Interviews

RAISED IN PENNSYLVANIA, JOSEPH MILLAR RECIEVED an MA from Johns Hopkins University in 1970, after which worked a variety of jobs, including telephone installation and commercial fishing. His writing includes two books of poetry from Eastern Washington University Press, Overtime (2001) and Fortune (2006), as well as two chapbooks, Slow Dancer and Midlife: (Passionate Lives: Eight Autobiographical Poem Cycles). In 1995, Millar was awarded first place in the Montalvo Biennial Poetry Competition, judged by Garrett Hongo, and won second place in the National Writers’ Union Competition, judged by Philip Levine. His work has appeared in many magazines and journals, including the Alaska Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Poetry International, and Prairie Schooner. He has also been the recipient of fellowships from the Montalvo Center for the Arts and Oregon Literary Arts.

Yusef Komunyakaa has described Millar as a “poet we can believe,” because his poetry is not only involved with commonplace jobs, possessions, and emotions, but to his voice is an authority for these things.

We met over lunch with Millar at the Palm Court Grill in Spokane.

JOSEPH MILLAR

I’m warning you right now that I read the interview with Gerry Stern and he is a hell of a lot smarter than I am.

ZACHARY VINEYARD

But you’ll be funnier right?

MILLAR

Well, OK.

Gerry came and visited me at my house one time. He didn’t know I had a back porch because he hadn’t been to the house. And the bathroom is right next to where he was sleeping. So he wakes up in the morning and he has to piss like a racehorse, and right out on the front porch he’s standing there, peeing. And the front porch is like eight feet from the sidewalk. And he said two people went by, they were very polite. He said they never looked up at him. [Laughs.]

VINEYARD

I can imagine him out there with crazy hair.

MILLAR

He’s a wild man.

VINEYARD

Not to beat up the tone of the interview, but do you consider yourself the speaker of the poems in Overtime?

MILLAR

That’s the thing about poetry with me. I can’t get out of it. I know people who write from different perspectives, you know, who write persona poems and stuff, but I think the subtext to all poems—I mean the really good ones—is that the author is the speaker. They’re in there. One of the best poets who acts as a speaker in her work is Louise Gluck, in Wild Irises. You know she’s in there. All those needling little observations she makes, and the short discursive statements about life that aren’t very salutary—that’s her. And anybody who writes a persona poem can’t really inhabit the persona they’re writing about, it’s just, it’ll be a shitty persona. It won’t have any juice. I didn’t even try and write persona poems for Overtime. The first-person speaker in there, I’m afraid, is the dreaded I.

VINEYARD

And that’s obviously important to you.

MILLAR

I think the best thing about writing, when it’s working, is that you somehow figure out how to have it be direct, like it’s what you mean.  You know how that is? You get a poem going and say, “Oh, that’s how it was. That’s how it was. There’s that old man standing there by the railroad station with the paper blowing in the streets and that’s how it was that day” and it’s coming back to you and you’re getting it down. And you go, this is hella cool. To me, you have a real piece of life that you’ve lived and you’ve got it down on paper in some way.  And when that happens, it’s magical and it makes you feel great. So people that say, “Oh the I sucks, get the I out of there it’s all so boring and everything” they’re just doing a bunch of smoke and mirrors to me, bunch of misdirection. If the I really isn’t in there, What are they doing it for? That’s a question you’ve got to ask yourself when you read a poem. If you have to ask yourself why the person wrote it, that basically means the poem bites. Pretty much. You can say, “This poem, I don’t know why the guy wrote it.” The next statement is, “Because I don’t care about it and it doesn’t seem like they care about it.”

HALINEN

Do you tend to generally write from memory or do you start from something from the present moment? How do you get a poem started?

MILLAR

Memory, mostly. And I have short lists in my notebook of stuff I mean to write about someday. Because I’ll forget it. So I write it down in notes. When a woman has a flat tire, or something like that. And I can’t always make a poem out of it, but I come back and give it a try a lot of time.

HALINEN

Do you usually find yourself writing in the same kind of vein?

MILLAR

Well, that was Overtime because when I wrote a lot of those poems, my life was changing a lot. In ’97, I quit working on the trades, and now I’m like, kinda fat and blah. So you think that I would be writing poems with gratitude, which is really how I feel a lot of times. But what happens when I sit down and go write the poems are angry, sad poems, a kind of poems that are not so cheery. So, I’m not real proud of that, but I don’t know what to do about it because that’s the kind I’m getting so I’m taking them and I say thank you and keep going. Sometimes I read wonderful praise poems. The whole tradition of praise poetry, from Hopkins on, and before him, Wordsworth, Shakespeare. Praise poems. Praise the world. Even the neos and Adam Zagajewski, and the poets captured that lived through the war, they’re writing praise poems. And here I am just this gringo American, you know, had to work for a living for a while and raise some kids and all I can do is piss and moan. What’s the matter with me?

HALINEN

Your poems have a great deal of attention to sound, and I wondered if that comes right away as you’re writing or if that’s something that you pay attention to in revision.

MILLAR

You know I think I sort of have a natural ear for language in that way and especially internal rhyme. I do a lot of that. And the phrases occur to me that way. And of course when I go back to revise if I can think of a way to amplify that, I do. That’s one thing that I do pretty good naturally.

HALINEN

Do you consider writing poems to be work or play or somewhere in between?

MILLAR

It’s work, but you know, it’s probably like you guys consider it. It’s work. When you’ve been doing it for even the amount of time I’ve been doing it, which is longer than you guys, it gets more like “I’ve got to go back in there” and then sometimes I put it off. And poetry, you don’t get to go back to the same one like a fiction writer does. The poem’s over. So when you go back in there, you have to start over again. And sometimes I’m like, “I might have forgotten how to do this, how did I do that? Can I still do that?” And then I’m thinking, “I can’t do this anymore.” William Stafford has this one poem where he’s trying to climb up a cliff, and it ends up where he goes, “I made it again.” That’s the last line. And that’s what it’s like. It’s always coming from some place where you can’t exactly tell how you did it. The ones that are good, especially. So to me, it’s messing with that thing that I can’t make work yet or whatever it is. But then after I get workout, or starting a run.  You’ve got to stretch, and you’ve got to get out there and it’s raining, and goddamnit. But then you get going a little bit, and you’re going oh yeah, okay.

VINEYARD

And you know that later on you’re going to forget this process, like it’s just going to go fleeting out the window.

MILLAR

Yeah, and it’s going to be over, and you’re going to over and you’re going to be a greedy bastard and go I want some more. There’s never enough. It’s like sex, there’s never enough. And that’s the thing about poetry, there’s magic like that. So it’s work and play and magic and it’s frightening. Sometimes when I don’t write for a long time I get anxious. I want to pick a fight with somebody, I want to break something. But, I live in a house with a family. I can’t go around doing that, obviously.

HALINEN

What’s it like being married to a poet?

MILLAR

Oh, well, being married to my wife, especially, it’s all good. It’s mostly a good deal. There’s times when it’s not such a good deal but mostly it’s a good deal. Because I can show her my stuff and she doesn’t lie to me. She risks me getting pissed off at her, which I do. “I’m not changing that! That’s the whole goddamn thing, right there! What do you mean change that?” and the thing is, most of the time it’s right. So I really trust her. But it’s hard sometimes because we’re both writing in the house and the phone rings and you say, “I answered it last time.” So that’s there. Who’s going to do this, and who’s going to do that. We’re got the chores of living divided up so it’s pretty even. And we’ve both been married before and we know what some of the pitfalls of a relationship can be. A lot of times there’s certain things, if you’re married with somebody, in a relationship with them, that you should never say, and I think people, and this is a little of a digression, sometimes people think in the name of honesty, of really having a really good, really honestly grounded relationship, you should be able to say anything to each other. And the thing is you can’t. You can’t say anything you want. You could say something to somebody and you’ll never be able to take it back. And this is my experience. And the damage is done, and it’s never the same after that. Because when we’re intimate with one another, we know things about each other nobody else knows. So there’s a rule of decency that comes in there. Poetry for us, and when we’ve had an argument talking something about poetry and it’s like a neutral ground. You’ll say something like, “I saw these translations of Transtromer” or something and the other person will say, “oh yeah?” and you start talking again about this thing that you both. . .

INTERVIEWER

You both have wide respect for.

MILLAR

Yeah, yeah. Something like that, you know. So that’s a good thing that it does, being married to a poet. It gives us a way of relating that’s real personal, yet it’s impersonal, too. Because there’s an impersonality about art. There’s an impersonality about it. There’s a story about Miles Davis, where somebody in his family, I want to say his sister but I’m not sure, said “Listen, I want you to use so and so, somebody’s cousin, I want you to use him as a drummer,” and Miles said, “Well I’ve played with that guy already, and he ain’t that good.” And she goes, “Yeah, but come on, but he’s our friend.” And Miles says, “Music doesn’t have friends like that.” And that’s the way poetry is, too. It doesn’t have friends like that. Now you know you don’t always play bad. If you look around you at the poetry scene, that thing is not always evident. Sometimes you see in somebody or in somebody’s friend, they’re getting over a lot and they’re not that good. But it doesn’t change the thing of the poetry. As Keats looked at it or Shakespeare looked at it, or Dante. It’s upon here and you’re bringing your little flowers to it. In our case they’re kind of like dandelions. But, you know, you’re bringing your little flowers to it. In our case they’re kind of like dandelions. But, you know, you’re bringing it over there and it’s what it is and they’re as good as you can make them. And no matter who publishes the book or who writes on that back of it, it’s as good as the poems are. And sometimes you’ll read poetry in the big houses and you’ll go, “you know. That guy shouldn’t have published this.” It’s got maybe five good poems in there and about thirty that are pretty mediocre. So you can’t tell and there’s an impersonality to it. And that’s part of the thing about it that’s cool.

HALINEN

Have you ever co-written a poem with Dorianne or have you ever thought about doing that?

MILLAR

Everything that comes out of our house is co-written in a way because we look at each other’s stuff and pencil it up and sometimes give each other lines and give each other images. But, no. I don’t have anything against it collaborations. But collaborations on poems, I don’t know. I’m not that thrilled with the idea.

VINEYARD

Especially if you’re writing from your perspective, the I.

MILLAR

The dreaded I. Plus, you’re not going to make any money at poetry, co collaboration doesn’t help out much. The most money you’re going to make is if you get really big and successful.

HALINEN

Christopher Howell, in an interview with Tod Marshall, said that poems written during Vietnam forced people to act, and since then poems haven’t accomplished that same type of “motivation.” How much power to do think the individual has to bring about positive change to such complex problems, and how do you see the poet’s role as a means toward bringing those changes?

MILLAR

When I was your guys’ ages, and the war was going on, there was a good chance the government would reach in, grab your ass, and send you to the jungle to be shot at by the Vietcong. So, there was a galvanizing effect in the country. We didn’t have all these “smart bomb” things they have now, where you can invade a country from the air. So, in other words, the poets against the war in the 60s, I agree with Chris, did motivate people to speak out. I remember watching Robert Bly read and being very inspired by him. Abby Hoffman was reading right before the war in 1969, back when the Chicago Seven were up for trial, and he talked about flying into Washington D.C. on the plane, and he said you could see the Patomic River going out like a big leg, and another river in D.C. going out the other way like a big leg, and then the Washington Monument sticking straight up between them like a big cock. [Laughs]. I just thought this guy was hella cool.

So, that whole time was, you know, different. The government could put hands on you personally, in a way they couldn’t do before. There was a draft. That had a lot more to do with it than Bly, Levertov, Stafford, and Kinnell going around reading poems. Although that was a great thing, I don’t think it was the poems.

Social injustice toward black people during the 60s was also a motivating force behind poetry. There’s a book by David Hilliard called This Side of Glory, and he was the minister for information for the Black Panthers. He talks about the beginning of the Black Panther party, which was him and Hewey Newton and Bobby Seal getting together to read a bunch of communist literature, getting all amped-up about it, and deciding that they would get some guns and patrol Oakland. If they saw the cops unfairly shake someone down, they were going to break loose. And, too, they were going to have this free breakfast program for children. They were going to do things in their community.

We lived in a much more fascist state during Vietnam. We were thinking, back then, that there was going to be a revolution. We were really thinking we were going to have an end to racism, and other things. Compared to 1954, racism was a lot better, so anyone who said they wanted to go back to the way it was before the 60s was crazy. Now they try and discredit the 60s by saying it was just a bunch of drug-induced kids running around. Bullshit. We stopped a war. But it wasn’t the poems. Poems can do more now—and I know this is a long fucking answer. All I know is I like the idea of having peace in your life, and not being an asshole.

You got anymore artistic questions? That was too political.

HALINEN

In a book that’s primarily about work, why did you choose to include love poems?

MILLAR

Oh easy. Work is the other side of love. Work is what we do, and you have to have a good attitude about that. Work is love made manifest. As I think Freud said: You have a lot more work ahead of you after your mistress is fucking around. [Laughs.]

KIRSTEN SUNDBERG LUNSTRUM WAS BORN IN CHICAGO and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a BA in English and writing from Pacific Lutheran University and an MA from the fiction writing program at the University of California, Davis. Her short fiction has appeared in Calyx and Willow Springs, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first book, This Life She’s Chosen (Chronicle, 2005) was named a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” title. the New York Times Book Review calls the collection ‘An impressive debut from a promising young writer.”

During the interview, which took place at the Palm Court Grill in Spokane, we discussed the role of faith in creative work, how family reacts to the autobiographical elements of fiction, and the pressure of being considered a “poster child” for a young writer’s success.

Lunstrum currently resides in South Bend, IN with her husband, the photographer Nathan Lunstrum, and teaches English at Saint Mary’s College and Indiana University, South Bend.

ADAM O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Since you’re a young writer, what should people know about your personal history?

LUNSTRUM

I was born in Chicago, but we moved a lot, something like 26 times. My mom was a nurse. My father was in grad school—he was going to be a professor—and when he left his Ph.D. program he had a lot of jobs—at a bank, at a men’s clothing store, as the vice president of a travel corporation. Eventually he went to seminary in Dubuque, Iowa. We spent two years there, then the year of his internship in Lincoln, Nebraska. By the time he finished that, I was in high school. We moved back to Washington—Bellingham, Monroe, Edmonds, Lynnwood. Now my parents are settled, and it is such a relief to feel like we have a home.

My husband and I helped them move into the first house they’ve owned in years a couple Thanksgivings ago, and it was an emotional day for the whole family. We’ve never had a place that felt like ours exactly, and so moving them into this house was momentous. We feel grounded in a way I don’t think any of us did before.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Is your religious belief one of the reasons the sex and violence are coned down in your work?

LUNSTRUM

I hesitate to call myself a religious person because of what that word—religious—has come to imply in our culture at our particular moment in history. But, yes, I am religious, and yes, I think my faith and my upbringing in the Lutheran tradition shapes my writing.

In a sort of practical sense, the stories and language of the Chris­tian tradition taught me about storytelling. In my family’s household, my sister and I were taught biblical stories as metaphor, rather than as evidence or factual history of our faith. I think this encouraged me to search out metaphor and to relish it—and more important, to see the way in which metaphorical truth can be more true than facts. That is an essential lesson for the young fiction writer, I think—the lesson that fact is not always truth.

I also think I learned rhythm and cadence in listening to my father’s sermons. He’s an amazing writer, and often his sermons took the form of long poems or short stories. I liked listening to the sound of his voice through the walls of his home office as he practiced and memorized his sermon search week, and listening to the more finished product on Sunday mornings. I think his sense of language as a spoken, living thing helps me when I construct my own stories. I still read out loud as I write, go­ing over and over sentences vocally until they sound right to my ear.

My faith probably underpins all of my stories, and probably is part of the reason sex and violence are limited in my work. I don’t mean to suggest that faith eliminates sexual desire or our tendencies toward violence—not at all. But I do think that my Lutheranism has caught me to search out grace in life—and to see the grace of people finding ways to carry on with their lives. The kind of redemption that comes in the continual carrying on.

The other reason my stories don’t include much violence is because I’m not interested in violence, I haven’t lived it, so I don’t even think I’d know how to write it, or that it’s necessary for me. I’m more interested in those small internal changes in characters. That’s where my faith comes in, too. Faith is subtle. In our culture, we like to see faith changing people in drastic ways—lives turning upside down, people who were scoundrels being suddenly reformed. And although I’m sure that may happen to some, I think real faith is much more subtle. It changes perspective and self quietly and without much glory or fanfare or glamour. I’m interested in how, sometimes, the most miraculous thing is the person who accepts what is and keeps going.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

The one scene of violence in the book is completely shocking—when the kid in “Exhibitions” loses his hand.

LUNSTRUM

That story is more about how the mother deals with his imperfec­tion than about the violence. And there’s grace at the heart of that story, too, when she realizes at the end that what is imperfect is often more beautiful than what is perfect. And the missing sex is more my own worry that I wouldn’t be able to write it correctly. I’ve read so many bad sex scenes. It’s implied in certain stories, but I don’t want to be one of those writers who gets wrapped up in tangled sheers. I know I wouldn’t write that well. I’d rather imply things. I’m aiming for elegance. I don’t know if I hit it, but I want to avoid things short of that, if I can. A woman I went to school with, Jodi Angel, who wrote The History of Vegas, writes amazing sex scenes. They’re graphic, bur they’re not at all off-purring. So I know it can be done. But not by me.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

How did you come to writing and to fiction specifically?

LUNSTRUM

I wanted to be a ballet dancer, so I devoted my teenage life to danc­ing. When I was sixteen, I went to college through the Running Start program, part of the point being not only to escape my horrible high school experience, but also to have more time to dance. That year, I auditioned for a company and failed miserably, because I’m not a good dancer. After I failed, I went through this depression about what I was going to do with myself. Then, I couldn’t get into a particular creative writing class I wanted to take for fun, on a whim, so I signed up for the only English class left. I was lucky enough to get a creative writing teacher teaching a composition class. He let me write all my papers as stories, and he became a mentor. Rich Ives, he still teaches at the com­munity college in Everett. He really encouraged me. I started writing then, and I haven’t stopped. I think, too, the first story I ever sent out, which was in that first quarter I took creative writing, was to Seventeen magazine’s fiction writing contest. And it placed. So I thought, Well, this is easier than I thought. Which was completely not how it worked out for me. But I think that encouraged me, helped me keep going. Then I kind of fell in love with it.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Your husband is a photography professor at Notre Dame—what’s it like being an artist married to an artist?

LUNSTRUM

Being married to an artist is a blessing, I think, especially because he’s not the tortured soul type. He’s grounded, a practical thinker. He approaches his work, maybe because it’s photography, in a measured, technical way—the same way he tends to approach life. It’s good because he stabilizes me. I’m not a tortured soul either, but I tend to be more emotional about my work. I’m fitful when I’m writing, more fitful when I’m not writing, and he tolerates that in me and actually, in living with him, I’ve learned to be more disciplined but less uptight about my work habits, too.

I’m also glad he’s not a writer. I could never be married to a writ­er—I’m far too competitive for that. I like that we have our own worlds to disappear into during the day, and that we can then come together in the evening, pleased to re-enter our relationship. He doesn’t read my work until it’s finished, and I don’t see his photos until they’re printed. We don’t make suggestions or dally in one another’s projects, and I like that.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you feel you’re living the dream, having your master’s thesis become a published work?

LUNSTRUM

You know, you’re in a fiction writing program, or you’re sitting in your room writing, and you think, If I have just this one success then everything will be okay and I’ll never feel self-doubt about the writing again and it’ll just be beautiful. It was not that way at all. It made thinks worse.

All of last year, I was totally paralyzed by the publication and I couldn’t write anything, because I thought it wouldn’t live up to this book. I felt, just as more experienced writers always tell you you’ll feel after your first publication, like a fraud or a fluke. I was horrified by the idea that I would be a one-hit wonder. That I would never write anything of value again. I didn’t think I would be able to do it, so I would try to write and it was terrible—I would feel physically sick when I sat at my desk. I’d never had panic or anxiety attacks before, but now I’m sure that’s what I was experiencing.

