Forensic Psychology and How to Be “Literary”: Nisha Singh on Her Bhrigu Mahesh Series

Nisha Singh is the creator of the Bhrigu Mahesh literary mystery/detective series, set in northern India but with international appeal.

She was inspired by Sherlock Holmes’ logical examination of circumstantial evidence, but decided to also explore the concept of forensic psychology in detective fiction and also its implications for real-life crime solving. She believes that at some point psychology may well become an exact science and advances this view through her books.

Cristina Deptula: Several reviewers have compared your two male lead characters to Sherlock Holmes and Watson. Do you think this comparison is accurate? How are Bhrigu and Sutte like, or unlike, the famous British pair?

Nisha Singh: I knew that this comparison would arise because Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson have become the quintessential detective pair and for more than a century, mystery fans have identified either directly or indirectly, every detective with them, that has been created after them. Many mystery writers over the millennium have been inspired by this British pair and I frankly confess that am among them too. While reading the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I was awed and impressed by his eccentricities and the genius of deduction that he possessed but as I matured and read those stories again, I found that where they were perfect as far as reading the physical clues was concerned, they were quite inadequate in using those clues which we now call circumstantial evidence. That was the biggest flaw in the Sherlock Holmes stories.

While investigating, it’s the standard procedure to lift circumstantial evidence like fingerprints and other residues and Sherlock Holmes helped revolutionize the field of forensic science but it fell short on how those clues should be used. Circumstantial evidence is just the first line of investigation and from there you have to dig much deeper or else it would end up in a botched-up investigation. Therein lies their biggest shortcoming. Sherlock Holmes’s methods rely almost completely on physical clues and not in the least on mental ones.

My detective, Bhrigu Mahesh, on the other hand, looks similar in temperament to Sherlock Holmes because he has a genius too but he is much more aware of himself than Sherlock Holmes and hence he is more mature. He understands that physical evidence just scratches the surface of a mystery and it should always corroborate the find and not dominate it. Bhrigu Mahesh goes behind the mind of his every suspect and lifts mental cues and that’s the reason why my every character is so well developed. Therefore, I should add that my books are a study in Psychology as if it were an exact science with no room for doubt.

In a nutshell, Sherlock Holmes was the genius of the physical realm of an investigation, whereas Bhrigu Mahesh is the genius of the mental realm and through him, I have tried to prove that the former should always follow the latter and not vice-versa.

As far as their scribes are concerned, Sutte is like Watson in the sense that he appreciates the great talent of his dear friend too, but he isn’t a sidekick. He understands his friend and offers help and assurance every time that his friend reaches a crisis. Hence, he is as indispensable to Bhrigu as Bhrigu is to him.

CD: You’re known for your well-rounded characters. What do you think makes the detective character interesting? How do you create original characters without falling into stereotypes? (i.e. brilliant but socially inept, etc?)

NS: My characters are well-rounded because, as I said before, it is imperative to my story. If the characters aren’t fully developed, lifting of mental cues would be impossible.

The character of the detective is made interesting by his strong personality and also by the methods that he employs to investigate. My detective, Bhrigu Mahesh, studies his suspects thoroughly and his scribe Sutte, studies him. For him, his friend carries a world in himself and he is on this exciting journey to unravel him. Hence, he devotes a lot of time writing about his every action and expression in a hope to understand his complex thought processes which he finds fascinating.

My characters are inspired from real life and hence they can never be stereotypical. Let’s discuss the nature of the word- “stereotype” A simple answer is when something gets repeated many a time, its gets stereotyped but I think this definition is untrue and can be used only for things that lack any depth. When the stories or characters are fuelled by your own observation and experience, it can never be stereotypical.

As some things, inevitably, could run parallel that could make it seem like it is the same but if someone feels that way for an original work, they haven’t read it thoroughly or have failed to look for the beautiful differences because they were too occupied looking for similarities. This bias is in the reader’s mind that gives rise to this feeling of an original work adhering to a stereotype. If my readers think this way about my books, I would request them to remove any biases from their minds which lets them concentrate on their preconceived notions. A broad-minded person with perspicacity and depth would never fail to see the real personality of my detective that runs throughout the narrative.

CD: Psychologically, are there any indicators that someone’s likely to be innocent, or have committed crimes? What indicates that someone’s lying or telling the truth? Do you agree with Bhrigu Mahesh that human psychology will eventually become an exact science?

NS: Yes, we can ascertain whether someone is lying or telling the truth by observing them and understanding their psychology. Every human brain has their own programming, as Bhrigu calls it, and if we are able to run that program, we will understand how he or she will behave in a particular situation. But this is a complicated program and every human evolves during their course of life which makes decoding it a very challenging task. It’s very important to understand how every brain is unique and similar too and is also given to be influenced by factors both internal and external. Hence, it’s important that we first try to understand the common factors and then specialize in that knowledge with our own personal observations. Statistical studies that are carried out by psychologists should be supplemented by individual studies that will help to get to the mother lode of this knowledge. Only then will we be able to make headway into understanding human beings, their behaviors and the patterns inherent in those behaviors. These patterns will then tell us all that we need to know.

When we get to that point, we’ll be able to conclusively say if someone is lying or not but for now, let’s hope that the lie-detector is still working!

Yes, I agree with Bhrigu that Psychology will become an exact science one day but we still have a long way to go and brilliant psychologists like Bhrigu Mahesh are rare to find. I have applied psychology in real life in order to understand the motivations of people and what influences their behavior. If we keep pushing the frontiers of this science which is still in its infancy, we’ll be able to make discoveries that will help us understand ourselves better. Evolution will then be just round the corner.

At this point, I would like to draw attention to the word- ‘Psychology’. It is made up of two words, Psyche and logic. Combining both of them together, it would translate to the logical study of the mind. What needs to be done is to understand that if we have to understand our psyches we will have to approach it as logically as possible because logic never leaves room for doubt. Aristotle’s book, ‘Prior Analytics’ first explained the importance of logic and scientific reasoning. It has also a chapter that deals with the study of the mind and how it should be accomplished scientifically. For me, he was the world’s greatest psychologist and his works have laid the foundation for approaching the study of the mind through reason and perception. Today, psychologists are more focused on statistical studies to diagnose human behaviors and hence they leave great margins for error. The field of psychology should be studied like an exact science and only then it would one day become one. This can only be achieved logically, as Aristotle believed.

CD: How do you successfully incorporate comic relief into a story with tragedy, where people get murdered? How do you place the humor in ways that don’t trivialize the tragic events?

NS: Humor can never trivialize any tragedy. In fact, it only helps augment it. From the beginning of time, humor and tragedy have been considered two things that are mutually exclusive. Even Shakespeare used to write chapters quite separate from the main narrative which he used to call “comic-relief”. I know that this practice has stemmed from the fact that everyone believes tragedy can never exist where there is humor and this is very untrue.

My books are a work of fiction but they have been plotted to stay as parallel to real life as possible because it is a scientific work; the study of mind. As everything inspired from reality, humor is something that we come across on a daily basis and it gives us relief from our own problems as we enjoy the mirth of the moment. I have seen witty people entertaining their friends in the midst of great tragedies and I am sure that during the two most devastating events in history, The World Wars, the soldiers and their families must have tried to hold on to humor much more than they did otherwise. What I mean to say is that humor doesn’t come at the expense of tragedy but it is a thing just like oxygen. It is present in the atmosphere, as people need it to survive. And when there is tragedy, the reliance on humor increases manifold.

My first-person narrator Sutte is a satirist and hence he is naturally witty. He sees the world through the lens of humor and even in the most mundane details he sees something or the other that tickles his funny bone. Bhrigu, unlike Sherlock Holmes, doesn’t stop him from expressing himself and thus he writes in the very way that he sees the world. Yes, he goes to places that are shrouded in mystery and hence tragedy lurks round the corner but still his mental makeup allows him to find relief there too. This is the reason that he is indispensable to his friend Bhrigu Mahesh. His ability to see humor in the most stressful of times, provides relief to the great detective and makes him focus more on the investigation at hand which can sometime get too much even for him.

It’s high time that humor shouldn’t be segregated from the main narrative to make it look “serious”. Life is full of light moments and hence despite the greatest of tragedies we see the light of hope to move on. If serious writing means the death of humor, it would be akin to saying that your light moments would be the death of your serious pursuits. If the colors of real life are so complex, its time that fiction should follow suit or else it would suffer genre segregation that would only make it more fiction and less real.

CD: What makes a detective novel, literary fiction, as opposed to those mystery and novels that are genre fiction?

NS: First of all, I would like to say that it is wrong and confusing to remove genre fiction from literary fiction. Literary fiction is a broader term which includes several genres and so separating them makes no sense at all. We just give genre fiction a name to make it more specific, that’s all. Literary fiction is an umbrella term only and should never be used to alienate genres that fall within it.

Literary fiction is the creation of complex characters that make us feel alive by bringing us closer to our own emotions that sometimes need words for expression. Also, we are a part of our surroundings and hence imagery plays a vital role in bringing out our own identities. So, characters and imagery are the two pillars on which rest the works of great literature, be it any genre.

CD: Was there a real-life event or place that inspired the story of The Witch of Senduwar?

NS: Yes. This story was inspired by a real-life event that happened in Senduwar, which is an actual village in the Rohtas district of Bihar. An excavation of a mound found buried treasure and during the monsoon, the odds and ends of that treasure got washed away and seemed to rain gold on the inhabitants. Many used inverted umbrellas to siphon this washed up gold and one or two of the natives got a good influx of money when they sold this gold in the market. I was so amused by this event that I decided to weave the net of my first mystery around this incident.

CD: If you were to set Bhrigu and Sutte’s adventures somewhere else in the world, where would you choose? How much does location matter to your story?

NS: Well, this is a very interesting question and something that I have pondered myself. Bhrigu and Sutte are universal and they can thrive in any location but I have used the villages and cities of India as the location for my stories as I was born and brought up here. Hence, I am acquainted with its cultural diversity which makes for a colorful and sensual writing. I only use the elements that I find captivating; right from the mean streets to lofty temples, and then graciously blend them in Bhrigu’s and Sutte’s world.

If I were to set Bhrigu’s and Sutte’s adventures somewhere else in the world then I would select a place which has a great culture. I have always been fascinated with South America which is replete with its mysterious, indigenous tribes and the great Amazon River which floods every year but still the natives depend on it for their livelihood. I would love to set one of my stories among the Amazonian tribes like the Waodani people who love their forest and enjoy a unique lifestyle.

South America has always been an exotic place to me, wrapped in mysteries and its every country has a unique culture that’s very interesting to read. From the legendary mountains of Peru where the Incas lived to the multicultural Brazil, everything about this continent is very appealing. I have also read that there are many indigenous tribes living in total isolation there than anywhere else in the world which only goes on to add mystery to this strange continent which is ruled by the awe-inspiring Amazon. I would love to explore Latin America’s many hidden secrets, art and culture by choosing locations that reflect its beautiful soul.

