Fluid Geographies: An Interview with Laurel Nakanishi, Author of Ashore

P.K. Eriksson: It was so very refreshing to read about a Hawaii that felt like a real place instead of the tourist-seducing prose and photoshopped images the tourism industry pushes. As a person who has never been there, I enjoyed biting into some reality. Can you speak to how or why Hawaii inspired the book? What was particularly Hawaiian about its inspiration?

Laurel Nakanishi: Hawai‘i has been, and continues to be, such a formative and integral part of my life that it is hard for me to imagine writing anything that does not ground itself, somehow, in this place. I was born and raised in Kapālama — an area of Honolulu, on the island of O‘ahu. Although I am not Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) I have still been shaped by many Hawaiian teachers and values, in addition to the ecological abundance of these islands. Along with Kanaka Maoli influences, the poems have also been inspired by Hawai‘i’s multi-cultural heritage and my own background as a poet of multiple ethnicities. I try to trace some of these lineages in the notes section of the book, and point to some key inspirations under the sub-headings “Further.”

Eriksson: I found what appeared to me to be a distinctly Western US influence, a voice that recognizes the land and place and the things of place. In particular, Gary Snyder came to mind with your concrete imagery and Poundian line, and of course, both Pound and Snyder have significant Eastern influences. Do you feel connected to the poets that adopted the East or the original sources more? As a writer in English, do you feel torn by the influences of both the East and the West? How do you or do you even feel the pull to honor them both?

Nakanishi: I admire Gary Snyder a great deal, especially his attention to the natural world. He is pulling from a long line of writers, particularly Japanese poets, in whom I’ve also found great teachers. I do not feel torn between the literary traditions of the US and Japan, but I do feel the limitations of my access to Japanese writers due to my limited fluency in Japanese. I love the work of Sei Shōnagon, Masaoka Shiki, Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa, and Matsuo Basho, along with contemporary Japanese writers. And while I try to read multiple translations, I know that much is changed in that shift to English.

Eriksson: The poems often seem to decenter the importance of human experience, particularly in poems such as “The Shark” and “Catalog.”  It seems intentional to draw one’s self as a writer and us as readers out of ourselves. Was this intentional or does it merely reflect your unguarded mindset? Why do you feel the need to give voice to the non-human?  

Nakanishi: I actually feel that these poems, and the others in the book, are very deeply rooted in the human experience. Although the focus of the poems is on the natural world, it is seen through a human lens which inevitably deciphers and warps what is seen and how that seeing is related. In “The Shark,” a fictional narrator has an affair with a shark and births a half-shark son. This poem, written in prose segments, explores the blurred lines between human and non-human, and the ways that our own children can prove to be quite foreign to us. In the case of “Catalog,” although a narrator seems to be completely absent, the descriptions of the animals are indelibly marked by human observation — in the use of language at all, and in that open sense of wonder that might characterize human observers. Instead of giving voice to the non-human, I see the project of these poems as attempts at interaction and connection with a greater ecosystem which includes both humans and non-humans.

Eriksson: Much of the second section of the book deals with family lineage and mixed family lineage in particular. Increasingly, this must be more the norm in America. I found your expression to be inclusive and so full of heart. What do you wish for us as a country where a strain towards purity is so often the test for identity?

Nakanishi: In so many different areas of our society, I see a pull towards binary. For many people, identities and understandings that resist clear categorization can feel frightening, or at worst, threatening. Yet, this habit of thinking and acting based on binaries can cause a lot of suffering, dividing us into groups: male/female, republican/democrat, human/animal, etc. I find this mode of binary thinking within myself, as well, especially when I question, “Am I Asian enough? Queer enough?” and “Where do I really belong?” But no one is never really just one thing. I believe that we are all a mix of different influences and entities, changing despite our desire to cling to one identity. I wish that we, as a country, could see past the binaries that divide us and begin to dismantle the systems of power that dehumanize so many for the benefit of a few.

Eriksson: Mānoa serves a significant role in the book, and its placeness speaks to story. Much of the collection, the longer poem “Mānoa” in particular, speaks to a worldview of water and its replenishing nature. Significantly, story plays out in novel and compelling ways to elucidate this place and seemingly life on Earth in general. What role do you think story could play in modern American culture, a culture which values pie charts, logarithms, and data over subjective human expression of story?

Nakanishi: Well, I often enter into a poem through the door of an image, and try to craft descriptions that are both precise and surprising. This grounding in the physicality of the world is a steady note in the series of poems called “Mānoa” (scattered throughout the book), and in the last poem of the book, the final “Mānoa.” Along with imagery and lyric musicality, it folds in narrative, research, and mythology. I was especially interested in exploring the mo‘olelo (story, history) of Kauawa‘ahila and Kauakiowao — a pair of siblings who escape their abusive step-mother and hide in Mānoa valley. This, and many other stories, are written in the land. Knowledge of a place in Hawai‘i must include knowledge of its stories. I love the depth and nuance that stories provide and the ways they link us to an ongoing history and relationship with a place.

Eriksson: While some poems press directly into a particular place, another poem speaks with much greater ambiguity about place, “Place(less)ness.” Does this ebb-and-flow of place seem more historical in nature or is that something more characteristic of this particular place, Hawaii?

Nakanishi: I wrote “Place(less)ness” when I moved to Nicaragua. As I adjusted to a new life in a rural town along the banks of the San Juan River, I was doing what I can only describe as “survival writing” — writing as a form of grappling with a new place, culture, language, and socio-economic reality. A few of these musings were later worked and re-worked into poems that appear in Ashore — “Place(less)ness” is one of these. I include this poem in the book because I think it serves as an interesting counterpoint to the poems set in Hawai‘i that are so clearly grounded in a sense of place.

Eriksson: What is your hope in writing poetry in this day and age? Why would you want people to read your poems and poetry in general?

Nakanishi: There is so much value on busyness now and countless ways to occupy our time. We may be swept away and swept away from ourselves, but poetry offers us a unique opportunity to slow down and look deeply at the world. I teach poetry writing to elementary school students. In my classes, I explain that poets are just regular people while one super power: they know how to notice the world around them. I love that poetry can take on so many different forms, and through different poems, we may explore new avenues of experience and build empathy for others. I hope that Ashore helps readers in the continental US and elsewhere to experience another (less commercial) side of Hawai‘i. And I hope that readers in Hawai‘i see the book as an invitation into writing their own poetry about this beautiful and nuanced place.

A Decorous Way to Explode: An Interview with Avner Landes, author of Meiselman: The Lean Years

Control

Stuart: Martin Amis has this great line about early Roth, that he was “always looking for a decorous way to explode.” I don’t necessarily sense this in your meticulous writing but I do sense it in Meiselman himself. At one point he says, “Jews don’t believe in controlling emotions. Jews believe in controlling actions.” Meiselman might know this intellectually, even theologically, but it doesn’t always work out for him in that way. The novel deftly introduces this idea early on when you write: “After thirty-six years, Meiselman had reached a limit, a breaking point.”

Avner: Yes. Meiselman thinks the “breaking point” is that he’s done taking everyone’s abuse. In reality, the breaking point is that he’s done sublimating his emotions. Of course, this isn’t something someone simply decides to do, and, in Meiselman’s case, it swings too far the other way, where he suddenly can’t control his emotions or his actions. Most of us wrestle with this question of how do we know when to act on our emotions. We have to learn to hear what the world—people, situations—is telling us. It comes down to self-awareness, but even the most self-aware person will get it wrong some—or most—of the time, but we hope that awareness of getting it wrong will lead to a better outcome the next time. As the story progresses, Meiselman loses any ability to control his actions. Can he reverse this before the story comes to a close?

Fatalism

Stuart: There are so many strong observations in the novel about what I would call Meiselman’s fatalism; he’s doomed, he deserves it. When he has car trouble he thinks, “Meiselman would never pull over for Meiselman.” You counter this with a comical strain of American self-improvement: he’s reading Lee Iacocca and Sam Walton and Ray Kroc, he’s wondering what Colin Powell would do. Meiselman wants to change his luck, even though he thinks his “luck breaks even.” This is such a rich source of return throughout the novel. And in many ways it works for him. Toward the close of the book, he is playing to win. Where do you locate the origins of this, and how did you think about luck and self-improvement when writing the book?

Avner: Early on, when I thought about the book’s shape, I used Bruce Jay Friedman’s Stern as a model. In the beginning of that book, Stern’s wife suffers an assault and humiliation at the hands of a neighbor, although we’re never fully sure what happened. Stern determines that he will eventually have to confront the neighbor and defend his wife’s “honor.” I was taken with this idea of Meiselman identifying a possible moment of redemption or liberation, which he does right after suffering his own humiliations at the story’s outset. When writing the book, I believed that this was a make-or-break week for Meiselman. Everything would change or he’d be doomed to a life of repeating the miserable patterns that had defined his lean years up until this point. But when I finished writing the book, it occurred to me that maybe this isn’t a unique week, a moment when the light bulb went off. Maybe this too is a pattern, where Meiselman identifies an upcoming moment that will act as a test, a moment when he can take an unexpected action and change his luck. Meiselman says at one point, “Every day, every waking moment, we torpedo potential paths to redemption…” Maybe for Meiselman every week is a week like this one.

Jewish writers

Stuart: Meiselman is an orthodox Jew from suburban Chicago who works in a library, so let’s start crankily with what it means to be a Jewish writer. I’m thinking of recent takes on this question by critics like Adam Kirsch and Joshua Cohen, who generally conclude that it’s the non-Jewish lions – Updike and Franzen come to mind – who long to play the Jew, while writers like Roth and Bellow wanted only to be Americans. What does identifying as a Jewish writer mean to you? What does it mean to write a ‘capital J’ Jewish book; Meiselman is not a Jew because he likes pickles and Crossing Delancey — he’s a believer. What are your hopes in publishing such a Jewish book, an American book?

Avner: Roth, Bellow, and Malamud definitely influenced my writing early on, but I took the wrong lessons from them when it came to the question of being a Jewish writer. I appreciated that they wrote stories that were heavy with Jewish content and populated with Jews because this was their world. Even if one can argue that Roth, especially, does end up saying a lot about Jews and the Jewish experience in America —you and I have been discussing The Counterlife, to pick one huge example —it would be presumptuous to assume that this was his goal. Well, I made this assumption when I started writing. And I strived to do similar things with my own work. I wrote a story called "My Trip to Poland," about a formerly religious guy who goes on a JCC heritage trip to Poland with a bunch of retirees. He ends up getting drunk every night in the hotel bar with one of the Polish hotel workers, and too hungover to ever join the group for the tour of Auschwitz. Is that funny? Hell, yeah. But the story bothered me as I developed as a writer, because it had nothing to say about people and why they do what they do. The humor felt cheap and obvious. To paraphrase something David Bezmozgis once said, irreverence implies that something is revered, his point being, I guess, that irreverence isn't something a nihilist can pull off, and if we can't access a character's soul then it's tough to know what he or she reveres. Eventually, I grew as a writer and became more interested in the characters themselves, as opposed to using them as vehicles to deliver a message, Jewish or otherwise. Readers can feel free to identify me as such but they shouldn't expect any grand or guiding statements. I don't speak for Jews. I don't even speak for me when I write. I speak for the characters I'm writing.

