Interviews

WEAVING NATURAL IMAGERY with memories of the past and moments of the present, Ada Limón’s work explores both gender and race while incorporating elements of the surreal. The Los Angeles Review describes her work as being filled with “discovery, and rediscovery of self and world.” Limón’s poems guide her reader through her speaker’s self-exploration and encourage them to find beauty in the unconventional—in the way a neighbor mows his farm, in an 8-pound female horse heart, in a lady groundhog eating a tomato.

Ada Limón is the author of The Carrying (2018), the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; Bright Dead Things (2015), a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Books Critics Circle Award; Sharks in the Rivers (2010); Lucky Wreck (2006); and This Big Fake World (2006). Her new book, The Hurting Kind, is expected from Milkweed Editions in May of 2022. Limón was a recent recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, and she teaches remotely from Lexington, Kentucky, where she also hosts The Slowdown, a poetry-focused podcast.

Ada Limón agreed to meet with us over Zoom during the winter of 2020. Amid a year of isolation, our conversation surrounding the importance of underrepresented voices in literature, poetic process, and the evolution of poetic style provided a much-needed sense of togetherness. Limón was candid, encouraging, and realistically hopeful while she allowed us into her world for a few hours on a chilly afternoon.

TORI THURMOND

Something that I love about your collections is the variety of form. I read in a past interview of yours that breath is really important when writing poetry. Does the incorporation of breath in your poetry determine the form of each poem or is that a different process for you?

ADA LIMÓN

No, they’re completely aligned. Breath, for me, determines how the poem is read, where we want the reader to breathe, where we as the writer breathe. Allowing for the line breaks, caesuras in the middle of the line, stanza breaks, all of that, where the white space is, is always allowing for breath. In some ways, they operate like stage directions. Once I’ve actually completed the poem, when I hand it to a reader, they should be able to read it in a similar manner to how I’ve placed it on the page and how I intend it to be read.

MIRIUM ARTEAGA

In Lucky Wreck, there were a lot of shorter, haiku-like poems. How does breath operate in those?

LIMÓN

I love that you asked about Lucky Wreck. It’s coming up on its 15th anniversary. Which is crazy because I feel like I’m not that old, right? Those little poems were meant to be like Post-It notes within the book, notes to myself on some level, moments to stop, especially after a longer poem or maybe a more complex poem or a poem that had a heavy subject matter. They were like little breaths, little breaks throughout the book, a place to land after a longer journey—the psychological journey of a poem.

The last poem, “Thirteen Feral Cats,” which is all one poem in thirteen sections, needed to be the ending, the reason for the book. It’s almost backwards in some ways, like it’s built to have some lightness, some cleverness, some joy of living, but that last section confronts mortality in a larger way.

Lucky Wreck was the first manuscript I put together as a manuscript; I would type into one word document. I wrote each poem individually, but I started to see them as a collection right off the bat. I started putting them together, and then “Thirteen Feral Cats” came at the end, and it felt like, “Oh right, it’s supposed be this journey I’m working through, and then here is the reason. My stepmother was diagnosed with cancer. How do I live with this information? And how do these thirteen feral cats play into what it is to want something, to live and also want to tame something?”

POLLY BUCKINGHAM

Have you ordered your books since then in that way, or do you say, “I have enough. I’m going make a book”?

LIMÓN

It’s a combination. Bright Dead Things, Lucky Wreck and Sharks in the Rivers all started as one poem at a time. Then I start to see them talking to each other, and I start to lay them next to each other and  I think, “If this is a manuscript, what am I missing?” It felt like Lucky Wreck was actually missing some of that real straightforward conversation about death.

Now when I build a manuscript, I think, “Okay, if this is a book and these poems are connected, what are the parts I’m leaving out? What are the things I’m scared to say? What are the things I need to push myself into, whether it be scary or hard or maybe even joyful?” The hardest poem to write is a joyful poem or a contented poem. I mean, what does a contented poem look like? There are times when I start to put together a manuscript and I think, “Oh, this needs more contentment. I’m content. I have joy. I look to see what parts are missing, and then I start to fill in those gaps and create a book that has a sense of wholeness to it. I’ve never wanted my books to be just a collection of poems. They’ve always felt like they needed a heart, that they needed a core, and that there was some sort of, for lack of a better word, narrative arc for the reader.

SARAH KERSEY

You have that thirteen-part poem in Lucky Wreck, and you also have a fifteen-part poem in Sharks in the Rivers called “Fifteen Balls of Feathers.” How do you decide when to include section breaks in poems and when to use stanza breaks?

LIMÓN

In both of those poems, each section acts as if it’s an individual poem, but it’s going to be more kinetic and vibrant if it’s part of the whole. It’s sort of about whether or not it can actually exist outside of the poem. Whereas with a stanza break, there’s no question that it needs to be connected, and so it’s giving into the leaps the brain makes. The section breaks feel more like that sort of pinging, where the brain goes over here then over here, whereas the stanzas, there might be a little pause, but the brain is still on track.

BUCKINGHAM

You’ve talked a lot about silence in your poems, and we were talking earlier about those smaller poems with a lot of space around them. I thought of Lorca, who you mention in The Carrying. I wonder if you could speak to his influence.

LIMÓN

Yeah, Lorca has been a big influence on me, and one part of that is those leaps. That’s one thing Lorca has always been really wonderful at, trusting the reader to go with him when he goes into a new realm. It’s no wonder that Salvador Dalí and Federico Lorca were partners and friends, or whatever their relationship was. That giving into the reality has always been a big influence on my work. When I allow my brain to go, “Okay, this is just where it’s going,” instead of stopping myself and going, “This is too weird,” the Lorca mentor in my mind says, “Go with it. Go with it.” I don’t know if it’s always about the silence or the breath, but more about trusting the weirdness of the self. The weirdness of the self might lead you to some place that might not be factual, but it might be truthful.

KYLE BEAM

Could you speak to sectioning in your collections?

LIMÓN

With The Carrying, I started reading it as all one section. I was going through fertility treatments, but that wasn’t necessarily the entire thrust of the book. I needed there to be a place where you could close the door on that and talk about a poem like “A New National Anthem” or “The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to Be Bilingual.” Even though our emotional state as we’re writing any manuscript is going to color an entire manuscript, I still felt that there were moments where I wasn’t thinking about my own fertility. I needed those moments of breaking. Even though that was the big impulse for the book, I didn’t want it to be the only engine. Those sections became a safe place for me to not always talk about the exact thing that was troubling me.

In the first section of Bright Dead Things, I’m in Kentucky. Why am I here? Why am I writing? And then the second section is dealing with what came before, which was the death of my stepmother, and I probably would not have been in Kentucky if it wasn’t for that. Then the third section feels like a return to the past, all the things and all the people we carry with us. There’s moments of talking about the exes, talking about past loves. Who are we when we enter a new relationship? Do we bring all the people who have been in a relationship with us behind us? We do. Sometimes you notice it. Sometimes you wish you didn’t. Then the fourth section was like, “What is it to be in a relationship?” and having that complicated. It ends in love poems. They’re less than smooth; they’re a little distressed in a way that I hope is truthful. Once I saw the organization for that manuscript happening, I was like, “Oh, this is exactly what it means, what it needs to be.” Also, once I realized there were poems about what the ex would bring to the relationship, I thought, “That person’s going to need a poem,” and I allowed myself to explore that. Sometimes the sections allow me to do what I was talking about earlier, which is to give myself prompts to explore something that I haven’t thought about or maybe haven’t even thought was worthy of a poetic impulse until I’ve seen what’s already there.

KERSEY

You mentioned that the first section of Bright Dead Things is a lot about your move to Kentucky. I was wondering how place and physical space influence your poems and if you set out to write poems about Kentucky, or did those happen without intention?

LIMÓN

Landscape is really important in my work. If I were to say that there are themes in my work, in general, it would be the natural world and animals. Bright Dead Things is the first book that was written entirely outside of New York, so it does have a certain amount of greenness and the natural world, whereas with Sharks in the Rivers, there’s the natural world—the mention of the Stillaguamish, and my family lived in Stanwood, Washington—but, at the same time, the rivers and the animals felt almost metaphorical. In Bright Dead Things they become more real, partly because I was living among them. It’s a different experience to talk about a horse when you’re in a high-rise office in the middle of Times Square than it is to talk about a horse while you’re actually looking out the window at a horse.

There were two things that moving to Kentucky gave me that I didn’t have in New York. One was that greenness and that true interaction with the natural world and the second one was the time to interact with it. Because when you live in a big city, especially in New York, most of your time is spent working to pay to live in that city. I had huge jobs. I was the creative services director for Travel + Leisure Magazine, and I left my house at 7:30 a.m. and came home at 7:30 p.m. or 8:00 p.m. When I moved out and started freelancing, my relationship to nature changed because I was out in it almost daily. The landscape became much more of my home. It went away from metaphor and became real.

ARTEAGA

Do you think it’s necessary or beneficial for any poet or writer to put themselves into the natural world?

LIMÓN

If I were to say what is good for writers, I would say, no matter where you are, recognize the bioregional area you’re in. I actually think that you could live in Brooklyn and have an incredible relationship with trees and plants and animals. I don’t think I had that because I was so distant in terms of time, but if you have time to walk in the botanical gardens, to walk in the parks—all of those things—you can have an incredible relationship with it. It’s really important, as human beings, for all of us to be in nature. We can talk about ecopoetics or nature poetry, but it’s really important just to recognize the plants and animals that surround us and are part of our community, the non-human animals.

BUCKINGHAM

What I love about your work is that odd combination between the Spanish surrealist vein and that gritty I’m-gonna-take-control-of-things voice, which is also a more narrative strain. I noticed it in The Carrying. Would you speak to those two competing voices?

LIMÓN

There are times where I’m in control and there needs to be a talking back, like the time you insert yourself into the world and you almost have a dominance because you need to for survival. You need to for rebellion. You need to for resistance. And then there are times where you need to receive the world, sit back and actually soak it in. You need to let the world be bigger than you. What a gift to let it be bigger than you. And then there are times you think, “No, I’m going to stand against this, and I will be the hummingbird in the hurricane.”

Those two voices exist within myself, and they very much existed in Lorca’s work, too. When can we be just the human animal, soft and receptive and listening and quiet and let the world happen to us? And then when do we need to say, “No, I need to be in this world, and I need to be using my voice in order to honor people maybe who don’t have the voice”? Those two things are not just necessary for my own poetics, but I think they’re necessary for my humanity.

BUCKINGHAM

Your imagery seems so connected to the Spanish surrealists. Some contemporary poets I can think of, Alberto Ríos and Sharon Olds, also have that striking and wild imagery within a more narrative structure. I wonder if you would speak to imagery and how you see it, where it’s coming from, what writers influence you in terms of imagery.

LIMÓN

I think imagery is key to how poems are made. I don’t think they can be made successfully without it, but there’s also a level at which we edit our own imagery, often outside of our poetic life. We don’t generally talk about the way we’re creating metaphors, or seeing things, or describing something, because maybe how we see it is a little strange. Sharon Olds was my teacher at NYU. I never studied with Alberto Ríos, but I love his work. “Rabbits and Fire” is one of my favorite all time poems. There’s a permission granted with both of those poets to follow the weirdness. I mean, Sharon is really weird. And I also lean into that idiosyncratic self that sees things differently than other people.

THURMOND

All of the collection titles are just breathtaking. Sharks in the Rivers represents exploring the unexpected—you don’t expect there to be sharks in a river. And Bright Dead Things explores finding the beauty in unconventional places. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your process of selecting a title for each collection.

LIMÓN

I love that question. Anyone who works with me always says, “You love titles.” I love titling poems. Why would I want a poem called poem? I don’t want that. I love Frank O’Hara, I love Alan Dugan, I love people who can get away with it, but for me the title does work. It sums up or contains everything that’s in the book. I will continue to be obsessed with titles. This Big Fake World is like a novel in verse—so it’s almost all fiction. And in Lucky Wreck, the idea is, “I’m a disaster but I’m also so happy to be here.” Once I found that title, I could put together the rest of the collection—it was dealing with mortality and the recognition of death as well as joy, and those two things are consistently balanced across all five collections. For Sharks in the Rivers, there needed to be something scary underneath it all; that was the first time really dealing with where my stepmother’s cancer was going. There was a recognition of the fact that the world started to feel a little more haunted, and I felt less and less comfortable living in the city. There was a pull for me going into that book, like a pulsing dark forest of the mind. I retreated into that as much as I could while living in the city. In Bright Dead Things, almost all of the poems deal with the idea of containing living and dying in the same breath. Sharks in the Rivers is the mortality underneath it, and then Bright Dead Things is the idea that we’re both living and dying at the same time. The Carrying is similar; it’s what we carry to be in the world. I feel compelled to say that I’ve always liked hard k sounds; the only book that doesn’t have that is Bright Dead Things, but it still has this brightness. I love a spondee. I tend to like how these sonics hit.

ARTEAGA

Are titles something you start with, or are they something you finish a poem or a collection with?

LIMÓN

It happens both ways, but for the most part they come at the end. Sometimes I think, “What’s this poem doing?” If I give it this title, suddenly it all connects, and I realize what the poem is about. Sometimes I ask myself, “What is this poem trying to teach me, what is it trying to tell me?” As we write, we don’t always know where the poem is going. If we did, the poems would be terrible for the most part. We have to not have any idea what we’re writing. The title also comes from the question, what is working?

KERSEY

Earlier you mentioned how The Carrying occasionally focuses on fertility. I also noticed a lot of the expectation for women to have children. I was wondering if this expectation is as common in literary circles as it is in the rest of society?

LIMÓN

I think it is. I think you’d be surprised if a man wrote about being a father. People would be like, “Oh, the sensitivity, the bravery, the courage.” But then if women write about being a mother, it’s like, “Oh, it’s sentimental.” It’s very strange. It’s very gendered and, like most of all our culture, hetero-maniacal—not just heteronormative, but hetero-maniacal. There’s something about white-predominant culture that’s constantly saying, “Okay, once you have a partner. . . .” That was one of the things about Bright Dead Things I started with. The line “People were nicer to me once I was partnered” has always stuck with me as if I was a problem that had been fixed. Like, “Oh, you’re now more human than you were before when you were single.”

The literary culture is very much also the predominant culture. The one thing I will say is that you do find more of us who have chosen not to have kids. We’ve leaned into a child-free life. You’d probably find that across the board in creative cultures. We’re making something that fulfills us. There’s also a little bit of a selfishness to being an artist. We’re selfish with our time, and that’s important. There’s an enoughness that we feel. People will say, “Oh, I didn’t feel complete until I had a child,” but as artists, there’s a completeness when we create something that non-artists don’t experience.

ARTEAGA

In The Carrying there’s this focus on the body, but then going back to Lucky Wreck, the focus is on the inner self. Is there a distinction between the body and the self? Or are they codependent or independent of each other?

LIMÓN

I’m really glad you pointed that out to me because I don’t think I would have noticed that. The body is essential in The Carrying because I was also dealing with vertigo and chronic illness. It also might have had to do with fertility treatments. It felt like my pain levels were almost always sixes, sevens, and eights while I was writing the book. So, the body was not just with me, but it was with me in a painful way. And I was very aware of it all the time. It was hard not to write about it. Whereas when I wrote Lucky Wreck, I was younger. I didn’t have the chronic illness. I had scoliosis, but the pain levels were not anywhere near what they were when I was writing The Carrying. I love the fact that I was able to not consider the body as much in Lucky Wreck because there’s a youthfulness to it.

We think what we are is our minds or hearts, but if our bodies betray us in any way, if we are having a chronic illness or if we are not able in the way that we were once able, the body becomes a deeper consideration. The body and mind are absolutely connected, but I sometimes wish I could only think about the inner self. I was laughing just the other day at someone asking if I liked teaching on Zoom and I said, “Yes.” Partly because it’s freedom. As someone who has had vertigo and had trouble walking and literally trying to get around, I said, “It’s really nice not to have to worry about falling while getting to a classroom.” There’s a freedom in just entering a space without my body, and my body has become much more of a consideration as I’ve dealt with some severe health issues.

ARTEAGA

Earlier you mentioned that This Big Fake World was a collection more fictional than personal. Is that something you plan to return to?

LIMÓN

There are times I really like to write fiction, and I particularly like to do it in poems. About a year ago, I wrote a project of twenty poems for the Art for Justice Fund grant that was about what it was like to be in a relationship with an incarcerated person. It was all fictional. A lot of things were pulled from real life and real experiences, my own and others, and they’re all in a different perspective. The poems were gifts; it was really fun to get out of myself for a little while. They were heavy poems, but it also felt like, “How can I explore this in a real way?” It felt like the only way to do it was to speak from someone who was not the incarcerated person but the person who was left; I kept thinking about how we grieve people when they’re not gone but they’re caged. That felt like a really important project. But now I have these twenty poems that I adore, but I’m not sure if they’ll fit because my sixth manuscript is more like Bright Dead Things than The Carrying. It’s dealing much more with the self. And I wonder if I should put them in a section or if they’ll be in something else at some point.

BUCKINGHAM

We’d love to hear about the new book.

LIMÓN

I’m sure you guys totally relate to this: I don’t want it to be pandemic poems. I don’t mind if there are some, but I don’t want this to be my pandemic collection. I want it to have a sense of ongoingness and timelessness, though there are poems that deal with the pandemic and that deal with politics in the last four years. But it’s still quite a personal collection. There are a lot of animals in it; it feels like a very alive animal book. It’s slowly coming together, and I’m excited about it.

BEAM

A lot of your work is somewhat autobiographical. How much do you find yourself embellishing to fit the poem or the themes?

LIMÓN

I’m pretty factual. I stay close to what has happened in my own life, but I’ll always bow down to sound. If something sounds better for the musicality or muscularity of the line, I’ll always choose that sound whether it’s true or not. For the most part, the autobiographical thrust of the poem is true, but specifics will be changed, and almost always because of sound.

THURMOND

“How to Triumph Like a Girl” is one of my favorite poems in Bright Dead Things. It’s a new take on the phrase “fight like a girl.” Could you speak to the importance of writing about the female body and female characteristics in today’s society and what that means to you?

LIMÓN

I always say my two favorite F-words are forgiveness and feminism. I feel very drawn to writing feminist work because it’s important to me to recognize what it is to be in a gendered body in a society that privileges one gender. That poem came out of a moment where I was interested in what it was that made me root for those particular horses, what it was to feel a bond to a female animal, and how that felt different than the bond to a male animal. What is it that I’m connected with? I also think that when horses come into my work, they symbolize power. They’re enormous, beautiful beasts. They’re not like the dog or the cat. It wasn’t really about celebrating my own power, but about trying to get power. You write yourself into something you want to believe. I want that huge beating genius machine in my body. What would it be like to have an eight-pound heart?

ARTEAGA

In The Carrying, there is a reoccurrence of suppression of anger versus accepting anger. How do you showcase that in poems about race or gender or politics?

LIMÓN

It’s not only about how I balance it in my own writing, but how I balance it in my life. That’s partly the reason those poems have those moments that lift away from anger, because I don’t want to live there. I can live there, but I don’t want to. I know what anger does. I know what it does to my body. Anger can be useful—it has brought me to the page, rage has brought me to the page before, isolation and otherness have brought me to the page. But when I’m stepping away from the poems or when I’m ending the poems, I do need some sort of acceptance or recognition that I won’t let this eat me alive. That to me is also rebellion, like how Audre Lorde talks about self-care as a radical act. I sometimes write so I can say, “You stay here now, you get to stay on the page, and I get to go walk my dog and have a beautiful day.” I get to have that. I’m not going to live in a place where I’m feeling that fear and anger and torment all the time. It’s a lot about laying it down. I need to put it somewhere. I’ll put it in poems and explore it in poems so that I can also walk away from it.

BUCKINGHAM

I was thinking about “Dead Stars,” which embodies what you’re saying. It’s a political poem with that really nice moment where we “bargain for the safety of others.” How do you see politics in your poetry?

LIMÓN

Yeah, politics are there. You can’t separate them out. You can’t separate who I am out of my poems, and that includes my political beliefs. Who I’m writing for is part of my politics, who I feel seen by is part of my politics. “Dead Stars” is a political poem. It’s an eco-political poem. It’s asking, “What is it to not only use our bodies to bargain for others but also to speak to the animal and to speak to the trees?” There’s so much giving up, and sometimes I want to give up, too. Sometimes it’s all too much, and it’s all too hard.

There are so many topics, we almost become a circular firing squad with each other because we think, “Oh, well if you’re working on women’s rights, are you making sure to include trans rights? Are you making sure to include the intersectionality of race relations? And, if you’re talking about BIPOC, are you making sure that you’re talking about Latinx folks? Are you using the Latinx term or should we say Mexican—because I’m Mexican?” I’m very aware sometimes that it can be overwhelming, and I just want to be like, “No, I don’t want to think about it.” And yet, I’m always thinking about it.

I’m thinking about my ancestors, I’m thinking about my connection to the earth. My connection to the earth is a political act as is knowing where I come from, writing for ancestors who did not have a chance to write because they were crossing a border and living in a chicken coop and not having a chance to actually be an artist. I think, “Okay, I’m going to be an artist because my grandfather, who was very much an artist, didn’t have that opportunity.”

But I also don’t want to write a polemic. I don’t necessarily get a lot from poems that are just telling me what to do. I don’t have the answers. I have a lot of questions, even of myself. I interrogate myself: What can I do more of? When have I done enough service? When do I get to say no? When do I get to say, “I don’t have to be the loudest person in the room right now. Someone else can do that on my behalf.” All of those things are active in my work.

There’s also a leaning into beauty that I feel is very important, especially for writers of color. It’s important that we get to have beauty. We all read nature poems, but it’s primarily white men who write nature poems—or the poems that we know, at least. But then you look at Camille Dungy’s amazing anthology Black Nature, and you realize that’s actually not the case. It’s an incredible anthology, a game changer. It came out in 2009. It’s great also if you’re teaching. It blows people’s minds because it really is like, “Oh wait, I didn’t know how segregated even poems about trees were.” We’ve celebrated those nature poems by white men, but people of color have been writing about nature forever. It’s just that we haven’t read them. We haven’t celebrated them. We haven’t published them. We’re not aware of that legacy. It’s important politically to show that writers of color can write about a groundhog or a butterfly if one needs to do that, if one feels like that’s the pulsing energy within them. We do sometimes have an expectation of and on writers of color that they need to write about their identity—you need to write about your identity in order to be published. I find it a huge disservice to us as writers and as creative people because I didn’t sign up for anything limited. I want an endless opportunity to write about whatever I want to write about. I maintain that I will do that forever.

When we get that pressure from within and outside of our communities to write about certain topics, every part of me is all elbows. Within my community, there are people who are like, “Why do you say Latinx? Why don’t you say Mexican? Do you ever write about your ancestry? Do you ever write about your identity?” All my work is about my identity, but my identity may not be the identity you want me to write about. Of course, there’s also pressure from outside of my community which is like, “Oh, in order for us to sort of fill a quota in this magazine, we would like to have a poem that represents the Mexican-American experience in Lexington.” And I’m like, “Well, I don’t think that’s me actually. I would prefer to write about a bird. Or I’d write it like a love poem.” That to me is a huge permission I don’t feel like we’re always granted. I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no. I want to write what I want to write.” Leaning in towards beauty feels like a political act.

ARTEAGA

We know that there’s this push for diversity in poetry, which has been historically very white and heterosexual, and I totally agree that there are negative side effects. But do you think there are more benefits to pushing diversity in the poetry world? Or do you think it comes with a cost for both the reader and the writer?

LIMÓN

I think one hundred percent pushing for diversity outweighs any of the pitfalls of it, but I just want to point out that there are pitfalls. If I were an editor of a magazine and I wanted to make sure that I had a diverse array of voices, I would also look for diverse range, like formally, but I would want to make sure that I was also asking, “Okay, am I publishing a Black man out of Detroit because he’s writing about guns in Detroit, and that’s my own stereotypical perception?” I feel like some of these editors don’t quite have the self-awareness to recognize that what they’re doing is not just diversifying their pages, but actually doubling down on their own stereotypes about who can write what. If you want to diversify—which we do, and it’s a huge, beautiful thing to push for diversity in the pages, a great, necessary thing—we need to have our poetic community look like America, but at the same time, we need to make sure that we’re also not perpetuating stereotypes about who can write what and allowing for people to write whatever they want. Like Wanda Coleman can write a poem about a bird, but then also can write a poem about identity. The poems should get praised equally, and that’s also the hard part. I love the more political work, the overt work about identity. I’m all on board for it. But I also want to make sure that young poets coming up see that they can do that work, but then they can also lean towards joy, even as a way of self-preservation. Doing that heavy lifting all the time is not always good for us. There are times where we need to protect ourselves and write about our friends and about some things that have actually gotten us through, to write about survival. I want to make sure that young writers of color coming up in that world know that the world is open to them and that they don’t have to fall into one category. They can write whatever they want.

KERSEY

I’m curious how writing during this time, during this pandemic, during this political era looks for you and how that differs from normal life.

LIMÓN

I miss life. This is what keeps coming out of my head: I miss life and there is also life. I really, really miss my family. For the most part, I get to see them often, and I’m very close to my mother and my stepfather and my father and his wife and my brothers. I haven’t been able to travel to see them, and that has been the hardest thing. I’ve also been feeling like, “How can a poem matter right now?” I really have to convince myself that it can. Some days I’m like, “It matters!” and I can really feel it, and then sometimes I’m like, “Does it?” Like, what would be more important? A vaccine. A new president. As artists, we’re always asking, “How do I write? How do I find my voice? How do I even allow myself to think that this counts for anything? That this matters?” That has increased a hundredfold during the pandemic. How can I even write when so many people are grieving? When we’ve lost so many people? I try to remember that writing is not just a connection to other people, but a connection to myself. During the pandemic, it’s become more of a discipline, like taking my dog for a walk. This is part of what I need to do to survive. It’s very easy to think, “What good am I doing? Shouldn’t I be volunteering? Shouldn’t I be doing something different?” But this is part of my survival technique, and I need to continue.

I’m also very interested in how our bodies carry grief. It’s important right now, and we’re not even talking about it. When I’m teaching, I’m always asking, “How are you? Are you okay? How’s your mental health? How are you doing?” Students are so used to it now, they’re just like, “Yeah, I’m fine. Just moving on.” And yet, I just read a study that our workday has increased by 48 minutes during the pandemic. Suddenly, people aren’t taking breaks. And then we’re asking, “Why are we so stressed?” Remember when it first started? It was like, “Just take your time, I know we’re going through so much.” And now everything is, “Can I have that ASAP?” It’s completely shifted. I don’t know if that’s just a North American thing, but it feels like we’re all distracting ourselves from grief with our work, and we’re also all trying to make money. We need money, but I’m worried that we’re not paying attention, we’re not grieving, we’re not leaving space to recognize what’s happening because it’s too much. We’ve lost our daily life and then we think, “Oh, who am I to complain that I can’t go get ice cream with my friends? Or I can’t whatever when someone is dying? How does my grief about what’s gone even matter?” I’m worried we’re not processing. The act of writing poems can help us heal. It can help us process some of the things we’re not saying in our Zoom conversations. It seems like this spring people are—for the lack of a better word—feeling harder. What we’re going to start to miss is our softness, the parts of us that can be vulnerable to the world. We put on masks to leave the house. We put on masks to be with each other. Everything now has doubled down on armor, and it’s hard for sensitive people. It’s hard on artists because we create from a vulnerable, soft place, but the world is requiring a much harder exoskeleton.

ARTEAGA

You mentioned in your interview with American Literary Review a few years ago that writing poems that reach outward and inward at the same time was the project of your life. Do you think this will always be important in your poetry?

LIMÓN

I think so, yeah. The idea is that I want to connect, but oftentimes, who I’m trying to connect with first is myself. It’s important to connect with the self and if the poem connects with anyone outside of that, that’s a gift. I don’t sit down thinking, “I’m going to write a poem that someone else will like.” I’m trying to write a poem that will help me or that will remind me about my own connection to the world.

KERSEY

So Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; you mentioned in a previous interview how you felt the pressure was on after it got so much attention. I was wondering if the popularity of this collection influenced your writing process for The Carrying, and how does the increased attention to your work affect your revision process for your poems now?

LIMÓN

Bright Dead Things has sold more copies than I could have imagined. I was really having a hard time trying to figure out what to write, how to write, and how to not consider the success of the book. I never considered success as part of poetry. So I thought, “I don’t want to consider it now because it’s never influenced me in any way.” You never sit down being like, “This poem’s going to make me some money.” It’s just not what we think. With The Carrying, I had to write poems for myself that I thought I might never publish. I got through it by not thinking about the audience, whereas normally I consider it. I pushed the audience away so that I could write as authentically as possible. Then, once I started to put the manuscript together, I let the audience in. It was big, surrendering to composing and creating poems without the expectation of even sending them out, maybe not even publishing them at all. I also had to let go of The Carrying’s success itself—maybe nothing would happen to it, maybe people wouldn’t like it. I just didn’t know. It’s a very different book than Bright Dead Things. They talk a lot to each other, but Bright Dead Things gets read a lot in undergraduate poetry workshops and The Carrying is a little more mature. It tends to get taught more in graduate school. I was really pleased that The Carrying had a nice reception. I was even told by a friend who loved The Carrying and thinks The Carrying is my best book, “I’m so sorry no one’s going to read this.” He’s like, “Your last book was so successful—usually after the success the follow-up isn’t really lauded or read as much.” So I was prepared for it to underperform, and that hasn’t happened, which is nice.

ARTEAGA

How do you feel knowing that there are hundreds of students out there reading your work versus how you feel about family members reading your work or friends?

LIMÓN

It’s super hard sometimes. We’re okay with the strangers. We could tell the strangers our deepest secrets. And then you see your aunt reading it. I don’t think I will ever get over that gut-wrenching fear of family members reading a book, or even just a poem. And I’m really lucky because I have a super supportive family who not only reads my work but praises it and comes to readings. When I was nominated for the National Book Award, they all showed up; we had a whole table. But still there are moments of, “Alright, how will they receive it?” I feel a need to do right by them: to write them well, to write them truthfully, but also, to honor them. That kind of obligation doesn’t come into play when you’re thinking about strangers reading your work.

BUCKINGHAM

Can you turn us on to any poets? Who are you loving right now?

LIMÓN

There are so many great books out right now. Victoria Chang’s Obit is fantastic. It’s heavy, but the way she starts with truth in every single poem and then ends with sort of a magical realism—something strange happens—it’s really marvelous. Jericho Brown’s The Tradition is fantastic and of course it won the Pulitzer Prize so maybe I don’t need to mention it. John Murillo’s Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry is really great work. I’m literally looking at my books now. Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz is phenomenal. Tiana Clark’s I Can’t Talk About the Trees without the Blood is a beautiful book. Eduardo C. Corral’s new book Guillotine is crushing, but wonderful. Jennifer L. Knox’s Crushing It—bizarrely surreal and funny and just very weird and wonderful. I’m currently reading and re-reading this book by Alejandra Pizarnik, she’s Argentinian, from Buenos Aires, and it’s phenomenal. It’s a new translation called Extracting the Stone of Madness.

THURMOND

Who was the poet that made you fall in love with poetry or your first favorite poet?

LIMÓN

It was kind of a combo, but it was one poem in particular that I was like, “What is this doing?” Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” I read it when I was fifteen. I had read poetry before that, but it felt like, “This is amazing.” Also Sharon Olds, “Connoisseuse of Slugs.” I was like, “What’s happening here, this kind of feels dirty.” Lucille Clifton was a huge influence on me, still is a huge influence; her collected is one of my favorite books. Pablo Neruda, even simply the love sonnets. When I was sixteen, I thought, “These are phenomenal.”

ARTEAGA

Do you think it’s important for people to explore international writers as much as, or even more than, American writers?

