Tag: interview

Interview with Mark Powell, Author of Hurricane Season

Hurricane Season is a noir thriller about fighting and addiction, prison and drugs; but more than that, it is a love story set in the carnage of an America wrecked by inequality.

 

Hurricane Season was published by Shotgun Honey Books in October 2023. To purchase Hurricane Season, and support Orlando local bookstore Zeppelin Books, click here.

 

Below is an interview with Mark Powell, author of Hurricane Season, and Blake Sanz, a fiction writer teaching in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.

 

 

 

 

SANZ: At the heart of this novel is Shy, a young Florida woman who emerges out of poverty and obscurity to become a UFC fighter, and who attains some fleeting level of greatness in mixed martial arts. This passage, early in the book, struck me:

 

Professional fighting is a world of misogyny and expensive t-shirts, of collapsed sinus cavities and unhappy boys. But it is also a world of the occasional genius, someone who seems to have sprung from the skin of a Grecian Urn, nervous system as hair-triggered as a peregrine. That was Shy.

 

What interested you about writing this world and such a fascinating character from within it? What was involved in becoming well-versed enough in that world to feel confident in depicting it as you do?

 

POWELL: Fighting is something that has fascinated me (and that I have dabbled in) all of my adult life. There are many activities (for lack of a better word) that are both brutal and beautiful, and thus representative of the complexity of being alive in this world. But I don’t know of any that make that paradox so starkly alive and immediate. I wanted to sit with that, particularly since–at least as I see it–the job of fiction isn’t to smooth over moral complexities but to dig into them. I also wanted to sit with the idea that there are far more brutal aspects of the world around us. Perhaps, though, they aren’t quite as visible. Which, I think, speaks to a willful blindness on our part.

 

SANZ: As a newcomer to Florida, I found myself taken by the deftness with which you depict so many areas of this state in so many detailed and interesting ways. From ramshackle houses on the Saint John’s River to the workout scene in Miami, from political fundraisers at wealthy politicians’ homes to the drug-addled regions of rural central Florida, and from rare books shops in Winter Park to small-town churches, the state itself works on your characters in profound ways. What do you see as the connection between the places these characters inhabit and the changes those characters undergo?

 

POWELL: I spent eight years in Florida, and I think there’s a way in which those of us not born there see and experience the state a bit more intensely than native Floridians. People sometimes talk about Florida as this strange otherworldly place–and I get that. But, in truth, Florida is simply an intensification of the greater United States. Different cultures, different geographies, ridiculous wealth abutting shameful poverty—it’s all on full display. My sense is that living in such a place has a similar effect on us humans. Florida may be the geographical equivalent of what the theologian Karl Rahner called “limit states”: moments, and places, as the case may be, where human behavior moves toward extremes. It’s also possible I’m imagining all of that and just spent my time there drunk on all that sunlight and chlorophyll.

 

SANZ: The narrator of Hurricane Season spends many pages invisible to us, focusing largely on giving us the story of other main players: Shy the fighter and Thomas Clayton the drug-addicted doctor, in particular. Eventually, though, the narrator tells us the story of how he came across these and other characters—through teaching writing in a prison—and also describes various versions of this story that he considered telling. How did you land on this writer character, Jess, as the point-of-view character, and what did you feel he afforded the narrative that other points of view might not have?

 

POWELL: I didn’t want to tell the story like this. It felt cleaner to simply tell it in alternating third person points of view, and I had plenty of readers who told me as much. But the more I’ve written, the more I’ve gotten interested not just in the stories we tell but why we tell the stories we tell. Why do some stories or moments or experiences linger in our minds while others don’t? The story the narrator tells shouldn’t hold such power over him, yet it does, and he needs to find out why. If, as Joan Didion wrote, we tell ourselves stories in order to live, it seems equally relevant to examine which stories we tell ourselves. That was my hope with the narrator.

 

SANZ: Various characters have moments of solitude and quiet that seem elevated, somehow important to them and to our sense of their otherwise chaotic lives. I’m thinking, for example, about Doc’s routines in prison, which include reading philosophy and contemplating Kafka’s mandates to quietness, and also about the narrator’s romanticizing of his time in Thomas Merton’s monastery in Kentucky. Could you describe the importance of making space for quiet moments in a novel filled with intense moments of big action and dire consequences?

 

POWELL: So much of the book is physical—fighting, training to fight, Doc’s addiction, Doc’s violence—I wanted some balance to such. I didn’t want the book to be a thriller or crime novel that was all gas from the first sentence; rather, I wanted something that balanced the idea of an inner and outer life. And, of course, something that considered the notion that our distinction between the two may be no more than a false cultural inheritance.

 

SANZ: The novel depicts various forms of drug addiction in a contemporary setting. What are the challenges of representing lives altered by drug use on the page, and to what extent were you aware of writing toward or away from preexisting notions a reader might have about the various cultures of drug use and distribution that the novel portrays?

 

POWELL: Any book about opioid abuse is in danger of great cliché. But so too is any love story. Or any prison story. Or any whatever else. I hope I’ve taken situations we generally encounter in the abstract—statistics about overdoses or incarceration or what have you—and made those particular. I didn’t want to write a book that put forth the notion that “this is what drug abuse looks like” so much as I wanted to say “this is what drug abuse looks like in this particular place, to this particular person, in this particular moment.” I hope that specificity, that granularity of detail, humanizes the characters since it’s harder to condemn people, harder to damn them when you know them.

 

SANZ: Hurricane Season feels literary and reads like a thriller. Did you consider the notion of genre as you wrote this book? Do you hope the book will be read as coming out of any particular literary tradition?

 

POWELL: I certainly wanted a noir feel, but, more than that, my hope was to write a book that moved quickly plot-wise without sacrificing too much character or intellectual depth. My models for this are the great short novels of Joan Didion. Didion is rightly lauded as a writer of nonfiction, but I’ve always felt she was grossly underestimated as a novelist. She wrote serious meditations on politics and power but somehow packaged them as political thrillers. The writers I find myself returning to do the same: Robert Stone and Denis Johnson. Dana Spiotta and Francisco Goldman. I once heard the great Bob Shacochis say he wrote thrillers for people “paying attention.” I aspire to the same.

 

SANZ: You invoke Don DeLillo with your epigraph: “If you think the name of the weapon is beautiful, are you implicated in the crime?” How is this book in conversation with that question?

 

POWELL: When you write about suffering, when you write about people who have been exploited by large structural systems as well as by each other, you like to think you are writing against such, that you are part of a sort of resistance standing for basic human dignity and against faceless, soulless, aggregated power. But I think one has to be mindful that in exposing suffering or exploitation that you aren’t also participating in it, that you aren’t wallowing or glorifying. This is another way in which fighting lays bare the truth of the world, the way it can be both beautiful and abhorrent at the same time. There are times I’ve watched fights and thought, as Joyce Carol Oates put it about the third Ali-Frazier fight, that I was watching the analogue to King Lear. There are other times I’ve watched fights and thought, as Shy thinks late in the book, I was watching two poor kids trying not to die. An honest book about fighting, an honest book about anything, I suppose, has to be willing to sit with the moral paradoxes that exist around and within us. Which means acknowledging that we are all deeply implicated in suffering.

 

SANZ: In how you pace action, you often toggle between scenic detail and a quickening of action via summary, all while keeping us bonded with the consciousness of the characters whose actions you describe. I’m thinking particularly of this paragraph:

 

Her mother died on the tenth of May and was buried two days later across town in the great retaining pond that was Memorial Gardens. Shy stayed alone in the house for several days but this was not a good thing. She let her phone die, got distracted and left the refrigerator door open, the lights on, and the food she never ate forgotten and dissolving on the shelves.

 

Here, we pass over a death and a funeral with style and grace, but we also get a scenic sense of Shy’s emotions in the week thereafter. This fluidity, this ability to dip in and out of days and into moments is a hallmark of how the book moves. Can you speak to your instincts for when to zoom in on action and when to zoom out, and how and when one versus the other (or both) seems like the right way to tell part of the story?

 

POWELL: I think a lot about how time compresses into realized precise moments and how it expands and slips by us, both in fiction and life. My usual sense is that if you want a reader to simply know something, you tell it as economically as possible. But if you want the reader to feel it, you have to slow time and show it in a scene. When to do which, though, is a tricky matter. No one is better at this than Alice Munro, and I’ve tried to read her in such a way that I absorb some of her technique. It hasn’t worked, by the way. But I do think that the more I’ve read her, the better intuitive sense I’ve developed of when to move quickly and when to linger.

 

SANZ: What did you think this book would be about when you started it, and how much did your idea of the book change over the time it took to complete? What core ideas carried through the drafts to the final version, and what new ideas emerged?