Fertility

Stuart: Meiselman and Deena’s fertility struggles are a source of humor and pathos throughout the novel. This made for some colorful passages. “Deena ate mandrakes, drank willow water blessed by an Israeli seer, recited Psalm 145 daily, and visited the graves of rabbis. Deena’s barrenness, though, could not be cured, and frustration ended this routine.” Talk about what this plot line meant to you and what you were trying to accomplish.

Avner: It came from my reluctance to give Meiselman and Deena a kid. At the time I started writing the book, I didn’t have a child and wasn’t confident I could pull it off. But here was an Orthodox couple that had been married for four years, and, in that world, fertility issues are one of the only reasons why a couple like that wouldn’t have a child. In the end, this plot line did a lot of work of manifesting Meiselman’s delusions, starting with his blaming their difficulty conceiving on “Deena’s barrenness,” when it is his own sperm count issue that is the problem. Then there is his reluctance to consider adoption, his belief that genes are all that matter, and not because he believes in nature over nurture, but because he assumes adoption will paint him as a sterile, and, therefore, unmanly man. But the real question I hope readers will ask is, “Is Meiselman prepared in any way to parent a child?” On some deeper level, is this why he can’t impregnate his wife? The thought does eventually occur to him. 

Food

Stuart: When Meiselman acts out, it is often through eating. I would say he has a borderline eating disorder in these, his lean years. How did you think about using food (and candy) in the novel?

Avner: Meiselman eats the same bowl of oatmeal at breakfast every morning and the same peanut butter and jelly sandwich, bag of chips, and apple juice box for lunch. Every Friday night, Meiselman and his wife eat dinner at his parents. Mealtimes in Meiselman’s life, in other words, are ritualized, providing him with the order he strives for in every other area of his life. How else will he keep his impulses at bay? He has even come to expect certain types of conversations at each meal. Breakfast is lighthearted, he and his wife sharing news stories from the papers. Sunday lunch is for serious matters. As his wife, Deena, remarks at one point, “It’s fun watching you with your parents at Shabbat dinner. Everyone giving rundowns of their week.” In Deena’s mind, mealtimes are about connecting. In the book, however, mealtime usually ends up exposing the frayed lines of communication between the people sitting at the table. Because food can only occupy people for five, ten minutes. Then they are full. Then they need to do something with their traps, which usually results in talking and saying the wrong things. At one point Meiselman comes across the name of the actress Christina Ricci and we get the line, “Meiselman rented one of the actress’s movies thinking it was about football. Turned out it was about a miserable family sitting around a dining room table spewing bottled up grievances at one another.” This is a more accurate description of how mealtimes unfold in the novel. The movie is Buffalo ’66.

Our entire discussion could have been about food in the novel! But I’ll just add something about candy, or, more specifically, non-kosher food in the novel. When you grow up Jewish Orthodox, you are surrounded by people from your community and you have little awareness that most of the world doesn’t share your lifestyle. Food plays an outsized role in those moments when you make contact with the “outside world” and its divergence from how you live; ballgame hotdogs; commercials for candy; the bar and bat mitzvahs of cousins who don’t keep the laws of kosher. Through a child’s eyes, food, more than anything else, becomes the symbol for how the other half lives. So, yes, he acts out and briefly breaks free from his confinement through eating. But these forbidden foods he eats are also about his appetite for exploring new tastes. Change isn’t easy for any of us, and it usually does look juvenile.

Therapy

Stuart: I really enjoyed the resistance and acceptance of therapy in the novel. I'm curious how you see therapy functioning in Meiselman’s Orthodox community? You write that he doesn’t like people who think of God as your pal. Is a therapist your pal?

Avner: This book is a subtle love letter to therapy. Sure it engages in all of the stereotypes about therapy but only because they are all true and funny. Meiselman, we can all agree, is a prime candidate for therapy, the three-days-a-week variety. We learn he went in his twenties for a year, but, for an inexplicable reason, his mother took him out of therapy. From Meiselman’s memories of his time with Dr. Lin, we detect regret over his not having had more time with the doctor. It was having some type of impact on him, however small. Later, when it’s decided that he’ll return to therapy after an eight years absence, we sense his excitement but also his anxiety. He knows it’s what he needs to finally let go of certain things. But who will he be once he lets go of those things?

Now to answer your question about whether a therapist is a pal: It takes years and years of therapy to understand that the answer is no, a therapist isn’t a pal because what friend would put up with so much complaining; a therapist is a therapist.

Losers

Stuart: The Capitol Riots have gotten me thinking a lot about the history of losers. I read this provocative idea about losers recently, in an essay about how the Hebrew bible could be historical fiction to soothe a nation that lost. I was reading your novel at the same time and I couldn’t help seeing this “history of the loser” in Meiselman. I’m curious what you think about this idea in relation to Meiselman: “History may in the short term be made by the victors, but historical wisdom is in the long run enriched more by the vanquished  . . . Being defeated appears to be an inexhaustible well- spring of intellectual progress.”

Avner: “Soothe a nation that lost” seems to indicate a sugar-coating of history, which wouldn’t be enriching but impoverishing. But maybe a people, or a person, need both things along the way. We first need to feed ourselves a soothing explanation, something to get our breathing under control. Then, one day, we’re ready to confront what happened and deal with the cold, hard truth of it. That’s how I see Meiselman’s processing the history of his loserdom. So many books treat traumas as if their interpretations are clear-cut to the victims and readers. That they unlock a deeper mystery, explain motivations. (I want to be clear that I’m not talking about violent, severe traumas. We’re talking garden-variety traumas.) I’ve tried to treat the interpretation of the traumas in Meiselman’s past as something ongoing. At age forty, we’ll look at something from our childhood in a much different way than when we were twenty. We’ve identified other patterns. We’ve learned more about our own tendencies and the tendencies of others. Or maybe we’re not more enlightened and we’ve sunk even deeper into our own delusions.  

Subtitles

Stuart: Finally, the full title of the novel is Meiselman: The Lean Years. What made you decide on a subtitle? Was the book ever just called Meiselman?

Avner: There was a point late in the game when I considered dropping one of the titles, but my publisher, Jerry Brennan, urged me to keep both of them, and I’m glad I took his advice. The subtitle? I always thought calling a 420-page doorstopper The Lean Years was a solid joke, one that was even funnier when it was 550 pages. I also like the idea that we can look at this one week in Meiselman’s life and know that all of his years until this point have been lean. It does prompt the question whether fat years are on the horizon for poor Meiselman, a thought Meiselman has at one point in the book, although he can’t recall the biblical story and is unsure of what precedes what. But the book takes place in 2004, and Meiselman’s beloved, long-suffering White Sox haven’t won the World Series in 86 years, a streak that will end the next season. Why the Meiselman part of the title? Because this is not a parable. I want to make clear to the reader from the get-go that no matter what you may think of him, I’m here writing this book, standing up for him, when nobody else in the world will.  

[Scene Change] Good Job: A Conversation between Terese Svoboda and China Marks

The grotesque Pinocchio-nosed image on the cover of my new hybrid text Theatrix: Play Poems was made by China Marks. We met at a wild 70th birthday party. She was part of a friend's study of geriatric artists — ha! laughs purple-haired China, geriatric? Recent exhibits are accurately titled: “China Marks, Not Quite Human” and “China Marks: Time Traveler”. Although I found this sculpture most appropriate for my title, it is her more recent work, primarily “sewn drawings” and “sewn books,” that has most inspired Theatrix. We share hybrid forms, the seductive line, visual wit, an interest in patterns, appropriation of found objects and images,  narrative drive, idiosyncrasy and flamboyance. Here is an excerpt from Theatrix: Play Poems published by Anhinga in March.

What? is your line

I think I’m panicking
I think I’m panicking
etc.
crying practice

[windowless]

quick, a dream:
one of you accuses the other

What? is your line
the gun is fake but you need a license

Miss Vulgarity comes forward in
a lack-of-bathing-suit competition

a different voice speaking “I”
to an “audience”

and rants: and you and you and you
and it wasn’t like that

brief interview with an innocent bystander
before the lover slash narrator finds his way over

floating along and then the queen says
women were at best queens then

WE

the chorus     too loud
but that is opinion
answers back: even the building is burning

[insert choreography]
where who keeps the extinguisher where backstage

Men and Their Ways

As ornery and subversive as a video by Matthew Barney, Marks' broadsides, books, and text-based drawings both invite and repel interpretation. Some pieces exercise Oulipian restraint, using only text found on the fabric itself, but more often texts appear in bubbles, titles, commentary and dialogue that she sews into the image by a computerized embroidery machine. Her visual iconography is often  found re-imagining 14th to 19th century tapestries in the style of Max Ernst meets Donald Barthelme. Part of the fun is trying to decipher the original. She's rethought a drawing by Peter Paul Rubens of “The Battle of Anghiari” and a lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci, and she doesn't hesitate to acknowledge her sources, providing a link to the original. But it's hardly an imitation or even “in the style of” — the original is the springiest of springboards.

Winging It

“I don’t know if the fellow on the left really wants his wings washed,” writes Marks, “or has something else in mind. But their eyes have met. The one bent over her laundry, who answered his question with another question, is waiting for his answer. Something deliciously fraught is going on. Whatever it is, we have a ringside seat.”

To me "deliciously fraught" suggests play. And there's theater in "ringside seat” that depicts situations of tension and conflict, like a circus, play, film or novel. Like me, she is in the audience as well as on the stage, often, as China says, “surprised, sometimes thrilled at what I see, or so bored and restless or unhappy that I make drastic changes, until my own jaw drops….”

Terese Svoboda & China Marks

T: Theatrix: Play Poems is not so easy to appreciate read aloud as my other work, although there's still sonic considerations. More of the play in these poems occurs visually, in the spacing and typography. I make visual decisions that are not completely foreign to yours. My choosing where to place a piece of text is similar to your positioning text where it sometimes "rhymes" with a brush stroke of sewing.

C: Of course there’s drama in my work, because I tell stories. I am a compulsive story-teller, ask anybody who knows me because I answer questions in the same way. Though I suppose there are other ways to do it, I not only draw, but also must draw attention to my art. Story-telling is a useful strategy for women, to get children to go to sleep or eat their vegetables and to keep men from killing us and to get people to spend some time looking at at my latest drawing, maybe even buy it. Women who lived to tell the tale were probably the best story-tellers.  It must be built-in to at least some of us by now. Look at you.

