young daughter, Miss Jebeen, demanding he tell her a story at night.
And then she would begin the story herself, shouting it out into the somber curfewed night, her raucous delight dancing out of the windows and rousing the neighborhood. Yeth manz ne kahn balai aasi! Noa aes sa kunni junglas manz roazaan! There wasn’t a witch, and she didn’t live in the jungle. Tell me a story, and can we cut the crap about the witch and the jungle? Can you tell me a real story?
Perhaps that’s what Arundhati Roy has done with this ambitious novel that spans a continent and several decades of war and peace and people who live in palaces and on the streets as well as undercover and underground—a novel that’s worth the wait. Once again, she has told a real story.
Renée H. Shea has profiled numerous authors for Poets & Writers Magazine, including Tracy K. Smith, Julie Otsuka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edwidge Danticat, and Maxine Hong Kingston. She is currently working on a series of textbooks for Bedford, Freeman & Worth, including Advanced Language and Literature (2017) and Foundations of Language and Literature, forthcoming in 2018.
In the late spring of 2000, on my first feature assignment as a twenty-seven-year-old editorial assistant for this magazine, I took the five-and-a-half-hour train ride from New York City to Syracuse, New York, to interview the author of one of that summer’s most highly anticipated books, the story collection Pastoralia (Riverhead Books). George Saunders had not yet received the kind of popular acclaim and critical recognition that followed him in the years to come, in the form of a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called Genius Grant; the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story; an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Story Prize; and so many other honors. He had not yet appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert or This Week With George Stephanopoulos, or been named by Time magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world. He had not yet delivered the convocation address at Syracuse University that was posted on the website of the New York Times and then, within days, shared more than a million times on social media.
Back in 2000, when the author had published just one collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (Random House, 1996), and his second was just starting to gain momentum, the name George Saunders was already on every critic’s tongue, but the literary world had yet to discover the true depth of the author’s talent. Seventeen years later, we still haven’t touched bedrock, though his subsequent books—two more story collections, In Persuasion Nation (Riverhead Books, 2006) and Tenth of December (Random House, 2013); a novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (Riverhead Books, 2005); a children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (Villard, 2000); and a collection of essays, TheBraindead Megaphone (Riverhead Books, 2007)—have added to the already overwhelming evidence that we are in the presence of a writer whose boundless imagination, laugh-out-loud humor, moral acuity, and, though he would protest the characterization, generosity of spirit truly set him apart.
Saunders’s soaring talents are once again on display in his long-awaited debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, published in February by Random House. Presenting a kaleidoscopic panorama of voices (the audiobook employs a cast of 166 narrators), Lincoln in the Bardo is set in a graveyard, over the course of a single night in 1862, where President Abraham Lincoln grieves the death of his eleven-year-old son, Willie, while the boy’s ghost confronts a congregation of other spirits in a strange purgatory—called the bardo, in Tibetan tradition. It is a wonderfully bizarre and hilariously terrifying examination of the ability to live and love with the knowledge that everything we hold dear will come to an end.
Seventeen years ago, Saunders offered to spend more of his time with me than any professional obligation or friendly courtesy required of him. It was my first, and fortunately not my last, opportunity to get to know this bighearted, wholly original writer. In December we met again, at a hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where we spoke for several hours about emotional realism, humor as a form of honesty, the flexibility of form, and, because this is George Saunders, poop jokes.
In 2000, I asked you if you’d ever tried to write a novel, and you replied, “Most of those stories in Pastoralia started out as novels. I’ve tried and I just recently got to the point where I’m not going to try anymore. If it happens, it’ll happen organically.” Here you are with your debut novel—so, did it happen organically? The idea for Lincoln in the Bardo had been around for a long time, and I found myself saying, “Well, I’ll do it, but I’m not sure it’s going to be a novel. I’m hoping it isn’t. I’m going to push against it whenever it starts to bloat.” And that principle seemed to be a good compositional principle, you know? If something tries to push its way into the book, you give it a stern look and say, “Are you just here because you think this is a novel? Because that’s next door.” So that meant, too, that all the moves I developed [writing stories] over the years were of course the ones that I used. How could it be otherwise, you know? But about halfway through, I said, “Oh, this is a novel only because it’s on a bigger stretcher-frame.” But each of the individual sections was being executed by the same principles as a story would be. So that was a relief.
You just treated it like pieces of a story. Yes. And I don’t know if other writers do this, but there’s that moment where you go, “Oh my God, I’m writing a novel. Anything goes!” And a couple of times I got in trouble because that mind-set took over. And then I would get that back in the box and say, “No, it’s by the same principles as all these stories: efficiency, one section producing and then leading to another. That’s it.” And then I would get back on track. So it was like the more I said, “The principles don’t change, but maybe the scale changes,” then I could do it. It was really a comfort to know that, in art, form is a way of accommodating one’s natural inclinations. If your natural inclination is to make small, concise structures, then form shows up and says, “Would you like me to help you link your small, concise structures?” And then form seems organic; it doesn’t seem whimsical. It doesn’t seem arbitrary. It seems organic, because it’s what allows you to accommodate your strengths.
Actually, at one point, a long time ago, I tried to do sort of a third-person version of this. And it was just dull, you know? “Lincoln walked into the graveyard. It was a dark and stormy night.” And sometimes you get into a zone like that, and you recoil. Like, no, no, no, I’m not using that voice. I can’t do it.
How far did you go using that voice? A page. Maybe two pages. It just felt creepy. And it was funny, because I loved that idea, but the prose was doing nothing to get me into a happy zone vis-à-vis that idea. It was just, like, typing about Lincoln. So that was no good. But I did try, over the years, to write a play. Kind of the same thing: It made me more convinced that there was definitely a story there, but that wasn’t it. The play wasn’t it, for sure.
That wasn’t the form that was going to allow you to tell the story. No. And strangely enough, the book is kind of playlike. But it was just, you know, sometimes you think—for me, for example, when I think, “I’m going to write a poem today,” it’s a guarantee that bullshit will come out of my head, because I’ve said I’m going to be a poet, and I just don’t have that gift. So my “poems,” in quotes, sound like poems in quotes. They’re just not good. The play was like that. It had a certain kind of faux-dramatic quality that just wasn’t interesting.
And how far did you get into the play? I finished it. I did twenty or thirty drafts. I kept thinking, “I’m going to figure out something here that makes this work.” At one point I put a big sign across it: Don’t Touch It! Just stay away.
That makes me think of something Colson Whitehead said when we talked for a recent episode of our podcast, Ampersand, about The Underground Railroad and how the idea for that was something he’d had fifteen years ago. And he just put it aside. He said he wanted to wait because he didn’t feel like he could do the idea justice. He wanted to become a better writer before he tackled that subject matter. That’s exactly the feeling I had about this…. I feel like my whole trajectory has been as a person of quite limited talent who’s a little strange and learns to harness that strangeness to accent the talent. So then you’re walking on a pretty thin ledge for the first two or three books. I think the thing has been trying to make my work—I’ve said as “happy” as I am, but I’m not sure I’m really that happy—I’m trying to make my work more like me. And so, over the past twenty years, the process has been trying to expand my toolbox to allow access to these different emotional valences that I didn’t really have access to early on. Or, I had access to them but only through a really dark route. I don’t think those early stories are particularly not hopeful. I think they’re kind of hopeful, but you’ve got to go a long way to get there, you know?
I suppose it’s like one’s personality: When you’re young, you’re a little insecure, you’re a little stealthy, and you try to find your way in the world, so you start embracing certain approaches and eschewing other ones. Then maybe at some midlife point, you go, “Wait now, I wonder if there’s more to me than this,” and you start to try to become more expansive, or maybe just get a little more comfortable in your skin, and you go, “Okay, I’m going to reconsider.” So for me it was an artistic enactment of that, which happened when I started writing essays. Especially the travel essays. Andy Ward, whom I worked with at GQ, had a really nice way of encouraging me when I would get into a place where I wasn’t relying on humor quite so much. And that in turn led to the Tenth of December and a couple of stories where suddenly I was drawing more directly on my real life…and finding that you could actually do that and still have a good prose style. Those kinds of things were the ladder that led me to be able to try this book.
What was the initial germ of the idea for this novel? We were in D.C. and driving by Oakhill Cemetery, and my wife’s cousin just casually pointed up and said, “That crypt up there…” I don’t know if we could actually see the crypt, or if we could just see the graveyard, but he said, “Lincoln’s son was buried up there.” And at that point, I didn’t even know Lincoln had a son. I’m not exactly a history major. And then she said, “Yeah, you know, he died while Lincoln was in office, a very low moment in the presidency, and Lincoln was so bereft that he apparently snuck out of the White House, crossed the city at night, and then newspapers at the time”—I’ve verified this since—“said that he had touched or held the body several times.” So that’s just one of those weird historical things. One, that a president at that point in history could leave the White House. This was during the Bill Clinton years, so you thought, “Bill Clinton’s not coming out at night.” And then also, as a father, just this sense of loss, and also the idea that, at that time, to touch and hold a body wouldn’t have been considered quite as morbid as we consider it. And this doesn’t happen to me, I’m not a real visual person, but there was just a pop of that image of Lincoln with the body across his lap—the Pietà, a monument or memorial or whatever. And then your mind goes, “Oh, that’d be a good story,” and I just had a feeling like, “Yeah, not for you.” Because maybe at that point…what year did we see each other?
That was 2000. So it would be around that time. A little earlier than that, because Clinton was president. At that point I had just gotten up on my feet a little bit with a certain voice and a certain approach to material that for me was very new. So when I just did the mental transposition of that material with what I thought was my voice at that point, it’s almost like sparks: “Nah, that isn’t right.” So I put it aside. I’m not sure I was so confident I ever would write about it. But I remember kind of thinking, “Yeah, there are people who could do that, but in this life, maybe it’s just not me.” And there are lots of stories in the world; I just happened to hear that one. No problem. But it definitely persisted. And the way I knew it was, I have a range of, like anybody, happiness and not-happiness, and whenever I’d be happy, that idea would almost come stand behind me and go, “Would you please?”
But every time I thought of it, I got that uncomfortable feeling like it was more than I could do. I’m not sure I was quite as confident as Colson that I would get there, but I just wasn’t able to get over it. So that’s interesting: an idea that just refuses to be boxed. That’s kind of weird. And I hadn’t actually ever had that feeling before. I normally don’t even think in ideas. So I felt a trap was being set, because when I was a younger writer, I would have those kinds of ideas: A novel in which…
The grand elevator pitch. Right. And then nothing would happen. So I was really resisting it. But when I have an idea like that, it’s trying to summon me into some new artistic ground. I was permitting parts of myself into the book that I had been keeping out all these years—genuine parts, and parts that I wanted to have in there. And somehow the idea went, “Come here, come here, come here. Trust me, trust me.” And I’m like, “I don’t know, I think it’s a trap.” And the idea said, “It is! It’s a good trap!”
And suddenly, you find yourself in really interesting, dramatic situations where the only way out is to summon up those previously suppressed or denied parts of your psyche that can finish it. And for me, those tended to be the more hopeful parts, actually. Or, hopeful and narratively straight, being comfortable with drama, no need to turn around and make jokes, just stay in that zone a little longer than I would normally be comfortable with. And then turn around and make the joke. It was a great experience.
I listened to an interview you gave around the time Tenth of December came out. And you were talking about how you were a little nervous about the reception of it, because you felt like it had more realism in it than your earlier work. Do you see this as a kind of trajectory, that you’re kind of pushing toward more realism? It’s funny, in talking about writing, I think people tend to make binaries. I don’t know why, but a student will come in and say, “I don’t know if I want to be funny or serious.” Or sometimes they’ll link it to people: “I either want to be Kerouac or Flannery O’Connor.” I don’t know why these writing problems present as binaries, but they seem to be neurological. So then of course one of the things you can do is, you can destabilize the binary. If you like O’Connor and Kerouac, put them on one side of the binary, and who’s on the other side? In this new novel, it’s a kind of realism, but when I think about writing a truly realistic book, I don’t have any interest in it. So I would say it’s emotional realism. And the goal has always been—that’s actually what it is, that’s the first time I’ve realized that: It’s just to have the fiction somehow simpatico with my actual emotional life, or let’s say with our actual emotional lives. I think that was always the goal. In CivilWarLand, that’s what I was trying to do. I was in a pretty rough patch. But I think the idea would be to say, “Okay, I’m going to try to remember every emotional state I’ve ever been in, and then assume that there are a bunch I haven’t been in, and that out in the world, all the ones I’ve ever experienced are still going on. It’s not like being a depressed eighteen-year-old went away because I turned nineteen.” So then you try to experiment, to imagine all those coexisting [states]; develop a style that would allow you to talk about that. I don’t really care much about realism, except in that sense. What does the human mind actually produce for us? What experiences and prejudices and impulses and desires? How do those desires actually play out in the real world? To get to the point where you could actually accommodate that would be the goal. And that makes sense for my work, because this novel isn’t—there are only three living people in the book, so I don’t know if we could really call it realism, but I think it certainly felt like I had more room to be emotionally realistic. In other words, to be able to write about grief not glancingly but rather directly. There’s some of that in the early books, but it’s always just a quick hit and move on, almost like a marker of grief. To be able to turn directly to it for three hundred pages feels to me like a step in the direction of emotional capaciousness, let’s say. So the goal would be, when I’m three hundred years old and I’m finishing my last book, that to anybody who walked in I’d be able to say, “Oh yeah, I get that. I love you, I understand you. Let’s have a book about you.” Whereas even now, there are some areas of human experience where I’m just like, “Yeah, I don’t know enough.” Or maybe I don’t have enough generosity of spirit.
In the interview you did with Random House—the one that appears in the back of the ARC—you talking about this book being a sort of chorus of voices. And you say, “These are people who did not in life manage to bring forth what was within them.” Where did that come from? It’s a psalm, I think. It’s the Gnostic Gospels, yeah. In some ways it’s just traditional ghost theory, which is, “Why are you here?” “I want my liver back!”
Unfinished business. That kind of thing. And that kind of melded with the Tibetan bardo idea, which is to me the more interesting and scarier idea: whatever way that your mind works in real time, right this minute, right this second. The body’s going to drop away, and that’s going to continue, but exaggerated. So with Heaven and Hell, it becomes a little complicated. It’s not: “Turn left, you’re in Heaven; turn right, you’re in Hell.” It’s: “Where are you right now?”
There’s that binary you were talking about again. Exactly. There’s something that’s Heaven-esque maybe. So if a person had gotten into a relationship with their thoughts in this life in a way that made them mostly pretty loving and happy, then I guess the idea would be that when you kicked off, that would continue. Or if you were an intensely self-flagellating, suspicious, greedy person whose every thought was sort of infused with that, then when you die, that could continue. That’s the theory. But the fun thing about this book was, your temptation was to say, “Well, let’s figure out what the afterlife is, and I’ll put it in a novel.” Well, I’m pretty sure that whatever it is, it’s not what you think it is. So part of it was fun. To make the afterlife surprising was a pretty natural thing for a comic writer to do. You know how to make things weird and surprising, so to take the afterlife and just make it a little bit strange. I didn’t want it to look like the Christian Heaven, I didn’t want it to look like the Buddhist Heaven. I wanted it to look like nothing you’d seen before, to simulate the idea that if you went there, you’d be like, “Oh my God, what is this?”
You’re referencing Heaven a lot. They’re not in Heaven.
I read this novel as much darker. It inhabits a much darker space. Yes, that’s true.
Back when we first talked sixteen years ago, you said that you could only write comic fiction. You said, “Humor, I don’t know, but comic.” So, is this a comic novel? Yes. I think so. But…I got to certain places where, in early rounds, the material was so straight. Sort of slavishly straight. It just had a History Channel vibe in the early drafts. And that panicked me a little bit, because that’s where it looked like it wasn’t emotionally honest. It was something else. So I kind of panicked and dropped in a couple funny things. And they just didn’t belong in that book. They were kind of funny, but they also were…it’s like somebody in the middle of a marriage proposal who senses he’s going to get a “no,” so he does a fart joke. You know? You think, “Well, that’s a desperate move.” So then I had a few days of just saying, “Okay, wait a minute now.” Again, in the binaries: I was saying funny versus not-funny. Then I thought to myself, “Is there a way to turn that? And whatever it is that I have always thought of in my work as funny, or people have thought of as funny, can we rename that a little bit?” Just to give myself a little bit of room. And I thought, “Well, all right: How does a joke work in fiction?” I think the way it works is, you and I are walking through the story together, reader and writer, writer and reader, and there’s something I’ve said behind us, and I suddenly remember it. As we’re going into the apartment building, I eat a banana, I drop the peel. And then we’re coming out of the building, and I remember that, you know? And you have just said something really arrogant to me, and then you step on the peel and you fall. That’s comedy. But really, at its essence, it’s the writer remembering what he said. In other words, it’s a form of narrative alertness. So then I thought, “Okay, since this draft is a little straight, is there a way that I’m not being narratively alert enough?” And I could show you, there’s one particular moment where I had the three ghosts arriving, and I’d forgotten that they all had these crazy features, these physical manifestations. Just by the act of putting those descriptions in, the text came alive, and the text coming alive made me hear them better. And I gave them a couple funny lines. So the whole thing came alive, but with, I would say, narrative alertness. So then suddenly it gives you a little more freedom to do things that don’t break the tone of the scene. From then on, I’m like, “Oh yeah, you don’t have to be funny.” People like it when narrative alertness becomes funny, but there’s a lot of forms of narrative alertness. Cormac McCarthy is the most narratively alert person you could ever ask for. Not particularly funny, but when he’s moving through a landscape, he doesn’t forget anything that he’s made. It all comes home in that beautiful language.
The Orchard Keeper. Unbelievable. And he sometimes can be very funny actually. But you can see that he’s not addicted to or looking for that. He’s just 100 percent alive in his fictive reality. Actually, Toni Morrison—I taught Sula this year: same. She can be very funny. But the main thing I feel with her is that the fictional world is just crackling with life, and the author is just generously looking around, blessing it all, and asking, “What do I need?” And that question means: What will make the most beautiful sentence I can put in front of you to make you feel as alive in the fictive reality as I am? So whether it’s humor or not is maybe a low-level understanding of that kind of interaction between reader and writer.
Well, I’ll tell you, when I started reading this I wasn’t sure what to do. Because I know you, and I’ve read all your books, and then here’s this novel. And it’s had such big fanfare. “George Saunders has a new novel, and I have all the feels,” that sort of thing. And I was reading along, and pretty early on you write, “When we are newly arrived in this hospital yard, young sir, and feel like weeping, what happens is, we tense up ever so slightly, and there is a mild toxic feeling in the joints, and little things inside us burst.” And so I stopped for a second, because so much of it, too, is that when a reader enters your work, so much depends on where the reader is as well. You don’t have complete control over the reader. Not at all, no.
So at that phrase—“little things inside us burst”—I guess I was feeling emotional, and I knew I was about to read a novel about a father losing his son. And I have young kids. You know, it’s all those little things that are happening in the reader. So I read that sentence, and it’s like, “Oh, the dead are weeping.” And there are very real emotions in here that I’m thinking through as I’m reading. But then the very next sentence is, “Sometimes, we might poop a bit if we are fresh.” And right there we realize we’re in George Saunders’s world. It’s so funny you should pick that out, because in the manuscript, that’s said on page two. In the galley, it’s deeper, but in what I worked on for many years, it was two. And I remember thinking, “I just hope my readers will make it to the poop joke.” And that’s my weakness, but I was just thinking, “That’s where I’m signaling that I’m all here.” I didn’t turn into a super-straight realist guy, which is a fear of mine, because humor came into my writing as a form of emotional honesty. We’re talking about when I was really young. I kept it out when I was trying to be Hemingway, which is a form of emotional dishonesty. My wife and I got married, we had our kids, we were having a great time, but we were pretty poor, all working really hard. The humor came back in at that point as “Holy shit, what’s going on here? This is really hard.” So that was honest. My fear is always that as you get old and august, the world actually stops being so difficult, and it’s not that funny anymore. Please note that I’m saying this in a British accent. [Laughter.] So in that case, again, that would be a form of emotional dishonesty. Just because it’s not happening to you doesn’t mean it’s not happening. In that first long section I hope my readers don’t think I’m that guy now, that I’m just indulging in a straight historical narrative with capital-R Romantic tendencies. For me, that joke was a place to sort of breathe a little. You with me? I didn’t leave anything behind. I’m still doing it.
You did it. But it sounds like you could have used a few more beats of the emotional stuff before the poop stuff.
You get a great mix of both in this novel. In all of your work. You know what it reminds me of? If you were a Led Zeppelin fan, and then, what’s the album, the one with “Over the Hills and Far Away” on it?
Houses of the Holy. There are parts of that album where you think, “Oh my God, where’s Jimmy Page? Where’s the guitar?” And they know that, and they’re kind of setting you up a little bit with those swelling strings, and then all of a sudden it starts. So to me, it was a little bit like, let’s make sure we don’t leave anything behind.
Let’s go back to something you said earlier about the essays that you were writing. You had mentioned that those gave you an opportunity to do a little bit of work on writing about your own emotional responses to things, which is in your fiction, but it’s not you, George Saunders, saying, “I feel this way.” There’s a part in the “Buddha Boy” essay, which a lot of people talk about because it’s a terrific essay…. Oh, thanks.
Do you mind if I read it? Yeah, no, I love it.
“You know that feeling at the end of the day when the anxiety of that-which-I-must-do falls away, and for maybe the first time that day, you see with some clarity people you love and the ways you have during that day slightly ignored them, turned away from them to get back to what you were doing, blurted some mildly hurtful thing, projected instead of the deep love you really feel, a surge of defensiveness or self-protection or suspicion. That moment when you think, Oh God, what have I done with this day? And what am I doing with my life? And how must I change to avoid catastrophic end-of-life regrets? I feel like that now, tired of the me I’ve always been, tired of making the same mistakes, repetitively stumbling after the same small ego-strokes, being caught in the same loops of anxiety and defensiveness.” I love that you had the presence and the courage to write that. I really connect with that notion. I think anybody who is sentimental, as you said that you are… I am.
Perhaps nostalgic… Yes.
And is very busy and maybe has kids, as we do, you can’t help but feel that way. Some of us feel that way a lot more often than others. Those would be the good people.
But to push that idea a little further, I have those feelings, exactly what you’re talking about there. And it’s this tremendous feeling of guilt, because I have those moments, and then I even think of myself having those moments, like, “Oh, okay, at least I’m aware enough to be feeling this.” Yeah, I think that’s true, actually.
But then an hour later, I’m checking my phone and looking at tweets. Yet it’s a wonder I ever leave the house and let my kids and my wife out of my sight. You know what I mean? I do. I do. I think that you’re right, first of all, that the awareness that one is less loving or less present than one would wish is actually pretty good awareness, you know? Because there were times in my life when I didn’t even have that awareness. I just was…right. I think that’s where, for me, a person’s desire to get better on that score is what leads them to something. For some people, it’s a spiritual push, meditation or prayer. But I think just to be aware of that is huge. But as you say, it doesn’t change.
It doesn’t solve anything. I know I can’t run a marathon, and I still can’t.
I could go out and train. I could do that. But I’m aware I don’t want to. And I think that’s part of art. Part of fiction writing is a small training in assessing how good your awareness is. You come back to the page you’ve written, and you’re reacting to it by reading it. And the critical thing is: How fine-tuned and honest are your reactions to your own work? So a part gets slow; do you notice it? Do you honor the fact that you noticed it? Are you willing to try to fix it? And then the second level is: You’re aware of your reaction to the work, then outside of that you’re also aware that that reaction is also temporary and may change. So how then do you revise? You go ahead and make the change. But then the next day you come back and do it again. And at some point, you reach a steady state where your reaction to the piece is pretty consistent. Then you’re good. But for me, that mimics the process of being in the world. How are you feeling right now? How reliable is your feeling about how you’re feeling right now?
I want to say one thing parenthetically about the GQ pieces, because you are right that I was able to turn to my own emotional state to write about them. The other thing that I learned is just the simple mechanics of…describing the setting, which I don’t usually do in my fiction. I feel like I can’t get anything going with that. Well, when you have to do it, you find that you can get something going. So there was a part of me that got more comfortable with the power of just describing physical stuff. That was something I had been suppressing. So the idea that I would spend a couple lines describing someone’s looks or something, I usually wouldn’t do it, except if I could get a little joke in there. But now I have more confidence that if I am given the task of describing your face or this street outside, I’ll be able to come up with some language that is interesting in its own right. That is something I learned from magazine writing. You’re driving through South Texas for three hours, and it’s gorgeous. You think, “Do I have something I can say about this?” Once I gave myself permission to do that, I found that, sure, your years of writing have made your language skills good enough to describe a mountain.
I want to refer to something in an essay you wrote, “My Writing Education: A Time Line,” about your experience earning a master’s degree in creative writing at Syracuse University in the 1980s. You wrote about a meeting you had with one of your teachers, Doug Unger, and basically that he didn’t pull any punches in telling you that your thesis was essentially not…it was “crap,” I think, is the word he used. He didn’t say it was crap; he just didn’t say it wasn’t.
Right. [Laughter.] And your response was that it was difficult to hear, of course, but that he had the respect to do such a thing for you, to not just feed you a line about how brilliant you are. That’s one of the things an MFA program can offer: respect. Because for a creative writer, where else can you go in today’s society where everyone around you respects what you’re doing—maybe they don’t necessarily like your work, but the act of writing is respected. That sort of validation for writers is something we try to provide at Poets & Writers, too: What you’re doing is important. I’m wondering if you could talk a bit about your experience teaching at Syracuse. When we talked in 2000, you had been teaching there for maybe three or four years. Did you have a sense then that you were going to be there for twenty years or more? I hoped so. Yeah, those early years were really rich, and they still are. There’s something to be gained by staying in the same place for a long time. But I like this idea of respect. That’s correct. And I think, also, what Doug gave me in that moment and what I got from my whole time there was just that standards don’t move, you know? This thing that we are doing is actually really hard, and there are no guarantees that anybody will be able to accomplish anything. So when you get to an MFA program and you realize that there actually are standards that aren’t being imposed by your teachers; they’re being imposed by the world, by culture, and the rabbit hole you have to go down is very, very deep. There are levels of exertion and understanding that you haven’t even touched yet. And the whole purpose for that journey is so you can be most uniquely yourself. That’s what it should do. It should be neither a teardown nor a feel-good factory. But just to say, this thing that you’re doing is really, really difficult, really, really essential. You don’t even know yet. “Know you do not yet” [in Yoda voice]. You’ve got to say, “Actually, this is even harder than you think, and also, we don’t know how it’s going to be hard for you in particular.” To set that up I think is really useful. In some ways, it’s maybe like going to medical school—except for the money—but in the sense that someone teaching young doctors doesn’t say, “It’s all right. You don’t have to worry about tonsillectomies, because you probably will get only about six in your career, so don’t bother.” You know? That’s not a thing. The way you’d know a culture was going down the shitter would be if someone was doing that. I think it’s the same with the arts. But it’s complicated, because part of that process is to nurture, but part of the process is to not over-nurture, which I think can be a problem in MFA programs. You come to love these people so much, and the delivery of bad news is not fun. But respect is the key thing, because if you really loved a young writer and you saw that she was doing something contrary to achieving her full potential, it would definitely be an act of love to put up a sign to stop her from doing that, in whatever way worked. Basically, my prayer is: “Let me positively inflect this person once or twice while she’s here.” More, if possible, but once or twice would be great. If I could just have one interaction so that five years down the line, she goes, “Ah! I now know what he was talking about.” Or the best is when students have walled off certain material that they don’t want to do, they don’t want to do it, but it’s essential to them, and you somehow help them take the wall down. That’s really wonderful. Or when they have been hurt or maybe diminished by some life situation, and you can make them see that that actually is their material, and it’s all right.
Have you noticed any changes in how writers are approaching the MFA? There are two observations. One is that the relation of the young writer to the MFA program has changed certainly since I was a student. At that time, the idea was kind of like, “Oh, that’s freaky. Let’s be outlaws and do this thing that isn’t actually going to make us richer or whatever.” And there weren’t very many programs. I’d never heard of one until the week before I applied. I didn’t know they existed. And then there’s the false and damaging assumption that if one wants to be a writer, you must go to an MFA program. And the related one, which is, if you go to an MFA program, you’ll definitely be a published writer. That whole suite of assumptions makes a lot of pressure for students. It’s what we call “professionalization,” and I think that’s not so good, and I predict there’ll be some kind of backlash against it. I predict there will be—there probably already is—a group of people who say, “I’m not going to an MFA program; I’m going to do it on my own.” And then we’ll have a series of successes from those writers, and the pendulum will swing. There’s nothing wrong with it, but the most damaging thing is when a student doesn’t get in and thinks, “Therefore I’m not a writer.” That is not true. And it’s a function, at least in our program, of the numbers. We get 650 applications for six spots. We have six spots because those are all that we can afford to fully fund, which we feel is kind of ethically or artistically important. So if you’re number seven, you’re great. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t get in.
Another thing you mentioned in that essay is that when you first got to Syracuse and were studying with Tobias Wolff, who is just an amazing writer, a master— He’s a genius.
But you had the realization that he’s also a real person. He creates this amazing art for four hours in the morning, and then he goes grocery shopping or picks up the laundry or whatever. And that leads into something I want to talk about, which is how to respond to success. Because here you are, and if people see you picking up your laundry, it’s like, “Wow, George Saunders has this normal life.” Not as often as you’d think. Mostly they’re just like, “Hmm, who’s that bald dude?”
You’ve been the cover story in the New York Times Magazine and appeared on talk shows; you sang a song with Stephen Colbert. You’ve achieved a very high level of success in this field. And literary journalists and bloggers and everyone on social media will pump that up, rightly so, but we don’t often talk about how, as a writer, you are supposed to respond to that sort of thing. That’s a great question. I think one thing you can do is watch it. I’ve said before, if you eat a bunch of beans, you’re going to fart. That’s it. It wouldn’t be a disgrace, but you might notice it. So I think anybody, at any level, who has gotten any attention knows this syndrome, which is the birthday syndrome. You get something published, you tell your friends, they get excited, and you get elated, which, as a word, has positive connotations. But I actually see it as kind of a negative. You get elated: You can’t think about anything else and you want more. It’s like a sugar buzz. And then the next day, it’s not your birthday anymore, and you’re like, “What the fuck is wrong with all these idiots?” You know? That’s just the human mind responding to stimuli. So I think part of it is to ask yourself, “Where am I on that scale right now? How full of shit am I based on this attention that I’m getting?” And by the way, that would also go the other way; if you were being criticized, you would have anti-elation.
Deflation. It’s the same thing, though, because you’re still thinking about only you and your hurt feelings. I think part of my deal is to sort of take everything in my life and subjugate it into the goal of using my talent wisely. So if success starts to occur, go on full alert to the ways in which your natural biologic reactions to success might screw up your work. One way is, you get into the rarefied-air syndrome, where you’re only in cool places being praised. That’s death. You can’t do that. The other thing would be believing that it’s objectively true that you did well. That’s anathema to an artist. Even after a work is done, you have to be going, “I should have done better; I know I could have.” That’s how you get to the next thing. I think most of it is just not believing in it too much, and maybe if you still have a little skill left you say, “Let me also not enjoy it too little, because it doesn’t happen all the time; it doesn’t happen to everybody.”
If we think about talent, talent is like a flower. I wasn’t doing publishable work until about thirty-three. Well, the odds are, it’s going to wilt. It may very well wilt before I die. So you have to treat it as something that you were gifted with briefly, and it may or may not be around. But I also think of it as kind of a fun adventure; especially in this time, I feel like it’s not a bad thing for a writer to work herself into a more public role, to kind of push herself into the public mind a little more so as to push back against some of the stuff that’s going on. But it’s like everything else. Anything that happens to you is going to have some effect on your artistic abilities, so I think part of it is to manage. Even when we met the last time, I had just come out of that period when I’d written a book at work, and the way I understood that was, okay, this is part of it. This is part of the artistic journey. I don’t have enough money, and my hours are getting burned up doing this work. All right, I accept. And then it becomes ennobled. And I found myself empowered by that. If I thought, “Ah, I’m getting cheated by the world,” then that’s disempowering. But to say, “This is part of my writer’s journey,” then suddenly you can take more of it.
We have a little more time, and there are two topics that I want to touch on: One is the election and the other is death. Wait, there was an election? Oh, you saved the good one for last.
It was very interesting to go back and reread, “Who Are All These Trump Supporters?” which was published in the New Yorker last July. I’ll confess that when I first read it—and this is maybe part of the problem—but my reaction was one of curiosity, almost like being at the zoo or something. Who are these creatures? What’s happening? It was almost a morbid curiosity. Now, rereading it, I think, “Why didn’t we see this coming?” I personally thought good would prevail. And it didn’t. It did numerically.
It did numerically, but the system did not. Well, that piece was really hard for me to finish, and I think it was exactly for the reason you’re naming. I went there thinking it was kind of a fringe—at the time, I think 40 percent of people who were going to vote said they would vote for Trump. But I thought it was kind of a fringe thing that would burn out. In other words, I found myself in the position of somebody who takes on the story, “Some People Like Football Better Than Baseball: Who Are They?” Well, they’re everybody. Or it’s a mix of all kinds of people. So I went in with this idea that I was going to try to pinpoint or diagnose this slender, fading movement, but in fact it’s half the people who voted. I’m still puzzling over it, actually. The one thing I’m sure of is this: The people who supported trump were either willing to ignore or could not see the humiliation and fear that he was causing in good people: Muslims, Mexicans, Mexican Americans, gay people, black people, any people of color. You’d have to be sort of willfully blind to not see the anxiety his rhetoric was causing in those people. So the thing that I think a lot of progressives are struggling with is, how could you discount that? Now, that’s an interesting question. Because the first-level answer is, they’re racist. I think it’s responsible to take that and try to break it apart a little bit, and one Gallup poll recently suggested an interesting answer, which was that most of the Trump supporters had a relatively low level of interaction with the other. They didn’t live near the border; they didn’t live near undocumented communities; they didn’t have a lot of friends of color. So it’s sort of a projection. When they have a fear about an undocumented person, it’s almost all projection.
And how were they getting their perspective on these matters? Fox News? Well, this is the interesting thing, because that’s what my assumption was, so I would do these little fishing questions like, “So, where do you get your news?” And they’d say, “I get my news from all over.” And it’s funny, at the time, last spring, I took that to mean they also watched CNN or something. But now, in retrospect, I think they meant Fox and Breitbart and alt-right sites. They were seeing Fox as a little bit left of center. In the reporting, I would get these weird refusals of data sets to intersect. We’d be talking about something, and their facts were coming from somewhere I didn’t know about. And at the time, I don’t think that network of right-wing sites was as widely known. That explains a lot of the data in that piece. So I’m still puzzling over it.
But I think for writers, it’s a time…I feel kind of excited about writing. I don’t think I’ve ever felt in my life that it was a more essential task. When there’s leadership in place that is purposefully encouraging anti-factuality, that got elected on repeatedly being as nonspecific as possible, constantly invoking linguistic tropes, meaningless linguistic tropes, using these rhetorical stances to alienate and terrify groups of people, that’s when language shows up and goes, “I did matter all along! You writers knew about it.” So, right is still right, virtue is still virtue, and I feel a little bit energized about it. Now, the one thing I noticed during this thing that scares me is that this left-right divide is getting fatal. I went with these Trump supporters, and I got along with everybody and had a really nice time. They were very friendly; we chatted; I insulted them and they insulted me. But one thing that was funny—if I was feeling insecure, I’d drop the fact that I’m a New Yorker writer, in general. And I don’t think there was a single Trump supporter—there might have been one guy in Wisconsin—who knew what that was.
I expected, “Oh, that liberal rag.” Not even that. “Is that some liberal thing?” sometimes. But they didn’t know what it was. So that means then I went home and worked five months on a ten-thousand-word piece trying to be very measured but not a pushover and all this stuff. Who read it? We read it. Now, I’m a fan of preaching to the choir; the choir needs to huddle around the most profound version of our ethos. But it was weird to think, “If I wanted to bust out and really speak directly to Trump supporters, how would I do it?”
That’s the question. It’s a big question.
You mentioned that you feel hopeful and energized now. That’s a very good message, this idea that language does matter now. Maybe now more than ever. But the hard thing is trying to reconcile the fact that no one really gave a shit about the language Trump was using during the campaign. I would break that down, because many of us, including you, care deeply about it.
Of course. It didn’t have an effect, though. When I was hearing him say some of these things—“Grab them by the whatever”—I was like, “Oh, well, it’s over now,” because there’s no way someone’s going to vote for that. It’s disqualifying, right, right.
But they did. Yeah. And that’s a deep well. One thing I’m trying to tell myself in order to stay hopeful is that heartbreak is the difference between what you thought the world was and what the world actually turned out to be. So you thought this person loved you; they didn’t. Aww. Well, actually, that’s on you, in a sense. So those of us who are feeling crestfallen or heartbroken at this time, I’m trying to say to myself, “That’s your problem! You were out there in the rallies, why didn’t you know?” So then isn’t it literary to say, “I’m going to adjust my view because it was too small. I misunderstood America. I misunderstood the country.” That’s okay. You’re allowed to misunderstand. Also, America is allowed to be as fucked up as it wants to be. My perceptions just can’t be out of sync with that. That’s one thing.
Now, we talk about specificity. With this thing, a fifth of the country voted for Trump. That’s a pretty small number. To elect someone else would take a sliver of about 15 percent. Say 15 percent of the population would have to flip over into an anti-Trump stance. That’s really easy.
Or just vote at all. Right. But part of me is wanting to say because of our election procedure, this looks like the country has totally changed, but the truth is—and this is something I left out of the piece because it didn’t come into focus—so many of those people I talked to were as much anti-Hillary as for Trump. To me, that’s mystifying, but that was their position. So I would imagine if you just plunk in Joe Biden next time, it all shifts. So I’m not hopeless. It’s still depressing, mostly because it makes me sad to think of all the people I met on this trip down in Phoenix, and so many wonderful Mexican Americans and also Mexican immigrants who were so humiliated by this. You know, they work so hard, and now the country is sort of turning them into enemies. And that’s heartbreaking. That’s disgusting, actually, and it makes me sad. But the other thing it does is it backlights our whole history a little differently. You talk to any African American and you say, “America’s racist!” they’ll go, “That’s not news.” So I think part of the sadness but also maybe the invigorating thing for me as an older person is to go, you know what? I maybe never saw this country correctly. And as you get older, a little bit of an Aaron Copland vibe gets in your head, like, “Oh, this lovely country that’s been so good to me.” It’s a time for me to maybe reconsider, for everyone to reconsider, and say, “Yeah, this is not new, this kind of oppressive rhetoric and this kind of knee-jerk, reactionary demagogue thing. We’ve been fighting it a long time.” I think heartbreak comes from the fact that many of us felt that that was in its death throes and that this next administration would be the end of it, or at least a good movement towards the end of it, and now we have to wait.
It’s also perhaps naive for some of us to have thought that we understood this country. It’s a huge country. There are so many people, so many different kinds of people, and to think that we know who we are as one united… Right. And so much of that comes from our mind, what we want to see. But to turn it back to writers: What an incredible moment to say, “Okay, we don’t know.” And let’s just generalize: “We don’t know the Midwest.” Well, that’s a good project, because it’s full of human beings and therefore full of literature. I remember coming the other direction; I was in Amarillo before I came to the Syracuse program, and I’d been working in a slaughterhouse, and we’d been having a lot of drama in our circle of friends and family—real deaths and drugs and all kinds of dark stuff. And I came out here very hopeful that that would give me a badge of authenticity, kind of like when Kerouac met Neal Cassidy. I came out, and I found that a lot of the people I met in the artistic community hadn’t had much experience there, and so therefore it didn’t hold much interest. It was sometimes just a one-line joke, you know? “Oh, Amarillo, I drove through there. Bunch of currency exchanges.” And I remember, it was maybe one of the most heartbreaking moments of my life to see that I wasn’t going to get in there with that. There was no understanding that there was an entire human community there that I loved, and they were suffering. So now, it’s a tremendous literary mission to say, “Can we reimagine our country?” It’s going to take some legwork, and it’s going to take some curiosity, which is in short supply these days, in both directions.
Well, shifting gears here— Let’s move on to death!
Let’s move on to death. It seems like the perfect place to end our conversation. You’ve mentioned that you find death such an interesting and terrifying thing to write about. It’s in all of your work, but this book in particular, because all but three peopleare dead. And a horse. Thank you for noting the horse. [Laughter.] I think it’s because I have a reasonable level of belief that it’ll actually happen to me. I remember, as a kid, being in my grandparents’ house in Texas, and it was a smallish house, and I could hear their sleep-noises, and it hit me really hard—and they were in their sixties, so they were old to me at that time—and I couldn’t sleep, and I thought, “They’re going to die, my God.” And that just-woke-up sort of confusion: “What if they die right now? They could. Well, they could. They’re going to, and they could.” I don’t think I’m fascinated with it, but I kind of feel like, you know, if you’re on the tracks and you distantly hear a train, come on! I’m not fascinated with the train, but—
It’s a fact, coming. Yes.
I guess another way to phrase the question here is that, similar to how taking the election as this sort of negative and looking at it as a positive, which you so beautiful did, it’s a similar thing with death. I think that the kind of general feeling about death is that it’s a negative. And yet it’s going to happen to every one of us. And you seem to have taken the positive view, which is that it makes life, life. Yes. Let me put it another way: As with the election, it’s not that you think the thing itself is positive, but being willing to accept the reality of the thing is positive. Then you accommodate it. It’s kind of like—actually, it’s sort of anti-denial. Denial is something I’m very prone to, and it’s always gotten me in trouble. Okay, look, death seems to be, as far as I can tell, it’s going to come for me. So is there any way I can accommodate that knowledge? No matter what, whether it enriches your life or fucks it up, it’s still healthy to acknowledge. So if you go to a party, and you know everyone is leaving at midnight, it should affect the way you pace yourself, or the way you are there.
I think what happened with me is, again, because of that thin ledge of talent I have, I’m not a writer who could write a story about something that has no urgency for me. There are really talented writers who say, “Oh, I’m going to imagine that I live in that apartment.” I can’t even do it, something so casual. I flounder in that mode. So I have to make sure that my stories get on something that really matters to me. Death would be one. I always quote Flannery O’Connor: “A writer can choose what he writes, but he can’t choose what he makes live.” So coming at that idea from the other direction, if your prose is flat, that means you’re not writing about—well, it means your prose is flat. And it means you better stop that. So for me, what that means is, when I get off into something where the prose starts jangling, then full-speed ahead, don’t worry about what it’s about. But that tends to be about mortality. And it might just be a lack of subtlety. I’m not too good at making a story in which nothing big happens. I mean, the masters do. Chekhov, he always can do that. I think I’m maybe just not that subtle. So for me, peril, death, has to be there for me to get the necessary energy.
This whole novel is predicated on death. Did anything about writing it surprise you? Oh, yeah. So much. But mostly it’s—this is Poets & Writers, so we can talk about it—but mostly it was the internal dynamics. If you’re writing a story as over-the-top as this one, it’s all in the doing. It’s all in the line-to-line and section-to-section transfers. And my thought was, if ever once I got too cheesy or on the nose, all the air goes out of the balloon. So much of the editing work was: If I juxtapose this speech with this speech, what does it feel like? If I cut this speech and move this one up? I just finished section nine; which way am I going? And the constant enemy was kind of—I was going to say “banality,” but it’s not really that. I think a lot of the energy is, as a reader, going, “What the fuck’s going on here? Who are these people?” And then, just about the time they figure out who they are, then I have to keep moving it. The idea was to keep the reader always a little bit behind me but interested. So sometimes if you make a too-obvious structural move, the reader passes you. “Oh, it’s a ghost story.” That’s really hard to talk about, but it’s all the micromanaging of text and transitions and the way the speech is made, which I really like, because if my attention’s on that stuff, the big questions come in anyway, and they come in naturally. So the surprises—there were thousands of things that surprised me.
I have to ask you about one of the voices in the book: the hunter. Yeah.
Where did that come from? I don’t know.
You pause on that character it seemed to me in a slightly different way. It was more detailed in terms of what he had to do in the afterlife. All the thousands of animals he killed during his lifetime were gathered around him, and he had to hold them all, one by one, “for a period ranging from several hours to several months, depending on…the state of fear the beast happened to have been in at the time of its passing.” I mean, I could make something up, but the truth is, this is what I love about writing. Basically, they’re going from Point A to Point B; they need to pass some people. What I love is to suspend the part of your mind that says, “Well, who should they pass?” and just go, “No, who do they pass.” And that guy just showed up. I don’t know why. I honestly…the only true answer is: I don’t know. He just showed up. And in that space…it’s funny: You’re walking through the woods, and you go, “Okay, I need somebody to show up on the left,” your mind turns there, and it supplies. That’s the difference between someone writing well and someone not. And I don’t think you can say much more than that. But you do train yourself, I think. I’ve noticed the training is mostly been to repress the side of me that wants to figure it out. Who should I have show up? No. Maybe just a vague turning in that direction that’s informed by everything that’s behind you, and then a trust that whatever the little intuitive leap is, is actually coming from the subconscious in a deeper way. But it’s literally like training yourself in putting up a little roadblock to your conscious mind and saying, just stay back a little bit. You don’t have to go away, but just stay back. And then veering over here and seeing what you’ve got. I mean, how do you talk about that?
You don’t want to look behind the curtain. No, you don’t. But it’s also years of being in that exact space and being somewhat confident. And I would even say, in that moment when you turn away from the conscious, there are several different strands of other things. There are several candidates going, “I’m over here! I’m over here!” And there’s a micro-moment where you can go, “No, no, no, no, yeah.” So it’s really freaky.
Well, this book is full of those moments. As you say, it’s a comic novel, but when I was reading it, moments like that are haunting. Oh, thanks.
Your work is full of those moments where it’s comic, laugh-out-loud moments, and then this little twist. Part of that, again, is that alert[ness]. I’m trying to imagine where you are. Now, again, you can’t exactly, but it’s surprising how you sort of can. So if, on a micro-level, you feel like you just landed a very nice, profound, serious moment, and I’m watching Kevin—what if I do the poop joke? So it’s interesting, you know? You’re enjoying the pleasure of that deep, literary, serious moment. Now, you know, if we just left it alone, does that trail off? And if we follow it with another one, do you now feel like it’s becoming predictable? It’s a challenge of teaching in an MFA program, or teaching writing in general: Those little skills are so small and subrational, in a certain way. You can’t teach those moments, and yet everything abides in them. So that’s why I do a lot of close line-editing with my students, because in that way you can sort of communicate, if you have a sentence that’s this way, and you can edit it and make it this way, and that way’s better, you’ve kind of engaged that moment a little bit. That’s very interesting. And the danger is, in school, we’re always analyzing the effect after the fact, in analytical language. Which may or may not have anything to do with how Tolstoy did it in the first place. That’s the thing. I try to remind myself of that, that we’re talking about literature often from the wrong end of the telescope. That’s the conundrum of a writing education.
I was saying earlier how you can never know the mess of neuroses and emotions and everything that a reader is bringing to it, but on the other hand, just in my case, I’m not feeling anything new. I’m not going through anything so special that hasn’t been gone through by other people, you know? Think of it this way: If we’re walking down the street, you’re having your thoughts, I’m having mine, somebody gets hit by a car; suddenly, we’re both in exactly the same space. So I think in art and writing, you can do the same thing, sometimes just with a simple sentence, you know? “They crossed the river.” You might be having a bad day, but suddenly, you’re crossing a river.
Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.
Don’t tell George Saunders you can’t get there from here. En route to an enviable writing career, he traveled from a working-class childhood in south Chicago to the oil fields of Indonesia, a slaughterhouse in Amarillo, Texas, and the stuffy office of an environmental company in Rochester, New York. Along the way he collected an MA in creative writing from Syracuse University, where he studied with Tobias Wolff, and a degree in geophysical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines.
Saunders readily admits he didn’t chart his course, and he approaches the writing of fiction the same way—with no particular destination in mind. As a result his stories end up in some unexpected places: a prehistoric theme park; a future world where citizens belong to two classes: “Normal” or “Flawed;” and a self-help seminar where participants learn to identify who has been “crapping in your oatmeal.” Ask him why his stories, at once hilarious and macabre, are littered with severed hands, dead aunts, see-through cows, and Civil War ghosts and he’ll share your curiosity. “Where does this shit come from? I don’t have an answer.”
Today Saunders teaches creative writing in the graduate program at Syracuse University. He lives with his wife of 13 years and his two daughters, ages 9 and 12. His first collection of short stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, was published in 1996 by Riverhead Books. In May, Riverhead published his second collection, Pastoralia. Villard will publish his modern fairy tale “for adults and future adults,” The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, illustrated by Lane Smith, in August.
Recently I visited Saunders in Syracuse. During lunch at Erawan Restaurant and over coffee in his sunny Victorian home, he revealed two qualities that make him so popular among his students—a friendliness and a generosity one wouldn’t necessarily expect to find in someone at this stage of a successful writing career. He also displayed a quality one would expect to find in the author of such stories as “The 400-Pound CEO” and “Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror”—the uncanny ability to find humor in unlikely places.
One of the things that’s immediately intriguing about you as a writer is your sort of non-traditional background— That’s a nice way to put it …
Well, it doesn’t seem like you’ve been stagnating in some university setting. No, that started up here. It was kind of an inadvertent path. When I look back I’m always a little bit embarrassed because it’s not like I had any sense. I had such a malformed sense of the world at each point that I ended up making some stupid decisions without really realizing what the options were. I grew up in Chicago in a pretty working-class neighborhood so writing wasn’t something…well, I didn’t really know who did it. It never occurred to me that I might do it. But I never even read a whole lot. I remember reading Johnny Tremain—that was a big watershed. I got a degree in geophysical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. This was at the height of the oil boom, so I went over to Sumatra and worked for a couple years in the oil fields. After that was a period of just bombing around with no real sense of what was going on. I worked in a slaughterhouse for a while in Amarillo, Texas. I was probably twenty-four or twenty-five. In that town if you wanted to get some money quick that’s where you went, and they would hire anybody and you could stay for as short as you wanted.
What did you do at the slaughterhouse? I was a knuckle-puller. It’s a leg thing. It would come in on a hook. It would look like a big chicken leg. There was this complicated series of cuts. You had a hook in one hand and a knife in the other. The cuts were very surgical, some of them. When that was done you just sort of heaved it across onto this conveyor belt. It was like this big Rube Goldberg thing and it would go somewhere else. At one point I got demoted because I was too slow and I went to this place where all the stuff that was left over at the end came by on this big belt and you had to separate it. There was one box that was for bone and one was for fat and one for miscellaneous. The story was that the bone went to make pizza toppings, and fat was for marshmallows. It wasn’t too good.
So you were de-knuckling the leg. Of what animals? Cows? Oh, cows, yeah. It was hard to tell. It could’ve been brontosaurus for all I know.
You’re a vegetarian now. Yeah, but that’s pretty recent. One wasn’t a result of the other.
How did these kinds of experiences inform your work? I always wanted to write but had never read anything contemporary. When I was in Asia there were all these great things to write about during the oil boom, but I didn’t have the vocabulary. I found myself drifting and not knowing how to put the stuff that was happening into the work because I had never seen it done before. But then I read that story “Hot Ice” by Stuart Dybek and that was basically my neighborhood where I grew up. To see that in prose… I couldn’t pretend that only Hemingway mattered after that. Dybek was a big breakthrough because I could for the first time see what you had to do to reality to make it literature, because I knew the neighborhood and I knew the people and I could see what he’d done to it.
You played guitar in a bar band in Texas. A really bad bar band. We were called—it’s really embarrassing—we were called Rick Active and the Good Times Band. It was along Route 66 in Amarillo, where they had these drunk palaces where you’d go to drink and they’d pay us each $50 a night and we’d play the same set six times over and over again, never practice, no original songs. This was 1986. I should’ve known better then. In a way it’s like half of your mind is saying, “It’s okay, I’m just slumming, I’ll write about this some day,” and the other half is just that there weren’t a whole lot of other options.
Were there any other early influences? Monty Python was a huge influence—the way that they would get at something archetypal through a side door was always really interesting. We just turned our kids on to that recently. The argument sketch. Do you remember that one? “I’m here for an argument.” “No you’re not.”
I remember watching Monty Python with my father. He was really busy and we didn’t do a lot together, but every Sunday night we’d watch that. In our neighborhood, a very working-class neighborhood, jokes were really a currency. If you could tell a joke or even if you could imitate somebody it was a really big deal. Junot Díaz, who teaches here at Syracuse, has this great theory that writers come out of any kind of situation where language equals power. So in his case, in the Dominican Republic, English was clearly a meal ticket. And I think that’s true. So that combined with just sitting there with my father roaring at Monty Python…somehow humor became validated. But for years, like a lot of working-class people, writing was that thing which I could not do. It had to be just beyond my grasp or it didn’t count, right? So it was only when that sort of dropped that I could really have fun with it. But that was relatively recently.
Humor is obviously a very big part of your writing. Humor combined with sentiment. I’m thinking of the ending of the short story “Isabelle” in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. It’s heartbreaking. I’m increasingly happy to be a funny writer. What I find really funny is the straight faces that people keep in spite of the fact that life is so full of suffering. I think of the poses people strike, and the hatred that they develop in spite of the fact that in fifty years we are all going to be dust. We have to occupy those places so that’s really funny to me. Whenever I try to write hard and earnestly it always comes out like that. I have to sort of trust it. I can’t write anything that isn’t comic—I don’t know about funny—but comic. Earnestness is my enemy.
You’ve written short stories and a novella. Have you ever tried to write a novel? Most of those stories started out as novels. I’ve tried and I just recently got to the point where I’m not going to try anymore. If it happens it’ll happen organically. I’m not going to sweat it because in the past when I tried to write a novel I thought, “I’ll have to do something fundamentally different, I’ll have to stretch things out.” But if I have any gift it’s for compression. At forty-one I’m like, “Well it’s nice that I can do something. I don’t have to do everything.” We’ll see what happens.
When I was working as an engineer at the environmental company there was just no way that a novel was going to happen. When I was in that job I was desperately trying to figure out another way because not only was it not a lot of money, but not a lot of time with the kids. There’s that great quote by Terry Eagleton: “Capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body.” That was such a beautiful lesson because you come home half despising yourself because you’ve done such stupid things with your day. You’ve groveled and you’ve not even groveled efficiently. Then you come home and you’re exhausted and you’re not capable of generosity and I find it really sad.
A lot of your stories, like “Pastoralia” and “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” take place in this beaurocratic, artificial universe. Disneyland gone wrong. I think it’s mostly that job I worked at the environmental company. It was a provincial office of a medium-sized company that was based in Texas so it had all the rigidity with none of the brilliance. There were probably thirty people there and they were all pretty anxious and by the time I got there they were shrinking the place down. It wasn’t huge enough that it was faceless. We all knew each other. There was quite a bit of inside space where there was no natural light. My own ego, my youthful arrogance, and my own high expectations of myself were put suddenly in conflict with this because, you know, by then I had two kids. I was maybe thirty-three or thirty-four and nothing was going as planned. I hadn’t won the Nobel Prize yet and Hollywood wasn’t calling because I hadn’t published anything, so there was something about that that made it seem absurd. It was a pretty petty place and there were a lot of rules. I mean at one point I was sending stories out and I got a nice rejection from the New Yorker and I was so excited because an actual person had responded and in a fit of madness I mentioned this to my supervisor at the end of the day. And he got this stricken look on his face and he said, “Well actually, George, it’s come to our attention that you are using corporate resources to produce your ‘writing’ so we’d like you to discontinue that.” And this was a guy who knew me and he knew my kids. So that wasn’t too good.
How are you able to negotiate some of the awful things that happen in your stories—death, dismemberment—with humor? That’s a South Side of Chicago thing because our whole world—communicating anything emotional—was to be sarcastic. If you wanted to say you loved somebody you’d punch him in the crotch. My impulses are always very sentimental, I mean mawkishly, sit-comishly so. So in some ways I think it’s a cloaking mechanism. If you have in one scene a kid getting his hand cut off, I think in some funny way you’re more willing to accept a sentimental scene. I don’t know if you’re more willing to accept it, but maybe the juxtaposition of those two things is more interesting. As a writer I’m really aware of my defects and how much I have to find other things to substitute, so humor helps. It’s got its own inherent energy so if you can sustain funniness you almost always have to sustain something else. Pure funny you see sometimes in humor columnists who are just funny, but in fiction to keep funny going you almost always dredge something else up. I think.
For some reason I think of Charlie Chaplin. Yeah, The Great Dictator. I think partly it’s ritualized humility. If you think of the great evils: When China invades Tibet they’re not funny, they’re not self-doubting. There’s no trace of humor in what they’re doing. And Hitler: not a guy who’s at all prone to see funniness in himself. One of the great things about fiction is that if I write an asshole into a story it has to be me. I can’t generate him. And it’s always funny in the reviews they say my stories are full of losers. I know where I got all those things. I didn’t just make them up. I think it’s ritualized humility.
In your stories, one thing that continually strikes me is guilt. I’m thinking of “Winky” in Pastoralia, and just about every story in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Well, I think it’s the Catholic background. The binary that got set up was that you were either doing good or you were doing evil, and you were never doing good. If you actually appeared to be doing good there was probably something wrong with your intentions. I think if you have any moral tension, guilt is part of it. If a person can feel guilt they are at least cognizant of a moral interplay. It’s a powerful emotion—one, because it implies you’ve done wrong, and two, that you know you’ve done wrong.
When I was a kid in Chicago, the big thing was to go to a Bears game because it was expensive and people didn’t really do it. But this family that lived two doors down from us—they were maybe ten years off the boat from Poland and they didn’t have much money and they lived in a house that was completely bare, no furniture. It always smelled like noodles and they were always kind of barking at each other. One day the kid came over and said “I got Bears tickets.” It was like someone in the poorest neighborhood saying they had a house in the Hamptons. So I said, “Great, we’re going to go.” It was his father, his uncle, Greg, and me. It was a big journey with trains and buses, and we stopped at other Polish relatives and there was a lot of cheek-pinching. But I was going to endure it all to see Gale Sayers and Dick Butkus. So we finally got to Wrigley Field and just before we go in the father says, “All right, boys, we’ve got a little problem which is that we only got two tickets, but don’t worry about it we got it figured out. The Andy Frain guys they never look up when they take your ticket.” So they picked each one of us up—we were maybe ten or eleven—picked us up and put us on their shoulders. And in those days they were still wearing those big overcoats, and they had us put our feet down their overcoat and they buttoned it up. And so the plan was that they were going to walk in and they would take our tickets and not look up. Now I was the all-time Goody Two-shoes, straight A, never had an evil thought. And I was just appalled to be cheating, and cheating publicly. Then the father says, “Now if they do look up, all you got to do is look retarded.” And he was serious. The idea was that if they thought you were retarded they would let you in for free. So he says, “Now let’s see how you’re gonna do it.” So we had to practice. And we started in. What I was really deeply ashamed of afterward is how willing I was. I was not going to get caught. If they busted us, I was going to go into the retarded thing, I was going to do what he said.
Something of that is in my writing too. When I’m getting ready to send something out, I get really intensely self-critical. To my credit I get really fanatical about revising, but sometimes that can bleed over to just lock-up.
I think sometimes you can find yourself frightened of what you’re going to find if you look at it too closely too soon. I finish something and I think it’s good and I don’t want to go back to it too early. How many times do you wake up the next morning and say, “That’s trash,” you know? I think you’re right. Part of being a writer is to know when to trust yourself. I know I’m going to have a cycle. I’m going to love it more than it should be loved at first, hate it more than it should be hated later. You let your ecstatic side have it for a while, then you let your neurotic, self-doubting side. For me it was a breakthrough to realize that that wasn’t abnormal, that you weren’t right or wrong in either of those two, that you were right in both and wrong in both, and you just had to let it have a long shelf life and then it would start to make sense. Part of it, too, is knowing when to quit.
When I start to write a story I always have a simple design that would make it sort of classic and beautiful, but I can’t do it. I have some kind of weird thing that twists it, but the twist isn’t meaningless. Somehow the distortion that always happens if I work hard is useful. It’s like having this dog and going out in the field and saying, “Bring me back a pheasant.” That dog is your talent, and it runs out and and it comes back with the lower half of a Barbie doll. But if every time it brings back the lower half of a Barbie doll, you put those things together and you think, “That’s kinda good.” I don’t fight it anymore.
You write on a computer. You also said you revise a lot. How do you trust your ecstatic instinct electronically? The kind of writing I do I wouldn’t be able to do without a computer. Until I get to the end part of a story I work on the screen almost exclusively. Any time something strikes me I just put it in or cut it or whatever. If there is anything significant that happens I’ll save it. But the main thing I do is to try to keep it really free. Nothing is ever lost. I can always go back to it. It’s like those fast motion pictures of trees growing. I don’t know if it’s true with trees or not but let’s pretend it is. You sort of see this thing accreting and parts disappear and come back in but in the long run it’s working in a general direction. I couldn’t do that on hard copy.
For me, writing has become—it sounds a little pretentious but sort of true—a spiritual practice. If you’re open to whatever the story presents with no attachments to what you did yesterday or any attachments to what you want the thing to be or how you want to be perceived, but just open to the needs of the story, that’s kind of ecstatic. It’s really beautiful to say, “What I did yesterday or for the last twenty years might be shit but that’s okay.” It’s interesting to see how the artistic form teaches you. It instructs you on your own shortcomings as a person. I love that writing can really help me turn back the spiraling neurosis. It can help me be a little bit less stupid, less judgmental and unkind.
You said it is important to be there when you’re writing, not thinking about yesterday or tomorrow. Is that harder for you now that you have a couple books? It was really hard after the first book because I just thought I had squeaked through a door. “The Falls” was the first story of the new book that I wrote and it was a real lucky sort of breakthrough because it was so different from the other book. And I remember writing it and thinking, ‘No I shouldn’t send it out because it’s not like the other ones.’ But when the New Yorker took it I thought maybe whatever it is I have to offer is not totally manifest in that book, it’s something different, and that was a nice feeling to think it’s not really about style but something else you have to offer.
And maybe you don’t even know what it is yet, and maybe you never will. Maybe you’ll be eighty and you just keep cranking stuff out and you’re good enough and then you die. When you’re young you think, “I want my work to last,” and then you see that nothing lasts. Shakespeare doesn’t last, nothing does. The moment of doing it is really all there is. Everything else is all delusion. It’s hard to remember, especially now when books are coming out.
Tell me a little about The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. I have two daughters, and I would tell them these made-up stories about this little girl and they were funny and in some ways they were funnier than anything else. They were freer and not so programmatic. And I wrote it. It’s basically a short story really. And I liked it. There was something Monty Pythonesque about it. I didn’t have to worry about any realism and I had a really good time working on it and I sent it to Daniel Menaker at Random House and he bought it. As kind of an extra bonus he sent it to Lane Smith and Lane had read CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and said, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” So that instantly became more of an important book than it was. That was really a thrill. I’d go down to his studio in New York and there would be a whole wall of sketches. Not only were they true to my work, they were twice as good as I could’ve ever dreamed of. One, he understood that the book is an exaggeration, but two, he understood the flavor of the exaggeration. It was really a thrill for someone who is not a bit visual. It was a good lesson for me because he is the least neurotic person I’ve ever met. He goes into the studio every day habitually and gets it done. I’m sort of a Catholic, “I think it’s good but it probably isn’t.” The Eeyore School of Literature.
Are you currently working on more stories? I’ve got one that Lane Smith and I might do if I can get it to be good enough. It used to be a novella. It seems to be pretty funny. It started to be a kid’s story and then it extended to be about genocide. So unless there’s a big need for a child’s guide to genocide it won’t be that. I’m sure this summer I’ll be working. I don’t really make too many plans. I just sort of see what develops.
Kevin Larimer is the assistant editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Fiction writer George Saunders in Syracuse, New York, in the spring of 2000. (Credit: Jayne Wexler)
Old age sits in a chair,” Donald Hall writes in his new book, Essays After Eighty, “writing a little and diminishing.” And so it’s not a surprise on a late August afternoon to find the former U.S. poet laureate and author of more than fifty books, including twenty-two poetry collections, perched by a window of his New Hampshire home like a rare bird, resplendent with beard feathers, pecking at a manuscript. It’s a hot, still day, and the poet who once barnstormed the country stumping for poetry, speaking out against the Vietnam War, is a few weeks shy of eighty-six—his once-notable height a rumor. Hall responds to a knock slowly, rising deliberately and moving to the door with a walker, like a man who has learned the hard way just how unreliable feet can be as they approach ninety.
Photo by David Mendelsohn
He waves me through an immaculate New England kitchen into the living room, where it is easily ten degrees cooler. “It’s the wonder of a porch,” Hall says, and begins telling a story about his great-grandparents, who bought the house in 1865, and his grandparents, who ran its farm when he was a child. Those days have long passed, though, along with so much else. The chair Hall once burrowed into later burned when he dropped a cigarette. He sits down in its replacement. There’s no car outside either; driving is something he’s had to give up too. These forfeitures, and the fact that we are in a town without a store, lends the room a hermetic, plush silence. Andy Warhol prints surround us. There is a portrait with President Obama, who awarded Hall the 2010 National Medal of Arts. I wonder if I should have taken Hall’s response to my interview request at face value—that he was “old as hell,” that he would get tired.
But over the next few hours something remarkable happens. Hall turns time around. His face brightens, his voice deepens—he expands. Arms waving, eyes flashing with a performer’s glee, he unleashes energetic and startlingly pitch-perfect impressions—of his longtime friend Robert Bly, of the sonorous-voiced Geoffrey Hill. Tale by tale the room peoples with ghosts. Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Adrienne Rich parade through his stories and recede. A different era of poetry, when anthologies could lead to fistfights, is briefly resurrected, a time when one could live by one’s wits rather than on an adjunct’s crumbs.
In many ways we have Robert Graves to thank for these hours of narrative fireworks. Half a century ago, Graves visited the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where Hall was then teaching, and encouraged the young poet to make a go of freelance writing. All it took, Graves instructed, was a twenty-minute nap and a bit of mercenary energy. All that was required, Graves said, was for the poet to use everything he had. Almost immediately after Graves departed Michigan, Hall began his first prose book—String Too Short to Be Saved: Recollections of Summers on a New England Farm (David R. Godine, 1961), about the very house and farm where we now sit—setting up his eventual move to New Hampshire in 1975, with his second wife, the poet Jane Kenyon. This farm was to be their retirement.
Next year will mark the fortieth anniversary of that flight, and twenty years have passed since Kenyon died of leukemia at the terribly young age of forty-seven. A three-time survivor of cancer, Hall did not expect to be here either, certainly not alone. “I was given a 30 percent chance of living five years in 1992,” the poet says. “I think, like a lot of people, I always thought I would die young,” he adds. “Instead, Jane died.” Hall’s father, who worked in the family dairy business, died at fifty-two. His mother, however, lived to be ninety and met all of her great-grandchildren, something Hall hopes to do as well. (He has two children from his first marriage and five grandchildren.)
In the interim, he has followed Graves’s advice and used everything. So now he brings forth his view on the territory before him in Essays After Eighty, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in December, in which he ruminates playfully and hilariously on the subtractions of old age: driving, drinking, sex, smoking, and physical vanity. It is a shockingly funny book, sometimes an irreverent one. He thumbs his nose at death, the very thing that in many ways made him a poet. “When I was nine or ten, a whole bunch of aunts and uncles died right in a row,” Hall remembers. “I sat in bed, at ten years old, saying to myself, ‘Death has become a reality.’ That was my language at ten.” He laughs.
His first love as a writer was Poe. As Hall wrote in Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), he composed his first poem, “The End of It All,” in the writer’s shadow. “Have you ever thought / Of the nearness of death to you?” the poem goes. He wonders at this precocious portentousness now, and then grows serious again. “I used to dread it. I don’t think about it much now, at eighty-five.”
Then, as now, he looked forward. He was in a hurry to grow up and leave Hamden, Connecticut, befriending students at nearby Yale in his teens, leaving home for his final two years of high school at Phillips Exeter. Hall’s mother and father met at Bates College, but the elder Hall always felt he had missed out on a life of the mind. He was determined the same would not happen to his only child. Donald was going to go to Harvard, and he did, arriving in the late 1940s amid a swell of enrollments from the GI Bill, and joining one of the greatest concentrations of poetic talent ever to be seen in one place. John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, John Hollander, and Robert Bly were all students there at the time. Richard Wilbur was a fellow.
“It was that American century,” Hall says now, “which lasted from 1944 to 1963. There was a great sense of looseness and power, that anything could happen.” Entering Harvard Yard, Hall recalls, one would be hawked a copy of the Daily Worker, the 1920s Communist newspaper, by a Brahmin student; same-sex couples held hands. “Frank O’Hara threw the best parties,” Hall remembers. “I knew him then as a fiction writer, but he was already writing all those poems on the side.” What Hall didn’t learn on campus he gleaned by lurking around the famous Grolier Poetry Book Shop. “I met Bob Creeley, who was a chicken farmer in New Hampshire. I met him in Grolier’s—that’s where you met everybody. We talked, I thought he was terrific, he was smart, and so I looked up his poems and they were terrible. Later I loved his poems; it took a while.”
Hall’s most important friendship, however, was with Bly, who had entered college after service in the army, but had seen no action. He’d had rheumatic fever. “He was like a dean and never smiled and didn’t open his mouth much. He wore a three-piece suit,” Hall remembers. “He’d come from western Minnesota to Harvard. For a while he was looking like a Harvard man, but a year later it was lumberjack shirts. We started talking about Robert Lowell—this was two years after Lord Weary’s Castle—and Richard Wilbur’s The Beautiful Changes. We were courting each other and so on; I thought he was a bright guy and he obviously [thought I was], too.”
Their friendship has lasted sixty-five years. Every poem Hall has published has been shown to Bly, and, Hall says, probably vice versa. They began writing to each other as soon as Hall left for England after graduation, and now their correspondence stretches to more than twenty thousand letters, most of which are archived at the University of New Hampshire. “I just got a letter from him the other day,” Hall says, “but it was handwritten, not typed, just six lines.” Bly is now eighty-seven years old but remains, Hall says, his optimistic self. “He always says he looks forward to seeing me soon again.”
Every single member of the generation with whom Hall entered Harvard, except for Ashbery, has now died, along with so many of his friends and contemporaries—Louis Simpson, James Wright, Maxine Kumin, Allen Ginsberg—and Hall takes seriously the task of remembering them and their time. The manuscript he was working on when I interrupted him will be a kind of update to his classic 1978 book, Remembering Poets: Reminiscences and Opinions (Harper & Row), which spun a series of keen-eyed portraits of the great poets Hall had met, from Robert Frost, whom Hall first encountered at age sixteen as a young enrollee at Bread Loaf, to T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, whom Hall interviewed for the Paris Review when he was serving as its first poetry editor, from 1953 to 1961.
Many of the new portraits will involve people Hall befriended when he moved to England to study literature at Oxford University in the early 1950s: Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill, both of whom he published at the very beginning of their careers, along with Ted Hughes and others. Sixty years after his first arrival in England, Hall remembers the time well and fondly, in spite of its deprivations. “Rationing ended during my first year at Oxford. Clothing was utility. You could not get Stilton cheese. It was all for export. You got Danish Blue, which was horrible. I had my ration card to hand in at the college. But I loved it.”
Hall met Hill for the first time in 1952, when the English poet was just twenty. “The poetry society had its final cocktail party, which meant South African sherry,” Hall remembers. “I invited him to it because I had read his poem in [the Oxford University student magazine] the Isis. I remember meeting Geoffrey and talking to him in the corner, and he talked to me in this most astonishing way, as if he were tipping his cap. I thought he was making fun of me; I thought he was making fun of me for being working class. No way. His father was a constable in a village in Worcestershire. That was the end of my first year. In the second year I saw Geoffrey almost every day. We went to pubs, talked poetry.”
Hall returned to the United States in 1954 with a manuscript in his back pocket that eventually became Exiles and Marriages (Viking), his debut volume, a finalist for the 1956 National Book Award alongside books by William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, and his old teacher from Harvard, John Ciardi. W. H. Auden would win that year for The Shield of Achilles (Random House). Hall had received his acceptance letter from Viking on the day that he learned his father would die of cancer. He read reviews of the book to his father on his deathbed. “My cup…runneth over,” Hall remembers him saying.
Like so many poets of his time, from W. S. Merwin to Rich to Galway Kinnell, Hall began his career as a formalist, only to immediately feel the inadequacy of the forms in conveying, as he has written, the “crucial area of feeling.” He sorted out this anxiety by editing, with Louis Simpson and Robert Pack, an anthology called New Poets of England and America (Meridian Books, 1957), which formed a kind of footbridge between Britain and the United States. With an introduction by Robert Frost, it was as notable for whom it included at the beginnings of their careers—Gunn, Hill, Rich, and Merwin—as for whom it left out: Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, and others. It was not meant as an exclusionary gesture, Hall says now. “When Simpson and Pack and I made that anthology, we weren’t trying to champion one kind of poetry over another. We were just publishing what we thought were the best poems.” Poet Ron Padgett echoes the sense that perhaps the ensuing brouhaha over the anthology—and Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry: 1945–1960 (Grove Press, 1960)—was overrated. “Anthologies don’t create divisions or reinforce them,” he wrote in an e-mail, “except in the minds of people who want to think about such things instead of about specific poems.”
From the anthologies and into the university, Hall’s movement in the first four decades of his career charts the creation of the poetry establishment as we know it today. In the early 1960s he accepted a post at the University of Michigan, teaching poetry when creative writing programs were an unusual thing. The novelist and biographer Edmund White, who was a student of his in 1962, remembers Hall as “sort of round-faced, slightly chubby, like a very healthy chubby man. And he would sit on the edge of the desk, and in those days you could smoke in the classroom. He would sit and smoke a cigar. He introduced us to high-class gossip. He had just interviewed T. S. Eliot for the Paris Review, and Ezra Pound. So he was full of anecdotes about that. I suppose the kind of intensity and awe that he brought to his discussions of those people made us all feel that being a poet would be exciting.”
White was writing poetry at the time, and Hall eventually came to discourage him by pointing out that “Everything I was doing could have been done better in the nineteenth century,” White recalls. White saw Hall ten years ago at Princeton and reminded him of this fact, to which Hall said, “I think that turned out all right.” However, Hall did encourage Lawrence Joseph. “He was an absolutely fantastic teacher,” Joseph wrote in an e-mail. “I know of no one who knows about and loves poetry more than he does, and his generosity knew no bounds. It’s been a great, lifelong gift having had one of our finest poets and prose writers as a teacher.”
Today Hall remains glad that he taught, but relieved that he left when he did, after thirteen years. “I was beginning to play the tape. You know what I mean. When I began, kids would ask a question and I’d never thought of the subject, so when I answered I learned something. But at the end they weren’t asking anything I didn’t know about. It was very good to get out of teaching at that point.”
While he was at Michigan, Hall’s first marriage imploded, and he went through a difficult period of heavy drinking and self-pity. He eventually met Jane Kenyon, one of his students, and married her in 1972. They decided to spend a sabbatical year at Hall’s grandparents’ New Hampshire farm, where Hall had cleared brush and milked cows as a child, in 1975. Once there, Jane didn’t want to leave. “She said in October of that year she would chain herself in the root cellar before going back,” Hall remembers. “In December I resigned from the English department.”
Turning his back on tenure and health care at the age of forty-seven worried Hall so much he took out a subscription to Money magazine. Very quickly, however, the freedom from teaching relieved his anxiety. “The burst of energy, to be in this house, and to be writing all day!” Hall exclaims now. “I was working ten hours a day! I always managed to work on Christmas Day, just so I could say so. Jane, unless she was in the depths of depression, would be up in her study working.” It was in this house that he wrote most of his breakthrough book, Kicking the Leaves (Harper & Row, 1978), which finally smashed the shackles of the old formalism and breathed a Whitmanesque breadth into his lines. Here, too, he wrote his Caldecott Medal–winning children’s book, Ox-Cart Man (Viking, 1979), which began as a story told to him by a friendly uncle, who talked about a man who used to load up a cart with goods to take to the market in Portland, Maine, and then sold everything but the cart before returning home.
Hall has always been an active correspondent, but in New Hampshire his correspondence expanded exponentially. If you wrote to him, he responded. Novelist and poet Alice Mattison, who was Jane Kenyon’s best friend, remembers striking up a correspondence with her friend’s husband in 1986, the year Hall’s The Happy Man was published by Random House. “It did not get a lot of attention,” Mattison says now. “His editor left; it was orphaned. Not a lot of people knew about it. I loved the book, so I wrote him a letter, and he answered the letter in detail, and we were just launched.” In over twenty-five years, their correspondence hasn’t stopped. “There have been times when letters overlapped and we began two correspondences,” she says.
Mattison, like many of Kenyon’s friends, was devastated when Kenyon got sick and died. “There was nothing like going out for coffee and cake with Jane,” Mattison says. “I used to hike with her sometimes; she would carry along a backpack with everything you could think of, and we’d stop every ten minutes to have snacks and water, talk. She came at life with incredible intensity, and was kind.” Hall’s grieving for her was intense—and public. And it was followed, as he has written, by a period of manic promiscuity. Mattison has not considered any of it out of bounds. “I was grieving too; I was also quite beside myself. I thought he made sense. I didn’t think he was crazy. The losses—one’s own personal losses—are the only losses in the world when they happen to you. Nothing would have seemed excessive.”
Throughout our afternoon together Hall mentions Kenyon frequently, always in the present tense. Her grave is not far away, and if the pain of her loss is not so near as to draw tears, Hall seems to remember it in small ways and big—reflexively, fondly, without shame. She reappears throughout Essays After Eighty, and the memory of surviving her loss remains acute. “I wrote poems on her death or out of her death for about two hours a day,” he remembers. “I couldn’t keep on after that. And then I had another twenty-two hours of misery. But when I wrote about her, I was almost happy, and writing about her death and all that misery was something that kept me going.”
Now, another half dozen volumes of poetry later, there will be no more poems. “Poetry is sex,” Hall says, alighting with mischief and melancholy, when I ask if he really has given up writing new poems. “No testosterone,” he adds. Prose remains, however, even if it requires more work than ever. “I used to write a book review in three drafts,” he says, hardly bragging. Talking about one of the pieces in his new book, he idly mentions it went through eighty drafts. How is that possible? “I will write down a word, and I know I’m not going to use it eventually, it’s a blank word I will fill in later, and probably in eighty drafts I’ve had ten or eleven words in one place, and each time it’s replaced by something more particular, or that fits the tone better, or with a better sense of opposites, you know, putting together words that don’t belong together.”
This work, and personal correspondence, keeps him busy. As he writes in Essays After Eighty, each day begins in the same way: “In the morning, I turn on the coffee, glue in my teeth, take four pills, swallow Metamucil and wipe it off my beard, fasten a brace over my buckling knee…then read the newspaper and drink black coffee.” Kendel Currier, his aptly named assistant and cousin, comes by to drop off manuscripts for further revision, and he dictates several letters to her. “His messages are lengthy, friendly, chatty, modest, full of reminiscences, and sometimes funny,” Padgett says. “He’s what—eighty-five?—and I can barely keep up with him.” Mattison wonders if Hall is helped here by his disclosures. “He is totally honest, he has no sense of privacy, doesn’t have a lot of secrets, and so he just says whatever needs to be said.”
Mattison is on the receiving end of one of Hall’s latest obsessions: his poems. He may have stopped writing them, but he has begun revising poems—again—to create a new (and much smaller) selected volume, to be released in 2015. She is one of his self-designated “hard-assed friends” to whom he has sent revised versions of his poems. “I can’t help myself,” Hall pleads when I ask why he does it, this continuous revising. “You do fifty drafts, publish it in a magazine, see it in the magazine, then start rewriting it. You put it in a book, and then the book would come,” he continues, then switches into the first person, as if to own up to the mania. “I’d put it here,” he says, pointing to a shelf crowded with photos of Geoffrey Hill and other friends. “I’d hate to open it up, because I know the first thing I’d look at, I would want to change something.” And so he does.
John Freeman’s most recent book is Tales of Two Cities: The Best and Worst of Times in Today’s New York (OR Books, 2014), an anthology of poetry and prose about New York in the age of income gaps. He is writing a book about American poetry for Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Tracy K. Smith was twenty-two when her mother died in 1994. Nearly a decade later, she published The Body’s Question, her first book of poetry, in which she reflected on that loss. In “Joy,” which carried the epigraph “In Memoriam KMS 1936–1994,” Smith writes to her mother, longing to “pick up the phone / And catch your voice on the other end / Telling me how to bake a salmon / Or get the stains out of my white clothes.” Another decade later, she returns to that wrenching loss in the memoir Ordinary Light, published this month by Knopf. Smith’s first book of prose, it is a book of excavation and navigation: The poet revisits her mother’s passing in light of her father’s death in 2008, the year her daughter, Naomi, was born, and in light of the birth in 2013 of her twin sons, Atticus and Sterling.
Smith, who characterizes herself as having been “still an adolescent” when she lost her mother, believes “it took losing my father to help me come to better grips with that first loss and think about what I needed to believe my mother’s life and her death had imparted.” And now, with three children of her own, Smith wishes her mother were nearby to consult about practical parenting concerns, but of course that wish goes deeper: “I want to think actively about the continuum to which I belong—the one that includes my mother and her mother and sisters and their ancestors—and also my children. In my mother’s absence, I want to cement that connection, and words are the best glue I know.”
But why prose? She’s already written poems about her mother, and her Pulitzer Prize–winning Life on Mars is, in many respects, an elegy for her father. A memoir in verse offered an intriguing form, one that is familiar territory—Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah (1986) and, more recently, Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, which won the 2014 National Book Award, are exemplary—but Smith credits the influence and encouragement of the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, her mentor in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, for emboldening her to venture into prose. Smith had never heard of the mentorship program, which pairs older masters with younger artists under forty, until 2008, when she was nominated and flown to Munich along with two other finalists. Each had an interview with Enzensberger and then all four went to dinner, an experience that Smith insists turned into more camaraderie than competition.
She and Enzensberger have become great friends after what sounds like a jet-setting year of being flown to many of the places where he had speaking engagements: “We rendezvoused in Tenerife and Paris, and gave a reading together at the public library in London. We spent much of a summer in Munich, where he lives, working on the book and getting to know each other.” In addition to face-to-face meetings, the two e-mailed back and forth, with Smith sending him parts of her work for comment. The idea she began with was, by her own description, “a big, ambitious mess” about a whole range of experiences, but Enzensberger urged her to focus discrete memories toward “a narrative with characters that moved beyond the private realm to take in and consider the relevant public history.”
From the beginning, Smith says, she knew she wanted to write “genuine prose,” possibly because some of what she wanted to explore had already been unearthed in her poetry. “But I also wanted to embrace a fuller sense of myself as a writer,” she says. And she wanted to work within “sentences, clauses, paragraphs, the whole to-do,” since, as she writes in Ordinary Light, “Being able to tell a good story was currency in my family.” Prose gave her a certain amount of freedom to explain and elaborate. She realized how much she relies on metaphor in her poetry to evoke “a strange, powerful sameness between two otherwise disparate things.” In prose, she initially felt reluctant to elaborate on an image or interrogate statements she made, but soon discovered her expansive abilities. “I learned that prose can bear the weight of much more explication,” she says. “I can think and rethink, even second-guess or analyze something on the page in prose without going overboard. The sentence, in prose, can be as tireless as an ox.”
Enzensberger recognized, perhaps before Smith herself, that her story was about her family, with her mother as the central character. Smith opens Ordinary Light with her mother’s deathbed scene, the family’s vigil during the final hours of her mother’s life, remembered twenty years later:
Then we heard a sound that seemed to carve a tunnel between our world and some other. It was an otherworldly breath, a vivid presence that blew past us without stopping, leaving us, the living, clamped in place by the silence that followed. I would come back to the sound and the presence of that breath again and again, thinking how miraculous it was that she had ridden off on that last exhalation, her life instantly whisked away, carried over into a place none of us will ever understand until perhaps we are there ourselves.
From that solemn moment, Smith circles back to her childhood as the adored and indulged baby in a family of five children and, further back, to her parents’ coming of age in Alabama at the dawn of the civil rights movement. Dedicated to her daughter, Naomi, Ordinary Light began as a way for Smith to bring her parents back to life, “to reconstruct them,” as characters for Naomi. “At least that was my intention,” Smith says, “though in the execution it has become a book about me—about excavating my own experiences, anxieties, and evolving beliefs.”
When asked about the title, she hesitates, musing that “maybe it’s the feeling of wholeness and safety and ongoing-ness that we slip into sometimes in our lives.” But after Smith settled on Ordinary Light as her title, she added an opening quote from James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” one of her favorite short stories. As Baldwin’s narrator recalls the perfect family Sunday afternoons of his childhood when all’s right with the world, he cautions: “But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light.” In her new memoir, it is this moment that Smith explores for herself and her own children—the moment when we hear the tiger at the door.
***
In many ways, Smith seems to have lived a charmed life. Her father retired from the Air Force at forty-five because he did not want to uproot the family once again by accepting an overseas post. Trained as an electronics engineer, he found a job in Silicon Valley, eventually working on the Hubble Space Telescope. Her mother, while active in her church and community, did not work outside the home except for a short stint as an adult-education teacher. Tracy, eight years younger than her closest sibling, recalls a childhood when “all of my siblings doted on me, then left for college. So I had this abundance of attention for a time, and then a period of abundant solitude.” A participant in gifted programs throughout her public school education, she graduated from Harvard College in 1994 with a BA in English and American Literature and Afro-American Studies. After an extended return home following her mother’s death, Smith attended Columbia University, earning an MFA in 1997; she went on to a two-year stint as a Stegner fellow at Stanford University. She taught at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York, and at the University of Pittsburgh before joining the faculty at Princeton University in 2005, where she is currently a professor of creative writing.
Smith has published three collections of poetry—The Body’s Question (2003), Duende (2007), and Life on Mars (2011), all with Graywolf Press—each receiving critical acclaim and significant literary prizes. In the introduction to her first book, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, poet Kevin Young, the contest judge, heralded an exceptional new voice: “Smith is a maker, a wordsmith of the first order.” In 2012, Life on Mars won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Two years later Smith received an Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Among her other awards and fellowships are the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, an Artist’s Residence at the Fundación Valparaíso in Spain, and an Essence Literary Award.
Smith had a series of mentors even before her time with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, as she developed her identity as a poet. A reader from the outset (one of the chapters in Ordinary Light is titled “My Book House”), she experienced a sort of epiphanic moment in college when she read Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging.” She describes how everything in that poem—the male speaker, the Irish setting—should have been completely foreign to her, yet, she says, “I felt so much a part of the landscape and the family he was describing that I realized this was what I wanted to do with language.” Ultimately, she got to know Heaney as one of her teachers. At Columbia, Mark Doty became, and remains, an important influence and mentor to her, someone who she says is “so generous and present” to his students.
Yet the seemingly idyllic life of Smith’s nuclear family—“us as an invincible unit,” is how she describes them in Ordinary Light—can prepare, though never entirely protect, its members from the loss of certainty and security and, especially, the realities of racial politics. Smith is known for sharpening a political edge in her poetry, whether she’s writing about science fiction, pop culture, or current events, and this memoir is no exception. “In writing this book, I was forced to speak about and into many of the silences that ran through my life: silence about race, silence about the painful features of African American history, silence about my own choice to turn away from or reenvision the religious faith I was raised in,” she says.
One of the side effects of the memoir, Smith discovered, is that her adult perspective remained active even when she was writing about childhood: “So Tracy the citizen was allowed to engage with these private stories, just as Tracy the mother was allowed in at times,” she says. What she calls “shifting subjectivities” becomes especially clear when she writes about returning as a child to Alabama, where her parents grew up, to visit her large extended family (her mother was one of thirteen siblings):
I was ten years old, living with a vague knowledge that pain was part of my birthright, part of what was meant by a word like Home. It was not the kind of beautified self-inflicted angst that can transform a girl into a swan or a doll or an ice princess in the ballet…. No, what I felt, what I feared and discerned, even from my rather far remove, was the very particular pain that was tied up in blood, in race, in laws and war. The pain we hate most because we know it has been borne by the people we love. The slurs and slights I knew were part and parcel of my parents’ and grandparents’ and all my aunts’ and uncles’ lives in the South. The laws that had sought to make people like them—like us, like me—subordinate.
“Growing up black in America is inherently political,” Smith says, and her own experience proved that collision with that reality is not limited to the South. In Ordinary Light, she remembers the sting she felt when one of her high school teachers in Northern California offered faint praise as encouragement by pointing out, “You’re an African American woman. You should take advantage of the opportunities that will bring you.” Even as she received one acceptance after another to impressive schools, including Harvard, Smith writes that this man’s “voice whispered in the back of my mind whenever the word diversity was printed among the catalogue copy.”
Through writing Ordinary Light Smith has also come to some peaceful terms with the fierce religious faith that guided her mother’s life. Even as a child, she struggled to understand her mother’s devotion, especially regarding the concept of salvation, “when the world of my family was the only heaven I needed to believe in.” As an adolescent and young college student, Smith felt the growing distance from her mother in her sense of religion as something imposed, even oppressive. Writing Ordinary Light has helped her appreciate the key role of the African American church of her parents’ era in fostering a sense of family, community, and discipline “in a world full of disparities.” Even her father, with his systematic, orderly mind, Smith says, prayed with and read the Bible to his children. He was a man grounded in both the worlds of science and faith. In Ordinary Light, we meet the meticulously ordered world that her parents, especially her mother, created for their children, inspired, in many ways, by their religious beliefs: “a life that would tell us, and the world, if it cared to notice, that we bothered with ourselves, that we understood dignity, that we were worthy of everything that mattered.”
Smith believes that the process of writing the memoir helped her codify some of her own beliefs and anxieties about religion and to speak “honestly” about how she sees God—something she needed to do for herself but that has also helped her decide what elements of her religious inheritance she wants to offer her children. “I hope they will bring their own ideas and feelings to the conversation,” she says. “I don’t want to subject them to the hard-and-fast, top-down approach to belief that repelled me.” Would her mother, who grew more religious after her cancer diagnosis, approve? Smith’s not sure, though her siblings have responded positively to the book, and she believes that “much of what the writing has urged me to discover along the way would make perfect, familiar sense to my mother.”
***
Coming at a difficult time in her life, when her first marriage had ended, the offer of a position at Princeton was, Smith says, “a benediction that my life would go on, that everything would be okay.” So far, it’s been more than okay. She relishes teaching: “Let’s just be honest and say that we academics have the best, most humane work schedule in the world, and I get to spend my workdays talking to smart young people who are devoted to the very same thing I love.” Admitting that Princeton’s faculty roster of luminaries is “pretty daunting,” she characterizes her colleagues as “happy and fulfilled and therefore very generous” and feels part of the family: “I feel that I’ve grown up at Princeton. I came here with one book. I was a child. That’s a paradigm I’m comfortable with, being the youngest of five kids, and so the eminence of my colleagues felt right, familiar. I’ve always been in the position of admiring the people around me and striving to play catch-up.” Her colleagues apparently agree. Poet and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon, who invited Smith to do her first public reading of Ordinary Light last December at the Irish Arts Center in New York City, describes her as “a truly exceptional poet, with an eye for the arresting image that puts most of us to shame,” noting also her commitment to teaching: “My office is right beside hers, so I have a sense of her being a teacher who is at once diligent and delighting in her work.”
Last summer Smith became a full-fledged member of that community in a more rooted way when she and her family moved from Brooklyn, New York, where she had lived for fifteen years, to Princeton. She doesn’t really miss the city, and she’s a bit surprised. Apart from the practical reality that she and her husband, Raphael Allison, a literary scholar and poet, were driving to New Jersey to teach every day while their children were in Brooklyn, she says she was emotionally ready to leave: “I have so much more mental space and more patience, now that we’re living in a house and surrounded by so many trees. I used to pity New Yorkers who moved to the suburbs: I had the smug idea that they were ‘giving up,’ but now I think how much of an inherent struggle it assumes, and I chuckle.” Tina Chang, one of Smith’s best friends and poet laureate of Brooklyn, understands, though she says she went through her own “mourning” process when her friend moved. “As always, we write letters and allow our writing to lead us through our friendship,” Chang says. “What has always been interesting to me is that Tracy can occupy any physical space, and her mental space follows. Whether her body occupies India, Mexico, Brooklyn, or Princeton, her poetry fills up that geography, illuminates it, and makes it more alive.”
So, with most of the boxes unpacked, full-time teaching under way, and three young children in tow, Smith is already contemplating another prose work, and she’s on to more poetry projects. New poems are included in a folio that accompanies a Smithsonian exhibition of Civil War photos called Lines in Long Array: A Civil War Commemoration, Poems and Photographs, Past and Present and in an anthology about Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello that is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press. She is also working on a translation of poetry by contemporary Chinese author Yi Lei and has signed on as librettist for an opera about the legendary 1960s battle between the disparate visions for New York City of urban planner Robert Moses and journalist and activist Jane Jacobs. Although most would be content to accomplish in a lifetime what Smith has already achieved, she considers herself at the end of the first part of her career, and she’s thinking ahead. She’s always been drawn to questions of what we leave behind, what it means to survive, to endure. In her poem “Letter to a Photojournalist Going-In,” from Duende, the speaker wonders if all we do is “kid ourselves into thinking we might last.” But Smith seems more like the tiny creature in “Flores Woman,” who defies the inevitability of her own extinction: “Like a dark star. I want to last.”
Renée H.Shea is the coauthor of a series of textbooks for Advanced Placement English, most recently Conversations in American Literature: Language, Rhetoric, Culture (Bedford St. Martin’s, 2014). She has profiled many authors for Poets & Writers Magazine, including Julie Otsuka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edwidge Danticat, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden has named Tracy K. Smith the next poet laureate of the United States. Smith, who will take on the role in the fall, will succeed Juan Felipe Herrera, who has served as poet laureate since 2015. “It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching,” said Hayden in a press release. “Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and memory to life; calls on the power of literature as well as science, religion, and pop culture. With directness and deftness, she contends with the heavens or plumbs our inner depths—all to better understand what makes us human.”
Smith, forty-five, is a professor at Princeton University, where she directs the creative writing program. She has written three poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011), and a memoir, Ordinary Light (Knopf, 2015). “As someone who has been sustained by poems and poets, I understand the powerful and necessary role poetry can play in sustaining a rich inner life and fostering a mindful, empathic and resourceful culture,” said Smith in the announcement. “I am eager to share the good news of poetry with readers and future-readers across this marvelously diverse country.”
Smith is the first poet Hayden has appointed to the position, which was established in 1936 as the “Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress” and later renamed the “Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry” in 1985. Each poet laureate serves for at least one year and is responsible for raising national awareness and appreciation of poetry. Charles Wright, Natasha Trethewey, Philip Levine, W. S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, and Charles Simic have all served as the poet laureate in recent years.
Each poet approaches the role, which comes with a $35,000 stipend and minimal specific duties, with a different focus. Robert Pinsky, who served as poet laureate from 1997 to 2000, launched the Favorite Poem Project, through which more than eighteen thousand Americans shared their favorite poems. Several laureates have focused more on bringing poetry into the classroom: Billy Collins curated 180 poems for high school teachers to share with their students every day in the school year as part of the Poetry 180 project, while Kay Ryan strengthened poetry’s presence in community colleges through a national contest and videoconference. Other laureates have opted to raise awareness poetry by collaborating with the media, such as Natasha Trethewey with her Where Poetry Lives video series with PBS NewsHour, and Ted Kooser with his weekly newspaper column, American Life in Poetry.
Smith will have plenty of inspiration to draw on when she starts her term in the fall. She is the first poet laureate appointed under the Trump administration, a time that has highlighted the political divisions in the country. If there’s anyone who can remind the American public of the power of poetry to give people a more nuanced way of thinking and understanding one another, though, it’s Smith. “It makes sense to me that the world of commerce and the world of politics would be invested in convincing us that we can each be one thing only: loyal to one brand, one party, one candidate,” she said in an interview with Yale Literary Magazine in 2015. “Too often we forget that we can say no to such false thinking, that nobody is single-sided, two-dimensional…. Poems activate and affirm our sense of being individuals, of having feelings, of having been affected powerfully by the events and people that touch us.”
Nominated by President Obama this past February, Carla Hayden took office in September as the nation’s fourteenth Librarian of Congress. She is the first woman, and the first African American, to hold the position, which involves overseeing the library (a collection composed of more than 162 million books and other items) and its three thousand employees, as well as the nation’s law library, the office of the poet laureate, and the U.S. Copyright Office. Just a little over a month into her term, Dr. Hayden spoke about her plans for making the library more accessible, and a typical day in the life of the Librarian of Congress.
How are you hoping to make the library more accessible to the public? We’re working on a digital strategy to make the collections available to everyone online. The collections range from comic books to the papers and memorabilia of Rosa Parks to the manuscript collections of twenty-three presidents. We just launched our new home page. It’s more active—you can really get a sense of what the collections are. We’ve also been tweeting every day, one or two things I find in the collections. The response has already been pretty wonderful because I’m tying it to what’s going on in the world. During the World Series we tweeted the baseball-card collections we have. On Halloween we posted the collection of Harry Houdini’s memorabilia—his personal scrapbooks and his funeral program—because he died on Halloween, in 1926. So we’re using social media and technology to touch as many people as possible in interesting ways.
How else do you envision people engaging with the library? We’re really excited about the possibility of traveling exhibits that can go to local communities, including an eighteen-wheeler that can pull up in a rural area or on a reservation. We want people to be able to get on that truck and have an experience they might not have had if they can’t visit Washington, D.C. We’re hiring a new exhibit designer who has museum experience, and we’re hitting the road and drawing people in. And raising general awareness of the fact that it’s the nation’s library, it’s America’s library.
What do you see as the role of the poet laureate? Our current laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera, shows how to bring poetry into people’s lives in an active and everyday way. He’s demystifying it, and working with teachers, librarians, and people who work with young people to get them excited about poetry and to recognize it around them and in themselves. He wants poetry to be more spontaneous. As he has said, it shouldn’t be something you labor over—you should feel it and write it. He has this activity where he has the kids line up, like a soul-train line—the kids go down the line and write down words they’re hearing. They come out with a poem at the end.
What happens during a day in the life of the Librarian of Congress? One month in, it is a period of discovery and getting to know not only the collections and the resources, but also the people who care for those collections. That’s been one of the greatest joys and discoveries—the curators are so knowledgeable at the library. So I go from budget meetings to visiting a collection to having the head of the British Library visit to participating in the National Book Festival and things like the poetry slam at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival.
What are you reading now? Mysteries. I also just picked up The Gershwins and Me by Michael Feinstein; I got a chance to meet him, and got him to sign it, which was really cool. I have so many books stacked in my home—I have baskets of books waiting, just waiting. I try to think of them as pieces of candy, that they’re treats. If you walked into my apartment, you’d probably think, “This person likes to read,” and be able to find a few things to pick up.
Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Annie Dillard wasn’t sure she was going to like me, she says, not long after I arrive at her cabin near Cripple Creek, Virginia, in the dark vastness of a November evening. Night had dropped abruptly as a curtain, just as she had warned it would, and were it not for the nearly topographic directions she’d e-mailed beforehand, and a few tips by telephone from her husband, Bob—that is, Robert D. Richardson, biographer of Thoreau and Emerson and William James—I probably would have been skulking about in the dark, kicking into one of the old iron forges Confederates used to make cannonballs a hundred fifty years ago. “I wasn’t sure if you were one of those guys who doesn’t like taking directions from a woman,” she says.
Instead, thanks to Dillard’s directions and a good bit of luck, my friend Garnette Cadogan—who came along as my copilot—and I are sitting at her dining table, cupped in the mountain cove’s silence that fills the room like a held breath, we men sipping whiskey and trying to play it cool as one of the most sensitive, listening intelligences ever to breathe American air perches before us like a falcon, unsure whether we’re for the eating or for the protecting. Dillard inquires if we mind smoke, lights an American Spirit and inhales deeply. As Bob lays out a simple supper of sweet potatoes and salmon, she steps into the silence, quizzing us on some of the books we’ve read recently.
Not surprisingly—for a writer who casually dropped into one of her books, as an aside, “I have been reading comparative cosmology”—the path into this conversation gets steep very quickly. Her references fan out, leaping from one outcropping of literary news to the next until my bad planning or Garnette’s driving or what is being read in New York seem a long way down. What do we think of Karl Ove Knausgaard? Is it possible he might not be as interesting as he thinks he is? Have we heard of Belomor by Nicolas Rothwell, the Australian writer? Now that is a masterpiece. Pico Iyer’s book on Graham Greene? He’s very good at Ping-Pong, Dillard adds, improbably. What about women, Garnette asks, after Dillard lists a string of books by men. Are there any women writers she likes? “I don’t read as many women as I’m told I should be reading,” Dillard replies. “I don’t like doing what I am expected to do.”
We start talking about humor, and as if tuned by sonar to Dillard’s needs, Bob returns holding a book on stand-up comedy by Phil Berger.
You can almost hear the pops and fizzes of combustion as the flue clears and Dillard’s mind gulps down the oxygen it has been feeding on for years—books. It’s something to behold. Here is the sensibility that emerged from a white-glove Pittsburgh background because she read a novel about Rimbaud and wanted her mind to be on fire too. Here is the writer who pulled it off, chiseling out Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper’s Magazine Press, 1974), the Walden of our time, in nine months because she read a book on nature and felt she could do better. And thus Dillard wrote that great, elegant prayer to the seasons, largely at night, in the Hollins College library in Roanoke, Virginia, powered by chocolate milk, Vantage cigarettes, and Hasidic theology. Here is the woman who, upon winning a Pulitzer Prize for that book at age twenty-nine, turned her back on fame and stepped even deeper into the void—this time all the way out to Lummi Island, Washington, in Puget Sound, to write a sixty-six-page narrative on pain and eternity and God, Holy the Firm (Harper & Row, 1977).
In person, the effect of all this is like meeting a mountaineer whose work lay behind her but whose stories of having done it still get passed around as legend. If Holy the Firm pointed to the peak Dillard was trying to climb, and her next book, Living by Fiction (Harper & Row, 1982), was a nod to the people who had gone before her and failed, then the ones that followed, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (Harper & Row, 1982) and The Writing Life (HarperCollins, 1989), told the story of actually doing it. The false starts, the caffeine yo-yos, the encounters in the Amazon or the Arctic—or at church—that kept pushing the horizon further out; the tapping at supporting rock walls and the bolts she’d drilled into them to see if they’d hold; the occasional plummets. All the hard work of staying awake, and the descent. One of the reasons Dillard is so beloved is that she tried just as hard to make the case that we could all do it, live this way, that all you need to do is work with a demented singularity of purpose.
But most of all, through everything, she has never stopped reading. “I have written down every book I’ve read since 1964,” Dillard explains as I turn the Berger book over now, wondering in what obscure corner of her mind she will sock this information away. These diaries now get packed off to Yale’s Beinecke Library as fast as she fills them, just the name of the book and occasionally a checkmark, if it was really loved. I remark there’s something almost monkish about this notational labor, surely she must be the best-read person for hundreds, if not thousands of miles—an assertion she refutes before I can finish the comment by telling me about Bob’s physician, who had read one of her books in German and English, just for the comparison.
As for her, what is she after, inhaling those hundred or more books a year since age five? That library in the sky of her mind she has built. What is she seeking? “It’s what I’m for,” Dillard says simply, putting out her cigarette. “Somebody has to read all these books.”
For the past ten years, that—and painting, and walking—is what Annie Dillard has been up to. “I had a good forty years of writing,” she explains to me later, but she stopped writing after her novel The Maytrees was published by Harper in 2007. “There’s no shame to stopping. My last two books were as high as I could go,” she adds, referring to the novel and For the Time Being (Knopf, 1999), her book about belief in landscape and time. The smoke has barely cleared from these books, though, and it is only now, as her oeuvre has settled into the culture—or perhaps, most important, the loam of its writers—that its radical illumination has begun to reveal its long neon half-life.
It is through the doorways Dillard torched open that writers as diverse as Jonathan Lethem and Maggie Nelson have stepped, the latter of whom was one of Dillard’s students at Wesleyan and is now a friend. “Her books are wild,” Nelson writes to me. “They do what they please; they do what they need to do; they keep their eye trained on the things that matter most.” Geoff Dyer was also enabled by Dillard’s permission and contributes an introduction to The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New, which is being published this month by Ecco with selections from all of Dillard’s work, including the lamenting and powerful uncollected essay she published after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
I tell Dillard the story of a writer I know, Phil Klay—a future marine, no less—who didn’t learn of the attacks until days later because he was walking the Appalachian Trail. “I was on the beach in Cape Cod,” she replies, nodding. “I came out of this shack I was writing in and figured now might be a good time to disappear.” She then taped a twenty-dollar bill to the gate at the top of the dunes, on the hope a passing stranger with honor and time to spare would pick up some provisions, some batteries. Someone did. Meanwhile, rather than wait, Dillard went back to doing what she has dedicated an enormous portion of her life to doing: contemplating the infinite.
Even in the dark near Cripple Creek, bedtime approaching, it’s clear the apparatus for this life remains in place. Dillard lives in a cabin separate from her husband’s, and has a third where she paints. All of this will be shown to us in the morning. “Bob,” Dillard says, just before turning in, eyes over my shoulder, “those are headlights.” For a brief second Richardson’s face flashes with alarm, and then indeed two beams begin to snake up Dillard’s long gravel driveway. As Bob walks out onto the porch to greet the surprise guest, Dillard explains to us that this is most likely Gary LaVallee, a friend from the area who helped Dillard clear the land on which she built the two additional buildings.
Gary’s methods are as extreme as Dillard’s observational register is austere. He doesn’t work with a crew, just his car, which he repeatedly drove into tree trunks on the nearby hillside to fell the evergreens, then hacked up what was left with an ax. His arms are as muscled as those of a professional rugby player. His eyes twinkle benevolently. Somewhere in the hills nearby he is building an enormous, five-thousand-square-foot cabin, alone, by hand, with eighty-foot logs he raises by himself with a pulley system. Gary talks genially and then excitedly when he finds out Garnette is working on a book about Bob Marley: “I heard him open for Springsteen.” He offers to pick up milk or anything else for Bob and Annie, and when told they’re okay, gently leaves.
Until recently, Bob and Annie inform us as Gary departs, he was driving around the hills of Cripple Creek in an antique dump truck with no brakes and a pile of boulders in the back. Now Gary gets around mostly by pickup or car, and occasionally he parks in their drive to use their Wi-Fi and get on Facebook.
“I’m not sure I believe in God,” Dillard says, packing up her books and supplies for a night of reading, “but I believe God watches out for Gary LaVallee.”
Annie Dillard in Key West.
(Credit: Brian Smith)
In the morning the cabin is clobbered by light. Deer stand in groups chewing on dewy grass so far away, yet still visible, the eye needs a moment to adjust its lens before one can count the animals. Hunters cannot shoot on this land and the animals seem to know it. Dillard owns most of what the eye can see, but is loose with her ownership. Appalachian land is cheap. Some of it she has bequeathed already to her friend, the activist physician Paul Farmer. It’s quite a spread; her great-grandfather founded the company that became American Standard. Bob boils rich Cuban coffee strong enough to compete with the view. As he begins frying up eggs, he raises Annie on a walkie-talkie to let her know breakfast will be ready soon. By the time she arrives at the table, Bob has pointed out cardinals and owls in the brush.
As we eat, details of Dillard’s biography—the known things—slip out in asides and in peripheral conversation, echoing some of what Bob told us the night before over a nightcap. How they met because she wrote him a fan letter for Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (University of California Press, 1986); how he was already teaching her book to students when she wrote; how they met for lunch—both of them married; and how they didn’t look back when it was clear they were falling in love. He is Dillard’s third husband. “She is the smartest person I’ve ever met,” Bob tells us when she is not present, “and I’ve known some smart ones.”
“I got my name from my first husband,” she explains to me later in an e-mail. “I had no intention of getting married, let alone young. Richard Dillard, my poetry-writing professor, talked me into it. It was fine. That was a ten-year marriage, after which I headed west and met Gary Clevidence. We were together twelve years. With Bob it’s been twenty-eight years and counting.”
The novelist Lee Smith met Dillard as a freshman at Hollins, and has known her ever since. “The class was filled with talent,” she wrote to me, “but Annie’s was always extraordinary.
The group of us became a gang, a cohort, a karass—and we had fun, too. Inspired by Richard Dillard and his friend George Garrett, often on campus, an antic spirit prevailed. We wrote and put on plays, took over the newspaper, published our own literary magazine, Beanstalks, when the upperclassmen running the real literary magazine turned us down. We satirized everything and everybody. We loved to party, and we especially loved to dance.
This was true of Hollins girls in general. When several mostly-English majors formed a (really good, by the way) rock band named the Virginia Wolves, several of us became go-go dancers and performed with them at Hollins, UVA, and other literary festivals. We all had go-go names (I was Candy Love), white boots, glittery outfits, and cowboy hats—I don’t think Annie was an actual traveling go-go girl (no outfit) but she always loved to dance, and still does, to this day, as does my entire class, which always shows up for reunions (even the 45th, our last) with music like “Barbara Ann,” “Stop in the Name of Love,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “Help Me Rhonda,” “My Girl,” etc. (I know, I know…you’d have to see this to believe it. Husbands flee.)
Watching Annie and Bob over breakfast, editing each other’s stories and officiating over the presentation of flatware, coffee, second and third helpings, it’s clear that whatever came before, this is the show. It is the big love, and they move with the grace and irascibility and tender watchfulness of a couple well into what Richard Ford called in his third Bascombe novel “the permanent period.” Virginia is one of three places they call home, boxes shipped ahead every six weeks like provisions sent further up a slope, the two of them following by plane with backpacks, like students. Spring and summer they spend on Cape Cod; in fall they are here in Virginia, and in winter they wind up in Key West, where over the decades they’ve come to know some remarkable writers—Joy Williams, Ann Beattie (who nursed Dillard during a recent hip surgery, coming by with movie rentals and hot meals), and the biographer and essayist Phyllis Rose. “These are some powerful, remarkable women,” Bob says, his eyebrows adding commentary.
“She was also one of the most generous teachers I’ve ever seen,” Rose writes when I ask her later about her friend. Dillard went to Wesleyan in 1979 at Rose’s request, after deciding her years in the Pacific Northwest were over and she was looking for someplace new—a general theme in Dillard’s life. “She was generous with her time, her hospitality, her advice, and even sometimes her money. She usually had classes meet at her house, and outside of class time students were welcome too, for Ping-Pong or potluck.” A Ping-Pong table sits on the cabin’s porch behind us.
Maggie Nelson says the games were part of the whole instruction method. “Annie made a writing workshop an ‘experience,’ involving an Act One, sitting in a classroom; then an intermission of sorts, which consisted of taking a brief walk through the Connecticut woods to her house; then an Act Two, with refreshments and reading aloud in her living room. On the way to her house there was a hole in a chain-link fence, which she taught us to crawl through, likely in celebration of both trespassing and accessing liminal spaces. She encouraged us to get out into the world, which explains at least one afternoon I spent playing video games with the owner of a local baseball-card store, in order to write a profile of him.”
I realize, when Dillard beckons us from breakfast for our tour of her own liminal spaces, that her demeanor is not that of a famous person reduced to interior scale—or even of a genius judging the brain capacity of two citified visitors—but that of a teacher who never truly left the classroom. She taught for four years at Western Washington University in Bellingham, followed by twenty-two years at Wesleyan, after all. “Studying with her was a top-to-bottom education on being a working artist,” novelist Alexander Chee tells me.
“I knew I liked you guys when I realized you read fiction; you’re fiction people,” Dillard says as we get ready to check out her cabin and her study. It’s a short walk over to the buildings, maybe a hundred paces, but in that space the energy changes. It feels wilder, more animal; a skull and pieces of wood sit on a table. The cabin itself is plastered with photographs of her friends and family; her daughter, a poet and Iowa MFA graduate who lives in Arkansas and whose privacy Annie asks me to respect; Gary LaVallee; Bob. There’s a photograph on her refrigerator door of a place in Turkey. Serious travel—for health reasons—is something Annie and Bob have had to give up recently, but, she says, “If I went again I’d go into the Hula Valley, the wilderness. Just to see it.”
A small shelf of books sits next to her laptop—an old hardback copy of Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, among some beat-up paperbacks. Some volumes of her own books. Her books are no longer coming out at the alarming rate at which they appeared in the 1980s and early 1990s, but this is where she still does the work she doesn’t consider work, firing off letters of encouragement and interest to writers all over the world.
Pico Iyer struck up a fast and ongoing long-distance friendship with Dillard, stoked by her correspondence. “Her e-mails to me, long and incandescent, veered between fervent literary recommendations (of Hardy, Joyce Cary, Robert Stone) and exuberant reminiscences of her cavorting on the beach and love of the [Pittsburgh] Pirates and delight in miniature golf.” If he was expecting a symposium in person, he was mistaken. “When we met, all she wanted to do was play Ping-Pong, in her backyard, each returned slam threatening to send a stack of books on esoteric theology or meteorology skidding off the dining table a few feet away. At some point, I realized that I was meeting the closest I could get to my longtime hero, D. H. Lawrence: someone furiously alive, attentive to everything and impossible to anticipate.”
As it did for Lawrence, painting has become Dillard’s primary mode of expression in later years. (She turned seventy this past year.) “I switched to painting,” she tells me. “Not really my art, but it lets me make something new. I paint people, mostly faces, in oils, on black-gessoed paper.” She invites Garnette and me to investigate the studio, which is as compact and crammed with information as a human skull.
The austerity of the studios she describes in Teaching a Stone to Talk, The Writing Life, and Holy the Firm come zooming back like déjà-vu. Tacked-up pieces of paper describe radial-axis instructions for depth and perspective. Another piece of paper lists the radio stations on satellite radio. An orphaned pack of American Spirits gleams. The view out the window unfurls the cove and the mountain across.
Bob radios back that it’s getting on toward noon, so we leave the studio and cabin and pile into his Toyota and head off in search of Gary LaVallee’s Valhalla, as locals have dubbed his massive log cabin in progress. We bounce treacherously up a muddy boulder-strewn drive out onto a high bluff only to discover this isn’t Gary’s yard at all. Whoever lives here has managed to transport, intact, an unmuddied, vintage 1940s low-rider with exposed piston, up the mountain, where it sits near a farmhouse, as improbable and somewhat sinister as a puma in a library. We circle around and down and off the hill and backtrack into town, Annie and Bob pointing things out along the way: the Confederate-era forge, the remnant of the railroad the army built into the mountains to haul the iron out, the hotel that was opened but never really took off.
Our destination is the Cripple Creek Mall, an ironically named general store where you can buy anything from MoonPies and soda made with real Carolina sugar to extension cords, hats, toilet drain snaking equipment, packaged ham, dried kale, bullets, and several strains of honey. Dillard talks to Eddie Younce, the proprietor, asking after his and his family’s health while he comments on how good she looks, after which Eddie delivers a detailed forty-five-minute dissertation to Garnette on the best places to gather and make honey in Appalachia. “I could sit and listen to my father and his friends talk about honey for two, three hours,” he tells us.
At some point during Eddie’s monologue, Annie and Bob back silently out of the store. We find them later down the lane, standing, holding hands, as if this is all there is to do in the world. It’s past noon and the sky is showing it and already I know we’re going to have to hurry to get out of Cripple Creek before dark. We hustle back to the house and through a lunch of chicken and potatoes before they send us packing. The light chases out of the hollows and falls again quickly as the little roads turn to interstate and Garnette and I race so I can make a train back to New York City. The next day, after I’ve woken in New York and the deep, soft pocket of earth we visited feels a million miles away, Dillard writes to me, the first of many e-mails about the late E. L. Doctorow, Key West, the Pacific Northwest, landscape and family, and generosity, as if she hadn’t been demonstrating it all along.
“Working in a soup kitchen is great for a writer or any artist,” she writes in one. “There are many unproductive days when you might hate yourself otherwise. You are eating the food, using the water, breathing the air—and NOT HELPING. But if you feed the hungry, you can’t deny you’re doing something worth doing.” She may have stopped writing, but Annie Dillard continues to feed the minds of generations of writers. As she might say, that’s what she’s for.
John Freeman is the founder of Freeman’s, a biannual anthology of new writing.
At the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Rachel Kushner was onstage discussing her first novel, Telex From Cuba (Scribner, 2008), which was inspired by stories from her mother, who had grown up on the Caribbean island ninety miles to the south in the 1950s. In the audience that day was best-selling author Judy Blume, a longtime resident of Key West, Florida, and a member of the Literary Seminar board of directors. When she heard Kushner utter the phrase “the fifties,” an epiphany hit Blume with the force of a thunderclap. She had a story to tell, she realized—a big, important story rooted in the fifties but about which, curiously, she had spoken to no one for more than half a century.
Photographs by Kevin Nance
Over the course of fifty-eight days in late 1951 and early ’52, when the then Judy Sussman was in the eighth grade in her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, three airplanes crashed there, all in or near residential neighborhoods and all with significant loss of life. When the first plane plummeted from the sky, it was believed to be a freak accident in an era when commercial air travel was relatively new and glamorous. When another disaster followed, the adults in Elizabeth began to wonder whether something was awry at nearby Newark Airport, while the kids—including Judy and many of her classmates at Alexander Hamilton Junior High—spoke of sabotage, aliens from outer space, perhaps even zombies. And when the third plane went down, it seemed to many that the town was under siege, or the victim of some modern version of a biblical plague. The airport was shut down for nine months pending a safety review, which ultimately failed to explain the crashes.
And for decades afterward, the future writer, who had watched her town endure unthinkable horror—her own father, a dentist, was called in to help identify burned bodies from dental records—kept those dangerous memories in some vault in her mind, locked away.
“I must have really buried this someplace so deep inside of me that for more than forty years it never occurred to me, ever, that I had this story to tell,” Blume says in a tone of wonder at the elegant Key West home she shares with her husband, nonfiction writer George Cooper. “How is that possible? It was really deep, I guess. My husband says I never told him this story. My daughter, who became a commercial airline pilot, said, ‘Mother, I cannot believe you never told me this story.’”
Better late than never. In her latest novel, In the Unlikely Event, published by Knopf in June, Blume unpacks the events of those two months when the sky kept raining down catastrophe on Elizabeth. The product of months of research and years of writing and editing, In the Unlikely Event hews closely to the actual details of the crashes and then, with the imaginative sympathy that has been a hallmark of Blume’s novels for young people and adults over the decades, describes the toxic fallout that afflicted the lives of the townspeople. The result is a portrait of a community in crisis, in which grief, fear, and outrage are balanced, to some extent, by the characters’ capacity for heroism and a faith that, even in the shadow of tragic events, life goes on.
“Because that’s what you do when something terrible happens,” the author explains. “You keep going, doing what you do.”
Along the way, Blume weaves a tasseled shawl of historical detail of New Jersey in the early fifties—the era of Frank Sinatra, Martin and Lewis, Nat King Cole, cocktails at the Riviera, Jewish gangsters, Liz Taylor haircuts, Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare, and sci-fi movies dressing up A-bomb paranoia in Halloween costumes—in which the comfortingly mundane reality of the characters provides a vivid contrast to the disruption of the airplane crashes. The novel’s heroine, Miri Ammerman, and her uncle, the young reporter Henry Ammerman, who breathlessly covers the crashes in the purple prose of small-town newspapers of the day (the word inferno comes up with alarming frequency), struggle to maintain their sense of normal life in the midst of extremely abnormal circumstances.
“I have a fabulous memory for my early life, but I remember very few things about the crashes—which is why I had to do so much research,” Blume reflects, still puzzled, one typically perfect afternoon in Key West. “I do have a very vivid memory of where I was the afternoon of the first plane crash. I was in a car with my parents on a Sunday afternoon, and it came over the radio: ‘We interrupt this program to tell you…’ The crash was a block from our junior high school—one block!” She thinks back, shakes her head. “I knew that the crashes happened, but I don’t remember my feelings about them. Was I scared? Was I not? I don’t know.” Another thoughtful pause. “But all the mundane stuff, how people lived back then, was right at the tips of my fingers. I am, after all, a kid of the fifties.”
It was in that seemingly carefree yet oddly stifling decade that Judy Sussman began to develop as a storyteller—not a writer yet, as she kept her tales in her head—which served as a way to explore questions that often couldn’t be asked out loud, even of her parents, as beloved as they were. “Full of secrets,” Blume, still peeved, says of that decade. “Nobody told you anything.”
The 1970s were hardly better. When the author’s narratives began to be recorded and published in her late twenties and early thirties, she was immediately celebrated—and in some circles deplored and censored—for her frank fictions that touched on, among other things, the physical and sexual development of girls and young women. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (Bradbury Press, 1970), still perhaps Blume’s best-known novel for teenagers, was primarily about its sixth-grade heroine’s struggles in a mixed-faith family, but caught the disapproving eye of cultural conservatives who objected to its candor about brassieres, menstruation, sanitary napkins, and the like. In Deenie (Bradbury, 1973), Blume broached the topic of masturbation, and in Forever… (Bradbury, 1975), she graduated to teen sex. Her books’ directness on these and other “adult” themes made them simultaneously among the most banned and most popular books of their era. (To date, according to her publisher, Blume’s books in all genres have sold more than eighty-five million copies, making her one of the world’s most commercially successful writers.)
“I was very interested in writing about real life, about growing up,” Blume says. “Nobody talked about those things back then, so the books were a way to satisfy my curiosity.”
Kristen-Paige Madonia, author of the young-adult novel Fingerprints of You (Simon & Schuster, 2012), grew up feeling similarly about Blume’s novels for teens. “My sister and I took turns reading Margaret, which was incredibly important to us,” says Madonia, who got to know Blume personally years later. “Judy took subjects that were masked and muddy and made them okay and understandable. She was very clear about things that were happening to us as young girls—boobs and periods, all that—and you felt you were in dialogue with her. She was with us, speaking to us, which was far more comfortable than having that conversation with your mother or a teacher. Her voice is so accessible, so warm and down-to-earth, and I think that’s why she’s connected to so many readers over the years.”
In later years Blume turned to adult fiction, producing a pair of best-sellers, Wifey (1978) and Smart Women (1983), both published by Putnam. Although writing had always been a joy—“I felt as if I were reborn every morning,” she says—Blume suffered an existential funk in the early 1980s after reading Dad (Knopf, 1981) by William Wharton, whose prose struck her as so superior to her own that she felt paralyzed. “I was so caught up in the book that it totally took away all my confidence,” she says. “I just felt, ‘Why am I doing this? I can’t write this well. I will never write as well as this.’ And I couldn’t write at all for three months.”
Eventually, Blume got her groove back, in part by making peace with what she sees as her own limitations as a prose stylist. “It was never about putting the words on paper,” she says now, over a dinner of grilled snapper and Key lime pie at an open-air beachfront restaurant. “I’m not that kind of writer, as many people would tell you. It’s about getting the story out, the story and the characters. It’s not about the language. I do what I have to do to tell the story.”
With that pragmatic approach, Blume has written several new books in recent years, including a third blockbuster for adult readers, Summer Sisters (Delacorte, 1998). But her editor at Knopf, Carole Baron, says that Blume’s way of describing her writing process doesn’t do it justice. “She’s a great writer, whether she believes it or not,” says Baron, who also edited Summer Sisters. “Her dialogue in particular is perfection. And I do believe that’s one of the reasons—whether in adult books or books for the young—that Blume has always connected with her readers. She knows how to speak to them through the words of her characters. Her writing is deceptively simple, but it delivers a blow. To say that it’s not about the language, she’s selling herself hugely short.”
As for the popular (and vaguely dismissive) characterization of Blume by some as a “YA writer” who occasionally writes books for adults, the author shrugs. “Children’s books, YA books, adult books—it’s all the same process,” she says. “Lots of times, I don’t know which it is. I’m just telling a story.” With a knife, she slices through a thick layer of meringue on the pie, as if hacking away at the fluff of the argument. “I hate categories,” she says with a rare frown. “You have to be published by a certain department, and there are children’s book buyers, YA book buyers, adult book buyers. But that’s about the marketplace, not the book.”
Last year, as the deadline for the delivery of the manuscript of In the Unlikely Event began to loom, two issues—both related to language and storytelling, as it happened—presented themselves as potential roadblocks in the publication schedule.
One was that after having written the first of the novel’s four parts, Blume took two years off from the project to work on the film adaptation of her novel Tiger Eyes (Bradbury, 1981), directed by her son, Lawrence Blume. (As a published author, she chose to retain the surname of her first husband, John M. Blume, an attorney. They divorced in 1976, after which she married a physicist, Thomas Kitchens. They divorced after two years, and she married Cooper in 1987. “I’ve been with George for thirty-five happy years,” she says with a smile, “to make up for everything else.”) When Blume returned to work on In the Unlikely Event, she came to see Part One as too slowly paced and too crowded with characters. “I kept telling Carole, ‘I want to speed it up!’ You know you’re in danger of damaging your book when you want to take out big chunks of it and throw them away. And Carole would say, ‘Put that back!’”
As Baron recalls, “My feeling was that when we experienced the horror of the first airplane crash, we should know who the people were.” She got her way.
The second issue was that the newspaper articles about the airplane crashes, attributed in the book to Henry Ammerman, were largely based on actual accounts that originally appeared in two local newspapers, the Elizabeth Daily Journal and the Newark Evening News, both now defunct. It didn’t feel right to publish the real-life newspaper stories verbatim under Henry Ammerman’s fictional byline, but with her deadline approaching, Blume despaired of finding enough time to rewrite the stories.
At that point, Cooper entered the fray. “I’ll be your Henry Ammerman,” he said. Under Blume’s supervision in the role of a tough “city editor,” as he put it, Cooper got to work, recrafting the newspaper articles, retaining and sometimes putting his own spin on their hyperventilating prose style. “I took all the stories and added some flourishes of my own,” he says now. “I tried to tailor them to the fictional narrative, building on the story that was building in the fiction.”
“I would have said the exact opposite,” Blume says. “The news stories gave me the structure for my narrative.”
During the writing of Summer Sisters, Blume, who then lived in New York City, frequently talked about her love of summer, so Cooper said to her, “You could have more summer in your life if we went someplace in winter.” “Great,” she said, “let’s try to rent a place somewhere for a month.” They rented a place in Key West, fell in love with the island, and returned again and again, eventually making it their home in 1997.
“You live a regular life here,” the author says during a contented walk on the beach at sunset, “and you forget how lucky you are until someone reminds you.”
The self-styled Conch Republic has been good to Blume, and not only because of its nearly endless summer. For decades the island has nurtured a community of poets and writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, John Hersey, James Merrill, and Shel Silverstein, a context in which Blume fits like bougainvillea on a breezy Old Town veranda. And from her twin perches as a best-selling author and a board member of the Literary Seminar, she has been well positioned to mentor many young writers whose work she admires, providing advice and much-needed advocacy at some of the most crucial stages of their careers.
“I wanted to be a writer because of Judy Blume and her books,” says Carolyn Mackler, who first met the author while interviewing her in Key West for an article in Ms.Magazine. “She was my hero, and she was very welcoming and generous and kind to me on that visit. I was twenty-four, and during the interview, I mentioned that I wanted to write novels like hers. She said, ‘When you get a draft that you feel comfortable with, call me and we’ll talk.’ She really ended up guiding me through writing and publishing my first novel, Love and Other Four-Letter Words [Delacorte, 2000]. She read an advance copy and gave it a wonderful book-jacket quote. She’s been a mentor to me for seventeen years.”
Something similar happened to Madonia, whose short story, “Cheap Red Meat,” won the first Key West Literary Seminar Fiction Contest, in 2008—largely because, unbeknownst to the young writer, Blume had come across the story in the contest slush pile and fallen in love with it.
“I got down there and was waiting in line to have my book signed by Judy Blume,” Madonia recalls. “She saw my name tag and said, ‘It’s you!’ She loved what she saw in that short story, and really fostered my career from that moment. Half an hour later we were exchanging numbers and making plans to have breakfast. You know, you meet her and forget that you’re talking to someone unbelievably famous. And whenever I’ve hesitated in my career or had doubts, she’s always been the one I reach out to. She always says, ‘Go write another book. That’s who you are.’”
After decades of feeling reborn every morning at her writing desk, Blume herself has reached a point in her life when she’s not sure whether she’ll write another book. And if she does do so, she insists that it won’t be another lengthy, scrupulously researched tome like In the Unlikely Event, which arrives in bookstores at a muscular 416 pages.
“I’m seventy-seven years old and I don’t want to write another long novel,” she says. “I don’t want to spend three to five years doing that. I’m not saying that I’m never going to do anything, because I have a lot of creative energy.”
Baron isn’t buying it, at least not entirely. “I think the thing about this new book that’s different from her other novels is that there’s a basis of fact in dealing with these airplane crashes,” she says. “Judy is so thorough about her research, so adamant about getting every single fact right, that it added a layer to her editorial process that I don’t think she’s ever experienced before. So, sure, I believe she’s not going to undertake another book that has such a basis in nonfiction. But Judy is a storyteller, and storytellers are always telling stories. She said the same thing to me about this maybe being her last novel, and I said to her, ‘When you’re ready, I have an idea.’”
Who knows? Thanks in part to the comfortable climate and her long walks around Key West every morning with Cooper, the author appears significantly younger and more energetic than her actual age might suggest. But as always, Judy Blume is a pragmatist who understands her limitations. After many happy years in their gorgeously landscaped, high-modernist home in Old Town, Blume and Cooper are making plans to sell the house and downsize to a much smaller condo on the nearby beach. The heavy spadework of In the Unlikely Event—the digging up of what had been buried for so long—has been done. An assignment has been completed, a burden lifted.
Standing on a Key West pier taking in yet another gorgeous sunset, Blume heaves an unmistakable sigh of relief. “If this is my last book, then I’m really happy about it,” she says. “I feel I was meant to tell this story, and now I’ve told it.”
Kevin Nance is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. Follow him on Twitter, @KevinNance1.
Tracy K. Smith was twenty-two when her mother died in 1994. Nearly a decade later, she published The Body’s Question, her first book of poetry, in which she reflected on that loss. In “Joy,” which carried the epigraph “In Memoriam KMS 1936–1994,” Smith writes to her mother, longing to “pick up the phone / And catch your voice on the other end / Telling me how to bake a salmon / Or get the stains out of my white clothes.” Another decade later, she returns to that wrenching loss in the memoir Ordinary Light, published this month by Knopf. Smith’s first book of prose, it is a book of excavation and navigation: The poet revisits her mother’s passing in light of her father’s death in 2008, the year her daughter, Naomi, was born, and in light of the birth in 2013 of her twin sons, Atticus and Sterling.
Smith, who characterizes herself as having been “still an adolescent” when she lost her mother, believes “it took losing my father to help me come to better grips with that first loss and think about what I needed to believe my mother’s life and her death had imparted.” And now, with three children of her own, Smith wishes her mother were nearby to consult about practical parenting concerns, but of course that wish goes deeper: “I want to think actively about the continuum to which I belong—the one that includes my mother and her mother and sisters and their ancestors—and also my children. In my mother’s absence, I want to cement that connection, and words are the best glue I know.”
But why prose? She’s already written poems about her mother, and her Pulitzer Prize–winning Life on Mars is, in many respects, an elegy for her father. A memoir in verse offered an intriguing form, one that is familiar territory—Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah (1986) and, more recently, Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, which won the 2014 National Book Award, are exemplary—but Smith credits the influence and encouragement of the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, her mentor in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, for emboldening her to venture into prose. Smith had never heard of the mentorship program, which pairs older masters with younger artists under forty, until 2008, when she was nominated and flown to Munich along with two other finalists. Each had an interview with Enzensberger and then all four went to dinner, an experience that Smith insists turned into more camaraderie than competition.
She and Enzensberger have become great friends after what sounds like a jet-setting year of being flown to many of the places where he had speaking engagements: “We rendezvoused in Tenerife and Paris, and gave a reading together at the public library in London. We spent much of a summer in Munich, where he lives, working on the book and getting to know each other.” In addition to face-to-face meetings, the two e-mailed back and forth, with Smith sending him parts of her work for comment. The idea she began with was, by her own description, “a big, ambitious mess” about a whole range of experiences, but Enzensberger urged her to focus discrete memories toward “a narrative with characters that moved beyond the private realm to take in and consider the relevant public history.”
From the beginning, Smith says, she knew she wanted to write “genuine prose,” possibly because some of what she wanted to explore had already been unearthed in her poetry. “But I also wanted to embrace a fuller sense of myself as a writer,” she says. And she wanted to work within “sentences, clauses, paragraphs, the whole to-do,” since, as she writes in Ordinary Light, “Being able to tell a good story was currency in my family.” Prose gave her a certain amount of freedom to explain and elaborate. She realized how much she relies on metaphor in her poetry to evoke “a strange, powerful sameness between two otherwise disparate things.” In prose, she initially felt reluctant to elaborate on an image or interrogate statements she made, but soon discovered her expansive abilities. “I learned that prose can bear the weight of much more explication,” she says. “I can think and rethink, even second-guess or analyze something on the page in prose without going overboard. The sentence, in prose, can be as tireless as an ox.”
Enzensberger recognized, perhaps before Smith herself, that her story was about her family, with her mother as the central character. Smith opens Ordinary Light with her mother’s deathbed scene, the family’s vigil during the final hours of her mother’s life, remembered twenty years later:
Then we heard a sound that seemed to carve a tunnel between our world and some other. It was an otherworldly breath, a vivid presence that blew past us without stopping, leaving us, the living, clamped in place by the silence that followed. I would come back to the sound and the presence of that breath again and again, thinking how miraculous it was that she had ridden off on that last exhalation, her life instantly whisked away, carried over into a place none of us will ever understand until perhaps we are there ourselves.
From that solemn moment, Smith circles back to her childhood as the adored and indulged baby in a family of five children and, further back, to her parents’ coming of age in Alabama at the dawn of the civil rights movement. Dedicated to her daughter, Naomi, Ordinary Light began as a way for Smith to bring her parents back to life, “to reconstruct them,” as characters for Naomi. “At least that was my intention,” Smith says, “though in the execution it has become a book about me—about excavating my own experiences, anxieties, and evolving beliefs.”
When asked about the title, she hesitates, musing that “maybe it’s the feeling of wholeness and safety and ongoing-ness that we slip into sometimes in our lives.” But after Smith settled on Ordinary Light as her title, she added an opening quote from James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” one of her favorite short stories. As Baldwin’s narrator recalls the perfect family Sunday afternoons of his childhood when all’s right with the world, he cautions: “But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light.” In her new memoir, it is this moment that Smith explores for herself and her own children—the moment when we hear the tiger at the door.
***
In many ways, Smith seems to have lived a charmed life. Her father retired from the Air Force at forty-five because he did not want to uproot the family once again by accepting an overseas post. Trained as an electronics engineer, he found a job in Silicon Valley, eventually working on the Hubble Space Telescope. Her mother, while active in her church and community, did not work outside the home except for a short stint as an adult-education teacher. Tracy, eight years younger than her closest sibling, recalls a childhood when “all of my siblings doted on me, then left for college. So I had this abundance of attention for a time, and then a period of abundant solitude.” A participant in gifted programs throughout her public school education, she graduated from Harvard College in 1994 with a BA in English and American Literature and Afro-American Studies. After an extended return home following her mother’s death, Smith attended Columbia University, earning an MFA in 1997; she went on to a two-year stint as a Stegner fellow at Stanford University. She taught at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York, and at the University of Pittsburgh before joining the faculty at Princeton University in 2005, where she is currently a professor of creative writing.
Smith has published three collections of poetry—The Body’s Question (2003), Duende (2007), and Life on Mars (2011), all with Graywolf Press—each receiving critical acclaim and significant literary prizes. In the introduction to her first book, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, poet Kevin Young, the contest judge, heralded an exceptional new voice: “Smith is a maker, a wordsmith of the first order.” In 2012, Life on Mars won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Two years later Smith received an Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Among her other awards and fellowships are the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, an Artist’s Residence at the Fundación Valparaíso in Spain, and an Essence Literary Award.
Smith had a series of mentors even before her time with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, as she developed her identity as a poet. A reader from the outset (one of the chapters in Ordinary Light is titled “My Book House”), she experienced a sort of epiphanic moment in college when she read Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging.” She describes how everything in that poem—the male speaker, the Irish setting—should have been completely foreign to her, yet, she says, “I felt so much a part of the landscape and the family he was describing that I realized this was what I wanted to do with language.” Ultimately, she got to know Heaney as one of her teachers. At Columbia, Mark Doty became, and remains, an important influence and mentor to her, someone who she says is “so generous and present” to his students.
Yet the seemingly idyllic life of Smith’s nuclear family—“us as an invincible unit,” is how she describes them in Ordinary Light—can prepare, though never entirely protect, its members from the loss of certainty and security and, especially, the realities of racial politics. Smith is known for sharpening a political edge in her poetry, whether she’s writing about science fiction, pop culture, or current events, and this memoir is no exception. “In writing this book, I was forced to speak about and into many of the silences that ran through my life: silence about race, silence about the painful features of African American history, silence about my own choice to turn away from or reenvision the religious faith I was raised in,” she says.
One of the side effects of the memoir, Smith discovered, is that her adult perspective remained active even when she was writing about childhood: “So Tracy the citizen was allowed to engage with these private stories, just as Tracy the mother was allowed in at times,” she says. What she calls “shifting subjectivities” becomes especially clear when she writes about returning as a child to Alabama, where her parents grew up, to visit her large extended family (her mother was one of thirteen siblings):
I was ten years old, living with a vague knowledge that pain was part of my birthright, part of what was meant by a word like Home. It was not the kind of beautified self-inflicted angst that can transform a girl into a swan or a doll or an ice princess in the ballet…. No, what I felt, what I feared and discerned, even from my rather far remove, was the very particular pain that was tied up in blood, in race, in laws and war. The pain we hate most because we know it has been borne by the people we love. The slurs and slights I knew were part and parcel of my parents’ and grandparents’ and all my aunts’ and uncles’ lives in the South. The laws that had sought to make people like them—like us, like me—subordinate.
“Growing up black in America is inherently political,” Smith says, and her own experience proved that collision with that reality is not limited to the South. In Ordinary Light, she remembers the sting she felt when one of her high school teachers in Northern California offered faint praise as encouragement by pointing out, “You’re an African American woman. You should take advantage of the opportunities that will bring you.” Even as she received one acceptance after another to impressive schools, including Harvard, Smith writes that this man’s “voice whispered in the back of my mind whenever the word diversity was printed among the catalogue copy.”
Through writing Ordinary Light Smith has also come to some peaceful terms with the fierce religious faith that guided her mother’s life. Even as a child, she struggled to understand her mother’s devotion, especially regarding the concept of salvation, “when the world of my family was the only heaven I needed to believe in.” As an adolescent and young college student, Smith felt the growing distance from her mother in her sense of religion as something imposed, even oppressive. Writing Ordinary Light has helped her appreciate the key role of the African American church of her parents’ era in fostering a sense of family, community, and discipline “in a world full of disparities.” Even her father, with his systematic, orderly mind, Smith says, prayed with and read the Bible to his children. He was a man grounded in both the worlds of science and faith. In Ordinary Light, we meet the meticulously ordered world that her parents, especially her mother, created for their children, inspired, in many ways, by their religious beliefs: “a life that would tell us, and the world, if it cared to notice, that we bothered with ourselves, that we understood dignity, that we were worthy of everything that mattered.”
Smith believes that the process of writing the memoir helped her codify some of her own beliefs and anxieties about religion and to speak “honestly” about how she sees God—something she needed to do for herself but that has also helped her decide what elements of her religious inheritance she wants to offer her children. “I hope they will bring their own ideas and feelings to the conversation,” she says. “I don’t want to subject them to the hard-and-fast, top-down approach to belief that repelled me.” Would her mother, who grew more religious after her cancer diagnosis, approve? Smith’s not sure, though her siblings have responded positively to the book, and she believes that “much of what the writing has urged me to discover along the way would make perfect, familiar sense to my mother.”
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Coming at a difficult time in her life, when her first marriage had ended, the offer of a position at Princeton was, Smith says, “a benediction that my life would go on, that everything would be okay.” So far, it’s been more than okay. She relishes teaching: “Let’s just be honest and say that we academics have the best, most humane work schedule in the world, and I get to spend my workdays talking to smart young people who are devoted to the very same thing I love.” Admitting that Princeton’s faculty roster of luminaries is “pretty daunting,” she characterizes her colleagues as “happy and fulfilled and therefore very generous” and feels part of the family: “I feel that I’ve grown up at Princeton. I came here with one book. I was a child. That’s a paradigm I’m comfortable with, being the youngest of five kids, and so the eminence of my colleagues felt right, familiar. I’ve always been in the position of admiring the people around me and striving to play catch-up.” Her colleagues apparently agree. Poet and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon, who invited Smith to do her first public reading of Ordinary Light last December at the Irish Arts Center in New York City, describes her as “a truly exceptional poet, with an eye for the arresting image that puts most of us to shame,” noting also her commitment to teaching: “My office is right beside hers, so I have a sense of her being a teacher who is at once diligent and delighting in her work.”
Last summer Smith became a full-fledged member of that community in a more rooted way when she and her family moved from Brooklyn, New York, where she had lived for fifteen years, to Princeton. She doesn’t really miss the city, and she’s a bit surprised. Apart from the practical reality that she and her husband, Raphael Allison, a literary scholar and poet, were driving to New Jersey to teach every day while their children were in Brooklyn, she says she was emotionally ready to leave: “I have so much more mental space and more patience, now that we’re living in a house and surrounded by so many trees. I used to pity New Yorkers who moved to the suburbs: I had the smug idea that they were ‘giving up,’ but now I think how much of an inherent struggle it assumes, and I chuckle.” Tina Chang, one of Smith’s best friends and poet laureate of Brooklyn, understands, though she says she went through her own “mourning” process when her friend moved. “As always, we write letters and allow our writing to lead us through our friendship,” Chang says. “What has always been interesting to me is that Tracy can occupy any physical space, and her mental space follows. Whether her body occupies India, Mexico, Brooklyn, or Princeton, her poetry fills up that geography, illuminates it, and makes it more alive.”
So, with most of the boxes unpacked, full-time teaching under way, and three young children in tow, Smith is already contemplating another prose work, and she’s on to more poetry projects. New poems are included in a folio that accompanies a Smithsonian exhibition of Civil War photos called Lines in Long Array: A Civil War Commemoration, Poems and Photographs, Past and Present and in an anthology about Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello that is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press. She is also working on a translation of poetry by contemporary Chinese author Yi Lei and has signed on as librettist for an opera about the legendary 1960s battle between the disparate visions for New York City of urban planner Robert Moses and journalist and activist Jane Jacobs. Although most would be content to accomplish in a lifetime what Smith has already achieved, she considers herself at the end of the first part of her career, and she’s thinking ahead. She’s always been drawn to questions of what we leave behind, what it means to survive, to endure. In her poem “Letter to a Photojournalist Going-In,” from Duende, the speaker wonders if all we do is “kid ourselves into thinking we might last.” But Smith seems more like the tiny creature in “Flores Woman,” who defies the inevitability of her own extinction: “Like a dark star. I want to last.”
Renée H.Shea is the coauthor of a series of textbooks for Advanced Placement English, most recently Conversations in American Literature: Language, Rhetoric, Culture (Bedford St. Martin’s, 2014). She has profiled many authors for Poets & Writers Magazine, including Julie Otsuka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edwidge Danticat, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
In his essay “Meditations of a Sitter,” Louise Glück’s onetime teacher Stanley Kunitz penned a line of such searing veracity it seems a condemnation of entire quadrants of the human tribe: “The empty ones are those who do not suffer their selfhood.” To suffer a selfhood means to embody the soul of self, to know yourself en route to becoming yourself. Glück studied with Kunitz at Columbia University in the mid-sixties, and for nearly five decades she has been the American poet most willing to communicate the flammable vicissitudes of selfhood, to detect the temblors beneath the self’s consistent adaptations to the facts of living. The facts of any life are impotent and ineffectual until literature intercedes, until it takes hold of those facts and twists them into the light, casting a refraction that allows us to glimpse them anew.
Glück’s refractions reveal the counterpoint between fable and fact, between mythos and mundanity, between the paralysis of silence and the necessity of assertion. Her new book of poems, Faithful and Virtuous Night, published in September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, betrays an intimate surrealism, a congress of parable and dream—it’s more a stranger to normality than anything she’s ever written and ceaselessly thrilling in its tonal effects. Thoreau believed that “truth strikes us from behind, and in the dark,” but in Glück truth seems to strike always from below, from beneath the half-lit undulations of desire and dread.
Glück shares a birthday with Immanuel Kant and is the author of thirteen books of poems and a fierce collection of essays. She is the Rosenkranz Writer-in-Residence at Yale University, and for eight years served as judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, a service of which she remains immensely proud. As a poet she’s so decorated that if she were a general you’d have to squint into the glare of her: the Bollingen Prize for Vita Nova (Ecco, 1999), the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris (Ecco, 1992), the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles (Ecco, 1985), the Wallace Stevens Award, the Lannan Literary Award—on and on. We spoke for several hours one July afternoon at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her immaculate apartment is adorned with artwork by the poet Mark Strand, and out back breathes her beloved garden, transplanted here from Vermont thirteen years ago.
What’s remarkable about the architecture of Faithful and Virtuous Night is that one can land anywhere inside this book and find a poem that is both self-fulfilled, unconcerned with what precedes or follows, and also a component in the larger whole that informs the unfurling narrative. You’ve erected similar scaffolding in the past—in all of your books since the 2007 collection, Ararat, the poems coalesce and function as a single movement—but in its intricacy and dynamism the architecture of this new book seems to me entirely different. It seems to me different too. There were years when I thought I’d never resolve the issue of this structure, never be able to give a shape to these poems, which usually means there’s a piece missing, as was true here. I had first thought that the long monologue—which is now divided, interspersed with these surreal, fragmented narratives and prose poems—I had thought that the long poem would be a whole that moved roughly chronologically from section to section, but it seemed lifeless when I put it together that way. I tried rearranging the sequence but that wasn’t the answer. At some point, fiddling with order, I put the title poem next to “An Adventure.” That juxtaposition suggested the shape this book wanted. But that shape didn’t really find itself until the end—when I wrote prose poems, which I’d never done before—they were written in a tide of exhilaration at the thought that maybe I could finally finish this book.
Those prose poems are ligatures that allow the whole to cohere with such startling poise. They recall the way Hemingway’s vignettes function in his story collections, the narrative tendons connecting muscle to bone. I cannot conceive of this book without them. I can’t either. It was my friend Kathryn Davis who prompted me toward them. She’d read every poem as it was written, and during one of my many stages of hopelessness she said, “I think you should be reading Kafka’s short fiction.” I’d read Kafka’s short fiction before but thought I’d try again, and although I didn’t love it this time around, that was useful to me, because I didn’t feel daunted by him. I read the short-shorts—“The Wish to Be a Red Indian” and others—in bed, where all my mental activity now occurs. My bed usually looks like Proust’s bed; my whole life is lived there. I got my notebook—which I keep around usually for other purposes, because if I let myself think that I might write something I become so paralyzed with longing and despair I can hardly bear it—and I wrote a little prose poem. It was, I thought, terrible, not even worth typing. But I was having dinner with Frank Bidart that night—I’m willing to be humiliated in the presence of my friends—and so before I threw away the prose poem, I thought I’d see what Frank thought. And Frank, as you know, can be a tough critic. He told me I mustn’t throw it out, and after that I wrote a little squadron of them. The book was then very easy to put together. I’d been trying for two years, but I didn’t have that last mode. It didn’t need another large thing, another tone, but it needed another mode, another facet to the prism, another method by which to examine these same materials.
What a bolt of insight for Kathryn Davis to recommend that you go back to Kafka. The frequent playfulness and stabs of comedy in your work are too little noticed, and the same is true for Kafka: Many readers don’t notice how funny he can be. I’m delighted by your dedication to great prose writers. The poetic persona in “A Summer Garden” is reading Mann’s Death in Venice. Do you see a novelist’s sense of narrative as different from your own? Yes, I think prose writers work with narrative very differently. When I’m trying to put a poem or a book together, I feel like a tracker in the forest following a scent, tracking only step to step. It’s not as though I have plot elements grafted onto the walls elaborating themselves. Of course, I have no idea what I’m tracking, only the conviction that I’ll know it when I see it.
The novelist enjoys a clear advantage over the poet who employs narrative: The novelist has characters who need something, and they have either to achieve their needs or not achieve them. The plot is the pursuit of those needs. The poet doesn’t necessarily have that. I like your image of stalking through the wood, unsure where it ends. The novelist had better see to the end of that wood. Not that there can’t be surprises in what is found there, but better at least to glimpse it in advance. I depend on that ignorance, on not seeing to the end of the book, because if I have an idea, initially it’s likely to be the wrong idea. I mean my ideas come later, after the fact. Ideas are not a part of how I conceive of a book.
Reading you, and especially these new poems, I’m often in mind of a quip by the English critic Desmond MacCarthy: “It is the business of literature to turn facts into ideas.” It’s pretty, but I don’t know if that’s what I think. I don’t like that trinity of words: business, facts, ideas. I don’t think literature exactly has a business, and the minute someone says to me what the business is, I immediately want to prove that that’s too limited a notion. For instance, I want to substitute tone for fact. If you can get right the tone, it will be dense with ideas; you don’t initially know fully what they are, but you want by the end to know fully what they are or you won’t have made an exciting work. For me it’s tone—the way the mind moves as it performs its acts of meditation. That’s what you’re following. It guides you but it also mystifies you because you can’t turn it into conscious principles or say precisely what its attributes are. The minute you turn tone into conscious principle it goes dead. It has to remain mysterious to you. You have to be surprised by what it is capable of unveiling. As you work on a book of poems you begin to understand what is at issue, but I don’t have any attitude toward the facts. And if MacCarthy’s terms are correct, I would prefer the notion that a poet turns ideas and abstractions into facts, rather than the other way around.
All through your work, certainly from Ararat on, much of that rhythm happens by the repetition of simple terms. In this new book the same terms appear again and again: silence, winter, mother, father, night. The overlap of personae works the same way, when the poet’s perspective repeatedly intrudes upon and augments the perspective of the larger narrative. Yes, there’s that overlap, as you say, because over and over there are the same materials, though to my ear they’re passing through a very different lens. More interesting to me than the repeating words (which seem fairly ordinary) are the repeated images. When I put the book together, I was astounded by the internal tapestries. I hadn’t consciously built in those recurrences or echoing gestures and vignettes, but there they were—there was the train, and the train again, and the train was a character. Averno I thought of the same way, actually. It’s not a shaped narrative arc the way some of the others are, but it’s a meditation on a set of conditions and dilemmas, so all the poems revolve around certain repeating images, such as the burned field, which is right out of Henning Mankell. Averno was my homage to Mankell. I tried to use something from one of his books in every one of the poems. Nobody noticed it, which is good, but it was there for me.
In her book Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, your friend Wendy Lesser speaks about your abiding love of murder mysteries and of Mankell in particular. Mankell makes me happy. Murder mysteries are a way of releasing the unconscious mind to speculative, shapeless, dreamy seeking by absorbing the conscious mind in a compelling quest. One of the advantages of aging is that you know you’ve read a book, or believe you’ve read a book, but you don’t really remember it. You remember only that you love it. And somewhere near the middle you realize that you actually do remember all of the details of the plot. It’s immensely pleasing to read something you have confidence in, something that won’t disappoint you. The only disappointment might be that you’re missing the thrill of uncovering the killer, but it’s a small disappointment if you love the world that’s being constructed.
In that regard Wilkie Collins is unmatched—one can read his best novels every few years with identical pleasure. He’s better than Dickens in the construction of a thrilling, alternate world that dictates its own stipulations. Do you remember The Woman in White? And The Moonstone, yes. I read those books first in my adolescence and a few times since then. I bought The Moonstone again when I felt I had exhausted all available murder fiction, and I had trouble getting into it. Maybe I’ll try again. I certainly need something to give competition to the iPad. I seem to be in an iPad period. I don’t read on it. I just watch things that move.
Your legion of devotees might be startled to hear about your iPad. I was startled myself. I never had the Internet until last year. This is all brand-new for me. The iPad was given to me at a reading. I told the person: “Don’t give this to me. I will never turn it on.” But the person shoved it at me, so then I had it, and I felt sort of responsible to it. So I sat with it for about six months. And then one day I began poking at it. I knew people poked at it. But nothing happened, and I thought: “Well, I just don’t have the gift.” Then I realized I needed some sort of hookup. That took another six months. By this time my niece was in a television show, Orange Is the New Black, which was available only through streaming. It turned out, on this little device, you just press something and there they all were. And it became my bed buddy. It’s really the freakiest thing because I became an addict very fast. At the moment it has usurped the place of reading in my life. Part of me thinks this is dangerous; my own vocation will dissolve. Another part of me thinks this is exploratory, that if my vocation is so fragile or precarious it isn’t a vocation. After all, there were two years when I read nothing but garden catalogues, and that turned out okay—it became a book.
You mean The Wild Iris. I’m certain you’re the only American poet who’s won the Pulitzer after two years of reading nothing but garden catalogues. Well, there’s something my brain needs in such indulging, so I indulge it. This iPad addiction seems to me endlessly curious. Something may come of it. I’m an opportunist—I always hope I’ll get material out of any activity. I never know where writing is going to come from; it isn’t as though I have something in mind and this iPad is the source. This is just dream time, the way detective fiction is. It stills a certain kind of anxiety and at the same time engages the mind. As the mind is engaged and anxiety suppressed, some imaginative work in some recessed portion of the being is getting done. Not to say that every moment is contributing to a book or a poem, but you can’t know in advance what will. Don’t prejudge your stimuli. Just trust where your attention goes.
You once said to me on the phone, “Follow your enthusiasms.” I believe that. I used to be approached in classes by women who felt they shouldn’t have children because children were too distracting, or would eat up the vital energies from which art comes. But you have to live your life if you’re going to do original work. Your work will come out of an authentic life, and if you suppress all of your most passionate impulses in the service of an art that has not yet declared itself, you’re making a terrible mistake. When I was young I led the life I thought writers were supposed to lead, in which you repudiate the world, ostentatiously consecrating all of your energies to the task of making art. I just sat in Provincetown at a desk and it was ghastly—the more I sat there not writing the more I thought that I just hadn’t given up the world enough. After two years of that, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be a writer. So I took a teaching job in Vermont, though I had spent my life till that point thinking that real poets don’t teach. But I took this job, and the minute I started teaching—the minute I had obligations in the world—I started to write again.
The catalyst for Faithful and Virtuous Night was your agon with not writing, with wordlessness. Yes, I was moaning to my sister about losing words, about the deterioration of my vocabulary. I said to her, “How am I ever going to write when I’m losing words?” and she said, “You’ll write about losing words.” And I thought, “Wow, good, I’ll write about having no speech, about deterioration.” Then it was the most exciting thing, a wealth of material—everything I had been bemoaning was actually unexplored territory. That was the catalyst, as you say, for the whole endeavor—a liberating, a permission. The idea of writing about not writing seemed promising because I knew a lot about those not-writing states, but they were not something I’d ever written about. One of the experiences of putting together my large book of extant poems was an astonishment because my sense of my life, now fairly long, is that almost all the time I’m not writing. I was flabbergasted putting together that large book, nearly seven hundred pages. And I thought: “How can that have happened? When did I write all that?” My feeling concerning my life is that always I was not working. Well, apparently I was.
The gestures of silence lurk everywhere in Faithful and Virtuous Night, as they do in your work as a whole, but is your conception of your own silence a kind of illusion? A seven-hundred-page collection of poems is not silence. No, it’s real, not an illusion at all. I go through two, three years writing nothing. Zero. Not a sentence. Not bad poems I discard, not notes toward poems. Nothing. And you don’t know in those periods that the silence will end, that you will ever recover speech. It’s pretty much hell, and the fact that it’s always ended before doesn’t mean that any current silence isn’t the terminal silence beyond which you will not move, though you will live many years in your incapacity. Each time it feels that way. When I’m not writing, all the old work becomes a reprimand: Look what you could do once, you pathetic slug.
I recall those lines from “Approach of the Horizon”: “It is the gift of expression / that has so often failed me. / Failed me, tormented me, virtually all my life.” Do you know Iris Murdoch?
She’s superb. I love the humor in Under the Net. I’d been rereading all of Murdoch before I began this new book. I often reread a writer—read one book and then want to enter that world more fully. In any case, I can hear Murdoch in those lines you just recited. I love The Black Prince, A Severed Head, The Green Knight, even strange things such as A Word Child. There’s something in her archness, not a tone I’d normally think to emulate, but there’s something delicious in it. Her people might be murdering and raping but really they’re thinking about what goodness is in the world, bizarre juxtapositions of that kind. Something of her got transferred to this new book. It’s a matter of tone. The interest of the poems is in the tone in which large pronouncements are made, not necessarily the pronouncements themselves. The pronouncements are constantly being scrutinized by the tone, which is taking objection to some of the things being said. It’s not a book in which large bannerlike truths are being unfolded.
There’s a disciplined seething detectable just beneath the surface of these new poems, a fervency of feeling we know is there just as we know distant planets are there—not because we can see them but because they cause a bending, a wobble in the light of their stars. In these new poems, the tone, the pitch is bent to reveal the seething beneath it. The book has such a patient turbulence. That’s nice, a patient turbulence. It’s there as a background but the whole book seems to me to be about moving beyond that turbulence, or that seething, as you say, and into this uncommon zone where you’re on a horse flying through the air. How did that happen? What’s distinctive in this book is that sense of dreaminess. But there are two parallel issues regarding silence: one is the silence that is the faltering of a gift or a need for expression, and there’s also silence that is the result of deterioration, a faltering in the being that is a product of age. Although I’ve been writing about death my whole life, deterioration or the weakening of the powers is brand-new to me. The subject is gloomy, I suppose, but new material is exhilarating. The quality I feel most intensely in this book is a quality of euphoria, a floating, a whimsy. It’s an undertaking of a large adventure, which is the adventure of decline. It seems an oxymoron, I know, and will come to seem a gloomy fate, but now—as long as it produces something of which you’re proud, you’re grateful for it, delighted by it.
You said once that the life of a poet oscillates between ecstasy and agony, and what mitigates those extremes is the necessary daily business of living. Yes. Friends, conversation, gardens. Daily life. It’s what we have. I believe in the world. I trust it to provide me.
William Giraldi is the author of the novels Hold the Dark, published in September 2014 by Norton, and Busy Monsters (Norton, 2011). He is the fiction editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University.
Tracy K. Smith was twenty-two when her mother died in 1994. Nearly a decade later, she published The Body’s Question, her first book of poetry, in which she reflected on that loss. In “Joy,” which carried the epigraph “In Memoriam KMS 1936–1994,” Smith writes to her mother, longing to “pick up the phone / And catch your voice on the other end / Telling me how to bake a salmon / Or get the stains out of my white clothes.” Another decade later, she returns to that wrenching loss in the memoir Ordinary Light, published this month by Knopf. Smith’s first book of prose, it is a book of excavation and navigation: The poet revisits her mother’s passing in light of her father’s death in 2008, the year her daughter, Naomi, was born, and in light of the birth in 2013 of her twin sons, Atticus and Sterling.
Smith, who characterizes herself as having been “still an adolescent” when she lost her mother, believes “it took losing my father to help me come to better grips with that first loss and think about what I needed to believe my mother’s life and her death had imparted.” And now, with three children of her own, Smith wishes her mother were nearby to consult about practical parenting concerns, but of course that wish goes deeper: “I want to think actively about the continuum to which I belong—the one that includes my mother and her mother and sisters and their ancestors—and also my children. In my mother’s absence, I want to cement that connection, and words are the best glue I know.”
But why prose? She’s already written poems about her mother, and her Pulitzer Prize–winning Life on Mars is, in many respects, an elegy for her father. A memoir in verse offered an intriguing form, one that is familiar territory—Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah (1986) and, more recently, Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, which won the 2014 National Book Award, are exemplary—but Smith credits the influence and encouragement of the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, her mentor in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, for emboldening her to venture into prose. Smith had never heard of the mentorship program, which pairs older masters with younger artists under forty, until 2008, when she was nominated and flown to Munich along with two other finalists. Each had an interview with Enzensberger and then all four went to dinner, an experience that Smith insists turned into more camaraderie than competition.
She and Enzensberger have become great friends after what sounds like a jet-setting year of being flown to many of the places where he had speaking engagements: “We rendezvoused in Tenerife and Paris, and gave a reading together at the public library in London. We spent much of a summer in Munich, where he lives, working on the book and getting to know each other.” In addition to face-to-face meetings, the two e-mailed back and forth, with Smith sending him parts of her work for comment. The idea she began with was, by her own description, “a big, ambitious mess” about a whole range of experiences, but Enzensberger urged her to focus discrete memories toward “a narrative with characters that moved beyond the private realm to take in and consider the relevant public history.”
From the beginning, Smith says, she knew she wanted to write “genuine prose,” possibly because some of what she wanted to explore had already been unearthed in her poetry. “But I also wanted to embrace a fuller sense of myself as a writer,” she says. And she wanted to work within “sentences, clauses, paragraphs, the whole to-do,” since, as she writes in Ordinary Light, “Being able to tell a good story was currency in my family.” Prose gave her a certain amount of freedom to explain and elaborate. She realized how much she relies on metaphor in her poetry to evoke “a strange, powerful sameness between two otherwise disparate things.” In prose, she initially felt reluctant to elaborate on an image or interrogate statements she made, but soon discovered her expansive abilities. “I learned that prose can bear the weight of much more explication,” she says. “I can think and rethink, even second-guess or analyze something on the page in prose without going overboard. The sentence, in prose, can be as tireless as an ox.”
Enzensberger recognized, perhaps before Smith herself, that her story was about her family, with her mother as the central character. Smith opens Ordinary Light with her mother’s deathbed scene, the family’s vigil during the final hours of her mother’s life, remembered twenty years later:
Then we heard a sound that seemed to carve a tunnel between our world and some other. It was an otherworldly breath, a vivid presence that blew past us without stopping, leaving us, the living, clamped in place by the silence that followed. I would come back to the sound and the presence of that breath again and again, thinking how miraculous it was that she had ridden off on that last exhalation, her life instantly whisked away, carried over into a place none of us will ever understand until perhaps we are there ourselves.
From that solemn moment, Smith circles back to her childhood as the adored and indulged baby in a family of five children and, further back, to her parents’ coming of age in Alabama at the dawn of the civil rights movement. Dedicated to her daughter, Naomi, Ordinary Light began as a way for Smith to bring her parents back to life, “to reconstruct them,” as characters for Naomi. “At least that was my intention,” Smith says, “though in the execution it has become a book about me—about excavating my own experiences, anxieties, and evolving beliefs.”
When asked about the title, she hesitates, musing that “maybe it’s the feeling of wholeness and safety and ongoing-ness that we slip into sometimes in our lives.” But after Smith settled on Ordinary Light as her title, she added an opening quote from James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” one of her favorite short stories. As Baldwin’s narrator recalls the perfect family Sunday afternoons of his childhood when all’s right with the world, he cautions: “But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light.” In her new memoir, it is this moment that Smith explores for herself and her own children—the moment when we hear the tiger at the door.
***
In many ways, Smith seems to have lived a charmed life. Her father retired from the Air Force at forty-five because he did not want to uproot the family once again by accepting an overseas post. Trained as an electronics engineer, he found a job in Silicon Valley, eventually working on the Hubble Space Telescope. Her mother, while active in her church and community, did not work outside the home except for a short stint as an adult-education teacher. Tracy, eight years younger than her closest sibling, recalls a childhood when “all of my siblings doted on me, then left for college. So I had this abundance of attention for a time, and then a period of abundant solitude.” A participant in gifted programs throughout her public school education, she graduated from Harvard College in 1994 with a BA in English and American Literature and Afro-American Studies. After an extended return home following her mother’s death, Smith attended Columbia University, earning an MFA in 1997; she went on to a two-year stint as a Stegner fellow at Stanford University. She taught at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York, and at the University of Pittsburgh before joining the faculty at Princeton University in 2005, where she is currently a professor of creative writing.
Smith has published three collections of poetry—The Body’s Question (2003), Duende (2007), and Life on Mars (2011), all with Graywolf Press—each receiving critical acclaim and significant literary prizes. In the introduction to her first book, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, poet Kevin Young, the contest judge, heralded an exceptional new voice: “Smith is a maker, a wordsmith of the first order.” In 2012, Life on Mars won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Two years later Smith received an Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Among her other awards and fellowships are the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, an Artist’s Residence at the Fundación Valparaíso in Spain, and an Essence Literary Award.
Smith had a series of mentors even before her time with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, as she developed her identity as a poet. A reader from the outset (one of the chapters in Ordinary Light is titled “My Book House”), she experienced a sort of epiphanic moment in college when she read Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging.” She describes how everything in that poem—the male speaker, the Irish setting—should have been completely foreign to her, yet, she says, “I felt so much a part of the landscape and the family he was describing that I realized this was what I wanted to do with language.” Ultimately, she got to know Heaney as one of her teachers. At Columbia, Mark Doty became, and remains, an important influence and mentor to her, someone who she says is “so generous and present” to his students.
Yet the seemingly idyllic life of Smith’s nuclear family—“us as an invincible unit,” is how she describes them in Ordinary Light—can prepare, though never entirely protect, its members from the loss of certainty and security and, especially, the realities of racial politics. Smith is known for sharpening a political edge in her poetry, whether she’s writing about science fiction, pop culture, or current events, and this memoir is no exception. “In writing this book, I was forced to speak about and into many of the silences that ran through my life: silence about race, silence about the painful features of African American history, silence about my own choice to turn away from or reenvision the religious faith I was raised in,” she says.
One of the side effects of the memoir, Smith discovered, is that her adult perspective remained active even when she was writing about childhood: “So Tracy the citizen was allowed to engage with these private stories, just as Tracy the mother was allowed in at times,” she says. What she calls “shifting subjectivities” becomes especially clear when she writes about returning as a child to Alabama, where her parents grew up, to visit her large extended family (her mother was one of thirteen siblings):
I was ten years old, living with a vague knowledge that pain was part of my birthright, part of what was meant by a word like Home. It was not the kind of beautified self-inflicted angst that can transform a girl into a swan or a doll or an ice princess in the ballet…. No, what I felt, what I feared and discerned, even from my rather far remove, was the very particular pain that was tied up in blood, in race, in laws and war. The pain we hate most because we know it has been borne by the people we love. The slurs and slights I knew were part and parcel of my parents’ and grandparents’ and all my aunts’ and uncles’ lives in the South. The laws that had sought to make people like them—like us, like me—subordinate.
“Growing up black in America is inherently political,” Smith says, and her own experience proved that collision with that reality is not limited to the South. In Ordinary Light, she remembers the sting she felt when one of her high school teachers in Northern California offered faint praise as encouragement by pointing out, “You’re an African American woman. You should take advantage of the opportunities that will bring you.” Even as she received one acceptance after another to impressive schools, including Harvard, Smith writes that this man’s “voice whispered in the back of my mind whenever the word diversity was printed among the catalogue copy.”
Through writing Ordinary Light Smith has also come to some peaceful terms with the fierce religious faith that guided her mother’s life. Even as a child, she struggled to understand her mother’s devotion, especially regarding the concept of salvation, “when the world of my family was the only heaven I needed to believe in.” As an adolescent and young college student, Smith felt the growing distance from her mother in her sense of religion as something imposed, even oppressive. Writing Ordinary Light has helped her appreciate the key role of the African American church of her parents’ era in fostering a sense of family, community, and discipline “in a world full of disparities.” Even her father, with his systematic, orderly mind, Smith says, prayed with and read the Bible to his children. He was a man grounded in both the worlds of science and faith. In Ordinary Light, we meet the meticulously ordered world that her parents, especially her mother, created for their children, inspired, in many ways, by their religious beliefs: “a life that would tell us, and the world, if it cared to notice, that we bothered with ourselves, that we understood dignity, that we were worthy of everything that mattered.”
Smith believes that the process of writing the memoir helped her codify some of her own beliefs and anxieties about religion and to speak “honestly” about how she sees God—something she needed to do for herself but that has also helped her decide what elements of her religious inheritance she wants to offer her children. “I hope they will bring their own ideas and feelings to the conversation,” she says. “I don’t want to subject them to the hard-and-fast, top-down approach to belief that repelled me.” Would her mother, who grew more religious after her cancer diagnosis, approve? Smith’s not sure, though her siblings have responded positively to the book, and she believes that “much of what the writing has urged me to discover along the way would make perfect, familiar sense to my mother.”
***
Coming at a difficult time in her life, when her first marriage had ended, the offer of a position at Princeton was, Smith says, “a benediction that my life would go on, that everything would be okay.” So far, it’s been more than okay. She relishes teaching: “Let’s just be honest and say that we academics have the best, most humane work schedule in the world, and I get to spend my workdays talking to smart young people who are devoted to the very same thing I love.” Admitting that Princeton’s faculty roster of luminaries is “pretty daunting,” she characterizes her colleagues as “happy and fulfilled and therefore very generous” and feels part of the family: “I feel that I’ve grown up at Princeton. I came here with one book. I was a child. That’s a paradigm I’m comfortable with, being the youngest of five kids, and so the eminence of my colleagues felt right, familiar. I’ve always been in the position of admiring the people around me and striving to play catch-up.” Her colleagues apparently agree. Poet and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon, who invited Smith to do her first public reading of Ordinary Light last December at the Irish Arts Center in New York City, describes her as “a truly exceptional poet, with an eye for the arresting image that puts most of us to shame,” noting also her commitment to teaching: “My office is right beside hers, so I have a sense of her being a teacher who is at once diligent and delighting in her work.”
Last summer Smith became a full-fledged member of that community in a more rooted way when she and her family moved from Brooklyn, New York, where she had lived for fifteen years, to Princeton. She doesn’t really miss the city, and she’s a bit surprised. Apart from the practical reality that she and her husband, Raphael Allison, a literary scholar and poet, were driving to New Jersey to teach every day while their children were in Brooklyn, she says she was emotionally ready to leave: “I have so much more mental space and more patience, now that we’re living in a house and surrounded by so many trees. I used to pity New Yorkers who moved to the suburbs: I had the smug idea that they were ‘giving up,’ but now I think how much of an inherent struggle it assumes, and I chuckle.” Tina Chang, one of Smith’s best friends and poet laureate of Brooklyn, understands, though she says she went through her own “mourning” process when her friend moved. “As always, we write letters and allow our writing to lead us through our friendship,” Chang says. “What has always been interesting to me is that Tracy can occupy any physical space, and her mental space follows. Whether her body occupies India, Mexico, Brooklyn, or Princeton, her poetry fills up that geography, illuminates it, and makes it more alive.”
So, with most of the boxes unpacked, full-time teaching under way, and three young children in tow, Smith is already contemplating another prose work, and she’s on to more poetry projects. New poems are included in a folio that accompanies a Smithsonian exhibition of Civil War photos called Lines in Long Array: A Civil War Commemoration, Poems and Photographs, Past and Present and in an anthology about Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello that is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press. She is also working on a translation of poetry by contemporary Chinese author Yi Lei and has signed on as librettist for an opera about the legendary 1960s battle between the disparate visions for New York City of urban planner Robert Moses and journalist and activist Jane Jacobs. Although most would be content to accomplish in a lifetime what Smith has already achieved, she considers herself at the end of the first part of her career, and she’s thinking ahead. She’s always been drawn to questions of what we leave behind, what it means to survive, to endure. In her poem “Letter to a Photojournalist Going-In,” from Duende, the speaker wonders if all we do is “kid ourselves into thinking we might last.” But Smith seems more like the tiny creature in “Flores Woman,” who defies the inevitability of her own extinction: “Like a dark star. I want to last.”
Renée H.Shea is the coauthor of a series of textbooks for Advanced Placement English, most recently Conversations in American Literature: Language, Rhetoric, Culture (Bedford St. Martin’s, 2014). She has profiled many authors for Poets & Writers Magazine, including Julie Otsuka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edwidge Danticat, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received the call on her thirty-first birthday, last September. She was taking a bath at her sister’s house in Lagos, preparing to go to dinner, when her brother told her she had an important call from Chicago. Wrapped in a towel, she grabbed the phone through a barely open door and heard from the MacArthur Foundation that she’d received one of its five-hundred-thousand-dollar fellowships, known as genius grants. With that call, Adichie joined a diverse group of scientists, artists, humanists, teachers, and entrepreneurs, as well as writers—company that still amazes her: “Half the time I think I shouldn’t be there. When I was in Lagos, anytime something happened, like the TV wouldn’t work, my friends would ask, ‘Well, what does the genius think?’”
Photos by Doug Barber.
Although she was shocked at receiving a MacArthur, Adichie should have been used to hearing such news. Her debut novel, Purple Hibiscus (Algonquin Books, 2003), a coming-of-age story about a Nigerian girl who must endure the cruelty of her evangelist father, was long-listed for the Booker Prize, short-listed for the Orange Prize, and won both the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Three years later, her follow-up novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf, 2006), a story set in Nigeria during the Biafran War in the late 1960s, won the Orange Broadband Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. More than that, its publication marked her arrival as one of Nigeria’s most important voices.
Recently she returned to the United States, where she lives part time, to promote her June release, The Thing Around Your Neck (Knopf), a collection of short stories, some originally published in magazines such as the New Yorker, Granta, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and Zoetrope. She had been on tour in England, Scandinavia, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada for the book’s overseas publication earlier this year. Accustomed to being in transit, she divides her time between Nigeria and Maryland, where she lives with her partner, a family physician, who practices there. “I’m so emotionally invested in Nigeria as a country and society, which I feel has so much potential it hasn’t lived up to, that sometimes it gets exhausting. There’s so much to do, and I want to be involved. But then I find I need to leave to have some space. I quite like America, my home of convenience, where I don’t have to deal with things like electricity shortages.”
Adichie grew up piecing together “tiny stories,” as she describes them, about the Biafran War, which raged from 1967 to 1970 and ended almost a decade before she was born. The conflict resulted from ethnic tensions among the Christian Igbo population in eastern Nigeria, which seceded to form the Republic of Biafra, and the largely Muslim Fulani-Hausa in the north. At least a million people, mostly Igbo, died from massacres and starvation during this brutally violent period, though some estimates put that figure as high as three million. Both of Adichie’s Igbo grandfathers died as refugees who had to flee their hometowns. Her grandmothers survived and, as she says, “somehow kept children and relatives together. My parents, part of the postindependent [Nigeria gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1960], hopeful middle class when the war started, lost most of their property”—in addition to family and friends.
Her parents rebuilt their lives and raised a family of six children. Her father was professor of statistics at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he was appointed vice-chancellor in 1982, and her mother became the first woman registrar. The fifth of the six children, Adichie grew up speaking both Igbo and English. She recalls the thrill of reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the groundbreaking novel about the clash between Igbo tradition and British colonialism, when she was ten years old. “I realized that people who looked like me could live in books.” But her parents encouraged her to pursue a practical career, so writing had to wait.
She began studying to be a doctor in Nigeria but, urged by her sister Ijeoma, came to the United States on a scholarship to Drexel University, in Philadelphia. She transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University, in Willimantic, where she lived with her sister and her sister’s husband, and took care of their son while they started a medical practice. During that time, she wrote Purple Hibiscus, reworking it during her tenure as an MFA student at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore.
Set around the mid-1990s, when Nigeria was under the control of a junta led by General Sani Abacha, Purple Hibiscus is narrated by fifteen-year-old Kambili Achike, whose father, Eugene, is both a courageous champion of human rights and a religious zealot who terrorizes his wife and children. Kambili, though desperate for her father’s approval, cannot measure up to his impossibly high standards: “I needed him to hug me close and say that to whom much is given, much is also expected. I needed him to smile at me, in that way that lit up his face, that warmed something inside me. But I had come second. I was stained by failure.” After a military coup, Eugene sends his children to stay with their Aunty Ifeoma, an outspoken university teacher, who introduces Kambili to “a different kind of freedom,” including traditional religious beliefs and more humane and expansive relationships. Even in this debut novel, Adichie depicts characters whose personal lives are played out on the larger canvas of a society beset by corruption and violence.
Moving back in time, Half of a Yellow Sun takes its title from the flag of the doomed Republic of Biafra and tells the story of the civil war from three interconnected perspectives. The main characters move back and forth between the earlier more peaceful part of the decade and the bloodshed that ended the 1960s. Adichie, who spent four years researching and writing the novel, tells the political saga through the lives of well-to-do twin sisters Kainene and Olanna, the urbane, intellectual Odenigbo, and the white British journalist Richard as their comfortable lives unravel into a struggle for survival. At the center of the novel is Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old who comes from a poor rural village to work as Odenigbo’s houseboy and is eventually conscripted into the Biafran army. Reviewers praised the novel for its epic scope. Rob Nixon, writing in the New York Times, lauded Adichie for positioning “her characters at crossroads where public and private allegiances threaten to collide.”
