Mary Akers: Hi, Sarah. Thank you for agreeing to talk with me today, and for sharing your wonderful work with us. One of the (many) things I liked about your essay “What I Know of Madness” was the accompanying pictures you supplied. I feel like they add to the mood and understanding of your essay. Sometimes images say more than words can articulate. Have you ever done this before? Paired an essay with your own images? How do/did editors respond to this?

Sarah Einstein: This is the first time I’ve used images in an essay, but I was so struck by the things I saw on the tour that I couldn’t see how I could leave them out. I was particularly struck by the awfulness of the sign that reads “Your Mother Doesn’t Work Here! Clean Up Your Own Mess!” hanging in, of all places, the children’s ward. The sheer obscenity of that took my breath away, and I can’t imagine anything I could write speaking so clearly to the way in which inmates (because that’s what they were) were so thoroughly dehumanized than the cruelty of that sign. It struck me like a punch to the gut, and I wanted the reader to have that same experience.

MA: It was definitely a punch to the gut for me, too. Shocking in its callousness. Speaking of images, what did you think of the image selected for your piece by our artist Wiley Quixote? Do you feel like it shapes the reader’s perception of the story before reading? If so, is that a good or bad thing?

SE: I love the image, and I think it’s perfect for this piece. The way in which the the man’s face, eyes closed, is obscured by shadows that look as if they come from bars on a window speaks so clearly to the experience of the former inmates. I was very pleased that the journal chose to focus on the actual people who had lived and died in the old State Hospital rather than on the ghosts that had been conjured for the tourists.

MA: Wonderful. That’s what struck me–the real people who lived and died there. But…now that you’ve said that, of course I have to ask. Do you believe in ghosts? What (if anything) changed in your mind after visiting the Trans-Alleghany Asylum?

SE: I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe that places can be haunted by the horrific events of the past. In fact, what bothered me most about the sanitized ghost stories that were told on the tour–the stories of little Victorian girls who danced to music boxes and of protective, maternal spirits–was that they made the old asylum less haunted, obscured the truth of the atrocities that happened there. I wanted the guides to tell the more awful, more true stories of patients who died because we called torture “treatment,” of patients who were lobotomized to make them easier to deal with and not to make them healthier or happier, of the ways in which the administrations benefited from the slave labor of inmates. These are the things which haunt the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, not pretty little girls who dance.

MA: I agree. Thanks for this insight and your wonderful essay. And finally, because we are a recovery-themed journal, what does “recovery” mean to you?

SE: I think “recovery” means so many things. In this piece, I try to “recover” the truths that the fictional ghost stories elide, the stories of people who themselves were sent to “recover” from illnesses we didn’t understand very well, and who were “treated” with the most horrific tortures imaginable. People who, when they were finally released, called themselves “psychiatric survivors” and worked to recover the human rights that had for so long been denied to them. All of this is recovery, and all of it is important.

by David Faldet

Thinking about the sources of my poem, “Tilt,” what comes to mind is phantom limb pain. I wrote the poem when my father-in-law was in a nursing home and my mother-in-law was living alone in the home they had shared for many years. After I wrote the poem my father-in-law passed away. This has only deepened my mother-in-law’s keen sense of absence described in the poem.

The poem ends with an image of two flowering crab trees: one cut off at ground level, the other with its trunk and limbs tilted away from the first to make way for the space the absent tree took when it was living. The cut-down tree is a phantom tree, its presence registered in the twist and angle its limbs etched into the shape of its neighbor.

When my father-in-law was in the nursing home, as in the poem, he was a diminished man, with little short-term memory. Even there, his worries as caretaker of his house remained in exaggerated form: concern about the garage door, an outdoor light, a touchy furnace, the door locks. He couldn’t follow the evening news or read a newspaper story. He was too weak to work a trowel, grub out a weed, or pick a flower: activities that once filled his days. Now, he is gone completely.

And yet, that is a lie. He left a real though unoccupied space, a deep and complex impression, especially on his wife. My mother-in-law spends much of her day going through his papers, his records, his pictures, his souvenirs of a long life as a married man, a family man, a Lutheran pastor. Though in her eighties she has a memory that puts mine to shame. All those pieces of her dead husband’s life are keen, colorful, and evocative of feeling in her mind. Though she has taken his name off the address on the gas bill, her heart is filled with the man whose life intertwined with hers for sixty years.

Although phantom limb sensations can register as freedom of movement and activity, doctors say these feelings are dominated by pain. That may not be true for the living memories of the dead whose lives have grown lovingly intertwined with your own, but from my experience those memories carry a shadow of pain.

Amanda Meader: I found your piece People Eat Chickpeas Bathed in Vinegar to be very evocative and moving. What was the inspiration behind it?