 

POWELL: Hurricane Season began as two distinct books. I had written a short story for Hunger Mountain about Shy, and I felt like there was more to say. At the same time, I was still haunted (I guess haunted is the word) by the years I’d spent teaching at Lawtey Correctional in North Florida. I thought maybe that was a different book. Then interesting parallels, interesting connections between the two stories, kept popping up (or maybe I kept imagining them). I was sensing some thread between the idea of addiction (and pain management) and fighting (actively seeking pain). Whether I was hoping or imagining these, I don’t know. But without fully realizing it, I began to merge the two stories. And the deeper I got, the more I felt like one complimented the other so that only together would each be fully realized. That was the idea at least. But as Denis Johnson put it, writing a novel is like trying to cross a large ocean in a small boat. Success is making it across, even if you don’t make landfall where you intended.

 

Mark Powell is the author of seven novels, including Lioness, Small Treasons–a SIBA Okra Pick, and a Southern Living Best Book of the Year–and Hurricane Season. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Breadloaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and twice from the Fulbright Foundation to Slovakia and Romania. In 2009, he received the Chaffin Award for contributions to Appalachian literature. He has written about Southern culture and music for the Oxford American, the war in Ukraine for The Daily Beast, and his dog for Garden & Gun. He holds degrees from the Citadel, the University of South Carolina, and Yale Divinity School, and directs the creative writing program at Appalachian State University.

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Interview: Dantiel W. Moniz

      

 

In Milk Blood Heat, Dantiel W. Moniz populates the state of Florida with characters as distinct, flawed, and capable of beauty as the peninsula itself. Writing about fraught relationships of all sorts, set against the heat and humidity of North Florida, Moniz builds out complex emotional challenges—ensnaring characters in the grips of loss, deceit, indecision, violence, revenge—and each time forces us to see them as whole people, rendering a startling and affecting portrait of Black femininity that holds nothing back and demands our attention. The Florida Review asked Dantiel about getting honest about the human body, the rise of “Florida lit,” and what it means to write against national perception.

 

Milk Blood Heat was published in 2021 by Grove Atlantic.

 

Steven Archer for The Florida Review:

The first and last stories, “Milk Blood Heat” and “An Almanac of Bones,” feature friendships scrutinized by disapproving parents on the basis of difference, cultural and otherwise; the former others the white family, the latter othered by the white family, and both protagonists grapple with seeking in their friends’ families what they lack at home. Could you share a bit about what that dynamic means to you, from a cultural perspective? Did you mean for these stories to be inverses/ bookends?

 

Dantiel W. Moniz:

It makes so much sense that I write about grappling with whiteness in the ways these characters do in both of these stories, as I feel I’m still in the process of unlearning so many conditioned thoughts and habits that have rooted within me just by being alive in America. If you grow up anywhere in the world, and in the particular brand of it that this country produces, you are steeped in whiteness from birth, in every facet of life, explicitly and implicitly, and that invisibility can be one of the most dangerous parts. The ideology and systemic privilege of it (or the disadvantage of its lack), and the internalization of its supremacy, both in desire and repulsion. I think Sylvie (the protagonist of Almanac) falls a little more into this latter camp. While she absolutely uses Kit and her family as a measuring post in some ways, she also inherently understands that what she has, though viewed as lesser than, is powerfully her own, and having that normalization would actually be the lesser thing. I don’t think anyone’s work has to “deal” with the idea of whiteness (though I wish more white author’s works would), but right now, it’s still a project of mine. I want to make its effect on the lived world, the macro, micro, and everything in between, a little easier to see.

“An Almanac of Bones” was written before Milk Blood Heat was ever conceived of, so there wasn’t any conscious creation of echo, but definitely after having completed drafts of each of the stories that would make the collection, I noticed there was a lot of mirroring happening throughout, in these two pieces and beyond. I always knew I wanted Almanac to close out the book, but it was only due to both my agent and editor’s insight that I realized MBH should open it. I love cyclical stories, so I’m glad it worked out this way for the collection as a whole.

 

TFR:

You write about bodies in such a refreshing, fascinating way, leaning into honest renderings of the human body without resorting to the gross-out. I’m thinking specifically of “Thicker Than Water” and its exploration of scent—discharge smelling of egg, armpits of onion or celery. How important was this choice to you, especially with your women protagonists? How did you go about it from a craft angle?

 

DWM:

But bodies are gross sometimes! And I think if we were more honest about this, or at least more willing to admit this as human, we would all be better off. Women are conditioned to uphold the importance of being clean and sweet 24/7. It’s almost like I came into the world knowing I needed to be mindful of how I looked, how I smelled, even how I tasted; it’s an absurd pressure to put on a human body, which is generally unconcerned with anything other than its survival. And sometimes, those necessary functions are anything but pretty, the same way grief can be unpretty, anger, wanting. These rigid standards also make it harder to lean fully into pleasure. At the beginning of dating my husband, when we were 19 and 20, I remember him making this joke like, “Whenever you’re in the bathroom for a while, I’ll just tell myself you’re taking a long pee,” and I corrected him immediately, saying, “No, I’ll be taking a shit. Just like you do.” And though that was something I might not have ever said in previous relationships, I’m glad I did, because it’s so important to be able to take something for its fullness. It’s the only way to really love someone. It’s the same for my work. I have to let the characters be full in order to be real, and I especially wanted to honor that for the women and girls who people my collection. From a craft perspective, I’m thinking less about “how not to gross out my reader” and more how I think of crafting sentences and images in general: how does this sound, what’s the rhythm of this, and does it hit on the larger idea I hope to convey?

 

TFR:

So many of these stories feature moments of consumption as catalyst, catharsis, or climax—the blood rite in the title story, the octopus in “Feast,” the snails in “The Hearts of Our Enemies,” the bone fragment in “Thicker Than Water,” milk from a distant mother in “An Almanac of Bones.” Could you touch on how this motif found its way into your work? What draws you to write about eating, feeding others, being fed, especially when it comes to ingesting weird, weaponized, or non-food items?

 

DWM:

This is a beautiful question. I don’t think anyone’s ever asked this before. So much of my writing comes from an instinctive place. It’s often hard for me to see what’s coming up until I have it all in front of me, so I’m not sure, in its creation, why this element came into the work. But this question makes me realize, I am interested in how we nourish our bodies, or starve them. What we put into ourselves and what becomes us. With Feast, there was definitely this Phoenix choice, of wanting rebirth, a new opportunity to start fresh, and often we can’t have that if we’re clinging onto a damaged foundation. This motif kind of reminds me of the Tower card, which can be scary in a reading, but it really means transformation, if you’re willing to let go. With food, there’s also this element of connection; it can be a love language (which is why it’s so savage when it’s used as a means of revenge). Even the blood pact in MBH is about transformation. Let me become a little more you. Let us be the same. What we eat, who we feed, and what we desire in that feeding, can say a lot about a person or their world.

 

TFR:

While perhaps the most intense use of food and eating comes in “Exotics,” I wondered more in this case about how form and genre served the piece; it is the shortest piece in the collection, as well as its only speculative/ fabulist piece, and is arguably the most direct in its portrayal and exploration of the interaction of Black and brown people with excess, privilege, and sacrifice. What went into the inclusion of this piece in the collection? Could you talk about distilling one of the collection’s more subtle running threads in this way?

 

DWM:

Definitely one of the moments in my writing where I had to pause and think, Am I allowed to do this? Fun fact, there was actually another story in the book that I cut, that I think would have been described as speculative, and I wonder if it had stayed in, if people would have accepted Exotics as a necessary part of this book more readily. Probably not though—I’ve witnessed that people thrill to be snobby about mediums they perceive as genre. I think what lends this piece a lot of its speculative coloring is that I’m doing directly what I’m doing more subtly in every other story in this book—examining capitalism, race, class, consumption, how we cannibalize youth, and our complicity in these systems—which makes it feel surreal. I think people often don’t want to look at these things in their own lives and neighborhoods, so it makes it particularly unpleasant to have to in this way. For me, this story belongs in this collection. It’s right at home.

 

TFR:

The stories in your collection feel distinctly Floridian, and yet often get away with not name-dropping the specific areas in which they take place. What aspects of the Florida landscape, culture, and experience felt most important in capturing such an authentic portrait of life in the northern part of the state?

 

DWM:

I am a person who situates herself through landmark and memorization. I very rarely know street names and my sense of direction is…not the greatest. Mostly because I’m focused on other things and when I’m really present where I’m at, more ephemeral elements come to me. Like noticing the color and quality of light or how tree bark feels under my palm (if you have ever walked somewhere with me, you know how often I stop for trees). So being super specific about names and buildings or even particular cities wasn’t a priority for me. I was most interested in capturing the quality of heat of my state, its presence and aliveness, and how it enacts on the characters. That type of omnipresence becomes a mood.