Adichie says she always knew she would write a novel about Biafra. At sixteen, she wrote what she describes as “an awfully melodramatic play” called “For Love of Biafra,” and earlier in her career, she wrote short stories that dealt with the war. In “Ghosts,” one of the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck, she revisits this time period with a meeting between a seventy-one-year-old mathematics professor retired from the University of Nigeria and a colleague, who was assumed to have died as a result of the 1967 violence but had, in fact, been living in exile. Adichie says this story is “in some ways a love letter to my father,” and the tenderness of that tribute comes through in the professor’s reflections on his past:
We hardly talked about the war. When we did, it was with an implacable vagueness, as if what mattered were not that we had crouched in muddy bunkers during air raids after which we buried corpses with bits of pink on their charred skin, not that we had eaten cassava peels and watched our children’s bellies swell from malnutrition, but that we had survived. It was a tacit agreement among all of us, the survivors of Biafra.
That period has remained a powerful political issue in Nigerian society, but Adichie felt that the conversation about it retained “an implacable vagueness” and was largely uninformed, particularly for her generation. Half of a Yellow Sun, which was well received in Nigeria, changed that to some extent. “I often get feedback from friends, from friends of friends, about how the novel has become a starting point for talking about the war. My Nigerian publisher told me about a family in Lagos—the man is a newspaper publisher. Their daughter read the book and asked her mother about the war. To the husband’s surprise, she began to tell their daughter stories of what her family went through—yet he had never heard these in all the years of their marriage.”
In a 2007 article, Vanity Fair featured Adichie—along with Doreen Baingana, Uzodinma Iweala, and Helon Habila—as part of the new generation of young writers leading an African literary renaissance. The piece described Adichie at a literary festival in Nairobi, looking “radiant, fresh off her rock-star-style tour of Nigeria and splashy New Yorker debut…part[ing] the crowds, Cleopatra-style” and hailed her as the heir to her countryman Achebe, whose Things Fall Apart celebrated in 2008 fifty years of continued popularity and influence.
Adichie says Achebe is her hero and guiding literary spirit. While there is remarkable variety in the work being written by the Nigerian authors in her generation, Adichie believes they all share a certain freedom that was forged by Achebe’s writing. “When Achebe published Things Fall Apart in 1958, it was a novelty,” she says. “There may have been five other African writers writing in English. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for people like him, feeling they had this burden of responsibility, of being a pioneer, thinking, ‘the dignity of my people rests on my shoulders.’ I don’t have that burden. I’m not representing anyone—and I owe this freedom to that generation.”
Most of the twelve stories in The Thing Around Your Neck focus on contemporary situations, whether the setting is Nigeria or the United States. They explore the subjects of immigration and exile, shifting values, and cross-cultural communication among families and communities. In “A Private Experience,” two Nigerian women—one a privileged Igbo student who is visiting her aunt while on holiday from her medical studies, the other a poor Hausa trader from the marketplace—find themselves hiding together during a violent riot provoked by a man who drives over a copy of the Koran that had dropped on the street. Based on an actual incident in northern Nigeria, the story explores the brief intersection of these women’s lives during a dramatic moment that links them regardless of their tribal, religious, economic, and educational differences. “Sometimes we like to say we’re really not different,” says Adichie. “I think we are, yet what interests me is that we still can make connections.”
“Cell One,” one of two stories previously published in the New Yorker, depicts a well-off family whose son, Nnamabia, is a member of a gang whose members “had mastered the swagger of American rap videos [and] were undergoing secret and strange initiations that sometimes left one or two of them dead.” Nnamabia, the spoiled brother of the female narrator, is arrested after a gang shooting. Although it is unclear whether he is guilty, in prison he experiences the corruption of the prison guards and finally confronts his own selfish and irresponsible behavior when he speaks up for another inmate who is being brutalized by them. At the story’s end, he seems deeply changed, but can he sustain this transformation? “I believe in redemption,” Adichie says quietly, then adds, “I’m very suspicious of excessive happiness. The way the world works is a struggle, but I believe in hope—in slender hope.”
In many of these stories, hope seems in scarce supply when it comes to marriage. The wife in “Imitation” tries to take in, via long distance, the news that her husband’s mistress has moved into their home in Lagos while she waits for him in their affluent home on Cherrywood Lane in suburban Pennsylvania. In “The Arrangers of Marriage,” a new wife resists changing her name from Chinaza to the Americanized Agatha, only one demand made by her husband in an effort to speed up her assimilation—and acceptability. Patriarchal attitudes seem to dominate, regardless of the Nigerian or American setting, as an expression of the imbalance of power, particularly when sex is part of the bargain.
“I’ve always had a problem with marriage as an institution,” says Adichie. “The way it’s set up, women automatically make more compromises than men.” Despite the inspiring model of her parents’ forty-five-year marriage, she gets angry at the way our society makes a fetish of marriage. “Undue privilege is awarded to married people in so many ways. I’m all for partnerships as long as they’re mutually beneficial, satisfying, respectful. I’m part of a couple and I’m quite happy, but I also think I could be quite happy if I were not part of a couple. In Nigeria, sometimes women act as if their lives are complete because they’re married—and it’s just not true. Maybe it’s the feminist in me, but I see the lies that people tell themselves about marriage and think how unwilling we are to admit that it’s not always a perfect thing.”
Although the subject is different, a similar fierceness fuels the story “Jumping Monkey Hill,” whose title refers to the name of a resort, where an aging British intellectual and his wife lead an African writers workshop. As two narratives unfold—the third-person narrative that describes the workshop and the story that the Nigerian participant Ujunwa Ogundu is writing—so does a brutal indictment of postcolonial paternalism. In the final scene, the pompous academic dismisses Ogundu’s story, saying, “This is agenda writing, it isn’t a story of real people.”
“That is the one story propelled by rage,” Adichie says. “I’m not interested in writing about myself, but that one is personally based on what really did happen to me. I felt diminished.” In fact, she had to change her thinly disguised portrayal of the workshop leader before Granta would publish it because of fear of a lawsuit. She still makes no apology for the unflattering depiction: “For me it’s about who is policing the production of literature, who is saying what is acceptable, especially for Africans. If someone tries to tell you what your own story should be, that’s ridiculous.”
Adichie takes her commitment to authentic storytelling well beyond her own writing. Along with her efforts to promote literacy in Nigeria, for the past two years she has led workshops in Lagos for aspiring writers. In 2007, when Fidelity Bank invited her to give a reading, she agreed but said she wanted to do more for the community. She proposed a series of workshops “to help writers polish their craft, to give them a chance to be with other writers, to demystify the publishing process—and hopefully to get them comfortable with the idea of being read by others.” The first workshop was advertised with no requirement other than a brief writing sample—and over two hundred applied. Adichie chose twenty-five participants and had enough success that the bank agreed to expand the project. In 2008, applicants exceeded seven hundred, mostly from Nigeria but a few from Cameroon and Zimbabwe. Dave Eggers from the United States, Binyavanga Wainaina from Kenya, and Marie-Elena John from Antigua joined her as guest faculty serving a group ranging in age from eighteen to fifty. “Friendships formed. People exchanged books and stories. One person from the first summer ended up at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, another just published his first novel in Nigeria,” Adichie says. “Some participants formed Web groups where they continue to read and support one another. So I like to think that their writing lives are better, in general, because of the workshop.”
Nigerian Breweries has signed on as sponsor for the next three years, and this September Eggers will return along with other international writers. The workshops received wide media notice, and the accompanying literary events during the evenings drew substantial crowds. Adichie says the attention has been both “moving and humbling” but also useful. “Being known has given me a platform to talk about the things I care about, which is an incredible luxury.” For Adichie, success has meant more than making a name for herself as an author. It has given her the ability to see her slender hope realized in the lives of her fellow Nigerians—and to see the rest of us inspired by her work.
Renée H. Shea, professor of English and modern languages at Bowie State University in Maryland, has written profiles of Andrea Levy, Rita Dove, and Sandra Cisneros, among others, for Poets & Writers Magazine. She is coauthor of the book The Language of Composition: Reading, Writing, Rhetoric (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2007).
Ocean Vuong made his literary debut in April 2016 with Night Sky With Exit Wounds, a poetry collection that chronicles a family’s journey as refugees from Vietnam to America, where the poems’ young speaker grows up attuned to the turmoil of his family’s traumas while becoming aware of his sexual identity. Vuong’s meteoric rise in popularity was immediate, and so was the positive critical response to his lyrical voice.
In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani raved about “his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.” The book’s warm reception was accompanied by a number of prizes and honors from the Whiting Foundation (Whiting Award), the Lannan Foundation (Lannan Literary Fellowship), the T. S. Eliot Foundation (T. S. Eliot Prize), Publishing Triangle (Thom Gunn Award), Forward Arts Foundation (Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection), and others. The New York Times went on to name it one of the top ten books of 2016. All for a first book of poems by a relative newcomer to the literary scene.
Rather than follow it up with another book of poems, however, Vuong shifted gears and turned his attention to a different genre entirely—fiction, in the form of a novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, out in June from Penguin Press. The book centers around the strained relationship between a mother, who struggles with PTSD induced by memories of the Vietnam War and her abusive marriage, and her son, who is contending with his sexuality as he comes of age on the drug-ravaged streets of Hartford, Connecticut. I recently sat down with Vuong to discuss his path from poet to novelist, a story that begins with—as Vuong puts it—“a little gay kid from Hartford, who read in the library with his head down so that people didn’t know he was reading.”
Born in Saigon in 1988 to a family of rice farmers, Ocean Vuong was only two when his extended family left Vietnam and traveled to Connecticut after making a brief stop in the Philippines. The seven-member household included his grandmother, “who would start to sing any time there was conflict,” Vuong says. “Since she was the elder, it cast a kind of spell over us so that we could survive our problems.” The cultural adjustment for this mostly illiterate refugee family was not easy, to say the least. Vuong’s father returned to Vietnam not long after their arrival, and his mother found a job as a manicurist, a profession she still practices. “Everything was erupting all the time,” Vuong recalls, “but it was our shared journey that kept us together.”
Though the Vuongs were the only Vietnamese family in a mostly Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood, they were embraced with generosity and kindness, which made them more comfortable with the reality that they now lived in a different country. “I didn’t know that most of America was white until I was eight or nine,” he says. The concept of white supremacy was encountered much later, when he eventually left the working-class side of Hartford to seek job opportunities as an adolescent in the more affluent and commercial areas of the city.
In the meantime, he was having to contend with two life-changing realizations: that he was gay and that he had, despite a love of reading, dyslexia. The learning disorder is a family affliction; Vuong’s mother and brother also have it. Much later he would find out that so did Octavia Butler and F. Scott Fitzgerald, which helped him reconcile with the possibility of becoming a writer. “I would insist it’s not a setback or an illness,” he says. “It’s just a different angle of looking at language that actually reveals a lot and was very advantageous for me as an artist.”
Vuong says he also sees his queerness as a source of strength in the way he thinks about the world. “For queer kids, when the world around you is dangerous, you go into your own refuge,” Vuong says. For him it was books. Coming out to his mother, however, was a different kind of challenge—one that he didn’t think would end well for him. In fact he was prepared for the worst and planned his exile from his family.
“I waited until I was seventeen,” he recalls. “I had enough for a bus ticket and $2,000 in my pocket saved up from my job at Panera Bread. I had my bag with me when I sat down with my mother. I was ready for rejection.” But that rejection never came. At this point the family had already suffered serious losses to drug overdoses, victims of the opioid epidemic that was affecting this working-class community, a harsh reality he weaves into his new novel. “Where would you go?” his mother asked. “What would we do without you?”
Relieved, Vuong set down his bag and began to imagine a future in Hartford the way his family had so many years ago. His mother suggested he try college first because her son “had a belly full of English.” And if not, she suggested, “You can always come work at the nail salon.” Vuong jokingly adds, “I thought, ‘Well, it’s not a bad job. Where else can you work and watch Oprah all day?’”
His time at Manchester Community College was brief but instrumental in changing his perceptions about who had the right to dream big. “I was fortunate to walk into my first class, a composition course, and be met by single mothers, people with two jobs, people in their forties—all walks of life—and it felt like for the first time I saw a teacher have faith in this community of outsiders, investing in our imaginations, and challenging us,” he says. “Folks that were not supposed to be having these discussions were allowed to.” By now he had started to keep a journal, feeling the magnetic pull to poetry—Rimbaud, Lorca, Vallejo, Neruda—copying poems from library books to his notebook because he couldn’t afford to buy books of his own.
Encouraged by his community-college education, Vuong decided to pursue a degree—one that could eventually lead to a job that would help his family—so in 2008 he enrolled in business school at Pace University in Manhattan. After two weeks, keenly aware that he didn’t fit in among the men in business suits and internships, he dropped out. “I still had my library card,” he says, “so I rekindled my love of reading. But I also began attending open mics to read from my scribbles in my notebook. I wasn’t ready to call it poetry.”
It was at one of these events that he heard about MFA programs, in which he could not only nurture his passion but perhaps also fund it. He was also eager to get back to college so he could stop deceiving his mother about his activities in New York City. Unbeknownst to her, he had been couch surfing since leaving Pace. But first he needed to complete his undergraduate degree. “I applied to the most affordable place I could find: City University of New York,” he says. He ended up attending Brooklyn College.
Although he credits Brooklyn College with giving him access to the literature he needed to finally feel well-read, it was the cafés, bookstores, and other venues that held poetry readings that gave Vuong the community he was looking for, forging friendships that fortified his resolve to keep going. “I met Saeed Jones,” he recalls, “who was fabulous and glorious, with a big, hearty laugh. And when he told me he was attending an MFA program at Rutgers in Newark, I knew that it was possible.” Soon after, he connected with poet Eduardo C. Corral, who at the time was living in his family’s double-wide in Casa Grande, Arizona, working at Home Depot, and running a popular blog called Lorcaloca. Corral’s blog gave Vuong a glimpse into the ways the writing profession welcomed or rejected writers of color. When Corral announced he was moving to New York City in late 2011, Vuong knew this too was a sign: “We had similar stories—both of us gay boys from working-class immigrant parents. He became a kind of mentor because his journey was like a map for me.”
Corral recalls their first meeting: “Ocean’s attentiveness is what first caught my attention. He was kind and curious, always asking questions, eager to listen, to learn. This attentiveness also extended to language.” Since then they have stayed in touch, though Corral contends that theirs is a bond not forged by literary success but by the amazing truth that they are sons of non-English speakers, who have been able to shape careers and help their families financially through a profession that, in effect, excludes their loved ones. “We now get to write about our immigrant families and claim a place for them in poetry,” he adds.
Ocean Vuong
(Credit: Jon Crispin )
In 2014, prompted by his intimate but influential writing community, Vuong applied to MFA programs, but only in the New York City area because he wanted to remain close to friends. He chose NYU because it offered him funding without teaching obligations. But on that fateful first day of class, he received a call from Michael Wiegers at Copper Canyon Press, letting him know the press had accepted his book for publication. “What people don’t understand,” Vuong says, “is that I had been working on Night Sky With Exit Wounds for eight years. And one of the reasons I sent my manuscript to that press was that they promised a personal rejection, and since I wasn’t enrolled in school yet, I was craving feedback.”
For Wiegers there was no doubt the manuscript needed to be in the world. “I was struck by his ability to risk toeing the edge of sentimentality, without crossing over it,” he says. “His poems were open and vulnerable and bold enough to take on the big topics of love and grief and war and familial legacy. These were gentle poems that were graceful and confident—and did not need to perform themselves toward the deep desire they contained.”
The prospect of publication would give Vuong something tangible to show his mother. “Since my mother could not read, I insisted that the book have my picture so that she could see it was really me and show all of her customers at the nail salon,” Vuong says. A few days later, Don Share from the Poetry Foundation called to offer him the $25,800 Ruth Lilly Prize. The timing was perfect for Vuong, who could now proceed with confidence, fine-tuning his book for the next two years without dealing with financial stress or the anxieties of an uncertain future. Two years later, Night Sky With Exit Wounds was published to considerable fanfare.
Besides giving his mother a book and, after years of financial hardship, a down payment for a house, Vuong also had the opportunity to show her a bit of the literary world he had just entered: “She has come to a few of my readings, and she sits in the room so that she can look at the audience responding to my work. She calls me a scholar, not a poet, because in Vietnam, scholars are revered.” What did he get for himself after that flurry of fellowships? “My only splurge was a coat,” he says.
Vuong, who now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, credits his Buddhist upbringing with his ability to navigate all the attention in stride. He meditates five times a week and keeps reminding himself of the person he was when he first fell in love with writing. “I bring him to the present,” Vuong explains, “not the person who won the awards—he has nothing to teach me. So when people ask what is the secret of my success, I say Submittable.”
He has maintained this sobering stance as he steps into the role of teacher and mentor at his new job as assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. “I tell my students that I didn’t have a social life. I had a library card,” he says. “I sit down with them and ask them to privilege intention over motivation.” But he admits it’s a challenge to keep students focused on the art of writing during the era of social media, which he believes fuels competitiveness.
“My interactions with Saeed and Eduardo and Rickey Laurentiis were important, but afterward I went home to the page, not to Facebook or Twitter,” he says. Nevertheless, he is determined to give his students the kind of positive experience he had with his own teachers like Ben Lerner, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Sharon Olds.
What also keeps him centered is the reality of his family’s urgencies. “They still need my support,” he says, particularly now as the current administration implements a policy to revoke residency from Vietnamese refugees deemed “violent-crime aliens.” Vuong says, “Those are my people! We come from a troubled history, and with such trauma come problems. It’s unfair to penalize a community for an affliction exacerbated by this country’s participation in the Vietnam conflict.” While he waits to find out how these policies will directly affect his family, Vuong turns to his first love, poetry, for solace. In May 2018 he partnered with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center to launch the Center for Refugee Poetics at the Asian Arts Initiative, an organization and venue in Philadelphia, with a day of activities exploring poetry and the refugee experience. Its next symposium has yet to be scheduled, but the center hopes to expand the reach of the conversation, which began with the Southeast Asian refugee diaspora.
With the publication of an acclaimed debut comes the inevitable expectation of the second book. Shortly after the release of Night Sky With Exit Wounds, as the accolades came pouring in, Vuong was courted by a number of literary agents, who suggested he write prose. But Vuong hesitated moving on from his previous project when deep inside he knew, he says, that the first book, “an eighty-five-page paperback, did not answer all of my questions. How does it contain everything I have been asking all of my life, like what does it mean to be a queer American body, or poor, or a refugee?” So he decided to investigate those concerns further in a different genre, to find out if he could learn anything new.
While on a residency in Italy, courtesy of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Vuong found himself browsing the castle’s extensive library, where he connected to other poets who also wrote prose, such as Anne Carson and Maggie Nelson. “I realized then that I wasn’t out in the sea by myself,” Vuong says. “Poets have been there and thrived with the sentence and the paragraph.”
Vuong chose to explore fiction writing because he wanted “the book to be grounded in truth but realized by the imagination. That’s why the opening chapter reads like an essay.” He also credits his education as a poet with the skills necessary to move into prose. In both he could “orchestrate an entire world,” he says. Nonfiction, he notes, would have presented issues he wanted to avoid: “As a person of color, when it comes to memoir, we are seen as anthropological conduits, a vehicle of exotic information. I wanted to insist on agency as an artist, with the freedom to embellish, and then claim it as my own rendition.”
An early role model was Maxine Hong Kingston, who had set out to write the great American novel but whose book The Woman Warrior (Knopf, 1976) was presented as nonfiction. He decided not to erase that effort and succumb to the pressure to write a memoir. “I wanted to insist that these lives—yellow, brown, poor—inspired me to create art as I wanted to create it, not as others wanted me to create,” he says.
Page after page, he allowed memory to shape the fabric of the fictional narrative. He understands the impulse of readers to want to make direct connections between the writer and the writing, and he expects many will also want to draw lines between the poetry book and the novel, but that’s beyond his control. He’s more invested in his right to invent. “Writers of color are not supposed to have the musculature of an imagination,” he says. “When we use it, we’re being bold, and that’s what I want to do—be bold, make things up. I’m not here to give people the juicy bits of my community. I’m not a journalist; I’m an artist.”
That said, he set out to write a book with a clear mission: “I wanted a voice in the conversation about what it means to be a body inhabiting this incredibly complicated, violent, and precarious country.” His inspiration was the community he hailed from: “When I moved to New York City and I’d tell people I came from Connecticut, there was this perception that I had come from a place of wealth. But I was a refugee. So I wanted to expand on working-class identity in a place where people lived rich and diverse lives. There are immigrant populations from all over the world in Connecticut. I want to shift the telescope and show that this world has always existed.”
Two years and four drafts later, a manuscript of the complete novel made its way to Frances Coady from the Aragi Agency. “I explained to Frances that I was a poet, that a poet doesn’t submit anything until it’s finished,” he says. For Coady, it was worth the wait: “When I read an early draft of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, I experienced one of those glorious privileged moments in publishing when you know that what you are holding in your hand will affect readers in the most profound ways you can imagine.” The novel was sold to Ann Godoff at Penguin Press in April 2018.
Though the book was acquired for a notable sum, Vuong doesn’t want to dwell on that. He’s got more immediate concerns, like his family’s well-being—“the distress signals arrive and I have to answer,” he says—as well as his own. Diagnosed with agoraphobia, an anxiety disorder in which one experiences fear of places and situations that might cause panic, helplessness, or embarrassment, which at times keeps him from performing the most basic functions, like going to the grocery store, he has had to rely on his partner, Peter Bienkowski, for support. A former copyright lawyer, Bienkowski quit the profession to help Vuong through the demands of travel and presentations. He drives Vuong to and from the university so that he can teach his courses and meet committee obligations, because, as Vuong admits, “I failed my driver’s test five times.” On difficult days, Vuong stays home, at the cost of canceling appearances or meetings. “People have been surprisingly understanding,” he adds.
As for his own expectations with the release of his novel, Vuong doesn’t care to fantasize about its future or the rewards that might come with further success: “I don’t see myself as a success story even though I’ve experienced success. Everything I learned along the way was a strength. If I didn’t have my communities, that many consider broken or forgotten, I wouldn’t be where I am. I don’t want to be a sob story or anybody’s project. I want to show that you can have pride no matter where you come from and joy without forsaking the pain it took to get here.”
Rigoberto González is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Ocean Vuong and his partner, Peter Bienkowski, along with their dog, Tofu. (Credit: Jon Crispin )
Jacqueline Woodson is the author of more than two dozen acclaimed books for young adults, middle graders, and children—a body of work that places African American characters at the center of richly drawn narratives that have helped young readers engage with real-life situations such as interracial relationships, child abuse, poverty, and homosexuality.
Her own childhood story—she was a precocious daughter of parents in a troubled marriage, who found solace in the imaginative world of books, and eventually in writing—forms the basis of her New York Times best-selling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2014), which won a National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Newbery Honor Award, an NAACP Image Award, and the Sibert Honor Award. Brown Girl Dreaming also traces Woodson’s journey from Ohio to South Carolina to Brooklyn, an eye-opening childhood in which she learns, among other things, about the regional differences of the black experience during the 1970s.
With the release of Another Brooklyn (Amistad), her first adult novel in twenty years, Woodson revisits that important period of dramatic social changes. August, a young black girl who moves with her father and brother from Tennessee to the culturally rich Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, comes of age during a time when her empowerment as a black woman offers new freedoms as well as familiar demons: classism, racism, and sexism. Another Brooklyn follows August as she learns the hard lessons of adolescence, uplifted by the strength of her girlhood friendships and guided by her family’s religious conversion. All the while, the terrible truth of her mother’s fate back in Tennessee weighs heavily on her emotional well-being.
I sat down with Jacqueline Woodson at her home in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn for a conversation about her new book, New York City’s literary legacy, gentrification, Islamophobia, and happiness.
The dedication of Another Brooklyn reads “For Bushwick (1970–1990) In Memory,” which covers the span of August’s coming-of-age in the novel. The reader also gets to observe Brooklyn come of age, as it negotiates the changes and challenges of those eras, through the perspective of a young black woman—a point of view that’s relatively absent from the portrayals of Brooklyn in literature. What drew you to tell this story at this stage of your career? Why this book now? The Bushwick that’s on the page is a true place, as it exists in the book. I wanted to put that on the page in its true existence because when a neighborhood becomes gentrified, its new inhabitants think they’ve discovered someplace new, but that place had a story before them. Bushwick is its own character, and this book is one of its biographies. I wanted to pay homage to the Bushwick I grew up in, so my dedication also suggests this book is an elegy to a place and time that is no longer with us. Overlaid on that biography is the narrative of the four girls, which is fiction. After having written Brown Girl Dreaming, which is a memoir, I really wanted to move away, just for a moment, from children’s literature and explore something I felt was invisible, which is the story of the black girl in Brooklyn.
In the novel, we meet August as an adult looking back at the place where she grew up. But what does Jacqueline Woodson have to say about the Bushwick of today? August in the book is looking back with a kind of melancholy or longing for this intensity of that period she lived through. Jacqueline Woodson looking at the place now—I look at it in wonder because I still go to my old neighborhood a lot and I’m just surprised by the fact that I grew up with white flight. Most of New York City was on the edge of white flight at the time, but now I’m watching the reverse of white flight, with white folks coming back into the neighborhoods their ancestors fled from. It makes me marvel at how cyclical everything is.
I’m trying to place Another Brooklyn as part of the borough’s writer-of-color lineage. I see Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, published in 1959, and there are a few contemporary works, such as Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper, but one has to really dig hard to find those narratives that are not centered on white characters. What areas need that literary attention in order to expand what is celebrated as Brooklyn’s—and New York’s—cultural heritage? There is so much territory left to explore in New York City in general. I feel like Brownsville is not on the page, East New York is not on the page; there are stories from the Bronx and Harlem, but since Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas not enough books about the black NYC experience are getting talked about. DJ does a great job in Shadowshaper, writing the black Latino perspective on the page, but we need more. Even in the Bushwick I grew up in there was a larger Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Ecuadorean population—I would love to see those stories, that Brooklyn.
And I’m even remotely interested in the vision of the kids of the hipsters who are growing up in those neighborhoods now. I know their stories are not going to be my story because of our differences in class and race, but I feel they too are part of all of these deep pockets that are not represented. I’m waiting for more stories from Queens—from Jackson Heights and the Hindu population. There’s so much that still needs to be told in order to shape this city in a way that’s nuanced. We still have a pretty flat narrative.
There are a few parallels between Jackie’s story in Brown Girl Dreaming and August’s in Another Brooklyn: Both young black women have roots in the South and eventually journey north with one parent. One gives shape to her memories through her affinity for language, the other comes to terms with her losses through her knowledge as an anthropologist of the rituals of death and dying. Agency is an important fire in your work. So is memory. How do you see these as critical components of a young black woman’s experience? Starting with memory, when you look at who we are as a people and how we got here and what we were allowed to hold on to: We were allowed to hold on to our spirit—a certain amount—and we held on to our memory. No one could take that away unless they beat us unconscious. I believe in genetic memory, that our ancestors are pretty much with us. And I believe in asking questions about the past to make historical connections because that’s what gives us strength. And in terms of agency, I grew up in the 1970s, which was so much about black power—taking your power, owning your power, making yourself visible in the world even if the world wasn’t reflecting you back. So as a writer I feel that every time I sit down to tell a story it is to create that mirror for myself and for other readers who have historically not seen themselves in the pages of literature, and to talk about how badass we are, because there’s so much strength in being a person of color and having survived.
Another Brooklyn is being marketed as an adult novel. But with contemporary YA novels being edgier, taking risks that keep their stories ahead of their time, could you imagine your younger fans reaching for the latest Jacqueline Woodson title? Is the YA designation fast becoming a fuzzy category? Oh, I think I see my audience reaching for this book the way I once reached for Judy Blume’s Forever—“Wait, she has an adult book? There might be some sex in it!” So I definitely see that happening. Also, having been publishing for twenty years, my population has grown up now, they’re adults. So I definitely see them reading it. But I do think that distinction between YA and adult is fast becoming a fuzzy line in terms of subject matter. There are still differences in the approaches to writing the two narratives, but today’s YA author is claiming more permission to take risks in order to keep up with a changing world, which is why our books continue to be banned.
Is Another Brooklyn an adult novel because of the treatment of sexuality? Not only August’s own sexual desires but also all of the lessons August learns about women and their bodies: from Muslim women, from prostitutes, from her own friends who are experimenting and pushing boundaries. Why is this still important work to do on the page? For too long we were given the wrong messages about our bodies, especially as women of color, and I wanted to show that a girl’s sense of her body is really shaped by the outside gaze, by the mirrors in her community. But I also wanted to show her agency and the way women can come together more powerfully. At one point in the book I have August with her girlfriends, and she’s thinking about how boys don’t understand why girls cover themselves even when they’re alone. It’s important work to do on the page because we are sexual beings and we have a right to be so and to walk through the world with these bodies. Living in the age of Beyoncé is really exciting for me—she’s not only celebrating the black body, but also the big body. I grew up with Twiggy as an idea of what is a beautiful body, but thankfully I also had Angela Davis and Diahann Carroll. I was informed differently, but when I’m coming to the page—because the narrative is so much bigger than real life—I have a responsibility to write what I believe in, in terms of representing more fully who we are as women.
There are so many rich layers to the life of August—her girlfriends, her brother, her love interest, the father’s love interests. She’s at the center of a complex support network, but one character who really stands out is Sister Loretta, who guides the family through their conversion to Islam. August says, “My Muslim beliefs lived just left of my heart,” meaning she understood everything that religion was providing for her and her brother, including structure and a mother figure. Was this a decision that came about given this country’s escalating Islamophobia? What do you hope readers take away from this encounter with a black Muslim family? It’s really a scary time to be living in. And Islamophobia happens when people are thinking, “Muslims are those people over there and have nothing to do with us.” Putting their humanity on the page was really important to me. We exist in all kinds of religions and this is the religion of this family, and the book deals with how this girl is taking in this religion because she’s negotiating it against this space and time of friendships and sexuality and puberty and adolescence. And faith. That’s all part of August’s journey.
I was talking to a friend about the shooting in Orlando, and during these times of crisis it’s so hard to remember the kind of work we do as artists. It’s nonstop. Much of it is economic, but so much of it is also emotional and at the core of who we are. Like Audre Lorde said, “We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we’ve done it.” And writers, especially, every time we sit down to work we are working to impact a great good. And even though I am not always conscious about what is happening, when I sit down to create the narrative I know that all the information coming in from the world is informing that narrative.
The four young women at the center of Another Brooklyn—August, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi—create such a special bond that it’s difficult to see those friendships begin to crumble. You once said that one question you wanted to explore through writing was “what is the happily ever after?” After completing this novel, dozens of books into your career, and as times change, what have you come to understand about happiness? That it ebbs and flows like every other emotion we have. I think that if I were happy all the time I’d be the most boring person in the world. The nuance comes from working towards happiness and not always getting there, or some days getting there surprisingly so. That I can wake up in the morning and get to write is amazing to me, so the mere fact that I’m here and that I’m able to tell my story is the happily ever after for me.
Rigoberto González is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
One can make a home wherever the body finds itself at rest. I imagine this to be true always, but especially now, while taking in the large plastic novelty fish hanging high on the wall above the head of Terrance Hayes. Even while slouching in his chair, Hayes towers above the table in front of him, so that the fish, a marlin, appears as a crown under the glow of red light humming overhead, darkening half of the marlin and half of the face of the poet. We are at Great Jones Cafe in lower Manhattan, a place Hayes told me is his “go-to spot” when we spoke earlier, trying to nail down where to meet. When I arrive, I find him alone in a corner, drink already on the table. Hayes is a Southerner at heart, having spent his childhood and early adulthood in South Carolina, so it comes as no surprise to find out why he has led me here, to this place he tells me he comes to every weekend, often alone. “I didn’t know how quiet it would or wouldn’t be in here,” he tells me as I sit down, in reference to my request that we find a low-key location for our interview. “But it’s the only place in this city where I can get good grits, so it’s one of the few places in this city I love.” I imagine this to be his way of welcoming me into a small corner of his home.
We are talking about primary colors, Hayes and I. He is describing for me his most recent project. His poems were commissioned by composer Tyshawn Sorey for Cycles of My Being, a song cycle that “explores the realities of life as a black man in America” (or so it is described in the publicity material), performed by renowned tenor Lawrence Brownlee at Carnegie Hall, Opera Philadelphia, and Lyric Opera of Chicago. So Hayes sent Sorey some work to be played in front of a mass audience. He tells me he agonized over which poems to send—“you know how I am with this shit; nobody knows what poems are except for poets,” he says—and eventually bent to the will of the composer, who had asked Hayes if he had any poems about hope, or about hate. Hayes balked at the idea.
“They wanted [it] to be hopeful, but a hopeful poem isn’t my tendency,” he says. “And a hateful poem isn’t my tendency either.” He eventually wrote a poem specifically for the show but then set it aside.
This story is less about the song cycle for me and more about what is happening with the interior of Terrance Hayes. “I’m not interested in primary colors,” he tells me when I ask him why he has no interest in hope or hate. “It’s not nuanced enough. I’m interested in the spaces where colors overlap. It’s like when people call someone a racist and think that’s the end of it. That ain’t the end. Racism is a symptom of fear, or greed, or some other bullshit. So even if I wrote a poem about hate, it ain’t gonna be about hate when I’m done with it. My personality likes a challenge, so I can write a poem that many would consider hopeful.”
“But aren’t you a hopeful person?” I ask.
“Am I?” he shoots back playfully, smiling before sighing and stirring a small tornado into his drink with the tip of his straw. “I mean, the endgame is always going to be death, so how hopeful can anyone really be?”
We are talking about death, Hayes and I. Or, it seems, death is the river’s mouth our conversation is flowing into. This makes sense, in some ways. We are here to talk about his new book of poems, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, published by Penguin in June, which is overwhelming in every sense. Overwhelming in its brilliance, yes, but also overwhelming in its pacing, its style. Each poem is the exact same length—a sonnet’s requisite fourteen lines—and carries the exact same title: “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin.” The book, despite its breadth and clever turns, is a confrontation. Not an unwelcome one but a confrontation nonetheless. Hayes is too crafty to force his way, unwanted, into a room, so his poems are like the slow and steady picking of a lock, until the door handle clicks. Instead of entering, the poet stands outside, satisfied with his work.
Hayes began the process of writing the sonnets with inspiration from Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets series. Coleman’s sonnets, much like Hayes’s own, are winding, endlessly questioning, and rich with syntax and alliteration. A stunning formalist, yet inventive and often two steps ahead of her peers, Coleman, who died in 2013 at the age of sixty-seven, spent much of her life as a poet struggling to make a living from her craft. Born and raised in L.A.’s Watts neighborhood, Coleman worked several odd jobs until her poems began to take off, and even then it was hard for her to make ends meet. Her hustle manifested itself in her poems; chasing new ways of crafting a poem became a form of survival. She was a mentor to some and an inspiration to many more, but Coleman wasn’t always granted the acclaim she deserved. Her work—unlike the work of Hayes—wasn’t fully celebrated until after her death.
Hayes is gathering his roses while he is still alive to grasp them—thorns and all. One such thorn: Hayes, who now lives in New York City after several years in Pittsburgh, where he taught at the University of Pittsburgh and was codirector of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics there, appreciated the love he was shown in the smaller city but notes that it became overwhelming. “They had my face up in the airport,” he says. “I couldn’t handle it.”
This is not to say that Hayes is entirely humble, however—nor should he be. But he is grounded, possessing a healthy blend of logic and confidence. You know the long list. The author of six poetry collections—Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999), Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006), Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), How to Be Drawn (Penguin, 2015), and now the new book—he has won much of what a poet can win, including the National Book Award for Lighthead; the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for Muscular Music; a Whiting Award; an NAACP Image Award; and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. He is also a chancellor at the Academy of American Poets. All that and he’s still relatively young, just forty-six years old. Young enough to have decades of future success but old enough to have watched skilled but less decorated writers die, without much control over their legacies.
As for his own legacy, Hayes tells me that he is most concerned with how he’s viewed as a teacher. He is at NYU now and finds himself at home in the classroom. He tells stories about his talented students and how there is a mutual pushing and pulling forward. None of it is about money, he tells me.
“This is why I just want to leave my kids my poems,” he says, referring to his two children. “I want to leave them art.” He pauses and references something he recently mentioned to his ex-wife, the poet Yona Harvey. “Money is nothing to be governed by, because once you get it, it’s never enough. When I die, I want my kids to have my art. Surely that will be worth something one day.”
Confidence and logic.
We are talking about Wanda Coleman again, as the darkness falling on Great Jones Street becomes richer, nighttime beginning to flood in through the windows. “I wrote an American Sonnet to Wanda Coleman,” he tells me, picking apart the catfish on his plate. “And I sent it to her. We exchanged letters, and then suddenly she was ill. She died in 2013, and I registered that, and then,” he pauses, “and then around the election I decided to do something else.”
Hayes says he had a “reaction” to the election, and I understand instantly what he means, as I felt it too. For all of the “now more than ever” tropes about writers and poets being needed at this particular moment—particularly writers and poets of color—the election did create a sense of urgency for many, not necessarily to share all of their work at once, but to establish a legacy of work, something that might be left behind, if there would be nothing else left of us. If things got “real bad,” whatever that meant. For Hayes, though, the week of the election also had another emotional touch point: Wanda Coleman’s seventieth birthday would have been on November 13, 2016.
“I had this obsession with writing these shorter poems, because I had been writing long poems,” he says, referring to the work in his last book, How to Be Drawn, which included a number of multiple-page poems such as “Who Are the Tribes” and “How to Draw a Perfect Circle.” He continues: “And I thought I could do this for her. I thought to myself, ‘Can I access the thing I most love about what she did, in these times?’” It became something he chased after relentlessly. “Also,” he smirks, after I ask him what other motivations existed for his use of the form, “I like a volta.”
It seems, at least to me, that a volta is defined best by the hand that crafts it, and so therefore a volta can be anything. Formalists will define it as the turn, or the rhetorical division, the shift, between the sonnet’s first eight lines and the final six. For Hayes the volta is in the project itself, tethered to his always shifting definition of the assassin in the work. “I’m trying to go in one way and come out another way. So, yeah, I’m trying to see how many turns I can fit into a poem, but also I like the sonnet as a way of addressing an idea: How can I write a traditional love poem to someone or something I don’t deem worthy of my love?” After a long pull of his drink, he adds, “I just don’t know what other form would be able to hold this particular moment.”
A love poem for an enemy or a foe is largely about restraint, I suppose. Which makes the project of the book and the restraints on the poems themselves even more fascinating. The central conceit is this: How can I reach out and gently touch that which might not be so gentle toward me? And how can I be sure that in honoring these foes with love, in my turning to face them, they won’t change?
Sometimes the foes are invented, and sometimes the foes are direct and predictable—country, or president, or racism. But the book is most interesting when the foe is Hayes himself. “I’m in a different phase of my life now,” he tells me after we talk briefly about what it is to want to love yourself when you are your own enemy. “Having been married and not being married [now] also bears on the sonnets,” he says, staring into his drink. Hayes is recently divorced from Harvey, though they remain on good terms, he insists, raising their children, a son and a daughter, shuttling between Pittsburgh and New York. “I haven’t talked…. People been asking this shit, but I don’t wanna talk too much about it. But what I will say to you is that sometimes the assassin is you, or sometimes the assassin is a beloved, and that role feels transferrable. It’s like the stuff in the book about Orpheus and Eurydice.” He pauses here, which is rare for Hayes when he gets into a stream of conversation. He is talking about a series of poems in the book that detail the ancient legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. The poems are decidedly distinct from the others, in both tone and what they are attempting to unravel. They are the poems in the book in which Hayes is hiding the least, taking himself to task, or taking the idea of love to task, or taking the idea of forever to task.
In one of the sonnets he writes:
I tried to tell the woman
Who sent me songs, it’s departure that makes company Hard to master. I tried to tell her I’m a muser, a miser With time. I love poems more than money & pussy. From now on I will eat brunch alone. I believe Eurydice is actually the poet, not Orpheus. Her muse Has his back to her with his ear bent to his own heart. As if what you learn making love to yourself matters More than what you learn when loving someone else.
“Most of that is me tying back to a different kind of relationship,” he says. “Who is the assassin between Eurydice and Orpheus? Who is the poet between those two? I’m thinking about…what does it mean to be married to a poet? What does it mean to be married to a motherfucker who’s gonna be playing his music no matter what? He’s a poet. It’s what he’s gonna do. But there are consequences to that. And so you might say, well, maybe she’s the poet then. I’m just…I’m wondering about the beloved as an assassin.”
This sits between us heavy on the table, the most open Hayes has been to this point in our talk. We leave it there, untouched.
I write the poems so I don’t have to talk about this shit,” Hayes tells me when I ask him which part of the response to his work he values more: his playfulness and precision with language or his sentimentality. He is not saying this to dismiss me, and we both understand this. It’s a moment in the conversation when he is talking to me as a writer, someone who he knows has likely had similar responses to questions like this. “Anything I say in a poem, I mean it,” he says. “Feeling and intuition is the only important thing to me. You can persuade someone through logic that perhaps what they’re thinking is wrong. But you can’t persuade someone that their feelings are wrong. You can’t tell a motherfucker that they ain’t hungry if they’re hungry. No words in the world can do that. So I trust feeling as a bedrock thing. Can you want to kill a motherfucker and simultaneously love them?”
To trust one’s feelings can be all-consuming, especially if those feelings are brought into a harsher light by a mess of a political moment. Hayes is invested in his obsessions, even if his obsessions are about the nation unraveling.
There are poets who are slow and deliberate speakers, working to make sure every sentence holds weight. But Hayes is a rapid-fire conversationalist, spreading his long arms wide, or gesturing with one massive hand. Like his work, he is challenging you to keep up with him and to pick out what’s worth expanding on. And if you don’t catch it, he’ll expand on it for you anyway. And in this moment the topic worth expanding on is Donald Trump.
“Everything I do has to be in service of poetry,” he says, with a little more excitement in his voice. “I can’t be waking up and thinking about Trump all day. And if I do, I have to do it in service of a poem, or else he’ll be a block.”
He is talking about boxes and how every box, like every poem, has multiple sides through which it can be entered. He decided to put Trump in a box and kept turning the box until his truth looked different from every angle. He found this to be more interesting than it would have been with, say, Barack Obama.
“Obama is super interesting to me, but I already know some of the sides to that cube. He’s a six-sided truth, but I know about half of those sides. As a brother, as a dude who loves basketball, as a dude who got old. To look at something and see yourself in it is easy. I’m not moved by that. With Trump it’s about power and the way his power has a bearing on everyone else. I can meditate on that for at least six months.”
The restraints of the sonnets have been liberating, he tells me. This is only interesting because of how the book wrestles readers inside of it and gives them little room to move within it. If anything, a reader then becomes a part of the interior of the box, which Hayes is turning around in his hand. I don’t mean this to sound negative: One of the book’s strongest points is how readers have to fight their way into and then out of it. Like all of the work Hayes has offered in his career so far, it is both inviting and asking a reader to earn enjoyment of it, in this case through a means of discomfort with the repetitive nature of the poems and their aim.
Hayes tells me he has become so obsessed with the project that he can’t unravel himself from it, which makes sense. He is conflicted, because he knows he can’t do another book like this, but he also knows that he isn’t done with the fascination. “I mean, I got seventy good ones, and I don’t want to overdo it,” he says, blending his usual cool and confidence with the anxieties he holds. “It’s like [ John] Berryman, right? He put out 77 Dream Songs, and then later he put out all of them. And like, there were some all-right ones in there, but shit. I was good with seventy-seven.”
It is political, in some ways: Hayes is surviving the world by writing against it. When I ask him if the work has made him feel any better, he matter-of-factly states, “Well, the shit is still going on, you know?”
There are other ways out, Hayes says. He draws, going to a class once a week and trying to improve his hand as a visual artist. Hayes has experience in the craft, receiving a BA from Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina, where he studied both English and painting. His drawings and paintings provide the artwork for the covers of his books. It’s easy to get lost in the visual form, but he keeps returning to the sonnets. Twisting a forkful of mashed potatoes around, and up toward his mouth, he pauses.
“There’s no law that says an obsession can’t continue beyond the production of the obsession, you know?”
It’s getting late, and the fish over the head of Terrance Hayes has begun to droop its long face lower. This is a trick of the eye, I’m sure. Perhaps Hayes is growing taller, more excitable with conversation, and the fish is shrinking in the face of that. Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” is playing through the café’s speakers, and small crowds of revelers have started to filter in, the way one might expect as a night stretches its palms wider. It is perhaps late only for me. Hayes insists he doesn’t sleep much. “I go to bed around two or three in the morning and wake up around seven. I’m good with four hours a night,” he tells me, as my body involuntarily trembles at the prospect of such little time in bed. He does his best work in the hours after these, when even the revelers beside us begin to lose steam (“I like a nap, though,” he insists). This disclosure makes for an interesting moment between us: me winding down, and him warming up.
Hayes and I find ourselves in the golden hour of our conversation, too. The talk about poems and craft has perhaps drawn all it can draw from the two of us, and now we’re just talking about basketball. Hayes was an Academic All-American basketball player during his time at Coker and has remained attached to the sport. Throughout the conversation Hayes insists that he is always thinking about poems, no matter what else we’re speaking on, but he seems at ease here talking NBA. The plates are cleared off the table, and he has leaned over his drink, swinging his massive palms in one direction or another as he makes a point. An athlete and sports fan and writer, Hayes has an intimate relationship with the game. Like me, he is in it for the narratives, which I do suppose means that even in our talk about basketball, we are talking about poems.
“LeBron James shoots free throws every day,” Hayes tells me. “And you gotta think, ‘Why is this dude shooting free throws every day if he gets paid to shoot free throws?’ He’s doing that shit with no one watching, because he’s after something different.”
I nod, and Hayes continues.
“I think about that versus someone like [Philadelphia 76ers rookie] Ben Simmons, right? Ben Simmons should be a huge star right now, and he’s perplexed by that….”
I take the opportunity to interject that Simmons isn’t a huge star yet because he can’t really shoot, but Hayes is off, sprinting a mile a minute to reach the end of his thought.
“Yeah, but Kobe Bryant struggled with that same shit too, right? Kobe had to fight through the same thing of doing the things that should make you famous and expecting fame. But it ain’t about the fame, though.”
In many ways, I know what’s coming next—Hayes the speaker is rarely separate from Hayes the poet—but I let him draw back the curtain with his own language. “It’s about the glory. There’s a difference in fame and glory. Fame is when everyone else is peeping what you’re doing, but glory is when your peers recognize the work you’re putting in. Glory has to be number one. Glory has to be number one, because no one else has to be there.”
I ask the obvious question, the one about whether or not an artist or an athlete or a parent or a construction worker can have glory without fame. Because this is the thing with Hayes, who is undoubtedly famous and has basked in his share of glory. It has created a mythology around him that he seems equal parts thrilled to revel in and sometimes uncomfortable with. Minutes before the conversation took this turn, we were speaking about pressure, and in the middle of a response, Hayes shook his head and said, “God forbid I ever start writing bad poems,” and one ear might hear I know all of my poems are good, but to another, the poet is saying I don’t know what I would be without my insistence on living up to my own standards. So I wonder out loud how you survive at the intersection of fame and glory, or if you can cut one off in service of the other. Hayes takes a moment.
“Yeah, I think so. On the days I’m writing and I’m in a good groove, I hit moments where I think, ‘Where the fuck did that come from?’ It’s the closest I can get from this,” he says, gesturing toward his head, “to getting it together on that page. And that’s glory. I’m doing that for me, with no one watching, knowing that the people I’m writing for—poets—are doing the same thing. And it only happens a few times, but when it happens it feels good. I did a 360 dunk once, and I was alone in a gym. No one saw it but the other guys on my basketball team, and those are the only people I cared to see it. A 360 dunk is fucking hard. I want the people who know how difficult the work is to bear witness to the work.”
The red light above our heads has only become more aggressive in its lapping up of the darkness, and by now we are both radiating in its shine. Hayes casually regales me with a tale of watching basketball with former NBA player and coach Phil Jackson last April, a story that few poets would have in their back pocket. “We talked about Buddhism and shit. You know, it was a good afternoon,” he says in an “Isn’t New York wild?” kind of way, to which I nod, thinking about the times I’ve been to this city and felt tiny. The gist of the story is that during their first basketball-watching excursion, Jackson insisted that Hayes not mention LeBron James, whom Jackson had found himself feuding with over a Twitter debate. When the 2017 NBA Finals came around, Jackson invited Hayes to his Manhattan apartment to watch them with him, and Hayes balked. “He invited me back to watch the NBA Finals and told me I couldn’t talk about LeBron James!” Hayes says, half-yelling and half-laughing, as energetic as he has been all night. “I can’t talk about LeBron James during the NBA Finals? I like LeBron James! So I was like, ‘Nah, I’ll pass.’ I watched the Finals alone.”
It’s the kind of casual story told by Hayes during which one realizes that he moves through multiple worlds in a singular way, something that can’t be said for many of his peers, though he is still very much among them and often in service to them. He blurbs books vigorously, he reads poems endlessly, and until recently he served as the poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. (Rita Dove took the reins in June.) He derives great pleasure from teaching—during our conversation he is most excited when talking about the ways his students show him to and through poems. But he is also someone who pens work for operas and has his face in an airport and casually watches basketball with one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time. And it all seems simple to him, something he has been working toward since he began working. Both fame and glory.
We are talking about death and isolation again, Hayes and I. It’s a fitting end to our time together. Hayes says his true inclination is to stay inside; he likes New York because he feels like he can do that here, and not many other places. He tells me he both loves and hates the way the city folds around him—loves it for its many options and hates it for its many options, all at once.
When we get to the topic of rap, Hayes is succinct, melancholic. “I think when it comes to rappers, Biggie Smalls is closest to my sensibilities,” he insists, spinning the last bit of ice around in his drink. “He scares me, and the consequences of his art, too…. The consequences of his art informed his life. I think of this like Sylvia Plath. The fact that Sylvia Plath would write ‘Ariel’ and then put her head in an oven, or the fact that Biggie Smalls would say he’s ready to die and then die. There’s something closer to the truth for me. Closer to my understanding of the consequences of what we do. The body’s relationship to the art’s consequences.”
I nod, and look at the time. When I look back up, Hayes is looking outside, while the street, drenched in sirens, howls.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet and critic from Columbus, Ohio.
Ada Limón is a North Star poet for me. She’s up there with Lucille Clifton, W. S. Merwin, and Adelia Prado in a great influential constellation. I’m drawn to Limón for the same reasons I’m drawn to the others: It’s as much for her surprising and sublime departures as for the earthbound truths they lay bare. And I have feelings when I’m inside her poems. I sigh. I laugh out loud. I cry. A lot. I do, I cry a lot.
Often when people hear of a reader having an emotional response to a poem, the engine assumed to be driving that response is the narrative subject matter: the familiarity of it, perhaps, or the dramatic imagining of it. It’s the compliment narrative poets like myself have come to dread—the relatability of the poem. That happened, or that could have happened to me, thus this is a successful piece of art. And, of course, great poems like the kind Limón writes often incorporate emotional subject matter and narrative. But focusing on subject matter alone doesn’t do powerful poetry like Limón’s justice. What drives her poems—what makes her new collection, The Carrying, so moving and masterful—is her dexterity with voice and diction and her giftedness with metaphor. It is her deep wellspring of surprising and evocative images and her syntactic superpowers. Most of all, it’s her intellect and intelligence. The poems are keen reflections of a mind constantly at work, seeing and wondering and moving toward meaning but not always the meaning to which the poem and its reader thought they were headed.
The Carrying, published in August by Milkweed Editions, follows Limón’s four previous collections, including Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015), which was a finalist for not only the 2015 National Book Award, but also the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award. It was also named one of the top ten poetry books of the year by the New York Times. Her earlier books include Lucky Wreck (Autumn House Press, 2006), This Big Fake World: A Story in Verse (Pearl Editions, 2006), and Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed Editions, 2010). Limón, forty-two, serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina and the 24 Pearl Street online program for the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She splits her time between Lexington, Kentucky, and Sonoma, California.
We had this conversation over the course of a week, just as the first advance copies of The Carrying were making their way into the world and just after I’d swallowed my copy whole.
Carrie Fountain: Ada, your book blew me away. Even the second time I read it—“Come on, Fountain, get it together”—I could hardly do anything but cry and sigh and gasp at the art of the poems, especially the very surprising revelations on which they open at their endings. It’s a gift. There are readers out there right now ready for, waiting for, needing these poems to change their lives.
As a maker and a reader of poetry collections—these weird books that aren’t necessarily narrative or even inherently linear, but also aren’t random in terms of tone or subject matter or voice—one of the things I admire most is how full The Carrying is and how complete and collected it feels as an artistic gesture. There is so much here of the world, of the beauty and responsibility and heartbreak of going through life in a human—a woman’s—body, and deep existential questions about life and legacy and fate. So, how did you make it? You know: How? And how did you know when you were finished, when it had gone from a group of poems to a collection?
Ada Limón: Oh, Carrie, thank you for this. It’s odd, the making of a poetry book, isn’t it? We write one poem at a time. One small poem and then, hopefully, another one comes. With The Carrying, I was experiencing long periods of painful silence, feeling completely overwhelmed by the degenerating state of the world, but then I would be reminded of how writing can bring me back to the world, into my being. In many ways the poems in The Carrying were answering the question, “Where do I put all this?” The poems came in fits and starts, and sometimes they’d flood over me, and sometimes I’d stare into the abyss for a long time wondering if I’d ever write again. When I finally had about thirty poems, I realized I was writing something real, making a complicated living thing. Then I started to push myself to plunge further, to be as veracious as possible and follow the craft, follow the song as far as it would take me. Before I even realized it, the manuscript was nearly done. To be totally honest, the book still terrifies me. But maybe that’s a good thing?
Fountain: I think I know that terror, and the accompanying feeling that maybe it’s a good thing, a good signal about the particular qualities of the art you’re about to release into the world. I’d love to hear you say more. Did you feel this with your previous books? What is it about The Carrying that terrifies you?
Limón: I think what scares me the most is that I’m writing more about the body and from a place of physical vulnerability. In my previous books I have been open to an emotional vulnerability, but in The Carrying I address more of the frailty of my own body. I also think this book is more overtly political than other books I’ve written. I feel like some part of me has lost interest in play, in poetry for the sake of play, and now I want only to get to the root of things. This book feels driven by a serious engine. I’m not saying it doesn’t have hope. I do have hope, too, but much of the poems are written from inside the well with only a glimmer of light coming from the earth’s surface.
Fountain: “I want to only get to the root of things.” How perfect a sentence to describe these poems. So many roots in this book. Aside from the poems that are about familial roots, and the poems that locate the body as a place where things may or may not take root, there are also so many actual roots. One of the poems I’ve returned to again and again, “The Burying Beetle,” ends with these lines:
I lost God awhile ago. And I don’t want to pray, but I can picture the plants deepening right now into the soil, wanting to live, so I lie down among them, in my ripped pink tank top, filthy and covered in sweat, among red burying beetles and dirt that’s been turned and turned like a problem in the mind.
Even in these haunting lines from your poem “A New National Anthem,” we find something dark and violent taking root beneath the surface:
Perhaps, the truth is, every song of this country has an unsung third stanza, something brutal snaking underneath us as we blindly sing the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands hoping our team wins.
There’s so much going on in these poems under the surface. Many of them make their turn down there, below. Is this something you were working toward actively as an organizing metaphor, or was it more a subconscious thing—a thing beneath the surface—or was it coincidence? Tell me what it means to you to “get to the root of things” in poems.
Limón: In your poems I always see the trembling thing underneath. I suppose the main thing that I mean by “the root of things” is that I am most interested in the process of writing poems as questions, as a troubling of the water, sending down the echo sounder and seeing what comes back. But also my obsession with physical roots is true too. Trees, trees, and trees. No one has ever called me a nature poet, but nature is what I return to most frequently. The earth below our feet, the water that moves through us and connects us to the oceans and rivers. And how we are nature too, even in our own destruction. How the human animal is also an animal.
Fountain: It makes me wonder what a nature poet is, if you’re not considered one. It isn’t that there’s not enough nature in your poems. I’m laughing thinking of the nature quota set by…Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver? Counting how many birds alight on branches in early morning, how many vistas, how many species of cacti named.
But then again, your poems aren’t contained wholly in nature—not containable by any category, really. Your poems contain the natural world, but also the world-world, the world of highway overpasses and torn pink tank tops and your funny friend Manuel—who’s my friend too! And beyond the image level, your poems aren’t “about” nature. I read “The Burying Beetle” to my husband, and the two of us discussed it at length, its many turns and gestures. Neither of us ever talked about it as a nature poem.
Still, I’m interested in these labels because I think they’re sometimes more about who gets to write what, or who is expected to write what. I think that’s changing—the lines are blurring, the categories are widening, there are more voices—but not fast enough.
Your poem “The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to Be Bilingual” examines this, doesn’t it, in a searing, hilarious way? The world sometimes wants to tell poets what they as poets, especially women, especially writers of color, should write about. Your poems and your presence in the world of poetry upends these expectations in such a wonderful way. You’re you. You’re Ada. You truly contain multitudes. I think this is important and inspirational for the generation of poets coming up.
When my first book came out, someone in a review called it “fake ecofeminism.” It was a man, shocker. Another guy—in the Harvard Review—said the poems were obsessed with my “body parts.” Back then I was hurt. I felt ashamed. There were only one or two body parts in that book. Most of the poems are about the conquest of the New World. Still, I heard that review and I just took it in. I didn’t know any better. Maybe I was too much: too sexual, too conversational, too woman. And at the same time, maybe I wasn’t enough—not intellectual enough, not valid enough, not a man’s woman poet.
Then, by the time I put out my second book, which is a lot about having my first child, I’d somehow unburdened myself from that worry. I think I’d begun to divest myself—rather organically—of my own internalized misogyny. I’d begun selling off the little acre of patriarchy between my ears that I’d so long cultivated without knowing. And with that, my readers changed. My ideal readers changed. I wasn’t writing to satisfy Mr. Body Parts anymore. In fact, I was looking him in the face and saying—kindly, because of course—“Maybe these poems aren’t for you. That’s not my problem.”
Some of the most powerful poems in The Carrying are about intimate things, women’s things: trying to get pregnant, coming to terms with not getting pregnant, the many ways we’re forced to change our idea of what our lives will be in the child-rearing department. Even the love poems here—and there are so many, so lovely—are about the tender, weird, specific qualities of married love.
I wonder: Do you feel there’s been a shift in the way women’s voices are read in poetry, especially women of color? And maybe all this is a roundabout way of asking, Who is your ideal reader? Do you have one? Has it changed?
Limón: I think you’re right. The uselessness of poetic and stylistic categories is becoming more evident as poetry and the world continue to evolve. The idea of divesting ourselves of our own internalized misogyny, of granting ourselves permission to write about whatever world we live in, of silencing the grouchy goateed hipster critic inside that writes cheeky snark from his parents’ basement in order to prove his own intelligence, that’s some of the heaviest work we do. Silencing that good-ol’-boy critic that lives in you and scares you into thinking, “Should I take the ‘I’ out? Should I erase my being?” I’m still working on silencing that dude. Daily.
When Bright Dead Things came out, I was nervous about the fact that it spoke about “the body” and loss, and I worried that it would be seen as sentimental. For the first time in my poems, I wasn’t thinking of writing to prove anything, to show off formal acrobatics, but rather I was writing the poems I needed for my own survival. I was disavowing myself from a “project” and just working on what mattered to me. I had no idea what would happen once those poems entered the world. It was thrilling to see people respond favorably, but it was absolutely not what I was expecting. Still, there were reviews that spoke of “identity” being the driving engine and even “shallow identity verse,” which seemed to be saying that if I wrote about being a woman, being Latinx—or, oddly, even if I didn’t—by default my poems were being driven by only a sense of alienation or, worse, manipulation. I maintain that this does not happen as much to men.
It’s funny that you brought up a reviewer writing “fake ecofeminism” about your work, as I received the descriptor “bogus feminism” in a particularly negative review, written by a man. I don’t think of it anymore, and I do like what you say about, “Hey there, this isn’t for you.” I happen to like the ocean and black-and-white movies, but it doesn’t mean we all have to. You can go on liking slushy machines and Fox News. I do think there’s been a shift in how we not only read women, but also how we talk about the work. It’s slow, however, and it’s frustrating, but it’s shifting. I think, for me, it all comes down to permission and capacity. I’m giving myself permission to write the poems I want—as different as they all are—and I am focusing on the human capacity to hold within us so many different things at once.
I don’t know if I have an ideal reader, but I know that with The Carrying, I’m writing for someone who perhaps has gone through the same things as I have, or similar things. Perhaps the older you get, you realize that so many people are suffering in so many ways and you get tired of privileging your own pain, or imagining your own isolation. I suppose, if this book is for anyone, it’s for those who have both struggled and searched for a way back into the world.
Fountain: This isn’t your first rodeo by any stretch. The Carrying is your fifth collection. You’ve been at this a while now. We’ve talked a little about how this book feels different now, as it makes its way into the world, but I wonder, too, how has your writing practice changed over the years? What have you learned about yourself as a writer, and what continues to evolve?
Limón: Like you, I’ve written for a long time now. I’ve written seriously and with purpose for twenty years. I’ve written a failed novel, a messy draft of a YA novel, and poems, poems, poems. So many words, and all the while I hope I am getting to be a better, smarter writer every day. Speaking of which, I’ve only just started I Am Not Missing—your new young adult novel—and I’m obsessed with Miranda the half-Mexican girl who is the story’s protagonist. She’s wonderful.
One of the things I’ve learned this far into a life in language is to be grateful about all of this. I get to read and spend time with words as a vocation. Yes, it’s work, and there is so much failure and so much getting it wrong. But still, we are so lucky. I wish people talked about that more. Just to be able to do this work, to meet people along the way, to celebrate other writers, to live in a life of words? I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that gift. As corny as that sounds, I don’t know where I’d be without poetry.
Fountain: I’d love to hear more about your fiction writing. So many times, while reading your poems, I’ve thought, “I’d love to read Ada’s fiction.” I have this feeling only for my favorite poets, the ones who really take me to a place and time. This isn’t about the narrative quality, but rather it’s about a surprising, specific image and inviting voice. Do you have a yen for writing fiction?
Limón: I love that you ask that. I do love to write fiction, but I’m not sure if it’s my strong suit. I think I need to keep practicing and keep learning. Right now, I think I write very “poetic” fiction. You know, there’s a lot of a woman standing in a field thinking about other times she stood in a field. All my plot shifts are emotional and psychological. What I love most is describing—both the landscape and the humans and their interactions. I love dialogue, too. But I think I’m a little too satisfied when nothing happens. That’s what I admire so much about your work. You’re this exquisite poet with an excellent ear, and an internal engine of unraveling drives your poems, but you are also able to write a real story. I Am Not Missing just moves so well and real things happen, big things. I’m envious of your storytelling ability. Maybe I’ll get there someday. Maybe my characters will stop daydreaming and go on a real adventure one of these days.
Fountain: I know The Carrying is hot off the presses, but I can’t help but want to know what you’re working on now. Where are you headed?
Limón: I think I will work on napping next. And gardening and breathing and wandering. It’s been a wild three or four years making this book, and I might rest my poem brain a bit. That said, I just wrote a poem today. So maybe poems will just come eventually? I am also working on some personal essays. These days I’m just trying not to rage too much at the world while still staying active and aware and working toward truth. On a good day, I just work on being a real person who wants to make real living things and give them to the world.
Carrie Fountain’s poems have appeared in Tin House, Poetry, and the New Yorker, among many other publications. She is the author of the collections Burn Lake (Penguin, 2010) and Instant Winner (Penguin, 2014). Her first novel, I’m Not Missing, was published by Flatiron Books in July. Fountain received her MFA as a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas and is now writer-in-residence at St. Edward’s University in Austin. She lives in Austin with her husband, playwright and novelist Kirk Lynn, and their two children.
The poets whose work I return to again and again answer a call that compels them, meaning their poems cannot not exist. I can’t escape them, even though what I want from poetry is lightless, weightlessness, to be untethered. The poems—for the writer and for me, the reader—create the feeling, however temporarily, that I am free.
Nicole Sealey is one such poet. Born in St. Thomas and raised in Apopka, Florida, she is the author of Ordinary Beast, published this month by Ecco, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. She is also the executive director of Cave Canem, a nonprofit organization in Brooklyn, New York, that cultivates the artistic and professional growth of African American poets. In fact, in mid-June we spent a week together at Cave Canem’s retreat at the University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg. There we had our first substantial conversation, though we’ve been in each other’s orbit and mutual admirers of each other’s work for years. Despite the sweltering heat that hit us in that special landlocked way, we talked about poetry and craft, our new books—I, too, have a new collection, Good Stock Strange Blood, out in August from Coffee House Press—aesthetics and language, vulnerability and vagrancy, luxury and yearning, drag and systematic repression.
Somewhere in my thoughts I held Sealey’s poem “A Violence,” from Ordinary Beast, as we spoke. I thought of how it feels like a poem for our times; at the end, it references what the mind cannot sustain. We are left to imagine what that is, exactly, though she gives us good direction. In Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015), Ta-Nehisi Coates writes of the art that he was coming to love as a young man, how it “lived in this void, in the not yet knowable, in the pain, in the question.”
Our discussion spanned several days, and I felt the calling that compels us both through our focus on the craft of our poetry and how we think meaning gets made. As our conversation spread (during the week of the retreat, the Minnesota police officer on trial for the killing of Philando Castile was acquitted of all charges in the July 2016 shooting), we never overtly said the names of those people who have been unjustly killed by police, but they are ever-present nonetheless. While at the retreat, we all heard of legal absolutions that confuse the rational mind. But the conversations between most of us who attended remained focused on poetry. Why? I think—and this is what I noticed in my talk with Sealey—that the art that moves us does something else entirely than speak to the thing at hand. What we do as poets is figure out how to negotiate the limits of the so-called rational world. This is a means of survival. And it is also, finally, where weightlessness might be found.
Nicole Sealey: I don’t know if you remember, but about a decade ago I wrote a review of your debut collection for Mosaic magazine. I wrote:
Just as the great American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston encouraged readers—through her mother’s words—to “jump at the sun,” so does poet Dawn Lundy Martin urge in A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering. It is the leap, not necessarily the landing, that forces risk and invention. Martin has taken such a leap and, in the process, invented new ways in which to engage and experience language. A Gathering of Matter…does not consult with convention, but rather vehemently argues with it.
I didn’t think it possible, but Good Stock Strange Blood takes even greater leaps and risks even more. Can you trace your journey from A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering to Good Stock Strange Blood?
Dawn Lundy Martin: When I was writing A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering, I was doing two things. One, I was figuring out how to speak to childhood traumas; and second, I was thinking of black displacement—like our relationship to a postcolonial continent. So I was trying to make work about something really big and something really small, and do it via a poetics that was interested in language’s inexactitude. Language feels too bulky to speak to trauma. What happens when we open our mouths to speak it? Out comes dust. Blathering. A cry. A stammer. A circling, a return again and again to try to say what happened.
I was working from the idea that language was not enough, that it fails us—often even in regular communication, like, say, an argument with a lover—and that where poetry enters is in the re-formation and ratcheting of language, so that it does its best job at speaking. This is especially important when it comes to trauma, which has no language, and the displacement of an entire people, which is almost unimaginable. By the time I got to Good Stock Strange Blood I’d been working in the art world and influenced by the ways utterance happens in art by folks like Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, and Lorna Simpson. I’d also been working a lot in the prose poem and attending to the sentence.
The sentence is such a curious method toward utterance for me. It really wants to control us with its yoke of grammar. In Discipline and Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life, the prose poem becomes a way of thinking through the concerns of freedom—both internal and external, individual and collective. In my mind, however, Good Stock is my strangest work to date. The approach to language is ranging—lots of lyric poems extracted from Good Stock on the Dimension Floor, the libretto I wrote for the politically trouble-making global artist’s collective HowDoYouSayYamInAfrican? And other approaches: essays, journaling, prose poems, poems that are poems and poems that approximate poems. Which is to say, the aesthetic approach is less contained, less namable. More vagrant.
Vagrant is the word I would use to describe Good Stock Strange Blood. But if I had to describe your work in one word, I would use “vulnerable.” Immediately, when reading Ordinary Beast, I’m struck by the opening poem’s gorgeous and stinging vulnerability. How does this kind of nakedness impact how you think about writing poetry? And when I say “vulnerable” or “naked,” I mean I feel a rawness in your work—the poems feel stripped of artifice, even as they make themselves available to us as crafted poems. This is a rare and gorgeous balance.
Sealey: Straight out of the gate there’s an assumed familiarity between the reader and myself, void of pretense. Part of the pleasure I take in being a writer and reader of poetry is this instant intimacy. By the first page, we’re practically what one would refer to as family—at this point, I’m comfortable in my nightclothes and headscarf. As you know, the relationship between reader and writer is reciprocal. We bring with us all that we are, the sum total of our experiences up to that point. There’s an exchange happening—one that encourages vulnerability, one that can transform strangers into kin. Which is why, without a second thought, I’m comfortable opening the collection with “Medical History,” its lines: “I’ve been pregnant. I’ve had sex with a man / who’s had sex with men. I can’t sleep.”
I read somewhere that in order to be likable, one mustn’t share too much too soon. I’m not convinced that this rule applies to art, particularly poetry, as some of the best work is some of the most exposed and indicting early on—take Sympathetic Little Monster by Cameron Awkward-Rich, Rummage by Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa, and Beast Meridian by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, for instance. All that to say, when poets sit down to write, we don’t think about being vulnerable. We just are.
But I so admire this idea of vagrancy. Did you consciously give yourself permission to be “more vagrant,” or was this an unconscious evolution? And I’m in love with the italicized voices that interrupt the “narrative” of Good Stock. Who are they?
Martin: Vagrancy just evolved. I’m less interested in doctrine than I used to be and more compelled by uncertainty. I know so little about how to write an essay but have been teaching myself how to write them, which is very exciting, like learning a new language. And the essays teach me about wandering. As much as I feel like the books are an evolution over time, I feel like they are also one big utterance—always circling around the same haunting themes in an attempt to get it down better. I think of that thing my mother does when she’s listening. She doodles by tracing a word or scribbles over and over, making a deep imprint.
In terms of the italicized voices, sometimes they are an interior voice I want to gift the reader. It’s the voice in my head—or a fabrication of it—or a certain register, which in a way is an invitation into my heart. In other moments, it can be like singing into one’s own ear. I happen to be, probably to my own detriment, a fairly abstract thinker—meaning the voice I whisper into my own ear is like a clock questioning time. When I write, however, “Something larger than ourselves to hold us,” I am writing about black people and thinking very concretely about how we as black people have historically always been left to build our own apparatuses for our own support, defense, relaxation, and protection.
And speaking of support, answer this: If someone you don’t know approaches you with an open hand and that open hand, you understand, is open for you to place a poem into, which poem do you place into it from Ordinary Beast and why? You know nothing about the person or what they need, just that their hand is open, and that they are desperate.
Sealey: Without a doubt I’d place “Hysterical Strength” in the hand. The first half of the poem describes true accounts of superhuman strength—a child lifts a car, a woman fights a bear, etcetera. These accounts are then juxtaposed with the strength black people have had to harness to exist in a world that, I would argue, has for centuries tried (and failed) to kill us. The poem speaks to our struggle and to our strength. I need that someone to know that they’re not imagining things, that this is not normal and that they’re stronger than some people would have them believe. Yes, I would hand over “Hysterical Strength.”
When I hear news of a hitchhiker struck by lightning yet living, or a child lifting a two-ton sedan to free his father pinned underneath, or a camper fighting off a grizzly with her bare hands until someone, a hunter perhaps, can shoot it dead, my thoughts turn to black people— the hysterical strength we must possess to survive our very existence, which I fear many believe is, and treat as, itself a freak occurrence.
There have been so many poems that have saved me in this same way. The most significant being Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die.” Whenever I get to thinking otherwise, that poem affirms that I’m not imagining things, that this is not normal, and that I’m stronger than some people would have me believe.
What about you? If someone approaches you for a poem, which from Good StockStrange Blood do you give that person?
Martin: There are these lines in the middle of the new book—a square block of italicized text:
Symptomatic of being a slave is to forget you’re a slave, to participate in industry as a critical piece in its motor. At night you fall off the wagon because it’s like falling into your self.
This is a reminder that we have to be vigilant, especially now with people running the country who are explicit in their disdain for black people, women, queer people, and the poor. The other day I was listening to this heartbreaking podcast about the resurgence of predatory home-lending practices. Instead of buyers acquiring mortgages, mortgage companies are offering “contracts” and telling buyers that this is a cheap route toward home ownership. “Buyers” never accumulate equity, so as soon as they miss a payment they’re out. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about this in “The Case for Reparations.” This was one way black people were kept from owning homes in the 1960s and ’70s. The practice is back. And guess who’s the secretary of treasury. A guy who has made billions from people losing their homes. Playing the game often doesn’t work—you know, being a good citizen, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.
But turning back to aesthetics, I’m energized by the ranging approaches to telling stories in Ordinary Beast and the range of forms you inhabit and invent. How did you develop these multiple means toward narrative? And I’m interested in how drag and gender is configured in the work. I love the emergence of all these drag queens who speak up through the interstices of the book via epigraph.
Sealey: In the movie Love Jones, the character Darius Lovehall says, “When people who have been together a long time say that the romance is gone, what they’re really saying is they’ve exhausted the possibility.” I say this to say, these multiple means toward narrative is my attempt to keep the relationship I have with poetry interesting…yet manageable. Writing is hard, at least for me. Having an architectural plan with which to imagine and engage poems makes the process less so. I love form for precisely this reason and find the constraints ironically freeing—the restrictions actually lend themselves to specific music, associations, and imagery that probably wouldn’t happen otherwise. This is definitely true of the various forms in the collection.
For the last decade I’ve been at work on “Legendary,” a series of personae sonnets inspired by the queens featured in Paris Is Burning, a documentary film about drag pageants in 1980s Harlem. Thus far I’ve drafted about a half dozen poems—only three of which were solid enough to make it into Ordinary Beast. What most interested me is the double interiority of it all, the idea of being a subgroup of an already marginalized community. In a perfect world—one free of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia—these queens, who were at the top of their game and art, might have lived the fabulous lives they emulated; instead, their high-ranking status was limited to makeshift ballrooms. The series acknowledges their restricted authority and, in so doing, is as much an assertion of their power as it is commentary on the lack thereof.
I’m interested in the way you use fragment and fracture as tools to reconstruct “truth” in Good Stock Strange Blood. “—The Holding Place—” is a great example of this.
Martin: When I look back at some of my earlier work and the way I used the em dash, I understand the usage to be a literal stutter, cut speech that won’t come out. Like trying to speak with a hand around the neck. In Good Stock, the fragment is a disruptive force to the poem itself. “—The Holding Place—” in particular is meant to self-destruct in the speaker’s attempt to grapple with her own blackness. Originally this piece was in the libretto, and the speaker, NAVE, I imagined, had been born from the head of Sarah from Adrienne Kennedy’s one-act play Funnyhouse of a Negro. Being born black on earth has rendered NAVE both mutant—her body made of many arches and windows—and crazy. NAVE’s is a madness meant to speak to what racism can produce. The truth is the poem can’t hold all of this, so it falls apart in these places of radical ellipses. I’m more than willing to let the poem slip out of the reader’s grasp at times to get as close as possible to the utterance that enacts the near impossibility of our simply being.
A little game I’ve played over the course of my four books is to borrow a line or two from a previous book in each new book. In this case “matter that matters” is extracted with slight variation from A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering and in its new location doing completely different work on what “good stock” might mean to American black bodies.
Ordinary Beast is such a striking title—hard and soft at the same time. I noticed how beasts and animals find several locations in the book. In the last poem, that beautiful moment, “There’s a name for the animal / love makes of us” still resonates in my imagination. What is the beast to you?
Sealey: Those lines from “Object Permanence,” the final poem in the collection, speak to how love can transform someone into something wholly unrecognizable—if we’re lucky, into something better. Whatever “better” looks like. The speaker seems surprised by her own affection for her beloved, by her own capacity to love, which suggests a shift in the way the speaker now engages with “love.” I can’t imagine her having similar thoughts about the love that came before the one she muses over in the poem.
I just did a quick roll call in my mind of all the animals in Ordinary Beast—fish, horses, tadpoles, a bear, scarabs, goats, elephants, locusts, dogs, caterpillars, unidentified “strays” as well as a variety of birds, one of which is made of fire. Fun fact about me is that back in the day I was studying to become a veterinarian. Obviously, that didn’t pan out, but I’ve maintained my interest in animals, human beings included. I think we’d like to think that we’re more evolved than ordinary beasts, but the truth is we’ve got some growing to do. As a species that prides itself on its consciousness, there are many who are content to live in the dark. And even more who would have us join them. What is the beast to me? At the moment, it is mankind—some men more than others.
Dawn Lundy Martin teaches in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and is codirector of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is the author of several books and chapbooks, including A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; Discipline (Nightboat Books, 2011), which was selected for the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Candy, a limited-edition letterpress chapbook (Albion Books, 2011); The Main Cause of the Exodus (O’clock Press 2014); The Morning Hour, selected by C. D. Wright for the 2003 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship; and Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2015), which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. Her latest collection, Good Stock Strange Blood, was published by Coffee House Press in August. Her nonfiction writing has been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and boundary2.
Dawn Lundy Martin (left) and Nicole Sealey at Cave Canem’s 2017 retreat at the University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg. (Credit: Richard Kelly)
Cave Canem was established by Cornelius Eady and Toi Derricotte in 1996 to nurture black poets both on the page and in the publishing marketplace. The Brooklyn, New York–based organization’s many programs include writing workshops, master classes, a reading series, publication prizes, and an annual retreat, which brings together more than fifty poets, or “fellows,” each year. In January Nicole Sealey, previously Cave Canem’s programs director, became the organization’s new executive director. A veteran arts administrator (including a previous role as the assistant director of Poets & Writers’ Readings & Workshops program), Sealey is also a poet; her first full-length collection, Ordinary Beast, will be published by Ecco in September. A couple of months into her new position, Sealey spoke about the future of Cave Canem.
Can you tell me a little bit about your relationship to Cave Canem? Almost ten years ago I participated in Cave Canem’s eight-week fall workshop in New York City, facilitated by Marilyn Nelson. I was a very young writer and it ended up being a formative experience in my life. We got serious about craft and made lifelong connections in the process. I’ve met many of my closest friends through Cave Canem, the closest of all being my husband, John Murillo. The very least I can do for an organization that has served me well for the last decade is to return the gesture.
How does being a writer influence the way you will lead the organization? Cave Canem has always had a “poets first” philosophy, which has served the organization well for the last twenty-plus years. Remember, the organization was founded by rock-star poets and directed for the past decade by Alison Meyers, also a poet. In that tradition, I plan to lead with both head and heart, which are the qualities I value most in poetry.
What’s ahead for Cave Canem and for you as the new executive director? In May we’ll be capping off our twentieth-anniversary year with Cave Canem 20/20: A Panoramic Vision of Black Poetry, a two-and-a-half day poetry forum at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn. The forum will offer readings, skill-building panels, artist conversations, and more. I’m also looking forward to my first retreat as executive director. The retreat takes place in June at the University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. It’s our flagship program, and where, as Harryette Mullen says, “black poets, individually and collectively, can inspire and be inspired by others, relieved of any obligation to explain or defend their blackness.”
So much has changed since Cave Canem faculty member Elizabeth Alexander recited “Praise Song for the Day,” the inaugural poem for Barack Obama in 2009. What do you see as the role of Cave Canem, and poetry more broadly, in the new political climate? “So much has changed” is a very gracious way to describe the political climate in which we now find ourselves. In “Praise Song for the Day,” the speaker asks, “What if the mightiest word is love?” I have no doubt that it is love, but the new administration would have me believe that the mightiest word is fear or, worse yet, the president’s name. It is neither. It is love. And what is love if not a society based on justice and equality? With this in mind, the role of Cave Canem in particular, and poetry in general, is and will be to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. With love. Bigly.
Are there any outreach programs on tap to connect poetry with readers? Cave Canem’s Poets Tour, a nonprofit speakers bureau, connects national audiences with Cave Canem fellows through readings and workshops. This year we hope to increase the number of participating fellows and reach out to presenting institutions, including high schools, universities, museums, libraries, and prisons. We want to bring black poets to diverse communities.
Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
From late nineteenth-century poet Paul Laurence Dunbar to Harlem Renaissance icon Langston Hughes to contemporary poetry stars Rita Dove and Toi Derricotte, the influence of African American poets on America’s literary culture cannot be overstated. But until recently there was no center that had significant institutional support and was specifically dedicated to sharing and studying the legacy of African American poetry.* Earlier this year, poets Dawn Lundy Martin, Terrance Hayes, and Yona Harvey decided it was high time to start one. The trio launched the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) as a creative think tank to spark conversation and collaboration among poets and other artists, and to promote and archive the work of African American poets for future generations.
“We recognized that there was this huge impact that African American and African diasporic poets were making on American arts and letters,” says Martin, who codirects the center alongside Hayes. “We wanted there to be a place where we could really think and work through what that means.” Housed at the University of Pittsburgh, where both Martin and Hayes teach in the MFA writing program, the center held its first event in March—a set of conversations and readings about race, poetry, and the humanities—and will host similar events throughout the academic year. Its first course on African American poetry and poetics, led by Lauren Russell, the assistant director of CAAPP and an English professor, will be offered to undergraduate and graduate students during the 2017–2018 academic year and will feature visiting speakers each week. Hayes and Martin also plan to launch a residency and fellowship program, through which poets, artists, and scholars can work at the center for periods between a month and a year.
Part of CAAPP’s core mission is to archive and document the work of African American poets, which will be accomplished through both a physical collection of books and an online archive of lectures, readings, and discussions. While organizations like Cave Canem create space to nurture new work by African American poets, and other university centers such as Medgar Evers College’s Center for Black Literature and Chicago State University’s Gwendolyn Brooks Center work to promote black literature, CAAPP will focus specifically on the research and scholarship of black poetics, particularly as it relates to historical, artistic, and cultural repression, as well as corresponding social justice movements. “Cave Canem is twenty years old, and there still hasn’t been a large body of work about how it came into being or archival work around it,” says Hayes. “Our organizations historically haven’t had an opportunity to take care of our own information, to build our own insights around that work…. Now we are in a position to be our own historians and our own archivists, and write our own biographies about the importance of these roots.”
The University of Pittsburgh has long been a home for the work of African American poets. The university press, with editor Ed Ochester at the helm, has published notable titles by both emerging and established African American poets, recently Derricotte, Ross Gay, Rickey Laurentiis, Nate Marshall, and Afaa Michael Weaver. Hayes and Martin hope to work with the press on a book prize, and harness other university resources. “What a university can do is provide infrastructure, in a way that’s just not set up in most sectors of our society,” says Hayes. “Infrastructure and research capabilities.” The pair have enlisted faculty from other departments, including English and Africana Studies, to advise CAAPP and possibly teach future courses. “We think of ourselves as a start-up,” says Martin. “And like innovators in tech, we want to be open and inclusive as we generate new ideas about what it means to work in the fields of African American poetry and poetics. This seems especially important in these trying and divisive times.”
A significant part of CAAPP’s work will also intersect with the university’s MFA program. Graduate writing students will be able to take courses offered by the center and have the opportunity to help curate, design, and teach these courses. This goes hand in hand with how Hayes sees the MFA as an opportunity to teach students the tools and skills needed to hold positions of power in poetry and arts organizations. “A person who is interested in getting an MFA and being a poet can learn how to live in the world, whether they are directing centers or working as librarians, archivists, or critics,” says Hayes. “Just to alert and inspire a poet to do that is a possibility. Maybe you want to run a press or be an editor of a press. I don’t see why the MFA can’t be an opportunity to begin that conversation, as opposed to assuming that all you can do is write or teach.”
*Editor’s Note: After this article went to print, it was brought to our attention that a center dedicated to studying African American poetry was already established before the launch of CAAPP. The Furious Flower Poetry Center, housed at James Madison University and founded by Joanne Gabbin, has been cultivating and promoting African American poetry since 1994. We regret the error.
Hayes and Martin hope that the center will also help make the university’s MFA program a more welcoming space for writers of color, an important effort in light of increased discussion about race and diversity in MFA programs. For Martin, this means creating and maintaining a space of cultural inclusion. “Pittsburgh is a place where there are other students of color, and the graduate faculty is extremely diverse. There’s already some understanding between folks who are there, so you can start from a place of not having to work through your values and struggle to articulate your cultural perspective.”
The CAAPP directors plan to offer courses that intersect with visual art and music, in order to explore how thinking across disciplines can parallel thinking across cultures and perspectives. “Certainly, we feel like if anyone is prepared to build those new conversations, it would be African American poets and poets of color in general,” says Hayes, adding that CAAPP aims to include non-black people of color and other marginalized communities in the conversation. “We talk about collage and hybridity—that’s what people of color are. [We’re] not thinking about segregation, not thinking about fences around what we do, but looking across those bridges, saying, ‘Well, how are these people across the street interested in what I’m doing?’ even if they’re not poets. They might be architects, they might be scientists.”
Moving forward, the center will hold a community workshop, reading, and exhibition from November 9 to November 11 on poetry and politics titled “Black Poets Speak Out,” featuring Jericho Brown, Mahogany Browne, and Amanda Johnston. The directors also hope to host a reading by emerging women and trans poets. Martin and Hayes are optimistic about the social impact of the center’s work. “As far as I’m concerned,” says Martin, “especially given the state of violence in this country—violence against queer people, violence against black people, violence against women—it makes sense to take up things like African American literature, African American culture, African American history, African American poetry and art as a part of making the world better.”
Tara Jayakar is the founder and editor of Raptor Editing. She lives in New York City.
Sometimes it pays to procrastinate. It took Alexander Chee fifteen years to complete his second novel, TheQueen of the Night, and about seven years in, during a particularly bad case of writer’s block, he spoke to his agent, Jin Auh at the Wylie Agency, about putting together a collection of essays instead. “It was one of many moments where I was like, ‘Is there anything I can do to get out of writing this novel?’” Chee says. While, thankfully, he persevered and completed TheQueen of the Night, which was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2016 to much critical acclaim, Chee continued to gather his previously published and discarded essays during the slow periods in his fiction writing. “It was this weird shadow creature that grew in the process of writing both my first and second novels,” he says, “almost like a back passageway to them.”
Chee has made his name as a fiction writer. His first novel, Edinburgh (Picador, 2001), which tells the story of a Korean American boy who is forced to deal with the devastating effects of being molested by his choir teacher as a young teen, won the $50,000 Whiting Award. TheQueen of the Night, a sweeping period novel in which an orphan moves from America to Europe to become one of Paris’s most famous opera divas, was a national best-seller and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. But for as long as he has been writing fiction, Chee—who is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire—has also been quietly publishing essays in venerable journals and magazines such as n+1, Guernica, and Out. And with the release of his first essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, out this month from Mariner Books, his “shadow creature” has stepped fully into the light.
The collection, which includes both previously published essays and new works, covers a wide range of subjects, all explored through the lens of Chee’s own life—from performing in drag, to a rose garden he grew outside his Brooklyn apartment, to a stint as a caterer for conservative socialites William F. and Pat Buckley. But as disparate as some of the topics are, they all circle back to one central question: How do we live and write truthfully? For Chee, a Korean American gay man growing up in a small white town in Maine, who came out at the height of the AIDS epidemic, the answer to that question has been fraught. But in his essays Chee explores the ways in which, despite tremendous external resistance, he forged a more consistent, authentic self both in life and on the page. The book is part memoir, part writer’s guide: While Chee mines the territory of his own life, he also offers useful advice about how other writers might do the same. In his essay “100 Things About Writing a Novel,” for instance, he offers this sage bit of wisdom for fiction writers: “The family of the novelist often fears they are in the novel, which is in fact a novel they have each written on their own, projected over it.” Many of the essays also include writing advice from Chee’s mentors, including his beloved undergraduate teacher Annie Dillard, and Deborah Eisenberg, his first professor at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In some ways, the book is far less a back passageway than it is a map, leading the reader to a deeper connection with both herself and the risky, rewarding act of creation.
I spoke with Chee about his new book, a lively conversation during which we discussed how to keep working during bouts of self-doubt, methods for successfully spying on yourself, and whether dancers do in fact make the best writers.
How do essays function for you in relation to fiction? I studied with Annie Dillard, and that set the tone for how I came to think about essays and their possibilities. Annie told us, and I didn’t realize how radical it was for her to say this, that you make more money from nonfiction. If you become good at essays you can sell them while you’re working on your fiction. If you’re trying to start a writing career, you can use a finished essay as both a writing sample and an introduction to an editor, and while that editor may not like what you’ve written specifically, it might create a relationship that will yield work in the future. Everyone else [who taught in my writing programs] had a kind of, “I don’t talk about business in class” mode, which, I think, is unfortunately quite common in creative writing. And I say unfortunately because the truth is that one of the ways you democratize literature is by teaching people how to make some money so that they can get by.
Yes, and how to talk honestly with each other about the money they are making. Yes, and how to stand up for the money that they are making. Annie encouraged us back then to have all of those conversations, taught us the format for submitting work, taught us to use the Best American anthologies as a guide to the places we should be submitting work to, taught us even to double check the addresses in the mastheads because some of them used codes to sort out who was only combing Best American anthologies for their address. Annie Dillard is no joke.
You’ve said before that we are living in a more “essay friendly” time. Can you say more about that? The irony of the Internet, which was supposed to rob us of our attention span and be the death of journalism, is that it has actually promoted a new passion for longform nonfiction. It’s also given us more opportunities to find and discover poets, who are a big part of the movement towards essays as well, since they are doing work that is increasingly hybrid. In general, the best thing I can say about social media and the Internet is that it has allowed a lot of people to bypass the gatekeepers, such that I don’t know if there’s a real gate any more.
You say in the book, and you’ve mentioned this on social media before, that readers often want to know what’s “true” in fiction. What is your relationship to “the truth” in writing, and does it vary between mediums? I think fiction is the thing you invent to fit the shape of what you learned and nonfiction is the thing you invent to fit the shape of what you found or maybe even what you can’t run away from. One thing that I noticed during the editing process of this book was how often it felt like I was dying. [Laughs.] It was just soul crushingly depressing and difficult work and it took so much longer than I thought it would. I had this kind of idea of, “Oh, I’ve published a lot of these essays before and this won’t take a lot of time.” Boy was that naive. It was shocking how naive that was. I think that’s because when you do it right, and this goes back to what Annie used to say, it’s a moral confrontation the writer has with the truth of their experience. That is no joke, and that is not a thing you can just rush through. In literary fiction I think you’re watching someone else in a landscape, wondering if they’re ever going to figure out who they are. In nonfiction of this kind, what you’re doing for your reader is riddling through the ways you lie to yourself and others and trying to get at what you actually believe.
Yeah, it’s horrible. And that’s why you feel like you’re dying, because the part of you that your ego has held is saying, This is me, while the essay is saying, Well, it’s nice that you think that, but…
You’re actually over here, in this big pile of shit. Right. Mary McCarthy wrote this essay collection Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. In between each of the essays she has a few pages about what she made up, what she lied about, what she didn’t mention, and she just calls herself on all of it. And it was this interesting early lesson when I read it about how much you have to be on your guard about yourself.
What were some of the lies you had to let go of in writing this book? I engaged in a kind of forensics of the self. It was something that, again, Annie had taught. An early exercise of hers was called something like, So you think you know your hometown? And she asked us: “Do you know the major populations in your hometown, do you know the major industries, do you know the flora and fauna of the different seasons, do you know the historical events that shaped the founding of the town? How much do you know and how much are you actually just around for?” I continued to take that approach with myself. I reread my journals and all my e-mails. I look at my social media “likes” history to find out what I’m actually paying attention to, and my browser history for the things I won’t even allow myself to “like” publicly. I act like a spy on myself, like someone who doesn’t love me and is just going to report on me. It’s a trust-but-verify relationship to the self.
In the book you write about how Annie Dillard said to you, “Sometimes you can write amazing sentences and sometimes it’s amazing you can write a sentence.” Has getting that kind of feedback helped with this honest relationship to the self? [Laughs.] I had a high school English teacher who said to me, “What I love about you is, I can knock your head off, hand it to you, and you just put it back on, straighten it and keep going.” And I think my ability to just hear people say those things and figure myself out in relationship to what they’ve said has made a big difference. As I’ve learned from a long teaching career, not everyone is built that way, and I’m very glad [my English teacher] identified that early on. He once took a paper of mine and read it aloud without telling me he was going to read it and at the end he just said, “This is an example of what not to do with metaphors.” I could have been upset but I thought, “Okay,” because I respected him and I knew I was showing off what I could do with words in a way that was overblown.
In this collection, was there a hardest essay or an easiest essay, or were they all hard and easy in different ways? That’s a good question. They all presented different challenges. Some of them were written in the nineties and abandoned and then revisited and abandoned again. “The Guardians” and “Autobiography of My Novel” were, for a long time, one essay and then I turned them into two essays. I started [the original piece] when I was about to finish my first novel, Edinburgh, and it was originally going to be one of those essays you publish in support of your novel—which has become this weird tradition that my essayist friends really hate because they’re like, “Who are these fiction writers showing up, thinking they can write an essay and flooding the market with low quality pablum?” And it’s true that writing a novel, writing a short story, and writing an essay are distinct skills.
My essay “Girl” was one that I actually workshopped initially at Iowa. I worked on it for a few years before deciding it was possibly juvenilia and set it aside. And then every few years I would pick it up and think, “This is pretty good, I should do something with it,” and I never would. And finally Guernica reached out to me and said, “Do you have anything about gender?” And I sent them that essay. I think I was like a lot of my students. I thought success in grad school or in a writing class was a kind of low bar, that it didn’t mean anything about success in the world, which to my mind had to be so much harder, and so I talked myself out of submitting a lot of work that I could have submitted earlier and who knows what would have happened. I think in this culture there’s such a value placed on hard work that your inherent talent can seem like something silly. So I ignored it for a while.
In “After Peter,” you talk about your involvement in the activist group Act Up and growing up in San Francisco during the AIDS epidemic. I’m wondering, how did coming of age in that time affect your sense of your body and sex and intimacy? I think intimacy is always fraught but it was differently fraught because of the AIDS epidemic. At that time, in the nineties, I was also just starting to experience the return of memories I discuss [in the essay] about being abused, and so my body was a kind of unfamiliar territory. Dustin, my husband, has memories of being in Hell’s Kitchen during the same time and seeing guys going up to the rooftops to jack off and watching each other at a “safe distance.” He said it was like jerking off in silence with the biggest condom of all, this gap of space between buildings.
Do you feel like writing has changed your relationship to your body? I think, in general, I often ignore my body because of writing, to my own detriment. So I’m trying right now to reinhabit my body. But I have noticed that students of mine who have a background in dance are often quite talented at writing as well. There’s some way of thinking about how the body can be articulate that translates into how you tell stories on the page. I don’t know if it goes the other way. I’d love it if it did. The body is the instrument for the essayist in particular. It’s the instrument by which the events are recorded; it’s the instrument on which the events are replayed. It’s a very complicated, interdimensional relationship we have with our bodies when we’re nonfiction writers.
You’ve written about your family in different ways in this collection. The line of what writers will share and won’t share about family is always different and I’m wondering where that line is for you. One thing I know is true for Asian and Asian American families is there’s a lot of intergenerational silence, so my mom [who is white] is the source of a lot of the stories I have about my dad’s family, which she learned when we were in Korea, because she doesn’t have any of those social taboos. There is also the silence of my father’s death, which is certainly a profound one for me—I’ve spent a lot of time in relationship to my memories of him and my imagination of him. One of the first essays I wrote, which I almost put in this collection but held back, is a confrontation with the memory I have of my father and what would happen if I told him I was gay, because he died before I could come out. That early experience of having to think through that and write what his reaction would be, which also meant writing about my mother and my sister, got my family used to the idea that I was going to write this book. And my mom read it and offered some insights into what she felt I’d gotten wrong about her, but she said, “It’s your truth.”
“Girl” was such a powerful example of all the ways you’re straddling different worlds: boy/girl, gay/straight, Korean/Korean American/white. Does writing feel like it creates bridges or synthesis, or is it just an observation of the gaps that are there? I have come to view writing as a sort of prism. Early on, at a time when I was experiencing a crisis, I had a therapist who said, “You are different with different people because you are uncertain whether you can be whole with any of them, and the result is that you feel inauthentic with all of them and you may even feel inauthentic to them. So you need to pursue a complexity in the relationships you want to be your core relationships and that will help you feel more authentic to yourself.” That was the source of a profound breakthrough because what I was experiencing as depression was a kind of self-rejection predicated on my imagined sense of other people’s rejection.
At some point you have to make a choice about which story you are going to tell about yourself. Are you going to tell a story of you as a failure who never did the thing that you wanted to do—which is the story you essentially tell yourself, a kind of private theater of pain—or are you going to tell the story that you’re working on, a story that can actually reach other people and connect outward to the world? If you’re busy telling yourself that other story about your own failure, chances are you aren’t writing. You may think you are protecting yourself by keeping yourself from writing, but that’s really not protection at all. That’s just another story trying to talk you out of being yourself.
Amy Gall’s writing has appeared in Tin House, Vice, Glamour Magazine, Guernica, Brooklyn Magazine, and PANK, among others, and in the anthology Mapping Queer Spaces.Recycle, her book of collage and text coauthored with Sarah Gerard, is out now from Pacific Press. She is currently working on a collection of linked essays about sex, violence, and bodily return.
Novelist Alexander Chee, author of the new essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, out this month from Mariner Books.
If nothing succeeds like success, Air Traffic: A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America is Gregory Pardlo’s noble attempt to show what becomes of the people who die trying. “My father’s world operated on homespun destiny,” Pardlo writes about his late father, Gregory Pardlo Sr., who lost his job as an air traffic controller during the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) Strike in 1981, “the kind of destiny that was dictated by character and the inevitability of Hollywood endings.” While it was this belief in the inevitability of Hollywood endings that fueled Greg Sr.’s decision to see the strike to its end, president Ronald Reagan’s firing of the 11,345 air traffic controllers who refused to return to work two days later was a dismal reminder that life ain’t a movie. That for all we, as Americans, want to believe in the Dream; here is our rude awakening.
The essays in Air Traffic, published this month by Knopf, function like someone who jumps up from sleep, thinking the nightmare is over, only to discover this is reality. Pardlo’s rendering of his life and the people in it takes on a quiet nobility because the author resists the temptation to achieve any simple resolutions. There are no grand statements to be made. No fortune cookie wisdom. No moral to the story. If Greg Sr. was driven to death by the promise of the Hollywood ending, Pardlo is in the parking lot of life doing donuts. This is where Air Traffic succeeds.
Instead of showing the ways in which Greg Sr.’s ambition makes his family exceptional, Pardlo undermines that ambition by highlighting the ways in which the paternal failure makes them like everyone else. Pardlo’s understanding that he is nothing “special” enables him to come to terms with some of his own failures as a father, husband, and poet.
I interviewed Pardlo at his home in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where we talked about his aversion to happy endings, his disillusionment with narratives of progress, complicated relationship to his Pulitzer win, and why alcoholism is like religion.
One of the first things I want to talk about in regards to Air Traffic is that the book ends without any real sense of closure. As if the wounds you’re describing haven’t healed yet. What was your intention in ending the book this way? My aesthetic in general is not to pursue a conclusion. Real early on in my writing development, I read Lyn Hejinian’s essay, “The Rejection of Closure.” That essay had a big impact on me in thinking about how to avoid the Disney kind of happily ever after ending. Life doesn’t work that way—particularly when you’re talking about an addiction or recovery narrative. The idea that one can be sick, and be healed, and be done with it is not a narrative that works in terms of recovery. There is no recovery. Just a lifetime of maintenance.
One of the strategies I had when I started writing the book was to look for the opposing ideas. Where I have one argument being made affirmatively in place, I want to make an opposing argument in another. I’m working against the idea of a narrative having a teleological arc; this idea that the story is moving towards something.
This is a book about manhood, and a lot of it is focused on your father, but I was wondering: What was behind your decision to not write about your mother as much? Not only do you describe her as the one who holds the family together, but it’s difficult to talk about manhood in all its nuances without the women who help to contextualize what that manhood means. If I’m going to be honest, it’s garden-variety sexism that the role of the mother, in the family, was always a secondary presence. Although she was most certainly a primary presence in my day-to-day life, in my imaginative life she was a supporting character. It sounds awful to say that but flat off, the impulse was to deal with my dad.
When I first started this book, I was most interested in the PATCO strike and the labor history around it. The more I learned about the strike, the relationship between the FAA and the controllers became more clearly paternal—so that theme of the father-son relationship pulled me in that direction. Then I discovered I’m not really dealing with my dad; I’m dealing with myself.
While I was writing this book, I was regularly visiting my therapist. One of her questions early on was, “When are you going to write the essay about your mom?” I didn’t know how [to write an essay about her] because my mother has always been a far more complicated character to me than my father. Case in point, for the intervention piece—which is not only the last piece of the book, but also the last piece that I wrote—I interviewed my mother. I wrote the piece and sent it to her. She wrote back that she loved it but felt that my depiction of her was a little harsh. My depiction of her was in service of her own ego, but that is the logic I applied to my dad. It doesn’t apply to her. So I’m still trying to find the emotional framework to render her fully.
Though the book is labeled a memoir, it reads so much more like essays in that the writing seems to be more concerned with the journey than any particular destination. There’s this very subtle way in which your father’s wanting to be the center makes you feel like you’re the supporting character in your own life. And you write every essay as though you’re experiencing your life through the eyes of someone else as opposed to your own.
Even the way you describe your drunk episodes, they seem sort of like they’re just treated as incidental. I felt it was an honest depiction of how our problems tend to happen in real time. They manifest themselves in the background. If it were something that you’re going to take hold of and keep in your eyesight it probably wouldn’t be a problem. I don’t know if you did that on purpose, but the most insidious things that happened in your life are the things you don’t see. You’re so focused on your father and brother, you lose sight of yourself. That’s absolutely right. One of the things I love about the essay is that I can have that kind of dual presence as author and character. In terms of the tension of the book, obviously there are points in there where I, as a writer, am not going to see what I’m doing entirely. There is no omniscient narrator, but there are many points in the book where I am conscious of how I’m allowing my “I” character to be flawed.
We can see the patterns of my dad’s big, tragic moment set against my own tragic moment and my brother’s tragic moments. If not explicitly, “narrativizing” the blind spot is definitely an agenda of the book. It is a strategy of mine to read the character of “I” as a character, which means there are flaws that I, the writer, am aware of after the fact. As a writer I can see the thing my character “I” did and say, “Oh, well that was stupid,” but it’s not for me to go back and correct it. I don’t need to protect him. I don’t need to justify him.
That being said, the book does have this sort of arc where the beginning is so much more “ambitious” than the end. In the first essay we’re introduced to your father, who is determined to die in this grand way. But as the book goes on, ambition is subdued—in that everything, in comparison to your father’s death, just seems so much smaller. I’m wondering if that’s a question that this book is concerned with: What happens when you have too much ambition in a world that doesn’t make space for it, or doesn’t believe certain people—like your father—should have any? You’re right. I think it’s my disillusion with the narrative of progress altogether. By damn near every metric of the American Dream, my life is a success story, but there is no point at which I want to stop and say, Alright we’ve made it. We think about the narratives of black progress, of uplift, and how that narrative has this teleology. What is the end game of the black uplift story?
How do we know when we’ve made it? My frustrations with that narrative—and how that narrative keeps us thinking about racism as the one dominating presence in the lives of black folks—was a distraction. There’s some shit there obviously. But I realized that so much of our family narrative was distracted by racism, by larger sociopolitical narratives, so that we didn’t pay attention to the ways that we interact generationally.
When I say this I’m thinking about Gayle Jones’s Corregidora. How the great-grandmother’s trauma gets passed down so that generations later, you still hate the slave master ’til the point that you’re unable to focus on what you’re doing in your own life. The extent to which I worship my father is a direct consequence of the way he makes himself a hero in my life. I grow up believing that his progress, his narrative, is more important than mine. I am a supporting character in his story. His story is the story of black uplift. His story is the civil rights story. My generation and on, however, are just there to bear witness to that narrative—and I realize that my father couldn’t see how he was part of this intergenerational story that was supposed to go beyond him because, in his mind, his story ends with him.
This goes back to narrativizing my own blind spot. As an artist, as a writer, as a person in the world, how do I claim my life, in service of my life, as opposed to being this subordinate character in my father’s? Or in service of the civil rights narrative? Or in service of some class, racial uplift narrative? How do I just do what I want to do and not feel beholden to some larger American narrative?
So is ambition something that you actually come to own or is it something that you inherit like debt? You inherit this sense that you have to do something bigger than yourself to prove that you have a right to exist. In this sense, any grand scale achievement, like your Pulitzer win, becomes a symbol of “progress.” Right, when people come up to me and say, “You being a black Pulitzer Prize winner is important for the community,” I’m like well, that’s awesome, but I also just like writing poems. And I would also like to be congratulated for writing nice poems.
When you won the Pulitzer what was your honest response to it? Block out the white noise of everyone else responding to you. How do you, Gregory Pardlo, feel? Fear, because I am sensitive to the ways other people’s narratives inhibit my ability to craft my own.
So if the larger narrative is about this black man who wins the Pulitzer and whatever else we turn this into for our own gain, what would be the Gregory Pardlo narrative about winning the Pulitzer? It would be: We gotta read these poems more closely, and talk about these poems more, which, of course, is a consequence of the Pulitzer. But I think the larger, predominating narrative is “Look at this black man winning this historical prize.”
One of the things I heard a lot after it was announced that I was awarded the Pulitzer was, “When I found out you won, I felt like I did too,” which is great. I don’t resist that narrative, but what that also feeds into is me being a kind of inverted sacrificial lamb. That what I have done was in service of this larger thing that has nothing to do with me. As soon as I try and answer that question, I find myself reaching for somebody else’s narrative about my potential.
It also sounds like what you describe your father did anytime he wasn’t the center of attention: He found a way to steal it. It’s not really your win; it’s everybody’s win, which is to say no one won. But that doesn’t fully answer my question about what you would want the narrative of the Pulitzer win to be. I think this is the central difficulty of what this book is trying to articulate: How do you think outside of those contexts that define you? As much as I want to wrest control of my own narrative, it is ultimately dependent on the larger context from which I derive my identity. I cannot be an isolated person in the world. My enjoyment of life, my sense of self-worth, is tied up in the ways I feel that I contribute to other people’s lives.
Something that I didn’t get around to writing about, but is probably in one of the early drafts and notes, is that having children was so important to me [because] that…was my father’s story. My great-grandfather, grandfather, and my dad all had kids—and I didn’t want to be the one to drop the ball. I can’t isolate my loving my kids from the pride I take in being a father as part of this lineage of fatherhood.
But at the same time, the contradiction there is I do say that I wish I was standing at the podium holding this trophy, not for the sake of the larger community, but to get my father’s acknowledgement. The trophy is a measurement of success that my father would recognize.
In the essay “Intervention” you ask your younger brother, Robbie, how he wants to be remembered when he’s no longer here. I’m going to ask you the same question—how do you want to be remembered? Having had this conversation and thinking about my legacy, an ambitious telling would be to have Gregory Pardlo High Schools around the country. What that symbolizes for me is a sense of permanence.
In this same essay, you also described your alcoholism as being the closest thing you have to religion. What did you mean by that? That is the only place that I feel it’s necessary to acknowledge helplessness. If the ambitious me feels like I can contend with whatever happens in the world outside, the thing that I cannot promise myself with any sense of security is that I’m going to be sober tomorrow.
Alcoholism is the one clear space in my life where my ambition is neutralized. There is no external narrative there. I am entirely in relation to myself. And the only way that I can even look forward to being sober tomorrow is by acknowledging that I have no control over that promise. It’s necessary for me to humble myself in the face of that threat.
Yahdon Israel is a writer, from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, who has written for Avidly, the New Inquiry, Brooklyn Magazine, LitHub, and Poets & Writers. He graduated from the MFA Creative Non-Fiction Writing program at the New School. He is the Awards VP of the National Book Critics Circle; runs a popular Instagram page which promotes literature and fashion under the hashtag Literaryswag, and host a web show for writers called LIT.
Whenever I read a book, I try my best to read it on its own terms. To not allow my understanding of what I think I know—or expectations for what I think should exist—compromise what’s right in front me. What I mean is I try to get out of a book’s way; I try to get out of the writer’s way. Instead of leading, I allow myself to be led, bearing witness to the journey.
In the same way that it’s “easier to build strong children than to repair broken men,” in the words of Frederick Douglass, it’s easier to make mistakes than it is to admit them. This is certainly true for me and, after reading Victor LaValle’s newest novel, The Changeling (Spiegel & Grau), I see I’m not alone. Borrowing its basic premise from folklore, The Changeling is a story that lends language to what happens, or what can happen, when a father, in this case a man named Apollo, is blinded by the fiction that he knows best, even when reality suggests otherwise. Under his nose, and on his watch, Apollo’s son, Brian, is switched out with the baby of a troll, but it is only his wife, Emma, who suspects it—not that she suspects their baby is a troll per se, but Emma knows the child they have is not theirs. Apollo isn’t convinced. This is where social media and technology enter the narrative.
For Apollo, Facebook is the site for which the fiction of his fairytale fathering can be turned into fact. He floods his feed with pictures of his newborn son. Some are clear, others blurry. He receives Likes and comments about what a good father he is, and it’s the Likes that blind him from what should’ve been obvious. The fact that Apollo’s own baby could be switched without his noticing wouldn’t only mean father doesn’t know best, and that Emma knows better, but also: that he knows very little at all. The simmering tension between Apollo and Emma boils over when Emma chains Apollo to a radiator, beats him bloody, kills the troll baby, and disappears into the New York City night. How does Apollo, a man intent on maintaining appearances, figure out that things aren’t always what they appear to be? How does he recover that which he has lost? He learns to listen. No longer to the chamber of voices that echo only what he wants to hear—the language of social media—but to those voices that were always there, telling him what he needed to hear, even when he did not want to hear it.
While reading The Changeling I started to become self-aware of the dependency of my generation (often referred to as “millennials”) on social media—its ability to make us seen and “likeable.” And by the end I realized that the most important technology we have is our ears, our ability to listen to one another. The photographs of me and LaValle, taken periodically during our interview, perfectly illustrate this realization. You’ll notice that there are times when either I’m not listening to LaValle, or he’s not listening to me, but that’s because we each have something in our hands that prevents us from doing so. “If the concept of God,” James Baldwin wrote, “has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.” This is how I’ve learned to feel about anything that’s been given to us with the intention of making us “better” and ultimately failed—whether it’s technology, social media, or even literature. Only when we put down those things that can oftentimes obscure our vision can we truly see—and hear—what’s right in front of us.
LaValle is the author of three three previous novels, The Ecstatic (Crown, 2002), Big Machine (Spigel & Grau, 2009), and TheDevil in Silver (Spiegel & Grau, 2012), as well as a collection of stories, Slapboxing With Jesus (Vintage, 1999), and the novella The Ballad of Black Tom (Tor, 2016). He teaches writing at Columbia University and lives in New York with his wife, author Emily Raboteau, and his two sons.
How long have been working on The Changeling?
About three years. I was trying to take a page from writers who are not super precious with their work. They just produce and produce and produce—and every second or third book might be great, the second one is really damn good and the third one is garbage. But so what? You’re just working through your stuff. I put out The Ballad of Black Tom last year; The Changeling is this year; I’ll have another one next year. This is so I don’t get too fussy.
The first draft of this book, my editor, Chris Jackson, told me, “No one’s gonna sign up for that.”
It literally began with the scene in the kitchen where his wife locks [Apollo] up and is beating the hell out of him and killing the baby. And it just went from there. My publisher, editor, and I all went to lunch together. The publisher, she says, “I’m not going to let Chris buy this book if it starts like this because I can’t imagine anyone who would get into it—and she had good reasons: “You’ll break a lot more people’s hearts if it feels like this is happening to them,” my publisher told me. “I’m not telling you to make it nicer. Right now, you’re doing the equivalent of a horror movie where it’s a gory beheading versus you’re an hour into the movie and you start to really care about these people and then it means more. If you do that, we’ll buy the book.” It was very good advice.
That makes sense because the first hundred pages are like a family history, explaining the circumstances that conspired to make Apollo and Emma’s marriage feel real. What I appreciated was your ability to create a timeline that felt to me like it was happening as it happened to the character.
Sometimes, as readers, we have access to certain information that the character doesn’t. That’s not the case here. The bomb drops on the reader and character at the same time. There’s very little shelter. It really shows how we, as people, move about the world with the information we have—and how that information is often very limited. And the people who withhold information from us, often our parents thinking they’re protecting us, but they’re also putting us in unforeseeable danger as well. I feel like we’re always learning about things that anyone outside of the situation assumes we should already know. You’re just now learning that the thing that you thought didn’t happen actually did. How much of this book is art imitating life? How often do you find yourself navigating moments like the ones Apollo navigates?
Well I always feels like I’m catching up, finding out information late, if at all. I’m always surprised about what I don’t know that I should’ve known—about family members, myself, my kids. And I definitely want the reader to feel like Apollo, in that most of the time he doesn’t know what the hell is going on.
And the irony of that is he’s named after a god. I mean, he’s also named after Carl Weathers’s Apollo Creed, but that is a god’s name. So Apollo, the character, is always at the mercy of what he can’t see. And what’s funny is, every time he tries to assert his authority, a woman usually subverts him. What struck me was the amount of empathy you had for your female characters.
For the past three years I’ve been reading books by men, and thinking about how they write women differently. And it all started when I read The Women by Hilton Als. It’s a 135-page critical memoir about how he basically didn’t realize who his mother was until she died. And not who his mother was in terms of her role in his life. He realized that all he had ever seen of her was as his mother, completely neglecting the fact that she had an interior life. You give each of the women characters a rich interior life. Is that something you knew you wanted to do?
I was trying to think about two things: The particular fairytales about changelings are almost always exclusively about mothers who realize their children had been switched and what they do as a result; and the unstated implication of that is the fathers wouldn’t care or wouldn’t notice because they weren’t present. And my thinking about that bonded with this idea of the “new dad.” Of a certain age and younger there are these men who go, “I’m going to change those diapers,” “I’m going to be at the school.” And the danger of being those new dads—and this is my opinion—I get so much credit for being little more than a minimal dad. I show up for school on Family Fridays and the mothers and teachers are like,“Oh! It’s so good to see you! Oh you’re such a good dad!” and the mothers who are always there volunteering and basically giving blood to the kids are stepped over just so I can be told I’m a good dad—and I haven’t been there for six months! And so I was really thinking about this idea. But as I tried to step up my game, and as Apollo in the book tries to step up his game, as a man and as a father, the seesaw Apollo is walking up, there’s still a bunch of women standing on it so that he can ascend, completely convinced that it is not going to drop out on him at all. And that lead me to thinking, “Well what if we told this fairytale in way that did not go, ‘Oh look how great the dad is,’ and instead the dad is doing his part,” but…these women have been doing this very thing for thousands of years.
Another reason the women characters feel full is because of my wife, Emily Raboteau. I was telling her about how Emma kills the changeling baby and then just runs. Emily asked me, “Well why did she kill the changeling baby?” And I was like, “because she has to, because the plot needs it.” And she was like, “Now that I’m a mother, even if I saw a demon baby I don’t know that I could kill it. It would be too hard.” And this led me to think about how there needs to be message boards where these mothers are sharing info about how to get their babies back. Some Reddit group where they’re talking about the old myths. Then it evolved into something more than her just killing the baby because she was angry at Apollo. The first version was Emma killing the baby because she was angry at Apollo. And Emily asked, “Why would she kill her baby if she’s mad at Apollo? Why doesn’t she kill Apollo?”
And that’s a way to still make the man the center of the narrative.
Exactly! So I asked her, “Well what would be a good reason?” and she said, “The only reason I would ever kill some other baby is if it meant I got my baby back—and it would still kill me to do it.” And so those conversations, her just sort of pushing back, filtered into the book in a lot of good ways that make all the women present in a real way.
Although the book follows Apollo, which by default should suggest he’s the protagonist, Emma strikes me as the protagonist. She’s the real MVP. I feel like Apollo is the threshold for which we get to see Emma be great. In that, the book strikes me, if nothing else, as a love letter/apology to Emily, your wife, for years of, I can only imagine, you not listening to her. This book seems to be saying, “For all the years I haven’t been listening, I am now.” I used to think all that mattered in a conversation was being right. Now I realize people want to be understood. Listened to. Believed.
Sometimes with fiction, readers try to interact with a book on a cosmetic level—plot, character, theme, etc.—to avoid the emotional logic on which the book operates. And that’s the level I think this book is working on—this remorse, this understanding of your place in the world as a father. That for doing so little you get so much, in contrast to the women, the mothers, who do so much but get so little.
I agree with you. At a certain point, I started treating Apollo as the antagonist and Emma as the protagonist so that I could get rid of the male ego thing, but also so that when Apollo says [to Emma], “You’re what’s wrong with this family,” when he think she’s gone crazy for not believing the troll to be their baby, that would only happen if he is the antagonist, and have everyone just sort of hate him. And then when Emma runs, after she kills the baby, the reader maybe responds, “I thought she was the one I’m supposed to like.” And then she’s gone and maybe this gives you time to begin to like Apollo. Part of Apollo’s journey is going from the man who tells his wife, “You’re what’s wrong with this family” to a man who at the end says, “We can’t win without each other.”
Yahdon Israel has written for Avidly, the New Inquiry, LitHub, Guernica, and Brooklyn Magazine. He graduated from the New School with an MFA in creative nonfiction. He currently serves as the VP of Awards and Membership for the National Book Critics Circle and runs a popular Instagram page that promotes literature and fashion under the hashtag #literaryswag.
How does Apollo, a man intent on maintaining appearances, figure out that things aren’t always what they appear to be? How does he recover that which he has lost? He learns to listen.
Whenever I read a book, I try my best to read it on its own terms. To not allow my understanding of what I think I know—or expectations for what I think should exist—compromise what’s right in front me. What I mean is I try to get out of a book’s way; I try to get out of the writer’s way. Instead of leading, I allow myself to be led, bearing witness to the journey.
In the same way that it’s “easier to build strong children than to repair broken men,” in the words of Frederick Douglass, it’s easier to make mistakes than it is to admit them. This is certainly true for me and, after reading Victor LaValle’s newest novel, The Changeling (Spiegel & Grau), I see I’m not alone. Borrowing its basic premise from folklore, The Changeling is a story that lends language to what happens, or what can happen, when a father, in this case a man named Apollo, is blinded by the fiction that he knows best, even when reality suggests otherwise. Under his nose, and on his watch, Apollo’s son, Brian, is switched out with the baby of a troll, but it is only his wife, Emma, who suspects it—not that she suspects their baby is a troll per se, but Emma knows the child they have is not theirs. Apollo isn’t convinced. This is where social media and technology enter the narrative.
For Apollo, Facebook is the site for which the fiction of his fairytale fathering can be turned into fact. He floods his feed with pictures of his newborn son. Some are clear, others blurry. He receives Likes and comments about what a good father he is, and it’s the Likes that blind him from what should’ve been obvious. The fact that Apollo’s own baby could be switched without his noticing wouldn’t only mean father doesn’t know best, and that Emma knows better, but also: that he knows very little at all. The simmering tension between Apollo and Emma boils over when Emma chains Apollo to a radiator, beats him bloody, kills the troll baby, and disappears into the New York City night. How does Apollo, a man intent on maintaining appearances, figure out that things aren’t always what they appear to be? How does he recover that which he has lost? He learns to listen. No longer to the chamber of voices that echo only what he wants to hear—the language of social media—but to those voices that were always there, telling him what he needed to hear, even when he did not want to hear it.
While reading The Changeling I started to become self-aware of the dependency of my generation (often referred to as “millennials”) on social media—its ability to make us seen and “likeable.” And by the end I realized that the most important technology we have is our ears, our ability to listen to one another. The photographs of me and LaValle, taken periodically during our interview, perfectly illustrate this realization. You’ll notice that there are times when either I’m not listening to LaValle, or he’s not listening to me, but that’s because we each have something in our hands that prevents us from doing so. “If the concept of God,” James Baldwin wrote, “has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.” This is how I’ve learned to feel about anything that’s been given to us with the intention of making us “better” and ultimately failed—whether it’s technology, social media, or even literature. Only when we put down those things that can oftentimes obscure our vision can we truly see—and hear—what’s right in front of us.
LaValle is the author of three three previous novels, The Ecstatic (Crown, 2002), Big Machine (Spigel & Grau, 2009), and TheDevil in Silver (Spiegel & Grau, 2012), as well as a collection of stories, Slapboxing With Jesus (Vintage, 1999), and the novella The Ballad of Black Tom (Tor, 2016). He teaches writing at Columbia University and lives in New York with his wife, author Emily Raboteau, and his two sons.
How long have been working on The Changeling?
About three years. I was trying to take a page from writers who are not super precious with their work. They just produce and produce and produce—and every second or third book might be great, the second one is really damn good and the third one is garbage. But so what? You’re just working through your stuff. I put out The Ballad of Black Tom last year; The Changeling is this year; I’ll have another one next year. This is so I don’t get too fussy.
The first draft of this book, my editor, Chris Jackson, told me, “No one’s gonna sign up for that.”
It literally began with the scene in the kitchen where his wife locks [Apollo] up and is beating the hell out of him and killing the baby. And it just went from there. My publisher, editor, and I all went to lunch together. The publisher, she says, “I’m not going to let Chris buy this book if it starts like this because I can’t imagine anyone who would get into it—and she had good reasons: “You’ll break a lot more people’s hearts if it feels like this is happening to them,” my publisher told me. “I’m not telling you to make it nicer. Right now, you’re doing the equivalent of a horror movie where it’s a gory beheading versus you’re an hour into the movie and you start to really care about these people and then it means more. If you do that, we’ll buy the book.” It was very good advice.
That makes sense because the first hundred pages are like a family history, explaining the circumstances that conspired to make Apollo and Emma’s marriage feel real. What I appreciated was your ability to create a timeline that felt to me like it was happening as it happened to the character.
Sometimes, as readers, we have access to certain information that the character doesn’t. That’s not the case here. The bomb drops on the reader and character at the same time. There’s very little shelter. It really shows how we, as people, move about the world with the information we have—and how that information is often very limited. And the people who withhold information from us, often our parents thinking they’re protecting us, but they’re also putting us in unforeseeable danger as well. I feel like we’re always learning about things that anyone outside of the situation assumes we should already know. You’re just now learning that the thing that you thought didn’t happen actually did. How much of this book is art imitating life? How often do you find yourself navigating moments like the ones Apollo navigates?
Well I always feels like I’m catching up, finding out information late, if at all. I’m always surprised about what I don’t know that I should’ve known—about family members, myself, my kids. And I definitely want the reader to feel like Apollo, in that most of the time he doesn’t know what the hell is going on.
And the irony of that is he’s named after a god. I mean, he’s also named after Carl Weathers’s Apollo Creed, but that is a god’s name. So Apollo, the character, is always at the mercy of what he can’t see. And what’s funny is, every time he tries to assert his authority, a woman usually subverts him. What struck me was the amount of empathy you had for your female characters.
For the past three years I’ve been reading books by men, and thinking about how they write women differently. And it all started when I read The Women by Hilton Als. It’s a 135-page critical memoir about how he basically didn’t realize who his mother was until she died. And not who his mother was in terms of her role in his life. He realized that all he had ever seen of her was as his mother, completely neglecting the fact that she had an interior life. You give each of the women characters a rich interior life. Is that something you knew you wanted to do?
I was trying to think about two things: The particular fairytales about changelings are almost always exclusively about mothers who realize their children had been switched and what they do as a result; and the unstated implication of that is the fathers wouldn’t care or wouldn’t notice because they weren’t present. And my thinking about that bonded with this idea of the “new dad.” Of a certain age and younger there are these men who go, “I’m going to change those diapers,” “I’m going to be at the school.” And the danger of being those new dads—and this is my opinion—I get so much credit for being little more than a minimal dad. I show up for school on Family Fridays and the mothers and teachers are like,“Oh! It’s so good to see you! Oh you’re such a good dad!” and the mothers who are always there volunteering and basically giving blood to the kids are stepped over just so I can be told I’m a good dad—and I haven’t been there for six months! And so I was really thinking about this idea. But as I tried to step up my game, and as Apollo in the book tries to step up his game, as a man and as a father, the seesaw Apollo is walking up, there’s still a bunch of women standing on it so that he can ascend, completely convinced that it is not going to drop out on him at all. And that lead me to thinking, “Well what if we told this fairytale in way that did not go, ‘Oh look how great the dad is,’ and instead the dad is doing his part,” but…these women have been doing this very thing for thousands of years.
Another reason the women characters feel full is because of my wife, Emily Raboteau. I was telling her about how Emma kills the changeling baby and then just runs. Emily asked me, “Well why did she kill the changeling baby?” And I was like, “because she has to, because the plot needs it.” And she was like, “Now that I’m a mother, even if I saw a demon baby I don’t know that I could kill it. It would be too hard.” And this led me to think about how there needs to be message boards where these mothers are sharing info about how to get their babies back. Some Reddit group where they’re talking about the old myths. Then it evolved into something more than her just killing the baby because she was angry at Apollo. The first version was Emma killing the baby because she was angry at Apollo. And Emily asked, “Why would she kill her baby if she’s mad at Apollo? Why doesn’t she kill Apollo?”
And that’s a way to still make the man the center of the narrative.
Exactly! So I asked her, “Well what would be a good reason?” and she said, “The only reason I would ever kill some other baby is if it meant I got my baby back—and it would still kill me to do it.” And so those conversations, her just sort of pushing back, filtered into the book in a lot of good ways that make all the women present in a real way.
Although the book follows Apollo, which by default should suggest he’s the protagonist, Emma strikes me as the protagonist. She’s the real MVP. I feel like Apollo is the threshold for which we get to see Emma be great. In that, the book strikes me, if nothing else, as a love letter/apology to Emily, your wife, for years of, I can only imagine, you not listening to her. This book seems to be saying, “For all the years I haven’t been listening, I am now.” I used to think all that mattered in a conversation was being right. Now I realize people want to be understood. Listened to. Believed.
Sometimes with fiction, readers try to interact with a book on a cosmetic level—plot, character, theme, etc.—to avoid the emotional logic on which the book operates. And that’s the level I think this book is working on—this remorse, this understanding of your place in the world as a father. That for doing so little you get so much, in contrast to the women, the mothers, who do so much but get so little.
I agree with you. At a certain point, I started treating Apollo as the antagonist and Emma as the protagonist so that I could get rid of the male ego thing, but also so that when Apollo says [to Emma], “You’re what’s wrong with this family,” when he think she’s gone crazy for not believing the troll to be their baby, that would only happen if he is the antagonist, and have everyone just sort of hate him. And then when Emma runs, after she kills the baby, the reader maybe responds, “I thought she was the one I’m supposed to like.” And then she’s gone and maybe this gives you time to begin to like Apollo. Part of Apollo’s journey is going from the man who tells his wife, “You’re what’s wrong with this family” to a man who at the end says, “We can’t win without each other.”
Yahdon Israel has written for Avidly, the New Inquiry, LitHub, Guernica, and Brooklyn Magazine. He graduated from the New School with an MFA in creative nonfiction. He currently serves as the VP of Awards and Membership for the National Book Critics Circle and runs a popular Instagram page that promotes literature and fashion under the hashtag #literaryswag.
How does Apollo, a man intent on maintaining appearances, figure out that things aren’t always what they appear to be? How does he recover that which he has lost? He learns to listen.
Getting to Ucross is not easy. There aren’t many direct flights into Sheridan, Wyoming. You have to fly to Denver, where there may or may not be a tiny plane waiting to take you the rest of the way. After that, budget another forty-five minutes by car. Unless it’s snowing. If that is the case, you’ll get there when you get there, but once you do, it’s paradise. I have a theory about artists residencies: They are helpful only if they provide something that you don’t have at home. A friend of mine who has a big family says that a retreat is any place her kids are not. When I was a young writer accustomed to writing on a desk shoved into a closet, a room with a window constituted luxury. By my fourth novel I had a room of my own, but I didn’t have peace and natural wonder. Ucross is situated on the open prairie. As an early riser, I delighted in glorious purple-streaked sunrises. Just outside my studio, deer pranced like jackrabbits. Needless to say this was a far cry from my life in Jersey City, where I once looked out of my window just in time to see a greasy raccoon scurry up a lamppost for a better look at the drunks tussling in the middle of the street. In the quiet dawn of Wyoming I solved a major problem in my novel An American Marriage. There in my studio, completely alone, I decided to experiment with an epistolary format. The solitude of Ucross lent itself perfectly to the idea of separated lovers communicating by post. The helpful staffers provided me with a typewriter so I was able to duplicate the way my hero would write letters from prison. Each morning for a month I awoke filled with anticipation. I tiptoed downstairs to my studio where my characters waited for me to break the silence of the dawn with the sharp click of a typewriter, scoring their words onto clean paper.
Three Points of Productivity: 1. It’s multidisciplinary. There’s less of a sense of competition—and less pressure to network, or to be networked—when folks aren’t in the same lane. 2. Meals are provided. Until you don’t have to feed yourself, you don’t realize what a hassle it is to feed yourself; also, good healthy food makes for a strong writing day. 3. The hikes are gorgeous. A daily sojourn into nature became a way to loosen up knots in my story; it was a meditation of sorts.
Tayari Jones is the author of four books, including the novel An American Marriage, published by Algonquin Books in February.
Ucross Foundation: Two- to six-week residencies from March through early June and from mid-August through early December to poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers on a working ranch in Ucross, Wyoming. Residents are provided with lodging, studio space, and meals. Next deadline: March 1. Ucross Foundation Residency Program, 30 Big Red Lane, Clearmont, WY 82835. (307) 737-2291. www.ucrossfoundation.org
I left the Millay Colony with a new relationship to deodorant and a new respect for wild turkeys, but it was my second collection and the relationships with my friends and collaborators that were born anew in that beloved barn. My month at Millay was split between a four-week individual residency and a weeklong group residency with the Dark Noise Collective, my artistic and chosen family. I showed up to Millay a lotta bit nervous but curious about what doors in my work would open up there, out of my element. (I’m very much used to being Black&FreeInTheCity, not Black&LostInTheWood.) Thankfully the staff and the land itself, which seems infused with some soft blessing by Edna herself, make it hard not to settle in and let the work take you. Millay is where my book became a book. I had time and space to play in new forms, get to the questions I didn’t always have the time to think. I got to the bottom of myself there. Millay offered comfort and the space for deep meditation and investigation. During the group residency, our relationships to one another and our work had no choice but to deepen, having been given so much time to be with one another, away from noise and worry. Millay is held up in my heart as one of the best places artists can go to toil and dance in the hard labor that feeds them most.
Three Points of Productivity:
1. The cooking is excellent, the groceries for all other meals are provided, and the kitchen is great for dancing. 2. The land surrounding the residency is perfect for people who love nature and people who are new to it and scared of it just the same. 3. If you’re ever feeling low on inspiration, you can just Google all the writers and artists who have carved their names into the doorframes to get some juice.
Danez Smith is the author of two books, including Don’t Call Us Dead, published by Graywolf Press in 2017.
The Millay Colony: Two- and four-week residencies from April through November for poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers at Steepletop, the former estate of Edna St. Vincent Millay in Austerlitz, New York. Residents are provided with lodging, studio space, and meals. Next deadline: March 1. Millay Colony for the Arts, 454 East Hill Road, P.O. Box 3, Austerlitz, NY 12017. (518) 392-3103. www.millaycolony.org
This is the twenty-fourth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
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Last week I wrote about how I came to make Roy the protagonist of my new novel, An AmericanMarriage. The decision was frustrating because I came to this tale seeking to amplify the muffled voices of women who live on the margins of the crisis of mass incarceration. So imagine how hard it was for me to make the Roy’s story the main color of the take and relegate Celestial’s point of view to a mere accent wall. It nearly killed me. I was prepared to pull the novel from publication.
Luckily, I had a craft epiphany.
Roy is a great character. He’s like Odysseus, a brave and charismatic man returned home from a might battle. He just wants to get home and be taken care of by a loving wife and sheltered in a gracious house. His voice was very easy to write because he is easy to like; his desires and decisions make it easy to empathize with him. He is a wrongfully incarcerated black man. What decent person wouldn’t root for him?
Celestial was bit more challenging. She’s ambitious. She’s kind of stubborn. And most important, she isn’t really cut out to be a dutiful wife. Back when she was the protagonist of the novel, I used to say, “I am writing a novel about a woman whose husband is wrongfully incarcerated…” and everyone would expect the novel to be about her fight to free him. And it wasn’t. It was about her decision not to wait.
On the level of craft, it just didn’t work. For one thing, you can’t write a compelling novel about what someone doesn’t do. (There is a reason why Bartelby doesn’t get to narrate his own story.) Second, as I wrote last week, Roy’s crisis is just too intense and distracting for the reader to care about any other character as much.
So, what to do?
I foregrounded Roy. He is the protagonist and readers find him to be very “relatable” (my very least favorite word in the world). I took Roy on the journey, and I invite readers to accompany him. As the writer, I came to the table understanding that the expectations put on women to be “ride or die” are completely unreasonable; furthermore, there is no expectation of reciprocity. But rather than use Celestial’s voice to amplify my position, I allowed Roy the hard work of interrogating his world view, and the reader, by proxy, must do the same.
The result is a novel that was a lot harder to write, but the questions I posed to myself and my readers were richer, more complex, and I hope, more satisfying.
Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.
This is the twenty-first in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
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Like most thoughtful people, I have noticed that the world is on fire and I want to use my skills to help extinguish the flames. To this end, I set out five years ago to write a novel that addresses the injustice of wrongful incarceration. I applied for and received a fellowship to the Radcliffe Institute and I became a dedicated researcher. I learned a lot, so much so that I got angry just watching Law & Order, my ex-favorite television show. I was informed, “woke,” and motivated, but I couldn’t write a novel because I had no story. The problem was that I was trying to write to the issue, and I can only write a story that is issue-adjacent.
I know I have a novel when I have a question to which I don’t know the moral/ethical answer. When it comes to wrongful incarceration, I am not torn. The state should not imprison innocent people. Full stop. Also without ambiguity: The prison system is cruel, corrupt, and in desperate need of reform, if not abolition.
So where was the novel?
The answer revealed itself in a food court where I spied a young couple. She was dressed in a lovely cashmere coat. He wore inexpensive khakis and a polo. They were clearly angry, and clearly in love. I overheard the woman say, “Roy, you know you wouldn’t have waited on me for seven years.” He shot back, “What are you talking about? This shit wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place.”
Just then, I knew I had a novel. The reason is that I understood that they were both probably right. I didn’t know him, but I couldn’t quite picture him waiting chastely by for seven years. At the same time, I couldn’t imagine her behind bars. But did he have a right to demand her loyalty when both seem to agree she would be in no position to demand the same? Was this question moot since she would not likely face this challenge? Was this a kind of privilege? Could she mitigate this privilege by waiting like a modern-day Penelope? Should she?
So we have a couple with a conflict, and at stake between them are issues of reciprocity, duty, and love. Yes, there is the injustice of mass incarceration. And yes, this injustice is fueled by racism and prejudice. Neither of them doubt this, and neither do I. But the question of “will you wait for me” is foremost on his mind.
The result is my new novel, An American Marriage. Roy and Celestial are newlyweds, married only eighteen months, when Roy is arrested for a crime he did not commit. When he is slapped with a twelve-year sentence, the questions of desire and responsibility are at the center of the characters’ lives. As a writer, I was genuinely torn: Roy needs Celestial to be a link to the life he left behind, and Celestial loves her husband, but she has only one life. I wrote this novel not only to satisfy my heart’s curiosity as to what they would do, but to also satisfy the part of my mind that wondered what should they do.
I realized that my passion for the issue of incarceration was the reason that I couldn’t write about it directly. A novel is not me, as a writer, telling the reader what I already know. And an honest novel is not about me pretending to take on “both sides” of an issue about which I have a clear opinion. I had to start with my issue and then walk away from it until I found the thing I didn’t know. To truly challenge the reader, I had to challenge myself as well.
Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.
This is the eleventh in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
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Years ago a distinguished poet hosted our class’s workshops at her home in Virginia. The house was perched on an incline; down the hill was her writing cabin alongside a pond. We met at her dining room table and tried not to be distracted by the hawks swooping outside the windows.
A student brought in a draft that compared the scent of gin to Scotch tape. Setting aside all other matters of theme or craft, the discussion lingered on this comparison. The simile was bright and original. But was it accurate? That only a few in the room had ever sampled gin, and even then only of an aristrocrat variety, did not aid our analysis.
Reaching her limit, the professor sprang up from the table. “We’re settling this,” she said. She walked into the kitchen and retrieved a roll of Scotch tape. She went to a corner of the dining room, opened a cabinet, and pulled out a bottle. She walked the gin around the table so we could sniff accordingly.
Lesson one? To compare the scents of Scotch tape and gin doesn’t quite work, because the former obscures the latter’s floral qualities.
Lesson two? Always be prepared to have your simile put to the test.
Lesson three? Never let a turn of figurative language, no matter how vivid or clever, hijack what you’re trying to say. I can’t remember who wrote that poem, or where its heart lay. I only remember the gin and Scotch tape.
Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.
This is the tenth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
***
I attended a high school geared toward professions in science or technology, so I have an active analytical streak and crave objective rubrics for understanding the wildly creative poems, stories, and essays that I read. I suspect I’m not alone in this.
One of my mentors, Gregory Orr, articulated four “temperaments” of poetry in a 1988 essay titled “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry.” You can envision these facets of craft as quadrants, positioned on an X-Y axis. To the left, limiting impulses: “Story” in the upper quadrant and, below it, “Structure.” To the right, impulses that extend limitlessness: “Music” in the upper and, below it, “Imagination.” Though designed for poetry, I find these temperaments useful for prose as well. As writers, we each typically favor two of the four in our work. Which temperaments bring you to the page? Which come easiest to you? Which do you need to consciously strengthen in your work?
This system gives us a way to articulate differences in aesthetic without ranking them. I’m relieved to set aside presumptive hierarchies. I suspect I’m not alone in this.
Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.
This is the eighth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
***
Beware the indeterminate “it,” I often say, when fine-tuning a draft.
But that word is so convenient. “It” carries the football from the previous sentence. Whatever “it” you just defined, you’re sticking with it for another ten yards, right?
Except that you’re fumbling the play. Too often, relying on “it” dissipates your language’s energy. Circle every “it” that leads off a sentence. Revising to avoid these instances will force your verbs into action, and clarify your intent.
This is not a hard-and-fast rule. Sometimes an indeterminate “it” will remain, one that has earned its place on the field. The pronoun can be strategic—signifying not just gender neutrality but an absence of comprehension or known name, a fumbling toward meaning, the building of suspense.
In the right hands, “It” can be a potent force. Just ask Stephen King.
Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.
This is the ninth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.
***
“Too many hours of revising—to no clear end!” my student complains. He is tired. He feels like the poem never really gets better. There’s always more work to do.
Welcome to revision: the arbitrary realm in which we debate “the” versus “an,” “this” versus “that.” Spend an hour putting a comma in. An hour later, take it out.
Part of the problem is that we complicate the revision process by making our aims abstract. One big revision, we promise ourselves, will make the poem “better.” Don’t privilege “better,” which is a meaningless term. Assign clear and objective tasks. Devote one round of revision exclusively to heightening your imagery, another to reconsidering your verb choices, a third to playing with lineation or tense.
Think of each revision as an experiment. Often these experiments will feel like evolutionary progress, and you’ll keep their results intact. Not always, especially as you near the end of the revision process. When the new version fails to appeal—when you find yourself resisting, reverting, defending an earlier choice—you are locating the poem’s true form. You are identifying what makes this poem yours, and yours alone.
Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.
This is the seventh in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
***
A friend of mine, a poet, was trying to figure out what bothered him about a draft of my poem. “A poem should be like a wall,” he told me. “You build it brick by brick.” He pointed out that, in his opinion, key bricks were missing.
I didn’t share his vision, but I admired that he had one. I’ve come to value developing a metaphorical model for your genre. A model can help you identify your goals, name your struggles, and proceed toward success.
Perhaps you follow the lead of “stanza,” the Italian word for “room.” You come to think of each poem as a house. How do the rooms differ in function, size, and occupancy? Where does your central drama take place? What comprises your roof?
Perhaps you come to think of your essay as a harp. Each researched fact glimmers, an available string in a golden frame. But you can’t play them all at once. Only in choosing which notes to highlight, and how to sequence them, can you create music.
Personally, I always think of memoir as an egg. I’m protective of the inspiring memory, smooth and undisturbed in its surface. But I have to be prepared to break the egg. I have to make the idea messy before I can make a satisfying meal.
Perhaps your novel is a shark. Perhaps your villanelle is a waltz. Perhaps your short story is a baseball game. Don’t adopt my metaphors. Find one of your own.
Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.
This is the first in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
***
As a project for school, my thirteen-year-old son, Will, spent several days carrying an egg around. His task was simple: Keep the egg from breaking.
The experiment was intended to show what it’s like to have a baby, to approximate the feeling of constant vigilance that never leaves you once you have a child. Ultimately, of course, it was supposed to make hormone-addled adolescents think twice before doing something stupid.
As a mother of three, though, I wasn’t convinced. A baby is nothing like an egg, unless it’s an egg that cries, wets itself, sucks on you constantly, and wakes you up four times a night. But as my son described the feeling of carrying his egg—he named it “Pablito”—I realized that it did remind me of something. “It’s always there,” Will said. “You can’t forget it or take it for granted. You feel protective and anxious all the time.”
Carrying an egg around is like writing a novel. No matter what else you’re doing, the fact of the novel is in the back of your mind. If you go too long without attending to it, you get nervous. It is always with you, a weight solid and yet fragile, in constant danger of being crushed. Like the egg, the weight of a book-in-progress is both literal and metaphorical. Within the accumulating pages, as inside the delicate eggshell, are the raw ingredients for something greater. Keeping it intact requires patience, time, attention—and, most of all, commitment. This concept applies to any stage of the process: The egg is both the idea that you nurture long before you begin to write, and the writing itself, which must be fostered and sustained.
Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.
This is the third in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
***
Jackson Pollock’s reply to an interviewer’s question about how he composed his paintings of “accidental” splatterings has stuck with me. “I don’t use the accident,” he said. “I deny the accident.”
The sheer bravado of this is thrilling, and as a writer I find it to be a useful way to think about my work-in-progress. When I’m putting words on the page it’s easy to second guess, to question the often-unconscious choices I make as I go: the trajectories of characters’ lives, shifts in direction and focus, minor characters who gain traction as the story moves forward. The editor in my head starts whispering: You’re going in the wrong direction. Why are you spending so much time on that character? You need to focus, get back to the story you originally envisioned, stick to the plan.
Over time I’ve learned to trust my impulses. Whatever else they may be, these unanticipated detours are fresh and surprising; they keep me interested, and often end up adding depth to the work. Not always, of course—sometimes an accident is just an accident. But believing that these splatterings on my own canvas are there for a reason, as part of a larger process of conception, gives me the audacity to experiment.
Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.
This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
***
The problem of beginning…
The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you’re having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.
On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season….
Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.
This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
***
The problem of beginning…
The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you’re having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.
On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season….
Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.
This is the second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
***
The problem of beginning…
The Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who was director of creative writing at the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student there, always said that if you’re having trouble getting into a chapter or a scene you should use all five senses right at the start, preferably in the first paragraph. Touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight. Your scene will jump to life, and you’ll have an easier time falling into the dream world of the story.
On a related note, Gustave Flaubert kept rotten apples in his desk drawer to evoke autumn when writing scenes that took place in that season….
Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published this month by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.
This is the sixth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
***
Anna Karenina is more than eight hundred pages long. So why does it feel shorter than many three-hundred-page books?
As I read this novel recently I noticed that Tolstoy cuts his long scenes into short chapters, usually no more than two or three pages. This makes sense, considering it was published in serial installments, from 1873 to 1877, in the Russian Messenger. Tolstoy often ends a chapter in a moment of suspense—a door opens, a provocative question is asked, a contentious group sits down to dinner, characters who’ve been circling each other finally begin to talk—which propels the reader forward into the next chapter.
The psychological effect of these short chapters is that this huge book is easy to get through. Reading in bed late at night (as I tend to do), I’m tempted to put it down, but then I riffle ahead to find that the next chapter is only three pages long. And I really want to find out who’s behind that door.
Three pages. I can do that—as a reader and as a writer.
Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website ischristinabakerkline.com.
This is the fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
***
For many writers, visual and tactile stimulation is an important component of the creative process. William Faulkner used to map his stories on the wall in his study. If you visit Rowan Oak, his home in Oxford, Mississippi, you can still see the notes for his 1954 novel, A Fable, in his precise, small handwriting. Edwidge Danticat has said that she has an evolving bulletin board in her workspace where she tacks up collages of photos of Haiti and images from magazines.
I, too, have a new board for each book I write. When I’m starting work on a novel I gather scraps like a magpie. My Orphan Train board was covered with postcards from the New York Tenement Museum depicting the interior of an immigrant Irish family’s cramped apartment, a black and white photograph of a young couple at Coney Island in the 1920s, a map of the village of Kinvara in Ireland. I hung a hand-carved Celtic cross on a green ribbon and a stone shamrock on a red ribbon from Galway; a Native American dreamcatcher from Maine; a silver train pin from a New York Train Riders’ reunion in Little Falls, Minnesota. I tacked up note cards: “Food in Ireland 1900s” was one (“wheatmeal, hung beef, tongue, barley”). Another listed ideas I wanted to explore (“links between misplaced and abandoned people with little in common”).
For A Piece of the World, I included a print of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World; photos I took, inside and out, of Christina’s home in Cushing, Maine; some Emily Dickinson poems (“This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me”); and postcards of other paintings Wyeth did at the Olson house, including Wind From the Sea and Christina Olson (both of which make appearances in my novel). I photocopied sketches Wyeth made for his portrait of Christina. I even included a small handful of grasses I’d plucked from the field Christina sat in.
I find these idea boards fun to assemble and inspiring as I work. My mantra, always: Find inspiration where you can.
Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.
An outline of A Fable on the wall of William Faulkner’s study at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi.
This is the fourth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
***
Dialogue is hard to get right. It should sound like natural speech, but in fact it’s nothing like it. I like to send my creative writing students out to cafés and parks with notebooks to transcribe bits of overheard conversations. Then I ask them to type up these transcripts and turn them into dialogue between characters. Inevitably their written dialogue bears little resemblance to the overheard conversations. When you write dialogue you must eliminate niceties and unnecessary patter, and cut to the core of the exchange—unless the patter is crucial to the story, conveying a dissembling, depressed, incoherent, or boring personality. At the same time, it should sound natural, like something someone would actually say. The writer George Garrett called this dovetailing—trimming for verisimilitude and impact.
In direct and indirect speech, your characters should constantly be saying “no” to each other. Most of us (myself included) tend to avoid conflict in our real lives, but conflict is crucial in fiction. It keeps the story interesting.
Richard Price, in his novel Lush Life, allows his characters to talk and talk and talk. Price maintains a delicate balancing act; his characters’ words matter. What they say changes the direction of the story. But he never burdens his dialogue with exposition or forces it to convey plot points that don’t come up naturally. In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway writes, “In order to engage us emotionally in a disagreement, the characters must have an emotional stake in the outcome.” Price’s characters are nothing if not emotionally invested.
Price’s dialogue is vital to the story because it moves the action forward. He constantly puts his characters in conflict with one another. Their conversations are full of surprises—self-revelation, inadvertent admissions, hearsay, evidence—and kinetic energy; they crackle with life. Real life.
Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website ischristinabakerkline.com.
This is the fourth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
***
Dialogue is hard to get right. It should sound like natural speech, but in fact it’s nothing like it. I like to send my creative writing students out to cafés and parks with notebooks to transcribe bits of overheard conversations. Then I ask them to type up these transcripts and turn them into dialogue between characters. Inevitably their written dialogue bears little resemblance to the overheard conversations. When you write dialogue you must eliminate niceties and unnecessary patter, and cut to the core of the exchange—unless the patter is crucial to the story, conveying a dissembling, depressed, incoherent, or boring personality. At the same time, it should sound natural, like something someone would actually say. The writer George Garrett called this dovetailing—trimming for verisimilitude and impact.
In direct and indirect speech, your characters should constantly be saying “no” to each other. Most of us (myself included) tend to avoid conflict in our real lives, but conflict is crucial in fiction. It keeps the story interesting.
Richard Price, in his novel Lush Life, allows his characters to talk and talk and talk. Price maintains a delicate balancing act; his characters’ words matter. What they say changes the direction of the story. But he never burdens his dialogue with exposition or forces it to convey plot points that don’t come up naturally. In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway writes, “In order to engage us emotionally in a disagreement, the characters must have an emotional stake in the outcome.” Price’s characters are nothing if not emotionally invested.
Price’s dialogue is vital to the story because it moves the action forward. He constantly puts his characters in conflict with one another. Their conversations are full of surprises—self-revelation, inadvertent admissions, hearsay, evidence—and kinetic energy; they crackle with life. Real life.
Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website ischristinabakerkline.com.
This is the fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
***
For many writers, visual and tactile stimulation is an important component of the creative process. William Faulkner used to map his stories on the wall in his study. If you visit Rowan Oak, his home in Oxford, Mississippi, you can still see the notes for his 1954 novel, A Fable, in his precise, small handwriting. Edwidge Danticat has said that she has an evolving bulletin board in her workspace where she tacks up collages of photos of Haiti and images from magazines.
I, too, have a new board for each book I write. When I’m starting work on a novel I gather scraps like a magpie. My Orphan Train board was covered with postcards from the New York Tenement Museum depicting the interior of an immigrant Irish family’s cramped apartment, a black and white photograph of a young couple at Coney Island in the 1920s, a map of the village of Kinvara in Ireland. I hung a hand-carved Celtic cross on a green ribbon and a stone shamrock on a red ribbon from Galway; a Native American dreamcatcher from Maine; a silver train pin from a New York Train Riders’ reunion in Little Falls, Minnesota. I tacked up note cards: “Food in Ireland 1900s” was one (“wheatmeal, hung beef, tongue, barley”). Another listed ideas I wanted to explore (“links between misplaced and abandoned people with little in common”).
For A Piece of the World, I included a print of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World; photos I took, inside and out, of Christina’s home in Cushing, Maine; some Emily Dickinson poems (“This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me”); and postcards of other paintings Wyeth did at the Olson house, including Wind From the Sea and Christina Olson (both of which make appearances in my novel). I photocopied sketches Wyeth made for his portrait of Christina. I even included a small handful of grasses I’d plucked from the field Christina sat in.
I find these idea boards fun to assemble and inspiring as I work. My mantra, always: Find inspiration where you can.
Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.
An outline of A Fable on the wall of William Faulkner’s study at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi.
This is the fifth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing fiction. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
***
For many writers, visual and tactile stimulation is an important component of the creative process. William Faulkner used to map his stories on the wall in his study. If you visit Rowan Oak, his home in Oxford, Mississippi, you can still see the notes for his 1954 novel, A Fable, in his precise, small handwriting. Edwidge Danticat has said that she has an evolving bulletin board in her workspace where she tacks up collages of photos of Haiti and images from magazines.
I, too, have a new board for each book I write. When I’m starting work on a novel I gather scraps like a magpie. My Orphan Train board was covered with postcards from the New York Tenement Museum depicting the interior of an immigrant Irish family’s cramped apartment, a black and white photograph of a young couple at Coney Island in the 1920s, a map of the village of Kinvara in Ireland. I hung a hand-carved Celtic cross on a green ribbon and a stone shamrock on a red ribbon from Galway; a Native American dreamcatcher from Maine; a silver train pin from a New York Train Riders’ reunion in Little Falls, Minnesota. I tacked up note cards: “Food in Ireland 1900s” was one (“wheatmeal, hung beef, tongue, barley”). Another listed ideas I wanted to explore (“links between misplaced and abandoned people with little in common”).
For A Piece of the World, I included a print of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World; photos I took, inside and out, of Christina’s home in Cushing, Maine; some Emily Dickinson poems (“This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me”); and postcards of other paintings Wyeth did at the Olson house, including Wind From the Sea and Christina Olson (both of which make appearances in my novel). I photocopied sketches Wyeth made for his portrait of Christina. I even included a small handful of grasses I’d plucked from the field Christina sat in.
I find these idea boards fun to assemble and inspiring as I work. My mantra, always: Find inspiration where you can.
Christina Baker Kline is the author of six novels, including A Piece of the World, published in February by William Morrow. Her website is christinabakerkline.com.
An outline of A Fable on the wall of William Faulkner’s study at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi.
This is the ninth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each Tuesday for a new Craft Capsule.
***
“Too many hours of revising—to no clear end!” my student complains. He is tired. He feels like the poem never really gets better. There’s always more work to do.
Welcome to revision: the arbitrary realm in which we debate “the” versus “an,” “this” versus “that.” Spend an hour putting a comma in. An hour later, take it out.
Part of the problem is that we complicate the revision process by making our aims abstract. One big revision, we promise ourselves, will make the poem “better.” Don’t privilege “better,” which is a meaningless term. Assign clear and objective tasks. Devote one round of revision exclusively to heightening your imagery, another to reconsidering your verb choices, a third to playing with lineation or tense.
Think of each revision as an experiment. Often these experiments will feel like evolutionary progress, and you’ll keep their results intact. Not always, especially as you near the end of the revision process. When the new version fails to appeal—when you find yourself resisting, reverting, defending an earlier choice—you are locating the poem’s true form. You are identifying what makes this poem yours, and yours alone.
Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.
This is the eighth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
***
Beware the indeterminate “it,” I often say, when fine-tuning a draft.
But that word is so convenient. “It” carries the football from the previous sentence. Whatever “it” you just defined, you’re sticking with it for another ten yards, right?
Except that you’re fumbling the play. Too often, relying on “it” dissipates your language’s energy. Circle every “it” that leads off a sentence. Revising to avoid these instances will force your verbs into action, and clarify your intent.
This is not a hard-and-fast rule. Sometimes an indeterminate “it” will remain, one that has earned its place on the field. The pronoun can be strategic—signifying not just gender neutrality but an absence of comprehension or known name, a fumbling toward meaning, the building of suspense.
In the right hands, “It” can be a potent force. Just ask Stephen King.
Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.
This is the tenth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
***
I attended a high school geared toward professions in science or technology, so I have an active analytical streak and crave objective rubrics for understanding the wildly creative poems, stories, and essays that I read. I suspect I’m not alone in this.
One of my mentors, Gregory Orr, articulated four “temperaments” of poetry in a 1988 essay titled “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry.” You can envision these facets of craft as quadrants, positioned on an X-Y axis. To the left, limiting impulses: “Story” in the upper quadrant and, below it, “Structure.” To the right, impulses that extend limitlessness: “Music” in the upper and, below it, “Imagination.” Though designed for poetry, I find these temperaments useful for prose as well. As writers, we each typically favor two of the four in our work. Which temperaments bring you to the page? Which come easiest to you? Which do you need to consciously strengthen in your work?
This system gives us a way to articulate differences in aesthetic without ranking them. I’m relieved to set aside presumptive hierarchies. I suspect I’m not alone in this.
Sandra Beasley is the author of three poetry collections, including Count the Waves (Norton, 2015), and a memoir. Her website is SandraBeasley.com.
This is the twentieth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
***
Several years ago I worked with a student who was writing a novel about a guy training for a career in the sport of mixed martial arts. The novel was exciting and interesting, and the writing was strong and compelling. Until the fighting began. The minute the bell rang and the fists and feet started flying, the pace of the narrative turned glacial.
This may come as a surprise to you; it certainly surprised me. The talented author was actually a former MMA fighter, so it seemed impossible that he was unable to write an exciting fight scene. Then I realized that fight scenes are rarely exciting on the page. I believe this is true for two reasons. First, a fistfight is a process, and processes rarely make for compelling reading. Second, fistfights are exciting because they unfold in real time, which is wholly different than page time.
I want to talk about process first. Process is part of our daily lives, and many of the processes we undertake are performed through rote memory: brushing our teeth, making coffee, pouring cereal. These processes aren’t very interesting, and they don’t really need to be written about in detail. Readers may need to know that your characters drink coffee, eat cereal, and brush their teeth, but they don’t need to see this happening. Telling them it happened is enough. This is an example of when telling should be privileged over showing. But sometimes you may want to show a process, especially if it proves a level of expertise. Perhaps you’re writing about a character who is skilled with firearms, and you want to show that level of knowledge and skill. Perhaps you should have a scene in which the character goes through the process of breaking down and cleaning a firearm.
Most often, when readers start down the road of reading about process they’re not interested in the process itself; they’re interested in the outcome. The fight scenes in my student’s mixed martial arts novel are a good example. While the scenes were very technical and showed the same level of skill and mastery that I just mentioned, as a reader I quickly became bogged down in the descriptions of the movements, and I lost a sense of the movements themselves. I found myself skipping through the process of the fight in order to discover whether or not our hero won the fight. I realized that as a reader I was more interested in the outcome than I was in the process. The scene hinged on the result of the fight as an event, not on the act of fighting.
Not only were the fight scenes weighed down by process, they were also slowed down by the act of reading. Let’s step out of the ring. Think about the fights or dustups or schoolyard shoving matches you’ve witnessed. How long did they last before someone stepped in or called the parents or the teachers came running? Thirty seconds? A minute? A few minutes, tops? These events almost always unfold very quickly. The movements are fast; words are exchanged at a rapid clip. Your eyes and ears are able to take in the movements and the verbal exchanges simultaneously. Now, imagine trying to portray these events verbatim on the page. Think about how many words would be required to nail down both the movements and the dialogue. It would take much longer to read that scene than it would to witness it.
There’s an old writerly saying that dialogue isn’t speech, but rather an approximation of speech. Sometimes, this is true of action, especially in terms of process.
Wiley Cash is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Last Ballad, A Land More Kind Than Home, and This Dark Road to Mercy. He currently serves as the writer in residence at the University of North Carolina in Asheville and teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program. He lives with his wife and two young daughters in Wilmington, North Carolina. His website is www.wileycash.com.
This is the nineteenth in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
***
When I work with new writers, one thing I often notice is their lack of faith in their dialogue: They don’t trust that it’s strong enough to stand on its own. They feel that they must add something to really get the point across. These writers add action words to their dialogue tags in an attempt to hide any flaws they fear may be hiding in their characters’ verbal interactions. In other words, they do everything they can to make certain that the reader gets the full import of what the characters are attempting, consciously or unconsciously, to communicate.
Often, and unfortunately, these action words take the form of gerunds. Let me follow this with a caveat: Gerunds in dialogue tags are not always a bad thing if they’re used purposefully and sparingly. I use them. Other writers I admire use them. But if I’ve used a gerund in a dialogue tag then I can defend it because I’ve already spent a good deal of time trying to consider whether or not to use it.
The gerunds in dialogue tags that bother me are the ones that are clearly there to underpin weakness in the dialogue. This happens when writers feel they need an action to complement a line of dialogue. Here’s an example:
“What do you mean?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders.
Let’s add an adverb and make that gerund really awful.
“What do you mean?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders nervously.
The writer (in this case, me) felt the need to add that gerund (and perhaps the adjective as well) because the dialogue itself was pretty weak. “What do you mean?” is a boring question. Anyone can ask this, but your character can’t just be anyone. He has to be a particular person with particular turns of phrase and particular movements (what are often called “beats” in dialogue) to flesh out what he means.
Let’s give it another try, and this time let’s write a better line of dialogue that essentially says the same thing as our original, just more clearly.
“What am I supposed to say to that?” He shrugged his shoulders. “What does that even mean?”
I tinkered a little with the original line and split it into two, but I divided the two lines with the beat of action. I feel like my two lines are pretty strong, and they seem particular to this person, whoever he is. Because my dialogue is strong, it doesn’t need the support of action. So my action can stand alone.
The action also does something the dialogue cannot do. It illustrates visually what the dialogue means verbally. The phrase “What am I supposed to say to that?” is a phrase of exasperation, so the action takes this a step further and shows exasperation. The follow-up question of “What does that even mean?” amplifies both the original question and the action.
If I had kept the gerund shrugging it would have combined the dialogue and the action, which crowds the reader’s mind in asking her or him to do two things at once: see and hear. Let’s focus on asking one thing of our reader at a time. The act of reading is not the act of movie watching, which often requires viewers both to see and hear at the same time. Literature and film cannot do the same things in the same ways.
The gerund shrugging is also a weak action word because it does not have a clearly demarcated time of beginning. How long has this guy been shrugging? After all, we enter the word “shrugging,” and presumably the dialogue, as the shrugging is already under way. On the other hand, when we read the line “He shrugged his shoulders” we are entering the action at the moment it begins. It has not been unfold-ing since an indeterminate moment in time. The action feels particular, as if it is caused by the line of dialogue that precedes it. It gives us a chance both to digest the dialogue and imagine the action. It does not ask us to do both at the same time with the confusion of wondering when the shrugging actually began. This is deliberate writing. We should all be deliberate writers.
I want to close with a few lines of dialogue from my upcoming novel, The Last Ballad. In this scene, a man has just come up a riverbank and met a small boy standing at a crossroad. The boy is staring down into a ditch where his injured dog is lying. The man asks the boy where they are.
The boy lifted his eyes from the ditch and looked around as if getting his bearings.
“Gaston,” the boy finally said.
“Gaston,” he repeated. He looked down at the boy. “Do you mean Gaston County?”
The boy shrugged.
“Mama just says ‘Gaston’ when she says ‘here.’”
I worked really hard on this scene. I wanted it to communicate an edge of laconic strangeness. The boy’s poverty has rendered him a bit provincial. The man’s travels have rendered him a bit wistful. I purposefully separated the actions from the lines of dialogue and cordoned them off in their own sentences.
But what if I’d used gerunds?
“Gaston,” the boy finally said, lifting his eyes from the ditch and looking around as if getting his bearings.
“Gaston,” he repeated, looking down at the boy. “Do you mean Gaston County?”
“Mama just says ‘Gaston’ when she says ‘here,’” the boy said, shrugging.
Written this way, the scene unfolds too quickly. The boy gives his answer about their location before getting his bearings. The man’s quizzical repetition of the word “Gaston” is marred by his deliberate action of looking down at the boy. The words and the actions do not go together. They must be separated and addresses and experienced on their own terms.
My advice is this: Trust your dialogue. If you don’t, make it stronger. Then, once your dialogue is strong, bring in action beats that amplify the speaker’s message, not messy gerunds that clutter it.
Wiley Cash is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Last Ballad, A Land More Kind Than Home, and This Dark Road to Mercy. He currently serves as the writer in residence at the University of North Carolina in Asheville and teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program. He lives with his wife and two young daughters in Wilmington, North Carolina. His website is www.wileycash.com.
This is the twenty-second in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
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The cell phone is the worst thing to ever happen to literature. Seriously. So many great fictional plots hinge on one detail: The characters can’t connect. Most famous is Romeo and Juliet. If she just could have texted him, “R, I might look dead, but I’m not. Lolz,” then none of this would have happened.
In my new novel, An American Marriage, both e-mail and cell phones threatened my plot. Here is a basic overview: A young couple, Celestial and Roy, married only eighteen months, are torn apart when the husband is wrongfully incarcerated and given a twelve-year prison sentence. After five years, he is released and wants to resume his old life with her.
A good chunk of the novel is correspondence between our separated lovers. In real life, they probably would have used e-mail. But the problem, plot-wise, is that e-mail is so off-the-cuff, and there is so little time between messages. I needed to use old-fashioned letters. Their messages needed to be deep and thoughtful, and I wanted them to have some time to stew between missives. But who in their right mind (besides me) uses paper and pen when e-mail is so much faster and easier?
The fix was that Roy uses his allocated computer time in prison to write e-mail for the other inmates, for pay. As he says, “It’s a little cottage industry.” He also explains that he likes to write letters to his wife at night when no one is looking over his shoulder or rushing him.
So look how this fix worked: You see that even though he is incarcerated, his is still a man with a plan. The challenge was to figure out how to avoid e-mail in such a way that it didn’t read like I was just trying to come up with an excuse to write a Victorian-style epistolary novel.
The cell phone was harder to navigate. Spoiler: Celestial has taken up with another man, Andre, in the five years that her husband is incarcerated. A crucial plot point, which I will not spoil, involves Andre not being able get in touch with her. Well, in the present day there is no way to not be able to reach your bae, unless your bae doesn’t want to be reached. Trouble in paradise is not on the menu for the couple at this point, so what to do? I couldn’t very well have him drop his phone in a rest-stop commode!
To get around it, I had to put Andre in a situation in which he would agree not to call Celestial or take her calls—although he really wants to. Trust me. It’s killing him. But he makes an agreement with Roy’s father, who says, “Andre, you have had two years to let Celestial know how you feel. Give my son one day.” Andre agrees and has to rely on faith that their relationship can survive. The scene is extremely tense and adds suspense to the novel. I had to get up and walk around while I wrote it.
I predict that future novelists will not grapple with this quite as much as we do, as technological advances will be seen as a feature rather than a bug. But for now, you can still write an old-fashioned plot that doesn’t involve texting or tweeting—you just have to figure out a work-around that enhances the plot and understanding of your characters.
Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.
This is the twenty-third in a series of micro craft essays exploring the finer points of writing. Check back each week for a new Craft Capsule.
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My new novel, An American Marriage, involves a husband and wife with an unusual challenge: Eighteen months after exchanging their vows, he is arrested and incarcerated for a crime he does not commit.
I was equally interested in both their stories, but for some reason early readers of the manuscript were way more interested in him (Roy) than her (Celestial.) At first, I was convinced that this was sexism, plain and simple. Men’s stories are considered more compelling. To try and make Celestial more appealing, I tried to give her a more vibrant personality. But regardless of the details I added to embroider her, beta readers still felt that she was “undeveloped” and that Roy was the character who popped. It almost drove me crazy. Finally, I realized that Roy held the readers’ attention because his problem was so huge. (He’s wrongfully incarcerated, for goodness sake!)
Undaunted (well, maybe a little daunted), I read stories by my favorite women writers who write beautifully about women’s inner lives. I checked out Amy Bloom, Antonia Nelson, Jennifer Egan. How did they manage to make emotional turmoil so visceral? In these writers’ hands, a small social slight can feel like a dagger. Why couldn’t I do this in my own novel?
I found the answer in the work of Toni Morrison, for all answers can be found there. It’s a matter of scale. There is a scene in The Bluest Eye where the lady of the house is distraught because her brother hasn’t invited her to his party, although she sent him to dental school. By itself, this is terrible and totally worthy of a story. However, in the same frame is Pauline, the maid who has suffered all manner of indignities in an earlier chapter. In the face of Pauline’s troubles, the matter of the party seems frivolous.
With this, I discovered a fundamental truth of fiction and perhaps of life: The character with the most pressing material crisis will always be the center of the story. Although Celestial’s challenges as a woman trying to establish herself in the world of art is intense, the fact of Roy’s wrongful incarceration makes her troubles seem like high-class problems and to center them in the novel feels distasteful to the reader, like wearing a yellow dress to a funeral and fretting over a scuffed shoe.
The solution: I made Roy the protagonist. Celestial’s voice is still there, but she is a secondary narrator. It was a hard choice because I was drawn to her story in the first place, but it was being drowned out by Roy’s narrative. Finally, I had to stop fighting it. The protagonist of An American Marriage is Roy Othaniel Hamilton.
It took me five years to figure this out. Of course, every craft solution makes for new craft obstacles. I’ll talk about the fall-out from this shift in my next (and final) Craft Capsule, next Tuesday.
Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the author of four novels, including An American Marriage, forthcoming in February from Algonquin Books. Her website is www.tayarijones.com.
Lauren Groff never wanted to live in Florida. “I mean, Florida is the biggest joke of all the states,” she says. “It is the punch line to every other state’s joke.” Nevertheless here she is: the acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and twelve-year resident of Gainesville whose husband works in his family’s construction and real estate business and whose two sons have only ever called the Sunshine State home.
“It’s a struggle every day,” Groff says, biting into toast with preserves at Oxford Exchange in Tampa, where we’re having breakfast on the third morning of the 2018 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference. “We moved here because, well, family businesses—they’re impossible to get out of. We’re never leaving.” She smiles ruefully as she chews. “I haven’t come to terms with being a Floridian yet. This is not my vision of myself. I feel if I were given my druthers, I would live in Paris full time, but that’s not where life brought me.”
It is in Florida, however, where Groff has honed her writing voice—all of her books have been published in the years she has lived here—and it is in Florida, perhaps, where she has discovered her most powerful subject matter. Groff’s new story collection, appropriately titled Florida, published in June by Riverhead Books, is ambitious, personal, and dangerous. Made up of eleven stories, it begins and ends with narratives told from the perspective of a character at odds with her circumstances. “Ghosts and Empties” follows a woman, a mother, as she runs in the predawn darkness trying to both escape from and return to her spouse and children. The final story, “Yport,” shows the same mother on vacation in France with her sons and, in the last scene, crouching in fierce maternal protection over one of them.
“I believe short story collections have to be an argument,” Groff says. “The argument here is about my life in Florida. In the beginning you see my narrator prowling, trying to get away from her family. At the end you see her crouched in this almost unbearable neuroticism of motherhood.” Another crunch of toast. “So the argument about maternity comes full circle.”
Yet Groff’s best work may not be in her starts or her finishes, but in her middles. She is an artist who knows how to pace herself, comfortable in suspension.
Lauren Groff grew up in Cooperstown, New York, a small town of fewer than two thousand that is best known for the Baseball Hall of Fame. She is the eldest daughter of a doctor and a biology teacher. She and her two siblings all participated in sports, were required to get good grades, and took after-school jobs starting at age fourteen. “It was pretty much a lovely, normal-type family,” she says. “But problems—we never talked about them. If there was a problem, we’d find out through other people who’d heard about the problem, not from the family member directly.”
Groff pauses for a sip of coffee. “They still do this. If my mom’s mad at me, she’ll never tell me. I’ll have to find out from my dad or sister what’s going on. My dad’s family is mostly Dutch, and they have a lot of that shunning tradition. When he’s mad, he’s mad. He really shuts down. He won’t talk. He gives you the silent treatment.”
While she hastens to clarify that she has “the best parents; they’re really lovely people,” she also notes that her parents’ psychologies permeate her art. “Part of it is you need to find the stories people are keeping from you, but you also need to find the deep-down secrets you’re keeping from yourself,” Groff says. “There’s a lot of cowardice in not facing the things that keep you up at night.”
“The things that keep you up at night” could serve as a tagline for most of Groff’s work, which includes three novels, The Monsters of Templeton (Hyperion, 2008), Arcadia (Hyperion, 2012), and Fates and Furies (Riverhead Books, 2015), and the celebrated story collection Delicate Edible Birds (Hyperion, 2009). But the line is a perfect match for Florida, whose stories all seem to inhabit the same dark world, one in which the physical dangers of hurricanes and snakes hint at the far deeper, more complicated emotional and psychological threats that lurk just under the surface of Groff’s characters.
“I’m interested in the cowardice and also in the deep beneath,” says Groff about her work. “I try to express these things and also express the ambivalence about them. I think parts of my new book where the narrator doesn’t ask questions that may reveal a worse story are important. It’s a very deliberate act of hiding. In ‘Ghosts and Empties’ my narrator is constantly trying to look into other people’s lives but not necessarily looking into the scary parts of her own life.” It is no wonder then that Groff chose the story as the first in her new collection. Each successive story digs deeper from there—the characters growing bolder, daring to look a little closer at the scary parts.
Groff may have been too busy to look very closely into any parts of her own life while she still lived at home in Cooperstown: She earned fourteen varsity letters in high school, maybe not competing with but certainly keeping up with her younger sister, Olympic triathlete Sarah True. However, after high school and before enrolling at Amherst College in Massachusetts, Groff spent a year in France living with a family of caterers. “Between the wine and champagne and every meal with dessert and cheese, I gained forty pounds,” she says. “When my parents came to pick me up at the airport, they didn’t recognize me.”
She eventually took off half the weight—“My souvenir of France, the other 20 pounds”—and at college signed up for soccer and crew. Joining the latter turned out to be a significant event, because the team captain, Clayton, became her boyfriend, then her fiancé, and then her husband. They lived first in Philadelphia and then in Madison, Wisconsin, where Groff earned her MFA in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin, before grappling with their next move. Clay wanted to live and work with his father in his native Florida and eventually raise kids with Groff close to his family. Groff made a decision.
“I had my husband sign a ten-year contract. I said, ‘I’m out of here in ten years.’” She pauses. “That decade is technically over, and we should renegotiate, but the most important part of the contract wasn’t about where we lived. It was about how we live.
“I told him that if I made this move for him, then here were my demands,” she says, and it becomes clear that this was no hypothetical contract. This is on paper: “I’m a writer. I’m going to continue to be a writer. I will never be a full-time mother. You will wake up with them. I won’t see you or the children in the morning. In the afternoons we’ll get a babysitter until I’m ready to come out of my office.”
She adds: “I understand that if I’m cornered, I get really resentful, and resentment just kills marriage.”
Groff says she is glad she put her needs in writing because, no matter what people believe, American parenting remains a sexist enterprise. “My husband is the primary parent, but my kids’ teachers still call me first,” she says, which can lead to a complicated situation when Groff is traveling for author events. “Sometimes I have to say, ‘What am I going to do? I’m in California.’ You can hear them thinking, ‘Ohhh, so you’re that writer mom.’”
The contract may be clear to Groff, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t disputes. “Sometimes my husband takes it less seriously than I do, but regardless of your gender or parenting status, if you’re the writer you have to take it more seriously. It means you’re taking yourself seriously as an artist.”
Separating herself as a spouse and parent from herself as an artist works, Groff says, because she’s very good at compartmentalizing. “I’ve come to understand that there are multiple Laurens, not a single one who is better or worse than any other, and that they can overlap and even contradict one another. The writer in me is deeply hostile to the mother in me, and the mother in me is fiercely protective of her children versus her work.” She compares the two states to writing and giving a reading. “Those are two very different skills, and they need to be cultivated separately. It’s all a matter of listening carefully and maintaining a fine balance and, if something goes awry, attempting to reset.”
Every morning Lauren Groff wakes early, around 5 AM, to take a long run through the Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park, a 21,000-acre expanse set on a freshwater marsh. “The other day I was running in the silence of the prairie and the fog was coming off of the tawny grasses, and there were big rain puddles all around. Just glorious.”
Now, Groff says, she finds it very spiritual to be in Florida nature, but this was not always the case. “When we first came to Florida, Clay took me through the Everglades by bicycle,” she says with a laugh. “At one point I looked ahead on the path and saw four giant alligators lounging in the sun, their jaws wide open. Clay had already ridden past them. We were separated by four giant alligators! I screamed and said I was sorry that he had to die this way. He rode back to me really fast. They didn’t even move.”
She was petrified to go back outside for a while, and she uses that brand of fear to great effect in the stories in her new collection, setting her narratives in snake-infested swamps and buildings covered in kudzu. When Groff saw Spanish moss for the first time, she says, “It reminded me of armpit hair.” Her remarkable gift for dark description can be seen in all of her books, starting with her debut, The Monsters of Templeton, but it took on more power in her first collection of stories, Delicate Edible Birds, in which one character describes depression as “this black sack filled with cobras.”
One story from that collection, “L. DeBard and Aliette,” a strange twentieth-century version of Héloïse d’Argenteuil and Peter Abelard’s legendary love affair, caught the attention of novelist Elliott Holt, author of You Are One of Them (Penguin Press, 2013). “My reaction was, ‘Who is this person?’” Holt says. “At the time I was an editor at One Story magazine, and I asked to interview her; there are some people you feel like you’ve known forever, and Lauren is one for me.”
Holt emphasizes Groff’s dedication to her work. “I don’t know a single person who works harder or is more disciplined or is harder on herself than Lauren is,” she says. “She’s incredibly focused, and her life is very structured but in a good way. I think the fact that she used to be a competitive athlete helps.”
“I love the way running forces your thoughts into a different form,” Groff says about her current favorite athletic activity, “the same way a poem written in a strict form makes strange new connections between thoughts.” But she also admits: “In case it wasn’t already apparent, I’m an anxious person. My writing is all about calibrating anxiety so that I have enough to finish the piece I’m working on—but not so much that it swamps me.”
This may help explain why her books are so distinct from one another. She needs to finish each one and then put it away. “I need to be a completely different person than I was when I start my next book, every time,” she says. Each book is a reaction against the previous book, from The Monsters of Templeton, in which the fifty-foot-long body of a sea creature surfaces in a town’s lake while a disgraced student returns home to search for her father after his mysterious disappearance, to Fates and Furies, a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Fiction and President Obama’s choice for his favorite book of the year, which tells the divided story of a marriage—the first half from the perspective of a failed playwright named Lotto, the second half from the perspective of his wife, Mathilde—threaded together into a revelatory portrait.
