Category: Interview

Interview: John Sibley Williams

John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. A nineteen-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: The Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and various anthologies.

 

Daniel Lassell corresponded with Williams last year, near the release of Skin Memory.

 

Daniel Lassell for The Florida Review:

Your newest book, Skin Memory, has a lot of subjects and themes that emerge throughout the reader’s journey. I found many poems touching upon topics of family, parenting, loss, home, violence, privilege, and societal and ecological concerns—all of which seem to buoy, contrast, and converse with each other. Which was the subject/theme that compelled your poetry most when writing, versus which emerged most clearly when editing the collection for publication?

 

John Sibley Williams:

What an interesting question. It’s certainly true that during the editing process, while sifting through a hundred or more poems in search of common themes and structures, unexpected threads emerge that weave seemingly disparate explorations together into a single tapestry. Of course, each poem tends to incorporate more than one theme, using the overt to subtly imply a more foundational concern. For example, when discussing parenting, societal gender expectations or our destruction of natural landscapes may be seething beneath all that talk of cradles and lullabies. When I mention the freedom of youthful play, say swinging from a tire trying to toe the clouds, that same tree will likely be shown in an ugly historical context. No poem can be boiled down to a singular theme. So, in this regard, editing isn’t so much trying to force pieces together as it is recognizing the varied themes in each poem and seeing which, both overt and implied, belong together. A collection should read like a river, not a puzzle. In a way, it’s an act of witness. And, at least for me, this isn’t dissimilar to my writing process. I never set out to write a particular kind of poem or to explore a specific theme. They emerge naturally, as if the connections were already there waiting for me to see them. All we can do is write about what haunts us and to do so as authentically and with as much vulnerability as possible. Every theme you mention was equally important, was equally a driving force, behind both my writing and editing.

 

TFR:

“A collection should read like a river, not a puzzle”—I love that. And Skin Memory certainly does read like a river too, easing readers between poems as if on a raft, encountering rapids and wet clothing along the way. Poetry acting as witness is a beautiful thought as well. It makes me think more specifically of your poem, “Death Is a Work in Progress”—a heart-wrenching portrayal of a mother, the decline of the human body. It harkens back to your earlier collection, Disinheritance, which explores this subject of mortality in great detail. Can you speak a little more to this relationship between parent and child, life and death, in your poems? It seems to be a theme in your work that you return to often.

 

JSW:

I’m thrilled that you recognized these overarching themes across multiple books. In the end, we write about what haunts us, what keeps us up at night, what stalks our mind’s periphery, just out of sight, emerging from the darkness to remind us how fragile we really are. A bit like wolves, perhaps. And what better way to explore fragility than through discussions of the body and our intimate relationships? I’m terrified of no longer existing. Like everyone else, I’ve lost and know that the more I love, the more I have to lose. There’s this double-edged sword, this balancing act, between wanting to open my heart to the world and fearing such an act’s consequences. And I fear my own body, how it will naturally react to age and disease. But it’s exactly this impermanence that makes each breath, each embrace, each poem meaningful. So, I suppose, most of my poems to varying degrees try to walk that tightrope. Skin Memory includes poems about my children, specifically the traits I may be passing down to them, that were passed down to me. It speaks of my father, whose father was a rough man, and how all that tumbles down to my own young son. And, with “Death is a World in Progress” and many of the poems in Disinheritance, I witness the steady mental and physical deterioration of my mother. These are simply different lenses through which I consider the same central question. I just can’t tell if I’m not loving enough, or loving too much, and what the full consequences to either are.

 

TFR:

Indeed, Skin Memory does resonate in all of these areas. As a father myself, I am increasingly drawn to poems that hold the subject of parenthood in conversation. Having spent time with your earlier books and reading up to your most recent collection, it seems that since becoming a parent, you might have undergone a personal shift. Of course, any artist should evolve in their art; but I also recognize a palpable difference between Disinheritance and As One Fire Consumes Another, which published in Spring 2019. Not to digress too much, but was Disinheritance written before or after you became a parent? As One Fire Consumes Another seems to drive more of a political message than your earlier work does (at least more overtly). No doubt it has much to do with our political moment, but Skin Memory also seems to act as a continuation in this focus. How would you characterize your poetic growth over time?

 

JSW:

I agree with you that, as writers, we should try to push ourselves into new, often uncomfortable themes. Growth is probably inherent to writing for a long period of time, but I still worry about stagnation, by which I mean writing about the same themes in the same tone using the same structures. It’s easy to fall into the trap of writing what about what we’re already comfortable with. As One Fire Consumes Another was an attempt to break out of my comfort zone by focusing, to a degree, on our current cultural and political climate. But, more importantly, I meant to explore my own place in that culture, which includes culpability, guilt, privilege, and family history. Skin Memory continues on those themes, though less directly, incorporating my my children and mother, with a greater degree of intimacy.  I feel Skin Memory exists somewhere between Fire and Disinheritance. Structurally also, as my earlier work was predominantly free verse, Fire… was newspaper column-like prose poems, and Skin Memory incorporates both, with the addition of more standard prose poem structures. So, in terms of growth, I feel experimentation is key. Sure, plenty of poems end up on the cutting room floor. Not all structures I’ve played with ended up feeling authentic to my voice. But we have to keep pushing, testing, and rethinking our preconceptions about our own work.

 

As it pertains to parenting, I’m not really sure how my work has changed. I write less, sleep less, can concentrate less. Raising twin toddlers is even more exhausting than I could have imagined. But within the stress and anxiety, I have expanded my definition of love to such a degree that I can no longer say I’d experienced it before my kids. My heart is more troubled but fuller.

 

TFR:

I think “more troubled but fuller” is a profound way of describing the interconnectedness of parenthood and love. And I hadn’t considered Skin Memory as a balance between Fire and Disinheritance until just now, but it sort of is. It’s the wave that settles after the body enters a bathtub. If we can, I’d like to explore your thoughts on the prose poem, since you mentioned form. My first poetry teacher was David Shumate, known for his prose poems, so my introduction to poetry is inextricably tied to this form—I’ve come to feel at home in it. But for others, the prose poem might represent or conjure apprehension, confusion, distain, etc. In Skin Memory, there are several poetic forms other than the prose poem, but I’m interested in why—when selecting the right vehicle to meaning—the prose poem felt like the best fit.

 

JSW:

Well, apart from the poems in Fire and Disinheritance, which were a set structure, I don’t begin a poem knowing in advance what it will look like on the page. I often experiment with various arrangements before, for whatever intuitive reason, something clicks and the poem screams, “This is my form; this has always been my form!” So, the simplest answer to your question about knowing when a prose poem is the best vehicle for a particular piece is, well, intuition. But, to be more precise, a lot of it, for me, has to do with three things: flow, the tension created by line breaks, and the sound of the poem when real aloud. Poems that are more fragmented or dense with metaphorical imagery may require more white space to allow a reader to digest each line, place it in its larger context, then move on to the next line. Other poems, especially narrative ones rich with connected imagery that doesn’t take as many huge leaps in logic, may thrive more with longer lines. But even this simple answer isn’t really accurate. Sometimes abstractions can be squeezed together, running one into the next with no room to breathe, to create the desired flow. Sometimes a straightforward narrative can be shattered and reassembled into something visually unrecognizable. Perhaps the easiest way to describe it is that: flow. How do I want the poem to read? Should it drive, propel? Should it strike with short staccato knives? Should it slowly, steadily paint a massive portrait out of smaller components? All this leads me back to intuition. Our ears know how a poem should be read. Our eyes know what the poem wants to look like. Listening closely and equally to both seems to strike the right balance, at least for me.

 

TFR:

You certainly do seem to have an intuition for what works on the page. This attention to flow, or cadence, seems to drive a lot of the poems of Skin Memory. Is there ever a disagreement between these two realms of the page and the tongue? In developing your intuition, does this mean finding a comfortable balance between your voice and poetic style? How does one develop their intuition?

 

JSW:

I think creative intuition simply comes from writing and studying others’ writing for so long that that various elements (and organs) learn to listen to each other. Over the years and decades, you learn to step away from yourself and trust the page. The poem begins to speak to you before it’s even written. Of course, all of this is an internal process, but it begins to feel as if your poetic decisions are born of an outside force. I wonder if that’s what some people call “the muse.” But it’s really just muscle memory. It’s having failed and failed and occasionally succeeded for long enough to unconsciously recognize when a poem is working and when it’s not. It’s the ear and eye thriving in a symbiotic relationship. Less and less of our creative decisions become conscious ones. We just know. And, sure, given the subjectivity of any artistic work, we still fail plenty. But I have found most of my newer poems that don’t quite work fail because I inserted myself into them; I didn’t shut up and listen to what the poem wanted to say.

 

Perhaps because of this “trained intuition,” I rarely find discord between the appearance and sound of poem. They both come pretty naturally, without me having to force it much. Admittedly, in trying to push myself, I do experiment with structures I end up abandoning because they don’t look or flow right, but I usually recognize this incongruity early on and find a more fitting structure before poem’s end. For sound, part of my composition process involves reading aloud every line over and over to ensure the lines that follow match the auditory tone and rhythm. Our ears know what sounds awkward.

 

TFR:

That makes sense. Somewhat relatedly, what are your thoughts on the accessibility of poetry?

 

JSW:

That’s a great question, and one on which opinions vary greatly. I suppose the subjectivity of “accessible” can be cause for this divide. For example, many have argued that down-to-earth poetry that paint personal narratives with clear, everyday language is the cornerstone of “accessible” work. By that definition, I suppose I prefer more challenging literature. That’s not to cast judgment, as such work is indeed valuable and is many people’s introduction to poetry. It’s all a matter of personal resonance. But I feel this common description limits the definition of the word. There’s also emotional accessibility. Even if a poem is fairly abstract, surreal, or bursting with what Robert Bly called “leaps” in logic, that emotional core that unites the disparate elements can be accessible. That heartache, grief, turmoil, doubt, celebration. That bit of light that filters through and puts into perspective darkest night. Even without a followable narrative or commonplace language. To me, that is the kind of accessibility I enjoy reading and tend to write toward. It’s that honest, vulnerable, universal core question, around which the other poetic elements whirl, that makes all poetry, regardless of its structures and rhythms and themes, inherently accessible.

 

TFR:

I like that way of looking at it, and indeed there are several opinions out there. For me, I tend to go back and forth. I agree that challenging literature can be fun, and doesn’t have to be the first form of poetry someone encounters. On the other hand, word choice is one of the things that separates poetry from other written art forms, and therefore, word choice is what makes and closes off meaning. In this vein, when a poet intentionally closes off meaning, it becomes a question of whom is getting closed off from that meaning and why. In this realm, I guess a discussion of accessibility can’t go without acknowledging privilege too, as we are both white males. In this modern age, how should a white, male writer compose poetry? It seems like there’s a duty to explore and dismantle our own privilege in art—and in living in this world more generally. The poems of Skin Memory do their part to confront difficult realities, privilege being one of them. For example, “On Being Told: White Is a Color Without Hue,” “We Can Make a Home of It Still,” “On Being Told: You Must Learn to Love the Violence,” and “Inviting Fire in Northern Michigan in December” all seem to interrogate privilege in some form. Even the book’s title encourages an exploration of racial and societal disparities. How and when does it make sense for a poet to rail against their own privilege in writing?

 

JSW:

This could not be a more crucial question. Privilege comes in so many forms, most invisible until you shine a light on them and see their hazy edges. Gender, sexuality, race, religion, socio-economic status, family status, and even these have gradations. They all combine to give us a cultural advantage or disadvantage, and exploring my own advantages and how they contrast against those born or raised without them is a central theme of my work. Even when it’s not overtly discussed, as it is in the poems you referenced, that recognition of privilege and what it means as an individual and a member of a larger community hums beneath all my poems. In the end, it all comes down to a mixture of self-awareness and empathy. It’s a balancing act between witness and action. All of us whose privilege allows us the space to write freely, who aren’t judged by superficial qualities, who needn’t fear police or politicians or bosses who could withhold that one paycheck that makes our children go hungry, we need to investigate how we got where we are and what we can do to expose such inequities. The question is how. How does one explore privilege from the inside out? Often met by controversy, some privileged poets have chosen to adopt another’s voice, to attempt the persona poem. I feel confident that these attempts are well-intentioned. However, I don’t feel that’s my place. If I have not suffered as so many others have, who am I to speak in their voice? Instead, I write about privilege in two ways, by discussing my own safe white lineage and by writing about others (instead of writing from another’s point of view). And when writing about others, I don’t hide the fact that my perspective is inherently tinged by privilege. That’s what I mean by combining self-awareness and empathy. So, in short, I passionately agree with you about the necessity for poets to consider their own privileged status in their work. However, all this said, I don’t believe in shoulds. Who am I to demand every poet write about these themes? If a privileged poet writes exlusively about gardens and alders or the grief of a loved one’s passing, that is their choice. We write what we need to write. And not all of us need to write about our privilege. But I do. It’s one of the ghosts that haunts me. The only way I’ve found to deal with it is by looking it square in the eye and admitting my role in its creation.

 

TFR:

Thank you for your thoughts in this area. “A balancing between self-awareness and empathy” describes well, I think, what poets of privilege can do in their work. And I know the topic of privilege can be a difficult one to broach, since it’s one that touches every aspect of people’s lives (and indeed, we as white males do bear a shitload of culpability for the wrongs of this world). For this reason, I do think it’s a conversation worth having. As more underrepresented voices continue to enter the literary firmament, how best could writers of privilege welcome them? What new voices have you read recently that you’re super excited about?

 

JSW:

The literary establishment has been making great strides but still has much more to do before underrepresented voices become as mainstream as those voices that have dominated our landscape. I don’t work within that establishment so cannot speak to the steps they are taking. I have read articles critical of how major journals and organizations still approach underrepresented poets, and I continue to hear such stories from peers who have attended national poetry conferences and felt tokenized. Luckily, it seems many presses and organizations are opening their doors wider than ever before in terms of offering awards, open reading periods, specific book series and issues, and other avenues open exclusively to underrepresented poets. In terms of what you and I can do, I have spent the past few years reading almost exclusively books by contemporary poets who do not fit the traditional white, male, CIS, able-bodied model. And these are the authors I teach in workshops and classes in hopes of opening students’ eyes and hearts to new perspectives on culture, identity, and politics.

 

I don’t even know where to begin a list of my favorites, but here are a few I feel everyone should become intimately familiar with: Ada Limon, Tracy K. Smith, Jericho Brown, Fatimah Asghar, Tarfia Faizullah, Jenny Xie, Ocean Vuong, Craig Santos Perez, Safia Elhillo, Joan Kane, Abby Chabitnoy, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, whose book Cenzontle (BOA Editions, 2018) is one of my all-time favorite collections.

 

TFR:

I agree that expanding one’s knowledge of the world through reading is a great place for anyone to start—and for those in teaching roles, assigning a wide array of literature that both includes diverse populations and challenges traditional norms is an equally important approach. And what an amazing list of poets you’ve shared, too. We truly are living in a golden age of poetry right now, Skin Memory included. Before we close, are there a few lines from Skin Memory that you’d like to share for readers new to your work?

 

JSW:

Well, in keeping with the themes of our conversation, I’d like to choose two selections that deal with privilege, history, and my responses to them.

 

The first is from the collection’s titular poem, “Skin Memory,” in which I address the incredible Inupiaq poet Joan Kane and wonder about the effects of my race’s privilege as compared to how her culture has been treated.

 

Because you are what song breaks open your throat and because

the same century burns a different mark into me. For now I can just

listen. To how choreographed our forgetting. To the dark little

narratives of this is mine / yours, in that order. Can you sing this

country its name?

 

The second is from “There is Still,” in which I investigate Mark Strand’s celebrated closing lines from “Keeping Things Whole”:

 

We all have reasons

for moving.

I move

to keep things whole.

 

In response, my poem explores time and privilege in recognizing how, while swaying in a tire swing, the speaker realizes that same tree may have been used for different kinds of…rope. And it changes the way he approaches the tree…and himself. The final lines of “There is Still” read:

 

We / all have reasons, Mark. I hope I am / swinging to remember.

 

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Interview: Jim Ray Daniels

Cover of Rowing Inland by Jim Daniels.     Cover of The Middle Ages by Jim Daniels.     Cover of The Perp Walk by Jim Daniels.

 

Jim Raymond Daniels was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1956. Since 1981, Daniels has been on the faculty of the creative writing program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor of English. His literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series, and he has won the inaugural Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 1985 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was educated at Alma College and Bowling Green State University. Daniels also collaborates with director John Rice to create films of merged media. He is the author, editor, co-editor, or scriptwriter for forty-four books and films.

 

The following interview took place with Jim Ray Daniels on November 18, 2017, at the Miami Book Fair. Since that time, he has published an additional collection of poetry, The Middle Ages (Red Mountain Press, 2018) and a collection of stories, The Perp Walk (Michigan State University Press, 2019), as well as co-editing Respect: The Poetry of Detroit Music (Michigan State University Press, 2019). While this interview focuses on Rowing Inland, we hope it will illuminate Daniels’s prolific output and poetic sensibility more generally.

 

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:

Before we talk about your collection Rowing Inland I want to get you to speak a moment on imagery. I watched the trailer for one of your films, The End Of Blessings, based on your poem of the same name.

 

The camera follows an African American cyclist on his weekly Sunday ride, when he regularly passes an older Italian couple sitting on their porch after church. There’s no dialogue. You concentrate on imagery, sounds, and the breathing, and you’re taking the art of poetry and putting it into film. This may sound naïve, but I was blasted by the film. I mean, we don’t expect to see these kinds of crossovers of art forms.

 

Jim Ray Daniels:

We know when we make these short films that we can’t expect to make any money off them. There’s been other films made of poems, and typically you’ll see the text on the screen, or the voice-over, and we were like, yeah, we’re not going do to either of those things. We want to make a work of art and do something interesting and different with the medium of film, and so we focus in on sound and imagery, which are also huge parts of poetry writing. In that way, we hope we can get across the essence of the poem.

