Grist

The Journal for Writers

“serving the art we need and love”: An Interview with Christian Anton Gerard | by Jeremy Michael Reed

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Christian Anton Gerard is a poet, teacher, and, as evidenced by his poems, voracious reader. His books are filled with allusions to other poets, writers, and musicians, yet maintain a personal, self-interrogating center. At the heart of his books are people in tension with each other, learning from their mistakes, and, sometimes, failing again before finding a way forward. Time and again, his poems crack a joke, converse with Philip Sidney, and feel as contemporary as possible all on the same page.

His first book Wilmot Here, Collect for Stella was published by CW Books in March 2014, and his second collection of poems, Holdfast, was published this fall by C&R Press. You can buy a signed copy of Holdfast directly from Gerard here. A former editor of Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts (for issues 6 and 7), Gerard was interviewed by current Grist editor Jeremy Michael Reed.

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JMR: Thanks so much for sitting down over the internet with Grist for this interview!

I wanted to start by asking how you saw the role of self-address in your poems in your new book. You have these incredible moments that structure your poems throughout Holdfast like in “Pointed” where you turn the poem on the lines “This is neither self- / deprecation or self-pity’s well, reader. This is me / reading, too” or other moments when you refer to Christian Anton Gerard in the third person. What draws you to this use of self as character in your poems? Another way to ask this question might be: how do you see yourself in relation to confessionalism as opposed to (or in conjunction with) other poetry traditions?

CAG: Confession: I was listening to The Smiths in the the park with my now-four-year-old son. “Sweet And Tender Hooligan” came on and I started singing his full name, Ansel Christian Gerard, instead of Sweet and Tender Hooligan to be silly. He was acting hooliganish, but I felt guilty saying his name because he certainly wasn’t that kind of hooligan. He was two and obstinate. I started saying my name instead.

My name felt syllabically awkward, but somehow right because of those lyrics “…no he’ll never never  do it again. Of course he won’t. No, not until the next time.” How many times I’d said that before I was sober. The song’s narrator rationalizes its character’s horrific actions and creates a wild duality and weirdness (like most of The Smith’s songs) that are like a thing you can’t look at, but can’t look away from. I think I’m this way to myself sometimes, or have been, or am able to be, or could be if I don’t do what I need to do to treat my disease, my alcoholism. I’d never really wanted to write about my alcoholism because I didn’t know what that might look like, which was scary. When those poems started coming, I let them, but I didn’t know what to do with them or if I’d do anything with them. I’d been afraid of form before these poems, but never afraid of content. This was a first for me.

Mikayla Davis, a poet in the University of Central Arkansas MFA Program, interviewed me last spring for a class she was taking and she asked a similar question in regard to Wilmot Here, Collect for Stella, though Holdfast wasn’t out then, which is helping me as I think now about your framing of the question, Jeremy, so I want to give her a shout out here because some of this answer is rooted in the thinking produced by the interview.

Anyway, I don’t think my work can ever fully escape the “confessional.” The personae in Wilmot Hereare in many ways just as confessional for me as the poems in Holdfast. Much of WHCS is rooted in emotional truth and often physical.

Holdfast differs from WHCS in my mind, though, in a lot of ways. For one, Holdfast uses myself in the third person, which was a wildly interesting experiment for me that showed me I could see me in different ways than I might otherwise. Holdfast also contains the first work addressing my alcoholism and my recovery, whereas, Wilmot, in my mind, was often drunk. I didn’t drink and write. I tried it, but I couldn’t do that. If I was drinking, I was drinking. If I was writing, I was writing.

Many of Holdfast’s poems began when I was in the problem, but they were all revised in recovery, which helped me own the I, I think, because these poems demanded an honesty I hadn’t been able to give poems before, or maybe that I didn’t believe I was able to give poems before. I’ve come to understand I have been a man I have and haven’t wanted to be. I have been a man I didn’t know how not to be. I have been a good man and a bad man and all the kinds of man one might come up with judgments or levees to judge or levee against me. Being human is to be a both/and a lot, which is weirdly not often publicly acknowledged (poetry is always showing us this, though) because, I think, to do so means acknowledging the difficulty in labeling one or one’s work a certain way when so much of our culture wants to name and categorize.

Holdfast also contains more of the idea of poem as prayer and touches more of the spiritual (not religious, really) elements of living and understanding poetry as a power greater than myself, which is also why every poem in Holdfast borrows at least a line from another poem, song, movie, and the like.

I used to think I was a wide open person; someone who’d talk about anything with anyone. And I am pretty good at talking to people. I’ve learned, I often am able to talk about anything with anyone, but really I’m able to let others talk about themselves, and while I can (and do) talk a lot, I’ve found out that I’m immensley private about a lot of myself. This isn’t to say I don’t talk about myself, but that I’m adept at talking around myself. The difference between me and another kind of private person is that I don’t embarrass easily, which makes me seem as if I’m wide-open. Using my full name in these poems didn’t exactly feel like I was making a character out of myself, but rather able to confess myself to the page in a way that felt different from the “I.”

There are many things I sometimes am, but few things I always am. I’m always a poet, whether I always want to be or not. In Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, he writes that he has “slipped into his unelected vocation,” meaning he didn’t intend to be a poet, but he is and can’t deny it. He’s confessed it.

Confession’s a fascinating idea to me. Its connotations often imply secrets held internally and then disclosed to a private listener, someone who “won’t judge,” but will grant pardon or at least the idea is that forgiveness might be possible because of confession. Confession implies guilt and admittance. It connotes a level of “personal” that’s “not for everyone.” There’s also (what can be) the very worst kind of confession, the death-bed confession, in which the dying admits something to be relieved of its guilt before their death, but in doing so, makes the listener live with something they may have been better off not knowing.

Confession is/can be exceedingly selfish, selfless, and/or an infinite combination of the two. In writing, though, there’s this other way we relate to “confession.” Somehow, confession implies “the truth.”

In Mark Strand’s poem, “Breath,” the speaker says, “…the lies I tell them are different / from the lies I tell myself.” “Breath” is a poem I’m never far from, and maybe because of these lines. I interviewed Tarfia Faizullah once and asked her about her use of “the personal.” She said, I just spilled my coffee. There. That’s something personal.” Such a damned good answer. That moment helped me see that in a certain light, everything written is a confession.

I was more willing to be in process, in fact, to give myself over to process and understand myself as process only; the process of an alcoholic, a divorcee, a father, a new lover, a poet, a poet beginning to believe poetry just means making, to make.

Confession’s simultaneously a liberation and a form of containment. Religious or not, spiritual or not, the idea of confession, even at a base level like, “Yes, Ansel, I ate your gummy bears” (I’m working on having to confess this less and less) is, yes, an admission to others, but also an admission to one’s self; a kind of culpability that can tell us something about ourselves or our characters at that particular moment. An artist is always confessing because an artist is always making, which is a continual confession of love for the art and the love of the art’s craft. As an artist, I am liberated in my obsession with writing’s craft, but that same obsession is also a form of containment helping me know or come to know myself as a poet in relation to myself and others or others in relation to others or things in relation to things in any given poem.

In short, I’d say Holdfast owns the “I” more than WHCS, even when I’m in the third person, because I thought of these poems as opportunities to study myself andpoetry/making as these poems were made. I was much less worried about “having something to say” in Holdfast. I was more willing to be in process, in fact, to give myself over to process and understand myself as process only; the process of an alcoholic, a divorcee, a father, a new lover, a poet, a poet beginning to believe poetry just means making, to make. In Holdfast I worried more about making poems and less about making myself seem other than I am, though, non-negotiably, WHCS contains just as much of who I am, though I was able to hide from myself a bit more there. In moments when I couldn’t stand to look at myself in the mirror, I had the personae and their history to be the rock I slept against. I took that away from myself in Holdfast. No. I’m wrong there. The poems took that away from me in Holdfast, for which I’m more than grateful.

JMR: You use literary allusions, characters, and quotes throughout both of your books in nearly every poem, an aspect of your poems that seems to nod to a life lived through and alongside reading. How did you develop this interest in incorporating other literary characters or lines directly in your poems?