Groff isn’t the only author to take such a stance on previous books, of course. At this year’s AWP conference she gave a reading with novelist Nathan Englander, who shares her perspective on past work. “We’re both oppositional personalities,” she says about the author whose most recent novel is Dinner at the Center of the Earth, published by Knopf last year. “So we were discussing how ready we each were to oppose the previous book we’d written. It actually is a revolt, a revolution against what came before.” She says she does this every time, no matter how successful her previous project. “I do it on purpose. And I think for me it’s a way to kill the previous book. I am invested in becoming a better person, and I don’t think I can do that by staying the same. As I write my way into my evolution, I become a better writer, too.”
Her agent, Bill Clegg, thinks Groff’s appeal is “something elemental and volatile in her sentences and plots, a tension between her capacity to create beauty and her impulse to subvert and destroy it,” he says. “She never lets you fully relax into a character or a story or even a passage, and that tension is exhilarating. Reading Lauren’s work, you have a sense that she writes first from a deeply personal place and is accessing these forces as they exist in her.”
And sometimes, Groff would be the first to admit, those forces can be quite explosive: She is not afraid of burning things up—literally. This past New Year’s Eve she threw the pages of something she’d been writing for twelve years onto a bonfire. “I’ve been struggling a lot with creativity in this ‘brave new world’ of Trump’s America, which is so vastly different from what I thought was my America,” says Groff. “Many artists right now are thinking about how to be creative when there’s so much to do. Creativity saved my personal life, but maybe it’s not enough to save our society. I want to bear down really hard on our responsibility to other people.”
The irony of the twelve-year manuscript and her ambivalence about Florida is not lost on Groff. “Everything about me now is different, down to the cellular level, except for the house I live in. I had a bias when I came down here, and I wasn’t open to loving it.” She is glad to discard all of what she calls her “knee-jerk Northerner hostility, thinking Florida was all hicks or uptight retirees,” she says. “Gainesville is a university town full of everyone from students to farmers to hard-core punks to artists. There are good people wherever you land.”
But “to escape the Florida heat for the summer, at least,” Groff and her husband have renovated a barn in rural New Hampshire. During the February cold they ran the woodstove and watched insects that had burrowed into vintage beams emerge, “falling into confusion onto our shiny new floors and walls.” Like those insects, she says, houses take on the personalities of the humans who live in them, humans who “remain pressed into the walls and floors like ghosts, even after they’ve passed.” Some of her unforgettable characters in Florida feel like ghosts pressed into its pages: a penniless grad student in “Above and Below,” two abandoned little girls in “Dogs Go Wolf,” and a bereft widower in “Eyewall.”
The cover of Florida features a golden panther on the prowl. “It’s a vision of danger and wildness,” says Groff. “Everything about Florida, every object and animal and plant, is translated through the characters’ mind-sets, an indicator of alienation or fear or anger—or anxiety.” Groff says that Florida bothers her, shakes her up, brings her to a new place. “It’s a set of contradictions for me. For a long time it was my nemesis, but it’s also my home, where I wake up every day and where my children were born and where my husband is from—and if it can give rise to the three best people I know, it can’t be all bad.”
We’re sitting on a bench beneath an enormous bush—or tree, or vine. Or something. Florida is multilayered in ways that are not always obvious, much like Lauren Groff, and as we talk an image occurs to me, one that may help explain the collective tone of the book. “It’s almost as if each story in this book is a horizontal layer, and when you stack them on top of one another, you can see a Lauren-shaped figure in the middle,” I say.
“That was my working image for it,” she says, “but I never thought anyone would see it. Funny that it has to do with construction. I seem to be fascinated by community, houses, ambivalence, anger, other books, loneliness, and place. Turns out you can do a lot of different things with those elements.”
Others agree. A few weeks after this interview, Lauren Groff was awarded a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship. Past the beginning of her career and nowhere close to the end, Groff shows the kind of creative stamina and artistic endurance that will sustain her through the middle. As for whether or not the argument she poses in Florida comes full circle, Groff says about her current relationship with the state: “I’m pulled strongly in two separate directions, and they’re both valid, but I’m suspended within them.”
In other words, she’s right at home.
Bethanne Patrick is a writer and book critic who tweets @TheBookMaven. She is working on a memoir for Counterpoint Press.
Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories.
Roger Robinson has won the 2019 T. S. Eliot Prize for A Portable Paradise, which was published by Peepal Tree Press in July last year. John Burnside, the chair of this year’s judging panel, notes the collection “finds in the bitterness of everyday experience continuing evidence of ‘sweet, sweet life.’” Established in 1993, the annual £25,000 award honors the best new poetry collection published in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
The Library of Congress has selected Jason Reynolds to serve as the next National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. He is the seventh person to hold the position and will succeed Jacqueline Woodson, who began her term in 2018. He plans to focus on outreach to young readers in rural America: “I have plenty of colleagues who are terrified or uninterested in going to those places, but if we love children, you can’t only love the ones who are convenient.” (Publishers Weekly)
“Because I have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and because in the Muscogee way all of the children we come into contact with are all our children, I have to do what I can to help make a place for sunrise.” Joy Harjo talks to the Washington Post about her experience as U.S. poet laureate and the crises of our era.
Vikram Paralkar talks about his latest book, Night Theater, and its imagining of an afterlife, “in which the very things we seek to escape (bureaucracy, drudgery) are heightened and ubiquitous.” (Electric Literature)
“The characters who were let go were not beloved. That’s why they had to go.” Neda Disney shares the origins of her debut work of fiction, Planting Wolves. (Los Angeles Review of Books)
Today the Library of Congress announced that Joy Harjo will be the next U.S. poet laureate. Harjo, who is a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, is the first Native American poet to serve as laureate. She will begin her term on September 19, succeeding poet Tracy K. Smith.
“Joy Harjo has championed the art of poetry—‘soul talk’ as she calls it—for over four decades,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden in a press release. “To her, poems are ‘carriers of dreams, knowledge and wisdom,’ and through them she tells an American story of tradition and loss, reckoning and myth-making. Her work powerfully connects us to the earth and the spiritual world with direct, inventive lyricism that helps us reimagine who we are.”
Harjo is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (Norton, 2015), and the memoir Crazy Brave (Norton, 2012). She is the recipient of the 2017 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the 1991 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, among other honors. On Monday, Poets & Writers, the nonprofit organization that supports this publication, awarded Harjo the $65,000 Jackson Poetry Prize.
“I share this honor with ancestors and teachers who inspired in me a love of poetry, who taught that words are powerful and can make change when understanding appears impossible, and how time and timelessness can live together within a poem,” said Harjo of her appointment. “I count among these ancestors and teachers my Muscogee Creek people, the librarians who opened so many doors for all of us, and the original poets of the Indigenous tribal nations of these lands, who were joined by diverse peoples from nations all over the world to make this country and this country’s poetry.”
Harjo succeeds Tracy K. Smith, who served two terms as laureate and focused on bringing poetry to rural and underserved communities. During her tenure, Smith edited and published American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf Press, 2018); launched The Slowdown, a daily poetry podcast produced by American Public Media; and read and spoke at many events across the country as part of her American Conversations tour. “As we approach the end of Tracy K. Smith’s two terms as the Poet Laureate of the United States, it’s a moment to celebrate her as arguably the most active and effective poet in this role,” tweeted Graywolf Press executive editor Jeff Shotts in late May. “That Tracy has done this work, had these conversations, and held this role as a Black woman in a racist and violent nation during this racist and violent presidency is impossible to overstate.”
The poet laureate position, which was originally titled the “Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress,” was established in 1937. Recent poet laureates include Juan Felipe Herrera, Charles Wright, Natasha Trethewey, and Philip Levine.
Joy Harjo is a poet unafraid of self-discovery. She explored painting, dancing and medicine before focusing on a writing career. Born in Tulsa in 1951 to the Muscogee tribe (of the Creek Nation), Harjo is both Muscogee and white, and her acceptance of both heritages plays a crucial role in her work: Her poetry preserves her Native American background, while integrating aspects of the mainstream American culture in which she was also raised, to create a unique, poignant voice.
Harjo attended high school at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and went on the study at the University of New Mexico, where in 1976 she was in the first graduating class of its creative writing program. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978. She has taught creative writing at the University of Arizona and is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of New Mexico.
Harjo has published four books of poetry and several short stories, and has written several screenplays. She is a winner of several awards, including an Academy of American Poets Award in 1978, two National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Fellowships (in 1978 and 1992), the Josephine Miles Award for Poetry from PEN Oakland in 1991, and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award in 1991. Harjo has also served on a policy panel for the NEA.
Now living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Harjo has a 23-year-old son, Phil Dayn, and a 19-year-old daughter, Rainy Dawn, who is the subject of the poem “Rainy Dawn” that appears in Harjo’s most recent collection of poetry, In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan University Press, 1990).
From a hotel room in Lincoln, Nebraska, Harjo reminisces about her childhood creative stirrings. “I went outside very early in the mornings to draw in the dirt while everyone was still sleeping. I’d sit there and imagine what I could paint. And what always came to me out of the imaginative sphere were images—not particularly words, but images. Maybe that’s how I think, because sometimes I feel that I write as a painter. It’s almost as if I paint the poems.”
Harjo came from a family of painters. Her grandmother Naomi, a full-blooded Creek Indian, and her Aunt Lois, who was the family member closest to Harjo, were painters. Both women received their BFAs in fine art in the early 1900s and painted in the classical European style, but their subjects were often Native American. In her living room, Harjo has a painting by her grandmother of Osceola, the Seminole warrior who would never surrender to the U.S. government. Harjo uses a different medium, but the same collaboration of classical and Native American influences is the marrow of her poetry.
Reading was a large part of her childhood. She loved poems and memorized them, first because she was forced to in school, and then because she enjoyed doing it. For her birthdays, she requested poetry books, but she was on her own in the quest for quality poetry because she did not have any outstanding educational figures to guide her.
In high school, Harjo trained as a dancer under Rosalie Jones, a dancer of the Blackfeet tribe, and toured as a dancer and an actress with one of the first all-Indian dance troupes in this country. The show was called “Deep Roots, Tall Cedar” and gained recognition from many professional dance companies because it combined elements of classical European drama with traditional tribal drama.
After the tour ended in 1968, Harjo, who was 17 years old, returned to Oklahoma, where her son, Phil, was born. She next moved to New Mexico, leaving Phil’s father behind and enrolled at the University of New Mexico as a premed student. Within one semester she returned to art. The university setting introduced Harjo to a world of poets from backgrounds similar to her own and among the group of Native American writers at UNM she found a poetry that spoke of familiar places in a language she understood, something she had never encountered before. “Most of the poetry available to my generation was set in New England or in the Northeast and was written by men, or women emulating the male experience. I always had to change myself to conform to the poem. But I loved the melodic tones, the rhythm, and the music—those are the things that pulled me into a poem, as much or more than the idea.
One of the first poetry readings Harjo attended was given by Galway Kinnell, who became a source of great inspiration to her. She views him as a musician as well as a poet in the way he writes and reads his poetry. Harjo recounts with verve another significant event that was the turning point in her “unconscious decision” to take up the art of writing poetry: “I was watching a documentary one Sunday afternoon about a tribe in New Guinea. There was a storyteller, but he was also a poet—you could tell by the way he spoke his words. The story was about a hunt for a wild pig, and as he spoke he became—through his inflections and physical movements—the poem, the animal itself, while remaining human. It touched me as nothing else had.”
When asked about other important influences on her poetry, she says, “There are people who were very important to me. They were poets who I felt were human beings with integrity—integrity to the word and integrity to their country (the land), and to their human beingness. I think of people like Pablo Neruda. One of my favorite poets from Uganda, Africa, who influenced me very much is Okot p’Bitek. I love his piece ‘The Song of Lawino.’ I also like the work of other African writers—West African writers especially. In this country, I became excited by the African American writers: Ishmael Reed’s fiction, the work of Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Leslie Silko, and Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, a novel that was pretty much a poem. All were important to my writing.” Harjo had also read the Bible twice by the time she was 12 years old.
Harjo became disenchanted with the academic view of poetry, because it distorted poetry’s sheer beauty. “I think that what’s happened within the past centry, and it probably came with T. S. Eliot—although you can’t blame everything on T. S. Eliot—is that poetry became the property of the academic. It was taken away from the people in a sense, and I don’t believe that’s where poetry belongs—it belongs to the people. Yes, you can take apart literature, separate it, and see how it works, but as with taking apart the human body, you can’t see the spirit, which is at the root of it. It is the same with a poem—you can’t touch the spirit.”
Harjo sought a more creative approach to teaching and adopted a method that was directly influenced by one of her students. “I was teaching a class that involved African music and its connection to the spoken word. There was a young Ghanian man who told an incredible story about how he studied to be a master drummer. At seven years old, he was the apprentice to the master drummer, who would send him out into the bush every morning. He had to listen to all of the sounds going on around him, including the sound of the sun coming up, the insects buzzing, the people going for water, and the sound of the hunters as they went out into the bush. He would take it all in, and his ongoing lesson was to repeat those sounds on the drum and perfect them. Of course, it was the same lesson that went on for years, but it was the first teaching method I felt made sense. The workshop method is useful for technique and craft, but the approach seems more like business rather than the sacred art that poetry is.”
As a poet, Harjo viewed a changing society as an opportunity to explore the new attitudes toward her culture and humanity through writing. “I have felt the explosion of the civil rights movement in this country and have been challenged by the shock waves of human rights struggles all over the world. I’ve been especially involved in the struggles of my Indian peoples to maintain a place and culture in this precarious age. My poetry has everything to do with this. I came into writing at a poignant historical moment. I was lucky to be a part of a major multicultural movement with other writers.”
The beginning of her writing career also coincided with the rise of the women’s movement. Harjo noticed a great many poems being written straight from “the kitchen table,” and her poetry fit into this niche as well. “This poetry spoke very openly and honestly of women’s experiences. I considered it to be an incredible revolution in which we gave ourselves back to ourselves. Women had been stripped away by the language, by expectations of the language, and by expectations of the poets and the fathers of the poets. And we are not out of it yet.
“I am seen as a feminist poet. The way I interpret feminism in my own work is the power of a woman to be a warrior—to recognize the warrior characteristics within herself, which include self-love, vulnerability, honesty, integrity, a sense of morals, and so on.” But in a broader sense, Harjo’s poetry reflects the truths of being human, our relationship to one another, and our relationship to the physical world we inhabit.
Harjo views herself as a woman who has had to learn—or who is learning—to honor the female within herself. “I think it’s easier to honor the male in our culture because it’s much more accepted. There are almost no truly powerful and sustained images of female power. None. Look at Marilyn Monroe? The Virgin Mary? And what images exist for Indian women? The big question is, How do we describe ourselves as women in this culture? It’s unclear.
“I’ve had to nurture and accept all the elements of myself—both the creator and the destroyer; accept both my white and my native relatives, and accept the female and the male. It’s an ongoing internal war. I almost destroyed myself by the time I was twenty, because I felt like I had to be one or the other. Finally, at one point I made a stand, and here I am.” If there is any one poem that exemplifies her reconciliation of self, Harjo says it is “I Give You Back” in She Had Some Horses (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1983), her second collection of poems.
Harjo’s subject matter is drawn mainly from the Native American tradition of exalting the land and the spirit, the realities of American culture, and the concept of feminine individuality. Her characters may be actual people like Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, and Russell Moore, or they may be imaginary entities. “I imagine like a fiction writer sometimes. Most readers assume that the events in a poem actually happened to the poet. Not everything I write is autobiographical. In my work, I add to or change the truth. It is still the truth, just presented in a different form.”
There is an inherent spiritual quality to Harjo’s poetry, but she doesn’t feel that she is any more spiritual than the next person. “Part of the way I am comes from being around Native American people, but I wouldn’t really use the world ‘spiritual.’ It is natural for human beings to be in awe of the sacred and to realize that the sacred is everywhere. But humans seem to have lost their way, although every once in a while someone may find it, and I think that’s the artist. The artists and the poets are the ones who search for the sacred place.”
Her first collection of poetry, a chapbook, What Moon Drove Me to This? (I. Reed Books, 1979) is now out of print. “It should stay out of print,” says Harjo. “It was a very young book. There are probably only two good poems in it—poems that showed promise. It was a painful book, written during a difficult period in my life. You could see the beginnings of something, but it wasn’t quite cooked.”
Harjo’s second book, She Had Some Horses, sold over 11,000 copies and is now in its eighth printing by the same publisher. Horses are a recurring image in many of her poems, but when asked about their meaning, she laughs and replies, “I don’t really want to say, and I get asked that question often. I just leave the horses to themselves.”
Secrets From the Center of the World (University of Arizona Press, 1989) was a new kind of book for Harjo, combining photography with poetic language. The photographer/astronomer Stephen Strom was looking for a Native American writer to collaborate with him on his book of photographs of a Navajo reservation. “My friend Rain Perish, a Navajo artist and writer, couldn’t do it and referred him to me. We met, and I loved his photographs. Whichever way you turned the pictures, the perspectives made sense, and I think his being an astronomer and spending so much time looking at the universe affected his vision. He sees the world with immense detail. I wrote some text to go along with the photos, made the rounds to all of those places, and then rewrote the text.” Harjo and Strom worked on the arrangement of the photographs together.
Harjo had already visited most of the places featured in the photographs. “I spent a lot of time going out as a student activist to work with the Navajo people. Many of my friends were Navajo, so I learned the language. I learned the language to the point where I could speak it pretty well, joke in it, and I actually started to dream in it. For me, Secrets From the Center of the World is, in a way a tribute to that time of my life, to those people, to the land, and to the language, which I think influenced my writing very much.”
In Mad Love and War, Harjo’s most recent book of poems, departs from her original chant-oriented writing style. “In Mad Love, the story started to take precedent. Even though the lyric is important for me, the narrative had more of an edge. Maybe I’m getting farther away from the poetics. My next book will be very different. Harjo’s next collection—The Field of Miracles—is a prose narrative, which she hopes to finish within the next year. A recent short story appears in a Norton anthology called Best of the West, a collection of works by writers west of the Missouri, and another story appears in an anthology of short stories by Native American writers called Talking Leaves (Harper, 1991).
Harjo’s work has grown in density and in scope, and her increasing love of music has become a major element in her poetry. She plays tenor and soprano saxophone and is now learning to play the flute. She is excited by the literary possibilities that arise out of writing and playing music. “I started playing the saxophone about halfway into writing Mad Love and could already see the effect of jazz. Even though I’m just learning the elements of jazz, I listen to it a lot.” She doesn’t think that her poetry is “jazz poetry,” although it is very much influenced by the music. “I’m close to my tribal music and ceremony, and there is a relationship to jazz. There is a history of connections among the Muscogee, African American, and Seminole people. What I hear in jazz is my people, and I feel related to the music.”
Harjo’s relationship to jazz runs parallel with her relationship to American poetry. “I am an American, but it took me a while to reconcile my feelings toward American poetry. James Wright praised the American condition, as did Richard Hugo, who truly came out of the American experience. Adrienne Rich, too, is very important—more important to America than America wants to know or realize. I think academics felt betrayed by her when she refused to wear the clothes of her fathers. She refused the forms of her fathers, and left the house of her fathers. When she left the house of the fathers and embraced the mothers, academia felt betrayed. But I look to her honesty as much as her incredible gift of language and intellect.”
Harjo has recently formed a band called Poetic Justice, with a drummer and a bass player, and would like to record a mixture of poetry and music. She has already completed one projected called “Furious Light” (distributed by Watershed Foundation in Washington, D.C.), taped a reading of poetry from She Had Some Horses and In Mad Love recorded over music. The music was taped separately in this instance, but Harjo is eager to produce a tape that integrates poetry and music even more dramatically.
In addition to working on her new book and pursuing her musical career, Harjo is teaching and writing several screenplays for a television series called “Tales From the Center of the Earth.” The acknowledgement and integration of all creative energy—art, history, emotion, music—are highly important to Harjo’s work and daily life. The personal growth Harjo sees through the evolution of her writing is key. “If my style didn’t change and evolve, I would quit writing. Poetry is reciprocal. As poetry feeds you, you have to nurture the art and give it time and attention. It does give back to you, I suppose like anything else.”
Stephanie Izarek Smith is a writer an editor based in New York City. She is currently writing a collection of short prose and poetry.
The opening spread of “An Interview With Joy Harjo” as it appeared in the July/August 1993 issue.
For more than fifty years the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been a vital part of this country’s creative ecosystem, providing funding and support to writers, translators, and organizations, as well as partnering with arts groups and non-arts sectors to create programs, such as Poetry Out Loud and the Big Read, that celebrate America’s rich cultural heritage and promote access to the arts in every community. For readers of this magazine, of course, the most visible—and sought-after—support offered by the NEA comes in the form of creative writing fellowships: $25,000 grants given in alternating years to poets and prose writers, enabling them “to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement.” In short, they allow writers to be writers—even if that means simply giving them the ability to pay the rent or the student loan or the babysitter or the credit card bill—in a world that rarely acknowledges their work in financial terms.
But this isn’t all about the money. This is about being part of a tradition, built over the past half century, that honors artistic excellence in its many forms. This is about writers who are also nurses and farmers and teachers and librarians receiving support and validation from experts in the field—a measure of reassurance that the work they do before or after the day job or the night shift is valuable. And, yes, this is about patriotism: the federal government sending a message that the work of poets and writers is integral to an open society in which free expression is not only protected, but also encouraged.
This and much more is at stake as we move through the congressional budget process following President Trump’s ill-advised proposal to eliminate federal support for the NEA. And while these kinds of decisions often come down to numbers on a spreadsheet, it is important to highlight the real people—with lives and loved ones and dreams and challenges—at the other end of those fellowship checks. I spoke with nine fellowship winners, from 1977 grant recipient Joy Harjo to 2017 fellows Kathryn Nuernberger and Monica Sok, about what receiving the NEA’s creative writing fellowship meant to them, both in terms of practical financial assistance and as a vote of confidence from the federal government at that particular time in their personal and professional lives.
“To be an artist in my family was somewhat expected. My grandmother and great aunt were painters. With Indian oil money, they obtained arts training—but more than that, they were afforded the time to create. Two of my most valued possessions are paintings by them. My grandmother Naomi Harjo even played saxophone. But to be a poet, especially as a single mother, with no additional income, made for a different story. My family was proud of me, but their constant concern was: How are you going to make a living? We already had one poet in our family tree, Alexander Posey, a Muscogee Creek poet who founded the first native daily newspaper, but he made a living as a journalist, not as a poet. I knew that I would write no matter what, and I wrote my way through jobs, classes, and childrearing. The Pueblo novelist and poet Leslie Silko was the first writer I knew to be awarded an NEA fellowship, and she urged me to apply. I was about to graduate with my MFA and didn’t have anything lined up except a return home to New Mexico and an application for teaching creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, then a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. I remember that late spring afternoon of 1977 opening the letter from the NEA announcing my fellowship. It was the gift I needed. It was enough money to assist me with writing what would be my breakout/breakthrough book of poetry, She Had Some Horses. I used the money for rent, utilities, supplies, and childcare. The fellowship bought me time. And it bought more than that; it brought affirmation. It put my family and community on notice that what I was doing as a poet—a strange occupation for a young native mother who needed to make a living—was considered worthy of support. My next fellowship came in 1992. It gave me the time I needed to get over that hump period that happens in the lives of all of us who create art. She Had Some Horses had set a mark. The second fellowship helped me leap the fence and make a collection that envisioned a book of poetry as an oral event.” —Joy Harjo, NEA fellow, 1977, 1992; author of ten poetry collections and a memoir, Crazy Brave (Norton, 2012)
“In the early 1980s I was studying Japanese at Columbia University and working in one of the college’s secretarial pools. When I wasn’t retyping a professor’s paper, I took advantage of the best typewriter in the world, the IBM Selectric, and put it to use for my own purposes. I was the busiest-looking secretary on campus, writing poems that would become my first two books, Air Pocket then Earshot. I was also a thirty-one-year-old new mother without an MFA—which is to say, without mentors or connections—and I felt alone, isolated. All my poet friends had books, but the support for presses was rapidly drying up. For me, mailing out a manuscript with the enclosed SASE was expensive. And waiting for snail mail was crushing. This was the backdrop to a parcel I received in our small mailbox: a thin envelope from the National Endowment for the Arts. I read it in the crack-infested vestibule of my apartment building in New York City and wept. It was 1986, the year I knew I’d be okay—more than okay. The NEA fellowship in poetry gave me validation that cannot be measured. Validation, for me, was a license to trespass: to continue writing fragments about the female body from an Asian American woman’s point of view. It may be difficult now to believe how radical this was: to hold a legal pad and pen in a coffee shop and write with confidence. The fellowship marked a turning point in my life, as it does for so many writers who receive the same gift of validation from the NEA.” —Kimiko Hahn, NEA fellow, 1986, 1992; author of nine poetry collections, including Brain Fever (Norton, 2014)
“My first job out of graduate school was as a poet in the schools in Kentucky, a two-year residency funded by the Kentucky Arts Council and the NEA in 1975. I traveled around the state giving writing workshops and exposing people of all ages and backgrounds to poetry—students in elementary schools and colleges, farmers in communities in Appalachia, and reform-school teens in Louisville. After the Kentucky residency, I went on to teach across America in poetry programs funded by the NEA. I taught migrant workers in California’s San Joaquin Valley; bilingual elementary school students in Baltimore; senior citizens in nursing homes, church basements, and Sunshine Centers, as they were called, centers where a free meal was provided, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. This last residency culminated in a book of their writings, Old Age Ain’t for Sissies, as well as a series of public readings in the community funded by the NEA. African American eighty-year-olds recited their poems before enthusiastic audiences, feeling for the first time in their lives that they had a voice and were being heard. The program helped create a strong, compassionate, connected community. The NEA is a cultural resource we can’t afford to lose. No other programs are so widespread, addressing so many different age populations and areas of the country. We must not think of the NEA and its programs as something ‘just for artists.’ It is a vital educational resource, which doesn’t quit after our school years are over. We are educating our citizenry in the rich literary resources of this great country and helping them evolve and develop their own expressive tools. An informed citizenry means a stronger, more united, compassionate, and educated America. The individual grant I received from the NEA in 1987 allowed me to take time from full-time teaching and work on the stories that would eventually become my first published novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, based on my family’s immigrant experience after escaping the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1960. The novel now forms part of the curriculum in many schools and universities—the NEA at work again, enabling the creation of a diverse culture that enriches us all. Finally, in 2015, it was the NEA that nominated me for a National Medal in the Arts. For a little immigrant girl to end up receiving an award from the president of the United States was the American Dream come true. But none of us get where we want to go by ourselves. Along the way we encounter helpers, fairy godmothers. The NEA has served that role for me and so many others. I don’t have a magic wand to wave, but I do have a pen to write down this plea: Keep this incredible national treasure endowed and vital for the next generations of students, artists, writers, and readers, so that they can continue creating the country we all dream this can be.” —Julia Alvarez, NEA fellow, 1987; author of twenty-two books, including the children’s book Where Do They Go? (Triangle Square, 2016)
“I was lucky enough to receive NEA fellowships in 1998 and 2016. Both enabled me to write for a year. Both provided a considerable morale boost. Both made possible the books I was working on. That much is likely true for most recipients, of course. In my case, though, as an immigrant to this country, both also felt like an embrace from my adopted home. The emotional significance of the $25,000 grants, in other words, far exceeded their already handsome monetary value. The NEA also cemented my bond to the U.S. in another way. In between my two awards I had the privilege of serving on the panel that selects NEA fellows, which is how I found myself in a federal building on Pennsylvania Avenue at 9 AM on September 11, 2001. We saw smoke rising from the Pentagon through the windows of our conference room. Shortly thereafter, we were evacuated. That afternoon, back at the hotel, we decided, in spite of shock and sorrow, to continue our work. A small gesture, of course, but it felt like something worthwhile, a modest assertion of life and hope, of creativity, in the face of destruction, and one only made possible by dedicated NEA staffers. That night I walked down to the White House, which was floodlit like a beacon, and stood with the hushed crowd gathered before it. There’s been much talk of patriotism in the years between then and now, much talk about what the country stands for. The NEA, representing as it does a nation’s faith in the arts, seemed to me that day and ever since, an institution any country could and should be proud of. The federal building where the NEA was based on 9/11, incidentally, was the Old Post Office Pavilion, now the Trump International Hotel. The cost for a night in its largest suite on September 11, 2017: $25,000.” —Peter Ho Davies, NEA fellow, 1998, 2016; author of four books, including the novel The Fortunes (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016)
“My wife and I were married in 2000, but we couldn’t figure out how to live in the same town. She was working for Hewlett-Packard in Boise, Idaho, and I was hopscotching around the Midwest chasing teaching gigs and fellowships. We were paying two rents, spending all our money on airfare and telephone bills, and multiple times a year I cajoled my Subaru across Wyoming and Nebraska with our goldfish in a gallon water jug beside me. Every night I asked myself, ‘How important is it to me to be a writer? Important enough to spend anniversaries and Valentine’s Day and random Tuesdays apart? Just because I want to chase a silly dream?’ Then I won an NEA fellowship. I promptly sold the kitchen table, gave away most everything else, drove two thousand miles west, and moved in with my wife. For the first time since we were married, we got to wake up together every morning on a consistent basis. And after she went to work, I got to turn on my computer and face down the dragon of my next book. Years later, serving as a judge on a panel to award those same fellowships, I discovered that all over the country, writers and their loved ones were weighing similar choices: Make a car payment, or write an essay? Take a second job so a partner can finish her novel? The National Endowment for the Arts allows artists and their families to prioritize creativity, even if only for a few months, and sometimes those months are all an artist needs to give back to the country a piece of work that will outlast us all.” —Anthony Doerr, NEA fellow, 2002; author of five books, including the novel All the Light We Cannot See (Scribner, 2014)
“If I could have any superpower, it would be to stop or stretch time. And whenever someone asks me what I want for my birthday or Christmas, I say, ‘Time.’ There is never enough of it. Here is the math of 2011: Two young kids, one still in diapers; two teaching gigs—at a traditional and a low-res MFA program—which translates to maybe a thousand manuscript pages in need of editing; one leaky roof; one totaled car; one novel under way; twelve speaking gigs; ten book reviews; six short stories; $40,000 in student loans; a five-hour flight to one set of grandparents; a five-hour drive to the other. There’s nothing startling or appalling about these numbers; I was responsible for many of them, and I was building the life I wanted. But working sixty hours a week and chasing bills and scrambling from one speaking engagement to the next and trying to be there for my family sometimes added up to a schedule that made me feel stretched so thin you could see through me. I remember saying to my wife, ‘I’m not sure I can keep up this pace,’ and she said, ‘I don’t want you to.’ The NEA fellowship allowed me to slow down and carve out time so that I could properly research and pour all of my creative energy into a book that I couldn’t have written in such a harried, exhausted state. Time. That’s what these grants give their recipients. The gift of time, which is in such short supply for all of us. And, of course, money: to hire a babysitter. To fly out a grandparent for help. To teach fewer classes or take on fewer freelance assignments—or escape whatever other obligations are keeping us away from the page, the canvas, the studio, the darkroom. And here is the lovely, complicated calculus of the NEA: Those dollars become hours, and those hours become novels, memoirs, sonnets, sonatas, landscapes, photo essays, documentaries that have an incalculable effect on enriching and expanding the lives of their audience.” —Benjamin Percy, NEA fellow, 2012; author of seven books, including the novel The Dark Net (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)
“Being awarded the NEA Fellowship changed the direction of my life. At the time it was awarded, I was teaching at Interlochen Center for the Arts, a secondary school in northern Michigan. I enjoyed the job but wasn’t writing enough. While a brilliant few are able to meet the time demands of high school teaching loads and still write, I didn’t have that stamina. Additionally, northern Michigan, though beautiful, was culturally isolating. Short on money and time, I worried I might get stuck in a career that would have meant limits on my writing. Winning this fellowship allowed me to accept my current residency at Washington University in St. Louis. It also gave credibility to my work. For poets, that’s a big deal. While, as artists, we all want to make work that is satisfying on its own merit, most poets do not survive on their work alone. As important as the work is to our audiences, I believe part of the reason harsh critics of the genre can get away with claiming poetry has no social poignancy is because we stand to make so little money in our field. Book contracts offer smaller advances than in other genres, so publishing does not always equal income. People who love poetry often depend on this community of reading and performance, and those events are generally free to the public. With our short form, we have a vibrant and accessible presence online. But it means the power of this art is not in its capital. We do what we love, and fellowships, such as the NEA’s, are monetarily crucial. The National Endowment for the Arts fellowship has, quite simply, allowed me to continue my work.” —francine j. harris, NEA fellow, 2015; author of two poetry collections, including Play Dead (Alice James Books, 2016)
“The recipient of an NEA grant sits precariously at the nexus of contradictory forces: art, government, and money. Great art ought to have nothing to do with money or power, and so paradoxically it comes to have a great deal to do with both. The philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer suggested the distinction between entertainment and art is that entertainment has purpose (to inspire people to pay for it), while art has ‘purposiveness.’ Purposiveness is the feeling that a work of art is accomplishing something beyond its own ends. By providing financial support and putting a spotlight on my recently released collection, The End of Pink, the NEA grant encourages me to focus more on purposive writing and less on a purposeful hustle to find readers, royalties, and otherwise ‘succeed’ in the literary marketplace. I’m able to use this year of grant funding to finalize a third book of poems, Rue, which considers eighteenth- and nineteenth-century botanical expeditions and folklore surrounding plants historically used for birth control through a lens of intersectional feminism. The grant has also allowed me to plan poetry readings in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado, often in rural areas that are disconnected from more urban literary hubs. How bold and brilliant a democracy is to invite paradox and dissent into its agencies, its budget, its apparatuses of power and control. Governmental support for the arts, which by their nature challenge the government that funds them, is a mechanism that inculcates within itself a relentless seeking after deeper understandings of what a democratic government should do and be for its people. Though not everyone who deserves these grants receives one, the presence of the NEA reminds all of us that our creative work is essential to the advancement of a great nation with even greater as-yet-unfulfilled ideals.” —Kathryn Nuernberger, NEA fellow, 2017; author of two poetry collections, including The End of Pink (BOA Editions, 2016)
“My manuscript needs work. It’s full of myth-making and family narratives in the context of the Khmer Rouge regime. Lately, I’ve been allowing myself to dwell in my dream space longer, to take more risks in my poetry. With the support of an NEA fellowship, I feel more confident about the imaginary world I’ve been trying to create over the last three years. Every week I continue my process of world-building. I spread out all my drafts and swim in the poems I’ve started. At this time in my personal life, I want to create new structures within my craft, to be wildly imaginative, to survive better in my search for love and healing. Without the financial burdens of rent and utilities, monthly student loans, credit card bills, and medical expenses, I can rest and practice more self-care while dealing with the difficult subject of genocide and intergenerational trauma. The award will also help me travel to Cambodia over the course of writing my first book. When I learned that the NEA might be defunded and then eliminated, I thought about the Khmer Rouge and its horrific transition into power, one where hundreds of thousands of artists and intellectuals were targeted in the early days of the regime. I’ve always been aware of myself as a poet in this country. The urgency to write remains the same for me, but I renew my desire to hone the subversiveness that my craft relies on so heavily. In 1990, the NEA also supported my grandmother Em Bun, a weaver, through a National Heritage Fellowship. My grandmother was a refugee. Over the course of three generations, the NEA has helped two women artists in my family. I strongly believe that it must continue to do the necessary work of preserving the arts.” —Monica Sok, NEA fellow, 2017; author of the poetry chapbook Year Zero (Poetry Society of America, 2015)
Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.
Photo credits: Joy Harjo: Karen Kuehn; Kimiko Hahn: Beowulf Sheehan; Julia Alvarez: Bill Eichner; Peter Ho Davies: Dane Hillard; Anthony Doerr: Todd Meier; Benjamin Percy: Arnab Chakladar; francine j. harris: Cybele Knowles; Monica Sok: Sy J. Abudu
Update: May 23, 2017. The Trump administration today released its first full budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2018 (running from October 1, 2017, through September 30, 2018). The $4.1 trillion budget is notable for its cuts to domestic programs focused on social welfare programs, science and research, and the arts, including the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, as well as the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Each of the proposed cuts must pass through Congress before becoming law.
Update: May 1, 2017. The House Appropriations Committee released the FY 2017 Omnibus Appropriations bill, the legislation that will provide discretionary funding for the federal government for the current fiscal year, which ends on September 30, 2017. The bill includes $150 million each for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), $2 million above the fiscal year 2016 level. Congress is expected to vote early this week on the full spending package.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, a word commonly used to describe the Republican Party’s nominee, Donald J. Trump, was nonideological. Running from outside—and to some extent against—the Republican establishment, Trump appeared ready to offer a policy agenda that would depart from his party’s traditional platforms in ways large and small.
Following his Electoral College victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton, however, President-elect Trump launched a transition during which he announced one rock-ribbed conservative appointment after another, including that of Stephen Bannon, the former executive chairman of far-right media company Breitbart News, who is committed to what he has called “the deconstruction of the administrative state,” as his chief strategist. And in the first six weeks of his administration, President Trump took a series of hard-line Republican positions: cracking down on immigrants, rolling back a slew of Obama-era regulations protecting the environment, nominating a Supreme Court justice said to be “an heir to Antonin Scalia,” reversing federal guidelines on restroom rights for transgender students, and, more recently, announcing a massive military buildup. This last increase is to be funded by deep budget cuts in other programs—including the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), an independent agency of the federal government that offers support and funding for individuals and organizations through partnerships with state arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the philanthropic sector.
On March 16, Trump became the first American president to propose not just cutting funds for the NEA but abolishing it outright. The White House unveiled a proposed budget that includes eliminating the NEA and its sister agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), as well as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or CPB, which helps fund PBS, National Public Radio, and local public radio stations across the country.
“We are disappointed,” NEA chairman Jane Chu said in a statement, “because we see our funding actively making a difference with individuals of all ages in thousands of communities, large, small, urban and rural, and in every congressional district in the nation.”
Why kill the NEA? If the $3.9 trillion federal budget is envisioned as a pie, the Endowment’s most recent slice under President Barack Obama ($147.9 million, or .004 percent of the total) would hardly register as a crumb, much less a sliver. And yet the NEA quickly surfaces in nearly any discussion of budget cuts in the Trump era—not because gutting or killing it would contribute meaningfully to any fiscal imperative, but because many Republicans object to it on the ideological grounds that taxpayer funds shouldn’t be spent on the arts, which they consider inessential (or even “waste,” as Brian Darling, a former staffer of the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank and longtime NEA opponent, put it in a recent article in the Hill, a newspaper covering politics).
“I am deeply troubled by the Trump administration’s proposed FY 2018 budget calling for the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts,” Robert L. Lynch, president and CEO of the lobbying group Americans for the Arts, said in a statement. “Our nation’s parents, teachers, community leaders, arts advocates, government officials, and even economists will not accept this proposal.”
Although Trump has now gone further than any of his predecessors in the Oval Office, the NEA has been the target of Republican budget hawks since early in Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget and an architect of what became known as “supply-side” economics, planned to abolish the NEA and NEH over three years. Those plans—later confirmed in a book by Livingston Biddle, NEA chairman from 1977 to 1981—were shelved when a special task force (which included Reagan’s former Hollywood colleague Charlton Heston) concluded that the two agencies performed a valuable service to the nation. Still, and simply put, conservatives have been critical of the NEA for more than three decades because they consider it a frill.
That philosophy was carried to its logical conclusion at the state level in 2011 in Kansas, where Republican governor Sam Brownback gutted the Kansas Arts Commission by line-item-vetoing the $689,000 in state funding that would have qualified it for matching grants from the NEA and a second group. “In difficult fiscal times such as these, the state must prioritize how to spend its limited resources and focus its attention on providing core services,” Brownback said in a statement at the time. In an interview for Poets & Writers Magazine, Kansas Arts Commission chairman Henry Schwaller called it “a devastating loss.” “This has happened because of the governor’s ideological belief that public funds should not be used to fund the arts,” he said. “But it’s also related to his clear misunderstanding of the role of the arts in society and in Kansas in particular. Children and seniors, especially in rural communities, will lose access to the arts because of this.”
Cultural conservatives also still harbor an animus against the NEA that has its roots in the controversies that erupted in 1989 over photographer and NEA grantee Andres Serrano—whose “Piss Christ,” part of the artist’s Immersions series, showed a plastic crucifix submerged in what was said to be his own urine—and Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photographs depicting the gay S&M subculture were shown in an NEA-supported exhibition in Cincinnati. The Serrano and Mapplethorpe firestorms, stoked by subsequent flare-ups involving the so-called “NEA Four” (performance artists Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller, whose grant proposals were approved by the NEA’s peer review panels but vetoed by then chairman John Frohnmayer in 1990), turned the NEA into a national lightning rod. Led by Republican senators Alfonse D’Amato of New York and Jesse Helms of North Carolina, conservatives in and out of government repeatedly called for the arts agency to be dismantled as an affront to traditional American values. “Do not dishonor our Lord,” Helms railed on the Senate floor in reference to Serrano. “I resent it, and I think the vast majority of the American people do. And I also resent the National Endowment for the Arts spending the taxpayers’ money to honor this guy.”
In recent years, controversies involving NEA-supported art have become exceedingly rare, in part because most grants to individual artists were discontinued, by congressional mandate, in 1995. The exceptions were literature fellowships and two lifetime honor programs, the NEA Jazz Masters and the NEA National Heritage Fellowships. At the same time the NEA’s advocates have successfully made the case for the arts as an economic engine, contributing $704.2 billion to the U.S. economy in 2013 alone, according to a study conducted by the NEA and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. (That includes for-profit arts activity such as filmmaking.) The NEA has also staked a claim as the nation’s most effective instigator of contributions to the arts by others. For every dollar it awards in grants, the NEA says, up to nine dollars is generated in matching support from private and public sources, leading to an additional $500 million in arts funding in 2016. Still, that onetime shibboleth of the religious right—that the NEA supports degenerate art—still bubbles up now and again on alt-right Internet forums.
Weeks before President Trump unveiled his budget plan, two powerful conservative groups—the Heritage Foundation and the Republican Study Committee, a caucus of 173 conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives—called upon him to abolish the NEA and the NEH. And the NEA remains a perennial target of right-wing media outlets such as Breitbart News, once edited by Bannon and known to be on Trump’s daily reading list. Breitbart has been publishing articles critical of the NEA at least since 2009, when it claimed the agency was encouraging artists to support President Obama’s agenda on education, health care, the environment, and other topics. “The National Endowment of the Arts is under attack—again,” poet Dana Gioia, who led the NEA from 2003 to 2009, wrote recently in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times. “The foes are the same tired cast of characters who have assaulted the agency for the last thirty years. Their arguments are the same threadbare notions that have been repeatedly rejected. They are mounting a partisan battle that will do the nation no good. But for the sake of the arts, it needs to be fought again and won.”
Gioia continued: “Both the Heritage Foundation and the Republican Study Committee have long been obsessed with ending federal support for the arts. During my six years as the chairman of the NEA under president George W. Bush, these groups launched one unsuccessful volley after another. Their stated rationale was that the federal government had no business funding the arts. Beneath that small-government ideal, however, was another openly acknowledged motive not related to the public good but to political advantage. By eliminating the NEA, they could deliver a symbolic victory against leftist urban constituencies.”
For all these reasons, the NEA finds itself once again in potentially mortal danger. With Republicans now firmly in control of the executive branch and both houses of Congress, the agency’s prospects for continued survival may be dimmer than at any point in its history.
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The NEA was established by Congress in 1965, during the Johnson administration, to “support the survival of the best of all forms that reflect the American heritage in its full range of cultural and ethnic diversity and to provide national leadership on behalf of the arts.” Over the years, the Endowment has dispensed more than $5 billion to artists and arts organizations in the fields of dance, design, folk and traditional arts, literature, media arts, music, opera, multidisciplinary works, performance art, theater, and the visual arts. (Poets & Writers, Inc., the nonprofit organization that publishes this magazine, receives an annual grant that supports the magazine and the website pw.org. Poets & Writers is also a cofounder of the Literary Network, or LitNet, a coalition of sixty-eight nonprofit literary organizations that was established in 1992 as an extension of the now-defunct Coalition of Writers Organizations and in response to the freedom of expression controversies surrounding the NEA.)
In the 2016 fiscal year, more than 80 percent of the NEA’s $147.9 million appropriation was distributed as grants and awards to organizations and individuals across the country. About 40 percent of that money was awarded directly to the states through their arts agencies. The other 60 percent was distributed to artists and arts organizations applying through the NEA funding categories.
In a clear response to past criticism of its grant-making process as “elitist,” the NEA now earmarks a portion of its grants for underserved communities. Forty percent of NEA-supported activities happen in neighborhoods with high poverty rates, and 36 percent of NEA grants go to organizations that reach people with disabilities, people in institutions (including prisons), and veterans. One-third of NEA grants serve audiences with low incomes.
And while some have charged that the NEA favors large cultural institutions that would more appropriately be funded by their presumably wealthy patrons, the majority of NEA grants—65 percent—go to small and medium-sized organizations in every congressional district in the nation.
All grant applications to the NEA are reviewed on the basis of “artistic excellence and artistic merit,” according to “Art Works for America,” the NEA’s 2014–2018 strategic plan. Applications are first evaluated by independent panels consisting of experts in the various disciplines and “at least one knowledgeable layperson.” The panels’ recommendations are forwarded to the NEA’s advisory body, the National Council on the Arts, whose members are artists, scholars, and arts patrons appointed by the president. The council’s recommendations are sent to the NEA chairman (currently Jane Chu, a holdover from the Obama administration), who makes the final decision.
But will there be any grant decisions to be made in the new fiscal year? Will there be a National Endowment for the Arts at all? As of this writing, it’s unclear how Trump’s budget will fare in Congress, where the NEA still enjoys the support of most Democrats and some Republicans, including moderates and even some conservatives. In his statement, Lynch quotes North Carolina Republican representative Mark Walker, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, as saying he opposes Trump’s plans for the arts: “I appreciate the education that is found in the arts, so at this point I have no path to making any kind of hard cuts right now.” In her statement, Chu implied that anything could still happen. “We understand that the president’s budget request is a first step in a very long budget process,” she said. “As part of that process we are working with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to prepare information they have requested.”
A message posted to the grant application page of the NEA’s website on the same day the president’s proposal was unveiled reads, “We continue to make FY 2017 grant awards and will continue to honor all obligated grant funds made to date. In addition, we will continue to accept grant applications for FY 2018 at our usual deadlines…. The agency continues to operate as usual and will do so until a new budget is enacted by Congress.”
In the coming months the House and Senate budget committees will each write and vote on budget resolutions, at which point the subcommittee’s “markup” appropriation bills determine the level of spending for all discretionary programs. Then the full House and Senate debate and vote on those bills; only after each bill passes Congress can the president sign them and the budget becomes law.
Whatever happens during this process, it won’t occur under the radar. It will be done in the full glare of the public eye, and under the careful scrutiny of those who benefit from NEA’s support, including members of the literary community who stand ready to protect the future of arts funding.
Kevin Nance is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
For more than fifty years the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been a vital part of this country’s creative ecosystem, providing funding and support to writers, translators, and organizations, as well as partnering with arts groups and non-arts sectors to create programs, such as Poetry Out Loud and the Big Read, that celebrate America’s rich cultural heritage and promote access to the arts in every community. For readers of this magazine, of course, the most visible—and sought-after—support offered by the NEA comes in the form of creative writing fellowships: $25,000 grants given in alternating years to poets and prose writers, enabling them “to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement.” In short, they allow writers to be writers—even if that means simply giving them the ability to pay the rent or the student loan or the babysitter or the credit card bill—in a world that rarely acknowledges their work in financial terms.
But this isn’t all about the money. This is about being part of a tradition, built over the past half century, that honors artistic excellence in its many forms. This is about writers who are also nurses and farmers and teachers and librarians receiving support and validation from experts in the field—a measure of reassurance that the work they do before or after the day job or the night shift is valuable. And, yes, this is about patriotism: the federal government sending a message that the work of poets and writers is integral to an open society in which free expression is not only protected, but also encouraged.
This and much more is at stake as we move through the congressional budget process following President Trump’s ill-advised proposal to eliminate federal support for the NEA. And while these kinds of decisions often come down to numbers on a spreadsheet, it is important to highlight the real people—with lives and loved ones and dreams and challenges—at the other end of those fellowship checks. I spoke with nine fellowship winners, from 1977 grant recipient Joy Harjo to 2017 fellows Kathryn Nuernberger and Monica Sok, about what receiving the NEA’s creative writing fellowship meant to them, both in terms of practical financial assistance and as a vote of confidence from the federal government at that particular time in their personal and professional lives.
“To be an artist in my family was somewhat expected. My grandmother and great aunt were painters. With Indian oil money, they obtained arts training—but more than that, they were afforded the time to create. Two of my most valued possessions are paintings by them. My grandmother Naomi Harjo even played saxophone. But to be a poet, especially as a single mother, with no additional income, made for a different story. My family was proud of me, but their constant concern was: How are you going to make a living? We already had one poet in our family tree, Alexander Posey, a Muscogee Creek poet who founded the first native daily newspaper, but he made a living as a journalist, not as a poet. I knew that I would write no matter what, and I wrote my way through jobs, classes, and childrearing. The Pueblo novelist and poet Leslie Silko was the first writer I knew to be awarded an NEA fellowship, and she urged me to apply. I was about to graduate with my MFA and didn’t have anything lined up except a return home to New Mexico and an application for teaching creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, then a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. I remember that late spring afternoon of 1977 opening the letter from the NEA announcing my fellowship. It was the gift I needed. It was enough money to assist me with writing what would be my breakout/breakthrough book of poetry, She Had Some Horses. I used the money for rent, utilities, supplies, and childcare. The fellowship bought me time. And it bought more than that; it brought affirmation. It put my family and community on notice that what I was doing as a poet—a strange occupation for a young native mother who needed to make a living—was considered worthy of support. My next fellowship came in 1992. It gave me the time I needed to get over that hump period that happens in the lives of all of us who create art. She Had Some Horses had set a mark. The second fellowship helped me leap the fence and make a collection that envisioned a book of poetry as an oral event.” —Joy Harjo, NEA fellow, 1977, 1992; author of ten poetry collections and a memoir, Crazy Brave (Norton, 2012)
“In the early 1980s I was studying Japanese at Columbia University and working in one of the college’s secretarial pools. When I wasn’t retyping a professor’s paper, I took advantage of the best typewriter in the world, the IBM Selectric, and put it to use for my own purposes. I was the busiest-looking secretary on campus, writing poems that would become my first two books, Air Pocket then Earshot. I was also a thirty-one-year-old new mother without an MFA—which is to say, without mentors or connections—and I felt alone, isolated. All my poet friends had books, but the support for presses was rapidly drying up. For me, mailing out a manuscript with the enclosed SASE was expensive. And waiting for snail mail was crushing. This was the backdrop to a parcel I received in our small mailbox: a thin envelope from the National Endowment for the Arts. I read it in the crack-infested vestibule of my apartment building in New York City and wept. It was 1986, the year I knew I’d be okay—more than okay. The NEA fellowship in poetry gave me validation that cannot be measured. Validation, for me, was a license to trespass: to continue writing fragments about the female body from an Asian American woman’s point of view. It may be difficult now to believe how radical this was: to hold a legal pad and pen in a coffee shop and write with confidence. The fellowship marked a turning point in my life, as it does for so many writers who receive the same gift of validation from the NEA.” —Kimiko Hahn, NEA fellow, 1986, 1992; author of nine poetry collections, including Brain Fever (Norton, 2014)
“My first job out of graduate school was as a poet in the schools in Kentucky, a two-year residency funded by the Kentucky Arts Council and the NEA in 1975. I traveled around the state giving writing workshops and exposing people of all ages and backgrounds to poetry—students in elementary schools and colleges, farmers in communities in Appalachia, and reform-school teens in Louisville. After the Kentucky residency, I went on to teach across America in poetry programs funded by the NEA. I taught migrant workers in California’s San Joaquin Valley; bilingual elementary school students in Baltimore; senior citizens in nursing homes, church basements, and Sunshine Centers, as they were called, centers where a free meal was provided, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. This last residency culminated in a book of their writings, Old Age Ain’t for Sissies, as well as a series of public readings in the community funded by the NEA. African American eighty-year-olds recited their poems before enthusiastic audiences, feeling for the first time in their lives that they had a voice and were being heard. The program helped create a strong, compassionate, connected community. The NEA is a cultural resource we can’t afford to lose. No other programs are so widespread, addressing so many different age populations and areas of the country. We must not think of the NEA and its programs as something ‘just for artists.’ It is a vital educational resource, which doesn’t quit after our school years are over. We are educating our citizenry in the rich literary resources of this great country and helping them evolve and develop their own expressive tools. An informed citizenry means a stronger, more united, compassionate, and educated America. The individual grant I received from the NEA in 1987 allowed me to take time from full-time teaching and work on the stories that would eventually become my first published novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, based on my family’s immigrant experience after escaping the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1960. The novel now forms part of the curriculum in many schools and universities—the NEA at work again, enabling the creation of a diverse culture that enriches us all. Finally, in 2015, it was the NEA that nominated me for a National Medal in the Arts. For a little immigrant girl to end up receiving an award from the president of the United States was the American Dream come true. But none of us get where we want to go by ourselves. Along the way we encounter helpers, fairy godmothers. The NEA has served that role for me and so many others. I don’t have a magic wand to wave, but I do have a pen to write down this plea: Keep this incredible national treasure endowed and vital for the next generations of students, artists, writers, and readers, so that they can continue creating the country we all dream this can be.” —Julia Alvarez, NEA fellow, 1987; author of twenty-two books, including the children’s book Where Do They Go? (Triangle Square, 2016)
“I was lucky enough to receive NEA fellowships in 1998 and 2016. Both enabled me to write for a year. Both provided a considerable morale boost. Both made possible the books I was working on. That much is likely true for most recipients, of course. In my case, though, as an immigrant to this country, both also felt like an embrace from my adopted home. The emotional significance of the $25,000 grants, in other words, far exceeded their already handsome monetary value. The NEA also cemented my bond to the U.S. in another way. In between my two awards I had the privilege of serving on the panel that selects NEA fellows, which is how I found myself in a federal building on Pennsylvania Avenue at 9 AM on September 11, 2001. We saw smoke rising from the Pentagon through the windows of our conference room. Shortly thereafter, we were evacuated. That afternoon, back at the hotel, we decided, in spite of shock and sorrow, to continue our work. A small gesture, of course, but it felt like something worthwhile, a modest assertion of life and hope, of creativity, in the face of destruction, and one only made possible by dedicated NEA staffers. That night I walked down to the White House, which was floodlit like a beacon, and stood with the hushed crowd gathered before it. There’s been much talk of patriotism in the years between then and now, much talk about what the country stands for. The NEA, representing as it does a nation’s faith in the arts, seemed to me that day and ever since, an institution any country could and should be proud of. The federal building where the NEA was based on 9/11, incidentally, was the Old Post Office Pavilion, now the Trump International Hotel. The cost for a night in its largest suite on September 11, 2017: $25,000.” —Peter Ho Davies, NEA fellow, 1998, 2016; author of four books, including the novel The Fortunes (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016)
“My wife and I were married in 2000, but we couldn’t figure out how to live in the same town. She was working for Hewlett-Packard in Boise, Idaho, and I was hopscotching around the Midwest chasing teaching gigs and fellowships. We were paying two rents, spending all our money on airfare and telephone bills, and multiple times a year I cajoled my Subaru across Wyoming and Nebraska with our goldfish in a gallon water jug beside me. Every night I asked myself, ‘How important is it to me to be a writer? Important enough to spend anniversaries and Valentine’s Day and random Tuesdays apart? Just because I want to chase a silly dream?’ Then I won an NEA fellowship. I promptly sold the kitchen table, gave away most everything else, drove two thousand miles west, and moved in with my wife. For the first time since we were married, we got to wake up together every morning on a consistent basis. And after she went to work, I got to turn on my computer and face down the dragon of my next book. Years later, serving as a judge on a panel to award those same fellowships, I discovered that all over the country, writers and their loved ones were weighing similar choices: Make a car payment, or write an essay? Take a second job so a partner can finish her novel? The National Endowment for the Arts allows artists and their families to prioritize creativity, even if only for a few months, and sometimes those months are all an artist needs to give back to the country a piece of work that will outlast us all.” —Anthony Doerr, NEA fellow, 2002; author of five books, including the novel All the Light We Cannot See (Scribner, 2014)
“If I could have any superpower, it would be to stop or stretch time. And whenever someone asks me what I want for my birthday or Christmas, I say, ‘Time.’ There is never enough of it. Here is the math of 2011: Two young kids, one still in diapers; two teaching gigs—at a traditional and a low-res MFA program—which translates to maybe a thousand manuscript pages in need of editing; one leaky roof; one totaled car; one novel under way; twelve speaking gigs; ten book reviews; six short stories; $40,000 in student loans; a five-hour flight to one set of grandparents; a five-hour drive to the other. There’s nothing startling or appalling about these numbers; I was responsible for many of them, and I was building the life I wanted. But working sixty hours a week and chasing bills and scrambling from one speaking engagement to the next and trying to be there for my family sometimes added up to a schedule that made me feel stretched so thin you could see through me. I remember saying to my wife, ‘I’m not sure I can keep up this pace,’ and she said, ‘I don’t want you to.’ The NEA fellowship allowed me to slow down and carve out time so that I could properly research and pour all of my creative energy into a book that I couldn’t have written in such a harried, exhausted state. Time. That’s what these grants give their recipients. The gift of time, which is in such short supply for all of us. And, of course, money: to hire a babysitter. To fly out a grandparent for help. To teach fewer classes or take on fewer freelance assignments—or escape whatever other obligations are keeping us away from the page, the canvas, the studio, the darkroom. And here is the lovely, complicated calculus of the NEA: Those dollars become hours, and those hours become novels, memoirs, sonnets, sonatas, landscapes, photo essays, documentaries that have an incalculable effect on enriching and expanding the lives of their audience.” —Benjamin Percy, NEA fellow, 2012; author of seven books, including the novel The Dark Net (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)
“Being awarded the NEA Fellowship changed the direction of my life. At the time it was awarded, I was teaching at Interlochen Center for the Arts, a secondary school in northern Michigan. I enjoyed the job but wasn’t writing enough. While a brilliant few are able to meet the time demands of high school teaching loads and still write, I didn’t have that stamina. Additionally, northern Michigan, though beautiful, was culturally isolating. Short on money and time, I worried I might get stuck in a career that would have meant limits on my writing. Winning this fellowship allowed me to accept my current residency at Washington University in St. Louis. It also gave credibility to my work. For poets, that’s a big deal. While, as artists, we all want to make work that is satisfying on its own merit, most poets do not survive on their work alone. As important as the work is to our audiences, I believe part of the reason harsh critics of the genre can get away with claiming poetry has no social poignancy is because we stand to make so little money in our field. Book contracts offer smaller advances than in other genres, so publishing does not always equal income. People who love poetry often depend on this community of reading and performance, and those events are generally free to the public. With our short form, we have a vibrant and accessible presence online. But it means the power of this art is not in its capital. We do what we love, and fellowships, such as the NEA’s, are monetarily crucial. The National Endowment for the Arts fellowship has, quite simply, allowed me to continue my work.” —francine j. harris, NEA fellow, 2015; author of two poetry collections, including Play Dead (Alice James Books, 2016)
“The recipient of an NEA grant sits precariously at the nexus of contradictory forces: art, government, and money. Great art ought to have nothing to do with money or power, and so paradoxically it comes to have a great deal to do with both. The philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer suggested the distinction between entertainment and art is that entertainment has purpose (to inspire people to pay for it), while art has ‘purposiveness.’ Purposiveness is the feeling that a work of art is accomplishing something beyond its own ends. By providing financial support and putting a spotlight on my recently released collection, The End of Pink, the NEA grant encourages me to focus more on purposive writing and less on a purposeful hustle to find readers, royalties, and otherwise ‘succeed’ in the literary marketplace. I’m able to use this year of grant funding to finalize a third book of poems, Rue, which considers eighteenth- and nineteenth-century botanical expeditions and folklore surrounding plants historically used for birth control through a lens of intersectional feminism. The grant has also allowed me to plan poetry readings in Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado, often in rural areas that are disconnected from more urban literary hubs. How bold and brilliant a democracy is to invite paradox and dissent into its agencies, its budget, its apparatuses of power and control. Governmental support for the arts, which by their nature challenge the government that funds them, is a mechanism that inculcates within itself a relentless seeking after deeper understandings of what a democratic government should do and be for its people. Though not everyone who deserves these grants receives one, the presence of the NEA reminds all of us that our creative work is essential to the advancement of a great nation with even greater as-yet-unfulfilled ideals.” —Kathryn Nuernberger, NEA fellow, 2017; author of two poetry collections, including The End of Pink (BOA Editions, 2016)
“My manuscript needs work. It’s full of myth-making and family narratives in the context of the Khmer Rouge regime. Lately, I’ve been allowing myself to dwell in my dream space longer, to take more risks in my poetry. With the support of an NEA fellowship, I feel more confident about the imaginary world I’ve been trying to create over the last three years. Every week I continue my process of world-building. I spread out all my drafts and swim in the poems I’ve started. At this time in my personal life, I want to create new structures within my craft, to be wildly imaginative, to survive better in my search for love and healing. Without the financial burdens of rent and utilities, monthly student loans, credit card bills, and medical expenses, I can rest and practice more self-care while dealing with the difficult subject of genocide and intergenerational trauma. The award will also help me travel to Cambodia over the course of writing my first book. When I learned that the NEA might be defunded and then eliminated, I thought about the Khmer Rouge and its horrific transition into power, one where hundreds of thousands of artists and intellectuals were targeted in the early days of the regime. I’ve always been aware of myself as a poet in this country. The urgency to write remains the same for me, but I renew my desire to hone the subversiveness that my craft relies on so heavily. In 1990, the NEA also supported my grandmother Em Bun, a weaver, through a National Heritage Fellowship. My grandmother was a refugee. Over the course of three generations, the NEA has helped two women artists in my family. I strongly believe that it must continue to do the necessary work of preserving the arts.” —Monica Sok, NEA fellow, 2017; author of the poetry chapbook Year Zero (Poetry Society of America, 2015)
Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.
Photo credits: Joy Harjo: Karen Kuehn; Kimiko Hahn: Beowulf Sheehan; Julia Alvarez: Bill Eichner; Peter Ho Davies: Dane Hillard; Anthony Doerr: Todd Meier; Benjamin Percy: Arnab Chakladar; francine j. harris: Cybele Knowles; Monica Sok: Sy J. Abudu
Since its launch in November of last year, U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith’s podcast, The Slowdown, has been bringing five minutes of carefully curated poetry to subscribers each day. Starting this month the podcast is expanding its reach, airing on local public radio stations in several cities across the country, including San Francisco, Honolulu, Toledo, Lexington, Charleston, Spokane, and Southampton, New York.
Produced by American Public Media in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation and the Library of Congress, The Slowdown was created “to make a daily space for poetry in an increasingly busy and chaotic world, a way of slowing things down, looking at them closely, mining each moment for all that it houses,” and to explore the ways in which poetry can help us better understand one another. Through its expansion as a syndicated radio program, the show will reach a wider audience, which speaks directly to Smith’s mission as the country’s ambassador of poetry.
Currently serving her second term as the nation’s twenty-second poet laureate, Smith has launched several initiatives during her post that focus on increasing poetry’s accessibility and readership, specifically in rural America: Her 2018 American Conversations tour, for instance, involved traveling to different cities and towns across the country, giving poetry readings and leading discussions about poetry with communities at libraries, senior centers, churches, and elsewhere. “I’m excited to continue the work I’ve done as poet laureate in celebrating poems and the conversations they foster,” Smith said of the podcast in a press release. “And thanks to technology’s ability to collapse the distance between people—to give you the feeling that there is one person out there speaking directly and only to you—geography is no longer a barrier to participation. I think this is a perfect medium for talking about the very real and natural ways that poems speak to the daily experience of being alive.”
Apart from her work as poet laureate, Smith teaches creative writing at Princeton University and is the author of four books of poetry, including most recently Wade in the Water (Graywolf, 2018) and Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011), which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her memoir, Ordinary Light (Knopf, 2015), was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in nonfiction. Read a Poets & Writers Magazine profile of Smith, “Far From Ordinary,” on the release of her memoir.
Sarah Ahmad is Poets & Writers Magazine’s Diana & Simon Raab Editorial Fellow.
The title of poet laureate is one of the highest honors a poet can hold, but beyond the honor, the post can mean a variety of things. The United States has a national poet laureate, forty state poets laureate, and countless more at the local level, in dozens of cities and towns across the country. All of these offices are overseen by different organizations, from the Library of Congress to local arts councils, and almost none of them have a universally agreed-upon definition of the title. Some have launched initiatives to bring poetry to the classroom, while others have sent poets themselves to the schools. Robert Pinsky asked Americans to send him their favorite poems, while Ted Kooser told the country about his favorites. We talked to three poets laureate—Luis J. Rodriguez, the current poet laureate of Los Angeles; Joseph Bathanti, the former poet laureate of North Carolina; and Natasha Trethewey, the former poet laureate of the United States and current poet laureate of Mississippi—to find out exactly what the title means to them. While they each have a different take, all three shared a common mission: to go out into the community (whether that be a city, a state, or the entire country) and talk to people about poetry and explore the influence it can have on our lives.
Luis J. Rodriguez Los Angeles Poet Laureate, 2014–2016 The author of nine books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, most recently the memoir It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing, published by Touchstone in 2011. His most recent poetry collection is My Nature Is Hunger: New & Selected Poems, published by Curbstone Books in 2005.
Before becoming the second poet laureate of Los Angeles, you founded a cultural center, helped start an organization for at-risk youth, worked in gang intervention, and campaigned for urban peace, actually helping to broker peace agreements between warring gangs. As poet laureate, what do you envision as your main project? How will this differ from the extensive work you’ve done in the past? Does the position afford you resources you didn’t have before? I have forty years of experiences working with troubled youth, in gangs and outside of gangs, for urban peace…for a healthy and clean environment, against poverty, and for social justice. This makes me a unique addition to the poet laureate tradition. Poets laureate are supposed to sing the praises of rulers, kings, queens, or the state; I [want to] sing the beauty and bounty of Los Angeles, but also point out its faults, such as income inequality, [how it is] both the poorest county in the country and one of the richest. My goal is beauty, truth, and the good.
But to do that I have to address the darkness as well as be a beacon for what’s possible, to consider new ways of thinking, living, and relating. An aim then is to use words, images, sound, and movement to convey the parameters of a just, equitable, and free world. However, I don’t want to make this position a “bully pulpit.” While I have a lot to say, and much to decry, I will do this with dignity, responsibly and artfully. There is far more good in Los Angeles, and from here the threads of a caring, cooperative, and fully conscious governance and economy should be imagined and created.
All this informs what I plan to do as poet laureate, including establishing and/or taking part in at least six city-wide events a year; facilitating workshops with youth and neglected communities; visiting and incorporating as many venues, open mics, and important spaces as possible; and, of course, writing poems. I will also work with others—the Mayor’s office, the City Council, the Department of Cultural Affairs, the L.A. Public Library system, community organizations, and more—to help poetry and the arts explode everywhere. I have always been doing this; now I can continue and magnify my life’s work by other means. I’m eager to use whatever resources this position may afford me to do just that.
You’ve also run for public office—including governor of California—a couple of times. Do you consider the office of poet laureate to be a political position? Do your personal politics inform the way you plan to operate as poet laureate? Everything I do is intertwined with politics. But I can discern the difference between running for political office, which is ultimately about governance, and being a poet laureate, which I see as being representative of a vast and diverse city with many voices, stories, flavors, and tongues. Mayor Eric Garcetti is moving in the right direction by addressing minimum wage, the environment, and the arts. Politically we may agree. But I’m aware that I have to be careful of how I use this position—neither to be the mayor’s “water boy” nor to seek occasions to attack him. Mostly I want to look outward, to people and their everyday concerns.
By its nature, poetry can address any and all issues, including governance. It is also a highly personal and revealing art form. I aim to help bring poetry to the center of our culture. Presently, poetry in our city, state, and country is highly marginalized, concentrated in a few hands; it’s not promoted and mostly unused. People are much more engaged in popular culture, sports teams, video games, reality shows, celebrity gossip—which is all entertaining, but very much pushed on the rest of us. There’s big money in this. Poetry is not that easily appropriated. You don’t need an industry to do poetry. Anyone is capable. Poetry, like most art, is internal. Provide skills, mentoring, and cultural spaces, and poetry can come alive for anyone.
Poetry is deep soul talk, truth derived, and therefore immanently scary. It’s a prophetic act, not in the sense that poetry or art “predicts” the future, but that it pulls from the threads of the past, the dynamics of the present, to point to a future free of uncertainties and inequities. I [want to use] my assignment as poet laureate to emphasize the healing and revolutionary qualities of poetry to a city hungry for authenticity and personal authority. Therefore, my politics, ideas, and experiences inform this position; I’ve also taken into account the particular limits and requirements of being poet laureate. They are not contradictory.
I’m curious about this idea of poetry being both healing and revolutionary—can you say more about that? I found poetry to be healing in my life. Without pressures from teachers, I wrote my heart out as a teenager in jails, in the street, but mostly in a small room next to the family garage that I stayed in until age eighteen. I became expressive, emotive, revealing—unlike the stammering and inarticulate noises of a sensitive and shy child. For me, writing became inseparable from spiritual and psychological growth. As a raging young man, writing provided a powerful outlet. All rage ultimately has roots in deep grief. I tapped into this as well. That’s why many therapists use writing in their treatments. I don’t claim that poetry is a full treatment program, but it’s therapeutic nonetheless. And in thirty-five years of doing workshops in schools, prisons, juvenile lockups, migrant camps, homeless shelters, Native American reservations, universities, and colleges, I’ve seen the power of writing and poetry to awaken the dream of one’s life.
Later when I decided to make writing a profession, I went back to school to learn grammar, spelling, and syntax. These are invaluable. These helped me sharpen the three aspects of any great art: clarity, gravity, and integrity. These are also aspects of a developed life. Yet they are not necessary to draw stories, imaginings, fears, and hopes from the most reticent of audiences.
The revolutionary nature has much to do with poets being the truth-tellers of the culture. They are the first to point out that the “emperor has no clothes”—or that a society at its core is bankrupt. Poets do this artfully—with powerful images, interesting language, and a musical sense. In addition, expanding any concept of revolution, it is also of the mind, the heart, and culture. Revolution is for the right kind of change to re-balance the right kind of inequity. Not simply ideological, but tied to objective and palpable needs. Poetry, like all art, can be politically and humanly charged. I’m for that, challenged also by the nature of the art.
You also mentioned the limits and requirements of being poet laureate. What do you consider those limits and requirements to be? So far the requirements are basic: Enhance the presence and appreciation of poetry and the literary arts in Los Angeles by engaging with the community in all its diversity, [through] a number of readings, workshops, and events; honor historic L.A. writers; and create new work. There’s a plan for a monthly blog on the city’s website, and I can write one or more commemorative poems to Los Angeles. Of course, I can do more—anthologies, publications, social media outreach, my own blogs and podcasts. My aim is to go broader and deeper. I [want to] be keenly aware of social mores, differences, and a general sense of propriety. I personally won’t use inappropriate language or insulting and divisive images. As long as I’m in this position, I won’t lend my name to political office seekers or be used for commercial purposes. Be that as it may, I will address as many issues as I can with dignity. I will assert my voice and help create spaces for more voices, ideas, and stories to be heard. I will continue to speak out, but as delicately and artfully as I can. This is a great responsibility and opportunity, not to be squandered or misused. And as I’ve stated before, this position should also not be so limiting that I can’t be who I’ve been most of my life—a revolutionary thinker, activist and truth-teller.
In terms of writing poems to Los Angeles, is there any pressure on you to write poems portraying the city in a positive light, to gloss over its problems? Or, in a more general sense, is there an expectation that you write a certain kind of poem? Mayor Eric Garcetti chose me knowing I’ve spoken my heart, written about hard, dark things, run for office, and fought for a just world. There is no pressure to write poems that make L.A. appear more—or less—than what it is.
Though you’ve spent most of your life in Los Angeles, you also lived in Chicago for a number of years. How do you view the two cities? Did you see similarities between the communities? Is the role of poetry different in Chicago than in LA? I see Chicago as my second home. I was enmeshed in Chicago politics, youth work, and poetry for fifteen years. I started Tia Chucha Press, a small cross-cultural poetry publisher, in Chicago—it’s now the publishing wing of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. Even my most famous “L.A.” book, Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., was published while I was in Chicago. On the surface, Los Angeles and Chicago are as different as two cities can be. Chicago is Midwestern, compact, flat, old, with three-story flats, and home to amazing blues, jazz, and the now world-renowned poetry slams. But the similarities are striking. They are both the largest manufacturing centers of the country. Chicago is known for its meatpacking yards, steel mills, and trains. But L.A. also had meatpacking, steel mills, auto plants, aerospace industries, a massive harbor, garment plants, canneries, and more (I worked in many of those industries as a young man).
Unfortunately, most people think L.A.’s industry is solely in Hollywood. During the de-industrialization that first struck the U.S. in the mid-1970s, picking up steam in the 80s and 90s, both cities got hit hard. For four decades, L.A. and Chicago have been the country’s gang capitals, mostly generating armies of economically strapped youth during this de-industrialization process when the trade in drugs and guns took the place of industrial-based work. Chicago today has more gang violence, but for years L.A. led in this area. Both Chicago and L.A. have been active in “squeezing” black and brown communities through versions of gang injunctions, gentrification, and high rents, forcing many poor to move to suburbs or outlying communities and states. But L.A. has been more successful at this, including massive deportations of Mexicans and Central Americans. Because of these two cities, I’m working-class in my ideology, writings, work ethic, and make-up—in my blood.
As for poetry, Chicago sparked a literary explosion in the mid-1980s that has moved across the country and other parts of the world, including slam poetry. I took part in this phenomenon not long after it began at the Green Mill Lounge in Uptown. I moved to Chicago in 1985 and in three years I became integral to this, as cofounder of the Guild Complex and cofounder of the Neutral Turf Poetry Festival, which at one time brought three thousand people to the city’s lakefront. I was even on the first slam poetry tour of Europe in 1993. I was at the heart of this particular brand of performance poetry that also included poetry bands, poetry videos, poetry theater, and more.
I also did writing workshops in homeless shelters, prisons, and juvenile lockups. And I worked as a journalist and editor, primarily in community newspapers, magazines, and radio. In addition, I pioneered gang intervention work through Youth Struggling for Survival, the Increase the Peace Network, and the Humboldt Park Teen Reach Program. When I returned to Los Angeles in 2000, I took this spirit and experience with me. This became the catalyst for the creation of Tia Chucha’s—in thirteen years we’ve raised more than a million dollars for community-based multi-arts training and presentation.
What do you consider to be your greatest achievement—as a writer, an activist, or a community organizer—so far? I can’t say any area is more valuable or more appreciated. I am every one of these—writer, activist, organizer—and I’ll add father, husband, elder, teacher. However, I incorporate them as a whole. For example, my writing cannot exist outside of activism, family, and community. Because I’ve been largely fractured, with various aspects of myself at odds with one another, it’s important for me to be keenly aware of this process. Any achievement I’ve had as a writer is integrated with revolutionary ideas and actions. Being L.A.’s poet laureate, given to me largely because of my development as a poet, my discipline, my contribution to spreading the power of poetry, is inextricable from being a long-time change agent. Not change [as in], “Let’s do something different” (though this can be part of it), but what needs to be changed in order to align. In my personal life it was for my emotional, spiritual, psychological, creative, and physical aspects to align to the dream of my life—to my gifts, my passions, what I was inherently born to do. I had to change addictive, raging, and impulsive dispositions in my nature. For society it’s aligning to the regenerative capacities of the earth and of people—which means having the right relationships so both can thrive. Presently we are not aligned this way in society or in our governance. This means changing those characteristics of the post-industrial capitalist world that tear away at the healing qualities of earth and people. So while I may emphasize poetry these next two years, including the vitality of poetry in anyone’s life, the underlying motives are these alignments—both for the short and the long range; for the immediate demands, and for our future.
Joseph Bathanti North Carolina Poet Laureate, 2012–2014 The author of fourteen books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, most recently the novel The Life of the World to Come, published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2014. His most recent poetry collection is Concertina, published by Mercer University Press in 2013.
You initially moved to North Carolina as part of the VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) program. How did this experience shape the sort of poet and teacher—and, by extension, poet laureate—you would go on to become? When I arrived as a VISTA volunteer in North Carolina, in 1976, recently out of graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh, I was burning to write, though I hadn’t really engaged in it with the kind of steadiness necessary to pile up pages. By happenstance, I was assigned as a VISTA to the North Carolina Department of Corrections and spent the next fourteen months, more or less, in a cell block or on a prison yard—mainly at Huntersville Prison, about twelve miles north of Charlotte—immersed in the tangle of things related to incarceration and reentry.
Prison is a place of extremes where very dramatic things happen by the moment. Young writers often harp about not having anything to write about, but suddenly I was handed a trove of material. Thus I started writing, rather obsessively, about the surreal world of prison. What’s more, my first foray into teaching began in prisons. One of the first things I did as a new VISTA was to organize informal writing workshops in the trailer [connected to] the prison that served as the de facto classroom. I’d supply the guys with a prompt, they’d read what they wrote, and then we’d kick it around. I was also able to put together a couple of saddle-stitched anthologies that featured their poems, stories, and artwork.
I wasn’t thinking at all, back then, that those weekly sessions in that too-hot or too-cold trailer might be therapeutic for the prisoners. It hadn’t occurred to me in those terms, nor had the big conversation about the indisputable benefit of writing in dealing with various sorts of trauma been initiated on a widespread scale. I initiated those sessions because I saw them as extensions of my own desire to write and as a way to contribute to the VISTA project. I became, of course, mystified and intoxicated by the stories those men had to tell and the manner in which they told them. I also launched into reading everything I could get my hands on about prison, especially poetry and fiction.
When asked to recapitulate my career, I always say that my first teaching job was in a prison, and in the narrowest sense this is true. More importantly, my VISTA assignment and teaching in prison were not only the beginning of my own education, but the true genesis of my writing life.
I discovered in VISTA that prisons are but one shackle in the ponderous chain of group homes, halfway houses, soup kitchens, mental hospitals, women’s shelters, juvenile detention centers, and homeless shelters. The same characters show up in each script. It’s no secret that all social ills are intimately connected, but it’s something I had to learn by seeing for myself. I became not only aware of the vast subculture of poverty and affliction, but also of the often invisible network of agencies, organizations, and socially [engaged], charitable individuals committed to helping the kinds of folks who find themselves in such places.
The philosopher and theologian Thomas Moore said, “Deep changes in life follow movements in imagination.” As a result of being not only with prison inmates daily, but also in close proximity to the community of mercy which inevitably responds to suffering, I experienced a radical shift in my imagination. Revealed to me was a rare and secret world and I was an eyewitness to it. Not only was it consciousness-raising, it was life-changing.
As North Carolina’s poet laureate, I was interested in getting in front of every citizen of the state I could manage to visit, but I was also especially keen on visiting those people and those regions of the state—very rural and/or underserved—that did not have regular access to writers and literature, including the populations my service in VISTA revealed to me.
It seems like the act of teaching writing lay at the heart of your work as poet laureate, especially in your signature project of working with returning veterans and their families. How did this go for you? Did you have any specific goals or hopes in mind for the project, and were they achieved? Ultimately, teaching is at the heart of a poet laureate’s service. A solid poet laureate, certainly at the state level, has to be a teacher, an educator. It’s a job that demands a decided pedagogical range to work with all kinds of folks in unimaginably diverse locales—not to mention all the planning and preparation that goes into it all. Traditionally North Carolina poets laureate spend a considerable amount of time in K–12 schools, cheerleading not only for the children, but for those embattled, dedicated, hard-working teachers who ensure that writing and reading endure. That same kind of teaching by the poet laureate also occurs in county libraries, community colleges, universities, churches, shelters, and hospitals. The laureateship in North Carolina remains, I’m pleased to say, a grass-roots service position.
When I declared my signature project as poet laureate—to work with military veterans, those returning from combat and others, and involve their families whenever possible, to tell their stories through poetry and other genres—I didn’t really know what I was getting into. I’m dramatically smarter today about the issues plaguing veterans and their families than I was thirty-two months ago, when I declared my aim to pursue that work, but I’m still very much on the front end of that apprenticeship.
Since then, I’ve taught at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, the Veterans Writing Project summer workshops at George Washington University, and a number of other venues. But, primarily, my work with vets and their families has been in North Carolina. There is nothing terribly fancy about what I do. In the main, I walk into those places and simply talk to those folks for a while, then ask them to talk, and then I ask them to write—not necessarily about their wartime experiences, but inevitably that’s exactly what they end up writing about. And the writing these sessions yield is always breathtaking.
At the outset of my project, I had hoped to launch a statewide initiative, to create a model that would be perpetuated beyond my tenure as poet laureate. I don’t think anything quite that ambitious was ever achieved, in a codified sense. Yet—because of my work, in part, and the attention the North Carolina Arts Council focused on it, and other like-minded agencies and committed folks that rallied to the cause—I do think there was a certain amount of concentrated attention devoted to vets and their families and how writing and other arts can be implemented to not only bring to light their stories, but also to assist them as they deal with the often debilitating fallout associated with deployment.
Again, I cannot at all take credit for this. So many terrific initiatives were already in place or in the process of taking hold when I was appointed poet laureate in 2012. I more or less became a focal point for the crucial intersection among vets, their families, and writing. The North Carolina Arts Council took up that torch, spread the word, and paved the way. Essentially, I mimicked what others had hatched before me. And I reached out initially for help, notably and especially to Ron Capps, founder and director of the Veterans Writing Project in D.C., and Donald Anderson, editor of War, Literature & the Arts, at the Air Force Academy.
In your essay “Ghostwriting,” you mention an aspect of teaching creative writing in prisons that I would think carries over to working with veterans as well: “In prison there are certain stories you simply do not criticize; to do so would be an epic breach of etiquette. Disrespect. Like you didn’t get it.” This can sometimes feel true even in more traditional creative writing settings, when someone shares a piece that is too real, too much from the heart, to be given the normal workshop critique. In these situations, what services are left for a writing teacher to provide? There are times when a writing teacher’s number-one task is to get the heck out of the way. I’m thinking primarily of the work I’ve done with prisoners and veterans—and I taught for a year in a battered women’s shelter—but also students of mine at the university. These folks might be taking their very first crack at articulating how they really feel about subjects that are often explosive and intimate—things they’ve kept hidden inside, possibly for years—in language, on paper, with strangers in the room.
They are suddenly exposed. It’s terrifically dangerous terrain. The teacher’s initial job is to get them to write anything, to assure them they have something to say in the first place, that they indeed have stories worthy of being told and listened to. Worrying about whether it’s good or not can come later—the assessment part, the craft part. Critical appraisal at this point is irrelevant. What’s more, their presence in such a class—especially in the case of vets and prisoners (and other immured populations)—might be a one-shot deal. The teacher has to ensure, through his very measured response, that he does not convince them that they were fools to put pen to paper in the first place.
The fact that certain folks even show up in a class or workshop strikes me as poignant. It’s not about style. It’s like being in church. You don’t criticize the style of someone’s prayer. You don’t tell someone who’s learning to talk again after a four-decade silence—as in the case of some Vietnam vets I’ve had in classes—that he’s going about it improperly. A hush pervades the room when one of these silent sealed vets—or anyone—elects finally and mysteriously to open up. The first draft sometimes is a wail, a keen—what Whitman called that barbaric yawp—and it tends to look very different on the outside than it did on the inside. And once it’s out, it can’t be called back. The teacher’s crucial goal with beginning writers, in any setting, is to keep them talking, keep them writing—until what’s too raw, too hot, seasons and cools. So you have to be pretty darned careful with any kind of knee-jerk qualitative judgment. The teacher’s job, initially, in these instances, is to back off, and get invisible in a hurry, and simply listen.
When Valerie Macon was appointed as your successor, there was an uproar over her perceived lack of qualifications and the governor’s rejection of the traditional nomination process, causing her to step down less than a week later. One positive that came out of the situation was the revelation that North Carolina really does care about its poet laureate. It’s obviously much more than a ceremonial role or an empty political gesture. What about the state and its poets do you think fosters that attitude? The uproar that ensued as a result of Valerie Macon’s appointment was triggered by a number of things, chiefly the fact that the long-standing process that had been in place to select North Carolina’s poet laureate was completely ignored. A great deal has been written about that fiasco, and everybody, everywhere, knows about it, so I won’t beat that straw man anymore. However, there was a terrifically positive side to that uproar. North Carolina poets and writers and readers sent out the message loud and clear that the poet laureate post in North Carolina matters very much to them and, by extension, and more importantly, that the cherished integrity of North Carolina’s legacy of writing and literature is something very much worth fighting for.
We often hear the word community used to describe a body of writers; and, in truth, the community of North Carolina writers is the real thing, not merely a rhetorical community. The writers of this state tend to know one another and support one another and care about one another; and, without getting too saccharine, there’s much about that community that’s familial. It’s a big state, but the literary community is very connected. It’s like a union. What’s more, the legacy of North Carolina and its writers, current and past, are supported and celebrated in every county in the state, in large places and very small places—in public schools, colleges and universities, community colleges, public libraries, local arts councils, and bookstores.
Of course, as in any other state, there are tiers and hierarchies among the writers here, but nothing elitist or hegemonic, nothing cutthroat. When I first arrived in North Carolina, thirty-eight years ago—a Pittsburgh Italian Yankee—the only writing credential I had was my yearning. I could not have been treated any more generously, any more graciously, by the established writers here. They nurtured me. They welcomed me into their ranks. And I really do believe that spirit of generosity, of inclusiveness, has continued to earmark North Carolina as the best place to be a writer. That’s certainly been my experience.
What rankled me more than anything during the flap over Valerie Macon’s appointment were the charges—from those folks who thought having a poet laureate was superfluous—that the post was “honorary,” “ceremonial,” “symbolic.” These were three words used to describe the appointment. Nothing is further from the truth. Poets laureate in North Carolina get in their cars and travel to the people. They show up everywhere. I made upwards of three hundred appearances during my tenure as poet laureate. I’ve said before that I don’t want a medal. It was my honor. But I do want to underscore that I took all my cues from my North Carolina poet laureate predecessors, the tradition of pride and service they exemplified, and the trails they blazed ahead of me.
In recent years, there’s been a proliferation of poet laureate positions in the country. Most states appoint a poet laureate, and many cities do as well. What do you think is behind this surge in the desire to name an “official” poet of a region? The surge in poet laureate posts has been prompted, I’d assume, by the surge in poetry, of all stripes, all across the country. Such proliferation is another indication of the health of poetry and its democratization among, hopefully, the working class and the most marginalized citizens, folks who perhaps do not have ready access to poetry—and here I’m thinking about my own childhood and the very working class, ethnic neighborhood in Pittsburgh where I grew up.
State poets laureate work very hard, but realistically can reach only so many people; and, again, my chief concern is that poets laureate maintain a vibrant visible presence among public school children as well as various immured populations—among everyone. The appointment of city, town, and county poets laureate certainly instigates dialogue and activities (workshops, readings, classes, you name it) that zero in on poetry in specific communities and spread the benefits of poetry as avenues to the obvious art of reading and writing and performing poetry, its timeless culture and appreciation, the enjoyment, the fun, that it provides. But those kinds of activities and dialogue also underscore essential keys to life enhancement: literacy, critical thinking, cultural awareness, community solidarity, and the groundedness and self-esteem that familiarity with one’s own stories—in one’s own language—and their importance brings.
Poets laureate who are from—in every sense of the word—those communities that appoint them (urban and rural, enormous and tiny)—who know and live among their target audiences—have a cachet that creates extraordinary groundswells around poetry in a particular locale. What’s more, the nominal dollars invested in launching these grassroots poet laureate programs repay those dollars exponentially in healthier, safer, and more rooted communities.
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Natasha Trethewey United States Poet Laureate, 2012–2014 Mississippi Poet Laureate, 2012–2016 The author of five collections of poetry, most recently Thrall, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2012.
Could you talk about your signature project as the U.S. poet laureate, “Where Poetry Lives?” What were your goals behind that project? Well, just what the title says: to show how and where poetry lives in the United States. How people are making use of poetry in their everyday lives in order to contend with all sorts of social issues. For example, we went to the juvenile detention facility in Seattle and looked at a program called Pongo there that uses poetry with incarcerated teens, as well as with homeless teens who are often coming to the homeless shelter after being released from a juvenile facility.
Do you feel like the project was a success? Or was there anything you would do differently now? Oh, I think it was wonderful. We hit such a wide variety of places, from a juvenile detention facility to Harvard Medical School, where the poet [and physician] Rafael Campo believes in teaching poetry to interns because it helps make better doctors. It helps make physicians better able to treat the whole patient—physicians who have more empathy. We also [visited] an MFA program in Los Angeles that has a service component as part of its curriculum where the graduate students go out and find ways to bring poetry into their communities.
Could you talk a bit about your office-hours project? It had been a while since a poet laureate had held office hours before, right? Right, not since the position was a consultantship, before it became the laureateship [in 1985]. I thought of it because, when I was named poet laureate, one of the things that happened was newspapers called and asked, “What’s your project going to be?” And I doubt that most people are sitting around thinking, “When I get named poet laureate, this is what I’m going to do.” So of course I didn’t have a project in mind, and it occurred to me that since the Library of Congress thinks of the poet laureate position as a “lightning rod” for poetry in America, and that the role that they like to see the laureate take on is to bring poetry to a wider audience, I wanted to figure out how best to do that. And it seemed to me that one of the best ways was to talk to people about the role of poetry in their lives and to see how they imagined poetry could be brought to a wider audience in the country. And so that’s why I decided to open my office and invite people in to talk to me about just that.
And through these meetings, by talking to people about poetry in this way, did you feel like you learned about what was happening in poetry in America? I did. You know, every few years an article comes out in the Wall Street Journal or other places about how nobody cares about poetry and it doesn’t mean anything. We hear that again and again, and yet that was not the case at all when I met with people, from all walks of life, who came in to talk about what poetry means to them, and how it is important. And so I learned with even more conviction that poetry is alive and well and matters to people in this country.
What kinds of people were coming in to meet with you? Everybody, really. I had everybody from groups of schoolchildren to senior citizens, writing groups who either got together because of a fellowship program at their church or at their senior community center. I think someone who was a lobbyist in Washington came. I should have made a list of all the different kinds of people, but it was just people who did all sorts of things. Sometimes it was researchers or people writing about poetry, or other poets themselves, or college students. It was a big list of people who were very different. But all lovers of poetry.
You once said in an interview for PBS NewsHour that you considered the role of poet laureate to be as a “cheerleader for poetry.” [Laughs.] Oh, yes, I did say that, didn’t I?
I was wondering if you could expand a little more on what you meant by that. You also said that part of the role is to be a promoter. How do you feel like you as a poet laureate can promote or be a cheerleader for poetry? Yeah, you know, that’s one of the funniest things I think I ever said. If only I’d said ‘advocate,’ or ‘ambassador,’ or something more dignified. [Laughs.] But I just had to come on record and say that the University of Georgia, when I was in college, I was head cheerleader. Yes I was. And I think I had been talking to Rob Casper right before I went in to speak with [PBS NewsHour’s] Jeff Brown—Rob is the head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress. He is, to use another one of those phrases, like an Energizer bunny. He has so much energy that he gets me kind of hyped. And so we were sitting there, getting excited about what we were going to do about poetry, and then I go in [to the interview] and say, “I want to be a cheerleader for poetry!”
But I guess in some ways it’s not that silly. It’s a very plain way of saying that I have great enthusiasm for poetry and I want to share that with other people in ways that gets them enthusiastic about it, too. That’s what a cheerleader does.
During your tenure as U.S. poet laureate, you had also begun serving your four-year term as the state poet laureate of Mississippi. How do those two roles differ, in your experience? Well, because I was doing both at the same time, a lot of my focus was drawn to the national level. And so I did the kinds of things that I did on the state level, which are of course ongoing, because I have two more years on my term. I participated in, for example, going to the state house, the capital, in Jackson on the day that they promote the arts, where various arts groups come to talk to the state senators and people in the house about the roles of arts in our lives. And so I was there to participate in that and to promote the arts and poetry in the state of Mississippi. I’ve also done other events, readings and other kinds of visits in the state. Not as much as what I was doing on the national level.
What has been your greatest challenge during your time as poet laureate? Oh, goodness. That’s a good question. I’ve only had the opportunity to talk about the things that have been the greatest rewards of it. Well, I suppose the greatest challenge for me would have been that, because I wanted to be an advocate and because I wanted to see the role as a public service position, I occupied a very public place for those two terms and I traveled a lot and I did a lot of things and it made it harder for me to have the quiet time that a poet needs to write poems. So my biggest challenge was finding time to also still be a poet—not just an advocate for poetry, but a working poet who could sit down and have some time to write poems.
Nick Narbutas is Poets & Writers Magazine’s Diana and Simon Raab Editorial Fellow.
The title of poet laureate is one of the highest honors a poet can hold, but beyond the honor, the post can mean a variety of things. The United States has a national poet laureate, forty state poets laureate, and countless more at the local level, in dozens of cities and towns across the country. All of these offices are overseen by different organizations, from the Library of Congress to local arts councils, and almost none of them have a universally agreed-upon definition of the title. Some have launched initiatives to bring poetry to the classroom, while others have sent poets themselves to the schools. Robert Pinsky asked Americans to send him their favorite poems, while Ted Kooser told the country about his favorites. We talked to three poets laureate—Luis J. Rodriguez, the current poet laureate of Los Angeles; Joseph Bathanti, the former poet laureate of North Carolina; and Natasha Trethewey, the former poet laureate of the United States and current poet laureate of Mississippi—to find out exactly what the title means to them. While they each have a different take, all three shared a common mission: to go out into the community (whether that be a city, a state, or the entire country) and talk to people about poetry and explore the influence it can have on our lives.
Luis J. Rodriguez Los Angeles Poet Laureate, 2014–2016 The author of nine books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, most recently the memoir It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing, published by Touchstone in 2011. His most recent poetry collection is My Nature Is Hunger: New & Selected Poems, published by Curbstone Books in 2005.
Before becoming the second poet laureate of Los Angeles, you founded a cultural center, helped start an organization for at-risk youth, worked in gang intervention, and campaigned for urban peace, actually helping to broker peace agreements between warring gangs. As poet laureate, what do you envision as your main project? How will this differ from the extensive work you’ve done in the past? Does the position afford you resources you didn’t have before? I have forty years of experiences working with troubled youth, in gangs and outside of gangs, for urban peace…for a healthy and clean environment, against poverty, and for social justice. This makes me a unique addition to the poet laureate tradition. Poets laureate are supposed to sing the praises of rulers, kings, queens, or the state; I [want to] sing the beauty and bounty of Los Angeles, but also point out its faults, such as income inequality, [how it is] both the poorest county in the country and one of the richest. My goal is beauty, truth, and the good.
But to do that I have to address the darkness as well as be a beacon for what’s possible, to consider new ways of thinking, living, and relating. An aim then is to use words, images, sound, and movement to convey the parameters of a just, equitable, and free world. However, I don’t want to make this position a “bully pulpit.” While I have a lot to say, and much to decry, I will do this with dignity, responsibly and artfully. There is far more good in Los Angeles, and from here the threads of a caring, cooperative, and fully conscious governance and economy should be imagined and created.
All this informs what I plan to do as poet laureate, including establishing and/or taking part in at least six city-wide events a year; facilitating workshops with youth and neglected communities; visiting and incorporating as many venues, open mics, and important spaces as possible; and, of course, writing poems. I will also work with others—the Mayor’s office, the City Council, the Department of Cultural Affairs, the L.A. Public Library system, community organizations, and more—to help poetry and the arts explode everywhere. I have always been doing this; now I can continue and magnify my life’s work by other means. I’m eager to use whatever resources this position may afford me to do just that.
You’ve also run for public office—including governor of California—a couple of times. Do you consider the office of poet laureate to be a political position? Do your personal politics inform the way you plan to operate as poet laureate? Everything I do is intertwined with politics. But I can discern the difference between running for political office, which is ultimately about governance, and being a poet laureate, which I see as being representative of a vast and diverse city with many voices, stories, flavors, and tongues. Mayor Eric Garcetti is moving in the right direction by addressing minimum wage, the environment, and the arts. Politically we may agree. But I’m aware that I have to be careful of how I use this position—neither to be the mayor’s “water boy” nor to seek occasions to attack him. Mostly I want to look outward, to people and their everyday concerns.
By its nature, poetry can address any and all issues, including governance. It is also a highly personal and revealing art form. I aim to help bring poetry to the center of our culture. Presently, poetry in our city, state, and country is highly marginalized, concentrated in a few hands; it’s not promoted and mostly unused. People are much more engaged in popular culture, sports teams, video games, reality shows, celebrity gossip—which is all entertaining, but very much pushed on the rest of us. There’s big money in this. Poetry is not that easily appropriated. You don’t need an industry to do poetry. Anyone is capable. Poetry, like most art, is internal. Provide skills, mentoring, and cultural spaces, and poetry can come alive for anyone.
Poetry is deep soul talk, truth derived, and therefore immanently scary. It’s a prophetic act, not in the sense that poetry or art “predicts” the future, but that it pulls from the threads of the past, the dynamics of the present, to point to a future free of uncertainties and inequities. I [want to use] my assignment as poet laureate to emphasize the healing and revolutionary qualities of poetry to a city hungry for authenticity and personal authority. Therefore, my politics, ideas, and experiences inform this position; I’ve also taken into account the particular limits and requirements of being poet laureate. They are not contradictory.
I’m curious about this idea of poetry being both healing and revolutionary—can you say more about that? I found poetry to be healing in my life. Without pressures from teachers, I wrote my heart out as a teenager in jails, in the street, but mostly in a small room next to the family garage that I stayed in until age eighteen. I became expressive, emotive, revealing—unlike the stammering and inarticulate noises of a sensitive and shy child. For me, writing became inseparable from spiritual and psychological growth. As a raging young man, writing provided a powerful outlet. All rage ultimately has roots in deep grief. I tapped into this as well. That’s why many therapists use writing in their treatments. I don’t claim that poetry is a full treatment program, but it’s therapeutic nonetheless. And in thirty-five years of doing workshops in schools, prisons, juvenile lockups, migrant camps, homeless shelters, Native American reservations, universities, and colleges, I’ve seen the power of writing and poetry to awaken the dream of one’s life.
Later when I decided to make writing a profession, I went back to school to learn grammar, spelling, and syntax. These are invaluable. These helped me sharpen the three aspects of any great art: clarity, gravity, and integrity. These are also aspects of a developed life. Yet they are not necessary to draw stories, imaginings, fears, and hopes from the most reticent of audiences.
The revolutionary nature has much to do with poets being the truth-tellers of the culture. They are the first to point out that the “emperor has no clothes”—or that a society at its core is bankrupt. Poets do this artfully—with powerful images, interesting language, and a musical sense. In addition, expanding any concept of revolution, it is also of the mind, the heart, and culture. Revolution is for the right kind of change to re-balance the right kind of inequity. Not simply ideological, but tied to objective and palpable needs. Poetry, like all art, can be politically and humanly charged. I’m for that, challenged also by the nature of the art.
You also mentioned the limits and requirements of being poet laureate. What do you consider those limits and requirements to be? So far the requirements are basic: Enhance the presence and appreciation of poetry and the literary arts in Los Angeles by engaging with the community in all its diversity, [through] a number of readings, workshops, and events; honor historic L.A. writers; and create new work. There’s a plan for a monthly blog on the city’s website, and I can write one or more commemorative poems to Los Angeles. Of course, I can do more—anthologies, publications, social media outreach, my own blogs and podcasts. My aim is to go broader and deeper. I [want to] be keenly aware of social mores, differences, and a general sense of propriety. I personally won’t use inappropriate language or insulting and divisive images. As long as I’m in this position, I won’t lend my name to political office seekers or be used for commercial purposes. Be that as it may, I will address as many issues as I can with dignity. I will assert my voice and help create spaces for more voices, ideas, and stories to be heard. I will continue to speak out, but as delicately and artfully as I can. This is a great responsibility and opportunity, not to be squandered or misused. And as I’ve stated before, this position should also not be so limiting that I can’t be who I’ve been most of my life—a revolutionary thinker, activist and truth-teller.
In terms of writing poems to Los Angeles, is there any pressure on you to write poems portraying the city in a positive light, to gloss over its problems? Or, in a more general sense, is there an expectation that you write a certain kind of poem? Mayor Eric Garcetti chose me knowing I’ve spoken my heart, written about hard, dark things, run for office, and fought for a just world. There is no pressure to write poems that make L.A. appear more—or less—than what it is.
Though you’ve spent most of your life in Los Angeles, you also lived in Chicago for a number of years. How do you view the two cities? Did you see similarities between the communities? Is the role of poetry different in Chicago than in LA? I see Chicago as my second home. I was enmeshed in Chicago politics, youth work, and poetry for fifteen years. I started Tia Chucha Press, a small cross-cultural poetry publisher, in Chicago—it’s now the publishing wing of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. Even my most famous “L.A.” book, Always Running, La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A., was published while I was in Chicago. On the surface, Los Angeles and Chicago are as different as two cities can be. Chicago is Midwestern, compact, flat, old, with three-story flats, and home to amazing blues, jazz, and the now world-renowned poetry slams. But the similarities are striking. They are both the largest manufacturing centers of the country. Chicago is known for its meatpacking yards, steel mills, and trains. But L.A. also had meatpacking, steel mills, auto plants, aerospace industries, a massive harbor, garment plants, canneries, and more (I worked in many of those industries as a young man).
Unfortunately, most people think L.A.’s industry is solely in Hollywood. During the de-industrialization that first struck the U.S. in the mid-1970s, picking up steam in the 80s and 90s, both cities got hit hard. For four decades, L.A. and Chicago have been the country’s gang capitals, mostly generating armies of economically strapped youth during this de-industrialization process when the trade in drugs and guns took the place of industrial-based work. Chicago today has more gang violence, but for years L.A. led in this area. Both Chicago and L.A. have been active in “squeezing” black and brown communities through versions of gang injunctions, gentrification, and high rents, forcing many poor to move to suburbs or outlying communities and states. But L.A. has been more successful at this, including massive deportations of Mexicans and Central Americans. Because of these two cities, I’m working-class in my ideology, writings, work ethic, and make-up—in my blood.
As for poetry, Chicago sparked a literary explosion in the mid-1980s that has moved across the country and other parts of the world, including slam poetry. I took part in this phenomenon not long after it began at the Green Mill Lounge in Uptown. I moved to Chicago in 1985 and in three years I became integral to this, as cofounder of the Guild Complex and cofounder of the Neutral Turf Poetry Festival, which at one time brought three thousand people to the city’s lakefront. I was even on the first slam poetry tour of Europe in 1993. I was at the heart of this particular brand of performance poetry that also included poetry bands, poetry videos, poetry theater, and more.
I also did writing workshops in homeless shelters, prisons, and juvenile lockups. And I worked as a journalist and editor, primarily in community newspapers, magazines, and radio. In addition, I pioneered gang intervention work through Youth Struggling for Survival, the Increase the Peace Network, and the Humboldt Park Teen Reach Program. When I returned to Los Angeles in 2000, I took this spirit and experience with me. This became the catalyst for the creation of Tia Chucha’s—in thirteen years we’ve raised more than a million dollars for community-based multi-arts training and presentation.
What do you consider to be your greatest achievement—as a writer, an activist, or a community organizer—so far? I can’t say any area is more valuable or more appreciated. I am every one of these—writer, activist, organizer—and I’ll add father, husband, elder, teacher. However, I incorporate them as a whole. For example, my writing cannot exist outside of activism, family, and community. Because I’ve been largely fractured, with various aspects of myself at odds with one another, it’s important for me to be keenly aware of this process. Any achievement I’ve had as a writer is integrated with revolutionary ideas and actions. Being L.A.’s poet laureate, given to me largely because of my development as a poet, my discipline, my contribution to spreading the power of poetry, is inextricable from being a long-time change agent. Not change [as in], “Let’s do something different” (though this can be part of it), but what needs to be changed in order to align. In my personal life it was for my emotional, spiritual, psychological, creative, and physical aspects to align to the dream of my life—to my gifts, my passions, what I was inherently born to do. I had to change addictive, raging, and impulsive dispositions in my nature. For society it’s aligning to the regenerative capacities of the earth and of people—which means having the right relationships so both can thrive. Presently we are not aligned this way in society or in our governance. This means changing those characteristics of the post-industrial capitalist world that tear away at the healing qualities of earth and people. So while I may emphasize poetry these next two years, including the vitality of poetry in anyone’s life, the underlying motives are these alignments—both for the short and the long range; for the immediate demands, and for our future.
Joseph Bathanti North Carolina Poet Laureate, 2012–2014 The author of fourteen books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, most recently the novel The Life of the World to Come, published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2014. His most recent poetry collection is Concertina, published by Mercer University Press in 2013.
You initially moved to North Carolina as part of the VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) program. How did this experience shape the sort of poet and teacher—and, by extension, poet laureate—you would go on to become? When I arrived as a VISTA volunteer in North Carolina, in 1976, recently out of graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh, I was burning to write, though I hadn’t really engaged in it with the kind of steadiness necessary to pile up pages. By happenstance, I was assigned as a VISTA to the North Carolina Department of Corrections and spent the next fourteen months, more or less, in a cell block or on a prison yard—mainly at Huntersville Prison, about twelve miles north of Charlotte—immersed in the tangle of things related to incarceration and reentry.
Prison is a place of extremes where very dramatic things happen by the moment. Young writers often harp about not having anything to write about, but suddenly I was handed a trove of material. Thus I started writing, rather obsessively, about the surreal world of prison. What’s more, my first foray into teaching began in prisons. One of the first things I did as a new VISTA was to organize informal writing workshops in the trailer [connected to] the prison that served as the de facto classroom. I’d supply the guys with a prompt, they’d read what they wrote, and then we’d kick it around. I was also able to put together a couple of saddle-stitched anthologies that featured their poems, stories, and artwork.
I wasn’t thinking at all, back then, that those weekly sessions in that too-hot or too-cold trailer might be therapeutic for the prisoners. It hadn’t occurred to me in those terms, nor had the big conversation about the indisputable benefit of writing in dealing with various sorts of trauma been initiated on a widespread scale. I initiated those sessions because I saw them as extensions of my own desire to write and as a way to contribute to the VISTA project. I became, of course, mystified and intoxicated by the stories those men had to tell and the manner in which they told them. I also launched into reading everything I could get my hands on about prison, especially poetry and fiction.
When asked to recapitulate my career, I always say that my first teaching job was in a prison, and in the narrowest sense this is true. More importantly, my VISTA assignment and teaching in prison were not only the beginning of my own education, but the true genesis of my writing life.
I discovered in VISTA that prisons are but one shackle in the ponderous chain of group homes, halfway houses, soup kitchens, mental hospitals, women’s shelters, juvenile detention centers, and homeless shelters. The same characters show up in each script. It’s no secret that all social ills are intimately connected, but it’s something I had to learn by seeing for myself. I became not only aware of the vast subculture of poverty and affliction, but also of the often invisible network of agencies, organizations, and socially [engaged], charitable individuals committed to helping the kinds of folks who find themselves in such places.
The philosopher and theologian Thomas Moore said, “Deep changes in life follow movements in imagination.” As a result of being not only with prison inmates daily, but also in close proximity to the community of mercy which inevitably responds to suffering, I experienced a radical shift in my imagination. Revealed to me was a rare and secret world and I was an eyewitness to it. Not only was it consciousness-raising, it was life-changing.
As North Carolina’s poet laureate, I was interested in getting in front of every citizen of the state I could manage to visit, but I was also especially keen on visiting those people and those regions of the state—very rural and/or underserved—that did not have regular access to writers and literature, including the populations my service in VISTA revealed to me.
It seems like the act of teaching writing lay at the heart of your work as poet laureate, especially in your signature project of working with returning veterans and their families. How did this go for you? Did you have any specific goals or hopes in mind for the project, and were they achieved? Ultimately, teaching is at the heart of a poet laureate’s service. A solid poet laureate, certainly at the state level, has to be a teacher, an educator. It’s a job that demands a decided pedagogical range to work with all kinds of folks in unimaginably diverse locales—not to mention all the planning and preparation that goes into it all. Traditionally North Carolina poets laureate spend a considerable amount of time in K–12 schools, cheerleading not only for the children, but for those embattled, dedicated, hard-working teachers who ensure that writing and reading endure. That same kind of teaching by the poet laureate also occurs in county libraries, community colleges, universities, churches, shelters, and hospitals. The laureateship in North Carolina remains, I’m pleased to say, a grass-roots service position.
When I declared my signature project as poet laureate—to work with military veterans, those returning from combat and others, and involve their families whenever possible, to tell their stories through poetry and other genres—I didn’t really know what I was getting into. I’m dramatically smarter today about the issues plaguing veterans and their families than I was thirty-two months ago, when I declared my aim to pursue that work, but I’m still very much on the front end of that apprenticeship.
Since then, I’ve taught at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, the Veterans Writing Project summer workshops at George Washington University, and a number of other venues. But, primarily, my work with vets and their families has been in North Carolina. There is nothing terribly fancy about what I do. In the main, I walk into those places and simply talk to those folks for a while, then ask them to talk, and then I ask them to write—not necessarily about their wartime experiences, but inevitably that’s exactly what they end up writing about. And the writing these sessions yield is always breathtaking.
At the outset of my project, I had hoped to launch a statewide initiative, to create a model that would be perpetuated beyond my tenure as poet laureate. I don’t think anything quite that ambitious was ever achieved, in a codified sense. Yet—because of my work, in part, and the attention the North Carolina Arts Council focused on it, and other like-minded agencies and committed folks that rallied to the cause—I do think there was a certain amount of concentrated attention devoted to vets and their families and how writing and other arts can be implemented to not only bring to light their stories, but also to assist them as they deal with the often debilitating fallout associated with deployment.
Again, I cannot at all take credit for this. So many terrific initiatives were already in place or in the process of taking hold when I was appointed poet laureate in 2012. I more or less became a focal point for the crucial intersection among vets, their families, and writing. The North Carolina Arts Council took up that torch, spread the word, and paved the way. Essentially, I mimicked what others had hatched before me. And I reached out initially for help, notably and especially to Ron Capps, founder and director of the Veterans Writing Project in D.C., and Donald Anderson, editor of War, Literature & the Arts, at the Air Force Academy.
In your essay “Ghostwriting,” you mention an aspect of teaching creative writing in prisons that I would think carries over to working with veterans as well: “In prison there are certain stories you simply do not criticize; to do so would be an epic breach of etiquette. Disrespect. Like you didn’t get it.” This can sometimes feel true even in more traditional creative writing settings, when someone shares a piece that is too real, too much from the heart, to be given the normal workshop critique. In these situations, what services are left for a writing teacher to provide? There are times when a writing teacher’s number-one task is to get the heck out of the way. I’m thinking primarily of the work I’ve done with prisoners and veterans—and I taught for a year in a battered women’s shelter—but also students of mine at the university. These folks might be taking their very first crack at articulating how they really feel about subjects that are often explosive and intimate—things they’ve kept hidden inside, possibly for years—in language, on paper, with strangers in the room.
They are suddenly exposed. It’s terrifically dangerous terrain. The teacher’s initial job is to get them to write anything, to assure them they have something to say in the first place, that they indeed have stories worthy of being told and listened to. Worrying about whether it’s good or not can come later—the assessment part, the craft part. Critical appraisal at this point is irrelevant. What’s more, their presence in such a class—especially in the case of vets and prisoners (and other immured populations)—might be a one-shot deal. The teacher has to ensure, through his very measured response, that he does not convince them that they were fools to put pen to paper in the first place.
The fact that certain folks even show up in a class or workshop strikes me as poignant. It’s not about style. It’s like being in church. You don’t criticize the style of someone’s prayer. You don’t tell someone who’s learning to talk again after a four-decade silence—as in the case of some Vietnam vets I’ve had in classes—that he’s going about it improperly. A hush pervades the room when one of these silent sealed vets—or anyone—elects finally and mysteriously to open up. The first draft sometimes is a wail, a keen—what Whitman called that barbaric yawp—and it tends to look very different on the outside than it did on the inside. And once it’s out, it can’t be called back. The teacher’s crucial goal with beginning writers, in any setting, is to keep them talking, keep them writing—until what’s too raw, too hot, seasons and cools. So you have to be pretty darned careful with any kind of knee-jerk qualitative judgment. The teacher’s job, initially, in these instances, is to back off, and get invisible in a hurry, and simply listen.
When Valerie Macon was appointed as your successor, there was an uproar over her perceived lack of qualifications and the governor’s rejection of the traditional nomination process, causing her to step down less than a week later. One positive that came out of the situation was the revelation that North Carolina really does care about its poet laureate. It’s obviously much more than a ceremonial role or an empty political gesture. What about the state and its poets do you think fosters that attitude? The uproar that ensued as a result of Valerie Macon’s appointment was triggered by a number of things, chiefly the fact that the long-standing process that had been in place to select North Carolina’s poet laureate was completely ignored. A great deal has been written about that fiasco, and everybody, everywhere, knows about it, so I won’t beat that straw man anymore. However, there was a terrifically positive side to that uproar. North Carolina poets and writers and readers sent out the message loud and clear that the poet laureate post in North Carolina matters very much to them and, by extension, and more importantly, that the cherished integrity of North Carolina’s legacy of writing and literature is something very much worth fighting for.
We often hear the word community used to describe a body of writers; and, in truth, the community of North Carolina writers is the real thing, not merely a rhetorical community. The writers of this state tend to know one another and support one another and care about one another; and, without getting too saccharine, there’s much about that community that’s familial. It’s a big state, but the literary community is very connected. It’s like a union. What’s more, the legacy of North Carolina and its writers, current and past, are supported and celebrated in every county in the state, in large places and very small places—in public schools, colleges and universities, community colleges, public libraries, local arts councils, and bookstores.
Of course, as in any other state, there are tiers and hierarchies among the writers here, but nothing elitist or hegemonic, nothing cutthroat. When I first arrived in North Carolina, thirty-eight years ago—a Pittsburgh Italian Yankee—the only writing credential I had was my yearning. I could not have been treated any more generously, any more graciously, by the established writers here. They nurtured me. They welcomed me into their ranks. And I really do believe that spirit of generosity, of inclusiveness, has continued to earmark North Carolina as the best place to be a writer. That’s certainly been my experience.
What rankled me more than anything during the flap over Valerie Macon’s appointment were the charges—from those folks who thought having a poet laureate was superfluous—that the post was “honorary,” “ceremonial,” “symbolic.” These were three words used to describe the appointment. Nothing is further from the truth. Poets laureate in North Carolina get in their cars and travel to the people. They show up everywhere. I made upwards of three hundred appearances during my tenure as poet laureate. I’ve said before that I don’t want a medal. It was my honor. But I do want to underscore that I took all my cues from my North Carolina poet laureate predecessors, the tradition of pride and service they exemplified, and the trails they blazed ahead of me.
In recent years, there’s been a proliferation of poet laureate positions in the country. Most states appoint a poet laureate, and many cities do as well. What do you think is behind this surge in the desire to name an “official” poet of a region? The surge in poet laureate posts has been prompted, I’d assume, by the surge in poetry, of all stripes, all across the country. Such proliferation is another indication of the health of poetry and its democratization among, hopefully, the working class and the most marginalized citizens, folks who perhaps do not have ready access to poetry—and here I’m thinking about my own childhood and the very working class, ethnic neighborhood in Pittsburgh where I grew up.
State poets laureate work very hard, but realistically can reach only so many people; and, again, my chief concern is that poets laureate maintain a vibrant visible presence among public school children as well as various immured populations—among everyone. The appointment of city, town, and county poets laureate certainly instigates dialogue and activities (workshops, readings, classes, you name it) that zero in on poetry in specific communities and spread the benefits of poetry as avenues to the obvious art of reading and writing and performing poetry, its timeless culture and appreciation, the enjoyment, the fun, that it provides. But those kinds of activities and dialogue also underscore essential keys to life enhancement: literacy, critical thinking, cultural awareness, community solidarity, and the groundedness and self-esteem that familiarity with one’s own stories—in one’s own language—and their importance brings.
Poets laureate who are from—in every sense of the word—those communities that appoint them (urban and rural, enormous and tiny)—who know and live among their target audiences—have a cachet that creates extraordinary groundswells around poetry in a particular locale. What’s more, the nominal dollars invested in launching these grassroots poet laureate programs repay those dollars exponentially in healthier, safer, and more rooted communities.
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Natasha Trethewey United States Poet Laureate, 2012–2014 Mississippi Poet Laureate, 2012–2016 The author of five collections of poetry, most recently Thrall, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2012.
Could you talk about your signature project as the U.S. poet laureate, “Where Poetry Lives?” What were your goals behind that project? Well, just what the title says: to show how and where poetry lives in the United States. How people are making use of poetry in their everyday lives in order to contend with all sorts of social issues. For example, we went to the juvenile detention facility in Seattle and looked at a program called Pongo there that uses poetry with incarcerated teens, as well as with homeless teens who are often coming to the homeless shelter after being released from a juvenile facility.
Do you feel like the project was a success? Or was there anything you would do differently now? Oh, I think it was wonderful. We hit such a wide variety of places, from a juvenile detention facility to Harvard Medical School, where the poet [and physician] Rafael Campo believes in teaching poetry to interns because it helps make better doctors. It helps make physicians better able to treat the whole patient—physicians who have more empathy. We also [visited] an MFA program in Los Angeles that has a service component as part of its curriculum where the graduate students go out and find ways to bring poetry into their communities.
Could you talk a bit about your office-hours project? It had been a while since a poet laureate had held office hours before, right? Right, not since the position was a consultantship, before it became the laureateship [in 1985]. I thought of it because, when I was named poet laureate, one of the things that happened was newspapers called and asked, “What’s your project going to be?” And I doubt that most people are sitting around thinking, “When I get named poet laureate, this is what I’m going to do.” So of course I didn’t have a project in mind, and it occurred to me that since the Library of Congress thinks of the poet laureate position as a “lightning rod” for poetry in America, and that the role that they like to see the laureate take on is to bring poetry to a wider audience, I wanted to figure out how best to do that. And it seemed to me that one of the best ways was to talk to people about the role of poetry in their lives and to see how they imagined poetry could be brought to a wider audience in the country. And so that’s why I decided to open my office and invite people in to talk to me about just that.
And through these meetings, by talking to people about poetry in this way, did you feel like you learned about what was happening in poetry in America? I did. You know, every few years an article comes out in the Wall Street Journal or other places about how nobody cares about poetry and it doesn’t mean anything. We hear that again and again, and yet that was not the case at all when I met with people, from all walks of life, who came in to talk about what poetry means to them, and how it is important. And so I learned with even more conviction that poetry is alive and well and matters to people in this country.
What kinds of people were coming in to meet with you? Everybody, really. I had everybody from groups of schoolchildren to senior citizens, writing groups who either got together because of a fellowship program at their church or at their senior community center. I think someone who was a lobbyist in Washington came. I should have made a list of all the different kinds of people, but it was just people who did all sorts of things. Sometimes it was researchers or people writing about poetry, or other poets themselves, or college students. It was a big list of people who were very different. But all lovers of poetry.
You once said in an interview for PBS NewsHour that you considered the role of poet laureate to be as a “cheerleader for poetry.” [Laughs.] Oh, yes, I did say that, didn’t I?
I was wondering if you could expand a little more on what you meant by that. You also said that part of the role is to be a promoter. How do you feel like you as a poet laureate can promote or be a cheerleader for poetry? Yeah, you know, that’s one of the funniest things I think I ever said. If only I’d said ‘advocate,’ or ‘ambassador,’ or something more dignified. [Laughs.] But I just had to come on record and say that the University of Georgia, when I was in college, I was head cheerleader. Yes I was. And I think I had been talking to Rob Casper right before I went in to speak with [PBS NewsHour’s] Jeff Brown—Rob is the head of the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress. He is, to use another one of those phrases, like an Energizer bunny. He has so much energy that he gets me kind of hyped. And so we were sitting there, getting excited about what we were going to do about poetry, and then I go in [to the interview] and say, “I want to be a cheerleader for poetry!”
But I guess in some ways it’s not that silly. It’s a very plain way of saying that I have great enthusiasm for poetry and I want to share that with other people in ways that gets them enthusiastic about it, too. That’s what a cheerleader does.
During your tenure as U.S. poet laureate, you had also begun serving your four-year term as the state poet laureate of Mississippi. How do those two roles differ, in your experience? Well, because I was doing both at the same time, a lot of my focus was drawn to the national level. And so I did the kinds of things that I did on the state level, which are of course ongoing, because I have two more years on my term. I participated in, for example, going to the state house, the capital, in Jackson on the day that they promote the arts, where various arts groups come to talk to the state senators and people in the house about the roles of arts in our lives. And so I was there to participate in that and to promote the arts and poetry in the state of Mississippi. I’ve also done other events, readings and other kinds of visits in the state. Not as much as what I was doing on the national level.
What has been your greatest challenge during your time as poet laureate? Oh, goodness. That’s a good question. I’ve only had the opportunity to talk about the things that have been the greatest rewards of it. Well, I suppose the greatest challenge for me would have been that, because I wanted to be an advocate and because I wanted to see the role as a public service position, I occupied a very public place for those two terms and I traveled a lot and I did a lot of things and it made it harder for me to have the quiet time that a poet needs to write poems. So my biggest challenge was finding time to also still be a poet—not just an advocate for poetry, but a working poet who could sit down and have some time to write poems.
Nick Narbutas is Poets & Writers Magazine’s Diana and Simon Raab Editorial Fellow.
Joy Harjo is a poet unafraid of self-discovery. She explored painting, dancing and medicine before focusing on a writing career. Born in Tulsa in 1951 to the Muscogee tribe (of the Creek Nation), Harjo is both Muscogee and white, and her acceptance of both heritages plays a crucial role in her work: Her poetry preserves her Native American background, while integrating aspects of the mainstream American culture in which she was also raised, to create a unique, poignant voice.
Harjo attended high school at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and went on the study at the University of New Mexico, where in 1976 she was in the first graduating class of its creative writing program. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1978. She has taught creative writing at the University of Arizona and is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of New Mexico.
Harjo has published four books of poetry and several short stories, and has written several screenplays. She is a winner of several awards, including an Academy of American Poets Award in 1978, two National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Fellowships (in 1978 and 1992), the Josephine Miles Award for Poetry from PEN Oakland in 1991, and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award in 1991. Harjo has also served on a policy panel for the NEA.
Now living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Harjo has a 23-year-old son, Phil Dayn, and a 19-year-old daughter, Rainy Dawn, who is the subject of the poem “Rainy Dawn” that appears in Harjo’s most recent collection of poetry, In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan University Press, 1990).
From a hotel room in Lincoln, Nebraska, Harjo reminisces about her childhood creative stirrings. “I went outside very early in the mornings to draw in the dirt while everyone was still sleeping. I’d sit there and imagine what I could paint. And what always came to me out of the imaginative sphere were images—not particularly words, but images. Maybe that’s how I think, because sometimes I feel that I write as a painter. It’s almost as if I paint the poems.”
Harjo came from a family of painters. Her grandmother Naomi, a full-blooded Creek Indian, and her Aunt Lois, who was the family member closest to Harjo, were painters. Both women received their BFAs in fine art in the early 1900s and painted in the classical European style, but their subjects were often Native American. In her living room, Harjo has a painting by her grandmother of Osceola, the Seminole warrior who would never surrender to the U.S. government. Harjo uses a different medium, but the same collaboration of classical and Native American influences is the marrow of her poetry.
Reading was a large part of her childhood. She loved poems and memorized them, first because she was forced to in school, and then because she enjoyed doing it. For her birthdays, she requested poetry books, but she was on her own in the quest for quality poetry because she did not have any outstanding educational figures to guide her.
In high school, Harjo trained as a dancer under Rosalie Jones, a dancer of the Blackfeet tribe, and toured as a dancer and an actress with one of the first all-Indian dance troupes in this country. The show was called “Deep Roots, Tall Cedar” and gained recognition from many professional dance companies because it combined elements of classical European drama with traditional tribal drama.
After the tour ended in 1968, Harjo, who was 17 years old, returned to Oklahoma, where her son, Phil, was born. She next moved to New Mexico, leaving Phil’s father behind and enrolled at the University of New Mexico as a premed student. Within one semester she returned to art. The university setting introduced Harjo to a world of poets from backgrounds similar to her own and among the group of Native American writers at UNM she found a poetry that spoke of familiar places in a language she understood, something she had never encountered before. “Most of the poetry available to my generation was set in New England or in the Northeast and was written by men, or women emulating the male experience. I always had to change myself to conform to the poem. But I loved the melodic tones, the rhythm, and the music—those are the things that pulled me into a poem, as much or more than the idea.
One of the first poetry readings Harjo attended was given by Galway Kinnell, who became a source of great inspiration to her. She views him as a musician as well as a poet in the way he writes and reads his poetry. Harjo recounts with verve another significant event that was the turning point in her “unconscious decision” to take up the art of writing poetry: “I was watching a documentary one Sunday afternoon about a tribe in New Guinea. There was a storyteller, but he was also a poet—you could tell by the way he spoke his words. The story was about a hunt for a wild pig, and as he spoke he became—through his inflections and physical movements—the poem, the animal itself, while remaining human. It touched me as nothing else had.”
When asked about other important influences on her poetry, she says, “There are people who were very important to me. They were poets who I felt were human beings with integrity—integrity to the word and integrity to their country (the land), and to their human beingness. I think of people like Pablo Neruda. One of my favorite poets from Uganda, Africa, who influenced me very much is Okot p’Bitek. I love his piece ‘The Song of Lawino.’ I also like the work of other African writers—West African writers especially. In this country, I became excited by the African American writers: Ishmael Reed’s fiction, the work of Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Leslie Silko, and Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, a novel that was pretty much a poem. All were important to my writing.” Harjo had also read the Bible twice by the time she was 12 years old.
Harjo became disenchanted with the academic view of poetry, because it distorted poetry’s sheer beauty. “I think that what’s happened within the past centry, and it probably came with T. S. Eliot—although you can’t blame everything on T. S. Eliot—is that poetry became the property of the academic. It was taken away from the people in a sense, and I don’t believe that’s where poetry belongs—it belongs to the people. Yes, you can take apart literature, separate it, and see how it works, but as with taking apart the human body, you can’t see the spirit, which is at the root of it. It is the same with a poem—you can’t touch the spirit.”
Harjo sought a more creative approach to teaching and adopted a method that was directly influenced by one of her students. “I was teaching a class that involved African music and its connection to the spoken word. There was a young Ghanian man who told an incredible story about how he studied to be a master drummer. At seven years old, he was the apprentice to the master drummer, who would send him out into the bush every morning. He had to listen to all of the sounds going on around him, including the sound of the sun coming up, the insects buzzing, the people going for water, and the sound of the hunters as they went out into the bush. He would take it all in, and his ongoing lesson was to repeat those sounds on the drum and perfect them. Of course, it was the same lesson that went on for years, but it was the first teaching method I felt made sense. The workshop method is useful for technique and craft, but the approach seems more like business rather than the sacred art that poetry is.”
As a poet, Harjo viewed a changing society as an opportunity to explore the new attitudes toward her culture and humanity through writing. “I have felt the explosion of the civil rights movement in this country and have been challenged by the shock waves of human rights struggles all over the world. I’ve been especially involved in the struggles of my Indian peoples to maintain a place and culture in this precarious age. My poetry has everything to do with this. I came into writing at a poignant historical moment. I was lucky to be a part of a major multicultural movement with other writers.”
The beginning of her writing career also coincided with the rise of the women’s movement. Harjo noticed a great many poems being written straight from “the kitchen table,” and her poetry fit into this niche as well. “This poetry spoke very openly and honestly of women’s experiences. I considered it to be an incredible revolution in which we gave ourselves back to ourselves. Women had been stripped away by the language, by expectations of the language, and by expectations of the poets and the fathers of the poets. And we are not out of it yet.
“I am seen as a feminist poet. The way I interpret feminism in my own work is the power of a woman to be a warrior—to recognize the warrior characteristics within herself, which include self-love, vulnerability, honesty, integrity, a sense of morals, and so on.” But in a broader sense, Harjo’s poetry reflects the truths of being human, our relationship to one another, and our relationship to the physical world we inhabit.
Harjo views herself as a woman who has had to learn—or who is learning—to honor the female within herself. “I think it’s easier to honor the male in our culture because it’s much more accepted. There are almost no truly powerful and sustained images of female power. None. Look at Marilyn Monroe? The Virgin Mary? And what images exist for Indian women? The big question is, How do we describe ourselves as women in this culture? It’s unclear.
“I’ve had to nurture and accept all the elements of myself—both the creator and the destroyer; accept both my white and my native relatives, and accept the female and the male. It’s an ongoing internal war. I almost destroyed myself by the time I was twenty, because I felt like I had to be one or the other. Finally, at one point I made a stand, and here I am.” If there is any one poem that exemplifies her reconciliation of self, Harjo says it is “I Give You Back” in She Had Some Horses (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1983), her second collection of poems.
Harjo’s subject matter is drawn mainly from the Native American tradition of exalting the land and the spirit, the realities of American culture, and the concept of feminine individuality. Her characters may be actual people like Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, and Russell Moore, or they may be imaginary entities. “I imagine like a fiction writer sometimes. Most readers assume that the events in a poem actually happened to the poet. Not everything I write is autobiographical. In my work, I add to or change the truth. It is still the truth, just presented in a different form.”
There is an inherent spiritual quality to Harjo’s poetry, but she doesn’t feel that she is any more spiritual than the next person. “Part of the way I am comes from being around Native American people, but I wouldn’t really use the world ‘spiritual.’ It is natural for human beings to be in awe of the sacred and to realize that the sacred is everywhere. But humans seem to have lost their way, although every once in a while someone may find it, and I think that’s the artist. The artists and the poets are the ones who search for the sacred place.”
Her first collection of poetry, a chapbook, What Moon Drove Me to This? (I. Reed Books, 1979) is now out of print. “It should stay out of print,” says Harjo. “It was a very young book. There are probably only two good poems in it—poems that showed promise. It was a painful book, written during a difficult period in my life. You could see the beginnings of something, but it wasn’t quite cooked.”
Harjo’s second book, She Had Some Horses, sold over 11,000 copies and is now in its eighth printing by the same publisher. Horses are a recurring image in many of her poems, but when asked about their meaning, she laughs and replies, “I don’t really want to say, and I get asked that question often. I just leave the horses to themselves.”
Secrets From the Center of the World (University of Arizona Press, 1989) was a new kind of book for Harjo, combining photography with poetic language. The photographer/astronomer Stephen Strom was looking for a Native American writer to collaborate with him on his book of photographs of a Navajo reservation. “My friend Rain Perish, a Navajo artist and writer, couldn’t do it and referred him to me. We met, and I loved his photographs. Whichever way you turned the pictures, the perspectives made sense, and I think his being an astronomer and spending so much time looking at the universe affected his vision. He sees the world with immense detail. I wrote some text to go along with the photos, made the rounds to all of those places, and then rewrote the text.” Harjo and Strom worked on the arrangement of the photographs together.
Harjo had already visited most of the places featured in the photographs. “I spent a lot of time going out as a student activist to work with the Navajo people. Many of my friends were Navajo, so I learned the language. I learned the language to the point where I could speak it pretty well, joke in it, and I actually started to dream in it. For me, Secrets From the Center of the World is, in a way a tribute to that time of my life, to those people, to the land, and to the language, which I think influenced my writing very much.”
In Mad Love and War, Harjo’s most recent book of poems, departs from her original chant-oriented writing style. “In Mad Love, the story started to take precedent. Even though the lyric is important for me, the narrative had more of an edge. Maybe I’m getting farther away from the poetics. My next book will be very different. Harjo’s next collection—The Field of Miracles—is a prose narrative, which she hopes to finish within the next year. A recent short story appears in a Norton anthology called Best of the West, a collection of works by writers west of the Missouri, and another story appears in an anthology of short stories by Native American writers called Talking Leaves (Harper, 1991).
Harjo’s work has grown in density and in scope, and her increasing love of music has become a major element in her poetry. She plays tenor and soprano saxophone and is now learning to play the flute. She is excited by the literary possibilities that arise out of writing and playing music. “I started playing the saxophone about halfway into writing Mad Love and could already see the effect of jazz. Even though I’m just learning the elements of jazz, I listen to it a lot.” She doesn’t think that her poetry is “jazz poetry,” although it is very much influenced by the music. “I’m close to my tribal music and ceremony, and there is a relationship to jazz. There is a history of connections among the Muscogee, African American, and Seminole people. What I hear in jazz is my people, and I feel related to the music.”
Harjo’s relationship to jazz runs parallel with her relationship to American poetry. “I am an American, but it took me a while to reconcile my feelings toward American poetry. James Wright praised the American condition, as did Richard Hugo, who truly came out of the American experience. Adrienne Rich, too, is very important—more important to America than America wants to know or realize. I think academics felt betrayed by her when she refused to wear the clothes of her fathers. She refused the forms of her fathers, and left the house of her fathers. When she left the house of the fathers and embraced the mothers, academia felt betrayed. But I look to her honesty as much as her incredible gift of language and intellect.”
Harjo has recently formed a band called Poetic Justice, with a drummer and a bass player, and would like to record a mixture of poetry and music. She has already completed one projected called “Furious Light” (distributed by Watershed Foundation in Washington, D.C.), taped a reading of poetry from She Had Some Horses and In Mad Love recorded over music. The music was taped separately in this instance, but Harjo is eager to produce a tape that integrates poetry and music even more dramatically.
In addition to working on her new book and pursuing her musical career, Harjo is teaching and writing several screenplays for a television series called “Tales From the Center of the Earth.” The acknowledgement and integration of all creative energy—art, history, emotion, music—are highly important to Harjo’s work and daily life. The personal growth Harjo sees through the evolution of her writing is key. “If my style didn’t change and evolve, I would quit writing. Poetry is reciprocal. As poetry feeds you, you have to nurture the art and give it time and attention. It does give back to you, I suppose like anything else.”
Stephanie Izarek Smith is a writer an editor based in New York City. She is currently writing a collection of short prose and poetry.
The opening spread of “An Interview With Joy Harjo” as it appeared in the July/August 1993 issue.
Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories.
The finalists for the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced on Saturday. Five titles were selected in each of the following categories: autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The board of the organization also announced the recipients of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the John Leonard Award for Best First Book.
After consulting 125 years of circulation data, the New York Public Library has shared its ten most checked-out books. The top three titles: The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats, The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, and 1984 by George Orwell. (Washington Post)
Rapper and poet Noname appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition to discuss her recent books-based community engagement initiatives. Last year, she founded a book club to highlight works by authors of color; two books are featured each month and in-person meetups are supported across the country. More recently, she launched a Twitter campaign encouraging the public to register for library cards.
“I really care about writing and the way it feels in the mouth, but I think I care most about the book being rigorous.” Emma Copley Eisenberg talks to the Rumpus about her debut essay collection, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia,and the complex responsibilities of writing true crime.
Electric Literature highlights ten collections by Latinx poets that published in 2019, including Why I Am Like Tequila by Lupe Mendez.
Valerie Stivers prepares a dinner inspired by the life and work Elizabeth Jane Howard, an English writer best known for her family drama novels, the Cazalet Chronicles. On the menu: foolproof sunchoke soup, rissoles, and a rabbit-and-gammon pie. (Paris Review Daily)
Every month, Literary Hub offers reading recommendations based on zodiac signs. Two picks for January: Scarlett Thomas’s Oligarchy for Leos and Tanen Jone’s The Better Liar for Geminis.
It’s a complicated thing, talking,” says Mira Jacob, whose graphic memoir, Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations, comes out in March from One World. “Social media has us believing that the only conversations worth having are the ones that affirm us, the ones we can align ourselves with by clicking Like. Meanwhile most of us are pretty clumsy when we’re trying to talk. We say too much or too little or the wrong thing entirely.” The tricky art of conversation is on full display in Good Talk, which depicts several of Jacob’s conversations with her inquisitive six-year-old son, who is both Jewish and Indian American. Her son’s questions—Was Michael Jackson brown or was he white? Is it bad to be brown? Are white people afraid of brown people?—cut to the heart of many issues concerning race, family, parenthood, and America.
With humor and a willingness to examine her own beliefs, Jacob explores how people struggle to speak to one another about hard topics. “I’m hoping readers will leave the book thinking about their own conversations,” she says, “the ones that have formed them, the ones they’ve only ever had in their imaginations, the ones they might need to have, the ones they might need to open themselves up to.”
This month, artist and author Alison Bechdel follows up her best-selling, National Book Critics Circle Award–nominated graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006), a coming-of-age story centered on Bechdel’s relationship with her late father, with a memoir focused on the other half of her parentage, Are You My Mother? In her new “metabook,” also published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Bechdel investigates her mother’s life—and the aspirations and wounds the two women share—from every accessible angle, using recorded conversations, recollected therapy sessions, photographs and documents, and renderings of dreams and memories as the connective tissue of the narrative. The author weaves literary allusions into the memoir
as well: The panels above, which are preceded in the book by a flashback into the imagined world of Virginia Woolf, capture a slice of phone conversation that begins when Bechdel’s mother mentions she’s been reading Sylvia Plath’s diaries. While the most immediate aspect of Bechdel’s work is indeed visual, the dual processes of her storytelling—writing and drawing—are inextricably intertwined. “I’m conceiving of the page in terms of images and design at the same time that I’m writing the narration and the dialogue,” she writes in a note on her artistic process that accompanied prepublication copies of Are You My Mother? For a more detailed look at Bechdel’s graphic and textual oeuvre, visit the author’s website, dykestowatchoutfor.com.
Fearless, inventive, persistent, beautiful,
or just plain badass—here are some of the living authors who shake us awake,
challenge our ideas of who we are, embolden our actions, and, above all,
inspire us to live life more fully and creatively. Add your favorites to the
list in the comments section below.
Chinua
Achebe
The best-selling Nigerian novelist sets
universal tales of personal and moral struggle in the context of the tragic
drama of colonization.
André Aciman
An uprooted Alexandrian
Jew, Aciman is a writer whose careful reflections, couched in dense and
unapologetic prose, unfurl like lifelines flung out to all the world’s
wanderers.
Uwem
Akpan
His is the perfect story line: Jesuit priest
from Nigeria becomes a best-selling, Oprah-chosen author. “I was inspired to
write by the people who sit around my village church to share palm wine after
Sunday Mass, by the Bible, and by the humor and endurance of the poor,” he
writes on his Web site.
Elizabeth
Alexander
There was too much chatter about the quality
of the poem. What matters is that she was up there reading it—a poem!—on the
biggest and most inspiring stage in recent history.
Aharon Appelfeld
As William Giraldi wrote, he is “a man for whom
language is dangerous, a man who measures every word because every word is
sacred.”
John
Ashbery
One of the best and most enduring poets that
this country is lucky enough to have. Period.
Alison
Bechdel
The graphic memoirist shows us that perhaps
the truest way to make sense of memory is by investigating the pictures of our
past (both physical and mental).
T.
C. Boyle
He’s like Santa Claus, only thinner. You can
count on a damn good book of fiction under the tree every year.
Anne
Carson
She was bending genres like silly straws long
before it was fashionable or commercially successful to do so. Plus, she’s
probably the smartest author we know.
Kang Chol-Hwan
His memoir, The Aquariums of Pyongyang, was the first account of North Korea’s gulag
system by someone who had survived it.
Susanna Clarke
She took one of the
staples of fantasy writing, the magician, and turned it into a high literary
epic, removing Jonathan Strange
and Mr. Norrell from the confines of genre entirely.
Billy Collins
He’s made accessible a dirty word by
celebrating the poetic pleasures and small comforts of ordinary life in a way
that encourages us to celebrate them too.
Joan
Didion
Check for the pulse of anyone who wasn’t deeply moved by The Year of
Magical Thinking. Didion’s simple, unsentimental prose is
pure inspirational power.
Katherine Dunn
It’s been more than
twenty years since she introduced us to Arturo the Aquaboy, Ephy and Elly the
twins, and Oly the albino hunchback, but we’ll gladly wait another twenty for
anything approaching the genius of Geek
Love.
Cornelius
Eady and Toi Derricotte
Two poets, two words: Cave Canem. The fact
that they have eleven poetry collections between them is icing on the cake.
Dave
Eggers
From A
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius to McSweeney’s
to 826 National to Where the Wild Things Are. He might just be the hardest-working writer in publishing.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The last Bohemian. A
cofounder of City Lights Bookstore. Publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl—and defendant in the
obscenity trial that ensued. Author of A
Coney Island of the Mind. His audience treats him like a rock star.
Because he is one.
Donald
Hall
The image of the eighty-one-year-old on the
cover of Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in
Poetry pretty much says it all.
Kathryn Harrison
It takes courage to
write The Kiss. Plain
and simple.
Brenda Hillman
Reminds us that the language we use when ordering a sandwich
is also the language we use to make art. Her environmental concerns prove
writers can offer more than just aesthetic pleasure.
Duong
Thu Huong
A former member of the Vietnamese Communist
Party, Duong, especially in No Man’s Land, reassures us that beauty tends to be oblivious to the threats of thugs.
Philip Levine
He conveys and
memorializes the struggles of the American working class in a way that is
authentic, heartfelt, and all too rare in contemporary poetry.
Jill
Magi
Her grassroots efforts to build community
through a micropublishing model prove that you don’t need a lot of money to
make an impact.
Gabriel García Márquez
He makes the most
magical of circumstances believable. And this nonsense that he’s finished with
writing? Don’t believe it.
Cormac
McCarthy
He made it okay for literary snobs to read
bloody westerns and postapocalyptic thrillers.
Pat Mora
The feminist poet and
founder of Día de los Niños/Día de los Libros is also an energetic advocate in
the bilingual community.
Toni
Morrison
A portrait of strength and beauty, the 1993
Nobel laureate writes utterly compelling novels about the whole arc of American
experience.
Haruki Murakami
He consistently
demonstrates how far the narrative form can bend and proves that a story with
surrealist tendencies can be both moving and compelling.
Barack Obama
Let’s never forget that
our first African American president is also a best-selling author.
Tim
O’Brien
In The Things
They Carried, he gave us the ultimate meditation on war,
memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.
Lucia
Perillo
Stares down multiple sclerosis and laughs in
its face. Plus, anyone who has the guts to title a book of poems Inseminating the Elephant has our vote.
Salvador Plascencia
Reminiscent of another
inspirational figure, Roberto Bolaño, Plascencia alters our experience of the
text and challenges our associations of symbol and meaning by incorporating
drawings, figures, and text objects into his writing.
Reynolds Price
The Southern poet,
novelist, and memoirist has done some of his best work after becoming a
paraplegic following surgery in the 1980s to remove a spinal cord tumor.
Thomas Pynchon
He’s like Proust. We
could live our whole lives and never read Gravity’s
Rainbow…and still be inspired by it.
David
Rhodes
He may have been down, but he’s never been
out. The author of Driftless still has a glimmer in his eye when he talks about motorcycles.
Marilynne
Robinson
She proves that great art takes time. With
the publication of Gilead, we were
reminded that twenty-four years isn’t too long to wait for a novel.
Salman
Rushdie
Possession of The
Satanic Verses will still get you arrested in much of the
Muslim world. It’s probably worth it.
Kay
Ryan
The quietness and measured quality of her
poetry also informs her lifestyle: As both a runner and cyclist, she
establishes a balance between the heady work of writing and the need of the
body to do its own work.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
His novels contain
heartbreakingly honest and unsentimental portraits of people struggling with
such traumas as alcoholism and sexual molestation.
J. D. Salinger
He found a way to write
characters, dialogue, and scenes that seem effortless. And he’s managed to stay
hidden for decades—how is that even possible in the twenty-first century?
Frederick
Seidel
Sure he’s filthy rich, but the man knows how
to spend his money. He owns four Ducati motorcycles and he writes poems about
them (probably while wearing a suit).
Floyd
Skloot
Despite virus-induced brain damage, he writes
with surprising tenderness and candor about recreating a life for himself and,
in the process, makes us think about our own.
Wole Soyinka
The first black writer
to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, he’s written in nearly ever genre while
relentlessly pursuing freedom in his homeland of Nigeria.
Ruth
Stone
Six years ago, when she was a mere
eighty-nine years old, the poet was quoted in our pages as saying, “You have to
allow yourself to take joy. Otherwise, you’re no good to anyone.”
Wisława
Szymborska
The most famous living poet in Poland proves
that quality is more important than quantity. The eighty-six-year-old Nobel
laureate has published no more than 250 poems.
Gay Talese
The New Journalism.
Elie Wiesel
“I was the accuser, God
the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone—terribly alone in a world
without God and without man.” —from the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s memoir Night.
C.
D. Wright
She’s a true original, who manages to be odd, beautiful,
tough as nails, and wonderfully inventive all in the same poetic line.
Authors who would have
made the list had we compiled it a little over a year ago: Jim Carroll, Frank McCourt, Reginald Shepherd, John Updike, David Foster Wallace.
We’ve shared our list. Now we want to hear from you: Which authors inspire you most?
When I walked into Women & Children
First, the
feminist bookstore that Linda Bubon and her business partner, Ann
Christophersen, founded more than thirty years ago, the overriding
feeling I
experienced was one of warmth. And it wasn’t because Chicago was having a
late-winter snowstorm that afternoon. From the eclectic array of books
stacked
on tables, to the casualness of the blond wood bookcases, to the
handwritten
recommendations from staff below favorite books on the shelves,
everything
feels personalized; an atmosphere of welcome permeates the place.
In the back of
the store, a
painted sign showing an open book with a child peering over the top
hangs from
the ceiling, indicating the children’s section. Not far away, a similar
sign,
this one of a rainbow with an arrow below it, points toward the GLBTQ
section.
Despite these signs—not to mention the name of the store itself—Women
&
Children First carries more than books for women and, well, children.
The
literature section stretches down one wall; there are stacks of
photography
collections; books on writing fill an entire bookcase; and disciplines
as
diverse as cooking and psychology have healthy offerings. Though
conceived as a
feminist bookstore three decades ago, since moving in 1990 to its
current
location in the Andersonville neighborhood (an area originally home to a
large
population of Swedish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century that has
since
evolved into a multiethnic community, and one with an equally diverse
range of
locally owned businesses such as Middle Eastern cafés, an Algerian crepe
house,
and, of course, a Swedish bakery), Women & Children First has become
as
much a neighborhood shop as a specialty store. And because the area has
become
popular with families and young professionals, the clientele is just as
likely
to be made up of men as women.
Still, books
related to women
and women’s issues—whether health, politics, gender and sexuality,
literature,
criticism, childrearing, or biography—are clearly the store’s focus.
Such
lauded authors as Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem, Annie
Leibovitz,
and Hillary Rodham Clinton have all read here. Many now-famous writers
such as
Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, Julia Alvarez, Margot Livesey, and Jane
Hamilton
got their start at this store. Needless to say, Women & Children
First has
a devoted audience for its events, and many who attend are well-known
writers
themselves. So on any given night you’ll be as likely to be sitting next
to
authors such as Elizabeth Berg, Carol Anshaw, Rosellen Brown, Sara
Paretsky,
Audrey Niffenegger, Aleksandar Hemon, or Nami Mun as hearing them speak
from
the podium.
Like co-owner
Bubon, Women
& Children First doesn’t take itself or its mission too seriously,
despite
its long history and literary laurels. Twinkle lights hang in the front
windows
facing Clark Street; there are jewelry displays around the front
counter; and
tacked to the community bulletin board are flyers for both theater
performances
and burlesque shows. When I met Bubon, she was wearing a simple, black,
scoop-neck sweater and a subtle, patterned scarf in shades of red,
orange, and
cream. (She also wore Ugg boots, which she unabashedly raved about for
their
comfort.) Because Christophersen had to be out of town during my visit,
Bubon
took me around the store herself—not that I needed much of a tour.
Women &
Children First is only 3,500 square feet in area, most of which is one
large
open room. Still, the store carries more than twenty thousand books, as
well as
journals, cards, and gifts. And perhaps it is this combination that adds
to its
coziness.
But nothing
captures the
laid-back feel and philosophy of the bookstore better than the wooden
kitchen
table that sits in the back, near the children’s section. Around it are
four
unmatched wooden chairs. Bubon brought us here for the interview, and it
seems
a perfect example of the spirit of openness that pervades this place.
Several
times during our conversation customers wandered over to chat with her
and I
was generously introduced. And more than once Bubon excused herself
politely to
help a nearby child pull down a book he couldn’t reach. But never did
these
interactions feel like interruptions, nor did they ever change the
course of our
conversation. Rather, it felt as though I was simply a part of the ebb
and flow
of a normal day at Women & Children First. Nothing could have made
me feel
more welcome.
When did you meet Christophersen?
We met in graduate school. We were both
getting a
master’s degree in literature, and we became very good friends.
Was that here in Chicago?
Yes, at the University of Illinois. Our
class and
the one just above us had a lot of great writers—James McManus, Maxine
Chernoff, Paul Hoover. It was a very fertile atmosphere. So as we were
finishing the program, Ann and I started talking about opening a
business
together, and the logical choice was a bookstore. There was only one
local
chain at the time, Kroch’s & Brentano’s, and there were probably
sixty or
seventy wonderful independent bookstores in the city and the suburbs of
Chicago.
That many?
Yeah. There were a lot of independent bookstores.
It was a really great environment for booksellers. I mean, we all
thought of
ourselves as competing with one another, but really there were enough
readers
to go around. By the mid-1980s, however, we were feeling crowded—after
five
years we had outgrown that first place. So we moved to a larger store,
two
blocks away, at Halsted and Armitage.
Did you decide from the beginning
that you
wanted to specialize in books for women and children?
Yes. It was what was in our hearts, and
in our
politics, to do. We were part of an academic discussion group made up of
feminist teachers from all the nearby universities that met at the
Newberry
Library. Two of our teachers were part of this group and they had asked
us to
join as grad students. They were discussing Nancy Chodorow, whose book The
Reproduction
of
Mothering had just
come out. Also Rubyfruit Jungle. I was like, “Oh, my goodness!”
because I had never read any lesbian literature, and here was this group
of
academics discussing it. They discussed Marge Piercy and Tillie Olsen.
These
were writers whom, when I went looking for them at places like Kroch’s
&
Brentano’s or Barbara’s Bookstore, I wasn’t finding. Similarly, as an
academic,
I knew how much Virginia Woolf had written. Yet I would look for
Virginia Woolf
and there would only be To the Lighthouse. Maybe Mrs.
Dalloway. Or A Writer’s Diary. But we envisioned a store
where everything that was in print by Virginia Woolf could be there. And
everything by outsider writers like Tillie Olsen or Rita Mae Brown would
be
there.
It’s interesting to hear you
describe these
authors as being outsiders at one time, because when I was growing up
they were
people I was reading from the beginning.
Oh, back then you had to go lookin’,
lookin’,
lookin’, lookin’ to
find these writers. And they certainly weren’t being taught. Alice
Walker had written The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and maybe Meridian
had come out. But all the
stuff that you think of as classic women’s literature—Margaret Atwood,
Toni
Morrison—they were not a part of the canon. They were just fledgling
writers.
It was much different. And, again, there was no gay and lesbian
literature.
None. I mean, it just didn’t exist. We put a little sign on the shelf
that
said, “If you’re looking for lesbian writers, try Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,
May Sarton, Willa
Cather….” You know, writers who historians had discovered had had
relations
with women. [Laughter.]
Nothing public at all. We had a little list. Back
then our vision was about this big. [She holds her hands about eight
inches
apart.]
Now, thirty years later, it’s incredible to look back and see the
diversity of
women writers who are published, and the incredible diversity of gay and
lesbian literature, and transgender literature, that’s being published.
I
still think
women lag behind in winning the major awards, and they lag behind in
getting
critical attention. So there’s still a need for Women & Children
First and
stores like it that push the emphasis toward women writers. But, at that
time,
we had to work to fill up a store that was only a quarter of the size of
this
one. That first store was only 850 square feet, yet it was still a
challenge to
find enough serious women’s literature to stock the shelves. Because we
didn’t
want to do romances. And it’s not that we didn’t have a vision of a
bookstore
that would be filled with works by women and biographies of women and
eventually
a gay and lesbian section and all that. But I had no idea that there
would be
this renaissance in women’s writing. That it really would happen. That
women
would get published, and get published in some big numbers, and that I
would
finally be able to sell books by women who were not just white and
American or
British. I mean, the internationalizing of women’s literature has been
very
exciting, I think.
What precipitated the move to this
neighborhood and this bigger store, then?
In those first ten years we had
double-digit
growth every year. Ten percent up, 11 percent up, 15 percent up. I don’t
think
we even made returns until we’d been in business three years. We were
just
selling. I had no ordering budget. “Oh, new stuff by women?” I’d say.
“Great!
We need it.” Business was growing.
Was that because nobody else was
selling this
type of literature?
Yes, and because women’s studies was
developing as
a discipline. Also, I think we were good booksellers. And we had great
programming right from the beginning. Not so much big-name authors, but
interesting stuff.
So like the first store, you outgrew
the second
one.
We outgrew it. Our landlord had also
sold the
building and the new owner was going to triple our rent. So if we needed
any
more motivation to move, that was it. What was tough, however, was that
we’d
been ten years in the DePaul neighborhood, which is very central to
Chicago.
You can get there very easily from the South Side, from the West Side,
off the
highways…yet we couldn’t really afford to stay there, and we couldn’t
find a
new space that would suit us. But then we were recruited to move up here
by the
Edgewater Community Development Organization. Andersonville is a part of
Edgewater, which goes all the way to the lakefront and west to
Ravenswood. They
literally came to us and said, “The people in our community would love
to have
a bookstore in that neighborhood. There’s a lot of spaces that are being
renovated, and we wonder if you’re thinking of opening a second store,
or if we
could encourage you to.”
This happened by coincidence, while
you were
already considering a new location?
Yes! And we said, “Well, you know, we
need more
space. We’ll come up and look.” At the same time, there were two women
who were
opening a women’s arts-and-crafts store, and all their friends said, “It
doesn’t matter where you’re located as long as you’re next to or on the
same
block with Women & Children First.” So we came up to Edgewater to
look, and
they showed us this building, which had been a big grocery store. It was
being
renovated and gutted, so we could get in at the beginning and say, “We
want the
corner and we want this much space.” The arts-and-crafts store opened
next
door.They
stayed open for seven years, and when the partnership broke up, in 1997,
we
took over their space. In terms of our growth, business kicked up 20
percent
the first year we were here. We opened in July 1990, and that first year
people
came in and brought us plates of cookies and said, “Thank you for coming
to our
neighborhood.” It was just great.
But
the move itself is the best story. Remember, this was still a shoestring
operation. We had to rely on the community. So we organized seventy
volunteers.
Four different women rented or had trucks. And those seventy people
moved every
book and bookshelf out of the old space and into this space in one day.
We
organized people in groups of three or four, and we said, “Okay, you
have the
Biography section. You pack up all these books in these boxes, mark them
‘Bio,’
pull out that shelving unit, you go with that unit and those boxes to
the new
space, and there will be somebody here to help set it up.” We had other
women
who went out and bought three trays of sandwiches and fed all the
volunteers.
We started on Friday night, worked all day Saturday, and by two in the
afternoon on Sunday we were open for business. We were only really
officially
closed for one day. And women still tell me, “I remember helping you
move.”
They’ll come in and they’ll say, “That’s my section; I put this section
back together.”
Have readings and events been a part
of this
store from the beginning?
They’ve been a huge part of the store.
Getting to meet
all these wonderful writers whom I’ve read—in person—is also something
that’s
kept me motivated and excited. And, you know, the excitement of
discovering a
new writer is always great.
We have a lot
of local
politicians who shop here too. When Jan Schakowsky decided to support
Barack
Obama in his run for the U.S. Senate, she had a press conference here.
She asked if she could use
our store to make the announcement that she was throwing her support
behind him
in the primary. And I remember her saying to me, “If we can just get
people to
not call him Osama.” I mean, that’s where we were at that time. Nobody
knew who
he was.
So the store has been important for
the
community in many ways.
A political gathering place, and a
literary
gathering place, and a place where we have unpublished teen writers read
sometimes. We’ve developed four different book groups, plus a Buffy
discussion
group. And if you came on a Wednesday morning, you’d see twenty to
thirty
preschoolers here with their moms for story time, which I do. I love it.
I just
love it. It’s absolutely the best thing of the week. I have a background
in
theater and oral interpretation, so it’s just so much fun for me.
Has that grown over the years as the
neighborhood has developed?
Grown, grown, grown. For many years I
would have
nine or ten kids at story time, maybe fifteen. Then, about four or five
years
ago, it was like the neighborhood exploded, and I started getting twenty
to
thirty kids every week. In the summer, I can have fifty in here. That’s
why
everything is on rollers. For story time, the kids sit on the stage and I
sit
here. For regular readings, it’s the opposite—authors read from the
stage and
we have chairs set up down here. We can get a hundred, sometimes even a
hundred
and fifty people in here.
A year and a
half ago, we
started Sappho’s Salon. Once a month, on a Saturday night, we have an
evening
of lesbian entertainment. Sometimes it’s open mike; sometimes it’s
acoustic
music. Kathie, who does our publicity, generally runs it, and her
girlfriend,
Nikki, who is a part-time DJ, brings her DJ equipment. Then we set up
little
tables and candles, and try to make it feel like a salon. We’ve even had
strippers. [Laughter.]
But right from the beginning we conceived of having a
weekly program night. Author
readings weren’t happening much, so we decided we’d have
discussions on hot books that people were reading. We knew a lot of
teachers
from this Newberry Library group who were writing, and who were in the
process
of writing feminist criticism, so we invited them to come and do a
presentation
on an idea.
Then we
conceived of having
a topic for each month. For example, “Women in the Trades.” So every
Tuesday
night in March a woman who was working in a male-dominated trade would
come and
talk about how she got her job, or how women can get into engineering,
or what
kind of discrimination she’s experiencing on the job and what her
recourses
were. I think one of our very biggest programs in those early years was
on the
subject of sadomasochism in the lesbian community. And we had eighty or
ninety
women who would come and sit on our shag rug—we didn’t have chairs and
stuff
like that then—and listen to people who had differing viewpoints
discuss the
issue. It seems almost silly now, but it was a big issue at the time,
and
people were really torn about whether this was an acceptable practice or
not.
Also, whether we should carry books on the subject. There was one
pamphlet
available at the time: What Color Is Your Handkerchief? Because
you would put a
handkerchief of a certain color in your back pocket to indicate what
your
sexual proclivity was.
It’s amazing how subtle the coding
had to be.
It was so discreet.
I remember the first time I saw two
women walk out
of my store holding hands. I was walking to the store a little later
because
somebody else had opened that day, and when I saw them [pause] I
cried. Because it was so
rare in 1980 to see two women feel comfortable enough to just grab each
other’s
hands. And I knew that they felt that way because they’d come out of
this
atmosphere in which it was okay.
At
our thirtieth
anniversary party [last] October, the Chicago Area Women’s History
Conference
recorded people’s memories of Women & Children First. They had a
side room
at the venue where we were having the party, and people took time to go
in and
talk about, you know, the first time they came to the bookstore, or when
they
saw Gloria Steinem here, or how they met their girlfriend here, or that
when
their daughter told them she was gay and they didn’t know what to do
about it
they came here and got a book. People shared all these memories. And
that’s
going to be part of our archive too.
This celebration was
also a
benefit for the Women’s Voices Fund, which you started five years ago.
Can you
talk about its mission?
Several years ago, Ann
and I were
looking at the budget and, frankly, there wasn’t enough money coming in
for the
expenses going out. Meanwhile, we were planning the benefit for our
twenty-fifth anniversary—this party that we hoped would raise some
extra
money—and other people in the not-for-profit world who were advising us
said,
“People will pay for your programs. They will make a donation to keep
your
programming going.” So Ann sat down and calculated what it cost to print
and
mail out a newsletter, to put on these programs, to advertise the
programs, and
then to staff them. What we discovered was that is was about forty
thousand
dollars a year we were spending on programming. And we thought, “If
there’s a
way to remove that expense from the budget and use people’s donations to
fund
that, that would be a smart thing.” So that’s what we did. Now anytime
we have
an advertisement or a printing bill or expenses related to providing
refreshments at programs, that cost comes out of the Women’s Voices
Fund.
So the store’s not a
nonprofit,
but it has a nonprofit arm.
It’s not a 501c3 on its
own. We are
a part of the pool fund of the Crossroads Fund in Chicago. So you can
send
Crossroads a check, have it be tax deductible, and have it earmarked for
the
Women’s Voices Fund.
Few people realize
how expensive
readings and events can be.
Occasionally there are
readings that
are profitable. Occasionally. But very, very often, even with a nice
turnout of
twenty to fifty people, you still may only sell three or four books.
Maybe five
or six. But it’s not paying for the program. And from the beginning we
didn’t
want to look at everything we did in terms of whether it was going to
make
money: “If we have this author
we gotta
sell ten books or we’re not gonna pay for the Tribune ad, or the
freight.” No. Having the fund
means we
pass the hat at the program, and maybe we take in twenty or thirty
dollars. But
sometimes people put in twenties, you know? And we raised thirty
thousand
dollars at this benefit.
But
obviously something
changed in the bookselling industry or you wouldn’t have had to hold
this
fundraising event. You
said earlier that when you first moved into this neighborhood you had
double-digit growth. What happened?
Well, the rest of that story is that a
year and a
half later our sales dropped 11 percent. This was 1993. And the next
year, they
fell another 3 percent. So that was a 14-percent drop in two years, for a
store
that had never seen a loss. Borders and Barnes & Noble started in
the
suburbs, but then they gradually came into the city. In 1993, when this
hit us,
Barnes & Noble and Borders had put in stores three miles to the
south of
us—right next to each other—and three miles to the north of us, in
Evanston.
Then, about seven years ago, Borders put the store in Uptown, which is
just a
mile from us, and they put another store west of us by about two miles.
More recently,
B&N closed the store three miles south of us, and Borders announced
over
two years ago that they were trying to rent all the stores around us.
They overextended themselves.
When everybody else was starting to
downsize,
Borders opened several new stores in Chicago, including this one in
Uptown.
And, you know, we’d almost gotten past the point where the chain stores
were
affecting us, because they’ve had to stop widespread discounting. But
the month
this Borders opened that close to us, our sales dropped 12 percent over
the
year before. And then over the course of that year our sales were down 5
percent. But, you know, it’s been an underperforming store. They put it
in
between two underperforming stores in a neighborhood that was more
economically
depressed than Evanston and Lincoln Park.
Do you think five years from now
they’ll be
gone?
I do. I do.
Can you wait them out?
You know, from what I can observe,
Barnes &
Noble seems to treat their employees pretty well; they seem to put
stores in
locations where there’s actually a need, and to close stores down when
needed
and redistribute employees. It seems to me Barnes & Noble plans very
carefully. Borders, on the other hand, has changed hands several times
since
1990. I just don’t see how they are going to survive. When I go in there
now
all I see is…sidelines. Candy.
I think what’s been
particularly frustrating for independent stores like ours that have
developed a
reading series over the years in Chicago—you know, attracting more and
bigger-name authors, and more interesting authors, and conducting ten to
fifteen programs a month—is when publishers take an author who has a
real base
in our store, and for whom we have a real audience, and they say, “Oh,
but the
Michigan Avenue Borders wants this author, and that’s a better
location.”
Why does that happen?
They
don’t always realize
that our location is not downtown, and that it attracts a different kind
of
clientele. And I’ve seen situations where we’ll have a local author—one
who we
have a close relationship with, and who’s done every launch with
us—whose
publisher will now say to her, “You know, two thirds of your books are
sold in
the chain stores, and so you have to do your launch at the chain store.”
But
those authors try to figure out things to do for us to get us some extra
business.
The author tour itself seems to be
waning. I
don’t blame publishers for their reluctance to send a writer out on the
road—after all, it probably seems hard to justify paying for an
author’s
travel expenses when you see only eight or nine books sold at an event.
But
people always forget the long-term sales that readings generate.
Right. Because I’ve read the book, and
so has one
of my coworkers, and we’ll both put it on our Recommends shelf. We’re
going to
keep selling this book long after the event. And we do find, when we
look at
our year-end figures, that our best-sellers for the year are almost
always
written by people who have had appearances here. Or, if not here,
they’ve done
an off-site event that we’ve been in charge of. Those books turn out to
be our
number one sellers for the year.
So what does the future look like for
you?
I’m a bookseller, but I’m a feminist
bookseller.
Would I be a bookseller if I were going to run a general bookstore? I’m
not
sure. Sometimes I think, “What will I do if the store is no longer
viable?” And
I think that rather than going into publishing or going to work for a
general
bookstore, I would rather try to figure out how to have a feminist
reading
series and run a feminist not-for-profit. Because the real purpose of my
life
is getting women’s voices out, and getting women to tell the truth about
their
lives, and selling literature that reflects the truths of girls’ and
women’s
lives. Sometimes we’re abused; we have to talk about that. Sometimes we
take
the bad road in relationships; we have to talk about that. Sometimes
we’re
discriminated against in the workplace; we have to talk about these
things.
Violence against women in the United States and worldwide has not
stopped. We don’t
have a feminist army to go rescue women in Afghanistan—would that we
did.
The goal of my
life has been
to get the word out, to understand women’s lives. We have to continue to
evolve
and change if we’re to have a full share, and if our daughters are to
have a
full share of the world.
page_5:
INSIDE WOMEN & CHILDREN FIRST WITH ANN CHRISTOPHERSEN
What were some of your best-selling
books in
2009?
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout; Her
Fearful Symmetry byAudrey Niffenegger; Yes Means Yes!
Visions of Female Sexual Power and
a World Without Rape, edited
byJaclyn
Friedman and Jessica Valenti; Unaccustomed Earth byJhumpa
Lahiri; TheYear of the Flood byMargaret Atwood; The
Sisters
Grimm
Book
1: Fairy-Tale Detectives byMichael Buckley; In
Defense of Food by Michael Pollan; Fun
Home by
Alison Bechdel; Hardball by Sara Paretsky; The Mysterious
Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart; Everywhere
Babies by
Susan Meyers; Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins; Mama Voted For
Obama! byJeremy Zilber; TheBrief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao
by Junot Díaz; and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg
Larsson.
What is the best-selling section in
your
store?
Paperback fiction.
What do you look for in terms of an
author
event?
First we consider whether the book fits
with our
specialty—books by and about women—or ones that offer a feminist
perspective
on any subject. It is also important to us that we can provide an
audience for
the author. Finally, though we always want to host women writers with a
national reputation, we are strongly invested in supporting local
writers and
those launching their careers with debut novels, poetry, or nonfiction.
In what ways have your events
changed over the
years?
In the store’s early days, many of our
events
were feminist issue–based, sometimes with an author or book involved but
not necessarily. We were a hub of feminist and lesbian politics and
culture,
and produced feminist plays and women’s music concerts, sponsored
women’s
sports teams, and provided support for almost every women’s/lesbian
project in
our city. Over the past number of years, however, we have focused our
energies
and events on books and other written material, knowing that that was
our
unique role in the women’s movement.
What challenges do
women still
face that you hope your store can help address?
Women writers are still
vastly
under-represented in review vehicles, which means their books are less
visible.
This can be verified by keeping a gender tally of writers reviewed in
the NYTBR or the New
Yorker, for example, during any
given month. Though women
artists working in most mediums have certainly moved forward, they still
struggle for opportunity and recognition. Women in general have also,
obviously, made many advances since the seventies, but we still have a
long way
to go. Women’s right to control our own bodies is constantly being
challenged;
we are still paid less for doing the same job as men; we still have few
good
options for childcare; married women who work—which is the majority of
us—still do more than our fair share of taking care of home and
children;
women are seriously unrepresented in political decision-making. I could
go on,
but these are some of the reasons we still need organizations—and
bookstores—that focus on women.
How does feminism in
the
twenty-first century differ from when you opened this store?
The main difference is
that the
second wave of the feminist movement in the seventies was just hitting
the
streets and was brilliantly, feverishly, and obviously active. New
organizations were being created every day to deal with issues like
incest,
domestic abuse, healthcare, job opportunities, equal pay, the absence of
political power, and many others. The work that began then has become
institutionalized over the years since. It continues to advance, but
people
don’t always notice it now since it’s become deeper, more complex, and,
some
might say, mainstream. Another significant difference is that many of
the
growing pains have been outgrown: Feminism has been able to overcome
many of
the challenges posed by race, class, and national boundaries, becoming
truly
global.
What role does technology play in
your store?
It has played an important role since
we bought a
computer and began using POS/IM bookstore software in 1985. We had a Web
site
for marketing purposes and then took advantage of the American
Booksellers
Association’s Web solution so we could sell books online; we switched
from
print to e-newsletters several years ago; we use social media, first
MySpace
and now Facebook and Twitter. And we have the technology—and desire—to
sell
e-books.
How do you think the rise of digital
reading
devices will affect your future?
The extent to which e-books affect our
future
depends on how large that segment of the market grows and whether there
are any
real opportunities for stores our size to get a share of online sales.
There’s
little to no local advantage online, and when your competitors are large
enough
to dictate market prices, it is somewhere between extremely difficult
and
utterly impossible to get even market share to scale.
Where would you like to see Women
&
Children First in ten years?
I would like to see us still finding
ways to serve
our community and fulfill our mission of giving voice to women.
How about feminism? Continuing to make steady
progress toward
a world in which women are free to live an unobstructed, rich, creative
life.
What do you most love
about
bookselling? Going through my days surrounded
by books
and the people involved in writing, publishing, selling, reading, and
talking
about them.
Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of
the
online journal Fiction Writers Review.
For the third installment of our ongoing series of interviews, Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travelled to Chicago to speak with Linda Bubon, who, along with Ann Christophersen, owns Women & Children First.
Founded more than thirty years ago in Chicago, Women & Children First is only 3,500 square feet in area, most of which is one large open room. Still, the store carries more than twenty thousand books, as well as journals, cards, and gifts.
Twinkle lights hang in the front windows facing Clark Street; there are jewelry displays around the front counter; and tacked to the community bulletin board are flyers for both theater performances and burlesque shows.
“In the back of the store, a painted sign showing an open book with a child peering over the top hangs from the ceiling, indicating the children’s section,” Chamberlin writes. “Not far away, a similar sign, this one of a rainbow with an arrow below it, points toward the GLBTQ section. Despite these signs—not to mention the name of the store itself—Women & Children First carries more than books for women and, well, children.”
The literature section stretches down one wall; there are stacks of photography collections; books on writing fill an entire bookcase; and disciplines as diverse as cooking and psychology have healthy offerings.
“Nothing captures the laid-back feel and philosophy of the bookstore better than the wooden kitchen table that sits in the back, near the children’s section,” Chamberlin writes. “Around it are four unmatched wooden chairs. Bubon brought us here for the interview, and it seems a perfect example of the spirit of openness that pervades this place.”
“The goal of my life has been to get the word out, to understand women’s lives,” says co-owner Linda Bubon. “We have to continue to evolve and change if we’re to have a full share, and if our daughters are to have a full share of the world.”
Co-owner Ann Christophersen says what she loves most about bookselling is being “surrounded by books and the people involved in writing, publishing, selling, reading, and talking about them.”
“I still think women lag behind in winning the major awards, and they lag behind in getting critical attention,” says Bubon. “So there’s still a need for Women & Children First and stores like it that push the emphasis toward women writers.”
“Though women artists working in most mediums have certainly moved forward, they still struggle for opportunity and recognition,” Christophersen says. “Women in general have also, obviously, made many advances since the seventies, but we still have a long way to go. Women’s right to control our own bodies is constantly being challenged; we are still paid less for doing the same job as men; we still have few good options for childcare; married women who work—which is the majority of us—still do more than our fair share of taking care of home and children….I could go on, but these are some of the reasons we still need organizations—and bookstores—that focus on women.”
Few independent bookstores are more iconic than Powell’s Books. Even readers who’ve never been to Portland, Oregon, know about the store from its ads in places like the New Yorker, or from its prominent online presence, or from its reputation as the largest new- and used-book store in the world. The “City of Books,” as the four-story flagship store on West Burnside is known, occupies an entire city block, and carries more than one million books. The sixty-eight-thousand-square-foot space is divided into nine color-coded rooms, which together house more than 3,500 sections. From the moment you walk in, it feels as if you could find anything there. (And if you can’t, try one of the seven branch stores in five other locations throughout Portland, specializing in everything from technical books to home and garden.)
I was early for my interview with owner Michael Powell, so I decided to get a coffee in the attached café. Like the bookstore itself, the guiding aesthetic is simplicity—no overstuffed chairs, no fireplace, no decorations on the salmon-colored walls other than some taped-up flyers for local bands and a Buddhist meditation group. Not that anyone seems to notice. While I was there, everysingle person I encountered was reading. At the table nearest me a high school girl in cat-eye glasses and a ski cap read Lucy Knisley’s French Milk (Epigraph Publishing, 2000), with a stack of David Sedaris waiting at her elbow. A well-dressed elderly woman flipped through the Oregonian not too far away. And on the other side, near the windows, a young woman with black hair and piercings through both her cheeks was making a list of recipes from The Garden of Vegan (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003). Filling the rest of the tables were hipsters in zip-up sweatshirts and Chuck Taylor All Stars, a young father in a shirt and tie with his two children, construction workers wearing Carhartt overalls, and women with trendy bags and knee-high leather boots. All were reading. Here was a microcosm of the store: A diversity of people and interests, sure, but what’s most important in Powell’s is neither image nor decor but the books themselves.
This is not to say that the store doesn’t have a unique vibe. Like Michael Powell himself, there is a straightforwardness to Powell’s that puts a person at ease. When the owner and I met, he was dressed casually in jeans and a pullover sweater. And though he had to attend a black-tie community event later that night, he was generous with his time, walking me through both the history of the business and the store itself—how the portion of the building with terrazzo floors had originally been an American Motors dealership; how when they built the newer sections of the store, more than a decade ago, they’d intentionally left the concrete floors bare because the industrial feel not only complemented the plain, pine bookcases but also added to the laid-back atmosphere; and how proud he is that their foreign-language section alone accommodates more than thirty thousand titles.
Michael Powell’s philosophy on bookselling is simple: He wants to provide people with books. He has no interest in telling people what to read. Nor would he ever judge a person by the type of books she purchases. New or used, dime-store paperback or first-edition hardcover, manga or metaphysics, all are equally at home on his shelves.
This sense of equality permeates every aspect of the Powell’s business model, from the practice of shelving used and new books side by side in each section, to the store’s long-standing advocacy on free-speech issues, to the fact that its five hundred employees are unionized and have a matching 401(k) plan. Likewise, Powell may be the boss, but it’s clear that he also sees himself as a fellow employee. When we left the downtown location and he drove me across town to the former ball-bearing warehouse that is now the site of the online bookselling operations, no one had to “look busy” when the owner arrived. Instead, they chatted with him as we walked through the facility, offering updates on their various ongoing projects, including ideas for how best to recycle used packaging materials. The warehouse, which feels like an airplane hangar but with the sound of jazz floating in the air, processes up to three thousand online orders daily. And 70 percent of those are single-title orders, a fact that amazes Powell, a logical man who never ceases to be surprised or impressed by his customers, even when they pay more than twenty dollars to have a four- dollar book shipped overnight. It makes him wonder aloud how he can better meet their needs.
This, then, might be the trait that best characterizes Michael Powell: curiosity. He is endlessly curious about the world, about his employees’ ideas, about what his customers want to read, and about innovative ways to do business. It is a trait that has served him well during his last four decades of bookselling. And though he’ll officially hand over the reins of the business to his daughter, Emily, in July, when he turns seventy, one gets the sense that Powell will always be dreaming of how to connect books and people. Because it’s clear that he loves them both.
How did you become a bookseller? In the mid-sixties I ran a little student co-op [at the University of Chicago] where students could sell textbooks and other books on consignment. I also rode my bike around to various thrift shops in the general area and went to the Sunday morning flea market called Maxwell Street—which was very famous in its day in Chicago—to buy books and put them on consignment. Then I sold books by catalogue for a couple years to university libraries, mostly out-of-print social science and history, before I opened my first store in 1970, in Chicago.
Early on, I was thinking of opening a store in Santa Fe, New Mexico, because my wife and I had traveled to Santa Fe and saw it for the first time and everybody falls in love with Santa Fe the first time. She was being offered a job as a Montessori teacher there and I was going to open a bookstore when I got a phone call from a mentor in Hyde Park, in Chicago. He wanted to move his store because he’d been attacked by a customer.