 

TFR:

I love that, because when you’re introducing someone to poetry, they can feel quite intimidated They may be too concerned they might not understand poetry. In my intro to poetry classes, I show students pictures of cave paintings to stress the importance of imagery and the ancient tie we have to images. When I watched the video this morning I thought, wow, I want to use it in the classroom.

 

Daniels:

I’ll give you the link to the full film.

 

TFR:

Thank you! A film like this will help the student move away from words and worrying about the words’ meanings, to a place where they see the images and hear the rhythms, and we don’t mean perfect end-rhymes. It might spark them to pay attention to sound as they move about their world.  So, tell, me, where did this idea came from? I read that you are an avid cyclist—

 

Daniels:

That’s correct.

 

TFR:

What sparked you to do this? To move from the poem to the film?

 

Daniels:

As a writer I try and find what’s going on beneath the surface—and in Rowing Inland, I think you see a lot of it, too, where on the surface it doesn’t seem as if you see a lot of things, or like nothing interesting is happening. So, a guy riding up a hill on his bicycle—on the surface you don’t think there’s anything going on, but there really is a lot layered in there.  And, I try to write a lot about my own experiences and enthusiasms. The director—he’s my partner in these films, his name is John Rice, he’s great, he’s also a big cyclist, and he said, “Have you ever written anything about cycling? Maybe we should make a movie about cycling.” And I said, “I got this poem, ‘The End of Blessings,’” and he said, “We can do this!” It’s a short film, and it and the poem each are in three parts: You rise up the hill, the old couple’s there, you rise up the hill, the old couple is not there, he rides up the hill, and the woman is there by herself.

 

I gave away the ending (laughs).

 

TFR:

I think it’s a wonderful medium to get people to see poetry as they walk down their street, go to the local store, to see images and hear rhythm all around. Anything to get people to appreciate poetry, but I don’t have to tell you that.

 

Daniels:

(Laughing) No, no.

 

TFR:

Rowing Inland is packed with imagery, imagery of Detroit in particular, and memories of adolescence, and parents and the grandfather, the yard, and mowing grass, there’s just so much here. When you’re writing, are you back there in your mind, where you are this past self again?

 

Daniels:

I get transported back to those places. And it’s really exciting as a writer—as a writer yourself I’m sure you’ve experienced this, too—where suddenly the process of writing does take you back. One of things poetry does is preserves moments in time, like photographs, an emotional kind of photograph, and I like to keep track of things and go back and move forward and revisit things I’ve written about before and see them differently through the lens of the present. I guess I’ve always written a lot about Detroit, and first there was some concern I was repeating myself, but—I feel like I always bring this up, it’s my mantra—novelist Richard Price said that where you’re from is “like the zip code for your heart.” I just remind myself that no matter where I go that’s in me, that place is in me and those people are in me, and they help shape who I am today. There’s the mother lode of experiences when you’re growing up and adolescence too, though not the whole book is about that.

 

The other thing for me, with that book, is people say, where are you from?, and I say, well I’m, from Detroit, because it’s easy to say, and, yeah, I was born in Detroit. But we moved to Warren, Michigan, right outside Detroit when I was a young boy. And so here, in this book, I deal more with Warren, which is the city bordering Detroit, where I went to high school. People from Detroit know that Warren and Detroit are two very different places. And, it has to do with coming back to James Baldwin in a way, with race. In Jeffrey Eugenides’ book Middlesex, he has some scenes of the riots in Detroit in 1967 and he once said, “Detroit is always about race.” And I wanted to make that distinction, so the long section in the center is a series of poems that are connected called “Welcome to Warren.” I wanted to capture this place people would just drive through, because it’s so anonymous-seeming. It’s basically houses surrounded by car factories. I wanted to try to bring that place to life—even if all the houses on the street look the same, the people are all different.

 

TFR:

Often there’s a way you might enter a certain collection, maybe from an emotional place or a geographical place, some kind of familiarity, some commonalities, and there was so much for me to discover in this book that was familiar to me. I’m from Chicago. Chicago, Detroit—you and I grew up within a few years of each other, in the land and culture of the steel mill towns, so when I read this, I kept going “yes” and I’ve already marked, noted, and highlighted the heck out of it,

 

As I read, I was conscious of how you were returning “home” as poet, and I thought about how I return to Chicago in my writing, though I haven’t lived there in decades. It’s my haunt, my muse. So I’m reading about the Detroit area, I’ve been to Detroit several times, I have relatives close by, and I kept feeling how much this is a familiar place, yet it is so much more than just one place.

 

Daniels:

It’s funny you mention Chicago, because Chicago writer Stuart Dybeck was a huge influence on me as a writer. So Chicago was his town, and he really brought it to life in his poems and stories, he writes both, and was a influence on me as a young writer.

 

That’s the key to writing about place so that others beyond that place can appreciate it, and that’s where the imagery comes in. Even though somebody may not be interested in going in an auto factory, you’re going to pull them in and say, Hey! look around, There’s poetry here.

 

TFR:

There is, and you’ve sparked me, inspired me with images of empty factories, the steel factories, which might sound strange. Also, there were so many poems in your collection that talked about the basement, and most of us who grew up “up north” had basements—down here in Florida, we don’t have basements, but there are so many poems in Rowing Inland that refer to the basement—

 

Daniels:

I never thought about that! But, yeah, (laughing) the basement’s big!

 

TFR:

In my life, the basement was a place, is a place, that holds a lot of memories. I was so touched by these particular poems, and I think that you as poet sometimes don’t know how your work, your words, might reach a reader until the book’s been out a while and you start to hear from readers.

 

In writing about the basement, you also wrote “upstairs she kept the order”—speaking about your mother— and then, “Downstairs, he drove another nail in.” You bring us into this neighborhood, this home, so that much of Rowing Inland is clearly set not in the heart of the city, but in a suburb, that commonality of so many Americans. At least, that’s where the first section is; the book is organized into four sections—

 

You have a line in here, where you’re an adolescent where you don’t quite understand what’s going on in the adult world, and in the “eight mile,” where you have physical landscape a little removed from the city—and as a poet, you make the connections and, then it reaches me, who grew up in a different city. Do the connections surprise you? Or do you feel they’ve always been there and just sort of bubble up a little bit?

 

Daniels:

I like when the connections surprise me. Your subconscious mind keeps going back to things without your realizing it.

 

And it’s true that adolescence is a time, especially in the suburbs, where we often didn’t fully understand what was going on. Eight Mile Road is the border between Detroit and Warren where the rapper Eminem is from. He did a film called 8 Mile, because he’s from that area, and there’s this whole border mentality, and that’s why he called the movie 8 Mile, and it’s like ten lanes wide and in the Detroit area. This kind of border mentality has kind of a symbolic resonance. It was interesting growing up there as a kid—you didn’t quite understand what was going on, such as with the riots in 1967.

 

TFR:

I want to ask about a poem that haunted me, the one about the young woman who died, in the fire?

 

Daniels:

Marlene, in “Calling out Marlene Miller.”

 

 TFR:

You were in Warren then.

 

Daniels:

Yes. She haunts me. Basically, your first death growing up—one that’s not like a grandparent. It is huge. Your first love is huge, but especially when your first love is also your first death.

 

 TFR:

And having to put those two together—they don’t leave you. You’ve written about her before.

 

Daniels:

It keeps on, I wouldn’t be surprised if I write more about her at various points.

 

TFR:

Some of us have one muse, some several, but we keep returning to them. I tell students to return to them. They’re bittersweet, those sorrows. Marlene Miller comes back again, in this book.

 

Daniels:

I think there’s three poems in here about her.

 

TFR:

I was surprised that she continues, yet there was a sense of satisfaction that she does. I start to feel like I know Marlene or I knew Marlene. There were Marlene’s in my life, and I believe many of us have such figures who haunt us.

 

Would you read a poem for me? “Weeding Out the Week”? Loved it. Took me back to the little brick row houses just south of Chicago, of Riverdale, where I grew up. The weeds, the brick, the rough brick.

 

Daniels:

Yes, sure, and it’s about trying to find your hiding places (laughs).

 

 

TFR:

Yes! Can young people even have hiding places anymore?

 

Daniels:

That’s a good question. I don’t have the answer, but in our current culture I think it’s harder. Behind the garage, between houses, little places where things were peaceful, and you could sort them out on your own. without the whole world watching

 

TFR:

To turn to your personal voice, there’s a poem where you were coming into a sort of self-realization. You say,  “I only faintly began to realize life is mostly a series of rhetorical questions.”  We all go through these self-discoveries, don’t we?

 

Daniels:

Yes, yes. These are things that happen: self-discoveries are necessary.

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Daphne Kalotay on Female Friendships in Literature and Life

Cover of Calamity and Other Stories by Daphne Kalotay.     Cover of Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay.

 

Cover of Sight Reading by Daphne Kalotay.     Cover of Blue Hours by Daphne Kalotay.

 

When Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize in literature, Maya Angelou threw her a party. Eudora Welty tried to teach her friend and mentor, Katherine Anne Porter, how to drive. George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe; Jane Austen and Anne Sharp… Probably I shouldn’t be so surprised that these female friendships are not as well known or well documented as those of literary men. As Margaret Atwood writes in her foreword to A Secret Sisterhood, “In accounts of the lives of male writers, peer-to-peer friendships, not unmixed with rivalry, often loom large—Byron and Shelley, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. But female literary friendships have been overlooked.” So, when I read Daphne Kalotay’s Blue Hours, which tells the story of a close relationship between two women, I felt compelled to ask her if she’d be willing to talk to me, not just about her book and writing life, but about female friendship.

 

In addition to being a talented writer, Daphne is one of my oldest and closest friends. We’ve known each other since we were nine years old, when the neighbor whose yard stood between hers and mine in suburban New Jersey cut back his hedges so that we could commute back and forth without getting scratched. We walked home from grade school together and, when we were older, sometimes walked aimlessly, flipping a coin to determine which way we’d turn. In high school, Daphne and I split the cost of a The International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, and I distinctly remember hearing back from one of the journals that I should not send my handwritten drafts.

 

Since then, Daphne has published four books:

  • Calamity and Other Stories,which was short listed for the 2005 Story Prize;
  • Russian Winter,which won the 2011 Writers’ League of Texas Fiction Prize and has been published in over twenty foreign editions;
  • Sight Reading, winner of the 2014 New England Society Book Award and a Boston Globe bestseller;
  • and Blue Hours, out in the summer of 2019 from Triquarterly.

She’s received fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo. After graduating from Vassar College, Daphne attended Boston University’s Creative Writing Program, and then went on to complete a PhD in Modern & Contemporary Literature, also at Boston University. Her doctoral dissertation was on the works of Mavis Gallant (and her interviews with Mavis Gallant can be read in The Paris Review‘s Writers-At-Work series.) She is currently teaching at Princeton University’s Program in Creative Writing.

 

Kirsten Menger-Anderson for TFR:

Do you remember any of the notes you got back from those early high school submissions? Did you get any encouraging ones? Did you publish anything back then?

 

Daphne Kalotay:

I remember thinking that I had to grow up to be a writer. In fact, I have a distinct memory of telling a wonderful babysitter of mine, when I was quite young, that I wanted to write a book about the street another friend of mine lived on, about all the adventures of the kids who lived on that street. And the babysitter asked why I wasn’t writing the book now, and I said I had to grow up, and she told me not to wait—but I was very suspicious of that; I knew I had a lot to learn. I recall that around the time you and I bought The International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, a poem of mine won some New Jersey student contest and was published in some sort of broadsheet. But I wasn’t even in the highest level English class, if I’m remembering correctly. And yet I have a memory of somehow being allowed to join your English class, which was a grade ahead of mine, on a class trip. I think this shows the teachers were trying to help me!

 

Menger-Anderson for TFR:

I love that Mim, the protagonist of Blue Hours, is an author and that I can read about her first submission, too: her decision to submit to Harper’s, where she knows no one, instead of The Atlantic, where she’d interned: “Perhaps it was fear of being rejected by my former colleagues. But there was something else, too. I wanted objective, completely impartial, affirmation of my brilliance. I am not ashamed to admit this.” I loved this line. Many of the details you capture—from the party where everyone is an aspiring writer, to Mim’s hesitation to identify herself as a writer, to how it felt to check the mailbox for the submission response—the thrill of a personal note, the dread of a form—really resonate.

 

Reflecting on her early success, Mim notes, “I hadn’t yet found my voice; I simply wrote down those other voices that would not let me sleep.” It’s interesting to hear Mim reflect on her own early work, and I was hoping you could talk a little about your own work and voice over time.

 

What was your first publication? And do you feel like your early work reflects your voice now?

 

Kalotay:

Interestingly, my first publication wasn’t my own voice; it was translations of three poems by the Hungarian poet Attila József, published in the Partisan Review. This makes sense to me, that this would be my first work good enough to be seen in print. My first original work was published very soon after that, a story called “Alabaster Doesn’t Count” that came out in a broadsheet called Bellowing Ark. These little magazines are so important, precisely because they are so often the ones that give us these first chances, our first publications. They’re that first pat on the back that says, You’re a writer!

 

Menger-Anderson for TFR:

Like Mim, who continues to write and publish, you are, decades after our high school submissions, a successful writer. Is it what you imagined when we were kids?

 

Kalotay:

You know, I’m not sure I even had a vision of what a “successful writer” looked like or what that life would be, just that I wanted to write something people would want to read. The funny part is that I remember as a kid often playing at being a teacher, and teaching creative writing is also how I make my living, so that part of the vision definitely came true.

 

Menger-Anderson for TFR:

Blue Hours is your fourth book. Do you feel like you’re now an expert when it comes to bringing a story into the world, or is each book/release different? Can you talk a bit about what you love about the process and what is difficult? And how friends can help?

 

Kalotay:

I don’t feel at all like an expert when it comes to launching a book. In fact, I think I’m pretty bad at it. I’m not on Twitter or Instagram, and I’m reluctant to send out email announcements; the other day I signed up for MailChimp simply because I can’t figure out a simple way to use Gmail to send out announcements, and I just felt like I was spamming everyone–but then I got all these wonderful messages back saying, “Thank you for sending me this announcement!” That’s the part I love about launching a book: hearing back from people I haven’t seen in years, seeing old friends at readings, meeting readers who come to have their books signed and tell me what my books have meant to them.

 

What’s hard is all the external business I have to keep up on that has nothing to do with creativity and takes up so much time and emotional energy: remembering to list my events on Facebook and anywhere else that might be relevant; fulfilling any press requests or opportunities the publicist secures; making sure my website is up to date and fixing it when I realize I have wrong event info—stuff like that. I imagine there are people who are good at it and enjoy it, but I find it alienates me from myself. As for how friends can help, just by showing up to my events, my friends have been so supportive. And friends like you have gone even further, by doing exactly what you’re doing here: coming up with a collaborative way to create something fun together.

 

Menger-Anderson for TFR:

One of the things I love about Blue Hours are the letters, a record of one friend thinking of another, as well as a record of sadness, as the letters were not sent, at least not until much later. In one, Kyra writes:

Sorry my letters always sound kind of down. I should write you on good days too. I see amazing things, Mim. Incredible people. Incredible beauty. But I guess I mostly write when I’m feeling blue.

 

When I was fifteen and doing a student exchange that was not working out, I wrote what must have been a miserable aerogram to you, and you wrote back immediately with a note that read, “it sounds like you need chocolate,” and included a box. Years have passed and I still think about that kindness, and that correspondence is a really beautiful part of friendship, even when it’s blue.

 

How did you decide to use letters in Blue Hours? Was it clear from the start that these should be part of the text? And that the receipt would be delayed? Or did you come to these decisions later?

 

Kalotay:

I remember letters from you in college, too. In fact, as I write this, it occurs to me that I must have been thinking of “Kirsten” when I came up with the name “Kyra”!

 

Regarding the letters in the book, yes, I knew they would be important and that their receipt would be delayed, but I struggled to figure out how to deliver them to the reader. Part of the problem was that I was using the letters as a way of avoiding going to Afghanistan. In the original draft, Part 2 was, instead, all of Kyra’s letters, in chronological order. I wrote them all out, year after year, from every country she had lived in. And then two things happened. One friend who read the book said it was too much to have all the letters in a row like that, and another friend said I had to have Mim go to Afghanistan. So, I did a year of research and wrote the Afghanistan section and interspersed the letters throughout the book—but then realized people were not reading them all, and that there were some letters I really needed people to pay attention to. In the end I just kept the parts of letters that I wanted to make absolutely sure no one missed.

 

Menger-Anderson for TFR:

I was really struck by the friendship between Kyra and Mim, and how often they viewed each other with admiration and love. “I thought maybe this was what it was like to have a sister, to be that close,” Mim reflects at one point. Or at another (and another of my favorite passages), Mim thinks about the first time she met Kyra:

Now it strikes me that I must have sensed this even in my very first glimpse of her, on the train: the no-nonsense part of her, the flat gaze. I think that frankness was what I picked up on—was perhaps the very source of her familiarity, the reason I thought I knew her. Really what I was recognizing was, I suspect, myself. That is, the possibility, in another person, of being fully, truly seen.

 

I love how the relationship is not plagued with competition, which often factors into the way female friendships are characterized. Were there any particularly challenging parts to developing their friendship? Or, alternatively, parts that came easily?

 

Kalotay:

What characterizes my best friendships is precisely that last line: being seen fully, in all of one’s aspects, and being loved for and despite them, in one’s totality. In developing their friendship, I knew my characters would connect as artists passionate about their art. What came easily, too, were the class differences and how that would complicate things. What was difficult was the mystery around Kyra, who is so elusive, hiding so much of what roils deep inside her. There’s so much we don’t know about her until much later in Part 2.

 

Menger-Anderson for TFR:

We often talk about writing in our emails. You’ve also read and responded to pretty much all of my work at some point or another. You once wrote me “I really want you to be true to your vision of the book,” and I know that when you give feedback, you are trying to help me realize whatever it is that led me to take on the project to begin with. In Blue Hours, Mim tells Kyra she finished her short story, and we see the theme of friendship and critique in the novel as well:

Her face lit up. “That’s fantastic!” Then almost shyly, “Do you need a reader for it?”