I’m returning to writing slowly. I’ve written a few stories—and I’ll keep a couple of them. I think I became so bound to perfection—to trying to surpass what I did in This Life—that I tied my hands. I’ve had to try to forget about rules, forget about readability, focusing on the process rather than the finished, perfect product.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you feel the short story is a superior form, at least for you?

LUNSTRUM

For me, it is. Although sometimes I think I’m inferior to the novel. I love the way a story allows you to narrow your focus as the writer. There is no room for the unnecessary or the extraneous in a short story, and that leads, I think, to a kind of refined and elegant prose. And though I’ve read a few novels that achieve that kind of precision in the longer form, I don’t know if I am up to that challenge yet.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

All the stories in your collection have a very Northwest perspective. Even the one that’s set in Iowa has a western perspective on snow. Do you think your northwest upbringing is essential to your stories?

LUNSTRUM

A lot of times my stories start with wanting to write a place. Especially ones like “The Skin of My Fingers,” which is set in Juneau, Alaska. That one started because I went to Juneau and wanted to write the place.

I think that when you move around as much as I did as a kid, you want to find home. I remember living in the Midwest, thinking, When are we going to go back home, to Washington? and feeling like that was the center of the universe. Because of that feeling, when I moved back I became more aware of the place. I love the Northwest, and I think I love it more than I might have if I hadn’t left it. And I think the characters a lot of times are looking for home in these stories.

Writing the land was a large aspect of the program I attended at UC Davis, too. That rubbed off on me, I’m sure, though I don’t write landscape in the way some of my professors or fellow students did. Landscape is not the focus of my writing, but I do consider landscape as more than just setting in my stories. I think my characters are shaped by the regions in which they live.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

You’re a very physical and object-oriented writer. How did that style emerge?

LUNSTRUM

That’s my favorite part of the writing process. I love writing descrip­tion. That’s where I’m having fun in the story. I kind of write myself ways to have fun. And I like stories to be visually interesting. I’ve probably had too many workshops, with the whole show-don’t-tell thing going through my head. But I often don’t care as much for stories that have just a first person narrator talking to you. I want to see the place, so maybe that’s my effort at that—

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

You do write some first-person narrators, though.

LUNSTRUM

Those came last. The first story I wrote in first, “By the Skin of My Fingers,” was an experiment to see if l could write first-person, because I was so used to writing in third. I went through this process—and that was the first story I was thinking about it—of deciding how much description you can put into a story before it becomes overwhelming to the reader, because I was reading a lot of Alice Munro then. She goes whole-hog, puts in everything and gets away with it. I felt, in that story, I got the closest to putting in as much as I could. And I was pleased that it seemed to work out. Also, that story feels the most autobiographical, even though nothing in it actually happened to me. And I feel closest to it.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

You only have one male point of view character in chapbook, and he only tells half a story. Is it a conscious choice for you to write primarily from a female POV, or did your editor just pick these stories?

LUNSTRUM

These were the only stories that I had for them, so it wasn’t their choice. But I wouldn’t say it was conscious, either. I don’t want to make a gender stereotype, but I think because I’m female, it’s easier to speak in a female voice. So, generally, the characters who occur to me are female. But Otto, in that story, is—I met this person on a trip who that story is loosely based on. I was struck by him, was really interested in why he had made the decisions in his life that he had made. I wanted to be in his head for a while. But I think I’m a little nervous to write men, especially younger men. I’m interested in trying it more. I know lots of writers who are able to write in either gender, but it’s a little scary to do it, just because I want it to work so bad. The one novel I wrote after college, the one no one saw because it was horrible, was all cold in the POV of a twelve-year-old boy. So it’s not that I haven’t done it.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Many characters in This Life She’s Chosen have “complex” relation­ships with their mothers (and in one case, a mother-in-law), and the ways mothers and children see each other is a theme you return to several times. I’m not going to ask you, “How is your relationship with your mother,” but, do the character relationships in the book mirror your own life?

LUNSTRUM

I don’t think I’m alone in this—a lot of women and probably men go through a period of figuring out How am I like my parents? How am I not like them? and I think the characters in the stories are doing that quite a bit. And that mirrored my own life, because I did go through that. All through my childhood, I was told how much I looked like my mother, and every family reunion, people would pull out baby pictures of both of us and say, “You can’t tell the difference. They’re the same person.” And we do have similar qualities in our personalities. So I spent a lot of time individuating. And that’s happening in the book, too. But my mother isn’t any of these characters. They’re all fictional, drawn from many people.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

How did your family react co the book?

LUNSTRUM

My father calls me almost every day to tell me if they spelled my name incorrectly somewhere online. My parents bought the book Tues­day and I’m sure the people at Barnes and Noble were tortured by the fact that I was their daughter. But they’ve been good about it. They had read all the stories before. Actually, they’re usually my first readers for any story, because they’re good readers. My father writes poetry, and he writes a sermon every week. So we can talk about that. And my mother is a voracious reader. They read things first and are usually great about not being upset if something’s based on our family.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What about your husband?

LUNSTRUM

He’s really supportive. The last interview I did, the woman asked me, “Is your husband nervous about your view of marriage?” I was sort of taken aback by that. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that people might read into the stories and assume things about me. I don’t know why that hadn’t occurred to me. But some of the questions the charac­ters are struggling with regarding their marriages are questions I have asked.

I remember coming home from teaching after we were first married, and standing over a sink of dirty dishes thinking, When did I become this kind of wife? Our marriage is very egalitarian, and my husband actually does all of our cooking and our laundry—does his fair share of the mundane household things—so I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. But I think a lot of wives of my generation, since we are among the first to really expect a kind of truly equal partnership, have that fear of Wifehood in the back of our minds. A fear of sacrifice. Though, I think part of what some of the marriages in my stories are working out is the necessity of sacrifice in marriage. The way in which a partnership challenges you to hold on to your individual identity while working to nurture the shared identity you have in the relationship.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Has teaching affected your writing?

LUNSTRUM

I don’t get much writing done while I’m teaching because I take the teaching so seriously, and live the teaching so intensely. Teaching reminds me why I love writing, though. Because the students are reading things for the first time, and I suppose it’s like being a parent, because people say you see your own childhood again, and reading certain stories that I read when I first went to college over again is great, because I get to fall in love with them again.

It’s rewarding, too, to watch students fall in love with reading or writing. I had a student last quarter who seemed to have just stumbled on her talent for writing, and it was an amazing thing to be able to spot that and encourage her to keep working. I love the way teaching allows you to feel like both the giver and the receiver of a great gift.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

You use the word “love” for books. What authors and books do you love?

LUNSTRUM

Alice Munro is my favorite. Elizabeth Bishop, I love her shore stories. I think she’s beautiful. I really like John Berger. Gina Berriault. Julie Orringer’s first collection, How to Breathe Underwater, is really great. She has a story called, “The Isabel Fish,” an amazing story about this girl who is with her brother’s girlfriend when they’re in a car accident that lands them in a pond and drowns the girlfriend, and it’s about the repercussions on the girl who witnessed it and lived. I really like the shore story most.

This summer I’m reading Alice McDermott, too. I’ve just finished At Weddings and Wakes, and before that, Charming Billy. She’s my new­est favorite, I think. I feel like I’m learning how to write when I read her work. Her sentences are so elegant and careful, her details so rich. And she moves effortlessly through the daily lives of her characters. I’ve been noticing how her novels don’t have much plot. Very little actually happens that one might call plot. But I’m drawn in as a reader anyway, and I come away from her writing feeling like she’s told me something essential about the experience of living. I think that’s marvelous. I want to know how to do that.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Several reviews of your book thought your cover art suggested that the book was “chick lit,” though the content surely isn’t. Do you worry about your book possibly getting thrown in with some less substantial literature?

LUNSTRUM

I talked to the publisher about this, actually. They send you a ques­tionnaire about such things. That was one of the questions: How you would shelf your book? And I don’t want it to be classified as “women’s fiction.” Not that I’m slamming women’s fiction—there’s a lot of good fiction written for women by women, but I also want it to be literary. I don’t know about the cover. I suppose I had veto power, but it didn’t occur to me that the cover would evoke that response. Though part of it is pistachio and pink. So I suppose, maybe. But I don’t want the book to be thought of that way. I don’t think it’s geared only to a female audi­ence, though it deals primarily with female characters. It’s more about the experience of figuring out who you are, of figuring out where you belong in the world. That’s a universal experience. So I hope they don’t miss shelve it after its fifteen minutes is up. I don’t want it to go the way of—I don’t want to mention any book titles—but I don’t want it to be shelved next to something frivolous, because I don’t think that it’s frivolous and I hope other people won’t.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Do you feel your experience getting your MA in Creative Writing was useful?

LUNSTRUM

I get frustrated with that whole debate about whether writers should get MA’s or MFA’s or not, because I don’t think it can be anything but useful to be in a community of working writers. And to have time to do your work as your sole purpose. That seems like it can only be a benefi­cial experience. Some people make it less than that, but I think that’s a decision on the writer’s part. In that way, it was a huge blessing to have those two years. And I met people who I think I will consider writing mentors for the rest of my life. And I met peers whose work inspires me, and I keep in contact with them, and that helps. When I look at the writing I was doing when I got there and the writing I was doing at the end, my work had completely changed over those two years. The ocher piece of it was that it’s an MA, not an MFA. Sometimes I debate whether or not that was a good choice. But my experience was so good, in terms of the writing and the classes, that I wouldn’t change my mind about it.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

Could you describe the process you went through to get your book published?

LUNSTRUM

I was saying to someone the other day that I’m a really bad example of this question. It didn’t happen like they say it will. The MA was my thesis, pretty much the ten stories that went in the book, in a slightly different order. After I defended the thesis, Pam Houston said, “You should send this out.” She gave me the names of a few editors, and was nice enough to e-mail them and say, “Look at the book.” I sent it out in July to a couple places. When I hadn’t heard back by September, she sent it to Jay Schaffer at Chronicle. He called me within two weeks. I thought he was going to say, “Make these changes and we’ll look at this again,” but on the phone he said he wanted to buy the book. It happened really fast—May to October. You spend your whole life having people tell you that it doesn’t work that way, especially because none of the stories had been published before. I thought that would be a problem. I was really worried that since none of the stories had been published, I would be embarrassing myself, like publishers would get the collection and be like, Who’s heard of this person or any of these stories? It felt good that it didn’t happen that way.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

What if someone said you were some sort of “poster child” for graduate writing degrees?

LUNSTRUM

I’m not sure I’m comfortable being the poster child. Because, you sit in a room by yourself and write your little stories. And, when I’m done with a story, I’m done with it. So now that they’ve been published and they’re out in the world, I don’t feel connected to them anymore, and so this whole coming out to talk about them is bizarre, and being put in a position where I’m the poster child of what’s supposed to happen—or, of what isn’t supposed to happen—is also strange. I’m still more excited about going home and writing the next story than I am about getting up and giving readings. I feel a lot more comfortable at my desk than I do hawking the stories. That’s the strange piece of the job that I wasn’t expecting. I’ve been aiming toward having a book since I started writ­ing, and I know that I should be soaking it up—and I am—but it also doesn’t feel quite real. I don’t feel like the book is what I wrote. When I saw it the other day at the bookstore, I was excited but at the same time it doesn’t feel like it’s mine the way it would if it were an 8½” x 11″ page that looked like it had just been through a workshop.

I work at my writing, and I think I’m very hard on myself, so I don’t want to suggest that I haven’t “earned” this by not working hard enough. But I know writers who have worked longer and harder than I have, and who have not had publication success. I feel a little un-entitled. And I feel young. I am beyond happy to have had this book published when I am still a young writer, as it is already opening doors for me, and as I feel like I have been given the gift of time for a long career, but I also feel a little shamed by my age when I see writers who are much older than me and still struggling for this—for publication. I am embarrassed at times to admit to my age.

The other odd thing about publication is the social responsibility that has come with it. Writers aren’t social beings, so it feels odd that the results of success in this world force us into sociability—readings and interviews and all of the promotion for a book. But I don’t want to sound ungrateful. I’m so grateful.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

The last line of your book is “Like a hope chest opened up.” While the tone of the story at that point is bittersweet, do you have a hopeful outlook on the world?

LUNSTRUM

I think that if you write, you necessarily think the world is beau­tiful. Otherwise, why record it? So I would say yes, I have a really hopeful outlook. But I think more than that, because that just suggests something about the future, I am constantly struck—and this sounds so corny—but I am constantly struck by how beautiful the present is. And I’m not talking about my personal situation. I mean the things around us. Like the other day, I was walking in Spokane, and I ate at a Greek restaurant, and I had these purple olives on my plate and it was sunny out and the light was coming through green on the window ledge in a particular way, and those kind of things make you think it’s worth getting up. I think you have to feel that way if you’re going to write.

O’CONNOR RODRIGUEZ

When you’re eighty—and I know this is an unfair question—how do you want people to talk about you?

LUNSTRUM

I want people to say then what I hope they say about the book now. That the writing’s elegant. That it’s true. And that they find themselves in it. I want people to have the same experience reading my stories that I have reading the stories I love. The kind that settle with you for a while, that you don’t forget right away. More, though, I hope I learn to be how I want my stories to be. I hope I can live elegantly, to be a graceful human being. I don’t know if l have that down yet, at 25, but I’ll keep trying.

LARRY HEINEMANN NEVER EXPECTED TO BE A WRITER. In Black Virgin Mountain, his most recent publication (2005) , he tells us, “I came to writing.. . .because I had a story to tell—a story that simply would not be denied and wasn’t going away anytime soon.” That story began publicly in 1977 with Close Quarters, a novel in which readers go “in country” for a year as they follow the Lift of Philip Dosier and witness the Vietnam War from the front Lines. That story continued in 1986 with Paco’s Story, Heinemann’s Second novel and winner of the 1987 National Book Award. Paco’s Story appears to take up where Close Quarters left off Philip Dosier is now Paco Sullivan, a wounded vet just back from Vietnam, trying to reclaim agency after the trauma of war and in the midst of alienation at home. Setting these two novels side by side, one might think that Heinemann had finished telling that story. He had, after all, captured the Vietnam veteran’s experience, from combat to homecoming. And Heinemann’s third book, a comic novel set in his hometown of Chicago, seemed to confirm this. Cooler by the Lake (1992) has nothing to do with Vietnam. But apparently, for all the power of writing, one thing it cannot do is neatly wrap up our lives with a beginning, middle, and end. Heinemann, it turned out, was not done with that story, or perhaps that story was not done with him. And so in Black Virgin Mountain, Heinemann’s first book of nonfiction, he returns to Vietnam because, as he asserts, “it is clear that there is much, still, to talk about.” Larry Heinemann was interviewed at the Fairfield Inn, in Valparaiso Indiana.

ALLISON SCHUETTE-HOFFMAN

Why Black Virgin Mountain now? And why nonfiction now? Did you ever consider doing this book as fiction?

LARRY HEINEMANN

No. The impulse for the story began in 1990 when I went back to Vietnam with a delegation of Vietnam veterans, writers and poets like Larry Rottmann, Philip Caputo, Bruce Weigl, and Yusef Komunyakaa. I was invited to join this delegation for a literary conference in Hanoi, the first of its kind. We spent two or three days in Hanoi and then we traveled to Haiphong and Hue and Danang and Saigon, and then up to Cu Chi, where we crawled through the famous tunnels.

Afterwards, the poets got to write poetry, the magazine guys got to write articles, but the guys who write books were sort of stuck. Any book you could write would amount to the literary version of “What I Did on My Summer Vacation.”

Rottmann and I are both train buffs, and it turns out that Vietnam has this funky little railroad—French built, one meter narrow gauge. They still had steam locomotives, about ten that worked and three they still used. Vintage equipment. That’s about the kindest thing you can say. I said, “Well, you know I do want to write a book about this—what Vietnam is today and who the Vietnamese are. I know a little bit about how a train system operates” (and I’ve learned from Studs Terkel that when you talk to people about their work, you get all these other interesting stories). “Ok, then, Rottmann and I, we’ll go to Vietnam, we’ll ride the train, we’ll talk to the train guys and I’ll do a train travel book.”

The train guys have this great phrase—it’s a literal sign—End of Track. That ‘s what I wanted to call the book in the first place; it was just gonna be a quick and dirty train travel book. But if you go to Vietnam there’s no way that you can write about it and not have some reflection about the war: about your participation, the politics—Vietnamese and American, North and South. How can you not write about those things as you’re making it down the line?

And how can you, at least from my point of view, not include the trip that you take from Saigon, up Highway One to Cu Chi and Tay Ninh and Nui Ba Den , the Black Virgin Mountain? That was a place straight in the middle of the area where I operated. And during the war it always had a tremendous impact on everybody. As I say in the memoir, it gave us something we didn’t even know we needed. The image was absolutely, totally disengaged from anything happening around us, a beautiful, beautiful place to look at, whether it’s ten miles away or two miles away or right next to you. Everyone I have talked to who served in that neck of the woods remembers the Black Virgin Mountain with extraordinary clarity, and at the very least, some warmth.

Here’s an aside: Native Americans speak of this place or that place or the other place as a power spot, where you can go—and it’s always an individual choice—and somehow your spirit is close to heaven or the Great Spirit or the grandmothers and grandfathers. For you, it is a spiritual place. And to know that the Black Virgin Mountain is a power spot for me is a considerable irony. And undeniably true. The terrain, in that part of Vietnam, is as flat as the back of your hand , and Nui Ba Den is 996 meters above sea level. It’s as if someone put Mt. McKinley in the middle of Kansas. You stand at the temple and you look out and you can see every place you ever camped, every ambush. You can see your war year spread out in front of you in a way that is dramatic and elegant and poignant. It was remarkable and that’s when the train travel book turned into a memoir.

SCHUETTE-HOFFMAN

I’m curious about how you decided to structure the book. You begin in the first chapter with your personal history of the war: being drafted, going through basic training with your brother, how it affected your family, being in Vietnam, coming home. Why did you choose to front load your personal history and then take us in the last four chapters on the train ride, instead of just having the train ride be the structure of the book and then do flashbacks? Because you do use flashbacks in the later chapters.

HEINEMANN

Part of it had to do with why I became a writer and where I came from. I wanted to tell readers what it was like to be a soldier, a draftee; I wanted to capture that extraordinary six or seven months at Ft. Knox before I went overseas. These guys coming back from Vietnam would transfer in and they looked just dreadful. And all of us who had orders from the levy—orders to be transferred overseas—looked at these guys and said, “Oh,Jesus fucking Christ. This is gonna be just awful.” Because these guys did not look healthy at all. They had a literal black look. Like I say in the memoir, it wasn’t as if they had an attitude about anything. These guys didn’t give a shit. And I wanted to write about it, but not a novel. This was a subject and a topic that a novel wouldn’t get at. Just to tell the story itself.

SCHUETTE- HOFFMAN

What did nonfiction allow you to do that fiction wouldn’t?

HEINEMANN

Telling it as a memoir allowed me to say things about the government , about lifers, about the USO and Bob Hope and some of the things about the dynamic of the war and how it developed and who was responsible. It allowed me to stand up absolutely, to step forward and name names. To say as unambiguously as I could, “I think these people betrayed us with such egregious lies,” and to say that as large and blunt as I possibly could. One of the things I say about William Westmoreland is that if there was a dumber person in Southeast Asia I have yet to hear his name.

SCHUETTE-HOFFMAN

Obviously you had the current war in Iraq and Afghanistan on your mind. Did that also influence your choice to front load the material about your time in Vietnam as a soldier? Because many of the derails you choose to include- for example, that soldiers really didn’t have the best or most proper equipment- often serve as a social and political critique of the current wars.

HEINEMANN

That was part of it. Initially, I thought front loading the memoir with the personal stuff was selfish and arrogant because when you’re writing fiction, you get to step back from the story. But when it’s a memoir the story is right here. The storyteller really gets to step forward. I learned that from the nonfiction Norman Mailer was writing in the late ’60s and early ’70s. He also taught me you could say the most outrageous things out loud and really get away with it. The interesting thing about Mailer is that when he was an undergrad at Harvard, he began in engineering. He quickly dumped that, but he always had an engineer’s kind of rake on things. His imagination was connected with that and not simply mechanical things, but how things actually work.

