Laura Shovan: The title of your poem “The Stick in the Big Boy’s Hand,” acts as a refrain, appearing twice more within the body of the poem. I thought this use of repetition suited the poem’s theme — the places in our memories or personal histories where we become stuck. Why was it important to you to emphasize this particular line?

Jacqueline Jules: Wow! I love the way you phrase that, Laura—“the places in our memories or personal histories where we become stuck.” You articulated my intended theme much better than I would have if you had asked me what the poem was about. For me, “the stick in the big boy’s hand” is a symbol. The majority of my poems have what I call “a controlling image,” an object or concept that represents the emotion I am trying to capture. However, I don’t often use repetition. But in this poem, it felt so right I almost did it unconsciously. As the controlling image, “the stick,” was meant to convey how both sisters were battered by the experience, just in different ways.

LS: Any discussion of childhood sexual abuse is going to be difficult. Explain why you chose, for your speaker, the victim’s older sister. Giving the speaker that little bit of distance deepens the poem, adding a complicated —and lifelong — layer of familial relationships to the narrative.

JJ: I am glad the choice of speaker resonated with you. The decision was highly personal, since this poem was sparked by a comment from a childhood friend who reminded me of an incident involving my younger sister. I observed the abuse from a distance and never fully comprehended how it affected my sister, who suffered psychologically all her life. My goal was to describe my helplessness, my inability as both a child and as an adult, to rescue her.

LS: There’s an almost gentle moment when we see the younger sister, “prone in the dew/ her cheek pressed into the long grass,” before the speaker realizes what’s happening. What does that image symbolize for you?

JJ: This is pure description—what I remember of the incident. I was a child. I didn’t expect to see a violent act and for a moment misunderstood what I saw. Like all poets, I write from my own experiences and emotions. However, I don’t mind changing details if it strengthens my point or theme. And I generally take many liberties in autobiographical poems with a first person narrative. This poem did not require that. Until the last stanza, I described the event exactly as I remembered it.

LS: The poem begins with the nine-year-old older sister who “didn’t know what to do, who to tell, or how to stop/ the stick,” then jumps forward forty years. Talk about how you help the reader make that leap in time.

JJ: That was the biggest challenge of the poem, the part I revised the most. I had to make the reader see the younger sister in bed, years later with “her cheek against the pillow,” recalling the abusive incident. I chose to use dialogue. The younger sister says, “Too dangerous to go outside. The grass is slick.” In this way, I strove not only to refer back to the younger sister’s troubling experience but the older one’s initial misunderstanding of what she saw. And when the older sister says, “I watched from the doorway,” the word, doorway is meant to put the reader clearly inside a house, many years away from the trauma on the grassy hill. It was important in this stanza to show how the sisters were haunted as adults by this childhood experience.

LS: Although it is an abstract piece, Peter Groesbeck’s artwork, “The Path to Pain,” emphasizes the dualities in your poem. How does the painting speak to you, in relation to “The Stick in the Big Boy’s Hand“?

JJ: For me, the black line in the middle of the art is “the stick in the big boy’s hands.” It is also the watershed event in the life of the youngest sister. At the same time, the division of the art represents the different perspectives and impact the incident has for the two sisters. If you start from the white strokes on the bottom and travel to the red at the top, you see a journey from innocence to affliction.

Laura Shovan is editor of the art and literary journal Little Patuxent Review and of two poetry anthologies. Her chapbook, Mountain, Log, Salt and Stone, won the inaugural Harriss Poetry Prize. In 2012, Laura was a finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award. She was a 2013 Gettysburg Review Conference for Writers scholarship recipient and has poems forthcoming in Barely South Review, The Fourth River and Switched-on Gutenberg. Laura works with young poets as a Maryland State Arts Council Artist-in-Residence. Visit her online at http://www.laurashovan.com/

Patricia Kinley: Hi, Catherine. I loved your essay, Chasing Normal. For me, it had just the right combination of the personal and the universal experience. Your own experience as a girl, then young woman, growing up and into full womanhood really resonated for me, having been very shy and coming late to my own appreciation of myself. I’m wondering if you can tell me what Chasing Normal is about and how you came up with such a poignant title?

Catherine Dowling: I’m glad the essay resonated with you. It started off as a story about internet dating experiences, not anything historical. But as I wrote, my past kept intruding on the present and a theme emerged. I remembered how awful it feels when you’re a teenager and you’re a bit different from others, a bit odd. How you desperately want to be like everyone else and find it so hard to appreciate your own uniqueness. What makes you who you are is often a source of embarrassment when you’re a teenager simply because it’s different from everyone else. So that’s what the essay is about. It’s about appreciating who you are, as you are. I really didn’t come to the title until I finished the essay and realized that many of us spend a good part of our young lives trying to be what we see as normal. I’ve spent nearly 20 years as a breathwork psychotherapist and I know this is a dilemma that haunts people well into adulthood. Growing up is often a process of growing into who we are, of appreciating our own uniqueness.

PK: “Normal” is so subjective. What does “normal” mean to you and was it more important to feel “normal” or to be perceived as “normal” during your varied age in which essay is placed?

CD: I guess “normal” is culturally determined to a large extent. Normal means being thin when thin is in fashion (when is it not?), it means being socially adept, attractive, sexy, flirty. Girls, at least in my generation, tended to define themselves by their ability to have relationships. And that meant getting engaged and married and having children. That was normal. Fortunately I also had some friends and classmates for whom intellectual achievements were very important. I think many of us have an idea of what we should be and it’s usually different from what we actually are. We can spend a lot of energy and angst trying to achieve that. Now I would say there’s no such thing as normal.

PK: I’m thinking that had I read your essay at a young age, it would have helped me process my feelings and find solace in that I would eventually grow into a confident self. Yet, as a grown woman, the essay gives language to my own trajectory to that very same place. And it’s not a stretch, I think, to believe boys and men could be enlightened by Chasing Normal, too. So my question is, when you wrote this piece, were you hoping to appeal to a particular gender/age group?

CD: I didn’t have a particular age group in mind, but I was aware of the universality of the theme. I did think in terms of women but now that you mention it, wanting to fit in can be a huge pressure for boys too. It shows in a different way with boys, but it’s definitely there. I’d be extremely pleased if it spoke to teenagers and saved at least one person the years it took me, and many others, to arrive at an appreciation of their own individuality.

PK: I took quite a lot away from the essay – the appreciation of honest writing, the relativity to my own experiences, the visceral joy of your “ah ha!” moment . What do you hope a reader will take away from it?

CD: I hope they enjoy the experience of reading. I love the craft of writing, of sculpting words and sentences into something that’s as flowing and rounded and pleasurable as I can make it. I hope readers also find it a little bit funny. And if they are in a place in their lives where they’re not fully appreciating themselves, I hope they get a little closer to the joy of being exactly who they are. When people talk about recovery, they’re usually referring to recovery from illness, or addiction. For me, life is a process of small recoveries, from limits, from the way we sometimes see ourselves, from self-criticism. Recovery is growth, growing into fullness, becoming who we are. And it never ends. It’s what life is about.

PK: I understand that you have already published a book and have another one in the hopper. Can you tell me about both and tell me what you have planned for your next writing project?

