Interview: Hanif Abdurraqib

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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Interview: Forrest Gander

Poet, novelist, essayist, and prolific translator Forrest Gander was born in Barstow, California. The landscapes of Mexico, Arizona, and the Mojave Desert find their place in several books of his poetry, including his most recent, Be With (New Directions, 2018). He has translated poetry from Spain and Latin America, bringing the work of such writers as Pablo Neruda and Raúl Zurita to new audiences. Gander has also written two novels, The Trace (New Directions, 2014) and As a Friend (New Directions, 2008), and received numerous awards in recognition of his writing. He formerly was on the faculty at Brown University. We caught up with him shortly after the 2016 publication of Alice Iris Red Horse: Selected Poems of Yoshimasu Gozo, which Gander edited for New Directions Press.

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:

This is such a fascinating work, Alice Iris Red Horse. You’ve worked with a lot of translations—how was it different working with one where the script is different, when you’re dealing not just with a different language, but different characters?

Forrest Gander:

Gozo Yoshimasu is a completely unique writer. In a way he is moving poetry into a beyond of writing, into a kind of performance. And he uses Korean Hangul and Chinese characters, as well as three different kinds of Japanese scripts plus French, English, and a colored system of writing kanji. In a way, he’s making available to us a whole new way of reading. You can’t read this book like you would an ordinary book.

TFR:

It was very interesting—as an editor, you weren’t just looking at the different pieces but also you had the different translators. It seemed there were also different styles within the translations.

Gander:

That’s right, because his work is so unique and because it’s so open-ended in many ways. The sort of failures of earlier translations of Gozo have been that they flattened out his work a lot. Right now, we’re suddenly availed of a new generation of Japanese translators. And I was in contact with a lot of them and thought the best way to present his work would not be to have a single voice but to have people approaching his work from different directions. Because the book is as much about what translation is, how one would translate this, as it is about the particular translation.

TFR:

Did you always have the idea to have the translators’ notes as part of the book? That was fascinating. Reading how they approached the task of translation was so interesting.

Gander:

It’s just as interesting and sometimes as interesting as the poetry itself because it opens up all of the layers like the night-blooming cereus. Gozo is like the poet of the night-blooming cereus where there’s a flower inside a flower inside a flower. And the translators are able to talk about how they deal with subtleties of trying to bring some of that out, including homophonic play and typographic play that work in Asian languages that don’t work in English at all. In other words, they had to ask, How do you deal with that as an English-language translator?

TFR:

In some places, I noticed they chose to keep some of the katakana and hiragana and kanji. And in others they wrote in Roman characters. There was one poem where the type was in orange and then it said “mikon” [referring to a visual symbol, logo, icon, or avatar]. And I wasn’t certain how much of that was because of how it was laid out in the original or a choice in the translation?

Gander:

It’s trying not to just stuff the strangeness and the fabulousness of the multi-lingual original into a shoe of conventional English language. And so, looking for ways to expand the notion of translation sometimes by including both languages. And Gozo uses symbols that he makes up also that we have to translate or choose to keep the same.

TFR:

I wanted to kind of call my friends in Japan and be like, “I want you to go read the original and then I want you to go read the translations and then I want your feedback. ”

[laughter]

Gander:

But no two people, who read the original, even in Japanese, will have the same reading of his work.

This is part of the ethics of his work. I think of him as a very ethical writer and one who’s concerned with letting other voices speak through his work. He’s always giving credit to where he’s heard information or what came out of a dialogue or who he’s engaging. There’s that sense that he doesn’t want to dominate the performance or interrogation of, in many cases, absence—he’s going to places where people disappeared in Fukushima and trying to make contact with spirits. He’s very influenced by shamanism, by Okinawan shamanism and the notion that we can cross borders of language of the living and the dead, of the spirit world and the daily world.

TFR:

It different than a lot of poetry that one encounters in that it was so worldly—he mentioned so many places he’d been and people that he had met, along with the incorporation of different languages. Very centered in Japan but also very worldly.

Gander:

It’s super worldly. He’s really an international poet. That’s also an aspect of, I think, his ethics—to constantly sort of open up. He gave up—like our own poet Robert Creeley did—the sense of the poem as a beautiful, polished, finished thing. And his poetry is instead an inquiry that continues to question and that doesn’t have a certain closure.

TFR:

This range of languages was new for you, but you have worked on Spanish translations a lot. Do you speak and read Spanish fluently?

Gander:

I do, yes.

TFR:

How is that different when you’re working in a language that you know more intimately?

Gander:

I studied Japanese, but all of my Japanese translations and my work in Japan has been with a fantastic co-translator named Kyoko Yoshida. In Spanish, on the other hand, my translations are solo. The most recent book of Spanish-language translations I’ve done is Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems. The Neruda Foundation discovered these poems that had never been seen in these boxes, folded away, written on menus, and they were published in Latin America and in Spain. And I read about them them and thought, Oh, they’re just squeezing the last juices out of that great grape. And then I saw the poems, and they’re great. He’s just such a great poet, and the poems are fantastic.

Even in Spanish, though, each engagement is really different, too. I’ve done a lot of Mexican translations and translations from the Spanish of Spain and Bolivia and Chile. And each country and area has a completely different dialect and completely different sort of secret words. One of the hardest poems to translate was the shortest one in here, and it was based on an old vernacular for abalone. Abalone in the ’50s in Chile by the sea were often called “orejas del mar,” little ears of the sea.

So Neruda’s got this poem to his wife’s ear that starts to seem to be about cooking his wife’s ear and it’s just this sort of mix between the abalone and his wife’s ear, and it took a lot, it took somebody’s grandmother to tell me, “Wait, I remember… ”

[laughter]

TFR:

Have you spent time in each of the countries that the poetry that you’re translating is rooted in?

Gander:

It’s absolutely necessary. Going to Bolivia to translate Jaime Sáenz was absolutely necessary. Seeing the territory that he lived in, the references that are so common in his books. And the same with Neruda. I spent a lot of time in Chile.

TFR:

Do you find yourself translating not just the language but the culture?

Gander:

You have to translate the culture. The culture is in the language.

TFR:

How do you find it to be both a translator and a poet yourself? Is there something that is fulfilled both in translation and writing your own work, and how are those two things different? How do you carve out space for both?

Gander:

I know some writers and translators who can do both at one time. And lots of writers who multi-task and do multiple manuscripts, but I need close focus on one thing. So when I am working on translations I can’t be working on my own writing and vice versa. But I’ve never felt it as a loss because when I come back to my writing I’ve learned things from the translation—new image repertoires, new ways of using syntax, new particular lexical phrases—that end up feeding my own work. So, though it takes time away, it gives to me and makes me, I think, a deeper poet in English, my own language.

TFR:

So you find that you can see some influences and impacts when you come back to your own work from what you’ve been translating?

Gander:

Absolutamente. [laughter]

TFR:

I happened to stumble across actually a podcast, Poetry Off the Shelf, in which you recommended a poem for the newly elected President Obama (“Poems for President Obama”). You said in that interview, “The election of the President is a kind of wedding with the people.” If you were asked now to come up with a poem for the new president, would you participate in that exercise again?

Gander:

That would be hopeless right now. I know it seems less of a wedding with the people right now than something very unsettling. And I’m afraid Trump would be disinclined to read any poem whatsoever, but if I had to, for him, I’d say, “Donald, start with Whitman.” [chuckle] The sense of inclusivity, the sense of men and women being involved equally. The sense in which Whitman was looking critically at the slave auctions and his political generosity, his care for soldiers who’d been hospitalized… All of that.

Fantastic empathy I think makes anyone a bigger person. And that’s what I think poetry and art can do. They articulate things that we haven’t completely articulated for ourselves that expand what it means to be human.

TFR:

Yes. I came across your poem “Ligature” and in one line it says, “The man writes, I’m not given a subject but I’m given to my subject.” Do you find that to be something you still feel?

Gander:

I think the great poets are given a subject. For instance, someone like the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita—in his early twenties he’s arrested by the Pinochet dictatorship and tortured, and during a period of a few years thousands of people, hundreds who he knows, disappear. They’re killed, and they’re chopped up and dropped into the mouths of volcanoes and the sea. Something like that happens to you and what else are you going to write about? You’ve been given a subject matter that you can’t ever look away from. [Akira] Kurosawa has that nice line, “Don’t look away, never look away.” And sometimes the great subject materials are inevitable I think.

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Interview: Joy Harjo

In celebration of Indigenous People’s Day (October 8, 2018), we are happy to present this interview with Joy Harjo.

Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Muscogee/Creek Nation. She is the author of thirteen books—including poetry collections, children’s literature, and memoir—for which she has received numerous awards including the 2002 Pen/Open Book for A Map to the Next World (W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), the 1991 William Carlos Williams Award for In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan, 1990), and her second American Book Award for her memoir, Crazy Brave (W. W. Norton & Company, 2013). She is also a renowned saxophonist and vocalist.

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:

The book that you’ve recently released, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings—what number of books is this for you?

Joy Harjo:

I think it’s the eighth poetry book, but I have other books. I have a memoir, two children’s books, a collaborative book with an astronomer, and CDs and music. So that’s the eighth poetry book.

TFR:

Do you find with each book you put them together a little bit differently, in how you approach the assembling in the order of the poems and . . .

Harjo:

Every one is different. It’s like children. [laughter] Yeah. Every one has its own story.

TFR:

Before the poems, you have these italicized sections in your books, and I was curious whether you wrote those after you put the poems in order, or if those were something that you already had that you worked in?

Harjo:

I worked those in to fit, because I’m a horn player too, so they’re like sax riffs. And I think all literature is essentially oral. So it’s another way that I have of saying, “Okay. Here, let’s do a little riff here. And a little riff here.” [laughter] I think most of those I wrote after assembling the poems.

TFR:

I went to your reading this morning, which was just lovely, and I was going to ask if you found it very different to read to poets versus to an audience that was there for music. But you started out with a poem that was very much a song, and I thought it’s kind of both. But do you approach different audiences differently, the poetry audience and the music audience?

Harjo:

I don’t know. I do what I do. I started playing horn when I was almost . . . when I was thirty. And I had been doing poetry for some time, and I already had a name in poetry, and I started adding music. And I thought, All of my poetry audience will come over to the music. But it’s not so. A lot of the poets say, “Well, we just want the poetry, straight. We don’t want anything with it.” And I have a whole music audience who, even though I’m using the poems, they don’t know anything about the poetry.

TFR:

So you find it’s very separated. Two different audiences that don’t have a lot of crossover?

Harjo:

Often, it is. I thought there would be a lot of crossover, and there’s some but not a lot.

TFR:

How does it feel different to be doing a spoken poem versus doing a song, and the feedback that you get from one group or the other?

Harjo:

I think I’ve always seen poetry as a matter of voice because of the way I came to it through my mother writing songs. To me, it’s pretty much the same voice. That’s what I’ve come to. There’s a voice in my saxophone voice, and if you hear my horn voice, my singing voice, the speaking voice, the poetry voice, it’s the same voice. It just expresses itself in different ways.

TFR:

When you edit your work, do you read the pieces aloud to check for the sounds?

Harjo:

I have to. [chuckle] I have to. That’s all part of it. I always tell that to my students: “Read them aloud.” And then there’s the next level of reading aloud. There’s reading aloud to yourself and, in a way, you can always find what’s knotted up or what’s not working. You can usually know, usually. But then, I have found there’s other levels of that, the next level is reading to someone else. Then you will hear more of what’s not working. But the biggest test is reading it to an audience. And I have made the mistake many times of reading new poems to an audience that are too fresh. And I’ll be up in front of the audience with a pen. I’ll make sure if I’m going to do that, I’ll take a pen, because then I hear right away what’s not working. [laughter]

TFR:

Do you find you get good edits out of that, even if you wished . . . you had saved it for later?

[laughter]

Harjo:

Yes, I do. You know how it is, you get so excited when you have a new poem and, then you want to read it, and I’ll have to tell myself, “Okay, just take some time with this.” Because you know, by now . . . if you don’t know by now, [laughter] then you should know by now that you’re going to be full of shame and horror the next day if you don’t let the poem have its time to settle.

TFR:

Have you had pieces that were published in, for instance, a literary magazine and then you put them in a book, and then you find yourself changing things prior to the publication of the second time or the third time?

Harjo:

Yes. One of the poems in Conflict Resolution, “Everybody Has a Heartache,” was published in Poetry Magazine for a Split This Rock conference. And I said, “It’s not ready.” They really liked the poem, the editor of that little section really loved the poem. I said, “But I know it’s not there yet.” But they wanted it anyway, so I gave it to them. So it’s much revised in the book. And even in the title poem, “Conflict Resolution,” there’s a whole section I would totally rewrite or take out.

TFR:

There was a lot of myth and cultural story woven into this book. And I taught history and English for many years, and as I was reading it, I kinda felt like I had done a disservice because of how little we talk about the stories of culture rather than just the history. Because it should be a part of history, and it’s often not. What do you feel is the importance of people’s individual stories?

Harjo:

History is stories. It’s just what’s called history is usually the old. I think the feminists came up with it, history meaning “his story.” And yet, ultimately, history is the stories of everyone who was there, including the plants, including the animals, including the rooms things happen in. [laugh] It’s all part of the story.

TFR:

Do you find that where you are writing influences what you are writing? If you’re home or if you’re traveling, do you find you come to different kinds of subject matter?

Harjo:

I’ve wondered about that. I remember when I moved to Hawaii for eleven years, and I had always wanted to be there, in the Pacific. I love the Pacific. But it was startling—even as much as I felt so at home and I loved the water and I got into outrigger canoe racing—that I had been so ingrained in the Southwest and Oklahoma where I’m from and that history. To move into another place was very difficult for my writing, at least for a while. A lot of the writing from that time . . . I don’t think is my best.

TFR:

Do you find that writing in the Southwest the landscape lends itself to being spare with words and conscious of every one?