 

TFR:

On a related note, so many of these characters come to life as vivid, well-realized, believable members of assorted Black and Hispanic demographics without being explicitly tethered to one background or another, even when one could hazard a guess using markers like the fish dreams in “Necessary Bodies” or the refrain of “por la sangre” in “Thicker Than Water.” Was this ambiguity a conscious choice? Did you find yourself writing with specific groups in mind, even if they were ultimately unnamed?

 

DWM:

In my work, I’m writing mostly around Blackness and its intersections. I was born a writer, it’s natural to me, but it took me a very long time to begin writing stories about characters that shared aspects of my identity. And once I understood I could do that, it opened up so much for me. I had been reading books all my life that characterized certain people only by their exclusion from whiteness, which itself was allowed to remain invisible. “The girl walked into the room” vs “The Black girl walked into the room,” and that being the main point of distinction visually or otherwise, like once you say that one thing, you should be able to see her. And I suppose readers could, if they had in their mind some catchall for Blackness. Even when I didn’t have the vocabulary for why, that used to upset me. So in my work, I don’t feel I have to be explicit in that way. My characters’ Blackness is not the biggest thing about them, though it does shape and direct their experiences.

 

TFR:

Last Spring, Milk Blood Heat was taught as part of a graduate course on Southern, Appalachian, and Florida literature at UCF, alongside the work of writers such as Steven Dunn, Jesmyn Ward, Leah Hampton, and Carter Sickels. What does “Florida literature” mean to you, as part of, or removed from, “the South”? How do you see your work in conversation with this emerging literary canon, and how might you hope to see that canon expand?

 

DWM:

This breadth of writers is so interesting, especially when you consider that each of the regions that make up what people consider “The South” is diverse and face the challenges that come with their particular national perceptions. Like, what Leah has to deal with in people’s discrimination against Appalachia, or Jesmyn Ward writing about Mississippi, is different than what I deal with in the perception of Florida, but they all stem from the same place—ignorance or indifference about the intentional repression or resource-stealing/shuttering from these places. What I’m excited for in the expansion of the canon of Floridian literature is the same thing I’m interested in for my human characters—a chance to explore its wholeness. To allow stories of people there to be as common as stories of people wandering around New York or other bigger, better regarded coastal cities. There are people trying to thrive even in the chaos of that place, and those people and their stories matter, regardless of its governance.

 

TFR:

Beauty and hostility appear in equal measure throughout Milk Blood Heat, in your portrayals of girls, women, mothers, siblings, and marriages, certainly, but also in your portrayal of Florida is a whole. Kids die at pool parties and nearly drown at the beach. Aquariums and museums full of nature and discovery are host to historical horrors, Klan activity, fiery destruction, black holes. Massive diversity and divisive politics; abundant wildlife, dyed water, pollution. With Florida being so often the butt of the joke, a shorthand for all things backwards and dangerous, did you feel at all compelled to temper or reclaim Florida’s image through your writing? Did any part of this book come out of a desire to engage with national perception?

 

DWM:

Absolutely. I think this question and the last are connected. And yes, I wanted to reclaim and to assert, but not to paint some idealized picture of Florida, but to show it for what it is, honestly, its dark and its light. I didn’t grow up with the perception that my state was literary or that any writing of artistic merit might come from where I was from. I grew up thinking I might never leave my city, let alone my state, but what that means is, everything I am now started as seed in that place, even though I wished to, and did eventually, leave. And what I and other artists, thinkers, and creators there have to say is valuable. I think its especially critical now, in light of all the legislation that’s being put in place to stop people from doing just that—from learning, feeling, thinking and most of all, connecting. That scares the people in power. So I hope, in even a small way, my work might encourage someone who might not be encouraged otherwise because they’d been overlooked.

 

TFR:

I was delighted to read, in your previous interviews, what a big influence film and television are in your approach to writing. What are you watching these days? Do you think film and TV are given a fair shake in literary or academic spaces?

 

DWM:

So here’s a fun thing I learned recently about symptoms of anxiety—you have a higher tendency to re-watch instead of starting something new. It makes a lot of sense to me on that level, the comfort of the familiar, but also for me, there’s the chance to analyze the same slant differently now that I know the story; even through the expected I usually come away with something new. Some always rewatches for me are Mad Men, Insecure, Veep, The Florida Project, and right now I’m rewatching Castlevania during flights. But I have been watching new shows and films too. Bones and All, both seasons of White Lotus, season 2 of Russian Doll, the latest of The Crown. These works offered exactly that slice of human emotional fragility and darkness that I come to the page for. In the summer of 2021, after stumbling upon Season 20 of Survivor and never having seen a single episode before, I started streaming from season 1 and now I’m on Season 41. Another thing I’ve learned is that I don’t really believe in this idea of trash tv. Like the Real Housewives of Atlanta is not supposed to be like Sharp Objects, although they both revolve around how women position themselves in power within their communities and families using socialized tools. I’ve learned so much about performance, conditioning, and gaze from reality TV, so I think it’s less about what you consume but how you consume and metabolize it.

To that point, I think more literary and academic spaces are making the explicit connection between these art mediums, and there’s definitely more attention paid to the writing that goes into image-making because there’s such an overlap between literature and adaptation. I’m actually teaching an undergraduate course on image this semester, teaching two books (We the Animals and The Virgin Suicides) and their film counterparts.

 

TFR:

Is there one piece of writing advice—something you hold dear, or perhaps tell your students—that you might share with us here?

 

DWM:

The writer Naomi Jackson once told me, “If someone can’t see where you’re going, they can’t help you get there.” Write for yourself and remember to protect that beginning space that’s just you and the work. It’s so important to get intentional about what the work is and what you hope to move toward before a community of writers can be useful to you. Be open to critique (this is so important) but remember you only have to take what resonates. And the best way to recognize that resonance goes back to understanding your intentionality for the work. One more thing—remember to play in your writing, remember you like this.

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Interview: Talia Lakshmi Kolluri

     

 

Kolluri’s touching and exquisitely crafted story collection invites readers to imagine the lives of animal characters. Themes of trauma and grief, of time and friendship intersect as the unique voices Kolluri builds for every narrator embrace the mystery and estrangement of animal lives with magic and wonder. The Florida Review asked Talia about the process of making unreal things feel real, the art of crafting non-human voices, and the potential of fiction to address the climate crisis.

 

What We Fed To The Manticore was published in September 2022 by Tin House Books.

 

Fernanda Coutinho Teixeira for The Florida Review:

The book features a variety of animal-human relations. Some are on the more positive end of the spectrum, like Hafiz and the donkey and the pigeon and the Toy Man. But we also see the pain humans can inflict in animal lives, such as with the poachers in “May God Forever Bless The Rhino Keepers” and the boat in “The Open Ocean Is An Endless Desert.” So I’m curious about how, when approaching an animal’s perspective, you decide what kind of role humans will play in the story.

 

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri:

When I was writing this collection I made a deliberate choice to decenter human perspectives, so I always began writing each story with the idea that the animal experience would always be primary. But the crucial foundation upon which all of these stories rest is the fact that humanity has impacted every ecosystem on the globe, even in places where we have yet to travel. So in that sense, humanity has played a role in every one of these stories. But when I wrote humans (or humanity’s impacts) directly into a story, their portrayal was more likely to be negative when I was portraying a human system, and the human role was more likely to be positive when I was writing an individual human character. I think lots of individual people can be very compassionate stewards of nature. But we live in a world full of systems that are destructive and this is ultimately what I wanted to call attention to.

 

TFR:

Some stories, like “The Dog Star Is The Brightest Star In The Sky” and “The Hunted, The Haunted, The Hungry, The Tame” focus on relationships and bonds between animals of different species. How do you set out to define these relationships, and how do you keep them from coming across as too “human” while also keeping the reader emotionally invested.

 

TLK:

Early on in my process, I worried a lot about writing characters that came across as too human. Anthropomorphizing animals has long been viewed with varying degrees of skepticism and occasionally perceived as unserious. I wanted my characters to be believable. And while I love reading work that uses animal narratives as an allegory for a human situations, I didn’t want my work to be read that way. I also did not want my inter-species relationships to be viewed as superficial or cute. I wanted them to have emotional depth and nuance the way all of my own relationships do. Ultimately the best way for me to achieve this was to do solid foundational research in animal behavior and use that to shape how my characters behave. I kept their senses and general actions as close as possible to what I could learn from research. And when it came to the emotional texture of relationships, as long as I could keep their reactions within the framework of realistic animal behavior, I felt they could be believable.

