In their Own Rivers: A Conversation with Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes

I met Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes when I was nineteen. We were both Creative Writing students at Susquehanna University, a small college in a hilly, rural, rivered part of Pennsylvania. The first times I met Liz, she kind of intimidated me. She was outspoken and smart and hugged easily and would kiss her friends on the top of the head. I'd never met anyone like her.

Over the next few years, Liz would come to be one of my closest friends and favorite poets. I was thrilled to learn, a few months ago, that Liz’s debut poetry collection, Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf, would be published by Mason Jar Press in April 2020. As anyone who has met Liz knows, she is all magic and warmth, and so are her poems. However, they are also ferocious, bold, and biting.

Following is a conversation that Liz and I had (through a shared Google Doc!) in early January. We chat about wolf mythology, song lyrics, and the challenges of writing about violence. Fittingly, our conversation starts with Pennsylvania.

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Dana Diehl: Let’s start at the beginning. Where and how was Ashley Sugarnotch born? Where did she come from?

Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes: When I started dating my now husband, I would drive from Harrisburg, PA to Moscow, PA, mostly along 81 North. Just south of Wilkes-Barre, there is the Ashley / Sugar Notch exit. They are two discrete towns that get to share a sign. I loved that name. I knew I wanted to write something about her—I didn’t know what yet—so I held it with me. I remember saying to my husband, “All I know is Ashley Sugarnotch is a bitch.” She’s not—not in the end—but you can see how annoying she is in the first poem I wrote for her: “Ashley Sugarnotch & the Big Red Bow.” This poem is partially ekphrastic to Bob Diven’s painting “Red Bow” which was displayed at Susquehanna University’s art gallery in the fall of my senior year. I remember seeing that painting and thinking, “That’s her! That’s it!” 

This other character showed up in one of the first seven or so poems I wrote, but at the time he didn’t have a name. I think I originally even thought of him as me! But then I had a dream where I was in a room with a dear friend filled with books and warm light and dust. He was reading to me, and I pulled his mustache off and plopped it on my forehead. And then I was like: Oh. Here’s this other person. I think this person is more sinister than I am. I think he’s a wolf. So I read everything I could find on mythic wolves. 

DD: Have your dreams inspired your poems in the past? How big of a role does your unconscious play in your writing?

EDML: Yes! I dream pretty intensely almost every night and have for most of my life. From the ages of 19 until I got pregnant at 27, I had a dream about once a month where I had miscarried a pregnancy or given birth to a stillborn child. Sometimes fetuses would bloom in my tea. In one of the dreams I miscarried in a birch wood in fall and buried the child under the only oak tree and wept, “Alison Dubai, I'm so sorry.” That was the main one that became poems. I wrote a series of epistles to Alison Dubai in some alternate timeline where I had gotten pregnant as a 21-year-old. I even wrote a poem from the perspective of Kenny! It got published as a very short run chapbook, Letters to Alison Dubai. At the reading, I read the first and last poem and had people in the crowd read the other poems. Kenny read his! Truly weird and beautiful.

The thing about dreams is they feel like something has happened in your sleep. I know that some of the more nonsensical parts are maybe less-than-interesting, so I usually wait until something very beautiful or pertinent to put in a poem.

One of Kenny's dreams makes it in the book too! The beginning of “The Wolf: A Shadow Manifested” are words he said to me as soon as he woke up one morning: i died on a ship / last night in my dream. // the ship had sunk i / was in the only unsunk room.”

DD: Fairytale retellings and adaptations are so prolific in our modern-day culture. Why do you think these old stories are still so accessible and irresistible to us? In Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf, you play with the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. Why were you drawn to this narrative? 

EDML: You’re not wrong to bring up Little Red—I bring her up in that first poem! But Ashley isn’t explicitly Little Red. I think it was Ian Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief (and cover designer!) at Mason Jar who said Ashley was more like Red’s older cousin who teaches her to smoke cigarettes. When I was doing all of that research of wolves in folklore, I came across a bunch of versions (old versions!) of that story. What was most striking to me was that the version we know best was in fact not the most common version. Often times the Wolf won. (In fact, Kenny just read our kid a version of it where the Wolf eats her and it just ends there!) Occasionally, Red saved herself. But seeing the story over and over like that made me start thinking about cycles of violence. Why did Red survive sometimes but not others? Or, why was the Wolf sometimes successful? And how does the moral tale change depending on the outcome?

Ashley and the Wolf live in modern times but they are Big Picture characters. I knew of three different stories where, for example, a daughter was left orphaned because her father killed her mother. One of the mothers, Trisha Edelman, was someone I went to elementary school and junior high with (she has a poem at the end). Is what I write about specific? Of course, to the point that I actually created an annotated version of my own book so I could keep track of everything I’m referencing. But are Ashley and the Wolf stuck in their own cycles—are they bigger than themselves? Yes. 