Morocco is also a charming place which is still steeped in old values and its Andalusian culture has always held a great fascination for me. I have read many travel articles about this place and how it has always been a sweet spot for writers like Tennessee Williams. It has also played a pivotal role in the creation of modern literary works of great value and Marrakesh is known for its glorious libraries and book shops. The old-world charm that is reflected in its villages is unparalled and if I ever get a chance in future, I would surely like to visit and explore Morocco whenever I am in need of fresh inspiration.

From my choice of locations, it must have become abundantly clear that for me, mystery is a very important factor. Fascinating cultures make for a unique reading experience and they blend seamlessly with elements of mystery fiction, adding charm and sensuality to the stories. Hence, any place which has an old-world charm and has still retained its roots will become ideal as a background for mystery novels. 

CD: Who are some other authors you admire, mystery writers or otherwise, and why?

NS: I am a great fan of Isaac Asimov. His accurate prediction of events based on the scientific knowledge of his time is unparalleled and hugely interesting too. I also admire the golden era of detective fiction as that era gave us some very interesting detectives. I like the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as he had created a bold template for the quintessential detective. I also like Edgar Allan Poe and his stories of Dupin, especially his short story, “The Purloined Letter”. We see the very first marvel of logic-based deduction in this story which has influenced countless mystery writers and has also gotten the gears of my brain to move as I admired and challenged it all at once.

Also, I like R. Austin Freeman and his character of Dr. Thorndyke with his perfect tools of deduction. His inverse detective stories are something that I have hugely enjoyed. I am also a fan of Jacques Futrelle and his detective, The Thinking Machine. His story, “The problem of Cell 13” is also a marvel in logical deduction which really thrilled me when I first read it as a teenager and also fuelled my desire to develop it even further.

I have read many mystery writers from the golden era of detective fiction, and I’ve seen authors like Anton Chekov, Mark Twain and P.G Wodehouse get inspired enough to try their hand at writing some. This only goes on to prove that mystery is something that no mortal can resist and if a detective is even more interesting that the mystery, well, it’s just icing on the cake.

CD: Why do you think so many authors have created mystery and detective books throughout time?

NS: The mystery genre has always been a compelling one because when executed well, they can captivate anyone. There is mystery everywhere and when one is solved, it leads to discovery and every new discovery introduces new knowledge. Hence, mystery has always been associated with the creation of new knowledge. Many great authors throughout time have dedicated their lives to writing in this genre because such stories are hugely entertaining and have an appeal not just for the readers but the creators too. There is a thrill in creating great characters/suspects who are a mystery to the readers and this room for doubt makes them rack their own brains in an effort to remove that doubt and reach their own conclusion. Hence, both the writers and readers are working together on a mystery but their intentions are different. One is creating the puzzle and scrambling the pieces while the other is busy collecting them and putting them in a neat order. This brain exercise is exhilarating; almost euphoric and hence like a potent drug, it is used again and again.

The genre of mystery is also appealing because it organizes the elements of fiction in a way that other genres can never achieve. For the creation of a brilliant mystery, it is very important that every ingredient is present in just the right amount or else the recipe for magic will never come alive on the pages. The work is technical and needs an expert to blend every element in order to create works of great fiction that captivates one and all.

For me, the charm lies in the creation of characters that are mysterious but real and to give a spin to real life experiences that charms readers and they are left wanting for more. I like many genres including science fiction but mystery is something that I love the most because it gives me the power to create an engaging plot where the reader has no option but to be glued till the last page, figuring out the mystery and connecting all the dots. Such a compelling reading experience can only be found with this genre and hence it has enjoyed such an overwhelming success form time immemorial. Also, it provides the framework to explore themes and issues of the modern world and also to explore complex ideas through the narratives of the characters.

Many authors have exploited this genre to use as a framework for telling their colorful and complex stories. No other genre provides such a support as this one and the fun of storytelling is magnified when the platform used is popular and enjoys mainstream success.

CD: In your opinion, what was the world’s first detective novel?

NS: Well, here the opinion may differ, but for me the world’s first detective novel was ‘The Moonstone’ by Wilkie Collins. Although, as far as creating a logical detective is concerned, Edgar Allan Poe was the pioneer but his were only three stories and he never attempted a novel. Collins was the first who introduced social commentary in his detective novels and thus laid the stone (pun intended) for the introduction of mystery genre into classic literature.

His plot is also attractive because it uses the Tippoo diamond of Seringapatnam. The plot is set in the east; Imperial India under Queen Victoria. India has always been the perfect location for mystery novels and Wilkie Collins also succumbed to this temptation by creating a work of detective fiction that is hailed as one of the finest that he ever produced in his lifetime.

An Interview with Grace Talusan, author of The Body Papers

The acts of language and speaking, or not speaking, feature prominently in Grace Talusan’s memoir, The Body Papers, winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, so it was truly a pleasure to be in conversation with her recently and to have the opportunity to ask her about the experience of writing her first book. The following interview was conducted over email in the spring of 2019. While Grace and I began by discussing The Body Papers, we soon found ourselves covering other ground as well, from the everyday structure dogs can provide in our lives, to the value of formal education for writers, the vital importance of good editors, and a lot in between.

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Erica Bernheim: As I was reading The Body Papers, I found myself thinking about other writers who have published non-traditional memoirs that make use of collage forms. Lynda Barry (whose name I was delighted to see appear in your acknowledgments), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Susanna Kaysen come to my mind. Who are some of the other writers and artists whose forms and formal decisions you would say have inspired and influenced you?

Grace Talusan: I have loved Karen Tei Yamashita’s books for a long time and while I was editing The Body Papers, I picked up Letters to Memory (Coffee House Press September 2017), a beautiful epistolary memoir. Throughout the book are handwritten notes, photographs, and other images from her family archives. They are incredibly moving and opened up possibilities for me as I revised my manuscript.

Many years ago, I read A.M. Homes’ novel The End of Alice and then the related book, Appendix A: which Homes’ website describes as “a collection of epistemological evidence, clues to the narrator’s mind, his “confession,” and photo scrapbook, his paintings, trinkets he pocketed: a ring, a watch, three teeth, the knife–all remnants of his lingering and deadly infatuation with a little girl called Alice.  Appendix A: is an exercise of imagination, occupying an unexpected space between truth and fiction, art and evidence.” That stayed with me and also showed me that there were ways to put together a book that were nontraditional.

Besides the writers I listed in my “Acknowledgements” (Sandra Cisneros, Jessica Hagedorn, etc), I was influenced by any writer I came across who breaks the rules of what a page in a book should typically looks like. I can remember seeing E.E. Cummings for the first time as an elementary school student and being so excited by the playfulness in his poems. There’s a part of me that has a hard time taking up space on the page and “wasting” paper so it is freeing for me to see writers own the page and do whatever it is they want on it, including only have a few words or taking up an entire page with an image, in order to achieve their desired effect.

EB: Can you speak about the process of selecting the photos you used for The Body Papers? I’m also curious about your decision to caption the photos from the third person perspective, rather than first person. How did you make that decision, and what effect do you think it has for or on your reader?

GT: Until this moment, I never thought about the narrator who captioned the images. I think I was being lazy, but your question brings up interesting possibilities in terms of who is narrating the images and how that is a different voice from the text. My husband, Alonso Nichols, is responsible for most, if not all, of the contemporary photos in the book and he had captioned them already for to use for other venues and I copy/pasted those into my book and then edited them. A more interesting response, and probably truer, is that the photos are very already intimate and captioning them in third person was a way for me, as a writer, as a human, to get some distance. I decided to pull a lot of photos that were initially in the galley because I felt they were too revealing and intimate. What I mean by that is the look on my face in the photos of my childhood says everything. They were too painful for me to look at because I knew the true story behind what I was trying to hide with my smile.

That’s my story and perspective of what I needed to do to get this book out in the world with images in it, but in terms of the impact and effect on the reader, I can only speculate, but the third person captions perhaps builds more credibility? I think other immigrants, people of color, women, girls, and other marginalized folks understand this experience of wanting evidence or “receipts,” as they are called, to back up their version of things. In case the reader didn’t believe me or dismissed my story, I wanted there to be a kind of third person evidence that the reader could assure themselves supported my story. It’s unfortunate, but that is something I’ve learned to do over a lifetime of being dismissed in small and big ways.

EB: In her novel Geek Love, Katherine Dunn describes some of our most brutal moments from childhood, the lessons we learn, including why children conceal information from adults who might be able to help, how painful it is to realize that adults can’t fix some problems: “Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion.” In Chapter 12, when downplaying the extent of your abuse in a conversation with your father, you say that “[e]ven then, I wanted to protect my parents.” For you, does this impulse to protect also become a factor in understanding why victims of abuse may remain silent for so long afterwards?

GT: I can only speak for myself and for the understanding that I’ve gained through talking with other survivors about why we are silent. There are the usual ways that have been talked about and explored—victims are not believed, they are dismissed, they are threatened, they are pressured to “take one for the team”—and this moment with my father was a way to explore a nuance of this experience. Power is seductive and I wanted even a tiny sliver of power, or the idea of power, in that moment, a time in my life when I was quite powerless in dozens of ways. The notion that I could protect someone else’s feelings, even if it wasn’t true, was a kind of power that I wanted. That moment was also one of the most uncomfortable in my life and I wanted any chance to alleviate the discomfort.

I can tell you that I told my friends what was happening to me while it was happening. They were children themselves and looking back, I don’t blame them for their responses, but they did not believe me. They said I just wanted attention. They told the other children in the neighborhood about what they called my lies. They said my grandfather was too nice to do those things. If my friends didn’t believe me, I had no hope that anyone else would.

EB: Throughout The Body Papers, you juxtapose images of domesticity against images of violence and abuse, such as in Chapter 3, when your father “hangs” in the kitchen while watching his mother prepare food, setting up your own story of abuse later, one which occurs from within the “safety” of home and family. And later, you say that “the irony of all of this is that the most hurt I’ve experienced was while I was living under her roof” (pg. 130), in reference to how your mother cares for you in your adulthood. Is there a way to reclaim one’s home once it has been violated?

GT: I have heard of people having rituals and ceremonies that helps with this. I have never had the experience of feeling truly safe in any home I’ve lived in so I don’t know. I’m not one who is always checking the locks on my windows and doors, but I can say that if there are strange noises, at first, I am completely prepared for anything to happen, for a stranger to walk into my bedroom. Then I have to remind myself that our windows and doors to the outside are locked and I am safe and it is unlikely that that small noise outside is someone breaking through our locked windows and doors.

I worked with a cognitive behavior therapist on this once. She told me to imagine a red traffic Stop sign when I had these intrusive thoughts. I do that. My home is my body and I will likely work the rest of my life trying to reclaim it.