Harjo:

I don’t know if it did that, but when I started writing I was learning the Navajo language. And I loved that . . . New Mexico, I went there to go to Indian boarding school and came back home for a little bit, for about a year or two, and then went back. But the poetry, the spirit of the poetry came to me there. And it’s so much a part of me. I miss it so much. I’ll be in Tuscon next week. I’m excited about that. But I really miss the Southwest. It’s very much a part of my poetry, as is the story of my people. As is Hawaii, the water and the spirit of the water, who is one of my biggest teachers. So, places do affect me. I travel. I’ve always been a traveler. Even as a child when we didn’t go anywhere, books were my means of traveling, as well as walking and trying. They gave me that sense of discovery, discovery of new places.

TFR:

You’ve talked about the importance of paying attention to the sunset and what you can let go at that time period. Do you feel like in your travels, you have to make a conscious effort to be aware of time and the sun and what’s going on outside of, maybe, the rooms that you’re in, more so than when you’re home?

Harjo:

Yes, they’re like markers. You realize we’re all in the ceremony of sunrise. I was watching the sun come up in my room . . . It was nice. I usually request a room that has an east view, but I didn’t and I had an east room anyway. What cracked me up is the guy said, “Oh yeah, and you have a balcony, too,” but my balcony looks out over a parking garage and the freeway. I didn’t get an ocean view with this trip. [laughter]

TFR:

Conflict Resolution for Human Beings includes this poem set in Vancouver about walkabout, and you had the dead umbrella and the broken wings. And as much as it’s hard to travel a lot, do you also find value in it, in that it brings you to pieces you might not have otherwise written?

Harjo:

Oh, sure. I think, I would say probably three-fourths. [chuckle] Most of those poems are set in places, like the one in British Columbia. One of the earlier ones, I’m in a hotel. Louis Armstrong’s band had been there, and the hotel had turned to trash, and yet the King of Jazz had been there. They resurrect . . . That’s one of the first little riffs that starts off the book. And, yeah, there’s a lot of horn, meeting horn players, out playing horn on the street. And even death appears. That’s a traveler. [laughter]

TFR:

Yes, yes, yes.

Harjo:

But, yes, there are also several poems in there about Hawaii, about Oklahoma. I get to travel quite frequently.

TFR:

So often when reading bios of you, they very much emphasize the history of and your role in Native literature in the US. Do you ever feel that it’s kind of a burden to be speaking, in some people’s minds, for a whole group of people as opposed to just for yourself?

Harjo:

I can’t think about that because I know that I don’t speak for anybody else. I just follow that voice that was given to me to take care of. So I can’t even speak on behalf of my family. [laughter] You know how most families are? Everybody’s so different. But it’s true that I have often been, through the years, the token or the person that’s speaking on behalf of anyone that’s not your all-American male. [laughter] So it’s an impossible situation, an even bizarre situation sometimes. And there are many Native writers and many Native poets who also have a place. They have a place, though a lot of people aren’t going for, or they don’t wind up in a large of an arena. Their poetry or their songs are very important at home, and that’s what’s important. It’s not about being at a big-book thing. One of the first times I went back to the ceremonial ground, and they have a speaker that goes around, and I remember when he came by my camp, he says, “And you can leave your university books, all of that behind because this is not the place for them.” It’s a different world. There’s literature there, and there’s a place. A different system.

TFR:

Do you find that the people in your life have a great awareness of you as a poet? Do you find that they have an expectation of not being included in a poem or being included in a poem?

Harjo:

I guess I don’t do a lot of using my poetry as a tool or wielding my poetry . . .

TFR:

Yeah. [laughter]

Harjo:

Not like a novelist or a . . . My memoir though, that was another story. But I don’t think they worry about it too much. And it was funny when I lived in Hawaii—people knew me as a canoe paddler, someone who paddled canoes, outrigger canoes, and they knew me. I remember going down to the Kapalama Post Office to mail out a box, and the woman looked at my name and she looked at me, and she says, “Oh, you’re the one that makes those really good cookies.” [laughter] So I thought, “Okay,” that’s what I was. People had no idea of my life as a poet.

TFR:

Do you find that when you were paddling, that that act of paddling, that the movement ever served to have words come to you that you would use later, that that was a meditative state? Or were you very much focused on just the paddling itself?

Harjo:

It’s kind of all of that. When you’re involved in an act that can be very strenuous, there’s different ones when you’re racing and then when you’re practicing. I almost said rehearsing. And then when you’re doing this practicing, you’re focused. You’re really focused. But there is something about the rhythm. And so much does come to you, even as so much falls away. And being out there at sunset or at sunrise is just incredible. And moving in a rhythm.

TFR:

Do you ever get on the water at night, after dark?

Harjo:

I have been, and it was kind of dangerous.

[laughter]

We were out one time with the canoe club with our group, and we went way out and we got in trouble because we were out near the lane where the ships were coming in, got beeped at. So then we were paddling back and it got dark, and it’s kind of . . . It’s cool, but then you can hear the wave action where you have to come in. And you have to know where to come in, and so that gets a little . . . dangerous. Maybe like poetry.

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Interview: Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly was born in New Jersey and grew up in Illinois, but has become a Southern transplant and is now the Poet Laureate of Mississippi, as well as teaching at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. She is the author of six books and recipient of numerous awards. Her three collections of poetry are: Unmentionables: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2008), Tender Hooks (W. W. Nortion, 2004), and Open House: Poems (Zoo Press, 2002). More recently, she has focused her work in prose. She published Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother (W. W. Norton, 2006), then co-authored the novel The Tilted World (Harper Collins, 2013) with her husband, Tom Franklin. Most recently, she published Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W. W. Norton, 2017).

We caught up with Beth Ann Fennelly at the Miami Book Fair in 2017 shortly after Heating & Cooling came out. Just this week, Heating & Cooling has been released in paperback, and so it’s a good time for us to finally get this interview published.

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:

I want to start with question about the wider context of your evolution as a writer. I’ve worked with a number of people over the past year—Brenda Miller and her co-author, Lee Gulyas, and Monica McFawn and Darrell Nicholson—who have been writing together. They’ve talked about how much they enjoy the co-authoring process, although I’m sure it has its challenges as well. I think this is a little bit new. It’s not that people haven’t done it before, but it’s something that people are really paying attention to now. And I guess I wanted to ask about you and Tom Franklin co-authoring your previous book The Tilted World. I also want to ask about how you started off as a poet. Can you describe that evolution from writing primarily poetry to adding work in prose, and then doing a co-authored project. How did all of that happen?

Beth Ann Fennelly:

It seems that every writing project I’ve taken on is never with foresight or part of a career strategy.

[laughter]

Everything is an accident and serendipity. I thought I would only be a poet—that’s really all I ever wanted because I think it’s such a beautiful art form. At first, I accidentally wrote a non-fiction book called Great with Child. That was a collection of letters that I didn’t write thinking they would be collected into a book. And so that was happy and lucky.

Then I wrote another book of poems. Then the novel with Tommy came about in just this bizarre way. We had been thinking a lot about the flood of 1927 after Katrina happened, and how if that story hadn’t been written out of history maybe Katrina would’ve been handled differently. That’s the problem when things get written out of history—we can’t learn from them. We thought this was a big Southern story that needed to be told. We ended up writing a short story about it—really as a lark, without thinking too much about it, except then it got reprinted in Best American Mysteries and a couple of other big anthologies. And Tommy’s editor called up and said, “You didn’t tell me about this story.” And Tommy said, “Well, what’s to tell?” And the agent said, “It’s your next novel.”

Due to that, we suddenly found ourselves writing a novel, although it might have happened anyway because these characters were still in my head after the short story. The research I had done for us to write the short story was really compelling to me, and I was thinking how much more there was. So, we wrote the novel, and then after that, there was a period where I felt I wasn’t writing. I wanted to write another novel, actually. But I was going through this long, slightly terrifying period of “not writing.” I kept saying to Tommy, “I’m not writing. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Every morning, I’d get my notebook and write down a couple of weird, little thoughts, and nothing was adding up to something. I would write about a little conversation I’d heard or a little memory. I’d been doing that for a long time when one morning I thought how excited I was to get back to my desk. I recognized the feeling of writing before I recognized the product because that feeling, that excitement is how I feel when the writing’s going well. That morning, I went back and started paging through my notebook of all these random little bits of conversations and memories that I kept waiting to add up to something.

For the first time, I thought, “What if I stop waiting for it to add up to something? What if it is something, just a really small something?” And then I thought of the term ‘micro-memoirs’, and in a weird way coming up with the term freed me to complete the project. None of this was done with great forethought. And in fact, if I were the type of person who had forethought, I wouldn’t have done any of this, because it’s not really what one wants from one’s career, in a way. Because your publicist wants to be able to say, “Oh, she writes sonnets about her cat.” The expectation is that you just do the one thing.

TFR:

Right, right, very specific.

Fennelly:

Yeah. And so just to confuse things, now I’m the Poet Laureate of Mississippi, and I haven’t written a poem in three years. [laughter] Oh no.

TFR:

That’s hilarious.

Fennelly:

I know.

TFR:

That’s so funny. But you will. Do you doubt it?

Fennelly:

No, not really. For now, I’m just in love with the sentence, and I used to be in love with the line. I’m just waiting for the cycle to come back around to that.

TFR:

One of the things I am also curious about is your embrace of Mississippi. You mentioned how The Tilted World was a Southern story that needed to be told. It’s often difficult for those who are raised and educated in other regions, as you have been, to find a happy home in the deep South. And yet you seem to have done it and have embraced it as an identity. And so how has that happened for you as a person and a writer? I grew up in the South, in Tennessee. I was gone for a long time, and then when I got the job in Orlando at UCF, I had friends who wouldn’t speak to me. They were like, “You’re going back to the South? How can you do that?” And I was like, “Well, it’s a great job where I get to teach creative writing all the time and no composition.” [chuckle] There were those kinds of things. But there’s so often that attitude of hostility from people who don’t know the South. I just wonder if there was a transition for you, if it was difficult for you, or if you’re just the kind of person who embraces where you are.

Fennelly:

I grew up, as you say, in the Midwest. And the Midwest landscape and architecture, I understood intellectually why they were beautiful, or why I was supposed to find them beautiful. But when I moved to the South for the first time—for graduate school at the University of Arkansas in 1994—I just loved it. It seemed to suit my personality in a weird way.

I come from an Irish background, and there’s a lot I love about being Irish that also seems to be very strong in the South. I love storytelling, I love music. I like emphasis on family. All those things are interesting to me. But there is the bigger question of how a place becomes a home or how we can choose a home, and I also think there’s an element of mystery to it, because the South shouldn’t have felt like home.

But it did. I met my husband the first day of graduate school. And now we have three children with Mississippi drawls. And we’ve bought five plots in the cemetery next to Faulkner.

TFR:

Has it ever been hard for you? Has there ever been a moment where you thought, “Ooh. Who are these people?”

Fennelly:

No, but I do obviously struggle with a lot of the things in the South.

Part of me accepting the role of Southerner—which wasn’t something I claimed for myself, but something people eventually honored me with—part of it is also remaining clear-eyed about the problems in the South. And in Oxford, Mississippi, it was just fifty years ago that James Meredith integrated the school. And there’s still a bullet hole where people were shooting during riots. So, it is something I think about a lot. What does it mean to be from this region and embrace this region, and yet just be determined to be part of the people who are working to change it for the better?

TFR:

That makes great sense.

Heating & Cooling is a tiny book that is nonetheless deeply rich, I found, and certainly poetic. You can definitely see your background as a poet. What do you see as the connection between poetry and memoir in this book, and more generally?

Fennelly:

When I came up with the term ‘micro-memoir’ and started thinking, “Okay, look, what are these things I’m writing?” what I realized was I wanted to take the things I loved most from the different genres. From poetry, what I love is that extreme compression and abbreviation and that lyrical explosion of the release. And from fiction, I love narrative tension. I love a page-turner quality. I like the storytelling. I like beginnings, middles, and ends. And from nonfiction, I love truth-telling. I love facts. And right now, because we are in an era of alternative facts, and truth is so malleable to some, I found my own insistence on the facts as maybe a weird reaction to that. My facts are just coming from my life, but—after spending four years writing a novel in the heads of characters—my own life seemed interesting to me again.

TFR:

One of my favorite qualities of this book and your work as a whole is how humane it is. There’s an appealing humility but without obsequiousness, if you know what I mean. There’s humor balanced with poignancy. Reading Beth Ann Fennelly is like reading someone you would really like to know.

Fennelly:

Oh, how nice.

TFR:

I just really feel that way. I think people can over-claim that they know you when they read a book. We all know that when you write, it’s not all of us that’s in the . . .

Fennelly:

I do that sometimes. I read a book and feel like I know the author.

TFR:

Sometimes, that can be really obnoxious. [laughter] I don’t mean to be weird about it, but I just think that over the years, having read a variety of your work, I feel like there’s a friendly quality. How do you feel like you achieve the balance between different tonalities that you work with? And how does that come out of your approach to drafting and revising? You’ve talked about that a little bit already with this book in particular.

Fennelly:

I love that you found it a humane book—that’s really flattering to me. I would say one of the things I wanted was for it to be the me-est book possible, and to bring in all the parts of me, and even the ugly parts. There are some pieces in here where I don’t really look all that kind or maybe even sane. But I wanted the full range of human emotions, particularly my human emotions. I didn’t want to keep anything out even if it was slightly salacious or unsavory. Part of that for me is not keeping humor out, too, which is something that I did when I was younger. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more confident in my own voice. When I was younger, I wanted to be taken seriously. And I looked around and what are the big boys doing? Well, they’re writing poems about Greek myths. So, by God, here’s my Perseus poem. Take this. Ugh.