LIMÓN

Yeah, I mean we’re in a global conversation and all of these things are connected. I don’t think Merwin would be writing the way that Merwin was writing if he wasn’t translating these Spanish poets, and I don’t think Robert Bly would be writing the way he was writing if he wasn’t translating Lorca. There’s all of these conversations happening. We often get stuck in this idea that the father and mother of poetry are Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. I just don’t believe that. There’s more to it. We’re seeing a bigger recognition even with the wonderful Native poetry collections that have just come out, like the Joy Harjo book When the Light of the World Was Subdued Our Songs Came Through, the brand new Native American Anthology from Norton. It’s fantastic. There are a lot of limitations to the western poetry traditions. When we talk about Neruda, who was before Neruda? Gabriela Mistral. And Mistral was phenomenal, but we don’t know a lot about her. She influenced Neruda, and yet he got all the credit. We kind of stop at the greats—and I love Whitman, I love Dickinson, it’s just that I feel like sometimes it’s a false dichotomy. There’s much more of an international influence. Poetry doesn’t really pay attention to borders. When we talk about great poets, we don’t talk about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz of Mexico writing in the 1600s. We have limits, and I get that, but it’s a kind of exciting time where we can break some of those limits.

BUCKINGHAM

Where do you see your own work in that line of Spanish and Latin poets?

LIMÓN

It’s funny because in the last five or six years I’ve done a lot of traveling to South America and it really brought me an understanding of what I was doing, like, “Oh, I’ve been doing that because of Lorca or the Spanish poets,” or, “I’m interested in duende in a way that I don’t think I was ever taught to talk about.” Even in the sixth book I call on Mistral and Pizarnik and Borges, and it starts to feel like there’s more of an international legacy to the Spanish language poets that I don’t think I had because, honestly, I had to teach myself. I had to do that work myself. I’ve been lucky that I was able to travel to South America and then teach a class on Latin American poetry. Of course, any time you have to teach a class, you have to learn the stuff and explore it. It made me recognize how much Latin American poetry is in my own work.

BUCKINGHAM

What has the role of teaching been on your work and on you as a writer?

Limón

It’s interesting because, for the most part, I don’t teach that much; I’m still what I call a “rogue poet.” I quit my job in New York City in 2010 and have been primarily working from home as a freelancer—on the road as a poet since then, which is kind of crazy to me. I haven’t had a full-time job, which has been really good for my work, not always for my bank account but sometimes that’s okay, I took a risk. It’s been important to have a sense of freedom as an artist. I’ve been curious as to what it would be like to work full time for a university, and maybe someday, down the line, that’s something that would interest me more. Right now, I really love doing visiting positions. I teach for a low-residency program, so I get to teach for like two weeks. I do these visiting writer things, and I can bring a lot of energy. I can also maybe not get as bogged down by administration and the political work of a creative writing department. In some ways, I still am leaning towards my freedom.

Teaching also keeps me reading. I’m reading and I’m re-reading things, and I get excited—“Oh right, I really love this Marianne Moore poem.” Or you get to say these marvelous things like, “It turns out Elizabeth Bishop was amazing.” A lot of times, if we’re not teaching, we may not revisit things. You may not actually think about reading all of Neruda or all of Mistral, but if you’re teaching it you think, “I’m going to do it.” That’s the big gift, revisiting texts. Right now, I’m the Mohr visiting poet at Stanford and I’ve been loving it. Amazing undergraduates. And it feels like a deep conversation. Especially during this pandemic, it felt really nice to have a sense of community, to feel like we’re in this together as poets. But teaching hasn’t been my identity as a writer like it has for a lot of my friends. I like to do it and I enjoy it and I want to keep it that way. I feel like I always want to bring my best self to teaching, and I don’t know if that would be the case if I was doing it all the time.

ARTEAGA

What would you say to the young poet unsure about pursuing their talent in poetry, or writing in general? Because the United States is dominated by Hollywood and the music industry, and then all the other arts are pushed aside as useless. What would you say to that young writer in today’s world unsure of writing on a daily basis, unsure if it’s going to get anywhere?

LIMÓN

One of the things I would say is that it’s not about making a career, it’s about making a life. When you choose poetry, you’re choosing to pay deeper attention to the world, and you’re choosing really to lean into silence and beauty that could sustain you for the entire length of your years. It’s not about necessarily making an income. I’ve always joked that there’s that saying, “Find what you love and the money will follow.” And poetry, it’s like, “Find what you love and then also get another job that you don’t hate too much.” Poetry, for the most part, won’t make you a lot of money and maybe that’s a beautiful thing. Maybe that’s what keeps it pure. No one’s sitting down like, “I want to write myself a million-dollar poem.” Even Amanda Gorman—she wrote an incredible poem and did an amazing thing, an incredible performance, but she knows that this is a crazy lucky thing that’s happening. She’s very aware, “Okay, this is a moment and I’m going to write it and I’m going love it and enjoy it, but this is a moment.” If you really are interested in being an authentic artist, a lot of what you’re doing is focusing on what it is to create things, and the best joy you will ever have is when you’ve made something that you like, when you’ve created something that you actually recognize is good. The rest of that stuff, publication or recognition, if you keep at it, those things will come.

This is actually a really wonderful time to be a poet. I would encourage young poets to recognize that we’re at a time where we’re the most diverse—there are books coming out all the time, a plethora of books, from all over the world. Internationally, globally, poetry is having a little shine on it right now. It’s partly because the gatekeepers are different now. They’re like dams that got overflowed. But still, publications come slowly. They come far and few between. The thing you can rely on the most is creation itself. There’s a great quote from Richard Hugo: writing is a way of saying you have a chance in the world. I have a chance and the world has a chance and we have a chance together. That’s survival skills right there. I was listening to a Ten Percent Happier podcast. This wonderful Stanford professor, Jenny Odell, was talking about all the things people can do to recommit themselves to the world during the pandemic. She was talking about making time for silence, making time for recognizing the birds out the window, staring at trees. Every exercise, I was like, “Poets do that.” All the skills she was talking about for non-artists are what artists do all the time. You may not make a living out of poetry, but poetry can and will save your life.

THE WONDER of Goldbarth’s work is in part its wild abundance, its ability to reach as far out as it can and, even within a single poem, move through a dizzying number of written modes and subject matters: quotes from scientists, artists, and writers, snippets of casual conversation, references to pop culture and historical figures, moments of high lyricism, and a certain Goldbarthian chattiness. His work is full of esoterica of the highest order; imagine one of those roadside half-thrift-shop, half-antique-store, half-smalltown- science-museums, and that’s a decent start to an approximation of Goldbarth’s oeuvre. And yet his poems and essays never feel like they exist to show off his knowledge of the things of this world (though his knowledge is staggering); reading them feels more like
reading the imagination at work trying to understand our contemporary predicament with empathy and grace. What makes his moments of deeply felt nostalgia resonant is his relentless attention to the present. Judith Kitchen writes, “Readers who consign him to the category of ‘humor’ fail to see that, as in most good comedy, the poems are a way to bare the pain,” and Lia Purpura writes, “May Albert Goldbarth continue leaving his readers open-mouthed, goggle-eyed, and knocked-out, all of us with our own concussive haloes of stars.”

Goldbarth began publishing books in the early seventies and hasn’t stopped. The occasional two-or-three-year gap between titles is offset by years in which he’s released several titles, including two new collections in 2021/22: Other Worlds (Pitt Press) and Everybody (Lynx House Press). While primarily a poet, he has also written books of essays and a novel, all of which are stamped with his poetic sensibilities. He taught at Cornell and Wichita State University for some thirty years (home of the Goldbarth Archive in Ablah Library).

Albert Goldbarth is not a fan of interviews. He would rather write poems than speak on them, and he would rather we read the poems than ask about them. With some fifty books to his name, he’s clearly too busy writing and reading. Surprisingly, he agreed to speak with Willow Springs magazine in a traditional interview. We met him over Zoom on January 22nd, 2022, another first for Goldbarth, who does not own or use a computer; he types his work into one of his many typewriters. Our correspondences were sent primarily through the mail. His wife, Skyler, provided her computer for the interview. In the interview, we talked about the invasion of technology into everyday life, the story of his first text message, his fascination with the obsolete, the relationship between science and the imagination, and the nature of change. We were honored to speak with him, to listen to him, and most importantly, to spend so much time with his work. The poems, of course, speak for themselves.

POLLY BUCKINGHAM

Okay, we’re recording.

ALBERT GOLDBARTH

All right, I’m the old man in the corner right there.

Warning: I don’t think I’m good at interviews. I’m always amazed when I read other people’s and see how eloquent and fascinating they are; it seems I pour everything into my poems. There’s nothing left over for occasions like this.

BUCKINGHAM

I finally read the “interview” you did with the Georgia Review, and I was like, “Well, why are we here? It’s all in there.”

GOLDBARTH

I have to admit, I was proud of that “interview” when I finally finished it. At the start, I wasn’t sure it would work. It was part of this special feature the Georgia Review did. The whole thing must be maybe sixty pages long: twenty-six pages of my poems, a couple of pages of my original handwritten manuscript for one of the poems, two essays on me, photographs that Skyler took, et cetera. And then the editors wanted to do an interview, too, which was not an unreasonable request. And I didn’t want to do it. They asked again. I really didn’t want to do it. Finally, I thought, “Well, I believe in poems, not interviews,” so I said, “What if all the questions come from other poets’ poems and all of the answers come from poems of mine?” I had no idea which specific poems might match up seamlessly as questions and answers, but by the end I thought it worked out. I was hoping it would become the role model for all poets’ interviews in the future, but [sigh] that doesn’t seem to have happened.

FOREST BROWN

I love the way that you were able to engage with other poets and your own poetry for the interview. I wonder if that’s something you do outside of that project or if that was just a one-time thing.

GOLDBARTH

Outside of that “interview,” I’ve never committed anything to a written format in exactly that way and published it, but sometimes I get together with my friends, and we’ll read poems out loud, poems we’ve encountered recently on our own that we think are worth sharing. Do any of you know Richard Hugo’s book 31 Letters and 13 Dreams? I don’t think it’s his best book, but it’s a lovely concept, trying to come up with language that would work as poetry in a published book or journal publication but that also works as actual real-world letters that he really sent out, postally. I appreciate ideas like that, poetry working in the real world and people communicating through poetry.

I still send postal mail to friends on a weekly basis and get postal mail on a weekly basis back. Every week my friend John from Texas sends me a letter typed on a manual typewriter, and we will clip things from magazines and newspapers for each other. Sometimes just the naked clippings. Sometimes we’ll doctor them in funny or otherwise interesting ways. It arrives, you open it, and it’s a meaningful, real-world weight in your hand. It has the impress of a human being’s breath and body behind it. It’s lovely. We’ve been doing this for decades.

I think the postal service represents, in some ways, America at its best. I still go to the post office, my local substation, two or three times a week. My own letter carrier is a woman named Nancy. She’s smart, she’s sharp, she’s funny, she “gets it.” I enjoy talking to her on the porch and typing up little postal related things or photocopying USPS-related anecdotes and leaving them for her on our mailbox. This week I heard postally from my old Chicago friend Wayne, and from poets Alice Friman and Larry Raab . . . the charge of their fingers was still on the paper.

TORI THURMOND

Quite a few of your poems start with research. I wanted to ask where it comes from. Is it while you’re reading you get an idea, and you want to base a poem off that? Or is it the other way around, where you get an idea for a poem, then go research it and pull some of that research in?

GOLDBARTH

Over the course of my writing life, both have occurred, but it seems healthier if I’m simply reading for pleasure, not specifically trawling through things just to find an idea for a poem. I’m reading something, and, bingo, that day or three years later, a little light goes off in my head, “Oh, yeah, I’d like to explore this.” To that extent, “research” sounds too calculated in its implications. Oh, there’s some research of course; but often it’s more like being open to a timely shout-out from my memory storage, my muse node.

BROWN

I had a question about the balance between inspiration and research. I thought of the balance between Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer in some of your work and how they’re connected, but one is more scientific, one more artistic. I wonder if you feel you owe a loyalty to one of those disciplines more than the other.

GOLDBARTH

In my introduction for a book about the sciences and the arts, The Measured Word, I try to address the state of science and the arts back in, let’s say, Wordsworth’s day, Coleridge’s day, when there existed a language that scientists and artists shared. I think they also shared a sense that they were involved in the same pursuits, the pursuit of knowledge in the objective world and the pursuit of knowledge of the self. The well-known scientific researchers of that day read literature and tried to write it themselves. The quest was similar, whether you were a geologist, chemist, Wordsworth, or Coleridge. There’s a famous moment when Coleridge and some other writers allow themselves to be put under what we would call laughing gas in a serious experiment to see how it affects the human psyche. They all wind up floating on the ceiling, getting high in the famous evening’s endeavors.

C. P. Snow wrote an influential book, The Two Cultures, about the disappearance of that communal endeavor, which explores the growing realization that artists and scientists do not live in the same universe any longer and do not share goals or language. I think, on the whole, my head exists back in the world when Coleridge and Humphrey Davy, the chemist, shared a single pursuit and a single vocabulary. A lot of the leisure time reading I do, reading that’s not simply an adventure novel, is work that credits both sides of the divide, to the extent that I can understand the science part at all. In my head, Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer are equals no matter the differences in their lives and their passions. They are essentially siblings, twins separated at birth, similarly and equally involved in attempting to answer the question, “What does it mean to be a live human being in this cosmos?” As I loosely remember, in my essay “Delft” I try to give them equal weight, I mean actual paragraph by paragraph equivalency.

BROWN

With so much of your work dealing with these sorts of characters and also with science and research, how do you feel about obsolescence?

GOLDBARTH

I think it’s my nature to want to eulogize what’s passing more than see the beauty of the transmutation. I understand everything needs to disappear. There’s only a finite amount of matter and energy in the universe. It has to be kept in revolution all the time. I understand you don’t get to move ahead unless you see the world in the rearview mirror diminishing. But at the moment, it seems to me the future, especially in terms of technology, is colonizing the present moment at a dangerously ferocious rate. It feels right that there should be some people who want to put the brakes on, halt that process to a small extent. There’s still a past that we have not happily used for all its pleasures and lessons. And it’s worthwhile for me to stand still for a moment, turn around 180 degrees, and further embrace what’s disappearing before we make the other turn around and face the untested wonder of tomorrow. There’s a beauty in that, and more and more, I think culturally it’s necessary to let the past live on . . . in TV terms, to replay in syndication.

Think of all of the things that were happening in 1913 in a wealth of realms. Harriet Monroe founds Poetry magazine, Edgar Rice Burroughs is publishing the first Tarzan novel and the first great John Carter of Mars novel, the Suffragist movement is doing fascinating, seminal, and brave things politically . . . there was the “Armory Show.” That year seems to be a watershed year that not only allows a number of what we might see as very disparate fields to make very important kinds of advances, but, again, as with Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer, it’s interesting to take the people involved in these discrete movements and see them, at our remove, in a way they might not have seen themselves: as equals working at a certain zeitgeist-cohesive moment of time. I don’t care to abandon that just in the interest of adding a new app to my phone. And, yes, I know it doesn’t have to be “either/or.” Still, our loyalties make themselves known as we choose how to parcel out our affection and attention.

BUCKINGHAM

In an article by David Wojahn, he talks about work that’s based on a Google sound bite versus broader research. He uses you, and he shows an example of a poem from Everyday People. It’s clear when I’m reading it that these aren’t just sound bites; this is stuff you’ve read thoroughly. I guess that’s one reason why none of this feels obsolete—because it’s placed in the context of a constantly changing world.

GOLDBARTH

It was a sweet piece by David Wojahn (himself one of the master poets of my generation), and of course I appreciated its sensibility. If I remember his language correctly, he draws a distinction between the poetry of “knowledge” and the poetry of “stuff,” between factoids grabbed on the run from Google scrolling, and knowledge gained from deeper reading; knowledge that doesn’t get paraded in a poem for its surface “interest value,” but gets constellated with everything else that’s been already incorporated into a writer’s understanding of the world. It’s common to try to differentiate between “knowledge” and “wisdom.” Wojahn reminds us that, particularly in our cultural moment, we must differentiate “knowledge” from “data.”

His essays have been collected in book form, and are themselves—like his poems—fine examples of the best use of deep, empathetic knowledge. Wide ranging, but also rooted in long-term contemplation. And while they can use, they don’t depend upon, the self-congratulatory mumbo-jumbo of academic lit crit terminology: they remain human. (I used to lecture on a Whitman poem, “The Sleepers,” for six hours, spread over two class sessions, unpacking it line by line, often word by word, without relying on lit crit “scholarship”. . . it was the reading, I’m certain, that Whitman himself would have wanted, derived from the poem, not forced on it from the outside.)

I own a number of books on what’s gone out of existence, become obsolete, in your lifetime and mine—all of those things, like the smell of burning autumn leaves, gone from the outside landscape; analog clocks (the very objects that give us “clockwise” and “counterclockwise”), gone from our inside landscape; and the pleasures of brick-andmortar bookstores and library shelf browsing, gone from our psychic landscape. I guess I’m someone who doesn’t automatically find “nostalgic” to be a pejorative descriptor. It can also imply an honorable stewardship of what’s endangered. I don’t particularly read steampunk science fiction, but its feel, of striding into the future without discarding the look and knowledge of the past, certainly has an appeal.

Some of the typewriters I’ve collected (and typewriter accessories, like gorgeous deco-design typewriter ribbon tins) by now have a magical aura around them. And I wish I could show you the Oliver typewriter from 1913 (there’s that year again!), with its keys arranged in a bowl shape like the audience in a round amphitheater, and its gilded lettering. No wonder some young people I know, half my age or less, have taken to collecting them. My arts-minded friend Joey sometimes types a poem, using a manual typewriter, on a four-by-six notecard—a “one-off” in the truest sense—and distributes it into a book on a local bookstore’s shelf, counting on chance to deliver it into (maybe) the right hands. This isn’t going to get him the National Book Award, but who could be blind to the beauty of that act?

I don’t collect antique fountain pens, but my friend Rick Mulkey does, and I know that when I join him in a few weeks in St. Louis at a fountain pen show, my eyes will be popping with a respectful wonder. Another old friend, the poet Bob Lietz, collected those pens (and taught himself to repair their nibs and ink bladders) and wrote an ambitious sequence of poems in which he gives voice to the pens during their lives of active use, creating a heartsore love letter from a World War I soldier overseas or a harsh sentencing coming down from a small-town “hanging judge.” Giving voice to the departed (and their world) seems to me a secular blessing.

BROWN

I noticed, in a lot of your books, your love for Karp’s In Flagrante Collecto.

GOLDBARTH

Yeah! It’s filled with jaw-dropping images of objects from once-upon-a-time and with a sense of the passion behind their being conserved. You know, some of those things we can wave goodbye to happily enough. Do we need Junior League meetings where everybody’s wearing white gloves? Maybe not so much. Kotex? Maybe not so much. I guess we each get to choose for our personal list of what’s a keeper that gets shelf space and what gets boxed up for Goodwill. I find it a little painful to realize nobody knows what carbon paper is any longer. It also makes me realize, and I don’t want to get too self-pitying, how much of my poetry really would not be readily comprehensible to many younger readers. Just a little while ago, I was talking to a friend of mine—I like him a lot, he’s witty, talented, he’s sharp, he reads, he’s about forty years old—and I made a quick reference to the heads on Easter Island. He had no idea what I was talking about. Not only could he not picture the famous heads, he had never heard the name Easter Island. Ditto Speedy Alka-Seltzer and Elsie the Cow. My work is filled with allusions to objects, people, events, places that are obsolete. At some point, if I can pretend my work would be read in the future, it will be read completely comprehendingly only by people who are looking things up every fourth or fifth line as they continue through the poem, which, of course, is not reading the poem as the poem wants to be read. Years ago, and I’m talking maybe twenty-five years ago, a poem of mine appeared in some textbook anthology, Groovy Contemporary Poets: Here They Are, something like that, and I was shocked to discover that there was a footnote explaining what Coors beer was. And there was a footnote explaining who Flash Gordon was. Painful for me, just painful, and that was a quarter of a century ago. Imagine now.

Do you want to hear the story of my very first phone text?

I never wanted even this little flip phone. I was sure nothing like this was going to be part of my life, but there came a time when Wichita’s sickly famous serial killer BTK, which stands for bind, torture, kill, emerged again from under a rock after a long hiatus. The fear engendered by 9/11 was also in the air. My wife was teaching at one place, and I was teaching at another place forty-five minutes away from hers. I thought, well okay, even me, just for emergencies, I’ll get one of these gizmos so my wife and I can stay in touch if we really need to, or, if we hear a noise downstairs, I can hit 9-1-1. So I hesitantly bought one, and for a long, long time, I didn’t use it. I didn’t have any names in my phone book. I didn’t know how to, or care how to, send or receive a text. In fact, most people I knew didn’t even realize I owned one. They didn’t have the number, and they wouldn’t have tried texting me even if they did have the number.

The poet and essayist Lia Purpura, a vastly talented woman younger than myself but sharing some of my sensibility, was with a friend of hers in Baltimore one night. Don’t take this as gospel, but I think alcohol may have been involved. The girlfriend said something like, “I’m going to teach you how to text,” and she said, “No you’re not, I don’t want to know,” “Yes girl, have another drink, I’m going to teach you how to text. Who do you want to send a text to?” “I believe I’ll send a text to Albert.”

So it’s midnight here, 1 a.m. for them. I’m driving around the streets, and I hear my phone make a sound it’s never made before, some kind of alert beep. I take it out of my pocket, and the phone must say something like, “Incoming Text” or “Text Just Arrived” because I wouldn’t have recognized what the sound meant. I pull into the lot of a closed-down gas station to see what this is all about. I manage to hit the right little key that calls up her text, and I remember saying to myself, “Ah-hah! I’m going to teach myself to text her back.” I stayed for forty-five minutes at this closed gas station until I was able to send some snarky sentence or two back to her. So there, Lia! There was no turning back as you know. It’s how technology works. It colonizes. There are now like 800 people in my phone book, whether I want them there or not. Heck, Polly’s in there.

BUCKINGHAM

I run across this dichotomy in your work a lot. You’re so flexible, embracing change, and yet at the same time there’s this important stuff of the past. I come back to the quote from your newest book, Other Worlds, where you say, “I want to be unwilling.” You also very much embrace popular culture. Could you talk about your obsession with pop culture and how it resonates for our cultural identity?

GOLDBARTH

This is my phone. [Holds up his flip phone.] I’ve never touched a keypad that isn’t this type of keypad. If I were to text you the word “Moonlight,” I would have to tap down sixteen times: one for the M, then three for the O . . . So that’s what I’m dealing with. That’s my chosen world.

In the sense in which you’re using that line from my poem, I’m “unwilling” to use a more super-duper model.

About “pop culture knowledge” versus “serious knowledge” . . . Once when I was still living with my parents in a little condo, our upstairs neighbor, Ellie, came down and asked me to talk to her two young girls and convince them to go to college. They wanted to be juvenile delinquents or buskers, or ballerinas, or whatever. She wanted them to be “successful” and make a “good” living. I remember trying to convince her that you should want to know things from the pure delight of knowing things. There’s a great joy in that, and a pure joy. Purity of that kind is important. I still like to believe my writing is not a career but a calling. I’ve been paid to give readings, but I work hard to make my writing a calling as I think it was, say, for Keats, who never went on a reading circuit, who couldn’t have imagined such a thing.

In my head there’s not always a great deal of difference between popular culture knowledge and the knowledge of science, politics, serious cultural studies. It’s all what I called “the delight of knowing things.” I know there’s a difference between reading an Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan novel and Foucault, I really do. But they’re both up there in my mind trying to have a voice in my life and be part of who and what I am.

Have any of you ever read The Reluctant Dragon, a children’s book by Kenneth Grahame, who did The Wind in the Willows? It’ll charm the socks off you. The epigraph to the book reads, “What the Boy chiefly dabbled in was natural history and fairy tales, and he just took them as they came, in a sandwichy sort of way, without making any distinctions; and really his course of reading strikes one as rather sensible.” To repeat a term I used earlier, it all gets “constellated” into a single connections-making sensibility. So long as one doesn’t fall down a QAnon rabbit hole or start truly believing the Earth is flat, all knowledge should provide a field to romp joyfully in. In any case, I use the Grahame statement as the epigraph to my book Arts & Sciences. It’s a banner I’m happy to wave.

KP KASZUBOWSKI

I just finished Pieces of Payne. The premise of the book is that you’re having seven drinks with a friend, a former student. That’s making me think of your story with the friend who learned how to text by texting you. I’m curious: what is fiction and what is not?

GOLDBARTH

I thought you were going to ask how often I go out for seven drinks with people. That can be for another interview. I’m not comfortable with the question of what’s “true” or “isn’t true.” I like to say, not just for myself but on behalf of all poets, it’s all true. I mean in the way that a real novel is as true as a piece of nonfiction or memoir, as true about human beings and the human experience. Perhaps even truer than some memoirs, in fact. Memoirs are also fictionalized—by the time it’s a readable, publishable piece of work, it’s all become fictionalized, massaged to some extent. Truthfully, although you can find many poems of mine that refer to a character called Albert, who maybe lives in Wichita, who maybe has a wife named Skyler, I don’t ask that any of my work be taken as autobiography.

There have always been lyric poems arriving here straight from the poet’s heart: think “Summer Is Icumen In.” But it’s easy to forget how drastically things changed with the relatively recent generation of “confessional poets” like Lowell and Sexton and Snodgrass, and with the Beats; easy to forget that for the longest time poetry was defined at least as typically by, say, Paradise Lost and “Endymion”: poems that in intent are true about the human condition, but the innards of which were—like a novel’s innards—based upon invention. I talk with people frequently who are not perplexed to read “Call me Ishmael” even while finding the name Herman Melville on the cover; and yet who are surprised or even offended if I suggest the possibility that Plath might have invented, have shaped events for some of her poems, in the interest of their greatest possible power or her own greatest psychological needs.

BROWN

I had a question not about autobiography but biography. I really like one of your lines, “A paleontologist could step inside and be surrounded by images of life but no life.” Whether it’s with a fictionalized idea of yourself or a character or people in the past, how do we, or how do you, like to see aspects of life that we can or can’t put into poetry? What can we portray in that way versus what just has to be lived?

GOLDBARTH

Well, poems ought to be able to include, and in fact do, anything they want to. It’s poetry, after all, and should be a bastion of pure creative freedom. If you can’t include anything you want or exclude anything you want in your own poem, something’s wrong.

This is going to be a reductive example as part of my answer, but: all of those things we’re calling essays right now, I originally tried to publish as poems. They felt like poems to me, and I think of myself as “a poet.” They happen to be in paragraph form since sometimes paragraphs are, for various reasons we could talk about, a more sensible or useful holding container for the kind of writing that includes characters, dialogue, research material. But in many ways, they didn’t feel any different to me than my poetry did. In fact, I thought it added interest and value to consider them as poems instead of essays. The longest piece of prose-looking writing I’ve ever done, perhaps even including my novel Pieces of Payne, I’d be willing to still think of as a poem. I would defend Moby Dick as a poem any day if you gave me time to think about it and make notes. But no publisher was willing to publish them as poems, in part because they believed they would sell better as books if they were essays, though (and I’ll sigh again) that’s never turned out to be the case.

For journal purposes, it was an easier (and editors might have seen it as a more forthright) way of including work in a table of contents or an end of the year index. My first book of essays was called A Sympathy of Souls published by Coffee House Press. At the time, Alan Kornblum was still alive, the founding editor. He was the one who accepted and edited the book. I remember quite clearly an exchange we had, a postal exchange, in which I kept trying to defend the book as a book of poetry and in which he finally said, and here I’m quoting many years down the line, “Albert, what do you want to shoot yourself in the foot for?” So it was published as a book of essays. Evidently, I don’t have a marketplace mentality. I guess I’m implying the simple idea that the wrestle of “real-self self” with “fictionalized self” can be played out even in decisions on determining genre . . . and that a writer’s claim to absolute authorial freedom can be laid out in that arena, too.

THURMOND

I like that idea—let the poem be what it wants to be, or a poem can be whatever you want it to be. I noticed how your long poems are sectioned throughout the collection. Some sections will be lyric poetry, some will be sections of prose, and then some even dialogue. The poems shift from one thing to another. Is that something you’ve always been experimenting with, or is that combination of form something you came into later?

GOLDBARTH

I’m not sure that after James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, I count as an experimentalist in any major way, but, yes, not all of my work consists of “standard” lineated lyric poems. Even some of my earliest pieces include the idea that a lyric poem can modulate into, or break and become, something that replicates the scholarship of archaeology or anthropology or quote overheard dialogue or newspaper coverage, or take on the form of a play script . . . and then move back into a more rhapsodic, lyric mode. That doesn’t seem strange to me. I like to think, at my most honorable, I’m not sitting around thinking, “Oh this’ll be attention-grabbing, this will show them what I can do, hey look I can do five modes here, take that,” but that instead it’s a holistic expression of the needs of that particular piece of writing. Pieces of Payne is about two-thirds endnotes. There’s the actual straight, novel-like narrative and then footnote-like numbers throughout. I don’t know how you read it, but the idea is you can read the pure narrative all on its own without going to the endnotes as their own cohesive entity, then read the endnotes, or you can flip back and forth and read the narrative and the notes in tandem, a kind of build-your-own-adventure book.

Anyway, I’m offering Pieces of Payne as a book-length example of the kind of “hybrid form” freedom we’ve been talking about. There’s a special issue of The Kenyon Review from Spring 1990 that I guest-edited devoted to what the editors called “Impure Form.” And the anthology American Hybrid edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John presents a very liberal understanding of what a “poem” can be.

CAROLINE CARPENTER

Would you be willing to talk about the immigration experience in your work and your family?

GOLDBARTH

Well, isn’t it a generally accepted idea that we’re all immigrants here, one way or another? Ever since the early hominids left the vicinity of Olduvai Gorge, isn’t everyone from immigrant stock? Even the very first Native Americans came over the land bridge from Asia (though, of course, without displacing anyone). So I don’t know that I have any particular insights. If you’ve read some of my work that deals with it, you would understand that I am a third-generation American Jew. There was a generation of European Jews who came over and wanted to do nothing but leave all of the misery behind and blend in and become good Americans. Parts of that same generation came over and held on to a kind of political fervor, became socialists, became Wobblies, were very politicized. Families broke apart over that divide. My father and mother just wanted to raise a happy safe family and blend in as much as possible, without abandoning a respect for Jewish tradition and ceremony. There were people on the other side, relatives who lived in Chicago where I grew up, who I never met. You see that divide in other cultures, too. I’ve heard stories similar to mine from people—the Mexican tradition, Iraqi tradition, on and on.

My parents were very lower to middle-class Chicago people, not sophisticated at all by many standards, certainly not college educated. They played poker with their friends. My mother read paperback mysteries. My father probably only read the newspaper, and that was it. I know they were naturally bright, but they were not bright in terms of cultural sophistication. At my father’s funeral, my sister and I were sitting in the first row at the synagogue service before we all reconvened at the cemetery. I look around and there are all these tubby Chicago Jews. They’re wearing suburban car coats they got on sale somewhere. They’d be eager to tell you what a bargain they got, too. That was their sensibility. They were straight from the nickel-bet poker table or an overheated kitchen. As I’m looking around, this couple about my father’s age walk in. They’re tall and thin and elegant. These people look like fashion models. He’s wearing a kind of butter-soft Italian hand-tailored leather jacket. She has long, straight, elegantly gray hair. Like Mary from “Peter, Paul, and Mary” in later life. They absolutely don’t belong there. I’ve never seen them before, but there they were at my father’s funeral. Later, I’m talking to my sister and I say, “Who were those people?” She said, “Oh, they’re from the other side of the family,” which is to say, the more politicized side. “He’s a painter,” she said, and I knew instinctively she did not mean a house painter. He was an actual “artistic painter.” When I was a little newbie poet in the family, I was given no idea there was an artist on the other side.