CD: I have a strong background in adult education. Adults learn experientially. I write mainly about self-development but I like to do it through telling stories. Stories make concepts accessible so the reader has the experience and the understanding before they ever get to the concepts being covered in a chapter. My books contain lots of stories about people’s lives, which I hope also makes them entertaining. My first book was published in the UK. It’s called Rebirthing and Breathwork and it’s about breathwork as a really effective tool for emotional and spiritual growth. My next one is called Getting to One: Five Keys to a Fully Lived Life and it will come out in 2014. That’s about spiritual experiences and how to put the wisdom of spirituality into practice in life. I’ve been so busy getting it finished and developing a marketing plan that I haven’t given the next writing project much thought.

PK: So many of us have been married, raised families, pursued careers, and yet find ourselves living alone at an age we felt we never would. For those of us who still hold out for romantic love, do you have any dating advice?

CD: Oh lord no, none. You’d need a different kind of writer for that, a romance writer maybe.

PK: Haha! I’ll head to my nearest library. Well, thanks, Catherine, so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure talking to you and I do so look forward to more of your written work!

Patricia Kinley is a writer, writing coach and copy editor. Her website is under development, but she can, in the meantime, be reached via email at pkinley07@yahoo.com.

Anne Dyer Stuart holds an MFA from Columbia University and a PhD from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her lyric nonfiction won New South journal’s 2012 prose prize, and her fiction received the Henfield/Transatlantic Prize from the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pembroke Magazine, Sakura Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Poet Lore, The Louisville Review, Third Coast, Midway Journal, Best of the Web, storySouth and elsewhere. She teaches at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania.

Most importantly for us, Anne wrote the oh-so-wonderful poem SCARS in this issue of r.kv.r.y.

Also, her poem, Ruined Ghazal, was just published a few days ago at Midway Journal:

She also has a lovely poem, First Grade, up at storySouth.

Enjoy!

Mary Akers: Hi, Ann, thanks for agreeing to talk with me today. I love your poem “Christmas Cactus.” It moved me the very first time I heard you read it and it still moves me with each successive read. I think what I love most about your work is all of the beautifully layered, understated, multiple meanings contained within your poems. You never hit the reader over the head, but the layers are always there. How do you feel about having your work described as “layered”? Are you conscious of the layers as you write?

Ann Goldsmith: You talk about layers and layering and wonder if I fill my poems on purpose with multiple meanings.  Yes and no, I guess.  I wrote a poem once about the poem as a kind of merfish that could be brought up sometimes from a deep well.  The last two verses tried to give a sense of the dynamic involved: The well is my well / and the poems in it / will rise for no bait but mine, / but it has underground connections. // Someday, perhaps, / I’ll land a shining one, / spawned and seasoned in the deep river, / speckled all over with a fire. / If I drown with it in my arms, / maybe it will carry me to the ocean / and teach me to swim.

With “Christmas Cactus,” questions of death and renewal were implicit in the actual experience; and then that time of year, especially these days, highlights my sense of time racing by while moments seem to go on for years.  I had an experience decades ago that I wrote a poem about, when I was hiking with my husband in the Colorado Rockies.  We were high up, on a narrow trail, and while I could touch the slope with my right hand, off to the left the mountain dropped away hundreds of feet and the view stretched to some far peaks.  I had to sit down because I got so dizzy trying to process the two kinds of seeing—and that became a metaphor for me of temporal and galactic time and the struggle to move between them.

MA: Much of your work involves the exploration of ties between the natural world and the man-made world: the hawk that swoops in and takes a small animal from a suburban yard; the wild mouse, a present from your domesticated cat, that you hold lovingly as it dies; personal pain eased through the calming effect of mountain ranges; giant trees just outside a city; the hiking dreams of a husband long gone. Has nature always inspired you to write?

AG: Quick answer: yes.  I’ve written a few urban poems, but even in those, nature tends to break through. That’s where my imagination automatically goes—a color, a shape, a gesture . . . they take me to the cabin in the woods, the two ants duking it out on the kitchen floor, the Christmas cactus. . . .

MA: Looking back over my list above, it strikes me that many of your poems also explore death in some form, but are infused with so much redemption that they feel uplifting. Is that a balance you consciously seek to reach? Or is it simply a glimpse into your own process of trying to make sense of a chaotic world?

AG: Oh, I’ll go with the glimpse.  I do aim for balance, but mostly I’m trying to sort through the stuff of my life and my questions and intuitions about death.  As the first grows shorter and the second draws closer, I find myself increasingly drawn to contemplation of the hinge or membrane between them.  Sometimes it feels as if I could almost reach through.

MA: Another phrase I would use to describe your work is “full of grace.” And I don’t mean strictly religious grace, but that is part of it–the grace of God, mostly unspecified. You also manage to make the structure and the sentiment graceful. You write accepting, embracing, loving poems. Does my description of your work ring true to you? Do you strive to make graceful work?

AG: I do believe in grace, but I’m not sure how to express the concept.  Perhaps it’s what leaks into a poem after enough struggle.  Thanks for this gracious comment!

MA: What did you think of the artwork selected to illustrate your poem? Did you find any special meaning in the image?

AG: I loved the illustrations not only for my poem but throughout this issue of r.k.v.r.y.  The red bird in “my” illustration seemed to capture the feeling of “Christmas Cactus” and also of a sense of flight and life that invited additional worlds into the poem.

MA: I’m always fascinated by the ways in which creative people find links between different genres of creative work. I know you have done several ekphrastic poems in the past and also participated in readings that were paired with the work of visual artists. I really love creative pairings. What do you think it is about blending and combining creative talents that makes the experience so enriching and rewarding?

AG: Collaborations like this are a lot of fun.  They bump me out of my ruts into new forms and ideas.  My favorite example from my own experience was when a group of poets, painters and composers put together a program several years ago in which we jumped off  from each other’s works.  I wrote a poem, “Requiem,” inspired by Catherine Parker’s painting, “Litany,” which she had created while listening to a symphony by Alvo Pert, and then Persis Vehar composed a choral piece entitled “Cathedral of the Universe” from my poem.  There were these marvelous connections, not just among us, but between individual works.

MA: Oh, that sounds wonderful. And ephemeral–at least the performance-pairings all enjoyed at once.

And finally, because we are recovery-themed, what does “recovery” mean to you? 

AG: The word “recovery” is one of those umbrella words, isn’t it?—encompassing a variety of possibilities.  Recovery for me, I guess, is healing of any kind and the restoration of life energies.

[Christopher Martin]: It interests me that your poem “Absentee,” from the current r.kv.ry quarterly, appears in a special issue on “faith and doubt.” Upon reading your poem, a couple connections between it and the issue’s theme came to mind, but I’m curious to hear about the connections you see. How do faith and doubt inform your poem? And in turn, what does your poem reveal about these two concepts that tend to be viewed dualistically?

[William Kelley Woolfitt]: “Absentee” meditates on concrete expressions of faith and doubt, or belief and unbelief, as they relate to body and land. In the poem “Sunday Morning, 1950,” Irene McKinney creates a list of objects that sacralize the physical and physicalize the sacred: “tight, white sandals” and “dust in the road, and on the sumac,” “narrow benches we don’t fit” and “shaven hilly graves.”  The objects in “Absentee” try to carry on that same work, to affirm that God is present in creation, even in hills and streams that have been exploited and profaned.