DD: Please tell us more about the wolf mythology you discovered through your research. Is the wolf always the bad guy? Did the wolf as a symbol change based on where or when the myth originated? 

EDML: I could have told you so much about this during my second year of grad school, but yes—the Wolf is always the bad guy. I read all the Grimm Fairy tales I could find (a very nice collected that the library had). I also read everything I could from this website, D.L. Ashliman’s Folktexts. The Wolf is intrinsically bad in folktales. That’s one of his characteristics. He’s never redeemed or redeemable. In fact, part of the moral of these tales is that people should know better something that on the one hand seems obvious (if fire is always hot, don’t be surprised when you’re burned) and yet also put the blame back onto the victim of the Wolf’s crimes. The last Wolf poem, the one where he’s killed Ashley, was written fairly early in the process. Later, I had peers suggest (as I mention in “Statement”) that I would be contributing to this negative cycle if I explicitly wrote about it happening. So I tried writing some alternative endings where those poems just stopped short of the murder itself. But I never, never wrote an ending where the Wolf redeemed himself or where Ashley got away. Of course that can happen, but that’s not the story these characters are telling.

We love highlighting narratives where someone overcomes adversity against all odds. Even less violent things: I’ve read more than one article on this woman who got some weird loan/grant situation, without a huge down payment, and bought a house in D.C. in such a way that her mortgage is under $1,000 dollars a month. Housing prices are so high here that, for example, even if I had a $100k downpayment, I’d still be paying $400 dollars more a month than I do in rent, and my rent is already more than double that woman’s mortgage. Sorry for all the numbers! My point is this woman is the exception, in fact nearly an impossibility, and yet people write about her like: see! It’s possible! It’s possible for you to climb into homeownership if only you know the tricks! If only you work hard enough! Ashley, Little Red, the kittens that the Wolf eats in one of the stories—it’s not their fault. And while it would be nice if they could break out of this cycle, they aren’t the ones that can do it. 

DD: One of the most challenging aspects of this book is that it asks us to engage with the aggressor. In “The Wolf Attempts to Explain Himself,” there’s this lovely and startling passage, in which the Wolf laments Ashley’s inescapable death and his part in it:

[…] the last thing / i want is to find you in my dreams tonight / and crack open your ribs and rid your body / of its organs. is it so unreasonable to want a justice / for myself? a new ending where i justify / i’m not a wolf inevitable. finding you in the water / of the river and holding you down your body / putting up a fight because that’s human ashley

When we talk about cycles of violence, our first instinct might be to silence or look away from the perpetrator. Why was it important for you to include the Wolf’s voice in this story? What was the experience like of going inside his head?

EDML: I want and need to start by saying I don’t think the Wolf is excusable. And I don’t think you should side with him. I also think it’s worth noting that Ashley and the Wolf are both white. That’s how both of them can survive for as long as they do—the privilege of their whiteness. That’s also largely what Ashley’s first poem is about: how she was so privileged, even if she felt so destroyed. 

I wrote all of these poems before #MeToo. I think it’s incredibly important for us to call out the people who have done terrible things, even if the justice can only be a public record (See: my poem “Statement”). But, I think going forward we have to consider how we can prevent these cycles from happening. I had a friend (mentioned in the “Be Kind” poem) who raped someone. I haven’t actually spoken to this person in more than half a decade now, but I still remained friends with him at the time. What he did was inexcusable. But I also know he was incredibly sick for months leading up to the choice he made. He did not have resources to get help. He tried on more than one occasion and was either waylaid or outright rejected. I was there; I saw this. It was not my job or my other friend’s jobs to take care of him more than we did, which was the most we could. But I wonder: what would have happened if he had gotten help in all of those moments before? What if he had been able to utilize the resources that would have stabilized him? There’s a graphic memoir (and now a movie, apparently) called My Friend Dahmer about a dude who went to school with Jeffrey Dahmer before he committed all of his terrible acts. He also muses here—what structures could have been in place to prevent him from murdering? The story about Pinegrove, the band, and how the lead singer was accused of some misconduct is, I think, a good example of something that could happen. An intimate partner of his called him out, and he took a full year to reflect—including taking time off from touring and being in the public. He only returned after, through a mitigator, his accuser gave her blessing. If that hadn’t happened, he might have ended up like Jesse Lacey, lead singer of Brand New, who spent years abusing women, some of which were minors! 