In Of Fire on the Moon, his book about the Apollo 11 shot and Neil Armstrong, he had a very complicated story to tell. And then there’s The Armies of the Night, which he subtitled History as a Novel, the Novel as History. In other words, the story is not clean cut and there are always elements of nonfiction and essay forms in a novel, and there are always fiction forms in nonfiction. As a novelist trying, trying, to write a memoir, you’re looking at the story as a novelist and it’s never a straight forward story. That’s the not easy part of writing, trying to get it all in and have it make sense.

SCHUETTE-HOFFMAN

I’d like to talk about the persona of the narrator in Black Virgin Mountain by asking you to compare him to the protagonists of your novels. In Close Quarters, you present Philip Dosier as a character overwhelmed by history. He’s never completely a victim, but he struggles with the fact that he loses a lot of his agency. You put him in his chronological narrative, so it really feels like history is rolling over him. On the other hand, in Paco’s Story, you spend a lot more time on the interior of Paco, like you’re working on the idea of reclaiming agency after serious trauma. It seems much more an exploration of subjectivity than an exploration of what happens to somebody when history—the “objective”world—rolls over them. What about the narrator of Black Virgin Mountain—is he more like Philip Dosier or Paco?

HEINEMANN

First of all you have to understand that Philip Dosier and I share a great many things. I know everything about him; he doesn’t know anything about me. He really doesn’t know what the next thing will be. He just responds on the spur of the moment. The narrator in Black Virgin Mountain is old enough to be Philip Dosier’s grandfather, and so has at least two generations on him. The voice is much more reflective. Black Virgin Mountain is probably the closest someone’s going to come to listening to me tell a story.

SCHUETTE-HOFFMAN

You do address the reader directly, establishing a certain intimacy, something nonfiction writers talk about when speaking of the persona created in memoir or personal essay. But you’ve also created an angry, bitter voice in your attempt to be “clean and direct,” creating a strong tension with that intimacy. Did you consider the effect such a blunt narrator might have on the reader?

HEINEMANN

Yes, but only for a moment. When I was scared of writing in the late ’60s, I came into the writing trade, into the craft, with war stories. At the time, it was possible to use language that simply didn’t exist in print before then. There was extraordinary permission for language subject matter and point of view. In the 1960s I was pissed off enough to say, “Okay, I’m going to tell you a war story, a body count story, a fuck-you story, and it’s my job as the storyteller not to leave anything out and let you know exactly, exactly what it was like so you can imagine actively participating.” There was no reason to leave anything out, including attitude. You’re passing the story on. This is oral literature from day one. I’m gonna tell you a story and you’re gonna deal with it the best way you know how.

It’s a challenge: Can you keep up with the story? When I was working on Paco’s Story in the 1980s, I would send my editor, Pat Strachan, chapters of the book, and she would call back and say, “I’m offended by this. I’m offended by that. I’m offended by this.” Now, Pat Strachan is one of the few people in the world I actually love. She’s a wonderful editor and did nothing but nurture my career. But I finally said, “Listen Pat, I’m sorry. I truly apologize. But the people I wish to offend, I want them to know that they’re offended. I want to tell people like Kissinger and Johnson and McNamara, any of the lifers that had anything to do with the war that I am really pissed off. And I’m not going to make any bones about it to anybody.”

I used to feel like I was the only one. Then I started listening. Tim O ‘Brien is pissed off. Bruce Weigl is pissed off. Yusef Komunyakaa is still pissed off. I was fortunate on a number of occasions to meet and talk with the war literature scholar, Paul Fussell. His book, The Great War and Modern Memory, had a tremendous impact on me and other writers who came out of the war. I was at a reading he gave once in Chicago and he said out loud, flat out loud, that he’s reminded of World War II and his time as a soldier every month when his disability check comes. And he looked around the room and he said, “I will always look at the world through the eyes of a pissed off infantryman.” That alone is a kind of permission. At one time in the writing of Paco’s Story, it became clear between Pat and me that I wanted to take the war, the whole fucking thing, and shove it straight up somebody’s ass. In Close Quarters, I didn’t know who to be pissed off at, so I was pissed off at everybody. But when I sat down to write Paco’s Story, I knew exactly who I was pissed off at. And in Black Virgin Mountain, I made sure to really nail the people I thought should be nailed once and for all. And now I don’t have to talk about it anymore. As far as I’m concerned as a writer, that time in my life has ended. Everything I’ve ever had to say about it, in thirty-five years, is said: good, bad and indifferent.

SCHUETTE-HOFFMAN

Do you think, then, that writers have a political responsibility? And do you have a particular ethic that you’ve formulated as a writer these last forty years?

HEINEMANN

You have to be honest. As a writer, as an artist, as an intelligent citizen in a democracy, it is your responsibility to say what is on your mind. Whether anybody pays attention or not is another matter. But your responsibility as a human being is to speak up, particularly about those things that get the hair up on the back of your neck. And this has to do with everything from a woman’s right to choose, to open communication between the government and its citizens, to specific and particular things like how the American people are going to deal with the rebuilding of New Orleans and that whole region of the country after Hurricane Rita and Hurricane Katrina. Yes, I feel a political responsibility. Plus, now I feel old enough to know that there’s no reason just to shut up. Things are too serious.

SCHUETTE-HOFFMAN

Has your working class background particularly influenced who you are as a writer?

HEINEMANN

Absolutely. You can’t not reflect your upbringing—four sons in a very small house. I’ve never lived alone. I shared a bedroom with my brothers, then I was in the army, then I got married. I do not have a class-A education; I went to a small city, private arts college.

One of the first things my father taught me: when I was twelve years old, I became a caddy, and on Mondays—this was a WASP country club—the course was closed so they could do maintenance. That was the day called “caddy day” and the caddies could go in and play golf. When my father found out I was gonna go in on caddy day, he looked at me and said, “Only a jackass goes to work on his day off.”

I never did learn how to play golf.

SCHUETTE-HOFFMAN

One of the consistent traits in all your books, even Cooler by the Lake, is your direct, conversational tone, bolstered by a lot of asides or parenthetical comments. Is that related to your upbringing?

HEINEMANN

I haven’t made a study of it, but it wouldn’t surprise me. For me, it’s a serious waste of time to try and figure out how I do this, rather than just doing it.

As a writer your tools are very simple: something to write with and language. I tell my students if you want to be a writer, you really have to become a master of language. That means reading all kinds of writing. It means taking a course in linguistics or the history of English and getting yourself a really good dictionary. Hit up your old man and have him get you a copy of the OED and a copy of the American Heritage Dictionary, the latest edition. As far as I’m concerned, American Heritage is the dictionary of the American language. Everything in it—slang and all. You gotta be a student of language and a student of American English. You need to know how language changes and how it has changed, like jargon and slang and bureaucratic language and how to hide an image in a phrase, hide meaning in a phrase. Writing is a craft like any other craft of the hand, and if you’re serious about it, you have to study the whole thing and take it all the way through and not be afraid of story. Even those things that may turn your stomach. You have to be able to tell the story in such a way that the person who is listening or reading has the same response that you did and you can’t shy away from that. I think that separates the writers from the hobbyists.

SCHUETTE-HOFFMAN

I can’t help but notice how dear Samuel Clemens is to you—

HEINEMANN

It is one of the serious regrets of my life that I never got to meet him. Having dinner with Mark Twain must have been a hell of an evening. What a wise man. He’s probably the dictionary definition of an American writer who’s also a humanist. And a great heart. He and Whitman and Melville—those three guys are the bedrock of 19th century American literature. If you want to be a writer and you don’t read and understand Melville, Twain and Whitman, you will always have a hole in your work.

Samuel Clemens brought ordinary, everyday, garden variety American speech into the story. And that I celebrate. He got the gag, as my friend Riley says. And he grew as an artist. He was raised Missouri-comma-Southern racist, and by the end of his life, he was this completely different person, one of the great voices of American literature. And his outrage about stupidity and foolishness and selfishness and arrogance? Spot on. He got off some real daisies. What a wealth of one-liners. When my students and I are talking about precision in language, I always quote Twain. “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” One of my great heroes.

SCHUETTE-HOFFMAN

Because Black Virgin Mountain is your first foray into nonfiction, at least as a book, did you draw from Twain in any particular way?

HEINEMANN

I went back and reread parts of Life on the Mississippi. He wanted to set the record straight on what it was like to be a riverboat pilot. He says in that book that it was an unfettered profession demanding serious craftsmanship. What a sense of place you had to have to pilot a boat up and down the Mississippi. You had to memorize the whole goddamn thing from St. Louis to New Orleans Twain enjoyed piloting much more than any other work he’d ever done. And spoke of it with nostalgia and pride. Generally, he spoke of things in a wry way. From Twain I learned that everything contains its own irony. You get that from Burroughs, too, but Twain really nailed it.

SCHUETTE- HOFFMAN

That speaks to the end of your book, which you’ve called ironic as well. In describing the epiphany at Black Virgin Mountain, you seem sheepish, as if you’re apologizing for this insight, this feeling of being home.

HEINEMANN

I remember the moment exactly. It was a true surprise. It makes my beard tingle to think about it. This is a place that I know I can come to: this temple, this woman, this story of Ba Den, this place. I can stand here and look at this and be renewed. Finally. Finally. Finally. Finally, I’m home. In contrast, the first dozen years I was back from the war, I felt alienated. Even though I was married, had kids, had a house, a home, had a career, found something to do that I love more than anything I’ve ever done, but I never felt at home. And feeling like an alien in your own country? Not comfortable.

In the book I say I don’t go to Vietnam to heal. I don’t go there to have a good old fashioned cry. A lot of Americans were killed—60,000 Americans—tens and tens and scores of tens of thousands of Vietnamese were put to death, so you can’t even with any conscience grieve about the Americans because the Vietnamese suffered much more than we did.

SCHUETTE-HOFFMAN

That you made it back.

HEINEMANN

In one piece. And something of your spirit intact. That counts for a lot. To be a writer is to look at the world in a much different way than other folks. You’re obliged to look at the world as a humanist, to take the largest possible view and be honest with yourself.At the moment of the telling of the story you put your personal feelings and politics aside as much as you can. Your whole responsibility is to the story. Sometimes it takes you to places in your imagination you would rather not be or visit, but wherever the story takes you, that’s where you go.

To be a humanist. That’s what you strive for. I think all the great writers, all the great storytellers had this, this broadest possible view of what the fuck is going on here.

MELLISA KWASNY COMES FROM THE GREAT tradition of poets writing in dialogue with the natural world, from the direct-address influence of Sappho, to H.D.’s treatment of nature as a character. Her first book of poems, The Archival Birds, was published in 2000 by Bear Star Press, and her latest book, Thistle (2006, Lost Horse Press), won the 2005 Idaho Prize for poetry. Kwasny is also the author of two novels, Trees Call for What They Need (Spinsters Ink, 1993) and Modern Daughters of the Outlaw West, (Spinsters Ink, 1990), and editor of Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950 (Wesleyan University Press, 2004). Her latest book of poems, Reading Novalis in Montana, is due out soon from Milkweed Editions.

Kwasny was born in Indiana and earned an MFA from the Uni­versity of Montana, where she studied with Patricia Goedicke , Mark Levine, and Greg Pape. She spent ten years in San Francisco teaching in the California Poets in the Schools Program, and now lives outside Jefferson City, Montana.

Kwasny’s work has appeared in The Bellingham Review, Crab Or­chard Review, Cutbank, Columbia, Poetry Northwest, Seneca Review, Ploughshares, Three Penny Review, and Willow Springs among many other journals. We met with her over lunch in Missoula, Montana.

MAYA ZELLER

In the introduction to Toward The Open Field, you talk about the “kind of patterning shaped not by inherited conventions but rather by the specific demands of the individual poem, or poet, or subject.” What is your process of “creating” form?

MELISSA KWASNY

I think people who are writing in open form—which most of us are now—are working with an ear to the movement of the poem itself, a processual rhythm. It’s not imposed from without, from traditional forms. Most contemporary poets don’t work with a declared meter, we’re doing it by ear, by how it looks on the page. In theory, it’s weighted, depending on different things—an individual lyricism. I talk as I’m working, sounding things out; the poem’s sound really does depend on that moment. I have certain sounds that are too much mine, of course, and I try to disrupt those. Many writers try to seriously disrupt their own fabric to see what happens.

For instance, in Thistle, I’m working with a very tight line, tight im­age, eight focus—I’m intimately focused on this one plane, the mullein for instance, so the lines are shorter and the rhythm is very integrated. Once I establish a rhythm, I pretty much stick to it—or if there’s a sound patterning, I stick with it for a while, because I’m in that world for as long as it takes for the poem to be finished. I love that kind of focus, that kind of aesthetic. The paradox is that the tighter the focus, the more it reveals an entire world. But after Thistle, I felt the need to bring more experiences into the poems, including my reading, my relation­ships, history, world events. The poems in Thistle are conversations with planes; I wanted to include the conversations I was having with others, in particular with the writers I was reading. Many of them were poets, but there were also people who were thinking of—for lack of a better word, “nature”—and I wanted to have conversations with chose people. You know, when people read Thistle, they say, “There’s no people in this!” Although that’s not true, I wanted to bring more people into the next manuscript, so the lines got longer, the images became more fragmented, there were more of them. And so the voice, the rhythm, changes.

ZELLER

Does your use of tercets, with long lines focused around a mid-stanza pivot phrase, grow out of the poem?

KWASNY

I’m glad you mention nor just the tercet but the turn. I worked with terza rima for a while; in the next manuscript, I have three pages of terza rima. But the turn through images is what I’m working on now. Your emphasis might be on the line break; your emphasis might be more on the different resonances of a particular word or words, more language-based. But it’s important to me to look at image as the way the world talks. The mysteries of the world reveal themselves through close attendance to image—and by image, I mean anything perceived by the senses. With image, we have, “The natural object is always the adequate symbol”—what Pound said—or people say, “It’s going to be able to stand on its own without interpretation.” So we don’t want interpreta­tion, but if the image stands alone, we also notice that it starts to flicker back and forth. Is it a concrete thing? Is it metaphor? Or is it just what I’m seeing? I love that. And on a deeper level, on a phenomenological level, that’s what the world consists of—we see it, and it speaks to us. So, formally, I want to know: If we don’t interpret it, do we leave the symbol to free-float as the symbolises did? How do we move from im­age to image without interpretation? If we leave it to that, how do we see it? Because we do see strings of images. Are they clusters? And if we don’t explain, the tension between emotional statements that aren’t interpreted and image is fascinating to me. I’ve started writing prose poems, because if I get rid of the line breaks, what I have is image and syntax for movement. I’m interested in how the combination of image and emotional statement that doesn’t explain the image work together to get me to the next image.

BRETT ORTLER

How is a prose poem different from a poem with line breaks?

KWASNY

All you have is a movement forward to rely on for rhythm; it’s all movement forward, because you don’t have line breaks to give you that music. So you have to really concentrate on each sound space. How does this sentence move? Because the problem with rhythm, the problem with space, is that you have to rely on your ear to create it.

What we love about poems is the silence in them, and you get that from stanza breaks, line breaks. It’s due to caesuras that form in a line. In a prose poem, you don’t have chose things, so you have to do it with sound, but you also have to do it with the spacing of the image.

ZELLER

You seem to do that by accruing images, and then popping in that big question. And you were talking earlier about making statements without analysis, about allowing image to do the work, and then that voice kind of links your images. Would you like to talk about that ac­cruement and then the voice that comes through questions?

KWASNY

What comes to mind is the word “trust.” I have something I’m work­ing toward now—that I have faith-in-progress, not faith in progress. But my goal is faith-in-process, in the progress of the process. The trust is in the image, and you’re trusting that image, you’re just feeling. Then you have to write the statement that comes through. That’s what the image led you to and so it’s a kind of process. It’s not narrative. The great thing about a prose poem is that it can be prose and disavow narration, which is against its grain-against the grain of its movement.

ZELLER

Your poetry is filled with plant dialogue—in the “Talk of Trees” section of The Archival Birds, and then in Thistle—whether the plant speaks or the speaker talks to the plant. How do you respond to argu­ments critics make about anthropomorphism?

KWASNY

I addressed that in an essay last summer called “Learning to Speak to Them.” It’s just been published in the magazine, 26. It’s a complicated question. Of course I’m interested in some kind of communication, a speaking and a listening, between the human and non-human. I think we really are restricted in our knowledge by being only human. That effort toward communication has been a personal practice of mine—and tied of course to poetry—so with the tree section in Archival Birds, a series of poems meditate on, mediate with trees. Thistle came out of that experi­ence of writing those poems. At some point in this process, the voice becomes indeterminate. We can’t tell—is that you speaking or is that the plant speaking? Is that you listening or is that the plant listening? In a communion, one doesn’t know exactly where the “I” is. I not only have a spiritual interest in that, but also a poetic interest. One could ask, Is it personification? which means you are giving the plant human character­istics. Or is it anthropomorphism? where you are not giving it, but you see everything as human. Or is it metaphor? You know, we say a tree is a metaphor because we want to project human characteristics onto the tree. Or does the tree have something to teach us about being human?

I’ve looked at a lot of traditions. When I was young, I was in love with Native American songs. Chippewa music, Seminole music. I was reading the volumes of beautiful translations by the ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore. Many of the songs have that indeterminate voice­ we don’t know who the speaker is. One of my favorites is called “Owl Woman Song,” and it goes:

How shall I begin my songs
in the blue night that is settling?
In the great night my heart will go out;
toward me the darkness comes rattling.
In the great night my heart will go out.

Who’s talking here? Is it the owl? Is it the Papago woman named Owl Woman? Is she talking as an owl, or is she talking to a human being as an owl? Or is she pretending she is the owl? You don’t know. It’s dispersed. It’s indeterminate. You don’t know who the conversation is with. And I think about that. While working on my M.F.A., I also was working on a Masters in literature. I studied the imagist poets. There’s a little poem by H.D. called “Oread,” which I love:

Whirl up, sea-
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.

An oread is a Mountain Spirit. Is she conjuring the mountain spirit or is she speaking as the Mountain Spirit? Or is she speaking as a person whom the Mountain Spirit comes to? I don’t know, and I love that flicker.

Patricia Goedicke, when I was working on Thistle, said, “I’m wor­ried about this, because people are going to say, ‘Is this too much like Louise Gliick’s Wild Iris?'” But I feel we did two different things, even though I love that book; it’s a gorgeous book, but in some ways it’s a Christian book—in some ways a plane becomes a metaphor for a higher god. And so I thought we were working under very different premises. That’s actually why I wrote the “Wild Iris” poem in Thistle—in homage but also because I couldn’t pretend that the book’s not there.

ORTLER

There’s a spiritual impulse in your work—Thistle is reminiscent of the Psalms, with its prayer and lamentation, often in the same breath. Is prayer related to poetry?

KWASNY

Sure. There’s a wonderful statement by Paul Celan: “Attention is the prayer of the soul.” In some ways, that is what prayer is, our abil­ity to attend the moment, to attend to being alive. That we are here is amazing. That you stop and are attendant to that fact. Isn’t it amazing? Isn’t it amazing that tree is here? The capacity to feel that is like prayer. That’s like a psalm.

ORTLER

You refer to Emily Dickinson a number of times in Thistle. Your poetry, like hers, shares a certain meditative impulse. How has Dickinson influenced your work?

KWASNY

She’s not a major influence, or one that’s been very conscious to me. I wish I were smart enough to understand her better! [Laughs.] Some of her poems are dear to my heart, and I love the letters. I used to call Thistle “Bright Absentee” because of her poem which begins, “I tend my flowers for thee.” But something like that, one line like that, you can carry around for years. And she is concentrated; I can’t read her off the top of my head. Everything is in that one line. Nothingness and everything all in one poem. I wish I could say she’s influenced me more. I feel like H.D. was more of an influence for me. When I was re­ally young, I loved Tess Gallagher. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Montana, studying with Richard Hugo, I started reading Gallagher’s book Instructions to the Double, and I started writing like her. You don’t even know you’re doing it, but when I look back years later, I realize.