EB: Dogs make intermittent appearances throughout The Body Papers. Your father has the chance to re-live his tragic childhood experience with Lucky through your family’s pampered beagle, Sashi. And later, your husband notes how differently he is treated when he is walking your sister’s dog than when he is walking by himself. Are there other ways that animals and your own relationships with them have factored into your writing?

GT: We don’t have our own pets at this point, but my husband dreams of having have two dogs. So we don’t have animals in our life expect intermittently. In terms this book, I wrote several pieces while dogsitting a yellow lab named Finn for a friend. My writing scheduled revolved around walking and feeding him. I would take him out and feed him early in the morning and then I’d go write for a few hours and then walk him at noon and then return to writing and then walk him and feed him dinner and then read or write and then walk him before I went to sleep. This was a wonderful schedule for me. It forced me to walk and take care of my body between writing sessions and it also put me next to a friendly loving dog who was happy to see me.

EB: The moment of closeness between you and your father in the final pages of The Body Papers is incredibly moving, and I loved the re-telling of it from both of your perspectives. How did you decide where to end your memoir?

GT: I have my editor, Nathan Rostron, and publisher, Ilan Stavans, to thank for helping me find the ending. We went through many iterations of this book. Countless. Dozens. We had many different table of contents. We were moving and shuffling pieces of the book up until the very end. I heard John Irving speak once and he said that he knew the ending of his very long novels, the last line, and he was writing to that line. Whatever that is that he’s talking about, I did the opposite of that for this book. I didn’t know where the ending was and I was not sure that this was the end, but we were constantly moving things around and at some point, this became the ending. I thought it was a placeholder until we found the right ending, but eventually, I realized that this was it. I was nervous to end it here, at this discrepancy between two versions of the same event, because I thought it would raise too many questions for the reader, but the feeling was right where I wanted to leave the reader.

EB: In Chapter 12, you mention that “[d]espite my grandparents’ lack of formal education, they understood its value.” What value do you place on formal education for artists and writers specifically?

GT: I do not believe that artists and writers need formal education to make their work; however, I do believe the value of MFA programs and other similar writing courses is that you are in community with others who could help you in many ways with your growth and development. This often requires money and time. I also think emerging writers need to be careful and discerning about where they take classes and who they invite into their lives. Some teachers and fellow students can be destructive to your writing and you have to guard against that. I have taught for many years at GrubStreet, Inc in Boston and that is the best writing center around. They have intentionally built a writing community that is rigorous, supportive, and responsive.

EB: I noticed in your acknowledgments that you have attended a number of wonderful summer workshops and artists’ residencies, including Ragdale! (I hope you saw the phone booth that Lynda Barry decorated when she was there!) How important have these spaces been for you, not just for your writing, but for connecting with other writers and artists?

GT: Yes! I would stand in that tiny, magical room of her drawings and have a moment almost every time I passed it.

Because of time, I can only attend a summer workshop or residency every few years. I really enjoy them and feel they are a way of resetting and reminding myself that it is ok to put writing and art at the center of my life ever now and again. The Ragdale residency and places like it that are multi-disciplinary are wonderful because I am living and working alongside artists who are musicians, sculptors, painters, fabric artists, and performers as well as other writers. We work alone all day and come together at night to eat dinner. I feel there is a way that all of us impact each other, even in small, but vital ways. I also have loved the spaces where I’m just around other writers. I can be around other people who are like me in that they spend many hours of their life reading and writing to no guaranteed end. Whenever I published an article or essay in a literary magazine or online, my immigrant father would ask me how much I was paid for it and then how many hours it took me to work on the piece. I would want to scream. Being at a residency reminds me that there are other people like me who are motivated (but also privileged) to work in a different kind of economy where the reward is not often financial.

EB: How do you perceive genre and the usefulness of it overall? Where does it overlap for you, one genre into another, both as a writer and a teacher of writing?

GT: I was a child immigrant, the Philippines to the US, but I also was constantly moving cultural contexts every time I left my house. I am very interested in knowing what the rules and norms, explicit and implicit, are for every occasion. I like to know where boundaries and borders are. That said, I have come to realize that the writing and art that excites me the most breaks the rules and opens up what is new and possible. The writers I am drawn to the most are making work that is between or on top of one or more genres. My friend Christopher Castellani, who comes from an immigrant family from Italy, recently published the gorgeous novel, Leading Men, and this book has a play in it that he wrote in the style of Tennessee Williams. When I read that, I thought, “What? You can do that? It’s allowed?” From Chris’ example, now I know that you can. Anything is possible. I need to be like Chris and be braver in my work.

In terms of the fiction versus nonfiction (and there are many kinds of nonfiction—literary journalism, reporting, memoir, lyric essay, and on and on), as both a teacher and a writer, I don’t want to be tricked. Just tell me in some way somehow that this is imagined or fiction or made up. Respect your reader.

EB: Who are some contemporary writers whose work excites you and makes you want to read more?

GT: I am lucky in that I am in the best writing group in the world, the Chunky Monkeys. I am excited by their work and want to read more of it. Looking ahead, I can’t wait to read forthcoming books from my group: Calvin Hennick’s Once More to the Rodeo in December 2019 and Jennifer De Leon’s Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From in February 2020.

I have been paying a lot of attention to contemporary writing by Filipinx writers. I am so excited for Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror in August 2019, Ricco Siasoco’s The Foley Artist and Other Stories in fall 2019, and Meredith Talusan’s Fairest in spring 2020. I just read Malaka Gharib’s I Was Their American Dream, which I am buying in multiple copies and putting into the hands of people I love. I have always wanted to write a book where people felt that way about it and did that.

A Conversation Between Kelly J. Beard and Adrian Koesters: Part One

Authors Kelly J. Beard and Adrian Koesters got together for a conversation on their new works, and talk about poverty, violence, faith, and coming to literature a bit later in life. Here is Part One of their conversation.

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AEK: I thought I would begin by saying that in my novel, Union Square, my main intention, other than to tell a good story the best way that I could, was to describe this place that was such a mixture of so many realities, people, skin color, religious belief. I wanted to set up the story so that that they all could (in theory) find each other in this small neighborhood, relate to each other, and within the strict confines of the time, not see each other as particularly unique or exotic. In part, I was trying to both address identity and provide a foil for some of the more excessive expressions of identity politics, which in my view, at least in literature, has something of a short shelf life. I also wanted to show how important the veneer of respectability is for the people of such a place, that has to do with race, but I would say much more with class and poverty.

KJB: That’s such an interesting observation about the shelf-life of identity politics in literature. I hadn’t thought of that with particularity when writing An Imperfect Rapture, but I have been chaffing at the narrowness of our individual (and collective) apertures for some time.

AEK: In terms of family violence, I guess the advantage I have in this conversation with you is that I’m discussing a work of fiction, while you are talking about your life, your relationships and family. So while the themes are certainly in accord, I can kind of side-step some things if I wish, at least as regards the novel. Someone asked me, “So, you are Catherine, right?” No, I’m not Catherine—I wish I had been Catherine. As a matter of fact, in this novel, there are only a small handful of instances drawn directly from my life experience. For example, for the novel’s denouement, I put together eating a cracker I found on the floor of my babysitter’s house when I was seven years old with waking up at a party when I was fourteen or fifteen, where I didn’t know anybody, sick from having taken God knows what, placing the party of the novel in a house on Charles Street I always wanted to go into but never had the chance.

Having said that, the greatest fear for me has been in people reading the book and saying, it was never like that, these people are not like that, she got it all wrong, who does she think she is—and these would be fears or questions that relate to memoir and non-fiction rather than fiction, but that was and is still hard to grapple with. So that gives an idea of the weight of writing the book, with the last question obviously the most crippling. I think if we heard as kids, Who do you think you are? once in a week, we heard it a hundred times.

The other difference in terms of the violence experienced in my own life is that there was not a person, as with your father, who believed he had the right to punish the members of his household. Though you and I both lived in a certain kind of very familiar poverty, and the massive disruptions that come with it, the only real continuity of family I had was with my two sisters and in my grandmother’s house. So a lot of my memory is very disturbed and discontinuous, and the terrible episodes of violence were less predictable and were not only from one or two other people. The violence and viciousness between me and my siblings was also less predictable and more explosive than what you describe. But I feel that the hallmarks of both our situations come directly out of poverty and the particular violence that goes with it, because I think that violence is so often fueled by shame and a desire for some kind of power, however meager. I suppose not everyone would agree that poverty violence is any different from violence engendered elsewhere, but I think it is.

KJB: I don’t think I fully grasped the connection between violence and poverty or violence and religious fundamentalism until writing this memoir. Even more importantly, perhaps, I hadn’t made the connection between my experience growing up in that particular American shadowland with some of my own rage and inability to navigate the world with any measure of equanimity or inner calm. I practiced employment discrimination law for a lot of years, and have a near-pathological commitment to justice and fairness, and yet the legal system is singularly unfair and unjust to the poorest members of society. One of the things I hoped to do with my writing was to show the rest of the world what it means to be ignored or abused because of one’s class, and to try to open the eyes and minds of readers to how impermeable the barriers to class mobility (at least from poor to middle or upper class) are in this country. It’s a fallacy to think that without intentional, guided assistance people born into poverty – especially generational poverty – have any real chance of getting out of it.

And I do think poverty violence is more pervasive and relentless than what the middle or upper classes choose to believe. I also think you’re right about it being fueled in part by shame and the desire for what one is excluded from – any sense of power or true autonomy — and the rage this fuels is something few writers explore. One of the first (and only) contemporary memoirs that really puts this on the page (in my opinion) is Townie by Andre Dubus III. He does a brilliant job of showing the continual micro- and macro-levels of violence inextricably bound up in the experience of being poor in this country. In truth, poor kids are far more likely to be raped, sexually abused, physically assaulted -to be targets – and perpetrators – of all kinds of violence. Middle and upper class folks are able to ignore or discount this fact by telling themselves, “Well, they’re doing it to themselves. We’re not driving down from our estates to beat up some poor kid.” That’s a subterfuge. Cause and effect aren’t that linear. Every time the wealthy classes choose to ignore or discount the truth of those living in poverty, they are affirmatively reinforcing the oppression of the poor.

I had a girlfriend in law school who came from the wealthy classes – huge money – but she competed with me for a $5,000 scholarship intended for law students with financial need. She knew the judge. She had connections. She won the scholarship. I was already $65,000 in student loan debt – a debt that felt so burdensome as to be almost unbearable – while her family traveled the world and spent summers sailing around the Maldives. How does someone like that justify applying for (let alone taking) a scholarship intended to help the truly disadvantaged? That’s just one small example of the kind of behavior I’m talking about when I say that too often those with means fail to see (or don’t care) how their conduct oppresses, damages, and degrades the poor.