 

But also, as I continued writing, I stopped worrying about my characters and their relationships seeming too human. In the wild world, a lot of different species interact and have lives that overlap. In some cases they have a history of collaboration, in others they may have a more neutral but regular interaction, and in some they have a mutually beneficial co-existence. In all of these cases, I have a hard time believing that animals don’t notice each other. And if they notice each other, perhaps they have significance to each other. Often when we describe something as human, it’s because we assign emotion to a reaction or interaction, and emotion is something that we are reluctant to assign to animals and instead hold only for ourselves. But why is that? I suspect we might be the only species that stubbornly insists that we are not animals at all, but are instead something above and apart from animals. But it just isn’t true. We are animals too. And if we respond to our surroundings and our interactions with emotion, and we assign meaning to things, then other animals probably do something similar.

 

TFR:

The spectrum of climate change is present in the book, like in “The Dog Star Is The Brightest Star In The Sky.” How do you view the role of literature in the ongoing political conversation surrounding this topic?

 

TLK:

I’m glad you asked this because I feel it is absolutely vital that literature directly bear witness to the astonishing uncanniness of the climate crisis, that is in fact becoming the ordinary texture of all our lives. For many of the years that I was writing the stories in this collection, I thought about Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement. Ghosh writes broadly of the ways that contemporary literature, and fiction in particular, has failed to reckon with the climate crisis and the colonial history that lit the first spark of the crisis itself. Despite it being a pervasive and escalating part of our reality, it is primarily addressed in non-fiction work, and when it is included in fiction, the very real features of the climate crisis are often deemed too extreme and too unbelievable to be included in fiction intended to depict reality. Instead, it is categorized as something more like science fiction. In other words, unbelievable because it couldn’t be real. This isn’t to say that science fiction doesn’t show us aspects of our reality, or that our futures don’t eventually converge with things we once imagined to be impossible. But Ghosh’s point is that the impacts of the climate crisis are being felt right now, and despite that, fiction that describes it plainly has been treated as deviating from reality.

 

Early in the book he writes, “[i]n a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museum-goers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance? And when they fail to find them, what should they—what can they—do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight?” I read this passage and felt as though he was writing directly to me, and telling me that my desire to write human impacts from inside the minds of creatures who have no agency over what humanity does, was a worthwhile artistic pursuit.

 

I think that confronting the climate crisis through fiction has the potential for magnified emotional resonance. I can read books and articles about ecology, and the science of climate change. I can watch the news and see the real-time impacts of droughts and superstorms. But all of these pieces of information will come to me from a distance, filtered through a medium that tells me that none of this information really applies to me. If I am watching coverage of a flood from my untouched home, then no matter how much empathy I purposefully cultivate in myself there is still some distance between me and the crisis because it is not, in fact, happening to me. But here is where fiction offers an opportunity. If I read a story where the characters face some aspect of the climate crisis, and I do what I always do, which is imagine myself as one of the characters, then suddenly the crisis becomes real. Because although it is not actually happening to me, the experience of imagining that it is creates an emotional response that brings me closer to the experience of the events themselves. I am less removed. My perception is less sterile. Instead of being reminded that it is not happening to me, I am instead reminded that it could and it might. And this difference is important because a person that does not see a vast distance between themselves and the climate crisis is a person more likely to be inspired to take action.

 

TFR:

Two of my favorite stories, “What We Fed To The Manticore” and “Someone Must Watch Over The Dead” employ, in addition to the animal perspective, elements that veer on the fantastical and mythical. What is the process to incorporate those elements in your work, and to decide when you’ll take a more realistic approach as opposed to a more magic one?

 

TLK:

I think my default way of writing is to write in a more mythical style. That’s what came to me naturally for most stories. But I found that some of them needed to be rooted in reality more than others, so in a practical sense I found myself having to deliberately incorporate realistic elements, instead of the other way around. I also find that myths, and fairy tales, and stories from various religious traditions are where animals stories most often live. I think the human heart hungers for magic, and there is truly something magical about wild spaces. Animals and birds and sea life are all so fantastical when I think about them long enough! I did find that I was more likely to discard mythical elements when I included human characters more prominently. Perhaps that’s because humanity holds a little less magic for me. Animals are still such a mystery to me and in mystery lies wonder and enchantment.

 

TFR:

Time is a recurring theme in some of the stories. In “The Good Donkey” you have a stunning scene of a drone attack that is rendered in the style of a rewind; “A Level Of Tolerance” is all about a wolf stuck in a time loop. What fascinates you about playing with time in your writing?

 

TLK:

Time is a tricky thing, isn’t it? I have noticed that the older I get the more I am aware of how elastic time is, how it speeds up and slows down according to how I feel, and how my perception of time has changed over my life. I also know that while time can be measured, it isn’t as rigid as we make it out to be. For instance, the time at the bottom of the Mariana Trench does not pass at same speed as the time at the top of Mount Everest. The other thing I think about often is how through memory and imagination, we are often traveling through time. If I recall a conversation from last week and I spend part of my day thinking about it, what time am I living in? Is it today? Have I returned to last week? Is it both? What if I’m imagining something three months from now? What time am I living in then? And what does trauma do to our perception of time? For those who suffer from post-traumatic stress, the memory of a traumatic experience can often feel as though it is happening again, in the present, in real-time. And this feeling can occur over and over. And perhaps after trauma, there remains the desire to undo the traumatic event. I wanted to find a way to convey the way that time is elastic, and also the way elastic time can bind someone in place when something painful happens.

 

TFR:

In your author’s note, you frame the notions of wildness and tameness as matters of dependence and communication. How did this influence your approach to dialogue in the book, and the process of finding each animal’s voice?

 

TLK:

I used this framing most often to imagine how well my point of view animal understood human life and all of its features. The closer an animal was to humanity, the better they understood human speech, human objects, and human choices. Perhaps the closest to humanity is the donkey. He began as a working animal but ultimately became more of a companion to Hafiz. In my mind this meant that the depth of their emotional connection would allow them to communicate directly. I also think that we are more likely to make an effort to communicate when it’s necessary and I imagine it could be the same with animals. But I don’t know that my ideas about interspecies communication had any real influence over how each character’s voice emerged. In a lot of ways, characters and personalities emerged organically. To me, writing fiction is a lot like playing make-believe. In each instance, I was pretending to be all the animals in every story, in pretty much the same way I would play all the characters in a game of pretend when I was a child. I think the difference here is that I could make all of the characters feel real to myself because I had a fuller understanding of their environments and how their senses worked. When I was small and I pretended to be a lion, for example, I understood what they looked like, and had an idea of how they walked and a superficial idea of what they did. But I had no real understanding of lion pride social dynamics, or what animals they had to compete with for food, or whether their habitat was dwindling or not. I just really wanted to be a lion. Now, I can take that same desire and fuel my game of pretend with a full spectrum of animal and habitat facts that I have gathered over the years, and maybe this is how the animals voices find me.

 

TFR:

I’m impressed by how evocative and memorable the titles in this collection are. How is your process for choosing a piece’s title? Is it usually something you come up with in the beginning of the story or after finishing it?

 

TLK:

I wish I had a process, but in most cases, the title arrives fully formed at the beginning and haunts me until I write something. Usually it ends up representing an idea that the whole story crystalizes around. In several of my stories, the title ends up embedded somewhere in the text, probably because they’re so linked to something I’m trying to communicate. The one exception is “A Level Of Tolerance,” which is a story I really struggled to find a title for. Instead of being haunted by a potential title, I was haunted by several lines that are now in the story. So, when I first wrote it, I gave it a working title of “832F” which is the identifying number of the wolf that inspired it. But my first readers had a really hard time connecting the title to the story and it seemed out of place to many of them, so I felt I needed something different. I ended up pulling the phrase “a level of tolerance” from a document that talked about wolf culling and discussed the idea that culling is used to bring wolf populations to “a level of tolerance,” meaning a level that the human population is willing to tolerate. I felt that phrase was a very sterile and detached description of how to think of an endangered animal population. I used it because I don’t feel very detached and emotionless when I think about the possibility of wolf extinction. Instead, I feel devastated. I thought the contrast was interesting, so I used it as the title.

 

TFR:

In the end of the book, you include sources related to every story. When writing about animals, how important is it to you to make sure you’re adhering to their biological realities? Is there any example of a story in which the science made it difficult for you to write out your ideas for the characters?