ZELLER

Poets are often guilty of recycling their obsessive words and images, and these familiar images usually stem from a common source. What is the significance of the blue robe or some of your other obsessions?

KWASNY

Well, there it is. [Points toward the sky.] It’s part of the earth, and when I discovered the sky was part of the earth, that it came all the way down here, it was amazing to me. It sounds so silly, but we live in this sky. It’s a primary gift. That it’s blue! And not some other awful color, like purple. . .it could be brown, or maroon.

We live on a blue planet, because of water—because of the four ele­ments and the way that they impact each other, enter each ocher. There’s something about a robe that reveals. lt encloses, but it also reveals. There’s something sexy about it. We want mystery in our lives, and so those small revelations of it are what a lot of people would define as spirit, as something that takes them to the divinity in life. We don’t want big revelations, just little ones to remind us. The robe has something to do with that. And birds. I’m reading an Iranian text, The Conference of the Birds. It’s a long poem, and all the birds have to go on this journey to see God. Each one uses a different excuse. One says: “It’s going to be a long trip,” and the nightingale says something like “I’m in love with the earth. I can’t leave her. I don’t want to go on this trip.” And the squirrel says, “I’m just fine here, I don’t need to go on this trip.”

ORTLER

In “White Clover,” you write, “You can’t just live here/ like a swarm of faint-hearted bees,/ clogged with emotion. But really, what is there to do?” This poem expresses a frustration common to many poets—those moments when our sense of direction leaves us and we flail. How can poetry help?

KWASNY

It can remind us, as poetry does constantly, that our job is to be—to really be—alive to our worlds and our relationships.And once we realize that, people can responsibly say, “I have to be something.” I think all readings of our poetry help us. In that particular poem, I don’t really have an answer, except here it is: it’s in our minds. There is frustration in our world. There seems to be so much that has gone wrong. The poet George Oppen quit writing for thirty years and became a communist and a political activist, and said, “You can’t just use poetry. . .you can’t tell yourself you’re changing the world by writing poems.” If you’re going to change the world, go into the Peace Corps. You’re deceiving yourself I think anything you can do to honor and strengthen the inner life is going to make the world better. The big problem is that we don’t believe in an inner life anymore. The idea of the individual self, the honoring of the individual life, is dissipating in our culture. I like to think poetry helps in that way.

ZELLER

Regarding the attention to self and its connectivity with the “over­ soul,” in your writing, you seem to have an attention to that larger good outside the self—

KWASNY

One of my favorite expressions is from Denise Levertov: “The progression seems clear to me: from Reverence for Life to Attention to Life, from Attention to Life to a highly developed Seeing and Hearing, from Seeing and Hearing (faculties almost indistinguishable for the poet) to the Discovery and Revelation of Form, from Form to Song.” She’s talking about attending to the poem, attending to nature. You know, that attending makes you religious, makes you compassionate I wish I would have said that!

ORTLER

You mentioned that things have “gone wrong.” What has gone wrong?

KWASNY

An incredible shamelessness that our country is best. We don’t feel shame that we torture people, we don’t feel any shame or repercussions that we bomb children, that we use depleted uranium. We’ve had this consciousness shift—before, at least people hid these acts. They would have been ashamed of them. Now it’s all done so blatantly. People think it’s okay. And that feels dangerous. A lot has gone bad.

ORTLER

In that same vein, do you think the culture’s veering toward enter­tainment, and away from the arts, is emblematic of that shift?

KWASNY

It is evidence of the lack of time for interior life. Rene Char has a beautiful poem in which he asks, “How can we show, without betraying them, those simple things sketched between the twilight and the sky?” He answers, “By the virtue of stubborn life, in the circle of artist Time, between death and beauty.” That wasn’t an esthete; he wasn’t blind to what was happening in the world. In fact, he risked his life as a commander in the French Resistance to the Nazis. At the same time, he was deeply pained and deeply reflective—deeply aware of what he was doing. He was thinking, feeling, being alive inside to the world outside. Attesting to that fact is his incredible Leaves of Hypnos. It’s funny. In French, the line reads “Par la verru de la vie obstinee, clans la boucle du Temps artiste.” A friend who has translated Char pointed out to me that the poet is naming Time as an artist—in the circle of Time, who is an artist—whereas I was thinking of Artist-Time as a special kind of time we could choose, that we do choose, a time where one lives in a state of creative attention. I have to say that I’m fond of both interpretations.

MICHEAL JAYME IS A NATIVE OF EL MONTE. A graduate of the University of California, Riverside, his early work was collected in 1996 as Look Back and Laugh for the Chicano Chapbook Series, edited by Gary Soto. The following year he began publishing under the surname “Jaime-Becerra” and shortly thereafter a limited-edition collection of prose poems, entitled The Estrellitas Off Peck Road, was released by Temporary Vandalism. He earned an MFA in Fiction from the University of California, Irvine in 2001. His debut short story collection, Every Night Is Ladies’ Night, is an exploration of place, cultural identity, and ethics. Published in 2004 by Rayo, the Latino imprint of Harper Collins, it has gone on to garner praise for its intricate construction and emotional honesty.

We met with Michael at the Palm Court Grill in Spokane, where we discussed the conceptual difficulties of using bilingual dialogue in fiction, the intersection of art and commerce, and the influence of punk rock on his literary aesthetic. He responded to criticism about his manipulation of verb tense, and explained his latest attempt to incorporate nonfiction into his upcoming novel.

When asked about his characters and politics in fiction, he said: “I go with the story that needs to be told. To me, politics are very personal, so I don’t worry about my stories having to represent a certain viewpoint, a certain belief, a certain anything. My characters have to act the way they’re going to.”

J. W. YATES

Do you believe a California literature exists?

MICHAEL JAMIE-BECERRA

People who aren’t familiar with California have weird associations—it’s all palm trees and surfers and movie stars. A while back I was in Joliet, Illinois, on the 4th of July, talking to these high school kids. They said, “Oh, you live in Long Beach. You got to know Snoop Dogg.” A few years later I did a book talk with a group from Ohio, and they didn’t understand Mini’s poverty in Every Night Is Ladies’ Night. Mini’s a morning manager at McDonald’s. And they’re asking, “What problems is she having making it? She’s probably making a good living. She’s making like sixteen, maybe eighteen-thousand dollars a year back then; that’s good money.” But that’s not a lot in Southern California. I’m happy I get to cast a different light on Los Angeles.

YATES

Do you think growing up in California shaped the way you use language?

JAMIE-BECERRA

The liquor store owners, a Vietnamese family near my junior high, spoke better Spanish than I did. You walk in and they say, “Como estas?” I say, “Good.” With the multicultural nature of L.A., it makes life much easier if you speak two languages. There are portions of the city you’ll go through and it’s all Spanish, all Mexican Spanish, or other places you go, it’s all Central American Spanish. Different accents, different idioms, different things going on. And then you’ll go to Monterey Park and everything’s in Mandarin. The street signs are Mandarin. Only the speed limit signs are in English. Everything else, you don’t know what they’re saying. Every culture has its space, its area, inundated with language. You can’t help but pick up something.

Growing up in L.A., I saw people move through languages. My dad would get on the phone and negotiate in English with the guys to clean the air conditioning ducts. Then he’d call my grandma and tell her about it in Spanish.

For me, it was important to have my Mexican characters—not my Mexican-Americans—speak in Spanish, because I’ve always had a problem where I read something with characters from Mexico, or from wherever, speaking in English. My difficulty there is that we’re seeing something in quotation marks, and the signal I’m getting is that someone actually said this, but I’m also somehow supposed to understand it’s not really what he said. That’s the narrator or the writer or someone else, taking what was said and putting it into another language for the reader. I wanted my characters to be able to speak for themselves and to be able to account for what they want to say on their terms rather than my terms as a writer, or the narrator’s terms of the story.

I don’t have to represent this dialogue in English; I can do it in Spanish. And I can do it in such a way that the non-Spanish speaker isn’t lost. It was really important for me to try to convey a basic sentiment or basic emotion, just to keep them on track of what’s happening through body language, sometimes through repetition if that’s needed, or sometimes through reported dialogue, or have a character answer in English.

YATES

Was deciding what to translate, what to give context, a hard process?

JAMIE-BECERRA

I write it in English first. That’s my first language. Spanish is the second one. So from that point I try to figure out how I can say this in Spanish. And not the literal translation, but sometimes to convey the same sentiment or the same kind of emphasis. Or to switch idioms. I’ll write it like it’s in American English. I have to switch it around in Spanish and translate it that way, and that’s like the second level. Then the third level is all the technical stuff to make sure all my accent marks are in the right place and my spelling is correct.

YATES

If Ladies’ Night were translated into Spanish, would you be part of the translation process?

JAMIE-BECERRA

I would like to be part of the process if that happened, but I’d definitely defer to an expert translator. If they had a question, I would want them to consult me. There was talk of translation initially, but one of the things that’s difficult there is the expense. Right now, I’m emerging, I’m up-and-coming. There may not be much demand for me to be translated at this point. I think it will happen eventually. I know that the Spanish market’s growing. I did a book event at a Latino bookstore in Long Beach, and this is the week Bill Clinton’s My Life came out, and they had Mí Vida, by Bill Clinton, on the shelf, wall to wall.

THOMAS KING

The stories in Ladies’ Night work together to create a sort of airtight universe. Did you mean for these to be interrelated so tightly?

JAMIE-BECERRA

I knew they were going to be interrelated, but the tightness of that weave came about through process. Before Ladies’ Night, I’d written a collection of loosely interrelated prose poems. A character would pop up here or there, or a car would pop up. When I started writing Ladies’ Night, I’d be working on one story, and a secondary character would emerge and then I’d take that person and write about them. The second story I wrote was “The Corrido of Hector Cruz.” I wrote a line about Georgie, about how Georgie and his wife got married on their second date. I wrote it, and I got some ideas out of my head. Then I was looking over some of the stuff I had written, and I thought Well, let’s earn this. If they get married on their second date, what was their first date like? And that’s how “Georgie and Wanda” came about. Things grew like that. My goal was to have ten stories. Once I had ten stories, I put them all out on my living room floor, and said, “Okay, who’s what? What goes where?” then I rewrote it, from page one all the way through and tightened everything up. I went through a couple drafts like that with Ladies’ Night. In the initial draft, Lencho sort of occurred in two different characters, and I realized, Hey, wait a minute. This is potentially him when he was sixteen, and this is him when he’s twenty-two. I can actually work with this, and make them the same person. At that point, the focus really came together.

My next project is continuing like that. In the new book, there was a line in there about a character named Joyce, about how there are two photos on the coffee table in her dad’s house—one of her deceased mom and one of her deceased brother who was in the army and disappeared in Vietnam. And I’m thinking, Does she still goes to see him every year—to his grave site, where’s he’s supposed to be buried, but there’s no body? Or I wrote a detail for a room, and I thought, What’s going on there? That evolved into the second section of the book. It’s forty-six pages right now, so I’m barely going. I’m not really attached to anything at this point, because I just want to get it out of my head.

PAUL SEBIK

Do you use any techniques in your new work that you don’t use in the first book?

JAMIE-BECERRA

Yes. I’m excited about this second section because I’m incorporating nonfiction into it. Joyce’s brother plays in a fictional garage band, but they’re trying to compete with real, influential garage bands from the 1960s era around Southern California—bands like Cannibal and the Headhunters, the Premiers, the Midnighters, bands that were big in East L.A. I want to have nonfiction bios about these real bands that add context to what the invented band is going through, and I want to do three or four of these through the course of this section so that by the end, there’s something larger. It’s a nice way of revealing character, especially since it’s being told in first-person, present tense. My character doesn’t have access to certain things: perspective, historical importance, inferiority; all that stuff’s not really available to him because I’m working in what is, to me, the most difficult verb tense and point of view to write in. He’s always thinking about what’s happening now; he’s not really concentrating on what happened in the past, or stopping to reflect, because he’s playing a song. And so, that’s another way of getting information on the page.

KING

How does the nonfiction get onto the page?

JAMIE-BECERRA

Separate sections will be printed in italics, so people will see a visual difference in the text. And language-wise, my narrator’s sixteen years old, not very educated—he’s speaking in that voice—so as soon as you read the nonfiction stuff, you’ll recognize you’re into a different voice.

YATES

How do you achieve emotional distance in first person present tense, when the character is always in the moment?

JAMIE-BECERRA

Getting distance isn’t a problem. It’s overcoming distance that’s a problem. I can have a character talking back and forth with another character, observing: he’s cutting his lunch up, he’s eating, he’s chewing; that’s fine because I can have a lot of access to immediate detail. It’s overcoming that, to get the character thinking about what happened, those places of interiority, that’s more difficult. I love backstory. Sometimes I dedicate entire sections to backstory, although my early teachers would tell me you don’t want backstory in the middle of your scene. It slows you down or sends you backwards, and the reader thinks, Well, wait a minute. What happened to the present moment? One way I’ve gotten around that with present tense narrators is to break it off, end the section, and start a new section and have it be the flashback. So the question isn’t, Where is he telling this from? or Why is he telling this? It’s just information the narrator’s telling the reader, and that puts a lot less pressure on the speaker.

KING

How much thought did you put into where those sections ended in terms of carrying the drama over, so that when the story returns to the present moment, the reader knows where he is?

JAMIE-BECERRA

At first I didn’t give it much thought. I just ended instinctually. I did that because I started as a prose poet. I have a sense of when small arcs end, with natural breaks and stops, which gives me a sense of how to finish a scene.

A lot of it is related to details, to description, to things outside the character’s head, so that the character can describe something that happened. And it takes on meaning as the scene unfolds, as the story unfolds. I like to work with what I call positive tension rather than negative tension. Positive tension is when the reader knows what’s at stake and how it’s going to happen. Negative tension is when the writer keeps something from the reader and the only tension for the reader is wanting to see: What is this thing being kept from me? Positive tension, for me, is more truthful. And working with positive tension makes it easier to end scenes, because the reader trusts you and you’re able to find those natural places to stop.

Another thing I like to do is overwrite a scene. I go as far as I can with a scene, especially with endings—I like to overwrite endings—and once I get everything out of my system, I go back and start chipping away, and I think, Can I stop here? Or what about here? Or here? And it’s easier to find the ending this way, when you’re cutting down, than it is to reach out and think, Is that the right ending? It’s easier when you’ve got everything out of your system and you’re working backwards, trying to understand where the character needs to come to rest.

KING

A critic in USA Today wrote that, “The stories from Every Night is Ladies’ Night are mostly told in the present tense, which is a trendy tactic. Sometimes it gives immediacy to the narration, but more often it’s a sign of laziness from writers who like to describe their stories rather than tell them. I don’t know why Jaime-Becerra joined the crowd, but he shouldn’t have. He’s good enough to do it the hard way.” How do you respond to that criticism?

JAMIE-BECERRA

First person present tense is much more difficult to write, and I don’t think of it as a fad. In first person present tense, your narrator has to remain in motion, like a shark has to keep swimming or else it will die. With past tense, you have a lot more recourse, you can take your time. You have the benefit of hindsight; “I walked into a room,” and yet that walking might have happened five hours ago, five minutes ago, five years ago. First person present tense is happening in front of the character and the character often doesn’t have the mobility to reflect on what’s happening in front of him or her. You can pull it off, but that’s one of the challenges. I respond to that criticism by saying, I wasn’t trying to be trendy. I wrote in that tense because it seemed natural to me and it seemed natural to the story. But in Ladies’ Night, six stories are told in first person and four in third person, so the book has a pretty good sense of balance, and that’s one thing the quote doesn’t take into account.

SEBIK

Do you map out what characters will do or wait to see how they respond?

JAMIE-BECERRA

I’m always willing to take a left turn with a character, but in general, it’s easier for me to write when I know where I’m headed. The stories easiest for me to write are the stories where I know the end moment. The more difficult stories are the ones where I don’t have an end moment but I know I have a character and I have a conflict and I know he or she is going to go through with it.

An example of a character surprising me occurred in this new project, when one of my main characters, Gaeta, is reacting to his wife leaving him. His daughter gets upset about why the wife has left and she doesn’t understand because he’s not explaining it to her, and every night she cries in her room. He’s upset, he’s ashamed, he feels horrible that he’s been left. And he says, You know what, let her cry. She’ll figure it out. And that’s what he does. Now that was a surprise to me when that came out. That wasn’t Gaeta speaking to me, saying, This is what needs to happen. But what happened was a convergence of characteristics and that moment was me coming to an understanding about that person.

KING

What about a story like “La Fiesta Brava,” where that surprising event is action-based rather than character-based. Did you know that ending before you started writing?

JAMIE-BECERRA

I knew Benny’s ending. Benny pops up in different ways throughout the book and he’s sort of the bad guy. I knew I really wanted Benny to get his. I just didn’t know how that was going to happen. I wanted the kid in the story to have to live with what he’d done, for however long it was, long enough to where he knew things were different. That story ends with him dancing with his aunt at the church, that moment where he has to live with the knowledge of what’s happened to Benny, and he can’t talk to his aunt until the song is over. That’s the character confronting what I’ve put in front of him.

YATES

How can you surprise us with an ending that’s so inevitable?

JAMIE-BECERRA

I wish I had the answer to that. But I know the outcome begins with character. Flannery O’Connor is the master of that. All her great stories, the endings are like, Duh, that’s what’s supposed to happen. But you’re completely moved. Like “Greenleaf.” Mrs. May has a flaw, and because of that flaw she is going to get it in the end. The end emerges surprisingly because you’re so focused on character that you’re not really noticing the machinations going around that character. Because you’re concentrating on this fascinating person. And “fascinating” is an appropriate word, because Mrs. May is not a likeable character, but she’s certainly capturing your attention.

YATES

John Keeble suggests that one way to study writing is to find an author you admire and read everything he or she has written. Who is that writer for you?

JAMIE-BECERRA

Initially, it was Raymond Carver. And then, after Carver, I think Stuart Dybek. When it comes to form, Dybek is all over the place. He has these really long, crazy stories like “Breasts.” It just keeps going and going and going. Then he has a story like “Pet Milk” which is five pages and it’s brilliant. And the other thing with Dybek is that he loves Chicago, and if you didn’t know anything about him, if you just read two of his stories, you would pick that up immediately. And, for someone who’s really attached to the place where he grew up, like myself, Dybek is a great model. Reading him was like, This is how you can write about place and not have the place overwhelm.

I just read the big orange John Cheever book last summer, cover to cover and it was an amazing experience. Cheever was my coach. I was writing that Gaeta section, and as I said, I didn’t know where it was going to end. I was really struggling to access the character, actually wrote about twenty-five pages and I went back and scrapped them all, wrote them all again, because I figured I needed to streamline things dramatically. I rewrote the whole thing, and throughout that process, I was reading Cheever. It wasn’t as if I copied things from Cheever or took structural things, it was just a matter of reading great writing and finding that writing was like unlocking a door. I would say, I’m stuck here, and I would go to Cheever and read for an hour, and I would get an answer. Something would emerge. A word he used, the way it triggered something, was really useful.

KING

Have you ever kept anything out of a story because of political concerns or because you didn’t want to upset someone?

JAMIE-BECERRA

To me, politics are personal, so I don’t worry about my stories having to represent a certain viewpoint, a certain belief, a certain anything. My characters have to act the way they’re going to act. A good example is in Hector’s story. Hector’s mom is racist toward her own people. Hector’s brother is dating this woman who’s an illegal immigrant, and his mom’s freaking out about it. Hector’s getting ready for his prom, and his mom is bitching at him, saying, “She’s just using you, she’s just trying to get pregnant.”