CAG:. I really like the phrase, “lived through and alongside reading.” Such a phrase, is, what I think Sir Philip Sidney (the reason for my Sixteenth-Century obsession), would have said about himself or claimed for anyone who would give much of their life to reading and writing. I guess I just did exactly what you asked about. My brain went to Sidney, who, like most of his contemporaries (and those writing after him) used lines from other writers and characters from other writers without pause. The early modern writers feel much in tune with what Eliot would later call “the presentess of the past,” that is, they weren’t worried about “originality,” they just trusted it would come if they imitated rightly. They also understood themselves as a part of a community and a tradition that was transhistorical. When they wrote, they did so as if those they’d read and loved were in the room with them.

When I was at Old Dominion, Luisa Igloria and Tim Seibles told me to do the same thing. When I was drafting a lot of these poems and I’d get stuck, I’d do what Richard Hugo suggests in “The Triggering Town” and give the poem a sudden turn by using a lyric from a song or a line from another poem or a character and then I got the pleasure of trying to make it work.

JMR: To many beginning writers, love poems can seem difficult to pull off without falling into the typical tropes of the genre. You even make a joke out of those tropes in your poem titled “Christian Anton Gerard to Her Sort of in the Style of a Teenaged Love Poem.” Both of your books focus on love in different ways: Wilmot Here, Collect for Stella focused on a discovery of love and tempestuous moments in a relationship, while Holdfast seems to be interested more in how relationships are shaped in order to be sustained over time. As you say in “Twenty-Something Poet Made a Mix Tape,” “Quintessential lovers… are always fucked, / the trying to love, a fiasco bigger than love itself.” Do you find yourself continuing to write bigger-than-love poems after the second book, and why have they been a form you return to?

CAG: Oh wow. I’m really in love with what you just said about the love poem as a form and a genre. I definitely find myself continuing to write bigger-than-love poems, or maybe it’s that I hope I can write as-big-as-love poems. Love is probably being alive’s most interesting thing to me. It’s so interesting to me that I almost hate writing the word because it doesn’t serve as a proper sign for the signified “thing.”

I don’t know that it’s possible to write bigger-than-love poems. Maybe the only thing bigger than love, for me, is poetry itself

When I was courting my now wife, the poet Heather Dobbins (with whom I’m more than fortunate and lucky to have and feel and share a love and life so big), I said soemthing once about not wanting to be cliché in my declarations of my love and she said, “clichés are clichés for a reason, and what could be more cliché than trying to say how in love we are?”  She’s exactly right. The challenging and exciting aspects about writing love poems are trying to figure out how to use cliché and skirt cliché at the same time.

I don’t know that it’s possible to write bigger-than-love poems. Maybe the only thing bigger than love, for me, is poetry itself, but even poetry, in its making, is, I think, an affirmation of love’s largeness and largesse. When we talk about love, we can (if we accept the most recent United Nations estimate) believe in 7.6 billion configurations of that emotion’s idea, and that’s if we just give one idea of love to each person. That’s a whole lotta love (and a whole lotta ways to configure how love feels).

I said earlier that I’m more than lucky to be alive. And I love being alive, which means I get to be in love with a lot of things and actually feel those feelings to my full capacity because I’m no longer able to feel so much I can’t handle it and turn to alcohol to shut me down. I have a lot of feelings and they’re really big and now I get to feel them, all of them, which is a gift I didn’t know I’d ever receive or that I ever asked for. I see this as a form of grace.

JMR: In your literary criticism, you have written about the role of apology or defending poetry, and the second part of Holdfast is made up of defenses of poetry (most of the time with that purpose in the poem titles). How do you see the argument for poetry in your second book as related to or different from your first book? Whose work are you reading among contemporary poets that you think acts as a great defense of poetry today?

CAG: Apologetics are wildly fascinating, especially for poets. It seems we’re continually up against the idea that “poetry is dead” or “that nobody reads poems, except for other poets.” If poetry was dead, it wouldn’t be made anymore. And when, exactly, was this golden age in which everyone was walking around reading poetry? Much of poetry’s history is the history of poets reading poets and learning from them how to make and then make differently, how to reconfigure ideas and emotions central to human identity.

My dissertation was a study of poetry’s defenses in the English tradition beginning with Sir Philip Sidney (though he’d point to Chaucer). I argue (and still maintain) “creative writing” as we know it today began with Sidney’s work and identification as a writer who taught other English writers how to read like a writer. I don’t know that the argument for poetry in Holdfast is different than in WHCS, but the way I make the “defense” gesture is different.

Rather than mashing up the historical Sidnean Stella with John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester to see what might happen if they’d been together, I started calling the poems “Defense of Poetry; Or…” because apologetics aren’t really about defending an art, they’re about making a space for more art in conversation with art that already exists. Calling the poems “Defense of Poetry; Or” was an experiment in what a poem could be “about,” or rather what all it could contain while it acknowledged its tradition and the art larger than it.

Working as an early modern scholar helps with content and hugely influences my work. For one, studying that time period allows me to see that my problems/feelings/not problems/situations aren’t entirely unique to me (I see the same thing in contemporary writing, but somehow the temporal difference between the early moderns and me makes it even more apparent), which frees me to write about myself and others who’ve come before me, or toothers who’ve come before me. I don’t know that I necessarily believe in inspiration. I think I believe more in what Shelley calls “the great conversation.” In “the great conversation” there’s no present or past or future, there’s just dialogue and craft lessons by reading and seeing others attempts and our own attempts and the understanding that being human is hard and easy at the same time. A both/and. I like understanding myself and understanding writing as a both/and because that disposition helps me understand others and the world I live in as a both/and, which makes living a bit easier sometimes.

Some contemporary writers I really love to read and return to that are both/ands (in no particular order) are Heather Dobbins, Marilyn Kallet, Tim Seibles, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Luisa A. Igloria, Terrance Hayes, Dorothea Lasky, Mark Strand, Charles Baxter, Cheryl Strayed, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Tim Sandlin, Arthur Smith, Annie Finch, Elijah Burrell, Karen Schubert, Shara Lessley, Paul Otremba, Rebecca Lindenberg, Timothy O’Keefe, John McDermott, Eula Biss, Sandra Lim and I could keep going, though I also do a lot of reading throughout the day from what I see folks post and what friends send me. Reading what friends post online and what I find in journals is a way I keep finding new work to read and new writers to keep reading.

JMR: In addition to your interest in self-address, love poems, and apology, Holdfast is also a book about being a parent and about addiction. Who are your favorite parenthood poets? Who are some poets who write on addiction or recovery whose work has helped you write about it?

CAG: The cool thing about this queston is that “parenthood” goes both ways.  There’s parents writing about their kids and kids writing about their parents and I’d call them both parenthood poems, or at least a lot of the time.

Geffrey Davis is one of my favorite parenthood poets. He’s also one of my favorite people, but that’s not what you asked. The poems he’s showed me and I’ve heard him read from his forthcoming book are, well, they’re just the most. But the same goes for his first book, Revising the Storm.

Sharon Olds is another go-to for parenthood, as are Ed Hirsch and Jill Rosser, Audre Lorde and Philip Larkin (Ha!).

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this question because it’s a really hard one for me in the sense that Holdfast is also all about influence and the poems show a lot of what’s influenced me in the past 10 or more years. But when I was writing those poems and reading, I didn’t know any sober/recovered poets, or if I did, I didn’t know they were recovered. I’m not claiming any type of originality here for my poems about alcoholism and recovery, I’m certainly not the first to write about the disease, but if I’m honest, I can’t point to specific poets who helped me write about recovery and maybe that’s because for a while I was worried if I started looking for their work I’d end up writing about recovery. I know this is a weird answer, but it’s the one I’ve got and it’s honest and I hope that’s enough because I feel like I should be able to name thirty or more people who showed me what recovery wrting looked like. I guess, though, I’ve read a lot of writers who didn’t recover, but suffered from the same disease as me and maybe those are influences.

JMR: As a poet who has both an MFA and a PhD and has gone on to publish two books, how has your approach to constructing or thinking of book manuscripts changed from your thesis and dissertation to your first book and now your second book?