 

TLK:

It was incredibly important for me to make sure I was writing my animals as accurately as possible from a biological perspective. I am asking readers to take a series of very large imaginative leaps with me. I am asking them to believe that animals can tell stories, that they have their own mythology, that they can commune with the dead, that they are chased by mythological creatures, they can talk to people, and they exist outside of time. I am trusting the reader to take these leaps with me. But if I am asking them to jump, I must give them a firm foundation to leap from. I wrote a lot of unreal things, but I want them to feel real. And if they’re going to feel realistic, they need to be grounded in facts that can be verified. I want readers to wonder if vultures actually can understand how their carrion lived through eating. I want them to wonder if whales really do live inside a song net. But a reader may not ask these questions if nothing in the story feels believable. This is not to say that fully fantastical stories are not wonderful, because they are! I love stories that lean all the way into the miraculous and strange. But if there’s nothing concrete for me to hold onto in a story, then I understand it as something wonderful that will never be real. I wanted my stories to include the possibility that everything in them could be true, which I think comes from knowing that some of the things in them are true.

 

However, the story where I struggled with this the most was “The Open Ocean Is An Endless Desert.” Whales are amazing, and fascinating, and strange, and completely unlike humans in an astonishing number of ways. But the difference between whales and humans that was hardest for me to grasp was how precise their hearing is underwater, and how imperfect mine is. When I was writing this story, there was one afternoon where I jumped in a pool with my spouse and had him talk to me underwater to see if I could understand him. All I could hear were indecipherable noises enveloped in a strange echo and even though I saw where he was, I couldn’t hear exactly where the sound was coming from. I had to return to research to learn more about whale ears and whale communication and how they sing to each other over distances before I could come up with a way to describe their lives and community. But I’m glad I did because as much as I loved whales before, I am so much more in awe of them now.

 

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Interview: Kristin Keane

     

 

In An Encyclopedia of Bending Time (Barrelhouse, April 2022), Kristin Keane (whose fiction, “The Thin Line,” recently appeared in The Florida Review) pushes the boundaries of craft as she struggles with the loss of her mother, which she refers to as ‘disappearance’ in the narrative. Here, she implores the unanswerable question: How can we hold onto what is no longer physically there?

 

In a wildly unique and tender craft choice, born of her childhood memory of the World Book Encyclopedias tucked in her family home, An Encyclopedia of Bending Time is written as a hermit crab memoir with alphabetized entries—much like that of an actual encyclopedia, complete with «SEE ALSOS » at the end of each entry, suggesting the cyclical and perhaps neverending aspect of grief. Keane indicates each of these vignettes weaves in complex concepts of grief, time travel, identity, and the limits of science.

 

Told in reverse, and encompassing aspects of the ocean, tides, quantum mechanics, and even pop culture like Alice in Wonderland and Quantum Leap, this is a masterfully organized, deeply felt narrative held together by the tenuous strings of love, memory and consciousness.

 

Keane artfully employs the often tricky second person narration, in a sort of ekaphrasic encylopedic letter to her mother, allowing the reader an intimate glimpse at the mother-daughter relationship; together we witness an achingly sharp loss and confusion, transforming a personal experience into the universal.

 

As a writer intrigued with the concepts of grief, motherhood, and unconventional narratives, this title captured and endeared me to Keane’s work, her ingenuity, and her sense of hope.

 

Leslie Lindsay for The Florida Review:
An Encyclopedia of Bending Time is a stunning yet heartbreaking exploration of love and sorrow, endings and beginnings. It’s about boundaries and expression. The cover embraces all of that: a flatlay depiction of an actual encyclopedia, a rose, leaves, a moth, and octopus tentacles. Can you share a little more about those images, please? How you see them as representing the text? The symbolism, if you will.

 

Kristin Keane:
When we explored cover ideas, we spoke about the idea of using a meta image—one with an actual encyclopedia displayed in some kind of way. Shanna Compton executed the stunning design which depicts some of the most important symbology in the text such as the octopus, the rose, the moth. Alone, they each have relevance to different aspects of the story I’m telling about my life with my mother, but together also convey some of the broader questions and concepts the text wrestles with: How can grief be contained? How can loss, a thing which feels so out of control and unbounded, realize a kind of structure? My mother loved roses and preserving flowers, artifacts representing a specific time that dry out, wither and die, yet still hold shape. The moths appeared at the window the night my mother died, unable to cut through the boundary of the screen that borders the room and the night. The octopus is a motif I return to again and again, an image I conjured in my mind long before my mother was gone; trapped in my memory and in the text in a way, but also functioning to stretch and hold together the actual and figurative past, present and future versions of us. On the cover, all of the images are reaching beyond the limits of the book, as I do, throughout the text. The images I think cohere the conceit of the story which circle around the borderlines of science, memory, divisions between the living and the dead, but also around that which cannot be restrained—love and time.

 

TFR:
I’m fascinated and awed by linked collections, mostly because this is how humans think. An Encyclopedia of Bending Time is told in a cyclical flow-of-consciousness, and sometimes in fragmentary form. To me, this seems organic. But it also speaks to the idea of an encyclopedia, the “See Alsos.” In that sense, this becomes a sort of endless narrative. One could continually flip pages, reading every “See Also” over and over and over. Was that your intention? The idea that grief never really goes away?

 

Kristin Keane:
One of the features I loved most about The World Book Encyclopedias I reference reading as a child in the book, were their “See also” refrents, a structure which enriches the reading and learning experience, but also makes clear just how circuitous and unending that process is. This became a handy device throughout the book to both weave entries together and serve as a call-back to material that was explicitly and implicitly linked. In this way, as you point out, it does become possible to read it in a choose-your-own-adventure fashion as a never-ending interpretation of loss. One of the reasons I selected the encyclopedic form was because of this possibility, but I’d say more as a gesture towards underscoring the effect of loss, than as an actual suggestion for consumption. The story arc flows a bit untraditionally as I play with ideas of time-inversion and the dissary of grief, so I would worry that skipping around in the entries might create a sort of further scrambling effect that would confuse story lines and also introduce the possibility of missing material since not every entry has referents at its conclusion.

 

TFR:
Your mother loved the sea and she is represented in a beloved photograph at the end of the book. What I like about this is exactly how you describe it: the sea is always changing; it’s never the same. The waves, that sand, the rock, even the color, shifts as does time. You liken this to the concept of photography, that a photograph of an individual can capture them at that moment, and while a photograph is enduring, the tangible form shifts. Same with taxidermy, another ‘entry’ in the encyclopedia. Can you expand on those concepts, please?

 

Kristin Keane:
As I decended into an obsession with time, it became clear I had spent so much of my life observing my mother’s own preoccupation with it. Her interest in science fiction, time travel, taxidermy, and the afterlife all became entries in the book because they connect me very really to her as well as the process of trying to reach her again. Yes, I conjure the sand, sea, color—things that can shift with time, just as my experience with loss will. But I also conjure artifacts which are time-defying: photographs, taxidermy. It’s very interesting to me how we’ve engineered ways to paralyze and freeze these things which transform in ways that are so very out of our hands. The sea changes but you can preserve it a certain way, at a certain moment in time. The same is true for encyclopedias. The image of her we used in the interior back cover, another gift the Barrelhouse design team conjured, in some ways is the central image of the text for this reason. I write about how much this picture means to me, but also how very hard it is for me to look at. In some ways that is a central concern of the book: observing even when it can be so hard to. I wanted to break time—I still do. I’ve tried to look at these artifacts in the same way she does at the sea in that photograph, to make sense of the impossible reality that she is not here anymore.

 

TFR:
In terms of the second-person POV, which I happen to love, but some may find disorienting, ‘tricky’ or a ‘bold choice;’ I found refreshing. It speaks to the idea that we don’t really know what we’re writing about until we write it, that experimenting with this form is a way to determine where we’re headed. You artfully take that POV and shift the structure even more: an encyclopedic letter to your mother. You mention about ‘writing [your mother] into you,’ as a way to observe, to pay attention. In a sense, that’s what text is—a weaving, as in textiles. Can you share a bit about your craft decisions?

 

Kristin Keane:
My original intention with this project was a purely personal one: to write my mother letters before she left this dimension. I had collected ideas on little post-it notes in the period before she became really sick, one being ‘encyclopedias’ as they’d been such a central text and artifact of my early life with her. She died before that project had the chance to realize itself, and when I returned to the notes, I began thinking about the possibility of attempting to write to her as a means for understanding what had taken place instead. So, I considered that post-it in another way: an encyclopedia had personal meaning, was structure-laiden, and fit the criteria of attempting a communication with the dead (e.g. explaining concepts to someone who might no longer understand them). It seemed like a vessel full of craft possibilities. Like you, I think second-person at times can be tricky to execute effectively, but certainly because of this project’s origins, choosing any other perspective would have resulted in an emotionally flattening effect. One of the central conceits of the book is pushing against the limitations of science, knowledge, and intra-dimensional boundaries—all of which in my view meant I needed to hold her very close in order to interrogate the questions I put forward. I made the decision then, to address the possibility of her directly, by speaking to a disappeared version of her. I think writing in first or third person would have erased and diluted the intimacy that second person created.