I read in El Monte a couple years ago, right when the book came out, and I was excited about it because this guy I played basketball within junior high had contacted me. I wanted to read “Practice Tattoos,” which is a story set in the 1980s, when we were growing up, so I thought that would be funny. But I arrive at this reading and the mayor is there, the guy from the local community college is there, trustees are there, so I’m thinking, I’ve got to switch gears, because they’re not going to get half of that story probably. So, I started reading Hector’s story, not having scanned through it beforehand, and I started reading that scene. I’m reading and I know it’s coming, and there’s that line where Hector’s mother says, “She’s just a wetback.”

And I read that and the older people were aghast. My girlfriend says I perceived it worse than it really was, but I felt like the air had gone out of the room. I mean, I could see the word coming, and I was reading and reading, and I could see it there on the page, and the word was getting closer, and there was no way to edit or skip it, so I just went through with it. Afterward, people around my age, in their early thirties, came up to me and said, “That was really cool.” They understood that people are sometimes racist against their own people. Older people had difficulty with that. I think it’s a generational thing. If I were concerned about making everybody happy, I wouldn’t have put that in there, but those were Hector’s circumstances.

My obligation is to be true to my characters. Those are the people I’m writing about, and I don’t think of them as substitutes for an idea, substitutes for a theory or anything like that. They’re people, so I have to represent their lives as well as I can.

YATES

Do you think punk rock energy has informed your work? Your language?

JAMIE-BECERRA

If you look at writing, at language, it’s so often about restrictions. Spelling, punctuation, grammar. You have to work within that framework. But once you know the framework, the possibilities are endless.

Punk, for me, is more an ideology, a perspective; it’s not necessarily having a mohawk and wearing plaid pants. It’s looking at music without boundaries, looking at clothing without boundaries, hairstyle without boundaries. Having bright red hair is not revolutionary now, but twenty years ago it was. And, if you look at things that way, a short story can become forty pages. For a long time, many people thought a short story shouldn’t be longer than fifteen pages. Well, I’m writing one that’s thirty-five right now, and I don’t feel worried about it. I feel I can do other things with the length of a story—as long as the character and the conflict dictate that the length is necessary. I don’t have to worry about cutting my thirty-five page story down to fifteen, because then I’m leaving something out. The confidence and willingness I have to do that is a result of growing up listening to punk music.

KING

Can you tell us a little about your early publishing history? You worked with a group called “Temporary Vandalism” that seemed to emerge from the same Do It Yourself ethic.

JAMIE-BECERRA

Temporary Vandalism is an imprint started by a college friend. He and his partner were really into punk rock, indie rock, goth rock—all that marginal stuff—and Estrellitas and those prose poems—stuff like “King Taco,” “El Mero Mero,” “Augie”—were my undergraduate thesis. I was sending it out to different poetry publishers and getting rejections, and my friend Barton said, “If you give us the poems, we can do something with them.” They were starting a magazine called Freedom Isn’t Free, making them at Kinko’s, developing a mailing list. It didn’t even occur to me to keep sending to those same poetry magazines; I just said, “Let’s do it.” I think they made 500 copies of that book, maybe less, maybe more, but nevertheless it was a great experience. I didn’t have any qualms about doing it because I was excited to work with them.

With fiction, it’s more difficult. If I’ve written a book, I want people to read it, so I have to work within that larger framework. But I’m still writing about things that interest me. I want people to read Ladies’ Night. Even though the imprint publishing my work, Rayo, is part of a larger company, which is part of a multinational corporation—they’re still doing things to change publishing. Books weren’t always published simultaneously in English and Spanish. Books weren’t published by an English publisher in Spanish. That’s a different movement within the publishing industry. And that’s something exciting to be a part of, too.

YATES

At the summer writing program in Squaw Valley, you told a story about a time when some one responded to your work by saying,“Your characters are brown, but they’re not brown enough.” What does that statement mean?

JAMIE-BECERRA

That was implied in a rejection letter to the manuscript for Every Night Is Ladies’ Night. We’re talking about the point where art intersects with commerce. First, an agent has to love what you’re doing on an artistic level, otherwise he or she will not represent the work, but I also think they have to recognize something that lets them know they can sell it. Part of what was being communicated to me was that they thought they couldn’t sell the book because it doesn’t easily fit into the categories that exist.

On the other hand, my agent could see where I was coming from, she could see that something could be done with the manuscript, and something was done with it. But these changes are still happening. Every year we see more books by Chicano writers, like The People of Paper, which is stylistically a much different book from Ladies’ Night, but it’s still breaking with the traditional ideas and stereotypes that people might have with Chicano literature.

SEBIK

You said in an interview that setting is central to some writers’ aesthetic. Why is setting so important to you?

JAMIE-BECERRA

It’s easiest for me to write when I can see what I’m writing about. El Monte has always been my home and I’ve always been happy with it as my home; it’s where I was raised—the only reason I wasn’t born there is because there wasn’t a hospital at the time. When it came time to write, at first I was writing things and I wasn’t even thinking about where they were set. And the stories were horrible stabs at wannabe Carver. But at some point, I wrote a poem about getting my dad a beer, and I worked through that, then I started to work out from my house. I wanted to write about my junior high, so I worked my way through that, and I worked on all the streets over there, and what developed was an exploration of my memory. Everything I wrote in Ladies’ Night is pretty much set between 1982 and 1989, my adolescence. A lot of what happens with El Monte in the book is exploration, me indirectly being able to revisit these places. I write about the go-cart track, which is my first memory—being at the go-cart track when I was four. I write about things that are gone, incidental things to a lot of people that have meaning for me. I can capture them, use them as a setting, as backdrop, and that’s fun but it’s also important to keep my memory accurate in some way. I’m not writing nonfiction—those stories aren’t by any means nonfiction—but the places in there are definitely real in my memory, real in my imagination, and using them is a way to keep them fresh.

SEBIK

Did using where you grew up help you start stories?

JAMIE-BECERRA

It allowed me to be honest more immediately. One of the writing clichés I have difficulty with is the sense of voice. Some writers say, “I have to find my voice. I can’t write because I can’t find my voice yet. I don’t know what my voice is.” I feel that it’s not that one has to discover a voice, it’s that one has to be honest and let the true voice emerge. It’s not something you have to work and work on; it’s not something you have to put coats of paint on and then you finally have it; it’s more a matter of stripping something away and writing honestly and directly. Once I was able to get a setting down, some silly backdrop, like a basketball court from my old junior high that I could see clearly, I could write more directly about that place because I understood it better.

YATES

Do you fear a sophomore slump going into your latest book?

JAMIE-BECERRA

I felt that sophomore slump with the first book! [Laughs.] When I started working on the new book, I had to start over because similar territory was already in Ladies’ Night. I think my response to that was to write through to the ones waiting for me, to the characters that were new. The first section in the new book is structurally the most complicated thing I’ve done because the conflict occurs in a triangulation rather than between two people. The result of my difficulty with understanding the dynamic for that conflict was that it took me a year to write those seventy-some pages. I got twenty-four, twenty-five pages in and stopped because I was like, Where am I? I realized I’d have to strip everything back and start from scratch. Then I reached a point, about fifty pages in, where I was like, God, I’m just completely lost and confused. I worked on it for the next two months, pounded my way through those last twenty-five pages or so, fifteen pages of which I ended up cutting.

So I know what you’re talking about with that slump, but a lot of that slump is other people forcing the work to grow too fast when it isn’t fully mature. I’m writing diligently, and I can feel myself growing. Whether or not people will like it and embrace it the way I was fortunate enough to have happen with Ladies’ Night, that’s out of my control.

YATES

How do you decide on an acceptable level of pop culture references in your stories?

JAMIE-BECERRA

There’s a lot of pop culture in Ladies’ Night, and a lot of pop culture in what I write about. As long as nothing depends on the reference, it’s fine. When a reader can understand the essential piece of information outside of the reference, then go ahead and use the reference. The one example that springs to mind is in “La Fiesta Brava,” the guy who’s “the worst DJ ever” because he plays the same songs over and over, “Brass Monkey” and “Jungle Love,” which are pop culture references. In the context of that passage, you can understand he’s a bad DJ without those two songs because he keeps playing the same ones. Those two references are just icing on the cake, not the cake itself. That’s what I mean: the passage doesn’t depend on the reference.

On the other hand, there’s the example: “She looked like Joey Ramone when he was on stage.” Unless you know who Joey Ramone is, you’re out of the loop, right? If I said, “He was tall. He was gangly. He was skinny. He looked uncomfortable at the microphone. He reminded me of Joey Ramone,” that’s different.

YATES

Supposedly Kerouac said he wanted to someday be known as an American writer, like Steinbeck, somebody everybody reads, rather than just a Beat writer. Do you feel like you’re being classified as a Latino writer?

JAMIE-BECERRA

I’d be happy to be classified as a writer, period. I think a lot of those terms are subjective and more reflective of the person assigning them. If someone wants to call me a Latino writer, for whatever reason, they need me to be one. That’s the fact of the matter: I’m Latino. If you want to specify it further: I’m Chicano. If you want to take the Nth political version of it, then I’m Mexican-American. If you want to look at it from a global perspective, then I’m an American writer. I’m happy with whatever term, as long as people think of me as a writer.

PATRICIA GOEDICKE WROTE THIRTEEN BOOKS OF POETRY, including her final manuscript, The Baseball Field at Night, published by Lost Horse Press in 2008. Her numerous awards include a National Endowment for the Ans fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Prize. Goedicke was an accomplished and passionate downhill skier and her poems frequently celebrate both physical movement and, quite literally, cerebral movement. In Invisible Horses, for instance, she set out to capture “what it feels like to think.” Though her books often have a thematic focus, such as The Trail that Turns on Itself, in which she decided to include all the narcissistic poems she could, her books’ themes were not always “preordained.”

This combination of cohesion and a resistance to preordainment is reflected in her long and complex thoughts, revealed both in her poems and our interview. She is known for her extended lines and extended metaphors. Goedicke can be tangential, gracefully returning to the beginning, to her starting point, but always, in returning, defining it more clearly. Peter Schjeldahl described her in The New York Times as having “discipline and the nerves of a racing driver. . .with enough vigor to rattle teacups in the next county.” The prepositional beginnings of her lines set up an expectation that is often fulfilled many lines later, after a multitude of associative meanings have been added. And yet her poetry remains grounded and memorable, rather than wandering into abstraction. Patricia’s poems “are a joy to read, and to reread. And reread,” Jonathan Holden wrote. Erica Jong wrote that she is “a poet to read in silence, to read out loud, to reread and to learn from.”

The following interview took place in the summer of 1998, at Goedicke’s home in Missoula near the University of Montana campus, where she taught for 25 years. One year later, As Earth Begins to End was published by Copper Canyon Press and was declared by the American Library Association to be one of the top ten books of 2000. In 2006, at the age of 75, Patricia Goedicke died from pneumonia related to cancer. Among her notes regarding this interview, she wrote, “Please be sure to speak of my utter joy,” and in fact her ruminations on death and deterioration are always balanced by an almost giddy celebration of pleasure and its importance, which she invites readers to share.

KENDRA BORGMANN

How has your relationship to poetry changed over the fifty years you’ve been writing?

PATRICIA GOEDICKE

I suppose the changes are much the usual. Nearly every one of my generation started off much more formally than we wound up. I wound up with more spaces in my mind, and spaces and indentations and movement over the page than I used to have, and I like that. At the same time I think I learned—I hope I’ve learned—to wander more, to leap more, and I don’t really mean to leap only in the Robert Bly sense. I am able to write bigger poems now. At the same time, every time I start going in one direction I very soon decide I’ve got to change. Right now I’m thinking I must set formal limits. I don’t mean in the sense of sonnets or villanelles or anything like that. But I must stretch out within rules because I feel I’ve become a little too loose, and I want to give myself more pressure, more emphasis on vocabulary, on language again. I’ve wanted to cover wide landscapes and I forget—I’m constantly telling my students this—that the best way to do that is to concentrate on the particular word. The word produces the landscapes of poetry, deepens them, gives them a perspective and a breadth and height and dimension that the landscapes don’t have unless the words are tended to. I don’t mean that William Carlos Williams doesn’t have that. He goes for the moment, the gesture of the moment, and he says things with a lapidary skill from time to time in the midst of this free flow of change and attention. And I hope I can do that. But at the same time I want to slow things down a little. And I don’t know whether that’s not coming back a little bit to the beginning, when I wrote with great difficulty and it seemed to me in narrower spaces.

I know myself about as little as anyone does, so I can’t really comment on my progress or lack of progress. I’m aware that my poetry has changed a lot, getting steadily, perhaps more abstract, more theme­ oriented. The last book I wrote, Invisible Horses, had a deliberately thematic orientation. I knew I was going to write a book about what it feels like to think. I did a great deal of research into microbiology and neurophysiology. I read enormously, but at the same time my father was a neurologist as well as a psychiatrist and I have always been aware of the connection between the body and the word, the body and the mind, feelings and ideas. That’s been a constant in my attention. This was just a more microscopic emphasis on it.

My other books are thematically oriented but they weren’t preordained. I didn’t decide ahead of time except for one other, The Trail that Turns on Itself, in which I decided I was going to talk about narcissism, and chose all the narcissistic poems I could. And I had plenty of them, believe me, which produced a very gloomy book because I wasn’t writing just self-absorbed, bitter, self-hating poems. Not that all narcissists hate themselves, but it’s a function of that practice, I believe, and living any kind of a real life. Anyway, that book was a result of selection. I wasn’t writing toward something, as was the case with Invisible Horses or the new book, As Earth Begins to End. A lot of these new poems have to do with earth in the sense of the earth of our minds, the mind considered as a complex of chemistry and biology and meditation, and the deterioration of the mind and the deterioration of the body that happens in age, the age of the individual organism, the age of plant, animal, human being, human couple in this case, and the whole world. We are a dying organism, the planet is, the earth we inhabit. On the other hand we are also an expanding organism. There’s an attempt in my book to come to grips with that on various levels. Anyway, if these things are changes—the two most recent books, the last one and the one I’m projecting—they are a kind of outgrowth of concerns that have occupied me from the very beginning. I began by speaking of formal changes but there’s some connection between formal and content—related changes too.

BORGMANN

When you’re writing a poem, do you write a couplet, then make a space and write the next one?

GOEDICKE

Lots of times I do, but very often also I will break things into couplets and one-liners and tercets, too, because I’m very much aware of space. And enjambments, as my students will tell you, are terribly important to me. I think that’s where the rhythm and music of poetry come from. And there is a silence that surrounds an image, just as negative space surrounds a sculpture. It’s a silence in music which lends itself to a greater emphasis when you come to a single line suspended in space or in silence. Which is what happens to the single word, say, at the end of a line, and then the single word or phrase at the beginning of the next line; the kind of exchange of balance that goes on between those two lines is important to me.

An extension of that is the indentational poem I write more frequently now. The couplets, I think, were an early expression of the same feeling. It’s not that I want to isolate things as much as give emphasis to different images and ideas in a dramatic flow. One of my beliefs is that a poem has got to move you, really move you in the old Emily Dickinson sense—if, when I read a poem, I feel the hairs on the back of the neck stand on end, then I know it’s a poem. That’s the kind of movement I believe a poem has to have; otherwise, it’s a kind of wonderful entertainment, the difference between some Shakespeare and King Lear or Hamlet.

The aim is to control the presentation of the images and the sound so that the audience is moved, the readers feel what you want them to feel. And that’s where the couplets come from, and where the line breaks come from, and where even the indentations come from. Because the movement is a matter of directing the attention visually, as well as verbally, as well as aurally, as well as kinetically. The breaking of lines and of spaces is what gets you in the gut as you read it or see it, as you feel it. I really believe what’s been said somewhere, that indentations work as a kind of subordination, not only semantically but aurally and dramatically. It’s a matter of graphics as well as aural. It never exists just on the page or in the head. It’s a combination, I think, nowadays, in our age. Poetry used to only exist in the ear but now we have both.

BORGMANN

I’ve heard it said that the most interesting poetry today is being written by women. Do you think that’s true?

GOEDICKE

I don’t believe in generalizations, but I would say there are a lot of reasons it could be true. I don’t want to say that it is true because I think there are men who more and more nowadays develop a feminine side. But I think that women are more aware of their bodies and therefore more aware of the darker, unconscious sides of life than men are. Also, women have lived for so long—have spent their lives—literately and intellectually adjusting themselves to the animus of the male, that it’s easier for them to develop the intellectual side, the animus side, at the same time they’re encouraging the feminine side, the anima side, and I think the best poetry is always a combination of yin and yang.

The movement of feminism has helped women to come to the fore and be less afraid of speaking of these things. They are able to be more whole about it than men are. For instance, women’s erotic poetry, the poetry of love and passion in women tends to be much more powerful and profound than masculine poetry, where there is so much objectification that you can only identify with it on one level. Whereas with women very frequently you will have many different sides of the relationship, of the feeling of each of the individuals involved.

I was fascinated by a remark made in a New York Times book review recently, regarding Jonathan Lear’s book, Open Minded, something about essays on the logic of the soul, whose lynchpin, according to the reviewer, is an essay in which Lear’s trying to rehabilitate Freud from some of the wear and tear that he has suffered in the middle of this century—and he suggests that Freud, or rather psychoanalysis, is important not only for our individual freedom but for democracy. That’s a remark that I couldn’t agree with more, because it has co do with understanding. He says that the danger in a democracy is people going around not knowing themselves. If we believe that everything we do is for the good, and our rational selves are triumphing, then we are perfectly susceptible to the dark side, which is always lurking. If we don’t realize that rationalizations not only seem to avoid the dark side but also tend to express it without our knowing it, we’re not going to get anywhere when we try to do things together. I don’t think he adds that. I do.

And I think that women’s insistence on the particulars of emotional and intellectual context is not only what produces the famous networking—which is the ideal vision of what a democracy should be, where things are done by consensus and informed discussion—but also makes for an illumination of both the dark and light sides of human behavior. Which is what poetry does. Which is what the image does. The reason humor is so important in poetry, the pun is so important, is because no great image in poetry ever exists on the page. It has all dimensions to it, all the layerings of dark and light, and it’s both smart and dumb, both enlightened and endarkened, and it moves us because of that.

If poetry does that it is always interesting to me, and interesting and moving to everyone, I think. And perhaps it is true, nowadays, for whatever reason, that it’s easier for women poets to do that. But I know some men poets who can. I think right now off the top of my head of Forrest Gander, or the critic Cal Bedient whose first book came out of Wesleyan last year; Edward Kleinschmidt has poetry like that; I think Jim Tate does coo.

BORGMANN

Maybe I’m generalizing, but it tends to be women who write poems from the first person, whereas many male poets, I don’t know if they’re trying to make it more universal, but it seems they don’t use “I”—

GOEDICKE

Perhaps it’s easier. Women stand on their own high heels or bare feet and want to speak to the world as “I” see it. Perhaps men in business have to speak corporate speak more than they speak “I” speak. In fact, that’s one of the things you learn as you go out and join the world of business and corporate procedures. As a woman at least, I have had to learn—in fact I never learned it successfully—I have co go into bureaucratese. I mustn’t say in a meeting, “Well, I hate that idea!” I have to touch it in the passive voice and preferably without my “I” being visible or heard. But as I say that I’m hearing, “What is the difference between corporate speak and networking?” There is a very particular difference. I think the corporate is aiming to make a monolithic, single-voiced statement: what “we” will say. Whereas the kind of statement or world view or cultural image of the soul in this century—again going back to the review of Lear’s book—would be many voices heard, individually speaking, and joining hands as they speak. And the voice of the minority is heard as well as the voice of the majority. One of my touchstones is Octavio Paz’s book of essays The Other Voice, where he speaks for poetry as the other voice, the voice of the personal, the voice of the individual, the voice of the minority, the voice of the unconscious which is a minority in our world, because in order to be civilized, we have to suppress some of our rampant, instinctual behavior. But we mustn’t suppress it entirely or we’ll be waylaid and ambushed by it. That’s one of the ways poetry works most importantly to me.

BORGMANN

What are some of your favorite essays about writing? Is it better to read about writing or read the writing itself?