 

It hadn’t occurred to me to show it to anyone. “I already sent it out.” My heart sank at my folly.

 

Kyra seemed to notice. “Well, if you ever need another set of eyes…” I had never seen her look bashful before. “I mean, I’d love to read your work.”

 

A bit later in the conversation, Mim adds:

“You’re always working together with other dancers, so you’re used to sharing work in progress. Writers work alone. It can be scary to show your writing to someone else.”

 

Can you talk a little about friendship and critique? I don’t think the two have to go hand-in-hand, but when they do, how does that benefit (or, alternatively, complicate) the experience?

 

Kalotay:

I’m so lucky in that I have friends I share my work with, whom I trust implicitly and without whom I truly could not complete my projects. For me, the friendship part is important because it means we know each other’s personalities that much better and can be that much more honest, with that much more nuance. It doesn’t make it any easier. I still have to brace myself for feedback. I have a friend who cries when her work is critiqued—but part of the reason she can cry is because she is one of my closest friends and knows she can express her fatigue and frustration when a draft still isn’t finished.

 

Menger-Anderson for TFR:

I don’t want to reveal too much about the novel’s plot, but at one point, when Mim is in Afghanistan, she is led to the women’s tent, while her male companions are taken to tea with the village elders. The things Mim learns and experiences at that time are different from her companions. Throughout history women have been excluded from power, their experiences, and their bonds with each other—despite being equally vivid and powerful—often diminished. Even Mim’s friend (and Kyra’s ex-husband), Roy, dismisses Mim’s romantic relationship with Kyra as a “phase,” for example. I was wondering if you had thoughts about female friendships in this larger context—either in the novel or in life.

 

Kalotay:

It’s especially interesting to me how easily dismissed female friendship is when really our relationships are often the sustaining forces in our lives. More than one friend has confessed to me that it’s her relationships with her women friends, not her husband, that she most “needs.” And when I tell women readers I’ve written about two women friends, I immediately see eyes light up and am told “I want to read that!” The first publisher who saw this book sent back notes for suggested changes—and one of the main suggestions was that Kyra and Mim not be friends but sisters, and that instead of a lesbian love affair I have a heterosexual one. You can see the bias there, this implicit assumption that strong bonds between women are somehow less novel-worthy than those between a man and a woman (unless those women are siblings). Probably if I’d made those changes I could have sold the book a lot more quickly!

 

Menger-Anderson for TFR:

And finally, can you talk about the role of female friendships in your own life?

 

Kalotay:

Particularly because I’m single and unmarried—meaning that I don’t have the support of a partner in my day-to-day living—and partly because I have a very tenuous existence as a writer who tries to eke out a living as a professor of creative writing—my friendships are one of the only reliable positive constants in my life. They are the nourishing force that keeps me going, remind me that I’m loved and that my love is received back. Many times in just the past year, I’ve been reminded that my core group of women friends are there for me even when I might not realize it.

 

Please also see Daphne Kalotay’s story “Relativity” in 41.2 (Fall 2017) of The Florida Review.

 

Kirsten Menger-Anderson and Daphne Kalotay, in grade school, feeding ducks.
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Interview: Abigail Chabitnoy

     

 

Abigail Chabitnoy is a mixed-race (German-Aleutian) poet raised in Pennsylvania and currently living in Colorado. Her first collection of poetry, How to Dress a Fish, was released in 2019 by Wesleyan University Press and is described as a “historical reclamation” in which “the speaker … works her way back, both chronologically and spatially toward a place that once was home” (see Weston Morrow’s review in Blackbird).

 

Chabitnoy has been previously published in Pleides, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. She was a Crow-Tremblay Fellow at and received the John Clark Pratt Citizenship Award from Colorado State University, and she was a 2016 inaugural Peripheral Poets Fellow.

 

Former Florida Review contributor John Sibley Williams interviewed her for us in the fall of 2019.

 

 

John Sibley Williams for The Florida Review:

“Everyone wants to see ghosts, in theory.” This line resonates across your entire collection. In a way, it defines your approach to storytelling. Tell me what this line means to you.

 

Abigail Chabitnoy:

It’s interesting that you’ve honed in on this line, as this was a later addition—and also one that does continue to haunt or inform much of my current thinking as well. At the most fundamental level, I’ve always been a bit of a wimp when it comes to horror. I’m fascinated by the idea of ghosts and the paranormal, but for an example, this past February I was a resident at Caldera in eastern Oregon. Midway through the residency one of the other artists asked the Programs Manager if any of our cabins were haunted, and I would not let her answer. I would not have been able to sleep in my cabin by myself, or leave that cabin after dark, if I knew there were ghosts on the premises—and to be honest, I don’t even know if I believe in ghosts. I was never allowed to play with Ouija boards or anything that could be considered occult growing up, which means I’m deeply uncomfortable with forces beyond my control and also that I’ve never properly unpacked my relationship with such forces. I don’t know if the other artists ever got to hear the answer when I wasn’t present, and in this context the example and line are quite benign. But consider the ramifications of such an unwillingness to face real horrors in this world, or real atrocities in history, or inconvenient truths that don’t prop up the narrative we want. See no evil, right no evil. The well-meaning narrative that we are a country founded by immigrants, for example, on the one hand encourages xenophobes to revisit the ghosts of their own past and their own relationship to this country, but further fails to face the violent genocide that cleared way for the first colonizers and earliest immigrants.

 

In terms narrower to the work, it’s a reminder of my own culpability in putting forth some stories and not others, and my responsibility to be faithful to my family’s narrative even when it doesn’t support the kind of rage or righteous anger one might desire for effect. My great-grandfather was removed impossibly far from his home, and it would have been incredibly hard for him to return. But the truth is: we simply don’t know if he even wanted to. Relationships were severed, but who’s to say they would have survived either way?

 

TFR:

I’ve found indigenous poetry often dually emphasizes place and placelessness, cultures thriving yet irrevocably changed by outside influences. Do you feel this is an accurate statement? Is it emotionally demanding to write from such a place?

 

Chabitnoy:

I can only say that this statement feels particularly accurate for my own work, and that’s because of how place and the removal from a specific place have shaped my family’s and my own experience of indigeneity. I’ve been fortunate that in tandem with my own searching for ways to reconnect meaningfully with my Unangan and Sugpiaq heritage, there have been various localized efforts by those communities to also revitalize the culture, to promote language acquisition and recover traditional art practices, and to take control of their own narrative, which has provided me with rich resources I can access remotely and has put me in touch with wonderful and enthusiastic people to patiently answer my questions, as the cost of going home is prohibitive (in more ways than one). I grew up with so many of the pieces missing that each one remains significant—including absence. And yet despite this absence, I do carry this visceral memory of home with me. I’ve always lived landlocked (first in Pennsylvania, now in Colorado) and yet as an anxious individual, there is a calm that takes hold when I am by the water that I am unable to find anywhere else. I find it extremely demanding to write from such a place personally, and the complexities I’ve just scratched the surface of here almost stopped me from sending the work out into the world more than once. It demands almost a constant othering of the self, a repeated rupturing, but then also a turning back toward a personal reparations of sort, some kind of healing.

 

TFR:

Your poems slide so organically between the tangible and ephemeral, body and legend, past and present. These elements all exist in the same sphere. For you, where does mythology end and contemporary human life begin? Is there a demarcation line? How do they inform each other?

 

Chabitnoy:

The boundaries of myth are still something I question and push against daily. I loved reading myths and folktales as a kid. In fact, it’s one of the few things I distinctly remember reading. It inspired me to get my BA in anthropology. (I was a latecomer to poetry, and it was in fact Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, itself building on the Greek myth of Geryon, that won me over.) I’ve been thinking a lot lately of what the purpose of myth is, what it is stories do, and why we keep telling them, and the closest thing to a working answer I’ve come to so far is that stories are necessary to help us survive. They teach us, they connect us, they present possibilities we at once might never have considered and that are timeless at their roots. There’s so much crossover in the motifs across time and culture, which I find fascinating. But it’s also interesting to me that they’re always perceived in the past tense, similarly to how society still often expects Native cultures to continue in a vacuum, forever frozen as they were first encountered by [white] settlers. But to be timeless means to look both ways, forward and back. I think I see this blurring of the demarcation as a way of extending beyond the self and beyond the present moment to tap into something bigger, something more fluid.

 

TFR:

Is there empowerment in (finally) being able to tell your own story, in your own words, from your own cultural and personal perspective?

 

Chabitnoy:

I think I have found empowerment in the process of writing this book, but I’m not sure if in this way. Which is to say, I think the experience has made me truly recognize the breadth of stories and perspectives, to recognize the microaggressions that potentially—and sometimes actually—prevent those narratives from being told, and to push past those aggressions even as I recognize and sympathize with where they are coming from. But I also think the work has taught me to accept that there aren’t always answers, and to allow me to continue in the space of that uncertainty. Poetry isn’t necessarily about finding the answers—it’s about learning to ask the right questions, the hard questions. And it’s okay to dwell in that space of uncertainty.

 

TFR:

How to Dress a Fish paints a multifaceted portrait of betweenness. As a child of mixed heritage, you seem to question your prescribed place in both communities. Yet you celebrate them. How does communal and familial belonging (or their lack) impact your poetic vision?

 

Chabitnoy:

Despite my family and my mom’s family being somewhat large, it didn’t feel like I grew up in a large family. Our extended family seldom came together, and my family doesn’t really tell stories. I think perhaps that’s why I cling so tightly to my great-grandfather’s story, fragmented as it is. I think much of my poetic vision is driven by a desire for community, and I don’t think this is particular to one side so much as a reflection of the isolation frequently experienced in today’s society. I think that particular desire drives much of the thematic elements and motivations within the poems, but for me there is personally also a pressure on the work to generate a greater sense of community outside of the book as well. In 2018, I finally made it to Kodiak, and as beautiful as the island was, and as moving as it was to stand on the beach of Woody Island, to be on that water, to feel home, my favorite experience was visits I had with cousins whom I’d never met nor even been aware of (and still couldn’t articulate clearly the direct lines of our relation), and how easy and grounding it was to spend hours talking to these women, hearing their stories, what they knew of our family. It was a wonderfully peaceful experience of belonging, as natural as a fish in the water, and the forging of these relationships in turn puts further pressure on my work to be sincere and rigorous in its research and its motives.

 

TFR:

Tell me what you mean by “legacy as a blank space. A space that unlike a slate cannot be written.”

 

Chabitnoy:

This language was actually in response to a narrative I read about one student’s experience of the Carlisle Indian School, but also became emblematic of the larger challenges of responding to past trauma. In my own experience, there are questions I have of my ancestors that simply will never be answered. There are voices I can’t speak for, and to attempt to would be a disservice, another form of erasure. Rather than attempting to fill these blank spaces, these holes and wounds, I have attempted to leave space for them to be felt in their own right throughout the work. The slate also refers to the sociological notion of the child’s mind as a blank slate, further emphasizing the rupture and inheritance of these holes we carry with us as survivors and descendants of historical trauma.

 

TFR:

When discussing culturally significant themes that you have such strong feelings on, how do you express your worldview subtly, avoiding didacticism? How do you make a point without preaching?

 

Chabitnoy:

This has actually been (and continues to be) a constant subject of attention personally since I first began writing seriously. With this work in particular, I employed several techniques to avoid didacticism. One “cheat” I used was ultimately to use the problematic language of others directly in the work and let their prejudices speak for themselves. Another way I avoided this in the writing was in my approach to audience. Many of the poems were approached as conversations I imagined having, most often with Michael, or at least Michael as the character I tried to summon to the pages. But as the project unfolded, that individual became multiple, became fluid. Sometimes I imagined I was talking to the grandfathers I had never known, but that could become a bit intimidating, perhaps because I never had a grandfather figure, and because of the weight I gave these figures. So I tried to imagine a more approachable figure, a sympathetic figure. I began to think of Nikifor, I suppose as the character with the least narrative developed and thus the most space for potential, but also because it was brought to my attention that the women in the book were missing, and it was true, but—beyond an imagined address—I didn’t know how to bring them to the page. There was even less of them in the archives. I think this is where the more mythopoeic themes come into play as well, which further gave me room for more imaginative work that could create distance from more didactic trains of thought.

 

TFR:

Now that indigenous peoples have the chance to tell their own stories, unfiltered by “white men with pipes and elbow patches who study Natives from armchairs,” do you feel a sense of responsibility to set history straight? How does one go about rewriting a disingenuous legacy?

 

Chabitnoy:

I think poetry is a brilliant avenue for indigenous people to tell their own stories, and in their own ways and structures. But for me, I feel a personal responsibility to remain within the conversation of my own family’s story and experience, and beyond that to give as much voice as I can to the history of my ancestors in the Aleutian islands while also recognizing the limits of my own understanding given the circumstances of my dislocation. I think the attention to language inherent to poetry makes it a good medium in which to question, for example, historical and anthropological narratives written by outsiders. What some historians call a strategic military victory, for example, are otherwise experienced as genocide. But I also feel a responsibility not to extend myself beyond the honest reach of my own understanding, experience, and voice. That is, I am more aware of my responsibility not to claim to speak for others, or to speak in a generalized manner, to recognize the gaps in my own knowledge and turn instead to the voices of other indigenous writers to extend the scope of my understanding rather than purport to know more than I do.

 

TFR:

As you employ a variety of formal and remarkably unique styles throughout How to Dress a Fish, how do you decide which structure will best serve a given poem? Is it intuition, poetic experimentation, or an intentional choice? And what motivates these structures?

 

Chabitnoy:

I think a lot of it comes down to intuition and experimentation, which in turn generate their own sort of internal rules that develop throughout the work. A lot of it has to do with the feeling of the shape on the page. For example, the narrative is messy. It’s full of holes. It’s nonlinear. It interrupts itself. It sometimes promises order (the few that include numbered parts), but ultimately denies any order. Thus for the poems to neatly hug the left margin or exist in tidy couplets or even stanzas felt ungenuine to how the narrative is experienced. With that said, there are also elements that line up, lines that may break but continue to meet. And of course ultimately these are water poems, and so it’s right that they should—like a fleet of kayaks, an archipelago, or even wreckage that washes up on shore—drift across the white space of the page.

 

TFR:

Speaking of structures, you often use objective “non-poetic” forms like student records, grocery lists, and footnotes to explore your themes. What draws you to poeticizing these forms? What do you feel they add to the book’s ongoing conversation?

 

Chabitnoy:

One of the things I love about poetry is its capacity for accumulation, to hold multitudes. I was drawn to a kind of docu-poetics because of how it could potentially make this process of accumulation apparent. In some cases, I wanted to challenge the credentials of such forms and the contexts in which they are most frequently used. Footnotes, for example, are often used in scholarly texts and lend academic authority, an air of certainty, to a body of work. My family’s enrollment into the Koniag Corporation and my sister’s and my subsequent acceptance into the Tangirnak Native Village depended on Michael’s student records and birth certificates. The case for the “success” of the Carlisle Indian School rested on surveys and news clips, the release of which and survival in the record depended on their favorable reflection on the school. Such documents are given a weight of authority that other modes of record keeping—oral histories, for example—are not. I wanted to open those structures to the same kind of skepticism traditional knowledge and oral histories are frequently subject to, while also asserting that same level of respect for such narratives. The use of grocery lists meanwhile was an effort to bring the daily into the historical narrative, to highlight the confluence of the two.

 

TFR:

Let’s talk erasure for a moment. Sometimes you cross words out, which allows us to see what you chose to expunge. Other times you blacken words out, making them unreadable. What roles do these forms of erasure play in your poems? Do you feel erasure is inherently a part of exploring a misrepresented culture?

 

Chabitnoy:

Erasure has certainly been a large part of my experience, yes. And there are various reasons, from negligence to willful erasure to sudden deaths in the family. But also at the root of these erasures is a discrepancy in which narratives get valued, whose, what information is deemed at the moment worthy of preserving. And it’s not just the narratives that get erased. Sometimes the story is preserved but the storyteller is erased and credit given to the note-taker or “scholar.” And then sometimes there is a desire to remain anonymous, or a desire as note-taker to preserve the privacy of an individual. All of these possibilities play into what I’ve chosen to erase entirely and what I’ve chosen to leave legible even while I suggest that someone else might choose to erase that text, might deem it unworthy of recording. For me, such markings became another way of subverting traditional hierarchies of authority and knowledge and highlight the lack of transparency in the recordkeeping and writing of history. Additionally, one of the operative themes of the work is that our understanding of our history is a process, is not fixed in stone, is subject to scratch-outs and do-overs, to misspeaking and self-correction, which I somewhat approached in those words that were only crossed out as one might when drafting with paper and pen.

 

TFR:

I know this is a broad question, but what are your thoughts on the current state of indigenous poetry? What other authors would you recommend? And where would you like to see it in, say, ten years?

 

Chabitnoy:

I’m very excited about the current state of indigenous poetry. Of course the representation and recognition could always be greater in the various categories of accolades and outside of academic circles of discussion. But if your finger is on the pulse of indigenous writing these days, there are so many great writers to follow, and some really great new voices emerging. Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas came out in 2017 and garnered quite a bit of attention. Sherwin Bitsui just released a new book, Dissolve. And of course Heid Erdrich just released a great new anthology, New Poets of Native Nations. Craig Santos Perez, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, and Brandi Nālani McDougall also recently released an anthology of indigenous poetry by Pacific Islander women, Effigies III.  In 2018 I had the privilege of reading along with several indigenous women in Seattle to celebrate the launch of Carrie Ayagaduk Ojanen’s debut collection, Roughly for the North, and also had the pleasure of hearing Cassandra Lopez’s work for the first time. Her book Brother Bullet was just published. I went to an amazing panel on Indigenous Womanisms where I heard work by No’u Revilla and cannot wait for more of it to be available. She was stunning. She’s one of the women featured in Effigies III. This list could go on forever. And, of course, I’d still leave people out.