 

TFR:
One of the themes that emerges is your struggle to understand time and what reality is now that your mother has “disappeared.” You explore quantum theories and other ways to study to the mind to dip into this realm. An alternative Kristin Keane emerges, Alice in Wonderland comes along, so does Scott Bakula as Dr. Sam Beckett from the television series Quantum Leap, but also Freud and Barthes, among others. Did you find these constructs helpful as you pushed through the pain of grief? What did you learn about yourself in the process?

 

Kristin Keane:
I had so many questions after my mother died and turning to thinkers and artifacts I’d been long preoccupied with brought comfort. I discovered the memory of objects and images from my early childhood and adolecence could be suddenly interrogated in new ways, carrying different meaning in her absence. The same was true in the case of some of the thinkers and works I bring forward as they too became imbued new significance, helping me to fortifiy my questions and also provide lanes for my examinations. In the case of Quantum Leap, for example, where before I saw only a story of time travel, was so clearly a tale of grief. With Alice, I became more drawn towards the focus on her bent reality, and the story’s preoccupation with limitations. These were interesting and meaningful exercises. I’ve been asked many times if I found the process of writing the book to be healing. Grief is as unique as fingerprints, and for me personally, the answer to that question is very firmly, no. My current belief is that I won’t be healed from this experience, something I learned in wrestling with myself on the page. I sometimes get the feeling that response might seem frightening, but that answer is the result of a lot of mental work I’m grateful for. It turned out I was in some cases, not asking the right things. How will I get over this ? became, How can I learn to exist in a space where there will always be a shape of emptiness ? In writing, I moved from wondering when the sorrow would lift, to understanding it wouldn’t. I know how sad that sounds, but I see this as a silver-lining as the state of understanding for me in this case, feels much more relieving than sitting in wonder. Alice, Scott Bakula’s Dr. Sam Beckett, Mourning Diary—and others—helped me make sense of myself and my experience. At a craft level, it became intriguing to me to encounter, question, and process them on the page. This book is as much about my experience with loss as it is about observing it. In a way, that feels more important and retaining tp me as a person, than searching for a space in the continuum where I am divided from my mother, but totally healed. At least, that’s where my thinking resides at in the present moment.

 

TFR:
I want to end on the concepts of hope and love, how maybe these are the great connectors—that our love is the strings that bind, keep us tethered in this cosmic twist of fate. What can we learn about beautiful endings ?

 

Kristin Keane:
I love this question so much—not what can we learn from them, but about them. In some ways, this question starts with sensibility as I think of beauty relating somewhat to satisfaction, which might be counter to other’s relationships to this word. This also depends on one’s conception of endings! This might mean ‘tidy’ or ‘complicated’ or something in between, depending on one’s preference for resolution. As a reader or viewer, I usually don’t need to be relieved of worry to find something beautiful at its conclusion, but in the experience of losing my mother, worry and questions were all I found in her death. I knew in embarking on this project that the ending couldn’t be neat because that quailty was so entirely untrue to my lived experience. My mother talked often about hope when she was sick, and we spent a lot of time dreaming that each new intervention would work to somehow change the anticipated outcome. All of my hope centered on her staying alive, which meant I suppose, that when she died that state dissolved. I could never have guessed how much I’d continue to cling to that word in the wake of her death, how I would come to desperately hope we’re wrong about the life/death continuum. That’s what this story became about for me: that there is not an end, that I hope for our dimensions to somehow dissolve to cease the missing. It’s pushed me to think differently about the possibility of upending what a conclusion even means. That possibility is very beautiful to me.

*

Keane is the author of the novella Luminaries (Omnidawn, 2021). Her work has appeared in The Normal School, The New England Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a doctoral fellow at Stanford University where she researches the teaching and learning of literacy.

 

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Interview: Annie Kim

 

Kim, Eros Kim, Cyclorama

 

Annie Kim’s second collection, Eros, Unbroken (2020), is the winner of the 2019 Washington Prize and follows her debut collection, Into the Cyclorama, winner of the Michael Waters Poetry Prize (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2016) and finalist for the Foreword INDIES Best Poetry Book of the Year. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Four Way Review, The Kenyon Review, Narrative, Plume, and Pleiades, as well as on The Slowdown podcast. The recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Hambidge Center, Kim works at the University of Virginia School of Law as the Assistant Dean for Public Service and teaches public interest lawyering. She is also a violinist, and as poet, she has collaborated with composer Aaron Stepp. This interview took place over email.

 

Rebecca Morgan Frank for The Florida Review:

In Eros, Unbroken, the preface poem, “Confession,” introduces us to two characters in this collection: Scarlatti and his friend Farinelli, a castrato. What drew you to these two figures as subjects?

 

Annie Kim:

One day I was listening to a Scarlatti album by pianist Anne Queffélec. I’d always thought of Scarlatti’s sonatas as these tiny, quick, chandelier-like things. But as I listened to the rollercoaster of emotions in the second piece on this album, the K.27 sonata, I was struck by how stormy and personal it felt. I was hooked.

 

As I Googled away, I learned that no one knows much about Scarlatti’s life. But I did find page after page about his friend, the singer Farinelli. Like a lot of promising young male singers at the time, Farinelli had been castrated as a boy to preserve the beauty of his voice. He went on to become the preeminent opera singer of his day. It’s hard to picture now, but castrati in 18th-century Italy were like K-Pop royalty. These boys were groomed for years to become the next big thing. Eventually, then, after a successful career on-stage, Farinelli met Scarlatti in the court of Philip V, where Scarlatti had been working as a music instructor to the princess. Farinelli was hired by the queen to sing each night to her mad husband as a form of musical therapy.

 

As you can tell, there’s plenty of drama here already! In a strange way, though, that drama seemed like the perfect counterpart to the story I was starting to write about my own life. I had been working on emotionally raw poems about my early relationship with my father. Writing about the body—my body—as the object of violence was something I’d never done before. Not fun. Locating an analogue of sorts in Farinelli made me feel better, more connected. The two “Castrato” poems in my book, then, emerged from my efforts to imagine Farinelli as a boy sacrificing his body for his music.

 

TFR:

In “Uses for Music,” you begin, “Because there is no soundtrack for the brain. / Because nothing has the beauty of a cage / you can enter when you want and leave behind.” This collection is steeped in music, from musical terms to musical forms and instruments (including the body.) What is your own background with music?

 

AK:

My musical background is pretty typical for an Asian American—I started playing violin in grade school, took lessons, did youth orchestras. Then, after a 13-year hiatus, I started playing again in a local chamber orchestra around the same time that I began my MFA writing program. Performing music has always given me a crucial emotional outlet. Now, those emotions are performed, as the quote from “Uses for Music” acknowledges. But those performances are still cathartic and restorative.

 

I think my musical experience also affects my everyday writing in subtle ways. It definitely informs how I think about progression or development. Playing Western classical music allows you to absorb musical structures like sonata form, theme and variation, preludes and fugues. These are all about creating patterns and then disrupting them. And, at the most basic level, you’re always moving between the poles of tension and release because you’re always driving toward resolution. Fast then slow, loud then soft. While I’m not consciously thinking about any of these musical strategies when I’m writing, they’re somewhere deep in my bones, in my inner ear.

 

Music also took on a major role in Eros, Unbroken. At a symbolic level, the body of the violin—my violin—became a metaphor for my own body. Both bodies can be violated, broken, and, fortunately, mended. In fact, I was practicing one day while writing this book when the soundpost inside my violin came loose from its upright position. Though the soundpost is just a tiny wooden stick, no bigger than a dowel, it’s essential to creating the violin’s voice. That dislodging felt terrible but revelatory—it was the necessary snapping that has to happen when you start grappling with old traumas, as I was.

 

I was also obsessed with trying to convey musical counterpoint—multiple notes, multiple voices—in words. It’s not really possible. But in the long sequences in the book (“Violins: Violence” and “A Hysteresis Loop”) and, most visibly, in “After Sonata Form,” I tried to suspend and juxtapose voices so that the reader could “hear” the first line still ringing a little even when the second line comes in.

 

TFR:

Your poem “Confession” even ends with the definition of counterpoint. Can you say more about engaging in this sort of poetic counterpoint with the collection’s larger narrative threads? Did this affect the overall shaping of this book?