GOEDICKE

Both, both, both, both. Sometimes, when I read a really wonderful poet criticizing another poet, I learn so much, because I get somebody else’s eyes on it. When I read Helen Vendler or Seamus Heaney’s marvelous appraisals of other poets, or when I read Randall Jarrell or Cal Bedient—and there are many others critics I’m slighting—that does help me a lot. Jonathan Holden is very interesting on poetry.

Donald Hall has written some brilliant things. There’s one essay of his in Claims for Poetry, in which he posits a dark wood with a fire in the center of it, and around this fire are dancing the three archetypal figures of poetry. One is called Goatfoot, the other is called Twinbird, the third is called Milktongue. Goatfoot is prancing [Goedicke gets up and prances, saying, “Oh I can’t do it. .. maybe… yes I can.”] prancing around the fire in the iambic tromp; Goatfoot is rhythm and that powerful release. And then Milktongue is the baby at the mother’s breast sucking words, sucking the world into its mouth, thinking, “I am the world and everything comes in through the mouth, and it’s mine, and my unconscious is the consciousness of the world.” It’s sounds, the aural, speech part of poetry. And Twinbird comes from, I think, the baby is sitting there making patterns with the hands, making twin birds as rhyme comes together and rhythm come together, and those three things, the rhythm, the overwhelming instinctual force, and the melos of the words themselves are the three. They all come together in another wonderful quote from him, “the dark mouth of the vowel through which the image tells its ancient runes.” That connects the mouthing of the instincts, the unconscious feeding and greed of the sound pleasure of language with the riddles that are enfolded and then unfolded from the image; they are layered in the images that poetry makes.

BORGMANN

In your essay “Entering the Garden,” you write, “Still the dream of somehow or other becoming able to accept the eventual dispersal of ourselves into who-knows-what mores of energy is essential, not only to our political well-being but to the very survival of ‘planet earth’ itself.” Does this pertain to As Earth Begins to End?

GOEDICKE

That’s what I’m aiming for. The more we realize that the inevitable is the loss of the boundaries between ourselves and the world, the less it seems we’ll cling to the boundaries that prevent us, that say “I can’t give this up, I have to have this food, these animals, this place, this space. I don’t know how to compromise.” And yet if we realize the compromise is coming no matter what, the dissolution of the self, that will help a little. I don’t think, and I have very little hope, that we can save anything, but at least perhaps we can go more gently into the night.

BORGMANN

I see that as your brand of optimism. There is something always hopeful in your poems.

GOEDICKE

Well, who’s to say? One of the things I was thinking about as I wrote Invisible Horses was consciousness. Where does it begin and end? We have a very narrow view of human consciousness. Animals have a kind of consciousness and plants have a kind of consciousness and it’s pretty humanly egotistical to say, along with the Bible, that we are the stewards of everybody else’s consciousnesses, but maybe we’re not. Maybe it isn’t so bad. I don’t know if that’s optimism. It frightens me to think of becoming nothing—nothing in my sense, but who knows what the other sense is? We don’t know what is coming. If that’s optimism, I guess it makes life a little more bearable because you don’t know for certain. There are two things that are true of beginning students. They don’t know how bad they are, and they don’t know how good they are. The same is true of this. You don’t know what’s coming. It all seems so trite and unmoving when it’s not a poem.

BORGMANN

Who are the great poets today?

GOEDICKE

My mind pulls an absolute blank on who is great. I don’t want to choose. I know poets that interest me tremendously. I’m always fascinated by Jorie Graham. I liked The End of Beauty very much. And a couple of the books after that. I like. . .[Laughs.]. . .oh. . .I don’t want to make these distinctions. I resist it because I am indisposed, I suppose habitually, to making judgments. I used to think that was a fault and I still do sometimes when I hear a really scathing critic, usually a young critic or a person with a lot of judgment, speak. In my thinking, an ideal community would be one where every view is expressed, every person’s particular, different take on the world is visible, is expressed to everyone else, and the voice would be the sound of all those different voices. That’s not choosing what’s the best. Ir’s choosing where the most agreement is. So if people ask me who my favorite poet is, I list a whole lot of poets, and that’s partly what is happening here, too.

At the same time, I’m always stimulated and pleased to be challenged by a mind which says “Oh! You can’t like so-and-so because of such-and­ such.” A lot of the time, because I have abdicated this judgmental quality, I find myself—and maybe this is a function of the optimism—going too far in the direction of generosity. That’s too nice a word for it. I let people get away with things. In talking to critics, such as that person throwing his weight around or being crisp and good about it, I like it because it makes me wake up, and makes me start to do that kind of thinking. Which of course you have to do in your own writing, when you’re rewriting. But to begin with seeing and experiencing the world you really have to do that Keatsian negative capability. Otherwise you won’t find out anything new and you won’t see anything real, anything more than anybody else sees. Keats describes Shakespeare as being a person who is able to encompass all worlds without judging. He can inhabit, without having to decide—Oh, Richard was a bad man. He is able to see Richard in all of his various aspects, and present him to the world, because he has not decided, I don’t like him. He has not insisted on his own positive input. He negates himself, is the way I would put it. The scholars would probably be outraged by a definition like that.

He also says—and it’s been a long, long time since I read Keats—”You should see the sparrow scratching on the pebbles outside. You must be the sparrow scratching.” I never thought of it before, but there is a relationship between Keats and the via negative that is an apprehension which is not prehensile, it’s not aggrandizing, but it is, to go from the sublime to the ridiculous word, “wait-and-see.” And let it happen.

BORGMANN

Is it true, as Harold Bloom has stated, that the best poetry was written by Shakespeare and that the general quality of poetry has been steadily decreasing since the Elizabethan age?

GOEDICKE

Traditionally, we say that we’re in a world where form has broken down, a world of chaos, where all forms have broken up—institutional forms, artistic forms, music, painting, poetry, the novel—everything has broken apart, as is happening to us in terms of our science. We are breaking things down more and more into particles. Even the universe is breaking down into discrete particles. We are seeing things in that sense. That means we can’t hold on to the shape of a Shakespearian play or sonnet.

But that doesn’t mean that we lose Shakespeare anymore than we lose Bach. We just hear him with different ears, feel him with different insights, think about him with different thoughts. Historically, whatever art form appears is usually initially called formless. Then our ears adjust to it as in music, as in the new poetry. We have postmodernism now, so what do we have after postmodernism? We’re adjusting constantly. Although there are giants like Shakespeare, I don’t think it’s fair to say everything has deteriorated since Shakespeare. There will never be another Shakespeare who can encompass that much. But we don’t know how we’re going to hear or understand some of the people who are writing today. We’ve already learned to hear many of them in a different way in my lifetime. When I stopped going to school, the end of my poetry books was devoted to Elliot and Pound, and many of my teachers were just throwing up their hands over Elliot and saying, “Well, we can’t understand him; this is a breakdown of form.”

BORGMANN

Do you dream vividly?

GOEDICKE

I don’t know that I dream more vividly than anybody else, but I do dream. I do not write about my dreams, because I think dreams conceal—either deliberately or just by their nature or the constitution of the dreaming mind. And it’s the business of poetry to reveal. So when I’m faced with a dream that has been moving and exciting and interesting to me, I consider it. I’ll use parts of the dream, but I wouldn’t ever just recapitulate the dream. I try to understand what the dream is saying. I very often use the word “dream” when I mean “poem,” and “poem” when I mean “dream.” A poet loose enough in a dream sort of state—not really dreaming—allowing the free play of the unconscious will come up with words and images that cause her to say, “Where did that come from?” the same as a dream will. And a poet’s response to that would not be as an interpreter of a dream, analyzing it, at least not right now, but instead to move it forward, to push, to play with it more, to do a kind of waking dreaming with it. At the same time, trying to use that other resource we have, language, to express it. Once you do that, the language begins to tell you other things, because dreams, like poems, are full of puns. But the poem is a far more conscious process, a conscious release of the unconscious. That’s why it’s so hard, because it’s so easy to will a poem. You say, “Ah! I know what that’s about.” And then you’re lost. You give a quick, glib ending, and you set the poem so it won’t move again. Whereas it may have a life that you haven’t discovered yet.

BORGMANN

Have you ever had something bubble up from your unconsciousness where your consciousness said, “No, I can’t write about that,” either because you might hurt someone else or yourself?

GOEDICKE

Oh yes. I used to just make sure the person didn’t recognize himself or herself. And if the poem were published, I’d be sure it was published in a magazine the person would never see. But sometimes those poems are the best. They are the ones, for me anyway, that are easiest and loosest, and I have the most fun with them.

It’s no accident that it’s easier to write a curse poem than a praise poem. I mean a good curse poem. You’re letting out stuff that’s original, because you’ve been suppressing it. Suppression is the enemy of originality, of course, and of honesty. We’re busy being polite and civil and we don’t let things out. I think poetry is based on both praise and cursing. . .swearing. What’s the opposite of praise? Denigration? Hatred? I don’t know. But misery, joy, those things are both there. It’s hardest to talk about the praise and the good things but you have to be able to. If you are all sunshine and joy no one is going to believe you, because we know it’s not that way. But if you bring in the dark part of it, that makes it whole. Usually.

One of the things that has always interested me is how much many of the philosophers I’ve known have been drawn to poetry. And vice versa, how many poets are drawn to philosophy. I think it’s intimately connected with, I’d say “ground and sky” or “earth and sky,” but also body and mind. I do believe if you concentrate on one aspect, you are fascinated by a lack of the other, and you want to go to it. And since both poets and philosophers are after wholeness, you tend to keep an eye out for the other, and of course both are yearning inevitably for some kind of—not an absolute—but an answer.

I’ll tell you a secret about Invisible Horses—I’m always waiting for some smart-ass person to say, “Oh, we know what those horses are in the burning stable. They’re just the shadows in Plato’s cave. We know that.” And they are, in a way, because, it seems to me, now here we are back on the dark side and the shadow, but the shadow and the substance—we’re always searching for what is substance and what is shadow. What’s particular and what’s general. How to make the particular general and the general particular.

BORGMANN

How do you write what’s in your heart when it’s painful and you want to avoid it?

GOEDICKE

Why is it easier to write about sad things than happy things? But here you’re saying some things are too sad to write about. And in a way, they are. When Leonard and I first met—in the MacDowell Colony—he asked what my favorite line of poetry was, and I said, “Brightness falls from the air,” from “Litany in a Time of Plague,” by Thomas Nashe. The brightness falls and yet fall is bright, too. And there’s always poignancy and beauty because it will not last, because it’s falling, it’s transient, and your awareness of it, that’s the shadow of the sunlight. It’s hard to write about because of that pain and yet it’s important, it’s wonderful, because in writing it, you can have your cake and eat it too. You can say, “Brightness falls from the air.” And there is the brightness. And there it is falling.

I can’t tell you the number of times that something beautiful and wonderful has struck me and brought me to tears, or almost to tears, because of the awareness that it’s not all. On the other hand, there are moments, as Jocelyn Siler said to me, that are “moments the devil can’t get at.” They’re not necessarily conscious moments, but sudden feelings, little bits of bliss that float across your landscape or emotional interior. They’re not really expressible but they are there. The fact of their inexpressibility is what encapsulates them from the devil.

When I had cancer, the first breast cancer, and even the last one, I wanted to write about it right away. But the nature of things made it impossible. Then gradually I decided I shouldn’t, and it was fine. When I wanted to write, I could. In fact, there was a period in my life when my friends used to keep saying, “Are you all right?” It had been ages, and I was cured, but they were still worried, because I kept writing about it. It’s that emotion recollected in tranquility of Wordsworth. When there’s some great grief that occurs, it’s a truism, but I think true to say that you mustn’t write about it too soon. There is some pain that takes a while to deal with. It’s frightening and so you need to wait to let it come out. But part of the way out of pain, in a way, is the shaping of it, and once you pour it out and then begin to shape it, you begin to feel some kind of control, some kind of intimacy with it which is not painful. I used to have a philosopher aesthetician teacher who talked about the “savage shriek of ecstasy.” He said we are savages. We go up to a sunset and we want to express it. We feel this glorious thing, and what do we say? “Wow, gee, come look, isn’t this great?” Or we feel a tremendous emotion toward someone, and we say, “Oh! I love you.” Or we artlessly say in pain, “Ow, ow, ow, ow.” But once you begin to put it into words, and you have any pleasure in the words, and any pleasure in the shape you’re beginning to make, then you begin to be able to stand it at the same time you begin to be able to express it. The reason you can’t do it when it’s so close is because you’re too busy saying, “Ow, ow, ow.” I think that’s how it works.

WILLIAM KITTREDGE WAS 35 WHEN HE STOPPED ranching on his family’s huge Eastern Oregon spread to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, earning his MFA in 1969. In the subsequent decades he has become a distinctive voice of the Western experience. In his memoirs, essays, and fiction he has explored the legacy of the agricultural West, and the effect of ownership and dominion on the land and people of the region.

By 1987, Kittredge had become established nationally as a writer to watch, with a new collection of essays, Owning It All, following two collec­tions of short stories, We Are Not In This Together, and The Van Gogh Field. He published a 1992 memoir about growing upon-and eventually leaving—a vast family ranch in Oregon’s Warner Valley, Hole in the Sky. He has also written the non-fiction works Who Owns The West? and The Nature of Generosity. He and his longtime companion, Annick Smith, edited the Montana literary anthology The Last Best Place, and he retired from a long career as a professor at the University of Montana in 1991.

In fall, 2006, Kittredge’s first novel, The Willow Field, was published by Knopf. Of that novel, author David James Duncan wrote: “William Kittredge is the bard laureate of the American West, and this novel will be bringing people joy thousands of days from today.” In March, 2007, Kit­tredge was named the winner of the 27′” annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes’ Robert Kirsch Award far lifetime achievement.

Kittredge was interviewed over breakfast at The Shack in his longtime home of Missoula, Montana.

STEPHEN HIRST

Your new novel, The Willow Field, just came out. After writing short stories, and memoir and essays for so long, what are some of the challenges you faced in the novel?

WILLIAM KITTREDGE

When I began writing—thirty-some years ago—I thought I would write novels. I imagined being one of these guys, Faulkner or Hemingway, who would have a novel out every two or three years. Just like that, every two years I’d publish a novel. Sure. I could never figure out how to make a novel work at all. Tried it several rimes. A friend who looked at one of them told me, “Your agent wouldn’t touch this with gloves on.”

I started writing essays because I couldn’t find ways to include a lot of things I wanted to deal with in short stories. Eventually, nonfiction began to wear out. I must have written every anecdote in my life at least once. I wrote that material to death. And when I tried to start a novel, my problem was, I was used to writing about ideas and theories. With The Willow Field, I had this business of driving horses to Calgary. And that was all. But, I thought, That’s a good thing. It’s active. Let’s get these guys moving and see what they want to do. As I’ve told students by the thousands, if your characters have to do what you want them to do, they’re just puppets, they’re dead. They should get to do what they want to do. If it fucks up the story, too bad, it fucks up the story. But of course it won’t really. The characters will bring it to life.

When I was beginning the novel, I didn’t even know where this kid lived. I had him quit high school in Reno and get a job at a ranch near Winnemucca. Then he starts screwing the ranch manager’s daughter. So the boss tells him, You’re gonna marry her or I’m going to kick your ass daily here. Or you can do the smart thing and take this job driving horses to Calgary. The kid takes the job, and meets a woman in Canada. Through all this, the characters came to life in my imagination, to the point where I dreamed about them as if they were real people.

HIRST

When you’re writing nonfiction, to what extent does fiction—or techniques usually associated with fiction—play a part in your work?

KITTREDGE

Fiction and nonfiction are in many ways the same creature. The kind of nonfiction I wrote—first-person memoir—really exists in your head. It’s a story. Writers shouldn’t invent from whole cloth in nonfic­tion; they shouldn’t make people say things they didn’t say. But to what degree is anything nonfiction? It’s always my version of the story. I’m the one deciding what to emphasize and what to leave out, organizing the anecdotes. It’s a construct that I make up. It’s my story. Someone else may write a completely different story after witnessing the same events. There’s really no such thing as nonfiction.

What got me writing essays was Rocky Mountain Magazine, started in Denver in 1978. The magazine represented a breakthrough for Western writers because it was slick, paid money, and looked like Esquire or G but it was entirely Western. The editor, Terry McDonnell, called and told me he’d read some short stories I had written, and he wanted me to write an essay for the first issue. It paid seven hundred and fifty bucks, which in those days was huge. I was used to getting ten. I said I’d like to but I couldn’t, I didn’t know how. He said, ”I’ll tell ya,” and he told me in about three minutes. It’s worked ever since. It’s perfectly formulaic, but a formula that works, an exact description of human decision-making, how we’re continually revising ourselves, telling ourselves a story and revising that story, re-imagining it, re-seeing it.

Terry asked for some ideas, and I earnestly wrote up about three, each on a single-spaced page. And I gave him three or four titles, no ideas attached. He called back and said, “I want something called ‘Redneck Secrets,’ (one of the titles). I want to be able to put that on the cover.” So I said, “O.K., sure, no problem.” Then I hung up and I thought to myself, Fuck, what are redneck secrets?

A good editor is often able to see what you’re trying to do even before you really understand, and place it  in a context which clarifies it. In the  revision process they can get you out of trouble, and point out things that are weak or not well-thought-out. I sent in “Redneck Secrets,” the first essay I ever wrote, and Terry found some things he thought were awkward and pointed out what was spongy, the soft spots. So then I went way over the top re-thinking those spots and came up with the most outrageous parts in the essay. Terry called and said, “The new stuffs great! Wish the rest of the essay was up to it.”

HIRST

What do you think are the essential characteristics of a redneck?

KITTREDGE

They’re disenfranchised people, often in the historic West of Scotch or Irish descent. Kicked out of Scotland and Ireland, kicked out of the Carolinas, kicked out of the Ozarks, pressing on and on. They tend to be libertarian, anti-government. They’re angry, perhaps justifiably, furious because of the ways they’ve been fucked over. If you go to breakfast out where Hugo’s old bar used to be, suddenly you’re not in upscale Missoula. Different kinds of people come into the restaurant, it’s a different world.

It’s more of a redneck place. I knew that world; I grew up in it. Our upscale world is speeding off into the future, and that world—they’re not on the airship yet.

SHAWN VESTAL

You wrote about writers trying to get past the romantic “lie” of the West, crying to write about the region in a clear-eyed way. How do you write about a place without being limited as a regional writer?

KITTREDGE

It’s said that if you want to have a hardback bestseller, you have to write a book that sells between Boston and Baltimore. That’s where they buy hardbacks. On the other hand, writers can live anywhere. Richard Ford lived in Montana for only a few years and yet Rock Springs is dead on the money, one of the four or five finest recent books about the contemporary West. But Richard was lucky enough to move on before he could be labeled “regional,” which seems like another way of saying I didn’t understand the emotional life of other places, and I’m not going to write about people I don’t understand. When I began this novel, I knew I would write about the West, and probably the West that I grew up in, not the West as it is now. This novel really gets away from the “cowboy West.” In any event, that world is the only one I’ve ever understood well enough to write about.

The mythology of the West is artificial. Those kinds of cowboy conflicts did exist, but those silly truth-and-righteousness stories never, ever happened—there were no Lone Rangers riding around. Years ago someone pointed out that there were more gunshot killings in a trailer village on the outskirts of Missoula in the last ten years than Dodge City had in ten years of its gun-fighting heyday.

VESTAL

You’ve noted that people in your hometown in Oregon consider you a traitor in some ways, because of your writing about the agricultural destruction of the area. Are you troubled by that?

KITTREDGE

I’d feel troubled if I hadn’t had the guts to say it. We did a lot of damage there, in shore order. We lost a foot of topsoil, the fields were going saline, we had to fertilize in various elaborate ways. Two-thirds of the water birds are gone—there had  been  enormous  flocks when we first got there. And it didn’t have to go down the drain like that. If someone doesn’t say something, it will just continue. So I don’t think I’m a traitor. Some of the practices in place now have to be changed. And they will be changed.