[laughter]

As I got older, I began to realize that what I want from a book is what I want from a friend, someone who accepts all of me. I began to realize that parts of the way I look at the world were not coming into my work. I think so much about being a human is funny. I think being a mom is funny. I think being middle-aged is funny. I think being in a long marriage is funny. What if I just stopped keeping that part out? All of these micro-memoirs are just ways of relaxing and knowing who I am and being less worried about being judged. I was taught to be a good girl. I was brought up Irish Catholic. It was pretty Victorian in some ways. And part of this book is about being less scared of someone thinking that I’m not being ladylike.

TFR:

I just laughed my head off when you were talking about having a large bladder. And I was like, “Yeah, me too.”

Fennelly:

That’s so funny. [laughter]

TFR:

But I also found more generally that I kept thinking, “Yes, me too.”

I loved a lot of the different ways that you talked about the body in the book. I don’t know how consciously you developed that as a theme, but there were some very poignant places, and there were some very funny places. I thought one of the resonances of this book was that it’s such a little book, but the complexity of the body that you depict in it was so profound. How consciously, when you were finally putting it together as a collection of pieces, did you think about those different, particular elements, but especially that body element?

Fennelly:

That’s a good question. It was hard to put the book together because they’re all stories from my life that are true with people that I know. I have myself as a child, an adolescent, and adult. I have all my major roles. I’m in there as a wife, and a mother, and a teacher, and a writer, and a human. And some of the pieces are short, and some are longer. When I first tried to put the book together, there was almost a problem of too-muchness. And I originally thought the book was gonna be a hundred pieces, because I know a couple of books that do a hundred short pieces, and I love them. But it just ended up seeming almost too exuberant.

My editor is the one who said I should cut it. She said, “Not because any of the pieces are weaker, but you need to strengthen the themes.” That inspired me to started thinking like, “Okay, this person comes in in more than one piece.” Or, “This role I have is in more than one piece,” and kind of cutting the outliers. It was a little challenging to figure out how to narrow it down. But narrowing it down did strengthen the themes. And I am really interested in the body, particularly the female body, and got that way through becoming a mother, actually, and writing about my body for the first time when it started to go south.

[laughter]

TFR:

We take it for granted. And then . . .

Fennelly:

Yes. Pregnancy and childbirth and all that made me inhabit my body and be intellectually engaged with walking around in a body in a way I hadn’t really noticed when I was younger, when inhabiting it was more thoughtless.

TFR:

I think many women writers, especially poets and nonfiction writers, are reaching out into this social moment that we’re having. With the loss of Hillary Clinton last year and the more recent revelations about sexual assault, it feels very much to me like women are saying, “We’re done putting up with this.” I thought that you also sometimes strike a feminist note, for example when you note that someone uses “pussy” as a synonym for weak.

Do you have advice for other writers who desire to address social issues without writing propaganda? How do you manage to bring such a light touch to that process?

Fennelly:

That’s interesting because I don’t think of myself as a political poet or a political writer, and I wanted to be when I was younger, and I failed. When I tried to write political stuff, it came out a little screechy.

TFR:

Pedantic, sure.

Fennelly:

What I realized is my best ideas don’t come out as argument—they come out as metaphor or narrative. In the narrative or in the metaphor, the politics sneak on through sometimes. I’ve always been someone who felt things strongly, but I would’ve been a terrible lawyer. I don’t have the ability to make that kind of logical argument. But the piece that you just referred to—it’s almost like the metaphor for calling a someone a pussy instead of a weak thing, was almost like a literary criticism. That’s a bad metaphor. The reason, of course, is clear in that piece, I think.

There’s another piece in the end of the book, “Salvage,” about my father-in-law who passed away, who I loved so much, who was a mechanic, and he worked so hard his whole life. And then in the end, he had to have his teeth pulled, and he didn’t have insurance to get new teeth. For me, what that piece is secretly about is my rage over unaffordable healthcare. How is it possible to be such a hardworking and dignified man working with his hands all day long, and at the end of his life, be abandoned? You know?

TFR:

Right, right.

Fennelly:

The politics is there, but kind of through the side door.

TFR:

How did you structure this book? You talked about having to pare it down from a hundred pieces. One of the things I noticed, of course, was that you have the three appearances of married love throughout the piece.

Fennelly:

Ultimately, I just tried to make sure I didn’t have two similar tones immediately together, or two pieces the same size. Because I wanted a lot of tonal variation, and that’s something that’s fun to do in short pieces. If you’re writing a novel, whether it’s literary or comedic or thriller, you can have small tonal variations. But with these short pieces, you could have one piece that’s funny, and then the next piece is super sad, and the next piece is bitchy, and the next piece is wry or nostalgic. And every piece can be its own thing, and the next piece can be completely different.

I wanted to move really rapidly through the emotions and to give the reader the thing that I feel like is a pleasure, where your heart is expanded a little bit through reading. And I tried to make sure I spaced the one-sentence ones throughout the book. And the married love sequence, I spaced that throughout the book. That was the kind of thing that guided me. But every time I cut a piece, it was like Jenga because I had to re-order the whole thing. It was so complicated.

TFR:

What is relationship between domesticity and art for you?

Fennelly:

My focus on domesticity here is in reaction to writing a very high stakes, deeply researched, historical novel [The Tilted World] where, if it failed, it would’ve been really bad for our marriage, and our egos, and our kids. After looking through a character’s eyes for so long, I started looking at my own life, and instead of doing research, just working with memory, which is really fascinating to me anyway. I think in a way when I was growing up, female novels were supposed to be centered in the domestic in a way that really was reductive. On the other hand, I’ve always thought that’s where so much of our important work as humans is coming from. It’s a pretty strange decision to say, “Well, this is a domestic novel,” and have that be a pejorative term. And so actually finding everything . . . love, and terror, and misery, and humor . . . finding everything that can come out of the domestic was really fun.

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Interview: Danez Smith

Danez Smith was born St. Paul, Minnesota. They are the author of two poetry collections, Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf, 2017) and [insert] boy (YesYes, 2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and are working on their third. Smith is also the author of the chapbooks Black Movie (Button Poetry, 2017) and hands on ya knees (Penmanship Books, 2013). It was while a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that Smith first discovered poetry through the arts program First Wave. Smith earned a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they were a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar. They are a co-host of the Poetry Foundation’s podcast, VS. The following interview with Smith took place at the Miami Book Fair in November 2017. Please also see Janine Harrison’s Aquifer review of Don’t Call Us Dead.

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:

I dove into Don’t Call Us Dead with mega-enthusiasm because when I was handed the list of poets I’d be interviewing here at the Miami Book Fair because I have taught your poem “alternate names for black boys” in the protest-poetry section of my intro to poetry class. It’s a great poem to teach for so many reasons. It relies on this list of names, in the body of the poem, which are not names at all, but images, which is the point. It shows students how this poet, you, totally trusts the images to do the work, and I struggle to teach our young poets this form of trust.

Smith:

It’s hard, it’s hard. You know, I was teaching a workshop the other day, and everybody was so caught up in talking content and asking, What do you think of this poem? And talking about it as if it’s a story that somebody just told, and I’m like, No, where are the images, what makes you actually like the poem? I’d been writing a lot of poems about black boys, about police violence, about the many violences America throws at the black body, and I think I got to a point where I could no longer tell the story, I just had to curate the images, to let everybody else tell it to themselves.

TFR:

I like that term, “curate.” I’ll continue to teach the poem, and it makes it so much more exciting to teach it after meeting the poet and to talk about your concept of “curating the images.” About 50 percent of my students are writing about police violence. Many of my students are in that age range of about twenty-five or younger. I’m not going to ask your age—

Smith:

Twenty-eight.

TFR:

How people view the police has changed, and so the culture changes. We all know poetry should try to disrupt, and make changes, and nudge people from their comfort zones, and obviously you’re doing that, clearly, in terms of your writing as well as your performances of slam poetry and your recordings. What do you see as hoping it’s going to accomplish, and will in the future—the poetry—and continue to do so, and with media?

Smith:

I think poetry’s goal has long been to distill something in the human (uniquely human), and the human is often beautiful, but it can be ugly and political as well. Our humanity is an ugly and gorgeous thing. I just hope that people read and that we have a diverse readership. It’s just not about inspiring a next generation of poets, but also making creative poems that inspire the next generation of policy makers, that inspire the teachers, the lawmakers, the educators, the shakers, and the movers, and everybody that makes up our society. To make poems that push the world by pushing the readers, and by offering them something, that some bit of language that can better seed the word in their world, or with words that better describe it. I hope to put into language what I know I feel, and maybe to help other people find some way of being, of seeing, of moving forward.

TFR:

And that language is like magic.

Smith:

Language is magic, yeah. But this language is not high; I think I’m trying better to bridge those two worlds. I want my poems to sound more like me.

But there are many me’s. I think poets always randomly say some high-lyrical jargon off the cuff [laughter] because we’re not even trying [to connect], but poetry for me is most interesting when it encompasses all the language that our world holds.

TFR:

The form of your poem “litany with blood all over” fascinates me. This to me is so powerful: “my blood, his blood, my blood, his blood, over and over” because it works as such a visual object as well. When you say that you’re not just reaching out to young poets, or young students, but across ages that’s great but difficult. I’m fifty-six and grew up in Chicago, but I have a totally different mindset than a lot of other people from where I live now. If I showed my neighbor, for example, a poem, it would mean nothing to him. I struggle to reach those people. Tell me what went through your mind, when working on this, it seems so full of emotion.

Smith:

I think there’s a certain point where a poem decides it wants to break out of some type of a traditional way of being on the page—I became aware of this studying poets like Duriel E. Harris, like Evie Shockley, like Douglas Kearney—and with this poem I reached a point where I had said everything I could say, and what actually needed to come out was something more visual and less legible, but full of emotion.

TFR:

There’s also a powerful rhythm to read this—“my blood, his blood” from the poem we spoke of earlier, “litany with blood all over”—repeatedly, over and over with its powerful visual overlapping like a spell—I don’t know what else to call it. I suppose you could find a powerful way in a straight-form line, but to me this is so powerful that you did it like this.

Smith:

It had to be like that—

TFR:

It had to be it like that?

Smith:

Yes—the poem wants to start breaking out of the traditional strategy for lineation. Even other poems are kind of wonky, where, you know, poets get rather tab-happy, with the tab button on their computer and sort of start pushing lines to the other side of the page for no reason [laughter]. That’s the kind of stuff I start playing with—

TFR:

Tab-happy?!

Smith:

I don’t know what that’s called, so I just call it “tab-happy.”

I’m just like, okay, you wrote a poem and you decided want it to be all over the place, and that’s fine. I love those poems, I write those poems all the time.

Tab-happy sounds so fun—but I think even when the poem is hard—“litany with blood all over” is a very serious and sad poem—but still there has to be an element of play within the writing process, I believe, even when you’re writing about possibly traumatic, or serious, sad, melancholy, depressive, what-have-you topics.

In that moment of trying to figure out how to make this my blood, his blood, this overlapping of language and blood, I think I found a way to lift above language and it actually just becomes the blood on the page. Here’s a moment of play. I remember becoming very excited trying to figure out how I was going to do this. I started writing “my blood my blood his blood his blood” and thinking I wanted this to crash together—How do I merge these things? That part just becomes fun, you start getting into Microsoft Word or InDesign and just have fun.

TFR:

When did you know you were going to be a poet, when did you feel you were a poet, and when did you feel—besides just expressing yourself ordinarily as a young man and a person—when did you say, This is what I want to do? What did you first read that made you excited? Or hear? Music?

Smith:

I wasn’t reading. I definitely came into poetry as an auditory tradition, oratory tradition, oral tradition. I came into poetry first, at least was first excited by it, through the oral tradition. A lot of my teachers were teaching Frost and Dickinson, and blah blah blah—well, not blah blah blah, but at the time it felt like blah blah blah—and Langston Hughes was only taught if it was February. It was spoken word, it was sort of the like Def poetry movement that happened in the early 2000s that caught me up.

TFR:

Got you—

Smith:

Yes, because at first I didn’t know poets were alive.

[laughter]

All the poets they showed us in school were dead! And so I thought poetry died with the poets—I didn’t know there were still living, breathing, poets. I’m glad to see there’s been a greater shift in the last ten-fifteen years to push living poets into the classroom, and the high school and college classrooms, and thank God for it, because for so long, I don’t know what people were thinking in the ’90s and early 2000s. It felt like nobody was actually interested in bringing in anything actually contemporary to students, and what I needed was a voice a little bit closer in, well not in age, but in “moment” to me. I heard that other poets were talking about things I cared about, not just things that happened in the past, but things that still are relevant, that still have echoes, that still have resonance today, where they were talking about today. That felt important. So, you know, I first found a little poetry then. I was always going to write poetry—I didn’t know it was a career option—and in college I was part of a hip hop and spoken word arts program called First Wave at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I was curious—we’d have these poets come through and teach us workshops and perform, and I didn’t know how they did this. How do you pay rent and call yourself a poet? Do you have a day job? Some had a day job, some did not, and I think for me it was never a question of whether I was going to write poetry but was more a question of income, which is a very real thing for artists.

I’ve been a poet since I started being a poet at fourteen, but at a certain point I was making enough to be a poet full time.

TFR:

In one interview in 2015, you mentioned that were obsessed with intersectionality. I like hearing about what other poets’ muses are, their haunts, their obsessions. Is this still an obsession?

Smith:

Okay, I don’t know if I’d say I’m obsessed with intersectionality, I think intersectionality is in everything, intersectionality being a foundational black feminist thought that you are never just the one thing—

With my first book, I was definitely obsessed with that. What happened with [insert] boy, part of my life process with trying to build that book was trying to parse out my identity to have a section that was supposedly about blackness, to have a section about queerness, or my life as a sex worker, about my family. The fun part about that was that even as I was trying to suss these topics out, they were still bleeding into each other, still speaking to each other. I couldn’t talk about just being black. I had to talk about also being queer within that, and all these other identities I hold—

They’re all layered over each other. I think then I was kind of obsessed with the concept of intersectionality, but not so much anymore. I think now in my work intersectionality is now just a fact. I think it was something I was playing around with in my first book, and now it’s our lives, we are, all of us, we each are our many selves.