 

AK:

Yes, and in every possible way! At its heart, counterpoint is about having your cake and eating it too. Two voices carry on simultaneously, going wherever they want but moving in ways that create productive tension and contrast. I was convinced I could find a way to counterpoint my autobiographical story with the Farinelli/Scarlatti one despite how crazy that seemed. I won’t lie—there was a lot of cursing.

 

Creating counterpoint with these two lines meant that I had to think hard about how to sequence the poems in the book. Certain material had to be introduced at particular points for narrative reasons. At the same time, I found that simply alternating story lines in an A/B/A/B fashion didn’t work. After a million different mash-ups and months of trial and error, I landed on a rough order that zigzagged between the two stories at moments that made emotional and dramatic sense. And, of course, a year after that first draft, I switched things around again!

 

Counterpoint also made me focus on how to make each story line stylistically distinctive. This was hard because the poems in the autobiographical strand ranged a lot in form. For instance, I had multi-page sequences composed primarily in short-lined, irregular stanzas, alongside a number of more traditional one-page poems. The Farinelli/Scarlatti pieces I decided to set as letters and dialogues. While I didn’t attempt writing in an archaic diction, I did use loose blank verse to give them a bit more cohesion.

 

TFR:

Can you talk a little bit about your path to becoming a poet? When and where did you first come to poetry?

 

AK:

Though I read poetry here and there throughout college, I didn’t try to write it until I was nearly thirty. I was practicing law. I was unhappy. I thought a lot about whether I wanted to have kids and decided that I didn’t. Late one night while I was having trouble falling asleep, I went downstairs and wrote a sonnet because that was the only poetic form I knew. It was a bad sonnet. But writing it felt so good! I started reading poems, writing poems, and then went to a few writers’ conferences where I met some wonderful teachers like David Baker. I eventually bit the bullet and applied to the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College which, miraculously, let me in. I was so new to writing that it hurt. After graduating, I still felt adrift and unsure of myself, as many people do.

 

Really, it wasn’t until I stopped practicing law and started working at my alma mater, the University of Virginia School of Law, that I finally had the mental space to write well. Working with students taught me how to be more open, vulnerable, and emotionally expressive—all of which helped my creative work.

 

TFR:

You not only have a background as a lawyer, but in fact also serve as a dean in the Law School at the University of Virginia. Do you find that this background, with your training and experience in legal rhetoric, influences your approach to poetry, particularly your poetic arguments and structures?

 

AK:

All law students go through a writing boot camp when they start school. In that boot camp, you’re drilled on how to structure your writing, sentence by sentence. There’s even an acronym for how to organize your paragraphs called IRAC or CRAC. It goes like this: Issue (or Conclusion) – Rule – Application – Conclusion. Legal writing forces you, then, to get to your point quickly, signal where you’re going, and build in explicit transitions.

 

So when you consider how much poetry relies on intuition, surprise, jump cuts and leaps, you can imagine what it’s like for lawyers to write poetry! At the same time, all that focus on structure and argument probably forced me to be more critical of my writing than I would otherwise have been. Does this statement make logical sense? If it doesn’t make sense, does it still belong here?

 

These days I’m much more interested in loose poetic structures than in arguments. Structures that progress and resolve, sometimes narratively, but not always in fully explicable ways. How does an extended image, for instance, complete the “argument” of a narrative passage, for instance? How do tonal shifts and modulations “argue” different stances of the speaker? I love to see how poems can quickly and stealthily open up the infinite gray space within any subject.

 

TFR:

The longer poem “Violins: Violence” feels like the heart of this book—this is a poem that wrestles with difficult material in part by seeking ways to connect the words themselves, as well as through dialogue with Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. What are the roots of this poem’s engagement with this particular text?

 

AK:

I was still working as a lawyer when I first read the Meditations. Though I liked my job, I got easily frustrated by people. It was comforting to read the inner musings of a man who had legitimate reasons to be stressed out (he was Emperor!). The form of the Meditations—serial, fragmented, often intimately voiced—reminded me why journal writing and, really, all forms of writing to yourself, can be powerful.

 

The text came to mind also because I was doing a lot of self-talk throughout the book, channeling the second-person voice. “Last night you dreamed again / about your father,” was one of the first fragments I wrote in the second person that eventually coalesced, with other bits, into “Violins: Violence.”  And the Meditations, of course, are written mainly in the second person, including the passage at the start of Book Two quoted in this poem:

 

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. . . .

 

That second-person pronoun creates such an interesting and productive distance between the speaker and the self. It doesn’t exist when we simply say, “When I wake up in the morning, I should tell myself…” It acknowledges a legacy self. A self that can be interrogated, grieved, and consoled.

 

TFR:

One of the highlights of this collection is the series of Eros poems strung throughout the book. The imagery in these poems, among others, appears almost painterly. What role, if any, does visual art play in your writing: where do you turn to for visual inspiration or connection?

 

AK:

Like a lot of poets, I love visual art—its freedom and wordlessness. And sometimes I even try to write poems about art in the ekphrastic tradition. These are mostly terrible. For instance, I think I’ve attempted once a year for the past ten years to write a poem about Bernini’s massive sculpture, The Ecstasy of St. Teresa. Ditto for some seaport paintings by Claude. These poems fail because there’s no way to turn a bridge into a tambourine—one art doesn’t translate into another.

 

But I’m always interested in the poem as a vehicle for seeing. Writing imagery, for me, is like sticking my head under the black cloth of an old-school camera. Relaxing and absorbing, all at once. Until you mentioned it, though, I hadn’t noticed how much the Eros poems grapple with seeing. How much they want to touch. Eros isn’t about having, after all; it’s about wanting. Maurice Merleau-Ponty has a beautiful essay, “Eye and Mind,” in which he says that seeing “is to have at a distance.” To enjoy a “strange possession.” The painter’s work, then, is to make visible what the eye sees but cannot hold. The poet does that, too, but also tries to make visible what can’t be seen. To suggest the fine tissue layers of memory, thought, and feeling.

 

As for the art I go to for inspiration, I’m a sucker for Byzantine and early Renaissance religious painting. I love busy triptychs. Goldleaf. Virgins wearing angular blue robes. The summer light of Claude Lorrain. The wintry light of Hendrick Avercamp. All of Velázquez, Lucas Cranach’s Judiths, Klimt’s landscapes, Courbet’s life-sized Burial at Ornans, the abstract paintings of Richter in which you can occasionally glimpse a stream in the woods.

 

TFR:

What poem or collection of poems do you find yourself returning to across your life as a poet?

 

AK:

Oh, so many books by Frank Bidart! Especially his chapbook Music Like Dirt, which is both searing (like all his work) but also enormously generous. I could name more collections, but I hate it when people cheat on questions like this. Okay, I’ll cheat just a little: every year I read a poem by John Donne called “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness.” It’s about trying like hell to calm one’s fears about death. And it contains some of the most moving metaphors I’ve ever read: Donne surrendering his body as an instrument to be “tuned at the door” so he can become God’s “music.” Though I’m a staunch agnostic these days, I grew up in the evangelical tradition. Something about Donne’s struggles with faith in this poem and in the holy sonnets pierces me every time.

 

TFR:

If you were to build a poetic family tree, who are some of the writers you would be sure to include?

 

AK:

In addition to Bidart and Donne, I’d add my former teacher Rick Barot, Robert Hass, Anne Carson, Susan Stewart, and Tomas Tranströmer. From the twentieth century and earlier, Zbigniew Herbert has meant a lot to me (Mr. Cogito!), as has Elizabeth Bishop, Horace, and Rilke. On reflection, I see that this tree of mine is pretty old and overwhelmingly white. Sadly, it doesn’t include many wonderful poets—including many poets of color—whom I love and respect. But the poets I’ve named are the ones who nourished and challenged me when I was just starting to write and whose words continue to vibrate in my subconscious.

 

TFR:

Is there a third collection of poems in the works? What are you working on now?

 

AK:

Something is in the works, I hope! The pandemic unleashed a lot of prose in me, for whatever reason. Some of the new pieces I’ve written seem to fit squarely in the prose poem tradition. Others are more like short fables. In many of these I’ve been trying to foreground the artifice of poetry, the “so what?” of poetry. And letting humor come in. So maybe these pieces will pave the way for a hybrid collection at some point.

 

In a completely unrelated project, I’m toying with the idea of writing an opera libretto based on Eros, Unbroken. I’m taking a class offered by the Seattle Opera (one gift of the pandemic!) that’s sparked my interest, and I’ve been talking with my friend, composer Aaron Stepp, who has more experience with this than I do, about how we might write a chamber opera. Whether or not we’re able to actually do this, I just love thinking about the narrative and other creative challenges that would come with this project.