T: Are we engaged in Q & A?

C: We are engaged, darling, kiss me.

T: I'm puckered.

C: How/why did you come up with Theatrix? I mean, there’s theatrics, but capitalizing it and changing  cs into an x changes everything.

T: Best to cap a title anyway, and it's all about play: “trix” as “tricks:” and even the multi-colored breakfast food. It's also a portmanteau of “theater” and “-trix" — the suffix that turns masculine agent nouns ending into feminine. You get to re-hear the last syllable of “theater” and gender-switch it, a performance all on its own.

C: Didn’t notice the gender switch, very nice! And why do you think you were able to “cut loose” with Theatrix?

T: You, dear. All the sotto voce's, those mutterings, lie at the core of what's important. In that, I believe, we are joined. I no more put down two words on paper and I see sparks between them and the page and the space and sometimes each letter, yet I endeavor to thread a story through, with bits that remind the reader of his own story. Your storytelling is never straight-forward narrative either.

Monkey Boy and the Magic Beans

C: Never straight-forward. A curator said she’d recently noticed (after 7 years) that the man sitting in the flower in “Monkey Boy and the Magic Beans” had a black eye and wondered why. I said I didn’t know why. The characters in my drawings live their own lives. As I keep saying, I am only part of the process, a process that wakes me up in the middle of the night with suggestions, concepts, apercus, most recently to reset the direction of something I’d already been working on weeks, but it was right to do so. The drawing is much better already.

Then also, seduction, to pull the viewer close, using the dynamics of the plot, if there is one, decorative elements, workings of the stitches and sewn lines, textures, what’s matte and what shines, the very plasticity of my figures. I make these drawings to have access to this material.  I am the first to be engaged and then my drawings pull viewers in. But I make it up as I go along, revising endlessly, simultaneously making it and watching it happen under my hands. I give myself over to the process and it all comes from that, the interminable process..

You mentioned the spacing and typography in Theatrix. Made me think about the charged spaces between elements in my drawing, my decisions about grounds, possible colors and patterns, what typefaces to use for certain texts but not for others. Text can take forever, re-written as the drawing changes. I draw the more-or-less human figure. I believe that there is an intuitive homologous knowing when human beings look at drawings of human figures and a need to see such things.

T: The cover image on my book, although singular, evokes a multitude of animalistic and human identifications, crippled, deceitful, yet innocent. Is that complexity evident early on in your work? Monochrome you are not.

C: I am after as complex a truth as possible. Your play begins before it begins and begins several times more in Theatrix. And it is as if there is a giant hand (the artist’s mind?) manipulating the characters and speaking for them. Simultaneously cozy and strange. Reminds me of when I was a child and we used the back of a sofa as a stage, with stuffed animals as the actors…. moving them and speaking for them as we liked….

T: That's exactly it. I have used my own tiny theater experiences, the ghost-texts of Shakespeare, Beckett, and downtown experimental theater and “sewn over it,” with some animation (see “Cast”) of characters that are not usually animate because why — animists are pre-animatronic.

C: Theatrix, the morphing, the high-jinks, the this-into-that, compression and expansion of time, etc.

T: All those things you do as well.

C: The only thing is, it goes both ways: my current drawing is derived, not literally of course, but formally, from Theatrix, which is crammed with tricky bits. The little drawing I began to work on a while ago, has been punching well above its weight, requiring many revisions, waking me up in the middle of the night to work on the text and title, insisting I get up at 4 this morning to finish the sewing, maybe. Have to look at it again, but I think so… Still must write the text file, sew it out and sew it on, clean up the edges, make and sew on the hangers. Another day or two… But I need to know.           

My title is a cue for applause, but of course this isn’t a theatre.

Will this do? “Applause” Or does it need parentheses ? Or should I put it in parentheses but without italics? Please advise.

T: Brackets.

[Applause]

Oddities and Pleasures: An Interview with Rick Bailey

EF: One of the things I admire most about these essays is how you’re constantly making unexpected connections and leaps. For instance, in “Don’t Wait,” you bop between your faltering hearing, the “what it is” salutation from a former student, a problem with your foot, the article your wife sent you on fashionable hearing aids, and reading The New Yorker. Can you talk a bit about how you create an essay? Where do you start, and how do you know what paths to follow? How do you know when it’s “done”?

RB: Where does an essay start? With a tidbit in the news, with something my wife says, with a piece of music that triggers a memory or arouses a curiosity. Why is this important? Why is it funny? What does it remind me of? Where does it lead my thinking as I walk through the day?

“Make the subject of the sentence you’re writing different from the subject of the sentence you just wrote.” That’s what Richard Hugo recommends in Triggering Town. Introduce multiple subjects. I followed that advice when I wrote poetry and then began to apply it writing essays. “You get 3-4 balls in the air,” a teacher once said. The trick is to keep them from falling on your head. In the piece you mention, “Don’t Wait,” failing hearing, that curious “what it is is…” locution I hear so much lately (reminding me of an eighth grader I taught in 1980), the thing on my foot. . . . It’s all-at-once-ness. When you think about it, that’s consciousness, right? We walk around thinking 10-15 things at once. They’re related and unrelated, random and connected. 

I was driving my son to get his wisdom teeth removed the morning it was announced that Encyclopedia Brittanica would cease publication. That news triggered an essay in which I told the story of my son’s experience under the knife while also reflecting on those tomes I was so familiar with when I was a kid, which drove me to do some fact hunting about Brittanica, how long it was in publication, its shortest entry (woman: female of man), how it has been supplanted by information technology. What often happens when I’m managing multiply subjects is discovery in one thread triggers ideas and possibilities in the another thread I’m working on. I feel like I’m “done” when the two or three threads begin to converge, when I can weave them together in a satisfactory way.

EF: I love the idea of so many balls in the air, of so many different nodes of connection. Along with all these disparate ideas coming together, I see you’re writing a lot about finding balance too, for instance balancing purity and gluttony, health and desire. Having spent so much time in Italy, do you think this is a particularly American phenomenon?

RB: Yes, I think it is an American phenomenon. Especially if you’re from the Midwest. I grew up in a meatloaf family, in a farm town, where we went to the Methodist church and became very wary of sin. Very taciturn. Very modest. One mustn’t call attention to oneself. Then I married into an Italian family that was garrulous and noisy and very big-hearted. “We keep fast on Fridays during Lent,” my wife said of her home, where we sat down to a voluptuous feast that was a fast only in the sense that there was no meat. And after dinner, when we pushed back from the table, her mother and father told family stories and laughed until they cried. It was a different universe. I was (and am) so lucky. I’m still a child of the Midwest, somewhat modified.

EF: Yes! I see that as another kind of balancing here: your Midwestern upbringing and your ties to Italy. Your time in Italy figures prominently in the book, and especially your interest in the language. You mention learning Italian through reading women’s fiction, and how there’s a humility to it. Can you speak to what learning other languages has taught you, and how it’s maybe changed (or not) your relationship with English?

RB: “You seem like a different person when you speak Italian.” One of my colleagues said that to me one night. We were in a restaurant in Florence. At the time I was doing 7-day excursions in Italy with small groups involving what I called “heroic eating.” His remark called to mind something I had been thinking about.

I was lucky to learn Italian in the home, from my wife and her parents. Over time I learned what my wife likes to call “the song,” the rhythm and intonation and phrasing of a language that’s not accessible on the page but alive in your ear. When I said to wait staff in a trattoria, “What do you have that’s good?” I said it the way my Italian family would say it, loading the question with enthusiasm and passion. There was a performance aspect to it, a kind of impersonation. If you have an immersion experience, for me 44 years of marriage, you gradually get the song right. But you have to be willing to get things wrong, to appear foolish. On a train over there years ago, I said something to a nun that made my wife and her cousin howl with laughter. Another time I announced I was going to become the Pope. In a bar I told someone I first came to Italy in the 15th century. 

EF: I haven’t yet hit double-digits in my marriage, but am continually learning that lesson about the willingness to be wrong. Forty-four years married, wow. Obviously you and your wife have grown and changed a lot over those years, and I see that aging comes up throughout the book. I love that you talk about it in so many different ways—sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, sometimes matter-of-factly. One of my favorite lines in the book is when you mishear your wife and write “a word can be Rorschach test . . . you make of it what you will.” There’s something so charming and positive about this. Aging has obviously entered as a subject you write about, but I’m wondering, has it also changed your writing process?

RB: On one hand, I sometimes feel a sense of urgency. In her 80’s my mother disappeared into dementia. I think about that. I think: I should write every day. I should capture memories and the fleeting oddities and pleasures of right now. On the other hand, that urgency, that decision to write, is just part of daily life. All the years I taught writing online, I wrote every day, with and for my students. Since then I’ve blogged for a number of years, which is part of the daily practice, the regular regimen.

EF: What a wonderful thing to have made a practice. Along with aging, I noticed technology and its advancements are a thread through the book. You say in “We’re Melting” that “humans are at war with the natural world.” You mention this in relation to the weather and the hardships of being outside when it’s less than pleasant, but I kept thinking of it in wider terms. Can you talk a bit more about your idea of humans in conflict with nature and how technology comes into play?

RB: Well we certainly have the sense of a ticking time bomb, right? We try to manage nature, all along with a sense of dread. Nature is going to come back and take a terrible vengeance. I read a story the other day about chicken in a test tube: lab-created chicken-ish meat that will be nutritious and environmentally friendly. Just think how excited those lab technicians and food engineers must be, how geeked by the tools they are using, for the betterment of human kind, to be sure, but also with deep engagement and satisfaction with the tools at their disposal. You just think, what about that oops moment. Will that come? We make mistakes, we flub, we cannot anticipate all the consequences of our actions. With tech we alter the world and we alter ourselves. My grandkids are born into a device-ified world. They will not learn to read the way I did. They will not read the way I did. I no longer read the way I did. What impact is tech having on deep cognitive structures and habits of mind? It has always been the case: the world we occupy is thick, complex, evolving, and we have always engaged with whatever tools we have available. My gosh, the sextant, the telescope, the microscope, enlarged understandings and greater human capabilities. I remember reading Rime of the Ancient Mariner, asking the question, Why does he shoot the albatross? Because he’s holding a crossbow. The tools make us do it.

EF: And yet I’m thinking back to your first answer, about how you make those connections between ideas to form an answer, and it gives me hope the computers and lab chickens won’t complete make us obsolete. I’m sure there’s no specific answer for this, but I’m wondering how long you go between living and experience something and then writing about it, or how you know when you’ve got the narrative distance to tackle a subject.