He’d found a new location that was closer to campus, and the reason it was currently vacant was that the Weathermen had firebombed its previous occupant out of existence and he didn’t want to go back into it, he was too nervous. And the university—well, not exactly the university, but whoever was in charge of organizing these things—had approached my friend. However, the space was too big for him; he wanted to take only half of it. So he said to me, “You take half and do mostly paperbacks, and I’ll do hardbacks.” And I said, “I could do that, but I don’t have the money.” My wife says I was always good for twenty bucks but never for a hundred. And he said, “There are some professors who would like to talk to you about that; they’re kind of the patron saints of bookstores.” There were three of them: Morris Janowitz, Edward Shils, and the third one was Saul Bellow. Morris Janowitz, who was the lead, came to me and said, “What would you need?” I had no idea. So I said—and this is, remember, 1970—I said, “Probably three thousand dollars.” And he said, “We can do that. We can loan you three thousand dollars.” Then I said, “But, you know, I’ve got a problem. I don’t know how quickly this will get up and running. And there’s all the rent.” So he said, “We can help with rent, too, for a little while.” Rent was, I think, a hundred dollars a month. So, okay, now they’re rehabbing the building and there’s some time before I can occupy it. So my wife and I take a thousand of the three thousand and we travel across the country to Oregon to visit my folks. [Laughter.]
When we were back in Chicago, I took the remaining two thousand dollars and bought some books. A friend and I built some shelves, and we opened. Like I was saying, it was a small, small store. But we did well. The students, of course, liked used paperbacks. They thought that was great. At some point my neighbor moved away and I took his space. Then there was another business in the back…and when they went away I took that space. So, ultimately, it was about four thousand square feet.
And then my dad [who had come to Chicago to work in the bookstore] went back to Portland in 1971. He opened his shop, moved once into a space of about ten thousand square feet, and had begun to introduce new books into the mix, shelving them side by side with used books. In 1979 he said, “You know, now wouldn’t be a bad time if you’re interested in coming back.” I always thought I would come back. I always thought of myself as an Oregonian, always kept my Oregon driver’s license. And I said, “Yeah, I’d like to do that.” There had been a huge snowstorm in Chicago that winter; we’d had an infant—she was born in November—and we had to get out of the neighborhood we were in. It wasn’t suitable for raising a family, and I’d had it with the weather. So coming back to Oregon sounded great to me.
Well, the night before we left Chicago, my dad called. He said, “I’ve got some news: We’ve lost our lease.” Our landlord, which was a brewery, had wanted to take the space back and had given us a year to find a new location. So we spent that year searching, and we found the space that is currently Powell’s Books. In the mid-eighties, we started opening branch stores. I was always curious about new ways to do things with books; I didn’t want just to replicate anything. And one of the questions was if we could do our new-used mix and do it in the suburbs, where everybody’s perception was that it would have to be Borders or Barnes & Noble or something.
By that you mean nice carpeting and polished wood, soft lighting— The whole nine yards. We weren’t getting women to our downtown location in the proportions that most people have women as shoppers, perhaps because our area was a little bit edgy.
It was a developing neighborhood? It was an undeveloped neighborhood—mostly warehouses, wholesalers, and auto repair shops. Kind of funky stuff, but not retail. Not restaurants and bars. Now it’s all high-end national and local boutiques, and dozens and dozens of restaurants and bars. It’s quite fashionable, I suppose.
In any case, I wanted to see if we could capture a different audience if we opened the store in a suburb, and that went well. And each year for about six years we opened a store. First, we did a travel bookstore downtown in about 1985. Then the Hawthorne District stores in about 1986. Then the cookbook store…somewhere in there we opened a store in the airport, and a technical bookstore. So I was both interested in segmenting books like technical and travel and cooking, and I was also interested in demographics, like urban centers, suburbs, and airports. It sounds like it was planned, but it wasn’t. It was just opportunity and impulse. The only one of those that we don’t have any longer is the travel store. The Internet took that business away enough to justify not keeping a whole store solely focused on the subject. And the cookbook store sort of morphed into a lifestyle store, with gardening and cooking and interior design. And now we have three stores at the airport.
What did you find with the suburban store that you built to look like Borders or Barnes & Noble? Well, we were going to build a fairly fancy store in the suburbs—nice white shelving, a tile floor, banners over the aisles, and colors, and so forth and so on. But the aesthetics weren’t right. So the first chance we got to get rid of all that, we did.
You shut the whole store down? We moved it. And when we moved it, we moved it into a larger space. And at that point we went back to wood shelves. Pine wood, cement floor, more of an industrial look. That has always worked for us well downtown. That was my misreading of the suburbs—that I had to sort of pretty it up, and I was wrong. We’ve more recently moved that store into a space double the size—thirty-two thousand square feet. And once again we have a cement floor. In fact, the ceiling has exposed insulation as a sort of architectural touch. It looks very industrial.
Why do you think that works? People want a calm background for the books. I don’t think they need…I think Borders’s and Barnes & Noble’s message is “Buy the book and get the hell out of here” in some subliminal way. It’s too bright, the shelves are low so everybody’s watching everybody. You feel very exposed. Our shelves are about twelve feet high. You live in these little alleys, and there’s a kind of cozy feel in that that makes it comfortable for customers. And you can sit on the floor, you know, you can spill something on the floor. It’s not a big disaster.
You don’t have to worry about messing up someone’s living room. No. And the used books look more comfortable in that environment, because they look a little shabbier when they’re too exposed. So, that’s where we are. In 1994 we went on the Internet with the only inventory we had in the database at that point, which was the technical bookstore. I’d only been up for about a month when I got a letter from England from someone saying, “I was looking for this technical book, and I was told in England it would take six weeks to deliver and would cost me the equivalent of a hundred dollars. So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just check out the Internet and see.’ You had the book for forty-five dollars and you could get it to me in three days.”
When I read this, I thought, “Holy hell! Here’s an opportunity.” So we got all our books into a database. We had what we called “the river” and “the lake”—there were all the new books coming every day that had to get entered, but we also had to back enter everything that was currently on the shelves. So it took a year.
Is that lake dried up now? The lake is now part of the river. And we built up the Internet business to where it was about a fourth of our sales. So we were an early adopter for selling books online. Amazon came along, of course, and blew right past us. But we sell a lot of books via Amazon, and we sell books via eBay and Alibris and AbeBooks in addition to on our own site. We also carry inventories from England and Germany—our books are drop shipped to the customer. We do what we can.
I imagine that most people think of you as being in direct competition with Amazon. But, in fact, you’re actually doing a lot of partnership with Amazon? Well, I don’t know. We are in competition at one level, certainly. I’m sure some of our business has turned over to Amazon. But I’m not foolish about it. If there’s an opportunity to sell books, I’m going to sell them. Amazon is my opportunity. And we sell some new books there, but mostly used.
So you ship to Amazon and then they repackage and ship them? No, we package and ship. We can ship in our boxes with our materials inside. So we can brand that shipment. They’re good with that. And if somebody just orders a new book from us, we’ll usually have a wholesaler fill that order. Ingram or Baker & Taylor drop ship for us in our boxes, so it cuts out shipping to us. That works well. We do the same thing with Gardner Books in England and Lieber in Germany, both wholesalers. And it works. Some of it is hard. It’s not easy—a lot of infrastructure crossed with the Internet.
What are some of its particular challenges? I think everybody, me included, thought the Internet was going to be this miracle way of making money, because for not very much money you could make all these books available around the whole world. Well, people didn’t count on all the software writers you need to keep your Web site hot and current, or the editorial work that has to go into maintaining a Web site both in terms of the tracking game and also making it sticky for people to visit and to find value there so that they’ll shop with us. Because we don’t discount the books, you know. It’s a small number—twenty, thirty books—otherwise it’s retail. You would think we’d have no business, that people are nuts for ordering books from us.
Because there are cheaper places? There are cheaper places. And yet, the brand, the interest, whatever…we maintain a good new book sale. I won’t say it’s growing, but it’s steady. There’s a lot of price competition in both the used book world and in the new book world. So it’s been hard to build that business, but we think we can. We have a lot of people who visit the site but don’t stay, and we have to find a way to encourage them to stay. A small percentage of these customers mean a lot to our business. My daughter’s working with some consultants to redesign and redeploy our Web strengths.
The site certainly has a wonderful array of resources—interviews with authors, blogs… We Tweet; we do everything. We do everything we possibly can with the resources we have. I always say that the people I have working on our Web site are a rounding error for Amazon. Amazon would have thousands of employees dedicated to what I have twenty dedicated to. On the other hand, I have to say we go toe-to-toe with them. They have things we don’t have, but we have things they don’t have. Sometimes they have them pretty fast after we have them, but we think of ourselves as innovators.
One of these recent innovations is our online buyback. Anyone in the U.S. can go to our Web site, check via a book’s ISBN number to see whether or not we want to buy it, and then find out how much we want to pay for it. We’ll pay the freight; all you have to do is box it, print out our label and packing list, and ship it in. Once it’s received and we’ve checked the condition, we’ll pay you via PayPal, or you can get virtual credit, which you can spend as you will. That has given us a pretty hefty flow of books.
So even after paying shipping costs it’s still worthwhile for you to buy these books?
Yeah. In order to maintain our inventory, we can’t rely only on books bought in Portland. We’ve always relied on a certain number of books being bought elsewhere in the country, whether they’re from store inventories or private collections. Well, that’s an expensive way to buy books. You have to fly people there to look at them, then you have to fly people there to box them, and then you have to pay the shipping in. Also, you usually have to take everything, which means you’re handling a lot of books you don’t want. So the online buyback is great because theoretically we want all those books. And you don’t have to go anywhere to get them. And the customer boxes everything up. At the moment, Amazon doesn’t do that. There are some people who do, but they’re not major players. So that’s given us at least a temporary advantage in source of books.
I’d like to go back and talk a little bit about the operation of the main store. In addition to the industrial look and feel of the space, another way that Powell’s is different from most bookstores is that you mix new and used books on the shelves. Why did you decide to do this? Well, we started as a used books company. My dad introduced new books in the late seventies, and his mantra was two of everything and three of nothing. So when a local writer like Jean M. Auel published her first book, we had just two copies. Then we bought a bunch of tables from Dalton’s, and they asked, “What are you going to put on these tables?” And I said, “Stacks of…something.” So that’s when we got into the new arrival business.
But now we have about three hundred thousand volumes in the main store, as well as however many in the other stores. It’s a substantial part of our business. In dollars, roughly 50 percent of our total business is new books, about 40 percent is used books, and then 10 percent is magazines, cards, and sidelines.
On average, bookstores make about 40 percent on each book they sell. Yet you’ve managed to nudge that up to nearly 44 percent. Considering that these percentages are before operational expenses, a small difference like this can mean the difference between staying open and going bankrupt. How did you achieve this? You know, when you’re done, you’re always plus or minus. Your minus can be a lot, but your plus is hardly ever more than 2 percent after costs. And that’s before you make any capital reinvestment. Because we’re a larger business, we tend to order in volumes that allow us to get the maximum discount. And we do one other thing: We ship all our books to a central warehouse and then we distribute. I don’t know if it’s Borders or Barnes & Noble, but whatever the discount those stores got for shipping to a central warehouse, the publishers had to match that for us.
I’m sure that being your own distributor also makes things more efficient. Yeah. We do all central receiving. Once the books are received, they’re labeled and then distributed out to each of the stores. So we have our own truck fleet that runs our books around.
With used books, on the other hand, you’ve said that your average is closer to 65 percent. Is that also something you’ve been able to nudge up in similar ways, or is that number static? We have slowly, over time, pushed that up about five points, either by paying less or controlling inventory better, and by making fewer buying mistakes. In the used-book world the risk is that you’re going to buy something that you already have too many copies of, or that sales have evaporated for, or it’s a book you had once and never sold. Now computers can tell you all that, so while we don’t check every book we buy at the moment we buy it, if there’s any doubt about the book we can scan it and see its history, the current inventory level, sales history, and make a judgment based on that. So I think our rate of having to pull things from the shelves has dropped considerably.
What’s hurting us at the moment is this move away from people buying new hardbacks. You’ve probably heard this elsewhere, but in this downturn many people are avoiding a twenty-five-dollar book and moving, in our case, to used books. This has meant that we can try to keep our dollar volume up by boosting the units we’re selling, because used books are cheaper, but of course the labor involved doesn’t go away.
Or the overhead or the cost of the building. Right. But the overall dollars have dropped because you’re not selling that twenty-five-dollar book. Fewer dollars are coming in. So it’s been a challenge. And we’ve had to do several things in the course of the last year to accommodate that.
Such as? Well, we had to reduce the number of people working in the company, which we did through not filling positions when people left.
But no one was let go? No one was let go, no. At one moment we were within two weeks of seriously considering it, but then the numbers looked like they maybe didn’t require it, so we backed off. You don’t do that casually. You don’t turn people loose in this economic environment. I really didn’t want to do it, and fortunately we didn’t have to. We had twelve months of down business. But [last] September we had our first up month, so that was certainly good news.
What do you think accounted for that? People are buying more books! I don’t know what to say.
Are you a bellwether for the economic recovery? Well, I hope so. It’s not like spending money on cars or houses, but if they’re feeling comfortable enough to do that…I mean, listen, they have an alternative. First of all, they can choose not toread. They can go to the library, they can buy fewer books, whatever. But the fact that the customers are back feels great.
Some people have suggested that it’s not the fact that Amazon or big-box stores like Walmart and Target are selling books that accounts for many independent stores’ losing their footing, but rather it’s a lack of readers. Do you feel that’s the case? No, I’m not a subscriber to that. I understand the theory. The theory is that there are only so many hours in the day, and so if you’re playing computer games or tweeting or searching the Internet or going to a movie or watching TV, you haven’t got time left over for reading. And, yeah, that makes perfectly good sense. Yet we are selling more books. [Last] September we sold more books than we did a year [earlier] by a fairly sensational number. They were cheaper books, but there were more of them.
Long run? I’m not a predictor of the future. I don’t know. Will the Kindle and the Sony Reader, or print on demand, or some other phenomenon we haven’t thought of yet, erode our business? It’s certainly possible. Nothing is forever. And there’s no way to say that somebody’s new vision of the future won’t force us to reshape our vision. But I think as long as we’re alert and pay attention and find ways to adapt, then we’ll be okay.
Let’s talk specifically about electronic books. Do they affect your business? We sell them. Been doing that for the better part of ten years.
Really? Yeah. There just weren’t very many books and they weren’t great and we didn’t sell a lot of them, though there have been people trying to do this for a long time. And, you know, it’s a small part of our business. But we’re positioned to make it a bigger part if that happens.
Now, I want to go back a minute. People always say, “Well, there’s this way of doing business and then there’s Powell’s way of doing business.” But I want to point out that I got on the Internet because there was one guy on my staff who came to me and said, “I can put the technical books on the Internet. I need ten thousand dollars to do that.” The money wasn’t for himself, but for the technology. And I said, “Seems good to me.” At the time, Barnes & Noble and Borders were opening stores all around me. My wagons were circled and they attacked from the suburbs, these giant stores. And I thought, “If there’s any way to leap over those stores and reach a broader audience, there’s nothing better than this thing called the Internet.” And I was very enthusiastic. And so for ten thousand dollars—which is a lot of money, I appreciate that—and his time, we got to play. But it’s not like somebody handed me ten million dollars and said, “Here, go invest this in the book business.” We have built every brick, every stone—every element of the system is a result of organic growth.
In addition to building this business from the ground up, your family has always played an important role in the process. Your father came to Chicago to work in the first store, and now your daughter Emily is involved. Yes. Emily is going to take over in July.
How long has she been moving into this role? Probably four years now. She was director of used books for a while, and she worked to get our minds back into the used book world.
What do you mean? Well, when the economy started to go bad, we told ourselves that we needed to get more used books on the shelves. That meant changing some of the ways of channeling books to the stores and also boosting the volume. For the last year she’s been in charge of the Internet marketing world, with the goal of taking a fairly flat Internet business and seeing it grow. She just finished an executive MBA, and one of the faculty members from her program, along with another fellow he knows, are acting as consultants. So she’s been working with them to redirect the energies of staff, reorganize staff, and redesign the Web site, and to do things that make it easier to use, more intuitive. We’ve always won awards for the content on our site, but I don’t think anybody would ever give us an award for the smoothness, or the use of the page. Now we’re trying to make it a more intuitive process to use, and that always involves a fair amount of rewrite on software, so you can’t do it overnight. But you can do it. So she’s been working on that and doing a great job.
Having grown up in a bookstore, she must have a familiarity with this world that few people possess. To say nothing of her commitment, since it’s a family business. There’s a great story about Emily. When she was about eight or nine, she and I were doing Christmas cash register work. I would open the book and read the price, and then she would key it in the cash register and make change while I bagged the book. A lady came up who was trying to be nice to Emily and said, “When you grow up, are you going to be a cashier?” And Emily, counting out her change, says, “When I grow up, I’m going to own this place.” [Laughter.] And by God, she is.
That was never in my mind, as a given. In this day and age, the world beckons. I just told her, “You’d be a damn fool not to kick the tires that had been good to us. I don’t ask or expect you to go in this direction, but I think you’d be foolish not to give it a shot.” And out of the blue one day she called from San Francisco and said, “You know, I’m ready to take that shot if you’re ready.”
Was she in college at the time? No, she was working in San Francisco. She had a boyfriend down there and she was in a variety of things—she was an apprentice to a maker of wedding cakes, then worked as an assistant to the head of a law firm for a couple years. And, you know, she enjoyed San Francisco very much, but I think that gave her the motivation to say, “Well, I think it’s time to try the book business.” She had worked here for a year earlier, right out of college, but she needed to really get out and try something else in the world for a while.
How hands on or off will you be once you retire? Well, I’ll tell you a story. I had someone like you come to interview me and he said, “So when you retire, what will you do?” And I said, “Well, you know, I’ll probably go out to the warehouse and process books, get them out of boxes. I like doing that.” And he laughed. So I said, “What’s funny about that? You don’t think I can do that?” And he said “No, no. I was out on the floor interviewing one of your employees and I said, ‘What will Michael Powell do when his daughter takes over?’ And he said, ‘He’ll go over to the warehouse and process books.'” So I guess I’m known for my limited talents.
Somehow I’d like to stay involved. You know, you learn a lot, and business is complex, and you can’t know everything and you can’t be everywhere. Just walking around you see things and you say, “I wonder why they’re doing it that way? That doesn’t seem as efficient.” Or, “Do they know that people in the other store are doing it differently?” So I think it’ll be helpful to have someone with an educated eye watching the business from the inside, to see where those opportunities are. For example, there are several things we’re doing by hand that we ought to be doing in a more automated way. At the moment, those are opportunities. You’re always working for productivity efficiencies because your costs go up and you’ve got to keep your costs and revenues in balance. The casual approach we had to the business fifteen years ago just doesn’t work. Certainly with the high investment in technology we have and the high investment in inventory, we better be very grounded in what we’re doing, and alert.
You came into this neighborhood when it was mostly just car repair shops and warehouses, and now it’s become more of a boutique area. Do you think Powell’s had a hand in that transition? I imagine that most people must think of you as an anchor in this community. Well, I think we’re an anchor for the city. That may sound immodest, but somebody’s got to say it. If you have a relative come into town, or a friend come into town, and they say “What is there to do in Portland?” If you name three things, one of them is going to be Powell’s. Because the city’s proud of it. You don’t even have to be a reader—you just want to show it off. Biggest bookstore in America, maybe the biggest in the world. You know, if you’ve got the biggest ball of string, people think you’re kooky. But if you have the biggest bookstore, it says something positive about the community—that it supports a store that large—and people like that message. And we try to then earn the respect of the community by not just running a good business, but also being involved in the community. I spend a lot of my time on boards and commissions and planning efforts. I chair the streetcar board. We just created what will now be about eight miles of streetcar. We’re the first city in America to put new streetcars back in.
Like old-style trolleys? No, they’re modern-looking streetcars, and they’re European built. They’re not San Francisco cute; they’re modern, sleek streetcars. And we move four million people each year. I’ve also been involved in dozens and dozens of committees and commissions, some in the arts and some in social services and some in politics. Not partisan politics, but political efforts to do things or to stop things from happening, all aimed at trying to fulfill the vision of a city that is a twenty-four-hour-a-day city, that works, that’s attractive and great to do business in, and great to live in. I think people respect the work that we do in that area. People will stop me and say, “I love your store,” but sometimes they’ll stop me and say, “I love what you do for the community,” and they’re referring to a broader level of involvement. People ask me if it ever gets tiring, being stopped by people. But I think no; when they stop, that’s problematic. That means we’re doing something that’s not working. I get involved in political things, but they’re almost always around censorship or involved with access to books. Oregon has a very strong constitutional defense of books, but we also have the same element of the population that would like to, for a variety of reasons, control that flow. You know: “Don’t put gay books in schools, don’t let anyone under the age of eighteen be exposed to bad books.” But we win those fights.
Still, they usually take a lot of energy and some money, and with the first anti-gay measure in Portland—Proposition 9—businesses were very closely involved. I have gay staff, of course, and friends who are gay, and they challenged me. There was an element of that legislation that involved not letting libraries, specifically school libraries, have gay-related materials. But we just turned the store into a poster board for that issue, and we won it, and we were very proud of that.
So you helped defeat it at the ballot. Yep. There were two efforts and we won both of those. Not by overwhelming numbers, but we won. If we can define the issue as one of censorship, and they can define the issue as perversity, and you let that go in a challenge, they’ll win. But Oregonians don’t like censorship, and again I say not by overwhelming numbers, but we do win. And so we get involved in those issues and they seem to come along with certain regularity, every four or five years. Otherwise most of the stuff I get involved in is more planning. I don’t get involved in partisan politics as a company. In fact I keep the company very separate from that. Personally I do get involved, but I try to keep it as separate as I possibly can.
As a citizen, not an owner. Yeah, yeah.
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What do you think people are most surprised to learn about independent bookselling? I think they’re surprised to know how hard it is. I think everybody—or the uneducated person who doesn’t know much about the business—thinks that as a bookseller you sit in a store, read books, and when someone comes in you have a nice conversation and then recommend and sell some things to that person. That you have a stock of books you believe in and know intimately. That you wear patches on the elbows of your sport jacket, and there’s a cat somewhere in the window, and there’s a fire burning in a fireplace, and there’s the smell of coffee and all that. That it’s a very relaxed and low-key kind of thing. The reality is that it’s extremely intense, whether it’s a small store or a huge store. You’re always pushing the rock up the hill, and it’s relentless, and an awful lot of people get ground down by it. That’s why you see stores close with the frequency they have. People give five or ten years of their lives and realize it’s not going anywhere. And that’s hard. It’s hard to be in an industry that takes so many casualties and that much stress.
The good news is you still get to work with books. And you get to work with people who really love books, both as customers and as staff. I’m sure people who love hardware love their hardware, but, you know, I wouldn’t. There’s a high level of gratification. I was trying to calculate how many books I had sold during my life under the Powell’s name. I’d like to think it’s coming close to a hundred million. You know, in chaos theory there’s this idea that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the globe can create a storm in Africa. Well, what about a hundred million butterfly wings? What has it done? You don’t know. People hardly ever tell you, “I read a book and it changed my life.” Most books are probably sold for entertainment, some are sold for information, and some are sold for inspiration. Certainly some are sold for all three at the same time. But I say to myself, “Well, at least when you’re reading a book it’s hard to rob a bank.” I like to think that some of those books have had a positive impact on people’s lives.
Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of the online journal Fiction Writers Review.
INSIDE POWELL’S BOOKS How many book sales are you processing a day as online orders? About 2,500. Upward to 3,000. It spikes at Christmas, and it spikes when the school year starts, but otherwise it’s fairly steady.
How many books do you have in your warehouse for online sales? About 380,000 in [the main] warehouse, and then there’s about 125,000 in another warehouse.
And how many books do you carry in your stores? About a million in the flagship store, and probably another six hundred thousand scattered around the other stores. And then we support another two million in Europe. So online we support upward of 4.5 million titles.
How do you determine the price you pay for used books that you buy from online customers? Do you use an algorithm, or is there a person who works on each order? No, it’s an algorithm. We have several million books in our database to match against, so we just take a percent of either the imprint price or the in-store resale price and pay that amount.
For the second installment of our ongoing series of interviews, Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travelled to Portland, Oregon, to speak with Michael Powell, owner of Powell’s Books.
The “City of Books,” as the four-story flagship store in Portland, Oregon, is known, occupies an entire city block, and carries more than one million books.
The sixty-eight-thousand-square-foot space is divided into nine color-coded rooms, which together house more than 3,500 sections. “From the moment you walk in,” writes Chamberlin, “it feels as if you could find anything there.”
“People want a calm background for the books,” Michael Powell says. “Our shelves are about twelve feet high. You live in these little alleys, and there’s a kind of cozy feel in that that makes it comfortable for customers. And you can sit on the floor, you know, you can spill something on the floor. It’s not a big disaster.”
When the newer sections of the store were built more than a decade ago, the concrete floors were left bare because the industrial feel not only complemented the plain, pine bookcases but also added to the laid-back atmosphere.
“We started as a used books company. My dad introduced new books in the late seventies, and his mantra was two of everything and three of nothing,” Michael Powell says. “It’s a substantial part of our business. In dollars, roughly 50 percent of our total business is new books, about 40 percent is used books, and then 10 percent is magazines, cards, and sidelines.”
Michael Powell is “endlessly curious about the world, about his employees’ ideas, about what his customers want to read, and about innovative ways to do business,” Chamberlin writes.
The main warehouse, “which feels like an airplaine hangar but with the sound of jazz floating in the air,” Chamberlin writes, processes as many as three thousand online orders daily. And 70 percent of those are single-title orders.
“I think we’re an anchor for the city,” Michael Powell says. “That may sound immodest, but somebody’s got to say it. If you have a relative come into town, or a friend come into town, and they say “What is there to do in Portland?” If you name three things, one of them is going to be Powell’s. Because the city’s proud of it. You don’t even have to be a reader—you just want to show it off. Biggest bookstore in America, maybe the biggest in the world… It says something positive about the community—that it supports a store that large—and people like that message.”
For more than twenty years, J. W. Marshall has been recommending poetry to his customers while writing it himself. He and his wife, poet Christine Deavel, own Seattle’s Open Books: A Poem Emporium, one of only a couple bookstores in the United States devoted exclusively to poetry and a fixture in the city’s literary community.
In March, Oberlin College Press published Marshall’s first full-length collection of poetry, Meaning a Cloud, winner of the 2007 FIELD Poetry Prize. The collection includes poems that previously appeared in the letterpress chapbooks Taken With (2005) and Blue Mouth (2001), both published by Wood Works, an independent press in Seattle, and named finalists for the Washington State Book Award.
The poems in Meaning a Cloud reflect Marshall’s ecumenical knowledge of poetry, a boon to his work as a purveyor of literature in verse. Informed by poetic tradition but shaped by delirious risk-taking, his writing is unabashedly autobiographical, yet stoically refrains from mere confession. Marshall’s poetic gaze into the interior is motivated not by a need to define his own self so much as by a desire to understand all selfhood.
Marshall’s cultivation of poetic presence extends beyond Open Books, as he and his wife cosponsor the Seattle Arts and Lectures poetry series, which brings top-notch poets—Li-Young Lee, Lucille Clifton, and Edward Hirsch, to name a few—to read in the city’s Intiman Theater, often to a packed house. The couple also participates in poetry festivals and conferences and host readings at their shop, which, they say, pays for itself.
Marshall spoke with Poets & Writers Magazine at Open Books, located in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood. While Deavel readied the place to open at noon on an overcast Sunday earlier this month, Marshall described what it’s like to take part in both the creation and the dissemination of poetry.
Poets & Writers Magazine: After so many years of supporting the work of poets in a very direct way—by selling their books to readers—you now have a book of your own. How did you transition from bookseller to poet?
J. W. Marshall: Is it easy? No, it’s not. The one thing I’m very aware of is book sales, and so I get to look to see if Ingram is stocking my book, how many copies, and has anybody bought it. It’s a curse. You know, it isn’t a transition; in a way, it’s just two different worlds. They have this intersection. I’m glad to have the bookstore because it keeps my mind off my own book.
P&W: How so?
JWM: I come here, and I’m trying to sell books to people. I’m not trying to sell my book to people because that would get old pretty quickly, and you don’t want to bore folks with credit cards in their hands.
P&W: Did you learn things in the process of being a bookseller that you’re using now as an author yourself?
JWM: Oh, sure. There are connections I have through the bookstore that I very gently tug on to see if I can get readings or offer the book to people who’ve written reviews. I certainly do that. The thing that I’ve done that may be the most worthwhile, honestly [has to do with] Oberlin Press—God bless them; they’ve been very good to work with. David Young is a terrific guy, Linda in the office too. I like them a lot. But they offered their books at a 30 percent discount when the industry standard is 40 or better, and, through Ingram, they offered them at only a 10 percent discount. While I like my book, I was kind of heartbroken thinking that bookstores are not going to order it at 10 percent. So I politicked with them for months. Now [Oberlin has] changed. With next season, they will hit the standard 40.
P&W: It sounds like you reasoned with them on the basis of understanding the business.
JWM: It was the dreaded confluence of bookseller and author. Watch out, publishers! That’s an ugly one.
P&W: What has changed for you with the publication of Meaning a Cloud?
JWM: It’s changed my writing, I think, because now I know what it looks like in a book. The chapbooks were one thing, and those helped a lot, but to see it in a book that has some national distribution makes it seem more real somehow, less ethereal. It actually stopped me from writing for about two months. I try to write every day and was doing a pretty good job of that for years, and once the book came out, I don’t know; I guess there was this shadow cast over the typewriter. I couldn’t quite get there.
P&W: I’ve heard other people talk about that same phenomenon.
JWM: Yes, and you know, I have a counseling degree, and I can’t psychologize it. It’s post-partum something.
P&W: The first section, “Blue Mouth,” is about an accident you had that landed you in the hospital. I’m guessing that happened quite a while ago.
JWM: 1972.
P&W: The third section, “Taken With,” is about your mother’s death. More recent?
JWM: Right.
P&W: You and your mother inhabit parallel worlds during your time in the hospital and her time in a care facility, and the juxtaposition is remarkable, to have the poems bookended in that way. The two sections, beginning and end, had previous lives as chapbooks. What was your process for writing them in the first place for the chapbooks and then bringing them together for this collection?
JWM: In neither case were they written to be chapbooks. The hospital poems were published in 2001, and some of those were written in about 1984. It’s just a matter of writing a lot and then pawing back through and saying, “This goes with this.” I give credit to Paul Hunter, who was the publisher of both chapbooks, because he heard a reading and wanted to publish—there’s a prose poem in the hospital series, “The Nightshift Nurse Brought Her Shoes to Work in a Paper Bag”—he wanted to do that as a broadside. I said, “Of course.” He knew I had other hospital poems he’d heard at readings, and he said he wanted to see a manuscript, so I put one together for him. He gave me an idea about narrative arc; he gets good credit for that. The mom poems just came; she was in a nursing home, and I would visit once a week or more often, and it would spill over into the daily writing. After she died, at one point I just took two years’ worth of pieces of paper and pulled out everything that related to her, and tried to find another chapbook because I thought Paul would publish it.
P&W: The middle section, “Where Else,” is a cogent bridge between those two. The beginning and ending sections deal with inner battles, very personal battles, and then the one in the middle seems to contain echoes of the outside world at battle. In your poems, war filters in through the radio and news or manifests itself in a dream you’re having. Did you write “Where Else” later than the other two sections? How did the poems in that section come together?
JWM: Because I’m writing every day, some things just speak more loudly and ask to be followed up on. It’s probably true for some books that people actually sit down to write them with a set idea in mind. Unless it’s a verse novel or something, that’s not how I would write. But you’re right on it; those other two sections are internal, and I didn’t want to be just internal—I wanted to be part of the public. I wanted a voice that was with and among, not so interior.
P&W: When you’re writing daily, are you writing full poems, do you keep a journal, or do you just write whatever comes?
JWM: Whatever comes. More and more, the important part is, whatever’s in should come out. I don’t want to write the same poem. I could give all these other people’s descriptions, which is kind of cheating I guess. Mary Ruefle at Seattle Arts and Lectures said that she used to think writing was about speaking, and then she realized it is about listening. In a way, I’m up for that. I have language going in my head all the time, so I sit at the typewriter and press the keys.
P&W: It sounds like you weren’t necessarily seeking publication as much as publication sought you.
JWM: I sent to magazines for twenty years. The great thing about the Oberlin is, they publish FIELD magazine, and it’s a magazine I have liked a great deal since I started taking poetry seriously—that would be about 1980. I used to keep little index cards of submissions and rejections, and before I got into FIELD, I had been rejected by them for almost twenty years. Then they took one, they took three, they took another, so I thought, well, I should enter the contest. I’d been trying to get published before, just not rabidly. I was daintily trying to get published.
P&W: How did you get from chapbooks to Meaning a Cloud?
JWM: It was [Oberlin’s] competition, and it was Alice James, another good publisher. I’d put the two chapbooks together, with nothing in the middle, and sent that in for the FIELD prize four years ago. I got a nice e-mail back from David Young saying, “You’re a high finalist,” and that was very encouraging because it was the first time I’d entered a contest. I entered Alice James, and I was a finalist there. In each case, I felt a little guilty because they’d already been chapbooks. I had other work I liked, so I put it in the middle and tried Alice James again but didn’t get anything. Then I tried FIELD again and got it.
P&W: You said you have a degree in counseling—do you have formal training as a poet?
JWM: I have a BA and an MFA in poetry.
P&W: From the University of Washington?
JWM: The BA was here. The MFA is from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I came back and got a degree in rehab therapy at Seattle University, which was the best education of them all. They were tough. Creative writing programs are not.
P&W: They’re tough in a different way.
JWM: Yes. Right. Socially. [Laughs.] At the UW, the person who got me to really love poetry was Nelson Bentley. Two times a week, he’d encourage us to write a formal poem. He’d say, “Write a villanelle; write a sestina.” As an impressionable, somewhat young person, I tried that, and I liked it a lot. I still look for some kind of iambic progression. I want to bust it up, but I want to know it’s there.
P&W: How would you compare those formal experiences with the informal experiences you’ve had since you’ve been able to read a lot of poetry and support poetry over the years?
JWM: That’s the best education, the bookstore and the customers and the books. I went through school just like everybody else, attending the classes but also attending to my fellow students and my ego and all of that stuff. Reading is by far the best education. We have some great customers who come in and say wonderfully profound, off-the-cuff things that make me look at other writers who I’ve never looked at. I was just reading an interview with Nathaniel Tarn, and he was talking about Language poetry and how he saw Language poetry against the “workshop” poem and the lyric and talked about people who are doing both. As I’m sure you know, [poetry] is a fairly balkanized art, probably all arts are. What’s good about the bookstore is we can’t be balkanized or we wouldn’t be in business. We each read fairly widely and think widely and don’t get into one school or another. That I hope comes through in the writing.
P&W: It does. Even though you’re writing daily and you’re running the bookstore, you have time to read books of poetry as well?
JWM: You have to in order to sell them. Much less reading just for pleasure: People want to know, “Is this like his first book?” “How is she compared to so-and-so?” If I don’t know, then they might as well go to any of our major competitors. We’d rather they didn’t.
P&W: That gets me to the next question, too, because you’re not just running the shop; you’re also supporting poetry in other ways. You’ve been involved with the Seattle Arts and Lecture series and the local poetry festival. Yours sounds like a dream job to many people, but especially for a poet. Is it all silver lining, or are there any clouds?
JWM: It’s retail. There are clouds. This is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I was just having a discussion with a wonderful customer, a great guy who was throwing flowers everywhere, telling us what great things we do for the poetry community, and I said, “You know, I’m a clerk. I could be at Les Schwab selling you tires.” There’s a hint of that that’s true. The Seattle Arts and Lectures work is great for us, but it’s economically great for us. While that’s supporting the community, it’s supporting the bookstore. Anything that supports the bookstore to some degree supports the community. At least it means that people can come here and find a relatively obscure book and find people willing to talk about aspects of poetry when it’s difficult to find people who will do that outside the academy, or even inside the academy in some cases.
P&W: Does that ever feel like a drag, the retail aspect: selling, staying profitable?
JWM: Once in a while. In a slow month. There needs to be income. There are clouds to the silver lining. But the silver lining: It’s lovely to be surrounded by poetry. And to have the customers who come in have an interest in poetry. That’s a godsend.
P&W: How do you choose the inventory?
JWM: That comes from two directions. If we have some knowledge about the writer. Some publishers we trust introduce people to us. We listen to our customers. I guess it’s just attentiveness. We’re open to failure. On the other hand, we’ve been in the bookselling business for more than twenty years, and there’s a learning curve. We’ve definitely learned some things.
P&W: Which poets have had the most influence on your own work?
JWM: Because of his love of poetry more than for his own poetry, Nelson Bentley. Bill Knott, and again, partially out of his poetry, which is just wild and liberating in its wildness, and he, too, was a teacher. He at one point asked me in a conference, “So what?” about a poem. That was devastating and was a great question. It’s a great question for all art. I’m afraid a lot of art doesn’t pass that question, not that there’s an answer you could know in advance. Bill was quite important. Then there are people I read, like Dickinson. Early James Tate. White guy American poets in the seventies and eighties.
P&W: What’s next for the poet J. W. Marshall?
JWM: I get to do readings in Michigan and Ohio in the fall. I’m still writing every day and liking some of the things I’m writing, and now, I fantasize about a second book. At the rate that I’m liking what I write, it will be a ways off.
When fiction writer Barry Eisler heard last summer that Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, California, would close after fifty years in business, his first reaction was a loud expletive. His second was an e-mail to owner Clark Kepler with an offer to help. “I used to see those big author photos in the window…and I was working on what would become my first novel,” says Eisler, the author of the Jain Rain series of thrillers. “My fantasies of literary success were all based on doing book signings at Kepler’s.”
Eisler was part of a cadre of Bay Area authors who offered to give benefit readings and drive as much business as they could to the bookstore. Their efforts, combined with an alarmed customer base and a group of Silicon Valley investors, helped Kepler’s reopen to cheering crowds last October.
Kepler, whose father Roy founded the store in the spring of 1955, expressed both delight and gratitude for the community’s generosity, but warned that Kepler’s future was far from secure. “I think we were like frogs in hot water,” he says. “The old way of buying books, putting them on shelves, and waiting for someone to come in isn’t working anymore.”
What will? Faced with increased overhead, diversified retail competition, and a dwindling reading population, venerable booksellers once thought invincible are changing locations (Denver’s Tattered Cover), downsizing (Cody’s in Berkeley, California, which was sold in September to Yohan Inc., a book distributor based in Tokyo), or closing altogether (San Francisco’s A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books). And while the American Booksellers Association (ABA) reports that its membership has held steady over the last few years, dramatic rescues like those of Kepler’s and Brazos Books in Houston, which owner Karl Kilian sold to a group of community investors in March, are becoming increasingly visible.
“When you run an independent bookstore, someone inevitably starts a conversation: ‘How do you compete? How do you stay in business?’ As if things weren’t bad enough with the chains, now you’ve got Amazon,” says Kilian from his new post as director of programs for the Menil Collection, a Houston art museum. Several years ago Kilian wrote a letter to friends and patrons of Brazos warning that the store might be in trouble. Rick Bass, Richard Ford, Susan Sontag, and other authors each wrote back with an offer to give benefit readings. While it turned out not to be necessary, Kilian says that Brazos’s reputation for first-rate author events was a significant part of what made the store’s potential closing “a loss the community would not tolerate.”
One of the less fortunate independent bookstores was Bristol Books in Wilmington, North Carolina, which hosted many readings by students attending the University of North Carolina in nearby Chapel Hill. Bristol Books closed last year after fifteen years in business. A rescue effort, says manager Nicki Leone, was neither possible nor practical.
“I think what happened to Kepler’s Books is great, but has it proved its case yet? Is it a working business model?” asks Leone. That question weighs heavily on the owners of bookstores who have been given a second chance. Jane Moser, who ran a successful children’s bookshop in Houston in the 1980s, was recently hired as the manager of Brazos Books. She says she plans on expanding the store’s hours, increasing its children’s book and cookbook sections, and improving its online presence, as well as deepening the store’s relationship with schools, universities, and area corporations. “Brazos was already an institution,” says Moser. “But times change. You can always do more.”
The seventy-nine-year-old Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of the two remaining all-poetry bookstores in the United States. In April poet and Wellesley College professor Ifeanyi Menkiti bought the store when its previous owner fell ill. Knowing that his teaching job both enabled the purchase of the store and prevented him from working there full-time, Menkiti hired a manager and declared that Grolier could not remain economically viable based solely on its reputation.
“It’s a wonderful little place, filled with great conversation, tradition,” Menkiti says. “Our goal is to move that cultural vision forward but still pay our bills and keep books on the shelves. Then the enterprise will have been worthwhile.”
Before closure looms, booksellers say, writers can help. Hut Landon, the executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, recommends that authors include links to Booksense.com, the e-commerce arm of the ABA’s Book Sense program, on their Web sites. Kepler adds that authors can underscore the difference independent bookstores have played in their success when they give lectures and readings. Tracy Wynne, the owner of Cover to Cover Books in San Francisco, which was saved from closure by community activism and author donations in 2003, reports that many local children’s authors now use only Cover to Cover as their bookseller for events and school visits.
Just as authors can no longer publish and then wait for the sales to roll in, more and more booksellers have begun actively finding readers instead of waiting for readers to show up. “If the question is, ‘Can independent bookstores survive?’ part of the answer has to speak to finances,” says Dave Weich, director of marketing and development for the thirty-five-year-old Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. “We have to deliver more value than an ethical shopping experience and a community gathering place.… That might mean reaching out to local businesses or working closely with regional schools and authors.”
“You have to be really scrappy,” Weich says. “It is all about being proactive.”
Kevin Smokler is the editor of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (Basic Books, 2005). He lives in San Francisco.
Faced with increased overhead, diversified retail competition, and a dwindling reading population, venerable booksellers once thought invincible are changing locations, downsizing, or closing altogether.
George Burke and Shamoon Siddiqui recently launched Bookswim, an online operation that allows readers to rent books much the same way Netflix allows people to rent movies. The two graduates of the New Jersey Institute of Technology posted a beta version of the Web site at www.bookswim.com.
Readers can choose from five rental plans that range in cost from twenty-four to thirty-six dollars per month. Once an account is set up, a customer can choose books from more than two dozen categories and place them in a queue. Bookswim then sends three to eleven books, depending on the chosen plan, to the reader, who can keep them indefinitely. When the customer is ready, books can be returned in a prepaid envelope and the next titles in the queue are mailed.
The new venture comes at a time when independent bookstores are struggling, Bertelsmann is cutting jobs at Bookspan, and voters in Oregon are choosing to shut down libraries. “Could the price of books possibly have gotten any more expensive?” Burke and Siddiqui ask on Bookswim’s Web site. “During any given week, the average bestseller lists for more than $20. Read three of these in a month and you’re spending over $60! What you’re paying for is the right to own the book…but is ownership what you really want?”
Bookswim members can review the books they rent and even rate them on a five-star scale. The “best rental” is currently The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult.
On the evening of October 29, more than seventy-five people crammed into The Red Wheelbarrow, a newly opened Anglophone bookshop, to inaugurate a reading series and celebrate two literary magazines: Upstairs at Duroc, published at the Anglo cultural center WICE, and Pharos, edited collectively by poet Alice Notley’s workshop at the British Institute in Paris. The enthusiastic crowd spilled onto the cobblestone street, smoking cigarettes and craning their necks for a view of the proceedings.
The reading series, “A Blue Monday,” featured sturdy and in some cases spectacular readings by six writers-some Paris fixtures, others new to the scene, and all relatively unknown outside of the literary expat community. Highlights included Laure Millet’s “The Crying Bowler,” a side-splitting short story about suburban family disorder, and Amy Hollowel’s poems about September 11, which she prefaced by saying that “a poet’s voice is more essential now than ever before.” Srikanth Reddy, a fresh arrival in Paris thanks to Harvard’s Whiting Fellowship, read his poem “Corruption (II),” which features the following lines:
“Lately I have found some comfort in words like here. Here was a chapel for instance. Here is a footprint filling with rain. Here might be enough.”
An international crowd of English-language lovers, including students and professors from the Paris VII university across the street, had found its own “here,” a place to call home, at least for the evening. “The Red Wheelbarrow is my act against globalism, my anti-matrix,” said Penelope Fletcher Le Masson, the bookstore’s Canadian proprietor. “Bookstores will become shrines.” She expects her new venture to complement the existing competition. After two months in business, The Red Wheelbarrow has found its niche among Paris’s half-dozen Anglo bookshops-not as high-brow as The Village Voice, and less bohemian than Shakespeare and Company.
Later, at a nearby wine bar, a post-reading gathering brought together six writers, one teacher, a dancer, two artists, and four magazine editors. A zealous activist named Mark Feurst peddled his new anti-war rag The First Amendment. A sighting of the just-released Frank magazine was rumored, and two representatives from Kilometer Zero-after huddling at a private table to plan their Paris-based art and literary center-promised a new issue by the end of November. Their “KMZ Venue,” a series of six Sunday night variety shows in a bistro basement, kicks off November 4.
“The whole [Blue Monday] event was a confirmation that a bookstore makes itself,” Le Masson said the next day. “People are thirsty to hear what people have written. I especially welcome unknown writers to read, even if they don’t have books to sell.” Upcoming readings at The Red Wheelbarrow include British novelist Rupert Morgan, American poet Kathleen Spivak and, Le Masson hopes, Canadian-Parisian Nancy Huston.
This is the inaugural installment of
Inside Indie Bookstores, a new series of interviews with the entrepreneurs who
represent the last link in the chain that connects writers with their intended audience.
Once the authors, agents, editors, publishers, and salespeople have finished
their jobs, it’s up to these stalwarts to get books where they belong: into the
hands of readers. News of another landmark bookstore closing its doors has
become all too common, so now is the perfect time to shine a brighter light on
the institutions that mean so much to the literary community. Post a comment
below to share your thoughts about a favorite indie bookstore.
The first thing customers notice when
they enter Square Books—apart from the customary shelves and tables
overflowing with hardcovers and paperbacks—is the signed author photographs.
There are hundreds of them, occupying nearly every vertical surface not already
taken up by bookcases. They cover the walls and trail up the narrow staircase
to the second floor, framing windows and reaching all the way to the
fourteen-foot-high tongue-and-groove ceiling. Most of the photos are
black-and-white publicity shots, the kind publishers send with press kits, but there
are also large-format, professional ones—of Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Richard
Ford, and others. Many have that spare yet beautiful quality of something
Eudora Welty might have taken. Collectively, they comprise an archeological
record of this place’s luminous history—all the authors have passed through
these doors—as well as a document of the important role that this particular
institution has had in promoting writers and writing.
Richard Howorth,
the store’s owner, would modestly deny having had a hand in any of the number
of literary careers that have sprung from the fertile soil in this part of the
country, but the honest truth is that Square Books has served as a nurturing
place for writers—as a “sanctuary,” to borrow a word from William Faulkner,
another Oxford native—for more than thirty years now. He and his wife,
Lisa, opened the first store in 1979. Seven years later they moved into their
current location, formerly the Blaylock Drug Store, after buying the building.
Since then, they’ve opened two other shops: in 1993, Off Square Books, which
specializes in used books, remainders, and rare books and serves as the
venue for store events and the Thacker Mountain Radio program; and, in 2003,
Square Books, Jr., a children’s bookstore. Howorth also helped establish the
Oxford Conference for the Book, which brings together writers, editors, and
other representatives from the publishing world each spring for public
readings, roundtables, and panel discussions on writing and literacy. This
year, as part of the seventeenth annual event, the conference will celebrate
the legacy of Barry Hannah.
I made my first
literary pilgrimage to Oxford nearly a decade ago. At the time, I was running
Canterbury Booksellers, a small independent bookshop in Madison, Wisconsin.
Invariably, whenever authors visited our store, one of the topics we’d end up
discussing was where they were headed next or where they’d just been. Square
Books was always mentioned as a place they one day hoped to go, were looking
forward to going, or couldn’t wait to get back to. Partly this has to do with
its lineage, for few places can claim to have hosted readings for such varied
and important authors as Etheridge Knight, Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg, Alice
Walker, Alex Haley, George Plimpton, William Styron, Peter Matthiessen, and
others. And partly it has to do with the Howorths themselves, who, despite the
cliché about Southern hospitality, make all authors feel as if they were the
first to visit the store.
This was certainly
the case for me. Even though I wasn’t reading, and even though I hadn’t been
back to town in almost ten years, I was welcomed with enormous generosity when
I arrived. For two days I was given the grand tour, including a dinner with
local writers at the Howorths’ house, a walk through Faulkner’s home, a trip to
the Ole Miss campus to see the bronze statue of James Meredith under a marble
archway in which the word courage is carved into the stone, as well as an oral history of what took place
in Oxford during the Civil War as we drove through the shady neighborhoods of
town.
No person could
have been a better guide to the literary and historical roots of Oxford.
Howorth grew up across the street from Faulkner’s home (in the house where the
bookseller’s father, a retired doctor, still lives). Faulkner’s
sister-in-law used to chase Richard and his brothers off the property
for pestering her cow and causing mischief. All the Howorth brothers still
reside in town—one a judge, one a retired lawyer, one an architect, and one a
retired admissions director at the University of Mississippi. In addition to
his thirty years as a local bookseller, Richard, the middle brother, also just
finished his second term as mayor of Oxford.
It was with this
same generosity of spirit that Howorth agreed to talk with me at Square Books
one afternoon. We sat upstairs, at a small table in an out-of-the-way corner. I
chose the spot because it seemed secluded—though, coincidentally, we were
between the Faulkner and Southern Literature sections. Howorth commandeered the
espresso machine and made us cappuccinos before we settled in to chat, fixing
us our drinks himself. He is a man quick to laugh, and despite having spent the
past three decades as a bookseller and the last eight years in public office,
seems largely optimistic about the world. Or, rather, has learned to appreciate
life’s quirks, mysteries, and small pleasures.
How did you come to bookselling?
Deliberately. I wanted to open a
bookstore in my hometown, so I sought work in a bookstore in order to learn the
business and see whether it was something that I would enjoy doing, and would
be capable of doing.
The apprentice model.
Yes. Lisa and I both worked in the
Savile Bookshop, in Georgetown, for two years. In the fifties and sixties it
was a Washington institution. It was a great old store. The founder died about
ten years before we arrived. It had been through a series of owners and
managers, and by the time we were working there it was on its last leg. It was
also at the time that Crown Books was first opening in the Washington
suburbs—it was the first sort of chain deep-discounter. The Savile had this
reputation as a great store, but it was obviously slipping. We were on credit
hold all over the place. So it ended up being a great learning experience.
Then you came back here with the
intention of opening Square Books?
Sure. We opened the first store in the
upstairs, over what was, I think, the shoe department of Neilson’s Department
Store. Back then the town square was so much different from what it is today,
and commerce was not so terribly vital. It was certainly viable, but the
businesses didn’t turn over very much because the families that owned the
businesses usually owned the buildings. Old Mr. Denton at his furniture store
didn’t care if he sold a stick of furniture all day; it was just what he did,
run his store. So when I came home I knew I wanted to be on the square, and I
just couldn’t find a place. My aunt owned the building where Neilson’s had a
long-term lease on the ground floor, but there were three offices
upstairs—rented to an insurance agent, a lawyer, and a real estate agent who
were paying forty dollars, thirty dollars, and thirty dollars a month,
respectively, for a total of a hundred dollars. So my initial rent was a hundred
dollars a month.
Did you have a particular vision
for this store from the beginning, or did it change over time?
The initial vision is still very much
what the store is today. I wanted it to serve the community. Because of
Mississippi’s distinct history and character, as well as social disruptions,
the state—and Oxford, in particular, due to the desegregation of the
university in 1962, when there was a riot and two people were killed—was
regarded as a place of hatred and bigotry. And I knew that this community was not that. I knew that there were a lot of other
people here who viewed the world the same way my family did, and my instinct
was that people would support the store not just because they wanted to buy
books or wanted a bookstore here, but because they knew—not to overstate
it—that a bookstore would send a message. That we’re not all illiterate, we’re
not all…it said something about both the economic and cultural health of the
community.
Has that happened?
The university, for instance, has made
a lot of progress—there’s now a statue of James Meredith; there’s now an
institute for racial reconciliation at the university. And most young people
today know what the civil rights movement was, but they don’t know the specific
events and how tense and dramatic and difficult all of that was at that time.
You grew up in the midst of
that.
Correct. I was thirteen when
Goodman and Chaney and Schwerner were murdered [in 1964] and buried in Neshoba
County, Mississippi, and I was eleven when the riots at Ole Miss occurred. I
remember my mother crying when that happened. Her father taught English at the
university for years, and she knew that it was a tragic event.
As someone who’s spent most of
his life in this town, how did you see the place after having been the mayor?
My view of the community is
essentially no different from what it was before I was mayor. Except, I would
say, I really appreciate all the people who work
for the city. A lot of good public servants.
When you talk with writers about
places they hope to visit someday, they always name Oxford. Partly that’s
because this is Faulkner country—his house is here, and his grave is here, and
so on—but how did this place become such a literary destination in the last
several decades?
You know, it’s a lot of things. Beginning with Faulkner. But there were
people preceding Faulkner connected to the university, mostly. Stark
Young
was a novelist and a New York Times drama critic and an editor at the New Republic who helped Faulkner a little bit. Phil Stone was
a lawyer here, educated at Yale, who introduced Faulkner to Swinburne and Joyce
and a lot of the reading that was so influential to him when he was very young.
And primarily because of the presence of the university, there’s always been
something of a literary environment. But I think because Faulkner’s major work
dealt with this specific geography and culture so intimately,and because of the mythology he created, that
makes for a very particular kind of literary tourism. Hemingway didn’t quite do
that with Oak Park. It wasn’t a little native postage stamp of soil. And in
Mississippi in general there were also Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams,
Eudora Welty—these great writers of the twentieth century.
More recently,
Willie Morris moved to Oxford in 1980, within a year after we opened the store.
He was from Yazoo City, Mississippi. He was the editor of the [University of]
Texas student newspaper, and from there got a job with the Texas Observer, where he became editor at a very young age. He
was hired by Harper’s Magazine to
be an editor, and a few years later, in 1967, became its youngest editor in
chief. And while at Harper’s,
he really changed the magazine and was on the ground floor of New Journalism.
He published David Halberstam and Larry L. King; he published Norman Mailer’s
“Armies of the Night” [originally titled “Steps of the Pentagon”], the longest
magazine piece ever to have been published; and he published Walker Percy.
He also wrote a
book called North Toward Home,
which was his autobiography, published in 1967, that kind of dealt with this
whole ambivalence of the South and being from here and loving so much about
it—stuff about growing up in Yazoo City, and his friends, and his baseball
team, and his dog, and his aunt Minnie who lived next door—but also the
racism. The murders and the civil rights movement. And he had to get out of the
South ’cause he loved it too much and hated so much of everything that was
going on.
That sense of conflictedness.
Right, right. The book expressed all
that and was a touchstone for a lot of people my age. Then he got fired from or
quit Harper’s, depending on
the story. He got in a fight with the publisher and submitted his resignation,
believing that he wouldn’t accept it. But he did. [Laughter.] So he continued to write, but none of his
subsequent books were quite as big as North Toward Home. And Willie was a big drinker and he had kind of
run out of gas in the black hole, which is what he called Manhattan. But Dean
Faulkner Wells, William Faulkner’s niece, and her husband, Larry, raised money
to give Willie a visiting spot here at the university. So he came here that
spring as a writer-in-residence. And he immediately befriended us and the
bookstore. He said, “Richard, I’m going to bring all these writers, all my
friends. I’m going to bring them down here and they’re going to do book
signings at your store and we’re going to have a great time.”
The summer I came
back to open the store was also about the same time that Bill Ferris, who was
the first full-time director at the newly established Center for the Study of
Southern Culture at the university, came here. Bill was originally from
Vicksburg; he’d been to Davidson [College in North Carolina] and got a PhD in
folklore under Henry Glassy at Penn, taught at Yale. Bill was a tremendous guy
and very charismatic and bright and enthusiastic and full of ideas. Bill had a
tremendous influence on the university and the community and our store. On the
South as a whole. What he did was, despite this whole business of the South’s
being known for racism and bigotry and poverty and illiteracy and teen
pregnancy and all the things we’re still sort of known for [laughter], he took Creole cooking and quilt making and basketry and storytelling
and literature and the blues—all these aspects of Southern culture—and made
it fascinating to the public. So Bill had a tremendous influence on the
community and the bookstore. He also knew a lot of writers. The first book
signing we did was with Ellen Douglas, the second month we were open, October
1979. She had a new novel coming out called The Rock Cried Out. The second person to do a book signing at the
store was a black poet who was originally from Corinth, who had taught himself
to write while doing time at the Indiana State Prison: Etheridge Knight. [Laughter.] Bill knew Etheridge and he got Etheridge to come
here. Bill also knew Alice Walker, got her to come here. Knew Alex Haley, got
him to come here. And Willie got George Plimpton and William Styron and Peter
Matthiessen. All these people were coming and doing events in the bookstore.
So, really, from the time that we opened, we had this incredible series of
events. Then the store kind of became known. And in those days the whole author
tour business was nothing like what it soon thereafter became. In the seventies
and early eighties, publishers would send an author to San Francisco and Denver
and Washington and Atlanta. Maybe. But primarily they were there to do
interviews with the press and go on radio and television. Publicity tours, not
a book-signing tour. They didn’t go to bookstores. We weren’t by any means the
first store to do this, but there weren’t many who were doing this at the same
time as we were. The Tattered Cover [Denver] and Elliott Bay [Seattle] and the
Hungry Mind [Saint Paul]. I think that’s kind of how the circuit business got
started.
Then Barry Hannah
moved here in 1983 to teach creative writing. And his personality and writing
style particularly contrasted with Willie’s. Because Willie, he was kind of a
journalist. And even though he could be critical of the south, part of his
method in being critical was to get to a point where he could also be a
cheerleader for the south. And Barry I think kind of looked down his nose at
that sort of writing. You know, Barry was the Miles Davis of modern American
letters at that point. There would’ve been kind of a rivalry with any writer,
any other writer in town, I suppose. Plus, both of them had to struggle with
Faulkner’s ghost—there was that whole thing. But it was an immensely fertile
period in the community’s literary history.
So that convergence of events
helped create the foundation you would build the store upon.
Right, right. And then, you know,
Larry Brown emerged from the soil. His first book came out in 1988. John
Grisham: His first book was published in 1989.
Had John been living here the
whole time too?
No, he’d been living in north
Mississippi, by South Haven. He was in the state legislature. But when he was
in law school at Ole Miss, he heard William Styron speak. Willie had invited
Styron down for the first time, and that was when he got the bug. That’s when
John said, “Wow, I’m gonna do something with this.”
And now he endows a great
fellowship for emerging southern writers here at Ole Miss.
Correct. And he did that because he
wanted to try to build on what Willie did with all the people he brought in.
Speaking of nurturing young writers, I once heard that when Larry
Brown was working as a firefighter he came into the store and asked you whom he
should read.
Nah.
Is that not correct?
No. [Laughter.]
Was he already writing on his own?
Firemen work twenty-four hours and
then they’re off for forty-eight hours. And then they’re back on for
twenty-four and they’re off for forty-eight. So all firemen have other jobs.
They’re usually painters or carpenters or builders or something. Larry worked
at a grocery store. He was also a plasterer; he was a Sheetrock guy; he was a
painter; he was a carpenter. He did all of this stuff. And he’d always been a
pretty big reader. Larry’s mother, especially, was a really big reader of
romance novels. So Larry had this idea that he could supplement his income by
writing a book that would make money. And he would go to the Lafayette County
Public Library and check out books on how to be a writer, how to get your book
published. He went through all of those. And I think he read that you start by
getting published in magazines, so then he began to read magazines—fiction
especially. He would read Harper’s and Esquire. Larry was
a complete omnivore of music and film and literature.
He took it all in.
Took it all in and he had an
incredible memory. You would talk about a movie; he knew the producer, the
director, the actor, the actresses, the location; music, the song, the group,
who was on bass, the drums. On and on and on. And at some point, yes, early on,
he came into the store. When I first opened the store, I was the only person
who worked there. So I was talking to everyone who came in. And we started
talking and, you know, I didn’t give him a reading list and say, “Read these
ten books and that’ll make you a writer.” Larry was already reading Raymond
Carver and Harry Crews. Cormac McCarthy very early, long before Cormac broke
out. Flannery O’Connor. So we talked about those authors, but Larry completely
found his own way. He was completely self-taught. And I did later on help him
in a specific way when he was kind of stuck. But he would’ve gotten out of the
jam that he thought he was in at the time.
What was that?
Well, he had had one or two stories
published and then he kind of couldn’t get anything else published. He kept
sending off these short stories and they kept coming back. Then he called me
one day—and, you know, I hadn’t read anything he’d written, hadn’t asked to; I
don’t go there with writers unless they ask me. It was a Sunday. He said, “I
don’t know what else to do. I’m sorry I’m calling you, I don’t mean to bother
you, but I think I must be doing something wrong. Everything’s coming back.” I
said, “Larry, I’d be happy to read them. Bring me a few of your stories. I’m no
editor or agent or anything, but I’d be willing to read them.”
So he came over
with a manila folder. It was raining outside. We sat down at the dining room
table and I opened this folder. He was sitting right across from me, and I just
started reading. The first story was “Facing the Music.” You know, I read maybe
four pages and I said, “Larry, this is an incredible story. You’re not doing
anything wrong.” And then I finished reading it and chills went down my spine.
Because I knew that it was a great story. It still is a great story. And I told
him, “This is going to be published. I don’t know when, I don’t know where,
just don’t despair.” Actually I was looking the other day at a note he’d sent
me. He thanked me for helping to make it better, that specific story. But I
don’t remember what that was. I may have said, “You might move this sentence
from here to here,” or something like that.
But mostly you were telling him
to keep the faith.
Exactly. Also, I suggested he
contact Frederick Barthelme and Rie Fortenberry at the Mississippi Review, who’d published his first serious publication, a
story called “The Rich.” I said, “What about this story? Where have you sent it? Have you sent it to the
Mississippi Review?” And he said, “No,
‘cause they’ve already published me.”
That’s a good thing! [Laughter.]
So he sent it to them and they
published it and he dedicated that story to me. And then later on I helped him
meet Shannon Ravenel, who published his first book.
It seems like so many of the greatest writers of American letters have
come out of the south: Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery
O’Connor. And, more recently, Tom Franklin, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah. All these
people whose work I deeply admire. They share something…an intimacy with place
perhaps?
It often gets explained in phrases
like that, but I think that for the moderns…well, Faulkner was a genius. But I
think he also realized early on what he could do and in contrast to the many
things that he could not do.
What do you mean by that?
Well, he was a failure as a
student. But I think with someone like Eudora Welty, who was an intelligent and
independent woman of that time, there were limited opportunities for things
that she could do. But writing, writing was one of them. And photography was
one. So I think it’s tied to economics in some way, but I also think that all
of the rich and conflicted history of the South has a lot to do with it, all
the various tensions. Because literature is built on conflict. There’s also the
whole war thing, the Civil War. Being the loser in that war makes us akin to
other literature-producing places—Ireland, Russia.
Do you see any collective
project happening as a trend in writing right now, in the same way that, say,
the modernists were trying to make sense of a new world?
No, but I think there are always
different schools in the same way that Updike focused on the suburban married
life, and I think other writers operate in certain other niches.
How about southern writers
specifically? How are they trying to make sense of what the south looks like
right now?
I think Southerners are mostly
concerned with just telling a good story.
The tale?
Yeah.
Since we’re talking about
contemporary southern writers, let’s discuss the Conference of the Book. How
did that start?
The Faulkner conference is held
every summer. I think it started in 1974. It’s always drawn a crowd—people
come from California, Japan, Canada, wherever. And over the years, people would
come in the store and say, “I heard about that Faulkner conference and I’d love
to come back here and go to that, but I don’t think I want to do Faulkner for a
whole week.” These are people who aren’t necessarily Faulkner fans or scholars,
but who want to come for the experience.
A literary pilgrimage.
Right. And at the same time, I was
going to conferences like ABA [American Booksellers Association] and BEA
[BookExpo America] and SIBA [Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance], where
you would hear not just writers but also publishers and agents and editors
talking about the process of publishing a book—all these great stories which
typically were not available to the public. And I thought, “What if we had a
conference in Oxford where people could get the local experience, but also a
more general thing about books?”
So I talked to Ann
Abadie, who was a founding director of the Faulkner conference. I told Ann,
who’s been a good friend for a long time, “I’ve got this idea. Instead of just
having the Faulkner conference, why don’t we do another kind of literary
conference? We can just talk about books and what’s going on with The Bookand how it’s doing today. We’ll invite editors and
agents and people who have these conversations, but make it for the public.”
And Ann said, “Yeah, maybe soon.” Then, after about three or four years, she
said, “Let’s do this book conference thing.” And so we did.
Is it focused specifically on
Southern writers?
No. I was trying for it not to be just a Southern thing.
That would be too insular?
Yeah, and frankly I get tired of
all this stuff about the South all the time. And I thought that the university
and the community had the opportunity to create a one of a kind conference.
Where would you like to see this
conference five years from now? Ten years from now?
In an ideal world it would have a
larger budget to bring people in. For instance, Nicholson Baker wrote that
article in the New Yorker about the
Kindle. You know, that’s a timely thing. He could come and do a lecture,
perhaps even be on a panel with other people from the industry, people like
[Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos.
So you want it to explore all
the different intersections, not just publishing.
Right. Everything that’s going on
that affects books. We want to put this thing called The Book on the operating
table and cut into it and see what’s going on.
With developments like the Kindle
and Japanese cell-phone novels and Twitter stories, how does a bookstore stay
relevant in the twenty-first century?
I
think there are a couple of things. There are the technological developments,
which are interesting and positive in that they offer opportunities for reading
and the dissemination of literature and ideas in a way that might be greater than
the way we’ve historically done before. As Nicholson Baker pointed out in that New
Yorker article, digital
transference of text is much cheaper than disseminating literature through
books. So you have that, which in many ways, properly conceived, is a positive
development.
But the question
we need to ask is, How does the technology threaten this thing that we love so
much, and has been so critical to the development of civilization for so long?
And how do we, in terms of that threat, deal with and understand it? There’s
also the cultural threat of younger people who are growing up not reading
books. The way I see it, though, I think that digital technology will go on, on
its own path, no matter what. But in terms of books, I maintain that a book is
like a sailboat or a bicycle, in that it’s a perfect invention. I don’t care
what series number of Kindle you’re on, it is never going to be better than
this. [Holds up a book.] I
don’t see how it could be. I could be wrong. Who knows? But this thing is
pretty wonderful—and irreplaceable.
I think they can
coexist is what I’m saying. And by the same token, I think bookstores offer an experience to book consumers that is
unique. To be able to go into a place physically, to experience a sensation
that is the precise opposite of all that is digital, and to talk to people
about books in a business that has as one of its objectives a curatorial
function and the presentation of literature as another—that is, I believe,
irreplaceable. Of course, the question we all recognize is how the development
of technology, in reducing the industry that creates the physical book, will
change bookselling. Because there won’t be as many of these [books], and
therefore the cost will go up.
page_5:
So what is the future for
independent bookstores? If their role is curatorial, will they become more like
art galleries? Should they have public funding? Or will bookstores become
nonprofit entities?
I don’t know. I hope not, though. It’s
a very difficult business. But in many ways, I like the fact that it’s a
difficult business. Otherwise, people who want to make money—by selling
crap—would be trying to get into the book business. [Laughter.]
This store specializes in
literature, especially southern literature, as well as books about this region
and this place. Do you think that specialization is part of the reason for your
success?
I don’t really think of it in terms
of specializing. I think of it in terms of giving our customers what they want.
If Nietzsche had been born here, our philosophy section would probably look a
little different. [Laughter.]
So what are bookstores that are
succeeding doing right?
Well, I think a lot of it has to do
with adaptation. The business’s ability to adapt in all kinds of ways to its
own market, to be innovative, to not ignore the technological developments and,
in some cases, take advantage of them. Thacker Mountain Radio was kind of an
innovation.
How did that come to be?
Ever since the bookstore opened,
there’ve always been people coming in wanting to have their art exhibit in the
bookstore, or to stage a play, or do a music performance.
So that really meets your vision
of a community place.
Yeah, except that I learned fairly
early on that you have to make it relate to selling books. You can’t just be an
all-purpose community center; you’ve got to make it conform to the mission of
selling books and promoting writers and literature. Because I did have art
exhibits and it was just sort of a pain. So I kind of got away from that. What
happened, then, was two graduate students who had been trying to develop a
little kind of a music radio show that wasn’t really working at one of the
local bars, came and wanted to use Off Square Books as a venue. I told them
that I’d done enough of this kind of messing around to know that I wasn’t going
to do something like that unless it could promote writers. I said, “Maybe if we
did a radio show that incorporated both music and writers it could be
something.” And that’s how that got started.
It’s been good for
our book business, mainly because writers really want to be on the show. And a
lot of publishers want their writers to be on the show because it’s broadcast
on Mississippi Public Broadcasting, so it reaches a large audience. Which is
always appealing, as you know, to publicists.
Do they just read? Do they do
interviews? Depends on what the book is and how they
want to present it. They can read; they can talk about it. We’ve had a lot of
writers come up there and just tell stories. It’s performed, recorded, and
broadcast live on local commercial radio. Then we edit stuff for time, do all
the production work on the disc, and send it down to Jackson where they
rebroadcast the show.
It’s often really
great. And a lot of times we have musicians who’ve written books come on the
show, or we have writers who are musicians who like to play on the show.
There’s almost no writer who, given the choice early in their career, wouldn’t
have rather been a rock musician. [Laughter.]
Now that you’ve finished your
two terms as mayor, you’re returning to the bookstore full time again. What are
you most looking forward to? What did you most miss?
I just missed being here. I missed
being around the books, going down to the receiving room and seeing what’s come
in each day, talking to the customers, knowing which books are coming out,
being able to snag an advance reading copy of something that I know I’m gonna
be interested in. The whole shooting match. So what I’m doing now is really
kind of returning to my roots. I’m just going to be on the floor. I’m not going
to resume buying; I’m not going to be doing all the business stuff; I’m not
going to go running around to every store trying to control staff schedules and
training. I just want to—
Be around the customers and the
books.
Yeah. There may come a point when I
want to do something else. I don’t know. But that’s the plan now.
Where would you like to see the
store ten years from now? Is there anything you still want to achieve with it?
No. But returning to that whole
future of books conversation, one of the things that I should’ve added has to
do with what’s happened at Square Books, Jr. We’re selling more children’s
books than ever. The level of enthusiasm and excitement about books from
toddlers to first readers to adolescents and teens…if you go in there and hang
around for a few hours, you would never even think that there might be such a
thing as a digital book.
Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at
the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of the
online journal Fiction Writers Review.
INSIDE SQUARE BOOKS
What were your best-selling books in
2009?
John Grisham signs books
for us—lots of them—every year, so his book is usually our number one seller.
Our best-seller list is dominated by local and regional titles—books about
Oxford or Mississippi or about or by Mississippians. Other than Grisham’s The Associate, I think our top 2009 sellers are The Help by Kathryn Stockett, The Devil’s Punchbowl by Greg Iles, and In the Sanctuary of Outcasts by Neil White. All three writers are from
Mississippi, and Neil lives here in Oxford. Two of the books are set in
Mississippi.
What
books did you most enjoy selling in 2009?
Lark and
Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips, A
Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, The
Missing by Tim Gautreaux, and Waveland
by Frederick Barthelme.
How do you compile your Staff Picks section?
There are no constraints
on staff picks, except the book has to be in print, of course. And, after a
time, the recommendation has to have made at least a sale or two. Doesn’t have
to be paperback, but they always seem to be. Anybody can recommend anything
using any language, although I recently made one staffer change his
recommendation because he’d written in big letters, “It’s great! I’m serious!
Just buy it!” It was the exclamation points that really did it. I told him to
see Strunk and White.
Any
books you’re particularly excited about in 2010?
I’m excited about Jim Harrison’s new book, The Farmer’s Daughter; that
big, wonderful new novel The
Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova, who has agreed to come to our
store; and Brad Watson’s new book of short stories, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, which has
one of the best stories I’ve read in years, “Vacuum.”
For the first installment of our new series Inside Indie Bookstores, Jeremiah Chamberlin travelled to Oxford, Mississippi, to interview Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books. For the past thirty years, the independent bookstore has been a cornerstone of Oxford’s literary community.
Richard Howorth and his wife, Lisa, opened the first store in 1979. Seven years later they moved into their current location, formerly the Blaylock Drug Store, after buying the building.
The first thing customers notice when they enter Square Books is the signed author photographs. There are hundreds of them, occupying nearly every vertical surface not already taken up by bookcases. They cover the walls and trail up the narrow staircase to the second floor, framing windows and reaching all the way to the fourteen-foot-high tongue-and-groove ceiling.
Most of the photos are black-and-white publicity shots, the kind publishers send with press kits, but there are also large-format, professional ones—of Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Richard Ford, and others. Collectively, they comprise an archaeological record of this place’s luminous history—all the authors have passed through these doors—as well as a document of the important role that this particular institution has had in promoting writers and writing.
Jeremiah Chamberlin sat with Richard Howorth upstairs, at a small table in an out-of-the-way corner. “I chose the spot because it seemed secluded—though, coincidentally, we were between the Faulkner and Southern Literature sections,” Chamberlin writes. “Howorth commandeered the espresso machine and made us cappuccinos before we settled in to chat, fixing us our drinks himself.”
In addition to Square Books, Richard Howorth and his wife, Lisa, have opened two other shops: Off Square Books, which specializes in used books, remainders, and rare books and serves as the venue for store events and the Thacker Mountain Radio program, in 1993; and, in 2003, Square Books, Jr., a children’s bookstore.
“To be able to go into a place physically, to experience a sensation that is the precise opposite of all that is digital, and to talk to people about books in a business that has as one of its objectives a curatorial function and the presentation of literature as another—that is, I believe, irreplaceable,” Howorth says.
This is the inaugural installment of
Inside Indie Bookstores, a new series of interviews with the entrepreneurs who
represent the last link in the chain that connects writers with their intended audience.
Once the authors, agents, editors, publishers, and salespeople have finished
their jobs, it’s up to these stalwarts to get books where they belong: into the
hands of readers. News of another landmark bookstore closing its doors has
become all too common, so now is the perfect time to shine a brighter light on
the institutions that mean so much to the literary community. Post a comment
below to share your thoughts about a favorite indie bookstore.
The first thing customers notice when
they enter Square Books—apart from the customary shelves and tables
overflowing with hardcovers and paperbacks—is the signed author photographs.
There are hundreds of them, occupying nearly every vertical surface not already
taken up by bookcases. They cover the walls and trail up the narrow staircase
to the second floor, framing windows and reaching all the way to the
fourteen-foot-high tongue-and-groove ceiling. Most of the photos are
black-and-white publicity shots, the kind publishers send with press kits, but there
are also large-format, professional ones—of Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Richard
Ford, and others. Many have that spare yet beautiful quality of something
Eudora Welty might have taken. Collectively, they comprise an archeological
record of this place’s luminous history—all the authors have passed through
these doors—as well as a document of the important role that this particular
institution has had in promoting writers and writing.
Richard Howorth,
the store’s owner, would modestly deny having had a hand in any of the number
of literary careers that have sprung from the fertile soil in this part of the
country, but the honest truth is that Square Books has served as a nurturing
place for writers—as a “sanctuary,” to borrow a word from William Faulkner,
another Oxford native—for more than thirty years now. He and his wife,
Lisa, opened the first store in 1979. Seven years later they moved into their
current location, formerly the Blaylock Drug Store, after buying the building.
Since then, they’ve opened two other shops: in 1993, Off Square Books, which
specializes in used books, remainders, and rare books and serves as the
venue for store events and the Thacker Mountain Radio program; and, in 2003,
Square Books, Jr., a children’s bookstore. Howorth also helped establish the
Oxford Conference for the Book, which brings together writers, editors, and
other representatives from the publishing world each spring for public
readings, roundtables, and panel discussions on writing and literacy. This
year, as part of the seventeenth annual event, the conference will celebrate
the legacy of Barry Hannah.
I made my first
literary pilgrimage to Oxford nearly a decade ago. At the time, I was running
Canterbury Booksellers, a small independent bookshop in Madison, Wisconsin.
Invariably, whenever authors visited our store, one of the topics we’d end up
discussing was where they were headed next or where they’d just been. Square
Books was always mentioned as a place they one day hoped to go, were looking
forward to going, or couldn’t wait to get back to. Partly this has to do with
its lineage, for few places can claim to have hosted readings for such varied
and important authors as Etheridge Knight, Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg, Alice
Walker, Alex Haley, George Plimpton, William Styron, Peter Matthiessen, and
others. And partly it has to do with the Howorths themselves, who, despite the
cliché about Southern hospitality, make all authors feel as if they were the
first to visit the store.
This was certainly
the case for me. Even though I wasn’t reading, and even though I hadn’t been
back to town in almost ten years, I was welcomed with enormous generosity when
I arrived. For two days I was given the grand tour, including a dinner with
local writers at the Howorths’ house, a walk through Faulkner’s home, a trip to
the Ole Miss campus to see the bronze statue of James Meredith under a marble
archway in which the word courage is carved into the stone, as well as an oral history of what took place
in Oxford during the Civil War as we drove through the shady neighborhoods of
town.
No person could
have been a better guide to the literary and historical roots of Oxford.
Howorth grew up across the street from Faulkner’s home (in the house where the
bookseller’s father, a retired doctor, still lives). Faulkner’s
sister-in-law used to chase Richard and his brothers off the property
for pestering her cow and causing mischief. All the Howorth brothers still
reside in town—one a judge, one a retired lawyer, one an architect, and one a
retired admissions director at the University of Mississippi. In addition to
his thirty years as a local bookseller, Richard, the middle brother, also just
finished his second term as mayor of Oxford.
It was with this
same generosity of spirit that Howorth agreed to talk with me at Square Books
one afternoon. We sat upstairs, at a small table in an out-of-the-way corner. I
chose the spot because it seemed secluded—though, coincidentally, we were
between the Faulkner and Southern Literature sections. Howorth commandeered the
espresso machine and made us cappuccinos before we settled in to chat, fixing
us our drinks himself. He is a man quick to laugh, and despite having spent the
past three decades as a bookseller and the last eight years in public office,
seems largely optimistic about the world. Or, rather, has learned to appreciate
life’s quirks, mysteries, and small pleasures.
How did you come to bookselling?
Deliberately. I wanted to open a
bookstore in my hometown, so I sought work in a bookstore in order to learn the
business and see whether it was something that I would enjoy doing, and would
be capable of doing.
The apprentice model.
Yes. Lisa and I both worked in the
Savile Bookshop, in Georgetown, for two years. In the fifties and sixties it
was a Washington institution. It was a great old store. The founder died about
ten years before we arrived. It had been through a series of owners and
managers, and by the time we were working there it was on its last leg. It was
also at the time that Crown Books was first opening in the Washington
suburbs—it was the first sort of chain deep-discounter. The Savile had this
reputation as a great store, but it was obviously slipping. We were on credit
hold all over the place. So it ended up being a great learning experience.
Then you came back here with the
intention of opening Square Books?
Sure. We opened the first store in the
upstairs, over what was, I think, the shoe department of Neilson’s Department
Store. Back then the town square was so much different from what it is today,
and commerce was not so terribly vital. It was certainly viable, but the
businesses didn’t turn over very much because the families that owned the
businesses usually owned the buildings. Old Mr. Denton at his furniture store
didn’t care if he sold a stick of furniture all day; it was just what he did,
run his store. So when I came home I knew I wanted to be on the square, and I
just couldn’t find a place. My aunt owned the building where Neilson’s had a
long-term lease on the ground floor, but there were three offices
upstairs—rented to an insurance agent, a lawyer, and a real estate agent who
were paying forty dollars, thirty dollars, and thirty dollars a month,
respectively, for a total of a hundred dollars. So my initial rent was a hundred
dollars a month.
Did you have a particular vision
for this store from the beginning, or did it change over time?
The initial vision is still very much
what the store is today. I wanted it to serve the community. Because of
Mississippi’s distinct history and character, as well as social disruptions,
the state—and Oxford, in particular, due to the desegregation of the
university in 1962, when there was a riot and two people were killed—was
regarded as a place of hatred and bigotry. And I knew that this community was not that. I knew that there were a lot of other
people here who viewed the world the same way my family did, and my instinct
was that people would support the store not just because they wanted to buy
books or wanted a bookstore here, but because they knew—not to overstate
it—that a bookstore would send a message. That we’re not all illiterate, we’re
not all…it said something about both the economic and cultural health of the
community.
Has that happened?
The university, for instance, has made
a lot of progress—there’s now a statue of James Meredith; there’s now an
institute for racial reconciliation at the university. And most young people
today know what the civil rights movement was, but they don’t know the specific
events and how tense and dramatic and difficult all of that was at that time.
You grew up in the midst of
that.
Correct. I was thirteen when
Goodman and Chaney and Schwerner were murdered [in 1964] and buried in Neshoba
County, Mississippi, and I was eleven when the riots at Ole Miss occurred. I
remember my mother crying when that happened. Her father taught English at the
university for years, and she knew that it was a tragic event.
As someone who’s spent most of
his life in this town, how did you see the place after having been the mayor?
My view of the community is
essentially no different from what it was before I was mayor. Except, I would
say, I really appreciate all the people who work
for the city. A lot of good public servants.
When you talk with writers about
places they hope to visit someday, they always name Oxford. Partly that’s
because this is Faulkner country—his house is here, and his grave is here, and
so on—but how did this place become such a literary destination in the last
several decades?
You know, it’s a lot of things. Beginning with Faulkner. But there were
people preceding Faulkner connected to the university, mostly. Stark
Young
was a novelist and a New York Times drama critic and an editor at the New Republic who helped Faulkner a little bit. Phil Stone was
a lawyer here, educated at Yale, who introduced Faulkner to Swinburne and Joyce
and a lot of the reading that was so influential to him when he was very young.
And primarily because of the presence of the university, there’s always been
something of a literary environment. But I think because Faulkner’s major work
dealt with this specific geography and culture so intimately,and because of the mythology he created, that
makes for a very particular kind of literary tourism. Hemingway didn’t quite do
that with Oak Park. It wasn’t a little native postage stamp of soil. And in
Mississippi in general there were also Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams,
Eudora Welty—these great writers of the twentieth century.
More recently,
Willie Morris moved to Oxford in 1980, within a year after we opened the store.
He was from Yazoo City, Mississippi. He was the editor of the [University of]
Texas student newspaper, and from there got a job with the Texas Observer, where he became editor at a very young age. He
was hired by Harper’s Magazine to
be an editor, and a few years later, in 1967, became its youngest editor in
chief. And while at Harper’s,
he really changed the magazine and was on the ground floor of New Journalism.
He published David Halberstam and Larry L. King; he published Norman Mailer’s
“Armies of the Night” [originally titled “Steps of the Pentagon”], the longest
magazine piece ever to have been published; and he published Walker Percy.
He also wrote a
book called North Toward Home,
which was his autobiography, published in 1967, that kind of dealt with this
whole ambivalence of the South and being from here and loving so much about
it—stuff about growing up in Yazoo City, and his friends, and his baseball
team, and his dog, and his aunt Minnie who lived next door—but also the
racism. The murders and the civil rights movement. And he had to get out of the
South ’cause he loved it too much and hated so much of everything that was
going on.
That sense of conflictedness.
Right, right. The book expressed all
that and was a touchstone for a lot of people my age. Then he got fired from or
quit Harper’s, depending on
the story. He got in a fight with the publisher and submitted his resignation,
believing that he wouldn’t accept it. But he did. [Laughter.] So he continued to write, but none of his
subsequent books were quite as big as North Toward Home. And Willie was a big drinker and he had kind of
run out of gas in the black hole, which is what he called Manhattan. But Dean
Faulkner Wells, William Faulkner’s niece, and her husband, Larry, raised money
to give Willie a visiting spot here at the university. So he came here that
spring as a writer-in-residence. And he immediately befriended us and the
bookstore. He said, “Richard, I’m going to bring all these writers, all my
friends. I’m going to bring them down here and they’re going to do book
signings at your store and we’re going to have a great time.”
The summer I came
back to open the store was also about the same time that Bill Ferris, who was
the first full-time director at the newly established Center for the Study of
Southern Culture at the university, came here. Bill was originally from
Vicksburg; he’d been to Davidson [College in North Carolina] and got a PhD in
folklore under Henry Glassy at Penn, taught at Yale. Bill was a tremendous guy
and very charismatic and bright and enthusiastic and full of ideas. Bill had a
tremendous influence on the university and the community and our store. On the
South as a whole. What he did was, despite this whole business of the South’s
being known for racism and bigotry and poverty and illiteracy and teen
pregnancy and all the things we’re still sort of known for [laughter], he took Creole cooking and quilt making and basketry and storytelling
and literature and the blues—all these aspects of Southern culture—and made
it fascinating to the public. So Bill had a tremendous influence on the
community and the bookstore. He also knew a lot of writers. The first book
signing we did was with Ellen Douglas, the second month we were open, October
1979. She had a new novel coming out called The Rock Cried Out. The second person to do a book signing at the
store was a black poet who was originally from Corinth, who had taught himself
to write while doing time at the Indiana State Prison: Etheridge Knight. [Laughter.] Bill knew Etheridge and he got Etheridge to come
here. Bill also knew Alice Walker, got her to come here. Knew Alex Haley, got
him to come here. And Willie got George Plimpton and William Styron and Peter
Matthiessen. All these people were coming and doing events in the bookstore.
So, really, from the time that we opened, we had this incredible series of
events. Then the store kind of became known. And in those days the whole author
tour business was nothing like what it soon thereafter became. In the seventies
and early eighties, publishers would send an author to San Francisco and Denver
and Washington and Atlanta. Maybe. But primarily they were there to do
interviews with the press and go on radio and television. Publicity tours, not
a book-signing tour. They didn’t go to bookstores. We weren’t by any means the
first store to do this, but there weren’t many who were doing this at the same
time as we were. The Tattered Cover [Denver] and Elliott Bay [Seattle] and the
Hungry Mind [Saint Paul]. I think that’s kind of how the circuit business got
started.
Then Barry Hannah
moved here in 1983 to teach creative writing. And his personality and writing
style particularly contrasted with Willie’s. Because Willie, he was kind of a
journalist. And even though he could be critical of the south, part of his
method in being critical was to get to a point where he could also be a
cheerleader for the south. And Barry I think kind of looked down his nose at
that sort of writing. You know, Barry was the Miles Davis of modern American
letters at that point. There would’ve been kind of a rivalry with any writer,
any other writer in town, I suppose. Plus, both of them had to struggle with
Faulkner’s ghost—there was that whole thing. But it was an immensely fertile
period in the community’s literary history.
So that convergence of events
helped create the foundation you would build the store upon.
Right, right. And then, you know,
Larry Brown emerged from the soil. His first book came out in 1988. John
Grisham: His first book was published in 1989.
Had John been living here the
whole time too?
No, he’d been living in north
Mississippi, by South Haven. He was in the state legislature. But when he was
in law school at Ole Miss, he heard William Styron speak. Willie had invited
Styron down for the first time, and that was when he got the bug. That’s when
John said, “Wow, I’m gonna do something with this.”
And now he endows a great
fellowship for emerging southern writers here at Ole Miss.
Correct. And he did that because he
wanted to try to build on what Willie did with all the people he brought in.
Speaking of nurturing young writers, I once heard that when Larry
Brown was working as a firefighter he came into the store and asked you whom he
should read.
Nah.
Is that not correct?
No. [Laughter.]
Was he already writing on his own?
Firemen work twenty-four hours and
then they’re off for forty-eight hours. And then they’re back on for
twenty-four and they’re off for forty-eight. So all firemen have other jobs.
They’re usually painters or carpenters or builders or something. Larry worked
at a grocery store. He was also a plasterer; he was a Sheetrock guy; he was a
painter; he was a carpenter. He did all of this stuff. And he’d always been a
pretty big reader. Larry’s mother, especially, was a really big reader of
romance novels. So Larry had this idea that he could supplement his income by
writing a book that would make money. And he would go to the Lafayette County
Public Library and check out books on how to be a writer, how to get your book
published. He went through all of those. And I think he read that you start by
getting published in magazines, so then he began to read magazines—fiction
especially. He would read Harper’s and Esquire. Larry was
a complete omnivore of music and film and literature.
He took it all in.
Took it all in and he had an
incredible memory. You would talk about a movie; he knew the producer, the
director, the actor, the actresses, the location; music, the song, the group,
who was on bass, the drums. On and on and on. And at some point, yes, early on,
he came into the store. When I first opened the store, I was the only person
who worked there. So I was talking to everyone who came in. And we started
talking and, you know, I didn’t give him a reading list and say, “Read these
ten books and that’ll make you a writer.” Larry was already reading Raymond
Carver and Harry Crews. Cormac McCarthy very early, long before Cormac broke
out. Flannery O’Connor. So we talked about those authors, but Larry completely
found his own way. He was completely self-taught. And I did later on help him
in a specific way when he was kind of stuck. But he would’ve gotten out of the
jam that he thought he was in at the time.
What was that?
Well, he had had one or two stories
published and then he kind of couldn’t get anything else published. He kept
sending off these short stories and they kept coming back. Then he called me
one day—and, you know, I hadn’t read anything he’d written, hadn’t asked to; I
don’t go there with writers unless they ask me. It was a Sunday. He said, “I
don’t know what else to do. I’m sorry I’m calling you, I don’t mean to bother
you, but I think I must be doing something wrong. Everything’s coming back.” I
said, “Larry, I’d be happy to read them. Bring me a few of your stories. I’m no
editor or agent or anything, but I’d be willing to read them.”
So he came over
with a manila folder. It was raining outside. We sat down at the dining room
table and I opened this folder. He was sitting right across from me, and I just
started reading. The first story was “Facing the Music.” You know, I read maybe
four pages and I said, “Larry, this is an incredible story. You’re not doing
anything wrong.” And then I finished reading it and chills went down my spine.
Because I knew that it was a great story. It still is a great story. And I told
him, “This is going to be published. I don’t know when, I don’t know where,
just don’t despair.” Actually I was looking the other day at a note he’d sent
me. He thanked me for helping to make it better, that specific story. But I
don’t remember what that was. I may have said, “You might move this sentence
from here to here,” or something like that.
But mostly you were telling him
to keep the faith.
Exactly. Also, I suggested he
contact Frederick Barthelme and Rie Fortenberry at the Mississippi Review, who’d published his first serious publication, a
story called “The Rich.” I said, “What about this story? Where have you sent it? Have you sent it to the
Mississippi Review?” And he said, “No,
‘cause they’ve already published me.”
That’s a good thing! [Laughter.]
So he sent it to them and they
published it and he dedicated that story to me. And then later on I helped him
meet Shannon Ravenel, who published his first book.
It seems like so many of the greatest writers of American letters have
come out of the south: Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery
O’Connor. And, more recently, Tom Franklin, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah. All these
people whose work I deeply admire. They share something…an intimacy with place
perhaps?
It often gets explained in phrases
like that, but I think that for the moderns…well, Faulkner was a genius. But I
think he also realized early on what he could do and in contrast to the many
things that he could not do.
What do you mean by that?
Well, he was a failure as a
student. But I think with someone like Eudora Welty, who was an intelligent and
independent woman of that time, there were limited opportunities for things
that she could do. But writing, writing was one of them. And photography was
one. So I think it’s tied to economics in some way, but I also think that all
of the rich and conflicted history of the South has a lot to do with it, all
the various tensions. Because literature is built on conflict. There’s also the
whole war thing, the Civil War. Being the loser in that war makes us akin to
other literature-producing places—Ireland, Russia.
Do you see any collective
project happening as a trend in writing right now, in the same way that, say,
the modernists were trying to make sense of a new world?
No, but I think there are always
different schools in the same way that Updike focused on the suburban married
life, and I think other writers operate in certain other niches.
How about southern writers
specifically? How are they trying to make sense of what the south looks like
right now?
I think Southerners are mostly
concerned with just telling a good story.
The tale?
Yeah.
Since we’re talking about
contemporary southern writers, let’s discuss the Conference of the Book. How
did that start?
The Faulkner conference is held
every summer. I think it started in 1974. It’s always drawn a crowd—people
come from California, Japan, Canada, wherever. And over the years, people would
come in the store and say, “I heard about that Faulkner conference and I’d love
to come back here and go to that, but I don’t think I want to do Faulkner for a
whole week.” These are people who aren’t necessarily Faulkner fans or scholars,
but who want to come for the experience.
A literary pilgrimage.
Right. And at the same time, I was
going to conferences like ABA [American Booksellers Association] and BEA
[BookExpo America] and SIBA [Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance], where
you would hear not just writers but also publishers and agents and editors
talking about the process of publishing a book—all these great stories which
typically were not available to the public. And I thought, “What if we had a
conference in Oxford where people could get the local experience, but also a
more general thing about books?”
So I talked to Ann
Abadie, who was a founding director of the Faulkner conference. I told Ann,
who’s been a good friend for a long time, “I’ve got this idea. Instead of just
having the Faulkner conference, why don’t we do another kind of literary
conference? We can just talk about books and what’s going on with The Bookand how it’s doing today. We’ll invite editors and
agents and people who have these conversations, but make it for the public.”
And Ann said, “Yeah, maybe soon.” Then, after about three or four years, she
said, “Let’s do this book conference thing.” And so we did.
Is it focused specifically on
Southern writers?
No. I was trying for it not to be just a Southern thing.
That would be too insular?
Yeah, and frankly I get tired of
all this stuff about the South all the time. And I thought that the university
and the community had the opportunity to create a one of a kind conference.
Where would you like to see this
conference five years from now? Ten years from now?
In an ideal world it would have a
larger budget to bring people in. For instance, Nicholson Baker wrote that
article in the New Yorker about the
Kindle. You know, that’s a timely thing. He could come and do a lecture,
perhaps even be on a panel with other people from the industry, people like
[Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos.
So you want it to explore all
the different intersections, not just publishing.
Right. Everything that’s going on
that affects books. We want to put this thing called The Book on the operating
table and cut into it and see what’s going on.
With developments like the Kindle
and Japanese cell-phone novels and Twitter stories, how does a bookstore stay
relevant in the twenty-first century?
I
think there are a couple of things. There are the technological developments,
which are interesting and positive in that they offer opportunities for reading
and the dissemination of literature and ideas in a way that might be greater than
the way we’ve historically done before. As Nicholson Baker pointed out in that New
Yorker article, digital
transference of text is much cheaper than disseminating literature through
books. So you have that, which in many ways, properly conceived, is a positive
development.
But the question
we need to ask is, How does the technology threaten this thing that we love so
much, and has been so critical to the development of civilization for so long?
And how do we, in terms of that threat, deal with and understand it? There’s
also the cultural threat of younger people who are growing up not reading
books. The way I see it, though, I think that digital technology will go on, on
its own path, no matter what. But in terms of books, I maintain that a book is
like a sailboat or a bicycle, in that it’s a perfect invention. I don’t care
what series number of Kindle you’re on, it is never going to be better than
this. [Holds up a book.] I
don’t see how it could be. I could be wrong. Who knows? But this thing is
pretty wonderful—and irreplaceable.
I think they can
coexist is what I’m saying. And by the same token, I think bookstores offer an experience to book consumers that is
unique. To be able to go into a place physically, to experience a sensation
that is the precise opposite of all that is digital, and to talk to people
about books in a business that has as one of its objectives a curatorial
function and the presentation of literature as another—that is, I believe,
irreplaceable. Of course, the question we all recognize is how the development
of technology, in reducing the industry that creates the physical book, will
change bookselling. Because there won’t be as many of these [books], and
therefore the cost will go up.
page_5:
So what is the future for
independent bookstores? If their role is curatorial, will they become more like
art galleries? Should they have public funding? Or will bookstores become
nonprofit entities?
I don’t know. I hope not, though. It’s
a very difficult business. But in many ways, I like the fact that it’s a
difficult business. Otherwise, people who want to make money—by selling
crap—would be trying to get into the book business. [Laughter.]
This store specializes in
literature, especially southern literature, as well as books about this region
and this place. Do you think that specialization is part of the reason for your
success?
I don’t really think of it in terms
of specializing. I think of it in terms of giving our customers what they want.
If Nietzsche had been born here, our philosophy section would probably look a
little different. [Laughter.]
So what are bookstores that are
succeeding doing right?
Well, I think a lot of it has to do
with adaptation. The business’s ability to adapt in all kinds of ways to its
own market, to be innovative, to not ignore the technological developments and,
in some cases, take advantage of them. Thacker Mountain Radio was kind of an
innovation.
How did that come to be?
Ever since the bookstore opened,
there’ve always been people coming in wanting to have their art exhibit in the
bookstore, or to stage a play, or do a music performance.
So that really meets your vision
of a community place.
Yeah, except that I learned fairly
early on that you have to make it relate to selling books. You can’t just be an
all-purpose community center; you’ve got to make it conform to the mission of
selling books and promoting writers and literature. Because I did have art
exhibits and it was just sort of a pain. So I kind of got away from that. What
happened, then, was two graduate students who had been trying to develop a
little kind of a music radio show that wasn’t really working at one of the
local bars, came and wanted to use Off Square Books as a venue. I told them
that I’d done enough of this kind of messing around to know that I wasn’t going
to do something like that unless it could promote writers. I said, “Maybe if we
did a radio show that incorporated both music and writers it could be
something.” And that’s how that got started.
It’s been good for
our book business, mainly because writers really want to be on the show. And a
lot of publishers want their writers to be on the show because it’s broadcast
on Mississippi Public Broadcasting, so it reaches a large audience. Which is
always appealing, as you know, to publicists.
Do they just read? Do they do
interviews? Depends on what the book is and how they
want to present it. They can read; they can talk about it. We’ve had a lot of
writers come up there and just tell stories. It’s performed, recorded, and
broadcast live on local commercial radio. Then we edit stuff for time, do all
the production work on the disc, and send it down to Jackson where they
rebroadcast the show.
It’s often really
great. And a lot of times we have musicians who’ve written books come on the
show, or we have writers who are musicians who like to play on the show.
There’s almost no writer who, given the choice early in their career, wouldn’t
have rather been a rock musician. [Laughter.]
Now that you’ve finished your
two terms as mayor, you’re returning to the bookstore full time again. What are
you most looking forward to? What did you most miss?
I just missed being here. I missed
being around the books, going down to the receiving room and seeing what’s come
in each day, talking to the customers, knowing which books are coming out,
being able to snag an advance reading copy of something that I know I’m gonna
be interested in. The whole shooting match. So what I’m doing now is really
kind of returning to my roots. I’m just going to be on the floor. I’m not going
to resume buying; I’m not going to be doing all the business stuff; I’m not
going to go running around to every store trying to control staff schedules and
training. I just want to—
Be around the customers and the
books.
Yeah. There may come a point when I
want to do something else. I don’t know. But that’s the plan now.
Where would you like to see the
store ten years from now? Is there anything you still want to achieve with it?
No. But returning to that whole
future of books conversation, one of the things that I should’ve added has to
do with what’s happened at Square Books, Jr. We’re selling more children’s
books than ever. The level of enthusiasm and excitement about books from
toddlers to first readers to adolescents and teens…if you go in there and hang
around for a few hours, you would never even think that there might be such a
thing as a digital book.
Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches writing at
the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is also the associate editor of the
online journal Fiction Writers Review.
INSIDE SQUARE BOOKS
What were your best-selling books in
2009?
John Grisham signs books
for us—lots of them—every year, so his book is usually our number one seller.
Our best-seller list is dominated by local and regional titles—books about
Oxford or Mississippi or about or by Mississippians. Other than Grisham’s The Associate, I think our top 2009 sellers are The Help by Kathryn Stockett, The Devil’s Punchbowl by Greg Iles, and In the Sanctuary of Outcasts by Neil White. All three writers are from
Mississippi, and Neil lives here in Oxford. Two of the books are set in
Mississippi.
What
books did you most enjoy selling in 2009?
Lark and
Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips, A
Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, The
Missing by Tim Gautreaux, and Waveland
by Frederick Barthelme.
How do you compile your Staff Picks section?
There are no constraints
on staff picks, except the book has to be in print, of course. And, after a
time, the recommendation has to have made at least a sale or two. Doesn’t have
to be paperback, but they always seem to be. Anybody can recommend anything
using any language, although I recently made one staffer change his
recommendation because he’d written in big letters, “It’s great! I’m serious!
Just buy it!” It was the exclamation points that really did it. I told him to
see Strunk and White.
Any
books you’re particularly excited about in 2010?
I’m excited about Jim Harrison’s new book, The Farmer’s Daughter; that
big, wonderful new novel The
Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova, who has agreed to come to our
store; and Brad Watson’s new book of short stories, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, which has
one of the best stories I’ve read in years, “Vacuum.”
The goal of this book is to triple the size of your To Be Read pile,” writes illustrator Jane Mount in the introduction to Bibliophile: An Illustrated Miscellany, published this month by Chronicle Books. It is sure to do just that: The book is chock-full of Mount’s colorful illustrations of volumes to read and bookstores to visit—including BooksActually in Singapore, below, which is watched over by Cake, one of the shop’s resident cats—as well as notes, literary trivia, quizzes, and quotes from writers. Bibliophile also features Mount’s illustrations of rows and stacks of books, which were the subject of My Ideal Bookshelf (Little, Brown, 2012) and which she paints on commission (www.idealbookshelf.com).
Ever since she unearthed an old library checkout card tucked into the back of a book in a Goodwill store several years ago, San Francisco artist Kerry Mansfield has collected hundreds of old library books and stored them in her studio, which she calls “the wayward home for ex-library books.” In 2013 Mansfield began documenting the books in her ongoing project “Expired” (kerrymansfield.com/expiredportfolio), which features photos of books against simple black backgrounds. “I tend to anthropomorphize the books since each one has its own character and damaged beauty,” says Mansfield. “Each one shares the stories not only written on the pages, but through pen markings, coffee splatters, filled-in checkout cards, or yellowed tape stretching the book’s life out before its demise.” Mansfield, who in October self-published Expired, a book of 175 photos from the project, selects books that have a story behind them. “What may look like a simple checkout card actually maps one kindergartner’s love of a book through several years, expressed by the improving quality of her handwriting over time,” she says. “I look for books that have a deep sense of history via travel, time, and readers combined.” Mansfield still has more than eighty books to photograph, which she plans to feature in a second collection.
At first glance, Nick Drnaso’s second graphic novel, Sabrina—which begins when its title character, a young woman living in Chicago, goes missing—might seem like a mystery. But after Sabrina’s disappearance is picked up by both the media and conspiracy theorists, the book quickly becomes much more—namely, an exploration of what privacy and grief look like in the Internet age. Sabrina, which is out this month from Montreal comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly, braids the narratives of three characters who grow more isolated and paranoid as they struggle to address Sabrina’s disappearance.
Drnaso deftly contrasts the fear and heartbreak of the story with his understated style of illustration—muted colors, clean lines, and unshaded images reminiscent of Chris Ware’s work—while amplifying the sense of loneliness and entrapment. The characters, for instance, often appear expressionless and are almost never depicted talking to one another in the same frame. Drnaso used the same approach in his first graphic novel, Beverly (Drawn & Quarterly, 2016), which offered a similarly nuanced view of American suburbia. In a 2016 interview with the Comics Journal about that book, Drnaso said of his style, “I’ve fully embraced rigidity. There’s simplicity in it, I think. At a certain point I realized that stripping away was more effective than going in and adding things….I wanted to tear things down to their essence.”
Modeled after a Catholic saint-a-day book, The Little Book of Feminist Saints draws together the stories of a hundred women—scientists, activists, artists, engineers, civil servants, entertainers, and others—who have changed the world. “I would argue that all the women in this book have done something with their lives that makes them worthy idols,” writes author Julia Pierpont in the book’s introduction. “So let this be the little, secular book of feminist saints.”
Illustrated by Manjit Thapp and released this month by Random House—which published Pierpont’s debut novel, Among the Ten Thousand Things, in 2015—The Little Book of Feminist Saints offers brief descriptions of women throughout history, from Hypatia of Alexandria, a mathematician and philosopher living in the fourth century, to poet Forugh Farrokhzad (aboveleft), who spoke out against the repression of women in Iran in the 1950s and 1960s, to Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 at age seventeen. Each “saint” is also assigned a Feast Day and title: Valentine’s Day is the Feast Day of ancient Greek poet Sappho (aboveright), dubbed the “Matron Saint of Lovers”; June 14 is the Feast Day for the Mirabal sisters, the “Matron Saints of Rebels,” who led the Fourteenth of June Movement against the Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1960; and April 15 is the Feast Day for the Brontë sisters, the “Matron Saints of Dreamers,” since it is also the birthday of their mother, Maria Branwell. While the women vary widely in their pursuits and beliefs, they seem to share a determination, as Wilma Mankiller, the book’s “Matron Saint of Leadership,” once said, to “take risks [and] stand up for the things they believe in.”
Poets have long drawn inspiration from visual art, from John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” to Robin Coste Lewis’s “Voyage of the Sable Venus.” Canadian painter and poet Melanie Janisse-Barlow is turning the tables on this tradition with her Poets Series project (www.poets-series-project.com), a collection of painted portraits of contemporary poets. Inspired by Ann Mikolowski, who painted portraits of poets in Detroit, Janisse-Barlow started her project three years ago and has since painted nearly eighty poets from North America, including Hoa Nguyen and Christian Bok (both pictured below), as well as Matthew Rohrer, Jordan Abel, and Claudia Rankine. Each poet selects an image to be painted—a traditional headshot or a broader interpretation of a portrait; for example, poet Anna Vitale sent a photo of the school she attended in Detroit—and Janisse-Barlow then reads some of the poet’s work before painting the portrait. While she initially chose her subjects, Janisse-Barlow now asks each poet she paints to choose the next poet for the series. The result is a map of portraits that trace a network of poetic influence and friendship. “I wanted the series to grow itself and expand and form along its own trajectories,” says Janisse-Barlow. “I have nothing but respect for the beautiful and challenging work of making poetry. Who better to celebrate than those who dedicate themselves to the reachings of language and ideas?”
From his first “diary” (a Kodak film box stuffed full of ephemera from his travels through the U.S. Pacific Northwest, collected in 1977) to more recent notebooks of art, writings, mementos, and postcards, writer and humorist David Sedaris has kept 153 diaries in the past forty years. In May Little, Brown published Theft by Finding, a selection of text from the diaries, and in October followed it up with David Sedaris Diaries: A Visual Compendium. Edited and photographed by artist Jeffrey Jenkins, a childhood friend of Sedaris’s from their days in a Boy Scout troop, the book includes photos and cutout images from Sedaris’s layered and collage-like diaries.
The collection shows Sedaris’s skill as an artist; Jenkins says he was surprised by the “visual, interactive nature of the diaries themselves—the fact that every time you turn a page or element in the diary, it may reveal and reframe all of the pages below it into something new and different.” Jenkins also notes how thorough and disciplined Sedaris is in keeping a diary; in his introduction to the book, Sedaris admits it’s an unshakable habit and cops to obsessively going through the trash while out on walks so he can look for ephemera. The visual diaries embody the same talent Sedaris displays in his writing: the ability to transform what others might discard as trivial—whether a stray comment overheard on the subway or a luggage tag pulled from the garbage—into something humorous or arresting. And the diaries offer more than just insight into Sedaris’s work—they serve as proof that writing, or visual art, or even just keeping a diary, revolves around paying attention and finding that anything, no matter how small, is fair game for inspiration.
Neil Gaiman’s first solo novel, Neverwhere, takes place in a shadowy underground world filled with a fantastical set of characters: an elfin young woman with a magical power to open doors, an imperious marquis inspired by Puss in Boots, a man who speaks to rats (pictured below), and a pair of slimy assassins, to name a few. A new edition of the novel—published last year in the United Kingdom and this month in the United States by William Morrow—brings these characters to life with artwork by illustrator and U.K. children’s laureate Chris Riddell, whose black-and-white illustrations take up full pages and adorn the margins of the text. “One hopes it creates a mood—it’s a little bit like some good stage lighting,” Riddell says in a video filmed by the U.K. bookstore chain Waterstones, adding that the illustrations help the reader “concentrate on the very heart of the book, which of course are the words.” Gaiman originally published the book in the United Kingdom in 1996 as a novelization of a BBC television miniseries of the same name. The new edition, the author’s preferred text, also includes an alternative scene and an additional short story about one of the characters. “I wanted to talk about the people who fall through the cracks,” writes Gaiman in the book’s introduction. “To talk about the dispossessed, using the mirror of fantasy, which can sometimes show us things we have seen so many times that we never see them at all, for the very first time.”
“Someday there will be nothing left that you have touched,” writes Kristen Radtke in her debut graphic memoir, Imagine Wanting Only This, published in April by Pantheon Books. Throughout the book, Radtke examines ideas of loss and decay as she travels around the world exploring ruined places after the sudden death of a beloved uncle from a rare genetic heart disease. With evocative black-and-white illustrations, Radtke explores the many ways in which ruin can pervade a life, whether it be mold creeping up the walls of a dilapidated Chicago apartment or the degeneration of the body through illness. “Anything we build will eventually crumble and decay,” she wrote in an e-mail to Poets & Writers Magazine. “It’s something I’ve come to find comfort in—that things we cherish can be both lasting and ephemeral.”
In her ongoing project “Library of the Infinitesimally Small and Unimaginably Large,” South African artist Barbara Wildenboer (barbarawildenboer.com) transforms old reference books into intricate, fantastical pieces of art, like the one above, “Atlas (Parallel Universe).” Wildenboer, who started the project in 2009, takes found books—dictionaries, atlases, psychology manuals, astronomy and gardening books—and lays them out flat, then cuts their pages into hundreds of tiny tendril-like shapes. The symmetrical patterns of the pieces are reminiscent of other scientific phenomena: A book on biological psychology looks like a set of nerves, a dictionary suggests a pair of feathery wings, and a book on vertebrate morphology calls to mind rivulets of blood. “The intention is to draw emphasis to our understanding of history as mediated through text or language and our understanding of the abstract terms of science through metaphor,” Wildenboer writes on her website. Wildenboer’s work includes a broad range of sculpture, collage, and photography that has been exhibited around the world, including galleries in South Africa, Jordan, and Hong Kong. She recently held a solo exhibition, The Invisible Gardener, a collection of paper sculptures and other pieces, at the Everard Read/CIRCA Cape Town gallery.
In his ongoing series Children of Grass, artist B. A. Van Sise photographs American poets who are influenced by Walt Whitman. Each photo is based on a poem—the one below of Nikki Giovanni is inspired by her poem “Allowables”—and a concept developed by Van Sise in collaboration with the poet. Van Sise, who also happens to be one of Whitman’s closest living descendants, hopes to photograph eighty poets, and since he began the project in Spring 2016, he has featured more than twenty-five, including Robert Hass, Rita Dove, Ada Limón, Robert Pinsky, and Cornelius Eady. The project can be viewed on Van Sise’s Instagram account, @b.a.vansise.
Creative people are drawn to each other, as notorious for falling in love as they are for driving each other insane,” writes novelist Catherine Lacey in her latest book, The Art of the Affair: An Illustrated History of Love, Sex, and Artistic Influence. “Seen a certain way, the history of art and literature is a history of all this love.” Throughout the book, out this month from Bloomsbury, Lacey maps many romantic entanglements, collaborations, and friendships between some of the most famous writers and artists of the twentieth century. Accompanied by Forsyth Harmon’s vivid watercolors of each writer and artist, the book spans many disciplines, with anecdotes about the legendary salons of Gertrude Stein, the modern-dance luminaries Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, and denizens of the jazz world of Ella Fitzgerald.
Lacey excavated these connections by reading artist biographies, obituaries, articles, and letters. While many of the liaisons discussed in the book are well known—like the fraught affair between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas and the rocky marriage between Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald—Lacey also constellates seemingly disparate sets of artists whose lives happened to intersect: how, for instance, Pablo Picasso once met and drew on the hands of the heiress and writer Caroline Blackwood (above left), who later fell in love with the poet Robert Lowell (center), who then divorced the writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick (right), who once profiled the singer Billie Holiday, who in turn had an affair with the filmmaker Orson Welles, and so on. The book is a reminder that art is not created in a vacuum, but arises out of the chemistry, envy, and camaraderie among those who love and create it.
In his ongoing series Children of Grass, artist B. A. Van Sise photographs American poets who are influenced by Walt Whitman. Each photo is based on a poem—the one below of Nikki Giovanni is inspired by her poem “Allowables”—and a concept developed by Van Sise in collaboration with the poet. Van Sise, who also happens to be one of Whitman’s closest living descendants, hopes to photograph eighty poets, and since he began the project in Spring 2016, he has featured more than twenty-five, including Robert Hass, Rita Dove, Ada Limón, Robert Pinsky, and Cornelius Eady. The project can be viewed on Van Sise’s Instagram account, @b.a.vansise.
In her ongoing project “Library of the Infinitesimally Small and Unimaginably Large,” South African artist Barbara Wildenboer (barbarawildenboer.com) transforms old reference books into intricate, fantastical pieces of art, like the one above, “Atlas (Parallel Universe).” Wildenboer, who started the project in 2009, takes found books—dictionaries, atlases, psychology manuals, astronomy and gardening books—and lays them out flat, then cuts their pages into hundreds of tiny tendril-like shapes. The symmetrical patterns of the pieces are reminiscent of other scientific phenomena: A book on biological psychology looks like a set of nerves, a dictionary suggests a pair of feathery wings, and a book on vertebrate morphology calls to mind rivulets of blood. “The intention is to draw emphasis to our understanding of history as mediated through text or language and our understanding of the abstract terms of science through metaphor,” Wildenboer writes on her website. Wildenboer’s work includes a broad range of sculpture, collage, and photography that has been exhibited around the world, including galleries in South Africa, Jordan, and Hong Kong. She recently held a solo exhibition, The Invisible Gardener, a collection of paper sculptures and other pieces, at the Everard Read/CIRCA Cape Town gallery.
Neil Gaiman’s first solo novel, Neverwhere, takes place in a shadowy underground world filled with a fantastical set of characters: an elfin young woman with a magical power to open doors, an imperious marquis inspired by Puss in Boots, a man who speaks to rats (pictured below), and a pair of slimy assassins, to name a few. A new edition of the novel—published last year in the United Kingdom and this month in the United States by William Morrow—brings these characters to life with artwork by illustrator and U.K. children’s laureate Chris Riddell, whose black-and-white illustrations take up full pages and adorn the margins of the text. “One hopes it creates a mood—it’s a little bit like some good stage lighting,” Riddell says in a video filmed by the U.K. bookstore chain Waterstones, adding that the illustrations help the reader “concentrate on the very heart of the book, which of course are the words.” Gaiman originally published the book in the United Kingdom in 1996 as a novelization of a BBC television miniseries of the same name. The new edition, the author’s preferred text, also includes an alternative scene and an additional short story about one of the characters. “I wanted to talk about the people who fall through the cracks,” writes Gaiman in the book’s introduction. “To talk about the dispossessed, using the mirror of fantasy, which can sometimes show us things we have seen so many times that we never see them at all, for the very first time.”
From his first “diary” (a Kodak film box stuffed full of ephemera from his travels through the U.S. Pacific Northwest, collected in 1977) to more recent notebooks of art, writings, mementos, and postcards, writer and humorist David Sedaris has kept 153 diaries in the past forty years. In May Little, Brown published Theft by Finding, a selection of text from the diaries, and in October followed it up with David Sedaris Diaries: A Visual Compendium. Edited and photographed by artist Jeffrey Jenkins, a childhood friend of Sedaris’s from their days in a Boy Scout troop, the book includes photos and cutout images from Sedaris’s layered and collage-like diaries.
The collection shows Sedaris’s skill as an artist; Jenkins says he was surprised by the “visual, interactive nature of the diaries themselves—the fact that every time you turn a page or element in the diary, it may reveal and reframe all of the pages below it into something new and different.” Jenkins also notes how thorough and disciplined Sedaris is in keeping a diary; in his introduction to the book, Sedaris admits it’s an unshakable habit and cops to obsessively going through the trash while out on walks so he can look for ephemera. The visual diaries embody the same talent Sedaris displays in his writing: the ability to transform what others might discard as trivial—whether a stray comment overheard on the subway or a luggage tag pulled from the garbage—into something humorous or arresting. And the diaries offer more than just insight into Sedaris’s work—they serve as proof that writing, or visual art, or even just keeping a diary, revolves around paying attention and finding that anything, no matter how small, is fair game for inspiration.
Poets have long drawn inspiration from visual art, from John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” to Robin Coste Lewis’s “Voyage of the Sable Venus.” Canadian painter and poet Melanie Janisse-Barlow is turning the tables on this tradition with her Poets Series project (www.poets-series-project.com), a collection of painted portraits of contemporary poets. Inspired by Ann Mikolowski, who painted portraits of poets in Detroit, Janisse-Barlow started her project three years ago and has since painted nearly eighty poets from North America, including Hoa Nguyen and Christian Bok (both pictured below), as well as Matthew Rohrer, Jordan Abel, and Claudia Rankine. Each poet selects an image to be painted—a traditional headshot or a broader interpretation of a portrait; for example, poet Anna Vitale sent a photo of the school she attended in Detroit—and Janisse-Barlow then reads some of the poet’s work before painting the portrait. While she initially chose her subjects, Janisse-Barlow now asks each poet she paints to choose the next poet for the series. The result is a map of portraits that trace a network of poetic influence and friendship. “I wanted the series to grow itself and expand and form along its own trajectories,” says Janisse-Barlow. “I have nothing but respect for the beautiful and challenging work of making poetry. Who better to celebrate than those who dedicate themselves to the reachings of language and ideas?”
Modeled after a Catholic saint-a-day book, The Little Book of Feminist Saints draws together the stories of a hundred women—scientists, activists, artists, engineers, civil servants, entertainers, and others—who have changed the world. “I would argue that all the women in this book have done something with their lives that makes them worthy idols,” writes author Julia Pierpont in the book’s introduction. “So let this be the little, secular book of feminist saints.”
Illustrated by Manjit Thapp and released this month by Random House—which published Pierpont’s debut novel, Among the Ten Thousand Things, in 2015—The Little Book of Feminist Saints offers brief descriptions of women throughout history, from Hypatia of Alexandria, a mathematician and philosopher living in the fourth century, to poet Forugh Farrokhzad (aboveleft), who spoke out against the repression of women in Iran in the 1950s and 1960s, to Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 at age seventeen. Each “saint” is also assigned a Feast Day and title: Valentine’s Day is the Feast Day of ancient Greek poet Sappho (aboveright), dubbed the “Matron Saint of Lovers”; June 14 is the Feast Day for the Mirabal sisters, the “Matron Saints of Rebels,” who led the Fourteenth of June Movement against the Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1960; and April 15 is the Feast Day for the Brontë sisters, the “Matron Saints of Dreamers,” since it is also the birthday of their mother, Maria Branwell. While the women vary widely in their pursuits and beliefs, they seem to share a determination, as Wilma Mankiller, the book’s “Matron Saint of Leadership,” once said, to “take risks [and] stand up for the things they believe in.”
At first glance, Nick Drnaso’s second graphic novel, Sabrina—which begins when its title character, a young woman living in Chicago, goes missing—might seem like a mystery. But after Sabrina’s disappearance is picked up by both the media and conspiracy theorists, the book quickly becomes much more—namely, an exploration of what privacy and grief look like in the Internet age. Sabrina, which is out this month from Montreal comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly, braids the narratives of three characters who grow more isolated and paranoid as they struggle to address Sabrina’s disappearance.
Drnaso deftly contrasts the fear and heartbreak of the story with his understated style of illustration—muted colors, clean lines, and unshaded images reminiscent of Chris Ware’s work—while amplifying the sense of loneliness and entrapment. The characters, for instance, often appear expressionless and are almost never depicted talking to one another in the same frame. Drnaso used the same approach in his first graphic novel, Beverly (Drawn & Quarterly, 2016), which offered a similarly nuanced view of American suburbia. In a 2016 interview with the Comics Journal about that book, Drnaso said of his style, “I’ve fully embraced rigidity. There’s simplicity in it, I think. At a certain point I realized that stripping away was more effective than going in and adding things….I wanted to tear things down to their essence.”
The assignment, notes the preface to My Ideal Bookshelf, was simple: “Select a small shelf of books that represent you—the books that have changed your life, that have made you who you are today, your favorite favorites.” Artist Jane Mount and editor Thessaly La Force solicited ideas for more than a hundred such bookshelves from creative people around the world—writers, artists, musicians, designers, and pursuers of every discipline in between—to create the new collection of art and essays, published this month by Little, Brown. Each shelf displays the spines of loved, inspiring, and influential books—some aligned neatly, some stacked askew—all hand-illustrated and painted by Mount, and each accompanied by an essay from its contributor.
Pictured above are the dream shelves of writers Mary Karr (top), who felt “less like a weirdo” after reading The House at Pooh Corner and more proud of her roots because of To Kill a Mockingbird, and George Saunders, who, as a geo-physicist fresh out of college, spent long stretches in the Sumatran jungle during which he first discovered, and then devoured, Chekov, Kerouac, and Steinbeck. To commission your own ideal bookshelf, visit www.idealbookshelf.com.
Ever since she unearthed an old library checkout card tucked into the back of a book in a Goodwill store several years ago, San Francisco artist Kerry Mansfield has collected hundreds of old library books and stored them in her studio, which she calls “the wayward home for ex-library books.” In 2013 Mansfield began documenting the books in her ongoing project “Expired” (kerrymansfield.com/expiredportfolio), which features photos of books against simple black backgrounds. “I tend to anthropomorphize the books since each one has its own character and damaged beauty,” says Mansfield. “Each one shares the stories not only written on the pages, but through pen markings, coffee splatters, filled-in checkout cards, or yellowed tape stretching the book’s life out before its demise.” Mansfield, who in October self-published Expired, a book of 175 photos from the project, selects books that have a story behind them. “What may look like a simple checkout card actually maps one kindergartner’s love of a book through several years, expressed by the improving quality of her handwriting over time,” she says. “I look for books that have a deep sense of history via travel, time, and readers combined.” Mansfield still has more than eighty books to photograph, which she plans to feature in a second collection.
For our fifteenth annual look at debut poetry, we chose ten poets whose first books struck us with their formal imagination, distinctive language, and deep attention to the world. The books, all published in 2019, inhabit a range of poetic modes. There is Keith S. Wilson’s reimagining of traditional forms in Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love, and Maya Phillips’s modern epic, Erou. There is Maya C. Popa’s lyric investigations in American Faith, Marwa Helal’s subversive documentary poems in Invasive species, and Yanyi’s series of prose poems in The Year of Blue Water. The ten collections clarify and play with all kinds of language—the language of the news, of love, of politics, of philosophy, of family, of place—and, as Popa says, they “slow and suspend the moment, allowing a more nuanced examination of what otherwise flows through us quickly.”
While the books share a sense of urgency and timeliness, in fact these collections got their starts years, even decades ago. So we asked each of the poets to share the stories behind their debuts—what experiences or scraps of language incited the book’s first poems and what insight pulled them through the process of writing and publishing a collection.
Many of the poets described accepting the time it takes for poems to arrive and learning that making poetry doesn’t always entail sitting at the desk, pen in hand. “If I am looking at the world through poetic lenses and thinking of all of my work through the lens poetry has gifted me, then the poems are being written and will touch the page when it is time,” says Camonghne Felix. Sara Borjas reminds herself that everyday activities like reading and cooking are also “a making.”
Several of the poets also said their books began when they wrote through their original subject to its opposite or counter. In writing about Blackness, Felix wrote about survival but also thriving. Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes took on the ghost as “both the obstinate echo, as well as a willful, living fury calling us into question.” Jake Skeets wrote about the fields of Gallup, New Mexico, as a site of both desire and violence; Patty Crane found inspiration in beauty, but also the suffering and injustice that brings it into relief.
And all the poets credit the people who helped them along the way—friends who pored over drafts, editors who challenged them to be better, mentors who encouraged and advised, family members who offered support. All the people who remind us that behind every book is a poet, and behind every poet is a community—or as Crane says, “the threads that bind us to one another and to the world.” So we hope that when we lift up these poets and their collections, it is also a testament to the communities that stand behind them as artists and nurture them far beyond the pages of a book.
Patty Crane Bell I Wake To Zone 3 Press (First Book Award for Poetry)
as if desire is a kind of blindness that listening unveils —from “Frogsong”
How it began: I didn’t set out to write a book. I set out to write the poems that came to me and compelled me to keep writing. Poem by poem, that writing was mainly driven by my daily life, the awarenesses unfolding from my roles as a woman, a mother, a friend, a citizen of a community, a country, and the earth—all the threads that bind us to one another and to the world, however tenuous and ephemeral. At some point I had a critical mass of poems and was eager to explore ways to connect them.
Inspiration: My richest sources of inspiration stem from my deepest connections. Rich because they’re deep. Deep because they require tending. My family and loved ones, especially my incredible daughters, who I once carried in my body and now carry at all times in my consciousness. My home and place, especially the natural world that surrounds me and informs how I live, work, and relate to the world. My translating, which allows me to inhabit another speaker and be the author of poems I did not write, their temporary surrogate and shepherd. My fellow artists—being around them, experiencing their work and inspirations. Beauty catches my eye everywhere, and everywhere its edges are defined, even heightened, by injustice and suffering, as if they’re beauty’s very outline—the way the dark shadings around [Giorgio] Morandi’s bottles suggest the power of the unseen. They’re what bring the bottles into relief, defining them as bottles.
Influences: The following are poets whose work I’ve read closely, sometimes with great difficulty, and through that close reading experienced some new awareness that helped me think differently about my own work. Emily Dickinson for the enduring boldness of her poetry and vision, the sheer weight of each word, and how she possesses a moment, telling it “slant.” Elizabeth Bishop for the lyrical precision, calm authority, and descriptive brilliance of her writing. Jean Valentine for the quiet intimacy of her poems, distilled to an emotional essence that often defies narrative conventions. Tomas Tranströmer for the way he moves so freely between the everyday and liminal worlds that his poems seem to bubble up from the realms of what’s inexpressible.
Writer’s block remedy: If I find myself losing a staring contest with the blank page, I usually set a timer for twenty minutes, put my pen to the paper and write, stream-of-consciousness, until the timer goes off. This often helps me uncover a subject hidden in the weeds of distraction or overthinking and gets me back in the groove. I try to stay open to the possibility inherent in letting the mind’s reins go. What gets me going is the timer and zero pressure to write anything “worthy.” What keeps me going is the subject, if I find my way to it. If not, and if I can’t read my way back into writing, I switch my focus. I might work on revisions, translations, or other creative endeavors such as erasures, collages, drawing, or exploring and scrounging around in the woods. I’ve also learned that impasses can be crucial for revitalization.
Advice: Believe in the work, be patient, persist. Quiet all the voices except the inner one. Less is more. If you’re not sure whether the poem belongs in the collection, it probably doesn’t. Make the book the final poem. Submit the manuscript to presses whose publications you love. Keep moving forward, thinking about poems for the next book.
Finding time to write: I’m most successful finding time to write when I make the time by scheduling it. Which is to say, I treat writing like work. It is my work, my job. One of my jobs. I also need to say that, for me, having a devoted space to write is as important as finding the time. I’m fortunate enough to have a tiny, humble studio I helped build with my own hands. It’s tucked into a field that overlooks an active beaver pond. This quiet space with no internet or cell service offers its own form of time, where I can enter the writing quickly and be more focused, making the most of the few hours I can devote to my writing on most days.
Putting the book together: The manuscript went through so many iterations! It’s been twice as long, half as long, had three different titles, and included poems that clearly didn’t belong. I think I needed to discover what Bell I Wake To was by first understanding what it wasn’t. Also, at some point I realized I was letting the feedback of others overtake my own innate feelings and sense of the work. While the feedback was often helpful, even crucial, in the end I had to set the manuscript aside for a good long while to settle all those voices and tune back in to the patiently waiting inner one. Ultimately, I ripped the manuscript apart and started over, allowing the process to flow by simply letting the end of one poem influence my choice of the next without overthinking it. Honestly, it was as simple as trusting my choice. This may have been the most powerful lesson of putting together the book.
What’s next: Right now I’m actively sending out my second full-length collection, which was written during the three years I lived in Sweden. I’m also deep into translating the complete poetic works of Tomas Tranströmer. And I’ve been thinking and writing a fair amount about the growing disconnect between us humans and the natural world, the threats this disconnect poses, how being stewards of the natural world means stewarding humanity. I don’t know how or even if this preoccupation coheres in the poems, as it’s all still unfolding.
Residence: Windsor, Massachusetts, and Craftsbury, Vermont.
Job: After a decades-long career as a registered nurse working in a variety of roles and settings—my undergraduate degree is in nursing, my master’s in creative writing—I’m now a literary translator, Swedish to English, and the president of a community-building nonprofit.
Time spent writing the book: About fifteen years. The buildup to writing them surely took far longer, probably my whole life. A good number of those fifteen years involved setting the poems aside and letting them steep, free from my meddling long enough that I could come back to them with fresh-eyed amnesia.
Time spent finding a home for it: I started sending out this version about a year ago. If you count other wildly different versions of the book, then ten years or so. In the latest round, it was rejected eight times and was a finalist twice before being selected by Zone 3 Press, whose editors are an absolute delight to work with and helped make Bell I Wake To a beautiful book.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: So many good debut books and wonderful presses, so little time! I’m excited about Space Struck (Sarabande Books) by Paige Lewis, Hail and Farewell (Perugia Press) by Abby E. Murray, and Bodega (Milkweed Editions) by Su Hwang.
Camonghne Felix Build Yourself a Boat Haymarket Books
No but wait you’re the water —from “Willing in the Orisha”
How it began: In my MFA program at Bard, Ann Lauterbach asked me, “Are you representing or presenting?” And I wanted to see if I could present Blackness both in theory and in practice without performing it or decodifying it for the consumption of non-Black readers. I had to ask myself a series of questions that ultimately came down to one question—what is the project of Blackness? The answer I found was that Blackness is survival. And then that question led me to the question behind the entire book project—what goes beyond survival? What comes after it? What does it look like to depart from a journey of survival and enter a journey of thriving? The need to answer those questions is what compelled me to write the book.
Inspiration: The Black Arts movement, psychology, the way a good R&B album pushes at the edges of your spirit and makes you feel new things, In the Break by Fred Moten, the everyday joy of being a Black girl, the everyday trauma of being a Black girl.
Influences: Fred Moten, because he introduced a whole new framework by which to analyze the Black literary experience and the charge of “being” a writer. He also taught me that academic and artistic rigor is very much “a Black thing” and that has transformed my craftsmanship and my life. Mahogany L. Browne—my first mentor, my first teacher, the first authority figure I trusted to teach me what I didn’t know. My lyric is born from her lyric. Gregory Pardlo, who made me ask questions about my experience that helped me approach the stories I want to tell as an authority and not a bystander. Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon—learning from Lyrae and reading Lyrae opened up a whole new world for me in how to think and write about heartbreak and love. I write the best breakup poems now.
Writer’s block remedy: Two things. One, I learned from a Black studies professor at the community college I attended that there is no such thing as “being a genius” but that we all have a genius, and that your genius comes and goes on her own accord. She will eat when you feed her but will rest when she’d like. I turn to this thought when I am afraid that I’ll never write a good poem again, because it reminds me that the first poem wasn’t up to me and neither will the last one. And two, I remember that by living with intention I am in the process of writing poems. A poem or a series of poems may ruminate in your brain for days, weeks, months—and you may sit down four or five times to write it, but it won’t come until it’s ready. But if I am looking at the world through poetic lenses and thinking of all of my work through the lens poetry has gifted me, then the poems are being written and will touch the page when it is time.
Advice: You’ll never get another debut! Your first is your first. Fight for yourself, advocate for your project, and trust your community if they tell you it’s not ready.
Finding time to write: Lucky enough, it’s a core part of my everyday experience as a strategist. There’s never a day when I am not writing—and everything, even if it doesn’t look like it, is a poem.
Putting the book together: I spent half of the process building the ethos of the book and deciding which tools and techniques belonged in the toolbox of the book. That’s how I came to the footnotes and use of white space as an apparatus of silence. Once I had decided on those things, I built an outline, and just let it go. I wrote poems about everything and anything while keeping the ethos and the outline of the project in the back of my mind. Toward the end of the process I gathered all of the poems I wrote during that time and looked to see if there were any through lines that led me back to the project.
What’s next: Electing the first woman president of the United States, and my first prose novel.
Residence: Boston—but I’m a proud and loud New York City native.
Job: I’m a political media strategist, currently working on the Warren for President team.
Time spent writing the book: I wrote all of the poems across a span of five years.
Time spent finding a home for it: Well, I didn’t worry too much about trying to find a publisher until people started asking me if I had a full-length book. I sent the project to some of the publishers who showed interest, and I originally signed with one press, but after an initial experience that raised red flags for me, I canceled the contract and pulled my book. It sat collecting dust for a year, and racked up accolades every time I submitted it to a first-book prize, still with no contract. When Haymarket reached out, I knew it was the right time and the right press, and I’m very glad I waited and didn’t let the pressure of publishing a first book take my eye off the prize, which is a book product I loved with a publisher I could trust.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year:Invasive species (Nightboat Books) by Marwa Helal, Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press) by Aria Aber, and Brute (Graywolf Press) by Emily Skaja.
Clockwise from top left: Patty Crane, Camonghne Felix, Jake Skeets, Yanyi, Marwa Helal, Keith S. Wilson, Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes, Maya Phillips, Sara Borjas, and Maya C. Popa. (Credit: Eugene Smith)
Jake Skeets Eyes Bottle Dark With a Mouthful of Flowers Milkweed Editions (National Poetry Series)
the closest men become is when they are covered in blood
or nothing at all —from “Naked”
How it began: It started with the body. The learning of desire prompted many of the poems in the early versions of the manuscript. My life shifted when I moved back home to the reservation. I noticed that the fields that surround Gallup, New Mexico, where I first experienced desire during summers and winters home, were also fields where other men would lose their lives. I also returned to the portrait of my uncle—a photograph Richard Avedon took of him in 1979—that is on the cover of the book. I began excavating the layers that exist in the narrative and violence of Gallup. Suddenly the fields that surround Gallup became a place for reflection, both in the collection and in my real life. I knew I had to write this book and poetry was the only way to tell it.
Inspiration: First, the land. The other day I noticed how quickly smoke from nearby forest fires can be cleared out by strong winds. Second, the way my mom and dad tell stories. They are the best storytellers. Third, the Black Mountain poets. Finally, all the other Diné poets.
Influences: Sherwin Bitsui because his type of thinking is so uniquely tied to the land and our community on the Navajo Nation. His mentorship guided me so much during the completion of my collection. Orlando White because he is a great thinker in terms of language and the idea of moving poetry away from just expression. He taught me to approach poetry through language, and I learned so much about craft from that shift. Joan Kane because her use of the lyric is so beautiful. I am floored reading just one line from her poems, and that’s what I want to accomplish in my work: one-line moments when the poem leaps from the page. Finally, Santee Frazier because his understanding of sound influenced much of my attention to sound.
Writer’s block remedy: I turn to craft. I turn to experimentation. If I am stuck on a particular image or trigger, I will give myself rules to compose a poem. I will use random word generators or word scramblers online. I give myself prompts that force me away from the left margin. I try to approach the poem through its language. This work and energy is a way to honor language and honor the image or trigger that inspired the poem. This communication with poetry is what keeps me carving through the white space until a poem is left.
Advice: In the words of my mentor Sherwin Bitsui, carry your manuscript everywhere with you.
Finding time to write: I don’t, which may be a crime to admit. If you’re in a circumstance with an end date, an MFA for instance, I understand the need to carve out writing time. During my MFA, I worked full-time, so I found time to write during my commute. I was very close to listing the Phoenix public transit system in my book acknowledgements because I finalized the first part of the collection in railcars and buses. Otherwise, it was small moments like waiting in a movie theater or waiting at the bar in a club. Now I am simply allowing myself to breathe. The collection took much to write. However, I do still find moments to write, and it’s often on drives. Residing on a reservation often means driving miles for daily needs. I get to experience so much on these drives in terms of image, time, and sound. Often, a poem finds its way through.
Putting the book together: I used a variety of approaches to order the book. I knew I needed something familiar for the reader to grasp within the collection. For me, that became time. The linear coming-of-age, coming-out timeline is that field where the reader can find footing to wade through the collection. Finding the poems’ order within that timeline took many exercises that I learned from the Institute of American Indian Arts. These exercises included traditional ones like hanging poems on a wall and recording myself reading the manuscript. Others included carrying the manuscript everywhere, hiking while reading the poem out loud, or hiking while listening to a self-recording of the manuscript.
In the beginning I thought I was writing a collection about coming out and desire. However, midway I moved back home to the reservation and everything shifted. I saw the face and portrait of my uncle in the faces I saw everyday traveling to Gallup. I realized I couldn’t separate my queerness from the violence that occurred around me. So I started the collection again, this time on the border between my reservation and the outside world, the border between masculinity and sexuality, the border between beauty and brutality, and the border between the body and the land.
What’s next: I am simply writing poems. I have written a few essays about the book and my poetics. My poems now have been revolving around the code used by Navajo Code Talkers during World War II, the idea of Diné love and Diné joy, and the many forest fires, diminishing water wells, and abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation.
Time spent writing the book: Some of the earliest images and lines are from high school poems I have kept with me. Other poems and lines were born from my undergraduate years at the University of New Mexico. Conceptually, I would say the book has been simmering within me for about a decade. Physically, the manuscript took about three years to compose, revise, order, and revise again for publication.
Time spent finding a home for it: I submitted the collection to several prizes before I heard from the National Poetry Series. I am very fortunate that the book was published only a year after finishing my MFA.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year:Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press) by Alison C. Rollins, Refugia (University of Nevada Press) by Kyce Bello, The Milk Hours (Milkweed Editions) by John James, The People’s Field (Southeast Missouri State University Press) by Haesong Kwon, Bodega (Milkweed Editions) by Su Hwang, Documents (BOA Editions) by Jan-Henry Gray, and The Last Visit (Autumn House Press) by Chad Abushanab.
Yanyi The Year of Blue Water Yale University Press (Yale Series of Younger Poets)
It is a certain life and not its answer that is worthy of being repeated. Invitation, invocation, request. —an excerpt of The Year of Blue Water
How it began: A series of events forced me into a major emotional reckoning. I was barely able to go through the motions of everyday life anymore. So, the urgency of being present with myself and my body. And the will to be alive on my own terms.
Inspiration: Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts showed me that an integrated self was possible in writing. Aldrin Valdez’s poem “Shuffled Slides of a Changing Painting (After Robert Gober),” numbered like Nelson’s Bluets, was crucial to my understanding the technical power of a poem out of, and still in, order. And of course the person who told me to start the notebook, who learned that from Carolyn Forché.
It’s funny to think about what we’re inspired by: So much is timing with who we are as artists. People have compared the book to Bluets a lot. But though I had read it before, I had gotten Bluets mediated through Valdez. I finally met Carolyn Forché this past fall. We did, indeed, have a conversation about notebooks. But only after the fact. “Original” is an adjective—it describes an experience of relative origin.
Influences: Susan Sontag: passion. Agnes Martin: repetition, solitude. Linda Gregg: not understanding. Robin Coste Lewis: gathering, taking time for what is worth saying.
Writer’s block remedy: I read recently in an advice column that time is not what heals relationships: It is that things happen in time. I don’t see silence as an impasse. I work to be available to writing when it arrives. In silence I focus my erotic energy on my relationship with the world. I work on eating, sleeping, feeling, and enjoying my life. I read. I allow myself to change. The writing comes to me when there is something to say.
Advice: I’ve found that it is more important to love your own book than getting it published. I mean the kind of nourishing love you feel when you read the poetry you admire. This is the love that will help you edit it. It will help you advocate for it and send it out again and maybe one day read it over and over as though it is still new to you. Because it should be. Become your own reader and someone else will read it too.
Finding time to write: I now have the fortunate problem of figuring out when I should write versus when I can. When I was working I read and wrote early mornings, evenings, and all day during the weekends—any time I had a thought and a snatch of time (commuting, in line, walking somewhere, etc). I did not like it. It is a writing for survival, not choice. I don’t take for granted the depth of thinking I can choose in my writing now.
Putting the book together: I went through every note I had written and formatted them on individual pages, then printed out the pile. Then I would take, oh, three hours and find the one that felt like a beginning, then read again until there was another poem that felt right in following. In subsequent drafts I would reread the last manuscript and change things as I got bored or uneasy while reading. Lather, rinse, repeat with two-month breaks in between. I did not analyze or outline. The accumulating effect and the thematic overlaps were not apparent to me until the book was completed. It was an emotional and intuitive process. Even the breaks I didn’t time: I just noticed after a while, looking at the dates of my drafts, that I felt ready to reread the manuscript every two months.
What’s next: I’ve been writing love poems and thinking a lot about intimacy. I’m at the end of a second manuscript and have started a new pile for a third—it’s too early to say what that will be in its final stages, but it seems my interest in intimacy was too large for one manuscript. In between, I’ve been writing short pieces of criticism, a verse play, and a larger critical project on politics, poetry, and aesthetics, with a focus on fascism in modernism and all the threads that come to and from that.
Job: I worked for several years as a software engineer and am now exploring life as a full-time student and writer.
Time spent writing the book: About eight months, then two years of editing until I handed it in to Yale.
Time spent finding a home for it: About a year, and I am lucky for it. I benefited from the long, hermetic editing process, encouragement from friends who read it, and every reader who could meet the work where it was.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: To be perfectly honest, I haven’t been reading very much in this century. I have accepted that I will always be somewhat out of sync. This year I’ve savored Linda Gregg and Jack Gilbert’s discographies and am recently admiring Agha Shahid Ali’s. Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s To the Place of Trumpets (Yale University Press, 1988) and Lydia Davis’s The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (Living Hand, 1976) are up there for best debuts I read this year.
language first my learned i second see see for mistaken am I native go I everywhere —from “poem to be read from right to left”
How it began: Wanting to bear witness to the experience my family went through in immigrating, wanting to find others who had similar experiences, wanting to highlight the flaws in the “legal” immigration system—a conversation this country doesn’t want to have—they would rather focus on what they deem “illegal” immigration when in fact they are the ones who are illegal, if anyone is. I didn’t know at the time that Homeland Security would become ICE, and ICE would become children in cages by the time the book was out. My story is just a small snapshot of the systemic abuse inherent in the immigration-industrial complex.
Inspiration: My teachers—the forms they have introduced me to, the possibilities they’ve shared in editing, reading, and delivering the work; the Nile Delta; the heart and resilience of Randa Jarrar; Philip Metres’s abu ghraib arias and Sand Opera; the Egyptian people past, present, and future; the ocean; all of the ways journalism fails—especially “objectivity,” and how that’s where poetry begins; the America we are making together…
Influences: Harryette Mullen for her playfulness and subversiveness; Evie Shockley for her transformation of old forms and aphorisms; Rilke’s searching; Simone White for archive and music; and Suheir Hammad for syntax, witness, ancestry, and teaching others how to use resources. (You thought I’d say DJ Khaled?)
Writer’s block remedy: I turn to photography. Or a dream will get me back in the space I need to keep going. Integrating the liminal. There is no “here” and “there.” They are simultaneous, overlapping.
Advice: Take your time—or, I am paraphrasing, “Time is your friend,” which is what my teacher Sigrid Nunez once told me. Trust your path and your work. Talk about it; don’t be shy about sharing your dreams. You never know who is listening or willing to point you to the next step in your path. Making it real is a [daily] practice and process.
Finding time to write: I have to make it. But my favorite is getting together with my BFF Tavonne on Saturday mornings for a full day at the library to write, work, and catch up. Otherwise, I try to get my morning pages in over breakfast. I write in my head a lot or while traveling. Aren’t we always writing? Even remembering is a kind of writing.
Putting the book together: I wanted the order to mimic both an emotional journey of alienation, voyage (explanation of alienation), and gift (to the reader for coming on the journey) plus bonus/secret tracks. But I also needed the structure to imitate my own haphazard immigration path. Poetry and the lyric essay lend themselves well to relaying difficult experiences, so it was easy to trust the pieces would fall into the right place. Poet tip: The book can be read in both directions.
What’s next: Being a better, or more generous, literary citizen. I’m less interested in making the next thing you would call a book and more interested in becoming a better teacher and contributing my voice to reviews and other literary conversations. Meanwhile, the book project is happening on the backburner, which is how I work. It’s a project centered on the interiority of migration, how the body is read in its new [home]land, and how that impacts relationships.
Time spent writing the book: About ten years from start to finish. First the lyric essay, “Immigration as a Second language,” then “I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN,” then Invasive species, the section and the book.
Time spent finding a home for it: I’m grateful to Nightboat for taking on this project and giving me the time to make it what it became. I don’t know how long I had been thinking about Invasive species when they selected it. They were only the second press I submitted to, and it looked very, very different when I did!
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Aria Aber’s Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press), Andrea Abi-Karam’s EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press), Zaina Alsous’s A Theory of Birds (University of Arkansas Press), Xandria Phillips’s HULL (Nightboat Books), Andrés Cerpa’s Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy (Alice James Books), Gala Mukomolova’s Without Protection (Coffee House Press), Ysabel Y. González’s Wild Invocations (Get Fresh Books), Ivanna Baranova’s CONFIRMATION BIAS (Metatron Press), Camonghne Felix’s Build Yourself a Boat (Haymarket Books), and Jan-Henry Gray’s Documents (BOA Editions), and so many more—it has been a satisfying year.
It was earth that taught me names for all the planets, how to look at an angle for the hummingbird, dark satellite of sugar in the blossom’s mouth. I could picture that vast absence of us, moons spinning coolly in unscripted pasts. —from “American Faith”
How it began: The heart of the book is a series in which different things—all, to some degree, metaphorical—are “canceled,” a term that’s deliberately glib paired against its subjects: the bees, the government, “the return to nature,” etc. The casualness of “canceled” felt at once chilling and right. The other poems in the book touch on themes and motifs from this series.
Inspiration: Certainly, for this project, the news. One of poetry’s many strengths is that it slows and suspends the moment, allowing a more nuanced examination of what otherwise flows through us quickly. Responding to world events or headlines through poetry allows me turn these things over in the light, to puzzle out the implications beyond the immediate reaction. The reality is that poems are often the only answer to all that restless cogitation I feel daily.
More recently, I’ve been thinking about wonder, since it’s the subject of my dissertation, and the marvelous sense of unlikeliness that presides over all things. I’m still preoccupied with the state of the earth and animals, which were central to my two chapbooks, as well as the usual existential difficulties that all writers negotiate, but my position toward these things feels freer and more exploratory than it did in the past.
Lastly—and vitally—conversations with friends, about writing or otherwise, are central to my practice and my life. I teach alongside fellow writers, which is a rare gift, and I correspond with writers I love and admire overseas. Sustaining these friendships is as generative and important to me as the work itself.
Influences: Shakespeare’s sonnets for their logic and cognition, Gerard Manley Hopkins for the restlessness in the language and lush musicality, Emily Dickinson for the mystery and compression, Anne Carson for the poignant clarity, and Alice Oswald for how she writes the natural world.
Writer’s block remedy: It does happen, and often, that one writes oneself into a corner in poetry. It becomes like working in a Rubik’s Cube rather than a field of language. I may work in prose if I need more space to think on the page, or I may return to older drafts if I want the wild pleasure of making radical leaps and cuts. There’s always the risk of over-editing and losing the initial urgency that inspired the poem, turning it into a purely rhetorical object. I try to avoid this by walking away for as long as necessary.
John Loughery, the art critic and biographer, and a dear friend for more than fifteen years, is a writer whose depth and prose style and wry wit I adore, but who also has a sort of stamina and lack of preciousness toward the writing process that I love. He gets it done without much existential whining, and that’s a valuable perspective for me to have as a refrain.
Advice: Don’t worry about how much or how little you write. It’s judicious to practice some degree of self-discipline, assuming you’re serious about completing a project. But don’t compare your practice with that of others. Trust that as long you’re paying the right sort of attention to your life and the world, there’s a lot going on in the brain that will allow for writing to happen later on.
Finding time to write: I’m fortunate in that I’m not tied to a particular place, nor do I require solitude or quiet to write. I don’t have a daily routine, though on a good week I can write or edit for an hour before work.
Putting the book together: The difficulty of a first book is that it’s often a miscellany of the poems one has written thus far in one’s practice. I tried to mask that initially by organizing the manuscript into three titled sections. The last ordering change came when I culled a large number of poems, changed the title, and the book become one in earnest.
I owe a debt to the poets Jen Levitt, who is the first reader of every poem I write, and Lizzie Harris, who made the astute suggestion about frontloading the more direct and confessional poems. My instinct had been to tuck those away toward the end of the book in some bizarre attempt at mimicking the process of getting to know someone.
Residence: New York City, but I go back and forth to London.
Job: I teach English literature and direct the creative writing program at an all-girls school in Manhattan. I am also the poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and a graduate student at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Time spent writing the book: Many of the poems in the book were written during the last two semesters of my MFA, so from 2013 to 2014. The most recent, “American Cowboy,” was written after Roy Moore pulled out a gun at a rally in late 2017. So, about four years total.
Time spent finding a home for it: I first sent the manuscript out long before it was ready. I am grateful, in retrospect, that the early versions of this book were not the ones that stuck. I reordered and retitled the book one summer morning on Long Island, using various objects to keep the pages from blowing away and recognizing that I finally had what Zadie Smith calls “the head of a smart stranger.” I could look at the book impartially and see what needed to be done—which, in my case, was to cut a large portion of it. That was in August 2017, and I sent it out that fall. I was offered a contract with Sarabande as the runner-up for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong about six months later.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year:Space Struck (Sarabande Books) by my press-mate, Paige Lewis, and Tap Out (Mariner Books) by Edgar Kunz, though every year feels like an embarrassment of riches for new voices.
Sara Borjas Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff Noemi Press
I am the scrape of the lowrider as it exits the driveway, bothering the neighbors. —from “Ars Poetica”
How it began: In my heart I wanted to love better. We are a colonized people putting ourselves together for hundreds of years. Much of our lives, ideas, values, and traditions are survival tactics. I wanted to see my parents as individuals but also through this lens and love them wholly. I didn’t want my heartbreak, or theirs, to be for nothing. So in each poem I asked: How am I making myself and my family more simple and responsible for our lives than we actually are? And I never really stopped answering, even through all the revisions and drafts, and even now. Many of these poems are me puzzling together how I show love and what and who I think deserves it and why. When I began working with Noemi, one of the first things my editor, Carmen Giménez Smith, told me was that I had a manuscript but not a book yet. This stands out as the beginning for me. This is when I felt for real compelled, capable, and honestly challenged to write this very specific collection.
Inspiration: Oldiez. Fresno. The reliability of crop rows and how you can see all the way to the end no matter what. Books like Whereas by Layli Long Soldier, Crush by Richard Siken, Blood by Shane McCrae, and MyOther Tongue by Rosa Alcalá; Anne Sexton; Rumi; “punk poetics,” as Juan Felipe Herrera says; the word no out of any woman of color’s mouth; Lifetime movies; Real Housewives; really, any drama where the protagonists are women; oranges from my dad’s tree and zucchinis from his garden; my mom’s sense of humor; all shit-talkers everywhere; my sister’s ruthless sentimentality and her writing—she’s an amazing writer but stays low-key; and watching and helping my friends work on their books at the same time.
Influences: Roque Dalton for his sentimentality coupled with self-ridicule and the tendency to exaggerate, Richard Siken for his associative genius and how he writes about love, Dulce María Loynaz for showing me that my parts equal a center and are not scraps, and No Doubt for showing how to make fun of the patriarchy. All these artists showed me how to be extra and be beautiful in it.
Writer’s block remedy: When I reach an impasse, I accept myself and treat it as a liberty. I don’t feel the need to keep going if I’m not excited about writing. I think that’s always bothered me about the possibility of becoming a writer, that I’m expected to produce writing. It feels very capitalist and very colonial to make any part of myself or my behavior a commodity. I try to break the habit by being okay with not writing. I watch TV and films, talk to my friends and family, read, watch shows about outer space, and go down rabbit holes looking up phenomena. I cook. And all that, to me, is a making.
Advice: Write toward honesty, then, really write toward honesty. Stop lying. As Bruce Lee said: “It is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky…. I can show you some really fancy movement. But to express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself—that my friend, is very hard to do.”
Finding time to write: Right now I have a dream schedule that creates an alternative problem of when not to write. However, I am not someone who can sit down and write like it is a job, which I am cool with. So I find time by reading and getting pumped about what others are thinking, asking, and their work leads me to writing. I’m an impulsive, and honestly, kind of dramatic, person, and my writing habits are equally volatile. If I’m feeling, it’s always deeply. If I’m writing, it’s always obsessively. I know this will probably be the only time in my life when I have this time, and I feel a pressure that accompanies that privilege, but I also feel really free.
Putting the book together: I cannot stress how crucial editors are. Editors make the poetry world go ’round. For a few years, I maneuvered papers around my bedroom floor, as poets do. But when I became strategic, it was because my editors challenged me. The poet Ángel García charged me to organize the book according to theme and that’s how I found imbalances in the narrative. My friend Julia Bouwsma, who was a hero in helping me make this book, said, “You can have a narrative without a narrative structure.” Her comment freed me. Carmen Giménez Smith did not let me get away with shit. One day she called me and said, “You wrote ‘heart’ seventeen times in this book,” and hung up. I needed to be checked, and she was really good at holding me accountable. Blas Falconer, in the kindest way, showed me where I was circling the wound, peeking all around it rather than through it. J. Michael Martinez pushed me to think about form, marginalia, the reader’s way of participating, and the kind of double consciousness that was at work in my speaker’s voice. Ultimately, I wrote new work, and mostly rewrote, sometimes entirely, whole poems. I consolidated poems. I wrote an essay called “We Are Too Big for This House” and stuck it near the beginning to explain why the speaker is so resentful and still so tender. I used the myth of Narcissus to say things I couldn’t entirely own. At a point I decided I was done. And I accepted it.
What’s next: I’m writing new poems; working on lyric essays; trying to organize readings for poets in Los Angeles when I can alongside Joseph Rios; creating my courses without fear of being fired for the first time; learning to walk away, to eat healthier, to prioritize my heart as much as my body and mind; and growing food and parenting plants.
Residence: Leimert Park, Los Angeles. But I’m from Fresno, California.
Job: I teach creative writing at UC Riverside and moonlight as a bartender.
Time spent writing the book: The oldest poems in the book are eight years old but are wildly different. The only thing holding them is the memory or the first draft and the essential question I had and that I can still sense in their revised forms.
Time spent finding a home for it: About three or four years. In 2014 I was a finalist for the Andres Montoya Prize, and that’s when I started taking my poetry more seriously. Since then I reworked it until I was offered a contract by Noemi in 2017—the year the real writing began.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year:Why I Am Like Tequila (Willow Books) by Lupe Méndez, Careen (Noemi Press) by Grace Shuyi Liew, Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy (Alice James Books) by Andrés Cerpa. All fire. All so honest.
Erou born in the county of Kings raised in the lap of Queens sitting on the throne of his mama’s front stoop
Isn’t this how an Erou begins? —from “Erou 1”
How it began: I’ve always been obsessed with mythology, and for years I knew I was, at some point, going to start writing about my relationship with my dad. It was a topic I kind of wrote around for a while, but our relationship, and the complicated ways that my family worked and related to one another, obviously had a deep impact on me. He died in 2014, and in those next few months I started writing about him but knew I needed some help shaping the work and the project, because I had been feeling a bit untethered from my work for a while. I started my MFA program, at Warren Wilson College, in 2015, and I wrote this collection almost wholly in that two-year period.
Inspiration: Mythology certainly. In particular, Greek myths, the epics, but I’ll broaden it and also say any kind of mythology or fairy tale or fanciful story in which there are heroes and villains and gods and quests. I like that sense of scope, of the largeness of humanity, and, beyond that, of some version of god, some kind of agency of fate. And visual art. Any kind of work that makes me experience something on a visceral level, and, because I think I must be a masochist, I particularly enjoy art that makes me feel sorrow or loss in a way that’s new and interesting and complex.
Influences: Anne Carson, for all of the ways she uses language. I’m talking about her poems but also her works of translation—she has such a rich understanding of language and there’s a cool kind of labyrinthine way that her poems work themselves out, like you can see the workings of her mind behind them, and it’s brilliant. Patricia Smith and Rita Dove were both influential in how I thought about these poems. I was introduced to Patricia’s work when I was in undergrad and had just discovered slam poetry. I heard her read in a dive bar in Cambridge and was stunned by her use of metaphor and how exquisite her sense of voice was. I spent several years writing toward her. And Rita Dove’s poems, particularly the ones about her parents and the Demeter and Persephone poems, helped me think about how one can mythologize family and relationships. And Louise Glück is a poet I admire for her spareness and thoughtfulness and use of white space. When I feel too bogged down in my own wordiness—which happens quite a lot!—I think of poets like her, how her poems feel light and airy and yet still so rich and substantial, like they’re whittled down to the most essential bits.
Writer’s block remedy: I panic a bit, honestly. I’m very hard on myself and struggle a lot with anxiety, so creative blocks are tough. I usually just try to push through, but if that doesn’t work, I try switching to another form of writing—there’s always a new article or review to write. Or I might try an essay or fiction or a play or something. Or I’ll just switch to another poem. I pace a lot when I’m stuck with poems, say the words aloud over and over again and try to let the sounds lead me somewhere new, because sounds and rhythms are really important to my work. I go from one room to another or just change seats to kind of trick myself into getting into a new headspace. A walk is usually my last resort—but sometimes that does the trick.
Advice: I’d probably say to be bold. Experiment with your work, and don’t edit out all the fun and the strangeness and the wonder. It’s so easy to get burnt out looking at the same poems over and over again and scrutinizing this manuscript that you want to be perfect, but I think the hardest part of being a writer is figuring out when you can trust that critical voice in your head and when you need to tell it to shut up.
Finding time to write: Though I’m a very A-type person overall, and I do think I can be fairly prolific, I don’t consider myself the most disciplined writer in that sense. I pretty much write when I feel like it. Sometimes I’ll go through periods where I sit myself down and make myself write every day, and those periods are always productive but draining. Doing an MFA while working full-time and freelancing really kept me regimented, but, again, I felt burned out after a while. But now I write when I decide to, sometimes in the evening, sometimes in the morning, sometimes at a random point in my day when a thought just occurs to me on my way to work or whatever. Between my journalism, poetry, and other creative writing, I’m always working on something. It’s just a matter of juggling them—that’s the real struggle.
Putting the book together: I love structure and order—I’m such an A-type—so I knew that I was going to use my central poem, “Erou,” my version of a contemporary epic poem, as the spine of the collection. “Erou” goes through the life of the main figure, the father/husband, from birth to death, drawing on tropes and symbols and patterns from the hero’s journey in various myths—the stories of Odysseus, Aeneas, Jason, etc. The tricky thing was figuring out how to interweave the other threads and how to introduce other characters and make sure that the narrative made sense. My MFA thesis adviser, Gaby Calvocoressi, who’s amazing, suggested that I group sets of poems together to make mini-arcs, which I did, and then I strung them together in and around the sections of my central poem. I made index cards for all of the poems, with the title, first line, and last line, and spread them all out on a table and just swapped them around, with the full poems handy nearby for reference, for the repeat images and themes and characters mentioned in the poems proper. I actually enjoyed that part, finally having the whole story there but just trying to decide how to tell it. It was like doing one of those big puzzles, but I could change the pieces to fit together in different ways to reveal the picture I wanted.
What’s next: Ugh, a bit of everything! I tend to overdo it, so I’m always working, or at least trying to work, on several things at once. There’s my culture writing, and I’m working on poems for what will be my second book. And then I’ll make various attempts at writing in other forms and genres if I’m feeling particularly daring.
Job: Copy editor/web producer/contributor at the New Yorker and a freelance culture writer.
Time spent writing the book: About two to two and a half years.
Time spent finding a home for it: Three weeks. I know that isn’t typical, and I feel so fortunate that this is how it worked out, but I had a list of publishers I knew I wanted to submit to, and I sent the manuscript to Four Way first and heard back less than a month later. I was pretty floored—and thrilled.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press) by Aria Aber and Invasive species (Nightboat Books)by Marwa Helal.
Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes The Inheritance of Haunting University of Notre Dame Press (Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize)
these five hundred years in our bones striated conquistas dragging the letters of the harrowed tongue into the geography of our marrow, down —from “prayer for the children who will be born with today’s daggers in their tomorrow eyes”
How it began: This book emerged as a result of poetry as a mode of survival and healing at the intersections of my own autoimmune illness and excavations into historical memory, generational trauma, and collective responsibility. I was undertaking familial genealogical research, as well as human rights research in militarized regions, while contending with illness that left me bedbound. Across the work, to be haunted is to live in an ongoing encounter with what will not let us rest, with what we face in the ongoing repetitions of violence in the afterlives of conquest, capital, coloniality. It felt necessary to write through some of the threads that intertwine our bodies with the world, with the political, with historical grief—to respond to the ghost as both the obstinate echo, as well as a willful, living fury calling us into question.
Inspiration: Family stories and ephemera passed down, prophetic dreams and how we carry our dead, colonial archives, histories of science, cultural mythologies and childhood legends, art and music and photography, monster studies, human rights reports and newspaper headlines, testimonies from survivors of state violence and authoritarian regimes. Jacques Derrida’s and Avery Gordon’s writings on haunting, and the film Rhymes for Young Ghouls. Saidiya Hartman’s work on the afterlife of slavery and critical fabulation. The awareness that my sadnesses are made up of the sadnesses of centuries. Somatic therapy, the Nueva canción movement, queer love.
Influences: Early on, I learned a lot about protest poetry from Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish: I find in their works a profound ability to document violence without spectacle, to bring me into the feel of the what else could be inside devastation and loss and various unfreedoms. Aracelis Girmay’s work has taught me a lot about wonder and intimacy inside of grief; close listening and cultivating familiarities; how to find the teeming universe in grain-of-sand moments. Aimé Césaire’s poetry gifts me with rule-breaking and the marvelous cacophony of anticolonial subversion—how poetry can do violence to the order of things.
Writer’s block remedy: I take walks or go to museums or read work by others—activities that draw me outward to listen and be in relation to the world around me, whether that be the sensory delight of pausing for a trail of flowers, or taking in new ideas through an art exhibition…things that will open me up in unexpected ways or transform me with a question or experience. I see writing itself as a process of transformation—of self, of reader, of the world. The impasse is prelude, inviting me to become something other than what I’ve ever been before. Transfiguration, metamorphosis, and translation (trasladar, other-siding ourselves) are called for at the impasse, and are conditions for traversing the moment between when the pen gets caught in stillness and begins to flow again.
Advice: Writing an abstract that articulates what the collection is about can help to communicate your work to editors while allowing you to create a map for what else your manuscript is asking to become. Take time to study presses and what they do, and ask others about their experiences with their presses. Seek advising and mentorship when things feel foggy. Submit, submit, submit. And don’t give up: Learn to know in your bones how much your stories matter.
Finding time to write: Given my schedule this year, I am insisting for myself that no matter what else I am in the midst of, I take at least two days a month to write poetry. Often things will come to me in dreams or in that space between sleep and waking, as if something (in me? outside of me?) is also insisting that no matter what, the writing must happen. And I also don’t only think of writing as a literal activity—there are ways we write or pre-write even if there is no page in front of us: Our bodies are writing our days; our thinking and feeling is writing before and through and after the writing. If we tune into that, we are making much more time for writing than we might otherwise assume. And then it is a matter of carving out spacetime to listen to what is wanted in the page.
Putting the book together: The book is divided into two parts, each moving through different kinds of ancestral memory, historical wound, and individual and collective modes of survival and flight. “El Otro Lado/The Other Side” winds through pieces of my family history in Colombia and the United States, reflecting our existence as a constellatory effect of histories of colonizers and colonized, violent and violated life haunting our present. “Casi Pájaros/Almost Birds” draws more on my human-rights work in different places contending with militarized atrocities; it relates a collective global haunted present in the afterlife of racial capitalism and traces a political inheritance that calls for response to material and symbolic violence. The two sections are meant to speak to each other, to convey the intertwining of individual and collective historical trauma and memory, as well as the forms of mourning, care labor, memory-work, imaginal endeavor, and political life necessary for healing.
What’s next: I am working hard on finishing my dissertation on settler colonialism and futurity in Colombia. As for poetry, I have begun writing my second collection while also trying to develop a generative workshop on queer science, and another on speculative memory. The Inheritance of Haunting took me through so much bone-deep grief; I’ve been coming up for air in the last couple of years, holding close the necessity of joy-work, of nourishing the imaginative and strange, of intimacy and love. And while none of that means the sadness has dissipated, I am interested in writing that senses more of the possible, and that, despite and through so much death and ongoing struggle, reaches for what it is to bring one another to life.
Job: I am finishing up my PhD in political theory and want to teach interdisciplinary classes in feminist theory, decolonial studies, Black and Indigenous thought, aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and writing poetry.
Time spent writing the book: Three years. The book was mostly written between 2012 and 2015, while I was bedbound from illness.
Time spent finding a home for it: Raspa, a queer Latinx journal and press founded by César Ramos, had invited me to publish a chapbook version of the book in 2014, but a whole confluence of things for which no one was to blame kept that from happening. I continued to build the manuscript, which came together in its current form at the end of 2017, and submitted it to the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. It was my sister, Chelsea, who dropped it at the post office, as I was too sick to leave my apartment the week of the deadline, so I have her to thank for that solidarity in getting the manuscript out. In May 2018 I got a very generous and kind phone call from Ada Limón, who told me she’d chosen my work for the prize, and everything unfolded from there with University of Notre Dame Press. It was such a dream come true; I was pinching myself for months.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Marwa Helal’s Invasive species (Nightboat Books), Gala Mukomolova’s Without Protection (Coffee House Press), and Jake Skeets’s Eyes Bottle Dark With a Mouthful of Flowers (Milkweed Editions). Enjoyed is an understatement. Reading those three was really more a series of devastations, of openings in the face of wreckage.
Keith S. Wilson Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love Copper Canyon Press
You bankrupt the sun, underwater statue. Dark galaxy of faults, our bed
a garden of the littlest sighs of our waking. Our room, abstract.
Our body heat in space, the condensation as the light makes heaven of it. —from “Aubade to Collapsed Star”
How it began: At Callaloo, Gregory Pardlo challenged us to write the hardest poem we could write. So I started writing about love, which became heartbreak. And because of what’s happening on the news, that also became heartbreak for the world. I wanted to write through it. I wanted to live, and through writing I have.
Inspiration: I’ve always been indiscriminate about art: I would read either The Invisible Man by Wells or Invisible Man by Ellison. Comic books or video games or modernist art—nothing is more inspiring to me than someone who loves something so much that they can’t help but sing with it. It isn’t even wholly about talent. Passion is inspiring. It can be someone talking, if they do it with love.
Influences: Claudia Rankine changed everything from the kind of subject matter poetry could handle and the confidence with which you say what you feel directly to seeing any moment become extraordinary with the right context and structure. Gwendolyn Brooks is masterful with form and sound, and I’m influenced by her life outside of her poems—she was an extraordinary human being. Frank X Walker who believed in me and gave me the tools to believe in my poetry. Lucille Clifton, whose poems are perfect.
Writer’s block remedy: Time. They say time heals all wounds, which is a lie, but it is true that no wound healed without time. I hope that given enough time, I will come to an epiphany, or someone will happen to teach me just the right something, or I’ll learn to let go. It used to be harder. Now I have enough poems I’m waiting for that I’m much less afraid of famine.
Advice: Being published is a call someone else makes. It’s hard to know what to do to please others, and it’s maybe contrary to the place your poetry comes from. But someone’s first book changed you. Know that there are people waiting for yours.
Finding time to write: I make it an unquestioned part of my day, like brushing my teeth. There’s no day that becomes so busy you can’t find a moment to brush your teeth, because it’s everything else that finds a way to fit. Some days I only write a moment, but it adds up.
Putting the book together: Intuition and a series of broken systems. The same way I wrote them. There are a lot of love poems, but also a lot of poems about race and gender and justice and outer space and Greek mythology. I didn’t want someone to open the book and assume it was singularly any one of those things, so I color-coded the poems by theme and then arranged them by emotional intensity and tried to maintain a variance of color. I’ll never quite be able to explain it. I could barely fully feel it when it was happening.
What’s next: I’ve been experimenting with incorporating graphic design and visual elements into my work. Today we largely receive poetry through visual media: books and journals and websites. Like, it’s important to see the line breaks because often you wouldn’t hear them. Or how the white space between stanzas and between margins changes how a poem feels, changes the speed we read it. I want to push that. As far I can get it. I’m writing comics and lyric essays too. And video games. Interactive fiction.
Job: Adjunct professor at Spalding University and writing and design contract work in video games.
Time spent writing the book: Sometimes I’ll write the same poem dozens of times before I feel like one of those drafts is the poem, or I’ll take lines from finished poems and make a new one. It’s like the ship of Theseus: It’s impossible for me to figure out when anything really started. But the earliest publication in the book, “The Lost Quatrain of the Ballad of a Red Field,” was published in Tidal Basin Review in 2010.
Time spent finding a home for it: I’ve been trying since I was sixteen, but I got real serious about it ten years ago. I was so used to getting generic rejection letters! A week after I had decided to scrap the entire book again, I got a voice mail from Michael Wiegers. As I was calling him back I remember thinking, “They definitely already rejected me, didn’t they?”
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year:Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press)by Alison C. Rollins and Brother Bullet (University of Arizona Press) by Casandra López. Go out and get both of them!
This year’s focus on debut poets features ten of the most notable first books of poetry published in 2018. The selected books, which encompass a broad range of styles and subjects, take on complicated and weighty topics—Fatimah Asghar’s If They Come for Us traces the impact of the Partition of India, Tacey M. Atsitty’s Rain Scald draws on Navajo ceremony to elegize and pray for the land, Mario Chard’s Land of Fire reckons with a sense of exile, and Tiana Clark’s I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood and Justin Phillip Reed’s Indecency contend with, among other issues, the injustices Black people have endured in America. Each poet seems to address the question Jenny George, author of The Dream of Reason, asks: “How much of our aliveness can we bear?”
For all the gravity of the poets’ concerns, though, there is also a sense of play and invention throughout their work. Asghar’s book contains poems written as riffs on Mad Libs and bingo grids and crossword puzzles, José Olivarez’s Citizen Illegal crackles with jokes, and Analicia Sotelo’s Virgin flashes with self-deprecating wit. When we asked the poets to describe the stories behind their books and how they work through writing impasses, many pointed to this balance between the serious and the playful. While writing his book, Olivarez says he wanted to tell stories with an “eye toward mischief.” Jenny Xie, author of Eye Level, says that when she reaches an impasse, it feels “completely necessary to lower the stakes, to restore some sense of play, or to build just for the sake of chasing a question, a sound, or the mind’s movements, wherever it leads.” Other poets describe it as the willingness to experiment—Clark discusses toying with different forms and syntax when she’s stuck—and other poets present it as daring: Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Ghost Of, advises writers, “Dare to take on ambitious, large poetry projects that terrify you.”
Whether it’s through mischief or experimentation or rebellion, through anger or pain or the process of recovery, the ten poets featured here all seem to seek the freedom to write without expectation, to eradicate feelings of obligation, and to proceed with a sense of possibility. And this, after all, is what we hope for most from a debut book of poetry: that we might meet language spoken in ways we haven’t previously encountered, that we might, as Xie says, find “wilder forms.” And perhaps the work of these poets might inspire you to play with new forms and move, as George says, “without attachment in a purposeful direction toward what it is you don’t know.”
Tiana Clark I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood University of Pittsburgh Press (Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize)
I think about patience and its stupid song. I can’t wait— Yes, I’m always looking back.
at my dead. —from “After Orpheus”
How it began: Survival. The seed of this collection is about poetry as a means of persistence, Black persistence: the extreme hyperbole of Black persistence itself, a tenacious ontological resolve, built and bred from struggle and resistance.
This collection emerged from my MFA thesis. However, after I graduated from my master’s program, I didn’t look at the book for four months. I needed a fallow season. I needed some voices to disappear. I am a deep people pleaser, and I lost my sense of control during the first draft of the book. So many edits were made to make my professors happy and to survive workshop. When I was finally ready to come back to the collection, I had clarity and freedom. I had learned to trust my own imagination again. The book revealed itself to me, and thousands of revisions ensued.
Inspiration: I’ll never forget the advice I received from Ross Gay when he visited Vanderbilt University for a reading and craft talk. I knew he had been a judge for several first-book contests, so I asked him what he looked for in a debut collection. He paused for a moment and said, “Broken shit.” He elaborated that he was interested in a collection that wasn’t highly curated but rather took great risks; even if some of the poems failed, he loved seeing new poets make magnificent attempts. My body slackened—and I took the deepest exhalation of my life. I’m paraphrasing his thoughts, but this notion that I didn’t have to have everything figured out provided a great sense of relief. It gave me permission to be audacious and messy with my work, to make mistakes, to risk making and breaking received forms, modulate my line breaks for speed and surprise, to split a sestina in tercets, to add air with caesuras to a sonnet, to reinterpret “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as my own, to add another epigraph to a poem despite what anyone has to say about too many epigraphs and so on—I say to you: broken shit.
Influences: Terrance Hayes, Natasha Trethewey, Nina Simone, Sharon Olds, Li-Young Lee, e. e. cummings, Kendra DeColo, Geffrey Davis, Bill Brown, Kate Daniels, Danez Smith, Donika Kelly, Hanif Abdurraqib, Natalie Diaz, Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Jarman, Phillis Wheatley, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, June Jordan, Robert Lowell, Robert Duncan, T. S. Eliot, Muriel Rukeyser, Rita Dove, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ross Gay, Ada Limón, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Patricia Smith, Nikky Finney, Amiri Baraka, Kaveh Akbar, Dr. Houston A. Baker Jr., Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Fatimah Asghar, Louise Glück, Robert Hass, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, Arthur Mitchell, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, Rihanna, Nella Larsen, Audre Lorde, Federico García Lorca, and the list goes on and on.
Writer’s block remedy: I allow myself to take a break. I don’t force myself to write when the poem is breaking down or dissolving. I pivot. I read, often in another genre. I listen to music, sometimes the same song over and over (for this collection, it was mostly Nina Simone’s “22nd Century”). I clean or cook; accomplishing a simple task helps me feel like I’m still moving forward, especially when I feel like I’m failing. I take a bath. I watch TV with pleasure and without guilt.
For me, it’s crucial to let my writing ferment often in darkness and without my incessant need to revise and fiddle and fix. After a few hours or days, I’m excited to meet the poem again like a long-distance lover. All this anticipation has built up, and I’ve forgotten what has annoyed me about this person—I mean poem, ha!
When I’m stuck I try to let my poems reveal themselves to me by experimenting with different containers. I will throw my poem in couplets, then tercets, or a ghazal. Sometimes I’ll employ what Carl Phillips calls the “grammatical mood” by changing tenses or adding a command or a question. With each costume change I’m weeding and slicing my syntax, and the poem can start to tell me what it wants from me. If I’m patient and attentive enough, the momentum of the poem swells and the shape starts to click into place like pushing down on matching puzzle pieces, satisfying.
Advice: Trust your imagination. Be on your own timetable. Ask yourself what you want out of this first-book process. Demand and determine your desires. Some advice from David Baker: “There is no hurry.” Some advice from my therapist: “Everything you want is not upstream.” Have a vision for your work before and after publication. Control your own narrative. Redefine what success means to you. Read or reread first books from your favorite poets. Write your own introduction to your collection. Ask a friend for their marketing questionnaire and fill it out. Trace your literary ancestry. Remember the last poem in your book is the entire book (I learned this from Nancy Reddy). Be kind to yourself and others. Keep submitting. Oh, and read this stunning excerpt from Heather Christle’s poem “Shelter in Place,” from the Harvard Review:
When you write a book you must not
forget to build a door you can use
to get out or else you will die there.
It is very exciting to make a new mistake.
Finding time to write: Due to teaching full-time and traveling for readings, I try to make the erratic and irregular nature of my schedule work for and not against me. For example, I often come up with poem ideas or lines in my car, so I’ll grab my phone and start recording. The major trick, for me, is to not only chase the impulse when it strikes, but to follow up on those notes whenever I can. My writing happens in a lot of intense bursts, so if an idea comes to me in the middle of a movie or during a conversation, I must stop and write it down. I’ve been woken up by a poem rattling through my body a few times too. I allow a new poem to take over my day, my weekend, all through the night when possible.
I also try to give myself buckets of grace when I feel I’m not writing enough. I remind myself that paying intense attention to the world is also writing. Revising is writing. Resting is writing. Loving myself through my failures is a way into writing. Defining my own relationship to writing is writing.
Putting the book together: It took me about a year to organize the collection. My amazing thesis director, Kate Daniels, gave me the idea for the title, which comes from a line in my poem “The Rime of Nina Simone.” Once she voiced the idea, the bones of the book coalesced in my mind. Instantly, I knew wanted to organize the manuscript as a triptych from the title:
“I Can’t Talk”
“About the Trees”
“Without the Blood.”
This triad structure helped to define the themes and movements of each section and to guide the flow of the book. From there, I decided to shape each section into its own thematic collection like three mini chapbooks.