CAG: In terms of drafting and revising, I don’t have the time like I used to to sit and draft for hours. I used to have to have at least an hour to “finish” a full draft. That was nice, but I find I’m actually more interested in what I’m making now that I don’t have that time. I write a sentence or a line a day. That’s my rule. At the end of each week or every couple weeks, I put them together and see if there’s any connection between them or some interesting relationship between them and then I start playing with what’s there on its own terms, not mine, because I am afforded the opportunity to see what’s there, not what I want to be there.

What that meant for full manuscripts now, or for the full manuscript of Holdfast, was that I had all of these things that I wasn’t sure how to order. I ordered the poems several times by myself, but each time it felt like a different narrative become dominant and I wasn’t sure that’s what the poems wanted. I gave the manuscript to four poets I love and trust and said “what would you do?” When I compared their orders, I went with the choices that overlapped. They almost all had a similar order and none of them were close to my original orders. They could see what I couldn’t because I was too close. They could see the intertwining narratives and interactions when I couldn’t, which is one of the greatest aspects of community.

When I originally ordered Wilmot Here, Collect for Stella, I had a similar problem, except that I knew I was working within the tradition of the dialogic lover’s sequence. Knowing that tradition got me stuck in the idea of chronology. I just couldn’t find a way to make the poems cohere without chronology until both Marilyn Kallet and Pam Uschuk (incredible poets and mentors to me) both ordered the manuscript a-chronologically and then talked to me about thinking patterns and memory patterns and how often we don’t think chronologically or remember chronologically, or write chronologically.

I guess the story here is the same. Knowing I have a manuscript, but not knowing how to order it means I have to ask for help, just like when I know I have a poem, but I’m not sure exactly how to get back into it for revision and I have to ask for help. Poetry makes me ask for help, which is good for me and keeps me close to the fact that it’s always bigger than me and that it will help me find ways to serve it, rather than me finding ways to make it serve me.

Almost every semester I show my students the covers of several books and then open the books to the acknowledgements page and say that every writer I know would rather have all of the names in the acknowledgements on the cover, but we can’t because “that’s not marketable,” so we have one name on the cover, though we all know none of the poems would be or be what they are if our art didn’t require we serve it and ask for help and perspective; a kind of help and perspective that comes only from writers working with and for the larger purpose of serving the art we need and love.

JMR: You’re a teacher as well as a writer. How has the writing of each of your books been shaped by and in turn shaped your teaching?

CAG: I’ve been really, really fortunate to have worked under writers who did their damnedest to help my poems get where my poems wanted to go, not where my mentors wanted them to go. I think workshop and MFA programs are what you make of them. If you write for workshop, then you’re not writing for your own work. If you’re not in a program that’s asking you to read widely, then you might not try to write in all those different ways.

One does, however, have to read and read and read and try and try and try.

The single most important thing all of my education has done for my writing is exposed me to a huge array of writers across time, identification, movements, genres, styles, subjects, forms, craft thinking, and on and on and on. The counterpart to reading widely is learning that, for me, if I don’t understand why someone is working in a certain mode, discussion with other writers often helps me understand what that person is trying to do, or rather what that person’s work is trying to do, which challenged and continues to challenge me to expand my desire for possibility in the relationship between form and content.

I think, more often than not, that, well, there are people who just want to complain and complaining about formulaic writing is a thing people can complain about. Okay. So what. I’d prefer to spend my time reading and talking to writers about reading and their writing and continue learning from them, which happens all the time in class with discussions with my students. I find I learn more about my own choices and boundaries and inabilities by talking about other’s work (which I all the time do as a creative writing teacher), not having others talk about my work. Therefore, if I can open myself to listening, I can try what I say about other’s work in my own and maybe I grow in the process.

One doesn’t have to have an MFA or a Ph.D. to be a writer. One does, however, have to read and read and read and try and try and try. For me, academia kept me disciplined when I might not otherwise have been and it still keeps me disciplined because I’m a part of a community, which is the most helpful thing to me.

When I read the essays of Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde and T.S. Eliot (yes, even Eliot) and Adam Zagajewski and Dean Young and Stacey D’Erasmo and Carl Phillips and insert infinite list of writers who write about writing in the U.S. in the 20thand 21stcenturies that I try to read and keep reading, what I’m seeing is not a charge to disavow the tradition of which we’re a part. I’m seeing every reason to acknowledge the tradition of which we’re apart and use it and read it and be emotionally honest on the page, and there’s no formula for feelings.

For me, teaching is the best job for me to keep working on craft and learning because my students challenge me and I won’t ask my students to do anything I won’t do. If I reveal a fear about my own work, say, short titles, for instance, which I was really scared of two years ago, then my students will say, Dr. Gerard, just do it, try it, that’s would you’d tell us. That’s the reason Holdfasthas a one word title and why many of the poems in it are shorter than in Wilmot Here, Collect For Stella.

JMR: Lastly, you feature a few poems in your book that allude to music and musicians, so I want to ask: if you were to make a mixtape for your book, what songs would you include for Holdfast?

CAG: Oh wow. Rather than individual songs, I’m going to go with artists who all have a a range of songs/records that I need in some way at least once a year: Prince; Ryan Adams; Cat Power; The Cure; Notorious B.I.G.; Stevie Nicks; Smashing Pumpkins; Tupac; Pearl Jam; Taylor Swift; Rappin’ 4-Tay; The Postal Service; Bob Dylan; James Taylor; Jim Croce; Bon Iver; The Civil Wars; Cyndi Lauper; The Rolling Stones; Joni Mitchell; The Counting Crows; Simon and Garfunkel; Whiskeytown; Diana Ross (with or without The Supremes); David Bowie; Carole King; The Smiths; P.M. Dawn; The Indigo Girls; Etta James; Michael Jackson; The Talking Heads, Crosby, Stills, Nash (and Young); Van Morrison; Janis Joplin; Heart; Firehouse; Guns N’ Roses; Eminem; The Allman Brothers; Coldplay; Bon Iver; Tha Dogg Pound; Neko Case; First Aid Kit; Kenny Chesney; Sharon Van Etten; Fleetwood Mac; Tom Petty (with and without The Heartbreakers); Bruce Springsteen; and all the other writers and bands that aren’t coming to mind right now because that thing is happening when someone asks me to tell a story and then I can’t think of a story to tell.

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Christian Anton Gerard’s first two books of poems are Holdfast (C&R Press, 2017) and Wilmot Here, Collect For Stella (WordTech, 2014). He’s received Pushcart Prize nominations, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarships, the Iron Horse Literary Review’s Discovered Voices Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize and a Best of the Net nomination. His work appears in the anthologies, Truth to Power: Writers Respond to the Rhetoric of Hate and Fear and Thrush: The First Two Years, and in magazines such as The Rumpus, Post Road, The Adroit Journal, Orion, Diode, and Smartish Pace. Gerard is currently an Assistant Professor of English, Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. He can be found on the web at www.christianantongerard.com

Jeremy Michael Reed is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee. His poems are published or forthcoming in Still: The Journal, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere, incuding the anthologies Bright Bones: Contemporary Montana Writing and Where the Sweet Waters Flow: Contemporary Appalachian Nature Writing. He lives in Knoxville, where he is the editor-in-chief of Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, associate editor of Sundress Publications, co-director of The Only Tenn-I-See Reading Series, and assistant to Joy Harjo. You can read his work at www.jeremymichaelreed.com.

Current: An Interview with Rebecca Morgan Frank About Her 2017 Collection Sometimes We’re All Living in A Foreign Country | by Allison Pitinii Davis

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Rebecca Morgan Frank published her collection, Sometimes We’re All Living in A Foreign Country, with Carnegie Mellon University Press in October 2017. It is available for purchase here.

APD: The language of childhood rhymes echo through the opening of the collection. In “Parable of a First Born,” sisters chant jump rope rhymes before relocation reduces them to strangers. In “Crawfish Chorus,” the language of nursery rhymes meets lyric word play: “Crawfish, crawfish,/Mary caught a dogfish./Dog face, dog race…” How are these rhymes operating in the collection’s larger examination of identity and place? Did their sonic qualities influence how you approached form and sound throughout the collection?