[CM]: “Absentee” is very much a concrete poem, even a bodily poem. The lines “scattershot ice a bruising reminder to me / that I am really in my body, and not in a dream, / when I go out to smell the world set alive” perfectly capture the poem’s presence in the flesh and in the world.  Yet, the poem is titled “Absentee,” and, to return to the previous question, it appears in an issue centered upon two words that are abstractions. In what ways does your poem interact with its title? And in what ways might such interactions lend physicality to the issue’s theme?

[WKW]: I borrowed my title from Barbara Rasmussen’s book Absentee Landowning and Exploitation in West Virginia: 1760 – 1920. The speaker of my poem, I think, is committed to (or wants to commit to) being not an absentee, but a “presentee,” a dweller, a witness who strives to be fully awake, alive, and aware of body, environment, and the interconnections between the two. Kathleen Norris suggests the connection between faith and heart when she states that “if we can determine what it is we give our heart to, then we will know what it is we believe.”  In my poem, it is how the speaker lives in his body and how he inhabits his world that reveals to him what it is he believes.

[CM]: This issue of r.kv.ry features some gorgeous artwork by Suzanne Stryk, and “Eclipse Salamander,” which accompanies your poem, might be my favorite. Do you happen to know if there was any purposeful arrangement among the artwork and text for this issue, specifically as related to “Absentee” and “Eclipse Salamander”? And whether their arrangement was or was not purposeful, how do you see Suzanne’s work as complementing (or complicating) your poem’s narrative?

[WKW]: While I don’t know much about how the art and text for this issue were arranged, I love Stryk’s work, and “Eclipse Salamander” is one of my favorites. I keep thinking it would make a wonderful book cover! I like to imagine that the salamander is a creature that inhabits two worlds (land and water) that are different but interdependent; thus, “Eclipse Salamander” seems an especially apt companion for “Absentee,” whose human speaker envisions or experiences a range of dualities not as mutually exclusive but as interdependent.

[CM]: How does “Absentee” fit in the larger body of your work?

[WKW]: For several reasons, “Absentee” plays an important part in my manuscript Beauty Strip. One reason is that I wrote the first version of “Absentee” ten years ago, and now I can see that it marks an important shift in my writing—from poems that were chiefly autobiographical (if I wanted to be harsh, I might say blinkered or self-absorbed) to poems that seek out closer and more intricate connections between speaker and environment, community, and history.

Another reason is that “Absentee” joins the title poem “Beauty Strip” and a number of others in the manuscript that take a closer look at extractive industries, mountaintop removal, subsidence, habitat loss, and so on. And yet another reason is that the well-house in “Absentee” reflects my interest in a variety of small utilitarian structures that mark our human passage on the earth – granaries, corn cribs, mills, coops, and so on.  (A related poem, “Time, the Springhouse,” was published by Quarterly West.)

Christopher Martin is author of the poetry chapbook A Conference of Birds (New Native Press, 2012). His poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Shambhala Sun, drafthorse, Still: The Journal, Thrush Poetry Journal, Buddhist Poetry Review, Town Creek Poetry, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume V: Georgia, and elsewhere. Chris lives with his wife and their two young children in the northwest Georgia piedmont, between the Allatoona Range and Kennesaw Mountain.

Mary Akers: Hey, Mc. Thanks for agreeing to talk with me today–I’ve really been looking forward to this conversation. Thanks also for sharing your marvelous story One Day a Year with us. We’re so honored to have it as part of this issue. Even before I read your piece, I had the thought that it might fit our Faith & Doubt issue, just because of what I know about your marvelous body of work, which Andrea Barret has described as “…brilliantly lit by hard-won faith.” I love that description.  In preparation for our discussion, I’ve spent the last several hours immersed in your work and your singing sentences.

And I want to start by referencing an interview in which you likened the process of writing to liquid. There was a fascinating discussion of spilling-pouring and pouring-spilling. If it’s all right with you, could we get right down to it with a metaphysical question? Namely, how would you describe the place from which all these rolling, pouring, spilling, singing, poem-songs of yours originate? What, in other words, is the wellspring, as you understand it?

Kevin McIlvoy: Thanks for this question, Mary.

The starting place for me as a writer was the luck of growing up hearing truly marvelous oral storytellers in my father’s large family, particularly the oldest women in his family. Their rambling, chaotic stories were spellbinding to me. They were a form of singing that shifted in register and expressiveness according to what the storyteller was feeling in her body.

The story had not been planned (as a self-conscious design), it was not thought out and, so, poured out; it was unplanned (as an unselfconscious wreckage) and, so, spilled out. The story was not driven by a compelling plot or theme regarding our ways of becoming; it was driven by the sensations and the enigmatic vulnerabilities of the body and its ways of being.

Themes and plots arose in the story only as happy accidents. At no point was the story constructing an experience of comprehension for the listener’s mind; it was, instead, creating a way to listen with the body. This kind of story left me with the impression that storytelling existed above all else in order to give us new ways to be fully present — in all our senses, in our skin and flesh, in our noses, on our tongues, and always in our sensitive ears — to the world before us.

I became a reader who wished to read stories first with my body, then my mind. I became a writer who wished for language to bring new terms of engagement and estrangement to my body, and a writer more than a little restless with language primarily dedicated to cerebral clarity and concision.

If it was a good writing day for me today, it is one from which I shall not recover.

MA: Fascinating. I don’t think I’ve ever heard quite that recovery perspective expressed. I’m so grateful for it, and for you, and for your marvelous writing. Thank you again, for sharing your time and your heart and your insights with us. May all who have read this be changed by the reading and never “recover” from what you’ve shared with us today.

Mary Akers: Hi, Matt. I’ve been thinking a lot about about your essay On Hauntedness–you might even say it has haunted me. I think most people attach a negative emotion to the things that are said to haunt us. We’re haunted, after all, by the things we can’t let go, yes? (Or by the things that won’t let go of us.) So here’s my question: Do you think we are as often haunted by the good things–the good experiences, the windfalls, the out-of-the-blue fortune bursts–as we are by the sad, the poignant, and the regret-filled?

Matt Hart: This seems like a really dynamite place to start, Mary! I think what you’ve brought up here gets at how slippery what we’re talking about is—both in the sense of its being difficult to define and in the sense of its being potentially a sort of slippery slope into doubt, faithlessness, and despair. And yet, weirdly, I think hauntedness in all its forms can be artistically generative and substantial, because it makes us think about (and give form/ shape to) what’s not present, the possibilities of presence, life as it once was or might be, rather than as it is. This is why hauntedness is so important to poetry (and art generally). To address, explore, investigate the things that haunt us requires reveling in and wrestling with the unsayable, ineffable, irrational, contradictory mess of human being.

As for the idea of being haunted by good experiences and “fortune bursts” (I’m stealing the latter for the title of a poem by the way), this is something I’ve thought about quite a bit, but I’m still not sure I’m really all that clear about it. The short answer is that I don’t think we’re really haunted by the joys in the same way we’re haunted by trauma and loss, because the former are about presence while the latter are about absence. This is part of the reason that I ultimately defined hauntedness in the essay as “the perceptible presence of an absence.” One is haunted by shadows, gaps, blank spots, memory, desire, not the life one occupies, and is occupied with, now. We aren’t haunted by the sensible, apprehendable, knowable present, but by the inexplicable, ungraspable, and contingent periphery, the margins and what ifs of what used to be.