I wanted to bookend the collection with two poems that dealt with a racial epithet being hurled at the speaker. I began with “Nashville” as the prologue poem because I wanted to set the tone with this frantic chase between Apollo and Daphne, coupled with the speaker feverishly searching the mob repeating, “Who said it? Who said it? Who said it?” The hunt for an answer is at the seam of every poem in this collection. I then chose to end the triptych book with my triptych poem “How to Find the Center of a Circle,” a poem that circles back to the origin of the speaker, as a child, being called a “n—” for the first time by two white boys on roller skates. The wound at the end is raw, yet permanent. The trauma is in the past—indelible—but always fresh in the speaker’s mind, a wound that resists healing.
After the structure was set, I commenced with the floor stage. I printed out every poem and spread them out on the floor, shuffled papers in each section until an order and pattern revealed itself to me like a giant Magic Eye picture. I read the intros and outros of each poem out loud like musical arrangements, and then I addressed aesthetic concerns. I often think about the eyes and ears of the reader. After a long poem, I want their eyes to rest on shorter poem, but I want to maintain a satisfying balance between fulfilling and thwarting expectations. I think of bookmaking as curating a new exhibit in a museum, as deciding how much access I want my readers to have to each poem. Some poems want to be touched, others have a ten-foot velvet rope.
What’s next: I am working on my second book of poems, which is invested in transcending pain and exploring length. I am fascinated with reading and writing long poems at the moment. I am trying to take up as much space as I need on the page and not apologize for myself.
Similarly, I’ve also begun to write essays. The dilation from poetry to prose—letting my mind unspool without compression—has been a wonderful surprise. I have a new essay out from Oxford American, an immersive homage about Nina Simone. I was fortunate enough to visit her birthplace in Tryon, North Carolina, and also conduct an oral history with my family who live nearby in Lenoir, North Carolina, reckoning with the damage that made me.
Job: Assistant professor at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville.
Spent writing the book: Six years. The oldest poem in the collection, “The Ayes Have It,” after Trayvon Martin, is from 2012. In some ways, the book started after that tragic tipping point, which intertwines with my origin story in the South.
Time spent finding a home for it: About a year.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: If They Come for Us (One World) by Fatimah Asghar, Citizen Illegal (Haymarket Books) by José Olivarez, Refuse (University of Pittsburgh Press) by Julian Randall, Indecency (Coffee House Press) by Justin Phillip Reed, Virgin (Milkweed Editions) by Analicia Sotelo, A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco) by Emily Jungmin Yoon, Perennial (Coffee House Press) by Kelly Forsythe, and Ceremonial (Orison Books) by Carly Joy Miller.
Jenny George The Dream of Reason Copper Canyon Press
This is the afterlife, but I’m not dead. I’m just here in this field. —from “Death of a Child”
How it began: The inquiry in these poems is shaped by the question: How much of our aliveness can we bear? Another way of asking that is: How much of our own capacity for violence must we tolerate in order to be fully awake? At the same time, I was very interested in humans’ complex, emotionally charged dependence on animal life and in the relationship between animal consciousness, dream consciousness, and childhood. These threads met in my work.
Inspiration: Fields and rivers; pigs and cows; object relations theory; Texas Hill Country; silence and solitude; Carl Jung; farming manuals; mystic traditions; conversations with my sister; dreams.
Influences: I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, the town where Emily Dickinson lived her whole life. Dickinson’s language was some of the first poetry I heard; that musicality and compression is still very much in me. I love Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich for political work with beauty and formal rigor. And Brigit Pegeen Kelly for restraint and mythic intelligence. I also read a lot of psychoanalysis. I read it like it’s poetry, in other words: to be moved, arrested, brought into relationship with my own interior.
Writer’s block remedy: I remind myself that language isn’t my job. Writing a poem isn’t my job. My job is the human job of waiting and listening, and language is just what poets use—like wind chimes—to catch the sound of the larger, more essential thing. Wind chimes themselves are not the point. The point is the wind.
Advice: All the best advice I’ve been given is some form of the same advice: A writing life is a long process, and engagement with the work itself is the antidote to fear and to anxiety around your career. The practice is to move without attachment in a purposeful direction toward what it is you don’t know.
Finding time to write: I have a quiet and minimal life, and I work part-time, so I have space for writing.
Putting the book together: I shuffled my poems around fruitlessly for a long time before I realized there was content missing, which was why the book wouldn’t cohere. But I didn’t know what that content was. My mentor Louise Glück gave me some very good advice: She suggested that I discover the missing material by pushing myself to use new syntax, by writing different kinds of sentences than I typically do. Over time, the new sentences led to the new material that fleshed out the book. Then I sat down and tried various orders for the poems. At some point, the poems just clicked into place, down to the final poem—suddenly there was a deep, precise feeling, like a voice saying “Done.” That was an immensely satisfying moment.
What’s next: I am working on being more courageous. I’m starting to write poems again after a period of several years when I wasn’t writing at all because I was caring for my life partner who was sick with cancer. She died last year. Now I find myself asking: What is really crucial for me to write? What is my artistic responsibility—to my own lived experience, but also to the grave, raw need of the world in these times? Who must I be now as a writer?
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year:Eye Level (Graywolf Press) by Jenny Xie, The Lumberjack’s Dove (Ecco) by GennaRose Nethercott, Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing) by Diana Khoi Nguyen, Refuse (University of Pittsburgh Press) by Julian Randall, and Half-Hazard (Graywolf Press) by Kristen Tracy.
i killed a plant once because i gave it too much water. lord, i worry that love is violence. —from “Getting Ready to Say I Love You to My Dad, It Rains”
How it began: There are a couple of origins. The first was just play. I was unsatisfied with the narratives that were emerging in my poems. The speakers seemed too stiff, so I kept playing with those stories and narratives with an eye toward mischief. The second origin is that I was unimpressed by the narratives I saw about Chicanx people in culture. The narrative the news tells us is so tired. Either we’re model minorities or we’re experiencing violent trauma. I set about to write poems that felt realer to me and my particular Midwestern Chicano experience.
Inspiration: My brothers inspire me the most. All I do is laugh when I hang out with them. I stole all the good jokes in my book from them.
Influences: Gwendolyn Brooks, Sandra Cisneros, Aracelis Girmay, and Ada Limón are four poets whose work teaches me how to see new possibilities in poems. When I get stuck, I turn to Chicago visual artists Sentrock, Victoria Martinez, Yvette Mayorga, Kane One, and Runsy. I usually write in silence, but when I’m walking around the city gathering images, I’m listening to Kaina, VICTOR!, Sen Morimoto, Joseph Chilliams, and Saba. My friends are brilliant. Erika Stallings is such a great partner: She encourages me to write more courageously just by the way she lives.
Writer’s block remedy: I used to try to write every day, and I would get upset when I failed to keep this goal. And I often failed. I’ve learned that even though writing every day works for some people, it doesn’t work for me. So when I reach an impasse, I go for a walk. I eat ice cream. I call someone I love. I trust myself to come back to the work and try again.
Advice: My advice is to read as much as you can. Write a lot. Experiment in your poems. If you start to notice patterns in your poems, see if you can break them. Be generous to other writers. Remember that ciphers rise together.
Finding time to write: A lot of times I don’t find time to write. I have to reassess constantly to make time to read and write. I prefer to write early in the morning, but sometimes that’s not possible. I try to be flexible about finding time.
Putting the book together: My major breakthrough was splitting “Mexican Heaven,” which I wrote as one poem, into eight separate poems that happen throughout the book. I knew that I wanted the reader to keep arriving at those “Mexican Heaven” poems. Nate Marshall deserves credit too. He helped me rework the sections the night before I turned in the manuscript.
What’s next: Celebrating this book. The next project will come, but I just published this book, so I’m going to celebrate for a bit.
Job: I write. I perform. I teach. I work at Young Chicago Authors, a nonprofit that organizes writing workshops, teaching residencies, poetry festivals, and more for young people. While writing this book, I was also a freelance tutor and a freelance arts administrator.
Time spent writing the book: The oldest poem dates back to my sophomore year of college in 2007, but the vast majority of these poems were written in bursts between 2014 and 2018.
Time spent finding a home for it: I found a publisher before I finished the manuscript. I have a longstanding relationship with Haymarket Books and the editors of the BreakBeat series, so I knew they were interested whenever I was ready to show them something.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year:If They Come For Us (One World) by Fatimah Asghar, Black Queer Hoe (Haymarket Books) by Britteney Black Rose Kapri, Throwing the Crown (American Poetry Review) by Jacob Saenz, A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco) by Emily Jungmin Yoon, Refuse (University of Pittsburgh Press) by Julian Randall, and Virgin (Milkweed Editions) by Analicia Sotelo.
Desire makes beggars out of each and every one of us.
Cavity that cannot close. That cracks open more distances. —from “Phnom Penh Diptych: Wet Season”
How it began: Some of the very earliest poems in this book were seeded in graduate school and crafted after a few years’ hiatus from writing poetry. I’d built up a mass of mental knots and stubborn questions, some of which had been born out of my time living abroad in Hong Kong and Cambodia. Others came out of certain appetites developed through reading: the drive to try out wilder forms or tones, to carry out conversation with selves I wanted to invite onto the page, to think and feel my way through certain modes, and so on. I’d also always been interested in sight as a manner of consuming and constructing the world and curious about how we are shaped by visual encounters and entanglements. This was showing in the poems, but it wasn’t until later that I saw the connective thread.
Inspiration: Basho’s travel writings; Forrest Gander’s Core Samples From the World (New Directions, 2011); Anne Carson’s poetry and translations; Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015); books of translated Chinese poetry from Zephyr Press; sequences from the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Wim Wenders, and Chris Marker; Zen Buddhist literature and koans; critical theory; and the bottomless complexity of other people.
Influences: There are so many, more than I can name here. Some constants: Tracy K. Smith, James Richardson, Eduardo C. Corral, Li Shangyin, On Kawara, C. D. Wright, Linda Gregg, Brenda Shaughnessy, Anne Carson, Jeff Nunokawa, Ilya Kaminsky, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jean Valentine, Andrei Tarkovsky, Meghan O’Rourke, Rigoberto González, Deborah Landau, Sylvia Plath, Henri Cole, Sarah Manguso, Sahar Muradi, Vivian Gornick, and Yiyun Li. Also, the work of my friends, which I keep close.
Writer’s block remedy: Impasses often arrive when I’m heeding demands made by the ego. To work through it I find I need to extinguish self-set expectations for how I need to write and at what pace—concerns intertwined with how I anticipate the work will be seen. To keep going I have to strip myself of that layer of self-consciousness and self-watching. It feels completely necessary to lower the stakes, to restore some sense of play, or to build just for the sake of chasing a question, a sound, or the mind’s movements, wherever it leads.
Advice: This is advice that gets repeated quite often, but I think there’s firm wisdom in it: Take your time, block out the noise that aims to conflate the work of writing with being visible as a writer, and hold out for a publisher whom you have faith in. I don’t regret at all not publishing my first book sooner, and I’m frankly relieved I didn’t send out earlier iterations. I also think that getting too much feedback on poems and manuscript drafts can be inhibiting at times and may lead you to mistrust your instincts, so be thoughtful about whom you choose to show your work to and at what stage.
Finding time to write: It’s difficult to find the time, especially when other demands seem to press much closer to the skin of daily life. Most days it feels less like locating a stretch of time that’s available for the claiming, and more like forcibly insisting on the clearing of space. Since I don’t have the inclination to write in small bursts, I need to be intentional about setting aside at least a few hours or half a day. When I’m off from teaching, the aim is to treat writing like any other work, which it is. This means if I mark off time to write, I can’t go off to run small errands, agree to coffee with friends or acquaintances, sit in front of my phone answering text messages and e-mails, or distract myself by chipping away at random tasks. When I’m teaching, I have to be in the classroom and devote my full attention to being there. What I owe to the students, I owe to my writing practice too.
Putting the book together: I didn’t entertain any ideas about ordering until I knew I’d accumulated enough poems to at least reach the minimum number of pages for a full-length poetry manuscript. It seemed to me a far more daunting task to write poems than to order them, which isn’t to say the latter came easily.
When I had enough pages for a book, I printed all of the pages and separated them into piles. Some poems had clear relations, some seemed to be in dialogue, and some shared certain affinities or preoccupations. After this period of grouping, I thought about the ordering within these sections and tried to organize with an eye toward the movements across the poems. Thinking by way of film metaphors proved useful; I tried to visualize the “shots” that the poems presented and how they dissolved or cut to ones after. Some poems seemed to be invitations into some space or mood, so I would usher those to the front. Others felt like they faced in a different direction—outward toward some far-off horizon. Those I might save for the ends of sections. Slowly, I began to see the contours. Doubtless there was a good deal of accident and chance in all of it too.
What’s next: At the moment, I’m not yet writing toward another collection. I’ve been putting together new poems here and there, but I don’t know if they fit inside something yet or are threaded together in any coherent way.
In response to this same question, in these same pages, Rickey Laurentiis wrote that he was working to access “the kind of specific ignorance one writes from before the first book gets published: when you’re simply writing poem by poem because of some insistence that you have to.” This resonates quite strongly with me.
Job: I teach writing to undergraduates at New York University.
Time spent writing the book: Some of these poems had their start more than six years ago, but those were radically revised and rewritten. Much of the manuscript was shaped and written between 2014 and 2016, although I continued to write and tinker with the manuscript until August 2017, when I had to turn in my final edits.
Time spent finding a home for it: I had been sending out manuscript to a handful of contests for about a year or so. It was in the second round of sending out the manuscript that I received a call from Jen Benka from the Academy of American Poets. She let me know that Juan Felipe Herrera had selected it. I was very lucky in that respect.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Analicia Sotelo’s Virgin (Milkweed Editions), Emily Jungmin Yoon’s A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco), Jenny George’s The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon Press), Chase Berggrun’s R E D (Birds, LLC), Amy Meng’s Bridled (Pleiades Press), Carly Joy Miller’s Ceremonial (Orison Books), Ben Purkert’s For the Love of Endings (Four Way Books), Celina Su’s Landia (Belladonna*), Soham Patel’s to afar from afar (Civil Coping Mechanisms), Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s Isako Isako (Alice James Books), Justin Phillip Reed’s Indecency (Coffee House Press), Faisal Mohyuddin’s The Displaced Children of Displaced Children (Eyewear Publishing), Kelly Forsythe’s Perennial (Coffee House Press), Nabila Lovelace’s Sons of Achilles (YesYes Books), Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing), and Duy Doan’s We Play a Game (Yale University Press).
their whole heavy tongue slack in my own throat, opiate-slow. —from “Anesthesia Is a Country You Leave for America”
How it began: It didn’t exist yet. I don’t mean that to be snide or dismissive. I wrote the poems in Indecency because I had not found them elsewhere. I needed text to represent and then transform the way that my body and my many iterations of self move through my life and its various environments.
Inspiration: It’s difficult to whittle this down, as I welcome inspiration from almost everything I encounter. I’ve been prompted to write by social-media posts, news articles, sculptures, paintings, songs, and films (with poems in direct conversation with Alien, Queen of the Damned, The Hitcher, The Witch, and a few porno clips). Most reliably my inspiration has come through reading literature, including essays, novels, and plays, in addition to poetry collections. I’ve found venturing out of my living space and spending time among natural landscapes to be an invaluable, productive practice. My local parks and rural landscapes have probably yielded most of the poems in my current manuscript-in-progress.
Influences: This may be quite a catalogue of shoutouts. My teachers, of course: Carl Phillips, Mary Jo Bang, Wayne Thomas, Heather Elouej, Desirae Matherly, and Clay Matthews, to name a few. The writers—friends and peers among them—Dawn Lundy Martin, Douglas Kearney, CM Burroughs, Claudia Rankine, Timothy Donnelly, Frank Bidart, francine j. harris, Khadijah Queen, Blair Johnson, Harryette Mullen, James Baldwin, Jericho Brown, Essex Hemphill, Phillip B. Williams, Rickey Laurentiis, Jonah Mixon-Webster, and Jayson P. Smith. In my most recent work, I see the influences of Jorie Graham, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Jay Wright, Wallace Stevens, Federico García Lorca, and others. Quiet as it’s kept, I’ve been heavily influenced by the band Deftones and Chino Moreno’s lyrics, as well as music by Marilyn Manson, From First to Last, and—perhaps less quietly—the moods of Radiohead and Massive Attack.
Writer’s block remedy: I revise, and I engage the work of other artists in various genres and media. From the friction between these two acts emerges the magnetism of new work, typically. What keeps me going is a conflict of awe and disappointment. Either I’m writing a poem that I’m sorry to have never read or written before, and/or I’m writing toward a feeling of dumbstruckness—sometimes to construct a similar feeling (the “inspiration”), and sometimes to create a sensation that doesn’t elsewhere exist in my life. I’m not terribly invested, though, in the idea of impasse. I can pass, and I prefer to—to write beyond where I expected to land in the lyric.
Advice: Be patient and respect your instincts. Write the book you never expected to have in you. Contest judges and publishers, if they are right for you, can wait for that. Take time away from your manuscript and return with renewed energy. Recruit a few invested readers of your work—not many—and hear their feedback. Remember that you’re creating an artwork with which you will, fortunately, have to live. Aspire to a consistent book of poems where each poem puts in work and not for a handful of collections from which only a few poems apiece, if that, emerge. I will attempt to do the same.
Finding time to write: I don’t write consistently, and I certainly don’t write on a set schedule. I was taught that I should write every day, and while I think I do this in many forms, my practice doesn’t include carving out a piece of each day to sit down and attempt a poem. I try to carry my notebook with me everywhere I go, even when I know I won’t open it. My poems typically arrive in seasons. For a few months, I will write a poem every other day; it’s an ecstatic experience, and I live for it. But in the time between those seasons, I acknowledge that each moment has the potential to lodge a parcel of poetry in my mind and body—be it an image, an utterance, a somatic response, a gesture, or a sound.
Essays, though, are a different matter. When I write them, I write feverishly. Essaying finds me in a tenuous state because I’m liable to ignore such necessities as meals and regular sleep, to be late for work or distracted while there, and to grasp for my vices. While I welcome a poem to unravel from the edge of a dream and wake me up, I find a good deal of stress in how unavailable I become to myself when researching for and writing an essay. I sort of resent the possessive gravity of essaying. There’s a want for grace in it.
Putting the book together: I let a more imaginative, intelligent, and prolific writer, Khadijah Queen, arrange it according to her experience of the poems. The order became a matter of resonance, a sort of ambulance effect of subjects and images. Also, people have asked me why Indecency has no section breaks: I wrote the book during a clearly intentional barrage of state-sanctioned murders of Black people and in a state of personal exhaustion—physical, emotional, spiritual. I wished to simulate that in the object itself, as much as it was possible. There is little pause. The onslaught is reciprocal.
What’s next: My sophomore collection of poems, at least three essays, my intuition, surviving winter, and the understanding that I’m worthy of a lot and am entitled to nothing.
Job: An assortment of things that don’t include “gain exposure” and do include making art. I work as a server. I lead community poetry workshops when the time is right. I visit universities to deliver readings and lectures. I publish essays. I sometimes win monetary awards for my writing. All of these contribute in some way to subsidizing my living costs. In my mind, I live to write and to read and discuss writing, so what I do for a living is done to protect and enhance that particular livelihood. It’s largely a lesson in patience and intuition.
Time spent writing the book: In my body? My whole life. On paper? Let’s say three years. While I produced the majority of the poems as part of, or at least during, the creation of my MFA thesis, I like to think that they’ve been coming along for many years, reinterpreting here and there previous lived experiences and struggling for language to articulate feelings I’ve known for much longer than I’ve written poems.
Time spent finding a home for it: According to my personal publication datasheet, I started sending out drafts of the manuscript that would become Indecency in Fall 2014, which would leave a little over a year until I was in conversation with Coffee House Press. In that brief time, it was rejected on at least seven occasions—which, I understand, is relatively slight. Honestly, I felt during that time a distinct paranoia that I would be shot by police or similarly dispatched or driven to an otherwise ill fate before the book would meet the world. I am not exaggerating. This anxiety spurred me to spend much of my time trying to ensure its publication, and it is not an energy that I miss. I wish the circumstances had been different, but of course I would have written a different book.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: I didn’t read many debuts in 2018 while I allowed myself some space to gain productive distance from the inundating business of contemporary poetry. I wanted to better understand my voice and art as part of a continually unfolding lineage, ancestral and otherwise. Perhaps this is somewhat irresponsible, given how fortunate I am that Indecency has enjoyed such graceful and careful readership in the year of its release, but I also have hope that someone will read it years from now and welcome it then. Likewise, there are debuts stronger than my own that I look forward to experiencing in the future; good reading is timeless. That said, Sons of Achilles (YesYes Books) by Nabila Lovelace is an astounding arrival and deserves your attention. Lovelace is incomparably generous and perceptive, and I’m lucky to live and write in her lifetime.
Analicia Sotelo Virgin Milkweed Editions (Jake Adam York Prize)
My veil is fried tongue & chicken wire, hanging off to one side.
I am a Mexican American fascinator. —from “Do You Speak Virgin?”
How it began: All I thought about when writing this book was whether the poems were honest in their investigations. While there are many poets I love, I don’t always think of their collections as a whole. I think instead of beautiful, sonic, individual poems and strong lines. I like it when a poem visits me unexpectedly while I’m doing the dishes or sitting around trying to figure out a feeling. There’s an emotional connection that a good, powerful poem can make across timelines and spaces. I often think there is so much more to that poem than the poet who originally wrote it. I think a poem is sometimes a conversation that was so powerful it was meant to continue.
With this collection I tried to honor the power that language carries by writing first, then seeing what might go together. I like to explore the feelings between feelings, the relationships that aren’t exactly linear. That led me to an anachronistic project through which I wrote from the perspective of a young woman trying to understand love, loneliness, and desire. At times Greek myth, Victorian life, and the Southwestern landscape all arrived in the same poem. I was questioning what has changed and not changed about the power dynamics of relationships. The book shaped itself in the spirit of that transformation.
Inspiration: How a delicious, quiet dinner can make a conversation with a friend go on for hours until, by the end of it, life seems a little nicer. The titles of most surrealist works. Bodies of water. Art nouveau. Thrift shops. Victorian curiosities. Old love songs. New love songs.
Influences: Elizabeth Bishop, Larry Levis, Louise Glück, Sharon Olds, Jack Gilbert, Franz Wright, Dorothea Lasky, Sylvia Plath, Anne Carson, Lorrie Moore, Andre Dubus, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville. In music: Janelle Monae, Lianne La Havas, Corinne Bailey Rae. Stephen Sondheim, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Bill Evans, or any of the old-timey love songs that are irresistible even now. All the ones obsessed with longing. In visual art, everyone. Clyfford Still, Marc Chagall, René Magritte, my mom.
Writer’s block remedy: I’ve decided I don’t always have to be writing. I let myself live and try to let go of the pressure to always physically write. In some ways it feels like I’m collecting feeling. That’s not to say I don’t sit down and try regularly to get something on the page, but it might not look like a poem. It might look like writing in a journal about what I’ve seen and heard that day. That process helps me feel more willing to listen to what’s possible rather than predetermine what I think I should be on the page.
Advice: Try to write authentically and read as much as possible; make notes on all of your favorite first books, and love poems more than publishing. Love poems.
Finding time to write: I try to leave every Saturday morning and early afternoon open to reading and thinking. On a good week, I wake up early and make coffee. Then I wait awhile, and I wake up to the world and try.
Putting the book together: At first, I tried to organize the poems as if they were emotional waves. I ate a lot of dark chocolate and drank copious amounts of black tea. I showed the poems to a couple of people, but they were sitting a little flatly next to each other, all the poems about heartbreak stacking on top of one another with very little breathing room. I read books and more books, and I thought about how I admire when a poet’s book has an overall form that gives their poems some space for me to absorb them. When I reordered Virgin, I was doing something labyrinthine. Each section is a path, with the poems in “Pastoral” leading into the poems in “Parable,” and then “Myth,” and so on. I wanted the reader to feel a little lost, but always aware of where they were, just as Ariadne leads Theseus through the maze of himself, only to find herself needing to articulate what it means to love someone that way.
What’s next: I’ve been playing with nonfiction and fiction, as well as some new poems. I feel very superstitious about it all. My dad taught me one of my favorite clichés: “Don’t talk about the cake before it’s done.” It is one of the only clichés I have allowed myself to love, perhaps because I really do love most kinds of cake. But to give a hint and break the adage: I’m interested in color right now. Color and light.
Job: I work in communications, marketing, and development at a nonprofit.
Time spent writing the book: Seven years. Some poems took seven years of relentless tinkering, some took a few months, and some closer to a week. There were many things in between the drafts, like work and school and relationships. I have so many other drafts I never finished or published that are early versions of these, all in pieces. They’re a mess, but an important mess, because they show me how hard I was on myself, trying to get the poems just right, while not actually being honest with myself or even really enjoying the writing. I needed to trust myself to intuit my way through the process. After I started tuning in that way, it came together pretty quickly.
Time spent finding a home for it: I think I sent out the manuscript for a couple of years, while continually revising before it was chosen by Ross Gay for the Jake Adam York Prize run by Copper Nickel and Milkweed Editions. I had convinced myself it could take up to five years to get the book placed, and that I would write and rewrite it until I found a home for it.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: I enjoyed Eye Level (Graywolf Press) by Jenny Xie.
n empty hou se, her siste rs dead bel ow her; no wind, no r ain; we st ayed —from “Triptych”
How it began: The suicide of my brother, which led me to look closer at my immediate familial history and then my parents’ histories in Vietnam and after the Vietnam War.
Inspiration: Max Richter, HBO’s The Leftovers, the Mediterranean Sea.
Influences: Abbas Kiarostami and his film Close-Up, Lucie Brock-Broido, Cal Bedient, Danh Vo, Harold Pinter, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Eliot Weinberger, Susan Howe, Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson.
Writer’s block remedy: I turn to other media, schools of thought. I read science texts, immerse myself in visual art and film, listen to avant-garde composers.
Advice: Be uncomfortable. Get lost intentionally. Dare to take on ambitious, large poetry projects that terrify you.
Putting the book together: By starting at the junction of my brother’s death and my ongoing life—and then weaving in familial histories, which include my parents’ exodus from Vietnam after the fall of Saigon. I knew I wanted three sections in the book because my parents had three children: me, my sister, and my brother. Even though my brother is no longer with us, I wanted to keep the trinity intact.
What’s next: My PhD dissertation, a multi-modal collection that includes poetry, drama, and multimedia work (video-poems, site installations), all of which will explore poetry as a stylistic mode that manifests in multiple media and activates narratives in both Vietnamese and English as a visionary vehicle of resilience for refugees and children of refugees.
Job: Assistant professor of teaching at the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver.
Time spent writing the book: Thirty days—fifteen in August and fifteen in December of 2016.
Time spent writing the book: Astonishingly fast—four months.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Jenny Xie’s Eye Level (Graywolf Press) and Duy Doan’s We Play a Game (Yale University Press).
Mario Chard Land of Fire Tupelo Press (Dorset Prize)
What is your name? they said. I am nameless I said. Yes they said. —from “Renditions”
How it began: I wanted to write poems about migration, war, parenthood, and childhood. But without authority beyond attention or observation, I wrote through personal implication. Migration is still the book’s heart. My mother waited twenty years to return to Argentina after marrying my father in the States—it took my parents twenty years to afford a trip back for all of us, back across the borders. And the truth is we couldn’t really afford that trip, but my parents took us, their four children, and the trip changed our lives. Today I know and work with many people who make regular trips home to their countries of origin or heritage; people who could, this afternoon, buy the first flight out to anywhere. And that, for me, proves the myth of borders: not of sovereignty or nationality, but the myth of their permanence, their precedence. How we often confuse what was given, found, or taken with what is owed, native, or heritage. The book was a reflection of my desire to understand why.
Inspiration: Memory first. Great anger. The empty space a sense of recognition might fill and hasn’t. But also what has filled it: my wife, Wendy, and our sons. My family. And the greatest poem of exile and migration, parenthood and childhood: Milton’s Paradise Lost. And Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia. The trees of Silicon Valley. Straight-line winds in Indiana. The desert outside Blanding, Utah.
Influences: Frost is my first wonder, followed quickly by Neruda. For these poems in particular, Milton and Herbert and Borges. All my teachers, and perhaps especially Marianne Boruch and Mary Leader. Naomi Shihab Nye. My friend Travis Crane and many others dead and many living. The list is much longer.
Writer’s block remedy: The impasse is never with the writing itself; it is with the reasons to keep going. I read Jericho Brown on Twitter recently: “Real gratitude looks like responsibility.” Yes, absolutely. I have reasons to be grateful—many. I was born on one side of a border that people this moment are marching toward from the other side. And what have I done? What am I doing? I have no right to speak for them, but I can listen. I can remember. I can be grateful. And grateful, I am responsible: to my family, to my people. I am responsible to the borders of my body, to my country, and what they will become. Poetry is an expression of gratitude. It is an action. There is too much to learn and do. I have a suspicion that many of our impasses are rooted in ingratitude.
Advice: There may be only one Pacific, but there are many peaks in Keats’s Darien. I am grateful for those who cleared the path for me. I am grateful for the peaks I climbed alone. I am grateful for advice generally and suspicious of its worth. The conquistadors wept when they saw the ocean. Standing on the same ground, those they enslaved knew the sight from birth.
Finding time to write: With difficulty. Even with reluctance on some days. I remember the writers I love describing their sense of discipline to me: waking early to write, clocking in, and clocking out. I’ve tried both. I even took my briefcase hiking once, and everyone who passed me climbing down or climbing up laughed at the sight. But every day I carry that briefcase: I try. And sometimes I get an afternoon or a morning, and those are good days. And most days I live until it gets too heavy to carry and then I write.
Putting the book together: With obsession and revision. “Caballero,” a documentary poem in six sections, was the central weight. The rest of the poems would orbit its gravity. Sometime before publication, Jim Schley, the managing editor of Tupelo Press, reminded me that people rarely pick up a book of poetry and start from the first page (especially people new to that book or poet). So I knew that if someone were to thumb through it—looking for a short poem, an aesthetic idea of one, a line—the book needed to survive. The poems needed to persuade on their own. I still believe, however, that the best way to read Land of Fire would be from the first page to the last. It begins in the desert and ends in mountain snow.
What’s next: Every night for ten years when I was growing up, my family cleaned a grocery store called Jubilee. I am writing what my family saw there and what we learned. What I haven’t learned yet.
Time spent writing the book: An arc of ten years. But I wrote and finished the majority of the book from 2011 to 2013.
Time spent finding a home for it: Four years or four months. Land of Fire was a manuscript in search of a home for four years, but the moment I saw its order, the moment after something in me confirmed it, I saw it as a book. I knew what it was. It was accepted four months later.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year:Cenzontle (BOA Editions) by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon Press) by Jenny George come immediately to mind. Many others I know in pieces and am eager to see their finished forms. We live in a lucky age.
Tacey M. Atsitty Rain Scald University of New Mexico Press
O Holy People, show me how I am human, how I am soon to sliver. —from “Evensong”
How it began: Healing, mostly. In Rain Scald you can find several histories that call for ceremony. But this was also my master’s thesis, so most of the writing was done in Ithaca, New York, where I lived for two years. Experiences I had in the gorges with the Cornell University community and neighboring tribes of Cayuga and Onondaga and Oneida influenced the genesis of this book. And I took a deeper look into the stories that land holds, both in New York and back home in the canyons of Arizona.
Inspiration: Jesus Christ, the land, death, love, almost-loves, memory of childhood experiences, and my family and ancestors both near and far.
Influences: My cohort at Cornell and my professors Alice Fulton and Kenneth McClane had the most influence on this work. I gleaned so much from everyone in my workshops—reading, hearing, and internalizing their work on a weekly basis for years was a blessing. Additionally I often listen to music while writing. Once I find the song that holds the emotion of the poem, I’ll play it on repeat for hours, sometimes days, until the piece I’m working on is ready. One song that helped me immensely was Louie Gonnie’s “Hooghan,” a Navajo early morning blessing song, and also Samantha Crain’s album Songs in the Night.
Writer’s block remedy: Prayer, desire, and knowing that I am a writer. It’s my makeup, a big part of who I am. Also, great friends who are poets, such as Benjamin Garcia, who are invested in my work and push me.
Advice: I know for some poets, myself included, it’s not our strong suit to be social, but networking and joining a community of writers can be beneficial, not only for publishing one’s work, but for building and strengthening ties and relationships.
Finding time to write: As of late it’s been difficult to keep to a strict regime of writing, but when the lines come, they flow—I’ll run for pen and paper to get those lines down. Sometimes they’re just lines, and sometimes they fill out into an entire poem. Winter will free up some time for me, so I’m excited to see what the lovely gray skies will hold.
Putting the book together: Ceremony played a full role in the organization of Rain Scald.
What’s next: A second manuscript of poetry is currently underway. I’m just over halfway through, but got a ways to go still.
Job: Native American program coordinator at a state historical park.
Time spent writing the book: The two years of graduate school.
Time spent finding a home for it: Not a month out of graduate school I was contacted by Laura Tohe, an acquiring editor for the University of New Mexico Press. She knew I had recently graduated with my MFA and asked if I had a manuscript to submit for review. There were years of revision, however, between that time and when the manuscript was accepted for publication.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Crisosto Apache’s Genesis (Lost Alphabet), Analicia Soleto’s Virgin (Milkweed Editions), Katherine DiBella Seluja’s Gather the Night (University of New Mexico Press) Fernando Perez’s Song of Dismantling (University of New Mexico Press), and Kristen Tracy’s Half-Hazard (Graywolf Press).
…my people my people the long years we’ve survived the long years yet to come… —from “If They Come for Us”
How it began: I was writing a lot of poems that were about my childhood, and my friend Kevin Coval pulled me aside one day and said, “You have a book you’re writing, and you should start compiling everything.” Sometimes someone else can see your potential when you can’t. So I compiled all my poems and looked at themes. It became really apparent to me that I was writing about my childhood, but I was also writing about historical legacy. I was writing about the things that we inherit historically, but also the way that both familial and historical violence sever those inheritances.
Inspiration: Years ago one of my uncles told me about how our family had to leave Kashmir during Partition. This sparked my obsession with Partition. For a long time I just couldn’t stop reading about it. I can’t explain what it feels like to be a marginalized person and not have your history taught in classrooms. And to also consider that 1947 was not that long ago and that history is one long conversation—and historical traumas continue to impact us today. Additionally, living in Chicago and crafting most of the book there was tremendously influential. Chicago’s artistic scene is incredibly vibrant and something that I’m always inspired by. It’s in the tradition of Chicago writers to embody a poetics of witness, which I strive to do.
Influences: So many. Krista Franklin, Douglas Kearney, Tarfia Faizullah, Natalie Diaz, Ross Gay, Patricia Smith, Arundhati Roy, Sandra Cisneros, Danez Smith, Franny Choi, Nate Marshall, Jamila Woods, Aaron Samuels, Safia Elhillo, Angel Nafis, Hanif Abdurraqib, Kaveh Akbar, Hieu Minh Nguyen, José Olivarez. I can go on forever.
Writer’s block remedy: I take a break. I think that if you bang your head against the wall trying to create, you’re going to resent the process of creation. Usually when you reach an impasse it’s a signal to move on to another thing. Maybe you haven’t slept in a while. Maybe you need some time to ponder, to just stare at the wall. Maybe you need to live, truly be alive for a little and not near a computer. Maybe you need to read, see, watch—to refill your well.
Advice: I’d say you’re on no one else’s timeline. I know how anxiety-ridden it can feel when you don’t have a book out, and you feel the pressure to produce and put it out. But one of the best pieces of advice I ever got was to wait and really craft a book that I would be proud to call my first book. What does that mean to you, to have a body of work that you would feel really proud to stand by? You can take your time.
Finding time to write: Over the last year and a half I’ve been lucky enough that writing has become my full-time career. So for me, writing is my job. I was a teaching artist before that; I worked two jobs and toured. So I would just find time whenever I could and actively make time: I often wrote alongside my students in workshops. I woke up early. I stayed up late.
Putting the book together: It went through a lot of different orders, sections, and thematic renderings. My friends helped a lot, as did my editor, Nicole Counts. It was a really long, frustrating process of constantly looking at all the poems on the floor of my room and shifting stuff around. Ultimately, I wanted to make sure that the Partition poems were woven throughout the book and not grouped off in one section alone, because I wanted to show the way that Partition echoes in my life.
What’s next: A few different writing projects that aren’t poetry. I’m taking my time with writing poems again. I need to replenish my well a bit.
Residence: I am back and forth between Los Angeles and Chicago a lot.
Job: Artist.
Time spent writing the book: This is an impossible question, because every poem I’ve ever written was a craft lesson to another poem, which led to the book. So really, if we look at it this way, we’re looking at a really long-ass time. But the two oldest poems in the book are from my chapbook, After, which was released in 2015. But I didn’t start working on If They Come for Us in earnest until after the chapbook was out, so I’d say three years.
Time spent finding a home for it: A few months. I didn’t start sending the book out until Fall/ Winter 2016. It was picked up by One World/Random House in Spring 2017.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year:Indecency (Coffee House Press) by Justin Phillip Reed, Stereo(TYPE) (Ahsahta Press) by Jonah Mixon-Weber, and Citizen Illegal (Haymarket Books) by José Olivarez.
The ten poetry collections featured in our thirteenth annual roundup of debut poets offer a glimpse of the wide range of contemporary poetry. Each of the books, published in 2017, shows just how much poetry can do. Eve L. Ewing’s Electric Arches tells stories that reckon with history and imagine a better future, while Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS and sam sax’s Madness reclaim language that has been distorted by governments and institutions of power. Emily Skillings’s Fort Not reveals the tendencies of our culture and society through the trappings of modern life, as does Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Jenny Johnson’s In Full Velvet both give voice to the interior—Akbar to the ongoing work of faith, Johnson to the vagaries of the heart and desire. Joseph Rios’s Shadowboxing and Airea D. Matthews’s Simulacra create personas and alter egos that argue and spar with one another, while William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind clears a path for understanding others. And all ten collections do what poetry does best: inhabit the many possibilities of language and form as well as attend to, as Seamus Heaney put it, “the lift and frolic of the words in themselves.”
We asked the poets to share the stories and influences behind their books, and they responded with a list of inspirations as varied as their collections, from the food of April Bloomfield and music of Flying Lotus to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and words of Adrienne Rich. When we asked the poets to offer advice to writers who are stuck or looking to publish their first book, however, their answers coalesced around some common suggestions: Take a break when you’re struggling with a piece. Permit yourself to write one or two or thirty or a hundred lousy poems. Most of all, reach out to the people who can keep you afloat. Listen to your family’s stories, as Chen and sax do, or talk with your kids, as Matthews advises. Or, as Johnson and Rios suggest, call up your friends, encourage one another, and then hold one another accountable for getting the work done.
Writing poetry can often feel lonely or frustrating or even futile—especially during a year of political turmoil and soul-searching—and these poets remind us to turn to whatever will protect our capacity for wonder and allow each of us to be our “whole self on the page,” as Rios says. They remind us to be attentive to the world, and they urge us to be ready for whatever scrap of language or feeling might help us pass from silence into speaking and jolt a poem into being.
How it began: When I got sober, poetry became my life raft. Every poem in Calling a Wolf a Wolf was written from a few months to a few years after I got sober. I had no idea what to do with myself, what to do with my physical body or my time. I had no relationship to any kind of living that wasn’t predicated on the pursuit of narcotic experience. In a very real way, sobriety sublimated one set of addictions (narcotic) into another (poetic). The obsessiveness, the compulsivity, is exactly the same. All I ever want to do today is write poems, read poems, talk about poems. But this new obsession is much more fun (and much easier on my physiological/psychological/spiritual self ).
Inspiration: The searching earnestness of the people I’ve met in recovery. They’ve taught me how to talk about myself without mythologizing, without casting myself as some misunderstood hero maligned by the world. I think (hope!) that resistance to flattening my narrative into some easy self-serving hero’s journey is one of the central features of Calling a Wolf a Wolf.
Influences: Franz Wright, Abbas Kiarostami, Mary Ruefle, Kazim Ali, Daniel Johnston, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Carl Phillips, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Nicholson Baker, Dan Barden, Kathy Acker, all writers for The Simpsons from 1990–1999, Fanny Howe, Eduardo C. Corral, Jean Valentine, francine j. harris, the verve of Marc Bolan, the voice of Kate Bush, the sneer of Justin Pearson/The Locust, the frequency of Eric Bemberger’s guitar, Sohrab Sepehri, Russell Edson, Lydia Lunch, Zbigniew Herbert, Joanna Newsom, Heather Christle, Patricia Smith, Anne Carson, Robert Olen Butler, Bruce Nauman’s neon art, Vic Ketchman, my mother.
Writer’s block remedy: I don’t really believe in writer’s block. If I sit down to write in earnest and give myself enough time, eventually I’ll walk away with something. Even if it turns out to be nothing (which is usually the case), I’m still training and preparing my instincts for the next poem. Even bad poems that go nowhere provide compost for the good ones to come. That said, I do believe in refractory periods, periods spent rebuilding one’s relationship with silence. Ellen Bryant Voigt talks about how in order to strike, a cobra also needs to recoil. I have recoil periods in which I throw myself into my reading, a kind of active listening. So much of Calling a Wolf a Wolf works by hypersaturation, by these breathless rushes of language. It’s been immensely useful for me to go back into silence, to reclaim a bit of psychic quiet to take back into the poems.
Advice: Be kind to yourself and to other poets. There are so many people in the world who would conspire against our joy, who would mistake our reverent wonder for idleness. Against everything, we have to protect our permeability to wonder. That’s the nucleus around which all interesting art orbits.
Finding time to write: I’m one of those people who wakes up obnoxiously early to get in my hours before the world really starts up. I like to get into my poem-writing while my brain is still gummy with dream logic, before the mundane argle-bargle of the everyday comes in.
What’s next: Rebuilding a relationship with silence. Being the best professor and mentor I can be. Orienting myself toward gratitude despite a political moment working very hard to prevent that. Being in love and planning a wedding. Being an uncle. Touring with the book. Staying alive one day at a time.
Hometown: Not sure exactly—I was born in Tehran, Iran, then moved to Pennsylvania, to New Jersey, to Wisconsin, to Indiana, to Florida, and now back to Indiana.
Residence: Lafayette, Indiana.
Job: I teach in the MFA program at Purdue University.
Time spent writing the book: The honest answer is twenty-eight years, maybe even longer than that, but to answer the question I think you’re actually asking, the oldest recognizable poem in the book is about five years old. That’s fairly fast, actually. There are a number phrases and images I cannibalized from poems much, much older than that, though.
Time spent finding a home for it: Not very long. Carey Salerno, my editor at Alice James, saw a poem of mine published by the Poetry Society of America and wrote to me asking if I had a manuscript. I actually wasn’t really done with Calling a Wolf a Wolf yet, but I sent her what I had with the caveat that I still needed time to continue building and rearranging and reimagining. She liked what she saw and took the leap. I couldn’t imagine working with a smarter, more generous, more compassionate editor. So much of what is good about the book is the result of her patient guidance and mentorship.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast (Ecco) is a collection I think people will still be reading in fifty years. Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press). William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions). Airea D. Matthews’s Simulacra (Yale University Press). Cortney Lamar Charleston’s Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books). Safia Elhillo’s The January Children (University of Nebraska Press). Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS (Graywolf Press). Eve L. Ewing’s Electric Arches (Haymarket Books).
Airea D. Matthews Simulacra Yale University Press (Yale Series of Younger Poets)
but I knew it was a winged thing, a puncture, a black and wicked door.
—from “Rebel Prelude”
How it began: My life and the lives of the people who have affected me were the impetus for the book. I’d had undiagnosed mental illness for a very long time, and I wanted to get to the root of it. It started with a question, actually. I asked myself if I had inherited hunger and instability. As I wrote the book, the universe handed me small parts of a very complicated answer.
Inspiration: Books, people, and technology—Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s The Blue and Brown Books, Albert Camus’s The Stranger and The Rebel, Franz Kafka’s absurdity, Greek and Sumerian myths, the wit of Twitter and Facebook, the days of Motorola Q, Anne Sexton, Gertrude Stein, my family and friends. In short, everyday life—private and public.
Influences: Aside from the nods in Simulacra to my poetic lineage, Nora Chassler, Vievee Francis, Rachel McKibbens, and Ladan Osman are some of my greatest artistic inspirations. They’ve all taught me more about community, poetry, and history through their generosity and friendship than I could ever hope to learn in a book. As literary exemplars, I’d have to say Rita Dove, Simone De Beauvoir, Anne Carson, Alice Notley, Haruki Murakami, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Muriel Rukeyser, Marina Tsvetaeva, Carl Phillips, Louise Glück, Antonio Porchia, Cecília Meireles, Wisława Szymborska, Heraclitus, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Hayden, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Writer’s block remedy: When I lose language it’s almost entirely because I am too focused on myself at that moment. And so, I step back. I consciously get outside of myself by unplugging and planting myself in public spaces at odd hours of the day. My perspective shifts because, in public, my gaze moves toward other forms of subjectivity—nature, outside conversations, cityscapes, etc. I am also a big fan of stepping away from work to listen to my kids’ observations about life and/or ask them how they’d work through a problem. Young souls are closer to Edenic wisdom. They understand human nature and the journey in a way that seems to elude the more grizzled traveler.
Advice: Listen to yourself, your hand, your gut, your pen, your mind. Be authentically who you are as a writer. Your work has its own logic and its own tools; honor them. And, finally, wear comfortable shoes because the journey toward making the impossible possible is rugged, long, and lovely.
Finding time to write: I suppose I don’t find time as much as I make time. I have long practiced jotting down at least one observation every day—anything from watching a child play to documenting arguments. I find that those observations help me sustain focus when I sit to write in longer form.
What’s next: I am trying to gain fluency in my body’s primitive language, my instincts. The next collection, “under/class,” will be driven entirely by those instincts and will almost definitely be outside of definition and genre—social criticism, poetry, and short stories.
Hometown: I grew up in Trenton, but I spent twenty years in Detroit. Detroit is the place where I matured into a writer.
Residence: The City of Brotherly Love (and car horns), Philadelphia.
Job: Assistant professor of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College. The college was voted one of the most beautiful campuses in the country (and not just the grounds); the people are exceptional humans.
Time spent writing the book: The poems were in my body my whole life, perceiving and altering the way I interacted with the world. Somatically, I would say it took me forty-plus years. But, in a more linear view, it took a solid five years to commit them to paper and have them coalesce into a collection.
Time spent finding a home for it: I heard “no” and “not quite right” so often, I started to answer to them. Interestingly, I had a hard time getting individual poems published, which explains why my publishing acknowledgements are fairly lean in the book. I sent the manuscript out thirty times in some form or fashion, under two different titles. It was rejected twenty-eight times. It was accepted twice, and I went with Yale.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: ALL OF THEM! It’s hard to name only a few, but here’s my feeble attempt: Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa’s Rummage (Little A), Chelsea Dingman’s Thaw (University of Georgia Press), Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS, sam sax’s Madness, Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast, and Charif Shanahan’s Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press).
William Brewer I Know Your Kind Milkweed Editions (National Poetry Series)
All the things I meant to do are burnt spoons
hanging from the porch like chimes.
—from “Naloxone”
How it began: In the broadest sense, I saw the opiate epidemic start to swallow up my home state. Eventually it made its way into my life in specific ways, including a day when someone came to me and my partner and told us they had developed a heroin addiction. I was extremely angry with them and brushed them off, but quickly after that—by which I mean within a matter of minutes—I was overwhelmed with repulsion toward myself for how quickly I had slipped into such a damning, limited, and unsophisticated view of what this person had just confessed. Here they were at their most vulnerable, and I couldn’t be less humane. I was enacting the shame and stigmatization that is our culture’s default. I hated that and wanted to push against it.
Inspiration: There are maybe five hundred books and writers I’d like to name if I had the space and time, but I Know Your Kind is particularly indebted to Virginia Woolf, Carl Phillips, Denis Johnson, the Inferno, Paradise Lost, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Timothy Donnelly, John Berryman, and Walt Whitman.
Influences: I am constantly nourished, refreshed and challenged by Herman Melville, Don DeLillo, Caravaggio’s paintings, most of Stanley Kubrick, early Terrence Malick, LCD Soundsystem and Radiohead, the food of April Bloomfield, Gabrielle Hamilton, and the Joe Beef cookbook. More recently I have been nourished, refreshed, and challenged by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Louise Glück, Lydia Davis, Joy Williams, Karen Solie, Isaac Babel, Teju Cole, and Blade Runner (new and original).
Writer’s block remedy: If my writing is stuck, it’s because I haven’t read enough. Sometimes I pretend this isn’t the case, but I’m always wrong.
Advice: I’d suggest thinking about what your book is doing as a composition. How does it read? What are its sources of heat and thrust? Does it have an arc? An architecture? A book can be a kind of random collection of poems and still be organized in such a way that creates drama, tension, interaction, and a greater composition.
Finding time to write: The Stegner affords me a great deal of writing time, for which I’m extremely grateful.
Time spent writing the book: The oldest poems in the book are about four to five years old, though a large chunk was written in a fit of about eighteen months. It’s hard to say because some poems existed in a kind of shadow form for years before they were fully realized.
Time spent finding a home for it: Long answer, five years; short answer, approximately eighteen months.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast. Elizabeth Metzger’s The Spirit Papers (University of Massachusetts Press). And I’m excited to read Emily Skillings’s Fort Not (The Song Cave).
Chen Chen When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities BOA Editions (A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize)
My job is to trick
myself into believing there are new ways to find impossible honey.
—from “Spell to Find Family”
How it began: The book happened poem by poem. I didn’t have a very specific project in mind. I wanted to write poems that excited me sonically and formally, that surprised me in their turns, that grappled with a wide array of subjects, such as: family, immigration, queerness, race, misrecognition, labor, pop culture, mortality, love, and “growing up” in a really broad sense. “Growing up” as something ongoing, unfinishable—not a linear process but a messy, multidirectional one. This theme of “growing up” became clearer the more poems I wrote and the more I saw them as being in conversation with one another.
The process of putting together my MFA thesis and working with my advisor, Bruce Smith, helped me take the step from a pile of poems to a poetry collection. After the book won the Poulin Prize, the judge, Jericho Brown, was so generous with his time and insights and helped me reshape and reenvision the manuscript. “Write the book you want to read,” Jericho said. It was the deepest encouragement as well as the most daunting challenge. And I felt that Jericho had inhabited the book in its ideal form, its most compelling state. He saw the potential, and he got me excited to revise.
I cut out about fifteen pages—poems involving this complicated relationship between a queer son and his unaccepting mother that were getting in the way of the book’s main movement. The book went from four sections to three, with that one poem (“Self-Portrait as So Much Potential”) set off on its own at the very beginning (a suggestion from my poet friend Jess Smith). And many poems underwent significant revision, mostly cuts and tightening up of language. I tend to be expansive and want to throw everything in, including the kitchen sink and everything from every kitchen on the planet going back to when kitchen sinks first became a thing; I’m fortunate to have such smart readers and editors who will tell me when my maximalist tendencies are working and I need to pull back.
Inspiration: Robert Hayden. Jean Valentine. Walt Whitman. Joseph O. Legaspi. Nikky Finney. Paul Celan. Audre Lorde. Allen Ginsberg, especially Howl. Richard Siken’s Crush. Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. My former teachers Aracelis Girmay, Martín Espada, Deborah Gorlin, Bruce Smith, and Michael Burkard. Sarah Gambito, especially a poem called “Immigration,” which includes the line, “So what if I don’t love you.” Marilyn Chin’s Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. Pablo Neruda, especially his odes, his poems about the Spanish Civil War, and his book TheBook of Questions. I love the range of Neruda’s work. In the United States he’s known for his early love poems, but he wrote so many different kinds of poetry, including some of the most moving political poems. Other inspirations: Buffy the Vampire Slayer; my mother (who is a fabulous storyteller); Tegan and Sara; Paul Klee paintings and their delightful titles; cross-country running; the trees of New England; the Texas sun; the Japanese gay porn star Koh Masaki; guanacos (an animal related to the llama); reduced-sodium soy sauce; Frank Ocean; my high school French teachers; my partner, Jeff Gilbert; our dog, Mr. Rupert Giles (named after the British librarian character in Buffy).
Writer’s block remedy: I have to take breaks. Walk around. Talk to people I like. Watch some TV. Eat a snack. Do a different form of work. I really like doing my laundry; I don’t know why, but I find it meditative and satisfying. It’s weird how much I like doing laundry because I’m not super cleanly when it comes to other things, like my desk, where I do the actual writing. But, nine times out of ten, doing laundry and then putting away all my clothes in a very organized fashion helps me return to the writing with a fresh mind and a sense of calm. When that doesn’t work, I have to accept the draft isn’t going anywhere, at least not at the moment, and I have to will myself to stop staring at the computer screen. And then it’s wonderful to realize that I have a totally different draft or at least some bundle of notes I could attend to. The well doesn’t dry up. I just have to look somewhere else and stop fixating on what I thought was going to be the next poem.
Advice: Believe in your work. Don’t write what you think will get you published. My book got picked up quickly, but it took a longer time for many of the individual poems to get published in journals. Rejection will continue to happen after your book comes out, so really know, for yourself, what you like about your writing. You don’t want to feel like you’re experiencing success from something that doesn’t fully belong to you. It’s so satisfying when someone does (finally!) appreciate the weird thing you’re doing, your weird thing. I’m going to sound Hallmark-y, but I’m serious: Don’t compromise on your heart.
Finding time to write: I’ve found that I’m a much happier person when I make time to write, so I try to do that first. Before answering e-mails, before checking the news and social media, before getting up to take a shower sometimes. First thing. Then I feel like I’ve had at least this small moment to tend to my spirit, to honor what’s most alive or mysterious in how I’m seeing or engaging with the world. I like to try getting a whole draft out, but even a couple lines or one image can make the moment glow, and I can carry that with me into the rest of the day. But, to be honest, much of the time I just try to squeeze in some writing here and there.
What’s next: A second collection of poems, tentatively titled “Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency.” A lyric craft essay on Asian American poets and the politics of humor. Some personal essays, but who knows if they’re actually poems, not essays.
Hometown: Amherst, Massachusetts, by way of Fort Worth, Texas, and Xiamen, China.
Residence: Lubbock, Texas.
Job: Doctoral student at Texas Tech University.
Time spent writing the book: The oldest poem is about six years old, but that includes a year of not even looking at it. I started it in college, then sort of abandoned it. This is a poem called “Race to the Tree,” which is probably the most narrative piece in my book. It took a long time to figure out the structure, though it ended up being pretty simple. Simplicity can take years, I guess. I was making edits on this poem up to the last minute before I had to turn in the final manuscript to my publisher. The other poems didn’t take quite that long. Most of my book was written during my MFA, and then I didn’t look at it for a little while after submitting it to contests and reading periods. I revised and revised after the book was picked up in Spring 2016. I work well with deadlines, so I’m glad that I had about five months (and not more than that) until the final manuscript was due last fall. It was a good amount of time for revisions—not too short that I felt rushed and not too long that I felt like I was overthinking everything. Well, I still overthought and over-obsessed, but not for terribly long!
Time spent finding a home for it: I was extremely lucky. I sent my book out to only seven places. One round of submissions in Fall/Winter 2015. I was mentally preparing myself to keep sending it out for many rounds. When I’ve submitted chapbook manuscripts, it’s taken more time and perseverance. When I apply for fellowships and residencies, it often takes a couple attempts at least. So I was stunned to learn that my book was a finalist for Waywiser Press’s Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and then the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize at BOA Editions. I was stunned and continue to feel deeply grateful to the readers and editors who’ve responded with such enthusiasm for my work. And it’s been a dream working with BOA.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS. Keegan Lester’s this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it (Slope Editions). Nico Amador’s Flower Wars (Newfound), which is one of the best chapbooks I’ve ever read; I’m excited to see what’s next for this poet. I’m painfully behind on new poetry collections, but I’m especially looking forward to reading Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied and E. J. Koh’s A Lesser Love (Pleiades Press).
they mailed me from Mississippi in a metal ice chest
—from “how i arrived”
How it began: It started as a collection of mostly autobiographical poems that were varyingly interesting but not really cohesive. I talked with the publisher of Haymarket Books about the possibility of doing something with them, and it became one of those great iterative conversations where, through the process of talking something through with an active and curious listener, you have a chance to articulate for yourself what you’re really interested in doing. I realized that I wanted to write a book that would enter my own autobiographical coming-of-age story through a rewriting of my city’s past and future, through joy and magic, and that I wanted the book to speak to adolescent black girls and young adult black women. After that I was able to revise the manuscript into something with a lot more focus.
Inspiration: Reading Citizen by Claudia Rankine and seeing its use of visual art and prose. Walking around Chicago, driving around Chicago, biking around Chicago. Seeing visual art—for instance, the poem “The Device” was inspired by a series of masks I saw in the African art gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago. Going to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and seeing “the Mothership” that used to land onstage when Parliament-Funkadelic and George Clinton performed. Watching the film that Beyoncé made to accompany Lemonade and listening to A Seat at the Table by Solange; both pieces engage in elements of magic and world-building and, in the case of Solange’s album, a cohesion and clarity of aesthetic that I find inspiring. Listening to the album Heavn by Jamila Woods. Listening to Flying Lotus. A million other things.
Influences: Gwendolyn Brooks—I was writing the show No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks when I was editing Electric Arches. Ross Gay. Fatimah Asghar. Jamila Woods. Kevin Coval. Nate Marshall. Hanif Abdurraqib. Patricia Smith. Studs Terkel. Danez Smith.
Writer’s block remedy: I write in multiple genres, so often I just try to turn my attention to something else or step away from a project if it needs a little more time to incubate—although I often find it helpful to interrogate myself somewhat about the nature of the impasse. Am I tired? Hungry? Distracted? Is this idea bad? Is it something I’ve lost interest in? Am I trying to make an argument that I don’t actually have the evidence to make yet? Do I need another pair of eyes? Reflecting and being honest with myself about what’s going on usually helps me move forward. I’m also patient with myself. Everything doesn’t have to be written just this minute. Sometimes it’s okay to go read a book or ride a bike.
Advice: I think I was so eager to publish my book—and also perhaps somewhat lacking in confidence in myself—that I was at risk of going with any press that came along. I’m so grateful that I ended up with Haymarket, which I think was just perfect for me for so many reasons. If that hadn’t happened, I think there’s an alternate universe where the book is out on some other press in a much diminished form. I think it’s worth it to be patient and find the right press that believes not just in your book in the abstract, but in your entire vision for how you’d like it to live and operate in the world. I also think it’s worthwhile to ask yourself, “Which of these poems really are exciting to me?” and try to figure out which poems serve as the core thematic foundations of the book, and then edit and cut mercilessly around those foundations.
Finding time to write: It’s my job, which means it’s nonnegotiable, and we have to find the time for things that are nonnegotiable. I clear a path for it in whatever ways I can. Sometimes that means having a very disciplined morning writing session or a daylong retreat, and sometimes that means doing things the old-fashioned way—scribbling notes on a train or a bus.
What’s next: I recently finished my second book, When the Bell Stops Ringing, a work of nonfiction about the mass closure of public schools in Chicago and the history of racism in the city. I’m working on kicking off some new research projects that I hope will result in my second academic book, though that’s a very long process. And on Sunday mornings, little by little, I’ve been working on some fiction.
Job: Professor at the University of Chicago and writer.
Time spent writing the book: Three years.
Time spent finding a home for it: About a year.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Three collections I both enjoyed and learned from were Safia Elhillo’s The January Children, Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast, and sam sax’s Madness.
Let us speak without occasion of relations of our choosing!
—from “Gay Marriage Poem”
How it began: There’s a scene in a somewhat dated film from 1983, Lianna, directed by John Sayles, in which the protagonist goes to a lesbian bar for the first time with her lover. The next morning, as she’s walking down the street, she is newly able to integrate a private way of being, seeing, and desiring into her public sphere. Through an exchange of looks, you see her recognizing that all along there existed a community of other queer folks. Suddenly she’s moving through a space where future friends or lovers are newly possibly everywhere—choosing a plum at the fruit stand or on the far side of a street smiling at you as you smile back. Kind of like an audience for a poem that you weren’t sure existed but who you kept writing and revising for just in case.
Inspiration: Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality by Gayle Salamon.
Influences: Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde are poets I read when I know I could be living and writing more courageously. A few other writers whose poems have been especially strong mentors are Rita Dove, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marilyn Hacker, and Larry Levis.
Writer’s block remedy: I often turn to my dear friend and fellow poet Soham Patel, who always reminds me that it’s okay to play. And then we do—though we live in different cities, we get on the phone, laugh a lot, give each other exercises, and hold each other accountable.
Advice: Don’t listen to the voices of those who fear the power in what you have made and will make. Trust your closest readers and the reciprocal spaces that nourish you and give you strength.
Finding time to write: Like many poets I know, I am resourceful. I memorize poems that I love by others, which helps me think through my own while walking home along a busy road muffled by traffic. I carry a pocket-sized notebook when I go for a run. I have a little desk in an attic by a third-floor window where I slow down to revise. But many poems begin in the interstices of the day, when my mind is in motion.
What’s next: I recently cowrote a one-act play with playwright and friend Paul Kruse. It’s called Boundary Layer. The play takes place in a mysterious world covered in the most humble of life forms—moss. The last two people on a lonely planet, Sam and Dusty, are left to negotiate unexpected desires, relationships, and boundaries as they step outside of what is safe, familiar, and human.
Job: I teach at the University of Pittsburgh and at the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program. Before I taught college, I was a public school teacher.
Time spent writing the book: Eight years. In “Invisibility in Academe,” Adrienne Rich says that when someone “describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors.” I share this because I spent eight years writing, but also eight years working through some sort of “psychic disequilibrium.” Often I was writing, but at the same time I was teaching, loving, showing up for others, organizing, dancing: choosing to be in spaces where I could better see myself. To write my book, I had to widen my sense of my work in relation to others.
Time spent finding a home for it: I was quite lucky—I sent my book out for about a year. Then I won a Whiting Award. The weekend of the awards ceremony in New York City, I gave a reading from my unpublished manuscript. After the reading, I was approached by an editor at Sarabande.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press) by Lauren Russell, Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora, and The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books) by Molly McCully Brown.
sam sax Madness Penguin Books (National Poetry Series)
you either love the world or you live in it
—from “Warning: Red Liquid”
How it began: The seed for this book was actually just an exercise I gave myself. I’d come across a list of reasons for admission to a mental asylum in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in the 1800s that included examples such as “kicked in the head by a horse,” “tobacco and masturbation,” and “novel reading,” which I thought would all make lovely titles for poems. So I went to the woods (a residency at the Blue Mountain Center) but found I couldn’t write poems within that stricture. Instead I refocused my attention on the precise moment in history when homosexuality was taken out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and how that act of depathologizing has affected the way we think about and embody queerness and desire today. I began to work sequentially, incorporating my own relationship and my family’s relationship with mental health as both patients and practitioners. Through this process I discovered how clearly you can draw a line between so much of the inherited, lived, and systemic violence we experience and perpetuate today back to those early diagnoses.
Inspiration: Some of my research materials were The Birth of the Clinic and Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault. The DSM-I from 1952. The collected paintings of Francisco Goya and Hieronymus Bosch. Freud’s idea of the pleasure principle. Talking with my grandpa. The Sawbones podcast.
Influences: My friends. The folks I started writing with and have grown alongside over many years have unequivocally had the most impactful and life-altering affect on my writing and personhood. Some of those folks are Franny Choi, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Danez Smith, Fatimah Asghar, as well as countless other geniuses I’m lucky enough to be around. I’d also say there’s a litany of smart, politicized, literary, sad homosexuals from the present back to Hart Crane flinging himself off the deck of that ship who have made my work possible.
Writer’s block remedy: Give up and start something new. There are many poems to be written. If something isn’t working, I feel totally fine putting it aside and writing toward what has the most urgency and energy around it. Another thing that frees me up from the internal and newly external pressures of writing poems is being a-okay making terrible ones. I try to think of each new piece of writing as an experiment until it transcends that and becomes a poem. There’s something about the lack of preciousness around this process that helps me think of them as disposable until they become indispensable. Also each experiment and almost poem that doesn’t meet the world helps me accrue knowledge that will inform the next thing I write.
Advice: Everyone’s journey is different, and I can’t think of any catchall prescriptive advice outside of: Don’t be a jerk. It can be a really crummy process. For the longest time not having a book made me quite sad, and I always found it mad frustrating when someone who was already established told me to take my time and that it would work out how it’s supposed to. Although that turned out true in my case, I don’t necessarily think this is good advice. If you’ve finished one project, move on to another. You can always return to edit what you’ve already written. The doldrums that sometimes arise from not having a book can be dangerous. Madness is the sixth or seventh full manuscript I put together over eight or so years of writing, and to be honest, had any of those initial books been published, it would have been bad news. The time it took to get these books into the world has been invaluable for their life as books and for mine as a writer. So if you can stomach the patience, go for it. If not, publish chaps! Self-publish zines (I made like twenty as a younger punk writer.) There are lots of ways to get your work out into the world that isn’t as precious, lauded, and seemingly impossible as the first book object. Fuck it up. Make your poems indispensable to the world and let publishers fight over the privilege of supporting your work.
Finding time to write: I find time to write in the mornings before other obligations, during a spare hour at the coffee shop, on trains, buses. I’ve been trying to broaden my notion of what writing is to include the passive moments—a shift in perspective where looking at the world is just as important as writing it down.
What’s next: I’ve got two books in the works. There’s a collection of poems that’s currently circling around a sequence of Anthropocene / Apocalypse poems that attempt to celebrate queer joy in community and loneliness as the world burns. I’m also working on a novel, which is a queer Jewish coming-of-age story told in nonlinear fragments from the perspective of someone who’s just lit their self on fire outside of Trump Tower.
Hometown: Born in Manhattan, went to high school in Mamaroneck, New York.
Residence: Brooklyn, New York.
Job: I teach poetry and give readings.
Time spent writing the book: A little over a year. I wrote the drafts and skeletons for two-thirds of the book in the month I was up at a residency, and I spent the next year editing and refining. The rest of the book I wrote in and out of graduate school.
Time spent finding a home for it: Well, I’d just had my first book, which will be published second, picked up by Wesleyan University Press. The process of writing and sending it out took five to six years, although the book is wildly different from earlier versions I’d sent out. I had finished writing that first book and was tired of waiting for it to be accepted, so I decided to write a second book. I sent Madness out on a whim to the National Poetry Series and was expecting to have a multiyear journey of searching for a publisher, but amazingly Terrance Hayes selected the book. We had to push back my first book, Bury It, by a year so that the two books wouldn’t be in competition with each other.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Oy. This year has been ridiculously plump with incredible and dangerous first books. Here’s my list of poets whose first books this year took the top of my head off: Nicole Sealey, Kaveh Akbar, Erika L. Sánchez, Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa, Tyree Daye, Meg Freitag, Chen Chen, Eve L. Ewing, Layli Long Soldier, William Brewer, Chelsea Dingman, Javier Zamora, and I am SURE I’m leaving some wonderful books off this list.
I was never here. I’m not coming back. I’m at sea.
—from “Crystal Radio”
How it began: This book is a collection of mostly discrete poems that I wrote in graduate school (a handful were written in the time before and after). I never set off to write it; I looked back and gathered things I’d previously written and arranged them and drew out connections among them. It’s more of an act of returning. I think many first books begin this way, by remembering what’s been done already. Some of the shared attentions and themes of the book include depression, gender, color, painting and visual art, toxic white femininity, cloudiness, somatic experience, cantankerousness, jealousy, sex, light, America, collage, feelings without names, looming dread, boredom, water. I think in a larger sense I wanted to create a space where a state of not quite knowing felt expert, delightful, powerful.
Inspiration: I feel a little corny saying this, but my friends are my greatest inspiration. I am about to coteach a class on the poetics of refusal with a friend, the poet and artist Simone Kearney, at Parsons School of Design. Our conversations around this subject, around phenomenology and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill, and other texts that draw out these “slow states,” have really helped to create an environment for my work to emerge. The workshops and seminars I attended at Columbia were also instrumental. My students inspire me every week with their risk-taking and generosity. John Cleese’s character, Basil Fawlty, in the 1970s British sitcom Fawlty Towers shaped a lot of my early fascination with language, as did my father’s yellow legal pads, my mother’s excellent malapropisms and non sequiturs (“mind like a steel sieve”/ “letting the can of worms out of the bag”), and my brother’s baroque prose and steady diet of cyberpunk novels. I am a dedicated follower of a Twitter account of Yiddish proverbs.
Influences: John Ashbery, A. R. Ammons, Marcella Durand, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Eileen Myles, Francis Ponge, Sei Shōnagon, Mary Ruefle, Douglas Kearney, Susan Howe, Myung Mi Kim, Ariana Reines, Claudia Rankine, F. T. Prince, Emily Hunt, H. D., Harryette Mullen, Adam Fitzgerald, Alice Notley, Fernando Pessoa, my teachers Timothy Donnelly and Dorothea Lasky, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Édouard Levé, Kim Hyesoon, Jorie Graham, Lucy Ives, Lyn Hejinian, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorge Luis Borges, James Schuyler, Lisa Robertson, Ali Power, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, my dance teacher Alexandra Beller.
Writer’s block remedy: I usually reach an impasse because I need to take a minute to recharge, so I listen to that. I quiet down my writer mind and enter a reading-seeing phase that may last weeks or months. I use a lot of repetition and anaphora in my work (some of which gets cut later) because I find the experience of repeating oneself to be both necessary in our times and deeply clarifying and stimulating. To repeat a phrase is both to stabilize it in the memory of the writer and reader and to question its soundness, as in Gertrude Stein’s “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” The rose is both etched in our mind and transformed, transmogrified. When I still made dances, I was obsessed with repetition and resultant exhaustion, and I often repeat as a way of entering or reentering a poem. I think I learned how to do this by listening to Anne Waldman and Dorothea Lasky.
One question I am still grappling with is how to negotiate a balance between “innovation,” constraint, and intuition. The painter Jane Freilicher put it best, I think, when she said, “To strain after innovation, to worry about being on ‘the cutting edge’ (a phrase I hate), reflects a concern for a place in history or one’s career rather than the authenticity of one’s painting.” There’s also, I think, a quieter quote somewhere about her letting go of the pressure to be innovative, and that she felt she could really paint after that, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere.
This sounds a little strange, but I like to think of my life so far as a writer as a kind of oscillation between states of openness and movement and states of stillness and solitude. There are islands of production, productivity, and then pockets of…nothing. I think I am grateful to my depression in this way, in that it often forces me to be still.
Advice: Support other writers by editing their books, teaching their work, inviting them to read, publishing them, letting them sleep on your couch, etc. Put your work in the hands of only people you know to be caring and dedicated. I am grateful that being a poet is perhaps more of a career path than it once was, and I know that being heard and read is vital to the form. That being said, I do find the professionalization of poetry (in which we all engage) to be in some ways hurtful to the writing itself. It’s okay to turn it off sometimes, this drive toward productivity. When you are writing, you are not involved in career making; you are being a poet. You are also a poet when you are teaching or walking around or doing your day job or looking at art. Don’t partition off your daily life from your writing life.
Eileen Myles once visited an undergraduate poetry workshop taught by Jennifer Firestone that I was taking, and she said something like: “There is something to being a poet that has nothing to do with writing poetry. It’s an identity.” This was such a relief for me when I heard it almost ten years ago, and yet I’m still not sure what it means. Perhaps what it means to me keeps changing. I like that.
Finding time to write: I am a very slow writer. I only sit down to write a poem a handful of times per month, but I find I am constantly jotting down fragments, recording phrases, and “puttering” (to borrow one of my mother’s favorite terms) over lines. I usually use my phone to record these, either as a note or in a voice memo. These scraps gleaned from daily life become the scaffolding of many of my poems. I’ve been commuting to teach this semester and have also found that being on a train (with no Wi-Fi!) and gently zooming through a landscape is very conducive to writing. I just have to stay ahead of the motion sickness.
What’s next: I’m working on a book-length poem sequence called “Mother of Pearl” about the environment and whether or not I want to eventually have children. It uses fragments of language from the anonymous Middle English poem “Pearl,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, lyrics from Roxy Music’s song “Mother of Pearl,” and probably a few more sources. It is a very different experience than writing Fort Not, both because it is more of a project book than a collection, and because it relies on and is building itself around found language. I also want to start writing a novel but don’t quite know how.
Residence: Brooklyn, New York, and sometimes Hudson, New York.
Job: Assistant to poets and an adjunct professor.
Time spent writing the book: Five years. I wrote the poem “Canary” in thirty minutes before a poetry reading at the Center for Book Arts in 2013 and didn’t change a word. I began the poem “Parallelogram” in 2014 and didn’t finish it until 2016, revising it well into 2017.
Time spent finding a home for it: I think I had a pretty rare experience in that the Song Cave (run by the incredible Alan Felsenthal and Ben Estes) was the first and only press to which I sent the manuscript, so not long. The deadline for the Song Cave’s 2016 open reading period (and my partner Danniel Schoonebeek’s gentle nudging to put it in my calendar) was one of the primary motivators for getting the initial manuscript together.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: William Brewer’s incredible I Know Your Kind comes to mind, and Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast. Tongo Eisen-Martin’s second book, Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Books), is one of my favorite books of the year, along with Alan Felsenthal’s debut, Lowly (Ugly Duckling Presse). I am incredibly excited for Samantha Zighelboim’s The Fat Sonnets, which will be coming out in 2018 from Argos Books.
Joseph Rios Shadowboxing: Poems & Impersonations Omnidawn Publishing
I am the American, güey
—from “Southpaw Curse”
How it began: It was a long while before I started thinking about a book. Willie Perdomo helped me with that at a Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation workshop. That’s when I found my alter ego, Josefo. Willie got me to conceptualize a project that could be built around this character. That was in 2012. It took another three years to mold the work into something that felt whole. I read John Berryman’s Mr. Bones character [from The Dream Songs] and Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito and fell in love with the notion of characters living full lives inside poems. It’s a thin veil, of course, but it worked for me. I was able to hide behind this character that looked and sounded like me, had the same memories and experiences as me, but was allowed to live apart from me.
Inspiration: My grandmother’s stories, my grandfather’s stories, the dudes I dug trenches with, the packinghouse where I used to work, wrench turners at my uncle’s airplane shop, jornaleros I picked up at Home Depot in Cypress Park, in Oakland, Marina del Rey, Daly City. My cousin Gabe’s vinyl collection, Dro’s Navy stories, dysfunctional romantic relationships, regret, mistakes, degenerate behavior, survival, and healing. You know, all that stuff you talk about when you and your cousin Erica are drunk and crying at four in the morning. Also, watching people I love get sick and pass away. All that loss, too much loss. Mourning, of course.
Influences: Javier O. Huerta, Michele Serros, Richard Pryor, Douglas Kearney, Warren G, Andrés Montoya, Rafa Cardenas, John Berryman, Zbigniew Herbert, D’Angelo, Art Laboe, and the Rocky films.
Writer’s block remedy: My poetry community, without a doubt. As I write this, I’m sitting across from my poet-cousin Sara Borjas. We met up to get some work done. I really couldn’t do a damn thing without these people.
Advice: Keep writing. Keep grinding. Send to presses that are publishing work you give a shit about. Don’t water down your voice because you think that’s what it takes to get a book. My homie Chiwan Choi asks us, “Why sell out in a zero-dollar industry?” It might sound corny, but be your whole self on the page. There isn’t much out there more terrifying to the powers that be than a bunch of people being their whole damn selves on the page. They straight up ban those books in places like Arizona. We need more of those books.
Finding time to write: I have to make time or it doesn’t happen. I get lazy. I work nights and weekends. Weekdays are usually free for poet work. I have people around me who keep me accountable.
What’s next: Tough question. I feel so far away from anything that resembles a second collection. I’m trying very hard to resist the producer mentality and to just enjoy this book and reflect on the journey I took to get here.
Job: I work at a venue called Civic Center Studios in downtown Los Angeles.
Time spent writing the book: Seven years, give or take.
Time spent finding a home for it: I submitted a previous version of the book as early as 2011. It was premature, without a doubt, but sending to contests kept me engaged in the work. I’m deadline driven that way.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: For real, 2017 needs to calm down. Where do I begin? Mai Der Vang’s Afterland (Graywolf Press). Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied. Vickie Vértiz’s Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut (University of Arizona Press). Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast. Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s Scar On/Scar Off (Stalking Horse Press). Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s Beast Meridian (Noemi Press).
Now make room in the mouth for grassesgrassesgrasses
—from “Part 1: These Being the Concerns”
How it began: The first half of WHEREAS is a collection of poems that date back over the last decade. There was no particular setting off or intent for those poems except the desire to write. The second half of the book is a response to the 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans. For those pieces, it was a kind of frustration and outrage—lifelong and on slow boil—that propelled me.
Inspiration: My daughter, motherhood, and watching the younger generation. The land—the artfulness of the land, its endurance and change, its nonverbal lessons. And people—unexpected encounters as well as long-term relationships. I am always profoundly struck by the surprising things people say and do. People are poems, in themselves.
Influences: My daughter’s dad, the poet Orlando White, was as an important influence on my development as a writer, as were the poets he introduced me to—bpNichol and Aram Saroyan—whose works I return to over and over. Frida Kahlo and Zitkala-Sa speak to me as women artists of mixed heritage who elevated indigenous art, philosophies, and histories within contemporary considerations of art. And definitely the Native poets of my generation, previous generations, and the upcoming; their works are my touchstones. I turn to their pages both for inspiration and as conversation; I look and listen to how they handle language, form, line, and the big, sliding boulders of content.
Writer’s block remedy: Conversation—e-mails and phone calls—with other poets. Talking things out really helps the energy start moving again. There’s also conversation with the page: I will open a book of poems and keep the pages turned upward, next to my laptop. Sometimes just a glance toward the page helps invigorate my belief that whatever I’m working on, it can be written. I have others to hold my hand, figuratively speaking. And, when a piece has stopped and won’t move no matter how much I try, I need to take a break and do nothing for a while. Relaxing my brain is very important! I need to watch Netflix or hang out with my daughter; I need to laugh and not think about poetry at all.
Advice: Write as honestly as you can. Write what’s most important to you.
Finding time to write: I work at night from around 10 PM to 4 or 5 AM. I sleep in, in the morning. But it’s worth it. The night is an uninterrupted block of time that I really need.
What’s next: A new manuscript titled “2.” In this, I am working with ideas of duality, multiplicity, mixed heritage, failure versus success (the illusion of both), love and its failure, love and its necessity. Mostly, I am working with “2,” even at the most basic biological level, as the beginnings of pain and, likewise, belonging.
Hometown: I grew up in the Southwest; I don’t have a single hometown. But I have lived in Santa Fe the longest and feel most at home here.
Residence: Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Job: Write, make art, do readings.
Time spent writing the book: A few of the poems date back ten years or so, not long after my daughter was born in 2006. And I began my response to the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans—the poems in Part II—in 2010 or 2011. Altogether, the response pieces took me about six years.
Time spent finding a home for it: A number of years ago, Jeff Shotts from Graywolf Press read my poem “Ȟe Sápa” online at the Kenyon Review. He messaged me about the poem and asked if I had a manuscript to read. At the time, I didn’t, but I told him that I was working on one. It took several years after receiving his message for me to finish WHEREAS. But we kept in touch and, although I was prepared to send my manuscript to other presses if Graywolf did not accept it, Graywolf ended up being the only press I submitted to when the manuscript was ready.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Mai Der Vang’s Afterland and Bojan Louis’s Currents (BkMk Press).
The debut has a certain allure: an air of freshness, the promise of an exciting, original voice. Here is the new. Here is something you haven’t yet heard. And while that certainly might be the case with a poetry debut, it can also be true of a poet’s second, fifth, or tenth book—artistic innovation can happen at any stage in a writer’s life. What does make a debut uniquely exciting, though, is its sense of beginning—that the arc of a poet’s career has just begun, that the ball has just been tossed into the air. For our twelfth annual look at debut poets, we asked ten poets to share the inspirations and processes behind their first collections, and what emerged were stories of beginnings: how a book begins and how a poem begins, certainly, but also how a writer’s attraction to poetry begins. “I wanted to know if my sadness could ever be useful,” explains Ocean Vuong. “[It’s the desire] to get closer to whatever it is that’s always just beyond reach or sight,” says Justin Boening. “It was fun,” says Phillip B. Williams.
The ten poets in this year’s feature wrote some of the most compelling debuts published in 2016 and represent a range of styles and backgrounds. From the sparse, demanding elegance of Eleanor Chai’s lyrics, to the irreverent, kaleidoscopic roaming of Tommy Pico’s book-length poem, to the linguistic opulence and sheer nerve of Safiya Sinclair’s work, these ten encompass many of the impulses and registers of contemporary poetry. We asked for their insight on inspiration, publishing, and writing through impasses, and two commonalities—among many—surfaced. One: that inspiration might lie in paying attention to what appears small or insignificant—how Carolina Ebeid will listen to every “little bell” of an Arvo Pärt piano piece for inspiration, how Ari Banias will pursue the feeling elicited by something as minor as the behind-the-knee wrinkles in someone’s pants. And two: the advice to not be in a rush to publish. To take one’s time and question, as Solmaz Sharif does, what it means to be an artist and not just a person who publishes a book. Or to wait, like Jana Prikryl, for the poem to emerge that helps the others fall into place. These poets’ words are a reminder that it’s not a race, but a process of fashioning poems that can connect with the world, that can confront the “roots and wide-ranging shadows of words,” as Safiya Sinclair puts it, and explore language as we know it.
Ari Banias Anybody W. W. Norton
“Mostly a name feels like the crappy overhang I huddle under while rain skims the front of me.
I admit it keeps me visible, the cool compromise of efficient lighting, the agreement to call this that.”
—from “Recognition Is the Misrecognition You Can Bear”
How it began: I wrote Anybody out of the conditions of my life, and out of a will to connect more than divide. I was writing into loneliness and the social, and as a way to be alone with myself while also being and thinking with others. It was a process of concretizing and externalizing those conversations I was having in my head and out loud, with people dead and living, in my life or not, with the culture at large, and with other selves—past, present, future, parallel. As a younger queer writer especially, there were books I needed but couldn’t find, either because no one had published them or because they hadn’t yet been written. So I was probably writing this book, however unconsciously, to address that self, those selves.
Inspiration: The need to counter alienation and death. Humor, my immediate surroundings, memory. Sometimes just wanting to figure out how I felt about something could be enough. Poems could come from a question, an irritation, or even from a desire to get at my response to an object—like, Why does this tree, that I’m fairly certain doesn’t know I exist, evoke deep feeling in me? It’s embarrassing! And, What am I bringing to it—I mean all the baggage (cultural, historical, and otherwise) I’m carting around when I look at a tree (or a broken chair, or the behind-the-knee wrinkles in someone’s pants in front of me in line, or, really, anything) and find myself thrown off by unexpected feeling. As long as I’m attentive and willing to follow through, past what’s easy or comfortable, a poem can start almost anywhere.
In her piece “The Untroubled Mind,” the painter Agnes Martin writes, “Nothing that happens in your life makes inspiration / When your eyes are open / You see beauty in anything.” I’d add that I think of “beauty” here not in the classical sense but more like meaning, importance. Martin [writes later in] this same piece: “The wiggle of a worm as important as the assassination of a president.” They happen in the same world, never entirely independent of one another. And maybe the one I think of as small is in fact enormous. Even if a poem doesn’t directly point at these connections, to keep them near, to refuse to forget or evade them—that did and does inspire me.
Influences: More than I could possibly name. Some voices: Nina Simone, Arthur Russell, Odetta, Elizabeth Cotten, and the rembetika singer Roza Eskenazi. Some books: Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses, James Baldwin’s essays, George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, Brenda Hillman’s Loose Sugar, Lorine Niedecker’s Paean to Place, June Jordan’s Collected Poems, Joy Ladin’s Transmigrations, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “terrible sonnets,” Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Hilton Als’s The Women, Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation, David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives, Guy Davenport’s translations of Archilochos and Sappho. And Roland Barthes, Elizabeth Bishop, Fred Moten, Frank O’Hara, Yannis Ritsos, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Conversations with others ignite and recalibrate me, without fail. A few winters ago I came to a sort of crisis point with poetry. I wasn’t sure how or why, but poems began to repel me—I couldn’t write them, and I could hardly read them. Lineation looked melodramatic and grotesque. I couldn’t stomach even a whiff of solemnity. Poems were like giant echo chambers. Not coincidentally, that was my third year in a row living in fairly isolated circumstances away from loved ones, and I was feeling disconnected. I didn’t know what else to do so I started writing letter-poems to close friends. Immediately detail, texture, and volition returned to the act of writing. It was like the electricity came on again. Somewhere I’d lost the sense of purpose and direction created by that fundamental exchange of one person speaking to another. A good lesson.
Advice: It seems obnoxious to tell people not to get discouraged by how long it takes to publish a book, because it can be a very long time, and who wouldn’t get discouraged? For me publication never seemed a given—only writing did. What I told myself, and still do, is this: Keep working. Follow the shape of your mind’s particulars (its rhythms, its oddities) like a bloodhound, and take the poems as far as you possibly can, so that they are utterly yours, so that you’re writing in that singular way that singular thing no one but you can write. Each time. As Hopkins (whom I’ll take way out of context here) said, “more wreck and less discourse.”
What’s next: Along with writing new poems, I am translating contemporary poets from the Modern Greek. It’s a relief to get outside my own head and work out problems of language and expression through someone else’s poems, while still being in music. And I welcome the different sense of responsibility. Finding my way back into Greek, which was my first language, is also its own private homecoming, with all the associated awkwardness and joy of that.
Age: 38.
Hometown: I was born in Los Angeles, and grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.
Residence: Berkeley, California.
Job: I work at Small Press Distribution.
Time spent writing the book: Nine years.
Time spent finding a home for it: I started sending out a mess of consecutively numbered pages I thought was a book nine years ago. The early drafts look very little like what came to be published. It took about four years of sending out versions of what’s now the book before it was accepted.
Ocean Vuong Night Sky With Exit Wounds Copper Canyon Press
“There is so much I need to tell you—but I only earned one life.”
—from “Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown): oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952”
How it began: I wanted to know if my sadness could ever be useful.
Inspiration: Fire escapes. I was walking in New York City one day years ago and saw this big, white fire escape. And I thought to myself, “That’s it. That’s what a poem should do. Be a place where we can move further toward ourselves, which really means moving further toward our fears.” And medical marijuana. And Gushers fruit snacks.
Influences: Li-Young Lee, Federico García Lorca, Frank O’Hara, Yusef Komunyakaa, Arthur Rimbaud, Anne Carson, Emily Dickinson, Matsuo Bashō, Gwendolyn Brooks, Garrett Hongo, Amiri Baraka, Troye Sivan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Thomston, Thao Nguyen, Kobayashi Issa, Etta James, Ben Lerner, Luther Vandross, Michel Foucault, Alexander Chee, Little Richard, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Maggie Nelson, Mark Rothko, Frank Ocean, Bad Future, Whitney Houston, Patsy Cline, Lyoto Machida, C. D. Wright, Amy Winehouse, Yoko Ono, Al Green, Sinn Sisamouth, Childish Gambino, Ralph Stanley, Max Richter, Nils Frahm, Joel P West, James Blake, and Vince Staples.
Writer’s Block Remedy: When I am stuck, I don’t like to force out work or words. I just walk away from the desk—sometimes not returning for weeks at a time. I find a quiet place in the day and stop. If I’m at home, I lie down on the carpet. Then I do this thing where I just say thank you to all the things and people who have helped me. Of course, simply saying thank you does not awaken any creative force; it just reminds me that the work I am doing is not validated by quantity, but rather by the connection it builds between the world and myself. When my own work is not coming along, I try to stop and recognize the people doing the same challenging, at times unforgiving, art—and I feel happy. I think it’s hard, in our day and age, not to think, It’s me against the world, or, I have to do this for my career because everyone else is hammering away and if I stop now, I will fall behind and be forgotten. But that’s a toxic and self-defeating gaze. I think we are more productive—even in stillness—when we can recognize one another, when we say to each other, Thank you for doing this with me. Thank you for carrying on when I cannot.
Advice: Hustling can be good—but make sure what you’re pushing is gold (to you).
What’s next: I’m working on being a better son.
Age: 28.
Hometown: Hartford, Connecticut.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Writer and teacher.
Time spent writing the book: Eight yearsafter believing that I could be a poet. But I think really it took me all of my life.
Time spent finding a home for it: Eight months. I was lucky.
“To all the girls Bernini loved before I’d say, caveat emptor.”
—from “Benvenuto Tisi’s Vestal Virgin Claudia Quinta Pulling a Boat with the Statue of Cybele”
How it began: The book started as individual poems written over about a decade. I was finally galvanized into bringing some of them together by the long sequence that forms the second half of the book, “Thirty Thousand Islands.” The sequence gave me a new way of thinking about loss and literary history and nature and men and Canada and Europe; as it grew I sensed it was a foil to the more ad hoc poems I had written up till then. So the book emerged from this encounter between different forms of poetry, which seems apt since many of my poems tend to spark from the friction between different voices or points of view.
Inspiration: There are some ekphrastic poems in The After Party—one about a great, overlooked Buster Keaton movie, another about a not very good Renaissance painting. I like taking in all kinds of art—especially paintings, photographs, movies—and thinking about its implications, formal and historical. But I’m also taken with something Frank O’Hara once said: “Sometimes I think that writing a poem is such a moral crisis I get completely sick of the whole situation.” What kind of experience or vision or formal experiment can really justify taking up the reader’s time? Parts of my book attempt to think about European history and the ways my own ancestors experienced it; what gives me the authority to speak for those individuals? In other words, what kind of poem could do so? I find these sorts of questions inspiring.
Influences: I don’t feel qualified to name my own influences—and the writing I revere most seems too distant a beacon to enter into my own stuff—but there are writers I’ve loved over so many years they feel like family. I’d include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, John Berryman, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and Don Marquis.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I tend to sit with the impasse, partly because I have a day job and write essays as well (and recently had a baby) so life can throw me off course very easily, and partly because I think impasses are trying to tell me something so it would be imprudent to ignore them.But when I really must go on I get energy from hazelnut gelato; whiskey; the Metropolitan Museum; swimming; dips into Flann O’Brien or Jane Austen or Laurence Sterne; dips into Twitter, which so far is the clearest source of dissent I’ve found against the fascism that the Republican Party is happily riding into power; dear friends whose work is new and great, and conversely random lines in magazines that irritate me. Getting pissed off is, in the absence of anything else, a reliable stimulant.
Advice: Every voice needs something different so it’s unlikely my experience will apply to anyone else. But what’s been most valuable to me is time—to let the words stew, and let myself stew, and in fact resist publication for as long as possible.Once you’re ready I recommend an Excel spreadsheet. Maybe this is common knowledge but it was a revelation to me: A spreadsheet helps to compartmentalize the painful chore of sending things out and really cleanses it of emotion. You just record rejections and can very clearly see where else something might be sent.
What’s next: Mostly diaper changes and tummy times. Occasionally noodling away at things that may or may not make it into a second book.
Age: 41.
Hometown: My teens were spent in Ancaster, Ontario, which feels hometown-iest to me. I was born in Ostrava (in what was then Czechoslovakia), and when I was five my family fled and lived in an Austrian village for a year. From the age of six I grew up in a few towns in southern Ontario—so it’s complicated.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Senior editor at the New York Review of Books.
Time spent writing the book: Too long. But the too-longness varies a lot: One of the poems is around fifteen years old, some started almost a decade ago and had to marinate for years before they were finished, and some were written in half an hour, with minor revision. In general I revise heavily and take long gaps between glances at poems, so I can hear them afresh when I return.
Time spent finding a home for it: I spent a decade avoiding gathering my poems into a manuscript—it felt somehow presumptuous. About a year after I started bringing the poems together, Tim Duggan read my work in the London Review of Books and the New Yorker and got in touch, asking if I had a manuscript. I took a few more months to revise it and once I sent it to him he got back to me quickly. So I’ve been very lazy and very lucky.
Carolina Ebeid You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior Noemi Press
“We live in a copy of Eden, a copy
that depends on violence.”
—from “Albeit”
How it began: The book isn’t defined by a unifying project. Many of its poems did not begin with a particular book in mind. However, when I was placing the poems side by side to see how many pages I had, I noted an orbital pull forming. They were already set in a certain orbit of tone, subject matter, and high-lyric style. Identifying this motion allowed me to see more clearly which subsequent poems would be accepted into this circle.
Inspiration: For a few years I listened to a musical piece by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt called Für Alina. It is a composition for the piano, spare and slow. It sounds like little bells being struck. Pärt has said that, when he was making this work, he “had a need to concentrate on each sound so that every blade of grass would be as important as a flower.” I have thought the same about poems. Also, the visual vocabulary of certain films has inspired many of these poems, deeply. Movies such as The Spirit of the Beehive, Ratcatcher, In the Mood for Love, and Days of Heaven hold something arcane, a strange quietness. Perhaps they withhold (it’s a better word). What has moved me to write after seeing these films is how much they withhold. I am drawn to poems that can dance like that, in a relationship of what is said and what is left unsaid.
Influences: The books of Lucie Brock-Broido, Anne Carson, and Briget Pegeen Kelly have been early and lasting influences. In my PhD work, I’ve delved into the fragments and letters of Emily Dickinson, the poetry of Raúl Zurita and Cecilia Vicuña, the multimedia art of Caroline Bergvall, as well as the various adaptations of Antigone—which I hope will all be future influences.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Always, the engrossing work of translating poetry from Spanish is a spark. I also turn to looking through old lexicons, field guides no longer in print, medieval bestiaries or glossaries of birds, and early photography.
Advice: Three things. One: Listen to your innermost self—a self that has been forming aesthetic principles by the books you’ve read, by your various experiences and identities—and try to lower the volume of well-intentioned critiques that stifle your work. Two: If you are fortunate, you will find a trusted reader-editor-confidant-friend, one who will open your work and imagination. Take care to develop that relationship. My primary reader also happens to be my partner, Jeffrey Pethybridge. Three: Try not to send out your manuscript blindly, which can deplete one’s inner and outer resources. Rather, choose presses whose author lists exhilarate you, and remember that small presses are in a golden age; they’re making vital and sparkling books.
What’s next: A long sequence of small poems called “The M Notebooks,” M being a character made up of various persons, such as the biblical Saint Miriam (a myrrh-bearer), the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta, and Russian writer Nadezhda Mandelstam. The sequence is a convergence, confluence, conflagration of speakers. Also, a couple of essays on the work of Ana Mendieta, as well as research on the literature of sleep, descent, and dream-space.
Age: 40.
Hometown: West New York, New Jersey.
Residence: Denver.
Job: I teach while I also pursue a PhD in the creative writing program at the University of Denver.
Time spent writing the book: The bulk of the poems were written in Austin during my three MFA years at the Michener Center.
Time spent finding a home for it: About three years.
How it began: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—namely, how quickly the nation mobilized to invade these countries when just months earlier we were living in the myth of indefinite and obvious peace. That peace, of course, did not exist then, either, but I remember, for example, an Army recruiter visiting my AP Government class in spring 2001 and saying, as part of his pitch to join the Army and see the world, that were we to join the Army, we would not be fighting in any wars, anyway.
Inspiration: Conversations with friends—especially Samira Yamin, Ari Banias, and Brandon Som. The various books and artists they have pressed upon me. The stellar work they put into the world.
Influences: June Jordan, Muriel Rukeyser, Mahmoud Darwish, C. D. Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Reznikoff, William Carlos Williams, Adrienne Rich, Leonel Rugama, Walt Whitman, and Claudia Rankine.
Writer’s Block Remedy: If the causes are perfectionistic, I pull out the collected poems of a poet I greatly admire and flip through to remind myself how many mediocre poems their oeuvre contains. It is my duty, I remind myself, to write even those mediocre, messy poems. These failures are the ones that create openings in the conversation for subsequent writers and poets to enter—I’m not trying to kill the conversation, after all. I pull out journals—André Gide’s, Franz Kafka’s, Susan Sontag’s—to remind myself how long the process is and how often the sense of failure or impasse hits. I watch a movie.
Advice: Write a book you want to fight for. Fight for it. I am, after all this, though, a little hesitant to keep the conversation on first books or debuts. I am a product of an industry that emphasizes first books—it’s where the prizes are, it’s what the MFA programs are gearing you up for with your thesis, it’s what our conversations with our peers are about, it’s what we buy because we want to support our friends. I’m not entirely sure who this “we” is, as someone both inside and outside of it, as someone not wanting to presume you are a similar product, fellow writer. But there is something, something shifting the collective attention (of presses, of journals) to younger poets—an attention that does not exist for a poet’s second or fourth book and that doesn’t again until I don’t know when. A blessing, maybe, that turning away of the gaze—it’s likely due to sales. We are not necessarily taught how to be artists, how to commit to artists and attend to their failures, their sustained conversation—a conversation that would undoubtedly challenge and even dismantle said industry. We are taught instead how to publish our first books. Product, not process. I don’t have answers about “how to be an artist”; I’m not trying to make it sound like I do. But I do want to have that conversation. What do you want to do as a writer in the world? What do you see the arc of your writing life to be? How is your first book a launch to that arc? To discuss the book itself, the writers themselves—myself included—is a misdirection. Or as Forough Farrokhzad said: “Remember the flight / the bird will die.”
What’s next: Translations of Forough Farrokhzad. And some secret stuff.
Age: 33.
Hometown: I haven’t worked out the answer to this question for myself. Los Angeles is probably the closest I will get to a hometown.
Residence: Oakland.
Job: I’m a lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University.
Time spent writing the book: I started working with the Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms in earnest at the end of 2007. The earliest poems in the book are from 2008. But some of the pieces and images are reworked from 2003, even. By 2012 or 2013 I had pretty much worked out all the conceptual elements and the general frame of the book, though I added and removed poems up until the last deadline. The most freeing realization was that I could ditch poems that had been previously published in journals and that I liked, generally speaking. I could create a book rather than a collection, I mean.
Time spent finding a home for it: I started sending the book out in 2009, which was massively premature, but I don’t regret it. I drew up a very short list of dream first-book prizes and vowed to continue sending out yearly until I was disqualified from doing so.
Phillip B. Williams Thief in the Interior Alice James Books
“I’m listening to Alice Coltrane to feel Blacker than God”
—from “Eleggua and Eshu Ain’t the Same”
How it began: It was fun. I used to write several manuscripts at a time. One year I was working on three books simultaneously. My first attempt at a book was in 2008 (“I Empire,” read as “first empire”), the second was in 2009 (“Thief in the Interior,” which was not the same book as the one that was eventually published), and the third was in 2010 (“In Vulnerabilities”). Eventually I released a chapbook called Bruised Gospels in 2010, and because I do not want poems in chapbooks to appear in my full-lengths, I was “forced” to restructure the main manuscript, “I Empire,” which remained the backbone of my debut.It had many, many names, to my friend Rickey Laurentiis’s entertainment. He and I exchanged different versions of our books for years. I distinctly remember two titles he had before Boy With Thorn that I do not think he would mind me sharing. The first was “Mirror God”and the second was “Down Atlantis.” If there were any others, I cannot remember. My failed titles were “Grace,” “Grace and Empire,” “Dancing on an Upturned Bed,” “Darling,” “Shame No Tongue,” “Lie Down,” and “Witness.”Going through this process with Rickey over the course of four to five years helped push me along. All I knew is that I wanted a book before I turned thirty. My book was published a month before my thirtieth birthday.
Inspiration: The book On Black Men by David Marriott was always on my mind while writing. The work of my peers. The work of those who have become ancestors.
Influences: Essex Hemphill, Jorie Graham, Terrance Hayes, Sonia Sanchez, the racism of Wallace Stevens seems its own kind of artist or shadow of the artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mary Jo Bang, Wangechi Mutu, Nina Simone, Leontyne Price, Björk, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Kerry James Marshall, Federico García Lorca, Lucille Clifton, Henry Dumas, Carl Phillips, Douglas Kearney, J. Michael Martinez, Dawn Lundy Martin, Octavio Paz, Camille T. Dungy, Evie Shockley, Frank Bidart, Alvin Ailey, Judith Jamison, Alonzo King, Clifford Williams, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Sylvia Plath and her fascination with the word nigger, Claudia Rankine, Carolyn Rogers, Thylias Moss, James Baldwin, afropessimism as a theoretical framework, Mahmoud Darwish, Toni Morrison, Meshell Ndegeocello, Suji Kwock Kim, Larry Levis, Sunni Patterson.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I go for months without writing and then write nonstop for about a month or so. An impasse for me is a sign that I simply have nothing to say, and that is fine. I had to learn that it was fine not to write. As far as what keeps me going, I’m still not sure. Something just clicks on and stays on until it runs its course. I frequently add to a Notes document any lines I come up with or words I need to look up. My memory is very poor, so I do not retain what I read. Sometimes, in order to assist with retention, I have to activate the knowledge, meaning implement it into something tangible like a poem. The joy in this is that most things I read are fresh when I return to them. The downside is that it takes me forever to do scholarly work and I’m not the best person to speak with about books or even single poems unless they are in front of me.
Advice: Just write. Study first, then write. We cannot control the reception of our work, but we can decimate our imaginations by trying to write “for the people.” Who are these monolithic people? Why think so little of them and call that kindness? Recently, there seems to be this idea that one has to write for someone else or a specific group. So many folks want to be mouthpieces for a community for which they’ve set low standards reminiscent of the oppressive forces they claim to want to counteract. In that writing, it is assumed what these potential readers will and will not understand. In the same instant that this idea wants to be communal and welcoming, it is also condescending and ostracizing. We have enough low expectations set on us by others, especially if we are persons of color, women, part of genderqueer and LGBT communities, and/or any other marginalized group. Almost every poem I’ve written my mother has seen. She may or may not understand each one but she has read those poems and encouraged me to keep going. She tells me what she loves and what touches her. So do my nonliterary friends and family members. It’s not up to me to assume there are restraints on their ability to understand me. My poems aren’t a standardized test that my friends need help cheating on, or that can even be “passed.” Though we have limitations, language barriers, literacy barriers, and other factors, we are also complex and capable if allowed to be.
What’s next: I’m working on trying to eat right and go to bed on time.
Age: 30.
Hometown: Chicago.
Residence: Bennington, Vermont.
Job: I am a visiting professor in English at Bennington College.I try to make some kind of living off my work but not to the point of distraction. Writing does keep me alive, even during those times it does not make money.
Time spent writing the book: The longest poem in the book I started in 2005 and it was a single-page poem. It continued to grow across different iterations of the book until it became a twenty-page poem while I attended Washington University in St. Louis for my MFA. I was convinced to shrink it down to fourteen pages and officially finished it in the spring of 2014, nine years later. Many of the poems I wrote that were originally in the book did not make the final edit. Most of the poems that made it I wrote during my MFA, so about two years.
Time spent finding a home for it: It depends on which version of the book we’re talking about. In my naiveté I submitted manuscripts to contests as early as 2009. They were unready projects that I would have regretted if they were published. It only took a few months for what was to become Thief in the Interior to find a publisher. When it started finalizing for prizes and open submissions I knew it would eventually get picked up.
Eleanor Chai Standing Water Farrar, Straus and Giroux
“This, I’ve seen. I see it always. I carry it in my torso as surely as a Buddhist lives in the skin of his own corpse.”
—from “Little Girl’s Auricle”
How it began: I can’t say I was compelled to write a book. I was compelled to write poems. I am not a native speaker of English, but I no longer speak my native language (Korean) for complicated and disorienting reasons. Finding shapes in language that hold for longer than the instant of speaking has always felt crucial to me.
Inspiration: I am happiest when I am completely and obsessively engaged. Nothing absorbs me as thoroughly as trying to get a poem on the page. So I suppose living the life I wish to live is what inspires me.
Influences: I spent years transcribing the complete correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. For a few hours each night for six years I was dropped into their intimate “Dear—.” Their devotion to their poems and to poetry continues to move me. Alongside one of her letters, as an afterthought, Bishop wrote: “And did you like the 4 Quartets?” exactly so, with the number 4 and the word Quartets. The “And,” the casual usage, the numeral 4—not the word Four written out—thrilled me. It felt spontaneous, in real time (which it was) and I felt a sliver of how it may have been to read the Four Quartets as a newly made thing, without the edifice of criticism bracing it. The Four Quartets constitutes at least one of my Ten Thousand Things. To see it considered before it aged into its full regalia made me feel closer to its nascence, its being made. I’ve also had the great gift of deep friendship with Frank Bidart. He is one of the finest, most exacting makers I know. His obsessive devotion to the needs of a poem stuns me. I love T. S. Eliot too much. I love Louise Glück. I love James Baldwin. I love Ezra Pound. I love Clarice Lispector. I love Mark Strand. I love Walt Whitman. I love Frank Bidart. I love Marguerite Duras. I love Winnicott and Freud. I love Bishop. I love Robert Frost. I love Louise Bourgeois. I love Toni Morrison. I love Van Gogh’s letters. I LOVE The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I love ethnographies.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I turn to silence, or rather, I surrender to it. Silence, and superior voices. And panic.
Advice: I wish I had some useful advice. Mine was a strange path.
What’s next: I am working on one new poem. Hopefully I will be able to write it and hopefully more will come. I am also trying to compose, or rather assemble, Mark Strand’s oral memoir from tapes we made in Nova Scotia and some of his unpublished writing. I am following the practice and principles he used in making his beautiful, singular collages from paper he himself made. I think of his sentences as his “paper” and I am trying to tear that material and place it on the page into a compelling narrative of his life. It’s such fine material; the task is daunting but animating.
Age: 49.
Hometown: My hometown is a complicated question. I was moved around quite a lot as a child. I suppose I would say Seoul, South Korea,though I’ve not been home in many years.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I started a school in Westport, Connecticut.My daughters are now both in college so I am trying to give myself the time and space to write poems, finish editing the Bishop-Moore letters with the meticulous Saskia Hamilton, and work on Mark Strand’s oral memoir. Working at the school demanded all of my energy when I was there.
Time spent writing the book: I have no idea how long it took me to write this book. Decades.I knew that my daughters’ time in my everyday care would not last forever. I’ve always been achingly clear that I had eighteen years to share our days, to participate, even shape what would be our holy, our minute particular (William Blake). I am devoted to the minute particular. Much that I value in life resides there. I did not have a childhood with my mother, so being a mother to my children every day and night seemed a privilege and a miracle.
Time spent finding a home for it: I was very fortunate that Jonathan Galassi, my editor [for the Bishop-Moore letters], liked my poems and took my book.
Justin Boening Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last Milkweed Editions (National Poetry Series)
“does sadness leave us? Is that the source of sadness?”
—from “Banquet”
How it began: The book’s title is taken from the thorny end of a Kafka parable called “The Coming of the Messiah.” It finishes: “The messiah will come on the day after he is no longer required, he will come on the day after his arrival, he will come not on the last day, but on the very last.” I’ve seen others attempt to negotiate these paradoxes by changing the definition of last day or very last. I guess that makes as much sense as anything else. But for me, this is a portrait of a savior who comes, not belatedly, but by not coming at all. I think it may have been this parable that put me on the road toward writing a book of failures, of mistakes, which is how I’ve come to understand the collection—a book where one learns to become a god by being unrecognizable, for example, or where one rules the world by being the only one in it. I don’t know. I’m probably the last one who should be talking about such things. More generally, though, I think what compelled me to write this book may have been distance from God. For me, poetry is an expression of this desire to reach out, not to communicate per se, but to get closer to whatever it is that’s always just beyond reach or sight. Maybe that sounds too lofty, but it’s a longing I’ve felt all my life, and a longing I’ve often associated with the essence of whatever it is I’ve called “human.” Stevens finishes his poem “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” by saying, “We make a dwelling in the evening air / In which being there together is enough.” I think that about sums it up for me—what compelled me to write these poems.
Inspiration: The unshakable belief that poetry is absolutely necessary, that it’s inextricably linked to language itself, and that, therefore, it’s one of the most human things we’re allowed to participate in.
Influences: As far as writers go, I return most often toFranz Kafka, Wallace Stevens, Clarice Lispector, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath,Mark Strand, and Lucie Brock-Broido.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I almost never push it. If a poem is frustrating me I walk away, watch some YouTube, read writers who know what they’re doing. Distraction is good for poetry, I think, maybe because it breeds uncertainty. In fact, I feel I do my best writing when I’m not writing at all.
Advice: Hold off as long as you can. And once you lose your patience, only send the work to people and presses you already respect and trust.
What’s next: Lately I’ve been putting a lot of my energy into a new magazine and press called Horsethief Books that Devon Walker-Figueroa and I have started together. As far as my own poems go, with the loss of so many friends and luminaries I’ve been writing elegies as of late.
Age: I’m 35and will be turning 36 on February 13 (yes, I was born on a Friday).
Hometown: I was born in Saratoga Hospital, on a holiday down to see the ponies. I call Glens Falls, New York, my hometown though, since I ate my first corn on the cob there, stole my first bike there, etc. I moved to New York City when I was six—pretty young—so that’s a home for me as well, though not my origins. Recently, I was eating a 1:00 AM chicken fried steak in Missoula, Montana, at a dive called the Ox. Two guys, who had just finished playing poker at the front card table, stood up suddenly from their counter stools. One guy walloped the other guy in the eye, snatched up his rucksack, and hustled out the front door. No one called the cops. Few were alarmed. That’s the place I’ve lived the longest, actually—Missoula is another home.
Residence: Iowa City.
Job: A living? Maybe you could call it that.I teach and edit, mostly.
Time spent writing the book: Well, there are some whispers from poems I wrote while I was a graduate student, but they’re really only whispers. The oldest poem in the book is one I wrote the moment after I handed in my graduate thesis—that was in 2011. The newest poem is one I wrote in 2015. So I guess that means four years?
Time spent finding a home for it: I sent out bashfully in 2013, and then in earnest until the book was taken in 2015.
Safiya Sinclair Cannibal University of Nebraska Press (Prairie SchoonerBook Prize)
“Tell the hounds who undress me with their eyes—I have nothing to hide. I will spread myself
wide.”
—from “Center of the World”
How it began: I began writing poetry as an act of survival. Faced with the silencing exile of womanhood in an oppressive household and a patriarchal society that discouraged me from speaking and thinking, the only way to make sense of my burgeoning selfhood was here on the page, by writing it down. Then, plagued still with the strange linguistic exile of writing in English, the language of the colonist, while dancing wildly in the brazen self of Jamaican patois, the only way to unfracture this amputated history was by making a home for myself on the page, and building new modes of language by writing poetry.
When I was younger I was very dismayed by how little of myself and my family I could trace into the past, and was very inspired by the oral folklore and storytelling tradition passed down by my mother and my aunts. It became very clear to me that this oral folklore and storytelling was a matriarchal tradition—a way of preserving our history, both family history and Jamaican history. This not only incited and inspired me to write Cannibal, but it was also a way of saving my own life, of making a record of our songs and mother tongue, and paying tribute to the women who have woven our words and days into existence.
Finally, it was imperative for me to confront the macabre history of the Caribbean itself—to expose the postcolonial roots of violence here; to explore how being “Caribbean” was so closely linked to being “savage,” being cannibal. By confronting the ugly language and prejudices that continue to plague all people of the African diaspora, I hoped to renarrativize the toxic gaze of white supremacy at home and abroad, to shatter its fictions through the shared ritual of poetry.
Inspiration: Always in my ear is the ghost meter of the Caribbean Sea, its old rhythm and singing. The possessed tempo of Pocomania, and the fire-root of duende. I am continually inspired by the fertile landscape of Jamaica, which fevers my dreams—our lush hills and blooms, our heavy fruit trees. The way nothing here grows politely. The wild animal of my childhood and its green river of memory.
I’m fascinated by Goethe’s lifelong search for the “Primal Plant,” from which grew my own notion of the black woman’s body as that elusive Primal Plant, the first site of exile. Early on in college I was very startled by Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, which showed me the wild possibilities of breaking form, how I could build my own labyrinth of mythification as a way to honor and transfigure family, a way to alchemize our folklore. I’ve also been writing from a desire to dismantle Western texts like Shakespeare’s The Tempest, to repossess Caliban as a throat through which the poems could sing, our one-drop rhythm transgressing violence and its lingering exile, a linguistic rebellion forged here through the music of linguistic mastery.
Influences: The poets, artists, and writers who feed the fire and bloodroot of my family tree are Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Frida Kahlo, James Baldwin, Federico García Lorca, Caliban, Aimé Césaire, Caravaggio, Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez, Paul Celan, Rita Dove, Wangechi Mutu, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I can’t say I’ve ever truly reached an impasse in my work. There’s still so much unwritten of Jamaican history, folklore, and culture, still so much of our rich lives that I need to give voice to, in my own small way. Because I read so feverishly, and am always engaging with topics outside of my field—mostly science, history, and philosophy—I’m always finding new ways to enter into a poem, then discovering how many ideas are already in dialogue with each other in that lyric space. I am often so possessed with language, with the roots and wide-ranging shadows of words, that I’m always chasing one word or another down a new corridor of inquiry. If I hit a wall, I’ll listen to music that opens a window unto memory and centers me in a specific time and place, or I’ll reread authors who’ve dazzled and nurtured me, who take the top of my head off. Both English and Jamaican patois are two deep oceans ready-made for diving. And I dive, unabashedly. There, I find the far-reaching tentacles of naming and wording in our society so expansive that I would have enough material to interpret for a lifetime.
Advice: Take your time. Read widely, expand your references and vocabulary; make the poems sing.Nowadays I think there is such a rush to publish a first book, and many poets might feel pressured to send something out that isn’t quite ready. My strongest advice is to be unafraid of waiting, to sit with your words and work until you’ve cultivated them into something flourishing. Live inside the book until you’re certain you’ve grown something lasting, a bloom of your absolute best self. You only have one first; make it count.
What’s next: I’m currently working on a memoir about growing up in a strict Rastafarian household in Jamaica, and feeling estranged in my own country (Jamaica is a heavily Christian country, and Rastafarians are an oft-ostracized minority.) At that same time, I began feeling exiled by my blooming womanhood, and eventually had no choice but to rebel against a religion and a home that made no room for me.
Age: 32.
Hometown: Montego Bay, Jamaica.
Residence: Los Angeles.
Job: I’m a third-year doctoral student at the University of Southern California, where I’m getting my PhD in literature and creative writing.
Time spent writing the book: The bulk of the poems were written in the three years I was in the MFA program at the University of Virginia. The book was my final thesis, and I spent a few months after that rearranging, focusing, and editing the manuscript. One poem snuck into Cannibal that was written in college six or seven years ago. After the book was accepted, I was still tinkering a bit with structuring, and I knew it needed three more poems (circling around a specific theme) to make it cohesive and complete in my mind, so I slipped three new poems into the manuscript, right down to the wire. Those last three poems were completed in September 2015.
Time spent finding a home for it: I waited to send out the manuscript (and most of its poems) until I felt certain that it was ready to breathe on its own full-bloodedly. The fall after I graduated from the University of Virginia I started submitting Cannibal to prizes, and was really fortunate to have the book accepted to a couple of places by the summer of 2015. Cannibal won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry that June. So it was a year or less of sending it out into the world until it was accepted—a fitting nine months.
“The stars are anxious. What version of yrself do you see when you close yr eyes?”
—from “IRL”
How it began: I was torn between a stable relationship and predictable future with a boring dude, and an exciting but uneven fling with a pretty young thing. It kind of broke open all the similar divisions inside me: how to transition into my thirties; hailing from the foothills of rural California but living in the busiest city in America; being a modern, queer, indigenous person with a lot of inherent self-love in a world that tries to deny me life, dignity, liberty, etc.
Inspiration: Survivors, femininity, experiences that happen within the span of ninety minutes (like movies [sometimes sex]).
Influences: A. R. Ammons, Beyoncé, Mariah Carey, Amy Winehouse, Janet Jackson, Nicki Minaj, June Jordan, Muriel Rukeyser, Jeffrey Yang, Sherman Alexie, James Welch, Joy Harjo, Louise Erdrich, Chun Li, Storm, etc.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I watch a movie—or a film, if that’s your vibe. Seeing something begin, build, and end in a certain amount of time gives me faith in a creative faculty.
Advice: Keep the faith, b, keep the faith.
What’s next: I’m working with Tin House to finish up the final edits on Nature Poem, the follow-up to IRL coming out May 2017. I’m about halfway through writing book number three, Junk, and have started Food—the final book in the four-part series I started with IRL. Also a roundtable-discussion-type podcast called “Food 4 Thot” about four multiracial, queer writers in New York City discussing literature, sexuality, and pop culture (hashtag elevator pitch) whom I met at the 2016 Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop. Teaching long-poem workshops. Also being a good friend, a good lay, and a good human.
Age: 33.
Hometown: The Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I have approximately sixty-nine side piece jobs, including teaching/touring/freelance stuff, and a main thing that involves writing—but I’m not at liberty to talk about it just yet. If I told you I’d prolly have to kill you.
Time spent writing the book: Officially, I wrote the book from May to August 2014 in an office in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, facing the entire trunk of Manhattan, but in a way I was writing the book for thirty years.
Time spent finding a home for it: I sent it to allllll the book contests and once or twice even got a personalized rejection, but mostly sturdy no’s from everybody. I don’t blame them, it’s a weird nonstandard poem and the initial manuscript was probs 70 percent realized. Sampson Starkweather at Birds, LLC saw me read one night in the city and asked me to send him something. Thankfully they had enough faith in my voice and work ethic to help me guide the book toward its final form.
If you want to get a sense of where contemporary poetry is headed, there’s no better place to start than with recently published debut collections. Each year sees a rich, diverse lineup of debut poets whose work offers fresh perspectives, exciting new ideas and experiences of language, and unexplored subject matter. Even tried-and-true poetic topics—history, the beloved, nature, family, identity—are explored, interrogated, and lit up in new ways. This past year is no exception: In 2015, debut poets took on everything from Chinese unicorns and Mesoamerican shape-shifters to jazz trumpeter Chet Baker and The Real Housewives television franchise. They wrote sonnet cycles, erasures, conceptual poems, and lyric poems that skip across the page and open their readers’ eyes, illuminating ideas at turns thrilling, devastating, and always alive.
For our eleventh annual look at debut poets, we selected ten of the most compelling debuts published in 2015. The work of these featured poets runs the gamut, though each book celebrates the ways in which language, as Hannah Sanghee Park says, “shifts, morphs, steals, and fractures through time.” We asked all our poets to share the stories behind both the genesis of their poems and the publication of their collections—how they navigate publication and how to, as Alicia Jo Rabins puts it, “forge ahead despite setbacks and rejections and silence while also holding the whole endeavor lightly.” Their answers prove that there is no single path from a manuscript to a published book, and that inspiration can be found in the most ordinary and unusual of places—from the former home of a much-admired poet or a yard full of weeds to a drive on the freeway along the U.S.–Mexico border. But there is one common thread woven throughout: the invocation to submit to one’s obsessions, to write past the machinations of the publishing industry and the expectations of others and into the refuge of language.
Robin Coste Lewis Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems Knopf
“Once, I thought I was a person with a body, the body of something peering out, enchanted and tossed.” –from “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari”
How it began: Actually, I began writing poetry because of a very serious accident that left me with permanent traumatic brain injury. At one point in my recovery (because reading, writing, and speaking made me very symptomatic), my doctors told me I could only read one sentence a day, only write one sentence a day. After that shock began to wear off, I decided to use their prognosis as a formal writing restraint. I spent many months not trying to write a poem, but trying to write only one very fine line. It sounds romantic, but it wasn’t. At first, I was profoundly depressed. After years of teaching literature and writing, what was a life without books? Writing a line a day was an experience in tremendous discipline. It was thrilling to work again, yes, but to work silently in bed for hours, without writing or typing, working just inside my head, was also very macabre. Slowly, my illness became a sort of game. I’d find the milk in the oven and crack up laughing. It was pure poetry, brain damage. It was profoundly humbling.
In short, all those skills artists must acquire—stillness, concentration, discipline, compression, wrestling with the ego, all of it—walked in the door, hand in hand, with brain damage. That’s the real story behind my book. Poetry was the means by which I learned to reenter the world after traumatic brain injury. What compelled me to write was the desire to continue living an engaged life. Poetry allowed me to reenter my work, but from a different door.
Inspiration: Epic literature, especially Sanskrit epics and comparative mythology. I’m also quite nuts about Sanskrit court poetry. Another court I love to visit is the royal kingdom of jazz. What both Sanskrit poetry and jazz have in common, I think, is their mysterious and masterful use of silence, their ability to achieve their goal by laying it on thick while pulling way back simultaneously. Any art form that can balance sublime expression with tacit restraint has me from hello. I’m also inspired deeply by individual, quiet responses to history. I love the historical nerd-freak no one wants to research because they are too strange or eccentric or unconventional to make anyone proud. I am compelled by people who simply do their work, whatever that might be, quietly. Quiet devotion is a primary source of inspiration for me, however that manifests. I usually find much of that in the colored ancient world. And then, of course, I swing the other way toward that entire, ongoing waterfall of post-modern, post-colonial, often queer, cultural production, which makes me just swoon.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Honestly, I have never reached an impasse with my writing. My impasse is that I can’t stop writing. It’s not cute. I’m completely hypergraphic. This is not to say, however, that any of the madness I write is any good. I merely mean to saythat not being able to write isn’t my issue. However, what occurs before writing—that’s where my demons skip and play rope. I used to think the longest road I’ve ever traveled was from my bed to my desk. All of those voices inside my head that tell me, “No, you can’t say…” or, “No, you better not…” or, “What would [fill in the blank] do or say or think?” I don’t know how to describe this, but I know it had something to do with being born in the sixties, being a child in the sixties and witnessing just heinous experiences without any true developmental ability to articulate it. We all had a profound sense of injustice growing up. It was impossible not to feel that, watching profound degradation so common it felt like air. Our education was a travesty. So just holding a pencil when I was younger was very difficult for me. No one took our minds seriously. As a child, all I had heard was that, historically, I, as an African American, was not believed to possess a real mind; or I, like my ancestors, only had three-fifths of a brain. I mean, lest we forget, our bodies were once dissected, literally. So my struggle has never been within language. Language has always, always, been a refuge.
What has never felt natural, however, is this sickening history wherein bodies like mine were positioned to play the role of buffoon. It’s a rare moment indeed that I pick up my pen and do not immediately remember that in America it was considered illegal for black bodies to read and write. Just holding a pencil for me is deliciously transgressive. So history is my impasse—nothing else. What keeps me going? The work of others. Others, definitely.
Writing Prompt: When I was at Harvard, Jamaica Kincaid once said in our workshop, “Write about that which most embarrasses you.” I think that’s profoundly good advice. It’s so easy, isn’t it, to climb atop a soapbox and recite a poem about the ways in which we believe the world is fucked up? When I write that way, I’m certain all I’m doing is insulting my reader. Who, for example, doesn’t know the whole world is in cinders? And so I believe my work can be more effective, can reach deeper inside the reader if I say, “It is I who feel profoundly fucked up,” and then explore why meticulously. I like to use tenderness as a weapon, a seduction, a door to leave ajar so that my reader will walk inside the poem and feel safe, even in the face of profound historical horror. Trust me, I’m not saying all poems should begin with shame or embarrassment as a motivation, not by any means. I like writing all kinds of poems in all kinds of forms. I’m simply saying that instead of using writing prompts, I sometimes ask myself, “Well, what are you most avoiding?” And for me that’s a good place to begin.
Advice: I’m not sure I’m the right person to give advice about first books. I am fifty-one after all. Don’t get me wrong, I love my age, and I love that I’m just now publishing my first book, but it seems as if the “debut” has become a sort of genre, a particular ideal regarding what constitutes a first collection. I’ve known for a long while that my work has never fit into that schematic. My book, primarily, is about the history of race and Western art. It’s an experiment in archive. It’s not really what first-book publishers are looking for. Also, many debut prizes and grants have age limits or requirements. So by the time I settled into raising my son and finding my place in my work, my writing was already disqualified from even applying because I was older. Ultimately, it’s worked out just fine. And anyways, I don’t think I really had much to offer any reader when I was thirty-five. I was a mess. What could I have done with a page at thirty-five besides romanticize being a thirty-five-year-old mess? I am more of a tortoise than a hare. I like what taking my time reveals.
Also, I adamantly don’t believe that because one writes it follows naturally that one must also publish. I’ve written books for one person, and shared it only with that sublime audience of one. I’ve burned others. Virginia Woolf said rather famously that writing is a far greater pleasure than being read. I’m from that camp, I think. I’m deeply suspicious of the market.
So, I guess this is a long way of saying that if I have any advice to poets trying to publish their first book it’s this: Try not to look up too often at what others are doing. Your work is interesting because it’s yours, not because of where it lands in the publishing world. Ignore literary fashions and stay close to your own hand. Try not to please anyone or any particular audience. Find out what the real work is inside of you, then find the courage to do it well. Resist the temptation to be clever. It’s sexy, but it’s a sure sign that your mask has control of you, and not the other way around. Just do your work.
What’s next: I’m revising the other two manuscripts I finished while at New York University. The first, “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness,” is about the Arctic and its history of both colonialism and exploration. I use this history as an allegory for post-colonial desires for subjectivity. Besides the circumpolar diaspora and the history of expansionism, the book pivots primarily around African American Arctic explorer Matthew Henson. Henson codiscovered the North Pole, but was reluctantly given historical credit, due to race relations not only in the United States, but in the sciences specifically. I’m also revising another collection that I also began at NYU, a project titled “The Pickaninny Wins!,” a double-erasure of a 1931 children’s book originally titled The Pickaninny Twins.
Age: 51.
Hometown: Compton, California.
Residence: Los Angeles.
Job: I’m a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Southern California. It’s a hybrid PhD, so I do both creative and critical work. That is, I write poetry, and research-wise, I work on the historical relationship between African American photography and African American poetry.
Does your job allow time to write? Is this a serious question?
Time spent writing the book: All in all, the whole book probably took five or six years—with brain damage and a new child thrown in for good measure.
Alicia Jo Rabins Divinity School American Poetry Review (Honickman First Book Prize)
“Let me teach you about beauty: a slanted shipwreck draped in its own torn sails.” –from “The Magic”
How it began: I am obsessed with a few consistent themes: how weird it is to live in time; the magic of teaching and learning; the closeness and distance between people; and the mysteries of living in a body, like sex, love, travel, food, beauty, death.
Inspiration: Ancient Jewish texts are a huge influence and inspiration for me: the practical, the mystical, and especially the intersection of the two. I also draw on yoga, ritual, and spiritual practice in general. Music is a big part of my life too—both the experience of making music in many different genres and touring itself have defined and marked my life. Kenneth Koch taught me, in college, not to take myself too seriously in my poems. New York City inspired me tremendously for years, and since moving to Portland I’ve been inspired by the forests and plants, the weeds in my garden. Having children is immense and mind-blowing and inspiring, and I draw a lot of inspiration from my dreams as well.
Influences: Anne Carson, James Joyce (Ulysses in particular), Sylvia Plath, Christopher Smart, John Donne, J. S. Bach, Pablo Neruda, Laurie Anderson, Harryette Mullen, Brenda Shaughnessy, Julio Cortázar, Lucille Clifton, Yoko Ono. And so many of my contemporaries and friends, whom I won’t name for fear of inevitably leaving some out.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Because I usually write in a stream-of-consciousness mode and edit later, I don’t really experience impasses. Something is always happening, even if it’s only the breath. I did stop writing for three years in my early twenties, though. I had studied poetry intensely in college and felt like I had strained my reading and writing muscle, and that my relationship to writing was too ego-based and needed a dramatic reset. I completely let writing go and promised myself I would only start again if it returned naturally, without any pressure or ambition or intention. I was glad when it came back a few years later, and my relationship to poetry was transformed. I guess it’s important to me to maintain some paradoxical mix of being stubbornly devoted to poetry, enough to forge ahead despite setbacks and rejections and silence, while also holding the whole endeavor lightly.
Advice: The best advice I ever got was at an artist training from Creative Capital: If you aren’t getting rejected from 90 percent of the things you apply to, you aren’t aiming high enough. It flipped the script for me so that rejections meant I was doing my job, rather than failing at it. Along the same lines, I try to separate the work of being an artist into two parts: my writing self, who is sensitive and passionate and all that stuff, and my personal assistant self, who just sits down with a cup of coffee and submits poems without any emotional investment. Or, to put it briefly, play the long game.
What’s next: I’m writing my second book of poetry, about motherhood and giving birth and gardening and midwifery goddesses and how psychedelic the whole experience of pregnancy, birth, and early parenthood is. I’m also touring with my songwriting project Girls in Trouble(we just released our third album), and with my solo chamber-rock opera A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. AndI’m slowly moving towards writing a nonfiction book I’ve been mulling over for a while now.
Age: 38.
Hometown: I was born in Portland, Oregon, and grew up in Towson, Maryland. I also lived in New York City and Northampton, Massachusetts, for years and they both feel like home.
Residence: Portland, Oregon.
Job: I patch together a living between my work as a writer, musician, composer, performer, and teacher of Torah. As Eileen Myles says, “There are so many different packages for the same energy to travel through.”
Does your job allow time to write? This isn’t an easy question for me to answer. On the one hand, I’d love more focused time to write, but on the other hand, the line between “writing” and “job” is blurry in my life—songwriting is part of how I make my living, for example—and I have always written in the nooks and crannies of my day. Also, for the record, I find that being a parent of two young children demands more consistent presence of mind than any job I’ve ever had, and (alongside all the great stuff) is therefore more of a challenge for me in terms of writing time.
Time spent writing the book: The oldest poem in the book is eighteen years old and, amazingly, in exactly the same form it was in when I wrote it in college. It wasn’t originally part of the book, but I added it back in somewhere during the editing process. The rest of them were written over the past twelve or so years, though almost all of them were continually revised while I submitted and resubmitted the manuscript. It almost feels like two different processes—eighteen years of writing the poems and seven of intentionally editing the manuscript. Wow, that’s a long time.
Time spent finding a home for it: Five years, though I edited it throughout, so it was a very different book by the end.
Three favorite words: Amethyst. Sage. Antediluvian.
Alicia Jo Rabins reads “How To Travel” featuring the face of Alicia McDaid. Video by Zak Margolis on Vimeo. Check out another recent reading Rabins gave in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as part of the Poetry in America series.
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Jay Deshpande Love the Stranger YesYes Books
“But we will never have enough of being wrong about the other, not once.” –from “Amor Fati”
How it began: The earliest pieces of the book came together during my MFA, but it had a very different form and was wrapped around a couple series of poems that ultimately didn’t belong. I’ve always been drawn towards the love poem and lyric descriptions of beauty, but in that period I began to experiment more with the unfamiliar and the disturbing. I found my poems coming alive at the moments when the erotic and the alien braided together. At some point I started to see how the loss of the beloved is not just an occasion for utterance, but also an opportunity for greater reckoning with what it means to be human, and alone, and therefore deeply connected. Following these themes, I wrote a chapbook called “Love the Stranger” shortly after grad school; it was another year before I realized that it held the keys to this book.
Inspiration: Visually, René Magritte’s work was an essential influence on the book. Also middle-period Federico Fellini. Denis Johnson’s poems have always been a major touchstone for me, and they helped to shape parts of Love the Stranger. Environmentally, I took great inspiration from a residency at the Saltonstall Arts Colony in upstate New York. A lot of unseen and necessary work happened there in the woods and on the trails.
Influences: Denis Johnson, Marie Howe, Timothy Donnelly, Ben Lerner, Lyn Hejinian, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Ashbery, Bianca Stone, Richard Siken, Lucie Brock-Broido, E. M. Forster, Marilynne Robinson. Among visual artists, Dorothea Tanning’s work in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and Diana Al-Hadid’s sculptures.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I have long conversations with my brother, who is a musician and writer, about why we do what we do. I reread Michael Ondaatje. I think about Frank Ocean’s songwriting. I play old standards on the piano and explore chords until I remember that some parts of experience stay blissfully outside of words. And then I go spend time with the people I love and try to learn from them. I’ve also found that I have trouble writing when my work has moved away from the physicality of pencil and paper for too long. Then I’ll print out a number of pages of poetry (mine and others’) and mark them up excessively.
Writing Prompt: Just to get the lede out and free things up, I like to take an old poem of mine and perform a phonetic English-to-English mistranslation on it. “I, too, dislike it” becomes “Why’d you ignite this?”; “A certain slant of light” becomes “The skirt and pants of night,” etc. The goal is to keep the music and change everything else.
Advice: Read widely and make it your job to really consider the character of different presses: what’s the range of authors they publish, what qualities and ideas do their books seem to value, how do their books feel in your hands.
What’s next: In addition to writing individual poems to push my voice in new directions, I’m at work on an essay collection and a book of translations of the Egyptian poet Georges Henein.
Age: 31.
Hometown: Boston.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I write for Slate and other magazines.
Does your job allow time to write? It’s a constant navigation, but at the moment it works pretty well.
Time spent writing the book: About five years.
Time spent finding a home for it: It took one year; I sent it to six places. It was a finalist for the 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize, and then was accepted by YesYes Books during its open reading period.
Three favorite words:These kinds of lists always make me squirmy! But if it’s absolutely necessary: sandwiches; flensing; and, if it can count as one word, chocolate milk.
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Hannah Sanghee Park The Same-Different Louisiana State University Press (Walt Whitman Award)
“Just what they said about the river: rift and ever.
And nothing was left for the ether there either.” –from “Bang”
How it began: I had a lengthy first manuscript I was editing and sending out, and wanted a change of pace and page. I was aiming for concision. At the book’s inception, I was researching myth and folklore in Korea, in the hopes that I would write a manuscript about stories. I found that a lot of Korean stories had counterparts elsewhere (with its own cultural DNA), and that mix of universality and specificity was compelling. But at its simplest, the book is a paean to what comprises storytelling—language, in its words, sounds, imagery, and meanings. It was at the end of my research that I found H. D.’s Trilogy. I kept these H. D. lines on a Post-It above me as I wrote: “her book is our book; written / or unwritten, its pages will reveal // a tale of a Fisherman, / a tale of a jar or jars, // the same—different—the same attributes, / different yet the same as before.”
Inspiration: International folklore, fairy tales, and mythology—shape-shifters, hybrids, dualities, and metamorphoses. The same could be said about language as well—how it shifts, morphs, steals, and fractures through time. I’ve always loved form, prosody, and wordplay. When I started writing: H. D., James Baldwin, and Marina Tsvetaeva. The letters of Philip Larkin, John Keats, and Sylvia Plath. The bulk of it: everyone mentioned, Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Merrill, Samuel Beckett, a physical dictionary and thesaurus. Poetry by my friends and mentors. The editing and the end—Don Mee Choi and Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman. And in full circle, I turned back to H. D., Baldwin, and Tsvetaeva in different forms—short stories, plays, and nonfiction. When I was finishing the book, I was also learning how to write screenplays, which was helpful in economy and setting. But the running fount has always been the communities I’ve been lucky to be a part of. Wherever I go, I have met brilliant people who make me a better writer: professors, colleagues, peers. The book was written in Korea, Washington, New Hampshire, and California, and the natural landscapes influenced the book’s backdrop.
Influences: This is an ongoing, disparate anthology, so to keep it short—other than the poets I’ve mentioned above, my immediate community is always influential. Since moving to Los Angeles, I’ve been stunned by these local powerhouses: Kima Jones, Blas Falconer, Ashaki Jackson, Marci Vogel, and others. And the many poets I’ve met and hope to meet who are keeping poetry alive. Recently, the students in the 2015 Poetry Out Loud Competition inspired me—I experienced familiar poems in new ways.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I read, or watch films or TV. I used to be a night writer, and my excuse was that there were no distractions—I’m off work, everyone around me has gone to sleep. But sometimes I need to clean, cook, decide now’s the time to take up a new activity, and then write. As if expending all this other energy, or resting my mind allows the mind to reset. Writing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and open dialogue is necessary. I call people—usually my writing partner, Jane Shim—to discuss ideas. What keeps me going is the belief that even if writing is frustrating or maddening, it’s ultimately worth it. Petrarch: “And so desire carries me along.” And caffeine, too. Getting the ball rolling in the right direction sometimes feels Sisyphean, but when it starts, the speed and the growth is euphoric. No distraction is great enough. Writing is like a labyrinth. Sometimes there’s a reward at the end of it; sometimes you’re pursued by Sallie Mae and her Echidna spawn Navient. But nothing feels better than actually moving through it.
Writing Prompt: How much a word can be dissected, rearranged, and reimagined—imagined etymologies, defamiliarization, constraint-based writing. In short, the intersection of structure and play.
Advice: Keep reading, writing, rewriting, and sending, even when it seems like there’s a void. Dream big (a bromide that’s useful), and go there. That’s what I needed to hear in the publication process. Every time my writing boomerangs back to me, there’s a chance to reassess my work and my thoughts. I know form rejection boilerplate, but I also know the generous people in my life who have cheered me on. Having both rejection and support provides a kind of ballast. Knowing why you write despite x is invaluable—the pure joy of creating is as powerful as the final creation.
What’s next: Writing scripts, rewriting scripts, treatments, short stories, and starting a new poetry book.
Age: 29.
Hometown: Federal Way, Washington.
Residence: Los Angeles.
Job: Freelance writer.
Does your job allow time to write? Yes, but personal writing requires juggling. It’s a constant turning of a lazy Susan—a little here, a pass there, but all that matters is movement.
Time spent writing the book: For this book specifically, about one and a half to two years. It was fast because I had the luxury of a fellowship and a residency. I did a two-month residency at the MacDowell Colony (paradise) where I kept to a tight schedule. I woke up early, ate breakfast, and went back to my Internet-less studio and wrote. As I ate lunch, I read. Then I wrote until dinner. When I came back from unwinding, I’d write until I needed to sleep. Rinse and repeat. I’m naturally lazy, so I need this kind of structure. The bulk of the book was written then, because most of the day could be devoted to writing. However, a poem I wrote about five years ago made it in as well—a long-lost relative finding her family.
Time spent finding a home for it: Before this book, I sent my first manuscript out for about four to five years. When I was satisfied with The Same-Different, the plan was to send to a few places each cycle, as I was on a tight budget. But I lucked out, and The Same-Different was accepted in its first submission round.
Three favorite words: Cleave, move, empathy.
Hannah Sanghee Park reads from The Same-Different at the Academy of American Poets’s 2014 Poets Forum Awards Ceremony.
Jonathan Fink The Crossing Dzanc Books
“The bodies hang like chimes within the boughs. Perhaps the height is welcome to the dead” –from “The Crossing”
How it began: What poetry offers, and what set me off writing this book, is the visceral engagement with language that welcomes attention to imagery, tone, rhythm, narrative, metaphor, politics, ethics, humor, myth, and justice, among many other things. Like a painter who simply likes the smell of paint or a potter who likes the feel of clay, the pleasure of embarking on a writing project, for me, always resides in the tactile pleasures of language.
Inspiration: W. H. Auden has a great line, “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings,” and I often feel inspired to write about personal, imagined, or historical material about which I have mixed feelings. The poems in The Crossing vary from an eighteen-section poem about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire to individual poems about myth, art, and my personal experience growing up in West Texas. In all cases, I was inspired to write these poems not because I knew what I wanted to say about the subjects, but because I felt compelled to explore and investigate the complicated material through poetry.
Influences: Too many to name, of course, although I would say, of contemporary poets, Jane Kenyon for the singular, resonate image; Marie Howe for book structure and thematic commitment; and B. H. Fairchild for lyrical, narrative expansiveness. I’ve also been immensely fortunate to work with wonderful writing mentors and teachers, including Natasha Trethewey, Mary Karr, George Saunders, Junot Díaz, Brooks Haxton, Michael Burkard, and Robert Flynn—all stunning writers who are unfailingly generous, constructive, and kind.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Raymond Carver defined a writer as someone who is willing to stare at something longer than anyone else. For me, that experience has been true; there is no trick to overcoming a writing impasse other than continuing to return to what I’ve written, looking for unexplored possibilities and/or unfulfilled expectations.
Advice: Submit to your obsessions, whatever they are. Resistance is futile. An honestly obsessive collection always resonates much more fully with a reader or editor than a collection constructed with an eye toward the market or some imagined palatable consensus. Remember that a camel is a horse designed by a committee.
What’s next: Dzanc is bringing out a finished second collection of my poetry, a book-length sonnet sequence titled, “Barbarossa: The German Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Siege of Leningrad.” I’m also nearing completion of a nonfiction collection primarily consisting of place-based immersive and investigative essays. Some topics include the fracking boom in Midland, Texas; the D. B. Cooper plane hijacking and parachute jump; the changing scope of U.S.–Cuba relations; and the failings and successes of the criminal justice system as seen through the lens of an assault trial in Pensacola, Florida; among other essays. I’m also working on new individual poems.
Age: 40.
Hometown: Abilene, Texas.
Residence: Pensacola, Florida.
Job: Associate professor and director of creative writing at the University of West Florida.
Does your job allow time to write? Yes, in the sense that my job contributes to the conditions that help make writing possible, but no job has ever prevented me from writing if I felt compelled to write.
Time spent writing the book: Approximately six years.
Time spent finding a home for it: Another six years after finishing and publishing the individual poems.
Jonathan Fink reads from The Crossing, published by Dzanc Books.
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Rickey Laurentiis Boy With Thorn University of Pittsburgh Press (Cave Canem Poetry Prize)
“I want to be released from it. I want its impulses stunned to lead. This body. Its breath. Let it. Let the whole pageant end.” –from “One Country”
How it began: I think about a friend and fellow poet, Phillip B. Williams, with whom I shared a suite at my first Cave Canem retreat in the summer of 2008. He had a manuscript then (actually several), but wouldn’t share it with me to read until I had something manuscript-length to share with him. So, that’s what I think Cave Canem must mean by fellowship: that kind of camaraderie, support, and push, however hard. I eventually did produce a manuscript and shared it with Phillip, but it was one very different in many ways from the Boy With Thorn that would eventually find publication. We helped shaped each other’s books along through the many years, but more importantly we helped compel each other’s poems. Poems first.
Inspiration: I’m likely to be inspired by anything in the right context: an overheard conversation on the street, a song, literary criticism, philosophy, a personal experience or, as is most present in my book, visual art. I was profoundly influenced and inspired by a course I took while at Sarah Lawrence College—queer theory, with Julie Abraham. That course threw a hammer into my ways of thinking. And not because it attempted to rebuild the pieces (although, in some ways, it did), but because it made me more aware of the pieces themselves and the various social/political discourses that have shaped them.
Influences: Here are some artists: Glenn Ligon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Björk, Piero della Francesca, Wangechi Mutu, Georgia O’Keeffe, David Bailly, Kara Walker, Edgar Degas, Judy Chicago, Yoko Ono, Jay DeFeo, Caravaggio, Auguste Rodin, Romare Bearden, Frida Kahlo, Anonymous. And I remain deeply influenced, in particular, by Jessye Norman’s rendition of “Deep River,” which she sung at a special concert with Kathleen Battle at Carnegie Hall in 1990 and most of which you can find recorded on YouTube.
Writer’s Block Remedy: My obsessions keep me going. I think about visual art and how, in the example of an artist like Mark Rothko, who explores the same terrain canvas after canvas, or at least seems to, I learned to recognize and trust my obsessions: the images, concepts, figures, and motifs that repeat in my head. Obsessions are ideas that I can at least remember are there at those anxious moments I’m willing to believe in a thing like “writer’s block.” But writer’s block, simply speaking, doesn’t exist if one’s willing to look back at all one has done and, realizing knowledge is always limited, thinks, “Nope, I need to try this again.” I still believe that.
Writing Prompt: Outside of what I offer to my students, I’m not sure I think about writing in terms of prompts, at least not thematic ones. If I chose any, they’re usually prompts that put restraints on the form or structure of the poem. A part of me vaguely remembers diagramming sentences as a young Catholic school student and so, in some ways, that finds itself in the pleasure I get from trying to sustain a single sentence over the course of a poem, or at least over several lines. There’s something about that exercise that seems dancerly to me, rhythmic.
Advice: So, there are thirty-three poems in my book—but that doesn’t mean I only wrote thirty-three poems. Of course I wrote way more than that at various stages in my growth and education as a poet—some that made the cut; some that I realize were the equivalent of a pianist practicing her scales; some that only exist as a single ghost line in another poem; some that might eventually find a home in a future collection, who knows. My point is to say that the process takes time, so much time, and, while I’m a fan of putting artificial restraints on a poem so as to get to more creative uses of language, I’m not a fan of artificial time restraints on publication. Just as I think that there’s something potentially problematic in knowing too much about what a poem is about when starting, so too I think there’s a problem in trying to know or demand when you should publish a book. Let the book tell you. And when it does send only to places that carry books you can’t live without.
What’s next: What they don’t tell you is that the second your first book is accepted for publication at a press (or wins a contest), let alone when it is physically published and released, all the poems you begin to write suddenly sound in a slightly different key, so to speak. The poems are suddenly working under the slight burden of knowledge that they may one day become (or that you need them to become) a second (or third or fourth) book. I am working hard now to try to get back to the kind of specific ignorance one writes from before the first book gets published: when you’re simply writing poem by poem because of some insistence that you have to; this poem must be written, alone, individual, not as a sequence necessarily, not because of some “theme” or “project,” but simply because it demands itself to be written, and for you to write and learn by it.
Age: 26.
Hometown: New Orleans.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Currently, I teach a course at Columbia University and at the Saturday Program at the Cooper Union. I’m also the director of an after-school writing and literacy program at the Harlem Children’s Zone.
Does your job allow time to write? No—but that’s a good thing. When I’ve been fortunate enough to be invited to some residencies, for instance, I’ve found that the sudden surplus of free, unstructured time can do harm to my writing process, insofar as I begin to occupy my time in other ways besides writing new work. Residences are great for editing older drafts or for ordering a book. But it’s in the gaps, in the minutes I steal when I’m on a crowded subway, when I’m in a less-than-exciting meeting or when I should be asleep, for example, that I find myself writing the most new material.
Time spent writing the book: The earliest poem in the book I wrote as a first-year at Sarah Lawrence College for a class (my first poetry class ever!) with Suzanne Gardinier. That was in the fall of 2007. The last poem I wrote that was also included in the book was written somewhere in late January/early February of 2014, after having seen one of my favorite Basquiat paintings in the flesh in a exhibit in New Orleans earlier that Christmas. So it would seem, then, that it took seven years to write all thirty-three poems that comprise Boy With Thorn (it took two years, alone, to complete one in particular). I was born on February 7. Seven’s always been my favorite number.
Time spent finding a home for it: Maybe about a year after Phillip first brought the idea to my mind that I could write toward a manuscript, I sent it out to a handful of contests. To my surprise, the manuscript was honorably mentioned for Red Hen Press’s Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. But I’ll remind you that this manuscript I’m referring to was, in significant ways, still very different from the book I would come to publish. After that, somehow, and quite suddenly, I wasn’t interested so much in rushing towards book publication. I concerned myself with the quality of the poems themselves, and with seeing them enter the world individually. So there was a large gulf of time when I didn’t submit a single manuscript to any contest or publisher, which mostly paralleled my graduation from Sarah Lawrence and matriculation into the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis. A year after I had received my MFA and had moved back to New York City, I sent my new manuscript to at least two publishers and four contests—four specific contests that either had a history of awarding books I admire or were being judged by poets I greatly enjoy. I didn’t get as much as a nod from three of them but, again to my surprise, I won one! And that it was the Cave Canem Prize just seemed so coming-full-circle perfect! Anyway, depending on how you read this narrative, you can say it took several years to find a publisher, or only a few months.
Rickey Laurentiis reads two poems from Boy With Thorn, published by University of Pittsburgh Press.
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Natalie Scenters-Zapico The Verging Cities Center for Literary Publishing
“You forgot to weed your eyes,so brush has grown wild in your stare.” –from “When the Desert Made Us Visible”
How it began: Homesickness. I wrote most of these poems while I was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I felt deeply haunted by things in my past that I had spent a lot of time ignoring: femicide, narco-violence, and the effect our broken immigration system had on me and the people around me. Suddenly, I felt compelled to face these things in a way I had never had an interest in before. For some reason, being away from the site of my liminality gave me the bravery to voice what had been silenced in me for so long. I also became very interested in the ways that people who are not from El Paso–Juárez were representing my border cities in art and pop culture. I wanted to write down my love affair with a place so often depicted as violent and corrupt.
Inspiration: The drive from Albuquerque to El Paso, Texas, and from Ciudad Juárez to Chihuahua was a huge source of inspiration. I would also drive the border freeway and take in that space, that in-between space, that illusion that is so physically damaging. And, of course, late-night conversations with my husband who is a border-rhetorics scholar, and who for most of our relationship was undocumented. When we fell in love, we also fell in love with each other’s pain, and the two cities that held us suspended in that pain.
Influences: While working on the collection: David Dorado Romo’s Ringside Seat to a Revolution, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Norma Elia Cantú’s Canícula, Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 spent a lot of time on my desk. These books deeply influenced the way that I conceive of borders and of my sister cities, El Paso–Ciudad Juárez. I also spent time with Federico García Lorca, Miguel Hernández, Anna Kamieńska’s notebooks, Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, Rigoberto González, Alberto Ríos, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I cook something that takes a while to make, but that I know how to make well. The repetitive motions of cooking keep me grounded in the body, but allow me the freedom to let my mind wander. I also like knowing that many women before me spent so much time in that domestic space, and I remind myself how important it is that I choose to be there, but that I don’t have to be there.
Writing Prompt: I spend a lot of time looking at the art books for the Bienal Ciudad Juárez–El Paso art shows, and then writing ekphrastic poems or flash fictions. It keeps me connected to where I’m from while helping me to see the border in new ways.
Advice: It is as important to know what you’re trying to accomplish in your collection as it is to know what it actually accomplishes. Sometimes placing your own will on a collection is the worst thing you can do.
What’s next: I’m in the early stages of working on the next book, which deals with border-security technologies, surveillance, and weapons. I’m interested in depictions of violence, how we consume that violence, and render that violence in art.
Age: 27.
Hometown: El Paso, Texas.
Residence: Salt Lake City.
Job: I teach high school English and creative writing.
Does your job allow time to write? It is always a struggle for me to write as a high school teacher. I have to schedule time for me to physically sit at my desk and write.
Time spent writing the book: It took me four years of obsessively writing and revising in constant rotation.
Time spent finding a home for it: One year.
Three favorite words: Sobremesa, cariño, and teeth.
Natalie Scenters-Zapico reads from The Verging Cities, published by The Center for Literary Publishing.
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Corina Copp The Green Ray Ugly Duckling Presse
“Let rest here my lyre and Hear soon the moon’s fair Lecture in black” –from “Pro Magenta”
How it began: I was reading Mark Ford’s biography of Raymond Roussel when I first came across mention of the green ray. In the same month, I saw Éric Rohmer’s Le rayon vert, and I attended a François Laruelle lecture. The notes from all three came to be the poem “Pro Magenta,” which set me into thinking about synchronicity and how I compose. The wheels of the actual manuscript were put into motion a few years later, when Ugly Duckling Presse editor Abraham Adams proposed a book project.
Inspiration: These poems range in composition date from 2010 to 2015, so what resonates now as far as inspiration goes is a list that I’ll spare you—but they are distinct, and each poem holds one or another source (or many simultaneously) in (I hope) different ways. Jean Day’s Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium was formative for me when thinking about devotion and source materials and how to think and write alongside inspiration itself, to construe it as an interlocutor, or a threat, or a friend, or a fetish, etc.
Influences: When I first started seriously writing poetry, I was reading Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Laura Riding Jackson; and I was obsessed with Alice Notley and Carla Harryman. Then Miles Champion introduced me to Tom Raworth and Jean Day—they both had a big impact. I had another turn when I really read Lisa Robertson, who led me to read Hannah Arendt. Richard Maxwell, the playwright, was another turning point; and the work of Big Dance Theater, Thomas Bradshaw, Kristen Kosmas. For a few years now, Ingeborg Bachmann, Marguerite Duras. And my friends are influential. They’re all brilliant. Can I say brilliant?
Writer’s Block Remedy: I’m easily comforted and astonished. By that turn from feeling like New York City’s rag doll, in particular; from that real desire to leave my life and start a new one; from that exhaustion; from walking into a diner or taking a train. I have to be in that place to write; I have to have a connection to future good feeling in general if I expect myself to write. Also: film and bibliomancy, both. Or Robert Ashley, an example. Opening to pages/sounds/images of work that I love will always help. Going to the library, feeling overwhelmed. But I can go for months without writing; I am often waiting to feel angry, or any emotional event, or just a deadline to push me. But accepting the stretches of not writing is okay, too. I mean: If I feel alert and awake and thoughtful and without remorse, then I am listening, which for me is also writing. I compulsively transcribe overheard dialogue or I note exchanges between people or how they are physically positioned. If I’ve gone months without this sort of openness, then I’m probably depressed and not writing. To help me accept that, I remember something Doris Lessing said—to paraphrase, you must use these energies while you have them, you will lose them; you are more clever now than you will be later. Terrifying.
Writing Prompt: Feeling constrained.
Advice: I took a strange route, and had faith I’d eventually get to work with people who cared about the poems. Having faith in those relationships is important.
What’s next: I’m working on an essay/score that reads and writes through the reading of the painter Alan Reid. The piece will appear in a monograph of his work that should be out in the spring.
Age: 36.
Hometown: I was born in Lawrence, Kansas, and grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and New Orleans.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I usually have two to three part-time jobs. I am currently a staff writer for the Poetry Foundation, I freelance copyedit and proofread, and I coordinate a master’s program in international finance and economic policy at Columbia University.
Does your job allow time to write? I’ve made it this far. But the answer is no, not at all. I would always prefer to be writing, to put it gently.
Time spent writing the book: About four or five years.
Time spent finding a home for it: I was very, very lucky in that Ugly Duckling approached me for the book. This was initially around 2012 or 2013, but I still had to finish writing it. We changed the date of publication a few times. They were patient with me.
Three favorite words: “Mom” and “or” and “Dad.”
Corina Copp reads an early version of her poems from The Green Ray, published by Ugly Duckling Presse, for the sixth Antibody Series in 2014.
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Morgan Parker Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night Switchback Books (Gatewood Prize)
“If I hear you’re talking shit about me in your confessional interview, please know seven birds have fallen dead at my feet right out of the sky.” –from “If My Housemate Fucks With Me I Would Get So Real (Audition Tape Take 1)”
How it began: This book started as my MFA thesis at NYU. It was embarrassingly large—something like 120 pages—so I spent the summer after graduation editing it, reordering it, and trimming it down in preparation for sending it out to contests and presses. The first book is a weird thing—mine contains some of the first poems I ever wrote, back in college. Of course, when I was writing those, I had no idea I was writing a book. I was playing around with new forms and registers and confessions, and it was only in grad school that I started thinking about the poems as a collection. There isn’t a “project” in this book, there isn’t a linear narrative or one central event, so in conceptualizing the book, I spent a lot of time thinking about my obsessions, taking in a lot of art and TV and movies and music and poems, and meditating on the themes they have in common.
Inspiration: Television. The Real World and The Real Housewives franchises have been particularly inspirational for me—something about the strangeness and boldness of reality TV, its dark comedy, is a really important lens in my work. Jay Z and Beyoncé are also super important figures in my work—or rather, symbols of them, the idea of them. In general, media and pop culture always have a lot of space in my poetic brain. They’ve got everything I want to talk about: loneliness, performance, representations of femininity, insecurity, family, sociocultural inequity, glitter.
Influences: My collaborator Angel Nafis; my peers Danez Smith, Charif Shanahan, Nate Marshall, Natalie Eilbert, Rio Cortez, Monica McClure, Wendy Xu (I could go on forever here); my big brother Matthew Rohrer; my poetry auntie Eileen Myles; Terrance Hayes, Tracy K. Smith, Evie Shockley, Matthew Zapruder, Cate Marvin, Anne Sexton, Lucille Clifton, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes; visual artists Mickalene Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Keith Haring, Glenn Ligon, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, William Pope.L.
Writer’s Block Remedy: If I feel stuck, I stop writing for a while. Or I write in another genre for a bit. I read. I go look at art. I have good conversation with friends over wine. Lately I’ve been trying to honor silence rather than being anxious about it. The itchy, restless feeling always comes back; the poems always emerge. I’m realizing more and more that “writing” is only a tiny aspect of writing poetry.
Writing Prompt: Formal poetry. Specifically sonnets and pantoums. Usually, I edit the drafts until they’re unrecognizable as formal poems, but constraint really helps my writing process. Honestly, I see prompts as rules to break, something to rebel against.
Advice: Submit widely, but also be strategic and thoughtful: Don’t submit to a press you aren’t familiar with or whose work you don’t love; don’t submit to a press whose aesthetic isn’t up your alley. A press is really a home for a book—and for you, the poet, as well—so I think it’s important (and often neglected in conversation) to remember the relationship continues past manuscript acceptance. It’s an intimate thing. Also, know that as you’re submitting, you should keep editing. Don’t be so stubborn you can’t see room for improvement. Finally, make the waiting time productive. Write new poems, go to readings, meet new writers, build community.
What’s next: I’m editing my second collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and getting it ready for publication with Tin House Books in 2017. I’m also at work on a young adult novel loosely based on my teen years spent coming to terms with my identity and depression in a conservative, religious suburb—it’s my first foray into fiction, and an exciting challenge. There’s also a rumor floating around that there may be an essay collection in my future.
Age: 28.
Hometown: Highland, California.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Editor for Little A Books and Day One, adjunct assistant professor of undergraduate creative writing at Columbia University.
Does your job allow time to write? Sometimes. I write at night, on the weekends, and in transit (buses, trains, planes). I wish I were one of those people who could wake up and write before work, but I’m a snooze-button person. Ideally, I block out a day each weekend to write or edit. I’ve also been known to take vacation days to hole away uninterrupted.
Time spent writing the book: They were written and edited over the course of five years.
Morgan Parker reads two poems from Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, published by Switchback Books.
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Richie Hofmann Second Empire Alice James Books (Beatrice Hawley Award)
“I have nothing to confess. I don’t yet know that I possess a body built for love.” –from “Idyll”
How it began: I began writing the first poems in this book while I was working on the book collection at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut—a magical, haunted place full of Merrill’s things, his furniture, his books. It was inspiring to inhabit that physical space with the spirit of someone whose art had meant the world to me. His “The Book of Ephraim” was one of the first contemporary poems I loved. To be showering in his shower, sleeping in his bed, staring into that mirror. There, among his art and belongings, my desire to write poetry was given new dramatic force.
Inspiration: Love; sexuality; history; music, especially opera and art song.
Influences: My teachers, foremost. Jorie Graham’s Erosion. Benjamin Britten’s operas and song cycles. Daniel Mendelsohn’s essays. French and Italian poetry in translation. Stephen Sondheim lyrics. Installations by Félix González-Torres.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Sometimes it’s important for me to get outside of poetry, or outside of literature altogether. To listen to music, look at a painting or sculpture or installation, see a concert, attend a lecture on something strange but intriguing. These other arts not only provoke new subjects, but they might offer new ways of thinking formally as well.
Writing Prompt: Write a poem in which your own name is invoked and explored.
Advice: Cut almost everything. Make your book as lean and dynamic as possible. Give yourself time to grow toward and away from poems, and see what new object you can create by subtracting and pruning and chiseling away.
What’s next: My new manuscript of poems explores my family’s history in Germany: my ancestors who owned a small bakery on the Rhine and my own childhood years spent in Munich. It’s about inheritance, history, power, violence, privilege, gender and sexuality, childhood, bookmaking, typography, and Mozart.
Age: 28.
Hometown: Haddon Heights, New Jersey.
Residence: Chicago.
Job: PhD student in English at Emory University in Atlanta.
Does your job allow time to write? It often does—in that reading and researching and working through critical questions is an essential part of writing poetry for me. Though I’d have to say, I like teaching even better, because I find interacting with people (usually) more stimulating than solitary research and writing.
Time spent writing the book: Four to five years.
Time spent finding a home for it: A year and a half.
Three favorite words: Exquisite, please, future.
Dana Isokawa is the assistant editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Ten years ago, Poets & Writers Magazine launched its annual Debut Poets series—a feature that aimed, quite simply, to highlight some of the best first books of poetry published in the previous year. In the decade since then, the series has grown into something all its own, bringing to light some of the most inspired, and inspiring, emerging poets from across the country—along with the ambitious, vital, and lasting collections they create. A number of the poets we’ve featured have gone on to become familiar names in the national writing community—Dan Albergotti, Todd Boss, Jericho Brown, Victoria Chang, Michael Cirelli, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Aracelis Girmay, Dana Goodyear, Tyehimba Jess, Dorothea Lasky, Joseph O. Legaspi, Alex Lemon, Ada Limón, and Justin Marks, to name just a few from the early years. But what’s most remarkable, when looking back through this list of poets (which you can see in full starting on page 90), is that all of them, regardless of how prolific or well known, made a commitment to writing, dedicating themselves to bringing words to life despite the jobs, everyday obligations, and myriad challenges that inevitably arise as time ticks along.
In celebration of our tenth annual Debut Poets roundup, we reached out to those poets—all 111 of them (one, Landis Everson, sadly, passed away in 2007)—and asked them to recommend their favorite debut collections of 2014. A good number responded, building for us a longlist of some of the year’s most exciting books. From that we selected the ten poets featured in the following pages. The task was not easy: We looked at both the work within those collections and at the poets themselves, in an attempt to curate not only a broad range of voice, style, content, and form, but also a diverse list of poets representing a unique breadth of age, background, and experience. These ten poets find inspiration in everything from neuroscience, outer space, black holes, and race to Anglo-Saxon elegies, Vietnamese musicals, honey badgers, and Nina Simone. Despite their many differences, though, they all point to a sense of wonder, exploration, curiosity, and community as essential to their writing—and they are all creating urgent, powerful, and important work. And what connects them even more fundamentally is that regardless of where they come from, what they do for a living, or where they draw inspiration, they all do it for the same reasons: for love of the work, and, as Sally Wen Mao puts it, to break into the silence, disarm the solitude, and find a place where poetry lives.
Sally Wen Mao MAD HONEY SYMPOSIUM Alice James Books
Abandon hive. If the hornet breaks the heat net,
save yourself. Abandon yen. Abandon majesty. Spit the light out because it sears you so. —from “Apiology, With Stigma”
HOW IT BEGAN: In early 2012, I decided that the poems I had collected needed to transform into a manuscript. What compelled me? Probably the naked trees on Linn Street, my tiny yellow living room full of books and ghosts, or the radio silence of the days. Those winter days were short and frigid: Every day I walked past a frozen waterfall and slipped on cracked ice. I knew I had to write to break into that silence, disarm that solitude.
INSPIRATION: The earliest incarnation of this manuscript was a thesis project I titled “A Field Guide to Trapped Animals.” In this manuscript, I sought trapped animals: the honey badger, Laika the space dog, endangered flightless birds such as the kakapo, taxidermists’ specimens, disgruntled pandas in captivity, a flock of doomed pigeons. I admired the honey badger for its inane yet marvelous tenacity to sate its appetites for dangerous animals. From that obsession I found bees, and the magical honeys that they can make, including mad honey (meli chloron), a noxious honey made from rhododendrons or azaleas or oleanders that causes drunkenness, hallucinations, and heart palpitations in humans. There I was able to find the manuscript’s spine—humans who poison themselves for the sake of their desires.
INFLUENCES: Ai, for her poems are fire escapes into the terrifying psyches of others. Lorca, for his theory of the duende, and his poems that wander through the darkest and loneliest spaces in New York City. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, for Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, one of my earliest introductions to poetry. Most recently Cathy Park Hong and Bhanu Kapil, women writers whose hugely exciting works transgress boundaries and shift borders in terms of subject, syntax, and form.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m working on a new manuscript, Oculus, that maps out the border between exposure and invisibility: ghosts, cinema, digital life, and Internet voyeurism. In this manuscript, Anna May Wong, the Chinese American film actress who peaked in the 1920s and 1930s, acquires a time machine and travels through time searching for her perfect role. Along the way, she meets some of her contemporaries (Josephine Baker and Zora Neale Hurston), and some of her successors (Bruce Lee), and she is dismayed to see some of the future films that continue to cast Asian Americans in a stereotypical light. Other poems in this manuscript are about magnetic levitation trains, Chinese bodies exposed in the Bodies Exhibition, a model who wears a homeless man’s pants, and girls competing for a national singing competition.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: Sometimes the writing stops, but there is never enough material for a poet’s arsenal. I look for high places and vantage points, new spaces to invade and interrogate. I look for old books in science libraries. I research poetic obsessions or I try to look for new ones. I visit contemporary-art museums, natural-history museums, planetariums, space museums, botanical gardens, science libraries, bookstores, parties, concerts, or arboretums. I love the feeling of movement, of being on a train heading to someplace unknown. My entire self is built around this wonder, this movement, this search for adventure. I seek adventures, and they float back as poems eventually.
ADVICE: Be impermeable. Research your presses: Read their books, see if you like their covers, get to know their submission and evaluation process. It’s like finding an apartment, really: Send your manuscript to those presses that you could envision as a home for your poems to live. The key is to find a place where your poems live.
AGE: 27.
RESIDENCE: Brooklyn, New York.
JOB: I’m an instructor in the Asian American Studies program at Hunter College in New York, where I teach Asian American Poetics, and a teaching artist at several sites around Brooklyn.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Yes, thankfully, but who knows for how long. In the mornings I write, or late into the night with a cup of milk tea.
Sally Wen Mao reads five poems from Mad Honey Symposium, published by Alice James Books.
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Charlotte Boulay FOXES ON THE TRAMPOLINE Ecco
As much as I wanted that boy saved, I wanted him eaten. —from “Watson and the Shark”
HOW IT BEGAN: I’ve written poetry since high school, and graduate school helped me think about ways a disparate collection of poems might become a more or less cohesive whole. Foxes isn’t a book “project,” although it has some themes and interests that run throughout. These include exploring ideas associated with journeys, both concrete and abstract, as well as questions about desire and loss.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: I’ve joked that in almost any of my poems you can find references to animals and weather, but I think these are less inspirations than touch points that help me structure my concerns. I spent time in my early twenties living in India, and that was certainly an education, as well as an inspiration. I’m also continually inspired by visual art—paintings and photography and sculpture can do things that words can’t, but poetry can create a dialogue with them. This book owes a debt to Cy Twombly, whose work continues to fascinate me. In working on Foxes, I particularly relied on and admired the work of poets Saskia Hamilton, Nancy Willard, Robert Hass, and Susan Hutton.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m working on both poems and essays. I’d love to write a second book more quickly than this one, but we’ll see.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I try to get outside and take a walk, if I’m smart, and if not I try to turn as far away from my own obsessions as possible, to get out of my own head. That may be how I discovered the YouTube home video of foxes jumping on a trampoline in someone’s backyard—aimless Web surfing. What keeps me going is reaching for the moment when a poem comes together, when it becomes itself and something separate from me.
ADVICE: Keep going. Cycles of feeling good about your work that alternate with doubt that any of it is worthwhile are completely normal. Listen to the judgments and suggestions you get from readers you trust, test them out, and then throw them away if they don’t feel right. Submit to all the places where you’ve always dreamed of being published. Don’t hold anything back.
AGE: 36.
RESIDENCE: Philadelphia.
JOB: I’m a grant writer at the Franklin Institute science museum.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? This is something I continue to struggle with. I thought that leaving teaching and entering a 9-5 job would leave me freer to write without the burdens of grading and office hours, but in fact I’m pretty invested in my day job, and it often occupies my thoughts both inside and outside the office. I do make more money than I did as an adjunct, though, so that’s something, but I have much less time off. I’m still figuring out how to make more room in my daily routine for poetry. I’m not very good at writing in small snatches of time, but I’m working on it, and hoping it will help me in ways I haven’t discovered yet.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: I worked slowly on the book for about seven years.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I sent it out to contests two years in a row, but had to withdraw from a few the second year after Ecco took it. My editor contacted me to ask for the manuscript after seeing a poem of mine in print, so that can still happen.
Charlotte Boulay reads the poem “Fleet” from Foxes on the Trampoline, published by Ecco. For more of Boulay’s work, visit www.charlotteboulay.com.
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Hieu Minh Nguyen THIS WAY TO THE SUGAR Write Bloody Publishing
Sometimes you don’t die when you’re supposed to, and sometimes you do. —from “Flight”
HOW IT BEGAN: For a long time, I didn’t know how to write about my traumas. I found myself writing the same poems over and over again, even if they didn’t make any sense to the world, even if I was the only person who would understand the significance of something as basic as a peach. I guess the hope was that if I could write the poems, if I could speak about my trauma in a way that didn’t seem careless, I could stop trying to explain myself. It is stupid to feel the need to explain yourself at all, but I spent a lot of time being ashamed of my experiences as a son, a body, a survivor, and I believe in the importance of confession as a tool to combat shame.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: So many movies! Since a lot of my book talks about my childhood, I spent a lot of time archiving my past, which meant interviewing my mother, visiting old neighborhoods, and watching movies from when I was younger. I spent endless nights watching and rewatching cai luong, which are essentially Vietnamese musicals. I was obsessed. Because my start in poetry began in spoken-word and slam poetry, many of my earlier influences came from performance poets, often poets who could transcend the arbitrary boundaries between the performance world and the written one, such as Rachel McKibbens, Bao Phi, and Patricia Smith. Through my participation in the performance world, I was lucky enough to have been introduced to the work of poets outside of spoken word, including Li-Young Lee, Anne Sexton, and Philip Levine.
WHAT’S NEXT: Currently I am applying to college. I abstained from going to college directly after high school, but now it seems like the right time. So basically a lot of my time has been spent writing college admission essays and studying for the ACT. It’s pretty terrifying; I haven’t done math in six years. As for poetry, I am currently working on poems about time travel.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I spend a lot of my time alone in my apartment writing, so when I come to a block, I feel like I’ve taken all I can from that space and need time to let it recharge. Usually, it requires engaging in something visual and half-social, like writing alone in a public location.
ADVICE: Give yourself permission to not explain everything.
AGE: 23.
RESIDENCE: Minneapolis.
JOB: Right now I am on a book tour, but when I’m back home I work at a haberdashery, selling fancy hats to fancy people.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? My job has been incredibly supportive; I’m very lucky. I’ve been able to take large chunks of time off of work to focus on writing or traveling, and am always welcomed back.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: Most of the poems in the book were less than two years old, some even a few months old, by the time it was released.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I started submitting the early version of the manuscript about two years before it got accepted.
Hieu Minh Nguyen reads a poem from This Way to the Sugar, published by Write Bloody Publishing. For more videos of Nguyen’s work visit www.hieuminhnguyen.com.
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Saeed Jones PRELUDE TO BRUISE Coffee House Press
in this town everything born black also burns. —from “Anthracite”
HOW IT BEGAN: The poems exist in the space between the reality of my life as a gay black man from the American South and the mythology I often dreamed of in my isolation. With that said, I wrote about half of the poems in the book before Boy, the character we follow throughout the collection, appeared to me. I wrote a poem in which a boy wakes up from a beautiful dream to find his father standing silently in the doorway of his bedroom. The silence of that moment—the interior and exterior worlds colliding—stunned me. Prelude to Bruise exists in the form it does now because I wanted to know what happened next and why.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: Homer’s The Odyssey, the last few collections Alexander McQueen designed before he took his own life, the way Toni Morrison involves landscapes and weather in the plot of her novels, and Nina Simone’s music. The poems of Lucie Brock-Broido, Patricia Smith, Rigoberto González, Anna Journey, Eduardo Corral, Jericho Brown, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Audre Lorde. The essays of June Jordan, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Susan Sontag.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m writing a memoir that charts a course from 1998, when I was 12, the year Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. were killed in hate crimes, to 2008, the year a straight man invited me into his bedroom, stripped down to his boxer shorts, and tried to kill me.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: When I’m struggling to write, I tend to begin reading in even more earnest than usual—earnest in the sense of pushing myself to read work beyond what I regard as my intellectual home and artistic neighborhood. I read to find work that will jolt me out of my usual habits and ways of approaching whatever I’m working on. Usually this works, but now and then it doesn’t. I’ve yet to be blocked in the sense of not being able to write for an extended period of time. Much more likely, I get frustrated because I hate what I’m writing and can’t tell if I should keep going or go in a different direction entirely. Reading then is like consulting a map for the best path forward.
ADVICE: Read five poems for every one poem that you write. You have to understand the broader landscape and community in which your work exists.
AGE: 29.
RESIDENCE: New York City.
JOB: I’m the editor of BuzzFeed LGBT.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? I’ve essentially finished one book and started another in the two years I’ve been working at BuzzFeed.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: I worked on the book for five or six years.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I submitted my manuscript to two contests; it was a finalist for the 2012 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. A few months later, Erika Stevens from Coffee House Press e-mailed me and said she wanted to talk. I was thrilled because Coffee House has published work by writers I love and respect, Patricia Smith among them. In retrospect, it all happened pretty quickly. I know I’m very lucky. Friends had told me to brace myself for a long haul so I tried to resist expectations. I’m glad my book wasn’t picked up as soon as I started submitting it; the act of being rejected and having to wait forced me to keep working at it.
Saeed Jones reads five poems from Prelude to Bruise for BuzzFeed. For more of Jones’s work visit theferocity.tumblr.com.
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Bianca Stone SOMEONE ELSE’S WEDDING VOWS Tin House/Octopus Books
What man does is build whole universes out of miniscule disasters and educational degrees. —from “The Future is Here”
HOW IT BEGAN: After I graduated from NYU’s graduate writing program in 2009 these poems just flooded in. I thought I’d be publishing my thesis, but that was just a stepping-stone to this book. When I look at Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, I realize that so many of these poems speak to past poems I’ve written. That’s important to me, to have my work never be static, moving forward but with those older poems still vital. For this book I wanted to write out the complexities of human love; how rich, but also how destructive it can be—and always somehow deeply inspiring. Being loved by someone is a great responsibility. And loving someone can be very hard, if part of their love is problematic.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: I’ve always been drawn to science, especially neuroscience. I feel that poets look at the world so differently because of something to do with the way their brains are wired: It’s not the normal, happy, healthy brain. It’s something else entirely. I also find inspiration in art—from reading comic books to sitting for hours in the Byzantine section of the Metropolitan Museum—as well as space travel, religion, and mythology. In addition, Vermont, where I’m from, is very important to the landscape in my poems, and I’m endlessly inspired by my friends and colleagues, all the amazing poets I know: listening to them, reading their books, collaborating with them. That’s really what keeps me going sometimes. I grew up spending a huge amount of time with my grandmother, the late poet Ruth Stone, and her poetry is ingrained in me. As is the work of my mother, novelist Abigail Stone. But of course I paved my own way too. I fell in love with Sylvia Plath and William Butler Yeats early on. Contemporary poets like John Ashbery, Sharon Olds, Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, and Mark Strand have been hugely influential.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m writing a lot of poems, some of which feels like a kind of memoir-essay-elegy-poetry hybrid book. I’m exploring narrative storytelling within the surreal. I’m also working a lot on what I call my Poetry Comics: that’s visual art and the lyrical working together, without one explaining the other. I use pen and ink with watercolor to do this. I find combining the text and image one of the most challenging things, but one that can be very exciting. We’ve been seeing a lot more of visual art in the writing world. I think it’s generative for students, too, to think about other means to express themselves and break out of the institutional bubble. Lastly, I’m in the (massive) process of rescuing and fixing up Ruth Stone’s house in Goshen, Vermont, and turning it into a nonprofit writers retreat and artist space.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: Sometimes I’m not feeling anything and I take a break from myself, find a well-written, engaging book of poetry and immerse myself. Getting out of your own head is just the key. Drawing or painting, too, lets my mind rebuild.
ADVICE: Be patient. Rather than focus on book contests, focus on making a community of support. Do readings, start magazines, take classes; make connections with like-minded poets and use those connections. Once you have a good, solid, thriving community of contemporaries, everything follows.
AGE: 31.
RESIDENCE: New York City.
JOB: I think this is a great question for writers, because usually it’s not as simple as saying, “I’m a poet!” Although, I always say that first, bluntly, without apology or pretention. I love people’s reactions. Usually they say, “Not a lot of money in that, huh?” and I say, “We actually make it work!” Really, there’s always so much more to being a writer than people think. Being a writer means you usually do many things, all of which is informed by your creativity. My livelihood comes from being a personal assistant to a poet at NYU. I also teach online classes in poetry and the visual image, guest lecture and teach, and do poetry-related freelance illustration. I’m also the chair of the Ruth Stone Foundation and editor-cofounder of Monk Books.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? I work from home mostly, and my work involves lots of multi-tasking. It’s a blessing and a curse because everything I do is self-motivation based. It’s hard sometimes to pick which task to focus all my energy on. But yes, compared to everyone else I know, I have lots of glorious writing time. I just have to make myself do work-work and poetry-work equally.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: About four or five years. It went through so many revisions, editing, cutting, and adding. I was editing poems right up until the last second. It’s a lot of deciding what’s working, and what you’re clinging to that perhaps should be let go.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: Four years. I submitted to a lot of contests, which is really a crapshoot. I started to realize I needed to find other ways to get it in someone’s hands. A lot of times that happens at poetry readings, when you get along with someone who is a publisher, and they like your poems, you’re like, “Well, guess that I have this book you can look at!”