RMF: I always follow my ear when I write–the music carries me into whatever it is I am trying to explore in the poem. Some of the music of this book was shaped by the sounds around me, such as the train horns that blared all night just yards away from my old loft above an antique store in downtown Hattiesburg, MS. But the music also comes from what I’m reading, and while I was teaching at the University of Southern Mississippi, I came across a fascinating book on jump rope rhymes in the library stacks. Reading those rhymes, and especially reading them aloud with my students to help them learn about meter and rhyme, brought back the early pleasures, and playfulness, of poetry that I first encountered as a child in Virginia. Because I was teaching graduate poetic forms courses over the years I wrote this collection, I was reading a lot of both published and student work that was rich with distinctive meters and rhyme. I am hard of hearing, so I am often drawn to more obvious sounds, the sounds I can identify and follow: the clarity of the chanting song of a jump rope rhyme, for example, makes it into my world. I am also interested in the way places have their own rhythms shaped by the way people speak, sing, listen.

APD: The collection is full of cataloging, and the lists often depict the lost, castoff, or forgotten. The collection opens with “Pawn Shop,” where the speaker is seated “at the boxy and floral pianoforte,/surrounded by shoestrings, an old leg bone,/a cracked Grecian urn.” The list compresses time, space, and the history poetry—the urn calls back to Keats calling back to ancient Greece. “Fishing Tackle and Fine Wines” begins “That’s the sort of city it was. You could find/everything you wouldn’t want within a block.” The collection thrusts these castoff relics into center stage and forces the reader to grapple with the histories of what we’ve left behind. I’m interested in how the collection casts these everyday objects in a new light that makes the familiar feel new. Can you talk more about the relationship between the castoff objects and the collection’s tension between the familiar and foreign? Formally, how did these lists of objects influence the construction of the poems?

RMF: I’m fascinated with how the wear on objects is the mark of the life of someone else: objects become temporal through their wear or decay, and thus as images, they can convey the passage of time. When I return to certain parts of the South, I can see the presence of the past, and of the passage of time, in material ways. The cluttered antique shops, the crumbling gas stations, the old malls that have long been demolished other places: the past is on the surface. I love what you said about these relics forcing the reader to grapple with the histories of what we’ve left behind, because that is what I felt was happening to me when I faced the material world around me when I returned to the South. The items in the pawn shop become concrete symbols of not only our individual pasts, but of our collective American pasts.

With each object we encounter, we are forced to experience the way we either are connected to it or alienated from it: both of those reactions intrigue me as a writer. Each of us has built distinct narratives of our histories and identities based on the materiality of our own lives. Imagery as a tool taps into this, but it also becomes problematic when we assume that we are all reading images the same way. Objects, the images, the left-behind stuff of these poems, seemed to me to be useful tools for trying to explore that tension between the familiar and the foreign, the way place and culture can cultivate nostalgia or a sense of displacement, of otherness.

APD: The speaker of “The Whole Town” is rooted in Mississippi—”I was born below/these trees.” The speaker of “Sometimes We’re All Living in A Foreign Country” complicates what it means to know a place:

I thought I knew a little about small southern towns–
what it meant to leave to live.
Now every direction takes me to a foreign land.
every turn returns me to a history that’s my own.

In a book that focuses on the uprooted nature of modernity, how do you understand the role of Mississippi in the collection? How do the poems about Mississippi contribute to and complicate the book’s examination of foreignness?

RMF: In terms of the broader questions I’m trying to explore in the book, I keep thinking of the Faulkner quote, ‘To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.” Politically, Mississippi is both canary in the coal mine and it is representative of our country and its weaknesses; it is a place that can teach us what happens when you don’t care for the environment and education and the health and well-being of all people, it is a place that holds some of our most shameful and horrific history as a nation. The poem “Bombed” emerged after I attended a Freedom Summer anniversary conference at the University of Southern Mississippi, where people who had participated in the civil rights movement as local activists, or as students in the freedom schools, spoke about their experiences. Hearing their stories changed my life, and sent me to the oral history archives. Only one of the poems from this made it into the book: I felt I had to tell the story of Vernon Dahmer. What does it say about our country that we don’t all know the story of the KKK firebombing and killing a man in his own home, where his wife and children were with him, for helping other Black citizens register to vote? How do we not all know the story of these murders going unpunished for decades?

To me, the foreign country is not Mississippi, but the corners and histories and laws of all of this country that deny humanity, that look away from who we really are as a nation. Of course, this particular sense of foreignness is more widespread post the 2016 presidential election, as people start to look around and notice where they have been living all along.

APD: In this collection about physical and metaphysical uprootedness, bodies are often left separated or in hiding at the end of poems. “The Movements of Mechanical Objects” imagines the fate of a fading dancer figurine in a jewelry box: “The body/junked and thrown/from the box. Separated/from everything that moves.” In “Rubbernecker,” a Midwestern flaneur who finds his city “scrambled” retreats to a ditch because “If you hide from/these vast forces, sometimes they spare you.” Can you speak more about the fate of bodies—both human and constructed—in this collection? I’d also love to hear about how you approach the endings of poems and how your approach has shifted collection to collection.

RMF: I find that the body continues to come into my poems in complicated ways as a reflection of what it is to live in the female body in this world. I also felt a bodily vulnerability in Mississippi that I had never experienced before: I was hit by a car (driven by an IRS agent!) my first week there; we had a hurricane scare my first week of classes; a powerful tornado destroyed a nearby neighborhood and some of campus at the start of my second semester; and at the end of my second year there, I became very ill with Rocky Mountain spotted fever from a tick bite and my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. I was suddenly viscerally aware of the body’s powerlessness in relationship to all things great and small, and I suppose this found its way into the poems.

And what a great question about endings: I wish I had a better understanding of what drives my endings. I have always loved Frost’s “The Figure a Poem Makes,” where he says, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.” Writing a poem is an act of discovery and/or investigation for me: I seek out that sense of surprise and delight in the early drafts, where I hope I learn or uncover something by the end of the poem. I’ll add that I imagine that my love for the lyric, and particularly the sonnet, can push me towards a certain kind of turn at the ends of poems.

APD: My favorite poem is “Postscript from Mississippi.” The speaker knows a place intimately enough to know what outsiders get wrong—to know what outsiders cannot see: “You want it all to be a metaphor. I’m watching/a front porch crumble. Still, someone sits there.” I write about the Rust Belt—a place that’s often misrepresented—and I wondered if you have additional thoughts about depictions of Mississippi in literature. Is this poem in response to a larger issue?

RMF: That poem captures some of the disconnect I felt living as an outsider calling Mississippi home: from the beginning, there was the aching shock of seeing the visible poverty of the rural South, particularly in the Delta, but also in some parts of the city where I was living. When you live in a place, you see humans living their lives, handling whatever they have been dealt the best they can. While I was frustrated with a state government that makes choices that keeps the state vying for last place in so many areas, especially health and education, I was also frustrated with the outside perception of Mississippi as an anomaly, the butt of all jokes, built on stereotypes that can allow people to ignore the way Mississippi is a reflection of our history and presence as a whole country. Regional caricatures deny the humanity of a people and deflect from the real problems of areas that don’t have the affluence to keep suffering and inequity out of sight.

Recently Joyce Carol Oates made an infuriating and ignorant comment on Twitter, saying, “If Mississippians read, Faulker would be banned.” Not only does she discount the reading and writing lives of Mississippians, but she flippantly disregards that the actual problems of illiteracy in Mississippi are rooted in the legacy of slavery and in ongoing inequality. She shows a complete lack of consideration of the diverse people of Mississippi and their real lives and concerns. (Does she know, for example, that more than a third of Mississippi’s citizens are African American?) She is not alone in her perceptions. In the Mississippi poems, I wanted to push past the joke, the symbol, the stereotypes, and write about our country, about what it looks like in a place so many people refuse to even visit.

I’m excited to see new representations of Mississippi coming from young writers, such as Mississippi poet Jermaine Thompson, and fiction writer Sonya Larson, who is writing about early Chinese communities in Mississippi. We need writers from both inside and outside of the South to take on its complexities and its many realities.