Zarin Hamid: That poem came about last summer, in the heat and humidity of New Jersey, and it was really just a result of longing across space for Kabul in the summertime, full of sun and dust, but also abundance of fruits and vegetables and cool mountain air once you get outside the city. The weather in the summer is very similar to southern California, even the landscape is similar, and I was reaching for that feeling of happiness of countless times I was stuck in the horrendous traffic of that city, but right next to rose bushes planted in between opposite going lanes, which in itself should give you a picture of the duality of the city, and of the people – nature loving people with their lives and their land ravaged by war. And overall, Afghanistan is a large part of my consciousness, and often my poetry unashamedly treads back to it.

AM: How does your professional work inform your writing?

ZH: My professional work is focused on, in broad terms, values of peace and gender equality, and often so is my writing. But what I often tend to write about has been with me as long as I have been able to think consciously and critically. Maybe my understanding of what I write about has improved over the years, and that is linked to my academic and professional work which has made me grow as well.

I don’t think the professional work informs my writing though – I think it’s the other way around. And I think I have given myself the freedom to go professionally where I am most moved or feel most ethically drawn to, and that often tends to be related to the natural environment, social justice issues, or international events. My critical consciousness first woke up as a young refugee child, and seeing my parents struggle, and trying to make sense of why we were in that situation. This has forced me to look outward, to the world, and to the connections of why and how our world is the way it is.

AM: What is your biggest challenge as a writer?

ZH: Finding the time to write, and to really give it the care and attention it deserves.

AM: Do you have a designated writing space? What special object do you keep on or near your writing space to inspire you?

ZH: I don’t have a writing space – I tend to write in any place, and I don’t have any objects that particularly inspire me to write. In the last few years, I’ve started typing on the computer and usually only use paper when away from a computer or a phone. In that case, I end up using whatever bits of paper are around. In the summertime, on long lazy days, I do love to write outside, though.

AM: What are you working on now?

ZH: I’m editing and organizing previous material and I’m hoping to create a few more pieces this summer, because honestly, there is a limit to editing and you really need to just write until something decent comes out of the mess.

Amanda Abbie Meader was born and raised in Maine, where she returned to practice law after graduating from Cornell Law School in 2004. By day Amanda is a staff attorney for a non-profit organization; by night she is the wife of a very patient man and the mother of two ridiculously spoiled Boston Terriers. Reading and writing infuse her with peace and energy in a way that nothing else can, and she is constantly dreaming up ways to devote more of each day to pursuing her true passion.

Kyle’s poem “Labradorite” appears in the April 2014 issue.

Barbara Daniels: Can you tell us about the title of your new book, Wildwood? I know it refers to a New Jersey shore town, but does it mean more than that, maybe all the wildness in your family or that you’ve encountered in your travels? Do the wonderful bars in the book, such as The Ugly Mug and Smitty’s Bar at the New Jersey shore, imply some wildness in you as well?

Kyle Laws: The name Wildwood has always had a special meaning to me, much more than the town that goes by that name. I grew up on the Delaware Bay, in a town first known as Wildwood Villas that was later shortened to the Villas. It was carved out of land held by the descendants of whaler yeoman families that had settled the area in the late 1600s and early 1700s. It was a “wild,” cut-off part of New Jersey, which is why it was so pristine when I was growing up. Many of the original trees had never been cleared, and some advertisements for the lots made a point of them being wooded. So, it was not only wild in its cut-off way, but wooded as well, which made it much more suited to the name of Wildwood than the barrier island on the ocean side. And, unlike most of the other residents, we lived there all year round in a house converted from a saloon. So, if bars show up repeatedly throughout the work, it’s because I grew up in the remnants of one. Liquor had been stored in the basement where I played hide-and-seek. And because story-telling was so much a part of my mother’s personality, I grew up with that history repeated over and over. The bar, owned by one of the original thirty-five whaling families, was lost in a tax sale.

From there I came west to Colorado, which certainly fits with being wild and wooded. It’s the extremes of landscape that have always been my home.

Barbara: Your book portrays fascinating people—Kay, Ordelia, and your father among others. Did growing up around these people influence your sense of the dramatic or inspire you to depict extremes of emotion?

Kyle: I think people have always sought places that were large enough to contain them, where something besides themselves was in charge. The West originally drew people who didn’t fit in the polite society of the East, who had a respect for the land and the native inhabitants. Of course that changed. The personalities in my family didn’t seem so extreme when compared to a nor’easter. And the overwhelming sense of their own morality (although a sexually-charged one) was not out of place in resistance to the culture of the town. It was two places, one in winter, one in summer. Winter was poor and lonely, but so pure in its way, so stripped of artifice. Summer was like a carnival. To be able to live well in those extremes takes a certain type of personality. And our family had it. It was a place where you could be yourself, no matter what that was. Who were you going to offend? The horseshoe crabs, the seagulls, the families who barely got by because of lack of work?