None of this is a full solution, but I wanted us to be with the Wolf in the moments before he acted. He fails, but he’s also in a system that lets him fail. Ashley and the Wolf are both walking upstream their own rivers.

DD: You’re open about the importance of music in your life. In fact, your poem, “The Wolf: A Shadow Manifested,” is written after a mewithoutYou song. What has music taught you about poetry? Are there any other musical artists who influenced this book?

EDML: Truly, the music I love the most is music that makes me feel like I’ve been torn apart and put back together. I want and hope my poems make people feel that way too.

There are a few sneaky lines that I added that were misheard lyrics, if I’m being honest. “you knew / hate is defined / as spitting out / each other’s mouths” is from the song “Still” by Daughter. She means that two people are fighting and spewing hate. I misunderstood it as people turning an intimate act, like kissing, into chewing each other’s faces off and then spitting them out. Yikes, Liz. 

The poem about the Ashley having windmills in her chest instead of lungs is also an actual dream I had, but the line itself is from “Almost Crimes” by Broken Social Scene. The actual line is, “You’re like a messiah, pal. Little kingdoms in your chest.” I thought he was saying windmills for years! Ironically, “little windmill” IS in a song, just not one I found until much later: in the Blink-182 song, “All the Small Things,” they end by singing, “The night will go on, my little windmill!” A term of endearment!

Another tiny note: I have a line about dragging a lake because it shows up in two songs: “Cicatriz E.S.P.” by the Mars Volta and “Floater” by Every Time I Die. No one else, when I workshopped that, knew what that phrase meant! 

So I guess music has mostly taught me weird words and turns of phrase, intentionally or not!

DD: If your book was a band, what genre of music would it play? Where would it perform?

EDML: They would play mid-aughts punk rock. No, actually—it would probably just be my favorite band, Roof Beams, which is folk rock. And because it was my book, and not the actual Roof Beams, they would play in my living room whenever I pleased. And sometimes outside in the summer in the grass. And sometimes next to my bed as I fell asleep. 

DD: Something people in the lit world might not know is that you co-host a podcast, The Smug Buds, with author and editor Will Hoffacker. So, I have to ask. What are you most smug about in your book?

EDML: Two things: the first is the sestina, “The Wolf Attempts to Explain Himself.” I had a teacher in a workshop setting tell me, “Well, it got pretty close to succeeding, too bad it won’t.” Basically, saying I had made a good effort but that the poem was impossible to fix. Well, considering it got published on its own and is now in this book, I feel pretty smug about that. 

The second is general, but: it’s the book itself. I had a lot of support writing this book, but very few people got really excited about it. Workshop, something that I am not super precious about, was mostly grueling. So often it seemed like people didn’t understand what I was saying/doing. I thought it all made sense in my head, but sometimes I would explain myself into circles. I didn’t think I needed to revise the book more (by the end of the writing process) but most of the feedback I got back was pretty lukewarm. But I knew the book was there, I knew all of its intricate parts, so I just went for it. The most gratifying part of getting this book published is—starting with my press, Mason Jar, and then onto the many people who so graciously blurbed my book—they all get it. At first it was relief. And now I’m just hella smug about it.

DD: Who should read Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf? Who would you like to read it?

EDML: You know, I have a lot of coworkers who have told me that my writing is too sad. To one of them I actually said, “But aren’t you concerned with the human condition!?” And she said, “NO!” One of them, who read my essay, “Touch Me,” told me it was just so sad. I said, “Oh no! That’s the warmest thing I’ve ever written! No one dies!” (I then followed this up, after a pause, with “There are some things worse than death, though,” and wow did he roll his eyes!)

Which is to say, if you just want to escape, like maybe not my book? But if you like stories, if you like poems, if you like things that aren’t exactly one thing or another, please read my book. I feel like I’ve always been in all places at once. I’m pansexual, neither here nor there. My poems tell a story but also have very specific forms. I sewed a man’s dress shirt to a skirt and wore it to a wedding this spring. If the things you like most you have trouble explaining because they seem to wimble-womble—then you. You should read my book!

Celebrating the Humor and Humanity of Black Women in Not Without Our Laughter

Written collaboratively by the Black Ladies Brunch Collective, Not Without Our Laughter: Poems of Humor, Joy & Sexuality is a book of poetry that centers the voices of six black women: Saida Agostini, Anya Creightney, Teri Ellen Cross Davis, celeste doaks, Tafisha Edwards, and Katy Richy. Editor celeste doaks posits that this book, itself a riff on the Langston Hughes title Not Without Laughter, offers “temporary shelter from the storm” of present-day racial injustice and gives voice to the experiences and laughter of black women. These voices, says doakes, have often been marginalized in the struggle towards equality, a struggle which would ultimately be lost without the laughter and voices of black women. And rightly so. The collection is riotous—often times humorous, but seasoned all throughout with devastating moments of depth that give punch to the levity.