HIRST

Native tribes factor into some of your earliest memories, as you reveal in your memoir. How did that affect your early sense of owner­ship or mastery of the land?

KITTREDGE

When I was a kid, there were some native people who lived half a mile from us. In Owning it All I write about them, about an Indian girl dying, and watching them bury her in their graveyard. But those people, I guess they were northern Shoshone, were gone by the time I was six or seven years old. Another fellow, Don Pancho, worked for my father and his wife cleaned house for my mother, and their children were our friends, three little kids that were playmates, you know. We hung out with them about every day, somehow missing the idea that they were disenfranchised compared to us. We thought we were all basically in the same boat, except my mother wasn’t cleaning house for the Indian lady, whose house was actually tenting over a frame. We may have had some smidgen of an idea that some of those people were oppressed, but nobody said anything about it. We assumed that was the nature of things. That was how American kids were educated to accept inequality.

VESTAL

There’s a romance about the circle of writers who were in Missoula during the 1970s and ’80s—you, Richard Hugo, James Welch. What was it like to be in that vibrant community of writers?

KITTREDGE

It was like a big party. And it rolled on and on and on and on, out of control a lot of the time. There wasn’t much talk of writing. Once in a while somebody would bring something up—mostly guys like myself who had the romantic notion about writing novels. “You guys get to write a novel, I wish I could write one.” But it was fun. We were young, and destroyed a lot of relationships. The university seemed to expect that sort of behavior. I used to say, “God bless Dylan Thomas; he set the standard for us all.”

Hugo came in 1964, when he was 40 years old, and replaced Leslie Fiedler. Fiedler had been in Missoula since 1946. He was a great teacher. Fiedler changed the state, in lots of ways. You go out to Sidney or Circle and you’ll find lawyers or school teachers or librarians who were students of Fiedler’s. He was radical, politically, and those people are all over out there, still espousing free speech and maximum liberty.

Hugo had never taught. He was a student of Roethke’s at the Uni­versity of Washington around the same time as Jim Wright. And right off the bat, he had Jim Welch. He had Rick DeMarinis and Ed Lahey. They were the scars. But Hugo—these were his first classes. This guy didn’t know what he was doing at all. DeMarinis wrote a very funny piece about Hugo’s classes, about Hugo smoking cigarettes, lighting one off another and walking around the back of the room, staring out the window at co-eds. But Hugo knew what he knew. He was kind of the harbormaster for all those parties.

VESTAL

What role did drinking play in the work and lives of writers you’ve known?

KITTREDGE

In my own case, it was some kind of self-medication. It started on the ranch, because I wanted to be a writer and couldn’t see any way it was possible. I wanted to get out. Silent Spring came out and with it the feeling that, Jesus Christ, we’re ruining the world when we thought we were doing God’s work. Turned out our farming and grazing practices weren’t exactly what God had in mind. I  had an extended—I  guess you’d call it an anxiety attack. The only way to kill the anxiety was to drink. I think it happens to a lot of people. Carver was that way. Hugo was that way. Hell, everybody was. Welch was. In the Warner Valley when I was a little kid, my father had a guy who worked for him who was a stone alcoholic. He was running water on these big fields. My dad had me in the pickup when I was about six years old, and we went driving down to where there were about 200 acres flooded. Here comes this guy in his old Jeep pickup, drunk. And he looked at my dad and said, “Well, shit, you get drunk sometimes.” And my Dad looks at him and said, “That’s right, and I sober up some­times too.”

That was kind of the model for many of us around here. You’ve got to sober up. You can’t write drunk. That accounts for the fact that not much got done by some people. Drinking brought on release. It seemed like fun. It seemed like an important part of life. Hugo sobered up and wondered what ordinar­ily sober people did with all their time, how they used up the days. Some people quit altogether. Others just got it under control. Others drowned.

VESTAL

The Last Best Place is an iconic Montana anthology. How did it come to be?

KITTREDGE

Annick and I went to the history conference in Helena, and met a bunch of people. Driving back, we got the idea it’d be fun to do an an­thology. We didn’t know enough, but now we knew people who did. So we asked Jim Welch and he said he’d do it, and asked some other people and pretty soon we formed a board. We had a meeting, kind of kicked around what ought to be in there. It was pretty clear that nobody had a clear idea how to do it. We all had areas of specialty, and we split up the material. Everybody started Xeroxing pages out of things we had found, eventually 5 or 6,000 pages. We had meetings about every six months. It was a great pleasure. We became good friends. It was like a club.

The only pay we got was meetings in great places, which were underwritten by grants, places like Chico Hot Springs. Slowly we put it together. We made mistakes. There were a lot of people who should have been in there who aren’t, who just missed. Rick Bass should have been in—somehow he didn’t come on the radar at that point.

And we didn’t have a title. We were actually in a trailer house at Chico Hot Springs. We had finished the whole proceeding, and we had the book. We had a bottle of gin, and it was twilight, and we were sitting there drinking and I was smoking cigarettes and trying to think of a title. In the air there was Hugo’s The Last Good Kiss, and Lincoln—the United State as the last best hope of mankind. I said, “The Last Best Place” and everybody said, Okay, that’ll do.

HIRST

You wrote in the essay “Buckaroos” that people aren’t going away to seek their fortunes anymore on a grand scale—that nobody believes that the Beatles or big-time rodeo is going to save them. Do you still believe that?

KITTREDGE

No, not necessarily. The salvation of the world is those kids at the university or high school who are really trying to engage the world—see it fresh and come up with workable options and a sense of a world that’s decent and fair. At the same time, there’s a lot of anger from people who are disenfranchised and left out of the equation, and they get tired of the smart kids, of computer geeks, the enviros; they get tired of all this stuff.

We live under schizophrenic conditions. We live in a world where, if I have a house for sale and you want to buy it and I don’t try to get as much as I can for it, I’m regarded as crazy, and if you don’t try to get it as cheap as you can, you’re regarded as crazy. On the other hand, we sit around and have meaningful discussions like this, which involve nothing but our ideas and faiths and hopes, and you go home and there’s your mother and there’s your father, and there’s this whole generous, giving, thinking society. Whereas out here in the world it’s this completely other thing. The problem is coming up with a way to translate that private, generous world into the public world. It’s not a matter of economics; it’s a matter of emotional commitment.

VESTAL

You wrote in “Who Owns the West,” “It is the proper work of our national leaders to bring us to confrontation against our own cold heart­edness.” What’s your assessment of where this country stands in relation to its cold heartedness?

KITTREDGE

I think our society is rapidly changing—for the better. There are polls showing that cultural creatives, the people interested in art and ideas, in 1975 numbered about 10 million in the United States. Now there are 50, 55, 60 million. It’s a huge change. If that number doubles again, the whole ballgame’s different.

So I tend to feel pretty positive, and at the same rime George Bush—Did you hear Barry Lopez yesterday? He was supposed to talk about his book, and, instead, he ranted for 20 minutes about the torture bill Congress just approved. He said, “For 217 years, this would have been unthinkable in the United States. Now it’s OK. What the hell is wrong?” One of the things that’s good is people like Barry making statements like that, which they didn’t used to make.

HIRST

You’ve written about people taking pride in what they do. Do you feel it’s easier to take pride on a ranch or when you’re writing?

KITTREDGE

A lot of people ask me, “Don’t you wish you were back on the ranch right now?” Oh yeah, I’d like to live 300 miles from a bookstore. No, I don’t wish I was back on the ranch. If I did I’d probably be there.

One of the characters in this novel says, after 30 years, when you’ve gone through the same ritual 30 times, where this is June, this is July, this is August, this is September, you realize that you’re going to be going through these processes, branding and haying and so on, for the rest of your life. Some people find that enormously rewarding and some people find it enormously stifling.

I’m one of the people who moves on. No, I don’t miss it.

There’s a lot of romance connected to ranching. People forget. I remember the first thing I did when I got our of the Air Force and went back to the Warner Valley. We had to collect 6,200 mother cows for brucellosis testing. These big bang-headed mothers. And it was Janu­ary. It was sleeting, the mud about five inches deep, the cow shit about three inches on top of it. After couple of weeks of that, the romance kind of goes out of it. lt just depends on your temperament and what you want. I fell in love with books—about my junior year in college—with ideas, with writing, with the idea of being a writer. Took a class from Bernard Malamud. He was teaching five classes of comp. I lived in the Phi Deir house, and we were all jocks. These guys on baseball rides, basketball rides. First-year freshmen. And they had to take Malamud’s class.

Routinely, first class, he’d say, “All right, who’s here on an athletic scholarship? You guys, next time show up in running shoes and sweats. Would you please? I’m not going to have you in here. You’re going to go out and run around the building and at the end of the quarter I’m going to give you an A. This is not a problem for me, and I hope it’s not a problem for you. I will not have you in here. You cause too much trouble, you don’t give a shit about this, you might as well get in shape.” And no one ever called him on it.

VESTAL

What are your thoughts as you look back on your years of teaching writing?

KITTREDGE

I used to say every bar I went into, there’s an ex-student behind the bar. But it’s a great pleasure. Some of them have gone on and been real good. Maybe one in a hundred. People criticize writing programs. They used to say that a third of the people who got out of Iowa were functionally illiterate, and it might be true. People say, How can you justify that? Surely being in a writing program is at least going to make people more empathetic, better read. It doesn’t hurt anything. I think it’s a good thing. Hugo used to say it’s the only place where your life might be taken seriously

People complain about workshop stories. I never identified what a workshop story was. I know that sitting on a ranch in Eastern Oregon by yourself is a goddamned poor way to learn how to do it. You can learn it a lot faster by going to school and talking to people who know something. Things seeps in after a while, a way of thinking, which somehow works for you.

TERSE AND BOTH RHETORICAL AND LYRICAL, Jericho Brown’s poems explore race and sexuality with an unflinching gaze. Sometimes formal and always smart, the poems are infused with a sense of grace. Subjects that feel at first deeply personal become part of the experiences of a greater we. At the core of Brown’s poems is a call for love.

A New York Times book reviewer writes of The Tradition, “In Brown’s poems, the body at risk—the infected body, the abused body, the black body, the body in eros—is most vulnerable to the cruelty of the world. But even in their most searing moments, these poems are resilient out of necessity, faithful to their account of survival, when survival is the hardest task of all.” Yusef Komanyakaa writes of his collection The New Testament, “The lyrical clarity in this poignant collection approaches ascension. And here the sacred and profane embrace. . . . Naked feeling is never abstracted, and this poet knows how to see into the dark.”

Jericho Brown is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition, was a Pulitzer Prize winner; it also won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

We met Jericho outside a coffee shop in Portland, the chaos of the AWP conference swirling around us. We talked about formal elements in poetry—in particular his own created form, the duplex—race, the blues, prayer, vulnerability, and love. Jericho was popular among the passersby, and we got to eavesdrop on several enthusiastic conversations with friends and fans. Brown was charming, down to earth, candid and open; he kept us laughing with his raw and honest humor.

JOSH ANTHONY

What are you reading right now, and what do you look for in a book?

JERICHO BROWN

There are a lot of writers who are really good . . . I don’t like this question. I want that in print, that I don’t like that question, but not that I have a problem with you asking me the question. I just think there’s something that happens where people try to figure on you based on your answer to this question, and I don’t like being figured on, you know what I mean? Because for some people there’s a right answer to this question. What I’m really reading right now is George Oppen. I’m reading Keith Wilson’s new book. I think it’s really beautiful. I’m reading Vievee Francis all the time. I’m reading Natalie Scenters-Zapico. Lyn Hejinian’s last book—y’all should read it. It’s really good.

When I was getting a PhD, I was reading a book of poetry a day. I was going to the independent bookstore and if it was there, I was going to read it. I thought it was my responsibility, particularly when it came to Black poets, to know everything. So I’ve read a lot of books. If I don’t think something’s good, I don’t feel like I have to finish it. But I also read systematically. I could read anthologies and find poets that way. When you’re reading an anthology, you can sort of be like, “No. No. No. Oh! There’s something. Look!” I think I found the poet Ai in an anthology. Then I read all of Ai’s books. I had a teacher who used to tell us to figure out who our favorite poet was, who you feel you’re close to. If you read all of that poet’s work, then you’ll be able to glean who their favorite poet was. Then what you should do is read all of that poet’s work, then you’ll be able to glean who their favorite poets were, and you should read all their work, and that’ll take you all the way back to the Bible. You’ll always have something to read, and you’ll get a history of poetry.

No matter how widely I read, I know that there are people out there trying to nail me down, and I don’t want to be nailed down. And I don’t want to nail anybody down. People have aesthetic prejudices. People try to find aesthetic prejudices in other people.

HANNAH ENGEL

Do you see reinvention as a way to not be nailed down?

BROWN

No, that’s not what I mean when I’m talking about not wanting to be nailed down. As a Black poet, as a southern poet, as a gay poet, as somebody who is comfortable in all of my identities, I want for you to find out as a reader that that identity becomes of use to you, whether you are queer or not. That you are and are not in that identity. People really think that in order to like a poem, it has to be relatable. It’s so dumb. What’s relatable about Wallace fucking Stevens? If you don’t like ice cream, I guess you can’t read “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” It’s so fucking stupid, this idea, “I have to find myself in the thing and then it means I like the thing.” That is the whitest shit I’ve ever heard in my life! Stuff is not good because you’re there. That’s crazy! I don’t like when people feel like they can cordon you off, given an identity or given an aesthetic, then they can say, “Oh, I already know I don’t like that.” Bitch, read my poems! You ain’t read my poems, so you can’t say that. When I really look at it, it turns out not to be about aesthetic or identity at all, it ends up being about friendship, it ends up being about something more social.

So you were talking about reinvention. I think the proper stance to being a poet in the world is that you’re always a little mistrustful of whatever you set down. If you set down something, an idea, if your poems are proving a certain poetic, by the time you write a book, you should be doubting that poetic. My students are always trying to do something I tell them they can’t get away with doing. But then my job becomes, “Let’s figure out if you can do that in a poem.” That’s what I mean by reinvention. You need an idea of what you think poetry is to write your poems, but that idea always must be changing if you’re going to keep writing poems because after a while you keep writing that same poem.

I also think it’s a good idea that whenever we write a poem, somewhere in our writing we’re also thinking, “I want to change my idea of what poetry is in this poem.” What I tell my students about revision and cliché is that when they come upon the cliché, they don’t have to stop writing and lose their minds. You can keep going, but you need to recognize that you’ve written a cliché. If you can say, “Oh shit, I said it’s raining cats and dogs,” you might need to write that to get to the next line, which is killer. If you write, “It’s raining cats and dogs,” and then you write another line, and it’s killer, and we’re in workshop, and you bring me the poem and it still has “It’s raining cats and dogs” in it, we got a problem, because that means you don’t know the difference between the cliché and the killer line. That’s gonna stress me out! If you can have that kind of knowledge on the line level, I think you can have that kind of knowledge on the word level, on the poem level, and on the book level, too: “There are ways of being in a poem that I’ve already done or that have already been done, and maybe I’ll want to find new ways.” You don’t have to find new ways to do everything in the same poem.

I have a whole lecture on penultimates because I think they are actually more important than endings. At least in American poetry something happens right before the end of a poem where everything goes crazy, or where things get really psychological, or where the language slips just a little bit, and it’s that slippage that directs toward the end of a poem. In Frost, for instance, it always happens with rhyme. In “Fire and Ice,” he brings up the new rhyme at the penultimate moment of the poem—all the rhymes had been the same before that. And in “The Road Not Taken,” for instance, it’s “and I—/I,” so there’s a certain kind of double rhyme; he makes a literal enactment of a sigh. Komunyakaa, in “We Never Know,” says “I fell in love” in that penultimate moment.

ANTHONY

You’re really enthusiastic with your rhyming schemes—maybe not schemes, but how you move around with the language.

BROWN

For me, there’s always been, in every book, a great deal of internal rhyme, because I’m interested in the music of the line and the sound of the line and rhythm. That has a lot to do with what I think poems are.

CAYLIE HERRMANN

I love “Bullet Points” and hearing the musicality behind it while you were reading. I often don’t notice rhymes when they’re on the page because it’s not what I look for in a poem, and it seemed very different from the rest of what you do. Why did you make that shift in this book?

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.

BROWN

I was reading a lot of Gwendolyn Brooks, and I noticed that there are times in her career where she chooses a very stark, obvious rhyme, sometimes on monosyllabic words. It seems like she was trying to get at something that was at the root of us, something that was childlike in us. An example of it is a poem called “Song in the Front Yard,” which is literally in the voice of a little girl. Something about that lends itself to song, lends itself to the ballad, and when you have so called “difficult material,” it’s a way of veiling it in what seems to be simplicity, so that if something comes to you as song, you can’t refuse it because you’re enjoying it, no matter if what’s being said might be something you want to refuse. You have to deal with an ambiguity as you are reading or hearing the poem—“I don’t want to hear that, but I want to hear that”—and you’re trying to figure out why.

KARI RUECKERT

Is that childlikeness something you try to inhabit in your own work?

BROWN

Yes. I’m interested in telling the truth. I’m interested in writing adult poetry. I want people to deal with the reality we deal with. I want my poems to be an opportunity to deal with those realities. I like for people to be honest about our bodies; I’d like us to be honest in particular about women’s bodies. I think that stuff feels unpalatable to people.

Most of what I talk about is pretty regular stuff, like Black people are getting shot by the police, or fearing getting shot by the police, or us knowing that Black people could get shot by the police. Why would that be controversial? There’s a way a child learns information—you know, how you can trust children but you can’t trust them, because they will say what’s true, because they don’t know what you’re not supposed to say. That’s really what I was interested in getting at in this particular book [The Tradition].

There’s a poem by Sharon Olds called “May 1968,” which I really love. It has this moment where there’s this woman on the groundcounting, and right after that, she makes the revelation that if her period doesn’t come that night, she must be pregnant. I’ve been teaching this poem since 2002. When I ask the men in my class what she’s counting, they don’t know. They’re like, “I have no clue.” She literally says, if my period did not come tonight, I’m pregnant. But they want to fuck, and I imagine the students in my class don’t want to get nobody pregnant, but they don’t know what she’s counting. How is that? These are 18-, 19-, 20-, 21-, 22-year-old people. All the women in my class know what she’s counting.

ENGEL

You’re talking about poetry as telling truths about the body, but you’ve also mentioned poetry as coming out of the body and from your lived bodily experience. What does being a poet look like, as far as how you live bodily?

BROWN

When I’m in the act of writing a poem, I don’t know what the poem is going to be about because I think that’s a bad idea. I’m interested in following the language for what it will tell me, the sounds of the language—that’s how I write. I try to put myself in the position of whomever the speaker is in the moment of that particular poem. So, like, in the track “Summertime,” I try to put myself in the position of Janis Joplin. “Bullet Points” is in many ways a poem of prayer. What does it sound like in that intimate moment of prayer when you’re asking for something that you really need? If I do that well—this is why it’s sort of funny for me to be writing in front of people—then I look certain ways, literally, while I’m doing it. If I’m angry in a poem, I can start hitting the computer because I’m trying to become the thing I’m doing.

How to be a poet, or how to live as a poet in the body, is going to be different for each poet. For me, it’s very important to get out of my head and into my body in a physical way. So I do one of two things in the morning: I wake up and I do one hundred burpees, then I try to write for two hours. Or I wake up and I eat, and then I write for two hours. That’s my writing day. If I’m really working on something, I wake up and I eat and I write for two hours, and then I go to the gym. During the moment when I’m doing burpees or I’m trying to pick up something heavy, I’m not thinking about anything because I’m scared that this weight is going to fall on me and I can’t have my mind on anything but that. That way, when I revisit the work, it’s new to me. Before I write, I’ll pray. I’ll have a mediation period. I have a time where I read a little bit of a book, which will make me feel more grateful for who and what I am and what I have and where I am.

ENGEL

What does prayer look like for you?