My father tried to keep up a certain sense of religiosity in the household. He also believed in earning a living and making a safe American life for his family. So, for instance, we would celebrate all the major Jewish holidays—we’d light candles, go through prayers, we had a real version of a real Passover seder—but if he needed to, he would work on a Saturday, which of course, Jews are not really supposed to do. It’s the Jewish Sabbath. He would only eat kosher meat and never mix meat and dairy, but he would go out and eat a limited number of foods in restaurants, which a truly Orthodox Jew would never do either. So he made his own, nuanced way through a combination of religiosity and accommodation to the world as it was presented to him.

BUCKINGHAM

I was reading “The Window Is an Almanac” from Who Gathered and Whispered Behind Me. I love Rosie, your grandmother in these pieces. I wouldn’t mind hearing more about your relationship with your grandparents because I like them as people already in your work. Also, there’s a lot of Chagall in there. I wondered about the role of art in your life and your work. You mention artists of light, Vermeer and Chagall.

GOLDBARTH

That poem, as much as I can remember it from a book published in 1981, mixes and matches the study of Chagall’s stained glass with more lyric memories or pseudo-memories of Rosie and my grandparents’ generation. When it ends, she’s dead already, but she kind of mystically appears in the light that might enter through a Chagall stained-glass window, almost as if she takes my hand and I walk together with her, and we converse. The poem takes its cue from Chagall: “Stained glass is easy. The same thing happens in a cathedral or a synagogue: a mystical thing passes through the glass.”

CARPENTER

I wanted to ask about the choice behind naming real life people in the poetry. Most contemporary poets I’ve read refrain from actually naming people who exist in real life. A lot of times, poets will just use initials. But you name them and give them their justified moment on the page. What, if any, power does it give the poem to name the person specifically?

GOLDBARTH

Contemporary poets don’t use “actual names”? Go figure. Maybe the world becomes increasingly litigious. Anyway, I’ll use a “real name” (as I would an invented name) if I think it’s in the poem’s best interest . . . and I’d like to think I still count as a contemporary poet.

I think there’s a power in names: we can see that in everything from tribal ritual, oaths, curses, vows, to lawsuits and rap battles. I try to access that power, although “My friend Doris” in a poem doesn’t necessarily mean in “real life” I have a friend named Doris. Hopefully, as I’ve already said, “the poem” is true to the human condition; but I may have been more interested in how the “d” ending “friend” and the “d” beginning “Doris” make an aural unit. As I said earlier, even what we receive as autobiography and memoir is normally shaped toward certain aesthetic ends. It’s like the difference perhaps between the past and history. The past is its own incomprehensible, unchangeable thing. History is what we make of it. And naming can bestow a poem with the power of authenticity.

In Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares, a book length poem I still think is one of the high watermarks of poetry in his generation, there’s a moment when he refers to himself in the third person. He says something like, “Look, Kinnell,” and then he reads himself a small riot act or gives himself a small bit of hard advice. It anchored that moment in a particular kind of believability that it might not have had otherwise. A little later on, a very widely published poet of my generation, perhaps not on people’s radar screens much anymore, Greg Kuzma—he might have been for a while the most widely published poet of my generation in the literary magazines of the time—his younger brother died, I believe in a car accident, and you could tell they were close. You could tell it was a loving brotherly relationship and Kuzma, this man for whom poetry might have been the single most important thing in his life, starts a poem, kind of an elegy for the brother, by lamenting (and accusing), “Galway Kinnell, where were you when I needed you? Bill Merwin, the same.” It becomes a very heartbreaking poem about how even for somebody who loves poetry down to the innermost molecule of his being, there are times when the poetry fails you, even the poetry of some of its wisest practitioners. “Where was Diane Wakoski in her charity, / or Donald Justice of the gentle hand?” There’s Kinnell referring to himself as Kinnell, and a decade later there’s Greg Kuzma using Kinnell in his poem. Both poems profit from the name.

BUCKINGHAM

I was happy to see Robert Bly and Tony Hoagland mentioned in Other Worlds. This would have come out before Bly died. It was a nice surprise.

GOLDBARTH

They were both major, important voices. Bly simply because he was Bly. Absolutely unduplicatable. He just did so much and did some of it so well. The poems, the very thinking, of my generation are different and better for him. He has a poem called “The Buff-Chested Grouse” in one of his later books. The first line of that poem has always resonated with me, and I’ve always been looking for an excuse to use it as an epigraph to a book. It says, and I know I’m quoting word by word, “I have spent my whole life doing what I love.” I think if a poet can say that by the end of his life, it’s a beautiful self-benediction. And Hoagland was good. He was a big poet, an exemplar of how a seemingly casual free-verse voice can be strategized toward effectiveness; a man of deeply tender and complicated feelings; a sly humorist; and someone formidably honest in his dissections of the best and the worst in us. He was very honest about the way he saw human beings. I assume he’s been in the magazine in the past.

BUCKINGHAM

Yeah, I think so. Bly did an interview with us, not when I was here, but he’s among our interviewees

GOLDBARTH

You know, speaking of that . . . I’m not crazy about interviews. I’d love to hijack the questioning now, and talk about how I think interviews are absolutely beside the point. One of the reasons I finally talked myself into doing this was the great list of honorable names that had been part of Willow Springs interviews in the past. I know Bly was part of it long ago. I reread Joyce’s [Joyce Carol Oates] interview. So yes, I know that I’m a little part in a list of grand presences. Still, and with no offense meant to you and the amount of homework you did leading toward this moment, I’m left thinking: if a writer is worth his or her salt, hasn’t he already told me what he really wants to in his or her fiction, in his or her poems? Life is short. I’m going to be seventy-four on Monday. When I open an issue of Willow Springs, shouldn’t I be reading the literature itself, the Real Deal?

Here’s a dictum: If it was good enough for Keats, it’s good enough for me. I think Keats is a great poet, I think I’m a good reader of Keats’s work. (I have an essay I like very much that pairs Keats with Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto at the Lowell Observatory.) I’m sure he was not sitting around when he was writing “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and thinking, “Oh God, I only wish there was something like a reading series where I could belt this out loud for people and then they could ask me questions afterwards—let’s call it a Q & A session—and I could hit on somebody, and they would take me to dinner.” He thought the poem itself was enough, and for the right reader it is, and I think I’m a “right reader” for Keats. I will never obviously hear him read his poems. I’m sure she’s probably been taped, but I’ve never heard Toni Morrison read her fiction, and now I never will. I’ve never heard either of them give a “craft lecture.” The phrase would be meaningless to Keats. But I know how to read their work. The other stuff (cue in this very interview), really, is only diverting, is mere chatter, and is nobody’s business. And yet here I am, being interviewed—and in the face of your friendly interest, inveighing against interviews. (“I know! I’ll use the interview as a Trojan horse, to attack the enemy from inside the gates!”) I have no excuse for seeming so passive-aggressive, except that one can’t slam the door in the world’s face every time it knocks. Hopefully, one selects the right knocks to answer. Polly and the magazine seem like one of those “right knocks.”

Often, lately, there’s more time devoted to the Q & A at a poetry reading than to the work, the primacy, itself. I fight against that. A number of years ago, the magician David Copperfield performed Wichita. My wife and I went, an amazing show. There’s a moment where he lifts off from the stage and flies over the audience. Flies right overhead. You can see there are no wires; you can see there are no mirrors. He flies over the audience. What he doesn’t do is come out from behind the curtains afterwards and say, “Okay, a Q & A session now.” Audience member lifts hand: “Hey, that’s a great trick. I’m studying to be a magician. I’ve got some magic tricks in my back pocket I could show you before you leave. Could you tell us anything about how that trick was done or why you even thought to create it? What does flying mean to you?” None of that. He performed the primacy. It was awesome. He’s given the best of what he is, the best of what he has to offer. He’s devoted how many hours to that effect? Hundreds to get that down right. Maybe more than hundreds. It was like watching the voice come out of the burning bush. That’s all that’s required of him. Why would anybody want to spoil it by knowing how it’s done?

So: magic. I think I read other people’s work hoping for magic to strike. As an example, let me use a poet you may know of, Lucia Perillo. From Oregon. She was a wonderful, honorable writer, I reread her frequently, and, as a side note, she dealt with her MS in honorably courageous ways. Gone from us now, way too early. Now I’ll digress for a moment. I remember my eighth-grade English teacher Mrs. Hurd saying, in her little-old-gray-haired-itty-bitty-lady voice, “Anytime you open a book and read it, that writer lives again.” She said it as if it were the most important wisdom she had to impart. So Keats is alive for me. Toni Morrison is alive for me. And Lucia is alive for me through her books. It’s a mitzvah to revive her, for my reading mind to give her breath again. And when I read Lucia at her best, I don’t find myself most immediately thinking, “Oh, that was a clever move” or “I bet this woman voted the way I vote” (although such thoughts may also come, down the line). No, I’m thinking, “Jesusfuck, how did she do that? I couldn’t do that.” She’s a good enough poet to gift me with that amazement: not many are. And that’s the moment you read for and the moment you hope against hope might be in your own work on occasion. “How did he do that?” The magic. The flying.

If I could make Lucia alive again, I’d be happy to go out for drinks with her in that “seven-drinks place.” I’d love to talk about all sorts of things with her. You know, politics, sports, food, gossip, why are guys jerks, why can’t women find their keys in their own purse? I’d love to talk to her for hours, but I bet we would not ask one another “interview questions” at all. “How’d you do this?” “Why did you?” “Where’d you research?” “How much is real, how much is invented?” We would just be people for one another. The one time I did meet Lucia—she hosted a dinner for me at her home—that’s how it went. The one time I dinnered with Toni Morrison, we talked mainly about Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja comic books.

The poet Richard Siken, I think this was before he published his first and very highly regarded book, interviewed me for one of Poetry’s online thingamajiggies about my collection of vintage space toys. He seemed to have his own honest interest in understanding that world of collecting. Although you’ve heard me talk now about what I think of writer interviews, that interview was about the toys and the collector’s instinct. I didn’t mind that interview at all.

I’ve worked diligently all my life in hopes of making my poems meaningful—moving, useful—to other people, and building them solid, to last. They in fact may not be meaningful for given reader X or Y (okay, fair enough), and I don’t know that the culture will move them on into the future. Still, that’s the hope. You may hope that for your own writing, too. But this interview? . . . I don’t mean to insult either you or myself (our intentions are surely good) when I say that it’s ephemeral chat, a small momentary bubble drifting away on the 24-7 litbiz torrent.

KASZUBOWSKI

In this spirit of not asking you about craft then, I came across a poem where you said you were a psychic. Can you tell me about how that happened for you and what that is in your life?

GOLDBARTH

Oh, that’s right! I’ll try to recap what leads to that line in the poem. My wife, or the woman somebody calls his wife in the poem, goes to her beautician, a woman named Lateena. She’s doing the wife’s hair, and some special occasion is implied by the fact that my wife is getting her hair done. The beautician asks what special event is coming up and the wife answers, casually, “Oh, my husband’s giving a reading.” Lateena whaps her forehead in astonishment at this news, this amazing revelation, and says, “Oh! Your husband’s a psychic!”

That’s the comedic setup; the speaker goes on to say, “Oh yes I am.” And he means this not in the sense of a carnival psychic in a hokey turban and a starry robe, but in the sense that real writers—let’s bring Keats and Perillo and Morrison back for a sec, let’s throw in Jim Harrison—indeed know the human condition well enough (even if intuitively and not consciously) to make illuminating assumptions about us. With an inflated sense of self and a dash of humor, my poem risks adding its speaker to that company.

Sometimes I’ve said in conversation, “You know, there were poets before there were shrinks and therapists, before there were priests and ministers and rabbis, and there will be poets long after.” When I was teaching at the University of Texas in Austin, this must have been forty years ago, I had a student in my class, Karen Earle. She was very bright, a little older than the other students, very likable—I was really pleased she was in the course; she made great conversation. She was a psych major. I’m always particularly happy when I see people in workshops who are not English majors or creative writing majors, who happen to be good writers and love reading. Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath came up in discussion. Students used to ask in those days, “Why do so many poets commit suicide?” to which I would often say, “Do you know how many plumbers commit suicide?” Anyway, this idea seems to be out there: why are so many poets in therapy? Karen, who planned on being a therapist, raised her hand and said, “I know there are a lot of poets who have gone to see therapists, but let me tell you: it would be a better world if more therapists went to see writers.” If we’re talking about “real writers,” and not just accumulators of CV fodder, I think that’s true. There are worse things many therapists could do than sit down and read a Jim Harrison book.

BUCKINGHAM

At the end of Other Worlds you say, “I’m lost, I don’t feel,” or the narrator says, “I’m lost, I don’t feel.” I appreciate the validation that it’s okay to be lost, it’s okay to scream, it’s okay to be unwilling; I think the book is very guiding for us.

GOLDBARTH

My friends tend to be the kinds of people who regret the disappearance, as I’ve already said, of real-world browsing in brick-and-mortar bookstores and libraries—of willingly “getting lost” in the interests of discovering some unexpected treasure. I understand that one can also “get lost” in the online infinitude—in fact for many reasons the powers behind the internet are counting on that—but I still think the very terms “search engine” and “Google search” imply a desire for direction and limitation. Nicholas Carr’s important book The Glass Cage has a section on what disappears—not only attitudinally but in terms of actual neural capability—when we rely on GPS, and not on our brainpower guiding us through terrain, risking “lostness” and maybe allowing us to chance upon some astonishing new locale. Lostness itself is becoming lost.

But I’m riding my hobbyhorse there, when I know you meant interior, emotional lostness. Literature sometimes does validate that kind of free-floating. Hamlet, in his should-I-or-should-I-not overcomplexities, is lost inside himself. Of course (spoiler alert) things don’t turn out splendidly for him. Still, there’s something attractive in his thoughtfulness and maze-like cogitations; and the playwright who creates him also reminds us that in order to experience the marvels of Prospero’s island, you need to be lost to the tempest first—wrecked, even. Alice’s journey through Wonderland is a grand adventure, but she needs to be lost from the world, from the workaday world, to get there. So being lost can also mean being liberated from dailiness, from convention. In children’s literature, it’s often through something like a shipwreck—think Swiss Family Robinson—or through “a journey to the center of the Earth.” In the adult world, we sometimes just have to dig in our heels and close our eyes and ears. “Get lost,” merchants would annoyedly say to immigrant Jews seeking employment in the early twentieth century. Okay; and then some of them wound up creating Hollywood.

BUCKINGHAM

This goes back to the thing that I asked at the beginning, this unwillingness. I’m way too willing. For instance, there are all these hoops that you jump through that are not part of the art itself, like when you get your first book published and you’re asked to come up with lists of contacts and you’re spending like sixty hours on the computer setting up your own reading series. One question that went through my mind when I was thinking about this interview was, “How the hell does he do this?” That’s not, how do you do the tricks, but how is all of that in your head? It’s in your head because you don’t deal with the shit that you don’t have to deal with. You’re unwilling sometimes. I think that’s really admirable.

GOLDBARTH

Thanks, Polly. That unwillingness, let me warn everyone, doesn’t do much for sales figures and awards; so it’s heartening to hear someone value it. I’m guessing your students and your magazine staff live in a world predicated upon willingness. If your writing isn’t a small part of a larger project that includes grant proposals and reading series and tweeting and blogging and reading my tweeting and blogging, then you’re doing something wrong. But I would want to give you the opposite permission. Remember this moment. I’m giving you the opposite permission. It certainly won’t be bad for your writing. You should have the freedom to say, “Here’s my short story, here’s my sequence of poems. I just devoted the last six months to it. This is what I care to give to the world. Now, let’s go watch the World Series.” Some people, and these days many, do have an honest appetite for all of those extra-literary extensions of the creative act. If it’s an honest appetite to, let’s say, devote time and energy to marketing one’s work . . . well, fine. So be it. But that’s not who I am. I assume there are fewer people who read me now than might have read me twenty-five years ago. I’m not online. I’m not blogging. I’m not tweeting. Wichita isn’t Manhattan, NY. I’ve taken myself off the radar screen. (Plus, the whole ancient straight white male thing.) In a way, this doesn’t trouble me at all. That Robert Bly line: “I have spent my whole life doing what I love.” Why would I want to spend time doing things I love less at this point in my life?

BUCKINGHAM

In the interview you wrote for the Georgia Review, Walt Whitman asks you, “Do you think it’s easy to change?” I just finished reading Ovid, so Metamorphosis is in my head, change is in my head, that sense that everything is constantly changing, and yet there’s such a human resistance to it. It feels like we’re at a cataclysmic time in history; part of it has to do with technology and part of it has to do with COVID and part of it has to do with politics. How are you getting through it? And, also, I guess I’m looking for your helpline advice to help us get through the change. Pay by the minute.

GOLDBARTH

It will cost a lot per minute, for the “Covid-Ovid” answer.

I’m not, I don’t think, particularly mystical—although I love reading about flying saucer research and is there really a Nessie and can the dead actually call us up and leave messages on our clouds, stuff like that. But it does feel to many of my most intelligent friends, who are also not mystical, that something is happening now, a convergence of negative forces—COVID and TikTok and Trump Republicanism, QAnon, gun violence, Russian predation and trolling, race tragedy, the erosion of education, et cetera. The rise of terrorism, the death of the printed page, all of these things going on at once. In unfortunate ways, they reinforce one another. These things do seem to be in step, as if there is some power in this universe, some terrible negative zeitgeist at work that might boil out of the Earth in a foul black cloud like a CGI effect in a superhero movie.

Some change is for the good, though. You’re living in some overseas tyrannical regime and you’re being tracked by the authorities (as we all are, and certainly you are every second of your online lives) but there are also radical progressive groups keeping in contact with cell phones or constantly moving internet cafes, trying to fight against the tyranny, using that same technology that the despots do.

Online support groups provide positive enhancement for . . . well, you name it, animal shelters, abuse survivors, struggling bees and butterflies. I underwent three small surgeries last month, all easier and more efficient for being computer-driven robotic procedures. My parents survived World War II and the Depression, and I’ve made it through the Cold War, 1984, and the dreaded “millennium bug.” The foul black cloud may be there, but the sky is larger than any cloud.

As Ovid knows, it’s the nature of things to change. Uranium is always decaying; every second, its life is decaying out of itself into another life. That’s true for you and me, as well. Nothing’s going to be born unless something else dies, and its matter and energy recycle into the new thing that emerges. It’s the way the universe functions. The universe doesn’t need us to function in the direction of change. Iron is always going to rust, whether we help it along or not.

Ideally, we can feel “at one” with that cycle. To the extent that (like anyone) I sometimes don’t feel that way, I can become Captain Unwilling: the universe is one of continual change, okay, but it doesn’t need my endorsement, my acquiescence. If I’m doing something, it is, not always but often, going to be to question the forward motion because that’s what some human beings need to be doing. The other stuff is going to happen no matter what. Let the universe take care of that on its own; I have postage stamps to buy.

THROUGHOUT HIS WORK, Brandon Hobson presents stories of Native lives shaped by intergenerational trauma and atrocity and also by cultural continuity and hope. As his characters navigate familial separations and systemic racism, they find themselves in circumstances both relatable and astonishingly surreal. They discover and recover identity; they hurt, heal, fall in love, leave, and find home in a fractured contemporary society. In her review of The Removed for NPR, critic Marcela Davison Avilés writes, “The story in this book is deeply resonant and profound, and not only because of its exquisite lyricism. It’s also a hard and visceral entrance into our own reckoning as a society and civic culture with losses we created, injustices we allowed, and family separations we ignored. It’s a path of renewed mourning, meditation and trauma which at once seeks the vitality of what once was, and justice for what was taken.”

Brandon Hobson is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and the author of The Levitationist (2006); Deep Ellum (2014); Desolation of Avenues Untold (2015); Where the Dead Sit Talking (2018), a finalist for the National Book Award;  The Removed (2021); and The Storyteller, Hobson’s first middle grade book, which will be published in April, 2023. His short stories have won a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in Best American Short Stories (2021) and McSweeney’s among other publications. Hobson served as a judge for the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards. He teaches creative writing at New Mexico State University and the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Puerto del Sol. Hobson is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.

We spoke to Brandon Hobson over Zoom in early June of 2022, a couple of months after hearing him speak and teach a craft class as a featured author at the Get Lit! festival in Spokane. We discussed the symbiotic relationship between music and imagery, representation, and ways to approach multiple perspectives and world-building in novel writing. We began by discussing intention.

MORGAN HENDERSON

Do you start your pieces with clear intentions, and do those remain the focus throughout? Or do you find meaning as you go?

BRANDON HOBSON

I usually start with an image, and then I build from there and see what happens. Sometimes I have an image that I think is something to end with, and I might work toward that image. I might think of a sentence, like an opening sentence, but it’s usually an image. Part of the process early on in writing is trying to figure out what the story is about because I think it’s about something when in reality it’s about something entirely different.

JOSHUA HENDERSON

Can I ask what image you had in mind when you were beginning to write The Removed or Where the Dead Sit Talking?

HOBSON

Sure. With Where the Dead Sit Talking I had an image of a man at a grave site in shackles. That image was in an early draft at the beginning of the novel. With The Removed, a lot of the images came from thinking about the Darkening Land, which is a mythological space used in traditional Cherokee stories, and making that Darkening Land my own—a great old downtown space with these crooked and falling-apart buildings and people walking around sort of bug-eyed and very gray. For me, at least with Edgar’s sections, what was exciting about The Removed was being removed out of this world and into the mythological space of the Darkening Land.

JENNIFER KRASNER

In an interview with David Heska Wanbli Weiden, you mentioned Kathy Acker as an influence for the Darkening Land. It was such a suffocating dystopia in that basement. She has some scenes like that, too. I’m curious to hear how you took that traditional origin, a literary influence, and your own vision and pulled those all together.

HOBSON

I don’t know that I was thinking so much about her when I was writing those scenes in the Darkening Land or writing the book necessarily, but that influence might be there somewhere because she was such an early inspiration for me. Kathy Acker is a writer from whom I learned to be bold and unafraid in my writing. She was one of the first writers where I was just knocked out and thought, “Wow, you can do this?” She does a lot of stuff with language. I think she was absolutely brilliant. My interest in surrealism grew out of reading Kathy Acker and William Burroughs, who I know was a friend of hers and an influence on her. That drew me into writing early on. Exploring that surreal space felt very exciting. I asked myself, “How can I incorporate this surreal element into a modern story?” Thanks for reminding me about her. She was amazing. She still is. I think she’s very underappreciated. Many students have not heard of her, so it’s always fun to introduce her. I know you’ve interviewed William T. Vollmann. I think they were kind of compadres back in the early 90s and were big writers at the time. I was reading both of them, and they influenced the way I’ve been writing fiction.

J. HENDERSON

In the Joy Williams essay “Why I Write,” she describes writers as sharks that move “hidden in our midst, beneath the din and wreck of the moment.” I saw this as describing a writer’s relationship to truth. In Deep Ellum and Where the Dead Sit Talking, it feels like these sharks—the emotional core or truth of the story—are obscured, like the characters either aren’t fully aware of the sharks or there’s something so difficult for these characters to talk about that they can’t quite access it. In Where the Dead Sit Talking, Sequoyah imagines scenarios of tying Rosemary down. These imagined acts of violence feel like they’re expressing something that he can’t otherwise express. In The Removed, the shark—this truth that I think Williams is talking about—feels more like it’s coming closer to the surface. As much as Edgar gets trapped in the Darkening Land, he does escape. The red fowl is killed. What is a writer’s relationship to truth in a story and how does a writer choose to obscure or reveal that truth?

HOBSON

Those are the big questions, very difficult to answer. I discover along the way. That’s done through revision. I don’t know how much I revised those sections, especially those sections of the Darkening Land. I was working with my agent at the time, revising it, and then revising with my editor, and that was after having revised it several times already on my own. What’s the truth I’m looking for, for this character on this journey? What is the question? What’s the image? What am I trying specifically to say? And how am I going to go about doing that in the most effective way or the most artful way possible? The red fowl was actually a later addition in revision. In fact, it may have been the last revision. Then, I went back and added the red fowl throughout the whole book. And I started thinking more about metaphor. I started thinking about colors. When Edgar escapes the Darkening Land, this dark gray world, I wanted it to be a colorful experience, which is why I mentioned cherry blossoms and the colors of other important Cherokee lore—golds, greens, and reds. These three combined colors are on the cover of the book as well. I focused on colors representative of justice, representative of returning from removal, representative of healing. So I began in revisions to start thinking about: How can I use color? How can I use symbol or metaphor to help show what I’m trying to approach—returning from removal—and do it in a unique way, in the most artful way I can? With the Darkening Land, what is Edgar’s truth? And how does that mirror the truth I’m trying to reach—the truth of the entire novel, which is exploring the answers to questions: What does it mean to heal? What does it mean to deal with trauma? What does it mean to deal with generational trauma? Abuse? All these are issues I love to write about. How do we approach them and look for ways out?

J. HENDERSON

It’s interesting that the red fowl is one of the later revisions because that really guided me through the Edgar sections. It felt like it was always there, but I guess that speaks exactly to what you’re talking about with finding the meaning through revision.

SAMANTHA SWAIN

I wanted to ask about crafting those ambiguous endings in As the Dead Sit Talking and The Removed. In As the Dead Sit Talking, we’re left with Sequoyah’s question about whether he contributed to Rosemary’s suicide. In particular, he said something like, “no one suspected murder.” We had some argument about whether he felt like his attempt to stop her contributed to her  pulling the trigger or whether he had intentionally helped her pull the trigger. Likewise, in The Removed, I interpreted the Darkening Land as an overdose and thus the ending where Edgar walks down the blossom path as him crossing over. Yet, simultaneously, I thought, “Well maybe he really did live and arrive at the bonfire.” Both of these endings feel really satisfying. I wondered if you could talk about how you conceptualize and approach open endings.

HOBSON

I’m interested in blurring the line between reality and fantasy. I’m also very interested in unreliable narrators and their effect on the reader and how seductive an unreliable narrator can be. With Where the Dead Sit Talking I was getting into the space of a fifteen-year-old boy—well, technically, it’s a man looking back and trying to retell his story. When we’re writing fiction, we’re telling lies, right? We’re making things up. Even if it really happened, how can we alter this a little bit to make it a better story because it’s not a great story right now, so we have to embellish or exaggerate, and we have to do that in a very seductive way. Our job as writers is to seduce the reader. That sounds creepy, but when I’m a reader, so often I’m seduced by the voice, by the narrator, especially when we’re talking about first person, these two works specifically being first person. When I read first person, I’m so easily seduced that I’m willing to follow this voice wherever it takes me. I’ve come across the narrators who, at some point, I’m asking, “Wait a minute, what’s really going on here?” That lends credibility to the story, to the voice of the story, no matter if it’s an adult or if it’s a child. Take To Kill a Mockingbird for example. When I taught seventh grade years ago, I taught that book. I remember talking about how effective Scout’s voice is. Is she telling me everything? Is she leaving something out? How reliable is she to tell me these things? These very dark thoughts that Sequoyah is getting when he’s looking back, why is he choosing to give these to us? Why is Edgar or why is Sonja telling us these details, and what are they leaving out? Those are the choices we make with first-person narratives that, to me, become very exciting.

SWAIN

I see, the ambiguity of the ending stems from unreliability. That’s really interesting.

HOBSON

I’m much more interested in how something is done than I am in a satisfying, happy ending. The Removed was chosen early on as a Book of the Month Club selection, which was great in that it sold a whole lot of copies, but I just wonder whether my work is too weird for many people. And that’s okay. It’s not going to be for everybody. I never want to write something that I think will have a feel-good ending. Not everybody loves Kathy Acker. Not everybody loves David Lynch.

J. HENDERSON

I’ll sometimes go in to Goodreads and see what people have to say about a favorite book, and they’ll be brutal. It’s like getting tossed to the dogs.

HOBSON

Well, that’s part of it. You have to deal with that kind of stuff and overlook it. I don’t have a profile there and don’t go there, nor do I look at Amazon reviews. People love to have an opinion about things. I was looking at hotel reviews—we’re going next week to New York—and it’s the same thing, right? They absolutely trash hotels.

SWAIN

In a past interview you talked about feeling like you were not Native enough to write novels like Where The Dead Sit Talking and The Removed. I have often struggled with thoughts of like, “Well, I’m not disabled enough to tell this story.” Could you talk a bit about how you overcame this sort of thinking? What advice would you give to young authors dealing with similar feelings?

HOBSON

I still struggle with those feelings. At some point, it’s about stepping out and being entirely honest with yourself and being the type of writer you want to be. It helped to think of myself as the audience. You’re putting aside what other people are going to think and just saying, “Fuck it. I’m going to write this book for me. This is the kind of book that I want to write. And these are the characters who are dealing with these issues that I want to write about.” It’s also important to lean on the support system of whatever group you’re in. I talk with my friends who are Native about this issue a lot, and it’s really surprising to hear how many have felt the same way. “Am I really Native enough to have this conversation?” It helps to know that everybody feels this way, whether you’re writing about gender identity, disability, or anything else. What also helps is thinking that this is just one story or one book. I’m going to write more. This is something I love to do, that I’ve been doing since I was young, and I’m going to continue to do it. It’s not going to be the end of the world if this one story or book doesn’t work out. Speaking of, Sam, a colleague of mine, Connie Voisine, just got a grant for writers with disabilities here at New Mexico State University. [https://www.zoeglossia.org]

M. HENDERSON

How do you manage what you demand of the reader versus what you give them?

HOBSON

I don’t know that I think too much about the reader, especially when I’m drafting. And again, I’m really writing this for myself, and I’m writing the kind of book that I would like to read.

M. HENDERSON

How do you know when you’re going to construct something that needs to be interpreted versus something you’re going to straight up tell the reader? Is it just intuitive?

HOBSON

A lot of that comes out in revision. When I’m first drafting, which is the most fun, I’m not thinking so much about the demands on the reader. Let’s say I’ve written a scene where someone is hurt by someone who’s just left. I might have them say it, but then, going back, I say to myself, “Well of course, it’s so obvious. I’m showing this person going through this struggle, why would I have them speak it out loud?” So I’m going to cut that. I start thinking about the demands of the reader. Am I being too ambiguous? Am I not looking at my sentence structure? Is this sentence that goes on for a page and a half too demanding? Do I really need this? Is this doing what’s it’s meant to be doing? Should I shorten this? All that is done later on. I actually really lean on my agent and my editor to help me.

SWAIN

That’s something I really appreciate about your work, its accessibility. It’s still nuanced and complex, especially your characters. In past interviews, you had talked about letting the characters speak for themselves and speak through you. I was curious what your character-building process looks like. When you’re first starting a novel, how do you get to know them?

HOBSON

These last two books have first-person narrators, so I have an idea before I start what they look like and what their voices sound like. I don’t know them fully when I begin writing about them, although by the end of the first draft I know them pretty well. Sonja in The Removed, I love her character. I’ve heard people say, “Wow, she’s really disturbing and dark and unlikable,” but I don’t see her that way at all. When I was writing her sections, she was very confident, maybe a little bit eccentric, riding her bicycle to the library and sitting outside on the steps, but I certainly didn’t mean her to be dangerous in any way. If anything, she’s a victim. She becomes a victim of the assault of the police officer’s son. I have her being very confident, very sexual, open about the relationships with younger men. The more I wrote about her, the more I felt that confidence, and that eccentric woman came out. At the beginning, I wanted to have her very fixated on Vin. The more I write, the more I discover about these characters.

KRASNER

It makes me think of something you said in your craft class at Get Lit! in Spokane, “Writing is kind of like acting.”

HOBSON

Oh, thanks. I don’t want to take credit for that. I heard that from Ottessa Moshfegh. I’m a big fan of her work, and seven or eight years ago in Wichita, Kansas, I had dinner after her reading with her and an owner of a bookstore. She was fantastic. That was one of the things she had talked about, how much working through your characters feels like acting. And I thought, “That’s right!” Especially in first-person, though you can do it with a close third, too. You decide how you want them to perform on the page instead of on the stage, right? Even though I find myself too cripplingly shy to be an actor, I can understand it as a writer.