To be haunted, then, is to be revisited and/or nagged by something one once had and/or would (still) like to have, but can’t, OR to be repeatedly, unpredictably, and uncontrollably made cognizant of something one never wanted to experience in the first place. The first of these covers losses of various kinds—funny enough, usually nouns—people, places, and things. Whereas the other sort of hauntedness has to do with traumatic or intensely negative experiences that one would like to forget (or quit), but can’t. Both are connected intrinsically to memory, a remembered past (or a possible one), either that one desires to have again (that one misses, or missed out on) or that one would prefer to erase entirely from one’s consciousness.

One question I still have about all of this is whether one can be haunted by the future, by the mere possibility of the occurrence of something one fears or desires. Can one be haunted, for example, by the threat of nuclear war or global warming or the death of a loved one at some time yet to come—how about the thought of one’s own death to come? Or, are such anxieties about the future always based on previous experiences? By my lights, there’s almost nothing more irrational than the future, because it’s largely unpredictable and unknown. In other words, it’s both out of our control and always a surprise. And since hauntedness is often a symptom of irrational desire or irrational fear— complicated by unpredictability—shouldn’t we be haunted by the future as much as the past? Maybe it’s no wonder that in mythology the Fates were three witchy weirdos who designated whether a person would be good or evil and how long he or she would live. The idea of fate is creepy. It makes me think about the phrases, “The future’s bright” and “Things are looking up,” but also The Sex Pistol’s “No Future” and the so-called Doomsday Clock. With DNA mapping we can find out if we have certain genes that make various genetic diseases more likely. Can one be haunted by the knowledge that she has the gene that makes Huntington’s disease possible? And in a literary context how would one make the giant blank of its increased possibility an affecting presence? Historically speaking hasn’t fortune telling and soothsaying always been about alleviating a hauntedness re: what’s to come—or, as Wallace Stevens might put it, “How to live and what to do”?

Mary Akers: The possibility of future haunting–that’s a good question. And if the haunting future is only one of many possible futures, then chances are good you are always going to be haunted by a certain number of things that NEVER COME TO PASS. So, in that case, it isn’t really a future haunting, it’s an alternate universe haunting.

And along those lines, I’ve been reading a book that talks about and analyzes something called the “imposter syndrome.” Basically, it talks about how so many people (creative types especially) feel like imposters. As if we’re just skating along, waiting to be found out. As if, with the next book, someone will come along and shout, “Aha! Here is proof! I knew it all along. You are NOT a writer!” And I’m not talking about posers here, not ACTUAL imposters, I’m talking about talented, successful people with accomplishments and awards and accolades who feel like imposters.It’s really fascinating stuff. Are you haunted by the shadow of success(es)?

Matt Hart: Maybe the “imposter syndrome” is related to the idea of being haunted by the future. Isn’t worrying that we’ll be “found out” and declared a fraud (I first typed “afraid”) a fear of the future, since it projects into the realm of “what if”? And isn’t there also inherent in this the further anxiety that to be “discovered” as talentless by some authority at some time in the future will be an irreversible and damningly forever retroactive value judgment about our personal worth in the world (notice that positive judgments to the contrary don’t carry the same kind of defining force for most of us)?

Perhaps the creative fear of being an imposter is really a matter of our knowing that as artists we hide more than we reveal, even though we’re in the business of making the internal external, the unsayable said, the ineffable sensible. We know that everybody has secrets. But this is a problem, because a lot of creative risk-taking involves bringing the darkness out into the light, making our private selves in various ways more public—if only fictionally. I should note that when I talk about making the private self more public, I don’t mean this in some obviously confessional sense, but rather merely in the sense that art-making is always a matter of deliberately taking something hidden—thoughts, emotions, ideas, memories—and expressing them in contexts where they become vulnerable

Somehow it feels like I’ve wandered a long way from the topic in the meadow, but also sort of not… After publishing five books of poems and lots of reviews, essays and interviews, I’m still worried that I will spill too much the beans (which could be content based, but also a matter of formal ineptitude, myopia, or sheer stupidity), and in them will be the definitive proof of my fraudulence—that I am my doppleganger’s doppleganger, a debacle debacle, both fuck-up and flood…or in Plato’s lingo, an imitation of an imitation of an imitation— which ironically was, for him, art. How’s that for haunted circularity?

Mary Akers: Fortune Bursts and Haunted Circularity. Brilliant.

When my first (ever!) short story was accepted for publication, I was thrilled and excited…until I went to sleep that night. Then I was plagued with imposter dreams. I dreamed that I projectile vomited all over my writing group. I dreamed that my husband had accidentally married the wrong woman. When I emailed a writer friend about it the next morning (someone who has published two books and dozens of short stories), she said, “Yeah. Those never really go away.” I was shocked to my core that someone I perceived as so successful could feel that way, but I’ve since learned how common it is. Have you ever had imposter dreams?

Matt Hart: I (used to?) have a recurring dream of walking down a dirt road in the woods in the middle of the night, and up on the left is an old gray house made of boards, and inside there’s a brightness, like a lantern light burning. The house is ominous, even evil. It radiates hostility and madness, something terribly gone-wrong and utterly sad— a big black negative negative. I know in the dream that whatever’s in there is going to be incredibly painful to me, that it might even kill me. And yet, I’m compelled to go to it, so I keep walking. There are some steps and a little porch. It feels like Tennessee for some reason (where my mother’s family’s from). When I get to the door, my fear is overwhelming, and that’s when I wake up.

In the broad light of day, the dream seems like a goofy Evil Dead type horror movie set, something more to laugh about than to be afraid of. About a year ago, I described it to a friend, and he immediately said that the next time I have the dream I need to make myself stay asleep and open the door—that I need to go inside the house. And when I asked him why he thought this he said simply, “Because it’s home.” I haven’t had the dream since, but before that I was having it four or five times a year. I think the dream is now haunted by me, and of course “haunt” comes from an old Norse word meaning “home.” Anyway, I will open that door the next chance I get.

MA: You totally should open the door. But…now that your psyche knows you are planning to go into the house, I think the need and fear and compulsion to dream it are perhaps gone. The irony of haunting, yes? Once we recognize/accept/stare down the haunting, the haunting stops. (Maybe.)

I used to have a recurring dream in which I was chased by a three-legged dog. I would run and jump and do everything I could to get away, but as soon as I stopped, there he would be, like a Droopy-the-dog cartoon character (but less benign). The thing that was so awful (both in the dream and out) was that the dog wanted and needed me to help him…but there was nothing I could do. And so it was this chasing need of another creature that I couldn’t escape, that was always with me–haunting me. I’ve come to believe that the dream was related to my father’s alcoholism. I wanted to help him so bad. But even as a kid I knew it was beyond the scope of my abilities. After my father died, the one-legged dog dreams went away to haunt someone else.

Matt Hart: That three-legged dog dream is intense, and what might be even more intense is that you figured out a more than plausible interpretation for how it was functioning in your psyche. I also love the notion that the three-legged dog dreams went away to haunt someone else, as if an explanation doesn’t dis/solve hauntedness, but only cures us of the pang that made it haunting to us. The haunting thing is still haunting to someone, so skulks off to find them. Whatever the effects, explanations in some way ruin hauntedness, as it requires for its effectiveness that we “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” Once we see hauntedness for what it is, what we thought we saw—misunderstanding—is replaced by understanding and reason. A possibility, a shadow, a question, a stranger is replaced with something clear and familiar, an answer. Questions—especially unanswerable ones—seem more haunted and haunting to me than answers ever are. It’s the chronic unanswerable, un-squarable, and unthinkable things that haunt us.