 

Ten years is such a long time. I wasn’t even seriously engaging with poetry ten years ago. I hope the field continues to grow, in terms of writers but also in the breadth of style and subject, as it is currently. But maybe also it would be nice to see wider recognition of more than just one writer per genre at a time. It seems that outside of the indigenous poetry community, in more mainstream consciousness, there is always one Native fiction writer, one Native memoirist, one Native poet that everyone knows, almost like a box to check off and then move on, when in fact there are so many writers to be excited about right now.

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Interview: Charles Simic

Cover of Scribbled in the Dark by Charles Simic.     Cover of That Little Something by Charles Simic.     Cover of Master of Disguises by Charles Simic.

Cover of The Book of Gods and Devils by Charles Simic.     Cover of My Noiseless Entourage by Charles Simic.     Cover of The World Doesn't End by Charles Simic.

 

A Serbian-American poet and former co-poetry editor of the Paris Review, Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and immigrated to the United States in 1954 and started publishing poems by the age of twenty-one, around 1959. He earned his bachelor’s degree from New York University in 1967, and within the year published his first full-length collection, What the Grass Says. He has since published more than sixty books in the United States and abroad along with numerous translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry. He is the author of several books of essays and has edited several anthologies. He has won numerous awards, among them a MacArthur Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn’t End. He was poet laureate of the US from 2007 to 2008.

 

Simic has taught American literature and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire since 1973 and is now professor emeritus there. The following conversation took place at the Miami Book Fair shortly after the publication of Scribbled in the Dark (Ecco, 2017).

 

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:

When your family first moved to the US, they settled in Chicago? I felt a connection to that because was born and raised in Hyde Park, Chicago.

 

Charles Simic:

Actually, it was New York, then Chicago, in Oak Park. We moved because my father’s job had moved to Chicago. I finished high school in Oak Park, then my parents broke up. I left home and was on my own, and got a job in the city on the Near North Side. Then I picked up and went to New York City.

 

After that, I came back to Chicago, but the family had fallen apart, and there was no money, so first I worked during the day at the Chicago Sun-Times. Not a fancy job, just a lowly job. I started going to school at night, at the University of Chicago. It took a couple of years because there weren’t too many courses at night, but it was an interesting time. I lived on the Near North Side because that’s where the Chicago Sun-Times was, by the Chicago River, so I’d go off to work, finish, then have to catch the . . .

 

TFR:

The L?

 

Simic:

Yes! The L train! You know, you’d go down south, to Hyde Park where the university was, and it was a different world there, in Hyde Park. And I was just saying to someone last night how Anglophiled it was at University of Chicago—all the professors wore tweeds and affected a British accent—even though they were born in Wisconsin or wherever.

 

TFR:

So, they put on fake accents?

 

Simic:

Yes, yes. And they would say to you, “Charles, if you like poetry, you must read Andrew Marvell.” And I’d say, “Sure, sure.”

 

(laughter)

 

TFR:

I’ve lived in Florida for nearly two decades now, but when I started in on the poems of section two in Scribbled in the Dark, the images grabbed me and took me back to my childhood. There’s “Bare Trees,” “January,” “In the Snow,” and “The Night and the Cold,” so many northern images that I felt I was back in wintertime Chicago. It was “Bare Trees” that reminded me of my lost period after high school when I wanted to attend the University but didn’t understand the process. I would go walk the grounds, wander the Oriental Institute, and just hope someone would ask, “Hi, want to take a class?” If I may, can I read you the lines that I felt the speaker was addressing me quite personally?

 

Simic:

Sure!

 

TFR:

“The bare branches moving in it, / Are like the fingers of the blind / Reaching to touch the face of someone / Who’s been calling out to them / In the voice of geese flying over, / The shots of a hunting rifle, / And a dog barking outside a trailer / For someone to hurry and let him in.”

 

Thank you for those words, I mean, yeah, that’s what it was like for me at nineteen.

 

On a larger subject, I’d like your opinion about the so-called state of poetry in the United States today.

 

Simic:

In the US there is more poetry being written than in the rest of the world put together. It’s an amazing, amazing thing. There isn’t a huge audience for poetry, but the number of poets now writing compared to when I started out in the fifties and mid-fifties has grown huge. I mean, in the city of Chicago, we knew the aspiring poets and contemporary poets. We knew about Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and all the others. I would say there were fifteen to twenty at a given time. It was like a cult!

 

Everybody was interested in literature, mostly fiction, of course, and not just American but European modern fiction as well. But poetry, well it was really an activity that was marginal, especially in Chicago—always like it had a chip on its shoulder culturally.

 

(laughter)

 

TFR:

That’s a colorful way to put it. I’m thinking of [Carl] Sandburg’s description in his poem “Chicago”—“the City of Big Shoulders.”

 

Simic:

It was such a small poetry community for a while, but then the Beats were the ones who made a big difference. It started with giving free poetry readings with [Allen] Ginsberg and everybody else. They were very, very popular. Then they were at colleges and universities giving readings, and a whole generation discovered this was a lot of fun! Both students and adults showed up to readings, so they started this thing in the sixties, and all of a sudden it caught on. I know my generation of poets profited from this—we were getting invitations from all across the country to come read. This was followed by the beginning of writing programs.

 

TFR:

Aaah, and now we have the “explosion” of writing programs.

 

Simic:

Yes, yes. They keep turning out poets. So you see, it’s really impossible to get a clear picture of what’s going on. There was a time until about ten to fifteen years ago, when someone like me who was real passionate about poetry, and others who were passionate, could get a clear idea who the poets of the generation were, even by region, East Coast, West Coast, etc. But now, with the proliferation of poetry on the Internet—I mean, you used to go to bookstores to find out about new poems and poets! There were so many everywhere, each town had a bookstore, and you went to the poetry section, and you could see who was doing what. Sure books are still coming out, but not so easily displayed. They aren’t as “seen.” So now, as I say, it’s beyond anyone’s ability to answer confidently where poetry is going.

 

TFR:

Tell me your thoughts on something I heard on NPR. It was a comment on poetry, and how in Europe three to four hundred will gather for a reading, but in the US only a few dozen.

 

Simic:

No, that’s not true.

 

TFR:

I’m glad to hear it!

 

Simic:

Years ago, in Russia, when poetry was read, there used to be a lot of people, in Paris maybe a few more, in Germany a little better, and in Spain even more, but here in the United States, there are readings even in remote areas at state universities, in the Dakotas, in Oklahoma, and Kansas. Perhaps because there’s not as much to do, as many activities all the time, they’ll have a poetry series each year which they alternate with fiction, and anyone with respect for literature will come and listen. Hundreds show up! Now, in New York City there’s too many other things going on, so only a few dozen may attend. And now, more recently, it’s just impossible to tell. There’s live reading groups online, and YouTube readings. It’s just impossible to grasp.

 

TFR:

I wonder, in hindsight, what will we see? I mean, as far as schools of poetry, movements of poetry, eras of poetry. We had the Symbolists, the Modernists, the Black Mountain Poets, and as you mentioned the Beats. What will this era be called, if anything? The Onliners? The Techs? My students go to poetry slams, and most participate, too. That’s kept poetry vibrant for them. I just wonder what this era will be—there’s a lot of political and social justice work out there bringing awareness to the art. Poetry still has a job to do.

 

Simic:

Yes, yes.

 

TFR:

Let’s get back to Scribbled in the Dark. When I read the title poem, I knew I wanted to ask you about it.

 

Simic:

This is a kind of big city experience in this poem. Up until a few years ago, I used to teach at both the University of New Hampshire and NYU, which gave me an apartment. One summer night, late, the Village is full of people, it’s 3:00 a.m., and I hear shrieks in the street, and I wonder, is it joy or fear? Is someone arguing? It could be anything! So I’m in bed, and I get up and look down at the street because it’s dark, and I’m up then—you see, I’m an insomniac, so was my father, it runs in my family, but it’s no big deal, and so if I lie there in the dark I get rest to a degree but no sleep. But, if I turn on the lights it feels like a struggle. And if I have an idea that comes to me, I don’t want to turn on the lights, but I can’t help myself, I have to write the idea down, so there I am, scribbling in the dark, but (laughs), often it’s quite hard to read what I wrote in the morning. But it works—I’ve been doing this for years, because, you know, you’ll forget in the morning.

 

TFR:

I love that.

 

Your poem “The White Cat,” where you say “the one who disappeared,” is profound to read.

 

Simic:

That’s actually kind of a true story.

 

I’ve lived in a little village in New Hampshire for forty-five years, and I know all my neighbors, a long time, and you get to know each other, and get to chatting, and someday someone says, “I wondered what happened to so-and-so,” and that’s how it starts.

 

TFR:

It resonates. I like your line, too, “my childhood, a silent movie.” What a metaphor.

 

Simic:

This was in my childhood in Belgrade. They were still showing silent films. My grandmother and mom would take me, and I’d fall asleep. My mother would nudge me and wake me up during a scene and say, “Look, look, a horsey!” And I’d say “Horsey!” The city was occupied then, and we had a curfew. We had to be home by 10:00 p.m. or we could end up in a camp.

 

TFR:

Wow. That’s experience, and your experience is, of course, unique, but it’s the commonalities that fascinate me, that span generations, that are ageless. I was raised by my grandmother, who was born in 1892, and she played the piano at the local theater playing silent movies when she was a young girl. We’re still those children, aren’t we? We remember so much.

 

Simic:

If you want to have a perfect memory of childhood, I don’t know, I had bombs falling all around and worried they’d fall on my head. It wasn’t perfect.

 

TFR:

I know. As instructors we joke “no one wants to read a happy story.” Some dark material makes the best poetry. I want you to know that I mention two quotes of yours at the beginning of all my poetry course sections.

 

Simic:

Yes?

 

TFR:

The two that I always refer to are “Don’t tell the readers what they already know about life” and “Don’t assume you’re the only one in the world who suffers.” I hear these two when working on my own writing, every time, and students struggle so with these concepts.

 

Simic:

You must out-write yourself. You have to find the way to make it interesting for the reader. You can’t say it in the same old way. You must work to captivate the reader.

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Two Writers at Alligator Point

Cover of Bob Kunzinger's A Third Place.     Cover of Bob Kunzinger's Blessed Twilight.     Cover of Bob Kunzinger's Penance.

Cover of Rick Campbell's Gunshot, Peacock, Dog     Cover of Rick Campbell's The History of Steel.     Cover of Rick Campbell's Dixmont.

 

Poet, essayist, and publisher Rick Campbell and nonfiction writer Bob Kunzinger have published a combined fourteen books. Campbell’s include The History of Steel, Setting the World in Order, and Dixmont, many poems in countless journals, and for more than twenty years he was the publisher at Anhinga Press in Tallahassee, Florida. Bob Kunzinger’s volumes include Borderline Crazy, Penance, and Fragments as well as hundreds of works in journals and magazines, including several notations by Best American Essays.

 

Now both have new books from Madville Press of Texas. Campbell’s Gunshot, Peacock, Dog premiered last fall, and Kunzinger’s A Third Place: Notes in Nature in August of 2019.

 

These two old friends—both writers and professors with a penchant for sharing their wisdom—sat down for a chat about writing:

 

Kunzinger:

I always found the relationship between poetry and memoir to be closer than either of those and fiction. That’s why I think you find many poets writing essays or other forms of memoir, but not too many fiction writers (though I can suddenly recall many) who bother with nonfiction, or even poetry. I have an easier time reading poetry than fiction because it sends me back into my own senses, and I like that.

 

Ironically, I’m as influenced by poets as I am prose writers. You’re both, so there’s that. In fact, I enjoy your poetry, for which you are known, but I’m especially fond of your essays—the two in History of Steel are among my favorite nonfiction prose. Who influenced you, do you think? Where are you more comfortable?

 

Campbell:

I have no interesting answer, no matter how many times I am asked. In poetry, Richard Hugo, James Wright, Philip Levine.  I’ve read and liked, even loved, hundreds of poems, but those three poets influenced me the most because I read them first, when I was poetically young. It’s possible that I have been more influenced by Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and so many song writers than I have poets. I am a listener. For years I have listened to music far more, for far more hours a day, a week, than I read poetry. I hear music and rhythm more than words. I am, I believe, more moved by songs than poems.  I am a poet because I wanted to be a songwriter.

 

Kunzinger:

I think that’s why we are very much the same when it comes to influence, and even a bit with my short prose and your longer poems. We were both musicians at some point—you still are—and the music of our youth was as much our literature as Salinger or Hemingway. For me, early Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Dylan. If I’m screwing around with a longer piece and listen to Neil Young or Browne’s “Sky Blue and Black,” it’s like getting a hit of something that fires me up.

 

Campbell:

I suppose I am more comfortable as a poet, but identity is a strange thing for me. For many years I think I was better known as a publisher than a writer, and I kept wanting to tell people I’m a writer too.  I spend more time thinking about and writing prose than poetry, even though I’ve published six books of poetry and not even one prose collection. I don’t think about poems—I get an inspiration and I write a poem. I never say I’m going to write a poem about ducks or love or something. Poems come quickly, and then it’s over. But I do think about and sketch prose ideas. I have about thirty essays that are finished or nearly so, and it’s taken about twenty years to get this far. If I start a poem, for whatever reason, I write it in a matter of minutes. I don’t bend it or play with it. I don’t even think of it as narrative, as if it’s going somewhere. It’s a bubble that rises over my head like in a cartoon. If I have a prose idea it usually takes longer to be born, but prose ideas go into one box and poetry into another. They don’t get mixed up. Sometimes I might take a finished poem and expand it into an essay, but rarely.

 

Your flash prose pieces and my longer poems often have much in common. I think your work and mine tends to move horizontally—sliding and leaping from subject to subject. I think it’s called accretion. We layer ideas, but more horizontally than vertically. 

 

Kunzinger:

I am not sure the material is horizontal—maybe in as much as there is some recognizable narrative arc in many pieces—but I think of the tangents within a piece as the real work more than the apparent direction. What’d you call it? Accretion? I tend to think of what we both do in writing as “digression.” I like the digressive nature of some of the pieces—“Flip Flops,” for instance, where the direction of the piece turns out to be little more than a vehicle for the deeper purpose. I think Tim O’Brien does that best, but I think he stole the style from Ernie Pyle, or maybe Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal.

 

Campbell:

I think I mean that our subjects are layered in a way that one idea isn’t privileged over the others. No dominant idea with the others subservient. Not much hierarchical structure. Your essay “Sliced Bread” does that. When I still used to workshop my poems, I was often told that I had too many subjects. I think that’s not possible as long as I leap and land properly. You and I think in associations and see lots of connections. This might also be why I have trouble finishing essays. Why or when should I stop leaping? It’s a process of montage. a palimpsest, a highway built over a trail, a road that follows a river. Accretion and digression might be the same thing. Tangents, too, but they go toward the essential subject not away from it.

 

Kunzinger:

I had to look up “palimpsest.” But, yes, exactly. The tangent is the point to begin with. I guess we layer ideas. That’s why I like longer pieces. I can layer it to the point where people will find more to relate to. It is hard for me to do short work. My short prose was developed for the sole purpose of reading to an audience, and some of it has been published, but they were meant to be read in the amount of time it takes to read a two- or three-page narrative poem, so that when I read with poets we’d share the same amount of time. What that did, though, was teach me the art of diction. I reached back to my journalism roots for that and stole from poets like Tim Seibles and Richard Lax. But I’m still way more comfortable in weaving ideas in longer form. That doesn’t mean it always works! Can you tell? I mean, how quickly can you tell if something’s working?

 

Campbell:

If I finish a poem, then it works. If it fades out partway through, then it’s over. I don’t go back to it. We have music in common and probably also that we never intended to be scholars. I saw my college studies more as vocational school, and my vocation was to write poetry.

 

Kunzinger:

My vocation is still to be determined. Our “occupational hazard” being that our occupation’s just not around.

 

Campbell:

Did you ever hear of the JBACC—the Jimmy Buffet Air Conditioning Club? It’s cooler than a fan club.

 

Kunzinger:

Oh, shit.

 

Campbell:

Back to writing. I very much give a shit about being read. I like to publish, and I like to have readers. Maybe I don’t care as much anymore about being famous and making it. Does that make us defensive of our work? As in we might still think we have not received the recognition the work deserves? If any?

 

Kunzinger:

I used to wonder or worry where I fell in the scheme of writers. I’ve published a lot, but I usually feel that is the result of their being not a whole lot of nonfiction writers out there compared to poets and fiction writers. Also, it might be subject-related. I might be the only one writing about Siberia in short form. I don’t know. In the few workshops I have taken, my work was always slammed. I know there are some “subjects” which are going to work and some which I write just for me. But the pieces which get the most attention are the ones that have universal themes buried in some digression. That light went on about twenty years ago when I was at lunch with Tim Seibles and he happened to read something I wrote which I had with me, which is unusual since, like you and me, he and I generally never talk about writing, and he tossed it back to me and said, almost off the cuff, “Don’t show me your pain, Bob. Show me mine.” It was like he flipped on a switch. My writing completely changed then or, I should say, found some new level, and I started not worrying about where I fit in the writing world; I just wrote.

 

But I can’t avoid the comparison thing. Sedaris still pisses me off. We both did an identical themed piece, his about standing in line at Starbucks and his impatience, and mine—written a few years before his, I might add—about standing in line at a grocery store with no ability to make small talk (“Small Talk”). His stays in the impatient mode whereas mine digresses into memory and something else. How can I not look at the success of his and wonder what I can do differently so the work gets more attention? I simply prefer that first thing we talked about—a piece not be the point of the piece—if that makes sense.

 

For instance, I love your idea that it doesn’t matter how many “subjects” are in a piece so long as the leaps from one to the other work and the reader lands with us. For me, though, I’ll hit a dead end about, say, geese, but then a few weeks later—or a few months—I’ll be working on the fifteenth piece since the geese one and stumble upon a concept—say people who follow others without understanding where they are going, or the players on a baseball team who spend the better part of their careers on the bench, making a living but ultimately not doing what they planned to do when they were in Little League, and I’ll remember the geese and somehow marry the two.