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Interview: John Sibley Williams

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

 

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

 

Daniel Lassell for The Florida Review:

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

 

John Sibley Williams:

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

 

TFR:

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

 

JSW:

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

 

TFR:

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

 

JSW:

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

 

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

 

TFR:

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

 

JSW:

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

 

TFR:

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

 

JSW:

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

 

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

 

TFR:

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

 

JSW:

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

 

TFR:

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

 

JSW:

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

 

TFR:

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

 

JSW:

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

 

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

 

TFR:

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

 

JSW:

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

 

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

 

Because you are what song breaks open your throat and because

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

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

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

country its name?

 

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

 

We all have reasons

for moving.

I move

to keep things whole.

 

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

 

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

 

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Interview: Sandra Simonds

         

 

Sandra Simonds is a prolific poet, critic, mother, and professor. She is the author of five poetry collections: Orlando (Wave Books, forthcoming), Further Problems with Pleasure (University of Akron, 2016, and winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize), Steal It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009). She is also author of a free electronic PDF collection,  Untitled Collage Poems (Bloof Books, 2016). A sixth print volume, Orlando (Wave Books), is forthcoming in 2018, and Simonds is working on another collection, Atopia. Please see five poems from Atopia and a review of Further Problems with Pleasure elsewhere in Aquifer.

 

Reading Simonds’ work is not unlike plugging into high-voltage poetica, fused with the hard metal of keen intellect, unmistakable humor, the reality of ourselves as sexual beings, and charged with political and social thematic waves. Nothing is at rest in these poems; they shout and taunt, but mostly they invite an engagement to language throbbing with 21st-century life.

 

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:
I’m thinking I was first introduced to your poetry when I received my May/June [2017] issue of The American Poetry Review, and was intrigued by your poem, “Dear Chris,” which is the first of three poems featured in the issue. It’s a hardworking poem, “long,” and of an eclectic construction that gives it restless energy.

 

Contemporary epic, or “long” poems, are my latest poetry-drug, so when I read an excerpt from Orlando in The Brooklyn Rail’s e-journal, I was smitten with its forty-eight flowing tercets, where the speaker seems to address the city of Orlando, but soon we’re accompanying the speaker in a kind of kinetic stream-of-consciousness journey, passing through the land of the body as if were a fantasy theme park like Disney World, which is referred to several times in the poem.

 

The form works fabulously against the energy, creating marvelous tension. Thoughts echo in my reader’s mind of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, yet I sense you, the poet, clearly enter at multiple points. For example, we see the speaker at their desk, trying to compose on a laptop, but they are interrupted, first by the action of another, then technology fails, and the work is lost. A hard-copy diary is remembered: “. . . and that is precisely the moment you fell out of love with me, / abandoning me to the very diaries and bookshelves of my consciousness, both as a teenage/girl and now as a middle aged woman, so I tried to figure out what I could have done back then, / what confession, what moment of weakness, what apology had driven you out of my life, / so abruptly . . .”

 

You have a collection soon to be published (2018) from Wave Books called Orlando. I’m excited about this as both a poet, and as a university instructor in Orlando; is the entire collection an epic poem, or is Orlando a long poem contained therein? Where did this spring forth from?

 

Sandra Simonds:
First, thank you for this question because I’m really excited to talk about Orlando, which I think of as an epic feminist poem that reads like fiction or memoir. In terms of structure, Orlando is composed of two sections. The first section is forty pages and each page is four very long-lined tercets; the second part of the epic is written in a kind of spiraling open form. The second part of the book, in fact, was initially forty or so discreet poems with titles that I, upon revision, transformed into one long second section called “Demon Spring.”

 

I chose the long poem form because I wanted to work in the tradition of the epic which is historically so heavily inflected with masculine energy. The “epic” has been coded “male” and I was interested in the challenges of writing an epic poem given the gender history. Who is allowed to write our history? Of course, I’m not the first woman to do this. Several feminist long poems that influenced me in this project come to mind including Alice Notely’s The Descent of Alette, Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts, and Loba by Diane di Prima.

 

You are right to note that “Orlando” in the poem is an unstable character—sometimes Orlando is a city, other times, Orlando is a lover, and other times Orlando is an idea or set of ideas. When I wrote the book, this instability wasn’t intentional but it turned out to be an effective way that I could talk about both love and relationships using this figure as well as broader cultural concerns, like materialism, entertainment, the surface and what lies beneath the surface and so on. So the instability of the figure creates a kind of creative and philosophical opening that worked for me and relates to the traditional concerns of epic poetry—telling a historical, social and political story about our times but through a distinctly feminist voice.

 

TFR:
As a poet, and poetry reader for The Florida Review, I find it increasingly rare that a poem both challenges and dazzles me. I find the poems of Further Problems with Pleasure just brilliant. How did you become involved with the subject or theme of your book?

 

Simonds:
I wanted to explore a number of themes at the same time: sexuality, sexual violence, sexual liberation, gender shame, the body, perversity, fantasy and how these things are constructed and defined in late-capitalist society. What are the norms? What is taboo? Lacan says, “Do not give up on your desire,” and I think that’s a sort of jumping off point of this book. Okay, well what does that mean for a single working mother living in the Deep South at this particular point in history? What part of our desire is “ours” and what part of it is manufactured?

 

TFR:
In this collection, is there one poem that worked as the spark for the rest of the pieces? If not, which poem do you feel best anchors the collection for you?

 

Simonds:
I think the “Further Problems with Pleasure” poems that are positioned throughout the book anchor it because these poems bring the book back to the central questions surrounding the nature of desire and, when the book veers away a little bit from these questions, they are brought back to the forefront of the reader’s mind. I also have a lot of affection for the last poem in the book, “Dear Chris,” which I wrote in response to a poem sent to me by the poet Chris Nealon. I was thinking about all of the leftists who stand up in society against hatred and violence against the oppressed. I wanted to both acknowledge the struggles that we have encountered both personally and more broadly as leftists, what we are up against, what we will be up against, but also to say that what we do every day, our actions matter. That what we did here, right now, matters, to each other and to our children and that even though we all come from different backgrounds, my hope for the future, is that our children will not have to face what we have faced and if they do, that they will be comrades, that they will be on the right side of history fighting for the same things.

 

TFR:
I’m always curious what literary fields a poet mines; what are you reading now?

 

Simonds:
I just finished Matthew Rohrer’s The Others, which I thought was great. His storytelling and the way he works with narrative is fascinating. I also just finished Rapture by Sjohnna McCray. I had the pleasure of reading with Sjohnna a few months ago and he gave me the reading copy of his book with all of his notes and directions to himself (Thank you, Sjohnna!). I love the way Rapture tells the complicated story of his relationship to his mother.

 

TFR:
I think I’d go as far as calling your poetry “combustible” and timely for what’s occurring in the both the political and social arena right now. It’s like the lines are “plugged in” and feel energized, so I must ask, any writing rituals you’d like to share? That is, where do you write best, what time of day, tea, coffee, wine or a bag of chips?

 

Simonds:
My only trick is to write when you are so desperate that you can’t not write what you need to write—when you read things in the news, write, when you feel a sense of justice, write. That usually puts a bit of urgency into the writing and makes the poems more resonant, so that when you’re drinking a cup of tea, revising those passionate poems, you don’t take out the passion, but you have some passion to work with and frame. I guess that Wordsworth covered this area long before I did, though.

 

TFR:
As a parent and an academic, a working professor, how do you find or make time to write? Is it easy for you or always a struggle, as in some sort of “compromise”?

 

Simonds:
It’s always a struggle to find time for me because I’m just a very busy person with two young children, but I think because I’ve been writing since I was a child, it’s like second nature to me. I think I’m probably a person who would write in any circumstances—in a jail or in a castle, in a factory or in an office. I can’t imagine not being a writer and writers write.

 

TFR:
Who (or what) acts as your muse? Or, perhaps there’s a particular subject you find you keep coming back to again and again?

 

Simonds:
The dead, the people who have struggled before us for social justice, the unborn, the people who will need our writing when we are dead. My themes usually center around the political—I want to make poems that are both political and creative, that are political but not obvious rants or propaganda, that touch people, that make people think.

 

TFR:
In your writing process, would you say you write more by logic (doing research, creating notes, etc.) or intuition, or some combination of the two?

 

Simonds:
I go on intuition and sound always. I have an idea or an impulse and I just follow my gut. Sometimes it’s wrong but more often than not it isn’t. I think that this kind of leap of faith is what you have to really develop and nurture.

 

TFR:
Anything that people THINK they know about your poetry, that isn’t so?

 

Simonds:
I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what people think about my poetry so, honestly, I have no idea.

 

TFR:
What projects are you working on at the present, and what subjects do you feel are calling you for future projects?

 

Simonds:
I’m working on an epic political poem called “Atopia.”

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