M. HENDERSON

Ottessa Moshfegh is my favorite!

HOBSON

She’s one of my favorite writers working today. And, at her age—I would say young, forty-one or forty-two—her body of work is just amazing. My favorite story in her collection is the last one [“A Better Place”] where the brother and sister go to kill the “bad man.” It has a fairy tale quality. Her new novel coming out this summer, Lapvona, is in a fairy tale style. I haven’t read it yet, but I have the galley here, and I’m excited to read it.

J. HENDERSON

In writing workshops as MFA students, we hear all the time about this dichotomy of active and passive characters. It’s not a strict rule, but we’re often told to avoid passive characters who avoid conflict. But in your work there are characters we might not traditionally think of as being active. Like Sequoyah—a lot of the time he’s just listening to people, observing, sitting back. There’s that teacher who corners him in the bathroom talking about how he misses his house and his ex-wife. Even if he’s just listening, he’s doing so in a way that feels active. He’s drawing these stories out of people. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on what makes an active or passive character. Is that something that matters to you at all? Can a character become active just through the telling of their story, even if they’re just sitting back and not literally doing something?

HOBSON

Thanks for that question and that scene. I don’t know that I think about active versus passive so much as I think about what’s
bizarre about human behavior. I have these conversations with my wife where we’ll say, “Did you notice that guy and what he was doing? What the hell was that?” We’ll laugh about it. I feel like those happen to me all the time. I don’t know that I think as much about active and passive as I do about situations. A large part of Where the Dead Sit Talking takes place at this new school, and when I think about schools, I always think about how strange my experience was, the strange things that teachers would say or do. I’m really dating myself, but going way back, pre-internet, using overhead projectors, and that light flashing—one of the scenes in that book was the weirdness of sitting in a dark room, drowsy, and listening to a teacher drone on and this weird light flashing in his face and finding myself way more interested in looking out the window. I always had this feeling I’d give anything to be able to walk outside and be by those trees, but no, I’m confined in this horrible space listening to this strange guy. I think those situations in the classroom or in P. E. are universal. Maybe I picture the characters as passive because I’m very passive, or just more observational. There’s a scene in Where the Dead Sit Talking where Sequoyah goes in the bathroom and sees a stick figure holding a gun, and I was thinking about all the drawings that I used to see and all the terrible, disturbing things that people wrote as graffiti—hateful, rude, disgusting drawings. Someone drawing a gun. I mean, especially right now. Is that a sign that there is something we need to be looking out for? I wanted to incorporate some of that in the book. I constantly, and I mean constantly, almost daily, when I go to the grocery store, find myself overhearing or seeing things that seem very strange. I’m fascinated by it as a writer because what a great opportunity this is, listening to this couple, this elderly couple, argue about what they’re arguing about. I’m very interested in making the normal feel absurd.

J. HENDERSON

I was thinking about the video game in the Darkening Land that Jackson Andrews is developing, how that feels so absurd but also real, and how the absurdity heightens the way it feels real, something dark and true about America. The video game was fascinating both in the way your approach to handling politics has evolved throughout your work and the way there’s a mixing of humor with a subject that is not funny. It’s really compelling. Also, there’s a manual for the game. How do you go about putting a manual in a novel?

HOBSON

I don’t think it’s really that absurd. Video games with shooting have been around for a long time, and recently there are video games where people have assault rifles and are killing people left and right. Now we’re seeing it play out in real life, not necessarily because it’s the video game’s fault. Edgar is going, “My brother was shot by a police officer. Now I’m in this space where I’m the target because I’m Native.” That’s part of the game, shoot the Indian. I pushed it into absurdity where in the basement Jackson has created this whole sort of replica and Edgar sees his brother. That’s absurd, but on some level, I don’t feel like it’s that much more absurd than what’s happening right now. My eight-year-old son is playing the Oculus. That feels more absurd. Part of my job as a fiction writer is to try to exaggerate those things. Ray Bradbury was onto virtual reality back in the sixties when he was writing The Illustrated Man.

For the manual, I used one of my son’s video game manuals as a model. I actually had a much longer manual and my editor was like, “Do we really need this many pages?” and I thought, “I kind of like all these pages in here, but I see your point. Let’s just stick to the objective of the game and the specifics.” She had a very good point and I think it’s ultimately better shorter, but it was fun to create that manual. I like to experiment, and I like it if a novel or a story has something in it like a manual or something seen as non-traditional that lends itself to the story. Do we really need this script in here? Well, yeah, of course we do. It’s showing something about the character we’re not seeing in a different way. One of the fun things of being a fiction writer is that we can incorporate little plays or drawings or whatever, manuals, and use them in our work.

SWAIN

I feel like that’s part of world-building. It’s very accepted in the fantasy and sci-fi realm that those sorts of things will be in there, but of course it also has to exist for something in the Darkening Land.

HOBSON

Writing should be fun. You want to find the pleasure in it. The more pleasure you have, the better it’ll be. The Darkening Land sections were the most fun to write because I could build that world and create my own video game, and I created my own manual and created my own little place there and tried to do it in a, you know, “literary fiction” way that hopefully works. We forget about the fun when we’re all in workshop and we’re talking about active conflict and asking, “So what is the point of this story?” We all become so critical of one another. We’re heavy with criticism and doubt. We’re doubting ourselves. “Am I Native enough? Should I write it?” I could have given up and said, “Am I even Cherokee enough?” Cherokee doesn’t follow blood quantum, so of course I am—these questions of doubt and these insecurities are a burden on us, whatever they are.

It’s really important for us to go back and think, “What drew me into writing?” Maybe it was Salinger or maybe it was Alice in Wonderland. It’s important to write for yourself like maybe you did when you first started writing stories. I remember the first stories I was writing in college, which were absolutely terrible. I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew this is fun. We need to come back to that because we lose that. I constantly deal with people who give up on writing, and/or give up on their books, and I think they’re going about it the wrong way. They’re looking for success or bestsellers. I didn’t start writing stories because I thought maybe I’ll get on a New York Times bestseller list. I did it out of some space of, “I love reading, and I would love to create my own world, I think things will fall into place.” That’s what I have to remind myself. I’m going to write whatever book I want to write. You know, I just wrote a middle grade book for Scholastic that’ll be out next year. I thought, “If I’m going do this, I’m going to have fun with it,” and I did.

M. HENDERSON

What are some things you’ve edited out of your books?

HOBSON

Tsala had longer sections in The Removed, and we scaled back on those. I had more stories from traditional Cherokee folklore, and we decided at some point it was a little too much. Keep it to a minimum since Tsala wasn’t part of the timeline of the novel. Tsala was this sort of ancestor spirit telling his stories. Too much of that would possibly be too much of a digression from the timeline.

J. HENDERSON

You mention digression. One thing that struck me was the smaller stories placed throughout the novels, like the stories characters would tell. I’m interested in stories within stories in my own work. I rarely intend to do it; it just ends up happening. How do you make sure they fit and that, even if there’s a digression, it doesn’t feel like something that doesn’t belong?

HOBSON

As you’re drafting, I wouldn’t worry too much about that. I would just get the draft done and enjoy it as much as you can, and then focus on your revision. It’s much easier to cut that stuff. A story within a story is asking, “What is this saying in the overall context of the novel? What is this telling us about the storyteller?” Let’s say that you have a character and she’s writing a play. You decide to put the beginning of Act One of her play about a woman who is trying to kill her husband. That’s a way of revealing that she is not happy with her husband.

Chekhov says, “Begin with questions.” For me, those questions are: How do we heal from trauma? How do we deal with racism? How are we dealing with abuse? What is justice? Those big questions are important to think about early on. Then, you can start thinking, “I want her story here within the timeline of the novel to reveal something that she’s not going to tell us.” I haven’t read it yet, but Hernan Diaz has a new novel out called Trust that I believe has a novel-within-the-novel, not a whole novel, but one of the characters in the novel is writing a novel, and I think there’s another story within the story, too. I’m excited because I’m like you, Josh, I like stories within stories. Gravity’s Rainbow has a digression and then there’s a digression from that digression. Pretty soon I’m lost as to what’s the point of this digression after this digression, and what does that have to do with the main storyline? Five hundred pages from now I’ll need to remember this because it’s got to be important. That’s very, very difficult. That’s very demanding for the reader, but it probably serves a purpose. But there has to be a point; otherwise, it would have been cut.

M. HENDERSON

The setting and imagery in Deep Ellum was intense and vivid, but you’ve lived in Oklahoma most of your life. So why Deep Ellum? And what kind of research did you need to do?

HOBSON

Deep Ellum is a district in Dallas near downtown that I was interested in because I used to go there when I was younger. There would be bands playing, and it was kind of gritty. It’s been a long time since I was there, though. Now they’ve put in nice condos and coffee shops, and it’s not the gritty, kind of druggy area that it once was. I wanted to relive that through the novella, through the imagery.

M. HENDERSON

Was all of it based on memory, or did you have to do some research?

HOBSON

Just my memory. I’ve been there so many times, and there are so many different clubs and bands that would come through. It felt like this weird space in a city like Dallas. It was its own little artsy space. I skewed it a little bit and blended a little fantasy with reality. Think of like The Royal Tenenbaums—it’s supposed to be New York, but it’s skewed a little bit. It’s Wes Anderson’s New York from his own view. Stanley Kubrick did that a bit with New York. So I was thinking about that idea, of taking a place and altering it to make it your own, which is risky because you always have those assholes who’ll say, “That’s not where that is” or “There’s no light post on that corner of Elm and Crowdus.” But I like blending and doing something a little fantastical. So I took this space, this area of Deep Ellum, which I loved. I knew the story, the brother returning home, sick mom, and a sister who’s dealing with addiction problems. I’m interested in that, like, here’s downtown Spokane but here’s Morgan Henderson’s vision of downtown Spokane. I know she did this for a reason. What is that reason? What is it telling us?

SWAIN

How did you weave the multiple perspectives in The Removed together to make a complete story, and what was that process like structurally?

HOBSON

The difficulty in juggling these multiple perspectives is that they all need to meet at one specific place. What can you do by the end that would somehow thread all of their stories together to make it one unified story? Your multiple characters all need to be probably addressing the same theme or dealing with the same question and then reaching maybe a conclusion. Early in drafting, I had Tsala sections, I had Edgar’s sections, and, okay, I’ve got these four different characters, they’ve all got to come together. There has to be an event or something at the end that draws them all together. For me, it was the image of the bonfire. Granted, it’s ambiguous when they see Edgar or spirits coming toward them, but I hope that the fire is representative of returning home, the last word of the novel being “home.”

A big question in a lot of my work is, “What is home?” I think that’s a big question in a lot of Native literature. There’s a TV series called Reservation Dogs on FX; Sterlin Harjo is a friend of mine. Early on, he and I talked about one of the things that a lot of his other work, his films, explores, “What is home? How do I get home?” In some ways Reservation Dogs is approaching that question as well.

KRASNER

There’s a scene in The Removed, in the Darkening Land, where Edgar puts on a Bauhaus record in Jackson’s house and listens to each side over and over again and parts in Where the Dead Sit Talking where Rosemary and Sequoyah listen to a lot of music together like X, The Velvet Underground, and, I think, Elliott Smith comes up in both books. Do you listen to music to create a writing mood? And how do you pick out bands for your characters?

HOBSON

It’s probably no surprise I’m an Elliott Smith fan, so he probably did show up in both books. I always put in music. I’m a huge music fan, I listen to music all the time. When I listen to certain music it sparks an image. In the middle grade book, I have a snake that’s Bela Lugosi reincarnated as a snake, and the chapter’s called “Bela Lugosi is dead,” right? I’m making my Bauhaus reference there, too.

Certain songs will spark memories that you can then transfer into images or will create fictional images. Gideon, for example, in Deep Ellum—it’s been over ten years since I wrote that novella, but I remember thinking about Gideon’s character walking at night wearing his sister’s coat. Music was helping these images form in my head. I’m a little bit obsessive about music. I want to make it part of the books. I think it’s a good space to go into when you’re thinking about your characters. What are those images and how can you use those images on the page? Music feeds our creativity, it feeds the image.

MOLLY GILES’ WRY AND QUICK-WITTED, observational voice has given life to female characters disenchanted with their circumstances and the underwhelming men that surround them. She is a master of the short form; her language is tight, precise, and caustic and her stories darkly comic. Her endings tum on a heartbeat, often surprising and always resonant as if they couldn’t have possibly ended with any other configuration of words and emotions.

Giles is the author of five short story collections, the first of which, Rough Translations, was awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction, the Boston Globe Award, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers’ Award. The stories were described by the Houston Post as “tiny gems, carved from real American life, precise and identifiable.” Giles’ other collections include Creek Walk and Other Stories, winner of the Small Press Best Fiction Award, the California Commonwealth Silver Medal for Fiction, and a New York Times Notable Book, originally published by Papier-Mâché Press, reissued by Simon & Schuster in 1998; All the Wrong Places, winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction (Willow Springs Books, 2015); and Wife with Knife, winner of the Leap Frog Global Fiction Prize Contest, 2020. She has also published two novels, Iron Shoes (Simon & Schuster, 2000) and The Home for Unwed Husbands (Leapfrog Press, 2023). Her autobiography, Life Span: A Memoir, is due out through WTAW Press in 2024.

Giles’ work has been included in the O. Henry and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Marin Arts Council, and the Arkansas Arts Council. She has taught fiction writing at San Francisco State University, University of Hawaiʻi in Manoa, San Jose State University, the National University of Ireland at Galway, the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and at writing conferences, including The Community of Writers and Naropa. Molly has also worked as an independent editor for many authors, including Amy Tan.

We met with Molly Giles on Zoom on Saturday, April 8th to discuss how her shift from poetry to short fiction, the unlikely circumstances that started her teaching career, seances, and the inspiration behind her work—including which stories were overheard, divulged, or completely fabricated. In a serendipitous turn of events, several of us had the pleasure of a second meeting with Molly Giles at the Community of Writers conference in Olympic Valley, California where Giles was on staff. This time, Giles was the one asking the questions. Giles was exceedingly thorough and generous with her feedback. Her command of story structure, pacing, and knowledge of exactly when to include a humorous quip was sincerely appreciated. Some of her signature zingers you’ll find throughout our conversation.

POLLY BUCKINGHAM

How are you doing? I know you had hip surgery recently.

MOLLY GILES

Yes, both hips are full of hardware now, but they’re getting me where I need to go. I do walk with a cane, and I’m trying not to point with it. One of my friends said, “It makes you look like an old lady,” and I thought, well yeah. I like my cane. I would like to have a little stiletto on the end of it.

BUCKINGHAM

Like Ida’s wooden leg.

BLAIR JENNINGS

Ida in Iron Shoes and The Home for Unwed Husbands has leg is­sues. I was wondering if your leg issues might have inspired that.

GILES

No, not mine. But my mother was a double amputee; she was very brave about it, though she did sometimes take her prothesis off and wave it at the grandchildren.

BUCKINGHAM

That leg up in the top of the closet after Ida dies—I couldn’t help but think of Flannery O’Connor.

GILES

Yes, “Good Country People.” That is a great story.

SHRAYA SINGH

What’s your favorite piece of your own work that’s been published so far, and why do you like it?

GILES

Probably the very last story in Wife with Knife, “My Ex.” It’s about how you feel after divorce—that combination of fond nostalgia and absolute fury and continued incomprehension. I’ve been divorced twice, and I wish I could divorce both exes again. Once wasn’t enough. So the enigma of the relationship continues long after the relationship itself. That story is two pages long and and took me two months to write. I was very happy with the end.

BUCKINGHAM

I’m so impressed with your endings. Even in Iron Shoes, there’s that turn where she discovers what a louse her husband really is. In the writing process, where do those turns come from? Do they come late? Do they come early?

GILES

I think they come late. That’s a good question, Polly, because it’s so hard to answer. My main trouble is with beginnings. I think there were about fifteen first chapters to Iron Shoes. By the time I got into the world of it, I could see my way better. When I start a novel. I have to ask, is this going to be a tragedy or a comedy? ls there going to be a wedding at the end or a funeral? I know what direction I’m going in, but I never know where I’m going to end. And in novels the big pressure is to have somebody end with some form of acceptance or redemption, even though that’s not often true in real life.

BUCKINGHAM

Before you came in, we had a long discussion because I had read Iron Shoes and they read The Home for Unwed Husbands.

SINGH

We were wondering about the overlap of characters and whether it was going to be declared as an official sequel.

GILES

I think The Home for Unwed Husbands can stand alone, and, to tell the truth, when I wrote it, I never had the guts to reread Iron Shoes. Iron Shoes is a dark book, and I wanted this one to be a comedy. It started off as a comedy, and then my ex-husband moved downstairs, and it didn’t stay funny. He lived with me, in the basement, but I worried about him all the time, and a light-hearted romp it was not.

BUCKINGHAM

The beginning of Iron Shoes, Ida with her legs cut off, is just so gruesome. It really brings you in. And there’s that piece at the end where Kay remembers the games she played with Francis­—it’s a tender memory but the games are terrible, really mean. So it’s not one-hundred percent redemptive. It’s still pretty dark. You know she’s not done.

GILES 

That’s why I felt Kay needed another book. She’s still under her parents’ thumbs; she still hasn’t grown up. I felt Ida needed more time too. She has a lot of my mother’s characteristics, but my mother was so much nicer. And the Kay character is sort of based on me, but I’m not half as nice. I have never been as generous nor as thoughtful, no. Most of the characters I made worse, and Kay I made better. I think that’s an author’s prerogative, right? I hope that The Home for Unwed Husbands can stand alone but I would love it if it leads anyone back to Iron Shoes.

SINGH 

You said that divorcing someone once wasn’t enough, and I think I remember reading that exact line in The Home for Unwed Husbands. I remember underlining it and thinking, this is pret­ty funny. I wanted to know why you write about so many unsuc­cessful romantic relationships and marriages.

GILES

Revenge.

SINGH

That’s a great answer.

GILES

I have a little candle that says lucky in love, and in many ways, I have been. I stress the bad parts because I was raised to believe that only trouble is interesting. That’s what we used to be taught when we were writing. And I find it’s pretty true. So I do stress the negative. I do no accent the positive. My present partner could not be sweeter or lovelier, but I can’t write about him—there’s nothing to say. He’s perfect. So no, it’s hard. Don’t ever be too happy. It’s not good for writers to be too happy.

JENNINGS

That’s good new for all of us, I think.

GILES

Are any of you poets? I mean, poets make a career out of being unhappy.

ISADORA ANDERSON

We know you used to write a lot more poetry. What impact did that have on writing fiction?

GILES

I never published a poem until maybe ten years ago. I love poetry. I read it constantly as a child. But the poets I was drawn to were telling a narrative. I loved T. S. Elliot, not because of “The Wasteland,” which I still don’t understand, but because of J. Alfred Prufrock, a character I related to. As a child, I loved Tennyson. I think if I went back, I would still love Tennyson. I loved Edna St. Vincent Millay—I’m not ashamed of that. I think “The Ballad of the Harp Weaver” is gorgeous. And later on, I loved Dylan Thomas and William Blake. A poet I still love and read is D. H. Lawrence. I love his poems about animals. But I recently took an online course about W. S. Merwin. The course was taught by two other poets. And what they loved about Merwin is that they didn’t understand him, and they went on and on about how great it was not to understand things. I think Kevin Mcllvoy said the same thing [in a previous Willow Springs interview], how he loves chaos. Not me. I am the sort of person who, if I start a book and get anxious about what’s going to happen, I have no qualms turning to the last page just to find out if they live or if they die because, otherwise, I will not be able to continue. After I know, I don’t give up the book unless it’s badly written. But I do like to have all my anxieties soothed. I still love W. S. Merwin, even after six weeks of failing to enjoy not understanding him.

BUCKINGHAM 

I do think poets, in general, are happier in uncertainty than fic­tion writers are.

GILES

Definitely. The one poem I did publish, about ten years ago, is the last piece in Bothered, “Young Wife on the Arc.” I rewrote it as prose, dropping the line breaks but keeping the rhymes. I didn’t start writing short stories until my late twenties. I was married, I had two children, and I was living in Sacramento. I didn’t know any other women who wrote or read. I felt isolat­ed and depressed. I took a correspondence course through UC Berkeley, which was wonderful training. I wrote my first short story through that correspondence course and sold it to a mag­azine that promptly went out of business the same month my story was slated to come out. But I was able to submit that story to the Community of Writers, and they gave me a scholarship. So I was thirty by the time I was around other fiction writers—it was heaven.

BUCKINGHAM

Can you talk about the shift in your work from short stories to micro-fiction?

GILES

In that correspondence course, the teacher made me count my words. One piece had to be five-hundred words, another could only be twenty-five words. It felt a little artificial, but I was amazed by how much I liked compression compared to expansion. I’m drawn to the shorter forms of prose. My pieces tend to be narratives. I want them to be understood. When I read somebody like Lydia Davis, I am impressed by the intelligence but often puzzled by the story.

The first flash piece that really worked for me was ‘The Poet’s Husband,” which was written maybe thirty years ago. It was based on going to a poetry reading and watching this beautiful young woman get up and talk about everything that her husband and she shared. And he just sat there nodding and smiling, and l thought, my God. I don’t know about you. but if somebody I’m close to gets up, for instance, and starts to sing. I blush. I’m terribly embarrassed for them. But this woman was very self-confident, and she was talking about her affair, her sui­cide attempts, her unhappiness. And he just sat there smiling. That’s what inspired the story.

BUCKINGHAM

I want to ask about the title story in Wife with Knife. There’s this adage in writing, you have to write four hours a day, or how­ever long, every day. But “Wife with Knife” suggests that this is perhaps a male perspective. Some writers I love, Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley, have small but mighty bodies of work. They never had a time in their lives where they could write all day ev­ery day. They couldn’t afford that. One thing I heard your story saying was that this is kind of a myth; it’s not that people don’t do it, but it’s kind of a selfish thing. The life we live is important enough that we have to live it, and that doesn’t necessarily give us long writing periods. But it does give us the writing. In an interview you said something like, “I’ve raised kids alone, I’ve had a gazillion jobs, I’ve taught, I’ve edited, I didn’t have time to write every day. That isn’t my process.” Could you speak to this?

GILES

I’ve never been able to write every day. I mean, I got married at nineteen. I had children right away. I’ve always had to work. I didn’t go back to school until I was in my thirties. I was working different jobs all the time. I only started teaching at forty because my professor was an alcoholic and couldn’t finish the course. The chair of the department didn’t know who to ask and he just tapped me. I stepped in and was there for the next thirty-three years. As a teacher, I wrote mainly in July. As a young mother, when the children were little, I wrote during their naps. I have scraps of ideas on the back of utility bills that I’ll find stuck in my purse. I’m talking to you now from a cottage on my property that I used to rent out. I recently took it over as a writing room, and I feel guilty about it. I don’t come out here very often. I’m retired now, the children are middle-aged, I’ve got what I always longed for, a room of my own, and I’m still scattered.

I do better with deadlines. Rough Translations, my first book, is my MA thesis. It was done because the stories were due in workshop. In our real lives, nobody’s standing over you saying, “We have to have this.” Nobody cares. Unless you’re Stephen King. Well, Stephen King writes every day, even on Christmas, so he doesn’t count. I’ve always had a lot on my plate until now. And now, I have everything I’ve ever wanted, which is part of my philosophy in life—you get everything you need, just never when you need it. I finally have this great space. And I’m coming to the end of my career. I doubt I will ever write another novel. I want to get my memoir out. And I’m still writing short stories. But the energy for a novel is not there. There is irony in almost everything, I’m afraid.

When the University of Georgia press nominated Rough Translations for a Pulitzer Prize, they wanted to interview me. I got a phone call from a guy with this lovely southern drawl: “Now,” he says, “I’ve noticed that you started college in 1960. And I noticed that you finished in 1980. That’s a lot of unaccounted-for time.” And I thought, yeah. But unaccounted-for time is often a woman’s world. Often a man’s, too, but I think more of a woman’s. Now that I have nothing but time, I find I’m addicted to the New York Times spelling bee. That takes at least a half hour every day. And then I garden, I putter, I cook; I’m enjoying myself. I love life. But no, I’m not sitting down and writing four hours a day. I never have.

I think it was Grace Paley who said her best advice to writers was “love your life.” And I think Keven said the same thing in his interview. He said to look at what’s around you and pay attention and be mindful to what’s actually going on in your life. All of us here could write a Russian novel just about what’s happening since we got up. If you think about all the stuff that’s been going through your head and the people who flit in and out of your consciousness and what you see on the street, it’s all material. It’s just hard to pay attention to all of it—you’d go nuts. But it is there.

ALISYN WAITE

You mentioned your memoir. To what extent do you draw from your own life in your writing? I know some authors like to keep things very separate, where others prefer to be open about the fact that the story is based on their lives. Do you have your own balance?

GILES

Yeah, and it’s a balance. “Wife with Knife” was literally me listening to a friend talk. I listen hard to my friends. A lot of my stories are stolen from people who are naïve enough to trust me with their stories. I don’t think you can edit yourself out of every story—I’m in about half, I think. The memoir is all me. I’m trying to be as true to my life as possible. I was born in San Francisco, and the book is based on crossing and re-crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. It is titled Life Span and is comprised of flash pieces—none of them are longer than three pages—every year from 1945 to the present. It will come out with WTAW in 2024. It’s amazing to me the things that have happened on that bridge and the relationships I’ve had. One thing I still have to do is go through and soften some of the portraits of the people I’ve known. I don’t want to hurt any-body. I know I don’t like looking at myself depicted in other people’s writing, especially not my own. As I said earlier, the character Kay is based on a really nice Molly—I was never that good to my parents. I’ve always been snippy, and I’ve always been lazy.

BUCKINGHAM

We all have a hard time believing that.

GILES

Don’t. I can think of specific stories in Wife with Knife where I could say, “Yes I’m in there” or “No I’m not.” “Accident,” that happened to me. I was rear-ended in Arkansas, and I had such mixed feelings about living in the South. I was dating a guy at the time who was a musician. He was ranting about the Yankees, and I said, “Do you think I’m a Yankee?” And he said, “Oh no. You’re a foreigner.” Because the South was foreign to some­body who’d grown up in the Bay Area. I made the character much younger than I was and gave her a different life. But the incident happened. “Church News”—I do apologize. A friend told me that story, and I went and wrote it. And then I tried to get her to say, is this ok? And she wasn’t sure. Still isn’t. “Deluded” is cruelly based on a friend of mine who doesn’t read. “Assumption” is sort of a rural myth about a body tied to the top of a van. I nabbed it. “Dumped,” I didn’t even change the names. I just used my friends. “Life Cycle of a Tick” is very much about a relationship I had. “Not a Cupid”? I was once on a bus in Mexico, and I saw a woman, an American woman, petting this sullen little boy who looked trapped. “Just Looking” was about doing all this weird shopping but never buying anything. “Eskimo Diet” is a fairy story. “Married to the Mop” was about a time I cleaned houses but the character isn’t me. “Banyan” is me. “Ears,” me. “Paradise,” a friend of mine who talks to spirits all the time. “Rinse, Swish, Spit”—I live in terror that my dental hygienist will read it. “Two Words” was based on a tenant I had. I was sitting here in the cottage—I would come back in summer and stay in the cottage and rent my main house out when I was teaching in Arkansas—wondering what on earth to write about, and I saw this little, fat, naked man run out to the garden. He wore a pink feather boa around his neck, and he picked up a garbage can lid and started fighting the deer in my yard and I thought, Okay. “Underage” is totally autobiographical. “Hopeless” I made up because I liked the little kid in it.

JENNINGS

I’m curious now. What inspired “Talking to Strangers”?

GILES

I live at the foot of Mount Tamalpais. A few years ago, a serial killer was on the loose, violating women hikers and murdering them on the trails up there. I loved hiking that mountain alone. When I realized I couldn’t do that anymore, I felt angry. I was sitting at my desk, trying to finish a grad school assignment, and the first lines, it was scary, came to me. It was like some­body was speaking directly to me. It was the only channeling experience I’ve ever had. It’s something writers pray for. I heard this voice, and I just followed it. “I know you don’t know me,” the voice said. And I knew it was a dead girl speaking. I don’t read that story at conferences because it’s triggering. There are too many women who have been assaulted.

The only other time I’ve ever had a visitation, if you will, was at the end of my most anthologized story, “Pie Dance.” I had no idea how I was going to end it, and it just came to me. You write forty different ends, and you think, I can’t I can’t I can’t. And then it just comes. You had asked earlier about ends; that end was a gift of grace. It’s not going happen if you’re not there. You have to be with your story; you have to sit with it. Sometimes, magic happens. And sometimes it’s black magic. I’m not a spir­itual person, but those were two times where I just didn’t know what to say except, “Thanks.”

JENNINGS

I’ve been known to write some dark things. It can affect my mood and throw me into a very deep depression while writing and a couple weeks after. I’m wondering how you get through that and still edit it enough to make it turn out well-crafted.

GILES

I think I’m shallower than you; I don’t stay depressed long enough. When I am depressed, I write. If I can’t create, I journal. I have journal after journal, and they’re all full of crap. The self-pity is incredible. Pages and pages and pages of it, since I was nine. I think of my journals as my puke bags. My daughter has promised me she’ll burn them all when I pass. I’m always horrified when someone like Hemingway dies, a beautiful writer who chose one beautiful word after another, and then when they aren’t there to revise, their journals or their rough drafts are published. You know, it’s just not fair. It does a real disservice to the writer.

I’ve only had a real depression once in my life, and that was because I wasn’t writing, wasn’t reading, wasn’t going to school. The children were little, and I couldn’t take care of them. I cried a lot, and I thought about getting rid of myself. I was in my late twenties—I think the twenties are a terrible time. People in their twenties need to know that things get better. You lose your looks, you lose your hips, but things get better.

BUCKINGHAM

I’ve been thinking about John Cheever as you’ve been talking and how some of your perspectives are kind of opposite. I love John Cheever, but he had the writing cabin and the ability to go, “Well, I’m off to the cabin and Mary and the kids can fend for themselves.” And also, he wrote his journals to be pub­lished, and then they were.

GILES

Well, they’re wonderful. I love those journals. They break your heart. And I love his stories. He does something I admire—­he’ll leave the here and now, and slip sideways into fantasy. He does it effortlessly. I’ve tried that a few times. I don’t always get away with it, but I do admire the way he did it.

BUCKINGHAM

Yeah, I saw that in Iron Shoes with the fairy tale and with the blue horse. Like Cheever, you’re also writing about a time period in which the cocktail party is really big, and these casual cruelties to children are part of the culture. I wonder about those casual cruelties younger people might be appalled by, and whether the world has changed.

GILES

My three daughters all have children, and I’m looking at the way they have parented; they’re so good at it. My parents came out of the Depression and out of the war, and they wanted their own lives. I think they felt they never had a chance. I was writing more about my parents’ generation than my own generation, which is a generation of dopers and maybe inept parents but not cruel parents. I don’t think we really took parenting seriously. I had my first daughter when I’d just turned twenty; there’s a picture of me holding her on my hip like she’s a football I’m about to dropkick.

Somehow, all three of my daughters turned out great. All are professionals. One is a geneticist in Amsterdam, another a cannabis publicist, another is an attorney. They are wonderful parents: tolerant, loving, interested in their children. The granddaughter who’s living with me now, twenty-one, is going to go home and continue to live with her mother and father in the Netherlands when she goes to college. I would no more have lived with my parents after the age of eighteen than I would have flown; it was unthinkable to me. I grew up in the forties and fifties and my parents had better things to do than parent. It was like that Philip Larkin poem, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” And it all goes back to the mom and dad’s mom and dad, so you can’t assign blame. You just try not to repeat the same patterns with your own children.