The book is divided into sections of varying lengths by theme, with such titles as “…Our Lists and Litanies” that complete the phrase “Not Without…” They run a gamut of personal experiences and daydreams, from fantasizing about other women’s husbands to the ethical dilemma of getting rid of a mouse. The majority of the poems take on a conversational tone, with the exception of those poems like “Prince—Album Cover” that utilize reverent, elevated language for the sake of comedic effect: “With the lavender dreamscape behind him/ who was this god, naked astride a Pegasus?” Throughout, the poems bring a wide range of nuance and diversity to the black female identity and experience, which emerges, along with the empowerment found in vulnerability, emerge as an overarching theme throughout the book. Though the book features six different poets, the work as a whole is unified in its voice, tone, and execution of vision.

The collaborative format of the collection functions on a variety of levels. Although the collection is edited by a single editor (celeste doaks), and although the poems are written by individual poets, this book does not read like an anthology or themed journal issue. Beyond the identity of “black female poet” that the six women of the BLBC share, the voices, forms, and themes of Not Without Our Laughter share a thematic flow. For example, Anya Creightney, Saida Agostini, and Tafisha Edwards all write at least one poem in prose form, without line breaks, and there is an entire section in which various poets take on the poetry-as-list format. Though the handling of these forms varies, the repetition of their use by different authors lends an overall visual and stylistic cohesion to the book.

Poems in the book interact specifically with each other, as well. As readers will see from some of the italicized subheadings in the by-lines of each poem, there are poems in the book that are written as specific responses to other poems. While there is inconsistency in the effectiveness of the response poems—some, such as “Kamal and Beebee” come “after” poems that appear later in the collection, while others such as “Finding the Divine” read more like criticisms of the poems to which they are responding than as standalone poems—there are some response poems that are true gems. “Atomic Snowstorm” takes the words from “Ars Poetica with Fever” and scrambles them to create a new poem with a unique meaning. “Knowledge of the Brown Body” responds to “harriet tubman is a lesbian,” itself a poem about reimagining historical heroes as queer, to riff beautifully on the risks and implications of loving a black female body during the era of slavery. “If Harriet Tubman had been a lesbian,” the response poem says, “I would know the brown body had been/ valued outside of chattel, to the point of risk.” Actively engaged with the prior poem, “Knowledge of the Brown Body” takes the concept of one poem, a poem about a queer woman re-writing history to create a queer hero, and exploring the implications of that concept in a new way, i.e. what impact a queer hero from the slave trade era could have on black women and “the brown body” universally. It is moments like these where the response convention really electrifies the work as a whole: a woman’s personal desire for a hero that speaks to her own identity becomes universalized, valuable to anyone with a brown body. These responses speak to the book’s overall theme of nuancing the identities of the collective while also unifying them. Regardless of the strength of each individual response poem, the response poem convention overall makes for a dynamic work that engages, re-engages, and rethinks its subject matter and themes much like an individual poet’s collection of work would do. This work is alive and engaged within itself, more so than an anthology or journal that merely collects the work of various authors, occasionally centered around a loose theme or aesthetic.

Nonetheless, there was one way in which the multi-author collective could have taken this convention even further. That is, it may have served a book written by a collective to have some actual individual poems written by multiple authors. Not Without Our Laughter does a great job of maintaining visual, stylistic, and thematic cohesion throughout. Still, where can one really draw the line between a “collectively written” book of individual poems and a well-curated anthology? A couple of multi-authored or collectively written poems may have gone a long way. Nonetheless, the collection still stands as a cohesive collective work in its continuous self-referencing and its sharing of form among poets throughout the work.

As is the case in many multi-authored books, there are inevitably poets whose work rises to the top. Saida Agostini and Tafisha Edwards emerged for this reader as the standouts in the collection. Agostini’s language and imagery is ablaze without fail throughout the collection, starting with her first poem “Adventures of the Third Limb,” a hilarious but touching ode to the speaker’s dildo and the way “she” brings the speaker and her girlfriend together: “she is fluent in seven languages, drinks dos equis, can paint, sing gospel,/ praise dance and is head usher at the church of dynamic discipleship.” Readers of Not Without Our Laughter will have their eyes light up when they turn a page to find her name italicized below the title, promising strange and fresh perspectives on familiar archetypes, historical figures, bodily functions, and amorous encounters. Likewise with Tafisha Edwards. One of her poems, “Top Billing,” begins “Starring My Pussy as” and goes on to list a litany of invented roles that range from hysterically funny to heartfelt and empowering, including “Doom of Man™” and “My own Mound of Oshun.” Like Agostini, Edwards stands out as a strong, highly developed, intriguing voice throughout the book. This is not to suggest that the quality of poetry in the collection is overall inconsistent—though readers may at times find themselves wanting more from some of the poems by celeste doakes in light of the overall more powerful voices of her five counterparts. Rather, Agostini and Edwards provide two voices that further electrify this otherwise highly energetic collection of work.