RB: My wife and I were taking one of our long Covid walks a few weeks ago. We were discussing—I should say arguing about—whether it’s safer to step off the sidewalk into the street when another walker is coming toward us or merely move a few feet off the edge of the walk and turn our heads to avoid the contagion. What are the chances of getting hit by a car vs. inhaling the virus? Over the next day or so I wrote on that what-are-the-chances theme, which caused me to remember crossing the Irish sea in 1974, from Hollyhead to Dublin, arriving the morning after a bomb went off. What were the chances? That experience in Ireland had been sitting there, in memory, for decades. It was a pleasure to examine it, to tell that story, and to frame it in the present moment.

I probably tend to lounge around a subject rather than tackle it. In The Enjoy Agenda, my second book, there are a couple essays in which “tackle” might apply, one essay going all the way back to high school (how’s that for distance?), another addressing “shortism,” the size-related bias humans seem hard-wired for, like racism or sexism. I needed distance on that subject. Still do.

EF: Like above, I noticed these discussions or “arguments” with your wife set off a lot of your wonderful tangents in your essays. Your wife figures prominently in many essays, and I read her as somewhat of a long-suffering woman who both loves you and is annoyed by you. Is it difficult to portray someone you know so well when there’s no way to fully incapsulate them on the page? How do you go about turning a real person into a character in your work? 

RB: I’m a very annoying person. She is long-suffering. She is also extremely private, so I take a minimalist approach to presenting her in my writing. My capture mode is mainly dialogue. People who know us will say: In your books, that’s just what you two sound like. In my writing you will know her by her reading and our ordinary interactions that pack married life. She reads everything and she remembers everything she reads. And she is a great summarizer and explainer. Sometimes it’s hard for me to get a word in edgewise. So in many of the essays, she’s kind of a straight man for me. My three collections, I’m getting my edgewise words in. 

Rick Bailey grew up in Freeland, Michigan, on the banks of the Tittabawassee River. A small-town Midwestern guy, he married a woman from the Republic of San Marino and over the ensuing decades became Italianized–avid about travel in Italy, the language, food, and history. He taught writing for 38 years at Henry Ford College. Since retiring from teaching he has published three collections of essays, all with University of Nebraska Press: American English, Italian Chocolate (2017); The Enjoy Agenda (2019); and Get Thee to a Bakery (2021). He and his wife divide their time between Michigan and the Republic of San Marino.

Don't Censor Yourself. Write What You Want to Write: An Interview with Lee Zacharias

Lee Zacharias and I met in Greensboro, North Carolina, too many years ago to specify. We were part of a group of women writers dubbed “Ladies Lit” that convened on a regular basis for drinks, dessert and invaluable rough and tumble criticism of early drafts of our work. I count Lee the person who nudged me toward proper grammar (among other stylistic improvements). An accomplished photographer as well as author, Lee’s books include the short story collection Helping Muriel Make It Through the Night, the essay collection The Only Sounds We Make and four novels, the most recent What a Wonderful World This Could Be (Madville Publishing, 2021). In the post-COVID era, with luck, Lee and I will again hoist drinks across from each other and continue the conversation started here.

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Kat Meads: At what age did you define yourself as a writer? How did that self-identification come about?

Lee Zacharias: I knew I wanted to write even before I could read. I loved books, and when I was in first or second grade I would always put my hand up for "show and tell"—do they still do that?—and make up a story on the spot. I got a lot of encouragement from other students, mainly because the longer I could make my story the less time we would have for arithmetic. I began to write around the time I was in sixth grade. I was reading a lot of girl detective and boarding school novels at the time, so the "novels" I began in the steno books we used for class notes were imitations of those, none of which I finished, likely because I wasn't a good enough detective to solve the plot. And the one my mother found made her so angry I didn't dare put anything on paper again until I left home for college. I applied to a graduate program but married a grad student instead, and so for the next few years I worked full time and wrote sporadically. I didn't start writing in earnest until I was 25, when my first husband finished his exams and we moved to Richmond, Virginia. But even after I began to publish, I never identified myself as a writer. During the years I taught, I would say I was a teacher, because everyone who's ever told the inquisitive stranger that he or she was a writer, knows what follows: "Have you published anything?" And then, "Anything I would have read?" Now that I'm retired from full-time teaching, I'm more comfortable saying I'm a writer, because I've always got a camera, so people want to know if I'm a photographer. Part of not wanting to identify myself comes of having had a mother who was forever defining herself for me, though her definitions were always expressed in adjectives instead of nouns: she was smart, independent, resourceful; I was resentful. I suppose it sounds passive—to let others define you— but I prefer to think of it as an active way of being. Gertrude Stein once said, in her essay "On Poetry and Grammar," that poetry was about the noun and prose about the verb. There are a lot of issues one could take with that statement, of course, but I like the distinction between noun and verb. I write.

Meads: Are there any writing "rituals"—superstitious or otherwise—that you swear by?

Zacharias: I have to work my way into writing. I don't get up at 5 a.m and start scribbling. I tend to write better in the afternoon. I don't write by hand, except for notes, and haven't since I was inventing girl detectives in the steno books of junior high. Before word processing came along, I wrote on a typewriter, so it's natural for me to sit at a keyboard. My hand cramps, I can't always read my own handwriting, and paragraphs and dialogue don't look right to me unless they're typed. But I'm old enough to want to see what I've written on paper, so I print a lot and mark up those drafts with pencil, though at a certain point I switch back to editing onscreen. But that's a ritual of revision. My preparatory rituals are more like stalling: I read the newspaper, check my email, take a shower, nothing in particular, just daily life. The actual rituals are technical: getting my computer to boot up and let me use it instead of telling me it has no internet connection or needs to clean the cache (whatever that is) or blocking out the screen with endless reports of threats it's saved me from, or insisting that the document I am writing has been saved by another user as "read only." Nothing like Samuel Clemens warming up with a game of billiards in his attic or Herman Melville filling inkpots and sharpening his quill pens. No spinning around five times or placing a lucky token on my desk. But eventually there I am in front of a functioning machine, and a few words in, I'm no longer there but wherever those words take me.  

Meads: When you get stuck on a project, what is your go-to activity to help unblock the blockage?

Zacharias: Oh, anything! I take a walk with one of my cameras. Make jewelry. If I'm really desperate, organize a closet, though I've never gone so far as to clean the stove. Right now I'm working on a memoir focused on my mother's life that includes scans of letters from my father written in 1941 and photographs I consider part of the text. I can spend an entire day processing a single image because you have no idea until you blow them up onscreen how full of dust, pinholes, scratches, and cracked emulsions those old photos are. Many are of people I know about but never met, others people I knew in much older incarnations. It's very mechanical work—something you can do even when you're blocked—but it begets an odd intimacy, like picking eyelashes out of strangers' eyes, that leads me back to the writing. I haven't had to process photographs for fiction, but I've often left a troublesome chapter of a novel to look at pictures or read more about the relevant time or place. It's a way of working myself back into the necessary atmosphere.

Meads: How has being a photographer affected your writing?

Zacharias: I used to think of photography and writing as completely separate. I wanted to compartmentalize them, to make photography a break from writing. But they're not nearly as separate as I pretended. Photography is about light in the way writing is about words, and over time I've realized how much attention my writing pays to light and weather. I love old snapshots in which the shadow of the photographer stretches toward the subject. You don't see the photographer, but you're very aware of the presence. To me, that is the story, the shadow the narrator casts. I never write from an omniscient point of view. Photography also teaches you a lot about framing—what goes into a picture, what is left out—and in a much more subconscious way I think that affects the way I construct units—paragraphs, longer passages, or chapters. Rhythm is important to me, so I am very conscious of the music of the language, but I had to learn the auditory part. From the beginning writing has been very visual to me.

Meads: You have a deep connection to North Carolina's Ocracoke Island. How did that attachment begin and how does that particular place contribute to your artistic life?

Zacharias: I first visited Ocracoke in 1971, before the water system was in place, while residents were still using cisterns. Certainly there was a tourist trade, but nothing like the industry that took off once the water treatment plant was built. It was still a fishing village. By the time I started visiting on a regular basis in 1990 a great deal had changed, and each year I would note other changes: the disappearance of the red and white wooden skiffs from the harbor, the paving of the roads in Jackson Dunes, new street signs, a narrow sidewalk, the trail to Springers Point, the bike path, the historical markers. I couldn't go last year because the island was closed to visitors in May for covid, which means I haven't been back since Dorian devastated the community in September of 2019. I have a lot of friends in the village and know something of what's changed, but knowing is not seeing, and when you visit an island every year, that island gets in your blood, becomes necessary to your life. I rarely write when I'm there. I'm outdoors, riding my bike, kayaking, reading or walking on the beach, always taking photographs. I go off season, so it's not as crowded as it gets come summer. There are sixteen miles of beach from which you cannot see a single building, and when I am riding my bike out South Point or Grass Roads, it's just me and the birds, the same when I am paddling up the back side of the island. I stay in a house where I can kayak from my front yard into the Sound. I'm also very isolated. I disappear into nature. I live entirely in the moment and entirely without ego. There is nowhere else I can divest myself so completely of myself, which is to say that it is the restorative part of writing that doesn't show but is everywhere.  

Meads: As a writer of both fiction and nonfiction, what are some of the factors that determine whether you deal with a subject as truth or fiction.

Zacharias: That's never a question for me. I'm writing about myself or my family or something I experienced, or I'm not, and when I'm not it's fiction. My fiction isn't autobiographical—oh, I might steal a detail here or there, a line of dialogue I've overheard, a rug, a sofa, the whoosh of a door's weather stripping because I know how to describe them—but not at all in terms of character and event. Because I've written personal essays, I don't bring any desire to write about myself to fiction. On other hand, my fiction sometimes goes places I wish I had been. In Across the Great Lake Fern and I mourned the town of Frankfort, Michigan, together, she because it was hers and she lost it, me because I wanted it and it had never been mine. In What a Wonderful World This Could Be I wanted to experience the youth politics of the 1960s from the inside because I was married and working office jobs during those years, and I often felt that instead of living it I watched the story of my generation unfold each night on the Huntley-Brinkley Report. That doesn't mean my novels are wishful thinking, though I did imagine, the first time I saw Frankfort, when I was eleven or twelve, that if I only lived there instead of in the industrial wasteland of Hammond, Indiana, I would have a perfect life. But the first thing any writer learns is that a novel is no place for a perfect life. I made Alex a photographer in What A Wonderful World This Could Be because I knew cameras. And at one time I did, very briefly, work as a darkroom technician for a TV tuner plant and for a newspaper, but I wasn't writing about myself. I simply gave her a profession I knew something about.