 

Campbell:

Richard Hugo wrote about the triggering subject and the true subject; that we need to give up the triggering subject when the true subject shows up. Funny, I think he used geese in his example, too. But as for my insecurities, yes, I still have them. Now that I am older, I tend to worry about the lack of offers I get to headline conferences or compare myself to those who seem to have plum positions in MFA programs.  I’m a working-class late bloomer who “chose” to spend his academic/writing life at a small college in a small town. Sometimes I feel sorry for myself, and then I hope I realize that I am doing that and try to get over it. That’s where music, baseball, and fishing come in handy. A poet friend once wrote that I was the best poet few readers had ever heard of. I guess that’s a compliment. All whiny shit aside, I think a lot of my poems and a few of my essays are as good as any other writer’s. I don’t want to be better than other writers, I just want to be good. At this point I should just say “so it goes.”

 

Kunzinger:

Vincent van Gogh is my inspiration for not worrying about what others think, which can be frustrating when I attend readings where people are paid thousands of dollars, and their work, in my not-humble-enough opinion, is not as good as ours, and our publishing record is so much deeper, and I wonder how the hell do I get gigs like that? Van Gogh painted for himself, completely and unapologetically for himself, to the point where other painters and critics called him a bum and a waste of space in the art world, but he persisted, confident he knew what he wanted to do.

 

But I still wonder if I’m too simplistic, the writing equivalent of knowing the three chords from which you can play any pop song. It is popular, but it has no staying power. And I fear I finish too soon, in the piece I mean, not time-wise.

 

Campbell:

Finished is a weird thing.  I say a poem’s finished when I feel it’s as good as I can make it. Then I might let it sit a little while longer before I think it’s ready to send out. But the essays baffle me; they are harder to finish, maybe just because the more words, the more possibilities. My real problem is that I forget that I have essays to send to journals. Even if I spend the good part of a day sending out poems, I will forget to send out the essays. Is this some Freudian lack of confidence? Did Freud ever talk about this?  My knowledge of Freud is just some shallow pop-culture reading.

 

I was never diligent about sending work out. I also know that I have never worked hard enough, never hustled enough, to garner fame. I don’t work as hard as you do. I respect how much you write.

 

Kunzinger:

Yeah, I am better than you. [Laughs.]

 

Campbell:

This is my virtual porch.

 

Kunzinger:

Seriously, I still hesitate a long time before actually sending something out. I’m always fighting the triteness. I have to go back and “get the trite out,” as I like to think of it. That reminds me of the idea that Rupert Fike told me once that an ending must both be a complete surprise and totally obvious at the same time. I’m okay with ending. No, for me, it’s when I start that I struggle to find something familiar but not at all trite. I can conceive an essay okay. It’s not unusual for me to stumble across one moment in my day, maybe in conversation with someone, or something I overheard in a hallway somewhere. “Flip Flops” started like that. The piece all hangs on one line the doctor said to me at a check-up: “It’s a good thing you whacked your ankle.” I had no idea where I was going in a completely separate piece about 911 until that line, and I joined a stale work with a new direction. Sometimes, though, the direction is so obvious.

 

Campbell:

When we are nonfiction writers, we promise to tell the truth as well as we can, given the limitations of memory and vagaries of time, given the influx of new information. I am thinking about when you found out that you had Italian ancestry and then saw your “new” family name on a building in Tampa. Actually, I think I saw it first. Discoveries like that change what we know and maybe what we have written. But poetry is neither true nor false, not fiction or nonfiction. I mean it is or can be one or the other, but there’s no rule, no category. There’s no nonfiction shelf for poetry.  And yet readers, despite often having a high level of poetic sophistication, assume that a poem is “true.” They want poetry to be autobiographical. Most of my poems are, and I assume that lures readers into thinking that all of my poems are true. I guess that’s the readers’ problem not mine.

 

Kunzinger:

If I’m reading or writing journalism, I expect absolute adherence to some form of objective truth; that is, verifiable information. But as a nonfiction writer—which is such a huge term covering everything from personal memoir to documentaries, and as a term literally means, simply, “What I’m writing is not fiction”—I find a massive gap can exist between “truth” and “accuracy.” In my Siberian essays, I can guarantee—that is prove—the “truth” of the pieces in that I was on the train with my son heading east toward the other side of the country. The people I met are all real, the stories of almost missing the train, as well as the floods on the Amur River, are all real, but I can’t guarantee accuracy. I don’t remember the conversations word for word or if they were in the day or at night or sometimes exactly which station we were at when we bought dried fish, but the essential narrative, a father and son traveling across Siberia together, sharing these experiences, is true, because that is the point of the piece; I’m not writing a guidebook.

 

I was reading some of your unpublished essays and I was not concerned with how accurate you were as to which highway you were on—I’m never going there—or when it was, and even the details of what happened; my focus was on the truth of the “spirit” of the places, and the nonfiction elements of remembering. Poet JT Williams described my work as, “This is a bunch of shit that happened to you and how you best remember it all these years later.” I think that’s an accurate definition of the truth. Tim O’Brien still has the definitive explanation for “truth” in insisting something that “seemed” to happen is often “more true” than what really happened, even though the accuracy might be questionable.

 

Campbell:

What I find interesting is trying to tell the truth, to be honest, in nonfiction.  I write a lot about how what I remember might not be exactly what happened. I try to be honest, try not to lie, but it’s clear to me that capital-T Truth is often not attainable.

 

You are more of a nonfiction writer than I, and you were trained in journalism, so how do you feel when accuracy and truth prove to be elusive?

 

Kunzinger:

I do my homework; I try and unearth the validity of what I’m writing, but if I keep reaching various “truths” because the foundation of what I’m writing is already subjective, I let “accuracy” go and just lean back on personal take.

 

My Siberian work takes place in Siberia, but it is about fathers and sons, about sacrifice and journey. It was the ultimate metaphor—my son and I on the same train going the same distance across an unknown wilderness, and his perspective is different than mine, which I tell through letters to my father. That isn’t a travel essay, I don’t think, nor is my work on the Camino or in St. Petersburg. If someone asks me what I write about, I don’t think of myself as a travel writer—the new book from Madville, A Third Place, is about nature, but it isn’t a guide. Ian Frazier and Colin Thubron both wrote extensively about Siberia and, honestly, their books aren’t guides either. That is why I left journalism. A journalist would write a guide; an essayist such as myself writes about the spirit of place, and a poet, well, they just ride the train into the distance and someone else writes about their death. That’s Russia.

 

Campbell:

I agree completely with your take on your writing: your memoirs are framed by travel. Travel is, metaphorically and spatially, your vehicle.

 

When my essays overlap with my poems, it’s almost always that the poem came first. Sometimes years before the essay. Those poems are often more narrative than lyrical (though I don’t really believe in or understand a hard distinction). The poems are condensed, and the essays are expanded, but the subject is the same. Sometimes it’s a travel topic but more likely it’s about family. Family is such a twisted and complicated subject that the poem, even a series of poems, just sometimes does not allow me to say what I want to say. There’s an essay that was in The History of Steel (and first in Kestrel) about my father’s death that is clearly an expansion, or a gloss, of a shorter poem from some years before.

 

I like to make a distinction between true and honest. I want my work to be honest—either as true as I can make it, or an honest attempt at accuracy. And, yes, the spirit of the work is the most important element. Still, I do like to get the highway numbers right. I have an essay, “On Not Going to Vietnam,” in which I claim this guy I met got #2 in the Vietnam War draft, went to war, and might have died. I accidentally found out twenty years or so later that he did not do any of that. I was being honest, though, it turns out, very, very inaccurate. The last part of my essay explores how I might have come to believe these inaccuracies, but I can’t even explain that.

 

Kunzinger:

When we discuss memoir vs. travel essays, we both seem to lean toward the memoir side, and the sense of place is important, but only in as much as it serves as a foundation for something else we respond to.  A Third Place is a compilation of short essays, mostly in nature, but not about nature; most of the writings—particularly the digressions—were not conceived together. I heard an interview with Billy Joel, and when asked about “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” he said the three different parts to that were written at three different times and none with any thought to being connected to the others. It was only later that he found a common thread and tied them together. I write like that. So if I “finish” a piece about missing a train in Russia, I already know in the back of my mind I’m going to write something else later, or maybe already have written it, that at some point I’ll realize would make a good fit for it, and then go back and tie them together or, sometimes, lace them. Often, I find the “truth” of the piece later, after the bulk of the “narrative” is complete. When you found the truth about the dude who didn’t go to Vietnam, it sounds like you thought you needed to explain yourself to the reader, like some Waltons epilogue—“Mary Ellen eventually moved to Richmond and is living as a prostitute.” I think what really happened to the guy not going to Vietnam is irrelevant—in that essay anyway. Maybe another one later will be solely about that. Tim O’Brien does that. I love reading his essays which later became parts of books—like those in “The Things they Carried.” If you read them carefully you see some significant differences between the original essay and the form it took when complied with other essays which he wanted to somehow connect. I see that in your work too.

 

Campbell:

Did I ever tell you my O’Brien story?  It’s the late 1980s, and my friend and I drove up to Augusta, Georgia, to hear Tim read. We didn’t leave till after noon, so we had to bust through rural Georgia. We got there just as he was being introduced and made a commotion by trying to come in quietly. My friend Judith Ortiz Cofer was hosting the reading, and after Tim was done she took us up to meet him. I was worried about how road ragged I looked, but Tim, as always, looked just as ragged. As we were talking, a man came out of a room behind us, and Tim says, “This is my friend Kiowa.” I just stand there looking dopey and then say, “Man I thought you were dead.” Kiowa shakes his head and says, “It was fiction.”

 

O’Brien intentionally blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction, and he certainly twisted me up. We have yet to mention the New Journalism.  As in Norman Mailer quoting the inner thoughts of Gary Gilmore that he could not have possibly known. Mailer, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe changed what we can say in nonfiction forever.

 

I used to tell people that I didn’t write fiction because the only character I am interested in is me. Then I blew it and published a short story about a kid nailing his father to a cross. I didn’t like my father, but, God, I never crucified him.

 

Kunzinger:

I have no fiction DNA; it’s that simple. Tim first wrote If I Die in a Combat Zone, which is the nonfiction predecessor to the stories in The Things They Carried, which he wrote about twenty years later. I can’t even pull that off. I was in a fiction seminar once with Sheri Reynolds, and we had to write a fiction story—I wrote about a twenty-four-year-old who worked in an exercise club and the people he met, which is completely me. It sucked. When we went over my piece, the other people in the seminar crucified me!I left and drank something like four margaritas that night.

 

Like now. See, this is why I hate talking about writing. I just remembered just how bad I can be at it. Dammit. Let’s get some oysters. Damn. Let’s get some beer.

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Interview: Min Jin Lee

cover of Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee.     Cover of Pachinko by Min Jin Lee.

 

After being born in Seoul, South Korea, Min Jin Lee came with her family to the US at the age of seven and was raised in Elmhurst, Queens. She studied history at Yale University, graduated from Georgetown University Law Center, and worked as a corporate attorney in New York City. Her short writing has been published in The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, and numerous other magazines, and she served as a Morning Forum columnist for the Chosun Ilbo of South Korea for three seasons. She is also a well-known and well-traveled speaker on writing, politics, film, and literature, serves as a trustee of PEN America and as a director of the Authors Guild, and currently is Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College.

 

The recipient of best story prizes from Narrative Magazine and The Missouri Review, Lee has also been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as an honorary doctorate from Monmouth College.

 

Lee’s first novel, Free Food for Millionaires (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, 2007) was selected a Top 10 Novel of the Year by The Times of London, NPR’s Fresh Air, and USA Today. It was selected for various special recognitions and awards by the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Book Sense.

 

Pachinko (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, 2017), her second novel, published after she lived in Japan for several years, was winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, a finalist for the National Book Award, a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times bestseller. It was recognized on more than seventy-five “best books of the year” lists and is translated into twenty-nine languages.

 

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:

One of the things that struck me, and that I really admired as I read Pachinko, is that it’s an epic. And that you chose—or, might we say, dared—to write on this grand scale, which I think a lot of women, especially, hesitate to do. And especially as just your second novel, how challenging to do that. Could you comment about your decision to do that? Did you set out to do that as a kind of statement—”I can do this too”—or did it evolve out of your original inspiration?

 

Min Jin Lee:

That’s such a good question. First of all, thank you for reading the book. Because it’s a huge surprise. When I meet people who’ve actually read it, I kind of think, “Wow, that’s amazing.” [laughter] Thank you so much. My ancestors thank you, my parents thank you.

 

TFR:

Oh, that’s sweet. Thank you.

 

Lee:

No, really. It’s really quite a gift for someone to give you twenty hours of their lives. It is. It is, especially nowadays. But going back to your question about epic and the decision to do it—I initially had written this book from 1996 to 2003 and it was not an epic. It was based on about ten to twenty years, and it was meant to be a book about Solomon, who appears at the very end of the book now and is a minor character. And then after I moved to Japan in 2007 and I interviewed all these Korean-Japanese people, I realized that I got it all wrong and the only way this book and the story would work is by making it an epic. And I was terrified, because I didn’t have that kind of ambition.

 

TFR:

That’s so interesting that you felt compelled to do it.

 

Lee:

I had the ambition to always write an omniscient-narrated, social novel—that was absolutely clear. But to write from cradle to grave, that was not my intention. It really upset me that I had to start all over again [chuckle].

 

TFR:

That’s a tough process. How did you stay on track?

 

Lee:

I outline all the time. I’m not attached to my outlines, but I outline constantly. My outlines, my character cards. I have little cards with people’s birthdays and where they went to school. And then, also, I interview prolifically. I constantly interview. I work like a journalist a lot.

 

TFR:

That makes sense. It was fascinating to me that the setting just seems so vivid and so real, even from the historical past. I was really interested in that research process and what you think research offers the fiction writer.

 

Lee:

I can’t imagine writing fiction without research for the kinds of books I want to write, because I am writing social novels. So, both of my novels have required an enormous amount of research. I’ve interviewed well over a hundred people.

 

And I’ve also taken classes that I didn’t want to take. For my first book, I took a class at FIT on millinery [laughter]. I’m not a fashion person. And I met all these people who can make things out of felt and put these things on their heads, and I thought, “Oh, you’re really different than a shoemaker.”

 

I was interested in the process of making. And I feel like I haven’t met enough people from all these different corners. And I want to write stories about people who aren’t represented. I also want to write about poor people, and poor people often don’t leave any documents… So I have to interview.

 

TFR:

Free Food for Millionaires, your first novel, is notable because you don’t make it only the story of Casey and Ella and their generation, but also of Sabine and Casey’s parents. So many coming of age stories are written as though young people know only other young people [laughter]. It’s great that you managed to include the parental generation there. In Pachinko, you extend even further across generations. And you started to speak to that a minute ago, saying that, “To tell the social story, I realized I had to do a bigger picture.” But what makes you want to extend that reach to the whole social novel? Is it a cultural matter of respect for our elders or other political or other social factors that influence you in that regard? How do you feel that came to be something that’s your goal?

 

Lee:

This really goes to who I am. I’m a historian, so I really care about the long view. People have often asked me, “How did you work on these things?” And I kinda think, “Well, if you look at different examples of people who make things, you should really expect failure. You should really expect suffering. You should expect obscurity.” Guaranteed obscurity.

 

[laughter]

 

And then you should try to pick a topic that you really care about. But in terms of picking generations, I don’t think any of us really makes sense without understanding all the people who inform who we are, whether they’re biologically related to you or culturally related to you or your community. For example, if you are a Mormon, you don’t really make sense without understanding Mormonism. It’s such a specific American religion. So I wanted to very much talk about every corner and every level, which is nuts, which takes a long time.

 

TFR:

It’s interesting too, because it’s against the flow right now, which is all … shorter, shorter, shorter, shorter. Snip it, snip it, snip it, snip it. One reason why I enjoyed Pachinko so much because it was a novel I could sink into the way I’ve sunk into novels so many times in the past (and not so much these flash-by novels so common now) and just really get that larger picture.

 

Lee:

I do know that what I’m writing is very against the grain of my contemporaries. I am writing a social novel of the nineteenth century kind with modern sentences. At the same time, I wanted readers to stay with me.

 

TFR:

It’s well worth doing. I have one more comparative question. It seems likely that Free Food for Millionaires was rooted in your own personal experience…

 

Lee:

Some of it, yes.

 

TFR:

… as a Korean-American who attended an Ivy League university, and experienced conflicts maybe similar to Casey’s. But you’ve noted that Pachinko stemmed from this history lecture that you heard. How did you make that transition from writing about something that was closer to your own experience—and this is obviously still something close to your heart—to something larger than your own experience or slightly different from your own background? How did you make the transition?

 

Lee:

Actually, I had no intentions of writing Free Food for Millionaires because it was way too close to home [chuckles]. I had written Pachinko in another iteration well before I published Free Food for Millionaires, because I’m a very political person, I’m a very theoretical person. I’m actually much more comfortable talking about global feminism, poverty, the refugee crisis. I actually like that. Until I read V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, I would not have written Free Food for Millionaires.

 

TFR:

So the transition was actually the other way round for you.

 

Lee:

When I noticed that Naipaul had the courage to write about his hometown, I said, “Well I’m going to write about my hometown of Elmhurst, Queens. And I’m going to write about the Koreans that I know,” because there are so many different kinds of Koreans and they were interesting to me. And I figured, well, I’m not gonna be successful, I’m not gonna make any money. I’ve made this incredibly stupid decision to quit being a lawyer [laughter]. I might as well write the book I want to write. I think honoring that was really helpful for me. That’s the reason why I wrote it, but it’s really uncomfortable to write about yourself. Really uncomfortable for me.

 

TFR:

So while some people feel more comfortable with starting close to home, your background in history perhaps meant you were a person more comfortable with the large-scale. In some ways, it was a relief to come back to Pachinko and be able to turn a little further out? Could you tell me a little bit about your reasons for going to Tokyo? Did you do that primarily to work on the novel? Or was that for other reasons and then it was just suddenly all this material presented itself? You began to meet people? Or how did you develop your routine of interviewing other people and doing research there in Japan?