TFR:

As an identification, as a persona, when you’re writing, does it keep changing from poem to poem? You’ve moved on, so what questions do you find yourself asking questions in the newer poems?

Smith:

I think every poem is a pursuit, is a failed pursuit of an answer, but just a poem getting a little bit closer to it. I wrote [insert] boy, and I spent time with those questions, and I wrote Don’t Call Us Dead, and spent time with those questions, and now I’m writing new things and working toward my third book, and so I have questions there that I’m trying to pursue too.

TFR:

It’s great to have a book like Don’t Call Us Dead for my advanced poetry class, for studying form—students need to see these new forms, they need to have their eyes opened. I make it a point to use few, maybe one or two dead poets.

Smith:

Well, now I love Frost and Dickinson, all those folks. I love William Blake, [laughter] and Keats, and stuff like that—

TFR:

Crazy guys!

Smith:

Right, crazy guys! I find something of value in that—but it took falling in love with contemporary poetry for me to be able to reach back, and where we understand something historical of note.

TFR:

Okay, then I want to ask a last question, did it take something to unlock the door, and there you went, and you kind of exploded from there?

Smith:

I didn’t love poetry for a while, and then a professor of mine in college asked me, “Are your poems only going to be good when you’re around to read them [aloud]?” And then that’s what really changed my life and sent me to the page. Then I discovered another whole other realm of possibility of how to be a poet, and I was already in love with the concept of poetry, and it was nice to discover it also be lived in a vibrant way on the page, too, because I think that’s the thing—when I found spoken word I did not also find the contemporary written word. That came later. I knew folks were speaking poetry into the world, but I didn’t know folks were still publishing books!

TFR:

Often people who like spoken word or slam poetry don’t think about looking at it—on the page or in a book. They think this is too quiet, or “I’m not going to get it.”

Smith:

No, no, books are loud, books are loud, books are forceful.

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Interview: Kate Carroll de Gutes

Packing my carry-on bag for a flight to Portland, Oregon to visit my son and his husband, I ran my finger along the spines of books I’d purchased but had yet to read. I selected a memoir called Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear, written by Kate Carroll de Gutes. I read the first few pages in order to weigh its merit as travel reading. I sat down to finish just the first chapter. An hour later, I had to force myself to close the book. Before tucking the book into my bag, I flipped to the author bio and learned that De Gutes lives in Portland, Oregon. This felt like kismet.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I quickly sent off an email asking her if she’d be willing to meet with me and allow me to interview her. Instinctively, I knew this author could guide me around some of the obstacles I’d been bumping into in my own efforts to write a memoir. Kate graciously agreed.

We met at Townshend’s Alberta Street Teahouse where we took up residence in a couple of chairs nestled in a back corner. For the next hour or so, we discussed the sometimes sticky challenges of writing about our lives and the people in them who didn’t necessarily sign up to become supporting actors in the stories we need to tell.

Kate Carroll de Gutes is the author of two books, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (Ovenbird Books, 2015)—which won the 2016 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and a 2016 Lambda Literary Award in Memoir—and The Authenticity Experiment: Lessons From the Best & Worst Year of My Life, winner of an Independent Publishing Award medal in LGBTQ Nonfiction (Two Sylvias Press, 2017). Please also see Heidi Sell’s review of The Authenticity Experiment.

Heidi Sell for The Florida Review:

You began your writing career in journalism. I’m wondering how that background informs your creative work. I’m finding there’s no shortage of people standing by to declare, “That’s not how it happened,” or “I never said that!” Since memories do indeed shape-shift over time, what strategies do you use to reconcile objective facts with subjective memory?

Kate Carroll de Gutes:

Both fiction and nonfiction are writing towards truth, but nonfiction writers are constrained by a ‘box of facts’ that they have to work within to get to the truth. I don’t make any composite characters in there. I don’t compress the timeline. I leave things out of the timeline obviously, but I don’t compress it as if ‘this all happened in one year’ kind of thing. Because I’m a real believer in facts. That’s why we read nonfiction, because we’re interested in the facts of someone’s life.

I don’t think it’s that hard to hew to fact and still get to some truth. I think you have to think awfully hard about it. How do you get there? And like you said, you have to bust through your own denial. What does that really mean? You have to bust through your anger and your pain and your shame. All of that.

TFR:

Something I keep running into is that in my own mind, some memories have morphed and merged, and I realize that couldn’t have happened that year. We didn’t live in that house when she was that old, or whatever . . . What do you do with things like that?

De Gutes:

I think you tell your reader. There’s a phrase that I use a lot in that book [Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear], which is, “But that isn’t exactly true,” or “But that can’t be true, because we didn’t live in that house then.” And sometimes I interrogate myself on the page. Is this true?

There’s an essay in the book about my dad in the Navy. I had to do a ton of research for that. I got my dad’s Naval records. I talked to people that he was in the Association of Naval Aviators with. You know, my mom had Alzheimer’s, so I couldn’t trust her memory. She said, “Your dad wasn’t an aviator.”

And I’m like, “Yeah, he was. He had his wings.”

And she says, “Yeah, he just had those. He wasn’t an aviator.”

“But he was in the Association of Naval Aviators.”

She said, “No. They let anybody in.”

TFR:

Really? Can I get in?

De Gutes:

Yes! It turns out they do let anybody in, but it also turns out my father had his wings.

I have a new essay I’m working on. I inherited the kitchen table that I grew up with, and it was, I thought, my grandparents’. My mom said, “Oh, no. That was your great-grandparents’.”

And my sisters and I were like, “You have Alzheimer’s.”

This table always squeaked, and I sent it out to be repaired, to be re-glued and all of that and when the guy came to pick it up he was like, “Oh, wow! This table’s a hundred and thirty years old, at least!”

We’d totally dismissed Mom. So, I think those are important things to tell a reader. I’d completely dismissed my mother, and it turns out this was true.

TFR:

I sometimes feel dismissed by my family that way, because I’m known for having kind of a wonky memory. So even when I’m sure I absolutely know something to be true, if they have any doubt, they just assume I’m the one who remembered it wrong. That’s something that I struggle with in trying to write my story. So I just think out loud on the page?

De Gutes:

Think out loud on the page, and also you have to remember that everybody has a different memory. You know, you’ll remember one thing from this meeting and I’ll remember another. It’s like the old car accident scene, right? Six people watch a car accident, and everybody has a different story about what happened.

That is the tricky part of memoir and that’s why, in my opinion, you always have to alert your reader. Like, “I’m imagining this. I don’t know this to be true. I think perhaps it happened this way.” I think an honest memoir writer will always alert their reader to the fact that they don’t know.

You know, my siblings remember this differently.

TFR:
Did you get a lot of push back from them?

De Gutes:

None, which I find fascinating. My dad had died by the time I finished the draft of the thesis. My mom read it. The original thesis was very different with a different ending. Her only comment was, “I don’t look very nice in this.”

I said to her what I think you should say to your family, which is, “Mom, these are just my memories, and they’re just the memories I chose to put down. It’s not the whole story.” When you’re writing about people, it’s hard.

You know, it’s like, No, I’m imposing a narrative structure. It’s okay, but people who aren’t writers don’t understand that.

TFR:

You mention in your book the generosity of your ex-wife and her current spouse in allowing you to tell your version of what happened. Did they know you were writing Objects as you were writing it, or only after you finished?

De Gutes:

My ex-wife definitely knew because we divorced while I was in graduate school. We were together twenty-four years so we had a lot of years of both reading together and talking about writing. I gave her the whole manuscript, and I said if there’s anything you object to let’s talk about it.

And she said, “I’m not even going to read it right now, because it’s your story. You tell it.”

You know, really gracious. She came to the book awards. She’s an amazing individual. And even her current partner, he’s like, “I hear I show up in the book. Do I get royalties?”

I’m said, “If you sell five thousand copies, I will send you on a cruise!”

He’s like, “All right, I’m working on it.” He’s a really good guy.

TFR:

If it hadn’t gone that way, if they’d been resistant or really upset with something you’d written, how would you have handled that?

De Gutes:

What do you do?

TFR:

Yes. Would you have gone ahead? Would you have abandoned the project?

De Gutes:

Well, that’s a great question. It’s a hypothetical, but I’m always open to change, you know? I’m sure you found my blog, which is actually becoming a book [The Authenticity Experiment]. I write about the people in my life. They all have nicknames, but my siblings were really upset about one of the posts.

And they said, “If you’re going to write about us, could you tell us and we could read it first?”

I said, “Sure.” And I actually changed a post for them. It was a simple change.

I think had my ex-wife been very upset about that I would have considered making changes. I would have considered cutting. As it was, you don’t know what happened in my marriage. That’s the biggest question I get from readers, “I don’t understand. What happened in your marriage?”

And I say, “That’s between me and my ex-wife.”

I hope I’ve told enough of the story that you’re engaged and it’s not tell-all. Nobody wants a confessional memoir, I don’t think. Read the National Enquirer for that.

TFR:

I have a blended family, so there are always these undercurrents of emotional stepfamily stuff going on. I’m trying to honor each of those stories that overlap my own, but it’s really difficult to tease apart and still tell a whole story. You talk about nonfiction writers being constrained by a ‘box of facts.’ So you use nicknames. That’s not something I’ve thought of trying, but they’d still know who they were in the book.

De Gutes:

Right, they know who they are. I write about so many people on the blog and they didn’t sign up to be friends with, or to love a nonfiction writer, so you know . . . nicknames work for them. And some people I don’t name at all.

The post that just went up, my two friends that I was with, I didn’t name them. They both contacted me and said, “That was such a great post and I’d forgotten that happened. Thank you for that great post.” Neither one said, ‘Thank you for not naming me,” but I’m careful with people.

And I think with your blended family, again, you still have to tell your story. It’s your experience of the step-kids coming in and blending them with your own children. And is all of that germane? That’s the question I ask myself, too. I write it all down. You know, I write hundreds of pages to get ten. I’m sure you do the same.

TFR:

Yes. There’s a scene that I have written again and again and again. I just can’t get it right. Part of the problem is revealing another kid’s personal crisis that was occurring in the same time frame as the event I need to write. That scene is crucial to the story, but difficult to write without exposing a painful time for our family that really isn’t relevant to the story I want to tell. Recently, I started over. Stopped trying to revise what I had already written and just started all over. This time I put everybody’s names in it, everything.

De Gutes:

Good.

TFR:

And now I’ll go back and revise again, but what do you advise in a situation where two stories are so tangled together?

De Gutes:

Well, the reality is it’s your story about it, so you don’t necessarily have to get their blessing. Right?

TFR:

That’s what I keep going back and forth about. I think of Anne Lamott who says that if people wanted you to write nice things about them, they should have behaved better.

De Gutes:

Right! Exactly, exactly! Anne Lamott will also tell you that she changes people. She uses composite characters sometimes.

TFR:

But you don’t feel comfortable doing that yourself.

De Gutes:

I don’t. I think it’s wrong. I really do. I do feel comfortable, like on the blog, giving nicknames and I also know there are some stories I can’t ever tell. There are stories I’ll never tell except for—you know—like sitting here I might tell you a story, but I’ll never write it.

But you’ve got to write this one.

TFR:

I can’t see the story without it.

De Gutes:

So I think if I were to give you any advice, I would say try writing it from a different point of view. Try writing it in third person. Try writing it in second person.

TFR:

I noticed that you use second person quite a lot, and it’s so powerful.

De Gutes:

It is. And it’s a great way to approach a scary topic. So is third person. She could tell you there were many times when she saw what was true, but chose to deny it. You know, that kind of thing, right? It’s fascinating what a change in point-of-view will do for a story. Another thing is try writing in future perfect. Using second person or third person, you know. She will tell you in 2017 that . . .

TFR:

I like that approach. I haven’t seen that in other memoirs. That’s something you did in this book that really caught my attention, that I really found to be very powerful.

De Gutes:

It happened by surprise. It happened because something was out of the timeline, and I thought, I’ve got to make this work. Oh, I’ve got to change the tense. Oh, and it’s got to be future perfect. And there’s one other one that’s future conditional.

TFR:

Future conditional. I must admit I don’t remember exactly what that means. [Laughs.]

De Gutes:

Me too. I didn’t know what to call it. There’s a great book that I always refer to called Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style by Virginia Tuft. It’s just fantastic. It’s so helpful in these situations.

TFR:

You shift those tenses throughout the book. And I guess in my head I thought that was ‘against the rules’ until I read Objects.

De Gutes:

Fuck the rules, right?

TFR:

Some of your chapters are really short. It makes me wonder about how I might use little snippets of my own that haven’t grown into anything bigger.

De Gutes:

Well, you might think about juxtaposition and how you can bump some things up against one another, because they inform each other. But sometimes a really short piece just works.

I’m also a big proponent of if you’re just writing a scene and it’s powerful and it stands on its own, then okay. I’m also a big believer in doing what works for you. Judith (Kitchen) was a big believer in working with your weaknesses. So you want to tie it up tidy, and she’s like, “Life isn’t tidy. Let’s work with that, you know?”

Your weakness is that you want to tie everything up. Let’s leave it untied. See what happens. I think it’s human nature to want to tie it all up, but you can’t.

TFR:

I think for me the trick is giving the reader a bit more trust to make their own meaning out of things instead of trying to tell them what I think it means.

De Gutes:

Right, and you never know what your readers are going to bring to the page anyway. I’m stunned when somebody tells me what they see and I think, Well, you’re right, but I wasn’t thinking that. I never saw that.

TFR:

Have you had anyone write a review of your book that you really disagreed with?

De Gutes:

No. I’ve been so lucky that I have only gotten good reviews. At least, the published reviews. There are a few on Amazon and Goodreads that . . . well, there are trolls out there. But no, I have been so, so lucky that my written reviews have all been good, and I’m really grateful for that because I know I would be kind of devastated.

TFR:

It’s tough to put yourself out there. I think most writers are introverts.

De Gutes:

Right, and sensitive little beings!