BROWN

I’ll read something either by somebody like Earnest Holmes or Michael Bernard Beckwith, and I’ll read until I get to a sentence that makes me feel enlightened somehow. Once I get to a sentence like that, I put it down, and then I pray in the way that I was taught in my church. I recognize that there is a source, a God, whatever I want to call Him, that particular day. Him, Her, It. I recognize that God has in Him whatever I am affirming in that moment. If I am affirming health, or if I am affirming prosperity, or if I am affirming courage, or if I am affirming time, or if I’m affirming peace, I say, “There is a God, and everything peaceful in this world comes from one source.” I’m doing this in front of my big window in my living room, so I can really, like, see peace, because I have a yard now and I live in a quiet neighborhood, which everybody doesn’t always have. Then I say, “Well, if that God is everywhere, then that God must be in me, and therefore peace is in me.” Or whatever I’m affirming is in me. Then I say some things that are in the world every day of my life where I’m not seeing peace, but if I think about it, there is peace there somewhere. And I sort of affirm that out loud. And then I give thanks for the realization of that, for understanding that it’s there in ways I didn’t understand before. Then I release it. I let it go. That’s how I pray.

I learned that through The Science of Mind, which is where I go to church, the Spiritual Living Center of Atlanta. I grew up in a very Christian church in Louisiana, but I started to New Thought teaching when I started going to Michael Bernard Beckwith’s church, Agape, when I lived in California. New Thought is a movement that started in the 1800s; Ralph Waldo Emerson is thought of as one of its progenitors or founders. Book people, literature people who find their way toward some sort of spirituality are of interest to me.

HERRMANN

In The Tradition, you started this form—the duplex. To me it feels almost like a crown of couplets. How did you come up with that?

BROWN

In a crown, you go from the first line to the last line, then the last line repeats. I kept thinking, what happens if you just get rid of everything in between the repeats? And then I tried it, and it looked bad. And I was like, there’s got to be a way to make this a poem, to make it work. If I can figure out how to merge the formal turns of a sonnet with the juxtapositions of a ghazal with the tone of the blues, if I can put those three forms together, then I’ll have this mutt of a form—just like the person that I feel like I am in the world, a mutt, this person who for whatever reason, when encountered I’m sort of misunderstood. People are like, “What’s happening? What are you? Which thing do you want to be?” I have all these forms that I put together to make what I call the duplex, which is actually one house, but with two or maybe three houses in it. This is the best name for the merger of things that are whole and remain whole even afterwards but with a wall between them. How do you live together with a wall between you is something that I kept asking myself about these couplets—sometimes disparate, sometimes leaning into one another. I wanted some to be narrative and some to be much more lyric and to really live off of their metaphors. I wanted to see how many I could do, and so I worked on a lot of them. And then Michael Wiegers, my editor, told me I needed another one. But the other ones I had sitting around I didn’t like. I was so tired. I was like, I can’t look at another duplex. I was really frustrated with Michael. I’ll show his ass. So instead I wrote a cento [“Duplex: Cento”], which used all the lines from all the duplexes in the book.

When I was working on these poems, I was in a workshop led by Mark Jarman and A. E. Stallings. I really wanted to talk to some people who had worked with form. Because you have to learn a thing in order to do a thing. Obviously, I had written formal poems before, but I knew this was going to be a different kind of an endeavor, and I wanted to really commit to it.

HERRMANN

Do you intend for it to be something that other people can use?

BROWN

Yeah, I want everybody to write a duplex. It’d make me so happy. I want to see duplexes in every journal I pick up! I want a duplex in The New Yorker every other month.

ANTHONY

I keep thinking about the blues, too.

BROWN

It’s really tonally important to me. When I read “Theme for an English B” by Langston Hughes, I just remembered thinking, “This is a blues poem that is also somehow a narrative poem, and it’s also not using the blues structure.” There are other writers who are good at that. I’ve always been thinking about how to get that tone into my poems. There’s a poem by Hughes called “The Island” that I think does it, and a poem called “Suicide’s Note,” which I have an essay about online—I think it’s called “To Be Asked for a Kiss.”

ENGEL

I read an interview where you were talking about the transition from Please to The New Testament, about how you wanted to stay away from musical language at first when you were writing The New Testament because Please was so musical. You said you wanted a new lexicon for The New Testament.

BROWN

I still wanted the poems to be musical, although it is true that the poems in The New Testament lean toward a certain kind of discursiveness, some digression, which also meant a certain kind of flatter language sometimes, which I was interested in trying because I had become enamored of the work of people like Claudia Rankine and Marie Howe and Lyn Hejinian and Anne Carson, who were making use of a flatter language that wasn’t as tinged with music as what I had been interested in before. I see music as the artifice of Please.

ENGEL

Did you find that for The Tradition you developed another new lexicon of words that you were coming back to?

BROWN

For The Tradition, there probably are words that I was coming back to, but not as consciously. When I notice those words return, I push toward them, but in Please, those words are different in terms of the world-building of the book. There are different factors that go into the world-building of The Tradition, and those factors have more to do with what I was trying to figure out in poetry. In The New Testament, and in Please, what I’m trying to figure out with poetry is not necessarily part of the world-building of the book. In Please, I’m just trying to figure out how to write a damn poem. In The New Testament, I’m trying to figure out how to be more discursive in a poem or how to write a longer line. In The Tradition, I was thinking, how direct can a poem be and still be a poem? I was thinking about metonymy as a corrective to metaphor. Can I write poems that are based in the metonym, rather than the metaphor? So that’s why you have these poems like “The Card Tables” and “The Rabbits” where what I mean to do is look at the thing for the thing, as opposed to comparing it to something else, to bring it to the reader, to allow the reader to make whatever assumptions they’re going to make based on the thing, without me saying it’s like something else. And I’m such a metaphoric poet—which is hilarious to me, I’ve turned out to be such a metaphoric poet—but I have to say I wasn’t before.

You watch Beyoncé a long time, you see her improve on something, you see her trying to learn to do a thing, and she gets better at doing that thing, and the same thing with Lebron James, or anybody you can pay attention to. One of the things I’m wanting to figure out was, how do you use a metaphor? And I think I’ve finally figured it out. And then after I figured it out, I couldn’t get rid of it.

ENGEL

So then you were trying to figure out how not to use a metaphor.

BROWN

Exactly. The metonym was what I was trying to make, and then there are these poems titled that thing that’s sort of obvious in the world. And then there are the duplex poems, which, they’re part of the world because you know you can come across a duplex. Right? I’m interested in that as a title because I imagine that when people see the word “duplex” they see a duplex. And so they have to imagine whatever happens in the poem happening in whatever world they think a duplex is.

RUECKERT

You talk a lot about vulnerability as a poet. I see vulnerability as something that’s internal, being vulnerable to yourself when you write a poem, and also externally when you share it with the world. How do both those experiences work together?

BROWN

I don’t know how they work together. I’ll say this one thing: it is really nice to find yourself in the middle of questions of integrity in ways that you may not have found yourself in the past because you didn’t know to question when you had integrity. Vulnerability in poetry is interesting to me because vulnerability is what leads to integrity. If you are really allowing your poems access to everything you know and everything you’ve done and everything you believe, then anything can appear in your poem. And you’ll be like, “Oh shit, I just wrote that thing.” But then there’s an opportunity there because once you’ve written it, you have to decide if that’s who you really are: “I said this, do I believe that?” So simply having a question and trying to answer it, through the poem or in yourself, is the process of figuring out what you believe, understanding that what you believe is going to be based in your ethics and your morals and your values and what you think of as right or wrong, what you think of as gray or whatever. When I’m talking about being vulnerable, that’s what I’m doing. I’m making myself available to the poem as much as possible, and then dealing with what that means when it’s on the page by finishing it and allowing it to work on my life. Once you say something in a poem, you as the poet, maybe I shouldn’t say you, but I as the poet, have to say, “Well, that’s how I have to live, then.” I just can’t be out there saying that if I’m not going to make that revelation a part of my life. So once I make the revelation a part of my life, then questions of integrity come up because I’m going to be asked to do things I can’t do anymore because I think that’s crazy now. I have to realize that.

Being vulnerable to people is a little different. I don’t think I have the same questions about that in the world, probably because of my upbringing and because I had priorities for a long time. It’s not so much that I feel like I’m vulnerable, I just feel like I’ve tried my best to build a world where I can love people and people can love me, and I can trust that I am loved. You know, sometimes you don’t feel that way. But I always have to remember that when I don’t feel that way, that’s anxiety, it’s a conspiracy theory of one, telling myself that I don’t have nobody or don’t nobody love me. There are people who’ve been really supportive of what I do, and I have gotten signs of appreciation. And I think somehow that’s enough for me to know.

Here’s what I really know. I know that poems changed and saved my life, and that they continue to. I know that. Since I was six or seven years old, poems were doing work on me. And I imagine, “I like this poem, because I’m writing this poem, it feels good,” and I imagine it can someday do work on somebody. When it does, it’ll be cool. I’ll be like, “Yay, it did work on somebody,” if that comes back on me. I might not ever get to know, and I don’t need to know. So being vulnerable is easier. Maybe it’s easier for narcissistic reasons. But I think, “It worked for me, it’ll work for someone else.” It’s harder for me to be vulnerable to myself. Being vulnerable to other people—I don’t really have a choice. I have to stand behind my work. I have to do what I can to help it be in the world.

RUECKERT

You said in your interview with Divedapper that the representation of the self is a representation of the truth of the human race. And it reminded me of what James Baldwin said when he said, “The artist’s struggle for integrity must be considered as a kind of metaphor for struggle. And the poets (by which I mean all artists) are the only people who know the truth about us.” I’m interested in what that looks like in your journey as a poet.

BROWN

I just need to know that something about my work can indeed hold a place in one human heart. It doesn’t have to be that much space. Integrity isn’t only about how you live. It’s also about how you write and what you let out into the world. And how precise you are in your language. When I’m writing my poems, I’m trying to get them right before sending them out into the world. For one thing, I don’t want to be embarrassed. I think it’s important that I give the poem everything I could possibly give it and that it’s as good as I can make it.

ENGEL

How do you know when it’s at that point?

BROWN

Well, for one thing, I have good friends. The wonderful thing about the poetry community is that we’re really good to one another. We like to sit in a room somewhere where it’s a little cold and dark and uncomfortable. And we will read up on each other. For nothing, for feedback. It’s a blessing to have people who will invest themselves and support your work. And it’s a blessing to be able to do that for somebody else. And it’s also a blessing to be comfortable about it. It’s not going to be there automatically, but when it’s there, it’s a real lesson and I’m really glad that it’s there.

HERRMANN

I want to know how you get these communities. How did you personally find your community?

BROWN

People are nice. And I try to be nice to people. And I try to tell the truth. People are like, “Oh, he’s telling the truth. Let me go stand next to him. Let me go stand next to him because he’s telling the truth. I don’t want him to get shot.” [Big laugh.] I also try to be sincerely grateful to people who’ve done nice things for me. That helps to build community itself. People thank you in a real way. They remember you said thank you. You wouldn’t believe how many people will not say thank you.

I try to tell the truth, and I try to be good to people. I try to be there for people. If I see there’s something that a younger writer needs and I can meet it, then I try to meet it. Sometimes that’s as simple as reading a poem. And sometimes that becomes financial, or sometimes it becomes writing a recommendation, or sometimes it becomes talking to somebody who’s in the same place in the same city to say, “Hey, can you let this person in your workshop?” If you support the poetry you love as much as you can, that’ll happen. And if you support the poets you love as much as you can, you’re also creating a world where people will want to support you because they see you as a supporter.

ANTHONY

In an interview, you said if you’re not writing you’re teaching, but it sounds like maybe if you’re not writing you’re giving back to the community.

BROWN

Well, teaching really helps because I feel like I’m writing. When I’m really helping a student with a poem or when I’m really talking about something, I feel myself learning that thing or re-learning it or learning it in a new way. My students will see something I haven’t seen, and it will give me something to chase. So I have this entire class or two classes of people who are giving me ideas and they don’t know it. They’re asking, “Can I do this? Is this possible? Can you have a poem that does this?” I’m like, “Let me go figure it out!”

HERRMANN

Did you ever struggle with students who were less interested in poetry in any level where you were still teaching it?

BROWN

Well, I wasn’t good at it when I started doing it. We’re not supposed to be good at anything we do the first time. And we’re hard on ourselves. Writers are hard on themselves about, like, not being Whitney Houston, but even Whitney Houston couldn’t do what she started doing the first time she tried to do it. I look back, and I think about when I was an early teacher. I wasn’t so great, and I feel bad. There are these people in the world who don’t have everything that I have now, but the important thing is that you give them everything you do have.

The younger my students are, the thing that I’m noticing is, anything I ask them, they’re like, “I can just look it up. I don’t have to know it.” If that’s the case, what happens with the knowledge that you gained from poetry? Because you can’t look that shit up, you’ve got to read it. And you have to internalize it. To really gain knowledge from poetry, you have to be a poetry reader. You have to know how to read poetry. I don’t necessarily know how to combat that yet. That’s another thing I’m learning because I didn’t have that experience at first.

RUECKERT

Do you think poets, no matter what, are teaching in some capacity a lot of the time? Even if it’s casual?

BROWN

Yes, poets are always doing something. I actually have a mini essay I wrote about this. Poets are ambassadors in some way. They’re always curating a reading series or writing a review or teaching a class or doing something to give. There is still in us this belief in introducing poetry to more people so they can know its glory because more people need it. I mean, if you’re a writer, you don’t love much else more than writing. A lot of that teaching has to do with creating a space where writing can be made, that the process itself can be made public and therefore you don’t feel like a crazy person.

HERRMANN

You said in an interview with Interlochen that there’s something so recycled about it all—just making literature for other people who make literature. It makes me wonder who you are writing for, if not other poets. It also made me think about not wanting to be nailed down. If you don’t want to specifically be writing for queer poets or Black poets, who specifically are you writing for?

BROWN

I just write for me when I was nineteen. I had really big needs. And I was getting them fulfilled by poetry. I’m trying to fill that need with the poems I write. And it was a future tense need even with this book [The Tradition]. I feel like there are things that he needed to know that are here. But I’m also trying to feel that need for myself, in the present tense. When I’m reading poems, what do I want from poems that I’m not seeing? And if I’m not seeing it, then I’m making it.

HERMANN

You use beginning caps in the overwhelming majority of your poems. Since it’s so unusual, I’m just wondering what your particular reason for doing it is.

BROWN

I do it for two reasons. One is that there is a history of African-American poets doing it whose work I really love like Gwendolyn Brooks, like Cornelius Eady. It puts a kind of pressure on the line that makes the reader have to read each line one at a time and see it as a line. If you have to see each line as a line, then you have to deal with the poem on its terms as a poem of lines and as a crafted thing. You don’t get to dismiss the poem because of what the poem is about. You see it coming to you formally in a way where you have to deal with it just as formally, no matter its subject matter, which I think has to do with why a lot of Black poets were doing it.

ENGEL

That’s working in an interesting way with what you were saying about rhyme. Rhyme has this song quality to it where you have to receive it, even if you don’t like what it’s saying. The caps make it so that you have to encounter each line.

BROWN

Yeah, and I want that to be visible. I want it in the ear, but I also want it visible on the page. I don’t want you thinking you’re encountering anything other than a poem. If you have prejudices about subject matter, I want you to understand that those are your prejudices and your problems. And that you should go solve them. If you want to tell me a poem can be about anything, it just needs to be well crafted, then I want you to understand if you want to pick me apart based on craft, we can go. “You don’t know how to end a poem. You don’t know how to use a metaphor. You don’t know how to black black black black black black”—whatever you want to call your racism today. Something about the way poems are formed on the page, something about the line, something about the line break, something about all those things, any lack of that ability, becomes an opportunity for some people to dismiss your work.

ENGEL

The Tradition feels like it’s doing more explicit political things, particularly with Black Lives Matter, than previous books. Do you feel like you have to push into the craft even more when you’re doing that because there’s even more danger you might be dismissed?

BROWN

No, I don’t feel that. I feel like I have it, and so I’m going to use it because I love it. I mean I actually love this shit. It seems like a silly thing for people who are not us—it seems odd to discuss it as important—but I think it’s really important to know what caesura is and to know what a caesura can do in a line. I think that’s where it is. I’m excited about it. My poems are what people will call more directly political. But I’m not really thinking about any of that when I’m writing a poem. In the midst of writing a poem, I don’t know where it’s going to go, what it’s going to be about, or how it’s going to work out. I do know I have that in me, so that’s a possibility. When you shoot an 18-year-old and then have his body laid out in the street for hours, I have emotions about that. And some of those emotions probably come from the fact that I’m Black. And some of those emotions I would hope are there just because I’m a person. As a person, I think it’s not a good idea to shoot people and to have their bodies laying out in the street for hours. I don’t think that’s cool. And I would like to believe that people will agree with that, that people don’t think that’s okay. That’s in me, somewhere walking around in my body, my psyche, who I am, so that might come out when I’m writing a poem. But when I’m writing a poem, I’m actually thinking much more about, “Should I make a leap here? Should I indent this line? Do I say the next thing, or do I make a metaphor first and then allow that metaphor to become the next thing after that?” As I’m asking those questions, I’m saying things people keep telling me are intense. But I don’t think it’s intense. Look at the world right now! People are out here acting like my poems are controversial. Girl! Seriously! Like, seriously! People are like, “Oh your poems are so sexual,” like what porn do you watch? My poems are so sexual? Me? What TV show are you watching?

I thank God for Alice Walker every day. She wrote a book called The Third Life of Grange Copeland, which was very important to me, particularly given my own childhood and my own past. I saw her giving a speech, and she said this thing about how she didn’t understand why every image of two people having sex on television and in movies now looks like rape. Somebody has got to get pushed up against something every time, and we’re programmed to believe that’s what feels good. But my poems are too sexual? I tell my students, “If you are just being offended left and right, you’re not going to have a good time in my class.” But then, I also say to my students, “And if you are offended by the fact of something in a poem that you love in a movie, we are not going to get along.” People out here are mad that there is sex in poems. But you’re trying to have sex!

“All your poems are so violent.” What? Do you watch the news? It is so ridiculous! You’re out here pretending that we’re not living in this world together. Why are you pretending that? How have you managed to isolate yourself, that you are not aware of the world, or you are trying to pretend the world does not exist? What kind of hatred is that?

HERRMANN

Do you have any advice for young poets?

BROWN

I think it’s important that you say yes to everything. Try not to say no. If there is something that you have an inkling to do, just go do it. If there is something you have an inkling to write, go write it. If there is something you have an inkling to see, go see it. Go make it happen. But I’m also saying be careful. You might have an inkling to walk down a dark road in the middle of the night by yourself. Don’t do that. But other than that, experience and see. Experience and see. Also, I think it’s a good idea to live the life that you claim. Live the life of whatever identity you’re claiming and if you are a poet just decide now what that looks like in terms of your time. For me, that looks like two hours a day. For you, it might look like fifteen minutes a day.

You keep the overhead low, that’s what Grace Paley used to say. Instead of getting the room that’s $127 a night, get the one that’s $125 because you will need those two dollars. Create some discipline in your life when it comes to the writing. I don’t think that has to be at the same time every day, although if it is at the same time every day, you know when it’s going to happen. I don’t think you should be going to sleep without practicing. You’ve got to practice some. Practice a little.

RUECKERT

On an Instagram post, you say rebirth and renewal are kind of like an invitation. What is your perspective of those words, rebirth and renewal?

BROWN

I just love spring. I was born on April 14th, and Diana Ross was born just a few days ago, and Billie Holiday is an Aries as well. I think it’s the poet’s season. I think Persephone, and I think Orpheus, those mythological people who had something to do with coming up from the underworld. There’s something about that that I think has a lot to do with writing. Making something out of nothing. Creating something, recreating something. There are these memories we have and we put them down or these facts we know and we put them down, and that becomes a whole other thing, other than the memory or the fact. That’s sort of my relationship to writing and to the way I think about . . . I love the fact that I can see, smell, feel spring happening all around. It’s a busy time because of AWP, my taxes are due, the semester’s ending. I have a birthday coming up and everybody wants to know, “What are you going to do for your birthday?” Take a nap. A very long nap.