JENNINGS

As I read your stories, I thought, all these men are so horrible. I’m wondering whether you’ve seen a change in men as well. Are they any better, or are they still the same?

GILES

I think men get better as they get older, and the testosterone dies down. If we could get rid of testosterone for a week, you know how easy the world would be? The Middle East would come together, the Ukraine war would end, the population explosion would slow. It’s a terrible, terrible hormone. I found that I at least can talk to men more after the age of fifty-five; they’ll talk to you about what they’re cooking, what their shopping list is like, their aches and pains. They’ll open up. The men of my generation were singularly silent. I remember reading Saul Bellow to find out what men thought. It wasn’t clear to me that men did actually think because the men in my acquaintance were charming in many ways, but mute. It was very frustrating. I remember thinking, especially in the D. H. Lawrence novels, florid as they are, oh, this guy’s thinking about something that I’m thinking about. It was new to me. I think men are chattier now. I hope so.

One of my early stories is “A Jar of Emeralds.” I was mar­ried to this beautiful guy, he was just lovely, but he never talk­ed. And one morning he woke up and turned to me and said, “I feel like a jar of emeralds,” and I thought, wait a minute, who is this guy? I want to know him. He’s a treasure chest I don’t have access to. I do apologize to the male characters I write about because many are one-dimensional cartoons. I’m very aware of that, especially in the last book; I meant it to be a comedy, and I wasn’t looking for rounded and deep characters.

ANDERSON

Regarding the unwed husbands, I found myself so frustrated with all the men anytime they spoke to Kay, Neal constantly calling her “Babe,” Victor being religiously judgmental, Francis disapproving, and Fenton just not saying anything. How did you ensure that each unwed husband sounded different and interacted with Kay in a different way, and what was your process for writing the dialogue for each one?

GILES

Fenton was easy because, as you say, he doesn’t speak. I delib­erately gave Francis the best lines because he’s just plain mean. He’s a terrible human being, but he cracked me up. With my own dad, if you’d hurt yourself—say you’d fallen down and scraped your elbow—he’d stomp on your foot and say, “Now how does your elbow feel?” It was that kind of Irish “humor'” I grew up with. Neal was the easiest because of the irritating oh Babes. I’m really embarrassed about Victor.

Biff was easy. I really liked the guy Kay met in Greece. He was nobody I had ever met, and I liked it when he talked. But I got rid of him fast because he was going to take over.

SINGH

You mentioned that all the characters from the most recent novel are like cartoons or caricatures, and they’re meant to be really unlikeable. Do you have any advice on how to write un­likable characters but still have your reader engaged with the material?

GILES 

I guess the best advice would be to try and be that person. Ev­ery character in a story has his or her own motivation, their own sense of justice, of who they are. To try and actually be your antagonist and try to see things from their point of view takes a real leap of faith, but I do think that listening hard helps, and knowing your character’s background. For each of those characters, I wrote a couple of pages on where they were born, what foods they liked, what they wanted to be. I tried to understand who they were. It didn’t make me like them, but it did help me see where they were coming from.

JENNINGS

The short story “The Writers’ Model” has the fascinating concept of women being physically examined and questioned by male writers who want to write authentic women yet never overcome their false impressions of them despite their interrogations. This reminds me of a discussion among liberal creatives right now. Do we only write our own gender identity, sexual orientation, disability vs. ability, or race so we don’t accidentally write something offensive because we can never truly understand another lived experience, or should we become as educated as possible about what each type of lived experience is like and write as many inclusive characters as possible with the guidance of one of those who’ve lived similar lives?

GILES

You guys are really walking on eggshells in your generation with this stricture you’re under, to be authentic, to only write your own gender, to only write your own sexual preference, to only write your own nationality. It seems so unfair. You want to be careful, yes, but the imagination was given to us. It’s a great gift. I just can’t imagine having to stick with yourself all the time­—who wants to? It’s wrong. I think that’s one of the great delights of slipping away from reality and writing fantasy because if you write fantasy, you can have green people and pink people and purple people, and you’re not offending anybody. You can ac­tually say what you want to say about the world. I don’t write it myself. But I think of a writer I adore, Ursula LeGuin; through fantasy she can say things about the world she couldn’t say otherwise. My feeling is, thumb your nose at the authorities and write what you want to write. I don’t know what workshops are like now, but I’m sure they’re scary as shit because everybody is saying, “You can’t say that” or “You can’t say this.” I find it very Soviet. I don’t like it. Be mindful of others in your speech, and to hell with them when you’re writing. I am delighted that it’s opened the door to trans writers, and I’m really glad that I’m reading things that weren’t available to read even ten years ago. There’s so much new, fascinating stuff coming out.

ANDERSON

How do you balance withholding information to keep the suspense while at the same time establishing trust with your reader so that they are along for the ride no matter where you’re taking them in the story?

GILES

Wonderful question. That’s part of the reason why we can’t teach writing. You’ll know when you get into a story yourself what to do, but it’s really hard to come up with a rule for anything. I love workshops, mainly for the comradery and the deadlines, but there are some things I don’t think I’ve ever been able to talk about or teach, like tempo in a piece of fiction. You can look at the way other people do it. I love Alice Munro, and I’ve been looking at the way she withholds information, and I thought, I’ll take one of her stories apart and study it; that’s easy. But you can’t really diagnose her; she’s too sly. It’s up to you as a writer to feel your way towards what you need to do. And cover your ears—try not to listen to what other people tell you. To deliberately withhold and then put it in there later is very mechanical, and that’s not the way we work. I taught for thirty-three years saying, “Show don’t tell.” I don’t believe that anymore; I like to be told. We used to diagram things on the blackboard about how a story arc should go. That’s a bunch of hogwash; I never did like that.

I don’t envy anybody teaching creative writing now, but I love creative writing classes. I love the community that comes together; I love the way people push each other and inspire each other and give each other heart and hope. I’m in a writing group now. Almost every writing group I’ve ever been in or every class has a certain undefinable magic just as writing itself does.

WAITE

Can you talk more about your own experience teaching?

GILES

I stepped in scared to death. I was so conscientious the first three years that I would write single spaced typed pages of my critiques of the stories. Students would just throw them out the window as they went, and I don’t blame them. I don’t have a good speaking voice. I was often told to speak up. I had been reading more than I had been talking, so I couldn’t pronounce words. Oaxaca, I couldn’t pronounce it. I couldn’t pronounce quaaludes. Students would help me a lot. What I loved, and still do, is the fact that when you’re teaching a creative writing class, you’re getting to know people in an intimate way that you couldn’t if you were teaching history or chemistry. That is a real gift, that willingness to be open. Most of us are pretty shy in person, but in writing, you can access each other. I always liked giving prompts. The prompt that has always worked in class is to write for twenty minutes with just the phrase “My mother always” and then follow with “My father never.” The responses are amazing.

By the time I retired, I was developing an allergic reaction to student papers so I knew it was time to quit. I know I could never have mastered remembering who’s they, who’s them, and I would never want to be insulting to anyone in the class. I call my children by the wrong name; I’m sure I would get everybody’s gender mixed up. And I didn’t want to be that politically aware because I’m not. I was tired of teaching. I had said everything I had to say. So, time to quit. But I still love looking at individual stories and telling people what’s wrong with them, especially if there’s a way to fix it.

BUCKINGHAM  

Have you done work with other writers like you did with Amy Tan?

GILES

I worked with Amy for a long time and it was a joy. I’ve worked off and on with Susanne Pari, whose wonderful second novel just came out, In the History of Our Time. I read my friends’ manuscripts all the time. I’m still getting letters from students I taught twenty years ago who are now just getting published, and that gives me so much hope. They might be in their late thirties, early forties because it takes a long time. They make me proud.

BUCKINGHAM

You’ve published with both smaller and bigger presses, and Amy Tan is with really big presses. What is your sense of the contemporary publishing landscape and where we’re headed?

GILES

I don’t know what’s going on in publishing today. I do think books are vastly overpriced. Amy Tan is a phenomenon. Few writers hit the big time so fast—she’s an excellent writer and has earned every accolade, but she should not be taken as the norm. Many excellent writers fail to succeed in publishing. They may never get used to rejections but they do have to live with them. I’ve had more rejections than I can count. After an especially bad siege of them, I’ll just stay in bed for an afternoon and then get up, rewrite, resend. They never feel good, rejections.

It seems to me it’s women my age who buy books. Bookstore readings are filled with middle aged and elderly women. I go to a lot of readings, and I look around and everybody has gray hair. That’s not true of the less formal open mic and coffee and dive bar readings I like to go to; they are buzzing with energetic youth. I want to support writers, so I buy. I get to take it off my taxes. I probably buy $3,000 worth of books every year. I’m try­ing to think of what I’ve just bought. Solito by Javier Zamora. It’s nonfiction. There seems to be a trend towards nonfiction. And there’s a real trend, of course, for émigré stories. This is about a nine-year-old boy from San Salvador who gets to America on his own. It’s very moving. Are any of you writing for television? I would urge that, or movies. There’s a market for writing games. Writing short stories is great, but it’s no way to make money.

BUCKINGHAM

There’s some really brilliant writing on TV right now.

GILES

Yes, The Wire is beyond brilliant. Sopranos, of course. I think when everybody’s out of the house later today, I’m going to watch Succession, but I’m not going to tell anybody.

SINGH

Succession is so painful to watch.

GILES

Because they’re horrible people. They make my characters look like angels.

BUCKINGHAM

What’s the difference in the process for you between a novel and a short story?

GILES

I love reading novels. But I like writing short stories. Both of my novels have been written like a series of short stories where one, hopefully, flows into the next. I’m trying to think of a novel that I’ve loved that has that flow in it. Oh, I know. A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul. Oh my gosh, it’s so good. I recently read a short book by a black writer, she’s gor­geous. Gayle Jones. The Bird Catcher. It was like reading jazz. And Claire Keegan’s Foster. Perfect. I like all the Irish writers. I love Sebastian Barry. Niall Williams’ This Is Happiness is a wonderful book. I can’t get enough of them. I just think they’re onto something. I listen to novels a lot when I walk. I’m listening to The Rabbit Hutch now. But in answer to your question, the difference between short and long. I don’t have the vision, really, for a long novel. I’m not a long-distance runner. I like to go a block, sit down, have a cup of coffee.

WAITE

In an interview with Emily Wiser, you mentioned that the voic­es in Rough Translations are “pretty naïve, self-conscious, and smartass.” How has your narrative voice changed throughout the years? How would you describe the voices of the characters in your more current works?

GILES

I do think the voices are smartass in Rough Translations. Then in Creek Walk, I was mainly writing about death, divorce, and depression so it’s a darker book. I think what I’ve done as I’ve continued to write is experiment with other people’s voic­es, rather than with my own. If you hear your own voice on your answering machine, don’t you just hate it? I think it’s still probably smartass, but older. I’ve always doodled. And I’ve al­ways doodled the same woman’s face. The woman’s face has aged. I think I do have a distinctive voice. But I don’t want to know what it is. I don’t want to be told, either.

JENNINGS

The Home for Unwed Husbands has gothic horror elements, even though it’s definitely not gothic horror—castles, ghosts, mental health issues, toxic relationships, and unresolved trauma. What inspired you to use these things?

GILES

I don’t know if people are still reading fairy tales, but I definite­ly grew up on fairy tales. And I do believe in ghosts. So it was natural to me.

BUCKINGHAM

I want to hear more about ‘”I do believe in ghosts.”

GILES

Oh, don’t you?

BUCKINGHAM

I totally do. I see that a little bit in your work. I’d love to hear more.

GILES

Well, I’ve lived in an old house for over forty years. It’s in a little rural community off the highway. l was told it was a bordello. And then I was told that it was a train station. I’ve always had this feeling of people passing through it. Years ago my youngest daughter came to the door and said, “Mom”—it was about three in the morning—and I realized the temperature dropped maybe forty degrees; it was freezing. I said, “I know. Get in bed.” And we sat there and huddled. We felt whish whish whish going through the room, and then it disappeared. I think it was a traveler, either that or a prostitute, and it was on its way out. When I was three or four I woke up in the middle of the night, and there was a goblin sitting on my feet. I went to grab it, and I could feel it twisting out of my hands. I believed far too much in fairies as a child. I know I did. At eleven I was still looking under creek beds. That’s one reason I loved teaching in Ireland. They actually have little fairy wells in the hills. Probably for tourists and children, but they worked for me.

I’m writing a short story now about a writers’ séance. A poet sitting next to me had brought a photograph of this pretty woman in a fur coat. The medium was a frazzled blonde who warned us that we might be contacted by the dead via a physical sensation, our hearts might catch or we might feel a pain in our lungs. Then she closed her eyes, said we were surrounded by spirits, and began to say things like she saw a windmill over the head of a certain famous writer whose upcoming trip to the Netherlands had just been written up in the society pages or she heard someone calling out a message in Spanish to the writer from Latin America. I thought, what a crock. And then suddenly, the poet next to me with the photograph, myself, and the woman to my left all felt like we couldn’t breathe. Our throats filled with acid. Tears were running down our cheeks. And we were all coughing. We didn’t know each other but we felt as if we were being gassed. The poet’s photograph was of a relative who had been killed in Auschwitz. I ended up thinking, no, couldn’t be, yeah, it could be, no, it couldn’t. But, yeah. it could. Why not be open to it?

JENNINGS

In Three for the Road, all three protagonists leave their current homes in hopes of finding new lives or because they feel like they have no other options, and in The Home for Unwed Husbands Kay is changed by her trip to Greece. Why are you drawn to this type of story arc?

GILES

I don’t know; when it comes to fight or flight, I flee. Don’t you think it’s so much more fun to just get out of there? I’m horrified in my own stories to see how many of them end with someone in a car getting the hell out. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I want to pinpoint it before some critic comes in and says, “Hey, she uses a lot of cars.” I adore the end of Huck Finn. Lighting out for the territory? What could be better?

ANDERSON

Just for fun, what’s on your writing desk when you do get down to business and find the time to write? And are there any tools or habits you feel you can’t write without?

GILES

I used to smoke. I’m so glad I quit, but I used to think that if I did, I wouldn’t be able to write. Then I found that I wrote just as badly when I wasn’t smoking as when I had and it was a relief. It’s amazing how when you come to a part in your story that’s really going to open it up or push it forward, you suddenly wonder if there’s anything in the refrigerator. Or you have to pee. There’s some instinct that makes you push back from the computer just when you’re about to nail it. I’m restless. I get up and come back and get up again. One thing that’s always in my writing room is a couch. I like to crash, and sometimes just meditating or dosing your eyes for a few minutes will help refocus you. I also have a little green Buddha on the desk. So how about you? Do you have any superstitions?

SINGH

It’s not my habit, but I was listening to a podcast with Ocean Vuong. He apparently wears boots every single time he writes.

GILES

That’s interesting. I love Isabel Allende’s process. She starts a new novel on the Epiphany, January 6th, every year. Bharati Mukherjee, who grew up in a crowded house in Calcutta, kept a TV blaring in every room when she moved to Berkeley. We all have different needs. I like having a crossword puzzle book when I get stuck, especially one with the answers in the back.

BUCKINGHAM

The title story in Rough Translations is about a dying woman. Did she have anything to do with the creation of Ida?

GILES

No. She was just a dearly loved friend. Ida was loosely based on my mother. Have any of you tried to write about your mother? The first story that I published was “Old Souls,” from Rough Translations. It came out in a magazine at that time called Playgirl. It had a naked man in the centerfold. You couldn’t get it at the regular magazine stand. You had to ask for it. My story was sandwiched in between ads for something called Sta-Hard Cream that looked like Elmer’s glue. I wanted to show this story to my mother because I was proud of it, and it had been published, so xeroxed it and cut it out column by column between the ads, but I worried she would recognize herself as one of the characters. She read the story, and then she looked up all starry-eyed and said, “Darling? Who’s the bitch?” “Diane’s mother,” I peeped, and she nodded and said, “I thought so.” So that was my first published story, and it was an introduction to shame. I don’t think dignity is a word that writers can claim. We submit. When your work does come out, you can be proud for the moment. But if you’re in a magazine, you may be read on a toilet and thrown away. You just learn to walk tall. And wear boots! No wonder Ocean Vuong wears boots. Good idea. These boots were made for writing, and that’s just what I’ll do .

EMBRACING IMAGE AND PERSONA, surreality and realism, form and disparate form, Nance Van Winckel’s poetry, fiction, memoir, collage, photomontage, and everything in between is as engaging an experience on the page as it is moving emotionally and intellectually. Throughout her work, Van Winckel contends with the personal, cultural, and political histories that shape people and the environments they occupy, the nature of memory and grief, and the nuances of familial relationships. As Herman Asarnow writes of Wan Winckel’s No Starling for The Cincinnati Review, her poems “sure-handedly carry out a thoughtful examination of mortality, of the pioneering spirit, of injustices caused by nature and by humanity, and of a sense of having to live this life in our own laughably frail and painfully desiring bodies.”

Nance Van Winckel has published seventeen books of poetry, fiction, and hybrid works including The Many Beds of Martha Washington (2021), chosen for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series; Our Foreigner (2017), winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series; Book of No Ledge (2016); Pacific Walkers (2014), a finalist for the Washington State Book Award; Ever Yrs (2014); Boneland (2013), recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Fiction Fellowship; No Starling (2007); and her first full collection of poetry, Bad Girl, with Hawk (1987). Van Winckel has also been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, three Pushcart Prizes, and awards from both Poetry Magazine and the Poetry Society of America. She is currently teaching in the MFA in creative writing at Eastern Washington University, and once served as the editor of Willow Springs magazine.

Nance Van Winckel kindly invited us to her home in Spokane where we gathered on the back porch, overlooking the Spokane River, on July 7^th, 2023. We discussed the roles of imagery, persona, intuition, and politics in poetry, and the benefits of joys and writing across genres and forms.

KURTIS EBELING

There are moments in you work in which arresting images seem to emerge from extreme emotion or felling. “They Flee From Me” in Pacific Walkers comes to mind. I’m also curious about your thoughts on the role of imagery in poetry generally. And, particularly, what are your feelings about the relationship between imagery and the expression of feeling on the page?

NANCE VAN WINCKEL

There’s something the image can create for the reader: an entrance into enchantment. As a reader, I like to be drawn into a place where I’m completely thrown out of my life, lost in language and tone, the mind behind the material. I don’t think so much when I’m tooling the image about the emotional resonance—that’s going to be a test that comes later. I’m focused on exploring image and putting images next to each other in different ways that maybe charge them in unexpected ways. I’ve gotten so interested in putting images together that now that I’m doing it physically with collage and photomontage and all sorts of visual methods because they all do that same thing for me when I’m making them, that sense of enchantment.

POLLY BUCKINGHAM

I love that term tooling the image. That’s great. What are some of the techniques of tooling the image?

VAN WINCKEL

The poet Charles Wright cam to visit a college where I was teaching, so I was driving him back and forth to the airport, and, oh my god, the poor man, I was pumping him the whole way there, the whole way back, with my little questions. One of the things he does, he told me, is “commit a stanza or two of a draft—a poem that’s in process—to memory, and then when he’s driving around doing errands, he starts to move the stanzas around. And then he starts to move the lines in the stanzas around. And then to move the words in the lines around.” He said, “I turn it over to my ear.” That’s the kind of tooling I’m most interested in. I wrote an essay about Wright’s work, and a phrase I wrote about him that stays with me because I have to think about it for myself a lot, too, is, “the hand of the image in the glove of sound.”

BUCKINGHAM

That’s beautiful. I know you’re a fan of surrealist poetry. Can you talk about its influence on your work and what you love about it?

VAN WINCKEL

Right. I do, I like a lot of the surrealists. I feel like I’m a hodgepodge of influences. One of the things that was helpful to me about reading some of the surrealist poets was how little narrative scaffolding the poems need and how much they really depend on what we were talking about, that juxtaposition of imagery, depending on the reader to make other kinds of connections besides narrative connections. Narrative seems less an expectation for the reader with the surrealists, ,so good. Instead we get a sort of sense of what the locus of the poem may be.

ORAN BORDWELL

Even in their titles, like Bad Girl, with Hawk and The Dirt, there’s this consistent recognition of the earth and of natural imagery accompanying, though seldom overshadowing, humanity and the human experience. I’m curious about how you might describe your relationship with nature, what role it plays in your writing process and the work itself.

VAN WINCKEL

I’m not that picky about what aspects of the natural world appear in my poems, but I do feel like the poems need to be IN a world. As Dick Hugo says, “You can’t go nowhere if you ain’t nowhere.” I don’t think of myself as a nature poet by any stretch, but I do like to know where I am. It’s hard to draw people without drawing the space around them, too.

I was a journalist before I went to grad school to study poetry, and what we learn in journalism is the who, what, when, where, how, and why. I still think about those issues in writing a poem. Where we are: reminding us of the physicality that we’re in; what’s going on, give us some action. I can’t stand poetry that doesn’t have something going on in it. I don’t care what, but I need action, baby. And then, who. Who’s the consciousness? That’s all about tonality. Personality equals tonality. Getting a good interplay of those aspects can really energize a poem.

Also it’s hard to draw people in poems, or any writing really, without drawing the space around them, too. When I was working on Limited Lifetime Warranty and Boneland, we drove out to freaking North Dakota and Montana. My husband and I went on a dinosaur dig, so I could convey an accurate physical description. People need to sense—okay, yeah, this is a real place. I’ve lately been liking urban poetry, cityscapes—have you read Alex Dimitrov? His poems are all set in New York City, and they’re just full of bustling and cab rides. Oh, and Singer’s Today in the Taxi. Every poem starts, “Today in the Taxi.” He was a cab driver for years in New York, and you get the sights and sounds of the physical world.

BUCKINGHAM

We were talking a bit about persona in your work. About Pacific Walkers and the persona being the journalist and to what extent that persona is fictionalized. How important is the notion of persona to work?

VAN WINCKEL

That’s what made the whole book come together—finding that tonal way into it. In that job I had, they sent me out to do a story on all these bodies they would find in the spring around Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Mostly they were homeless people who had died, had too much of something, passed out, and froze. And when the coroner got called out to pick up the bodies, the newspaper would send me, too. It was really hard.

BUCKINGHAM

So you actually saw the bodies.

VAN WINCKEL

I did. I saw them being put in the plastic bags. And it stayed with me, but I moved it to Spokane in the book because I could access the Spokane Coroner’s website, where there is detailed information and because this place was fresher in my mind and that gave me a little bit of distance from “factuality.”

BUCKINGHAM

In Ever Yrs, there’s the persona of Nance with the letter at the beginning that’s to you. It seems like it’s a real letter, and then you get reading, and it’s like, oh, this isn’t a real letter. That’s playing with persona, too.

VAN WINCKEL

That was super fun to do. I loved working on that book so much. Finding the voice of that grandmother, I really loved her. I miss her sometimes. I wish she’d come back and talk to me again.

BORDWELL

I noticed a focus on children and their perspectives, as well as on animals, in some of your books. Often, they’re abused, neglected, lost, injured, or otherwise oppressed, though some are ultimately adopted. How and why do you choose to write about children, from the child’s point of view or otherwise, and what about animals?

VAN WINCKEL

The child’s point of view and childhood in general are compelling because children witness us as adults, and that means they’re seeing a lot of fucked-up-ed-ness, and it’s, I’m sure, very mystifying. I remember the first time I saw my grandmother’s breasts and I though, “Oh, am I going to have those?” You’re trying to figure out how to read the world, and they’re your guides, such as they are. The whole dynamic is really interesting to me.

I remember when I was in tenth grade of so, and this social studies teacher was telling us this story about growing up in North Dakota and how his family lived so far out of town, as did a lot of the farming community there, that their kids couldn’t get to school in the wintertime. So they sent the kids to live in a hotel during the weekdays so they could go to school, and then they’d come and get them and bring them home on the weekends. Years later when I was working on that book I remember thinking, that’s fantastic. What a way to grow up. You’re living in a hotel with a bunch of children with very little supervision just so you can go to school. I put my narrator in Limited Lifetime Warranty in such a hotel with children. She’s just starting out as a veterinarian. At the time, my husband and I were raising a few sheep. When you raise animals like that, you do a lot of your own veterinary stuff, like the hoof-trimming and tail-docking. I had a friend who lived on a sheep farm, and she showed me the ropes. My way of catching lambs so that we could use the tool called the emasculator—I kid you not, this is an actual tool—was to throw myself upon them. They were so fast. I did have a shepherd’s crook, but I could never get the hang of it.

Anyway, I did spend a lot of time with animals, and I’ve had experiences in the woods with cougars, and, you know, wild creatures are about. I was just remembering that cougar experience. I was walking on some dirt road out by Liberty Lake, and there was this cougar right in front of me on the road. Oh my God, I was so afraid. And then we stared each other down for the longest time. Big stare down, me and the cougar. And then he just walked on across the road, very slowly, watching me. And he went on up, high, to this big ridge that overlooked the road, and he watched me as I walked, backwards, all the way to my car.

KEELY LEIM

Yes, that features in Curtain Creek. It’s a terrifying cougar scene.

VAN WINCKEL

Is that in there? Right, right, I did not bring the cougar back for that.

BUCKINGHAM

We realized a lot of the images come up over and over again. The fox stole is one of them, and I noticed textiles repeating themselves.

VAN WINCKEL

God, that’s so cool, I hadn’t really even thought about that.

ELIZABETH GRAVES

Zero comes up a lot, as well. What’s your interest in zero?

VAN WINCKEL

I like the sound of that word, zero. .But when writing Sister Zero, I was thinking about writing code—solid ones and zeros. Those were my only thoughts. Things kind of matriculate out of a poem and into a story, or out of a story and into a poem. And the stole, I just think it’s a riot that women used to wear those with the little mouths that opened and closed and hooked onto the tail. It’s kind of a moebius image. The poor fox can’t stay dead. I think my grandmother had one of those, and I remember buying one at a flea market and wearing it as a Halloween costume.

BUCKINGHAM

It’s interesting that these stories and images that are part of your consciousness and your subconscious have no bounds of form. It’s in a poem, it’s in a story, it’s in a digital thing—it’s not like, here’s this image, and therefore I have to write a poem. My question is about choosing a genre. It almost seems like the image, or the obsessions, are about the form, more important than the form.

VAN WINCKEL

I think that’s really true. They get in my deep subconscious somehow and emerge later. But it’s that question about how things decide if they want to be poems or stories that I often wrestle with. Oh my god, lately if I sense something’s trying to be a story, I’m like, please, don’t be a story, please, don’t, because it takes over my life for such a long, long time. I’ve got notes for one in my office right now. It’s so much energy, and I know if I start writing it, I have to just close off the rest of the world completely. It sucks everything out of me.

I’m deep back into poems again, but, going back to persona, when I was in grad school all the poets were required to take a fiction writing class and vice-versa. And as a poet when I took my fiction workshop, oh my god, the story I wrote was terrible, and I was pretty much laughed out of the fiction workshop. Mine was all, like, deep image stuff. It makes me cringe to think about how awful it was. It wasn’t until I started teaching Introduction to Creative Writing, and I’d be walking to class trying to think, was DOES this person’s story need? I was teaching myself to write stories, and I had no clue that was happening. And then persona in poems finally blew the door open for me to be more fully in a character’s perspective. Then shit started happening. This first book of linked stories I wrote, Limited Lifetime Warranty, I began on my drive from where I lived in northern Illinois into Chicago—an hour-and-a-half drive. On the passenger seat I jotted on a piece of paper five little sentences that became the first five stories in that book. They all came just like that: the situation, the character—the same character, the young woman who becomes a veterinarian, her coming of age.

EBELING

Could you talk a little more about how writing fiction has informed your poetry and vice-versa, and do you feel like the composition of one genre informs the other?

VAN WINCKEL

Okay, let me take your first question first, and then we’ll go back, because that’s my favorite question. Thank you. When I started writing stories, what happened was they sucked a lot of the narrativity out of my poetry, and I really like that. I appreciated that I didn’t feel I need so much “story” in the poems anymore, that stories could be their own thing and fleshed out, more imaginatively alive, and I didn’t have to drag all that into a poem. It was very freeing. I guess as an old person now, one of the ways I feel like I’ve kept going is that I keep finding ways to change up what I’m doing. The experiments I’ve done lately with visual stuff—Ever Yrs, for instance, opened up a whole other door, giving me permission to learn and experiment in a new discipline. I loved the challenge of that. It helps that I work in an environment where I have other writers around me all the time, and I go to their lectures. It’s great. I’m learning so much. For instance, I was out at Vermont College one summer, and a writer I really like, Pam Painter, who’s especially known for her flash fiction, was giving a lecture. She said, “If you’re writing flashbacks, try not to let them go on for more than two pages. Any more than that, we lose the momentum of where we were before flashback.” That’s a kind of boneheaded place I was in with my own fiction back then, and I so needed to learn exactly that. Just being around that kind of information feed all the time has been such a privilege.

BUCKINGHAM

Not only do you write in a bunch of different genres, but almost every book of yours I’ve read is cross-genre. Pacific Walkers is journalism and poetry, and Boneland is linked stories. There’s a crossover everywhere. Ever Yrs is a novel but also visual. And it reads like Book of No Ledge—it goes so many different places that the story line of novel feels less important than some of the other stuff.

VAN WINCKEL

Yes, the big challenge for me in that scrapbook novel, Ever Yrs, was the through-line.

BUCKINGHAM

Oh, that interesting that you had to think about that—so your instinct was kind of to play.

VAN WINCKEL

Exactly. Exactly. I think every book has presented its own “experiment” for me. For instance, with the linked story collections, each one has had really different linkages. That’s been part of what was fun about making those books—discovering how I was going to link them up. Especially the one with the woman who is getting cataract surgery.

BORDWELL

Boneland.

VAN WINCKEL

Yes. Those pieces where she’s up in Canada and she’s had the botched surgery were their own little story and published as such. So I ripped them all apart and made them into little flash pieces to go in between the other longer stories. I liked what happened when I spliced them; they gave the book a sort of grounding, “a looking-back” perspective that helped me think through the longer stories as I revised them.

BORDWELL

In that book, Buster has this incredible persona, and he’s there and then gone and we hear about him a couple times, but he gets that much depth even though he’s just one fragment of the whole narrative.

VAN WINCKEL

I love what you’re saying. Later, though, I wondered if what I had done with him was okay in terms of appropriation, since he seems like an autistic character.

BORDWELL

I think he was my favorite. As an autistic person, I found that story so poignant and accurate. It wasn’t just, oh, he’s good at math, and let’s talk about how he goes into a career in science. The dude becomes an ice skater and is the Beast in Beauty and the Beast on ice. That’s not the standard autistic narrative that gets pushed around. I found it really, really endearing.

VAN WINCKEL

I can’t tell you how much that means to me that you think that’s okay. Because I worried about that so much. This whole issue of appropriation. I have to remind myself, Nance, you can’t just take other people’s worlds and issues they’re dealing with. But then I think, well, shouldn’t people who have those issues, shouldn’t they get to be a part of fiction, too? I struggle with this.

BORDWELL

I found myself really moved by poems about or in reference to indigenous people such as the Inuit and the Apache in Bad Girl, with Hawk. Many early poets in my generation are afraid for very justifiable reasons to write about any people who aren’t their own, but I also see this as being its own kind of erasure or silencing. Can you speak to why you chose to write about cultures beyond your own, how you did so, and perhaps offer guidance to this new generation of anxious poets?

VAN WINCKEL

It’s hard to navigate when that inclusion thing steps over the line and you’re appropriating other people’s troubles as if you know what that life is like. I think it’s a tonal thing sometimes where one assumes an authority one does not have over the material. I guess my instinct has been to presence them in the work, to bring them in. It’s not about judgement or trying to suggest I know their lives, but rather that they are with us, part of the family, the larger family.