Mary Akers: I love your description of fraudulent feelings and especially the bit about fear of being a debacle debacle…which, incidentally (or not so incidentally) is the title of your forthcoming poetry book. Very exciting! Can readers expect to find some haunted poems in there? Would you share a poem from it to whet our readers’ appetites? And would you say a bit about the haunting behind the poem?

Debacle Debacle is my new full-length collection of poems that just came out from H_NGM_N Books in May. I don’t know if the poems in it are haunting or not. That’s probably more a thing for others to judge. So much of what poetry is for me has to do with making sense of my experience, of finding a way to deal with something that’s gripped me (and won’t let go) in the first place. Maybe it would be better to say that the poems themselves are a way of taking something inexplicable and giving it a shape I can live with and that fits in with some larger worldview. In that way, poems for me are definitely like your three-legged dog going off to haunt someone else who needs it. My response to a haunted world, a haunting life, is poetry. I think if I wanted answers, I’d have been an engineer or an accountant. Writing poems is a way of containing more or less beautifully the terrors and joys and contradictions of living.

The urge and urgency (and emergency) of what we feel is a kind of noise to sense—an interruption or interference—that plays against and sometimes undermines the mind’s explanation apparatus. The Ka-Blam, the felt need part of being human—which is of necessity connected to the imaginative and empathic parts of who we are—will never align perfectly with the rational, problem-solving part. That’s the part of being human that poetry deals with best. If everything was explicable, unambiguous, and orderly, we wouldn’t need poetry in the first place…

Here’s a poem from Debacle Debacle:

POEM

Now in my infinite.
Now in my fall.  Of course,
I mean autumn and the leaves,
mostly the red and brown and orange-gold

leaves.  Remember last year?
You raked into mountains.  I raked
and I raked, and my tongue was a dog’s.
You laughed and you jumped.

You ran down the driveway, breath steaming visibly
the cold after air.  I the sky and you the nerve,
and life a crashing ladder.  The apple tree
pinker and weirder than ever.  Now beer with black pepper.

Catalytic converter.  I love it when the first line
and last line weave together; I think I should read you
a thousand more books.  In all other matters,
I am barking and happy.  What matters, we get up.

We brush ourselves off.

I chose this poem, because it’s one I’m haunted by. It gives shape to some joys and anxieties that even now remain at the forefront of my mind, having to do with parenting and my daughter growing up a little more everyday—so I’m losing her a little more everyday as I’m getting to know a new version of her a little more everyday—and sometimes I just wanna freeze the frame, and yet we go on. We have to…into the unknown. It’s all very sentimental when I put it this way, but there it is. And sentimentality is another thing that haunts me.

Mary Akers: I’ll be teaching a fiction workshop later this summer and I decided to talk about HOW TO HAUNT YOUR READER because I’ve been so inspired by your thoughts and ideas on this subject. I have yet to write out my lesson plans, but I’ve been thinking about the topic and also asking other authors what they think makes a work “haunting.” I asked Ann Pancake recently, and she said that for her it’s the musicality of (and within) the language. It feels true, that the rhythm and sound of words play a part in a piece feeling “haunting.” The Lydia Davis piece you used in your essay shows words haunted by their arrangement and etymology. Are there other poems you might think of as being “musically” haunting?

Matt Hart: I definitely think music can be haunting. That Lydia Davis piece is a good example, but it can also be as simple as a catchy melody that gets stuck in your head. This morning I woke up with the song “Safer in the Forest/Love Song for Poor Michigan” by La Dispute at the forefront of my mind. I don’t know why. And it wasn’t the whole song that I woke up with, of course, just this little piece of it, “I’ve been watching a slow thaw come around./I’ve been waiting in the cold and hazy blue./I’ve been driving alone out to the edge of town./I’ve been thinking too much of you.” I love the desolation this suggests, the loneliness, the absence of the “you”…that the rhyme is the glue… the thing we get stuck in… Maybe since you only have the words, here, and not the music it doesn’t have the same effect. Maybe it just sounds like song lyrics, i.e. it’s missing something essential, so it doesn’t sound like much of anything. That essential thing might be the actual music, the guitars and drums that go with it, or it might be something I bring to it, a personal, associative landscape of feeling, memory, and imagery that makes it haunting. In contrast to songs, one of the great things about poems is that they are simultaneously the lyrics and the music— no backing band necessary—what they say and how they say it are made of exactly the same words.

Mary Akers: Any famous examples of musically haunting poems you can think of?

Matt Hart: There’s a very famous and, I think, haunting bit from John Berryman’s “Dream Song #29″:

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
so heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.

Part of what makes this opening of the poem so musically memorable and haunting is the way the disrupted, distorted syntax, “There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart” and “in all them time” create both surprise and a forcefully awkward cadence that makes Henry’s not being able to “make good” all the more heartbreaking. The Dream Songs are full of these very deliberate syntactical “errors,” interference with ordinary speech to create song. The language is ornamental, textural, antiquated and wildly contemporary all at once—it’s also often melancholy in its grand dishevelment, its drunkenness. One thing the Dream Songs aren’t, however, is ordinary speech. It’s dis-arrangement is its music; it’s disarrangement is a kind of aural derangement. It trades in the prosaic (and even sentimental), “Once there was a thing that sat down on Henry’s heart, and it was so heavy” for something strange and strangely catchy, even a little disturbing as is the case in the poem’s final stanza:

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

The hooks in the music of these poems are very often syntactical, grammatical and word choice “problems” of the sort that a writing teacher would encourage a student to fix, “Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.” It’s kind of intoxicating. Frightening. Even still, what the Dream Songs and a lot of poems are haunted by as much or more than anything else is “plain speech”—saying something clearly for a practical purpose.

Another favorite example of haunting music in a poem for me comes from Ted Berrigan’s “Old Fashioned Air,” which is dedicated to Lee Crabtree, a friend of the author’s, and it’s full of plain speech, but a lot else as well. The poem is a description, almost a litany, of the texture and fabric of one day in the life of Ted Berrigan. It moves from walking through London’s “Battersea Park” to changing “a diaper” to reading “a small poem” to writing a line of poetry. In this way, the poem is a kind of “here’s what I did today” letter to Crabtree, a seemingly ordinary and very simple thing, a continuing conversation with an old friend who’s far away. As it turns out, however, the poem is anything but simple. It begins like this:

I’m living in Battersea, July, 12
1973, not sleeping, reading
Jet noise throbs building fading
Into baby talking, no, “speechifying”
“Ah wob chuk sh’guh!” Glee.

Berrigan’s opening is concrete. First person. He gives us the place, the date, a run together sound and image (“Jet noise throbs building fading,/Into baby talk”) and a feeling of “Glee.” I love all the long “e” sounds here, the constant rhyming and chiming with “Lee Crabtree.” Hard to believe that beyond these first five lines they intensify even more, as Berrigan begins describing a walk he took earlier in the day:

Across there is
Battersea Park
I walked across this morning toward
A truly gorgeous radiant flush;
Sun; fumes of the Battersea
Power Station; London Air;
I walked down long avenues of trees
That leant not ungracefully
Over the concrete walk. Wet green lawn
Open Spaciously
Out on either side of me. I saw
A great flock of geese taking their morning walk
Unhurriedly.
I didn’t hurry either, Lee.