 

Lee:

I always interview people for my fiction. Even Free Food for Millionaires, I was interested in writing about money and class.

 

TFR:

And the millinery class [chuckle].

 

Lee:

Right. And so because I did all those things, I’m very comfortable with the interview form. I also grew up incredibly shy, but in interviews, I feel like it’s okay to talk to people.

 

TFR:

You have a role.

 

Lee:

Yes, I have a role. And also, in the service of a story, it’s okay to ask all these questions. I went to Japan because my husband got a job and we needed the money and the upgrade. So we went and I got to interview so many Korean-Japanese people. And the initial interviews are very hard. It was really hard to get those interviews. But once people realize that I’m a harmless fiction writer, they’re like, “Oh, okay. All right, fine. Let me introduce you to my friends” [laughter].

 

TFR:

These interviews, I’m sure, influenced the rich array of characters in Pachinko. I’ve a hard time figuring out which particular character or characters to ask about so many are well-developed. But Sunja, of course, is the cradle-to-grave presence in the novel, and I loved her so much. She was a fabulous character. But I also want to ask about Yoseb and Isak. They were the two who struck me as the tragic figures in the book. And I wanted to ask a little bit about whether you felt… Sunja went through many, many, many difficulties, but she seemed to have this stronger spirit. And is there a little bit of a feminist commentary in this book? Do you feel that the women survive better than the men? And is that something that you feel is sort of more generally true in the world? That women can face this kind of conflict and travail better and intact?

 

Lee:

I think it’s not so much a matter of inborn resilience of women. It’s a matter of all the cultural messages that men and women receive. I think that men from oppressed minority groups still have the burdens of the masculinity of the outer world, and consequently, the choices that they make in order to become men in that world are very often unfavorable to their lives. And they become tragic characters. So for the two characters that you mentioned, Isak and Yoseb, Isak really cares about being a really excellent person, so he decides that he’s going to become a man by being a martyr, and that’s a tough road.

 

[laughter]

 

Whereas Yoseb, his attitude is, “I’m going to try to become a man by having conventional ideas of providing for my family.”

 

If you’re an oppressed minority male, it’s difficult to provide for your family.

 

But going back to your initial question about how women in these groups survive. I really admire many women that I’ve met, who are illiterate, who are really poor, and the way they survive… And a lot of it has to do with the fact that I think women who—across culture, across race, across class, around the world—have this in common, which is that our biologies force us to make decisions that are not only about our individual lives. And one of the things I heard over and over and over again is that women are supposed to suffer. And in Asia, in Europe, in Africa, in Latin America, in older countries, that message is, I think, relayed over and over again, because women don’t have the same rights as in advanced Western nations, and, also, they are older countries.

 

Even in Europe—I’ve met women from Germany who have to leave their work to make lunch for their families at 2:00 every day. It’s an advanced nation, and yet it’s an older country, and the expectations of femininity are different.

 

This is the other flip side of suffering—if you can bear humiliation, it’s easier to survive. You may not like the kind of life you have, but you can survive. I think it’s harder for men to bear the same humiliation that women bear.

 

TFR:

That’s beautifully put. Do you resist the labels? Or do you consider yourself a political writer, or a feminist writer, or a Korean-American writer?

 

Lee:

Presbyterian writer.

 

[laughter]

 

TFR:

What do you think about all those labels that I’m sure that get used for you quite a lot?

 

Lee:

It’s fine. The fact that people think that I’m any kind of writer, I’m like, “Thank you.”

 

[laughter]

 

Just to be obscure and to not be read for such a long time, I’m so grateful to have readers.

 

TFR:

Would you read us a favorite passage from Pachinko?

 

Lee: Yes. [Reads from xxx].

 

TFR:

I love that passage because it’s just that moment of change.

 

Lee:

And wonder.

 

TFR:

And wonder, and there’s so much that’s coming together there in terms of the relationships that are going to be built and explored in the novel.

 

Do you have any words of advice for anyone wishing to write a historical epic kind of novel? Or any other good tidbits about you or your writing process?

 

Lee:

When I teach my writing classes, I often meet really talented writers who feel discouraged. And I always say that, “If you could choose the topic that means the most to you, then the external discouragements will feel a little more bearable, because you are staying closer to the things that you love.” So I think the pages need to be something that you love and that you want to turn to as opposed to something that the world is judging, and that will help you stay with the project longer.

 

TFR:

As opposed to what is “selling” or what will be popular?

 

Lee:

Yes! Or what they think will be… admired. I always try to discourage that. And what’s the expression that I’ve heard? “Forget being the best, be the only.” You can do that if you really honor the thing that you care about.

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Interview: Marie Howe

Cover of Marie Howe's Magdalene.     Cover of Marie Howe's What the Living Do.     Cover of Marie Howe's The Kingdom of Ordinary Time.

 

Marie Howe is originally from Rochester, New York, and is the author of four poetry collections, of which the most recent is Magdalene (W. W. Norton, 2017), a musing of the channeled voice of the Biblical Mary Magdalene. The oldest girl of nine siblings, she did not seriously write poetry until the age of thirty. Howe, whose brother John died of an AIDS-related illness in 1989, has said: “John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic entirely.” Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, and Harvard Review. Honors include the National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships. In January 2018, Howe was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

 

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:

I’m so excited to get to speak with you: Irish Catholic grade school commonality! Oh my, the stories! Reading your poems cues me in as to your own immense, lingering remembrances of an American Irish Catholic upbringing, grade school, and family. Your collection of the death of your brother—

 

Howe:

What the Living Do—

 

TFR:

Yes—I’ve taught that book—it resonates so much for me personally, and now I have the chance to ask you how your most recent book, Magdalene, came about.

 

Howe:

I feel fortunate to have been brought up in a tradition that had a very strong symbolic world. I was the oldest daughter of nine children. I’m the only one who went to a convent school, Sacred Heart in Rochester. I first went to parochial school, then this convent school. From a very early age, the gospels, and what we call “the old testaments,” and of course what the

Jewish tradition calls the Torah—the stories meant a great deal to me.

 

TFR:

In what way, specifically?

 

Howe:

Well, they felt archetypal and deeply poetic as there were so many silences in them.

 

TFR:

Silences?

 

Howe:

Yes, silent space where they could be inhabited, and of course in the Jewish tradition there’s midrash, a critical explanation where the Torah is considered a living document, and the rabbis imagine into those silences, and continue to create the Torah. I always loved those stories and the spaces one could inhabit within them—all those stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, and the Jewish great dilemmas, or debates as they’re also called.

 

TFR:

I studied the Kabbalah in an undergrad course on world religion and love that aspect about Judaism—the intellectual debates with the sense that the faith is in a state of evolving. I like this idea of “silences.”

 

Howe:

Yes, exactly. And the silences, well, Moses was a stutterer—I was a stutterer as a young person, and I identified. Really, so many of the stories, right up to the New Testament, I was able to identify with, and those stores still mean a great deal to me. Some people grow up with the Greek myths, or other some other kinds of symbolic worlds, but that was the world I grew up in, the Biblical one.

 

TFR:

At the side of my nightstand when I was a child, I had a huge children’s Bible storybook with the most amazing illustrations. I still have it. I feel the stories helped create who I am. It’s not that my beliefs are the same as when I was a child, but as a writer, they’re so foundational when you hear them at a young age. Do they always find a way into your work?

 

Howe:

Not always, I mean there are many poems where they don’t, not really, but like any interior world they are there, somewhere, always in the background. They were for many people, for many writers, like Tolstoy and Kierkegaard. You know, he spent years writing about the Abraham and Isaac story.

 

TFR:

In Fear and Trembling—

 

Howe:

Yes, and for me, always of course like many girls, it was Magdalene’s story that appealed to me. I knew from a very young age that how she was depicted was wrong.

 

TFR:

I always questioned the Cain and Abel story, why an all powerful being would prefer a lamb over wheat. It always bothered me. Mary Magdalene too, I always thought of the scene where the crowd was going to stone her.

 

Howe:

I knew it, always, I just knew it. And then later, when studying the New Testament and the early Church, I studied with Elaine Pagels, actually, who wrote a book about the gnostic gospels, and how the church fathers created that persona of Magdalene we came to know. [The Gnostic Gospels, Vintage, 1979].

 

TFR:

This is why I love your book—you’ve given her the voice stolen, and let her take advantage of the empty space left.

 

Howe:

We’ll never know, as much as we want to know about the historical woman, and as a woman I can identify with a her searching for meaning and for her own subjectivity outside the norms that existed for her then.

 

TFR:

That is sad, really, right? I mean all the women of the Bible, and there are so many! Their voices have been filtered, right? We only get to hear the redacted male versions. When did this idea come to you, to focus poems on her? Is this the first you wrote of her?

 

Howe:

I’d been trying to write in the voice of Magdalene for thirty years. I think trying is the key word there—for me it was a kind of receptivity that had to occur, I think I had to grow up!

 

TFR:

I get that. I’ve had to move away from the religion of my childhood, and then sort of dance with it through the years. Or maybe I should say break up with it, and reconcile, and then do it all over again. It feels like it will be a life-long process. As a poet I’ve written in the voice of Eve, Noah’s wife, stuck on that boat, questioning her husband’s sanity, and recently a piece where I envisioned Adam going through a divorce in twenty-first century Florida before heading off to Vegas. I never thought about Magdalene, really, and now I feel a bit bad about that. I did do an ekphrastic poem based on a de La Tour painting before I knew of your collection. I’m interested: When you found yourself exploring, felt her voice coming out, would you say you were channeling her? That’s how I feel they come to me, as if I’m the receptacle and I let them speak.

 

Howe:

Well, it is and it isn’t, I mean in the book she’s me, she’s you, she’s a contemporary woman, she’s a woman who’s still in history.

 

TFR:

“Still in history.” Could you speak to that phrase a little more?

 

Howe:

I mean every poem, of course, for me is different. Some are more like just me wearing a mask of Magdalene, but sometimes it’s like everything is there, and I feel she is me, she is you, she’s the woman over there. That what was taken from us, from us women, was our commonality of her—she was turned, by men, into a repentant prostitute, who was closed off to us. I feel she’s the female principle trying to integrate herself.

 

TFR:

I wanted to ask, how you feel about it—that she’s the one who always had to be forgiven for something, or Eve, right? These voiceless women who’ve been reduced, in so many ways, to objects in need of forgiveness.

 

Howe:

According to the story, it might have been her, or it might not have been her. A lot of those female figures were combined in the gospels to one kind of object, a female representational object for men.

 

TFR:

To fit into their narratives.

 

Howe:

Right. Have you read the gnostic gospels and the gospel according to Mary Magdalene?

 

TFR:
No, only the old and new, the little blurb-version in my Catholic Bible.

 

Howe:

The gnostic gospels were outlawed by the Catholic Church, and we had no access to them until they were found in the late 1940s in a cave in Egypt—

 

TFR:
The dead sea scrolls?

 

Howe:

They were found along with the dead sea scrolls, but they really were the Gnostics, the early Christian communities who called themselves the Gnostics, and there is a gospel according to Mary Magdalene. There’s a story that you can get, though the original scroll was tattered and there’s a lot of empty spaces, as it’s ripped up, perhaps missing some pages.

 

TFR:

A physical object that was found then. Is there an idea when she wrote it?

 

Howe:

There’s also many different ones, gospels, thirty or forty of them. As Elaine Pagels notes, there is a Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and in it she is “a character.” Whoever she was, the early communities split off into different kinds of communities, you know, then someone dies, a leader or writer, and arguments arise: He said this, she said that, they were all priests at that time, it was circular, both men and women, in a circular community that was eventually outlawed by the hierarchy of the patriarchal central church that determined priests and bishops should be all male, with no women in even perfunctory roles.

 

TFR:

Which of course left us with two thousand years of patriarch-diluted history.

 

Howe:

Yes, oppressions of female history!

 

TFR:

This book, this collection, I feel, on oppression, is quite timely. On the other hand, when wouldn’t it have been? It’s two thousand years in the making. What do you want to say to young female poets, with your own revelations, about what we’ve always known of as sexual harassment?

 

Howe:

The key thing we’ve always known is that women know women who have been beaten down, drowned, burned, killed, beaten to death by men. I mean, I love men, but the patriarchy has to end. That’s the political feeling I have, as a poet. I feel Muriel Rukeyser’s great poets’ voice of [German artist] Käthe Kollwitz in the poem of the same name, comments in her poem, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” I feel we need to tell the truth about our lives. and we’ve been telling the truth all along, but no one would write it for us. There were a few women writers, but they’re almost invisible. We have to tell the truth about our lives. So I would tell young female poets, “Tell the truth about your life. Whatever that means.” All of our young women poets need to tell the truth in such a way they become transformed in the telling, which is what poetry does. Mere complaint doesn’t do it, mere witness doesn’t even do it. Something has to occur in the telling that’s transformative to the writer.

 

TFR:

Thank you for that. I find in some contemporary poetry it’s men and women ranting, and the ranting doesn’t do it.

 

Howe:

This is a very mysterious aspect of art, right? That somehow through language and style, silence and metaphor, and musicality, and writing into a subject, not merely about a subject, but into what you don’t understand about it, about the subject, then one becomes transformed in the act of writing, and one discovers something one doesn’t know, and that is what art is for. There’s nothing wrong with witness, we need it, but art transforms the maker. Art transforms both the poet and the reader.

 

TFR:

Do you feel once the poem leaves you it becomes the reader’s?

 

Howe:

That’s the great thing about poetry. It’s worthless in the commodified world and doesn’t belong to anybody. That what is so precious, one of that last things that can’t be sold. Learn poems by heart, and then take them across borders. Put them in your wallet, on your refrigerator, carry them around—that’s what I’ve done all my life! Cut out poems and carry them around. I didn’t have to ask permission, the poem belongs to the world—this gift is one of the last examples that shows how art belongs to all of us.

 

TFR:

I tell my students I probably only appreciate about 30 percent of the poems I read, and of that 30 percent there are only a few I love, but those poems help me live. I take them with me when I try to go to sleep at night after a horrible day. In your book, What the Living Do, you endured the death of your brother. I had a younger brother who died at forty-three of alcoholism.

 

Howe:

I’m so sorry! In my family too, we dealt with that. I feel the same way. Poetry saved my life.

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Interview: Anna Levi

Cover of Madinah Girl by Anna Levi.     Author Anna Levi.

 

 

Anna Levi is a writer of dual Grenadian and Trinidadian citizenship, born August 29, 1984, and now living in Tacarigua and Trincity, Trinidad. Her first novel, Madinah Girl (Karnak House, 2016), won Special Mention in the 2016 Bocas Literary Awards competition. Levi’s narrative style is both lyrical and rude, combining a Caribbean realist literary tradition with the creole nation language spoken in the streets and rumshops of Trinidad.  Levi has been hailed by literary icon Earl Lovelace for taking readers into the “bruising, multi-religious, multi-ethnic churnings in the underbelly of Trinidad.” Her second novel, “Nowherians,” continues to develop Levi’s vision of life among young people on the margins of contemporary Trinidad. Please see the excerpted chapter, “Rich Gold,” in Aquifer as well.

 

Kevin Meehan for The Florida Review:

Madinah Girl is a very strong and uniquely voiced debut novel. How did you come to be a writer, and what motivates you to write?

 

Anna Levi:

My life! It has been a flamboyant, emotional, and a kind of surrealistic adventure—from selling avocados and empty Carib beer bottles in rumshops, begging for food and money in Mosques for Juma, running around half-naked and bare-feet on the hot-pitched streets of Tacarigua, selling my mother’s aloo pie in primary school in order to buy red mango and tamarind balls, pitching marbles with orphans, roasting pigeons, doves, and cashew nuts on the fireside for lunch, listening to Lord Kitchener from a jukebox, liming with cows in the cemetery, attending funerals of children who died from drowning in the river, catching butterflies, flying kite, playing cricket, frightening children with Lagahoo stories, bursting bamboo and lighting deyas for divali, eating orisha food my mother always warned me about, and so many other tragic-buoyant, memorable things I have done in my life. The world of children—their voices/language, their livelihood, their social and emotional status, their environment and the underworld culture—is the biggest motivation for me to write.  From childhood I was always telling and writing stories. When, much later, I began to study literature formally for a degree and reading people like Selvon, Naipaul, Michael Anthony’s Green Days by the River, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, I realized I had the material to develop this interest. Acting as Atticus Finch in a high school production of Mockingbird gave me a breakthrough—when I realized that as a writer one could assume any identity.

 

TFR:

Other critics have compared your work to the social realism of Harold Sonny Ladoo, you yourself have spoken to me many times about the importance of Jean Rhys as an inspiration, and I myself was frequently reminded of Merle Hodge and especially her short story, “Inez,” that appeared in Callaloo some years back. What do you make of these sorts of comparisons?

 

Levi:

I began Madinah Girl before I’d read any Ladoo and I haven’t yet read Merle Hodge’s “Inez.” If you’re looking for comparisons, I think someone like Reinaldo Arenas, in terms of childhood, poverty, and abuse as content, subject matter, and also his self-declared peasant identity, might be more productive. Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night would be another comparable text, in its treatment of sexual abuse and trauma. While I can now see similarities between Ladoo’s irreverent attitude, his settings and language, he wrote almost exclusively about the rural Indo-Trini community, whereas my focus is on all the indigenous and immigrant communities in Trinidad and then beyond in the intra-Caribbean diaspora (Guyana, Grenada, etc). Jean Rhys—whose narrative I identified with and who first showed me that life experience can be structured in literary form—is definitely a major literary inspiration—but mostly because of Voyage in the Dark.  Although I’ve studied Caribbean literature, because of my rootsy upbringing which brought me into direct contact with the range of Trini cultural and religious practices, I tend to treat my texts as extensions of these practices, rather than neatly formulated linear narratives. Creole language, dance, and song are integral to my writing. I write from a Creole position with no apologies.