BORDWELL

Like the way Robert or Robbie in Boneland ends up being gay at the end. It’s that tiny bit of inclusion thrown in at the end that enriches the narrative and contextualizes his life, but he doesn’t have to be gay. Just like nobody in the book has to be straight.

VAN WINCKEL

Exactly, it just is. That’s one of the reasons I liked the grandmother in Ever Yrs. Her grown son is gay, and she is so accepting of that even though she’s been raised in the Christian church, and in a way her trajectory in that book is really my own, which is away from Christianity towards more acceptance of, let’s say, more humanistic teachings. She’s me when I’m a hundred. Getting there.

LEIM

On the subject of you and your life and how it intersects with your writing, how do you view your incorporation of certain autobiographical elements into your work? For example, the last chapter of Curtain Creek Farm with Francine features a mother who doesn’t always remember her daughter.

VAN WINCKEL

Interestingly, when I wrote that story about Francine and her mother. . .do they go to a strip club?

LEIM

The Elvis show.

VAN WINCKEL

The Elvis show, yeah! There’s a part in there when the mother says the ginger root looks like a penis. Yeah, that came from my mother. Definitely. There are a lot of things that I’ve taken from my family and from my friends. The whole Curtain Creek Farm book in so many ways. I don’t know if you guys have ever been out to Tolstoy Farm, the commune just west of Spokane. It’s one of the oldest communes in the US. It started in the early 60s, and one of my friends moved there around 1968, had a kid there, and when she comes to visit me, we trek out of there. I remember coming home from Tolstoy Farm with her, and I turned to her, she’s a writer too, and asked, “Do you think you’re ever going to use this place in your work?” She just looked at me and said, “You may have it.” So because I’m writing fiction, I moved it to a different location. But back to Francine for a second. When I wrote that story, my own mom was fine. She didn’t have Alzheimer’s. Not yet. I know. Kind of eerie.

BUCKINGHAM

Well, it seems pretty clear to me that writers have that prescience.

VAN WINCKEL

Okay, I’ll tell you a scarier one, then. So that book Quake. You know that last story where there’s that earthquake? I wrote that story and then my husband came home and I said, “Okay, I finished the book today,” and I gave him that story to read, and there’s an earthquake. A bridge collapses. And later that night we turned on the TV, and there had just been that earthquake in Northridge, California. That was rather scary actually. It feels sometimes like I’m in a dream space when I’m writing, like I wasn’t expecting to write about an earthquake. And then there it was. Complete with visuals. Then there it was on the nightly news.

BUCKINGHAM

The way you talk about fiction seems like that, too. “I don’t want to, I don’t want to, but it’s here at the door, and I have to.”

VAN WINCKEL

It wakes me up. In the morning when I’m working on fiction, I wake up, and there are people talking in my head. I tell my husband, “Don’t speak to me. Don’t speak to me. I have to go write this down.” It’s like your subconscious is still on the job while you’re trying to freaking sleep.

BUCKINGHAM

I wonder what role the mythic plays in your work because I see it all over the place, and it always surprises me. Even in Ever Yrs, that minotaur. It’s kind of misplaced. There is this super contemporary stuff on top of these old pictures, and then there’s this minotaur. And in Pacific Walkers there are archetypal characters.

VAN WINCKEL

I do like when that happens. I don’t think I consciously go there, but when I see that it’s percolating up, I may investigate its potential. That book is set in Butte. The whole minotaur thing seemed so apt. The city is set on top of a maze of intersecting mine tunnels. And then I saw that minotaur figure in some piece of graffiti, so I moved him into the book, too. It’s like when you’re working on something, poem or fiction, you’re in a mode where things around you are suddenly magnetized and pulled into the work. I’ve always liked being in that place. I feel like I have my antennae up, there’s things I’m looking for, but I don’t know what they are, and I’m in a waiting mode. I’ll never start writing a story until I have at least three or four fields of action, I call them, things I know that are going on simultaneously. Like different balls thrown in the air. I don’t even start writing until I have these balls to move between. If there’s only one ball in the air, anybody can do that. Two balls, still easy. But when you get three or four or five, things start to be really interesting, and that’s where I want to be before I write a single word. I need to have that sense of dynamic—of moving back and forth. Same for a poem, too, that sense of place, action, who’s speaking. Who is this person? I don’t work from the idea that it’s me, my own life. I’m just a suburban housewife, please. My life is boring, but my life in poems is way more interesting.

GRAVES

I was thinking about your visual poems. Can you talk a little bit about the process of those? Is it similar to having a whole bunch of balls in the air? They feel very intuitive.

VAN WINCKEL

I love that word intuitive, yes. I’ve moved ever so gradually into the visual realm: visual poems, erasure poems, collage poems. I think it’s because I love images so much, I realize, oh, these are actual, physical images. I want them! I must have them. But I need to be loyal to poetry and to literature because that sort of brung me to the dance. And I’m still a reader. I read all the time. The challenge in that, and what’s been fun about it, is to figure out how to integrate text into that visual space that feels more my own.

GRAVES

In your work, I was reminded of something that William Stafford wrote in Writing the Australian Crawl. “Writing is a reckless encounter with whatever comes along. We have to earn any moon we present. The only real poems are found poems, found when we stumble on things around us.” What do you think about serendipity in writing and art? Or what is the role of intuition or willingness to be open to receive the world around you?

VAN WINCKEL

Oh, I love that so much. Yes, I agree, and I think that’s part of what led me down the road to visual poems. My husband loves graffiti. He’s a visual artist, that’s how he makes his actual living, and so whenever we’ve traveled someplace together, I think because I had the purse—this is just so sexist—I carried the camera. “Nance, get the camera out, shoot this, shoot this.” Mostly he wanted me to shoot images of graffiti. He loves the bold vibrance of them, and I really came to appreciate them, too. So I would take all these shots of graffiti, but there would be text mixed in with it, and I love that, too. I remember one of the first ones I shot. I think it’s somewhere in Spokane. I started packing along the camera, even sans husband, just for myself when I was out doing my urban walking. And there was “Roo ‘n Boom love more than you.” I thought, okay, that’s a perfect little poem. So when I took that photograph I didn’t add any text because I loved that language it already had. To make it mine, to make that wall, that brick wall with graffiti on it belong to me, I needed to enter the conversation. So, instead, I added some imagery, a scene from the 1890’s of women in big hats, and then I made it look like it had been on the wall for a really long time. That was one of my first stabs at interacting with the graffiti. Usually, however, I try to add a few words just to be a part of the conversation on the wall, which is another thing that I like about graffiti. It’s a place for anybody. You don’t have to be famous to have your say. I can send you a copy. Is this going to be online? You can put it up with the interview. [See the bottom of the page for the image.]

BORDWELL

I’m fascinated by how The Many Beds of Martha Washington began as a single poem in Bad Girl, with Hawk. Can you speak to how and why the ideas of that piece stuck with you? How do some pieces or ideas sit with us for so long, and how do you know when to further explore them?

VAN WINCKEL

One of the things that’s influenced me is American history and folklore—folk stories. The stories of the folks. I grew up as a kid in rural Virginia. I remember taking the school bus, and there were all these signs around. “Martha Washington slept here.” I was just learning to read. And I thought, who is this person? And who cares? What is this about? Later, I found out who she was and that she and George had lived down the road from where I started school in Mount Vernon, Virginia. It felt like history was already kind of inside me. I spent a lot of time with my grandfather. He was the only reader I had as a model growing up. My mom read ladies’ magazine, and my dad, my stepdad, was not a reader. But I remember seeing my grandfather reading history books all the time. And when I went to college, he sent me all these letters that were often three, single-spaced, typed pages about our family and the battles they had fought in during the Civil War. We were one of those families that had people on both sides of the Civil War. And my grandfather, I think, was really torn by that. He wanted me to know who these people were.

BORDWELL

I’m curious about the role you see Martha Washington and other historical figures playing in your work and why there’s a drive to write about them so consistently. For lack of a better way to phrase it, why do we become obsessed with people?

VAN WINCKEL

Yeah. God, I don’t know. They enter your deep psyche somehow. They’re like dream figures. Especially people and stories that you read as children.

LEIM

Are there other historical figures who won’t lose their hold on you?

VAN WINCKEL

It’s more the wild, outlandish stories, the sort of manifest destiny idea we learned in junior high. I remember thinking, wow it would have been cool to be a part of a wagon train and travel across the country. I remember thinking that. The older I got, the more I thought, that would be terrible! To think you could just go into some other part of the world and say, “Okay, this place is nice. I like this spot on the river here. I’m going to call it mine.” So it’s more like talking back to some of those ideas that were shoveled into us as kids, especially these kinds of folk myths, that if you were strong and deserving and lived a good life you were owed X, Y, and Z. You had a right to it. The Butte story in a way is that same story.

BUCKINGHAM

All the mining going on.

VAN WINCKEL

The mining. Between Minneapolis and San Francisco, that was the most populated US town in the early 1900s. Butte, Montana. And now look at it. It’s a superfund clean-up site.

BUCKINGHAM

I have a question that relates to what you’re saying. When I read your work, I think of it as very subversive. I wonder how you see the role of politics in poetry.

VAN WINCKEL

I think a lot of poetry talks back to politics. As a writer, I can’t have an agenda going into it. The work needs to surprise me. But what you’re asking is definitely one of the things I use as a test. Does this have any relevance outside my own imagination, my own little life? What’s it speaking back to, or what does it call into question that maybe need to b called into question? Often I think I’m just raising questions.

Right now, for instance, an issue that confronts me daily and something I’m writing about is homelessness. We have campers all around, right? They’ve adopted my shed out back. They’re here, , really close. And it presents a very complicated issue for me. Because I’m afraid of them sometimes, and sometimes I take them a Coke. Seriously, I do. They want to use my hose to take a bath. I say, “Okay.” Fear vs. empathy. It’s hard to figure this out. So I simply ask questions, stay focused on the questions. But in terms of writing about it, I had to move it to another place. I had to move it to the city, New York City, where my husband and I used to rent a little B&B before or after my teaching stints at Vermont College. Homelessness there is really interesting, too. Homeless New Yorkers: if you don’t get out of their way, they’ll just give you a shove. My imagination seems able to work the questions better if I don’t use my own backyard. I feel like I can’t be as imaginative if I’m stuck too much in my own life.

BORDWELL

Since many of us are writing our first poetry collections, can you speak to your experience writing your first books? What guidance might you give to early writers, specifically today? How do you think first collections have changed since your own?

VAN WINCKEL

First collections have changed a lot. When I was starting out, a lot of people’s first books of poems were, much like my own, about their lives growing up and becoming adults: the struggles that one has with family, with family dynamics, charting one’s own path out of the first books I’m seeing, and I think maybe this is to the betterment really, are organized more as kind of project books. You will see some childhood issues and maturation, but with more of a through-line or central concept. It’s gotten harder than ever to get that first book out. Competition is really stiff now, thanks to all these writing programs. So a person has to have a very distinctive voice and style to set themselves apart, more than ever. And that’s good. If you can find that, that’s what you need to do.

My favorite thing to do with graduating MFA students is to help them make their book. In a poetry book, one approach is to find say four or five poems that are the main punchy poems and then make those central to a section, configuring the other poems in that section around that central poem. That’s just one way. As opposed to the student who years ago wanted to organize her book fall, winter, spring, summer, and I said, “No, please.”

Let’s make it interesting. Just get out of those clichéd traps. Find a line from a poem to be the title of the next poem—just little things like that give the book more cohesion. And I’m sensing that’s happening more in first books. They used to be like, “Here’re all the poems I wrote in graduate school, all the experiments that I did, and I learned so much. Here’s a sonnet, and here’s a villanelle, and then oh, here’s a five-page narrative poem in the middle here,” and oh my god.

BORDWELL

The way you describe it makes it sound like a very good change has occurred.

VAN WINCKEL

Yes, higher expectations. When I published Bad Girl, with Hawk, my first book, there wasn’t a single poem that I’d written in graduate school. Not one. And someone I went to grad school with—I’m not going to say her name, published her first book about the same time I did, and I recognized about half her poems from our workshop. She’s done fine though. She’s doing fine.

EBELING

We often talk about the emotional resonance of speakers and characters in both poetry and fiction. And since you compose both, I’m wondering if would you talk about the role of emotional investment in your readers across these genres.

VAN WINCKEL

Emotional investment, yes. Okay, I’m going cop to this because it’s true: the thing that makes me happiest is when I look out at the audience and see they’re crying. I’m pleased someone has been moved by something. That I’ve touched a nerve. I really think that sadness connects us in a much more deep-down way that happiness. About this new memoir book, Sister Zero, people have been saying to me, “Oh this happened to me, too. I know just what you mean.” Wow, connection. But you can’t just do sad. Nobody wants that. You need to have a range. And it’s the range that makes it work. For instance, in my memoir, since it was mostly so sad, I had to make myself put in Mr. Ed, the talking horse. It needed that counterpointing. I’ve noticed when I read things, if I read something humorous first and then I read a sad thing, the sad gets much sadder—probably because you weren’t expecting it. It’s because you went from an UP place into some down deep place. That’s the only way I know how to make emotionality work. I know I’m writing emotional stuff when I’m crying as I’m writing. this is a test. And I can’t tell you how often that happens. But I know I’m in a good place then. I know I’m hitting that nerve. I like funny though, too. I really like funny.

GRAVES

I wanted to ask about your experience working with or accessing memory. In Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir, she writes, “Memory is a pinball in a machine. It messily ricochets around between image, idea, fragments of scenes, stories we’ve heard. Then the machine goes tilt and snaps off. But most of the time we keep memories packed away. I sometimes liken that moment of sudden unpacking to circus clowns pouring out of a miniature car trunk. How did so much fit into such small a space?” Throughout this conversation, you’ve been reminiscing about things, too. I don’t know if you takes notes or keep a journal, or if these little memories just come back to you at the right time. How are you accessing them?

VAN WINCKEL

No, I don’t take notes, I don’t do journaling. I work on a yellow legal tablet, lined paper. It’s what I was talking about before with the antenna. I write down fragments. I’m not trying to write a poem. I’m just writing down some lines I like the sound of. Maybe two or three. Then I’ll go back, and I’ll read some more Charlie Simic—oh yeah, that line of his reminds me of something. Then I write that down. I’m not even going to put that line close to these lines. I’m going to start a whole other column and put that over there. To my mind that’s what Karr’s idea sounds like: that ricocheting. Then what I have is this giant freaking mess of lines: columns of them, nothing really connecting to anything else. But then, later, things start to forge connections. My antennae are up. As if on their own. I cannot write a poem if I give myself an assignment. I don’t like those. People have asked if I want to part of some, I don’t know, poem-a-day, or if I want to write a poem to go with a painting. I can’t stand that shit. Please. Poems do not come from assignments. A poem is its own little creature, and it grows. My lines are like molecules waiting to attach to other molecules. This sounds too weird, doesn’t it?

BUCKINGHAM

No, it’s very ricochet-y.

VAN WINCKEL

I love that ricochet word. Mary Karr is great. Reading is such a big part of it. I need to have somebody I’m reading who just gets my language synapses all fizzy. That’s what makes me write. And what I’m writing has nothing in common with who I’m reading except for I like their fizziness. I want to steal that fizziness.

BORDWELL

I discovered, upon my finishing the book, that of the 400 published copies of A Measure of Heaven that exist, I happen to own the 314^th. This happens to be one of the only poems I’ve committed to memory, by Emily Dickinson. Number 314 begins, “Hope is the thing with feathers / that perches in the soul / and sings the tune without the words / and never stops at all.” When I saw that number, I thought of how often faith seemed to weave its way into your work, not just with the obvious A Measure of Heaven, but even in your fiction. I don’t mean faith in the traditional, religious sense, although it has that, too; instead, I’m thinking of an understanding of our place in the world, of hope in it. What role does hop and/or faith play in your writing? Does creative work change your own hope and faith? Does it reaffirm your own faith in humanity, or the Earth?

VAN WINCKEL

That’s just beautiful, Oran. What a great question. Yeah, definitely not religious faith, but faith in each other—the human family. That we’ll get through. We’re not going to all burn up. And you’re right. It’s really the work that pushes me to that feeling. Just the fact that people still want to read and go to literature for exactly that reason. Especially those of us who maybe don’t have a religious faith but have faith in each other. That we want to reach each other, and we want to share stories that somehow make the hard stuff beautiful.

LEIM

As a follow up to that, how do you retain that sort of faith in a post-2016 world?

VAN WINCKEL

I really struggle with that. I feel like I’ve gone increasingly to a really pure, imaginative space when I read and when I’m writing too. Something that’s not about endings. That doesn’t have endings. I come back to that idea of enchantment again. That’s sustaining somehow. That we can still be enchanted.

BORDWELL

It’s rare, in fact I don’t know if we’ve ever gotten to do this, that we get to interview someone who worked at Eastern and someone who ran our magazine. What do you think of as your favorite memory, moment, lesson that you gained or received, or taught even, at Eastern Washington University? Or specifically in the magazine.

VAN WINCKEL

One of the things that I loved doing when I was editing was the magazine layout and finding the cover art and art for the inside pages. That was such a delight. That was when I think I realized I could be lost for hours doing freaking Photoshop. The student taught me it. I didn’t know how to do any layout when I got there. And I loved our editorial meetings.

LEIM

I’d love to hear some of the name of writers who’ve companioned you, dead or alive, and what they’ve meant to you.

VAN WINCKEL

Yes. I definitely have my writers. People I return to. I’ve mentioned Charlie Simic, since I’m rereading him right now. Oh god, I love Dennis Nurkse, Norman Dubie. Dubie has really helped me think about persona. He goes into these other headspaces, like, who is this person. I really, really like Norman Dubie. I remember we were reading some of Dubie in one of my classes and I said, “Yeah, I like to haave a little Dubie each morning with my coffee.” They went, “Yeah, Nance we’ve heard that.” I’ve been reading James Baldwin. Laura Kasischke. Wallace Stevens. Oh my god, Wally. He’s somebody who’s pure imagination. Here’s this guy who’s a vice president of Hartford Insurance Company, and he writes these poems while he’s walking back and forth to the office. In his head. Gets to to the office. Writes them down. Those poems are full of sound. Talk about the fizz of language. That’s what Stevens was. That’s what drove him to poetry. Fuck insurance. Really, I mean, the guy had a bazillion dollars. He didn’t need to write poetry. It sustained his inner life. The life of the imagination. That’s what he wrote about. Because that was the thing I think was so worried he was going to lose. It was going to get sucked out of him by Hartford Insurance Company. So, yeah, the sustaining. We have to find out peeps. I remember when I was a freshman in college, where I was when I read some of these poets for the first time. My life felt altered. I remember lying in the top bunk reading a poem by John Berryman called “The Stewardess,” where she falls out of an airplane and dies.

BUCKINGHAM

That’s really funny.

VAN WINCKEL

Yeah, it’s funny in the poem! The poem is funny. It’s weird—her gloves are here, part of her is there. And then, there’s this poem of James Dickey’s called “The Sheep Child” where a guy is looking at something like in Barnum & Bailey, in a jar.

BUCKINGHAM

Oh, no.

VAN WINCKEL

He’s being told, “Don’t have sex with animals, this could happen to you.” But then, Dickey lets the sheep child speak. Oh my god, it’s amazing. That sense of otherness. Of being not this earthly realm, but of another realm. I remember what if felt like to go there with Berryman. Anyway, I remember all these people and where I was and how the world felt changed afterwards. I hope you guys have that same experience.

A NATIVE OF WEST VIRGINIA, Ann Pancake is the author of a short story collection, Given Ground, winner of the 2000 Bakeless Fiction Prize, and last year’s novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been, which, according to Rick Bass, “crackles with this century’s great white background noise of loss, greed and dishonesty.” Pinckney Bene­ directly refers to Pancake as a writer “who sees with a lover’s generous heart, with a prophet’s steel-hard gaze.” Pancake’s rhythmic prose creates what she calls “background music” to her stories. Rooted in her Appalachian heritage, her fiction weaves precise language with vivid attention to place and complexity of character.

Ann Pancake graduated summa cum laude from West Virginia University, obtained her MA in English from the University of North Carolina, and earned a PhD in English from the University of Wash­ington. She has taught in Japan, American Samoa, and Thailand, and her numerous publishing credits include the Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Glimmer Train, Antietam Review, Quarterly West and New Stories From the South. She’s been awarded a Tennessee Williams Scholar­ ship in Fiction, a Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writers’ Fellowship Grant, the 2003 Whiting Award, the Glasgow Prize, and fellowships from the states of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

Ms. Pancake currently lives in Seattle and teaches creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program. We met with her at Bluefish Restaurant in Spokane.

MICHAEL BACCAM

Would you say Strange As This Weather Has Been promotes an agenda?

ANN PANCAKE

It does promote an agenda, but I worked as hard as I possibly could to make it art, too. When I was writing my dissertation, I did research on political novels, especially those written in the 1930s, and I learned that many of them failed as art because their politics were their driving force, which made them polemical. When I went into this novel, I was really invested in the art. I knew for the novel to be successful politically, it would first have to be successful aesthetically. And it was difficult. The hardest thing was to get information about mining and mountaintop removal into the story organically. It was easier to capture the kids’ lives, their fear and desire and guilt and shame. But some of the particular facts about mountaintop removal that are in the later Lace chapters—I still don’t think those chapters are completely successful; I didn’t incorporate the information organically. But, yeah, I guess it does have an agenda, although I think most books do.

BACCAM

Was it mostly the politics of the story that drove you?

PANCAKE

No, it was love of the land and the people’s passion. Love of the land and my outrage over the way the people in my region are being treated. In Strange As This Weather Has Been, I needed to convey a sense of legacy to show what is being lost and why it’s worth saving and what future generations are going to have when the land is destroyed. I guess what also drove me was my own grief over the loss of culture in Appalachia, the loss of the language, and the loss of civility and things like that. There are things West Virginians still have that have been lost to an extent in the rest of American culture—warmth and generosity and community spirit and respect and work ethic—and in Appalachia, these qualities are being preserved. I’m sure they’re being preserved in other parts of the country, too, but in general, I believe they’re in decline. So I think it’s an expression of grief over the loss of some of these things.

I was raised on a farm, the seventh generation to have that land. My family had been there since the 1770s, and we were indoctrinated not to ever sell it. I think a lot of people in West Virginia are indoctrinated with the idea of holding onto land. Partly because a lot of it was taken in the past by crooks as part of this huge land grab. In the late 19th and early 20th century, coal companies would buy mineral rights to farmers’ land and tell them they could go ahead and farm the land, that they’d just be working underneath them to get the coal, so the farmers would sell. Then strip-mining started later in the 20th century, and because the deed said the companies could get the coal by “any means possible,” the companies would strip the land and the landowners were devastated. Natural resource companies swindled all kinds of people out of land in Appalachia. I think something like 75 percent or more of the land in West Virginia is now owned by private companies and that’s partly why the industry has so much control in southern West Virginia, where they own an even higher percentage of the property. Anyway, that’s one reason so many West Virginians value land and legacy—because they’ve heard again and again about the family farm that was lost.

NICHOLAS ARNOLD

Your work often mixes notions of God and land and nature so much that characters struggle to recognize the differences between all of these. Is this struggle representative of Appalachia?

PANCAKE

I don’t think for most people in Appalachia there’s any confusion about the three. But I think there is a sense that the land is—I don’t want to say sacred—but for us land isn’t just land, it’s also family and culture and tradition. So there’s a deep, passionate investment in the land. Most people keep their God separate, though. They’re good Christians, and I was raised the same way, although my dad is both a minister and somewhat pantheistic, so that influenced me. Some of the mixture of God, land, and nature in Strange As This Weather Has Been just arises from my own experience and feelings. It’s not fair to extrapolate from that to the beliefs of other Appalachians, and I feel guilty when people use my work to make generalizations about all of Appalachia. However, in southern West Virginia there’s now a Christian movement to save the land, an anti-mountaintop removal movement. They won’t say that the land is God, but they’ll say that the land is God’s body, and we have to take care of it that way. More churches are forming alliances with environmentalists, and in this way the movement is fusing conservative and progressive politics. I think this is extremely important, and I think it’s the only way we can get mountaintop removal stopped.

ARNOLD

How much of what you know about mining and its environmental impact came from your experience growing up in Appalachia?

PANCAKE

I lived in a coal mining part of West Virginia until I was eight years old, so I was introduced to strip-mining as a little kid. My dad was a part of this introduction. He used to take us to this beautiful mountain called Buck Garden, and then one time when we were up there he told us that we couldn’t go again because they were going to strip it. He also once preached a sermon against strip-mining on the radio when I was about six. I was more interested in him being on the radio than in strip­ mining, but I remember it well because before I heard him on the radio, I hadn’t realized we had an accent. I heard him and I thought, Oh my gosh, we talk like that? So that stuck with me from a pretty young age. Then I moved to Hampshire County, where I lived until I was eighteen, and there’s no coal there at all. Coal mining wasn’t an issue for me again until I got involved in Appalachian studies in graduate school. Then in 2000, my sister Catherine decided to make a documentary about mountaintop removal and asked me to help her, and we went down to southern West Virginia and started interviewing and researching.

BACCAM

Do you associate the voice-driven qualities of your work with the oral storytelling tradition you grew up in?

PANCAKE

To some extent, yeah—oral storytelling in a really general sense. Especially with the older generation, there’s still a lot of story telling, a lot of flood stories and wreck stories and hunting stories and basic gossip stories. But I think the voice of my writing derives less from the storytelling tradition than from the cadence and rhythm of the language in Appalachia, which I’m afraid is dying out. Younger kids are speaking it less. When I was a kid, we only got one TV channel—there weren’t any satellite dishes—and I didn’t have much exposure to the outside world. But now they’ve got all this media exposure, and the language is being rinsed out, homogenized. Anyway, when I’m writing, the voice I hear is not usually a voice telling a specific story. It’s more the rhythm and cadence that I hear. And the poetics and the lyricism of the voice. The story comes later.

I think the language in Appalachia is more elastic than Standard English. Maybe partly because people there aren’t as formally educated as people tend to be outside, the grammar isn’t as strict and there’s more flexibility—to both make up words but also to change and play with syntax. There’s a great freedom in joining words together, compound­ing words, so when I make up words in my novel like “speak-taste” and “leaf-wait,” it’s not that I’ve heard those exact words used by somebody back home, but I grew up hearing people make up their own words, along with more commonly used compounds like “gray-headed lady,” or “pitiful-looking,” or “big-bellied,” words like that. Also nouns and adjec­tives are sometimes used as verbs, like “I’m doctoring with that Indian man over in Winchester,” or “They mounded up the dirt real high,” and in my work that pattern shows up in sentences like “They rumored that dam to bust every spring” in Strange As This Weather Has Been and “his long john shirt whitening a space in the dark” in Given Ground. Syntax, too, is looser in Appalachian English than it is in Standard English, so you can play with the structure of the sentence in ways that I think are more poetic and fit rhythm and cadence the way that I hear them.

ARNOLD

Repetition of words seems like a part of that voice—

PANCAKE

It’s probably a poetic technique. If I was writing poems I would be able to use repetition and it would appear more conventional. For me, especially in the short stories, the primacy was how does it sound, does it sound right? And I’d read over and over again to get it to throb right or thrum right, and I think the repetition helps with that. I want the story to feel like it has background music, and from that perspective, the repetition is kind of like a refrain in a song or a bass beat.

ARNOLD

You mentioned community and gossip earlier. How does a sense of community inform your work?

PANCAKE

I think community makes for good stories. I live in Seattle now and there’s little unplanned community, so there aren’t a lot of really good stories. Nobody knows what anybody else is doing, you know? If you have a tight community, everybody knows what everybody else is doing, and there are your stories. I’ll hear stuff still. People call from Romney to tell me what so-and-so did. In a small community, you know what’s going on all the time, people know everybody else’s business. This is good if you have a problem, and it’s good for stories. Of course, it’s bad when you do something you don’t want others to know about.

BACCAM

You’ve said you rewrite your stories completely instead of working mostly off of previous drafts. Is that something you do with all of your fiction?

PANCAKE

Well, I rewrite the stories completely, but as I do that, I am work­ing off previous drafts. It’s very inefficient. Usually the first drafts are just fragments, things that are most compelling from the voice I hear in my head. When I finish, I have to go back and do a lot of work to craft transitions, to pull everything together, to make the piece cohere. I rewrite the whole drafts longhand for the first four to eight drafts. I even did it with the novel, which is one reason it took me forever to finish it. I think I rewrite this way because it lets me sink back into the song of the piece, into the sound of the song, and it also helps keep the momentum going and holds the voice consistent. By the time I get to eight drafts, I’ll usually go back and tinker with different parts. But when I’m rewriting, I’m not changing everything—I’m changing a sentence here and a sentence there, a word here and a word there. So it’s not always a total overhaul after the first three drafts.

BACCAM

Does your work help redefine how people look at Appalachia?

PANCAKE

I hope so. At least I hope it redefines the popular stereotypical understanding of Appalachia. Of course, the Appalachian writers who have influenced me most, the best of Appalachian writers, have already worked to redefine how people look at us. I’m thinking here of James Still, Harriet Arnow, Denise Giardina, Breece Pancake, Jayne Anne Phillips. These writers don’t just reproduce the dominant paradigm of Appalachia and Appalachian people, and I resist that paradigm, too, but when you don’t provide the familiar paradigm, it’s harder to get published. Many people outside Appalachia, including editors and publishers, want to publish a conventional representation of the place because they feel it will sell better. And it probably does, but that doesn’t make it good art or good politics.

I didn’t know Breece [Pancake], but he’s a distant cousin. He died when I was about sixteen, and I didn’t know him, but he absolutely influenced me. He and Jayne Anne Phillips. When I was a kid, I didn’t know any West Virginia writers at all. Maybe Pearl Buck, and she didn’t really write about West Virginia. In college I realized, here’s Jayne Anne Phillips and Breece—see, we have a big inferiority complex in West Virginia because we’re always being told how bad our schools are and how bad we are—and then here’s Jayne Anne Phillips and Breece, who are about ten years older than me, and they went all the way through West Virginia public schools. They didn’t go to Harvard or Princeton, they went to WVU and Marshall and they could write really well. This made me believe I could write well, too. The fact that Breece succeeded in publishing was an inspiration for me, but his language and sensibil­ity affected me even more. Probably his sensibility has influenced me the most.

ARNOLD

Can you elaborate on the role of ghosts in your work?

PANCAKE

They come up a lot, don’t they? They’re not something I put in consciously. Especially in the short stories, I didn’t work very consciously on anything. In retrospect, though, I think the ghosts represent loss. I’ve witnessed tragedies in my family, and the state of West Virginia has had more than its share of tragedy, and all that leads to an intimacy with loss. Then there is the loss of the culture, which I’ve already mentioned. There is the devastation of mountaintop removal, the cultural genocide there, but in the part of the state where my family’s farm is, where I lived from eight to eighteen, there has been a huge influx of people moving in from outside, mostly from Washington and Baltimore. The economy has shifted from agriculture to second homes and retirement homes, and while the people moving in bring some good things with them, the indigenous culture is being lost. So I think the ghosts represent loss, change and death of culture, death of land and family members and tradition. But again, I don’t really think about it in the writing.

I did hear a lot of ghost stories growing up, from babysitters, even from church. In the novel, some of the ghosts represent people who were forced to leave the land, and people from Appalachia never really leave, so there’s a part of them that’s left behind when they go out.

ARNOLD

Do you think the sense of anger toward the government is justified in your characters and the people of West Virginia?

PANCAKE

Oh my God, yes. West Virginia has been exploited since its establish­ment in 1863 when industrialists made it a state without even putting it up for a referendum—some local people didn’t even know it was a state until later. The coal counties in particular have been horribly exploited. The coal companies have always been in bed with the government, and Appalachia has always been treated as a sacrifice zone by the rest of the nation. Appalachia has provided the natural resources for industrializa­tion, the soldiers for wars, the workers for factories, and the nation has given almost nothing back.