Bianca Stone reads a poem from Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, along with original illustrations and animation by the poet, for Tin House. For more of Stone’s videos visit vimeo.com/tinhouse.
Sara Eliza Johnson BONE MAP Milkweed Editions (National Poetry Series)
all moments will shine if you cut them open, glisten like entrails in the sun. —from “As the Sickle Moon Guts a Cloud”
HOW IT BEGAN: The book began as a seafaring narrative—influenced in part by a stormy winter in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod—and expanded outward into the world of Bone Map. As the poems expanded outward, as they further considered the contemporary American moment, they also became more visceral and brutal, and eventually I realized I was writing an organic and ancient violence into the book, that the book was in some sense about violence as origin.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: I immersed myself in the materials of strange, old worlds (ones often as alluring as they are terrifying): Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the 1967 Czech film Marketa Lazarová, the Anglo-Saxon elegies and riddles, the sixth-century voyage of Saint Brendan the Navigator, Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise. The poets and artists who have particularly influenced me include Lorca, Plath, Celan, Ingmar Bergman, and the Polish artist Zdzisław Beksinski, who said, “I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams.”
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m still in the early stages of the next book, but it’s one preoccupied with the apocalyptic moment. I’m writing a lot about human annihilation and alien or inhuman spaces, such as primordial earth, future earth, outer space, and deep sea.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I’m always looking for new sources of fascination to spark my imagination: a book on black holes or human evolution, a visually exciting film, a visit to a museum or the aquarium. If I’m experiencing writer’s block or feel stuck in a comfort zone, I’ll more aggressively seek those sources out. It’s in part this curiosity—and the potential to transform my curiosities into art—that keeps me writing and creating.
ADVICE: Don’t be afraid to cut the dead weight. Beware of nostalgically clinging to poems that marked artistic milestones for you. And just because a piece is good—or has been published in a grand venue—doesn’t mean it belongs in the project you’ve undertaken. If you think of the book as a dynamic, breathing thing, or as a unique textual place, every page should seem indispensable when you read through it.
AGE: 30.
RESIDENCE: Salt Lake City.
JOB: I’m a PhD student in the creative writing program at the University of Utah, where I also teach.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Though often my academic and creative work intersect, it is not always easy to balance work obligations and writing, especially because it can be a challenge to switch on the creative regions of the brain at will. It is not only necessary to carve out the time to write, but the mental space as well. To get myself in the right headspace, I usually clear my desk of papers and books, put on some music (headphones are essential), and pour some coffee if it’s daytime or (just a little) bourbon if it’s night.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: About five years.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: Bone Map was selected for the National Poetry Series in its first round of submissions. The NPS was the fourth book contest to which I submitted the manuscript.
Sara Eliza Johnson reads the poem “Dear Rub” from Bone Map. For more of Johnson’s work visit saraelizajohnson.com.
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F. Douglas Brown ZERO TO THREE University of Georgia Press (Cave Canem Poetry Prize)
my body, rain drenched on the inside and you arriving faster than the next song —from “The Talk”
HOW IT BEGAN: What initiated this book was the birth of my son, then that of my daughter, five years later. It really came together thanks to the Cave Canem retreat and the influence the writers gave then and continue to give. I am both a Cave Canem and Kundiman fellow, and the folks who are connected to these two phenomenal organizations are generous, intelligent, and the best advocates for poetry that I know. They all helped me push and delve deep into the work. When my father died five years ago, so many poems erupted. When I stepped back and looked at the body of work, a book made sense.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: My kids and father were the immediate sources for this. As I mentioned, the poets of Cave Canem and Kundiman really push all of us involved to believe in the work we’re doing. However, back in ‘99 or so, I was in the MA Creative Writing Program at San Francisco State University, where I took a class called “What the Body Knows.” Toni Mirosevich and the rest of the class helped push me to see my father body as a vehicle for exploring my growing baby who was walking, talking, and figuring out the world. Music also factors into my work. I recently wrote a poem trying to imitate the cadence of Beyoncé’s song “Flawless.” Cornelius Eady’s You Don’t Miss Your Water and Yusef Komunyakaa’s serial poem “Songs for My Father” were also big inspirations. Both helped me take mere observation and make it stand up to the duty of fatherhood. Later, Natasha Trethewey’s books helped me reexamine pain, and [learn] how to open the voices of fatherhood that had been surrounding me as a parent.
WHAT’S NEXT: I am working on two projects: first, more fatherhood poems, and second, my namesake. The fatherhood poems are a collaborative work with poet Geffrey Davis, who I met at the Cave Canem retreat in 2012. At that time he was a new father, and what we shared regarding fatherhood—mostly our attempts to be better fathers—inspired us to continue via poetry. We are conducting workshops together, discussing poems on fatherhood from seminal poets, and doing our own work to complete what we hope to be a manuscript. Whatever it becomes, the work is good thus far, and liberating.
My complete name is Frederick Douglas Brown. How could one named after such a remarkable figure avoid it? In my work I am specifically responding to the paintings of Frederick Douglass’s life by the Harlem Renaissance painter Jacob Lawrence. My ekphrasis poems have been a pleasant journey for me. I have been able to do plenty of research, but I hope to view the Lawrence work face-to-face before releasing a final manuscript. As it is, I have completed fifteen poems.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: Reading is the best cure for me when the words are not coming together on the page or are nowhere near the page. Reading gives me permission to try new approaches. If I’m stuck or in a rut, an imitation poem helps. To see my friends publish work helps too. There is a bit of competition in every poet, and I don’t want to fall behind. I let that happen before, but Cave Canem teaches us how valuable our voice is.
ADVICE: Two things were told to me that really helped me finalize the work: 1) This is not your thesis. Approach it as a means to speak to a larger audience. 2) Friend and poet Jenny Factor told me, “Doug, this is not the only book of poems you’ll write about your kids or your dad.”
AGE: 42.
RESIDENCE: Los Angeles.
JOB: I’m an English teacher at Loyola High School of Los Angeles. I’m also a deejay on the side.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Most of the time is does not! I have been a teacher for twenty years. From my experience, teaching and writing dip from the same well. When I am “on” in the classroom, rarely does that translate to being “on” in my writing. I am accustomed to having my hands in as many projects as possible: parenting, writing, teaching, deejaying, etc. When I am at my best as a writer or teacher, my job is singularly that. This, of course, excludes fatherhood, which asks/needs me to be whatever my kids need.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: This work took sixteen years to complete. The poems about my kids took a while, mostly because I did not want the book or any individual poems to be a slideshow of my family. Also, many of the poems explore the mystery of fatherhood, so the logic of the poems, like parenting, had to be thoroughly sifted. I was learning how to be a father as I was writing the poems (and still am). The poems about my father came rather quickly: I waited a year after his death, and then started writing them. The drafts were strong and needed minor tweaking, but tweaking nonetheless.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I submitted the manuscript on three separate occasions. The first two submissions were a year before I won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2013.
F. Douglas Brown reads two poems from Zero to Three, published by University of Georgia Press. For more of Brown’s work visit fdouglasbrown.com.
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Cindy Williams Gutiérrez THE SMALL CLAIM OF BONES Bilingual Press
Garland my bones with those who have gone before, colli, And the ones who have gone before them, colli. Return, Return.” —from “If I Were a Nahua Poet”
HOW IT BEGAN: When I entered the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Program (graduation was a gift to myself for my fiftieth birthday), I knew I wanted to explore two things: Mesoamerican poetics, specifically Aztec “flower and song,” and the poetry of feminist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who secured a cell of her own 250 years before Virginia Woolf insisted on her own room. I realized later that this was my way of bridging borders as well as history. I was born and raised in a Texas town on the border of Mexico, and my father worked for the U.S. Immigration Service on the bridges in Brownsville for more than thirty years. Though he is the “Williams” in Williams Gutiérrez, he was raised in a Mexican mining camp in Santa Bárbara, Chihuahua. Primarily of Welsh and German ethnicity, he was also one-quarter Cherokee and had an abiding respect for native peoples and their way of life. My mother’s heritage (the “Gutiérrez” in Williams Gutiérrez) can be traced to a sixteenth-century land grant from the King of Spain. In exploring Mexico’s history as a backdrop for my own mixed heritage, I realized that I was not bicultural (Anglo and Hispanic), as I had thought growing up, but rather multicultural—braiding together my father’s indigenous and Anglo roots with my mother’s Hispanic heritage.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: My father has been my muse. He was a history buff and loved telling stories about Mexico. He was also always fascinated by women’s lot throughout history: He read voraciously and spoke often about the misogynistic treatment of Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc, Sor Juana, even Marilyn Monroe. Early on, he made me believe I could do anything, that the world was mine. In high school, he’d return from his shift on the bridge after midnight and read my English papers. I would awaken to a full, handwritten page of thoughtful remarks. I reference this in the poem “The Gift,” which is the seminal poem in the first section of my book. I would also have to say that Charles Martin, my first mentor at Stonecoast, inspired (and terrified!) me when he suggested I create poems in the voices of Nahua poet-princes. This book would not have been born without his provocation. Aside from Sor Juana and Nezahualcoyotl and other Mesoamerican poets, my literary guiding lights are Yeats and Lorca—both tapped into ancestral memory and revived the local imagination. I draw inspiration from the silent and silenced voices of history.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m searching for homes for my manuscripts that have remained tucked in my computer for the past two years. I also have an idea incubating for a play inspired by a Rumi poem. And today I awoke with an idea for a chapbook inspired by—no surprise—women’s lot. Though my father passed away a year and a half ago, he still speaks to me in my sleep.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I haunt cafés. All I need is the aroma of coffee and a strong dose of people-watching (and the accompanying eavesdropping) and something (some image, line, dialogue, idea) will emerge.
ADVICE: I have found that the more I write about my writing, the better I can shape my collections. An abstract is a beautiful thing: It encapsulates your intention for the book in less than a page. More than once, this has helped me perform the hardest task of all—prune poems from a budding manuscript.
AGE: 56.
RESIDENCE: Oregon City, Oregon.
JOB: I split my time between my careers as a business consultant and as a literary artist. My firm, Sage Marketing Associates, has provided strategic planning and marketing consulting services to West Coast–based global technology companies, regional healthcare organizations, and local nonprofits since 1997. I am also a poet-dramatist, producer, and educator. I have taught poetry (mostly in English, sometimes in Spanish) to every grade from kindergarten to twelfth through the Portland Art Museum, the Right Brain Initiative, Wordstock, and Writers in the Schools. I also teach poetry to adults at my home in the country and at Studio 410 in Portland, Oregon, where I offer an annual ekphrastic poetry class in response to Russell J. Young’s photographs.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? I have striven to piece together a writing life since 1997 when I left my job as a marketing executive in Silicon Valley (I have a Bachelor’s degree in Computing Science and a Wharton MBA). Consulting has afforded me the flexibility to become a serious writer as well as to return to graduate school to earn my MFA and, afterward, to teach. It continues to be a challenging balancing act, particularly because I am equally devoted to theatre, which is incredibly consuming, especially in the role of producer. My most recent production was Words That Burn—a dramatization of World War II experiences of William Stafford, Lawson Inada, and Guy Gabaldón (in their own words), which I created and coproduced in commemoration of the William Stafford Centennial. The show was featured in Milagro Theatre’s 2014 La Luna Nueva festival, which celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month in Portland, Oregon.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: Two years. I wrote the poems during my first two semesters at Stonecoast and then spent the last semester editing and shaping them into a collection. But the collection wasn’t in its finished form for another few months after graduation.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: During the 2009 AWP book fair, I shopped my manuscript around and received interest from Arizona State University’s Bilingual Press. I followed up three months later with a book proposal and my manuscript. About a year and a half after that, I received the press’s letter of acceptance. In the meantime, I received fifteen rejections.
Cindy Williams Gutiérrez reads the poem “Micacuicatl, Or Song For The Dead” from The Small Claim of Bones. Original pre-Hispanic music by Gerardo Calderón (www.grupo-condor.com). For more of Gutiérrez’s work visit grito-poetry.com.
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Danniel Schoonebeek AMERICAN BARRICADE YesYes Books
The question of whether the idea of America is dead is not a question. —from “Correction”
HOW IT BEGAN: There’s this feeling in the United States that the country is somehow finished. I wanted to peel off that scab, and peel off the scabs I found underneath, which for me were family power dynamics, the American workforce, taboos of love, the rifts surrounding gender and class, the problem of having a name and a history, the misnomer of the word America. I wanted to dig into that American disgust.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: In place of inspiration, which I don’t think I feel, what I feel instead is camaraderie. And to that end the names can be endless. But Rukeyser and Woolf, global protest, James Agee, the Clash, running in winter, August Wilson, gunpowder tea, Eileen Myles, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, postcards, the Anti-Rent War, anxiety, Poet in New York, C. D. Wright, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Occupy movement, Paul Thomas Anderson, living in a cabin, Claudia Rankine, rush hour, Allyson Paty, percussion, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Frank Bidart, night walks, Austria, Walker Evans, Sarah Kane, Camus, shaving, Simone Weil, Jules Renard, Marina Tsvetaeva.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m finishing a book of prose, a travelogue called C’est la guerre. It details a two-month reading tour I did in support of American Barricade last year. C’est la guerre will be published by Poor Claudia in 2015. (I sometimes hear grovelers say that certain poems feel like prose broken into lines, and I think C’est la guerre is maybe poetry broken into prose; I want to see who’ll grovel at that). And I’m also, every day, writing poems that will be my second book of poetry. Which so far appears to be about problems of capital.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: It helps me to think of a poem as a house you can demolish. When the lines aren’t budging but I know they can move, I like to start knocking down walls and prying up floorboards and putting the rooms back together the wrong way, with new lighting and banisters. Experimental editing is something I urge upon myself, and more times than I can count it’s resulted in a radically different poem that I had to essentially destroy in order to make.
ADVICE: Any advice people give only distracts other people from writing the book they need to write.In my life and in my writing I’ve been grateful when I can stop and remind myself to revolt against what revolts me. Always unsettle myself into myself, if you will. I’m always asking myself to write the poem and the book and the sentence that I don’t want to write.
AGE: 28.
RESIDENCE: Brooklyn, New York, and the Catskills.
JOB: I write books and read poems aloud for a living. I publish poems written by other people and I have conversations about art and politics for a living. At some point we all have to make our own distinctions between living and money. To make money I work as an editor, a booking agent, and an occasional book critic.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? It’s a little war every day, and you have to antagonize the conflict in a new way every day. The simple answer is never. I find that most jobs are the opposite of writing, or creating any art that will matter to people. I felt this for the first time when I was young, and ever since then I’ve written poetry from a place where the poems want to jam themselves into the gearworks of this problem.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: About four years. Some of the poems were drafted and edited for years. A few poems were written in a fever pitch and finished within a week or two.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: My publisher was actually the one who found me. I read a poem in a really crowded basement bar in Boston about two years ago and she was in the audience; she got in touch with me a few days later and asked if I’d written a book. I wish that scenario happened more in poetry. Before that I mailed the book around to publishers for about a year.
Danniel Schoonebeek reads five poems from American Barricade. For more of Schoonebeek’s work visit dannielschoonebeek.tumblr.com.
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Tarfia Faizullah SEAM Southern Illinois University Press (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award)
How thin the seam between the world and the world: a few layers of muscle and fat, a sheet wrapped around a corpse: glass so easily ground into sand. —from “Reading Tranströmer in Bangladesh”
HOW IT BEGAN: I learned about the widespread rape of Bangladeshi women by the Pakistani Army during the 1971 Liberation War. I wanted to know more, and I applied for a Fulbright fellowship to go to Bangladesh and interview the women. A number of them are still alive. Seam emerged from my time there.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: The courage of other artists who share beautiful and difficult stories about the conversations taking place between their interior and exterior lives. I’m in awe of Detroit poets: Vievee Francis, Nandi Comer, francine j. harris, Jamaal May, Matthew Olzmann, and Tommye Blount. I’m moved by Eugenia Leigh’s Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows and David Tomas Martinez’s Hustle. I always return to poets in translation such as Rumi, Hikmet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Anna Akhmatova, César Vallejo, and Tomas Tranströmer.
WHAT’S NEXT: A second book of poems, Register of Eliminated Villages, and a memoir, Kafir.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I try to get into the physicality of what the vastness inside and around me looks like. I listen to the train going past our house and wonder at the science and magic that collided to create its vibrations. I wonder who decided to write the informational signs at the top of a mountain during a hike, and what that person looks like. The world isn’t material for my poems; it’s its own fabric and when I’m not writing, I’m disconnected from it. For me, what keeps me going is mindfully rolling around in the world and feeling it in my whole body.
ADVICE: Let yourself be surprised. Relentlessly do the work of making every word of every line of every poem sing. Make mistakes and let them lead you into unexpected and wondrous places. A quote that has become my mantra is by the poet Russell Edson, who said, “Desire and patience takes us where we want to go.”
AGE: 34.
RESIDENCE: Detroit.
JOB: I teach at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program as the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor in Poetry, and codirect the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press and Video Series with Jamaal May.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Absolutely. Even when it doesn’t seem like there’s time, there’s always more.
Tarfia Faizullah reads the poem “Instructions for the Interviewer” from Seam, published by Southern Illinois University Press. For more of Faizullah’s work visit tfaizullah.com.
Melissa Faliveno is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
[Credits]
Ilustrations by Eugene Smith; books by David Hamsley
The debut has a certain allure: an air of freshness, the promise of an exciting, original voice. Here is the new. Here is something you haven’t yet heard. And while that certainly might be the case with a poetry debut, it can also be true of a poet’s second, fifth, or tenth book—artistic innovation can happen at any stage in a writer’s life. What does make a debut uniquely exciting, though, is its sense of beginning—that the arc of a poet’s career has just begun, that the ball has just been tossed into the air. For our twelfth annual look at debut poets, we asked ten poets to share the inspirations and processes behind their first collections, and what emerged were stories of beginnings: how a book begins and how a poem begins, certainly, but also how a writer’s attraction to poetry begins. “I wanted to know if my sadness could ever be useful,” explains Ocean Vuong. “[It’s the desire] to get closer to whatever it is that’s always just beyond reach or sight,” says Justin Boening. “It was fun,” says Phillip B. Williams.
The ten poets in this year’s feature wrote some of the most compelling debuts published in 2016 and represent a range of styles and backgrounds. From the sparse, demanding elegance of Eleanor Chai’s lyrics, to the irreverent, kaleidoscopic roaming of Tommy Pico’s book-length poem, to the linguistic opulence and sheer nerve of Safiya Sinclair’s work, these ten encompass many of the impulses and registers of contemporary poetry. We asked for their insight on inspiration, publishing, and writing through impasses, and two commonalities—among many—surfaced. One: that inspiration might lie in paying attention to what appears small or insignificant—how Carolina Ebeid will listen to every “little bell” of an Arvo Pärt piano piece for inspiration, how Ari Banias will pursue the feeling elicited by something as minor as the behind-the-knee wrinkles in someone’s pants. And two: the advice to not be in a rush to publish. To take one’s time and question, as Solmaz Sharif does, what it means to be an artist and not just a person who publishes a book. Or to wait, like Jana Prikryl, for the poem to emerge that helps the others fall into place. These poets’ words are a reminder that it’s not a race, but a process of fashioning poems that can connect with the world, that can confront the “roots and wide-ranging shadows of words,” as Safiya Sinclair puts it, and explore language as we know it.
Ari Banias Anybody W. W. Norton
“Mostly a name feels like the crappy overhang I huddle under while rain skims the front of me.
I admit it keeps me visible, the cool compromise of efficient lighting, the agreement to call this that.”
—from “Recognition Is the Misrecognition You Can Bear”
How it began: I wrote Anybody out of the conditions of my life, and out of a will to connect more than divide. I was writing into loneliness and the social, and as a way to be alone with myself while also being and thinking with others. It was a process of concretizing and externalizing those conversations I was having in my head and out loud, with people dead and living, in my life or not, with the culture at large, and with other selves—past, present, future, parallel. As a younger queer writer especially, there were books I needed but couldn’t find, either because no one had published them or because they hadn’t yet been written. So I was probably writing this book, however unconsciously, to address that self, those selves.
Inspiration: The need to counter alienation and death. Humor, my immediate surroundings, memory. Sometimes just wanting to figure out how I felt about something could be enough. Poems could come from a question, an irritation, or even from a desire to get at my response to an object—like, Why does this tree, that I’m fairly certain doesn’t know I exist, evoke deep feeling in me? It’s embarrassing! And, What am I bringing to it—I mean all the baggage (cultural, historical, and otherwise) I’m carting around when I look at a tree (or a broken chair, or the behind-the-knee wrinkles in someone’s pants in front of me in line, or, really, anything) and find myself thrown off by unexpected feeling. As long as I’m attentive and willing to follow through, past what’s easy or comfortable, a poem can start almost anywhere.
In her piece “The Untroubled Mind,” the painter Agnes Martin writes, “Nothing that happens in your life makes inspiration / When your eyes are open / You see beauty in anything.” I’d add that I think of “beauty” here not in the classical sense but more like meaning, importance. Martin [writes later in] this same piece: “The wiggle of a worm as important as the assassination of a president.” They happen in the same world, never entirely independent of one another. And maybe the one I think of as small is in fact enormous. Even if a poem doesn’t directly point at these connections, to keep them near, to refuse to forget or evade them—that did and does inspire me.
Influences: More than I could possibly name. Some voices: Nina Simone, Arthur Russell, Odetta, Elizabeth Cotten, and the rembetika singer Roza Eskenazi. Some books: Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses, James Baldwin’s essays, George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, Brenda Hillman’s Loose Sugar, Lorine Niedecker’s Paean to Place, June Jordan’s Collected Poems, Joy Ladin’s Transmigrations, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “terrible sonnets,” Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Hilton Als’s The Women, Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation, David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives, Guy Davenport’s translations of Archilochos and Sappho. And Roland Barthes, Elizabeth Bishop, Fred Moten, Frank O’Hara, Yannis Ritsos, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Conversations with others ignite and recalibrate me, without fail. A few winters ago I came to a sort of crisis point with poetry. I wasn’t sure how or why, but poems began to repel me—I couldn’t write them, and I could hardly read them. Lineation looked melodramatic and grotesque. I couldn’t stomach even a whiff of solemnity. Poems were like giant echo chambers. Not coincidentally, that was my third year in a row living in fairly isolated circumstances away from loved ones, and I was feeling disconnected. I didn’t know what else to do so I started writing letter-poems to close friends. Immediately detail, texture, and volition returned to the act of writing. It was like the electricity came on again. Somewhere I’d lost the sense of purpose and direction created by that fundamental exchange of one person speaking to another. A good lesson.
Advice: It seems obnoxious to tell people not to get discouraged by how long it takes to publish a book, because it can be a very long time, and who wouldn’t get discouraged? For me publication never seemed a given—only writing did. What I told myself, and still do, is this: Keep working. Follow the shape of your mind’s particulars (its rhythms, its oddities) like a bloodhound, and take the poems as far as you possibly can, so that they are utterly yours, so that you’re writing in that singular way that singular thing no one but you can write. Each time. As Hopkins (whom I’ll take way out of context here) said, “more wreck and less discourse.”
What’s next: Along with writing new poems, I am translating contemporary poets from the Modern Greek. It’s a relief to get outside my own head and work out problems of language and expression through someone else’s poems, while still being in music. And I welcome the different sense of responsibility. Finding my way back into Greek, which was my first language, is also its own private homecoming, with all the associated awkwardness and joy of that.
Age: 38.
Hometown: I was born in Los Angeles, and grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.
Residence: Berkeley, California.
Job: I work at Small Press Distribution.
Time spent writing the book: Nine years.
Time spent finding a home for it: I started sending out a mess of consecutively numbered pages I thought was a book nine years ago. The early drafts look very little like what came to be published. It took about four years of sending out versions of what’s now the book before it was accepted.
Ocean Vuong Night Sky With Exit Wounds Copper Canyon Press
“There is so much I need to tell you—but I only earned one life.”
—from “Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown): oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952”
How it began: I wanted to know if my sadness could ever be useful.
Inspiration: Fire escapes. I was walking in New York City one day years ago and saw this big, white fire escape. And I thought to myself, “That’s it. That’s what a poem should do. Be a place where we can move further toward ourselves, which really means moving further toward our fears.” And medical marijuana. And Gushers fruit snacks.
Influences: Li-Young Lee, Federico García Lorca, Frank O’Hara, Yusef Komunyakaa, Arthur Rimbaud, Anne Carson, Emily Dickinson, Matsuo Bashō, Gwendolyn Brooks, Garrett Hongo, Amiri Baraka, Troye Sivan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Thomston, Thao Nguyen, Kobayashi Issa, Etta James, Ben Lerner, Luther Vandross, Michel Foucault, Alexander Chee, Little Richard, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Maggie Nelson, Mark Rothko, Frank Ocean, Bad Future, Whitney Houston, Patsy Cline, Lyoto Machida, C. D. Wright, Amy Winehouse, Yoko Ono, Al Green, Sinn Sisamouth, Childish Gambino, Ralph Stanley, Max Richter, Nils Frahm, Joel P West, James Blake, and Vince Staples.
Writer’s Block Remedy: When I am stuck, I don’t like to force out work or words. I just walk away from the desk—sometimes not returning for weeks at a time. I find a quiet place in the day and stop. If I’m at home, I lie down on the carpet. Then I do this thing where I just say thank you to all the things and people who have helped me. Of course, simply saying thank you does not awaken any creative force; it just reminds me that the work I am doing is not validated by quantity, but rather by the connection it builds between the world and myself. When my own work is not coming along, I try to stop and recognize the people doing the same challenging, at times unforgiving, art—and I feel happy. I think it’s hard, in our day and age, not to think, It’s me against the world, or, I have to do this for my career because everyone else is hammering away and if I stop now, I will fall behind and be forgotten. But that’s a toxic and self-defeating gaze. I think we are more productive—even in stillness—when we can recognize one another, when we say to each other, Thank you for doing this with me. Thank you for carrying on when I cannot.
Advice: Hustling can be good—but make sure what you’re pushing is gold (to you).
What’s next: I’m working on being a better son.
Age: 28.
Hometown: Hartford, Connecticut.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Writer and teacher.
Time spent writing the book: Eight yearsafter believing that I could be a poet. But I think really it took me all of my life.
Time spent finding a home for it: Eight months. I was lucky.
“To all the girls Bernini loved before I’d say, caveat emptor.”
—from “Benvenuto Tisi’s Vestal Virgin Claudia Quinta Pulling a Boat with the Statue of Cybele”
How it began: The book started as individual poems written over about a decade. I was finally galvanized into bringing some of them together by the long sequence that forms the second half of the book, “Thirty Thousand Islands.” The sequence gave me a new way of thinking about loss and literary history and nature and men and Canada and Europe; as it grew I sensed it was a foil to the more ad hoc poems I had written up till then. So the book emerged from this encounter between different forms of poetry, which seems apt since many of my poems tend to spark from the friction between different voices or points of view.
Inspiration: There are some ekphrastic poems in The After Party—one about a great, overlooked Buster Keaton movie, another about a not very good Renaissance painting. I like taking in all kinds of art—especially paintings, photographs, movies—and thinking about its implications, formal and historical. But I’m also taken with something Frank O’Hara once said: “Sometimes I think that writing a poem is such a moral crisis I get completely sick of the whole situation.” What kind of experience or vision or formal experiment can really justify taking up the reader’s time? Parts of my book attempt to think about European history and the ways my own ancestors experienced it; what gives me the authority to speak for those individuals? In other words, what kind of poem could do so? I find these sorts of questions inspiring.
Influences: I don’t feel qualified to name my own influences—and the writing I revere most seems too distant a beacon to enter into my own stuff—but there are writers I’ve loved over so many years they feel like family. I’d include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, John Berryman, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and Don Marquis.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I tend to sit with the impasse, partly because I have a day job and write essays as well (and recently had a baby) so life can throw me off course very easily, and partly because I think impasses are trying to tell me something so it would be imprudent to ignore them.But when I really must go on I get energy from hazelnut gelato; whiskey; the Metropolitan Museum; swimming; dips into Flann O’Brien or Jane Austen or Laurence Sterne; dips into Twitter, which so far is the clearest source of dissent I’ve found against the fascism that the Republican Party is happily riding into power; dear friends whose work is new and great, and conversely random lines in magazines that irritate me. Getting pissed off is, in the absence of anything else, a reliable stimulant.
Advice: Every voice needs something different so it’s unlikely my experience will apply to anyone else. But what’s been most valuable to me is time—to let the words stew, and let myself stew, and in fact resist publication for as long as possible.Once you’re ready I recommend an Excel spreadsheet. Maybe this is common knowledge but it was a revelation to me: A spreadsheet helps to compartmentalize the painful chore of sending things out and really cleanses it of emotion. You just record rejections and can very clearly see where else something might be sent.
What’s next: Mostly diaper changes and tummy times. Occasionally noodling away at things that may or may not make it into a second book.
Age: 41.
Hometown: My teens were spent in Ancaster, Ontario, which feels hometown-iest to me. I was born in Ostrava (in what was then Czechoslovakia), and when I was five my family fled and lived in an Austrian village for a year. From the age of six I grew up in a few towns in southern Ontario—so it’s complicated.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Senior editor at the New York Review of Books.
Time spent writing the book: Too long. But the too-longness varies a lot: One of the poems is around fifteen years old, some started almost a decade ago and had to marinate for years before they were finished, and some were written in half an hour, with minor revision. In general I revise heavily and take long gaps between glances at poems, so I can hear them afresh when I return.
Time spent finding a home for it: I spent a decade avoiding gathering my poems into a manuscript—it felt somehow presumptuous. About a year after I started bringing the poems together, Tim Duggan read my work in the London Review of Books and the New Yorker and got in touch, asking if I had a manuscript. I took a few more months to revise it and once I sent it to him he got back to me quickly. So I’ve been very lazy and very lucky.
Carolina Ebeid You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior Noemi Press
“We live in a copy of Eden, a copy
that depends on violence.”
—from “Albeit”
How it began: The book isn’t defined by a unifying project. Many of its poems did not begin with a particular book in mind. However, when I was placing the poems side by side to see how many pages I had, I noted an orbital pull forming. They were already set in a certain orbit of tone, subject matter, and high-lyric style. Identifying this motion allowed me to see more clearly which subsequent poems would be accepted into this circle.
Inspiration: For a few years I listened to a musical piece by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt called Für Alina. It is a composition for the piano, spare and slow. It sounds like little bells being struck. Pärt has said that, when he was making this work, he “had a need to concentrate on each sound so that every blade of grass would be as important as a flower.” I have thought the same about poems. Also, the visual vocabulary of certain films has inspired many of these poems, deeply. Movies such as The Spirit of the Beehive, Ratcatcher, In the Mood for Love, and Days of Heaven hold something arcane, a strange quietness. Perhaps they withhold (it’s a better word). What has moved me to write after seeing these films is how much they withhold. I am drawn to poems that can dance like that, in a relationship of what is said and what is left unsaid.
Influences: The books of Lucie Brock-Broido, Anne Carson, and Briget Pegeen Kelly have been early and lasting influences. In my PhD work, I’ve delved into the fragments and letters of Emily Dickinson, the poetry of Raúl Zurita and Cecilia Vicuña, the multimedia art of Caroline Bergvall, as well as the various adaptations of Antigone—which I hope will all be future influences.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Always, the engrossing work of translating poetry from Spanish is a spark. I also turn to looking through old lexicons, field guides no longer in print, medieval bestiaries or glossaries of birds, and early photography.
Advice: Three things. One: Listen to your innermost self—a self that has been forming aesthetic principles by the books you’ve read, by your various experiences and identities—and try to lower the volume of well-intentioned critiques that stifle your work. Two: If you are fortunate, you will find a trusted reader-editor-confidant-friend, one who will open your work and imagination. Take care to develop that relationship. My primary reader also happens to be my partner, Jeffrey Pethybridge. Three: Try not to send out your manuscript blindly, which can deplete one’s inner and outer resources. Rather, choose presses whose author lists exhilarate you, and remember that small presses are in a golden age; they’re making vital and sparkling books.
What’s next: A long sequence of small poems called “The M Notebooks,” M being a character made up of various persons, such as the biblical Saint Miriam (a myrrh-bearer), the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta, and Russian writer Nadezhda Mandelstam. The sequence is a convergence, confluence, conflagration of speakers. Also, a couple of essays on the work of Ana Mendieta, as well as research on the literature of sleep, descent, and dream-space.
Age: 40.
Hometown: West New York, New Jersey.
Residence: Denver.
Job: I teach while I also pursue a PhD in the creative writing program at the University of Denver.
Time spent writing the book: The bulk of the poems were written in Austin during my three MFA years at the Michener Center.
Time spent finding a home for it: About three years.
How it began: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—namely, how quickly the nation mobilized to invade these countries when just months earlier we were living in the myth of indefinite and obvious peace. That peace, of course, did not exist then, either, but I remember, for example, an Army recruiter visiting my AP Government class in spring 2001 and saying, as part of his pitch to join the Army and see the world, that were we to join the Army, we would not be fighting in any wars, anyway.
Inspiration: Conversations with friends—especially Samira Yamin, Ari Banias, and Brandon Som. The various books and artists they have pressed upon me. The stellar work they put into the world.
Influences: June Jordan, Muriel Rukeyser, Mahmoud Darwish, C. D. Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Reznikoff, William Carlos Williams, Adrienne Rich, Leonel Rugama, Walt Whitman, and Claudia Rankine.
Writer’s Block Remedy: If the causes are perfectionistic, I pull out the collected poems of a poet I greatly admire and flip through to remind myself how many mediocre poems their oeuvre contains. It is my duty, I remind myself, to write even those mediocre, messy poems. These failures are the ones that create openings in the conversation for subsequent writers and poets to enter—I’m not trying to kill the conversation, after all. I pull out journals—André Gide’s, Franz Kafka’s, Susan Sontag’s—to remind myself how long the process is and how often the sense of failure or impasse hits. I watch a movie.
Advice: Write a book you want to fight for. Fight for it. I am, after all this, though, a little hesitant to keep the conversation on first books or debuts. I am a product of an industry that emphasizes first books—it’s where the prizes are, it’s what the MFA programs are gearing you up for with your thesis, it’s what our conversations with our peers are about, it’s what we buy because we want to support our friends. I’m not entirely sure who this “we” is, as someone both inside and outside of it, as someone not wanting to presume you are a similar product, fellow writer. But there is something, something shifting the collective attention (of presses, of journals) to younger poets—an attention that does not exist for a poet’s second or fourth book and that doesn’t again until I don’t know when. A blessing, maybe, that turning away of the gaze—it’s likely due to sales. We are not necessarily taught how to be artists, how to commit to artists and attend to their failures, their sustained conversation—a conversation that would undoubtedly challenge and even dismantle said industry. We are taught instead how to publish our first books. Product, not process. I don’t have answers about “how to be an artist”; I’m not trying to make it sound like I do. But I do want to have that conversation. What do you want to do as a writer in the world? What do you see the arc of your writing life to be? How is your first book a launch to that arc? To discuss the book itself, the writers themselves—myself included—is a misdirection. Or as Forough Farrokhzad said: “Remember the flight / the bird will die.”
What’s next: Translations of Forough Farrokhzad. And some secret stuff.
Age: 33.
Hometown: I haven’t worked out the answer to this question for myself. Los Angeles is probably the closest I will get to a hometown.
Residence: Oakland.
Job: I’m a lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University.
Time spent writing the book: I started working with the Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms in earnest at the end of 2007. The earliest poems in the book are from 2008. But some of the pieces and images are reworked from 2003, even. By 2012 or 2013 I had pretty much worked out all the conceptual elements and the general frame of the book, though I added and removed poems up until the last deadline. The most freeing realization was that I could ditch poems that had been previously published in journals and that I liked, generally speaking. I could create a book rather than a collection, I mean.
Time spent finding a home for it: I started sending the book out in 2009, which was massively premature, but I don’t regret it. I drew up a very short list of dream first-book prizes and vowed to continue sending out yearly until I was disqualified from doing so.
Phillip B. Williams Thief in the Interior Alice James Books
“I’m listening to Alice Coltrane to feel Blacker than God”
—from “Eleggua and Eshu Ain’t the Same”
How it began: It was fun. I used to write several manuscripts at a time. One year I was working on three books simultaneously. My first attempt at a book was in 2008 (“I Empire,” read as “first empire”), the second was in 2009 (“Thief in the Interior,” which was not the same book as the one that was eventually published), and the third was in 2010 (“In Vulnerabilities”). Eventually I released a chapbook called Bruised Gospels in 2010, and because I do not want poems in chapbooks to appear in my full-lengths, I was “forced” to restructure the main manuscript, “I Empire,” which remained the backbone of my debut.It had many, many names, to my friend Rickey Laurentiis’s entertainment. He and I exchanged different versions of our books for years. I distinctly remember two titles he had before Boy With Thorn that I do not think he would mind me sharing. The first was “Mirror God”and the second was “Down Atlantis.” If there were any others, I cannot remember. My failed titles were “Grace,” “Grace and Empire,” “Dancing on an Upturned Bed,” “Darling,” “Shame No Tongue,” “Lie Down,” and “Witness.”Going through this process with Rickey over the course of four to five years helped push me along. All I knew is that I wanted a book before I turned thirty. My book was published a month before my thirtieth birthday.
Inspiration: The book On Black Men by David Marriott was always on my mind while writing. The work of my peers. The work of those who have become ancestors.
Influences: Essex Hemphill, Jorie Graham, Terrance Hayes, Sonia Sanchez, the racism of Wallace Stevens seems its own kind of artist or shadow of the artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mary Jo Bang, Wangechi Mutu, Nina Simone, Leontyne Price, Björk, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Kerry James Marshall, Federico García Lorca, Lucille Clifton, Henry Dumas, Carl Phillips, Douglas Kearney, J. Michael Martinez, Dawn Lundy Martin, Octavio Paz, Camille T. Dungy, Evie Shockley, Frank Bidart, Alvin Ailey, Judith Jamison, Alonzo King, Clifford Williams, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Sylvia Plath and her fascination with the word nigger, Claudia Rankine, Carolyn Rogers, Thylias Moss, James Baldwin, afropessimism as a theoretical framework, Mahmoud Darwish, Toni Morrison, Meshell Ndegeocello, Suji Kwock Kim, Larry Levis, Sunni Patterson.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I go for months without writing and then write nonstop for about a month or so. An impasse for me is a sign that I simply have nothing to say, and that is fine. I had to learn that it was fine not to write. As far as what keeps me going, I’m still not sure. Something just clicks on and stays on until it runs its course. I frequently add to a Notes document any lines I come up with or words I need to look up. My memory is very poor, so I do not retain what I read. Sometimes, in order to assist with retention, I have to activate the knowledge, meaning implement it into something tangible like a poem. The joy in this is that most things I read are fresh when I return to them. The downside is that it takes me forever to do scholarly work and I’m not the best person to speak with about books or even single poems unless they are in front of me.
Advice: Just write. Study first, then write. We cannot control the reception of our work, but we can decimate our imaginations by trying to write “for the people.” Who are these monolithic people? Why think so little of them and call that kindness? Recently, there seems to be this idea that one has to write for someone else or a specific group. So many folks want to be mouthpieces for a community for which they’ve set low standards reminiscent of the oppressive forces they claim to want to counteract. In that writing, it is assumed what these potential readers will and will not understand. In the same instant that this idea wants to be communal and welcoming, it is also condescending and ostracizing. We have enough low expectations set on us by others, especially if we are persons of color, women, part of genderqueer and LGBT communities, and/or any other marginalized group. Almost every poem I’ve written my mother has seen. She may or may not understand each one but she has read those poems and encouraged me to keep going. She tells me what she loves and what touches her. So do my nonliterary friends and family members. It’s not up to me to assume there are restraints on their ability to understand me. My poems aren’t a standardized test that my friends need help cheating on, or that can even be “passed.” Though we have limitations, language barriers, literacy barriers, and other factors, we are also complex and capable if allowed to be.
What’s next: I’m working on trying to eat right and go to bed on time.
Age: 30.
Hometown: Chicago.
Residence: Bennington, Vermont.
Job: I am a visiting professor in English at Bennington College.I try to make some kind of living off my work but not to the point of distraction. Writing does keep me alive, even during those times it does not make money.
Time spent writing the book: The longest poem in the book I started in 2005 and it was a single-page poem. It continued to grow across different iterations of the book until it became a twenty-page poem while I attended Washington University in St. Louis for my MFA. I was convinced to shrink it down to fourteen pages and officially finished it in the spring of 2014, nine years later. Many of the poems I wrote that were originally in the book did not make the final edit. Most of the poems that made it I wrote during my MFA, so about two years.
Time spent finding a home for it: It depends on which version of the book we’re talking about. In my naiveté I submitted manuscripts to contests as early as 2009. They were unready projects that I would have regretted if they were published. It only took a few months for what was to become Thief in the Interior to find a publisher. When it started finalizing for prizes and open submissions I knew it would eventually get picked up.
Eleanor Chai Standing Water Farrar, Straus and Giroux
“This, I’ve seen. I see it always. I carry it in my torso as surely as a Buddhist lives in the skin of his own corpse.”
—from “Little Girl’s Auricle”
How it began: I can’t say I was compelled to write a book. I was compelled to write poems. I am not a native speaker of English, but I no longer speak my native language (Korean) for complicated and disorienting reasons. Finding shapes in language that hold for longer than the instant of speaking has always felt crucial to me.
Inspiration: I am happiest when I am completely and obsessively engaged. Nothing absorbs me as thoroughly as trying to get a poem on the page. So I suppose living the life I wish to live is what inspires me.
Influences: I spent years transcribing the complete correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. For a few hours each night for six years I was dropped into their intimate “Dear—.” Their devotion to their poems and to poetry continues to move me. Alongside one of her letters, as an afterthought, Bishop wrote: “And did you like the 4 Quartets?” exactly so, with the number 4 and the word Quartets. The “And,” the casual usage, the numeral 4—not the word Four written out—thrilled me. It felt spontaneous, in real time (which it was) and I felt a sliver of how it may have been to read the Four Quartets as a newly made thing, without the edifice of criticism bracing it. The Four Quartets constitutes at least one of my Ten Thousand Things. To see it considered before it aged into its full regalia made me feel closer to its nascence, its being made. I’ve also had the great gift of deep friendship with Frank Bidart. He is one of the finest, most exacting makers I know. His obsessive devotion to the needs of a poem stuns me. I love T. S. Eliot too much. I love Louise Glück. I love James Baldwin. I love Ezra Pound. I love Clarice Lispector. I love Mark Strand. I love Walt Whitman. I love Frank Bidart. I love Marguerite Duras. I love Winnicott and Freud. I love Bishop. I love Robert Frost. I love Louise Bourgeois. I love Toni Morrison. I love Van Gogh’s letters. I LOVE The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I love ethnographies.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I turn to silence, or rather, I surrender to it. Silence, and superior voices. And panic.
Advice: I wish I had some useful advice. Mine was a strange path.
What’s next: I am working on one new poem. Hopefully I will be able to write it and hopefully more will come. I am also trying to compose, or rather assemble, Mark Strand’s oral memoir from tapes we made in Nova Scotia and some of his unpublished writing. I am following the practice and principles he used in making his beautiful, singular collages from paper he himself made. I think of his sentences as his “paper” and I am trying to tear that material and place it on the page into a compelling narrative of his life. It’s such fine material; the task is daunting but animating.
Age: 49.
Hometown: My hometown is a complicated question. I was moved around quite a lot as a child. I suppose I would say Seoul, South Korea,though I’ve not been home in many years.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I started a school in Westport, Connecticut.My daughters are now both in college so I am trying to give myself the time and space to write poems, finish editing the Bishop-Moore letters with the meticulous Saskia Hamilton, and work on Mark Strand’s oral memoir. Working at the school demanded all of my energy when I was there.
Time spent writing the book: I have no idea how long it took me to write this book. Decades.I knew that my daughters’ time in my everyday care would not last forever. I’ve always been achingly clear that I had eighteen years to share our days, to participate, even shape what would be our holy, our minute particular (William Blake). I am devoted to the minute particular. Much that I value in life resides there. I did not have a childhood with my mother, so being a mother to my children every day and night seemed a privilege and a miracle.
Time spent finding a home for it: I was very fortunate that Jonathan Galassi, my editor [for the Bishop-Moore letters], liked my poems and took my book.
Justin Boening Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last Milkweed Editions (National Poetry Series)
“does sadness leave us? Is that the source of sadness?”
—from “Banquet”
How it began: The book’s title is taken from the thorny end of a Kafka parable called “The Coming of the Messiah.” It finishes: “The messiah will come on the day after he is no longer required, he will come on the day after his arrival, he will come not on the last day, but on the very last.” I’ve seen others attempt to negotiate these paradoxes by changing the definition of last day or very last. I guess that makes as much sense as anything else. But for me, this is a portrait of a savior who comes, not belatedly, but by not coming at all. I think it may have been this parable that put me on the road toward writing a book of failures, of mistakes, which is how I’ve come to understand the collection—a book where one learns to become a god by being unrecognizable, for example, or where one rules the world by being the only one in it. I don’t know. I’m probably the last one who should be talking about such things. More generally, though, I think what compelled me to write this book may have been distance from God. For me, poetry is an expression of this desire to reach out, not to communicate per se, but to get closer to whatever it is that’s always just beyond reach or sight. Maybe that sounds too lofty, but it’s a longing I’ve felt all my life, and a longing I’ve often associated with the essence of whatever it is I’ve called “human.” Stevens finishes his poem “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” by saying, “We make a dwelling in the evening air / In which being there together is enough.” I think that about sums it up for me—what compelled me to write these poems.
Inspiration: The unshakable belief that poetry is absolutely necessary, that it’s inextricably linked to language itself, and that, therefore, it’s one of the most human things we’re allowed to participate in.
Influences: As far as writers go, I return most often toFranz Kafka, Wallace Stevens, Clarice Lispector, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath,Mark Strand, and Lucie Brock-Broido.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I almost never push it. If a poem is frustrating me I walk away, watch some YouTube, read writers who know what they’re doing. Distraction is good for poetry, I think, maybe because it breeds uncertainty. In fact, I feel I do my best writing when I’m not writing at all.
Advice: Hold off as long as you can. And once you lose your patience, only send the work to people and presses you already respect and trust.
What’s next: Lately I’ve been putting a lot of my energy into a new magazine and press called Horsethief Books that Devon Walker-Figueroa and I have started together. As far as my own poems go, with the loss of so many friends and luminaries I’ve been writing elegies as of late.
Age: I’m 35and will be turning 36 on February 13 (yes, I was born on a Friday).
Hometown: I was born in Saratoga Hospital, on a holiday down to see the ponies. I call Glens Falls, New York, my hometown though, since I ate my first corn on the cob there, stole my first bike there, etc. I moved to New York City when I was six—pretty young—so that’s a home for me as well, though not my origins. Recently, I was eating a 1:00 AM chicken fried steak in Missoula, Montana, at a dive called the Ox. Two guys, who had just finished playing poker at the front card table, stood up suddenly from their counter stools. One guy walloped the other guy in the eye, snatched up his rucksack, and hustled out the front door. No one called the cops. Few were alarmed. That’s the place I’ve lived the longest, actually—Missoula is another home.
Residence: Iowa City.
Job: A living? Maybe you could call it that.I teach and edit, mostly.
Time spent writing the book: Well, there are some whispers from poems I wrote while I was a graduate student, but they’re really only whispers. The oldest poem in the book is one I wrote the moment after I handed in my graduate thesis—that was in 2011. The newest poem is one I wrote in 2015. So I guess that means four years?
Time spent finding a home for it: I sent out bashfully in 2013, and then in earnest until the book was taken in 2015.
Safiya Sinclair Cannibal University of Nebraska Press (Prairie SchoonerBook Prize)
“Tell the hounds who undress me with their eyes—I have nothing to hide. I will spread myself
wide.”
—from “Center of the World”
How it began: I began writing poetry as an act of survival. Faced with the silencing exile of womanhood in an oppressive household and a patriarchal society that discouraged me from speaking and thinking, the only way to make sense of my burgeoning selfhood was here on the page, by writing it down. Then, plagued still with the strange linguistic exile of writing in English, the language of the colonist, while dancing wildly in the brazen self of Jamaican patois, the only way to unfracture this amputated history was by making a home for myself on the page, and building new modes of language by writing poetry.
When I was younger I was very dismayed by how little of myself and my family I could trace into the past, and was very inspired by the oral folklore and storytelling tradition passed down by my mother and my aunts. It became very clear to me that this oral folklore and storytelling was a matriarchal tradition—a way of preserving our history, both family history and Jamaican history. This not only incited and inspired me to write Cannibal, but it was also a way of saving my own life, of making a record of our songs and mother tongue, and paying tribute to the women who have woven our words and days into existence.
Finally, it was imperative for me to confront the macabre history of the Caribbean itself—to expose the postcolonial roots of violence here; to explore how being “Caribbean” was so closely linked to being “savage,” being cannibal. By confronting the ugly language and prejudices that continue to plague all people of the African diaspora, I hoped to renarrativize the toxic gaze of white supremacy at home and abroad, to shatter its fictions through the shared ritual of poetry.
Inspiration: Always in my ear is the ghost meter of the Caribbean Sea, its old rhythm and singing. The possessed tempo of Pocomania, and the fire-root of duende. I am continually inspired by the fertile landscape of Jamaica, which fevers my dreams—our lush hills and blooms, our heavy fruit trees. The way nothing here grows politely. The wild animal of my childhood and its green river of memory.
I’m fascinated by Goethe’s lifelong search for the “Primal Plant,” from which grew my own notion of the black woman’s body as that elusive Primal Plant, the first site of exile. Early on in college I was very startled by Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, which showed me the wild possibilities of breaking form, how I could build my own labyrinth of mythification as a way to honor and transfigure family, a way to alchemize our folklore. I’ve also been writing from a desire to dismantle Western texts like Shakespeare’s The Tempest, to repossess Caliban as a throat through which the poems could sing, our one-drop rhythm transgressing violence and its lingering exile, a linguistic rebellion forged here through the music of linguistic mastery.
Influences: The poets, artists, and writers who feed the fire and bloodroot of my family tree are Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Frida Kahlo, James Baldwin, Federico García Lorca, Caliban, Aimé Césaire, Caravaggio, Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez, Paul Celan, Rita Dove, Wangechi Mutu, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I can’t say I’ve ever truly reached an impasse in my work. There’s still so much unwritten of Jamaican history, folklore, and culture, still so much of our rich lives that I need to give voice to, in my own small way. Because I read so feverishly, and am always engaging with topics outside of my field—mostly science, history, and philosophy—I’m always finding new ways to enter into a poem, then discovering how many ideas are already in dialogue with each other in that lyric space. I am often so possessed with language, with the roots and wide-ranging shadows of words, that I’m always chasing one word or another down a new corridor of inquiry. If I hit a wall, I’ll listen to music that opens a window unto memory and centers me in a specific time and place, or I’ll reread authors who’ve dazzled and nurtured me, who take the top of my head off. Both English and Jamaican patois are two deep oceans ready-made for diving. And I dive, unabashedly. There, I find the far-reaching tentacles of naming and wording in our society so expansive that I would have enough material to interpret for a lifetime.
Advice: Take your time. Read widely, expand your references and vocabulary; make the poems sing.Nowadays I think there is such a rush to publish a first book, and many poets might feel pressured to send something out that isn’t quite ready. My strongest advice is to be unafraid of waiting, to sit with your words and work until you’ve cultivated them into something flourishing. Live inside the book until you’re certain you’ve grown something lasting, a bloom of your absolute best self. You only have one first; make it count.
What’s next: I’m currently working on a memoir about growing up in a strict Rastafarian household in Jamaica, and feeling estranged in my own country (Jamaica is a heavily Christian country, and Rastafarians are an oft-ostracized minority.) At that same time, I began feeling exiled by my blooming womanhood, and eventually had no choice but to rebel against a religion and a home that made no room for me.
Age: 32.
Hometown: Montego Bay, Jamaica.
Residence: Los Angeles.
Job: I’m a third-year doctoral student at the University of Southern California, where I’m getting my PhD in literature and creative writing.
Time spent writing the book: The bulk of the poems were written in the three years I was in the MFA program at the University of Virginia. The book was my final thesis, and I spent a few months after that rearranging, focusing, and editing the manuscript. One poem snuck into Cannibal that was written in college six or seven years ago. After the book was accepted, I was still tinkering a bit with structuring, and I knew it needed three more poems (circling around a specific theme) to make it cohesive and complete in my mind, so I slipped three new poems into the manuscript, right down to the wire. Those last three poems were completed in September 2015.
Time spent finding a home for it: I waited to send out the manuscript (and most of its poems) until I felt certain that it was ready to breathe on its own full-bloodedly. The fall after I graduated from the University of Virginia I started submitting Cannibal to prizes, and was really fortunate to have the book accepted to a couple of places by the summer of 2015. Cannibal won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry that June. So it was a year or less of sending it out into the world until it was accepted—a fitting nine months.
“The stars are anxious. What version of yrself do you see when you close yr eyes?”
—from “IRL”
How it began: I was torn between a stable relationship and predictable future with a boring dude, and an exciting but uneven fling with a pretty young thing. It kind of broke open all the similar divisions inside me: how to transition into my thirties; hailing from the foothills of rural California but living in the busiest city in America; being a modern, queer, indigenous person with a lot of inherent self-love in a world that tries to deny me life, dignity, liberty, etc.
Inspiration: Survivors, femininity, experiences that happen within the span of ninety minutes (like movies [sometimes sex]).
Influences: A. R. Ammons, Beyoncé, Mariah Carey, Amy Winehouse, Janet Jackson, Nicki Minaj, June Jordan, Muriel Rukeyser, Jeffrey Yang, Sherman Alexie, James Welch, Joy Harjo, Louise Erdrich, Chun Li, Storm, etc.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I watch a movie—or a film, if that’s your vibe. Seeing something begin, build, and end in a certain amount of time gives me faith in a creative faculty.
Advice: Keep the faith, b, keep the faith.
What’s next: I’m working with Tin House to finish up the final edits on Nature Poem, the follow-up to IRL coming out May 2017. I’m about halfway through writing book number three, Junk, and have started Food—the final book in the four-part series I started with IRL. Also a roundtable-discussion-type podcast called “Food 4 Thot” about four multiracial, queer writers in New York City discussing literature, sexuality, and pop culture (hashtag elevator pitch) whom I met at the 2016 Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop. Teaching long-poem workshops. Also being a good friend, a good lay, and a good human.
Age: 33.
Hometown: The Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I have approximately sixty-nine side piece jobs, including teaching/touring/freelance stuff, and a main thing that involves writing—but I’m not at liberty to talk about it just yet. If I told you I’d prolly have to kill you.
Time spent writing the book: Officially, I wrote the book from May to August 2014 in an office in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, facing the entire trunk of Manhattan, but in a way I was writing the book for thirty years.
Time spent finding a home for it: I sent it to allllll the book contests and once or twice even got a personalized rejection, but mostly sturdy no’s from everybody. I don’t blame them, it’s a weird nonstandard poem and the initial manuscript was probs 70 percent realized. Sampson Starkweather at Birds, LLC saw me read one night in the city and asked me to send him something. Thankfully they had enough faith in my voice and work ethic to help me guide the book toward its final form.
If you want to get a sense of where contemporary poetry is headed, there’s no better place to start than with recently published debut collections. Each year sees a rich, diverse lineup of debut poets whose work offers fresh perspectives, exciting new ideas and experiences of language, and unexplored subject matter. Even tried-and-true poetic topics—history, the beloved, nature, family, identity—are explored, interrogated, and lit up in new ways. This past year is no exception: In 2015, debut poets took on everything from Chinese unicorns and Mesoamerican shape-shifters to jazz trumpeter Chet Baker and The Real Housewives television franchise. They wrote sonnet cycles, erasures, conceptual poems, and lyric poems that skip across the page and open their readers’ eyes, illuminating ideas at turns thrilling, devastating, and always alive.
For our eleventh annual look at debut poets, we selected ten of the most compelling debuts published in 2015. The work of these featured poets runs the gamut, though each book celebrates the ways in which language, as Hannah Sanghee Park says, “shifts, morphs, steals, and fractures through time.” We asked all our poets to share the stories behind both the genesis of their poems and the publication of their collections—how they navigate publication and how to, as Alicia Jo Rabins puts it, “forge ahead despite setbacks and rejections and silence while also holding the whole endeavor lightly.” Their answers prove that there is no single path from a manuscript to a published book, and that inspiration can be found in the most ordinary and unusual of places—from the former home of a much-admired poet or a yard full of weeds to a drive on the freeway along the U.S.–Mexico border. But there is one common thread woven throughout: the invocation to submit to one’s obsessions, to write past the machinations of the publishing industry and the expectations of others and into the refuge of language.
Robin Coste Lewis Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems Knopf
“Once, I thought I was a person with a body, the body of something peering out, enchanted and tossed.” –from “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari”
How it began: Actually, I began writing poetry because of a very serious accident that left me with permanent traumatic brain injury. At one point in my recovery (because reading, writing, and speaking made me very symptomatic), my doctors told me I could only read one sentence a day, only write one sentence a day. After that shock began to wear off, I decided to use their prognosis as a formal writing restraint. I spent many months not trying to write a poem, but trying to write only one very fine line. It sounds romantic, but it wasn’t. At first, I was profoundly depressed. After years of teaching literature and writing, what was a life without books? Writing a line a day was an experience in tremendous discipline. It was thrilling to work again, yes, but to work silently in bed for hours, without writing or typing, working just inside my head, was also very macabre. Slowly, my illness became a sort of game. I’d find the milk in the oven and crack up laughing. It was pure poetry, brain damage. It was profoundly humbling.
In short, all those skills artists must acquire—stillness, concentration, discipline, compression, wrestling with the ego, all of it—walked in the door, hand in hand, with brain damage. That’s the real story behind my book. Poetry was the means by which I learned to reenter the world after traumatic brain injury. What compelled me to write was the desire to continue living an engaged life. Poetry allowed me to reenter my work, but from a different door.
Inspiration: Epic literature, especially Sanskrit epics and comparative mythology. I’m also quite nuts about Sanskrit court poetry. Another court I love to visit is the royal kingdom of jazz. What both Sanskrit poetry and jazz have in common, I think, is their mysterious and masterful use of silence, their ability to achieve their goal by laying it on thick while pulling way back simultaneously. Any art form that can balance sublime expression with tacit restraint has me from hello. I’m also inspired deeply by individual, quiet responses to history. I love the historical nerd-freak no one wants to research because they are too strange or eccentric or unconventional to make anyone proud. I am compelled by people who simply do their work, whatever that might be, quietly. Quiet devotion is a primary source of inspiration for me, however that manifests. I usually find much of that in the colored ancient world. And then, of course, I swing the other way toward that entire, ongoing waterfall of post-modern, post-colonial, often queer, cultural production, which makes me just swoon.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Honestly, I have never reached an impasse with my writing. My impasse is that I can’t stop writing. It’s not cute. I’m completely hypergraphic. This is not to say, however, that any of the madness I write is any good. I merely mean to saythat not being able to write isn’t my issue. However, what occurs before writing—that’s where my demons skip and play rope. I used to think the longest road I’ve ever traveled was from my bed to my desk. All of those voices inside my head that tell me, “No, you can’t say…” or, “No, you better not…” or, “What would [fill in the blank] do or say or think?” I don’t know how to describe this, but I know it had something to do with being born in the sixties, being a child in the sixties and witnessing just heinous experiences without any true developmental ability to articulate it. We all had a profound sense of injustice growing up. It was impossible not to feel that, watching profound degradation so common it felt like air. Our education was a travesty. So just holding a pencil when I was younger was very difficult for me. No one took our minds seriously. As a child, all I had heard was that, historically, I, as an African American, was not believed to possess a real mind; or I, like my ancestors, only had three-fifths of a brain. I mean, lest we forget, our bodies were once dissected, literally. So my struggle has never been within language. Language has always, always, been a refuge.
What has never felt natural, however, is this sickening history wherein bodies like mine were positioned to play the role of buffoon. It’s a rare moment indeed that I pick up my pen and do not immediately remember that in America it was considered illegal for black bodies to read and write. Just holding a pencil for me is deliciously transgressive. So history is my impasse—nothing else. What keeps me going? The work of others. Others, definitely.
Writing Prompt: When I was at Harvard, Jamaica Kincaid once said in our workshop, “Write about that which most embarrasses you.” I think that’s profoundly good advice. It’s so easy, isn’t it, to climb atop a soapbox and recite a poem about the ways in which we believe the world is fucked up? When I write that way, I’m certain all I’m doing is insulting my reader. Who, for example, doesn’t know the whole world is in cinders? And so I believe my work can be more effective, can reach deeper inside the reader if I say, “It is I who feel profoundly fucked up,” and then explore why meticulously. I like to use tenderness as a weapon, a seduction, a door to leave ajar so that my reader will walk inside the poem and feel safe, even in the face of profound historical horror. Trust me, I’m not saying all poems should begin with shame or embarrassment as a motivation, not by any means. I like writing all kinds of poems in all kinds of forms. I’m simply saying that instead of using writing prompts, I sometimes ask myself, “Well, what are you most avoiding?” And for me that’s a good place to begin.
Advice: I’m not sure I’m the right person to give advice about first books. I am fifty-one after all. Don’t get me wrong, I love my age, and I love that I’m just now publishing my first book, but it seems as if the “debut” has become a sort of genre, a particular ideal regarding what constitutes a first collection. I’ve known for a long while that my work has never fit into that schematic. My book, primarily, is about the history of race and Western art. It’s an experiment in archive. It’s not really what first-book publishers are looking for. Also, many debut prizes and grants have age limits or requirements. So by the time I settled into raising my son and finding my place in my work, my writing was already disqualified from even applying because I was older. Ultimately, it’s worked out just fine. And anyways, I don’t think I really had much to offer any reader when I was thirty-five. I was a mess. What could I have done with a page at thirty-five besides romanticize being a thirty-five-year-old mess? I am more of a tortoise than a hare. I like what taking my time reveals.
Also, I adamantly don’t believe that because one writes it follows naturally that one must also publish. I’ve written books for one person, and shared it only with that sublime audience of one. I’ve burned others. Virginia Woolf said rather famously that writing is a far greater pleasure than being read. I’m from that camp, I think. I’m deeply suspicious of the market.
So, I guess this is a long way of saying that if I have any advice to poets trying to publish their first book it’s this: Try not to look up too often at what others are doing. Your work is interesting because it’s yours, not because of where it lands in the publishing world. Ignore literary fashions and stay close to your own hand. Try not to please anyone or any particular audience. Find out what the real work is inside of you, then find the courage to do it well. Resist the temptation to be clever. It’s sexy, but it’s a sure sign that your mask has control of you, and not the other way around. Just do your work.
What’s next: I’m revising the other two manuscripts I finished while at New York University. The first, “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness,” is about the Arctic and its history of both colonialism and exploration. I use this history as an allegory for post-colonial desires for subjectivity. Besides the circumpolar diaspora and the history of expansionism, the book pivots primarily around African American Arctic explorer Matthew Henson. Henson codiscovered the North Pole, but was reluctantly given historical credit, due to race relations not only in the United States, but in the sciences specifically. I’m also revising another collection that I also began at NYU, a project titled “The Pickaninny Wins!,” a double-erasure of a 1931 children’s book originally titled The Pickaninny Twins.
Age: 51.
Hometown: Compton, California.
Residence: Los Angeles.
Job: I’m a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Southern California. It’s a hybrid PhD, so I do both creative and critical work. That is, I write poetry, and research-wise, I work on the historical relationship between African American photography and African American poetry.
Does your job allow time to write? Is this a serious question?
Time spent writing the book: All in all, the whole book probably took five or six years—with brain damage and a new child thrown in for good measure.
Alicia Jo Rabins Divinity School American Poetry Review (Honickman First Book Prize)
“Let me teach you about beauty: a slanted shipwreck draped in its own torn sails.” –from “The Magic”
How it began: I am obsessed with a few consistent themes: how weird it is to live in time; the magic of teaching and learning; the closeness and distance between people; and the mysteries of living in a body, like sex, love, travel, food, beauty, death.
Inspiration: Ancient Jewish texts are a huge influence and inspiration for me: the practical, the mystical, and especially the intersection of the two. I also draw on yoga, ritual, and spiritual practice in general. Music is a big part of my life too—both the experience of making music in many different genres and touring itself have defined and marked my life. Kenneth Koch taught me, in college, not to take myself too seriously in my poems. New York City inspired me tremendously for years, and since moving to Portland I’ve been inspired by the forests and plants, the weeds in my garden. Having children is immense and mind-blowing and inspiring, and I draw a lot of inspiration from my dreams as well.
Influences: Anne Carson, James Joyce (Ulysses in particular), Sylvia Plath, Christopher Smart, John Donne, J. S. Bach, Pablo Neruda, Laurie Anderson, Harryette Mullen, Brenda Shaughnessy, Julio Cortázar, Lucille Clifton, Yoko Ono. And so many of my contemporaries and friends, whom I won’t name for fear of inevitably leaving some out.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Because I usually write in a stream-of-consciousness mode and edit later, I don’t really experience impasses. Something is always happening, even if it’s only the breath. I did stop writing for three years in my early twenties, though. I had studied poetry intensely in college and felt like I had strained my reading and writing muscle, and that my relationship to writing was too ego-based and needed a dramatic reset. I completely let writing go and promised myself I would only start again if it returned naturally, without any pressure or ambition or intention. I was glad when it came back a few years later, and my relationship to poetry was transformed. I guess it’s important to me to maintain some paradoxical mix of being stubbornly devoted to poetry, enough to forge ahead despite setbacks and rejections and silence, while also holding the whole endeavor lightly.
Advice: The best advice I ever got was at an artist training from Creative Capital: If you aren’t getting rejected from 90 percent of the things you apply to, you aren’t aiming high enough. It flipped the script for me so that rejections meant I was doing my job, rather than failing at it. Along the same lines, I try to separate the work of being an artist into two parts: my writing self, who is sensitive and passionate and all that stuff, and my personal assistant self, who just sits down with a cup of coffee and submits poems without any emotional investment. Or, to put it briefly, play the long game.
What’s next: I’m writing my second book of poetry, about motherhood and giving birth and gardening and midwifery goddesses and how psychedelic the whole experience of pregnancy, birth, and early parenthood is. I’m also touring with my songwriting project Girls in Trouble(we just released our third album), and with my solo chamber-rock opera A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. AndI’m slowly moving towards writing a nonfiction book I’ve been mulling over for a while now.
Age: 38.
Hometown: I was born in Portland, Oregon, and grew up in Towson, Maryland. I also lived in New York City and Northampton, Massachusetts, for years and they both feel like home.
Residence: Portland, Oregon.
Job: I patch together a living between my work as a writer, musician, composer, performer, and teacher of Torah. As Eileen Myles says, “There are so many different packages for the same energy to travel through.”
Does your job allow time to write? This isn’t an easy question for me to answer. On the one hand, I’d love more focused time to write, but on the other hand, the line between “writing” and “job” is blurry in my life—songwriting is part of how I make my living, for example—and I have always written in the nooks and crannies of my day. Also, for the record, I find that being a parent of two young children demands more consistent presence of mind than any job I’ve ever had, and (alongside all the great stuff) is therefore more of a challenge for me in terms of writing time.
Time spent writing the book: The oldest poem in the book is eighteen years old and, amazingly, in exactly the same form it was in when I wrote it in college. It wasn’t originally part of the book, but I added it back in somewhere during the editing process. The rest of them were written over the past twelve or so years, though almost all of them were continually revised while I submitted and resubmitted the manuscript. It almost feels like two different processes—eighteen years of writing the poems and seven of intentionally editing the manuscript. Wow, that’s a long time.
Time spent finding a home for it: Five years, though I edited it throughout, so it was a very different book by the end.
Three favorite words: Amethyst. Sage. Antediluvian.
Alicia Jo Rabins reads “How To Travel” featuring the face of Alicia McDaid. Video by Zak Margolis on Vimeo. Check out another recent reading Rabins gave in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as part of the Poetry in America series.
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Jay Deshpande Love the Stranger YesYes Books
“But we will never have enough of being wrong about the other, not once.” –from “Amor Fati”
How it began: The earliest pieces of the book came together during my MFA, but it had a very different form and was wrapped around a couple series of poems that ultimately didn’t belong. I’ve always been drawn towards the love poem and lyric descriptions of beauty, but in that period I began to experiment more with the unfamiliar and the disturbing. I found my poems coming alive at the moments when the erotic and the alien braided together. At some point I started to see how the loss of the beloved is not just an occasion for utterance, but also an opportunity for greater reckoning with what it means to be human, and alone, and therefore deeply connected. Following these themes, I wrote a chapbook called “Love the Stranger” shortly after grad school; it was another year before I realized that it held the keys to this book.
Inspiration: Visually, René Magritte’s work was an essential influence on the book. Also middle-period Federico Fellini. Denis Johnson’s poems have always been a major touchstone for me, and they helped to shape parts of Love the Stranger. Environmentally, I took great inspiration from a residency at the Saltonstall Arts Colony in upstate New York. A lot of unseen and necessary work happened there in the woods and on the trails.
Influences: Denis Johnson, Marie Howe, Timothy Donnelly, Ben Lerner, Lyn Hejinian, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Ashbery, Bianca Stone, Richard Siken, Lucie Brock-Broido, E. M. Forster, Marilynne Robinson. Among visual artists, Dorothea Tanning’s work in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and Diana Al-Hadid’s sculptures.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I have long conversations with my brother, who is a musician and writer, about why we do what we do. I reread Michael Ondaatje. I think about Frank Ocean’s songwriting. I play old standards on the piano and explore chords until I remember that some parts of experience stay blissfully outside of words. And then I go spend time with the people I love and try to learn from them. I’ve also found that I have trouble writing when my work has moved away from the physicality of pencil and paper for too long. Then I’ll print out a number of pages of poetry (mine and others’) and mark them up excessively.
Writing Prompt: Just to get the lede out and free things up, I like to take an old poem of mine and perform a phonetic English-to-English mistranslation on it. “I, too, dislike it” becomes “Why’d you ignite this?”; “A certain slant of light” becomes “The skirt and pants of night,” etc. The goal is to keep the music and change everything else.
Advice: Read widely and make it your job to really consider the character of different presses: what’s the range of authors they publish, what qualities and ideas do their books seem to value, how do their books feel in your hands.
What’s next: In addition to writing individual poems to push my voice in new directions, I’m at work on an essay collection and a book of translations of the Egyptian poet Georges Henein.
Age: 31.
Hometown: Boston.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I write for Slate and other magazines.
Does your job allow time to write? It’s a constant navigation, but at the moment it works pretty well.
Time spent writing the book: About five years.
Time spent finding a home for it: It took one year; I sent it to six places. It was a finalist for the 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize, and then was accepted by YesYes Books during its open reading period.
Three favorite words:These kinds of lists always make me squirmy! But if it’s absolutely necessary: sandwiches; flensing; and, if it can count as one word, chocolate milk.
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Hannah Sanghee Park The Same-Different Louisiana State University Press (Walt Whitman Award)
“Just what they said about the river: rift and ever.
And nothing was left for the ether there either.” –from “Bang”
How it began: I had a lengthy first manuscript I was editing and sending out, and wanted a change of pace and page. I was aiming for concision. At the book’s inception, I was researching myth and folklore in Korea, in the hopes that I would write a manuscript about stories. I found that a lot of Korean stories had counterparts elsewhere (with its own cultural DNA), and that mix of universality and specificity was compelling. But at its simplest, the book is a paean to what comprises storytelling—language, in its words, sounds, imagery, and meanings. It was at the end of my research that I found H. D.’s Trilogy. I kept these H. D. lines on a Post-It above me as I wrote: “her book is our book; written / or unwritten, its pages will reveal // a tale of a Fisherman, / a tale of a jar or jars, // the same—different—the same attributes, / different yet the same as before.”
Inspiration: International folklore, fairy tales, and mythology—shape-shifters, hybrids, dualities, and metamorphoses. The same could be said about language as well—how it shifts, morphs, steals, and fractures through time. I’ve always loved form, prosody, and wordplay. When I started writing: H. D., James Baldwin, and Marina Tsvetaeva. The letters of Philip Larkin, John Keats, and Sylvia Plath. The bulk of it: everyone mentioned, Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Merrill, Samuel Beckett, a physical dictionary and thesaurus. Poetry by my friends and mentors. The editing and the end—Don Mee Choi and Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman. And in full circle, I turned back to H. D., Baldwin, and Tsvetaeva in different forms—short stories, plays, and nonfiction. When I was finishing the book, I was also learning how to write screenplays, which was helpful in economy and setting. But the running fount has always been the communities I’ve been lucky to be a part of. Wherever I go, I have met brilliant people who make me a better writer: professors, colleagues, peers. The book was written in Korea, Washington, New Hampshire, and California, and the natural landscapes influenced the book’s backdrop.
Influences: This is an ongoing, disparate anthology, so to keep it short—other than the poets I’ve mentioned above, my immediate community is always influential. Since moving to Los Angeles, I’ve been stunned by these local powerhouses: Kima Jones, Blas Falconer, Ashaki Jackson, Marci Vogel, and others. And the many poets I’ve met and hope to meet who are keeping poetry alive. Recently, the students in the 2015 Poetry Out Loud Competition inspired me—I experienced familiar poems in new ways.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I read, or watch films or TV. I used to be a night writer, and my excuse was that there were no distractions—I’m off work, everyone around me has gone to sleep. But sometimes I need to clean, cook, decide now’s the time to take up a new activity, and then write. As if expending all this other energy, or resting my mind allows the mind to reset. Writing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and open dialogue is necessary. I call people—usually my writing partner, Jane Shim—to discuss ideas. What keeps me going is the belief that even if writing is frustrating or maddening, it’s ultimately worth it. Petrarch: “And so desire carries me along.” And caffeine, too. Getting the ball rolling in the right direction sometimes feels Sisyphean, but when it starts, the speed and the growth is euphoric. No distraction is great enough. Writing is like a labyrinth. Sometimes there’s a reward at the end of it; sometimes you’re pursued by Sallie Mae and her Echidna spawn Navient. But nothing feels better than actually moving through it.
Writing Prompt: How much a word can be dissected, rearranged, and reimagined—imagined etymologies, defamiliarization, constraint-based writing. In short, the intersection of structure and play.
Advice: Keep reading, writing, rewriting, and sending, even when it seems like there’s a void. Dream big (a bromide that’s useful), and go there. That’s what I needed to hear in the publication process. Every time my writing boomerangs back to me, there’s a chance to reassess my work and my thoughts. I know form rejection boilerplate, but I also know the generous people in my life who have cheered me on. Having both rejection and support provides a kind of ballast. Knowing why you write despite x is invaluable—the pure joy of creating is as powerful as the final creation.
What’s next: Writing scripts, rewriting scripts, treatments, short stories, and starting a new poetry book.
Age: 29.
Hometown: Federal Way, Washington.
Residence: Los Angeles.
Job: Freelance writer.
Does your job allow time to write? Yes, but personal writing requires juggling. It’s a constant turning of a lazy Susan—a little here, a pass there, but all that matters is movement.
Time spent writing the book: For this book specifically, about one and a half to two years. It was fast because I had the luxury of a fellowship and a residency. I did a two-month residency at the MacDowell Colony (paradise) where I kept to a tight schedule. I woke up early, ate breakfast, and went back to my Internet-less studio and wrote. As I ate lunch, I read. Then I wrote until dinner. When I came back from unwinding, I’d write until I needed to sleep. Rinse and repeat. I’m naturally lazy, so I need this kind of structure. The bulk of the book was written then, because most of the day could be devoted to writing. However, a poem I wrote about five years ago made it in as well—a long-lost relative finding her family.
Time spent finding a home for it: Before this book, I sent my first manuscript out for about four to five years. When I was satisfied with The Same-Different, the plan was to send to a few places each cycle, as I was on a tight budget. But I lucked out, and The Same-Different was accepted in its first submission round.
Three favorite words: Cleave, move, empathy.
Hannah Sanghee Park reads from The Same-Different at the Academy of American Poets’s 2014 Poets Forum Awards Ceremony.
Jonathan Fink The Crossing Dzanc Books
“The bodies hang like chimes within the boughs. Perhaps the height is welcome to the dead” –from “The Crossing”
How it began: What poetry offers, and what set me off writing this book, is the visceral engagement with language that welcomes attention to imagery, tone, rhythm, narrative, metaphor, politics, ethics, humor, myth, and justice, among many other things. Like a painter who simply likes the smell of paint or a potter who likes the feel of clay, the pleasure of embarking on a writing project, for me, always resides in the tactile pleasures of language.
Inspiration: W. H. Auden has a great line, “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings,” and I often feel inspired to write about personal, imagined, or historical material about which I have mixed feelings. The poems in The Crossing vary from an eighteen-section poem about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire to individual poems about myth, art, and my personal experience growing up in West Texas. In all cases, I was inspired to write these poems not because I knew what I wanted to say about the subjects, but because I felt compelled to explore and investigate the complicated material through poetry.
Influences: Too many to name, of course, although I would say, of contemporary poets, Jane Kenyon for the singular, resonate image; Marie Howe for book structure and thematic commitment; and B. H. Fairchild for lyrical, narrative expansiveness. I’ve also been immensely fortunate to work with wonderful writing mentors and teachers, including Natasha Trethewey, Mary Karr, George Saunders, Junot Díaz, Brooks Haxton, Michael Burkard, and Robert Flynn—all stunning writers who are unfailingly generous, constructive, and kind.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Raymond Carver defined a writer as someone who is willing to stare at something longer than anyone else. For me, that experience has been true; there is no trick to overcoming a writing impasse other than continuing to return to what I’ve written, looking for unexplored possibilities and/or unfulfilled expectations.
Advice: Submit to your obsessions, whatever they are. Resistance is futile. An honestly obsessive collection always resonates much more fully with a reader or editor than a collection constructed with an eye toward the market or some imagined palatable consensus. Remember that a camel is a horse designed by a committee.
What’s next: Dzanc is bringing out a finished second collection of my poetry, a book-length sonnet sequence titled, “Barbarossa: The German Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Siege of Leningrad.” I’m also nearing completion of a nonfiction collection primarily consisting of place-based immersive and investigative essays. Some topics include the fracking boom in Midland, Texas; the D. B. Cooper plane hijacking and parachute jump; the changing scope of U.S.–Cuba relations; and the failings and successes of the criminal justice system as seen through the lens of an assault trial in Pensacola, Florida; among other essays. I’m also working on new individual poems.
Age: 40.
Hometown: Abilene, Texas.
Residence: Pensacola, Florida.
Job: Associate professor and director of creative writing at the University of West Florida.
Does your job allow time to write? Yes, in the sense that my job contributes to the conditions that help make writing possible, but no job has ever prevented me from writing if I felt compelled to write.
Time spent writing the book: Approximately six years.
Time spent finding a home for it: Another six years after finishing and publishing the individual poems.
Jonathan Fink reads from The Crossing, published by Dzanc Books.
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Rickey Laurentiis Boy With Thorn University of Pittsburgh Press (Cave Canem Poetry Prize)
“I want to be released from it. I want its impulses stunned to lead. This body. Its breath. Let it. Let the whole pageant end.” –from “One Country”
How it began: I think about a friend and fellow poet, Phillip B. Williams, with whom I shared a suite at my first Cave Canem retreat in the summer of 2008. He had a manuscript then (actually several), but wouldn’t share it with me to read until I had something manuscript-length to share with him. So, that’s what I think Cave Canem must mean by fellowship: that kind of camaraderie, support, and push, however hard. I eventually did produce a manuscript and shared it with Phillip, but it was one very different in many ways from the Boy With Thorn that would eventually find publication. We helped shaped each other’s books along through the many years, but more importantly we helped compel each other’s poems. Poems first.
Inspiration: I’m likely to be inspired by anything in the right context: an overheard conversation on the street, a song, literary criticism, philosophy, a personal experience or, as is most present in my book, visual art. I was profoundly influenced and inspired by a course I took while at Sarah Lawrence College—queer theory, with Julie Abraham. That course threw a hammer into my ways of thinking. And not because it attempted to rebuild the pieces (although, in some ways, it did), but because it made me more aware of the pieces themselves and the various social/political discourses that have shaped them.
Influences: Here are some artists: Glenn Ligon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Björk, Piero della Francesca, Wangechi Mutu, Georgia O’Keeffe, David Bailly, Kara Walker, Edgar Degas, Judy Chicago, Yoko Ono, Jay DeFeo, Caravaggio, Auguste Rodin, Romare Bearden, Frida Kahlo, Anonymous. And I remain deeply influenced, in particular, by Jessye Norman’s rendition of “Deep River,” which she sung at a special concert with Kathleen Battle at Carnegie Hall in 1990 and most of which you can find recorded on YouTube.
Writer’s Block Remedy: My obsessions keep me going. I think about visual art and how, in the example of an artist like Mark Rothko, who explores the same terrain canvas after canvas, or at least seems to, I learned to recognize and trust my obsessions: the images, concepts, figures, and motifs that repeat in my head. Obsessions are ideas that I can at least remember are there at those anxious moments I’m willing to believe in a thing like “writer’s block.” But writer’s block, simply speaking, doesn’t exist if one’s willing to look back at all one has done and, realizing knowledge is always limited, thinks, “Nope, I need to try this again.” I still believe that.
Writing Prompt: Outside of what I offer to my students, I’m not sure I think about writing in terms of prompts, at least not thematic ones. If I chose any, they’re usually prompts that put restraints on the form or structure of the poem. A part of me vaguely remembers diagramming sentences as a young Catholic school student and so, in some ways, that finds itself in the pleasure I get from trying to sustain a single sentence over the course of a poem, or at least over several lines. There’s something about that exercise that seems dancerly to me, rhythmic.
Advice: So, there are thirty-three poems in my book—but that doesn’t mean I only wrote thirty-three poems. Of course I wrote way more than that at various stages in my growth and education as a poet—some that made the cut; some that I realize were the equivalent of a pianist practicing her scales; some that only exist as a single ghost line in another poem; some that might eventually find a home in a future collection, who knows. My point is to say that the process takes time, so much time, and, while I’m a fan of putting artificial restraints on a poem so as to get to more creative uses of language, I’m not a fan of artificial time restraints on publication. Just as I think that there’s something potentially problematic in knowing too much about what a poem is about when starting, so too I think there’s a problem in trying to know or demand when you should publish a book. Let the book tell you. And when it does send only to places that carry books you can’t live without.
What’s next: What they don’t tell you is that the second your first book is accepted for publication at a press (or wins a contest), let alone when it is physically published and released, all the poems you begin to write suddenly sound in a slightly different key, so to speak. The poems are suddenly working under the slight burden of knowledge that they may one day become (or that you need them to become) a second (or third or fourth) book. I am working hard now to try to get back to the kind of specific ignorance one writes from before the first book gets published: when you’re simply writing poem by poem because of some insistence that you have to; this poem must be written, alone, individual, not as a sequence necessarily, not because of some “theme” or “project,” but simply because it demands itself to be written, and for you to write and learn by it.
Age: 26.
Hometown: New Orleans.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Currently, I teach a course at Columbia University and at the Saturday Program at the Cooper Union. I’m also the director of an after-school writing and literacy program at the Harlem Children’s Zone.
Does your job allow time to write? No—but that’s a good thing. When I’ve been fortunate enough to be invited to some residencies, for instance, I’ve found that the sudden surplus of free, unstructured time can do harm to my writing process, insofar as I begin to occupy my time in other ways besides writing new work. Residences are great for editing older drafts or for ordering a book. But it’s in the gaps, in the minutes I steal when I’m on a crowded subway, when I’m in a less-than-exciting meeting or when I should be asleep, for example, that I find myself writing the most new material.
Time spent writing the book: The earliest poem in the book I wrote as a first-year at Sarah Lawrence College for a class (my first poetry class ever!) with Suzanne Gardinier. That was in the fall of 2007. The last poem I wrote that was also included in the book was written somewhere in late January/early February of 2014, after having seen one of my favorite Basquiat paintings in the flesh in a exhibit in New Orleans earlier that Christmas. So it would seem, then, that it took seven years to write all thirty-three poems that comprise Boy With Thorn (it took two years, alone, to complete one in particular). I was born on February 7. Seven’s always been my favorite number.
Time spent finding a home for it: Maybe about a year after Phillip first brought the idea to my mind that I could write toward a manuscript, I sent it out to a handful of contests. To my surprise, the manuscript was honorably mentioned for Red Hen Press’s Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. But I’ll remind you that this manuscript I’m referring to was, in significant ways, still very different from the book I would come to publish. After that, somehow, and quite suddenly, I wasn’t interested so much in rushing towards book publication. I concerned myself with the quality of the poems themselves, and with seeing them enter the world individually. So there was a large gulf of time when I didn’t submit a single manuscript to any contest or publisher, which mostly paralleled my graduation from Sarah Lawrence and matriculation into the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis. A year after I had received my MFA and had moved back to New York City, I sent my new manuscript to at least two publishers and four contests—four specific contests that either had a history of awarding books I admire or were being judged by poets I greatly enjoy. I didn’t get as much as a nod from three of them but, again to my surprise, I won one! And that it was the Cave Canem Prize just seemed so coming-full-circle perfect! Anyway, depending on how you read this narrative, you can say it took several years to find a publisher, or only a few months.
Rickey Laurentiis reads two poems from Boy With Thorn, published by University of Pittsburgh Press.
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Natalie Scenters-Zapico The Verging Cities Center for Literary Publishing
“You forgot to weed your eyes,so brush has grown wild in your stare.” –from “When the Desert Made Us Visible”
How it began: Homesickness. I wrote most of these poems while I was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I felt deeply haunted by things in my past that I had spent a lot of time ignoring: femicide, narco-violence, and the effect our broken immigration system had on me and the people around me. Suddenly, I felt compelled to face these things in a way I had never had an interest in before. For some reason, being away from the site of my liminality gave me the bravery to voice what had been silenced in me for so long. I also became very interested in the ways that people who are not from El Paso–Juárez were representing my border cities in art and pop culture. I wanted to write down my love affair with a place so often depicted as violent and corrupt.
Inspiration: The drive from Albuquerque to El Paso, Texas, and from Ciudad Juárez to Chihuahua was a huge source of inspiration. I would also drive the border freeway and take in that space, that in-between space, that illusion that is so physically damaging. And, of course, late-night conversations with my husband who is a border-rhetorics scholar, and who for most of our relationship was undocumented. When we fell in love, we also fell in love with each other’s pain, and the two cities that held us suspended in that pain.
Influences: While working on the collection: David Dorado Romo’s Ringside Seat to a Revolution, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Norma Elia Cantú’s Canícula, Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 spent a lot of time on my desk. These books deeply influenced the way that I conceive of borders and of my sister cities, El Paso–Ciudad Juárez. I also spent time with Federico García Lorca, Miguel Hernández, Anna Kamieńska’s notebooks, Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, Rigoberto González, Alberto Ríos, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I cook something that takes a while to make, but that I know how to make well. The repetitive motions of cooking keep me grounded in the body, but allow me the freedom to let my mind wander. I also like knowing that many women before me spent so much time in that domestic space, and I remind myself how important it is that I choose to be there, but that I don’t have to be there.
Writing Prompt: I spend a lot of time looking at the art books for the Bienal Ciudad Juárez–El Paso art shows, and then writing ekphrastic poems or flash fictions. It keeps me connected to where I’m from while helping me to see the border in new ways.
Advice: It is as important to know what you’re trying to accomplish in your collection as it is to know what it actually accomplishes. Sometimes placing your own will on a collection is the worst thing you can do.
What’s next: I’m in the early stages of working on the next book, which deals with border-security technologies, surveillance, and weapons. I’m interested in depictions of violence, how we consume that violence, and render that violence in art.
Age: 27.
Hometown: El Paso, Texas.
Residence: Salt Lake City.
Job: I teach high school English and creative writing.
Does your job allow time to write? It is always a struggle for me to write as a high school teacher. I have to schedule time for me to physically sit at my desk and write.
Time spent writing the book: It took me four years of obsessively writing and revising in constant rotation.
Time spent finding a home for it: One year.
Three favorite words: Sobremesa, cariño, and teeth.
Natalie Scenters-Zapico reads from The Verging Cities, published by The Center for Literary Publishing.
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Corina Copp The Green Ray Ugly Duckling Presse
“Let rest here my lyre and Hear soon the moon’s fair Lecture in black” –from “Pro Magenta”
How it began: I was reading Mark Ford’s biography of Raymond Roussel when I first came across mention of the green ray. In the same month, I saw Éric Rohmer’s Le rayon vert, and I attended a François Laruelle lecture. The notes from all three came to be the poem “Pro Magenta,” which set me into thinking about synchronicity and how I compose. The wheels of the actual manuscript were put into motion a few years later, when Ugly Duckling Presse editor Abraham Adams proposed a book project.
Inspiration: These poems range in composition date from 2010 to 2015, so what resonates now as far as inspiration goes is a list that I’ll spare you—but they are distinct, and each poem holds one or another source (or many simultaneously) in (I hope) different ways. Jean Day’s Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium was formative for me when thinking about devotion and source materials and how to think and write alongside inspiration itself, to construe it as an interlocutor, or a threat, or a friend, or a fetish, etc.
Influences: When I first started seriously writing poetry, I was reading Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Laura Riding Jackson; and I was obsessed with Alice Notley and Carla Harryman. Then Miles Champion introduced me to Tom Raworth and Jean Day—they both had a big impact. I had another turn when I really read Lisa Robertson, who led me to read Hannah Arendt. Richard Maxwell, the playwright, was another turning point; and the work of Big Dance Theater, Thomas Bradshaw, Kristen Kosmas. For a few years now, Ingeborg Bachmann, Marguerite Duras. And my friends are influential. They’re all brilliant. Can I say brilliant?
Writer’s Block Remedy: I’m easily comforted and astonished. By that turn from feeling like New York City’s rag doll, in particular; from that real desire to leave my life and start a new one; from that exhaustion; from walking into a diner or taking a train. I have to be in that place to write; I have to have a connection to future good feeling in general if I expect myself to write. Also: film and bibliomancy, both. Or Robert Ashley, an example. Opening to pages/sounds/images of work that I love will always help. Going to the library, feeling overwhelmed. But I can go for months without writing; I am often waiting to feel angry, or any emotional event, or just a deadline to push me. But accepting the stretches of not writing is okay, too. I mean: If I feel alert and awake and thoughtful and without remorse, then I am listening, which for me is also writing. I compulsively transcribe overheard dialogue or I note exchanges between people or how they are physically positioned. If I’ve gone months without this sort of openness, then I’m probably depressed and not writing. To help me accept that, I remember something Doris Lessing said—to paraphrase, you must use these energies while you have them, you will lose them; you are more clever now than you will be later. Terrifying.
Writing Prompt: Feeling constrained.
Advice: I took a strange route, and had faith I’d eventually get to work with people who cared about the poems. Having faith in those relationships is important.
What’s next: I’m working on an essay/score that reads and writes through the reading of the painter Alan Reid. The piece will appear in a monograph of his work that should be out in the spring.
Age: 36.
Hometown: I was born in Lawrence, Kansas, and grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and New Orleans.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I usually have two to three part-time jobs. I am currently a staff writer for the Poetry Foundation, I freelance copyedit and proofread, and I coordinate a master’s program in international finance and economic policy at Columbia University.
Does your job allow time to write? I’ve made it this far. But the answer is no, not at all. I would always prefer to be writing, to put it gently.
Time spent writing the book: About four or five years.
Time spent finding a home for it: I was very, very lucky in that Ugly Duckling approached me for the book. This was initially around 2012 or 2013, but I still had to finish writing it. We changed the date of publication a few times. They were patient with me.
Three favorite words: “Mom” and “or” and “Dad.”
Corina Copp reads an early version of her poems from The Green Ray, published by Ugly Duckling Presse, for the sixth Antibody Series in 2014.
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Morgan Parker Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night Switchback Books (Gatewood Prize)
“If I hear you’re talking shit about me in your confessional interview, please know seven birds have fallen dead at my feet right out of the sky.” –from “If My Housemate Fucks With Me I Would Get So Real (Audition Tape Take 1)”
How it began: This book started as my MFA thesis at NYU. It was embarrassingly large—something like 120 pages—so I spent the summer after graduation editing it, reordering it, and trimming it down in preparation for sending it out to contests and presses. The first book is a weird thing—mine contains some of the first poems I ever wrote, back in college. Of course, when I was writing those, I had no idea I was writing a book. I was playing around with new forms and registers and confessions, and it was only in grad school that I started thinking about the poems as a collection. There isn’t a “project” in this book, there isn’t a linear narrative or one central event, so in conceptualizing the book, I spent a lot of time thinking about my obsessions, taking in a lot of art and TV and movies and music and poems, and meditating on the themes they have in common.
Inspiration: Television. The Real World and The Real Housewives franchises have been particularly inspirational for me—something about the strangeness and boldness of reality TV, its dark comedy, is a really important lens in my work. Jay Z and Beyoncé are also super important figures in my work—or rather, symbols of them, the idea of them. In general, media and pop culture always have a lot of space in my poetic brain. They’ve got everything I want to talk about: loneliness, performance, representations of femininity, insecurity, family, sociocultural inequity, glitter.
Influences: My collaborator Angel Nafis; my peers Danez Smith, Charif Shanahan, Nate Marshall, Natalie Eilbert, Rio Cortez, Monica McClure, Wendy Xu (I could go on forever here); my big brother Matthew Rohrer; my poetry auntie Eileen Myles; Terrance Hayes, Tracy K. Smith, Evie Shockley, Matthew Zapruder, Cate Marvin, Anne Sexton, Lucille Clifton, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes; visual artists Mickalene Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Keith Haring, Glenn Ligon, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, William Pope.L.
Writer’s Block Remedy: If I feel stuck, I stop writing for a while. Or I write in another genre for a bit. I read. I go look at art. I have good conversation with friends over wine. Lately I’ve been trying to honor silence rather than being anxious about it. The itchy, restless feeling always comes back; the poems always emerge. I’m realizing more and more that “writing” is only a tiny aspect of writing poetry.
Writing Prompt: Formal poetry. Specifically sonnets and pantoums. Usually, I edit the drafts until they’re unrecognizable as formal poems, but constraint really helps my writing process. Honestly, I see prompts as rules to break, something to rebel against.
Advice: Submit widely, but also be strategic and thoughtful: Don’t submit to a press you aren’t familiar with or whose work you don’t love; don’t submit to a press whose aesthetic isn’t up your alley. A press is really a home for a book—and for you, the poet, as well—so I think it’s important (and often neglected in conversation) to remember the relationship continues past manuscript acceptance. It’s an intimate thing. Also, know that as you’re submitting, you should keep editing. Don’t be so stubborn you can’t see room for improvement. Finally, make the waiting time productive. Write new poems, go to readings, meet new writers, build community.
What’s next: I’m editing my second collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and getting it ready for publication with Tin House Books in 2017. I’m also at work on a young adult novel loosely based on my teen years spent coming to terms with my identity and depression in a conservative, religious suburb—it’s my first foray into fiction, and an exciting challenge. There’s also a rumor floating around that there may be an essay collection in my future.
Age: 28.
Hometown: Highland, California.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Editor for Little A Books and Day One, adjunct assistant professor of undergraduate creative writing at Columbia University.
Does your job allow time to write? Sometimes. I write at night, on the weekends, and in transit (buses, trains, planes). I wish I were one of those people who could wake up and write before work, but I’m a snooze-button person. Ideally, I block out a day each weekend to write or edit. I’ve also been known to take vacation days to hole away uninterrupted.
Time spent writing the book: They were written and edited over the course of five years.
Morgan Parker reads two poems from Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, published by Switchback Books.
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Richie Hofmann Second Empire Alice James Books (Beatrice Hawley Award)
“I have nothing to confess. I don’t yet know that I possess a body built for love.” –from “Idyll”
How it began: I began writing the first poems in this book while I was working on the book collection at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut—a magical, haunted place full of Merrill’s things, his furniture, his books. It was inspiring to inhabit that physical space with the spirit of someone whose art had meant the world to me. His “The Book of Ephraim” was one of the first contemporary poems I loved. To be showering in his shower, sleeping in his bed, staring into that mirror. There, among his art and belongings, my desire to write poetry was given new dramatic force.
Inspiration: Love; sexuality; history; music, especially opera and art song.
Influences: My teachers, foremost. Jorie Graham’s Erosion. Benjamin Britten’s operas and song cycles. Daniel Mendelsohn’s essays. French and Italian poetry in translation. Stephen Sondheim lyrics. Installations by Félix González-Torres.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Sometimes it’s important for me to get outside of poetry, or outside of literature altogether. To listen to music, look at a painting or sculpture or installation, see a concert, attend a lecture on something strange but intriguing. These other arts not only provoke new subjects, but they might offer new ways of thinking formally as well.
Writing Prompt: Write a poem in which your own name is invoked and explored.
Advice: Cut almost everything. Make your book as lean and dynamic as possible. Give yourself time to grow toward and away from poems, and see what new object you can create by subtracting and pruning and chiseling away.
What’s next: My new manuscript of poems explores my family’s history in Germany: my ancestors who owned a small bakery on the Rhine and my own childhood years spent in Munich. It’s about inheritance, history, power, violence, privilege, gender and sexuality, childhood, bookmaking, typography, and Mozart.
Age: 28.
Hometown: Haddon Heights, New Jersey.
Residence: Chicago.
Job: PhD student in English at Emory University in Atlanta.
Does your job allow time to write? It often does—in that reading and researching and working through critical questions is an essential part of writing poetry for me. Though I’d have to say, I like teaching even better, because I find interacting with people (usually) more stimulating than solitary research and writing.
Time spent writing the book: Four to five years.
Time spent finding a home for it: A year and a half.
Three favorite words: Exquisite, please, future.
Dana Isokawa is the assistant editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Ten years ago, Poets & Writers Magazine launched its annual Debut Poets series—a feature that aimed, quite simply, to highlight some of the best first books of poetry published in the previous year. In the decade since then, the series has grown into something all its own, bringing to light some of the most inspired, and inspiring, emerging poets from across the country—along with the ambitious, vital, and lasting collections they create. A number of the poets we’ve featured have gone on to become familiar names in the national writing community—Dan Albergotti, Todd Boss, Jericho Brown, Victoria Chang, Michael Cirelli, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Aracelis Girmay, Dana Goodyear, Tyehimba Jess, Dorothea Lasky, Joseph O. Legaspi, Alex Lemon, Ada Limón, and Justin Marks, to name just a few from the early years. But what’s most remarkable, when looking back through this list of poets (which you can see in full starting on page 90), is that all of them, regardless of how prolific or well known, made a commitment to writing, dedicating themselves to bringing words to life despite the jobs, everyday obligations, and myriad challenges that inevitably arise as time ticks along.
In celebration of our tenth annual Debut Poets roundup, we reached out to those poets—all 111 of them (one, Landis Everson, sadly, passed away in 2007)—and asked them to recommend their favorite debut collections of 2014. A good number responded, building for us a longlist of some of the year’s most exciting books. From that we selected the ten poets featured in the following pages. The task was not easy: We looked at both the work within those collections and at the poets themselves, in an attempt to curate not only a broad range of voice, style, content, and form, but also a diverse list of poets representing a unique breadth of age, background, and experience. These ten poets find inspiration in everything from neuroscience, outer space, black holes, and race to Anglo-Saxon elegies, Vietnamese musicals, honey badgers, and Nina Simone. Despite their many differences, though, they all point to a sense of wonder, exploration, curiosity, and community as essential to their writing—and they are all creating urgent, powerful, and important work. And what connects them even more fundamentally is that regardless of where they come from, what they do for a living, or where they draw inspiration, they all do it for the same reasons: for love of the work, and, as Sally Wen Mao puts it, to break into the silence, disarm the solitude, and find a place where poetry lives.
Sally Wen Mao MAD HONEY SYMPOSIUM Alice James Books
Abandon hive. If the hornet breaks the heat net,
save yourself. Abandon yen. Abandon majesty. Spit the light out because it sears you so. —from “Apiology, With Stigma”
HOW IT BEGAN: In early 2012, I decided that the poems I had collected needed to transform into a manuscript. What compelled me? Probably the naked trees on Linn Street, my tiny yellow living room full of books and ghosts, or the radio silence of the days. Those winter days were short and frigid: Every day I walked past a frozen waterfall and slipped on cracked ice. I knew I had to write to break into that silence, disarm that solitude.
INSPIRATION: The earliest incarnation of this manuscript was a thesis project I titled “A Field Guide to Trapped Animals.” In this manuscript, I sought trapped animals: the honey badger, Laika the space dog, endangered flightless birds such as the kakapo, taxidermists’ specimens, disgruntled pandas in captivity, a flock of doomed pigeons. I admired the honey badger for its inane yet marvelous tenacity to sate its appetites for dangerous animals. From that obsession I found bees, and the magical honeys that they can make, including mad honey (meli chloron), a noxious honey made from rhododendrons or azaleas or oleanders that causes drunkenness, hallucinations, and heart palpitations in humans. There I was able to find the manuscript’s spine—humans who poison themselves for the sake of their desires.
INFLUENCES: Ai, for her poems are fire escapes into the terrifying psyches of others. Lorca, for his theory of the duende, and his poems that wander through the darkest and loneliest spaces in New York City. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, for Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, one of my earliest introductions to poetry. Most recently Cathy Park Hong and Bhanu Kapil, women writers whose hugely exciting works transgress boundaries and shift borders in terms of subject, syntax, and form.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m working on a new manuscript, Oculus, that maps out the border between exposure and invisibility: ghosts, cinema, digital life, and Internet voyeurism. In this manuscript, Anna May Wong, the Chinese American film actress who peaked in the 1920s and 1930s, acquires a time machine and travels through time searching for her perfect role. Along the way, she meets some of her contemporaries (Josephine Baker and Zora Neale Hurston), and some of her successors (Bruce Lee), and she is dismayed to see some of the future films that continue to cast Asian Americans in a stereotypical light. Other poems in this manuscript are about magnetic levitation trains, Chinese bodies exposed in the Bodies Exhibition, a model who wears a homeless man’s pants, and girls competing for a national singing competition.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: Sometimes the writing stops, but there is never enough material for a poet’s arsenal. I look for high places and vantage points, new spaces to invade and interrogate. I look for old books in science libraries. I research poetic obsessions or I try to look for new ones. I visit contemporary-art museums, natural-history museums, planetariums, space museums, botanical gardens, science libraries, bookstores, parties, concerts, or arboretums. I love the feeling of movement, of being on a train heading to someplace unknown. My entire self is built around this wonder, this movement, this search for adventure. I seek adventures, and they float back as poems eventually.
ADVICE: Be impermeable. Research your presses: Read their books, see if you like their covers, get to know their submission and evaluation process. It’s like finding an apartment, really: Send your manuscript to those presses that you could envision as a home for your poems to live. The key is to find a place where your poems live.
AGE: 27.
RESIDENCE: Brooklyn, New York.
JOB: I’m an instructor in the Asian American Studies program at Hunter College in New York, where I teach Asian American Poetics, and a teaching artist at several sites around Brooklyn.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Yes, thankfully, but who knows for how long. In the mornings I write, or late into the night with a cup of milk tea.
Sally Wen Mao reads five poems from Mad Honey Symposium, published by Alice James Books.
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Charlotte Boulay FOXES ON THE TRAMPOLINE Ecco
As much as I wanted that boy saved, I wanted him eaten. —from “Watson and the Shark”
HOW IT BEGAN: I’ve written poetry since high school, and graduate school helped me think about ways a disparate collection of poems might become a more or less cohesive whole. Foxes isn’t a book “project,” although it has some themes and interests that run throughout. These include exploring ideas associated with journeys, both concrete and abstract, as well as questions about desire and loss.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: I’ve joked that in almost any of my poems you can find references to animals and weather, but I think these are less inspirations than touch points that help me structure my concerns. I spent time in my early twenties living in India, and that was certainly an education, as well as an inspiration. I’m also continually inspired by visual art—paintings and photography and sculpture can do things that words can’t, but poetry can create a dialogue with them. This book owes a debt to Cy Twombly, whose work continues to fascinate me. In working on Foxes, I particularly relied on and admired the work of poets Saskia Hamilton, Nancy Willard, Robert Hass, and Susan Hutton.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m working on both poems and essays. I’d love to write a second book more quickly than this one, but we’ll see.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I try to get outside and take a walk, if I’m smart, and if not I try to turn as far away from my own obsessions as possible, to get out of my own head. That may be how I discovered the YouTube home video of foxes jumping on a trampoline in someone’s backyard—aimless Web surfing. What keeps me going is reaching for the moment when a poem comes together, when it becomes itself and something separate from me.
ADVICE: Keep going. Cycles of feeling good about your work that alternate with doubt that any of it is worthwhile are completely normal. Listen to the judgments and suggestions you get from readers you trust, test them out, and then throw them away if they don’t feel right. Submit to all the places where you’ve always dreamed of being published. Don’t hold anything back.
AGE: 36.
RESIDENCE: Philadelphia.
JOB: I’m a grant writer at the Franklin Institute science museum.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? This is something I continue to struggle with. I thought that leaving teaching and entering a 9-5 job would leave me freer to write without the burdens of grading and office hours, but in fact I’m pretty invested in my day job, and it often occupies my thoughts both inside and outside the office. I do make more money than I did as an adjunct, though, so that’s something, but I have much less time off. I’m still figuring out how to make more room in my daily routine for poetry. I’m not very good at writing in small snatches of time, but I’m working on it, and hoping it will help me in ways I haven’t discovered yet.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: I worked slowly on the book for about seven years.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I sent it out to contests two years in a row, but had to withdraw from a few the second year after Ecco took it. My editor contacted me to ask for the manuscript after seeing a poem of mine in print, so that can still happen.
Charlotte Boulay reads the poem “Fleet” from Foxes on the Trampoline, published by Ecco. For more of Boulay’s work, visit www.charlotteboulay.com.
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Hieu Minh Nguyen THIS WAY TO THE SUGAR Write Bloody Publishing
Sometimes you don’t die when you’re supposed to, and sometimes you do. —from “Flight”
HOW IT BEGAN: For a long time, I didn’t know how to write about my traumas. I found myself writing the same poems over and over again, even if they didn’t make any sense to the world, even if I was the only person who would understand the significance of something as basic as a peach. I guess the hope was that if I could write the poems, if I could speak about my trauma in a way that didn’t seem careless, I could stop trying to explain myself. It is stupid to feel the need to explain yourself at all, but I spent a lot of time being ashamed of my experiences as a son, a body, a survivor, and I believe in the importance of confession as a tool to combat shame.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: So many movies! Since a lot of my book talks about my childhood, I spent a lot of time archiving my past, which meant interviewing my mother, visiting old neighborhoods, and watching movies from when I was younger. I spent endless nights watching and rewatching cai luong, which are essentially Vietnamese musicals. I was obsessed. Because my start in poetry began in spoken-word and slam poetry, many of my earlier influences came from performance poets, often poets who could transcend the arbitrary boundaries between the performance world and the written one, such as Rachel McKibbens, Bao Phi, and Patricia Smith. Through my participation in the performance world, I was lucky enough to have been introduced to the work of poets outside of spoken word, including Li-Young Lee, Anne Sexton, and Philip Levine.
WHAT’S NEXT: Currently I am applying to college. I abstained from going to college directly after high school, but now it seems like the right time. So basically a lot of my time has been spent writing college admission essays and studying for the ACT. It’s pretty terrifying; I haven’t done math in six years. As for poetry, I am currently working on poems about time travel.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I spend a lot of my time alone in my apartment writing, so when I come to a block, I feel like I’ve taken all I can from that space and need time to let it recharge. Usually, it requires engaging in something visual and half-social, like writing alone in a public location.
ADVICE: Give yourself permission to not explain everything.
AGE: 23.
RESIDENCE: Minneapolis.
JOB: Right now I am on a book tour, but when I’m back home I work at a haberdashery, selling fancy hats to fancy people.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? My job has been incredibly supportive; I’m very lucky. I’ve been able to take large chunks of time off of work to focus on writing or traveling, and am always welcomed back.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: Most of the poems in the book were less than two years old, some even a few months old, by the time it was released.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I started submitting the early version of the manuscript about two years before it got accepted.
Hieu Minh Nguyen reads a poem from This Way to the Sugar, published by Write Bloody Publishing. For more videos of Nguyen’s work visit www.hieuminhnguyen.com.
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Saeed Jones PRELUDE TO BRUISE Coffee House Press
in this town everything born black also burns. —from “Anthracite”
HOW IT BEGAN: The poems exist in the space between the reality of my life as a gay black man from the American South and the mythology I often dreamed of in my isolation. With that said, I wrote about half of the poems in the book before Boy, the character we follow throughout the collection, appeared to me. I wrote a poem in which a boy wakes up from a beautiful dream to find his father standing silently in the doorway of his bedroom. The silence of that moment—the interior and exterior worlds colliding—stunned me. Prelude to Bruise exists in the form it does now because I wanted to know what happened next and why.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: Homer’s The Odyssey, the last few collections Alexander McQueen designed before he took his own life, the way Toni Morrison involves landscapes and weather in the plot of her novels, and Nina Simone’s music. The poems of Lucie Brock-Broido, Patricia Smith, Rigoberto González, Anna Journey, Eduardo Corral, Jericho Brown, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Audre Lorde. The essays of June Jordan, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Susan Sontag.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m writing a memoir that charts a course from 1998, when I was 12, the year Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. were killed in hate crimes, to 2008, the year a straight man invited me into his bedroom, stripped down to his boxer shorts, and tried to kill me.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: When I’m struggling to write, I tend to begin reading in even more earnest than usual—earnest in the sense of pushing myself to read work beyond what I regard as my intellectual home and artistic neighborhood. I read to find work that will jolt me out of my usual habits and ways of approaching whatever I’m working on. Usually this works, but now and then it doesn’t. I’ve yet to be blocked in the sense of not being able to write for an extended period of time. Much more likely, I get frustrated because I hate what I’m writing and can’t tell if I should keep going or go in a different direction entirely. Reading then is like consulting a map for the best path forward.
ADVICE: Read five poems for every one poem that you write. You have to understand the broader landscape and community in which your work exists.
AGE: 29.
RESIDENCE: New York City.
JOB: I’m the editor of BuzzFeed LGBT.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? I’ve essentially finished one book and started another in the two years I’ve been working at BuzzFeed.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: I worked on the book for five or six years.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I submitted my manuscript to two contests; it was a finalist for the 2012 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. A few months later, Erika Stevens from Coffee House Press e-mailed me and said she wanted to talk. I was thrilled because Coffee House has published work by writers I love and respect, Patricia Smith among them. In retrospect, it all happened pretty quickly. I know I’m very lucky. Friends had told me to brace myself for a long haul so I tried to resist expectations. I’m glad my book wasn’t picked up as soon as I started submitting it; the act of being rejected and having to wait forced me to keep working at it.
Saeed Jones reads five poems from Prelude to Bruise for BuzzFeed. For more of Jones’s work visit theferocity.tumblr.com.
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Bianca Stone SOMEONE ELSE’S WEDDING VOWS Tin House/Octopus Books
What man does is build whole universes out of miniscule disasters and educational degrees. —from “The Future is Here”
HOW IT BEGAN: After I graduated from NYU’s graduate writing program in 2009 these poems just flooded in. I thought I’d be publishing my thesis, but that was just a stepping-stone to this book. When I look at Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, I realize that so many of these poems speak to past poems I’ve written. That’s important to me, to have my work never be static, moving forward but with those older poems still vital. For this book I wanted to write out the complexities of human love; how rich, but also how destructive it can be—and always somehow deeply inspiring. Being loved by someone is a great responsibility. And loving someone can be very hard, if part of their love is problematic.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: I’ve always been drawn to science, especially neuroscience. I feel that poets look at the world so differently because of something to do with the way their brains are wired: It’s not the normal, happy, healthy brain. It’s something else entirely. I also find inspiration in art—from reading comic books to sitting for hours in the Byzantine section of the Metropolitan Museum—as well as space travel, religion, and mythology. In addition, Vermont, where I’m from, is very important to the landscape in my poems, and I’m endlessly inspired by my friends and colleagues, all the amazing poets I know: listening to them, reading their books, collaborating with them. That’s really what keeps me going sometimes. I grew up spending a huge amount of time with my grandmother, the late poet Ruth Stone, and her poetry is ingrained in me. As is the work of my mother, novelist Abigail Stone. But of course I paved my own way too. I fell in love with Sylvia Plath and William Butler Yeats early on. Contemporary poets like John Ashbery, Sharon Olds, Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, and Mark Strand have been hugely influential.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m writing a lot of poems, some of which feels like a kind of memoir-essay-elegy-poetry hybrid book. I’m exploring narrative storytelling within the surreal. I’m also working a lot on what I call my Poetry Comics: that’s visual art and the lyrical working together, without one explaining the other. I use pen and ink with watercolor to do this. I find combining the text and image one of the most challenging things, but one that can be very exciting. We’ve been seeing a lot more of visual art in the writing world. I think it’s generative for students, too, to think about other means to express themselves and break out of the institutional bubble. Lastly, I’m in the (massive) process of rescuing and fixing up Ruth Stone’s house in Goshen, Vermont, and turning it into a nonprofit writers retreat and artist space.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: Sometimes I’m not feeling anything and I take a break from myself, find a well-written, engaging book of poetry and immerse myself. Getting out of your own head is just the key. Drawing or painting, too, lets my mind rebuild.
ADVICE: Be patient. Rather than focus on book contests, focus on making a community of support. Do readings, start magazines, take classes; make connections with like-minded poets and use those connections. Once you have a good, solid, thriving community of contemporaries, everything follows.
AGE: 31.
RESIDENCE: New York City.
JOB: I think this is a great question for writers, because usually it’s not as simple as saying, “I’m a poet!” Although, I always say that first, bluntly, without apology or pretention. I love people’s reactions. Usually they say, “Not a lot of money in that, huh?” and I say, “We actually make it work!” Really, there’s always so much more to being a writer than people think. Being a writer means you usually do many things, all of which is informed by your creativity. My livelihood comes from being a personal assistant to a poet at NYU. I also teach online classes in poetry and the visual image, guest lecture and teach, and do poetry-related freelance illustration. I’m also the chair of the Ruth Stone Foundation and editor-cofounder of Monk Books.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? I work from home mostly, and my work involves lots of multi-tasking. It’s a blessing and a curse because everything I do is self-motivation based. It’s hard sometimes to pick which task to focus all my energy on. But yes, compared to everyone else I know, I have lots of glorious writing time. I just have to make myself do work-work and poetry-work equally.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: About four or five years. It went through so many revisions, editing, cutting, and adding. I was editing poems right up until the last second. It’s a lot of deciding what’s working, and what you’re clinging to that perhaps should be let go.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: Four years. I submitted to a lot of contests, which is really a crapshoot. I started to realize I needed to find other ways to get it in someone’s hands. A lot of times that happens at poetry readings, when you get along with someone who is a publisher, and they like your poems, you’re like, “Well, guess that I have this book you can look at!”
Bianca Stone reads a poem from Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, along with original illustrations and animation by the poet, for Tin House. For more of Stone’s videos visit vimeo.com/tinhouse.
Sara Eliza Johnson BONE MAP Milkweed Editions (National Poetry Series)
all moments will shine if you cut them open, glisten like entrails in the sun. —from “As the Sickle Moon Guts a Cloud”
HOW IT BEGAN: The book began as a seafaring narrative—influenced in part by a stormy winter in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod—and expanded outward into the world of Bone Map. As the poems expanded outward, as they further considered the contemporary American moment, they also became more visceral and brutal, and eventually I realized I was writing an organic and ancient violence into the book, that the book was in some sense about violence as origin.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: I immersed myself in the materials of strange, old worlds (ones often as alluring as they are terrifying): Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the 1967 Czech film Marketa Lazarová, the Anglo-Saxon elegies and riddles, the sixth-century voyage of Saint Brendan the Navigator, Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise. The poets and artists who have particularly influenced me include Lorca, Plath, Celan, Ingmar Bergman, and the Polish artist Zdzisław Beksinski, who said, “I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams.”
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m still in the early stages of the next book, but it’s one preoccupied with the apocalyptic moment. I’m writing a lot about human annihilation and alien or inhuman spaces, such as primordial earth, future earth, outer space, and deep sea.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I’m always looking for new sources of fascination to spark my imagination: a book on black holes or human evolution, a visually exciting film, a visit to a museum or the aquarium. If I’m experiencing writer’s block or feel stuck in a comfort zone, I’ll more aggressively seek those sources out. It’s in part this curiosity—and the potential to transform my curiosities into art—that keeps me writing and creating.
ADVICE: Don’t be afraid to cut the dead weight. Beware of nostalgically clinging to poems that marked artistic milestones for you. And just because a piece is good—or has been published in a grand venue—doesn’t mean it belongs in the project you’ve undertaken. If you think of the book as a dynamic, breathing thing, or as a unique textual place, every page should seem indispensable when you read through it.
AGE: 30.
RESIDENCE: Salt Lake City.
JOB: I’m a PhD student in the creative writing program at the University of Utah, where I also teach.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Though often my academic and creative work intersect, it is not always easy to balance work obligations and writing, especially because it can be a challenge to switch on the creative regions of the brain at will. It is not only necessary to carve out the time to write, but the mental space as well. To get myself in the right headspace, I usually clear my desk of papers and books, put on some music (headphones are essential), and pour some coffee if it’s daytime or (just a little) bourbon if it’s night.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: About five years.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: Bone Map was selected for the National Poetry Series in its first round of submissions. The NPS was the fourth book contest to which I submitted the manuscript.
Sara Eliza Johnson reads the poem “Dear Rub” from Bone Map. For more of Johnson’s work visit saraelizajohnson.com.
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F. Douglas Brown ZERO TO THREE University of Georgia Press (Cave Canem Poetry Prize)
my body, rain drenched on the inside and you arriving faster than the next song —from “The Talk”
HOW IT BEGAN: What initiated this book was the birth of my son, then that of my daughter, five years later. It really came together thanks to the Cave Canem retreat and the influence the writers gave then and continue to give. I am both a Cave Canem and Kundiman fellow, and the folks who are connected to these two phenomenal organizations are generous, intelligent, and the best advocates for poetry that I know. They all helped me push and delve deep into the work. When my father died five years ago, so many poems erupted. When I stepped back and looked at the body of work, a book made sense.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: My kids and father were the immediate sources for this. As I mentioned, the poets of Cave Canem and Kundiman really push all of us involved to believe in the work we’re doing. However, back in ‘99 or so, I was in the MA Creative Writing Program at San Francisco State University, where I took a class called “What the Body Knows.” Toni Mirosevich and the rest of the class helped push me to see my father body as a vehicle for exploring my growing baby who was walking, talking, and figuring out the world. Music also factors into my work. I recently wrote a poem trying to imitate the cadence of Beyoncé’s song “Flawless.” Cornelius Eady’s You Don’t Miss Your Water and Yusef Komunyakaa’s serial poem “Songs for My Father” were also big inspirations. Both helped me take mere observation and make it stand up to the duty of fatherhood. Later, Natasha Trethewey’s books helped me reexamine pain, and [learn] how to open the voices of fatherhood that had been surrounding me as a parent.
WHAT’S NEXT: I am working on two projects: first, more fatherhood poems, and second, my namesake. The fatherhood poems are a collaborative work with poet Geffrey Davis, who I met at the Cave Canem retreat in 2012. At that time he was a new father, and what we shared regarding fatherhood—mostly our attempts to be better fathers—inspired us to continue via poetry. We are conducting workshops together, discussing poems on fatherhood from seminal poets, and doing our own work to complete what we hope to be a manuscript. Whatever it becomes, the work is good thus far, and liberating.
My complete name is Frederick Douglas Brown. How could one named after such a remarkable figure avoid it? In my work I am specifically responding to the paintings of Frederick Douglass’s life by the Harlem Renaissance painter Jacob Lawrence. My ekphrasis poems have been a pleasant journey for me. I have been able to do plenty of research, but I hope to view the Lawrence work face-to-face before releasing a final manuscript. As it is, I have completed fifteen poems.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: Reading is the best cure for me when the words are not coming together on the page or are nowhere near the page. Reading gives me permission to try new approaches. If I’m stuck or in a rut, an imitation poem helps. To see my friends publish work helps too. There is a bit of competition in every poet, and I don’t want to fall behind. I let that happen before, but Cave Canem teaches us how valuable our voice is.
ADVICE: Two things were told to me that really helped me finalize the work: 1) This is not your thesis. Approach it as a means to speak to a larger audience. 2) Friend and poet Jenny Factor told me, “Doug, this is not the only book of poems you’ll write about your kids or your dad.”
AGE: 42.
RESIDENCE: Los Angeles.
JOB: I’m an English teacher at Loyola High School of Los Angeles. I’m also a deejay on the side.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Most of the time is does not! I have been a teacher for twenty years. From my experience, teaching and writing dip from the same well. When I am “on” in the classroom, rarely does that translate to being “on” in my writing. I am accustomed to having my hands in as many projects as possible: parenting, writing, teaching, deejaying, etc. When I am at my best as a writer or teacher, my job is singularly that. This, of course, excludes fatherhood, which asks/needs me to be whatever my kids need.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: This work took sixteen years to complete. The poems about my kids took a while, mostly because I did not want the book or any individual poems to be a slideshow of my family. Also, many of the poems explore the mystery of fatherhood, so the logic of the poems, like parenting, had to be thoroughly sifted. I was learning how to be a father as I was writing the poems (and still am). The poems about my father came rather quickly: I waited a year after his death, and then started writing them. The drafts were strong and needed minor tweaking, but tweaking nonetheless.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I submitted the manuscript on three separate occasions. The first two submissions were a year before I won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2013.
F. Douglas Brown reads two poems from Zero to Three, published by University of Georgia Press. For more of Brown’s work visit fdouglasbrown.com.
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Cindy Williams Gutiérrez THE SMALL CLAIM OF BONES Bilingual Press
Garland my bones with those who have gone before, colli, And the ones who have gone before them, colli. Return, Return.” —from “If I Were a Nahua Poet”
HOW IT BEGAN: When I entered the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Program (graduation was a gift to myself for my fiftieth birthday), I knew I wanted to explore two things: Mesoamerican poetics, specifically Aztec “flower and song,” and the poetry of feminist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who secured a cell of her own 250 years before Virginia Woolf insisted on her own room. I realized later that this was my way of bridging borders as well as history. I was born and raised in a Texas town on the border of Mexico, and my father worked for the U.S. Immigration Service on the bridges in Brownsville for more than thirty years. Though he is the “Williams” in Williams Gutiérrez, he was raised in a Mexican mining camp in Santa Bárbara, Chihuahua. Primarily of Welsh and German ethnicity, he was also one-quarter Cherokee and had an abiding respect for native peoples and their way of life. My mother’s heritage (the “Gutiérrez” in Williams Gutiérrez) can be traced to a sixteenth-century land grant from the King of Spain. In exploring Mexico’s history as a backdrop for my own mixed heritage, I realized that I was not bicultural (Anglo and Hispanic), as I had thought growing up, but rather multicultural—braiding together my father’s indigenous and Anglo roots with my mother’s Hispanic heritage.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: My father has been my muse. He was a history buff and loved telling stories about Mexico. He was also always fascinated by women’s lot throughout history: He read voraciously and spoke often about the misogynistic treatment of Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc, Sor Juana, even Marilyn Monroe. Early on, he made me believe I could do anything, that the world was mine. In high school, he’d return from his shift on the bridge after midnight and read my English papers. I would awaken to a full, handwritten page of thoughtful remarks. I reference this in the poem “The Gift,” which is the seminal poem in the first section of my book. I would also have to say that Charles Martin, my first mentor at Stonecoast, inspired (and terrified!) me when he suggested I create poems in the voices of Nahua poet-princes. This book would not have been born without his provocation. Aside from Sor Juana and Nezahualcoyotl and other Mesoamerican poets, my literary guiding lights are Yeats and Lorca—both tapped into ancestral memory and revived the local imagination. I draw inspiration from the silent and silenced voices of history.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m searching for homes for my manuscripts that have remained tucked in my computer for the past two years. I also have an idea incubating for a play inspired by a Rumi poem. And today I awoke with an idea for a chapbook inspired by—no surprise—women’s lot. Though my father passed away a year and a half ago, he still speaks to me in my sleep.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I haunt cafés. All I need is the aroma of coffee and a strong dose of people-watching (and the accompanying eavesdropping) and something (some image, line, dialogue, idea) will emerge.
ADVICE: I have found that the more I write about my writing, the better I can shape my collections. An abstract is a beautiful thing: It encapsulates your intention for the book in less than a page. More than once, this has helped me perform the hardest task of all—prune poems from a budding manuscript.
AGE: 56.
RESIDENCE: Oregon City, Oregon.
JOB: I split my time between my careers as a business consultant and as a literary artist. My firm, Sage Marketing Associates, has provided strategic planning and marketing consulting services to West Coast–based global technology companies, regional healthcare organizations, and local nonprofits since 1997. I am also a poet-dramatist, producer, and educator. I have taught poetry (mostly in English, sometimes in Spanish) to every grade from kindergarten to twelfth through the Portland Art Museum, the Right Brain Initiative, Wordstock, and Writers in the Schools. I also teach poetry to adults at my home in the country and at Studio 410 in Portland, Oregon, where I offer an annual ekphrastic poetry class in response to Russell J. Young’s photographs.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? I have striven to piece together a writing life since 1997 when I left my job as a marketing executive in Silicon Valley (I have a Bachelor’s degree in Computing Science and a Wharton MBA). Consulting has afforded me the flexibility to become a serious writer as well as to return to graduate school to earn my MFA and, afterward, to teach. It continues to be a challenging balancing act, particularly because I am equally devoted to theatre, which is incredibly consuming, especially in the role of producer. My most recent production was Words That Burn—a dramatization of World War II experiences of William Stafford, Lawson Inada, and Guy Gabaldón (in their own words), which I created and coproduced in commemoration of the William Stafford Centennial. The show was featured in Milagro Theatre’s 2014 La Luna Nueva festival, which celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month in Portland, Oregon.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: Two years. I wrote the poems during my first two semesters at Stonecoast and then spent the last semester editing and shaping them into a collection. But the collection wasn’t in its finished form for another few months after graduation.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: During the 2009 AWP book fair, I shopped my manuscript around and received interest from Arizona State University’s Bilingual Press. I followed up three months later with a book proposal and my manuscript. About a year and a half after that, I received the press’s letter of acceptance. In the meantime, I received fifteen rejections.
Cindy Williams Gutiérrez reads the poem “Micacuicatl, Or Song For The Dead” from The Small Claim of Bones. Original pre-Hispanic music by Gerardo Calderón (www.grupo-condor.com). For more of Gutiérrez’s work visit grito-poetry.com.
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Danniel Schoonebeek AMERICAN BARRICADE YesYes Books
The question of whether the idea of America is dead is not a question. —from “Correction”
HOW IT BEGAN: There’s this feeling in the United States that the country is somehow finished. I wanted to peel off that scab, and peel off the scabs I found underneath, which for me were family power dynamics, the American workforce, taboos of love, the rifts surrounding gender and class, the problem of having a name and a history, the misnomer of the word America. I wanted to dig into that American disgust.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: In place of inspiration, which I don’t think I feel, what I feel instead is camaraderie. And to that end the names can be endless. But Rukeyser and Woolf, global protest, James Agee, the Clash, running in winter, August Wilson, gunpowder tea, Eileen Myles, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, postcards, the Anti-Rent War, anxiety, Poet in New York, C. D. Wright, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Occupy movement, Paul Thomas Anderson, living in a cabin, Claudia Rankine, rush hour, Allyson Paty, percussion, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Frank Bidart, night walks, Austria, Walker Evans, Sarah Kane, Camus, shaving, Simone Weil, Jules Renard, Marina Tsvetaeva.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m finishing a book of prose, a travelogue called C’est la guerre. It details a two-month reading tour I did in support of American Barricade last year. C’est la guerre will be published by Poor Claudia in 2015. (I sometimes hear grovelers say that certain poems feel like prose broken into lines, and I think C’est la guerre is maybe poetry broken into prose; I want to see who’ll grovel at that). And I’m also, every day, writing poems that will be my second book of poetry. Which so far appears to be about problems of capital.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: It helps me to think of a poem as a house you can demolish. When the lines aren’t budging but I know they can move, I like to start knocking down walls and prying up floorboards and putting the rooms back together the wrong way, with new lighting and banisters. Experimental editing is something I urge upon myself, and more times than I can count it’s resulted in a radically different poem that I had to essentially destroy in order to make.
ADVICE: Any advice people give only distracts other people from writing the book they need to write.In my life and in my writing I’ve been grateful when I can stop and remind myself to revolt against what revolts me. Always unsettle myself into myself, if you will. I’m always asking myself to write the poem and the book and the sentence that I don’t want to write.
AGE: 28.
RESIDENCE: Brooklyn, New York, and the Catskills.
JOB: I write books and read poems aloud for a living. I publish poems written by other people and I have conversations about art and politics for a living. At some point we all have to make our own distinctions between living and money. To make money I work as an editor, a booking agent, and an occasional book critic.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? It’s a little war every day, and you have to antagonize the conflict in a new way every day. The simple answer is never. I find that most jobs are the opposite of writing, or creating any art that will matter to people. I felt this for the first time when I was young, and ever since then I’ve written poetry from a place where the poems want to jam themselves into the gearworks of this problem.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: About four years. Some of the poems were drafted and edited for years. A few poems were written in a fever pitch and finished within a week or two.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: My publisher was actually the one who found me. I read a poem in a really crowded basement bar in Boston about two years ago and she was in the audience; she got in touch with me a few days later and asked if I’d written a book. I wish that scenario happened more in poetry. Before that I mailed the book around to publishers for about a year.
Danniel Schoonebeek reads five poems from American Barricade. For more of Schoonebeek’s work visit dannielschoonebeek.tumblr.com.
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Tarfia Faizullah SEAM Southern Illinois University Press (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award)
How thin the seam between the world and the world: a few layers of muscle and fat, a sheet wrapped around a corpse: glass so easily ground into sand. —from “Reading Tranströmer in Bangladesh”
HOW IT BEGAN: I learned about the widespread rape of Bangladeshi women by the Pakistani Army during the 1971 Liberation War. I wanted to know more, and I applied for a Fulbright fellowship to go to Bangladesh and interview the women. A number of them are still alive. Seam emerged from my time there.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: The courage of other artists who share beautiful and difficult stories about the conversations taking place between their interior and exterior lives. I’m in awe of Detroit poets: Vievee Francis, Nandi Comer, francine j. harris, Jamaal May, Matthew Olzmann, and Tommye Blount. I’m moved by Eugenia Leigh’s Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows and David Tomas Martinez’s Hustle. I always return to poets in translation such as Rumi, Hikmet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Anna Akhmatova, César Vallejo, and Tomas Tranströmer.
WHAT’S NEXT: A second book of poems, Register of Eliminated Villages, and a memoir, Kafir.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I try to get into the physicality of what the vastness inside and around me looks like. I listen to the train going past our house and wonder at the science and magic that collided to create its vibrations. I wonder who decided to write the informational signs at the top of a mountain during a hike, and what that person looks like. The world isn’t material for my poems; it’s its own fabric and when I’m not writing, I’m disconnected from it. For me, what keeps me going is mindfully rolling around in the world and feeling it in my whole body.
ADVICE: Let yourself be surprised. Relentlessly do the work of making every word of every line of every poem sing. Make mistakes and let them lead you into unexpected and wondrous places. A quote that has become my mantra is by the poet Russell Edson, who said, “Desire and patience takes us where we want to go.”
AGE: 34.
RESIDENCE: Detroit.
JOB: I teach at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program as the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor in Poetry, and codirect the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press and Video Series with Jamaal May.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Absolutely. Even when it doesn’t seem like there’s time, there’s always more.
Tarfia Faizullah reads the poem “Instructions for the Interviewer” from Seam, published by Southern Illinois University Press. For more of Faizullah’s work visit tfaizullah.com.
Melissa Faliveno is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
[Credits]
Ilustrations by Eugene Smith; books by David Hamsley
The ten poetry collections featured in our thirteenth annual roundup of debut poets offer a glimpse of the wide range of contemporary poetry. Each of the books, published in 2017, shows just how much poetry can do. Eve L. Ewing’s Electric Arches tells stories that reckon with history and imagine a better future, while Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS and sam sax’s Madness reclaim language that has been distorted by governments and institutions of power. Emily Skillings’s Fort Not reveals the tendencies of our culture and society through the trappings of modern life, as does Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Jenny Johnson’s In Full Velvet both give voice to the interior—Akbar to the ongoing work of faith, Johnson to the vagaries of the heart and desire. Joseph Rios’s Shadowboxing and Airea D. Matthews’s Simulacra create personas and alter egos that argue and spar with one another, while William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind clears a path for understanding others. And all ten collections do what poetry does best: inhabit the many possibilities of language and form as well as attend to, as Seamus Heaney put it, “the lift and frolic of the words in themselves.”
We asked the poets to share the stories and influences behind their books, and they responded with a list of inspirations as varied as their collections, from the food of April Bloomfield and music of Flying Lotus to the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and words of Adrienne Rich. When we asked the poets to offer advice to writers who are stuck or looking to publish their first book, however, their answers coalesced around some common suggestions: Take a break when you’re struggling with a piece. Permit yourself to write one or two or thirty or a hundred lousy poems. Most of all, reach out to the people who can keep you afloat. Listen to your family’s stories, as Chen and sax do, or talk with your kids, as Matthews advises. Or, as Johnson and Rios suggest, call up your friends, encourage one another, and then hold one another accountable for getting the work done.
Writing poetry can often feel lonely or frustrating or even futile—especially during a year of political turmoil and soul-searching—and these poets remind us to turn to whatever will protect our capacity for wonder and allow each of us to be our “whole self on the page,” as Rios says. They remind us to be attentive to the world, and they urge us to be ready for whatever scrap of language or feeling might help us pass from silence into speaking and jolt a poem into being.
How it began: When I got sober, poetry became my life raft. Every poem in Calling a Wolf a Wolf was written from a few months to a few years after I got sober. I had no idea what to do with myself, what to do with my physical body or my time. I had no relationship to any kind of living that wasn’t predicated on the pursuit of narcotic experience. In a very real way, sobriety sublimated one set of addictions (narcotic) into another (poetic). The obsessiveness, the compulsivity, is exactly the same. All I ever want to do today is write poems, read poems, talk about poems. But this new obsession is much more fun (and much easier on my physiological/psychological/spiritual self ).
Inspiration: The searching earnestness of the people I’ve met in recovery. They’ve taught me how to talk about myself without mythologizing, without casting myself as some misunderstood hero maligned by the world. I think (hope!) that resistance to flattening my narrative into some easy self-serving hero’s journey is one of the central features of Calling a Wolf a Wolf.
Influences: Franz Wright, Abbas Kiarostami, Mary Ruefle, Kazim Ali, Daniel Johnston, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Carl Phillips, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Nicholson Baker, Dan Barden, Kathy Acker, all writers for The Simpsons from 1990–1999, Fanny Howe, Eduardo C. Corral, Jean Valentine, francine j. harris, the verve of Marc Bolan, the voice of Kate Bush, the sneer of Justin Pearson/The Locust, the frequency of Eric Bemberger’s guitar, Sohrab Sepehri, Russell Edson, Lydia Lunch, Zbigniew Herbert, Joanna Newsom, Heather Christle, Patricia Smith, Anne Carson, Robert Olen Butler, Bruce Nauman’s neon art, Vic Ketchman, my mother.
Writer’s block remedy: I don’t really believe in writer’s block. If I sit down to write in earnest and give myself enough time, eventually I’ll walk away with something. Even if it turns out to be nothing (which is usually the case), I’m still training and preparing my instincts for the next poem. Even bad poems that go nowhere provide compost for the good ones to come. That said, I do believe in refractory periods, periods spent rebuilding one’s relationship with silence. Ellen Bryant Voigt talks about how in order to strike, a cobra also needs to recoil. I have recoil periods in which I throw myself into my reading, a kind of active listening. So much of Calling a Wolf a Wolf works by hypersaturation, by these breathless rushes of language. It’s been immensely useful for me to go back into silence, to reclaim a bit of psychic quiet to take back into the poems.
Advice: Be kind to yourself and to other poets. There are so many people in the world who would conspire against our joy, who would mistake our reverent wonder for idleness. Against everything, we have to protect our permeability to wonder. That’s the nucleus around which all interesting art orbits.
Finding time to write: I’m one of those people who wakes up obnoxiously early to get in my hours before the world really starts up. I like to get into my poem-writing while my brain is still gummy with dream logic, before the mundane argle-bargle of the everyday comes in.
What’s next: Rebuilding a relationship with silence. Being the best professor and mentor I can be. Orienting myself toward gratitude despite a political moment working very hard to prevent that. Being in love and planning a wedding. Being an uncle. Touring with the book. Staying alive one day at a time.
Hometown: Not sure exactly—I was born in Tehran, Iran, then moved to Pennsylvania, to New Jersey, to Wisconsin, to Indiana, to Florida, and now back to Indiana.
Residence: Lafayette, Indiana.
Job: I teach in the MFA program at Purdue University.
Time spent writing the book: The honest answer is twenty-eight years, maybe even longer than that, but to answer the question I think you’re actually asking, the oldest recognizable poem in the book is about five years old. That’s fairly fast, actually. There are a number phrases and images I cannibalized from poems much, much older than that, though.
Time spent finding a home for it: Not very long. Carey Salerno, my editor at Alice James, saw a poem of mine published by the Poetry Society of America and wrote to me asking if I had a manuscript. I actually wasn’t really done with Calling a Wolf a Wolf yet, but I sent her what I had with the caveat that I still needed time to continue building and rearranging and reimagining. She liked what she saw and took the leap. I couldn’t imagine working with a smarter, more generous, more compassionate editor. So much of what is good about the book is the result of her patient guidance and mentorship.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast (Ecco) is a collection I think people will still be reading in fifty years. Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press). William Brewer’s I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions). Airea D. Matthews’s Simulacra (Yale University Press). Cortney Lamar Charleston’s Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books). Safia Elhillo’s The January Children (University of Nebraska Press). Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS (Graywolf Press). Eve L. Ewing’s Electric Arches (Haymarket Books).
Airea D. Matthews Simulacra Yale University Press (Yale Series of Younger Poets)
but I knew it was a winged thing, a puncture, a black and wicked door.
—from “Rebel Prelude”
How it began: My life and the lives of the people who have affected me were the impetus for the book. I’d had undiagnosed mental illness for a very long time, and I wanted to get to the root of it. It started with a question, actually. I asked myself if I had inherited hunger and instability. As I wrote the book, the universe handed me small parts of a very complicated answer.
Inspiration: Books, people, and technology—Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s The Blue and Brown Books, Albert Camus’s The Stranger and The Rebel, Franz Kafka’s absurdity, Greek and Sumerian myths, the wit of Twitter and Facebook, the days of Motorola Q, Anne Sexton, Gertrude Stein, my family and friends. In short, everyday life—private and public.
Influences: Aside from the nods in Simulacra to my poetic lineage, Nora Chassler, Vievee Francis, Rachel McKibbens, and Ladan Osman are some of my greatest artistic inspirations. They’ve all taught me more about community, poetry, and history through their generosity and friendship than I could ever hope to learn in a book. As literary exemplars, I’d have to say Rita Dove, Simone De Beauvoir, Anne Carson, Alice Notley, Haruki Murakami, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Muriel Rukeyser, Marina Tsvetaeva, Carl Phillips, Louise Glück, Antonio Porchia, Cecília Meireles, Wisława Szymborska, Heraclitus, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Hayden, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Writer’s block remedy: When I lose language it’s almost entirely because I am too focused on myself at that moment. And so, I step back. I consciously get outside of myself by unplugging and planting myself in public spaces at odd hours of the day. My perspective shifts because, in public, my gaze moves toward other forms of subjectivity—nature, outside conversations, cityscapes, etc. I am also a big fan of stepping away from work to listen to my kids’ observations about life and/or ask them how they’d work through a problem. Young souls are closer to Edenic wisdom. They understand human nature and the journey in a way that seems to elude the more grizzled traveler.
Advice: Listen to yourself, your hand, your gut, your pen, your mind. Be authentically who you are as a writer. Your work has its own logic and its own tools; honor them. And, finally, wear comfortable shoes because the journey toward making the impossible possible is rugged, long, and lovely.
Finding time to write: I suppose I don’t find time as much as I make time. I have long practiced jotting down at least one observation every day—anything from watching a child play to documenting arguments. I find that those observations help me sustain focus when I sit to write in longer form.
What’s next: I am trying to gain fluency in my body’s primitive language, my instincts. The next collection, “under/class,” will be driven entirely by those instincts and will almost definitely be outside of definition and genre—social criticism, poetry, and short stories.
Hometown: I grew up in Trenton, but I spent twenty years in Detroit. Detroit is the place where I matured into a writer.
Residence: The City of Brotherly Love (and car horns), Philadelphia.
Job: Assistant professor of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College. The college was voted one of the most beautiful campuses in the country (and not just the grounds); the people are exceptional humans.
Time spent writing the book: The poems were in my body my whole life, perceiving and altering the way I interacted with the world. Somatically, I would say it took me forty-plus years. But, in a more linear view, it took a solid five years to commit them to paper and have them coalesce into a collection.
Time spent finding a home for it: I heard “no” and “not quite right” so often, I started to answer to them. Interestingly, I had a hard time getting individual poems published, which explains why my publishing acknowledgements are fairly lean in the book. I sent the manuscript out thirty times in some form or fashion, under two different titles. It was rejected twenty-eight times. It was accepted twice, and I went with Yale.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: ALL OF THEM! It’s hard to name only a few, but here’s my feeble attempt: Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa’s Rummage (Little A), Chelsea Dingman’s Thaw (University of Georgia Press), Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS, sam sax’s Madness, Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast, and Charif Shanahan’s Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press).
William Brewer I Know Your Kind Milkweed Editions (National Poetry Series)
All the things I meant to do are burnt spoons
hanging from the porch like chimes.
—from “Naloxone”
How it began: In the broadest sense, I saw the opiate epidemic start to swallow up my home state. Eventually it made its way into my life in specific ways, including a day when someone came to me and my partner and told us they had developed a heroin addiction. I was extremely angry with them and brushed them off, but quickly after that—by which I mean within a matter of minutes—I was overwhelmed with repulsion toward myself for how quickly I had slipped into such a damning, limited, and unsophisticated view of what this person had just confessed. Here they were at their most vulnerable, and I couldn’t be less humane. I was enacting the shame and stigmatization that is our culture’s default. I hated that and wanted to push against it.
Inspiration: There are maybe five hundred books and writers I’d like to name if I had the space and time, but I Know Your Kind is particularly indebted to Virginia Woolf, Carl Phillips, Denis Johnson, the Inferno, Paradise Lost, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Timothy Donnelly, John Berryman, and Walt Whitman.
Influences: I am constantly nourished, refreshed and challenged by Herman Melville, Don DeLillo, Caravaggio’s paintings, most of Stanley Kubrick, early Terrence Malick, LCD Soundsystem and Radiohead, the food of April Bloomfield, Gabrielle Hamilton, and the Joe Beef cookbook. More recently I have been nourished, refreshed, and challenged by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Louise Glück, Lydia Davis, Joy Williams, Karen Solie, Isaac Babel, Teju Cole, and Blade Runner (new and original).
Writer’s block remedy: If my writing is stuck, it’s because I haven’t read enough. Sometimes I pretend this isn’t the case, but I’m always wrong.
Advice: I’d suggest thinking about what your book is doing as a composition. How does it read? What are its sources of heat and thrust? Does it have an arc? An architecture? A book can be a kind of random collection of poems and still be organized in such a way that creates drama, tension, interaction, and a greater composition.
Finding time to write: The Stegner affords me a great deal of writing time, for which I’m extremely grateful.
Time spent writing the book: The oldest poems in the book are about four to five years old, though a large chunk was written in a fit of about eighteen months. It’s hard to say because some poems existed in a kind of shadow form for years before they were fully realized.
Time spent finding a home for it: Long answer, five years; short answer, approximately eighteen months.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast. Elizabeth Metzger’s The Spirit Papers (University of Massachusetts Press). And I’m excited to read Emily Skillings’s Fort Not (The Song Cave).
Chen Chen When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities BOA Editions (A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize)
My job is to trick
myself into believing there are new ways to find impossible honey.
—from “Spell to Find Family”
How it began: The book happened poem by poem. I didn’t have a very specific project in mind. I wanted to write poems that excited me sonically and formally, that surprised me in their turns, that grappled with a wide array of subjects, such as: family, immigration, queerness, race, misrecognition, labor, pop culture, mortality, love, and “growing up” in a really broad sense. “Growing up” as something ongoing, unfinishable—not a linear process but a messy, multidirectional one. This theme of “growing up” became clearer the more poems I wrote and the more I saw them as being in conversation with one another.
The process of putting together my MFA thesis and working with my advisor, Bruce Smith, helped me take the step from a pile of poems to a poetry collection. After the book won the Poulin Prize, the judge, Jericho Brown, was so generous with his time and insights and helped me reshape and reenvision the manuscript. “Write the book you want to read,” Jericho said. It was the deepest encouragement as well as the most daunting challenge. And I felt that Jericho had inhabited the book in its ideal form, its most compelling state. He saw the potential, and he got me excited to revise.
I cut out about fifteen pages—poems involving this complicated relationship between a queer son and his unaccepting mother that were getting in the way of the book’s main movement. The book went from four sections to three, with that one poem (“Self-Portrait as So Much Potential”) set off on its own at the very beginning (a suggestion from my poet friend Jess Smith). And many poems underwent significant revision, mostly cuts and tightening up of language. I tend to be expansive and want to throw everything in, including the kitchen sink and everything from every kitchen on the planet going back to when kitchen sinks first became a thing; I’m fortunate to have such smart readers and editors who will tell me when my maximalist tendencies are working and I need to pull back.
Inspiration: Robert Hayden. Jean Valentine. Walt Whitman. Joseph O. Legaspi. Nikky Finney. Paul Celan. Audre Lorde. Allen Ginsberg, especially Howl. Richard Siken’s Crush. Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. My former teachers Aracelis Girmay, Martín Espada, Deborah Gorlin, Bruce Smith, and Michael Burkard. Sarah Gambito, especially a poem called “Immigration,” which includes the line, “So what if I don’t love you.” Marilyn Chin’s Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. Pablo Neruda, especially his odes, his poems about the Spanish Civil War, and his book TheBook of Questions. I love the range of Neruda’s work. In the United States he’s known for his early love poems, but he wrote so many different kinds of poetry, including some of the most moving political poems. Other inspirations: Buffy the Vampire Slayer; my mother (who is a fabulous storyteller); Tegan and Sara; Paul Klee paintings and their delightful titles; cross-country running; the trees of New England; the Texas sun; the Japanese gay porn star Koh Masaki; guanacos (an animal related to the llama); reduced-sodium soy sauce; Frank Ocean; my high school French teachers; my partner, Jeff Gilbert; our dog, Mr. Rupert Giles (named after the British librarian character in Buffy).
Writer’s block remedy: I have to take breaks. Walk around. Talk to people I like. Watch some TV. Eat a snack. Do a different form of work. I really like doing my laundry; I don’t know why, but I find it meditative and satisfying. It’s weird how much I like doing laundry because I’m not super cleanly when it comes to other things, like my desk, where I do the actual writing. But, nine times out of ten, doing laundry and then putting away all my clothes in a very organized fashion helps me return to the writing with a fresh mind and a sense of calm. When that doesn’t work, I have to accept the draft isn’t going anywhere, at least not at the moment, and I have to will myself to stop staring at the computer screen. And then it’s wonderful to realize that I have a totally different draft or at least some bundle of notes I could attend to. The well doesn’t dry up. I just have to look somewhere else and stop fixating on what I thought was going to be the next poem.
Advice: Believe in your work. Don’t write what you think will get you published. My book got picked up quickly, but it took a longer time for many of the individual poems to get published in journals. Rejection will continue to happen after your book comes out, so really know, for yourself, what you like about your writing. You don’t want to feel like you’re experiencing success from something that doesn’t fully belong to you. It’s so satisfying when someone does (finally!) appreciate the weird thing you’re doing, your weird thing. I’m going to sound Hallmark-y, but I’m serious: Don’t compromise on your heart.
Finding time to write: I’ve found that I’m a much happier person when I make time to write, so I try to do that first. Before answering e-mails, before checking the news and social media, before getting up to take a shower sometimes. First thing. Then I feel like I’ve had at least this small moment to tend to my spirit, to honor what’s most alive or mysterious in how I’m seeing or engaging with the world. I like to try getting a whole draft out, but even a couple lines or one image can make the moment glow, and I can carry that with me into the rest of the day. But, to be honest, much of the time I just try to squeeze in some writing here and there.
What’s next: A second collection of poems, tentatively titled “Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency.” A lyric craft essay on Asian American poets and the politics of humor. Some personal essays, but who knows if they’re actually poems, not essays.
Hometown: Amherst, Massachusetts, by way of Fort Worth, Texas, and Xiamen, China.
Residence: Lubbock, Texas.
Job: Doctoral student at Texas Tech University.
Time spent writing the book: The oldest poem is about six years old, but that includes a year of not even looking at it. I started it in college, then sort of abandoned it. This is a poem called “Race to the Tree,” which is probably the most narrative piece in my book. It took a long time to figure out the structure, though it ended up being pretty simple. Simplicity can take years, I guess. I was making edits on this poem up to the last minute before I had to turn in the final manuscript to my publisher. The other poems didn’t take quite that long. Most of my book was written during my MFA, and then I didn’t look at it for a little while after submitting it to contests and reading periods. I revised and revised after the book was picked up in Spring 2016. I work well with deadlines, so I’m glad that I had about five months (and not more than that) until the final manuscript was due last fall. It was a good amount of time for revisions—not too short that I felt rushed and not too long that I felt like I was overthinking everything. Well, I still overthought and over-obsessed, but not for terribly long!
Time spent finding a home for it: I was extremely lucky. I sent my book out to only seven places. One round of submissions in Fall/Winter 2015. I was mentally preparing myself to keep sending it out for many rounds. When I’ve submitted chapbook manuscripts, it’s taken more time and perseverance. When I apply for fellowships and residencies, it often takes a couple attempts at least. So I was stunned to learn that my book was a finalist for Waywiser Press’s Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and then the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize at BOA Editions. I was stunned and continue to feel deeply grateful to the readers and editors who’ve responded with such enthusiasm for my work. And it’s been a dream working with BOA.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS. Keegan Lester’s this shouldn’t be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it (Slope Editions). Nico Amador’s Flower Wars (Newfound), which is one of the best chapbooks I’ve ever read; I’m excited to see what’s next for this poet. I’m painfully behind on new poetry collections, but I’m especially looking forward to reading Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied and E. J. Koh’s A Lesser Love (Pleiades Press).
they mailed me from Mississippi in a metal ice chest
—from “how i arrived”
How it began: It started as a collection of mostly autobiographical poems that were varyingly interesting but not really cohesive. I talked with the publisher of Haymarket Books about the possibility of doing something with them, and it became one of those great iterative conversations where, through the process of talking something through with an active and curious listener, you have a chance to articulate for yourself what you’re really interested in doing. I realized that I wanted to write a book that would enter my own autobiographical coming-of-age story through a rewriting of my city’s past and future, through joy and magic, and that I wanted the book to speak to adolescent black girls and young adult black women. After that I was able to revise the manuscript into something with a lot more focus.
Inspiration: Reading Citizen by Claudia Rankine and seeing its use of visual art and prose. Walking around Chicago, driving around Chicago, biking around Chicago. Seeing visual art—for instance, the poem “The Device” was inspired by a series of masks I saw in the African art gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago. Going to the National Museum of African American History and Culture and seeing “the Mothership” that used to land onstage when Parliament-Funkadelic and George Clinton performed. Watching the film that Beyoncé made to accompany Lemonade and listening to A Seat at the Table by Solange; both pieces engage in elements of magic and world-building and, in the case of Solange’s album, a cohesion and clarity of aesthetic that I find inspiring. Listening to the album Heavn by Jamila Woods. Listening to Flying Lotus. A million other things.
Influences: Gwendolyn Brooks—I was writing the show No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks when I was editing Electric Arches. Ross Gay. Fatimah Asghar. Jamila Woods. Kevin Coval. Nate Marshall. Hanif Abdurraqib. Patricia Smith. Studs Terkel. Danez Smith.
Writer’s block remedy: I write in multiple genres, so often I just try to turn my attention to something else or step away from a project if it needs a little more time to incubate—although I often find it helpful to interrogate myself somewhat about the nature of the impasse. Am I tired? Hungry? Distracted? Is this idea bad? Is it something I’ve lost interest in? Am I trying to make an argument that I don’t actually have the evidence to make yet? Do I need another pair of eyes? Reflecting and being honest with myself about what’s going on usually helps me move forward. I’m also patient with myself. Everything doesn’t have to be written just this minute. Sometimes it’s okay to go read a book or ride a bike.
Advice: I think I was so eager to publish my book—and also perhaps somewhat lacking in confidence in myself—that I was at risk of going with any press that came along. I’m so grateful that I ended up with Haymarket, which I think was just perfect for me for so many reasons. If that hadn’t happened, I think there’s an alternate universe where the book is out on some other press in a much diminished form. I think it’s worth it to be patient and find the right press that believes not just in your book in the abstract, but in your entire vision for how you’d like it to live and operate in the world. I also think it’s worthwhile to ask yourself, “Which of these poems really are exciting to me?” and try to figure out which poems serve as the core thematic foundations of the book, and then edit and cut mercilessly around those foundations.
Finding time to write: It’s my job, which means it’s nonnegotiable, and we have to find the time for things that are nonnegotiable. I clear a path for it in whatever ways I can. Sometimes that means having a very disciplined morning writing session or a daylong retreat, and sometimes that means doing things the old-fashioned way—scribbling notes on a train or a bus.
What’s next: I recently finished my second book, When the Bell Stops Ringing, a work of nonfiction about the mass closure of public schools in Chicago and the history of racism in the city. I’m working on kicking off some new research projects that I hope will result in my second academic book, though that’s a very long process. And on Sunday mornings, little by little, I’ve been working on some fiction.
Job: Professor at the University of Chicago and writer.
Time spent writing the book: Three years.
Time spent finding a home for it: About a year.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Three collections I both enjoyed and learned from were Safia Elhillo’s The January Children, Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast, and sam sax’s Madness.
Let us speak without occasion of relations of our choosing!
—from “Gay Marriage Poem”
How it began: There’s a scene in a somewhat dated film from 1983, Lianna, directed by John Sayles, in which the protagonist goes to a lesbian bar for the first time with her lover. The next morning, as she’s walking down the street, she is newly able to integrate a private way of being, seeing, and desiring into her public sphere. Through an exchange of looks, you see her recognizing that all along there existed a community of other queer folks. Suddenly she’s moving through a space where future friends or lovers are newly possibly everywhere—choosing a plum at the fruit stand or on the far side of a street smiling at you as you smile back. Kind of like an audience for a poem that you weren’t sure existed but who you kept writing and revising for just in case.
Inspiration: Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality by Gayle Salamon.
Influences: Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde are poets I read when I know I could be living and writing more courageously. A few other writers whose poems have been especially strong mentors are Rita Dove, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marilyn Hacker, and Larry Levis.
Writer’s block remedy: I often turn to my dear friend and fellow poet Soham Patel, who always reminds me that it’s okay to play. And then we do—though we live in different cities, we get on the phone, laugh a lot, give each other exercises, and hold each other accountable.
Advice: Don’t listen to the voices of those who fear the power in what you have made and will make. Trust your closest readers and the reciprocal spaces that nourish you and give you strength.
Finding time to write: Like many poets I know, I am resourceful. I memorize poems that I love by others, which helps me think through my own while walking home along a busy road muffled by traffic. I carry a pocket-sized notebook when I go for a run. I have a little desk in an attic by a third-floor window where I slow down to revise. But many poems begin in the interstices of the day, when my mind is in motion.
What’s next: I recently cowrote a one-act play with playwright and friend Paul Kruse. It’s called Boundary Layer. The play takes place in a mysterious world covered in the most humble of life forms—moss. The last two people on a lonely planet, Sam and Dusty, are left to negotiate unexpected desires, relationships, and boundaries as they step outside of what is safe, familiar, and human.
Job: I teach at the University of Pittsburgh and at the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program. Before I taught college, I was a public school teacher.
Time spent writing the book: Eight years. In “Invisibility in Academe,” Adrienne Rich says that when someone “describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors.” I share this because I spent eight years writing, but also eight years working through some sort of “psychic disequilibrium.” Often I was writing, but at the same time I was teaching, loving, showing up for others, organizing, dancing: choosing to be in spaces where I could better see myself. To write my book, I had to widen my sense of my work in relation to others.
Time spent finding a home for it: I was quite lucky—I sent my book out for about a year. Then I won a Whiting Award. The weekend of the awards ceremony in New York City, I gave a reading from my unpublished manuscript. After the reading, I was approached by an editor at Sarabande.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press) by Lauren Russell, Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora, and The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded (Persea Books) by Molly McCully Brown.
sam sax Madness Penguin Books (National Poetry Series)
you either love the world or you live in it
—from “Warning: Red Liquid”
How it began: The seed for this book was actually just an exercise I gave myself. I’d come across a list of reasons for admission to a mental asylum in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in the 1800s that included examples such as “kicked in the head by a horse,” “tobacco and masturbation,” and “novel reading,” which I thought would all make lovely titles for poems. So I went to the woods (a residency at the Blue Mountain Center) but found I couldn’t write poems within that stricture. Instead I refocused my attention on the precise moment in history when homosexuality was taken out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and how that act of depathologizing has affected the way we think about and embody queerness and desire today. I began to work sequentially, incorporating my own relationship and my family’s relationship with mental health as both patients and practitioners. Through this process I discovered how clearly you can draw a line between so much of the inherited, lived, and systemic violence we experience and perpetuate today back to those early diagnoses.
Inspiration: Some of my research materials were The Birth of the Clinic and Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault. The DSM-I from 1952. The collected paintings of Francisco Goya and Hieronymus Bosch. Freud’s idea of the pleasure principle. Talking with my grandpa. The Sawbones podcast.
Influences: My friends. The folks I started writing with and have grown alongside over many years have unequivocally had the most impactful and life-altering affect on my writing and personhood. Some of those folks are Franny Choi, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Danez Smith, Fatimah Asghar, as well as countless other geniuses I’m lucky enough to be around. I’d also say there’s a litany of smart, politicized, literary, sad homosexuals from the present back to Hart Crane flinging himself off the deck of that ship who have made my work possible.
Writer’s block remedy: Give up and start something new. There are many poems to be written. If something isn’t working, I feel totally fine putting it aside and writing toward what has the most urgency and energy around it. Another thing that frees me up from the internal and newly external pressures of writing poems is being a-okay making terrible ones. I try to think of each new piece of writing as an experiment until it transcends that and becomes a poem. There’s something about the lack of preciousness around this process that helps me think of them as disposable until they become indispensable. Also each experiment and almost poem that doesn’t meet the world helps me accrue knowledge that will inform the next thing I write.
Advice: Everyone’s journey is different, and I can’t think of any catchall prescriptive advice outside of: Don’t be a jerk. It can be a really crummy process. For the longest time not having a book made me quite sad, and I always found it mad frustrating when someone who was already established told me to take my time and that it would work out how it’s supposed to. Although that turned out true in my case, I don’t necessarily think this is good advice. If you’ve finished one project, move on to another. You can always return to edit what you’ve already written. The doldrums that sometimes arise from not having a book can be dangerous. Madness is the sixth or seventh full manuscript I put together over eight or so years of writing, and to be honest, had any of those initial books been published, it would have been bad news. The time it took to get these books into the world has been invaluable for their life as books and for mine as a writer. So if you can stomach the patience, go for it. If not, publish chaps! Self-publish zines (I made like twenty as a younger punk writer.) There are lots of ways to get your work out into the world that isn’t as precious, lauded, and seemingly impossible as the first book object. Fuck it up. Make your poems indispensable to the world and let publishers fight over the privilege of supporting your work.
Finding time to write: I find time to write in the mornings before other obligations, during a spare hour at the coffee shop, on trains, buses. I’ve been trying to broaden my notion of what writing is to include the passive moments—a shift in perspective where looking at the world is just as important as writing it down.
What’s next: I’ve got two books in the works. There’s a collection of poems that’s currently circling around a sequence of Anthropocene / Apocalypse poems that attempt to celebrate queer joy in community and loneliness as the world burns. I’m also working on a novel, which is a queer Jewish coming-of-age story told in nonlinear fragments from the perspective of someone who’s just lit their self on fire outside of Trump Tower.
Hometown: Born in Manhattan, went to high school in Mamaroneck, New York.
Residence: Brooklyn, New York.
Job: I teach poetry and give readings.
Time spent writing the book: A little over a year. I wrote the drafts and skeletons for two-thirds of the book in the month I was up at a residency, and I spent the next year editing and refining. The rest of the book I wrote in and out of graduate school.
Time spent finding a home for it: Well, I’d just had my first book, which will be published second, picked up by Wesleyan University Press. The process of writing and sending it out took five to six years, although the book is wildly different from earlier versions I’d sent out. I had finished writing that first book and was tired of waiting for it to be accepted, so I decided to write a second book. I sent Madness out on a whim to the National Poetry Series and was expecting to have a multiyear journey of searching for a publisher, but amazingly Terrance Hayes selected the book. We had to push back my first book, Bury It, by a year so that the two books wouldn’t be in competition with each other.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Oy. This year has been ridiculously plump with incredible and dangerous first books. Here’s my list of poets whose first books this year took the top of my head off: Nicole Sealey, Kaveh Akbar, Erika L. Sánchez, Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa, Tyree Daye, Meg Freitag, Chen Chen, Eve L. Ewing, Layli Long Soldier, William Brewer, Chelsea Dingman, Javier Zamora, and I am SURE I’m leaving some wonderful books off this list.
I was never here. I’m not coming back. I’m at sea.
—from “Crystal Radio”
How it began: This book is a collection of mostly discrete poems that I wrote in graduate school (a handful were written in the time before and after). I never set off to write it; I looked back and gathered things I’d previously written and arranged them and drew out connections among them. It’s more of an act of returning. I think many first books begin this way, by remembering what’s been done already. Some of the shared attentions and themes of the book include depression, gender, color, painting and visual art, toxic white femininity, cloudiness, somatic experience, cantankerousness, jealousy, sex, light, America, collage, feelings without names, looming dread, boredom, water. I think in a larger sense I wanted to create a space where a state of not quite knowing felt expert, delightful, powerful.
Inspiration: I feel a little corny saying this, but my friends are my greatest inspiration. I am about to coteach a class on the poetics of refusal with a friend, the poet and artist Simone Kearney, at Parsons School of Design. Our conversations around this subject, around phenomenology and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill, and other texts that draw out these “slow states,” have really helped to create an environment for my work to emerge. The workshops and seminars I attended at Columbia were also instrumental. My students inspire me every week with their risk-taking and generosity. John Cleese’s character, Basil Fawlty, in the 1970s British sitcom Fawlty Towers shaped a lot of my early fascination with language, as did my father’s yellow legal pads, my mother’s excellent malapropisms and non sequiturs (“mind like a steel sieve”/ “letting the can of worms out of the bag”), and my brother’s baroque prose and steady diet of cyberpunk novels. I am a dedicated follower of a Twitter account of Yiddish proverbs.
Influences: John Ashbery, A. R. Ammons, Marcella Durand, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Eileen Myles, Francis Ponge, Sei Shōnagon, Mary Ruefle, Douglas Kearney, Susan Howe, Myung Mi Kim, Ariana Reines, Claudia Rankine, F. T. Prince, Emily Hunt, H. D., Harryette Mullen, Adam Fitzgerald, Alice Notley, Fernando Pessoa, my teachers Timothy Donnelly and Dorothea Lasky, Wayne Koestenbaum, Tracie Morris, Édouard Levé, Kim Hyesoon, Jorie Graham, Lucy Ives, Lyn Hejinian, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorge Luis Borges, James Schuyler, Lisa Robertson, Ali Power, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, my dance teacher Alexandra Beller.
Writer’s block remedy: I usually reach an impasse because I need to take a minute to recharge, so I listen to that. I quiet down my writer mind and enter a reading-seeing phase that may last weeks or months. I use a lot of repetition and anaphora in my work (some of which gets cut later) because I find the experience of repeating oneself to be both necessary in our times and deeply clarifying and stimulating. To repeat a phrase is both to stabilize it in the memory of the writer and reader and to question its soundness, as in Gertrude Stein’s “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” The rose is both etched in our mind and transformed, transmogrified. When I still made dances, I was obsessed with repetition and resultant exhaustion, and I often repeat as a way of entering or reentering a poem. I think I learned how to do this by listening to Anne Waldman and Dorothea Lasky.
One question I am still grappling with is how to negotiate a balance between “innovation,” constraint, and intuition. The painter Jane Freilicher put it best, I think, when she said, “To strain after innovation, to worry about being on ‘the cutting edge’ (a phrase I hate), reflects a concern for a place in history or one’s career rather than the authenticity of one’s painting.” There’s also, I think, a quieter quote somewhere about her letting go of the pressure to be innovative, and that she felt she could really paint after that, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere.
This sounds a little strange, but I like to think of my life so far as a writer as a kind of oscillation between states of openness and movement and states of stillness and solitude. There are islands of production, productivity, and then pockets of…nothing. I think I am grateful to my depression in this way, in that it often forces me to be still.
Advice: Support other writers by editing their books, teaching their work, inviting them to read, publishing them, letting them sleep on your couch, etc. Put your work in the hands of only people you know to be caring and dedicated. I am grateful that being a poet is perhaps more of a career path than it once was, and I know that being heard and read is vital to the form. That being said, I do find the professionalization of poetry (in which we all engage) to be in some ways hurtful to the writing itself. It’s okay to turn it off sometimes, this drive toward productivity. When you are writing, you are not involved in career making; you are being a poet. You are also a poet when you are teaching or walking around or doing your day job or looking at art. Don’t partition off your daily life from your writing life.
Eileen Myles once visited an undergraduate poetry workshop taught by Jennifer Firestone that I was taking, and she said something like: “There is something to being a poet that has nothing to do with writing poetry. It’s an identity.” This was such a relief for me when I heard it almost ten years ago, and yet I’m still not sure what it means. Perhaps what it means to me keeps changing. I like that.
Finding time to write: I am a very slow writer. I only sit down to write a poem a handful of times per month, but I find I am constantly jotting down fragments, recording phrases, and “puttering” (to borrow one of my mother’s favorite terms) over lines. I usually use my phone to record these, either as a note or in a voice memo. These scraps gleaned from daily life become the scaffolding of many of my poems. I’ve been commuting to teach this semester and have also found that being on a train (with no Wi-Fi!) and gently zooming through a landscape is very conducive to writing. I just have to stay ahead of the motion sickness.
What’s next: I’m working on a book-length poem sequence called “Mother of Pearl” about the environment and whether or not I want to eventually have children. It uses fragments of language from the anonymous Middle English poem “Pearl,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, lyrics from Roxy Music’s song “Mother of Pearl,” and probably a few more sources. It is a very different experience than writing Fort Not, both because it is more of a project book than a collection, and because it relies on and is building itself around found language. I also want to start writing a novel but don’t quite know how.
Residence: Brooklyn, New York, and sometimes Hudson, New York.
Job: Assistant to poets and an adjunct professor.
Time spent writing the book: Five years. I wrote the poem “Canary” in thirty minutes before a poetry reading at the Center for Book Arts in 2013 and didn’t change a word. I began the poem “Parallelogram” in 2014 and didn’t finish it until 2016, revising it well into 2017.
Time spent finding a home for it: I think I had a pretty rare experience in that the Song Cave (run by the incredible Alan Felsenthal and Ben Estes) was the first and only press to which I sent the manuscript, so not long. The deadline for the Song Cave’s 2016 open reading period (and my partner Danniel Schoonebeek’s gentle nudging to put it in my calendar) was one of the primary motivators for getting the initial manuscript together.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: William Brewer’s incredible I Know Your Kind comes to mind, and Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast. Tongo Eisen-Martin’s second book, Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Books), is one of my favorite books of the year, along with Alan Felsenthal’s debut, Lowly (Ugly Duckling Presse). I am incredibly excited for Samantha Zighelboim’s The Fat Sonnets, which will be coming out in 2018 from Argos Books.
Joseph Rios Shadowboxing: Poems & Impersonations Omnidawn Publishing
I am the American, güey
—from “Southpaw Curse”
How it began: It was a long while before I started thinking about a book. Willie Perdomo helped me with that at a Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation workshop. That’s when I found my alter ego, Josefo. Willie got me to conceptualize a project that could be built around this character. That was in 2012. It took another three years to mold the work into something that felt whole. I read John Berryman’s Mr. Bones character [from The Dream Songs] and Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito and fell in love with the notion of characters living full lives inside poems. It’s a thin veil, of course, but it worked for me. I was able to hide behind this character that looked and sounded like me, had the same memories and experiences as me, but was allowed to live apart from me.
Inspiration: My grandmother’s stories, my grandfather’s stories, the dudes I dug trenches with, the packinghouse where I used to work, wrench turners at my uncle’s airplane shop, jornaleros I picked up at Home Depot in Cypress Park, in Oakland, Marina del Rey, Daly City. My cousin Gabe’s vinyl collection, Dro’s Navy stories, dysfunctional romantic relationships, regret, mistakes, degenerate behavior, survival, and healing. You know, all that stuff you talk about when you and your cousin Erica are drunk and crying at four in the morning. Also, watching people I love get sick and pass away. All that loss, too much loss. Mourning, of course.
Influences: Javier O. Huerta, Michele Serros, Richard Pryor, Douglas Kearney, Warren G, Andrés Montoya, Rafa Cardenas, John Berryman, Zbigniew Herbert, D’Angelo, Art Laboe, and the Rocky films.
Writer’s block remedy: My poetry community, without a doubt. As I write this, I’m sitting across from my poet-cousin Sara Borjas. We met up to get some work done. I really couldn’t do a damn thing without these people.
Advice: Keep writing. Keep grinding. Send to presses that are publishing work you give a shit about. Don’t water down your voice because you think that’s what it takes to get a book. My homie Chiwan Choi asks us, “Why sell out in a zero-dollar industry?” It might sound corny, but be your whole self on the page. There isn’t much out there more terrifying to the powers that be than a bunch of people being their whole damn selves on the page. They straight up ban those books in places like Arizona. We need more of those books.
Finding time to write: I have to make time or it doesn’t happen. I get lazy. I work nights and weekends. Weekdays are usually free for poet work. I have people around me who keep me accountable.
What’s next: Tough question. I feel so far away from anything that resembles a second collection. I’m trying very hard to resist the producer mentality and to just enjoy this book and reflect on the journey I took to get here.
Job: I work at a venue called Civic Center Studios in downtown Los Angeles.
Time spent writing the book: Seven years, give or take.
Time spent finding a home for it: I submitted a previous version of the book as early as 2011. It was premature, without a doubt, but sending to contests kept me engaged in the work. I’m deadline driven that way.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: For real, 2017 needs to calm down. Where do I begin? Mai Der Vang’s Afterland (Graywolf Press). Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied. Vickie Vértiz’s Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut (University of Arizona Press). Nicole Sealey’s Ordinary Beast. Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s Scar On/Scar Off (Stalking Horse Press). Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s Beast Meridian (Noemi Press).
Now make room in the mouth for grassesgrassesgrasses
—from “Part 1: These Being the Concerns”
How it began: The first half of WHEREAS is a collection of poems that date back over the last decade. There was no particular setting off or intent for those poems except the desire to write. The second half of the book is a response to the 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans. For those pieces, it was a kind of frustration and outrage—lifelong and on slow boil—that propelled me.
Inspiration: My daughter, motherhood, and watching the younger generation. The land—the artfulness of the land, its endurance and change, its nonverbal lessons. And people—unexpected encounters as well as long-term relationships. I am always profoundly struck by the surprising things people say and do. People are poems, in themselves.
Influences: My daughter’s dad, the poet Orlando White, was as an important influence on my development as a writer, as were the poets he introduced me to—bpNichol and Aram Saroyan—whose works I return to over and over. Frida Kahlo and Zitkala-Sa speak to me as women artists of mixed heritage who elevated indigenous art, philosophies, and histories within contemporary considerations of art. And definitely the Native poets of my generation, previous generations, and the upcoming; their works are my touchstones. I turn to their pages both for inspiration and as conversation; I look and listen to how they handle language, form, line, and the big, sliding boulders of content.
Writer’s block remedy: Conversation—e-mails and phone calls—with other poets. Talking things out really helps the energy start moving again. There’s also conversation with the page: I will open a book of poems and keep the pages turned upward, next to my laptop. Sometimes just a glance toward the page helps invigorate my belief that whatever I’m working on, it can be written. I have others to hold my hand, figuratively speaking. And, when a piece has stopped and won’t move no matter how much I try, I need to take a break and do nothing for a while. Relaxing my brain is very important! I need to watch Netflix or hang out with my daughter; I need to laugh and not think about poetry at all.
Advice: Write as honestly as you can. Write what’s most important to you.
Finding time to write: I work at night from around 10 PM to 4 or 5 AM. I sleep in, in the morning. But it’s worth it. The night is an uninterrupted block of time that I really need.
What’s next: A new manuscript titled “2.” In this, I am working with ideas of duality, multiplicity, mixed heritage, failure versus success (the illusion of both), love and its failure, love and its necessity. Mostly, I am working with “2,” even at the most basic biological level, as the beginnings of pain and, likewise, belonging.
Hometown: I grew up in the Southwest; I don’t have a single hometown. But I have lived in Santa Fe the longest and feel most at home here.
Residence: Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Job: Write, make art, do readings.
Time spent writing the book: A few of the poems date back ten years or so, not long after my daughter was born in 2006. And I began my response to the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans—the poems in Part II—in 2010 or 2011. Altogether, the response pieces took me about six years.
Time spent finding a home for it: A number of years ago, Jeff Shotts from Graywolf Press read my poem “Ȟe Sápa” online at the Kenyon Review. He messaged me about the poem and asked if I had a manuscript to read. At the time, I didn’t, but I told him that I was working on one. It took several years after receiving his message for me to finish WHEREAS. But we kept in touch and, although I was prepared to send my manuscript to other presses if Graywolf did not accept it, Graywolf ended up being the only press I submitted to when the manuscript was ready.
Recommendations for debut poetry collections from this year: Mai Der Vang’s Afterland and Bojan Louis’s Currents (BkMk Press).
The debut has a certain allure: an air of freshness, the promise of an exciting, original voice. Here is the new. Here is something you haven’t yet heard. And while that certainly might be the case with a poetry debut, it can also be true of a poet’s second, fifth, or tenth book—artistic innovation can happen at any stage in a writer’s life. What does make a debut uniquely exciting, though, is its sense of beginning—that the arc of a poet’s career has just begun, that the ball has just been tossed into the air. For our twelfth annual look at debut poets, we asked ten poets to share the inspirations and processes behind their first collections, and what emerged were stories of beginnings: how a book begins and how a poem begins, certainly, but also how a writer’s attraction to poetry begins. “I wanted to know if my sadness could ever be useful,” explains Ocean Vuong. “[It’s the desire] to get closer to whatever it is that’s always just beyond reach or sight,” says Justin Boening. “It was fun,” says Phillip B. Williams.
The ten poets in this year’s feature wrote some of the most compelling debuts published in 2016 and represent a range of styles and backgrounds. From the sparse, demanding elegance of Eleanor Chai’s lyrics, to the irreverent, kaleidoscopic roaming of Tommy Pico’s book-length poem, to the linguistic opulence and sheer nerve of Safiya Sinclair’s work, these ten encompass many of the impulses and registers of contemporary poetry. We asked for their insight on inspiration, publishing, and writing through impasses, and two commonalities—among many—surfaced. One: that inspiration might lie in paying attention to what appears small or insignificant—how Carolina Ebeid will listen to every “little bell” of an Arvo Pärt piano piece for inspiration, how Ari Banias will pursue the feeling elicited by something as minor as the behind-the-knee wrinkles in someone’s pants. And two: the advice to not be in a rush to publish. To take one’s time and question, as Solmaz Sharif does, what it means to be an artist and not just a person who publishes a book. Or to wait, like Jana Prikryl, for the poem to emerge that helps the others fall into place. These poets’ words are a reminder that it’s not a race, but a process of fashioning poems that can connect with the world, that can confront the “roots and wide-ranging shadows of words,” as Safiya Sinclair puts it, and explore language as we know it.
Ari Banias Anybody W. W. Norton
“Mostly a name feels like the crappy overhang I huddle under while rain skims the front of me.
I admit it keeps me visible, the cool compromise of efficient lighting, the agreement to call this that.”
—from “Recognition Is the Misrecognition You Can Bear”
How it began: I wrote Anybody out of the conditions of my life, and out of a will to connect more than divide. I was writing into loneliness and the social, and as a way to be alone with myself while also being and thinking with others. It was a process of concretizing and externalizing those conversations I was having in my head and out loud, with people dead and living, in my life or not, with the culture at large, and with other selves—past, present, future, parallel. As a younger queer writer especially, there were books I needed but couldn’t find, either because no one had published them or because they hadn’t yet been written. So I was probably writing this book, however unconsciously, to address that self, those selves.