All these long “e”s make for a kind of “ease,” an atmosphere both relaxed and familiar,” which culminates here both in the direct address to Crabtree—Berrigan’s old friend—and in that flock of geese “taking their morning walk/Unhurriedly.” Lee Crabtree is everywhere in the air with the speaker.

A few lines later the poet describes stopping to smoke a cigarette and watch those same geese, now in the water, “As they swam past me in a long dumb graceful cluttered line”— itself a long dumb graceful cluttered line. From there (and oh so leisurely!) he makes his way out of the park, but finding the gate locked he has jump the fence. Then finally, after stopping to pick up a London Times, he makes his way home, where he finds his infant son awake “in his bed” and “Alice asleep in mine.”

I changed
A diaper, read a small poem I’d had
In mind, then thought to write this line:
“Now is Monday morning so, that’s a garbage truck I hear,
not bells”…
And we are back where we started from, Lee, you
& me, alive & well!

Thus, the poem begins and ends with life, “I’m living/ alive & well”—but the poem’s bookends belie its real subject (never explicitly mentioned in the poem), Lee Crabtree’s untimely death by suicide. The poem rambles as the mind rambles, talking talking talking. It uses the direct address and the ordinary rhythms of a particular existence, including deliberate nonsense, awkwardnesses and word play as a way to undo the past and resurrect the dead—or at the very least simply distract the mind from the presence of the absence at hand. The poem’s old-fashioned and sonically beautiful air subtly creates an elegiac atmosphere of mourning and nostalgia that’s so breathless and energetic it’s almost hard to breathe. The repetition of the long “e” sounds throughout the poem, echo the long “e”s in “Lee Crabtree,” who is quite literally now music in the air. That is, until line 20, when, after singing with “ease,” the sound suddenly disappears—the “easiness” disappears—returning only briefly in the final line to rhyme “Lee” with “me,” joining sonically the poem’s speaker to its subject and occasion—the presence to its absence, and the present to the old fashioned air of the past, “here we are back where we started from, Lee, you & me, alive & well. The poet protests too much. The whole poem is Berrigan talking to himself, and thus talking to a ghost, nostalgically singing his friend Lee Crabtree back among the living. And just like the “long dumb graceful cluttered line” of geese in Battersea park, the poem seems to suggest that life too is “a long dumb graceful cluttered line” of other such days, beginning and ending, singing and working, writing and walking.

Mary Akers: Ruth Stone often talked about poems that came across the landscape toward her. She could feel them coming and know that she had to run to get to a pen and paper fast and catch the poem before it moved off and found another poet who could capture it. How do you feel about this description of her process? Do you think that is a sort of haunting?

Matt Hart: Honestly, I can’t say I’ve ever experienced the kind of thing that Stone seems to be suggesting, but I like it. It reminds me of Jack Spicer’s idea of the poet as a conduit, where the writer’s job is to tune into the atmosphere and take dictation. If I ever actually experienced something along those lines, I would feel great pressure to get those messages down. To miss even one of them would be to allow a presence perceived (as fleeting as it might be) to become an irreversible absence. How awful to have to consider in the wake of such an experience that perhaps that was the poem one was supposed to write, but blew it by not being quick enough. Perhaps this is a little of what happened with Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” when he was interrupted by the man from Porlock and lost two thirds of his vision in a dream. That poem is certainly haunted by what’s not in it—what the fragment of it points to, but doesn’t manifest. It’s haunted by Coleridge as well, his opium addiction, his ruin. Nevertheless, it’s one of the most imaginative poems written in English, super witch-crafty:

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice!

My own sense of process, in contrast to what Stone describes—and what Coleridge’s opium fever dream demonstrates—is probably more deliberately a matter sitting down repeatedly to write poems, and there, having nothing in particular to write about, attending to the world as I find it, usually initially via description. Describing things in words is really a way of filtering experience, memory, impressions through one’s own internal mechanism. It never comes out as it is, but as we see it. The world gets made inside us and translated into words. It’s also the one hope any of us has of being original, since each one of us is strange. We all have our own unique way of seeing and re-imagining the world. When that personal weirdness (which to each of us is just normal) comes through in a poem, that’s when we really have something alive…

But I realize that’s all pretty philosophical, and as I hear myself saying it, it sounds pretty silly. The truth is I don’t know where poems come from, how they get written and made, and that’s as haunting to me as anything. It’s unpredictable, and that’s scary if one defines oneself in terms of what one writes and feels at some point in the process compelled to say. I never wait around to be struck—to be inspirited, for poems to come to me—I get to work. I’ve been writing poems long enough now that I trust that paying attention and describing what I attend to will result in more poems. Poetry is a way of being in the world, a human activity that makes the world anew every time we sit down to write it. But there’s also a snowball effect inherent in the language. Words lead to more words. That’s why the dictionary’s so cool. Each and every word leads, via definition, to every other word in the language—but also to ones we haven’t invented yet. And now we’re back to the hauntedness of etymology and the future…

Mary Akers: Yes, the hauntedness of etymology. This is one of the aspects of hauntedness that is so compelling to me. In a way, it’s about not denying the origins of things and the way words and language and our own work develops.

In every poem, the ghost of the first draft poem is still there. And this is what I want to talk about for our final question. In any creation, there are a lot of steps to get to a finished product. These steps used to be an obvious part of the finished product, not hidden from the consumer–like the ribs on the spines of books that showed where they’d been hand-sewn, for instance, or the uneven finger-rings in a hand-thrown piece of pottery. After the industrial revolution, though, it became all about the gleaming finished product, or at least the efficiency of a mechanized process. Then, interestingly enough, craftsmanship and process came back in style, a sort of handmade backlash to industrial impersonalization.

If you were to look at the history of American poetry, can you see a similar shift away from “perfect,” and in favor of “process?”

Matt Hart: Mary, this is a barn-burner of a final question, so bear with me a minute here. I need to untangle some things for myself.

Obviously you’re right that etymology points to process, maybe especially in the way that Hegel talked about history—a sort of historical progression that moves along from thesis to antithesis and finally synthesis, which then becomes a new thesis, etc. But the important part of all that for our purposes is the historical progression jag. Etymology is the study of word origins and the development of words/language over time. In the essay I talked about this a bit, so I won’t re-hash it here, but there does seem to be a sense in which things (including words) are haunted by their origins, histories, and the baggage—both associative and otherwise—that they carry with them from being alive. Words contain remnants of all they once were (e.g. current spellings point back to older ones and other languages) and all they’ve ever meant (definitions accumulate and expand and shift with use). I’m writing an essay on Noise in poetry at the moment, so I looked that word up a few weeks ago. Turns out that it comes from the Latin word (via Old French and Middle English) nausea, meaning seasickness. Isn’t that wild? Noise is about disorientation by sound (which we now know consists of waves), interference, disruption, etc. There’s something woozy-making about intensified experiences with noise. Suddenly Moby–Dick makes so much more sense. That book is one narrative disruption after another, and both Ishmael and Ahab could be said to be “seasick” in different ways—both are haunted by the sea, even in the midst of it. Ishmael’s seasickness manifests itself as Romance, lovesickness, obsession, and (perhaps) unwarranted nostalgia, while Ahab’s manifests as monomania, the brutality of blankness, the nausea of human being … Even reading the book could be said to make one a little seasick. The whale-sized sentences. The waves and waves and waves of language. The graphic depictions of the hunt and slaughter and butchery of the whales. The gossip between both seaman and ships at sea. The sound of the sea in a shell. Noise and noise and noise. Sorry for the fragments there. I’m a little woozy myself. Anyway, yes, words point to the process of their own histories and that’s tangled up in the history of language itself, not to mention culture and value and human development… It gets huge so fast. That’s terrifying. I’m haunted by that.