BACCAM

You use many different narrators in Strange As This Weather Has Been. Did you know that you were going to structure the novel this way?

PANCAKE

The novel started as a short story. I started writing because my sister was making Black Diamonds, a documentary about mountaintop removal. I went down to southern West Virginia with her—at the time I was living in Pennsylvania—and we interviewed a lot of people, and it completely blew me away, both the devastation and also local people’s reaction to it, the way they were dealing with it. One afternoon we interviewed a family that had three little boys—actually their cousins were there too, so five little kids and I ended up in the back of a pickup truck. They lived at the foot of a valley fill like the one I described in the novel and they kept telling me how they wanted to get up on the top of the valley fill so they could see what was behind it. They were scared it was a coal slurry impoundment, one of the big wastewater lakes that they have all over central Appalachia now. The road to the valley fill was behind a locked gate, and they told me how they got a blowtorch, and “Daddy did this” and “Daddy did that,” and Daddy busted through the gate and then they got through. Once we got up to the foot of the valley fill, of course we couldn’t see what was behind it, and one of the kids said to me, ”I’m gonna take my four-wheeler up there,” but I knew he could never do that, and another one, a ten-year-old, kept saying, “This is dangerous. This is dangerous.” All these little kids crawling around on big rocks off the mine with blue and green and purple oily water around chem. I’ll never forget that day.

A few weeks later, I started writing what I thought was a short story based on that experience, from the perspective of a fourteen-year­ old boy. I’d never considered myself a novelist—I’m voice-driven and language-driven, and I’m not good at plot. I started writing the story from the fourteen-year-old boy, who eventually morphed into Bant, a fifteen-year-old girl, and after I wrote that story, Dane started talking, the fearful one, and then Corey came into the picture. None of the kids in the novel are based directly on the kids I rode with in the pickup that day, but that day moved me deeply and triggered the stories. I started with those three characters and the stories kept getting bigger. I realized the subject of mountaintop removal couldn’t be contained in a short story.

But, to be honest, because I was a short story writer who didn’t know how to write a novel, writing the novel from different perspectives came easier to me. It felt more like writing a series of short stories or novel­s. At the same time, I wanted a lot of different perspectives because the experience of living with mountaintop removal is too huge to be cold effectively by one person. I wanted Dane’s fear, I wanted Corey’s love of machinery, I wanted Bant’s desperation to find out, and also her love/hate relationship with the miner boy, and also her love of the land—the younger kids don’t have that love of the land; they were in North Carolina when they were little, and by the time they got back to West Virginia, so much had been destroyed. So I wrote them. I wrote Avery because I needed the perspective of a local person who also knew what it was to live outside and who knew the history of the region. And I wanted to include the Buffalo Creek disaster because so many people you talk to in southern West Virginia will say, “This is gonna be another Buffalo Creek.” They’re terrified that the slurry impoundments are going to break and cause another disaster, another Buffalo Creek.

Mogey came three years after I started the novel, after I interviewed a guy in Raleigh County. Part of the reason I included Mogey is because I didn’t want the males in the novel—I didn’t want it to be like “Women love nature and men are against it.” Jimmy Make is based on a lot of guys I grew up with, and I love Jimmy Make, but he’s not a good representative of some of the men in Appalachia who are very powerfully fighting mountaintop removal.

In the original full draft of the novel, I just had one Lace chapter—I wanted Lace to give some regional context and to give the background of this family. I had an agent who tried to sell the novel, and at that point I only had one Lace chapter, and the agent couldn’t sell it. After a frustrating year of revising for the agent and for an editor who hadn’t given me a contract yet, I gave the manuscript to a poet friend, and he said, “This is a great novel, but you’ve got to expand Lace, you’ve got to tell her whole story.” Then I spent a year doing that. I took the thirty page Lace chapter I wrote originally and stretched it into the eighty or hundred pages Lace has now. I pulled the chapter out, broke it up, drastically expanded it, and then threaded it back through the novel.

BACCAM

So you had different strands you cut together in revision?

PANCAKE

I wrote the kids’ stories first, and I wrote them more or less in a linear fashion, sometimes writing one character’s chapters consecutively, sometimes taking a break and working on another character instead, if I got bored. The kids’ stories were more or less interwoven from the get-go. But originally, I wanted each adult to have just one chapter—at that point, Lace had one chapter, Jimmy Make had one, Avery had his, and Mogey had his—and then I had to figure out the best placement of their stories within the kids’ stories. And then when I expanded Lace, which was the last part I wrote, I had to thread it through the whole thing that was already present. That caused organization problems.

Many people have asked me why Jimmy Make doesn’t have a chapter. In the first full draft, Jimmy Make had the final chapter in the book, an epilogue. However, several readers thought the epilogue was anticlimactic, thought ending with the Bant chapter was best, so I dropped the Jimmy Make chapter.

ARNOLD

Lace and Bant are the only characters who speak in both first-person and past tense. Why did you develop that kind of voice for them?

PANCAKE

I write tense and point of view intuitively at first, then I’ll go back and change them if it seems the piece will be stronger in another tense or point of view. But I think I needed Lace and Bant in first person to capture their language and the idiosyncrasies of their perspectives. Corey and Tommy aren’t as self-conscious as Bant and Lace, so to have written their perspectives in first person would’ve been too limiting. Lace has to be in past tense because she’s telling everything that happened from the time she was eleven up to the present. With present tense you gain immediacy, bur you sacrifice the ability to give a whole lot of context. And I wanted Bant to have a sense of history, too; even though she’s fifteen, she’s got this pretty long history with the grandmother that’s important to the story. Corey and Dane also tend to experience things very immediately. There’s not a lot of reflection; they’re just living their lives. So that’s one reason I wanted them in present.

BACCAM

In some of those perspectives, specifically Mogey’s and Avery’s, you enter their consciousness rather late in the novel. Was that a risk?

PANCAKE

Yeah. But I needed to tell Mrs. Taylor and Dane’s story before I could tell Avery’s story. Also, I had to build up everybody’s fear about the present circumstances before I brought in Avery with the regional history. Otherwise, I don’t think a non-Appalachian reader would care as much. Avery’s chapter is sort of a watershed. Ir’s kind of a hinge. In my imagination, the novel builds to that chapter, and then after that everything happens a bit more quickly and finally resolves. I tried Mogey in a couple of different places; I switched him around a lot. Ultimately, I decided he needed to be in the middle, too, after I’d firmly established the kids’ stories and a sense of the destruction of the place. Mogey and his spiritual connection to the land follow naturally as a counterbalance to Banc and Corey’s first full-on look at the mining site.

BACCAM

You make a point to portray the men in Strange As This Weather Has Been as “babified,” compared to the stronger female characters. Do you think that’s a general Appalachian issue?

PANCAKE

Mogey and Avery aren’t babified. That’s one reason I put them in the novel. I didn’t want the reader to assume that Appalachian men are in general “babified” just because Lace perceives Jimmy Make that way. However, through Jimmy Make and some other characters, I wanted to show how shifts in economics in Appalachia cause a kind of emas­culation in some of the men. Now a lot of wives are the breadwinners because they do the white-collar jobs and the service industry jobs, whereas the men, who traditionally worked in mining and logging and manufacturing and farming, are now more temporarily and seasonally employed. So men have lost some power, control, status, because they’ve lost work, and I wanted to illustrate this through Jimmy Make. He lost his job and he wants to work, but he won’t take a minimum wage job because that would hurt his dignity, and Lace won’t let them move back to North Carolina.

ARNOLD

Your characters in general, especially in Given Ground, seem to share a need to leave the land, even if they feel there’s nowhere else to go. Do you think this constant struggle is needed for them to fully develop?

PANCAKE

The struggle to leave the land that arises in them is probably more from my subconscious than anywhere else. The characters both love their places and hate them, need to leave and need to stay; there’s a kind of cultural dissonance or biculturalism that they either are trying to negotiate or have failed to negotiate. I didn’t do that deliberately for character development. I think it’s more a testament to my own struggle, first growing up in West Virginia and wanting desperately to leave, but also being scared about leaving. Then there was the actual leaving. I didn’t realize that Appalachia had its own culture until I left it. I just thought we were like the rest of America. Yeah, I knew our state was poorer than other places and I knew that people always made fun of us, but until I lived in Japan and then in other parts of the U.S., I didn’t recognize the distinct culture we had in West Virginia. During the years I wrote the stories in Given Ground, I lived in Albuquerque and American Samoa and Thailand and Chapel Hill and Seattle and Pennsylvania. I was all over the place. And the moving in and out, in and out of Appalachian culture, and the learning how to negotiate all those other cultures, including dominant middle-class white American culture, was really hard for me. I think that’s where the struggle in the characters comes from. But I also believe my struggle is one a lot of Appalachian out-migrants share.

BACCAM

Do you feel the need to return?

PANCAKE

I went back for a year to work on the novel and lived in Charleston. I love being back there; I hope to move back to West Virginia eventually. I have a lot of family and friends there, and I do go back to visit twice a year or so. But it’s difficult to find good-paying work in West Virginia. To be honest, the colleges there, they have really heavy teaching loads, and I can’t do that and write, even if they’d hire me. Then there are the politics. West Virginia has a lot of progressive subcultures, but overall, it’s a conservative state, and the way industries treat the people and land is really outrageous and depressing. But I miss West Virginia. I feel guilty about not being back there and doing more to help.

BACCAM

Is it difficult to write from the point of view of characters in hope­less situations?

PANCAKE

There were times when I was writing Strange As This Weather Has Been when I had to stop because it was too painful, but usually that was because there was something else going on in my life that rubbed up against my writing. But I don’t see, can’t see, the characters in the novel as completely without hope. It is true that their situations are desperate and painful, but generally writing from such points of view makes me feel alive and passionate. To write about such characters fires me because they make me feel like my writing matters, that it isn’t superficial or trivial. In addition to that, almost all of these characters are based on a part of me, so maybe that’s one reason why it’s not as difficult to write from their points of view. And in terms of narrative momentum, loss and desperation are what drive my plots much of the time.

ARNOLD

How does alienation figure into your work?

PANCAKE

Part of it is feeling like an outsider because of West Virginia being considered lower by the rest of the country. And you have to keep in mind that I was middle-class—I wasn’t poor—but I still had this idea of inferiority because I was a West Virginian. When I first went to grad school out of state, I always had the feeling that I was the dumb­est person in the room because of where I came from. I’ve always felt alienated, even when I was a little kid. I read all the time, I was really nerdy, you know, and bookish, so I felt like an outsider even within the community. And then I leave and I’m an outsider everywhere else for a different reason. [Laughs.] So I think that’s part of my fascination with alienation, but there’s also the fact that alienated characters carry a lot of narrative tension—they contain conflict, generate conflict, find themselves in charged situations-and it’s interesting to see what those characters will do in response to their alienation. Hopefully interesting for the reader, yes, but also for me—for me, I want to know what Jolo’s going to do, where he’ll take me next.

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY IS A CANVASSER of the human experience. From the Catholic theology of his childhood to new discoveries in cosmology, from the cultural revolution of the 1960s to Eastern Europe in the 1990s, from the art of Georgia O’Keeffe to the poetry of contemporaries like Gerald Stern and Pablo Neruda, his poetry explores the gamut of the physical and intellectual environs he has occupied. Always incisive, Buckley explains his investigations in direct terms: “One of the main reasons a person is drawn to art, to writing, to poetry particularly, is to try to make sense of his/her life. . .as you go at puzzling out any individual existence, certainly as you look back and try to put pieces together, you are making that myth of yourself.”

His process of myth making is mirrored by a technical facility that allows Buckley to pursue the elements of his craft most appropriate to parsing his experience. His lines balance rhythm and image to offer his reader a seat of comfortable distress that echoes the very complexities of life his work so consistently pursues. But Buckley is adamant—poets must also write critical prose, and he has done just that for thirty years, championing the work of young and underappreciated poets we’d be poorer without.

And we’d be poorer without the mythic sense of life Buckley has created in fourteen books of poems, the most recent of which is And the Sea and Sky. Last year, Eastern Washington University Press released his second collection of creative nonfiction, Sleepwalk. And he has authored or edited, seven celebrations of poets and poetry, including A Condition of the Spirit: The Life & Work of Larry Levis (with Alexander Long), Homage to Vallejo, and Appreciations: Selected Reviews, Views, & Interviews—1975-2000. He has been honored with dozens of grants and awards, including four Pushcart Prizes. He is currently working on a collection of new and selected poems. Buckley teaches at the University of California, Riverside, and was kind enough to conduct this interview by way of electronic correspondence.

JEFFREY DODD

In your recent “Poet on the Poem” essay in American Poetry Review, as well as in several essays in Appreciations, you appear both weary and wary of poetry “camps and schools.” Can you draw out some of the dangers—if you consider them dangers—of such schools and divisions?

CHISTOPHER BUCKLEY

Camps are formed to promote their members and often function more politically than aesthetically. They develop, almost necessarily, an us vs. them situation—our way is right; yours is not. And because an individual helps promote the camp, helps wave the banner, makes the work conform to the protocols, that poet will be included and the work—sometimes inferior—will be promoted and acclaimed, whereas alone in the world, it might meet with a fate appropriate to its accomplishment.

I think of my first teacher, the poet Glover Davis, a great teacher, a committed teacher, who gave a great deal, and rigorously, to his students. Mainly, he was a formalist and extolled and taught inherited forms. He published his first two books with the renowned Harry Duncan, then a book with Wesleyan. But he was not a political animal, not a networker. He was ignored by the New Formalists and when he contacted them when they were making a lot of noise on the poetry scene, he was still ignored. I think he has two or three manuscripts of fine, mostly formal verse on his desk in his retirement. So it’s never strictly the idea, or quality; it’s too often finally political. We have the great example of Donald Justice who wrote, for most of his years, free verse and traditional forms. A good poem presented itself in the form it presented itself—no need to join a school. And one of my favorite poets, Stanley Kunitz, wrote some fine prose explaining why for most of his life he did not want to write sonnets. One of the best poets I know, Mark Jarman, wrote a collection of honest and authentic Unholy sonnets and also has a book of prose poems forthcoming. Both are good. Academia is full of politics; poets need to be more democratic and look to excellence and originality rather than one style as opposed to another.

Also, a young poet may—and I have seen it—appear on the scene with simple narrative gifts and write good and accomplished poetry. He or she often has a difficult time in graduate school where the group or camp or school is theory driven. These kinds of camps work against the wider appreciation of poetry and the range of poetic talent.

I stand with the wise and humane spirit of Stanley Kunitz, who said in the introduction to his Collected Poems, “Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole‚ that is the consummation of the endeavor of art.” So I do not care if the poem is a prose poem, a sonnet, a raving lyric anaphorical ode; if it is well made and says something accessibly and freshly about what it is to be human, then it is a good poem to me. I just don’t see that camps are focused on the essential good of poetry.

DODD

Dark Matter seems to represent a turn toward openness in your work, with respect to the last point you made. Was there a discernible pressing outward in the bounds of your aesthetic, or was something else at work?

BUCKLEY

Form follows function, accommodates subject. Matisse said the painting always exists before the theory. So, no, I had no big idea about what I would do next or how I would do it regarding forms or expanding an aesthetic. One simply hopes to grow from book to book, but often there is a pendulum effect, one side of the working spectrum to another. For a number of years the voice that was working in me gave me long poems in long lines. It was not fashionable. Editors always wanted something short, but that is not what I was writing and I was grateful that something was coming to me at all and engaging me, obsessing me to whatever degree. Fall from Grace is a book wholly in that manner. The last three books, on the other hand, have gone back to, what is for me, shorter poems in tighter forms—lots of couplets and versions of the triadic line we all learned from Williams. One side to the other.

At the same time, I am writing prose poems when that particular voice fits a subject and the last three books have had a few prose poems counterpointing the tighter lines. Sometimes I edge more toward the lyric, and sometimes a more expansive, ironic, self-reflexive voice. But with Dark Matter I was finding more and more varied forms presenting themselves to me as I tackled more pointedly a new and particular subject matter, that of recent cosmology and astrophysics. All of that information and reading was fresh material to support the old arguments and inquisitions regarding metaphysics, mortality, the temporal beauty of the world. I wrote in that book a couple poems in a wide and orchestrated format—lines, images, surrounded by space and floating there to isolate them, to let them “resonate and baste,” as Charles Wright has it. “Star Journal” and “Perseid Meteor Shower” are two of those and their subjects are obvious from their titles. “Sun Spots”—the “concrete” poem—took off in that direction almost from the beginning. The trick was of course to make each line work as a line, to have integrity, and to simply chop it off mid-syntax to fit a visual template. It’s the only one I’ve ever written, but the form seemed to fit the subject and it was selected for a Pushcart Prize and of the four poems I’ve had in Pushcart, it was the one selected for their 30 year best-of anthology— probably for its invention or unusual shape, but I am grateful no matter what the reason. In that book there are a number of regular free verse stanzas, a number of poems in even-lined stanzas, and even a Shakespearian sonnet. But yes, I think you are right to see some reaching out in forms to accommodate a more expansive subject matter.

DODD

The last few lines of “Mystery” approach those issues of metaphysics and cosmology in a nearly ars poetical fashion: “The salt, the dust, the old suspects—I continue to have them change hats and coats for this, for any scrap of evidence we have of heaven.”

BUCKLEY

“Mystery” is an ars poetica, but more about the over-reaching themes of poetry than about tidy imagery or strategy. I’m just on to myself there, aware that I keep making the same search, that I keep rounding up the usual suspects, to try to find examples of transcendence. The short version is that despite attending Catholic school even through to my BA, I stopped buying into orthodoxy at about eleven years old. But despite my rejection of Church dogma and the changing rules, the idea that stayed with me was that there might be some metaphysical construct behind all we see. Emphasize “might”—it would be great if there was. And so when I first started reading books and articles on cosmology, particle physics, etc., it was clear to me that the good writers of those books had to find imagery and metaphors to explain the concepts of quantum mechanics to those of us with only a high school understanding of science. What subject matter, what great new material.

Dark Matter employed a lot of recent science when dark matter was first discovered. Then, say a dozen or so years ago, they figured that ninety percent of the universe was not radiating and yet something was holding galaxies together, and hence dark matter. What a metaphor, working with any emotional state, past personal history, and more to the point with all the speculation about hidden forces in the universe. But the science usually changes by the time you read the book. Now, the standard model of the universe provides for about twenty-one percent dark matter, four percent atoms, and seventy-percent of what they are now calling dark energy. I’ve got a new pamphlet on parallel universes (there are three distinct possible kinds) and super string theory. I read it for fun. It’s sometimes like finding money in the street: theoretical and metaphysical Lincoln Logs to try to construct something to stand on and see clearly to some source beyond our common mortality. Interestingly enough, many of the popular books written for a general audience on cosmology begin with the pre-socratic philosophers who all had postulated what everything in the world was made of—the beginnings of the first atomic theories, and in a way the beginning of the search for the Grand Unified Field Theory, or what they are now calling—without tongue in cheek—The Theory of Everything. Sounds pretty close to metaphysics, going at it a piece at a time.

DODD

So many writers today seem to privilege minutiae and eschew “the big thing,” as though they could be divorced. What are the dangers of failing to recognize the link between the search and the “evidence”?

BUCKLEY

The surface of art is just that, the surface. Alone it’s not much, but some folks want it to be all. The evidence is there just to get us to the search, to the speculation and reach for something beyond ourselves. You do not have to be religious to realize this. Non religious writers—Hemingway and John Fowles come to mind—make a consistent case for the dignity and essential value in acting humanely toward each other, in realizing there is a “right” thing to do according to just being alive on the planet, even if we are an amazing coincidence of self-conscious chemicals. Williams always had an idea and an emotion, a deep humanity at the core of his work. He wanted to go about it concretely and not abstractly, not in the largely intangible and attenuated language of philosophy. And that was a good thing for poetry, especially American poetry.

DODD

Maybe related, how would you characterize the relationship between poets and “critics”—however you define the term—these days?

BUCKLEY

Poets need to write critical prose on poetry. After Jarrell, what? Professional critics who have a career and often are allied to camps and particular theories—Margorie Perloff comes immediately to mind— there are many out there. An exception is Kunitz. If you read through his prose collection, A Kind of Order, A Kind of Folly, you’ll see that in addition to the fine introductions he wrote for his Yale selections, he has wonderful essays on many poets—Aiken, Rilke, Jeffers, Louise Bogan, Marianne Moore, Stevens, Lowell, Berryman, and Dylan Thomas. There are four essays on Roethke. But Kunitz was not out to carve anyone up and so his prose on poetry did not draw much attention. I should mention as well David Young and David Walker at FIELD—poets who have for years written criticism whose sole intention is to illuminate and praise great work. Young’s short essay on James Wright in the FIELD symposium on Wright is to my mind the most helpful and concise—say on Wright, a piece every young poet should read. But again, these are poets who have done their due diligence in support of poetry and who have not tried to “make a name” as a critic. Gerry LaFemina and Dennis Hinrichsen have started a tabloid format journal, Review Revue, whose focus is reviews of and essays on poetry by poets. It’s a wonderful project and is really succeeding.

For over twenty-five years, I did my best to write and publish reviews, interviews, and essays on contemporary poetry. I’m not near as brilliant as Perloff, Helen Vendler, Richard Howard, but I trust my motives. I did not gain much critical attention, but I did the little thing I could to support young poets and say what I could about some of our great poets. I did not do any “hatchet jobs” as I concluded early on that if I were going to spend the time writing critical prose instead of my own poetry, I had better spend it on work I admired and could be instructed by. Ed Hirsch, a fine poet with a brilliant and comprehensive mind for poetry, has many essays on poets of all stripes and varying periods that are our current hallmark for my money. His newest book of prose on poetry, Poet’s Choice, is a gem.

DODD

You’ve written admiringly of Charles Wright’s and Paul Mariani’s investigations of the spiritual and earthly. This is a question that appears in various manifestations in your own work. What do you consider the particular characteristics that seem to make poetry so well equipped for approaching this and other big questions?

BUCKLEY

Well, of course in many cases a poem is a meditation. Some classical techniques of meditation, say those of St. John of the Cross or St. Ignatius Loyola, are not so far removed, I think, from the mental processes of imagining and making a poem. And of course the focus of meditation is not how to make more money in the stock market; generally, it is about making some sense of transience and confronting the notions of an afterlife or the lack thereof. Granted, there are plenty of rewarding poems about the plums in the icebox, and the day to day things of the world. I’m a fan of Ted Kooser and his pragmatic epiphanies. Still, beyond the particulars, there is usually an emotion or idea that has more common gravity about our situation on earth. Again with Kunitz, from the introduction to Passing Through: “Poetry I have insisted, is ultimately mythology, the telling of the stories of the soul. This would seem to be an introverted, even solipsistic, enterprise, if it were not that these stories recount the soul’s passage through the valley of this life—that is to say, its adventure in time, in history.”

And what more can I say about Charles Wright? He has characterized the project of his poetry as an ongoing argument with himself about the unlikelihood of salvation. He doesn’t leave much meat on the bone for those of us with similar concerns coming after him. And then there is just the genius of his talent. Had I been able to predict this when I was starting out, I may have opted for that tennis pro job at the country club instead of the career path to poetry.

But seriously, what do any of us know early on about what it is that will ultimately concern and compel us? It seemed I struggled for years just to swim to the surface of clarity. Oh, our theme is there, and probably if we spent a few years with a shrink in our twenties he or she could predict what obsessions we would have to work out and resolve in part if we were to succeed. But who had money for that kind support in those early days? I sold my VW van to finish up my MA.

And finally, look back. The great Chinese poets were trying to figure out the metaphysical debate. And the Aztec poets way back in the day. My friend Peter Everwine has translated two books of the Aztec, and I recently found Stephen Berg’s 1972 versions of the Nahuatl poems, Nothing in the World. What consistency in voice and vision and the ancient problem of knowing the gods, or God, there is between these two translators. Here is a poem that particularly grabbed me from the Berg book:

where are we going Oh where are we
going are we dead are we still alive
is this where time ends is there time somewhere
else people are only here on earth
with pungent flowers and with songs
and out of the world
surely
they make truths!

Had I written that poem as my first poem, I wonder if I would have written another? A meditative poem allows us to look at the world and ask larger questions, allows us to speculate and guess as we try to make sense of our lives.

DODD

There’s a slight echo of late Po Chu’I in the Nahuatl poem. There’s also an engagement with the natural that reminds me of the end of your poem “From the White Place,” in Blossoms and Bones:

I come here to be reminded from the umber and the gold,

from the land’s dramatic gestures as it breaks itself down,
how pure the palette can finally be— these few columns, rinsed with sun, lift me—mountain’s husk like chalk, like snow, like our last words
up this dry waterfall of light.

I like the idea of the “pure palette,” and I’ve noticed that one of the “colors” on your palette is the corps of natural images and elements, wherein I see a very strong similarity between your work and Gerald Stern’s. That natural imagery seems to be one of “colors” that sometimes gets passed over in a good deal of contemporary poetry.

BUCKLEY

For me it’s a very obvious thing, my “palette”—I was raised in an Edenic environment in Montecito/Santa Barbara, CA in the mid 1950s, surrounded daily with undamaged and uncrowded nature. I lived in the wooded foothills and often followed the creeks down to the beach as a child.

In my teenage years, a group of us took up skin diving and then surfing, and no experience I have had has equaled the almost beatific exhilaration and vibrant, intuitive communion with the natural world. My subject/palette picked me really, and in spite of my interest in cosmology and philosophy, I always come back to that place and those images and find they are part of the new lines of inquiry anyway.

The O’Keeffe work is interesting in the context of the previous question. The Vanderbilt book and the two chapbooks I have published of poems derived from her painting and life are all very short imagistic poems, very different in scope and strategy from my other work. Yet, I connected with O’Keeffe’s work for its display of and examination into the natural and the metaphysical, so the driving forces were the same. As I’ve written elsewhere, the voice, for those poems seemed to possess me—they are all persona poems, written as if O’Keeffe were speaking. Her writings were quite eloquent and compelling so I am sure I was fortunately influenced. I began the project in the late 1970s and wrote the last of the poems in 2002, or 2003.

And while the natural world may be passed over by many, certainly we have to mention Mary Oliver who is a marvel in her close observations of nature and her invention and insight and great sympathy for life. She is a favorite of mine and one of the best poets we have.

As for Gerald Stern, I love the man, I love his poetry. His energy and generosity were life-savers for me, and his wonderful poems helped me move in a direction I needed to go at a point when I was a bit stalled. But no one sounds like Stern, unless they are unwise enough to try to imitate him. He’s unique, and as well as his attention to the natural world, his cherishing of the smallest element, I love his courage and willingness to engage the political forces of injustice or anything, small or large, that does not grant us our dignity.

DODD

Your prose work consistently reminds me that poetry is one of the arts that depends primarily on its practitioners for its preservation, and I find that to be a fascinating dynamic. Whom, if anyone, do you look to for that preservationist’s perspective?

BUCKLEY

Well, one project that deserves lots of praise and support is Review Revue, which I mentioned earlier; they have been publishing three years now and they publish reviews of contemporary poetry by poets and essays on poets by poets. They are pretty democratic too, and have no agendas, no theories or camps to advance. They are doing a great service for poetry and I would encourage everyone to subscribe. They give attention to the famous and important poets but as well to those who are not going to receive any run in the major publications. They recently featured a nice piece on a series of chapbooks by a small press and their poets, and they give a good deal of support to small presses and their editors, essential to contemporary poetry.

Otherwise, I have to give a great deal of praise to Ed Hirsch who has done as much or more than anyone in the last several years to advance poetry. To my mind, he knows everything and appreciates just about everything about poetry. His first book of prose on poetry, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, is just great. I use it in my classes and it shows students how passion for poetry, a particular poem or poet, can lead to understanding and illumination. His essays and examples are accessible and compelling and erudite all at once, and his vision is truly democratic. That book goes from Christopher Smart to Hikmet to Neruda and more. His newest book, Poet’s Choice, collects 130 short essays on poets ancient and contemporary, American, European and middle eastern and more. It’s an invaluable resource for any student and reader of poetry as it introduces many poets with whom one might not be familiar, while at the same time offering distilled insights and appraisals of essential poets—and all with a passion that is at the heart of poetry. Nothing better.

Finally here, it would be wrong to say that Larry Levis and William Matthews were not appreciated. But especially in the case of Larry, he was overlooked relative to his genius, and both he and Bill were lost to us tragically long before their time. If I had to pick two poets to whom the often over-used term “genius” applies, it would be them. We should not forget them or their work, and to that end Sebastian Matthews has done a fine job in preserving his father’s memory and work. And one other project of mine has been to not let us forget Larry Levis. While he was not exactly ignored, he was overlooked relative to his genius. He received book awards, an NEA and Guggenheim, but was left out of the great anthologies that define the age. He had contributed some truly insightful and salient prose on poetry throughout the 1980s especially, yet there was no study of his achievement. He died at forty-nine and I just felt his work and his memory, so singular in 20th century American poetry, should not be forgotten. So I began to write essays, long and short, on various topics, to keep his work and genius in front of us. Eventually, I put together a fairly comprehensive book on his life and work—A Condition of The Spirit: On the Life & Work of Larry Levis (Eastern Washington Univ. Press 2004)—which included Larry’s prose on poetry, recollections of Larry as a poet, colleague, and teacher, and a third section which collected both the published criticism and new essays written for the book. Bless Christopher Howell at EWU Press for recognizing the importance of Larry’s work. My co-editor of the book was a former student of mine, Alexander Long, who I helped to learn to write poetry mainly by showing him Levis. I feel this book is one of the most important contributions I could make to contemporary poetry.

DODD

You’ve talked about the mythology of the self with Salamun, and I’m curious about this in relation to your own work. In a different way than Salamun, but especially with the publication of Sleepwalk, the body of your work seems to have in many ways accrued into a sort of mythopoeic construction: this in the sense of creating a history that is native to, and obtains consequence beyond, the individual. Do you, or does any poet, have a choice in such myth- and meaning-making?

BUCKLEY

One of the main reasons a person is drawn to art, to writing, to poetry particularly, is to try and make sense of his/her life. The poet may find as many different versions of “sense” as experience allows week to week; the job is not to formulate a philosophy. Yet as you go at puzzling out any individual existence, certainly as you look back and try to put pieces together, you are making that myth of yourself.

In poetry, of course, you can adjust the facts to get at the essential truth, emotion, idea. In creative nonfiction, you cannot. Yet both are very similar, and in that respect I agree with the “godfather” of creative nonfiction, Lee Gutkind, who says creative nonfiction is much closer to poetry than it is to fiction. It was his second or third issue of his magazine Creative Nonfiction that he gave over the issue to poets writing nonfiction and wrote a small editorial enunciating the connections. Essentially, a high percentage of creative nonfiction is lyric-driven. More specifically, Sleepwalk is my second book of creative nonfiction, and to a large extent it takes up the “myth” of my life where the first book, Cruising State, left off—the first book being mainly about childhood in Santa Barbara, CA, and Sleepwalk taking up predominately high school and college years and after. And so in the attempt to understand your life, to find meaning putting events and outcomes together as best you can, you tell a story, a true story, about yourself and your experience in relation to the history of the times.

In such a posture, you become to a degree an “every man”—a mythical figure on a common level. If the essays are successfully written and presented, with memorable and accurate detail, then they will be to some degree convincing, and in that they will witness a portion of the rush of experience from that period. Look, people argue back and forth about history, which is supposed to be objective and factual, so it comes as no surprise that my story, my true nonfiction, can be disagreed with by someone else with another experience. We choose to see resolutions from the events and details we assemble. If we do it well, the emotional impact will trigger a recognition factor, and while it is somewhat a subjective myth, it can also be a truth to be shared.

My poetry and my creative nonfiction have for many years now been aimed at the same target—trying to cherish and preserve my sense of “home”—and in that sense are the elements of a vanished time and place and environment, social and world view. Gone for sure.