Meads: As a professor at UNC-Greensboro and instructor at the Wildacres Writing Workshop, what writing question from students a) is most frequently asked and b) the hardest to answer?

Zacharias:  You have written and taught both nonfiction and fiction, so you've heard this. Students always want to know how to write about their lives or what someone might interpret as their lives without damaging their relationships. How do I write about Mom without making her mad at me? I think my answer is the same one most teachers give. Don't censor yourself. Write what you want to write, what you remember, what you imagine, what you feel. You can decide later whether or not to publish. But that's not what students want to hear, because they hope to publish, and they want a formula for writing about others without risk. But there is no formula. Oh, there are the strategies memoirists suggest: changing names or genders, creating composite characters, finding a different setting. But the truth is that writing is a risky business. Others will read themselves into your fiction even if they aren't there—and nonfiction, well…no one's story happens in a vacuum. So some people will be angry about the way they think you've portrayed them or secrets you've revealed. Others may be angry because you didn't think them important enough to write about. It's impossible to predict every response. Some writers show their work to family or friends and invite them to object. I don't. I edit to improve the work, not to spare feelings. But there are also things I choose not to write about. Every writer has to decide what they value most. Writing is hard work, and students want some part of it made easy. But this is the most uncomfortable part, which is why the question always comes up, and why the answer rarely satisfies.

Meads: Do any of your fictional characters continue to nag at you, post-publication? If so, in what ways to they nag, and (best guess) why do they hang about and nag.

Zacharias: No. Someone asked if I intended to write a sequel to Across the Great Lake, and I was floored. A sequel? Fern is eighty-five years old. She dies, or experiences a vision of her death, on the last page. Where in the world would I go from there? Do I still care about her, about Alex, or other characters I've invented? Absolutely. But even though I suppose I could write a book about what Alex would be doing in 2021, I feel no reason or desire to. That may be where the photographer's sense of framing comes in. I framed the part of her life that interested me. What haunts me more than characters are the worlds I leave behind. My first novel was about a classical clarinetist. That is a profession I knew nothing about, and I immersed myself so completely that it was a shock to finish the book, to get up from the table where I'd often lunched with musicians from the Eastern Music Festival who graciously answered my questions and realize I had no reason to come back. I can't sing; I don't play. I've never lived in Michigan or in a collective. To write a novel is to create a world that you will someday leave with the homesick backward glance of an exile.

Meads: Your most recent novel, What a Wonderful World This Could Be, wonderfully interweaves the personal and the political. Was that mix a conscious goal at the onset? What are some of the challenges of that approach and how did you go about narratively solving those challenges?

Zacharis: Oh, yes, that interweaving of the personal and the political was very much a conscious intent. To me, that's really what the book is about, the tension between the two. As a photographer Alex is committed to the individual vision of the artist, to the singular, whereas her husband, the civil rights and antiwar activist is committed to the masses. She is initially attracted to him because she wants—needs—to get outside herself, but ultimately she recognizes the danger in putting ideology above all else. As she sees it, her husband multiplies and strings zeroes, whereas she reserves the right to count on her fingers one by one. I think the biggest challenge came in what happens to her when her husband disappears. She withdraws. I'm quite certain that if I were writing about her in 2020, for instance, she would have been making her voice heard, because there are some things in politics you simply can't ignore. But that's not where I left her. I left her in 1982, when she still bears the emotional scars of her husband's and her own—but especially her husband's—political involvement in the 1960s and wants to think of herself as apolitical. I'm sure a lot of readers will fault her for that. But they are reading in a different time than the one in which she is acting.

Metamorphic Imaginaries: A Conversation Between H. L. Hix and Dante Di Stefano

DD: In the introduction to The Gospel, you note: “This book is not ‘creative writing’ or ‘imaginative literature’ in the sense that applies to those works [books about the life of Jesus by Saramago and Coetzee]. I did not ‘make up’ anything here. I selected, arranged, and translated all the material, but I invented none of it: everything in The Gospel derives from ancient sources, nothing originates with me.” It strikes me that much of your work (and especially your more recent poetry collections such as American Anger and Rain Inscription or even books like Demonstrategy and Lines of Inquiry) blurs the boundaries between poetry, prose, criticism, philosophy, translation and so on; sometimes when I read one of your books, I think perhaps there are no boundaries between these modalities of engagement. You always bring me back to Benjamin: “all great literature either dissolves a genre or invents one.” Could you talk a bit about The Gospel, and your body of work, with some of these thoughts in mind?

HH: Thank you for this generous question, itself a robust modality of engagement that sees a continuity between The Gospel and my previous books.
Because the fact is so easy to forget, it’s worth occasionally reminding ourselves that genres are made up. Genres are not what philosophers call “natural kinds,” distinctions that exist in the real world independently of us, and that our categories then correspond to (or fail to correspond to). Instead, our categorizing creates and sustains genres, and they never “pull away” into an existence independent of our conceptualizing. They’re invented, not discovered, and they’re not very tidy: a novel isn’t distinguished from a short story by the same principle that distinguishes a novel from a memoir. Our genres don’t “cut literature at the joints.”
Which makes them susceptible to questioning. I would string the pearl you offer from Walter Benjamin with this pearl from Audre Lorde: “For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.” And this from Amartya Sen: “We can not only assess our decisions, given our objectives and values; we can also scrutinize the critical sustainability of these objectives and values themselves.” All three, like your question itself, point toward an urge that drives all my writing: not merely to renegotiate one particular agreement or another between us, but to reveal, and thus to make available for evaluation and revision, the “metastructure of consent” (Lauren Berlant’s term) that has been governing all our agreements.
So you’re right to pose the question of genre to The Gospel. To read for the gospel exclusively by haggling over what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote is to grant the metastructure of consent that says those four texts and only those four texts contain the gospel. But that metastructure of consent is constructed, not observed. It doesn’t describe a quality inherent in those four texts; it imposes a rule on my behavior, setting limits to what I should read and how I should read it. The Gospel is a way of asking what that rule hides from me, a way of asking what I can see if I don’t follow the rule, that I can’t see when I do follow the rule.
The fact that several poems in the Ill Angels’ first section are addressed to your students leads me to ask you a version of the same question. If you talk to students all day in class, in that modality of engagement, how important is it to talk to them also in another modality of engagement, in poems? And how important is it to you to address a particular person or group in a poem?

DD: It’s both of utmost importance and of no importance at all. In some sense, any addressee is merely a trope, part of the poem’s furniture and frame. Sometimes when I reread a poem I’ve written I feel like I’m speaking to myself in a small empty room and sometimes I feel like I’m speaking to all the round earth’s imagined corners.
I do speak to students all day long in my job as a schoolteacher, and sometimes those conversations are poems, sometimes those conversations die into poems, sometimes poems die into those conversations, but most of my students will never read the poems I write. Still, addressing my students in a poem shows that I care for them deeply—it’s a form of prayer for their wellbeing and future success. Deep attention is the highest form of love; embodying and engendering deep attention is the work of poetry and the work of teaching.
The greatest two words in all of literature are the epigraph to E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End: “only connect.”
After the birth of my daughter, it became very important to me that in the future she might read my poems and understand something about her parents that might otherwise remain hidden to her. In a very real sense, my wife and my daughter are the ones I am always speaking to in any poem I write.
Who do you see as the ideal audience for The Gospel? Who is this book for?

HH: The glib answers to this question—It’s for everyone! and I write for myself—do point toward something that I think is not at all glib. I myself experience an awe before the world and a wonder at experience that could be called “religious” because they convey a sense that in what meets the eye there is more than meets the eye. But I haven’t found (yet!) an institutional form or a heroic figure or a codified set of beliefs adequate to that awe and wonder. I wrote The Gospel for myself, then, in that the awe and wonder I feel invite continuing exploration in preference to settling on (or settling into) a received framework. And The Gospel is for everyone in that of course I’m not the only person who feels awe and wonder, or the only person intent on continuing to look toward what I can’t yet claim to be looking at.
While we’re thinking about who is speaking to whom, the first poem in Ill Angels, “Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen,” ends “This is the part where I take your hand in / my hand and I tell you we are burning.” If angels are messengers, as the etymology of the word suggests, does the “I tell you” in that last line alert the reader that the speaker is one of those ill angels in the book’s title?

DD: I hadn’t thought of that possibility, but I think it’s a smart reading of those lines. The ill angels from the title are the ill angels from Poe’s “Dream-Land,” which begins: “By a route obscure and lonely, / Haunted by ill angels only.” To me, “Dream-Land” is a “fantasia of the unconscious” (to borrow a phrase from D. H. Lawrence); it’s a poem about journeying deeply into the self in order to turn outward more ardently. These ill angels are the legion woes that amass in the four chambers of our hearts as we go through this life; they are our dead, our regrets, our wounds, our arnica and eyebright, our hopes, our dear ones—they hold out the possibility of seeing ourselves the way a stranger does, unfolding in moments. In some sense, all the personae speaking through these poems, and all those spoken to, are these ill angels.
On an entirely different tack, I was reading in The Atlantic about Thomas Jefferson’s redacted New Testament, which he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Jefferson’s version expunged all the supernatural elements from the gospel. Your version adds miracle upon miracle from the ancient source material. We have, for instance, the baby Jesus taming dragons on the flight into Egypt, a trip during which he collapses distance and time. I was delighted by these stories, especially the ones from Jesus’ childhood. Has your conception of Jesus (as character, as metaphor) changed during your selection, arrangement, and translation of this material? What can we learn from the Hixian Jesus? How does this Jesus speak to our era?

HH: Jefferson was very concerned with the operation of things. How did things happen? How do thing happen? How will things happen? That concern invites historical and scientific accounts, which are especially good at answering those questions. An answer to how things happened should leave out miracles. There are no miracles in the domain of cause and effect.
I value historical and scientific accounts, and I am interested in how things happen, but I am even more interested in what things mean. I share Jefferson’s sense that the answers to those questions should be coordinated as far as possible, but I don’t share his strategy of coordinating them by only asking how things happen. I share Jefferson’s assessment that how things happen is an important concern; I choose not to follow him in making it so exclusive a concern.
A person who wants to know how things happened (what actually took place in the Middle East 2,000 years ago?) or how things happen (how do political institutions and religious institutions shape one another?) should get rid of supernatural elements in the narratives. A person who wants to understand what things mean might decide to attend to those supernatural elements, with the possibility in mind that they have more to do with significance than with cause and effect. Historical narratives are really good at answering how things happened, and scientific narratives are really good at answering how things happen. Literary narratives are really good at answering (or, I would say, at addressing) what things mean.
I don’t for a second think that a real goddess named Athena really appeared in the guise of Deiphobus to trick Hector into squaring off with Achilles, but I don’t take that or any of the other supernatural elements out of The Iliad, because I’m not reading The Iliad to find out how things happened; I’m reading it to find out what things mean. For me, it’s the same with reading a Gospel. I don’t believe, as an historical record of actual events that really occurred between physical entities, that baby Jesus tamed dragons, any more than I believe, in that way, that Beowulf slew a fen-dwelling monster named Grendel. I don’t think the writer who recounted the baby-Jesus-taming-dragons story in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew is offering me, and I’m not reading that particular story for, an historical record of actual events that really occurred between physical entities. I do think the writer of that story is signaling me that Jesus is exceptionally attuned to what today we might call the more-than-human world. I’m not any more worried about whether baby Jesus really tamed actual dragons than I am whether Gregor Samsa really turned into an actual giant beetle. So, I’m happy to stock The Gospel with lots of miracle stories: bring ’em on!
Miracle stories or not, literature remains connected to real events and real people. We’re engaged in this conversation as a deeply contentious election looms, and I’ve written one book called American Anger and another called Counterclaims. I just want to hear anything and everything you have to say in relation to your lines “Here in America, trauma and rage / dovetail, become birthright, counterclaim us.”