APD: In the collection, “foreignness” is approached and deconstructed from many angles, and one that I found especially mesmerizing is how perception through space can render the known into something new. In “Bird’s Eye” and “Crusoe is Still There,” distance erases contact and perception of life—“Bird’s Eye” concludes the collection with the line “From a distance, there are no bodies.” Did the poem always have this anchoring position in the collection? Can you talk more about the organization of the collection and the argument that the order makes about the relationships between how we look at the world and what we see?

RMF: In early versions of this manuscript, the final poem was “The Bridge,” which I realize, after reading your question here, has the same sort of gesture of perception and distance: the poem ends looking across the bridge at a glittering distant city. This perspective seemed important to me to end with in order to show both the gesture and frustration of trying to look back at ourselves, at our pasts, at the places we inhabit or have left behind.

Environmental destruction and pollution on a local level was another force I was grappling with in this book, and in this particular poem. My neighbor was a lawyer who had come to town for a few years to settle a suit with a large company accused of extensive pollution that led to cancer, and there were some other significant environmental issues where we were, ranging from superfund sites to unpleasant visceral experiences that were hard to measure in terms of threat: the water that came out of my tap was often brown, and the downtown was frequently overwhelmed with a stench that came from outdated sewage lagoons affected by the waste from a manufacturer. Clean water and clean air and soil are, of course, an issue across the U.S., across the world. It felt important to end the book with that broader vantage point with “Bird’s Eye,” which to me reflects, among other things, global environmental destruction.

APD:Who are some poets and artists that you turned to while working on Sometimes We’re All Living in A Foreign Country? Can you share what you’re currently working on and reading?

RMF: One that stands out is Caki Wilkinson’s The Wynona Stone Poems, which is just a marvel of a book with its one-of-a-kind Southern woman protagonist. I was also constantly reading and teaching old and new books by Terrance Hayes and Kevin Young: these are two poets of my generation whose work is really exciting to me for its music, its relevance, its formal innovation. Photographer Sally Mann’s memoir “Holding Still” was also a memorable read to me during this time period. She not only captures the home of my early childhood (my childhood was split between Lexington and Charlottesville), but she expresses that deep, hungry connection one can feel to a land itself, that umbilical chord-like connection I feel to Virginia.

Another big influence on this book was Mississippi photographer Betty Press, whose photograph is on the cover of this collection. She models for me the way one can reflect the many layers of the South, with its surface decay, its difficult history and presence, its beauty and humanity. I have framed prints of hers above my writing desk.

As for my own current projects, I am in the early stages of a new book, in which I’m investigating early automatons–medieval and 18th and 19th century automatons–as well as modern robots. I am having a lot of fun reading and researching for these poems, and it helps that I live with a Medievalist, whose bookshelves are a gold mine! My doctoral dissertation is also calling me to return to it: that book is a collection of poems about my family’s history and heritage in the Philippines. It is a book that keeps growing and changing as I try to get it right.

On my reading table right now are new books by Joseph Legaspi, Charif Shanahan, Angela Ball, and Hadara Bar-Nadav. I’m also currently obsessed with the novels of Rachel Cusk, whose seamless narrative moves fascinate me. I hope her work will influence my poems in some interesting way.

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Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of three collections of poetry: Little Murders Everywhere, a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; The Spokes of Venus (Carnegie Mellon 2016), and Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country (Carnegie Mellon 2017). Her poems have appeared in such places as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and Guernica. She is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for her next manuscript in progress. She is the Jacob Ziskind Poet in Residence at Brandeis University and co-founder and editor of the online magazine Memorious.

 

Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press, 2017) and Poppy Seeds (Kent State University Press, 2013), winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize. She holds an MFA from Ohio State University and fellowships from Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner program and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She’s a PhD student at The University of Tennessee.

A Conversation Between Samantha Duncan and Katie Manning

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Samantha Duncan’s chapbook The Birth Creatures and Katie Manning’s chapbook A Door with a Voice were published by Agape Editions in 2016. The two poets interviewed each other via email.

 

Manning: Hi, Samantha! I read The Birth Creatures upon its release and again today, and I love the way your chapbook captures the strangeness of pregnancy and motherhood. That strangeness is something I also explored at length in my forthcoming full-length, Tasty Other, and it crept up unintentionally in my Bible word-banking chapbook, A Door with a Voice.

I was afraid when I began writing “mother” poems that no one but mothers—and maybe not even mothers!—would want to read them. I’ve been glad to be proven wrong. Will you tell me about how you began your project? Did you have a purpose and a plan from the beginning? Did you have any fears about writing this?

Duncan: Hi Katie! I’m glad you brought up the strangeness of pregnancy and motherhood, because I think it’s important to dismantle the notion that every part of these experiences is universal or joyful. Part of the motivation for The Birth Creatures came from my desire to share the aspects of childbirth and motherhood that aren’t glowing and perfect, that are messy and bleak. My other purpose for the book was to gain some footing over my own narrative, as my first postpartum experience was not a positive one that I felt in control of.

I do wonder how much truth there is to the idea that “mother poems” aren’t very popular or are only read by mothers. It’s certainly a thought that was in the back of my head while writing The Birth Creatures and trying to get it published. Another reservation or fear I had was that it’s the most personal project I’ve published. Luckily, readers’ reactions so far have been generous and positive!

This question also came to my mind while reading A Door with a Voice, as the Bible is an ambitious text and subject to take on. I love the idea to create art from language in the Bible, instead of, as you say, using the language as a weapon. Did you have any fears or reservations when you began the project? How did you decide on a found poetry approach? Did you have clear themes about the book beforehand, or did they emerge as you wrote the poems?

katie-25Manning: Oh, yes, I definitely worried that some people would be offended that I was using the Bible as a word bank, even though I was doing this in part as a protest against misusing the Bible by taking the language out of context. I was so relieved when my writing group members (who are also committed Christians and writing professors) responded to my project poems by saying that they were important and necessary, and I was pleasantly surprised when they found some of them humorous.

I chose the found poetry approach because I’d just had my first baby and I’d just finished my dissertation, and I worried that I’d just let go of writing unless I set myself an intentional assignment. I was exhausted, so it was a relief to use a limited word bank instead of choosing from all of the words I know. This project made me view found poetry in a way that I never had before. It’s not so different from “un-found” poetry really—we’re always working from a limited set of words. Found poetry simply sets tighter strictures.

I did not have any clear themes in mind when I began writing these poems; I just picked out words and phrases and started arranging to see where I could go with them. It was interesting to see what emerged and recurred—for A Door with a Voice, I pulled out the poems from the larger project that especially focus on women and mothers.

The poems in both of our chapbooks tend to have short lines, and your poems often include white space within lines. For A Door with a Voice, I usually broke lines to keep words and phrases separate that I found separately in the original text. How did you come to the short lines and white space for your poems? Did this form arise organically as you wrote and revised, or did you set out to work with that lineation from the start?

author-photo-1Duncan: I don’t know that the lineation fell into place from the start, but it definitely felt necessary as the book came together. Most of it is based on my first postpartum experience, which, as I mentioned, was not a positive one. For me, a large part of the aftermath of giving birth was a loss of control that left me feeling dissociated from myself. My mind felt different, my body felt different (especially during a rough recovery), and this inability to recognize myself was very new and unsettling.

In this way, the poems shaped themselves as I wrote them. The lines having different indents appeared to me as them being strangers to each other, much in the way I felt like a stranger to myself. The white space spoke to an uncertainty I felt, a sort of unfilled space that I, as a new parent, saw being filled with more of a new normal than the old normal I was used to. And it all happens quietly, these changes you have little control of. Overall, I ended up trying to visually represent that unfamiliarity and uncertainty in the shape of the poems, and this was the result that spoke most clearly to that.

It’s great that your writing group partners were supportive of your book. I’m curious about the humor they saw in the poems. My book adopted a sort of darkly comic tone, as I didn’t want it to be too serious. Is humor a tone you sought out for A Door with a Voice, or did it emerge less intentionally?