Almost every time I give a reading or talk to folks about my book, I get asked about one of two recent memoirs: J.B. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” or Tara Westbrook’s “Educated.” With respect to both of these writers and the difficult circumstances they surmounted through ivy league educations (Yale and Harvard, respectively) the truth is that this isn’t a realistic formula for more than the teensiest percentage of kids born into poverty. The message strikes me as not only unrealistic but actually damaging because it allows the middle and wealthy classes to (continue to) remain willfully ignorant of the prison generational poverty creates for most people born into it. I didn’t even know what an ivy league was when I was in high school, let alone have the slightest notion of how to get into one (or the slightest chance of getting into one).

That’s not to say I think education isn’t – or can’t be – part of the path out of poverty, and it certainly affected my life and world view, but it doesn’t address the ways in which our culture condones and even encourages the emotional trauma and psychic stunting of the poor. I’m probably misquoting my own work, but at one point I’m writing about the experience of discovering classical piano in college – and how, ultimately, I realized that no matter how much I loved it, how much talent I may have had, how many hours I practiced, or how much I longed to be a classical pianist, I could never make up for the years I’d lost. I quote Yeats’ comment about Keats growing up looking through the window of a “Sweet Shop.” Some of us grow up not even knowing a Sweet Shop exists. And, not to be cynical, but I often wonder if the greater culture prefers it that way.

AEK: This gives me so much to think about! And is perfectly expressed. You could describe the “emotional trauma and psychic stunting of the poor” to those who have no idea first-hand what it means until the cows come home (presuming you even knew when that was), but I don’t think there any way to let them know. For me, there is no very good way to understand why they don’t know, or can’t, whichever it is. There was a wonderful penny-candy store on the way home from one school I attended in 4th and 5th grade, just a little thing run by a little old lady, but the view of the potential world from that “Sweet Shop” where I spent a penny on the afternoons I had one (mostly during the milk surplus when milk cartons were less than a penny each at lunch time) was the first place of longing I can remember fully–and it was in part because I had read “The All-of-a-Kind Family” books in second grade, that had a memorable scene of two little poor girls and their wild indulgence in penny-candy store wares.

Beyond that, I was really lucky–a relative plucked me out of Baltimore to Washington State, just at the moment in junior high when I was about to succumb to drugs and promiscuity. Whatever else that experience was about, there is no doubt that it saved my life. Had I not left, if I were still alive it’s doubtful I would have the tools or the psychic energy to reflect on these matters, much less to have this conversation. What I find with Mr. Emerson, for example, is that readers either get him immediately, or don’t really understand his place in the book. He represents that psychic and intellectual stunting, which he overcomes for a brief period in his life, until the entirety of his circumstances overwhelm him again, and finally.

KJB: Well, that’s one of the aspects of your novel I loved so. You didn’t over-tell or over-explain the characters, which I suppose will leave some readers thinking they don’t get Mr. Emerson or some other character, but really it’s brilliant to leave that measure of mystery. You offer the reader the best gift a writer can, I think. It’s so much more interesting to read work by a writer who trusts the reader’s intelligence and imagination.

AEK: Thank you so much for that—I feel the same about your memoir, that even when you write about getting older and more able to articulate your ideas and beliefs, you don’t insist that the reader accept them or be converted by them.

We also talked a little bit before about both of us coming, if not to writing, to publication pretty late in life. That in my case was fueled by the twin sisters of fear and recrimination, what someone I know calls the very real consequences of breaking the family rules. For twenty years, I didn’t write anything, and just thought, well, you know, I guess I’m not going to be a writer after all. Every time I took up the pen, I thought I was going to die of terror. I suppose that’s not something everyone can related to, even if you have a massive case of writer’s block, but for me it was the thought that someone was going to show up at my door with a shotgun and that would be the end of that.

Slowly, though, and by grace is how I would put it, since I love to write, I began to write poetry, not just because it’s a quick in-and-out (which I think is why a lot of people start with poetry), but because the sheer pleasure of making that music had always been what I loved more than anything. And then I wrote a small book about how praying the Rosary helped in healing post-traumatic stress disorder. From there, I started taking classes in creative writing at the university where I was working, and had some idea that telling stories was pretty great, too, and here I was with this monumentally hilarious and tragic and fascinating backdrop from which to tell a good story. The fear is far from gone and in many ways hardly subsided, but I have learned some tricks and strategies to jump the fence. Teaching for a few years also helped enormously, because I could see that the strategies I had developed for myself as a student were also helping blocked student writers in my classes. Not much has been as professionally rewarding as that, so I thank those students from the bottom of my heart.

KJB: We’re so alike in this! I started writing poetry in high school (actually I plagiarized the hell out of Rod McKuen when I was in grammar school trying to impress my childhood sweetheart) because I loved the feel and sound of language, and the way I thought poetry let me write truths that I didn’t have the courage to admit otherwise. But as you know from the book, I got derailed from that path pretty early on. I actually married a poet the year after graduating from law school – and I think part of me had a fantasy of being in this romantic relationship with a poet who would love and encourage my work until I could find a way to make a living writing poetry, so, you can see I’ve always had a pretty rich fantasy life. Once we were married and I started practicing law full-time, I stopped writing anything but legal briefs. For over two decades. In my early 50s I experienced a major depressive episode, and started seeing a Jungian therapist. He was the first person to help me realize that much of the depression stemmed from the way I’d compartmentalized my life, and how I’d hidden so much of myself and my past from everyone in my life. It was literally killing me.

Now I see that long hiatus as necessary to writing An Imperfect Rapture. I wouldn’t have had the courage or insight to write this book in my 30s or 40s. At some point, it meant more to me to leave this message – the best way I knew how – my particular imprint. Not to get all maudlin, but I recently had a health scare. Thankfully it turned out to be nothing, but when I got the call to come back for additional tests, I remember thinking if it turned out to be bad news, I was grateful I’d written this book.

AEK: That makes perfect sense—and though I’m sorry you had the scare, so glad it meant you put the book out into the world. For me, the starting place was learning about haiku and Biblical literature in 6th grade—I thought, MAN! This is amazing, I didn’t even know you could do this yourself! And then high school, too, I tried to impress a number of young gentlemen with my chops, not to much avail, but still. And I don’t think you can come from anywhere and succeed with words without that rich fantasy life (especially if the fantasy is making some money!). I mean, I still have imaginary friends, so.

Click Here for Part Two of this Conversation

A Conversation Between Kelly J. Beard and Adrian Koesters: Part Two

Kelly J. Beard and Adrian Koesters continue their conversation about the writing life, their experiences of faith, and the legacies of poverty and violence in this conclusion. Click Here for Part One of this conversation.

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AEK: And of course, as you so movingly and astonishingly describe in your book, you take all the rules you learned as a child with you into adulthood, and continue to play by them, consciously or unconsciously. The main reason I created Carmen as a mixed race person, other than to represent the real mix of black and white in that neighborhood, was because, first, I needed a renegade who was a woman; and I needed a woman who would have very good reasons not to care about anything. Carmen turns not-caring into an art form from a very early age, and part of that for her is passing “as white,” though in fact her mother is White. In Carmen’s mind, race is something that, at least consciously, she doesn’t think about as applying to her. But again, I think in that location, this is something that would be possible where it would not someplace else.

The rage and inability to navigate the world you identify I also understand well, even though, like you, it took a lifetime to recognize and understand how directly these came from being poor. It is a very long time since I have not had enough to eat or enough money to buy shoes, and beyond that, I have a Master’s degree and a doctorate, though both were achieved pretty late in my life. For that reason alone, I will never not be a privileged person again, no matter what my material resources. But as author Ruby Payne would say, I have those resources but still lack understanding of social rules. Among my so-called “peers,” I still never really know what the rules are, and see how I still break them all the time. I have lost friends and relationships this way, and experienced a great deal of social isolation. In that respect, I would say that most places at most times of my life, I have been passing as a middle-class person.

For the story of Union Square itself, I also chose to use the Rashomon technique for the first four days of the narrative to replicate the fracturing and isolation I wanted to convey, that as far as I can see is not a part of middle class culture as a rule, while exploring this place and the kind of people who lived in it. Young Emerson represents both the neighborhood and the social isolation that comes with not having been taught how to take on an adult set of rules. Catherine likely represents the more healthy, though immature side of myself, or as I say, who I wished I had been. Petie is the solid guy who is provoked to violence as nearly his default response to every situation—he’s the kind of hot-head who populates such places, though he’s a good person. He’s also the one who really belongs to and understands the environment as such. And Paddy and Carmen, of course, represent the sum of what it means to be broken by such experiences, and how they break everyone else in their turn.

KJB: One of the most compelling and risky aspects of your nonfiction work, I think, is how you directly embrace your faith. Your novel does so as well, albeit more obliquely. I wonder if you get asked about this when you’re reading or talking with folks about your work. How (or why) does one retain her faith despite having witnessed or experienced deeply wounding betrayals by the human representatives of that faith?

AEK: Yes, that is definitely one of the hardest parts of all of this. Mostly, people don’t ask that question directly. I get the feeling they sort of put up with that part of me because they respect me as an artist, for which I’m grateful, but I do find it amusing and yet often frustrating.

The early days of my childhood in the Catholic Church were mixed of fear, awe, and love, and there’s no other way to say that. I have very hazy memories of incidents that seem to have involved clergy members. I can’t say more than that, because I don’t really remember, but the feelings about it are both strong and often debilitating. But I have always had a feeling of “knowing” the presence of God, even in my nominally atheist teen years—and in fact, they were not atheist years, but anti-religion years. I had a hatred of fundamentalist Christians that would have burned your eyebrows off—but that was the embedded rage against all things religious.

The change for me came when I (against all expectation) decided to go to Creighton University here in Omaha for my undergraduate degree. At the time you had to take what now would be considered a dual minor in theology and philosophy, and I ultimately majored in theology. We thought we had discovered the Holy Grail of Catholic truth, Vatican II, and we were taught by lay professors and Jesuits, many of whom I owe a great debt of gratitude to, for their intellectual honesty as well as their care and kindness for me as a young person. In those years, I had a conversion experience, came to understand Jesus as a person, and I’ve never deviated from that since. I went on after graduation to work as a volunteer for a year, and taught high school religion for three years after that. Our family, my husband and daughter and myself, are not what I would call deeply religious, but thoroughly religious. This is simply a matter of fact, not of any kind of superior stance or any assumption.

But having faith and hope in the reforms of Vatican II have obviously been no sinecures for the terrible abuses that came to light over the past four or more decades. As an adult, college and beyond, I have known some truly horrible clergy members. A handful tried to seduce me, or I knew of them seducing or attempting to seduce other young men or women. A priest I held in the highest esteem turned out to be a child molester, maybe a child rapist, I don’t know. Any number of them had adult relationships which, had they been married, would have made them adulterers, and as I understand it, that’s actually one of the commandments you’re not supposed to break. The scope of the revelations of 2002 that were followed by the film Spotlight were shattering, and at one point I was not sure I would survive them.