 

TFR:

What are some other inspirations—and not necessarily literary icons—people, places, or things that had an impact on the writing of Madinah Girl that we might not expect?

 

Levi:

When I was fifteen years old, I went to Grenada. I was on my uncle’s estate, and I was wandering the estate because I was trying to see how big it was. And I saw an orisha woman living in a shack, very poor, she was squatting on my uncle’s property. Very very very very VERY poor place, I’m telling you, I took pictures, and she had a blind son, a very big boy he looked like about twenty-something and he was a blind boy, and he was walking around and looking for his brother and sister. They were small. And so I’m hearing the man—the boy—calling out for his brother and sister, and he’s blind. I saw him with a stick, so I said, “Who’re you looking for?” and he said, he’s looking for his sister. So, I went off to look for his sister, and his eleven-year-old sister was being raped by her twelve-year-old brother. And I stopped him. And the girl was crying, tears, and that really woke me up to literature to want to write about it. So after that every year I went to Grenada, and I used to check on the girl and see if she was fine and okay. I think her brother died, but that girl being sexually abused by the brother really was painful for me, and I had to write about it. And in the same village when I walk down the road, I’m seeing men drinking alcohol, drinking rum in rumshops, and they’re really having a good time, I’m talking about father’s drinking rum in rumshops, like heavy rum, and getting drunk, a pig roasting in the back, they’re eating pork. And the girl’s being raped in the bush there, and the father is drinking alcohol in the front here, so it’s the whole landscape and the village life that really woke me up to write about it.

 

I grew up in a poor (but not depressing) and racially divided environment.  My parents are an interracial couple with a big age difference. My siblings and I were often rejected by primary schools because of our father’s skin color, religion, social/economic, and marital status. For seven years, I attended a primary school which included orphans. The orphanage was across the road from the school, also close to where I live, and we shared the same church. The school and the orphanage were one. Children confided in me. From secrets about sexual, physical, and verbal abuse to their lives of their incurably insane and alcoholic birth parents to the luck of being saved by the bell. I was also a victim of child sexual abuse. At the age of eight, I felt psychologically homeless and emotionally parentless. So there was a special kind of bond with these friends of mine. We created our own kinship… many of these kids have been demonized by their own society.  These children are my biggest inspiration and you’ll come across it in “Nowherians,” the novel I’m currently working on.

 

TFR:

What’s at stake in the title, Madinah Girl?

 

Levi:

Madinah means city in Arabic, “city girl.” It’s a young girl who’s looking to be enlightened. She has been suffering for so long, and she leaves home to find enlightenment, love, everything.  Madinah is also the holy city of spiritual enlightenment. It’s a multicultural place where people interact and fuse. I love Arabic language… especially through music. I’ve learnt a lot about the culture through the music, like “Mastool” or “High” in English, by the Egyptian singer Hamada Helal.

 

TFR:

So, carrying on with the topic of children and your interest in children and children’s stories, the coming-of-age novel is arguably a primary genre in Caribbean literature. I wanted to ask you how you see Madinah Girl as either fitting into that slot or what makes it unique as a Caribbean bildungsroman?

 

Levi:

Well, it’s the language that makes it unique. I write about the language of the people, it’s a nation language, so you look at other novels, and it’s really bourgeois and you can laugh it off, and then you move on with life. But when you look at Madinah Girl, you can’t laugh that off. It’s realer. So when you get someone in their own language who reads Madinah Girl, they recognize one time what is right and what is wrong, what’s going on in a village, you know, people are sick, people are dying, all the issues. They are conscious, it makes them conscious. And, you know, I did an experiment. I gave a few people, a few uneducated people, Madinah Girl to read and after they read it they were like, “Oh, my God, I know someone who did this.” They were conscious of other stories and stories in their own life.

 

TFR:

Typically in the bildungsroman, the character finds a place in society at the end, but I don’t know that Maria, the protagonist in Madinah Girl, finds that place in society at the end. It seems as if it’s open-ended at the end, if not fragmented and shattered.

 

Levi:

Yeah, because we are a fragmented people. Caribbean people, we are fragmented and we are made of all different kinds of things. I wanted to leave it open because it continues, it’s like a discourse, something that’s going on still. I didn’t want to put an end to it, it’s still going on.

 

TFR:

Does her story continue in “Nowherians”?

 

Levi:

Yeah, it continues in “Nowherians,” but it goes back to children. It goes back to their lives at a tender age, much younger than Maria in Madinah Girl. I think in both books, “Nowherians” and Madinah Girl, it’s a nation of language, people, and culture. It’s that nation that people do not want to know about, especially the bourgeoisie.

 

TFR:

And what about “Nowherians”? How did you come up with that title?

 

Levi:

That is a working title, but I really love it. “Nowherians” means “children of Nowhere” and most of the things I’m writing about in the book concern children who feel abandoned or not loved or they feel bad because of their treatment. So, children of Nowhere, they’re lost, they are lost.

 

TFR:

When I read Madinah Girl, I found the issues of chronology, time, and development of the protagonist to be extremely interesting, difficult, and bordering on chaos even. What are your thoughts about chronology?

 

Levi:

Well, I want to jump. I believe in the gap. You know, I did a workshop with Marlon James, and he said that gap is important. Sometimes when you write a story line and it’s too consecutive it’s sometime boring and sometimes you’re stuck. I just wanted to jump, because I just wanted to show the importance of the lives of Maria and even her brother Pablo, I wanted to show the important parts of their lives, and the effects and all the chaos in their lives. I didn’t want to have to jaunt through a chapter that’s settled. I wanted to pinpoint the chaos, like “This is it, I’m nailing it. I’m not hiding it at all, I’m nailing it, and this is the fucking chaos.”

 

TFR:

What’s up with the shift from the first person to the third person in one of the chapters, I think it’s titled “Walima”?

 

Levi:

I sometimes want to be like God in the book. I want to use my skill, to tell it in the first person, but then I want to step aside and look at a character. I change to third person when I don’t feel comfortable in the character’s shoe,  when I don’t feel comfortable with the character.  So in “Nowherians,” I am in most of the characters’ shoes. So I’m changing and each character is different. We have three characters—Donna, Bruno, and Keisha—and I am Donna in one chapter, Keisha in another chapter, and Bruno in yet another. I feel so comfortable it’s like I’m writing a story I can experience and I can tell. But third person is when I don’t feel comfortable enough to be in the first person, so I kind of step aside.  Writing in the third person allowed me to be omniscient. I wanted to show and tell with many eyes and with an unobstructed view by switching the point of view. It’s like sitting on top of the world with a microscope!

 

TFR:

Can you say something about your writing process?

 

Levi:

Writing “Nowherians” depresses me.  I went to two interviews yesterday—child brides—then before I write I get so depressed. All morning I am in tears, then I go into exile and write for days. I interviewed a woman who was a child bride, and it made me realize something.  When I was eleven, a Muslim woman brought me to my “future husband”… it was the same man I ended up with after leaving the woman I lived with. In Hindu and Muslim culture, men are given their brides as young as nine.  This woman I interviewed was married at age eleven, she met her husband at age five.  Her mother chose her husband. Her mother was Indian and her father was African, but her family didn’t accept the mixing of the races so she was considered a bastard child and her mother married her off to get rid of her and the “shame” she (the mother) brought into the family.  She is in her forties and has fourteen kids. Some died. Her husband beat the shit out of her.  He is dead now, but she lives alone because all her kids were taken in by people. If you see the poverty the woman lives in… I can write about it without taking any pics, because I grew up with women like that—women who marry young.  These same women who marry young, often do the same… they bring husbands for young girls… a fucking cycle. And I remembered, the same Muslim woman who gave me my first lover, she was in an arranged marriage at age eleven.

 

TFR:

How would you characterize the Trinidad that you write about in Madinah Girl, the world of Orange Grove, Trin City, Dinsley Village, Calcutta Village, rumshops, masjids, and brothels in St. James? This is not the sort of place you typically see depicted in literature, so how do you talk about this Trinidad?

 

Levi:

Through experiences, one, and then when I’m writing a chapter I revisit the place and look at it then and now. I look at images, I talk to people. I look for the filthy stuff, the dirty stuff, the things that people do not want to talk about or do not want to write about or hear about. You know, you come to Trinidad, you eat bake and shark, you drink coconut water, or you go to the beach and you don’t know how many kids are in the orphan home, are abandoned by their drug addicted parents, you don’t know about children being sold off into shops to work for people. So I wanted to look at that, at the bitterness behind all of this sweetness. It’s very bitter, and when you come out of the beautiful zone of Trinidad and you go into the ghetto, and you see a young boy with a gun, and you see a young girl being a prostitute, and you see an old-old woman who is digging in a dustbin and smoking crack cocaine, you wonder where this began. You know, it just didn’t happen now.

 

TFR:

I would say the flora and the fauna and the food, the things that people drink and the clothes that they wear, and the landscapes around them, all of that is brilliant and sharply drawn in the book—

 

Levi:

—and the vagrants!

 

TFR:

I want to ask about the range of languages in the novel.  In particular, how would you talk about the language of your protagonist, Maria, when she is functioning as a frame narrator versus the vernacular spoken language of both Maria herself and the other characters? How do you handle the issue of narration versus spoken language as a writer?

 

Levi:

It’s kind of difficult sometimes because when I’m writing the dialogue and I go into the narrator, I kind of fall back and I wanna stick to the damn Creole English, right, I wanna stick to the language? But it’s challenging so that’s why I have an editor who edits for me, to keep me on track, but it’s sometimes difficult to maneuver both. Maria, like most Trinis, works the linguistic continuum from Creole to Trini Standard English, sometimes all the way to Standard English. When she’s framing narrative she’ll tend towards the more “proper” register, whereas when she’s speaking like some of the other characters, she’s more comfortable with Creole, although even then, because we’re dealing with a traumatized character, she may almost subconsciously slide between registers. One very important point has to be kept in mind when engaging with Madinah Girl. This is a series of events/episodes recalled through the consciousness of a character who is not stable, which is why it veers between the sublime and ridiculous, the horror and the beauty. This fluidity is also reflected in the language, which refuses like Maria’s fragmented consciousness to be standardized or regulated. Some publishers and critics fail to grasp this basic dynamic and have attempted to get me to tidy it up, to make it logical, which would entirely defeat its essence. My editor even tried to retain some of the incongruities of Maria’s thought processes, which are expressed in a strange combination of a creolized literary Standard English, resulting in the unique voice. Once you start standardizing and attempting to force this text into conventional forms, you kill the voice. The voice, the language, reflect the damaged consciousness not only of Maria and other characters but indeed of postmodern neo-colonial T&T.  The text, the narratives it carries are a cry against denial (of the realities presented) and a Creole assertion and subversion of the impositions of a postcolonial society unable to free itself from the jumbies of colonialism, respectability, and bourgeois/globalized values. If readers and critics find this confusing, so much the better, because the reality is itself highly confused and conflicted.

 

TFR:

So what’s at stake there? Why not just use nation language to voice the narrator?

 

Levi:

For the narrator? Well, I want to do that in the future. It’s a good experiment!

 

TFR:

Your experience suggests that, if you write in nation language, a local audience is there to receive it.

 

Levi:

Yeah, mostly the poor people. I have great feedback from my supporters, so, I just write, you know, in my language, so that my people could understand, and other people who aren’t my people are welcome to understand the culture.

 

TFR:

I want to ask you another question about the style or technique of your writing.  Because it does have a social realism aspect to it, which is both extremely beautiful and extremely harsh from paragraph to paragraph or even sentence to sentence. But, against the social reality, you have these utopian desires of the protagonist. This opposition or tension is also a formal/stylistic issue in which harsh and obscene language is pitted against unexpected lyricism, and adjectives or adverbs often work to modify objects and actions in surprising ways. So, what about those oppositions in your writing?

 

Levi:

Maria doesn’t get to be a child when she is around her family. With her father, she doesn’t get to be a child. So she has to fake things in order to get out of things and not go to the church. So I wanted the style to reflect that and change when she’s around different kinds of people.

 

The opposition (brutality vs. beauty, innocence) reflects Maria’s struggle with the harshness of her position and her innocence, her longing to belong, when her family fail to protect and nurture her. To transform/transcend the specific adverse social conditions of T&T we must first acknowledge rather than deny the plantation’s legacy of brutality, which persists in the sometimes very cruel way people deal which each other. Under the veneer of modernity and globalization this brutality continues unchallenged –children are still viewed as potential labor and objects not as vulnerable emerging people thus, robbing them of their childhood and the emotional development necessary for them to become complete caring adults.

Various global and local influences have accelerated the meltdown of postmodern Trini society, and I believe that we can transcend/transform our condition by revisiting/revisioning some of our Creole cultural expressions and rituals, many of which focus on healing and community.  This is the way forward for us in our unique historically framed reality. We can’t solve our very basic problems by distracting ourselves with the trinkets of globalization –social media, global mass culture, pretending once again that what happened over the last 300 years in T&T didn’t happen. Recognizing the oppression and suffering we’ve inflicted by following the plantation model is a vital first step, and Madinah Girl recognizes all this and throws it in your face. It demands that readers, especially here in T&T and the Caribbean, take responsibility for their humanity, or lack of it and by confronting our daily horrors we can then move forward.

 

TFR:

And what does it take for the human spirit to transform/transcend adverse social conditions?

 

Levi:

I think again it’s freedom, you know?

 

TFR:

What does that line mean: “Men like to use women and treat them like metal”?

 

Levi:

You know metal is something that is very hard. It’s a saying in the Caribbean. Metal is something you can hit on the ground many times. It can bend but it can’t hurt like a human body, it’s an object. So it means that men like to use Drupatee like an object. Something that can’t feel. So women aren’t supposed to feel anything when they’re abused.

 

TFR:

Madinah Girl seems at once intensely autobiographical—sometimes excruciatingly so—and yet utterly NOT an autobiography of the author, Anna Levi. How do you talk about that issue of muddling the line between autobiography and autobiographical writing?

 

Levi:

Art comes from life, is a part of life, can inform life but shouldn’t be confused with life. Madinah Girl began from a store of life stories I kept telling my husband. When he got fed up with hearing them for the nth time, he suggested I start writing them, in the same voice as I told them. Obviously much of the raw material is autobiographical, but my intention never was to write an autobiography but by presenting a series of fragments to make some sense of my own fragmented childhood and adolescence and a period of recent Trini socio-cultural history which hasn’t really been written about from the bottom up.

 

TFR:

What are you working on now, and what can you tell us about the scope, the focus, the stylistic issues?

 

Levi:

I’m reading for a Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of the West Indies. I’m working on my second novel, “Nowherians”. It’s about the life, living condition, and treatment of children who were raised with informal fostercare parents/families and even orphans in Trinidad and Tobago. Most of my materials are from experience… but to give me a boost, I talk to vagrants, drug addicts, ex-convicts, incurably insane people, happy children, sad children, elderly impoverished people, criminals, sex workers, immigrants, and even religious spiritual leaders/healers. In writing, I love, respect and appreciate the dialect Trinidadian English creole and all other dialects from the Caribbean …. in fact the world.  I like to write with visibility. The first chapter of “Nowherians” was adapted into film by film students at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, under the supervision of their directing lecturer, Yao Ramesar.

 

TFR:

Before we wrap up, can you talk about your interaction with the filmmakers? What did you see?  How was that set up? What kind of versions of your writing did they produce?

 

Levi:

So, there’s the film department at UWI, and my work was selected, so they took a chapter from “Nowherians”, and the students had to read and take any part and adapt it. Some students liked the landscape, right, so they did a silent film on the landscape. Some of them loved the dialogue and did the dialogue. Some of them liked different parts of the book. They changed it up and adapted it, but it’s very connected to the book itself. I spoke to them before they made their films and they told me what were their plans. It was a great attempt because some of them didn’t even have dialogue in their film, they had just a landscape, just a young boy who grew up. He was an orphan and he grew up, and he’s walking through the place that he knew when he was young, like an old broken wooden house where it had fallen, with his pets and just some music in the background showing his emotion. I’m really loyal to “Nowhereians” and really dedicated to finishing it.

 

 

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Interview: Hanif Abdurraqib

Cover of Hanif Abdurraqib's The Crown Ain't Worth Much.     Cover of Hanif Abdurraqib's Vintage Sadness.     Cover of Hanif Abdurraqib's They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us.

 

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic. His published work includes poetry in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN America, and various other journals and essays and music criticism in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry, 2016), was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, and others. He is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Vintage Sadness (Big Licks, 2017), which was produced in a limited edition and is no longer available.

 

He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow and a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet/essayist Eve Ewing. He now serves as poetry editor for Muzzle.

 

Yes, he would like to talk to you about your favorite band and your favorite sneakers. You can find out more at his website.

 

We caught up with Hanif at the Miami Book Fair in the fall of 2017, right before the release of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us to talk to him about that collection and The Crown Ain’t Worth Much.

 

Hunter Case for The Florida Review: I’m a little bit star-struck (laughter) and I’d like to have you start off by reading a poem.

 

Abdurraqib: Sure. This poem is called “None Of My Vices Are Violent Enough To Undo Remembering.” (Abdurraqib reads the poem, found here.)

 

TFR: The last couple of years have had you releasing a collection of both poetry and essays. Do you find it easier to go between the two forms? Or do you find you have a certain proclivity for one genre?

 

Abdurraqib: I’m actually at a point now where I don’t even think of genre as something that affects my approach to the work. I’m really driven instead by whatever it will take for me to figure out what’s latching onto me at the moment. Oftentimes, so much of my work is driven by my curiosities and knowing that I’m wrong about something. I’m interested in finding whatever avenue it takes for me—not even to find answers, but to find better ways to discuss my wrongness. Sometimes that’s a really long piece. Sometimes that’s a poem, sometimes it’s a combination of the two. But the sooner I gave up the idea of adhering to genre the easier the work came to me.