Inspiration: The need to counter alienation and death. Humor, my immediate surroundings, memory. Sometimes just wanting to figure out how I felt about something could be enough. Poems could come from a question, an irritation, or even from a desire to get at my response to an object—like, Why does this tree, that I’m fairly certain doesn’t know I exist, evoke deep feeling in me? It’s embarrassing! And, What am I bringing to it—I mean all the baggage (cultural, historical, and otherwise) I’m carting around when I look at a tree (or a broken chair, or the behind-the-knee wrinkles in someone’s pants in front of me in line, or, really, anything) and find myself thrown off by unexpected feeling. As long as I’m attentive and willing to follow through, past what’s easy or comfortable, a poem can start almost anywhere.
In her piece “The Untroubled Mind,” the painter Agnes Martin writes, “Nothing that happens in your life makes inspiration / When your eyes are open / You see beauty in anything.” I’d add that I think of “beauty” here not in the classical sense but more like meaning, importance. Martin [writes later in] this same piece: “The wiggle of a worm as important as the assassination of a president.” They happen in the same world, never entirely independent of one another. And maybe the one I think of as small is in fact enormous. Even if a poem doesn’t directly point at these connections, to keep them near, to refuse to forget or evade them—that did and does inspire me.
Influences: More than I could possibly name. Some voices: Nina Simone, Arthur Russell, Odetta, Elizabeth Cotten, and the rembetika singer Roza Eskenazi. Some books: Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses, James Baldwin’s essays, George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, Brenda Hillman’s Loose Sugar, Lorine Niedecker’s Paean to Place, June Jordan’s Collected Poems, Joy Ladin’s Transmigrations, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “terrible sonnets,” Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Hilton Als’s The Women, Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation, David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives, Guy Davenport’s translations of Archilochos and Sappho. And Roland Barthes, Elizabeth Bishop, Fred Moten, Frank O’Hara, Yannis Ritsos, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Conversations with others ignite and recalibrate me, without fail. A few winters ago I came to a sort of crisis point with poetry. I wasn’t sure how or why, but poems began to repel me—I couldn’t write them, and I could hardly read them. Lineation looked melodramatic and grotesque. I couldn’t stomach even a whiff of solemnity. Poems were like giant echo chambers. Not coincidentally, that was my third year in a row living in fairly isolated circumstances away from loved ones, and I was feeling disconnected. I didn’t know what else to do so I started writing letter-poems to close friends. Immediately detail, texture, and volition returned to the act of writing. It was like the electricity came on again. Somewhere I’d lost the sense of purpose and direction created by that fundamental exchange of one person speaking to another. A good lesson.
Advice: It seems obnoxious to tell people not to get discouraged by how long it takes to publish a book, because it can be a very long time, and who wouldn’t get discouraged? For me publication never seemed a given—only writing did. What I told myself, and still do, is this: Keep working. Follow the shape of your mind’s particulars (its rhythms, its oddities) like a bloodhound, and take the poems as far as you possibly can, so that they are utterly yours, so that you’re writing in that singular way that singular thing no one but you can write. Each time. As Hopkins (whom I’ll take way out of context here) said, “more wreck and less discourse.”
What’s next: Along with writing new poems, I am translating contemporary poets from the Modern Greek. It’s a relief to get outside my own head and work out problems of language and expression through someone else’s poems, while still being in music. And I welcome the different sense of responsibility. Finding my way back into Greek, which was my first language, is also its own private homecoming, with all the associated awkwardness and joy of that.
Age: 38.
Hometown: I was born in Los Angeles, and grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.
Residence: Berkeley, California.
Job: I work at Small Press Distribution.
Time spent writing the book: Nine years.
Time spent finding a home for it: I started sending out a mess of consecutively numbered pages I thought was a book nine years ago. The early drafts look very little like what came to be published. It took about four years of sending out versions of what’s now the book before it was accepted.
Ocean Vuong Night Sky With Exit Wounds Copper Canyon Press
“There is so much I need to tell you—but I only earned one life.”
—from “Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown): oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952”
How it began: I wanted to know if my sadness could ever be useful.
Inspiration: Fire escapes. I was walking in New York City one day years ago and saw this big, white fire escape. And I thought to myself, “That’s it. That’s what a poem should do. Be a place where we can move further toward ourselves, which really means moving further toward our fears.” And medical marijuana. And Gushers fruit snacks.
Influences: Li-Young Lee, Federico García Lorca, Frank O’Hara, Yusef Komunyakaa, Arthur Rimbaud, Anne Carson, Emily Dickinson, Matsuo Bashō, Gwendolyn Brooks, Garrett Hongo, Amiri Baraka, Troye Sivan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Thomston, Thao Nguyen, Kobayashi Issa, Etta James, Ben Lerner, Luther Vandross, Michel Foucault, Alexander Chee, Little Richard, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Maggie Nelson, Mark Rothko, Frank Ocean, Bad Future, Whitney Houston, Patsy Cline, Lyoto Machida, C. D. Wright, Amy Winehouse, Yoko Ono, Al Green, Sinn Sisamouth, Childish Gambino, Ralph Stanley, Max Richter, Nils Frahm, Joel P West, James Blake, and Vince Staples.
Writer’s Block Remedy: When I am stuck, I don’t like to force out work or words. I just walk away from the desk—sometimes not returning for weeks at a time. I find a quiet place in the day and stop. If I’m at home, I lie down on the carpet. Then I do this thing where I just say thank you to all the things and people who have helped me. Of course, simply saying thank you does not awaken any creative force; it just reminds me that the work I am doing is not validated by quantity, but rather by the connection it builds between the world and myself. When my own work is not coming along, I try to stop and recognize the people doing the same challenging, at times unforgiving, art—and I feel happy. I think it’s hard, in our day and age, not to think, It’s me against the world, or, I have to do this for my career because everyone else is hammering away and if I stop now, I will fall behind and be forgotten. But that’s a toxic and self-defeating gaze. I think we are more productive—even in stillness—when we can recognize one another, when we say to each other, Thank you for doing this with me. Thank you for carrying on when I cannot.
Advice: Hustling can be good—but make sure what you’re pushing is gold (to you).
What’s next: I’m working on being a better son.
Age: 28.
Hometown: Hartford, Connecticut.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Writer and teacher.
Time spent writing the book: Eight yearsafter believing that I could be a poet. But I think really it took me all of my life.
Time spent finding a home for it: Eight months. I was lucky.
“To all the girls Bernini loved before I’d say, caveat emptor.”
—from “Benvenuto Tisi’s Vestal Virgin Claudia Quinta Pulling a Boat with the Statue of Cybele”
How it began: The book started as individual poems written over about a decade. I was finally galvanized into bringing some of them together by the long sequence that forms the second half of the book, “Thirty Thousand Islands.” The sequence gave me a new way of thinking about loss and literary history and nature and men and Canada and Europe; as it grew I sensed it was a foil to the more ad hoc poems I had written up till then. So the book emerged from this encounter between different forms of poetry, which seems apt since many of my poems tend to spark from the friction between different voices or points of view.
Inspiration: There are some ekphrastic poems in The After Party—one about a great, overlooked Buster Keaton movie, another about a not very good Renaissance painting. I like taking in all kinds of art—especially paintings, photographs, movies—and thinking about its implications, formal and historical. But I’m also taken with something Frank O’Hara once said: “Sometimes I think that writing a poem is such a moral crisis I get completely sick of the whole situation.” What kind of experience or vision or formal experiment can really justify taking up the reader’s time? Parts of my book attempt to think about European history and the ways my own ancestors experienced it; what gives me the authority to speak for those individuals? In other words, what kind of poem could do so? I find these sorts of questions inspiring.
Influences: I don’t feel qualified to name my own influences—and the writing I revere most seems too distant a beacon to enter into my own stuff—but there are writers I’ve loved over so many years they feel like family. I’d include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, John Berryman, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and Don Marquis.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I tend to sit with the impasse, partly because I have a day job and write essays as well (and recently had a baby) so life can throw me off course very easily, and partly because I think impasses are trying to tell me something so it would be imprudent to ignore them.But when I really must go on I get energy from hazelnut gelato; whiskey; the Metropolitan Museum; swimming; dips into Flann O’Brien or Jane Austen or Laurence Sterne; dips into Twitter, which so far is the clearest source of dissent I’ve found against the fascism that the Republican Party is happily riding into power; dear friends whose work is new and great, and conversely random lines in magazines that irritate me. Getting pissed off is, in the absence of anything else, a reliable stimulant.
Advice: Every voice needs something different so it’s unlikely my experience will apply to anyone else. But what’s been most valuable to me is time—to let the words stew, and let myself stew, and in fact resist publication for as long as possible.Once you’re ready I recommend an Excel spreadsheet. Maybe this is common knowledge but it was a revelation to me: A spreadsheet helps to compartmentalize the painful chore of sending things out and really cleanses it of emotion. You just record rejections and can very clearly see where else something might be sent.
What’s next: Mostly diaper changes and tummy times. Occasionally noodling away at things that may or may not make it into a second book.
Age: 41.
Hometown: My teens were spent in Ancaster, Ontario, which feels hometown-iest to me. I was born in Ostrava (in what was then Czechoslovakia), and when I was five my family fled and lived in an Austrian village for a year. From the age of six I grew up in a few towns in southern Ontario—so it’s complicated.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Senior editor at the New York Review of Books.
Time spent writing the book: Too long. But the too-longness varies a lot: One of the poems is around fifteen years old, some started almost a decade ago and had to marinate for years before they were finished, and some were written in half an hour, with minor revision. In general I revise heavily and take long gaps between glances at poems, so I can hear them afresh when I return.
Time spent finding a home for it: I spent a decade avoiding gathering my poems into a manuscript—it felt somehow presumptuous. About a year after I started bringing the poems together, Tim Duggan read my work in the London Review of Books and the New Yorker and got in touch, asking if I had a manuscript. I took a few more months to revise it and once I sent it to him he got back to me quickly. So I’ve been very lazy and very lucky.
Carolina Ebeid You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior Noemi Press
“We live in a copy of Eden, a copy
that depends on violence.”
—from “Albeit”
How it began: The book isn’t defined by a unifying project. Many of its poems did not begin with a particular book in mind. However, when I was placing the poems side by side to see how many pages I had, I noted an orbital pull forming. They were already set in a certain orbit of tone, subject matter, and high-lyric style. Identifying this motion allowed me to see more clearly which subsequent poems would be accepted into this circle.
Inspiration: For a few years I listened to a musical piece by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt called Für Alina. It is a composition for the piano, spare and slow. It sounds like little bells being struck. Pärt has said that, when he was making this work, he “had a need to concentrate on each sound so that every blade of grass would be as important as a flower.” I have thought the same about poems. Also, the visual vocabulary of certain films has inspired many of these poems, deeply. Movies such as The Spirit of the Beehive, Ratcatcher, In the Mood for Love, and Days of Heaven hold something arcane, a strange quietness. Perhaps they withhold (it’s a better word). What has moved me to write after seeing these films is how much they withhold. I am drawn to poems that can dance like that, in a relationship of what is said and what is left unsaid.
Influences: The books of Lucie Brock-Broido, Anne Carson, and Briget Pegeen Kelly have been early and lasting influences. In my PhD work, I’ve delved into the fragments and letters of Emily Dickinson, the poetry of Raúl Zurita and Cecilia Vicuña, the multimedia art of Caroline Bergvall, as well as the various adaptations of Antigone—which I hope will all be future influences.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Always, the engrossing work of translating poetry from Spanish is a spark. I also turn to looking through old lexicons, field guides no longer in print, medieval bestiaries or glossaries of birds, and early photography.
Advice: Three things. One: Listen to your innermost self—a self that has been forming aesthetic principles by the books you’ve read, by your various experiences and identities—and try to lower the volume of well-intentioned critiques that stifle your work. Two: If you are fortunate, you will find a trusted reader-editor-confidant-friend, one who will open your work and imagination. Take care to develop that relationship. My primary reader also happens to be my partner, Jeffrey Pethybridge. Three: Try not to send out your manuscript blindly, which can deplete one’s inner and outer resources. Rather, choose presses whose author lists exhilarate you, and remember that small presses are in a golden age; they’re making vital and sparkling books.
What’s next: A long sequence of small poems called “The M Notebooks,” M being a character made up of various persons, such as the biblical Saint Miriam (a myrrh-bearer), the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta, and Russian writer Nadezhda Mandelstam. The sequence is a convergence, confluence, conflagration of speakers. Also, a couple of essays on the work of Ana Mendieta, as well as research on the literature of sleep, descent, and dream-space.
Age: 40.
Hometown: West New York, New Jersey.
Residence: Denver.
Job: I teach while I also pursue a PhD in the creative writing program at the University of Denver.
Time spent writing the book: The bulk of the poems were written in Austin during my three MFA years at the Michener Center.
Time spent finding a home for it: About three years.
How it began: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—namely, how quickly the nation mobilized to invade these countries when just months earlier we were living in the myth of indefinite and obvious peace. That peace, of course, did not exist then, either, but I remember, for example, an Army recruiter visiting my AP Government class in spring 2001 and saying, as part of his pitch to join the Army and see the world, that were we to join the Army, we would not be fighting in any wars, anyway.
Inspiration: Conversations with friends—especially Samira Yamin, Ari Banias, and Brandon Som. The various books and artists they have pressed upon me. The stellar work they put into the world.
Influences: June Jordan, Muriel Rukeyser, Mahmoud Darwish, C. D. Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Reznikoff, William Carlos Williams, Adrienne Rich, Leonel Rugama, Walt Whitman, and Claudia Rankine.
Writer’s Block Remedy: If the causes are perfectionistic, I pull out the collected poems of a poet I greatly admire and flip through to remind myself how many mediocre poems their oeuvre contains. It is my duty, I remind myself, to write even those mediocre, messy poems. These failures are the ones that create openings in the conversation for subsequent writers and poets to enter—I’m not trying to kill the conversation, after all. I pull out journals—André Gide’s, Franz Kafka’s, Susan Sontag’s—to remind myself how long the process is and how often the sense of failure or impasse hits. I watch a movie.
Advice: Write a book you want to fight for. Fight for it. I am, after all this, though, a little hesitant to keep the conversation on first books or debuts. I am a product of an industry that emphasizes first books—it’s where the prizes are, it’s what the MFA programs are gearing you up for with your thesis, it’s what our conversations with our peers are about, it’s what we buy because we want to support our friends. I’m not entirely sure who this “we” is, as someone both inside and outside of it, as someone not wanting to presume you are a similar product, fellow writer. But there is something, something shifting the collective attention (of presses, of journals) to younger poets—an attention that does not exist for a poet’s second or fourth book and that doesn’t again until I don’t know when. A blessing, maybe, that turning away of the gaze—it’s likely due to sales. We are not necessarily taught how to be artists, how to commit to artists and attend to their failures, their sustained conversation—a conversation that would undoubtedly challenge and even dismantle said industry. We are taught instead how to publish our first books. Product, not process. I don’t have answers about “how to be an artist”; I’m not trying to make it sound like I do. But I do want to have that conversation. What do you want to do as a writer in the world? What do you see the arc of your writing life to be? How is your first book a launch to that arc? To discuss the book itself, the writers themselves—myself included—is a misdirection. Or as Forough Farrokhzad said: “Remember the flight / the bird will die.”
What’s next: Translations of Forough Farrokhzad. And some secret stuff.
Age: 33.
Hometown: I haven’t worked out the answer to this question for myself. Los Angeles is probably the closest I will get to a hometown.
Residence: Oakland.
Job: I’m a lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University.
Time spent writing the book: I started working with the Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms in earnest at the end of 2007. The earliest poems in the book are from 2008. But some of the pieces and images are reworked from 2003, even. By 2012 or 2013 I had pretty much worked out all the conceptual elements and the general frame of the book, though I added and removed poems up until the last deadline. The most freeing realization was that I could ditch poems that had been previously published in journals and that I liked, generally speaking. I could create a book rather than a collection, I mean.
Time spent finding a home for it: I started sending the book out in 2009, which was massively premature, but I don’t regret it. I drew up a very short list of dream first-book prizes and vowed to continue sending out yearly until I was disqualified from doing so.
Phillip B. Williams Thief in the Interior Alice James Books
“I’m listening to Alice Coltrane to feel Blacker than God”
—from “Eleggua and Eshu Ain’t the Same”
How it began: It was fun. I used to write several manuscripts at a time. One year I was working on three books simultaneously. My first attempt at a book was in 2008 (“I Empire,” read as “first empire”), the second was in 2009 (“Thief in the Interior,” which was not the same book as the one that was eventually published), and the third was in 2010 (“In Vulnerabilities”). Eventually I released a chapbook called Bruised Gospels in 2010, and because I do not want poems in chapbooks to appear in my full-lengths, I was “forced” to restructure the main manuscript, “I Empire,” which remained the backbone of my debut.It had many, many names, to my friend Rickey Laurentiis’s entertainment. He and I exchanged different versions of our books for years. I distinctly remember two titles he had before Boy With Thorn that I do not think he would mind me sharing. The first was “Mirror God”and the second was “Down Atlantis.” If there were any others, I cannot remember. My failed titles were “Grace,” “Grace and Empire,” “Dancing on an Upturned Bed,” “Darling,” “Shame No Tongue,” “Lie Down,” and “Witness.”Going through this process with Rickey over the course of four to five years helped push me along. All I knew is that I wanted a book before I turned thirty. My book was published a month before my thirtieth birthday.
Inspiration: The book On Black Men by David Marriott was always on my mind while writing. The work of my peers. The work of those who have become ancestors.
Influences: Essex Hemphill, Jorie Graham, Terrance Hayes, Sonia Sanchez, the racism of Wallace Stevens seems its own kind of artist or shadow of the artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mary Jo Bang, Wangechi Mutu, Nina Simone, Leontyne Price, Björk, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Kerry James Marshall, Federico García Lorca, Lucille Clifton, Henry Dumas, Carl Phillips, Douglas Kearney, J. Michael Martinez, Dawn Lundy Martin, Octavio Paz, Camille T. Dungy, Evie Shockley, Frank Bidart, Alvin Ailey, Judith Jamison, Alonzo King, Clifford Williams, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Sylvia Plath and her fascination with the word nigger, Claudia Rankine, Carolyn Rogers, Thylias Moss, James Baldwin, afropessimism as a theoretical framework, Mahmoud Darwish, Toni Morrison, Meshell Ndegeocello, Suji Kwock Kim, Larry Levis, Sunni Patterson.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I go for months without writing and then write nonstop for about a month or so. An impasse for me is a sign that I simply have nothing to say, and that is fine. I had to learn that it was fine not to write. As far as what keeps me going, I’m still not sure. Something just clicks on and stays on until it runs its course. I frequently add to a Notes document any lines I come up with or words I need to look up. My memory is very poor, so I do not retain what I read. Sometimes, in order to assist with retention, I have to activate the knowledge, meaning implement it into something tangible like a poem. The joy in this is that most things I read are fresh when I return to them. The downside is that it takes me forever to do scholarly work and I’m not the best person to speak with about books or even single poems unless they are in front of me.
Advice: Just write. Study first, then write. We cannot control the reception of our work, but we can decimate our imaginations by trying to write “for the people.” Who are these monolithic people? Why think so little of them and call that kindness? Recently, there seems to be this idea that one has to write for someone else or a specific group. So many folks want to be mouthpieces for a community for which they’ve set low standards reminiscent of the oppressive forces they claim to want to counteract. In that writing, it is assumed what these potential readers will and will not understand. In the same instant that this idea wants to be communal and welcoming, it is also condescending and ostracizing. We have enough low expectations set on us by others, especially if we are persons of color, women, part of genderqueer and LGBT communities, and/or any other marginalized group. Almost every poem I’ve written my mother has seen. She may or may not understand each one but she has read those poems and encouraged me to keep going. She tells me what she loves and what touches her. So do my nonliterary friends and family members. It’s not up to me to assume there are restraints on their ability to understand me. My poems aren’t a standardized test that my friends need help cheating on, or that can even be “passed.” Though we have limitations, language barriers, literacy barriers, and other factors, we are also complex and capable if allowed to be.
What’s next: I’m working on trying to eat right and go to bed on time.
Age: 30.
Hometown: Chicago.
Residence: Bennington, Vermont.
Job: I am a visiting professor in English at Bennington College.I try to make some kind of living off my work but not to the point of distraction. Writing does keep me alive, even during those times it does not make money.
Time spent writing the book: The longest poem in the book I started in 2005 and it was a single-page poem. It continued to grow across different iterations of the book until it became a twenty-page poem while I attended Washington University in St. Louis for my MFA. I was convinced to shrink it down to fourteen pages and officially finished it in the spring of 2014, nine years later. Many of the poems I wrote that were originally in the book did not make the final edit. Most of the poems that made it I wrote during my MFA, so about two years.
Time spent finding a home for it: It depends on which version of the book we’re talking about. In my naiveté I submitted manuscripts to contests as early as 2009. They were unready projects that I would have regretted if they were published. It only took a few months for what was to become Thief in the Interior to find a publisher. When it started finalizing for prizes and open submissions I knew it would eventually get picked up.
Eleanor Chai Standing Water Farrar, Straus and Giroux
“This, I’ve seen. I see it always. I carry it in my torso as surely as a Buddhist lives in the skin of his own corpse.”
—from “Little Girl’s Auricle”
How it began: I can’t say I was compelled to write a book. I was compelled to write poems. I am not a native speaker of English, but I no longer speak my native language (Korean) for complicated and disorienting reasons. Finding shapes in language that hold for longer than the instant of speaking has always felt crucial to me.
Inspiration: I am happiest when I am completely and obsessively engaged. Nothing absorbs me as thoroughly as trying to get a poem on the page. So I suppose living the life I wish to live is what inspires me.
Influences: I spent years transcribing the complete correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. For a few hours each night for six years I was dropped into their intimate “Dear—.” Their devotion to their poems and to poetry continues to move me. Alongside one of her letters, as an afterthought, Bishop wrote: “And did you like the 4 Quartets?” exactly so, with the number 4 and the word Quartets. The “And,” the casual usage, the numeral 4—not the word Four written out—thrilled me. It felt spontaneous, in real time (which it was) and I felt a sliver of how it may have been to read the Four Quartets as a newly made thing, without the edifice of criticism bracing it. The Four Quartets constitutes at least one of my Ten Thousand Things. To see it considered before it aged into its full regalia made me feel closer to its nascence, its being made. I’ve also had the great gift of deep friendship with Frank Bidart. He is one of the finest, most exacting makers I know. His obsessive devotion to the needs of a poem stuns me. I love T. S. Eliot too much. I love Louise Glück. I love James Baldwin. I love Ezra Pound. I love Clarice Lispector. I love Mark Strand. I love Walt Whitman. I love Frank Bidart. I love Marguerite Duras. I love Winnicott and Freud. I love Bishop. I love Robert Frost. I love Louise Bourgeois. I love Toni Morrison. I love Van Gogh’s letters. I LOVE The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I love ethnographies.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I turn to silence, or rather, I surrender to it. Silence, and superior voices. And panic.
Advice: I wish I had some useful advice. Mine was a strange path.
What’s next: I am working on one new poem. Hopefully I will be able to write it and hopefully more will come. I am also trying to compose, or rather assemble, Mark Strand’s oral memoir from tapes we made in Nova Scotia and some of his unpublished writing. I am following the practice and principles he used in making his beautiful, singular collages from paper he himself made. I think of his sentences as his “paper” and I am trying to tear that material and place it on the page into a compelling narrative of his life. It’s such fine material; the task is daunting but animating.
Age: 49.
Hometown: My hometown is a complicated question. I was moved around quite a lot as a child. I suppose I would say Seoul, South Korea,though I’ve not been home in many years.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I started a school in Westport, Connecticut.My daughters are now both in college so I am trying to give myself the time and space to write poems, finish editing the Bishop-Moore letters with the meticulous Saskia Hamilton, and work on Mark Strand’s oral memoir. Working at the school demanded all of my energy when I was there.
Time spent writing the book: I have no idea how long it took me to write this book. Decades.I knew that my daughters’ time in my everyday care would not last forever. I’ve always been achingly clear that I had eighteen years to share our days, to participate, even shape what would be our holy, our minute particular (William Blake). I am devoted to the minute particular. Much that I value in life resides there. I did not have a childhood with my mother, so being a mother to my children every day and night seemed a privilege and a miracle.
Time spent finding a home for it: I was very fortunate that Jonathan Galassi, my editor [for the Bishop-Moore letters], liked my poems and took my book.
Justin Boening Not on the Last Day, but on the Very Last Milkweed Editions (National Poetry Series)
“does sadness leave us? Is that the source of sadness?”
—from “Banquet”
How it began: The book’s title is taken from the thorny end of a Kafka parable called “The Coming of the Messiah.” It finishes: “The messiah will come on the day after he is no longer required, he will come on the day after his arrival, he will come not on the last day, but on the very last.” I’ve seen others attempt to negotiate these paradoxes by changing the definition of last day or very last. I guess that makes as much sense as anything else. But for me, this is a portrait of a savior who comes, not belatedly, but by not coming at all. I think it may have been this parable that put me on the road toward writing a book of failures, of mistakes, which is how I’ve come to understand the collection—a book where one learns to become a god by being unrecognizable, for example, or where one rules the world by being the only one in it. I don’t know. I’m probably the last one who should be talking about such things. More generally, though, I think what compelled me to write this book may have been distance from God. For me, poetry is an expression of this desire to reach out, not to communicate per se, but to get closer to whatever it is that’s always just beyond reach or sight. Maybe that sounds too lofty, but it’s a longing I’ve felt all my life, and a longing I’ve often associated with the essence of whatever it is I’ve called “human.” Stevens finishes his poem “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” by saying, “We make a dwelling in the evening air / In which being there together is enough.” I think that about sums it up for me—what compelled me to write these poems.
Inspiration: The unshakable belief that poetry is absolutely necessary, that it’s inextricably linked to language itself, and that, therefore, it’s one of the most human things we’re allowed to participate in.
Influences: As far as writers go, I return most often toFranz Kafka, Wallace Stevens, Clarice Lispector, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath,Mark Strand, and Lucie Brock-Broido.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I almost never push it. If a poem is frustrating me I walk away, watch some YouTube, read writers who know what they’re doing. Distraction is good for poetry, I think, maybe because it breeds uncertainty. In fact, I feel I do my best writing when I’m not writing at all.
Advice: Hold off as long as you can. And once you lose your patience, only send the work to people and presses you already respect and trust.
What’s next: Lately I’ve been putting a lot of my energy into a new magazine and press called Horsethief Books that Devon Walker-Figueroa and I have started together. As far as my own poems go, with the loss of so many friends and luminaries I’ve been writing elegies as of late.
Age: I’m 35and will be turning 36 on February 13 (yes, I was born on a Friday).
Hometown: I was born in Saratoga Hospital, on a holiday down to see the ponies. I call Glens Falls, New York, my hometown though, since I ate my first corn on the cob there, stole my first bike there, etc. I moved to New York City when I was six—pretty young—so that’s a home for me as well, though not my origins. Recently, I was eating a 1:00 AM chicken fried steak in Missoula, Montana, at a dive called the Ox. Two guys, who had just finished playing poker at the front card table, stood up suddenly from their counter stools. One guy walloped the other guy in the eye, snatched up his rucksack, and hustled out the front door. No one called the cops. Few were alarmed. That’s the place I’ve lived the longest, actually—Missoula is another home.
Residence: Iowa City.
Job: A living? Maybe you could call it that.I teach and edit, mostly.
Time spent writing the book: Well, there are some whispers from poems I wrote while I was a graduate student, but they’re really only whispers. The oldest poem in the book is one I wrote the moment after I handed in my graduate thesis—that was in 2011. The newest poem is one I wrote in 2015. So I guess that means four years?
Time spent finding a home for it: I sent out bashfully in 2013, and then in earnest until the book was taken in 2015.
Safiya Sinclair Cannibal University of Nebraska Press (Prairie SchoonerBook Prize)
“Tell the hounds who undress me with their eyes—I have nothing to hide. I will spread myself
wide.”
—from “Center of the World”
How it began: I began writing poetry as an act of survival. Faced with the silencing exile of womanhood in an oppressive household and a patriarchal society that discouraged me from speaking and thinking, the only way to make sense of my burgeoning selfhood was here on the page, by writing it down. Then, plagued still with the strange linguistic exile of writing in English, the language of the colonist, while dancing wildly in the brazen self of Jamaican patois, the only way to unfracture this amputated history was by making a home for myself on the page, and building new modes of language by writing poetry.
When I was younger I was very dismayed by how little of myself and my family I could trace into the past, and was very inspired by the oral folklore and storytelling tradition passed down by my mother and my aunts. It became very clear to me that this oral folklore and storytelling was a matriarchal tradition—a way of preserving our history, both family history and Jamaican history. This not only incited and inspired me to write Cannibal, but it was also a way of saving my own life, of making a record of our songs and mother tongue, and paying tribute to the women who have woven our words and days into existence.
Finally, it was imperative for me to confront the macabre history of the Caribbean itself—to expose the postcolonial roots of violence here; to explore how being “Caribbean” was so closely linked to being “savage,” being cannibal. By confronting the ugly language and prejudices that continue to plague all people of the African diaspora, I hoped to renarrativize the toxic gaze of white supremacy at home and abroad, to shatter its fictions through the shared ritual of poetry.
Inspiration: Always in my ear is the ghost meter of the Caribbean Sea, its old rhythm and singing. The possessed tempo of Pocomania, and the fire-root of duende. I am continually inspired by the fertile landscape of Jamaica, which fevers my dreams—our lush hills and blooms, our heavy fruit trees. The way nothing here grows politely. The wild animal of my childhood and its green river of memory.
I’m fascinated by Goethe’s lifelong search for the “Primal Plant,” from which grew my own notion of the black woman’s body as that elusive Primal Plant, the first site of exile. Early on in college I was very startled by Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, which showed me the wild possibilities of breaking form, how I could build my own labyrinth of mythification as a way to honor and transfigure family, a way to alchemize our folklore. I’ve also been writing from a desire to dismantle Western texts like Shakespeare’s The Tempest, to repossess Caliban as a throat through which the poems could sing, our one-drop rhythm transgressing violence and its lingering exile, a linguistic rebellion forged here through the music of linguistic mastery.
Influences: The poets, artists, and writers who feed the fire and bloodroot of my family tree are Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Frida Kahlo, James Baldwin, Federico García Lorca, Caliban, Aimé Césaire, Caravaggio, Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez, Paul Celan, Rita Dove, Wangechi Mutu, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I can’t say I’ve ever truly reached an impasse in my work. There’s still so much unwritten of Jamaican history, folklore, and culture, still so much of our rich lives that I need to give voice to, in my own small way. Because I read so feverishly, and am always engaging with topics outside of my field—mostly science, history, and philosophy—I’m always finding new ways to enter into a poem, then discovering how many ideas are already in dialogue with each other in that lyric space. I am often so possessed with language, with the roots and wide-ranging shadows of words, that I’m always chasing one word or another down a new corridor of inquiry. If I hit a wall, I’ll listen to music that opens a window unto memory and centers me in a specific time and place, or I’ll reread authors who’ve dazzled and nurtured me, who take the top of my head off. Both English and Jamaican patois are two deep oceans ready-made for diving. And I dive, unabashedly. There, I find the far-reaching tentacles of naming and wording in our society so expansive that I would have enough material to interpret for a lifetime.
Advice: Take your time. Read widely, expand your references and vocabulary; make the poems sing.Nowadays I think there is such a rush to publish a first book, and many poets might feel pressured to send something out that isn’t quite ready. My strongest advice is to be unafraid of waiting, to sit with your words and work until you’ve cultivated them into something flourishing. Live inside the book until you’re certain you’ve grown something lasting, a bloom of your absolute best self. You only have one first; make it count.
What’s next: I’m currently working on a memoir about growing up in a strict Rastafarian household in Jamaica, and feeling estranged in my own country (Jamaica is a heavily Christian country, and Rastafarians are an oft-ostracized minority.) At that same time, I began feeling exiled by my blooming womanhood, and eventually had no choice but to rebel against a religion and a home that made no room for me.
Age: 32.
Hometown: Montego Bay, Jamaica.
Residence: Los Angeles.
Job: I’m a third-year doctoral student at the University of Southern California, where I’m getting my PhD in literature and creative writing.
Time spent writing the book: The bulk of the poems were written in the three years I was in the MFA program at the University of Virginia. The book was my final thesis, and I spent a few months after that rearranging, focusing, and editing the manuscript. One poem snuck into Cannibal that was written in college six or seven years ago. After the book was accepted, I was still tinkering a bit with structuring, and I knew it needed three more poems (circling around a specific theme) to make it cohesive and complete in my mind, so I slipped three new poems into the manuscript, right down to the wire. Those last three poems were completed in September 2015.
Time spent finding a home for it: I waited to send out the manuscript (and most of its poems) until I felt certain that it was ready to breathe on its own full-bloodedly. The fall after I graduated from the University of Virginia I started submitting Cannibal to prizes, and was really fortunate to have the book accepted to a couple of places by the summer of 2015. Cannibal won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry that June. So it was a year or less of sending it out into the world until it was accepted—a fitting nine months.
“The stars are anxious. What version of yrself do you see when you close yr eyes?”
—from “IRL”
How it began: I was torn between a stable relationship and predictable future with a boring dude, and an exciting but uneven fling with a pretty young thing. It kind of broke open all the similar divisions inside me: how to transition into my thirties; hailing from the foothills of rural California but living in the busiest city in America; being a modern, queer, indigenous person with a lot of inherent self-love in a world that tries to deny me life, dignity, liberty, etc.
Inspiration: Survivors, femininity, experiences that happen within the span of ninety minutes (like movies [sometimes sex]).
Influences: A. R. Ammons, Beyoncé, Mariah Carey, Amy Winehouse, Janet Jackson, Nicki Minaj, June Jordan, Muriel Rukeyser, Jeffrey Yang, Sherman Alexie, James Welch, Joy Harjo, Louise Erdrich, Chun Li, Storm, etc.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I watch a movie—or a film, if that’s your vibe. Seeing something begin, build, and end in a certain amount of time gives me faith in a creative faculty.
Advice: Keep the faith, b, keep the faith.
What’s next: I’m working with Tin House to finish up the final edits on Nature Poem, the follow-up to IRL coming out May 2017. I’m about halfway through writing book number three, Junk, and have started Food—the final book in the four-part series I started with IRL. Also a roundtable-discussion-type podcast called “Food 4 Thot” about four multiracial, queer writers in New York City discussing literature, sexuality, and pop culture (hashtag elevator pitch) whom I met at the 2016 Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop. Teaching long-poem workshops. Also being a good friend, a good lay, and a good human.
Age: 33.
Hometown: The Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I have approximately sixty-nine side piece jobs, including teaching/touring/freelance stuff, and a main thing that involves writing—but I’m not at liberty to talk about it just yet. If I told you I’d prolly have to kill you.
Time spent writing the book: Officially, I wrote the book from May to August 2014 in an office in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, facing the entire trunk of Manhattan, but in a way I was writing the book for thirty years.
Time spent finding a home for it: I sent it to allllll the book contests and once or twice even got a personalized rejection, but mostly sturdy no’s from everybody. I don’t blame them, it’s a weird nonstandard poem and the initial manuscript was probs 70 percent realized. Sampson Starkweather at Birds, LLC saw me read one night in the city and asked me to send him something. Thankfully they had enough faith in my voice and work ethic to help me guide the book toward its final form.
If you want to get a sense of where contemporary poetry is headed, there’s no better place to start than with recently published debut collections. Each year sees a rich, diverse lineup of debut poets whose work offers fresh perspectives, exciting new ideas and experiences of language, and unexplored subject matter. Even tried-and-true poetic topics—history, the beloved, nature, family, identity—are explored, interrogated, and lit up in new ways. This past year is no exception: In 2015, debut poets took on everything from Chinese unicorns and Mesoamerican shape-shifters to jazz trumpeter Chet Baker and The Real Housewives television franchise. They wrote sonnet cycles, erasures, conceptual poems, and lyric poems that skip across the page and open their readers’ eyes, illuminating ideas at turns thrilling, devastating, and always alive.
For our eleventh annual look at debut poets, we selected ten of the most compelling debuts published in 2015. The work of these featured poets runs the gamut, though each book celebrates the ways in which language, as Hannah Sanghee Park says, “shifts, morphs, steals, and fractures through time.” We asked all our poets to share the stories behind both the genesis of their poems and the publication of their collections—how they navigate publication and how to, as Alicia Jo Rabins puts it, “forge ahead despite setbacks and rejections and silence while also holding the whole endeavor lightly.” Their answers prove that there is no single path from a manuscript to a published book, and that inspiration can be found in the most ordinary and unusual of places—from the former home of a much-admired poet or a yard full of weeds to a drive on the freeway along the U.S.–Mexico border. But there is one common thread woven throughout: the invocation to submit to one’s obsessions, to write past the machinations of the publishing industry and the expectations of others and into the refuge of language.
Robin Coste Lewis Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems Knopf
“Once, I thought I was a person with a body, the body of something peering out, enchanted and tossed.” –from “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari”
How it began: Actually, I began writing poetry because of a very serious accident that left me with permanent traumatic brain injury. At one point in my recovery (because reading, writing, and speaking made me very symptomatic), my doctors told me I could only read one sentence a day, only write one sentence a day. After that shock began to wear off, I decided to use their prognosis as a formal writing restraint. I spent many months not trying to write a poem, but trying to write only one very fine line. It sounds romantic, but it wasn’t. At first, I was profoundly depressed. After years of teaching literature and writing, what was a life without books? Writing a line a day was an experience in tremendous discipline. It was thrilling to work again, yes, but to work silently in bed for hours, without writing or typing, working just inside my head, was also very macabre. Slowly, my illness became a sort of game. I’d find the milk in the oven and crack up laughing. It was pure poetry, brain damage. It was profoundly humbling.
In short, all those skills artists must acquire—stillness, concentration, discipline, compression, wrestling with the ego, all of it—walked in the door, hand in hand, with brain damage. That’s the real story behind my book. Poetry was the means by which I learned to reenter the world after traumatic brain injury. What compelled me to write was the desire to continue living an engaged life. Poetry allowed me to reenter my work, but from a different door.
Inspiration: Epic literature, especially Sanskrit epics and comparative mythology. I’m also quite nuts about Sanskrit court poetry. Another court I love to visit is the royal kingdom of jazz. What both Sanskrit poetry and jazz have in common, I think, is their mysterious and masterful use of silence, their ability to achieve their goal by laying it on thick while pulling way back simultaneously. Any art form that can balance sublime expression with tacit restraint has me from hello. I’m also inspired deeply by individual, quiet responses to history. I love the historical nerd-freak no one wants to research because they are too strange or eccentric or unconventional to make anyone proud. I am compelled by people who simply do their work, whatever that might be, quietly. Quiet devotion is a primary source of inspiration for me, however that manifests. I usually find much of that in the colored ancient world. And then, of course, I swing the other way toward that entire, ongoing waterfall of post-modern, post-colonial, often queer, cultural production, which makes me just swoon.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Honestly, I have never reached an impasse with my writing. My impasse is that I can’t stop writing. It’s not cute. I’m completely hypergraphic. This is not to say, however, that any of the madness I write is any good. I merely mean to saythat not being able to write isn’t my issue. However, what occurs before writing—that’s where my demons skip and play rope. I used to think the longest road I’ve ever traveled was from my bed to my desk. All of those voices inside my head that tell me, “No, you can’t say…” or, “No, you better not…” or, “What would [fill in the blank] do or say or think?” I don’t know how to describe this, but I know it had something to do with being born in the sixties, being a child in the sixties and witnessing just heinous experiences without any true developmental ability to articulate it. We all had a profound sense of injustice growing up. It was impossible not to feel that, watching profound degradation so common it felt like air. Our education was a travesty. So just holding a pencil when I was younger was very difficult for me. No one took our minds seriously. As a child, all I had heard was that, historically, I, as an African American, was not believed to possess a real mind; or I, like my ancestors, only had three-fifths of a brain. I mean, lest we forget, our bodies were once dissected, literally. So my struggle has never been within language. Language has always, always, been a refuge.
What has never felt natural, however, is this sickening history wherein bodies like mine were positioned to play the role of buffoon. It’s a rare moment indeed that I pick up my pen and do not immediately remember that in America it was considered illegal for black bodies to read and write. Just holding a pencil for me is deliciously transgressive. So history is my impasse—nothing else. What keeps me going? The work of others. Others, definitely.
Writing Prompt: When I was at Harvard, Jamaica Kincaid once said in our workshop, “Write about that which most embarrasses you.” I think that’s profoundly good advice. It’s so easy, isn’t it, to climb atop a soapbox and recite a poem about the ways in which we believe the world is fucked up? When I write that way, I’m certain all I’m doing is insulting my reader. Who, for example, doesn’t know the whole world is in cinders? And so I believe my work can be more effective, can reach deeper inside the reader if I say, “It is I who feel profoundly fucked up,” and then explore why meticulously. I like to use tenderness as a weapon, a seduction, a door to leave ajar so that my reader will walk inside the poem and feel safe, even in the face of profound historical horror. Trust me, I’m not saying all poems should begin with shame or embarrassment as a motivation, not by any means. I like writing all kinds of poems in all kinds of forms. I’m simply saying that instead of using writing prompts, I sometimes ask myself, “Well, what are you most avoiding?” And for me that’s a good place to begin.
Advice: I’m not sure I’m the right person to give advice about first books. I am fifty-one after all. Don’t get me wrong, I love my age, and I love that I’m just now publishing my first book, but it seems as if the “debut” has become a sort of genre, a particular ideal regarding what constitutes a first collection. I’ve known for a long while that my work has never fit into that schematic. My book, primarily, is about the history of race and Western art. It’s an experiment in archive. It’s not really what first-book publishers are looking for. Also, many debut prizes and grants have age limits or requirements. So by the time I settled into raising my son and finding my place in my work, my writing was already disqualified from even applying because I was older. Ultimately, it’s worked out just fine. And anyways, I don’t think I really had much to offer any reader when I was thirty-five. I was a mess. What could I have done with a page at thirty-five besides romanticize being a thirty-five-year-old mess? I am more of a tortoise than a hare. I like what taking my time reveals.
Also, I adamantly don’t believe that because one writes it follows naturally that one must also publish. I’ve written books for one person, and shared it only with that sublime audience of one. I’ve burned others. Virginia Woolf said rather famously that writing is a far greater pleasure than being read. I’m from that camp, I think. I’m deeply suspicious of the market.
So, I guess this is a long way of saying that if I have any advice to poets trying to publish their first book it’s this: Try not to look up too often at what others are doing. Your work is interesting because it’s yours, not because of where it lands in the publishing world. Ignore literary fashions and stay close to your own hand. Try not to please anyone or any particular audience. Find out what the real work is inside of you, then find the courage to do it well. Resist the temptation to be clever. It’s sexy, but it’s a sure sign that your mask has control of you, and not the other way around. Just do your work.
What’s next: I’m revising the other two manuscripts I finished while at New York University. The first, “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness,” is about the Arctic and its history of both colonialism and exploration. I use this history as an allegory for post-colonial desires for subjectivity. Besides the circumpolar diaspora and the history of expansionism, the book pivots primarily around African American Arctic explorer Matthew Henson. Henson codiscovered the North Pole, but was reluctantly given historical credit, due to race relations not only in the United States, but in the sciences specifically. I’m also revising another collection that I also began at NYU, a project titled “The Pickaninny Wins!,” a double-erasure of a 1931 children’s book originally titled The Pickaninny Twins.
Age: 51.
Hometown: Compton, California.
Residence: Los Angeles.
Job: I’m a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Southern California. It’s a hybrid PhD, so I do both creative and critical work. That is, I write poetry, and research-wise, I work on the historical relationship between African American photography and African American poetry.
Does your job allow time to write? Is this a serious question?
Time spent writing the book: All in all, the whole book probably took five or six years—with brain damage and a new child thrown in for good measure.
Alicia Jo Rabins Divinity School American Poetry Review (Honickman First Book Prize)
“Let me teach you about beauty: a slanted shipwreck draped in its own torn sails.” –from “The Magic”
How it began: I am obsessed with a few consistent themes: how weird it is to live in time; the magic of teaching and learning; the closeness and distance between people; and the mysteries of living in a body, like sex, love, travel, food, beauty, death.
Inspiration: Ancient Jewish texts are a huge influence and inspiration for me: the practical, the mystical, and especially the intersection of the two. I also draw on yoga, ritual, and spiritual practice in general. Music is a big part of my life too—both the experience of making music in many different genres and touring itself have defined and marked my life. Kenneth Koch taught me, in college, not to take myself too seriously in my poems. New York City inspired me tremendously for years, and since moving to Portland I’ve been inspired by the forests and plants, the weeds in my garden. Having children is immense and mind-blowing and inspiring, and I draw a lot of inspiration from my dreams as well.
Influences: Anne Carson, James Joyce (Ulysses in particular), Sylvia Plath, Christopher Smart, John Donne, J. S. Bach, Pablo Neruda, Laurie Anderson, Harryette Mullen, Brenda Shaughnessy, Julio Cortázar, Lucille Clifton, Yoko Ono. And so many of my contemporaries and friends, whom I won’t name for fear of inevitably leaving some out.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Because I usually write in a stream-of-consciousness mode and edit later, I don’t really experience impasses. Something is always happening, even if it’s only the breath. I did stop writing for three years in my early twenties, though. I had studied poetry intensely in college and felt like I had strained my reading and writing muscle, and that my relationship to writing was too ego-based and needed a dramatic reset. I completely let writing go and promised myself I would only start again if it returned naturally, without any pressure or ambition or intention. I was glad when it came back a few years later, and my relationship to poetry was transformed. I guess it’s important to me to maintain some paradoxical mix of being stubbornly devoted to poetry, enough to forge ahead despite setbacks and rejections and silence, while also holding the whole endeavor lightly.
Advice: The best advice I ever got was at an artist training from Creative Capital: If you aren’t getting rejected from 90 percent of the things you apply to, you aren’t aiming high enough. It flipped the script for me so that rejections meant I was doing my job, rather than failing at it. Along the same lines, I try to separate the work of being an artist into two parts: my writing self, who is sensitive and passionate and all that stuff, and my personal assistant self, who just sits down with a cup of coffee and submits poems without any emotional investment. Or, to put it briefly, play the long game.
What’s next: I’m writing my second book of poetry, about motherhood and giving birth and gardening and midwifery goddesses and how psychedelic the whole experience of pregnancy, birth, and early parenthood is. I’m also touring with my songwriting project Girls in Trouble(we just released our third album), and with my solo chamber-rock opera A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff. AndI’m slowly moving towards writing a nonfiction book I’ve been mulling over for a while now.
Age: 38.
Hometown: I was born in Portland, Oregon, and grew up in Towson, Maryland. I also lived in New York City and Northampton, Massachusetts, for years and they both feel like home.
Residence: Portland, Oregon.
Job: I patch together a living between my work as a writer, musician, composer, performer, and teacher of Torah. As Eileen Myles says, “There are so many different packages for the same energy to travel through.”
Does your job allow time to write? This isn’t an easy question for me to answer. On the one hand, I’d love more focused time to write, but on the other hand, the line between “writing” and “job” is blurry in my life—songwriting is part of how I make my living, for example—and I have always written in the nooks and crannies of my day. Also, for the record, I find that being a parent of two young children demands more consistent presence of mind than any job I’ve ever had, and (alongside all the great stuff) is therefore more of a challenge for me in terms of writing time.
Time spent writing the book: The oldest poem in the book is eighteen years old and, amazingly, in exactly the same form it was in when I wrote it in college. It wasn’t originally part of the book, but I added it back in somewhere during the editing process. The rest of them were written over the past twelve or so years, though almost all of them were continually revised while I submitted and resubmitted the manuscript. It almost feels like two different processes—eighteen years of writing the poems and seven of intentionally editing the manuscript. Wow, that’s a long time.
Time spent finding a home for it: Five years, though I edited it throughout, so it was a very different book by the end.
Three favorite words: Amethyst. Sage. Antediluvian.
Alicia Jo Rabins reads “How To Travel” featuring the face of Alicia McDaid. Video by Zak Margolis on Vimeo. Check out another recent reading Rabins gave in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as part of the Poetry in America series.
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Jay Deshpande Love the Stranger YesYes Books
“But we will never have enough of being wrong about the other, not once.” –from “Amor Fati”
How it began: The earliest pieces of the book came together during my MFA, but it had a very different form and was wrapped around a couple series of poems that ultimately didn’t belong. I’ve always been drawn towards the love poem and lyric descriptions of beauty, but in that period I began to experiment more with the unfamiliar and the disturbing. I found my poems coming alive at the moments when the erotic and the alien braided together. At some point I started to see how the loss of the beloved is not just an occasion for utterance, but also an opportunity for greater reckoning with what it means to be human, and alone, and therefore deeply connected. Following these themes, I wrote a chapbook called “Love the Stranger” shortly after grad school; it was another year before I realized that it held the keys to this book.
Inspiration: Visually, René Magritte’s work was an essential influence on the book. Also middle-period Federico Fellini. Denis Johnson’s poems have always been a major touchstone for me, and they helped to shape parts of Love the Stranger. Environmentally, I took great inspiration from a residency at the Saltonstall Arts Colony in upstate New York. A lot of unseen and necessary work happened there in the woods and on the trails.
Influences: Denis Johnson, Marie Howe, Timothy Donnelly, Ben Lerner, Lyn Hejinian, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Ashbery, Bianca Stone, Richard Siken, Lucie Brock-Broido, E. M. Forster, Marilynne Robinson. Among visual artists, Dorothea Tanning’s work in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and Diana Al-Hadid’s sculptures.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I have long conversations with my brother, who is a musician and writer, about why we do what we do. I reread Michael Ondaatje. I think about Frank Ocean’s songwriting. I play old standards on the piano and explore chords until I remember that some parts of experience stay blissfully outside of words. And then I go spend time with the people I love and try to learn from them. I’ve also found that I have trouble writing when my work has moved away from the physicality of pencil and paper for too long. Then I’ll print out a number of pages of poetry (mine and others’) and mark them up excessively.
Writing Prompt: Just to get the lede out and free things up, I like to take an old poem of mine and perform a phonetic English-to-English mistranslation on it. “I, too, dislike it” becomes “Why’d you ignite this?”; “A certain slant of light” becomes “The skirt and pants of night,” etc. The goal is to keep the music and change everything else.
Advice: Read widely and make it your job to really consider the character of different presses: what’s the range of authors they publish, what qualities and ideas do their books seem to value, how do their books feel in your hands.
What’s next: In addition to writing individual poems to push my voice in new directions, I’m at work on an essay collection and a book of translations of the Egyptian poet Georges Henein.
Age: 31.
Hometown: Boston.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I write for Slate and other magazines.
Does your job allow time to write? It’s a constant navigation, but at the moment it works pretty well.
Time spent writing the book: About five years.
Time spent finding a home for it: It took one year; I sent it to six places. It was a finalist for the 2014 Kundiman Poetry Prize, and then was accepted by YesYes Books during its open reading period.
Three favorite words:These kinds of lists always make me squirmy! But if it’s absolutely necessary: sandwiches; flensing; and, if it can count as one word, chocolate milk.
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Hannah Sanghee Park The Same-Different Louisiana State University Press (Walt Whitman Award)
“Just what they said about the river: rift and ever.
And nothing was left for the ether there either.” –from “Bang”
How it began: I had a lengthy first manuscript I was editing and sending out, and wanted a change of pace and page. I was aiming for concision. At the book’s inception, I was researching myth and folklore in Korea, in the hopes that I would write a manuscript about stories. I found that a lot of Korean stories had counterparts elsewhere (with its own cultural DNA), and that mix of universality and specificity was compelling. But at its simplest, the book is a paean to what comprises storytelling—language, in its words, sounds, imagery, and meanings. It was at the end of my research that I found H. D.’s Trilogy. I kept these H. D. lines on a Post-It above me as I wrote: “her book is our book; written / or unwritten, its pages will reveal // a tale of a Fisherman, / a tale of a jar or jars, // the same—different—the same attributes, / different yet the same as before.”
Inspiration: International folklore, fairy tales, and mythology—shape-shifters, hybrids, dualities, and metamorphoses. The same could be said about language as well—how it shifts, morphs, steals, and fractures through time. I’ve always loved form, prosody, and wordplay. When I started writing: H. D., James Baldwin, and Marina Tsvetaeva. The letters of Philip Larkin, John Keats, and Sylvia Plath. The bulk of it: everyone mentioned, Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Merrill, Samuel Beckett, a physical dictionary and thesaurus. Poetry by my friends and mentors. The editing and the end—Don Mee Choi and Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman. And in full circle, I turned back to H. D., Baldwin, and Tsvetaeva in different forms—short stories, plays, and nonfiction. When I was finishing the book, I was also learning how to write screenplays, which was helpful in economy and setting. But the running fount has always been the communities I’ve been lucky to be a part of. Wherever I go, I have met brilliant people who make me a better writer: professors, colleagues, peers. The book was written in Korea, Washington, New Hampshire, and California, and the natural landscapes influenced the book’s backdrop.
Influences: This is an ongoing, disparate anthology, so to keep it short—other than the poets I’ve mentioned above, my immediate community is always influential. Since moving to Los Angeles, I’ve been stunned by these local powerhouses: Kima Jones, Blas Falconer, Ashaki Jackson, Marci Vogel, and others. And the many poets I’ve met and hope to meet who are keeping poetry alive. Recently, the students in the 2015 Poetry Out Loud Competition inspired me—I experienced familiar poems in new ways.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I read, or watch films or TV. I used to be a night writer, and my excuse was that there were no distractions—I’m off work, everyone around me has gone to sleep. But sometimes I need to clean, cook, decide now’s the time to take up a new activity, and then write. As if expending all this other energy, or resting my mind allows the mind to reset. Writing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and open dialogue is necessary. I call people—usually my writing partner, Jane Shim—to discuss ideas. What keeps me going is the belief that even if writing is frustrating or maddening, it’s ultimately worth it. Petrarch: “And so desire carries me along.” And caffeine, too. Getting the ball rolling in the right direction sometimes feels Sisyphean, but when it starts, the speed and the growth is euphoric. No distraction is great enough. Writing is like a labyrinth. Sometimes there’s a reward at the end of it; sometimes you’re pursued by Sallie Mae and her Echidna spawn Navient. But nothing feels better than actually moving through it.
Writing Prompt: How much a word can be dissected, rearranged, and reimagined—imagined etymologies, defamiliarization, constraint-based writing. In short, the intersection of structure and play.
Advice: Keep reading, writing, rewriting, and sending, even when it seems like there’s a void. Dream big (a bromide that’s useful), and go there. That’s what I needed to hear in the publication process. Every time my writing boomerangs back to me, there’s a chance to reassess my work and my thoughts. I know form rejection boilerplate, but I also know the generous people in my life who have cheered me on. Having both rejection and support provides a kind of ballast. Knowing why you write despite x is invaluable—the pure joy of creating is as powerful as the final creation.
What’s next: Writing scripts, rewriting scripts, treatments, short stories, and starting a new poetry book.
Age: 29.
Hometown: Federal Way, Washington.
Residence: Los Angeles.
Job: Freelance writer.
Does your job allow time to write? Yes, but personal writing requires juggling. It’s a constant turning of a lazy Susan—a little here, a pass there, but all that matters is movement.
Time spent writing the book: For this book specifically, about one and a half to two years. It was fast because I had the luxury of a fellowship and a residency. I did a two-month residency at the MacDowell Colony (paradise) where I kept to a tight schedule. I woke up early, ate breakfast, and went back to my Internet-less studio and wrote. As I ate lunch, I read. Then I wrote until dinner. When I came back from unwinding, I’d write until I needed to sleep. Rinse and repeat. I’m naturally lazy, so I need this kind of structure. The bulk of the book was written then, because most of the day could be devoted to writing. However, a poem I wrote about five years ago made it in as well—a long-lost relative finding her family.
Time spent finding a home for it: Before this book, I sent my first manuscript out for about four to five years. When I was satisfied with The Same-Different, the plan was to send to a few places each cycle, as I was on a tight budget. But I lucked out, and The Same-Different was accepted in its first submission round.
Three favorite words: Cleave, move, empathy.
Hannah Sanghee Park reads from The Same-Different at the Academy of American Poets’s 2014 Poets Forum Awards Ceremony.
Jonathan Fink The Crossing Dzanc Books
“The bodies hang like chimes within the boughs. Perhaps the height is welcome to the dead” –from “The Crossing”
How it began: What poetry offers, and what set me off writing this book, is the visceral engagement with language that welcomes attention to imagery, tone, rhythm, narrative, metaphor, politics, ethics, humor, myth, and justice, among many other things. Like a painter who simply likes the smell of paint or a potter who likes the feel of clay, the pleasure of embarking on a writing project, for me, always resides in the tactile pleasures of language.
Inspiration: W. H. Auden has a great line, “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings,” and I often feel inspired to write about personal, imagined, or historical material about which I have mixed feelings. The poems in The Crossing vary from an eighteen-section poem about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire to individual poems about myth, art, and my personal experience growing up in West Texas. In all cases, I was inspired to write these poems not because I knew what I wanted to say about the subjects, but because I felt compelled to explore and investigate the complicated material through poetry.
Influences: Too many to name, of course, although I would say, of contemporary poets, Jane Kenyon for the singular, resonate image; Marie Howe for book structure and thematic commitment; and B. H. Fairchild for lyrical, narrative expansiveness. I’ve also been immensely fortunate to work with wonderful writing mentors and teachers, including Natasha Trethewey, Mary Karr, George Saunders, Junot Díaz, Brooks Haxton, Michael Burkard, and Robert Flynn—all stunning writers who are unfailingly generous, constructive, and kind.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Raymond Carver defined a writer as someone who is willing to stare at something longer than anyone else. For me, that experience has been true; there is no trick to overcoming a writing impasse other than continuing to return to what I’ve written, looking for unexplored possibilities and/or unfulfilled expectations.
Advice: Submit to your obsessions, whatever they are. Resistance is futile. An honestly obsessive collection always resonates much more fully with a reader or editor than a collection constructed with an eye toward the market or some imagined palatable consensus. Remember that a camel is a horse designed by a committee.
What’s next: Dzanc is bringing out a finished second collection of my poetry, a book-length sonnet sequence titled, “Barbarossa: The German Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Siege of Leningrad.” I’m also nearing completion of a nonfiction collection primarily consisting of place-based immersive and investigative essays. Some topics include the fracking boom in Midland, Texas; the D. B. Cooper plane hijacking and parachute jump; the changing scope of U.S.–Cuba relations; and the failings and successes of the criminal justice system as seen through the lens of an assault trial in Pensacola, Florida; among other essays. I’m also working on new individual poems.
Age: 40.
Hometown: Abilene, Texas.
Residence: Pensacola, Florida.
Job: Associate professor and director of creative writing at the University of West Florida.
Does your job allow time to write? Yes, in the sense that my job contributes to the conditions that help make writing possible, but no job has ever prevented me from writing if I felt compelled to write.
Time spent writing the book: Approximately six years.
Time spent finding a home for it: Another six years after finishing and publishing the individual poems.
Jonathan Fink reads from The Crossing, published by Dzanc Books.
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Rickey Laurentiis Boy With Thorn University of Pittsburgh Press (Cave Canem Poetry Prize)
“I want to be released from it. I want its impulses stunned to lead. This body. Its breath. Let it. Let the whole pageant end.” –from “One Country”
How it began: I think about a friend and fellow poet, Phillip B. Williams, with whom I shared a suite at my first Cave Canem retreat in the summer of 2008. He had a manuscript then (actually several), but wouldn’t share it with me to read until I had something manuscript-length to share with him. So, that’s what I think Cave Canem must mean by fellowship: that kind of camaraderie, support, and push, however hard. I eventually did produce a manuscript and shared it with Phillip, but it was one very different in many ways from the Boy With Thorn that would eventually find publication. We helped shaped each other’s books along through the many years, but more importantly we helped compel each other’s poems. Poems first.
Inspiration: I’m likely to be inspired by anything in the right context: an overheard conversation on the street, a song, literary criticism, philosophy, a personal experience or, as is most present in my book, visual art. I was profoundly influenced and inspired by a course I took while at Sarah Lawrence College—queer theory, with Julie Abraham. That course threw a hammer into my ways of thinking. And not because it attempted to rebuild the pieces (although, in some ways, it did), but because it made me more aware of the pieces themselves and the various social/political discourses that have shaped them.
Influences: Here are some artists: Glenn Ligon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Björk, Piero della Francesca, Wangechi Mutu, Georgia O’Keeffe, David Bailly, Kara Walker, Edgar Degas, Judy Chicago, Yoko Ono, Jay DeFeo, Caravaggio, Auguste Rodin, Romare Bearden, Frida Kahlo, Anonymous. And I remain deeply influenced, in particular, by Jessye Norman’s rendition of “Deep River,” which she sung at a special concert with Kathleen Battle at Carnegie Hall in 1990 and most of which you can find recorded on YouTube.
Writer’s Block Remedy: My obsessions keep me going. I think about visual art and how, in the example of an artist like Mark Rothko, who explores the same terrain canvas after canvas, or at least seems to, I learned to recognize and trust my obsessions: the images, concepts, figures, and motifs that repeat in my head. Obsessions are ideas that I can at least remember are there at those anxious moments I’m willing to believe in a thing like “writer’s block.” But writer’s block, simply speaking, doesn’t exist if one’s willing to look back at all one has done and, realizing knowledge is always limited, thinks, “Nope, I need to try this again.” I still believe that.
Writing Prompt: Outside of what I offer to my students, I’m not sure I think about writing in terms of prompts, at least not thematic ones. If I chose any, they’re usually prompts that put restraints on the form or structure of the poem. A part of me vaguely remembers diagramming sentences as a young Catholic school student and so, in some ways, that finds itself in the pleasure I get from trying to sustain a single sentence over the course of a poem, or at least over several lines. There’s something about that exercise that seems dancerly to me, rhythmic.
Advice: So, there are thirty-three poems in my book—but that doesn’t mean I only wrote thirty-three poems. Of course I wrote way more than that at various stages in my growth and education as a poet—some that made the cut; some that I realize were the equivalent of a pianist practicing her scales; some that only exist as a single ghost line in another poem; some that might eventually find a home in a future collection, who knows. My point is to say that the process takes time, so much time, and, while I’m a fan of putting artificial restraints on a poem so as to get to more creative uses of language, I’m not a fan of artificial time restraints on publication. Just as I think that there’s something potentially problematic in knowing too much about what a poem is about when starting, so too I think there’s a problem in trying to know or demand when you should publish a book. Let the book tell you. And when it does send only to places that carry books you can’t live without.
What’s next: What they don’t tell you is that the second your first book is accepted for publication at a press (or wins a contest), let alone when it is physically published and released, all the poems you begin to write suddenly sound in a slightly different key, so to speak. The poems are suddenly working under the slight burden of knowledge that they may one day become (or that you need them to become) a second (or third or fourth) book. I am working hard now to try to get back to the kind of specific ignorance one writes from before the first book gets published: when you’re simply writing poem by poem because of some insistence that you have to; this poem must be written, alone, individual, not as a sequence necessarily, not because of some “theme” or “project,” but simply because it demands itself to be written, and for you to write and learn by it.
Age: 26.
Hometown: New Orleans.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Currently, I teach a course at Columbia University and at the Saturday Program at the Cooper Union. I’m also the director of an after-school writing and literacy program at the Harlem Children’s Zone.
Does your job allow time to write? No—but that’s a good thing. When I’ve been fortunate enough to be invited to some residencies, for instance, I’ve found that the sudden surplus of free, unstructured time can do harm to my writing process, insofar as I begin to occupy my time in other ways besides writing new work. Residences are great for editing older drafts or for ordering a book. But it’s in the gaps, in the minutes I steal when I’m on a crowded subway, when I’m in a less-than-exciting meeting or when I should be asleep, for example, that I find myself writing the most new material.
Time spent writing the book: The earliest poem in the book I wrote as a first-year at Sarah Lawrence College for a class (my first poetry class ever!) with Suzanne Gardinier. That was in the fall of 2007. The last poem I wrote that was also included in the book was written somewhere in late January/early February of 2014, after having seen one of my favorite Basquiat paintings in the flesh in a exhibit in New Orleans earlier that Christmas. So it would seem, then, that it took seven years to write all thirty-three poems that comprise Boy With Thorn (it took two years, alone, to complete one in particular). I was born on February 7. Seven’s always been my favorite number.
Time spent finding a home for it: Maybe about a year after Phillip first brought the idea to my mind that I could write toward a manuscript, I sent it out to a handful of contests. To my surprise, the manuscript was honorably mentioned for Red Hen Press’s Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. But I’ll remind you that this manuscript I’m referring to was, in significant ways, still very different from the book I would come to publish. After that, somehow, and quite suddenly, I wasn’t interested so much in rushing towards book publication. I concerned myself with the quality of the poems themselves, and with seeing them enter the world individually. So there was a large gulf of time when I didn’t submit a single manuscript to any contest or publisher, which mostly paralleled my graduation from Sarah Lawrence and matriculation into the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis. A year after I had received my MFA and had moved back to New York City, I sent my new manuscript to at least two publishers and four contests—four specific contests that either had a history of awarding books I admire or were being judged by poets I greatly enjoy. I didn’t get as much as a nod from three of them but, again to my surprise, I won one! And that it was the Cave Canem Prize just seemed so coming-full-circle perfect! Anyway, depending on how you read this narrative, you can say it took several years to find a publisher, or only a few months.
Rickey Laurentiis reads two poems from Boy With Thorn, published by University of Pittsburgh Press.
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Natalie Scenters-Zapico The Verging Cities Center for Literary Publishing
“You forgot to weed your eyes,so brush has grown wild in your stare.” –from “When the Desert Made Us Visible”
How it began: Homesickness. I wrote most of these poems while I was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I felt deeply haunted by things in my past that I had spent a lot of time ignoring: femicide, narco-violence, and the effect our broken immigration system had on me and the people around me. Suddenly, I felt compelled to face these things in a way I had never had an interest in before. For some reason, being away from the site of my liminality gave me the bravery to voice what had been silenced in me for so long. I also became very interested in the ways that people who are not from El Paso–Juárez were representing my border cities in art and pop culture. I wanted to write down my love affair with a place so often depicted as violent and corrupt.
Inspiration: The drive from Albuquerque to El Paso, Texas, and from Ciudad Juárez to Chihuahua was a huge source of inspiration. I would also drive the border freeway and take in that space, that in-between space, that illusion that is so physically damaging. And, of course, late-night conversations with my husband who is a border-rhetorics scholar, and who for most of our relationship was undocumented. When we fell in love, we also fell in love with each other’s pain, and the two cities that held us suspended in that pain.
Influences: While working on the collection: David Dorado Romo’s Ringside Seat to a Revolution, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Norma Elia Cantú’s Canícula, Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 spent a lot of time on my desk. These books deeply influenced the way that I conceive of borders and of my sister cities, El Paso–Ciudad Juárez. I also spent time with Federico García Lorca, Miguel Hernández, Anna Kamieńska’s notebooks, Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, Rigoberto González, Alberto Ríos, and Benjamin Alire Sáenz.
Writer’s Block Remedy: I cook something that takes a while to make, but that I know how to make well. The repetitive motions of cooking keep me grounded in the body, but allow me the freedom to let my mind wander. I also like knowing that many women before me spent so much time in that domestic space, and I remind myself how important it is that I choose to be there, but that I don’t have to be there.
Writing Prompt: I spend a lot of time looking at the art books for the Bienal Ciudad Juárez–El Paso art shows, and then writing ekphrastic poems or flash fictions. It keeps me connected to where I’m from while helping me to see the border in new ways.
Advice: It is as important to know what you’re trying to accomplish in your collection as it is to know what it actually accomplishes. Sometimes placing your own will on a collection is the worst thing you can do.
What’s next: I’m in the early stages of working on the next book, which deals with border-security technologies, surveillance, and weapons. I’m interested in depictions of violence, how we consume that violence, and render that violence in art.
Age: 27.
Hometown: El Paso, Texas.
Residence: Salt Lake City.
Job: I teach high school English and creative writing.
Does your job allow time to write? It is always a struggle for me to write as a high school teacher. I have to schedule time for me to physically sit at my desk and write.
Time spent writing the book: It took me four years of obsessively writing and revising in constant rotation.
Time spent finding a home for it: One year.
Three favorite words: Sobremesa, cariño, and teeth.
Natalie Scenters-Zapico reads from The Verging Cities, published by The Center for Literary Publishing.
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Corina Copp The Green Ray Ugly Duckling Presse
“Let rest here my lyre and Hear soon the moon’s fair Lecture in black” –from “Pro Magenta”
How it began: I was reading Mark Ford’s biography of Raymond Roussel when I first came across mention of the green ray. In the same month, I saw Éric Rohmer’s Le rayon vert, and I attended a François Laruelle lecture. The notes from all three came to be the poem “Pro Magenta,” which set me into thinking about synchronicity and how I compose. The wheels of the actual manuscript were put into motion a few years later, when Ugly Duckling Presse editor Abraham Adams proposed a book project.
Inspiration: These poems range in composition date from 2010 to 2015, so what resonates now as far as inspiration goes is a list that I’ll spare you—but they are distinct, and each poem holds one or another source (or many simultaneously) in (I hope) different ways. Jean Day’s Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium was formative for me when thinking about devotion and source materials and how to think and write alongside inspiration itself, to construe it as an interlocutor, or a threat, or a friend, or a fetish, etc.
Influences: When I first started seriously writing poetry, I was reading Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Laura Riding Jackson; and I was obsessed with Alice Notley and Carla Harryman. Then Miles Champion introduced me to Tom Raworth and Jean Day—they both had a big impact. I had another turn when I really read Lisa Robertson, who led me to read Hannah Arendt. Richard Maxwell, the playwright, was another turning point; and the work of Big Dance Theater, Thomas Bradshaw, Kristen Kosmas. For a few years now, Ingeborg Bachmann, Marguerite Duras. And my friends are influential. They’re all brilliant. Can I say brilliant?
Writer’s Block Remedy: I’m easily comforted and astonished. By that turn from feeling like New York City’s rag doll, in particular; from that real desire to leave my life and start a new one; from that exhaustion; from walking into a diner or taking a train. I have to be in that place to write; I have to have a connection to future good feeling in general if I expect myself to write. Also: film and bibliomancy, both. Or Robert Ashley, an example. Opening to pages/sounds/images of work that I love will always help. Going to the library, feeling overwhelmed. But I can go for months without writing; I am often waiting to feel angry, or any emotional event, or just a deadline to push me. But accepting the stretches of not writing is okay, too. I mean: If I feel alert and awake and thoughtful and without remorse, then I am listening, which for me is also writing. I compulsively transcribe overheard dialogue or I note exchanges between people or how they are physically positioned. If I’ve gone months without this sort of openness, then I’m probably depressed and not writing. To help me accept that, I remember something Doris Lessing said—to paraphrase, you must use these energies while you have them, you will lose them; you are more clever now than you will be later. Terrifying.
Writing Prompt: Feeling constrained.
Advice: I took a strange route, and had faith I’d eventually get to work with people who cared about the poems. Having faith in those relationships is important.
What’s next: I’m working on an essay/score that reads and writes through the reading of the painter Alan Reid. The piece will appear in a monograph of his work that should be out in the spring.
Age: 36.
Hometown: I was born in Lawrence, Kansas, and grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and New Orleans.
Residence: New York City.
Job: I usually have two to three part-time jobs. I am currently a staff writer for the Poetry Foundation, I freelance copyedit and proofread, and I coordinate a master’s program in international finance and economic policy at Columbia University.
Does your job allow time to write? I’ve made it this far. But the answer is no, not at all. I would always prefer to be writing, to put it gently.
Time spent writing the book: About four or five years.
Time spent finding a home for it: I was very, very lucky in that Ugly Duckling approached me for the book. This was initially around 2012 or 2013, but I still had to finish writing it. We changed the date of publication a few times. They were patient with me.
Three favorite words: “Mom” and “or” and “Dad.”
Corina Copp reads an early version of her poems from The Green Ray, published by Ugly Duckling Presse, for the sixth Antibody Series in 2014.
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Morgan Parker Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night Switchback Books (Gatewood Prize)
“If I hear you’re talking shit about me in your confessional interview, please know seven birds have fallen dead at my feet right out of the sky.” –from “If My Housemate Fucks With Me I Would Get So Real (Audition Tape Take 1)”
How it began: This book started as my MFA thesis at NYU. It was embarrassingly large—something like 120 pages—so I spent the summer after graduation editing it, reordering it, and trimming it down in preparation for sending it out to contests and presses. The first book is a weird thing—mine contains some of the first poems I ever wrote, back in college. Of course, when I was writing those, I had no idea I was writing a book. I was playing around with new forms and registers and confessions, and it was only in grad school that I started thinking about the poems as a collection. There isn’t a “project” in this book, there isn’t a linear narrative or one central event, so in conceptualizing the book, I spent a lot of time thinking about my obsessions, taking in a lot of art and TV and movies and music and poems, and meditating on the themes they have in common.
Inspiration: Television. The Real World and The Real Housewives franchises have been particularly inspirational for me—something about the strangeness and boldness of reality TV, its dark comedy, is a really important lens in my work. Jay Z and Beyoncé are also super important figures in my work—or rather, symbols of them, the idea of them. In general, media and pop culture always have a lot of space in my poetic brain. They’ve got everything I want to talk about: loneliness, performance, representations of femininity, insecurity, family, sociocultural inequity, glitter.
Influences: My collaborator Angel Nafis; my peers Danez Smith, Charif Shanahan, Nate Marshall, Natalie Eilbert, Rio Cortez, Monica McClure, Wendy Xu (I could go on forever here); my big brother Matthew Rohrer; my poetry auntie Eileen Myles; Terrance Hayes, Tracy K. Smith, Evie Shockley, Matthew Zapruder, Cate Marvin, Anne Sexton, Lucille Clifton, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes; visual artists Mickalene Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Keith Haring, Glenn Ligon, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, William Pope.L.
Writer’s Block Remedy: If I feel stuck, I stop writing for a while. Or I write in another genre for a bit. I read. I go look at art. I have good conversation with friends over wine. Lately I’ve been trying to honor silence rather than being anxious about it. The itchy, restless feeling always comes back; the poems always emerge. I’m realizing more and more that “writing” is only a tiny aspect of writing poetry.
Writing Prompt: Formal poetry. Specifically sonnets and pantoums. Usually, I edit the drafts until they’re unrecognizable as formal poems, but constraint really helps my writing process. Honestly, I see prompts as rules to break, something to rebel against.
Advice: Submit widely, but also be strategic and thoughtful: Don’t submit to a press you aren’t familiar with or whose work you don’t love; don’t submit to a press whose aesthetic isn’t up your alley. A press is really a home for a book—and for you, the poet, as well—so I think it’s important (and often neglected in conversation) to remember the relationship continues past manuscript acceptance. It’s an intimate thing. Also, know that as you’re submitting, you should keep editing. Don’t be so stubborn you can’t see room for improvement. Finally, make the waiting time productive. Write new poems, go to readings, meet new writers, build community.
What’s next: I’m editing my second collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and getting it ready for publication with Tin House Books in 2017. I’m also at work on a young adult novel loosely based on my teen years spent coming to terms with my identity and depression in a conservative, religious suburb—it’s my first foray into fiction, and an exciting challenge. There’s also a rumor floating around that there may be an essay collection in my future.
Age: 28.
Hometown: Highland, California.
Residence: New York City.
Job: Editor for Little A Books and Day One, adjunct assistant professor of undergraduate creative writing at Columbia University.
Does your job allow time to write? Sometimes. I write at night, on the weekends, and in transit (buses, trains, planes). I wish I were one of those people who could wake up and write before work, but I’m a snooze-button person. Ideally, I block out a day each weekend to write or edit. I’ve also been known to take vacation days to hole away uninterrupted.
Time spent writing the book: They were written and edited over the course of five years.
Morgan Parker reads two poems from Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, published by Switchback Books.
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Richie Hofmann Second Empire Alice James Books (Beatrice Hawley Award)
“I have nothing to confess. I don’t yet know that I possess a body built for love.” –from “Idyll”
How it began: I began writing the first poems in this book while I was working on the book collection at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut—a magical, haunted place full of Merrill’s things, his furniture, his books. It was inspiring to inhabit that physical space with the spirit of someone whose art had meant the world to me. His “The Book of Ephraim” was one of the first contemporary poems I loved. To be showering in his shower, sleeping in his bed, staring into that mirror. There, among his art and belongings, my desire to write poetry was given new dramatic force.
Inspiration: Love; sexuality; history; music, especially opera and art song.
Influences: My teachers, foremost. Jorie Graham’s Erosion. Benjamin Britten’s operas and song cycles. Daniel Mendelsohn’s essays. French and Italian poetry in translation. Stephen Sondheim lyrics. Installations by Félix González-Torres.
Writer’s Block Remedy: Sometimes it’s important for me to get outside of poetry, or outside of literature altogether. To listen to music, look at a painting or sculpture or installation, see a concert, attend a lecture on something strange but intriguing. These other arts not only provoke new subjects, but they might offer new ways of thinking formally as well.
Writing Prompt: Write a poem in which your own name is invoked and explored.
Advice: Cut almost everything. Make your book as lean and dynamic as possible. Give yourself time to grow toward and away from poems, and see what new object you can create by subtracting and pruning and chiseling away.
What’s next: My new manuscript of poems explores my family’s history in Germany: my ancestors who owned a small bakery on the Rhine and my own childhood years spent in Munich. It’s about inheritance, history, power, violence, privilege, gender and sexuality, childhood, bookmaking, typography, and Mozart.
Age: 28.
Hometown: Haddon Heights, New Jersey.
Residence: Chicago.
Job: PhD student in English at Emory University in Atlanta.
Does your job allow time to write? It often does—in that reading and researching and working through critical questions is an essential part of writing poetry for me. Though I’d have to say, I like teaching even better, because I find interacting with people (usually) more stimulating than solitary research and writing.
Time spent writing the book: Four to five years.
Time spent finding a home for it: A year and a half.
Three favorite words: Exquisite, please, future.
Dana Isokawa is the assistant editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Ten years ago, Poets & Writers Magazine launched its annual Debut Poets series—a feature that aimed, quite simply, to highlight some of the best first books of poetry published in the previous year. In the decade since then, the series has grown into something all its own, bringing to light some of the most inspired, and inspiring, emerging poets from across the country—along with the ambitious, vital, and lasting collections they create. A number of the poets we’ve featured have gone on to become familiar names in the national writing community—Dan Albergotti, Todd Boss, Jericho Brown, Victoria Chang, Michael Cirelli, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Aracelis Girmay, Dana Goodyear, Tyehimba Jess, Dorothea Lasky, Joseph O. Legaspi, Alex Lemon, Ada Limón, and Justin Marks, to name just a few from the early years. But what’s most remarkable, when looking back through this list of poets (which you can see in full starting on page 90), is that all of them, regardless of how prolific or well known, made a commitment to writing, dedicating themselves to bringing words to life despite the jobs, everyday obligations, and myriad challenges that inevitably arise as time ticks along.
In celebration of our tenth annual Debut Poets roundup, we reached out to those poets—all 111 of them (one, Landis Everson, sadly, passed away in 2007)—and asked them to recommend their favorite debut collections of 2014. A good number responded, building for us a longlist of some of the year’s most exciting books. From that we selected the ten poets featured in the following pages. The task was not easy: We looked at both the work within those collections and at the poets themselves, in an attempt to curate not only a broad range of voice, style, content, and form, but also a diverse list of poets representing a unique breadth of age, background, and experience. These ten poets find inspiration in everything from neuroscience, outer space, black holes, and race to Anglo-Saxon elegies, Vietnamese musicals, honey badgers, and Nina Simone. Despite their many differences, though, they all point to a sense of wonder, exploration, curiosity, and community as essential to their writing—and they are all creating urgent, powerful, and important work. And what connects them even more fundamentally is that regardless of where they come from, what they do for a living, or where they draw inspiration, they all do it for the same reasons: for love of the work, and, as Sally Wen Mao puts it, to break into the silence, disarm the solitude, and find a place where poetry lives.
Sally Wen Mao MAD HONEY SYMPOSIUM Alice James Books
Abandon hive. If the hornet breaks the heat net,
save yourself. Abandon yen. Abandon majesty. Spit the light out because it sears you so. —from “Apiology, With Stigma”
HOW IT BEGAN: In early 2012, I decided that the poems I had collected needed to transform into a manuscript. What compelled me? Probably the naked trees on Linn Street, my tiny yellow living room full of books and ghosts, or the radio silence of the days. Those winter days were short and frigid: Every day I walked past a frozen waterfall and slipped on cracked ice. I knew I had to write to break into that silence, disarm that solitude.
INSPIRATION: The earliest incarnation of this manuscript was a thesis project I titled “A Field Guide to Trapped Animals.” In this manuscript, I sought trapped animals: the honey badger, Laika the space dog, endangered flightless birds such as the kakapo, taxidermists’ specimens, disgruntled pandas in captivity, a flock of doomed pigeons. I admired the honey badger for its inane yet marvelous tenacity to sate its appetites for dangerous animals. From that obsession I found bees, and the magical honeys that they can make, including mad honey (meli chloron), a noxious honey made from rhododendrons or azaleas or oleanders that causes drunkenness, hallucinations, and heart palpitations in humans. There I was able to find the manuscript’s spine—humans who poison themselves for the sake of their desires.
INFLUENCES: Ai, for her poems are fire escapes into the terrifying psyches of others. Lorca, for his theory of the duende, and his poems that wander through the darkest and loneliest spaces in New York City. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, for Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, one of my earliest introductions to poetry. Most recently Cathy Park Hong and Bhanu Kapil, women writers whose hugely exciting works transgress boundaries and shift borders in terms of subject, syntax, and form.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m working on a new manuscript, Oculus, that maps out the border between exposure and invisibility: ghosts, cinema, digital life, and Internet voyeurism. In this manuscript, Anna May Wong, the Chinese American film actress who peaked in the 1920s and 1930s, acquires a time machine and travels through time searching for her perfect role. Along the way, she meets some of her contemporaries (Josephine Baker and Zora Neale Hurston), and some of her successors (Bruce Lee), and she is dismayed to see some of the future films that continue to cast Asian Americans in a stereotypical light. Other poems in this manuscript are about magnetic levitation trains, Chinese bodies exposed in the Bodies Exhibition, a model who wears a homeless man’s pants, and girls competing for a national singing competition.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: Sometimes the writing stops, but there is never enough material for a poet’s arsenal. I look for high places and vantage points, new spaces to invade and interrogate. I look for old books in science libraries. I research poetic obsessions or I try to look for new ones. I visit contemporary-art museums, natural-history museums, planetariums, space museums, botanical gardens, science libraries, bookstores, parties, concerts, or arboretums. I love the feeling of movement, of being on a train heading to someplace unknown. My entire self is built around this wonder, this movement, this search for adventure. I seek adventures, and they float back as poems eventually.
ADVICE: Be impermeable. Research your presses: Read their books, see if you like their covers, get to know their submission and evaluation process. It’s like finding an apartment, really: Send your manuscript to those presses that you could envision as a home for your poems to live. The key is to find a place where your poems live.
AGE: 27.
RESIDENCE: Brooklyn, New York.
JOB: I’m an instructor in the Asian American Studies program at Hunter College in New York, where I teach Asian American Poetics, and a teaching artist at several sites around Brooklyn.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Yes, thankfully, but who knows for how long. In the mornings I write, or late into the night with a cup of milk tea.
Sally Wen Mao reads five poems from Mad Honey Symposium, published by Alice James Books.
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Charlotte Boulay FOXES ON THE TRAMPOLINE Ecco
As much as I wanted that boy saved, I wanted him eaten. —from “Watson and the Shark”
HOW IT BEGAN: I’ve written poetry since high school, and graduate school helped me think about ways a disparate collection of poems might become a more or less cohesive whole. Foxes isn’t a book “project,” although it has some themes and interests that run throughout. These include exploring ideas associated with journeys, both concrete and abstract, as well as questions about desire and loss.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: I’ve joked that in almost any of my poems you can find references to animals and weather, but I think these are less inspirations than touch points that help me structure my concerns. I spent time in my early twenties living in India, and that was certainly an education, as well as an inspiration. I’m also continually inspired by visual art—paintings and photography and sculpture can do things that words can’t, but poetry can create a dialogue with them. This book owes a debt to Cy Twombly, whose work continues to fascinate me. In working on Foxes, I particularly relied on and admired the work of poets Saskia Hamilton, Nancy Willard, Robert Hass, and Susan Hutton.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m working on both poems and essays. I’d love to write a second book more quickly than this one, but we’ll see.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I try to get outside and take a walk, if I’m smart, and if not I try to turn as far away from my own obsessions as possible, to get out of my own head. That may be how I discovered the YouTube home video of foxes jumping on a trampoline in someone’s backyard—aimless Web surfing. What keeps me going is reaching for the moment when a poem comes together, when it becomes itself and something separate from me.
ADVICE: Keep going. Cycles of feeling good about your work that alternate with doubt that any of it is worthwhile are completely normal. Listen to the judgments and suggestions you get from readers you trust, test them out, and then throw them away if they don’t feel right. Submit to all the places where you’ve always dreamed of being published. Don’t hold anything back.
AGE: 36.
RESIDENCE: Philadelphia.
JOB: I’m a grant writer at the Franklin Institute science museum.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? This is something I continue to struggle with. I thought that leaving teaching and entering a 9-5 job would leave me freer to write without the burdens of grading and office hours, but in fact I’m pretty invested in my day job, and it often occupies my thoughts both inside and outside the office. I do make more money than I did as an adjunct, though, so that’s something, but I have much less time off. I’m still figuring out how to make more room in my daily routine for poetry. I’m not very good at writing in small snatches of time, but I’m working on it, and hoping it will help me in ways I haven’t discovered yet.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: I worked slowly on the book for about seven years.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I sent it out to contests two years in a row, but had to withdraw from a few the second year after Ecco took it. My editor contacted me to ask for the manuscript after seeing a poem of mine in print, so that can still happen.
Charlotte Boulay reads the poem “Fleet” from Foxes on the Trampoline, published by Ecco. For more of Boulay’s work, visit www.charlotteboulay.com.
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Hieu Minh Nguyen THIS WAY TO THE SUGAR Write Bloody Publishing
Sometimes you don’t die when you’re supposed to, and sometimes you do. —from “Flight”
HOW IT BEGAN: For a long time, I didn’t know how to write about my traumas. I found myself writing the same poems over and over again, even if they didn’t make any sense to the world, even if I was the only person who would understand the significance of something as basic as a peach. I guess the hope was that if I could write the poems, if I could speak about my trauma in a way that didn’t seem careless, I could stop trying to explain myself. It is stupid to feel the need to explain yourself at all, but I spent a lot of time being ashamed of my experiences as a son, a body, a survivor, and I believe in the importance of confession as a tool to combat shame.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: So many movies! Since a lot of my book talks about my childhood, I spent a lot of time archiving my past, which meant interviewing my mother, visiting old neighborhoods, and watching movies from when I was younger. I spent endless nights watching and rewatching cai luong, which are essentially Vietnamese musicals. I was obsessed. Because my start in poetry began in spoken-word and slam poetry, many of my earlier influences came from performance poets, often poets who could transcend the arbitrary boundaries between the performance world and the written one, such as Rachel McKibbens, Bao Phi, and Patricia Smith. Through my participation in the performance world, I was lucky enough to have been introduced to the work of poets outside of spoken word, including Li-Young Lee, Anne Sexton, and Philip Levine.
WHAT’S NEXT: Currently I am applying to college. I abstained from going to college directly after high school, but now it seems like the right time. So basically a lot of my time has been spent writing college admission essays and studying for the ACT. It’s pretty terrifying; I haven’t done math in six years. As for poetry, I am currently working on poems about time travel.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I spend a lot of my time alone in my apartment writing, so when I come to a block, I feel like I’ve taken all I can from that space and need time to let it recharge. Usually, it requires engaging in something visual and half-social, like writing alone in a public location.
ADVICE: Give yourself permission to not explain everything.
AGE: 23.
RESIDENCE: Minneapolis.
JOB: Right now I am on a book tour, but when I’m back home I work at a haberdashery, selling fancy hats to fancy people.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? My job has been incredibly supportive; I’m very lucky. I’ve been able to take large chunks of time off of work to focus on writing or traveling, and am always welcomed back.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: Most of the poems in the book were less than two years old, some even a few months old, by the time it was released.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I started submitting the early version of the manuscript about two years before it got accepted.
Hieu Minh Nguyen reads a poem from This Way to the Sugar, published by Write Bloody Publishing. For more videos of Nguyen’s work visit www.hieuminhnguyen.com.
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Saeed Jones PRELUDE TO BRUISE Coffee House Press
in this town everything born black also burns. —from “Anthracite”
HOW IT BEGAN: The poems exist in the space between the reality of my life as a gay black man from the American South and the mythology I often dreamed of in my isolation. With that said, I wrote about half of the poems in the book before Boy, the character we follow throughout the collection, appeared to me. I wrote a poem in which a boy wakes up from a beautiful dream to find his father standing silently in the doorway of his bedroom. The silence of that moment—the interior and exterior worlds colliding—stunned me. Prelude to Bruise exists in the form it does now because I wanted to know what happened next and why.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: Homer’s The Odyssey, the last few collections Alexander McQueen designed before he took his own life, the way Toni Morrison involves landscapes and weather in the plot of her novels, and Nina Simone’s music. The poems of Lucie Brock-Broido, Patricia Smith, Rigoberto González, Anna Journey, Eduardo Corral, Jericho Brown, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Audre Lorde. The essays of June Jordan, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Susan Sontag.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m writing a memoir that charts a course from 1998, when I was 12, the year Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. were killed in hate crimes, to 2008, the year a straight man invited me into his bedroom, stripped down to his boxer shorts, and tried to kill me.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: When I’m struggling to write, I tend to begin reading in even more earnest than usual—earnest in the sense of pushing myself to read work beyond what I regard as my intellectual home and artistic neighborhood. I read to find work that will jolt me out of my usual habits and ways of approaching whatever I’m working on. Usually this works, but now and then it doesn’t. I’ve yet to be blocked in the sense of not being able to write for an extended period of time. Much more likely, I get frustrated because I hate what I’m writing and can’t tell if I should keep going or go in a different direction entirely. Reading then is like consulting a map for the best path forward.
ADVICE: Read five poems for every one poem that you write. You have to understand the broader landscape and community in which your work exists.
AGE: 29.
RESIDENCE: New York City.
JOB: I’m the editor of BuzzFeed LGBT.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? I’ve essentially finished one book and started another in the two years I’ve been working at BuzzFeed.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: I worked on the book for five or six years.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I submitted my manuscript to two contests; it was a finalist for the 2012 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. A few months later, Erika Stevens from Coffee House Press e-mailed me and said she wanted to talk. I was thrilled because Coffee House has published work by writers I love and respect, Patricia Smith among them. In retrospect, it all happened pretty quickly. I know I’m very lucky. Friends had told me to brace myself for a long haul so I tried to resist expectations. I’m glad my book wasn’t picked up as soon as I started submitting it; the act of being rejected and having to wait forced me to keep working at it.
Saeed Jones reads five poems from Prelude to Bruise for BuzzFeed. For more of Jones’s work visit theferocity.tumblr.com.
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Bianca Stone SOMEONE ELSE’S WEDDING VOWS Tin House/Octopus Books
What man does is build whole universes out of miniscule disasters and educational degrees. —from “The Future is Here”
HOW IT BEGAN: After I graduated from NYU’s graduate writing program in 2009 these poems just flooded in. I thought I’d be publishing my thesis, but that was just a stepping-stone to this book. When I look at Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, I realize that so many of these poems speak to past poems I’ve written. That’s important to me, to have my work never be static, moving forward but with those older poems still vital. For this book I wanted to write out the complexities of human love; how rich, but also how destructive it can be—and always somehow deeply inspiring. Being loved by someone is a great responsibility. And loving someone can be very hard, if part of their love is problematic.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: I’ve always been drawn to science, especially neuroscience. I feel that poets look at the world so differently because of something to do with the way their brains are wired: It’s not the normal, happy, healthy brain. It’s something else entirely. I also find inspiration in art—from reading comic books to sitting for hours in the Byzantine section of the Metropolitan Museum—as well as space travel, religion, and mythology. In addition, Vermont, where I’m from, is very important to the landscape in my poems, and I’m endlessly inspired by my friends and colleagues, all the amazing poets I know: listening to them, reading their books, collaborating with them. That’s really what keeps me going sometimes. I grew up spending a huge amount of time with my grandmother, the late poet Ruth Stone, and her poetry is ingrained in me. As is the work of my mother, novelist Abigail Stone. But of course I paved my own way too. I fell in love with Sylvia Plath and William Butler Yeats early on. Contemporary poets like John Ashbery, Sharon Olds, Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, and Mark Strand have been hugely influential.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m writing a lot of poems, some of which feels like a kind of memoir-essay-elegy-poetry hybrid book. I’m exploring narrative storytelling within the surreal. I’m also working a lot on what I call my Poetry Comics: that’s visual art and the lyrical working together, without one explaining the other. I use pen and ink with watercolor to do this. I find combining the text and image one of the most challenging things, but one that can be very exciting. We’ve been seeing a lot more of visual art in the writing world. I think it’s generative for students, too, to think about other means to express themselves and break out of the institutional bubble. Lastly, I’m in the (massive) process of rescuing and fixing up Ruth Stone’s house in Goshen, Vermont, and turning it into a nonprofit writers retreat and artist space.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: Sometimes I’m not feeling anything and I take a break from myself, find a well-written, engaging book of poetry and immerse myself. Getting out of your own head is just the key. Drawing or painting, too, lets my mind rebuild.
ADVICE: Be patient. Rather than focus on book contests, focus on making a community of support. Do readings, start magazines, take classes; make connections with like-minded poets and use those connections. Once you have a good, solid, thriving community of contemporaries, everything follows.
AGE: 31.
RESIDENCE: New York City.
JOB: I think this is a great question for writers, because usually it’s not as simple as saying, “I’m a poet!” Although, I always say that first, bluntly, without apology or pretention. I love people’s reactions. Usually they say, “Not a lot of money in that, huh?” and I say, “We actually make it work!” Really, there’s always so much more to being a writer than people think. Being a writer means you usually do many things, all of which is informed by your creativity. My livelihood comes from being a personal assistant to a poet at NYU. I also teach online classes in poetry and the visual image, guest lecture and teach, and do poetry-related freelance illustration. I’m also the chair of the Ruth Stone Foundation and editor-cofounder of Monk Books.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? I work from home mostly, and my work involves lots of multi-tasking. It’s a blessing and a curse because everything I do is self-motivation based. It’s hard sometimes to pick which task to focus all my energy on. But yes, compared to everyone else I know, I have lots of glorious writing time. I just have to make myself do work-work and poetry-work equally.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: About four or five years. It went through so many revisions, editing, cutting, and adding. I was editing poems right up until the last second. It’s a lot of deciding what’s working, and what you’re clinging to that perhaps should be let go.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: Four years. I submitted to a lot of contests, which is really a crapshoot. I started to realize I needed to find other ways to get it in someone’s hands. A lot of times that happens at poetry readings, when you get along with someone who is a publisher, and they like your poems, you’re like, “Well, guess that I have this book you can look at!”
Bianca Stone reads a poem from Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, along with original illustrations and animation by the poet, for Tin House. For more of Stone’s videos visit vimeo.com/tinhouse.
Sara Eliza Johnson BONE MAP Milkweed Editions (National Poetry Series)
all moments will shine if you cut them open, glisten like entrails in the sun. —from “As the Sickle Moon Guts a Cloud”
HOW IT BEGAN: The book began as a seafaring narrative—influenced in part by a stormy winter in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod—and expanded outward into the world of Bone Map. As the poems expanded outward, as they further considered the contemporary American moment, they also became more visceral and brutal, and eventually I realized I was writing an organic and ancient violence into the book, that the book was in some sense about violence as origin.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: I immersed myself in the materials of strange, old worlds (ones often as alluring as they are terrifying): Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the 1967 Czech film Marketa Lazarová, the Anglo-Saxon elegies and riddles, the sixth-century voyage of Saint Brendan the Navigator, Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise. The poets and artists who have particularly influenced me include Lorca, Plath, Celan, Ingmar Bergman, and the Polish artist Zdzisław Beksinski, who said, “I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams.”
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m still in the early stages of the next book, but it’s one preoccupied with the apocalyptic moment. I’m writing a lot about human annihilation and alien or inhuman spaces, such as primordial earth, future earth, outer space, and deep sea.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I’m always looking for new sources of fascination to spark my imagination: a book on black holes or human evolution, a visually exciting film, a visit to a museum or the aquarium. If I’m experiencing writer’s block or feel stuck in a comfort zone, I’ll more aggressively seek those sources out. It’s in part this curiosity—and the potential to transform my curiosities into art—that keeps me writing and creating.
ADVICE: Don’t be afraid to cut the dead weight. Beware of nostalgically clinging to poems that marked artistic milestones for you. And just because a piece is good—or has been published in a grand venue—doesn’t mean it belongs in the project you’ve undertaken. If you think of the book as a dynamic, breathing thing, or as a unique textual place, every page should seem indispensable when you read through it.
AGE: 30.
RESIDENCE: Salt Lake City.
JOB: I’m a PhD student in the creative writing program at the University of Utah, where I also teach.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Though often my academic and creative work intersect, it is not always easy to balance work obligations and writing, especially because it can be a challenge to switch on the creative regions of the brain at will. It is not only necessary to carve out the time to write, but the mental space as well. To get myself in the right headspace, I usually clear my desk of papers and books, put on some music (headphones are essential), and pour some coffee if it’s daytime or (just a little) bourbon if it’s night.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: About five years.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: Bone Map was selected for the National Poetry Series in its first round of submissions. The NPS was the fourth book contest to which I submitted the manuscript.
Sara Eliza Johnson reads the poem “Dear Rub” from Bone Map. For more of Johnson’s work visit saraelizajohnson.com.
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F. Douglas Brown ZERO TO THREE University of Georgia Press (Cave Canem Poetry Prize)
my body, rain drenched on the inside and you arriving faster than the next song —from “The Talk”
HOW IT BEGAN: What initiated this book was the birth of my son, then that of my daughter, five years later. It really came together thanks to the Cave Canem retreat and the influence the writers gave then and continue to give. I am both a Cave Canem and Kundiman fellow, and the folks who are connected to these two phenomenal organizations are generous, intelligent, and the best advocates for poetry that I know. They all helped me push and delve deep into the work. When my father died five years ago, so many poems erupted. When I stepped back and looked at the body of work, a book made sense.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: My kids and father were the immediate sources for this. As I mentioned, the poets of Cave Canem and Kundiman really push all of us involved to believe in the work we’re doing. However, back in ‘99 or so, I was in the MA Creative Writing Program at San Francisco State University, where I took a class called “What the Body Knows.” Toni Mirosevich and the rest of the class helped push me to see my father body as a vehicle for exploring my growing baby who was walking, talking, and figuring out the world. Music also factors into my work. I recently wrote a poem trying to imitate the cadence of Beyoncé’s song “Flawless.” Cornelius Eady’s You Don’t Miss Your Water and Yusef Komunyakaa’s serial poem “Songs for My Father” were also big inspirations. Both helped me take mere observation and make it stand up to the duty of fatherhood. Later, Natasha Trethewey’s books helped me reexamine pain, and [learn] how to open the voices of fatherhood that had been surrounding me as a parent.
WHAT’S NEXT: I am working on two projects: first, more fatherhood poems, and second, my namesake. The fatherhood poems are a collaborative work with poet Geffrey Davis, who I met at the Cave Canem retreat in 2012. At that time he was a new father, and what we shared regarding fatherhood—mostly our attempts to be better fathers—inspired us to continue via poetry. We are conducting workshops together, discussing poems on fatherhood from seminal poets, and doing our own work to complete what we hope to be a manuscript. Whatever it becomes, the work is good thus far, and liberating.
My complete name is Frederick Douglas Brown. How could one named after such a remarkable figure avoid it? In my work I am specifically responding to the paintings of Frederick Douglass’s life by the Harlem Renaissance painter Jacob Lawrence. My ekphrasis poems have been a pleasant journey for me. I have been able to do plenty of research, but I hope to view the Lawrence work face-to-face before releasing a final manuscript. As it is, I have completed fifteen poems.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: Reading is the best cure for me when the words are not coming together on the page or are nowhere near the page. Reading gives me permission to try new approaches. If I’m stuck or in a rut, an imitation poem helps. To see my friends publish work helps too. There is a bit of competition in every poet, and I don’t want to fall behind. I let that happen before, but Cave Canem teaches us how valuable our voice is.
ADVICE: Two things were told to me that really helped me finalize the work: 1) This is not your thesis. Approach it as a means to speak to a larger audience. 2) Friend and poet Jenny Factor told me, “Doug, this is not the only book of poems you’ll write about your kids or your dad.”
AGE: 42.
RESIDENCE: Los Angeles.
JOB: I’m an English teacher at Loyola High School of Los Angeles. I’m also a deejay on the side.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Most of the time is does not! I have been a teacher for twenty years. From my experience, teaching and writing dip from the same well. When I am “on” in the classroom, rarely does that translate to being “on” in my writing. I am accustomed to having my hands in as many projects as possible: parenting, writing, teaching, deejaying, etc. When I am at my best as a writer or teacher, my job is singularly that. This, of course, excludes fatherhood, which asks/needs me to be whatever my kids need.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: This work took sixteen years to complete. The poems about my kids took a while, mostly because I did not want the book or any individual poems to be a slideshow of my family. Also, many of the poems explore the mystery of fatherhood, so the logic of the poems, like parenting, had to be thoroughly sifted. I was learning how to be a father as I was writing the poems (and still am). The poems about my father came rather quickly: I waited a year after his death, and then started writing them. The drafts were strong and needed minor tweaking, but tweaking nonetheless.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: I submitted the manuscript on three separate occasions. The first two submissions were a year before I won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2013.
F. Douglas Brown reads two poems from Zero to Three, published by University of Georgia Press. For more of Brown’s work visit fdouglasbrown.com.
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Cindy Williams Gutiérrez THE SMALL CLAIM OF BONES Bilingual Press
Garland my bones with those who have gone before, colli, And the ones who have gone before them, colli. Return, Return.” —from “If I Were a Nahua Poet”
HOW IT BEGAN: When I entered the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Program (graduation was a gift to myself for my fiftieth birthday), I knew I wanted to explore two things: Mesoamerican poetics, specifically Aztec “flower and song,” and the poetry of feminist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who secured a cell of her own 250 years before Virginia Woolf insisted on her own room. I realized later that this was my way of bridging borders as well as history. I was born and raised in a Texas town on the border of Mexico, and my father worked for the U.S. Immigration Service on the bridges in Brownsville for more than thirty years. Though he is the “Williams” in Williams Gutiérrez, he was raised in a Mexican mining camp in Santa Bárbara, Chihuahua. Primarily of Welsh and German ethnicity, he was also one-quarter Cherokee and had an abiding respect for native peoples and their way of life. My mother’s heritage (the “Gutiérrez” in Williams Gutiérrez) can be traced to a sixteenth-century land grant from the King of Spain. In exploring Mexico’s history as a backdrop for my own mixed heritage, I realized that I was not bicultural (Anglo and Hispanic), as I had thought growing up, but rather multicultural—braiding together my father’s indigenous and Anglo roots with my mother’s Hispanic heritage.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: My father has been my muse. He was a history buff and loved telling stories about Mexico. He was also always fascinated by women’s lot throughout history: He read voraciously and spoke often about the misogynistic treatment of Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc, Sor Juana, even Marilyn Monroe. Early on, he made me believe I could do anything, that the world was mine. In high school, he’d return from his shift on the bridge after midnight and read my English papers. I would awaken to a full, handwritten page of thoughtful remarks. I reference this in the poem “The Gift,” which is the seminal poem in the first section of my book. I would also have to say that Charles Martin, my first mentor at Stonecoast, inspired (and terrified!) me when he suggested I create poems in the voices of Nahua poet-princes. This book would not have been born without his provocation. Aside from Sor Juana and Nezahualcoyotl and other Mesoamerican poets, my literary guiding lights are Yeats and Lorca—both tapped into ancestral memory and revived the local imagination. I draw inspiration from the silent and silenced voices of history.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m searching for homes for my manuscripts that have remained tucked in my computer for the past two years. I also have an idea incubating for a play inspired by a Rumi poem. And today I awoke with an idea for a chapbook inspired by—no surprise—women’s lot. Though my father passed away a year and a half ago, he still speaks to me in my sleep.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I haunt cafés. All I need is the aroma of coffee and a strong dose of people-watching (and the accompanying eavesdropping) and something (some image, line, dialogue, idea) will emerge.
ADVICE: I have found that the more I write about my writing, the better I can shape my collections. An abstract is a beautiful thing: It encapsulates your intention for the book in less than a page. More than once, this has helped me perform the hardest task of all—prune poems from a budding manuscript.
AGE: 56.
RESIDENCE: Oregon City, Oregon.
JOB: I split my time between my careers as a business consultant and as a literary artist. My firm, Sage Marketing Associates, has provided strategic planning and marketing consulting services to West Coast–based global technology companies, regional healthcare organizations, and local nonprofits since 1997. I am also a poet-dramatist, producer, and educator. I have taught poetry (mostly in English, sometimes in Spanish) to every grade from kindergarten to twelfth through the Portland Art Museum, the Right Brain Initiative, Wordstock, and Writers in the Schools. I also teach poetry to adults at my home in the country and at Studio 410 in Portland, Oregon, where I offer an annual ekphrastic poetry class in response to Russell J. Young’s photographs.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? I have striven to piece together a writing life since 1997 when I left my job as a marketing executive in Silicon Valley (I have a Bachelor’s degree in Computing Science and a Wharton MBA). Consulting has afforded me the flexibility to become a serious writer as well as to return to graduate school to earn my MFA and, afterward, to teach. It continues to be a challenging balancing act, particularly because I am equally devoted to theatre, which is incredibly consuming, especially in the role of producer. My most recent production was Words That Burn—a dramatization of World War II experiences of William Stafford, Lawson Inada, and Guy Gabaldón (in their own words), which I created and coproduced in commemoration of the William Stafford Centennial. The show was featured in Milagro Theatre’s 2014 La Luna Nueva festival, which celebrates Hispanic Heritage Month in Portland, Oregon.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: Two years. I wrote the poems during my first two semesters at Stonecoast and then spent the last semester editing and shaping them into a collection. But the collection wasn’t in its finished form for another few months after graduation.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: During the 2009 AWP book fair, I shopped my manuscript around and received interest from Arizona State University’s Bilingual Press. I followed up three months later with a book proposal and my manuscript. About a year and a half after that, I received the press’s letter of acceptance. In the meantime, I received fifteen rejections.
Cindy Williams Gutiérrez reads the poem “Micacuicatl, Or Song For The Dead” from The Small Claim of Bones. Original pre-Hispanic music by Gerardo Calderón (www.grupo-condor.com). For more of Gutiérrez’s work visit grito-poetry.com.
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Danniel Schoonebeek AMERICAN BARRICADE YesYes Books
The question of whether the idea of America is dead is not a question. —from “Correction”
HOW IT BEGAN: There’s this feeling in the United States that the country is somehow finished. I wanted to peel off that scab, and peel off the scabs I found underneath, which for me were family power dynamics, the American workforce, taboos of love, the rifts surrounding gender and class, the problem of having a name and a history, the misnomer of the word America. I wanted to dig into that American disgust.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: In place of inspiration, which I don’t think I feel, what I feel instead is camaraderie. And to that end the names can be endless. But Rukeyser and Woolf, global protest, James Agee, the Clash, running in winter, August Wilson, gunpowder tea, Eileen Myles, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, postcards, the Anti-Rent War, anxiety, Poet in New York, C. D. Wright, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Occupy movement, Paul Thomas Anderson, living in a cabin, Claudia Rankine, rush hour, Allyson Paty, percussion, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Frank Bidart, night walks, Austria, Walker Evans, Sarah Kane, Camus, shaving, Simone Weil, Jules Renard, Marina Tsvetaeva.
WHAT’S NEXT: I’m finishing a book of prose, a travelogue called C’est la guerre. It details a two-month reading tour I did in support of American Barricade last year. C’est la guerre will be published by Poor Claudia in 2015. (I sometimes hear grovelers say that certain poems feel like prose broken into lines, and I think C’est la guerre is maybe poetry broken into prose; I want to see who’ll grovel at that). And I’m also, every day, writing poems that will be my second book of poetry. Which so far appears to be about problems of capital.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: It helps me to think of a poem as a house you can demolish. When the lines aren’t budging but I know they can move, I like to start knocking down walls and prying up floorboards and putting the rooms back together the wrong way, with new lighting and banisters. Experimental editing is something I urge upon myself, and more times than I can count it’s resulted in a radically different poem that I had to essentially destroy in order to make.
ADVICE: Any advice people give only distracts other people from writing the book they need to write.In my life and in my writing I’ve been grateful when I can stop and remind myself to revolt against what revolts me. Always unsettle myself into myself, if you will. I’m always asking myself to write the poem and the book and the sentence that I don’t want to write.
AGE: 28.
RESIDENCE: Brooklyn, New York, and the Catskills.
JOB: I write books and read poems aloud for a living. I publish poems written by other people and I have conversations about art and politics for a living. At some point we all have to make our own distinctions between living and money. To make money I work as an editor, a booking agent, and an occasional book critic.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? It’s a little war every day, and you have to antagonize the conflict in a new way every day. The simple answer is never. I find that most jobs are the opposite of writing, or creating any art that will matter to people. I felt this for the first time when I was young, and ever since then I’ve written poetry from a place where the poems want to jam themselves into the gearworks of this problem.
TIME SPENT WRITING THE BOOK: About four years. Some of the poems were drafted and edited for years. A few poems were written in a fever pitch and finished within a week or two.
TIME SPENT FINDING A HOME FOR IT: My publisher was actually the one who found me. I read a poem in a really crowded basement bar in Boston about two years ago and she was in the audience; she got in touch with me a few days later and asked if I’d written a book. I wish that scenario happened more in poetry. Before that I mailed the book around to publishers for about a year.
Danniel Schoonebeek reads five poems from American Barricade. For more of Schoonebeek’s work visit dannielschoonebeek.tumblr.com.
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Tarfia Faizullah SEAM Southern Illinois University Press (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award)
How thin the seam between the world and the world: a few layers of muscle and fat, a sheet wrapped around a corpse: glass so easily ground into sand. —from “Reading Tranströmer in Bangladesh”
HOW IT BEGAN: I learned about the widespread rape of Bangladeshi women by the Pakistani Army during the 1971 Liberation War. I wanted to know more, and I applied for a Fulbright fellowship to go to Bangladesh and interview the women. A number of them are still alive. Seam emerged from my time there.
INSPIRATION AND INFLUENCES: The courage of other artists who share beautiful and difficult stories about the conversations taking place between their interior and exterior lives. I’m in awe of Detroit poets: Vievee Francis, Nandi Comer, francine j. harris, Jamaal May, Matthew Olzmann, and Tommye Blount. I’m moved by Eugenia Leigh’s Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows and David Tomas Martinez’s Hustle. I always return to poets in translation such as Rumi, Hikmet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Anna Akhmatova, César Vallejo, and Tomas Tranströmer.
WHAT’S NEXT: A second book of poems, Register of Eliminated Villages, and a memoir, Kafir.
WRITER’S BLOCK REMEDY: I try to get into the physicality of what the vastness inside and around me looks like. I listen to the train going past our house and wonder at the science and magic that collided to create its vibrations. I wonder who decided to write the informational signs at the top of a mountain during a hike, and what that person looks like. The world isn’t material for my poems; it’s its own fabric and when I’m not writing, I’m disconnected from it. For me, what keeps me going is mindfully rolling around in the world and feeling it in my whole body.
ADVICE: Let yourself be surprised. Relentlessly do the work of making every word of every line of every poem sing. Make mistakes and let them lead you into unexpected and wondrous places. A quote that has become my mantra is by the poet Russell Edson, who said, “Desire and patience takes us where we want to go.”
AGE: 34.
RESIDENCE: Detroit.
JOB: I teach at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program as the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor in Poetry, and codirect the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press and Video Series with Jamaal May.
DOES YOUR JOB ALLOW TIME TO WRITE? Absolutely. Even when it doesn’t seem like there’s time, there’s always more.
Tarfia Faizullah reads the poem “Instructions for the Interviewer” from Seam, published by Southern Illinois University Press. For more of Faizullah’s work visit tfaizullah.com.
Melissa Faliveno is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
[Credits]
Ilustrations by Eugene Smith; books by David Hamsley
Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—publishing reports, literary dispatches, academic announcements, and more—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories.
“This was a setup Stieg Larsson would have admired: a clever thief adopting multiple aliases, targeting victims around the world, and acting with no clear motive.” Reeves Wiedeman investigates the case of the manuscript thief who has now been haunting the literary industry for several years. With assistance reporting from Lila Shapiro, he offers new insight on the scope and evolution of the thief’s tactics. (Vulture)
Julia Shiota celebrates the burgeoning popularity of linguistically diverse media and interviews three audiobook narrators to learn how they prepare for projects that feature multiple languages. “Meaningful representation always takes effort and intention,” she writes. (Electric Literature)
A vote has determined that employees of Greenlight Bookstore, which has two locations in Brooklyn, New York, and its affiliated stationery store will be joining the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union. Co-owner Jessica Stockton Bagnulo has confirmed that management will offer voluntary recognition. (Publishers Weekly)
“I’m asking for the reader to participate in the same vulnerability I had to access in order to write the book. I’m asking the reader to come closer, to feel what I felt, and to also tap into what they feel too.” Caleb Azuma Nelson reflects on choosing to use second-person narration in his debut novel, Open Water. (BOMB)
“What all these memorable first sentences convey, in all their variety, is confidence. No equivocation. No building up to the good stuff.” Alice McDermott muses on the art of the first sentence. (Literary Hub)
“Yet why, precisely, does the unicorn persist in our collective imagination, and why does it feel especially relevant now?” Mallika Rao charts the history of the unicorn. (T: The New York Times Style Magazine)
“Free stuff is the zenith of the gardener’s life, the soil tender’s greatest thrill.” Novelist Charlotte Mendelson writes about the “unalloyed joy” of nurturing abandoned or gifted plants. (New Yorker)
“ISBN doing some research, and I am about to explain to you exactly what those numbers on the back of your books mean.” Carina Pereira has prepared an explainer on the ISBN. (Book Riot)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jaime Cortez, whose first story collection, Gordo, is out today from Black Cat. Set in the 1970s, Gordo follows the escapades of a young boy who lives in a migrant workers camp in California. Gordo is bookish and wrestling with a queerness he has not yet named. In one story, the boys and girls become locked in an intense rivalry over the rights to a stash of porn magazines—exacerbating, in Gordo’s words, “an excruciating binary to a sissy boy like me.” And while he struggles internally, external threats loom: The very magazines the kids are warring over were scavenged from the room of a man taken away by Immigration and Naturalization Service agents. Through Gordo’s eyes, the community comes to life in this story and others similarly filled with both irreverent humor and heartache. Cortez reveals the imperfect, but tender ways families and friends care for one another. “What a voice, what a charming, idiosyncratic voice!” writes Rabih Alameddine. “Cortez tells the untold stories of California. Set what you know aside, lay your expectations on the couch next to you, put your feet up, pick up this book, and journey into a land as real and complex as the state itself.” Jaime Cortez is a graphic novelist, visual artist, writer, teacher, and occasional performer. Cortez has historically used art and humor to explore sexuality, social justice, HIV/AIDS, and Chicano identity. He wrote and illustrated the graphic novel Sexile for AIDS Project Los Angeles in 2003.
1. How long did it take you to write Gordo? I wrote the short story “Raymundo the Fag” around 1998. The other stories followed over the course of the next two decades. The longest story in the book, “Alex,” was completed in 2020.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? One of the first public readings I ever did was around 1998 at Café International on Haight Street in San Francisco. I was still a bit of a hick and felt super boho and sophisticated reading at a ratty café. People in the audience laughed when I hoped they would. Yay! This was so exciting to the humorist in me. I began to think I was onto something with my tragicomic tales. I was not in any way thinking that this story would be part of a book of connected short stories. That was not at all my plan at the time, but that is what happened.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Telling all the truth.
Both of my parents are dead now, but I still want to protect them. In my semi-autobiographical stories I could not bring myself to go fully into the family history of domestic violence. It was too painful to fully unpack that in depth. In some ways I perpetuated the code of silence that many distressed families enforce. Writing Gordo showed me the limits of my willingness to tell the whole truth, and challenged me regarding the merits of telling it all.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? I do not have a powerful internal engine of creation that keeps me writing no matter what. I write best when there is a howling deadline hurtling in my direction. Given the gift of a deadline, I inevitably wait until the last minute and enter that zone of potent focus and desperate productivity. I write when there is a publishing opportunity in the offing. I write when I am on fire to set a story to the page. I have never kept regular hours or routines. I write at my normal desk, seated on an expensive—for me—office chair, and I am very easily distracted and stop writing to attend to the distraction. What works for me could be disastrous for other writers and vice versa.
5. What are you reading right now? I am polyamorous—slutty?—with books. I have five books in rotation at this time and curl up in bed with one or more of them in random order. Becoming A Man by P. Carl is one trans man’s story of transition. Selected Poems of Emanuel Xavier, wherein Xavier reminds me why he is such a New York City lit legend. The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story edited by John Freeman—who also edited Gordo! And I’m about to dive into Honey Boy by Camille Roy and am almost finished with Recollections of My Nonexistence by the fabulous Rebecca Solnit.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I am a prose kinda guy, but occasionally a poet really gets under my skin. Joe Jiménez’s Rattlesnake Allegory is beautiful and I hope he continues to publish and get recognition for his work.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Gordo, what would you say? “Hey you. Yeah you. Listen up. Combining unsparing humor with heart is a superpower. Trust it.”
8. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Gordo? I write in pictures, movies, really. I am interested in how dialogue and action can define a character and less so in the inner monologue that runs through a character’s head. The visual arts were my first love, and my MFA is in visual art. I love graphic novels—writing and illustrating my graphic novel, Sexile, just about killed me while giving me so much life.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? Professor Patrick “Pato” Hebert of New York University. He is so damned brilliant and knows me with the intimacy of a bestie of twenty-five years. His analysis was deeply intersectional before that word entered the parlance.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Hearing various versions of “don’t wait for the muse, don’t wait for inspiration, just do the writing” has effectively incinerated most of the woo woo from my thoughts of how and why to write. I am grateful for that.
Jaime Cortez, author of Gordo. (Credit: Mark Smotroff)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Louis Edwards, whose fourth novel, Ramadan Ramsey, is out today from Amistad. The title character, Ramadan Ramsey, is born with an “unspoken well of longing.” Raised primarily by his grandmother, he loses his mother at a young age and has never met his father. His parents, Alicia and Mustafa, fell in love as teenagers in New Orleans in 1999. But Mustafa, a Syrian immigrant, was lured home by his family before he learned that Alicia had fallen pregnant. Richly imagined and epic in scope, Ramadan Ramsey charts the young boy’s journey from New Orleans to Istanbul to Aleppo, through Hurricane Katrina and war, in search of his father. “An immediate global classic, Ramadan Ramsey joins the ranks of Sula, Oliver Twist, and Moll Flanders, as a tale named for a character that invites readers into a world both hyper-local and universal,” writes Alice Randall. “New Orleans has never been more vivid on the page.” Louis Edwards is the author of three previous novels, Ten Seconds (Graywolf Press, 1991), N: A Romantic Mystery (Dutton Books, 1997), and Oscar Wilde Discovers America (Scribner, 2003). He lives in New Orleans, where he has had a decades-long career as a producer of music festivals and other special events. He is currently the chief creative officer and chief marketing officer of Festival Productions, Inc.–New Orleans, which produces the world-famous New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (aka Jazz Fest).
1. How long did it take you to write Ramadan Ramsey? Actual writing time, about five years. But the book had a very long gestation period. More than twenty years passed between my having the first inkling of the idea for the title character to writing the last word of the book. Only now as I’m saying that do I realize that the inkling and the very last word are one and the same thing.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? Well, that’s easy—and this is what precipitated that inkling I just mentioned—one afternoon in the late nineties, I was pumping gas outside a convenience store when I witnessed a flirtation, mostly wordless, between a young man who worked inside the store and a young woman. She was Black, he was Middle Eastern, and their encounter, filled with mutual attraction and quiet daring, played out near where I was standing. It was thrilling and cinematic. What might become of their obvious mutual attraction? I wanted to know the answer. I definitely wanted to see that movie. But, then, I write books.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The middle phase of editing this novel involved paring the story down to its essentials. I’d written a couple of long sequences for fun that didn’t make the cut. Sometimes making a necessary edit, lightening the load, can feel like heavy lifting.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write when an idea, story, or book commands me to. I’ve been fortunate that writing has never been my job. Interestingly, working in a full-time capacity, apart from the literary world or academia, has given me the luxury of writing strictly for pleasure. The downside of the day job, of course, is sometimes the difficulty of finding the time to write. For Ramadan Ramsey, during a couple of years of the most intense writing, I’d start the “work” of imagining at around 4:30 or 5 AM, which was a new experience for me. You hear people speak dreamily about how “oh, the world is such a different place before dawn….” Guess what: It is.
5. What are you reading right now? I just finished N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, book one in her Broken Earth trilogy. Unusual reading for me, but refreshing. For much of this gruesome pandemic I retreated to Shakespeare. Play after play. Tragedy, he reminds us, is no match for language. Poetry wins every time.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? The late, great Albert Murray. He’s well known in some circles, but he certainly should be better known and read, especially by writers. There are two Library of America volumes of Mr. Murray’s work, one of the novels and another of his vital nonfiction, including “The Omni-Americans,” his 1970 masterpiece in which he redefines America and American culture and shatters simplistic notions about race. Not included in either of those volumes is Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. A must-read for writers. The remarkable camaraderie, the erudition, the triumph of style. They’re like a literary Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but Black and intellectual. It will leave writers wishing there was a Tinder or Match.com for writers, so that you could find your literary soulmate and engage in a lifelong correspondence as enthralling as marital bliss.
7. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? The twenty-four-hour daily cycle of being. The requirement for sleep. The marvels of the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball, Venus and Serena. More and more, the dwindling amount of time I have left on the planet.
8. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? One day about three years ago, after a great call with Joy Harris, my agent, about editing ideas, I laid the manuscript out in sections on my dining room table, took a shot of the scene with my phone, and e-mailed it to her with a “thanks.” Joy said, “What a perfect picture,” and when the book was published the photograph would earn her caption: “A writer digs in.”
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I’m not a big sharer of works-in-progress. But my sister, Marla—bless her—reads anything I dare send her.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Keep reading.
Louis Edwards, author of Ramadan Ramsey. (Credit: W. David Foster)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, whose third novel, Savage Tongues, is out today from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Savage Tongues begins on an airplane: The narrator, an Iranian American writer named Arezu, is en route to Marbella, Spain, for the first time in twenty years. As a teenager she had come to the city to spend the summer with her negligent father, but instead arrived to an empty apartment and became ensnared in an affair with his step-nephew, a sadistic man over twice her age. Arezu is returning to Marbella now, accompanied by her best friend, Ellie, “to conduct emotional fieldwork, to turn the soil with a plow and unearth the past, loosen its hold on the person I had become.” With searching intelligence and firm moral conviction, she seeks new language to describe both the private violence in her past and the public violence that surrounds her in the world. “This uncompromising novel lives at the border of memory and dream, restlessly seeking a logic that can transform cruelty into love,” writes Garth Greenwell. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of two previous novels, Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), which won the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and Fra Keeler (Dorothy, 2012). She is the recipient of a Whiting Award, as well as fellowships from MacDowell and Ledig House. Her writing can also be found in BOMB, Granta, Guernica, the New York Times, and the Paris Review, among other publications.
1. How long did it take you to write Savage Tongues? It took me one year to draft the novel and another two to revise it.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? There are a lot of layers to Savage Tongues; the novel investigates the many ways that our personal scars relate to the wounds of history. We’ve been taught to think of gender-based abuse along the lines of victim/aggressor rather than understanding intimate violence as part of centuries-long tides of geopolitical crisis. It was challenging to capture the narrator’s fractured interiority as she processes the effects of her trauma while also registering the historical and colonial dimensions of her grief.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write daily, often in the mornings, at my desk. I like to daydream about writing in bed or while I’m walking my dogs in the evenings.
4. What are you reading right now? Rachel Cusk’s Second Place.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Amina Cain, whose first novel, Indelicacy, is excellent.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? While I enjoy teaching, it does make it difficult to have the kind of uninterrupted writing time that is so critical to finishing a book.
7. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Savage Tongues? I didn’t expect the apartment that Arezu inherits, where the majority of the scenes unfold, to take on a life of its own or to be quite as haunted/haunting!
8. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? I enjoyed writing about the writing life through the perspective of the narrator. Following her about as she reflected on her book tour was quite the delight.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I always ask my partner to read my work first. He is a Medieval scholar and a literary critic who is deeply invested in journey narratives that have a touch of the speculative. He is, in many ways, my ideal reader. And he is always honest, for good and for bad.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Show up no matter what so your writing knows you are there.
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, author of Savage Tongues. (Credit: Kayla Holdread)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Shin Yu Pai, whose latest poetry collection, Virga, will be published on August 1 by Empty Bowl. In Virga, Pai models how to live with openness and intention. The title poem begins, “as young people we are / taught to hold our tears,” but ends, “the lesson / now to pour down & resound.” Like the meteorological virgae—columns of rain that evaporate before reaching the earth—Pai’s poetry inspires great depth of feeling. The opening poem describes the loneliness of gathering virtually for meditation and the loss of a beloved teacher. Another, titled “White savior industrial complex,” addresses how activism can steamroll the marginalized people it purports to serve. Informed by Buddhist thought and various in form, the poems of Virga are searching, meditative, and incisive. Shin Yu Pai is a writer, photographer, and editor based in the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of several previous poetry collections, including Ensō (Entre Rios Books, 2020), Aux Arcs (La Alameda Press, 2013), and Adamantine (White Pine Press, 2010). She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her writing can also be found in Atlas Obscura, the Rumpus, and the Stranger, among other publications. From 2015 to 2017 she served as the fourth poet laureate of Redmond, Washington.
1. How long did it take you to write Virga? Virga collects work written largely between 2018 and 2021. At the end of last year I realized that I had enough poems to put together a new book. I sat down in January to assemble the collection, which came together very quickly when it was clear that there were a few specific themes guiding the book. There are also some older poems from my son’s early years included in Virga.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? In Virga I write about my relationship to teachers and one particular teacher who had a significant impact on my life. That person ended their life in July 2018, which spurred a deeply personal and spiritual crisis in me that required the reexamination of my faith, belief, and life choices at all levels. The hardest part of writing Virga was finding the courage to be vulnerable on the page in the face of different kinds of grief and loss and documenting the journey back to myself with honesty.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write in my backyard cottage, in my home office, on the bus, during and after meditation, after going for morning runs, after my son goes to bed at night, and whenever the muse visits. I don’t have a daily practice due to the circumstances of my current life. I try to save up different things I’m working on and then block out a few hours once a month to dig into writing and revising. Now that my son is a bit older, I’d imagine that one- or two-week retreats would be tremendously productive for me.
4. What are you reading right now? I just finished reading Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife. I’m rereading for the second time Jessica J. Lee’s Two Trees Make a Forest, a memoir of the author’s connection to her Taiwanese identity. Sitting on my desk right now is a copy of Madeline Miller’s Circe.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I like to champion Koon Woon. Koon is local to Seattle, where I’m based, and has uplifted the work of emerging and established writers for a long time through his work as publisher of Goldfish Press. Koon’s work is innovative, provocative, and grounded in his specific experiences as a Chinese immigrant. His book Water Chasing Water from Kaya Press—a fine publisher of works from Asian diasporic writers—is a wonderful introduction to his collected works.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Time. I work full-time and have a young child at home. There are many demands on my time on a day-to-day basis. It’s hard to make or find time on a consistent basis, particularly during a pandemic. The pandemic has been a humongous impediment to my writing. So has the formlessness of summer.
7. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Virga? The poem sequence “Tidal,” which appears in Virga, is actually a series of poems that I wrote for U.K. filmmaker David Ian Bickley. He was working with some water and tidal imagery that he had collected over the years and was interested in having me write a text that could reflect on tides as a metaphor for karmic forces. He shared some of that footage with me before and as I was working on the sequence. I recorded a voiceover of the video poem and he put the whole thing together. You can view two sections of that work online.
Likewise, “Embarkation” grew out of a collaboration with video artist Scott Keva James and originated in a performance piece that I created for the stage a few years ago. When I think about it, performance is an element of many of the texts in this book—there are ritual-type invocations and a David Antin–style talk poem that meditates on ritual, or sacred art, and the casting of sacred reliquary objects.
My writing has always been deeply engaged with the visual arts and there’s a series of poems that was inspired by the work of sculptor Richard Serra. The artist Michael Swaine, from Future Farmers, makes an appearance in “Anything can go wrong at any time.”
8. How did you know when the book was finished? The book was accepted for publication by Empty Bowl in an earlier draft form. At the point where I knew the book would be coming into the world, I turned back to my notebooks to surface a dozen or so poems that would work in Virga and complement and fill out existing themes in the book.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I met the poet Rick Benjamin at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival and we’ve been friends and readers of each other’s work ever since. Rick has a distinctly Buddhist sensibility, as I do. And his work is grounded in notions of desire, longing, and the body. I occasionally share poems and glimpses of work in early draft phases with Rick for a gut check.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? I can’t actually think of anything that’s stayed with me in the context of writing advice. There are lots of tired chestnuts that are recycled from one writing workshop instructor to the next that have been repeated ad nauseum.
My friend Tom Gilroy, with whom I write haiku, has often talked to me of the importance of seizing the energy of a moment. Along the lines of “If someone hands you a microphone and a train is coming towards you, what are you going to do? Sing.” I take it as some variation of the Zen koan about the man eating a strawberry who hangs off a cliff faced with tigers on either side of him. All writing advice is its own koan until we crack the code for ourselves. It boils down to embracing the act in the moment.
Shin Yu Pai, the author of Virga. (Credit: Daniel Carrillo)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Katie Kitamura, whose fourth novel, Intimacies, is out today from Riverhead Books. In the wake of her father’s death, the narrator of Intimacies decides to leave New York City to serve a one-year contract as an interpreter at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Proficient in five languages and keenly observant, she is accustomed to complexity in both her professional life and social world. Of the Court, she writes, “What was at stake was nothing less than the suffering of thousands of people, and in suffering there could be no question of pretense. And yet the Court was by nature a place of high theatrics.” But the narrator’s aptitude for interpretation is tested like never before when she steps in to work on a particularly high-profile case concerning a former president accused of ethnic cleansing and other war crimes. Simultaneously, she is wrestling with whether The Hague can ever truly become a home, a question complicated by an uncertain relationship with a lover. Intimacies is a novel attuned to cerebral and emotional contradictions of all scales. “Katie Kitamura is among the most brilliant and profound writers at work today,” writes Garth Greenwell. “She reminds me how high the moral stakes of fiction can be.” Katie Kitamura’s third novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. Her first and second novels, The Longshot and Gone to the Forest, were both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.
1. How long did it take you to write Intimacies? There’s a four-year gap between the publication of my last novel and the publication of this one. But there was a lot that happened in those four years, apart from the writing. That just seems to be how it is for the time being. I rarely get a stretch of consecutive days to write, and the writing takes place alongside a lot of other things, and eventually a manuscript emerges.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? I was listening to the radio in 2009 when I heard a clip of Charles Taylor speaking at his trial in The Hague. Taylor was known for his oratorical powers, and his speech was monstrous and pompous, but undeniably compelling. The disquiet of that combination stayed with me, and I only write about the things that haunt me in some way.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The end of the book. I didn’t know exactly what would happen, or what choices the various characters would make, but I did know that I wanted it to feel very different to the end of my previous novel, A Separation. In that novel there’s a real sense of claustrophobia and paralysis at the end—I wanted the end of Intimacies to feel the opposite, like a door opening up, both for the characters and the reader.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? In theory I write best in the morning, and in theory I am able to write every day. In practice I write when I can and with no discernible schedule. I do find that if I’m not writing, I need to be reading. Reading is such a big part of the work of writing, and a lot of things come unknotted in my head when I read. I find solutions to problems that aren’t necessarily apparent when I’m sitting in front of my computer.
5. What are you reading right now? Deborah Levy’s Real Estate.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? There are many. In particular I always wish there was a wider readership for work in translation. Much of the fiction I read is in translation and that has influenced the way I write. Reading in translation of course brings me into contact with more of the world. It also reminds me that the rules of fiction are not fixed, and that the conventions of storytelling vary according to culture and literary tradition. For that I’m grateful to publishers like New Directions, Archipelago, Fitzcarraldo, And Other Stories, Europa, Transit, Open Letter, Charco Press, among many others.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? My agent, on the first read, told me that it was a book about many things and not one thing, and that it should remain that way through the editing process.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Intimacies, what would you say? Nothing specific to the book. Nothing even that specific to my personal life. But many things about the world and its various turns of events.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My husband. It’s in his best interests to tell me the truth, but he knows how to present it in the kindest, least painful way possible.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? You have to keep doing it. That is much harder than it sounds.
Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies. (Credit: Clayton Cubitt)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Beth Morgan, whose debut novel, A Touch of Jen, is out today from Little, Brown. Remy and Alicia,two dissatisfied and asocial food service workers, sustain their deteriorating relationship by fantasizing about a popular influencer named Jen, one of Remy’s former coworkers. The pair obsess over her latest posts, and Alicia regularly role-plays as Jen both in the bedroom and in their daily routine, but their obsession becomes more perilous when the real-life Jen unexpectedly enters their lives. A chance run-in leads to an invitation to Jen’s boyfriend’s place in Montauk, where sexual tension and class conflict are heightened by surfing mishaps and a sleepwalking incident. Even after the trip Jen’s presence looms large, and Remy and Alicia’s lives rapidly devolve in unexpected, grotesque, and terrifying ways. Darkly funny and absurd, A Touch of Jen is an ingenious dramatization of the very real perils of millennial social life. “A Touch of Jen is bananas good,” writes Carmen Maria Machado. “Funny and sharp and surprising and bittersweet. Just [three chef’s kiss emojis].” Beth Morgan grew up outside Sherman, Texas, and studied writing as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College. She recently received her MFA from Brooklyn College. Her work has been published in the Iowa Review and Kenyon Review Online.
1. How long did it take you to write A Touch of Jen? I first had the idea for A Touch of Jen when I was in the Philippines in February 2018, and I workshopped the beginning of the novel that summer in Tony Tulathimutte’s CRIT workshop. A year later I finished my first draft, which I edited through the fall of 2019 and sent out to agents at the beginning of 2020. This whole time I was supported by my partner’s salary as a teacher and by working part-time as a dog-walker, so I was very fortunate in having more time to write than I did when I was working 9 to 5 in an office.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The ending! I wanted the story to go to this specific fantastical place at the end, but there needs to be a certain amount of coherence to any fantasy, even if ultimately what’s important is the emotional impact, not the fantasy’s realism. In the first draft there wasn’t really a full cosmology in place explaining the fantasy, so I had to develop one while also making sure it wasn’t too complex and felt true to the story’s emotional stakes. I also think taking mushrooms helped! Having worked on the book for a year at that point, I had a lot of rigid patterns in place for how I thought about the end, and I think the mushrooms were crucial in helping me to let go of some of those patterns and think about the story in a new way.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I try to write for at least three hours a day and use a timer to keep myself to that, but it’s important for me to be flexible about when and where I write, since there are so many ways that writing rituals can be disrupted. Most of my writing is done at home, either at my standing desk or sitting on my couch, but I’m constantly taking notes on my phone while I’m out and about.
4. What are you reading right now? I’m reading a lot of Patricia Highsmith. I actually hadn’t read any of her work before I wrote A Touch of Jen, but almost immediately people started comparing my work to hers. I definitely feel a kinship with her for better or worse!
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Elizabeth Gaskell! She’s often overlooked in favor of other Victorian novelists, but her works are ambitious, psychologically insightful, and deeply concerned with class and class conflict in a way that feels relevant today.
6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? I had mostly finished my book before I began my MFA program, so it probably didn’t make a big difference in getting published. However, I did study creative writing as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence, so fiction workshops and craft classes definitely had an impact on me. For example, one of my writing professors, David Hollander, directed me toward Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, which was a big influence on A Touch of Jen. And studying writing as an undergraduate helped prepare me for many years without any kind of connection to writers or a writing community because I had developed the ability to write on my own without a program.
Of course I’m also grateful for many of the workshops I’ve been in more recently, including Tony Tulathimutte’s CRIT workshop and my Brooklyn College workshops with Joshua Henkin and Madeleine Thien. Tony is a very thoughtful reader and also gives amazing practical advice and assistance in navigating the publishing world. Josh and Maddie are also great readers, and as my thesis advisor, Maddie has given me so much love and encouragement as I’ve struggled with my latest project.
As a more “experimental” writer, I’m not really interested in the American realist short story, which is of course the dominant genre in a lot of the classes and programs I’ve been in. I’ve definitely found it useful to think about how these kinds of stories work, but I agree with Matthew Salesses, the author of Craft in the Real World, that the kinds of assumptions underlying this genre can be pretty limiting and can make writers unnecessarily second-guess themselves. I’d definitely recommend his book to anyone thinking about an MFA—both as a way to think more freely about their own writing and also as a way to become a better reader.
I think what I’ve appreciated the most about my MFA program is having the opportunity to share my work with a wide spectrum of thoughtful readers. It’s given me a better idea of the kind of reception I can expect for my work and of the extent to which certain ideas are or aren’t coming through.
I definitely don’t think anyone should go into debt to go to an MFA program. Not only is debt horrible, but there are so many great programs that are inexpensive or fully funded, which also means that these programs are able to attract a more diverse cohort. Brooklyn College doesn’t have the big names of NYU or Columbia but the professors there are brilliant and deeply care about their students.
7. What trait do you most value in your editor (or agent)? From my first phone call with my editor, Jean Garnett, I felt like she just had this perfect understanding of what I was trying to do with my work. The personal essay she published this spring in the Yale Review has the kind of psychedelic intensity that I’m aiming for in my own writing, so I feel very privileged to have her as a reader.
8. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? One of the most enjoyable parts of writing the book were the supernatural text messages. They were inspired by a scene in Olivier Assayas’s movie Personal Shopper that I thought was really exciting, so when I was writing those text messages I felt like I was recapturing some of my excitement as a viewer.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My partner, David. He’s believed in my work so passionately for so long but is also very blunt if he thinks something isn’t working. So I feel very confident that he won’t sugarcoat criticism or hold back if he thinks that my work is falling short of my vision.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? My senior year at Sarah Lawrence, I took my first-ever art class—a sculpture class with Joe Winter. Before I took his class, I thought that people who “got” art had a special X-ray vision that allowed them to know if art was good or bad or interesting, and I thought that I didn’t have access to that. I expressed those insecurities to Joe—who I think was confused but was very patient with me. I kept on asking, “What about a jar of vomit, is that art?” And he kept saying, “Are you referring to a specific jar of vomit?” I was hoping he could just give me some straightforward criterion for determining if something was good art or not.
His response was basically, “If what you’re trying to express with a work of art is a discrete meaning, we have words for that, so you would just say the meaning.” Maybe because I was so used to the standardized testing culture of Texas, it didn’t occur to me that engaging with art doesn’t have to be about understanding something or getting the right answer. I think Joe helped me to get more in touch with the ways that I was responding to art and literature independently of its “meaning.” And it changed the way I approached my writing as well. It helped me feel confident in making work that felt more sculptural, that was aware of the variety of artistic responses I could get from a reader without feeling the need to impose on the work a straightforward interpretation or meaning.
Beth Morgan, author of A Touch of Jen. (Credit: Vita Burn)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Pajtim Statovci and David Hackston, the author and the translator of the novel Bolla, which is out today from Pantheon. Bolla follows Arsim and Miloš, two young men who first meet in Kosovo in 1995—as the threat of war looms—and begin an affair. Arsim, who is married and a soon-to-be father, is Albanian, while Miloš is Serbian. “We should be enemies,” Arsim reflects. “But now, as we touch, there is nothing between us that is strange or foreign to the other.” When the violence in the region escalates, Arsim’s family decides to leave the country and Miloš enlists in the army, and yet despite their abrupt separation, they remain forever touched by each other. The story extends into the 2000s, weaving back and forth in time, and is punctuated by the legend of a demonic serpent. This is a sweeping novel about difference, desire, and the consequences of war. Pajtim Statovci was born in Kosovo in 1990 and moved with his family to Finland when he was two years old. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki. He is also the author of My Cat Yugoslavia (Pantheon, 2017) and Crossing (Pantheon, 2019), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Bolla was awarded Finland’s highest literary honor, the Finlandia Prize. David Hackston is a British translator of Finnish and Swedish literature and drama. He graduated from University College London in 1999 with a degree in Scandinavian studies.
1. How long did it take you to complete work on Bolla? Pajtim Statovci: I wrote the first sentences of Bolla about ten years ago. However, I often find it difficult to designate the starting point of a novel. Many aspects, themes, and even plotlines have been on my mind for much longer than the actual years of writing and working on the novel.
David Hackston: After translating a preliminary sample from different sections of the book, preparing the initial draft of Bolla took around three months. Of course, the relative speed of a translation project depends very much on the style of the original, but a good rule of thumb is to allow around one month for every hundred pages of text. Though Pajtim’s rich deployment of Finnish is always a challenge, over time I’ve become more familiar with his voice, and with each subsequent translation—this is the third of his novels I have translated—getting the initial draft done feels easier. Though it’s never “easy” in the truest sense of the word.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? Pajtim Statovci: On the last page of the novel there’s this picture of bolla, a demonic serpent. I think I was maybe six or seven years old when I drew this picture—that has been edited and photoshopped by a graphic designer to fit the page—based on the stories I was told about this creature. How it spends its life in a dark cave, hiding from humans, only to be released once a year for a single day. And when it’s released for that brief moment of freedom, it becomes a kulshedra, a dragon that causes havoc by destroying everything and everyone it sees. I think that this drawing was, in a way, one of the starting points of this book.
David Hackston: My very earliest memory of Bolla is when Pajtim sent me a draft of the novel, some six months before it was first published in Finnish. This was a great privilege, as authors don’t ordinarily involve their translators in the process of writing the original novel. It was fascinating to compare this early draft with the finished product. Of course, through translations into different languages, the text takes on new life again and again. In this sense, the publication of the original—in this case, the Finnish text—isn’t really the end of the process so much as a pitstop on a much longer journey.
3. What was the most challenging thing about the project? Pajtim Statovci: I really wanted to challenge myself with this novel by writing a story with a narrator that is not a typical hero. Bolla’sprotagonist is a human wreck, a man that is so lost and broken and wounded that he ends up hurting the people closest to him. In fact, creating this character has been one of the hardest things in my writing career. After failing to find a believable narrator’s voice for him multiple times, I had to disregard some “unwritten rules” of fiction writing, such as the necessity of having the reader in your corner all the time. Doing that also freed me, because now I could write without fear of judgment, and I started getting somewhere. A catharsis isn’t necessarily always peaceful.
David Hackston: As I mentioned earlier, Pajtim’s use of language is particularly rich, and rethinking this richness in another language is always a challenge, though one that I relish. One particular challenge here is in conveying aspects of the history explored in the novel to readers who may not necessarily be familiar with the details of the Kosovo-Serbia conflict. The translator has to provide little signposts here and there to keep the reader up to speed, but in such a way that the prose doesn’t read like a textbook.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? Where, when, and how often do you translate? Pajtim Statovci: I only write when I feel like I have something to say. I don’t have a work schedule, and I don’t write every day. I need to be inspired and motivated to be able to start, and if I force myself to write, what I have managed to write is usually something that just doesn’t last. Currently I work from home. Before COVID-19 I worked in libraries and cafés. My day usually consists of answering e-mails, reading, occasional interviews—and on a good day, writing, too.
David Hackston: Some translators really need absolute silence in order to concentrate, but I actually prefer a little background hubbub. I translated most of Bolla at a café across the street from my house. Because I often travel—at least in pre-pandemic times—I sometimes need to translate whenever I get the chance: in cafés, local libraries, in transit at an airport. In this respect, the pandemic proved challenging as it forced me to find a way of concentrating at home where, paradoxically, there are so many other things that easily distract me.
5. What are you reading right now? Pajtim Statovci: I’m reading Emma Cline’s Daddy. It was just published in Finnish, translated by Kaijamari Sivill. I enjoy Cline’s writing immensely. These stories are so rich in detail, drawing you in instantly. What is left unsaid, to bubble under the surface, is what I really do appreciate in Cline’s work. It defies explanation and doesn’t avoid a single thing.
David Hackston: One of the drawbacks of being a translator is that I rarely get the opportunity to read anything that isn’t directly related to my work: I’m either reading the original of an upcoming translation project, checking the proofs of a translation about to go to print, editing things I translated last week, or more often than not all of the above at once. It’s also hard to read Finnish literature without my translator’s spectacles on. I’m currently reading Lovetown by Polish author Michał Witkowski, in a glorious and uproarious Finnish translation by the excellent Tapani Kärkkäinen, and Pete Buttigieg’s Trust.
6. What is one thing you might change about the literary community or publishing industry? Pajtim Statovci: I wouldn’t know.
David Hackston: In the twenty or so years I have been working as a translator, the number of titles published in English translation has grown steadily, something demonstrated by the recent inclusion of a category for translated literature at the National Book Awards. This is a great development. Given the rise in popularity and visibility of translated fiction in the English-speaking world, sometimes it’s disappointing when reviewers, magazines, and journals forget to mention the input of the translator in the process, giving rise to the recent #namethetranslator hashtag on Twitter. While we don’t necessarily need or want to bask in the limelight, we have creative agency too, and it’s only right that it should get the credit it deserves.
7. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? Pajtim Statovci: I don’t know if I miss anything about it, really. Writing this book was, as I said, very consuming and also emotionally draining. It’s been over two years since I finished Bolla, and I have moved on to other interests and other themes. The excitement of having something new to work on is what I like to focus on, and not miss what’s forever gone. When you’ve given your work for publication, it’ll never be yours again, it’ll never give you the comfort of being solely yours, a place of freedom. You just need to build this space again from scratch.
David Hackston: The worlds, characters, and lives portrayed in Pajtim’s books are very unique, and there’s always an element of sadness at saying goodbye to them once the translation goes to print. But as I said earlier, just as the publication of the original isn’t the end of the process, neither is the publication of the translation. The book will go on to live a life of its own, and it’s gratifying to read reviews and hear other people’s thoughts about something that until that point had existed only on my computer. This is why we translate: to make fascinating works of literature accessible to other readers, who can then make up their own minds and have thoughts of their own about them.
8. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Pajtim Statovci: I find it a bit hard to say what counts as “wide recognition.” But I’d like to see more discussion about the works of György Dragomàn and Hiromi Kawakami, both of whom are respected and recognized authors.
David Hackston: Among authors writing in English, it’s hard to say because everything we read has already been published and, therefore, “recognized.” The one English-language author I keep coming back to is Alan Hollinghurst, for the stories but also for the beauty of the writing. As for Finnish authors, who to my knowledge haven’t been published in English translation but certainly should be, there are many, but I would particularly mention Riitta Jalonen, whose recent novel Clarity is a touching, semi-fictionalized account of the life and career of New Zealand author Janet Frame, and Sirpa Kähkönen, whose novels, notably her Kuopio series, explore aspects of Finnish history and life in rural communities.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? Pajtim Statovci: I have many trusted readers, friends and colleagues, all of whom focus on different things while reading, which is helpful. Then, I listen carefully to everything my editors here in Finland, as well as abroad, especially in the United States and the U.K., have to say, as English is a language I understand and know, to some extent. I equally respect the opinions of my translators, especially David, who has done a fantastic job in bringing all of my books to life in the English language. He has this miraculous ability to capture the essence, the soul and spirit, my writing. I am very lucky to have him by my side.
David Hackston: At least for me, this is generally the copy editor. They are able to read the very first draft of a translation, often still full of question marks and chunks of the original text, and to look beyond the roughness and see the novel itself as it emerges through the translation process.
10. What’s the best piece of creative advice you’ve ever heard? Pajtim Statovci: “Creativity is tolerating continuous incompleteness.”
David Hackston: Often it’s the comments said in passing that can end up being the most important. I remember studying Finnish in London sometime around 1998, and my late Finnish teacher, Hannele Branch, saying after a short translation exercise, “Have you ever thought about becoming a translator?” At the time, I hadn’t ever thought about it, but now, twenty-plus years later, this feels like a significant moment.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Sirpa Kähkönen’s Kuopio books were a trilogy. They are a series.
Pajtim Statovci and David Hackston, the author and the translator of Bolla. (Credit: Statovci: Anna Kurki; Hackston: Ville Kuukka)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Clare Sestanovich, whose debut story collection, Objects of Desire, is out today from Knopf. The eleven stories that make up Objects of Desires are filled with subtle yet significant gestures. A boyfriend “close to getting angry” goes to lie down and faces the wall; a mother falls asleep in her daughter’s bed after she leaves for college; a husband pauses to mark his place in the book he is reading when his wife asks for a divorce. Throughout the collection, Sestanovich remains this attuned to the often precarious dynamics between her characters. She reveals how friends, family, and lovers perform or fail to perform for one another—how there will always be mystery, miscommunication, and strangeness even in the most intimate of relationships. “Astonishing—one of the best story collections I’ve read in a long time,” writes Brandon Taylor. “The stories in Objects of Desire are subtle and sophisticated, written with sensitive lucidity and warmth; their emotional effects are brought about naturally, almost indirectly, and one leaves each of the stories feeling a little homesick.” Clare Sestanovich is an editor at the New Yorker. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Harper’s, and Electric Literature. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Objects of Desire? The oldest story in this collection is five years old, and when I wrote it, I had no idea that I was writing a book. It took another year or so for me to realize, and even then, I didn’t quite believe it. I never referred to “my book.” Other people sometimes called it that, which was surprising and flattering and a little preposterous. It was just a lot of words on my computer! But up until the very last minute, that’s all a book ever is. The newest story was written a year ago, at the height of the pandemic, when I thought the collection was already finished. Which is all to say: The book often knows more, and knows better, than you do.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? In the early months of writing the book, I turned down a job, because it was a job that I suspected would give me meaning and purpose, and I was afraid that if I took it I would use it as an excuse to abandon writing—a vaster but far less stable source of meaning and purpose. I don’t think this was an especially brave decision—had I not found another way to make money, it could simply have been arrogant and unwise—but it was a difficult one, and I lost a lot of sleep over it. The agonizing helped, though. I put my eggs in this basket, this book, and after that, I had to do whatever I could to find out what would hatch.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? That hardest part was that every day I had to decide—again—to keep writing it.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write early every morning. This isn’t really a preference, or a principle, it just happens to be the only schedule that I can follow while also doing my day job. I regret that early risers seem virtuous and night owls seem cool. I would much rather be cool!
5. What are you reading right now? I just finished A Shock by Keith Ridgway and started Erasure by Percival Everett.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Mary Robison is funny and unafraid and knows how to break your heart in two sentences. Why aren’t we all talking about her?
7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? I wish there were more paths to being in it. Communities so often just mean institutions. And getting inside one institution usually requires passing through another, which in turn requires pushing open the door at yet another. I hope we can remap the labyrinth, because too many people get lost in it.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Objects of Desire, what would you say? I wouldn’t tell her that it was going to work out. The negative capability that is required to write without certainty but with conviction is surely the most important skill you can acquire. I haven’t yet, but every day that I lose and find my faith—in myself, in my prose—feels like one step closer to relinquishing the need to believe in anything other than the process.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? For a long time my writing felt a little bit like a secret. I wasn’t hiding it on purpose, but other people only ever glimpsed it in bits and pieces, and most of them never saw it all. My agent, Bill, was the first person who ever saw the whole thing, and it’s true what they say about being seen: It makes all the difference. I imprinted on Bill the way ducklings do. You know you trust a reader when they tell you to cut your first sentence or your last sentence—those sacred darlings!—and your only reaction is, of course.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? My greatest menace as a writer is self-doubt, which is why I return so often to the advice that Martha Graham gave to Agnes de Mille: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open…. No artist is pleased…. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
Clare Sestanovich, author of Objects of Desire. (Credit: Edward Friedman)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Mariana Oliver and Julia Sanches, the author and the translator of the essay collection Migratory Birds, which is out today from Transit Books. In Migratory Birds, Oliver writes about historical episodes—and the experiences of various figures—as if they are personal memories. In the opening of “Normandy,” for instance, she transports readers to 1944 as “amphibious vessels slid out of the water like sea monsters and shook themselves dry” during the liberation of France. Meanwhile, in the title essay, she steps into the point of view of naturalist and ultralight aviation pioneer Bill Lishman, who helped guide endangered migratory birds: “It was like his body had multiplied. As he flew among the birds, Bill became one too.” Weaving vignettes from her own life alongside those from history, Oliver offers revelatory and poetic insights about migration, memory, and home. Mariana Oliver was born in Mexico City in 1986. She received a master’s degree in comparative literature from the National Autonomous University of México and is currently a PhD candidate in modern literature at the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City. Julia Sanches is a translator of Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. She has translated works by Susana Moreira Marques, Claudia Hernández, Daniel Galera, and Eva Baltasar, among others.
1. How long did it take you to complete work on Migratory Birds? Mariana Oliver: I wrote Aves migratorias in the span of two years, from 2013 to 2015, thanks to a grant I received from the Fundación para las Letras Mexicanas.
Julia Sanches: I translated the titular essay several years ago, and “Özdamar’s Tongue” a couple of years after that, during the pandemic. But the whole book took me less than a month to translate. By then I’d become familiar with Mariana’s voice and style, which can only have helped the fast turnaround.
2. What was the most challenging thing about the project? Mariana Oliver: When I started writing the essays in Aves my writing experience was exclusively academic, so I felt insecure about my work.
Since I didn’t have a concrete project to work toward, much less any idea of how to plan a book, I began to write about issues that were on my mind at the time: home, migration, belonging, how memory is shaped, adopted languages. I had come back from a short stint in Germany a couple of months before.
From a distance, I started seeing a unifying thread; the questions posed in the book were all connected and addressed the same line of inquiry.
Julia Sanches: I struggle with brevity in my own writing, and Mariana’s style is so spare and directed that I found myself constantly striving to whittle sentences down to the bare minimum without compromising the voice, tone, and sense. I also spent a lot of time refining the opening paragraph of each essay, where Mariana sets the scene. For example in “Normandy,” where she describes the landings in a way that is almost aquatic, and “The Other Lost Boys and Girls,” in which she paints the ocean in a frightening, powerful light.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? Where, when, and how often do you translate? Mariana Oliver: I’m about to begin the last year of my PhD program, so I dedicate almost every day to writing my thesis. At the same time I’m compiling research for a new book. I make a point to add notes to my working draft at least once a week.
At home I have a small office space to myself, facing a window, but if I didn’t have to be at home, I’m sure I’d be writing in other places: at the university library or a café. While writing Aves, I rode the Mexico City metro almost every day, so I also ended up working on a lot of the essays there.
That said, I’ve realized that when I’m working on a piece of writing, I think about it around the clock, so I end up solving a lot of the questions raised in the process of writing while I’m doing something else: walking, washing the dishes, or cooking.
Julia Sanches: In the Before Times, I did most of my translating at a coworking space in downtown Providence in a bid to achieve work-life balance. Now I translate all over my house: I tend to start in my office, where I have an ergonomic, two-screen set-up, and migrate to the sofa after lunch. Sometimes I work on my feet at the kitchen island. Now that it’s summer and my new apartment has a porch, I often end up translating there, where I take the occasional break to feed a menagerie of our neighborhood’s characterful stray cats. Like Mariana, though, when I’m working on a project I don’t ever really stop thinking about that project. I carry around a small notebook where I write down words that I hear in movies and television or from people around me, as well as those I read in books, so that I make sure not to forget them.
4. What are you reading right now? Mariana Oliver: I’m reading a book with a beautiful title: Esta herida llena de peces by Lorena Salazar, published by Angosta Editores. I’m also reading a book of essays by George Steiner called Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution.
Julia Sanches: My attention span has suffered enormously during the pandemic, so I’ve been reading several different books very slowly: Live; Live; Live by Jonathan Buckley, a soothing and beautifully written book about the relationship between a young man and his neighbor, a clairvoyant called Lucas; Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes, which I’m reading as research for a book I am currently translating that features a good deal of colorful cursing from its potty-mouthed ten-year old protagonist, her best friend, and her best friend’s grandmother, Chela. I’m also reading Divya Victor’s Curb, because I’ve vowed to read more poetry, and Sinéad Gleeson’s Constellations.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Mariana Oliver: There are two Mexican essayists who deserve to be read more widely. One is Marina Azahua, whose writing is sensitive and brilliant. She’s published two books: Treinta ensayos mínimos ante el vacío and Retrato involuntario. El acto fotográfico como forma de violencia. The other essayist is Marisol García Walls, who has an eye for detail and contrast. Later this year her book Atlas de rasgos familiares will be published by the Colombian press Tragaluz.
Julia Sanches: My boring answer is that there are too many to name, if you consider the miniscule number of writers from other countries, especially those writing in non-European languages, that ever find their way into English.
6. What is one thing you might change about the literary community or publishing industry? Mariana Oliver: In Mexico, without a question, I would change the gender disparity. Men continue to be published more than women. They have more public appearances and are invited to take part in more panels and juries.
Julia Sanches: Hire more immigrants.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? Mariana Oliver: When I started writing these essays, a friend of mine told me to use fewer parenthetical clauses because it interrupted the flow of the text. Now, whenever I write, I pay careful attention to this and read aloud to make sure the flow isn’t being interrupted in any way. Ever since then I’ve listened to my writing.
For the English edition, Julia and our editor, Adam Levy, suggested a series of subtle but important changes to a couple of the essays; for example, eliminating statements that from a distance felt out of context. Throughout this process, I had to take a step back from the book and ask myself what aspects of the text no longer spoke to my current thinking and how the context in which I’d written had changed. The experience is similar to when you look at an old photograph of yourself: You recognize certain traits and, at the same time, others seem foreign to you.
Julia Sanches: I remember that Adam complimented a comma placement in the penultimate essay, and it made me smile.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your creative life? Mariana Oliver: I need to finish my PhD and research, which doesn’t leave much mental space to do other things. Even though at the moment it feels like an impediment, I know that won’t be the case in the long run, because all of the ideas and questions being raised now will eventually find their way into my writing.
Julia Sanches: Making enough money to survive as a literary translator in the United States is…no small challenge. Trying to find ways to fix everything that is broken in the publishing industry also takes up more of my time and energy than I would like it to. All of which gets in the way of my creative life.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? Mariana Oliver: My friends, my sister. Not only because I often hear their voices when I’m writing, but because they’ve always been the first to read and workshop my work.
Julia Sanches: My fellow translators, who are always fielding questions from me, and all the wonderful editors I’ve had the opportunity to work with.
10. What’s the best piece of creative advice you’ve ever heard? Mariana Oliver: Once the poet Dolores Castro told me that words were like doves: You have to feed them every day or they won’t keep coming. Leila Guerriero said something similar in an essay called “Writing”: “You have to knead the bread. You have to knead the bread with energy, indifference, rage, ambition, while you’re thinking of something else. You have to knead the bread when it’s cold and when it’s the middle of summer, when the sun is out, when it’s humid, when the rain is freezing. You have to knead the bread when you can’t be bothered to knead the bread.”
Julia Sanches: I learned from my colleague Charlotte Whittle to always pay attention to how sentences end. You never want them to fizzle, unless the fizzle is the point.
Editor’s Note: Mariana Oliver’s answers appear in translation from the Spanish by Julia Sanches.
Mariana Oliver and Julia Sanches, the author and the translator of Migratory Birds. (Credit: Sanches: Dagan Farancz)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Krys Malcolm Belc, whose debut, The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood, is out today from Counterpoint. In The Natural Mother of the Child, Belc weaves back and forth in time to tell the story of his life as a nonbinary, transmasculine person and parent. He focuses particularly on his experience carrying and birthing his son Samson: “Queer people had children,” he writes, “but I almost never saw pregnant people like me.” Raising Samson and his other two children alongside his partner, Anna, Belc finds clarity about his gender and past. He also speaks candidly to the inevitable moments of shame, jealousy, and anger that populate a life, including those particular to life as a parent. Accompanied by ultrasound images, family photos, and other documents, The Natural Mother of the Child is an intimate and inventive text about transness, family, and caregiving. Krys Malcolm Belc is also the author of the flash nonfiction chapbook In Transit (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2018). His work can be found in Black Warrior Review, Granta, and the Rumpus, among other publications. He holds a BA from Swarthmore College, an MEd in special education from Arcadia University, and an MFA from Northern Michigan University. Belc lives in Philadelphia.
1. How long did it take you to write The Natural Mother of the Child? About two and a half years of really focused work to have a solid draft. I wrote the majority of it in an MFA program that I started just a few months after my third kid was born. I went to school for fiction and this book happened instead. The book sold soon after I started working as an educator in a pediatric oncology clinic, and so I was editing it while learning so much about cancer and its impact on patients’ school functioning. Instead of feeling like my book was frivolous or navel-gazing, I found great solace and gratitude in getting this story right and in getting to think deeply about myself again at the end of a long day.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? It’s very hard to maintain the clarity of sentences, moments, and scenes in writing that is ultimately about ambivalence and in-betweenness.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I don’t write more than once a week. Daily writing is just not a thing that leads to good art for me. Given how people talk about productivity and writing, it is hard to accept my own pace, but I’m getting there. I can’t do anything in twenty minutes or even an hour. The idea of a daily word count horrifies me. But every day I do try to write a little prompt in a document or notes app, so that I have a variety of possible starting points when I have time to sit down. Even just a phrase. Yesterday’s was “Strawberries, again.”
4. What are you reading right now? I am reading White Girls by Hilton Als and I am listening to Tana French’s The Likeness. On deck is Chase Burke’s chapbook Men You Don’t Know You Know.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Lori Ostlund’s debut short story collection, The Bigness of the World,absolutely changed my life. Not my writing, my life. When I encountered it I had recently moved to the Upper Midwest to give my writing life more dedication and intention, and her characters move in reverse, out of the Midwest. That book helped me to adjust to living in a place that I was unprepared, on the deepest level, to love, and in the end I did love it and still do. If you know, you know; a lot of queer writers in my life know and admire her work. Its emotional precision is unparalleled. Everyone should read it and her pitch-perfect novel, After the Parade.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? I wish we could do away with the idea that telling the story of a life in temporal order within the confines of a narrative arc is the “natural” way for memoir to be. It impedes my confidence and imagination, worrying what a market might make of what I create. I don’t want it to, but it does. These confines are a barrier to many marginalized stories even making it into the world. Life is messy and some of us want to corral it into a recognizable form, but others want to embrace the questions and fracturing and employ forms that are in the service of that messiness. If we’re going to ask me why my work is in the form it’s in, why don’t we ask every single memoirist that? All memoirists are making art out of time, and there isn’t one way.
7. What trait do you most value in your editor (or agent)? My agent, Ashley Lopez, has an absolutely incredible editorial eye. Her comments on my manuscript, when I finally had one, led to some of the best writing of my life, sections that are now some of my favorites in the book. She and my editor, Jenny Alton, did not try to morph my work into something it isn’t. It has an unusual form and many images, and they did what they needed to do to help me sharpen my vision and my sentences without telling me to have a different imagination than the one I have.
8. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I show my partner, Anna, everything I write that I think even has a spark of hope in it. My book has many sections of direct address to her because the most complex thoughts and feelings in my life sometimes only come into sharp focus when I imagine myself explaining them to her.
9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? Before I went to graduate school for writing, I read books because they were best-sellers, “classics,” in the Best Americanseries, and so on. Turns out, this isn’t because I have a small appetite for experimentation or a limited imagination. But how was I supposed to find books to read? I was an elementary school teacher living in a neighborhood with no independent bookstore—though we now have two, Harriett’s Bookshop and The Head & The Hand. I didn’t know writers would come hang out on Twitter. I had never seen a chapbook. There has to be a way to make sure that work that isn’t a blockbuster finds its way to people who don’t have the time to be full-time book sleuths. All kinds of readers deserve to find small press books. The deck is stacked against readers and writers who aren’t in academia finding brilliant books that bend and break boundaries.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Monica McFawn told me to think about my writing when I was doing other things and to “count” that as writing time. There’s a lot happening in my life now more than ever. Monica’s advice years ago was a gift that has allowed me to feel like I am truly a writer even though I must engage in paid work and care work during many of the hours and days I’d like to have time to make art.
Krys Malcolm Belc, author of The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood. (Credit: Mark Likosky)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Akwaeke Emezi, whose latest book, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir, is out today from Riverhead Books. In Dear Senthuran, Emezi tells their origin story through a series of letters. They reflect on enduring challenges—their struggle with depression, for instance—but also describe coming into their own power. In an early letter, they write, “We can, I promise you, bear much more than we predict.” And in the many letters that follow they chart those moments of perseverance: They undergo surgeries that bring a “shift from wrongness to alignment,” they fend off predatory men who seek to leech off their literary talent and celebrity, and they survive heartbreak. This is a searing and intimate memoir about choosing to live despite the many sacrifices and pains of living. Akwaeke Emezi is also the author of The Death of Vivek Oji, which was a New York Times best-seller and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and Freshwater, which was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Their novel for young adults, Pet, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.
1. How long did it take you to write Dear Senthuran? I started writing Dear Senthuran sometime in 2019, but I was in the middle of rolling out Pet, so it wasn’t until that fall that I really sat down to finish it. That time was very much a blur—a lot of the traumatic things I wrote about in the memoir had just happened, so the exact timeline escapes me, but we submitted the manuscript to my editor in January 2020.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? There’s a moment I write about in the memoir, about e-mailing Senthuran Varatharajah, who helped translate Freshwater into German, and how I liked the sound of his name with a dear before it. Composing those e-mails would be the earliest memory tied to the book.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Holding my center. It was hard enough to do while writing, worrying that it wouldn’t be received well, but it was also incredibly difficult to go through the editing process because it felt like my fear that centering a work in Black spirit would come with violent repercussions was proven right. Having to insist on that center and refuse, over and over again, to compromise the work in service of a white gaze was one of the most brutal experiences of my career.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? I no longer have any kind of regularity or structure around my writing, unfortunately. I get it in where I can fit it in. I do have to write in my office because my health issues mandate that I now work in an ergonomic setup—farewell to my laptop—but occasionally I write on my phone in bed at night and hope it doesn’t decimate my body too much.
5. What are you reading right now? I’m about to catch up on two of Zen Cho’s books, Black Water Sister and The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, which I’m really excited about because she’s one of my favorite writers. I will read anything she publishes.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Definitely Chinelo Okparanta. We have so many writers working in queer Nigerian literature now, including myself, but she was the vanguard, and the work she did to open the road for us should be recognized. Her craft is brilliant, and she has an incisive intelligence that I’m excited for even more people to engage with once her next novel, Harry Sylvester Bird, comes out in 2022. It’s a satire of white liberalism, so I think it’s going to ruffle a few feathers, which should be delightful to witness. Chinelo is also an amazing member of the literary community—she’s taught at multiple workshops, advocated tirelessly for young queer Nigerian writers whose lives were quite literally at risk back home, and donated so much of her time to judging awards. I think how you move with your platform as an author is as important as the work you make.
7. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Dear Senthuran? I learned to respect myself as a thinker. I used to believe that because I wasn’t in academia, I wasn’t qualified to engage with theory, but now I understand how much I am a spirit, not a scholar, and how working in Black spirit theory is my pocket.
8. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? I don’t think I’ll miss anything. After I completed the book last January, I wrote three more books in 2020 and I’m working on another book now, so I’m always in a writing process that has its own particular joy.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? It’s never one particular person. With my manuscripts, I have a community of trusted readers, and they each bring something specific to the table, informed by what their centers are. They are people I think with and write with, so for me, making work is really a community effort.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Octavia Butler said it wonderfully: “First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.”
Akwaeke Emezi, author of Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir. (Credit: Kathleen Bomani)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jack Wang, whose debut story collection, We Two Alone, will be published next week by HarperVia. Through the seven stories that make up We Two Alone, Wang offers a window into the complexity and diversity of experiences in the Chinese diaspora over the past century. In the title story, a struggling actor and founder of an Asian American Shakespeare company in New York City wrestles with dissatisfaction and heartache. In “The Valkyries,” set in early-twentieth-century Vancouver, a young Chinese boy is turned away from a men’s hockey team and so disguises himself in order to play alongside women. With other stories set in Nazi-occupied Vienna and Apartheid-era South Africa, We Two Alone is an ambitious collection that is richly imagined at every turn. “These stories are so elegantly shaped, so satisfying as individual stories, that their collective power sneaks up on you,” writes Emily Fridlund. We Two Alone was first published last year by House of Anansi Press in Canada. Wang’s writing can also be found in the Humber Literary Review, Joyland, the Malahat Review, the New Quarterly, and Prism International. He holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and a PhD from Florida State University. He lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches at Ithaca College.
1. How long did it take you to write We Two Alone? About eight years, going back and forth between projects. My Canadian editor asked me to add a story to the collection after the book sold, so that extended the process.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? I started working on these stories after putting a novel in the proverbial drawer. I remember the freedom of getting to invent something new after grinding away at the same story for so many years. I also remember the pleasure of working on something short and crossing the finish line quickly, even if the collection itself took a while to complete.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? As I mentioned, when I started these stories, I’d just retired a novel. This novel was read by a few publishers, but in the end there were no takers. So, after writing for many years and coming close to debuting, I suddenly found myself back at square one. That was probably the hardest thing, being almost forty, with young kids, and staring up again from the bottom of the mountain. But I found a way.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? A few years ago my wife and I renovated the second floor of our house in Ithaca, New York, and we turned the master closet into an office so that I wouldn’t have to write in the bedroom. It’s a windowless room that would probably crush the spirit of most writers, but it’s mine, and I love it. When I’m in the middle of a project, as I am now—I’m working on a new novel—I write every morning.
5. What are you reading right now? Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen, which just came out in February. It’s a terrific collection of short stories about contemporary China and recent Chinese immigrants to the United States.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Gil Adamson. Gil is fairly well-known in Canada—her literary Western, Ridgerunner, won the 2020 Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize—but she should have a wider following in the United States. She’s a good old-fashioned storyteller who writes lush, gorgeous prose.
7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? The only rejection I received that bothered me was from the editor who said they’d just published a Chinese American writer. I read about something similar in the New York Times article, “Just How White Is the Publishing Industry?” Apparently someone at a major house was reluctant to make an offer to a Black author because they’d already published a Black author. It’s high time editors stopped thinking of BIPOC writers in terms of quotas.
8. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of We Two Alone? I did a lot of research for these stories. We Two Alone is set on five continents and spans nearly a century. I’m familiar with places like Vancouver, Shanghai, London, and New York City, where some of these stories are set, but many of the times, places, and events I was writing about—women’s hockey in Western Canada in the 1920s, the Second Sino-Japanese War, Kristallnacht, Apartheid—were less known to me. So I read a lot of books, everything from obscure diplomatic and scientific memoirs to dissertations in the British Library.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My wife, Angelina Mirabella, is a novelist. She’s always my first and best reader, even—or maybe especially—when the things she tells me aren’t easy to hear.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Isak Dinesen said, “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” The trick is to cultivate that Zen, to not get too high or too low. You’re neither the genius nor the failure you think you are.
Corrections: A previous version of this article misstated the title of the book and misattributed the blurb that appears in the introduction.
Jack Wang, author of We Two Alone. (Credit: Mike Grippi)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Monica West, whose debut novel, Revival Season, is out today from Simon & Schuster. Miriam Horton is the daughter of a Black Baptist preacher known for leading packed revivals—gatherings to inspire religious conversion—across the American South every summer. She is devoted to her father, in awe, especially, of his apparent miraculous power to heal the sick and injured at the end of each service. But after witnessing her father lose control and act out in violence, on more than one occasion, she begins to question him and all his teachings. Meanwhile, she discovers her own healing power and increasingly chafes at her exclusion from the ministry as a young woman. Revival Season is a sweeping novel about the pains of disillusionment and finding the courage to speak one’s truth. “Compact, suspenseful, and written with incredible elegance, Revival Season is a highly rewarding, utterly original read—one of my favorite debuts of the year,” writes Jami Attenberg. Monica West is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow. She received her BA from Duke University and her MA from New York University. She has also earned a fellowship from Kimbilio and a residency from Hedgebrook. Born and raised in Cleveland, she lives in Oakland.
1. How long did it take you to write Revival Season? Nine years total. It took three years to research it and complete a first draft. During the next six years—including two in Iowa—I rewrote, revised, and edited it more times than I can count.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The most challenging aspect of writing this book was the process of holding multiple different novel threads in my brain simultaneously. There were so many characters, dates, timelines, plotlines, geographies, character arcs, flashbacks, and backstories that I had to be aware of in order to refer to them in a consistent way throughout. And then I made that task even harder for myself because I didn’t physically outline it until really late in the process.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write every day from my living room. I know that a lot of people can’t work at home, but I get distracted by other people when I’m in coffee shops or other public spaces. My writing hours are different depending upon other daily responsibilities—teaching, meetings, and so on—but I like to start in the morning around 10 AM. I set out to write one thousand words each day on my nonteaching days and five hundred words on my teaching days. I don’t have a set number of hours that I work each day, but I don’t let myself stop until I complete my goal. Sometimes that goal takes three hours to complete, but other times it takes ten.
4. What are you reading right now? Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Several readers have compared Revival Season to it, and though I’ve read many of her other books and short stories, I’ve never read this one. So now seems like a great time to read it.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I loved Lesley Nneka Arimah’s What Happens When a Man Falls From the Sky. I read the story “Who Will Greet You at Home” when it was first published in the New Yorker, and when the entire collection came out I devoured it. I adore her strong characters and the lushness of her worlds.
6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? Getting my MFA was one of the best decisions of my life, primarily because it gave me the time and space to write the novel. I had never made writing a priority before because work got in the way, so an MFA was ideal for that reason. It also gave me an amazing community of other writers who not only workshopped my fiction but also became great friends. Even though an MFA was exactly right for me, the programs are not for everyone. Pursuing an MFA is a highly personal decision, and each writer should figure out what makes sense for them and what they need. After evaluating all of that information, they should decide if an MFA is worth the time and potential expense.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? My editor told me from the beginning that “everything is a conversation.” It put me at ease to know that if we had a disagreement about something editorial, we could talk about it. I used to think that the editorial process was that the editor told you what to fix and you had to fix it; Carina disabused me of that notion in our first conversation. Though I agreed with her about almost all of the edits, we had conversations about other ones that were truly dialogues.
8. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? I will miss these characters living in my head, miss the way that I kept thinking about how they interacted with each other or what they would say to each other. They have been with me for years, so even though I’m glad that I’ve finished writing the novel and have written the entire story that I intended to in the book, I will miss them dwelling with me every day.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? Margot Livesey is a sharp, precise reader who gets right at the heart of what’s working and what needs work in my fiction. She is also generous with her time and her feedback. She gave me some great advice about the book early on, and I trust her judgment about my writing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? “Write what you can.” Paul Harding gave me this advice after I had received a ton of feedback on the first draft of Revival Season during my first semester at Iowa. I didn’t know how I would start revising based on everything I’d just heard in workshop. Paul’s advice gave me the permission to start with what I knew I could do. Maybe I couldn’t figure out the ending yet, but I knew that I could write a specific scene, even if it was out of order. That advice got me through every revision.
Monica West, author of Revival Season. (Credit: Chickpea Photography)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brian Broome, whose debut memoir, Punch Me Up to the Gods, is out today from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Broome begins his story at a bus stop in Pennsylvania, where he watches a young Black boy fall on the pavement, only to have his tears admonished by his father. “I realize that this, what I am witnessing, is the playing out of one of the very conditions that have dogged my entire existence: this ‘being a man’ to the exclusion of all other things,” he writes. Traveling back and forth in time, Broome retraces his own journey as a Black gay man, detailing the violence and alienation he weathered as a child in small-town Ohio, the racism and homophobia that followed him into adulthood, and the unexpected moments of hope and tenderness throughout his life. He pays tribute to those who helped him survive, while also striking out entirely on his own, seeking an understanding of Blackness and masculinity free of limits. “Punch Me Up to the Gods obliterates what we thought were the limitations of not just the American memoir, but the possibilities of the American paragraph,” writes Kiese Laymon. Brian Broome is also a poet and screenwriter. He is pursuing an MFA at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is a K. Leroy Irvis Fellow. He has been a finalist in the Moth storytelling competition and won a Martin Luther King Jr. Day Writing Award from Carnegie Mellon University.