So, it’s a complicated situation to say the least. Like A. Richard Sipe, I consider myself Catholic, and though I try to be part of a faith community, that is not always possible. Many of the poems I have written are essentially “problem of evil” questions, as Union Square is in many ways a problem of evil novel. No one can get to the bottom of such matter—I certainly don’t pretend to. On the other hand, I also believe that no one has the right to rob you of how you express your truth and belief. So much of the Church right now is bad, but I still think that its core is the revelation of God that I am meant to follow. Though I have tried, I’ve never been able to completely deviate from that stance.

I wonder how your answer will differ from mine, as clearly you were equally part and parcel of your faith and that world as a child. Have you had to reconcile how that influenced you, and have you made a new choice or a different one?

KJB: I have so much trouble with that question. In part because I can’t say I’m Catholic or I’m Jewish, or otherwise claim some presumably concrete theology. When people ask (as they do) “What do you believe now?”) I’m stumped. I spent years dragging my husband and daughter to every church within a ten-mile radius of our home, trying to find a church I felt comfortable in, but after weeks or months, or sometimes years, I’d walk away feeling disillusioned, and often angry. It was usually a tithing sermon that sent me over the edge. I grew up in a church that prioritized tithing over everything – including buying decent food or clothes – and I can’t stand to hear sermons on tithing. In any event, every church experience was ultimately a let-down. I stopped attended services three or four years ago.

And yet, I have never lost my faith. When I try to answer that question about faith – what and why I believe – I am reminded of Jung’s late-in-life answer to that question. He declined to reveal or write about his own faith until he was in his 80s, fearing that to do so would marginalize his work. But in his posthumously published Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he writes that he never lost his faith. His faith came to him experientially, he wrote, and thus he could never lose it. It’s precisely what you said earlier. You can’t lose faith you gain through experience, that is, you can’t un-know the experience of knowing.

And, like you, in the midst of all the pain and craziness, there were moments of knowing and transcendence. I include a few of those moments in the memoir. The times when, inexplicably, I experienced moments of grace – miracles, if you will – that I can’t discount. I suppose that’s the best explanation I can give for why, despite everything, I have never lost my own faith. Sometimes I’ve felt the door closing between me and that knowing, and I work at faith then, because I don’t want to lose it, I don’t want to bear the darkness alone.

AEK: “You can’t un-know the experience of knowing”—wow, that is exactly how I was wanting to say that, thank you.

I guess I would end with the question of culpability and forgiveness, which in a novel is really not the same kind of issue, as long as you don’t condescend to any of your characters by making them holier than everybody else, or more evil than they are. Paddy was the best exercise in this for me, and my aim was to get as close inside the head of such a person as I could, so as to (at least for a while) deliver him as a person and not a cipher or a cartoon. But in memoir, you also have the choice about whom to picture as the enemy and whom the beloved, and you have the duty to take responsibility for your own sins. I believe the accuser and the accused can be unjustly conflated far too easily, that we can put ourselves to blame and shame far more readily than those who hurt us. And I suppose you have already gotten comments from readers who wonder how you could forgive especially your father, and how you could write about that. But that is where I would really appreciate hearing your thoughts, as you must have wrestled with them greatly.

KJB: I have had a few readers ask some iteration of “I hate your dad, why don’t you?”  That just makes me think I didn’t do what I set out to do, which was to work against stereotypes and caricatures with intentionality – to write difficult characters with enough of their experiences and contradictions and complications on the page to make the reader empathize with them – even when the reader may not want to. I feel most heartened by responses like one I received in an email the other day, where a woman said she felt like she should hate my dad but she ended up loving him instead.

It’s deeply complicated, of course, and it brings to mind the Watson research from the ‘60s (studying, among other things, the effect of maternal negligence and abuse on chimpanzee babies, and how the babies kept trying every strategy imaginable to evoke love or tenderness from the parent, no matter how many times the mother ignored or abused the baby – it’s really heartbreaking, but pretty eye-opening, too) concluding that babies and children are so hard-wired to love their parents it’s almost (almost, but not completely) impossible for a child not to love her parent.

Also, I believe that with very few exceptions, if we really get inside the skin of another person, if we can move around in that person’s interiority long enough, we will find empathy and compassion – and love – for that person. I think I spent my whole life prior to writing this memoir trying to figure out the why of my parents’ abuse, the why of what prompts someone who loves you (and who you love with the wide-open heart of a child) to also hurt you. My dad died in 1996, long before it occurred to me to ask that question directly. My mom is still alive, though, and I recently asked her some version of that question. It wasn’t a very satisfying answer. She’s in her 90s now, and has some cognitive challenges, so I didn’t think anything would be served by pressing it, even though her answer was to blame my dad.

AEK: I have pretty well spent my lifetime trying to extinguish my need to walk around in those people’s shoes, but the difference is likely that your father and mother clearly loved all of you. But there is a point at which I just have to say, forgiveness is God’s job, not mine. As one pastor said to me a long time ago, if one of those people showed up at my door and was truly contrite and asked for my forgiveness (and, when your father, Kelly, does that, it changes everything about him for the reader), then I would have a choice to make. I never had to make that choice.

My private feeling is that the betrayal of the mother is worse for most of us. Whether she is the abuser or complicit in abuse by father, sibling, whoever it is, she is the one who is supposed to not be that person. And I would think someone like your mother would have to blame someone else. I agree with you that there is a point at which hammering out the truth despite the expense just isn’t worth it. It doesn’t make us less authentic, I think, but really more so.

And I have to compliment you in turn: what you achieved was obviously a breath-takingly delicate balance of what is, in your life, the truth, the authentic. It is an incredible accomplishment. I love your book and hope there is another one to come, and that we can meet again.

KJB: Thank you so much, Adrian. I was already a huge fan of your work before we had this chance to chat, but getting a peek at the person behind the work has been a thrill. I hope our paths cross again.

In the End, There’s Only Love: A Conversation between Dante Di Stefano and J.G. McClure

Dante Di Stefano: The Fire Lit & Nearing includes several self-portrait poems. I was wondering if you could begin with some thoughts on this type of poem. Why write a self-portrait poem? How are your approaches different in each self-portrait poem? How is the gesture toward self-portraiture different in poetry, art, and life (in the era of the selfie)?

J.G. McClure: I like the “Self Portrait as ____” format for its ability to efficiently establish and contextualize an otherwise absurd conceit. If in the title we get that piece of information to orient us—read this as a self-portrait—we’ll be able to immediately start making sense of what follows. Once you’ve given the reader that firm ground to stand on, you’re free to go where the poem takes you, zany as it may be. So the format allows a lot of freedom to explore different angles on the self: I have a “Self Portrait as B Movie Script” where I get to riff on my affection for campy 80s action movies, I have a “Self Portrait as Ego and Vehicle” where my ego is a tiny man driving me around like a motorcycle, another where I’m the reluctant keeper of an unruly dog named Sadness, and so on. The “Self Portrait” mode lets these otherwise very different metaphors work together in the same collection.

Besides, I suspect that any poem is a self-portrait to some degree. Borges has a lovely little parable tucked away in one of his books’ epilogues:

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.

Whatever you write, no matter how different the subject or style or point of view, the one common factor is always you. Since you can’t escape it, you might as well have fun with it.

Your latest collection, Ill Angels, starts with two back-to-back epigraphs—one from Edgar Allan Poe, the other from the Beastie Boys—and many of your poems are presented as reactions to specific encounters with art or music or literature at specific times: “Reading Dostoevsky at Seventeen,” or “Reading Rilke in Early Autumn,” or “Love Poem Written While Listening to ‘Alligator Crawl’ Repeatedly and Misremembering Lines from Kobayashi Issa.” Could you discuss the ways in which you join allusions to specific times and places? Why situate your poems in this way? How about your blending of cultural references traditionally characterized as “high” (like Rilke or Issa) with the so-called “low” (like the Beastie Boys)?

DD: Don Quixote is as real to me as any friend I’ve had in the past forty years. A Love Supreme is as inhabitable in my memory as the first time I met my wife. The paintings of Marc Chagall appear as warmly in my mind’s eye as the face of my long dead great grandmother. Writing a highly allusive poetry allows me to celebrate all the lives fountaining through my own; those lives include the lives of loved ones and friends, and, also, the lives of the artists, musicians, and writers I love. I don’t like to make distinctions between high and low culture (although, of course, I know what you mean). Who’s to say that The Low End Theory or Paul’s Boutique isn’t as valuable a cultural artifact as Sketches of Spain or Philip Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts? To answer your question more directly, though, I just write about things and people I love, and experiences that compel me (most of which are bound up in some way with art, music, and literature.)

Speaking of compelling experiences, I admire the prose poems scattered throughout TheFire Lit & Nearing, particularly “The Cat,” which like a Russell Edson poem takes an absurd premise to its logical conclusion but does so with a straight face. Whose prose poems do you most admire? Why choose to write a poem in prose rather than in lineation?

JGM: I’m flattered that you thought of Russell Edson; I admire his work a great deal. Another favorite is James Tate’s “Distance from Loved Ones,” from the collection of the same name.

As I think about it, the Tate poem follows a similar trajectory: we start with a plausible premise, and then see Murphy’s Law going further and further as the speaker’s mother recounts the litany of escalating misfortunes that befall Zita. It’s so over-the-top in its tragedy that we can’t help but chuckle uncomfortably. Then we get what could be a mean-spirited joke about the elderly mother’s babbling: “My mother tells me all this on the phone, and I say: Mother, who is Zita?” Again we chuckle—all this, and the speaker doesn’t even know who his mom is going on about.

But then Tate springs his trap: “And my mother says, I am Zita. All my life I have been Zita, bald and crying. And you, my son, who should have known me best, thought I was nothing but your mother.” All that escalating misery, and our increasingly callous response to it, suddenly hits home, and we, like the speaker, have to recognize our failure of empathy.

If the poem ended there, it would be okay: a bit preachy, but fine. Instead, it follows this argument, too, to its logical conclusion: “But, Mother, I say, I am dying. . .” Now we understand that the failure of empathy cuts both ways: the son fails to recognize the mother’s crisis, the mother fails to recognize the son’s, and the distance from loved one to loved one remains uncrossable.

In Tate’s poem, as in Edson’s poems, the focus is on the story that’s being told. I think we tend to see prose as transparent, while poems call attention to themselves as made things. Of course in reality the form of prose mediates our experience of its content too, but we don’t really think about that–we’re used to reading prose all the time for information, without thinking about its form. So I think the prose poem is able to tap into that idea, to keep the reader’s focus on the narrative. For that reason I think it’s well suited to pieces like “The Cat,” or “Parable,” where the narrative is primary.

