In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sean Hill

Your nonfiction pieces “To Be Born in the Briar Patch” and “A Father and Son Speak about the Painting A Desperate Stand by Charles M. Russell” appear in Volume 28 and complement each other thematically, both dealing with the inherent racism which lives within American society. When did these ideas first come into being?

I was born in the early 1970s, not that long ago, in the recently desegregated South. The history I was born into wasn’t explained to me, as I imagine is the case for most folks. I remember being taught in school about the Brown v. Board of Education I Supreme Court decision of 1954 and, perhaps, the Brown v. Board of Education II ruling of 1955 and its “with all deliberate speed,” but I’m sure I didn’t understand what that meant in practice. And I’m sure I wasn’t taught about the various cases that followed in the next fifteen years that pressed for a more immediate redress of school segregation which resulted in the schools in my hometown finally being desegregated in the 1970/71 school year, as was the case in many other school districts across much of the South.

I wasn’t made aware of this fact until my senior year, when I was assigned to write an article about the 20th anniversary of school integration for the school newspaper. I wonder how the current administration’s Executive Order Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History would assess this history that I was born to and lived with and grew through. All that to say, from childhood I’ve had a growing understanding of “the inherent racism which lives within American society” as well as an evolving understanding of the social construct that is race.

My nonfiction practice at the time that I was drafting these pieces that were published in WSR involved keeping a daybook, so my daily observations and noticings were a source of material. The events in these particular nonfiction pieces involving my son happened when he was almost two and when he was four. He’s ten now. These ideas about race (how society views and groups people), which can be held separately from culture (the values and beliefs one practices in life) as they serve different purposes, have been percolating for quite some time.

What was the impetus for writing “A Father and Son” in third person (and therefore with a little distance) and “To Be Born in the Briar Patch” in first?

They were both originally written in first person because I was writing about my life and the first-person point of view felt natural. First person was the immediate go-to point of view, and it continued to feel like the right choice for “To Be Born in the Briar Patch.” 

But at some point in the drafting of “A Father and Son Speak About the Painting A Desperate Stand by Charles M. Russell” I tried on the third-person point of view, for that little bit of distance. I found that it allowed for a different way of experiencing and rendering my memories. The seed for this piece was a daybook entry, a kind of contemporaneous note, in which I was trying to capture the details of the scenes, the dialogue between my son and me, and the texture of the morning. I remember experiencing these things, but that third-person distance allowed me to see the father and son as characters. It introduced the mediation of that third-person narrator, which felt like it allowed me to write into the facts of their experience.

In my new collection, The Negroes Send Their Love: Poems, Perspectives, and Possible Futures, which contains poems, essays, and stories, there are a series of five “Father and Son” pieces. Three are written as lineated poetry and two as prose. Two of the poems and “A Father and Son Speak About the Painting A Desperate Stand by Charles M. Russell” are written in the third person. In the case of each of them, that distance felt useful and right.

There are a lot of lenses in “A Father and Son Speak about the Painting A Desperate Stand by Charles M. Russell;” the narrator through the father’s eyes; the painting through the father and son’s eyes; the world the son sees through the father’s eyes. What was it like working with this layered ekphrasis surrounding the painting?

I think ekphrasis works best when it goes beyond describing the art it’s engaged with and enters into a conversation with that art and engenders something new. The painting was the focus of my conversation with my son; it was the center of our engagement in the moment of that morning while we waited for our breakfast to arrive. And once I started drafting the piece, I realized I needed to study Russell’s painting of those cowboys defensively circled and firing rifles at the Indigenous men more closely in order for my narrator to describe it for the reader to see, so they could sit with the father and son considering the painting beyond Russell’s visual romanticization of the valor of those cowboys which elevates a valorized view of the settler colonial West. From that conversation with my son and the painting, I think I engendered something new.

I love the line, “The father tells him that there could be a painting in which the Indians are in the center and tries to imagine it for himself and his son.” The narrator doesn’t elaborate, and I’m wondering, was the father able to imagine that? What did it look like, and perhaps what would the world have to look like for that picture to be created?

That morning, in the moment I did try to talk through what that painting would look like with my son. And it did involve imagining a world that would engender that painting. And it was difficult. 

And at some point in the drafting of the piece, the father did stretch his imagination in that direction. I think the third-person telling gave me permission to keep the father and the narrator from attempting to convey the father’s imagining of “a painting in which the Indians are in the center.” And in leaving that imagining off the page, my hope is that I’m inviting the reader to imagine that painting and the world that would engender it. 

“To Be Born in the Briar Patch” weaves the homecoming of the family to southern Georgia and the tale of Joel Chandler Harris’ character Brer Rabbit. At what point in writing did you decide to juxtapose these two pieces with each other? 

The episode on the playground with my two-year old son and the racist graffiti happened toward the end of August 2017. This was from my daily noticing practice, so in the moment I snapped a picture with my phone, and when I got home, I wrote a daybook entry about that excursion to the playground. When I started writing about it later, I felt that I needed to write about how we got to Georgia as a family and how being back there was a homecoming for me. And I think, organically exploring that context to situate my experience of the graffiti, a written message, led to the paragraph about the literary history of Central Georgia. And that led to Joel Chandler Harris and Br’er Rabbit. I’m often putting things next to each other, like this, in my thoughts. The essay recreates my often juxtapositional thought pattern and allows me to render a stylized version of this process. 

There’s a theme of travel and home throughout the piece, with lines like, “the South would likely feel more foreign than moving to Canada,” and “[white people] understand the concept of home differently as they shelter in the power structure that is the privilege of whiteness,” and how white privilege creates a home-like safety net. In this piece, there’s different threats in different parts of the country for the family. Can you talk about that? 