I don’t know about the whole ideal business in poetry. Certainly poets have tried to make things of ideal Truth and Beauty, but even those truly great poems, like Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” are alive because they aren’t perfect in so many ways; Keats’ messy humanity shines through, the irresolvability, the lily on his brow. Do I wake or sleep? There have always been formalists, of course, but any good formalist will tell you that the formal parameters of a sonnet, for example, aren’t meant to be filled in perfectly. Even the people who we think of as the great sonnet writers, like Shakespeare, we’re constantly breaking, if only subtly, the given formal rules. The goal is to make a poem that has a blood stream. That has a ghost, something that cannot be reduced and that we perceive as both there and not there simultaneously.

I do think it’s interesting that this word processing age of ours has in some ways obliterated the rough draft. It’s so easy to “revise as one goes.” I type a few words, and then delete them. They disappear forever. We should be more haunted by this than we are. How many amazing, potentially generative “mistakes” have been turned immediately into ghosts in our writing, since the moment that many of us stopped using typewriters and handwriting drafts of things? How many accidents that could’ve been a breakthrough have been ghosted in the name of proper craft and our own expectations about what a poem is and should be? Sadly, these ghost aren’t perceivable. They never existed at all. How many words have I deleted to write these? I actually often draft poems on an old Remington Noiseless for the very reason that I can’t revise as I go. I can XXXXX things out, but I still have to live with the fact that I did that and the words peak through anyway, still mostly readable and asserting themselves as a constant challenge to my decision to release them from duty.

I think it’s important to remember that craft is essentially a description of everything that’s already been done. It is the set of rules and expectations that have been shown to work and produce results in the past. The problem with this for us as artists in the present is that we revere the great artists of the past not for the ways that they followed the rules, but for the ways they established them. How much revision/editing in the name of craft kills the very alive, very messy, very human poem by making it try and fit some ridiculous ideal of what’s already been done? With the plethora of “craft” that’s being taught I worry that we all start to think that if we learn these rules we’ll be able to make great art. Art history suggests otherwise. One size does not fit all. Certainly craft is hugely important, a foundation, a set of parameters to work with and against, but NEVER within. To work within them is to be ghosting oneself in the image of something already dead. To follow those rules is to be working from inside a coffin. I think it’s good every once in while to be reminded of the ineffable, of the fact that what we’re after is always a territory uncharted, an elusive something, a vague shape in the periphery. As artists, we bring it out into the light, but only partially. At the heart of poetry is something so totally giving and radiant and defiant, both at once, something totally uncontainable, but that every so often, if we’re lucky, we come face to face with, and then it’s gone. The poem hangs around after to remind us.

Mary Akers: Yes, wonderful. Thanks so much, Matt!! This has been great, great fun.

Mary Akers: Hi, Randon. Thanks for agreeing to talk to me today. I loved your essay “Advent” in this issue. It spoke to me and stayed with me, which I think is a fine testament to any piece of writing. And actually, this may be our “Faith & Doubt” issue, but as I was assembling it, I realized it could just have easily had a theme of…oh, something like “Haunted.” We have a full-length essay On Hauntedness (in poetry), and in the first line of your piece, you say your grandmother “haunted our house like a pink ghost.” Then again, maybe anything that touches on the idea of “recovery” by its very nature involves some sort of haunting. It occurs to me that authors can be haunted–as evidenced by our repeating themes–but a particular work can also be “haunting.” What themes do you think “haunt” your work? And what do you think makes a piece of writing read as haunting?

Randon Noble: Hi, Mary. Thanks for your kind words about “Advent” and for asking such a provocative first set of questions!

I actually think “hauntedness” is a theme that haunts my work. I usually wind up writing about things that have grabbed me and won’t let me go: a near-death experience, a lost love, an unpreventable tragedy, a time in my past that I can remember but never return to. In each of these cases something was alive, died in some way, and came back – but not entirely comfortably. Hauntedness feels different from something like nostalgia. Nostalgia may be bittersweet but there’s a pleasure to the pain. When you’re haunted it’s not pleasurable – you may feel curiosity, passion, longing – even companionship – but there an uneasiness to the relationship, which is what makes me feel so compelled to write about it, whatever “it” is.

MA: Of course. That makes perfect sense–hauntedness as a theme. Why didn’t I think of that?

I’m interested in the ways that authors respond to the work chosen to illustrate their pieces–especially how often they find a personal meaning in the image that I couldn’t have known about when pairing illustration and written word. What did you think of the painting selected to illustrate your piece? Did it have any special meaning for you?

RN: I love it! When I was in graduate school one of my teachers, Chuck Wachtel, told us, “I am an ornithologist but also a bird.” He was reminding us that even though he was our teacher, he was also a writer. When I was teaching I tried to remind myself of that same fact and wrote “Also a bird” on an index card and tacked it above my office desk. Birds continue to feel resonant in my work – using Aesop’s “The Bat, the Beasts and the Birds” to figure out what kind of writer I am, seeing the image of my writing “fluttering” at the margins of my life as a mother, and, in more recent work, thinking about ravens and doves as messengers and birds in general as a source of augury. “Private Devotion” seems the perfect image to accompany “Advent” in particular as well as my writing in general.

MA: Also a bird. I love that. And speaking of what we are and how we define ourselves, in your bio, you use the term “essayist” to describe what you do. I really like that. I think it’s good to be specific. To tell people what you do, and how you want to be known, right up front. It also occurs to me, that in the French sense of the word “essay” (essayer: to try), all writers are essayists, as we are all trying to convey meaning or emotion or time, distance, space, etc, with words. On the best days, this seems like a wonderful, lofty, possible thing. On the worst days, it seems like such folly. I mean, really. Symbols on a page? Who are we kidding? There’s no emotion in hash marks. And yet….we still manage to somehow make this amazing brain transfer every time we write and someone else reads it. Could you talk a little bit about that brain transfer, and also about your decision to go with “essayist” rather than “writer” or “non-fiction” writer, or some other term?

RN: When I was in graduate school a classmate once said that calling yourself a writer was like knighting yourself: you can’t do it; someone else has to do it for you. Publication was the sword on your shoulder, the seat at the round table. Once I was published I felt like I could call myself a writer more comfortably. But becoming a self-proclaimed essayist was a little more complicated.

One of my first published essays got the attention of an agent. She read the manuscript of the collection I had put together, took me to lunch at Nobu, and signed me. I was over the moon! Here it was – the dream come true. But then the dream dissolved. My agent wanted me to rewrite my collection of essays into a memoir and I couldn’t do it. It felt like filleting all the lovely skeletons I had worked so hard to craft and leaving 250 pages of meat and tissue. I said no, and we broke up. For a while I was crushed. But I kept thinking about what I really wanted to write – toyed with the idea of memoir, and of biography – and kept coming back to essays. So I decided to declare it and live it: I am an essayist.