You’re the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America (NYQ Books, 2018), and many of your own poems directly engage with political issues. For instance, “Words for My Twelfth Grade English Class, After Reading Malcolm X’s ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’ on Inauguration Day 2017” ends with this urgent call to action:

Still, the masts of the Niña, the Pinta,
and the Santamaria are burning
down our dreams as we pledge allegiance to
the flag inside a hood at Abu Ghraib.
Scalpel us out of apathy; take sides
with freedom, with fire, with freedom again.

Do you see yourself as a “political poet”? Is there a meaningful distinction between “political” and “non-political” poems, or is all writing political in some way? What is your view of the role of the poet in today’s social/political landscape?

DD: I don’t see myself as a political poet (or as any other type of poet, for that matter). It’s probably true that all writing is political in some way. From the time I first started reading poetry seriously in the late 90s, I’ve been interested in poetry of the political imagination; Carolyn Forché’s anthology, Against Forgetting, was an important early introduction to a global poetry of witness. Some of my favorite poets write directly political poems: Amiri Baraka, William Blake, Martín Espada, Miguel Hernández, Federico García Lorca, and Patricia Smith (to name a few). I do like to keep in mind John Ashbery’s caveat about political poetry: “there is not much ‘political’ poetry that I like for the reason that the political sentiments reiterated in it are usually the exact ones I harbor, and I would rather learn something new.” As far as the role of the poet in the social landscape goes, I believe that depends on the poet. There are as many different roles for poets as there are poets themselves. One role that most poets share is (to paraphrase Roethke) to create art that undoes the damage of haste.

One poem you’ve written that undoes the damage of haste is “The Cat.” In that poem you end with a wonderful sentence as the world skitters on the brink of apocalypse: “In the end, there’s only love.” Stanley Kunitz said, “All poems are love poems.” Do you agree with that?

JGM: Maybe? On one hand, it’s hard to read something like Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,”  with its comically extreme misanthropy, as a love poem. But on the other hand, maybe in some ways it is. To complain “the world shouldn’t be this way” is to suggest “there’s another way I want it to be.” So maybe in that sense, even the bitterest poems about this world are love poems to a possible alternative. Even in Larkin, I think we can see that. Take a poem like “High Windows.”  Cynical as the voice may be throughout, it ends in a place of almost unbearable longing for the things it no longer can believe in—a longing that feels, to me, a lot like love.

Resignation is as boring as contentment. Fiction writers know this: you can’t have a story where your characters just stand around talking about how great everything is. Likewise, you can’t have everybody standing around saying “Life sure is unpleasant. Oh well, let’s have lunch.” Whatever that is, it’s not a story. What’s interesting is yearning, the hunger for things to be other than they are. Or, when things are good, the tension that comes from the awareness that nothing lasts forever. Love poems dramatize yearning especially clearly. The lover’s complaint dramatizes the yearning for things to be otherwise (for the distant lover to be near). The “happy” love poem shows the joy of things as they are, but in the background is always the awareness that it can’t last (the near lover will eventually be made distant by changes in, or the end of, life).

But other poems can and do engage with yearning in similar ways, and in this way I can see how “all poems are love poems.” For instance, Alan Shapiro has a wonderful poem, “Old Joke,” which argues that the gods’ perfection, their “easy excellence, with nothing to overcome,” renders them incapable of the kinds of meaningful experience that we in our ridiculous, everyday miseries are able to attain. The poem isn’t about a lover, but in the broader sense, it’s very much a love poem to our human imperfectability.

Returning to Misrepresented People, I wonder if you could say more about the process of co-editing that anthology. Any anthology will necessarily accept some poems and reject others: there’s only so much page space to work with. Beyond that, part of the point of an anthology is that the work in it has been preselected: readers pick up an anthology partly so they don’t have to track down and read the mountains of relevant work themselves, but rather can skip straight to the “best” pieces. But on the flipside, this selection process—especially in an anthology specifically focused on questions of (mis)representation—brings up difficult questions about whose work does and doesn’t get amplified and why. How do you go about making these tough choices? How do you see the role of the editor in today’s world, where technology has made it easier than ever to disseminate one’s own work?

DD: Working on Misrepresented People was a learning process. Hopefully, I will have the chance to edit an anthology again with the knowledge I gained from the editorial process on this book. Misrepresented People began the day after Trump became president. I sent out a mass email to every poet I knew asking for work for an anti-Trump anthology. As the project developed the book became a way to explore the historical arcs of injustice and inequity of which the Trump administration is a mere symptom. I also wanted to create a book that would embody a concrete form of activism (the proceeds from the book are being donated to The National Immigration Law Center).

Halfway through the editorial process, which also involved securing a publisher, María Isabel Álvarez came on board as a co-editor and she did a tremendous job helping me make some of the hard decisions you asked about. We weren’t necessarily looking for “best” poems in this anthology. From its inception, I conceived of this project as timebound. So, we looked for poems that drew out different aspects of the current political moment, but also ones that spoke to systemic and historical forms of misrepresentation. Most of the poems were solicited directly from the poets included. There were a few open calls for submissions, but we ended up passing on a vast majority of the work that came in over the transom. We tried to take work from as diverse a group of poets as possible. Of course, not all our choices were perfect, and we passed on several great poems and poets. Having said that I’m happy with the choices we made, and I am tremendously proud of the anthology. I mean this anthology has sam sax, Fatimah Asghar, Kaveh Akbar, Natalie Diaz, Gregory Pardlo, Alberto Ríos, Alison Rollins, Dana Levin, Patricia Smith, Maggie Smith, Martín Espada…and the list goes on! I should add that I didn’t know most of these poets beforehand, but they were all incredibly supportive of the endeavor.

The role of the editor in the digital era is the same as it has always been: to create opportunities for other writers and to provide a platform where their work can be put into productive dialogue with the work of others. Although the internet and social media have allowed work to be more widely distributed than ever before, the digital ether tends to atomize some of the connections that a traditional print anthology or journal fosters and strengthens. As an editor for DIALOGIST and as an anthologist, I see it as my role to take seriously, and on its own merits, every poem that comes my way. I am particularly interested in publishing work that is far afield of my own, aesthetically and thematically. I don’t want to push a single approach to poetry; I believe in a descriptivist editorial stance.

On a widely different note, one element that binds the poems in your book together is the figure of Ellie, an ex-girlfriend, and the breakup that the speaker in many of these poems is working through. The book ends with “The inked blossom of poppies / and rue on her back.” This is such a beautiful and sad image to end the book on. Is this breakup autobiographical? If so, could you discuss writing through heartbreak? How much fidelity do you think a poet should have toward autobiographical detail? Does it depend on the poet? If so, why? How does the trope of loss and the figure of Ellie nuance other thematic and structural elements of the book?

JGM: Yes and no. I did go through an especially painful, seemingly never-ending breakup that acted as a catalyst for many of the poems, and “Ellie” is primarily based on one person (though there’s a bit of compositing). She really did have that tattoo. But names have been changed to protect the innocent, and facts have been changed or made up or left out as needed to make better poems.

I don’t think you need to have any fidelity to autobiographical detail as long as you’re not claiming to. Nobody has a problem with fiction writers making things up; there’s no reason to expect otherwise from poets. (Now if you’re saying “everything in here is true” and then making things up, that’s a different matter. But that’s an ethical issue, not an aesthetic one.) The job of the poet is to make good poems. That’s all. If the way to do that is through fictionalization, then fictionalize away.

Writing through heartbreak can be therapeutic, certainly. In the act of writing, you transform your pain into an aesthetic problem to be confronted on the controlled environment of the page. You take control of it, make something from it, and there’s a joy in that; Yeats called it “the gaiety transfiguring all that dread.”

But at the end of the day, my breakup is only interesting to me. If anybody else is going to care about the poems I write about it, those poems have to show readers something important in their own lives. Otherwise, I’m just indulging in the kind of solipsistic writing Addonizio and Laux parody so well in The Poet’s Companion: “Here I stand / looking out my window / and I am important.”

In this case, I think the breakup with Ellie is a microcosm for a more fundamental aloneness and a more fundamental absurdity that comes with being human. What made this particular breakup so devastating to me was that we were so close in so many ways, but still hopelessly separated in others. Our fights were about stupid, trivial things, as I suspect most lovers’ fights are. They meant nothing and they were inescapable. And no amount of love or good intentions could bridge that gap in the end. It’s a variation of Tate’s Zita problem: you, who should have known me best, didn’t. Couldn’t.

That fundamental separation is, I think, what the book is concerned with. The Ellie poems are about that, but so are poems like “The Astronaut,” which have no connection to her. In a way, I suppose the very act of writing poems is an attempt to bridge that unbridgeable distance—to connect with the reader even though you know it’s always only a partial connection.

In addition to “Words for My Twelfth Grade…,” Ill Angels includes several other poems about your experiences teaching high school. Your poem “Prompts (for High School Teachers Who Write Poetry)” was recently featured on Poets.org, and you are the winner of the 2019 On Teaching Poem Prize. How do you see the relationship between your work as a teacher and your work as a poet?

DD: Being a high school teacher keeps you humble. You’ve got to be tough and a little bit stupid to continue teaching in such a broken system. Teachers aren’t respected in our culture, no matter what anyone tells you, and even in a good public school like the one where I work, you are witness to systemic failures that are crushing. I teach students with learning disabilities, students from extreme poverty and abusive households, and students from great wealth. I teach unmotivated students and wonderful, striving, bright children who want to succeed. I witness deep pain and failure daily. It’s a heartbreaking job with little rewards, but I do my best to help all my students. I’ve always thought of the classroom as a poem I was composing period by period. Frost said: “a poem should begin in delight and end in wisdom.” I don’t believe that to be true for all poems, but I strive for that in each class I teach.

The job has provided me with a decent middle-class life, which has afforded me the leisure to write around my workday. It’s also kept me grounded; no matter how good of a teacher you are, on any given day an angry teenager might tell you to go fuck yourself. Teaching teenagers puts everything else in perspective. You can’t take yourself too seriously if you want to survive in the job. A sense of humor helps.

You use humor and a colloquial phrasing in a manner reminiscent of poets like David Kirby, Billy Collins, and Jeffrey McDaniel. Could you discuss the uses of humor in poetry?

JGM: I think it’s a vital and overlooked tool in the poet’s kit. When I first started writing, I got this idea in my head that in order to be a “serious” poet I had to write “serious” poems, where “serious” meant something like “joylessly clubbing the reader over the head with my very poetic despair.” But somewhere along the line I realized those weren’t the poems I wanted to read or the poems I wanted to write.

Remember the TV show Scrubs? I loved that show for the way that no situation was ever just one thing. The show was very funny, but it took place in a hospital, where sickness and death were constantly present. Characters you cared about died. Characters who deserved happy endings didn’t get them. Characters tried to do the right thing and it all went wrong and the fallout nearly broke them. But the show was very funny at the same time, and that’s what made it so poignant. The show, like real life, was full of humor and full of pain and you couldn’t disentangle them. When it’s done well, humor in poetry can work similarly, letting the comedy and the pain enrich and complicate each other to produce something more than the sum of its parts.