Like “danger,” “threat” is about the likelihood or possibility of harm, which is as much about perception as it is about reality. With shifts in geographic location, that perception changes as does the possible source of possible harm. For much of the last twenty-six years, I’ve lived outside of the South and called a few places outside of diverse metropolitan areas home including in northern Minnesota. 

In those places, I’ve encountered white people who seem to assume that the South is an oppressively racist place, and I surely feel safer away from it. And in these last twenty-six years, most Black folks I’ve encountered have wondered how I can feel safe in such predominantly white spaces. 

According to the Pew Research Center, there are close to 50 million Black folks in the nation; we’re around 15% of the population, and over 50% of us live in the South, while around 17% live in Northeastern states, and another 17% in Midwestern states, and 10% in the West. 

Though I imagine most white folks who live in these spaces outside of the South and outside of cities think of their spaces filled with individuals and not homogeneous at all. But when I am in the space, I also imagine that they likely see our then shared space as homogeneous and me in it as outside of the homogeneity of our shared home. Like I snap into sharp contrast, and that Sesame Street song “One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others)” could be the theme song of the moment. 

And in my current home, Montana, Black folks are less than 1% of the population–about .6% or around 6,000 folks statewide. There are over 3.5 million Black folks in Georgia, around 33% of the population. And Montana is about two and a half times the size of Georgia. In Georgia my son and I encountered racist graffiti on the playground, and my interracial family got occasional sneers. In Montana I see the occasional Confederate flag flying or a car decal and even a complete hood wrap. And I sometimes get a look that seems like the extra attention given to the unexpected. I’ve met Black tourists who’ve wondered how I can live here and feel safe, feel at home.  

I wonder what state would elicit that response from white folks if they imagine simply walking down the sidewalk. I mean not opening their mouths to express an idea (political, religious, or otherwise) but simply just being in their body, in their skin, and being known only by their appearance. That is what I was getting at with the phrase “the power structure that is the privilege of whiteness” and the shelter it provides.

What does your editing process for your work look like?  

My writing process is recursive. I start with notes or a draft, either on the computer or in a notebook, and I go back and forth between the screen and the printed page. Writing on the page is an important part of my process. I also need time away from the draft which can often look like strolling around my neighbor, sometimes with our dog. If I’m working on a poem, I may have a draft folded up in my back pocket that I can pull out and scribble on as I walk down ideas. With the prose, I’ll make note of the ideas that come to me on a walk. And the revising and editing can involve trying different points of view, adjusting a system of images, working out a rhyme scheme, tuning the figuration, figuring out what I’m doing with my sentences, getting a handle on the order of things, overall patternmaking and pattern breaking, and opening myself up to finding surprise in my work. And at some point, when I feel like I’ve gotten the piece as good as I can get it at the moment, I’ll share it with a trusted reader to gauge their experience of it and weigh that against my engagement with it. 

What themes show up in your writing?

I had a desire to be a writer from an early age. And because I was reading mostly fantasy and science fiction short stories and novels, I thought that was what I would write. I tried without success–there are a few failed story-starts. In high school I wrote opinion articles for the school newspaper. And I won a local writing award for my article on the 20th anniversary of desegregation. I didn’t start writing poems until my first year in college. My very first poem imagined a great horned owl hunting. Another early poem was about driving around the Georgia countryside looking for llamas and finding peacocks. I also took inspiration from hikes in the north Georgia mountains. 

My first collection of poetry, Blood Ties & Brown Liquor explores the history of my hometown through the lens of the Black community. And my second collection of poetry, Dangerous Goods explores travel, migration, and home through looking at emigration from Georgia to Liberia in the 1870s and my move from the South to Bemidji, Minnesota in the early aughts. 

Since appearing in WSR, these nonfiction pieces have been published in my third book, a multi-genre collection, The Negroes Send Their Love. That book continues and, I think, deepens my exploration of place, migration, home, family, history, race, and the greater than human world. These are the topics that fascinate me, snag my imagination, and compel me to some articulation. These are the things that I hope bear repeating and repeated engagement.

Who inspires you? What authors or creatives are your favorites? 

There are so many. I count Anne McCaffrey and Ursula K. Le Guin as early inspirations. I took my first creative writing class at the University of Georgia, and I was fortunate to have the brilliant and generous Judith Ortiz Cofer as my teacher. She told our class to find our writing tribes. She meant for us to find the writers from the past through their pages and our contemporaries who felt like our people—those folks whose work speaks to us and inspires us to strive in our own work. Among those inspirations, I count Seamus Heaney, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Marilyn Nelson, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, Grace Nichols, James Baldwin, Ishmael Reed, Michael Ondaatje, Cornelius Eady, Toi Derricotte, Charles Johnson, Marilyn Hacker, C. P. Cavafy, Ernest Gaines, and Toni Morrison, not necessarily in that order. These are some of the writers who have modelled and made possible for me ways of thinking and saying on the page. And there are so many of my contemporaries that I can’t begin to name them all.

What are you currently working on?

My current writing project is focused on travel and road trips as a way of engaging with place, access, and belonging. In the last three decades, I’ve been to all fifty states, and I’ve driven to forty-nine of them. I’m drawing from that experience for some of this project. In addition to poems and essays, I’m also working on a novella, which I say to hold myself accountable.

Photo by Brian Powers

Sean Hill is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection The Negroes Send Their Love, and two previous poetry collections, Dangerous Goods and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor. He has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Callaloo, Harvard Review, New England Review, Orion, Oxford American, and Poetry, and in dozens of anthologies, including Black Nature and Villanelle. He directs the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference at Bemidji State University and teaches in the Creative Writing program at the University of Montana.