Barbara: In what ways are you a poet of place–the mid-Atlantic region where you grow up and the American West, where you live now, as well as all the places you’ve traveled to?

Kyle: More than anything else, I’m a poet of place. I remember being at a poetry conference in Cape May, New Jersey in winter, and someone commented that they didn’t really understand my reverence for the land. I was in front of a window looking out as the waves crashed on a shore lightly crusted in snow. It was the shore at its most beautiful. And even though I knew the winter wind would bite my face, I had a strong desire to walk along the tide line. I didn’t understand how that could be lost on people. In some ways it’s about your homeland, even if it’s an adopted one as mine in the West. I remember looking up at a man in the group who was born in Israel. I could tell he got it. Every evening in the Villas, people walked to the top of the street to watch the sunset. It was a ritual. It kept you connected to where you were, what was going on. I think if you understand the land, you understand the inhabitants. And you really need to understand people, even the wild ones of your family.

Barbara: You write so vividly about specific locales, such as La Veta Pass in Colorado, Decatur Street in New Orleans, and the Deer Dance at Taos Pueblo. Do you return to the same places again and again for inspiration or head out in new directions when you travel?

Kyle: I return to a place until I think I’ve gotten it down in all its aspects. Then a new idea will pop up, and there I go back again. I’ve returned to the Villas at least once a year for twenty-five years. My mother’s ashes were spread from the Cape May-Lewes Ferry, and my sister and I visit her resting place each January. I’m now working on another series about the area and my family’s connection to it. But I’m always going someplace new. Often I follow threads backward. The four trips to Haiti were following threads from New Orleans, and threads from the American West. The first horses in the Americas were brought to Hispaniola, now Haiti and the Dominican Republic. But here, in Colorado, to go anywhere south you have to cross a pass, and that’s why La Veta shows up so frequently. This fall, I’ll be returning to Taos once again. I’m hosting a Poetry Rendezvous over Labor Day weekend at the Sagebrush Inn. The Rendezvous group has been getting together for twenty-six years now, longer than the fur traders from which the name came.

Barbara: My favorites among the poems in Wildwood include “The Other Thing Kay Said at the Ugly Mug,” “Ranson,” “Father Left on Monday for the Swing Shift,” and the title poem, “Wildwood.” Do you have favorites among the poems in the book and if so, why?

Kyle: Not necessarily favorites, but I do have a fondness for the long poems in the book, “199 Steps to the Top of the Lighthouse,”“Bottom of My Voice,” “Coronado’s Trail,” and The Bridge Builder.” I like the extended rhythms that can be developed in a long poem. “The Bridge Builder,” and why it’s named that, was written to the rhythms in a sound recording of Hart Crane’s “The Bridge.”  “Coronado’s Trail” was written on the route of that trip. “199 Steps to the Top of the Lighthouse” and “Bottom of My Voice” were also written on location. So, they bring up thoughts and feelings as listening to a song on the radio will about where you were and what you were doing when you first heard it. And as I look through the table of contents, I realize that the majority of the poems were written on site.

Barbara: Some of your poems, such as “Bottom of My Voice,” are love poems. Do you set out to write love poems or are you surprised to find that you’re writing them?

Kyle: I think the hardest thing to write is a love poem, and because of that I would never just sit down to write one. For me, it would be a sure recipe for disaster. I have found that when writing about the relationship between two things, even in a landscape, that a love poem can come out of it. It’s the tension. And I don’t think I’ve ever thought about that until you asked the question.

Barbara: Often your poems are about losses (such as the buildings “washed away by the sea” in “199 Steps to the Top of the Lighthouse” and the darkroom your father lost “to his own darkness” in “Coronado’s Trail”), yet your book as a whole is remarkably upbeat, and, it seems to me, life affirming, full of passion, energy, and desire. Did you intentionally choose such poems for this book, or is your work usually positive?

Kyle: Because I believe in the power of transformation, from dark to light, from despair to hope, that must come through. I’m always interested when people say what they do about the narrative being upbeat. I once had a psychologist scream at me for not acknowledging my family’s negative effect. I came to find it an interesting story, and one that had its origin in a specific time and place. Once I understood that and them, it had little to do with me, and more to do with them. And they were hardly boring. I cannot even imagine growing up with “normal” parents.

Barbara: In “Waiting in New Orleans” you mention “something unsaid” between Hawthorne and Melville. Your poems reveal some secrets about yourself and your family history, but is there “something unsaid” in your own work, some theme or topic you’ve shied away from? If so, why?