Ill Angels features a kwansaba suite. (The kwansaba, invented by Eugene B. Redmond, is a praise poem that formally represents the Seven Principles of Kwanzaa: seven lines per poem, seven words per line, and no more than seven letters per word). What appeals to you about writing in this form? What challenges does it bring?

DD: I love the fact that the kwansaba is a newer form. There are fewer models for what a kwansaba can be than, say, a sonnet. The only kwansabas I’ve read have been by Eugene Redmond, his daughter, Treasure Shields Redmond, Tara Betts, and Saeed Jones.

I’m drawn to forms because of the limitations they impose upon language, and because of the possibilities those limitations generate. By choosing a form you are also opening up a dialogue with the tradition from which the form springs, and that dialogue necessarily nuances the meaning of the poem you are composing. My kwansaba suite disregards the seven letter per word stricture of the original form. So these are really nonce kwansabas.

You have some interesting approaches to form throughout your book, but I was also struck by the wild ideas behind some of your poems. Two of the poems I enjoyed the most in this collection, “Reverse” and “Chaos Is Seattle in a Spaniel,” propel themselves forward through the momentum of their imaginative premises. In “Reverse” a relationship is imagined as if watching a VHS tape rewinding. In “Chaos…” a misfire from Siri leads the speaker to imagining a life on the molecular level. To write poems like these I imagine you spend a good deal of time daydreaming. What is the role of imagination and leisure in your writing process?

JGM: I’ve never thought of myself as much of a daydreamer, actually. “Chaos” came from a response Siri really did have when I was bored and playing with my phone. If I were better at daydreaming, I probably wouldn’t have needed to play with the phone in the first place. But lucky for me I did, and “she” misunderstood, and the rest came from following that premise where it led me.

“Reverse” came primarily from reading, I think. There’s a haunting image in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five in which his time-traveling narrator notes that when you watch an air raid in reverse, you see planes above a ruined city putting hurt people back together, reconstructing buildings, sucking the bombs up into the sky, and finally carrying them away where they won’t be able to hurt anyone again. Martin Amis has a novel in reverse which explores a similar idea to Vonnegut’s. Matt Rasmussen has a stunning poem in Black Aperture where we see a suicide in reverse. I can’t think of specific examples, but I’m positive I’ve seen the time-rewind device in various sci-fi movies and shows too. So what I did in “Reverse” was take that pre-existing device, apply it to a new situation, and see where it went. I think that’s largely what “imagination” is: not coming up with never-before-thought ideas ex nihilo, but rather combining bits and pieces of old ideas in new ways.

Ill Angels is your second collection. How did the process of writing your second book compare to your first?

DD: Like many first books, Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight collects poems written over the long period of my apprenticeship to poetry. The book spans about fifteen years, and there are many different textures, tones, and formal approaches on display in it. The second book was composed over a much shorter period (about two years). It was also accepted for publication immediately after I finished it and then I had almost two years to work on editing it before it was published. As a result, the second book is tighter, more organic, and more of a piece than the first one. I can’t say enough how impressed I am by the staff of Etruscan Press. It’s been a dream come true to work with them on Ill Angels.

Figures from antiquity and from the world of art recur in The Fire Lit & Nearing: Virgil, Homer, Catullus, Munch, Magritte, and so on. Could you riff on the allusive and ekphrastic gestures in your poems? Why include them? How do they nuance your examination of the contemporary and the quotidian, of sadness and longing?

JGM: However you feel about T.S. Elliot as a critic (and there’s plenty there to criticize), he sure has some zippy one-liners. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” he writes:

Someone said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.

I didn’t really understand that I was feeling the particular loneliness I explore through the lens of a Magritte painting in “Nothing Will Be Alright, But Thank You Anyway” until I explored it through the lens of that particular Magritte painting. And I didn’t really understand the painful banality of friends’ genuine attempts to comfort one another until I thought about the poem through the lens of that title, itself an allusion to a pop song.

Or in another poem, “Raleigh-Durham International,” the central drama of the poem comes from the speaker’s awareness that his little miseries aren’t worthy of the epic mode. He’s no Aeneas, and he knows it, but he can’t stop thinking about his experience in those terms, and the uneasiness about his own interpretive framework becomes part of the experience that he can’t stop thinking about.

In other words, I include the allusions because, to me, they’re an essential part of the experience. I include them because there’s no way not to include them.

That said, I think it’s essential to give the reader enough to go on. In “Nothing Will Be Alright,” I give enough description of the painting so that even if you’ve never seen it, you get the gist. Plus I give the name of the artist and of the painting, so that the reader can google it if they want to. In “Raleigh-Durham International,” I give the relevant narrative context from the Aeneid within the first lines of the poem.

I never want to do what Elliot so blithely does in “The Waste Land,” assuming that the reader has a detailed knowledge of Italian, German, and Sanskrit, not to mention literary sources including but not limited to Homer, Sophocles, Petronius, Virgil, Ovid, Saint Augustine of Hippo, Dante, Shakespeare, Spenser, Gérard de Nerval… (Credit to Wikipedia for that list; I certainly couldn’t have pulled it out of thin air).

First off, it’s a silly assumption to make; probably only Elliot is familiar with everything Elliot talks about. Second, it takes an attitude toward the reader that I find rather troubling. The assumption seems to be “anyone who is worthy of my genius must know these things, and if they don’t, then the hell with them.” It’s a stance that assumes the poet is entitled to the reader’s time, which just isn’t true. If I want you to give up your limited time to read my work, I need to make it worth your while, and I need to approach you with a generosity that acknowledges the gift of time and attention you’re giving me.

The final poem in Ill Angels, “Words for My Unborn Daughter Written After Removing a Briar Patch from My Front Yard and Beginning with a Misremembered Line from a David Ignatow Poem,” wrestles with the question of why we write when we know that our poems, like ourselves, will likely one day be forgotten:

We’ll be buried under the births and deaths
to come, in one hundred years from now, flung,
as the thistles I just plucked from my shirt,
onto the ground and forgotten instead
like these lines. Why strive to immortalize
a gesture? Why not spin this transience
into a gift of crushed wildflower stems
pressed between the pages of Genesis?
Little root and seed, these lines might not survive
their own inception, but so what? …

There’s hope here, a refusal to quit creating despite the real possibility of futility. At the same time, though, the poem enacts exactly that process of forgetting: the Ignatow poem that inspired it is already misremembered before this poem even begins. Could you talk about why you write? Why do you choose to “strive to immortalize / a gesture”? Why through poetry specifically?

DD: I write because I love to read, and writing leads me into a deeper critical engagement with the art, music, and literature I love. It also leads me into a deeper emotional engagement with the quotidian, with the people and places I love, and with the experiences that are always washing over me, and I wish I could keep forever. I write because I love the world and I don’t want it to end. I don’t strive to immortalize a gesture, per se. I just want to be a small part of a conversation that is way bigger than me. Writing also allows me to meet and talk to interesting people like you, Jonathan, and that’s one of the great blessings of our shared vocation.

After my daughter was born, I came to see my poetry as something I could pass on to her, a chronicle of my enthusiasms and griefs. I don’t care if my work endures. The planet is headed for ecological disaster soon, and none of our literature may endure much longer anyway. I would like to leave my daughter something that might show her how much I love her and her mother, a record of who I’ve been at various times in my too swiftly fleeting life.

In Conversation with Poet and Writing Coach Joan Gelfand

Joan Gelfand describes her writing practice as a stove with all four burners firing at once. Looking at her journey thus far and the events still to come, one must agree. I picture her as a chef in a small but powerful kitchen. Burners lit, prep station lined with ingredients, dishes going in and out of pots and pans like clockwork, all in service of a three-course dinner that seems to have been effortlessly created. Any chef will agree—effortlessness requires a good knife and good heat. Joan’s words are the knife and the heat is her four burners kept boiling: craft, commitment, community, and confidence.

Her book, You Can Be A Winning Writer: The Four C’s Approach of Successful Authors, is a holistic approach to creating a writing life that incorporates all the necessary elements to writing success—honing your craft, prioritizing your practice, finding your community, and finally, developing and building the confidence to share your work with the world. In her opening letter, Joan mentions that she wrote this book for writers of all backgrounds and in all stages of life. “I wrote this book for the writer who has never seen the inside of a university.” This sentence stood out to me because I am (somewhat) that writer. I have seen the inside of a university but not the inside of an MFA classroom, or any other writing class for that matter. Joan’s Four C’s, namely, the confidence, struck me as a simple, clear, and validating path to a successful writing career—one that I was already on whether I realized it or not. I was so pleased to be able to interview Joan about how the Four C’s manifest in her writing life.

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LB: First, your craft. 

You are quite an accomplished poet and have a forthcoming novel. What is the “entry point” for you in regard to fiction and poetry? Are they different?

JG: Ideas can come from anywhere—dreams, films, conversations, or sparked by other art. But poetry, well, poetry is magic. I never try to make poetry happen—poetry happens to me. I do believe that poetry arrives from a different place than fiction—a more meditative, quiet, and curious ‘headspace.’ Writing novels feels much more journalistic, left-brained, while poetry feels intuitive, even magical. When writing fiction, I feel like an architect; I am building a foundation, raising scaffolding, finding the gestalt of the project. It’s more like creating a film. But poems are like captured moments—even if they are ‘worldly’ and address ‘big themes’ they are still a project of several hours as opposed to the commitment required of a novel which, for me, has been multiple years.

LB: Second, the commitment. What was the moment you “got serious” about writing? What did that look like for you? 

JG:That’s a question that doesn’t have one answer, but rather levels. For example, I was always writing poetry, starting in high school. When I arrived at Berkeley, a friend commanded: “Type your poems!” So that was a level of seriousness.

LB: Sometimes that’s all it takes! One very supportive (and demanding) friend.

JG: Then I began being asked to read and to submit. I began submitting in earnest—over 100 packages of poems a year! Soon, I had my first collection. That felt very serious. Deciding to get that book published was a game changer.

LB: Do you have any commitment “hacks?”

JG: For whatever reason, I have been blessed with a strong degree of self-motivation. When I am working on a long-term project (for example, right now I am deep into my first memoir), I stick to a routine, usually two-three hours of writing early in the day, depending on how much email I have to answer. And of course, when a book comes out, I am consumed with promotion, social media, writing articles, blog posts, etc. For me, the writing has to be done in the morning because that’s when I am the clearest and inspired. I turn the phone off; I shut down the email.

One ‘trick’ I’ve devised (and there is more in You Can Be a Winning Writer) is to go to my co-working office space a few days a week. There, I can treat my writing as a job. There are no distractions, no pets to play with, no household tasks to distract me.

And, yes, like all writers, I still sometimes struggle to get to work.