 

TFR: A lot of your poems are very narrative, or at least seem to be driven by some sort of distinct memory. I hope you don’t mind me asking this, but the ghost of the author’s mother and Tyler both play prominent roles in each collection respectively. And in “When We Were 13…” [a poem from The Crown Ain’t Worth Much], you say that a “piano can coax the most vicious of ghosts out of a body.” Do you ever find that your writing, or what you write, tends to do the same? That is the way of coaxing these ghosts out of your memory?

 

Abdurraqib: Yeah, or perhaps more efficiently, is that it’s a way of bringing people to life. Bringing people back to life I’ve lost. I think that’s important. I think that work is more vital than anything, which is why I don’t think of the work as sad when others might. I think of it as honoring—that it’s an honor for me to write about people who are no longer with me so that they might live on in a space that is outside of me. In a world beyond the one they inhabit while they are here.

 

TFR: You write so much about fear. The fear of loss, and there’s a fear of whiteness, blackness, violence. Do you ever find yourself being afraid of something in particular? What is the fear you find through your writing?

 

Abdurraqib: I’m afraid of the current state of the world. I’m afraid for the marginalized people I love. I’m afraid of empire and the way that America is positioning itself, not just in our States but globally. I’m afraid of all those things, and I believe that together we can work toward changing those things, but I’m even more afraid of the things I’m individually in charge of. I’m afraid of my anxiety overcoming my day-to-day life and not allowing me to live a life that chases some joy. I’m afraid of letting down the people I love in whatever way that looks like. And I’m afraid of not honoring and valuing the people I love while they’re still here to be honored and valued.

 

TFR: So since a lot of your writing is about honoring people, or being afraid of letting down people you care about, what is the most important part of that process? Getting those thoughts out? Living your life in that way?

 

Abdurraqib: The most important part of the process—for me at least—is trying to approach all of my relationships as honestly as possible. Trying to—and this is the real struggle—bring the vulnerability that exists on the page and bring the kind of honest tenderness that I attempt to bring to the page and bring that into my real life interactions. I think that’s hard work because it’s easy to write the thing, but it’s harder to live the thing sometimes. It’s easier for me to wax poetic about how I love my people and my work, but sometimes it’s harder to do that when I’m tired or frustrated. So I think the thing I’m working on endlessly is trying to live close to the way I write.

 

TFR: And do you think, coming from a masculine community, that tenderness is especially challenging to express on the page as well?

 

Abdurraqib: Yes and no. I will say this. A thing that I’m always aware of is the fact that I’m a straight, cis-male, so I am rewarded for showing vulnerability in ways that people who don’t identify like me are just expected to show vulnerability. Or that sometimes those who don’t identify as I do are punished for that vulnerability. I try to be very aware of that. Yes, vulnerability is a challenge for everyone. But all this stuff has to be seen through the lens of whatever privileges we hold. So I am cognizant of my vulnerability being applauded because of how I identify, but I also still earnestly chase after that because when I was young I didn’t have a real masculine blueprint for vulnerability, and what that led to was me growing up in a world in which I thought vulnerability was the work of women. I spent my late teens/early twenties in the punk scene, and I thought [vulnerability] was the work of my queer or women friends in the scene. And it’s not. So I want to work to strip that idea away, and I think it is stripping away honestly. I sometimes go into high schools and do workshops with students, and I think young men are really writing poems fearlessly and comfortably in a way that I wasn’t when I was their age because I was afraid of what writing a poem would mean. I was afraid of what writing a poem would tell me about myself. That if I put the emotions I was having down on the page that it would make them real and then I’d have to confront them. I think I’m seeing that in high schools—young men confronting those emotions in ways that I was not ready to.

 

TFR: And coming up in the scene that you did, did you ever get blow-back from attempting to get into writing—both as writing and as vulnerability—from anybody that you grew up with?

 

Abdurraqib: Not really, the most push-back I got was from being one of the few black kids in the scene. But I also came up in a particular era of punk/pop-punk/emo. The Myspace and AOL Instant Messenger era of the scene where everyone fancied themselves some kind of poetic person even though none of us were, right? The men who were the front-men of those bands, or the mouthpieces of those bands, were often the brooding writer types even though most of their writing was directed pretty poorly.

 

TFR: A lot of your writing talks about growing up in the Midwest. Both in the suburbs and out of them. Or, as you say, “the less than suburban neighborhood.” How do you think your writing and you, yourself, would be different had you not come up in the Midwest? Because I know that that scene—both the Midwest and its punk scene, similar to Chuck Klostermann who writes a lot about the Midwest metal scene—is very influential and very present in your writing. How do you think it would be different if you had grown up somewhere else?

 

Abdurraqib: I’m growing a little more interested in how I talk about the Midwest because post-election I feel the Midwest person became this one entity—this singular being—and there are as many types of Midwesterners as there are anyone. I was recently in Nebraska and that’s a very specific type of Midwest different from mine in Columbus, Ohio. I was in Omaha and Lincoln and those are very different Midwests, but there’s an ethos that I think has to do with facing your people. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist on the coasts, but I think that I am writing, always, as though I am in conversation with an audience already. I want people to come to my readings or see me read and feel like they have already joined a conversation in progress—or that they’re welcome to. I don’t know if I’d have that ability, or I’d have an eye towards that, if I did not grow up in a place where I felt like I was always a part of a conversation.

 

TFR: Do you feel that that critical distance is something that helps when you’re unlocking moments of tenderness? Or do you think you’d be impeded if you didn’t have that lens thinking of your audience when you approach the writing?

 

Abdurraqib: I feel like it’d be impeded. But I also think that my music writing, knowledge, and education was totally born just talking about music with my pals. In diners, in bars, in living rooms and basements. That’s what I’m trying to recreate. I don’t want there to be a world in which I am the critic and I am writing down to audience. My audience are the people I want to talk to about music, and I want to create that large living room where we can all sit and talk about some songs that we like. Or don’t like.

 

TFR: Is that recreation, besides being an egalitarian measure, maybe a nostalgia for those moments which might be gone otherwise?

 

Abdurraqib: I think there’s some nostalgia there. But I also think there’s an interest in that. I don’t think people anymore are interested in reading the critic-on-high telling them what to like or not like. A lot of people want to dive into the discussion and may not have time to be music writers for a living or may not have the passion. I did a reading recently and there were these two guys in suits, two businessmen who came to this reading, and they were so eager to talk to me during the Q&A about the piece I wrote on Fleetwood Mac. I’m interested in that person. The person who has a day job but also loves music and doesn’t have the opportunities to talk about it as much as they want to. They want to seek out someone who’s speaking to them on their level, where they feel a part of the conversation.

 

TFR: Jumping off of that, in They Can’t Kill Us, all of your essays are framed by these vignettes around Marvin Gaye. And his final performance at the NBA All-Star’s game before he died. His 1983 performance. Why did that feel right to you?

 

Abdurraqib: So there were a handful of things. One, it was the year I was born. Two, I had this interest in Marvin Gaye—the unpacking of that moment and how it could sing to every part of the book. Because it encapsulates everything: there’s fear there, triumph, violence.

 

TFR: There’s vulnerability.

 

Abdurraqib: There’s vulnerability. I’m fascinated by Marvin Gaye on the whole, but that was the one thing where I thought, Gosh, there’s so much of this and that singing to the collection, and it’s such a fascinating story because it’s this performance that he performed miraculously under a great deal of duress. And he was able to find this small bit of freedom in that performance. I think everything in that book is arcing toward freedom, at least as I see it. So it was natural for me to insert that throughout.

 

TFR: So, in the words of Marvin Gaye, “What’s going on?” With you, I mean.

 

Abdurraqib: (laughs) A lot. Just in general?

 

TFR: In general. Today.

 

Abdurraqib: Today’s great. I’m just overwhelmed by this. I got here this morning, maybe I should have come the night before. But I got here this morning, I had to fly out of Columbus at six in the morning. And I’m thrilled to be here, so many of my friends are here. I think the writing community I came up in is that there’s so many people I love and consider dear friends, but we sometimes only see each other at things like this. Or if we’re in each other’s towns for a bit, so this is like a small family reunion for me. I’m really thrilled.

 

TFR: Do you think that kind of atmosphere also captures the feeling of leaving your twenties, where your friendships fall to where you see each other occasionally? It almost parallels that arc.

 

Abdurraqib: Yeah, it arcs that way. I think adulthood is sometimes honing your long-distance communication skills. I think that’s it.

 

TFR: Each of these collections is structured—you said They Can’t Kill Us is structured around freedom. What do each of these collections mean to you, if they mean something different at all?

 

Abdurraqib: I don’t know if they mean anything different at all. I think they’re both archiving a certain thing. I think Crown is more specific in that it’s archiving a very specific brand of East Side Columbus, adulthood, and a very specific brand of black male childhood. I grew up watching films like Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society, where I saw these black coastal narratives. So I think Crown was my attempt to kind of make Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City in book form for the Midwest. This portrait of a black childhood that is not entirely autobiographical—the bones of it, yes, but it’s not a memoir. I wanted to create a landscape and a storyscape that was like these things I grew up watching but specifically for my brand of Midwest.

 

TFR: The title, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, what is the crown to you?

 

Abdurraqib: So the title comes from the TV show The Wire and the full quote is, “The crown ain’t worth much if the person wearing it is always gettin’ their shit taken.” For me, because so much of the collection is about the generational impacts of gentrification on the East Side of Columbus or Columbus in general, I began thinking the crown itself is any thing or any place you love and want to believe is yours. It’s something that can be taken as easily as it can be given, which I think is true of it in the traditional definition but also in this metaphor I crafted about land and home and freedom.

 

TFR: You said it’s semi-autobiographical, do you feel that your writing might portray you as having a more exciting life than you may feel you have?

 

Abdurraqib: Oh, absolutely.

 

TFR: (laughs)

 

Abdurraqib: I think that’s always the case. Crown, I wouldn’t even call it semi-autobiographical in some ways. I mean I think the most autobiographical stuff is maybe in that third section where I talk about the anxieties of preparing to be married and all of those things. But, a lot of it is the bones of my life with more complex, newer, better flesh on top of them. The stuff that’s in They Can’t Kill Us is way more personal. Way closer to home. And of course, you’re always worried about how you portray yourself more than anyone else. I think I did okay.

 

TFR: I saw in an interview that you’re working on a second collection of poems. Are there any forms or topics that you haven’t had a chance to write about yet that you are excited to experiment with?

 

Abdurraqib: Topics-wise, I feel like I wrote a very large political book with Crown. I know it might not seem political because we weren’t in this “political moment.” But I think I may be picking an interesting moment in time to want to write about the minutiae of living. When I first moved back to Columbus, there was a tree outside my apartment, and the way the sun would hit it in the morning the shadow of a leaf would move across my bed and eventually end up on my face. I’m fascinated by that. I want to write about several small mercies as they come to me. I know that might not seem as impressive now because people are expecting the now-more-than-ever book. We need poets to be political now more than ever but, I think that for me, as a black person in America, my now has been now for a long time. So I’m interested in exploring that which will get me through.

 

TFR: While I think it’s important to speak about the grand narrative, you can also lose a lot if you don’t focus on the personal moments. It’s almost as though you can sometimes forget how to live.

 

Abdurraqib: Absolutely.

 

TFR: Before the interview, we were talking about Fall Out Boy and their importance in They Can’t Kill Us, and I wanted to ask you: if you could tell Pete Wentz something both pre-hiatus and post-hiatus, what would you say?

 

Abdurraqib: I’ve actually told him something post-hiatus. In short, I told him, through someone, that the new songs aren’t for me, but I’m glad to see that the band is still affecting young people in a good way. I went to go see them on the back of the American Beauty/American Psycho tour and I just thought that album was a nightmare to listen to, but I wanted to see them. It’s a different type of young person, but I don’t want to dismiss that. Pre-hiatus, it depends on which Pete, right? Because pre-hiatus there were four different Petes. There’s a Pete for each album. The Pete that’s most interesting to me is the Infinity on High Pete who was struggling with the idea of fame. He really wanted to be famous, but didn’t really want fame. Because now, Pete Wentz is mega-famous, he adjusted. But the whole band break-up was because he couldn’t adjust, he married Ashlee Simpson. I guess I don’t know this for a fact, but it seems like the whole tension between that last album pre-hiatus was because he couldn’t [adjust.] I think Infinity on High is their greatest album, but I think it’s the album where, as a writer, Pete is seeing through a lot of his tricks. He’s just writing plainly about this intense agony—and as I wrote about them in They Can’t Kill Us. I saw early Fall Out Boy shows—I saw the first Fall Out Boy show ever. It has to be a very specific kind of pain to come up in the Chicago hardcore and emo scene, to be Pete Wentz in that scene. To be beloved in bands like Race Traitor and Arma Angelus, playing to thirty people who were his best friends; to go from that to playing VH1 for Paris Hilton overnight. They put out From Under the Cork Tree, thought it would be fine, and then “Sugar, We’re Going Down Swinging” becomes this massive hit. That had to be a real pain, where the band would play in Chicago and his friends couldn’t get into the show, or to have people from his scene, that he was in bands with, calling them “sell-outs.” My heart broke for that Pete Wentz. That writing scene means so much to me, I can’t fathom what it would be like to be so successful that it harms my relationship to it.

 

TFR: I love talking music and, given your writing, I know you do too. If you could make our readers a mixtape, who would be on it?

 

Abdurraqib: It’s hard to make a universal mixtape. A mixtape is a story, and you have to build a narrative, so I like leading off with songs that are haunting. I would probably lead off with “Devil Town,” the Bright Eyes version, because I don’t think the Daniel Johnston version is that compelling. I would put “Crazy” by Kehlani because that’s a really fun song. Cat Power has a cover of the Velvet Underground’s “I Found a Reason” which I think is maybe the best cover of anything, ever. I’m just fascinated by Cat Power. There’s a piece on them that was cut from the book—I don’t think it should have been cut from the book, I wish I could put it somewhere else. I’d put some Otis Redding, you can’t go wrong with any Otis Redding. Anderson Paak. But if I put Anderson Paak, I also have to put A Tribe Called Quest because I think it’s good to put an artist and the lineage they come from. This could go on forever. I would put Fall Out Boy. Generally, if I’m making a mixtape for somebody, I’ll end it with Fall Out Boy’s “Saturday.” It’s the great closer.

 

TFR: Similarly, if you could have a “poet mixtape.” Not generally, but for you, who would be on it?

 

Abdurraqib: Oh, Angela Veronica Wong, who’s one of my favorite writers. Sam Sax. Safia Elhillo. Courtney Lamar Charleston. And Nate Marshall. William Evans, who’s my mentor from Columbus. Terrance Hayes. Kaveh Akbar. Franny Choi. Cameron Awkward-Rich. Ocean Vuong. Anne Sexton. Frank O’Hara. Gosh, I could go on.

 

Oh, Adrian Matejka. Sorry, that’s the last one.

 

TFR: (laughs). I read in a previous interview with you that you always manage to feel like an artist, even when you aren’t producing. I know that that can be a struggle for a lot of writers, myself included. Any tips on how to keep yourself from being self-critical and feeling inadequate if you don’t produce constantly?

 

Abdurraqib: I think the answer is imagining the work living as the work. This society—because of capitalism and how it bleeds into the art world—is so obsessed with what we can produce and how much we’re producing when really the production is an ongoing thing. If I go out tonight and have a conversation that moves me closer to the unearthing of something that has been nested inside, or that allows me to see the world in a way that’s a tiny bit richer, that is also work. That’s also art. If I wake up tomorrow morning, look out my hotel balcony, and see a bird diving into the water and that motion brings to mind some poetic movement I haven’t been able to figure out yet, that’s also work. It’s not only work if I run to go write it down immediately—the witnessing is work. Conversation, laughter, and song, all of these things that sit inside of us and push us on a path towards whatever eventual art may exist that comes from us, or others, that’s all the art, too. So you’re an artist when you’re doing these things. You’re an artist when you’re consuming that which opens you up to something refreshing or new. You’re an artist when you’re enjoying a meal alone. You’re an artist then, too.

 

TFR: What advice would you have for writers, in general? Not just about self-doubt, but just about writers, for writers.

 

Abdurraqib: I think read twice as much as you write. That’s been my thing since the beginning. I read way more than I write. I guess this isn’t universal advice, because sometimes the people you love to read might be too busy to talk to you, but find the writers you love and don’t be afraid to reach out to them and ask them who they’re reading. That’s how I built my poetry canon. I asked the writers I admired who they admired, or what books they loved. Because I don’t have an MFA, I didn’t really start taking poems seriously until around 2011.

 

TFR: Do you have a favorite piece from either of your collections? Or both?

 

Abdurraqib: In They Can’t Kill Us, “Fall Out Boy Forever” means a lot to me.  I don’t know if it’s the best piece. It’s the longest thing in the book by, at least, 3000 words. It was one of those things that lead to a lot of self-discovery. I also really like the piece on My Chemical Romance and feel good about the piece with Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson kissing.

 

TFR: From The Crown?

 

Abdurraqib: I like the first poem in the book, “On Hunger.” It’s the first poem I wrote for the book, and it’s an effective thesis statement for the book.

 

TFR: To echo what you said earlier, it’s very haunting, which is a good way to start off a mix.

 

Abdurraqib: I sequenced that book as though I was making a mix. I think that piece is probably my favorite.

 

TFR: Your author bios on your publications always say that you want to talk about music, love, and sneakers. So, what is your favorite sneaker and do you think it means anything that you were born right before Air Jordans came out?

 

Abdurraqib: Probably. (laughs) Although, the first couple of ones were pretty bad. I think my favorite sneaker of all time is the third sneaker: the Jordan 3. It’s just very clean and comfortable. It fits my foot really well in the way that some don’t because it’s a little wider. My foot’s a little wider. It just looks good with any pair of pants. Sometimes the thing about shoes is how they look with pants, and I think Jordan 3’s look good with every pair of pants. They’re not complicated, there are some Jordans that are complicated, like Jordan 6’s. The design is so muddled. The Jordan 11—those are beautiful with the patent leather on them, but it is just not a practical shoe. But I would say that the Jordan 3 is my favorite.

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