Kyle: Someone once asked me about how I got through the things I did, and my answer was “I always told the truth.” If you don’t have secrets, then there’s not much anyone can do to hurt you. There’s little I shy away from. There are things I might not shout about because I’m protecting someone else, but not myself. Because not much would shock me, I am the kind of person people talk to. I hear a lot of interesting things that I never write about. It all goes into the mix of understanding human nature, which is fascinating. But that being said, there are always secrets, ones you don’t even know. Like my maternal grandfather’s family claimed to be Scots and “Indian” as they called it. Well, they were Irish, not Scottish, but at the time if you could pass with a name that sounded Scottish, it was best to use it to your advantage because the Irish were looked down on. It was a variation of Dundee: Dundess. And recent research has the “Indian” showing up as “Mulatto” on a census. I’m still trying to track that down. Wildwood Villas had a covenant in all the deeds against anyone other than the Caucasian race living there. Talk about secrets.

Barbara: You allude in Wildwood to work by other writers, including the poet J.C. Todd’s Nightshade and a verse novel, Ludlow, about a deadly labor dispute in a Colorado mining camp. Are there poets or teachers that have influenced your writing?

Kyle: The first influences were the French Surrealists, especially André Breton. I diagrammed a number of his poems to learn how to layer and build images. After a while, I could see patterns. And I did study with Diane di Prima, a Beat poet, early on. Books mentioned in poems are often ones I’m reading at the time of writing, and there’s some connection to what I’m working on. I prefer the mention to a footnote.

I would have to say artists have influenced me more than writers. I have always looked for strong women in order to figure out how to live my life. Georgia O’Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, Emily Carr, and George Sand (the one writer in the group) come to mind as influences. I have always thought of writing as an outgrowth of how you lived. Create the life; then write about it.

Barbara: The titles of the poems in the book sometimes transport readers to specific times and places, such as “Nat King Cole and Pepe’s Cottage on the Bay 1961,” while other titles are wonderfully mysterious, such as “I Walk the Abyss” and “The River Is Hungry.” Do you choose your titles first or do they occur to you as you’re writing your poems?

Kyle: I always title a work after it is done, after the full concept of the poem has been developed. So, the poem determines the title. Sometimes I try to set a mood for the poem by the title so the reader has a frame of reference for what follows, and titles can do that without having to explain a lot in the poem. The more mysterious titles have a tendency to be philosophical in nature and often provide a link to the poems around them.

Barbara: Your poem “Dazed” is about your first experience of writing poems. What prompted you to begin writing? “Dazed” mentions “the bends / on the way to the surface,” during the process of writing. Does your writing still sometimes cause pain, or is this something associated more with your early work?

Kyle: That image came from the thought of the sheer volume of material and experience I would have to go through to get to any kind of truth, as if I could not hold my breath long enough to get there. The nice thing I discovered about poetry is you don’t have to do it all in one poem. You can take a whole book to do it.

I began writing seriously in my mid-twenties after being a dancer for years. The body wasn’t going to continue to cooperate. Since I’d written pretty consistently since grade school, teachers always encouraging me, I thought it was something I could do if I worked at it.

Barbara: You’ve sometimes written poetic sequences.  Do you plan them ahead of time or do the poems coalesce around specific themes and situations?

Kyle: I would say both. I have finished a poem to find that it doesn’t tell all there is that is interesting about a subject, so have continued onto another, and another, an organic process. And I have started out with a very specific subject and structure in mind. I recently completed a 30/30 Project series for a Tupelo Press fundraiser, thirty responses to Zane Grey’s Desert Gold. That was conceived ahead of time. The structure, which consisted of text from the novel, responses to the text, and related historical and personal footnotes, really helped with writing and posting a poem every day.

Barbara: What has kept you writing for thirty years?

Kyle: I think I have a writer’s temperament. I’ve always been a meticulous observer, and while observing I often draw connections to other things. I see interrelationships, or make them up in my mind. I love to research. I enjoy it as much as writing. My sister recently spent two days in the County Clerk’s office in Cape May Court House (the name of a town, not just the building), NJ patiently sitting in a chair while I researched 300 years of deeds, drawing connections I had anticipated and those that were surprises. I dragged her to a cemetery at dusk to see the site of a mass grave for nine African American Union soldiers washed up on shore not far from where we grew up. She bragged to my brother about the cemetery, but not the two days in the stacks. It really is the adventure of discovery, coupled with the telling. I write easily. It’s the editing that is a slow go, as it should be. Poetry is my main medium. I love the rhythm and sound of words.

Barbara Daniels received a 2014 fellowship in poetry from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and one of her poems was selected for the 2013 Best of the Net Anthology. She is the author of a book of poems, Rose Fever, and the chapbooks The Woman Who Tries to Believe, Quinn & Marie, and Black Sails. She earned an MA at New York University and an MFA in poetry at Vermont College.