TFR:

Do you have a workshop group, a list of first readers? How do you keep yourself moving forward?

De Gutes:

I keep myself moving forward because I’m just ridiculously driven, so there’s that. I’m always writing. I always have a journal with me. I’m constantly working on something that may turn into something and may not. Like I said, I write a hundred pages to get ten.

I do all my work longhand and then type it. I have a great group of first readers that I went through graduate school with and they’re all thanked in the book—Cynthia Stewart Renee, Judith Pullman—and they’ll read anything for me, anytime. I’ll be on a deadline for something, it’ll be totally last minute, and I’ll ask, “Does anyone have time to take a look at this for me?” And they will. We do that for each other, and so they’re great first readers for me.

I have another friend who is a singer/songwriter, a storyteller, and she gives me a different kind of feedback. She’s like, “You need to take me right into the story here. I wanted to go right into the story. And I wanted to know what the cigarette smoke did to your nostrils. Did you sneeze? Did it make your eyes itch?” You know, things that other people don’t notice. Songwriters notice all these physical details.

TFR:

I wondered if there are any other writers in your family.

De Gutes:

None. Well, my grandmother’s sister, my great-aunt Bobbi. She was a writer.

TFR:

Did she have any impact or influence on your decision to go into this field?

De Gutes:

No. she died before I was born. I’ve always written. I wrote as a young kid even. It’s in my blood. Music and writing.

TFR:

And why journalism first? Over fiction or other genres, what took you there?

De Gutes:

Well, you’ve got to make a living. Right? I don’t make a living with this—teaching and selling books does not provide what I want. So, I ghost-write magazine articles and e-books and blog posts and thought leadership pieces for technology executives. It works. It’s a little draining, like I’ve got to leave here and jump on a call, but it affords some flexibility, too. I can look at my schedule and know when I can book myself out. I work for myself.

I don’t consider it ‘real writing.’ But other people say, “It’s real writing. You put words down every day.”

TFR:

Do you have other big projects in the works?

De Gutes:

The Authenticity Experiment: Lessons from the Best and Worst Year of My Life is coming out from Two Sylvias Press in September (2017). Then another project I’m working on is probably narrative nonfiction/memoir. I think it’s going to be a hybrid book on Alzheimer’s. I’ve got an agent in New York now, which is great. I’m finishing the book proposal for that, and then she’ll shop that for me. And then I’ll have to write it.

TFR:

That’s a story that’s needed.

De Gutes:

That story is needed, right? There are 65 million people right now that have Alzheimer’s. We haven’t even hit the peak of the baby boomers aging. It’s a problem.

Judith died, my best friend died, and my mother died within a ten-month period, and I had to close my friend’s estate and my mom’s estate. I delivered three eulogies and closed two estates in ten months.

TFR:

That’s life changing.

De Gutes:

Right? Objects came out in June [2015]. Judith died two days after she finished the edit on the manuscript. So my book came out in June, my friend Stef died in January, and my mom died in August.

The years 2015 and 2016 are just kind of lost years for me. I keep thinking, when did that book come out? It’s just been a year since I won the Oregon Book Award, so the massive change in the last two years of my life has been huge. You know, it’s both good and bad, which is why I started writing The Authenticity Experiment. We have to stop thinking in the binary about everything.

Life is messy and it’s both things—dark and light.

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Interview: Yrsa Daley-Ward

Yrsa Daley-Ward was born to immigrant parents (Jamaican and Nigerian) in England, then lived in South Africa for several years as she pursued a career in modeling. It was in South Africa that she encountered the slam and spoken-word poetry community and began writing. She has now published three books—a collection of short stories, On Snakes and Other Stories (2013); a collection of poems, Bone (2014; 2017); and, most recently a memoir, The Terrible (2018). Daley-Ward considers herself an activist for feminist, LGBTQ+, and mental health issues, but expressed the hope that her writing is for everyone.

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:

It’s rare to find a fashion model who becomes a poet. I read that you had come across a slam poetry event, a spoken-word poetry event when you lived in South Africa. I thought that was a wonderful story. Did that inspire your frankness? It’s interesting to think about you as this very independent person who speaks about the fashion industry in this very honest way and yet still participates in the fashion industry. I just wonder how you combine these two worlds. Is it the sort of situation where you feel a little estranged from the fashion world? Do you have good friends that are thrilled that you are also writing? How do you combine these two cultures—one of which seems to be based on a certain kind of objectification of women, and yet your poetry is very strong and powerful and feminist and anti-objectification? How do you combine them?

Yrsa Daley-Ward:

I think it’s really important to remember—and that’s, I think, the beauty of doing lots of things that are seemingly contradictory—that we’re all multi-faceted human beings. There are models who write. There are people who are seen controversial and wild to our brilliant parents. There are teachers who are engaged in nefarious activities. We’re all like a composite of so many things, and to be in your fullness is really important. I think too much we’re defined by what we do [for a living] or what we look like, even like the gender binary, being super feminine or masculine, so to speak. I love to embrace all aspects of myself. I think that’s super important.

TFR:

I think a lot about the spotlight and how the spotlight is different for a model versus an author. Could you comment about how the spotlight is different?

Daley-Ward:

It is, and it really shouldn’t be, but it is! It’s sort of this weird Venn diagram that’s happening. I enjoy both because in both there’s an aspect of you and performance and rawness. As much as people don’t appreciate it, modeling is an art form like writing. I do think it is.

TFR:

I’m sure it is.

I’m just thinking about the spotlight. I think a lot of that performative act. Do you think it’s easier for you to perform as a writer because you have the modelling career?

Daley-Ward:

No.

TFR:

It’s a different kind of performance.

Daley-Ward:

It’s completely different.

TFR:

That’s what I was fascinated about. For some reason, I think it had to do with seeing those photographs of you, especially the ones that were with the Guardian article and they were extremely beautiful, but they were also severe and remote, distant. I felt a great deal of distance from you, so I was like, “I wonder what it’s like to be photographed in that context.” I’m sure you are performing that for the camera, yet there is something else that comes across in these poems that’s so powerful and human and down to earth. You had described that first spoken-word event where you read your poem and people applauded for you and loved it—you felt that close human connection. I was just interested in how those two things are different or similar if they tap into each other at all.

Daley-Ward:

First of all, that article was really odd because what I said was taken out of context in nearly every line, and I completely didn’t recognize myself in that or in the photos. If you look at any other photo, even in modelling, I just don’t look like that. It was strange. I think most photos capture my essence as it is, but I do think there’s a different spotlight. In modelling, I guess you’d be prepared for what’s happening, whereas you roll up to a writing event and then, all of a sudden, people are taking photographs and it’s just you. But both of them are just different aspects of the same thing. I love balance; I love being able to do the switch between the two. I write every day. I actually do a lot more writing than modelling at the moment, but I really enjoy both elements. I think they can bleed into each other. I think you can show humanity and softness, maybe not in the Guardian article [laughter], but humanity and softness in modelling in the same way.

TFR:

I am fascinated by how you developed such a strong sense of self coming out of the religious background that you describe in some of the poems, and in other interviews as well. It’s a very strict, very severe kind of upbringing that you’ve described. I guess the stereotype, especially of women, who come out of that kind of background is that they are very self-sacrificing and they’re very self-abnegating. They don’t have a lot of confidence, and yet you do. You exude strength. Where did that spark start for you that, “I’m me and I’m these complicated things and I’m going to be powerful”?

Daley-Ward:

I was lucky enough to have been introduced to literature and language at a really young age by a mom who was a single parent, a Jamaican immigrant, so the need for education and everything like that was impressed on me from an early age. So, I got this gift of opening books and learning about deep and complicated subjects and people who didn’t always say what they meant, people who were doing all kinds of things. I read everything when I was young. I read the Bible, I read the Kama Sutra, both of them very intently. There’s always been dichotomy and contradictions, but I think that allowed me to feel rich. And conflicted—yes—but conflict is very human, isn’t it?

The gift of religion helps you understand people because you go to church or wherever it is that you worship, and you see the way people struggle with religion and what they say versus what they do and everybody trying to chase this ideal. Of course, religion has its very difficult aspects, but it’s also really beautiful. Learning to appreciate and see the joy in a lot of different things is something that such a strict religion did for me because as much as I was nervous and I felt like I was not going to heaven, I also loved the ceremony of it and the fellowship of it as well. There are lots of different parts to it.

TFR:

How would you describe your own religious belief? I felt like Bone in a way moves back in time. I was really touched by getting to the poems in the latter part of the book where they seem to be very kind to your grandparents and your mother. I had formed this question early on which was like, What is your relationship with your grandparents now? What is your relationship with that? You’ve talked about it already a little bit, about the community that you found in the church and the beauty of the ritual and such. Maybe that’s a very personal question, but I’m really interested in that same issue that you brought up, which is about watching people in various religious traditions struggle with what they mean in their own lives. We have a lot of that going on in the U.S. public life right now.

Daley-Ward:

Oh, goodness! Yes, so much.

TFR:

If it’s not too personal a question, how do you relate to the religious world that you came from?

Daley-Ward:

I’m not a Seventh-day Adventist, which is the religion I was brought up in. It’s ever-changing. I’m attempting to fathom what that is. What do I believe still? There were a lot of things that were heavily ingrained, and they never really worked themselves out. Even though I live this life that is apparently the opposite of all of that, there are things in me that aren’t going to come out. I do catch myself on any given day wondering what the truth is. Of course, nobody knows for sure. We live on faith. Especially, Christians live on faith. I am constantly grappling with how I feel about religion and the idea of God versus my idea of the universe. I am spiritual, but religious, no.

TFR:

I think that’s really what I sensed in this book, and it comes across really well. Your poem “Poetry,” from Bone, but which you read in an online video, reminded me a lot of Tess Gallagher’s short essay, “Ode to My Father.” Do you know that essay?

Daley-Ward:

No, but I’m going to read it.

TFR:

I brought it to you.

Daley-Ward:

Oh, my God! Thank you!

TFR:

She has this wonderful line. She says, “If terror and fear are necessary to the psychic stamina of a poet, I had them in steady doses just as inevitably as I had the rain.” This is an essay and poem about her parents arguing and her father beating her and how she gradually came to forgive him. When I read your poem “Poetry,” I was very much reminded of that.

Daley-Ward:

I see the link.

TFR:

I wanted to ask what you see as the connection between difficulties in life and poetry.

Daley-Ward:

There is nothing that you can’t work up into art. Whether it’s poetry or whether you’re painting or making a piece of theater or anything, what happens to you is going to strengthen what you are doing. The thing I think is so beautiful about poetry is how we can succinctly reach into our hearts and the hearts of other people because we are all having the same experiences on this planet. These experiences transcend, for the most part, class, race, gender, all those things. I think it’s important to have those moments and—I wouldn’t say to document them or identify with them—but definitely reach out. If a poem can make somebody feel somewhat less isolated or that there is somebody else who understands what they are feeling or just put a voice to how they’re feeling, then the poem’s done its job or the piece of art has done its job. Of course, difficulty is gold.

TFR:

It’s such an interesting thing about writing. It’s kind of a joke that we tend to say. Something terrible happens to you, and you’re like, “Oh, well, it’s material.”

Daley-Ward:

Yeah!

TFR:

I think it’s an odd juxtaposition for writers where sometimes they end up seeking it out.

Daley-Ward:

Yeah—that’s dangerous!

TFR:

Being destructive in their own lives in order to have material. Sometimes that works out and sometimes it doesn’t work out.

Daley-Ward:

I guess too much of that could block you. Those difficulties are going to come up. You don’t need to make them happen. They’re part of life.

TFR:

Why do you think it’s so important for poetry to reach beyond the “elite,” to reach ordinary people, and what do you think that poetry can do to help ordinary people?

Daley-Ward:

We’re all ordinary. We all have feelings. Literature is for everyone, not a select group of people. That’s ludicrous! What can it do for ordinary people? It gives them voice, it helps people feel less alone, it brings us together and we all desperately need to be brought together because we’re so divided. We’re all connected in this world. It feels crazy to me. Poetry acts as a bridge. It brings us closer together, it helps us not feel so alone, it gives an outlook to something that’s inside. If I was not writing, God knows what mental state I would be in.

TFR:

Your poems are very, very, very personal, but they also feel to me that they have a social, political edge to them. They have implications beyond the self. I think for writers in particular, the current social state that we’re living through in this world can feel increasingly hostile. How we might work, all of us, writers, to bring people to poetry and to literature where I feel that there is this more complex understanding of other human beings?

Daley-Ward:

I think there are so many things. This is actually so exciting because this is starting to happen online—and I know people have a lot of mixed feelings about this—but even the poetry, almost a whole canon already, that has appeared on Instagram has made lots of young people, people who would never pick up a poetry book for fear that it might be boring, which a lot of poetry is . . .

TFR:

Sometimes it is!

Daley-Ward:

Things like that—poetry in dance, in films, poetry with music, going to prisons, teaching it in schools. Impromptu poetry performances on the street would bring so many people to it because they realize, “Oh, it’s not this closed shop. It’s just people talking about their feelings.” If more people knew that and didn’t think that it was this thing that is closed. Honestly, there is just so much poetry that I don’t understand. I know it’s so clever, but I don’t think I’m a strong enough reader of poetry yet. I buy poetry books by the bucket-load, but I’m still learning how to read it and how to access that super academic poetry. I love everything, but it’s important for that not to be the only thing.

TFR:

I agree. That’s one reason why I was so drawn to your book.

Daley-Ward:

Yes.

TFR:

Partly, it was that contrast with some of other poets. Just the contrast is a wonderful thing. We can have both of these things. We can have the world where someone is paying attention to every single syllable and creating some kind of sonnet or some kind of formal poem and yet, we can also have poetry that’s raw and down to earth.

I’m also really looking forward to your memoir [The Terrible]. I love that you said, “It will tell everything.”

Daley-Ward:

It pretty much does.