Manning: Humor was completely unintentional in my first string of first drafts! At that point, I was writing from a place of protest, so I was really caught off guard when I first read these poems and my workshop friends laughed along with them. Their response shifted the way I viewed my project, and I embraced my playfulness.

Speaking of playfulness, you have a recurring rhino in your chapbook that might be disorienting or disturbing to some readers, but I’m completely charmed by it. (Note: When I first saw a rhinoceros at the zoo at age 2, I told my mom, “I want to be one of those when I grow up!” I have a special place in my heart for rhinos.) Would you tell me about your choice to use a rhino? Why that animal? What’s its significance for you?

Duncan: I like that you’re charmed by the rhino! It came partly from a children’s alphabet book called Alphabeasts by Wallace Edwards, which features some oddly pensive creatures taking over a house with their theatrical musings. In other ways, the rhino symbolized the absolute takeover of a family and household a new baby can bring about. Rhinos are large in their presence, hard to ignore, and, in a more surreal moment in my book, swallow you whole. They’re the hulking physical opposite of a tiny, fragile newborn baby, but somehow, this one showed up in my poems and embodied many of the overwhelming, burdensome feelings I had about the new human I’d brought home and was expected to raise.

I’m glad we got to chat about our chapbooks, Katie! What’s next on your plate – any new projects in progress or publications to share?

Manning: My new full-length poetry book, Tasty Other, is being published by Main Street Rag (as the winner of their book award!) in November 2016. It explores my transition to motherhood with poems inspired by anxiety dreams, fairy tales, biblical narratives, parenting handbooks, weekly pregnancy calendars… it’s all there, and it’s all weird. I’ve got readings set up in San Diego, LA, and Kansas City already, and I’m excited to set up more readings and school visits to share this work in the coming year.

I’ve loved chatting chapbooks with you too! Thanks for taking the time. Will you close us out by telling me what’s new and next for you?

Duncan: My poetry chapbook, Playing One on TV, is being published by Hyacinth Girl Press in 2017. The poems are about memorable female TV characters, mostly from the nineties, explored through a feminist lens. It was a fun book to work on and closely study how these characters represent girlhood and womanhood and social norms, as well as how I sometimes struggled to relate to so many white female icons as a woman of color. I also have a flash fiction chapbook, Chaos Theory, that I’m excited about and would love to find a good publishing home for.

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Samantha Duncan’s fourth chapbook, Playing One on TV, will be out from Hyacinth Girl Press in 2017, and her recent fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Meridian, The Pinch, The Conium Review, and Flapperhouse. She serves as Executive Editor for ELJ Publications and reads for Gigantic Sequins. She lives in Houston and can be found at planesflyinglowoverhead.blogspot.com and @SamSpitsHotFire.

Katie Manning is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Whale Road Review and an Associate Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, and her first full-length poetry collection, Tasty Other, is the 2016 winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. She has received The Nassau Review Author Award for Poetry, and her writing has been published in Fairy Tale Review, New Letters, Poet Lore, So to Speak, Verse Daily, and many other journals and anthologies. Find her online at www.katiemanningpoet.com.

 

Pretty Girls, Ugly Circumstances, and the Mythos of Becoming: A Conversation Between Fox Frazier-Foley and Donna Vorreyer

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Fox Frazier-Foley: Hi, Donna! I just finished reading your chapbook, Tinder, Smolder, Bones, and Snow (Dancing Girl Press, 2016), and I’m really excited to talk with you about our work. It seems we’re both writing from a magical, or mystical perspective, even though the types of mythology we’re engaging with are different (yours is secular, while mine is more religious in nature). I’m interested in finding out about the differences and overlaps in our approaches to re-telling familiar or inherited stories.

Donna Vorreyer: Fox, your chapbook Like Ash in the Air After Something Has Burned (forthcoming in 2017 from Hyacinth Girl Press) opened up a world of religious story and imagery that, despite being raised Catholic, I had never experienced. The vitae of female saints in your chapbook plays with myth, but also with representation and reinvention of female tropes and gender identity. Despite such a different source inspiration, I feel that both of our books address and challenge roles that have become assigned to women over time. I am looking forward to our conversation.

Fox Frazier-Foley: Tinder, Smolder, Bones, and Snow is such a beautiful collection of poetry, and even the title feels like a magical invocation. I love it so much. My experience of it, as a reader, is that its poems seem to draw upon imagery and tropes that many readers will be familiar with from fairy tales and folk tales. So, I wanted to ask you—what do fairy tales mean to you? My relationship to fairy tales began when I was very small: my Dad used to read me some of the Brothers Grimm tales before bed every night when I was really little. Then, as an undergraduate student, I TA’d for a class about the genesis of European fairy tales, where I learned that they were originally intended as sort of “civilizing devices”—to help instill conventional morality/mores, customs, and gender roles (and other forms of social hierarchy) in children from a very young age—almost as a supplement to the religious and social institutions that imparted these ideas in a more overt way. But I’m curious about what these sorts of stories mean to you—as a woman, a writer, an educator of children, a mother?

dsc00058Donna Vorreyer: Fairy tales/folk tales have been a part of my reading life for as long as I remember reading, but I really got interested in them in my 20s when my husband and I started traveling all over the world. One of the things I started to collect and/or read before I visited somewhere was the folklore of that place, its stories. When I was a kid, I think I read the basics—and you know, princesses and Disney movies in the 60s were all the old-school fairy tales—so I never really knew the dark origins of the European tales, which, once I discovered, I loved. After investigating stories from other cultures, I learned that most folklore does NOT pull the punches of the Disney-ized versions we are fed at an early age. Their original darkness, meant to highlight the consequences of bad/greedy/“unacceptable” behaviors, had been scrubbed from the versions I knew as a child. As a young teacher, I often used picture book versions of tales from other cultures to compare the purposes of the stories. Luckily, that was a big thing in the ’80s—books like Lon Po Po (a Chinese story, similar to Red Riding Hood) and others were becoming available. I felt it was important for kids to know that all cultures have stories and that even the stories we THINK we know, the ones we claim as ours, are not. As a woman, I never bought into the princess thing, so I can’t say that fairy tales impacted the way I viewed relationships at all. But, as a mom, my son is South Korean, so showing him the stories of his birth culture and all the cultures we visited in our travels was always a high priority. You can learn a lot about a time or a culture from its stories. As a writer, I can get fixated on a tale or myth and build a whole series of poems around it—that happened with my chapbook Encantado, which is based on myths about the pink Amazon River dolphins. With this chapbook, a 1914 illustrated edition of Anderson’s Fairy Tales, found at a garage sale, was the impetus.

Fox Frazier-Foley: I’m also a believer in the importance of the kind of intercultural exchange that can come from sharing our stories, both religious and secular. I think something that’s also interesting to me is the relationship between different versions of the same story within a given culture, as the story (d)evolves over time. For example, as you say, there’s a big difference between many of the original Grimm- or Perrault-penned tales and their later Disney or Disney-esque counterpart versions. Sometimes, when I teach creative writing to undergraduates, I’ll have my students look at 4 or 5 different incarnations of the same fairy or folk tale; after they consider what each major changes adds to (or subtracts from) the essence of the original narrative, I ask them to write their own version of the tale—to consider what familiar elements they’d like to keep, but also what they’d like to change, and why. And so something that really struck me in this collection as delightful and effective was the appearance—which often felt like a subversion—of familiar objects (and tropes) from Western fairy tales. One example might be the appearance and reappearance of teacups. I really enjoyed the fact that you use them in different ways than a reader might expect. For example, in many of the stories I grew up with, a teacup might be meant to suggest femininity, decorum, delicacy, and fragility—but all in a sort of hyper-idealized context, meant to teach little girls that they should enact all of those qualities if they want to be pretty, proper little girls—if they want to perform their femininity “correctly.” But in Tinder, Smolder, Bones, and Snow, when the teacups appear, it’s frequently as a testament to the inadequacy of those concepts of fragile femininity. I was curious how you selected these objects or images, and whether you consciously thought through how to use them in subversive ways. Also, what are some of your favorite symbolism-imbued objects that turn up frequently in fairy tales? And why are they favorites?