DD: The poem that those lines come from (“National Anthem with Elegy and Talon”) is about the intergenerational impacts of mental illness and domestic abuse, as much as it is about notions of national belonging and the experience of living in the United States in the early twenty-first century.
As many writers have noted, due to systemic racism, widespread misogyny, income inequality, a variety of broken social institutions (the public-school system, for example), and so on, daily life in America has been traumatic for many people for a long time. Fear, pain, and hopelessness accrue into rage and/or apathy (American Anger charts some of these tributaries). Any degree of safety and comfort we might experience as American citizens is underwritten by violence at home and abroad; this violence makes demands upon us all. No wonder that, in W. C. Williams famous formulation, the pure products of America go crazy, driven by a “numbed terror / under some hedge of choke-cherry / or viburnum, / which they cannot express—.” The Trump era has rendered much of this suffering, anguish, and violence far more legible to far more Americans than ever before.
In the beginning of Counterclaims, you note: “Poetry offers instead a field in which transformation becomes intelligible: a metamorphic imaginary, a landscape of renewal. The new self enters the world first in and as imagination. The new self is made by making.” Huge swaths of American life run counter to a metamorphic imaginary. I feel my self being constantly unmade, as a consumer, as a citizen, as a man; the feeling of that unmaking might be where a commitment to poetry begins.
Thinking of this kind of unmaking calls to mind the claims that the canonical gospels make on western readers. Reading The Gospel was a profoundly moving and unsettling experience for me, mainly I think, because of the way that you redress the deficits caused by translation inertia and gender tilt. You speak about this at length in your introduction to the book, but I was wondering, if, for the purposes of this conversation, you could discuss those aspects of the text?

HH: Thank you for drawing attention to these two concerns, which were very important motivations for my undertaking The Gospel. The concern I call “translation inertia” is that a great many word choices in existing English translations of the canonical Gospels have become fixed by convention, even though the English language is continually changing (as are human societies in which English is spoken). Those word choices have become static, even though the relationship between the Greek word being translated and the English word used to translate it is dynamic. 
I give a few examples in the introduction, but the list could be expanded. To follow up on one example that is only mentioned in the introduction, every previous English translation I’m aware of translates the Greek word christos as Christ, an obvious enough choice since the English word is a transliteration of the Greek word. But that “obvious” translation distorts something very important. The Greek word does not only refer, it also describes. In this it resembles, for instance, the English word president. “The President” refers to an office or to the person who holds that office, but it also describes the office or person as one who presides. The noun president relates to the verb preside, and the noun christos relates to the verb chrio, to rub a body with oil or dye or ointment. The English word “Christ,” though, doesn’t have a correlative verb form; it only refers, without describing. To capture that missing descriptive element, in The Gospel I translate christos as “salve,” which does function as both noun and verb: I can salve a wound or apply a salve to a wound. So “salve” describes as it refers, the way the Greek christos does, but the English “Christ” doesn’t.
The impulse to contest gender tilt is slightly different. Insofar as The Gospel is at all successful in resisting translation inertia, it is to that extent closer to, truer to, the original language of the sources; insofar as The Gospel succeeds in resisting gender tilt, to that extent it compensates for a limitation of both source and target language.
We recognize a problem with, say, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, a limitation in its depicting God as a thickly-muscled, light-skinned, heavily-bearded male, and we recognize a similar problem in referring to God as a male, and assigning God masculine roles such as father. The Gospel is an experiment in not doing so. I didn’t figure out a way to get The Gospel to pass the Bechdel Test, quite, but I hope its approach to degendering references to God and Jesus at least helps it not flout the Bechdel Test!
On a lighter note, I nominate you for President of National Poetry Month, and for “emotion recollected in tranquility” I substitute “a world less rickety, ricocheted with uncompromised shining.”

DD: Then, I’d recommend replacing “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” with your lines “…it is our work to send you careening / from consciousness to consciousness like tumbling down a hill.”
One of the stories from early in The Gospel stayed with me:

Walking once with xer mother across the city square, Jesus saw a teacher teaching some children. Twelve sparrows flurried down from the wall, bickering, and tumbled into the teacher’s lap. Seeing this, Jesus laughed. The teacher, noticing xer laugh, was filled with anger, and said, What’s so funny? Jesus replied, Listen, a widow is on her way here carrying what little wheat she can afford, but when she gets here she’ll stumble and spill the wheat. These sparrows are fighting over how many grains each will get. Jesus didn’t leave until what xe’d predicted had occurred. The teacher, seeing Jesus’ words become accomplished deeds, wanted to have xer run out of town, along with xer mother.

There’s so much to note and wonder about in this passage. We glimpse Jesus’ sense of humor, but its architecture remains a mystery. We see a link between Jesus’ clairvoyance and the clairvoyance of the sparrows. And I am left with many questions. Why is he laughing at the sparrows? Why does Jesus wait to see his prediction come true? Why doesn’t he help the widow? And so on. I will think of this anecdote every time I think of Jesus; it has subtly altered my perception of the metaphysics of the world presented in the Christian scriptures. What moments from The Gospel stay with you? What moments have altered your perception of the world presented in the Christian scriptures? And, out of personal curiosity, what’s your take on the passage I quoted?

HH: There are a lot of reasons to love that story, I’m sure. A couple of resonances are particularly strong for me.
One is by connection with Kierkegaard’s take, in Fear and Trembling, on the Abraham and Isaac story. Against the reassuring moralistic reading of the story that highlights God’s substitution of the ram for Isaac, and takes the point of the story to be something like Never fear: no matter how bad things look, God will rescue you, Kierkegaard foregrounds God’s command and Abraham’s obedience to it. The takeaway Kierkegaard registers is more like God is not bound by your judgments of value; God does not have to act the way you think God should. I hear something similar in this story, a reminder not to get too lazy or too cocky in thinking that Jesus just performs my vision of what’s right. Maybe Jesus is a rounder character than that, and maybe my vision of what’s right isn’t finished and perfect yet, but needs continuing adjustment and refinement.
Another resonance for me is with contemporary events. In the story, the teacher, confronted with truth, does not respond with self-correction and grateful embrace of truth: he responds with rage, and an impulse toward violence against truth and the bearer of truth. The teacher in the story seems to me to share a temperament with Trumpist America, the rage and violence being acted out against the truth of racial injustice, and against the bearers of that truth.
We live in an era where “facts” and “truth” are being constantly called into question in public discourse. For a collection that feels securely “grounded” in “real life,” Ill Angels also seems ready without warning to venture into surreal or dream worlds (“Because all the animals are kings and queens, / I wait for the rain to paint me”). How do those worlds connect for you? How do you want them to connect in the poems?

DD: William Blake’s visionary phenomenology inspires me. In one of his letters, Blake famously wrote: “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees.” Most of the times, I see the green things in the way, but I want the tears of joy. I want to learn to bear the beams of love. I want “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.” Poetry trains me in this direction: in a poem, I hold open the palm of my hand and hope for infinity with its skylarks and lambs and caterpillars and lions and oxen and owls and, even, its poisons…
I think Blake would have loved your translation of the Sermon on the Mount as much as I do; this sermon forms the heart of any version of Jesus’ teaching. You translate, for example, the famous “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” as “Graceful, the unassuming: they will inherit the whole earth.” Could you discuss your translation choices for the beatitudes? Also, how does the additional material you included change the sermon itself?

HH: I’ve been dissatisfied for a long time with “blessed” as the translation of the Greek word makárioi in the beatitudes. It has been the obligatory translation ever since the King James: everyone translates it that way. But there’s something deeply misleading in that choice. Blessing comes to me from outside. I’m not blessed in myself, but blessed by something. Which allows for blessing to be transactional, part of a system of reward and punishment. It sets up “for” as the translation of the Greek hóti, to suggest that the blessedness derives from what comes after the hóti: the meek are blessed because they will inherit the earth, their blessedness consists in their inheritance.
But that’s not the flavor of the Greek at all. Makárioi is the collateral form of mákar, the primary meaning of which is the disposition, the well-being, of the gods, by contrast with that of humans. Its other uses are extensions of that primary meaning. Mákar is a godlikeness. It inheres in me, arises from within rather than being bestowed from without. It’s not a change of state imposed on me by something other than myself, it’s who I am. In the usual English translation it’s a transaction: if you are meek then you will be rewarded for that meekness by inheriting the earth, by which reward you will become blessed. But in the Greek the quality of being mákar is attended by inheritance of the earth. In the usual English translation, the value of being meek is utilitarian, teleological: it’s good to be meek because of the good results it brings. The value is in inheriting the earth. The usual English translation makes being meek a sound investment, and makes the rationale that runs through the beatitudes “rational self-interest,” the profit motive. In the Greek, though, the value of being meek is intrinsic, deontological. 
I’ve tried other approaches. In a previous version of the beatitudes, the one in the sequence called “Synopsis” (in Legible Heavens and then First Fire, Then Birds), I used “replete” for makárioi. In The Gospel, I chose “graceful.” Maybe better, maybe not, but what I was aiming for was restoring the implications of the original that makárioi inheres in the person and has value in itself.
The beatitudes work by repetition. The intense repetition in your “Solo” feels like the intense repetition in A Love Supreme, which “Solo” cites (and there are numerous other jazz/music references throughout the book). But “I am beyond professing music now,” one of your speakers says in a later poem. How do experiences of music and other art forms relate to your work as a poet?