TFR:

What do you think is the relationship between truth-telling as an important kind of upstanding thing to do and rebellion for shock’s sake? What’s the relationship between those two things? How do you think about truth-telling?

Daley-Ward:

I think it’s a powerful tool in a world where there is not a lot of it, unfortunately. I never intended to write a memoir or tell anybody anything about myself, ever, but it’s just the way in which this has come to me. There were doses of fear that come along with that. When I started to examine what the reason for this was, the most important thing that came out of nowhere—and which gives me a reason to be here and sit down and be able to do all this, without turning me into a nervous wreck—is just the fact that I think to be here is to be in service to the world, in service for people for whom these experiences are completely normal. When I speak about marginalized communities, it’s not only people of color, queer people, sex workers, people who’ve been involved in what we call criminal activity. I’m a deeply private person, but something about making this kind of work is stronger. I was talking to my friend today on the phone and we were just talking. I get some lines sometimes when I’m just chatting and I said to her, “My destiny is louder than my comfort.” I was like, “Oh! I’m going to Tweet that!” It really is at this point. It’s become more important to do that.

TFR:

It’s gone beyond yourself and your expression. You feel a responsibility to other people.

Daley-Ward:

I do! Otherwise, how are we going to do this? Our sex workers are going to think that they can’t write the next bestseller. Children of color who live on council estates or in the hoods are going to think they can’t write a Pulitzer prize.

TFR:

Especially now, because we do seem to be in a time of shrinking opportunity where the rich get richer and everybody else is left behind. It’s scary sometimes, especially in terms of education. I understand that completely, that sense of responsibility for bringing that forward.

Could you comment on Instagram and other social media as a method of artistic expression? Do you see social media as the future of poetry and other literary forms? What are the limitations of that?

Daley-Ward:

Not completely the future, because where there is progress and wonderful work on Instagram, one of the issues with things happening on mass media is that, sometimes, it might lose its power. That’s a small price to pay because it’s making literature current. Literature has always been current, but now to reach everybody, because almost everyone has a smartphone. As much as people who have an attitude about this won’t like this, I think it’s wonderful because if you were never interested in poetry, now, these days, people will be engaging with poetry whether they know it or not, which I think is wonderful, especially for young people, the next generation.

TFR:

What’s next for you?

Daley-Ward:

Every day I ask myself that. It’s The Terrible next. I just finished my final edit of that which has been a really interesting process. I’ve just relocated to New York. I love to meet people and I love to read poetry, and I hope to do so much more of it live. Sometimes I do it with musicians. Just to be doing what I love and to create more work constantly. I hold myself accountable in that way—actually getting stuff done. So, writing and really documenting this time because it feels really special. It’s very important to me.

TFR:

Any last words of wisdom?

Daley-Ward:

I don’t know that I’m wise.

TFR:

Or last words of spirit?

Daley-Ward:

I would say that in this world, it’s more important than ever before for people to feel empowered to tell their stories because their stories are very valid, and if you are worried whether it’s strong enough or good enough or whether it’s compelling enough, always know that the thing that is the most raw and honest will be compelling to other people because we are all connected. If you have a story that you want to write, tell your story. We really do want to hear it.

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Interview: Ha Jin

Ha Jin is the author of seven volumes of poetry, four short story collections, eight novels, and one collection of essays, and cowriter of an opera libretto. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including a National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the Townsend Prize for Fiction, and the Flanner O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Born Huefei Jin in Liaoning, China, Ha Jin served the People’s Liberation Army during the Cultural Revolution from the ages of fourteen to nineteen. Afterward, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in China before coming to the US to study at Brandeis University, where he earned his PhD and began writing poetry. While there, he witnessed the Tiananmen Massacre and decided to remain in the US and eventually to become a citizen.

When Jin decided to make his life in the US, he also decided to write in English. As he noted in “Exiled to English” in The New Yorker in 2009, he felt that “the Chinese language had been so polluted by revolutionary movements and political jargon” and that anything he wrote for a Chinese audience would be subject to censorship. Therefore, he chose English, “to preserve the integrity of my work.” Though he still focuses on issues and characters concerned with China, over the more than fifteen years that he has been writing, his English has grown more fluid and natural, and his more recent work is set more solidly in the US.

In this interview, we focus on The Boat Rocker, Ha Jin’s most recent novel, published by Pantheon in 2016. The Boat Rocker is the story of Feng Danlin, a Chinese immigrant living in New York and working as a culture reporter and writer of exposés, who sets out to reveal the corrupt network of support around a new highly touted but low-quality novel. It turns out the novel has been penned by none other than his ex-wife, Yan Haili. Needless to say, Danlin’s motives get murky. The book provides an intense, but humorous, look at not only Chinese political corruption, but US publishing shenanigans and the impact of politics even there. As always in Jin’s work, the human struggles with love, envy, and betrayal exist on the same plane as larger cultural and political ones.

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:
One of the things that I wanted to note was that this is only the second time that you’ve set a novel completely in the US. A Free Life, in some ways, reflected your own sudden decision to immigrate to the US after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and now The Boat Rocker‘s main character is a long-term resident, as you are. I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about how your consciousness might have shifted as you, yourself, made your adult life in the US. Do you feel more embedded in life in the US? Do you still think about setting most of your work in China? How are you thinking about place in your work now?

Ha Jin:
In recent years, I think I have set my work in between, between the United States and China. In fact, the novel before this is A Map of Betrayal. The narrator is an American history professor. Part of the novel is set in China, but more than half is set in the States. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I wrote a collection of short stories that’s set in Flushing, New York [A Good Fall, Vintage International]. Basically, this is my territory—the in-between.

TFR:
I think that seems to be more and more true for more people, as people move all over the world. Even I, who have always lived in the United States, have lived in the North and the South, and there are such distinctions.

Jin:
Yes, even within the States, I can see among my students, often, they are in-between, too.

TFR:
How do you think that impacts your work in particular, living in between, writing in between?

Jin:
I think it really sharpened my sense of survival, because this is a very slippery region, and so I had to be more cautious. Also, it is by definition, marginal. I had to accept that as my condition, a condition for existence as writer, as a human being. A lot of things, I think, I knew, especially I had to figure out by myself. I can’t make a clear statement, because there’s a lot of uncertainty, but uncertainty is a part of the environment, in this space, and so that’s why I had to accept it as my own way. [Laughs]

TFR:
Has it changed as you’ve been in the US longer? Do you feel more American now?

Jin:
Yeah, I do feel that way, because I’ve been a citizen for almost twenty years now.

TFR:
My husband has been a citizen for two.

[Laughter]

Jin:
For two! From where?

TFR:
Canada.

Jin:
Canada. Oh, Canada is a great country, but you can have dual citizenship. That’s great. I wish I could. That would make life easier for me—because for me, because China does not accept the dual citizenship, I had to resolve. The door is closed. There’s no way it’d be sane for me to think of going back. There’s no way to go back. I have not been back to China for thirty-one years, ever since I came to the States. That’s the situation. I have to be very rational about this. There’s only this space now, and ahead. There’s no way to go back. It’s very hard for me to think that way.

TFR:
One of the things I loved about The Boat Rocker is that there are such great moments of humor in it, too, even as Danlin struggles with this in-between space, as you describe about yourself.

Jin:
Yes, I set out to write comically.

TFR:
What inspired you to have Danlin’s investigation focused not on just corruption in Chinese cultural life, but also on his ex-wife?

Jin:
That would make the project more exciting, more personal. Because, otherwise, it would be just a political investigation. I wanted his motivation, somehow, mixed. There’s an element of vengeance here, and he’s not perfect. He’s traumatized, but, in a way, his motivation is nuanced. That’s why—I wanted this to be more subtle.

TFR:
I thought he was a wonderfully complex character. Could you talk a little bit more about your development of him as a character?

Jin:
Yes. In fact, a lot of people think this is too bizarre, too far-fetched, but, in fact, for almost every incident here, there is a factual happening. I just unified them and picked them from different places. There were a lot of Chinese, many Chinese men I know, as soon as they arrived here, their wives gave them the divorce papers. I have a friend who was given divorce papers at the airport. There was also a freelance writer, so I combined different people in life to create a character.

TFR:
One of the things I was interested in, also, was that sometimes I felt that you do have a certain amount of sympathy for Niya and even Haili. I wonder, do you feel that a fiction writer is obligated to love and sympathize with all of their characters somehow?

Jin:
No!

[Laughter]

No, I don’t agree. Often, even when you are disgusted with a character, people like him or her. I just want to be factual, to see the psychology, the motivations, the situations. I don’t have sympathy for everyone, no. It’s impossible.

TFR:
Which is a character here that you have the least sympathy for?

Jin:
The wife, Haili, I have the least sympathy. I have more sympathy for Danlin, for Gary, even, because he’s in the dark most of the time. Niya—I can understand her, where she comes from, but she’s really somehow, brainwashed in a way. I can understand them, why they have become like that, but Danlin, I do have a sympathy for him. I can see he’s traumatized. He’s troubled.

TFR:
When I was reading all the copy about the book before reading the book itself, it was talking about him as a pure, anti-corruption kind of crusader. I was like, “I don’t think that Ha Jin believes that. I think that there’s much more subtlety to him, even as he takes up this position of investigating his ex-wife.”

Jin:
He just got into it emotionally, couldn’t get out, and just got deeper and deeper, and was in a way trapped in there.

TFR:
You deal mostly with corruption in government and culture affairs kinds of offices, but you also, especially in chapter four, you satirize the publishing world a bit. What do you think are the biggest problems in the publishing world today?

Jin:
I have a lot of sympathy for publishers. Firstly, they are businesspeople. When they publish a book, they have to think of a market, otherwise their argument is, if you’re a new author, why should I waste money, lose money on you? I do have sympathy for that. But, it really is a business world. They don’t care too much about literary merit at all. I had the experience that my first few fiction books were all published by small presses. At the time, I got a lot of rejection letters. They would say, “We like it. This well-written, but it’s too poetic, but it’s very good. I remember episodes and characters—they stay with me, but we don’t have a market. We can’t see a market for it.” In a way, sometimes publishers are near-sighted, I think. They think too much in profits. A lot of books—you don’t know. They might yet have a different life once in print.

TFR:
How do you see that influencing our literature?

Jin:
That’s why commerce, the business part, is really not about good literature. I think that there should be some kind of balance. Some publishers have been doing this—they have a special series. Even if they know they might lose money, it still is good for the press. In the long run, we don’t know what a book may do—maybe the press will benefit in the long run. Like New Directions—basically, they’re still supported by the early high-modern poets [who never made money in their time].

TFR:
You’re a teacher as well as a writer, and I wonder if you could comment about creative writing programs. There’s been so much criticism about how “writing can’t be taught” and all of that, though I think there’s also the matter of cultivating a readership, which we do through our teaching of creative writing.

Jin:
I think it’s a democratic thing. In the book, I talk about the Chinese literary operators. You have to really tow a line with the officials, you have to be very active, accepted by the powers that be. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have a chance. At least the creative writing programs are open. It’s open to everyone. We give people an equal chance.

People elsewhere may think of faculty like literary agents—this was new to many other countries. I think they, in fact, compare MFAs with other, more commercial aspects. MFA programs have done much for aspiring writers. But we don’t take money personally. We don’t benefit. We don’t get a commission from it.

[Laughter]

TFR:
You commented in your Paris Review interview in 2009 that you are open and outspoken, and that’s certainly something that I have long admired about both your work and about your reputation as a person. Why are these traits that you’ve cultivated, and in what ways do you think they’re important in addition to, obviously, allowing you to speak out about political corruption?

Jin:
As human beings, we must find some basic principles that we must go by. For instance, consistency, integrity. These are very basic principles. Otherwise, how can we act in the world? We might just get lost in our own confusion. That’s why I believe in speaking about the Tiananmen Massacre, ever since it happened. I have to keep on, continue it. I can’t cancel myself. I can’t go back on it.

TFR:
What does your knowledge of and experience of Chinese situations make you think about what’s going on in the US today?

Jin:
I think, really, China has been very aggressive in recent years. In fact, this novel is set twelve years before now, and so, at the time, China was very cautious, but China, because of the crisis in 2008, China has done well. In fact, even developed. That gives some kind of legitimacy, or justification, to the system. Basically, they’re trying to, now, denigrate democracy. The new election—basically, I think China is very happy about the results, because Trump is a businessman and has business dealings with China. The Chinese side—I think they believe he can somehow have more influence.

TFR:
Do you think that your writing will go in a direction where it approaches American politics in addition to Chinese and Chinese-American politics?

Jin:
Maybe in the future. I’m not sure. [Laughter] I’m not a political writer. That’s another reason I’ve written this—because I really wanted to make the subject personal.

TFR:
What else would you like to say about The Boat Rocker? What else was important to you about the writing of The Boat Rocker, and how does it mark the next step for you? Where are you going next?

Jin:
Stylistically, it’s different from my previous novels, because I wanted to make this somehow comic.

TFR:
Which it was.

Jin:
That was the challenge to me. Basically, I want to be serious, but at the same time entertaining. That’s my ambition.

TFR:
Great, and any news about what’s next? Are you working on a new project?

Jin:
My wife was sick, gravely sick for some years—she’s well now, but I couldn’t pounce into a long novel project. So, I’ve been writing a lot of poetry in Chinese. I published two books of poems in Chinese, and then I re-wrote some of the poems in English, so basically I have a book of English-language poems I’ve been working on. [A Distant Center, Copper Canyon Press, 2018].

TFR:
I wish we had another hour to talk about poetry.

Jin:

Yes.

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Interview: Sandra Castillo

Sandra M Castillo was born in Havana, Cuba, and moved to Miami, Florida, in 1970. She received her MA in creative writing from Florida State University. In 2002 she was awarded the White Pine Press award in poetry for her collection My Father Sings to My Embarrassment (2002). Her work has appeared in publications including The North American Review, The Connecticut Review, Cimarron Review, The Florida Review, Little Havana Blues, and Paper Dance: 52 Latino Poets.