Donna Vorreyer: Some of the repeated imagery/tropes in the chapbook came from the reading of the inspiration material. The 1914 Anderson’s uses old-fashioned and very time-specific diction that I saw over and over again—words like prattled, suitors, and dram, images like teacup, hedge, leaf, and palings. I love the objects that inhabit any story—I think they are crucial to establishing not only place and time but also character traits and attitudes. So turning some of those ideas on their heads in these poems was purposeful. For instance, in “Death, Your Eyes are as Blue as Paul Newman’s”, the speaker forsakes other suitors to woo Death itself. Instead of suitors being the prize of wealth/beauty, they become nuisances in the way of letting go of life. The teacups are also related to death and strength in the face of it—they appear both in poems where the pretty girl burns her husband in a funeral pyre and where she is peacefully facing her own demise. The wise old ragged woman also becomes a sort of prescient sage in the first poem—her words come back to haunt the speaker’s new reality toward the end of the set. None of these characters or items are used in traditional ways. In response to your other question, some of my favorite mythological ITEMS would have to be any personal effects that have some sort of role in the story—the magic mirror in Snow White, the shoe in Cinderella, the cloak in RR Hood. It’s fascinating to see someone’s personal effects bearing witness to the story and also being featured in the plot. It would cool to write a set of poems just about the famous items in fairy tales.

Fox Frazier-Foley: Ha! Maybe that’s a chapbook we could write together someday, because I also think that that sounds like a delightful project. And, yes, one of the things I really enjoyed about this chapbook was that there were familiar archetypal characters—the wise old ragged woman seemed to me to fit the Crone archetype—but they were rendered in ways that made them feel new—surprising, unfamiliar, uncertain. Probably the most obvious example of this would be the “pretty girl” who usually, in a traditional Western fairy tale, becomes a princess by marrying her prince (or, at the very least, a wife-who-is-lucky-and-happy-to-be-made-a-wife). That’s definitely a stock character—and, I’d argue snarkily, maybe more of a familiar object than a character proper. And yet, from the get-go in your collection, the pretty girl is a wife but that definitely doesn’t save her or give her a happy life. All of the traditional “pretty girl” rewards and values are thrown into upheaval. Are you “being mean to the pretty girl” in this book? What was the intent behind identifying her as “the pretty girl”? I love that you seem to be deliberately challenging the conflation between prettiness as a character trait and the idea that cultivating personal fragility means the world will bend to take care of you in all your attractively non-threatening frailty. Can you talk about the process of creating this pretty girl character and mapping out her story?

Donna Vorreyer: Well, having never been the pretty girl myself—the quiet one, the smart one, the musical one, the athletic one, and at some points in my life, the nerdy one, the fat one, etc.—I took great pleasure in taking the pretty girl, the one who gets “the good life” due to her looks, and putting her through the wringer, so to speak, stripping away EVERYTHING—husband, children, home, hope—to see if she would survive. And, of course, being someone who doesn’t want to promote the idea that beauty presupposes weakness, I had her find that strength, do what she needed to do to survive in the post-apocalyptic landscape into which she is thrust. I feel like that was a fair way to, yes, be mean in a way to the pretty girl. I feel okay about that, having been the target of so many pretty girls in the past. 🙂 Also, being older than many of my poetry friends and contemporaries, I wanted to play with the idea of the hag, the wise old woman. In the opening poem, she is not only dispensing wisdom, she is assuring the pretty girl that, despite their markedly different appearances, she also has lovers and a life beyond what others might perceive. She is happy in her own way that does not require youth or beauty. I think that is a message I am trying to send myself a lot these days.

Fox Frazier-Foley: That approach seems really productive to me—both intelligent and compassionate. I think I’ve seen other authors, in different contexts, try to raise similar points, but in ways that keep the pretty girl useless and/or helpless—they condemn the trope of “the pretty girl” by denying a particular character growth or the ability to develop her own agency. It resonates with me that you use “meanness” as a way of forcing a character to locate her actual character—her strength, her self. That’s what the world does to most of us, I think, in one way or another—I mean that most of us who aren’t utterly sheltered do learn to grow and adapt through adversity. And watching a character evolve into someone more compelled and compelling is very satisfying. I didn’t think of it in these terms when I was reading your book, necessarily, but in retrospect I think that’s part of why I enjoyed the book so much—the pretty girl’s pain really brings about her evolution, her eventual empowerment. And the embrace of self-progress is a marvelous thing. I think it’s probably a great message for all of us!

Donna Vorreyer: I think the idea of pain bringing us to a place where we face our true characters is a common theme in many stories, but I tried to switch the code on that story a bit by bringing a fairy-tale quality to this really horrible sequence of events that happen to this character. It sounds like it worked for you as a reader, which makes me very happy! I think it’s important to recognize the power of adversity, both in lives and in stories. In many tales from around the world and in the news every day, the bodies literally pile up. Not everyone lives happily ever after. So bodies pile up in this collection—the poor little match girl, the soldier, so many bodies!—and the pretty girl herself becomes a bleeding, blinded, broken shell, one who does what is necessary to survive. Writing the darkness brings the light—something I was told once. I think many of my poems end up falling into this category in some way, and I’m glad that you found that light in this collection.

Now let’s talk about your chapbook Like Ash in the Air After Something Has Burned. My first question for you is about your inspiration. What initially drew you to the stories of saints, specifically to these women who chose to present as male or non-binary? How much research was required, and did you draw heavily from the official Catholic vita for the details of the poems or did you let imagination take over?

1475461270520Fox Frazier-Foley: I grew up steeped in both the histories and the mythologies of the Catholic church; it was by no means my only religious influence, but it was a prevalent one. The contradictions between the spiritual mission of the Church—I mean, the blueprint, idealized version—and the way its earthly bureaucracy conducts itself has long been a source of fascination for me. Additionally, I had to become pretty familiar with a lot of the writing of theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, and I read all of the letters of Abelard and Heloise, more than once. All of these narratives really influence how I approach the world, in general. A few years ago, I was sick with flu, and I was in that state where you’re too sick to do anything, but just well enough to be lucid, so I wanted something to feed my bored brain. I went hunting online for some documentary about Joan of Arc, but I couldn’t find it—and I happened upon a documentary about the mythos of Pope Joan. I had never heard of her before, but she’s a figure in Catholic legends and histories. She is depicted as someone who was gendered female and either disguised herself or chose to authentically present/identify as masculine, depending on which versions you read. According to all the different versions of her story, she passed for a man and became Pope.

Of course—utterly predictably—the Church historians involved in the documentary eagerly concluded that Pope Joan never existed, but was rather a fictional character in a cautionary tale about how women can’t truly lead. That infuriated me—partly because they believe all kinds of other stories that can’t possibly be verified, so why not this one? And partly because I think a lot of the time, whenever we hear any stories from history about women from almost any era displaying agency or doing surprising, daring, or interesting things, we’re immediately cautioned not to believe it.

Anyway, so I started trying to find proper books about the mythos surrounding Pope Joan, and that led me eventually into reading about these other saints. Some of them, like St. Joan of Arc, of course I already knew about, but I didn’t necessarily know the full contexts of their stories. I didn’t know, for example, that the English were able to convict Joan of heresy by creating circumstances that manipulated her into dressing in men’s clothing. That’s verifiable fact, but that’s not the story I was told growing up, or at least not all of it. However, several of these saints’ biographies have also been dismissed by Church historians as “romantic fictions,” which, of course, infuriated me all over again. I mean, sure—we can believe in virgin births and all manner of culinary alchemy (water into wine, multiplying loaves & fish), but we can’t believe that a woman (or someone who was gendered female by the society into which she was born) stopped camouflaging her facial hair as a deliberate, subversive act, and was then murdered for saying “no” to the men trying to control her body? That’s essentially St. Uncumber’s story, and I feel like we read about things happening even today that are not so conceptually dissimilar. Why rush to insist that it’s not true? Who’s gaining from that immediate dismissal of her story and the dynamics it signifies? So, when I started reading the dismissive treatments of these vitae, I decided that maybe I should write about these stories and lives in a way that would try to honor them. I did draw pretty heavily from details in each saint’s vita, but I also kept at the forefront of my mind that these histories are stories that have already been so heavily edited and manipulated. My goal was partly to undo some of the visible, reductive, destructive manipulation, and then try to allow in sometimes—judiciously—new details that might enhance the essence of the story in a productive way, in a way that I felt honored the saint and the story.