In a supposedly “post-racial” society that still commodifies, dehumanizes, overly romanticizes, and overly criticizes the lives and choices of black women, Not Without Our Laughter does something radical and important: it features poems about black women being purely, unapologetically human. This is a book of poetry that values honesty and humor over self-seriousness, and yet the book does not lack depth as a result. Mason Jar Press has a true gem on its hands in this book by the Black Ladies Brunch Collective, and it is a gem you’ll want to get your hands on.

That's How It Is With Me: A Review of Notes from My Phone*

It’s tempting to write off Notes From My Phone* as a gimmicky attempt at memoir without fully plunging into the self-indulgence of writing about oneself. The contents of this book started as notes that Michelle Junot left to herself on her phone. At the urging of Mason Jar Press, they were shaped into a collection of memoir fragments that construct a twentysomething woman’s quarter-life crisis, among other things.

Even that is tempting to write off. Who cares about a twentysomething woman’s quarter-life crisis, you might ask. All of our favorite celebrities are dying and Donald Trump is filling the government with Nazis. Enough with this Thought Catalog “elegy for my twenties” bullshit, the past few months have taken too much from us.

I’m getting really specific here because I had those thoughts when I started this book, and I’m glad I ignored them. As it turns out, Notes From My Phone* is quietly profound.

For one thing, it’s not all lists and reminders to buy contact solution. Themes do emerge from repetition; heartbreak, self-doubt, rejection, attempts to regain confidence as a response to heartbreak, and a mouse in Michelle’s apartment whose appearances get funnier as Michelle gets more exasperated. As someone who once found a mouse sleeping in his damn bed a few apartments ago, she won my sympathies.

“The power just went out. How is this my life?” Michelle wonders at one point during the mouse’s unwelcome tenancy in her apartment. “I’m in the dark with a mouse who may be agitated by the smell of peppermint.”

Earlier, she’d been ruminating on whether it was better to be aware of the mouse’s presence, or ignorant of it. “I am not one for confrontation,” she writes. “I do not like speaking about hard things or the lump that forms in my throat when tears find my eyes. I don’t like the way that men’s faces change when my eyes tear.”

Later, she writes that the mouse “taught me how I deal with fear: I let it consume me. I let the what-ifs rule who I am. I err on the side of seizing a false sense of control over my life.” By this point, the mouse’s original, comedic role in this book has shifted into a mechanism for introspection.

Religion has a similar function in Notes From My Phone*. Michelle is a Christian, and a lot of talking to God happens in this book. In a way, that’s kind of a bold move, to announce one’s religious beliefs beyond the context of ultimately rejecting them, or as part of a grander redemptive arc.

“Lord, I’m tired, and I’m awake again,” she writes, complaining of insomnia. “I want to take comfort in you, rest in the fact that you have a plan for me. Rest in your grace and deep love for me. Rest in the fact that those feelings and desires and misunderstood heartache will go away soon. But how will it go away if I don’t let go of it?”

“I just wish I understood what was of you and what wasn’t,” she says later, while grieving the end of a relationship. “I’m scared of your comfort, and I’m scared what following you might actually mean,” she says in a prayer, of sorts. “How do I learn to trust you when my own heart gets in the way?”

Clearly, Michelle’s relationship with God is complex and frustrated. When she prays for advice about how to move on from a dissolved relationship, or what it means to be an adult when the hallmarks of adulthood (career, house, kids) seem impossible to reach, one wonders if she’s using prayer as a vessel for talking to herself.

Michelle wonders that herself sometimes. “I like to think I put my trust in God,” she says, “but really, I’m functionally trusting myself/and then I screw up/and then I’m shocked by it/because I have this unrealistic view of my own heart.”

The frank, confessional tone of passages like those — and the book’s sparse interior layout — makes the reader feel almost voyeuristic by the end. It’s like finding your outwardly stable older sister’s journal and discovering her hidden frailties; this book genuinely doesn’t read like something that was meant for other people to see. In that sense, it’s unlike any memoir I’ve ever read before. Both in structure and execution, Notes From My Phone* resists the urge to show off, and therein lies its strength.