Castillo’s poems are threaded with history, not just the history of the many family members and friends who take shape with her words, but with the history of Cuba and those living the exile experience. But for all the broader issues her pieces touch on, they are never far from the deeply personal, never uncolored by her lyrical presence in the stories being told.

Danielle Kessinger for The Florida Review:

What made you choose the title Eating Moors and Christians for this work?

Sandra M. Castillo:

I’d never written about food, which is really funny because we always think about culture and the easiest way into cultures is through food. You think Cuban—you think Cuban food. And I’d never really tried to write about food, and I wondered how I would do that. And some years back there was local poetry being paired up, poets being paired up with chefs, and somebody said to me, “Oh, do you want to participate?” And I was like, “No. I am not that cool. I wouldn’t even know how to write about food. No. Thank you though, but no.” And then I thought, subsequently, Why can’t I write about food? I should be able to write about food. I should be able to write about whatever else that I want. It took me a really long time to figure out that in writing about food you’re really writing about something else.

And so I was in Cuba in 2006, which was the last year that my mother and I were able to go because that’s the year that the George Bush administration changed the policy about who qualified to go to Cuba. I thought that was going to be our last year visiting in the summer. So we found ourselves there eating moros y cristianos, which is what they really call black beans and rice when you cook them together. And I thought, Wow, it’s a whole legacy of colonialism here. That’s the poem food. And there we were in Havana, after the revolution to post-exile-experience, eating moros y cristianos, Moors and Christians. And there seemed to be a lot wrong with that. So I thought this was the way to do it.

TFR:

Now that there are more public flights leaving, how does that change the perspective of the exile experience, and how does that impact what you’re approaching as topical?

Castillo:

I think I’m still dealing with how you talk about the exile experience. How do you even talk about Cuba or what it means to be Cuban American? I was at work when I first heard that diplomatic relations had been restored, and I gotta tell you, I wept like an idiot. I was thinking, I never thought I would get to see that in my lifetime. I just didn’t think that was going to ever be possible. And for somebody who had not been able to go since 2006, by virtue of the change of policy, I thought, “Oh my gosh, the opening of US-Cuba relations. This is amazing! This is like having a front row seat to openness.” We’ve needed to be there for a long, long time. The embargo was a failure. It’s a crazy policy that goes back to the dark ages of the Cold War. I think this was a political blessing of sorts. Now I just need to talk my way into being brave enough to be able to go back since I haven’t been there since 2006.

TFR:

So you haven’t gone back since the change in policy?

Castillo:

No, my mother’s always my passport to Cuba. I always think I need a passport and that’s really my mother because the relatives that remain are relatives of hers, distant family. But it’s a way back into the past and I haven’t gone. We’re talking now about going this summer. I’m really interested in seeing what’s going to happen, what feels different but there’s a sense of openness that I’m pretty happy with and thankful that the president who did this was Barack Obama.

Now, I’m worrying about the Trump presidency and what this will mean for US-Cuba relations. But I can only hope that because he’s so pro-business, this is sort of like a mixed blessing of sorts, that he’ll see Cuba as an opportunity to maintain the openness of the relationship. But by the same token, I’m afraid that they’ll turn Cuba into what it used to be in the 1950s, and that’s not a good thing.

TFR:

It is hard to know.

Castillo:

I’m as weary of that and what’s going to happen with that restoration of diplomatic relations as I am about this impending presidency.

TFR:

So much of this work in particular is suffused with nostalgia.

Castillo:

Which is a disease.

TFR:

I was reading an interview with you where you mentioned Jack Kerouac, and I was thinking about how I hadn’t realized that he had written Dharma Bums in central Florida. Re-reading that novel and thinking of him being in Florida, it became totally different because then it has this sense of nostalgia I’d never realized it had before. Do you feel like where you are writing impacts what you write? Do you find yourself being more nostalgic when in Miami, or if you’re writing elsewhere, writing back towards where you came from?

Castillo:

I don’t think where you write is necessarily as important as what it is that you’re writing about. Because essentially whatever nostalgia exists in the work, you’re bringing into it by virtue of the fact that you’re recreating place and place is in your mind and so whatever place you’re creating, it’s already viewed with that sense of nostalgia. My fascination with Kerouac was that I think in a lot of ways he was an immigrant. He actually didn’t learn to speak English until I think he was six or eight years old. So, he had that sensibility about him. And I think much of what he wrote was really about where he was from, Lowell, Massachusetts. And he was trying to create place using language. And I think part of the exile experience is in the essence just that. You are trying to visit a place that no longer exists, so we create it. I think we just drag that nostalgia into it, and it’s not necessarily a positive thing. But I think it’s sort of inevitable because it goes with that sense of loss that Kerouac said, “I accept lostness forever.” Right? So there’s nothing else you can do. Just embrace it. But, at the same time, much of what I wrote in the book is really about coming to that place of understanding that the past is gone. You’ll never get there.

TFR:

Do you feel nostalgia is a natural state for poets, always looking back at some loss of what could or could not be?

Castillo:

Inevitably. We were talking earlier about titles and getting drawn in by titles and I do this thing where I look at a poetry book, and I open it, and does it pull you in? And I think that the allure for me in people’s work, and it doesn’t matter what poet it is, is that commitment to place. And I think inevitably, that comes from that place of nostalgia. Even though it’s not sentimental because, sentimentality, I could do away with. The idea of that lure, which is what I think nostalgia is, a lure back into the past. And really, I think we all have it. Just poets try to recreate it, visit it over and over and over again. If you’re Cuban, I think you just can’t escape it.

TFR:

You often refer to photographs in this work. Do you look at photographs as a doorway to explore?

Castillo:

My uncle lived with us when I was a child in Cuba, and he was a photographer. And he turned our bathroom into a darkroom. And so, as a kid, the photos were always hanging. He created this little clothesline. And I remember thinking about place as something that could be captured in these photos, these still lives of everything around us. And we always thought that our lives in Cuba were sort of transient because we always knew we were going to go. It’s like if you’re in exile, you always knew at some juncture you might leave the island. But in looking back, and even in living with those photographs, it’s almost like he was trying to freeze time, and that photography somehow enabled you to do that, to capture it, to hold it. And I think about memory like that, where it’s not moving pictures. It’s actually still images. So I find that, especially in this book, I think that’s what I’m doing. I think those are photos, and I’m using language to do what my uncle was doing when I was a kid.

TFR:

You’re doing it with words.

Castillo:

I think so.

TFR:

That’s lovely.

Castillo:

So there is that. But I’m also quite visual, and that’s how I think about things. So I’m always trying to frame it. And I think that’s what it is. I mean at its simplest.

TFR:

When I got to the back of the book, I was surprised to find that you had a glossary.

Castillo:

Oh yeah. [laughter]

TFR:

When writers have multiple languages to play with, I find language and word choice even more interesting. This book has predominantly English peppered with Spanish.

Castillo:

Right.

TFR:

Did you start the poems in English when you wrote them?

Castillo:

I did. I do. Always.

TFR:

And the choice of when to use Spanish? The Spanish words just come out naturally?

Castillo:

They do. I think that there are some things that you can only really talk about in Spanish, particularly when you have all the baggage of the Cuban Revolution. It’s a complicated story because the political is personal, and the personal is political, and our lives are packed in with all of this history that had tremendous impact on our lives, sort of like being defined against your will. And so, I find that I need the Spanish to tell the story. So, even though I think in English, and I’ve spent more than half my life in the United States, that part of me that is Cuban, I need to access it in the language of home which is the Spanish. So I throw my Spanish around.

TFR:

Did you debate over having a glossary or not, just leaving the Spanish as is? Your glossary, it’s not just saying what the word means, but the context of the word.

Castillo:

I was trying to do that. I actually did a lot more than that, and the press said, “Nah, that one is self explanatory.” So they edited it down a little bit. I didn’t know if the title would make sense if you’re not Cuban, and I wanted to provide a larger context for talking about the exile experience. Because I think that while I am talking about being Cuban and an immigrant, I think that those experiences, those themes, that sense of loss and displacement, that’s not unique to me as a Cuban American. It is whoever had to move for political reasons, historical reasons, to some other place. But at the same time, the particulars I think needed to be qualified and quantified. And so I thought, “Well, okay so let me just kinda provide a context.” So, I don’t know if it’s helpful or not. Nobody’s given me any feedback on that.

TFR:

It was interesting reading not just the meaning, but kind of the context of it, because Spanish is very much a language that depends on the country, the place, or origin.

Castillo:

That is true. Yeah, absolutely.

TFR:

Do you have pieces that you do more fully in Spanish and pepper with English references?

Castillo:

Sometimes I worry that I did too much. I’m reading today, and I was thinking, Okay I don’t know what the makeup is going to be of the audience. Do I need to do more poems that don’t have that much Spanish? And that’s always kind of hard to gauge because you don’t know and you find yourself translating. I feel like I’m always trying to provide a context. And so, when I write in Spanish, I always feel like I have to kind of keep myself in check. Did I do too much? And there are several poems in there that I think maybe I did too much, but I don’t know. Nobody has complained yet.

TFR:

I think it comes across as very natural and your words are just as they should be.

Castillo:

Oh good, thank you [chuckle]. Thank you very much.

TFR:

You have a lot in here about your family. Do they participate at all in approving the pieces that feature them?

Castillo:

That’s really interesting. My sisters always worry about what I say about them, and they’re the only ones that say, “Please don’t read that poem about blah blah blah.” And so, they’ll kind of say, “So and so is coming. Don’t read that poem.” My mother is interesting in her response because I always say to her, “Listen I’m gonna tell this story.” And she’ll go, “Do you really have to?” And I always say, “Yes, so I’m just telling you.” And then she never asks me, “Well, what did you say?” And she doesn’t read it. I just give it to her. “Okay, I said this and I said this and I said that and I hope that’s okay.” And sometimes she’ll frown heavily, but she’ll never say, “Oh, you shouldn’t have done that.” She’s never said any of that. And I think my other relatives don’t know.

TFR:

Have you ever had a piece that you decided to leave out of a collection because of this?

Castillo:

There’s a poem in there I wondered if I should have included at all. And I’ve never read it out loud. I did a presentation at Tallahassee Community College two and a half weeks ago and I didn’t read it. I’ve never read it. And a student came up to me afterwards and said, “I want to talk to you about this poem.” And I thought, Wow. Wow really? And he was a young man, and he said, “I found it really curious that you wouldn’t have read it.”

And it’s the one called “Porn.” I don’t know if you had the chance to look at that. And no one knows that I wrote that poem. I was sexually molested when I was a kid. And it’s the kind of poem that I don’t think I need to ask anybody for permission to tell that story. It’s my story. It happened to me. That’s exactly what happened. And I think it’s one of those things that, had I said anything to anyone, I would have been told not to tell that story. But I think as writers, if the experience belongs to you and it did, you just have to claim it and then deal with the fall-out later. And that’s one of those poems. I don’t know if that answers your question.

TFR:

No, no it does. Do you feel that sometimes even asking someone about a poem is giving them permission to say, “No, don’t use it.”

Castillo:

Yes. And sometimes I tell them afterwards, “I wrote about this,” as opposed to, “I’m going to do it.” The first poem of the collection, “El Bayú”—this story I only found out about recently. My grandmother was somehow running some kind of bordello. I was like, What? Are you kidding me? I mean that’s just a crazy story that I verified. That’s indeed something that happened. And there was no way I was asking anybody for permission to tell that story. It was told to me, I verified it, and I told the story. I don’t think my father would be too happy that I told it either.

TFR:

So much of your poetry explores history. Do you feel that when you’re living in a time that feels like it’s more heavily creating significant history that there is a pressure to commit to writing about the present?

Castillo:

Speaking as a Cuban American who lived in a time when things were so volatile, I think that history isn’t something that’s separate from our daily lives. And I think that when you’re born in the “Third World,” you come to understand that historical events directly impact our lives. That you can’t say, “Oh well I’m not worried about that,” because you see the response immediately. This is going to impact my life in a way that I will never be able to get past. You think about exile, all the things that had to have happened historically for me to even be here, to be the person that I am. So that whole concept of history shapes and defines us against our will. You can’t escape that. And, as immigrants, I think because we grow up in it, you understand that. Americans don’t have that experience in the same way, because events seem further away and it takes longer for you to feel the impact. You don’t get a revolution but you do get a presidency that we’re still grappling with. And so it’s gonna be interesting to see. I’m really interested in seeing how writers and poets respond to this presidency. What’s going to happen? And is this the beginning of another civil rights movement? There is already that move towards people mobilizing to express concerns about women minorities, etcetera. So this is new. And I’m looking forward to what writers have to say about that. This is one of those events that we’re gonna have to deal with.

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Interview: Nicole Dennis-Benn

Nicole Dennis-Benn was born in Kingston, Jamaica. She left her home country at age seventeen to attend Cornell University, where she earned a B.A. in biology and nutritional sciences. She then earned a master’s in Public Health from the University of Michigan, and went on to work for Columbia University as a project manager in the Department of Social Sciences. She wrote during all of these years and, while working for Columbia, completed an MFA in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

We caught up with Dennis-Benn shortly after she published her first novel, Here Comes the Sun. The novel won a Lambda Literary Award and has been named a New York Times Notable Book and Editors’ Choice, a Kirkus Reviews Best Debut Fiction, an Amazon Best Book, and numerous other recognitions. Learn more about her work at her website.

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:
Here Comes the Sun is a difficult book to read, not because of the writing–the writing is exquisite–but because the subject matter is difficult.

Nicole Dennis-Benn:
It’s a lot. It’s a lot that I dealt with in that book. Yeah, which I’m happy to talk about with you.

TFR:
Yes. One of the things I really loved about it was the centrality and complexity of the female characters. You know, there are male characters, too. And some of them are treating lovingly, like Charles. But it’s clearly a women-centered story.

Dennis-Benn:
Yes, it is.

TFR:
And Margot and Thandi are particularly compelling. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you inhabited those two different characters. They are obviously, clearly close and related. I wonder whether you feel that each of them takes up a part of you?