LB: In order to keep myself on track, I make a list of writing goals for the year. This year, my goals are 1) to finish a draft of my second book, 2) finish and submit a certain number of new pieces, and 3) receive at least 100 rejections (harder than it sounds!) Do you make goals for yourself?

Absolutely! I do the exact same thing. I set my goals on a quarterly basis. I have a hard time doing it for the year because different things come up that could feel like a ‘derail’ but are actually necessary. For example, traveling to speak at a writing conference can throw me off track, but it’s a great invitation and it spreads the word about my books and my coaching. Some writers won’t tour or travel; I believe in it 100%. It’s so important to get out there or you’ll tap out your local audience within a few months of your book’s publication. Once you are published, it’s great but it does make it harder to stay on track. I remember reading that Tony Kushner (author of Angels in America) was so busy after he won the Pulitzer that he struggled to carve out an hour a day to write!

So yes, I set goals. I also set three to five-year goals as it can take me a year or more to draft a book, get it to the editor, draft again, etc.

LB: Your writing community can have a huge effect on your level of commitment and success. I know you are very involved in the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA); how has that affected your work and career?

Here’s the fact of the WNBA—it was oodles of work and oodles of fun. I spent 14 years on the board, first as the President of the San Francisco chapter, then as the President of the National Organization, and finally as the founder of the WNBA Annual Writing Competition. Running a national non- profit as a volunteer is very demanding.

LB: To say the least.

JG: But here’s the thing: in those 14 years, I either directly or indirectly met all six of my publishers. My first book came out with a group of members who had started a small press. They heard me read at a WNBA open mic, loved my work and asked to publish it. The publishing of my sixth book is an ‘outside the box’ story which I love to tell; I met a woman in WBNA who ran a successful open mic series, so of course, I went to read at the open mic. A woman approached me, said she loved my work and asked, “What else do you have?” I told her I had a manuscript that was looking for a home. Over the next few months, I negotiated a contract with Benicia Literary Arts, a non-profit press. (Read more about this story in You Can Be a Winning Writer.) Bottom line: I am not just theorizing about “teaching writers to become successful.” I have been in the trenches and learned a lot.

What organizations are you a member of right now and what would you recommend to a writer who is new to the game?

Right now, I am dues paying member of the Women’s National Book Association–San Francisco Chapter, Bay Area Travel Writers, The National Book Critics Circle, the Author’s Guild, PEN America. I am also the member of a Bay Area wide women’s poetry salon (invitation only) and another list-serv of published authors (also invitation only.)

Some of these groups have monthly or bi-monthly meetings; some are online only. Some I use simply for the resources. (For example, the Author’s Guild provides legal advice for writers.) I included a list of writing groups and conferences in my book.

LB: It’s a great list! What is your favorite way to show support for your writing community? 

Going to colleagues and friend’s events is surely a great way to show support. It also telegraphs to the literary community that you are not all about your own career. Reading a colleague’s book and giving it a good review on Amazon or writing a review for a local magazine is certainly a great way. Effective literary citizenship is about showing up—giving your time to events and projects that are low on budget but in need of help. I try to volunteer at the San Francisco WNBA events, at conferences, and book fairs. It’s a great way to see and meet your community.

LB: Lastly, I want to talk about confidence. This is my favorite section of the book. I feel like a lot of books on writing cover craft, commitment, and community, but few talk about the importance of personal confidence. Being a Leo, confidence is how I personally get it done! What was the moment you felt like you had “arrived” in terms of confidence?

When my second book, A Dreamer’s Guide to Cities and Streams, was published in 2009 by San Francisco Bay Press, that really boosted my confidence. First, the publisher wrote an introduction that was so laudatory, I had to run out of my office and go shopping to calm down! He compared my work to Gerard Manley Hopkins. He said there was more poetry in my piece “Transported” than in most volumes of poetry. He was a huge fan. The book was seriously reviewed, I was invited to over 40 readings— I felt taken incredibly seriously for the first time. It was my second book but my first time to feel like a “real author.”

LB: What are your suggestions for growing confidence for even the most insecure writer? 

It is very important to compartmentalize. If you are pathologically shy, then you need to get busy on social media and commit to building a following. If you can network and be in public, then you need to make as many friends and colleagues as you can. And don’t forget to pay it forward! Review other people’s books, feature them on your blogs, go to their readings—there’s so much you can do to grow your literary community.

I Know I’m Somewhere New: An Interview with Chelsea Biondolillo

Dana Diehl: In this book, you use birds to reflect on your life. Why do you think birds have such power over you? Why do you think they illuminate your life more effectively than other animals might?

Chelsea Biondolillo: Birds live on every continent. They have incredible diversity of size, shape, color, and behaviors. When I travel, birds are one way I know I’m somewhere new (mockingbirds in Arizona, scrub jays in Oregon, rheas in Chile, tuis in New Zealand, and European cuckoos in Austria). And while they are unlike people in nearly every way, they feature frequently in our metaphors and clichés across cultures and throughout history. This means they can always be found somewhere in the periphery of any story I want to tell.

Practically, I live with a lot of anxiety and attendant depression, and birds are one way for my brain to get some perspective. They remind me about all I can’t know and can’t control, about all the things I can’t see (like geomagnetic navigational lines) and will probably never understand (like why Oregon has a hummingbird that doesn’t migrate). It doesn’t always work, but sometimes looking for a bird can help me to break out of panic states.

DD: As long as I’ve known your writing—about five years now—you’ve been writing about and researching birds. It makes me wonder, which came first? The birds or the writing? Did these passions develop independently of each other, or have they always been intertwined? Or has one fed the other?

CC: I started actively writing after I lost my corporate job in 2008, and my first publications came the following year—short travel essays on a couple of blogs, some sidebar pieces for glossy mags, and a handful of book reviews. One of my first essays published in a real literary magazine, though, was about starlings. It was the runner up in Diagram’s hybrid essay contest in 2011. That same year, according to my Submittable rejection history, I was sending out a piece on red-winged blackbirds (which eventually appeared in Birding in 2014) and one on hummingbirds (landed in Phoebe, 2012). I remember printing a bunch of peer-reviewed papers on big cats when I got to grad school in 2011, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to be the bird lady, but nothing has so far come of those. My thesis was full of birds and I still like writing about them.

My grandmother was an avid birder, and much of my reading and creative pursuits were encouraged by her—so I think there’s some creative-muscle memory there, but also there’s a lot of science available about birds, and so when I had a bird question (like, why do starlings mimic, or are hummingbirds really headed toward extinction), there was easy information to find and mostly approachable experts to interrogate. In that sense, birds helped me become a more interesting writer.

DD: The essays in this book vary widely in form. What do you enjoy, or what is useful, about shifting forms?

CB: My undergraduate degree is in photography, but that’s only because my alma mater hadn’t yet created a mixed media studio major. In art school, I sewed books and glued tiny tarot cards on the pages. I built boxes and filled them with broken ceramics. I took photos and transferred them to watercolor paper. I was always looking for my form—and it turns out it was in a different discipline! Playing with text and form in my essays is one way I am continuing that collage/mixed media process. Experimenting with line breaks or balancing small text blocks with images (or obscuring text with photos) allows me to view an essay as a visual composition or even as an object—which means I can consider how I hope to reach a reader and a viewer, both.

DD: In “The Story You Never Tell,” fifteen lovely, stark, black-and-white photographs of seashells block out fifteen pages of text. The words that creep around the edges of the photographs are ominous and evocative. What was it like to write this piece? Did you know you’d cover it up as you wrote it? If so, how did that affect the experience of writing it?

CB: That essay was originally written as a “regular” essay, but after a few rounds of revision, it still didn’t feel done. I wanted a way to redact the textual specificity without turning it into a MadLib that readers would want to solve like a puzzle. As an art student, I often incorporated words, phrases, or even pages of text in my work, and as a result, had many conversations with my instructors about how readability can negatively impact a composition. (Reading the text was not supposed to be the point in painting class.) I wanted to play with that idea—how much text would it take to make clear that what the viewer was seeing was an essay, without the content of the essay taking over? I was inspired by works from painter Titus Kaphar and texts like Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper, which feature elements of concealment / or otherwise hiding one or more parts of a composition to highlight another. I tried out several methods of obscuring the text, including other imagery, before settling on portraits of seashells from both my and my grandmother’s shell collections.

And while the resulting piece can’t be “solved” through reading (so it’s not like I can spoil it), I am worried that too much talk about the hows/whys of writing it could dictate a new reader’s experience of it in ways that I want to avoid. In that regard, it could be sort of a spoiler to say too much more about it.

DD: You mention several animals that have occupied your life: the cats, the geese, the insects, the dogs, the mockingbirds. Who are the important animals if your life right now, both wild and domestic?

CB: I’m living in the home my grandparents built, and one of the artifacts my grandmother left behind was a stack of birding journals. Over several years she tracked every bird she saw every day—most from her own picture window. It’s been weird and amazing to read her journal and see which birds are still regularly appearing at the feeders my partner puts out, and which seem rare now. We delight in seeing downy woodpeckers and varied thrushes, and often see bald eagles in the neighborhood—something I do not remember from my childhood.

As far as non-bird obsessions go, the other inhabitants of this place, the rabbits, snakes, deer, and hordes of ravenous insects (they got about half of my kitchen garden last year and would love back into our house’s fir posts and beams) and their boom-bust seasonal cycles are one of my areas of focus right now, for both practical and creative reasons. But also, I’ve also become much more aware of plants, as I’m currently surrounded by two acres of formerly neglected landscape. What thrives on neglect, and what literally withers and dies without care is of considerable interest to my gardening decisions.

DD: If you could disappear off the grid for a year and immerse yourself in the study of a single species that you haven’t already devoted a lot of time to, where would you go? What would you study?

CB: Being back on the West Coast has reminded me how much I love the Pacific. Rather than any single species, I’m often interested in systems, and the relationship between sea lions, salmon, and fishermen out here (and its current lack of balance) intrigues me. Sea lions have been seen on local rivers, over a hundred miles from the ocean, and are posing major risks to steelhead numbers, which impacts recreation and ecology. I’m drawn to stories that seem to have easy answers—over fishing or oceanic pollution in this case—but upon review, have complicating factors, like, are the sea lions starving at sea, or are they exploiting ready food sources inland? I’d have to see a lot of the Northwest and North coasts to be able to draw any reasonable conclusions—and that would be a wonderful way to spend a year.

DD: If you could be reborn as a bird, which bird would you like to be?

CB: Probably a crow. They seem to watch out for one another and have a good time when they can.

DD: What is something you are obsessed with right now? It could be a hobby, a TV show, a dish, anything.

CB: I am deep into sweater knitting, having finally settled down somewhere that is at least chilly for much of the year. Since moving back to Oregon, I’ve finished nearly half a dozen, and I have a dark green wool pullover on the needles right now.