1. How long did it take you to write Punch Me Up to the Gods? I actually started writing it eight years ago in rehab. Although, at the time, I didn’t know I was writing a book. I was just sitting in rehab writing about why I thought I ended up in rehab. But I think the official writing of a book happened when I met my agent, Danielle Chiotti, at a public reading where I performed. She asked me what I was writing and I told her that I had a few autobiographical pieces. I sent them to her. Danielle saw a cohesive book in my work that I couldn’t see at first. We worked together on connecting it all into a whole manuscript, starting in February 2018, and Danielle sent it out on submission in October 2019.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? I had to think a great deal about the people I might damage by telling these stories. Those who are still alive, I mean. I often wondered if there would be backlash or anger. But I decided to be a servant to the story. Also, in writing about painful times from the past, I tried to put myself in the emotional state that I was in at that time. That was difficult. There were times when I was writing it that I actually felt like getting high because the feelings of worthlessness became so real.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write in my house. I’m not the kind of writer who can write in public places. I wish I were. I have an office downstairs that I’ve set up just the way I like it. The garden just behind me. I’ve painted it orange and green and I go down there during the day to do non-writing-related work. I only write at night. I turn all the lights off and sit in the dark. I find it works best because I can shut everything out. It gets really dark in my office at night. I don’t write often enough. I make up my mind to do it, give myself pep talks, and then I talk myself out of it. Eventually, the words start to feel like they’re punching my skull from the inside and I just sit down and begin.
4. What are you reading right now? My students’ essays. Honestly, school is taking a lot of my time right now and it’s particularly challenging when it’s online. I’m enjoying reading my students’ work, but I’d love to have nothing on my plate for a few days and just sit out back in the garden and read a book. That’s a luxury. Right now there’s a big pile. On top is Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, and I want to reread Flowers in the Attic by V. C. Andrews. Sometimes I’m sure I’m going to end up like Henry Bemis in that episode of The Twilight Zone. The one where all he wants to do is read and the whole world has to come to an end before he finally gets enough time. Then he breaks his only pair of reading glasses.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Reginald McKnight. His books The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas and White Boys really made me want to write more. He’s mastered the short story, in my opinion. I don’t really know how widely recognized his work is. But I know I don’t really hear his name mentioned a lot.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Me. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s really difficult to get going. There are some writers who love it and can’t wait to sit down and start pecking away. I often wonder what their secret is. As I mentioned earlier, I will avoid writing as long as I can until an idea starts ricocheting off the walls inside my head and I have to get it out. Once I sit down it’s never as terrible an experience as I thought it was going to be. But the next day I’m back at square one.
7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? I actually learned a lot and the experience itself is one I’ll never forget. The community it provides is valuable. I spent a long time writing in a vacuum and I’ve learned that this is not how you get to your best work. It also taught me a lot about the business of writing, which is important. I learned a great deal on a craft level as well. And I have very much enjoyed teaching writing. I truly believe that’s what I’m meant to do. It brings me more joy than any job I’ve ever done. Far too many people my age seem to believe they don’t have anything to learn from the young. Nothing could be further from the truth. I learn a great deal from my students.
8. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? Both my agent, Danielle, and my editor, Rakia Clark, were incredibly supportive throughout this process. I did a lot of handwringing about what other writers or people who read my work were going to think of me and my writing. I remember sitting at the Bureau Coffee shop and Danielle telling me to stop worrying about what other people think and just to write. After she said that, she shrugged her shoulders and went back to drinking her coffee. That shoulder shrug said a lot. It said that there will always be people who hate your work, and you have to decide how much energy you’re going to give them. That was a valuable shoulder shrug because I had been laboring under the delusion that revision was tantamount to failure. Both my agent and my editor taught me that a draft is a draft and not to be afraid to make mistakes or hit the wrong note.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? Right now it’s just Rakia and Danielle. It’s best to keep that pool of people small, I think. Too many cooks and whatnot.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Make it a routine. Do it every day at the same time and don’t ever deviate. Be consistent. This is the best writing advice I’ve ever heard and, someday, I may even follow it.
Brian Broome, author of Punch Me Up to the Gods. (Credit: Andy Johanson)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features E. C. Osondu, whose second story collection, Alien Stories, is out today from BOA Editions. In Alien Stories, Osondu transports readers into landscapes that feel at once futuristic and all too familiar. “Memory Store” imagines a world in which people can exchange their memories for money. In “Feast,” a community gathers to celebrate the hanging of an alien. Osondu takes these dark premises and inflects them with wit and irony. In doing so, he elucidates both the pain and power of immigrants and people of color, of any person or extraterrestrial who has been othered. E. C. Osondu is also the author of the story collection Voice of America (Harper, 2010) and the novel This House Is Not for Sale (Harper, 2015). His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Atlantic, Guernica, Kenyon Review, Lapham’s Quarterly, McSweeney’s, and Zyzzyva. He is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing and the Allen and Nirelle Glaso Prize for Fiction, among other awards. A graduate of the MFA program at Syracuse University, he lives in Rhode Island and teaches at Providence College.
1. How long did it take you to write Alien Stories? About a year and a half. Some of the stories were from way back, but the bulk of the stories were written within the space of a year and a half.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? It was all fun and games until I realized that I was actually writing a book. Before that I was just writing short stories as they came to me. When I realized that this could well be shaping up into a book, I figured that it needed an organizing principle or some kind of scaffolding but should not run the risk of being formulaic. I had also given myself the task of never writing any story that reads even remotely like a story from my previous collection. One of the greatest things about the legendary Afrobeat musical maestro Fela Kuti was his insistence on never performing any of his songs again once they have been released as an album. So as you can see I was meandering and juggling around a bunch of tall orders.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? To be completely honest, I am always not not writing. For me writing is much more than the proverbial putting pen to paper. I am always in a writing mode, so to speak. Writing mode might include reading a book, a magazine, author interviews, profiles, short stories in online magazines, and so on.
In my past life or once upon a time long ago, I was an advertising copywriter and one of the things that was often repeated in the agency was the need for creatives to always be in a creative mode. It was said that when one is in a creative mode, two flies perched on a windowsill could inspire a great copy idea for a TV commercial.
When I am reading widely and in creative mode, I find that the writing itself comes in short feverish bursts of blooming, satisfying creativity.
4. What are you reading right now? Map: Collected and Last Poems by Wisława Szymborska—I find poetry to be a great palate cleanser.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Most, if not all, African writers deserve more space. Right now the literary table reserves one seat for African writing. It is an approach that I call “the one bright morning star” approach. This simply means that only one African writer can be acclaimed and read and celebrated and venerated and even canonized, at a time. There seems to be more space for others than African writers. Look at the generation of writers in Britain referred to as the Angry Young Men, or the generation of British writers that produced Amis, McEwan, Rushdie, Ishiguro, Timothy Mo, and even nominally Hitchens. Or the Language Poets. Or the New York School made up of Ashbery, Guest, O’Hara, Brainard. You see the plurality? As I had cause to say in a different context—we are legion. You know, there is an African proverb that sums up all I have been trying to articulate ever more succinctly: The sky is wide and spacious enough for every bird to fly without crashing into each other or knocking the other down.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? James Baldwin once said, in his inimitable way, “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.” I find that both impulses come from two totally different places. The task is to find the secret to being both.
7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? Many more writers deserve to be published. Publishing appears to grow more risk-averse by the year.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Alien Stories, what would you say? Writing a book is like having a wild and vivid and amazing dream, but while in the dream a part of you is second-guessing and asking yourself, When I wake up and tell people of this dream are they even going to believe that I had a dream this magical? So I would say to myself, Someone is going to believe in my dream no matter how outlandish. Just keep plucking that chicken, as someone once said.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I often share story ideas with friends and family even before I write them. I would usually start with “What if?” and then watch their faces.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? I will mention two. The first is to lean on your strengths as a writer instead of focusing on your weaknesses. I believe I first heard this from George Saunders at Syracuse. I am not certain, but it does certainly sound Saundersesque. I have run with it since then.
The other is from something the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer once said to someone I know but in a totally different context. He said when you are walking towards the Great Sphinx of Giza from behind, it looks like a random collection of stones, but if you approach it from the right direction, you realize it is a great work of art. If your writing is looking like a random collection of stones, at any moment, it may be because you are approaching that particular piece from the wrong angle.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Donika Kelly, whose second poetry collection, The Renunciations, is out today from Graywolf Press. Throughout The Renunciations, Kelly often invokes the monumental—deities, the oceans, continental drift theory—but she always returns to the individual. In one poem, she writes, “I am neither land nor timber, nor are you / ocean or celestial body. Rather, / we are the small animals we’ve always been.” Yet it is through bold metaphor—her understanding of memories and the body as landscapes—that Kelly finds insight. She retraces experiences of abuse as a child and divorce as an adult, but also travels beyond these wounds and builds into a new world, rich in possibility, with each poem. “I can’t imagine a time before having The Renunciations as a part of my emotional ecosystem and poetic landscape,” writes francine j. harris. Donika Kelly is also the author of Bestiary (Graywolf Press, 2016), which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Foglifter, and the Paris Review. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Lannan Foundation, she lives in Iowa City and teaches at the University of Iowa.
1. How long did it take you to write The Renunciations? I wrote the poems in The Renunciations over the course of about five years or so. The oldest poems are from 2013 and the most recent were written in 2018. I started to gather these poems into what would become the book in 2017, when I realized that the poems were in conversation with each other and were a part of a larger project.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The biggest challenge to writing the book was living through the events I write about and finding some peace on the other side. Each poem in this collection was a step toward that peace: the other side of divorce, the other side of having survived childhood sexual abuse. Once the poems were written, then came the fun part of figuring out how they fit together.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write when I feel that I have something to say, which in real life means I write about two to three times a year in one- to two-week stretches. I set a pretty low bar for myself by committing to write twenty minutes a day, and I usually begin with a series of questions meant to lead me closer to myself. I write best at night, between 10 PM and 1 AM, which isn’t feasible for me during the semester.
4. What are you reading right now? I’ve had a really tremendous year of reading. Poetry collections I have enjoyed recently are Taylor Johnson’s Inheritance and Dujie Tahat’s Salat. Both collections are a query into what we carry in our bodies, as prayers, as love, and what we mean to hold onto.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I’m going to answer this a little askance and make a small claim for reading entire poetry collections, as the poet orders the book. The book that convinced me of this practice, that brought me not only into the world of a poem but the whole of book, was Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia. The way the two primary sections resonate against and with each other to build the portrait of the speaker is expert and stunning.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Life stress and anxiety get in the way of my writing. I need a quiet mind to write, and the travails of being alive can get quite loud.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? My editor, Jeff Shotts, is a patient man. We had many conversations about how to create more white space between sections. Initially I resisted even the thought of sections, but over the course of a year I came around to the kindness and generosity of giving the reader space to process all the book holds.
8. How did you know when the book was finished? Late in the process, one of the “Now” sections was giving me background trouble—nothing was wrong with it, but it also wasn’t correct. My dear friend Ama Codjoe suggested reordering the poems in the section. Again I was resistant, but I came around more quickly, and then the manuscript felt complete.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I have a trusted network of readers, Ama Codjoe, Ladan Osman, and my beloved, Melissa Febos, because I need the volume of more than one trusted reader to hear suggestions over my own investment in being right. They are such incisive, compassionate, close readers, and I trust their sense of my work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? In Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook, she writes about the importance of imitation, which I understand to be a skill-building exercise, a way to apprehend a technique. It’s been a vital practice for me because I haven’t always had, intuitively, the techniques I’ve needed to write a given poem.
Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations. (Credit: Ladan Osman)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kelli Russell Agodon, whose latest poetry collection, Dialogues with Rising Tides, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. From the first line of Dialogues with Rising Tides, Agodon is transparent about hardship, yet optimistic: “If we never have enough love,” she writes, “we have more than most.” Instead of seeking to outpace anxiety and fear, she lingers with her most difficult emotions in order to better understand them. She wrestles with both personal and global traumas, setting poems about her family history of suicide alongside those addressing climate disaster. She does not promise recovery, but she does offer pockets of hope—moments of wit and humor that inflect the darkness. “This is the book I need right here, right now, as the fires burn and the tides rise,” writes Diane Seuss. Kelli Russell Agodon is a poet, writer, and editor from the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Hourglass Museum (White Pine Press, 2014). She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press and the codirector of Poets on the Coast, a writing retreat for women. She also teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
1. How long did it take you to write Dialogues with Rising Tides? I wrote “Braided Between the Broken” and “Love Waltz with Fireworks” in December 2013 and January 2014 respectively. At the time I didn’t realize I was beginning a new manuscript, but those two poems make up the right and left ventricles of the collection—one acknowledges a flawed self while the other tries to fall in love with a flawed world. I hadn’t realized I had started a new book until 2015 when I created the I-think-I-may-have-a-new-book-in-the-works folder called, uninterestingly enough, “Manuscript 4.” Dialogues with Rising Tides was accepted by Copper Canyon Press in March 2019 and I turned in my final version on Valentine’s Day 2020, so final answer: five to six years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Amusingly enough, I’d say trying to answer this question. Finding the best order for the poems is always a bit of a task, deciding whether to take a poem out or put one in can be a challenge, but mostly I so enjoy the process of creating a book that there isn’t one particular aspect that comes to mind. I guess if writing a book was a map, I’d say choosing which road to follow is probably the hardest part, as there are so many journeys I’d like to take.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I tend to be a seasonal writer—I write much more from September through May and easily kick into that school-year schedule. However, during the pandemic, fellow poets Martha Silano, Ronda Broatch, and I started what we now call “The Thursday Night Poetry Club,” where we show up with quirky writing exercises and write on Zoom from 5 to 7 PM.
I refer to them as “quirky writing exercises” because we add some curious elements, such as blocks of random words, unexpected questions—Does rain ever tumble into a lightbulb? Who plugs in the weather?—and maybe a few instructions: Describe a ghost’s fedora. We do three prompts for about eighteen to twenty minutes each and share our work.
I also did some collaborative writing with Melissa Studdard, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Dean Rader, and still have many online writing dates with my friend Susan Rich. They have all helped me get through the pandemic and continue writing poems.
As to where I write—I pulled the lawnmower out of our shed during the pandemic, added a desk and a chair, and turned it into my writing space. There were just too many people home during the pandemic and I was struggling to write with all that energy around me and so many dirty dishes in the house. Oddly, the dirty dishes were still there when I returned from my writing, but at least I wrote.
4. What are you reading right now? Besides e-mail? I love nonfiction and am reading Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain by Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler, which is a fascinating look at how the mind uses self-deception as a way to create happiness. Also: Night Angler, a stunning collection of poems on family and fatherhood by Geffrey Davis. When I read Davis’s poems I feel as if I am being held in a deep prayer—the writing is beautiful and meditative. It’s a book I keep returning to. I also recently realized some of my favorite poetry books are available as audiobooks, so I’m listening to Jericho Brown’s The Tradition, Paige Lewis’s Space Struck, as well as Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Sandra Yannone, January Gill O’Neil, and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha are three of my favorite poets and people whom I’d love to see get more attention for their work. But also, nonbinary, trans, and queer writers, as well as most women authors over the age of sixty and writers who have books from smaller indie publishers. I think there is always room in the literary community for more recognition. Poets tend be like meteor showers: They are acknowledged when they are seen, but many times, the world is looking in another direction and misses the show completely.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Besides sunny days, I would say my ability to put nonessential work before my writing. Also, snacking.
7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? As the newest faculty member of the Rainier Writing Workshop—Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program—and a graduate of the program myself, I’d love to give a big “yes” here.
For me, returning to school to get my MFA was life-changing, as it created the space and time I needed to write and taught me how to be an advocate for my writing life; it made me take my work more seriously. I still have that community and I look back on my days at PLU as some of the happiest times in my life. Our writing lives are such a personal choice—each person needs to determine what their writing life needs. Returning to graduate school made me a stronger poet and led to my book, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, which was my creative thesis at PLU. An MFA definitely gives writers the structure and accountability they may be lacking in their own lives.
8. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Dialogues with Rising Tides? Vintage photographs of lightships and lightvessels whose names became my section titles—Breaksea, Cross Rip, Overfalls, Black Deep, Shambles, Scarweather, and Relief—but also old maps, a misremembered quote from Zelda Fitzgerald, a line from an Anne Sexton poem, and a quote from Postcards From the Edge by Carrie Fisher. But I’d say the central form of work was the natural world—the sea and the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. Nature will always be the top source in my bibliography.
9. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? Anything and everything. When I’m working on a book, I’m in my happy place. But I also adore the “almost done” place. Right before I’m ready to turn in the final version, decisions feel big—what to leave in and take out, final word/image choices, and so on. There is this moment when my intuition comes into play. I’m very much a trust-my-gut person, and when I’m in this space, I have an inner knowing about what works. It’s like looking at the insides of a pocket watch and seeing all the parts moving, and while I may not understand how everything came together, I can see it’s ticking and complete. I miss that breathless moment of knowing it’s done and the confidence of that space, which I lose the moment the manuscript is out of my hands.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? The best advice I hold onto that works for both one’s writing life and daily life comes from drag queen Alyssa Edwards: Don’t get bitter, just get better. In regards to submitting one’s work, poet Elizabeth Austen said these wise words: Don’t say no for them. It’s their job to say no, not yours. Meaning: Don’t self-select yourself out of opportunities.
Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides. (Credit: Ronda Piszk Broatch)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Carey Salerno, whose second poetry collection, Tributary, is out today from Persea Books. Tributary is full of questions and rich contradictions. In an early poem, Salerno writes: “River, what are you? / River I drink from. River in which I drown.” Using the river as a guiding metaphor, she searches for a better understanding of family secrets, religion, whiteness, and other concerns. She palms her subjects like river stones, turning them over and over until they are both more familiar and unfamiliar. “In poem after poem, Salerno layers thought after thought onto the river until it overflows,” writes Victoria Chang. “Dexterous, relentless, and edifying, these are exploding and gorgeous poems of unapologetic rebellion.” Carey Salerno is also the author of Shelter (Alice James Books, 2009). The executive director and executive editor of Alice James Books, she coedited the anthology Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry From Alice James Books. She is a graduate of the MFA program at New England College and teaches at the University of Maine in Farmington.
1. How long did it take you to write Tributary? The first poems for Tributary came about, in earnest, around the fall of 2016. They crept onto the page while I was feeling blocked trying to wrap up a wholly different manuscript. There were just a few poems, but I remember feeling ready to follow where they were leading me. Their conversations were burrowing in my body, or perhaps stirring from their deep burrows! I guess that makes the collection almost five years in the making. It seems like it went by a lot more quickly than it did.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? Deep summer in rural Michigan, playing in the sun-scorched grass with my older sister. We were swinging from the swings my father hung for us, having drilled them into the nearly horizontal bough of, what seemed at the time, a pretty mighty oak tree. He’d later hung a deer, slashed open from neck to tail from another branch before us, but we still swung, making a game out of trying to clap our feet together on the other side of its body without touching it. It’s gruesome and red death-y thinking about it now, but at the time we didn’t see it that way at all. We just made a game of it.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? This is such a great question, and I don’t know that I have just one answer. Writing into these subjects was so opaque at first. I didn’t know where I would end up. I didn’t know what I was going to say—that was a challenge. I often worried what would come out would be scary, accusing, not close enough to the truth or too close. In terms of probing whiteness, patriarchy, religion, and other systems of violent power, I’m writing about systems that, to many degrees, protect me in ways that I can’t always readily distinguish, so how do I know if I’m using that same system to protect myself as I move through my poems? How do I know if I’m resisting self-incrimination, self-examination, self-acknowledgment, awareness, culpability? These systems taught me to avoid these things, to approach power with silence, gratitude, and acceptance, because they often don’t need to be spoken to or dealt with—just paid tribute to. Everything is set up to prevent the “dealing with” entirely, so how, as a product/beneficiary of these systems, do you interrogate them without using what you’re conditioned by them to use?
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? It’s so sporadic. I want to be real with anyone reading this: No one writes like you do! Everyone does it differently. Everyone has their own process, unique unto them. I say this because I spent a lot of time comparing myself to others—and being compared to others, contemplating these comparisons, judging myself against them. Why wasn’t I as prolific as __________? Why didn’t I have a daily “practice.” When I write, I write intensely for weeks at a time for a few years at a time and then there’s drought—serious drought. That used to make me very uncomfortable, but now I just try to see it for what it is, knowing that the writing always comes back because it’s part of who I am, not because “it seems to be about time for another book.”
5. What are you reading right now? The answer to this is always “lots of poetry manuscripts,” but outside of my editorial life, my jam is historical nonfiction. I’ve been savoring The Splendid and the Vile for too many months now just because I’m completely enamored by the way in which Erik Larson can spellbindingly storytell history. I’m reluctant to finish it. Also, Unworthy Republic by Claudio Saunt, and for poetry: Doppelgangbanger by Cortney Lamar Charleston, Embouchure by Emilia Phillips, and Prometeo by C. Dale Young. I spend a lot of time dreaming about when I’ll reread Hari Kunzru’s White Tears as well, which is probably one of the best books I’ve ever had the pleasure to read.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Ha, well, myself… in relation to work and motherhood. Because I’m so deeply invested in these areas of my life that call for concentrated and persistent effort, personal responsibility, and commitment, they just take precedence over what I see as “something for me,” which of course isn’t really true at all, except for the fact that the only one who I am certain is counting on/thriving off of the writing is me. Whereas with my work at Alice James and being a parent, I see, more ostensibly, the results of my efforts and dedication and how they benefit people. I feel really deeply the call to be in service of others, I guess is what I’m saying, and I’m also saying that it’s hard for me to switch that call off and attend to my writing or even other pursuits and passions.
7. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Tributary? The music. The formal variation. All of it really. This book was such an act of discovery in its writing in terms of really utilizing form to embody/evoke emotion. I never set out to do that, but the mechanism found me along the way, and it definitely took me by surprise to be writing what felt like little songs, incantations, longer poems, interludes. I’m really grateful, even if at the time I was terrified by it, that I listened to the poems, followed where they wanted to go, and relaxed into them without my editorial self swooping in to try to “arrange” the chaos I initially perceived.
8. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of the book? Music, absolutely. Music from my teen years and especially the compilations of albums like Radiohead’s Kid A, Outkast’s ATLiens, Wu-Tang Clan’s Wu-Tang Forever, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, and then later, Kendrick Lamar’s Damn. These albums are, of course, composed of individual songs, but the order, placement, conversations between, and formal variation of each tells a great story over the album’s course through the lyrical experimentation, interjections, backmasking, register changes, and so on. I’ve always been deeply engaged by this type of creative expression, musically challenged as I am. And, too, the work calls to Jean Valentine, Marie Howe, Claudia Rankine, and Monica A. Hand.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? This is an easy and hard question to answer, because handing my work over to anyone, I realize, fills me with an enormous sense of guilt, as if I’m burdening that person. We are all so overworked! I’ve had so many people be incredibly generous to me over the years, offering to read things when I have them, and I so rarely take them up on it for fear of adding to their plates. That said, a dear friend and mentor of mine for nearly all my writing life, Anne Marie Macari, is my person. She’s a generous reader, and I know she’s a sounding board for more writers than just me, which makes the attention and care she gives my work all that more extraordinary. Our friendship is a rare gift. She’s also a writer I find myself turning to over and again. Have you ever read her book Gloryland? It’s just a complete masterpiece, as is her new book Heaven Beneath.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? “Just write” is a simple piece of advice I carry with me always. Just write it. Write it down. Write without judgment or worry about the “final” outcome or where the poem/words will take you. Don’t think too far ahead of the poem you’re in. This advice was especially useful after I became a mother. I feel indebted to Nicole Cooley, who told me she would just write a few words or a line or two on any surface she could when she was a new mom, and that the poems found their way to doing the work they needed to do eventually. That opened doors for me to see the act of writing as a malleable thing. It was really empowering.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Justin Jannise, whose debut poetry collection, How to Be Better by Being Worse, is out today from BOA Editions. The poems of How to Be Better by Being Worse are fearless and alive, queer and unapologetically indulgent. In the title poem, Jannise writes: “Be clothed / in scandal. Smear / and smudge and slander yourself // courageous.” Throughout the collection, he heeds his own advice to be daring. He frequently experiments with form—the poem “Flamingosexual” appears as the silhouette of the iconic bird—and tackles issues of family, love, and the self with great emotional honesty. “Justin expertly commands the techniques of his craft to summon up an authentic and undeniable voice that lifts off the page,” writes Richard Blanco, who chose the collection as the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize. Justin Jannise received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Columbia Journal, Copper Nickel, Hobart, Split Lip, and the Yale Review. He has taught classes for Inprint, Grackle & Grackle, Writespace, and Writers in the Schools.
1. How long did it take you to write How to Be Better by Being Worse? Seven or eight years. The earliest draft of the oldest poem dates back to 2012, and I was allowed to make some last-minute changes in 2020. There are human beings nearly capable of making a book who were not born when I started writing it.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Everything about writing is a challenge for me, but something that took a really long time to figure out was how best to sequence the poems. I’m aware that many readers will not approach the book from beginning to end, but those who do—I’m almost certain—will enjoy the whole theme park much more than any one thrill ride.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? Before the pandemic I wrote mostly on the go—initially in my head, later on a note-taking app on my phone. Walking is great for poetry. So is driving. Basically, any activity besides sitting and putting down the thoughts that come to mind in the order that they arrive. Shopping. Eavesdropping while eating alone. Juggling or rummaging. Anything that occupies the hands and feet but not the writing brain. I like to know that a line has been turned over a few hundred times before I stop to write it down. I love that scary feeling, once the poem has grown about eight lines solely in my head, that I’m about to receive an important phone call, or witness a crime—something that’ll make me lose the whole thing. Poof! Another masterpiece lost! I love the utter absorption of pulling the vehicle over, or dropping the flaming chainsaws, and as rapidly or discreetly as possible trying to get the important parts down—all over the page sometimes, like a police sketch.
4. What are you reading right now? Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red, in the bathtub. Last fall I read from more than ninety titles for my comprehensive exams, starting with a good chunk of the Bible. I also chose to immerse myself in psychoanalytic theory, which was like learning a foreign language. On my nightstand I have new poetry collections by Erin Belieu, Diane Seuss, Mark Wunderlich, Christopher Kempf, and Natalie Shapero. What I like about poetry is that you can shuttle back and forth between books and it always feels like you’re getting somewhere, but when you stop to look at how much you have left, finishing feels impossible! There are just too many ways to get lost in the woods—in a good way.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I usually find it difficult to tell how widely recognized a writer is. I’ve bounced around enough to know that one person’s junk folder is another’s Treasure Island. If you haven’t read anything by Danez Smith or Ilya Kaminsky, I’m a little afraid of you. Many writers I know have had their first books come out during the pandemic, which feels unfair, but is Benjamin Garcia’s brilliant Thrown in the Throat more or less recognizable for that reason? Are people reading more because they’re going out less? Are they reading more poetry because it resonates more strongly during global catastrophes? Can we all agree that Willa Cather should’ve won a Pulitzer for The Professor’s House and not One of Ours? Is light verse “in”? Is “serious literature” out? How’s the novella doing? And what about all the fantastic work that appears in multi-author volumes—lit mags, anthologies, translations, and so on? What about hybrid genres? Online journals? Zines?! I just learned I’ve been mispronouncing Wisława Szymborska’s name even though she’s one of my all-time favorites. In a poem, Szymborska wrote that maybe two people in a thousand like poetry. That’s less than 0.2 percent! Can we recognize that?
6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? I wouldn’t say it’s worth taking on a lot of debt, but sure, why not? If your particular brand of genius is so fragile that it can’t withstand a bad teacher’s scrutiny—can’t overcome a hungover classmate’s offhand critique—you think the world of publishing is going to welcome you with open arms? Ha! I know some great writers who opted out of the MFA but still have solid careers and a list of publication credits a mile long. They all live in New York City. They were all born rich.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started How to Be Better by Being Worse, what would you say? Go to your Google Drive. Create a new folder. Call it “Cover Art Ideas.” Fill it with artwork you’ve seen in galleries, on street corners, at fancy hotel bars—wherever. Keep track of who made it, and when and where you saw it. Include the artist’s or gallery’s contact info if you have it. Only include images you like, but there’s no need to be stingy. A day will come when you will quickly need a TON of good, affordable options and, well, let’s just say that circumstances may prevent you from doing a worldwide tour of all your favorite galleries. There may even be a chance that the only thing you’ll be able to browse is the internet because everything else will be shut down. Have fun!
8. How did you know when the book was finished? Call me psychic. I just knew.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I trust my friend Christine Kwon, a great writer in her own right, to tell me exactly what she thinks without hesitation or apology.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? I don’t know if it’s writing advice per se, but in The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides writes: “All wisdom ends in paradox.” Robert Frost, definitely issuing advice in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” said that a poem “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” Put those two together and you get that poems end in paradoxes, which might be helpful if you are trying to determine whether or not a poem is finished. I wouldn’t be too literal about it and end every poem with a self-contradictory phrase or something like that, but I do think there’s something sort of final and fulfilling about discovering, say, that a poem’s floor is also its ceiling—as I think I did when I finally arrived at the title of “Poem with Trap Door.”
Justin Jannise, author of How to Be Better by Being Worse.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Quiara Alegría Hudes, whose memoir, My Broken Language, is out today from One World. Born to a Jewish father and Puerto Rican mother, Quiara Alegría Hudes grew up between two languages and cultures. When her parents separated, she recalls: “It was baffling, watching parts of myself get further and further from each other.” But above all she loves her family deeply and is in awe of the women, especially her mother. Ever tender and watchful, she ultimately finds her voice as a playwright, rooting her work in the lives and language of her family. This is a virtuosic and intimate memoir about building a rooted creative life. “Wise, graceful, and devastatingly beautiful, Hudes’s memoir gives voice to the complicated cultural collisions and gentle rebellions that seed a life,” writes Lynn Nottage. Quiara Alegría Hudes is the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright of Water by the Spoonful. She wrote the book for the Broadway musical In the Heights and wrote the screenplay for the forthcoming film adaptation. She lives in New York City.
1. How long did it take you to write My Broken Language? I wrote the first paragraph on my phone in October 2016. It was about a dance party at my Abuela’s house in Philly on her birthday, July 4, soon after Juan Luis Guerra’s Bachata Rosa album hit. Watching an old home video jogged my memory and reminded me how hard we used to dance.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Keeping it wild and mischievous and badass and ecstatic and irreverent while at the same time going deep and being real about the sorrow, loss, and struggles of the 1990s. As an adolescent, I numbed myself to much of the loss around me. But adult writers cannot afford the luxury of emotional numbness nor protective armor.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? In a studio uptown in Washington Heights, New York City. On a small, thick, silken slab of curly maple that my dad turned into a writing desk. I write every day for as many hours as possible. At around 3 or 4 PM, I usually need a glass of wine—a creative method endorsed by Questlove in his memoirs on creativity—so that’s when I head to the bar and keep writing there.
4. What are you reading right now? Celia Cruz’s autobiography. Her life and talent are miraculous. And she’s got stories for days. I recently finished Mia McKenzie’s great new novel, Skye Falling, which comes out in August, and I encourage everyone to check it out.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Leslie Marmon Silko. Her book Ceremony was an essential read for me. It felt like a cleansing. The kind that starts with a burning.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? COVID lockdown. I used to write in bars—can’t anymore. I used to write while walking—can’t do that either. Or in museums—nope. Being sedentary is the pits.
7. What trait do you most value in your editor (or agent)? Wisdom, trust, and clarity. My editor, Chris Jackson, had no interest in telling me who I was or what kind of writer I should be. He was adept, though, at making me look further and further inward. It was a gentle, nurturing sort of ruthlessness. He is extraordinary.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started My Broken Language, what would you say? Hydrate more often. Have fresh ginger on hand at all times.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My mother and my husband. They both know me well enough to point out when I’ve betrayed or misrepresented myself.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? José Rivera, the great playwright and screenwriter, said: “Character is the embodiment of obsession. A character must be stupendously hungry. There is no rest for those characters until they’ve satisfied their needs.” His entire 36 Assumptions About Playwriting has been a rich source for me.
Quiara Alegría Hudes, author of My Broken Language. (Credit: Jon Chu)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Kaitlyn Greenidge, whose second novel, Libertie, is out today from Algonquin Books. A sweeping historical novel, Libertie begins in the Reconstruction era in Brooklyn, New York. The eponymous protagonist is eleven years old, and in the opening scene she watches her mother, a local doctor, revive a man who has just been smuggled north to escape slavery. If at first Libertie is fascinated by her mother’s work, she increasingly chafes against the expectation that she, too, will become a doctor. Greenidge maps Libertie’s life as it unfolds, from New York to Ohio to Haiti, and her pursuit of a life in music. Through Libertie’s eyes, Greenidge records the subtle and overt violence of racism, colorism, and misogyny, while meditating on what freedom might look like. “This is one of the most thoughtful and amazingly beautiful books I’ve read all year,” writes Jacqueline Woodson. “Kaitlyn Greenidge is a master storyteller.” Kaitlyn Greenidge is the author of a previous novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, which was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times, and her work has also appeared in Vogue, Glamour, and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. The recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Libertie? It took about three years in total. I came up with the idea for the book in the spring of 2016. I spent about a year just thinking about how it might work, reading and researching pretty slowly. I was overwhelmed with the technical challenge of setting part of the work in Haiti, a country I did not yet know well; in Kreyol, a language I did not speak; and during the 1870s, a time period in Haiti that is hard to find much information about in English. We have a lot of English books about the Haitian revolution at the start of the nineteenth century and U.S. intervention in Haiti in the twentieth century, but the time period I was looking at seemed more difficult to find. Luckily, I started e-mailing academics and writers and poets during that year and I found my way.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Probably figuring out how all the different elements would work cohesively. I knew what I wanted in the book, but convincing the reader that those things were in there for a reason was the challenge.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I don’t follow a set schedule. I write and rewrite constantly in my head, often e-mailing myself lines or images or ideas. In 2018 I was very lucky to receive a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute, which meant for the first time in a very long time I could write fiction every day. That was great—I came to my office by about 10 AM, wrote till about 2 PM, and then did nonfiction work in the afternoons. But then I got pregnant and had to rethink my fellowship time, so that schedule only lasted for about four months.
4. What are you reading right now? Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show, which is an absolute game changer. Both in revealing more information about the history of ACT UP and in demonstrating how to use oral histories and write about social movements and organizing. I love it a lot. I just finished Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters, which is just so satisfying and perfect. So many times in the last few years I’ve been told a novel is the novel of millennials, and I’ve been like, “Which millennials are you talking about? Not anyone I know.” Detransition, Baby feels like the last decade of my life. It’s so familiar.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Simone Schwarz-Bart. The Bridge of Beyond is, on the sentence level, an absolute masterpiece of a novel. I don’t know how she did it. I read it twice while writing Libertie.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Time. There’s never enough of it.
7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? It’s a highly personal decision. It all depends on the program you get into and whether the particular mix of instructors and students fits your particular needs at a particular point in your artistic life. I don’t think it’s helpful to be prescriptive about it.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Libertie, what would you say? Keep going and do the hard stuff first.
9. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? The research and the characters. I loved them all and I also loved figuring out how to fit all these weird, wonderful pieces of history into the book.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? There’s no perfect writing advice. It all depends on your particular artistic moment. But if you are in this for the long haul, it’s valuable to know that all you understand about yourself as an artist—your working habits, your interests, your needs—will shift as you grow and life changes. It’s helpful to expect that and roll with it rather than mourn a past perfect writing life or long for a future one that is never coming.
Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of Libertie. (Credit: Syreeta McFadden)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Gina Nutt, whose debut essay collection, Night Rooms, is out today from Two Dollar Radio. In Night Rooms, Nutt weaves images from horror films and other media with her own personal memories. She writes about potent illusions—how difficult it is to enter the ocean without thinking of Jaws—and others that are more fragile: As a child beauty pageant contestant, she recalls chipping one of her gold trophies, revealing its brown plastic interior. Accumulating vignettes, she circles in on the most intimate and challenging subjects, reckoning with grief and survival. “Gina Nutt writes prose so astonishing I want to read it in an MRI machine just to confirm that every part of my brain indeed lit up,” writes Jeannie Vanasco. “Night Rooms is a brilliant, beautiful, boundlessly inventive book.” Gina Nutt is also the author of the poetry collection Wilderness Champion (Gold Wake Press, 2014). Her writing has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Joyland, Ninth Letter, Poetry Northwest, and Salt Hill, among other publications. She received her MFA from Syracuse University.
1. How long did it take you to write Night Rooms? Four years. An essay that included the book’s earliest seeds was published in 2017. I kept writing from there, expanding and cutting away, then repeating the process.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Staying true to the lyrical momentum and reining in the disorienting tendencies; finding a balance between the dreamy and concrete.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write in my office at the back of my house every morning.
4. What are you reading right now? I’m simmering in a few short story collections: Julián Herbert’s Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino, which is translated by Christina MacSweeney, Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife, and Rebecca Fishow’s The Trouble With Language.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Jose Perez Beduya, whose debut poetry collection, Throng, is a gorgeous study in image, precision, and atmosphere.
6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? An MFA—mentors, writing peers, workshops, time to write and read—can be transformative. It was for me. And funding can support an experience plenty of us can’t otherwise afford. I think, too, that online workshops, mentorships, writing groups, and other nonacademic opportunities can channel the most helpful aspects of MFA programs, and are sometimes more accessible or practical. My recommendation is to center the writing at the heart of any creative endeavor, sincerely weigh personal logistics, and decide from there.
7. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Night Rooms? I spent some time in a friend’s jewelry studio during a stretch of revisions. Learning with her and working in a tactile creative form refreshed my approach to making changes in my writing. I also took breaks from this book and worked on other writing. Time away from the book was helpful. So was writing poetry and fiction, finding new approaches or ideas that I could carry back to the essays.
8. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My husband, David Nutt, who is also a writer. He’s amazing at suggesting when something I considered minor may be the pulse of a piece, or worth another look.
9. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? Encourage the long game by supporting sustainable creative lives for authors and continuing to reimagine the ways we write, publish, and ascribe value to writing.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Arthur Flowers, in the first fiction workshop I found myself in as an undergraduate: “You’ve got to learn how to sing your own song and respect others for singing theirs.”
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jo Ann Beard, whose latest book, Festival Days, is out today from Little, Brown. In the nine essays that make up Festival Days, Jo Ann Beard renders her own life and the lives of others with characteristic precision. In “Werner,” she inhabits the story of a man who narrowly escaped an apartment fire, shifting from the smoke-filled room to his childhood memories as if they were her own. In the title essay, she weaves scenes from India, Arizona, and elsewhere to tell the story of losing a close friend to cancer. With each piece, she presses the essay form into new, more intimate territory. “Festival Days is an artistic triumph—vividly peopled, elegantly written, and full of surprises,” writes Adrienne Brodeur. “Each essay and story is an electrically charged tale of loss and partial redemption.” Jo Ann Beard is also the author of The Boys of My Youth and In Zanesville. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Tin House, and Best American Essays, among other publications. The recipient of awards from the Whiting Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
1. How long did it take you to write Festival Days? Festival Days was written over the past twenty or so years—essays and stories that appeared in magazines and literary journals, and a new, novella-length piece that gives the book its title.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? My challenge is that everything has to go silent for me to hear my own thoughts and find inspiration, and the current world isn’t designed for that. It wants us to always be listening to, or scrolling through, someone else’s thoughts. For me, the drone of that, visually and aurally, must be manually turned off. In the silence that ensues, windows have to be stared out of, floors have to be paced, and then eventually, like a banner, the imagination unfurls itself.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? By necessity I am a teacher first and a writer second, and since teaching is its own consuming creative activity, the writing only occurs during breaks. But those are plentiful enough that I can’t complain. Although, of course, I do.
4. What are you reading right now? I’m reading books about consciousness, some good and some not so, some understandable and some beyond my ken. Which is good—once you leave the realm of your own understanding, you bump into some amazing things. Like cephalopods and fungi and Mexican medicine men.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Some authors, no matter how much recognition they get, deserve even more. So, Lynda Barry.
6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? I believe in graduate school, and not just as a teacher, but as a former student. Not because it confers knowledge, though it does, but because it’s difficult as an artist to claim your intention and your will to create. Whereas the rest of the world remains skeptical, graduate school takes it seriously and tries to help. Just try not to go into debt to do it—the rewards for a writer are immense, but they are rarely monetary.
7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? I have close friends in the publishing industry, and they are as deeply committed to books as any writer I have met along the way. They have a lot of power over writers, of course, but very little power over readers, so it’s a marriage of convenience. As with all marriages, there are things we would change about our partners. That’s my way of not answering the question.
8. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Festival Days? Teaching and the reading of other people’s writing, which is what makes mine possible.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I write with, and for, Mary Allen, an essayist in Iowa. Every piece in Festival Days emerged from our long-distance writing friendship that has stretched from the early nineties to now. We listen and tell each other what we like, and the key to how we help one another is that we like everything. It’s like getting a massage—when you leave, everything hurts again, but while you’re there, you’ve never felt so good.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? A long-ago student named Zac said about an essay we were workshopping: “I’m looking at a circle where I’d like to see a sphere.”
Jo Ann Beard, author of Festival Days. (Credit: Franco Vogt)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, whose third poetry collection, Dēmos, is out today from Milkweed Editions. In Dēmos, Kingsley reveals and speaks out against the violence that pervades American history and society. In an early poem, he addresses and challenges colonizers directly: “colonize / the crevice between my brown lungs, cremate me / in ashy anonymity before / I surface, I breathe, I war.” Writing about historical events—such as the infamous Phips Proclamation, which promised a bounty for the capture or scalps of Penobscot men, women, and children—Kingsley also attends to his own memories and experiences as a person belonging to Onondaga, Japanese, Cuban, and Appalachian communities. “Dēmos is a powerhouse collection of poems by a powerhouse poet,” writes Victoria Chang. Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley belongs to the Onondaga Nation of Indigenous Americans in New York. The recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he is the author of Colonize Me (Saturnalia Books, 2019) and Not Your Mama’s Melting Pot (Backwaters Press, 2018). His work has also appeared in the Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Oxford American, and Tin House, among other publications.
1. How long did it take you to write Dēmos? It’s terrible that I know the exact answer. I started writing Dēmos in the fall of 2016. The writing took me almost exactly as long as forty-five’s presidency.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? In ninth-grade biology we had to go through all that genotype/zygote stuff—I say “stuff” because I got through high school by the absolute skin of my shovel-shaped, Native incisors and am still making up for that mislaid literacy. The teacher gave prompts like “Fill out these squares with your family history: eye color, recessive, dominant, knuckle hair, yea, nay, etcetera,” and we kids start filling them out for ethnicity, which is hilariously apropos in its nearly two-decades-ago ignorance—for we so wise in the here and now—as if these cultural markers were some recessive trait you’d maybe or maybe not be born with. I remember writing all four of my “races” outside those Punnet boxes—Onondaga, Cuban, Japanese, Appalachian—and fitting them together as if I’d be able to figure out why I was me, and my homie looks over at me and says, “You’re one messed-up Punnet Square.”
That really stuck with me. A messed-up Punnet Square. I saw myself like that for a long time. That was my earliest memory associated with the book, and now fast forward a decade and a half, and maybe I see myself like that right now. If my monitor goes black and becomes that smudged electric mirror, I’m one messed-up Punnet Square. That’s me. Because I have this intimate, or at least long-standing, relationship with a sterile, probabilistic—easily misread as problematic—diagram. I am a kind of cross-breeding experiment in and of myself. My goal in the specific memory of these poems was to remove the individual “me” and focus on the higher resolution “we,” à la “we the people,” and what a crisscrossed American experiment might yield. I wanted to experiment, to turn that relationship on its ear.
You put that all-too-famous—or way, way not famous enough—Phips Bounty Proclamation on one side of the Punnet. You put my people, our people, on the other. What do you get? The results aren’t as anodyne as eye color. They aren’t as neat as knuckle hair. Not as tidy as, Can she roll her tongue, her “R’s?” When They are dominant, what do We inherit? Is revolution a recessive necessity?
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? When I first presented my work to potential editors, early gatekeepers, they were always like, I don’t hear a unified voice. That happened all the time. To be fair, the corpus of my work is weird. Like, when you aggregate it, I mean, when you collect it all together and present it to a publisher, it’s weird. You get one poem or hybrid narrative essay about Japanese American internment. Then the very next is like in Spanish or broken English or Appalachian Amerikan—shout-out Pennsyltucky, we out here dropping linking verbs! Then the very next poem is talking about how in the Onondaga Nation, within my people, there is a famous legend of the Tadodaho: keeper of the people’s history, of the council fire. The tribe’s Tadodaho is charged with preserving the culture, tradition, and keeping the people’s spirit alive—a very pre-Derridean survivance. In the very next poem, I’m the binary-bucking cub of two mixed-race parents.
I pull as much blood from that “I am multitude” cliché as I can, as I want. What are you? is what editors/publishers were saying in rejection after rejection. There isn’t a unified voice, I heard repeatedly from big-name editors. What are you? is what people have been asking me my whole life. I’ve been teaching college students for a hot minute now, and especially at the beginning—like ten years ago—students would always ask, “Where are you from,” which is to say what are you, what race are you. I used to get asked that outright a lot. We know the whole rigamarole by now—especially if you look remotely ethnically ambiguous. I get out ahead of that somewhat these days, but it initially led to some of the wildest classroom conversations.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? I wake up—I try and chug a lot of water—and most days I try and write. My focus is, I hope, first and foremost on effort and not output. I have a lot more control over the discipline than I do the result. I tend to like the adage You don’t have to write, but you can’t do anything else. I write on one of those flash-furniture Costco folding tables. I have a mechanical keyboard. It’s dope.
5. What are you reading right now? I’m reading Kentaro Miura’s Berserk series, Garry Ezzo and Robert Bucknam’s On Becoming Baby Wise: Giving Your Infant the Gift of Nighttime Sleep, Alan Moore’s Absolute Swamp Thing, and Pushcart Prize XLV: Best of the Small Presses 2021. They’re all drastically different enough that the plot lines haven’t been getting confused.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Being assaulted by the police. This is a tongue-in-cheek answer, but maybe a hopefully positive spin on turning absolutely negative real-life circumstances into positive generation or a call to action. A year into writing the book, in August of 2017, I was full-on maced—that big, pumpkin-orange, police-grade conical tornado of crowd-controlling pain—in the face by a cop. I was walking on the sidewalk, more or less minding my own business, where there were a dozen cops arresting and getting real aggressive and violent with this not-even-five-foot young woman of color.
The initial action took place on a narrow sidewalk, and there was no room for anyone to get past. So, they mace me very unexpectedly and I stumbled into oncoming traffic. It’s a busy Saturday night on the most popping street in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—which isn’t saying a ton, but it isn’t saying nothing. Fight or flight kicked in hard. And yeah I’m not a fighter, lmao. Could you guess I fall into the sensitive poet stereotype? I almost get hit by these cars but I can’t see a damn thing. Your eyes capital S slam shut, trust me. I’m huddled in the corner of this pizza shop, totally alone, and by this point people are screaming—I find out later that the wind had picked up the clouded bloat of pepper spray blast and carried it up to a second-story, outdoor night club wherein the patrons began screaming and vomiting. Long story short, every storefront locked their doors, and I ended up being saved by the kindness of strangers and the cups of murky water they splashed in my eyes. Whew. I have bad eyes already, so I was worried permanent damage was on the table. Military folks and police get to wash their eyes out immediately after their pepper spray/tear gas tests with milk/water, whatever. I had nothing, you know? I did have to get a stronger prescription after that. It sucks to think about. There was a news article written up about it a couple days later. Like I do most things, I decided to turn it into art. I just cribbed straight from the racist comment section and the poem literally wrote itself. I like to think that, in this, and in the precursor poem that more detailed the assault in a more conventional narrative, I’m reclaiming a little of the white-whale space taken up by 2011’s fad(ish) Franco/LaBeouf-ian “uncreative writing.”
7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? I cannot wait until we can all be together again. I miss the intimacy of hearing undiluted voices. Hugs. Raw laughter.
8. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? Senior year of my undergrad I was desperate for a mentor, comradery, and guidance. I synced up with this about-to retire professor who had gone to Iowa in the seventies. After a semester of trying to impress him and taking two of his classes, he told me, “An MFA program might take pity on you, but I hope they don’t.” Bleh. Maybe his heart was in the right place and he just thought I wasn’t ready. Maybe I’ll look back in two decades and be like, Yeah that guy was right. Right now I think, What an asshole. I kept writing. My first semester of grad school in English/Comp Lit I found space in my schedule for a creative writing class, I submitted a creative nonfiction piece about Down syndrome, disabled bodies, and violence. My professor wrote “No.” “No.” “No.” “Offensive.” “Wrong.” all over the essay. They asked me to drop the course. I later found out they actually knew nothing about Down syndrome, and their only experiences had been with TV, with the ultra “high functioning.” My family was on the wrong end of their spectrum, unbelievable, a reality to be erased. They tore me to shreds in workshop. But I believed in the veracity of that essay, and it ended up getting me into an MFA. Unfortunately, anecdotes like that abound. All this to say: I am the most trusted reader of my work. I’ve had enough bad workshops to know that if I don’t have faith in the work, no one will.
9. How did you know when the book was finished? The only honest answer is that I know a book/essay/story/poem is finished when people in charge, i.e. publishers, will get mad if I change something, lol. Up until then everything is fair game.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Write. I know it sounds banal, but I think everything boils its way down to just write.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose second novel, The Committed,is out today from Grove Press. In The Committed, Nguyen returns to the story of the unnamed narrator of his debut novel, The Sympathizer. After enduring a year in a communist reeducation camp and two years in an Indonesian refugee camp, the narrator has managed to reach Paris and gain shelter with his French Vietnamese “aunt.” He, along with his close friend Bon, turn to drug dealing to make their way in the new city. But the work becomes increasingly dangerous, and the narrator is wary of participating in such a decidedly capitalist business. Told with characteristic wit and intelligence, The Sympathizer is a nuanced examination of ideology and identity. “A rich and exhilarating story of friendship, loyalty, and greed,” writes Laila Lalami. “Viet Thanh Nguyen gives us an unsparing look at the poisonous effects of ideology—whether colonialism, communism, or capitalism—even as he explores the deep-seated need we all have to believe in something.” Viet Thanh Nguyen’s first novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among several other awards. He is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees and the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, which was a National Book Award finalist. He lives in Los Angeles.
1. How long did it take you to write The Committed? A bit over four years, from 2016 to early 2020. The novel would have been published in late 2020 but for the pandemic pushing everything back.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? How fun it was to start writing it in 2016. The Sympathizer had been a success, but it hadn’t yet won a Pulitzer Prize, so I was still left alone to enjoy the writing.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Coping with all the attention and expectations the Pulitzer brought. It was very distracting and prolonged the writing of the book by at least a year, maybe two.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? When I’m not teaching, I write four hours or one thousand words a day, whichever comes first. When I am teaching, I write a few days a week, nothing during grading, and mostly during holidays and summers. Most of my life, I wrote in a corner of a bedroom, facing a wall. Now I’m lucky to have my own office with a view of my garden.
5. What are you reading right now? Many incredible books for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. The Aspen Words longlist is public and I highly recommend it. The Pulitzer Prize is confidential so you’ll have to wait until the nominations and winners are announced in April.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Edward P. Jones. He won a Pulitzer Prize for The Known World, but he’s a modest man who doesn’t indulge in publicity, so he’s not as well-known as he deserves to be. His Lost in the City is one of the great short story collections. I love that book.
7. What trait do you most value in your editor (or agent)? Their ability to understand what I want to do and their willingness to suggest what I need to cut.
8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? Eliminate blurbs. They are a tax on the writers and editors who have to ask for them, and the writers who have to write them. I’ve been on both sides. Just publish books without blurbs and let readers decide.
9. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? It was set in Paris and gave me a reason to spend more time there, including two full summers. I haven’t been back since the pandemic and look forward to returning in summer 2022, if not sooner.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? I found Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to be the most inspirational book about writing, even though it’s explicitly about running. But that’s what writing is. You get up and you go and run every day, or as many days of the week as you can, for as long as you can, and you do it over and over and over and over until you can’t do it anymore, and it is an experience that is both repetitive and inspiring, painful and exhilarating. That’s writing.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Committed. (Credit: BeBe Jacobs)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Elizabeth Miki Brina, whose debut memoir, Speak, Okinawa, is out today from Knopf. As a child, Elizabeth Miki Brina held her mother at a distance. She was embarrassed by her mother’s accent, how conspicuous it felt in their predominantly white suburb in upstate New York. She did not yet understand the complexities of her parent’s relationship—her mother was born on U.S.-occupied Okinawa and met Brina’s father, a white American soldier, while working as a nightclub hostess. But as an adult, Brina begins to look at her parents with new eyes. She reexamines her memories, her family history, and the history of Okinawa itself. “I had not learned this history, my mother’s history, my history, until I was thirty-four years old,” she writes. “Which is to say that I grew up not knowing my mother or myself.” Speak, Okinawa is a virtuosic and unflinching search for clarity. “In exploring how one comes to be, Brina’s prose illuminates and dazzles—and we see, in the end, what was intangible made clear in her writing,” writes Bryan Washington. “Speak, Okinawa is indelible, and Brina’s words are unforgettable.” Elizabeth Miki Brina is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe–Bread Loaf Scholarship and a New York State Summer Writers Institute Scholarship. She lives and teaches in New Orleans.
1. How long did it take you to write Speak, Okinawa? I started writing the essay that would eventually become the book in the summer of 2015. So, five years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The most challenging thing about writing the book was deciding what personal details to share or not share, deciding what was mine or not mine to share, and knowing that these decisions would affect and alter the narrative, as well as the reader’s perception of and attitude toward the people being portrayed. This was a great deal of responsibility that I didn’t want to abuse. Kept me awake some nights.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write on my porch and backyard mostly, sometimes in my office when the weather gets too ugly. I typically write at night, though sometimes I sneak moments during the day. I have a solid writing session about twice a week.
4. What are you reading right now? I’m reading A Manual for Cleaning Women, a short story collection by Lucia Berlin. It’s fantastic.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I’m not the most up to date or in tune when it comes to discovering new or underappreciated authors. Julie Otsuka wrote one of my favorite books, The Buddha in the Attic, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, but I still think it should get more attention. Maybe it is. Maybe it will.
6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? Yes. Absolutely. I learned so much from the workshop process: submitting drafts, reading drafts, receiving feedback, and trying to articulate what invites and moves or what falls flat on the page and why. Not to mention the camaraderie and lifelong connections. The MFA experience was invaluable to me.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? Both my agent and my editor have been incredibly encouraging and supportive. All of their continual reassurance and validation and faith in the importance of this story sticks with me.
8. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Speak, Okinawa? I was surprised by how much I remembered, and how much my perspective of memories shifted as I was writing, rewriting, and revising. There were so many revelations I could only have reached through the process of putting memories on paper, seeing them reflected back at me, trying to view them objectively and find the precise words to describe them.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? Besides my editor at Knopf who is so brilliant and generous and thoughtful with how she reads, I have a couple close friends from my MFA program that I trust the most for different reasons. One of them praises and uplifts, but in a very pointed and concerted way, while asking more open-ended questions that make me feel safe and allow me to explore. Another friend scrutinizes and resists, a bit harshly for my thin skin, but that’s precisely what I need to toughen up and retort with something better.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? There is a quote by Adrienne Rich that I always keep in mind: “You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.” It helps me to write about the deeply personal, the private, to trust the reader with my secrets, to take risks and pursue high stakes.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features María José Ferrada and Elizabeth Bryer, the author and the translator of How to Order the Universe, which is out today from Tin House. At seven years old, the narrator of How to Order the Universe, M,begins to assist her father in his work as a traveling salesman. Shadowing her father, her sense of the world becomes defined by his philosophies and his inventory of hardware tools. “While my classmates wrote poems about trees and the summer sun,” she recalls. “I wrote odes to door viewers, pliers, and saws.” But cracks begin to appear in what M initially presents as an idyllic arrangement. Through the eyes of her young narrator, Ferrada subtly reveals the true precarity of M’s family life and Pinochet-era Chile. “How to Order the Universe is a dreamscape of a book,” writes Tara Conklin. María José Ferrada is also the author of numerous children’s books, including the forthcoming Niños:Poems for the Lost Children of Chile (Eerdmans, 2021); she lives in Santiago, Chile. Elizabeth Bryer is an author and translator whose previous translations include The Palimpsests by Aleksandra Lun (Godine, 2019) and Blood of the Dawn by Claudia Salazar Jiménez (Deep Vellum, 2016).
1. How long did it take you to complete work on How to Order the Universe? María José Ferrada: It’s a short novel, but it took me three years. I think partly this had to do with the fact that it draws on my own life. Writing it meant finding myself in the company of people who were dear to me, people who became characters. I knew that finishing the novel would mean saying goodbye to the traveling salesmen once more, and I think that some part of me wanted to take all the time in the world to do so.
Elizabeth Bryer: Around six months, spread across a couple of years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about the project? María José Ferrada: The most challenging thing was finding the narrator. I only identified who that would be once I’d written half of the first version, so I had to retrace my steps and start over from the first word. It has taken me a long time to learn that changes in plans—identifying the narrator, eliminating characters, eliminating entire chapters—are not necessarily setbacks, but part of the writing process.
Elizabeth Bryer: Getting the precocious voice of the narrator right. That and the humor! Humor can be such an intricate puzzle to translate, especially those instances where a play on words is involved. Sometimes what does not read as a play on words in one language can look like one when viewed from the perspective of another. The constellation of meanings encompassed by a single word in one language rarely matches exactly that of the word’s closest counterpart in the other language, which is part of what makes translation so creatively and intellectually stimulating.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? María José Ferrada: I write in the living room—the only part of my apartment where a desk will fit—or at a café when possible. Unfortunately, with the pandemic, the café no longer counts as one of my “offices.” I try to be methodical, leaving periods for writing—a month, for example—and then a couple of weeks for revising and thinking about where to take it from there. Sometimes this second period—seeing where the text is going, if it’s going somewhere—can draw out. Mornings are much more productive for me than afternoons, so I try to keep them for writing.
Elizabeth Bryer: Workflow for translation can be intermittent, so it depends on when you ask me. If I have signed a contract to translate a work, I try to keep the early morning for my own creative writing, and then translation work is the next thing I do, starting around 9:30 AM. Ideally I do this five days a week, though this is not always possible around other commitments. As for where: inside a second-story flat in Birrarranga/Melbourne, on unceded sovereign Wurundjeri land, wearing expensive noise-canceling earphones to dim the drone of the frame-making factory next door.
4. What are you reading right now? María José Ferrada: Cosmos by Alexander von Humbolt, a treatise in which the German naturalist and explorer attempts a “physical description of the universe” that incorporates all the things that he observed on his travels around the world. It is so interesting to see how he links biological and physical phenomena, until he arrives at the hunch of “nature as a whole,” interdependent, which three centuries later we are yet to fully comprehend. There are some poetic moments. He wonders, for example, at the number of phenomena that must have disappeared long before our eyes perceived them, or about changes that have already occurred and are yet to make their effects known. In those moments the perspective of this man of science reverts to that of a child asking why things are the way they are. That perspective interests me because I think it is the driving force behind many things.
Elizabeth Bryer: Currently I have two books on the go, a classic novel and a recent-ish essay collection: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal, which has been a balm during confinement; and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick: And Other Essays, which is so intelligent and generous and sublimely written.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? María José Ferrada: I think that Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji, isn’t remembered as she should be. We don’t hear about her when we start learning the history of literature at school. We hear about Cervantes, but not about her, the person who, ten centuries ago, wrote what is now considered by many to be the first novel. She observed behavior in a way that was so profound and so free at the same time, that she not only wrote a classic, but also took the first steps into a genre that a thousand years later we are still reading.
Elizabeth Bryer: Adania Shibli. It’s a few months now since I read her novel Minor Detail, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, yet I still think about it at least once a day. And Alexis Wright. Carpentaria and The Swan Book are mesmeric novels of the highest order.
6. What is one thing you might change about the literary community or publishing industry? María José Ferrada: I think that in the publishing industry everything is too rushed. I always wonder how many good books never got a chance to be read—and perhaps never will be read—because they were discarded when the next month’s titles arrived. Literature, in contrast, operates at a slower speed, not only in terms of production, but in terms of reception. How did a novel do? That is something we only know a good deal of time later. There are novels that go unnoticed when they are published, only to be discovered later by a reader, and then they are reborn and attract a lot of attention. There are also best-sellers that we know nobody will remember in ten years’ time. Publishing and literature are two different things, and they operate on different timescales; I think it’s important not to lose sight of that and to recognize the times when you are working for one and the times when you are working for the other. I am not saying that you don’t need to sell your novel, because you do, especially if you want to make a living from your work, but you need to be aware, for better and worse, that the result, especially in terms of reception, doesn’t solely depend on the work you did. There are many factors involved; the pace of the market and the times we are living in are just two of them.
Elizabeth Bryer: Far more literature is translated out of English than into it, which of course means the flow of economic and cultural capital operates mostly in the inverse direction. I really like the idea—which I am pretty sure came from Michael Henry Heim, though I haven’t been able to relocate the source—for a system whereby a small percentage of earnings destined for each English-language author is automatically diverted to a pool of funds, and then these funds are dedicated to bringing into English more works by authors who write in other languages. I would also add a corrective bias towards underrepresented languages, regions, and intersections.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? María José Ferrada: This has to do with my previous response. Once I’d delivered the manuscript, I asked my editor Juan Manuel Silva what would happen if it didn’t do well. He responded that if that happened, he would be buying the beers. Which meant, he continued, that if it did well, I would be buying them. What he was saying, I think, is that after doing the work—in this case, after writing the story I wanted to write—I had to do what any worker would: crack open the beer that meant I’d made it to the end of my shift. I also think he was trying to warn me about what is and is not important in this trade. Literature and best-sellers are two different things. Sometimes as writers we confuse the two.
Elizabeth Bryer: It’s something the author, María José Ferrada, told me, and I know I can share it because she spoke about it in an interview: How to Order the Universe is very autobiographical, a gift for her father and his friends. I think this came as such a shock not only because of how endeared I had become to the characters, but also because of how crafted and almost fable-like the novel’s setting of 1980s Chile is, not to mention its picaresque tone. Translating means to inhabit the world of another author’s novel in such an intimate way, which always feels like an enormous privilege, but Ferrada’s revelation about the novel’s origins enhanced the privilege that I felt immensely.
8. What is the biggest impediment to your creative life? María José Ferrada: E-mails, phone calls, the washing machine I must turn on, the food I must buy at the supermarket, and that long to-do list, which is never-ending and which you can’t ignore if you are alive in this world. But I also believe that literature is nourished by these acts, so I welcome all those small, and sometimes tedious, impediments.
Elizabeth Bryer: Financial uncertainty, and/or having too much on my plate, with the latter often a direct consequence of the former.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? María José Ferrada: A poet friend who has a remarkable ear and, most importantly, an enviable sincerity.
Elizabeth Bryer: For translation work, the editor of whichever book I am translating. In the case of How to Order the Universe, this was Masie Cochran. Often, rereading a translation that I am working on or have recently worked on means triggering a palimpsest in my head that includes all the turns of phrase I chose in earlier iterations. For this reason, it is incredibly valuable to have an editor’s perspective.
10. What’s the best piece of creative advice you’ve ever heard? María José Ferrada: A piece of advice that Akira Kurosawa gave young people who wanted to make films. He told them that they could understand the details of how to structure a film by writing a screenplay. That to do so, they didn’t need a big budget, only paper and a pencil. He acknowledged that writing is certainly hard work, but that the only way to do it was to put one word down and then another. He insisted that you needed to be patient and, if you found the patience, after a few hours, even if it had been a challenging few hours, you would have a whole page. I think he was saying that it is a process that you can’t rush.
Elizabeth Bryer: To give whatever you are working on more time, care, thought, and creativity than you think you are able.
Editor’s Note: María José Ferrada’s answers appear in translation from the Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer.
María José Ferrada and Elizabeth Bryer, the author and the translator of How to Order the Universe. (Credit: Ferrada: Ignacio de la Cuadra; Bryer: Percy Cáceres)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Alex Dimitrov, whose third poetry collection, Love and Other Poems, is out today from Copper Canyon Press. True to its title, Love and Other Poems swells with tenderness and feeling. “I love writing letters and this is my letter. To the world that never wrote to me,” Dimitrov writes. Despite the misery of the world—“How people are being detained / and shot with our money”—he remains devoted to approaching both cruelty and beauty with open eyes. Turning over familiar subjects—New York City, the moon, sex—and holding them up to the light, he models how to reclaim a sense of wonder and purpose in daily life. Alex Dimitrov is the author of Together and by Ourselves (Copper Canyon Press, 2017) and Begging for It (Four Way Books, 2013). The recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review, among other publications. He and Dorothea Lasky write together as the Astro Poets and published Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac with Flatiron Books in 2019.
1. How long did it take you to write Love and Other Poems? I started writing the book in August of 2017. I finished it in March of 2020. It was delayed by almost a year because I kept changing things. I’m a perfectionist.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? I remember meeting a friend for a drink at Old Town Bar on a summer Friday, and walking from there to Lovers of Today in the East Village to meet another friend. It was that hazy, late light of summer. The streets were very hot. And I was happy because I was about to quit my office job and take a big risk. I’d just started writing the title poem, “Love,” which I really believed in.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Not having healthcare or benefits while also having more jobs than I’ve ever had in my life. I think I taught, as an adjunct, at something like six or seven different colleges and universities in the time period in which I wrote the book. Most semesters I taught five classes. The poems came easy compared to that.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write in my apartment at a white desk that faces a window. I write every day. The time I write changes depending on my schedule. Ideally I read in the morning and write in the late afternoon. Usually I like to go for a late run after I write and then meet a friend for a drink. Having an entire day free almost never happens. Regardless, it’s important to treat writing like a job and be serious about having a routine. Like any job, there are many bad days. But writing is the most important thing in my life. There’s no quitting.
5. What are you reading right now? Melissa Broder’s novel Milk Fed. I think Melissa Broder is a genius.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Money.
7. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Love and Other Poems? I want poems to sound as pleasurable as songs and to speak to everyone. I also want them to have an edge and feel cool. I was listening to a lot of sixties and seventies girl groups. Also rock. The Strokes. The Stones. Love, time, and New York City are the big subjects of my work.
8. How did you know when the book was finished? I didn’t. I don’t know when anything is finished and I’m not sure I want to. I hate saying goodbye and I hate finishing things.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I send my poems to almost no one. I will occasionally send them to my best friend, who is an art historian, though not for general feedback. Sometimes I have a very specific question about a line or punctuation or a larger idea. I trust her to tell me the truth, as a reader who is interested in both the intellect and pleasure, which is important to me. I care a lot about the reader. I do not take them or their time for granted. I know there are a million other things they could be doing—having sex, eating, smoking. When I have their attention, it’s on me to make it worth it.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Spend as much time alone as possible.
Alex Dimitrov, author of Love and Other Poems. (Credit: Sylvie Rosokoff)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Randa Jarrar, whose memoir, Love Is an Ex-Country, is out today from Catapult. Love Is an Ex-Country opens in the summer of 2016, in the shadow of the upcoming presidential election, as Jarrar sets out on a cross-country road trip from California to Connecticut. Along the way there are many moments of joy and pleasure: She gathers with fellow Arab American and Muslim writers at a conference in Minneapolis, for instance, and reflects, “I wish we could spend our whole lives in celebration, communion, checking on each other, loving each other, being free.” Yet the journey also presents new challenges, and throughout the book, Jarrar revisits painful memories of domestic abuse, racism, and death threats. But no matter her subject, Jarrar steers through the varied landscape of America and memory with steady hands, speaking boldly and truthfully at every turn. “There wasn’t a page in this memoir that didn’t make me want to jump up and cheer, murmur in awe, scream with laughter, or weep,” writes Melissa Febos. Randa Jarrar is also the author of the novel A Map of Home (Penguin Books, 2009) and the short story collection Him, Me, Muhammad Ali (Sarabande Books, 2016). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Salon, Bitch, and Buzzfeed, among other publications. She lives in Los Angeles.
1. How long did it take you to write Love Is an Ex-Country? Some of the chapters were written seven years before the book sold. But from the moment I understood this would be a book to the moment I sent it out: three years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? I love being in a car and hearing directions to “go straight.” I always yell, “Gayly forward!” I wanted to write a road trip memoir but to subvert the form, so that readers would share my sense of disorientation as a refugee, as well as my sense of alienation. But I also wanted the book to be read. Ha! So the toughest part was finding a balance between reflecting my experiences of trauma and exile, while guiding the reader gayly forward through the narrative.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? Any time, any place, and as often as I feel like it! I self-assign deadlines for my creative projects. I raised a child alone, so I always had to write wherever I could: McDonald’s play areas, the park, at cafés with cheap tacos, and so on. Nowadays I tend to write where I’m most comfortable. I write quick drafts and spend most of my time revising.
4. What are you reading right now? Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses, which is long overdue and needs to be required reading for both students and professors.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Sherley Anne Williams, specifically her book The Peacock Poems, a beautiful book about Black desire, motherhood, and California’s Central Valley.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Racism and imperialism—the biggest impediments to the vast majority of people’s lives, really.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? It’s not really one thing editor Megha Majumdar told me, it was what and how she told me in her first round of editorial notes. When I received her comments I was at AWP in Portland—a Very White conference in a Very White city. I’d never had a book editor of color. I was so moved by how deeply engaged she was with my work, her sharp and great suggestions, the way she saw my story, that I wept.
8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? Only if they’re paid to, or it’s an affordable state school. Academia is often harmful for the most marginalized of us.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? Women and nonbinary queers of color, because we are who I write for. My first reader tends to be a close friend, and for Love Is an Ex-Country, it was writer Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, with whom I share a lot of intersections. She was equal parts encouraging and constructive in her criticism.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? When you’re working on a project, create a regular writing schedule and commit to completing a scene each time you write. For some, word counts and page numbers work best. But once a teacher told me to shift to scenes, books happened.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Edward Carey, whose latest novel, The Swallowed Man, is out today from Riverhead Books. In The Swallowed Man, Carey reimagines the classic tale of Pinocchio from the father’s point of view. The novel begins inside the belly of a monster-fish, where the carpenter Giuseppe “Geppetto” Lorenzini became trapped after venturing into the sea in search of his runaway wooden son. Writing in an old journal—scavenged from the stomach of the beast—Giuseppe addresses the reader directly, relaying not only the joy of creating Pinocchio but also the misfortune that followed: “Have you ever had those moments when, without quite knowing how, your art comes through with more grace, more life in it, than you had supposed possible?” Accompanied by the author’s own illustrations, The Swallowed Man is a surreal and intimate portrait of a father in crisis. “The Swallowed Man is profound and delightful,” writes Max Porter. “It is a strange and tender parable of two maddening obsessions; parenting and art-making.” Edward Carey is a novelist, illustrator, and playwright. His previous novels include Little, Observatory Mansions, and Alva and Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City. He is also the author of the acclaimed Iremonger Trilogy for young adult readers. Born in England, he lives in Austin, Texas.
1. How long did it take you to write The Swallowed Man? A couple of years. The book is the journal and art of the two years Geppetto spent inside the belly of a gigantic sea beast. Originally the book was a sort of catalogue to an exhibition at the Parco di Pinocchio in the town of Collodi, Italy. Since then, the book has changed rather a lot. There’s new art—I always illustrate the books I write—and a new character called Ill-face, a very unpleasant, burnt puppet who haunts Geppetto.
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? I read the story of Pinocchio as a child but I think it must have been in a very adulterated version, probably by Disney. I don’t think I read the book properly until I was commissioned to adapt Robert Coover’s wonderful novel PinocchioIn Venice for the National Theatre of Craiova in Romania. Since then I’ve been obsessed by Carlo Collodi’s original story, which is dark and strange and full of life. I think of Pinocchio as something like the patron saint of objects. And when I was in my early twenties I saw the beautiful wooden Jesus in the Basicila di Santo Spirito in Florence, carved from wood by Michelangelo at age eighteen, and the sculpture seemed to me a relative of the famous Tuscan puppet.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? I wanted to explore Geppetto as a character. He’s abandoned by Collodi for two years inside the belly of an enormous shark, but Collodi gives us no information on what that imprisonment was like, except that there’s a wrecked ship inside the belly with him. Collodi’s book keeps asking the question from the puppet’s viewpoint, “What is a human?” I thought that Geppetto must have asked himself the same question during his confinement.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? I used to work in my office on campus at the University of Texas at Austin, but that hasn’t been possible for some time. Now it’s on the dining room table, or in the bedroom or in a studio a walk away, which is also where I teach from. Since the pandemic I’ve put one novel on hold and written a draft of another. My main way of getting through this strange time is doing a drawing a day and posting it on Twitter and Instagram. Every day without fail. Small marks with a pencil. Sometimes I draw something someone suggests, sometimes the drawings are in relation to current events, sometimes they’re because I’m missing England and I draw something from home. If I’m not able to write I can at least draw a little, every day.
5. What are you reading right now? One Thousand and One Nights. I’m teaching a class on fairy tales and right now I’m getting lost in that extraordinary ocean of stories. The best way I can think of traveling during a pandemic.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I wish more people knew of the fairy tales of Giambattista Basile. He wrote his extraordinary collection The Tale of Tales in the 1600s, but he wrote in the Neapolitan dialect and, unless you were from Naples, you wouldn’t be able to understand them. He died of plague in 1632, and his sister published his masterwork after his death. For centuries no one read his work, or only saw it in poor translations. Not until 1925 did Benedetto Croce translate Basile into Italian, and we did not get a brilliant English translation until Nancy L. Canepa published one in 2007. Oh, it’s so good. He wrote, for example, many amazing sentences about dawn. Here’s one: Until Dawn brought the news that the Sun had been found alive, and the sky shed its mourning clothes.
7. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Swallowed Man, what would you say? I would say, “Stop! Don’t do it. Put the computer down. Go outside, get on a plane, go and see friends, go to the theater, go to the cinema, go to restaurants. Stop sitting in a corner, you’re going to be stuck inside a bungalow in Texas for at least a year which is a little too similar at times to being inside the belly of a giant sea beast, go, get out, SEE PEOPLE while you still can!”
8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? Diversity.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My wife, the writer Elizabeth McCracken. She’s wise and kind and very sharp. I trust her absolutely. She’ll tell me the truth, but she’ll tell it to me in such a way that I’ll feel excited about going back to work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? I really love this from Italo Calvino: “Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic.”
Edward Carey, author of The Swallowed Man. (Credit: Riverhead Books)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jana Larson, whose first book, Reel Bay, is out today from Coffee House Press. Nearly two decades ago, writer and filmmaker Jana Larson was riveted by a short news item in a Minneapolis newspaper, which reported the apparent suicide of a young woman, Takako Konishi, who was visiting from Japan. The police, who had by chance interviewed Konishi a few days earlier—though greatly inhibited by a language barrier—speculated she had come to the Midwest in search of the money hidden in a snowdrift in the movie Fargo. Captivated by the strangeness of the report, and an image that flashed in her mind of the young woman wandering in a great expanse of white, Larson began to research the case further. Written as a hybrid screenplay-essay, Reel Bay documents the author’s obsession with Konishi’s story and her various attempts to transform the story into art. What begins as an exploration into another woman’s struggle becomes a broader reckoning with the author’s own creative and emotional lives. “Reel Bay is an obsessive, fascinating, haunting debut,” writes Dana Spiotta. Jana Larson holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Hamline University and an MFA in filmmaking from the University of California in San Diego. As a filmmaker, she has received honors from the Princess Grace Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board. She lives in Minneapolis.
1. How long did it take you to write Reel Bay? Too long. My friends and family had, for the most part, stopped asking me how I was doing because it had become painful for them to hear about the book. My mother would occasionally scream, “When are you going to be finished with this thing so you can move on with your life?” I worked on the project off and on for about seventeen years, first as a documentary film, then as a screenplay, and finally as a book. If I were to add up all of the time I was actively working on the project, it was probably ten years. I now console myself by thinking that might be fairly typical for a first book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Grappling with my own mind. Admitting to myself that I was as much a part of the story as Takako; that my own delusions rivaled hers. Then finding a structure to tell that story—about a long quest that occurred in the minds of two different women, that took them across continents at different times. Only one of them survived.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? When I’m actively working on something, I try to write every morning for an hour or two. If I don’t do that, the continuity and momentum of my thought process breaks apart and it takes me a long time to get back to it. I need to be alone at a table near a window because I need natural light. Sitting in a chair under a tree is also good. I am very particular about the pen and notebook I use. Later I go back and highlight or underline whatever interests me in the notebook and then work to cobble those lines and paragraphs together into a longer piece.
4. What are you reading right now? I’m about halfway through Antkind by Charlie Kaufman. I’m also reading A Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson and In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. Next up are Ornamental by Juan Cárdenas, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, and Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Probably all of them. It seems like reading isn’t a very popular pastime right now. But I feel comfortable in the more obscure corners of the artistic world. I grew up going to punk rock shows in tiny clubs and dilapidated warehouses. Mostly the bands couldn’t play their instruments very well, but there was something amazing about the energy that came from being part of something that felt totally uncommercial and sometimes a little dangerous. That probably gets lost when people in board rooms get involved and start fretting over how much money they’re investing and what kind of return they need to get. Maybe it’s great to have that kind of validation; I wouldn’t know about that. But to answer the question more directly: Julio Cortázar. I love his stories so much I want to climb inside of them. I love Lydia Davis’s stories too, but I’m already living inside of a Lydia Davis story.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Self-doubt.
7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? During my first year of graduate school, one of the professors said to me, “Run while you still can! People arrive here with talent and leave with none.” I thought he was kidding, but he absolutely wasn’t. The wrong MFA program can be very damaging and confusing. Still, I think that if a person has a project they’re working on and they want structure—deadlines and critiques and a practice community—to help them finish it, then perhaps graduate school is a good fit. To those people, my advice is: Get absolutely clear about what supports your creative process and what undermines it; steer toward the former and treat the latter like kryptonite.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Reel Bay, what would you say? I don’t think you can give someone insight; they have to struggle to find it on their own. But I remember one of my professors in graduate school telling me that Jonas Mekas, patron saint of lyric and experimental cinema, encouraged artists to buy real estate in New York. He understood that the existence of an art scene depends on artists having affordable spaces to live and work. So I would say, “Buy property in San Diego while it’s still possible.”
9. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? Sometimes I can’t imagine myself without this book, and without Takako. Of course, she’s mostly a figment of my imagination; she’s continued on for so long as my companion because of all that I’ve projected onto her. And I don’t have that anymore. I have to let it go. It’s like any intimate relationship, really.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Patricia Weaver Francisco, after watching me struggle with this book for many years, said, “You need to just choose an island and swim to it.”
Jana Larson, author of Reel Bay. (Credit: Shelly Mosman)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Torrey Peters, whose debut novel, Detransition, Baby, is out today from One World. Reese is proud to have served as a mother figure for several other young trans women in New York City, but above all else she longs to have a child of her own. To become a mother, she believes, is to be “granted the womanhood that she suspected the goddesses of her childhood took as their natural due.” She had once imagined she would build a family with her partner, Amy, until Amy chose to detransition, and go by Ames, leading their relationship to fall apart. But now three years after the breakup, Ames reappears with the news that his new lover, Katrine, is pregnant, and he proposes that the three of them raise the child together. And while all three characters carry fears and uncertainties, they set out to envision a family on their own terms. An honest and loving portrait of trans feminine culture, Detransition, Baby offers new visions for motherhood and kinship. “Torrey Peters evokes these characters with such fullness and compassion that they felt like dear friends to me,” writes Helen Phillips. “This is an important book, and I couldn’t put it down.” Torrey Peters is the author of the novellas Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MA in comparative literature from Dartmouth. Born in Chicago, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Detransition, Baby? I started in the summer of 2016 and had a complete draft of it by 2019, but then I spent another year revising and writing a different ending.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? It was a time in my life when I was figuring out, basically, how to live as a trans woman after the drama of transition had passed. Which is a lot of what the book is about as well, but it meant that my setbacks in life were also setbacks in the writing process. Bad boyfriends, intermittent finances, odd living situations: They happen in the book, but first they happened in life, and I had to recover from them to have the time and space to write. Finally I read a bunch of horribly square business books on time management for like, thwarted corporate middle managers, which embarrassingly taught me more about how to separate my writing from other parts of life than any advice meant for writers.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? When I have a project I’m into, I can write for about four hours a day, and can do it steadily in the mornings. I have been restoring a tiny, old off-the-grid log cabin in Vermont, and as soon as I get some solar power going up there, I’m pretty excited to start working with no internet access and just a wood stove to distract me.
4. What are you reading right now? I have always wanted to be in a literary moment or scene, a place and time where other authors care a lot and share their work. I’ve always had fantasies of the Harlem Renaissance or Paris in the twenties…only with trans and queer authors. Maybe it’s finally happening! I’ve got just-finished unpublished manuscripts by Zoe Whittall and Casey Plett that I’ve just started in on. Big Canadian representation in this answer!
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? T Fleischmann. Their last book, Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, I believe, will eventually be looked back on as an important work in nonbinary thought. Often really great books arrive ahead of their time and, therefore, wide recognition comes with a delay. It takes a while for the rest of us to realize we’ve been given brilliance, but after some years, we figure it out. I believe that will be the case with T.
6. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? This is a hard question, because neither my editor, Caitlin McKenna, nor my agent, Kent Wolf, speak in quotable aphorisms. Instead, to their credit, they are about long, slow hard work. I think that a lot of writers believe they need tank-like champions in agents and editors to take on the murky forces of the publishing world. But Kent and Caitlin are exceptional in that they have set me up to solve a lot of the publishing world problems myself. I feel confident in talking about why my book matters to both publishers and readers, and I feel that way because Caitlin and Kent have positioned me to speak for my book, instead of setting themselves up as arbiters and gatekeepers. They are an agent and editor confident enough to relinquish power back to the authors with whom they work. I mean that as the highest compliment.
7. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of the book? Fighting and loving other trans women. Especially other trans women artists. The book contains a lot of collective knowledge about how to make our work resonate, how to be honest, what we owe each other, and the ethics of exposing each other’s flaws for outside audiences. That didn’t just happen in the book. It happened in living rooms, in parties, at bars, working together, hurting each other, and afterwards trying to make it right—or occasionally, holding grudges.
8. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Detransition, Baby? How much the writing of it changed me. It was a bit of an exorcism. It holds parts of me that are now gone from my current self. I read some of the chapters and I’m like, “I wrote that? I’m really no longer the person who would write that.” But I remember being that person, and I remember the process of the book taking that piece of me—not always bad things, sometimes even humor. I’ll read something and think, “Wow, imagine still being bitchy enough to be funny like that.”
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My girlfriend, Chrystin. Her intelligence is totally different than mine. She’s a law professor and I feel like her mind is a deep digester, a ruminant. So she’ll read something and come back three days or a week later with it completely processed, and will be like, yeah, I wrung everything nutritious out of it, chewed the cud many times, and passed it through all four of my stomachs, but in the end, I’m missing these specific essential vitamins.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? I don’t think there’s any one piece of advice that’s always correct. What works for one project doesn’t always matter in the next—perhaps presumptuous for a debut novelist to say that, but in my experience, it’s true! So instead of responding with a quote, I’m going to respond with a book. Even though I write fiction, I find myself turning to Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir when I’m stuck. I’ll reread it, and usually in one of the chapters I stumble across a key to unlocking experiences that I can turn into fiction. Each time the necessary key has been different, but she’s stashed many keys in that book.
Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby. (Credit: Natasha Gornik)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Robert Jones Jr., whose debut novel, The Prophets, is out today from G. P. Putnam’s Sons. At the heart of The Prophets are Isaiah and Samuel, two young enslaved men who share a secret love. Some of the other slaves on the Mississippi plantation have intuited the nature of the pair’s relationship, but most leave the matter alone—that is, until one man begins to preach the master’s gospel and persuade the others that Isaiah and Samuel pose a danger to the group. Narrated by an ensemble of characters, including Isaiah, Samuel, ancestors from the distant past, and many others, The Prophets is a sweeping tale of both pain and joy. “The Prophets shakes right down to the bone what the American novel is, should do, and can be,” writes Marlon James. Robert Jones Jr. was born and raised in New York City and earned his MFA at Brooklyn College. Featured in “Black Male Writers for Our Time” by T: The New York Times Style Magazine, his writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Essence, OkayAfrica, and the New York Times. He is also the founder of the social media community Son of Baldwin.
1. How long did it take you to write The Prophets? I began writing the very first sketches of The Prophets in my first year of graduate school in 2006, and I made the very last changes to the final manuscript in 2020. So technically it took me fourteen years to write the book that will hopefully make it into many readers’ hands, ears, minds, and hearts.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The most challenging thing about writing The Prophets was trying to conjure up what it would have been like to be both Black and what we now call queer during antebellum slavery. I could find nothing in the established canon about this outside of examples of sexual assault, and I was looking for representations of love. And because I couldn’t find it in the texts, I had to imagine it through what I guess was ultimately communing with my ancestors.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? Because I created and run the social justice and social media platform Son of Baldwin, much of my writing—mostly nonfiction—appears there. I’m writing there constantly, commenting on the social and political turmoil we experience as people from marginalized communities, writing in my home office, sitting at my desk, typing on my laptop. In terms of fiction, I like to write in public spaces like mass transit or sitting on the stoop in front of my house. But sometimes I’m up at the witching hour jotting things down on whatever’s available—laptop, smartphone, or scraps of paper.
4. What are you reading right now? I just finished Maisy Card’s remarkable These Ghosts Are Family. I’m halfway through Deesha Philyaw’s stunning The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Up next are Kiese Laymon’s reissue of How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Bryan Washington’s Memorial, and an advance copy of Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers. There’s another stack of books I have to get to as well. I love being surrounded by books.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Gayl Jones. I was stunned to discover that she’s considered an “overlooked writer.” She’s clearly brilliant and it’s evident to anyone who reads her work that she’s probably the greatest living writer in the United States. It’s absolutely puzzling to me that more people don’t know who she is, that more people haven’t read her work, that her name isn’t mentioned with Hemingway, Baldwin, Faulkner, and Morrison, and that she hasn’t won every literary prize in existence.
6. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? Yes—for this one crucial reason: to understand how to give constructive criticism and how to receive constructive criticism. I attended the fiction program at Brooklyn College and one of the most valuable things I learned was not to be precious with my writing and to recognize that 99 percent of writing is revision. Sometimes we as writers don’t realize that a first draft is not a completed draft and that we have to rewrite even the parts that we personally believe are sublime. The more we work on it, the greater the result. Writing is revision. Period. That’s not glamorous, but it is rewarding.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? It isn’t anything that they told me specifically, but what I learned was that it is critically important to have both an agent and an editor who believe in your talent, share your goals, understand your vision, and are completely interested in ensuring that your integrity and the integrity of your work is protected at all times. I’m so lucky that I have no half-steppers on my team.
8. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? I’ll miss particular characters, some of whom I wanted to spend more time with—like King Akusa, for example. I would love to delve into her history and think about how she became ruler of her people and how expansive her love is.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My husband, Adrian. He is a Virgo and a lawyer, which means that his mind is a razor, his eye is keen, and his tongue is sharp. That also means I’m going to get the unvarnished truth about my work and really get the chance to polish it before it’s seen by other people.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? The best writing advice I ever heard came from the late, great Toni Morrison: “If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” If she hadn’t said that, I might not have had the courage to write The Prophets.
Robert Jones Jr., author of The Prophets. (Credit: Alberto Vargas)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Yxta Maya Murray, whose latest novel, Art Is Everything, will be published in January by TriQuarterly Books. In Art Is Everything, Chicana performance artist Amanda Ruiz navigates critical points in both her art practice and personal life. She has a residency lined up at the Guggenheim, among other honors, but frets over becoming compromised by institutions. She’s madly in love with an actuary named Xōchitl Hérnandez, but Xōchitl has recently announced she wants a child—and Amanda worries a baby would disrupt her most ambitious projects. Then a death and an incident of violence shake her further. Shifting in form from critical essay to Wikipedia post to Snapchat message, Art Is Everything is a whip-smart and intimate portrait of ambition and survival, love and loss in the contemporary age. “In Amanda Ruiz, Yxta Maya Murray has created a character that is fresh and sassy and unlike any I’ve encountered in recent fiction,” writes Alex Espinoza. Yxta Maya Murray is a writer and law professor living in Los Angeles. She is the author of several previous novels, including The Queen Jade and The King’s Gold. Her writing has also appeared in the Georgia Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, and the Southern Review, among other publications.
1. How long did it take you to write Art Is Everything? Two and a half years. I’d stopped writing fiction for about eight years, but I had a big surgery in 2015, and in the aftermath I began furiously banging out passages on art, ambition, longing, and survival that wound up becoming the novel.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? It wasn’t challenging. I leapt into it and wrote it like a banshee. Not all projects come to me as ferociously though.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write in my bed because I blew my neck out editing my fourth novel at my work desk and had to run around with a padded neck brace for two months. Now I flounder amongst the pillows and bash away at it, so to speak. I write in the morning after running, if I can. I try to do it every workday. I used to write through the weekends but then found that wasn’t good for my relationship. “I can’t! I’m writing!” Ugh.
4. What are you reading right now? I just finished Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion,which is about a guy who wants to burn down the most beautiful thing in the world. The last line is so, so boss: “I wanted to live.” I’m also careening through Iris Murdoch’s An Accidental Man—I can’t get enough of her Oxford drama and all of the philosophical sex. Camilo José Cela’s great experimental novel about the Spanish Civil War, San Camilo, 1936, recently almost broke my mind, but I coped by reading only ten pages every morning and then journaling about it. It’s got to be a precursor to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, one of my favorite novels even though I still don’t know if it’s a feminist revolution or snuff porn. The misogyny in San Camilo, 1936 is bionic. Another good ending though.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Carribean Fragoza’s writing is passionate and precise. Her gorgeously goth book of short fiction, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, is coming out from City Lights Publishers in March. Maceo Montoya’s Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces is an electric bildungsroman that University of Nevada Press will publish in April. Anaïs Duplan’s Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture just came out from Black Ocean Press. Duplan writes about aesthetic strategies that can help create liberation and chronicles his own gender transition journey. “I have discovered that when I experience what is universal in me, I may leave my individual oppressions behind,” Duplan writes. Essential and irresistible.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Death.
7. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Art Is Everything? I dash about the world thinking that I’m relatable, low-key, and have a totally accessible emotional style, but in the writing of the novel I learned that I just might be the human equivalent of habanero chilies or Vegemite.
8. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? My protagonist, Amanda Ruiz. She wears slashed Reagan/Bush campaign jerseys as couture and can make awesome art out of Styrofoam and tears.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? This is a hard question for me. Virginia Barber used to be my agent, and she was a god. Rest in peace.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? I started writing in 1995 during a federal clerkship for a district court judge in the Central District of Los Angeles. It was a lot of intimidating work, and I would try to write at night and on the weekends. I would cry at my computer like I was Kafka collapsing under his desk at the Workers’ Accident Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. But then I read a Michiko Kakutani New York Times review of some writing advice book I don’t remember the name of, and she relayed that the book said that you should just write a page a day. A page on my computer was twenty-six lines. I wrote a page a day come hell or high marital dudgeon and pushed out three books that way.
Yxta Maya Murray, author of Art Is Everything. (Credit: Andrew Brown)
Over the course of two and a half years, nearly one hundred and fifty writers have answered Ten Questions from Poets & Writers Magazine, generating an index of almost 1,500 responses for readers to peruse. The interview has evolved since the first installment in June 2018—questions have cycled in and out—but the last question has remained: What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? As we approach the end of 2020, our editors have selected ten of their favorite answers to this question, responses that we hope might renew your creative spirit after this unusual and difficult year.
“Everything you’re most afraid of is what you need to write.” —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer Door
“It sounds a little nutty coming from someone who’s been teaching writing for more than a decade, but I’m mistrustful of writing advice in general—which relates to my irritation that writers are now expected to be sages. But I have noticed that the writers who are willing to revise their work substantially are eventually able to get their work to do what they want it to, and to find someone willing to publish it.” —Kate Zambreno, author of Drifts
“My friend, the incredible and generous poet, Willie Perdomo, once told me to work on my writing in pieces, breaking it down, and do a bit each day. I needed his wisdom. Because I can get overwhelmed. Left to my anxiety, I’ll ambush myself before I even begin because I think I have to know the entire life of a story and that it must be a single breath. But that’s not how we breathe.” —Rachel Eliza Griffiths, author of Seeing the Body
“It might not be the best I’ve ever heard, and it certainly isn’t the most appropriate for this moment in time, but the advice I most often need to hear is: You’ve got to get out. Take a walk. At the very least, these days, leave the screen and stand by a window. So much work can happen while you’re not working. I think this is instinctive for some people, but I always have to remind myself; otherwise I end up stuck and hunched and ripping everything in half.” —Natascha Bruce, translator of Lake Like a Mirror
“Alexander Chee once said something like, When you put something that actually happened to you in a story, you have to privilege the needs of the story and not merely what happened. I don’t remember the exact quote, but I think about that all the time.” —Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life
“Indigenous Canadian writer and Elder Lee Maracle once told me, ‘Don’t throw anything away. There’s a reason you wrote it in the first place, even if it doesn’t belong in the piece you’re drafting.’ I keep a folder on my laptop with snippets that have to be cut. After editing one of my novels, I ended up using the pieces in the folder to finish a volume of short stories.” —Cherie Dimaline, author of Empire of Wild
“My best piece of writing advice came from the poet-scholar Chiyuma Elliott at a Cave Canem workshop back in 2009. I was a baby poet who loved grand finales for my poems, and in her feedback, she said very gently, ‘At the end of a poem, leave the door open.’ I’ve spent every day of my writing life since learning all the ways you can leave a door open: unlocked, cracked, off the hinges. There are so many ways.” —Destiny O. Birdsong, author of Negotiations
“I’ve been terrible at everything I’ve ever wanted to be good at—dating, tying my shoelaces, athletics, writing, driving, math, drawing, fashion, parenting—the first time I tried it. But years ago, my father, who’s a musician and public school teacher, told me about how much better his music had gotten when he’d just made it a point to commit to doing it—with focus and intention—on a daily basis. Even when it’s terrible. Especially when it’s terrible. Intentional, focused practice: That’s it. Maybe some people are phenomenal enough to not need it, but for me there’s no shortcut. Not for anything.” —Kawai Strong Washburn, author of Sharks in the Time of Saviors
“‘Ah, go on. You’re living your life’—said to me by Grace Paley when I was not writing every day.” —Heid E. Erdrich, author of Little Big Bully
“My friend Richard Sala had two catchphrases/mantras: ‘I can’t win’ and ‘It never ends.’ Taken together, they seem like the perfect summation of creative struggle.” —Adrian Tomine, author of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist
Clockwise from upper left: Destiny O. Birdsong, Cherie Dimaline, Kawai Strong Washburn, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Natascha Bruce, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Adrian Tomine, Brandon Taylor, Kate Zambreno, and Heid E. Erdrich. (Credit: Birdsong: Hunter Armistead; Dimaline: Wenzdae Brewster; Washburn: Crystal Liepa; Sycamore: Jesse Mann; Taylor: Bill Adams; Zambreno: Heather Sten)
As we near the end of a year like no other, we turn to the work of our fellow writers to mourn all that we’ve lost and to celebrate the dreams of a better future. The following is a collection of ten author readings, culled from the most recent installment of Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin, that reflect the beauty, hope, resilience, and strength of writers to confront the failures of the past and to rejoice in the promise of what lies ahead.
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor reads “Hand of the Midwife” and “Stone” from her poetry collection Mama Phife Represents, published in January 2021 by Haymarket Books.
Peter Gizzi reads “That I Saw the Light on Nonotuck Avenue” and “The Present Is Constant Elegy” from his poetry collection Now It’s Dark, published in December 2020 by Wesleyan University Press.
Anne Marie Macari reads “Boats Can Take You,” “Bow Down,” and “We Will All Go Home With You” from her poetry collection Heaven Beneath, published in December 2020 by Persea Books.
Rodney Gómez reads “Warbler,” “Theories of Violence,” and “The Annunciation” from his poetry collection Arsenal With Praise Song, published in January 2021 by Orison Books.
Jackie Wang performs “Damnation” from her poetry collection, The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void, published in January 2021 by Nightboat Books.
In search of an alternative to rewatching the same Netflix series? From London to New York City, these extended readings and conversations with Zadie Smith, Édouard Louis, Ocean Vuong, Min Jin Lee, and Joy Harjo possess a nearly cinematic quality. Videos might never replicate the magic of those bygone crowded halls—where the writer’s voice somehow managed to dispel the discomfort of the folding chair, or of standing shoulder to shoulder with strangers at the door—but they can provide some semblance of community while we continue to shelter indoors.
Zadie Smith on Swing Time (Penguin Press, 2016)
“I wanted to write about dance, really, and dance’s relation to Black life,” Smith says. “That was the first thought.” She appears in conversation with Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.
Édouard Louis on The End of Eddy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017)
“When I started to write The End of Eddy, I felt that I wanted to say something true, something real,” Louis says. He appears in conversation with Tash Aw at the London Review Bookshop.
Ocean Vuong on On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019)
“Having written poems for over ten years, I got really good at getting out of the poem. I got really successful at ducking out the side door when things got too hot,” Vuong says. “The novel was the perfect antidote because it forces you to tend to bodies, day after day.” He appears in conversation with Darin Strauss at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House in New York City.
Min Jin Lee on Pachinko (Grand Central Publishing, 2017)
“I don’t believe in writer’s block,” Lee says. “But I do believe that your time is limited which means that we have to make choices about who we see, what we do, and how we spend our time.” She appears in conversation with Ken Chen at the Tenement Museum in New York City.
Joy Harjo
“Poetry doesn’t just emerge, it emerges from the soul of a community, from a community’s history,” Harjo says. She delivers her inaugural reading as the twenty-third U.S. Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
As the long days stretch into the month of August, settle in, pour a cold beverage, and let the cool sounds of these five readings from recently published books of fiction provide some relief from the summer heat.
F*ckface: And Other Stories (Henry Holt, July 2020) by Leah Hampton:
As the long days stretch into the month of August, settle in, pour a cold beverage, and let the cool sounds of these five readings from recently published books of fiction provide some relief from the summer heat.
F*ckface: And Other Stories (Henry Holt, July 2020) by Leah Hampton:
Howard Yoon of the Ross Yoon Agency 4.13.2022 The agent answers questions about mentioning positive feedback in a query letter, how much plot to include in a query, and agents for teen writers.
Monica Odom of Odom Media Management 12.15.2021 The agent answers questions about attracting agents using self-published books and whether to use a summary or a writing sample to pitch a memoir.
Larissa Melo Pienkowski of Jill Grinberg Literary Management 10.13.21 The agent who represents writers TJ Alexander and K. Tempest Bradford, among others, answers questions about being ghosted by agents and how to query for nonfiction books.
Jade Wong-Baxter of Frances Goldin Literary Agency 8.18.21 The agent representing Chris Belcher, Kate Broad, Delia Cai, Duy Doan, and others offers advice about working with a coauthor, changing a memoir to fiction, why agents don’t consider previously published work, and how to become an agent.
Amy Elizabeth Bishop of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret 6.16.21 The literary agent answers questions about how to seek representation as a self-published author, break into the agenting business, and more.
Iwalani Kim of Sanford J. Greenberger Associates 4.14.21 The literary agent answers questions about submitting story collections, getting an agent’s attention, and querying two agents at the same agency.
The Literary Agents database contains details about more than 170 agents who are looking for new clients. Search the listings to find contact information, submission guidelines, client lists, tips from the agents, and more.
Priya Doraswamy of Lotus Lane Literary 10.10.18 An agent answers questions on obtaining the copyright of a self-published novel and seeking a U.S. publisher from abroad.
Annie Hwang of Folio Literary Management 12.13.17 A literary agent answers readers’ questions—from how seriously agents consider a writer’s previous sales to how to responsibly seek new representation.
Kirby Kim of Janklow & Nesbit Associates 4.12.17 A seasoned literary agent offers valuable counsel on when to query, how to keep revising, and whether horror fiction is a genre worth pursuing.
Anna Ghosh of Ghosh Literary 12.14.16 Anna Ghosh answers readers’ questions—from why poetry agents are seemingly nonexistent to whether or not it is possible to be “too young to write.”
Betsy Amster of Betsy Amster Literary Enterprises 10.14.15 The agent of authors such as María Amparo Escandón and Joy Nicholson offers advice on query letters, editing, and what not to do when submitting a manuscript.
A dependable source of professional and creative advice, Agents & Editors Recommend features anecdotes, insights, tips, recommended reading and viewing for writers, and more from leading agents and editors.
Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan 4.15.15 Should you pay to have a manuscript edited beforehand? Are there benefits to querying via snail mail versus e-mail? Danielle Svetcov of Levine Greenberg Rostan answers readers’ questions about what (and what not) to do when trying to find an agent.
Meredith Kaffel Simonoff of DeFiore and Company 8.20.14 An agent representing authors such as CJ Hauser and Cecily Wong answers questions about writing in multiple genres, agents’ fees, and publishing work in online journals.
Amy Rennert of the Amy Rennert Agency 3.01.14 The agent of authors such as Diana Nyad and Herman Wouk answers questions about self-publishing, age restrictions, and working with an agent remotely.
Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company 10.06.13 Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company offers advice on submitting query letters and manuscripts, and when to embrace or eschew self-promotion.
Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency 9.01.13 Lucy Carson of the Friedrich Agency discusses e-book publishing, when to send a sample to an agent, and more.
Matt McGowan of Frances Goldin Literary Agency 5.01.13 Literary agent Matt McGowan, who represents Eula Biss, John D’Agata, Brian Evenson, and many others, answers writers’ most commonly asked questions.
Rebecca Gradinger of Fletcher & Company 10.17.12 Literary agent Rebecca Gradinger explains why writers need agents and offers tips about best practices for finding one.
Douglas Stewart of Sterling Lord Literistic 4.12.12 The agent of Jami Attenberg, David Mitchell, Carolyn Parkhurst, Matthew Quick, and others offers guidance about publishing credits, MFA programs, and unagented submissions.
Jenni Ferrari-Adler of Brick House Literary Agents 3.01.11 Does your book need to be finished before you seek representation? Do agents really read synopses? Agent Jenni Ferrari-Adler, whose clients include Lauren Shockey and Emma Straub, answers these questions and more.
Terra Chalberg of the Susan Golomb Literary Agency 10.15.10 When is the best time in your career to look for representation, and when should you call off an author-agent relationship? Terra Chalberg, whose clients include Lori Ostlund and Glenn Taylor, tackles these questions and more.
Jennifer Carlson of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner 8.11.10 The agent of authors such as Kevin Brockmeier and Marisa de los Santos offers her thoughts on self-publishing and what she looks for in the first five pages of a writing sample.
PJ Mark of Janklow & Nesbit Associates 5.01.10 The agent of authors such as Samantha Hunt, Dinaw Mengestu, and Josh Weil offers advice on shaping a query letter and when to follow up after pitching your book.
Katherine Fausset of Curtis Brown, Ltd. 3.01.10 Agent Katherine Fausset answers questions from readers about the agent’s role in submitting work to literary magazines and how writers can choose agents based on their client lists.
Launched in 2008, this series of in-depth interviews with book editors, publishers, and agents offers a unique look at the past, present, and future of the book industry and what writers can do to thrive in today’s publishing world.
Tanya McKinnon by Vivian Lee 2.14.24 The principal agent of McKinnon Literary talks about how publishing can be a form of activism, the different ways agents and authors can use comp titles, and how the future of the book business still holds many wonderful possibilities.
Jamia Wilson by Vivian Lee 8.16.23 Random House executive editor and vice president Jamia Wilson talks about her passion for publishing as a craft, how being a writer informs her work as an editor, and the importance of keeping an expansive interest in books.
Rakia Clark by Vivian Lee 2.15.23 Mariner Books executive editor Rakia Clark talks about unlocking the full potential of an author, how writers can shine in the query letter, and effecting meaningful change in the publishing industry.
Annie Hwang by Vivian Lee 8.17.22 Annie Hwang of Ayesha Pande Literary talks about community building, professional burnout, the questions writers should ask when querying agents, and the demanding work of advocating for diversity in publishing.
Sarah McGrath by M. Allen Cunningham 2.10.21 The editor in chief of Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, talks about her start in publishing, acquiring books, editing as a creative process, and more.
Ben George by M. Allen Cunningham 8.14.19 Ben George, a senior editor at Little, Brown who works with some of the biggest names in literary fiction and nonfiction, talks about the author-editor relationship, the plight of the midlist writer, and the art of revision.
Rob Spillman by Michael Szczerban 10.12.16 Editor Rob Spillman talks Tin House—the magazine, the books, the summer workshop—and the pleasures, perils, and surprises of independent publishing.
The Book Group by Michael Szczerban 6.14.16 Four veteran agents—Julie Barer, Faye Bender, Brettne Bloom, and Elisabeth Weed—talk about the business of books, the secret to a good pitch, and what authors should do in the lead-up to publication.
Michael Wiegers by Michael Szczerban 10.14.15 Michael Wiegers, the editor in chief of Copper Canyon Press, talks about how he decides which books to publish (from the two thousand manuscripts the press receives each year) and what it’s like to edit the likes of Pablo Neruda, W. S. Merwin, and C. D. Wright.
Dawn Davis by Michael Szczerban 8.19.15 Dawn Davis—vice president and publisher of 37 INK, an imprint of Simon & Schuster’s Atria Publishing Group—talks about editing Edward P. Jones, the lack of diversity in publishing, and what some of the most successful authors have in common.
Claudia Ballard, Seth Fishman, Melissa Flashman, and Alia Hanna Habib by Michael Szczerban 6.17.15 Four young literary agents meet for an evening of food, drink, and conversation about how they find new authors, what they need to see in a query letter, and the common mistakes writers should avoid.
Jennifer Joel by Michael Szczerban 2.10.15 Jennifer Joel, whose clients include Chris Cleave, Joe McGinniss Jr., Evan Osnos, and Shonda Rhimes, talks about the difference between selling fiction and nonfiction, what inspires her to go the extra mile for her authors, and what writers should really want out of publishing.
Jeff Shotts by Michael Szczerban 10.15.14 Graywolf Press executive editor Jeff Shotts discusses the power of patience in publishing, editing as an act of empathy, and why it’s an exciting time to be a poet.
PJ Mark by Michael Szczerban 6.18.14 PJ Mark, whose clients include Samantha Hunt, Wayne Koestenbaum, Dinaw Mengestu, Maggie Nelson, Ed Park, and Josh Weil, talks about what writers can do to improve their chances of success, why fiction is harder to sell than nonfiction, and the importance of trusting your heart.
Susan Golomb by Michael Szczerban 5.1.14 Susan Golomb, whose clients include Jonathan Franzen, Rachel Kushner, and William T. Vollmann, talks about the ebb and flow of submission season, the art of the preemptive offer, and the gems she finds in her slush pile.
Amy Einhorn by Michael Szczerban 2.12.14 The publisher of her eponymous imprint at Penguin Random House, Amy Einhorn discusses her early days as an assistant at FSG, the importance of titles, and how she pushes her authors to make their books the best they can be.
David Gernert by Michael Szczerban 1.1.14 Literary agent David Gernert discusses the bookstore as a key to our culture, what it’s like to work with John Grisham, and how big changes in the industry are affecting authors’ incomes.
Jordan Pavlin by Michael Szczerban 9.1.13 A vice president and executive editor at Knopf, Jordan Pavlin discusses her terror of launch meetings, the particular genius of Sonny Mehta, and her job as a writer’s ideal reader.
Eric Simonoff by Michael Szczerban 7.1.13 A heavy-hitting agent who for twenty-two years has represented some of the biggest literary writers in the country, Eric Simonoff discusses recent changes in the publishing industry, the pitfalls of self-publishing, and what he’s learned about staying creative.
Jonathan Karp by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 11.1.09 As the editor in chief of Twelve, Jonathan Karp is always looking for good writing. Considering that half of all the books he’s published there have become best-sellers, that should make a lot of writers very, very excited.
Georges Borchardt by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 9.1.09 Georges Borchardt has been an agent for more than fifty years. He’s seen authors, editors, and other agents come and go, but two things have never changed: his belief that good writing is a gift and his ability to get it published.
Jonathan Galassi by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 7.1.09 Some publishers may have lost sight of what’s important, but the head of FSG shows his allegiance as he discusses the fallacy of the blockbuster mentality, what writers should look for in agents, and his close bond with authors.
Maria Massie, Jim Rutman, Anna Stein, and Peter Steinberg by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 5.1.09 Four agents discuss how the economy is affecting their jobs, where they’re finding new writers, and what totally freaks them out about MFA students.
Lee Boudreaux, Eric Chinski, Alexis Gargagliano, and Richard Nash by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 3.1.09 Four young editors, from big houses and small, take some time off to discuss what makes a good manuscript, what they’ve come to expect from their authors, and how much of their work needs to be done at night and on weekends.
Julie Barer, Jeff Kleinman, Daniel Lazar, and Renee Zuckerbrot by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 1.1.09 Four young literary agents meet for an evening of food, wine, and conversation about the writing they’re looking for, how they’re finding it, what they love, what they hate, and ten things writers should never ever do.
Chuck Adams by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 11.1.08 A veteran editor who has worked at publishing houses both large and small, Chuck Adams of Algonquin Books talks about what beginning writers tend to forget, the secret to selling two million copies, and the problem with MFA writing.
Molly Friedrich by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 9.1.08 Known as a heavy-hitting agent willing to go to bat for her clients, Molly Friedrich discusses how an author should choose an agent, what she looks for in a manuscript, and what separates great agents from merely good ones.
Janet Silver by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 7.1.08 Having settled into her new role at Nan Talese’s imprint following her ouster from Houghton Mifflin, editor Janet Silver discusses what she looks for in a new writer and what every author should know about agents.
Nat Sobel by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 5.1.08 Agent Nat Sobel, one of the most forward-thinking and outspoken agents in the business, voices his opinions on what authors should do for themselves, the dangers of MFA programs, and what he finds in literary magazines.
Pat Strachan by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 3.1.08 With nearly four decades of editing experience, publishing veteran Pat Strachan reveals the qualities she looks for in fiction, her approach to editing, and how writers can help themselves navigate the industry.
Lynn Nesbit by Jofie Ferrari-Adler 1.1.08 With more than forty years of experience in the business, agent Lynn Nesbit discusses how she signed some of her biggest clients, how a writer can get an agent’s attention, and what’s wrong with the publishing industry.
To say there are a lot of literary agents out there is an understatement—almost like saying there are a lot of writers looking for an agent (but not quite). The Association of Authors’ Representatives (AAR), a nonprofit membership organization founded in 1991, currently lists more than four hundred agents as members, all of whom meet certain experience requirements and abide by an established code of ethics. Another, more general, online database claims to offer details for nearly a thousand agents of varying levels of expertise and areas of emphasis. The carefully curated and focused database of literary agents at pw.org lists more than a hundred, including contact information, submission guidelines, and client lists.
No, the challenge for writers is not a dearth of agents, but rather picking the right one out of the crowd. (Of course, the same could be said about the challenge for agents.) To help narrow the field, I contacted some hungry agents who I know are eager to receive an e-mail from an as-yet-unknown writer and asked each of them for some basic information about what kind of work they want to read and how to reach them, as well as some not-so-basic information that will help you get to know them a little better. Remember, publishing is a business of relationships. You don’t want to simply fire off an e-mail to any agent you happen to come across. Read carefully. In the following profiles, a dozen agents are dropping some subtle (and not so subtle) hints for you. Have you written a piece of narrative nonfiction that gets to the heart of what it means to live in a specific geographical region? Duvall Osteen might be a great fit. Do you have a novel set in North Carolina? Adam Eaglin could be your man. Are you from Detroit and love music? You may need to look no further than Carrie Howland. Are you a writer of smart horror fiction and just can’t get enough of the work of Joe Hill and Nathan Ballingrud? You should take the time to get to know Renée Zuckerbrot.
These twelve agents all have distinct personalities, aesthetics, work habits, backgrounds, proclivities, and peeves—and so do you. So take your time, do the research, read books by their clients, and listen to what these professionals are saying. One of them might be speaking directly to you.
Who she represents: Bridget Quinn (Broad Strokes), Bonnie Tsui (Why We Swim), Nicole Perlroth (This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends), Stephanie Wilbur Ash (The Annie Year), Meg Elison (The Book of the Unnamed Midwife), James Nestor (Deep), Shalane Flanagan and Elyse Kopecky (Run Fast Eat Slow), Eben Weiss (The Ultimate Bicycle Owner’s Manual)
What she wants to read: Biographies and histories in which I can smell the breath and walk in the footsteps of the characters profiled; memoirs and reported narratives braced by vivid scenes and a sense of urgency; humor that can revive a marriage when read before bed; fiction that reads easy but isn’t.
When you should contact her: If your manuscript is the only piece of writing you’ve got to share (you’re not a working journalist, say, or a published author), then your manuscript (if it’s fiction) should be complete before you query. If you are a professional writer with clips galore to share, I still recommend you query when you’ve got a finished manuscript (if fiction), because it leaves no mystery (but it’s up to you). If you’re submitting nonfiction—all writers—then you should have a full proposal to share when you query. Coda: An agent should not be the first person (besides you) to read your manuscript or proposal.
Who she represents: Dan Chaon (Ill Will), Shannon Leone Fowler (Traveling With Ghosts), Kelly Link (Get in Trouble), Deborah Lutz (The Bronte Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects), Andrew Malan Milward (I Was a Revolutionary), Keith Lee Morris (Travelers Rest), Shawn Vestal (Godforsaken Idaho), M. O. Walsh (My Sunshine Away), Daniel Wallace (Extraordinary Adventures)
What she wants to read: I tend to be seduced by voice, so voice-driven fiction and nonfiction are high on my wish list. I love getting lost in a world that is strikingly different from mine. I have a deep appreciation for storytelling that allows me to see the world anew, or introduces me to a culture or worldview outside my own. I read to be entertained and educated. Writers who approach current events and historical topics with original, provocative ideas will always find readers. I’m also looking for smart horror writers along the lines of Joe Hill and my client Nathan Ballingrud (North American Lake Monsters). There will always be room on my list for popular science—Eric Sanderson’s Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City is a good example—and pop-culture books like my client Theron Humphrey’s Maddie on Things.
When you should contact her: Please query me when you have a complete manuscript or proposal with a sample chapter. I am also willing to look at a complete short story collection and partial novel, or a complete novel and a partial story collection. For memoirs, I will consider a proposal with a sample chapter or the complete manuscript.
Why you should want her as your agent: I am a careful reader who reads on both a micro and macro level. My first job was in editorial—I’m a former Doubleday editor—so it’s all about the writing. I work with my clients on getting their work in the best shape possible before submitting it. That said, my job is not to edit a manuscript so that it conforms to my idea of perfection; rather, it is to edit a work so that editors reading it will be able to envision the book as the writer intends. I need to leave enough room for editors to work with my clients to shape their manuscripts to their shared vision and the publisher’s vision. I’m proud of the fact that the manuscripts I sell never require major editorial overhauls. Also, I value fostering long-term relationships with my writers. Last but not least, I’m enthusiastic about collaborating with my writers and their publishers during the publication of their work. I love helping to generate buzz for my clients by talking up their work to anyone who will listen.
How she wants to be contacted: Please include a description of your work, your writing credentials, a brief bio in the body of an e-mail, along with the first three chapters/stories from your manuscript as a Word document. For nonfiction, you can also send a proposal and sample chapter.
Who she represents: Bethany Ball (What to Do About the Solomons), Elizabeth Poliner (As Close to Us as Breathing), Marjorie Liu (Monstress), Lauren Holmes (Barbara the Slut and Other People), Brooke Barker (Sad Animal Facts), Brad Watson (Miss Jane), Bryce Andrews (Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West), Wil S. Hylton (Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II), Pablo Medina (The Island Kingdom)
What she wants to read: Fiction and narrative nonfiction with a big voice and/or a strong sense of place.
When you should contact her: For fiction I request completed novels or story collections. For narrative nonfiction I’m happy to read a proposal, which should include an overview and at least two finished chapters.
Where she can be reached: e-mail queries@aragi.net; attn: Duvall Osteen
Why you should want her as your agent: We’re a small, selective agency. We keep it that way for a reason. Our authors are never going to be handed off; they can always reach us, no matter how big or small the question, no matter what stage of their career. Every single author at Aragi is of equal importance.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send your query via e-mail, which should include a synopsis of the book and your bio.
Who he represents: Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain), Elizabeth Letts (The Eighty-Dollar Champion), Eowyn Ivey (The Snow Child), Jacquelyn Mitchard (Two If by Sea), Charles J. Shields (Mockingbird), Karen Dionne (The Marsh King’s Daughter), Benjamin Ludwig (Ginny Moon), Val Emmich (The Reminders), Kathy McKeon (Jackie’s Girl)
What he wants to read: I focus on book-club/literary fiction and narrative nonfiction—especially those projects that I feel can make a difference either to me personally or to the world. I love unique voices, magnificently strong characters, unusual premises, and books that offer some new perspective on something I thought I already knew something about or never even dreamed existed. I’m always interested in learning and love when someone can teach me something organically so it doesn’t feel like I’m even learning. I’m particularly looking for voice-driven fiction as well as very well-written thrillers and psychological suspense novels; or novels with a great, quirky, fun voice. I love narrative nonfiction and memoir and have sold projects in a wide variety of subjects, including art, history, animals, military, and many other genres.
When you should contact him: Fiction writers, when you’ve finished your entire novel, had it read by several readers, edited and reedited it, and feel like it’s now absolutely as strong as you can possibly make it, write me a letter and tell me about it. Nonfiction writers, when you’ve written a book proposal, paying particular attention to the sample chapter(s)/excerpts and marketing materials, write me a letter.
Where he can be reached: E-mail jeff@foliolit.com, but please consult the Folio website (foliolit.com) before you fire off an e-mail. No phone calls or hard copies, please.
Why you should want him as your agent: I’m very hands-on and love the editing-collaborating process—brainstorming plots, rejiggering motivations, tweaking backstory. It’s really satisfying and invigorating to be part of the creative process. I also love being part of the publication process, too—coming up with marketing ideas, discussing PR strategies, revising flap copy, reading/editing short promotional materials, and so forth. I do best working with authors who see their agent as a partner in the book publishing process: I’m not a guy who rubber-stamps a manuscript and just forwards it to the editor; and I don’t just disappear once the book has been sold. As one author told me recently, “I was just saying that what you do for me is not normal. I don’t know of a single other agent who works so hard to make sure his clients look good—and I know a lot of agents!”
How he wants to be contacted: For fiction, a query letter plus the first page of your manuscript; for nonfiction, a query letter plus a proposal overview and/or first page of a sample excerpt.
Who she represents: David Wroblewski (The Story of Edgar Sawtelle), Susie Steiner (Missing, Presumed), T. Geronimo Johnson (Welcome to Braggsville), Aline Ohanesian (Orhan’s Inheritance), Susan Straight (Between Heaven and Here), Michael Lemonick (The Perpetual Now)
What she wants to read: I believe a good book should wake you up by taking you out of your life and immersing you in someone else’s. So I want to read books with deeply imagined worlds, by writers who are not afraid to take risks with their work.
When you should contact her: Fiction writers, I want you to contact me when you have a full draft of your novel. I sell a lot of nonfiction on proposal, so I’m happy to look at those projects a bit earlier. If I’m considering nonfiction on proposal, I’d like to see one or two sample chapters. In general, I think the best moment for writers to contact an agent is when they have done everything they possibly can on their own.
Where she can be reached: Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency; 27 West 20th Street, Suite 1107; New York, NY 10011; e-mail eleanor@dclagency.com
Why you should want her as your agent: I consider my clients my friends. They all have my cell-phone number and are free to use it. My list is intentionally small, so I can give every project the attention it deserves. I also like to think long-term, about how to build a career as well as sell individual books.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send me a one- to two-page query letter with a summary of your work and an author bio. If you have a proposal, please attach it to your query. If you are working on a novel, please attach the first ten to twenty pages to give me a sense of your writing.
Who she represents: Katie Heaney (Never Have I Ever), Arianna Rebolini (Public Relations), Swan Huntley (We Could Be Beautiful), Anna Pitoniak (The Futures), Anne Helen Petersen (Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud), Christina Kelly (Good Karma), Victoria James (Drink Pink), Kelsey Miller (Big Girl), Jen Chaney (As If!), Emilie Wapnick (How to Be Everything), Dvora Meyers (The End of the Perfect 10), Eliot Nelson (The Beltway Bible), Megan Mulry (A Royal Pain)
What she wants to read: Literary and commercial fiction, especially upmarket and women’s fiction, as well as select memoir, narrative nonfiction, cultural studies, and pop culture. I’m especially looking for funny female writers, great love stories, campus novels, beach reads, family epics, and nonfiction projects that speak to the current cultural climate.
When you should contact her: Fiction writers, please wait until you have a complete, polished manuscript. Nonfiction writers, you should have a fully fleshed out idea and ideally a full book proposal.
Why you should want her as your agent: I like to think that I offer my authors the best of both worlds—the resources of a large, world-class agency but with a great deal of personal attention. I am a fast and voracious reader and feel that it is my duty to read widely in the genres I’m representing, to fully understand the market. I pride myself on my close working and personal relationships with editors at every publishing house, as well as my connections with the greater literary community in New York City.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send me a query and approximately ten to fifteen pages of your manuscript or proposal.
Who she represents: Kaitlyn Greenidge (We Love You, Charlie Freeman), Carmiel Banasky (The Suicide of Claire Bishop), Melissa Gorzelanczyk (Arrows), Sarah Prager (Queer, There, and Everywhere), Jason Tougaw (The One You Get)
What she wants to read: I’m actively seeking adult-fiction writers, both literary and upmarket. My background is in poetry and literary fiction, so beautiful language is one of the first things I look for in any project. Equally important are a strong voice and great story, which I’m looking for across genres. I would love to see a literary thriller, whether adult or young adult, come across my desk. For children’s books, I love voice-driven, contemporary fiction that isn’t afraid to tackle tough issues. I adore a middle-grade adventure story but am also taken by one that might deal with the loss of a sibling, for example, or a serious issue at school or with a friend. For nonfiction, I’m a music fanatic, and as such I’m always looking for great books on movements, culture, musicians themselves, or simply how we as a society respond to, and are affected by, the music around us. I’m a Detroit-area native, so I’d also love submissions for books that deal with the city itself, or cities like it, the politics surrounding them, and stories of people who live there. In addition to poetry, I have a strong background in public policy, so I’m incredibly interested in books that deal with politics, education, or other societal issues. Finally, I love all things pop culture, so I will never say no to a proposal about anything from “why we’re a Bachelor-obsessed nation” to “why we can’t ever seem to get enough of Gilmore Girls.”
When you should contact her: For fiction, a project should truly be finished before I see it. I recommend you have a not only complete but also well-edited manuscript before sending to me, or any agent. For nonfiction, a proposal is perfect.
Why you should want her as your agent: After nearly twelve years as an agent, representing award-winning authors, I’ve developed a hands-on approach to launching the careers of debut novelists. I’m a very editorial agent and love collaborating with my clients. Whether that’s idea development, manuscript feedback, assisting with publicity, social media, or marketing, I really do consider myself a full-service partner for my authors. I absolutely love what I do; I live and breathe for my clients and work tirelessly to promote their work and careers. Beyond that, while I’ve been a New Yorker for over a decade, I’m a Midwestern girl at heart, so you’ll find not only an advocate, but a friend in me as your agent. This can be a tough business, and I like to remind my clients why we all chose this profession in the first place: because we’re passionate about the written word.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send your query letter and first twenty pages (for fiction) or proposal (for nonfiction) as a Word document to carrie@empireliterary.com.
Who he represents: Isaac Oliver (Intimacy Idiot), Charlyne Yi (Oh the Moon: Stories From the Tortured Mind of Charlyne Yi), Rachel Lindsay, Manoush Zomorodi (Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self), A. Brad Schwartz (Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News), Rebekah Frumkin (The Comedown), Ruth Joffre (Night Beast and Other Stories)
What he wants to read: My taste tends to lean toward the literary, but as long as the plot surprises and entertains, I’ll be won over. I love to find new, unpredictable stories—I think every agent will tell you that—but I particularly enjoy the feeling, the unease, the excitement that creeps in when I honestly don’t know what’ll happen next. When I finish a book (or proposal), the lasting feeling of wonderment is what I’m after.
When you should contact him: You should write to me (and, yes, please do!) when you feel comfortable sharing your work. I tell writers that the right time to share your work with an agent is when you feel confident that it’ll speak for itself—without you having to be in the room. If you’re going to want to be over my shoulder saying, “Well, this part will be fixed…” or “I intend to make this part a little clearer…,” you aren’t ready to share the work, which is completely fine. Many writers make the mistake of looking for an agent too soon. An agent’s primary job is to sell your work, so if you don’t have anything yet to sell…wait until you do. You get one first impression. Make it count.
Where he can be reached: My inbox is always open to new and prospective clients: rh@skagency.com.
Why you should want him as your agent: I’m fun, I mean business, I care deeply about seeing each and every client succeed in her or his own way. When I work with any writer, regardless of genre or style, it’s a very personalized relationship.
How he wants to be contacted: A partial manuscript, a proposal, or full manuscript. The work doesn’t have to be 100 percent polished, but remember that I’m going to be considering its salability, not potential salability. Just make sure you’re ready (and feel confident) to send. If you’re excited to share your work with me, I’ll be excited to read it.
Who she represents: Meghan Flaherty (Tango Lessons), Brandon Hobson (Where the Dead Sit Talking)
What she wants to read: In almost any genre, I’m attracted to great prose and a strong sense of emotional intelligence on the page. For upmarket and literary fiction, I tend to be particularly drawn to relationship-driven novels, stories about obsession, and work that grapples with intimacy and its discontents. With nonfiction, I’m very interested in deeply reported narratives and stories that take the reader into the heart of a subculture as well as idea books with a surprising or unusual central argument.
When you should contact her: I’d like to see your work when you feel you’ve taken it as far as you can by yourself. With a novel, this will almost always mean an edited full manuscript; in nonfiction, I’d generally want to read at least the fundamental elements of a proposal (outline, sample pages, etc.).
Where she can be reached: It’s best to get in touch by e-mail at ce@goldinlit.com
Why you should want her as your agent: I do a lot of editorial work with my clients, generally from the ground level of a project. That can mean brainstorming about the concept behind nonfiction or coming up with plot solutions in fiction, but my goal is always to help authors reach the best possible version of their book before submission. I’m also a clear communicator who’s constantly thinking about what my clients want and need, and I will do everything possible to make those goals happen. I worked in marketing and digital publishing before coming to agenting, which gives me extra insight into how to position my clients in an evolving landscape.
How she wants to be contacted: Please send a query. If the work is fiction or completed nonfiction, include the first ten pages in the body of the e-mail.
Who he represents: Lawrence Osborne (Hunters in the Dark), Jennine Capó Crucet (Make Your Home Among Strangers), Ron Rash (The Risen), Lisa Servon (The Unbanking of America: How the Middle Class Survives), David Treuer (Prudence), Devin Leonard (Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service), Leah Vincent (Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood), Diksha Basu (The Windfall)
What he wants to read: Debut literary and upmarket fiction; narrative nonfiction and memoir; journalists and academics writing new takes on culture, politics, and current events. Regardless of genre, I’m always interested in diverse voices and underrepresented perspectives, and as a native North Carolinian I am partial to great fiction set in the South.
When you should contact him: For fiction, it’s usually best to be in touch when you have a finished manuscript to share. For nonfiction, a draft of a proposal.
Why you should want him as your agent: I try to keep a small, selective list and only take on projects I really believe in, which enables me to be a hands-on and passionate advocate for each of my writers. This includes in-depth editorial work, working strategically to find the best publishing deals, and shepherding an author through all aspects of the publication process, including publicity and marketing. My goal is always to help each of my author’s books make as big an impact as possible and to build careers over time.
How he wants to be contacted: A query by e-mail with a full manuscript (for fiction) or a proposal (nonfiction).
Who she represents: Caite Dolan-Leach (Dead Letters), Mark O’Connell (To Be a Machine), Matt Gallagher (Youngblood), Joy Williams (Ninety-Nine Stories of God)
What she wants to read: I’m looking for books—whether fiction or nonfiction—that feel engaged with the larger world. That can mean having a big new idea, taking me to a place or a part of history that I haven’t seen, or simply having a kind of inquisitive spirit. I’m looking for writing that comes from a place of urgency.
When you should contact her: Ideally I’d like to hear from writers who have a finished manuscript or proposal ready for review. At the very least it should feel like you’ve really pushed the project as far as you can without outside eyes and feedback.
Why you should want her as your agent: The projects I look for are the kind of things I know I’m going to want to be in the trenches fighting for in the years to come (publishing is a slow business), and I think that shows in how I work with my clients—whether it’s reading multiple drafts, batting ideas around, or shepherding them through the publishing process. I like to be pretty hands-on, especially in the early, developmental stages: It’s exciting to watch something become the book we know it should be.
How she wants to be contacted: A query letter plus the first ten pages pasted into the body of an e-mail.
Who she represents: Joshua Ferris (To Rise Again at a Decent Hour), Bret Anthony Johnston (Remember Me Like This), Lily King (Euphoria), Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You), Cristina Henriquez (The Book of Unknown Americans), Helen Simonson (Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand), Mia Alvar (In the Country), Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles), Alice Sebold (Lucky), Kathleen Kent (The Heretic’s Daughter), Nicole Dennis-Benn (Here Comes the Sun), Megan Mayhew Bergman (Almost Famous Women), Paula McLain (The Paris Wife), Kevin Wilson (The Family Fang), Charles Yu (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe)
What she wants to read: My list is predominantly fiction, and I am particularly interested in representing diverse voices and perspectives from around the world. I’m always looking to learn something new from the fiction I read and to be taken somewhere I’ve never been before. I’m drawn to original voices, or retellings of stories we’ve heard before in new and innovative ways. I need to feel emotionally connected to the characters, and as obvious as it sounds, I need a real plot. More than anything, though, I just want to fall in love. I want to miss my subway stop because I can’t stop reading. I want to completely disappear into the world of the novel. I want to turn the last page and immediately feel the need to tell everyone I know about it.
When you should contact her: In general I think it’s best, when writing fiction, if you have a complete and polished manuscript. That means you’ve taken the time to self-edit and even stepped away from the project for some time so you know that you’ve really put everything into it that you can. If it’s nonfiction, then a proposal with forty to fifty pages of material is usually enough.
Why you should want her as your agent: At the Book Group we believe in a very hands-on approach at every stage of the publication process. I love to edit, and I bring a strong editorial eye and passionate commitment to each project, making sure I’ve done all I can do to help authors realize their vision and address any issues before we submit to publishers. I’m extremely selective in taking on new projects, which ensures that I’m able to give my clients the time and attention they need. I’m also committed to helping my clients establish and navigate their careers across many years and many books, so I like to be involved in everything from helping write jacket copy to developing a social media presence, pitching magazine ideas, and submitting short stories to brainstorming for the book’s marketing campaign and beyond. We are right there with you every step of the way, and in addition to the U.S. market, we’re thinking about international sales, film, television and audio, and also what your next project should be. This long-term, big-picture perspective and involvement is one of the most interesting parts of my job.
How she wants to be contacted: Please submit a query letter along with ten sample pages with “Julie Barer” in the subject line to submissions@thebookgroup.com. Please do not include any attachments.
Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.
We did the work for you and found the most active and insightful agents to add to your Twitter feed. The seventy-eight listed below share with their followers upcoming pub dates, news, reading recommendations, and more. For more agents, visit our Literary Agents Database.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, whose latest nonfiction book, The Freezer Door, was published in November by Semiotext(e). From Seattle’s Volunteer Park to local gay bars, Sycamore roams in search of intimacy. Yet the American city in the contemporary age seems to deny connection at every turn, as gentrification, consumerism, and fear encroach further and further upon daily life. Even in queer spaces and communities that once felt familiar, she finds herself increasingly alienated. Shifting between various scenes and timelines, Sycamore mourns sites of brokenness, but also discovers glimmers of humor, pleasure, and new language along the way. She keeps moving, despite everything, finding new ways to be alive. “I really love Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s The Freezer Door,” writes Maggie Nelson. “In a happy paradox common to great literature, it’s a book about not belonging that made me feel deeply less alone.” Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of several previous books, including the novel Sketchtasy (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018) and the memoir The End of San Francisco (City Lights Publishers, 2013), which won a Lambda Literary Award. Her writing has also appeared in BOMB, Bookforum, Fence, n+1, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She lives in Seattle.
1. How long did it take you to write The Freezer Door? This is such a tricky question because, in a way, I think every book I write is informed by my whole life. But I started writing the text that became The Freezer Door around 2012, when I moved to Seattle. I think I wrote most of it between 2014 and 2017 and finished the final draft around 2018? But then of course I was still editing for another year, until it was sent off to the printer. So six or seven years. In the literal sense. There are other senses of course, but I don’t want to get too confused.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? I think the hardest part was living it. So much of the book is about searching for intimacy in the places and spaces that work so hard against connection, even if that’s what they’re supposed to be for—the book is about staying present in this search anyway. And this can be so painful.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write every day in my apartment at the computer screen, and I write in my head when I’m walking around, and I write on Twitter, where I can look at text out of context. But I don’t have the routine that so many writers talk about, where they get up in the morning and have a certain number of hours or whatever. I deal with devastating chronic pain drama, and have for years, so sitting and staring at the computer for a long time is not an option. Sometimes I wish it were, but also knowing that I have to move around does help me to think in different ways.
4. What are you reading right now? Right now I’m reading Bloomland by John Englehardt, which uses a second-person narrator to engage the minutia of intimate and interpersonal trauma—I’m thinking about this quote at the moment: “The accident by which people die is the same accident by which they live.” And also this existential question: “Are you in a good cage, or a bad one?”
And I just finished Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie Glaude, who writes, “If the condition of the love of country is a lie, the love itself, no matter how genuine, is a lie.” We all need to pay attention to this, in this country of violence.
I also just finished Sarah Dowling’s Entering Sappho, which is such a beguiling collection of poems because it lures you in with a research-based process that almost invokes a kind of American regionalism paradoxically infused by town names drawn from ancient Greece, and then pulls you into “pseudo-translations” of Sappho’s poems with such an incredible rhythm and inside the rhythm are the questions of whether desire can ever truly exist outside violence and whether colonialism is always in the anthem.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Dionne Brand is a genius.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Dealing with devastating chronic health problems. For example, I was just on a roll with answering these questions, and then my head went blank. This often happens after fifteen minutes at the computer, even if I have an entire essay in my head beforehand. So I constantly have to go back and forth. There are so many days when I can only write a few sentences, but a few sentences every day builds into a surprising amount, actually.
7. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation ofthe book? I think the work of staying in my body. The work of not giving up on the dream of the city as the place where you will find everything and everyone you never imagined, even when that dream has been squashed by gentrification, consumerism, technology, surveillance, and the stranglehold of the suburban imagination over urban life.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Freezer Door, what would you say? When I start working on a new book, I like to write without an intention of what I want it to become. So that the writing itself creates the form. I don’t think I would go back.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I don’t have a single most trusted reader. I have a number of writer friends who always give me invaluable feedback on my manuscripts, but everyone has something different to offer and I always want multiple viewpoints—the more the better. And I can’t ever trust anyone completely, right? Not with my own work, I mean. Doesn’t it have to be that way?
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Everything you’re most afraid of is what you need to write.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer Door. (Credit: Jesse Mann)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Morgan Christie, whose debut story collection, These Bodies, is out today from Tolsun Books. In the eleven stories that make up These Bodies, Christie examines close relationships tested by various challenges, from addiction and mental illness, to subtle disagreements and misunderstandings. Punctuated by dreamscapes, mysterious animals, and glimmers of the supernatural, each narrative is often enriched by unexpected symbolisms: In one piece, a young woman stumbles upon a shop that exclusively accepts payment in strands of hair; in another, witnessing an altercation between a coyote and a cat helps a character resolve a workplace conflict. Focusing specifically on the lives and stories of people of color, These Bodies is a rigorous, inventive study of family, community, and other bonds. Morgan Christie is a poet, playwright, and fiction writer from Toronto. The author of several poetry chapbooks, her writing has also appeared in Aethlon, Moko, Little Patuxent Review, and Room, among other publications. She received her Master of Studies in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford.
1. How long did it take you to write These Bodies? Four years. The vision for the collection was not preset in my mind—it just so happened that there was enough of a trend in my writing, themes, and perceptions to compile a cohesive collection. As far as the time it took to craft individual stories in the collection, that really varied. Some fell out of me in a day, or night. I’ve had multiple stories come to me in dreams, which I write immediately after I wake. Others took weeks, even months, with the editing process.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Probably the emotional purge that came along with the project. So many of the pieces are open flesh wounds, observing unrequited sentiment or examining norms faced by communities and people of color, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, women, people living with mental illness, individuals of lower socioeconomic statuses, and people living with addiction. We sit with these realities every day, but to pen them through prose just tugs and pulls everything up in you a lot of the time. There’s just anger and sadness in the reality of these stories, experiences, and voices. Having to carve around those emotions to craft clear and digestible fiction can be a bit trying, but always worth it.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? That varies. Typically all I need is a quiet space. My thoughts are disturbingly sensitive to noise. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around the idea of listening to music while I write. I did try it once, and effectively typed out a line of lyrics that I had wailed not so long before with the song playing. A bit of house clatter and chatter isn’t too bad, but I like to be somewhere I can close the door. It doesn’t always happen that way, but I prefer it. Which leads me to when I write: almost always after dark. I accepted years ago that the only scary things that go bump in the night were thoughts in my head, so I began peeling them out and looking at them when my surroundings were at rest. Love it. The world is quieter at night—I find that allows me to hear the voices and stories much more clearly. As far as how often, it just depends on responsibilities and workload. I typically aim for at least a couple of solid writing sessions a week. Sometimes it’s more, sometimes less.
4. What are you reading right now? I’m finishing up Natalie Diaz’s most recent poetry collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, as well as the first book in the Star Trek: Picard series, The Last Best Hope by Una McCormack. I’m about to crack the spine of De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s In West Mills,and my shopping cart contains Let Me Tell You What I Saw by Adnan Al-Sayegh.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I can’t name a single author. There are too many. All writers not under the guise of what is formulated as literary really; so, underrepresented writers. Authors of color, LGBTQIA+ authors, writers from various socioeconomic statuses, women writers, writers living with disability or authors living with mental illness, I could go on. Those deserving of wider recognition are those who still have to fight for recognition, in the literary world and outside of it.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Time. Life and the responsibilities surrounding it are time-consuming, simply put. We have to try to keep a roof over our heads, food in our bellies; basic survival needs have to take priority. Being able to carve out the time, and sometimes energy, to write, edit, and rewrite can be tough. There’s never a lack of inspiration on my end—as an observer and patron of a global community I believe there’s always something to write about. It’s just finding the time amid life, and what comes with it, to get words onto paper or screen.
7. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of the book? Athletics, my love of and participation in sport. There’s a kinetic quality to the prose that I didn’t quite notice until I read the collection in its entirety. The illustration of movement and physicality is heavily influenced by my athletic career. I predominantly played basketball but dabbled in almost every sport. In examining the text I studied my language and found it reminiscent of the way I understand the fluidity, control, and movement of various games. The way wheat stalks bend and contort, how concrete feels under our feet in a sprint, our breathlessness, our muscle pulses as anxiety builds, or the way a rock can be weighted as perfectly as a baseball. I had no idea when I wrote these stories that that aspect of my life influenced the writing so immensely, but it’s everywhere if you look closely.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started These Bodies, what would you say? Nothing. The collection wouldn’t be what it is if I did.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I’ve never thought about this. I have quite a few trusted readers, fellow writers, old professors, and so on. If I leaned in the way of trusted and transparent, I’d say a standout is Harry Man, an old tutor, poet, and friend. Harry’s understanding of my poetry and prose was the most all-encompassing and all-consuming I’d ever experienced. I’d never known someone to so wholly understand my process, utterances, and decisions the way he did. So his perspective and critiques are some I greatly cherish, as are those of many others.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Metta Sáma once told me that just like in all things, when it comes to writing, you are more than one type of writer. It was a wonderfully simplistic piece of advice that touched on the limitations we inadvertently create for ourselves. I’ll always be grateful to her for those words, and much more.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Francesca Ekwuyasi, whose debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread, was published yesterday by Arsenal Pulp Press. In Butter Honey Pig Bread, estranged twin sisters Taiye and Kehinde reunite in Lagos to visit their mother. As young children they had been inseparable, but a traumatic event created a fracture in the family that, left unexamined, expanded and festered over the years. Shifting between various time periods, the novel also tells the story of their mother, Kambirinachi, who had her own complex childhood. An intergenerational saga frequently enriched by the language of food, Butter Honey Pig Bread is a poignant tale of familial love and hardship. “Ekwuyasi’s sensuous prose, deft plotting, and keen insights into human nature combine to form a vision that feels like peering deep into the souls of a trio of dear friends,” writes Kai Cheng Thom. Francesca Ekwuyasi is a writer, artist, and filmmaker born in Lagos. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Brittle Paper, GUTS, Transition, Visual Art News, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Winter Tangerine Review,and the Malahat Review. Butter Honey Pig Bread was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
1. How long did it take you to write Butter Honey Pig Bread? I started writing it in 2013 and worked on it on and off over six years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The most challenging thing was cultivating the discipline to finish it, as well as the discipline to “kill my darlings,” as they say during the editing process.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? The answer to this has changed and is likely to continue changing frequently, ha! I write in my bedroom, in the studio, in the kitchen, on my work computer at either of my day jobs, in my journal, on my phone. Sometimes, during my more disciplined periods, I write as soon as I wake up. Other times I record voice memos of ideas, plot, or dialogue on my phone while I’m walking or running errands. Sometimes I write every day, other times only a few times a week. Like I mentioned earlier I’m really working on that discipline thing!
4. What are you reading right now? Right now I’m reading a few things. I’ll list the last three I opened this week: The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, Luster by Raven Leilani, and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe. I also thoroughly enjoy audio books—provided I dig the reader’s voice and cadence. I just started listening to The Midnight Library by Matt Haig.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Ooh this is a tricky question because my answers will be biased to my own tastes! I genuinely believe that any writer who is committed to their craft and doing the work with integrity deserves to be read by folks with whom their work resonates.
6. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Butter Honey Pig Bread? I was surprised by how much agency my characters seemed to have; the imagination is wild and impressionable. I was also surprised by my commitment and passion for the story. I didn’t expect it to mean so much to me, but it does.
7. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of the book? Reading was crucial, as well as indulging in many other forms of art, music, fine art, and performance. Talking to friends and peers, working out dialogue and ideas with them. And other forms of research!
8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? I don’t believe I know enough about this to have opinions on what needs to change really. I think the writing community and publishing industry exist in the larger context of the world, which is rife with inequity and brutality, crumbling under the pressure of late-stage capitalism, the horrifying symptoms of climate change—you get the gist. Anything that I think needs to change within writing communities and the publishing industry is inextricable from that. For example, the stories that we write and reward are not apolitical, nothing is, but that doesn’t mean they have to be didactic. So perhaps that’s my answer.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My friends and my editor!
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? “Read more than you write. In expressing the ambition to be a writer, you are committing yourself to the community of other writers.” A quote from Teju Cole I found via the Aerogramme Writers’ Studio.
Francesca Ekwuyasi, author of Butter Honey Pig Bread.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Zeyn Joukhadar, whose second novel, The Thirty Names of Night, is out today from Atria Books. In The Thirty Names of Night, a young Syrian American trans boy seizes an opportunity to investigate the mystery of his mother’s death. Five years ago she died in a suspicious fire shortly after she came across an exceedingly rare bird nesting on an old tenement building in Manhattan she was trying to protect from demolition. Everyone doubted the discovery; most ornithologists simply did not believe the species existed. Even the narrator doubted his mother, until now, when he comes across a tattered journal belonging to a long-disappeared Syrian American artist named Laila Z, which also makes mention of the bird. With his mother’s ghost frequently by his side, the narrator seeks out answers about the mysterious species and, along the way, makes unexpected discoveries about his family history and the queer and trans histories of his community. Zeyn Joukhadar is also the author of The Map of Salt and Stars (Touchstone, 2018), which won the Middle East Book Award for Youth Literature. His writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Salon, Shondaland, PANK, and Mizna, among other publications.
1. How long did it take you to write The Thirty Names of Night? Three years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Trying to put experiences that are inherently wordless—particularly around desire, embodiment, and existing outside of binary (cis) gender—into words. So much of who we are—and I use “we” here for all of us, including cis people—and how we experience the world and ourselves is touched by the language we have for gender. One of my main questions in the writing of Thirty Names was: When you exist outside of the cisgender binary and, by extension, live your life beyond that framework, how do you convey your experience of yourself? I think there are many answers to that question, some of which include visual art and the sacred. I explore both in the text. I wanted someone still in those early phases of self-discovery, when language is often fraught, to be able to recognize themselves.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? While I was writing Thirty Names I was nomadic, which for me meant that I moved every one to two months for over three years. Being on the move constantly meant that I had to be ready to write anywhere—on planes, on buses, at friends’ dining tables or spare-room desks, or on my laptop on someone’s sofa. Sometimes I’d jot down a scene using the notes function on my phone. I generally write every day for one project or another, and my best hours are often in the morning, though I’ll write at any time I can.
4. What are you reading right now? We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Rickey Laurentiis, the author of Boy With Thorn, which won the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the 2016 Levis Reading Prize.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? The three years of housing instability I experienced following my transition made it extremely difficult not only to have the physical space to write, but also the emotional and mental space to focus on my work. The logistics of navigating life as a trans person of color re housing, documentation, immigration, lack of access to health care, and physical and virtual safety are ever-present impediments to my creative projects. I often think of the economic and logistical hurdles other trans creators of color in my life face, and all the incredible work that we’re losing as a result, and it makes me sad and angry at the high costs of cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, ableism, and racism. If we are invested in the kind of radically innovative art and literature of which we, as a society, most certainly have a desperate need, we have to better support queer and trans creators of color, especially Black trans women and transfeminine people, and we need to dismantle the systems designed to silence, incarcerate, and kill us. There is no other way.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? I remember my editor told me after reading one of the middle drafts of Thirty Names that she felt she understood something about the experience of being trans that she had never quite understood before. And what stuck with me was the fact that I had put into words a very specific experience of transness and of gender, maybe one of an infinite number of different experiences of transness, and it means something to me that both cis and trans people could identify with that experience and feel connected to it. There is no one single “trans novel” and there is no one single “trans experience,” just as there is no one single “gender experience.” Conceptions of and experiences with gender shape all of us, without exception.
8. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of The Thirty Names of Night? I’ve always drawn and painted—my father was a visual artist, so that was a big influence on me growing up—and I’ve always been particularly interested in nature art. During the writing process, I spent a lot of time drawing birds to explore the character of Laila Z. The team at Atria ended up turning one of my drawings—the yellow-crowned night heron—into a poster that we sent to early reviewers. It was wild seeing it on people’s Instagrams.
9. What, if anything, will you miss most about working on the book? I really loved writing the historical scenes. In 2019, when I was an artist in residence at the Arab American National Museum, I spent hours listening to the oral histories of Arab autoworkers in Detroit. It was one of the most moving parts of the research process. I felt connected to all the Arab Americans who had come before me and all the different lives they’d led. Knowing that there were queer and trans people in every time and place is also comforting for me. We’ve survived so much, have loved each other through so much, and I wanted to do justice to that history in TheThirty Names of Night.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? You have to become the person who can write the book you’re working on.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the protagonist of The Thirty Names of Nightidentified as a trans man. The narrator is trans and nonbinary.
Zeyn Joukhadar, author of The Thirty Names of Night. (Credit: Neha Gautam)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Simon Han, whose debut novel, Nights When Nothing Happened, is out today from Riverhead Books. Recent immigrants from China, the Chengs are attempting to settle into their new lives in an affluent suburb of Dallas, but find themselves drifting further and further apart in the process. Early in the novel, after a long day at her tech job, Patty Cheng wonders, “Who were these people she lived with, and what did they do when she was not there?” Her husband, Liang, is privately wrestling with his past while running an ailing photography business and caring for their children: eleven-year-old Jack, who keeps to himself, and five-year-old Annabel, a “Problem Kid” at school and a serial sleepwalker. For a while each individual’s troubles and alienations hang in a delicate balance, but then a misunderstanding involving another family in the neighborhood shatters any semblance of stability. A stirring family saga, Nights When Nothing Happens examines both the fragility and strength of the most intimate bonds. “Achingly tender and emotionally devastating,” writes Charles Yu. “A stunning debut that will stay with me.” Simon Han won the 2020 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award for Fiction from Poets & Writers. He is also the recipient of awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, MacDowell, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Vanderbilt University, where he earned his MFA. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Guernica, and the Iowa Review, among other publications.
1. How long did it take you to write Nights When Nothing Happened? About six years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Understanding that it didn’t have to be, nor should it want to be, other books I love.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? In a different year it would be every other day or so. I try to go for two- or three-hour blocks to build momentum, to forget, even for a minute, that I’m writing at all—but that’s a luxury. Another luxury now: to write anywhere other than at this desk where I’m sitting at the moment. I miss writing in libraries so, so much.
4. What are you reading right now? A. Kendra Greene’s The Museum of Whales You Will Never See. It’s about Iceland’s museums, the people behind them, and so much more. And Siamak Vossoughi’s A Sense of the Whole—a book of flash fiction. It’s so good!
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I finished Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s novel Dragonfly Sea recently, which hadn’t crossed my radar when it came out last year. It’s great. It’s about so many things—among them China’s entanglement with Kenya on a national and personal scale. And it rewired for me how language and rhythm can work on the page. Also Colleen Abel, who has a poetry collection called Remake that explores the body and the domestic space and it’s stunning.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? The people who gave Edward P. Jones’s books two stars on Amazon. Also Amazon.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? My editor was really good at helping me build my authority as a writer—on and off the page. To say things simply when they needed to be said simply, for example. To know that subtlety can be a form of authority.
8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? Depends. Workshop isn’t for everyone, but it was amazing for me, as someone who hadn’t known much about the literary world, to be in a space where people took my made-up stories seriously. I think I needed that to take myself seriously. I know that’s not everyone’s experience though, and an MFA is a big commitment. With the pandemic there are more and more options out there too, including affordable and accessible virtual workshops.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? That’s a tough one. A lot of readers helped my book to be what it is. I will say that around my wife, I get the chance to work through images and situations and characters in their rawest form—basically, she lets me vomit out my ideas to her in a completely judgment-free space. That’s pretty special.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Lorrie Moore said not to write from the assumption that you’re better than your characters. That one’s always stayed with me.
Simon Han, author of Nights When Nothing Happened. (Credit: Melissa Lukenbaugh)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Ellen Cooney, whose latest novel, One Night Two Souls Went Walking, is out today from Coffee House Press. The unnamed narrator of One Night Two Souls Went Walking has always ruminated on existential questions. She recalls asking her parents at an early age, “What is a soul?” Now in her mid-thirties, attending patients as an interfaith chaplain at a local hospital, she contemplates the same question, turning it over and over and finding new angles. Accompanied by a dog who might well be a ghost, she makes the rounds on the night shift, uncovering new truths about her patients and herself in the process. “This book will grab your heart and not let go,” writes John Grogan. Ellen Cooney is the author of nine previous novels, including The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances (Mariner Books, 2015) and Lambrusco (Pantheon, 2009). Her stories have also appeared in the New Yorker, Ontario Review, and New England Review, among other publications. Born in Massachusetts, she lives on the Phippsburg Peninsula in Maine.
1. How long did it take you to write One Night Two Souls Went Walking? I think about four years. Of actual writing, I mean. There were lots of drafts, each wildly different. It was such a long time coming. I’d had the main character in mind for ages, also the idea of a novel in some sort of medical setting. Why? I was the daughter of a nurse. In my teenhood I worked in our local hospital. As a mom I was in and out of hospitals all the time with my special-needs child. I’m a very ordinary fiction writer in that everything in my life is material. It’s mostly an issue of when to use what, and how. Which can take ages to become known to you!
2. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book? The earliest are many and all about flying, or at least being up in the air and sort of floating around, looking at people and stuff below: memory fragments and vivid scenes involving a small me and that powerful, terrible desire to be like a bird or human kite. Terrible because you have to get it in your head that it’s a desire that will never come true. But then, for me, I was so lucky. I was a child poet. And also a playwright and a story writer.
Writing is like flying. Well, kind of. My personal greatest fortune is that I know how it feels when a paragraph or a sentence, after many, many tries in the creation, comes out right. Absolutely that’s a desire fulfilled.
3. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Not losing my nerve. The form is a tricky one that needed to look so simple; it all just sort of happened. Also, not settling for a draft that was good, merely good, when it nagged at me that I could make it better, even take it to another level.
4. Where, when, and how often do you write? I only write in my writing room, which is small, and except for bookshelves, blank on the walls. Every day I come in here and write, and either it gets thrown out immediately, or saved for future deletion, until something starts working and a novel is happening. I try to keep a routine about it. Failure all the time! Once I get near what might be the end of the first draft, I have to be reminded to eat and sleep and like, show signs I am a normal functioning human being.
5. What are you reading right now? I always have a thing going on with some Italian poet from another age, which is my way of staying the grandchild of Italian immigrants—a part of me is always in their other-country of a home, with another language filling the air, always as poetry, even when members of my family were screaming insults or threatening to cause great harm to each other. “My” poet right now is Giuseppe Ungaretti. I am going through a dual-language edition from Archipelago Books of Allegria.
Never, though, am I reading just one thing. For stories I’m in and out of three collections, in daytime only, as these are works that delight me but also in different ways baffle me, scare me, and freak me out: The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya, Wild Milk by Sabrina Orah Mark, and Song for the Unraveling of the World by Brian Evenson. For evening reading I just started the novel River by Esther Kinsky, and I’m slowly absorbing the poetry-like Annotations by John Keene.
6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? I don’t think I’m sure what “wider recognition” means. But like lots of people, especially old-time English majors and getters of graduate degrees in lit, I think about the thing called “the canon,” especially, lately, in terms of American works and writers. You can think, for example, you know something about fiction of the first quarter of the twentieth century, and then one day in a used bookstore you happen upon a Dover Thrift Edition of something called American Indian Stories and Old Indian Legends by someone called Zitkala-Sa, and how come you didn’t know about these pieces? I do not think you can just blame yourself for not knowing such a thing before.
7. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Impediments change from life phase to life phase. For me right now it’s all about energy and physical stresses, as I was very ill for a couple of months and while I’m fine now, more or less, I have to learn to live and work—which often mean the same thing—with limitations. I hate it that I can’t go strongly through a long writing shift, and I have to take naps like a toddler. But! I’m still around and still writing!
8. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of One Night Two Souls Went Walking? Two of my favorite stories are by Gabriel García Márquez: “Eyes of a Blue Dog” and “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings.” In my novel there are no obvious indications of either work. Because isn’t that the best thing about inspirations? You steal and conceal.
Somewhere around Draft Number Eight, I realized that an element of each of those stories made it in, morphed of course into my own way of doing things. I was reminded of that angel and those dreamers in my own prose. I loved the surprise of that.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? I’ve had the same three first readers for ages and ages, and apart from them, I do not show manuscripts to anyone outside the publishing process. Of those three—son, wife, dearest old friend—the number one is my son. I was a teen mom, and for a long time it was just him and me. Which is to say, we go back. He is fifty. I’ve been reading to him his whole life. Lately, since we live on different coasts, him west and me east, we’re on the phone or videos. I read him the rawest, most vulnerable-making early drafts. He never has to use words to tell me when something is off or way less good than I could make it. He can grunt a certain way. Or breathe. Or make a face that’s sort of, “Meh.” Although he is not above outright letting me know something like, “The description of the guy in the next-to-last paragraph kind of sucks, Mom.”
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? I really heard this, because it came from myself: a rule, from a time when I needed it, laid out by the me of that present to the me of any future. “Do not write in your head.”
Somewhere in some anthology or collection of stories by Patricia Highsmith, there’s one about a fiction writer, writing fiction. Really actually writing. Punctuation and everything. The reader becomes a peeper, a spy on a creative act, and it’s thrilling and very intimate, and then whap, you find out the writer was imagining the writing, was doing the piece without writing it down, and whap again, the piece will never actually exist. Please if anyone knows what this story is or where it is, do not tell me; I never want to see it again. It’s too horrifying. I know exactly how it feels to sit down to write something I had planned out in my head—when finally in my day, or more likely my night, I had time to work—and nothing came, because I already wrote it.
Ellen Cooney, author of One Night Two Souls Went Walking. (Credit: Greta Rybus)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Valzhyna Mort, whose latest poetry collection, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, is out today from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Employing various poetic and musical forms, Mort searches for a genealogy in the labyrinthine history of Belarus. With the legacies of various catastrophes looming—from World War II to the Chernobyl fallout—she zooms in on private scenes that are at once gentle and violent. One poem, a lullaby, begins, “Snow glints and softens / a pig’s slaughter,” and throughout the collection there are many such striking contrasts. The cumulative effect is symphonic, generating a “music which, over accordion keys, / unclenches the fist of ancestry, / loosens fingers into rose petals.”Valzhyna Mort is also the author of Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press, 2008) and Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). The recipient of fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the Amy Clampitt Residency, her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Granta, Poetry, and the New Yorker. Born in Minsk, Belarus, she writes in English and Belarusian.
1. How long did it take you to write Music for the Dead and Resurrected? Ten years of writing—four of them, intensely. What’s impossible to count are the years of lived obsessions that explode into a book.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Knowing that, despite small victories of finishing poems, you are going to fail to capture that thing with words. That thing being the reason why you are writing in the first place.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? Where, when, and how often does a religious person worship? My Muse is with me always, everywhere.
4. What are you reading right now? I got this wonderful anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry in the Russian translation, and I’m savoring it by reading two poems a night before bed. Also on my bedside is Moyshe Kulbak’s novel The Zelmenyaners, which I open at random and read a few paragraphs at a time like poetry. The Zelmenyaners reminds me where I’m from. I’m also reading From Moscow to the Black Sea, Teffi’s memoir of traveling through Russia and Ukraine after the 1917 Revolution. My former student’s book of poetry, The Understudy’s Handbook by Steven Leyva. More new poetry books: Guillotine by Eduardo C. Corral, Obit by Victoria Chang, In the Lateness of the World by Carolyn Forché, The Dyzgraphxst by Canisia Lubrin.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? What is wider recognition, I wonder. Perhaps it’s when an author’s language becomes part of the cultural code? I come from a country where people do not read more than Americans do, but literature is a part of our cultural code. At the Belarusian protests against the authoritarian regime that is currently illegally holding onto power, you can see people holding posters with literary quotes, literary puns. There are books that are a part of everybody’s vocabulary. In the United States, even the “widely recognized” authors aren’t a part of a public vocabulary. Sports and TV shows are. As a result even a literary giant like Gwendolyn Brooks deserves wider recognition. Let’s try to connect to every American household right now and see how many of them have volumes of Emily Dickinson and Gwendolyn Brooks standing somewhere between a TV and a Crock-Pot. I don’t think that we’ll record any wide recognition.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? People who don’t read poetry.
7. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA? Yes, but I don’t agree with this formulation. You pursue poetry, not an MFA. The goal of an MFA program is to provide you with mentorship, community, along with space, time, and money to grow, write, and think. It provides you with access to amazing libraries. It’s a utopia: two years of poetic self-care.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Music for the Dead and Resurrected, what would you say? Take another ten years with it? It’s a good thing I cannot go back in time for this.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? A translator. Nobody else has a reason for a reading so obsessive, so slow, so attentive. There’s only one committed literary relationship: between poems and their translator, and trust is at its foundation, especially if the poet is not familiar with the target language. A real translator is not a traitor, but somebody who gives up their lung for your work.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? James Baldwin’s “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”
Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and Resurrected. (Credit: Tanya Kapitonava)
Follow our cover subject, Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, on her recent
trip to New York City. From a Ukranian diner in the East Village to a
conference hall in midtown, Mort shares her poetry and talks about the language and people that inspire her work.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Erica Hunt, whose latest poetry collection, Jump the Clock, is out today from Nightboat Books. Collecting new and selected poems from the past four decades, Jump the Clock is a wide-ranging yet focused examination of the mechanisms of language. In the first poem, “Preface,” Hunt proposes, “We could eliminate the ritual of walking around ourselves, meet head on.” Here, and elsewhere, the poet models how to speak directly, honestly, and without foregoing complexity. She observes and speaks of body language and grief, love and justice, in scenes that feel at once surreal and hyperreal. Reinventing itself at every turn, Jump the Clock is a master class in attention and engagement. “These poems are embodied,” writes Yanyi. “They are meant to be savored and thought with the heart and the mind; they exist in our world.” Erica Hunt is the author of several previous books of poetry, including Local History (Roof Books, 1993) and Time Flies Right Before the Eyes (Belladonna*, 2015). Her poems and essays have also appeared in BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Poetics Journal, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She teaches at Brown University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
1. How long did it take you to write Jump the Clock? Jump the Clock assembles selections from five books of poetry written over a span of almost forty years. There are a few poems, never gathered in a volume and unpublished, but the majority passed the “would I read this poem more than once” test.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The most challenging aspect of assembling this selection was suspending my inclination to look for a single integrated through line in the work and accepting that the through line is about the operation of multiple time signatures in poetry. By multiple time signatures I mean the time encapsulated in the poem, the “snapshot”; the time a poem prolongs as feeling or experience; that time contrasted with the time of reading the poem; and then the present time—the poem’s appearance here, early twenty-first century, amidst crumbling structures of white supremacy, patriarchy, maldistribution of wealth, and so on.
Many of my poems seek to invent a language—as if to break out of conventional usage, illuminate the sand pits, and find open paths to emancipation. Meaning binds the generic to the situation-specific, and readers use intuition and reason to see past language’s strictures on thinking and feeling and imagining. That sense of orchestration between our language for mediating the world and our social apprehensions is the book’s through line.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write almost every day, though when I was working full time and raising a family, that was not always possible. When I was working full time and parenting, I sometimes managed the exercise of writing one computer page a day, and many of those pages turned into poems over time. With that said, I have been writing for many years, keeping a journal practice for forty-eight years.
Often I write in response to art, a gallery, or museum show. I will write in the dark while watching a movie, what I see and hear, answers and questions to the scene unfolding in the intimacy of a theater, which is like writing after waking from a dream. I will write in response to newspaper articles, particularly outrageous reports—the strong emotion is an impetus to write my scorn or resistance. I will also write to music, especially music without words, though the soundtracks change from very abstract soundscapes and jazz improvisations to beats.
I am never without pen and paper.
4. What are you reading right now? Like many writers, I read several books at once. Right now, I am enjoying Ossuaries by Dionne Brand, {#289-128} by Randall Horton, and Numbers by Rachel Blau DuPlessis. I am reading them as book-length poems, though their strategies for achieving a “rested” but still mutable cohesion are different.
Increasingly I am interested in literature working across media and genre that incorporates the visual—DuPlessis, for instance, works with poetry and collage. I am also interested in how writers manifest their work through performance in the reading itself. Julie Patton, Tracie Morris, and Douglas Kearney are brilliant innovators in that realm.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? There are many poets who have received attention and then fallen out of fashion. In this group I place Melvin Tolson, Lorenzo Thomas, and Larry Eigner. Other writers deserving “wider” recognition are Wilson Harris, Carla Harryman, and Sarah Schulman. In poetry, Julie Patton, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Impediments are shape-shifters, different at different times. Time and money—and the apparent lack—are constant. I am also a person who keeps busy: I teach, I am a community activist who is also attentive to care for family and friends. Sometimes I am the “impediment” and have to remind myself that a “no” is a “yes” to the chunk of time required for writing about difficult subjects with complexity, resistance, and seeing beyond the despair of the present.
7. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? I participate in multiple writing communities, and they have provided different kinds of sustenance to me as a creative artist: Cave Canem, the Poetry Project, Belladonna Collaborative Language Poets, and the Naropa Summer Writing Program all have provided “homes” for my writing and thought. When I teach poetry, I urge my students not to get hung up on the “schools” and to be sure they sustain multiple sources for their work, and just as importantly, to participate in and outside literary communities: to be a part of multiple social worlds. The experience of working in community settings in a workshop, in a voter drive, in planning a demonstration, any volunteering or listening, provides material for one’s work beyond oneself.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Jump the Clock, what would you say? Trust the process from notes to draft to next draft. From reading critically to reading out loud. From performing to listening again. From redrafting to reframing. Books are not monuments but are particular instances for conversation and thinking through with readers.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? The poet and scholar Tonya Foster, who is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, and my partner, the composer and performer Marty Ehrlich.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? From Elizabeth Alexander: As a poet, “Write—and publish—one piece of critical appreciation of another poet per year.”
From Rachel Blau DuPlessis in “Statement on Poetics”—paraphrasing now: A poem is “bottomless,” “intricate,” and “tangible” in detail. I like thinking this is true regardless of “school” or length. Here is what it has helped me to appreciate: A poem is a work made through language that bears rereading, to discover that difficulty is never without love.
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Khaled Mattawa, whose fifth poetry collection, Fugitive Atlas, is out today from Graywolf Press. Early in Fugitive Atlas, Mattawa poses the question, “How to stop thinking of bodies / as worth extinction, worth eating or enslaving”? Examining both ancient cruelties and contemporary social, political, and environmental crises, Mattawa exposes how humans have become desensitized to suffering, and searches for a path forward. Employing inventive and various forms—one poem, for instance, adopts the structure of an index to break down the language of military occupation—Mattawa reckons with what it means to be human in a troubled and troubling age. “These are poems of exceptionally real human and political consequence, filled with news that the news does not speak,” writes Alberto Riós. “Khaled Mattawa’s Fugitive Atlas is a work of uncommon, poignant character, of resonance and depth.” Khaled Mattawa is the author of four previous collections of poetry, most recently Tocqueville, and the translator of nine books of contemporary Arabic poetry. He received an MA and an MFA from Indiana University, and earned his PhD from Duke University.
1. How long did it take you to write Fugitive Atlas? Nine years.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Settling on the core themes of the book and how best to represent them. For the first five years I did not think I had a book. But once the central sequence of poems emerged, it was a matter of creating a mural where all the parts fit to tell a kind of story.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I write mostly at home. I begin with an idea and set it aside, but depending on how I’m drawn to it, I might or might not go back to finish the poem. I think that’s what happens. But in reality, writing seems like a dreamy activity to me. Fugitive Atlas has a sequence of haibun that I no longer recall how and when I wrote. The process must have involved being ensconced at my desk for several days. I realize that sounds torturous, but given that I have no memory of it, it was very likely an ecstatic experience. I don’t go on residencies because my schedule is never that open, but a ten-day residency at the University of Arizona Poetry Center was a very productive time for me. But there too I don’t remember which poems were written during that residency. Written in the sphere of the imagination, poems perhaps seek to be their own beings, not attached to us or to the time in which we wrote them.
4. What are you reading right now? The Devil’s Pool by George Sand.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? There are so many.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Time and everything else. I am engaged in so many extracurricular activities—editing a journal, translation, arts activism, administration—that keep me from writing. But the truth is I need them to stay away from writing, or to refuel my mind for writing. After finishing a book, even if I have a project in mind, trying to write can be demoralizing. The new book project is insisting that it be new, that you renew yourself, which means you have to teach yourself how to write again. I don’t know if that’s an impediment. Maybe it’s just the enduring challenge of the process.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? My editor said, “This is your best work,” which made me feel very good about the book and about my career as a poet.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Fugitive Atlas, what would you say? I hear you’re working on a series of poems about Greek myths told from a postcolonial perspective. Good luck with that!
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? The editor I’m working with. I sought help from several friends with Fugitive Atlas, which I don’t do normally as I think it’s such a big imposition on one’s time. But I did this time and received excellent feedback. However, a book gets built and rebuilt in the editorial process, and for that the editor you’re working with is important. I very much enjoyed working with Jeff Shotts at Graywolf who read and reread the book several times.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? Don’t ever find your voice.
Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas. (Credit: Khairy Shaban)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Destiny O. Birdsong, whose debut poetry collection, Negotiations, is out today from Tin House Books. In Negotiations, Birdsong pulls no punches. She exposes and writes against tokenization, fetishization, anti-Black violence, and liberal complacency. On voting, she writes, “we all take the sticker; we all / brag of our civic duty, gliding home / on a wave of solidarity that feels / like kinship.” In another poem, she throws back racist comments at a man: “I hope someone tells you / everything your culture made / is meaningless: Stonehenge, democracies, and you.” Each line in Negotiations is this fierce and truthful. Whether addressing sexual assault and illness, or self-love and community, Birdsong maintains this intense and intimate register. In one poem, the narrator addresses her child self, imagining if only she could tell her, “she was right / in her utter belief she could build a world / and live in it alone.” Negotiations is a whole world of its own, a revolutionary manifesto and love letter. “These poems are desire, survival, the body, rage, vulnerability,” writes Jaquira Díaz. “A fierce celebration of Black womanhood.” Destiny O. Birdsong is a Louisiana-born poet, fiction writer, and essayist. She is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Jack Jones Literary Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and MacDowell. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she earned both her MFA and PhD from Vanderbilt University.
1.How long did it take you to write Negotiations? Though some of the poems in thebookdate back to 2015, I started writing it in earnest in 2017, and it was a complete accident. That April I did my first 30/30 challenge—thirty poems in thirty days—in hopes of finishing another manuscript, but when I turned back to these poems during a residency later that year, I realized they were talking almost exclusively to each other, and doing something entirely different from the manuscript I’d intended to add them to. I wrote the last few poems to round out one of the middle sections in October 2019, after the book had been picked up. So in total, two and a half years. The other manuscript, which is more than a decade old, still isn’t finished.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? The most challenging thing hasn’t happened yet, which is my mother, my family, and a few other folks who are close to me reading the book. There’s a lot in it they don’t know about me, and my biggest fear is causing them pain when they find out. I hope that’s not the case, but that would be incredibly difficult for me.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? I don’t write things for public consumption every day, but I do journal most days. I believe that it clears my brain for the writing I do later, whether it be the same day or the following year. Sometimes it offers me a phrase or idea, a concept for a poem, or space to map out revisions for an essay. My writing times depend on the genre: I tend to write poems in the middle of the night, 2 to 5 AM; fiction in midday, from 2 to 5 PM; and essays whenever I have a block of time to work on a draft. I write where I live because I have trouble concentrating when other people are in the room, so coffee shops have always been off-limits for me. If the subject matter is heavy, I write in bed—that’s my safe space. Otherwise I’ll write on the couch with the TV on but muted, so I have someone to look up at every now and then, but not be bothered by the noise. If it’s nice out, I journal on my patio.
4. What are you reading right now? I just finished a collection of essays called Like Love by Michele Morano, and it was such a fascinating read. The book’s premise is about unconsummated romance in all its forms: with friends, complete strangers, parents, children. It confirmed much of what I’ve been feeling about my own friendships: There can be deep and sometimes even romantic love that just is and doesn’t have to try to be anything else—not sexual, not more platonic—and I can lean into it, flourish in it, give it back, and not feel weird or guilty for doing so.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? Tara Betts. She really is a trailblazer for me when I think about the Black women who came before me, who write about what I write about, and who are still out here, doing all kinds of work, both on and off the page. Give her her flowers!
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life? Right now? Money, which ultimately means time. I spend a lot of time—not to mention energy—doing stuff to pay my bills. I’d love to live at least for a little while not having to worry about that at all, and just writing.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? A couple of months ago, my agent, Kiele Raymond, told me, “Presses promote books; writers shape careers,” and that was such a helpful way to think about the bigger picture. It reminded me that: 1) A book is not an entire career, and 2) I can—and should—always be thinking about my writing life as a whole, and continue to work toward everything I want even as I prepare for the publication of my first collection. Her advice has also made it easier to pursue other passions right now, like writing essays and fiction that don’t necessarily have anything to do with the book.
8. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? The contest model for poetry book acquisitions and unpaid journal publications. Sorry, that’s two, but they both operate on the same conceptual economy of lack that tells us we should be grateful for whatever we get because getting chosen is so hard. And that may be true, but it shouldn’t have to be.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My friend Claire Jimenez. She’s an amazing fiction writer and essayist—and poet, too, but that might be a secret. I’ve learned so much from her, but the trust really comes from the fact that she’s a friend of my work, and I’ve only recently realized how important that is to me. I’ve had experiences where people tried to shape my writing to fit their own agendas or soothe their own egos, and she doesn’t do that. I know I can get an honest read from her. Plus, Claire is scrappy. When she believes in what you’re doing, she’ll fight for you, even if she has to fight against your own misconceptions about the quality of your work. I really admire that about her, and I try to give it back whenever we’re reading each other’s manuscripts.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? My best piece of writing advice came from the poet-scholar Chiyuma Elliott at a Cave Canem workshop back in 2009. I was a baby poet who loved grand finales for my poems, and in her feedback, she said very gently, “At the end of a poem, leave the door open.” I’ve spent every day of my writing life since learning all the ways you can leave a door open: unlocked, cracked, off the hinges. There are so many ways.
Correction: An earlier version of this article was incorrectly edited to state that the 30/30 challenge involved thirty minutes of writing a day for thirty days. Birdsong clarified the challenge she was referring to was to write thirty poems in thirty days.
Destiny O. Birdsong, author of Negotiations. (Credit: Hunter Armistead)
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Heid E. Erdrich, whose latest poetry collection, Little Big Bully, is out today from Penguin Books. Witnessing the country in crisis—the decimation of wild bird populations, the epidemic of violence against Indigenous women, the endless land theft—Erdrich asks readers, “How did we come to this?” Often beginning with personal memory, she writes with an eye for detail and an attention to how language can both reveal and conceal truth. In a world where the bullies increasingly demand, “Avert your eyes / not so you do not see / but so you are not seen,” Erdrich’s poetry models how to stand, see and be seen, and resist. “This book broke me open,” writes Amy Gerstler, who chose the collection as a winner of the 2019 National Poetry Series. “It electrified me and made my hair stand on end, tingling on my head like a mob of hypersensitive antennae.” Heid E. Erdrich is the author of several previous poetry collections, including Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media (Michigan State University Press, 2017) and Cell Traffic (University of Arizona Press, 2012). She has received fellowships and awards from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Bush Foundation, and Loft Literary Center, among other institutions. She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, and is Ojibwe, enrolled at Turtle Mountain.
1. How long did it take you to write Little Big Bully? This book came pretty quickly—it was a deep dive and a shock, really. Most of the poems were completed in January 2019. A few poems are from before then, and one or two are from 2020, but most of the work came in a rush during the polar vortex of 2019.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book? Considering the personal when I generally write critical analysis through the second person or a kind of poetic persona who can stand for a lot of people as well as Native women like me. What I was trying to understand in writing Little Big Bully is the mechanism of abuse that puts all of us at risk. I had to write about my life, the events and abuse inflicted on me as a girl and adult, and worse, what happened in front of me as a child in a world beyond my family where I witnessed brutal misogyny.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write? My writing practice is not disciplined. Sometimes I am in my unruly garden, or on a walk, or staring out our porch windows, or doom scrolling. I may look like I am not writing, but I am. I do have a study full of books and curious furnishings in vintage green colors I favor, and I go there most days. But mostly I try to catch a poem in the pool of my life—not unlike someone with a rod at a pond. If you look at them on a day when they don’t catch anything, you would not say they are not fishing. You may not see it, but I am always writing.
4. What are you reading right now? The Old Road by Staci Drouillard, a family story about an Ojibwe community along Lake Superior; Apple (Skin to the Core), a memoir in poems written and illustrated by Eric Gansworth (Onondaga); and my sister Louise Erdrich’s new novel in manuscript draft. I read a lot of titles at once and I don’t finish a lot of books, which I’d like to change.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition? There are many great writers who don’t get enough attention who happen to be Native. Maybe their work is not so Native-forward that it can marketed that way, so publishers take a pass. Of course there are dozens and dozens of Native poets who should be better known. You can find many in the new Norton anthology of Native Nations poets edited by U.S. poet laureate Joy Harjo.
6. What is one thing you might change about the writing community or publishing industry? Well, we’ve been saying how male and white it all is and are starting to say how rich it is too. It’s all so mysterious what people get paid for books, what the process is for publication, who decides what, how to get into the biz, how people get prizes or notice or reviews. There’s a lot I don’t know after thirty years. From my time working with visual artists and performers, I don’t think other fields are so closed-mouth. I’d love to see publishers and literary organizations be more up front about who they are and how they support Native and Black writers in particular.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you? I don’t have an agent—another thing that baffles me as, primarily, a poet. But my editor Paul Slovak and all the folks at Penguin really helped me to accomplish my vision in every detail from revision to design. It’s not what they said, it was that they did not say no.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Little Big Bully, what would you say? Don’t be too subtle and do read a bit more about narcissistic abuse before you hand off the book.
9. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why? My sister Louise. She pays a lot of attention to the overall shape and impact of the poems in total. She never suggests an edit or ideas or anything substantive, she just gives me her reading and if it matches what I wanted to say, I know I’m on the right track.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard? “Ah, go on. You’re living your life”—said to me by Grace Paley when I was not writing every day.