Donna Vorreyer: It’s very interesting to see issues of censorship, denial, and control as they relate to women so clearly reflected in this church history. You’ve said the church dismisses these stories – this makes them seem highly modern and timely in terms of how people who choose to live in non-binary ways are often dismissed by society, especially by spiritual institutions. Starting with the famous Donne poem as an epigraph to your collection, the end of the stanza—“make me new”—seems to be a battle cry for these poems. Each poem is an exploration of how these women made themselves new, of how disguise in many of these cases becomes, alternately, deliverance, safety, freedom, or death sentence. Even the title of the collection shows us this— the thing but NOT the thing, the aftermath, the changed state of matter. Was this flux and its impact a way to comment on the many ways that change or choice impacts all of us?

Fox Frazier-Foley: Yes, I will say that as I was writing some of the poems, I felt frustration over how little things seem to have changed, in terms of how we identify, talk about, and accept (or don’t accept) different ideas of gender. I think of gender fluidity as simply part of the overall human condition, so the continued dismissal over time by these different cultures that each saint hails from—and then reading modern-day headlines about similar close-mindedness—sometimes felt a little bit like smashing my face into a brick wall. But, in a way, I also wasn’t really thinking about gender as THE major change I was writing about. I mean, obviously it’s there, but when I chose the Donne epigraph from Holy Sonnet XIV, I was thinking about how in that poem, Donne is essentially asking God to obliterate his personal identity and replace it with an identity that belongs to God, that is determined by God. I was thinking about what it means to find something in the world that you love so much—so insanely, so devouringly and desperately—that you want it to alter who you are. In one way, these saints were all experiencing this kind of love both from and for themselves; but, in another way, I think that all of these people I wrote about were simultaneously engaging in another, equally radical, type of transformation—they found a force in the Universe they identified with and loved, and they wanted to let that change them as well. And then I was thinking about how when something burns, a chemical change is created, and the state of matter, the identity and essence of the thing, can’t be put back to what it was. It can’t be the same again. And so the title is from a line that references the change we call death, but I thought it could stand as a title because of the other types of radical change these humans are willingly undergoing.

Donna Vorreyer: Funny that you say this. It seems like you are viewing their changes as more of a step toward a different state of being, as the Donne quote suggests. But in some cases, as in the poem about St. Theodora, when the spouse returns, (traditional male figure), he seems to usurp the power she has gained from her new life even though he cannot match her miracles or spiritual strength, making all of the transformation almost moot. As I was reading, I wondered if you felt any contradiction in showing these women of strength changing gender identities, gaining freedom/power, only to remain subservient in a spiritual sense. Was this a concern for you?

Fox Frazier-Foley: It’s interesting to hear someone ask this question outside of my own brain, because I actively worried about that, repeatedly, before I started writing the poems. I think I found that my answer was no—because in the end, I didn’t see them as remaining subservient, not really. I saw their adoption and enactment of their spirituality as giving them a deep sense of honesty, and of agency. I was thinking about their relationships, respectively, to God in perhaps the way I look at the ocean, or the vast expanse of night sky—I recognize that it is much vaster than I am, and that it contains elements that could easily kill me, so when I gaze at it I feel my own limits and finitude, for sure. But that doesn’t necessarily, for me, equate to feeling powerless or subservient. I think as I wrote the poems I began to feel that for these individuals, enacting the gender presentation they chose for themselves was empowering on a societal level—they were allowed to do things that they otherwise would have been aggressively prohibited from doing. But it also allowed them to manifest a sense of spirituality that I think women were not really allowed to exercise openly at those times. And I felt like they ended up seeing themselves as these electric, kinetic particles lighting up the hem of God’s garment, you know? They felt themselves, in being subsumed by spiritual experience, to be part of the overwhelming, vast, bright, pulsing energy that keeps the universe spinning, that keeps the stars apart. I couldn’t help but feel that there is true power in that, in all of those stories.

Donna Vorreyer: “as these electric, kinetic particles lighting up the hem of God’s garment”—what a beautiful thought! To give oneself over so completely to some larger belief. Speaking of power, I was particularly drawn to the poems about St. Pelagia (the courtesan/dancer who converts). She takes up a lot of real estate in the book, appearing in several sections spread throughout. Her story gives us the glitter and garments and wine of the courtesan’s life, shows us the transformation from someone who is concerned with temporal, sensual, and material things to someone who seeks a larger, more spiritual truth. It is she who admits in one section that she is “learning to discard,” which I think is a theme of this collection, one that many of us struggle with every day. Why does her story bear such weight in the collection? Is it because she discards SO many parts of her former life to convert and to change her way of living?

Fox Frazier-Foley: St. Pelagia definitely takes up a lot of space—the arc of the book is actually structured around those sections of her long poem! I crafted the poem so that the process of her conversion would have “stations” to mirror the Stations of the Cross. That was partly because she made an actual, physical journey, and partly because, yes, there were SO many layers that her path called her to discard. I felt that for someone who made a living by using her body—to act, dance, fuck, and otherwise perform—and who also enjoyed material wealth that she used to adorn, enhance, and indulge her body—I felt that for her, the sensory details of her conversion would be so important. It’s really nice to know that that came through, for you as a reader!

Another reason she takes up so much space in the book is that—I feel a little silly admitting it, but the truth is that when I read about her I felt like I was in love with her. I just thought—what a woman, what a person, to be able to give up the comforts she had, in exchange for such a harsh physical reality—the tenacity and intensity of vision she must have felt was really fascinating and alluring to me. And yet, on some level, I also felt that I could understand why someone might want to make that kind of choice. And, for someone who had spent most of her life accumulating wealth and power, discarding seems like it must have been such a dangerous and powerful act; so counter-intuitive, so unpredictable, and probably exciting. She discarded her wealth, power, beauty, interpersonal relationships, and even, ultimately, her body. I was interested in what I might be able to discover about myself and my own tendencies, in trying to map out an experience like that.

Donna Vorreyer: I will now have to go back and read again to see the connections to the stations of the cross—what a great idea to parallel the two unique sacrificial stories. And it’s not silly at all to feel so connected to a character—I think that happens to all writers at some point. Perhaps this is why the pretty girl had to find her power in my poems—I couldn’t be completely mean to her! Giving her the strength to overcome the expectations of her appearance offered me my own reminder to defy expectations and push through to a different self. Your characters transform in a similar way.

Fox Frazier-Foley: Yes—I love that both of our characters discard some aspects of their respective identities that had previously helped keep them comfortable or sheltered—and in doing so, they both turn into compelling people whose stories and perspectives become so much more interesting! I guess on some level, we both write about “pretty girls” who go through some trying circumstances—but we reward our characters for their struggles! In my case, I think it felt like giving a reward to myself, too.

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Fox Frazier-Foley is the author of two prize-winning poetry collections, Exodus in X Minor (Sundress Publications, 2014) and The Hydromantic Histories (Bright Hill Press, 2015), and editor of two anthologies, Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity (Sundress Publications, 2016) and Among Margins: Critical and Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics (Ricochet Editions, 2016). Her newest collection of poems, Like Ash in the Air After Something Has Burned, is forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl Press in early 2017. Fox is founding EIC of Agape Editions, which is an imprint of Sundress Publications and is dedicated to publishing literary works that engage with concepts of the mystical, ecstatic, interfaith/intercultural, and the Numinous (follow Agape on Twitter, on Instagram, Facebook, and weekly Blog). Fox was graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Binghamton University, was honored with merit-based fellowships at Columbia University, where she earned an MFA, and was a Provost’s Fellow at the University of Southern California, where she earned a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016) and A House of Many Windows (Sundress Publications, 2013) as well as seven chapbooks, most recently Tinder, Smolder, Bones, and Snow (dancing girl press, 2016). She currently serves as the reviews editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection and teaches middle school in the suburbs of Chicago where she tries to convince teenagers that words matter.