DD: Music and the visual arts nourish me as much as poetry; both artforms suggest a range of possibilities for what a poem can be (picture a poem as expansive and effusive as a Mingus composition, a poem as repetitive and minimalist as a Philip Glass piano etude, a poem as gesturally complex as a Jackson Pollock canvas from the drip period, a poem as Baroque and phenomenologically complex as Velázquez’s Las Meninas).
The work ethic of Jazz musicians inspires me. The romantic images of Sonny Rollins woodshedding to the wind on the Williamsburg Bridge and Charlie Parker playing for the cows in a pasture belie a daily and total commitment to their art that is common to all of the artists I most admire.
The goal for me is to be always engaged in poetry, to dwell in poems the way I might dwell in the red ochers and umbers of a Caravaggio or the blazing hues of a Basquiat.
Another moment in The Gospel that moved me occurs after Jesus goes to the Mount of Olives and then returns to the temple to teach; the scribes and pharisees bring before Jesus a woman caught in the act of adultery for whom Mosaic Law mandates death by stoning. The scribes and pharisees ask Jesus what they should do with this woman. Jesus’ lengthy response turns into a Whitmanesque (and Blakean) view of divinity and humanity—the godhead in the biosphere: “This is wholeness of life, to know oneself in and of the whole.” I am thinking of the section that runs from “I am the first and the last” to “I am xe who cries out and xe who hears the cry” (104-106). What do you make of Jesus’ discourse at this moment?

HH: I share your attraction to that passage, which comes from an amazing text called Thunder, Perfect Mind, part of the Nag Hammadi find, that gives a first-person address by a female deity. It does have that quality you point out, that is familiar to us from Whitman and Blake. I think what I am drawn to is the contrast with our more usual epistemology. That dominant epistemology (whose champions would include Descartes) posits that everything is in principle explicable to the human mind, everything is subject to human reason. But what if that’s just not true? What if nothing is subject to human reason? Who am I then? How do I stand in relation to the world? This passage seems to me to take those questions seriously.
That passage doesn’t fulfill the usual preconception, the norm that has come to be associated with gospel writing. “Brief Instructions for Drawing…” is not a “My love is like a red, red rose”-type love poem. (Nor are the love poems that follow it.) What impels the veering away from that “normal” approach?

DD: Because of the misogyny embedded in the courtly love poem, the English and American poetic tradition has always invited a subversion of the power and clichés associated with erotic and romantic themes; Shakespeare’s sonnets are, of course, a huge pivot in the tradition.
In my own life, I’ve found that nothing has been more productive and more challenging than the love I share with my wife. Being in love is a choice, full of daily unromantic tasks and realities. Being in love is a political and moral act; for me, writing about love should be too. Being in love is both the most transformative and the most mundane experience a human being can undergo. To return a phrase of yours I quoted earlier, love offers us “a landscape of renewal” like the field offered by a poem. In a poem and in love, a new self is made by making.

HH: A related question arises for me in relation to your “Epithalamion with References to Philip K. Dick, Paul Klee, and Gene Roddenberry.” Your titles seem to equal parts orientation for the reader and disorientation. What is the relation for you between a poem and its title? What do titles do for you?

DD: Sometimes a title is like a light switch in a darkened room; it’s the first place you go to illuminate a text. Sometimes it’s a dimmer switch. Sometimes it’s a circuit breaker. Sometimes it’s a live wire, exposed and sparking. Sometimes it’s not wired into the structure of the poem at all. Sometimes it’s a satellite, a dose, an antidote.
My titles tend to be expository, subversive, allusive, and metapoetic. I’d like any title to orient and disorient simultaneously.
The Gospel constantly reoriented me as I read it. The passage I mentioned (about the discussion between Jesus and the scribes and pharisees) also recalled the ways in which The Gospel nuances (challenges, confirms, reorients) my understanding of gender and misogyny in the Christian scriptures. Is The Gospel a feminist text? Did your synthesis of the source material reorient your understanding of gender and misogyny in the Christian scriptures?

HH: Readers will have the final say on whether The Gospel is a feminist text, but my intention was to compose it as a feminist text, and my hope is that it may prove to be so. I take this as a criterion: if there is gospel—good news—that any given Gospel (Matthew’s or Thomas’s or mine) tries to give an account of, that good news is equally available to all persons. If it’s good news for white persons but not for persons of color, then it’s not good news at all. If it’s good news for men but not for women, then it’s not good news at all. I don’t claim success, but I did attempt to incline my Gospel in the direction of that feature of the gospel. It’s the impulse behind the gender-neutral pronouns for God and Jesus, and the coinages such as fother and xon.
An impulse behind a work is susceptible to personification as a muse or spirit. Asked who has been appointed in heaven as presiding spirits over this book, I would guess John Coltrane and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Who have you requested as presiding spirits?

DD: Those are the two greatest saints in my litany. Others for Ill Angels would include: Marc Chagall, Katsushika Hokusai, Cy Twombly, Frida Kahlo, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Elizabeth Cotten, Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra, Charles Mingus, Louis Armstrong, John Fahey, Django Reinhardt, Robert Johnson, Chet Atkins, Jerry Garcia, Mississippi John Hurt, Sleepy John Estes, Hounddog Taylor, R.L. Burnside, Akira Kurasawa, John Ford, Sergio Leone, Christopher Smart, Christopher Gilbert, William Blake, Lucille Clifton, Wanda Coleman, Gwendolyn Brooks, Thérèse of Lisieux, Theresa of Avila, Augustine of Hippo, Søren Kierkegaard, Li Bai, Federico García Lorca, Kobayashi Issa, Matsuo Bashō, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jorge Luis Borges.
Some fictional spirits I’d invoke: Prince Myshkin, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote, Pierre Menard, Bartleby the Scrivener, Malte Luarids Brigge, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Zebra, Helen Dewitt’s Sybilla, Tom Bouman’s Henry Farrell.
In your author note at the end of the book, you mention your retelling of the Book of Job in First Fire, Then Birds and your redaction and translation of a sayings-gospel in Rain Inscription. How did writing those poems prepare you for writing The Gospel? Why do you consider those texts as poems, but you don’t consider The Gospel a poem? How would you compare your book God Bless with your project in The Gospel? Aren’t both projects conceptual poetry? What makes a poem a poem? Where do selection, translation, and arrangement end and invention, imagination, creation begin? (Note: I’m also thinking of some of the things you say in Demonstrategy and As Easy as Lying here.)

HH: Just to reiterate: thank you for this level of engagement, putting The Gospel into a context that includes my previous work. It is an act of intellectual/spiritual generosity, and I am grateful.
For me, this relates to the question we broached above, about genre: maybe my sense that genres are not tidy boxes only reveals how bad I am at keeping my writing in those boxes! But it also has to do with how much of my life experience is mediated experience. I spend a far larger portion of my waking day reading books and scanning screens than I do gazing at where two roads diverge in a yellow wood or listening to gathering swallows twitter in the skies. Consequently, as an attempt to come to terms with my life experience, my writing is more curatorial than diaristic, more about selection and arrangement than about production, more to do with composition than with invention.
We love magical origin stories for our works, according to which the poet or evangelist is the vehicle of a Higher Power—the Muses, or God—who speaks through the writer. But even pop-culture bromides such as “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” work at debunking the magical origin stories. As a poet, I find it liberating to eschew such origin stories: I perceive myself as having more agency if I’m working, not only hanging out, waiting for a visit from the Muse. And the texts themselves of the canonical Gospels indicate that their writers selected and arranged material from sources: in that regard, my Gospel is simply following precedent.
In addition to “mediated” cultural presences animating your poems, there are “immediate” physical presences. Apples, for instance, recur throughout. But it doesn’t feel to me like apple-as-mythic-symbol; it feels more Cezanne-ian or something…

DD: You’re right, there is something impressionistic (or post-impressionistic) about the way the apple recurs in my poems. I love the geometry of apples. I love the sound of the word “apple” and the almost endless number of varietals and their evocative names: imagine an orchard of Empires, a bushel of Jubilees, an Autumn Glory held in the palm of your hand. I’ve always loved apples and being in an orchard. My friend owns an orchard and I helped him plant many of the trees in it. My father dreamed of owning an apple orchard. My grandmother always used to make homemade apple sauce. I don’t employ the apple out of nostalgia, but I am drawn to it; it’s a deep image for me, as it is for many other people. 
Last month, I was reading As Easy as Lying, your collection of essays on poetry published by Etruscan Press in 2002. At one moment in that book, you mention that nobody reads your first book anymore, Perfect Hell (Gibbs Smith, 1996). Of course, I immediately bought a copy. I was struck by the way Perfect Hell contains all the wilding seeds that would orchard your oeuvre…Even The Gospel is there, and yet, in many respects, it’s a very traditional debut featuring short lyric poems. This assessment isn’t meant in a derogatory sense; it’s an amazing book, for the dialogue opened through your titles alone. And the poems! (I love “Another Winter, Farther Away” and “Reasons” and “1 Is the Point, 2 the Line, 3 the Triangle, 4 the Pyramid”). The point is, I would never guess that the poet behind Perfect Hell would one day write Chromatic or Rain Inscription or, indeed, The Gospel. Could you talk about your journey from Perfect Hell to The Gospel? How has poetry changed for you? How has poetry changed you? How has the poetry world changed?

HH: One way to respond to this would be to connect it to our earlier discussion of the beatitudes. Perfect Hell tries to perform (its poiesis is) ergon, the root of such English words as work and urge and orgy. The Gospel values mákar more, and seeks to do/be makários. That long-lost me wanted to secure a place in the world, and apparently thought he could. These days, the perplexity more present to the present me is how to let go the world.
When I was writing Perfect Hell, the metaphor of building would have seemed apt to what I thought I was doing; nowadays, the metaphor of mushroom-hunting seems more applicable.
There’s a moment in the Investigations when Wittgenstein says “The real discovery is the one that makes us capable of stopping doing philosophy when we want to.” In my Perfect Hell days, I wanted to be capable of doing. In my Gospel days I want to be capable of stopping doing.
Both books, Perfect Hell and The Gospel, aspire to the attention-to-everything that gives your poems such precision! (“… filigreed like the grip / of a cavalry officer’s pistol / in a black and white western…”) How does one sustain such precise attention?

DD: In As Easy As Lying, you mention that we might think of the training of a poet in the same way that we think of the training of an Olympic athlete (as an ongoing everyday process). You mentioned Fear and Trembling earlier and Kierkegaard’s insight from that book comes to mind: “faith is a process of infinite becoming.” The ongoing training, the infinite becoming, that manifests sporadically as poetry demands this kind of attention. Paradoxically, attaining this type of attention, if not sustaining it, drives such training and becoming forward.
Put more simply: to invoke the awe and wonder you also mentioned earlier, there is so much to love and to uplift and to be stupefied by in this world, there is so much strangeness and grotesquery and astonishment to be undone by in this world, how can a poem not recognize such richness (and such lack)  in all its intricate particularity?
In your excellent book on W. S. Merwin, you mention Merwin’s notion that one should find a poet or two to read exhaustively and repeatedly.  Besides Merwin, who have been those poets for you? Also, I know we share a love of G. M. Hopkins. I was wondering if you could share some thoughts about him?