MA: You write a lot about relationships in your work. Past and present love relationships, family relationships, the joys and trials of motherhood. Having written a few personal essays myself, I know that there is often (always?) a small (huge?) frisson of anxiety associated with “putting oneself out there.” How do you push past that and write what you need to write anyway?

RN: I usually write without self-censoring and then see what I have. There are essays I have written and put away. There are essays I’m glad were rejected because now (a few months or years later) I’d rather keep them to myself. (George Saunders once said at a reading that he was grateful for every rejection because it kept him from publishing work that was not his best – what a wonderful way to think about it!) I also have a few trusted readers, including a friend who is about ten years older than I am and very wise; she helps me see obstacles and objections that I might not.

MA: And a related question, how do you balance, as a parent…okay, I’ll say it, I’ll bite, how do you balance as a MOTHER (that sacred title that everyone calls into question when we write honestly about our human lives) knowing that what you share with the world your children will one day grow up and read. They will see what you have written and possibly feel exposed themselves, or embarrassed, or proud, of course, or they will look for pieces of themselves, as my children do, even when it’s fiction–and they’ll find it, too. How do you balance that with your need/desire/commitment to tell the honest truth?

RN: So far I’ve only had to think about this for two years – that’s how old the twins are. Whatever I wrote before they were born, before I had any idea they might be born, well, that ship has sailed and there’s nothing I can do about it. But there’s also nothing I want to do about it. Eventually I want to the twins to see me as a whole person – not just their mother. And part of being a whole person is not knowing how to make eye contact with a stranger you’ve seen naked, or being reluctant to let a love affair go, or being a little cavalier with your life when you’re young. I don’t want to set myself up as a perfect image they feel they have to emulate. I’d rather show at least a little of the seams, the work, and the ache that sometimes comes with living. Maybe it’s naïve to think this way, but sometimes naivety and stubbornness can force a whole new way of living in and looking at the world.

MA: Rereading that last question of mine, those words, “the honest truth,” seem like such a silly choice. Isn’t all truth honest? But maybe not. I can’t bring myself to edit those words, so maybe they are the honest truth themselves. How about the hard truth? The naked truth? Or we could go even farther and say the God’s honest truth? Did you ever notice how many people throw a qualifier at the word truth? Shouldn’t the truth (like the cheese) stand alone? What’s that about?

RN: I love your invocation of the cheese that stands alone! But maybe the truth is like Swiss cheese. There are always holes in it because of our human perceptions. And the holes in Swiss cheese are caused by a certain bacteria that eats the lactic acid and “burps” out carbon dioxide that leaves the holes. Even cheese holes are part of a living biological process – as is the truth.

But I think that truth-telling in essays is essential. I want essays to spin meaningful gold from the straw of real life. Anything else feels like cheating. (Although I will confess that I find myself intrigued by others’ thinking about the truth – David Shield’s Reality Hunger really challenged me, his How Literature Saved My Life knocked my socks off, and Pam Houston’s writing, fiction or non-, completely engages me – in part because she once said that 80% of everything she writes is true.)

MA: Whose work do you read when you want to read the God’s honest truth?

RN: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Live,” Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge and When Women Were Birds, Pam Houston’s Contents May Have Shifted, Paul Crenshaw’s “After the Ice,” William Manchester’s A World Lit Only By Fire.

When I want to see the truth: Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century, the photographs of Diane Arbus, Rembrandt’s late self-portraits.

When I want God in there I might look to Thomas Merton’s journals or The Rule of St. Benedict. Or Rembrandt.

MA: What are you working on now? Do you have a full-length manuscript in the works?

RN: I am currently working on a new collection of essays – trying to find a theme and a shape for it. This conversation has helped a great deal!

MA: And finally, what does “recovery” mean to you?

RN: The first thing that comes to mind is a passage from The Faerie Queen (which I always hear in Alan Rickman’s voice as Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility when he reads to Marianne near the end of the film):

What though the Sea with Waves continual
Do eat the Earth, it is no more at all;
Ne is the Earth the less, or loseth ought:
For whatsoever from one place doth fall,
Is with the Tide unto another brought:
For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.

I think of recovery as the return of something lost. And now I feel like we’ve made a full circle back to “hauntedness.” Maybe recovery is its opposite.

MA: I think you’re right. And what a great place to conclude our discussion. Thanks again, Randon. It’s been delightful talking with you.

We are thrilled to announce that the painter and photographer Peter Groesbeck will be illustrating our July “Sexuality” issue!

He is currently employed by Drexel University and maintains a freelance photography business. His work has been most recently displayed at the Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, and the JMS Gallery in Chestnut Hill, PA

His photography has appeared in Darkroom Photography, Collector’s Photography, Popular Photography, and has been published in several books, including Graphis Nude and Sensual Photography.

We are delighted and honored to pair Peter’s fine visual art with our wonderful literary work. It’s going to be a marvelous issue!

Asha Gupta: What is your background in writing?

Jacob Fons: Well, I don’t have any “formal” training if that’s what you’re asking. I’ve spent most of my life as a singer/songwriter traveling the country, living in parking lots, trying to simply make it day by day, you know all the glorious stuff that comes along with the music industry. I finally gave all that up a few years ago or so and I guess just kind of went into creative limbo for the past two years. When the creative voices began talking to me again, I knew I had to do something so I began telling stories on paper instead of through music.

AG: Your SOS piece, Sushi at Midnight, introduces an interesting perspective, where did the inspiration for that piece come from?

JF: I guess I wanted to take the simplest emotion, place it in the most extreme circumstance, and see where it led me. You know what’s kind of funny, when I began pitching this piece to publications, editors told me it wasn’t right for their magazine (which I expected), or, I got a handful of editors upset with me for writing this piece, or should I say, “not finishing this piece” as they said. I kid you not; I got long emails, which I still have from truly upset editors who told me that Sushi at Midnight was not finished. They were also kind enough to tell me how to finish it. I had to laugh. They thought it had no meat to it, it should have gone deeper, into Jeremiahs story, why he was in prison, where was his wife, the relationship between the priest and Jeremiah, you know that kind of stuff.

AG: Talk about Jeremiah, who is he to you?

JF: I think Jeremiah is much more of an emotion, than he is a person. I believe with Flash-fiction, at least for me, my job is to simply illustrate an emotion. I try to express the feeling on your drive to work on a Monday morning, how you’re feeling before a first date or an inmate’s last meal. I put myself there as best I can, and put it on paper.

AG: Is most of your work Flash-fiction?

No not everything. I seem to go through phases with my writing, between short stories, and flash-fiction. I think I have about an even number of published short stories as I do published flash-fiction. I guess it matters which day you catch me on.

AG: Where can readers find some of your other works?

JF: You can find a link to all my stories on my LinkedIn page

AG: Can you talk about any other projects that you’re currently working on?

Well I’m working on a book of short stories called Stories from 32nd Street. It’s mostly fictional pieces, but there are a few creative non-fictional stories as well. It’s where I grew up, on 32 nd street, in the inner city of Milwaukee, so I have a lot of experiences to choose from. I have stories ranging from getting in trouble with the law as a teenager, to drug addiction, to block parties, to swimming in flooded sewage rivers. There was never a dull moment. I’m talking with a few publishers.