At the very end of Borges’s 1960 book, El hacedor (Dream Tigers in the 1964 translation) the last paragraph of the epilogue reads: “A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face.”

Does any poet have a choice in such myth- or meaning-making? Well sure, you can choose to write about the surfaces of poems, you can write about “Language.” But I feel that if you are truly trying to make sense of your life and engage the larger questions of our short time on earth, you do work toward myth- and meaning-making. What I have been up to is best put by George Santayana in one of his letters: “I wish to mourn perpetually the absence of what I love or might love. Isn’t that what religious people call the love of God?”

DODD

In the title piece from Sleepwalk, you make very clear the distinction between the political and cultural atmosphere of the early- and mid-1960s and the atmosphere and turmoil of the late-60s and 70s. How long did it take and what prompted the realization that you had grown up not only during but on the eve of what’s often considered such a revolutionary period?

BUCKLEY

During the late ‘60s and early ‘70s we were too much in the crush of things for many of us to make over-reaching rational evaluations. What was immediate was important.

There was conscription; one reason Kennedy was given a parade in Dallas was his intention to draw down the military involvement in Vietnam; as soon as you graduated from high school—if you were male—you had to start bobbing and weaving to avoid the draft and death at the hands of corporate interests behind the war. Remember that Westmoreland lied, that LBJ lied, and there was no Gulf of Tonkin incident, that the “domino theory” was also a lie.

We came out of the ‘50s, which were great—the biggest battles socially and politically being about duck-tail haircuts, Elvis’s swiveling hips, Rock n Roll, and later the Beatles shaggy hair. Gas was 30¢ and you could put an old Chevy together for a couple hundred dollars and drive around all night. Ike played a lot of golf and everyone liked him. But his parting words about the military industrial complex—a realization he had just come to after eight years in office—have never been heeded. Witness the Bush/Cheney wars and the national debt. Many of us were coerced into Indochina and death; others more fortunate, like myself, got time to get a little education and time to think, and that brought you the late ‘60s and protest and revolution on that modest scale.

So we went from dressing in our father’s business suits to long hair and work shirts. The same forces that were trying to ban Elvis and rock ‘n’ roll were later the political forces promoting the war and advocating rounding up all the hippies and sending them to Vietnam. The Civil Rights movement, the 1968 Chicago Democratic National convention (a title that still reeks with irony), marches in DC—all of it, we went from the eve of change right through the turmoil of the ‘70s. We were sleepwalking on the eve of it, early and mid-60s, while some a bit older were already fully engaged. But by and large, the country digested what the government and media fed it until those forces were changed. Then a lull, a dissipation of political energy and will. Look what we have now. The term sleep walk seems apt once again

DODD

While reading Sleepwalk I was reminded of the Dylan song “My Back Pages,” all about the usefulness of a kind of mature humility. So maybe a more important question is what do we have to learn from looking closely at the period?

BUCKLEY

The often quoted sentence from Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” applies once again. Check the income for the corporate recipients of the military industrial complex going back to Kennedy. The profits keep going up with each war; it’s not likely we will not have wars, as lucrative as they have become for those at the top. Santayana also tells us, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

We got complacent after the 1970s. We had Reagan and conspicuous consumption for eight years and the steady funneling of our tax revenues into the military industry. But there are lots of things to buy. What did Cicero say? Bread and Circuses. They give us bread and circuses instead of freedom. Dylan. Some flaming brilliant social defiances in his youth. Mature humility? He had an angle on that even when he was not mature, certainly as mature as he is now. One secret which is not really such a secret about nonfiction writing is the value of humility; you had better be able to see yourself as a character with failings and blind spots if you are going to tell a true story and have anyone believe you. Were we idealistic, sure. Did everything turn around? Not by a long way. We did eventually stop a war and push LBJ out of office. LBJ—supreme irony of ironies—did have to promote Kennedy’s Civil Rights agenda and some changes were made. But were we foolish or unrealistic at times? No doubt. But again, the motives were moral ones and not driven by a spreadsheet presented to shareholders or a desire to drive a Hummer. In The Godfather: Part II, one of the characters says that if history teaches us anything, it’s that you can kill anyone. Would the reforms have been more long lasting, would they have been cut more deeply into the bedrock of our society had Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King lived? Perhaps. I’d like to have seen that play out. Had they lived, perhaps fewer of us would have disappeared into mutual funds, mortgages, and installments on the Honda.

DODD

You’ve written that hearing William Stafford read when you were in college influenced the way you approached poetry. What were your other early influences beyond the standard college curriculum of the time?

BUCKLEY

Well, a very early influence of mine was Swinburne; I first found a stanza of his poetry in a surf magazine when I was fourteen and read him through college. I loved Eliot too, and largely for the same reasons I like Swinburne, the grand music of the phrasing. I read Eliot on my own, not having a clue as to the themes and concepts until I took a class later in college. So the early influence of Stafford was important that day when I first heard him read. I learned about contemporary voice and language and what was possible in a poem without high philosophy of archetypal overarching themes. Stafford was the first poet to show me you could write in your own voice and sound like a human being, a lesson it took me years to come around to,

In the early 1970s everyone was trying to sound like Merwin and I loved his Lice and Ladders books, but it did not take me too long to stop trying to imitate the inimitable. Same with James Wright. Phillip Levine was another story. I was so taken with his poems—still am—that I spent a couple years while working on my first graduate degree trying to write like Levine. Luckily my first poetry teacher, Glover Davis, was an early student of Levine’s and would always point out my thefts. I did not write many successful poems during that two and a half years at San Diego State, but I learned something, if not wholly consciously, about writing poems from reading Levine so closely. Peter Everwine was a big influence also, as was Charles Wright. Those three poets’ work has never faded for me.

DODD

In what ways might poetry be underestimated, even among poets and serious readers?

BUCKLEY

Many do not fully appreciate it as art, i.e. craft, discipline, work. It takes an equal amount of discipline and work to make a good poem as any other piece of art, but art in general is undervalued; look at the emaciated NEA for example. Of course the semiologists and theorists discount it totally; they look at writers as not much more than satellite dishes receiving messages. I had a colleague at a university in Pennsylvania say to me shortly before I left there that I didn’t really think I knew what I was doing when I was writing a poem, did I? This was at a social occasion, but he was serious. This kind of academic arrogance is not uncommon. He was so sure of his theory that the level of insult never occurred to him.

Then there is “popular” poetry by way of poetry slams and pop culture/socially immediate end rhymes, and people forget, at that level, the long hours—aside from degrees of talent—that go into real work. Now you may put in weeks or months and still not come up with a memorable poem or piece of writing, but the idea that it all comes in a flash of inspiration, that all you have to do is aim your Palm Pilot or BlackBerry at the brightest star on a clear night and save the document, dismisses poetry as unimportant and a minor hobby.

To do well at all, you have to give your life to it, and in return it gives you your life and some thinking about your life that may well support your spirit. Everyone cannot be a celebrated poet; all the usual received wisdom about politics applies. William Carlos Williams said that a successful poet is one who writes a successful poem. That’s it—it’s hard to keep going on that alone, but many have to. Poetry, any art, is the result of dedication and great discipline and I’ve never had the feeling that many appreciate that.

DODD

Aside from a handful we might name, it seems that poets often have to die or win the Nobel before they receive wide attention among American readers. What do we risk losing by not having a strong understanding of and appreciation for international contemporary poetry?

BUCKLEY

We risk missing out on some of our best poets and their original imaginations and thinking, and we risk a cultural and aesthetic myopia. The greater range and variety of voices the better. Szymborska is a good example. Without the Nobel, most of the English speaking world would not know about her. In Milosz’s anthology, Post-War Polish Poetry, published in 1965, Szymborska has but one poem. There was nothing in English until she got the prize in 1996. The Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert is another example. After he received the Nobel in 1984 The Selected Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert was brought out by an English publisher. Prior to that there were only two thin paperback books, one published in the UK, An Umbrella from Piccadilly, and one in the U.S., The Casting of Bells from The Spirit That Moves Us Press, both in 1983. Part of the function of major prizes is, I think, to bring the poet/writer to a larger audience.

However, to my view, a great deal of great poetry by great international poets is in print and is promoted. Look to Bly and all of the Spanish language poets he, along with others, has translated and rounded up into anthologies. Merwin has two books of selected translations, and James Wright translated many poems from Spanish and German. Of course Rexroth and all the Chinese and Japanese translations should not be forgotten. As far back as 1957 Langston Hughes translated the Selected Poems of Garbiela Mistral. Philip Levine does not, I feel, receive much credit for all the translating from Spanish he has done—Tarumba, by the great Mexican poet Jaime Sabines (along with Ernesto Trejo): Off the Map, by Gloria Fuertes, translated with Ada Long. And for anthologies, Levine has translated José Emilio Pacheco, Efrrain Huerta, Miguel de Unamuno, Jorge Guillén, Miguel Hernandez, and Claudio Rodriguez. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk have been bringing Nazim Hikmet to an English speaking audience for more than thirty years and now have a revised and expanded edition of his selected poems. New Directions has done a good job over the years; to point out one example, Shadow Lands—selected poems by Johannes Bobrowski. In England, Bloodaxe has an eye on translations as well, recently the Romanian poet Liliana Ursu, The Sky Behind the Forest: Selected Poems. The University of Texas Press has an ongoing translation concern with books of Borges and Gabriela Mistral. And look at all the good years Robert Hass has put in helping Milosz get his great poems into English. William Matthews’ selected poems was in fact Selected Poems & Translations, and he translated a book of 100 epigrams of Martial, The Mortal City. In the 1970s Peter Everwine and Stephen Berg brought out translations of the ancient Aztec poetry and Everwine has recently published a new book of Aztec translations. And look at someone like David Young at Oberlin; he has recently edited a new anthology of Montale with translations by himself, Charles Wright, and Jonathan Galassi, and has translated the T’ang poets, Petrarch, as well as a superior rendering of Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Piccu. Really, there is a lot available out there and I for one regularly bring a great deal of translation into my classes and workshops. The work is being done and done well and there is little excuse not to include it.

DODD

What are you currently working on or hoping to pursue?

BUCKLEY

I’m working on several things of late. With a graduate student, Ruben Quesada, I am translating some poems of the great Spanish poet Luis Cernuda. Ruben is especially interested in Cernuda’s work and life, a poet who is not near as well known to us as Lorca, Machado, Hernandez and others. I expect after I make my little contribution to the handful of poems we are working on, he will go on to more ambitious translations of Cernuda. I also have put together a book of prose poems. I find that over the last ten years or so I have counterpointed the lined poems—which more and more often present themselves in couplets or the triadic stanza we learned from Williams—with prose poems. It’s a book which collects twenty years of work, but really most all of it is new and recent. The prose poem has undergone a revival of late with Peter Johnson’s magazine, The Prose Poem: An International Journal and now Brian Clements’ good journal, Sentence: a journal of prose poetics. I have notes for a few essays. And, I guess it is about time for a New & Selected Poems, though I keep putting that off. I need much more time than is available to me to really get my teeth into that project, especially for a concentrated go at the “new” poems. But it’s there.

A NATIVE OF IVANHOE, VIRGINIA, David Huddle served as an enlisted man in the Army during the Vietnam War. After returning to the United States, he completed his undergraduate education at the University of Virginia. He went on to attain additional degrees from Hollins University and Columbia University. Of his education he says, “I couldn’t have become a writer without the two graduate writing programs that I went through. I needed that time to be able to believe that I could be a writer, to have people treat me as if I were a writer.”

Since that time, Mr. Huddle has built an impressive body of work, including two novels, four collections of short stories, five books of poetry, and various novellas and essays. His writing has appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, Ploughshares, Story, and Best American Short Stories. His novel, The Story of a Million Years (1999), was selected Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times Book Review and named a distinguished first novel by Esquire.

“I love good sentences,”Huddle says. “I have a lust for a good sentence, as a reader and as a writer. ” That passion for fine writing has garnered him two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and position on the faculties at the University of Vermont, Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English, and Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency Master of Fine Arts program.

We interviewed Mr. Huddle over lunch at Europa restaurant in Spokane.

J. DUNCAN WILEY

When we first met, you said you sometimes read things and it was like you hadn’t written them.

HUDDLE

I meant to say that I read with more and more detachment. I often can’t remember names of characters or stories I’ve written. Sometimes people describe stories to me they thought I wrote, and I nod and say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Later it occurs to me that somebody else wrote that story.

One of my beliefs as a writer is that you need to move on. What you did once you can’t do again, and you need to always be breaking into new territory. I believe that intellectually, but it’s also my natural inclination. I admire musicians who have been able to sustain careers over a period of time—Paul Simon , Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, people like that.

THOMAS KING

Is there material from your previous writing that, like a jazz musician, you want to do a different riff on? Material you could treat differently at this point?

HUDDLE

Yes, my collection of poems, Glory River, is actually a remake of my first book of poems, Paper Boy, which was about the quaint goings­ on of my family and some townspeople. I came to know them when I delivered newspapers as a boy, probably around ten, eleven, twelve years old. In the first version of those poems, I tried to stick more or less to what really happened, with some notable exceptions—an occasional exaggeration here and there. In the remake, I’m lying and exaggerating at every possible opportunity.

WILEY

In your essay “What You Get for Good Writing,” you say your original aspiration as a writer was to profit as “a commercial hack.” Has that changed?

HUDDLE

I guess it has changed in how I’ve come to regard literary writing, to value it and to almost believe in it with a religious fervor. What goes with that sometimes is a contempt for the work of commercial hacks, but if there were some halfway point, I could go for that. I think Stephen King believes himself to be a serious writer. I think in that same essay I say if I could write like Stephen King I would. Maybe that’s still true. Certainly if I could write like Haruki Murakami I would, but I don’t think he’s a hack. He makes a lot of money, but he does, it seems to me, do a lot of very foolish things in his otherwise superb books.

WILEY

In that essay, you also write that the “high-minded” and the “trashy” have equal parts in your writing process.

HUDDLE

I think I’m stuck with that aspect of my upbringing, which is sort of tragic, but I think I need to be true to it. I feel obligated to be true to it, even though I have sort of a refined taste in some respects. I love good sentences. I have a lust for a good sentence, as a reader and as a writer. I think you’re stuck with that, even if you come from Ivanhoe, Virginia.

KING

With several novels published and many short stories in the nation’s best magazines, what inspires you at this point?

HUDDLE

I’m one of those people who needs to write, and I’m not really myself if I’m not writing. The act of writing brings me into balance on a daily basis. It’s like running, or practicing meditation, or prayer if you’re spiritual. I need it for my mental and spiritual well-being. I suspect that long after I am able to get anything published, or long after I even continue to write coherent sentences, I’ll be pecking away.

I don’t know that I would have gotten as deeply into writing if I hadn’t had some luck getting published, or if l hadn’t found some people who seemed to like what I did. I have always depended to some extent on getting a positive response. Though I’m probably far enough into it now that I would just go on doing it. My editor at Houghton Mifflin once said, “Well, you know there are people who need to write—it’s kind of like a disease.” And she looked right at me when she said it.

WILEY

How do you feel about the proliferation of MFA programs across the country?

HUDDLE

I am of conflicted opinions about that. At the University of Vermont, we’ve talked about having an MFA program, and I’ve opposed it. One thing the country does not need is another MFA program. There are so many graduates within that base, and there are only so many jobs, and that relationship is outrageously disproportionate. But at the same time, I’ve done that. I’ve signed on to work at the new low-residency program at Pacific Lutheran University. So that must mean I’m still willing to make a buck out of it. I think there’s a real ethical issue about it, which MFA students are very much aware of. What jobs are available when you get your degree? I think most MFA students are not under any illusions about what jobs are out there. But it’s a suspect enterprise that academia carries out.

For me, I couldn’t have become a writer without the two graduate writing programs I went through. I needed that time to be able to believe I could be a writer, to have people treat me as if I were a writer. But, assuming you can get to the point where you believe that you can be a writer, then the issue of how you’re going to make a living or survive in the world is one you have to work out for yourself.

KING

What was that point for you, when you started to see yourself as a writer, rather than someone who-

HUDDLE

Was trying to write? It was probably at Hollins University when I first sent out a story that was accepted. I had written a story when I was still an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, and my professor, Peter Taylor, had liked the story and suggested I send it out. I sent it to the Sewanee Review and had it rejected. Then I revised it, and another of my professors, George Garrett, suggested sending it to the Georgia Review. That editor wrote me a letter and asked for revisions, and I did those and it got accepted. If you get a story accepted, you think, “Oh, okay, I can do that.” That was in my first year of graduate study. Then when I was at Columbia, which was very intimidating—and which probably would have been extremely discouraging, except I thought “I got this story published, by God”—then I was able to get another one published at Esquire. So that was two solid things: I could say, “Okay, I did this. I’m at least that much of a writer.” Neither of those would have happened without the graduate programs I was in.

SARAH HUDGENS

Do you still find time to write every day?

HUDDLE

Ordinarily I write every day. But this semester I’ve sort of turned it off because I can’t keep up with it. One method that I’ve started doing is writing with my classes. At Bread Loaf, we’ll do four poems a week, and I write those with the students. So that means I’m very productive in the summer—four poems a week. I tried that with a fiction class I taught there, but with the logistics of covering fiction in class I couldn’t make it work very well, even though I tried to make them write very short, sudden fiction. I didn’t write very well that summer because I don’t have much aptitude for that form.

HUDGENS

Is the flash fiction form the wave of the future, or will it always be a side thing some people do?

HUDDLE

Some of them are very charming, but I can’t think of many I re­ally love. There’s one by Stuart Dybek called “Pee Milk” that you may have run into. I think it’s quite a wonderful piece. There’s another one by Tobias Wolff called “Bullet in the Brain.” It’s an interesting story, a memorable, worthwhile piece of work. But chose are almost the only ones I can think of that I really loved. Otherwise, you read them and think “That’s really cool,” then you sort of forget them.

KING

What are some lesser known books that you think serious readers and writers ought to have on their shelves?

HUDDLE

In terms of poetry three collections—Marie Howe’s What the Living Do, Tony Hoagland’s Donkey Gospel, and Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires—have been very valuable to me. And I learned a lot about poetics from reading Theodore Roethke because I could hear meter and cadence and see things going on in his work. I learned a lot about prosody from reading him. But in fiction, I’m not sure. Inspiring writers for me were certainly Faulkner and Hemingway. More recently Andre Dubus has been important to me. And Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor are probably my instructors in the short story. But they’re not lesser known, by any means. O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners has been a powerful influence. After I read an essay of hers I find myself crying to not only say what she says in content but trying to say it the way she says it.

HUDGENS

What are you reading right now?

HUDDLE

I’m halfway through Haruki Murakami’s The Wild Sheep Chase. I have several books that have been sent to me to blurb; a fair amount of my reading these days is of that sort . The last book I read of short fiction that really made an impression on me was Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker which I have taken to reading. And I’m a big admirer of Edward P. Jones—The Known World, and the one before that, Lost in the City. I taught Lost in the City from when it first came out until it went out of print, then began reading it again when it came back into print. I admire Annie Proulx’s Close Range: The Wyoming Stories.

KING

Any young writers to lookout for? Maybe people whose manuscripts you have?

HUDDLE

Well, Greg Spatz’s book, Fiddler’s Dream. I think that’s a gorgeous book. Since it’s going to be published by a university press, there’s a possibility that it may not become very well known, but it should. It’s really a lovely thing. And I’m sure he qualifies as somebody young. Edwidge Danticat probably qualifies as being young, though she must have three or four books out at least. I’m an admirer of Jhumpa Lahiri, though I don’t think she’s especially young. We have a creative nonfiction writer at the University of Vermont , Greg Bottoms, who has one book of creative nonfiction, Angel Head, and I think he qualifies as being young. I think he’s mid-thirties or so. He’s really good.

KING

I wanted to ask you about some other crossover writers, especially the vanguard of fiction who have gone into non fiction—Jonathan Lethem, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen. What do you think about their work as they navigate between the two genres?

HUDDLE

I know Lethem a bit, and I think his achievement in fiction is the big thing about him, and the essays I think are interesting. I’m guessing the same is true of Franzen. I didn’t have any luck with The Corrections. It’s one of those books that sort of put me off. I stopped around page sixty and didn’t go on. I’ve read essays of his that were really wonderful, so I suspect I would like his essays more than his fiction. But it seems his fiction is what’s really important about him. People who did get through The Corrections know that it’s a book of consequence. David Foster Wallace I should admire more than I do, because he’s a tremendous tennis player. That should recommend him, but I have trouble with him. I have to say I don’t know much about his work. I bought his most recent book of stories, Oblivion, which I mean to read for my Contemporary American Short Story classic Bread Loaf to see if I could teach it, because he seems to be important enough that he should be taught. So we’ll see what happens. Franzen and David Foster Wallace seem to be following in the footsteps of Don Delillo and other writers who are very, very ambitious, who want to create monumental works of literature. I have to say that the whole school of writing is alien to me. I think of myself as more of a local, down-in-the-dirt kind of writer than those people are.

KING

You write about restraint in your book of essays, The Writing Habit. Most of the examples you use are from short fiction. How do you see employing restraint in a longer piece?

HUDDLE

I think it’s more a sentence-by-sentence ethic, rather than resorting to exaggerated diction or language with more potency than you require for the occasion. I tried to pick a more exact and understated way of presenting things. I think that applies to longer works, too. I forget whether I say it in that essay, but there’s a very successful writer, and I think a very much-admired and much-liked writer, Pat Conroy, whose work I find just awful in this regard—just sentence-by-sentence heaping on of excessive and exaggerated diction. I was assigned to review The Prince of Tides, and I read halfway through it and said, I’m not going to review this book—I just can not, will not do it. Of course, he made millions off it, so he shouldn’t care what I think. And maybe that’s the rule: Flannery O’Connor says, “If you can learn to write badly enough, you can make a lot of money.”

WILEY

In the introduction to A David Huddle Reader, “The Confessions of a Multi-genre Writer,” you say that many pieces you start don’t end up in the same form you start them in. Your novella Tenorman, for example, started as a poem—

HUDDLE

We just had Edward P. Jones visit at the University of Vermont. He said this astonishing thing about the book he published a couple years ago, The Known World, which was that he thought about it for about ten years without writing on it. He essentially worked it all out in his head. So when he sat down to write it, the first draft took him only about three months. And then he took another year to revise it and rework it. But I’m exactly the opposite. I start with a piece of something. If it’s a poem, then that something usually has to do with language, maybe a first line or combination of words or a title. If it’s a story, it’s usually a scene or something I know will happen. But I rarely have much of it in my head when I start. And I also try to stay open to unexpected, unplanned things coming up. The nature of what you think you’re writing can change because you haven’t really filled in enough of it to know what its true nature is.

I think that’s kind of a stupid way to write, and I think that a lot of people practice it, but a lot of people argue against it. I think John Gardner argued against it. He called it “snowballing,” when you start with a snowball rolling down a hill and you just go with what comes to you. That is my method. Hearing Jones talk about how he did his work, I thought maybe I should rethink my approach.

HUDGENS

But doesn’t your way open up imaginative possibilities more than if you just go in with a plan and execute it?

HUDDLE

I think so, but one could hardly wish for a more wildly imaginative book than Jones’. A lot of very strange stuff happens in that book.

So maybe one could—I don’t think I have that quality of mind—but it could be that you carry our the imaginative work in your thinking about the book, as you plan it.

KING

You said that as a writer, you’re in service to the writing. Do you think that follows here? Do you ever find yourself in territory you didn’t want to be wading through?

HUDDLE

Well, I have found myself in that territory, and I think the best rule of thumb in that case is to get out of there. But I suppose if you write with a plan, there is a temptation to organize it around your opinions—you think people ought to behave better toward each other, so you write fic­tion chat shows people learning that they need to behave better toward each other. It seems to me that if you go into the work without having done that planning, things bubble up out of the subconscious that may or may not be very welcome. It may be that what you really want to write about is one’s inclination not to be nice to the other person or to do harm to the other person. And sometimes it may be a place where you don’t want to be, but I think you’re obligated to pursue it and see what it comes to.

HUDGENS

When you’re composing section poems that bring together stylistically different parts—I’m thinking of “Things I Know, Things I Don’t Know” and “The Penguin Sonatas”—what is your organizing principle?

HUDDLE

My organizing principle is, as much as possible, not to think about organization as I compose. But clearly you know you’re writing a poem that came out of the poem before it, and maybe you hope there will be one that follows it. Writing poems in sequences interests me a great deal. It’s almost a fiction writing impulse that I carry into poetry. I don’t see a poem as a one-time experience, I see it as a piece of something that can lead to something else. Then, when you’ve generated a bunch of pieces, you take a look at them. Sometimes they don’t fall in the order you thought they would and you rearrange them. That can be a pleasurable activity. That was probably more the case with “The Penguin Sonatas,” which was more of a fooling around kind of project than “Things I Know, Things I Don’t Know,” with the final poem that straight-on tries to come to terms with the death of my father and what it means. When I came to that conclusion, I knew I had come to what I needed to come to. So it clearly was the closing part. But with “The Penguin Sonatas,” I think I changed my mind several times about what I wanted the end to be. And the end doesn’t seem very good. If I read from “The Penguin Sonatas,” I usually don’t read the end.

HUDGENS

In the poems about your father’s death, I was struck by how honest you were about him, but also about your reactions to him—

HUDDLE

Anybody who practices poetry knows that you can’t lie in some basic way about it. You sort of have no choice about being honest, you have to be or else you don’t write about it. I think a lot of people steer around it. The book of poems I value most is probably Marie Howe’s What the Living Do. There are two, really three, parts of that book—the first deals with sexual abuse as a child, and the second has to do with the death of her brother by AIDS. They’re both transforming sequences of poems about having gone through these periods. But they’re not the kind of poetry people want to read if they’re looking for a sunny, cheerful experience.

HUDGENS

In the poem “The Episodes,” which deals with your mother’s Alzheimer’s, you write, “I don’t really want to tell this, but I have to.” When you write about emotionally difficult subject matter, how do you deal with that tension?

HUDDLE

I write the poem as a way of dealing with that tension. It seems that if the poems have any current going through them, it comes out of my using that occasion to work through it. It didn’t happen in the poems about my mother, but it did happen in the poems about my father’s death. A reviewer in the Burlington newspaper took me to task for my choice. I think his point was that I should have kept choosing things for myself, the unattractive aspects of my father that came out in the course of his illness. But I think sometimes a poem is testimony to your having gone through a difficult human experience and quite often can be of use to other people. I know it has been in those poems about dealing with Alzheimer’s or dealing with slow death by emphysema, in particular. A lot of people have those experiences and not many people are inclined to write about them directly. Poems about those subjects exhibit an understanding that somebody else had this experience and came out the other side. I believe in that.

HUDGENS

So much of your poetry is straightforward and honest about personal events in your life—your hometown, your family. What effect has that had on your relationships?

HUDDLE

Not so much as you might think. There were people I was really concerned about who would read those poems in Paper Boy. There was one guy called Jeep Alley, whose real name is used in the poem—I think the poem is called “Jeep Alley, Emperor of Baseball.” And it shows him to be kind of a character in a way that is both flattering and not flattering. If I could have chosen, I would rather he had not had access to that poem. But he wrote a letter to the University of Pittsburgh Press saying, “My name is Jeep Alley, I am from Ivanhoe, I am David Huddle’s friend, I am Jeep Alley, Emperor of Baseball.” And he wanted a copy of the book, so I was pleased by that.

But there’s another story of mine that uses the name of a young woman that I grew up with and that I had a crush on in high school. She just sort of appears for a moment, along with a sort of bawdy thought that this character had about this girl. I took it to be kind of an homage to her beauty, so I put it in there. It had to do with a period of time when I think I was in eighth grade, which is at least fifty years ago. And I had a phone call from her this summer, saying that she had heard about this story, and that she heard that I had said something that wasn’t very nice about her. She was really irked and wanted to see the story. So I told her to write to me and give me her address, that if she would do that then I would send her the book. She hasn’t written to me yet, so I haven’t had to send it to her.

But, compared to what some people have gone through, I have had very little of that, and I don’t think I have truly alienated members of my family. I think my older brother didn’t much like a story of mine called “Summer of the Magic Show.” When I sent it to him, it took him a long time to write back, and when he finally did he said, “Well, my the memory of that summer is a lot different from yours.” But he didn’t stop talking to me. I suppose I haven’t had as bad an experience with that as I might have, or is yet come.

KING

Do you have some writing that’s so personal no one ever sees it? What disappears in your private drawer?

HUDDLE

That’s an unfair question. [laughs] There are a couple novels that certainly not many people have seen, and I have a few stories and some poems. I actually have a few story beginnings or novel beginnings that take up what seem to me my darker interests. If l’m not able to take those and make something of them then nobody gets to see them. But I feel the obligation to kind of push against what’s appropriate and acceptable, so in a lot of my attempts to do that I’m not able to make a piece that seems very good. The latest thing I’ve been working on is a sequence of poems called Glory River, a kind of a cartoon or exaggerated version of Ivanhoe, Virginia, where I grew up, and it uses a lot of unacceptable language, very unpoetic language and sentiments. So I feel like even though I’m being pretty risky with those, I still bring them out for the public to see. But I can’t tell you about what I won’t let you see.

KING

Is it easier for you now, later in your career, to push those limits?

HUDDLE

I think so, but I suppose that as a young writer that’s a way to become noticed or get published. I admire Mary Gaitskill’s work a great deal. Bad Behavior was a collection of stories she published some time ago, and it just blew me away. And I really like Two Girls Fat and Thin. She’s always been into a territory that most writers don’t write about. But she makes literature out of it. That’s what I’d like to do.

My parents, I should say, were very staid people, and my mother, when it became evident that I was going to be pretty serious about writing in my twenties, sort of collared me and said “David, you know what, we write lives after us.” I think she didn’t want any trashy writing on the record with my name on it. I think about that every now and then.

WILEY

Your essay, “Just Looking, Thank You,” seems to encompass that desire to push limits and take risks and seems to court controversy in a way the rest of your work doesn’t.

HUDDLE

Since you read it in that reader, you must’ve seen the letters that followed it, so you know it did generate a good deal of controversy. It wasn’t written that way. It was published in Playboy, but I didn’t write it for Playboy, wasn’t thinking about Playboy when I wrote it. It was written back at a time when New York Times Magazine was publishing short essays about men, and I actually published a couple of other essays in there about male experience.

I think I probably began it that way. But it got into that territory of looking at the opposite sex, and what that’s all about, which really interests me. So I think I pursued it in a kind of honorable, aesthetic way. And when I finished it, I liked it. I thought it was a pretty good piece of work. I thought it was confessional, but I didn’t think it revealed anything really terrible about me. I actually thought to put that out there would perhaps be liberating to people with similar experiences. But the fact that it appeared in Playboy I think enraged people who didn’t even read it. And the cover of that issue of Playboy seemed to me particularly salacious. It was a startling picture—they were twins, I don’t know what those twins are called, but they were fairly famous back at that time.

I guess it also hit right at a point in time when that kind of discussion would be questioned by people. And Playboy—I don’t know what can be said about this—but because they want attention brought to their magazine, I think Playboy does a little poking at this kind of thing. So I believe they might have called newspapers and said, “Hey, your local boy’s got an essay in here. Don’t you want to read this?” So then it got into the newspapers, and people were furious. “There’s this professor at the University of Vermont who’s looking at women and writing about it.” For a while I was scared I would lose my job, scared I would be thrown out for having done this awful thing.

KING

After that essay, did you notice people looking at you differently?

HUDDLE

I did. As a matter of fact, newspapers called the university. I think the university spokesman had to make a statement about this, and he said “Well, of course we encourage our professors to have freedom in how they express themselves.”

So I didn’t write it to generate controversy, although I suspected that some readers wouldn’t particularly like it. A couple of women writer friends of mine didn’t like it, and they told me so in a kind of mannerly way. From early on, I sort of have been inclined that way. I think my mother understood that when she said, “Our words live after us.”