HH: I’m sure we all have our lists of those poets whose work has had an especially transformative effect on us, and/or whose work has been an especially lasting presence for us. Hopkins is definitely one of those poets for me. I’ve tried periodically, though so far unsuccessfully, to write an essay about why Hopkins was transformative for me and remains a lasting presence. 
At least one element of my response to Hopkins, though, has direct connection with The Gospel. I was raised in a religious tradition committed to the doctrine that divine inspiration has ceased. God spoke through the writers of the books of the (Protestant Christian) Bible, I was taught, but then, once those books were written down, stopped speaking. (I take the point to be, not that God is capricious or has withdrawn from involvement with humans, but that the Bible is complete and sufficient.) But when (in second-semester British Lit, sophomore year, sitting at the plywood desk in my dorm room) I read “The Windhover,” I felt that it was not so. This was the first clear moment of my departure from received religion, the sense “The Windhover” secured to me, that I could not have put into words at that time but did experience viscerally: that inspiration had not ceased, and that if any words were the words of God, those words were. 
My religious beliefs are quite different now from how they were at that time, but Hopkins still exemplifies for me the principle that if I want to address what is “higher” than myself, I need to “elevate” my language. If I want to be in touch with what exceeds me, I’d better “language up.”
I hear in your work that same impulse to be in touch with what exceeds you. It’s hard not to take your question addressed to your daughter as a question any poet might ask, so I ask it back to you: “… these lines might not survive / their own inception, but so what?”

DD: For me, as for you, and for most other writers I am sure, we cannot live otherwise. I read and write because I know the truth of John Donne’s “Since I die daily, daily mourn.” I choose to live in the word because it allows me to enter more fully the greater mystery of being alive, in all its unbounded ecstasy and deep sorrow. My reading and writing lives lend me the discipline to try to move beyond the manifold vertiginous fictions of the self, to continue a turning outward, to love more, to more fully be.
What impact has translating, selecting, and arranging The Gospel had on your poetry? What project are you working on now/next?

HH: I hope they have informed one another, been integrated and reciprocal in their mutual influence.
By received distinctions (such as the genres we discussed earlier in this conversation, or disciplinary divisions as they are codified in university departments) my work is a discombobulated mess. And maybe that assessment is accurate! But I experience as unified and coherent the life commitment that received distinctions identify here as poetry, there as translation.
It all feels of a piece to me.

Lizz Schumer and Anne Leigh Parrish Talk About Trust and How Stories Connect Us

I met Anne in that strange, liminal space so many of us are these days: Online, while planning a virtual event reading for my latest book, Biography of a Body. We share a publisher, Unsolicited Press, who matched us up as co-readers because so much of our work explores similar themes. But while I write personal essays and hybrid poetry that delve into what it’s like to be a woman in the world through a highly personal lens, Anne’s fiction brings to life richly painted characters who feel like people you already know. In A Winter Night, we meet Angie Dugan, 34, a social worker struggling with her career, her anxiety, and her difficult family. But like so many of us, she’s also looking for a love she can lean on. Many of the themes in this book — substance abuse, mental health, how much we can trust each other, and whose feelings are worthwhile — feel so pertinent right now, as so many of us grapple with those same issues in isolation. Anne and I talked about what readers can find in this book and how it fits into our broader context.

Lizz Schumer: First, I am always fascinated by titles. The fact that the story is set in the winter certainly tips me off as to why A Winter Night fits on one level, but can you expound a bit on why else that tile works for this book in particular or how you came to it while writing?

Anne Leigh Parrish: I grew up in the Finger Lakes Region of upstate New York, where A Winter Night is set. Winters were long and hard. On a psychic level, winter felt like a retreat, a need to withdraw and seek protection, but it also was a chance to be quiet and reflect. I often sat at my window and watched the snow fall, thinking of the world being covered, lying in wait, preparing itself for the next season. I felt like I did that, too. I waited for time to pass, and my eagerness for what came next was my way of preparing for it.

LS: Without giving too much away, substance use is a major theme in this book. I wonder if you can talk about how you decided to incorporate it, what sort of research you did in order to depict it accurately and thoughtfully. Why do you think it's such a compelling topic, especially now?

ALP: A lot of my characters are train wrecks, and the reason many of them go off the rails is because of alcohol and drug use. These things make someone unreliable, despite his best intentions when he’s sober. My research is personal experience. I have been close to people similarly afflicted, and trying to understand them, and not be harmed by them, spurs me to write about them. With the stress of the pandemic, the economy, and the presidential election, I have to think a lot of us are struggling with substance and alcohol abuse and trying not to jump down our own dreadful rabbit holes.

LS: Similarly, I noticed that weight, food, and the body type of your female characters was also very heavily featured. It struck me that you describe your characters as attaching a lot of value to their size and the food they're consuming (or not consuming). Why do you think that's such a driving force in our culture, and what inspired you to focus on that element?

ALP: Angie Dugan, my thirty-four-year-old protagonist, carries a little too much weight. She’s the only one who cares about this, but she imputes the concern to her love interest, Matt. Early in the novel, she reflects on the fact they haven’t yet slept together, and she wonders if her weight is to blame. I think Angie represents many women in our culture, regardless of what number pops up on the bathroom scale. Men are judged by how much money they make; women by how attractive they are. Angie’s self-doubt is so deep, so hard to soothe and bolster, that even when Matt tells her how great she looks, she doesn’t believe him.

LS: I saw a lot of my own late grandmother's elder care facility in the one where Angie works, which was really touching. I loved the emphasis on the residents' stories. In one scene, two characters talk about the fact that we all tell ourselves stories and that stories keep us human. As a writer, why is it important to you to tell these people's stories, and how do you think storytelling draws out our humanity, in general?

ALP: The purpose of writing — of any art — is to remind us of our common humanity. Stories hold us together across space in one generation, and across time from one generation to the next. The stories we tell ourselves are how we navigate the world. They’re our own private religion and mythology about how we became who we are and why that’s important. Often these stories are based on lies which defend us against how we believe others see us. We take these stories and soften a painful past and brighten an uncertain future.

LS: Similarly, there's a scene in which several of the characters talk about whose feelings are worth protecting. That's such a fascinating idea. Can you talk more about how we make that decision in our lives, and how that sometimes drives our relationships with others?

ALP: I think we learn to view and characterize people through the lens of their weaknesses, or what we perceive as their weaknesses. This speaks again to substance abuse and how it warps not just the perspective of the user, but also the perception of those who have to deal with it. In Angie’s case, her father has a long-standing problem with alcohol. He drinks — or drank, since he’s put much of it behind him now — because he knows how badly he disappointed Angie’s mother, Lavinia. Lavinia suffers a lot, too, but because she just carries on and does what’s required of her, the vibe she gives off is one of strength and being secure in herself, even if she’s not. Angie comes to see that she tends to protect her father because she thinks he can’t take care of himself, when he can. And she tends to overlook her mother’s pain and unhappiness because she functions at a higher level.

LS: I love the complicated relationships in this book, especially those between men and women. Do you model those after anyone in your own life? Who are some of your influences when crafting these relationships between people?

ALP: I’ve been married almost forty-four years, and that’s a long time to spend both observing and experiencing marriage and romantic love. My own parents never seemed to talk about anything important, which contributed to their getting divorced. Many people didn’t open up to their partners back then, probably because it wasn’t encouraged or accepted. I don’t know. My husband and I strive for candor, though we don’t always get there. There’s so much under the surface the other person never sees, yet somehow knows is there. This creates the presence of enormous complexity which both keeps a relationship interesting but can cause strain, especially when other things in life, like careers and what’s going on with your children, go against you.

LS: The meaning of reliability and the limits of how much we can really rely on one another (as well as what it means to go too far) are also explored in depth here. What about that theme interested you? Why do you think it's such an interesting one to explore?

ALP: How much you can rely on someone really comes down to how much you can trust them, assuming they’ve shown themselves to be fairly steady in the first place. We learn this first as children under the care of our parents. Mine were reliable in some ways, and unreliable in crucial ways, especially when it came to affection and offering moral support. They were very wrapped up in themselves, and I never trusted their affection for me, as a result. In Angie’s case, she knows her father loves her unconditionally even though he can’t be counted on to be where he says he’ll be. Her mother is the opposite. She doesn’t hand out affection, though she feels it deeply enough, and is always on time. So, I think it’s a study in what it means to be reliable and more importantly, how. Will one reliably show affection? Kindness? Pay the bills and do chores? Some people are better at some of these than others, and Angie’s is trying to figure out just where Matt falls on this spectrum.

LS: There's a line in A Winter Night that "love is giving someone a chance," which I think is a beautiful sentiment. I'd love to know if there was a particular moment in your own life, or during the creative process, that led you to that idea.

ALP: Angie is constantly confronting her doubts about people, especially Matt. It’s easy for her to assume the worst, and figure he’s just another guy who’s let her down, even when he’s speaking and acting to the contrary. He admits his mistakes then goes on making them, and this drives her crazy. I was proud of her for not falling into the trap some women do, where they tell themselves that the man’s failings are her fault, that she didn’t believe in him enough, or give him enough confidence. Matt asks her flat out if she’ll give them a chance and she sees that she has to, that people don’t come with guarantees. It’s a risk she simply has to take.

LS: One of the things I found fascinating about this story is how timeless it feels. It could have taken place last year, or 20 years ago (a few technological tweaks notwithstanding). Was that intentional?

ALP: I can’t say it was, but I’m glad you found it so. It’s a huge compliment, really. I want my stories to last and not be nailed down to the current time, because life always moves on. The situation Angie finds herself in is timeless, I think, because it’s universal. She wants to find love and has been burned. She has to put herself on the line and try to overcome her doubts and not be all starry-eyed and unrealistic. It’s a hard balance to strike, finding that boundary between oneself and another person, especially because the boundary is always in motion, always shifting.

LS: Let's talk a bit about the writing process. Can you give us a little insight into how this book came to be, and who some of your greatest influences were while writing it? Who are you reading these days? Are there authors your readers might enjoy as a dessert course after finishing this one?

ALP: Well, I love Alice Munro and William Trevor. They are my major influences, and I’d suggest both as dessert to the main course of A Winter Night. As to my writing process, I never outline. Instead, I just roll forward then pause and reread what I’ve got, trying to sense the subtext and direction. I also start pulling out plot threads that need to be resolved or carried through. The one thing I must have always have in hand as I go — or even to begin a story at all — is to know how it ends. Then it’s a matter of building to that point, filling in all that’s blank before then.