Dennis-Benn:
Right. That’s a good question.

TFR:
How do you feel about that?

Dennis-Benn:
Thandi, in all honesty, came into being when I went back to Jamaica in 2010. I moved to the US in 1999. And I never went back home because I feel like, yes, it would be only for brief visits, but I was in this self-imposed exile where I didn’t want to deal with the classism, the homophobia. All these other things. So I stayed away. But, upon meeting my wife, who was then my girlfriend, she said, “You know, you’ve never taken me to Jamaica, where you’re from. You have all this accent,” she’d say, but I didn’t even take her to the parts in Brooklyn that’s populated with Jamaicans. That was how, I think, traumatized I was.

And so, I finally made the decision to take her back home in 2010. And in going back home, a lot of the emotions that I was running away from came back. And I didn’t know what to do with them but just journal. And in journaling, I remember, Thandi came up. Because I was that girl, in high school, who felt ostracized because of our complexion. And also being working class. And so I was like, “Well, I’m not a non-fiction author, yet.” But, as a fiction author, how do I channel that? And Thandi, Thandi’s character came about ’cause she’s really me in that sense of going through that. In terms of… feeling insecure, feeling invisible. I wanted to document that through a teenage girl’s eyes. You know, because on the island itself they say, “Well, it’s vanity that would drive a girl to bleach her skin.” But she’s showing us that, no, it’s actually this whole context of feeling unworthy because of her darker complexion. And forcing people to say, “Well, look at me.” And so that’s really where I wanted to go, I hoped to have gone with that character.

TFR:
You did. You did. And I felt like you did a good job in the sense that you showed very well just the sort of myriad pressures on her, about that issue. One might think, “Why would anyone do that?”

Dennis-Benn:
Right.

TFR:
But you build them gradually, to just kind of show the pressure on her.

Dennis-Benn:
Yeah. And even her own educational possibilities. People want her… Margot and Delores want her to be a doctor. And she herself is saying, “No. That’s not what gonna get me that access. What’s gonna get me that access is lightening my skin.” And a lot of girls and boys that stay in Jamaica still feel the same way.

Margot is also a part of me as well. Because Margot, I call her my heroine. Because I feel like Margot is that person that I wanted to be, in that she was able to say, “You know what? I’m not given the things that I need to survive in life.” Like, she didn’t have the best education, like Thandi. Her mother sold her into prostitution very early. And Margot uses what she knows. And she’s kinda like that voice in society that’s saying that, “Well you know, this is what’s gonna get me that piece of that pie that I’ve been denied. And this is all I know. So let me use that to get ahead.” And so, people think Margot is a villain. I mean, yes, I can understand that.

TFR: But she’s heartbreaking.

Dennis-Benn:
But she’s heartbreaking. Exactly. The struggle with her being loved by her mother. The struggle with her own internal identity, or her sexuality. All these things are burdening Margot. And so, I think with that character, I kind of used not only what I’d experienced with homophobia, but also experiencing that anger. For a country that is so… Upward mobility is so hard there. And so, for Margot to say, “Well, it’s hard, but I’m gonna break it somehow.”

So I wanted to show the reader where that character is coming from. For her to have made certain decisions, though unpopular.

TFR:
Right. It’s interesting—I don’t want to get off the subject, but right now we’re living through a time in this country where rage seems appropriate, too. I think about the rage that how powerless people seem to feel here, and then you think about someone who has experienced what she’s experienced with far fewer resources, and…

Dennis-Benn:
Exactly.

TFR:
More discrimination. And you’re just like, “God, that rage… ”

Dennis-Benn:
Exactly.

TFR:
It just seems to grow. I found Margot really, really the most interesting. Because I couldn’t decide how I felt about her. It was, obviously, she was doing these horrible things to people that she supposedly cared about.

Dennis-Benn:
Right. I like that, exactly. And using her sexuality as a weapon.

One thing I wanted to talk about in the book was also the sexualization of our girls, and Delores, Margot, and Thandi have been victimized sexually. We have this conversation a lot, in terms of victims versus survival, in terms of the wording itself. And Margot, I feel like she’s that person that, if she were in this room, she would not say “I was a victim of anything, I am a survivor. I am gonna continue surviving.” So, taking that and putting it in that character as well, because Here Comes The Sun is about exploitation of the land itself but also the bodies of women. And, there was that parallel with Margot herself, kind of doing to those women what our government had done to us, in terms of the exploitation.

TFR:
This brings up something that’s masterful in the novel, your mastery of analogy and simile … and how often it was almost metonymic because there was this close relationship between the place and the bodies. You even talked about Margot and “the island of her body.” And then there was that wonderful one, “the red hibiscuses hang from their stems like the tongues of thirsty dogs.” And “they are as silent as caterpillars that rest on the leaves”, and then “Charles’s palms are dry and surprisingly warm like sun-warmed stones.”

Dennis-Benn:
Oh my gosh, I wrote that? [laughter]

TFR:
Yeah, you did! In fact, I had a whole list of them, that was like in the first half of the book, and then as time got closer, and I was reading this in the car and stuff, I was making a list of them in the back ’cause they go throughout the book. That kind of connection between bodies and place, and other phenomena, and the environment. Is that something that you did consciously?

Dennis-Benn:
I didn’t do it consciously! But I do have a passion, though. I feel that we are connected to our environment. We are… Everywhere we inhabit, we’re part of the universe, we’re part of the Earth, everything. So, I try my best not to overlook that in my writing as well, and I think it has come out.

TFR:
You could get somebody to go through your book with a highlighter and note all those, because I was thinking this would be a great literary criticism essay because they were just so close, and they were so predominant. You used the metaphoric language really well. They were always so apt, and yet they were thematic as well, which is really wonderful. Well, one of the things that Margot obsesses about is moving to another place on the island with Verdene, or even to London. But, Verdene tells her it wouldn’t really be different in those places.

So this actually reminded me… I don’t know if you’ve ever read Carson McCullers’ novelette, A Member of the Wedding, and it was written in the first half of the 20th century, and it’s kind of a pre-Civil Rights era story, but Frankie is obsessed about the North. And she dreams about moving to the North, which Carson McCullers ultimately did. She left her native Georgia and moved to New York. But it just reminded me of that kind of longing of this mythical place, where everything will be better. So, how do you think that the dream of a safe and accepting place influences the plot of this book, and to what extent do you consider that mythical other place an obsession in your work, in general?

Dennis-Benn:
Margot very much wants to escape, right? So, in her mind, she feels like escaping to Lagoons… That was gonna give her the safety that she wants, especially being a lesbian woman. I mean, she wouldn’t call herself a lesbian woman, but very much in love with Verdene. And I think that was her first step in acknowledging this love for Verdene. Of course, she ends up crushing it, but in her mind that place would signify happiness, it would signify abundance and love. For her, it was really important, but in one part Verdene would say to her, “Well, we’re still in Jamaica. It’s not like Lagoons is in the United States or in Canada. We’re still in Jamaica.” Even that dynamic of still not wanting to leave her own country… Even though, perhaps Verdene could take her to London, and Verdene herself is living in Jamaica, loving the country so much that they still don’t want to leave it. But still not being able to survive as themselves. And I wanted very much to capture that as well. In our country, a lot of people fantasize about heading up North, like heading to the United States.

TFR:
And you did that!

Dennis-Benn:
Yeah exactly! It’s like, what we see on the other side… The other side looks greener. And for a lot of us, it’s freedom, freedom to be ourselves. For me, it was freedom to be a lesbian. And I am sure if Margot had that freedom to come here too, she would probably would have said yes. If it weren’t for Thandi keeping her back, for example. But I had no such links, besides parents, saying, “Coming here, I could be also beautiful.” Because in my own country, it’s kind of interesting because yes, there is classism, there is complexionism. Here, there’s racism. But it’s more hurtful to be discriminated against by your own people, who are looking down on you because in their minds there’s a hierarchy of blackness. But here I’m like, “Oh, well… Okay, you expect it, so what?” It’s kind of interesting psychologically to…

TFR:
It’s not that it doesn’t exist here. It’s not that it’s the mythic perfect place.

Dennis-Benn:
Exactly, yeah. But it’s better than still working in a house of all people of color and being looked down upon by your own people who you’ve expected them to embrace you.

TFR:
That’s interesting. What do you think the pros and cons have been for you, of moving from Jamaica to New York? And I think again of this situation that we’re in in this country right now, where people keep saying, “I’m gonna move to Canada.” And I have the option. My husband’s a Canadian citizen, so… And he’s lived there before. He grew up there, lived most of his life there. He knows it’s not a mythic perfect place, but sometimes for me it kind of looms that way, other than the weather. So what do you think about this… I guess there are two conflicting urges that we have and one is to find a better place, and one is to stand and fight.

Dennis-Benn:
I think what’s going on with this country is that Americans are now experiencing what it’s like to be an immigrant because it’s not the easiest decision to move away from your home land. And so when that decision is made it’s definitely because you’re fleeing something and hoping for the better, but still not wanting to cut ties with your country. Period. And so it’s like that ambivalence that we feel and it’s gonna definitely… It’s a lifetime of feelings. Home-sickness is definitely not the easiest and I think I wouldn’t mock anybody leaving the United States, but at the same time I think it’s worth it to still fight, to still stay here.

Especially for those people who are voiceless. And I got emotional when I was at BEA in Boston because, while I’m here I’m free technically, I’m that immigrant living the “dream” whatever that looks like. For me it’s that published book that ended up here in the New York Times, and I felt like, “Wow!” But a lot of my friends, the Margots of society, they are back in Jamaica and I’m gonna get emotional… They can’t come here, they can’t escape. And so what do they do with their situation? Some of them wither, some of them just give up. I have a friend in Jamaica, she’s now a security guard and… She should be in this chair because she’s a writer, and yeah… But I made it… I’m getting teary-eyed…

TFR:
Clearly I think there is a way in which this is a social protest novel… Do you have a sense about what you think writer’s responsibility is in terms of writing for social justice and change, and how do you balance that with other concerns in your writing?

Dennis-Benn:
I use fiction as my best method of activism. Because it’s not didactic. People don’t know that they’re being fed certain things, ’cause it’s entertaining. So I try my best to balance that.

TFR:
Page turner. [chuckle]

Dennis-Benn:
I do it through characterization. Humanizing characters, or documenting the human experience. So, yes, a book could be set in Jamaica, or it could be set in Brooklyn, or Canada, or wherever. But people can still come to the table knowing that, “Well, this is what I’ve felt before in terms of relationships, or love and loss, or displacement.” Doing it that way, and then individuals can see how certain things affect people.

TFR:
And maybe relate to it in a way that they might not otherwise.

You mentioned just very briefly when we first sat down to talk that you haven’t written nonfiction yet. So is that something you’ve been thinking about?

Dennis-Benn:
I’ve been thinking about it, because I’ve been writing a series of essays and people have been saying, “Oh, this looks like a collection you’re starting here.” Or even I’ve gotten inquires about memoirs, for example. I think at some point I will, but I think for now I speak through my fiction. But I’m not knocking the idea of doing a nonfiction down the road.

TFR:
There are different thoughts about it in terms of, what you say, in terms of people sometimes, I think, have an easier time entering into the fictional world and absorbing that fictional world. And on the other hand there’s the urge to testify which you can do, really, a nonfiction as yourself, as, “This is my experience and it’s real.”

Dennis-Benn:
Exactly. Yeah…

TFR:
Okay, cool. Well, I’ll look forward to that. [chuckle]

Dennis-Benn: The thing with non-fiction, I think it’s also more brave… With fiction we hide behind our characters, while with non-fiction you say… You’re right, it’s you.

TFR:
Another question I wanted to ask you about has to do with secrets. Could you talk a little bit more about why… I kept thinking about secrets in this book and how harmful they are and how strange it kind of is that there’s such a wonderful plot device, and yet… I would just pretty much say most of the time in life they’re just awful. Do you think you could comment about that relationship between the fictional world and the living world where secrets drive fiction forward? Secrets are this thing that can be uncovered and can land surprises for people that change them. As opposed to in life where mostly they’re just a destructive element. I mean, in some ways they are in fiction too I guess.

Dennis-Benn:
I feel like we’re constantly evolving as human beings, and there are usually epiphanies that happen. It doesn’t have to be the deepest darkest secrets but something that we didn’t know before, that we just discovered, and we’re like, “Oh. Wow,” and the world suddenly looks different.

And using that device in fiction I feel like, for Thandi of course being a teenager, discovering that her mother is not perfect. And that discovery for a lot of us happens when we’re a little older, when we were like, “Oh, our parents are human beings as well. They’re not God.” And so, for her saying, “Oh, wow. Delores did this? Really?” And then Margot keeping that secret that would actually save her life, because if she ever discloses that, that could be the end of it for her. So that was important for her to keep. And then with Thandi, that secret of wanting to be an artist, and wanting desperately to… She wants more, but also what’s really ailing her is feeling invisible and knowing that she’ll still keep that as a secret and pretend to be that color.

TFR:
I wanted to ask which was about your use of dialect in the book. Dialect is so often criticized and you obviously made a choice to say “No. This is a part of the culture and I want to reflect that accurately.” So what… Could you talk a little bit more about your decision to write the dialogue in dialect so frequently?

Dennis-Benn:
My book is about working class Jamaican women. And they would not be speaking standard English unobserved. Language is a huge part of identity so I wanted to preserve that because forcing the reader to slow down because to see, to hear them speak and even… It’s to really see them as well. Live on the page with them just for a moment. And I find that that’s really important for me. Not only to preserve my language but also the authenticity of the characters.

TFR:
Any other last things that you would like to tell us about Here Comes The Sun or what you’re up to next?

Dennis-Benn:
So first of all I enjoyed writing this book. It was definitely a great purging in writing this book. There are still themes from Here Comes The Sun that will be in the second book, but it will be even more layered… I’m really excited now about that second project.

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Category: Interview